Roofing Success
The Roofing Success Podcast is a show created to inspire roofing contractors to achieve optimal success in their roofing businesses. The host, Jim Ahlin, is the co-author of the book, "Internet Marketing For Roofing Contractors, How to TRIPLE Your Sales and Turn Your Roofing Website Into an Online Lead Generation Machine", and Co-Founder of Roofer Marketers, the Digital Marketing Agency for the roofing industry. On each episode, Jim will be sitting down with industry leaders to talk about their processes, the lessons they learned, and how to find success in roofing.
Roofing Success
Your Marketing Strategy is BROKEN—Here’s Why You’re Not Getting Results with Joseph Hughes
Roofers are throwing money at marketing agencies, boosting posts, and running ads… yet leads are slow, close rates are low, and it feels like you’re just burning cash.
The truth? Most roofing companies don’t have a marketing problem. They have a marketing control problem.
In this episode, Joseph Hughes (Contractor Dynamics) breaks down how to stop the guesswork and take control of your marketing. You’ll learn:
✅ The difference between spray-and-pray marketing vs. intentional marketing
✅ The biggest waste of marketing dollars (and how to fix it)
✅ Why hiring a marketing agency is NOT an easy button
✅ The #1 role every roofing company should hire before spending more on marketing
This is the conversation roofing contractors NEED to hear. If you want to stop wasting money, take control of your leads, and maximize ROI, hit play now.
🔗 https://www.contractordynamics.com/
🤖 Have a question? Ask this customized ChatGPT for the answer! Specifically designed for this episode, it’s here to help! https://roofingpod.com/chatgpt-252
PODCAST SPONSORS:
- The Roofing & Solar Reform Alliance: https://roofingpod.com/RSRA
- JobNimbus Marketing Services: https://roofingpod.com/jobnimbus-marketing
- PowerUp Agents AI: https://roofingpod.com/power-up-agents-ai
- Day 41 Thrive: https://roofingpod.com/day-41-thrive
IG: https://www.instagram.com/roofingsuccess/
FB: https://www.facebook.com/groups/roofingsuccess
Join Our Facebook Group: https://roofingpod.com/facebook
📱 Text Jim @ (612) 512-1812 – Say Hi!
💬 Leave Us a Review: https://roofingpod.com/review
How do you go from marketing guesswork to consistently generating high returns for your roofing business? In this episode, joseph Hughes shares his insights on how contractors can take control of their marketing and stop spraying and praying for results. Joseph Hughes is the founder of Contractor Dynamics, a marketing training company that empowers roofing contractors to master their own marketing. With over a decade of experience, joseph has helped countless businesses demystify and optimize their marketing strategies. Joseph's focus on teaching instead of doing shows his commitment to equipping contractors with the tools they need to thrive, making him an indispensable voice in the industry. Today's episode is packed with actionable strategies to measure and maximize your marketing ROI. Let's get started with Joseph Hughes. Welcome to the Roofing Success Podcast. I'm Jim Alleyne and I'm here to bring you insights from top leaders in the roofing industry to help you grow and scale your roofing business. To help you grow and scale your roofing business.
Speaker 2:The infamous Joseph Hughes, infamous Whoa, all right, all right, that's a curve ball.
Speaker 1:Let's start it off that way. Joe, like you know, I love what you do in the industry, love having you on. We've talked a lot over the years For those of you that, for those that don't know Joseph Hughes, I'm pretty sure our whole audience knows you. But what's a little update? What's an update on Joseph Hughes and Contractor Dynamics?
Speaker 2:Cool, real, quick. Contractor Dynamics marketing training company for the roofing industry. So what we do all day, every day, is we have an amazing team and we are training roofing companies on how to run their own marketing, how to take control of their own marketing. So, in contrast to a lot of marketing agencies that do the work for you, we are training you on teaching you how to fish. We're not selling you the fish.
Speaker 2:So I've been in business 11 years. It makes me feel kind of old, but we're still kind of like that, you know, startup mindset, where we're continually learning and growing. And we added a bunch of people to our team last month. So we've got an awesome new sales guy, kevin. We've got an awesome new integrator, coo, steve, a new copywriter. We added a coach to our team last month. So, yeah, as we kind of finish up 2024, we're getting our new team members on board.
Speaker 2:It's always an interesting time of year for a business owner because you're focusing on the now and finishing up your strong. Then you have an eye toward next year. So you're kind of like one foot in this year, one foot in next year, trying to do both and just trying to keep everything afloat and thriving. So, yeah, learning and growing literally every day and blessed to have an amazing leadership team, team of people overall at CD. So, yeah, I'm excited to step more into the visionary role Now that we have our new integrator in place, step more into that visionary role in 2025 and kind of just continue to evolve.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's, a business is an evolution, like it never stops iterating, right, there is no, and I think we have to fall in love with that iteration If we're going to to do this for the long term right, if we want to be successful for the long term, it's just always that iteration, always the next thing that you need, that you get to learn and implement in the business, right, it's always a lot of fun. I mean, you've been in the marketing space for a long time. We came up knowing each other in the marketing space. I wanted to talk to you because I think that a lot of contractors struggle with maximizing the results of their marketing, and so let's start with that how do you maximize the results or maximize your return on investment from your marketing efforts?
Speaker 2:Man, that's the multi, not even the million dollar question, the multi-million dollar question, Because it's so common. I'm sure everyone listening, watching is like man, yeah, I don't know, I really don't know. Like, we're in December right now. We're recording this. Okay, I've spent some.
Speaker 2:I spent this amount of money on marketing this year. Maybe some people don't even know which was me before. We had our fractional CFO who kind of like, hey, this is what you guys have been spending. I'm like, oh wow, All that stuff adds up Two grand a month here, four grand a month there. Before you know it, you're spending more money on marketing than you ever expected because there's no one at the helm of that ship. It's just like throwing a bunch of things out there. We call it spray and pray. Right, Spray a bunch of things out there, pray that like something works. Um, and that's not a good strategy because even if something does work, like you don't know what's working and what's not there's that old marketing saying that you probably know, Jim, it's uh, uh, I think it's John Wanamaker back in the mid-1900s. He said half of my advertising spend is not working. Problem is, I'm just not sure which half, and it's so true. So there's a lot that goes into that. I forget the question, man, I'll just be honest.
Speaker 1:No, that's right, You're on the right track here and it's.
Speaker 1:I think that that's what it is, the, the, you know, maximizing the return on investment of your marketing dollars really starts with understanding your marketing Right, and and I think that you you made a point there that was, you know, even to that old adage of 50% of my marketing is working, but I don't know what 50% is working. And a lot of times contractors don't even know, they don't know a hundred percent of what's working or what's not working. They don't like and that's a big struggle, and I think that's the conversation that we wanted to have is to this man like first, what are what do good results look like? Do people even know what? What good results look like? What you know? You know, you've, you've coached a lot of contractors and help them, help them set up with a marketing manager in their business and and worked along the way. How do you, how would you tell the way? How would you define to a contractor? Maybe we'll start on a more macro level, but how do we know if our marketing is working?
Speaker 2:Man that's great For everything that we do, whether it's we were just talking with our CFO yesterday about this digital marketing specialist we want, want to hire in Q1, and he's like, okay, like what, what does success look like for this person and how are you measuring it? Cfo is just, you know, looking to justify every, you know every line on him, right? So like, all right, well, this is what success looks like for this person. Here's how we're going to measure it. Same thing with marketing what does success look like and how are we going to measure that? So that can come in different forms.
Speaker 2:So, with marketing, some things are trackable down to the penny. So say, google ads, lsa, facebook ads, things like that that are more like direct response in nature I put a dollar in, I'm going to get $10 out, whatever that equation might be. Then there's other things that are more qualitative. I'm running brand awareness, social media ads, we're doing direct mail, we have our trucks wrapped, we have our community event, we're sponsoring the Little League team, we're radio, tv billboards, you name it. There's some of those things that aren't attributable to a particular lead, right? So Mrs Jones calls in hey, how'd you hear about us? I don't know. I see you guys everywhere in the neighborhood. I've been living in the area for a while. It's not like she clicked on this particular Facebook ad, so I'm interested to hear your feedback on that too. So there's that quantitative like yes, there's that dollar and cents ROI. But then there's also that qualitative return, which is like okay, we're getting our we're having warmer appointments, which means our close rate is higher, because people have seen us over and over and we're not just any old roofing contractor in Minneapolis Our close rates higher. We're getting beat up on price. Last, our gross, our average gross profit, is higher. We're getting more referrals, more reviews, things like that. So those are qualitative in nature, which is why you need to be looking at everything on a regular basis.
Speaker 2:We get into tracking in a little bit. So how do you measure that? It's going to be your overall at the end of the quarter, end of the year. It's like what did we spend in terms of marketing for this year? And that's going to be your people, that's going to be your offline stuff, your swag, your truck wraps, your yard signs, your online marketing. What do we spend in total? What was our revenue? Is that within our acceptable range of what we want to spend. We can get into particular numbers there. So you have to look at it on a micro level in terms of the leads that you generated, but also as a team on that more macro level.
Speaker 2:And then, yeah, did we open up new opportunities from our marketing? More relationships with realtors or insurance agents or GCs or whatever else is important to you other people that can feed you business. And marketing is also a key player in terms of recruiting and attracting talent. So how many people do we need to hire next year? How is our marketing going to play into that? So, if you're going to use your marketing to attract a million dollar sales rep, well, yeah, you want to make sure you do a good job at your marketing. Be intentional about that, because you're not just marketing for a $20,000 roof, like you're marketing for someone that's going to produce a million dollars in revenue. That's marketing as well.
Speaker 1:There's so many things and this is, I think, the core of it. First is that people don't even know what to expect from their marketing sometimes, and I think that if you don't know what success looks like, you have a hard time making good decisions as to what you should be doing. I always think that if you don't know, you have to guess at first. Right, if you're newer to a marketing channel say Facebook ads or something like that man, you're going to have to guess as to what a successful lead cost might be, or customer acquisition cost or long-term value of that customer. So in setting up, let's talk a little bit about that, like those getting set up to understand if this is really what should we be doing or not.
Speaker 1:Right, like, if you don't like what you had said, let's go back and see what we spent over the quarter and did it work? That would be a lagging indicator, right? Maybe let's look at some things that we can look at as leading indicators and maybe some decisions that people would need to make. So I think first off is like hey, man, do you know what an acceptable customer acquisition cost would be? Maybe they start there. Do you think that's a good starting point. Is there a different place that they could start?
Speaker 2:Yeah, the acquisition cost is fantastic. Even a step before that is getting clarity on. A step before that is getting clarity on who is my ideal client, what's my ideal project, right, and what is that in terms of? So my ideal project is an asphalt roof replacement. I'm in New Jersey, so the average ticket is going to be $20,000, right, that's our ideal project. Our ideal client is that couple in their 40s that have, they're busy, they don't have a lot of time, they have money to spend, they appreciate value, they're not looking for the cheapest guy, they're looking for a great experience.
Speaker 2:So we have our ideal client, our ideal project, that $20,000 asphalt shingle replacement. Our gross profit on that is, you name it, 12 asphalt shingle replacement. Our gross profit on that is, you know, you name it, 12 grand. Just say you know round number. So our average gross profit is 12. What are we willing to? You know what's our acceptable range for, like what we're willing to pay to acquire one of those, one of those roofs, right? So you're going to have to find your range from there.
Speaker 1:So, so, yeah, I love that you said range. Yeah, I love that you said range, because that's I always have. Have have put a dollar amount on it, but I love that that there's a range, because there really is a range, right. Um, and, and I want everyone listening to understand that the least amount possible is not an acceptable range. Yes, the least amount possible is not an acceptable range. Yes, yeah, that's not acceptable. Do not say as the least amount possible that's what I want to pay for a customer, that's what I want my customer acquisition cost to be. You know really what is, man, if we're at $600 to acquire a customer boy, we're doing really good, right, but if we get up to $1,200, now it starts to get a little. You know, we got to make some decisions, right, like you know. So I love the idea of the range, man, that's a good point for everyone to think about.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, and two things there. Well, one of the ratios that we track in our company is cap to think about. Well, yeah, and two things there. One of the ratios that we track in our company is cap to LTV. So that's customer acquisition cost to a lifetime gross profit. So, and for us it's a little different because we're kind of a recurring business model but like as a contractor, what is that customer acquisition cost as a percentage of that value, that gross profit of 12 grand?
Speaker 2:You know you could use a benchmark of like four to one. So in that case you'd be willing to pay maybe up to $3,000 to get a $12,000 gross profit roof. Again, 20,000 top line, just kind of rough numbers. It's going to have to make sense for you and your business and talk to your CFO and things like that. But understanding what that benchmark looks like for you. And if you're over that 4 to 1 ratio, great, because you're spending less to acquire a customer. If you're under that, then you're going to spend too much on that.
Speaker 2:And then, jim, what you said is like so many people, I guess, when you don't understand marketing, you view it as an expense, right Like a cost center. How little can I spend on marketing this year? How can we drop our marketing spend? But that's kind of the wrong mindset. And I'm not just saying that like, spend more money with Contractor Dynamics or anything like that. But it's like if you want to scale, if you want to grow your company from 5 to 8 million, marketing is going to be a lever and you got to understand how to use that lever so you can say, yeah, we're going to increase our marketing spend next year, we want to grow by 60%, which is a big jump from five to 8 million. What, what more? What do we need to do more of Like. And if you don't understand what's working, you can't like, you can't scale that Right. So I think that's that's a mindset thing A lot of contractors have.
Speaker 1:Definitely.
Speaker 1:I was in the real estate and mortgage industry for many years and I met this realtor in the mid-2000s out in Denver who had come from a different profession and was just starting their real estate career and they had a little bit of money to invest in their marketing and they bought every Zillow zip code, so all of the leads and all of the Zillow zip codes in the Northern Metro area of Denver. This was an aha moment for me, joe. I was like wait, you're doing what? With the intention that they knew that homeowners move every five to seven years. So the goal was to buy as many customers every year, not for what they made in profit on them that year, for what they will make in profit on them in the future. And I was like whoa, yeah, there's not many people that'll do that right, like you. Really, truly, the way I put it is if you have faith in the outcome, you'll execute. Right. I put it is if you have faith in the outcome, you'll execute right, like and so if you don't have faith like that, that individual had faith that that they would. But it was faith in their execution. It was faith that they would continue to follow up and make that homeowner continue to know that they're the realtor of choice. Right, when you know they're going to, they're not just going to do the transaction and then move on and never talk to them again. Right, they wanted to build a long-term relationship with that person. And now, not only might that person move, in five to seven years their neighbor might be moving, their cousin might want to buy or sell a house. Right Like? There's such a long-term value out of customers that I think if you don't have that long-term vision, boy, it's hard. Right? If I told you, joe man, if you invested a million dollars this year, that 10 years from now you would have a $50 million business, like I think everyone would you know, like with great profit margins let's add that caveat in for all the haters, you know, all the commenters on YouTube. Right, like this, like, if you really, if you were, if someone told you if you really made this investment but you had to execute on all of the little things along the way, would you really do it?
Speaker 1:And so I think that comes down to that CAC LTV conversation is, man, if you really have faith in the outcome of your people, if you know that your sales reps I've had this conversation on some RSRA calls. Recently I was talking to one owner who he has three or four sales reps and one of his sales reps he knows that if that sales rep goes out to a neighborhood. If they get one job in the neighborhood, that guy's getting five, like four or five right away, right off of that one neighbor, and because of the faith in that one individual boy you can pour marketing dollars at that person. Now he has that. Don't ask as well for those referrals. It's harder to pour money into those reps, right? So the long-term value might be a little bit different between your sales reps too. So knowing your business well is probably a good thing. I know I kind of rambled on there, but I guess that leads me to how much of an investment should a company make in marketing when they're making that educated guess as to what the outcome might be.
Speaker 2:Sure, I love that. You talked about the referral thing. That was on my mind as well. Like, if you're going to, if you know that for every job you get, you're going to get 1.2 referrals from every customer, then that lowers that customer acquisition cost. So, yeah, awesome point there. As far as, like, how much did you spend Invest?
Speaker 1:Let's not say spend right, let's talk about investing in marketing. You got me, you got me yes. We still do it ourselves and we know and we-.
Speaker 2:One of our core values that we're impeccable with our words. So thanks for making me impeccable. So if you Google that question and, jim, I know you have a lot of experience with this too your answer may vary, but I'm the guest, so I'm right now For sure. So if you Google it, you know how much. You know what. Should my marketing spend be per percentage of revenue? You're going to find like five to eight percent in maintain mode, 10% and over if you want to really grow. And I think like a lot of maybe you know greedy marketing professionals will be like yeah, you got to spend. You know 10% plus, especially if they're getting paid on a percentage of your ad spend, which a lot of agencies of record will do. So you got to be aware of those incentives.
Speaker 2:Margins and contracting and roofing are great. Should you spend 10%? I don't believe so. Our clients are more on an average of like 5%. The caveat there is that they're spending, they're investing again, investing time into their marketing.
Speaker 2:So it's not just like hey, I'm a roofing company owner, I don't. I know marketing is important. I don't want to figure it out, I'm too busy, I'm just going to pay Jim to like, make magic happen Right. So if that's your mentality, yes, you're going to overspend because you're trying to pay your way out of your marketing problem. You're not taking ownership of it and you've got to take ownership of it.
Speaker 2:In no other I don't know we don't work in other industries outside roofing but in no other industry is there such a widespread belief that like, hey, I'm just going to put my customer acquisition in the hands of someone else. I'm not going to take ownership of that. It's just, it's amateur hour and I get passionate about it because I see people just like it's just an education moment. You got to take ownership of that your ability to generate customers. So 5% of your target revenue allocates toward marketing and then you're investing time in it. You're creating content, you're creating a marketing plan, you're creating a marketing budget. You have someone in-house who's helping you with marketing or in charge of that marketing. So it's this time plus money investment. It's not just a money investment.
Speaker 1:For sure, let's call it the easy button, joe, I coach about 35 agency owners that are all in different niches and I'll tell you it's very similar from type of business to type of business, from vertical to vertical, from niche to niche. I think it's a small business thing, okay, good, I heard a friend of mine was on a podcast recently and I heard her talking about how those were some of her challenges early on in business as she was looking for the easy button. I think that's what happens, right, I think that's what we're actually doing, because business is hard yeah, right, like all of it is hard. Sales is hard, you know. Production is hard Like all of it is hard. Managing cashflow is hard yeah, like all of these things are. So we always look for an easy button and marketers are probably the best at marketing. Agencies are probably better at marketing the easy button than an accounting firm that might help you, you know, like a fractional CFO or something like that.
Speaker 1:But we're always looking for that easy button.
Speaker 2:That's true Totally, and actually that was the example I was going to use. Jim, we've man we've worked with like I think we're on a third fractional CFO. We've been through like bookkeeping companies and things like that. Bookkeeping companies cool, there's a lot of them Fractional CFOs we tried a couple over the past couple of years and now we have our Rob, who's amazing, he's great, he's the best one we've had and we're going to be with him long term. However, the reason why A big reason why it's working out so well is that we are I've never been more involved in it. Right, like, I meet with Rob every Tuesday, we're texting, we're calling, like it's you know, it's top of mind all the time. We run all our decisions by him.
Speaker 2:In the past, when I was not, as you know, I just didn't develop that skill set, I didn't know I needed to be involved and the bookkeeping and the financial aspect of things, even though I have a finance degree from college, which means basically nothing, right, because you don't learn anything. So you got out in the real world and really get your teeth in. But like I just kind of treat it as an afterthought, like oh yeah, whenever. Like I'm just gonna to procrastinate until the deadline and then I'll do whatever needs to get done and get off my plate and go back to creating content. You know, and it's the same thing with marketing, like you've got to be, you've got to be more, you've got to be involved in it, and there is no easy. There is no easy button.
Speaker 1:And sometimes Verify, right, like there's the. It makes me think of that trust. But verify, yeah, like you're not paying attention, like just something simple, right, if you're not paying attention and you're just hoping, that's where things go off the rails, right, and we had that from an agency side of things. There was a company that we were working with and their Facebook ads seemed to be really going well, lots of good, lots of leads coming through, things happening, and then, like six months later, they paid attention and they were like these things suck. And we're like, man, but wait, you're just telling us this now, like, we've been, like it looked like because we didn't have a viewpoint all the way through close in their company, right, and they weren't creating that feedback loop of communication of, hey, we received these leads, these ones were good, these ones, you know we set appointments on those. We closed those from last week. You know there wasn't a good feedback loop and without that good feedback loop, your fractional CFO can't help you make adjustments on the. You know, as you're going along, if you, you know, if you're not talking to your production manager on a regular basis, right, like you're probably going to run into some issues, right, like, if you're not talking to your sales team and they're just out in the field doing whatever, you're going to have problems. So I love that concept right. So now let's get into that a little bit. What should people know? Because it makes me think of.
Speaker 1:I did a fair amount of real estate investing from 08 to 13 and buying foreclosed properties and fixing them up, and I GC'd all my own projects and in the beginning, every house that I did, I learned a trade. So I did drywall in one, which sucks. Don't do drywall, joe, if you don't. If you haven't done drywall, don't do drywall. It's the worst thing ever. Painting is terrible. I hate painting. I really realized plumbing. I've done electrical. I've done so many trades but I didn't do them because I wanted to learn the trade and become good at the trade. I learned it so that I knew what I was paying for.
Speaker 1:I think that there's a gap there, that in small business ownership and with roofing contractors included in that right, is that we have a gap of knowledge and instead of learning enough to have an intelligent conversation to be able to verify those results, we're kind of leaving it up to, we're just pushing it off. We're trying to hit that easy button. What do you guys? How do you guys train the contractors that work with you or their marketing managers? What are some of the skillsets that they need to learn to be effective at measuring their marketing results?
Speaker 2:That's a perfect setup, jim, and yeah. So if you, if you had this house that you bought and you were flipping it and you said to all these you know some contractor buddies that you had hey guys show, you had hey guys show up on December 15th, here's the address and do your thing, just do your thing. Call me when it's done. They're going to do something. Right, bunch of guys running around, they're going to do something, but the chances of it coming out well or coming out as you had envisioned are very, very small. But awesome that you went through that whole process to learn like okay, well, here's how long it takes to frame a house or drywall or paint or do the rough electrical, whatever that is, so that you knew how to collaborate with them. And when they were taking nine days to do a two-day job, you can be like hey bro, I know that's not a nine-day job, let's have a conversation about it. Same thing with marketing. Right, roofing company owner, contracting company owner is like all right, great, I'm willing to spend money on marketing. Cool, I'm going to hire the Facebook ads guy. I'm going to hire this guy to do the website. I'm going to hire this guy to do direct mail. We need a Google thing. Oh yeah, this guy called me about some billboards. They have a special. I signed up for some billboards.
Speaker 2:Okay, now you have this roofing company owner who's hired all these effectively, like the marketing subcontractors, but he doesn't know what he just paid for. He doesn't know how to measure the results, he doesn't know what to expect in terms of like. Okay, seo should take, you know, a long time, whereas Google ads you could probably get results, you know, pretty quickly. He doesn't really know any of that. So our whole model, or our whole, one of our big education points, is that you, as the contracting company, need to be the general contractor of your own marketing. Just like Jim was GCing those houses that he was flipping, you need to be the GC, so you don't need to know how to pull all the levers and turn all the dials no-transcript creating the game plan, creating the marketing strategy, creating the budget, hiring the subs, meeting with them regularly, holding them accountable, reviewing reports, reviewing the work that was done, making strategy adjustments and really driving that ship.
Speaker 2:So that concept of being the general contractor of your own marketing doesn't mean that you can't hire a marketing agency. Yes, certainly hire those subs right, because you can't do everything yourself. But you understand that you have control over that and everything's being done in alignment with your vision and your brand. And if you're a company that's really focused on like, you know that that kind of premium brand and you want to sell on value and you're not the cheapest guy. But then you hire the Facebook ads guy and he's putting out these crummy ads that are like thousand dollars off your next roof or you know $6,000 roof, you know guaranteed Like.
Speaker 2:Does that align with, like, the brand that you want to build? Probably not. So that's a whole other part of it is controlling that brand messaging. But, yeah, being that general contractor of your own marketing someone, in addition, other than the owner, should be. If you're a small company, maybe that's a spouse, an office admin who's spending 10 hours a week on marketing whatever that is for you, as you grow into that multimillion dollar company, look to hire that full-time in-house marketing person that's really going to drive that ship. Does that answer your question?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's great. I love the idea of just send all the subs out on the same day and see what happens. Right, you didn't pick carpet, you didn't pick paint colors. You didn't tell them no, we're going to take this wall out and open up the living space. We didn't say this is what flooring goes in the kitchen, this is what goes in the bathroom. That's a great analogy in how this should work.
Speaker 1:You said a couple of things there about hiring a marketing person or having someone on your team. That is that, like, this is their job. Right, they own this metric on your scorecard, if we want to throw it in EOS terms. Right, like, someone has to own the metric, and and if it is you, you know it's just like everything else you want to be working your way out of those seats If that's not your core competency, right? One thing you said was part-time.
Speaker 1:I think a lot of people forget that. Some people can. You can hire someone part-time sometimes. Right, like you don't have to hire a full-time $80,000 a year. You know marketing and I don't know what marketing managers you know salaries are usually. Maybe you could speak to that a little bit too of what you're seeing in the marketplace. But, man, you might be able to just hire someone 10 hours a week, five hours a week, you know like to just do certain tasks. Make sure the social media is going out consistently. Hey, give it. Throwing some ideas around and then measuring what the you know, how your SEO is progressing and how your Facebook ads are doing or what like. I think that's a great nugget for people is that we always look at hiring full-time. But if you're early, if you're in earlier stages, you might be able to just get that part-time person to come on in. What are, what are, what are, what are people? What is it? What would be the different levels of a marketing manager and what type of compensation ranges are you seeing for them?
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks, jim, for opening people's eyes to that part. That's so scary, especially as a as a younger company, and that might be your first hire I was. We have a prospective client who who was kind of going through that and he was really like just really hesitating and finally I asked him like hey, man, is this, would this be your first ever like W2 employee hire? And he was like yeah, I was like okay, now I get why, like you're so hesitant about everything, which is completely normal Because, like taking on overhead, especially like going into the winter like dude, that's, that's scary. Regardless of whatever size business you're at, you know your larger business you want to hire higher level people. Like you know, at the beginning of this thing I said we brought on a few higher level people in November. That's scary, that's increased overhead Right. So totally we're right there with you. So, yeah, if you're, say, under, say, 3 million bucks a year, that part-time person might make sense. We've had clients hire their kid who's in college or just graduated college. Or we've had one client actually she was on our webinar this morning this guy hired his mom. His mom is retired and she doesn't want a full-time job but she works 15 hours a week or whatever that is. That could be an office admin person. I don't advise that because when that office admin person gets busy in the spring, their priority is always going to be answer the phone, send out contracts, collect money which there probably should be those things right.
Speaker 2:Marketing is going to fall to the bottom of that. We've seen it over and over. So someone that is dedicated to marketing someone's waking up every day and thinking about, hey, how are we going to get more people to know about our company today than knew about us yesterday? And that person doesn't need to be a marketing guru by any means. That person needs to be core value aligned. That person needs to be coachable. They don't have an ego, they're not territorial, which means if you're going to work with a marketing agency, they're not going to be like I know how to do this better than you do. We've seen that. Someone that's really open and aligned with that mission. So whatever that means for your area of the country, line with that mission. So whatever that means for your area of the country.
Speaker 2:If that's an hourly thing I don't really do hourly, I don't know what the rates might be but figure out what makes sense and then from a full-time anywhere between that $50,000 and $80,000 range per year, depending on, again, where you are in the country. You don't need someone that knows all the marketing things. That person is going to be a unicorn. They're going to be running their own company. They're going to be super expensive.
Speaker 2:You want someone I generally say younger. I don't know if I'm allowed to say that, but someone younger has a little bit of marketing experience, getting coachable, and then that person can also be, if you're like, all right, well, I don't think I have enough marketing for a full-time person Well, that person can be also your business development person that's going to your BNI meetings or chamber of commerce meetings. They're meeting with realtors, meeting with insurance agents, going to the networking events in town. As the owner, like Jim said, you need to fire yourself from some of those things so you can focus on being the leader. So a lot of times our clients will utilize a hybrid model where it's like a marketing coordinator slash, like community relations person and they become the face of your business. So that's a really attractive option as well. And then you can compensate that person with like a base plus, like some kind of performance performance pay.
Speaker 1:I think it's a good point what you said about that. If you get someone on your team that says, well, I could do this better than the company you hire. You're not looking for someone in most of these cases, in most cases, to do the work, to do the SEO, to run your ads maybe running your Facebook ads or something like that, but maybe not your Google ads, because that's to me it's a very specific skill set, you know and so, but one of the things that we always had, the times we had friction with marketing managers at Rufa Marketers was when the marketing manager felt that they needed to justify their existence, their existence, and so I would recommend that in your company culture that they don't have to feel like they'll get fired if the agency is underperforming or overperforming. Their job is to measure the metrics and help to determine what and to help create that good feedback loop with the people that you hire to do some of those things.
Speaker 1:Like I said, if no one's monitoring what the results of some of these performance-based advertising efforts are, that's a problem. So you need someone on top of that. But creating that feedback loop helps the people that you hire in those roles to develop better campaigns, to optimize campaigns to, you know, to do all of those things. So I think it's a company culture thing and making sure that they don't feel worried about their job in these scenarios. I've always, those were always the friction moments for us, and I don't know if you can think back to your agency days friction moments for us, and I don't know if you can think back to your agency days. It's been a while now, but like, like that to me seems like when there's an adversarial relationship and I would assume that, like, if you have an adversarial relationship with your subs, that probably creates friction too right. Like it's the adversarial relationship with these, with the partners that you create in your business, is not, it's not the way to go into a relationship, it's not the best relationships.
Speaker 2:Yeah, totally. I mean, we see that Right. So a you know we provide marketing training, so we might be talking with a prospective client who's a roofing company. They have an in-house marketing manager, marketing coordinator, and then you know, we, and then we might get on that sales call and you could see, the marketing coordinator is a little bit territorial, defensive, like well, I don't need contractor dynamics because I'm the marketing person. I know they don't say that, but you get that vibe. Yeah, get the vibe. Yeah. That comes down to. That's a you know more macro kind of issue as far as, like, you have the right person that's aligned with your values, aligned with, like, the vision of where the company's going, because if he or she is going to be offensive like that and territorial, then then they're going to hold back your growth.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, that's kind of different within your culture, have a culture of, of continuous improvement you know, you know and and and for the that. You know some of the relationships might work out, might not. You may use the new subcontractor and it just doesn't work. You don't like them right. The same way that you may hire someone to do your Facebook ads and you may not. It may not work out, but you still. But you don't want to start off in an adversarial way.
Speaker 2:So yeah, so a concrete example of that is in our company. Sydney Corral is our marketing director. So, like inside the marketing department, like I report to her, but she, we run on EOS, we have a scorecard, we have our marketing meeting every Monday and she brings the scorecard and she'll be like all right, well, we were running this Facebook and she runs the Facebook ads. So she'll be like all right, we've been running this Facebook and she runs the Facebook ad. So she'll be like all right, we've been running this Facebook ad campaign for about a month now. You know we were trying to give it a little bit more time to see if it got some traction, but ultimately it just was not performing. Our cost per lead was, you know this and way above our threshold, and for that reason I turned it off and we're going to, you know kind of regroup and she's able to present that to our team and and not in a way that she's like, man, I really messed up that campaign. No, it's just, it's testing. Like I shot. I recorded 10 videos yesterday at a studio here in new jersey. We had a lot of fun. I think the videos are going to turn out like good. They're going to be part of our facebook ad campaign for q1.
Speaker 2:But I said in our team slack yesterday, I'm like I think we shot some really good videos. The market will tell us, we'll see. You know, if they bomb, like I'm not going to take that personally, we're just going to go back to the drawing board and see what we can learn from that for next time. So I think that's another point, maybe getting off topic here, but no, I was thinking the same thing. A lot of companies will you know they'll try something like that. It won't work. And they're like, ah, through marketing Facebook doesn't work. Like I'm done, I'm just going to go back to banging on doors because I know that works. Well, it's like you know, if you get in a car accident, it doesn't mean that like you're never going to drive again because like cars don't work the right way, like it's just you know, like it's that particular campaign didn't work. So, yeah, just that's another point I want to make.
Speaker 1:That's a big thing, Like the expectations of different marketing channels. Is something in that? Marketing is not an exact science, right? Like I remember being in college and in an economics class and one of my one of the things that I got from the instructor was like, yeah, economics is not an exact science.
Speaker 1:This isn't right Like, and it's not an exact science because we can't predict consumer behavior. It's very similar in marketing, right Like. As we went through the election this year, you know consumer behaviors changed based on what they felt that the election results may or may not be, and like there's so many things. You could have a killer Facebook ad, but if people aren't in buy mode at that time, right Like, it might not work out well. So have proper expectations. And I think that's back to our learning process. Right, we just have to know enough, right, and we have to know enough to say, okay, that's working, that's not working. When to move those dials, what are some key metrics? Maybe a few key metrics that people might want to measure around, just to know if things are working or not, and you could do it by marketing channel. You could do it however you want to think about it hitting channel.
Speaker 2:You could do it, however you want to think about it. Yeah, so I'm just thinking of, like the scorecard that we help our clients. We have a few different templates, depending on how sophisticated a client might be in terms of how long they've been doing marketing. But, yeah, ideally by channel right, especially if you're doing paid ads, you're doing Google PPC, you're doing Google local service ads, meta ads let's use those as an example. You want to look at your cost per lead from each channel and then, like Jim you said before, you want to take that lead as far as you can. So you're at cost per lead. And maybe, if you're doing marketing qualified lead and then you're doing sales qualified lead, so you don't just want leads, you want sales qualified leads, whatever your qualification criteria is. So what's our cost per SQL sales qualified lead? What's our cost per appointment? What's our cost per signed contract? What's the dollar value of those contracts that came from, like Facebook ads, for example?
Speaker 2:So you might have 10 leads that came from your Facebook ad campaign. Eight of them might be sales qualified, six of them might be turning into appointments. Your close rate is 50%, so you're selling three. Your average ticket is $20K, so $60,000 came from that particular ad campaign, $60,000 of revenue. Again, ideally, you're looking at gross profit. So you're looking at whatever $30,000 gross profit.
Speaker 2:Just keep it simple. So you got 30 grand gross profit from you know you spent a thousand dollars on Facebook ads. Is that? Is that within your acceptable range? Great, like, just keep running that. Or increase your ad spend if it's working so well. And then, if it's, you know, google, for example. We were talking about this. I think before we hit record, you want to look at, like, what campaigns or what ads are actually producing those leads. So a lot of times it's very typical for a lot of marketing agencies that aren't as good as refer marketers. Well, you know, marketing agencies love to take credit for for, you know, for anything they can and then push blame for anything they they don't want to get blamed for. And I say that like kind of tongue in cheek. There's some great marketing, awesome marketing agency can change your freaking life.
Speaker 2:Like no, no exaggeration like no, no exaggeration. But that being said, you know there's we have we have clients, roofing companies. I'll come into our training program and you know one of the things we do is a full blown audit of everything that's going on. All right, you're spending this is an example from this past summer One of our roofing company clients in Orlando. You're spending $10,000 a month on Google Ads. All right, let's look into that.
Speaker 2:All right, well, most of the leads that you're generating are branded searches. So, in other words, people are searching for dynamic roofing as an example, and that's how they're clicking on that ad. They might see billboards, trucks, they might know you, they might be your best friend from the gym. They're just looking for your freaking phone number. They're Googling your company name. The first result there is an ad. They don't even know that. They just click on it because they're on their phone, that sort of thing.
Speaker 2:And then you're paying for that, so that your 10 grand a month most of the 80% of those leads are people that are already searching for you anyway. In effect, you're paying for your best friend at the gym to become a lead. So that example this summer was like hey, why don't you try to turn off your ads for a month and see what happens and like their lead flow did not decrease. I'm not saying that's always the case. Google ads can work extremely well if you have them dialed in and you're really like on top of them. But a lot of times you know you have to look at that like, you have to get that granular to see, because your agency might be like yeah, you generated, you know, we got you 20 leads a month this week, this month from Google ads Great yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, if 16 of them are already going to find you and call you anyway, like then your cost per lead is way higher. It's four times higher than you thought it would be. So, yeah, getting into those, getting granular on things, but just the learning, just knowing those basic kind of things, right, like knowing those basic kind of things. Where do you see along a customers or, I'm sorry, along a contractors, like the stages of business as they're going through, maybe their startup phase, their scaling phase, their sustainability phase, as they're going into these? What? What marketing channels do you see or do you feel are the most important in the in the early stage, kind of in that scaling middle stage, and then when they're, when they're like, oh, this is where we want, we're maintaining this $7 million company, this is where we want to be, we don't want to get any bigger or smaller than this. What marketing channels do you see as some of the most important at each of those stages?
Speaker 2:All right, we could do a whole episode on this, but I'll try to keep it succinct. So, disclaimer it's going to depend on your particular situation. So you might be starting up a roofing company, that you have some capital. It's not your first rodeo. You have some money saved up. You have budget to go out and start. In more cases than not, it's the bootstrap company. I started bootstrap.
Speaker 2:You don't have a ton of money to invest in a full-blown marketing strategy, so you're going to be putting in your labor and we hear this a lot, jim, you'll see it in the Facebook groups like hey, I need a new, who do you recommend for SEO. Or we'll even get clients who are like hey, I need to do SEO, who should I sign up with? And I'm like I always like to answer a question with a question Like why do you think that you need SEO? Like how does that play into your marketing strategy? I think they might know a guy that crushes it with SEO, but that guy's been in business for 10 years and you know he's got like you don't know what's below the surface. Seo, for example, takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of money, it takes a lot of patience. You got to be willing to invest in it for a long time before you see that return. So SEO is something that we don't typically. I mean, yes, there's levels of everything right, the basics, google business profile setup, optimized, website optimized, all that sort of thing but should you be doing aggressive SEO from day one? I don't believe so that sort of thing. But should you be doing aggressive SEO from day one? I don't believe so.
Speaker 2:You can have a lot of traction by getting your face on video so faces on video on social media, on Facebook and Instagram primarily and then backing your content. Because if you're starting out, you don't have a lot of followers, you don't have a lot of likes on your pages and profiles, running some brand awareness ads on Meta, which is Facebook and Instagram. So take those videos of your handsome or pretty face out there on the job site and spend $10 a day on some brand awareness ads in your local five mile, 10 mile radius and all of a sudden, you're getting thousands of people to see your content, not just the 247 followers that you have on your Facebook page. So that's a big one. Make sure you have your you know clean website, google business profile dialed in. You're getting some reviews. You're getting out there on social media consistently, on Facebook and Instagram, backing some of that content with some advertising dollars on meta, that's a really good start. Of course, making sure that you are over-delivering, providing a great client experience, earning those referrals, that's a really good start. So that could be you as the owner, your spouse, whatever that is. And then you get a little bit of traction.
Speaker 2:Or that part-time marketing person to just continue that, again, you can't hire that person if you don't know what you're doing. So you got to know it. Like Jim did the drywall before he hired a drywall guy, you got to buck up and do it. You just got to do it. There's no way around it. You just got to do it, learn a little bit so that you can hire that person, be able to lead them, manage them, hold them accountable. And then, yeah, as you grow, I would say Again, we have clients that are doing $2 million a year that have a full-time in-house marketing manager.
Speaker 2:Generally they're younger owners in their 20s who really understand the importance of that. But I would say more generally you get to that $5 million a year range, you're looking to hire that full-time in-house person, You're getting toward that $10 million range and you have that vision Again, that longer-term vision. You know where you're going. I'm a big fan of hiring for where you're going, not where you're at. So you get toward that $10 million range. Maybe you look to have that full-time in-house video creative person in addition to your marketing coordinator. So now you have two full-time people on your team and that's going to help you get to that next level. So there's so many nuances.
Speaker 1:So many. But, like you said, we could do at least do an hour on that. Right, just on that. But yeah for sure. But the core, the core of it is is to me, I think, is that, like the way I refer to it, joe, is the marketing stack right? So you start doing one thing and you then consistently do that and then you add something to that stack, and then you add something to that stack and then you add some, but it's not taking the other thing away, in my opinion. Right Like, if you, unless, of course, it's it's completely off the rails Right Like, but you continue to build and add to this stack. So now it's the old, you know the? How many lines in the water? Do you have kind of analogy? Right Like, in the more lines you have in the water, the more consistent.
Speaker 1:You'll, looking at, may seem like it's the right thing to do.
Speaker 1:Like you said, I know a guy that crushes it in this, right Like.
Speaker 1:I know yeah, I met a guy down at an event and they crush it at Facebook ads, they crush it at SEO, they crush it with billboards, they crush it with whatever. But it might not be right for your company and I think you should look at your team, and what we were talking about off camera is. An example of this is if you have a door-to-door sales team and they're knocking a storm, a fresh storm, and you get a Facebook ad lead that comes in across town or a Google ads lead that comes in across town, I don't think that sales rep is gonna jump in the truck and drive across town. Or a Google ads lead that comes in across town, I don't think that sales rep is going to jump in the truck and drive across town for that. They may pretend that they did, yeah Right. Their follow-up may not be as diligent on that lead across town because they are focused on that next door where that fresh storm is. What are your thoughts on how to use the right marketing channels for the team that you have?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a great one. I would use that phrase, reverse engineer, which is just basically a fancy way of saying like, start with the end in mind, right? So go back to that ideal client, ideal project. What do you want? You want, you want to. You're at 2 million. You want to grow to five, okay, well, those ideal projects for you are those $20,000,.
Speaker 2:You know, shingle replacements when? Where do you want to work Like? Where are geographically? Like, where are those you want to focus on? Your around your office or your home? Do you want to focus on, like, the higher end of town? Where do you want to focus? Focus your efforts?
Speaker 2:And then you're going to have, you know, you're going to have, like, sit down with your team and it's. It's not like you're not like the dictator, right. It was like, all right, I'm going to my black box, I'm going to do my planning for 2025. And this is our marketing plan. Then you're, like, cascading it down to the team. I would say, like at a round table with your team and talk that out. Because, yeah, like you said, that buy-in is key. Whether you're investing in a new CRM or a video marketing strategy, you have to have that buy-in from your team.
Speaker 2:And then you mentioned follow-up. It's not all about just getting a bunch of leads in the door. It's like, hey, how are we, how are we responding to leads? How are we following up? What's our long term nurture with leads that someone inquires today, on December 11th? Well, maybe they're not ready today, but like when they're ready in April, how are we staying top of mind so that you know they're calling us automatically when they're ready to go?
Speaker 2:And so there's companies that are like some of the I'm just looking at our clients like the younger companies, younger people. They're like, yeah, like video. Obviously, I need to get my face on video. That's going to be our thing. We're going to crush it on video, great. Maybe you have some other companies like yeah, that's not really our thing. I would challenge you on that. But maybe you're doing something else. Maybe you're in Dallas-Fort Worth where it's so freaking saturated that you're going to focus more on building referral relationships with commercial property owners or realtors or other people that are spheres of influence for you.
Speaker 2:And so the way I look at it is like here's our ideal client, our ideal prospect. What do they need to see and believe before they reach out to us to feel comfortable enough to say hey, jim, I want you guys to come out and do an inspection or look at my roof, right. What do they need to see? They're going to need to see your brand 10, 15 times before they feel comfortable enough to reach out to you. What do you want them to believe about your company? You're not the cheapest guy, you're not the low price guy. You're going to be more expensive, you're not going to be the most expensive, but you might be in that 70th percentile, right? They're going to pay a little bit more for a great experience. And then how can you get that content out in front of them?
Speaker 2:Like, 90% of the buying decision is made before a company reaches out, before a person reaches out to a company for the first time. So what kind of questions are they asking? Do they want to see an instant roof quote tool on your website? So all these different questions. But it all starts with, like, who is our ideal client and what do they need to see and believe in order to feel comfortable enough to reach out to us? And then you just backfill from there. Enough to reach out to us? And then you just backfill from there. So it's not easy.
Speaker 1:Sorry guys, it's not the easy button but it's worth it because very few companies are going to do that work. Very few will do that work. Awesome, joseph Hughes. It's been a pleasure. This has been another episode of the Roofing Success Podcast. Thank you for tuning into the Roofing Success Podcast. Thank you for tuning in to the Roofing Success Podcast For more valuable content. Visit roofingsuccesspodcastcom While there, check out our sponsors for exclusive offers, shop for merchandise and sign up for our newsletter for industry updates and tips. Also join the Roofing Success Facebook group to connect with other professionals and stay updated on the latest trends. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, like, share and leave a comment. Group to connect with other professionals and stay updated on the latest trends. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, like, share and leave a comment. Your support helps us continue to bring you top industry insights. The website link is in the description. Thanks for listening.
