Transcript of Inside LJW: 40+ Years of Advertising That Actually Works - Sam John

Even though this advertising seems expensive, it's the best investment you're going to ever make.

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New episodes every Monday. Before we get started, I wanted to share two important things with you. First, I want you to implement what you learn today. To do that, you'll have to take a lot of notes, but I also want you to fully concentrate on the interview. So I asked the team to take notes for you. Just text notes, N-O-T-E-S, to 888-526-1299. That's 888-526-1299. And you'll receive a link to download the notes from today's episode. Also, if you haven't got your copy of my newest book, Elevate, please go check it out. I'll share with you how I attracted and developed a winning team that helped me build a $200 million company in 22 states. Just go to elevateandwin.com/podcast to get your copy. Now let's go back into the interview. All right guys, welcome back to the Home Service Expert. Today I got Sam in the house with LJW, Larry John Wright Advertising. You know, a lot of people ask me, they say, Tommy, what do you do for marketing? And I'm like, how much time you got? But this one is, I've gone through a few media buyers over the years and I was in this, it's called Owens Harky years ago.

And he goes, Tommy, he goes, he's got hundreds of people out there. And he goes, let me take you to the money room. And he goes upstairs to these two people. He goes, these two women do all the media buys. This is where all the money's made. And they had Disney and they had like some big accounts, not home service stuff. It was like the—

Arizona Lottery.

Arizona Lottery, stuff like that. And Scott became a good friend over the years. And it's just interesting, like we talk about top of the funnel and direct response marketing and media buys with TV, radio, billboards, and all the things you guys do. But we don't really, you're so much more than that. And I thought I should share this and I'm gonna start doing more of these things and just sharing who've been great to us and A1 and myself. Sam's an expert in social media, digital ad placement, advertising consulting, traditional media negotiation and placement, creative brand building. It's a full-service creative advertising and media strategy firm founded in 1982 by Larry John and John Wright, headquarters in Mesa, Arizona. LJW works with companies across the country, primarily helping growth-focused businesses turn marketing into measurable revenue. LJW focuses on building strategies that combine smart media investment, strong messaging, and disciplined execution. That means negotiating and placing media across traditional channels like television, radio, and billboards, while integrating modern digital platforms like streaming, online video, and targeted digital and social media campaigns. One thing that makes LJW different than many other agencies is that they operate their own in-house production studios.

Producing, producing thousands of television, radio, and video and digital ads each year, which allows clients to move faster, control costs, and maintain creative consistency across campaigns. With one of the most experienced media buying teams in the industry, LJW's goal is simple: help clients invest their marketing dollars more effectively so they generate more leads, more customers, and ultimately more growth. Over the years, LJW has worked with companies in industries ranging from home services and automotive to retail, legal, real estate, education, and political campaigns. Sam, it's a pleasure. And you and I being here—

Pleasure's mine, man.

It's awesome, man. This is so easy because we work so close. You guys are next door shooting stuff all the time. You make my life so simple. We'll do shots at clients' houses. We just did. So we did what we did. Make-A-Wish Foundation. We helped out that gal, that, that little kid, those little kids with cancer.

Cancer. Yeah. Something else.

You guys are big with our PR side. You fly to different markets for me and you do it at such a good rate. And I'm not gonna talk about the pricing here, but compared to other companies, you just, you guys are like, dude, we're gonna make it work for you. Like, you're a big client, you spend a lot with us, we're gonna make it work. And, and in January we're like, we're taking off the band-aids and we're going all in. We're buying more media than we've ever bought. We're buying so much media. I mean, We're spending a significant 7 figures a month in media. And what people don't know, and I just want to just give a few hints here, is our pay-per-click campaigns have done so much better. Even Valpak has done better.

You're in charge.

You took that over for us too, and you're helping us out. I don't think that's something you normally do. You took over a lot of the mail stuff for us. You just helped out. You're like, dude, wherever we— wherever you need us, Tommy, we're going to go and help. You fly to Milwaukee, you fly to these markets, you're getting it because we can't have a cactus in the background in Michigan.

No, it doesn't work.

So you guys have just been, you know, very, very great to us. And I really— I can't thank you enough. And I'll get behind you. I— it's two thumbs up for Sam and his team. Everybody that he works with put— they put out great, great videos. They always are refreshing things that they're like— I get phone calls still to this day all the time. Like, I I love your mom. Like, that's why we did business with you. So why don't you just talk a little bit about the company, where you're at today yourself? I know it's a family business and just tell us about what you're looking forward to.

Yeah, no, I mean, we've been obviously family-owned business from the very beginning and kind of like you said, I think the opportunity for us is to work with other home service businesses that are, you know, most of them are just family-run. I mean, you referred us a client in Houston the other day. It's a, it's a father and son and we relate to that real well. My dad started the company obviously in '82. Originally when he started, it was just him and his business card was Larry John and Son Advertising. Well, I was the son. I was 2 years old, obviously wasn't doing any of the work, but I've benefited from that my entire life. So I worked in Larry John Wright from day one. A1 from day one was Larry John Wright from day one, you know. But yeah, no, our company was really built from the ground up, just like you did here with, with A1, like most of, most of your audience has done. They built this from nothing and and really, you know, put their money where their mouth is and risk a lot. And that's the big thing is the risk that goes into building a business.

And so we understand that. We understand that it's a big risk, especially when you look at advertising. And so we understand the advertising risk that people take and we take that seriously. I, my business partners and I, we started running the business in 2009. All of us has worked there for, well, over 28 years and we bought the business about 5 years ago. So our dads are out of the business. My dad passed away in 2018 and John Wright actually passed away last year. So we— our founders have left us, but they're still with us in spirit. And we really just really have taken this business to the next level over the last 10 or 15 years, surviving the downturn in the economy in '08. Our business at the time was 20% real estate and 80% car dealers. So we went from, you know, living high on the hog to basically having nothing. And rebuilt the business, really focused on a different model. And the model was we want to do business with people that appreciate what we do and that we love working with. You know, car dealers can be really hard in that they're very demanding in what they, what they ask for, but they don't appreciate anything that the advertising really provides for them.

Working with businesses like yours, home service businesses, we've established relationships with people that have lasted over 30 years. A lot of our clients stay with us for You know, well, I'll give you one example. Many people here locally in Phoenix are familiar with Spencer's TV and Appliance. They're the largest independent. Yeah, you're familiar with them. They probably stock many of your houses, you know. But yeah, we've worked with them for over 30 years and Spencer's has had phenomenal success, but because they believe in advertising like you have done. And so there's, there's this model of when you believe in something that's going to work, it's going to work.

Yeah, you know, it does work. But many people listening unfortunately think, and I've seen this happen, I mean, it happens 9 times out of 10. I started to run the radio ads. All my family called me, all my buddies called me, but the phone's not ringing off the hook. And I expect it to take at least a year when you start really blitzing. And I'll just say this. I stopped telling you exactly what to do. I said, dude, you've ran ads for way longer. 1982, you guys have been around. Tell us how to win. And I think that was an important thing because a lot of people, especially like a smaller business, they come to you and say, we got the perfect ideas, we know what to do. And you're like, yeah, we'll do it. But yeah, but so talk to me a little bit about that.

Yeah. I mean, Tommy, you know more about marketing than most people I've ever worked with. The amount of time you've invested in learning about and testing and really just coming to an expert level of what makes advertising actually work. You know, it's unmatched, honestly. And so what we find is that people will come into an advertising idea thinking advertising is going to change my world in 30 days, maybe like a pay-per-click campaign can do, not realizing that it's an investment. And so when we think about the stock market as an investment, we're going to put our money in and hope that we have a return in 30 years, right? Well, obviously we want to start seeing some return right away. And when the stock market gets a little rough, then people start to panic and maybe they pull out and then they've lost everything. Same thing happens in advertising. I mean, people throw in, you know, 30, 40, maybe even 100 grand in advertising, think it's going to work in 30 days, and then they pull out. They've just lost 100 grand. I can spend that 100 grand better just by putting it in the stock market for you.

So, yeah, well, honestly, what we try and do is we try and let people know really what it is that makes advertising work. And it really— it's the answer is the same and it's always going to be the same. It depends. Right. And so the answer to what makes advertising work depends on a lot of things. It's going to depend on the market conditions. And so if we're, if we're looking into a market where, like, for example, Las Vegas right now, it's hard for all my home service businesses, but it's also hard for my car dealers. It's hard for everybody. Las Vegas is a struggling market.

It's struggling and there's a lot of competition.

A lot of competition. I mean, I've got a personal injury attorney who wants to go into a lot of markets this year. They've already expanded into quite a few. And honestly, that's one market they're avoiding because of the level of competition. But the scarcity also of people who are really going to be generating that revenue there. And so, yeah, when we look at that, we got to consider the market and the market's always going to be determined. And that's something we can't control, right? We can't control the market. But what we can do is we can use the market to determine what it is we need to do to win in that market, because a lot of our clients are in a market and they're not ready to move into the next market like you guys are doing. And so how do we win in that market? And that's going to boil down to a number of things. When it relates to advertising, it's pretty simple. It's going to be dependent on the media. And your choices in media. And so a lot of clients are going to ask, where should I advertise? You know, and then the next one is going to be budget.

How much should I spend? Right. And the answer to that is always $1 million, right? There's never— there's no real true answer to it. It just depends. But the rule of that really is going to be that he who spends the most always wins, all things being equal. So that's my job as an advertiser to make things unequal. And we do that by placing media more strategically, by negotiating more for your dollar. And then we really hone in on the message. And so you talked about the message, right? That was— that's one of the things that you're like, hey, Here's my ideas. The reality is I think everybody thinks they know what works because they know what they like. Yeah, right. And so what we have to— we have to step back a little bit and say, well, you may like that, but what is the general market? So now we're back to the market. What does the market actually like? And what you'll find is that a lot of times what we perceive as funny or as clever or as endearing isn't necessarily that to the general public. And so we're really focused in on who's your audience, who is it that we need to target?

And we're going to create a message that revolves around that. And so a lot of people get caught up in, I have to be funny, right? And humor is so subjective. And so we try and steer our clients in a way that's going to be memorable. What we want is when someone sees their ad, that number one, they know that they can solve the problem that they have. And number two, that they were going to remember who it is, not just what they said. Right. And that's where a lot of people get lost is they do a commercial. It's 30 seconds. At the very end, they put their logo. And everyone forgot what the logo was, but they remembered how funny the commercial was. Well, that's a failure, right?

So, you know, the trucks, the number one calling card, like Dan Antonelli taught me this. He's like, you've got hundreds of trucks driving around the country. He's like, that's your calling card. They see that. That's your rolling billboard. Put that in your ads. It needs to be in every ad. And he's right. It should be on the front of your website, too. Yeah.

I mean, just while you're on trucks, I've got a client, a local AC company. He did $25 million last year. His goal is to do $37 million this year. He's a great company. He's very successful, mostly commercial business. So he's trying to grow his residential. We went ahead and said, hey, listen, let's start out with radio because his budget wasn't big enough for television. And immediately people started to recognize the vans. Well, he's got 34 vans driving around the country that are around the state that nobody's really seen because they don't know who he is. Right. And all of a sudden people are— he's like, man, people are telling me to see my vans everywhere. Well, what changed? All of a sudden, people are hearing the name of his company. Well, this year we put him on television and what are we doing? We're showing him in front of the vans. And because that really is the calling card, it is. Nobody knows who you are until you've told them who you are.

And that's the deal for me is, is I want to build trust. I want to build reliability. My dad taught me you can do 3 things. You can be the best. And what does the best mean? The best means you got the best warranty, the best parts. You stand by your product. You've been around a long time. You got the best training program. You offer the best warranty and you stand by it. You could be the fastest. I show up within an hour when you call. We're there when you need us most. We're open late nights, weekends, holidays. Third one is you could be the cheapest. You can never be all three. You can pick two out of the three, any two you'll be, but you can never be all three. So you got to decide, do you want to be discount garage doors and HVAC for less? And that works. But most people think they can pull off the Walmart strategy and it's normally a race to the bottom.

Yeah.

And it takes a long time because there's people listening to this that don't like me. They literally, they listen and they go, yeah, you take advantage of grandma. I'm like, no, I don't. We offer options all the way from the Contractor Series to the Taj Mahal. I let the client decide. And the other thing is I don't sell things people need. I sell things people want. Nobody needs a new garage door. I can Band-Aid the hell out of it.

Yeah. I mean, I've used A1 for probably over 15 years. So from the very beginning, We've been in our house for 22 years. I've had 3 times I needed a garage repair. The first one, we replaced the spring. I felt like it was a phenomenal experience. It was probably you that came out and did it, or, you know, it was a— it was a handsome man. That's what I know. So, but ultimately, you're right. I mean, we don't know what we don't know as a consumer, right? And so I didn't know when the guy came out the last time that the reason why my garage door wasn't working was because it was on the last thread of its, you know, the I forget what it's called, but the last thread and the springs were broken and the rods were bent, the cables, you know, my bottom rubbers were bad. And so the client needs those options. That's what I love about what you do because we do the same thing in advertising. It's like, I'm going to provide you with options where if someone comes to me selling a product. So if you came and just said, here's what you have to do to fix your garage, they're probably not going to feel very comfortable, especially when you show them the price, right?

But when you come to them with options, you've now given that client an opportunity to choose for themselves what it is that's going to be best for their budget. Best for their experience, and then now they walk away. You're not screwing Grandma. You gave Grandma exactly what she needed, right? And we do the same thing in advertising. It's like if someone came to me and they said, here's what I want, I said, well, here's what you have to do. And that's all I gave them was that one option. Ultimately, I've sold a product to them, not a service, right? And so one of the things we see a lot of companies doing out there is they come and say, here's the solution to all your problems in advertising. But really all they're doing is selling their product. So they have a vested interest in their product versus what's best for the client. And so as we look at advertising, we're like, I'm an advertising agency, I have all the options. And whether it's from pay-per-click all the way up to TV advertising, billboards, radio, whatever it is, social media advertising, we do it all. We offer all those services.

But it's finding out what option is going to be best for the client. And when you do that, you win, right? And so from your, from your standpoint, for a lot of these people who are listening, they need to get out of the mindset of, um, I'm going to get a bad review if I charge too much. It's It's like, no, no, get into the mindset of I'm going to get a good review because I provided the client with the service they needed.

Right.

I gave them options, just like what you guys, you guys do. So I think your listeners, a lot of times, you know, you may get a bad review every now and then because someone feels like they got screwed. Maybe the sales guy did a bad job in explaining the options. But the reality is, is as your people are trained higher and higher levels, they know how to communicate with the people. So they're making those decisions on their own. That's what— that's really what I think makes you so successful is you're not afraid to charge what you can charge. Versus racing to the bottom. We see it with car dealerships all the time. You know, they're successful in making a lot of revenue or they're successful in volume, but they have a really hard time doing both.

You're 100% right. And here's the thing that happened with us is I remember my first radio endorsement was a long time ago. It was a guy named Jim Sharp. Oh, I loved him. And he's a great guy. I need to catch up with him. We need to pull him back in. I would love to pull him back in because he's such a good guy. And you've introduced me to a lot of endorsements we're picking up. But the crazy thing is, is people are like, Yeah, you can't get out here till 3 days from now. That's fine. We trust you. We're going to wait. You know, the no-shows don't happen. And then you walk up, you walk up, you knock on their door and they're like, here's the garage, here's lunch. You're a great company. Do whatever it takes. The trust is built. They're not calling any other company. They decided to call yours. And that's where the biggest thing changes. I have people that are like, dude, I hear your ads all day. Day long. And that's one thing you've kind of taught us is we're going to own the demographic. We're not spraying and praying.

You're not going to be on every country station and AM and like everywhere. You're going to be a lot on the ones we want to own. And you got to know who your client is and your avatar. And we want to own— we don't need to be on, you know, a station or a channel that's not our target demographic. So what are the lessons you could teach the audience right now on instead of spraying and praying for the phone to ring to just— if you got a smaller budget, let's just own this demographic.

Yeah, I mean, that's one of the biggest mistakes we see most companies making is they dabble instead of dominate. And so what that looks like is the client's like, well, I want to try OTT, I want to try some streaming, I want to try some social media. It's like, guy, you're nowhere. And even though you're spending money in all these places, you're literally nowhere because what really makes advertising work is frequency. Right? So without that frequency, you're, you're basically just wasting money. And so my goal is always to make sure my clients don't waste their money. So I'll be blunt with them and say, listen, I appreciate we can do all those things. And until your budget's at this level, I'm not going to, I'm not going to recommend you move those dollars into any of those mediums. We have to maximize, right? So domination is one of the things that you guys have done really well. And maybe it's because I've, you know, kind of ingrained that in the media or marketing team's mind is like domination before we move on to the next media. You guys have done expert at that. And so what that looks like is, is once we own a market on television, for example, and we've reached this point of frequency that we need to be at in order to really be successful, then we add in radio, then we add in billboards, and then we add in streaming.

And then, you know, we start to add in these layers that expand your reach without impacting the frequency. And so we call it owning an audience or maximizing before you mix. But that's what makes companies successful. When they dabble, they're never going to be successful. I've got a client, you know, he's— he does a great job. I mean, most of the clients we work with are phenomenal in running their business. It's when they start to say, here's how advertising should work, where I get a little concerned, right? Because they think they know how advertising works when their business is whatever it might be— garage doors. Well, I don't know. I'm not going to tell you how to run your garage door business, but I can tell you how advertising will and won't work. And he loves to dabble. And so he's always here, always there, and never anywhere. And people don't hear his ads. And so we finally got him focused in. Like, let's just own radio, let's get a couple of endorsements, let's get some great frequency there. Then he was able to see the magic and then roll into TV and, you know, move from there.

It's so crazy. It's like you remember the company, you remember what they stand for, and all of a sudden the cost goes out the window. It really does. It's like, I just want it fixed right. I remember I bought my first house in 2012, and I mean, I was the king of negotiating. I got my tile installed for a buck a square foot. And I was going and I was going on Craigslist and I got my cabinets. I would negotiate the cabinets, the roof, the HVAC unit. I mean, this was a full demo at the house in Scottsdale. And man, the tiles had hollow spots every single where you put a golf ball. I needed to replace the tile years later. The roof leaked after 4 years. The HVAC unit didn't last. It was just like everything. I thought I was like the king of negotiation. I didn't get what I paid for. I did get what I paid for, I guess. And it's very interesting because now I really— I do use bigger companies. I want them to show up like I really care about my fiancée, Bree. She's at home a lot of the time, and I want somebody that's going to show up and respect her and respect our home and respect my doggies.

Yeah. And, you know, a lot of people have kids and like, I want somebody that's been through a background check. I want somebody that's going to show up not in a beat-up truck. I want somebody that's going to be able to communicate the benefits. And by the way, rich or poor, black or white, old or young, male or female, me in particular, I want to be offered everything. If the plumber comes, I want you to look at every toilet. I want you to see how fast does the water get to my shower? Can you make it faster? Don't judge me because I'm rich or poor. Offer me the same stuff no matter what. Let me decide if I want it. And I think that so many people, they prejudge, they sell out of their own pocket. They might not offer things. I remember going, you know, Levine.

Oh, yes.

Like I go to Levine to run all the jobs in Levine. And man, people would pay me $3,000 cash and they didn't speak English as a first language. And people would have drove up the— the landscaping is messed up. And it was crazy because I didn't prejudge the situation. I treated them like everyone else, like they were rich or poor. It didn't matter. I'm just going to use my system. I'm going to smile. I'm going to tell them I'm on their side. If they say they're selling the home, let's make sure you pass inspection. I want to be your garage door guy for life. So many people are like, give me 100 cards. I work at Intel, I work at Honeywell. I'm going to pass your card out because you treated me with respect. And that's, that's the difference is like marketing is not going to fix your business.

No, it doesn't fix reputation problems either.

No, if you got all the one stars and everything else, that's another thing we're pretty good at, is getting 5-star reviews. The one-star reviews, the most angry customers are the cheapest. And people are like, Tommy, how do you get all these great clients? I'm like, well, we advertise to them. So you're advertising to Make a Deal Sally. I'm advertising to people like, I just want to fix, right? And I want to fix today.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, you're really talking to— talking to the language of the people who are in a situation where they need something to be fixed today. And so if you, you know, a lot of these home service businesses, HVAC, roofing, plumbing, and these are all kind of emergency type needs, right? Like I need it done within the next day or two, maybe three. So offering things like same-day service, offering, you know, a free inspection, you know, those types of things go a long way in the messaging. And what people— what we find in advertising is the messaging a lot of times gets cluttered with all these different things when really all you need to do is really engage the person in your story, right? So you do a really good job of telling stories about your Kawasaki, about your mom. You know, got a lot of great stories and it doesn't take much to come up with a story, engage them in your story. Tell them how you can solve their problem. Tell them you can do it today and then give them an offer. Right. And what we have found is the best offer is always going to be free.

Now, free is not always going to be great, right? And so we want to look at it and say, well, we're going to offer free when the market's down and we're going to bring that offer up as the market improves. Right. So if we're at capacity, we don't want to keep offering free. We want to bring that offer maybe up to a $29.95 or $99.95, $129.95. Right. So we're going to, we're going to fluctuate our offer based off of the capacity of the business to manage what's coming in. Where it gets scary is when a client comes on for the first month and they're putting it all out there and it's got to work this month. It's like, that's not a way to advertise. The way to advertise is to come in as an investment and look at it as, hey, I want to start telling this story. I'm going to give people a reason to call me, which is I can solve your problem and I'm going to give them a good offer. And that solid offer really is what makes, what makes the commercial, because now we've, we've, we've closed the deal. Where it gets hairy is when people feel like they've been, you know, like baited and switched, you know, to something bigger.

But we're not— we're not going to promise a garage door for $1,000 when it's going to cost them $10,000. Right. So, you know, we kind of steer our clients in a direction that allows them to really understand how to have a good offer, how to tell a good story, and how to make sure the client knows what you're offering. And that really just works. It's a solid formula.

You know, I, I come and do the recording at your studio and what I love about it is you're pretty rough with me. You're like, dude, you're not smiling. Redo that. And I appreciate it because I don't want to come off on the radio. And man, I hear people on the radio, they're like, and one day I realized I was going to be a garage door man. And it's like so monotone. And you're like, dude, just, just smile. Get excited like you get. Pronounce the words, redo that one more time for me. And you're like, get a big sip of water. I mean, last couple of times my allergies were killing me. Like, let's get you some coffee. Let's get you. But it's like, it's one of those things. If you could get the radio voice down and you're like, no, no, no, resay that when you're smiling. And so it's so important the way the message is delivered. And I've got a really distinctive voice. They used to call me Froggy in middle school, like this deep. It sounds like I've been smoking my whole life. But I really love doing it from a founder's perspective.

Like, dude, this is my 20th year in business. I remember the days when it was mom, me, my stepdad. I was running jobs on Sunday night and like those stories, if you could tell a great story that people feel like they're part of the story, like I know the same thing. And so you really help. And there are times that I'm like, I scratch that. I don't like that a lot.

Yeah.

And you guys do such a good job. The A1 from day one, we brought back in a heavy way. Because people are always like, yeah, A1 from day one, A1 from day one. Own it.

You got to own what you have, right?

And you guys came up with jingles for us for the other brands. And I mean, it works. And I'll just— what's really cool too is what you guys do is you're like, to own Atlanta is going to be a lot more difficult than it was to own this or own this or own this. You're like, dude, you're going after Atlanta and Dallas. It's going to be— those are big markets. So when I want to go own a market like own it. How do you guys start the process of like, this is what it's going to cost as a competitive analysis? What else do you guys got to do?

Yeah, I mean, we're in 65 markets across the country. So most markets where your listeners are, we're probably already there. And so we either understand the market very well, we know what the cost per thousands are, we know what it takes to get the reach and frequency they need to be successful on the big mediums. Right. So whether it's TV, radio, billboards, and I'll use Atlanta and Dallas as a good example because we went into both those markets differently. And so we went into Atlanta, we did what I would consider dabbling. The budget wasn't big enough to own TV. We were barely on radio. We did some OTT and some billboards that were very targeted to where you had, you know, GMBs, which is important, right? If we had GMBs all over the place, we would have screwed the pooch on that one. But right. But because we only had GMBs in the northern part of Atlanta, we just targeted that area with billboards and OTT and did a little bit of radio in Dallas. We went in Dallas guns blazing. We went in with what we call a domination budget. And so what we do is we offer you and we offer to all of our clients, we say, here's a competitive analysis to see what other clients are spending.

And in most cases, there's not a whole lot of competition that's really in that what we would consider dominant phase. So it's really easy to own a market if you just have the, the cajones to go in there and do it. And then what you look at is, you know, what's it going to take to be really low? Like, this is a low budget that can get you started if you want. There's a medium budget, there's a domination budget. I always recommend being somewhere between, you know, our recommended budget and that domination budget. If you want to win today. If not, that's fine. Let's go with a low budget and let's just own that. But own it for a long time, you know, minimum 90 days before you even start thinking about whether or not your investment's working up to a year. We got a client, you may or may not have heard of them, but Little Dealer, Little Prices, they were here in Phoenix for years and years and years. They sold about 2 or 3 years ago. A lot of our clients, we build them up to sell, right? And so Little Dealer, Little Prices built up and sold.

But up until the point that they sold, for about 30 years, all they did was spend about $10,000 a month on advertising. That's nothing in Phoenix. But because they did it consistently, and I always teach consistency is king, they won, right? They were able to sell. They were a huge company. They had locations all over the valley and they were able to sell at a huge profit when they were ready to close up shop. So I think the opportunity for your audience is to really look at and say, well, who's going to help me analyze what needs to happen? And that's what we offer is like a tune-up to your advertising. If they're already advertising, one of your referrals that came through an event that Jim was at. He came to us and said, look, I'm already doing TV. I'm on my own. I've got a radio buy, though, that I want you to help me with. So we helped him with the radio buy. I said, why don't you let us just evaluate your TV buy?

Yeah, I remember here.

Yeah. So he goes, oh man. I mean, the buy itself was great. They were buying good programs. They were on the news, some sports. But what he was spending, we were able to buy the same thing for half the price. Right. And that was before we even negotiated any bonus on top of that. And so, you know, making that switch over, it already, you know, automatically increased his results almost dramatically. Yeah.

So, you know, one of the things that I think is important, we're doing a lot of greenfielding and the hard part is matching up when the leads come on. By the way, it's going to take a while to take dominance. It's like a year. I mean, Aaron Gaynor would tell you with Eco Plumbing in Ohio, like he starts seeing heavy-duty results where he's penetrated the hell out of the market in 18 months. But you just got to trust it. Yeah, but the deal is for me is I got to have the talent to the conversion cycle. I got to be booking the calls, I got to be converting those calls, and I got to be offering more to increase the average tickets to be able to afford the marketing. So part of what we do with Larry, John Wright, and you, Sam, is we do a lot of stuff like I want to do, like in these newer markets, I want to do a lot of stuff that looks like a recruiting ad slash building trust with my potential clientele. So telling a story about why I work for A1, how it's such a great opportunity, and we're always going to treat our clients right.

I just see stories and you'll go out and you'll shoot anything I need for social media too. And that's what's really killer is like you need A+ players when you start investing in this stuff. You can't have the B and C players because you're never going to be able to afford it if you're not converting those calls and offering everything and booking every call and minimizing cancelations. And if there's a no-show, following up. And just like selling service agreements and offering financing and all these things, it's never going to work for you.

Never going to work.

And by the way, I hope you don't take on a lot of clients. I hope you tell them, let me look at your booking rate. If you don't know that, we're not going to be able to work with you. I hope you tell people like they got to get started. And I don't like— I know when you start with people, you got a big heart and you want to help them. But there's certain people that I've talked to that I'm like, this person is never going to be able to help themselves. So what do you think about using TV, radio, and billboards to recruit and really find A-players as well as putting a good message out to clients?

Yeah, I mean, that's probably one of the greatest resources you have because again, your ability to tell a story in a pay-per-click ad is zero, right? Right. My ability to tell a story and maybe a LinkedIn request for employment, not really much. But when we start putting that out there in TV, radio, and billboards and really TV and radio, because that's where we're able to tell the story, billboards just emphasizes that story. It gives us a chance to tell people that we care about who we hire. And so then you got people who want to be hired that are going to be, I want to be affiliated with a company that cares. And then you got people who want to hire you to do the job because they realize that, hey, they're hiring people who are, you know, a step above maybe your normal mom-and-pop garage door shop or AC company that, you know, we all know the typical guy that shows up. We call them the sleazy guy or the sleazy salesman or the other guy, you know, the guy that smokes while he's on his break. When he should be just finishing the job, right?

I mean, it's like you don't employ those kinds of people. And the companies that we want to work with are people who are like literally taking that seriously. Like we're professionals. We're not just a guy who learned how to fix garages or learned how to fix ACs one day and decided he can do that for the rest of his life and show up in his dingy truck with his untucked shirt, you know?

Yeah.

And so you're training people the right way. We see a lot of the companies that we started to work with, you know, through the Home Service Freedom doing the same things. They're following the program. They're following that. And now it's just time to start advertising to tell people about. So recruitment-wise, it's one of the best tools you can have.

I love this stuff, man. What separates you guys? If there's someone just hearing about LJW, what separates you guys from— we've kind of talked about it, but really there's a lot of agencies that do media buys. They're everywhere and all of them claim the same thing. We're the best. We've got the most data. We're going to get you the best cost. I don't think they put near the emphasis on the creative and making sure they're changing it up. I hear radio ads one year later that are the exact same, and it's like at some point, when is it deafening? Like, like they don't even hear it anymore because it's not different. But what separates you guys?

Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. And honestly, one of the things that we've had to come to terms with over the last couple of years is that everybody sells OTT streaming, right? Everybody sells pay-per-click or you know, social media advertising. My neighbors sell it, the radio stations sell it, newspaper, everyone's selling the same stuff, but nobody really has a strong strategy, at least not one that we've seen. And so what we do is we really go in and we say, we're not providing a product, whereas a radio station provides a product, a billboard company provides a product, and they may add on some layered products like, oh, we can target with banner ads on the internet when people have seen our billboard. That's great, it's a great product, but we don't sell products, we sell services. And our service is really to come in and to to really analyze what it is that's gonna make your business most successful with the budget that you have and with your revenue goals, right? Because most people don't look at it as like, oh well, this is how much I have to spend. It's like, no, no, how much should you be spending?

If this is where you wanna be, you can't stay here. And so a lot of clients get stuck in like, well, I wanna just spend a little bit amount, you know, a little bit of money on advertising. It's like, no, no. And that's what you guys have done. You guys see your goal, you know where you wanna be, and the budgets have matched that to really get to where you wanna go. What sets us apart more than anything is that, you know, there's all the other things like, oh, we love relationships. We've got long-term relationships with clients for over 30 years. With many of our— most of our clients are 10 years, you know, 10 years or more. Those things are all great and good. And I'm sure there's other agencies out there that have those same reputations and love their clients and all those things. But it's that we provide a service that's unmatched. And where that really comes in is that you're going to be working with owners most of the time, right? We've got 4 owners of the company and they're heavily involved in the management of the business, but also the management of clients.

I mean, I work directly with you, but I also work with your marketing team, right? And I got it. I got assistants to help me, right? There's— you always have to have other people working. But ultimately, it's kind of like when someone shows up at the house to fix something. I mean, if Tommy Mello were to show up at my house to fix my garage door, I would be elated because everyone knows Tommy Mello, right? And one of my clients— I'll name names here— it's Henry Brown, Buick GMC. He's been a client for over 30 years. Henry Brown, in his jingle, he talks about shaking hands. Back in town to keep the prices down, your neighbor Henry Brown, and he shakes your hand. And that's one of the things that he— he's 81 years old and he still shows up to the business and shakes people's hand when they come in to buy a car. There's something about that. And so you had talked about, you know, the fact that you're on the radio. Well, we really— one of the things that we really emphasize that we really push is that the owner personality is what makes all the difference in your creative.

You can have a crappy message and still be successful with an owner. But if you have a good message and the owner's on the commercial, it's going to, it's going to seal the deal because people want to feel like they're doing business with a real person, not just some 110%. I mean, tell us about your success with that.

Well, I'll just tell you, I was in Houston and we volunteered to work at a food bank and it was the YMCA. And Bree's there, Mike Bailey's there, and I've got a Garage Door Doctor shirt on. And this lady that was in the food bank was like, you're Tommy Mello with Garage Door Doctor. And she gives me the biggest hug and she goes, you guys are the best company. You were in my neighborhood. She goes, I am so excited. And 3 more people walk up. She goes and talks to them. And I'm like, I'm at a food bank at the YMCA in Houston. And it's crazy because people are like, I'm at the airport now. I'm in Washington, D.C. last weekend. And this guy, you know, obviously I do the podcast, I do other things, and I'm not trying to be famous, but people are like, you're the garage guy. And that's what I want to be known for. I don't want to be known as this podcaster. I want to be like, I'm the guy that's going to fix your garage door the best. And if it needs to be replaced, we're going to take care of you.

And that's what we're doing. And the more we can resonate that message out there, the better. Like, you know, it's crazy to see the outcome of this stuff working. And I got people— I'm from Michigan, as you know, and people are hitting me up from high school that I haven't talked to since high school. And they're like, dude, congratulations. Like, we see you everywhere.

Yeah.

And it feels like you're everywhere, but we're really not. I mean, we don't have a million billboards in Michigan, but our trucks are in a lot of places, always on the road. And we've just penetrated the market at a point where, like, it feels like we're everywhere. It's almost like everywhere I look, I see you, I hear you, I see you on TV. It's like people are like, are you stalking me? And that's exactly what we want. And that's what you guys make happen.

That's what we do.

Yeah.

And honestly, that's what my goal is, is not to necessarily make you famous, but you will be famous because of it. And it's amazing how many people we've made local famous, right? Our clients who are on TV, they get recognized everywhere they go. And that's not the goal, like you said. But when they see that and they see people recognizing them and seeing them, they know that the advertising is working. And what it really does— and this is probably the most important part of it— it's not about being famous. It's about being trusted. And we just did— we just put a client on the air and it was immediate. The amount of people who responded back with, that's a guy I can trust. And that's how we want to help sell these businesses is like, hey, you people— people can trust this guy. And that's how they're going to get in the door. Right. And so that's what really sets us apart is we, we definitely provide services for our clients that goes above and beyond what other people do when they're selling a product. And so if someone comes to your door, you know, an advertising guru comes to your door and they have a product and this is the solution to your problem, they're selling you something.

They're not providing you with solutions.

So you guys, you guys have your own full house creative agency and most companies that do media buys, they sub that out and it's $35,000 a video and the videos aren't really that great. I love that you guys brought my DeLorean into it. You know, what we'll do is we'll create a landing page and put some of the ads you guys have done. Oh yeah. But talk to me about having an in-house team versus, you know, within your four walls versus not. Yeah.

I mean, the biggest thing we used to have a saying, it's still on our wall, but we haven't taken it down yet. It says twice as good, twice as fast, half the price. And really where we got to that was in order to get people on the air quickly, in order to change their message quickly, in order to give them the services that they needed for less money than maybe someone else would, we knew we had to go in-house. So we built the full production studio 35 years ago and really have just owned that. And so we've got full-time editors, graphic designers, we've got the creative suites, the creative directors, people who really are experts at their field and do a great job. I mean, that DeLorean commercial was phenomenally fun, but we do that every day for clients across the country. And talking about Michigan, I mean, that's, you know, we've got a client there in Michigan that's a window company. And they— so I kind of want to take a step back a little bit here and just talk about the importance of management. I've heard you talk about it with other people on podcasts and stuff, but advertising is great.

But if you've got crappy people running your business, it's never going to work. And because I work with managers all day, every day, I see what works and I see what doesn't. And so this window company, they had a great product, probably the best product you've ever seen as far as windows go. And they had a decent manager. Well, they fired the manager and they hired this new guy. Well, the new guy actually came from a business, another business in Michigan that we work with, a carpet company. And the first thing he did was hire us. Well, we knew he was going to be successful, so we were excited. We got the client to up the budget because of what we knew. But the management is what made the difference. The advertising was just the catalyst to get him the leads he needed in order to win. Right. And so as we look at that, I think the opportunity is to say— and he's— oh, and he's on the spots. And we tell— I'll put some of those spots on the link. They're hilarious. And we've done some of those fun things with you as well and with other clients.

But it's more about telling the story, right? And owning that story and just really being able to do that. That's what owning the production studio allows us to do. So it makes us faster, it makes us more efficient, and it doesn't cost— I mean, you haven't paid a penny for production ever and never will. And that's most of our clients. I'd say 95% of our clients never spend a penny on production, and yet they're getting high-quality, great production.

It's a big deal. And I love the production because you guys make it so easy for me. I mean, it's like you got— we took a while to kind of learn how to do it. And now we got the teleprompters, the little things, but I could be better. You know, the deal is for me is practice makes perfection. Just like the first time I got on a stage, it was frightening. You know, I'm like, I'm just going to go up there and tell stories. And so I got some cool stuff I'm working on. I got this app on my phone. That when I do a selfie, I can kind of be reading it and it looks perfect and it looks authentic and it's absolutely phenomenal. Can you share an example where your strategy significantly increased leads or revenue?

Yeah, I mean, ultimately, one great example more recently, I'm going to name names again. Doug Hopkins, you know, Doug, he was a great guy. Got you out to his house, had some great steaks and just— he's one of my favorite people in all the world. Doug, uh, he, he had a great advertising agency, um, and, and this guy, um, you know, he, he was helping a lot of people in his industry, doing a lot of great things. Um, at some point he needed a change, so he came to Larry/John Wright. Within the first 30 days, he'd increased his, his leads by 20%, revenues through the roof, records broken, all those things. But it's simply just because of our media strategy, right? What we do differently in our media strategy and our ability That's the only thing that changed. The message was exactly the same. He refused to change the message.

Yeah.

Now he's changed the message since then a little bit, but ultimately media alone is going to make a huge difference in a client's life. If they're already advertising, we can help them. If they're not advertising, we can help get them on track a lot faster than anybody else can.

I agree. I mean, I really love your company. I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't get behind it in a big way.

If you're—

if a company is listening right now and struggling with inconsistent lead flow, what's the first thing they should fix?

You know, again, the answer is always the same. It depends, right? And I'm going to look at a lot of different things from an advertising perspective. There's only 5 variables that are going to impact their success. But we want to look internally as well. So a lot of times I sit down with your people and I'll be like, hey, we're struggling in Market X, and I'll say, let's dive into the numbers. Let's find out what the— what the— you know, are we losing people because we're not showing up same day? You know, what's What's the turn rate? What are all the things that we're going to look at in your business first? And let's make sure it's not an internal problem. And I can help with that. That's one of the things that we've done for years and years and years is look at the internal problem that may be, may be causing some of the things that are causing your leads to go bad. Tom, we've seen it all. We've seen landing pages that are broken, you know, all the stupid things that people should be paying attention to and they forget about. So we dive in, we take a look, make sure there's not an internal problem that's causing lead flow to fluctuate.

And then we're going to dive in and look at those 5 variables I talked about. We're going to look at the market, you know, is the market bad? And maybe there's nothing you can do about it. But when the market's bad, most people make a big mistake and they pull out. And what we see is when someone owns the market, regardless of whether it's good or bad, what happens at the end, it's kind of like investing again, stock market, signal call. Yeah. And so when, when the market starts to improve again, you're going to be twice as successful as you were and twice as successful as all the other guys. I mean, think about, think about this. You, you have an opportunity more than any other time when the market is down to win. And so if, if a client pulls out when they're— when the market's bad and their leads are down and all those things, they have now just given someone else an opportunity to win. And we help clients to stay in the game. We give them hope. And our whole thing is to say, look, yeah, maybe you can't keep spending the same amount, but if you spend it over here, here's what's going to happen and you're going to be able to steal that market share.

So when the market comes back, you win. If people didn't win in 2023, '24, and '25, shame on them. I mean, those were phenomenal markets.

It was— you were printing money, right?

Yeah. But the people who can win are the ones who still win in 2020, who won in 2009 through 2012. Those are the people who really won because they stole so much market share. And that's what we do is we help people do that by not making knee-jerk reactions to down markets. When the leads are down, what we do is we come in and we evaluate the market. The money is— did a new competitor enter into the market? I mean, you look at the pull personal injury landscape here in Phoenix. We pull a competitive spend report every single month. A year ago, it was almost half of what it was in January. January was the biggest spend ever recorded for personal injury attorneys. It more than almost doubled what was spent the January before. It's become an extremely competitive market here in Phoenix. But does that mean our clients lost? No. I mean, we handle two of the biggest personal injury attorneys here in Phoenix. They both won because they maintained course. And instead of like, oh, well, I can't compete in this big market, they stepped up a little bit, but they're not going to be able to jump their budgets to these huge budgets.

They just stepped up a little bit. They won market share, had two great months the first two months of the year. So that's really what we're doing. We're consulting with them and then we want to focus in on if the money can't increase, it has to decrease. Great. How are we going to make the media more efficient? We make the media more efficient. We're always doing that anyway. But then we look at the message because at this point there's nothing more we can change. We can't change the market, we can't change the budget, we can't change the media. Let's look at the message. How can we get more effective in our messaging? So we're going to go through and do a tune-up of their advertising. And help them to, to really succeed when times are tough?

I love it. Yeah. I think when the market's bad is the best time. I mean, if you look at the Great Depression, that's where billionaires came out of. I mean, but it was a tough climate. But that's when the, when the market, when everyone's running. And the first thing, the biggest mistake I see in business by far is instead of cutting people that don't care, that aren't loyal, that aren't performing, they cut their marketing spend. That's the death spiral.

Yep.

They say, I'm gonna cut marketing first when they should be doubling marketing and trimming all the fat. And by the way, if you're loyal to me, if you're the worst performer, but you're showing up like Rudy the movie. Yeah. And you're showing up and you're ready to play the game and you're like, help me, I'm gonna be on your side. You go through a divorce, something happens with a family member, I'm on your side. When you start rolling your eyes, not showing up on time, getting one-star reviews, not, not playing our playbook, the 8-step process is when I'm like, my loyalty can't overcome your unloyalty. So I think that's a big mistake. And a lot of people, a lot of people are like, I've talked to so many people in the last 2 weeks just alone that are like, I'm like, what are you doing for marketing? They're like, PPC and LSA. I'm like, you're never going to win. There's no way you can play that game. You're not getting any branded search terms. You're going to spend 35%. On an unbranded search term and PPC, and you can go down as low as 5% for branded searches when they're searching your name.

But you can't spend $3,000 a month.

No. I mean, yeah, you talked about two things here. You talked about processes. You're unmatched in systems and processes. I've never met a company who has better systems and processes. And so your listeners, if they can just grab onto those, they'll be successful. When it comes to advertising, our systems and processes do the same thing for our clients to help them to really achieve those results. But you had us meet with a good friend of yours. I thought the guy was amazing. I won't name names, but he was a company here we came and sat and met with. He had sold his business and was now running, starting a new one with the same program. I'd never heard of the guy, but he dominated his market. He had a phenomenal idea on how to dominate in his market. Now, really what he dominated was 3 zip codes. And in Phoenix, that's nothing. Now, he was successful. Don't get me wrong, he was successful, but he was not known. Nobody knew him before they needed him except for in that zip code.

Right.

So he was very successful, didn't spend a penny on advertising, and good for him. But if you want to grow beyond that little niche that you have, you have to do something different. And that's where we come in to disrupt, to say it's not my product, it's the services that I provide that are going to give you the best opportunity. So depending on, you know, that guy with the 3-budget, you know, zip code or 3 zip code budget, I could have helped him, you know, go into 5 zip codes and then 10 zip codes. You know, that's the whole idea is like, how do we strategically do this to bring people And it's the processes, right? Like you talked about, those processes are so important.

100%. And we are— I mean, we're a software company now that does garage doors. I mean, that's straight up like the KPIs are super dialed in. FP&A is like a word I didn't know years ago, and now I'm obsessed with the data, which is tough. I will say this, people are going to ask you, how do I know it's working? Where's the attribution? But you got to be able to look like when we launched Valpak in these markets, it was a 60% coming, 60%. Our comp of what we pay for a Valpak, what that means is like if I'm paying $10,000 for a Valpak, I'm, I'm getting, you know, $18 grand total. So it's horrible.

Horrible.

But yet in our markets where we dominate on the brand side, which is TV, radio, billboards, and our truck wraps, we're paying 15% or less. Yeah. And so I've seen firsthand like, yes, there's a choice. You could pick 4 other companies in a Valpak or a clipper or a home mag or whatever you're doing. But when you're doing these things top of the funnel and you're doing them right, the com goes down everywhere else. So how do you handle that question of attribution?

Yeah, I mean, the problem with like all advertising works and that's the cool thing, all advertising works. The problem with Valpak, for example, if that's what you're relying on, is that it's a race to the bottom like you talked about in the very beginning. And so how we kind of combat that is going to be looking at the opportunity that branding provides to a company to to really step outside of the race to the bottom advertising. And so when we look at television, what it does is it reaches more people more often to create a perception of a great deal or a perception of someone I can trust or a perception of somebody that can help me with my problem. That's really what you guys are doing is solving problems. And so when somebody comes to us and says, hey, I want to, I want to grow my leads, I want to grow my business, but this is what's working and I'm spending all my money over here. Like Valpak and all those things, I'm going to say, hey, let's, let's not get rid of that, but let's look at your comp. What's your current comp?

And so that's where we come in is we're not going to just say, hey, here's how much you need to spend. It's like, well, my current— and like lots of HVAC companies, for example, we talk with a lot of HVAC companies, 3 to 6%. And I'm like, that's great. If you want to grow though, you're going to need to hit 12 to 15%. And that's, you know, everyone's comp is going to be different, right, depending on their you know, how much, how much markup they have on their products and whatnot. And I know garage doors are a little bit harder than HVAC, right?

So, I mean, our average tickets are just— it's a tenth. Yeah. I mean, yeah, on any given day. But it's a much more skilled— I mean, you got to get journeymen that need 5 years. They got to go through an apprenticeship. There's a lot of advantages of garage doors. But I will say, like, if I was in the HVAC industry, we'd be worth $10 billion.

Oh, yeah. Today. I mean, and so we're going to look at that. We're going to look at the, you know, every industry is going to be different. No, there's no one size fits all. And we're going to look and say, You know, in order to grow your business, you're going to need to, to, to like look at how you can increase that cost of marketing. Now, if you want to dominate, we're going to tell you what number it needs to be. If you want to just grow steadily, we're going to tell you what that number is. But what we know is that 3 to 6% ain't going to cut it. Yeah, right. And so that's what we're going to come in and do and kind of just help people evaluate their situation. And then we'll give them options that kind of just exactly what you do in the garage door situation. I can do a Band-Aid over your bad marketing and give you a better ad. Like when you guys started with us, I don't know how involved you were, but the ads that we had that because originally you hired us just to do media and you had some ads.

And I talked to Chase, I was like, hey man, I'll do it for free, but can I make you some new commercials? Tommy on the commercials instead of, you know, they were fine, but they were great. You know, yeah, I'm not trying to make a big difference.

I'm not trying to do like vanity, like I need to be on them. But like, I know for a fact when I'm next door to an orientation yesterday, a lot of people are like, we see you, we're here to work for you. That A1 means nothing. They want to come work for a person that's going to look out for them and make sure they're winning. Their dreams are coming true. Their dreams. The Dream Manager program, you know, that's, that's— and I know that the main question I got yesterday is how long are you going to be involved in this company? Because when you're gone— and I don't need that. You know, Jim Collins wrote a book, Built to Last. I want this company to go far beyond me here, but I need somebody at the helm that cares just as much about the coworkers that I do.

Yeah, well, and that's a good question that they asked. But, but ultimately, if you build the system right, like you've done the systems and processes, a lot of the same things that made the company what it was will remain. What won't will be you. But I know someone who's actually in training right now. So he's been texting regular updates on how things are going. He did his ride-along a couple of weeks ago. He's been in training. You spoke to them for 3 hours yesterday. Yeah, I was like, what, 3 hours?

Holy cow.

Yeah, that's phenomenal. And I know you can do this all the time, but to him, when he came out of that meeting, he says he is the most amazing person I've ever met in my entire life.

Wow, man.

I was like, no doubt, no doubt.

I really appreciate that. Yeah, that's I want to pour into the, you know, here's my job. Tommy 3.0 is to go meet the radio endorsers, hang out in the markets, do the orientations, and go after these people's dreams. I'm here to pull the best out of them if they're ready to be pulled. If they're not, it might not be a good fit. But at the end of the day, what more could I be? Talk about an inspiring job that you love to go to when someone buys their first house, goes, becomes a— you know what I love? I want to, I want to interview the wife that says, you know, Sam, I married an amazing guy, but for 10 years of his life, he got capped at $65,000. He was working 60-hour weeks. He came home depleted. He wasn't the guy I married. Now he's the best dad. He's— we're going to church on Sundays. He became Tommy's soccer coach. He's coming to dinner every night. He's appreciated. And we're working on our goals. And we bought our first house. We paid off our cars. We got out of credit card debt. And those are the stories.

And it's always the significant other that they could say, look, he's loyal to the last company, but he was not being treated correctly. And those are the stories I strive for. And, you know, I wish I could tell you I love board meetings and just running through financials. I got great teams for that. But I think the impact of the business is far more with me hanging out with clients, me hanging out with my internal clients and building that chemistry and allowing me to pull on them as much as I possibly can. And when, like, their lives— I talked to a guy yesterday, he's like, Dude, Tommy, I've been in the garage door industry for 10 years. He's like, my first week with you, I doubled my best check. And I just love that. Yeah. And he earned it.

Yeah. Well, you talk about that a lot. And honestly, that's one of the things that's inspired me. We've hired a lot of new people over the last 5 years, just growing and growing and growing. And I have basically weekly conversations with my team specifically about non-work-related stuff. Let's talk about debt. Let's talk about how you're going to buy your first house. Let's talk about how you're going to do these things, because I've seen you do that with your people. And any of these people who are still with us today, it's Tommy's birthday, by the way, so wish him happy birthday. But if they're still with us to this point, like, probably the most important thing you can do is take care of your people first. Now, how you're going to do that honestly is going to be through advertising. And I hate to say it, but I mean, you do all the processes on your end. But if you want to really give them those opportunities to make the kind of money your guys are making, I mean, when I heard we were interviewing some of your techs for some testimonial videos, when I heard how much money these techs were making, I'm like, Why would anyone go to college?

They should, they should literally take this course with Tommy over here, become a garage door technician, and—

and I'm taking it. AI is not taking over your job.

No, it's not. Yeah. And that's a good, good— another good question. I got some questions I put on there about AI.

But, you know, one quick thing I wanted to say is I was at a buddy's house the other day. He's like, Tommy, can you come by, give us a 20-minute— and he, he's a guy that flips houses, buys a lot of houses. Really good friend of mine. And there's about 20 trades there. And it was kind of like a BNI meeting. And all these guys, they're like, man, we are making so much money, but they're still showing up to the job site every day. And I love referrals. Referrals are the best, most endearing thing we could ever receive. And we use a software called ReferPro now. But some people— what do you say to somebody out there that's like, dude, I stay so busy with referrals, I just can't even keep up.

I think the answer to that question is, is that you're not ready to advertise if you're not ready to step away from, oh, I got enough, because enough is never enough. You can't— you'll never grow your business to where it needs to be. And the potential is so great, especially in home service businesses. I mean, we see this HVAC company I was talking about. They're going to plan on doing $37 million in revenue this year. Him and his wife, they want to sell, right? And the idea is, well, how do we do that? Like, how do we sell? I'm like, you have to grow the business. And so that's why they're advertising is because they want to grow this business into a position where they can profit from it. And I think most of your listeners are in that same position. Most of the guys we talk to, it's like, yes, I want this business, but I'm not so proud of the business that I have to run it.

You know that book right there, Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell. He was in this studio and he said, why don't you buy like you want to be bought from? We work with a lot of property managers. We went out and we did this massive overhaul on all the doors. And I mean, it was a $12,000 job. The property manager, the gal told my guy, I've got 20 more properties, go do this to all of them. And here's why. When this guy gets in his Ferrari, when he comes home from Aspen, that door better open and it better open right. And the lights better work and it better close properly and it better be quiet. She goes, money's not an option, but it needs to work perfectly because that's what they pay me for. And those are the clients I want. And I think some people, they miss target their ideal client. Right. Ken Goodrich just told me it's a dual income family in Chandler that they're making $120 grand. It's not the richest people. It's not the poorest people. It's the people. They use financing, they pay it off early. And he understands that most people don't even understand their ideal client.

Right?

That's their avatar.

That's understanding your market. Your market conditions are going to determine how you win or how you lose. But being able to reach those— the right audience and knowing who they are, and that's what that's going to translate into where you buy media. That's going to translate into how much money you need to spend. It's going to translate into what message you have. Because if you do all those things wrong to the wrong audience, you've lost, you're wasting money. And that's where I— my goal in life is to really help my clients not waste a penny. I want every single dollar that they spend to go to their success. And so when, you know, one of the questions you asked earlier is how do we do that? Well, that's how. It's going in and really evaluating who are the time savers, who are the people who just want the job done right, you know, and ultimately there's going to be some wasted dollars if you look at it from the perspective of, well, I'm going to try this for a little while and see what happens. You're wasting money. It's like, let's just not waste money.

And so, but what I will say is if you're putting money into the ValPacks and the pay-per-clicks and all those things, you're never going to make enough money. Even though this advertising seems expensive, It's the best investment you're going to ever make versus doing these things that never give the long-term value. It's a one and done.

Yeah, you're right. You're right. It's not an investment in the company. And, you know, I go on Google Trends in Phoenix and it's like, whoa, we own this market.

You own this market.

And then I see all the potential in a Houston, a Denver, and a Vegas. And we're growing. But I'm like, I know what's possible because of Phoenix. And that's one other thing is like all these people like, when should I grow? When should I grow? I'm like, you better own the market share where you go to church, where your kids go to school, where you've got relationships and family. Because if you don't own that market, you're not going to solve any problems by moving to the next market. You wanted to talk a little bit about AI. What did you have on that?

Yeah, no, I mean, AI is— it's changed our business. I know it's probably changed yours too. You talk about AI all the time. Happening.

Yeah.

As far as the home service businesses go, if they're not using AI to automate systems to really dial in how they charge, how, you know, all these things are available on AI. There's apps for every single thing you can imagine. We use AI a ton. I use it every single day. I'm more on the writing side versus the, you know, the video editing. But our editors are now making commercials. The hard part with AI and commercial making is really just the opportunity to make it look real. But we made a spec spot for you guys for this Pats Run deal we're doing just to make sure the client would approve it. So we did it all with AI, sent it over, client approved it, we shot it all. Shot last Friday and boom, away you go. It makes our job easier. Everything we do with AI, even down to media buying and analysis. So one of the first couple of years ago, I plugged a media buy into AI and said, or into ChatGPT and just said, hey, analyze this media buy for me. And it was pretty wild how it spit out almost exactly what I would have said to the client had I given that same analysis.

AI understands your job, so let it do the job for you. Now, what I do know about AI is it's making people dumber. I know that AI is making people slower in a lot of things that they should be doing. And so it's using AI the right way so that it enhances what you shouldn't be wasting time on, but not allowing it to take over your life where you become an idiot. I mean, there are people who are really just turning everything over to AI and they don't understand because ultimately, like, for example, at church, people will write a talk with AI. They get up, they deliver the best speech they've ever given in their life, and they can't repeat it. If I were to ask you to do that again, it's unrepeatable because AI did the work for you. If you don't know it in your heart, it's not who you are.

I think you need to speak to AI, tell us stories and make the stories. It adds details, but it's your story. Yeah, I think that like a lot of times I'll just tell it a really good story and it'll all make it make sense.

Yeah.

And I'll be like, my grandma was like a second mom to me and I'll give it all these details. The smartest thing to use AI is to say, ask me 100 questions on this and then let's come up with it. Instead of telling it, have it ask you. And that's, that's how to maximize.

The answers are always the same. And that's true in all aspects of life, relationships, whether it's work, whether it's church, whatever it is that, you know, does God exist? Well, the answer is the same, right? But what is the hardest part for people to come up with is the questions. And so if you're using AI to come up with the right questions to help you solve the problems that you have, that's how you're going to win.

What I want to give the audience here something, you know, we haven't talked about this, but I think no matter what, like, they should talk to you and at least look at maybe there's something broken. Maybe they've never heard of TV and radio buys. I don't know what we could do for them, but what kind of— have you thought about anything that's special for the listeners? I mean, obviously some of them, I do want you to say you're just not ready yet. Yeah. I mean, I just want you to be fair to them because I know some of them, they've got their own ideas. I mean, I'm not asking for like massive discounts and free shit. Yeah.

Well, everybody, everybody wants the answer, right? Like, what's going to make my business successful? And the truth is, is it lies right between the eyes of the person who's asking that question. They have to be the one who makes the decisions that are best for that business. You give a lot of solutions— hiring the right people, having managers that will do the things that you can't do or shouldn't do. You know, those are all the things that I think we've talked about that are very important. But when they're ready to advertise, at least they think they're ready to advertise. We want to offer just a free tune-up. Like, let's, let's just sit down. We'll evaluate your advertising. Like you said, I work with— I've been at this business for 28 years, but the company's been around for over 40. I have talked to hundreds and thousands of successful people. I work with some of the top companies in the industry as far as home services is concerned. But I also work with other companies who are very, very successful outside of home service. And we, we see what works. We see what doesn't work. We see the mistakes people make.

and we've been able to evaluate their business as well as their marketing and kind of bring it into a cohesive plan. I mean, some of the referrals that you've given us, we, we're not working with them for very good reason. You know, when they just don't have enough money to make an impact, I'm going to tell them, don't waste your money. When you, when you have this kind of money, come back. And we give them the answers that they need in order to know when they're ready to come back to us. And so it's not a waste of my time. It's not a waste of their time because at least they know the path they need to be on in order to really start stepping up to where you are. So we'll have— we offer to all the listeners today, you know, anyone who reaches out at any time, the video is going to be live forever. They can have my personal email at sam@larryjohnwright.com. You'll probably have it in the show notes or whatever, but it's super simple and we'll set up a meeting. We'll do a free advertising tune-up. We'll talk about what their objectives are and help them realize those goals.

Now, if they are ready, that's a whole nother thing, right? Like, like, let's— we'll make sure that they're, they're dialed in. But we can get people on the air as soon as tomorrow. I mean, This can happen really fast. Some people think it takes a long time and we help them overcome some of the hurdles that they maybe they don't like. One of the reasons why people aren't on TV is because they think it's hard. It's hard to get on TV. Someone's going to do radio. It's like, well, radio may be a good option, but ultimately it's never going to have the power of television. And even though TV is losing market share to streaming, it's still the most viable place to spend your money cost per thousand wise, as well as reach, as well as impact. And so we're going to kind of evaluate. But if the budget's right, if the situation's right, we get you on TV quick. I mean, we do, you know, we do a really good job of that and that's where we excel. I mean, if radio's the right answer, radio's the right answer. But ultimately, if they're ready, we're ready to help them.

And so we want to give a free evaluation, no charge for the time. We're going to sit down with them, take the time it takes to really evaluate their business. One thing I'll say, I know we're kind of wrapping up here, is something that I wanted to kind of bring up is I'm short, you're tall, right? There's differences. You've got amazing hair. I've got— amazing beards. We all have our strengths and our weaknesses, right? And I think what we want to recognize is that we're not a one-size-fits-all business. We don't have one solution for everybody. But what we do know is that there are certain things that's going to make a business win.

You know, it's so funny how marketing gets blamed for so many things when they don't even understand the conversion cycle and the cancelation rate. And most people, they assume all these things. And I think if they were to do a one-on-one with you, those are the questions you'd ask them is, look, How do you have attribution? Do you have UTM parameters set up? What are your landing pages? What's the click-through rate? Like these are, you gotta be online if you're gonna do TV, radio, and billboards. You've still gotta be available when they search for you. Google gets a lot of the credit. And I think people just, they miss these things. And the future of the business depends on my ability to attract really great talent. That's the facts. That's the facts. It's not me. I don't, I'm not the smartest guy in the room. I will say I'm probably the most curious. I'm out there seeking more answers. I'm out there reading more. But I'll say this, Luke is reading just as much. He's listening to podcasts. Adrian's an animal. And now we've got this team that's like, how can they raise their level?

The lid, the law of the lid.

And if everyone's trying to raise their lid at the pace I am, sometimes they're going to outshoot me. And that's great. I want people to outgrow me. I just want to be making content, having fun, doing shop tours, doing orientations, going to meet endorsements, going and doing the nonprofit stuff we're getting involved in. And people are like, well, that's not a CEO. And I'm like, yes, it is. That's the level that it becomes. You think Jeff Bezos is in Amazon right now at a factory in Dallas going, oh, we got to get these boxes out quicker? No, no. You think Elon Musk— if you look at the top CEOs on the planet, their job has been PR and strategic thinking, looking towards the North Star and being the visionary. So hopefully when somebody listens to this, they understand, like, you don't need to be everything. If you're the smartest guy in the room, you better look in the mirror and say, I better hire better. And I will just say this and I'll let you close this out. I trust you. You show up with a smile. Your team's amazing. I wouldn't endorse you if I didn't feel like you're going to be a ride or die for life as long as this company's around, hopefully for decades to come, even though if you're not at the helm.

And I enjoy working with you and I always feel like you're giving me a fair shake. I never feel like you're not like a You're not trying to be like, this is a long-term relationship. You're playing the long game. And the stuff that you've done to go above and beyond is like, I'm truly appreciative. And you're one of the main factors of where we're at, where we are today. You're authentic. You do a great job. You got a great team and you're not a money hungry, you know, grow my EBITDA like crazy and get a big valuation. You're just like, look, this is a long-term relationship. So people should take you up, big or small, no matter what industry, even if you're not in home service, if you're in home improvement or if you're a lawyer, I highly— I'm imploring you, like, reach out to Sam.

Thank you, Tommy. I can't thank you enough for having me on. This is my first podcast, hopefully my last. I don't like the— I don't like to be in the limelight, but, but everything you said is what we try to accomplish. We try to accomplish that trust with our clients. We're not for everybody. I'm going to— if it makes it in the podcast or not, great. But throw out a few things. Dan Antonelli, KickCharge Media. If they're— if you're people watching aren't using him, they're— they need to change their mindset. He is the guy. He knows how to make those vans pop. And that's one of the challenges that we've seen with some of our clients is they're not popping. So make that van pop. You talked about Scott Harky earlier, so I don't know if I've told you, but Scott Harky is my brother-in-law's stepbrother. So I've known Scott since he was a teenager. Yeah. And I love Scott to death. He is— he's kind of like, like you on energy, just full of energy, full of curiosity, full of, you know, just trying to make his business the best ever. Scott actually interviewed us when he was about 20, you know, He'd exited out of school and was, you know, exiting radio and was like, I'm going to do advertising.

So we— I interviewed him and this was 20-something years ago. And I flat out told Scott, I said, Scott, you would revolutionize my business, but you need to go somewhere else. We will never be big enough for you. Like, your aspirations were bigger than what we would ever accomplish. And he's done it. I mean, he's done an amazing job. But one of the things that I think that separates us from Scott is that I'm here with you and I'm working on your account. Scott's got 100 interns and that's who you're going to get, right? And so I think one of the opportunities, if you want to work with a small business, we're a small business. I mean, we, you know, we do pretty decent revenue every year, but we're for all intents and purposes a small business and we understand small businesses and how to help them grow. We've helped countless businesses go to either sell or to stock market. Right. And we see the successes and what gets them there, whether they stay successful or not after that, it's up to them. Right. And we see that some of the guys who pull out of what they did to make them successful, And when they go public or when they sell purely for profits, everything just falls off.

And so it's just amazing. So we want to be here to help these guys to become what you have become in their lane, in the opportunities that they've been given. Consistency is king. And if they can, if they can figure out how to consistently win, we can, we can help them do that.

Sam, it's always a pleasure, man. I can't wait. Go out there and shoot some ads, man. I'll tell you, it's a lot like— here's the last thing I'll say is like, They do my makeup. Like, I've got very glowy, oily skin. Same. And like, so they're getting all the sweat off of me and making me look good and like, making like baby powder. I don't know what the makeup girl does, but, you know, it's very important. Like, I want to look my best and it's important. And I like, I'm working out a lot. Like, I want to look so much better. I want to look my best, really for Brie, but really for myself. I want to, I want to walk in a room and say, dude, I work out. I'm the like— and you guys really do a great job, like, of making me look good on TV, which isn't easy to do. But thank you for everything, brother.

Thank you, Sammy. Appreciate you, my friend.

We'll, we'll get you guys a landing page to check out all the work that Sam's done for us. I'll add those here in a little bit. Hey there. Thanks for tuning into the podcast today. Before I let you go, I want to let everybody know that Elevate is out and ready to buy. I can share with you how I attracted a winning team of over 700 employees in over 20 states. The insights in this book are powerful and can be applied to any business or organization. It's a real game changer for anyone looking to build and develop a high-performing team like over here at A1 Garage Door Service. So if you want to learn the secrets that helped me transform my team from stealing the toilet paper to a group of 700+ employees rowing in the same direction, head over to elevateandwin.com/podcast and grab a copy of the book. Thanks again for listening, and we'll catch up with you next time on the podcast.