Transcript of The Guy Behind Tommy Mello's Emails Only Sends 4 A Month For A Reason | Zac Garside

So you're just never going to talk to your customers again? That's it? You're just never going to say anything? You're never going to remind them to take care of that thing you sold them? It's over. It's done. They're probably going to go back to Google and call again, and you're going to have to rebuy that customer. You already have the leads. You already have the list. You're already paying for a way to send something to them. Let's scoop up all that low-hanging fruit that's there.

All right. Welcome back to The Home Service Expert. Today I got Zach Garside with me. He co-founded SendIt Email Marketing. He partnered with Cristiano.

That's right.

Who built Rhino Strategic Solutions to $90 million, and today they've been growing SendIt. He works with some of the biggest contractors in the country, including us at A1, helping them turn their existing customer list into consistent revenue through email campaigns that actually drive service calls and sales. Today he breaks down why most contractors are ignoring their most profitable marketing channel, how to build email campaigns that actually drive service calls and sales And the research framework that reveals what your customers actually want.

That's right, dude.

So Zach, just tell us a little bit about you, where you've been, what you're excited about.

Well, I'm excited about everything. I'm a very easy— I'm easy to get excited about stuff. I do email marketing for a living, you know. I spent 8 years in the trades with Power Selling Pros, you know, training CSRs. But every contractor always asked me the exact same thing. What's— how do I get my CSRs to do more outbound calls? And eventually I was like, what about email? Like, do you guys use your list when you want to get jobs? Do you have any kind of campaigns you can send to get people to call in, like in a quick surge? Pretty much nobody I talked to really had like a solid strategy for email marketing in the trades. But in industries like e-commerce, coaching, software, email is one of the top profit drivers. So I basically just said, what would happen if I took the email strategies that those industries use and applied it to the trades?

Yeah.

And so that became— at first it was just ZachGarstad.com, you know, a little freelance email marketing business. And then I partnered up with Chris like a year ago. We started SendIt, and now all we do is go in and help contractors who have enormous lists of open estimates, membership customers, and past customers in general, and we run campaigns to help them book jobs.

So capacity planning plays into that big time, right?

Oh, for sure. I mean, yeah, when we sit down every month, it's like, where are you short, right? Which markets do you need jobs in? If you're multi-location, if you're single location, which service lines are you in need of jobs for right now? Oh, it's not HVAC, but it's plumbing. Or, you know, we need to get more tune-ups on the schedule so we can give our techs opportunities to turn something over. Planning what you want, who you want to send it to, and then creating content that's just, you know, Second to none, right? Nobody wakes up in the morning thinking, man, I hope I get an email from my garage door company.

Yeah.

But that doesn't mean they can't be glad they did get one. You know, if you write something that's entertaining and funny and insightful, makes them think about something new they didn't know before. Most people are just too boring. You know, they send an email, they go, ah, that didn't work. I'm like, well, of course it didn't work. It's boring, you know?

Yeah. Well, how do you make it to the inbox? I mean, Google's different than you think about the Hotmail, AOL days, and each of them It gets harder and harder to get into the inbox without going to spam. Yeah.

I mean, the easiest way to get in the inbox and stay out of spam is write stuff that people actually look forward to getting. I mean, people, if they're looking forward to something from the guy who came to their house, right? You're not just any company. You're not an e-commerce business that's selling trinkets for $10. Like, you went to their house, you know, you pet their dog, you met their kids. You commented on the painting on the wall. So when they get an email from you, it should be something they look forward to, right? If you send them a follow-up on that estimate or if you send them, hey, we came out and did this 6 months ago, now let's do this thing for you. The first way to stay out of the spam is just be someone that they appreciate hearing from. The second thing is you got to be consistent. It's really hard to avoid going to spam if you've never emailed your customers.

Yeah.

If it's been 10 years and all of a sudden you're like, crap, we're desperate for jobs. Let's send out a blast to our customer list.

Yeah, the blasts.

You know, like, now you're probably gonna go to spam 'cause people are going, wait, who's this guy? I don't remember. Do you remember this, babe? Like talking to their spouse. So be someone they like hearing from, be consistent, be a person of value, and then obviously send emails from a reputable platform. Don't copy paste your customer list into your Gmail or Outlook window and try to send them— send all of them from an inbox. Yeah, use a, Legit email sender.

You ever burn down a server?

For sure.

Yeah.

When I first was getting started, I worked with a company that it helps you— they help you buy your car when you're in a lease. Like, oh, I don't want to be in this lease. I want to own the car. And they purchased lists from like big, big data brokers. And we burned some servers in the early days learning. Yeah. Learning the trade for sure.

What do you think? So obviously they say in everything, it's the subject line in the first sentence, right?

Yeah.

So what are some of the things that you've seen, like best practices work the best?

Well, in the subject line, like the subject line's job is get an open.

That's it.

All you're trying to do with the subject line is get somebody who's going through their inbox to see it and go, oh, what's that? Most companies will do something way too direct, like $29.95 tune-up, act now. The problem is you're giving it away.

Yeah.

You're not creating any intrigue. You wouldn't let your technicians give a price before going out to the home, right? You want them to go out there, create the experience. With the subject line, you're trying to do the same thing, create some intrigue, some curiosity. So for example, I wrote a— I wrote an email for an HVAC company once about how the husband and the wife are constantly fighting over the thermostat. She sets it to 68 degrees to overcompensate because she wants it to feel like it's 71 degrees. So the subject line was, overcompensating?

That's it.

And that reaction, like, that's what I'm going for. The nose breath laugh is what I call it.

Yeah.

When somebody's looking through a piece of content, looking through their inbox, and they chuckle a little bit. But even more important than the subject line is the from line. Who is it from? Because if it's from a name they know, like, and trust, Yeah. they'll open it regardless of the subject. If your mom sent you an email today and she literally forgot to put a subject, You sold it because it's from your mom. So how do I use a name at the company that has so much trust, or like the founder, or the team at— never just the business's name, but either the team or the founder— and then a subject line that creates that open loop so that someone goes, what's this? And then they click through. And that's like a slippery slide. First sentence makes them want to read the second, second makes them want to read the third. Next thing you know, they're calling your business.

Now you guys, I'm jumping probably way ahead, but You like to give a guarantee?

We like to. I gotta vet, you know, make sure we can give it for everybody, but I wanna be able to guarantee the result.

And what does that look like?

Company's gotta have at least 5,000 past customers.

Okay.

For me to confidently guarantee, oh yeah, you're gonna see a good result here. If it's less than 5,000, we still have a lot of clients in that range who do great, but you gotta—

And it's something like 5 times what you spend or something?

6 times.

6 times what you spend.

Yeah, 6 times what you spend with us, we guarantee you'll make back in the first 60 days.

Which is a good comm. I mean, it's a really warm list, theoretically.

Like, it's— I don't want to keep her money, right, if it doesn't—

Yeah, well, you're not going to last as a client. You might as well part ways.

Yeah, exactly.

So you got past clients that were happy that probably need maintenance checkups. You've got non-closed estimates. How do you segment? How do you know when to hit when? I'm just thinking about A1, but I think about HVAC and obviously seasonality doesn't apply as much to us. But like, there's a lot of segmenting. I mean, you probably just don't— like, we use Klaviyo. Yeah. Where is ServiceTitan? That's good stuff for this, or probably not. Yeah.

Every platform has ways to segment, ways to say it's easiest to start with. What are your goals? Right? Like, what are you trying to accomplish right now? Mr. Business Owner, over the next 90 days, over the next 12 months, year, what do you want to see more of on the calendar? And then we work backwards from that. So it's like, dude, you have a massive list of open estimates. Uh, first of all, let's, let's hit that because those are people who you've gone out, given a quote to. We should do something consistent there. You should have automated emails for your open estimates that are following up, hitting all the objections, letting them know about warranties and financing and The quality of the service. Once a month at least, you should be hitting your open estimates as well with an offer, something to get them to take that next step. Then I look at memberships after open estimates. Okay, now that we've got a plan for open estimates this month, what are we going to do to reactivate memberships? How many of your members are on the verge of expiring and we need to get them to renew, right?

If you're in the 11th and 12th month of a membership, have they used it? Have they taken advantage of those licenses?

A lot of people— I'm writing a book on memberships right now, and they can't even fulfill their memberships. They get too busy.

Yeah.

I mean, that happens almost every time. Ken Goodrich writes a section of my book that's like, we couldn't fulfill even half if we were lucky. And so that's where some of the technology comes in, is like Nuvei or like the— there's this other— what is it called? The sensor AC— I forget what it is.

No, I don't know.

I think that's where technology could come in a lot and say, after this many cycles, we're going to call you and we're going to come out and do it.

Oh yeah, there's just proactive piece.

Shouldn't be on a timepiece.

I think there's also, when it comes to how email marketing plays into memberships, an often overlooked benefit of memberships is the perceived value the homeowner gets of just having it, even if they don't use it. Because you have customers who are paying you every single month. For maintenance, but they're not taking advantage of it. But they would still say it's worth it because you are reaching out, you're offering advice, you're sending them reminders to get tune-ups done. You're— they see you as, oh, I'm paying this company and not only will they do the work, but they're, they're giving me things to think about. They're giving me knowledge and insight. That's one of the, one of the sequences we set up with a lot of our clients is, hey, you've got members, we're going to do a year-long drip sequence. And every month there's a new tip, there's a new piece of advice, a new cautionary tale.

Yeah.

So now that information becomes part of the benefit of the membership, even if those customers aren't taking action. Right. And that helps to, that helps to keep them.

I'm a bad client because Ashley opens up all my email.

Because what?

Because my— yeah, I stopped doing email a couple years ago. I just—

No, it's not—

They still get opened and they still get sent to me if they're important. But it's like, dude, I Obviously I'm pretty busy. I got a lot going on and I just get bombarded. So how do you stand out when you're just bombarded all the time?

Well, there's a difference, right, between a business owner who has somebody checking their email address and a homeowner who's keeping an eye out on their inbox every day.

Yeah, it's a lot less email.

For bills, for receipts, they're trying to return something to Amazon that they purchased. They gotta look out for those confirmation. So the business-to-business email and business-to-consumer are 2 very different worlds. Like, I would, if you were a homeowner on a list, that's a different mentality than me trying to contact a business owner. So with homeowners, I've seen lots of research out there, you know, and I can't like, I'm not on a research committee or anything verifying any of this data, but it's something like 60, 70% of people who check their email like first thing when they wake up in the morning, first thing when they get into the office, just like everyday people, you know, going about their lives. I know my wife checks her email all the time to see what deals she's gonna be able to get from her favorite clothing store.

Sure.

From, you know, she's checking for receipts for clothing that she bought and then sent back. So homeowners are in a different mentality to receive email than a business owner, because I get that a lot, dude. A lot of business owners, they're like, ah, dude, but I don't check my email. Like, well, we're not sending emails to you, right? We're sending emails to your homeowner customers, to their Gmail address, not to your @business.com address, right?

Yep. So what, um, I've really been studying a lot of e-commerce, and one of the things that I find, number one, if they don't have The, uh, what is the e-commerce built on?

Shopify.

So it says shop, and if I can't click shop on an e-commerce site and boom boom, done. Yeah, I don't really care. I don't need it next day. I just wanted the easy— I don't want to have to put in my address, my billing information. Bam, I hit 2 buttons. Yeah, I'm out. But what's crazy is all of them are getting my SMS as well, and it's like you're getting a discount up front. But that list is like gold. And, and I'm thinking like 800 contacts. It's a KKR company. 50% of all the contacts online are sold through them. And they know when you're running low on your contacts. They know, like they've got this data engine behind it and how much time they put on just A/B testing the website.

Yeah.

And A/B testing the scripts and A/B testing to own 50% of contacts all sell online. So I don't think any of us really obsess about— what do you think? Do you think potentially you see a road where you're getting the opt-ins for SMS and running that as well?

Oh, 100%. Like, in a perfect world, I want to do email, I want to do SMS, I want to do direct mail. I think our creative approach to email would crush on direct mail. With SMS, there's a lot of legal compliance that makes it—

It is tough. You got to have the opt-in and then It's a double opt-in half the time.

You know, it's a whole different game from a compliance standpoint. And I think you see a lot of platforms that businesses are having a hard time using because they're not compliant with the laws of SMS marketing. I feel like I talk to a business owner once a week who's like, oh yeah, we went through a lawsuit because we were texting customers without—

It's all the time. And it's just a mistake. Like, we got a lawsuit because the company, and I'm not gonna name them, the person instead of saying stop, said opt out.

Oh yeah.

And there you go. This is one of those people that this is all they do is sue.

Yeah.

And they're like very good at it. And it's like, I almost kind of want to do it, but I'm not a prick. Um, but yeah, I think that there's, um, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on direct mail. I mean, what do you think you would do differently than most do?

So one of my, one of the things that our works so well about our email approach is that we place really heavy emphasis on it comes from a friend, right? That mentality. When you open an email marketing message that we created, it doesn't scream, I'm an ad. Like, I look like advertising. Whereas a lot of messages people open, it's like, boom, discount code, coupon at the top, obvious product placement.

No real people.

Yeah. It's clearly not from somebody who you know, like, and trust.

Yeah.

You know, you're a big fan of Robert Cialdini. You know him, right?

Very well.

I've heard you talk. Okay, everybody loves Influence. Influence is awesome. I like Pre-Suasion even better.

Yeah.

Dude, that book is amazing. Have you seen the story? They went to the grocery store, they're testing out new soda flavors, and they're like, hey, do you wanna try this new soda? And people go, no, no, no, no thanks. But they change the question right before they ask to, hey, do you consider yourself an adventurous person? Of course. Yeah, of course I'm adventurous. Well, do you wanna try this new soda flavor? And the response, 10x's, right? I apply that same mentality to email. What is email but the ask before the ask? It's, I'm trying to create an emotional transformation before they get on the phone with your CSR so that they're already excited, already enticed, already thinking fondly of your brand. I wanna do the exact same with direct mail. Somebody gets a message that is like, A personal, relevant— looks like a letter from the contractor. You know, hey, this is Tommy Mello with A1 Garage Door. 6 months ago we came out to your home. I want to check in. How's it going? So that you know, here's a list of other things that we do. Give us a call. We'd love to hear from you.

I just want stuff that looks like it comes from a friend, not something that looks immediately on site like an ad. You've got the A pile, the B pile when you check your mail, right?

Well, I'll tell you what I just did, and you're gonna dig this. Hey guys, today's the day. The discounted hotel block for Freedom 2026 at Mandalay Bay closes tonight. After today, rooms go back to full price, and honestly, the bigger issue is the hotel's just running out of space. Once the block's gone, you might be scrambling to find a room anywhere near the event. No reason to pay more or worse, end up somewhere offsite because you sat on this too long. Freedom 2026 is October 26th through the 28th at Mandalay Bay. Go to freedomevent.com right now and get your room locked in or call us or text us at 602-581-7563. That's 602-581-7563. Get it off your plate today. Now let's get back to this episode. Well, I'll tell you what I just did, and you're going to dig this, is I'm working with a very advanced handwriting company and they just, they just took my handwriting. It's the first time they've done this. Yeah, but my handwriting is like a 2-year-old. So what I did was I put— it's a real envelope with a real address. Yeah, it says your neighbor, but it's got this address.

And I don't want to put my real address, of course. Yeah, but, but it's a real stamp. It looks like a birthday card.

Yeah.

And I put a picture of me and Bree holding our dogs in front of a truck in front of my garage. And I said, from your neighbor. I sent it out to 3,000 people. So far it's done $225,000.

I'm telling you, I'm telling you, direct mail is awesome.

Yeah. And the thing is, is like, if it's done correctly.

Yeah.

And the thing is, is it was like, hey, I just want to make sure you know I live in your neighborhood. I want to make sure everybody's house is safe. And it was from a friend, exactly what you said. And I called Robert Cialdini on this one. And of course—

Oh, when you were making it, you called? Yeah.

Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. And he helped me write it.

Oh, that's cool.

And literally we went through 10 scripts and I said, it's not perfect. It's not perfect. I just don't like this. And then I said, P.S., if you ever need anything, Just call your neighbor. I'll take care of you because we're friends, and I'm— and I'll give you 20% off of any work.

There you go.

And I just put a QR code, but, uh, it was real handwriting. But now what I'm looking to do with this company is, I'm like, can we build a smear system? What I mean by that, but by when you take it out right at the end, there's a, uh, like something damp that just smears the ink. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, I'd say, or pushes harder, or pushes harder in the— you could see if somebody writes hard, it's indented for sure, because now they're getting so good at printing handwriting. This is what Andersen Renewal does. But I love the idea that now we're building a campaign that hits everybody on their street. But here's what I'm working on. You're going to love this. Is, Zach, would you mind if I sent something to your neighbors on your behalf? Here's exactly what I was thinking, because everybody should have a beautiful garage door.

Yeah.

So we— they approve it. And it says, from your neighbor, it's a letter from Mr. Anderson. And then it goes out and they've already approved it. So they say, hey, I had the boys at A1 come fix my garage door. They did a fantastic job. I ended up replacing it. I didn't know that the garage door was almost 300% return on investment. These guys did a great job. They're going to be in the neighborhood for the next month doing work. They're willing to do this because now it's from a friend. Now it really is. So you're talking about friends.

Genuinely.

From their neighbor.

From the neighbor.

On the street. Yeah. So. Like, I'm always thinking— and by the way, I love Robert. Like, the dude is— like, I love that guy because I'm just fascinated. He comes to my house. He's been there several times. And he's like, now here's the interesting study that you're going to like. Now wait a minute. And he's a perfect—

He's so generous.

And he goes, you know, things like what they did is— well, it's very interesting. So many stories about Robert. But what they used to do and the people that used to come give you the flower. And they used to just come pin you up with the flower and say, we're just trying to raise $5 for the cause. And so that, from that was born, listen, Zach, I'm stopping off at Starbucks. Can I grab you something?

Yeah.

No thanks. Listen, I'm good. Listen, you come to my house, my wife's going to feed you.

That's right.

Don't make me guess. Are you a caramel frappuccino, espresso, or green tea? All right. And if not, I'm still bringing you something. And what Robert says, just make it easy. Give them a guide to make their house safe.

Yeah.

Just a simple guide. It costs you about $0.27 to make. say, hey, I thought I'd give you this. Yeah, there's been around my neighborhood, there's been some boat burglaries. I mean, they always come to the beautiful neighborhoods like yours. Here's a guide on us, and I think you'll dig it. It's just a few quick steps that you need. Yeah. And like, another idea I have, I just want to share with y'all because it's going to get your brain going.

Yeah, I'm loving this.

Is, you know, I'm really close with the Chirp guys. I invested in Chirp.

Yeah.

And I can get accounts for probably better prices than most. Is give every painter, every epoxy company a free Chirp account that I pay for. And the 5 things you need to know so that the sale is done on painting your house. 5 things that you need to know before we come paint.

Mm-hmm.

And number 4 is make sure you check your garage door for dents, cracks. If it's not insulated, check out the trim and the bottom rubber. By the way, the boys at A1 Garage Door Service will come do it for no charge. Take a peek at it to make sure it's ready. And so I'm paying for the account, I'm controlling the messaging, and then after 3 months of the results, I'm covering 20% of it. Like these little things. But no, no, even if people hear it, they're never going to do it. That's the problem. They're like, like you, they're like, well, we've been thinking about getting the email marketing going. And you're like, well, listen, when were you planning on doing that?

Yeah.

And how many years ago were you planning on doing that?

Yeah.

And when are you going to have somebody sophisticated that's monitoring the results? I think you said your results of your clients are 30 to 50% email open rates. Industry average is 16%.

Yeah, that's one. I mean, open rate is the first indicator, right? We just got to make sure we're getting eyeballs on it. 30 to 50, we're pretty consistent at. 20 to 30 is good. I always like to set that expectation like, hey, if you haven't emailed in a long time, 20 to 30% is good to get to. Everything you just mentioned, that's like that persuasive power, right? Like the thing that happens before the ask or before setting, planting those seeds along the way. Uh, here are 5 ways to make sure your home is safe. If you're a contractor who has never emailed your list before, that is a perfect way to get back in good graces with those people. If you're going, man, I've got 15,000 customers that I've never emailed before, I've never reached out to my past customers before, ever— 5 ways to keep your home safe is a perfect way to get back in touch. Hey, this is Zach with Awesome Heating Air, Awesome Garage Door Repair. We came out to your home once upon a time. We never stayed in touch. That's on us to reach out again and kind of rebuild this bridge.

Here's 5 ways to keep your home safe. I was thinking about you. I wanted to make sure you had this. Boom. Now you're back in business with your list. That's how you get to like a 30%, 40%, 50% open rate is just be somebody that people look forward to hearing from and they know, oh, when he sends me something, it's going to be useful. It's going to be entertaining.

What do you think about— what do you know? Restaurants do a really good job of getting birthdays. And the secret sauce of the birthday is you get a free meal. Who goes on their birthday to get a free— who goes by themselves? So, you know, you probably got 20 people with you.

Yeah.

Or at least a family.

Right.

So I've always thought, like, how to make people really feel special is hit them on their birthday, on Christmas. You know, my buddy John Ruhland, he passed away, but Giftology, he said hit people when it's not a special time. You know, everyone gets Valentine's Day and birthday cards. Like, hit somebody to just say, hey, I'm just thinking about you. Same thing as Bluefishing. Steve, you ever read Bluefishing?

I don't think so. I've never heard of that one. No.

It's like he's on these trips. He passed away too, dude. I've lost a few good buddies. And so he's on this trip and he's at this restaurant in Italy. I think it was Italy. And he goes, listen, do you have coasters with the recipes on the back? He goes, could I take 100 coasters? And he goes, I do got coasters that are paper, like with our logo on it, but I don't have the recipes on the back. And he goes, can I write the recipe on each one of these? Can you help me? I'll tip you. So they wrote the recipe down and all he did was put it, the recipe on the back and said, you gotta try these margaritas. Next time we'll have one together. And he sent it to all of his clients and just, just for the hell of it, just to say, hey, listen, thinking about you. Next time I hope you come. This is one of the best margaritas I've ever had.

Yeah.

And just acts of kindness when you don't need to do it. And I just love that idea. I mean, I'm obsessed with Robert Cialdini. In fact, like, I'm gonna make— I read his books all the time, but, um, there's one like Getting the Yes, I think it's called. Um, but, and then he's got this like 99 steps. Like, people love babies and they love their pets. If I started a, uh, pest control company, I'd go to every vet in the city and I'd say, we're taking care of your pets for free. This is why to use us. We spend extra time making sure it's safe around kids and pets. And then I'd say, I'm going to give you a 10% marketing fee for everybody you recommend, and it's going to become a second income that goes directly to you. Yeah. And all of a sudden, what's— do you have dogs?

I don't, no.

Do you have cats?

Uh, no. I have 6 kittens who live in my backyard right now.

6 kittens?

But no, they're not—

Dogs are like— I mean, kids are way more important, but dogs, they be—

they got my 4 kids, I got the stray cats.

So you're going to make sure you get clean, like, pest control that's—

Oh, yeah, dude. I take pest control every month for sure.

Yeah, no doubt. I found out my buddy— my buddy sold his pest control company and he goes, we used to put 15 gallons of product down every time we'd visit. The company that bought us switched to backpacks, put 3 gallons. Think about that. They were able to run 5 more routes per guy per day.

Right, right.

And they saved $7 a house in product. But it freed them up to run 5 extra calls. But they cheapened— The experience, it's just, it's interesting.

You know what I think the next like wave of marketing tools is gonna be? I think you've had over the 2010s or the 2020s, it's all been about follow-up, tools to follow up, tools to stay in touch, which obviously we're a stay-in-touch agency, right? But I believe the next wave of tools for marketing in the trade specifically is all personalization, taking your customer experience to a level of personalization that industry just hasn't seen. The way that we are recording all of our phone calls, the way that we're recording all of our technician visits, the amount of data we are capturing from those conversations that we just need to build a bridge, a way to take that info and use it in our follow-ups. When you talk about birthdays, first of all, I can't— I think it might have been your team. There was another— there was a contractor last week I was talking about setting up birthday campaigns with, but the big roadblock was how do we bridge— how do we bring the data in?

How do we get their birthday? That's what I was asking. How do we get their birthday?

How do we get it? How do we bring all this info that we know, even if it is you notice they have a dog or you notice they're Cardinals fans or whatever little things you're catching when you're in the course of talking to that customer? I envision tools that capture all that information and help us follow up with insane personalization. On your website, somebody comes to your website, welcome back, Zach. Like, it's been 6 months since your last service. Here's a $20 off coupon, right, for your next service. Why aren't we doing that in the home services? You know?

Well, what's— because it's really hard to do all these things, but with AI, it makes it easier. But what's interesting is, like, you've met Joe Crisaro a bunch of times, I'm sure. Joe came and trained us plenty of times, and he goes, what I want you to do is listen for the little things. Like, little Tommy wakes up every time I leave for work because the garage door is so noisy. So he said, when you're going through your options, say option 4. That's— I call it the Keep Tommy Sleeping When Dad Leaves for Work option.

Yeah, dude, that's beautiful.

Super personalization, right? Like, like, and you know, listen, the listeners, they love these ideas. They're probably writing some down. They probably— but the problem is it goes and sometimes it gets started, yeah, but never stays started. And so that's why I like using companies like you. I really do. It's like set it and forget it. You're monitoring it. My team's always like— it's just one more thing. And I don't have to pay, uh, I don't pay your payroll taxes. I don't pay you, um, FICA or Medicare.

Right.

I don't have to pay for your PTO. Uh, I don't pay your— and I'm not saying I have 1,400 people. I'm glad to pay for it. I mean, they're great people, but a lot of people think everything needs to come in-house.

Yeah.

And also what I've always liked is specialists. I don't like an agency that does everything because they're— they started the agency doing a few good things, right? Then they hired for this, this, this, and they're okay at everything else. And I hate to say that, but it's true. They add the SEO into the package. They give you this package deal: email, SMS, Google optimization, PPC, and LSA. And the PPC they're breaking even on. They're spending Philippines building a couple backlinks. Your site's not getting any backlinks.

That's right.

They're not building anything. And what I've noticed is, I mean, It's just I've got specialty for everything that just are the best at what they do. And I think that that's important. And you guys have really spent the time and know results. You know, Leland Smith spends a lot of money on direct mail to his members.

Oh, yeah.

And his members— so one day Victor Rancor worked for him. You know Victor. He had his best sale ever working for Champion Group. Leland calls him and says, dude, great job, $30,000 or $40,000 on that HVAC unit. And he goes, yeah, yeah, boss, you know, really great. I'm really excited. Like, you guys taught me well. He's like, but did you sell them a membership? He goes, well, I just got a $40,000 sale. He goes, well, if you believe in the company, we sold a membership, right? Leland wants memberships sold, especially in Southern California with no weather, more than he wants big tickets. Isn't that interesting?

Yeah, that's crazy. There's so much debate about that right now. You know, like so many people, oh, memberships are dead. No, memberships are more alive than ever.

I'm sure you're writing about this in your book. That's why I wrote a book on it. And it's 180 pages. And I'm also writing a book on equity incentive program that's almost done. And what I figured out, what I write about is where I get the most questions. So if you could actually have the recording in the garage of like, you know, I always wondered if Amazon really does deliver in the garage. Wouldn't that be the best to use on email? Is have the AI analyze what most clients are asking about.

100%.

And actually write about those subjects that people are like, did you know this many people are stealing in your neighborhood? And you got like, that stuff's so easy now with Claude.

Exactly. One of the, one of the things we're setting up with your team right now, I mean, I guess I shouldn't share trade secrets.

Go ahead.

I don't know if it's a trade secret or not, but you got like a, I think Walt, he came and he said, we noticed that the 2-year anniversary of a new spring being installed is when most people come back for service.

Yeah.

Once it's been 2 years. So we're like, perfect. What are we going to do now? We're going to set up a flow so that once it hits that 2-year mark, boom, email campaign going out with a special for service, letting them know, hey, it's your 2-year anniversary. Since we see that 80% of customers, they come back for service after this. Again, taking that personalization, using the data you have in your CRM to send something relevant, personal from someone you know, like, and trust. It really is very simple. Do you have a way to send emails to your customers? Do you have something interesting to offer them, something interesting to say about it? And then just being wildly consistent, being there when they need you. Everybody knows what times of year they're going to be slow. Everybody knows what times of year they're going to get certain service calls more than others. So just anticipate that and prepare messaging that gets you there before somebody else does. Because let's face it, You could put your sticker on the equipment in their home that you work on. You could leave behind an invoice with your logo on it.

They're probably not going to remember. They're probably not going to remember though. They're probably going to go back to Google and call again, and you're going to have to rebuy that customer. But if you're staying in touch, Yeah. if you're using the data you have and being consistent in a way that's valuable, then you increase the chance significantly that they only think of you when they do need service. Who am I going to call when I need service again? Oh, how about the company that's been showing up every week in my inbox for the last year With insight.

No, no, no. That's why membership works. That's why email works. You know, one of the things I told the crew yesterday in a big marketing meeting is we will not— we will take the user ID and it's based on a lot of things now. It's got advanced that we know it's coming from that IP address and other things to make sure. And we block it for the next year. But now what we're doing is sending a vCard to the customer for them to store. But now I'm blocking it right after because guess what? If they go to PPC, even on our own search terms, we're paying a couple hundred bucks for that. So these simple little things, I'm like, how's our PPC costing so much? And then I'm like, well, let's do this, this, this. Let's send a vCard where they could store it and say, hey, and you make it funny and you're like, store our number. And when they have to save it, they remember that it's in there. You know what I mean?

Yeah.

Dude, I could talk. I just, you don't understand. Like as much as I love sales, I freaking love it.

Damn marketing. I could talk. We could go for hours.

You know what? I was sitting with Brad Lee. You ever heard of— he's out of Vegas. Brad Lee, he's—

I feel like I've seen his name on my Facebook feed.

Yeah, he's all over.

I can't really picture it.

Yeah, he's like dark hair. He interviews people all the time. And where was I going with this? Oh, man.

We could talk about marketing for hours.

Oh, yeah, yeah. He asked me, he goes, what's more important? Marketing or sales? Grant Cardone asked me that actually. And I'm like, well, and I was thinking about Tom Howard with what he'd done with Fetchy Tech.

I wouldn't mind answering that question with him.

Well, the thing is, is, is, is I go, well, sales. I mean, I think about what Tom Howard did is just buy lists, outbound call them, send Phil or Brent Buckley. And he built a $75 million company by just being really good at sales with a couple A+ home run hitters. But really, what's the most important thing? Marketing is— so the question you got to really think about, let's say you got the 10 best salesmen or the 10 best marketers. 10 best salesmen are sitting around waiting for leads. The 10 best marketers could send an average salesman and make way more money. So I do think marketing is— this is a tough one. Marketing and sales overlap a lot.

For sure. I think the best way I ever heard it put— Gary Vee said this. He might've said this on Chris's show, I don't remember. But he basically said, marketing people will not win as much as salespeople, but salespeople will never win as big as marketing people. Like when marketing wins, marketing wins big.

Yeah.

And salespeople win consistently, right? They have to go out and win every day. But when the marketing team wins, it's like, holy crap.

It's— and it can be, Alex Hormozi took a quote off of Jeff Bezos, and Jeff Bezos said, In baseball, the best you could get is 4 runs, right? You got bases loaded, you hit a home run, you got 4 runs.

Yeah.

But in business, every once in a while you can get 1,000 runs or 10,000 runs. And so I look at marketing as that thing, that engine that could get like, I've been obsessed with marketing. People are always like, how could I recreate that? I was like, you gotta get obsessed about marketing. Al Levy taught me 2 things. Get obsessed with your financials and KPIs and get obsessed with marketing. Never hand that off. You need to know that stone cold.

Yeah.

Everything else could be worked out and delegated. Yeah. So you talk about 3 buckets, campaigns, tactics, and automations.

Yeah.

Most contractors don't know the difference. Walk us through each one.

Yeah. If you're, if you're listening to this and you're going, all right, maybe we should take our list more seriously. Maybe we should stay in touch with our customers. There's some money there. You have broadcasts or tactics, which is a one-off email. You get in, oh no, we're low on jobs today. We need plumbing jobs, we need repair jobs. Let's send out a broadcast. People usually call it a blast. I hate the word blast, but that's a one-off email broadcast. Then you have sales campaigns, which is a series of emails working together to achieve a goal by a deadline. So you say now through September 31st, you can get $500 off a new garage door. Here's how to take action. So you do a series of emails, 6 or 7, building up to it, teasing the deadline. I, I don't see any companies in the trades that do that until we come in and show them how to do it. Because most people send out an email, they don't get a lot of calls. Oh, it doesn't work.

Yep.

Dude, you got to run a campaign. You got to overcome objections, make a case over a series of emails. And then the third type is automations, which are emails that trickle out when customers meet a criteria. They become an open estimate. Boom, series of automated messages. They become a customer who finished a job but did not sign up for a membership, boom, series of follow-up messages. So one-off broadcasts, sales campaigns that have a deadline, and then automated emails.

Yeah, I think that's what you learn a lot from. Scarcity is another thing about influence is like, hey, we got 3 slots open next week.

Yes.

You know, that works really, really well.

Super.

And it's gotta be honest. You know, he talks about integrity. But I mean, yeah, if you do that correctly and you just tell people, like, we're only giving— we're going to give 10 doors out, we've overordered. Like, I do this all the time. I've got 10 doors for a 16/7, and the customer ended up canceling because they had to go out of town or whatever. Use real reasons.

Yeah.

And say, you know, even like the kickdown approach I was telling you, listen, you don't want to use our company, great, because we give a lifetime warranty. We do this, this, this, this. There's a builder company we know. does great work, and because they don't have any of the overhead, they offer this at this price, but it's a little harder to get on their schedule if you're not in a hurry.

Yeah.

Like, how do you take every single thing and obsess about it? From the way the lead comes in to how you handle the call to how you convert that to a client to how you build the average ticket by giving more options. See, the reason why I think email is not as effective for us as it would be for a multi-trade Is if I just did your HVAC unit, I could come out and do the plumbing and electrical.

Exactly. Yeah.

And for us, we're like, we just gave you a lifetime warranty on everything we just did. We don't even need to be out there in the next 5 years. You know, there's nothing— last guy I want in my house is a salesman that I just bought from 2 years ago that gave me a lifetime warranty to find something else to shove down my throat. Yeah. So I try to look at it from the customer's perspective. But once I do garage flooring or some of these other trades like insulation, yeah, the email. Oh my God.

Well, that's— That you're 100% spot on. Multi-trade is such an obvious fit, right? It's so easy because you sold them product A. What about B, C, D, E? What about all these other things you do? There's also something to be said for the referral component though, for a single trade service. Like you talked about, hey, can I send a message from your neighbor? You can't send it directly to the neighbor, but you can send out incentives, you can send out reminders. I love sending out reminder emails for single trade services like, hey, This is your reminder to perform this routine maintenance, change your filter, do this regular thing. Reminders are awesome because people go, oh yeah, dude, that's super helpful. And then when their neighbor asks them, who does your— who did you have come out for your garage door? They're like, oh, A1. You know, they send me these reminders. It's super helpful. They're great. So there's a value as well for even a single trade business to just staying top of mind, period. Like sometimes people kind of balk at it, right? And they go, well, I don't know about the ROI for us.

I don't know if it's worth it. And my question in return is always, so you're just never gonna talk to your customers again? That's it? You're just never gonna say anything? You're never gonna remind them to take care of that thing you sold them? You're not gonna send 'em any helpful advice, any tips at all ever again? You're just, it's over, it's done. But at the same time, if I ask, do you wanna have a long-term relationship with your customers? Everybody will say yes.

Like, well, the key to a long-term relationship is stay in touch, you know, keep communicating. Oh yeah, yeah. Like, I want you to read this book, Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes.

Yeah, yeah.

Talks about his Dream 100. And there's a separate book called Dream 100. And what I want people to think about right now is I've built software for this, but I haven't added this piece to it. But think about 100 people in your life that some of them are close to you. It could be a vendor, it could be your supplier, it could be somebody that's super close, somebody that helps you get ahead in life. It could be your preacher. But you put this Dream 100 together and some of the people you don't know. So how would you get to know somebody that you don't really know yet? Well, on their social media, you always are the one liking and commenting, right? And you're like a fan.

Yeah.

And but, but not in a fan way that you want to take a picture with them, like not, but just like a weird— you, you want to have a really genuine comment and say like, I really appreciate your stuff. And all of a sudden you stand out and then you send up— you're constantly Chet Holmes talks about it. So he says, he sends a tape measure to like this one client, could be my biggest client, could pay payroll for 10 years. So he sends him a tape measure with a logo on it. Says, are you measuring the result with so-and-so? Then he sends him a Rubik's Cube, a small one.

Yeah.

And says, I'm still puzzled why we haven't met. And there's a drip. But in this Dream 100, you're constantly staying on top of people, sending them a letter, certain people you want to stay in touch with. Other people you want to get in front of to get in touch. And I just, I just love that stuff. And then some of that sales, some of it's marketing, but it all really, for me, drives into marketing.

I mean, people like— people buy from people they like, you know, people like—

Well, people, you know, it's true about— I played this video yesterday. I'm just going to pull it up because we were going to edit this podcast. So I'm going to play this video. And you're just gonna listen, and I think you're gonna dig it. So— The number one rule of sales is to come to like your customer and show them. And as soon as they see that you like them, uh, the defenses come down because we know that the people who like us are gonna do well for us. So honest praise, or giving people a compliment, also showing people that you like You connect with them because you have similarities to them. Really? You were born in Michigan. I was born in Michigan, or my wife was born in Michigan. Show them that. So here's the deal. I'm thinking about this, right? Contemplating this all morning. I played it in my morning interview with my staff. I call them coworkers. And I was like, I had this epiphany in my Garage Door Freedom call. And I'm like, you got to love your clients. Like, when I went out with my clients, World War II got out, I took the rest of the day off.

I walked in a guy's house with a kegerator. I was like, dude, I'm on the clock, but I can't— can you show me how you make beer? This is the coolest thing.

Yeah.

The guy had 7 fishing poles. I'm like, show me your biggest fish. I had a guy with a Bernie Sanders shirt on. This is way back when I was in the field. I was like, I want to learn more about this guy. What do you love about him? Genuinely interested. So then I said, I'm doing this all wrong. I took this epiphany off of that. What if I hired people that I genuinely liked? That I was like, I got so much in common with you. And I showed them every day and I saw them and I'm like, dude, how about that volleyball game?

Yeah.

How about that golf tournament Sunday? How about that game the other day? The Patriots got smoked. You know what I mean? Like, what if you hired people that you genuinely liked? How easy it would be to build a culture.

Have you—

Instead of being liked, you like them. So therefore, you know, does that make sense?

100%. Have you heard of, uh, The 10 Greatest Salespersons? It's a really old book. It's like maybe '80s or '90s. It's pretty hard to get a copy now. I just managed to find one. 10 Greatest Salespersons is the name of the book. It's super old. I recently got my hands on a copy like a couple months ago. The first chapter of the book is about a guy named Joe Girard.

Oh, I know Joe Girard, the best car salesman. Yeah, there's a book called The Greatest Salesman.

Okay, yeah.

That's it, The Greatest Salesman. And all he did was stay in contact with people. They kept coming back for their son's car. Like, all he did was send out cars Just, he spent more time reaching out to clients in the past, and then he built a book of business, and they'd come back, we need another car.

And he'd finish every interaction with, and remember, I like you. That's what he said to people. I really like you. Like, he literally said it as his closer when he was going away from them.

I have that book, and it's literally, if you look at my book, like, that book is so underlined and circled.

Yeah. 10 Greatest Salespersons has 9 more chapters on, like, other people like him, but he's the first chapter, and he's by far. It's like the best one.

Yeah, so The Greatest Salesman in the World is just on him and it's still available. It's just a paperback. Then there's— what is it? The Greatest Secret? What is the one that— man, there's another book by— it's a really good book, but it's like the greatest gift. I forget what it's called. But anyways, so somebody's listening. I'm going to get back to this for a minute. And they've never done email marketing.

Yeah.

You know, how do they get started from scratch? Step 1, step 2, step 3. What platform do they sign up for? How do they get their lists in there? What do they do first? Yeah.

Step 1, gotta have a way to send emails. That's number 1. You gotta have a way to send emails to your entire customer list. Again, no copying and pasting, put it in, putting it in your Outlook or Gmail window and trying to send all your customers from there. Got to have a legitimate platform. Mailchimp, Constant Contact, ServiceTitan Marketing Pro, Klaviyo.

Is there anyone you like better?

You know, at this— I used to be pretty strongly opinionated about it. Now I recognize every software has its trade-offs. So we use whatever our clients have. But if somebody doesn't have something, I'll typically refer them to Constant Contact.

Does HubSpot work at all?

Yeah, I use HubSpot. Yeah, I use HubSpot too. So have a way to send messages to your customers in the first place. The second thing is decide who the emails are gonna come from. Whose name is going in the from line? Is it the founder? Is it the president? Is it a mascot?

Who do we use?

The team at A1. That's your, that's what we use with you guys. So you have the founder's name, a name of a personality, or the name of, or the team. So it's—

Did you, we should A/B test putting Tommy at A1.

For sure, dude.

We'll just build a separate, yeah.

Yeah. I think it's a great idea. Never just the name of the business though. Always have a name of a person or people people. The second thing is sit down and plan one email a week. That's it, one email a week to a different segment each week. So week one of the month, every single first week, send a follow-up to all your open estimates. So it can be 2 sentences. Hey, what's up? It's Tommy with A1 Garage. You had an estimate with our team in the last 6 months.

What should we do?

What should we— what should we do? Are you still sitting on that? Should we close this out for you? Have you given up on this?

Have you given up on this?

You know, I love that.

This is boss, baby.

Yes. Yeah, yeah, that's right. I love those. Again, it's a personal conversation. Like, that's my point. It's just make it feel like it's coming from a person because it is. Second week of the month, do some kind of reminder message to all your past customers in general. Hey, what's up? This is just your monthly reminder to make sure you get your tune-up or you take care of your filter or you take care of XYZ. Make sure your sensors on your garage door are working. Here's how to do it. 3rd week of the month, send something to all your membership customers, get them to take advantage of their benefits or make sure they don't cancel when the end of their contract comes. And 4th and final week of the month, do a— I call it a hand-raiser campaign. It's what you mentioned with, we have 5 spots left, 10 spots left, or we have a limited amount of availability this month. Would you like to claim one of these spots? Let me know ASAP. And then you have your call to action. Just do that. 1, 2, 3, 4 every single week. Open estimates, reminder, members, hand raiser email, done.

That's your email marketing strategy. If you do that, first of all, you're probably already paying for a way to do it. Like most companies already do have a way to send emails, they're just not using it. They're just burning $1,500 a month on whatever software they have. But if you just do that, you're gonna be really surprised at how many people reach out, book jobs, when you need it, like, hey, let's get one of these campaigns out right away because we need some jobs in this market or we need some jobs in general. You'll be pleasantly surprised at how many people go, oh, I really like this. I was talking to a garage door company that we work with just yesterday and he goes, dude, you've turned me into like a little celebrity in town. When I walk around in town, I get customers who say they read my emails. And I'm like, that's awesome. You know, that's—

That's really, really cool. Yeah, I gotta have you reach out to my buddy that had, an AI company. Did I send you his contact? I think I did at one point. An email AI. So what it did is, uh, Joe Polish introduced me. Really smart guy, big company, doing like $10 million a year or something. And what it would do is look at the email of where you went to, where you spent time. One of my buddies goes over, he goes, you ever read Joe Polish's email? He goes, they're so effing good.

There you go.

But every single time, They were built for that guy of what he liked because the emails were like 20 pages. And so he'd go narrow in on this. And this is where he was spending his time. So the AI would know, focus in on these areas to be customized. We talked about customized. Yeah.

Personalization, I'm telling you.

You know what I've been really pushing? And I haven't done it yet. And it's been very hard for me to do with my vendors. But why would my vendor want to give a discount to me cheaper than the price? Well, wouldn't they rather their equipment go in versus someone else's? So if I was able to prove to them this customer did not buy, Yeah. and I had the CEO of that company, the vendor, make a quick video, and I gave him the script, it was like simply, look, we work closely with A1. They spend a lot of money with us. They're the largest company, so we only do this for them. But we have a lot of doors that customers have canceled in our warehouse. And what we're willing to do is give those for a much better price to A1 and A1 only, and then extend that Discount to you.

Yeah.

And, and have them, the vendor, make the video, send it out in an email. If I see that and I like the company, it was just more than I wanted to spend. But it's got to be true. Everything that I just said has to be true. But that's one thing I'm going to work with you on. I mean, I need to get more involved. But dude, it's like I can't— 168 hours in a week, I always say to myself. But it's like, where did it go? Yeah. So you were the CEO of Power Selling Pros. Well, let me ask you one other thing. So You developed something called the Will Won't Research Framework.

I didn't develop this. I learned it from a guy named Eddie Schleiner. He's, he's, in my opinion—

Eddie Schlonger?

Schleiner.

How do you spell that?

S-H-L-E-Y-N-E-R.

S-H-L-E-Y-N-E-R.

Yeah, he's, he's, in my opinion, he's the best copywriter in the world.

Better than Dan Kennedy?

Uh, I think Dan Kennedy would probably look I think he might know Dan Kennedy actually.

Okay.

I think Dan Kennedy would probably look at him and be like, I approve.

Okay.

So Eddie, I recently hired him for some coaching and I went through a new training he did. He has this brilliant research method where you basically go through AI and you're like, here's my customer base, here's what I'm trying to sell. I want you to find me real voice of market data, not blog posts, not editorials, real voice of market data from Google, Reddit, Quora, wherever customers are talking in actual forums on what they struggle with related to my service, what pains they have. It gathers all this voice of market data, incredible amounts of quotes, things customers actually are concerned about when they're purchasing garage doors or air conditioners. Then you say, okay, rank the mass desires. What are the desires that these talking points are revealing from the customers. And it will come up with all the market's mass desires, things that people really want when they're purchasing these products. And then the final step of the research is, I want you to compile a— you'll love this— I want you to compile a will and won't analysis for me. For each mass desire you have found in this voice of market data, what will customers admit about that desire?

What will they say? And what won't they say because it's too painful or tied to their ego? In the case of garage doors, one mass desire is to be treated fairly by the company that comes out and serves me. A customer will say, I need to shop around, or I need to look at this and make sure I'm getting a good quote. What they won't say is, I don't want to look like a fool in front of my spouse. I don't want my spouse to come home and think that I got taken advantage of by a contractor.

Right.

They won't say that out loud. They won't admit that.

Right.

But that's data. That's information that you can use in your marketing messaging. Another mass desire would be, you know, I want a high-quality product. I want something that works consistent like it's promised. They'll admit that out loud, but what they won't say is, I've been burned in the past and I'm too insecure to say I have no idea how to fix this if it breaks. I'm completely— if this breaks, I'm—

Yeah.

I'm either gonna look like an idiot because I have to fix it or look like an idiot because I don't have the money to pay for it. So when you have all this will and won't table, I basically go in when I'm writing campaigns, I'm like, This just wrote my ads for me because I'm just gonna dramatize the will statement in my hook. And then I'm gonna call out the won't statement so people feel like I'm reading their minds. And then I'm gonna put my product as the solution at the end. And that's my framework for how to craft these messages.

I love it.

Yeah.

That's powerful. I would like to see it in action. We'll jump on a couple calls in the next month.

Yeah.

'Cause I wanna learn more about this stuff. At Power Selling Pros, you were training customer service teams across the trades. What did you learn about why customers say yes or no that most contractors still don't understand? Hmm.

What did I learn about why people say yes or no? I learned that confidence and enthusiasm is an incredible selling tool. I think confidence and enthusiasm might be the most underrated tools of selling in your arsenal. I would, when I was at Power Selling Pros, and even now today, I'd listen to thousands of CSR phone calls. And you got 2 CSRs who are saying the same things. Like the words coming out of their mouths are identical, but one's booking 90% of their calls and the other's barely getting past 50 or 60. One of them has confidence and enthusiasm. They're excited about what they're, How do you think I built an email marketing business, dude?

Yeah.

Like, nobody's going around with the same level of enthusiasm for email marketing as I am. Not even close. In the entire industry, I have the most confidence and enthusiasm about this particular channel. And I firmly believe that's been probably the number one asset for me in growing and acquiring customers and proving this out to people, because I'm just really enthusiastic about it. That's something I learned there coaching CSRs, even now working with our sales team. I'm like, the most enthusiastic salesperson usually wins because they give the customer the most confidence.

You know what's interesting is I've gone to a lot of events and been on stage. And I'm like, do you guys realize that the garage door is the smile of your home? It's 40% of your curb appeal.

Exactly.

It's literally 268% return on investment. I'm like, listen, when I'm watching a James Bond movie, I'm looking in the background at that garage door. Like that. I learned to love it.

Yeah.

And I bought a company from one of my mentors, a garage door company in Phoenix, been around a long time, great guy. I walk in his warehouse and he's got stacks and stacks and stacks of uninsulated doors.

Yeah.

And I go, why aren't you selling steel backs? He goes, Tommy, it's just a garage door. And oh my gosh, my heart got— I just— I was like, just a garage door?

Building a cathedral.

I'm like, this is like This is so important. And it was just crazy because you see a guy that's owned a business for that long.

Yeah.

And that he doesn't believe. And I think the difference is belief. And if you could sell the belief and you could have people believe like I believe.

Yeah.

Like I'm working on this stuff with Marcus Sheridan, basically to help rank the LLMs. And he's given me all these questionnaires and I'm like, I truly believe my heart of hearts that most people deserve to have a new garage door, and it's an investment into their home and their family and their safety and their security, and that it's the best thing to do. It'd be like, you know, obviously it's cheaper than a roof or an HVAC unit or a hot water heater. I think the price is right. And I don't think being the cheapest is a solution. But if you can offer people flexible payments that make it affordable, Yeah. I think that's where you're going to win. You talk about the emotion marketing, emotion marketing, making customers feel something and not just see an ad. How do home service companies, which most people think of transactional, create an emotional connection with their clients?

You know, a lot of what we talked about, I think, kind of helps with that. Like, when I— again, when I'm creating a campaign, I always sit there and think to myself, I know for a fact that nobody's looking forward to— like, nobody's expecting this email today. Nobody's expecting an email from their HVAC company. Nobody's expecting an email from their garage door or their window cleaning business. But how can I make it so that they're happy they got it anyway? Nobody goes around thinking, I really hope I see an ad for water today. But when you see a Liquid Death ad, you can't help but smile a little, right? When you see a When you see Ryan Reynolds on a Mint Mobile ad.

Or the Dollar Shave Club. I just saw that yesterday.

Dollar Shave Club.

Yeah, I'm like, dude, that ad is just—

Jesse Cole, Savannah Bananas.

Yeah.

Nobody was clamoring for—

He's an attention guy.

Trick League Baseball.

He's looking for attention.

But nobody's mad about it either once they see it.

His is like yellow.

There's so many different ways to do it, right? You could tell stories, you could answer questions, you could just be one of our copywriters, Pat, He is the man. He wrote this awesome email for a company that's gonna go out next month right before Halloween. It's a company that sells generators. So it's how do you surprise and delight? How do you create some entertainment value here? So the email is painting a picture of the first scene of a horror movie, right? Lights go out, wife walks out, she sees the shape of an ax. It's all downhill from there, right? But not if you had a generator. You know, a generator could make every horror movie irrelevant in 3 seconds. It's just a really entertaining, funny email that as you're going along, you're like, you know, I didn't wake up thinking about generators today, but like, that's delightful.

That's entertaining. And it's memorable and it's a story. I was studying The Wizard of Ads.

Oh dude.

And the story, so I've been telling a lot of stories. And so the stories I've been working on is, I wish I had it in front of me, but it's like, when I was a kid, all I dreamed about was a 250cc Kawasaki dirt bike. And that's my ad. And it goes— it's something along the lines of chrome handlebars, and it's going through it, and it's like, every dream starts in a garage, or something like that. You know what I mean?

Oh, yes.

But it didn't say discounts or anything else. And it was like— and people called me. Everybody I knew called me. They're like, dude, that ad.

Yeah.

And then I go with the next one. I got these TV ads where this little boy, he's got, uh, he's— all the neighbors going, thanks, Tommy. And he's— he goes to his friend Darla, she's like, thanks, Tommy. So he's fixing stuff, right? He's like a little handyman. And it goes, uh, hey kid, could you hand me that wrench? And then it's me. And then the technician goes—

I've seen the Back to the Future one you did.

Yeah. And then the second one was Back to the Future. Yeah. But it's just super fun. It's a story of people. It's got the DeLorean in it. It's like Yeah, dude, I'm— I just, I, I just know that my calling, like talking to you right now, is like, I love being the CEO founder, but if I could just be in marketing.

I know, I know.

And, but there's so many other steps to it. Like, you got to get the call booked, you got to dispatch it right. Like, you're only strong as your weakest link.

Yeah.

And, and that's just interesting because I'm like, man, I could do so much. There's a study, I think it was with New Balance, that they said The CEO came in, it was 80% direct response, 20% top of funnel branding. The guy flipped it. It was 80% top, 20% direct response.

Yeah.

They stayed even the next 2 years. The next year the company tripled because top of funnel takes a lot longer. But it's just really, really— I was talking to Alex Hormozi the other day. He's like, you know that, right? I was like, yeah, I've heard about that. He's like, that shit works. He's like, most people don't have the time, the patience, or the commitment. Or, you know, you got to pick your station and then own that audience. So Aaron Gaynor uses Roy. And he goes, dude, 50% of the people know me. He goes, everybody recognizes my voice. I get hate mail because I advertise so much. But that's what it takes. And I don't know where the world's going because there's so— I was on a call yesterday with Duct Tape Marketing, the daughter that took it over. And I was like, dude, Reddit's a good spot. Houzz, Pinterest, Angie, Yelp. And I'm going through every LLM is great. Like if you really think about it, marketing is this vast, there's so many places. Before it was the Yellow Book.

Yeah.

Yellow Pages, TV, radio, right?

Yeah.

Now it's like, oh my gosh, what do I do? And we're talking about email marketing. But what I love about email marketing is it's basically free other than paying for the service.

Exactly.

And it's a list that's warm.

Yeah, super low cost, super high ROI. I mean—

You think it's the best ROI any company could do?

I think it's the easiest. Like, you already have the leads. Yeah, that's my whole pitch, right? I'm like, look, you already have the leads, you already have the list, you're already paying for a way to send something to 'em. So let's create something, the most compelling thing possible, and let's scoop up all that low-hanging fruit that's there. Have you ever heard of Scott Galloway? You know him? Prof G Media?

No, I don't think so.

You would like his stuff. But when his team is working with him on a speech or a podcast appearance, they're always putting together data. They're heavy, heavy on the data. And Scott will walk in and he'll be like, more drama. That's his phrase when they're prepping the material, more drama. And I feel like that's my same with our team at SendIt. When we're reviewing email campaigns, I'm looking at stuff and I just go, where's the drama, guys? Where can we add more drama here? Where can we create more of that? dreaming in your garage effect. We're gonna create more of the haunted house effect. Because with email marketing, you already have the leads, you already have a way to talk to them. Just be consistent, be entertaining, and good things happen. Like, it's pretty— if you're consistent and entertaining, it's pretty hard to mess it up.

I agree with you. I mean, I love this stuff. I'm trying to see if I have this story. Oh man, I don't know if I have it, but it was this— it's a story I put in my book and it's not out yet, but it's a book about— it's called The Mellow Method and it's all A1 employees like me and we each took a chapter.

Oh, that's way cool.

And there's this story in there about this lady whose husband just died and he took care of everything. She's like, I don't know what to do. I'm going to sleep in my car tonight. I don't want anybody to break in. And I really worked hard to write it into a story. And man, I had so many comments. And, you know, here's what I've learned is human talking into AI, let the AI do it, and then a human rewrite it. Because AI will help with the details and get the punctuation right, but then you got to go in and write it and make it your own. It's your own, it's getting fixed, and then it's your own again. That's how it's done.

There's one thing that AI is terrible at with writing. There's really, I don't have an opinion strongly either way on whether people use it or not. AI is really bad at pacing though. Pacing the story, pacing the message. It uses all the weird, it's not X, it's Y, and the em dashes and stuff, but it can't pace a story well.

Yeah.

It can't build suspense. When you go through, you've got to create this feeling of suspense so people feel like they're slipping down the slide line by line in your ad. That's the one thing that I, I haven't been able to figure out how to get it to do is pace it well. It just kind of throws the details at you. Yeah, immediately. It's not as emotional.

Oh, it's good. It's good. You know, we almost went through the whole call with podcast without talking about AI. What's one piece of advice for every home service company owner listening?

I think that the— I think the most important thing that we all need to remind ourselves again and again and again is that when it comes to marketing and sales and growing your business, trust is the most important thing. You just gotta trust. If people trust you because you do good work, because the way you communicate is clear and compelling, and your team trusts you, it's really hard to fail, I think. And trust, if everything could come back to one thing, I would always just say it's trust. How can you be a person of trust, communicate trust, build trust, re-earn it again and again and again? And never take it for granted when you have it.

I love that. I want to give you one idea, then I want you to tell people how to get a hold of you. So I shouldn't even say this because I think it's like a secret idea. But, you know, Al Levy had a great business, the 7 Power Contractor, but he was getting ready to retire. And he'd done so much for me when I transacted the first time for A1. I said, Al, let me buy out your company. You stay on. And he already had everything built. He just didn't necessarily have the time, effort, or energy.

Yeah.

You know, being close to 70 at the time. And, you know, Jim take it— took it to the next level and actually implemented it in the courses in HSF. And I'm like, how many people out there are there that never really did anything with their list? They might have 300,000, they might have sold books, they got this list, but they haven't done anything with it. And how many of them are correlated to, or HVAC or home services. So, and how many of them unfortunately pass away or retire and just kind of let it dwindle? So I'm going to build a service that finds those things and just buy it from the family and say, let's let this legacy live on. And I think that could be massive.

Wow.

It's these little things that we get all these great ideas, nobody acts on them though. They're like, ah, well, one day we'll get to it.

I will act on I like that idea, Tommy.

You know what? The first time I saw Zoom, it was during COVID And I'm like, dude, this works really, really good. I should probably throw $1 million in stock. It went up 6 times. I never did it. I'm like, you just know that it's going to go— it's the Warren Buffett mentality of like, if you like— if you understand how it works and you like it and you know other people like it and use it, invest in it. How do people get ahold of you, Zach?

Easiest way to get ahold of me is withsendit.com. In fact, we made a— we came up with a free gift for your listeners. If they go to withsendit.com/expert, it's a swipe file of 20 of our best performing email campaigns and a copy paste open estimate follow-up campaign that they can send out and see what happens with their list. But withsendit.com is the best way.

So withsendit.com. And if they want to reach out to you personally, are you on LinkedIn, Facebook? Where do you hang out?

I'm on all the places, but Facebook I think is where most contractors reach me. Yeah. Zach Garside.

All right. And finally, we talked about a lot of stuff, man. Give us one final thought for the listeners.

One final thought. Be authentic. Be not needy and be consistent.

I love it, man. Well, this is well done.

I learned that from one of your guests, actually.

Which one?

Ben Settle came on your show several years ago. I learned a lot from him on email, and he taught me that. So full circle. Super cool.

Well, I just want to add that you're a student, and if you stay curious, you're just going to go places that are unimaginable. Stay reading. Stay reaching out to people. Don't be afraid to ask. Sky's the limit because somebody's already been where you want to go. I always say you don't need to replace the tire or reinvent the wheel. Sometimes you can throw new hubcaps on it. Thanks, Zach.

Thanks.

Well done.