Alex Johantgen on Setting an Ambitious Vision at Rise and Shine - Ep.287

0:00There's just a lot of things as a smaller company, you don't realize you're doing wrong. You don't realize that you should have systems and processes in place. Me, I never went to college and I didn't get a business degree. Everything we've done, we've either taught ourselves or learned from somebody. so it's it's something where you know you kind of need to go see it you need to go see what's what's possible out there you should if you're not attending conferences to see what what best practices are in your industry you should be because you don't know what's achievable until you've seen someone else achieve it

0:41Alex Bridgeman: Alex thanks for coming on the podcast Think Like an Owner is all about building small businesses and I focused a lot on garage doors for my new venture durable trades that we can we can chat later too but I would love to hear more about like the like how did you get into this business and like where did you start you have a business partner like how did you guys get to this point yeah it's impressive like walking around I love the tour you gave last time and the inventory management in particular is like stuck with me like the system you run really well So I'm excited to dive into all of it. But where was the starting point for you?

1:16Yeah, absolutely. So first, thanks for having me on. Super happy to be here and talk about this. How I got started in Garage Doors goes back to actually when I was 16 years old. I worked for basically a friend of their family for several years. And it was more of like a summertime job. And then I ended up continuing to work there after high school. And I worked there for about three years or so. and then I ended up leaving that job to go to work at Comcast, which is where I met my business partner, Josh. Josh and I worked at Comcast as service technicians for about five years. That entire time, we talked about starting a business together.

1:53We had a lot of different ideas. One of them was a liquor store with a drive-thru window, which never came to fruition, but it was... Can you do that? I don't know. They do have them. I've seen them in Wisconsin. But anyways, it's probably a good thing that that never actually happened because, you know, further on down the road, I ended up getting recruited back to the garage door industry. And I went back for a little bit of, I think, right around a year. And I was working 60, 70 hour weeks, six days a week. And I would say I wasn't necessarily getting paid appropriately. And at that time, I kind of decided if I was going to work that much, I wanted to do it for myself.

2:31So that's when I reached out to Josh. And, And, you know, we didn't have a lot of money to start, but Josh was all in from the start. He's like, heck yeah, let's do it. And so I ended up selling my home to have some startup money and Josh cashed out his 401k. And that's kind of how we started our company. We each had a work or we each had a personal truck that we converted into work trucks. And from there we got, you know, cheap logo designed on, I think it was called like Fiverr or something like that, or logotournament.com or something. Paid a couple hundred bucks. And we had a website built.

3:04And really from there, we just continued to progress. And we would do everything from going door to door, you know, knocking on customers' homes. And just in exchange for, you know, a complimentary tune-up, we'd ask for like a five-star review if they, you know, appreciated the service. And that's kind of how we started building our reputation and building our customer base until we got to kind of, you know, being able to take a step back and get out of the field. and continue to hire employees and went from one to two trucks and now over 20 trucks on the road.

3:40Alex Bridgeman: And was it called Rise and Shine to begin with? No. So the original name for the company was called Garage Door Repair Company, which is super generic. And you know what? It worked really great for SEO purposes immediately, which helped us tremendously at the beginning, which is why we did it. I kind of had the idea of like, well, if the name of our GBP, our Google business profile is Garage Door Repair Company. It's the Google terms. Yeah, it's literally what everyone's typing in. And our website URL is Garage Door Repair Company. Do you have that URL? We do still have that URL. That's a great URL.

4:14So anyways, it did help us with organic traffic right away. It helped a lot of our web pages rank at the top of Google organically right away. We did not spend money on like Google ads back then. We really just networked. word of mouth built up a ton of reviews on google and yelp and that's how we started building the business that way and what year is this that was 2015 2015 yep so you're 11 years in now yes yeah

4:41Alex Bridgeman: that's i mean your own trucks to 20 trucks that aren't your personal trucks yeah that's that's quite yeah quite a journey do you feel like there were phases of life you went through in the business certainly yeah there's definitely several phases you know when you're starting a small business and, you know, the first couple of years and being below, you know, a million dollars in revenue, you're doing everything. So it's, you're doing the work in the field, you're installing the doors, you're working every weekend, Saturday, Sunday, you're running the emergency call that comes in at 1am, you're answering the phones while you're in the garage doing the work for the customers book in the next appointment.

5:24So and then you're trying to also, you know, put all the invoices into QuickBooks, get everything ready for the end of the year. So it's hectic at that stage for sure. And then you know, you continue to progress. You know, that$3 million mark was a pretty big mark for us. Once we hit that we felt pretty, you know, established, Josh and I really weren't necessarily in the field anymore at that point. But at that point, that was around like 2020 or 2021. And we ended up going to a conference, which was Tommy Mello's conference back then. It was called Garage Door Freedom. And it really opened our eyes to what was really possible in the garage door industry, seeing what Tommy had built there.

6:10And we got connected with Dan Antonelli at Kick charge. And immediately, that was the first thing we were like, we have to do this, we have to rebrand. It was pretty evident that, you know, we had built a, you know, a decent business to that point. But one of the big things we thought was lacking was, we didn't feel people necessarily remembered who we were. After we left, it's hard to remember a company named garage door repair company. It's just generic, doesn't stick with you. So in 2022, we rebranded to rise and shine garage doors and we have amazing graphics and wraps on our vehicles and you know customers remember the company that shows up with a giant rooster on the truck and on the vans yeah good

6:53Alex Bridgeman: colors too like blue and orange like kind of a denver broncos look yeah it stands out for sure yeah very uh eye-catching yeah yeah do you own a home today now i do own a home good good i'm glad i came back around yes yeah funny funny story about that we ended up my wife and i when we sold our house and got the startup funds we actually moved in with my parents for a little bit just uh you know when we first started but it was it wasn't it was short-lived but yeah it was not something my wife was super thrilled about but she was very supportive so she's always been supportive the whole way which i couldn't appreciate more that's huge i mean there's a lot there's what feels like probably a lot of off-ramps yeah through building a business like that.

7:36Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, that's impressive. It has to feel good now, like feeling some sense of like vindication that like this, this bed we took on ourselves that maybe felt pretty risky at the time, like has paid off. It's doing okay. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, it's, you know, if I, if I were to look back and a lot of times I need to do a better job of looking back at you know where i've been did i have aspirations of like building something like this absolutely did i think it was necessarily going to happen the way it did i don't know probably not but you know we definitely at least surpassed what my initial growth expectations were when we first started the company but as we continue to progress and see what's possible you know we have much bigger growth aspirations now which is exciting that is exciting yeah And 11 years is fast to go to do that.

8:35Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, zero from zero. And right now we're on pace to do, you know, 10 and a half to 11 million.

8:41Alex Bridgeman: So yeah, that's a good year. Yeah. Was there a, you mentioned the conference, was there some key idea or turning point from that conference or in and around that time that you feel like changed the trajectory for the business? 100%. And, you know, there's just a lot of things as like a smaller company, you don't realize you're doing wrong. You know, you don't realize that you should have systems and processes in place. You know, me, I never went to college and I didn't get a business degree. And everything we've done, we've either taught ourselves or learned from somebody. So it's something where, you know, you kind of need to go see it.

9:24You need to go see what's possible out there. you should, if you're not attending conferences to see what, what best practices are in your industry, you should be because you don't know what's achievable until you've seen someone else achieve it.

9:38Alex Bridgeman: Are there any owners that you really admire, whether in garage doors or other industries that are like, wow, that was an impressive business? Yeah. I mean, there's, there's obviously, you know, Tommy's like easy one. He's built something pretty massive and, you know, he's obviously the biggest garage door company in the in the US so that's super impressive I've met several business owners throughout all the networking groups that I'm in and events that we've gone to and one of my best friends Matt with Eminem garage doors in Michigan he's someone I respect a lot and we go back and forth on ideas all the time and you know he picks my brain on on something I'll pick his brain on something it's really nice to have someone that you can have that conversation with as a business owner.

10:26Sometimes as business owners, you feel kind of like you're alone. So it's nice to be able to talk out ideas or even frustrations or whatever it is with someone who knows what you're talking about.

10:37Alex Bridgeman: Yeah. It's hard to find a true peer who you can talk to about all the same challenges. I'll talk to Michelle about my work, but there's still a difference in that she's not next to me doing the same job. She has her own job in a totally different field. And there's, you know, there's folks on your team you could talk to, but probably on everything, there's not this perfect Venn diagram of like someone you can bounce all day, all every idea around. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I, I definitely will, will talk with my wife about certain things here and there, but I also, at the same time, if I'm, you know, frustrated about something or maybe have anxiety about a situation or whatever it is at work.

11:22I don't necessarily want to bring that home. I kind of want to keep that separate because when I'm home, I, you know, want to spend time with my wife and my kids and, you know, have that be, you know, good time, not kind of separate the work and home life a little bit. So, yeah.

11:36Alex Bridgeman: Yeah. Yeah. There's a balance of, you know, sharing what's going on without, yeah, making the whole evening about whatever is happening. 100%. Yeah. Yeah. And what is there, maybe as a CEO or leaders or anything in particular, either through like coaching or just listening to like others talk about like how they improve their own leadership style that you feel like you've taken on and focused on? Like for personal growth? Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I think books is a great way to, you know, develop as a leader. You know, several books that have helped me would be like Rocket Fuel or Traction or EOS books.

12:20We've implemented EOS in our business, which I think is a game changer when it comes to continuing to grow your business. And then, you know, I've also joined Vistage Group for CEO. It's a CEO peer group, basically. And so we meet every month for an entire day. And it's a great group. If you really want to develop as a leader, you have to be able to help other business owners solve problems. And they have speakers that come in regularly to help train you or help make you a better leader. And I think that's been super valuable. We also get through Vistage. We have a Vistage chair who regularly does a one-to-one with us.

13:02So I get a monthly one-to-one with my Vistage chair and get to bounce ideas off him or struggles within the business or problems that maybe we need help solving, it's definitely helpful.

13:13Alex Bridgeman: I imagine it's also helpful having a, there's peer groups of other garage owners and then there's peer groups of broad owners who maybe have encountered like flavors of the same challenges you have and then have a totally different perspective or idea that you wouldn't have heard otherwise. Yeah, it's actually really cool being a part of a group where I am the only garage door company because the industries are, all over the place. So it's really cool to see that. It's funny because a lot of the issues all these businesses are facing are so similar, but how people handle them is very different.

13:51So it's very cool to hear how that business owner is either handling that issue and then how this other business owner recommends they handle that issue. You get a lot of different perspectives.

14:04Alex Bridgeman: Anything come to mind as a challenge you guys worked on the last year or two that maybe came from like a couple ideas from other groups fed into fixing it? The last year or two, I would say, you know, our sales process has come a long way in the last year or two in our training. So that was an area that we knew was definitely needed. I think it's helped tremendously to keep, you know, from start to finish the overall outcome the same. That's a big thing that we focus on here is we want all of our customers to experience the same level of service. Do we make mistakes every once in a while? Sure, absolutely everybody does.

14:45But I think that's the way you handle those mistakes and also the way you train keeps your technicians delivering that outcome from start to finish for every customer.

14:55Alex Bridgeman: so because if you have 20 trucks i assume we're at somewhere around 20 techs then too yeah that's and each are doing three to five jobs a day like that could be up to 100 jobs per day and you're making sure like there's some consistency in a process across all of them that's a constant challenge yeah yeah definitely you know if if you don't have systems and processes in place and everybody's doing things a little bit different, you're going to end up with a lot of different outcomes. So it's definitely important to train to a specific process and do it regularly. Because a lot of times, you know, our technicians go to an eight-week training program and, you know, we teach them everything from day one, but, you know, it's hard to retain everything in an eight-week training program, you know, when once you're three months or six months out of the training program and you're in the field.

15:50So it's important to really go back and we have weekly meetings with all of our technicians. And a lot of times we're highlighting a specific part of the process or a specific way we greet the customer, whatever it is.

16:06Alex Bridgeman: And then is this like weekly in the morning on a Monday or Tuesday? Yep. So we do Tuesdays and Thursdays every single week with all the technicians. Oh, so twice a week then? Yep. Wow. what's what's the structure of that meeting how long do you have it what are you what are the key topics you tend to cover yeah so typically it's 30 minutes and we typically will have a couple shout outs in there you know for great jobs on with this customer that customer we might highlight a couple reviews that came in five-star reviews that were awesome some some of the reviews we get are like three paragraphs and they're funny and they're great to read out loud in front of the in front of the group.

16:46And then so after the shout outs, typically there's a couple admin topics could be like, when's the next install availability? So the guys know if they run into a situation where, you know, a customer may be backed into the door and now we need to replace it. They know when the next available install is. And then from there, it goes to a main topic. And typically the rest of the time is spent on that main topic, whether that's a part of the sales process whether that's we recently just did how to ask the customer for a five-star review because if you don't ask they don't know so it's important that we ask yeah that's it there's a way

17:23Alex Bridgeman: to ask in a in a way that's not like you know pushy but just like hey by the way like this helps yep yeah absolutely makes a difference for us yep yeah what were the different stages before like we walked through your training facility which is fantastic yeah what did that look like before this space well before this space so we did have a very small training center at our previous location but i would say before we even had a training center what it looked like was hire a guy stick him in a truck with another guy until he says he's ready to go on his own yeah yeah yeah that's how it was and you know that's where we started and we've come a long way since pros and cons yeah yeah what are some maybe benefits of that consistent training that maybe seem less obvious but over time you're like oh that that i don't have to fix that problem anymore okay yeah i would say you know the biggest thing is just less upset customers you know you're going to end up with a lot more consistency of like, we pride ourselves on getting, you know, five stars on Google, Yelp, whatever it is.

18:38And you get that a lot more when you have a consistent training process from start to finish. You know, the other thing I think that is a big benefit is having these regular trainings and having these, you know, at first you start having meetings with guys that you weren't having before. And sometimes, you know, guys might say like, well, why are we having all these meetings but after a while like these guys want to see each other and like it starts creating like a better culture for everybody so i think that's like the the bigger thing that comes from it is like having these regular cadences having consistency having guys being able to you know joke and laugh in the same room and yeah it creates a great atmosphere yeah

19:17Alex Bridgeman: yeah you create friendships and there's a sense of you know your work affects each of these individuals around you. Yeah. It also creates a sense of pride, I think, in the technicians as well, because we're all here trying to get a little better every time we meet. And I think, you know, I know they know a lot of the companies don't do these types of things. So I think a little bit of pride goes along with it where they like, we're here to get better, you know, as a team and as a company. So how do you lay out a career track for a tech? So new, you know, Early career tech joins your team. They start looking at, you start setting them up for training.

20:01Alex Bridgeman: How do you talk through what a career at Rise and Shine looks like for them? Yeah. What the options are? Yeah. So if they're applying for an entry-level technician role, they're typically going to start off in training. And then when they graduate training, they'll go into being an apprentice tech. And so as they continue to progress, we have different KPIs that we track. and thresholds that the technicians have to reach in order to advance into another higher tier, essentially. So they would go from an apprentice technician to a junior to a senior, and then they get all the way up to a master technician would be the trajectory of the technician.

20:42And then from there, if they have interest in, you know, advancing their career past that, obviously there's office opportunities, whether that's management, things like that. We encourage anyone who's interested in maybe getting out of the field and getting into management, you know, we try to encourage like reading a few leadership books, trying to make sure they are coming, they have the right why for it. You know, because I think there's a lot of technicians who think maybe that getting out of the office or getting out of the field and going into the office is going to be easy. And I think it's, you know, not necessarily easy if you're not

21:19Alex Bridgeman: used to managing people yeah that makes sense yep what are some of the kind of guideposts or things you have to clear to move out what's an example of something a tech needs to master before moving to you know senior apprentice so that up from there yeah so i mean the big things would be like we track like oja which is opportunity job average and then we track like their recall rates we track, which is if they went to a job recently and then the customer called within 60 days because there's an issue and we have to go back. So we make sure that we're not getting a lot of those. Obviously, we want to make sure we limit that as much as possible.

22:03We also track customer satisfaction scores. So that's a big one on our KPI list. Like we have to be getting five-star reviews and then close rate. What's the percentage of close rate that they're doing? And then it's kind of just a career trajectory of, you know, we do have a like threshold that they have to reach in total sales to be able to advance to the next level while also maintaining these KPI thresholds to ensure that we're delivering the customer service experience that we're looking for. We're meeting all of our close rate standards and we're not causing a bunch of recalls and stuff like that.

22:39Gotcha.

22:40Alex Bridgeman: And then along the way, I imagine then that your base pay is moving up. How do you balance base commission? What do you like to do? And then how do you maybe translate that across as they move up in their skill set? Yeah, so their pay advances for each step. And I'm sorry, what was the second half of the question? Like if they base plus commission, then how does, what does a tech like pay look like as they move up? How does that change? Sure. so our technicians are all they all have a like a guaranteed base pay that they can't fall below and then we do what's called performance pay which a lot of other companies have you know developed over the years so essentially for instance like the apprentice tech is going to start at like 15 okay and as they advance they'll go up to 17 19 and then 21 as they advance through the scales.

23:38And so essentially, we'll pay the technician either their base hourly rate or their commission, whichever is more. Typically, the commission is more than the base day. Gotcha.

23:49Alex Bridgeman: Gotcha. And thinking about hiring a new tech and you have an alternative of someone with tons of experience, but you're not convinced on personality and customer service versus like someone who comes from awesome customer service background but knows nothing about doors how do you do you have a preference or i'll take the guy with the awesome customer service and no door experience yeah yeah because the it seems like from other owners like owners seem pretty comfortable training the yeah technical side yeah the technical side you know definitely can take a little bit to master, but the ability to communicate with customers is so important in our in our industry.

24:33I think it's what helps us maintain the level of customer service we deliver to our customers. We've definitely done it both ways. And we have some great guys who are in our on our team that have come from other companies. But we've also had hires that came from other companies where it's really hard to some people don't like change and it's sometimes hard to get them to buy into how we do things or our processes. And, you know, we're pretty organized. We like to track KPIs. And so, you know, that's not for everybody.

25:06Alex Bridgeman: Where do you tend to find that person with really good customer service? Is there a couple places you've found that are great for recruiting or meeting people or all over the place? So Facebook is a great way. You know, we have some hiring campaigns that we have out there. You know, we do a little bit on Indeed, but honestly, like some of the, you know, better ones we get are referrals from people who work here. And so those tend to be good ones. And yeah, I mean, we're pretty, I don't want to say picky, but we like to be very detailed and make sure the person we're interviewing has a full understanding of like who we are as a company, you know, what the training process looks like.

25:54We give them the first step that we do when applicant comes in here, we give them the full tour like I gave you. So we show them everything, show them the training center, and then we sit down for an interview. And then from the interview process, we like that applicant, typically we'll schedule a ride-along interview where that person is going to come in and go on a ride along with one of our technicians for one job and kind of get an idea of what we do, interact with that technician, see the job firsthand because we don't want any surprises that, you know, obviously with garage doors, you have a little bit of heavy lifting.

26:31You have to work with tools. So you want to make sure they're comfortable with what that looks like. And yeah, that's, that's our hiring process.

26:39Alex Bridgeman: How have you built out your leadership team over time you're obviously not answering the phone anymore you have multiple locations now what were the kind of key hires along the way and then you know what did those look like yeah so going back several years when it was just josh and myself in the office and this kind of goes back to well we did have csrs as well but when we went to tommy mellow's event one of the first thing as we did when we got back was we decided, you know, we needed to pull Kyle, who's our director of operations now. He was originally, when we hired him, he was a technician.

27:20He had management experience and we brought him out of the, out of the field and into the office. And that was a really big move for us back then and really helped free Josh and I up to start focusing on how can we continue to grow the business rather than work necessarily on all the day to day stuff.

27:41Alex Bridgeman: And how did it grow from there? Well, that was around the same time that we rebranded and started documenting processes and started training and stuff like that. So, you know, I, I want to say we were right around the$3 million area. And now we're going to be over eight figures. And so like, what's the leadership team look like today? Sure. So right now it's myself and my business partner, Josh. Kyle's our director of operations. And then we have our three service managers out there who oversee all of our technicians. And then we have a lead CSR who kind of handles all of our CSRs and doing their trainings and stuff like that.

28:28Alex Bridgeman: And you guys take care of finance, HR, those things? Correct. Yeah. Any outsourced resources there? Yeah, so we have a fractional CMO and a fractional CFO. So, nice. Yeah. That's a big upgrade. Yep. Yeah, comfortable. No CFO to one or even half a CFO. Yep. It's pretty great. I'm always curious about that because the CFO and CMO, those are huge areas to focus on. But I'm also just curious when companies and owners tend to take on a full-time person in those roles. Yeah. What does it look like? I'd say we're getting pretty close to bringing on like a marketing manager or something like that. Right now, I oversee all the marketing.

29:17But yeah, I hired a company as our CMO and they help us with all the planning, the budgeting, what avenues we're going to go down for marketing. And obviously, I approve everything still. But yeah, they've been very helpful.

29:33Alex Bridgeman: Well, I mean, talk about how marketing strategies evolved. over time. Certainly the rebounding was a big one. Yeah, I mean, obviously, the rebrand was a big one. Like I said, back in back in the beginning, like the only thing we were doing was, you know, word of mouth, networking, and getting reviews on social media, we weren't doing any like paid advertising for a long time. To where it's evolved. Now we do just about everything we do, you know, Google pay per click, Google LSA, we have several different Google business profiles, building up our reputation. And we do radio, TV, billboards, and direct mail, and everything.

30:12You know, paid social is a big one that we do now. And the OTT ads that, you know, follow you around if you've been on our website. So. Any surprise performers? Direct mail has actually performed pretty well. You know, it's an older school form of marketing, but it still works if done correctly.

30:32Alex Bridgeman: I brought you the handbook last time. I'm a big fan of physical paper. You have to hold it, look at it, and it's not as easily just swiped and deleted. There's something to look at. Do you send it to just broad neighborhoods or in and around? Do you have a specific one in and around jobs you did recently? Yeah, so we've done both. The better performing one that we've seen so far has been when we're in a neighborhood and we just did some work there, we have a software that links to our CRM that's able to grab that job information. And then it'll send out mailers essentially to that entire neighborhood with specific offers, just saying something simple like, hey, we were just in the neighborhood and we fixed your neighbor's garage door spring.

31:17While we're in the neighborhood, we're gonna, you know, here's three offers for you. And then we have three various offers on the mail form.

31:24Alex Bridgeman: Is it super specific? Like we fixed the spring or the door? Yeah, so we have ones that are like, we just repaired your neighbor's garage door and we have ones that we just replaced your neighbor's garage door. So it's specific to either repair or replace. I wonder if the replaced garage door, because that would visually be obvious. Yeah, so that's the one thing we love about it is on a replacement job, you have the initial consult where our vehicles out center in front of the house. And then from there, you're going to have the installation, which is a separate appointment. And you're going to have at least one of our vehicles there for the installation.

31:58our technician is then going to put a yard sign in the yard and then the neighborhood is going to get

32:02Alex Bridgeman: dropped with mailers how do you track mailers like if someone from like it must be difficult because they could see the mailer and then google you yeah absolutely so that's a great great reason why we have our cmo our fractional cmo cmo company they do all the reverse lookup attributions so they're able to they get the mail list and they're able to search the mail list and in our crm based off when the the mail drop hit and then they are able to add that revenue back yeah so they could tie like this home received a mailer tuesday they googled us that afternoon yep there we go okay yep that makes a lot of sense some of them do call the number on the mailer as well which makes a lot easier because that call number is tracked.

32:51Is it a specific

32:52Alex Bridgeman: number for each type of mailer? Like the repair or replace? Yeah. That would be really fun to study all that data and make sure or see what's going on. Yeah. It's pretty cool when it comes in and you can see your advertising efforts work and we did the last match back they did we were at like a 7.8 roll as on that campaign. Pretty solid. Yeah, that's pretty good. Yeah. Yeah, I'll do that. Yeah. Did the podcast you guys had, did you try that or were you able to track versions there? No. No. No, we only, I mean, we had the podcast for a little bit and I don't know, maybe we'll bring it back someday.

33:34Alex Bridgeman: Yeah. I'd like the billboard one would be hard to track. Billboards are hard to track, but what's not hard to track is when you go out to eat and the server says like, she saw, one of our servers saw my logo and she's like, you're the guys that have all the billboards. And I was like, yep, that's us. So anyways, she got a big tip to say. Anecdotal. But I think it's, you know, I'm a big believer in the law of seven. So like, you know, I think it takes seven times for someone to see your brand, for them to become familiar with it. And when it comes to the billboards or the TV and the radio and the social media ads you know the biggest thing i want to get out of that is when they end up going to google and they search garage repair and they're scrolling about who they're gonna pick but they see that rooster that they've seen before and it's familiar there's a higher chance they're gonna click on us than the competitors absolutely yeah and they're if they've seen your trucks yep driving by all the time especially you have 20 of them to miss yep that definitely had some familiarity.

34:39Alex Bridgeman: Have you tried podcast ads, like local podcast ads? We're looking at potentially doing like Spotify. Because they have, I've noticed that if I, certain shows will have dynamic insertion. So based on where your phone is downloading the episode from, it will like use your location to pull like any ad, like advertising spend that's been happening for people in that area. And so I'll get like a local ad for some city I'm passing through. Or if I'm on a layover downloading an episode, I'll get something for Minneapolis. Oh, I guess that makes sense. You know? Yeah. We haven't tried it yet, but it's something that we've talked about.

35:26Do they tell you what shows you could do? They don't necessarily, my understanding is they don't specifically tell you what shows you're going to be targeting, but you're able to target specific zip codes, which is the bigger thing. Like you're able, so you can look at like whatever, maybe your top 10 performing zip codes. And if those are the zip codes you want to target, that's where you'll show up.

35:48Alex Bridgeman: And then how do they track that? Is there a good way to track it? Track the Spotify ad or the top? Yeah, I listened to a Spotify ad with Rise and Shine. Yeah, I don't know exactly how they track it, but they did say you can actually track the performance of like, the raw ass from it. I'm not sure exactly. That'll be fascinating as a podcaster. I'm just curious. That sounds pretty interesting. Are you the one doing the voiceover for the podcast ads? No, I'm not. No. I do enough of our social media ads. Maybe someday I'll do a radio ad, but I haven't done one yet. Yeah. Alright, gotcha. So you're going to try podcasting soon.

36:30Alex Bridgeman: Podcast ads through Spotify. What else are you excited or curious to try? From a marketing standpoint? Yeah. Well, one of them, I actually just did a demo today, was a company called Ride the Wave, which is essentially a company that will help you show up more in Facebook groups. So like neighborhood groups, moms groups, or just collective groups that are on Facebook. they'll identify what groups would be best to suit your business and then they create content and then they'll post, not spammy posts, but like they'll engage in the group and then help you post some different content in there to help you rank and get more customers.

37:16So that interests me.

37:18Alex Bridgeman: That'll be pretty unique. What other random guerrilla marketing tactics? You seem to try most of them. Yeah, we do. We also do trade shows, which is a big one for us. So just like local trade shows are just one day. It's usually like six hours. And pretty much every, you know, there's 100 vendors or 150 vendors in the trade show. One thing that's worked really well for us is we want customers to experience our level of service. So while we're at these trade shows, one of the offers we have is a complimentary tune-up. So if you're at the trade show, we'll give you a complimentary tune-up. and then we send the tech out and we book on average in a six hour trade show we'll book 20 to 30 appointments.

38:06It's one way to get your name out there, treat customers to a five star experience and hopefully get a review at the end of it.

38:14Alex Bridgeman: Have you sponsored auto shows? We have sponsored a few car shows yes. Do they work or is it kind of a fixed conversion? I didn't really it was hard to track that yeah here also curious just how many other vendors an auto show would let like have a booth of some kind if you wanted to show some of the products and like making off make offers to people coming by probably need some sort of space yep but they may or may not be interested in using right or something that's not a car yeah i think the one thing that i believe like some of those high-end car enthusiasts would like is you know the high lift the high lift garage doors and we've done several of them where customers have like a car lift in the garage so they need the door to go up and over the car lift which is pretty cool we've done a few of those those are cool jobs yeah yeah what are you most excited to see happen the second half of this year i'm excited to see our team continue to grow we have at least one more hiring class that we're going to do this year how big is the class depends on our needs but this next one we're looking at probably about five technicians so that should be pretty exciting yeah that'll be great yeah and one of the other things that i'm really excited for is we're bringing in a trainer who's going to be elevated from within most likely we're interviewing applicants right now from within for this trainer role and we're going to be hiring that soon so it's like full-time training yeah because currently my business partner josh does all the training but to free him up a little bit for him to focus on a couple of other areas in the business we're going to hire a full-time trainer and that's going to be their sole focus that'd be exciting yeah it's super exciting i love it well thanks for coming on the podcast yeah it's been fun yeah absolutely thanks for showing me around yeah this is sweet thanks for having me on man i really appreciate it absolutely

40:23Alex Bridgeman: Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's episode of Think Like an Owner. If you enjoyed the show, please consider leaving us a review and telling a friend to help more folks find Think Like an Owner. For full episode transcripts in our weekly newsletter, please visit our website at tlaopodcast.com.