Andy Felice on Garage Door Marketing for Ambitious Owners - EP.282

0:00Andy Felice: Repair, it's inelastic is what it is. You need it. It's like insulin. You have to have it. And then replacements, that's a whole different ballgame. A lot of it is the lady of the household is usually driving the purchase decision. And it's very much aesthetic. It's very much, you know, I want to flex on my sister-in-law coming over for Thanksgiving dinner. That's the example I like to use to show that it's more of an aesthetic type of purchase. but if you don't understand that and you're a marketing agency that works with all home services you're going to waste a lot of people's money learning that the hard way that there's a humongous difference between all these things and you need to be marketing to them and the language that you're using needs to be different for both of them

0:51Alex Bridgeman: so trace back from where you are now maybe a couple years ago how did you get to this point How'd you get to decide to focus on marketing for GarageDoor?

1:02Andy Felice: Yeah, I can't even tell you how many times I get asked this question, especially at like family events when people are like, my aunt would be like, you do what? Like for who? Is there enough clients out there for you?

1:13Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, and you got to see it again the next time too.

1:14Andy Felice: Yeah, 100%. Yeah, man. So I quit my job in 2018. I had no clients. I started knocking on doors the old-fashioned way. I almost became a financial advisor at Edward Jones. And at Edward Jones, they teach you how to knock on doors. So I knew I didn't want to do that for a living, but it gave me a good skill. So that's how I got started. I started driving for Lyft at night and knocking on doors during the day. And my company is called Felici Marketing. It's 2018. you know only did that for a couple months until i started to get better at networking and presenting myself and communicating my offer and things like that and long story short you know to make this kind of quick i i would get pulled into consulting opportunities i was like 24 25 26 i mean i was a young young man and just getting started and people would recognize okay andy is he's you know There's some opportunity here and they would offer me positions and such.

2:14Andy Felice: And I would say, no, thank you. I enjoy working for myself. I've got the curse of entrepreneurship. It's in my heart. It's in my blood. It's in my family. It's in my DNA. It's just how it is. And so I'd get pulled in these consulting opportunities. And a lot of them were much bigger companies than what I would normally work with marketing-wise at the time. And just one of those opportunities, my first garage door company ever, was this little company called A1 Garage Doors. owned by Tommy Mello. And I did a six-month consulting engagement there doing, for sake of time, process optimization. So mapping on paper and then making the software match the process.

2:53Andy Felice: And that was how I learned the garage door industry. After that, I mentioned it a couple of times to a couple of people. And they'd say, oh my gosh, what's Tommy Mello like? And I'm like, Tommy, A1 Tommy? Is that who you're talking about? Like the guy I went to dinner with last night? Like, you know, just he's super cool, dude. He's awesome. They're like, no, he's like the God of the industry. And it honestly, man, I didn't understand the gravity of my experience of what I got to do my opportunity, I should call it until after the fact. And then I started mentioning that and it's like, wow, okay, I've learned more about garage doors than I realized and started applying it aggressively and intentionally.

3:35And here we are.

3:37Andy Felice: Garage Store Marketing Lab is our sole brand now. We used to be called Felici Marketing. Now it's Garage Store Marketing Lab. And yeah, we haven't turned back since. We turn away all other business that is not a garage store company. Nice.

3:50Alex Bridgeman: I have a cousin who's a, he does some web design work and has designed most of my websites, actually. We were having this conversation maybe six months ago. And he's thinking about kind of what industries, if any, should he specialize in? Because at this point, it's been pretty broad. I'm like, I'll design website and branding for lots of different industries and types of companies. but he said you know there's there's probably a benefit to being focused and focusing on one niche or one type of business and we were like yeah so we're like running down the list of like what do you need in an industry if you're going to focus on it like one you need lots of companies in that industry so you have a lot of business to go after you need like ongoing marketing spend like there has to be a reason you're spending every month on your product or service and then has to be like high enough margin that they're kind of willing to spend more or like do more business with you over time it's not some declining industry that's you know generally gonna be steady or declining and you have to enjoy it you have to like have a good time like working in that industry and talking to those people and so you like you start kind of going down the check boxes and it seems like garage doors like fits that although yours was more of like from what it sounds like just a really good opportunity was one client that was like oh okay this actually makes a lot of sense and there's enough here to specialize in it.

5:11Alex Bridgeman: But did you think through some of the like, okay, if I'm going to specialize in this industry and garage doors, is this a good fit for something that I would specialize in or should I look at other areas? Like, how did you kind of think through that? No, I fell just right back into it.

5:25Andy Felice: You know, I was not going out looking for it completely. Just, you know, the universe, God, luck, whatever you would like to call it. That's what it was. I was not trying to create Garage Door Marketing Lab. It kind of just started getting built on its own.

5:42Alex Bridgeman: Nice. So then how does that compare to your first couple clients? What industries were your first clients in?

5:49Andy Felice: I've worked with probably north of 300 different clients, most of them not in Garage Doors. It was a few years of just running Felici Marketing, we thrived in home services. So I've worked with almost any kind of home service company you can imagine, except for like two or three. And then a lot of like health services or soft health services. So like massage therapy, acupuncture, chiropractic, things like that, that have more of a recurring kind of model, not just going to the doctor when you have a sinus infection type of thing. So yeah, we were all over the place. And the challenge with that is you have to learn a whole new business model every single time a whole new you know what's the purchase cycle what's the personas what's the buying psychology you know of a pair versus a replacement to very different mindsets for you know going for looking for one of those products or services and you have to relearn that and honestly at the time you know I had a lot of energy I enjoyed the heck out of it like making the automations and such for every single different industry I really enjoyed it a lot got to learn a bunch I get bored if I'm not stimulated pretty fast so that was like a nice way to keep me you know keep me engaged keep me stimulated so yeah man just attorneys I mean I've worked with quite a few different industries over the years.

7:22Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, it feels almost counterintuitive to say, I'm going to ignore 299 industries and only focus on one. Like, well, wouldn't your universe of clients like shrink and be super small? But the counterintuitive piece is like when you get really good at that industry, you become known in that industry as the go-to person. And that changes the whole like sales cycle for you.

7:46Andy Felice: So I would come at it at a different perspective. Well, what you're saying is valid. I think what's higher priority or more relevant would be that if you work with one type of industry, you can learn the operations of the business and you can learn the best practices of the business and those little tiny things that can get a deal over the finish line. you pick up enough of those crumbs along your journey of learning, then you can really help a, for me, a garage door company, you know, get that next truck on the road, send their kid to college, you know, hit that 20, 28 % profit margin that you've been eyeing for a couple of years, you know, stuff like that.

8:32Andy Felice: You pick that up as a marketing person, you know, and honestly, we're great at marketing. We are amazing. And we got it dialed in, but it's almost boring now. Like we've got it pretty, we got it in a good spot. I want more. I want more information. I want more knowledge. I want to learn how these businesses run internally. Because if I can make the operation, I mean, every business is just finance operations and marketing. If I can learn the other two things, then I can make it all work synergistically and just really create something cool. Yeah.

9:04Alex Bridgeman: And what would make the most sense to add on to that? A little cart before the horse in some ways, but like the, what's the other? tack-on service to kind of go after one of the other two.

9:15Andy Felice: So I'm not talking about it from like adding on services kind of perspective. I'm talking about the more knowledge, the more information that I can gather about a garage door company and how it operates, and I can fine-tune everything that I'm touching to accommodate what is reality already instead of adding on additional things. Now, we are adding on additional things. You're thinking forward. I'm thinking forward. That's where this conversation, I think, will probably go. But yeah, that's what I meant. But to answer your question now, the next level of this, marketing is awesome. Generating leads is great.

9:55Andy Felice: Repair jobs, hardware rebuild jobs, awesome. Replacements, awesome. The next level is how do we get our technology to work for us twice as good as it does currently? Whether that's, oh, we're using Service Titan or Housecall Pro and we don't have good, better, best hardware rebuild packages built out for the five most common size garage doors or the five most common spring sizes. Why not? I just haven't gotten around to it. okay, well, would it help if me and my team hopped in there and got that whipped up for you? And we can talk about the price or you tell us what's included, whatever. Yeah, okay, Andy, that sounds good.

10:40Andy Felice: And so then we're able to do this consulting on their CRM. And that's a huge value. And that does very clearly connect back to marketing, attribution, all that kind of stuff, getting dynamic number insertion set up and all those kind of extra nerdy things that are kind of boring to talk about maybe. But we love it. You know, that's our thing. We're getting D &I dialed in for one of our clients when service Titan this morning. So yeah, I think the direction for me and my business, marketing always. We're Garage Door Marketing Lab. That's the name of our company. It's always going to be that name.

11:18Andy Felice: But we are becoming a proper consulting shop. And that's more of my background. We're like, deploy in to proper discovery analysis of all the data sources, what's talking to each other, what's not. Then we make our sprints, you know, what's the highest priority. It's going to give us the most value. So we're not just building forever. And then let's get after it. So I think that's the direction of everything. I think that has to be the direction of every marketing agency. And if they're not, you know, super techie and able to do that, I think they'll just get bought up by everybody else.

11:50Alex Bridgeman: yeah well i mean to the point of you know some other owners who are more ambitious have kind of related to us as you know marketing is like as you're saying like it's interacting with operations like your your marketing is only as good as you can handle leads and service leads and get techs out quickly and then there's sales training there's all these components that interact with marketing that can determine the success of your marketing too that you want to to make sure are dialed in as well.

12:20Andy Felice: Oh, absolutely. You're spot on. And if you don't mind, I'll just elaborate a little bit on that. So something we started doing with all of our clients of a certain level, we, I shouldn't say we, I do a 90 minute sales training with all of our clients. So recently I had 28 technicians all on a Zoom call. Some of them are out in the field, some of them are in the office, most of them are out in the field. The owner's in there, the head of sales is in there. And I've got, I know the process of how to sell a job, how a technician should arrive, whether it's a repair job, replacement job, whatever.

12:56Andy Felice: And to the point where they're leaving, you know, shaking hands firmly, asking for a referral and then, you know, taking off. And so we do a whole 90 minute interactive training. And the reason for this was purely, it was self-interest. Like, let's be honest, like, come on, I'm a marketing agency. I get leads for people. I look much better when my clients close more deals. But we just tee it up. We're not smacking it out of the park. We're not grabbing that driver and hitting it for them. We're just putting it right there on the tee. So if I can teach them how to sell better, then it makes my data look better.

13:37Andy Felice: It's purely self-interest. That's what we can call it. It helps our clients a lot. They really enjoy it so far. everyone that we've done, like we've done like 10 or 12 so far, they've been amazing. They've been, they've been so grateful for it. They've been, one time I had a guy got off the phone and he's like, Hey, I'm not, I'm not a call right now, but I'm going to try that thing you're talking about, Andy. Like I'm gonna let you know, man. I'm like, all right, dude, like, let me know. Like, tell me how it goes. Gets off 25 minutes later, it gets back on. He's like, Hey, I just got back to my truck.

14:07Andy Felice: Like I see him joining the zoom meeting again. I just got back. Andy, that thing, that thing that you mentioned, the way you articulated that it worked. Like I just sold this job is 1300. And the goal is like 1000 bucks for average repair ticket, you know, he just went 300 bucks over it. So that's rewarding. That feels really good. Because when it makes the business owner, you know, who's our decision maker, you know, signing our proposal, keeping us, you know, as recurring, you know, continuing our engagement. But also like the technician, they've got families, if they're able to make more and do better, because everyone's on performance pay.

14:42Andy Felice: I mean, everyone should be on performance pay. I'm sure there's garage door companies out there that aren't. But it makes a difference. You know, the lifestyle you're able to live, what you're able to give your family, your kids. And that's, that feels really good. That makes you feel warm and fuzzy.

14:57Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, no kidding. What parts of like garage door marketing and maybe looping like sales training into that, like, what do you get most excited about? And what are the like rabbit holes that you've gone, you feel like you've gone deepest on?

15:11Andy Felice: I would say, there's a lot of rabbit holes of like wild things in this industry that I never thought I would learn about. Not all of them are appropriate for podcasts. So I'll keep it to some of the more, you know, high, highly leverageable, you know, type of information. But really, I think for me what's been most what I've been able to give the most to the industry or to my clients has been understanding the psychology aspect between a repair and a replacement because repair, you need it now. You've got a situation and the garage can be holding up your lifestyle. It can be preventing what you want to do.

15:58Andy Felice: Either taking your kids to school, going to work, you know, whatever. A car can be stuck in there.

16:06Alex Bridgeman: My grandparents, like when I was a kid, their garage door was broken and their motorcycle was stolen out of it. Oh. And it was like a, not like a Harley, but it was like a dirt bike, like Central Oregon kind of, you know, old Honda. That's the store I usually use. I'm talking to owners like there's, you know, stuff like that happens. People want their garage door closed.

16:28Andy Felice: Exactly. That's a great example. So repair, it's inelastic is what it is. You need it. It's like insulin. You have to have it. And then replacements, that's a whole different ballgame. A lot of it is the lady of the household is usually driving the purchase decision. And it's very much aesthetic. It's very much, you know, I want to flex on my sister-in-law coming over for Thanksgiving dinner. That's the example I like to use to show that it's more of an aesthetic type of purchase. but if you don't understand that and you're a marketing agency that works with all home services you're going to waste a lot of people's money learning that the hard way that there's a humongous difference between all these things and you need to be marketing to them and the language that you're using needs to be different for both of them

17:20Alex Bridgeman: Totally agree and because the sales training piece drives so much what principles do you try to hammer down with techs, let's say, as a way of framing sales training. There's a lot of no sales training happen. There's a lot of bad sales training happening. There's a sales scene usually as a dirty word. How do you kind of come at a tech who maybe has a mixture of hearing all those different things and say, here's what the ideal looks like. Here's how we think about sales training.

17:53Andy Felice: Yes. So that was a question I came to because I considered designing my own. And the conclusion that I came to, we're Garage Door Freedom official vendors. So what we do is we just, we use Tommy's eight-step sales process, which is on page 112 of the Home Service Millionaire book, his first book. There's two books that I think every garage door company should rate. It's that one first and then Elevate second. But we just use that. And because a lot of our clients are in Garage Door Freedom already, we found that it helps when you're just immersed in a community where everyone's kind of drinking the same thing.

18:32Andy Felice: You know, everyone's kind of on the same page of how things are done. And I mean, I'd say 90 % of the industry that has an intentional sales process is already just using Tommy's sales process to begin with. That's what I've found.

18:45Alex Bridgeman: What book do you feel like is missing from the home service garage door world that five years from now you'd write?

18:53Andy Felice: it's pretty funny that you asked that question because i have a printout with the answer on it so here's something we send to all of our clients suggested reading so you've got the home service millionaire at the top elevate on the bottom and then this book right here is multipliers by Liz Wiseman. And this was the book I've done a lot of, I went through a phase a few years, I've read a lot of different books, mostly like career oriented. And this one had the biggest impact on me. Because if you can teach somebody to be a leader, teach someone to be a multiplier, and they have a team of five technicians, let's say, and they're really good at teaching other people how to, you know, do more, then you can get 20x out of a team of five versus having a non-multiplier leader, you know, in place instead.

19:57Andy Felice: That concept has really stuck with me. So I would say reading Multipliers by Liz Wiseman for sure.

20:03Alex Bridgeman: Nice. Can you send me a picture of that?

20:05Andy Felice: I sure can.

20:06Alex Bridgeman: That'd be great.

20:06Andy Felice: I'll get your address after this. I'll do you one better. I'll send you a little something.

20:10Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, let me, I have a, I have something to send you to. There's a book I was writing with a small team operator's handbook. It's like a print magazine for small business owners. I don't think I sent you one. It's a, it kind of ties in with the podcast. It was like a heavy print or it was meant to be kind of like a coffee table kind of thing. But there's a, you know, there's room for more print content in small business. But I love the idea of like, I think that also distinguishes you as a company to customers. I care about your business more than just its marketing. I care about you as a business owner building a growing, high-performing business.

20:50Alex Bridgeman: Here's some recommendations. I think positioning yourself as a broader consultant with marketing as a specialty, that seems smart. That seems like a nice way to distinguish yourself.

21:02Andy Felice: Yeah. And honestly, it keeps things more interesting for me. It really keeps my brain stimulated. and it's just more exciting when we can have conversations about the business and not just these nerdy metrics about the marketing. Like, yeah, those things are necessary. They're a requirement. Every garage door company needs to be doing a certain number of marketing services, in my opinion. I can say that with a lot of confidence. But after you dial it in, we're working together for, we got everything kind of in a good spot. It's like, all right, now let's not take our foot off the gas. Do you have SOPs?

21:37Andy Felice: No? Okay, why not? Do you have your pricing dialed in to where you're not having to explain a whole list of items in front of a customer and explain to them what, you know, this drum is better than that drum and they don't care at all. They want you to get the heck out of their house. It's weird, you know? Like, that's the reality of things. But I think for, especially for garage door guys in particular, of any other service-based kind of business owners I've worked with over the years, they kind of take themselves for granted almost. us where it's like, hey, you have a PhD in garage doors and like that, that's worth something.

22:12Andy Felice: People don't just have that information. I thought that the garage door got opened by the motor, you know, like that's, and I bet you a lot of people thought that too. And I'd say I'm probably a little more tech, like savvy, you know, than the average person perhaps. So I think it's, it's important that, you know, we can kind of remind those kinds of things to the clients and talk about the operations in a way that's just like, you know, we're seeing reality clearly. Let's make operations kind of accommodate for that reality.

22:42Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, I completely agree. What concept do you feel like is, as you think of like the pool of garage door, maybe even just like home service owners broadly that you've talked to, what concepts do you find take maybe the longest to fully absorb and incorporate in someone's business or life or whatnot?

23:04Andy Felice: I would say for the garage door industry in particular, the hardest pill to swallow for, I mean, I've had this conversation at least eight times, seriously. And the summation of the conversation is if you don't change the way you do business, you're going to feel good at night, you're going to sleep well at night, and you're going to be bankrupt in the morning. Because the way that a garage door business ran 12 years ago, 15 years ago, and the cost per lead on Google and the average repair ticket that could actually get you a profit of 15%, which is still low. If you do that same thing today, you will go bankrupt.

23:49Andy Felice: I would bet every single dollar that I own on it because I've seen it happen too many times. And the reality is that, and this is normal. I'm not saying I have an opinion one way or another on this. This is just the reality. Private equity comes into the industry, spends a lot of money, which is awesome. Rising tide raises all ships. But there are externalities that come with that, like the increasing price of leads. Every single year, lead prices, they go in one direction in the garage door industry. They're not going down. They're just not. And we have to pivot. We can't just keep doing things the same way.

24:29Andy Felice: You have to be selling the hardware overhaul, the rebuild kit, whatever. It's like East Coast, West Coast lingo, whatever you call it. You have to be selling that, good, better, best. And your average ticket needs to be north of$1 ,000, including tune-in lube leads. Not everyone knows what those are. We do a lot of tune-in lube leads. Our clients crush it with proper coaching on those, but including those, it needs to be north of$1 ,000. Ideally, it's north of$1 ,300. That's the hardest thing for some guys to swallow. And I was talking to a guy last week. He's had his business for 40 years, and we were on the phone for an hour.

25:10Andy Felice: He wasn't even a client of mine, but he's probably become a client pretty soon. But he's like, Andy, I've known this in my heart for a long time, but I haven't been able to stomach it. And to hear you articulate it, it's like, it feels like I can see it now. Like I kind of get it now. But I've been watching this happen for so long. And it's like when you're so close to the fire, I don't blame you for not, you know, you've got a lot of things going on. You got a business to run. You got people to take care of. You got clients to take care of. You know, no problem. I'll bring this stuff up and have that hard conversation.

25:49Alex Bridgeman: How do you think that changes geography-wise in different markets? Like, obviously, I would assume leads go up pretty much everywhere, but a lead in, you know, Phoenix is probably going to be more expensive than a lead in, you know, Spokane, Washington, or Billings, or somewhere like that. Like, how do you, where does the region come into play, And does that adjust how you approach marketing or sales training or maybe not at all?

26:17Andy Felice: It definitely has an impact without a doubt. Every market is different. Everything's a competition. It's an auction system. It's not just like static everywhere. And really, so we're talking about ads. We're not talking about SEO. We're very specifically talking about generating leads through ad channels, PPC, meta ads. etc. LSA, whatever. Yeah, if there's 25 garage door companies in one market all spending$85 ,000 per month, then yeah, that market is going to just be, it's probably going to be north of 200 bucks per lead or something crazy. You know what I mean? But you go somewhere else, let's say Podunk Town in Mississippi, where there's no precision, there's no R &S, there's no access, none of those guys.

27:06Andy Felice: then yeah, we can generate$6 tune-in lube leads. And those are real metrics that we're really attaining in real time right now. So yeah, it just totally varies. And for the sales training part, in my sales training, there's no augmentation of things for something like that. Because what I'm talking about is really, it's the, we're just getting, we're just dipping our toes into sales training. I think sales training needs to happen every week. It's not something you do once a year with your marketing agency. So it's for a real sales trainer, you know, that's doing something every single week. I think that should really be dived into really deep and really consistently.

27:52Andy Felice: Does that answer your question?

27:53Alex Bridgeman: Yeah. So, I mean, it sounds like if you're me and you're looking at, you know, building a handful of good garage door brands through buy and build across primarily West Coast, but hopefully nationally, it sounds like there's maybe an opportunity in smaller, like secondary and tertiary markets to kind of build the one-stop shop or the group that can own most of the small market versus compete in larger markets. Do you approach clients in each one maybe a little bit differently? Like if you have a client in like Bend, Oregon versus Phoenix or Dallas, maybe in thinking about my perspective of like trying to build companies how does that change how does it change for you saying yeah approaching like if you were my if if i was a client of yours like in smaller markets what are some things that you would do differently with me it depends

28:52Andy Felice: i think a big thing so like something we really like to do is be strategic with our money on a month to month basis. So, you know, we've got PPC, we've got meta ads. If you're over staffed, you want to shift your budget towards PPC because those are more expensive leads, but they're much higher, you know, converting and much higher average ticket than meta ads. So meta ads is where you get the$49 tuning lubes and replacement leads. In a smaller market, I guess you could just, you can be a lot more, you know, pick and choose which one you want to do. and have like a more closely similar like lead cost.

29:33Andy Felice: I think it's just really at the end of the day, it just makes you, it allows you to breathe better when you're in one of those smaller markets that, you know, the big brands are in. It's kind of like you're in a more normal kind of environment, like not all these externalities going into the marketplace that are debatable of how natural they are or unnatural. So yeah, I think you just have a little bit more ability to breathe. And the other thing is not every single small market is going to be stoked to have an outsider come in and join the community. So some of our clients that are going gangbusters with our marketing, I have to give them some credit too, because they've been around, they grew up in a small town, they went to the elementary school, the middle school, the high school there, you know, and their grandma's always at the public library down the street.

30:25Andy Felice: you know so they they do have this kind of a little bit of some roots in there that there's there's there's credibility there there's something to be said for that but on paper yeah i mean it just it let you breathe a little bit better i guess is my answer

30:39Alex Bridgeman: to that does it matter if you have ford mavericks versus like vans branding wise like does that matter is there data behind that or is it more like having any branding at all just like makes so much difference then there's no reason to fine tune and pick you know nitpick or like understanding like a shitty marketing plan and like being able like diagnose like what are the three things I should look at to understand like what's the rough like weighted score of like how well this company is doing like

31:09Andy Felice: let me just give you Alex some real suggestions and maybe these are things you know already but what I would do like evaluating a deal to see if this is a company worthy of you know getting acquired and at what multiple. I would get heat map reports for their Google business profile or profiles, depending on how many they have, for garage door repair near me and garage door replacement near me. Have to get both of those. Run the reports at the same time so your variables are all held constant, you know, ceteris paribus. That'd be the first thing I'd do. Second thing is just see how long the domain has been alive.

31:50Andy Felice: Is this website brand new? Is this a brand new fresh domain that they just rebranded to because they wanted to put lipstick on the business? Or has it been around forever and it's this junky HTML website from the 90s or early 2000s that they've just left, but it has a ton of domain authority? You got to look at things like that. And how many times have they changed locations? How many times have they changed domains? stuff like that. Very important phone numbers. That's the biggest one. I mean, I looked at buying a garage door company and I nearly bought a small garage door company two years ago.

32:27Andy Felice: My cousin was going to be the technician. I was going to run the business. He decided to become a firefighter instead. So I totally support, obviously. It's super exciting. But what I was interested in with this gentleman, I was calling on. He's like, oh, I'm going to sell my business and he was telling me the numbers and i was asking him about his books and you know what's this look like and i was like i'm really sorry to say this but you don't have anything to sell like you're you don't have a business to sell unfortunately you just didn't design it well enough you just you just didn't it's so you don't have anything here you'll get maybe five grand for your website and your your phone number and that's what someone's gonna buy you know so So if you can find a good website, a good phone number, it's been around, been consistent for a long time, and they are using LSA, they've got LSA working, and it's providing, because not every LSA account just gives leads.

33:23Andy Felice: Some of them just doesn't work. It's like, what the heck's going on? And there's only so many things you can do to shake that snow globe to get it to work. So I'd say the website, the phone number, the LSA account, health status, and their database. Their database. Do they get emails? A lot of people only get first name and phone number. Why? What are you doing? Get their full address. Get their email address. Let's be professionals here. Because there's a lot of remarketing, database reactivation. These are things that we do that there's a lot of juice to be squeezed there.

34:05Alex Bridgeman: yeah maybe even just diving into that for a few minutes like what's okay you've done the the 1300 service ticket a couple months ago by maybe maybe longer like what are the things like a well-run marketing like engine should be doing once a customer's already purchased from you they've

34:26Andy Felice: got an upgrade from you what happens then well they should be getting you you'll probably be this might interest you. You should be getting all of your clients on an annual maintenance program. It should be priced at at least 250 bucks a year. Give them discount. Give them a free tuning lube every year. Wash their garage door. Put a ceramic coating on it maybe. These are products I have on my website branded with my brand on it that I thought I was going to sell to all my clients. But, you know, it's not working that way. But it's a great idea still. I know it. and my clients really love it when I talk to them about it.

35:07Andy Felice: And the big obvious thing of this and the reason why I tell my clients to do it is if you get 100 customers paying you 250 bucks a year, what's it going to do to the multiple? It's going to make it increase. And everyone knows that's the game right now. So that's a big thing that they should be doing. Let's say they don't get them on there. No problem. What we do, and this is included in a lot of our programs, not all of them. And I custom architected this myself. Don't ask me how long it took. But we have a database reactivation program system, I should say. And the way it works is I tell my client, give me every contact that you've gotten that you haven't touched in the last 11 months.

36:00Andy Felice: 11 months because I want 30 days head start so I can get my client trained up on this. But the way it works, the way database reactivation works is you take the list, we upload it into my system, and then we trickle out emails during scheduled times. So let's say the customer service we're at the CSR, Susanna, she's only available. Andy, I'm busy. I'm a busy lady. I got a lot of stuff going on. I can't be doing this all the time. I can do maybe three hours a week. Susanna, all right, I got you. no problem. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday from 3 to 4 p.m. You'll be available, right, Susanna? Yes, Andy, I'll be available.

36:40Andy Felice: Awesome, Susanna. So I schedule 50 emails. Emails. It has to be email to go out to each client, to each past person. And when they open the email, my client gets notified. And I train them. I give them a script to pick up the phone the old-fashioned way and do an outbound call to that lead and say, hey, this is Susanna with XYZ Garage Doors. We just wanted to call you because you are a past client of ours and we're actually running an exclusive offer for a$49 tune-in loop. We've got Thursday at 3 p.m. or Friday at 8 a.m. available. What works best for you, Mrs. Homeowner? And Mrs. Homeowner goes, oh my gosh, I can't believe you're calling me.

37:28Andy Felice: I just saw an email from you. That's crazy. But the way I design the system is that if the email just gets open, just gets looked at, my client gets notified in real time. So it makes it stickier, makes it more relevant. So that is something I haven't come across to the garage door companies doing that or other marketing agencies doing that. We're pretty proud of that system. So yeah, that's something, you know, after the annual maintenance program that I believe needs to be on. There's more stuff to like doing... like farmers markets, having a booth there or home shows. I've got a couple of clients, man.

38:07Andy Felice: Oh my gosh. Especially the ones that like to focus on higher end replacements. They'll do a hundred grand in a weekend off of a couple doors. You know, I mean, it's nuts. It's absolutely nuts. So doing stuff like that, collecting email addresses, it's groundwork. Like it's consistent, consistent persistency. Like you just have, you can't stop. It's not just like, oh, we did this. we're done. It's got to be momentum. It's got to be a system. It's got to be constantly going.

38:37Alex Bridgeman: As a closing thought, what's a piece of advice you give owners often?

38:44Andy Felice: Oh, that's easy. Join BNI. I tell every client to join BNI. I have a blog article about it. Everyone that I talk to, you know, oh, okay. Every technician needs to be in BNI. It's plain and simple. The owner should join first and set a precedent. And then every technician has to be in a different chapter, one that starts at 7am so they can still get to their jobs early. It's not in the middle of the day, going to throw everything off. but I have clients I have clients that I've I've set some records with in the industry that my records are awesome but it's hard to hold a candle up to how successful they've been in B &I so B &I absolutely that's what I tell my clients and prospects the most you know as advice

39:35Alex Bridgeman: I love it Andy this has been awesome thank you for sharing a few minutes I'm excited to chat a whole lot more off mic but appreciate the podcast here too.

39:44Andy Felice: Absolutely, man. Thanks for having me.

39:49Alex 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.

40:11Thank you.