EP207: How to Stand Out in a Crowded Market: Rich’s Guide to Identity-Based Marketing

Hey, thanks for having me, Brad. Good to be here.

Yeah, I just hit my 30 year mark in November. So I've been doing this a long time. We have an agency that caters. our services to contractors, remodeling contractors and home services contractors. We build websites. We do search engine optimization, digital advertising, also do a lot of traditional advertising, radio and TV. Like I said, I've been doing this for 30 years, been specialized in this industry for about 20 years now.

uh, no, I'm a marketing guy through and through. I've been doing marketing since I, since before college, uh, studied it in college, just started my own business right out of college. Uh, but I got in introduced into the remodeling world. I had a few clients here and there, the first 10 years of my business, but, uh, in, uh,20,2005. I was asked by a guy to do, back in those days, they didn't have webinars. They had what's called teleseminar. He said, hey, can you come on and do this teleseminar for a bunch of contractors? I said, yeah, what the heck? I just released a book at the time called Monopolize Your Marketplace. And after, there was about 300,400 people on that teleseminar. And afterwards, I said, hey, who's the marketing guru in the remodeling contractor space? Because they were mostly remodelers. And he said, well, there isn't one. That's why I had to go outside of the industry and ask you to come on this thing. And so got involved then, started doing a bunch of seminars, went all over the country doing seminars back in those days, probably 50 or 60 in a couple of years, and then just got entrenched in this industry. It's all we do now. Worked with some of the biggest HVAC companies in the country. You may have heard of Horizon Services and their private equity group. Currently work with Champions Group, Service Champions. Bell Brothers, some very large companies in the space. Also a lot of huge and smaller interior and exterior modeling companies. That's what I do.

Yeah, well, I would say that television is definitely shifting. We're getting a lot more into streaming, but to say it's dead is going to be true. It's not quite true yet. It is a good way still to reach older customers, which a lot of my clients are trying to still reach the older 50,55,60,70-year-old folks. So we can reach a lot of those people on. traditional linear television. But I would say probably a third of our TV business in the last year has switched to streaming television, which obviously is very vibrant. It's new. It used to be really expensive. The costs have come down quite a bit over the last couple of years as the inventory has gone up. So that's been a pretty good advancement. In radio, radio is a lot less dead than you think. It's surprising. It's been pretty resilient. Personally, I don't listen to the radio. I listen to podcasts and Apple music, but the numbers are holding up pretty strong. But here's the reality, Brad. If you've got a radio station that has, to say hypothetically,5,000 listeners, and 10 years ago it had 10,000 listeners, it doesn't really matter because we're only paying for the audience that's actually listening based on the ratings. And they've got a certain way of developing those ratings. So if we're paying... based on a cost per thousand CPM, you know, I don't really care how many people are listening because I'm only paying for the ones that are actually there.

My best guess, Brad, is five years from now. So you heard me, I said, in the last one to two years, we've shifted a third of our TV budget into streaming. Two years from now, it'll probably be 30% traditional,70% streaming. Five years from now, it'll probably just all be streaming. Yeah.

I think it's overrated. Not that I think Tik TOK itself is overrated and there's. I've got clients that are on TikTok, no problem. But here's why it's overrated. My biggest client, single client, is probably $130 million in sales. And they've got an advertising budget of about 7% or 8% of that. So it's over $10 million. Here's why I'm bringing that up. Even that biggest client does not have enough budget to do everything that's available. Okay? So people are like, oh, let's go to TikTok because You know, Facebook demographics getting a little older. People want to be entertained. Well, guess what? 70% of adults are still going to Facebook every day. 70%. That's outrageous. It's the highest number of anything. And you don't really, you, whoever you are listening, you don't have enough budget to even spend all the money you could possibly spend on Facebook, let alone, you know, TikTok or Instagram, which is obviously part of Facebook, Twitter, you know, all of these things that are available. It really comes down to where's the best place to spend my money. And for contractors, Facebook is still a great place to be. Hear me loud and clear, Brad. I didn't say TikTok is dumb. Don't do TikTok. But when I've got a client that comes to me and says, hey, I'd like to get into TikTok, I look at him and I go, you're spending $8,000 a month on Facebook. You could be spending $40,000 on Facebook. Why are we going to split this? Why don't we just go deeper into that one channel? So I'd rather be deep in one channel and get a lot of exposure, consistency, and frequency than going off and doing multiple things. You could say it the opposite way too. If somebody was on TikTok and they said, well, I want to go to Facebook, you could have the exact same conversation. Yeah.

Your customer is on all of them.

Your customers on all of them. Your customers on Facebook, they're on Instagram, they're on TikTok, they're on Twitter, they're on streaming, they're on the radio, they're on traditional television. Where do you want to put your money, man? It's all of them will work.

Well, so the short answer is no. The nuanced answer is Because each of these platforms has massive audiences and they allow you to choose and segment based on geographic and demographic selections. Again, it goes back to that idea of how much budget do you have? There is more audience available on all of those platforms for your specific area of demographic than you can spend. So if you want to go on TikTok. You know, the traditional thinking is TikTok is for 12 year old girls and everybody knows that it's kind of aged up and okay, maybe it's for, you know, people in their twenties, but there's plenty of people in their forties, fifties, sixties watching TikTok. Right. And you can reach them by just selecting those particular people.

Yeah, this is one reason we're moving so heavily into streaming television, because streaming television has some really, really cool capabilities. For instance, traditionally, if you wanted to segment just a certain part of town for television, the only way to do that was to go on cable. The cable has a lot of problems. We won't go into the discussion about what the problems are with cable, but just suffice to say, there's some pretty big problems. With streaming, I can go in by zip code. Let's say that there's 100 zip codes in the area that you live in and you only want to hit three of them. Boom, we can hit just those three. And then it's going to feed commercials to people based on their IP address. So it doesn't actually matter what channel they're watching or what platform they're on. If we know their IP address and we know who they are based on data that we can buy from third-party sources, we can hit them. They're watching HGTV. We hit them. They changed the channel to lifetime. We hit them. They changed the channel to ESPN. We hit them. They changed the channel to Roku. We hit them. And so we can hit people across multiple channels and platforms through their IP address. It's really pretty cool.

Yeah. I'll give you an example. So you come to me and let's say you're a, an HVAC company and you're kind of higher end and you want to go to people that have a little bit more money. So we go great. What zip codes do you want to hit? And you say, okay, we want to hit these five zip codes or these eight or these 11, whatever number of zip codes you want to hit. Awesome. All right. We can also select homeowners only. So now we've eliminated all renters. They're not going to see your ads. They won't ever see them in the first place. We don't have to worry about them. They're gone. We can segment by income. Okay. How much income do you want to hit? 50,000 plus,75,000 plus, a hundred thousand plus, two 50 plus, you know, you, you tell me we can make it happen or we can hit a range. We can hit people from 100 to one 50, no more, no less. We can hit just men. We can hit just women. We can hit people that are 45 to 50 years old only. We can hit what, Mix and match. You choose, we can hit them.

Yeah, that is correct.

Well, let me give you a frame of reference on this, why it's becoming more viable. Because traditional TV, I can... usually buy somewhere in the neighborhood of $5 to $12 cost per thousand. In other words, to reach a thousand people, a thousand impressions, it's gonna be five to $12, depending on the market, depending on the station, there's a lot of parameters, but let's just say five to $12. And let's say 10 is kind of an average. Streaming television used to be 40 to $50 cost per thousand. So you'd look at that and go, okay, do I really wanna pay four or five X? even though I'm going to get better targeting? And the answer historically has been probably not. In some cases, it makes sense. In a lot of cases, it doesn't. Now we can buy it for about $24, $25, $26 CPM. So still more expensive. But again, we cut out all the non-homeowners. We can target specific areas. So it's become a lot more viable that way. And that's why it's shifting and switching.

Let me tell you something else, Cole, Brad. Sorry, I know this wasn't necessarily our topic. But in the old days, meaning regular TV, first of all, you have to hit the whole city because that's where the TV signal goes. And if you're in a big city, if you're in Chicago... and you're a $2 million contractor, you're screwed. TV is not a viable option. It'll cost you more than your annual revenue to play the game, or at least a lot of money. With streaming, we can say, okay, great, how much money you got? I've only got $3,000 a month to spend. Great. We're going to have to narrow the zip codes. We'll narrow the demographics, and we'll go pound the living snot out of those people and those zip codes, and you'll get customers.

It used to not even be an option on regular TV and also regular radio. Now we can do that. So I used to have this conversation a lot with smaller contractors. It was like, Hey, if you're in, you know, Bloomington, Illinois, or a Muncie, Indiana, we can put you on the radio and TV. If you're in Chicago or Dallas or Denver or Washington, DC, it's not even an option. And then also you would have companies, you know, my biggest customer that I mentioned earlier, they're in Orange County. They didn't, they do now, now they service Los Angeles, but they used to only be in Orange County. So we couldn't be on TV because they don't even service two thirds of where the signal goes to. Now we can surgically go in there and just hit right where they want to be. It's really cool. Big or small companies.

Okay, so let's define identity. Let's first define what identity is not. This has been my experience. I've been in this industry, marketing industry, for 30 years. And the reason I got into it is because I noticed something, which is that almost all advertising and marketing uses what I call platitudes. Platitudes are words or phrases that are commonplace and dreary, and they're not very powerful. And people say them as if they were, you know, some kind of original or significant thing, but they're just not. It's like, Hey, uh, we're family owned business. We've got the best service. We've got the best prices. We've been in business since 1431 BC. And I was like, nobody cares. So I realized that if you talk more specifically about who you are, how you're different, why you're better, and what people can expect when they do business with you, and you tell it in a story format, and you build a case for why you're different, it really moves the needle in a very, very significant way. So that's where this concept of identity comes in. So identity would be the opposite of platitude. Platitude, words or phrases that are generally commonplace, predictable, that lack of power to evoke interest or overuse, versus identity. communicating with power, precision, passion, who you are, how you're different, why you're better, what people can expect when they do business with you. So it really makes a big difference. If it's okay, I'd like to give you an example to make it

So I've got a client, they're in Kansas City, kitchen and bathroom modeling company. They're on the radio, they're on TV. And so you say, well, you know, what makes you guys different? And they go, oh, well, we... we use higher quality materials. It's a kind of a higher end remodeling company. Okay, great. So here's what you would expect normally. Let's just use a radio commercial because this is, you know, I'm talking. So it's a good way to give an example. You might expect to hear this kind of radio ad. Hey, if you call Jericho Home Remodeling for kitchen or bath remodeling, we use the highest quality materials. We always make sure that it's done right. You're gonna be happy with the job. And it's going to last a long time and look beautiful for years to come. And people hear that and they're like, yeah, that's what I would expect you to say. What are you going to say? It's going to be terrible. We're going to use crappy products. Of course not. So then let me contrast that with identity. Now, keep in mind, communicating with power, precision, and passion, who you are, how you're different, why you're better, what people can expect when they do business with you. And then overlay on that, this element of storytelling. Okay. So here's an example. I'm just going to look on this screen here and read it. butcher it, but you'll get it. One of the most common questions, this is Radiohead, okay? One of the most common questions we get about kitchen and bathroom remodeling is how much does it cost? But the question you should be asking is how much does it weigh? How much does it weigh? Actually, you can tell a lot about the quality of a kitchen or bathroom remodel by how much the faucet weighs. At Jericho, we only use high quality mull and faucets. They weigh about 10 pounds each. They're solid metal. They look fantastic and they last forever. Other remodelers save money by using off brand plastic faucets that only weigh about a pound and a half. 10 pounds versus a pound and a half. Which would you rather have? Okay, so look what I just did there. I told a story about faucets. Now, most people don't know Jack Squad about remodeling. They know their old one looks bad. They want it to look cool. They've looked up online cool stuff, but they don't know any of the details. So we choose something that is very easy for people to understand, the faucet, okay? Everybody knows what a faucet is. So we talk about the faucet. We talk about it weighing 10 pounds. We talk about other ones weighing a pound and a half. And after listening to that, people draw a conclusion. Oh, they're higher quality. If they do that with the faucet, they probably do it with other things as well. Things that I don't even know what they are, but now I have an example. And we've communicated with power, precision, and passion, who they are, how they're different, why they're better, what people can expect when they do business. So you take that concept, now overlay this on a radio campaign, and you create two or three different ads similar in nature based on different identity points. And it starts to be very, very powerful. Think about this. If you're trying to charge higher prices, so you want to do a little price conditioning, do you think people understand if you have a Moen faucet that's 10 pounds versus a cheap plastic pound and a half faucet, it probably costs a little bit more?

But notice I never said it costs more. but it's just understood and it's implied. So I'm sort of letting people self-select. Do they want to call a company like that? Great. Call us. If not wonderful, go to Craigslist. We don't care. Yeah.

Yeah. We're taking things that people understand and we're. Yeah. using them as a proxy for the whole process, which they don't understand. Yeah.

Let me give you another example. This is for a debt company and the identity point is that they have good reviews. So again, think about what a debt company might say about good reviews. They might go on the radio and say, hey, call Hutcherson Construction. We've got great reviews. Go to Google and look. It's five stars. And people will go, okay, great. But we want to bring it alive by making the story a little bit more powerful. So we say this, hey, do you ever notice how most people never leave online reviews unless they're really mad and they want the entire world to know just how bad their experience was? This is Nick from Hutcherson Construction, and believe it or not, we only have five-star reviews. No four stars, no three or two or one stars, only five stars. I'm serious. Google Hutcherson Construction. Click on reviews, and you'll see that our lowest review is five stars. Think about it. We build decks. Our industry is notorious for over-promising and under-delivering. And yet in seven years, we don't have a single solitary customer that gave us less than five stars. We treat our customers right. We do what we say. We finish on time and we never charge more than we quoted. Oh, by the way, we have the most gorgeous, durable, amazing decks you've ever seen. Want to be our next five-star customer? Give us a call. That's really good. That makes sense. Yeah.

So we're just saying things in a way that brings it alive. And it etches into the customer's brain.

Short answer, yes. I've done a lot. And I'll tell you this, it's actually really hard to train copywriting because there's two parts of copywriting. So if you go out and hire a copywriter, and there's a lot of them out there, good ones, they can write stuff that's powerful and it's hard hitting. Here's what I found is the hard part to train, knowing what to write about, knowing what to write about. So, you know, you look at these two examples I just gave you. You have to know if you're going to write about high quality materials coming up with that concept of, you know, heavy faucet. That's not super intuitive and easy for most people. So it's pretty hard. I've trained a lot of people on it.

Well, here's the reality, Brad. Think about it this way. Most people are contractors. You got to consider this. How did they become an owner of a contracting business? And the answer is that most of them came from one of two backgrounds. Background number one is they were an installer. So if it's HVAC, they were an installer. If it's a remodeling, you know, kitchen remodel, they were an installer. So they were the guy holding the hammer. Okay. They were hammer and grinding to use a phrase I've heard recently.

Or the other place that they come from is they came from sales. So they work for a company. that was doing that stuff, but they were on the sales side of thing. Very few people come from a finance background or an operations background or a marketing background. So what happens is they start their company. Now they're a landscaper. They've got their business and they go, Oh, geez, man, I need to get some leads in the door here. I need somebody to sell to. And they just look at, they look around at what everybody else is doing. They look at the company they used to work for, what they were doing, and they just sort of copy it. And they end up saying all of these platitudes that are not compelling whatsoever. They go in one ear and out the other and everybody is the same. Yeah. So this is an opportunity to really, really, really set yourself apart, not just on advertising, but also probably even more importantly for a lot of smaller contractors on your website.

Well, that's why I brought up where, what background are people coming into this business from? The reality is if you said to me, Hey, uh, rich, I want to put you to work in a roofing company, get up there and, you know, pull the roof off and put the new one on or go install the new air conditioner, you know, go plan a yard for landscaping. I don't know. I don't know how to do any of that stuff. I'm terrible at it. I hire people to do that stuff. There's a lot of different pieces of a company that you have to be good at, but you don't have to personally. have the skill in all of those areas. So I'd recommend people lean into what you're good at and hire what you're not good at and make sure you got good people around you.

You know, so part of what my company does, like I said, we build websites, we do search engine optimization. We do regular advertising. Like we talked about in digital advertising. Each of those categories of things that we do, it took us years to get to an elite level at providing those services years with hiring people that are experts in the field, but being able to put that together and actually produce good results consistently over time, over a large number of clients. I mean, and I'm bringing this up. I hope it's obvious. It's like, Yeah. Now you're, you're one dude who's going to go watch a YouTube video and try to get good at this. Meanwhile, professional people whose whole livelihood depends on being good at this. It takes years to master it. It's not nothing. It's like, again, think about your highest caliber master craftsman and whatever it is you're doing and how long did it take them to get that good? And then also think about it this way. Again, I don't know what most of your listeners are into. If it's landscape, if it's HVAC, what is it?

Think about your very best guy installer versus your fourth best guy. Like, it's a tremendous difference. Like, man, if we could just clone Dave over here, who's our best guy, we'd be, you know, hitting home runs all day long, every day, no exceptions. but just to get the guy that you've hired to do your job to the level of the very best guy. That's why he's the fourth best guy and not the best guy. It's just a law of life. So to expect that you're going to come into a domain that you're not familiar with in the first place, like marketing and, and. train yourself to be good. You can do it, but it's probably going to take energy away from other things that you should be doing.

You're dating yourself, man. It

We're on the same page there, man.

Yes. A hundred percent. In fact, uh, can I share my screen?

That's okay. I'll walk through it. But for those who are watching on YouTube or wherever video, I'll show this to you here.

Yeah. Well, I can't find it. Well, I'll just walk you through it. It's all good. I've got what I call the five pillars of identity, five pillars of identity. So just make a note, jot these down. So these are five broad categories of what I call identity points. So the first one is your products. Second one is workmanship. Third one is what I call bedside manner. It's going to be how you treat people. Fourth one is core values. And the fifth one is culture and reputation. And honestly, the fifth one is kind of a catch all for things that didn't conveniently fit into the other four. Okay. So within each of these five pillars of identity, there's going to be specific identity points. So for instance, let's, let's use a workmanship. So here's an identity point, no cutting corners, attention to detail, do it right the first time. slow down for quality, using quality materials, experience, worker oversight, no subcontractors, training, installation standards, warranties. Okay, so those are all sub points under the category of workmanship. So somebody might hear that and go, whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on a second. I think you just said no subcontractors. We use subcontractors. It doesn't matter. I'm not telling you that these are the things you need to do. I'm telling you that you need to look at this list and say, what are two or three of these that really map well to what your company is all about? And you're going to lean into that. Think of it like building a case, like a court case. Okay. So what does the, what does the attorney do? The attorney does discovery and says, okay, I'm going to figure out what the points of this case are. Okay. We have the smoking gun. We've got the witnesses. We've got the alibi, you know, they're going to pull all that together. Then they're going to figure out how to present that in the most effective way to the jury. So we got to do a little bit of discovery first. So we're going to, we'll do a little test here for you, Brad.

Okay. I'm going to read that list again under workmanship. And I'm going to ask you to determine if you can figure out where the. Our faucets weigh 10 pounds commercials originated from ready. Yep. Workman jet, no cutting corners, attention to detail done right. The first time slow down for quality, quality materials, experience worker oversight, no subcontractors, quality materials. Okay. So this is where we start. We look at the list and say, well, what is it that we do? And when I sit down with my client, I say, okay, what is it that makes you guys different and better? Oh, yeah. We're higher quality. Well, what do you mean higher quality? Well, we use higher quality materials. Well, give me some examples of that. So what we want to do is find these identity points and then we want to, we want to find stories, examples, and comparisons so that we can bring them alive. Okay. So let me give you another list from bedside manner. Here's what bedside manner is. These are ones you could choose from being punctual, your communication, easy and accurate quotes, no sales pressure, no pricing games, cleaning up after yourself, your workers appearance, hiring standards, being kind and courteous, listening, not requiring any money down on time and on budget. Okay. So those are all under a bedside manner. So I might look at that and go, Oh, well, geez, uh, no money down. Now, a lot of people listen to that and go, well, we require money down. Okay, great. That's not a good identity point for you. Right. But if, This one Hutcherson's construction that I gave you an example before, they actually don't require money down. So we created an ad for radio and also television called deposit hopping. And it goes something like this. Hey, did you know that most contractors are gonna require you to put down anywhere from 30 to 50% as a deposit? We call it deposit hopping. Here's why. They're gonna take that money. and they're gonna use it to buy materials for another customer's job because they're not financially secure and they don't have the money to buy it. So then they go and finish that job, collect the final payment, and they come over and buy the materials for your job. Or they have to go sell somebody else and take their deposit. It's called deposit hopping and it puts you at risk. Everybody's heard the stories of contractors that take off with your deposit and they're never heard from again. Look, I'm not saying that happens all the time, but you need to protect yourself. At Hutcherson Construction, we never require any deposit ever. The first time you'll give us a nickel is when your materials are sitting on your property ready to be installed that day.

So we're telling the story based on the identity point.

Well, in the five pillars of identity, there's about 12 sub points that you can choose from. So across five pillars, that's around 60 sub points or identity points. You only need two or three to really. lean into a marketing program. And if you're a little bit bigger company and you've got a little bit more budget, you can hit a little bit more identity points, maybe five or six, you don't need 60,60. You can't have 60. It's too many. You need one or two that you really lean into. I'll give you an example. The first big HVAC company I worked with was horizon services out at East coast, Philadelphia, Wilmington, Delaware. And one of their main identity points was that they would show up on time or your service is free. That's a pretty strong point, right? If we're not on time, your service is free. Okay, well, how do you say that so that it makes sense? So we created a commercial with the owner that said something like this. It says, don't you hate to wait? I do. If I go into the doctor and he makes me sit in that room for five or 10 minutes, I get up and leave. If I show up at a restaurant and they say it's gonna be a 10 or 15 minute wait, I'm out of there. I go to a different restaurant. I can't stand waiting. That's why when I started Horizon Services, I promised that my customers would never have to wait. We're gonna give you a specific time when we're gonna be there and if we're even one minute late, one single minute. Your entire service is going to be free. No hoops to jump through, no fine print, just free. You know why? Because I hate to wait and so should you. That's powerful. Then I started working with service champions, West Coast, different company. I showed them some of the stuff I'd done from Horizon and here's what they said to me. Whoa, we don't want to talk about that. We don't have a promise that if we're one minute late, it's free. We don't want to do that. Great. What are you guys all about? Well, a lot of our customers are older. Our whole thing is about our technicians are friendly. They're presentable. They do good deeds for free. What does that mean? Well, it means when they show up, they ask the customer, is there anything we can do for you around the house? We'll move boxes for you. We'll set up your internet for you. We'll do, you know, whatever you need. Okay. So we coined a phrase, world's friendliest technicians, trademarked it. And we started leaning heavy into that. Print ads, billboards, trucks, radio. television, mailers, world's friendliest technicians, and two different companies, both wildly successful, wildly profitable companies, completely different identities.

is like a fingerprint. Everybody's going to be a little bit different. So if you look at the home services industry, there's a few identity points that make sense in general, showing up when you said you would not charging more. then you said you would quote, doing the job right the first time, having an accurate quote. These are things that are pretty universally desirable, but you just got to figure out where do you want to lean into. And like you said, I could care less if you do deposits. I'm an attorney is a good way to think about it. So my job is to look at the case that's presented and find out the best way to argue that case. And if you require deposits and you use subcontractors, guess what? I'm not gonna talk about that stuff. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna talk about hiring standards. So I might create a commercial that says something like this. Over here at Jericho Home Improvements, we don't hire 98 out of every 100 people that apply for the job. The reason is simple. First of all,50% of them, they don't know how to do the job to our exacting standards in the first place. Then 60% can't pass a drug test,30% can't pass a background test, and 40% are just completely unpresentable. They're gonna scare the bejesus out of you and your family if they knocked on your door. We don't hire those people. We don't even let them through the first interview. If you want the highest caliber master craftsman that can do the job right, that have 500 jobs, worth of experience or more that are presentable, friendly on time, then that's Jericho. Or you could go hire one of our competitors. Guess who they're picking up. Perfect. Just depends on what you do. It doesn't matter what you do. It only matters if you don't do anything good, then you deserve to suck and be out of business anyway.

This is all covered in detail in my book. The book is called Unlocking Unlimited Lead Flow. It's on Amazon. Uh, it's also covered multiple times on my podcast. My podcast is called the level 10 contractor daily podcast. It's on all the usual platforms. You're obviously listening to a podcast, so just look it up and, uh, you can just search for identity topics. Uh, it's covered several times.

It just depends on what your company's all about. Uh, worker appearance, hiring standards, being in kind and kind and courteous all the above. Yeah. You know, uh, when I told you earlier, we talked about world's friendliest technicians. We wrote a bunch of ads that were based on that. One of them said something to this effect. Uh, it's similar to the one that I just gave you, but it has a different flavor. Notice the different flavor here. As service champions, we have the world's friendliest technician. When we go to hire, the very first thing we look for is how friendly they are. In fact, when they come into the interview, they don't realize that they're being judged on their friendliness. If they are not friendly, we immediately dismiss them from the interview. We don't even care how good they are because if the guy's good at his job, but he's not going to treat our customers right, we don't want them. It's not going to happen. We're not going to try to train friendliness into people. We start with friendly, then we go to qualifications. Obviously, we're only going to send qualified people, but you can make darn sure they're going to be friendly because why? We have the world's friendliest technicians.

That's my forte. That's my core competency. That's a

Like I said earlier though, Brad, it's like everybody's good at something. And they're not good at way more things than they're good at. So just figure out, you know, hopefully if you're in your business, you're good at selling or you're good at, you know, delivering the thing that you're selling, lean into that, hire people around you, whether it's marketing or sales or finance. How many contractors are naturally great at finance? Answer, almost none. Yeah, zero. It's a super important part of your business. It's not my forte. I can hold my own, but it's not my forte. Right.

It's on Amazon.

Amazon's actually the only place you can buy it. Go to Barnes and Noble. You won't find it. Go to Amazon and you will find it.

I would strongly recommend that you start with a podcast, level 10 contractor daily podcast. The book is also a good place to start. If you have any specific questions for me, I'd be happy to talk to you. Just reach out to me. My email is rich, R I C H at level 10 contractor. com. Awesome.

The book that I would read, man, I read books on a wide variety of topics. I'm going to keep it more in the wheelhouse of business, okay?

Probably a little bit advanced. I don't say that to be condescending at all, but... Some really small business owners may not take quite as much away, but there's going to come a point where the book Good to Great is going to be an invaluable resource to you. Good to Great. Talk about the flywheel effect. Talk about the metrics that you're looking at and keeping track of in your business. That's one of those books. I mostly listen to books rather than read them. I go back and I listen to that book about every three years. And every time I listen to it, I'm making notes because I've grown and gotten better and different and I'm taking new and different things out of that book. It's a great one.

Anytime.