This is a transcript of our recent Marketing Interview with Mary Jean Anderson of Anderson Plumbing, Heating & Air.
To listen to the recording of the interview – click here.
Hello and thank you for joining us on today’s episode of Plumbing Marketing Process. Today we are actually fortunate enough to have Mary Jean Anderson of Anderson Plumbing Heating and Air out of the San Diego market on the line with us. She was recently recognized as the plumbing contractor of the year by the PHCC, and she has got some great knowledge and wisdom that she can share with us on the call, so Mary Jean, thanks so much for joining us.
>>: Thank you. Thank you for having me and I appreciate the congratulations. That was a fun event and we are really grateful to have won.
>>: That’s quite an honor. Did you guys do anything special to celebrate or commemorate the event?
>>: No, other than four generations of us, my mother and my granddaughter even, all of us took off for Philadelphia to receive the award, and you know I also really appreciate the award, but as a marketing person which is what I love to* any kind of award that your company can achieve is of great value to you moving forward, because customers want that.
>>: Absolutely.
>>: It was wonderful for us for many different reasons.
>>: It was fun to get it, and it is also a great marketing piece that you can say, “Look we are the plumbing contractor of the year by PHCC.”
>>: Absolutely. It’s national. A big one.
>>: It’s a big deal. It is a really big deal. If you might tell us just a little bit about your business, how long you have been around, approximate revenues, number of trucks, the types of services that you offer, and the actual service area that you service there in the San Diego market?
>>: Sure. We have been in this business since 1978. It started as a family business. After I had my children, I came to work in 1983 and full-time, and was able to learn a lot, and we learned a lot without having to physically do it, and I think I could fix just about anything now even though that’s not what I do. I was able to buy my partners out in 2004, I believe it was, and from there I ran it and I shifted to a female-owned business, and of course want to be recognized and known wherever you go, so at that point we painted our trucks actually pink on the bottom.
I have a large giant picture of myself, which, believe me, no woman wants to do, but if you want it to be memorable in this industry, and if you are a woman out there working with your husband, I would highly suggest that. We took our company over the top, so our trucks are moving billboards and they are important to the overall branding of our company. We have grown. I bought a small company and threw that into the mix. I tried a couple of franchises that didn’t work for me, and today we are close to 11 million dollars in revenue this year, and in 2007, we were 5.2 million, so to do a 11 million in this economy, I think we have done quite well.
>>: That’s outstanding.
Mary We're double digit profits, and I'm not bragging about that. I'm just saying that it can be done. I'm not trying to throw out that but it can be done. Anybody can do it because, believe me, there is nothing that; I'm not a genius, I'm just a hard worker and average intelligence, but it can be done if you put the energy into it. This year, I think we are going to be at about 5 million in heating and air conditioning, about 6.2 in plumbing as we end out the year.
You asked about trucks. We have 45 trucks, 22 are plumbing service, eight are heating and air conditioning service. We are new in heating and air. We started that in 2007 when I brought that small business I talked about earlier. We think a little bit different than other companies, we break things out. We have three re-pipe crews and we have two drain sales people, and then we have five drain crews. We have five install heating and air teams, and hope that makes sense, but we have people to sell the work and people that install the work.
>>: Actually I get you. Your guys are out there in the field doing the estimates and selling the service, and then the guys are actually going and do the work and make sure that it is done well.
>>: Of course, there is quality control supervisor as well. I have found after being in the medical field, which is my original education, I'm working with doctors and plumbers. They are very different in the way that they learn. I don’t believe anyone is more intelligent than the other honestly, but they learn different ways, and they are better, and we just divide them out by their capability.
It is hard to find somebody that’s really technically sharp but has great communication skills, and that’s what we look for, and we actually test for that upfront, but if they are really, really good technically and are really strong but their strong suit isn’t dealing with customers, they are more on the install side and somebody else sells the work.
>>: That makes a lot of sense. Put people where they are the strongest and leverage their strengths.
>>: Right.
>>: You grew from 5 million to 11 million in arguably one of the toughest economic climates over the last 10 years. That’s phenomenal.
>>: Yes, and I seriously don’t take credit for this, and as we go through and you ask me questions, I will be able to explain how we got there, but it is not just because of me. Like I said earlier, I'm average intelligence, I'm a very hard worker, and I don’t have much ego about me. I learn from other people. I'm more than willing to learn, and I think that’s what has been a success, is that I listen to other people.
My mom always said, “Show me your friends and I will tell you all about you,” and I worked really hard to surround myself with the best technicians I can find, the best products, and the best mentors out there, and that’s who I'm and that’s why we are where we are today.
>>: Excellent, and if you don’t mind may I ask you, you started in the business small-time back, I guess in 1983. Do you remember off hand how much revenue the business was doing at that time?
>>: About one and a half million.
>>: Wow, excellent. That’s quite a climb. That’s phenomenal. If we start to look at the marketing plan for the business, and how you have taken it from, it was a million dollar business to a 12 million business over the last several years, a couple of decades. I feel like any marketing plan has three core fundamentals. The market, who are your ideal customers, the message, in what are you saying that’s making you unique, that’s making people chose you, and the media. I want to drill down on each of those three as we go, and I think the best place to start really is the market.
Obviously you guys have world-class organization and a very robust marketing strategy. I'm just curious as to what you guys have identified as your target market or your ideal customer there in San Diego.
>>: That’s a great question. We’ve had it very drilled down and our demographic is white-collar, double-income, over 35 years old and seniors, and everything that we do is generated towards that market.
>>: Excellent, and it's interesting, as I do this interviews and talk with people in plumbing and outside of plumbing, the clearer you have that demographic, the more you can really pin down on what your actual customer is, typically that’s an indication of how successful your business is, so you guys have done a real nice job drilling down on that and knowing what that market actually is.
With that said, once you know what your market is, you can start to craft the message, and you can put together something that will resonate with that specific audience, and I have read through your Web site, and I know that you have some really good unique selling propositions in place down from the pink truck to everything else, but what would you say is your unique selling proposition and how you position yourself in the eyes of your customers?
>>: I think integrity that starts with me. I’ve sat on the board for the better business bureau here, which is actually a very rapid-growing town, and I really believe in ethics and I believe in integrity, and I believe in doing things right, and that’s the core value, and also coming from my dad, he was a blue-collar worker. He was a very intelligent man and he just learned differently than the doctors I worked with. His older brothers and sisters were all college graduates, so he had intelligence, he just learned differently, and he was successful working with his hands.
He was touch, feel, see, and that’s what I have learned about the guys and girls that I work with, that they learn a different way. They are as smart as the next person. They just have a different way of learning, and I think they know that I believe that, and they know it and they get it, and so they want to work hard. I feel that what we have done has made our people very proud to be who they are and what they have achieved, and if you are proud of who you are, you are just going to do a good job. That’s our whole brand, is we care and we are good about we do, and we don’t just mouth it, we live it, we believe it.
>>: Excellent, and I love the catch phrase that seems to be on most of the materials I have seen, “Nobody wows clients like we do,” so you guys really go out of your way to create that “wow” experience for your customer.
>>: We do. We do weekly meetings and we do monthly. We talk about what we did to “wow” and it builds more “wow”ing. It can be anything from, and this is what is going to build your brand and build your client base is, it could be anything from stopping at an automobile accident and stopping for a guy that fell off a horse, raking up the leaves for seniors who said, “I'm so embarrassed and I cannot rake up these leaves, the HMO is supposed to do it and they never do,” and when we are done with our work and we take them out to see the work and we have raked up the leaves and put them in a bag.
How long did that take them to do? 10 minutes. What did that do for the customer? It wowed them, and that’s exactly what you have to do. You have to definitely be proud of who you are to be able to want to do that, and then you have to talk about it in groups.
>>: You don’t be shy about saying, “Look, this is what we did,” and the customer then will feel so happy. They will want to tell their friends and share with their colleagues as well.
>>: It builds them around the company because if Jose can do that, then what I can do next time you know. I will just grab the trash cans and take them down, whatever, so we talk about it in our own group, when I sit there, we talk about own group setting on weekly, monthly meetings, what did everybody do, what surprised the customer, and it’s a feel-good thing for everybody.
>>: Excellent, so that creates the sense of competition. “How can I make sure that I'm creating that 'wow' experience, too?” You are one-upping the other guy to some extent that needs to create that positive experience.
>>: Of course the biggest thing is inspect what you expect, and that’s, you got to make sure they are really doing it, and so we do happy checks after every single one of our calls, within 24 hours, and make sure that the customer was happy. It’s all in branding and building. It is all in marketing. It sounds like it wouldn’t be under that heading, but it is, because if you call your customer and make them happy, they are going to market for you.
>>: No doubt, and so what is the mechanism for these happy checks, is it a phone call or is it an E-mail, what is the happy check mechanism?
>>: It’s a personal phone call, and we call back. We actually try to call within an hour of the service, so that if people are working that they can grab the call before they go back to work, but the goal they have to do in their check off list, they go to certain people, and all customers have to be called within 24 hours, and then on Saturday, those that left the message, you have a Saturday person who calls everybody one more time and leaves the second message. After that we don’t bother them again, but we do try twice.
>>: Excellent. That’s a great strategy right there. I would imagine operationally, that’s a challenge, at least it was at some point, getting the people in place ramped up and consistently making that happy call, but that’s probably a key reason why you guys are doing as well as you are.
>>: It was ;to put it in place was. It is whatever you focus on happens, and we have to focus on it and we had to make sure, and we had to regularly hold meetings on why this is so important, but once you get something like that going, it is just a rhythm. It is just part of the day.
>>: Just part of your day-to-day business operations and that’s just the way that it goes. Let us start talking about media and marketing channels, and typically when you just talk about marketing in general, your mind goes straight to that. Direct mail, TV, wrap on the truck, but the other two components that we have just talked about in depth here in the last 10 minutes, what the message is and who the customer is are actually probably been more important than the media.
>>: I totally agree, and I think the thing that we all need to keep in our heads all the time is that you are not going to need a plumber but every three years, and there are a couple of things that you have to do. One is you have to stay in their mind and create something, a memorable experience or something they will see on the road and they will remember you by, and the other is to keep those customers, and I think that’s the marketing that people tend to forget about. We do several things where we keep our customers engaged with us so that they don’t call somebody else.
It is as simple as putting stickers on everything water heaters, all that. You have one person that’s an outbound. We call him, which his title is something control. I'm going blank by this title, but basically what he has to do for sales. He has a different title. What he does is, he calls our customers regularly and he reminds them that we did a stoppage for them 11 months ago, and it is just about to expire, would they like us to come and run the camera, so what we do out on sales all the time or they call our people self service agreement. We call our service agreement people to make sure that it’s done, and they come in and it’s time for us to come out and do the tune up.
We call regular customers and offer them specials during the down time. We know April is always going to be bad month for us, so we call a lot of people in April and we offer whole home; a water heater flush and whole home plumbing inspection for $49. It keeps the trucks moving, so that’s a component. We can talk about Yellow Pages and I can give you specifics and you can drill down on all the different things we do, but I think you first have to look at your client base, because that’s where they know you and are going to spend the most money. You've really got to work on them first.
>>: Absolutely. As we look at that marketing mix, what specific tactics or channels are you guys leveraging? We talked about direct mail, Yellow Pages, billboards, what types of things are you guys doing for that net new customer call type acquisition?
>>: Number one, our trucks are billboards and that’s the best thing that you can make, because it’s very inexpensive to get your truck looking really nice and memorable, whether it be somebody with their hand raising it all times, and one guy that has his hand on a spring and so he waves at everybody that goes by, my face on the side, it is a female-owned, lot of the colors could do, bright orange, you can do. Billboard your truck, number one.
For us, we do radio and television, we do primarily, in our market, television works better for us, but everything we do, we drive people to the Internet to get to our Web site, so when we do a commercial on radio or TV, we tell them go to our Web site and look at our specials, go to our Web site to learn about this. Go to our Web site. Go to our Web site. It is simple. It’s www.andersonpha.com, so plumbing, heating, air, so our main source of revenue comes through the Internet. We have a lot of backend things where we track.
The one thing I would like to tell people, is that you should track everything and that there are companies out there. I didn’t know about these term, maybe five or eight years ago or so, and it's wonderful, is you rent phone numbers, and every single one of them the calls are recorded. It is very inexpensive, so if you can put in that in the Yellow Pages, which by the way, I was out of for three years and I'm back in and doing quite well with them, and that's a whole other story, but every single page has a tracking phone number, so not only do you know that ad is working, because when someone calls in, it is attached to their number to it, they say theYellow Pages that call has also been recorded and you what book it came out of.
You can do that with Yellow Page ads. You can do with every page on your Internet and your Web site, and you can go on and on with these tracking numbers, but it’s really the way to hone in on what is working for you.
>>: Absolutely, and I love what you said there about the Yellow Pages, because I'm finding that a lot. There is so much information about the Yellow Pages no longer being relevant and nobody using it, but again, as I talked to the more successful plumbing businesses, I'm finding that your key demographic is probably, some of them are still accessing the Yellow Pages, and with so many competitors pulling out and the costs of the ads going down, it seems to still be a viable channel for generating opportunity.
>>: Exactly. I totally agree. An ad here, we have five major books and I used to pay for Double Track back years ago at $12,000 for Double Track, and they are two-page ad, and now for all my five books I pay $4,000, so you are talking about a significant change, but I did back out for a few years and said, “I don’t want anything to do with you. It’s not working,” but now they work quite well.
In fact, they work very well, so what I pay for them, they just price themselves right out the market, and now that they are reasonable in their pricing, it's worked out well for us, and everything is tracked that we do and Yellow Pages is now a viable, as long as you don’t pay too much for them. They work and it clearly has to with our branding, so that people may open the Yellow Pages now that they didn’t 15 years ago and they see us and they saw us on TV so it’s the whole see you on tv, see you in the mail, see you in the street, and then see you in the Yellow Pages, so in that way the Yellow Pages does work for us now.
>>: I'm just curious on the TV/radio medium. What type of ads are you putting out there? What is the message on those ads? Obviously you are driving them to the Internet, but is it changing on a season-by-season basis or is it some type of low cost special to come in and do an inspection? What are you trying to lead with on those ads?
>>: I would welcome anybody that is listening to his iPod to go to YouTube and then put in our company name, Anderson Plumbing Heating and Air, and probably 42 of our commercials will come up, and basically we really work on branding, number one, on branding, and we talk about the services. I learned early on that if you say plumbing, heating, and air, it doesn’t make people realize you do plumbing, heating, and air.
For some reason, I have had say people “Gosh, I wouldn’t have brought my heater from so-and-so if I knew you then. I thought you just did plumbing.” It is like really it says right on the shirt. We say it when we answer the phone, and how do people not get that, so we spoke this on the commercials to let them know of the services we provide, and we get in-depth and we say do drains. We do big drains. We do little drains. We talk about all the different things that we do. We do specials.
Right now for instance, we are running a pre-season tune up special. We derive a lot of work through our tune ups on heating or air conditioning, so we normally do it’s a $67 plan and has specials, so that’s what we are running right now, on the heating and air side, so we do have times of the year that we know we need to build these in certain areas, but generally if we really focus on that, and let people know that we do everything and exactly what we do.
>>: Excellent. As far as other channels, are you doing any direct mail as far as letters in the mail, Valpak, or any that type of stuff?
>>: No I don’t. I tried it. I was a direct mail person for a lot of years, and I don’t want to say anything bad about it, because I know people that run very successful businesses with direct mail. I did it for many years, and it became less and less of the value to us over the years, but what we do do is, because we have been in business for so many years and have a large customer base, we send a Thanksgiving card and we send a Valentine’s card to our customers twice a year, and in that we give a plastic card, just like $50 gift card, and that’s probably the best, it’s fabulous best direct mail, actually the best direct mail.
>>: You get response from that, or is it just the good way to remain top of mind with that loyal customer base you have built up over the years?
>>: Incredible response.
>>: Wow.
>>: Now absolutely immediately, and we will get people call, especially seniors, which is a good target market, and *I will say “I haven’t had a Valentine’s card in 20 years and I opened the mail and I'm so thrilled.” They don’t even know what to do to spend the money, because they want to because they are so appreciative of the card, so that’s just one of the things you can do.
>>: Not your traditional, send out 1,000 pieces in the mail or 10,000 pieces in the mail, but real targeted followups to your existing customer base to build that loyalty even deeper.
>>: Yes.
>>: That’s very nice.
>>: We collect email addresses on all of our customers. What we do is we collect, and people don’t want to always give it, so we tell them that we are going to send them an E-mail and confirm the time of the arrival, and we will send a picture and a bio of the technician that is showing up, so that we can collect their E-mails for a real reason, but then of course they go straight into our E-mail bank and we get Constant Contact.
It is very inexpensive and you need to use your Constant Contact when you are slow. I did it recently at a real slow deal, and I just said on Tuesday this is going to be horrible week. Let’s just give a 30% off for any service or repair, now this wasn't install or new set up and it was very specific and it filled our board, and you know what, we would have been slow, so did I mind, not really. It got us out in front of the people to sell extra.
>>: It did generate that bump to get the trucks moving again.
>>: Yes it did, so Constant Contact, collecting E-mail directly is so important.
>>: You just gave the huge tip, and this is something we find, too, in what we do, is if you just told the customer, “Give me your E-mail address after service, because we want to follow up with you,” the resistance to that is extremely high, but what you just said was at the time of booking the service, we collect the name, phone number, address, schedule the time, and then get the E-mail where you add it, and we are going to send the confirmation with all of the information you need, and that’s a powerful way to grow that E-mail list, so that’s a huge tip, if you are listening.
>>: It also is on the backend, because if you tell a customer when booking between two and four, let’s say, when you send that mail, it says we will be there no earlier than two and no later than four, you have the confirmation, because I know everybody out there that's listening has gotten that call. “You said you will be here at 2 o’clock, I have been sitting for an hour and a half and nobody showed up,” but they have that E-mail, and so they cannot say that anymore.
>>: What about the E-mail, exactly. That might be proprietary, so if you cannot answer this that’s fine. What mechanism is that you are using, so that E-mail goes outright after the appointment is booked? Is there a special CRM or is that customized that you guys developed?
>>: It is something custom. It does take a little more time and actually we are looking for better way to do it right now, but we have SuccessWare, which is great, and I'm hoping that they are going to be adding that to our package, because we do it in a little bit of cumbersome way itself put together.
>>: I think it’s a brilliant idea and I see that it is executed a couple of different ways but it doesn’t seem like there is any really streamlined way to book an appointment and have a series of E-mails go out automatically so that’s interesting. Moving on to networking, I know that you are involved in a number of organizations. What type of networking do you guys do in order to develop that relationship in the community?
>>: Well I have always been a proponent of doing work for others and helping others and doing as a company. I believe that it builds morale and it is kind of the way life is. If you ever feel bad go do something for somebody else. I have kind of taken that and so we have always been a company that does reach out work.
We do a lot of reach out work, never really realizing that there is a whole marketing aspect around cause marketing, and so I would say the people to have that a very limited budget get involved with your Humane Society, things like that, because pretty much whoever has a dog has a home, and you know the places you can go that you can do work where you will build clientele .
For instance, just by example,I don’t have breast cancer. I have not had breast cancer, but my grandmother died of it and I have two maternal aunts that have had breast cancer; they are survivors. I lost my best friend to breast cancer. One of our major causes is finding a cure for breast cancer. That’s a whole market of people right there, and we do a lot of work for people because they know us and they know the work that we do, and it just passes like wildfire.
I even got recently Padre tickets. I got the best Padre tickets you can imagine for 25th of the price, because when I called to book them and I went to get my credit card the girl said ,”I know you.
My mother had breast cancer. I'm going to give you my discount.” I ended up getting 30 seats for 25, right down on the field. Never would have expected that in a million years; I wasn’t asking for it, didn’t expect it, but that’s how you get to be known, and when people who are undergoing chemotherapy they need to be comfortable. When they are sick, they need your help, and so they are really good market and you are doing something good and you are bringing a base to yourself and you are building your company morale.
You know what I mean, it’s just a whole process. So cause marketing is another whole deal in itself that people don’t realize is an incredible way to market yourself. I happened upon it, but now I have been reading and now it’s a whole big deal of cause marketing.
>>: It is not something you would look at and say okay I'm going to do all of this cause marketing. I'm going to try and build awareness for a cause that has nothing to do with my business and it is really hard to connect the dots then. How the heck is that going to come back to me as a business in a way that it’s going to be help us get the phone ringing and get more repeat and referral business, but I think you have executed on that in an outstanding way.
>>: Like I said , it was happenstance. It wasn’t something that I planned, but it really does work and that’s one of the things that we do. I would highly recommend it and it’s not expensive really, and what it does to build morale in your company is great.
>>: Nice. I have noticed you have been using public relations in putting up press releases on MarketWire and a variety of other sources. Obviously one of the press releases that I saw was for breast cancer awareness and how you guys are raising money. Are you doing anything else along those lines, know leveraging public relations? I imagine you put out a press release pretty frequently.
>>: We do because as you know search engine optimization has become the thing, and we spend a lot of money on pay per click, but the majority of people really don’t use the top three pay per clicks that usually go down to the body of the first page, so we work hard and part of those press releases has something to do with SEO. I have got somebody doing that for me, and it helps to go for search engine optimization and so that’s part of it, part of the whole.
>>: What she is talking about there is if you take something that’s news worthy like raising money for breast cancer or some new service that you are offering, you can put that out on the press release and by putting out one press release you can pick up a lot of citations for your company, a lot of inbound links which, like she talked about, helps with SEO. Real quick, just jumping back to networking, I was looking as far as Chamber of Commerce, BBB, you know Business Networking International, how involved are you as an organization in those types of networking organizations if at all.
>>: Well I actually sat on the board of Better Business Bureau for a period of couple of years, and I took a leave of absence and I'm actually going to start back in 2013. I'm involved with that. We do a lot of like I said a lot of cause type of things, but I really don’t do a lot, I don’t like to do those breakfast in the morning, I don’t like to do that kind of thing. I'm not good at it and it has never been successful it. We are more successful in doing reach out programs. For instance you had mentioned home shows earlier, and that’s one where we do our cause and we bring the spinning wheel and on it we have our $50 gift card.
We have handmade bracelets that are made by our people that are made when they are in between calls. We have ice cream certificates. We have tune ups that we give away free and people spin the wheel and they donate for our cause ,and then that money goes to the cause, but we are a soft sell; we are out there doing something for the community, but everybody knows who we are and then we are giving away our services for their donation. It’s another way just to build your business, but I don’t go out of reach other than the board of directors of the BBB.
>>: Okay good, I was just curious about that. Now the other channels that we touched on briefly here are obviously; we talked about internet and I wanted to drill down on that a little bit further. Do you guys do any of the lead buying services like ServiceMagic or Elocal Plumber or any of those other services where you pay per lead? Or have you have kind of moved beyond that?
>>: Moved beyond that. We have been in ServiceMagic and Elocal. What I have found is that they deliver one week to too many people and you just can't. It just hasn’t been ever worked in money trust. Now Angie’s List is other story. Angie’s List is in the listener. We did quite well with Angie’s List city search. We do well, we actually do sales with Angie’s List. They are called the Angie’s List Big Deal and they are similar to Groupon, but we offer a whole house plumbing inspection and a water heater flush or a tune up at a drastically reduced price. They buy them from Angie’s List and then Angie’s List pays you a percentage of the sale. We did quite well as those just overboard on several times. Angie’s List is good.
Yelp is not our demographic. We have terrible reviews on Yelp right now. Some of them are not ours. Some of them are fake. They are written by people. We are one of the larger companies in town, and we definitely have a target on our back. I actually have hired an attorney and I don’t know what I am going to do about Yelp, because it is typically the Yelp is somebody that sounds very frugal and they are looking and they are not our demographics. They are young and like I said it has been a target for us.
If you go to Angie’s List, which is a paid site, which is our demographic you are going to find we have an A rating at all times, and we probably get three or four straight A reviews a week with them and with many of the other sites you go and see. If you check this out we have four and a half to five stars, but Yelp we don’t we are really in trouble there. I'm fighting it. I don’t know what else to do on it. I don’t like Yelp, and there are many lawsuits out there, and we don’t market with them and if you don’t buy marketing with them you are at the bottom of the heap.
>>: They don’t throw you a bone unfortunately. That can be a problem.
>>: In fact that would be the opposite, so that’s not a good one for us, but everything else if you are looking for the higher demographic that pays more. We have another plumber that is our local, I will just give listeners a hint, and he is marketing himself as a real low cost plumber and he said it was the biggest mistake he has ever made and he is known as a low cost plumber and now he can’t make the switch, but he has a full in house attorney. I think he is about a 10 million dollar company, but he has a full in house attorney who handles all of his complaints, because it is that bottom group of people that do all the complaining.
I think that the 80% of the complaints come from that 20% of the people, so our demographics is not that and when you work with them more, a professional person, they typically understand and if you do something wrong they get it. They get it and they are easy to deal with.
>>: That goes back to that “what is your market?” question. If you want to be the low cost guy you are going to be going after a different demographic and you are going to wind up with troubles. If you go after the higher end demographic and you position yourself to be the right choice for that demographic you will have a lot of happy customers that aren’t going to be penny pinching you on the price for everything.
>>: I completely agree with you. Very well said.
>>: You mentioned Angie’s List on reviews. Do you happen to know off hand approximately how many reviews you have on there currently?
>>: No it’s funny, I just saw them. A lot. You know I don’t want to. I want to say 900 but maybe it's 300. I don’t know. It’s a lot.
>>: I think it’s almost 900, when I was looking at it. It blew my mind. I couldn’t believe it. That’s amazing. It’s a common trend that Angie’s List is being mentioned again and again as a good source. Once you have got quality reviews on there it’s a great source of the right kind of customer that’s not going to be a penny pincher so.
>>: Our closing percentage is 83% on an Angie’s List. Our closing percentage is 88%, and our average is almost 100 dollars higher on an Angie’s List customer versus the regular customer.
>>: Wow. Okay.
>>: You tell me why. I would like to know why. I would like to know why, that the demographics there ….
>>: My opinion on it is, it's the demographic. Somebody that’s willing to pay a premium, because they are paying in order to have access to the Angie’s List. It is somebody that’s going to be looking for a good quality contractor that’s going to be able to come on time, be clean, be professional, and they couldn’t care less about what you are going to charge.
I mean they care about what you are going to charge, but that’s the most important thing. The most important thing are those are the factors. If you got great reviews and you are a best in class organization like yours, then you are going to resonate with those types of customers very well. That’s why you have such a high conversion rate. Your average transaction sale is higher because it’s the right kind of customer that’s not worried about price.
>>: I agree with you. I do.
>>: Excellent; that’s interesting. Now just to drill down, I know we are going a little long so if we need to cut this off you just let me know, but just to drill down on internet marketing you talked about the fact that you do a lot of pay per click. You have been doing press releases and other SEO type stuff. I think you mentioned that the internet is the number one source of business for you right now. Can you just kind of elaborate on that?
>>: We do our pay per click, and I have been through three different people. I'm on my third one, which is working out wonderfully. I have a certain budget that I have put out, and with him it’s funny because he was able to clean them up so well and get them so isolated and to really work for us and not having wasted words, that we are now using some of our pay per click money over on Youtube, because we didn’t need as much I allocated. It’s really important that you work with the right person, and I don’t really know how to tell someone to find that person because it took me three people.
It was the third person I found that got it right and its really saving us money, and its worth every penny of what I pay him, but I think pay per click is very important. Then of course especially if you are in a smaller town and people don’t really understand search engine optimization yet and if you can get your name up there on that first page so many more people go, I have heard it is 65%. I don’t know what you know, maybe statistically, that I don’t, but I have heard 65% of people go below the pay per click. You want to be on the first page, so if you Google, which most people use 'plumbing San Diego' or 'plumber San Diego' or 'San Diego plumber' we will come up on that first page.
>>: You guys rank well.
>>: That’s really important, because I actually rent; was renting, I don’t have to do it anymore, but I was renting sites where they guaranteed me it will be on their first page and it was their phone number and I rented the page from them and I was paying per week and then that is when I realized “oh my gosh.” It doesn’t have to be at the bottom of the page or the middle of the page, people use those and so it is just where you got to go. It is where the majority of the work comes from now.
>>: Absolutely. The stat you said is pretty much accurate. Some sources tell you different things, but it is somewhere between 65 and 75% of people will look directly at the organic non-paid listings when they are searching and click in that area more often than not.
>>: That is more important.
>>: No doubt, and I think that was a great discussion that you just gave us on your marketing mix and you guys do have a very robust marketing mix with lots of different channels for people to find you and call you and do business with you. Just to kind of drill down going on to the next series of questions here. What marketing effort drive has the most leads, and I know we touched on this a little bit. What would you say is actually driving the most leads for you now?
>>: Well it would be people going to our website, but they are directed to our website from TV and from radio and from the internet, whether it be in pay per click or search engine optimization; that’s what worked best for us. If I buy something that I needed calls to come in for it would probably be Angie’s List. I think cost per lead is quite good, but you’ve got to get your reviews up there too so it’s kind of a catch 22 there. I would say our repeat and referral is probably the most inexpensive way to get your customers and that’s to be in front of them in any way you can.
>>: Excellent. This is the question that’s listed here. I think we have already answered it, and the most profitable working channel sounds like Angie’s List based on the conversion rate, but again it’s a catch 22 just getting started and buying an ad on Angie’s List isn’t necessarily going to make your phone ring off the hook, because you have to have that base of reviews. Are there any marketing efforts that you stopped recently or in the last couple of years just because they are not performing as well as they once did?
>>: Yes and that’s a good question; I like that question. Sales; people really don’t ... We do have a sale that we offer every month. We have two specials on our side and then they are technicians have sales and ad on sales with them and it might be water filtration one month and the next one month it might be a kitchen sink pullout, so if we are in the home we have a special that we can offer to customer, but we tried to market specials on the internet, and we tried to market specials on TV, and we found that other than tune ups they really don’t work.
People aren’t, at least the demographics aren’t working to save money but they are really looking for is a person that won that award ‘national contractor of the year’ or whatever award that you can bring in your local town, 'people who mean business' award, whatever, there are lots of awards out there. They want to make sure that you have a 100% satisfaction guarantee. They want to know how long you have been in business and those are the things that really sell, not price. It’s not about money, and I wasted a lot time focusing on sales trying to get internet sales and TV sales and people just don’t. They are not going to you because you have some water filtration system; they are not going to call you. Though if you are in the house and you have $300 off for water filtration, that’s a different story.
>>: Right; you get the up-sale opportunity there. I guess the key nugget of wisdom there is you tried just focusing on the coupon sale, the special offer, and all your marketing found that it was a better use of your energy to show why you are different and better and that you have gotten the awards and you have been in business and you get all these reviews on Angie’s List. That’s a better use of your marketing message than just promoting some special discount.
>>: Right, yes.
>>: Excellent. Okay so I'm just going to kind of keep the ball rolling here. We talked about special initiatives to get; actually, we didn’t. Would you guys have any special initiatives in place in order to get reviews? You have got probably more reviews than anybody I have ever seen on Angie’s List. Are you doing anything specific to solicit or to ask and prompt for those reviews at this point?
>>: No, but I'm going to start. Right now we are building a webpage on our site where people can comment if they have a client concern and they can issue that, and we are going to focus on that and if they want to say something good about our company and then we are going to direct them to sites such as Google.
We are going to steer away from Yelp because it’s not our demographic their and we are having such a hard time with them. We are going to start asking them. Then what I'm going to do, and I haven’t done yet, but what I'm going to do is a competition with our technicians and for every time they get a review we are going to put them in a hat and then every month we are going to draw out of that hat, and there is going to be a special gift. Whether it be a specific drill or or a TV; we are going to do that, maybe even a trip to Las Vegas, but we realize how important reviews are and we haven’t been doing a good job.
The reviews that we get are very random and are people that just write them, but we have never asked for them and we should be.
>>: Wow, imagine how many reviews you would have if you guys were asking; that’s amazing.
>>: We should be. I wish I had gotten on that bandwagon sooner.
>>: It seems like a logical place to insert that will be as part of your happy calls. You guys are already making calls after every service, so this is a just a follow up to that happy customer to drive them to that page where they can make that review.
>>: Yeah, but I don’t want to pay the customer to do a review. I don’t think that’s ethical, but I think that if our technicians ask them and then we do our happy checks so our CSR reminds them we would have a better chance at it. I just think if they do a really good job and they wow them; that’s what we get people to write us all the time. People send these E-mails and letters. Every single week we get three or four or five, so if we can turn them into the internet, and we would be doing a better job at getting our search engine optimization up.
>>: Excellent. Now the next thing is social media and I know you guys, at least from what I have seen, have a pretty robust social media plan. What were you guys doing with social media at this point?
>>: We have Facebook and we are working on getting the clicks, people to like us on Facebook, and then we do our regular blogs, and what we are doing right now is, because this is breast cancer awareness month, anybody that likes us and we are putting that out through things like press releases and blogs and twitter and things like that so that they will tell friends and then we donate $5 for every person that likes us in this month we donate to Susan G. Komen.
>>: That’s awesome. Have you guys seen a notable increase in your likes as part of that, or have you guys been tracking?
>>: I think we have gotten about a dozen this month, which is good because it is hard to get people to do these things.
>>: Sure it is.
>>: I have heard of people giving a drawing, and if you like you get into a drawing and you can win an IPad and things like that. I would rather do it; again, I am about the cause marketing type of thing, so I would rather do it for a cause. People could do it and donate to the Humane Society or somewhere people give.
>>: When they give them incentive that’s also adding value to the community as a whole and not just a self seeking thing.
>>: It gets the customer that we want. It gets the customer that we want. Those are the people that we want as customers and want people to have the same values that we do. Typically people that care about other people have the same values; they align with the business we do.
>>: Right. I guess we are coming to the end of our time here, so I want to get through some really important questions I want to ask. What training organizations do you or have you belonged to as far as just developing yourself, developing your plumbing and heating business?
>>: I don’t want to criticize any organizations, but I have been through least three. I have been through three. I have been through four let me say. I have been with the PHCC for 30 years and I use PHCC for large technical training and different technical needs that we have and legal issues with regards to the State of California changing codes and stuff and they are really great for that.
Then I work with a group called Nexstar, which I highly recommend; they turned me around. I just cannot even; It’s a kind of thing that if you, … I had reached my maximum intelligence. I think I started off by saying I'm an average intelligent person. I'm just a hard worker and that’s true and I did everything that a nurse knew how to do just like a plumber would know how to do when you are running a business, and they just took me off the chart by teaching me what real growth margins were. I knew financial statements, I learned what a balance sheet was, but I really didn’t understand and I didn’t have that comparison and Nexstar had access to 400 or 500 other companies across the United States that I meet with.
I'm meeting with 10 of them tomorrow in LA. We compare financials. We talk about what is working this month. What is going on? What can we do? It’s awesome. I highly recommend a group, and I would highly recommend Nexstar, and you can tell them I said so if you call them.
>>: Nexstar is a slam dunk. I have actually heard that a few times.
>>: Oh my god.
>>: If you are on this call and you are wondering why some of these people I am interviewing who are doing million dollar business and they are all mentioning Nexstar and some of these other organizations; training. It is something you don’t know is what is keeping you from getting to where you want to get. That’s a great tip. I think you said three; PHCC, Nexstar.
>>: Well I have been with other groups but the two, and I had left the other groups to move on to better groups, and so PHCC I use for my training and technical and then for everything else I use Nexstar, which has taken me to where we are. I have my individual coach who goes over financials with me every month. I have email access to just so much. I can just go on and on. Even the discounts because they have group discounts. You can even buy a Ford pickup and get 10% off no matter what you pay for it, you just fill your paperwork in and you get additional discount and stuff.
There’s a lot of advantages to being in a group like that, but mainly it is networking because your next door plumbing companies aren't going to tell you what you need to know but you know somebody in Florida who is successful will share with you and remember my mom said, “show me your friends and tell you all about you. I hang out with winners; they are all winners.
>>: There you go. Nice. Powerful. Are there any outside of Nexstar and PCR, there are any trainings or books, maybe even seminars that you have attended that really impacted your success over the years?
>>: I am going to say books that have to do with sales, but the reality is what I have learnt about people that are technical is their communication and part of sales and part of communicating the sales and, lets face it, if you are a plumber and you walk into the house and you put your head down and fix the garbage disposal and walk off, you are not very professional because that lady could have a sink that has been clogged up for months by her husband’s shaving, but doesn’t think about it. The professional talks about everything in the home and so the books, my favorite is Dale Carnegie.
He is the oldest and the best of the best, and so I actually still keep his DVD in addition to all of his books and he is kind of my little bible. Then Zig Zeigler, I really like 25 Habits of Highly Successful Salespeople. Again, I know people who think, “ugh, she's all about sales,” and I am all about sales. I am all about sales because these guys need to earn money to be able to put their kids through college. They are working as hard as anybody else, and the customer doesn’t know that tankless is out there, and if you are not a good communicator you are not going to be able to tell them and they may want a tankless, they heard about it, and this is what you have to train your people to do and so those are the books that I focus on.
>>: Okay excellent. What would you say to the plumbing business owner wherever they are at. Whether they are just getting started or they are doing half a million or they are doing a million and they are trying to get to that next level. Are there any specific insights or nuggets of wisdom that you would say to that plumbing business owner?
>>: I would say to reach out. Don’t think you can do it yourself. To leave your ego behind, and I think I started this off by saying you know I don’t have much of an ego that way. I listen to other people, and I go back to what my mom always told me “people will help you, they are out there, just look for them,” whether it is Nexstar or QSC or Airtime 500 or any other groups, there are people that will help you and don’t do it yourself because you will isolate yourself and you will struggle. It is so much easier when you share your successes with other people’s successes and you work together as a team to build the successful company. Don’t do it on your own.
>>: Right; excellent. This has been wonderful. This is a lot of great information here. We really appreciate you taking the time to share these great ideas and insights. If you guys would like to subscribe to the podcast, if you want get more interviews like this one you can always go to plumbingmarketingprofits.com and then you can subscribe to the podcast you will get other great interviews like this one. Mary Jean, it has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for your time.
