Builder Marketing That Actually Works: Lessons from Scaling a Construction Company

speaker-1 (00:00.265)

you

Welcome back to the Meridian Pursuit Builders Podcast. I'm your host, Jesse Sampley, and this is where we sit down with home builders, developers, real estate professionals, and industry leaders who are out there doing the work. You'll hear real conversations about markets, design, mistakes, and lessons learned, and how builders can position themselves in a way that brings more customers to the table. Let's dive in.

speaker-0 (00:32.526)

that I would love to know is, you know, what did you do before construction and then why the switch to construction?

yeah, good question. So before I was in construction, I actually was in the army. So I went to West Point for college and then I got out and was an infantry officer. And then I was getting out. Actually I got a bit of what's called a golden handshake because we had, basically I was supposed to do five years in the army, but they had way too many young lieutenants. And so they basically,

gave me the option to get out early and not owe anything for the two and a half years I didn't do. Which usually, we're supposed to pay it back. It should have been about 125K. But they, because I had so many people at the time, I got the option. So I'm getting out and out processing in the Army takes a long time. It's probably like a six month deal. So where you're just not really doing anything. So you get to, you get a lot of time to think about what you're going to do and decide. And I have a degree in physics from West Point.

And I'm really good at economics and math and stuff. And so I was like, well, maybe I'll a lot of my friends who had similar stuff were, you know, basically would get jobs on Wall Street or in investment banks and make a lot of money there. And I was like, I could, I could see myself doing that. I was like, or I could come run my family's construction company. And I always had to like a really strong affinity for my parents. mean, they really set me up really well in life. Like they literally like.

would help me fill out my West Point applications and that were always very like, really they didn't just say like, do good in school and stuff. They like, they helped me too. So I always felt like I owed them. So I was like, let me come back and grow the family business and turn it into something that actually supports them rather than just kind of like a drag. Cause they had always, they'd worked in it for seven years and not made a penny out it.

speaker-0 (02:36.302)

Okay, the the same as as it is now the the renovation side the the custom side Yeah, okay, so so they had you said they had that for seven years

Let's see, through, I took over in 2018. Yeah, seven years. And then it's been another seven now that I've, I didn't take over like completely right away. This is probably a year where it's kind of like, I was just kind of there, but not really running a show. And then I took over in like 2019. We rebranded to Home Love Construction, like what it is now. And then,

Yeah. So tell me what, were some of those things you kind of prioritizes? You know, you, you've made the switch or like, I want to go and help the family business. What were some of those immediate things of like, did, did you come to the table with ideas of, mom and dad, I would love to fix these things. Or did they give you full reins to do whatever you want?

Yeah, no, they didn't give me full reigns immediately. I took them over time. And by the way, that's a big piece of advice for people who are in their family business. They would just take control. Like if you see something that needs to be changed, just go for it, man. Just go for it. like it's people are waiting for someone to give them permission to take control. It's like, like who gave you permission to start this podcast, Jesse? Nobody. You just did it right. Like

Yeah, nobody.

speaker-1 (03:59.19)

Nobody gave me permission to start my plumbing company. I just fucking did it. Right. And it's like, same with my electric company. Like it's like, nobody's going to give you permission. So it's the same in a, in a family business. But yeah, what, what I immediately brought to the table really was marketing. Prior to me coming in, we didn't do any marketing. There was like literally zero. And, I had watched a lot of Gary V videos at the time. So I was like,

I'm gonna just do a bunch of videos about whatever the F I think about. And so I did that kind of like vlog style videos. I did a lot of vlog style videos. I literally had a 16 year old follow me around with a camera for three months out of the year when he was on summer break. Just paid him full time to do that. And that was good. It was good experience. It made me very comfortable on camera, obviously. But it didn't really produce results to be honest with you. Like it was not.

I wouldn't call it good marketing, because it didn't really get us leads. It got us some, but not really a lot.

and this was all being posted to YouTube.

YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Yeah. Yeah. TikTok didn't really exist back then. But our marketing really started going like really well, probably in about like 2021 when I started trying paid ads and when I really like was focused on like, okay, how do I, because in, the other thing that, that wound up happening.

speaker-1 (05:35.606)

is we put in a standard pricing system. So then this has been a stable piece of our company for the last five, year, decade basically, which has really allowed us to grow is we have a, so we have a sheet of the prices for everything from like a linear foot of concrete footer, a square foot of concrete slab, a sheet of drywall, a square foot of paint, inside, outside, ceiling, wall, whatever. And we just go and update it quarterly.

And having that has allowed, like, I don't have to tell people what things need to cost or what to charge. It's like, okay, how many feet of it are we doing? Good. Put that into the formula and it tells you. know, so that allowed me to actually hire salespeople. That's, that was the other huge thing is the marketing and then having like sales, but having an actual sales team. Like right now we have a seven person sales team. Right. So that.

Yeah.

speaker-1 (06:33.784)

keeps the business going. And once I saw that I could have somebody else selling and out, like actually creating and getting new business and bringing it in and I didn't have to do it. It was like, all the wheels are off. Like this, this is, or the brakes are off. Like this is a real business.

Yeah. And you had those, that's a lot easier SOPs because you had a standardization that you can go off of. Right. On a paid ad side, what, were those channels that you're doing paid ads on at first or what are you doing now?

Yeah, it started with Facebook and then I'm trying to figure out, I'm trying to remember like, when did we really crack Facebook? Maybe it was actually in 2022. Cause we had always done a lot of organic. Actually, you know what? No, in 2020, what happened 2021 to 2022, what I'm remembering now, what occurred is we started getting a lot of traction on YouTube. Cause YouTube during COVID times went.

ballistic. Everybody went onto YouTube and we started getting a lot of inquiries of, Hey, I saw your video. I realize you're in Tampa. I'm in Tampa. They're like, can you build my edition? And I'd be like, yes, yes, I can actually. That's great. You know, and those were easy sales because they're like, I found you through your own informational content. You know, it was just like easy, easy to close.

Hahaha

speaker-0 (08:02.294)

Yeah. And they've already built that trust. So it's not like, okay, yeah, let me talk to your sales person. Let me get comfortable with you people. you know that it makes that buying process so much simpler. Cause like, I already know you guys and I know what you focus on. I know your personality. I know what to expect. Were you real intentional with what kind of content you're putting out so that people came to the table more prepared?

a little bit. wouldn't say, know, I personally, I'm not super into my intention with content is to make it. Like, that's, that's my intention with content is make the freaking content. Cause I find that if I get too into the weeds of like, how do I want to say this exactly? I don't make the video and, and, and a bad video is better than no video.

Perfect as the enemy have done.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah. so most people, most people, like you take like Alex Hormozi, for example, he talks a lot about prepping for his videos, which I totally respect. And he has the mental fortitude to do that. But most people who are going to prep for their videos will never make the video. They'll spend all their time prepping, you know? So, yeah, I'm definitely in the, in the camp of like, just make the content and then make it better over time.

Like my content has gotten way better over time. It used to be trash. Now we've just refined it down to, what exactly do they want? And now we do mostly short form. I actually need to get back into doing some long form.

speaker-0 (09:34.158)

You're a freaking beast on the short form. mean, you're like, you're everywhere.

I'm efficient.

I think you've posted three short form videos like in the past 17 hours.

Yeah, probably. We do six a day.

Nice. And then how, what's, what's your scheduling look like? Cause you know, some of the builders that are looking to this is like, great looks, sounds like Brad's got it all figured out. Like, you know, I'm still in the weeds. Like how are you, how did you set that intentionality, you know, now to build where you are now, you were you doing time blocking? Were you doing, you know, a couple of days out of the month? What's your insight there?

speaker-1 (10:12.552)

I just do what's important and I do it right now. Like if something's important, I just do it right the fuck down. Like I don't wait. I just do it right now.

Do you have a place already set up to where, okay, I'm gonna do it right now. Oh, for content? Yeah.

I'm sorry. Yeah. So, so, so I thought it was a different question. Yeah. So on the content, dude, we have it so easy. I used to have to go and like record for hours because the videos, each video is 15 to 20 minutes long. which I do need to get back into doing that a little bit, but it's so easy with short form content. I, we will literally sit down and, I'll have my, my video guy.

Like if I'm doing reaction videos, my video guy will have 50 videos preloaded in a list where I'm just clicking the link for the next video. I click the link. I watch it. I react done. Next one. React done. Next one. React done. We will literally do 50 videos in probably like 70 minutes.

Wow. Yeah. And again, kind of going back to your point of not over preparing, these are what you would do naturally. You you're sitting on your phone, you're, you're, in the scroll and it's like, you're thinking these things already of like, wow, that's cool. Or that's not cool at all. Like that's bogus. It's not even real. You're just saying it out loud. And I love the way that you even do it, which is almost like, you're not really talking to anyone either. You're kind of just talking to yourself of like, nice. Wow. How have I never seen that before? Okay.

speaker-0 (11:40.512)

Okay, may use that one next, you know, I just learned something new.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, dude. It's, it's, what, you know, I got that idea from somebody who actually gave up on it. So I got that idea from Tigran Gertz. You know who Tigran is? No. Tigran, right. So write down, write down Tigran, T I G R A N G E R T Z. think you should try to get him on. I don't know him personally, but, he's probably got, he's got a big, big following.

No. No.

speaker-1 (12:13.902)

Hold on, me look. Tigran. He's got, yeah, he's got like 560,000 followers on Instagram. He runs a landscaping company in California. He's a really funny guy. He does a lot of content and it does really, really well. And for a while he started doing landscaper react videos. And I saw that and I was like, man, I gotta try that. Cause I saw he was in the studio. Cause the biggest problem with making content as a contractor is your job sites are all over the place.

So.

If you always have to go to the job to make content, by the way, most office content sucks. It doesn't do well at all. People hate it. It's just boring. I don't know. Like we have a video studio that costs me like 40 grand to set up. Most of the stuff we make in it does terrible. Just to be honest, it doesn't even, doesn't hold a candle to the job site videos. People love the job sites, man. You know, but

I saw this thing of Tigran doing this where he was reacting to a ridiculous video and we did it a little, I was like, okay, I would do this then this differently. And so we tried it and his, gave up on it. He stopped doing it months ago. Ours have just gone like a freaking rocket. Like we'll have one to a million views pretty much every week. We'll have at least one to a million plus views. Yeah.

You know, another thing that I've noticed with that is it also power of association, depending on what you're reacting to, is that I assume that this person knows about this, even though it's just a reaction video, but there is a, an association to what you put out there is, if they're sharing this and they're, they're putting this type of content out there, that person must do things like that. So if you're reacting to, you know, multimillion dollar home renovations,

speaker-0 (14:00.482)

be like, assume this guy does multimillion dollar renovations because this is he's putting out there. It's just kind of a natural progression of thought.

Yeah, yeah, it's a great point, especially if you have something to say about it. Like there's one where there's like this crazy heated driveway or something like that, right? And in the video and they did this really cool colored, like pink colored concrete, which is pretty crazy. I mean, it's pretty awesome. But I commented on it and I was like, I gave my two cents on like why you don't see more of it. And you know, blah, blah, blah. And I actually had a customer bring it up to me.

later on of like, Hey, you know, can we go see that project? I had to explain to them that it wasn't a project that we did. So you're right. Yeah. The association is powerful.

Yeah. I come from a commercial high-end videography background where we did a lot of this. We started 14 years ago. So a lot of the way that we operate on our marketing side is very kind of brand focused. know, how do you position yourself? You know, kind of be a little bit more intentional on that. all of it was the same playbook. We being in Kentucky, a lot of these companies that we work with were bourbon companies. And it was every single time it was same playbook of power of association.

of if I'm going to drink a certain bourbon, then what type of person do we want to portray ourselves with? So who is going to hold the bottle? And what kind of watch are they wearing? What kind of suit are they wearing? Or is this on a tailgate? And what kind of truck are they sitting on? All of those things of just power of association was so huge because that's what people identify with. Like, obviously I'm to build that type of home.

speaker-0 (15:48.172)

be my guy because that's the type of home I'm looking for towards, you know, maybe early on, you know, someone that's just getting started. If it's just a renovation project, it may not be that impressive, you know, eight foot ceilings, you know, some stuff that they're doing on a cabinetry side, but what a great opportunity to just, Hey, you don't, what you're, there's, still going to consume it. So whether it's your project or not, what an easy, what an easy win to say, Hey,

Give your two cents.

Yeah, and it's like, you know, people forget that DJ Khaled doesn't make his own music. You know what I mean?

Yeah. Exactly. He'll say, he'll say, yeah.

He'll say some BS line in a song and then he'll put himself as an artist. He'll say like another one. And then it'll be like, yeah, I'm the artist. You know, but it's like, he just takes other people's stuff and combines it in a tasteful way that people like the end product. But he, he's not the guy singing or rapping or whatever, you know? So it's, it's, it's, it's the same thing. People forget that the DJing of content, Gary V has talked about this for, for over a decade, by the way. So I'll give him credit.

speaker-1 (17:04.142)

When it started working, was like, why is this working? was like, oh, it's the DJing of concept. You know, you're like, I'm the DJ.

Man, I love that. That is really good insight for people that very low barrier, very low time, you said, loaded up, even if it's just a screen record, set up your phone on a tripod and then stitch it in a cap cut. mean, you, you've got zero overhead, but that's another thing too, is exercise that muscle because then it'll get easier and easier and easier. I think people put content and I saw this when we had the, the video production company, which was, you know, we've kind of moved away from it now.

Yeah

speaker-0 (17:42.126)

just because people aren't engaging with the high end stuff. But people put these blockers of, I've got to have this video guy. And then that's gotta, you know, I'm looking at, you know, high investment and what's my return and all that. Dude, just start, just start with your phone, start with what you have now and just talk about, doesn't have to be anything ridiculous, but just if you are on a job site, do a home tour, you know, get a little mic or don't get a mic, just, just start. Um, and then you start even with.

you know, with this podcast that we've started, it's just, just start and then you start refining over time and it'll get better and you'll see opportunities where you can, when you can do things better, but just start, you know, don't overthink it at all.

And I've done a couple of events like coaching contractors on marketing specifically. And the thing, the thing I always have them like, at one point we do a little like workshop type thing and I have them practice like making a video about something in the room. So I'm like, Hey, pick, make it, make a video about that window. I'm like, we'll, we'll delete it. We won't ever post it, but just try just like, it. And they always go super like big picture, like look at this whole thing. Whereas me.

I'm always pushing like okay go more specific talk about the type of screw that you have to use to install that window You know, it's like down to the tiny tiny little details Because when you get down to the tiny details you never run out of stuff to talk about and yeah And Pete you'd be surprised at how interesting people find those tiny details You know

Yeah. Especially if it's, you know, your, your client, know, your, your audience isn't other builders, but someone that's not in this every day. And they probably, you know, maybe some of these people are only in this position as far as getting their home renovated or getting a new home, you know, just a handful of times in their lifetime. Yeah. So just one time. So if you're talking the video I watched earlier, right before this call was the, folded tape, you know, of like, okay, this will crease and you know, this is why this over met. Okay.

speaker-1 (19:34.894)

most of them one time.

speaker-0 (19:47.912)

that no one's thinking about that on your client side. No one's thinking about that. And it's just, okay, that's interesting. Is this a nugget, you know, a real golden nugget that I'm going to carry on with my life? Probably not. But again, it's just something like that's, that's interesting. And then the more little intrigue points like that, you know, then the algorithm starts showing you to more and more. that's where the power of that short form is. This is pretty much just pure entertainment now of this is kind of cool. Yeah. I didn't know.

Yeah, it's definitely intended to be like, like infotainment for sure. Like information that's made to be entertaining. The other thing that I, I realized along the way that I think would be really insightful for people is like, if you're, if you're wondering what's interesting to people, the answer is what you can become interested in. And what I mean by that is like, you inject the interest into the video.

You follow? Like the person making the video injects the interest into it.

Like you're saying, here's a window. Okay. What about the window? What, why am I supposed to care about this? Yeah. Well, look, you know, look at these, the certain type of screw that is a non-rusting screw that is, okay. Now I'm, I'm thinking about something that I would never think about before or a potential issue of, you know, most of these windows are getting replaced because of these reasons. wow. Do I have those kinds of windows?

Yeah, that's right.

speaker-1 (21:20.962)

That's right. That's right. Yeah. And if you can get something that like is, is real to people, like, you know, why are your outlets slightly black around the edges. Well, because your thing, your, your outlet keeps shorting, which means that it's, there's too many things on that breaker. Yeah. Like you need to get your, you need to get rewired.

Then you're walking around your entire home like okay. I'm looking at every single outlet that I have now

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Well, let's talk a little bit about the process that have you have you did you dial that in? You you dialed in the marketing side on a process side. You touched on it a little bit, but what what did what were some immediate things that you wanted to refine just to make this customer journey the best possible?

Yeah, so the biggest thing that we changed is we used to have pretty much everything done by in-house labor. Like we self-performed almost everything. And in the first year and a half, we actually basically exited all of our in-house, like, big hammer swingers. And we went to completely a subcontractor base. And that immediately moved our quality of work up because we're now using specialists for their specialist roles rather than

speaker-1 (22:38.464)

generalists, know, like jack of all trades type thing. So like our drywall quality went way up, our painting quality went way up. like using a drywall guy and a specific painter. I also found that also our margins got better. Like our, what we actually made got better using subs because I now had a controlled cost. The clock was no longer running away my profit on the clock.

Which you'd almost think it would be the opposite of, maybe I'm going to have less margins because I'm spending more on the trades than if we just did it ourselves. But you don't really, normally you don't have a, like you said, the clock can easily run away when you win, they're on your own team because you're not looking as closely as that, as it is of, you know, I'm contracting this person to do this job.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. excuse me. And the, yeah, the, the other piece of it is like, jobs started finishing faster as well. Like we wouldn't have things that, cause if you look at it, like, now I will say now I have a plumbing business where our plumbers, we do pay them hourly and we have an electrical business where we pay our electricians hourly.

That works. Like our plumbing company makes money and our electrical company, it's a brand new company. It's probably like three months old. It doesn't really make money, but it's like we're getting close. But like with plumbing, because it's a single trade, we know how long everything should take, right? We have scheduling rules of thumb for like how much we're charging versus how long we allot for the stuff. So that's pretty closely dialed in. But I found that when you had

In construction, there's so many different trades on a remodel or a home build. If you look at it, there's probably on any given project, 20 to 40 trades, depending on how complicated the build is. that, for one crew to do all of that and know how to do all of it competently, it's kind of an unreal ask. You're asking them to be freaking Hercules.

speaker-0 (24:42.401)

Yeah.

speaker-0 (24:58.542)

and taking aside if there's an issue that's a little bit more of a complicated issue to solve.

Right. Yeah.

And then maybe then too, you're again bringing on another subcontractor to try to figure that one out. Yeah. Where's kind of your sweet spot right now as far as on a building side? What are you guys building? Is it more custom? Is it more renovation? What's that ratio look like right now?

But by number of projects, we do a lot more renovations than custom home builds, just by number. Like I think we built like three or four homes last year and we probably renovated 70 or 80 homes.

Are these renovations with additions or is this just a change in layout and design and it's just more of a matter of time?

speaker-1 (25:45.646)

Good question. It's probably, I'd say at least 40 % of those were included additions. So we probably did 20 or 30 additions last year of varying sizes. You like I can think of one guy's house where we added a roof and a half bath for his pool. And then there's another one where we added 4,000 square feet to a house, know, gutted an existing 4,000 square feet and then added another 4,000, you know.

Okay.

speaker-0 (26:14.318)

And this is in the Tampa, St. Pete kind of that. Okay. So no one's wanting to give up the real estate. it's, I've, I've already invested in being here. Like I'm sitting on, on a gold mine. So like, I don't want to leave. I just want something a little different. So it makes sense that it's not like, okay, I've got my perfect vision for what I want. Now I just need a place because there's not a lot of places in Florida. If you already love where you live. It's like, mean, there's, there's

You can't really find that. You know, you're going to have to go to more of rural area if, you're wanting to add, you know, have a 8,000 square foot home or something like that. just change where you are now, you know, dial that in, just because the ground they're sitting on is so valuable.

Yeah. And, and the thing that makes it more and more valuable over time is that like Tampa Bay, like specifically we're in Pinellas County. So we go over to Tampa as well, but Pinellas County has a very interesting, you could call it a problem or opportunity, whichever it's different, depending on where you sit for us, it's a huge opportunity. There's water on both sides of Pinellas County. literally a peninsula and it gets really thin at the top.

And it's all already fully built up. Like there's houses everywhere. There's, basically no land left. So now you're in a situation where, and most of the housing stock, by the way, is more than 30 years old. So the renovation market here just keeps climbing and climbing and climbing and climbing. Like it's just like a never ending increase. now, you know, you, you know, a renovation market at some point turns into a tear down rebuild market.

which is what we're now starting to see happen. The hurricane last year accelerated a lot of that or two years ago now. like we got a couple of tear down rebuilds from the hurricane. And yeah, where it just doesn't make sense to do a build back, like to build back the house the way it was, because this person has the money. They want to build a nicer house and they'd rather build it up elevated where it's never going to flood again. So a ton of those got pulled forward in time.

speaker-0 (27:58.48)

really?

speaker-0 (28:20.29)

Yeah.

speaker-1 (28:24.866)

due to the storms. yeah, it's an interesting market, man. It's a really, it's a good place to do business.

Yeah. My wife's aunt has a restaurant in Pinellas Park. nice. Stone soup. Kind of a pub and sandwich shop. we go there quite often. It's a nice part. It's not as busy, you know, as when you go over to the Tampa side. But like you said, you drive around and you really do see how age the inventory is. I know exactly what you're talking about.

Yeah. And there's no land either. it's very

Yeah, it's, it's, it's constrained. And the other thing is there's positive, population growth as well. People, more people are moving in that are going out. yeah, yeah, yeah, it's, it's true. It's true. A lot of people come in and stay. Not a lot, not a lot of people go. but the other thing about it is dude, when DeSantis gets this, this property tax thing done, it's going to go to another level.

How would you ever leave?

speaker-1 (29:39.822)

It's going to go so crazy, people don't even understand how crazy it's going to go. It's happening. 100 % it's happening. Yeah. It's like, if you look at it, it's one of the most popular proposals in the history of government. You realize there's nowhere on earth that doesn't have property tax.

How realistic do you think that is? Really?

It's gonna be.

speaker-1 (30:08.046)

other than like the Cayman Islands, I think are the only ones.

Yeah. The logic follows so well as I mean, it's just insane that the property tax that gets paid in Florida. And I think it, have to factor that into, you know, for us, we do some investing and really short-term rentals. it's like, that's a, it's such a ding out of your cap rate. What you're spending in insurance and property tax, especially when it's like, well, these are the markets that people want to, you know, vacation in, but then you're looking at, well, this is got

flooded within a hundred years ago. So now my, my flood insurance is just astronomical because a tiny little portion of my property, you know, flooded within the past hundred years, you know, little things like that. it overwhelmingly popular to either eliminate, reduce, whatever it ends up landing. but that'll be super exciting to see, you know, for on an investing side on, on a, on a, you know, just a, a residential side that's.

Yeah, that'll be an interesting thing to follow.

Yeah, it'll be good. In terms of your original question was about process. So I talked about moving to subcontractors. The other thing that has taken some time to get actually implemented, but it's been, we've been doing it for like the last three or four years now, is we do something that's a bit odd in the space, but works really, really well for us. It's that we name our price to our subcontractors.

speaker-1 (31:42.816)

So we don't put something out to bid. We already know what we should be paying by trade. We've just done the research. We know what we should be paying per square foot of concrete to form and finish. We know what we should be paying for hanging and finishing a sheet of drywall level three, four, five, right? Different textures. so we quote to our customers based on those prices.

and then we put it out to the subcontractor saying, hey, here's what we got, you want it or not. Tell us.

Are you using a lot of the same trades?

Yeah, yeah, we do find that we do get a lot of repeat business to our subcontractors. Like we probably only have one or two drywall subcontractors that we really use a lot, maybe three. know, tile, it's probably two.

And they already have that expectation of way, whatever the project is, I know you guys are going to take care of me. You know, you're not, you're not just looking at the very bottom dollar, trying to see what you can get the most out of. you've building that rapport over the years of, whatever you got, yeah, give it to me. I'll check availability, you know, but if, if I'm able to do it, of course, you know, we'll do it for you guys. Are there things that you're doing to strengthen those relationships with your subs?

speaker-1 (33:03.618)

Yeah, you know, it's funny. I actually intend to do more. We don't do enough to be honest with you. Probably the biggest thing that we do is we pay. We pay often. Like we run our sub payments every week and typically if they're done the prior week, they're getting paid the next week. there's probably about a seven day lag, assuming that everything is cool on the project.

Like if a client isn't willing to pay, I'm like, okay, like stop all the sub payments on this project. We need to figure out what's going on. Cause I don't know who caused the upset, right? So I'm like, okay, hold, you know, hold all the payments and that's, you know, they understand that that's in the sub agreement. It's, it's made known and so paying regularly and fast really helps.

And then just communicating with them in a non-bullshit way. Like if there is a payment problem with a client and like let's say we've given a subcontractor $300,000 worth of demo work and there's like a $5,000 payment that's held up. We're like, hey, listen, man, don't freak out.

Remember, we've already paid you $300,000 over the last 18 months. Like, you really think we're gonna just blow this up over five grand? Like, we got a lot more business to do. It's not like we're just done. So, usually when we tell them that, when we put it in perspective, we're like, hey, dude, have we ever not paid you? No. Okay, well, what are the odds we're gonna start now?

Realist, I know you're scared. Like I know everybody's like, people just freak out. But when you actually talk them through the logic of like, hey, we paid you $300,000 in prior work for the past 18 months, we've had a great relationship. Like what are the odds we're really gonna blow it up now? And what are the odds that we're gonna do that knowing we're gonna need you literally in two weeks on another project?

speaker-0 (35:04.694)

Yeah. And like you said, communication, just be, just be open, honest, in a non BS way. And then also I'm sure that translates to how you talk with your clients too is, frequent communication. If there's a problem, we're going to work through it. Nothing's unsolvable. are you, what's the frequency look like on a communication side? You know, I'm assuming renovations are naturally, you know, you're

you're in their space, you know, unless they're, unless they're leaving for a couple of months. But, is there anything intentional that you do to make sure that, you know, you're communicating well, or you're doing little things along the way just to kind of strengthen that, that customer relationship?

Yeah. So on the customer side.

There's a mandated weekly update email from the project manager. Like they have to send them at the end of every, every Friday from like two to 4 PM. Our office is full of all the PMs come in and they, they do their weekly summary email basically of a, Hey, what happened this week? And then what's coming up, you know, and what is the updated schedule look like? And they do all their schedule changes then, like they, they changed their, they drag the, the events on their Gantt chart.

which then levels out the rest of the project. We use a software called Builder Trend, which has been fantastic for us. Yeah, it's really good. We do it for all of our purchasing for subs. Like we do purchase orders. For every trade, for every project, we issue a purchase order with the scope and whatever. That's all inside of Builder Trend. And then the schedule is there as well.

speaker-0 (36:26.286)

A lot of guys using that today.

speaker-1 (36:45.568)

And we have it set up in the beginning so that all the schedules linked, right? Like we the critical path all linked up. So the PM just drags, if something got delayed, he just drags it by however many days it got delayed and then it pushes everything else. So they can then tell the customer, hey, we got delayed by three days on our cabinets or whatever. Here's how it affects the rest of the project and your completion date.

Nice. Any other softwares you're using that you're finding are real helpful.

Uh, yep. Um, Excel, Microsoft Excel. But in reality, actually we do a lot, we do a lot, a lot, lot in, uh, in Google sheets. Like, dude, you can, you can do amazing things with a spreadsheet. Like there's not, there's not a lot that you can need to do that you can't do with a spreadsheet.

Well, Jim and I it's kind of changed it too, as far as the chat, you know, chatting with your own spreadsheets or documents. we're, we're using it a lot more of just here's an entire PDF that's been uploaded or, know, here's a, here's a document where we're tracking stuff. And I'm, I'm going to go in, I'm just going to chat with Jim and I within the doc and ask it different questions about the sheet. That's been a huge, a huge thing, mostly on like a really long.

a PDF, you here's an extremely long document that we're just trying to get through. We're trying to find some answers. We're not trying to just, you know, command F and find, you know, different parts of it. We're trying to ask logical questions. And then Jim and I is able to actually give you an intelligent answer based on that document or base based on that sheet, which is super cool. Yeah. AI is, we're, pretty tuned into AI and how it's, you know, changing. We're, we're trying to trying to keep up.

speaker-1 (38:16.471)

wow, yeah, that is cool.

speaker-0 (38:25.046)

you know, as best as possible, but it just seems to be this, the spider web that is, I mean, it's intentional, you know, of course, but you know, it's, it's in everything. But then the kind of the question is out of all of the, out of everything that's out there, you know, how are we dialing this in best for builders and construction companies so that you're not subscribing to every new thing that comes out.

Yeah. Well, the biggest, the biggest thing for a contractor that it can help you with in my experience is the legal side. Like, you know, it's, it's, it's the best lawyer ever. You know, like it, it, you, can literally give it a contract. Like you can give it your contract and say, okay, Hey, you're a really, really good $2,000 an hour New York attorney.

tell me how you would fuck me over with this contract. And you can write fuck me over and it will give you an answer. Sorry, I to delete that. like you can give it that prompt and then it will tell you and then you can say, okay, good. Now give me edits that will prevent you from doing that.

Yeah. Right. Yeah. That's, don't know if a lot of people are using it. They definitely should use it like this, which is give me the perspective of the person that I am. I am, you know, trying to work with. So, you know, I'm a, I'm a, you know, a customer that I'm in a challenging position. I've been told by this construction company, you know, work it backwards so that you're almost reading what's in their mind. you know, it's just,

It's, it has all access to everything. So every personality type, every, knows that. you know, why not lean into that, which, whichever AI platform you use, if it's chat, GBT or, or grok or whichever, you know, fine, fine, whichever one you want to use. again, I mean, on a basic side, they're all going to be the same as far as being able to tackle that logic with here's the perspective that you've told me to give you. now.

speaker-0 (40:21.518)

we're able to kind of have this two way conversation of, what if I said this or, what if you were thinking this? It's just insane. When it first showed up on the market, you know, several years ago, I was like, this is the most important day. I told my wife, I was like, this is the most important day of our life is the, when we first pulled up that chat, GBT bar and we're asking questions. Yes. And it was just like,

You know, back then, mean, now it seems real slow, but you know, it was taking, you know, 15 seconds to like ride out its response. And it was just like mind completely blown. But I, we're actually getting our countertops redone right now. And the guy that came out, he came and did the measurements. You know, he gave us our, our, our list of, know, different materials that, that we could look at and then instantly took a picture. Chad GPT has done a.

Yeah.

speaker-0 (41:12.832)

has done a partnership with Adobe. So their photography side and generation has gotten a lot more refined. So he snapped a photo, said, you know, they're looking at this type of courts. And then, you know, it mapped it out within seconds. He's like, you know, how does this look like? It looks amazing. You know, let's, the visualization side, I think is huge. And as someone that's, you know, maybe doesn't have a huge team, use all of those tools available.

You know, that's, the more that a customer can visualize it, it's easier to, you know, maybe communicate some things that more challenging or more abstract on a project.

Yeah, agreed. Yeah. Yeah, we definitely need to use it more.

Yeah. Would you have a policy for how you handle some bad news with, with either you to a sub or you to a customer?

yeah. mean, my, my policy is just rip the bandaid off. Why, you know, why enter time into it? Like, like I get this with my staff sometimes where they want to talk internally about the bad news for hours and hours and hours and never tell the client. And I'm like, dude, you know, they, it's like, somehow they like feel like they've done something if they've talked about it internally a lot.

speaker-0 (42:14.744)

Yeah.

speaker-1 (42:41.154)

But they haven't actually done the thing. Cause the thing is tell the person who it affects, let them know, you know? And mostly it's stupid stuff like, Hey, the, the, the County decided that we need a, a vertical wall dry-in inspection, even though there's no vertical wall dry-in, right? Like there's no, like there is none, but they said we needed an inspection for it. So now we have to actually.

Yeah.

speaker-1 (43:07.946)

submit a product approval code for something like, and we have to do this permit bullshit and it's going to slow us down because we're supposed to be, you know, closing up. And, it's like, okay, just tell them, you know, and, and the, the other thing that I find is like, often, people are, are, are hesitant to assign responsibility where it belongs. Like,

they, instead of saying like, like let's say a cabinet order is delayed. And instead of saying, hey, the cabinet order is delayed because the cabinet company did something wrong or screwed up their logistics. We don't know exactly what they did, but they did tell us this delivery date. Now they're telling us this delivery date. They'll be like, hey, the cabinet order is delayed. I don't know why it was delayed, but we'll get on it as soon as possible. It's like, no, no, tell them that.

It was the cabinet company that delayed it. know, it's like we've, we've ordered these things months ago and now they're telling us they're going to be delayed. There's a lot of times I find that in delivering bad news, people get themselves into trouble by not just giving the person, all the information. Like they'll, they'll hold back information that if you just told the person the full story,

it would actually make you look better. I'm like, why would you hold back information that's gonna make you look good? It's so dumb. People are so self-effacing, I think is the word, like make yourself look bad. So that's a little crazy to me. And then the other thing is like, you're just giving somebody bad news, dude, just tell them. Just like, hey, bad news, we gotta do blah, blah, blah. And then the person's probably gonna be like, okay, well, fine, do it.

Yeah.

speaker-0 (44:49.591)

Yeah.

speaker-0 (45:04.076)

Yeah. Is there anything I can do about it? Nope. Okay. Maybe piss for a little bit, but if there's nothing I can do, there's nothing I can do. I have found too that, and we use this ourselves as if it's the relationship is built off of here's a, here's a problem. let's, let's agree that, you know, here's the problem that we're trying to solve for.

And then you and I together are going to go on this journey together to solve this problem. And then there's going to be almost like the hero's journey. There's going to be some issues along the way that we're going to work through, but we're working on them together. But like we are doing this together. It is not this in between where you have something that we're trying to solve for. Here's you over here and then we're in the middle and we're just kind of acting as ambassador between the two. If it's more of we're doing this together, then it's easier.

just in all the communication, it's easier to kind of cross those bridges when you get to it of like, hey, why aren't we getting so many leads? And then it's like, we're kind of acting as a guide of, know, this is what we're seeing in the market or it's an election year and there's, your cost per lead has gone way up because there's a lot more money in the market. it's not so like the focus is on the problem and less on us as far as like, what are you doing wrong? And it's like, a lot of times, you know, we're

we're just kind of the guide, you know, and I think builders are a little bit in the same position of, you know, we're facilitating so many things, but you know, we're doing this together to, we're responsible for a lot of things that we don't have full control over, which is, be a real frustrating thing too, is, know, this is on the cabinet people, know, yeah, we're trying to work through this, but, you know, we're here to just facilitate and, and, you know, bring you the news.

So like you said, yeah, open communication, being honest, don't hold anything back. I think that's a great nugget for people.

speaker-1 (46:53.984)

Yeah.

Who do you look for inspiration? Something that drives you. This could be on a leadership side. This could be within the industry, you personally, but different people, different companies that you look to to just improve what you do in the day to day.

Yeah, good question. Well, unfortunately, there's not a lot of big construction companies out there. know, like there's, there's maybe like, I think there's only two residential construction companies, like remodeling companies that have ever made it over a billion dollars. One of them is West Shore Home. And then I forget the...

The other one, the name escapes me, but I would say, mean, look, the real answer to the question is I look at things like if you Google like construction market size Tampa Bay, right? It's $10 billion in my local market. That inspires me. I'm like, hey, you know.

15 million is not even close to 10 billion. It's not even close to 1%. 1 % of 10 billion is $100 million. That would be 1 % of my market, my local market. So that inspires me. But in terms of people and companies, I really like Grant Cardone. I think Grant sets a really good example.

speaker-1 (48:37.422)

And I think, you know, I've gotten to meet him personally a couple of times. He's, he's the real deal. Yeah. He's a real deal man. Like, yeah, he's, he's definitely a good, good example. He's, he can be a bit, you got to realize he's very late in, his character arc. I mean, he's still got a lot he's going to do, but he's, he's late in his character arc. mean, he, makes so much money at this point and has so many opportunities that.

It's so far from where most people are that it seems unattainable. But I have close friends. I have a close friend who recently came in as a partner on our companies. He's got probably all of his holdings together are worth probably close to like a billion dollars. So he's like knocking on the door of being a billionaire.

He's an inspiration for me. He mentors me without knowing it, you know?

On a business model side too of just, know, what, what's being, what's, what are you acquiring or, know, what are you scaling? Cause a lot of that too, just evaluation side is, you know, you have to have, you have more than one thing. You know, you have the spider web that's, know, it sounds like you have even started that, but you know, you've got electrical company, you've got a plumbing company, you've got this construction company, you know, you just, you, you build this portfolio that then, you know, all kind of works in, in, in sync.

But you also have a lot of the same processes, especially if it's a similar business, you know, there's a lot of those, those SOPs that are kind of get shared amongst those different businesses. So then it's not like I'm starting something brand new. It's like, not really, I'm just kind of changing some of the wording, but you know, as far as the internal workings, a lot of it's the same.

speaker-1 (50:28.748)

Yeah. Yeah. And, and the thing that really makes it like really easy to manage multiple companies is like, can see just in the core of my screen here, we put everything we care about on a graph. Like any, anything we care about, we graph it week by week. Like if I care about my income, I need to put my income on a graph every, every week. I need to plot it on a graph and, I need to see, it going like this or is it going like this?

Or is it flat, which by the way, plot means spoiler alert, you're flat. Eventually that's going to become down.

Yeah. You can't improve. You can't improve anything that you don't track and you can't prove anything that you don't measure. And that's a lot of what we do for our clients is just to give them visibility on what they're doing because they kind of feel like, I'm doing a whole lot, but you know, this isn't working. And a lot of it is emotional. And it's like, no, actually it is working, you know, just because, you know, you may have had a bad day or a bad week. You're, you're kind of

You're kind of putting everything on to all of your efforts and being like, Hey, it's not working. It's like, look at the numbers. we, we do, you know, all kinds of like tracking dashboards just to see, Hey, here's what you can, you can change the view. But, it also is a good accountability to say, Hey, we missed it this week. You know, what do we need to do different? Because, you know, what, what we were doing is not working or here's a trend that we're seeing that over the past month.

you know, content that you are putting out, it's not converting. So let's change gears. Let's do something different because what you're doing is not working.

speaker-1 (52:05.1)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The, like the other thing is like, if you're looking at, if you're putting something on a graph and it's going up over time, like the, saying, if it ain't broke, don't fix it applies. Like first figure out what made it go up. Like what's happening. That's making that thing increase over time. Strengthen that. And then don't fuck with it.

That's the biggest thing that's the biggest one of the biggest things that good business owners screw up is they get something that works and then they change it It's like dude If something's working don't change it. I've had the same ad set running for I think two years now and it still gets me like I Mean it still gives me like $50 leads, which for me that's like a good cost per lead for me for custom home build You know like it and I just leave it I just let it run. I don't touch it

yeah.

speaker-1 (53:02.114)

You know, I try other stuff on the side, but I don't mess with what I know works.

Yeah. But, do you feed, do you feed the budget? Like once it's working, are you increasing the budget just to get more visibility on, what's already working? Yeah.

Yeah, well, I increase it to get more, more leads.

Because you already know it's like, okay, well, let's run this for a couple of weeks. But you know, if our, if our costs per, um, our cost per lead is, is still at $50, it doesn't matter if we spend $5 or a hundred thousand dollars, just the volume is going to change. You know, and that's what we're going to track is that that number is still the same. But yeah, I think I have run into this a little bit as like, if you know, I'm, I'm my expenses more. It's like, no, no, no. The

your, your leads, I mean, you should be converting these people, you know? So, I mean, maybe something's broken along the way, but you know, after you have the volume of people, once you see what's working, that's when you pour the gas on it. That's when you spend more, more money to get the volume. And then you start refining the conversion as far as the lead conversion, you know, how many of these people actually booked and then what type of projects were these two, you know, cause another thing is other marketing companies that, know,

speaker-0 (54:17.24)

people will send us, here's, here's what someone else is doing for us. Can you just review this as a, as a, you know, another I, I to, to see what's going on. And it's like, yeah, they're, they're bringing in leads, but these are low quality leads, you know, or this is a really small project. And some of that is, you know, messaging or what you're putting out there, but wouldn't you rather less volume, but higher quality? Yeah, of course you would, you know, we've got a plumbing client and

It's like, yeah, you could go out for $300, you know, toilet leak or something like that, but wouldn't you rather do a hot water heater or a tankless hot water heater and get less volume, but you're more.

speaker-0 (55:04.462)

Well, yeah, I probably should check those ads make sure that those are make sure that those are hitting

I mean honestly if you put it in an ad it'll probably perform. Because most people say hot water heater but...

problem.

It's all search volume. Hey, what are people searching for? This is another thing too, is what you're offering may not be the same as what people are searching for.

Yeah. So show up, show up for their typos. because at the end of the day, it's, the same service.

speaker-1 (55:41.494)

It's true. Yeah, that's totally true. Yeah. And you get into things like for us, it's like renovation, rehab, remodel, rebuild. What's another one? Makeover. Like there's all these different terms that people use to describe what we do. yeah, you're totally right. It's like, you just need to show up where, like you need a message to.

whatever people are calling it.

Yeah, we have another client. do these outdoor lifts. So an outdoor cargo lift. it's a non, you know, it's not ADA compliant. So, you you're not supposed to ride in it. Of course people do, but they're like, yeah, these things are, you know, cargo lifts and everything was around cargo lifts. So I looked up search volume. like, yeah, people are calling these outdoor elevators for my groceries. And they're like, yeah, well, these aren't elevators. I'm like, it doesn't matter.

If you're not, if these ads aren't being shown for outdoor elevators, no one's searching the correct terminology. So it really doesn't matter. That's right. You know, we still want to show up for, you know, we're not going to put this obviously on the website, but how people are finding you, you know, gotta know, cause that's where you want your ads to be.

Yeah, yeah.

speaker-0 (57:00.95)

What would you tell a builder that's a little hesitant? They, you know, this is, I've never run ads. Everything's been referral based. You know, I'm just going to, I would like the scale, but I don't have a belief that paid ads really work. I tried it for a little bit. Nothing came out of it. What would you tell that builder?

Well, mean, paid ads is definitely a trial and it's like a trial and error type game. If you think you're just gonna run one ad, nevertheless, like one set of ads, like for us, when I'm trying to figure out what works, we'll launch 50 or 70 different individual ads to find out which one works, you know?

And we the algorithm figure it out.

I was about to say, yeah, you're letting Facebook figure out, here's all of our different creatives you figure out, but our ad set is going to just reward the best ad.

Yeah, so I mean if if you you know tried but didn't get anything out of it It means you didn't try enough things Because paid advertising works all the biggest companies on earth run paid ads and they that's for you know That's that way for a reason it's because you can literally get in front of the person who you want to hire you like boom and you just pay a little bit for and You know the the other thing about it is like

speaker-1 (58:31.502)

I have this thing that I love to tell my sales team and it's that all leads suck. I'm just like, dude, just go on the basis of all leads suck. Like then that way you can, you can just focus on getting more shitty leads, right? Like that's what I focus on. Like for me, I'm like, okay, I know all the leads are shit. How do I just get more shitty leads? You know?

Like, cause, cause here's the thing, when you start hiring salespeople, they're going to tell you the leads suck anyways. Like you're going to hear it when you dig in, by the way, I'm being, I'm being sarcastic. When you dig in, the leads would be great. You'll like go in and you'll, you'll find like, this person had us out to see them in their $3 million home. It's like, they weren't qualified again. Why they're in a $3 million house. How are they not qualified? They're like, they.

They have bad price expectations. Of course they have bad price expectations. Welcome to planet earth. Nobody wants to spend money even though there's a super abundance of it.

But everybody wants the result. Yeah. That's where that's where your sales becomes a service.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So get over it and then get back in there and find out what that person really needs to give it to them. Cause they're, you know, they're qualified. So it's, you know, I just go on the basis of all leads suck. I'm like, might as well have more shitty leads and fewer shit. At least we have more people.

speaker-0 (59:56.494)

That's right. Do you have any rules around like how fast your follow up is or is that different between the salespeople?

No, no. So we go for within 60 seconds of when the lead comes in.

And what about weekends? What about weekends?

Yeah, weekends, it doesn't really apply. mean, it, it, that kind of comes down to, to your hiring. If you can get a person on that job, like your reception person to answer the call over the weekend, then that's great. but yeah, even if it's only a text message within 60 seconds, it increases the contact rate way higher.

Like you just get in touch with more of your leads if you contact them super fast. doesn't, you know, I don't know what it does to close rate necessarily, but if you're going to like actually have more phone conversations with people, you're going to wind up closing more deals.

speaker-0 (01:00:49.206)

Yeah. Well, they're also, they are, you're not the only person that they're reaching out to. If it's, if it's a smart person too, you know, it's like, I'm just shopping around and I'm going to see, I'm, I'm shopping around. I'm going to check, you know, six, seven people, depending on what market you're in. So the really the first person, and that's where a lot of the, I don't know if you guys are doing any automations.

But even a simple automation, we do this for, you know, weekend stuff is, Hey, we've got your message. It's in the inbox. You know, we're returning early on Monday. We'll be sure to reach out if they don't have like an AI answering a lot or something like that. But that's not for, for everybody. That's a, that's all another trial and error too, because that can be a deterrent more than it is a, a convenience.

Yeah, yeah,

Yeah. Well, man, this has been great. Anything else you want to add or something that we didn't touch on?

Um, I mean, look like as, uh, as a contractor, your, your marketing is the most important thing you can do. Like there, there is nothing more important to, um, a contractor. Like if you're an owner or a CEO of contracting company, the most important thing you can do is market. Like literally I have time blocked like right after this where I'm, I'm going to launch a bunch of new ads, you know? So it's,

speaker-1 (01:02:18.518)

It's the most important hat that you wear. Nobody else is gonna do it for you. So you gotta make sure it happens.

You're doing the marketing in-house.

Yeah, yeah.

Nice. If someone doesn't have that skill, you know, working with another company, you know, where do you see that being a benefit?

Yeah. I mean, it's like the most, the most important thing is not that you do it necessarily. The most important thing is that you make sure it gets done. You know, so whether that's you having a team to do it, are you hiring a team to do it? Whatever. It's, it's six to one half dozen of another, like marketing is one of the only things that we don't sub out, you know, everything else we sell out.

speaker-0 (01:03:01.186)

Yeah.

So it's, you know, it's just like hiring a subcontractor and it's very, you know, and marketing firms are very results based. So it's just a matter of like, you need to be able to think big for yourself because you can't outsource thinking big.

Maybe a little bit AI, but just as a...

maybe. Maybe.

All right, that's a wrap for this conversation. If you know someone who should be on this podcast, send us an email at info at meridianpursuit.com and nominate them. We're always looking for great stories to share. And if you got something out of this episode, please leave us a quick review on the show. And if you're watching on YouTube, tap like and subscribe so we can share this with more people. I'm Jesse Sampley. Thanks for listening and I'll see you on the next one.