Asa Hunt: Sky's the limit. When you get in business, it's really hard, but that light at the end of the tunnel, the doors that it opens up, just keeps things so fun, so exciting. Getting that first win is just everything, and once you get that first win, you're like, oh, if you can do it once, that's the hardest job. I joined an SEO Facebook Ads Company when I just started. We ran the ads at the worst time of the year and I was like, oh, this isn't gonna work. So I quit that relationship. But now we're running Facebook ads again and we're absolutely cleaning house.

Austin Gray: Hey, welcome back to another episode of the OWNR OPS podcast. I'm your host, Austin Gray, and in this episode, ASA Hunt is joining me who owns a painting business in Denver in this episode. AA is going to share the exact Facebook strategy that he's using to get leads and book more painting jobs, and his strategy is very similar to ours.

This Facebook ad strategy right now in 2025 is the one that is working. I've seen multiple other people, and since recording this episode, I've actually talked to other owners in different local service industries like soft washing, like Christmas lights, who are using the same type of strategy. If you wanna learn the Facebook ad strategy that is working right now in 2025, listen to this whole episode and we talk in further detail, more about this kind of stuff in our free school community for local service business owners. If you haven't signed up now, you can join for free. It's at. school.com. That's skool.com/ownrops skool.com/ownrops. Let's jump into the episode. 

 Asa Hunt: Looking at starting this business, I think it was you and Brian Beers are the ones I was following that were hammering the, oh, like the home service business. Keep it simple. Just do it well and you can make money. And I was like, yeah, that makes sense. Let's give it a go here. 

Austin Gray: Cool. Yeah, we've engaged back and forth a few times over the last, it's probably been a couple years, right? 

 Asa Hunt: Yeah, yeah, I think so. Yeah. 

Austin Gray: So why don't you introduce yourself. We're already on record here, so why don't you introduce yourself to the audience, tell us who you are and what business you run and we'll start there.

 Asa Hunt: Sounds like a plan, man. So, my name's Asa Hunt. I own Bighorn Painting here in Nevada, Colorado. It's a suburb of Denver. I started this about a year and a half ago after getting laid off from my tech sales job for the second summer in a row. So I was kinda like, man, I get tired of tech sales. It's the same nonsense in every company you go to.

So I was, I really wanted to start my own, uh, business, but my original plan was to buy a business. 'cause that's like super cool right now. And it was taking too long. It was a couple months. I was like, man, I'm no closer to the goal. So then I was like, all right, what about a franchise, like the middle ground between buying and starting?

I was looking at franchises so much, so many of 'em looked just shady without a lot of value add, and it's 120 grand to operate a painting franchise in one city. I was like, man, I don't like that either. So I found a business coach that specializes in painting, and the business model was pretty simple, easy to get your head around, fairly low risk.

So I was like, man, this seems like it could have some legs here. So I got going on that in October, 2023, launch the business like end of November a month or so later. Got a website, some basic stuff. Got our first job. About a week or two later, early December, and it was a hot mess. We got through it and survived somehow, and we've been off to the races ever since. I know you said you like to talk numbers and stuff, right? I think something like that, yeah. 

‍Austin Gray: Yeah. So I saw this last week. You posted, what was it, 48 k this week in jobs? 

Asa Hunt: Yeah, man. So our first year we did 300,000, which. You know, nothing crazy. If you start a franchise, they typically aim between three and 4,000. So I'm like, oh, I did that mostly by myself without having to pay the franchise. So I was pretty happy about that. But, uh, we did 300,000 our first year, about 40% gross margins. You really wanna be closer to 50. That's what I'm working on this year, is getting the margins up. But yeah, I made that, I posted that tweet.

We're gonna do probably 48K next week through three residential jobs, and we're starting a big commercial job, so it's just nice timing. That'll be our biggest week, but I'm not sure what we're pacing at this year. I just keep my head down and keep going. But I think we're, yeah, I think we're at like 200 or two 50, and it's only April, so we're growing at a good clip here.

Austin Gray: I recently got back from launching a land clearing business down in Austin, and this last winter I launched a snow shoveling business alongside Bear Claw. And in both businesses I've implemented jobber as a way for us to efficiently manage quoting job schedules and invoicing, and even collecting online payment. Why? Because it's worked so well for us in BearClaw and it's saved us a ton of time and headache. So if you are looking for a software that can help you manage the back end of your business, look no further than Jobber, you can visit go.getjobber.com/ownrops O-W-N-R-O-P-S. 

Austin Gray: It's fantastic. It's definitely worth celebrating. So like in the early days, I, I can specifically remember those first jobs when you win and you see the check clear, you're just like, oh my gosh, this is real. At what point did that happen for you? 

 Asa Hunt: Yeah, I get that first win is just everything. 'cause once you get that first win, you're like, oh, if you can do it once, that's the hardest job, man. I remember meeting these painters. And I am like, man, I have no idea if these guys can really paint. I have no idea what I'm about to get into. I have, I've never painted anything. So trying to sell that first job to the homeowner, you don't wanna just lie to people and be shady or whatever. So trying to learn about painting enough to where like, all right, I know what goes into it so we can sell these jobs.

All that kind of a thing. It was hard. The job did go off the rails for a number of reasons. Not really related to paint, but so that was a good lesson learned. Don't let subcontractors do all kinds of other trades that you haven't seen them do. Like they did some electric in these people's house. They messed it up.

We agreed to paint some people's countertops with this absolutely atrocious kit from Home Depot that will put like a rock texture on their counters. It was horrible. It clogged the drain with paint chips, like everything that you don't wanna deal with on a first job and get dragged on for two months, going back and forth with this lady. It was terrible. 

Austin Gray: Oh, man. It sounds like you got the learning lesson out of the way. 

Asa Hunt: Yeah, for the most part. Then our next job was a couple weeks later, and that one was like for 15 grand and that one was smooth, straightforward. I made good money on it. I was like, all right, man, I'm hooked. Now we gotta go out there and make this thing happen.

Austin Gray: Sweet. So how did you think about going to get those first jobs? You said you hired a business coach, but how did you go find those first ones? 

‍

 Asa Hunt: So there's two things I think are pretty underrated. I know everybody hates Thumbtack and Angie's List, but Thumbtack worked well for us. That first year, man, we maintained probably like a nine x return on the spend there.

So for your first year, that was instrumental in getting a handful of first jobs. We probably got, I don't know, like 30 grand from Thumbtack. I spent maybe. Like 1800 bucks or something on those leads and it, they're super annoying. It works once you get the numbers going, but really the best thing to do is get on those neighborhood Facebook groups, just try to tune in and say, oh, who's looking for painters?

Send 'em a message. Comment in the thread. So just doing that, we probably did another like 30 to 40,000. Just me doing that, that doesn't scale super well. 'cause you gotta be plugged into Facebook all day. But paying for leads like Thumbtack is a great way to start. Obviously networking. There's a lot of things I would've done different if I started over, but I think those are good ways to get going for sure. 

Austin Gray: This is the second week in a row. I've heard people talking about Facebook groups. Locally. So listeners, if you're listening and you're wanting to start, I would take note of that because there is some power in that and I've been paying attention here in our local Facebook group and people do it.

The customers just will post and ask specifically, who does X, Y, Z service? And yeah, to your point, if it doesn't scale, but it's one way to get your first jobs. I'm curious though, to hear, you said you'd do some things differently. What would you do differently if you were starting today? 

 Asa Hunt: Oh man. So nowadays man, I'm big on referral relationships, like my backgrounds and like business development and I've really leaned into cold calling like roofers, property managers.

We're gonna start calling GCs to get on more commercial bid lists. 'cause roofers, man, a guy I met in the, the owner ops group, Connor. Here at Best, roof and Solar, like they were huge giving us referrals our first year. So I spent the last couple months cold calling through roofers trying to get on their referral and their subcontractor list.

So now I've built up a good little size list of roofers. I always start there. Same thing with property managers. We work with another property manager here in town that gave us probably 25. 35% of our leads last year. And so like when you're just getting going and you don't necessarily have the money to dump into ads, like all that stuff's super helpful.

And I would've started with Facebook ads and I joined up with an SEO Facebook Ads company when I just started. We ran the ads the worst time of the year and I was like, oh, this isn't gonna work. And so I quit that relationship. But now we're running Facebook ads again and we're absolutely cleaning house.

Austin Gray: Are you? 

Asa Hunt: Yeah. And I'm like, dude, if you would've kept with this guy, you easily could have done 500, 600 or more last year. You could have doubled because we just started running Facebook ads. I think we're up to. 37 grand booked on a 900 bucks of ad spend. Yeah, it completely blew me away. So I'm like, all right, double, triple, quadruple down on what's going on here.

Austin Gray: So $900 in spend and 37 K booked in revenue. How many total jobs from that? 

‍Asa Hunt: That is five or six jobs, and I think we're gonna squeeze a little bit more. Out of that lead list too, I'm thinking we'll get one more and land in the low forties. So we're going in hard on Facebook ads for sure.

Austin Gray: Are you open to sharing what you're running, like the type of ad you're running, and then also like leads, lead numbers that you're getting? And I'll tell you why I'm asking this. I went and spent a weekend in Austin helping this guy launch a land clearing business down there, and he owns a. Internet marketing business, they do about 90 million bucks a year, and it's all in paid acquisition. And so I got to spend a week with him every morning at his office, and I was asking him, I'm like, what's the most important thing that you spend your time on?

Because of course, I'm just, if you've listened to the podcast, you guys know that like I'm always trying to get better, right? And I want anybody who listens to this podcast to take the learning lessons as well. And so the big thing that he said, we got to 25 million off of organic. They were in the early days with Instagram, but then he said when you build off organic, you have complete platform risk.

So he said, we got, our account got shut down overnight. We lost our business. I had to go figure out paid ads. And he said, once we did that, then we said, excuse me. So he says, if I can encourage you on anything, go fare out your paid ads funnel. Because if he's, if you've built the baseline of the business, now it's your job as the owner to go scale.

So since I got back, I've been just like diving into every single one of our leads, attributing it to where exactly it came from. Tagging all of our jobs in jobber for the specific service so that we can remarket to them. And I'll tell you guys the video that was really that they outlined it very well.

Hormozi has a video. It's titled LTV to cac. So it's basically like your lifetime value versus your cost to acquire the customer. Mm-hmm. And so I'll post that video here in the link, a link to that, because that video, I watched it probably like three nights in a row before I went to bed and I was like, we have to know these numbers. 

Tying that in with Sam, who runs a $25 million roofing business, and he is doubled every year since. And when I asked him in that interview what's one of the most, or what is the most important thing he does with his time, he's, I track my metrics daily on my paid ad spend, so I'm like, okay, here, if Sam is saying this and he runs a $25 million roofing business, and if the guy I'm working with in Austin says this and he runs a $90 million business, I should probably pay attention to this.

So that's why I'm asking these questions because I think this type of information is going to be super applicable. To anybody listening to this, especially who wants to start a painting business in any other market. 

Asa Hunt: Yeah, I think the caveat that I would add that I think's been tough for me is finding the right partner to do that. I've gone through two Google, like pay-per click ads, guys, all in. I've loan 7,500 bucks, man on Facebook ads that didn't go anywhere. Google ads that didn't go anywhere. And so now third vendor, it's like, all right, now we got the right formula for meta. So I understand like guys that are all are really most sizes could be 10 to wanna go down that road because nobody wants to blow 7,500 bucks in the off season when things are tight.

Jobs aren't flowing on paid ads, so you really have to have a stomach is steal. Just keep looking for the right partner knowing that it's gonna pay off once you get it right. That's what was tough for me, especially 'cause things were tight in the early days, man. That's why I didn't wanna put the money into it. 'cause man, if it doesn't work, I'm hose 

Austin Gray: No doubt about it. And Asa, I believe you're a great example. For people who are starting, because you took that bootstrapped approach. If people go listen to this episode, they're gonna hear the first piece of that episode, and I hope y'all go back and listen to that piece and not skip over that and straight to the Facebook ads.

Because what you talked about is very important to go get those first jobs, right? Do the things that don't scale. Go in the Facebook groups, pick up the phone, call the roofers, call the property management companies, get cash flow going so that you have some cash flow to then go. Take a chance on something like Facebook ads. Did I hear the story correctly there? 

Asa Hunt: Yeah, definitely man. And it helps to have a little war chest to fall back on. When I got laid off, I got severance and we had a, that I was coming outta my best year and tech sales anyway, so like we had money to spend. And it's funny, I was more afraid to spend the money when I had more of it.

And now that I have less overall. I'm like, man, we gotta spend it to get out of this pit man. That, that's the only thing that I got. But, uh, yeah, really the paid ads thing, it's about building a foundation for the business, right? You have to have scalable marketing channels that you can reliably put dollars into and expect X return, right?

So right now on the digital side, we got Facebook, and then I'm trying to diversify into the print side. So I really wanna get like some direct mail. And like door hanger marketing going and that way it's like, all right, we got digital through Facebook for now. We got either direct mail or door hangers.

That way we can hit these neighborhoods with print. They keep seeing my mug on Facebook and Instagram. Now you start getting the yard signs out and you've got a nice little engine you can build up. 'cause those channels scale almost. To infinity, right? 

Austin Gray: Absolutely. And I did record an episode with somebody named Thomas Rudy. I recorded it last week. He's one of the co-founders of a tool called Data Shopper. I haven't used it yet, so take it with a grain of salt. But apparently what they're building is a way for you to send targeted direct mail or postcards, things like that. To your website visitors. So if you're running Facebook ads to a landing page, you can capture that traffic and then say, okay, let's go grab that traffic and then send the retargeting direct mail to them.

That's the way I understand it, I believe, and I haven't allocated time to look into it for my business, but that would be interesting. Why don't we jump into the Facebook ads. If you're open to share, just like high level what ad you're running, which one's working well, how many leads you've got, and then how many booked jobs you've got from that?

Asa Hunt: Yeah, for sure. One quick thing before I forget. On the Facebook groups, I think the up and coming thing I think is really gonna be a game changer. There's a couple agencies out there that all they do is Facebook group marketing. So they'll join all the local neighborhood groups in your target areas, on your behalf.

Every other week they'll put content, they'll post about your business and try to do it in a non-salesy way. And they've been telling me like 1525 leads a month. Just doing those organic posts and Facebook. So I really wanna lean into that and like maybe have a social media manager and a VA that kind of distributes content to those groups.

'cause I think you can really build an organic brand and start to dominate neighborhoods through that. And uh, it could be done really cheaply too, right? If you go the VA route and some basic content. So I think there's a ton of potential there. But yeah, the Facebook ads man, so. I don't know if we could do screen shares. I could pull up the ad itself or whatever. Yeah, whatever works here. 

Austin Gray: You should have a button on your end to share screen. If not, let me know, but I think it comes through on your end. 

Asa Hunt:The heart of the Facebook ads, the ones that we've identified are really hitting are just really simple, like me in front of the camera. Hey, Arvada Asa Hunt here with Bighorn Painting. I'm located over here on 72nd and Ward, your local neighborhood painter, if you're looking to paint this year, would be honored to have a chance to paint your home, blah, blah, blah. Or small family owned like, and whenever I go in person, you're like, oh man, I love that your family owned, you're local, you're small.

You're family owned. And I tell 'em like, Hey, it's just me here. You're gonna see me at the quote. You're gonna see me managing the job. Hopefully you don't see me painting anything. 'cause then there's a problem. But it's just really simple stuff and I'm like, it do, you don't have to overcomplicate it. You know my guys that made the Facebook ads, they make some pretty cool stuff. Let me, let's see if I can pull one up. That's really crushing it. But yeah, can you see the ad stats here? 

Austin Gray: Yes, I can. 

Asa Hunt: Okay. Yeah. So what do we got? 35. 35 leads, 1200 spent. 

Austin Gray: Are you running these to a landing page or is this Facebook lead form? 

Asa Hunt: Lead form. Facebook lead form. Yep. Okay. Yep. And then the one that's just absolutely crushing it here, 21 bucks a lead. And man, like when we first ran Facebook. The leads were garbage. Like late people with burned down kitchens wanted me to come paint their burnt charred cabinets. Uh, just all kinds of nonsense, but it has been like, these are quality leads. Ta-da. Here we go. 

Austin Gray: So why don't you just click play on that and then since you have the captions on space right here in your community. I would love to hear from you. It's my goal to become golden's, go-to painter this year by providing an exceptionally smooth and personalized painting experience and doing top quality work. If so, if you've been thinking about painting, click the link below and I will reach out to you directly to set up a quote.

We'd love to hear from you soon. I love that. I love it so much. You know how many people like, dude, it's crazy. It's what works. And I don't know if you, like, did you have any, was that natural for you or was it hard for you to get on camera?

Asa Hunt: It was pretty natural. 'cause I've been selling crap over Zoom and like doing video prospecting for a long time. But man, I'm just, that's just some dork in his car. Talking to his phone, I didn't realize, but that one doesn't even have any fricking painting footage, man. I thought this is the one I thought was gonna crush it. Me talking. 

Austin Gray: So let's talk about this. Yeah. 'cause I've got an ad running in Austin right now where I don't have any land clearing footage and it's just me talking as well. Yeah. And that's the one that's crushing. So why do you think, just from a psychology perspective, why do you think the one without any painting footage is. Performing almost 10 x or nine x better. 

Asa Hunt: It's, yeah, it's just killing it, man. I think there's a couple of reasons. Part of it, I think, um, whenever you're working with contractors and people like, it really helps to know whoever you are dealing with is and sounds legit.

They pass the vibe check, for lack of a better term. They seem friendly, they seem nice, and I think that's what I try to do. On camera. And when I'm with people I'm just like, Hey man, I'm just a normal guy. I care about doing good work. We care about integrity here. I'm friendly. I'm not gonna screw you over.

Like all that stuff I think gives people those subconscious green lights and their head, like clean all that stuff. I think signals like, oh yeah, we could trust him. He seems genuine, he seems nice, friendly, blah, blah, blah. I think that really makes people more comfortable reaching out. 'cause even if you're painting a house, it looks amazing.

You're still like, oh, like how's it gonna be working with these people? What are they? Am I gonna be like, 'cause dude, painters, I don't want to go off too much of a tangent, but if painters can be some shady cats, man, my worst story from last year, like I had a painter try to fight me in a customer's yard.

Oh no. Like not. Not get into an argument like we had to do some evasive maneuvers or else we were gonna scrap in their front yard. Like people in the trades. Like that could be people's impressions, man, who's gonna show up at our house? So going back to the ad, just so that's your normal, hopefully cool, friendly dude. It goes a long way. 

Austin Gray: Absolutely. Now I'm curious, I've got a question on Facebook ads. Has your media buyer told you when they plan to. Cut that ad or is there a reason they're keeping the one on that got two leads instead of allocating spend all to the one that has 17? I'm just curious to hear if they've given you feedback on that.

Asa Hunt: Yeah, we met last week and so man, we've only been running these ads for 30 days, so like that, like we still are trying to collect more data. Obviously the signs are overwhelmingly pointing towards those selfie style videos, but 30 months into a campaign, that's still pretty early, so we're still trying to test different things and really make sure we've got the winner. 'cause that same ads, it's not doing that great in Westminster for whatever it's doing than the other ones. For some reason, Westminster. Just they're tired of my mug already. 

Austin Gray: Do you think that has to do with demographic?

Asa Hunt: I don't know, man. It's tough to say 'cause Westminster golden not that far away. But even in Arvada, like same thing, nine leads, like just me and my fricking car. But I do think actually, yeah, that's, if, if you see this like 64th and Ward, I think that call out of like where I'm at. Is a big winner too. 'cause like this one that's not performing at all. It's kinda like a generic, yeah local painter. So I don't know. But that's what the Facebook ad process is all about, like testing and retesting. That's why you hire an agency to kind mess with that stuff so you don't have to. 

Austin Gray: Absolutely. I am always interested in which ones perform the best and then dissecting. Why? Because I think that's our job as owners because ultimately we have to direct the decision as unless the media buyer is coming to us with, Hey, this is absolutely the one that we should scale if you tell me any otherwise, right?

You're wrong. That's really what I want to hear from a media buyer, right? We shouldn't be running this and we should be running this 'cause the data tells us. But then even that, if they come to us telling us that, I still wanna understand why that ad is performing so that. I can go replicate that in another market and use the same principles. So I'm just, yeah. I'm really interested in why that one in Arvada is performing better than the others. And you think it's because you have a specific call out of 

Asa Hunt: Yeah, I, that's my hunch. Let's see what this one, yeah, so this one's really generic. I don't like that. I, I wanted need to get them to change that. Is your home's exterior crying out for a refresh? I don't like that, so I'm not surprised. It's not working of somebody's, Hey, I'm on 64th and Wars. Oh, hey. That's great. That's right by me too. This guy's completely local. 

Austin Gray: Can you click on the copy of that top performing ad within this ad set? 

Asa Hunt: Ta? Yeah. Uh oh Yeah. That's a good one. Yeah. Tired of chasing big companies that treat you like just another invoice. 

Austin Gray: Nice. I wanna go back to the headline too. What is the headline? Aveta Homeowners. Aveta Homeowners. I'm Asa Hunt from Bighorn Painting right here on 64th and Ward. 

Asa Hunt: I think that's, yeah, that's the key. Then I'm interested to see what do I have in Golden? 'cause this one is just blowing up here. 

Austin Gray: Hey, golden neighbor. 

Asa Hunt: So, yeah, 

Austin Gray: I mean, I think the important thing is like you're calling out your target market, right in that first sentence.

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 Austin Gray: Hey, golden neighbors.

Asa Hunt: Yeah. That's a best practice for Facebook ads for sure. The other thing I've thought about is in the video thumbnail. A thought bubble that says, Hey, golden. 'cause that way once they're scrolling, they're gonna get a giant picture of my face and then a thought bubble that says their town name. And I think that'll grab even better, just my hunch. 

Austin Gray: Man, I love it. This is my favorite part of business right here. Once the media buyer says, let's kill those two, then let's go run another variation. Doing exactly what you just did. Keep the test, and then split. Test the next. Yeah, and add that bubble in and see which one performs better from there. Keep me updated on this, man. This is so much fun and so cool to watch. 

Asa Hunt: Yeah, because I think it is exciting. 'cause we know this is how you print money. That cliche phrase, everybody throws around, oh, printing money. Once these start to hit and you figure this out, like that's how you do it. 

Austin Gray: Let's, let's dive into the metrics a little bit further. So let's just go back to the ad or the campaign in total, and let's just run some quick calculations here. Yeah, so, so you've spent how much total? 

Asa Hunt: 1200 bucks. And so this is the ad spend. We pay about a thousand bucks a month, uh, for the ads. Shout out to Micah and the search click grow team. They do a lot with painters, but yeah, a thousand bucks a month for management.

And then I'm trying to get this ad spend up to two grand. Actually, that's what I'm gonna be doing this weekend. I'm gonna go shoot more videos 'cause we wanna expand into a couple other. Neighborhoods and obviously get this ad spend up to two grand, three grand and see, I don't think I could handle more than two grand at this point without having to hire somebody.

Austin Gray: I mean, you couldn't handle from a sales perspective or from a fulfillment perspective? 

Asa Hunt: Uh, from a sales perspective, probably. 'cause I'm leaning, I'm trying to lean into the commercial side since it's just me, man. I gotta focus on. The commercial side is way more scalable than the residential side. So that's what I'm trying to lead into for now until we can hire a sales rep to kinda, to run these quotes for me.

Austin Gray: Sweet. Okay. I've got a spreadsheet that I put together this week after watching this video, so listeners, the video that I mentioned earlier. Where Hormozi breaks down LTV to cac. That was the video that the guy I'm working with in Austin challenged me to just understand deeply and understand those metrics so that you know whether you should or should not scale.

So caveat like this is very rudimentary. I've put this together on my own. I also have a call set up with Sam who does this on a daily basis and has a very dialed in process. So please take this with a grain of salt Listeners, we're gonna do this in real time though. But I just wanna run some quick metrics because one, it's fun, and two, I do think it's important to know as business owners here, I will reiterate here, take this with a grain of salt before we verify the absolute. Final numbers with Sam. So I guess just listen to the exercise here and the thought process. Can you tell me total Facebook ad spend? Just total?

Asa Hunt:  I'd say 1200 bucks. 1200, okay. 

Austin Gray: And then how many total leads generated? 

Asa Hunt: I think it was 31. 31 30? Yeah, 30. Say 31. 35. 35. 

Austin Gray: 35 leads generated. Okay, so your average cost per lead is $34 and 29 cents.

Asa Hunt: Yep. Right. 

Austin Gray: How many jobs total do you have? Do you have the data to support? What CRM are you using? 

Asa Hunt: I use paint scout and high level. 

Austin Gray: Okay. Do you have the data to support who has either paid a deposit or booked a job? 

Asa Hunt: Yeah, we're up to six. Six people. 

Austin Gray: Six customers acquired? 

‍Asa Hunt: Yep. 

Austin Gray: And then what? How much total booked revenue?

Asa Hunt: 30 A, oh, actually it's 40 now since yesterday.

Austin Gray:  40,000? 

Asa Hunt: Yep. 

Austin Gray: Okay. And you bid these at 40% gross margin, correct? 

Asa Hunt: I shoot for 50. 

Austin Gray: Okay. So times 0.5 and then total gross profit. I think I have these calculations correct. Once again, listeners like please just verify this as you go through. Like I'm serious, like Hormo outlines the process for doing this in that video, so verify these numbers. But what you told me is that you spent $1,200 on Facebook ads and you generated 35 leads, correct? 

Asa Hunt: Yep. 

Austin Gray: So that means your cost per lead is $34 and 29 cents. Out of that 20, out of that $1,200 Facebook ad spend you spent, you acquired six customers for a total revenue amount of $40,000. So your cost to acquire that customer, if this is correct, is $200 to acquire a customer.

Asa Hunt: Does that include, I probably should throw in management fees in there too. 

Austin Gray: We, we should as well. Yeah. 

Asa Hunt: So it's really probably like 2200 bucks. 

Austin Gray: Okay. Spent 2200 bucks spent. So your cost to acquire the customer is $366 and 67 cents. 

Asa Hunt: Yeah, that's sounds about right for painting. Trying to, 'cause I haven't thought about this too much. It's something I know I should, but man, there's so much stuff I should be doing that I'm like, man, I just don't have time to, 

Austin Gray: yeah, yeah. And these are the beginning stages and I'm right here with you. And that was the one thing, like when I started this podcast, like I'm not claiming to be an expert. I'm claiming to do this journey with the listeners.

So I'm right in the middle of doing this in my business, I'm actively learning. What I'll do is I will just send a screenshot to Sam after this and I'll just say, Hey. At a real quick, high level, could you just verify that we're calculating these numbers correctly and he'll be able to tell us really quickly yes or no.

And if for whatever reason I'm off on these calculations, I will come back in and add an edit into the episode and just be like, Hey, here's what Sam said. Here's what we should change with this. That way listeners know that they're getting the absolute best, and then I'll send it to you as well. But basically what this is showing is that you booked 40,000 in revenue off of $2,200 in marketing.

Mm-hmm. You booked six customers. You generated 35 leads. Your cost per lead was $62 and 86 cents. Your cost to acquire the customer was $366, and your average revenue per customer, which is basically taking 40,000 divided by the number of customers you acquired, would be $6,667. Since you bid at 50% gross margin, your average gross profit.

Is $3,333, meaning you are putting in $366 into that machine, and you are getting $3,333 back out. If you don't ever sell that customer any more services, and you keep your lifetime value at that $3,333 amount, the lifetime value to CAC ratio that Hormoz talks about in that video is 9.09 to one. Now, once again, I'm gonna verify these numbers, but all the research that I've done says that if you're above a three to one, you're good.

If you're four to one, you're doing better. If you're five to one rock and roll, that's what they're saying. And I want to, like I said, verify this with Sam 'cause he does it in inside and out. But this is sweet. 

Asa Hunt: Yeah. And that's why it's so important to all these numbers, man. 'cause there's all kinds of guys on Facebook that are like, oh man, I'll, we'll get you a five x on your ad spend. And if I got five x on this ad spend like that, math wouldn't really work. It's not as scalable. 'cause if you got 50% gross margin, you book a $10,000 job and what? One in five. So what? You spent $2,000. To book a $10,000 job and that $2,000 just ate up like 40% of your gross profits. Like that works but barely. Like what happens when you have to hire somebody, you got overhead and all that. Five x just doesn't really cut it. 

Austin Gray: This is fun, and I will just say on air hats off to you because. You're getting in front of the camera. At least for me, getting in front of the camera was hard until I started doing the podcast, I got a little more comfortable.

But like, it's still hard for me to go film in my local market with a bunch of people I know because the reality is I'm always just like, man, what are people gonna think? Are they gonna think, oh, that dude's stupid for filming ads? And at the end of the day, at least that's a real thing, real struggle that I deal with and.

I was just tell talking to myself last night and this morning I'm like, I need to go film some new ads and just get over the fact. Just get over it. Who cares? Like you're in business. The goal is to grow the business. Just get over it. And so like I have to talk myself through that. It sounds like you don't deal with that as much 'cause you're very comfortable on there. But I just have to say hats off to doing it because I think a lot of other people struggle with wanting to get on the camera as well, but it works. 

Asa Hunt: Yeah. Yeah, I appreciate that. And I think it's all about, 'cause so much in business is uncomfortable, right? Like one of the things that I just can't get over is like doing door to door. Like I hate doing it. For us, it didn't work that great. So that's one of those things like, man, if I'm gonna really push myself outside of my comfort zone, like I wanna make sure it's something that's gonna really move the needle. Like these ads, I like doing donut drop-offs for like roofers and these and stuff like that.

That's another thing that I've had fun with just getting out there. So that's really half the battle for me right now is man, there's a million different routes. I could be going down, I'm executing and I'm trying to figure out like how do we keep growing? 'cause like we're still young. Like I still gotta tighten up the unit economics of our jobs and what I pay my subs, blah, blah, blah.

While also trying to figure out like, man, how can we keep going and landing these commercial jobs? There's just so much. I wanna acquire another painting company later this year. So we just. Yeah, that's what's fun, man. The sky's the limit When you get in business, it's really hard, but that, that light at the end of the tunnel, the doors that it opens up, just keeps things so fun, so exciting, versus the W2s. Dude, this is it. You've done it for two years. It's gonna look like this for 30 years, and I couldn't do that. 

‍Austin Gray:  It's so cool to watch, man. Hats off to you. If I can offer encouragement, just keep doing more of what you're doing. Whatever you're doing is working. And I know that you said in the beginning of the year, you're like, oh, 300 isn't crazy, but it's worth celebrating, right?

Like the people who are listening to this, and this is the premise of what I want the podcast to be. I want our listeners to be able to come to a podcast where they can learn about the zero to 1 million phase because there's all these podcasts. My first millions like. All these people talking about, oh, I scaled a business to a hundred million dollars.

It doesn't really relate to us who are starting a business from scratch. Right? And so I say hats off to you because I remember when you reached out a couple years ago and you were asking some of the questions, and then here you are, like you're gonna do, I dunno, what's your goal for this year? What do you think you'll do?

Asa Hunt: We're the goal is over seven, so double and then some. So that's kind of what I'm trying to hit. Would love to crack a million, but it'll take some serious hustle to do that. So I don't know if that's in the cards, but 

Austin Gray: I love it. I love watching this. I am excited for your growth, and this is super cool that you've got Facebook ads dialed in.

It's very interesting to me though that Westminster's not cranking and golden's cranking. Like the only thing I can think is, are there more affluent people in Golden and they're willing to pay for a hire? Tier service, is that resonating? What service areas can you do? All of Denver Metro. Can you do Boulder?

Asa Hunt: Yeah, that's a really important thing to consider. The reason I'm trying to keep it so tight is just for my own sanity. Like I can't be driving 45 minutes out to Aurora to do a quote. 'cause there are a lot of tire kickers on Facebook. So just trying to balance everything is like just a sole proprietor.

You gotta. You can't boil the ocean. Like that's why I'm trying to squeeze what I can 'cause it's so nice. Oh, I got a quote. Where is it? Oh, it's five minutes away. We could do five of these a day without breaking a sweat. So really trying to maximize my time as a business owner. 'cause dude, the commercial bid volume that I get, it's crazy man.

Like we probably get invited to 15 commercial bids like a month. It's like all those are 20, 30, 40, $50,000 jobs. If I drive out to Aurora, go bid a $2,500 job, I could have sat here in my basement and put in three bids for a $40,000 commercial job. So I'm intentionally trying to like keep it tight so I can go whale hunt, and then I have another guy.

Doing some cold calling and trying to get me on the bid list for GCs for more commercial work. Get in with those roofers as subcontractor. Build that referral base. Yeah, that's kinda, that's where I'm at. 

Austin Gray: That's so awesome. You're doing it all and it's cool to watch. 

Asa Hunt: Yeah. Doing a little bit of everything. 'cause like really? Yeah. I'm just trying to build, put pieces in place, man. Trying to build a foundation of. This pyramid. So we wanna build a digital foundation with Facebook in a print foundation like referral relationship, like a system, which I do that pretty well, like a base of commercial. That way next year we've got these little pieces in place and like, all right, now we can hire somebody to run the commercial side. Now we're off to the races. 

‍Austin Gray: Actually, one more question on Facebook ads, and you don't have to share your screen, but what does the form look like whenever they click, and what data are you capturing? 

Asa Hunt: Yeah, so it's pretty basic. I believe it's a one pager name, phone, email, zip code, so we don't go for the address right away. Maybe people don't wanna do that much work or aren't comfortable just putting their address into something and Facebook, even though I'm sure Facebook already has it somehow. So that's a bit of an operational annoyance. 'cause then when I talk to 'em, I gotta refill in their address into the CRM and. Yada. So I don't love that the ads are working so well. I'm like, all right, don't touch it. Don't jinx it. Don't blow it up. Don't change. Whatever we're doing, don't change it. 

Austin Gray: Absolutely. I did interview the founder of Open Phone yesterday on the podcast. Oh, nice. They've got a, basically now like you can, if you use that for your business line, and I'm gonna switch over here because of this reason exactly. They can summarize the call and automatically update your CRM if you ask them the address over the phone. 

Asa Hunt: Oof. That's new. Yeah, that's new. 

Austin Gray: Yeah. It's gonna be a game changer. So to your point, it's like on that landing page, and for listeners, if you don't have any experience in digital marketing, like it's all about reducing friction on those lead forms, and you're doing a great job of that as well.

So Ace's point here is that if he added in the address on that form, he might have less people fill that out because it's one more friction point and it's one more. Piece of personal privacy that people have to give up in that first interaction. And so I agree with you wholeheartedly. It's reduce friction there, get the most important things, which is like name and phone number, and of course email if they're there.

But yeah, I'm excited to implement, I. Some of the, and I don't think they're the only tool that's gonna be doing this, but they do. I use jobber, so they're gonna be integrating, if our sales guy calls and gets the information, now it's gonna be summarized and automatically synced over to our CRM and jobber.

As a request, and we have tags for like fire mitigation, road grading, septic repair, things like that. If they talk about that specific job, the integration will automatically tag it in the CRM, which I'm super excited about. 

Asa Hunt: Yeah, man, that's nice. I started on open phone, then I got over to high level. Just 'cause it's, there's just so much within high level. I'm guessing they'll put that feature in down the road 'cause they've already got AI agents and stuff like that, which, that's a whole nother thing I haven't got to mess with yet. But there's some sick platforms out there building the AI agents for home service businesses. And it does just that, like it'll parse, the AI agent will talk to them and get their name.

Book an appointment on your calendar, fill out the CRM, do all that stuff on its own. That's like the next wave of AI for home service, I think. And it's pretty cool. But I'm also hesitant to, 'cause that's such an important touch point in the sales process, like I, it's very tempting. Oh yeah. I just have a call agent for man that first touch. Like it sets the stage for everything. And I, I would be interested to see if that impacts win rates. Just have an AI agent do some of that stuff, but we'll figure that out later. 

‍Austin Gray: I agree with you a hundred percent, and I believe that. So internally, that's gonna be the last thing that at least personally, the last thing that I implement AI for like I believe the people who can do exactly what you're doing, get on camera, show that you're a real person in today's day and age, and then call them and talk to them. As a real person, like I just don't see any scenario where AI beats that out anytime soon. Do you?

Asa Hunt:  I don't think so, man. 'cause especially when the trades like picking up the phone is half the battle. 'cause like I cold call a lot of roofers, a lot of the times I can't, I don't get through man. And like you lose those people. And so just being able to. Dial a painting company, two rings. Hello, Asa Hunt here. Big horn painting, how can I help you? It's like that means something. It's important. 

Austin Gray: I agree a hundred percent. Now what I am very interested in is leveraging AI to do things that we as humans would've had to do on the backend. So, oh yeah. Like when you said, Hey, that's a pain to go. Get the customer's address over the phone and then I have to go update the CRM. Those are the things where it triggers in my mind.

If there's a way to automate that, let's do it a thousand times. But to your point, like. I'm with you. I'm not replacing the human level of touch because I don't think that is going away anytime soon. If anything, the people who commit to doing human level, I'm making a bet that those are the businesses they're gonna beat out.

The ones that try to do the whole AI answering service, people are just think about it's, I don't know about you, but when I call Verizon or Chase and it's, oh, tell us what you, I'm just like, just get me to a freaking person. Please throw me off. Like I just yell at the phone. I'm like. Just send me to a person. That's all I want. 

Asa Hunt: Yeah, and kinda along those same lines of just the personal touch and getting on camera. The other thing I think is underrated, that's kind of part of my secret sauce, is like email drip campaigns during the estimate and purchasing process, like I'm trying to build out right now, like a sequence of emails where they get one every other day.

And it's just me. It's like an article, but it's also me talking through, Hey, this is what you can expect from an estimate. This is what this looks like, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, now next email. Hey, if you're exterior painting, this is what it looks. This is what the process looks like. And I'm talking and I'm like, we got a video of a guy power washing the house, video of somebody caulking the house video of spraying and like that content, it's not just to get people in the funnel.

But like it's to help you win the job, right? If there's three painters in there, oh, Bighorn sent me all these helpful videos. I feel like I know Asa 'cause he is explained like eight things on colors, on how the job's gonna go. And he's given me pictures. Of the process so I can see is teams neat, they're clean, they're not gonna screw up my house.

The finished product looks nice. You sprinkle in some like client review videos in there and they get all that in that two week period when, you know, a couple days before the quote. They see some of it after the quote when they're getting other bids and they're deciding it like you're still selling, you're still in front of them.

Once we get that up and running, I think that's gonna really help win rates too, man. And that's really where I think content shines just as much as like getting people in the funnel. It's like boosting your close rates 

‍Austin Gray: You’re gonna crush. There's no doubt in my mind that I'm gonna talk to you in a year back on the podcast and you're gonna be like, yeah, we did a million or we did a million and a half and then like next two years, yeah, we did 3 million. There's no way that you don't with this type of approach. Do you have that built out in go high level, that campaign?

Asa Hunt:  So I've got five. I've got the skeleton built out. I've got about five or six emails written so far. I just need to sit down and finish it up and have some videos put together. So I keep kicking the can down the road. I just need to do it, but I hate sitting down. I'm like. Writing emails and talking into the camera.

Austin Gray: It takes work, right? Like Yeah, absolute work. Stryker Digital specializes in SEO services specifically for local service businesses. Bodie and Andy, the two co-founders, have helped me get Bearclaw land services to the number one search result on Google inside my state for my specific search term.

If you wanna learn more. Visit strykerdigital.com. That's S-T-R-Y-K-E-R digital.com. Anything else you wanna share with listeners before we wrap the actual podcast episode up? 

Asa Hunt: Yeah, man. For anybody out there that's thinking of going out on their own, starting a business, I'm always happy to help. I've had tons of coffee chats around Denver with folks. Always happy to be a resource and an encouragement. It's worth it. It's very hard. So is sitting in a job that you don't like for the next 25 years. So if you're gonna do something hard, you might as well build something that has infinitely more potential and potential life satisfaction for yourself and your family. So go get it. 

Austin Gray: I love it. I love it. Asa, thanks so much for being on once again, Asa Hunt with Bighorn Painting. Where can people find you online? 

Asa Hunt: Bighorn painting.com. Check us out if you're in the Denver Metro. If you need some painting done too. Of course. 

Austin Gray: And then how about you? You're on X, right? 

Asa Hunt:Oh yeah. Yep. What am I? One at one Asa hunt. I don't do a ton on Twitter. I need to though, 'cause it's hugely helpful. So many good people. So many networking connections get on Twitter X, whatever it is. 

Austin Gray: We all still call it Twitter. Anyway. Yeah, thanks again for being on. Hey, so this is awesome, and listeners, thanks again for listening to another episode of the Owner Ops podcast where we.

Talk weekly with people like ASA about building homes, local service based businesses in that zero to 1 million phase. So if you are either considering starting your own business or if you have just started your own local service based business, we drop episodes every Friday. I. With a business owner like Asa.

And then we also send a weekly newsletter on Saturdays where we take the episode and we summarize all the key points and the learning lessons that Asa and I talked about, and then we'll send that to you in a summarized newsletter to your inbox on Saturdays. So if you haven't signed up for that yet.

You can go to ownrops.com, that's ownrops.com/newsletter. And then after my interview with Doina from open phone yesterday, we're going to implement a q and a text line for the podcast. So I'm gonna have a number to text in the bottom of this episode. And some of the listeners have been asking like, how can we do q and a on the podcast and open an air?

So here's what you can do. Go text your question to that number. Below in the Lincoln description, or what we're going to do is you can just call into that and leave a voicemail with your question, and then open phone is gonna take that and send that over to our CRM so that we have all the questions and we can answer these in open air.

So to paint the vision for this, if we had questions this week, I would take three questions and then Asa and I would say, Hey, here's how we handled that question, or here's some ideas on that. So I hope this will be a helpful resource for you guys. For podcast listeners, especially for those of you who are starting and want to grow from the zero to 1 million phase.

All right, thanks again for listening. Don't forget, work hard, do your best. Never settle for less.

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