Thomas Rudy: Honestly, that's how I found a lot of the contractors that have worked on my home and the things that I needed to do. Just ask for local referrals. It's like getting a referral from your friend. So I know there are a ton of service businesses that are actually like agencies that help groups do this now. I think it's a really interesting model. That one's easy and it's free, right? Like you don't, if you're doing it yourself, I'm assuming you're not hiring somebody. Set yourself a reminder every day or whatever the timing needs to be, to go in there and look and scope out different customers.

Austin Gray: Hey, welcome back to another episode of the OWNR OPS Podcast where we talk all about starting and growing local service-based businesses. I have a special guest today, Thomas Rudy, from Data Shopper. He's gonna show you how you can retarget your website visitors. With. Direct mail, postcards, things like that so stick around. This is going to be a little bit different. This guy owns a software company, but I do believe it can be valuable to local service-based businesses, which is why he's on this podcast. He does share a lot about how he thought about going and getting his first customers in that startup phase.

So the first half of the, uh. The first half of the episode is going to be applicable really to starting any business. And then the second half of the episode, we got more into the nitty gritty details about how to go retarget website visitors with things like direct. Thomas Rudy, welcome to the Owner House podcast.

Thomas Rudy: Thank you, sir. Thanks for having me. This is pretty cool. 

Austin Gray: Yeah. Excited to have you on. I wanna talk all about acquiring customers. So in your mind, what's the fastest way someone can acquire a customer in today's day and age? 

Thomas Rudy: I mean, if we're going from like the local service angle, honestly it's probably commenting on all these little Facebook groups. That's probably the fastest way. Or another really good one is just to call and ask for referrals. Somebody who needs something. Um, just make your first 10 calls. More than likely, your first sale is already in your phone book. Like that's true for my business to routinely will go through my phone book and just see who I can call, who I can ask an intro to who may or may not need what, who works at what company.

So it could be, you know, that your mom's friend needed a new deck, or if you're like helping commercial companies too, somebody that works at this company ask for an intro. So yeah, I think really just like taking that first action and it's not gonna be what's gonna help you scale, but get that first W under your belt. I think more than likely, like your first sale is already sitting in your phone. You just gotta go take the action to figure out what that is. 

Austin Gray: Absolutely. I agree with that wholeheartedly. Can you tell our listeners a bit about the software platform that you've founded and a bit about your background?

Thomas Rudy: Yeah, I'll start with the background first. So honestly, I got started on the internet, on online advertising, and digital marketing. I guess really first I was selling stuff on eBay, doing eBay arbitrage back before that was cool. Um, but then my career really shifted into local marketing and local SEO. So I did a ton of I mean, at the time it was predominantly legal, SEO, hvac, all your home service stuff, any of the big ticket items we would do local SEO for. So at first I was working as a contractor, then I guess again, was a fractional CMO for a while before that was a thing. We're going back to 2010, 2011, and then just kind of worked my way through bigger and more enterprise deals than I would call them.

And while simultaneously, I was also becoming a developer and a software developer, so. All of that rolled up into some bigger projects that I work on, like reviews.com. I was the GM of, I was software developer at Microsoft for a little bit. I ran a performance marketing agency for quite a while, worked with companies like Rocket Mortgage, Money Lion um, Benzinga was a big customer for any of the listeners, knew who that is. 

We helped basically grow their business from a few million, so they ended up selling for 300 million and we had a really good relationship with them. And so in all of that, the Data shopper came out of with a customer of mine at the time called print by and ship that was a three PL provider and a commercial printer. And they basically had this facet of a product that was doing direct mail remarketing. Um, so over the course of the last few years, we took that concept and really developed it into a data company. This group print partnership had been sitting on all these different vendor relationships with data companies.

They've been around for 70 years really? They were sitting on some relationships that I don't even think they knew were that valuable. So we took a simple concept of doing direct mail remarketing, and really turned it into this pretty advanced enterprise grade software that allows you to do some really sophisticated retargeting and audience building. And of course we still do a ton of direct mail. That was the original concept of the business. Yeah, that was like 15 years wrapped up in about a minute and a half there. So. Been quite a while. It's been a quite a wild ride for sure. Yes, and it's definitely not done yet, but

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 I 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 Bear Claw 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/ownerops O-W-N-R-O-P-S.

Austin Gray: So you're touching on something that we haven't. Dove into big time here on the podcast, which is remarketing, so I'd like to come back to that, especially as it relates to local service businesses. But you're the CMO? Correct. At your software company?

Thomas Rudy:  I'm actually the co-founder, so I'm the CMO of print by ship. Oh, of print by ship. 

Austin Gray: Okay. I see. 

Thomas Rudy: Yeah, they're, they're like connected at the hip. 

Austin Gray: Okay. Essentially, at this stage. As someone with a background in local marketing, I get this question all the time from guys who are starting out in local services. Let's say like they're in the zero to 1 million revenue mark, and they've just now, like, they're just now realizing that this online thing can be a valuable resource for their business. Where do you recommend that person start? 

Thomas Rudy: Don't have a ton of marketing dollars to spend, you gotta make sure every one of those dollars counts. So doing some of the things that I would say are more like sweat equity driven are probably the most important until you get to a stage where you can remove yourself from that, like the Facebook groups, stuff like that.

It works so well for, there's whole service industries around helping people do that. But I would say like 80% of your effort should really be in like the sweat equity approach, what you can control to hedge against different marketing tests that you're gonna run. Because marketing, at the end of the day, you'll have a cohort of 20 people and 10 of them.

So like Facebook ads don't work and the other 10 will say that they do because either they are better at it or they ran more budget against it, or they have a better offer or whatever the case may be. Um, but yeah, if you're starting out, I would be very careful with where you throw your marketing dollars.

I would say probably focus more on being like the community driven outreach approach of your own business and hitting yourself some like stable ground before you go and blow 20 grand on marketing that you maybe do not understand. Unfortunately, I think, again, I'm like selling against myself for those groups, but that's just like the reality.

Like you, you gotta have some stable feet before, you know, put something into marketing that. May not give you the best results that you want to get. So yeah, if I was starting out, I would say treat it like you. You're in the, I have to say this, you're in the woods with your kids and you gotta get out, and the way to get out is to get to XX revenue or X sales, do whatever you have to do.

And I don't think it's always pretty, honestly, when you're first starting out. But yeah, I think it was just be cautious about your marketing spend. One of the simple ones, I don't know, you've probably seen this a million times, but so many people will go and they'll spend 20, 30K on a website. It'll take 'em six months to build it.

Really, it doesn't even matter, right? You just need like a good local SEO strategy implemented and a decent website that converts. And then once you get some headwind or some tailwind rather, and you can go and reinvest in a pretty design. But things like that can be killer if you're starting out and you don't understand the space.

Austin Gray: Agreed, yes. And what are some of those ways just to get out of the woods? Like just other than picking up your phone and calling. So you've already mentioned. Your first sale is likely, and you're, we're talking to the people who have already been out there. They've already got an established presence locally.

You've mentioned this jump in the Facebook groups multiple times, so I want to dive deeper into that, and then if you have any other specific creative ideas, I'm interested to hear that as well. So let's start with Facebook groups, like specifically, what should somebody be doing when they jump into that Facebook group?

Thomas Rudy: Yes.I live in a little city. It's a little island called Grazi. Um, we have four different Facebook groups that are like your community groups. At any given time, you can go in there and someone's commenting, does anyone know a painter? Does anyone know somebody that who does pest control, et cetera. Hey, you can just search for the keywords that are relevant to your business and have a stream of people that are asking those questions, and then do that for all the different cities in your area.

It's probably like the easiest method. You're getting bottom of the funnel buyers. Hey, we're the local business X, whatever. We're licensed insured. We've been in business for this amount of time, or whatever the chops are that you need to say to them. Honestly, that's how I found a lot of the contractors that have worked on my home and the things that I needed to do.

Just ask for local referrals. It's like getting a referral from your friend. So I know there's a ton of service businesses that are actually like agencies that help groups do this now. I think it's a really interesting model. Yeah, that one's easy and it's free, right? Like you don't, if you're doing it yourself, I'm assuming you're not hiring somebody.

Set yourself a reminder every day or whatever the timing needs to be, to go in there and look and scope out different customers. Some of the groups will let you post too. I, unless you got some humor behind it, or if you're really giving someone a really good offer. But if you can connect the dots. If someone's like, Hey, who is the blank in this area?

And you're meeting them at that point, you have a really high likely chance to at least have a. A conversation or a quote happening. That's probably the easiest way to do it. There's other cheap ways to do some of these grassroots marketing efforts too. They just require effort, like getting involved with the schools, wearing a t-shirt of what you do.

Obviously putting your truck in the right place, people can see it. Um, so there's a million ways you can do it that are free. They just require effort. This is like when I built my performance marketing agency that I exceeded from a few years ago. Um, I would just cold call. That's a little different than a local business, but people are afraid to pick up the phone if you have a service business, and especially if you support commercial, uh, companies, like whatever it might be, window cleaning, trash removal, et cetera. Pick up the phone and start calling people. They don't know who you are. They may or may not be interested. Get them. Get into their vendor approved list. That's another thing you can do too. Call around all these bigger companies. Get vendor approved. I probably rattled off like 20 ideas.

Take all those ideas and put it into a spreadsheet and figure out how you're gonna divvy up that time between it's you and a partner, or it's just by yourself and just do it. I know that sounds oversimplified, but that's really it. Like a lot of the difference people like finding success is just taking the action, taking the first step, and then doing it, not quitting after a week. Doing for a good nine months straight. And you, it's hard not to find success, in my opinion, unless you're just a crappy service provider. Um, yeah, I think like really just don't have fear in putting yourself out there. No one knows who you are. Just take the first steps, be vigilant, but professional, and just get after it, like old fashioned hard work, as they say. 

Austin Gray: Yeah, I love this and I love the analogy that you stated. You're in the woods with your kids and you've gotta figure out how to get them out.

Thomas Rudy: Oh yeah. That's my favorite one to say. Like, Monday, you gotta be out by Friday. How many deals are you gonna close? 

Austin Gray: Yeah, absolutely. 

Thomas Rudy: How are you gonna get out? 

Austin Gray: So one thing that I feel like is just highly overlooked, and I'm so glad you brought up the concept of just picking up the phone and cold calling. Real estate agents, general contractors, and property management companies in every single town. If you're a service business, like all of those people should have marketing material, or at least an email or a phone call, letting them know that you are there in the area. 

And I think a lot of people just get scared about the whole concept of cold calling because they put so much pressure on themselves that it's, oh, I have to sell on this call. I don't know how you view this, but when I view this, it's, oh, my goal is not to sell on this call. My goal is to build a long-term relationship, and so this first opportunity where I get to speak with them is, Hey, my name's Austin. I'm with Bear Claw. I just wanted to let you know that we offer tree removal services in the area.

I know your property management company, you get asked from your clients if they ever need tree services, and then they'll be like. No, we never do. And then it's, shoot. Okay, maybe that's not the right avenue, but most oftentimes people are gonna be like, oh yeah, we have people who ask all the time, or our clients ask all the time, right? And it's like, great. I would love to be on your approved fender list. I'll just stop by your office. I'll bring by my business card. Bring by a sheet just so you know who we are. And it's just like that little gesture goes so far. 

Thomas Rudy: A hundred percent. Yeah. And you can do, I guess the way I view it is definitely have conversations like that. And then if it's opportunistic and you think you can make the sale out of it, then go for it. And if you just get your reps in at this stage, sales calls, or reaching out to people, joining podcasts, going to events, it doesn't necessarily come naturally to me, but I've done it so much because it's a requirement to get out the woods.

It just keeps saying, it doesn't become a problem after you've done it for so long. Like it's just the natural form of business. Of course, you have to pick up the phone and call, how are we gonna get to this revenue goal? Pick up the phone, start calling, start engaging. Form relationships. The call that you made six months ago just landed in your lap with whatever deal that made the week.

So yeah, I think that's not just in local service businesses either. That's in all businesses. People are just afraid to pick up the phone and call. And if you can get past that and all the other things that go into providing a good service or a good product, you'll probably do okay. It's not the magic bullet to scaling everything.

Everyone always wants to scale or maybe you don't, but if you're happy with a business that pays you a few hundred thousand each year. But yeah, picking up the phone and calling and just engaging. If you can get past that mental block, which I think a lot of people are always stuck on even five years into it, kinda like reset, I think you'll do okay. That's a very easy one. And honestly, the same concept applies to our software too. The first sale is already on your website, and that's what we help you do.

We help you retouch that person like that prospect. I don't even know if you can call it a lead, but that prospect is there putting forth whatever method it is on our wallet that's direct mail, advertising, retargeting, or whatever sequence makes sense to go out them depending on your business there. The prospect is already on your website. The prospect is already in your phone book. You don't need 50 leads a day. You probably just need to convert the ones that are already in the funnel or close to being in the phone. 

Austin Gray: We, we'll come back to this and I do want you to get us to dive more into the, your leads are already on your website, but before we jump off the fear concept, you've mentioned a couple times there, people are just fearful. Why do you think most people are scared to pick up the phone? 

Thomas Rudy: That's good question. Obviously, fear of objection for sure. I think some people are just lazy, like a lot of people are just lazy. They just don't wanna do it. There's a combination of both of them, and I think a lot of people don't even start businesses because they're just afraid that it won't work out.

There's certainly an aspect to just kinda not giving a shit about, you know, how people will perceive you, especially your immediate friends and family. Unfortunately, oftentimes those are the ones that tell you not to do things in a lot of cases, not necessarily me, like I've had some very good. Friends and family have been supportive.

But yeah, I think a lot of it's just fear of failure and people just can't get past that. They're worried about what people are gonna say about them, and I guess it's understandable. Like you can understand not wanting to get ridiculed or feel like shit from failure, but there's only one way out of the woods, you know what I mean? There's only one way to go, but yeah, you just have to flip that switch in your brain. Even if you're afraid, you just have to do it. You can't succumb to the fear. You can be afraid, but you cannot let it overtake you and create inaction, and it's something you probably battle with every day. Like I said, it's all regular and normal now deep into running businesses, but it's not that I necessarily like cold galling people or like getting told no or stop calling me or whatever, but you still do it. 

Austin Gray: What are some ways you recommend people? Get through that fear. 

Thomas Rudy: That's a good question too. For me, I guess the repetition almost numbed it. I don't even think about it anymore. Like you laugh it off, it's just becomes business as usual if something goes awry. But you also, you'll come across really big wins too. Those ones feel great. But yeah, I don't think there's really any secret sauce to it. I think for me it was always just repetition, I guess some component, like flipping the switch, like.

I'm doing this kind of like you're gonna the gym every day. Like I'm going to the gym. I don't necessarily want to go run and then left and all that, but you just flipped the switch and you doesn't do it. And then on the other side of that just feels like nothing. But I think you gotta flip that switch and after a certain amount of repetition of doing it, or like, I've worked in a lot of corporate settings too, where you'd be in these, these board meetings with. Some pretty heavy hitters and first those were very nerve wracking. It just becomes business as usual after time. So yeah, I think probably repetition's the biggest point, but you do have to like lock in and dig your heels on the ground and just go for it. 

Austin Gray: Yeah, for sure. Are you familiar with lead measures, first lag measure goals? Like the concept of that? 

Thomas Rudy: No, I don't think so. 

Austin Gray: I wish I would've known this early on. So I did door-to-door sales right outta college for security systems. I. And I sucked it up that year, the first year. And it was because I was tying myself to the outcome where I was like, I need three sales a day, right? And then I wouldn't get three sales a day, and then I would just end up in this funk at the end of the day. And then it was like this cyclical, just emotional battle. And then one of the sales leaders the following year coached me on, why don't you just start framing things? For the number of doors you knock, remove yourself from the outcome.

You're not worried about getting the sale. All you're challenging yourself to do is knock on that door and just talk to the person. And so he was like, set your goal based off of that. And so once I flipped it, I was then introduced to the concept of lead measures and lag measures and lead measures is essentially what can I control in this situation.

So like in this conversation with what we're talking about, the lead measure would be. I can pick up the phone and I can call five property managers in my local area today. I can't control what they're gonna say. I can't control how they're gonna react and I can't control whether or not I get a sale or not.

What I can do though, is I can control the fact that I call them and I tell them that I'm in your local area and that I provide the X, Y, Z services. And so like tying this all back into what you're talking about is like one, just go do it two. Get the reps in and flipping it from the lag measure based, tied to the outcome, to the lead measure of, I'm just going to focus on the action, is really what helped me get through that.

And yeah, I just wanted to like weave that in here because I do have people who listen to this podcast who reach out where it's like, how do you get over that fear? And I think what you're saying is it's as simple as you've gotta figure out a way to just go do it. Right? Whatever you need to do in your head, just go do it.

Thomas Rudy: I think you brought up a good point earlier too, when you were saying, I call whatever property management group and I just introduce myself and make it like a passive sale. So maybe like a little context. We floated around this idea of raising money in our group just because we've been growing pretty quickly and we have some ambitious goals.

I'll say that. So like one thing that I've done there is I'm like, I'm not gonna like just pick up the phone and call and be like, Hey, we need your money, or whatever. I'm really saying, Hey, like person that I respect, or um, someone that I value their insight, I'll call 'em just like, Hey, will you just gimme your feedback on this deck and let me know what you think? And the kinda like half-heartedly, you know, like opening the door to show what we're doing without giving them a hard sale. I think another component of that too is like the, just be honest with yourself. When you, if you knock on those a hundred doors and you get a hundred nos.

Austin Gray: After you go through that process, just like talk through it with a friend or your business associate or whatever and say, what are some other angles that we can try?

Thomas Rudy: Not necessarily, if you knocked on the first a hundred doors, you may knock on the next a hundred doors differently with a different approach. And just like benchmark that. So the latest example of that for me is like, I've talked to a few VCs and just all filled out their form to get a meeting and it's, I've had some conversation, but now I'm just some of the colleagues that I worked with in the past that have had these big exits just like, "Hey, let me see." Let me know what you think about this concept and what are the holes and how can we fill them if we're gonna actually turn this into a, like a very big business. So I think being honest with your approach too is another thing too. If you do get the, no, don't feel too bad about it.

Treat it like a game and see what other strategy tactic you can take. I hate to say like AB tested it 'cause you're probably not gonna have like exact science to something like that. But yeah, just think through it pragmatically. I. Whatever you did today, try something else. You see what other results you get.

But yeah, the latest like idea around raising money, I'm having many more conversations. Just being passive and saying, Hey, take a look at this and let me know what you think. People who would wanna write an angel check or a BC firm, like what they would say of this. And I've gotten like way better feedback and way more intros taking that approach rather than just like diving all into it. So yeah. 

Austin Gray: And if, I'm sure you genuinely care about their feedback, right? Because it's valuable for you, 

Thomas Rudy: Of course. 

Austin Gray: If the approach is genuine in that, it's just a way to show them under the hood of what you're doing, right, to get essentially the full pitch and provide their expert entrepreneurial or investor feedback.

Thomas Rudy: Yeah, and the biggest thing is like what? What are the holes in this? Or when they come back and say. What's your MO or any of these questions like, do I have a good enough strategy behind what I'm doing? And if not, like how can I either pivot or position the messaging to help with what I'm trying to accomplish?

But yeah, I guess that's another thing too, is like just being honest with yourself is just, you can go back to the beginning of this podcast, like a lot of people just lied to themselves. Either I didn't win because of X, Y, Z, or. I would've if this would've happened. And this is all bullshit. None of it ever really matters.

So being honest with yourself too. So if you do make those first thousand phone calls or door knocks and you can get any results, maybe you'll be a little honest with yourself and try different approaches. I think that's a huge component to be going from zero to one too. It's just, uh, literally just being honest with yourself.

A lot of people just say to themselves about how good they are, how things should or should not have gone. I think that can help alleviate some of the fear too. If you're just like, it's all right, I failed and I can put my boots on again and try it again. Like it's okay. But the people that are not honest with themselves, I'll just get stuck in this like limbo wheel where it's everyone else's fault or it's all these external reasons why it's not working out the way that I thought it was gonna be, be working out in bad spot to be in. 

Austin Gray: For sure. Yeah. Or I, I tried so hard on that, and I think we're all guilty of this at different times of our life, but I promise listeners, I'll stop doing this, but I wanna reiterate the woods concept that you've talked about. If your kids are in the woods and one of them is hurt, and you gotta figure out a way out, you are going to figure that out.

Thomas Rudy: Yes.

Austin Gray: And so if business was thought about the same way, right? If you had to go zero to a million this year, how would you do that? And so making that complete effort. To your point, being honest with yourself is really important with that. Alright, so here's the deal. We just spent about half an hour talking a lot about getting over your fear and picking up the phone. Your first customers are in your phone book is what Thomas has said. We're gonna spend the next half of this episode talking about, alright, let's say you're a couple million bucks in revenue. Next marketing strategies. 

Austin Gray: 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. 

Austin Gray: What as a CMO, what percentage? Just as a rough percentage of your total revenue should go towards marketing budget?

Thomas Rudy: Ooh, that's a good question. It's wildly varied in the groups that I've worked with. My agency business was, virtually all the expenditures were marketing, uh, most like performance affiliate marketing. So I think it depends. I think really like you need to set your margins and figure out what your cost of marketing should be baked into that.

I think maybe a lot of times in the home service world that's 7% ish, maybe you're also front loading. If you're like a service business that has brick and mortar, you're investing more of that to get into your next location and promoting it because you just opened up a new store or whatever. I think it depends. I think a general rule of thumb for groups is probably like in that seven to 10% range. 

Austin Gray: Okay. And let's say this person, let's say they've generated, let's call it 300 K in profit, way between one and 2 million revenue somewhere in there, or let's just say several hundred in profit. They've got some money that they can either take as a distribution or next year they can reinvest back in marketing.

And let's say they've bootstrapped already. To that point, doing exactly what you just said, just picking up the phone. Hey, my name's Austin. We're in the local markets just doing B2B sales, and they've gotten to where they've gotten. Now they want to build their presence online. How do you break up that 7%. 

Thomas Rudy: If you're a local service business, I would absolutely, 100%. And this is like where the world I came from. Invest in your local SEO channels. That is your bread and putter like way to get leads. And we did that like with the group print, find ship. They were a client of mine when I exited my firm. I kept working with them for a little bit and then ended up joining them. But this group, local service business, I mean they serve a national and international audience, but they had never gotten a lead through their website in 50 years ever before the internet. So we did a heavy SEO campaign for them. Now huge deals just fall into their lap. Weekly. So I think that is like your fortress of solitude, essentially.

Like knowing that you're getting inbound leads takes a little bit of pressure off. And then I think you really have to experiment with the rest of the budget. So if that's maybe half of your budget to start and that can taper off after you start to get results or you can bring that in-house to help alleviate some of that cost. Um, I think really taking a step back before even any of that you need to set up, invest a little bit in how to measure attribution. After you have attribution set up, and if you do spend $5,000 here or $10,000 there, but actually worked, you're not just like throwing money out there. And yeah, I think that had good results.

So I think setting up the attribution is important, and I think you really should just have 90, 120 day cycles of testing things and at least getting some of those initial metrics. Maybe not the downstream revenue metrics, but we know that this got this amount of leads. We know that it fit our ICP. It was a good lead. And it resulted in a customer quote or some sort of consultation. And if it fit the profile, maybe it's a good lead If you didn't convert that sale, you know, that can happen. But um, if you're getting the right people into the door to sell to, I think that's a really good way to see in the first 90, 120 days if something can be successful for you.

And then you'll shift budget around paid ads. Obviously they work and paid ads work really nicely with our software too. But yeah, I think. If I were starting a local business today, I would absolutely invest marketing dollars into the local SEO presence. Once we got lead flow from that, try different paid avenues. Um, and then you can go a step further, again, depending on your business, and do things like radio, billboards, all of that. But you need to have attribution set up before you do something like that. 'cause otherwise you're just guessing if it's working or not. 

Austin Gray: And when you say attribution, could you please explain what you mean by that and I want it to be framed in the context of, Hey, I'm the guy who's just been picking up the phone. We've done a couple million bucks in revenue. I've got some profit to deal with. I need to start marketing now. What does attribution mean? 

Thomas Rudy: Yeah, attribution, its simplest form is literally just knowing where the source of that prospect lead came from. So it's pretty easy to do, and in most marketing mediums. Maybe some of the harder ones might be like a billboard, but anything you're running online or even radio, if you have a special link, our software is extremely easy to attribute. It's just telling you where the lead came from, and then you can book that into a certain cohort in your CRM and know what the potential value of those leads customers would be, and then eventually what they end up becoming.

So as easy as it is to set up, I'm sure you're not surprised, but. There's lots of businesses that don't have it set up, and they're like, I don't know. You've been spending five grand a month on Google Ads, and I don't know if it's working or not. They didn't have the conversion pixel set up, so there's tons of people that can help out and do this kind of thing.

You go on Upwork, you'll find somebody for 15, 20 bucks an hour that you, maybe you'll have to spend a thousand bucks on it in total to set up that flow for you. So it's worth it for sure, and every marketing expenditure that you have in the future. If it actually worked, because there's so many people that just throw money at the wall and have no idea if it's working or they think it's working. So that is absolutely key. Otherwise, I wouldn't even recommend spending marketing dollars maybe on your local SEO, but if you don't have attribution set up, I definitely wouldn't run Meta or Google ads. 

Austin Gray: What do you search for on Upwork specifically to find that person who can set this up properly? If you're doing this right now and you're going on Upwork, what are you putting in their job post?

Thomas Rudy: Yeah. Honestly, Upwork, I dunno if you've used it recently or your audience has, but it's so great now it has an AI job posting tool. So I don't know what the latest job post that I put out was. I think it was like a integration specialist for some of these ad platforms we wanna build into. But if I were to, I would probably say like conversion ad conversion specialist, um, you're gonna find so many people that can do it for you and knock it out and will work hard.

Just say ad conversion specialist. I need someone to hook up my CRM to all the different marketing initiatives that I have going on and make sure the attribution is sourced correctly. And I would say make sure you do some of your own attribution too. So you'll see things in like Google or Meta. Always make sure that you have the right UTM parameters or whatever source parameters set up on your links and they actually pass to your form fill outs.

If you wanna get sophisticated too, you can change the phone number. For it to call on your website. So yeah, all those things are if, if you're not tech savvy, it might sound difficult, but for anyone who's working online, digital marketing, those things are very easy to set up. It's routine. I would say definitely lean into the results from different platforms on what they're reporting back to you, but also make sure you have your own attribution where a source is passed to some sort of hidden field on your form or a few different hidden fields on your form.

We actually, we just set up a campaign for a medical provider. Same kind of thing. They were spending a decent amount on ads. Google was saying this amount of conversions came through. Facebook was saying this amount of conversions came through, wasn't matching up to their CRM. So we helped them take another level of redundancy to pass the exact campaigns and ads from a keyword structure into their form so they could see.

This one came from video ad A. This one came from static ad B on meta. This one came from. Exact keywords on Google. This one came from phrase match on Google, and you tie it back to the ad in the campaign. Again, not overly complicated, but a lot of people skip that step. It's an easy step to hire out. So I would say hire that out for sure.

Before you went spend any marketing dollars, maybe local essay is the one that you would do before you have that set up. But yeah, attribution. Attribution is huge. And if I had to guess, I would say over half of local service businesses are not doing that correctly. That's a rough guest, especially the ones that are starting out 

Austin Gray: And I believe you're correct. And so listeners, if, if that's you, if you have been running ads or if you've been doing Google ads and you don't have this set up, hear me out on this. I just spent a week in Austin with a guy who owns a really big marketing agency. They've spent over 40 million bucks in Facebook ads, and the one question that he asked me was do you know your metrics? And I left that week. The only thing I could think about is I don't know my metrics well enough at this point. And the point that he was making to me, and I believe the point you're making to our listeners too, is you should know your metrics like the back of your hand if you're spending money on ads, because you need to know whether you can or cannot scale this business.

 And the last several days, like I mentioned before, we jumped on. I've been spending, I don't know, like every night, early every morning just diving into our data. And so for listeners, we use jobber internally. And so I will tell you a real world example. I was not doing a good enough job of this. So if you're not alone in this, but I am actively hiring somebody to do exactly what you've just said because if I'm gonna be spending money on ads, I want to know exactly what ad that came from.

I also want to know when we book a job with a customer and a customer pays an invoice, I want to be able to look back at it at a report and be able to say, okay, this customer, we can attribute back to meta ad one or Google Ad three, whatever. And, and I didn't have it that detailed. And so what I've spent time on is going through all of our paid invoices from 2024, backtracking everything back to our lead list.

Just like manually searching everything so that I could understand my KPIs and the metrics. 'cause I really wanna understand our cost per acquisition. I really wanna understand like our average customer value, things like that. And I had no way of doing that. And so listeners, if you are listening to this, please take this seriously and please hear Thomas out on this because it has cost me a lot of time and a lot of work manually to go back and pull our numbers for 2024. Moving forward, we will be buttoned up here. I can vouch for that right now, but I'm gonna encourage, 

Thomas Rudy: I was gonna say, and it becomes more fun like, and you, 

Austin Gray: Oh my gosh. 

Thomas Rudy: These things, and you're like, oh wow, that ad is ripping. Or you can brag too. I spent whatever. I spent this on this ad and it resulted in these ROAS. Isn't that cool? You end up becoming like a little expert yourself just by taking the simple step of attribution. So like some attribution is more complex than others, but for the most part it's pretty easy to set up and it will help. Just that. If you imagine 40, 50, maybe as high as 60% of businesses in the local service realm are not doing this, you can immediately outpace some of your competition by spending a few thousand dollars on somebody setting this up for you. That's a huge step forward to my opinion. 

Austin Gray: Then another area that I've uncovered is the lifetime value metric of the customer. I have no way to upsell other services. So we run a tree crew and we also run a dirt crew. We have two different crews, and so if a customer comes through on our tree crew funnel and we perform a tree service for them this year, the following year, or even later this year, we want to be able to segment them that this is a customer that has paid us for tree services.

But in the notes, they also have a gravel driveway, so we should be hitting them with gravel, driveway repair emails and nurturing that customer so that we can increase the lifetime value of that customer. Because if it doesn't cost us any more money to go acquire that customer, and we already have that customer in our database, we can now remarket to them, which is what I want to jump into now, and it's not gonna cost us any more money. So I think that there is this whole gold mine sitting underneath people's fingertips, especially in local service that could be nurtured and used in a way to just upsell more services. And you don't have that customer acquisition cost associated with that. 

Thomas Rudy: A hundred percent. And I don't know if you, I think Jobber does this, but you can take it a step further and ask them for the referrals and then all of a sudden your one customer is now there. Two best buds and their family members. You have a whole new audience. Send this to your, just send a group text to your friends. Yeah, whatever spring special on the driveway, repair, whatever it is. So yeah, like using that effectively, it goes back to like first sales already in your phone book, like your next sales, already in your CRM there's so much exhaust, which is like what data shoppers all predicated on so much exhaust happening on the eyeballs that are already interested in your business.

Just easy money grabs. Here's like a fun exercise. It's like outside of the home service realm. But, um, when I was running my agency, we were doing like really big affiliate deals for some of these financial media brands. And basically like every, everyone that you've ever heard of, we've worked with in some capacity.

But it would be like seven days before the month was up and we would sit down and be like, all right, we gotta try to do another quarter million this month. How are we gonna do it? Like all the things that we just discussed and talked about, like we're like, all right, yeah, rip that email off to this group.

Let's put this placement here. Let's do that. Like everyone that was already in our system, we would set these crazy goals for adding another whatever amount of revenue in seven days. We wouldn't always hit it, but we would come close. Often hit it sometimes, but it was just always fascinating how much was already right there that we would otherwise let die off if we didn't pay attention to it or take.

Some sort of action and a lot of those actions ended up becoming automated over time after you figured out what work. But yeah, again, like that's data shopper is literally taking your audience segmenting out however you want. So an example a, a really simple example is like we have a few remodeling companies, some of them are in the basement realm.

So is this customer that's on your website a homeowner and. Do they actually have a basement? Okay, they, they fit this cohort. What's their income and what's their credit range and what's their net worth and the home value. So you can really take the audience that's already on your site and do some very interesting things with them, um, in the home service route. And we have property data on everybody. We have all their financial footprint, obviously all their contact information, mailing address, so we get really in the weeds with the data and we can do some really interesting stuff with it. 

Austin Gray: Please tell us more. You got the floor for the next 10. 

Thomas Rudy: Let's see, I got a 10:00 AM Eric's on that. My other sales guy's on that call so I can show up a couple minutes late. But yeah, so data shopper, it is literally just a simple script that goes on your website, takes two minutes to install, assuming that you have access to your code base or you got a dev guy, send it over to him just like a Google Analytics script.

And then in real time it is feeding. The data of who is actually looking on your site name, address, email, phone number. Um, maybe a differentiator for us is we have a myriad of other data points. So we have all their device IDs, that means their phone. What's the id? So you can retarget it. Um, we have their property information, so what type of home it is, all the different components of that bed beds, baths. What's, what's the mortgage? What's the estimated value, what's the mortgage rate? How many people are in the home, how many kids are in the home property details surrounding like business or commercial? So you can take all that data and I guess first we can return only the data that fits your ICP.

So as an example, we're working with a pretty big financial institution. In a trailing seven day period, we might see 500,000 visitors to the site and we might match half of those, identify half of the people that are in that cohort. Then we filter it down to maybe 10,000 that actually meet their ICP, and then we take action on that.

So in the home service realm, we can get very specific on that, even their behavioral data. So we have data on people that are looking for a new kitchen or people that are looking for a new roof. Um, and really it's drilled down into that. And then from there you can remarket them. Obviously direct mail is a huge way to do it.

So we send letters, brochures, postcards, we even do handwritten letters. Now we have a machine that has a little robot and it literally writes it out. So it's like getting a letter from your grandma, you're gonna open it. Um, and then people do that. If they have a sales team and it makes sense like you're calling on commercial properties or whatever, reach out to them.

Call them. So do we have the anonymous visitors? B2B profile merged with their B2C profiles? You can see their LinkedIn and the company they work for, et cetera. Then people will also take the data and feed their various ad platforms. So if you are at the stage where you're running 10, $15,000 a month of ads, or more people spending millions of dollars on ads, you can take all that data and feed it into different audiences that you can benchmark against success, right?

Like the goal is to take that data and reduce your attack. So if your cost per lead is, I'm just making up a number, 200 bucks. Employ this strategy, feed the data to it. Let's try to drive that customer acquisition cost for that CPL down for you. And our service is so cheap. Like everything that I just described, that entire flow would be less than the cost of a click on Google for you to actually get the lead for you to actually send mail out for you to actually pick the data to the various ad platforms.

All we're talking like less than a couple bucks for everything included. So we're, we're making some tremendous strides and like doing some damage in this world, um, which is really exciting. But yeah, so home service, it's great for marketing in a lot of ways because the ROEs are very easy to back into.

But we have e-commerce companies, we have obviously the financial media marketing and financial service. Marketing is where I come from. So we have a lot of that too. But our service is super simple to set up and really creates like an automated way to. Get a customer that's at that point where they could be signing up. Again, it's similar context to your first sales in your phone, like your next sales on your website. You probably just need to do a little bit of like handholding, pushing to the edge, which our software helps you do. Pretty much automatically after for a little bit of setup. 

Austin Gray: This episode is brought to you by DialedIn Bookkeeping. Ben and his team provide bookkeeping services, job costing reports, and accurate financial information for the home services industry. If you're looking to keep your books up to date, visit dialedinbookkeeping.com/ownrops. When you use this specific landing page, you'll get your first three months 50% off.

Austin Gray: That's incredible. And monthly subscription setup fee? Anything there? Or is it all just based on how many people you're sending, marketing, messaging or retargeting?

Thomas Rudy: Yeah, so we actually set it up just like Google or Meta or any of these platforms. We just have a daily budget so you can go in there and we have people that spend $10 a day. We have people that spend thousands of dollars a day. Um, it just depends on what your budget is. More often than not, groups will start small and we'll just start testing and seeing the data. Seeing the type of mail collateral that goes out and then after finding, they got their first sale or they booked a demo or whatever, then they'll wanna ramp it up or we use the data in different ways. The only contracts that we would give people is if you want better rates, if you wanna go for six months or a year, we'll give you better rates. But otherwise, it's a daily contract. You can turn it off whenever you want. So we make it really simple front too. 

Austin Gray: Wow, this is interesting. And it's all off. Website visitors. Can you do any lookalike audiences? 

Thomas Rudy: Yeah, so we have an incredibly powerful intent driven database too. More often than not, what will happen if we wanna do the lookalike audiences, we've cataloged the US adult population. So from that, we can obviously identify traffic on your website, but we have all these different intent feeds that we bring in click traffic or sign up traffic or search traffic.

So we can pair things like, I want to go after this age group and this area that meets this sort of demographic, or this has this financial footprint, um, and has this property, like the property details surrounding them would be this. And then we can take that cohort and that can be an audience for you, or you can also layer in and they need to be looking for a new route or something to that extent or they've showed interest in remodeling their bathroom. So those are things that we can kinda like tack on to our software, but they can also run independently. Like we have a lot of customers that will just take data feeds and inject them into their hats as a way to help reduce cost. And since the data's so affordable, especially at scale, talking like pennies per record, it makes it a really easy test to benchmark against.

So we're averaging, again, $200 CPL now we're averaging. One 40. Right. And across the macro it's huge savings, right? So yeah, we have lookalike audiences that you can tap into the website. Retargeting audience in itself is its own lookalike audience, but it's coming from your website. And most of the time, um, for local home service businesses or anything that are blue collar jobs, as I often call them, the traffic to those sites are really good.

Like they. Somebody actually interested in your service, somebody that's shopping around and looking for it. So this data shopper helps you get an extra edge to touch them when they might be considering your three competitors in your area. And we also have tools too. This is a really common instance too, like somebody will have a blog that'd be like, how do I hang a picture on my wall? And it gets a ton of traffic, but it's not your localized traffic. So we have a lot of tools that help you segment. Where on the site that it runs. So be a certain page path. It can come from a certain UTM parameter. It can obviously be like geo focused state or zip focused. You can upload blacklist to it.

So if you have all your current customers, you don't wanna remarket to them in that certain format or your employees, you can upload those lists either via me email or address so it won't get matched. So we have a lot of tools to help you filter down into. The prospects that are gonna convert. And we built it that way intentionally. So we're not just, again, like throwing money out the wall. It's all very intentional with how it's put together. 

Austin Gray: This is crazy. Super cool though. Very interesting. Anything else you want to add for our listeners on that? 

Thomas Rudy: No, I don't think so. If you wanna check us out, we're in the process of relaunching our website that describes a lot more what we've done sitting there for a minute, ironically. If you wanna go to datashopper.com, you can book a demo with us. Um, and yeah, just help you get outta the woods and help you get a little further is the overall goal of it. 

Austin Gray: Fantastic. Other than datashopper.com, where can people find you online?

Thomas Rudy: Honestly, most of the time now I'm on Twitter or x I've been like a behind the scenes marketer for a long time. And yeah, actually I've had a lot of fun on x meeting, a lot of cool people. And like I, I tried to do the LinkedIn thing. It does not feel as authentic. No. Just can't do it. I'll post sometimes or like I'll obviously flick people up on there and add 'em. And actually, to be fair, in my world, LinkedIn does okay. But definitely X has been where I'm the most active. 

Austin Gray: X is like just the entrepreneurial hangout. It seems like LinkedIn is just, I don't know. It just seems like that's where you want to go if you want a CEO of a corporate company's. 

Thomas Rudy: I was gonna say, yeah, it's like corporate grandstanding on LinkedIn.

Austin Gray: Yeah. 

Thomas Rudy: Not my style. 

Austin Gray: Yeah, me either. 

Thomas Rudy: Yeah, that's about it. And hopefully on many more of these podcasts. I've been doing a few of these and it's been fun, so it's a newer thing for me too. 

Austin Gray: Cool. All right, Thomas, thanks for being on the on house podcast. We appreciate you listeners. Thanks again for listening to another episode here. If you have not already, go check out our newsletter. We summarize these episodes and we will send you the highest level action points on Saturdays. You can sign up ownrops.com. That's O-W-N-R-O-P-S.com. Then we would sure appreciate a five star review here if you are enjoying and getting value out of these episodes.

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You'll get the notifications when we publish our weekly episodes on Friday. And with that being said, we'll wrap this one up. We'll see you guys next week. Don't forget, work hard, do your best. Never settle for less.

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