Andrew Rampulla:  You can't waste your time with people who aren't qualified, especially with Christmas lights. I ended up dropping outta college to go full time with soft washing, and then we tacked on Christmas lights just because off washing seasonal and here we are. So I started in soft washing probably like four years ago at this point. Originally I was in like the online space. I started in agency, which didn't go very well. I had zero skills and thought it was a get rich Riggs game camera. And I saw TikTok saying, you can make a hundred dollars an hour pressure washing. I was like, man, I could do that. My dad was a pressure washer, so I went out and uh, started going door to door, and that was it man.

Austin Gray: They likely want the absolute best service in the market that requires the least amount of their time. They just want a professional to come in, handle it. They'll pay a higher price. They just don't wanna be bothered or contacted.

Austin Gray: Hey, welcome back to another episode of the OWNR OPS podcast. I'm your host, Austin Gray. In this episode, I have Andrew Ramo joining me. Andrew is a wash business owner and he also. Understands how to run Facebook ads and develop a sales process that wins for local service-based business owners. So stick around this whole episode if you want to learn a deeper dive strategy into running Facebook ads and developing a sales process.

I hope you guys get as much as I did out of this episode. He's sharp, he knows what he's doing, so stick around for the whole thing. If you have not yet, go check out the new school community. We created an owner ops free school community, specifically for local service-based business owners. If you wanna grow your business alongside other people and get access to free video trainings, like how to go start your business, how to develop your brand, how to do logos, how to go get your first customers, things like that, you can visit school.com s kol.com/owner ops Oow N-R-O-P-S.

Austin Gray: Thanks, Andrew Rampulla, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me. Yeah, so much fun. Why don't you tell us about the businesses you started? 

Andrew Rampulla: Yeah, so I, I'm in soft washing and Christmas lights, so I started in soft washing probably like four years ago at this point. Originally I was in like the online space. I started an agency, which didn't go very well. I had zero skills and thought it was a get rich quick schemes. Damn. And, uh, I wanted some more money to buy another course so I could learn more. And I saw TikTok saying, you can make a hundred dollars an hour pressure washing. I was like, man, I could do that.

My dad was a pressure washer, so I went out and then I started going door to door, and that was it, man. I ended up dropping outta college to go full-time with soft washing, and then we tacked on Christmas lights just because soft washing, seasonal. And here we are. 

Austin Gray: Where are you located? 

Andrew Rampulla: I'm, I'm in New York, half the year and Florida the other half of the year. So the soft washing business is in New York and the Christmas lights is in Florida. Oh wow. Um, just because it just so happened that, or I went to school in Florida when I was in school during the wintertime. So we started the lights down there and now they're just in two states. 

Austin Gray: Okay. Got it. So which one do you like better?

Andrew Rampulla: The lights a hundred percent. The light is like my, a bit of my baby. It's just a, it's such a fun business. It's, I used to compete track in high school, so it very much feels like you're back in competition with, we have a really good team. All of the boys are like pretty much getting together for two, three months and just working like 12, 13 hours every day.

‍Austin Gray: Just, 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. 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.get jobber.com/ownrops O-W-N-R-O-P-S, 

Andrew Rampulla: and having a blast at it.It's like, all right, we have. A 60 day stretch to just go all out and it's just so much fun. And the business too, like it's super high ticket, it's super sticky and customers absolutely love the product. It's just people walk outside and they're ecstatic to see their house look absolutely awesome. It's not quite the same with soft washing.

People are, when get your house gonna get like nice, it looks clean. So I really do love the Christmas lights. It's such a fun business. 

Austin Gray: Awesome. So what are the average ticket values for a Christmas light business? 

Andrew Rampulla: So year one, our average was 2,800. Year two, we dropped a little bit to 2200 just because we we're in the lower income part. We're in Tallahassee and the market's pretty small there. We have three neighborhoods where you have like upper middle class people and the rest is pretty poor. So we started selling more of those, like a thousand, $1,500 tickets to accommodate that sort of, uh, clientele. But yeah, last year was 2200, hoping to bring that closer to three grand again this year.

Austin Gray: What are margins on that after you pay out labor? 

Andrew Rampulla: So margins are interesting 'cause because of the model. So we do, we lease the lights. So year one you have all of the product costs, you have the acquisition cost of the customer, and then year two and year three, that'll, that all drops. So year one, our margin was around 35%.

Year two is maybe just above, closer to 40. I can't tell you for sure what year three is gonna be. We're planning for a lot of growth this year. So with that obviously comes more like payroll, cost more advertising cost, all of that good stuff. So it's been steady between 35 and 40%, and that's what I've heard from some of the bigger players as well.

When you get closer to seven figures is around there. But like I said, the coolest thing is that you build up all of the inventory, right? So like it's paid for year one and then for customers with you for seven years, all you're paying for the is for the labor, which US cost us like 15% of the ticket value.

Austin Gray: Do you have any data to support how long a customer stays with the Christmas slide business? 

Andrew Rampulla: All I have right now is churn year one to year two. So if you, we retained 65% of customers and given it was really small sample size, year one, we did just under 50 K with 18 customers. And I think right around 12 returned.

So 65% and if you extrapolate that, it's around like a three year lifetime value, which I'm hoping with more data that goes up a lot. Maybe it's closer to 4, 5, 6 years. 'cause last year we had about 75 customers, so it's gonna be a little bit more clear. What the actual data is in terms of retention. 

‍Austin Gray: Okay, got it. Now, is there a job that sticks out in your head where you just were like, okay, that was a awesome job, and you have the number, like the revenue number that's sticky in your mind? Do you have that in your head right now? Okay. How many people were on that job? 

Andrew Rampulla: Three. 

Austin Gray: And then what was the total ticket size?

Andrew Rampulla: About just under five grand. I think it was like 4,900. 4,900. 

Austin Gray: Okay. Let's break this down. If you're down. I did this with Ty, the stump guy, and we just said, okay, what's the, what's, what are the actual margins on this? So you have 4,900 top line revenue. You had three guys. How much do you pay on each lead?

Andrew Rampulla: Lead Tech is 35. So one guy gets paid 35 and the other guys they get paid. 25. 25 actually. Sorry. No, no, they don't. They get, they get paid 20. I lied. 

Austin Gray: Okay. And how many hours to get that job in? 

Andrew Rampulla: That one was right around three, maybe a bit on. 

Austin Gray: That job was a three hour job. Yeah. So you paid three hours to a $35 per hour lead tech and three hours to two $20 per hour?

Andrew Rampulla: Yeah. 

Austin Gray: And that, that, that was literally all start to finish. Like from time they leave the shop to come back, start to finish. 

Andrew Rampulla: Obviously you have take down, but yeah. Start to finish just about three. 

Austin Gray: Holy smokes. So what's your labor cost on that? Let's see, three times 35, 1 0 5. Three times, 20 times two plus one 20. So you've got 240, 200 $40 in pure labor costs. Are they W2 or 10 99. 10 99. 

Andrew Rampulla: 10.99. 

Austin Gray: Wow. So labor is at two 40 and we'll use AI to extrapolate all this. I'll send this back over to you after we do it. Ty, I think Ty used it for some X content and stuff. Okay. And then you said you have the leasing on the lights, so can you break down how that. I'm assuming you break it out on an annual, like you're making an assumption, right? Like when you lease lights up front and then you bake in, Hey, I'm gonna get to use these for how many years? 

Andrew Rampulla: Yeah, so we still make money year one, so we're still right around like year one with all the product costs. We were still at 35% net and that way that's without, keep in mind, anytime I talk about margin, it's without an owner salary. I don't, I don't pay myself and take that out of the, so that that is something to consider. But we don't set it like, we don't price as if they're gonna stay around for five years. So we have like a standard like eight to $10 per linear foot, which is relatively standard, like a little bit higher than some companies.

But essentially if they only stay for one year, it really doesn't matter because we can also just recycle that material and use it for someone else. So regardless whether they stay or not, we still have the material in inventory, and I'm assuming it's gonna have a shelf life of anywhere from four to eight years.

Austin Gray: Got it. So can you dive deeper on how you think about the numbers of that? What did that, or what did those lights for that job cost you? Yeah, so the, all of the material cost for, and this is for roof lines. 

‍Andrew Rampulla: So there's two sort of main like sectors with Christmas lights. You have roof lines, so like those big C nine bulbs that go on the roof. Then you have mini lights, which is the smaller wraps of lights that you're probably more familiar with, like regular Christmas lights that are just commercial grade that you wrap with, like bushes, columns, trees, all of that good stuff. So the roof line right around, and I'm not super clear on our numbers, so this is more of an estimate is right around a dollar 50, maybe closer to a dollar, depending on when we buy per linear foot.

And the mini lights are about 11 or $12 per strand, and that's before taxing shipping gets quite expensive. Like on some orders we're paying like 500 to a thousand just to have it shipped, which, which does get crazy. And then you have REIT costs, which are any of the greenery in the Garland is, or like the REITs in Garland are the biggest sort of material expenses.

But those literally take 30 seconds to put up and down. So the labor cost is next to nothing. Um, and after they're paid for year one, it's the same thing. Like you profit a hundred percent of their re costs every other year after that. So on that project in particular, I don't know. I don't remember for sure what the material cost is. I'm gonna do my best to see if I can take a look. 'cause I believe it was about maybe 550 feet of lights.

Austin Gray:  So, so $8 and 90 cents a foot? 

Andrew Rampulla: Yeah. Right around there. I think I priced that job at $9 a foot. Okay. After we did all the measurements. So if you take that times 1.5 and then add in 10, 20, whatever you 30% for like shipping and tax, that sort of thing. Right around a thousand in terms of. Okay. Material. Yep. 

Austin Gray: That's checking out here. So roughly, just for rough numbers sake, like depending on how, what math you guys use there. Right Around a thousand for material costs and your labor, what we said was two 40. What else do you have in there? 

Andrew Rampulla: We have a customer acquisition cost, which I think we were acquiring customers for 220, around $220 last year. So you have that, but you have insurance, which is pretty cheap I think. We pay like $70 a month or something like that. 

Austin Gray: Uh, $70 a month for insurance. Wow. 

Andrew Rampulla: I gotta make sure that's like correct because that, that was a very last minute in September or October that I found an insurance provider that, that said they covered Christmas lights and it didn't seem right in my head. It was like, switch cheap. Especially for like ladder work, but that Right. That is what we pay. But you have to make sure. Yeah, yeah. Double check that. 'cause in the same reality, it doesn't sound right. 

Austin Gray: Yeah. You never know though, right? You just never know. Yeah. But it sounds like you're a lot like me. I get so fixated on, oh, I can deliver this product, I can do it. Or like right out the gate and then I'm like, oh shoot, I need insurance. I remember that I was going to, my first job, I'm calling my broker. I'm like, I need coverage now. 

Andrew Rampulla: Yeah, yeah. You're one. We just, I used, we weren't even, like, everything wasn't, I was using my pressure washing insurance 'cause I called my insurance broker. I was like, yo, can I like get on roof? So can I hang Christmas sites? He's like, yeah, you're fine. He didn't realize it was in Florida, so like they don't cover us. He was like, I called again here too. I was like, Hey, we're still good, right? He's like, yeah, like just to make sure, like, this is in New York, right? No, bro. Look, he's on. No, you're not good. So 'cause like shit, need new address. 

‍Austin Gray: Ah, man. I'm glad I'm not the only one. Yeah. Insurance is just that drag at the very end of this. Oh no. Now I gotta go through this process. 

Andrew Rampulla: Yeah. Yeah, and sometimes it's just the biggest pain to find or like it'll get ridiculous. I remember when I was first starting with the soft washing, I could not find general liability for the life of me. I called probably like 20 brokers, and they were giving me like quotes for 1500 a month. I was like, dude, like we're not doing anything crazy here. Tell me please gimme something reasonable. Holy crap. 

Austin Gray: Yeah, and seriously, if anybody's listening to this and you are an insurance broker. If you could specialize in these sweaty service-based businesses, especially for early stage guys like Andrew and myself, like there is room for somebody to own this niche. Especially if you jump in on the X network.

And if you just start like figuring out how to help guys in the early stage get insurance. 'cause like I'm, I know it exists, but sounds like you experienced the biggest pain as well. Man, the amount of calls I had to make to initially get that first one, and then you have to fill out the applications and all that stuff. I'm telling you, if a broker would step in and help owners and operators do that stuff, you would have so much business. It would be insane. 

Andrew Rampulla: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's just such a pain point for guys starting out, especially mainly, like I said, it was just such a pain, 

Austin Gray: so insurance was 70. Are there anything, is there anything else associated with cost of goods sold? Like they're all 1099, right? 

Andrew Rampulla: They drive their own trust pretty much. Yeah. I have, uh, one work truck that's for the soft wash business and the Christmas light business that's thrown out in the field. And we have basic stuff like ladders and that sort of thing. But there's really, the cool thing that Christmas lights is there's pretty much zero CapEx. Like the only thing you need to expand is pretty much another vehicle to go drive to the job. 

Austin Gray: So if we were being nitpicky about this, add what, 50, $50 in fuel? To drive the job and back. 

Andrew Rampulla: Yeah. You can do fuel in terms of cost of good. Sold you, yeah. Fuel. You can even do like depreciation on the truck or like, you know, that sort of thing. And there's a lot of other like weird miscellaneous costs that just decide to sprout out. Yeah, those are the big ones 

Austin Gray: I like to add, and I think people do it differently, but I like to know the true cost internally at my 'cause. We operate a lot of heavy equipment, so I try to say, okay, here's what it costs to own the equipment. Here's what it costs to own the trucks, and let's break it down by how many working days we have. And then let's just plug that number in just so we know it, like a true cost on that. I think some guys will do it that way. Other guys will do it down below. The margin, the like down below in your actual expenses, below gross margin.

So you seriously only have $4,900. Top line, $240 in labor, a thousand dollars in material. So what is that? 1240 plus $50 in fuel. You're at 1290, so 4,900 minus 1290. Anything else? It's really, those are the big ones. It's really maybe if that's really it, I can think of. So gross profit of $3,610. 

Andrew Rampulla: Yeah. Yeah.

‍Austin Gray: So now you have that insurance and then you have your customer acquisition costs. I wanna dive into this with you because before we were jumping on, you were saying you're a paid ads guy. How do you go get those customers? 

Andrew Rampulla: The easiest, like low hanging fruit with Christmas lights is yard signs. I think that's true for any home service, to be honest. And anytime like I, I have someone start out or ask me like, where do I start with home service? I always try to point them to yard signs. 'cause it's just, it's one of the most like. If you do it relative relatively right, it's one of the most like close to idiot proof sort of ways of advertising that you can have.

Like you just go out, you put them, you have a simple yard sign with a big service, a big phone number. You put it out in intersections, it costs you $4 for the yard sign and maybe a couple hours of your time. And it's just, it's super easy and you get thousands of impressions for $4. So that's the always the lowest hanging fruit.

And year one, that's all we did was just yard signs. So I was still full-time in school as well. So we didn't have a ton of time to really fulfill, and it was really just me and two other part-time guys. But that's the biggest thing, or that's the, again, the easiest one. Year one we did just like I said, just under 50 K with 250 yard signs.

So I extrapolated like the ROI from that, and it was like 39 x from what we paid for the yard signs. So that, again, it's just so easy. It's just always has such a high return if the service is relatively in demand and Christmas lights has a lot of demand, so it's a little bit skewed compared to some other ones.

You do have diminishing returns with yard signs. There's only so many places you can put 'em. There's only so many you can put out. We put out. I don't even know, probably like close to six, 700 last year. And this year I plan to put out like 2000, but behind the yard signs, it's paid ads. So Facebook is our main one.

That's what I've gotten good at over the years for both of our brands is just Facebook ads and that's pretty much top of funnel. And then we also have, uh, through together A GMB in September, October and ran like 20 reviews to it from a bunch of my friends. And there was zero competition where I was in terms of a Google business.

So that generated a ton of traffic I had. I think his name's Alex on Twitter, the guy that does websites. I had him throw websites together for us, throw it on there, and then I paid someone to do some Google ads. But the really, the main thing where a lot of it came from was Facebook. 

Austin Gray: All right. How are you running your Facebook ads? Can you break that down for us? 

Andrew Rampulla: Yeah. Biggest thing, there's a couple key components with Facebook ads. I think the, probably the most important is your creative. Um, so gone are the days of just throwing together like a before and after with a line of copy and trying to make that profitable. We do all pretty much like 80% video ads.

So us out in the field with a good hook showing the service, getting on face or getting on camera with my face. And that's like the big thing is like having your face and all of the creatives. I've gotten recognized dozens of times in public by now, which is just super funny. It, it happens with my friends too.

There, there was one time we were actually at a job with, finished up a project and our Domino's delivery guy was like, you're the guy on Facebook. I was like, that's me. Yeah. It, it happens quite frequently because you have, but we spent 7,000 in paid ads last year to get. We reached a hundred thousand individual accounts, and the total population for our service area is 200,000.

So when you look it up, one in two people I see, I've seen my face at some point, so it gets pretty crazy. So really just video ads with a mix mix of good creatives, a really good offer, direct response copy, and a call to action at the end. Yeah, we send all of the traffic. So we, uh, I, I split test, but anything, anytime I start a new campaign, I split test between messages and lead forms, so there's always like a bunch of heat from people like saying one or objectively better than the other.

It's really market dependent. Like in New York for off washing, we just run messaging ads because the quality of person there is a little bit higher. The pixel's really conditioned to the type of person that I wanna come through, but there's less filtering. So there's all someone has to do to qualify as a lead is press the send message button.

I tried the exact same thing when I first started in Tallahassee and it was terrible. It was all like really like low quality people, people that like mis collected and whatever. So you need to add a lot of a layer of filtration because after like you get three or five conversions from people that like mis-clicked or just aren't qualified.

And all of a sudden the pixels, yo, those people are the ones that are responding to this ad. Let's show it to more of them. So we need to add a little bit of filtration. So that's when I switched over to lead forms and those absolutely crush for us in Florida. So lead forms and then to go high level automation to pretty much instantly respond to them.

And then last year it was just me pretty much handling all of the sales, all of the marketing. This year I'm working on a AI sort of agent sort of situation where we have all of the leads just managed by an SMS chat bot and then funneled over to an automatic appointment set. But yeah, that, that's essentially the funnel for Facebook.

Austin Gray: I want to hear, let's stay in touch on that 'cause I wanna hear how it's going. I'm really hesitant to implement, we do all follow ups with go high level text sequences, email, all that stuff. But I am hesitant to jump into the AI appointment center, at least for my business here right now. So I'm excited to hear how that goes for you. Yeah. At some point, at some point it's gonna work. I think we both know that, whether it's now or a year from now, or five years from now, but there's gonna be a, uh, appointment setters at some point. 

Andrew Rampulla: Yeah. So my, I've been very hesitant. I don't want to try the, I don't want to implement. Ai like voice, like a voice call agent sort of thing. Like when they answer they call our phone or like we answer the phone. I want someone, like a real person to be behind the line. Yeah. But in terms of like text messages, my biggest bottleneck last year was I didn't have the staff to handle all of the leads. There were 20, 30 leads coming in every day. And like me as just one dude who's also trying to run the install team.

Yeah. And do all of the sales in person and handle all of the backend and everything like that, I just couldn't get to all the leads. So I'm like. If we either a hire two or three VA type appointment Siters, plug 'em in here, tunnel training. I have to reiterate, and you're doing this right? Yeah. Obviously there's a training period, but from what I've tested over the past couple weeks, it's pretty much like you're talking to chapter two BD.

You just fine tune the, the AI inside of, and this is direct inside of Go Eye level too. So rather than having to manually call all these leads instead of appointment, we pretty much just have a flow that the AI goes through to essentially qualify them through text. And then set the appointment right through text message.

So rather than having that like extra step, which is where I personally got bottlenecked 'cause there was just too much volume, I couldn't call up the leads. You stick to AI there and then they set it directly to your calendar. The only sort of thing that I haven't, that I'm working on work around right now is like root density.

Is inevitably you're gonna have an appointment scheduled for nine that's an hour across town, and then another appointment for 10. That's the other way. And then one at 11, that's right back where you were at nine. So that's the only sort of work I'm trying to solve at this point in time. But I think it's gonna be a huge unlock because at least for what I, the numbers I plan on doing this season, we're gonna have, after I financially modeled everything, we're gonna have 70 leads coming in every day. And it's just too much. It's either you just gotta hire a ton of bodies or have some sort of automation in there to reduce the workload. 

Austin Gray: You should be able to, um, I'll be interested to see, 'cause I know that your head is gonna go here whenever you try to implement AI to optimize your route density and that, Hey, I need appointments scheduled for this side of town. There's gotta be a way to optimize that. I was using that for my snow shoveling business here. There must be, yeah, we were doing like hundreds of accounts shoveling and so. It was pretty straightforward just to have it optimize driving routes to get to everything in order. And so I would guess that, I think we both know it, it exists in some way, shape, or form now.

Just gotta figure it. We just gotta figure it out. Yeah. It's awesome man. Dude. Like we are living in, we are living in a really cool time. Especially if you can have someone on your team who can start diving into this. Have you hired any of this automation stuff out or found any, anybody? Any contractors who are building automations for you?

Andrew Rampulla: Not yet. As of right now, I've just been like dipping my toes in myself, just trying to find out like where it would even make sense to have something implemented like it, and then attempting to build it myself. When I was in high school, I always wanted to be a software engineering, so I loved just like throwing the headphones in, like is in at 9:00 PM and just working for four hours on my laptop and just like building cool things.

Yeah, so I like that. I like that sort of thing. Eventually the knowledge app's gonna widen pretty greatly. Especially 'cause this is not what I'm doing full-time. And when you have people that are just like, here's the price, this is the insane system that I could give you for it. Like obviously it's gonna be a no-brainer at some point.

Austin Gray: Do you think that there's, you think that's gonna be a, an online play is just selling AI agents specific to niche businesses? 

Andrew Rampulla: I think it already is. I think it's, I think over the past year it's been like really crazy. If you look at like Google Trends, it's just absolutely blown up. Anyone with anyone that like niche hops in like info is already jumping on like the AI thing and just repositioning. Even Ty Lopez is running like an AI agent for different niche businesses. I've seen a couple of his ads, but yeah, I think that's really hot. And when you, and that's just like a license of your money when you dip your, like a bucket into such a big macro river. Something like that where it's just the AI rush, quote unquote, anyone with a decent offer. I'm sure it's just gonna absolutely print, 

‍Austin Gray: But my question is like, and you're seeing it, so am I. I think the opportunity right now exists for guys like you who have built the actual business and understand the actual operations in the nuts and bolts of how to put that system together. But where I think these, the guys who were just trying to dip the bucket into the big river.

Yeah, you can gimme a general AI agent, but I don't, I need it to do so much more than that specific to my business. I'm curious if you think that, you know, a guy like yourself who understands how to own and operate a wash business and a power light, excuse me, NA and a Christmas light business, there's gotta be opportunity there to bring your expertise into building that system, correct.

Andrew Rampulla: I would think so. I would think so, a hundred percent. The only thing I'm hesitant for, I've been victim of shiny object syndrome in the past, so I try to just keep my focus narrow. Yeah, but I totally think so. Like anyone that's been in home service, they spin up something like that. If you spend a couple weeks to get really talented at a, at ai, I totally think there, there's definitely a market for that and, and especially on like Twitter, if you come whatever sort of niche, it's roofing or track and you have industry experience. You package that all up, like in addition to all of the AI stuff that you're super honest on? Yeah. That's super valuable, I would imagine. 

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 stryker digital.com. That's S-T-R-Y-K-E-R digital.com. 

Austin Gray: And ultimately where I'm going with this is like, you are gonna build this system for yourself regardless. Yeah. I'm gonna build this system. I'm like, we're both working on similar stuff, right? Specific to our business, but there's different tweaks that you need for the wash business, different tweaks that you need for the light business.

Different tweaks that I need for land service business, right? And so I think where I'm going with is if you can spend your time as an operator building this system, there is going to be future opportunities. If you can perfect that system because what we're talking about right now, and this is where I'm spending a lot of time in my business, is how do we make sure that we get the most out of our advertising dollars when we're running Facebook ads and when we spend $200 for that lead. I don't wanna flush that $200 down the toilet if that lead doesn't answer us to going back what you were talking about earlier, like we need to have a way to engage that person and keep them in the funnel and get them in touch with our appointment set. Let's go back. 

Andrew Rampulla:Yeah, ab, absolutely. 

Austin Gray: Let's go back into the Facebook ads. I want to hear how you're thinking about this, because I see people in home service say a lot, oh, I tried Facebook ads and it didn't work. I'm like, dude, Facebook ads have been gold for us, and it sounds like they have been for you. How do you think about running an ad? First? You gotta get on camera, but what are you saying to the camera?

Andrew Rampulla: Yeah, so I think we always start with some sort of hook, right? So the first step is to. Understand who you're selling to, which is why I think it's important for any sort of operator to have some sort of like base level of marketing, direct response knowledge. Otherwise just don't even try Facebook, hire someone else to do it. So the first kind of what, the thing that we broached in terms of like the creative is like, all right, who are we actually selling to and why are they buying from us, and why would they respond to the ad? Because the messaging is super, super important. If you take one form of messaging and have another like slight tweak of messaging that speaks to a slightly different avatar.

Like you, you'll have a wildly different campaign with wildly different results just from the, like the sort of people that respond to the ad. So for example, if your whole entire campaign is like, based around this super cheap price that you're offering, right? What, what, whatever, whether it's like a $19 home clean or like a 6,000 home clean, you tend to attract the people or the like the main focus.

The main concern is like getting the cheapest price. On the contrary, if you speak to how you're providing white glove service, how you're providing everything A to Z, like for example, for the Christmas lights, like they don't have to lift a finger. We provide the lights, we do the installation, maintenance, take down storage, and you speak to the experience.

And essentially the offer is that this is totally hands off for you. That attracts a wildly different person that's not attracting the person that you know is on welfare that wants to pay a truck and a truck a hundred dollars to put up lights, right? So the first thing is like the messaging. Who are we actually speaking to and what's gonna make them tick?

And how can we incorporate that in our hooks? What's gonna make them stop scrolling? So that's the first thing that I do when I'm approaching a campaign. And then obviously the rest of the body is not like super, like not nearly as important as that first, like that hook and then the offer. So the body we write as just either pushing on the pain pan point, pain points a little bit more, speaking to our service, explaining a little bit more detail, exactly what we're offering, and then a call to action at the end.

Um, but the biggest thing is gonna be the hook. The body is relatively straightforward once you've written a couple good ads and then a call to action when the creative is really where you stand apart. So we typically, I'll have a good mix of probably 70 30 of videos and still images. The videos always perform better for us, like nine times outta 10, but the static images always perform as well.

Like it's not there's, it's not like the static images are unprofitable for us. They're very profitable, just slightly less. So, for example, for the Christmas lights with our, one of our winning ads was getting leads for $8. Then the static, that was the video ad and the static images were getting like 12 to $13 leads for lead forms.

So like they still work for the video ads, same thing with the copy. And sometimes we'll just use the exact same copy that's in the ad, in the video or vice versa, like we'll record a video in the exact same copy or the relatively the same framework. We'll be in the actual copy. But a good hook to get someone to stop scrolling and you can study this on short form, right?

So you look at different videos being by like TikTok, Instagram mails that like get you to stop scrolling. Okay? What made that a good hook? Why did I stop scrolling with that? Whether it was something they said or something visual that hooked them in. And try to replicate that for yourself. And as a body of most of the ads is again similar to like the actual body of the creative, but for us we usually keep it pretty simple.

And in terms of both of the services, like they're not super edited, they're not super like high production or anything like that. And I know people do have success with videos like that, but I've had a lot of success with just super raw, like personal content, just telling a story and showing like behind the scenes of us actually doing the service of what's included, of why we're so amazing.

And that sort of thing. Uh, and same thing, just having a call to action at the end call to action. And a big thing with Facebook ads that a lot of people don't talk about is you can have, you can take one campaign and duplicate it, and you can give it to operator A and operator B. And operator A will get a 20 XROI and operator B will get a three XROI, the exact same campaign, the exact same leads.

But the only thing that's different is the sales process on the other side. A lot of people come to me and they're like, man, like I'm just not getting a, a great return with my ads. I'm getting a 2, 3, 4, 5 x, whatever. It's, and I look at inside the campaign and everything looks perfect, right? Like the lead cost looks good.

The everything else inside the campaign isn't broken. It all looks fine. Okay. What are we doing? That's wrong on the other side of this, and sometimes it'll be average ticket. Sometimes it'll be speed to lead and sometimes it'll be improper follow up, whatever it is. But the key to ROI like after you have a decent campaign is really just like your sales process, right?

I had one guy, I had one guy come to me probably like a month ago at some point or around there with the exact same situation. Like I looked inside, his campaign looked perfect. He was getting decent leads. I think like for 25, 30 bucks. But he was stuck at the four x or ROI. He was like, alright dude, what's your average ticket?

And it was 400 bucks. I'm like, alright. Like there you go. Like it's a, if you take that average ticket and you turn it to a thousand, which is what we have for soft washing, which I know like most of the high level operators in that space that I know have an average ticket around there. If we take $400 average ticket and we turn into a thousand with an in-person constant data sales process and upsells.

Do you go from a four x to, what is that? Probably like a 10 x close deal, 2.5 x. Just from that, you don't even touch the campaign. You literally just change how you're selling and what you're selling, and you instantly, drastically improve the profitability of your entire campaign. Just like simple tweaks like that.

So a lot of times it's like we don't just look at the Facebook ad, but we look at the entire funnel to find holes and leaks and patch things that need to be patched, if that makes sense. 

Austin Gray: You know what the harsh truth is. What if you're not having success with Facebook ads, it's your fault. 

Andrew Rampulla: Yeah. I think it's funny that people like say, Facebook ads don't work. I always end use the analogy like, that's like me giving you a guitar and you trying to play it and you saying it doesn't work because you don't know how to play it. No, dude, you just, you just not scared like you don't know how to play the guitar. 

Austin Gray: And that's just the harsh reality, and that's the, that is the harsh reality in business. If something's not working, if you're the business owner, this is what you signed up for. It's your fault. And until you figure out a way to either get better at that or go hire the right person who is better at that than what you're currently doing, it's gonna be your fault. So thank you for addressing this on the podcast because I think that this is something that a lot of people need to hear. If you are not having success with Facebook ads, if an ad's not working, guess what? It's your fault. And I just went through this. Like we ran a Facebook ad that I thought should have converted everything. Everything was right in my mind, but for whatever reason it wasn't. So I can either choose to just accept failure or I can go try something new.

And that's what we did. And we launched a new ad. And then since two days ago, we've got 12 new leads for high ticket services. So I'm not saying this to brag, I'm saying this to encourage you that if something's not working, go try something new. Just try to get better. If you're listening to this or go hire somebody who is better at Facebook ads. Andrew knows what he's talking about. Reach out to him, he's on Twitter. 

Andrew Rampulla: Yeah. 

Austin Gray: Let's talk sales process though, because to your point, I see a lot of people just flushing leads down the toilet as well. So how do you structure a sales process? 

Andrew Rampulla: Yeah, for most home services, at least the ones that that, like the games that I play, I always have an in-person like consultative sales process. I, and it depends on the service too, but anything over like a, I don't know, I, but like a 750 average ticket, something like that, I try to always go in person. The average ticket's gonna be higher, you. Conversion rate's gonna be higher. The stickiness of the customer is gonna be higher 'cause everything's better.

And obviously like the time cost is higher, you have to drive there. Right? So you have, that's an inherent cost of an in person process versus over the phone. And different people have different philosophies on this. I'm just saying what worked for us was doing in person. So our goal, anytime a lead comes in is to essentially set them to an in person appointment and qualify them over the phone.

I don't do pretty much any quotes over the phone or like through email for Christmas lights. Everything is in person, especially like. A lot of the people that it is slightly more dependent. Like I know people in Christmas lights that have a lot of success with just doing it over the phone, but a lot of times, like if you have a higher income, a wealthier demographic that is like there, it doesn't need as much convincing.

Sometimes it's a little bit easier, but for most scenarios, I'd love going in person and having an actual like sales process, not just walking around the house and saying, all right, the Christmas lights are gonna be $2200. That's not what you do. So we follow Ram's closer framework mix in with some niche things that we added in, in terms of a framework and like a structure for our sales process.

But essentially what you're doing is like diagnosing what they actually want and why they want it overviewing, like what they've done in the past. Why are we getting it done now specifically, and then bridging whatever that pain is to your solution specifically and like selling the vacation. I think this is where a lot of people, especially in higher ticket services, get it wrong.

The top guys. If you wanna learn this, you learn from like the top guys in the back and like window installation and that sort of business where like they're selling 30, 40, $50,000 tickets that people don't like. Not that they don't need, but you're not like walking outside and like, man, I need to spend $50,000 on a whole new top of the line window set.

People don't do that. It's a little different in my opinion, for like roofing. If someone needs a new roof, like they need a new roof or if their like vac system blew up, whatever it is, but maybe they don't need the top of the line system. When there's a $20,000 difference, whatever it is. Like those people, those companies, from what I've seen, really have the sales side of things like dialed down.

But yeah, so essentially, like I said, having an actual conversation and like my goal with, especially with Christmas slice, is to get into the kitchen. Get to the kitchen table. That's my goal. Get in there and essentially build enough rapport that they're comfortable to let me inside the house. And like I said, we dig through all the pain points, find exactly why they want it done.

That could be, that's gonna be different for every service, right? So like with Christmas lights, some people are like, man, like the grandkids are coming home this year and they just keep asking me for Christmas lights and I just really want the house to look nice this year. You know? And that there's your not, it sounds malicious, but there's your ammunition, right?

For later down in the conversation, other people are like, yeah, I'm never here. I just, all my neighbors have lights and I just wanna throw something up so I'm not falling behind. There go, there's your admonition. That's what we build. The entire rest of the conversation around is solving this pain point, and that's why they came to us, right?

And framing the solution around that pain point. So stuff like that that I feel like most home service companies don't really implement except the super high ticket ones. But the only time we use like over the phone is really just set an in person appointment and get to the front door and to the get your table.

Austin Gray: What does your process look like whenever you set appointments? So when you take us through the process, whenever you get the lead, what do you do from there? 

Andrew Rampulla: Cool. Yep. So we have the go high level automation, which I've tweaked different scripts and what I like funneling to last year, the initial like message, as soon as they opted in there was like a two minute delay and then, hey, Joanna saw you just submitted a request for a hundred voucher for Christmas lights on Facebook. We're super busy right now. We're almost fully booked. We have a couple spots left, but when's a good time to give you a call to go over some details? So a little bit of urgency. We're reaching out immediately and they respond back with, yeah, shoot me a call in an hour, whatever it's, and then call 'em up.

It's pretty much very quick qualification process. It's a little bit different for soft washing just because the ticket's a lot lower and you don't really have to sell quite as hard in audiences. But with the Christmas lights, it's pretty much like initials. Rapport building for 30 seconds a minute just makes it, just make them laugh, make them smile.

Make it seem like you're not a robot on the other side of the line. Get them to lower the guard a little bit and then I'm pretty much, it is almost like a condensed version of our in, in person process, but like, Joanna, what were you guys looking to have done? What kind of calls did you reach out? And they're like, oh, we want X, Y, Z.

Okay. Totally cool. Got it. Are you, have you worked with a Christmas like company in the past or would this sort of be like the first time Oh no, we, we usually do it ourselves or always Espositos or whatever. Okay. Got it. Understand, I guess, why are we looking to have it done like professionally this year?

Oh, X, Y, Z. My kids are whatever it is. Okay. Totally cool. And then we go into explaining the service. So awesome. So just a little bit about us. Like I know not everyone's super familiar with what we do. Essentially our service is like full white club A to C. We take care of everything for you. We provide the lights for you, we do all of the installation, all the maintenance, all the take down on the storage. My goal for you is to just have a fantastic holiday experience, Joanna. With that being said, like most of our clients spend anywhere between one and 5,000 with us. Our minimum seven 50 with that be within budget for you guys. And then they have, some people are like, oh God, absolutely not. I thought I was gonna pay a hundred bucks. And they have, some people are like. Yeah. Cool. Sounds good. Awesome. Joanna, I have two appointments this week. I have one for Thursday and one for Friday available. Which of those sort of work better for you? And then we just go into to send the appointment and send a confirmation 

Austin Gray: So you're bracketing them at the qualification. I love what you're doing there. I love what you're doing. 

Andrew Rampulla: Yeah, yeah. You can't waste your time with people who aren't qualified, especially with Christmas lights. 

Austin Gray: So do you get people who immediately. Ask, what's the cost? Or are you controlling the conversation with your questions right out of the gate to beat them to that punch?

Andrew Rampulla: Yeah, the latter. So you of course, will always get people that are just like, what's the price? What's the price? But you kinda have to control the frame and take that back and control the conversation, like you said. 

Austin Gray: So when you get that question, what's your response? 

Andrew Rampulla: It depends on the person. I'll be like, yeah, no, you're asking all the right que questions, John I totally get it. Honestly, I don't even know. Like we have packages that range anywhere from seven 50 to 10 grand, so I wouldn't even be able to tell you without some more information what have done though. And it's like just reframing and pushing them back into sort of that sales flow that, that, that kind of framework that we already have.

Austin Gray: So what you're doing here is you're qualifying them over the phone. Correct. So if they do not respond well. If they respond with a, oh my gosh, it's just an immediate, immediate gone pass gone. 

Andrew Rampulla: Totally cool. I'm happy to refer you to some of that might be a better fit. And then I throw 'em to the competitor I don't like. 

Austin Gray: That's great. How many, you said you're planning to get 70 leads a day? 

Andrew Rampulla: Yeah, that, that's, that's the KPI around. Oh. I wanna do seven 50 this year, between 500 and a million in life. So the right smack jump in the middle for seven 50,000. I actually have the financial model pulled up. I was sending it to one of my buddies.

Austin Gray: Um, real quick though, if you get, yeah, let's just pick a number. Yeah. Let's call it 50 leads. If you get 50 leads a day. Yeah. How many people are going to one answer the phone? 

Andrew Rampulla: I don't know, to be honest, to be totally honest with you, I don't know what, what the staff will need to look like. I have an estimate I have a guess based on, 

Austin Gray: Oh, sorry. How many people, how many leads are going to actually respond, meaning outta those Oh, I understand. 50 out of your staff. Out of those 50 leads that you get from Facebook, how many I'm trying to get to, how many are trash leads and just aren't going to answer your call. Okay. Or respond, or how many people are going to be willing to jump on the call with you?  

‍Andrew Rampulla: Yeah. I wish I had a perfect number for you, but it's less than people think. I'd say we probably have like a 70 to 80% response rate. Just with the, with all of the automation and everything that we have, and then the one in the 50% qualification rate, I have to look at the actual, the amount of appointments we set from Facebook, but from what I found about one in two people that I talked to over the phone, maybe a little bit more, were qualified, essentially like we're able to, to spend that amount of money.

So if you look at it from a lead perspective, like a cost, we are spending on average $12 per lead. If, let's say you have a 70% connection rate, that's maybe like $15 per connect and then a 50% qualification rate, that's 30% or $30 per qualified lead, essentially, if you wanna put a buffer, call it 40 or 50.

Austin Gray: Okay. Okay. And then based on your assumptions, can you take, let's say 50 leads total? Walk us through that funnel again and all the way down to how many people you think will pay for a job. 

Andrew Rampulla: Yeah. Um, so let's say 50 people come through the door. Let's say 40 of them. Let's be conservative. Let's say 30 of them were able to reach, 15 of them are qualified. Let's have an even bigger drop off. Let's say 10 of them actually get to appointments, and let's say three to five of them convert even that might be a little bit generous. I have to look at the actual numbers. I know we had a lot of wasted spend. And on Facebook last year, just like I was talking about with the bottleneck, I just couldn't get to them all.

We spent about 7,000 and returned like 40 or 50 I think, right around. Okay. Um, and I think once all the processes are in place and we don't run into that bottleneck, I think it'll be at least double. Um, 'cause I was looking back at our c around the other day and like literally half of the leads were just never contacted.

I was like, oh my God, I wasted so much money. Hmm. Yeah. But yeah, I mean it's a numbers game with Facebook, right? So I hear people too say that the quality is trash on on Facebook, and sometimes that is the case because they're not doing something right. But even when they are doing something right, yeah, you will get trash leads and that's okay.

It's still very profitable. You just have to understand, like you have to have sales process and understand that we're filtering through, through people, right? So like maybe we, we have 50 leads and maybe only two of them convert. Like your job is to filter to the rest of them and get to those two. 

Austin Gray: And then what's your average cost per lead? 220

Andrew Rampulla: Cost per acquisition or cost per lead? 

Austin Gray: Cost per lead. 

Andrew Rampulla: Cost per lead on Facebook was $12. $12. Okay. 

Austin Gray: So your cost per acquisition was two 20? Correct. Through all Janice. Okay, got it. Got it. Cost per lead $12. Geez. So my question for you is, what could you do in that process to qual to pre-qualify them even more and you. You may just be like, that's stupid, right? Whatever your process is working. I'm just curious to think about, 'cause you're thinking about all of these things in the same way that I do. I'm like, what did I say in the ad to attract this type of person? Once again, like if we're getting a ton of people who are asking what's the cost?

What's the cost? Guess who fault that is mine? Because I recorded something in the video that triggered them to, to say, Hey, inquire about the cost, and I've made that mistake before. So what can you do in your ad or your creative, and I like what you said earlier about it, so you may just be repeating something, but what can you do as the marketer to pre-qualify and to attract that right type of customer?

Andrew Rampulla: I think it, uh, it might be a little bit repetitive, but I think it really goes back to just deeply understanding who you're selling to. And you can do this on chat, GPT, like you can say AI, to help you really build out a really thorough avatar profile. And for the people who don't know what like avatar means, essentially like the ideal person that your company sells to.

So for example, for us, maybe her name like Sally Jones, she's 42 years old. She has a husband, she has. Four kids. She's a stay at home mom. The family makes 250,000 per year. She likes to go out for coffee at 10:00 AM She likes to go for Pilates with her friends. They really love luxury. They love the nicer things in life.

They have a suburban and they have a, a Porsche nine 11 in the driveway and they just like the finer things in life. They have a a $750,000 house. They have two dogs and that's our profile. Right? Something like that. Okay. So everything down funnel of that, everything downstream is okay. What would Sally respond to?

Is Sally gonna respond to the ad that's saying we're doing Christmas lights for 4 89, or is she gonna respond to the ad that says, we're doing a full white glove service, we're taking care of everything for you. Your house is gonna look the best on the neighborhood. Which of those two is Sally gonna click on?

And then on the like contrarian of that, you have the, let's say like the single woman, she's 32 years old, they make 40,000 a year lives in. I don't know, a $200,000 house who is barely scraping by and only wants the absolute cheapest of everything. So what sort of ad are they gonna respond to? Are they gonna respond to the $79 window cleaning, the $79, whatever? Or if you talk about a ton of price, like price sort of things. Is she in response to that? Probably, yeah. 

Austin Gray: This episode is brought to you by Dialed in 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. 

Andrew Rampulla: So anytime I'm trying to fix a funnel or any time I'm trying to like create messaging, it's always going back to what is the person who I'm trying to sell, going to respond to them. Sometimes it's not super clear, right? Like it does take trial and error and you will make mistakes and you will, like you said, like you will build campaigns that you think you're gonna crush and they just don't. And you have to go back to the drawing board and say like, where do we go wrong and where can we do better? But that's how I, that's how I approach everything, is just with the avatar in mind.

Austin Gray: I love that. I love that. Thank you so much for diving deeper on that, Andrew. Listeners, we're gonna wrap this episode up, but what I'm going to leave you with is a challenge. Identify your customer avatar. Think about. Who your 1000% ideal customer would be? What service do you offer? And who is that perfect customer who you want to go work for?

Just think about it. What do they do for work? What does their house look like? What kind of cars do they have? What do they do for fun? Where do they frequently travel on a day-to-day basis? What are they thinking about and what is important to them? And I'll touch on something that you touched on, Andrew. They likely want the absolute best service in the market that requires the least amount of their time. They just want a professional to come in, handle it. They'll pay higher price, but they just don't wanna be bothered or contacted. 

Andrew Rampulla: That's it. Yeah. 

Austin Gray: So go find that customer. And Andrew, I'll ask you this as the last question. How do you encourage our audience to go define that customer avatar? What's the first thing that they need to do? 

Andrew Rampulla: I would utilize ai. I think we're in a great time where you have that resource available to you, and I would pretty much feed it all the information possible and I'd feed it all the information about your business, about your ideal business, about who you want to serve, ask it to ask you questions, to really get a detailed analysis and then be like, Hey, Jacky Patillo, you'll me a full avatar analysis.

And that didn't exist like a year ago, or at least I didn't use it. Like even six months ago, and now that's at everyone's fingertips, which is just so amazing. And you can literally just do that and have a really comprehensive analysis of the exact person you're trying to sell to. 

Austin Gray: Remember on Chad GBT, the quality of the outputs you get are going to be determined by the quality of your prompts that you give it. So if you want to be the best business in your market, tell chat GPT, that's who you are, or that's what your goals are because it's then going to kick out outputs. Determined on how you've prompted it. So that's gonna be my last challenge. Let's wrap up this episode. Andrew, thanks for being on podcast. I sure appreciate your time. Is there anything else you wanna share with our audience before we wrap up? 

Andrew Rampulla: That's it. I think we covered everything. I appreciate you having me on. 

Austin Gray: Yeah, man. Where can people find you online?

Andrew Rampulla: I'm most active on Twitter slash x. I'm starting posting a little bit more on YouTube and TikTok for some different styles of content, but X is gonna be the place, best place to sort of reach out.

Austin Gray: Awesome listeners, thanks again for listening to another episode of the OWNR OPS podcast. Every week on Friday, we publish an episode about building and growing local service-based businesses. On Saturdays we publish a newsletter. So if you haven't signed up for the newsletter yet, we basically summarize all the topics that Andrew and I talked about in this episode, and then we'll send you a summary because we leveraged Chad GPT to try to pull out the main insights for it.

So you can do that. Owner ops.com. Slash newsletter. It's owr ops.com/newsletter. And then finally, I just launched a free school community for service business owners. You can go join that. It's for free school.com/owner ops. That's SKOO l.com/owr ops. We'll see you guys in the next episode. Don't forget, work hard, do your best, never settle for less.

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