Ep 39 - The Digital Marketing Landscape, With Rico Garcia

0:00 Christopher. Brendan. Dude, this show. This one is a million miles an hour, man. Yeah, it's a scorcher. But I think it's one of those ones that you're gonna want to have a notepad out and jot some notes and do some Googling afterwards. It's not something that you're gonna be able to just go back and all of a sudden start doing digital marketing. Yeah. But it's a great introduction. And I think it's gonna highlight some of the biggest opportunity areas. for your business. But what are we talking about? I got ahead of myself. Today on the show, we have Mr. Rico Garcia. A lot of people know Rico from the Restoration Domination podcast. The dude has had some really iconic figures on it from the industry and he's got a ton of energy.

0:41 Tons. Yeah. Holy cow. I think you alluded to he's 110% at 110 miles an hour. Yeah. It's pretty awesome, actually. But the cool thing is, he totally nerds out on the digital marketing topic here. And so do we. I mean, digital marketing has never been in our wheelhouse. We never tried to be a pro at digital marketing. But I think you and I are both seeing... As we look at our clients' businesses and so forth, it is becoming a more and more critical thing for people to get on top of. But the neat thing about Rico is behind the scenes, Rico actually has owned a company. Yeah. He's an operator in industry as a mold remediation business in Florida and does really well with that. So his perspective is colored with, hey, he's had to find the jobs and make the phone ring as well.

1:24 And that's a lot of where his experience is coming from. So... It's a fire show. Buckle up, hang on. And hey, take notes so that you know what to go back and dig deeper into because it's going to come at you like a flood. Yep. All right, gang. Hang on. Here we go. Welcome back to the Head, Heart & Boots podcast. I'm Chris. And I'm Brandon. Join us as we wrestle with what it takes to transform ourselves and the businesses we lead. What'd you think? I don't know, it was kind of serious. Should we laugh? Rico, brother, welcome to the show, my friend.

2:07 You're already a million miles an hour. So I know the episode will be awesome. For those of you just tuning in today, we are hammering down on marketing, sales, digital marketing. And Rico is going to spit some fire for us and get us all jazzed up on what we can do to kick it into another gear. Okay. I have an opening question for you, Rico. You're opening Pandora's box. Oh, I know. Let's roll in. I know. So I know because I have a bunch of technical marketing questions for you, stuff that I don't understand, and I hope you can shed some light on. But then I want to open with, as you look out over the restoration landscape, you know a lot of people. You have a lot of people on your Restoration Domination podcast that are real icons in the industry.

2:48 When you look out over the restoration landscape... Who are some companies that you see being innovative, progressive, aggressive in the digital marketing space? Who are some of the companies you admire? Are there some folks that you see moving and shaking and pushing the envelope, testing the edges? Can we delete this question? Because I don't even have a good answer for that. Because the simple answer is none. Okay, why? None. Because this is what gets my, like really grinds my gears, right? And I think that if there's any of the smaller companies, and now let me kind of backtrack just for one second, right? And let's just kind of set the stage to that.

3:29 The right people, when they hear this, they understand, okay, cool, this message is for them, right? So I always try to keep my feet very, very solid on the ground. Because there was a time where I only had one fan and there was a time when I only had one truck. Right. And I was legitimately trying to figure out how to get that next job. So and the reason why I mentioned this is because I always remember like where we came from and where it all started. So what really grinds my gears is looking at the financial war chest that some of these restoration companies have. And they're doing zero with it with regards to actual marketing and getting to the end consumer.

4:14 It's really obnoxious because there's tons of other smaller restoration companies, which I would say probably make up the majority, like on a per number basis, 80%, 90% probably, right? All of the smaller organizations out there. And these guys are really trying to figure out, it's like, man, like, Who is this really big, innovative company that's already got the arrows in their backs, that have already spent a tremendous amount of money, that have kind of paved the way so that I can clone and kind of mimic that, right? Who was it? Pablo Picasso says something along the lines, you know, good artist borrow, great artist steal. And it doesn't mean that you legitimately steal a little bit more philosophical meaning to that.

4:56 But what it means is you find the thing that works within some great artists and you have to look at marketing as a form of art. Right. Which is why sometimes you get really, really bad ads. You're like, oh, my God, that was horrible. And then other times you're like sharing it with your friends because there was something there that. created this shareability. So you got to find that one thing that you can say, oh, wow, this company is doing this really well. Let me go ahead and bring that in-house. So to answer your question, there's really not enough of that. And I think that part of that is by, I don't want to say by design, by the companies, but by design because of the industry, how it's based mainly on AOBs and program work and TPA, which again, full disclosure, I don't have a horse in that race.

5:40 So we're not even going to get into that TPA, non-TPA world because that's a totally different animal, right? I believe whether you're doing program work or not, you need to be going out aggressively in marketing, period. Yeah. Let's get into that. So I think for many of us, there's just in general a misunderstanding between... sales, and marketing. For years, all I've heard people say is, Well, I have 3 marketing personnel. No, you don't. Yeah. Hopefully, you've got 3 sales personnel, but maybe you don't. But you don't have 3 marketing personnel for sure. So just give us your rundown. Break up this concept between sales and marketing. And then of course, we're going to dive into more on that marketing side in general. Seth Godin talks about the importance of marketing on the front end, right?

6:24 And there he tries to clarify this difference between the world of marketing and the world of selling. Really, your marketing should get them to the point where they've already bought. And then your sales aspect is just making sure that they can stay out of their own way to pull the trigger. And or that there's nothing that is causing any additional friction. Yeah. really most of the sales should be done pretty much on the front end, right? That means that your messaging should be clear. That means that your company mission should be clear. That means that the incentives to do business with your organization, to do business with you as an individual, those things should be clear. All of that selling is actually the marketing. Everything else, it's the actual climax, right?

7:05 It's the, oh, okay, great. You know, shake hands and, you know, we get to sign this deal and fantastic. I'm a great closer. Yeah, maybe, maybe you are, but... But it's very difficult to become a great closer, right? Or a great salesperson if you don't have the marketing pieces in place. Opportunities in front of you. Yeah. Well, you need the opportunities. Like it doesn't matter. I mean, you can only dial the phone 700, 800 times a day. Even when you go and you use tech and you do a three-line dialer, you can only contact, physically have so many conversations each and every single day. Your quote-unquote marketing reps, which again, they're route salespeople, right?

7:45 I mean, if that's what we're talking about, they're just knocking on doors. They're interrupting people's day. It's not really that effective. And again, I'm not saying that it doesn't work. So I always go back to everything works. The disconnect is how these two sectors of the market intersect. And that's the big disconnect. And I'd like to talk about at some point, hopefully you guys mentioned this because this is hot topics that are happening now, like how people are talking about using plumbers and how they market to plumbers and all of this stuff. There's like some nutty stuff that's going on out there. And people are wondering like, well, why doesn't it work? And it's well, because you're not really breaking up your time properly. And you're not using digital to help leverage the kind of results that you really want to drive.

8:29 Yeah. Well, let's do this. Can you take us through... Walk us down digital marketing boulevard, so to speak. And can you introduce us to the different types of digital marketing and just give us a survey of all the different marketing tools? For example, and I'm asking this partly because I do not... I am in no way an expert in any one of these things. I just have a cursory. I know they're out there. And I'm curious for you to talk a little bit about them and explain them. So things like... Obviously, we talked about PPC and we're going to talk a lot about that. You're a subject matter expert on that. But other things like retargeting, click funnels. These are things that we see these sidebar ads a lot of times as operators and people in the industry for these programs and stuff like that.

9:11 Email marketing, that whole list building piece. And of course, PPC and then social PPC. Can you walk us through just some of these available tools and methodologies that are out there? Yeah, definitely. So let's go ahead and actually do a little bit more of a deeper dive than what you asked just so that we can really set like the playing field, right? So let's talk what I call old school versus new school, right? Which is probably not the best description because a lot of the old school stuff, you'll see how I tie this into the new school. But let's just kind of go with this train of thought here. So let's just say old school, typically people are talking about phone calls, right? That's old school. Pick up the phone, call. Okay. Okay. letters, right? Like an introductory letter, a handwritten note.

9:52 Wow. I mean, that's powerful, right? If I'm like, hey, Brandon, you know, thank you so much for having me on the show today. I'd like to swing by your office one of these days and maybe have coffee. That's like, wow. Like you open that up and you're like, wow, this guy took the time to like. Especially now. Absolutely. Especially now. So a lot of the old school things come back. There was bell bottoms back in the 60s. It almost came back in 2000s. It happens. You get these little life cycles of things. Because when you... I don't know if you guys remember back in AOL days, and you've got mail. Yeah, the DVD, the CD-ROM that you install to, yeah. Yeah. I mean, that was exciting. Like when you got mail, you got to your computer, right?

10:35 And you typically, most people at that time had like one computer for the whole house. And you'd log into your account and you'd open up your email and you're like, you see three emails. You've got mail. You got excited. You're like, oh my God, someone took the time to email me. It's a big deal. Now, I mean, if I was to look on my phone, this is probably embarrassing. But just to keep this as real as possible, I got 47,822 emails. Oh, my gosh. We're kindred spirits. I can't do it. My head is blowing up right now. I know Brandon sees my Gmail inbox. He sees my Gmail and he's like, dude, you have like thousands of emails in your inbox. I'm like, well, I have a method. Right. So do I. So again, I'm constantly... First of all, I have tons of different emails.

11:19 So I use a special software, not software, but a different browser. Again, here's yet another tangent. I use a software or a browser called Shift and it keeps all of my emails. So I use Gmail, even like my business emails that are all on G Suite. instead of like having four or five tabs open with different emails, they're all on like the left-hand side. And I can do like a universal search for, let's say like Brandon. And then I don't know which email you sent it to, but it will go ahead and search all of that. And then I've got all of my apps, like my email marketing apps, my click funnels, like everything that I would normally go to on a consistent basis is all right there in one browser.

12:00 And it just saves so much time. It's a shift. I think if you go to try.shift, I think that's their website. Anyways, so you have phone calls. You've got letters, right? You've got, of course, the postcards. So those kind of letters and postcards, similar but different. You've got every door, direct mail pieces, right? You've got all of that stuff. And then, of course, you've got the good old-fashioned Chamber of Commerce. You've got the B&Is. You've got the breakfast lunch with all these people that are, quote-unquote, successful entrepreneurs, but they can blow an hour a week every single week to be with you, to have lunch, to give you a 60-second elevator pitch, which, by the way, 90% of the time really sucks.

12:41 But then you have the B&Is and all of that stuff. And again, nothing wrong with B&Is. Nothing wrong with any of these groups. I mean, as a matter of fact, I got, I don't want to say bullied into one, but I just recently joined one. And the only reason why I did it is because it's a very, very, very good friend of mine. And he legitimately... We talk every day anyways. And I was like, you know what, dude, it doesn't matter. So this counts towards you anyways. So why not? But literally every time I jump in, mind you, this is online because of like the whole COVID thing. So this still isn't even live. And I contemplate suicide every single time I'm about to log in. Yeah. So anyway, so you have all of these old school methods of marketing, right? So your phone calls, your letters, your handwritten stuff, your mailers, and of course, your traditional networking meetings, right?

13:25 So these are all of that. And then of course, you can go ahead and dig a little bit deeper and you can consider your route marketing. Right. You print out a list of all of the insurance agents in your area, of all of the plumbers in your area and all of this stuff. And then you go ahead and hire two or three people and you say, hey, you are my marketer and you are going to go out there and you're going to generate business for us. Well, OK, cool. So that's old school. New school way of marketing would, of course, entail any and all things considered digital. So what is digital? Digital. So you obviously have PPC, which is your pay per click. It's your pay to play. It's a quick injection in the arm. It's the fastest way to go ahead and test any market pay per click.

14:07 Now, pay per click has gone through several evolutions. There was a point in time when you can buy emergency plumbing, emergency mitigation or emergency flood damage for like 10 cents. Like those days are long gone, but they're still profitable, right? So you've got PPC. The next is, of course, organic. And when we talk about organic, most people are talking about, okay, you need to get a website, which a website sucks, by the way. Like no business in the beginning should really have a website. It's a dumb thing to do. Now, I know that that's counterintuitive and I'm probably losing like half your crowd right now. I was like, this guy knows nothing of what he's talking about. But here's the thing. On my desk right now, I have a stack of business cards.

14:47 So my question to you is, and my listener, you know, probably your listeners right now, if they're listening as a podcast, they're like, I wish I could see this business card. This business card does no good for your listener. Why? Because it's on my desk and it's physical and they don't have access to it. And for all intents and purposes, that's what a website is. It's a digital business card that if nobody knows how to find you, they'll never see it. Yep. Right? So it's not necessarily the website. It's how you optimize the website in order to rank it. So that's organic, right? So this is a very long-term, by the way, amazing ROI. The best ROI, return on investment, that you could possibly get on most digital is probably going to be your organic website.

15:33 So notice how that's like contradictory statement, right? It's like, hey, you shouldn't have a website, but wait, the best ROI is on the website. Let me clarify that before we continue down the list. Love it. We got time? Yeah. So the reason for that is number one, your website, you have to optimize it really, really well, both technically. In other words, it has to be like mobile friendly. Your images can't be too big. There can't be any errors. In other words, any links that are broken internally, it has to be just technically sound so that the Google machine, as they start exploring and crawling the web and start indexing, basically like making a copy of your website on their servers, by the time that you do that, they need to make sure that they can get in and out, gather all the information to identify, okay, cool.

16:20 This is a really good website. And then they index it, right? Well, that's the technical aspect of it. But then there's also the linguistic aspect of it, which means now you have to optimize for your keywords. And then, of course, your competitors are already in the market. So they've been in the game for a while. They're ranking from certain keywords and they've gotten a bunch of different votes from other websites that are saying, oh, this other competitor got this great article and they link to that. That's called a backlink. That's how Google kind of determines its popularity contest, really. So now you're starting fresh. So being the new kid on the block or being maybe the old kid on the block that just never went to go play ball and finally says, hey, you know what? Maybe I should get moving a little bit.

17:02 You're already behind the eight ball, right? So you got to make up all of this time. And Google is not just going to say, oh, welcome. Yeah, you haven't been playing ball in a while. Come on in. We'll get you in a starting position. Never going to happen, right? Because you need to build. Even with Google, it's like, is this fly by night? Is this real? So you have to do a lot of building. But once it's built, you can kind of to some degree set it and forget it. I mean, give it a little bit of maintenance. But now if you're ranking right... for the right keywords and all of that stuff, well, then now your phone is consistently ringing. Now you become kind of the gold standard in your local area. And the best ROI is there. But meantime, let's say that it takes 6 to 12 months to start ranking for some of these positions.

17:44 Well, how much did you spend? Because you're not going to get good PPC for 500 bucks. And this is the challenge that I would say to a lot of business owners that I speak to on a consistent basis. When we start talking about this, it's like, oh, I've got this SEO guy. They can do it for a thousand bucks a month. I was like, do you want to put down a fan for 25 bucks? Well, no, I would never. Why? Well, because I'm too good. Okay, great. And you expect that your SEO guy for 500 bucks is too good? Like, what is this SEO guy going to do for 500 bucks a month? You know, it's like nothing is going to happen. What is it? How's the old saying that good things aren't cheap, cheap things aren't good? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the whole you get what you paid for. Sure. Exactly. So then we've got that organic, right?

18:24 And then of course, you've got your email marketing. Email marketing to this day, in my opinion, I think is one of the most profitable and probably the most important aspect of any business. And I think that every business should start immediately. building their email list immediately, like right from day one. You're like, well, what am I going to do with this email list? I don't care what you do with it. Just have it because that's the only thing. Facebook could go away tomorrow. Yeah. You know, YouTube potentially, I mean, could, right? Just could go away tomorrow. There was a time where you would only log into AOL or Yahoo. Like Yahoo was Google. It could have gone either way. Yeah. You know? So if you had all your chickens in the Yahoo basket, right?

19:07 Like you lost that bet. So the point is, is that again, everything ebbs and flows. However, email for the most part is one of the most consistent aspects of controlling the customers that you have. It's an asset that you own and that your business owns. And there's actual metrics that, depending on how you work it out, you can actually assign a value, like a physical dollar value to each email name that you have on your email list. And this varies from industry to industry and depending on who you are, but that could be anywhere from $1 per user per month to $50 per user per month. In some cases, even more, depending on the industry, of course, right? Yeah. So there's a tremendous amount of value in email marketing.

19:49 Now people get email marketing totally wrong because they're just sending out coupons all the time. That's again, a topic for a different discussion. And then you've got, did we talk on PPC? You just spotted it. Yep. So SEO, which is organic is what you referred to the PPC. We've got some email marketing. Where does social fall on this list? Social is amazing. Social, however, I think is one of these things where... Let's try to narrow this down, right? Because again, there's a lot of things that work really well, depending upon the business that you're in and what you're doing. So let's break this down into two camps. So if you're talking social for the restoration business specifically...

20:31 and you're trying to run Facebook ads, right? Because they're social organic and they're social paid, right? Yep. Paid is very sketchy if you're trying to get water mitigation jobs. Because most things on social are in fact a pattern interrupt. They have to stop a scroll. That's objective number one. And then objective number two is to have them read the first headline and then the second headline and then hopefully each one of those subsequent lines are inspiring the reader to keep going down and hopefully have a call to action. Guess what? If you don't have a flood, if you don't need tarping, if you don't need mold remediation at that moment, you're like, yeah, this doesn't apply to me. And I keep this in the back of my mind all the time because I live in Florida.

21:12 I was born and raised in Florida. Florida gets a lot of mold. It's hot. It's humid. We got old buildings. We get like a lot of mold. And I'm embarrassed to say I didn't know what remediation was until I got into the remediation business. I had never seen a truck. Why? I had never suffered water damage or mold damage. Just never happened to me. Just wasn't, you know, I guess my ticket never got punched, you know? And then of course, once, you know, started doing marketing for a company, because that's kind of like our backstory and how we ended up getting into the restoration industry. Every time I would like hit a light, there'd be two or three chocks. I was like, oh wow, I guess this is actually an industry, right? Which is trippy.

21:52 So all that to say that Social has to be used intelligently. And the best way that I like to use social is to keep people front of mind, which then now ties into one of the other aspects, which is the retargeting, right? That's where I believe social is extremely, extremely, extremely powerful. Because now, if you've already got a touchpoint with a potential customer, now you can get in front of them again and again and again and again at a relatively low cost by comparison to cold traffic. Because there's already been some kind of interaction. Now, this could be anything, right? This could be an email that you sent out that you interacted with, right? This could be a visit to your website or a visit to your landing page.

22:36 This could be a YouTube ad that you ran. This could be a number of things. But then now, what you should have with retargeting, this is kind of getting into the weeds now. Retargeting means that you need to have what's called either a pixel and or a tag. Now, yeah. This is not complicated stuff. And a lot of people don't want to talk about this because it sounds complicated. Because you're like, Pixel, what is a Pixel? Okay. So let me break this down. Back in the, I don't know, 90s, early 2000s, if you had to build a website, what did you have to do? You had to learn code, right? HTML. Yeah, like HTML, CSS, like all of that stuff. To this day, when people say, hey, can you build a website?

23:19 The very first thing that comes to mind is that all of this, like the matrix screen, right? I could never... that's not internet marketing anymore. That's not website building anymore. That's not what it is. You can look at pretty much anybody's website. And even if it's a WordPress site, like even WordPress, when WordPress was out, it was like, oh, well, you know, you can kind of do like this blog and it's somewhat easy, you know, and it's always got like the hello world, like all of that stuff. But even like designing a WordPress site was difficult. But to this day, you can pick any website out there. And even if it is WordPress, they've got a website builder on top of it. which is a front-end drag-and-drop builder, which is why I always say, if you can click this mouse and if you can operate your iPhone or your Samsung and you can listen to this podcast, guess what you can do?

24:08 You can do everything digital marketing. And there's zero reason why you should be paying somebody else to do it who probably doesn't know your business as well as you. So anyways, going back to remarketing and tags, there's a little itty bitty piece of code. And again, that's just what it's called. It doesn't mean that you need to know how to code it. It's just, if you can copy it, you're golden. Okay. Super simple stuff. Like if I was to text you an email address, right? Or a special discount code, I was to text it to you or email it to you. If you have the mental bandwidth to just sit and copy that, you can copy this code. right? And then paste it into your website. That's where you get the remarketing aspect.

24:49 And this would be everything from, let's say, if you're running Google, you should always have Google remarketing. If you've got YouTube channel and you've got videos, which I would strongly encourage everybody to do, anybody who's interacted with your videos, now you can go ahead and remarket to them later. If you've got a LinkedIn account, you should have a LinkedIn tag. If you've got Facebook, you should have the Facebook pixel. If you've got TikTok, Your website should have every single social media platform tag and or pixel installed because you don't care where your customer hangs out. You just care about being able to contact your customer. Yeah. So, but people are like, oh, I'm not on TikTok. I'm not going to do funny dances.

25:29 Cool, dude. Neither am I. But guess what? My client might be. Are you sure you're not going to be down for some funny dances? Come on, man. I mean, one day. Hey, let's... This is the wrong crowd to be talking about that. So I'm pretty enamored with this whole retargeting concept. And truth is, we tried to dabble in it several years ago. And I don't know, five, six years ago, retargeting was an expensive proposition. I reached out to a couple of my buddies who were in digital marketing. And at the time, retargeting was one of those high-level strategies that big corporations who had deep pockets were leveraging. So let's describe what retargeting is.

26:10 Because my experience, how I got turned on to it, was I was shopping on one of my favorite clothing sites. And looking at a shirt. And you know how when we're shopping for clothes or shoes or whatever, something catches your eye. You might leave that browser tab open and go back and look and read a couple reviews or whatever. Well, I looked at this shirt maybe three or four times. I got it. Do I buy it? It's on sale. I like it. And I go back to work or whatever. Yeah. And then that shirt, that very shirt that I was sort of hemming and hawing over shows up in my Facebook feed. And then I end up, lo and behold, because I bought clothes from that company before. Then the next morning, I get an email with a promo code for that exact shirt.

26:53 And that shirt, the photo is sitting in my email. And I'm like, wow, okay. And so I open, I click that email. I go back and I'm like, okay, it's like 75 bucks or something still. Do I do it? Do I not? And this goes on for days. And I'm telling you, literally, my interaction with that shirt continued on for over a week. Yeah. That company, I was finding this shirt in my web results. I'm seeing it on Twitter when I open my Twitter feed. I'm like, oh my gosh, that shirt keeps showing up. It must be meant to be. You know, anyway. So... Did you buy it? Yeah, that was... This is a really shitty... That would have made a better story. I know that would have been no. No, the answer is actually no. But I was so...

27:34 I was enamored with this idea of... It did not bother me though. That's the point I'm... The thing I want to capitalize on is... I didn't find it annoying or pitchy or salesy. I actually found the retargeting experience to be very value added. And it was funny when I talk with some friends, they're like, Oh, big brother. They know what you're doing. They're following you around the internet. And I'm like, No. To me, it's a convenience as a consumer. They're showing me something that clearly they figure out some way to assess that I like this thing. I don't know if it was how long I was on that product page or where I clicked or if they had some kind of humorous heat map they were looking at that triggered the retargeting. But it was real. I did like that shirt and they just kept showing it to me. And so I just, of course, spun out on all the possibilities.

28:16 How could somebody lands on our water mitigation page on our website? How can we extend that interaction with that customer and or turn that website visit maybe into a phone call? Wow. Yeah, there's tons of ways to do it. Now, again, there's something that does need to be highlighted because the industry, not our industry, the marketing landscape has changed a little bit with the iOS 14 updates, which is your iPhone updates. Google now has what they call the sandbox. So there's a lot of what they call third-party browser cookies, right? So basically, most of us use Chrome. Mm-hmm. as our browser extension, right? And of course, people still use Bing and there's some advantages to that as well.

28:59 Really hardcore people who really just... These are like the bunker people use like DuckDuckGo because they don't want to be ever attracted, but then they still have a Facebook account. So anyways, there's this whole dilemma now between are people really getting value from being targeted? And I'm personally of the opinion, yeah. Because look, sometimes life gets in the way. Right. Sometimes I'm looking at something online and then I get a phone call and then I got to walk away and I, man, what was that site that I was on? What was that one thing that I really, really wanted to buy? And now if we don't have retargeting, that opportunity for me as a consumer is kind of gone. Right. So we all bitch and moan a little bit and we're like, oh my God, you know, I wish things were more convenient.

29:40 And then life gives you convenience. And then we're like, this is too convenient. People know what I'm doing. Well, then get offline. Like, You're the same person who just posted when you dropped off your kids at school and what you had for breakfast and you're concerned about privacy. Yeah. Stop it. Oh, yeah. Stop. You know, so I'm losing your crowd. Yeah. No, it's great. It's all good. It's great. So bring us back, though, man. Bring us back to concrete. Yeah, tie back in this retargeting piece. Yeah. So retargeting, very simple. If you have a code, and again, these things are changing, but now they're server side codes, which work exactly the same. Basically, what that means is someone visits, let's say, for example, they do a Google search, right?

30:21 Let's just use that as a stepping stone. And they're looking maybe for consulting. Okay. And they come across your website. Well, great. More than likely, what's going to happen is they're going to go to your website. They're going to read about you guys and they're going to go off and then they're going to read about somebody else. Right. So they're probably not making a buying decision right then and there. Now, of course, water mitigation is a little bit different because 90 percent of success there is just picking up the phone. So if you want to be successful, just pick up the phone and just don't send it off to a shitty answering service because I've heard tons of those. Just actually have someone pick up the phone. So, but anyways, let's use the consulting example because I think this is a little bit more well-rounded. They go to your website. They're probably going to go to two or three competitors, whatever the case may be. Great. Now, once they're done with that Google website phase, they're probably going to do a couple of things.

31:05 Either they're going to go to YouTube They're going to go to Facebook. They're going to go to Instagram. They're going to go to maybe LinkedIn if they're a pro, right? Because maybe for the consulting side, maybe they're on LinkedIn. And maybe later on in the afternoon, they'll probably head on over and they want to see some funny videos. They'll probably go to TikTok, right? Whatever. Okay, cool. So then there's one, two, three, four, five, six, or seven different possibilities, social media platforms that this person is going to visit. Now, by having a pixel and or that piece of code on your website, and just because they interacted with that website for X amount of time, now you could set an ad budget to each one of these platforms to go ahead and say, hey, by the way, I saw that you visited our site.

31:52 Did you get what you were looking for? Right now? Video is even more powerful because now if you have, let's say, a specific video on your YouTube channel or as an initial ad, like that's the initial contact or even on your organic Facebook, you can go ahead and target this person. The people who interacted with your video directly. based on how cold or how hot they are. Meaning, did they watch 10% of my video, 25% of my video, 50% of my, 75% of my video? You see, like, that's a different degree of commitment because if someone just listened to Rico for like the first five seconds, like, ugh, no. I was like, okay, cool, that's not my guy.

32:32 And I'm cool with that because we're not meant for everybody to like us because that would be a hell of a shit show. But if they're like at 99%, there's a good possibility You know, just maybe. Or just crazy, morbid curiosity. One of the two, but it's pretty good in your chance. Yeah. But morbid curiosity I could deal with because seven, eight, 12 exposures, 21 exposures to my message. My message makes sense. Here's the thing. Like nobody's message doesn't make sense. It just doesn't make sense to you right this second. But there's always a crowd for someone. Yeah. My job is not to convince people on the restoration side that they need remediation.

33:15 You either need it or you don't. The question is, do you want to do it with me? Yeah, I love it. You do. In fact, are you in business? Yes, you do need marketing. Question is, are you going to take my advice on how to do marketing? Or are you going to try to figure it some other way? Like the question is never the thing. It's just, are you ready to receive the various versions of things, right? Wow. We got really philosophical in that one. Yeah, I like it though. Yeah. So, but anyways, so now with video, it's very, very powerful and it's really dirt cheap to do this retargeting because now you can set up however it is that you want. Why do I like landing pages more than... So let's go to ClickFunnels, right? Why do I like ClickFunnels, let's say, more than a traditional website?

33:57 People get lost in your website. They look at the contact us, they look at the about us, they look at the customer testimonials, they look at this, they look at that. And next thing you know, they're reading like three blog posts that's not even like relevant to what they were originally talking about. Now there's paralysis by analysis, whereas a funnel is much more geared. So you can control your messaging better and that customer journey. Remember, the whole idea of marketing is to prevent as much friction as possible to the buying, making decisions. Right? So that's why I personally like landing pages a lot more. I'm not saying that you should not have a website. You should have a website. However, when it comes down to marketing and where you're driving traffic to, you should kind of break it up into small little silos.

34:44 And you should pick kind of one thing. one thing and be like, okay, cool. What am I going after? What is this campaign? What do I want the most of now? So we were talking off camera about a webinar that I did kind of talking about this whole deal. And I have a worksheet and it's just a simple, like, you know, it's not like a fancy worksheet. It's just like questions. It's like things like 36 to 40 questions. And the whole idea of that is just to get really clear on who you are as a human being, as an entrepreneur. And it's a really weird exercise because I ask really basic questions. But the clarity that comes from this basic questions is amazing because now you get to dig deep. You're like, who am I? What do I like to do? Why is it that I'm in the business that I'm doing? What jobs do I enjoy doing?

35:24 What jobs do I not enjoy doing? Which jobs are the most profitable? Which ones am I pursuing the most? Which ones am I not getting enough of? And you can kind of follow that logic. And then once we break out, I think it's like the first like 10 to 15 questions. And we break out of the me, me, me phase, getting really clear on me. Then you start getting really clear on your customer. And you're like, okay, cool. What does my customer want? Who is my customer? Where do they live? Where do they hang out? What would they do? What would they want to hear? And then why am I getting these kinds of customers? Because maybe sometimes you're getting one type of customer, but you want a different type of customer. Right. That happens all the time. Oh yeah. Like all the time. Right. Why am I getting more of these when I really want more of these? These are all great questions. Simple questions. Right.

36:04 Yeah. Being like Rico, this is really elementary. Guess what? Everybody skips elementary, you know, so it goes back to the basics. So you answer all of these questions and then you start creating what's called this customer avatar. Right. Well, now you get clear on even to the point of who has access to, to your customer, right? Because now if you know something about your customer, which by the way, we could find out pretty much anything about our customer avatar. I mean, emergency water mitigation, that's a little different because it's like, who's your customer? Someone whose pipe just busted. Well, you can't really target that, right? Because they're not watching like a pipe busting video like all the time. But we do know that there's probably people that might have access to that customer along that customer journey, right?

36:48 So your customer is, let's say, for example, someone who just had an emergency roof repair. Is that a potential customer for a water mitigation company? Absolutely. 100%. Why are they calling it emergency roof repair? It's not because they're upset that they've got this beautiful view of the night sky. It's because probably water is getting in the house. Right. Yeah. You know, so once you do this questionnaire, you become really clear on who you are and then who your customer is. And then you can go ahead and start creating a campaign around that. And you create a singular campaign that has, you know, different branches. And depending on where that customer is in that journey, now you can start cultivating that individual. So what does this all mean? What this means is that you need to create a roadmap.

37:30 And this is simple. This is not difficult stuff. You got to understand, number one, who you are as an individual. Number two, who your customer really is now. And then number three, who you'd like your customer to actually be. And the services that you actually want to provide. And you'd be surprised. Like sometimes I've gone through this exercise. Cause again, you guys know, like on our podcast, like we talked to quite a few people and these are like successful company companies. I'm like, wow. Okay. This is, you've done amazing things. And even for them, sometimes we're going through this exercise and they're like, Oh no. Yeah. We're totally getting these jobs that we would never want to do. I was like, so then why are you doing it? And when we dig deep, it's just because they never like time to say, point the finger at something and be like, I don't want to do this anymore.

38:10 And that's not the most profitable way for me to do this. And I'm actually losing business because I'm like tied up over here. So you've only got X amount of bandwidth, right? So you get clear on all of those things and then you start putting together a marketing plan. And that's where you would start with your PPC. This is where you start using Google AdWords. And the reason why I start with PPC and Google ads is very simple. That is the path of least resistance. And it is the path that's going to give us the fastest shot in the arm. Because if you spend a dollar today, you want to try to get an ROI back as quickly as possible. Yeah. Very few things give you that, especially in the restoration industry.

38:50 I would argue in most industries, right? You spend a little bit of money today, you get that right, because there's still going to be a little bit of a testing phase. Although what we show is we show how to eliminate that testing phase as much as possible. Yeah. Just shorten the length of it. You shorten the length of it. Like there's no reason for you to be cute or to be innovative. Like there's no time for that, especially in the beginning. You need something that's effective. So how do you find something that's effective? You find someone who's already been doing it. Yeah. Right. So for example, that would be like step number one. And then what you start doing is once you've identified these keywords that are actually making you money, that you're driving that traffic to a landing page. Well, then guess what? Now your phone's ringing. Now you're happy, but that's scalable.

39:31 Right. So now we kind of have to go back a step and be like, well, Rico, what happened to all this old school stuff? Because there's still money there. So for example, if you're doing phone calls, right? And people are talking about plumbers right now. A lot. A lot of the restoration groups. I'm sure you guys, because I know that you guys are in the mix. And everybody's asking the same question. How do I grow my business? So the advice is you go out and you meet people. That's not scalable. You can't do it. You can, if you have more time than money, you can do that. But now I beg the question, which is an important question, I think. Let's just pretend that I'm calling people every single day. Okay. And out of those people that I'm meeting every single day, I finally forged some relationships to where a pro is willing to give me a shot to trust me with their customer.

40:17 Like that's a big ask. And mind you, they already have a relationship. So you're like, kind of like, you've got to be something better than, you know, they got to feel bad for you or you got to be better. Like one of the two. Sure. So it takes a lot of work. Right. Or somebody has got to drop the ball somewhere along the way. And you're kind of like the rebound guy. Like you're always there. You're like, Hey honey, look at me. Like, you know, I'm a really nice guy. I've been here. Like, Oh, it's my turn. It's my turn. Come on. Look, just give me a shot. Yes. Yeah. That was like almost like too close to home. I was going to say, I wanted to call that out, but I didn't feel comfortable. Rico's dating playbook right there. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's like my claim to fame.

40:59 Anyways, so that's basically, it's hard. The point is, is that it's hard, right? Yeah. Time intensive. Yeah. Very time intensive. But let's just pretend for a second. Because again, it's a numbers game and it will happen for you and it will become profitable. But now two of your contacts start sending you business. Yeah. Now what do you do? Well, now you got to service that client, which now means you no longer can go ahead and be on this little route that you had to shake hands and kiss babies. If you were doing 50 phone calls a day, well, now you can't do 50 phone calls a day. Maybe you're going to end up doing maybe 10 phone calls a day. Maybe. The point is, is that the one thing that kind of pretended to give you the illusion of maybe you're on the path to success is now by design, not workable.

41:42 It's going to cycle. You're stuck now in some form of execution cycle. Exactly. You're like prospect, prospect, prospect, close, close, close. Yeah. Deliver on the work, deliver on the work. Oh shit. Where's my next deal coming from? Yeah, exactly. Go find more work. Yeah, yeah. Basically, and I know that I'm not the most like politically correct guy, but it's like, it's crackhead behavior. It's really what it is. It's like, hey bro, you got something for me this time? Like, because once you run dry, you're like, hey bro. Oh yeah. And then the other pro knows, it's like, you were just fine like two weeks ago and now you're calling me again. There's a neediness that can come across. Yeah. Maybe we'll go with your version better than mine.

42:22 It's almost too bad that you guys don't have a video component because this would be the great time to have that Dave Chappelle meme. He's got the white lips on. You know what I'm talking about? Anyways. So yeah. So it's a very needy behavior, right? And it becomes a cycle. So now how do you take this old school stuff that used to work and turn it digital, right? So for example, with phone calls, how many people have you met legitimately? And this is like a question, right? And I think we've all fallen into this. How many people have we gone to a networking meeting? Have we gone to an event that we know is a potential customer and or a referral base for us? And we took a business card from them, but then we've never reached out to them. Those are lost opportunities, right? Oh, yeah. The reason for that is because everybody's busy. Okay, well, how do you digitize that?

43:04 This is the key. It's like, let's take old school. Let's think new school. Okay. So now what I do, for example, when I go to events and when I have, you know, someone hands me a business card and when someone, or if I'm doing route marketing, let's say, which I really don't do, but let's just say that I did, I would take all of that information and I would either give it to a VA and I would have them put that in a Google sheet. That's it. Name, phone number, email address, all the pedigree information that's on the business card. Boom. And then what I do is I take that and I send it on over to a program called, let's say, for example, slide broadcast. Okay. And this is a ringless voicemail. Now, what this does is that means that every week or every two weeks, I can have it on a cycle where I can break up my list and I can leave a voicemail that says something along the lines of, hey, what's going on?

43:50 I don't know. I was just making this video and I don't know why, but I just randomly thought about you. You know, I thought it would be really cool to connect. Why don't shoot me a call whenever you have a sec? You can call me at 305, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now, if you got that voicemail from me, you'd be like, oh, shit, yeah, yeah, that's Rico. Right? Because notice I didn't say your name. I didn't identify anything specific about you. Right. But if you got that voicemail, you'd be like, oh, shit, yeah, Rico. Yeah, he just called me and just randomly thinking about me. I can kind of see your face. You both are like, oh, that's nasty. Because it is nasty. Because now while you're pounding your fingers to the bone, I just did 1500 calls like this. And I'm not emotionally connected to the results because I don't care if you pick up or if you don't pick up.

44:31 I don't care if you call me back or not, but I had a touch point. Yeah. Now, if you call me back now, it's okay. What's going on? Oh, yeah. I don't know. Cause I mind you, you got to keep track of like what you sent out. Right. Right. I mean, I was just thinking about you, blah, blah, blah, blah. That'd be really cool to connect. Well then guess what? Now your calendar is booked out for the next three weeks. You sent basically a text message. You recorded it one time and you sent it out. Now that's an old school method of doing things with the new school twist, which one's more effective. Do you want to pick up the phone all day or do you want to do it the Rico way? Yeah. I mean, oh, nice coin there, Rico. Yeah. Nice coin. Trademark. All right, let's take a minute to recognize and thank our MitResto Mastery sponsor, Accelerate Restoration Software.

45:18 And I'm fully aware, by the way, that when I say those last two words, restoration software, that that instantly creates heartburn for some of you out there, right? Because we probably all fall into one of two camps when it comes to software. We've either cobbled together kind of a version of free website tools and spreadsheets just to make our business work Or we're in the camp where we've adopted one of these existing restoration platforms, you know, one that has all the bells and whistles and supposedly does it all. But we can't get our team to consistently adopt it and input information to it. Yeah, and that's really where Accelerate has honed their focus. They've created a system that's simple, right?

46:00 It's intuitive, and it focuses on the most mission-critical information, i.e., guys, your team will actually use it. Let's talk about sales. After years of leading sales and marketing teams, the biggest trick is getting them to consistently update notes about their interactions with referral partners and clients. And the essential piece there is there's got to be a mobile app experience. the solutions that were previously out there were just too cumbersome and tricky to use. Yeah. Imagine guys, how your business would change if your entire team was actually consistently using the system. Do yourself a favor, go check these guys out at xlrestorationsoftware.com forward slash MRM and check out the special offers they're providing to MRM listeners.

46:51 All right, let's talk about actionable insights. Owners, GMs, you can't be your business's expert on all things estimating. You might've been three years ago when you're writing sheets in the field, but the industry's always changing and so are the tools. If you're the smartest person in the room when it comes to Xactimate Matterport, how does that scale? You're the bottleneck. I know I'm preaching to the choir, but this is where actionable insights comes in. They're a technical partner that can equip your team with the latest bleeding edge information and best practices and then update them with webinars and training resources when the game inevitably changes again. For this reason, we recommend actual insights to all of our clients.

47:31 Yeah, three of the kind of big things that stuck out to me when being introduced to AI and their team. First off is this consistently updated training. I mean, at the end of the day, these guys are the experts. They're out front all the time. They're constantly learning new trade secrets and ensuring that your team's got access to those things. A 3,700 plus page database of Xactimate templates. I don't know what else to say here other than don't reinvent the wheel. It's already available. Download it, copy it, use it, bam. database of commonly missed items. I think this is huge. So many of us can change the numbers by just moving the needle a couple points and those commonly missed items can make all the difference in the world.

48:15 So go check them out at value.getinsights.org backslash fcg. Okay, I'm just thinking about this and I'm listening to you. I'm like, oh my gosh. Okay, so so much information is coming. So much information is firing on all cylinders here. There is no doubt in my mind, man. There's no doubt in my mind. Half the people listening right now are just being overwhelmed by this. And the key to what you do, I understand, is you boil it down. You break it down. You make it simple. You try to remove people's hurdles from getting into this and being effective at it. Let's slow down the pace a little bit though, knowing that there's no way we can cover the richness of the experience and the perspective that you have on the tactical ways to do this and to introduce it to our business.

49:05 So let's hang somewhere for a minute. I'm more interested, I think, just to create enough curiosity for someone to take action. Talk to us about just like these key elements from the owner of a business or a key leader in the business making this comment like, Well, I'm just not very good at sales, but I'm good at operations. Or I've got a technical background. I'm a restoration contractor by trade. I'm not really good at sales. Yeah. Help us overcome that. And the reason I'm setting the stage for that is, I think the largest barrier of entry to this digital side is the same excuse that we get why people don't sell for their own business. They wait for the TPA.

49:46 They create these dependencies on these programs to make the phone ring. Because they just have bought into this limiting mindset that I don't do sales. And you hammered on us, I think, before we hit record on, we have two functions in our business. What are they? Take it from there, my friend. So yeah, there's two main functions in any business. Doesn't matter what it is that you do. And those functions are function number one, marketing. Function number two is sales. Everything else outside of that is just a byproduct of how you're actually delivering to get that money. And it doesn't matter. This is universal across the board. Apple computers, what do they do? They market the hell out of their products, right?

50:30 And what those products can do for you, it just so happens that they provide either a laptop or iPhones, right? consulting. Great. You know, people aren't really paying you for your time. That's not what they're doing, right? You're marketing your services on what you can deliver, right? And it just so happens that that involves whatever that involves. Same thing with mitigation, right? So it's always what you think you're doing is not what you're doing. Every business is marketing and sales. That's it. Once you can wrap your head around that, and again, this is why I think like the exercises that I like to do are really important because you will identify that you are not just One of the biggest problems that people have as a general rule, and I say all people, myself included, is that we are so focused on the problems that are given onto us instead of focusing on what we have the ability to do inside.

51:23 So we're so focused on these external limitations instead of focused on how great we genuinely all are inside and that we do have these capacities and that now with just the time being on our side, things have gotten so legitimately easier. And I would argue if any business owner told me that they are not in sales and they are not in marketing and they have a quasi successful business, I'd tell them to stop lying because you are utterly lying either to myself, like me, or to yourself. Someone is being lied to in this equation because you cannot become successful unless you're selling something to someone. Sorry, dress it up however you want. You could say that, you know, it's because I'm a service and I'm a really good technician.

52:04 Yeah, maybe. But then you would have just been you in a truck. But if you scaled beyond just yourself, you sold employees on working with you. You sold your business partner to be in business with you. You're selling these new vendors to go ahead and choose you over the competitor. There's something about that. But Rico, but you know, keyboards turn me off. Well, then I don't know what to tell you. It is 2022 and you're either going to evolve or you're going to die or you're going to die on the vine because you're paying money for somebody else to do what you should be doing in-house. The future of the business, my humble opinion, is... All marketing is for our restoration industry.

52:44 The big boys, they're all going to be bringing it in in-house. And I know that marketing companies might be listening to the podcast and be like, Rico, you are killing us. And I would say yes, because I'm a firm believer that no marketing company cares as much as you do the owner. Yeah. How many hours do you guys work in your consulting business? Like tons, even after hours, how many times are you like kicking around an idea or do you call each other? Hey, you know what I was thinking about? Yes. It never stops. Yeah. Right. When you're showering, right. When you're putting in beard balm, like, How'd you know? But when you're doing your thing, like thoughts are coming and it's business. How do I do this? How do I do that? Your marketing guy, first of all, does not have that mental capacity because he's concerned with his business, right?

53:29 And you're just a number. So here's an example that I give quite a bit. Let's just pretend for a second that there was this thing as a 100% amazing marketing agency. And they are 100%. It does not get better than them. Okay? So that's 100%. And they charge X amount a month to go ahead and handle whatever it is. Which means that you're not getting 40 hours a week. You're getting a fraction. It's a timeshare of talent. Right? It's a timeshare of talent. But they're 100%. They are legitimately the best. Or you can go ahead and hire a 25 percenter. And you're like, oh my God, but I got this agency.

54:09 They're a hundred percent. Rico, I mean, stupid Rico, you got a 25 percenter on your staff. Yeah. But my 25 percenter is eating, sleeping, thinking, dreaming, executing 40 hours a week on the Rico plan. Yeah, that's it. Yeah. When we have meetings, we're talking about our company culture. We're talking about our ideas. They understand my verbiage. They understand when I'm aggressive, when I'm not, when I'm happy, when I'm not, how certain situations and certain clients make me feel some kind of way. They understand all of those nuances. And more importantly, They're researching every competitor that I have on a consistent basis, meaning that my finger at 25% is much better at identifying the pulse of the market than your firm at 100% talent.

54:55 Because even if my person is lacking, let's say on technical SEO, well, guess what? Those one-off tasks, I could always outsource that. or offshore for... Because those are like one-off tasks, short tasks. So the point is, my 25%, I get so much more of an ROI based on that. Because you're getting 100% of that work. 100% of the effort is yours, right? That's a whole 100% of zero is still zero, right? So... Exactly. Exactly. So like, for example, like if it takes an SEO agency, let's just pick an SEO for a second. Let's pick PPC. Okay. How much time is Google ads going to take for you to go ahead and do keyword research and competitive keyword research and all that stuff, right? For an agency, that might take three weeks.

55:36 For an individual, honestly, even as a business owner, a busy business owner, you could do it in a weekend. and have a much better idea and understanding of what you want to do, then that PPC company is going to tell you, oh, and of course they always look, and I get it. Again, I own a marketing company. I mean, to this day, I still own it. I just have a big fat red velvet robe because I don't want to work with people unless they have X amount. And, you know, it's a whole different dynamic that I have going on now. But when I wasn't in the restoration business, I used to like flood people with these reports. And it's like, oh, look at this. This competitive research just took me so long. And it was like, no, it's because we had X amount of time to allocate towards your thing. And if the enemy is smarter, what do you do? Confuse them.

56:16 Right? And of course, like the market thinks that this is all complicated. So you provide charts and graphs and competitive research and you use all of these words like PPC and CPC and, you know, ALV and all this stuff. And people are like, oh, this guy's really, really smart. No, no, no. It's just, we are trying to keep you somewhat confused. We want to educate you, but not really. Keep it technical. Yeah. Let's keep it technical because when I tell you it's five grand a month or 10 grand a month, you need to be like, okay. Yeah. Cause I don't understand it. Right? Yeah. Yeah. So when I come out and I say, hey, everybody should do this in-house, people are like, I can't possibly do this in-house. And you're probably right. You probably can't do all of it in-house. But there are things right now that you should start bringing in-house.

56:56 And I think the path of least resistance is getting your foot in the door with... some kind of pay-per-click advertising. I personally love Google ads because most people in the industry aren't doing it well enough, but there are enough people that are doing it to where you can identify the winners and the losers really, really quick. And that provides a quick win. And once you get that quick win, now you're like, oh, wait, this is actually possible. Let me give you one more thing that I think is really the most important. Let's talk about real quick why this is such an important strategy for actual business growth. If you are predominantly in the business of marketing and sales, and you know that there's another hidden component, a subcomponent, which is building relationships, right?

57:41 Because you want to get referrals from other pros. In the restoration business, that's key. We've added an exuberant amount of revenue to our restoration company by doing this one thing. And we can do this at scale. And let me tell you what that is. actually being of value to other pros. Now that's cliche because you've heard that a million times, right? Let me tell you how I actually do this. If I go to a plumber, first of all, I would never go to a plumber and call a plumber. I'd be like, hey, Mr. Plumber, pretend to be a cold caller. And I'm just a client and I'm trying to vet them. And I can do all this stuff for them, kind of feed them down all this BS. But really what I'm looking for is for them to send me business because I don't have business. That's bad. And mind you, there's guys that are doing tons of that stuff, right?

58:22 Right. So here's a better approach. Hey, plumber, do you want more plumbing leads? Yeah? Okay, cool. Let me show you what I'm doing for this plumber in this county. I want to do this for you. I'm a restoration contractor and I don't want anything from you, but I do want to give something legitimate to you, right? I'm going to start sending you leads. Let me show you how I'm going to do it. And then I sit down with them and I show them the backend of our Google Ads account. And I show them how many clicks we're getting, how much we're spending and how much traffic we're building. And I'm going to say, Hey, look, your competitor is doing this. you're not doing this. If we can go ahead and just capture a fraction of this action, that represents X amount of revenue. Because what does a plumber want? He wants more plumbing jobs. What does a roofer want? He wants more roofing jobs. He doesn't want a thousand dollar referral fee.

59:03 I mean, sure, he'll take it, but he doesn't really want it. He's a plumber. If he wanted a referral fee, he would have gotten into the brokerage business. He doesn't want to be a plumber, right? Dude, I love where you're going here. Yeah, I love this. Keep going, man. So now what I do is I don't charge them Here's what the magic is. Because now we've already vetted this in-house. We've done it in-house. So I'm going after, let's say mold remediation is really my bag. That's where I really like to play. So who's an ideal client for me? Mold assessment companies. Well, guess what mold assessment companies need? They need mold testing jobs. Like that's what they need. So now what I do is I say, hey, look, no problem. I'll go ahead and I'll take care of Google Ads. Yeah. You put up the ad spend, obviously, because I'm not going to pay for that. But am I going to charge you for my service?

59:43 Am I going to charge you for the setup? Am I going to charge you for this landing page? Am I going to charge you for anything? All this other stuff that people are trying to take from you, I'm not going to do that. I want to give you what you want. Here's my ask. If you come across a client that obviously came through my channel and you find it right for you to make a recommendation so that I can also participate and help your client out, our client out, that's the only thing that I ask in return. Dude, I love it. Nasty. Nasty. I love it. Yeah. Totally nasty. Because here's why. If we were doing the referral-based business, and let's say that I'm dynamic enough, or I'm funny enough, or I'm just audacious enough for me to say, hey, look, send me a referral.

1:00:25 I'll give you 1,500 bucks, right? And a plumber says, yes, I'll do it. Great. Well, what happens if now, all of a sudden, three months from now, it's not Rico who's doing the marketing. It's some other company who hired Betty. And Betty is just like a showstopper. She's dynamic. She's really excited. Oh yeah. Dude's not calling Rico no more. Right. Because it was based on that. But now check out what I did. What I did is I'm putting this guy's company on the map. I'm still holding on to the purse strings because I'm doing the marketing because if I turned it off, I turn it off. Like that's it. Like we don't have a commitment. Like the commitment is I'm going to help you, but we've got this simpatico thing going on, right?

1:01:06 It's symbiotic. It's like, I'm helping you. I'm giving you what you want. And in return, if you can go ahead and give, because those are in fact my clients, like that's my ideal avatar. Right. Now, all of a sudden this person doesn't go anywhere because I'm helping them build their business. And our relationship now goes real deep. That's how you build meaningful relationships. There's a huge barrier of entry now for your competitor. Dude, I dig it. I love that so much. I love it. I think that that's a perfect example of the kind of out-of-box opportunities that businesses have when we get out of the scarcity mindset. And I think you alluded to this already once too, Rico.

1:01:47 It was just What business are you in? And forgetting that as business owners, yes, we understand that you have this technical background. You've got time and grade. You've been in the industry or you were a GM for someone and now on your own... That's all great. But at the end of the day, your mind space... And if it's not yours, you've got to have somebody in the team whose mind space is spent... problem solving the stuff that you're talking about. That's a beautiful, beautiful example. But we also can't hang here all day. And I know that your time is precious. So dude, two things I want to hammer out with you before we let you go. One is... Where do we send people? Because I don't know that we've made it super clear, but you provide some resources to get people started in this level of independence and taking some ownership of their inside marketing or their actual marketing efforts.

1:02:40 So where are we going for that first? Yeah. So we do provide resources. I have a course which is called Total Ads Domination. And basically what we do, this is a prerecorded course, right? So you have video modules, you have lifetime access to them, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You can go ahead and pause them, rewind them, watch them a thousand times, whatever the case may be. And it's an over-the-shoulder screen share of exactly step-by-step, my run-and-gun method. So I don't make anything technical. I keep it real simple. And more importantly, it's kind of industry related because I'm in the industry. So you'll see like from the inside, like how I actually do it. Step-by-step everything, like how to do the competitive research.

1:03:20 I give you a powerful negative keyword list. If you don't know what that is, it basically just means that you're not going to be blowing money for no reason. We give you tons of resources, everything. But then on top of above and beyond that, we also do a weekly coaching call, which is a live Zoom call, which this is going to go away eventually. We've already jacked up our prices once. The course was originally $9.97. Now it's $19.97. It's going to go to two more tiers, $5,000 and then $10,000. So if any of your listeners are listening, jump, huh? Yeah, it's already happening. So it was built that way by design. But as of right now, we also offer, as part of the package, this is an extra, as part of the package, you also get the live Zoom classes where we sit down with an hour and we just talk about what maybe you're getting stuck at.

1:04:06 Like real functional stuff. Oh, you're not getting the ROI you want, or you're getting these weird clicks, or you're having a problem with your landing page or recall. I don't quite understand how to do this, right? No big deal. Like we spend that time together and we figure that out and you get a total of those 10 coaching calls all for like 1997. And if they wanted to, if they wanted to get the free resources, if they go to… ricogarciajr.com forward slash free dash resource. And I'll send you guys a link so you guys can post it in the show notes. You can go ahead and have access to the cheat sheet that I was mentioning earlier before, which is just kind of like this clarity worksheet, as well as a couple of things. You'll get also a, what's called a Google ads ROI calculator.

1:04:51 So it's a small Google sheet that you can use where you can just plug and play with numbers to figure out, Hey, look, if I have X amount of budget, how much could this actually mean as far as a return on ad spend and an actual physical net ROI, and you can play with your numbers. And you know, if your closing ratio is 40%, what does that mean? If your closing ratio is 80% because you have killer salespeople on the field, what does that mean? So you can get a real worldview of what that is. Plus you also get the negative keyword list just to kind of get you started and a whole bunch of other really cool stuff that we kind of throw into the mix. Right on, man. I love it. It sounds like a lot of opportunity for people to dive in and just start getting their feet wet. And then of course, everybody who's listening, most of you already know, but Rico, obviously host of the Restoration Domination podcast.

1:05:37 It is fire. Great guests, very intentional, very purposeful. And you can clearly hear that Rico is not short on perspective, information, experience, and energy. Thank you, my friend. It was a good time. Thank you, guys. I know we'll probably do it again soon. So thanks for joining us, man. Thank you so much, guys. We appreciate you. Yeah, man. All right, everybody. Hey, thanks for joining us for another episode of Head, Heart & Boots. And if you're enjoying the show, but you love this episode, please hit follow. Only know to subscribe, write us a review, or share this episode with a friend. Share it on LinkedIn, share it via text, whatever.

1:06:18 It all helps. Thanks for listening.