“If your business is level, then your business is actually dropping.” – Morris Carey
facturers to help you with that. Spending somebody else’s money is always better than spending your own. We reached out and asked some vendors if they’d be interested in having their name on our truck. In turn, theirs is the first piece of literature we hand people when we go on the appointment. Not only do you have to get the phone to ring, but once you get there, you want the job, otherwise you just wasted your time. So we’re always looking for a way to get people so that they want us. Exactly what James said: so they have that good feeling about you. A lot of our neighborhoods do not allow jobsite signs. You can’t put a sign out, you can’t canvas a neighborhood, you can’t do door hangers, there’s no soliciting. So they have private Facebook pages. One thing we really like to do is incentivize our clients to promote us on their Facebook page. We throw little things, because you can’t pay them for it. We’ll throw in lighting on their deck. We might add a little curve somewhere, an inlay or a border, so when we’re there we want to help promote ourselves through them because nothing speaks better for you than a satisfied customer. James: I am proof that you can teach an old dog new tricks. Funny, having a building business for nearly 40 years and a radio show for 33 of those years, one would think that we’re astute and on the leading edge when it comes to marketing, but I had to wake up and really embrace digital and social media as an integral part of what we do. Not as a stand-alone, but to lend credibility to the other forms of what we do. So if we’re doing broadcast, direct mail, magazines, trucks, job signs, when people see them, the first thing they do is they pick up their smartphones and go right to one of the rating services, whether it’s Yelp or GuildQuality, or something like that and they check you out. And if you don’t have the positive reviews, or if you don’t have the visibility that consumers now expect, then all of your efforts to create visibility through all of the other platforms is in many ways money poorly spent.
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Deck Specialist
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Winter 2019
Q: How do you use already-finished projects to market future projects? Morris: We ask for Yelp reviews. Before the days of digital, we asked for letters of recommendation from our customers, but now it’s digital because we don’t even use a showroom anymore. My brother has sold jobs where he went into the customer’s home only once, yet met with the customer online a half-dozen times and then signed the contract online. We have a sophisticated computer program that connects every advertising source to each customer, whether they came to us because they saw a truck sign or a job sign, heard us on the radio, or read our ad in a newspaper or magazine. Then we take that customer all the way through job costs. So we can actually take our most profitable jobs and tie them to media. In fact, not only do we do that with our media, but we can do that with our salespeople based on profitability, beyond their closing rate, and we can do it with our crew people as well. So if you start tying your crew people with your customer, your advertising method with your customer, and your salesperson with your customer, and bring that information all the way through job costing, you end up finding out who your most profitable salesperson is, who your most profitable workman is, and what’s your best advertising method. “We’re constantly doing things to get feedback that will help us improve our overall business.” – James Carey James: We do beautiful post-photography and videography. Look, you can use a smartphone and photograph your project, but there’s nothing like a wide-angle lens with great lighting that’s done professionally and staged properly. The other thing we do is we have a rating service. We use GuildQuality. So we want our clients to weigh in, we want them to tell us what we’re doing right, we want them to tell us where we need to improve, and we even send surveys to those who didn’t select us. We want to know why they didn’t select us. We’re constantly doing things to get feedback that will help us improve our overall business.