Außenbeleuchtung: Mehr Leads außerhalb der Weihnachtssaison

0:00Unternehmer/Gast I sell uh outdoor lighting to homeowners. We do 880,000 revenue. About 40% is in the holiday season. >> Yeah. >> Doing Christmas lights. Um Bas- The problem is we don't have enough leads in the not holiday light time of year. So, um the first half until basically now >> this business so many times. Do you want me to walk you through it? Okay, cool. Um So, basically you have you have one kind of existential uh decision that you need to make, which is are we going to be full-time lighting, which there's nothing wrong with that. Look at the Halloween store. Like they're open 2 months a year and they just murder it and that's all they do, right? The alternative is that you basically have um a home team that goes from lawn care and other home services to uh you know, lighting because the the lawn care guys have the equal opposite issue. They're like, "Okay, well, there's grass that's growing 9 months of the year and then it's holiday season and what do my guys do for 3 months or 4 months depending on whatever geographic area you're in, right?" And so, um I'll tell you which one I prefer. I prefer the keeping the holiday season business

1:03>> Mhm. >> year-round. And I'll explain why, but either option works. I just want to be really clear about that. I like thinking about it. How many months of the year are you doing the lights? Three? >> Yep, 45 days basically. Yeah. >> So, instead of So, the way I think about it is how can I take how can I equip my existing team with as many skills as possible so that the other 10 months of the year all they're doing is getting business. And so, like the perfect business in the world is you sell all year and then you have to deliver for this much. It's an amazing business. You just collect cash all day long. Collect cash, collect commitments, collect cash, collect commitments all year round and then you boom and you basically earn the living over the next 45 or 60 days and then you go back into the sale cycle.

1:43And so, that's one way of doing it. I like that cuz it's such a simple like you just have to think about one thing for 10 months, which is marketing and sales. >> Yeah. >> And that gets pretty nasty and the cash flow is really good. The alternative obviously is you're like, "Okay, well, these guys don't have these skills, which then begs the next question is what type of talent would I need to facilitate model A versus model B. But if you have model B, which is maybe maybe you have lower skilled people who work for you right now, then it's like, okay, can I buy some lawnmowers? Can I buy some landscaping stuff so that I can give them something to do for the other 9 months of the year?

2:15>> Yeah, so we were doing lawn care and picked up Christmas lights to fill that gap. Well, where I live in October, you have to do both. >> Yeah. >> So I got rid of the lawn care. >> Okay. >> Well, just do all just Christmas. >> And you made better margins and all that stuff. >> yeah. Yeah, so that was awesome. So what we're doing now is project-based permanent lighting jobs with the exact same team. >> Okay. >> So we can literally just shut it down as soon as Christmas time starts. >> Cool. >> So I guess where I'm what you're saying would be just sell Christmas all year.

2:44Which is like really hard to sell this time of year. Really like super easy to get leads in Christmas. >> Yeah. >> So my thought was sell permanent lights. >> Uh-huh. >> And then also 50% of them still get Christmas lights. Um, but >> Why not do that? >> That is what I'm doing. >> Well, great. >> Well, so the the problem is the leads problem. >> Okay. >> So I'm running out of Christmas light customers to sell landscape lights to cuz that was the natural first like easy to get them. Well, I'm running meta ads. >> Uh-huh.

3:10>> Um >> So leads in for permanent lights, okay. >> Yeah, exactly is the problem. So what I'm trying to figure out is is the problem like lead magnet issues or landing page issues is where I'm at, I think. >> so now we're now we're in the meat of it. Great. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Uh, no, I'll bet you that the creative is probably not that good because I think it's a pretty easy thing to sell. >> Yeah. >> The permanent lighting like you just show a house before and after to show the dark before and after like Oh, look, lights. Nice thing is it's very visual. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah.

3:35>> actually think that I actually think that the ads is probably the issue. What's the lead magnet you're offering right now? >> Uh, we come to your house to do a free demo so you can see how it looks. >> Yeah. Um I'd probably try and enhance that offer. Um, the nice thing is in local markets it's very offer driven. Um, and so I'd have to think more than three minutes, you know, two seconds about it um cuz it'll be the front end of the whole business. Um but it would probably be some element of like some amount of lights that come for free.

4:05Uh so like like I think something that would murder would be like can I light someone's like not their deck, but like maybe they're the side like from the sidewalk to the house or can I just light the driveway? Like some small element. So we talk about in the in the leads book. Um a lead magnet can either be a trial of something. It can be one part of a multi-step process. Um uh or it can be a third thing.

4:33But for yours, I think the Thank you. Uh one step in a multi-step process. That's why I wrote it. I wrote it down so I don't have to remember it. Uh Um but I think uh like if I can if I wanted to because like I'll I'll prefer to start with a banger offer and then add friction. Uh because the thing is is like you can say I'm going to give this away, but you don't have to give it away to everybody. You can say I only give it away to houses that are over X. And you can have people put their address in and then run an API to Zillow, look at home value, and then rank-order the leads based on value of home, and then basically prioritize those leads ahead of time. And so you can go to those, you know, those houses first and probably sell much bigger bigger packages overall. But I think that like if I'm struggling to get leads, I just need them to say they want lighting. I don't really care how they say they want lighting. I just need them to say they want it and then the sales process takes care of the rest.

5:24>> Cool. >> Do you like that? >> I'm just trying to process. Yeah, yeah. Like how that would go. I mean, you're 100% right. That's the problem is people once they say they want lighting, selling it is easy. Yeah. So I just got to get them to say it and put their phone number on the phone. >> Exactly. So give them a crazy So give them a much better offer than I'll give you a free sales pitch. >> Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. >> No, I'm just being real. Like that's So fundamentally that's it. So I think uh you saying like we'll we'll do the install for free. You just cover the cost of the lights. >> Mhm.

5:49>> For this tiny amount. See how I'm developing it now? I like it. All right. Now, you can put the markup on the lights and put zero on the labor. It doesn't matter either way. You just basically mix and match how you're showing the money. And that way you'll still break even on that first thing and you'll just know that one out of two or whatever it is who buy the first thing buy the 10 times bigger package. And then that's just math. >> Cool. I said I like that. >> I like that, too. >> Awesome. Thanks. >> Yep. >> [laughter] >> If you are a business owner and you are not growing as fast as you like, I'd like to give you a free gift. So, my team and I put together the $100 million scaling road map, which is basically 200 hours of us looking over all the portfolio companies we've had and what stages of growth they went through and more importantly where they got stuck and how they got past it. And so we broke it in these 10 stages and we made this little kind of quiz thing where if you put in your business information, it'll tell you where you're at and the most important part for you, what to do for each of functions of the business across product, marketing, sales, customer success, recruiting, IT, human resources, and finance. And so, no matter what you're struggling with, someone else has already struggled with it and solved it. And so I'd like to give you this thing absolutely free. You can go to acquisition.com/roadmap, plug in your business information, and if you want us to actually help you deconstruct the business and you're trying to scale, we'd love to help you out. On the thank you page you can just book a call with my team and we will look at the business, see if we can help, and if we can, we'll invite you out to Vegas and we'll do this in person live.