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E0105 - Home Improvement Creativity with Special Guest Kevin McKenzie
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In this episode, Kevin McKenzie of Built Right Digital, joins us to discuss creativity in the Home Improvement industry. Kevin also discusses what small to mid-sized home improvement businesses can do to up their creativity.
Welcome to OneLeg Up, where we discuss how you can deliver the very best customer experience and how you can achieve zero marketing waste. I'm Ed Davis, the chief operations ninja here at OneLeg. And today I'm joined by co owner of Built Right Digital, and our friend and our partner, Kevin McKinzie. Kevin, how are you doing today?
Kevin McKenzie:Great. Thanks for having us.
Edward Davis:Good. Absolutely. Really happy to have you on actually. Today we're going to talk about creativity in the home improvement sector. It's a it's a sector that both built right and one leg operate in, we've obviously tried to partner on a couple things. You all have helped us a lot as we've had, as we've started the business and helping us to grow it
Kevin McKenzie:Happy to help.
Edward Davis:Yep, no, thank you for that. And I just I what I really wanted to get into with you just given all of your experience in the fact that you all cover, you know, digital, and advertising and content with built right, digital, you know, what are the big stumbling blocks? I know, we're starting from a negative place. But what are the big stumbling blocks that you see in the home improvement industry?
Kevin McKenzie:This is probably the number one conversation I have with home improvement company owners, or sales and marketing managers is essentially having that conversation of, Hey, where are the pain points? Where can I help you? What could a skilled technology and creative team, where can we smooth out your sales funnels? Right. So the big stumbling blocks now they're they're diverse, there's lots of them. Probably the more common ones are, they're subtle, but these are all things that can throw a real wrench into your ability to scale your company. So you won't realize anything's wrong until it bites you in the butt as you're trying to scale up. Some of the quintus Central's are essentially like poor integration between your systems. So imagine the steps that an interested homeowner takes before they successfully purchase your product. Right? Think of all the touch points there where your company departments are going to hand that person from the first inbound phone call, or even before that someone visits your website, they're enticed by what they find there, they give you a phone call, they hit your inside sales team, they're then set with an appointment with your outside sales team, you're in the home sales reps. Each one of those touch points requires really clean technical integrations. That's a constant, you know, for built right digital, that's a it's a half hour project to set that up in a seamless and intelligent way. It's rare to think that if you don't do it on the front end, again, it can really turn around and bite.
Edward Davis:Do you see? So you know, I come from, you know, one legs a startup, you all are pretty far along in your your growth path. And you're doing really well. I've got I have a background of working in big international agencies. And I'm quite surprised that within the home improvement sector, the the disconnects that I see between the various channels, the various tactics that a home improvement company might take, do you is that just me? Or is that a real thing that you all try to combat?
Kevin McKenzie:No, you you 100% hit the nail on the head. This is something that home improvement industry insiders know Home Improvement company owners know it to the Home Improvement industry is behind where digital technology is concerned. This is a good thing and a bad thing. You know, the the traditional strong suits and skill sets of a home improvement company. I have a tremendous amount of respect for every every person at our client organizations who partner with us, but especially the operations teams, they make fantastically complex operation run like clockwork, those are the traditional strengths of the home improvement industry, the craftsmanship, the many moving parts being coordinated into one cohesive whole. And, you know, making homeowners feel comfortable and dignified in their homes, beautiful industry to work in. Information Technology, you have to think about this. And you know, the history of the home improvement industry, Digital's only been a thing for 20 years. Maybe 20.
Edward Davis:If that maybe Yeah,
Kevin McKenzie:exactly. Exactly. So that's like the blink of an eye for the you know, the legacy of this, you know, long standing industry. So, Home Improvement company owners were able to get by particularly for you know, the first 10 of those years digital was like a sideshow there has suddenly with the introduction and the quickness of smartphone technology. All of a sudden, you just can't get by with what you used to be able to get by with As a slower moving industry that adapts digital changes on a on a slower pace than say, Oh, I don't know, any it heavy industry like software, for instance, that's moving, right. Home Improvement is just a little bit more hesitant to adopt the latest technologies. We try to bring that barrier of entry down as low as possible, these technologies can really benefit you, you shouldn't see them as like, Oh, this is a hurdle I have to get over to get back to doing the things I want to do it my business. This is 100%, an asset to Home Improvement company owners, and we can show you how to implement it so that Yeah, fewer headaches and more payouts?
Edward Davis:Well, I think that it's interesting that you use that term asset, because I do. My sense is in talking to the handful of Home Improvement company owners today is that they, they definitely, definitely don't understand the power that and the the value of the asset in the sense that you can make it work for you. Right, the whole the whole point of the technology is to make life easier to make your company more available for for people to get the answers even when you might not be available. And that is a benefit. That is a that is a non human resource, right, that you can leverage to maximize your, your presence, right, like, but I do think that they see it. Yeah, I do think that they see it as if this is a hurdle. This is this, this is something it's, it's a pain in the ass because I really want to be out there, you know, you know what I'm saying? So? Yeah, so it's an interesting dynamic. And I, you know, I relish the opportunity to change that within the industry. And we are seeing signs of that. Of course we are. And I'm I'm actually pretty impressed with the rapidity that people are in fact adopting some of these technologies.
Kevin McKenzie:That's real exciting to see.
Edward Davis:That's right. So speaking of that, but but let's let's keep it in the negative space before we go to solving people's problems real quick. Give me your biggest pet peeve. What's Built Right Digital's biggest pet peeve when it comes to, you know, we all do these business development conversations and how do you not know that just yet.
Kevin McKenzie:So one thing that you'll find with so the CO owners Built Right Digital so I'm half the leadership team, me and Tony Murali, we have a common bond. We are central Illinois, nice. I lived in Central Illinois for about a decade, I was a handyman down in normal Illinois, way back in the day, and that's where my, my partner and co owner Tony is from. He's from Ottawa, Illinois, two tiny little towns in like, like dead center Heartland. More cows per capita than humans. Nice and just great, folks. You could never meet a nicer friendlier group of people. I mentioned that I moved to Central Illinois. I'm from the south side of Chicago natively. Alright. And if you're not familiar with the South Side of Chicago, it's, I am good. Good for anyone who might not be. Yeah, I'm from there. So I can say it. It's a rough part of like, you're not friendly to you on the street. Let's put it that way.
Edward Davis:They don't go out of their way to be friendly to you.
Kevin McKenzie:Exactly. Yeah, when I moved to normal Illinois, it was like a sea change. people you don't know make eye contact with you in the street and wave happily when they see. This gets back? This is my very roundabout way of answering your question. I don't have pet peeves. I love every conversation I have with my customers like I just I go into it with the with the feeling of me and Tony, it's at Central Illinois factor. I go into the conversation How can I help you? Like what what can I do to make your life easier? That just Prime's the whole conversation people pick up on that when you when you walk in to a partnership conversation. And you just lay your cards on tables like hey, here's how I can help you. What do you like of all this? It's less of a, you know, folks have adversarial conversations, particularly in the business development world like auto sales trainers encourage you to do that. That's one of the common strategies they teach. That is that's old fashioned, I think. sure way to help people is to help them
Edward Davis:to be appreciative.
Kevin McKenzie:Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, I love ministry, we work and I have a tremendous amount of respect for the folks who I'm talking with to get their digital marketing so And I think all that just it just sets up a better relationship.
Edward Davis:No, I would I would agree with that. 100%. So good, then let's get on to helping people. What what are the easy things? Nothing's ever easy, of course. But what are the easy things? What are the easy wins for people in the home improvement space from a digital standpoint that they, they might not be doing? Absolutely. Everybody's got a website, right? Everybody's got a Facebook page, so that let's move past that part of it.
Kevin McKenzie:So we had touched on the idea that the Home Improvement industry adapts to technological changes a bit slower that really digital dependent industries. And that's no judgment, it's actually a good thing. Some of the some of the classical, you know, traditional strength of Home Improvement companies, that's an industry strength, no one else has the craftsmanship, the attention to detail. If you haven't taken a close look at what a contractor does to your home, after making the home improvement, I really encourage you to do it, look at the lines, look at the detail work the stuff, you wouldn't notice that the clients, they do fantastic work, and they're doing it fast. These are the traditional strengths, the Home Improvement industry, digital, you know, digital technology, adoption is not one of those traditional strengths. So we often see like when, when new home improvement companies come to chat with us, almost everyone has a website, maybe maybe one in 10 don't have any website so that obviously that's the easiest problem of all to solve. But folks who have websites, they tend to be a couple years behind. Right? When digital technology was really taking off, and it became a necessity to market your business online. The barrier for entry and the barrier for success were both really, really low. When we did a homepage, maybe you would have a smattering of content from there. And that was enough. Like, you know, you might have a five page website and you would be one of the leading Home Improvement companies online in your area. So just food for thought. Today, when I ship a website, I consider it competitive when I have not five or 10 pages, but maybe 60 to 80 pages of content on our website. The designs are really crisp, they incorporate video, they incorporate calls to action, you know, like a phone number where someone can call you to request a quote, or an online forum where they can request a quote, you can even layer on top of that with like, chat bots that can book your appointment for you get options, you can speak with a human straight away. There are great options for both those technologies that we were happy to incorporate that into any website on day one. So when we're talking with folks, we often find it's okay, you're doing the right thing, but you're doing the right thing for 2015, we can bring you into the present. And you know, it's a quick investment, it only takes about a week to do the work. And then you reap that benefit, essentially forever. We keep your website up to date and at the cutting edge for you. So we find folks, they have the best practice, it's just out of date in a way that's holding their business back.
Edward Davis:So but is that really the bigger bit that people? business owners haven't quite come to grasp with just yet. I think they all get I need a website, I need my social media channels, I need to be able to communicate, maybe through SMS chatbots, whatever. But in order for you to stay relevant, because, you know, there's 100 plumbers and in a particular location, there's 10 roofers, right? Is it about the content? That's the bit that people need to get in their head? You need more content, and you need to find other sources of content? Yeah,
Kevin McKenzie:it's making it all work together. You need the content. So think of it as it in this rare instance, it is a zero sum game. You mentioned there's 100 plumbers in your market, there's 100, bathroom, remodelers, whatever your specialty is you have more competitors than Google has slots to show companies. So you need to be in the top 10. And it is a zero sum game. If someone beats you, that means you don't show up and they do show up. You are competing for both the content on your website. So you need more of it. And it needs to be higher quality. That content needs to make the right impression. Because even if you win the search and someone clicks on your website, if they then don't see your phone number, how are they going to call it? What was the point? Yeah, exactly. You've you've boosted one of your metrics that doesn't ultimately lead to your success. That's something it really helps to have a digital partner who understands what success looks like in your industry. Others You'll get mismatches where they're optimizing for a metric that you really don't care about. For home improvement, it's leads, it's inbound phone calls, and it's folks emailing you asking for a quote, it's not branding measures by and large. So having someone who's on the same page with you on what success looks like, that's critical to your overall program, hitting the metrics that you needed to hit.
Edward Davis:So you mentioned their leads. And this is a debate that one leg is is is hope, I think we're interested in starting, which is, I think a lot of people when we start a conversation with them, they talk about lead generation. And my my thought is, in doing the research that I've done, and looking at the metrics that I've looked at, for this industry in particular, I don't really see excuse me, individual contractors, roofers, plumbers, whatever the case may be, I don't see them having a lead generation problem, what I see is lead acceleration lead conversion, would you agree with that now,
Kevin McKenzie:that is, I would treat them as separate and equally important parts of Home Improvement contractor success. We are we're actually both mutual partners of lead perfection, we are when you dig into the data and lead perfection gives you a fantastic window into your home improvement company's overall performance, lead efficiency metrics, your ability to convert inbound leads into sales, doing all the mission critical tasks that are such a barrier to do manually. Lead perfection brings all those data points together in one place, and makes it really intuitive to interpret them. So you can see like, hey, if I spent, let's say, just pulling numbers out of my ear, I spent $10,000 on radio ads this month, I spent 15 $100, on my website and on digital advertisements, what phone calls they get from each of these sources? And did they turn into appointments, and did those appointments turn into sales, having an integrated funnel and having the right technology like lead perfection, there to help you understand your funnel? That's mission critical to your success. So I actually I completely agree with your original point there, there is equal importance to generating leads, and then following through the sales funnel to make sure the leads you generate turned in again into that bottom line success metric revenue, which is what you ultimately want to see from the program.
Edward Davis:Right? Yeah, and then and how fast those Um, so no, yeah, we're totally in line. So then my last question is we talked about, a lot of customers come to you and they're in 2 15. Right. And you can bring hem to 2021. Yeah. So do do us a favor. Do the audience a favor. here's this whole thing going? W ere are we in 2025? What does that look like for people?
Kevin McKenzie:Man? This is what what a time to be alive, right. chatbots are just the tip of the iceberg for artificial intelligence technology. That's, that's the stupid simple implementation of AI. Yeah, it's a machine that can talk back to you and set an appointment, which is a you know, that's a critical task for a home improvement company, you likely have a human being who's doing that right now. And a robot can do it just as well. If you haven't heard Google's voice based AI technology yet, it's called duplex. Do a YouTube search for Google duplex, you'll hear a human sounding robot calling businesses to set appointments on behalf of the customer. That's where the future is headed, you're going to have an AI that answers the phone for you. And the customer will be thankful for it will save money because suddenly you don't need a phone room with 20 people in it. You might need your phone room function that's one IT person and the manager to oversee it. So you just multiplied your revenue from those inbound calls by a factor of 10. Just by making your your staffing more efficient, right.
Edward Davis:It's amazing.
Kevin McKenzie:That's where we're headed. The automation tech, the smart automation with AI technology. I think those are going to define the next five years. And everyone
Edward Davis:Well, I think between that and and the the video I might be late to this video, but I you know, so be it. I just saw the video of the robot that lays bricks, right. You know, they they just they just truck in the cinder blocks and You know the little thing picks it up squirts the the, the the mason mix or whatever, the grout I don't know it's called I'm in marketing the Home Improvement guy. Right. Well, I really appreciate you coming on Kevin, this has been fascinating. And as ever, whenever we talk to you we get smarter about digital marketing so so we really look forward to those conversations. And oh, no, I absolutely will. Then, you know, this is the part of our show where we get into the SEC shameless plug as Vic likes to call it. who's not here he's he's on the keyboards today not actually making music but making sure this podcast comes off today. If you're looking for better, more engaging creativity for your home improvement company, give us a shout here at one leg give Kevin a shout there at built right digital. Either one of us be happy to help you out.
Kevin McKenzie:Absolutely. And I and a must plug for one of our partners. Yeah, please spray high profit margin gutter protection product to add to your home improvement company line. If you're a roofer, or exteriors contractor, gutter cap. It's an outstanding product. They carry a metal roofing line as well turtle shell roofing they support both fantastically and we can help you with lead generation for either products if you're if you're out there wondering Hey, how do I how do I hit my sales targets for 2021 gutter cap and turtle shop? We're huge fans.
Edward Davis:Excellent. Excellent. Right Lastly, OneLeg believes poor marketing pollutes the planet and that business is full of tired, outdated, indistinct, unremarkable and underperforming marketing that sucks. What sucks even more is that many companies have forgotten the most important thing of all, the customer and we're on a mission on behalf of our clients customers to change that. To learn more, go to ZeroMarketingWaste.com. We hope you've enjoyed our chat today and learned a couple of things. Find us, follow us, and rate us wherever you socialize online. Thank you and talk to you next time.