Belief #5: Why You're Losing to Worse Companies

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Most plumbing companies think they have a marketing problem when they actually have a branding problem.

In this video, Gene Johnson breaks down why the best plumbing company doesn't always win—the best marketer does. You'll learn how successful plumbing businesses create a powerful brand, attract more customers, spend marketing dollars more effectively, and grow without relying entirely on Google, Yelp, Angi, or lead generation platforms.

Whether you're a plumber, HVAC contractor, electrician, remodeler, or home service business owner, this training will help you understand how to build a business people specifically ask for instead of competing solely on price or paid leads.

You'll discover:

✅ Why branding matters more than most contractors realize
✅ The difference between marketing and brand building
✅ How to create a purpose-driven business customers remember
✅ Why throwing money at ads often fails
✅ How to generate more calls without increasing ad spend
✅ The marketing lessons learned from building a successful plumbing company
✅ How community involvement creates trust and referrals
✅ The contractor growth strategy that compounds over time

If you're serious about growing your plumbing business, attracting better customers, hiring great technicians, and becoming the company everyone in town recognizes, this episode is for you. Based on Gene's experience building a leading plumbing company, the core message is simple: build a brand first, then amplify it with marketing.

#PlumbingBusiness #ContractorMarketing #PlumbingMarketing #HomeServiceBusiness #BusinessGrowth #ContractorBusiness #ServiceBusiness #LeadGeneration #MarketingStrategy #SmallBusinessGrowth

Chapters

00:00 Why the Best Marketer Wins
02:02 The Marketing Budget Formula Every Contractor Should Know
04:15 What Yellow Pages Taught Me About Marketing
06:25 Why Most Contractors Market Too Soon
08:40 Building a Brand One Truck at a Time
11:15 The Difference Between Branding and Marketing
13:20 How Customers Learn to Trust Your Company
16:05 The Cycling Team Sponsorship That Built Our Brand
19:30 Why Google, Yelp, and Angi Aren't Enough
22:10 Finding Your Company's Purpose Beyond Plumbing
25:45 The Compounding Effect of Brand Building
28:10 How to Amplify a Brand With Marketing
30:45 The Biggest Marketing Mistake Contractors Make
34:00 The Sewer Liner Lesson That Changed Everything
37:15 Let Demand Force Growth
40:20 Why Every Contractor Needs Business Coaching
43:10 Trade Traction Score App & Next Steps
45:00 Final Thoughts on Winning Through Marketing

The Podcast that helps plumbing and heating service contractors stop working for free and actually turn a profit. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

I know you're a plumbing company, but the simple truth is it's not the best plumbing company that wins. It's the best marketer. It's the best plumbing company that markets itself the best that wins. Like if if you're a great plumber but you only serve a few people, do you win? Don't you want to take care of as many people as possible? Don't you want to make sure that as many customers as possible don't get bad service and bad plumbing? Right? So like you can be good at plumbing, but you've got to market well. So how do you do that? How do you become the best marketer? Well, part of it is you have to afford it. So how do you afford it? Well, let's just say, for example, that 10% of your revenue goes to marketing. This is around this is to talk about this, right? So if if you charge a hundred dollars an hour, then you can spend ten dollars marketing. Does that make sense? If you charge five hundred dollars an hour, then you could charge, you could afford to spend fifty dollars in marketing. Just as an exercise. Does that make sense? So here's an exercise. Back in the day when the yellow pages were the thing, we used to do an experiment, and I was told about it, and then I did it. When I go to another city, I would always open up the phone book. And the biggest ad in the phone book was usually the first one. Remember that there was one page, then two pages. I'm from Seattle, so there were three page ads. Like the biggest plumbing company in town had three pages. The first three pages were one company. Um we were like, you had to turn the page once you got to plumbing, you had to turn the page, I think it was 34 times to get to our ad. And we had a beautiful professionally designed, professionally designed double truck ad, two pages. There we were. But you had to turn the page 34 times to find us, and that cost just like $112,000, I think it was, to do that. So think it's crazy now was crazy then. There were less options, but they were more, they were bigger. Like, and if you didn't buy that, you just weren't in the phone book. Like if you didn't have a double truck ad, like we were already 34 pages back. But okay, so as a matter of principle, or the exercise, the budget exercise, if it was $112,000, or we spent $100,000 in advertising, we had to have been a million-dollar company. Does that make sense? So see how this starts to play. Like how much you charge and how much you make has to do with how much you can spend. Like, this is the money, this is your budget to spend on marketing. Now you can spend it all in one place, right? But but you probably want to spread it around a little bit. So let's talk about that. How do you become a good marketer? I've had this new thought. I've ran it by a couple people I really trust, and they think it's true as well. You know, a lot of times I think a lot of people are marketing, they're spending a bunch of money marketing trying to get a part of the market they don't deserve yet. And so they throw a lot of money in that direction, and they don't get much back for it. And what I mean by they don't deserve it yet is they haven't built their brand. See, if you have a strong brand, um let's see what let's let's let's go back to the very beginning. Just you and your apprentice and your truck, and you start your company, and you do things, um, like you get an email, you get an email, or you you you start to you send out a newsletter, and uh maybe you do some kind of charity. Um, maybe 1% of your revenue goes to a certain charity, and maybe you and your apprentice, you know, put one, take it, make a little video, have your apprentice make a little video and put it on YouTube and on Instagram, right? And by you guys doing that after about a year's time, boy, you've you're getting four, five, you can't keep up. You got four or five, six calls a day coming in. And so now you need to hire another plumber, and you do. And now you're back down to normal calls, three, three calls a day, right? For each guy. But but what if that second truck does the same thing? What if they make a video a day and put it on YouTube and make a video a day and put it on Instagram? And what if one percent of everything they make, they contribute to the same charity or a different charity? But they do some things, build the brand. Now there's two trucks, right, with your logo driving around. Instead of one truck driving around, now there's two. There's twice the chance that people are gonna see you, twice the chance they're gonna be standing in line at the grocery store and see your uniform on. And then you do some other marketing that you know on Google or and in different places, and pretty soon you've got 10, 11 calls coming in a day. It's too much. Because you're both doing, so then you have a third guy. You see how that works? If you're doing the things that create and identify you as a particular brand, and maybe what uh another way to say brand is people don't go online, don't go to Google and say, I need a plumber near me. They say, What's the number of John's Plumbing? I always see that guy at the grocery store, or I see their trucks everywhere. John's what's John's Plumbing's phone number? Oh, there it is. Yeah, that's who I want to call. That's branding. Branding is when they call you for service, they don't go to Google and say, Hey, Google, who do you think I should call? Because I have no idea. So I think a lot of people spend less time branding. It's actually easier, just give Google money and have them recommend you. But if you'll do the work, the diligent, disciplined work of doing the things that you do to make you the best company to work for, the best plumber to call to someone's home. If you'll do that little brand branding effort, and pretty soon it doubles, and then it triples, and then it quadruples. And if everybody does the same thing to build the brand, then the marketing actually works way better. Because when you spend money on marketing, they go, they might, they might forget, but then they type in plumber near me and your name pops up and go, Oh, yeah, that's the side, that's the guy you see in the grocery store, and they call you. Does that make sense? Or for us, we sponsored a big bike racing team. I love bike racing. And uh, see that little trophy right there. That's a trophy we won a big huge season series, uh bike racing series. And um, so we sponsored a bike racing team, and there were lots of people, not only my 150 team members, but the whole bike racing community. I was the only um, you know, family-owned, like there was some bigger names like Audi, for instance. The Audi, the car manufacturer, they sponsored a team, but it was just like Audi. Like, but mine was my company's plumbing name on the on the it was the Gene Johnson cycling team. And so not only did my team call us when they needed plumbing, but so did all the other bike racers because they wanted to they to support they wanted to support the the company that that supported bike racing in the Seattle community. There's a lot of cyclists in Seattle. It's like over 30,000 people claim to be bicycle riders. And so that gave all those people a reason to call my company rather than just say, hey, Google, what plumber should I call? Or hey, Angie's list, what plumber do you think I should call? See, I call Angie's list and Yelp and Thumbtack and all those. I call them trust peddlers. What they're actually saying is they're saying, don't call the company or the contractor, call us and we'll tell you who to call. But the truth is, you know the truth as well as I do. They just they just sell that listing to all of us contractors. There's nothing special. You don't have to earn the right to be on Andy's list or you know, Yelp or anything or thumbtack. You like to be on Google, you have to have a background check and some stuff like that, right? But for the most part, anybody can be there. It's nothing special. They're just peddling trust. They're telling the consumer to trust us. Well, why don't we get good at giving the customer a reason to trust us ourselves? What about that? What about giving the consumer a reason to call? What if we put a part of our money to a cancer and we get involved with cancer charity of some kinds? Then people with cancer who and who doesn't have a family member about that's been touched by cancer, they start to recognize our company being a part of the community that's fighting cancer. And so when they have a plumbing problem someday, they're gonna say, Well, who should I call? Well, I could go to Google and ask Google, but wait, there's that one company that did that one thing or donated that money to the what was the name of that company again? And they'll either remember or when they do a Google search, they'll see your name and then, oh yeah, that's the company. They donate money to cancer research. They donated money to my my grandmother's hospital, right? That's branding. So you give people a reason to call you, to believe in you, to give you the first shot at the job. That's branding. And the reason why are we talking about branding? I said at first the best marketer wins. I think when you have built a brand, another way to say brand is purpose. What's the purpose? Why do you exist besides plumbing? Yeah, of course you do plumbing, but what else? What else? Come on, there's gotta be something else. What is your purpose besides plumbing? Like, plumbing only takes you so far. Like, what else? Is that all we talk about is plumbing? Um, see, the cycling gave us something else to talk about. We got to talk about the races that we did, and our bike racers would take pictures of themselves all over social media in our uniform, right? And so, so that's that plumbing company talking about bike racing, and bike racing happens to be really popular in Seattle. So that was kind of our angle, and we kind of fell into it. But give something when you give, when you have a purpose other than plumbing, like you can't be that boring, right? Like, all work and no play makes Johnny a dull boy who wants to be dull, right? So what else? And that might sound stressful to you right now. If your back's against the wall and you're trying to make payroll, I get it. It's hard to think of anything else. And that's why we got to get serious about the business of plumbing, right? We have to get serious about business and figure this out. And once we figure it out, we can start thinking about other things other than making payroll. And then we quit being so boring, and then we get involved with charities because we actually have money to give. We have money and time to donate to a charity that we care about. I like bicycle racing. There's not a lot of plumbing companies getting involved with bike racing teams. That's me. What's your deal? What turns you on? What turns your crank? What makes you interested? What do you think about other than plumbing? What do you care about in your community? That's that purpose, that cause can help you identify and establish your brand. And when you just start out small and have one person do it, and then two trucks do it, and then three trucks do it, and then four trucks do it, and all the time you're only spending 10% on marketing. You just keep putting your name out there in different places, it has a compounding effect. And then it takes off. And then people wonder, wow, how do you spend so little money and get such good results? Well, it's because you established a brand and then the marketing just amplified that brand. You had a good thing, and then you just amplified it a little bit, right? Like in social media, what they say, a good ad is you put out uh organic content until something really hits. Like I've made a couple videos on social media that really got a lot of attention. Like most of them don't, right? But every once in a while, one will pop off. Well, that struck a chord. And then what they say in marketing is okay, take that one and make that put money behind that one. And that's it already is proven that it's got legs and traction in the social media community by itself. Now you put some money behind it and you push it. That's marketing. And so when you start to build your brand, this is exciting. You know, now you're talking about the what's your purpose, what's your cause, why do you exist, what else besides plumbing is there to think about and talk about and and contribute to? Do that. That starts to build your brand. You start to tell a story, and then you amplify that story, and that's super powerful. And that's how you win the game of marketing by building a brand first. See, I think most people have a backwards. They say they hire a plumber, they get all excited, they hire a plumber, they don't have enough calls. So then they throw too much money at marketing trying to make the phone ring, but they don't even have a brand yet, and it doesn't work. And they just throw all this money at marketing, and they wonder why nothing works. When it's the opposite. We learned this the hard way. We bought uh sewer liner equipment. And the reason we bought it, we spent $70,000 and bought this whole trailer, this whole kit, this whole setup for doing sewer liners. You know why? Because I thought it was cool. I knew it was cool, and I wanted to sell it. And I wanted to, but guess what? We as a company, we didn't have that many drain calls. And when we went on them, we didn't know how to convert them into a lead and we didn't know how to sell a liner. I sold several, but it would, we only did like two a month. Like we just didn't figure it out. And so we actually lost money on that. We actually ended up selling it. Um, later we learned how to do it all, but then by by then, people were doing it so cheap we just subbed it out. But what we learned in that lesson was we don't do stuff because we want to, we do stuff, we make our company force us to do it. And so if you're branding, if you're doing the disciplined, diligent work of building your brand and contributing to causes that you care about that make you come alive, then pretty soon the calls start to come in, and then you have to hire a plumber. You got too many calls. And then you hire a plumber, and then you back it up with a little bit of marketing. Like the marketing dollars is just to secure it, just to make it secure. You just push it out there. You want to, you don't want someone to come to work for you and then not have enough work for them, right? They're they're trusting you that you've got enough work, they can make their mortgage and pay their bills and put their kids through college, right? So you put the marketing just to ensure that everything works. But even without the marketing, your brand is strong. And as you keep, as everyone keeps contributing to that, it gets bigger and bigger and bigger. Does that make sense? So that's how you win the marketing. It starts out with you figuring out what your purpose is, what you really want to do besides plumbing, what really turns you crank, what turns you on, what gets you excited, what makes you not boring, what do you talk about, what do you care about besides plumbing? And then that brand, then you amplify it with marketing, and then that's how you win at marketing. And when you do that, the phone keeps ringing and you keep attracting more plumbers, and you start, yeah, you can have apprentices and you start building plumbers, and pretty soon you're the biggest company in town, taking care of the most customers, saving the most people as possible from the bad plumbing that other companies do. And the reason why is because you figured out marketing. You won at marketing, you gotta be a good plumber, but if you want to take care of your community, you gotta win at marketing, figure out your brand, and then amplify it. Let's go. Hey, is this exciting? Did this turn you on? Business is awesome. If you're in business, you're probably good at plumbing, right? You're good at your trade. But now it's time to get good at your at the business of plumbing. If you think about it, you served an apprenticeship under a mentor who taught you the tools of the trade, what tools to buy, what tools not to buy, how to little hacks you can do to make things go easier and quicker, things to do, things not to do, right? The same thing. For some reason in the trades, we think that when we get business for ourselves, we have to figure it all out by ourselves. And it's simply not possible. Yeah, a few people will get lucky and kind of hit gold accident and things kind of just take off on them. But most people, it takes a while to figure out. And when I mean a while, I mean too long. Like people can spend years. You'll figure this out eventually. If you're stubborn enough to stick it out and figure it out, you'll figure it out. But by the time you figure it all out enough, see, it's not one thing that makes you profitable. It's when you do enough things right. That's when the profit comes. That's when things really click and go. It's when you do enough things right. You don't want to take too long to do enough things right, or you'll be too in you'll be too old, frankly, and too tired. And your kids will be grown and they'll already be gone before you figure it out enough to enjoy it. So it's hit the easy button, get yourself a coach, throw me in. Throw me in. I'd love, I'd love to be your coach. I the the trades were so good to me. The trades are the place to be, in my opinion. But you do probably need a coach to figure it out quick enough to enjoy to enjoy the fruits of your labor. Does that make sense? Hey, if you're interested in the description below, there'll be a link to a score app, my trade traction score app. There's 17 questions. It helps me get to know you a little bit. It'll also help me determine what you should work on next. There'll be a couple videos from me and a couple insights about what you should do next. And then if you want to, you can book a call with me, get on my calendar, and we can um chat and I can help you out with your business. And you might even want to join my coaching group. I have a whole group of contractors nationwide now where we work together. We get together really twice a week. Um, we get together on Tuesdays to talk about our sales, our sales process and everything else, all thing, all things sales. And then on Thursdays, we talk about ownership, all the issues about ownership and our culture and all that kind of stuff. Hey, if you're at all interested, check out that that uh score app, trade traction score app, go through that, book a call with me. We'll see if we're a good fit. And in any case, you'll get some more insight on what to do next. And if you don't even do that, just subscribe, share this with a friend or a buddy that's struggling as well. And stay tuned because there's more because I just can't stop passing on the little insights that helped me figure out my business and get all there is out of the trades for myself. And now I want to share it with you. All right, stay tuned, book a call. I'd love to help.