The LFG Show
Talking with movers and shakers who grew up with nothing and worked their asses off to achieve success. Let's 🤬 Go!!!!
The LFG Show
Eric Peschke of Zintex: Winning Big in the Home Improvement BOOM 💥🏠🐻🍯
Hey, LFG Fam! 💥 Ready to LEVEL UP in the home improvement game? Whether you're tackling bathroom remodeling, roofing, windows, siding or anything in between, Eric Peschke from Zintex Remodeling Group is bringing the *heat* on how to thrive in this growing vertical. 🔥
Homeowners are investing in their spaces like never before, and Eric shares how the shift to digital-first strategies and strong lead gen partnerships are driving success. His secret sauce? Kindness, respect, and crystal-clear communication to land *high-quality leads* every time.
💡 **Highlights You Can’t Miss:**
- Cutting costs with the genius "Roofs in A Box" model using virtual staffing from South America 🌎
- Scaling from 4 to 30 markets with a flexible business model and powerhouse team culture 💪
- The rise of AI-driven text communication 📲 and why **private equity** is opening doors for massive opportunities in the home improvement space.
Plus, Eric breaks down how to crush lead vendor negotiations, adapt to new regulations, and dominate the market with pay-per-call strategies. 💸 Whether you're a marketer, media buyer, or home improvement pro, this episode is PACKED with insights to boost your business.
💎 Zintex is showing us how to WIN in the evolving home improvement space, and you can too! Don’t miss this GOAT-ed episode! 🐐
Subscribe to *The LFG Show* and follow us on LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and Spotify for more industry-shaking insights. And don’t forget—our sponsor Ringba is helping businesses cash in BIG with their call-tracking platform. 🏆 #NoMoneyNoHoney #GetGoated
I think that companies that don't treat their lead gen partners properly are missing the boat as far as remembering who's feeding them, Because at the end of the day, I always want more. How can I continue to generate really high quality leads that? You know, I got a lot of sales reps now with the amount of territory that we've taken over and I got a lot of mouths to feed. So I always feel like, you know, you've got a better chance of just being kind to people and being transparent and trying to make sure that they respect that and then they return the favor.
Speaker 2:I feel a lot of people that are very successful have come from call centers. My career.
Speaker 1:I started in 2011 at a small Renewal by Anderson dealer outside of Green Bay, Wisconsin, and I was the call center.
Speaker 3:Let's talk about home improvement, right, because I feel like it's like a boom as awful as COVID was it created this boom in the home improvement industry?
Speaker 1:for a couple of reasons. I mean, you know, when people are locked up in their house, they're staring at their eyesore problem every day. You know they're like we need new windows, we need new roofs, we need new bathrooms, we need new flooring, whatever it might be.
Speaker 2:A lot of really good lead generators. They struggle trying to get something like home improvement going.
Speaker 1:I think it's very competitive. I think there's a lot of you know there's a lot of media buyers out there there's.
Speaker 3:you know the costs are going up to fight in the same space. How big do you think paper call is going to be in the home improvement site?
Speaker 1:Yeah, here's. The only thing that's concerning about it is is the fact that a lot of customers now don't want to spend time talking on the phone. They want to text. The environment is forcing us to have to change who's going to be ahead of it and who's going to be making the changes or testing or tweaking certain've been talking some serious business, from the best digital marketers, government contracting experts to top athletic and celebrity doctors We've got it all covered.
Speaker 4:We're talking to guys who've cashed in for billions with a, b and the best thing is we're just getting started. So hold on tight. We're about to crank it up a notch. Get ready for next level networking and masterminds within the LFG community. Scare money, don't make no money or honey. Hit the subscribe button, drop a like, leave a comment and let's fucking go guys, we're coming straight out of las vegas.
Speaker 2:Right now we're at the qualified remodeler conference. It seems like a very high quality event here. A lot of good, good people here and we have one of the top known people in the home improvement industry, eric pesky of zintex remodeling group. He's been in the industry for a long time and I'm glad to have you show because our show a lot of. We have made a lot of media buyers and affiliates on our show. We don't really have a lot of direct advertising, so it's good to hear from a direct advertiser. These are the guys who are paying the bills at the end of the day. Right, we've got to treat them right and give them good leads. Eric, that's right. Great to have you on the show. Man, thanks a lot. Our VP on the biz dev side handles home improvement. He's like I got Eric. He'll be at the show next week. He can get on the show. I'm like great, let's get him on, man.
Speaker 1:So really, really appreciate the last minute doing this man, yeah, and for any of our lead gen partners. I'm always happy to help out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you are, and I can see that. I know we haven't worked together. It seems like you. You seem to be a big believer and giving back, and it's not surprising, and you come from a family of teachers. Your wife's a teacher, so that's kind of what it comes down to, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that companies that don't treat their lead gen partners properly are missing the boat. As far as remembering who's feeding them and who's taking care of them and uh, and being able to spend a lot of time, you know, nurturing those relationships, because, at the end of the day, I always want more. It's like, well, how can I, how can I continue to generate really high quality leads that? You know, I got a lot of sales reps now with the amount of territory that we've taken over and I got a lot of mouths to feed. So I always feel like, you know, you've got a better chance of of just being kind to people and being transparent and trying to make sure that they respect that and then they return the favor.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I can say for one thing that I've been a Legion games for like eight, eight, nine years, right, and the one thing that separates success and failure is really that transparency and the communication. I think you're very communicative. I've been. I'm on emails where you'll send. You'll be very transparent. We say, hey, last month this was our goal, we hit the goal. We didn't hit the goal. This month we got to do this and this is what I'm hoping to do. I want to hit this region or that region and I think that's amazing. That's what helps. That's one of the reasons you guys have grown so much because your role is so important, having that good communication, so everyone knows where we're marching.
Speaker 1:I want everybody to know that, obviously, that I'm looking at the numbers, so there usually nothing really gets by me about the performance of a specific source. I'm also transparent enough to where there's certain things within our call center or our sales team that we're trying to work on to perform better that could influence, you know, the quality of those leads. Like, if we don't do our job, then you know we're not going to see the cost of marketing where it needs to be, in the net revenue where it needs to be. So you know, being able to be transparent to where it's like, these are the goals, these are the metrics, these are the things that we want to hit. So every partner of ours knows this is what we're trying to achieve.
Speaker 1:If we're not achieving it, we're working together to try to make sure that we have the best chance of the relationship working out. And then at the end of the day, if something doesn't work out, it's like, hey, we did everything we possibly could, both on my side, your side. I never want to break a bridge or burn a bridge, never want to have any kind of issues where I might need to go back to that lead partner at some point and say, hey, let's try again. Maybe they did some things that they were able to fix, optimize on their end. I did some things on our call center and sales side and then it might work again, and that's happened a number of times.
Speaker 2:Yep, I want to get deep into that, but before we do that, let's talk about home improvement, right? Because I feel like and I don't know if it was COVID I'm eager to get your opinion, but it's like a boom. I don't want to say it came out of nowhere. I feel like it's always been there, right? But the one thing I like about this vertical and I got into this whole lead gen space through the solar right, solar direct marketing we're one of the top five lead vendors in the country.
Speaker 2:We tried to crack home improvement years ago. Couldn't make it work, and then just earlier this year, we just hit some campaigns that just worked. Man, I'm like I wish we were able to crack this earlier, but I think it's one of those things where it's not a matter. If it's a matter of when you got to replace your roof or you got to do your windows, you're going to do your bathroom, right. So it's just such an amazing vertical. I feel like it's a gift that keeps on giving, but that's why there was a number of different factors.
Speaker 1:I actually did a power hour at LeedsCon back in March here in Vegas, and one of the things that I discussed was basically what's happened. You know, as awful as COVID was, it created this boom in the home improvement industry for a couple of reasons. I mean, you know, when people are locked up in their house they're staring at their eyesore problem every day.
Speaker 1:You know they're like we need new windows, we need new roofs, we need new bathrooms, we need new flooring, whatever it might be. The other thing that COVID created was for the people that you know had jobs. They couldn't spend any money on vacations, on sporting events, on you know, entertainment. So they're sitting there on a bunch of cash saying, well, we can't go do these things that we normally would be doing. Well, where's the best place to put your money to see the highest return on your investment? In most cases, it's everybody's home. So you saw people saying, we're going to. I mean myself, I did two different home improvement remodeling projects during 2020 and 2021 because I had a job, I couldn't spend it on vacation and I'm like, hey, these are things within the house that need to get done.
Speaker 1:So you know we saw that boom and you know, coming out of that, the other thing that happened is, once inflation started to ramp up, you know we saw lead gen partners start to raise the cost per lead, which we can absorb that to a certain degree. But then you also saw finance declines starting to go up and that became a big issue. I'm hoping that we've seen the peak of it back this past spring. That was the highest finance declines that we saw in March and April, which usually March and April for us are always peak months. But because we saw a very high finance decline rate, it turned out that they weren't. We've since seen the finance decline rate come down by about 10%.
Speaker 1:What's weird in my shoes is I'm looking and I'm going well. What caused that? I'm glad that it happened, but the Fed didn't do the basis point reduction until September. So why did it come down in June, july, august? Maybe the banks just weren't lending out as much money and they said, hey, we got to open it up a little bit and that's why it came down. But it's great that it's booming. I think the other side of it is is that because of the interest rates being high and people not wanting to go out and buy a new home and take a new mortgage at a high interest rate or what they consider a high interest rate. You know, you ask my parents about their first house in the 80s and it's like you know, 8% it was 18%, I was like.
Speaker 1:What does that amortization table look like? You know on what you're paying for that house at that rate, but you know mortgage rates being high, people aren't moving, selling and buying as much, so they tend to be doing more remodeling.
Speaker 2:There is a new endeavor called roofs. In the box it's just man from day one it's taken off.
Speaker 5:When I first started getting in the roofing industry, what was happening was my fixed costs were always there, and so for me I was looking at how can we kind of one, save on these costs and then, two, how do I not lay people off during down times, but also maybe even the ability to pocket more money during the slow season or even the peak season. Since we've done this before, like with our Legion companies where we have virtual staffing from Argentina or Colombia, I'm like why don't we do the same thing in the construction business? Now, once we figured it out, we reduced their fixed costs by 70%, and so now during the downtime they have real seasoned, veteran type of players, but during the uptime they pocket. 70% of their operational costs are now going back in their pocket, and then, when it's time to scale, you have the back end prepared, already ready to go to help them.
Speaker 5:Like lift off, depending on what state you're in, you're averaging about 12.5% on what you pay out on taxes, insurance, fica, all the different insurances that you have to pay out, right, so yeah, you don't have to pay out unemployment, you don't have to pay out FICA, insurance, medicare, social Security, the things that business owners have to eat. Roofs to Box is not just limited to roofing or home improvement companies. You can use it for any services, right? You can use it for IT.
Speaker 2:We use internally for data cells, for hygiene, for analytics it doesn't even matter what the vertical is Like, business in a box at the end of the day, Pretty much, yeah. Yeah, it's very fascinating and I want to ask you so finance declines a result of credit or debt to income, or what's the reason?
Speaker 1:for that. It's a combination of both and it depends on the specific markets that each company is in, as far as the difference in finance declines and what they see. I mean I'm fortunate that between our vice president of sales and our owner, who are the ones that handle everything with the financing companies that we use, I mean we've got four or five different lenders that we can use in a house.
Speaker 1:So, when it's a finance decline on our end, it's like nobody's approving them. We did everything we possibly could to try to get them financed. Versus, if there's a company that says we only use one financing lender or two financing lenders, it's like, well, you might be losing revenue because you don't have a third or a fourth one to be able to try to get the customer qualified.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and as a Legion side, that's music to our ears because obviously we're providing the more leads you can convert, the more business we can transact. Right yeah, the more money we're going to spend, yeah.
Speaker 1:And that's been part of our you know, part of our growth, and our trajectory has been obviously cultivating with our current lead gen partners. How can we get more? And then we've you know, we've expanded to where we're. We're covering 30 markets now, Um, and that expansion has happened basically within the last three to four years. Wow, Congratulations.
Speaker 2:That's amazing. So where did you guys start off?
Speaker 1:It was as regional regional company in the Midwest and used. No, we were, yeah, we were located out of uh, I live outside of Chicago, but we the you know, the company that I work for is Intex Remodeling Group. We're based out of DFW. Oh, okay, when I started in March of 2021, they had four markets in Texas and we've basically since and it's not because of me, but we've since grown into 30 markets in eight states and a lot of times, it's taking those certain sources that you have that work in certain markets and deploying them into the new markets. It's working with different manufacturers and being able to utilize their lead gen programs and opportunities that they have.
Speaker 1:So it's really been a lot of fun. We've got a great team. Our leadership team is so much fun to work with. We're a group of characters. We like to have a good time and a laugh and also make sure that the work's getting done. And I think a group of characters. We like to have a good time and a laugh, yeah, and and also make sure that the work's getting done.
Speaker 2:And I think, a lot of the times I'm fortunate in that when I'm working remote, I've got such a great call center manager, crm manager, where they're making sure that everything's being done um you know, in the office and you have a call center background right before you got into, you were in the call center and I want to say one thing I feel a lot of people that are very successful have come from call centers or no.
Speaker 2:I feel, and I think a lot of people see the call center maybe as this, like a dead-end job. But if you get in the call center, man, you, you have that, that insight, and you realize, hey, I can grow, I can become a supervisor, a manager. Eventually I can own my own call center. I can do this, I can do that, can do that. So I worked in the call center for numerous years, right, and it sounded like you did. And I think that when you have a lead partner or an advertiser that actually has been in the call center, they get it Like you know, when it's the lead or maybe there's something going on in the call center, I think someone like you, you're not afraid to say, hey, something's going on in the call center now.
Speaker 1:This. That goes a long way, would you agree? Yeah, yeah, I mean I. The funny thing is is I started, you know, home improvement marketing.
Speaker 1:Uh, my career I started in in 2011 at a small renewal by Anderson dealer in uh, outside of green Bay, wisconsin, and it was a $2 million family owned and operated business. I knew the sales manager really well. He was the one that hooked me up with the job and was the call center. I was answering the phones, taking and setting all the appointments. I was the one confirming all the appointments. I was the one doing all the advertising. I mean, it was a small business.
Speaker 1:So the fun thing about it was that you're in the Renewal by Anderson culture, which I think is a great place to learn how to do marketing properly. And the second thing was that I was forced to do everything. So, as my career has progressed and I've become responsible for call center events and shows, traditional marketing, all the different things, there's really not one position that I've asked somebody to do something that I haven't done myself. So, a lot of times it it it brings credibility when you're training and when you're asking about doing things, because it's like I've been in your shoes. You know, I know how to answer specific customer questions that they might have the appropriate way, and it's basically being able to just continue to train and replicate, you know, as many individuals as possible to be able to generate that many more appointments.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's great and that's a true mark of leadership that you can understand. Being someone's little shoes, they see that they're willing to go the extra mile for you. So no wonder you guys have grown as much as you have.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's been. It's been a lot of fun. It's been a lot of fun to make more money. You know I want to have more balance in my life. You know it's like what are you driven and what do you want to do and how do you want to progress through the company. And then, when you understand that as a leader, you're able to say, okay, this is how we're going to get there, this is the, this is the blueprint to make sure that we're achieving what you want to achieve. And then you know the backside of it is is that, okay, they grow within the company and we're able to continue to go into new markets, because we know if we've got the leads and we've got the people to be able to convert them properly and we have the sales reps, we know we can see exponential growth.
Speaker 2:That's awesome. Now, going back to the lead gen side, I feel correct if I'm wrong, but I feel like a lot of really good lead generators or affiliates, media buyers, whatever you want to call it's all the same thing they struggle, trying to get something like home improvement going and and I have my thoughts about it, I don't know if it has to do with uh, it's just fragmented. Right, obviously you're in eight different states, eight different markets. Right, a lot of these guys used to run a nationwide maybe like a medicare campaign. That's nationwide. You know homeowners, renters, whatever, and you can get more aggressive angles, whereas with homeowners, more homeownership, I mean homeowner leads and this home improvement is more like plain vanilla. You can't mislead, pull the wool over the homeowner's eyes, you're going to know about it right away. Right, the leads are saying government stuff or whatever. So what do you think? Media buyers struggle cracking that vertical so much. I mean it's.
Speaker 1:I think it's very competitive. I think there's a lot of you know there's a lot of media buyers out there. There's, there's, you know the costs are going up to to fight in the same space, I mean the. The spaces are relatively the same. I mean social media has been around obviously for a while, but that's kind of the new one.
Speaker 1:I think there's certain things and trends that we see when we're analyzing certain sources where, like an example would be, we typically would see a higher finance decline rate from a social media source. I don't know if that's because they're the customers that don't have good credit scores or don't have debt to income. They're spending more time on social media. I don't have good credit scores or don't have debt to income, they're spending more time on social media. I don't know, and that's not knocking social media sources, because you know you do see a good chunk of net revenue and you also have to try to be in front of, like, well, where is the customer looking, where are they shopping, where do I want to be in front of them? So yeah, I think there's a number of factors that really go into it being difficult to get in there. Crack it, find the secret sauce. But I think one of the things that I try to do is, you know, I'll usually give any lead source a chance.
Speaker 1:I try to continue to be stringent with my test periods. You know, I try to test in the peak seasons because it's like man if a lead source doesn't work in the peak season, it's not going to work any other time. And usually the peak seasons where my sales goals are higher, my marketing budgets are also higher. So if I test something worst case scenario it doesn't work out, it doesn't wreck my overall cost of marketing. In those months I'm able to absorb, you know, to to absorb, um, testing a couple of lead sources. So, but I I try to. I'll always have a conversation with anybody. Somebody hits me up on LinkedIn and they're like, hey, this is what we do. I'm like okay, I'll make some time for you. You know, get on a call, find out what I don't know and look at the opportunity to see if, if we can do business together.
Speaker 2:And so you sound like you're very and I believe that you're very open to test new sources. But how do you vet them? Because there's so much I think you let me know if you've seen this but there's an increase in fraud, fraudulent leads, people, farms that are putting in fake information in there. You see, we'll talk about paper call later, but paper call is laden with that. Yeah, protect yourselves at the same time, because you do have to test, like anything else, but how do you protect yourself in the company at the same time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean the first thing is is that we started working with Active Prospect back in the beginning of 2022. And the fact that they're going to be automatically rejecting any duplicate lead that I have. And then I've negotiated with that vendor like, hey, if you get an auto reject on a dupe, I don't want to pay for it because I've already got the lead. You know, making sure that we have trusted form, making sure that we're TCPA compliant, I mean all those different things. I don't want to say that eliminates certain lead gen partners, because it's like, hey, everything's going through our active prospect and if they can't push everything through the right way, we're not going to accept it. So I think that's forced a lot of lead gen partners to. You know, get on board.
Speaker 1:And then, obviously, with the upcoming you know TCPA change in January, I think there's going to be everybody's kind of waiting to see, like, what's going to happen? What's this going to look like? How? How can we best prepare ourselves to one? Make sure that you know we're covering our own butt and obviously, making sure that you know that we're not the company that the government or anybody else might come down on. You know, I'm going to be interested to see what happens with the. You know the first case and then how it's handled and what the fine might be.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's fine, it'd be interesting.
Speaker 3:We'll see what happens. I mean, someone's going to get it. Yeah it's a matter. It'd be interesting. We'll see what happens.
Speaker 1:I mean someone's going to get it. Yeah, it's a matter of trying to make sure that it's like hey, we want to make sure it's not us. You know, I think we've done a pretty good job. I'm fortunate that between my call center manager and my CRM manager, they are very versed and it forces all of us to get better. It's forcing us to learn something else to where I always the last LinkedIn post I think I put up was. You know, it's like well, everybody that's having to make these TCPA changes and get this education should get some sort of an honorary law degree, because that's what it feels like You're having to learn. You know the ins and outs and prepare for it the best way that you can.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's all you can do. There's so much gray too. It's subject to interpretation. I went to one of these conferences I think it was TCP World or something in Florida and it's funny One attorney will interpret it this way, the other one interprets it this way, and you don't know which one is right. It just comes down to, sometimes, the freaking luck man. Like you said, you can't be a hundred percent at risk. Where you want to minimize, you want to get to like maybe 99.9%. Right, that's what you want to do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean you, you know you want to protect yourself as much as possible because of what's at stake and it's just it's having the right partners. It's going through the process of you know, looking through every agreement. You know, we've, we've, we've had multiple meetings now with our TCPA attorney that we've retained to make sure, and sending all of our lead gen partners disclaimers everything over to them so that they can take a look at it and say you guys are in the clear or these are some things that need to be changed well before the law goes into effect.
Speaker 2:Yeah, 100%. It's awesome. I'm glad that you're doing that. I know some people that they're like oh, we're going to wait to the last minute. You got to get ahead of it. I know a lot of clients. I don't know if you're doing it, they're having us. We're about to hit 90 days, I think today or tomorrow before it's go to. They want these changes made in effect now or November 1st, right? So you guys doing that too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we're up to 90 days old. So when that new law goes into effect January 27th, basically that lead has to be compliant. So if you were to be calling a 90-day-old lead on January 28th, it needs to be compliant as of October 28th for the one-to-one consent. So it's always trying to stay ahead of the game.
Speaker 1:I mean, I've always tried to be a person where it's like I'm looking three to six months down the road to try to say, okay, if this happens, I'm doing this, I've got plan B and C in place to try to make sure that I'm never caught with my pants around my ankles going, oh, I don't know what we're going to do now. I never want to be in that position when it comes to any questions from our owner or our leadership team where they're like, hey, how could you not see that this was coming up? Yeah, I mean can't predict COVID, but there's certain things that I can't control, but there's certain things that, by thinking ahead and trying to be ahead of the curve or testing out new things that are coming out there, you know you want to be able to be first in line to take advantage of some of the new stuff. Yeah, you have to.
Speaker 2:That's what it comes down to pivoting. We're always in a business where you're always constantly pivoting. There's always a new media channel. I mean, newsbreak came out. You got you're a native. You got Google, there's YouTube. There's always something new. You always test and try something. You've got to be ahead of the curve. You're not going to be able to survive.
Speaker 1:And when we test sources. The nice thing is that through our CRM, every one of our lead gen partners is getting either a daily or a weekly disposition report, so they're seeing exactly what's going on with those leads. I'm usually getting on a weekly call with that particular partner to where we're looking at and saying, okay, this is how many sets we got, this is how many runs, how many demos, how many. You know gross sales, finance declines, net sales and where our cost of marketing is. And you know, I think, a lot of our.
Speaker 1:I've been surprised that a lot of our lead gen partners have said, like you know, there's not a lot of companies that are willing to share their disposition data. And I kind of ask them like, well, why is that? Like it's that lead gen partner's leads, you know, are they scared to share it? Because it would expose that they have a problem in the call center or that they have a problem with being able to close in the house, and it's like, well, if you know that that's a problem, like work on fixing it, don't not provide the information back to the lead gen partner because they can't optimize off of it. So I always want to be able to provide my lead gen partners with enough information, or as much as I possibly can. That's going to help them optimize their campaigns, and then I'm going to see the return on that coming back by better quality leads.
Speaker 2:Yeah that's music to any lead generator's ears. To kind of just have that transparency, I can tell you with us, when we get the disposition reports, which is probably 30, 40% of the time I wish it was double that, right, but when we get it there's a 90% chance that's going to work. The campaign will work, that we can scale the campaign because we can optimize. We might know, especially in home improvement, it's so fragmented. We might be our cost of marketing might be slightly above where it needs to be, but we might have a state.
Speaker 2:I'll give an example Louisiana was one where gross sales were great, but it was only 20% of people were actually netting right. So we're like, hey, it's not. And it's like you throw out the baby with the bathwater. We just got to turn off Louisiana, maybe another state turn them off and boom, we're exactly where we need to be. So I think that's it's huge that you do that and you got to. You got to have someone on Allegiant side. We need to have someone on our side watching that stuff, communicating, and don't just you send them a report. I bet it happens a lot of times. You send it out and they don't look at it, right.
Speaker 1:Well, usually when that happens I mean after a certain amount of time, and it's pretty short it's like hey, are you looking at this data that I'm sending? Because the results of your leads haven't changed and our call center and the sales team are basically those haven't changed. So what's going on? To where we can move the needle?
Speaker 1:One of the other things that I like to provide and I talked about this at LeedsCon in March is I go through and I run a net revenue by zip code report for each of our markets, and in the markets that are the oldest, I go back to September of 2022, through the end of the current month. So I'm looking at the data. The reason I picked September of 2022 is because that's when the finance declines really started to ramp up. So I'm looking at that length of data and I'm being able to see well which zip codes are performing the best when it comes to net revenue in each of our markets. And then I share that information to all of our lead gen partners because I want them to see if these are the zip codes that work best. I want more leads there.
Speaker 1:Figure out a way on your end to try to make sure that I'm getting more leads there. On the flip side, if I pull the net revenue by zip code report and it will show in certain zip codes you bought this many leads. There's this much in finance decline, there's only this much in net revenue. I have to then look and go do I wanna still buy leads in that zip code? And one of the speakers today at Qualified Remodeler Top 500 this morning they were saying this is how we're optimizing within. You know, our own system is looking at it and saying why do you want to continue to buy a lead in that zip code if you're getting the same result and that's not the result you want? So it's a way to be able to kind of force lead gen vendors where if I say, hey look, remove these zip codes in these particular markets after a certain amount of time, I can tell do I want to still try to take leads there?
Speaker 2:I love it. I always say success leads clues. So does failure, I mean. At the end of the day, the disposition report is showing you where you're successful. Press the gas there where you're failing. All right, figure that out, stop it and stop the bleeding.
Speaker 1:Right it's not rocket science. I always joke with a lot of people that have worked with me where I said I sense sometimes that I am viewed as having a pessimistic attitude towards stuff. And I said one, I'm very sarcastic, I like to joke and mess with people and have fun. But two, you know, I said I'm always looking for the problems. You know, when lead sources and stuff's going well, it's like yeah, just give me more of that. I'm always trying to look through my reports and go, okay, what's going on here, what's going on there, what can we influence on our end to potentially change the results? And I'm always the first to point the finger at us, saying we got to get better at this, Whereas I think a lot of companies, they tend to turn around and point the finger at the lead gen vendor and say, hey, you know, your leads just stink and they're not doing the internal look and going, okay, how can we qualify these better?
Speaker 1:How can we make sure that we're able to sell these better? So, you know, usually if we end up having to part ways with a Legion, you know, partner, at some point it's a matter of looking them in the face and kind of the same way that you would with an employee and saying, look, we've done everything we possibly can to make this successful and it just hasn't. Let's take a pause and then let's talk in three to six months and see where we're at and maybe we can relaunch it again.
Speaker 2:That's the way it should be, and I love that you say it that way, because it's exactly that's what happened with us, too. We started off, I think, we were up and down, we had to pause, we came back, and now it's working yeah, it's a great way. I mean, it's happened with us, you know it's it's
Speaker 1:and that's that's the thing is is the home improvement space. It's like everybody knows everybody and it's like I want to be the guy that's known, where it's like, hey, this guy will try it. You know, this guy will try it. He knows that he's got to do some work and fix some things within his own operation to make sure that it's working properly. Um, but it's that has helped me been able to to scale up our lead gen partners a lot in the last couple of years, because it's like, okay, now you got 30 markets to try to make sure that the sales reps are being fed enough appointments and it's. It's been tough. There's been some markets that it has been a challenge and that's something that we're looking at for a game plan of. You know, 2025 is all of the different things that we potentially could turn back on spend some more money, make sure that we're taking care of our sales reps in the markets.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's great stuff and I love how granular you get. Talking about net revenue per market, you go back historically. That's the stuff that helps move the needle. And I was going to ask you. You spoke at a show. There are a lot of, I think, fortune 500 companies at the top with key metrics that matter. Yeah, and I know a lot of some people watching this are already doing home improvement. They're generating leads in home improvement. Probably some newbies that aren't, or maybe they're having success in another vertical. They want to try home improvement. What are the key KPIs, or key metrics, and what did you talk about on stage so that everyone understands it.
Speaker 1:I think one of the first things that I talked about was asking the crowd what's more important your cost per lead or your cost of marketing percentage, and I think that then that comes partially from working for a very small you know small family owned operation. When I first started, where they were always I want that cost per lead to be as low as possible. You got to beat up these vendors and try to get it low. Well, what ends up happening is is you end up buying a lot of really low cost leads but they don't turn into run, appointments, demos, net sales. So in my mind is is that the cost of marketing percentage is the most important metric to where I don't mind. I mean, obviously I don't want to pay too much for a lead. You know if I can pay less, but I don't mind paying more for leads when I see that the call center and the sales team converts it into net revenue and the cost of marketing percentages in line. That's the way that you're able to scale that.
Speaker 1:So that was one of the key metrics that you know I tried to go over and it's like there are certain ways of being able to negotiate with a lead vendor to where you say you know like some vendors will will provide credits on leads and and you know like some vendors will will provide, uh, credits on leads and and you know, usually I'm like, look, I've got so many different lead partners in so many different markets. I don't want to have to take the time to log into your site to request these credits. Like it's, it's, time is money. You know, can you give me five or 10 bucks off of every, every lead and I'm not going to bother you about credits and let's see where the cost of marketing ends up there. And a lot of times everybody's like, yeah, it's a win-win because they're not having to go through and do the credit requests on their end Tedious.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So it's you know, it's just there a problem. What are we going to do to fix it? Not after the month is over with, but right now. What are the things that we can say? We need to get better at this. We need to change this, you know, tweak it whatever you want to say, but we need to change it to see what happens and then look at the results. You know after that and then go, hey, did it work?
Speaker 2:Great stuff that has music to everyone's ears. I love all the stuff you're saying. A lot of media, buyers, affiliates, lead gen companies this is what you want to hear at the end of the day. Right, I think you touched upon something. There's so many companies that don't want to do. They'll hit you and them oh, can we get these 20, 50, whatever that is number of returns like? Why didn't you know the deal that we didn't discuss this stuff? And obviously you want to keep long-term business, but when you find a company lives and dies for every single lead, it's not the right fit. Yeah, you know, you got to know your value and and a company like yours you know how much you're willing to spend to get the actual results you need to get. It is either going to happen or not.
Speaker 1:If it doesn't, then you know you is that, hopefully, the people that have worked with me you know they see he's fair, he's transparent, hopefully a good guy, you know, fun to be on the phone with to talk about certain things. He's not just beating us up over everything. And there's something in it for that lead gen vendor, you know where they're like, hey, we want to have a partnership with him. We know that they're doing the right things on their end to try to make it successful. We know they pay their bills on time. They're not asking for you know how much. You know, can I get, you know, 90 days? It's like, no, you're not going to get 90 days, like it just doesn't happen that way. But but that, that'll that has allowed me to be able to network within the lead gen space to where I've had a number of people reach out to me on LinkedIn and say you know, hey, we do this. Can we possibly, you know, get this program up and running with you? And there's some that I vet out and it's just like, hey, this isn't something that I'm interested in doing.
Speaker 1:I don't see the metrics working or, you know, whatever the reason may be, but I'm also willing to Like, I've had a couple different. I'm curious to see how it's going to happen with the TCPA stuff, but I've been able. Vendors are switching to inbound calls or switching to transfers versus form fills. So what I'm trying to look at going forward is, as well, we might not have to make as many outbound dials as we used to because of the type of lead coming in, but on the flip side, I have to make sure I have enough call center reps and agents and capacity wise to be able to handle more inbound, more, more transfers. So I think that's going to be one of the challenges for this upcoming year is is being able to make sure that that the leads that come in they're being worked properly. We've got as many people as as we possibly need, and then we have to. We have to scale up the sales reps too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's such a balancing act. It's like every action has a reaction, right. So you put more leads, you're going to have the reps.
Speaker 1:It's playing whack-a-mole every day. You know it's like, oh, okay, this one, we got that problem solved. And the next thing you know and and that's you know, knowing that there's going to be change, and that's where I think that that sometimes on the marketing side, it's like marketing is change. You're you. You have to be able to adapt, you have to be able to change. If you're just going to try to stay in that, like this is the way we do it, this is you're going to. You're going to fall behind. I mean, you're just the. You have to be able to adapt the new technology and things like that that are coming out, the new laws that are coming out. You know it's, it's who's going to adapt the best and be able to keep that trajectory of growth and the and the cost of marketing in line and speaking of adapting, you kind of talked about this.
Speaker 2:obviously, one-on-one consent January 27th, we talked about this, but where do you? How, how big do you think paper call is going to be in the home improvement side? I felt I don't know I could be wrong, but I feel like a lot of people haven't cracked paper call. We're doing a little bit of it. I mean, obviously, campaigns like debt, credit card, debt nationwide, aca, insurance nationwide. So again, it's hard with home improvement because the fragmentation. But have you had success with it? Do you think that's going to really blow up? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Here's the only thing that's concerning about it is the fact that a lot of customers now don't want to spend time talking on the phone.
Speaker 1:They want to text that's true, yeah, so it's like you can go and switch from a form fill lead that we would outbound to try to get them on the phone to an inbound call or a warm transfer if you're able to keep the customer on the phone that long. But it's interesting to where it's like they would prefer to be able to text. So now you're looking into making sure that you have, you know, automated systems to be able to communicate with customers the way they want to be communicated, and that is a change. We look at it and go. You know we're used to calling and talking to customers and making sure that you know you got 60, 90 minutes set aside for the appointment. All homeowners are going to be there, and now it's we're starting to dabble into. Okay, we need to be doing that via text because they won't want to get on the phone.
Speaker 2:The actual sale, the appointment setting, or both?
Speaker 1:No, no the appointment setting and confirming portion of it.
Speaker 1:I think it's it's. It's getting more and more difficult to get customers on the phone to where they're just like hey look, I got two minutes. Hurry up, that's the way it is, and a lot of people want to text. It's a lot easier to be able to send a text message back. So you're having to. The environment is forcing us to have to change. Who's going to be ahead of it and who's going to be making the changes or testing or tweaking certain things to see how you can get the best?
Speaker 2:result and who's going to be making the changes or testing or tweaking certain things to see how you can get the best result? That was great LFG show baby ideas. My brain was give me light bulbs we have a call center.
Speaker 2:Right, we got to have our call center doing more texting. We could become like a BPO or like some outsource center for just texting campaigns yeah, and just like doing customer service. I was at a solar company that built a call center back in 2017. They put one guy on that. He was just messaging people all day long. They were ahead of the curve. This was 2017, Momentum Solar, by the way but the point is that I remember thinking that and I don't think a lot of other companies have evolved since then I still think a lot of people that were that old school, and so am I. I've been doing this forever. But you're right, I mean, you've got to have that army doing that.
Speaker 1:Well, this is where a lot of the AI technology comes in to, where you know, I'm sitting there with a home improvement, you know, marketing mind going OK, how's AI going to help us get into more homes? And it's like, well, it's basically the ability to have a system in place to say, we're going to text these customers, they're going to text back and AI is going to talk to them and either be working them towards an appointment or working them away from one, depending on how they answer certain questions. So that's exciting to be able to look at capacity to where it's like okay, the machine, the computer, is going to be kind of running some of this stuff. And if we get to a point, I don't know 10 years, 15 years, whatever it might be where a lot of it might not be done over the phone anymore.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I believe that it's funny. We were at the Chandelier Bar yesterday and I guess there's a food conference going on. I'm not even sure we talked to this guy. He goes, like he does all the headsets for, like Wendy's and Burger King and all this stuff. These companies have been around for 50 years, but I don't know how we started talking about AI, but they're all they're looking to see if they can replace those people, like the Starbucks person when you drive through with machines and they're actually using call centers now and, like, like Philippines, actually do the ordering for you. So it's, it's just. I mean, it's not a matter of if it's a matter of when this is going to happen. It might be a year from now, five or 10 years from now, but you gotta get.
Speaker 1:We gotta adapt. Yeah, I mean, we, we try to always be on. It's like, how can we be on the cutting edge of whatever it is that's coming out? And I think one of the ways is through a lot of our lead gen partners and and our and our tech stack. It's like okay, we'll test it, you know, as I mean, as long as it's, you know, compliant, we'll we'll test it and we'll we'll provide you the, the results and the transparency. And I think that's where a lot of companies, you know, and partners, they, they start coming to me saying you know, hey, we know you're willing to test it, we know you track your metrics, we're going to get good data on this. So how can, how can we work together and the and if there's an opportunity, I'm always willing to have that conversation.
Speaker 2:I love it. Yeah, that's how you just you gotta. My next question I was going to ask you is what is the future of? I guess it's all tied together what's the future of home improvement? I mean, is it the automation Ties into, like the future of Legion? What is it? Because obviously the thing is, a home is never. People are going to live in their homes that's not going to change and people spend. I've read somewhere that people spend, like I think, $8,000 a year on renovations and improvements or this thing or that thing right.
Speaker 1:So that's that's always going to happen.
Speaker 1:But but where do you think the what's the future of all this? Well, in the last, I mean the last couple of years, you've got private equity coming in looking at the home improvement model, saying you know, they might've missed the boat years earlier by not being involved. Now they are getting involved into it and I think I think, unfortunately, it's one of those things where you're going to see these mom and pop mom and pop home improvement companies that are small disappear because they're not. They're not going to be able to withstand the cost per lead increase that's going to happen. They're not able to get enough leads from the sources that they used to be able to get the leads from.
Speaker 1:You're going to see a lot of these private equity-owned companies or larger non-private equity companies. You're going to see them, because of their budgets, be able to take more market share and it's kind of the Walmart effect. It's like you're going to see the local hardware store go out of business because that Walmart's in place and that's you know. I'm not opposed to that. I think it's just a matter of knowing that there's going to be some smaller companies that are not going to be able to afford to do business anymore.
Speaker 2:I know a lot of you guys do a paper call. A lot of you guys have call centers. We got AI in the house. We got Neil Billick. He's the founder and the CEO of All Rise AI.
Speaker 6:They're doing big things. I'm a user of his service. We are coming in immediately for X-ing contact rates for clients. What we found in my BPO when I ran it and deployed the AI was we had 30 second wait times before the deployment between connections and my guys were making about 500 connections a day. Times 30 seconds. We were wasting 250 minutes a day per head in a call center. That's four hours half their day.
Speaker 6:They're half their wages being spent on them waiting for a call. What the reason? Your wait times highs when you're calling out you have an abandoned rate. You have to stay under of 3%. That's programming your dollar if the AI is weeding that out and I think that's the benefit it's collapsing timeframes.
Speaker 2:It's helping your top producers produce, which is what you want them to do.
Speaker 6:People are afraid AI is going to replace call center agents and it may but right now, use it to maximize your human resources, so leveraging it for the tools it can be to do exactly what you're saying Let the humans do what they can do best. Let the AI get cursed out.
Speaker 2:I don't know if you saw this article. I think it was like two weeks ago. It was in the Wall Street Journal where it said you're talking about the new millionaires in America and you would think it's like some AI guy or some tech people or crypto guys or whatever. It's like the old schools, the plumbers, the HVAC guys, the roofers, and they talk about that how these mom and pops didn't expect to be rich. They just wanted to make some money to survive. And then the private equity mothers come in. They're scooping these guys up and they're becoming part of these exits and whatever. That makes you wonder if that's like I'm not saying it's a bubble, but that's what you're talking about is more like consolidated maturationuration. What's going on? Right, I feel like. Is that a sign? And I agree with you I think that is where it's going long term.
Speaker 1:Well, I think one of the biggest concerns that we see and I'm hoping the current cost of college might help this is there's not as many people going to the trades. So every year you've got certain tradesmen that are retiring and you don't have the amount of people coming in as a young age that say you know, I didn't go to college. What can I do? Well, learn a trade, you know. Get on a trade because there's going to be so much opportunity for you, because there's been this gap of not as many people going to the trades.
Speaker 1:So when you look at, unfortunately, college kids coming out and they've got six figures worth of debt and it's tough to find a job, it's like well, I know that you want the college experience, I get it. You know I get it. It's a fun time. You only go through it once. I understand that. But long term, you know, how long do you want to be paying these student loans? Could you have come out of high school and said look, instead of going on the hook for this much and going to college, I'm going to go learn a trade and when your friends that have that four-year degree come out of college, you've got four years of experience and you might be making six figures because there's such a demand.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, that's why you guys are doing 200,000, 300,000, 400,000 a year.
Speaker 1:There's such a demand. I mean, I taught my wife's a high school teacher, so we always have conversations about different things that are going on with her students and they've got a program set up at her high school where they're sending certain kids that want to get into the trades to the local community college and saying go get there, go get licensed, and then there's plenty of work for you and that kind of ties into what I asked you right now Where's this whole industry going right?
Speaker 2:And no one really talks about it. Keith or Regan or our team talked about it last week. We spoke at RoofCon and we did an interview together and he was like you know what I told these kids don't go to go to trade school, right, learn something. It kind of makes sense.
Speaker 1:Think about how expensive it is, man, it is. It think that you have to spend and go on the hook for this much for four years of your life. And then, if you don't get that job that you went to school for which some people don't I'm a good example of it. You know, I never would have thought in college I would have I'd be a home improvement marketing manager, you know. But, yeah, you're going on the hook for that much money and you got to pay it back. You know, well, you should pay it back, but but basically, you know you're, you're, you're going on the hook for that much. And then the next thing, you know it's like, okay, now I'm working this job where I don't know if I can pay those, you know those loans off. And it's like, well, if you would have went into the trades, you know, yeah, you might not have had that four years in college, but out there for you, as long as you're doing it right, 100%.
Speaker 2:We had an issue with a sink. The other a couple months ago my mother-in-law got sand, like a little tiny bit of sand in Miami Plumber came with like two minutes with like 500 bucks for this thing, you know, and it's like man, I mean these plumbers are doing it, but you need it done, if not your sink is out.
Speaker 1:It's on the fritz, it's the supply and demand. It's like they can charge whatever because there's not as many of them out there to take care of it too. Yeah that's what it comes down to.
Speaker 1:It's going to be interesting to see you know how, like okay, is it going to start to shift back again where not as many kids are going into college? They don't look at it as valuing that four-year degree and they figure hey, I need to get out of school and start making some money and this is a way to make sure you always have work.
Speaker 2:Well, you're a historian, right, you like history, but I do too. But history repeats itself. It does, it's what it does. So maybe you're right, maybe the pendulum's going to swing to that side. One of my buddies from New Jersey's daughter, miami. I had no idea, I was shocked. It's $95,000 a year. Are you creating me? Because I went to NYU. I started off in 97, it was $30,000. By the time I left it was $36,000, which was a lot. I graduated with $120,000 student loan debt and I can't imagine these kids now. I mean that inflation is out of control to go from 30 to I don't know. I think NYU is like 80 now. But well, shock, 95,000 a year. And that's now like when my kids go to college. I have a daughter, six years she'll be. What's it going to be? 120, 130? I don't get it, man.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's crazy, and I just feel like it's tough to try to explain to somebody that might be 17 or 18 years old how important these four years can be. You know I want you to go have fun, but you can set yourself up to have a great future by doing the things that you need to and getting a job and paying off your student loan, or you could set yourself up for a rough time in your twenties, you know, trying to figure it out, and so it's just. You know they never want to listen to the old. You know the old guy. You know you don't know what you're talking about, but it's like, okay, well, you know, if you've got six figures worth of loans, you know I don't want to hear it. You know what's coming. Yeah 100%.
Speaker 2:And now the rates when I went to college, I think I graduated my rate was like two and a half or three, but I consolidated them. I don't even know what they are now. It must be double. That, you know. So that's the other thing. So this is great. I mean, you touched upon so many things and we really went deep, which I appreciate.
Speaker 2:That's what I wanted the audience to hear, and especially the audience listening, because I feel like a lot of people are missing the boat on home improvement. They either can't crack or they're focused. There are a lot of shiny objects in them. I know you've been to a lot of the marketing shows and there's always something that's hot right, a few years ago it was crypto. You have the insurances, you have the Obamacare, affordable Care Act, stuff, and a lot of that stuff is here today, gone tomorrow. But homeownerships everyone wants to own a home right, there's always going to be something. Whether it's a window, the floor in the bathroom, it's always going to be something going on. So I feel like if you can crack that, it's evergreen, it's always going to be around.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's basically it's having the people you know, the right people, and systems and process and procedure and things like that in place to be able to take advantage of a wave. You know, there's been certain times this year where it's been difficult to predict, like, hey, is this going to be a good month where all of a sudden we start? We start, you know, breaking company records in successive months and it's like, well, it's because we've got the right stuff in place and there's, there's always things that I look back on and go, oh man, I wish we would have had. You know, this, this is something that we can improve on to where we could have even broken the record that much, that much more, but that much, that much more. But that's, that's the way that you learn and that's the way that you adapt to, you know, to the the 2025. Yeah, that's awesome, I love that you think that way.
Speaker 2:So last thing obviously a lot of media buyers watching this. What kind of leads are you looking for? What kind of KPIs?
Speaker 1:And then, obviously, it's bathroom no-transcript and we want to make sure that we're able to do everything possible to keep customers in their home. So they're saying take that bathtub out, put a walk-in shower in with a bench seat. It's easy to step in and then they have a much smaller risk of having a fall. The second reason for the younger crowd is that they typically don't take baths anymore. You know they're like, hey, I don't have the time In and out of the shower, let's go.
Speaker 1:You know I got stuff to do, so that's the tub to shower.
Speaker 1:Conversion is basically the hottest, most popular product that we see.
Speaker 1:So, you know, those are the kinds of leads that I'm looking for, whether it's a form fill lead, whether it's a inbound phone call, whether it's a warm transfer. We, we do have it in place with a lot of our lead gen partners right now where we're providing them our collateral to be able to provide branded leads. So if and we see those perform better, um than you know, than the non-branded leads and obviously with the one-to-one consent TCPA, we're already kind of ahead of that um, working with a number of partners that have been providing us with those one-to-one consent leads, you know, for the entire maybe last uh, year and a half or so, um, so, yeah, we, we try to, you know, work, know, work with partners where we're providing them, like here here's our logo, here's all our beauty shots, here's our time-lapse videos, here's any of the other raw footage from videos that we've done from installations to try to allow that lead gen partner to build a landing page or build a website that generates, you know, higher quality converted leads.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you set them up for success, right. Yeah, that's what it comes down to, and that's a true part of the partnership.
Speaker 1:You know, it's like I want to be able to say and I rarely have to have these conversations but I want to be able to say like, is there anything else that you need for me to make these results better?
Speaker 1:You know, and kind of put a little bit of pressure on them, and that part of that is is just the, the constant communication. One of the speakers this morning talked about it where it's like don't just set it and forget it. You have to be in front of those lead gen partners all the time. And if they have account reps where their job is to go through and look at like, how can we make this better on their end? I want to be in front of them because I feel like, well, if they know the call's coming up with Eric, then I want to. They want to be able to provide me with like, hey, this is what we're doing, this is how we're trying to fix this. Or a lot of times I'm telling them like, hey, this is going crazy, it's awesome. How do I get more leads? How can I continue to scale it up to where our invoice from them gets bigger and bigger and bigger every? Month. That's great stuff.
Speaker 2:You heard it. This is a partner who's willing to work with you. You do the right thing by him. He'll do the right thing by you. Also, I want to say one thing your LinkedIn is great. Follow him on LinkedIn. A lot of industry knowledge. That's what we need to know. We need to grow together. We need to learn together. So any other recommendations you have in terms of what's good about whether it's LinkedIn, anything else yeah, I mean, I use LinkedIn a lot.
Speaker 1:I mean I, you know I'm on Facebook. I mean I'm not, I don't have a, I'm not active on Twitter, on TikTok or anything like that. I mean I pretty much use LinkedIn for a lot of the you know work-related relationships and fortunately, I could care less about the number of followers I have. I really. I mean it's like you know, everybody gets oh, you got 5,000, you got 10,000.
Speaker 1:It's like I just like the fact that there's so many people that know people and then they're like, hey, have you talked to this guy about? You know what he's doing, and that's the way that I've been able to make a lot of the you know the long-term relationships that we have. You know, and saying no, I don't have time, it's like, no, no, I got time, I'll make time. It might be two weeks from now, but it'll happen. So that's been exciting. It's been exciting to see that there's been a lot of growth. You know sustained relationships, ones that we want to continue to be able to grow, and it's just about being a good partner and people. You know I was looking. It's like I always look forward to the calls where the people want to work with me and you hope that, if you treat them the right way, that it's reciprocal and they feel the same way.
Speaker 2:Beautiful, great way to end this phenomenal interview. I love having you on the show. We went way further than I thought we would go here. Well, I can talk. I love it. Might have to do a part two here, but you'll be seeing more Eric on the show. I'm sure. Follow him on LinkedIn. Guys, if you like what you heard here, make sure you subscribe. You like you follow. We got a lot more heavy hitters coming on deck here and you'll see more advertisers like Eric there doing the right thing creating women.
Speaker 1:So great having you on the show man Looking forward to doing more stuff.
Speaker 2:Really appreciate it. It was fun. All right, let's fucking go, let's go, let's go.