Scaling Past $1M: What Marketing Systems Contractors Need

Every replacement contractor who has crossed a million dollars in revenue earned that number the hard way, usually through years of long days, personal referrals, and an owner who answered every call that came in. On the latest episode of Digital Marketing for Contractors, hosts Caitlyn Noble and Meredith Medlin of FatCat Strategies made a point of saying so before they said anything else.

Then they said the harder thing. The contractors who cross a million and stall out are almost never less talented or less hardworking than the ones who climb to five million and beyond. In most cases they are working harder. That is precisely the problem.

Want to find out how we can create a custom digital marketing game plan for your contractor business? Schedule a call with us at fatcatstrategies.com.

Transcript

Intro: Welcome to Digital Marketing for Contractors, a podcast for home improvement contractors to help you crush your lead goals and take your business to the next level. Join us each episode as we give you powerful insights and practical tips on the best digital marketing strategies to help you grow your home improvement business. Let's get started.

Meredith: Welcome back to Digital Marketing for Contractors, the show for home improvement contractors who want to stop guessing and start growing. I'm Meredith Medlin.

Caitlyn: And I am Caitlyn Noble. We are with Fat Cat Strategies. We're a digital marketing agency that works exclusively with home improvement replacement contractors. So if you sell and install roofing, siding, windows, baths, gutters, doors, the replacement products homeowners buy, that's who we are built for.

Meredith: And we lean on that word exclusively a lot in this show, but today it really matters. We have watched a lot of contractors make the jump from 1 million to 5 million and beyond, and we've watched as many get stuck right at that line and never move.

Caitlyn: Yep.

Meredith: The difference between those two groups is almost never talent. It's almost never how hard they work. It's systems.

Caitlyn: Right. The contractor who is stuck at a million dollars, which is still... Congratulations, that's... What a

Meredith: Huge

Caitlyn: to already get there. But you're usually the hardest working person in the building. That's the actual problem. The whole business runs through you, that sole person. They're returning leads at 9 at night, they're remembering which customer wanted the gray trim, they're the one who knows where every dollar went, and you cannot scale a business that lives inside one person's head.

Meredith: So for context on the numbers, our sweet spot here at Fat Cat is contractors doing 5 to 30 million a year.

Caitlyn: Sweet spot.

Meredith: And the companies that get there are running 30, 40, 50 plus installs a month, depending on your product, of course.

Caitlyn: Yes.

Meredith: With project prices anywhere from 8,000 on a bath to up to 50,000 on a full exterior. You do not run that volume on hustle. You have to run that on systems.

Caitlyn: Absolutely. So here's the roadmap for today. We're gonna walk through five marketing systems you need to scale past a million dollars. We're going through them in order because they build on each other, and we'll close the way we always do, with tomorrow morning action items, so you've got something to actually do.

Meredith: And one heads-up, we are going to be using an example company the whole way through today's episode. We're gonna call them Cornerstone Bath.

Caitlyn: Perfect name.

Meredith: They're, they not a real client. They are just a composite client that we've made up so that it'll help you get the idea to make this more concrete. But if they sound a little too familiar, well, that's kind of the point. All right, so let's start with system one. This is your lead capture system. I think of it as the front door of your business. It, in almost every contractor we meet, is spending money to drive people towards that front door, and it's halfway stuck shut a lot of times.

Caitlyn: Okay, let's define it. Your lead capture system is everything that turns attention into a contact that you can actually follow up with. Your website, the forms on it, the click-to-call button, the live chat, the way every channel feeds back into one place. The mistake at a million dollars is spending all of your energy on traffic and almost none on capture.

Meredith: For sure. Okay, so picture Cornerstone Bath.

Caitlyn: Our friends at Cornerstone.

Meredith: Our dear, dear friends. They're right around a million in rev. The owner is proud of his website. It looks great. There's nice photos of their finished bathrooms on it, but here's what's happening under the hood. On a phone, the quote form is buried three scrolls down. There's no click-to-call button at the top, and the leads come in from five different places that don't actually talk to each other.

Caitlyn: Oh, that last part is the killer. A scaling contractor doesn't have one lead source. They've got organic search, paid search, their Google business profile, maybe TV or radio, that's expensive, manufacturer co-op programs, Val-Pak, mailers, lead aggregators like ANGI or Modernize. Every one of those is a doorway. If even one of those doorways dumps the homeowner onto a page with no clear next step, you're just gonna... You paid to lose that person.

Meredith: Exactly. So the system question isn't, do I have a website? Yes. Most people have a website. The question is, does every single channel point to a capturable action? So a form, a phone number they can tap on, a chat bot, and does it work on a phone? Because that is where most of these homeowners actually are.

Caitlyn: And it has to be on a platform you can control. We are big believers in WordPress for exactly this reason. When you can't change your own forms or your own offers without filing a support ticket, ticket with some vendor, you actually don't own your front door. You're renting it.

Meredith: And the fix here is not glamorous. It's making the next step obvious on every page, on every device, from every source. This is our first system. This is system one.

Caitlyn: Okay, before we get into system two, I'm gonna take my earring out because these headphones are

Meredith: Yeah, I'm just gonna poke you in side of the head

Caitlyn: smashing it. I know you all have the same problem. Okay, so system two. Earring is out. The lead came in the front door. Now what happens next in the next five minutes? So the lead came in the front door. What's gonna happen?

Meredith: So this is speed to lead. I'm sure you guys know what I'm talking about, and it's the system that quietly decides whether your marketing money was worth it, because a fresh inquiry is hot, and it's only hot for a very short window. The homeowner just filled out three forms on three different contractor sites, yours being one of them. Whoever calls has a massive advantage when they call first.

Caitlyn: Mm-hmm. And this is where the million-dollar contractor really feels the ceiling. At our friends at Cornerstone Bath, who's calling those leads back? Unfortunately, it's the owner, between sales appointments, at the end of the day, which means a lead that came in at 10:00 in the morning gets a call at 7:00 at night, if it even gets a call at all.

Meredith: Yeah. So walk through the funnel for a second, because the the language that we use here matters. So a lead comes in as an inquiry. That's what some folks call a raw lead. Somebody has to turn that inquiry or raw lead into an appointment set. Then that appointment gets confirmed. Then it's, it gets issued to a salesperson.

Caitlyn: Mm-hmm.

Meredith: Then you have the demo, and then sold. Every single one of these steps is a place that a lead can die. And in the very first hand-off, inquiry to appointment set, this is one that is the most affected by speed.

Caitlyn: This is exactly why the contractors scaling past a million dollars almost always have a call center, and I don't mean a giant operation. We're usually talking three to 15 people. That's kind of giant. But, like, I mean,

Meredith: I mean,

Caitlyn: One to

Meredith: For a million-dollar company

Caitlyn: Yeah

Meredith: we're not looking at 15.

Caitlyn: But your, their entire job is answering inbound

Meredith: Mm-hmm

Caitlyn: and making follow-up calls, working from real scripts. A dedicated call center does three things at once. It responds fast, it qualifies the lead so your salespeople aren't driving to dead-end appointments, and it gives every homeowner a consistent professional experience.

Meredith: And we just talked about call centers. If you're not ready for a full call center, the system can start smaller. So don't worry about having a

Caitlyn: Mm-hmm

Meredith: full of people. It can be one trained person whose job it is to pounce on those new leads when they come in.

Caitlyn: love that.

Meredith: It can be, you know, a service that answers after hours. If you are curious about some of those, shoot us an email. We can set you up with some.

Caitlyn: We have partnerships.

Meredith: Yes, we do. So the point isn't the size. The point is the speed. It's responding fast, and that being somebody's actual job, not something that the

Caitlyn: Mm-hmm

Meredith: squeezes in between everything else on their plate.

Caitlyn: Mm. Because here's the painful truth. You can be winning at system one, generating tons of leads, and lose all of them at system two. Fast response is not a nice-to-have. It's the multiplier on everything upstream.

Meredith: Very well said. So all right.

Caitlyn: You get to take something off now.

Meredith: Great, great. My hair tie coming out. So system three, lead management system. This is the one that contractors resist the longest, in our

Caitlyn: Mm

Meredith: because it feels like software and paperwork instead of doing what you want to do, which is selling.

Caitlyn: Yeah, I get the resistance, but a CRM is just one source of truth for every lead, where it came from, what stage it's in, who owns it, what's the next action. At a million dollars, you can run that on memory, and y'all, we've talked to many clients who are much bigger than a million dollars who run it on memory.

Meredith: Yeah.

Caitlyn: And with sticky notes and a whiteboard.

Meredith: Mm-hmm.

Caitlyn: But at five million plus, that whiteboard becomes a liability. Leads fall through. Nobody knows who called whom.

Meredith: And this is the system that finally lets you see the leaks.

Caitlyn: Mm.

Meredith: Remember those funnel stages we walked through earlier? A real CRM tracks every one of those. So you can finally see the two stages where money quietly disappears. We're talking about the cancel prior to issue.

Caitlyn: Yep.

Meredith: This is the homeowner who agreed to an appointment, then calls back to cancel before you ever even assigned a rep. And the demo no sell, sometimes called sit no sell. This is where your rep gave the full presentation and the homeowner did not sign.

Caitlyn: And here's why that's gold. Most contractors have no idea how big those two buckets are. They feel busy, leads are coming in, trucks are rolling, but a huge share of the leads they paid for never become a sale, and they couldn't tell you if the number... Like, I can't even... And they couldn't tell you the number if you asked.

Meredith: Yeah.

Caitlyn: You cannot fix a leak that you can't see.

Meredith: Exactly. So for our space specifically, the CRMs built for this world are definitely worth a look. Marketsharp is probably one that we mention the most on the pod.

Caitlyn: We have an integration.

Meredith: We do. We have a custom integration, so look for it on the back end if you're already in MarketSharp. It is purpose-built for home improvement. It's made for you guys that are listening. Lead Perfection, Job Progress, those are also tailored to contractors, and there are broader tools like Jobber or Zoho, Salesforce.

Caitlyn: ServiceTitan is a mothership.

Meredith: Yeah, there's, there's a ton. And the brand matters less than the discipline.

Caitlyn: That's correct.

Meredith: The system is only going to work if everybody at your company actually uses it, and you're using it the same way.

Caitlyn: Yes. I think we have another podcast. We've definitely written about all the different types of CRMs that are out there.

Meredith: Yeah.

Caitlyn: We do not you know... Well, I don't know what the word is, but we love, we love all of 'em.

Meredith: Yeah.

Caitlyn: Use one, please.

Meredith: Yes.

Caitlyn: We can definitely recommend 'em. But yeah, again, so like, like Meredith said, the system only works if everybody in the company actually uses it. That's the real test. A CRM that three people use and two ignore is not a system.

Meredith: Nope.

Caitlyn: It's an expensive spreadsheet. The companies that scale make it non-negotiable, every lead, every stage, every time.

Meredith: Absolutely.

Caitlyn: All right. System number four, I'll kick off my shoes.

Meredith: Crazy.

Caitlyn: Oh, man, they're we're gonna get in trouble. System four is attribution. This is our absolute favorite here at marketing at our marketing agency. Another word for attribution is measurement, and honestly, this is the system that separates the owners who scale calmly from the owners who are always anxious about money.

Meredith: Right, and so here's the picture of an owner who has this system. You could call them up right now and ask, "How much does a lead cost you from

Caitlyn: Yep

Meredith: versus Angie versus your TV spot, and how much revenue did each of those bring in last month?" And they would answer from memory. That's not a personality trait. That is a system that is producing clarity.

Caitlyn: And if you have a good marketing agency like Fat Cat Strategies, they can do the same.

Meredith: Good plug.

Caitlyn: For specific digital leads. But that owner does exist. We've met him. We love them. They track every lead source in their CRM, and they know their cost per lead by channel. They watch their total marketing cost as a percentage of revenue like a hawk. When you have that, scaling spend stops being scary. You're not gambling. You're feeding the channels that already proved that they work.

Meredith: Exactly. So our friends at Imaginary Cornerstone

Caitlyn: What's up?

Meredith: at a million, they don't have this yet. They know they spent money, and they know some jobs came in.

Caitlyn: Mm.

Meredith: But if you ask them which dollar produced which job, they're gonna just shrug and say, "Oh, I don't know." So when it's time to grow, they're just guessing at where to put their money. They might pour more money into a channel that feels busy, but it actually has the worst cost per lead.

Caitlyn: Yeah, definitely. I, my brain just, like, went sideways, and I've told this story seven times on this podcast, but I'll just tell it again. I mean, baby, infant, kitten, Fat Cat, we were generating a ton of meta leads for a client. And I was so happy. I was like, "Oh my God, the cost per lead is amazing."

Meredith: Look lead numbers.

Caitlyn: phenomenal, da da da da da." And then we got into a room with the owner, and he was like, "Well, that's cool, but none of them sold." You know, and it's just like, ugh, it makes you sick.

Meredith: Yeah.

Caitlyn: You know, and like, as an agency, we made a point of, you know, never being in a conversation like that

Meredith: Exactly

Caitlyn: because we can attribute what we're doing to sales.

Meredith: Mm-hmm.

Caitlyn: But that being said, okay, so let's, that, all of this does come back to those other like, system number three. Attribution lives on top of your CRM.

Meredith: Mm-hmm.

Caitlyn: Exactly like I said, the owner was able to come into our office and say, "That's cool. You guys generate all these meta leads. None of them sold." He was able to see that because of the CRM. If every lead is tagged with its source, the moment it comes in, then by the month's end, the math does itself. Which source was the cheapest? Which one closed the best? Which one is quietly bleeding you? Then you do the simplest, most powerful thing in marketing. You kill what's losing, and you double down on what's winning.

Meredith: Exactly, and I mean, your agency, I know we do it, should be helping you look at those

Caitlyn: Yes

Meredith: and tell you. I mean, we do that for our clients.

Caitlyn: Seriously

Meredith: they're in a really difficult market for a certain and there's just not search volume in that area,

Caitlyn: Preach

Meredith: we're seeing low-quality leads, we're gonna recommend, "Hey, we know we're doing PPC for you. We don't recommend we keep doing it right now. Let's do it in a different season. Let's pivot, or let's cut back for a little while." They should be working with you, and you know, that's how you scale spend without scaling your stress. You're making decisions with a scoreboard instead of just a gut feeling.

Caitlyn: We love a scoreboard here at Fat Cat.

Meredith: We sure do. We have one in our big open area. We always see our lead numbers.

Caitlyn: Yes.

Meredith: Okay.

Caitlyn: Last one.

Meredith: System number five, yes, last one, nurture and follow-up, and I think this one is probably my favorite. It's the most underrated system on the whole list because it's where you are essentially getting free leads.

Caitlyn: Oh my gosh, okay, let's go back to those buckets we found in system three, the demo no sale, the cancel prior to issue. Most contractors treat those as dead, lost, move on, but they're not dead. They're not yet. That homeowner wanted a new bathroom badly enough to fill out a form, book an appointment, maybe even sit through a full demo. The interest was real. The timing just wasn't.

Meredith: And that is the cheapest lead you will ever touch.

Caitlyn: Yes.

Meredith: You have already paid to acquire that person. A nurture system, you know, a simple sequence of emails and texts that keeps you in front of them, costs almost nothing compared to going out and buying a brand-new stranger.

Caitlyn: I couldn't agree more. I was just on a call before we jumped on here with a really amazing company who's got this nailed, and they have a person on their team who solely focuses on remarketing and nurturing. Yeah, and I mean, like, she does a phenomenal job, but like, it's her sole

Meredith: Yeah

Caitlyn: to do this. And like that same thing, when I say nurture, that goes for past customers, too. The homeowner you did a bath for two years ago, well, they might need windows next, or maybe they have another bathroom that they need done.

Meredith: Yeah.

Caitlyn: And you are the best source of reviews and referrals. A scaling contractor has a system for staying in touch in that whole database, not just whoever happens to be top of mind.

Meredith: Exactly, and I mean, the honest reason that most contractors don't do this is the same reason from the top of the show. They just don't have the resources to manage it consistently. It always falls to the bottom of the list, so it has to be a system, automated where it can be with somebody actually owning it.

Caitlyn: Exactly, so think about these five systems. Think about what these five systems do together. System one captures more of the people Your pain to reach, system two, responds before your competitors do. System three shows you every leak. System four tells you where to put your money, and system five squeezes more value out of every lead you already bought. That is a growth engine. That is how a contractor goes from one million stuck to five million scaling.

Meredith: Amen.

Caitlyn: Hallelujah.

Meredith: So, let's make this real. We want to give you five things that you can do tomorrow morning, one per system.

Caitlyn: Number one, for lead capture, put, pull out your phone... I'm having a hard time today with words.

Meredith: It's hard.

Caitlyn: Ugh. Pull out your phone, go to your website like you're a homeowner, and try to request a quote. Time it. Count the taps. If it's hard for you, it's impossible for them.

Meredith: Number two, this is for speed to lead. Have somebody submit a test lead through your

Caitlyn: Mm

Meredith: Monday morning, tomorrow morning, whenever you have the time, and then just watch the clock. How long until a real human calls back? Write down that number. That number is either going to be great, or it's gonna be horrible. One way or another, you're gonna know if that is one of your soft spots and where you're leaking leads.

Caitlyn: It's so funny. I mean, we, we expect now, as we're testing clients', you know, forms all the

Meredith: Mm-hmm

Caitlyn: we're like, "Okay, we're we're about to get called."

Meredith: Yep.

Caitlyn: And so, you know, we'll, we'll intentionally put tests sometimes, but still, like, don't put tests for this instant. Like

Meredith: Yeah

Caitlyn: like, go ahead and just, like, raw,

Meredith: Raw lead. Yeah. See, see what that raw lead turns into.

Caitlyn: Correct. Okay, number three, for lead management, try to answer one question from your CRM: What did a lead cost me from my top source last month? If you can pull it in two minutes, great. If you can't, you just found the system to build first.

Meredith: Boom. Number four, attribution. Take your best performing lead source and your worst, and move a small slice of budget from the loser to the winner. Now, this is just a test, but start training the muscle of moving money towards the channels that work.

Caitlyn: Mm.

Meredith: It's gonna help in the long run.

Caitlyn: Yes. And number five, for nurture... This is a lot to do on a Monday morning, but hey, you can do it.

Meredith: are ambitious.

Caitlyn: You got it. You You're... If you're listening to this, you can do this.

Meredith: Yeah. And a lot of you are probably already have, you

Caitlyn: A lot of this in place

Meredith: one, two, three systems already in place, so skip to the ones you don't have.

Caitlyn: I love that. Okay, last but not least, you are going to make a list of every demo no sale and every cancellation from the last 90, 90 days. Don't overthink it. That list is your nurture campaign. Those are real people who almost bought.

Meredith: Exactly. So if you do those five things, you are going to know exactly which of your five systems is strong, and which ones, hopefully just one maybe, are costing you jobs and costing you money. Then we can fix them.

Caitlyn: All right. I love that we always say this. Okay, we're gonna bring it home.

Meredith: Land that plane, baby.

Caitlyn: Land that plane. Hey, we, we work with contractors, though. We, we are bringing it home.

Meredith: Amen.

Caitlyn: Let's bring it home. If you feel stuck at a million, resist the urge to just go buy more leads. Look at the systems first. Capture, speed to lead, lead management, attribution, and nurture. More leads into a leaky system just makes a bigger mess. Fix the system, and the leads you already have start working a lot harder.

Meredith: And if you want help figuring out which of those five systems is your weak link, that's literally what we do all

Caitlyn: Yeah

Meredith: at Fat Cat. We work only with replacement contractors, so we're not gonna make you explain what demo no sell is, or why speed to lead matters. We already get it. We're talking your language. We can skip to the good part.

Caitlyn: You can obviously book a strategy call at fatcatchstrategies.com. We will listen to where you're stuck, set, look at your setup, and map out a game plan to just get you scaling. And that's a free discovery call.

Meredith: Yes.

Caitlyn: And you can obviously call us. I've been surprised, a lot of

Meredith: Yeah

Caitlyn: are calling more than... And, and I love that.

Meredith: Yeah. voicemail.

Caitlyn: Yeah, leave us a voicemail, 919-341-4190.

Meredith: And if this particular episode was useful to you, please do us a favor and subscribe so that you don't miss the next episode. Share it with a contractor friend who's been stuck at that same ceiling. But we are so glad you are here, and we will see you next time on Digital Marketing for Contractors.

Caitlyn: One more shout-out to Leo. Leo requested

Meredith: Leo

Caitlyn: Leo

Meredith: Tripod

Caitlyn: I know,

Meredith: Yes

Caitlyn: requested a tripod. I mean, the it was just, it was great, and he sent a wonderful email. Thank you for listening, Leo. Please keep listening, and you too can get a tripod if you're interested with

Meredith: Go to the

Caitlyn: But yeah

Meredith: backslash brand.

Caitlyn: We love our listeners, and we hope we're continuing to bring you value. Thanks, y'all. Have a great one.

Outro: Digital marketing for contractors is created by Fat Cat Strategies. For more information, visit fatcatstrategies.com.