Behind the Success: A Marketer's Leap to Contracting

Mission Control Podcast

In this episode, Mike is joined by Matt Kulhaneck, who runs All Access Builders in Buffalo, NY. Matt previously worked in marketing for contractors before switching to contracting work himself. He gives insights into what his struggles and triumphs have been throughout his journey.

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00;00;00;26 - 00;00;20;26 Mike & Matt Some weather we're having some weather having six or seven degrees of sunny. How's that feel after eight months of I mean, it feels like years. It might only be two months, but it feels like a really long time. It's just gray skies and defeatist attitudes. It's like a breath of fresh air, just trying to get back out of the cave.

00;00;20;26 - 00;00;43;27 Mike & Matt Like yesterday. It was foggy for the first 20 minutes of my drive, and then I see the sun come out and I'm like, I'm alive again. Yeah, it's it's crazy what a little bit of sunshine can do for for your soul and for your for your sake. Yeah, I agree with that. Yeah, it's good. All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of the Mission Control podcast.

00;00;43;29 - 00;01;01;00 Mike & Matt As always, probably brought to you by the Sun Digital Agency, the brand and the team over at Roofer. If you need instant Roof quotes, clean, pristine proposals which will give your customers no choice but to buy from you. Quite honestly, if not the team of roofer, you can. My guy Christian is going to drop the link in the description below.

00;01;01;07 - 00;01;29;15 Mike & Matt You're going to click it. They're going to know iSentia and we're going to ride off into the sunset. Very special guest today. Some of you may know Matt, Matt Kalanick, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Yeah. So you were in marketing, you did sales. Now you you own a construction company in interim? Lee Inter I've been running it for a few years since I left marketing.

00;01;29;17 - 00;01;54;19 Mike & Matt What inspired you to make the pivot from working with contractors and their marketing strategies into I want to work for a contractor. I wanted to become an owner of a contracting company. There's a few things at play for that I would say. I grew up around construction. My father was a general contractor. Naturally, when I did marketing, I gravitated towards construction workers and things that I was familiar with.

00;01;54;21 - 00;02;18;01 Mike & Matt And, you know, I started to see how successful these guys can be, You know, seeing my father not very successfully provide for three children, I didn't really realize that it could be a lucrative business where I can become a good provider doing it. Until I did marketing and saw all the money I was making everyone okay. Did you ask for a cut?

00;02;18;08 - 00;02;39;26 Mike & Matt I want to draw every time. And they never gave it to me. It's. It's fucked up. Guess what? I'm interested because it's been, what, four years since you've been in marketing something like that over five. Over five. I'm interested to see what the struggles look like for you and your clients back then versus what that looks like now.

00;02;39;26 - 00;03;06;11 Mike & Matt As we know, a lot of things change day over day, week over week, especially year over year. So I like to take like an opportunity to kind of ab test or observe rather, you know, the struggles on the struggles. And I'll see what overlap there is, see what differences there are. When you were in marketing, in providing marketing and advertising for roofing contractors, what were some of the biggest challenges that you guys were faced with as far as producing opportunities?

00;03;06;13 - 00;03;34;29 Mike & Matt For a lot of it was experience, experimentation going into new markets, not realizing a field and how people were searching and being able to capture the correct audience, finding out which strategies worked in different markets where one market was heavily, you know, organic traffic, another market may only get leads off of paid traffic. Some of the things change throughout the years where you'd be able to have ads in the map section.

00;03;34;29 - 00;03;57;29 Mike & Matt And then Google Guarantee came along and it just continued to progress. It was something that you had to continually keep up on with market trends and each specific market that you were working, especially me, much like you, I did not really make it a habit to work with competitors, so I wasn't saturating a market with my marketing as well.

00;03;57;29 - 00;04;25;24 Mike & Matt I was, you know, all over states, all over the country. I had clients all the way from Washington to Florida, back up to Maine, just learning curve. And I would say, you know, it's diligence and keeping on top of it, making sure that your fulfillment is as informed as you are, as well as monitoring it and keeping your customer relations.

00;04;25;26 - 00;04;56;16 Mike & Matt Yeah, Communication's important, right? Absolutely. Yeah. I see. I work with a lot of businesses. I have friends that own businesses and a lot of the times when you boil down the the symptoms of issues that they're having within the business, it can all be kind of drawn back to breakdowns in communication, whether that's from company to client, whether that's from colleague to colleague, from ownership to management at some fast that usually has some semblance of a breakdown in communication.

00;04;56;19 - 00;05;38;07 Mike & Matt Absolutely. You'd run into situations where you would be communicating with your client just as client maintenance and some of your clients you'd become friends with. Very, very often I have clients that are no longer my clients that are now good friends of mine and you know, a couple of them, and you're actually doing their marketing now. However, you know, in the conversations that you'd have with these folks, you would not get the information about often the bug in their ear about the, you know, the the nice new girl who says that they're going to do so much better for you and leave your wife and all that stuff until it's almost too late.

00;05;38;14 - 00;05;56;28 Mike & Matt Yeah. Where you're being diligent, you're keeping on top of things, you're always calling to check in, you're always making sure that you're doing everything to keep the customer happy, as well as making sure that you're helping them provide to feed their family and all the families of those that they employ, which is priority number one. I apologize for that.

00;05;57;04 - 00;06;17;22 Mike & Matt Yeah, And it wouldn't come up until they already had a sour taste in their mouth because of he said season type things. Yeah, that's a it's actually a well-timed point because we just had a similar situation yesterday with a customer and you know, we have I usually tell people we'll give you as much time as you'll give us, right?

00;06;17;22 - 00;06;36;19 Mike & Matt So as a worst case scenario, we would love to meet at least once a month. But that doesn't mean that, you know, myself or my staff isn't available to call us. If you want to schedule biweekly meetings. In this particular instance, we have biweekly meetings and client was I hate to call you and tell you this, but you know, we're going to go in a different direction.

00;06;36;21 - 00;07;02;13 Mike & Matt Okay. Like, let's talk about it. And, you know, they had their ad account audited by a couple of people. And, you know, we're running experiments and, you know, testing things. Right. Like that's how you optimize ad campaigns. You do what you're doing. You take the feedback that Google's giving, you try to parse through what is more malevolent and for their self-interest, that's going to make Google more money and what's going to actually serve your client better as far as getting them more opportunities.

00;07;02;13 - 00;07;22;21 Mike & Matt And then what the strategists are seeing and then we're drawing, we're deducing things based off that and making our best informed opinion. And then based on that, we're going to create tests. So we had a we had a test run, and I think, you know, we had spent like $8,000 on a budget that was, you know, spending like 30 grand a month and it got six leads.

00;07;22;23 - 00;07;38;27 Mike & Matt And, you know, he had seen or somebody pointed out to him like, I can imagine the conversation being something like, is this how you want to spend your money? And I assured him, like, you know, this is like there are successful tests, there's unsuccessful tests. And like, that's a spectrum, right? It's not it's not binary like this work.

00;07;38;27 - 00;08;01;16 Mike & Matt This didn't work. It's like what? What worked within here? What can we learn from this? You know? And you can't make changes like this on an aggregate level, you know, especially in Google ads. So I get if I run a sample or if I run a test and the sample size is five days and let's say we expect to be at a cost per lead of $200 and the cost for leads $37 and it's just killing it.

00;08;01;16 - 00;08;23;28 Mike & Matt And then we go implement all those changes across all the ad groups and campaigns like you're setting yourself up for failure, right? Those things, there's a spurious relationship as far as like the advocacy of the changes that you're making based on how small that sample size is, You have to let those tests run and then there's obviously a cutoff point where it's like, okay, for reasons A, B, C, and D, this one's a flop, or this one is performing really well.

00;08;23;28 - 00;08;46;26 Mike & Matt This is what we're going to take away from this. We decided to try to save the marriage. We're going to keep working together, but it's the communication, right? And and I told this client, regardless, I'm I'm very close with this guy and I'm like, we're good regardless, right? If you decide to go, like, I'd hate to see you go, but at the same time, I understand it and we'll still be cool, Like we're still boys, whatever.

00;08;46;26 - 00;09;10;04 Mike & Matt And I just, you know, we have biweekly meetings set up and sometimes he shows up to them, sometimes he doesn't. And I get it. You got like contractors are busy. I understand that. But some of the points that are being brought up that seem to be points of contention and frustration are, you know, well, we notice that these calls, you know, we're getting an assignment of calls that are under X amount of length.

00;09;10;04 - 00;09;33;23 Mike & Matt And these are typically going to be things that aren't going to be actual opportunities. This is why we want to have that constant interaction, right? Because we're looking at KPIs. And KPIs are what we have to go off of. We can't listen to every single call that's coming in, you know, and I'm I'm relying on my team to meet with you and your team to communicate the information so that if there is a situation like that, we can try to get to the bottom of it.

00;09;33;23 - 00;09;56;08 Mike & Matt Like if there's an issue where we're getting a lot of spam calls, like what ad group or ad campaign are those coming from and how can we reverse engineer to try to enact pivots to make sure that that doesn't happen again? And if we don't have that communication, we're just operating off of KPIs, which is second best to having feedback from your the team, but it's still second best.

00;09;56;11 - 00;10;28;06 Mike & Matt And like Ricky Daddies, Bobby said of you in first year, last, that's a challenge that I had to endure quite a lot because you get a tendency as a business owner and somebody who is running a business to get tunnel vision and look into a very small sample size. If I were to look at my sales in the middle of February where we had a pretty rough winter, I'm out of business right now, where same thing with marketing.

00;10;28;06 - 00;10;55;02 Mike & Matt You know, it's an average, right? Is this marketing a good investment overall, 25% of a budget being used effectively? Not necessarily a big moneymaker, but it's a growing thing, right? It's something in order to help the campaign grow, in order to help the campaign succeed, you have to know what doesn't work just as much as what does work in order to avoid it.

00;10;55;02 - 00;11;15;25 Mike & Matt You know, Same thing with my customers now in construction, I need to tell them all of the possibilities of different things and I need them to communicate with me their concerns. If they don't tell me that they're concerned about their prized rosebush. Right. I'm going to make my normal efforts to protect it as such and knock off a flower.

00;11;15;25 - 00;11;35;16 Mike & Matt It's the end of the world. I didn't have the opportunity to present them like we're going to be tearing off, you know, tens of thousands of pounds of debris off of your roof. We're going to protect things with plywood. We're gonna protect things with tarps. We're going to have a guy monitoring these different things. There's a chance that you may have some temporary recoverable damage, just like with marketing.

00;11;35;16 - 00;12;00;12 Mike & Matt You know, you can have different points that you're hitting and everything's not going to be 100% year round trial after trial. And but that's the job, right? To your point about the recoverable damages and lack of communication, have you enacted things within your business to try to get ahead of those things? So let's say we go out, we visit a lead, we sign that customer.

00;12;00;14 - 00;12;21;27 Mike & Matt Do you have any processes in place for communication as far as like, Hey, here's what you expect coming into your end. So your schedule for this day, here's a punch list of things to, you know, inspect your attic, put down the tarps over things that mean something to you. Communicate to us externally, you know, things that are important to you that you want to make sure that, you know, don't take any damage or do you have anything like that?

00;12;22;01 - 00;12;48;28 Mike & Matt Absolutely. It was a hard or hard learned experience. I actually implemented an addendum, an entire addendum in my contract to go over all of these tidbits and pieces, drywall cracks, drywall damage, things like that are a direct result of Spanish. So this is a perfect example doing a customer's house, who has a roof in their houses is not the greatest condition to have laid in plaster ceilings.

00;12;49;01 - 00;13;15;10 Mike & Matt These ceilings are already on the verge of falling. We're doing our job. We're installing a roof, we're dropping bundles on the roof like we need to do. Ceiling Falls was responsible moving forward. I have now have an addendum. If it's not a result of a direct penetration of a hand or tool foot or something that we directly cause, if the work itself causes it, you know, we can try to help you out.

00;13;15;10 - 00;13;40;17 Mike & Matt But it's not our responsibility that your house is out of maintenance. Yeah, that's got to be really tough for a customer. Absolutely. Absolutely. I get hired. The people that hire me love me. The people that don't hire me are probably scared of me for telling them the truth. I mean, I just can't imagine. I know how careless I can be when I'm reviewing a contract ever having a conversation.

00;13;40;17 - 00;14;18;05 Mike & Matt So I talk to you? Yeah. Yeah, everything sounds good. Sent over the agreements. 14 pages. There you go. It's six pages. Okay. So is it something you explicitly talk about? The addendum? Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. It's something that I found to be of paramount importance to save any future friction with clients. It helps to avoid uncomfortable conversations later. It helps to avoid a lot of hurt feelings on both sides, right where we may both feel justified in it because we didn't have a conversation about it.

00;14;18;07 - 00;14;44;13 Mike & Matt Yeah, yeah. Relationships fail and flaws with setting and either meeting or exceeding expectations or not meeting them right. And if you guys aren't communicating about what those expectations are, it's impossible to be on the same page. So the likelihood that there's a discrepancy between what you feel and believe and what your customer feels and believes is significant. And it's really I don't want to say it's a powder keg, but it's not far off.

00;14;44;15 - 00;15;11;22 Mike & Matt Okay. Yeah. So we want to do everything that we can to consistently ensure the best experience possible for your company, your employees, also your prospective customers and your customers and future customers. Right? That's What are some other things you do to help achieve that? I hired project managers to also kind of hold hands, so to speak, with customers throughout the process.

00;15;11;22 - 00;15;34;04 Mike & Matt Similar like you'd have an account manager, somebody to consistently be a point of contact. Obviously I'm out, you know, doing several different things and I'm often not on the job sites. So there needs to be a point of communication there. So that person's there to reiterate the things that I went over with them in the addendum, not in the addendum.

00;15;34;04 - 00;15;58;18 Mike & Matt Other things to be on guard for, to be honest, mostly to point out the negative and to show the positive, to say this could happen. Hey, we were running into this just so you know it also, we're going to take care of it. It's going to turn out wonderful. Yeah, that's smart. So do you have a project manager on every job?

00;15;58;18 - 00;16;28;27 Mike & Matt So, yes. Do they stay there or are they floating between multiple projects? So no, what they're citing, citing foreman managers citing he's not installing is the project manager, but is he boots on the ground at 1 to 3 anywhere avenue start to finish of the project unless he has to run to get materials. Yeah. Okay. So how many project managers do you have to do and what's what's the breakdown as far as three?

00;16;28;27 - 00;16;53;09 Mike & Matt I take that back because I have a project manager that manages carpentry and framing and then I have siding and roofing. What's your breakdown look like as far as like jobs sold over the last year? Roofing, siding, framing. I'd have to get back to you on those numbers, brother. Most importantly, you got to know your numbers, guys. Absolutely.

00;16;53;09 - 00;17;27;10 Mike & Matt Absolutely. I, I know a roundabout that I have been seeing a downtrend in roofing and an uptick in framing. I've gotten a pretty good influx of building projects, garages, additions, decks, fences, whatever things that my framers would perform. Yeah, and my siders and roofers and carpenters would finish up in a big downtick in roofing, mostly because of cost.

00;17;27;13 - 00;17;49;00 Mike & Matt Obviously, as you know, in the conversations that we've had on personal level, you get to a point, at least me specifically, where you do sales, you do sales, long time sales a long time, and you just want to be a person and be honest with people and tell them the truth about what's going on. And do you want it or not?

00;17;49;03 - 00;18;18;03 Mike & Matt And, you know, I do tend to give a good value offer, but I have noticed that in our market and conversations with, you know, like past clients that are in other states, that the economy is really, for lack of better words, budget chopping right. Whereas myself running an established company who's five star rated on Google, Better Business Bureau accredited, not that that means most big BBW guy over here.

00;18;18;05 - 00;18;43;22 Mike & Matt To some people that means something. And that's what counts to me. We've been in business long enough to stand the test of time where you know the statistics 80% of roofing companies go out of business within their first year. 80% of those within the next five. We've stood the test of time in order to be able to hang in the market and show that we're going to be there to follow our warranties to support you if you ever need anything else, we're here again.

00;18;43;25 - 00;19;08;10 Mike & Matt That's how the business was established. We started out as a fencing company and then we got a guy who knew how to do this and people said, Do you know how to do that? Now we do. And then before you know it, we're a full service. GC Building custom homes. So that's my point. There. That's okay. It was good up until that point.

00;19;08;12 - 00;19;42;20 Mike & Matt I'm proud of you. You're doing great still. You're welcome. You're welcome, Steve. So what would be the ideal break down as far as roofing siding, framing in your mind, and why? As far as revenue dollars or day to day performance, let's say revenue revenue dollars, I would say 70 roofing would be ideal. I mean, I'd take 100% roofing because the roofing is fast or money.

00;19;42;20 - 00;20;17;13 Mike & Matt It doesn't keep you as cash. Poor production times or days, not weeks, not months. No. That's why a lot of people like roofing, a lot of people who are on roofing companies never touched a roof. Maybe I should open up a roofing company. Ascend Roofing will get on top of that one. Hey, that was something that's. That's worked well for you as far as getting new customers over the last few years.

00;20;17;16 - 00;20;39;18 Mike & Matt Relationships. Also, let me back up for a second before we get there. I think it's I don't think it's mutually exclusive of, you know, either being honest or, you know, being sales or sales oriented. I think you can do both in if I'm here. The way that I heard it was kind of like is one or the other.

00;20;39;21 - 00;21;02;25 Mike & Matt But I think what you're the point that you're trying to make is that you're just fucking tired of of going, doing, doing the show to get the dough. I think that's fair. I'm not quite the exhibitionist anymore. You know, in today's modern technology, we don't have to get at roofs anymore, right? If we want to view the type of decking, we just go inside the attic or look in the crawl space, or look under the drip edge.

00;21;02;28 - 00;21;18;14 Mike & Matt People still want to see that, right? They still want to see somebody take that ladder off your truck and put it on the roof and take a look at it. Even though none of the information that you're going to gain matters because the measurements remain the same and the amount of layers that you determine from the ground maintain the same.

00;21;18;16 - 00;21;20;13 Mike & Matt They still want that exhibitionism.