The title will sound a lot better if you insert the Beastie Boys song while reading it. Well, I wasn’t feeling too motivated to work today and honestly should have done more work but the work I did get done was very useful. It was more business planning and thinking ahead than anything else. It was much needed.
So the girls calling companies are killing it. They called about 250 companies today and got a few more companies saying they want to join. If we look at he cadence of calls, we should be done with the DFW list in less than 3 weeks. So thats where the planning stuff got important. 3 Weeks till Houston. Holy crap…thats around the corner. We need a formal plan on launching. We learned things NOT to do here in DFW and we will try and avoid those mistakes going forward. So lets talk about that plan.
First off, we will need to hire one more cold caller. Our plan is to have 1 caller for each main service line; plumbing, hvac and electrical. We need to increase to 3 because we need the services onboarding along all 3 lines at the same time. Not good if we have plumbers and electricians but no HVAC. With this, this will also increase the providers onboarding (hopefully). The though will be start calling and onboarding one week before we hit Houston with ads. Hopefully one week will be enough to onboard and get a few providers on with each service line to have some availability. Then you hit up the homeowners and start attracting people to the site and hopefully grow both at the same time.
So Raymond has started working on ads and Im glad we hired him. His ads are better and we have a lot more actual testing going on with structure. So far in 3-4 days we have reduced our lead acquisition for our nationwide ad by $1 which alone will pay for his labor costs. The local ad (DFW) we were paying $25/lead. Now the new ad isnt apples to apples because we changed to app downloads (which isn’t quite ready so we can only measure clicks). While a click doesn’t equal a lead or an app download, we can see our clicks are looking like $.75 each. The number sounds amazing but its not a fair comparison.
Annette and I also had a great chat about where should we focus our advertising dollars. It suddenly dawned upon me, we need to kill off the nationwide ad. Why are we advertising to people what wont see us for 6 months, 18 months or more? We initially started it as a heat map to see where we should go next. With 1200-1300 spots on the heat map, we have the idea already. So, we are going to kill off the nationwide ad and use all of the ad money on the local ad. When we go to Houston, we will leave some residual amount in DFW that will always continue but the bulk will go to Houston. Each move, we will leave a small residual amount of ads going and put the full budget in the next city.
