Dec '22 (edited) in Getting Started
Step 3: How I Got Started
Prior to joining Heavenly Greens, I’ve worked on or in a variety of business models. I've sold TV Advertising as a rep for ABC, NBC and Comcast and was an early adaptor of High-Tech Convergence Marketing.
My very “first startup” was with my brother in law building a hardware solution that we sold into retail big-box stores like Radio Shack and Best Buy or, if you are from California you would remember Fry’s Electronics. We managed overseas supply chains that we built into hardware peripheral components for gaming.
From that business, I moved on to web-development and SaaS products (Software as a Service) where we developed (too late as it turned out) an Angie's List type, or Home Advisor type of service for the home improvement space called HomeProHub.com.
From there I was a founding team member of a PFM (personal finance management) cloud software tool that we developed. I wouldn’t discover my true passion for digital marketing until years later after this start up project failed as well.
Back in 2005, Dan Theis, the owner of Heavenly Greens at the time was actually one of the first investors in the now failed HomeProHub business. That next year, 2006 he offered me a job as a Sales Rep. After nearly a year proving myself as a rep, he hired me as the VP of Marketing in 2007.
This turned out to be a great opportunity. Build and develop marketing systems inside a company that nothing. Next to zero tracking. We began a process of tweaking and changing marketing strategies year after year which led me to discover what worked, what failed, and what to avoid.
Over the next decade I would end up creating all the systems that run Heavenly Greens today.
This experience has given me the opportunity to build out localized marketing campaigns with fairly large advertising budgets ranging from $750k to over $1,000,000 per year.
In the first few years of my Heavenly Greens experience, the big marketing push was mostly all Direct Response TV advertising. Of course we invested in all the other staples at the time; Direct Marketing, Magazines, Newspapers and event marketing. Yup, we had a website, however it was very basic and completely static. Some called those sites, back in the day “brochureware” flat and static, just information.
The Direct Response TV opportunity gave me the chance to experience local network TV buying (remember is used to sell TV ads) with in-studio live broadcasts, and work with an ad agency producing the local TV ads, which today still handles all of our buys.
From there it was learning the art of long-form direct response advertising by scripting, producing and even being the spokesperson inside of numerous 30-minute infomercials. At the time, TV broadcasting of local infomercials was a big deal for our market, it gave us access to a large audience and produced great results.
The infomercials days were nuts though, just insane... we drove “Act Now” offers as the CTA (call to action) at a time when we were first to market with these products and no one had ever seen fake grass on TV before. It was pure insanity, the wild west really.
It was quite literally 30-minutes of phone calls just raining down on us. We had no hope of catching them all. I remember we would tell the entire office staff to brace for the onslaught, we’re going live at 10am on Saturday morning…
At the time we had no call center, no phone system really, just an old-school hunt-group type of phone set-up that directed all inbound calls to any available phone that was not in use. If all the phone lines were busy… too bad, we missed the calls and those phones rang off the hook. I don’t think we even had a voice mail system for messages, so we missed a lot of calls.
But we got a lot of leads… like thousands of them. Those infomercial days where the first in a series wake up calls for me after taking over the marketing department.
That’s when I discovered the archaic reporting systems in place or should I say, the lack of reporting systems in place. At the end of the 30-minute broadcast, the dust would settle and our total lead reporting system consisted of nothing more than scribbled names on 3 or 4 different clipboards with multiple pages. Each page contained a list of contacts which had grown as fast as the people answering the phones could write information down and collect...before moving on to another call.
And the questions...
So many questions, remember this was 2007… nobody new what fake grass was.
Every caller asked at least 2 of the same questions every time, “how much is it”, “how do you install it” etc., all great questions to ask, except we had to end the call as soon as possible in order to grab the next line that was ringing… good times.
Here's the thing: Even that insanely broken system still worked. Later you will hear me talk about getting your company from “Point A to Point B” for Heavenly Greens, this was our Point A.
That’s how it started, no tracking, nothing digital and just about everything on paper.
I was grateful however, that I had spent most of the prior year cutting my teeth as a sales rep for the company, first. That experience provided real insight into what happens to our prospects after they set an appointment with us and what takes place when the rep shows up. It was valuable to understand what expectations the prospects had, or the lack of...had been set at the time the appointment was booked.
After a few months of running appointments and selling deals I began to notice gaps in our front end marketing process. Many of the same common questions were coming up over and over which could be addressed much earlier in the marketing process.
It was a valuable experience to learn what it was like for our prospects to go from being interested in our products, to the appointment setting phase and to the close.
I will save those details for later, suffice it to say, after years and years of iterations, today this business runs entirely on systems and can be managed by checking a few apps and simply tapping thru dashboards on any smartphone.
We can see which type of advertising channel (ad-outlet) is producing the most leads or how many appointments the call center set that day or the number of projects being installed. I can tell you how many conversions our website had, down to the number of appointments our PPC (Google Adwords) bought for the day, month, quarter or year.
In other words I have complete visibility from the top to bottom of this company. All because we view this business as a Top, Middle and Bottom of the funnel operation.
In fact, these marketing and production systems have grown into predictable revenue models that consistently, year after year, produce 7 & 8 figures in annual sales and collectively produced nearly $300mm in total sales.
I’m excited to share this information with you as I believe if you take what I layout here and implement these strategies into your business you could see great results too.
Back to the story…
This experience had, at the time, evolved into me creating a digital marketing agency, Complete Online Strategy. The focus here was leaving Heavenly Greens and helping other businesses create and execute digital marketing plans, my exit strategy out of Heavenly Greens.
In fact, I nearly left the company near the end of 2017. As 2018 started, the team and I made a Pivot into a new brand and created software based on the marketing stack that runs Heavenly Greens, we rebranded the Agency to AGM Artificial Grass Marketing, and continued to work with clients and help other entrepreneurs achieve great results using our services and software.
This was the time when Dan Thies approached Tim and I about acquiring both Heavenly Greens and Artificial Turf Express. That transaction concluded in 2018, where we both went to work on the Beast we just bought. We made some changes, upgraded trucks and equipment, upgraded our cutting machine and had an incredible 2019.
Well... you know what happened next, the Pandemic hit and the insanity that followed it.
In many ways, the technology of today has made it much easier to use and set up, as compared to what I went through building the systems at Heavenly Greens.
However at the same time, it can still be quite overwhelming and complicated for business owners to navigate if they don’t speak the language.
Which is exactly why I created the Artificial Grass Marketing Community.
What are your thoughts? Share below in the comments.
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Step 3: How I Got Started
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A community to support Business Owners with Educational Content, Operational Support and Marketing Strategies to grow their Artificial Grass business.
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