Attention Home Services, Construction, or Trades Business Owner: Do Not Spend Another Dime On Marketing or Hire Another Marketing Person, Agency, Advertising Vendor, or Recruiting Firm Until You Read This Urgent Letter
How To Get More Qualified Leads Than Your Competitors and Delegate All Your Marketing Without Spending a Fortune, Guaranteed.
Plus, How To Profitably Scale a Home Services Business Into a Multi-State Powerhouse With An Endless Supply of Quality Customer Prospects and Top-Notch Employees
May 20, 2022
From the Desk of:
Jesse Stoddard
Fractional CMO
Snohomish, WA
Dear Home Services Entrepreneur,
If you are tired of the constant barrage of advertisements and marketing options hitting your inbox every day, being swamped with work, having a ton of great ideas that never seem to get implemented, and living in a constant state of overwhelm, then this is the most important letter you’ll read all year.
Getting leads first, before our competitors, is a constant and never-ending necessity in our type of work. Not only do we need to market for homeowners and customers, but we now have the added challenge of also being in a constant state of recruitment. In other words, we need to be marketing for good employees just as aggressively and shrewdly as we do for the customers of our services.
After all, what good is it to flood our company with leads when we can’t attract and retain enough good workers who will get the job done, on time, in an effective and quality-controlled manner? However, the minute we get enough (even mediocre) employees, the pressure is on again to keep them busy with consistent work, so they don’t flee for the greener grass on the other side of the fence.
Such is the life of a home-services contractor business poised for growth, but hitting brick wall after wall, all along the way.
I know you can feel the pressure; scaling a business takes an entirely different set of skills and abilities than starting one did.
Remember when it was just “a couple of guys and a truck”? That was ancient history once you broke a million dollars. You thought you would finally arrive, but it was only the beginning.
And every additional million-dollar-annual-revenue benchmark comes with higher hurdles to jump.
That’s where I come in. I have a particular set of skills and strategies that can make the crucial difference between making that leap or falling flat on your face.
If you own a successful home services business, then I can help you become the master and commander of your marketing system and effortlessly manage your team, agencies, and vendors.
When you follow our proprietary methodology, the Functional Marketing® Framework, not only will you have built a superior marketing strategy and plan, but you will also see it executed and producing real-world results, better than trying to do it yourself or hiring a marketing manager or consultant.
Then, you will have a consistent and predictable source of qualified leads with positive ROI within 90 days, even if you’ve had a bad experience with marketers in the past and are too overwhelmed and busy to deal with it yourself, or else I’ll give you all your money back, plus an additional $2,000.
In other words, if I don’t deliver results, you don’t pay. I pay you for your trouble. In fact, read on to find out how even if you feel I wasted your time on our initial discovery call, I’ll pay you for that too. You’ll see how this can work for you risk-free, protected by three different unprecedented iron-clad guarantees.
Who am I?
Before I go further, you might want to know why you should bother listening to anything I have to say.
My name is Jesse Stoddard, and I was Chief Marketing Officer (the highest C-level position available in any company that oversees revenue generation) of the number one Crawl Space and Attic Remediation company in the Pacific Northwest in 2017 and helped the Company go from 13.8 Million to 17.8 Million in one year (I’ll go deeper into the story of how I did that in a minute).
I founded the Stoddard Agency at the end of that year. I helped dozens of clients significantly increase revenues, profits, customer lifetime value, and lower customer acquisition costs, thereby improving my clients’ businesses and freeing up the entrepreneurs and owners to have life on their terms.
I am currently working with a home-services contractor client that is going from locations in two states to nationwide expansion. We aim to dominate our niche and, God willing, grow to well over $100,000,000 in revenue. I’ll get into the executive leadership strategy and structure that is essential to accomplishing this goal over the course of this letter.
By the way, I’m not just a “marketing guy.” I started in business as a fitness professional in my twenties, with over sixteen years of experience as a gym owner, then multi-city boot camp owner, and consultant to other fitness pros worldwide.
I wrote two books in the fitness industry. I hosted a top-rated fitness niche industry podcast and was once featured in CNN Money Edition. I helped several entrepreneurs become published authors for credibility, authority, and celebrity in their niches by ghost-writing or editing their books. I’ve owned an import business, an e-commerce business (before they were popular), and been a highly-paid professional sales copywriter.
As a small business owner, I had to learn marketing for survival. I know what it means to start and run a small business.
I have a wife, two kids, and a one-eyed dog, and I coach my son’s baseball team.
Now we need to talk about how this is different from everything else out there.
How is this different from everything else you’ve seen?
Most of the marketing messages you see are from digital agencies, media salespeople, freelance specialists, and one-hit wonders. They promise to give you their “strategies” for free, for the sole purpose of selling you their services. Their specialized marketing “trick” might be fantastic, but they are specific tactics and techniques that work at specific times, for nuanced reasons, and for particular business verticals. They don’t take care of the most important thing; your bottom-line ROI. They are often not based on time-tested principles; they are not the customized, individualized, bespoke lead generation system catering to the big picture overall plan that you need.
The Massive Headache of Hiring a Marketing Director, Chief Marketing Officer, or Doing It Yourself
If you’ve thought about hiring a marketing director, or a chief marketing officer for your company, then you probably know that you don’t have time to do everything in your business when it comes to marketing and sales.
You probably know a lot about marketing already (after all, you’ve come this far and made a lot of money), but you also realize you have limitations. Even if you think of yourself as an expert on all things marketing, advertising, and lead generation, you probably can at least acknowledge that the bigger your business gets, the bigger the headaches become—the more complicated and time-consuming it inherently gets.
…So you consider hiring the big guns.
However, the compensation of the average CMO, according to Salary.com in my area, is $252,930, and that is before benefits, retirement compensation, bonuses, stock options, or other revenue sharing (which the-best-of-the-best often require).
The average equity stake in a company by a CMO is 10% to 15%. That means you pay them all this money, AND you give them equity. Even if you want to invest that kind of money (and have the extra cash lying around), you still have to find the right fit for your company—run job ads, sort, filter, screen, and then do countless interviews spending hours upon hours to find a good fit… and you might end up having to fire them after realizing they are not going to work out anyway.
Possibly the Worst Mistake You Can Make: Hiring The Wrong Marketing Assistant
Of course, you can stick with what most home services owner-operators do; you can hire what I affectionately call “Barista Betty” to be your director of marketing. Sure, go ahead and trust the number one most important activity of any business, top-line revenue creation (via lead generation), to the girl who was serving you coffee last week.
Think I’m kidding? I can’t tell you how many people have a “marketing assistant” who knows absolutely nothing about marketing other than how to post good selfies on Instagram. Even those coming out of college with marketing degrees have never spent a single day in the trenches selling a high-end service to skeptical homeowners or having a clue what it is like to start their own business. They’ve never even had to learn how to sell a neighbor on the idea of them mowing a lawn or walking a dog.
See, the best marketers were and are salespeople. Truly effective direct-response marketing is often a “canned-and-cloned” sales presentation, and as you know, mastering the art and science of sales takes experience. There is no way to learn it without applying it. Unfortunately, there isn’t even such a thing as a kid doing a paper route in modern America anymore. They skip all that real-world stuff and spend 16-plus years in government schools getting their heads pumped full of leftist theories and socialist propaganda, and they want to tell you you should promote your 14 million dollar business by doing a dance on Tik Tok.
For the record, a dance might work if your affluent homeowner customers spend a lot of time on TikTok. Probably not.
Digital Marketing and SEO Agencies Are Out to Fleece You
Or, maybe you just trust your SEO agency to do the thinking for you. Sure, go ahead and trust those guys charging you $11,000 per month to do some mystery technical stuff (that you never really get to see, much less understand) on the back-end of your website and writing generic crap for your blog to (somehow magically) make you another five million dollars this year.
Hey, maybe your guys are better than most. Maybe they are amazing. Good! But they gotta’ run a business too, so they have to get a LOT of other clients. Hopefully, those clients aren’t your competitors for whom the SEO agency performs the exact same services, essentially canceling out the work they do for you.
Are you sure they don’t do that? Even if they aren’t working with your competitors, what about the bazillion OTHER SEO companies opening up every weekend who copy all the other SEO hacks doing the same thing for every client. So how does that create differentiation for you in the marketplace?
Hint: It doesn’t.
So how do you keep those guys in check? How do you evaluate them properly? How do you deal with the fact that you can tell when they shuffled employees around and have yet another person working on your account (who knows nothing) because you see a drop in productivity and results. Are they using your account to train new employees? You can sense this stuff, but you don’t know for sure because you don’t know how to evaluate their work. It’s hard to know without expert insight, which you don’t have time for!
If you rely on an SEO or general Digital Marketing Agency, you also run the risk of losing all their earned experience, insights, and wisdom once they leave. While they are working for you, they are learning crucial skills and honing their expertise in your business niche and vertical. They are perfecting the nuances of their craft, impossible to gain without their time working on your account. Of course, this is valuable to them, but it is also incredibly valuable to you.
Even if you think you want to keep them around forever, chances are you will eventually outgrow them. Just like in the world of horse racing, “Eventually, they all go lame.”
My goal is to help you build your proprietary knowledge, internal secrets, insights, and wisdom so that you can be successful regardless of whether SEO companies come and go. When they leave, you won’t care because you can replace them. They won’t be walking out the door with your lead generation system in shambles. You’ll understand exactly what they do, how they do it, and how to hold them accountable.
Pumped-Up Coaching Programs Are Blowing Smoke
There are also coaching programs that teach you how to scale, build lead gen systems, and hire employees, but that’s never as good as getting it done for you. In fact, I bet you’ve already joined a few of these fantastic guru coaching programs or mastermind groups yourself. If not, you’ve undoubtedly been pitched those solutions over and over again.
You know the drill; go to the Ra-Ra event, get pumped up, and maybe implement one or two items on your 178 action-step lists.
The truth is that a lot of them are high-quality programs that can help you produce results.
You want to believe that you already have the ability within yourself to achieve your goals. Part of my role is first to show you that you actually do have this power and then show you how to use it. However, knowing what to do and getting it done are two totally different things—and my job is to get it done! Executed, implemented, and finished, not just theorized.
How Is This Different From Hiring a Consultant?
Becoming one of my private clients is like consulting and includes solid advice, but there is a difference; I am an actual CMO and, for all intents and purposes, can join your team as your CMO (even if I am technically an independent contractor).
A consultant typically has a particular short-term fix or provides you with a big binder of stuff to do. Everybody smiles, and you write a huge check. Then the binder gets set on a shelf and gathers dust for five years since nobody wants to take accountability for doing what’s in it.
Here’s a joke that is instructive: A consultant is somebody that knows 142 ways to pick up a woman at a bar but who never has a date on Friday night.
Plus, a Fractional CMO has to know much more about the entire sales and marketing process— the entire business—and has to theorize about a better plan and make the plan a reality. This requires leading meetings, sometimes hiring and firing, managing KPIs of your vendors, and so much more. We’ll get more into defining the role in a minute. First…
Got Leads But Not Enough Good Employees?
Finally, none of the aforementioned options includes the solution to a huge glaring problem; finding, recruiting, hiring, and retaining solid employees to do the work. Many marketing systems and agencies can get you more leads, but how do you keep taking in more leads if you are booked out for six months and can’t find any help to deliver the service?
You might be wondering what that has to do with marketing. Well, the truth is that recruiting is marketing. You need to market to identify the ideal candidate and recruit them, to begin with. You should have a marketing system for the stage before you recruit, during the recruitment process, and after you get the perfect employee to sign on with your company.
You should have a marketing process before the actual new hire starts, during their onboarding process, and after they begin work. You need a marketing process for the early stages of retention during their time with you, including culture, community, and support, and after they’ve been with you for a long time.
You need to magnetically attract the right people to you rather than push and pursue them, and you have to engage and motivate them with a system that gets results over and over again.
Without this kind of recruiting and hiring marketing system, you will never grow a service business that consistently does over thirty million dollars in annual revenue. Don’t ever forget that you need to market for employees just as hard (or harder) than you do for customers and clients.
So that leads us to how this is different from all other inferior options. The truth is, you can “Grow Faster With a Fractional Chief Marketing Officer (CMO).” You can let us create, manage and deploy a marketing strategy to help you reach your goals faster.
What is a Fractional CMO?
A fractional Chief Marketing Officer (sometimes referred to as an outsourced CMO or part-time CMO) is a marketing executive serving businesses by leading marketing strategy, sales development, growth opportunities, and heading the marketing department. Businesses use fractional CMO services because they do not need a full-time CMO but still require expert strategy and leadership.
Businesses enjoy the flexibility that a fractional CMO provides. It often makes sense to bring in a fractional chief marketing officer instead of a full-time CMO. This can be for financial reasons, as a typical full-time CMO salary can cost far more than $252,930 per year. Or because the work needed to be done by the CMO does not require a full-time position—and the dirty little secret is that most companies under fifty-million dollars in revenue don’t need a full-time CMO anyway!
EXPERTISE YOU NEED: Don’t rely on inexperienced marketers to dictate your business’s overall marketing strategy. Bring in a Fractional CMO to provide a comprehensive marketing plan for your business.
COST YOU CAN AFFORD: You don’t need a top-heavy organization with a full-time CMO on staff. A fractional CMO will provide you with the insights and reporting that you need—without the high price.
SELF-MANAGING EXECUTIVE: A CMO will lighten your workload by managing all aspects of your company’s marketing department. From vendors to employees, the CMO acts as an executive.
What’s in it for you?
If you’ve followed along thus far, by now, you are asking yourself, “what’s in it for me, exactly?” Here are some primary benefits to you:
You can essentially have a right-hand man who understands what it is like to be an entrepreneur, business owner, and marketer at the highest level, who can provide help, guidance, leadership, wisdom, experience, and mastery over marketing lead generation and sales strategy.
This allows you to breathe a little easier, knowing that you can confide in someone who is helping you to build marketing assets instead of doing “drive-by marketing” or random acts of advertising. This allows you to get excited again because you can work more on your business instead of just in your business. This allows you to focus on growth and less on the minutiae of trying to keep everything organized and running an adult daycare.
A primary benefit is that you can finally develop a real marketing plan with KPIs, schedules, budgets, tracking, and accountability.
This strategy becomes your map, and your CMO can be a compass. This drives your team to succeed. It drives the vendors, it drives the digital marketing agencies, it drives revenue—everything. In the past, this was all in your head swimming around and inevitably led to confusion and frustration and balls being dropped at best. At worst, this meant losing a lot of money or leaving millions of dollars on the table.
Why follow this treasure map? First, to generate marketing qualified leads and sales qualified leads—and a lot of them. You need to get leads first in order to do everything else. With a steady flow of leads and buyers, you can create security for your business. Without leads, no other business system even matters. It all starts with bringing in the revenue from converting prospects, leads, and buyers into closed sales and cash in hand—and that’s where you’ll find the gold.
Let’s not forget one of the biggest things this gives you: Power.
You get power over your company, your vision, and your management. You can finally get a grip on what your SEO firm is doing and hold them accountable for results. You get a person to guide and direct your in-house marketing assistant, technicians, and team. This helps you delegate properly. Of course, you never abdicate all responsibility, but this is the closest thing to real dream-team building so that you can ultimately have more freedom as an entrepreneur.
You get to stick to your unique ability and help other people focus on their unique abilities so that you can create a well-oiled business machine that ultimately lines your pockets with cash. After all, that is what a business is supposed to do for you (and never be ashamed of it!).
Let’s define “fractional CMO” because most people think of a CMO as the head of marketing and sales (and all revenue generation), which is true but is still a limited view. A fractional CMO is someone who works with the CEO or Owner-operator to shape the growth strategy for the business and then help execute it.
Fractional CMO Responsibilities
- Developing the marketing strategy for both the short-term and long-term.
- Deciding and committing to which marketing strategies are best for your business, such as SEO, content marketing, paid advertising, Google PPC, Bing, Facebook, social media, email, direct mail, a podcast, etc.
- Solving marketing problems that will arise and need to be resolved quickly.
- Leading the marketing department and inspiring team members.
- Hiring new employees and building out your team for success.
- Working with outsourced agencies leaning on their experience and holding them accountable.
- Your Fractional CMO should have a wealth of marketing and managerial experience. Therefore, the Fractional CMO should be the natural leader of the marketing team.
- In addition to leadership qualities, the Fractional CMO is to be seen as the c-suite level marketing strategist who helps organizations achieve their marketing goals.
- As a Fractional CMO, I will work closely with both your organization’s leadership team and the marketing talent executing the marketing tactics on a day-to-day basis.
Our Fractional CMO Services
- My staff and I help businesses improve their current marketing campaigns through expert marketing strategy and leadership.
- Our proprietary methodology, the Functional Marketing® Framework, is proven to improve your current marketing programs, marketing results, and how the marketing team runs from dysfunctional to functional.
- Use metric-driven decision-making and my Fractional CMO expertise to reach your business’s goals.
- Hire the highest level non-full-time marketing executive, the Fractional CMO.
Why You Need a Fractional CMO
A business needs a Fractional CMO when they require marketing leadership and the expert marketing strategy skills of a CMO but do not need it on a full-time basis.
Reasons a business needs a Fractional CMO
- Leadership: Your marketing department requires leadership from an experienced marketing professional. In addition to leading the marketing team, a leader (in terms of decision-making) is required.
- Marketing Strategy: Your business needs a comprehensive marketing strategy for your niche and industry—such as a Fractional CMO with years of experience in Home Services.
- “Part-time” CMO: You require the skill set of a chief marketing officer, but not for the 40+ hours per week that a full-time CMO will be. There’s no reason to focus on time or pay for it. Results should be the focus. Even if you need a Fractional CMO for only 5 hours per week, or 20, your agreement is flexible. Again, the hours don’t matter; the effectiveness does.
- Experience: You have staff to execute marketing campaigns, but they lack strategic expertise. Therefore, you need someone who has done it before and can foresee challenges and obstacles.
- Reporting & KPIs: You need to monitor the health and progress of your campaigns and have someone lead weekly KPI meetings. Namely, so your team has accountability and is always results-focused.
- Optimization: You need to improve marketing campaign optimization by having an expert identify opportunities and new possibilities.
- Efficiency: Your existing marketing team’s efficiency is below optimal. You need leadership and management to maximize efficiency for your marketing department.
- Go-to-market Strategy: When you are launching a new product or service for your business, you will need a new marketing plan for the short term and the next few years. Your digital marketing efforts need to be precisely planned out so that your marketers know exactly what to do. Additionally, they need to know what marketing initiatives and key performance indicators are a sign of success.
Growth-focused Marketing Leadership
- As a Fractional CMO, my team and I are growth-focused strategic experts. Moreover, profitability in campaigns is crucial to what we understand success with a client to be. This can be done by maximizing the efficiency of your marketing team. Therefore our first 90 days with you as a client will focus on improving the systems and processes within your marketing department.
- This is most effectively done via our weekly reporting on marketing KPIs through a scorecard. We will create this, or improve your current one, as an immediate improvement for your marketing department.
- As you consider a Fractional CMO for your high-growth business, consider the cost of not having a marketing leader. Additionally, think of the potential gains of having an experienced marketing leader.
- Consider the risk you’re taking by having an ordinary marketing director or coordinator set your organization’s campaign objectives and success criteria. Odds are, they are under-qualified for the role.
- By hiring a fractional CMO, you’re getting the confidence and capabilities your team needs to reach new heights, both in terms of sales and profitability.
Additional Benefits
- As a part of the CMOX community, we don’t just come with our ideas, but we come with the ability to solve problems at an unparalleled level by utilizing our network of other Fractional CMOs in a variety of industries. Any experience that we have not had, someone else likely has. If in doubt, we can ask other experienced CMOs. This creates a unique advantage by leveraging the insights of other experts.
- Years of experience have allowed us to curate a powerful list of vendors, strategic partners, agencies, top-level copywriters, technologists, creatives, and a whole host of resources unavailable to most business owners and CEOs. Our “Rolodex” alone is nearly priceless.
Recap
- You get Maximum Growth in Minimum Time
- If your organization has yearly revenue between $500K to 50M, hiring a fractional CMO will allow you to keep capital free to onboard the experienced implementers necessary to accomplish your vision, as well as save money for your ad budget
- Part-Time CMO, Full-Time Results
- Hire an experienced CMO. An Outsourced CMO will map your sales and marketing funnels, review your team’s strengths, and provide expert strategies on how you can grow.
- Ready to talk about how we can help your company achieve maximum growth in minimum time? Schedule Your No-Cost Marketing Clarity Call Now.
How can you know this is real?
Okay, you are probably tired of waiting for me to get to the story about the 13.8 to 17.8 Million-dollar one-year increase I happened to generate as a CMO to an attic and crawl space remediation business. In case you’ve lived under a rock for the last twenty years, that is one of the fastest-growing home services contractor niches in the country. Sometimes they are coming at it from the insulation contractor business, sometimes from pest control or pest exclusion, or even from the electrical or whole-house energy efficiency inspector angle. Either way, they are going where nobody else wants to go; the crawl spaces.
The story really started ten years earlier, when I was employed for a time as a salesperson. I jumped in those crawl spaces on my belly with the rat turds and all. I was, for a few months, the number one salesperson. If I wasn’t number one, I was number two. Eventually, I decided I didn’t like physically being in the crawl space (who does?!) and wanted to pursue higher callings, but I never lost my curiosity about this fascinating business model.
Ten years later (after mastering marketing for many service businesses), the owner offered to have me come back as their Chief Marketing Officer in charge of all revenue generation (all sales and marketing). There was no higher-level position he could have given me, and in terms of responsibility, it was one step away from being an owner.
I went into that business right before Christmas time and started going through every single nook and cranny (or crawl space) of the business, especially every single marketing and sales strategy they had ever tried. I created a 70-page, incredibly thorough marketing plan between Christmas and New Years’ eve. The office was empty, and I was slaving away, pounding on the keys of the only computer still switched on. No vacation for me. I was there to get ‘er done!
After people started to come back to work, they realized something was different. They came by my office and saw a whiteboard with an entire marketing funnel diagramed out, copies of sales letters (which I also wrote, based on interviews with the owner and salespeople, along with my own experience in sales) taped to the board, and a three-ring binder, containing the Sales & Marketing Plan on my desk.
But then reality hit me like a ton of bricks. As cool as a comprehensive written plan is, it means nothing if it isn’t executed. It means nothing if people just leave it on the shelf to gather dust (like the binders they already paid consultants to produce that hadn’t been cracked open in several years).
It also doesn’t work if there is resistance to change. And EVERY service business has resistance to change. The front desk hates change, the customer service representatives and sales guys hate change, and the service technicians and the crews hate change. The only kind of change they like is when you give them a “tip” by increasing their pay (without them having to do more work).
Therefore, I knew I had to focus on implementation! We needed quick wins to prove that the change was worth the effort.
We rebranded and added ancillary products and services to increase the average customer lifetime value and so much more.
I worked with the sales team, the front office, and the customer service representatives and developed every marketing asset and vendor relationship to create an entirely new system. Sometimes that meant hiring and firing team members and vendors. I met with the owners regularly to discuss every step and then helped to ensure that it all got done. It was grueling.
I even physically sat in the SEO agency’s office every week for several hours to work as closely as I could with their entire team.
Here are a few things we accomplished for this successful Crawl Space Remediation Insulation Contractor:
- Managed vendor relationships and budget allocations to improve outputs
- Developed a comprehensive business and marketing plan, built the marketing team, implemented strategies, and helped hire and coordinate with the sales team.
- Helped expand into new cities and territories, coordinated with legal counsel to protect trademarks, and worked with a franchise consultant to present the opportunity for national expansion as a valid option for ownership.
…And it worked.
I am proud of the fact that I helped position and drive this Crawl Space Remediation, Insulation Contractor, and Pest Control business of the Pacific Northwest to (by FAR) the number one company in 2017 and helped the Company go from 13.8 Million to 17.8 Million in one year.
The owner decided to sell the company and cash in on a big payday, so it was a happy ending for him.
Please feel free to investigate my LinkedIn profile to see my resume, work history, and reviews.
More Clients
Testimonials
Diverse Examples Outside of Home Services, Requiring Expert Skills and Entrepreneurial Thought Processes To Improvise and Adapt the Ideas to Home Services Marketing
I’ve had some other successes outside of home services, which helped me bring even better strategies into the field that nobody else thought to do. Many home services contractors who have been around a long time get stuck in the mindset of “This is just how we do it in our industry. It’s the way we’ve always done it.”
They end up engaging in what Dan Kennedy calls “Marketing Incest” because they are letting peer pressure influence them to do what everyone else is doing. By doing marketing like everyone else, they are average by definition and get average results (or worse). Over time, everybody gets dumber.
Instead, I like to seek out and find great ideas from outside of the industry that I can bring in and deploy, like secret weapons for home services businesses. These contrarian concepts make my clients stand out from the crowd by arriving at the marketplace like no one else can or is willing to do. I can do this because I don’t have blinders on that most contractors-turned-business owners have. I have been able to avoid that and stay neutral to see the forest through the trees.
Here are some highlights of a few of those other clients:
Personal Injury Law Firm
- Helped expand the firm during the difficult transition from $4M to $5M in revenue, using a strategic marketing plan
- Worked with the in-house team to direct marketing efforts and delegation
- Managed vendor relationships, especially SEO and digital marketing agencies
- Ghost-wrote a book for lead generation, as well as to help promote the brand with credibility, authority, and celebrity appeal for the owners
E-Commerce
- Engaged owner and ad agencies to organize and integrate efforts
- Helped rewrite control sales letter and beat existing sales copy
- Did comprehensive site analysis and split testing to determine the best performing sale page to increase conversions
- Redesigned website and increased sales
- Analyzed and improved checkout process and cart recovery to further increase conversion
- Worked with Conversion Rate Optimization vendor closely to maximize results
- Helped establish the systems for an in-house team to take over
Limited Spots Available
If you are running a successful company in the home services business vertical, you have huge ambition but not enough time or support, and if you hire me as your Fractional CMO and follow my proven system, then you will increase your revenue, have a solid plan to create consistent profits and predictable positive ROI within 90 days, or else I’ll give you all your money back, plus an additional $2,000.
What’s holding you back?
You might be thinking: “Spending a bunch of money to get marketing help was not what I had in mind.”
I get it; you are used to doing things a certain way, and you want lower-cost leads and “cheaper” advertising. Everybody does. However, isn’t it better to spend a little more than you expected rather than spend less than you should? In other words, is it the cost of the leads and the cost of the marketing help that really matters? Or is it the Return on Investment, the sales, and the net profit that matters more?
The key function of a business can be boiled down to return on capital. If you can spend a dollar and make four dollars each time with no catch, wouldn’t it make sense to spend as many dollars as possible as long as you kept getting that 4X return over and over? The answer to that question ought to be, “I want to spend as much as possible, and how can I spend it faster?” If you don’t answer that way, you need to reconsider your approach to business and investing.
Many business owners never see the connection between marketing, advertising, and net profits because they don’t really know what I call “marketing math.” If you don’t know exactly what your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is per marketing channel, and you don’t know what your referral multiples are, your Cost Per Lead and Cost Per Sale, and your Customer Lifetime Value or Average Order Values, your target cost per lead, and your maximum cost per lead to produce a profit, then you don’t really know how to create a repeatable and duplicable, reliable marketing machine for your business that spits out cash like clockwork. If you want that, you need a high-level strategist that knows how to do it. That’s what a Fractional CMO is and does.
Why don’t I just hire a full-time marketing manager, assistant, or director first?
Lower-level experience, wisdom, and talent will produce lower-level results, period.
Are you going to trust the number one crucial business priority to somebody who doesn’t really know what it’s like to sell, let alone run the entire sales and marketing leg of your business?
Do the math. You can hire a full-time lower-level person for less than a part-time CMO. Sure, that seems to make sense on the surface, but do you really care about the time somebody puts in, or do you care about the results? The two ideas are NOT the same thing and are not even correlated. We all know people that work full time for a company for 30 years who never substantially impact the business. Just because you work full time on a computer doesn’t turn you into Bill Gates.
Would you rather get the RIGHT advice or just okay advice? If you get the right advice, and it makes you an extra four million dollars this year, is it worth it? What if you insist on saving a few bucks, and you get okay advice that just maintains what you already do on your own? Is it worth “saving a few bucks” if it means leaving four million dollars on the table due to a lack of accurate thinking?
Heck, let me play devil’s advocate against my own argument here… Another way of looking at it is this: If you pay a Fractional CMO $250 per hour (again, who cares about how much time it takes but humor me for illustration), and you could have paid a regular marketing manager only $50 per hour, you “save” $200 per hour.
Let’s say you paid the Fractional CMO for 10 hours that week. You end up paying $2,500 for the week of high-level strategy. For the regular old marketing manager, you would have only had to pay $500 per week, or you could have them work 40 hours and paid $2,000 per week.
So you get a lot more bulk time from the run-of-the-mill Marketing Manager for less money. In the first 90 days (when most of the hard work really happens), during the critical time when a good strategy is the most important, you would have paid the Fractional CMO $30,000, or you paid the marketing manager $24,000. So you save $6,000 by just going with the greenhorn marketing manager over 90 days, and you got someone working full time. Sounds like a smokin’ deal, right? WRONG.
Here’s where that breaks down:
First, you had to find this halfway decent marketing manager person by running help wanted ads, sifting and sorting through hundreds of applicants, doing interviews, and rolling the dice. That’s a lot of time and added expense.
Second, if you look at help-wanted job posts right now on LinkedIn or Indeed.com for marketing jobs, you’ll see HUNDREDS of openings. Everyone is trying to hire a good marketing person. You’d think it should be easy until you realize that there is nobody who knows what they are doing out there.
Lots of young folks coming out of school call themselves marketing people, yet they are clueless. You can see evidence of this fact when you watch the job post disappear because the company hired someone and then get reposted again a month or two later because the company had to fire the loser to find a replacement (repeatedly). If you don’t believe me do a search for job listings seeking marketing people. EVERYONE wants to find a good one. They want a “rainmaker,” and they can’t find one. It’s almost impossible.
Third, you save, in this theoretical scenario, $6,000. So what? You got “more hours” worked. More hours doing what, exactly? What are they going to do?
I’ll tell you what they are going to do. They are ONLY going to do what YOU hold their hand and lead them by the nose toward. In other words, they might be a “worker bee,” but not a leader (even if they talk a good game). They don’t know your business as you do, and they don’t even know what to ask to really find out how you tick or what you really want to accomplish.
So YOU are the one that will need to micromanage them. You have to come up with the marketing plan and the strategy. You have to constantly watch over what they do and make sure they go in the right direction while they spend your money willy-nilly. You are the one that will have to do the thinking for them. Almost nobody will have a higher-level, experienced, results-oriented focus that aligns with your goals and objectives as an owner.
In place of a self-managing executive, you get a button pusher and lever puller. You have a “marketing factory worker.” That’s great if you already have the system and plan in place. It’s great if you already have the conveyer belt, and they just walk up to their station, clock in, and start building your widget. But they definitely don’t know how to put the conveyor belt together, to begin with! That’s what you need—someone who can build the marketing machine.
You need a Fractional Chief Marketing Officer who is at the table with you as an inner-circle member who wants you to win, not just your business, and also can help you hire (and fire) the rest of the marketing department. They can oversee and guide them, whether they are a marketing manager, technician, vendor, or assistant.
Actually, a fractional CMO is BETTER than a full-time one.
Okay, so why not just hire a full-time CMO right out of the gate? Isn’t that the ultimate goal anyway?
Maybe, but maybe not. First, there is the cost. Depending on the area of the country you are looking in, any decent CMO is going to cost you at least $200,000 per year salary, plus the benefits, health care plan, retirement plan, the insurance, taxes, and most likely a huge bonus tied to production, in the form of a commission, revenue share, profit share, or royalty. You need to keep them motivated, just like a salesperson (because they essentially are the highest level salesperson in the organization). The average CMO salary in my area is $252,390. That’s average, and you don’t want average.
… This leads me to point number two. If you want something better than average (and you NEED someone better than average), you are going to have to pay more, a lot more. I looked on Salary.com and found that a top-level CMO costs $377,715. Again, that’s BEFORE all the spiffs. If you include the basic benefits package, it goes up to a cost of $542,814 for the best of the best. Check out the results from Salary.com.
Okay, what if you are on target for $50,000,000 a year in annual revenue, and you are ready for a full-time CMO. That’s great, but you still have to find one and go through all the hassle of interviewing and tossing the dice on your initial pick. Besides, if you are at that level, then you’ve likely already gone through a lot of marketing people and know what I mean. Maybe you’ve come this far with outside agencies, vendors, and just a mid-tier marketing manager. It got you this far, but you still find yourself working in the business, not just on the business far more than you’d like.
That’s why the Fractional CMO might still be the best choice for you. It allows you to test-drive a CMO, check on your current marketing effectiveness, and help organize the plan and systems properly from a safe and conservative point of view because you don’t have to overcommit yourself. Then, if you love the fractional CMO test drive, maybe you hire them to do ongoing work for you, and they can direct your existing marketing manager or director and marketing technicians.
This kind of outsourcing option is very appealing in the “new normal” where everybody is virtual anyway. Then, if you really feel it is necessary, you can offer to bring the Fractional CMO in full-time or give him an incentive to spend more time focusing on your business.
Alternatively, it will also give you time to find a full-time person, working with the Fractional CMO to find that ideal candidate. After all, nobody will be able to sniff out a great CMO like another CMO.
So there are the cost savings, the time savings, the headache and hassle savings, and the practical matter that it allows you to test-drive and ultimately transition into a higher level of executive management and control, with you remaining in the driver’s seat.
Incidentally, the CMO is the highest turnover C-suite level position in any large organization. I’m not sure why, but it probably has to do with some of the reasons I have outlined, as well as the fact that the CMO is so front-and-center in lead generation and promotion, kind of like a Masters of Ceremonies in a large event.
In the Hunger Games, the game master had the limelight but was also the first head to roll if the games didn’t go well. A CFO or a COO can usually hide in their more protected positions much longer than the CMO. Since this is the case, you save a lot of time and money by simply making the right selection in the first place, and therefore, a Fractional CMO makes even more sense.
Who and What is to blame?
Look, you aren’t to blame. There is no way you can simultaneously know the ins and outs and nuances of your entire business, manage the “adult daycare” of employees, run the whole show and somehow also understand the complicated world of advertising shysters, marketing freelancers, and corporate bureaucratic suckups that are masters at playing you so they can have a cushy desk job. Marketing and Sales are the most important aspect of any business. That’s why the need is so high. That’s also why so many wannabes want you to hire them and yet can’t deliver. Sure, some can, but they are in really high demand. I know because I have to turn away a lot of business. I have to be really selective to make sure it is a good fit so that I deliver results and everybody wins. You don’t have time to mess around, and neither do I.
The real blame goes to the weirdness of the marketing “industry.” Sadly, with the ten thousand emails you get every week from somebody in India wanting to fix your SEO to the SAAS company trying to get you to upgrade to their wiz-bang software, it’s bewildering. There are too many choices, too many advertising options, too many platforms, too many options, and they contradict each other! One guy says Google PPC is the only way and SEO sucks, and the next Guru says that Google is a waste of time and you need to be on Facebook or perhaps even TikTok. The truth is, it depends on who your perfect customer is and where your target market is spending their time! You can’t let a media salesperson or a marketing technician who masters one particular skill persuade you that they have the only way. They don’t, and it all depends on your particular business and set of circumstances.
Why now?
This is a great time to get started because there has never been more volatility in the economy. Obviously, Home Services businesses are particularly sensitive to changes in the real estate market, and nobody has a crystal ball. Contractors who are flush with leads right now might be famished and starving six months from now. The time to do the planning and establish a stronghold for market share domination is NOW, not when the market shifts. If you wait until the tide turns (and it inevitably does), you are too late, and your competitors who worked hard in preparation can eat your lunch.
Right now, I am looking for only two more high-level “Engaged” clients. I charge $10,000 per month with a 3-month commitment. Alternatively, I charge $7,500 for a half-day consult (preceded by a week of discovery and research so that the half-day is super productive). The half-day option is designed to deliver a solid plan you can either execute yourself or hire me to lead your team to get it done for you. In either case, I have options for after the initial work for those that want ongoing leadership, support, help, and continued execution of the plans.
As soon as I get another client or two, I will be raising my prices.
I can also only take on a few clients at a time, as I do not have endless hours of energy. High-level thinking requires far more energy than a typical marketing job. Although I still consider myself very young, none of us are nineteen anymore, able to party all night and make it through work the next day without so much as letting on there is a lingering hangover. Heck, I don’t even party anymore anyway—I wouldn’t be able to survive it!
Because I am highly specialized, there are only so many of a particular niche or business vertical within home services that I can take on in order to avoid conflicts of interest. If your business category is taken in your area, you are out of luck. So for that sake alone, you should act quickly (before your competitors do).
People are starting to look at Fractional CMO as not only a viable option but a preferred one. The search volume for Fractional CMO, a keyword that you would think is incredibly obscure and was almost non-existent before the pandemic, is increasing steadily, according to Google Trends. Check it out:
The spike at the right side is only the start. As more entrepreneurs and business owners figure this out, the more popular our relatively tiny group of specialists is going to become. You benefit from being an early adopter of this superior model of hiring.
In addition to raising my prices, I may open my final slots for new clients to the highest bidder. It worked for eBay. In the Seattle area, where I live, we’ve seen houses that were $250,000 just a few short years ago sell at over $1,000,000… and people are waving inspections and throwing cash at the sellers. They do this willingly. That’s the power and reality of supply and demand. So if you don’t want to get stuck paying three or four times as much for my services, I suggest you contact me immediately.
Why should you trust me?
Why should you trust me? Well, if I were you, I’d be skeptical of all marketing people (as a whole, the reputation is one step above used car salesmen, but don’t hold that against the used car salesmen). So you don’t have to because I guarantee my work.
Suppose you aren’t happy with the results we produce together and don’t feel it is worth it. You can get a full refund of all monies paid to you or the difference in the shortfall of revenue generated (see my Extra 90-Day Ultimate ROI Guarantee below). I have four separate guarantees, and in the first 90-days, if you aren’t happy, you get to keep the marketing plans, the spreadsheets, the analysis, and all the proprietary information I bring to the table for free and pocket $2,000 for your “trouble.”
Plus, I do have a good track record. I haven’t just helped one home services contractor business make an extra 4 Million dollars in one year, but I have helped companies in other industries do very well too! Not to mention the countless little startups that would have failed had we not built their marketing from scratch for them. I’m not a greenhorn, and I know how to get you leads first (before your competitors).
If even one idea helps you, and you increase your revenue by only 5%, it will have been more than worth it. Using that admittedly over-simplified math, a company doing $10 Million can easily generate an additional $500,000. A thirty grand investment to get 500k is over a 16X return on investment. Is that realistic? Well, as you know, big doors can swing on small hinges when it comes to marketing and lead generation. The math alone makes it worth testing, don’t you think?
How does it work?
Here’s how it works:
First, you fill out the form I have on my website so that I can vet out the spammers from real people like you. All you have to do is answer a few simple questions, like your name, email, phone, website, and average annual revenue. This way, my assistant can be sure you are a real human being.
Next, we set up a discovery call where we can get clarity on your marketing goals. This is a 15-minute call to meet each other and go on a “mini-date.” I don’t believe we should get married before dating, so there is no way to give me money before we determine we’re a good fit. I don’t want a dime until I know I can help you, and I am 100% confident that you will get a great ROI from our relationship.
In this marketing discovery and strategy call, you can ask me any questions you like, and I will likely give you ideas that can make you money right away. This call is 100% free, with no strings attached. There is no obligation for you to do anything whatsoever. In fact, if we do this call, and you don’t feel it was worth it at all for any reason, and you feel I wasted your time, I’ll write you a check for $200 to make it up to you.
I’ve never had to write this check, by the way, because if you and I even get on a call in the first place, it is because we are likely a good fit, and just trying to confirm this fact. Usually, I can give some great pointers at the very least, and we will know whether or not we should work together in under 15 minutes.
If that goes well, we decide together what makes the most sense, Engaged for $10K or the Half-Day Consult for $7,500. I’ll put together a proposal and send you a DocuSign agreement that outlines our engagement. My agreement is pretty straightforward, simple, and protects both parties equally—no need to get into employment contracts or anything like that. I’m an independent business, so you don’t need to cover payroll expenses or benefits.
After the discovery call, if you decide you want to hire me as your Fractional CMO, here are the options you have:
CMOx Engaged
- A fractional Chief Marketing Officer for your business for 10 hours per week
- Deploys the Functional Marketing® Framework to build out marketing strategy, establish KPIs and reporting, define positioning, and more
- Functional Marketing® Systems Map delivered after the first 30 days
- Quarterly Planning calls, Sprint Planning and Review calls led weekly, and Daily Stand-Ups with the team
- Hire, train, evaluate and fire vendors, employees, & contractors
- 3-month minimum commitment (short-term, high-octane)
Investment: Starting at $10,000/month
CMOx Half-Day Consultative Strategy Session
- 4-hour Strategy Session for your team using the Functional Marketing® Framework to focus your marketing strategy. Custom, bespoke based on your company’s needs.
- 7-day Preparatory Period via email correspondence
- Delivery includes an immediate marketing punch list, a list of blindspots, and marketing campaigns for the next 1-6 months
- Investment: Starting at $7,500
After the discovery call, we schedule our first strategy meeting, and we get to work.
If, after the Engaged Package or Half-Day Consult, you want to keep working with me, we can talk about my Advisor level, which varies depending on the client arrangement, starting at $3,000 per month.
Some clients, after they feel I am a truly valuable addition to their team, decide to offer me equity, stock, stock options, a royalty, revenue or profit share, or some other performance and incentive-based option, which I am open to, depending on the particulars.
My Unheard-Of Performance-based Guarantees
- Total Unconditional No-Questions-Asked Guarantee For the First 30 Days
If within the first 30 days after signing on as a client you feel for ANY REASON WHATSOEVER that I am not providing value to you, or that my ideas are no good, or that you don’t like my personality or my haircut, then all you have to do is say the word and I will IMMEDIATELY REFUND 100% of your money. - Initial Consult and Marketing Clarity Call Guarantee
If you feel I “cheated” you out of your time or that I tried some high-pressure sales technique to get you to buy anything from me, then you can call me out, and you aren’t obligated to do anything. If you feel I wasted your time, just tell me why, and I’ll write you a check for $200 to make it up to you. Getting on this call is simply for us to determine if we are a good fit for each other, but I also want to provide you with value. - 90-Day CMO Performance Guarantee
If you make an honest all-out effort to execute my strategies, but you are unable to get any positive results toward your ROI, you can get a full refund of all money you paid within the 90 days we work together, PLUS I’ll fork over another $2,000 out of my pocket for your trouble. You get to keep the marketing plans, the spreadsheets, the analysis, and all the proprietary information I bring to the table for free. - The EXTRA 90-Day Ultimate ROI Guarantee
If you decide to keep working with me for an additional 90-days after the initial period and sign up for ongoing services, then you’ll qualify for my Ultimate ROI Guarantee, which means that if you don’t make additional revenue equal to or greater than the cost of my services, I’ll refund the difference between what you paid me and the revenue shortfall. In other words, I guarantee that our strategies will cover the cost of my fees for days 91 to 180. If you pay $10,000 for three months and I only help you earn an additional $20,000, then I’ll refund you the $10,000 difference, essentially covering my own costs!
How can you get started?
Answer just a few questions on a short form and schedule your call.
What do you have to lose?
Don’t forget that the market is volatile, and your competitors are ALWAYS looking for a way to edge in on you and steal market share. Not only that, but new upstarts are eyeing your success and thinking they can do it better. Of course, most won’t, but all it takes is one truly determined entrepreneur with a slightly different offer to carve out a section of your business, robbing you of valuable profit. Now is the time to get on the cutting edge of lead generation and to stay there permanently.
If you don’t act now, you very well stand the chance of being too late since I only work with one specific niche in one vertical per territory. As home service businesses are obviously extremely competitive and sensitive to overlapping territories, this creates a potential situation for my clients and me. To eliminate potential conflict, I simply won’t take on any direct competitor with any of my existing clients. First-come, first-serve, and you snooze, you lose.
Besides, I am not going to keep my current prices for long. Honestly, although my fee may seem like a lot of money for smaller businesses, this is a drop-in-the-marketing-budget-bucket for the established companies I work with, and the ROI makes it a no-brainer. I will raise my prices the minute I start to fill up. I don’t have any other option. I can’t help everyone. Besides, I don’t even like everyone and can get a bit grumpy dealing with tire-kickers, so I might raise prices just because. You are best served by taking me up on this offer while I am in a good mood 😉
Remember, if you don’t create your ultimate marketing machine using our Functional Marketing® Framework and other proprietary systems with me as your Fractional CMO, you are in danger of missing an opportunity to grow your business and scale up dramatically. If you aren’t taking advantage of new and better opportunities, you are sliding backward and losing ground in the competitive landscape. In business, there is no maintaining the status quo and treading water. You are either swimming or drowning. Floating in one place is temporary, and the sharks are circling.
Best to ACT NOW.
Sincerely,
P.S. Don’t forget; you have nothing to lose. I am taking all the risks.
We help home services contractor business owners just like you to develop market-dominating growth plans and marketing strategies with measurable ROI and rule their digital agencies and advertising vendors with an iron fist, better than hiring any marketing manager, consultant, or assistant, even if you are stressed, and have been burned in the past.
I offer 3 different guarantees to safeguard your investment and eliminate your risk. There really is no better way to get started with a Fractional CMO.
