Latest / Booked Out / Kee Hart Marketing: Jen McKee on Personal Branding and Social Media for the Trades

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Kee Hart Marketing: Jen McKee on Personal Branding and Social Media for the Trades · Booked Out

• speaker-0: Welcome back to Booked Out, the podcast that helps home service business owners scale their business. And I'm your host, Murphy Nadald. Today we are here with Jen McKee. Jen is the founder and CEO of Keyhart Marketing, an award-winning social media agency specializing in the home services and trades industry. Her team has produced more than 30,000 pieces of content for over 200 trades businesses. She's a sought after speaker and mentor who helps trade businesses with visibility, attract top talent, and turn social media into a true business asset with the show up, stand out, and scale framework. Welcome to Booked Out Jan. We're glad to have you on here today. speaker-1: Thank you. I'm excited to be here. I appreciate that intro. I could see the three S's were a little hard to say. My three S framework. speaker-0: We'll get down. We'll be pros at the end of today. But I've heard great things about speaker-1: Absolutely. You're not the only one that trips over I hear all kinds of words put in there for the S. speaker-0: Yeah, we're excited to have you on today. Thanks for joining us. And we were we were just at your event that you threw a few months ago. The refer pro team was down there. The growth experience, it was phenomenal. You're a legend. so glad to have you on today. We're excited to dive in. speaker-1: Thank you. I appreciated y'all being there. That was a lot of fun. And I think that you I think a lot of people met you guys there and were excited to add a refer pro to their to their stack of getting new customers. speaker-0: Absolutely. It was a great a great event. we heard great things about about every from everyone there. It was well received by everyone. So congrats. I think that was the first one, right? And that'll be an annual conference now moving forward. Yeah. speaker-1: We're working on it right now. It's exciting. speaker-0: Well tell us how you got here, Jen. Tell us a little bit about your backgrounds, how you got here, key heart marketing, anything that would be interesting to know here. speaker-1: thank you. Well, I let's see, I started off in the restaurant industry and worked for 17 years in restaurants. So that was a lot of fun. I was a restaurant manager for a little while and decided I didn't want to do that anymore. But I wanted to figure out a way to I was looking for like my million dollar idea, like what can I do that I can control my own success and not have to depend on something somebody else created. And ended up doing marketing for a friend of mine who owned a couple of bars. And I was doing a lot on Facebook and Instagram for them in order to fill the bar. So for different watch parties or themed parties that we would have and started to recognize that social media was really necessary, but also like a lot of work. And a lot of business owners probably didn't want to do it on their own. So I just kind of started freelancing social media. In 2021, I was introduced to a plumber who wanted to really like up their social media game. And she wanted to be on every platform. At the time, I was looking at TikTok as a place for business. this was like right after COVID-ish, you know. So COVID is really when TikTok blew up. It's when millennials started paying attention to it. And so I I was thinking like I wanted to put a business on TikTok. She wanted to be on TikTok. It was just a match made in TikTok Heaven. And we we had a lot of success with that. And a lot of people started asking her who was doing her social, so she was able to refer me. And that's how I found myself in social media for home services. speaker-0: Yeah, I love it. Congrats. What an awesome story. where where are things today? What are you focused on? What are your goals? What's the what's the focus of the business today a few years later? speaker-1: I mean, we still do social media for home services. We're constantly looking on what's cool is that my differentiator at the time was TikTok, but really short form video is the most necessary piece of content online right now. And it's still something that so many people struggle to do for a lot of reasons. they don't know what to do. or what to say, they don't know how to edit, they don't know they don't have the time to do those things. So being able to support home service businesses really elevate their social media presence, but be consistent and have video is it kind of our whole thing still. speaker-0: Yeah, I love that. Everyone that we know, we work in the trades. Obviously the Booked Out Podcast is separate from ReferPro, but but in day to day at ReferPro, every business that we know that works with Keyhard Marketing and Jen and your team is is blown away at the results and and the the brand and the voice that you're able to build for them. So we've heard great things across the industry. Coming as an outsider when you first started your business, what did you see in the trades? it's an it's an amazing place, obviously, but what stood out to you for Positive on the negative side, anything that was interesting to you when you first got into the trades as you started your business? speaker-1: Yeah, there's a couple things. I mean, number one, honestly, people when I got started were not looking at TikTok as like an actual platform that was important. That was like a question in every call that I had with people is like, should I really be on TikTok? That's not a question anymore. Like people know that this is a place. social media was not done well across the board where it's completely leveled up over the years that just in general. But Aside from the social media part, some things that I notice that I think are really interesting. I'm definitely like a pattern seeker. Like I'm I always am trying to find patterns and things, but a lot of people in home services, I work with a lot of husband and wife teams, which I love. And so there's a lot more women in home services than people might think. And a lot of it comes from that is that partnership. Although there's a lot of women who own their own home services company without their husband or without a man with them, which is another whole thing. but then on top of that, there's so many people in home services that come from nothing and have been self-made and self-built. And I can relate to that and I appreciate that. I think that is what makes this group of people so magical is that they've all kind of built their own legacy or are in the process of building a legacy and that's it's not like that in every industry. So I think that's really special about this industry in particular. speaker-0: Absolutely. We just had your friend Carrie Kelch on the podcast a few weeks ago. she's phenomenal. The story yes made just a phenomenal story building A plus and still building it and such a great business. we we love working with them. speaker-1: Yeah. speaker-0: Yeah, she's phenomenal. We had we had the sisterhood group here in the refer pro office separately from that, doing a little visit and and demo and walkthrough and Q and A session and so Awesome things happening in the trades. I I totally agree with you and it's so fun to see that. speaker-1: when I had the growth experience conference, that was like one of the big things that a lot of men were saying. They're like, gosh, there's so many women here. They're like, somehow you threw a women's conference in home services. And I mean, I have a lot of women connections in home services. I've been a part of the sisterhood since almost since it was created, which I'm grateful for that. and I I like I said, most of my clients are husband and wife teams. I we work with a lot of women in general. There's a lot of women in the trades. speaker-0: There are. I love it. It's growing and it and it's it's moving quick. I love to see that. Speaking about social media and personal branding, as we talked to, you know, people that might be listening to this, business owners, operators, you know, small from small and large trades businesses, why does that personal branding matter so much to these business owners? speaker-1: I mean, there's a lot of reasons. One of is it's your differentiator. I mean, branding is so important, but people still always buy from people and if people know you, and like you and trust you, they're gonna be way more willing to buy from you. And it's so much easier to Convert somebody who already trusts you and already knows you and already likes you than it is for somebody who and has no idea who you are. And your personal brand really gives you the opportunity to to stand out. And that's really what we teach. I mean, social media is a great place for that. Your personal brand is encompassing, it's not just social media. Social media is a it's like a leverage point of everything else that you're doing in marketing. And it's the same on the business side too, but If you are out networking, you can post it on your social media to get more visibility and to get more connection from that. If you are doing something in your business behind the scenes, you can post that on your social media. If you're running commercials, you can post that on your social media. If you're doing, if you're sponsoring the local basketball team, you can post that on your social media. So there's all of these ways that social media can kind of just elevate everything else that you're doing, but Personal branding is really the opportunity to elevate yourself, to stand out, to be different. And not every company has to be like this founder-faced, founder-led company, but it certainly doesn't hurt. Like I would say that it helps a lot. The problem with that is that once you leave, your b like you take your asset with you. So I don't know how if your business is as if it's worth as much, but you're still worth a lot. So then you can do more with it. Maybe you leave that business, you can start something else because you already have this group of people who are following you, who like you, who know you and trust you and are willing to buy your next thing. I speaker-0: Yeah, yeah. speaker-1: feel like I went on a couple of different tangents with that. speaker-0: Yeah, no, I love it. There's there's so much gold in there. I wanna double tap on a couple of things. The first one, what do you say to these business owners that you work with? Obviously, sounds like being on camera is important for that personal brand and your social media content. There's a lot of owners that that's not natural. I'd say the majority probably that's not natural. So what do you tell them? How do you coach them up when you start working with this business these business owners on how to how to be comfortable in front of the camera and and make that an important piece of what they're doing? speaker-1: I I think there's a couple sides to that. I I just talked to an owner and she's like, I'm having nightmares about being on camera. And I'm like, you know what? You don't have to. Somebody else can do it. You have a great brand. Your husband can be the face of the brand. You can, you can do something else with it. It can be somebody else. But if it's not a debilitating anxiety that you're getting from it, then I think that you should try it. it's not comfortable for anybody at first. It's something that takes practice and after time you're gonna feel more comfortable. Don't be worried about getting it right. Don't worry about like if you're not doing it because you're worried about what other people are gonna say, you're worried about what your high school friends or the soccer team's parents or whoever is gonna say about you. Like, is that really a reason to not like creating content can help build your business. It can help you get more customers. It can help continue to build whatever goals and dreams that you have. And it's one of like the easiest things, simplest things that you can do. And it doesn't cost any money if you just literally push record on your phone and then post it. And so you're not willing to do that because of what somebody else might say. Like that doesn't that doesn't make sense. So I think that there are some people who just like cannot. But if you are not somebody in of that and instead it's just uncomfortable or you don't know how or you've never done it. I would say I would challenge you to just do it. My advice is always like, don't re-watch it. Just post it and it and start to get that visibility and start to put your personality out there because you have the opportunity to impact so many people with your story, with your knowledge, with your offers. like, do you want your kids' soccer teammates, parents to buy their new AC system from some, you know, I don't know, ja what do they call them, chuck in a truck or something? Or would you rather them have the opportunity to buy from you and your team and the service and the warranty and the guarantee that you have? Like, why would you not want them to know what you do? speaker-0: Yeah, absolutely. I love that. And how do you how do you separate this? I mean, there's obviously listening to this, there's there's large private equity backed business owners. There are small, you know, chuck in a truck, owner operator situations. How does this differ? Does this have does this only work for, you know, founder led shops or can this work for absentee owners or private equity backed businesses where there's maybe not a face to the company anymore? speaker-1: I I think the personal brand is like it's personal, right? So whatever you're doing, you build your personal brand for you. When you're talking about a company, if they're private equity or n absentee founder, somebody is going to be the face of the brand. Like we have a company out in Florida and there's like four guys that are in every video. They're super famous in their community now. People see them at the gas station. When they see them in their home, they recognize them immediately. I kind of like the idea that there's four of them because then if one of them leaves it, they still have three more and they could add somebody to the group rather than just depending on one person. Cause that's always the problem, right? If it's not the founder, the people could leave. And especially now that they're building their online presence, they have an asset now that they could take to another company and actually could help them stand out to another company. Or they could start to build their own company and they know how to create content. They know what's going to make you know views on social media. So It doesn't have to be you. It could be anybody. But just know that whoever it is, they are building an asset for themselves along with the brand. So when you have a nicely branded company, a really strong brand, and we know what that is, right? When you have a really strong brand, it's a lot easier to create great content because everything looks really good. Everything looks really branded. The people, the face maybe isn't as important because you can have multiple people doing the videos. We have plenty of really strong branded companies where there's Three, five, seven people who are in all of their videos. So there's almost like characters, right? These different characters that play in these different parts of the videos. And we do fun videos, we do educational videos, we do culture videos, we do b-roll, and everything looks really cohesive. When you're doing your personal brand, it's more you, and then you have that as an asset for you. So it doesn't have to be founder led. And like I said, we have a client who's like, I'm not gonna be on video. That's fine. We need some people on video. We need your really great brand. We need your trucks. We need your shirts. We need your office. All of the things and it'll still look really great. speaker-0: Yeah, absolutely. I love that. We've talked a little bit about, you know, the key heart marketing piece specifically. I'm curious your perspective on marketing as a whole across the trades. What are you seeing working right now? What's not working? What's changed over the past few years? What what's your perspective there? speaker-1: So just from like a tactic, marketing tactic, one that a lot of people are talking about right now, which surprised me so it sticks in my head, is direct mail being really successful for people. but I think that no matter what business you have, you have to consider your entire marketing ecosystem. I'm actually about to do a training on this with my sisters, for my sisters and the sisterhood because A lot of people struggle with this marketing ecosystem idea. And what that is, is basically there's all these different places, entry points that people have into your business. And the goal is to continue to move them through. And so once they find out who you are, how do you capture their information so that you can continue to nurture them? And then once you continue to nurture them, how do you move them into a place where they're going to buy from you? And then once they buy from you, how are you going to create a great experience that then they can refer you? And once you're done working with them, how Do you make it easy for them to refer you, which is great for refer pro and it's something that we were some it's what refer pro does and it's something that we actually implemented this year because no matter what business you have, everybody's like, referrals are my best source. Great. But like, how can you continue to get more referrals? And that takes getting great testimonials. It takes asking for referrals, it takes reminding people to get referrals. So all of these things are your whole ecosystem and you want all of these things and you want ways to bring people into your ecosystem so that you can make it into like a big circle where people I keep hitting my mic, sorry, where people are like coming through and then bringing more people in. speaker-0: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we look at that day to day on the refer pro side of things and and we're looking at, you know, as booked out. The purpose of this booked out podcast is to help service business owners keep their keep their top of funnel full, keep the leads coming through and be efficient with those. And from a marketing perspective, specifically ROAS at the end of the day is is what these decision makers and business owners care about. And as you talked about, filling that top of funnel, you know, direct mailers have have been really interesting to dive into recently. And and with refer pro specific, we've talked a lot about this lifecycle marketing and and these the ability to stay front of mind with your customers. You mentioned it and every one of everyone that we work with says referrals are their, you know, their highest converting leads, they're the golden standard of leads. Right. And then there's no systemization or optimization behind those. And so it's how do you stay front of mind with your companies? I think people underestimate that six months after you get your HVAC installed or tuned up. you're not really thinking about the HVAC company. People go back to their day-to-day life. And so you're not thinking about the company. You're not thinking about the referral program specifically. And so staying front of mind and giving people ways to remember that experience that they had and then to capitalize on that. which is, yeah, all these ways to stay to top a funnel, you know, and then convert those down through. And when you look at the efficiency in these home service business owners funnels, all these different mechanisms and the way that they balance their ROAS. We always want to hear people's perspectives on that because there's always so many interesting things for for these business owners to try. So awesome awesome feedback. speaker-1: Before we move away from that, I mean, podcasts are also part of a marketing ecosystem. There's so many things that that are for visibility. And like, I'm just thinking, you know, like you talked about ROAs, and not everything that you do in marketing has a direct return on the investment. it's that's just not how marketing works. And there's so many things, especially at the top, that are going to improve your cost per lead as they move down because you've given people a place where they can get to know you. And so that's where social media comes in. Sometimes email marketing can be in different places, usually around the middle funnel, but it still like could be a nurture area. at podcasts, there's so many times that that we get clients and like if we were to just look at, well, they clicked on this And then they or they were referred to as from this person or whatever. But then as you get to talking to them, they're like, well, actually, I listened to your podcast. I've been following you on social media. I have been on your email list for whatever, whatever. And so that happens in every single business. So like you can't just think about your return on your investment because if you're not thinking about the entire place, all of the places that people are seeing you, the billboards, the trucks, And then even when you're looking for referrals, that then you're you have to consider the experience that you're offering from the time that the phones are answered until the person leaves a the job. Like there's so many things that all are encompassing in your marketing and bringing in leads and driving down your cost per lead. speaker-0: Yeah, I love that you brought that up. And and one thing that we see specifically with business owners is most people want more leads, obviously. And I think that's helpful for any business. But we see a sales issue with a lot of companies where there's tons of leads from all these different channels that they have, but but they're not actually getting speed to lead or converting those in an efficient way. And so new leads in the top of the funnel don't actually mean anything if if the business is unable to convert those and the go give them a great experience. So yeah, there's there's a whole comprehensive view there. that's some interesting insight. That Chan, thank you. speaker-1: There's so there's literally so many places that you could have leaks an in your funnel. So it's like where it and you know, I talk to people on the vendor side, which is why I decided to do this marketing ecosystem master class that I'm running. But on the vendor side, they're like, I don't have enough s I don't have enough sales or I don't have I don't have enough sal I have a sales problem. And so then I start talking to them. I'm like, Okay, so does it like Are you you know you're getting all these leads and then you're not converting them? Well, no, I'm not getting any leads. Okay. That's actually not a sales problem. You have a marketing problem. People don't know that you exist. Or maybe they do. Maybe you have a capture problem and people don't know what to do once they find you, which happens a lot. People go viral, they have no offer, they have no capture. There's nothing to bring people. So there could be places all throughout, and you're right. A lot of times it it's like the booking rate. What is your booking rate? my booking rate's 90%. Is your booking rate 90%? Or is are like, do you have leads coming in that are now being disqualified as leads? And why are they being disqualified as leads? And where are these coming from? And you know, like there's just so many places that you can look at to see what's actually what your problem is. If it's a marketing problem, if it's a sales problem, all of it could fall under operations. But look at the entire system and search for your leaks. speaker-0: Yeah, it's interesting. I we could talk about the sales and and marketing funnel all day. There's so many interesting inputs and leaks and and ways that businesses can improve that. And it's fun to see how businesses do do some of those things so well. And then there's some some low hanging fruit of ways to improve that and clean it up. But Yeah, I'm curious on your side with Key Hard marketing, what are some of the first things when you get a new client and you're working with a new business? What are the first things you attack, some of the first posts you put out there? speaker-1: So whenever we start working with people, we start our first 30 days with a content shoot. We get like all of our content library. we love a good we love the trends. I know some people are like, it's so cringy. All these people dancing around. And you know, it's funny because it was like when I was first talking to people about TikTok, I'm like, you don't have to dance on TikTok. What you don't, you know, and TikTok came from Musicly, which was like this dancing app. But right now there are a lot of trends where people are like dancing and lip syncing on TikTok. And the whole thing about social media is if you can get the visibility, then you start to get people's attention. And that is how you use social media as an asset. You start to leverage it and you can really, like I said, top of the marketing funnel. But so we love the trends. We're always starting off with some trends just to like get some great visibility. We love a good like owner's post, meet the owners or meet the managers or at kind of like storytelling type stuff. We love anything, especially right now we're coming into Q4. dress up days, like if it's football, if it's Halloween, if it's Thanksgiving, get together, Christmas party, ugly sweater day, any of those, always really overperforming. And then consistently like overperforming content, our birthdays and anniversaries, they are definitely can be a ha I don't wanna say a hassle, but like a whole thing to keep up with. Like new team member, team member's not here anymore. The we have the wrong birthday, whatever. But like birthdays and anniversaries are always high performing posts on social. speaker-0: Yeah, I love that. That's awesome. You've talked about social not just from a a lead generation perspective, but also from a recruiting perspective. How does that work and what do you coach your businesses on there? speaker-1: We've all we always hear that people who have a consistent social media presence are have a better time hiring, that they're just able to hire the best talent. it's important social media should be your people, your team, n versus like graphics or Canva or letting your marketing company just like put your logo on a stock video that they're posting across a hundred different accounts that really does nothing for you. But if you are posting your team, if you're posting the things that you're doing, your trainings, your behind the scenes, that's naturally gonna attract some of the best talent. TikTok is a great place for that. Instagram is a great place for that. You can also run ads for hiring. We do that a lot whenever clients are like specifically hiring for positions. But just all the time posting on social, like I said, your team, your people, your culture is gonna attract some great talent. speaker-0: Yeah, I love it. What would you advise to someone listening to this that's got twelve trucks, an eight track company, twelve trucks, twelve technicians, and really no social presence to this point? What would be your advice to them to get started this week? speaker-1: I mean, no matter what size you are, I would advise to get started. I think one of the things that people run into is like, how do I get the content? and there's a couple things that you can do. You can yourself get the content, you can ask somebody in the office to be in charge, you can incentivize your team for doing it, it could be a part of their checklist, it could be they're already taking photos usually for Service Titan and House Call Pro. Those are not great social photos because they usually have nothing differentiating. They don't have your brand. They don't have people. But I've seen clients that ask for a selfie in front of the truck. I've seen clients. So we actually sell a quarterly content calendar. They're $7. I swear. They're worth they're worth gold. They have posts Monday through Friday for four three months, whatever that quarter is. We also do we do static and video, we include trends at educational things, things that are related to holidays. All the like trades holidays are in there. And I seen people just like copy and paste those, not clients, people who buy the calendar, they'll copy and paste those to their team and send them out in a text, especially on slower days, like hey, if you have a time right now, you know, and they kind of tell them what to do, like set your camera up here. You can talk through this, you can actually hold the camera and talk behind it and explain it to me. So getting your team involved is fun. And then one of the best things to do from there is to celebrate it. And so the next time that you have your town hall or training, celebrating the content that perform well, celebrating the people that are giving you the content. So you can start to build that culture of capturing content and posting it. speaker-0: Yeah, I like that. We'll have to we'll have to buy that content calendar from you. It's got some good stuff, I imagine. speaker-1: It's good. speaker-0: talking about the trades in general, we've done this a little bit. I I love this space and something that's so special about the trades. Every time I see, you know, we're at shop tours almost every week and just how the trades pour into each other and share their best practices and tips and recommendations and show each other how they can grow their business really is one of my favorite things about the trades that's unique and you don't see that in in many other industries. curious though, I I want your perspective and expertise on some of these areas. AI has obviously changed the trades a lot recently. Private equity, it's an interesting time. Things are growing really quickly. Very exciting time in my opinion. There's a ton of opportunity for every trade's business owner at this point. but curious to see where where does AI fit in right now from a content perspective? What are you seeing across the industry? You know, AI in general, AI as it pertains to content specifically. speaker-1: I mean, AI is a great tool. I use AI all the time. I think I was just telling you I vibe code a lot of landing pages with AI. I definitely wouldn't vibe code your website. it makes me uncomfortable that people are using AI to create their CRM, mostly from like a safety perspective and also from the perspective of like how much do you know about what you're creating? Meaning like Developers have a lot more knowledge. And I'm not saying it won't be able to be done in the future. It does make me uncomfortable. But to using AI as a way to connect a whole bunch of tools together is something that we do all the time. And from a content perspective, there's a lot of cool stuff. Like we are using Notebook LM to take all of the information that we have about clients and help us to create like really, really specific. content calendars using what we have and then putting R Ip into it as far as our frameworks and you know so being able to like do more with less time is super cool and just be a lot more intentional about things. Love that. I don't love AI generated photos. they are almost always obvious. The AI generated Chat GPT, what are those graphic, like whatever, flyer type things. The problem with those is that they have a certain look to them. And so then it starts to look like everybody else's that is created the same way. AI generated video, we test it on the ad side more than the organic side. It does take some really great prompting to get it right. it is kind of cool that you can like use a photo of somebody and turn them into that. So there's some stuff that you can do there. Love AI a lot for researching for you. So have AI go out and it find it or it give it content that you like, ask it how you can recreate it. there's some video editing tools that use AI to help edit videos faster. I haven't found a solution to like you don't need any humans involved in your content at all. The people that I have seen that have automated content completely, it's it has no engagement. It's just not, it's not great social content yet. So not to say that maybe in the future there won't be some great solutions. It would still take people's involvement because you still need it context. You still need photos and videos. So that's kind of where AI and content is right now. speaker-0: Have you noticed any shifts as it w with your strategy and what you're recommending to businesses as as the industry shifts from, you know, Google search optimization, SEO to now AI recommendations for for finding home service businesses? Does that change any of your strategy or what you recommend to post or what those what those models scrape to make those recommendations? speaker-1: I mean, they scrape YouTube. it started off with a lot of Reddit. I don't know how much Reddit is still involved in those, but to it's not easy for home service companies to just like use Reddit as a social channel. I've always kind of been like I've always questioned that strategy when it's brought up as like, you should use Reddit. Because I use Reddit regularly and it's not a social media channel. It's a community conversation. So it doesn't work the same way as like Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or something like that. videos being indexed by Google from every platform. So Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, of course, even your website. So that's why video is so, so, so important right now. having keywords and hashtags and geotags in your videos, making sure that your bios are fully filled out with your information. So your bio should say air conditioning repair in San Antonio, Texas. It shouldn't say like, we're the best in town with like nothing relevant about what you do. Like your tagline isn't as important in your bio as making sure that it's SEO ready. LinkedIn is highly ranking on Google. So it there's a lot of like rankings. But what I will say too is that people are Researching you on social media. So wherever else they're finding you, they're going to your social media to see if you're real, to see what type of content you're posting, to do more research on who you are, especially millennials, which is like prime homeowners right now. So social media presence is important not only for your Google search, but also just for the way that people are consuming content right now and the way that people are making decisions. speaker-0: Yeah, I love that. That's that's insightful. What are you seeing across the trades as it as it pertains to private equity? How is that affecting businesses from your perspective and and specifically when it comes to their marketing strategy and the way that you work with these businesses on the social front? speaker-1: You know, I hear a lot of people, privately owned companies want to post on their social media a a bunch that they are not private equity. and I would I would not focus so much on that. I would focus more on who you are rather than who you're not. And and maybe I I I've I really love this company that I met recently, called Elevate Market Research. And they do market research across the country for home service companies, and they have a lot of information about what people actually care about in their marketing. and they don't across every age group, they just don't care as much about that. They care about that they can trust you, that you are going to guarantee your work, that you offer warranties. they don't care as much that your family are locally owned. And so If you are family and locally owned, then do the things that you can do. Be in the community, meet people, shake hands and kiss babies, have a lot of fun with your marketing. And so don't rely so heavily on just like Google PPC LSA have to win that game. Do all of the things that private equity is not doing and win that game. And you'll go a lot further than worrying so much about what they're doing. speaker-0: Yeah, I love that. That's awesome, Jen. Thank you. We could go all day. this is awesome. We we do lightning rounds. So I've got a a bunch of questions I want to go through quickly with you and and get your take on as well. first one is what's your favorite book? Any book recommendations that have have changed your personal life or the way you look at business? speaker-1: So I'm reading Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself by Joe Dispensa right now, which is really blowing my mind. So that is a great book. speaker-0: What is the most overrated marketing advice in the trades right now? speaker-1: Mm. I can't think of a good one. I think that like marketing's there's not a silver bullet. So I can't think of anything that's totally overrated besides just the argument about whether you're doing enough for AI. Like I think that that's going on and on. So speaker-0: What's one metric that you watch every day in your business? speaker-1: Like one metric for my business or for our clients? speaker-0: Yeah, maybe both. Yeah. Both would be interesting to the to listeners. speaker-1: For our clients on social media, we're looking at engagement and it overperforming content because it you can't compare yourself to an account that has twelve times the amount of followers that you do. So you have to just look at yourself versus yourself. And we use AI to help us with that, which is really cool. for my business, it what was it that you said metric? speaker-0: Yeah, what are the important metrics you're watching? speaker-1: We run on EOS, so we have like all these scorecards that we're looking at. I love to see praise hands at we have a praise hand slack channel, so people shouting each other out, people sharing things that clients have shouted out. speaker-0: Yeah, that's awesome. And then the sequins in purple, where did the color strategy come from? I love it. speaker-1: Thank you. So the sequence really comes from how important it is to stand out. You want something in your business that makes you memorable, that is sticky. it gives people something to talk to me about, but it also just makes it really obvious who I am when I go into a room. it's you know, people see e we see each other online every day. And then when you see people in real life, it's n sometimes it's hard, especially for me, to like connect the person to the social media version of themselves or the Zoom version, but nobody has that problem with me. And so that's really great. So then people can see me and be like, chin, and then I can figure out who they are. And that that's what I want. I want it to be really easy. So you don't have to question like, who are you? Or how do I know you or what is that thing? So have something in your brand that makes you memorable, that makes you sticky, that helps you stand out. And Plus it's fun. I have a lot of fun with wearing sequins and and I I enjoy it. It makes other people happy. It makes me happy. speaker-0: Yeah, I love it. And seeing you at HVAC Tactical recently and at all the events, it just it is it's awesome. It's it's great. So speaker-1: In sequence, of course. I did wear sequence. speaker-0: That's right. Absolutely. I love it. All right. wrap it up, Jen. Tell us, you know, your final advice. What's what's one piece of advice or or something from this conversation you hope every business owner takes takes with him today? speaker-1: To get started on social media, you don't have to know what you're doing. Just get started, put yourself out there, just document, post, get something going, learn as you go, have fun with it. That's what it's about. speaker-0: Yeah, fantastic. So great to have you on today, Jane. We appreciate you and and all the advice you shared with us. Let's do it again soon. speaker-1: Thank you, meet you.