Almost a year ago, I was in Salt Lake City to do a seminar for one of our vendor partners. While there, I had a chance to grab lunch with Lori Smith. Lori is someone I have worked with successfully over the years, since she had been involved with setting up the marketing systems for quite a few of our larger clients during this time. While working with her to coordinate her clients’ websites with the marketing machine she was putting together for them, I had always been impressed with Lori’s knowledge of the industry and how much her clients praised the results of the work she did for them.
While getting to know Lori better at lunch, it was uncanny how similar our backgrounds were. Both of us had grown up and worked in family HVAC businesses, both of us had been involved in the industry since we were kids, and both our family companies were part of the original CSG group in the 1990s. I thought I had her when I told her my father used to drop me off on jobs when I was 15 to do entire home pipe change-outs—until she “one-upped” me by sharing that she was bending “S” cleats for her Dad at age seven! It was easy to see why she has been so successful in helping her clients create the marketing-driven companies they wanted because, after talking with her, I was sure she instinctively understood their businesses as well as they did. Learning that Lori started working with Service Experts after her family’s business was acquired and was managing Service Experts' marketing in the rocky mountain region just four years later was not surprising.
As we talked, it was also refreshing to find someone else who understood that marketing without sustainable customer communication and development systems in place is as silly as a bear believing in ‘catch & release’ fishing. It’s inevitable that both the bear and business will always be hungry. Truth be told, it was a great lunch, and I left with even more respect for her than I had before actually meeting her in person. I thought that was all there was to it, until I was surprised to get a call from Lori about three months later asking me if there might be a place for her at my company. Knowing how rare it is to find someone who knows our business so well and has a proven talent in helping contractors be very successful by developing sustainable marketing systems for them… I did what every good entrepreneur does and said ‘yes’ without exactly knowing how we would utilize her unique skill set.
As it ended up, Lori’s decision to approach me was because things were changing in the agency she was working with in ways that didn’t fit how she liked to work with clients. Turns out, that as we talked at lunch, she really liked the openness, growth potential, and our focus on customer ROI that she saw in our approach to contractor marketing and wanted to be part of it. Long story short, we spent the summer discussing what we wanted to do and, in October of last, year Lori came to work for us as we “very quietly” launched our new Contractor Marketing Partnership product. The product, our ‘MORE’ Program, as we call it, is designed to help a...