All right. Thanks everybody for joining us. We have with us today, Craig Philippic from the Meridian Company. Thank you so much for joining us today, Craig. Thanks for having me. My pleasure. Kay. Awesome. If you don’t mind, just start us, start out by telling us a little bit about your company, how you started, how long you’ve been in business, and how you got where you are today.
I’m the current director of business development at the Meridian Company in East Lansing, Michigan. We are a multi trade shop, plumbing, heating, hvac electrical, and we also do kitchen and bathroom renovations. We are in our 42nd year of business currently, and I believe this is our eighth or ninth year with plumbing and Hvac, SEO.
Amazing. Amazing. And how would you say things changed when you joined and partnered with your digital marketing agency? That was a. We were a different company at the time, much smaller. At, I had a couple team members that were really encouraging me to find a different vendor for our online management at the time.
And of course, budgets were different then. Internet marketing was much different then. But I had vetted a few different companies and we chose your firm. And since then our company’s doubled in size. Amazing. So if you don’t mind, just give us a little overview of how many trucks you have now, how many techs you have.
Trucks. There’s probably on any given day, 25 to 30 trucks on the road. And technicians you’re gonna be with helpers probably 30, 35. Fantastic. And aside from digital marketing efforts, what do you do for marketing? Aside from digital marketing, we do television, radio some print ads, some direct mail electronic email marketing.
I think the main focus though has been internet marketing with pay-per-click, organic Google website, stuff that you guys manage for us. Awesome. And has there been anything that you’ve tried that didn’t work and you decided to let it go? The first thing that pops into mind would be we tried some of the Angie’s List, home Advisor, Thumbtack, some of those things I’ve, that I’ve heard worked in certain geographic regions, but in the Greater Lansing market and even the Midwest, I’ve, I haven’t heard great things about them.
Other things that we’ve tried, we did billboards outdoor once. Once. Six, eight years ago. At the time it was something that we didn’t have the budget for to really go full speed ahead, so we pulled back on that. I’m anxious to see if we get back into that soon. Now that we’re a little bit bigger, okay. And what would you say is your most profitable? Definitely our online presence. Local services, pay per click, and organic search that, that we use you folks for gets the lion’s share of our budget, but also generates the lion’s share of our leads. High conversion rate.
First, first page, top of page presence and in, in our market area certainly has put us on the map. Fantastic. And do you have any special initiatives to attract online reviews? As we know, those are very important to every business and everyone has a different method to collect those.
So what do you do that maybe is a little different to collect those reviews online? Through ServiceTitan and other operating software that we use, the technicians, the customer’s given a review link at the end of each call. Fantastic. And that’s hasn’t always been the case. We used to ask for ’em in person, but now it’s more automated now, and certainly technicians, we’ll ask for that endorsement if things went really well. That supports the automated side of it. Fantastic. And do you incentivize your texts to get reviews? We do. They get a small spiff per Google review. That’s awesome. Okay, perfect. And how are you using social media to attract business?
Do you do YouTube, do you do tiktoks? What type of social media do you engage in? Primarily Facebook. We do have a YouTube page. It doesn’t really have a lot of material on it yet, but mostly just Facebook. Okay. Fantastic. And are you using email marketing as well? We do. We use the ServiceTitan Marketing Pro for that.
Perfect. So email marketing is like plan holder renewals. Monthly specials, weekly specials, things like that. Perfect. And what services do you find most profitable? Plumbing service is our flagship. When we started 42 years ago, we were a plumbing only company. But nowadays HVAC and electrical are certainly moving up in terms of their revenue and profit.
So looking forward to getting all those departments firing on all cylinders. Nice. And you guys are getting quite warm out your direction right now, aren’t you? Oh yeah. Yeah. It’s in the eighties. Oh yeah. It’s getting there. Michigan. Yeah. Craig, if you were to give a new business owner two pieces of advice to really help them grow, what would you say?
The first one’s easy, and it speaks to my character versus perhaps another entrepreneur’s character is, what’s your risk tolerance? I could have doubled. More than once in the time I’ve known you guys, but I am a conservative budgeter and now that I’m no longer an owner, I look back and see, say to myself, gosh, if I just would’ve invested more money in the business leveraged more of my working capital in the business instead of being so conservative, I probably could have got a lot farther.
So definitely don’t don’t be too conservative if you wanna grow. With your marketing budget or your wage scale. ’cause you’re gonna need good people. If your marketing works, you gotta be able to serve the customers that you’re marketing to. Okay. Another piece of advice I don’t know, I think I covered it with the right people on the right budget.
Yeah, that’s fair. Definitely. Yeah. Making your team feel valued is so important. I think it might be something that a lot of business owners miss is just pay, being willing to pay the right, the right employee, the right wage. Yeah. I also, some of the best practices groups that I’m a part of or formerly was a part of you, I.
How their owners and managers are sometimes quicker to make decisions that sometimes I would’ve maybe taken a week or two to ponder. That’s just my character style. So yeah. Hold the trigger growth. Yeah. I love it. Growth sits on the side of the road. Unless you push it, you gotta drive it. I love that.
I read somewhere that the your growth is always outside of your comfort zone. So be ready to be uncomfortable, be prepared, and definitely. Yeah. And do you have any services that you don’t offer that you are considering offering in the future? I think some things that have come up in conversation are more focused and emphasis on additional sewer and drain work, possibly lining bursting.
We do jetting right now and just standard, cable drain cleaning. So I think we’re gonna get more emphasis on that. And we might see a return to the, a whole home generator market. Oh, interesting. Okay. Which we did a few years ago, got out of it ’cause we weren’t able to service the ones we installed.
So I think we might reenter that market though now that we’re partners with someone. Oh, that’s fantastic. Yeah. I greatly appreciate your time today and thank you so much for joining us sharing your story. It is really valuable to anyone else that’s in the industry or trying to learn a little bit about how they can grow in the same fashion that you have, and we’re so thankful for your partnership.
Thanks, Kay. It’s been my pleasure. I’m glad you invited me along today. Thank you so much and we’ll talk soon. All right. Thank you. Bye.
