Welcome to the construction disruption podcast, where we

uncover the future of design, building, and remodeling.

I'm Ryan Bell of Isaiah industries, manufacturer

of specialty metal roofing and other building materials.

And today my co host is Ethan Young.

Ethan, how are you doing today?

Doing pretty good, Ryan.

Enjoying this nice weather.

Finally.

How are you doing?

I'm doing great.

Same.

Uh, we've had some, some.

Not great weather.

That's kind of just on the verge of raining one minute and then sunny

the next, but it's nice to see the sunshine, have some warmer weather.

It's certainly improving the mood around here at my house.

Absolutely.

Well, let's get started.

Uh, today our guest is Jared Spiewak.

An international speaker and founder helping service and SaaS businesses

scale to five to 10 million by turning clicks to cash at just 14 years old.

Jared took his first steps in the business world, earning

money needed to attend college.

And after graduating Jared spent a year working in corporate America,

and then two years with a digital market marketing agency before

launching the first iteration.

Of comet fuel at only age 20 annoyed by digital agencies promising the

moon, but only delivering stardust.

Jared saw a clear need for a digital agency that provided transparency

and a revenue focused approach.

After discovering that 97 percent of lead generation businesses don't know how much

revenue their marketing is generating.

And 95 percent of those who think they do don't realize their data is bad.

Jared, it's great to have you on the show today.

Thank you for joining us.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

So you started, uh, dipping your toe in the business world

pretty young at only 14 years old.

Can you kick us off by sharing a little bit of your story, uh, with

our listeners and what your motivation was for getting started so young?

Yeah, so I, I ended up starting college at

15, graduated high school at 16.

And because of that, I had to basically figure something out.

I didn't grow up with a whole lot of money and college is expensive.

And so those, those two things don't mix very well.

What I did at the time, because I was too young for anybody to really hire

me is I went to Google and as a lot of people do, I searched for how to

make money online, which is full of Legitimate opportunities, uh, everywhere.

So that ended up leading to me, uh, being a content writer and I would write at

the time, like very keyword stuffed SEO content for less than a penny a word.

And I did that for a little bit, but that was kind of my introduction

to the world of marketing.

I knew at the time I was going to go to college, but I didn't know exactly

what for I was interested in business.

But that is what set me down the path of, of marketing in and of itself.

A

lot of ingenuity there and how you kind of went about that.

Um, I mentioned it briefly in your intro, uh, but let's go

kind of a little deeper into what inspired you to launch comet fuel.

So you saw a need in the market for an agency that provided transparency

in a A revenue focused approach.

Can you elaborate on that a little bit for us?

Yeah, of course.

So there's, there's a couple of things that I noticed when, uh, kind of some of

my other background is when I transitioned from, uh, working in corporate America

to working for an agency to eventually having my own in between all that

I was freelancing at the same time.

And that transition was basically made from me having Too many freelance

clients have actually been like, Hey, what am I going to do now?

That turned into the agency.

So what I had was a unique perspective of both working for an agency at the same

time that I was working as a freelancer.

And I saw the pros and cons of both.

One being the freelancing side of things tended to be a lot more personable.

It tended to be a lot more transparent.

And the agency side of things used to typically is able to get a lot more done.

The skills are a lot more wider.

It's not just one person trying to do, you know, a million different things.

But the challenge was everybody that I talked to that one of the experience

of working with an agency due to the skill set did not like usually

the communication side of things.

The reporting side of things like I have no idea what these people are doing.

I have no idea if I'm getting results.

All I know is that they're charging me a lot of money.

And on the freelancer side of things, the challenge was usually you can

have a very limited client base.

Freelancers come and go, they disappear all the time.

They get full time jobs somewhere, or they take on too many clients, or their rates

massively increase at a dime's notice.

Cause you know, they took on a big project, et cetera.

And so by kind of combining what I really liked about my freelancing experience

and what I really liked about my agency experience, I felt as though that there

was something unique there where people could get the best of both worlds.

To a certain extent, the other side of that was, of course, on the revenue side

of things, which was really just a matter of sitting down with people and saying,

Hey, you know, how much money did you spend on your advertising last month?

Everybody can answer that question.

It's not very difficult.

And then when I ask, well, how much money did you make from

your advertising last month?

Either I get, I don't know, or it's we can figure it out, but it takes us forever.

And so we do it like twice a year.

And the challenge then is my third question is how will you determine.

If our relationship is successful and the response is almost always,

if you're making me more money, like, well, we just established, you don't

know if I'm making you more money.

So that seems like a pretty big disconnect.

And, you know, just having that conversation over and over again,

uh, just made it very clear that, uh, we're basically setting each other up

for failure at the get go before we even decide to work with each other.

We're admitting.

I'm not helping you figure out how much money you're making.

You're not helping me figure out how much money that I'm helping you make.

And we're just going to work together until one of us decides

it's no longer a good fit.

And that's just a recipe for disaster.

So what exactly are the services that you kind

of provide at, at Comet fuel?

Um, I know when it comes to marketing, there's a huge range of services

that that are helpful to businesses.

Do you guys focus, uh, on a few that you really kind of hit it out of the park

with, or do you have a broader approach?

Yeah.

So kind of, uh, Encompassing what you mentioned earlier, our core

offer is called clicks to cash.

And within that, I like to say we do four things.

The first is we help drive qualified traffic to websites through Google ads.

That's pretty straightforward.

Someone raises their hand and saying, I want to buy red widgets.

We want to put that brand that sells red widgets in front of them.

The second thing that we do is we help maximize the opportunity that a user

has to become a lead through creative.

So that's landing pages.

That's creative on like the ad copy front.

The display ads would.

What have you, so maximizing conversion rates once somebody,

somebody becomes elite.

The third thing that we do is help his help, follow them

throughout the sales process.

So now they're elite.

Now they're qualified leader and unqualified lead.

Now they're at these different deal stages.

Now they've become a customer.

This is how much money they've paid you.

So on and so forth.

The fourth thing that we do is then use that both quantitative

and qualitative sales data to then optimize on the marketing front.

So you can very easily end up in a scenario where.

One keyword drove, let's say 10 leads and one sale, another keyword

drove five leads and four sales.

But if you're only paying attention to how many people called me or filled

out my contact form, you're going to spend more and more money on the

former, which is driving 25 percent as much volume of sales as the latter.

But if you only look at that individual marketing channel, whether it's SEO,

whether it's Google ads, Facebook ads, what have you, if you're

only paying attention to what most marketing channels define as success.

so much.

You're losing out on what you actually care about, which

is customers and revenue.

So we're trying to close that gap and make sure we're paying attention to

and optimizing for the sales process, not just for people picking up the

phone and calling you or filling out a form, which also includes all those

robots that are also doing that.

On the, so on the front end of things, you're focused on Google ads.

Is that specifically what you focus on?

Or like, do you do Facebook, Instagram ads, that sort of thing too?

Yeah.

So for the traffic source, we just focus on Google ads.

I'm a big believer in only doing what you're good at.

Like we have tons of people on the team that are familiar with Facebook ads.

I've run Facebook ads.

Half our team has run Facebook ads, but we're not Facebook ads experts.

If that changes one day.

Yeah, sure.

We'll throw it in there, but, uh, there's so much that we still don't know about

Google that, you know, Between the entire team, we probably have like 25,

30 years of experience on Google ads.

And there's still things that we're just learning of like, Oh, I did not

know that that feature worked like that.

Or, Oh, this is a strategy we haven't considered before.

So having the ability to go really deep on that one channel, uh, I think at

least for now, uh, benefits us and our clients a lot more than being a lot more

broad and, you know, PBC or just, you know, email marketing, SEO, et cetera.

Do you guys do anything with local service ads

or is it just pay per click ads?

Yeah.

So what I recommend everybody when they ask me about LSAs is whoever is your

receptionist should be doing them for you.

It is, there's no point of you ever hiring an agency to do that for you.

Like if you're, Like, don't get me wrong.

If you're like, Hey, I literally do not have anybody to do this for me.

And you can't do it yourself, but yeah, sure.

All you really have to do is file a dispute when there's a bad

lead and then adjust your budget.

And if you're in a market where you can change your bids per lead, it's

straightforward enough that I just haven't found a reason to justify.

Charging for it.

So it's not something that we offer.

And generally when people ask me, I just say, you know, whoever's answering

your phones, they can just file the dispute and you're good to go.

I'm sorry, Ethan, were you going to say something?

Yeah, no, I was just going to say, I think there's definitely something

to be said for knowing what you're good at and sticking with it and just really.

Honing in on that, that's definitely going to help.

Um, you know, it, it presents a lot of value to whoever's looking for you.

And then you get to have that authority of being an expert in the field too.

So I think that's a smart move.

I, that's something I always struggle with.

There's too many, I have shiny object syndrome.

I always struggle to stay focused on something.

Um, In your experience, uh, what would you say are some of the most

common misconceptions or pitfalls that businesses encounter when it comes

to lead gen and, uh, understanding kind of their marketing ROI?

I

think that I could call it three that, that I feel like most.

Most who I talk to always necessarily fully understand, you know, that might

be a bit harsh wording, but, uh, the first is, uh, insert any marketing

channel here will make me money like Google ads will make me money.

Facebook ads will make me money.

SEO will make me money.

It will absolutely not.

Your email list will not make you money.

Your Google ads will not make you money.

Your website will not make you money.

What makes you money is the combination of.

I'll just use Google ads as example, Google ads, sending you traffic,

your offer being enticing enough for somebody to actually want to contact

you, your copy, your design, et cetera, helping reinforce that offer

and educate people so that they're more willing to actually opt in.

It's the speed at which your intake or sales team can get in contact with

that person, how well your intake and sales team is able to nurture

that person, whether that's over days, weeks, months, or for some

sales cycles, years to help them.

Move further and further down the sales process.

It's your sales team's ability to sell your products and services at

a rate that will help you hit the profit margins that you're trying to

hit, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

All those things put together is what helps you turn a dollar into more money.

Cause it doesn't matter if you get a billion people to visit your website.

It doesn't matter if a billion people are like, Hey, here's my credit card.

You know, please charge me if you never actually do that.

You won't make money.

And so it's all those things put together working, uh, you know, kind

of synergetically, if you will, that'll allow you to actually make money.

So that's number one.

Number two would be, uh, as I already mentioned, like not tracking beyond

that conversion, like not knowing.

Not just how many people called you, filled out a form, did a live chat,

what have you, but actually being like, okay, well, how many of the people that

came in from Google ads specifically, or Facebook ads specifically, or SEO

specifically, were qualified leads, and what were they inquiring about if you have

multiple products or services, and what was the close rate on those particular

leads, and how much money did they give you, and being able to tie that back to

Google ads, Facebook ads would have you to say, this was the ROI from this channel.

This was the CAC from this channel.

This was the CPL from this channel and not just take an overall number

for the entire business, but really tie it back to individual channels.

The third thing that I would say is, um, And this isn't a whole entire can

of worms is a big problem that a lot of businesses have is you make everybody feel

equally indifferent about your business.

So that nobody really cares about what you have going on where you're,

you're fairly, you're trying to target everybody at the same time.

I'll just take an example.

Um, you're a kitchen remodeler and you're like, Hey people, who

am I trying to target people who want to hire kitchen remodelers?

Okay, great.

That's literally you and all your competition.

So you're at that point what somebody is seeing when they

click on your ad when they visit your website is nothing different

compared to anybody else's website.

At least nothing that they can understand because they're not a kitchen modeler.

They don't understand the nuances of the business.

And so what happens is you have that approach versus if you're able to

identify like, oh, the people that I'm trying to talk to watch HGTV.

Okay.

Thank you.

Get really inspired by, you know, whatever the modern aesthetic of a kitchen looks

like, and then they reach out because they want to bring their kitchen up to

date, you know, from the past 20 years, well, I'm going to have a very different

approach in the imagery that I use in the iconography that I use in how I talk to

that person compared to someone who is.

Trying to min max their ability to spend a thousand dollars, you know, get

some new paint on the cabinets, maybe put, you know, uh, over, uh, floor

over whatever the current flooring is with LVP, what have you, spend,

you know, two, three grand and then be like, Hey, you know, this looks

much more modern while still keeping.

You know, what was built, you know, 20 years ago to completely different markets.

That's different.

If you're talking to investor is different.

If you're talking to single family, multifamily, et cetera.

But if you try and lump all of that into a single message, you

come away being painfully generic.

And so anybody who sees that is just completely indifferent

to what you have going on.

A lot of good stuff there.

Um, I've been, I've been kind of going down this.

Let me see.

I got to think how I want to say this, the, the offer, understanding

the importance of the offer, um, and generating a lead and I, in our industry,

I see a lot where we use offers like free consult for, you know, like, and, and

they're very generic and, and I think there's a big missed opportunity there.

Um, I'm going to put you on the spot a little bit here.

Can you give us an example of what, what makes a good offer

for the construction industry?

Yeah.

So a good offer in general is just whatever is hard,

ideally impossible to ignore.

And I think that there's two directions you could go with this.

One, you can improve your offer by still having the same, I guess you

could say like the same core offer.

I'm not using very good verbiage here.

Um, but you could say, I'm not just the kitchen remodeling company.

I'm the kitchen remodeling company for property investors.

I know that somebody who's buying a property, whether it's a buy and

hold or whether they're just trying to flip it is not concerned about it.

Having the most beautiful looking kitchen.

They're concerned about the ROI of this remodel.

And so if I were to try and approach these people, I would write my copy, design my

page and not maybe my entire brand, maybe just for a particular marketing campaign

and make it very clear that I understand the importance of ROI in your remodel.

I understand that you're not putting in a marble countertop for somebody who's

paying you 3, 000 a month for rent.

I understand that your goal is that every single day.

But this property does not have somebody living in it.

You are losing money.

And so I'm going to speak to those pain points specifically, even

if my offer is still at the end of day, get a free consultation.

If everybody else, all these other kitchen remodelers are putting themselves in front

of people and saying, Hey, we're a kitchen remodeling company, kitchen remodeling

company, book a free consultation.

And I'm saying, Hey, I understand the needs specifically of people

who are property investors.

Please book a consultation.

I'm going to feel a lot more if I'm in that market, I'm going to feel a

lot more attracted to that offer just because it's a lot more specific to

me, even though the core of what's.

What I need to do book that call is still the same.

Conversely, I could have a more generic, like, Hey, you know, kitchen remodeling

company, anybody who's here, you know, come, you know, have a conversation

with us in which case, um, you know, what are the, you know, what are the

needs and pain points, uh, of people?

It could be something as simple as I live in an area where.

Most people still just want me to call them.

And I actually have a online booking system where you can schedule your

estimate without ever having to talk to a person, without ever having to wait

for somebody to respond to a form fill.

In certain markets, that might be enough, especially if you're in an

area where nobody's updated their website in the past 20 years, right?

Just that small little technical advantage for somebody like me, who's like, man,

like, Are they going to answer the phone?

Like, how long is that conversation going to be?

If I fill out this lead capture form, is it going to be days, weeks, or

months before they respond to me?

Am I going to forget that I responded to these people?

Versus, oh, I could just fill out this form and literally, I have

an appointment tomorrow at noon?

Great, like that, I'm probably not even going to bother contacting anybody else.

Until unless that appointment goes wrong.

So two ways you can go about it, find the audience a lot more so that your

offer is already just more specific to them or find a way to position where

you're already doing easiest way.

What are all the objections that I get from people find out a way to solve

that objection and then work that into your offer one way or another.

So you've trademarked the phrase clicks to cash.

Can you elaborate on that a little bit, uh, kind of on that concept

and how it differentiates you at Comet fuel, uh, from other agencies?

Yeah.

So at its core clicks to cash is all about trying to track from that first

initial click all the way to cash being in the bank so that it becomes easier

to answer a load of different questions.

Uh, like what is our actual ROI?

What is our customer acquisition costs?

So on and so forth.

Not just for the overall company, but ideally for the channel,

for individual campaigns, for individual keywords as well.

And then being able to make decisions based off of that data, like the, the,

the keyword, uh, two different keywords performing very differently example that I

gave before having that data to say, yes, even though when I make this change in the

ad account, everything's going to go red.

You're going to get fewer clicks.

Your click through rate is going to be worse.

Your cost per lead is going to be higher.

Your conversion rate is going to be lower, but.

I can go into your CRM and I can see that this is actually

four times more profitable.

So even though Google is telling you, you're doing everything wrong.

The actual thing that matters is telling me that I'm doing everything.

That's right.

And that's something that, uh, that Google simply can't tell you.

You can improve its ability through importing a whole other conversation.

It won't be perfect.

CRM should always be the source of truth, separate conversation, but, uh,

being able to close that gap and being able to answer a lot of really key,

important information, uh, that, uh, You actually care about you actually care

about the number of leads that you're getting and how qualified there are.

You don't care about how many phone calls you're getting that

like as much as people talk about.

I want the phone to ring.

Yes, we want the phone to ring until it's all telemarketers

and you're like, wait a second.

Maybe this wasn't the right goal.

Maybe my goal is actually something that's more important further down the line.

So we're trying to really enable that to even be possible for a lot of

businesses, first and foremost, and then utilize that data as much as we can.

And what happens and I'll try to give you a couple of quick examples.

What happens is we were in the situation.

We're, we're working with this company that depending on the month, they're

spending anywhere from 400 to 700, 000 a month on their advertising.

So a lot of money within the first month of us working together, we made

a change that dropped their cost per lead or cost per conversion within

the ad account by half, which would be everybody celebrating, right?

Like, like, Holy crap.

Like we're working with this big company within like a month,

maybe like a month and a half.

We made this massive improvement.

They're obviously going to love us.

However, once we went into the actual CRM, there was no noticeable change in

the amount of clients that they were actually getting from that massive change.

So even though we, from the ad account, they would be, the reporting would tell

them that you're going to get double the amount of leads you were getting before.

And No, seemingly different, different result on the sales side and without

that additional data, we never would have been able to make that decision.

We never would have been able to know that we would have assumed that we

just made this massive impact on this business that is going to see little

to no changes as a result of it, even simpler things like we are working

with the company and the people who handled the technology on the back end.

It just changed over time.

And so they had all these happier automations that eventually broke.

And from our data, we could see people are still filling out the forms.

But what they didn't realize was that 85 percent of the leads that they

were getting weren't actually being attached to a salesperson on HubSpot.

And so because there's so many salespeople, it's a large organization,

they, you know, they get like tens of thousands of leads a month because

it's like low cost, uh, high volume.

That's not something that like one person is seeing every single

email that's coming in and seeing, oh, did the salesperson get it?

No, you know, there's just a disconnect between who managed this before and

someone left, someone new came in, they didn't realize how it worked.

No one realized that something was broken until he went, Hey.

Our data says we have all this.

Your data says we only have this amount.

You know, why is there such a big disconnect?

And we just kind of work backwards until we go, hang on, shouldn't that Zapier be

firing every time that there's a lead?

And most of the time, it's just not.

And like, whether it's a kind of a smoking gun that breaks or whether it's

something small, where it's just like, Hey, I was able to listen to sales calls.

And turns out when I listened to your sales, people talk about

your products and services.

They're like, I have a very different understanding than when I actually

talk to the owner because I'm talking because now I can hear the people who

are actually on the ground floor tell these leads why they're not qualified.

I can hear them sell these leads.

I can hear them talk about the features and the products and services and

like the benefits in a way that I might not have gone from the founder

who doesn't take sales calls.

And so just having that information that isn't normally communicated between

these teams is just simply game changing.

Is there anything with AI that you're leaning into?

Uh, that's been helping out or, you know, speeding up your processes or that

you've implemented with your clients that helps them kind of speed up what they do.

So when we're, we're talking about AI, I'll assume that

we're talking about generative AI.

So when it comes to tools like You know, mid journey or chat,

GPT, et cetera, et cetera.

When it comes to these types of tools, um, anything that's visual, I would

not put that on anything commercial.

Uh, the copyright laws are just still too up in the air.

And, uh, I, I certainly don't want that lawsuit hitting my desk

when it turns out that, uh, uh, Disney's copyright got involved.

Like you're not winning that like goodbye, basically if

you're getting sued by Disney.

So I think that's just way too up in the air.

Um, as far as I understand the more.

Text based is, um, from I don't understand the legal component of it,

but from what I understand, there's less of a concern around the copyright

issues for text than there is images.

That being said, even when it comes to text, um, the quality of the

text you get out is dependent on the quality of text you put in.

So if you're really specific with what you want, you can get.

Pretty good text out.

Am I going to, you know, put in a two second response and then copy

and paste something into an ad?

Probably not.

But what I do is for some of my personal use cases is when I'm building like

reporting spreadsheets, GPT is usually writing the equations for me when

I'm nesting like query functions and V lookups and like left and rights

and all that kind of stuff that will take me like half an hour to create

a single equation that will You know, pull a bunch of data, clean it, etc.

I'm just teaching GPT how my spreadsheet is set up and asking it for an equation.

So I can copy and paste.

And that's saving probably hours every time I put together like a

needlessly complex spreadsheet.

Um, if I'm doing something like writing emails, something that I use it for is I

will bullet point out what I want to say.

And then I'll let GPT determine how to write a cohesive message from that,

and then I go in and edit it to be more in my voice, remove redundancy, etc.

But that saves me a lot of time, where like, man, I know I

want to say these four things.

I know that if I'm not careful, it can sound as me being, um,

Condescending with my language.

And so I'm going to tell GPT here are my four bullet points.

Please write a message.

This is what somebody sent me.

I want this to be in this tone.

Please keep it short and brief.

I'm going to get the response, edit it, then send it out.

But what I'm never doing is just going from, you know, that message

right to be sending an email.

It's an, it's an intermediary step that is, uh, it allows me to

be more efficient, but it's not replacing anything that I'm doing.

effectively.

Sure.

I found it more than anything.

It helps me get through being stuck.

Um, when it comes to design related projects or, or whatever.

And it's, it's so true.

What you said about, you know, with GPT, what you, you know, what you

put in will change what you get out.

I found the, it's the exact opposite for mid journey though.

If I have a very descriptive Uh, request that usually is horrible, but

it spins back, but the kind of the more generic and simple, uh, prompt

that's put in there, the better the results from what I found, but there's,

there's still always pretty weird, but, but it can really, it can really

get you thinking, um, too, and, and.

Generate some ideas that I, you know, things I would never think of probably.

Yeah.

I think the idea generation aspect of it is really valuable.

And that's, um, yeah, like I wouldn't, you know, like I mentioned, I wouldn't

like copy and paste an image that I got out of it, but if I was like, Oh

man, like I, I have this general idea or concept for a piece of creative.

Yeah.

Maybe I'll have it spit out like 10 things, but like, Oh, I really like

how it used these colors, or I really like how it designed this one aspect.

And then I'm going to hand that to a designer and say, Hey, you know, Here's

the inspiration, you know, please create something based off of that.

But yeah, yeah, I completely agree.

So, uh, transparency seems to be a key value, uh,

in your approach at CometFuel.

How do you provide clients with clear visibility into the performance and ROI

of their, their marketing campaigns and kind of what you're doing with them?

Yeah, so I think one is just when we're communicating just Being

honest, like as, as silly as that sounds, um, just the feedback that I get from

people, like when I just said, like, Hey, like, thanks for sending me your goal.

I don't think that's realistic.

It's not going to happen.

Like you're just not going to be able to do that.

And that small amount of pushback, I think a lot of people are just afraid to get

that pushback, especially, um, uh, within the agency world, like you don't have,

like anybody can start an agency tomorrow.

They want to, there's no barrier to entry.

There's no license that you have to have or anything like that.

And because of that.

There are tons of agencies out there that simply really just don't know where

their next dollar is going to come from and understand like anybody who started a

business, you know, that there's a point in time where like, I don't know where

my next dollar is going to come from.

And I think when you're in that state, it's really, it's.

You're incentivized almost to do anything in your power to retain

those people and be like, yes, I can hit that goal no matter, no matter

what, like, yes, you want to turn a dollar into a billion dollars.

I got you like, sure, but that's just not going to happen.

And so I think just being like, like, don't get me wrong.

I'd much prefer to keep you as a client, but I'm not going to go out of my

way to lie to you or to deceive you.

Potentially.

I'm just going to be like, Yeah.

Like that doesn't make sense.

Cause I don't want to be in that phone call three months from now

where like you told me that you were going to do X, Y, and Z like that

make, that doesn't make me feel good.

So I'm going to avoid that from, from the get go.

So I think that's one thing, like just being honest and having no problem, just

telling people like that's not going to work or like, that's a dumb idea, but

you know, more nicely than that, or, you know, what have you, uh, I think the

other component of it is just because of how we try and track things, we just

have a lot more insight and visibility already where I can go into the CRM and

be like, Hey, like you spent a dollar.

You made 8.

You told me your goal was to make 6.

I don't understand why you're upset.

Like, we can have that conversation and we can have that transparency and

be like, oh, well, something changed.

Oh, our margins are down.

Okay, great.

Now I understand your perspective.

Now let's re evaluate this goal.

And we're working together and not, you know, seeing each other as the

bane of each other's existence.

Essentially, you know, just.

Like, we're here to work together.

We're here to, you know, partner.

If you see me as the enemy or if I see you as the enemy, then it's just

not going to be a good relationship and we should just kind of cut that

out and like find somebody else.

I have no problem telling you we're not a good fit or

referring you to somebody else.

I don't have an issue with that.

I think that's just kind of my personality that just translates to the business

where like I know that this is going to be a painful conversation in six months.

I'm just going to do what I need to do to avoid that today.

Save yourself some big headaches that way.

Probably.

Um, are there any trends or shifts that you, uh, foresee kind of coming in the,

in your industry, in the construction industry, anything, any, anything

on the horizon that you are kind of predicting, uh, might help shape or

change kind of where we're headed.

What has been interesting is.

I've been having this conversation about, uh, so the very short background is clicks

to cash started off as a spreadsheet that I would walk people through and be like,

tell me each step of your sales process.

Like I'll play around with the numbers and I'll show you basically the

difference in you only caring about cost per click conversion rate versus

everything being basically optimized.

So.

What happened over time was more and more people just naturally through other

people communicating this learn the value of tracking and more and more people that

I talked to have at least attempted to try and track beyond just a conversion.

Some have done it successfully.

Some have done it not so successfully.

There are more softwares that are being set up that by default are helping

you, uh, more easily track leads.

And attribute them to individual channels and help you track them

throughout the sales process, etc.

There are more agencies that I run into.

They're trying to educate their clients about this.

So, I believe that over the next few years, it'll be more common for

service businesses specifically to have greater insight into how you.

Well, their marketing is performing just due to natural shifts.

What this also means, though, is businesses who are late to

the game are going to be at a substantial disadvantage because

right now it's a massive advantage.

If you have the ability to know by marketing channel your your stats of

leads, qualified leads, you know, all the things that we've already talked about.

Pretty much none of your competitors do that.

Even when I talk to companies that are doing, you know, 10, 15, 20 million a

year plus, a lot of them don't really have that insight, or at least not

in an automatic way where it doesn't take a bunch of people pulling reports

together and hoping for the best.

But a few years from now, that'll, that might be the norm.

In which case, if you're still like, Hey, like I judge my success based off

of phone calls and form fills, everyone else is making decisions based off of.

Potentially a year or two of sales data and I have zero sales data that

I'm including in my optimizations that you know, that's just night and

day for a lot of businesses and I think that that'll what that'll cause.

Is where things are working, people are going to double and triple down their

budget because they know that it's working and that's going to cause cost

to rise your cost per click is going to go up your, you know, the difficulty

of keywords to rank for organically is going to go up the amount of noise that

people are getting in that market Jones going to go up because everyone's going

to try and capitalize on it, which means.

You might see your cost per click, let's say increased by 35 percent

over the course of a quarter or a year and you still don't have any

additional transparency as to how this is performing versus something else.

And you just don't know what decisions to make about this.

Should I spend 35 percent more per click?

Should I not?

I don't know.

Other people are.

What do they know that I don't?

And even if I start this process today, they still have two years of data on me.

So like for me, I, even if you don't have everything connected now, the most

basic thing you can do is do everything in your power to know what lead source

your leads came from a lot of other stuff here at CRM will automatically do for you.

You can go through your notes and you can see, Oh, this person, I

had a call with them on this date.

And the, here are the notes of the call.

I can retroactively update that they were, went from a lead to a qualified lead.

That's fine, but I can't retroactively most of the time.

I'm not going to be able to retroactively know that this lead

two years ago came in from SEO, or it came in from this conference event

that I went to, or this came in from Google ads, Facebook ads, what have

you, so attribute leads to marketing channels, everything else is like.

A thousand times easier.

Once you have that, assuming that you have some sort of even basic CRM,

what's your favorite CRM?

So if you can afford it, I quite like HubSpot mostly because

it's very plug and play for a lot of this tracking that I'm talking about.

It's literally like connect to Google ads.

It'll automatically send tracking templates into your account.

People convert, especially if you're using like the HubSpot forms, it'll

automatically tell you where your leads are coming from and you can do a lot of

this stuff without Zapier or any other integrations or like fancy, like cookie

capturing through tech manager, et cetera.

For simple B2B, I like Close.

That's what we use.

I've used them for years.

Um, if you have very low volume, a spreadsheet is fine and you can

worry about like a tool later on.

You know, if you deal with like a couple leads a month, you know,

you're not going to be overwhelmed with a, with a spreadsheet.

So, how smart if you can afford it?

Close if you're B2B.

If, if you're something in between, there's like a million of them out there.

It really just depends.

Pretend I'm about 20 years younger.

What, and I'm a aspiring entrepreneur, I'm looking to get into the digital marketing

side of the construction industry.

What advice would you give

me?

Assuming so when it comes to the marketing stuff, DIY don't

initially hire someone else.

Um, you need to establish a baseline.

Uh, Chances are, uh, marketing is way more complicated than you

realize at this, at this point in time, there's a lot more components.

Um, you, then you've realized there's a lot more that goes into branding

and positioning than you realize.

And it's very easy to hire a company that they might even be great at what they do.

They may even be the best and you could still crash and burn.

Because of what you don't know what I recommend to pretty much everybody who

hasn't worked on a specific channel before is start off by spending

your own time or somebody on your team's time to establish a baseline.

You spent a dollar and you only made 25 cents back.

Not great, but you'll be shocked how many agencies you'll hire.

That you spend a dollar and you make less than 25 cents back.

And it's definitely not worth it for you to work with them.

If you having little to no knowledge or experience to better job.

So start off, establish a baseline.

And then when you do have a conversation with somebody else to take it over, you're

giving them way more ammo for them to help you because you have baseline data.

You have you.

Have a rough idea of where your cost per click is.

You have a rough idea of how you're converting.

You have a rough idea of what is or is not working.

And so somebody like myself or another agency can go in there and start off not

on square one, but you know, square 15.

And like I said, you also have that baseline where you can actually

compare and get a sense of an idea if they're doing a good job or not.

But if you have, if you've never tried it before, you don't know.

Like if I'm spending a dollar making 2 back, is that great?

It doesn't seem great, but.

Maybe if I tried it myself, I'd only be making 30 cents back, and this is actually

a massive improvement to what I thought I could do, and I still might want to do

better, but at least I know it's better for me to hire somebody else at this

point, because if I did it myself, like I tried it and it wasn't working, or I tried

it and it was only a two extra turn, now it's a five extra turn, what have you.

So that's one, establish the baseline before you hire somebody else to do it.

Um, Next, I would just say, like, learn marketing.

I think a lot of businesses, like they see marketing as a necessary

evil to grow their business.

Most people that start a service business, they do it because they did that thing.

Like I was, I was on roofs for 20 years.

Now I own a roofing business.

I know I was a plumber for 20 years.

I owned a plumbing business.

You know, you don't see a whole lot of people that, you know, You

know, I was a plumber for 20 years.

Now I own a FinTech company like it happens, but you know, it's just not

the most common path and marketing is often seen as the bane of the existence.

It's a necessary evil and it tends to be kind of the lifeblood of

the business, a sad reality for anybody who is a technical person.

Like my background is doing the work.

I'm not a salesperson that started an agency that, you know, I'm a.

You know, I was doing the work, then I started my own company.

Guess what?

Nobody knows the quality of your work until they've paid you.

If you can't convince them to pay you, it doesn't matter if you're the best

in the world or the worst in the world.

You're still not making any money.

And so being able to help people understand, guide them to

understand, are you the right fit?

Why you're the right fit in a way that they understand.

Nobody cares that you've been in business for 20 years.

Nobody cares that you claim that you're the best.

Literally, everybody else does the same exact thing.

So, I would recommend starting to understand marketing.

Like, whether that's books, whether that's podcasts, it doesn't have to be, you

know, you don't have to become an expert.

But, if you're in a position where, like, man, I put my website in front

of people, nobody's contacting me.

I've hired four agencies.

None of them are working.

All of these agencies are bad.

Yeah, maybe, you know, maybe you, you know, hired for, you know, unfortunate

events, but, uh, you know, chances are there's a disconnect between

who you're trying to reach and what and how the company's positioning

themselves and you hiring an ad agency isn't going to solve that problem.

A branding agency, maybe probably not going to want to spend that money on it.

So spending that little bit of time to understand how people work, how people

decide to buy things will, uh, I think massively improve your success rate in

business in general and your growth.

Every single business that I've worked with who the founder Has

either a background in marketing or they just understand marketing.

Their businesses almost grow a hundred percent faster.

Not like the, their businesses almost definitively grow way faster than

businesses that I talk to that just don't really understand marketing.

But like I've worked with businesses that have gone from in the construction space,

uh, home services space go from like zero to multimillion within like a year or two.

So, and, and they have a great looking brand.

They just started off with a great understanding of marketing and

they were able to leverage that to scale their company massively.

I also have conversations with people who have been in business for 20

years and they're like, yeah, I've had a moving company for 20 years.

I still only have one truck.

I don't understand what I'm doing wrong.

And, you know, yeah, they might have a great service, but the people who,

who see that business don't understand that it's a great service because they

don't know how to communicate that.

And, you know, that that's, you know, sometimes that makes all the difference.

Great advice.

Well, thanks so much, Jared.

Uh, this has been great and we're thankful for the time, uh, we've had with you

today and everything you've shared.

Um, we're close to wrapping up what we call the business end of things.

Is there anything that we haven't covered today that you'd like to share?

Don't be afraid to try stuff.

This is a conversation I have a lot of people, um, throw stuff at the wall.

Like nobody, I've rebranded my company several times.

Like we started off as, you know, I was a freelancer.

Then I rebranded to Blue Dog Media when I started my agency.

I knew from day one that wasn't going to be the right name.

We started out as an SEO company.

We then realized that, hey, our clients Growing faster through

ads when we started, you know, taking on a couple ads clients, we

completely shifted from SEO to ads.

We then changed the name from BlueDuck Media to CometFuel.

Big changes that, you know, people freak out about, like,

oh, like, that'll never work.

People are going to be so confused, like, nobody cares.

Like, it's, you know, we're not, you know, we're not a 400 million

company that gets national press attention every time I sneeze.

Like, nobody cares if we change our name.

Um, and, you know, try stuff, like, it's, it's okay.

If people aren't, you know, this.

Yeah, I'll try to keep this short.

But if you know, sometimes I'll tell people is, oh, like

nobody's buying from us, right?

Like, okay, like, tell them it's 50 percent off.

It's like, Oh, no, everyone's gonna buy from us.

I'm gonna lose so much money.

I'm like, just try it.

And you're gonna be shocked to find out that it wasn't the pricing that

was causing people like something you might even be able to make it free

and people still might not buy it.

Be that interested.

Why?

Because maybe you just, they didn't understand what it is that you do.

They didn't understand the value that you provide.

You know, you're one of X amount of other companies in the area.

Nobody's, you know, depending on how long you've been in business, they might

not have ever heard from you before.

It might not be the pricing.

It's not the licensing that you have.

It might be that when they Google you, um, Nothing comes up.

Like it's, it's not about your ad copy.

It's not about the colors on your website.

It's, I don't know if I'm willing to pay a company that I've never

heard of that has no online presence.

12, 000 to redo my roof.

Just, just try stuff.

See what works.

If it doesn't work, try something else.

Like there's no, there's no pain.

Like there's, there's no issue.

Like reposition yourself, try something else.

You know, you're the kitchen remodeler for investors today that didn't work.

Now you're the kitchen remodelers for commercial properties

with at least a hundred units.

Figure stuff out until it works.

Once you figure out what works, triple down on it.

Like nobody's going to care that you change.

No, I would say the funny thing is like you're saying that kind

of applies to if you are having success or if you aren't having success,

because if you are having success, like you said, with your business,

well, you can still pivot to something new, but if you're not having success,

you're already not having success.

You may as well try something else, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's funny.

Um, just kind of.

Anecdotally, um, like I, I've done things where it's like, Hey, like

literally like take your pricing.

This mostly for like SAS companies, like take your

pricing, make it 90 percent offer.

You know what?

Tell the next 10 people that you're going to get the product

completely for free for life.

Like we can set it up and automatically.

So like, you know, it can't, you know, no more than 10 can get it.

And everyone's always afraid, like, Oh, I'm going to lose so much money.

I'm like, no, what I'm afraid of is that even when you tell them that's

free, they're still not opting in.

Like, that's the problem.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No kidding.

Wow.

That's interesting.

That's a very interesting way to look at it.

Yeah.

Well, uh, so before we close out, I have to ask if you'd like to

participate in our rapid fire questions.

These are seven questions.

Some are serious.

Some are silly.

All you got to do is give a quick response.

Are you up for the challenge?

Yeah.

I mean, has anybody ever said no?

No.

Oh, I won't be the first.

I kind of don't know why we ask anymore.

It's just kind of built into our scripts and how we present it.

But I've thought that too, like, why do we even ask?

We just need to do it.

Roll right into it.

Um, Ethan and I will take turns asking Ethan.

You want to kick us off and ask the first question?

Yeah, I can do that.

Um, what's

one book or movie that's had an impact on your life?

Oh, uh, this is easy.

Uh, profit first by Mike Mike fits.

I, this is a book that I send to every client that we work with.

It's a book that I've created some content about.

It's the, there's a lot of things that go into this book, but what it helped me do

was establish a cashflow management system book talks about a couple of things.

But for a long time, I had a problem where I was like, Hey, we have

X amount of money in the bank.

I don't know how much of this money I can spend.

Without freaking out.

And so I delayed hiring people because I didn't feel as though I could afford

it while at the same time paying for things that I didn't necessarily need

because, hey, this is a one time purchase.

I know how much money I have today.

I don't know how much money I'm going to have in six months.

So I don't know if I can hire this person that I'm going to

have to pay for X amount of time.

And what this did, Is it just helped me better understand how

much money do we actually have?

How much money can we spend?

How much money do we need to allocate for X, Y, and Z?

And it made me, uh, much more comfortable in making financial

decisions on the business rather than just seeing what I had, which was, uh,

an operating account and a tax account.

I'm like, great.

I'm confident that the government isn't going to be mad at me

because I'm paying them, but everything else that I have in here.

How much of this can I spend without getting into potential liquidity issues?

And now I can answer those questions by just logging into the bank and just

looking at, Oh, this is, this is the account that is the play money account.

That account can go to zero, makes no difference in the business.

That account has 20 grand in it.

Someone wants to, you know, we want to get started on a project that we want

to allocate 15 grand for no problem.

Sign off on it by a 50 grand in a single account.

And that's the entire business.

Someone is asking me for 15 grand.

Now that's a scary question.

That's a scary number.

I don't know how much money I can spend.

So, uh, long winded answer.

Profit first.

I highly recommend everybody read it.

Question number two.

If aliens landed tomorrow and offered to take you to their planet,

what earthly possession would you insist on bringing with you?

Probably Probably the simplest answer

would just be food and water.

Like who knows what, who knows what they use on their planet.

I might not be living for very long if I don't

good answer.

Um, question three, if you could have any superpower, but it would only

work when you're actively crocheting, what would that superpower be?

Okay.

So if I'm actively crocheting, that kind of limits what I can do at the time.

Um, I guess I would say.

Let's go with controlling time.

Oh, okay.

Because I feel like you can kind of do

whatever you want at that point.

And if we want to be pedantic about it, like how do you define crocheting?

As long as if I'm holding, I don't know what they're called, but

the sticks, and I have some yarn, does that count or do I have to?

Actively be moving them either way, you know, how quickly I think I can, uh,

I think I can find some new ones there where, uh, I think that would work.

Very thoughtful answer there.

Next question.

How do you define success?

And do you think you've achieved it based on your own definition?

I think success is really difficult to, to define.

Um, I don't think, I don't think it's like a, a single thing.

Cause like, I think success in like, My personal life is

different from my business life.

I think success from my personal life versus like when I'm sitting

down and playing a video game and what I define success in that

moment is going to be different.

Uh, for me, there are two things that I really just kind of look towards.

Like one, can I sleep well at night?

Like that, that's something that's really important to me, like knowing that,

uh, by my own definition of ethics and morals, which are going to be universally

different for everybody, but I'm doing things that align with my goals.

You know, my interest, you know, sometimes that's saying no to, you know, really high

paying products because I know they're going to be a nightmare and like, but

being able to sleep well at night, knowing that, you know, a week from now, I'm not

going to be up at three in the morning trying to finish deliverable or, you know,

firing a client who is being, you know, belligerent to a team member of ours,

Did I have to personally deal with that?

No, but it doesn't make me feel good that that's happening at all.

It's not going to make them feel good.

And so, you know, just kind of cutting that loose and, you know, getting rid of

them, uh, helps me sleep better at night.

So that's one that's really important to me.

The other side is just happiness, which is obviously, you know, also something that's

kind of a moving target, depending on just what's going on day by day, but in the

macro, um, just being happy with, Where I am on things, just it's still being fun.

Um, if it's not fun and I'm not happy doing it, then I just don't

really see a point in doing it.

So it just has to be fun for me.

Like where we could probably simplify the company and make a lot more money and

grow a lot faster and I could work a lot less, but it wouldn't be as fun for me.

And so I just wouldn't do it.

Like I just don't have the capacity to do something that I don't personally enjoy.

If you woke up tomorrow with the ability to speak to animals,

what animal would you go to first?

And what's the first question you would ask?

Uh, so we've kind of been living with our friend's dog for the

past year because, um, she's active duty.

And so when she's gone, we're, we're watching her dog.

Um, she whines a lot.

And so I think I would just want to know what, what are you whining

about at this particular moment?

Because like, you've been fed, you've been watered, you've gone to the

bathroom, like you've been outside.

And Like, why are you just looking at me and whining?

Like we've played, like what's going on?

Like, am I missing something?

Like, you need me to do something.

Uh, so I think that, I think that would solve a lot of frustrations

in a my and hers relationship.

Yeah.

You know, I, I thought about this when I was writing these questions

and I use chat GPT to come up, to help come up with these, uh, But

there's like so many animals, right?

But, but my answer would probably be a dog too, even though I feel like I have

a good understanding of what my dogs want and when they there's times you're right.

Like, well, what do you want right now?

Just tell me, spit it out.

Okay.

Um, we are on to question number six.

If you had to pick one celebrity to be your personal assistant

for a week, who would it be and what task would you have them do?

Let's see, I mean, I think Ryan Reynolds would be a fun one,

just because he seems like a fun dude to hang out with, like, like he can do

whatever he wants, like just being around him would probably be a good time, um,

man, that, that might be the best, best answer I can give off the top of my head,

um, yeah, I mean, there's, there's so many interesting people that I'd love

to, like, have a conversation with, just see how they, how they think about

things, but if I'm going for just, I

mean, he's, he's a genius when it comes to marketing and branding stuff.

I mean, he's, he's turned so many companies and brands into gold mines with

his humor and, and just being him really.

So good answer.

All right.

You last question, um, what's a valuable lesson you've learned from a failure

in your career or personal life?

I mean, there's just so many failures to choose from.

Um, uh, I think something that's just been really, Always difficult for me to like

I constantly have to remind myself like you can't you won't always win even if

you do everything right like you can still like you can have the best communication

you can have the most thorough onboarding process the most thorough reporting

process the most thorough, uh, you know, uh, Review of everything that you do, you

could be, you know, consider it the best in every aspect of what you're doing.

You can still end up losing.

Someone could still be unhappy with what it is.

You could set proper expectations.

They could change their expectations, not tell you and still get mad at you.

And, you know, you're just like, man, like, no matter what I,

like, I did everything in my power and I still lost here.

And I think, um, just accepting that because every time a

situation like that, Uh, occurs.

I always try to find the solution to it.

How can we make sure that this doesn't happen again?

And, you know, sometimes we're then going down a rabbit hole

that we really just don't need to.

And it's like, Hey, like it, it sucks that this happened, but like, it's okay.

Like we were all adults here.

Like we said, our goal is to do X, Y, and Z, then suddenly

the goal changed to a, B and C.

And we didn't know we failed to meet the ABC expectations.

We got told that yeah.

When we were being fired and you know, that, you know, that sucks, but it

doesn't make sense for us to spend the next two months being like, okay,

what if we were asked everybody every day, like, did your goals change?

You didn't tell us because then we annoyed the 99 percent of

people who that doesn't happen to

good stuff.

Well, Jared, thank you again for your time today.

Um, for anyone that wants to get in touch with you or connect with you,

what's the best way they can do that.

Yeah, absolutely.

So if you want to learn more about CometFuel, you can go to cometfuel.

com.

All of our contact information is where you expect it to be on a website.

And if you want to do me a huge favor, you can look up Jared Spiewak on YouTube

for my consistently inconsistent channel.

Perfect.

We will make sure to put those notes, uh, or I'm sorry,

those links in the show notes.

Well, thanks so much for tuning into this episode of Construction Disruption

with Jared Spiewak of Comet Fuel.

Please watch for future episodes of our podcast.

We're always blessed with great guests.

Don't forget to leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or

give us a thumbs up on YouTube.

Until the next time we're together, keep on disrupting and challenging those in

your world to better ways of doing things.

And don't forget to have a positive impact on everyone you encounter, make them smile

and encourage them to simple yet powerful things we can all do to change the world.

God bless and take care.

This is Isaiah industry signing off until the next episode

of construction disruption.

This podcast is produced by Isaiah industries, manufacturer of specialty

metal roofing and other building products.