EP: 221 Jordan Finley w/ Any Hour Group - Exploring Advanced Marketing Techniques in HVAC

Tune in to our newest HVAC Success Secrets Revealed episode, where we chat with Jordan Finley, Marketing Manager at Any Hour. We dive deep into the tricks of the trade for nailing your HVAC marketing. If you’re eager to level up your marketing game and stand out in this tough market, you won’t want to miss this episode. 

Here are three major takeaways:

• Mix It Up With Your Marketing: Jordan explains why it’s risky to rely on just one type of marketing. He explains how combining old-school methods like TV and radio with digital strategies like SEO and social media can really boost your brand and attract more customers.
• Use Data to Drive Your Strategy: Learn how Any Hour hones its marketing tactics using solid data. It’s all about making smarter choices that cut unnecessary costs and pump up your returns.
• Think Long-Term with Your Customers: Hear Jordan’s take on why focusing on the long-term value of each customer beats chasing quick profits. This approach isn’t just about making sales—it’s about building lasting relationships and growing your business over time.

Tune into the full episode to understand how Any Hour has successfully implemented these strategies, driving them to be a market leader. Whether you're a seasoned pro or just starting out, there's something in this episode for every HVAC business looking to boost its marketing power.

Find Jordan: 

Website: https://anyhourservices.com/



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Transcript

Jordan Finley: 0:01

And the question is okay, how many eggs do I put in that basket? How many eggs do I put in, traditional media? And that's going to vary by market.

Evan Hoffman: 0:12

Hey, welcome back to another episode of HVAC Success Secrets Revealed here with Jordan Finley. He is the marketing manager for Any Hour. Managed to pull him out of the session here. He just finished his message to the group, did a fantastic job, by the way, brought the energy as a marketer should. Jordan has a wealth of knowledge around not just marketing, but also the trades. He ran his own landscaping company for 20 years sold it to join the Any Hour team and came on as their marketing manager, which one of the unique perspectives that, that you mentioned that you think you have is that full picture of how a company works in the home services space and then being able to bring that to marketing. So I'm curious. Now that you are focused on that one component, how much better have you got at marketing?

Jordan Finley: 0:54

Oh, absolutely. I've gotten better. It was very much a jack of all trades, master of none, running the company. I knew how to do everything to a sufficient degree to be successful for two decades, but to actually now be able to focus in on one thing and to have Mike Wilson as my mentor, like sky's the limit. But in the years time that I've been here just the growth, the wisdom that all of it it's amazing.

Evan Hoffman: 1:19

I imagine having that marketing budget to play with is a little bit of fun too.

Jordan Finley: 1:22

It makes negotiating an adventure, it's nice. It's a privilege to be able to flex that much muscle to take our buying power and take the data that we meticulously collect and be able to, in a fair and honest way, say here's the results. And here's what we need. Here's what we need from you. Can we keep doing business together? And so there are some perks that we enjoy.

Evan Hoffman: 1:44

Absolutely. One of the things that you did talk about on stage is the wasted ad spend that exists on Google, right? And it's something that's escalated exponentially here in the last little while through COVID and all of that and contractors are really feeling that pinch. Google's raised their prices every single year on pay per click and they're the ones that control the bidding for most of the ad accounts that exist on there and so looking at other avenues, looking at other ways for contractors to be able to attract leads into their business, to attract phone calls into their business. What are some of the things that you're seeing that are working really right now with Any Hour that are allowing you to guess leverage the brand in a variety of different ways, but just get the phone to ring from new customers.

Jordan Finley: 2:26

I'm

Evan Hoffman: 2:26

not going

Jordan Finley: 2:26

to reveal anything people don't already know but the most fundamental principle is you want your finger in as many pies as possible, right? You never put all those eggs in one basket. Google costs a fortune. You're absolutely right. Google also is borderline essential to pull any of it off. And the question is okay, how many eggs do I put in that basket? How many eggs do I put in, traditional media? And that's going to vary by market. Now, our location, our brand presence, We are still extremely successful with radio and TV. So we actually put a big chunk of our marketing budget into those because the results are there, but we are all over print. We are in direct mail. We are in a shared mail. We have digital efforts. We've got a social media team. We are emailing, we are text marketing. We are doing just about everything that's out there. We've got billboards all over the place. You name it. We are involved in parades We are involved in home shows. We are supporting high schools like there's a little bit of everywhere. And that's the success I can look at specific channels and go ooh, that's a winner. Look at the return on that I still have to have those other pieces and you can't isolate the two Maybe that successful channel is only successful because of all that little branding, I can't really track, just being ubiquitous in people's minds, being ever present and so you can never, as, as much as I love data, as much as that is where the answers are, you will never have purity there because there are some things you can't track and you can't take for granted what that's doing to make other things look better. Yep. I'm hedging a little bit in what's very successful for us. It's having a healthy blend. That's what's successful. But for us, traditional media is a big piece. Google is a big piece, whether you like it or not our direct mail is a consistent winner our shared mail is right now as the as things have softened, we are no longer. suffering from the struggle of we have too many calls and how do we get to them all? And it's, how do we find those extras? How do we keep our guys fully engaged? We have pivoted for example, text marketing. That's something that I have, I carry a burden of responsibility for us with that one because it has proven to be so useful, right? It is not a tool that solves every problem by any stretch, right? But boy, in the right moment, for pennies, you can make that phone ring and it's one of the only ways that you can take a rough start to a morning and you can actually do something in a marketing manner that can change the outcome of that day. You think of traditional media, you're weeks out. You've got to create the art. You've got to send in the art. You've got to wait for publication, so if you're having a bad day today, it used to be. Give me three weeks, give me three weeks and I'll make this different or let me throw a whole bunch of money and see if I can get on the radio and then maybe this week, if we're lucky, right? And so text marketing has been a big deal, utilizing our customer base and leaning into those positive relationships that we have built by doing business the right way has enabled us to get through this turbulent moment that we're in pretty well.

Evan Hoffman: 5:34

No, and that's very well put. I were a big believer in the omnipresent approach. That's the approach that we take with our marketing company. How can we show up where you are as a contractor, add value to you in as many different ways as possible through the podcast, through reels, through whatever it is that we can put out webinars so that we can then show up in ways when you are looking for a marketing company. Here we are, right? We're big believers in that and we're not going to dictate to you how you receive our content. We're going to make it available to you in any way possible. So I love that approach. The text message marketing is fascinating because it's incredibly important to fill dispatch boards. It's difficult for you to do that with demand calls in a lot of ways, unless you're going to overpay on Google, right? Because those are the most expensive calls. But looking at acquiring those customers so that we can text them later on and this was the question that I had asked you in the room too, looking at lifetime value versus that initial value. How much do you put emphasis on that when you are spending on Google? To say, maybe we can not, we're not going to get the change out today to six year old system. But if we can get them as a member, now there's that value long term so that we can text them and get them back into our ecosystem for a penny instead of that 400, 500, whatever it was that cost us initially.

Jordan Finley: 6:49

Great question. It allows me to brag a little bit about Any Hour. I worked for myself for 20 years because I don't trust other people. I don't agree with them on so many levels. I have real ethical dilemmas with how a lot of business is run and operated. The things that are justified, the decisions, they go against my moral code. And so I ran my business myself so I didn't have to compromise. When Any Hour recruited me, they shared a vision of things that actually completely aligned with my moral values and to get to the point is Any Hour services looks at each customer, at each potential customer, as what is the value of that customer over a lifetime? That is the only metric we use and if that means we'll lose money for five years, helping them with maintenance, making sure whatever system they have lasts as long as possible, that's totally okay. Because through that experience, we have built a relationship that will last and it will come around. If we are doing, if our technicians are going out there and honoring the system that we have built and how to treat the customer and how to absolutely deliver that five star experience, we can't lose. It's chess, not checkers and so what can I get out of this ticket? That's a losing game. That's a short term game. That is not how we play ball. And so when we look at it, it is all about, how it? What could the next 30 years look if we do it right? And if we do air, can we make it right? Can we, if we ever lose trust, can we fix that such that the only person they're ever thinking about to take care of those systems in their home is us. That's how we win. That's what has separated us from the herd and put us to where we are more than triple the size of our next biggest competitor in the state.

Evan Hoffman: 8:34

It was interesting. We I had Dustin on the show, Dustin Van Orman, when we were in Memphis at Joe Crisara's event and he talked about one of the technicians here reached out to him and asked him about a specific customer that he had serviced 10 years ago. I'm sure he's bragged about this story a few times. But yeah, he absolutely remembers the customer and he reached out to him and looked at the data and it was 130 times that any of our technicians have been out to visit him in the last 12 years, I think it was. Which, it's an average of almost one a month. Which is pretty absurd, but y'all offer a lot of different services. So it was still question what's going on there, but that's cool. Yeah, absolutely. It was really fascinating. And the thing that the customer brought it back to was Dustin provided a five star experience. Then not every time did Any Hour hit that five star experience with every single technician that came out over those 12 years, but most of the time they did, and they always made it right. And when you have that level of service, you're going to keep customers longterm, which by the way, it makes marketers look really good.

Jordan Finley: 9:40

Yeah. And anyone who knows anything, you don't have to be a marketer to know it is always cheaper to utilize an existing customer than to expense finding a new one, right? That's business one on one and by relentlessly pursuing that as an objective of ours. It's been successful for us.

Evan Hoffman: 9:58

I love it. One of the things that you talked about in the message, and then you mentioned briefly here earlier as well, is looking at the data. So how can we get the data as good as we possibly can? Because it's never going to be perfect. What are some of the things that you're doing and you're putting in place so that you can get as good of data as you can to make decisions?

Jordan Finley: 10:17

First

Evan Hoffman: 10:17

of all,

Jordan Finley: 10:18

I stand on the shoulders of giants. The systems that are in place here are heavily attributable to Mike Wilson, the CMO of the Any Hour Group, that through the years, and just one step at a time, one little thing, it was just a matter of let's get a, let's get a separate phone number for this so that we can track it. Okay. Let's look at the revenue. It's bringing in, okay, maybe now we should start looking at how many calls did that generate? Okay. So then what's the ticket price through that medium for that? And how does that compare? It's just this endless game. So the very boring answer is we have massive spreadsheets filled with every data point we can. And not only are we looking at week to week, month to month, year to year, we are recording like weather spikes. One that I just added that we realized was an opportunity. Oh, we better track when spring break is. Because business falls off a cliff because everyone leaves. They all head south, they head to Disney, wherever. And so it's just leveling up and getting wiser over the years. But we are looking at everything. The spend, the return. Does something seem to end up with more cancellations than another? Is there something going on there that we're not building value the way, or we're not targeting quite the demographic we're after? Things like that. We're breaking things down by zip code. You name it, if there's any way to track it, we are. You can't track everything, but it means you need to be religious about tracking what you can and we can comb through the data and it's something we can leverage in so many ways as we compare and contrast vendors and where to spend that money, where to stop spending that money, where we need to renegotiate because it's close but it's not close enough. Those kind of things.

Evan Hoffman: 11:58

Wow. Yeah, it's A never ending game of looking at numbers, looking at data, being able to make decisions. It's fascinating to dive into it and God, does it feel good when you find something?

Jordan Finley: 12:10

Oh

Evan Hoffman: 12:10

yeah.

Jordan Finley: 12:11

Yeah. It's exciting when you get something that's got a triple digit ROAS. Yeah. You're like, Oh, how much can I put in there? Where's that sweet spot before it diminishes? And then it's fun to play those games. It's always a little disheartening when you do finally find that spot where the returns are not quite what they want, but it's fun and yeah, you take your eyes off of it for a second and you've fallen behind. You're missing something. You're wasting money or missing opportunity. You can't not be in the data literally every day.

Evan Hoffman: 12:39

So

Jordan Finley: 12:39

now

Evan Hoffman: 12:40

for companies that don't have that internal marketing partner and they're relying solely on vendors as the owner, you should be owning your marketing. I'm a firm believer in that. That's what we coach our clients on. It's what we talk to our clients about. That's why we ask them to be on calls. To know what it is that's happening there and we need to have open communication and open dialogue between what's happening in the office and outside of it. But for those smaller companies, what are the metrics that you would encourage them to make sure that they know inside and out daily for their business?

Jordan Finley: 13:09

Where

Evan Hoffman: 13:09

we are

Jordan Finley: 13:10

at is a luxury, right? And we weren't there at the beginning either. We all start the same. You're answering the call. You're also the person booking the call. You might even be the technician in the afternoon running the call, right? It's, you wear whatever hat is necessary. And to get to that level of having someone in house to monitor things. That's awesome. That's terrific. Most of us don't have that. They really don't and so you have to develop a relationship with vendors, right? And that's where it gets tricky is you are now having to trust someone who their living is getting as much of your money as possible, right? And so the first answer obviously is you cannot just leave them to their own devices. No matter how much trust you have in them. It's got to at least be trust, but verify. But reputation, knowledge, track record, before any of it happens, you've got to do that. Just because someone gave you a name is not a good enough reason to utilize them. Go with someone who knows what they're doing and is as transparent as possible. One of the trickiest parts is they want to make everything proprietary so that you don't know what they, you don't know what they're doing because it protects at least they believe it protects that connection. If they don't know how to do it, they have no choice but to keep using me, right? It's the nature of the beast, right? But fundamentals, those basic things, right? Inputs and outputs. How much am I spending? What was the return on that? I mean that in and of itself, if you can't track anything else, that's all you need to get started is, was it a good in investment or was it bad? You do need an understanding of what kind of return do I actually need? What is the ratio of dollars input to dollars back in order for me to grow and succeed and then that's the metric. That's, it's that simple. Here's the money I gave you. What'd that turn into? That's either working and let's go a little harder in the paint with that one or that's not, what are we doing here? And explain to me why it didn't work the way you promised me. You said this happened. How do we pivot? And how do you make that right to me? You've got to protect yourself too and I just go, Oh, that sucks. You want to leverage, you want to hold them. Accountable to who they said they would be for you. Yes. And I don't know. It's I feel like I'm circling the wagon here, but it's, there's no rocket science here, right? It is invest, get that return, play with it, measure it. Yeah. That's it. Watch and never just blindly trust that someone else is going to do it for you. A hundred percent. Unless it's the marketer you hired.

Evan Hoffman: 15:38

But even then, even when you bring an internal marketer in, It's not their baby. They're never going to care about it as much as you do. Now I think Any Hour does a better job than just about anyone that I've ever met in terms of crafting a vision and getting buy in from team members and you see it in this room, you see it on the tour, you see it throughout the entire office, offices, I guess I should say is you guys are taking over the entire the entire parking lot here with multiple different locations throughout here. And then expanding even North into what is it? You're up in ogden.

Jordan Finley: 16:11

Ogden location. Yep. And Kaysville. Yeah. Yeah. And to be clear, I was flippant about trusting your market, rest assured. All my decisions are tracked and watched that Mike is the CMO is watching, but even on top of that. That's not even the top layer. Like the upper echelon, we are all aware of what we're doing and we are all more or less in agreement with the decisions being made. Everything is checked and accounted for. So as I joke that trust your marketer. Don't trust your marketer. Keep your eyes on everything. That's the right answer.

Evan Hoffman: 16:41

Like you said, trust the therapist. It's what we talk about in our business too anytime that we're making changes or gosh, Google, we just put out a post this week about it and now they've got a toggle that you can put on there where Google is switching out your phone number on your GMBs. They did that and the phone for one of our clients was going to nothing. Yeah. And so being able to verify those things.

Jordan Finley: 17:00

We seem to have to switch ours back every few months. I don't understand what's going on over there.

Evan Hoffman: 17:04

And this one switched to an old ad's phone number that wasn't active anymore. It wasn't even from us. It wasn't one of our numbers at all.

Jordan Finley: 17:12

You never know about.

Evan Hoffman: 17:14

Now thankfully we caught it quite quickly and we're able to turn it back on and get that fixed. But still it's incredibly frustrating. You can't take your eyes off of anything. I swear. Yeah. Yeah. We did find a service though. We can talk about it after. Whites Park has a service where you can monitor your GMBs for a dollar, I think per GMB and any changes that happen on it, it'll notify you so you can get it done. Okay. That's so for the group, incredibly invaluable, and yeah, for a buck to get the change that quick, when you're talking about the call volume, that's coming through your GMB for any hour. Yeah. I can only imagine the numbers there. As we wrap up here we do have one final question for you. It's our token. Final question. What is one question, Jordan, that you wish people would ask you more, but they don't.

Jordan Finley: 17:58

Why? That's the question. It's why. You can either be a chef or a cook, right? From a distance, it looks like they're doing the same thing, but they're not at all. You take a cook, and you remove the cookbook, you remove the instructions, they are lost. They are rudderless, they don't know what they're doing. A chef, on the other hand, doesn't need the cookbook. They've got it, it's all up here, right? But they know how to pivot, they know how to make decisions, they know what flavor profiles will resolve the difficulty they're dealing with, right? The question I wish that I got more is, why? Understand why you're making the decision you're making. Not just because everyone else is doing it. That's the worst reason to do anything ever. But that is so common. That is the difference between a great coach and the coach that gets recycled every two or three years, because all they're doing is stealing plays, right? They're not thinking about the game. That's the question. Why? Why understand the dance, understand Why we pivot, why we pull that lever, why we cut this off even though it was still, it still had a return. Understand that, make sense of what's going on. Don't just ask for that next step, that next instruction. I wish people comprehended it better, like just collectively we'd make better decisions. So that's, that would be mine.

Evan Hoffman: 19:16

Yeah, I always talk about peeling back the story behind the data, right? There's just numbers on a page, but there's a story behind those numbers. If you go deeper and you ask why so that's great taking the time to pause and think sometimes Yeah, so simple.

Jordan Finley: 19:30

It's

Evan Hoffman: 19:30

hard to

Jordan Finley: 19:31

do deep work. Yes in this day and age. Everything is hurry run I battle with that Mike and I talk about it routinely the struggle to find that quiet space to reflect and analyze but it's essential. Otherwise You're just following everyone else, you're following the crowd you're just, you feel good cause you're busy, but that doesn't mean you're productive.

Evan Hoffman: 19:51

Ooh,

Jordan Finley: 19:52

that

Evan Hoffman: 19:53

one's deep. That one might hit a nerve for some. Awesome. Jordan, I appreciate it. Thank you for coming on. Thanks for making the time. I know we're going to be on the panel here in a little bit, thank you for having me. No worries. Yeah. Until next time. Cheers.

Thaddeus Tondu: 20:08

Well, That's a wrap on another episode of HVAC Success Secrets Revealed. Before you go, two quick things. First off, join our Facebook group, facebook.com/groups/hvacrevealed. The other thing. If you took one tiny bit of information out of this show, no matter how big, no matter how small, all we ask is for you to introduce this to one person in your contacts list. That's it. That's all one person. So they too can unleash the ultimate HVAC business. Until next time. Cheers.