Full transcript10 chapters · 10,986 words
00:00Send more mail to less people, and what Dope Marketing does
Dave Carroll: I always was of the belief that you should send more mail to less people. Like not do one blast of 20,000, do 20 blasts to the same thousand people to get in front of them.
Tyler Martin: Welcome to Profit and Grit with Tyler, where blue-collar owners and insiders spill the real story behind their hustle, building businesses that thrive through sweat and smarts. We’ll dig into their journeys from scaling chaos to growing the bottom line with lessons and grit that pay off big.
Tyler Martin: Here’s your host, the Blue Collar CFO, Tyler Martin. Today’s guest has one of the wildest entrepreneurial journeys you’ll hear on this show. From serving time in prison to building a 22 plus million dollar company, Dave Carroll proves that grit, systems, and relentless belief can change everything. We’re going to dig into
Tyler Martin: his personal story, the lessons of scaling fast, how EOS transformed his leadership, and why old school direct mail might just be the best marketing move for your home service business. Dave, welcome to Profit and Grit. Hey, Dave, welcome to the Profit and Grit show. How’s it
Tyler Martin: going today. Appreciate you having me. Yeah, I was excited to have you here, man. Like to me, your brand, if people don’t know Dave Carroll, Dope Marketing. Like not only is the name super cool, but it’s like a well-known name. So usually I ask what you do, but since I kind of spilled the
Tyler Martin: beans, tell us a little bit about Dope Marketing. And then I’d also love to learn a little bit
Dave Carroll: about you personally. So Dope Marketing is a software company that helps business owners send laser-focused direct mail with no minimum order, with the result being getting better jobs in the right neighborhoods for less money that convert higher. That’s what we do at Doe.
Dave Carroll: I have a background in home service, in data, starting companies. I’m a serial entrepreneur. And Doe Marketing has kind of been the compilation of my career. I think as entrepreneurs, as founders, as business owners, like we don’t have a resume. I’ve only had two jobs in my life for like less
Dave Carroll: than a couple of months and I’ll be 40 next month. So my resume is, and I think a lot of our resumes are, you know, the building of what we’ve built. And so dope is really everything that I’ve done in my career put into a business to help other businesses grow. Very cool. How about a little
Tyler Martin: tidbit about yourself personally. One thing I’d love to just share or learn about you is you have
02:44Five kids, homeschooling, and a second home in Puerto Rico
Tyler Martin: two residences, I believe, at least two, and sometimes you’re not always in the States themselves. You go outside of the States. Share that with me. And what was your, like, what was, what pushed you
Dave Carroll: in that direction or decided to go in that direction? So my beautiful and wonderful wife turned 40 last year, and we had got some advice from a friend that we needed to go check out Puerto Rico. There’s a place called Dorado Beach in Puerto Rico. We went down in September of
Dave Carroll: last year of 24 for the first time. From September 2024 until now, I have now spent almost six months there on the island. We ended up getting a second home there. We leased it. We didn’t buy it yet. We’re working on that. We got a second home there early in the summer.
Dave Carroll: and yeah, we do about a third. My plan for next year is I’ll do at least a third of the year. I know a lot of people in Puerto Rico, they have like some tax advantages for business owners and stuff. That’s not really the priority for us.
Dave Carroll: I just found a place that I didn’t even know places like this existed. Puerto Rico in itself is an amazing island culture, everything. Toronto Beach is a bit of a bubble. I would say it’s not always, it doesn’t always feel like real life there.
Dave Carroll: It is a beautiful, amazing, very private, private place that we’ve just fallen in love with and made a part of our lives.
Tyler Martin: That’s cool, man. I love when people kind of go against the grain and just push themselves to go into another area. And I’m talking a little bit of a hypocrite here, someone that’s always kind of been in the same area. So I always fantasize about kind of pushing myself to do something different.
Dave Carroll: It was an interesting decision of how we got there because we have five kids. We have 12, 9, 5, 3, and 2. Wow. And we made the decision to do some homeschooling this year with our oldest. We tried it out with our 9-year-old and our 5-year-old.
Dave Carroll: We ended up getting them back in the school they were in before my fourth grader. His name is also David. He was just bumming. Wanted to be around his buddies and his pals, exceeding in the school part. But you could tell just the socialization.
Dave Carroll: And so it’s cool when we’re in Puerto Rico because a lot of families do that in that community. But, you know, just my whole life, you know, when I career what led me up to the conversation we’re having today, I’ve kind of gone against the grain a bit.
Dave Carroll: But, yeah, I’m sure I’m sure we’ll talk.
Tyler Martin: Let’s go into that, because I think this is what frames you as a person. And I I love your story. So you’ve had some hard knocks. Like you started out, I believe, in your 20s and believe you had a drug problem, maybe even some level of prison you had to serve.
05:28Drug dealing, prison, and starting a window cleaning company
Tyler Martin: Tell me that story. How do you go from really on a path of probably winding up in prison or jail to running an eight-figure company that I think you aspire to someday be a nine-figure company? Talk me through that, and I’ll dig in a little bit.
Dave Carroll: So I grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, started getting into trouble or whatever when I was 12, 13, like most of us, right? Bunk your head, hanging out with the wrong people. Cliche. I got really heavy into drug dealing. 16, 17, 18. We had some family out in California bringing hundreds of pounds back of cannabis from a very young age.
Dave Carroll: I mean, I was 17 years old. It wasn’t my money. But I was 17 years old, counting a million dollars in a hotel room. It was all I knew, really growing up. And then what happened, 18, 19, 20, got deeper into drugs, just the culture, the lifestyle.
Dave Carroll: I wanted every day of my life to be a rap video, and it was. We ended up, people are getting into drugs and again, just accelerating that lifestyle. I ended up getting robbed for about 200 grand. And I, a long story short, ended up figuring out who it was, kicked the guy’s door in,
Dave Carroll: ended up hitting a guy with a gun. I got stabbed four times in an incident, woke up in the hospital. And I ended up, there was like a plea. I’d never really been in that level of trouble before. So the judge said, I can take one felony and take eight years.
Dave Carroll: I can take four felonies and take four years. Or I can tell on the guys that I went into the house with, get a year and a day in the workhouse and get an expunged. Mr. Tough Guy, flipped the judge off, said run the four years. So I went to prison when I was 21,
Dave Carroll: got out right before I was 25, ended up having to go back for seven months on a violation. I was out for a month messing around as usual, got out and really went back to the same lifestyle for like a year, year and a half, right, right back into it. And I think in, in sobriety, they talk
Dave Carroll: about sick and tired of being sick and tired and took some other hard financial losses, some stuff happened. And the only job I had really had in my life was I got a job in a window cleaning company when I was in a halfway house transitioning out of prison. And so I looked what me and my wife had
Dave Carroll: just gotten together. I decided to start a window cleaning company. This is now 16 years ago. I still own that company to this day. We’ve now gotten into general contracting. We do exterior cleaning. We do roofing, siding, whole bunch of stuff. I’ve been removed from that business
Dave Carroll: completely for about eight years. Literally, like I don’t know the names of employees. My wife was joking. We just bought three trucks last week. I had no clue. Very removed. Set that business up like what I always believed the business was supposed to be. Set it up, it makes some money,
Dave Carroll: it runs, whatever. I came out with a software product three years into the cleaning company. It’s about 13 years ago. Couldn’t spell software, but just had an idea. And it was similar to like a PandaDoc or a DocuSign. It was expediting the estimate process. Had no clue what I was doing,
Dave Carroll: but I sold, I sold a $30 subscription to 400 people in 90 days. Was like, this is easier than washing windows. Let’s get into this shit. And so, uh, fast forward, we tried to turn that thing into a CRM a couple of times that didn’t really work. Learned some lessons with some staffing
Dave Carroll: companies. I got into a lawsuit actually with a staffing company in Canada. If anyone knows about Canada, they don’t let people like me into Canada. So I couldn’t go into a lawsuit and there was this whole thing, but just learned a lot. That’s four or five years into the software company.
Dave Carroll: I ended up getting into brokering data and selling lists, business lists to business owners, consumer lists, telemarketing companies, direct mail companies. And when you sell lists, it’s one thing for the transaction for the list, right? Tyler wants a list of business owners that do
Dave Carroll: under over 10 million to do fractional CFO work or whatever for it. So you sell someone a list, but then you also have to teach them how to use it. Like where are they going to apply the list?
09:28Selling data lists and why he ended up owning a print shop
Dave Carroll: Are they going to run ads or send mail or do cross channel stuff? And so I always can make a good living selling data. We were still doing some stuff with the software company. But what I saw was if you sold 10 lists,
Dave Carroll: two of them were small businesses, love some small businesses. They’re like their businesses, they’re like babies, they’re born every day. Four of them were to telemarketing companies. I didn’t like telemarketing and the BDIs and the C3PO texting laws and all this stuff. And then four of them were to direct mail companies.
Dave Carroll: And direct mail, the print industry in general, is ran by 70-year-old fat guys who suck at golf, whose kids don’t want to work for them. And I saw opportunity in just direct mail was very hard. So I’d always had a vision. We had sent a lot of direct mail.
Dave Carroll: I mean, there were months for my service company that we were sending 100,000 plus pieces a month, figuring that out, learning it, going through it, selling a kidney to make it work, the whole dance. and like I just saw the pain I mean a direct mail campaign would take two to eight weeks to put
Dave Carroll: together you got to get your list and clean it up and figure out who you’re targeting then you got to find a designer and your niece’s boyfriend who was a graphic designer or someone on fiver and then you posted a facebook group like is this good and a bunch of other non-designers are giving
Dave Carroll: you feedback and then you got to set up the mailing and the tracking and deal with the post thought. It’s just a very cumbersome, painful process. And the strategies, I was born in 1985. A lot of the strategies for direct mail were created in the year before the year I was born.
Dave Carroll: And just technology is different. Automation is different. Tracking is different. Targeting is different. And so about six years ago, I had a vision that we were going to build a piece of software that was going to expedite this process. Now, when we started building this thing, if you
Dave Carroll: would have told me I would own a print shop, Tyler, I’d tell you, you were nuts. That wasn’t the plan at all. We built the software three to six months in. The whole plan was to broker out all the print work. We’re not printers. We didn’t know about that. It didn’t work.
Dave Carroll: We’re sending it out and it’s late or it’s going to the wrong place or the paper’s wrong. It’s like,
Tyler Martin: this isn’t that difficult. You had no control, basically.
Dave Carroll: No control whatsoever. And it goes in, we’ll talk about control in a little bit, but it’s like, what I saw was we were trying to do something that I believed was possible that the industry was saying was too hard or was against the grain or doing whatever.
Dave Carroll: So I just said, fuck it, man. We’re going to do it ourselves. And I ended up leasing some printers, getting into some of the stuff. And then I remember right away, I told my business coaches, I was like, I’m going to buy a yard sign printer.
Dave Carroll: He’s like, what are you talking about, Dave? Buy a yard sign printer? You’re selling software. But I had this vision that, especially in home service, but any business owner, if you pop a yard sign in front of a job, what are you trying to do? trying to let the neighbors know. I have some very strong beliefs around targeting neighborhoods,
Dave Carroll: even directly talk a lot about zip codes and we’ll get into that more. But we started building the software and it was getting some traction right away from relationships. I’ve been in the home service space for a while. Hold on one second. I just, I feel like there’s
12:31The Canada lawsuit and sunsetting his first software product
Tyler Martin: so many things here I want to unpack. So I just want a little bit of tangents. I want to go back to Canada. So you had a software company, got into a lawsuit, couldn’t even get into Canada. Do you just abandon that business?
Tyler Martin: Like, were you like, was that because of the lawsuit or what happened?
Dave Carroll: I hired an attorney up in Canada. I actually, Buffalo, New York, that had representation in Canada. And I’d never gone through something like that before. I didn’t know the first thing about lawsuits and getting into that or whatever. And like most things in business and life, you just learn.
Dave Carroll: And so, spend some money, learn some lessons. I think the total lawsuit that they were trying to get 200 grand out of us when we only owed them, like… $40,000, and I ended up having to pay him about $50,000 total over a payment plan through it.
Dave Carroll: But it was just like anything in life. You get into something, you kind of try to figure out what you’re doing, something comes out of left field, and you just kind of roll with the punches.
Tyler Martin: So what happened to that business ultimately? Did you sell it, or did you walk from it, or is that some of that software part of dope?
Dave Carroll: We ended up, so what happened was we built the software, and we just stopped adding features to it. And then over about three years, we just kind of like sunset it, like close the job.com is the domain. It might still be active. There are people that will like tag me in a post from
Dave Carroll: 10 years ago about it or whatever, but we just communicated. It went from like, and it’s max, I think there was like 1200 users on it or something like that. Cause it was a monthly, no contract, like that type of thing. Cancel, get back on, use it once, whatever.
Dave Carroll: We just communicated with our like users, the initial people that stayed on it. Like hey, we’re not developing features anymore. And eventually we’re going to sunset this thing and there’s no support anymore. And so from a monetary standpoint, I just let the thing kind of like
Dave Carroll: wind down and just dealt with people. You had like another idea. Hey, I’m now I’m moving on to this. It sounds like you kind of grew into that. Yeah. So a lot of those clients, we would still like sell lists to and sell data to, to use this stuff. It’s kind of how we would sell it. I’d speak in
Dave Carroll: trade shows or do stuff like that. We’d show them how to aggregate the list or buy a list, and then they could use the software to make the proposals for the list. It was part of that whole consultative process. And so we still have a lot of those clients from way back are still clients
Tyler Martin: of dope now to this day. Here’s my other question. So as you’re getting into dope marketing and you’re building software, great, I get it. But then you start thinking about printing and doing things like that. Is there any part of you that’s going, man, this is the days of the internet.
Tyler Martin: People are doing everything over the internet. Mail really is going away. Is there any part of you that’s kind of going through your mind? Like how do you know this is the right direction?
15:16Going deep not wide instead of blasting 20,000 pieces
Dave Carroll: You know, I think as founders, as business owners, like a lot of times, the only thing we have is our gut and our judgment. And I always had sold a lot of lists for direct mail, dealt with these companies. And I think I just, I mean, like Martha Stewart insider trading information, but like,
Dave Carroll: I just had a little bit of a peek behind the curtain of what was going on in an industry that constantly, I mean, since the days I remember I was back in like the Billie Jean is marketing coaching stuff 10 years ago, direct mail is dead. This doesn’t work like selling
Dave Carroll: against it to sell digital. My vision with direct mail was always a little bit different than what the traditional like strategies and standards was. I always felt like the best way to do mail, and this was through learning, doing shotgun mailing, doing spray and pray. I always was of
Dave Carroll: the belief that you should send more mail to less people, like not do one blast of 20,000, do 20 blasts to the same thousand people to get in front of them. And that was where we were kind of going against the grain, where the companies we were trying
Dave Carroll: to initially broker the work to was like, this isn’t going to work. We can’t do these low minimums. It can’t turn over this fast. Can I’m like, yeah, it can. Like, I understood it enough that I believed that the way that we were approaching it was
Dave Carroll: not only like a better strategy, but it was doable. And still to this day, I’ll never say we don’t have competition at dope. We have tons of amazing competitors, but it’s like, I just, what makes us really different. And one of the commitments I made with the just print is dying
Dave Carroll: or it’s, I just always knew if it didn’t work and we owned a print shop, like everyone needs a business card at some time and you can still work on, did I spend a hundred G’s a month on digital apps for dope to get in front of people. I believe in digital, but I also believe that
Dave Carroll: getting in front of the right customer consistently is more important than going broad. We want to go deep, not wide. Yeah, that’s powerful. And I think that’s one thing that we get
Tyler Martin: wrong a lot when we’re marketing is we think if we just send a, we think of a list as like 5,000 people rather than 2,000 homes or 1,000 homes or 100 homes or whatever it is, and just really get them to know us. It’s kind of like similar, I would say, to a lot of realtors will use that
Dave Carroll: approach. They’ll canvas a zip code or an area. Yeah. Farming a neighborhood and getting into that. And the real estate industry taught us a lot about targeting. Once we get into some of the technical stuff, we’ll get into that. But it’s like, you know, a lot of us as entrepreneurs,
Dave Carroll: I think we try to like chase the squirrels or find the opportunity when it’s more like one of the things that really worked for us at Dope and continues to work so we can help our clients is just like, we’ve all seen those studies of your ICP or your customer avatar,
Dave Carroll: your thing. I don’t think we focus enough on the systems and the discipline of just like coloring in the lines when we think about who we’re trying to get our business in front of.
Tyler Martin: Yeah, that’s good stuff. So I do want to, as you bring up the word systems, I love your content on LinkedIn. We were talking about this a little before we started. I feel like a lot of times the way you write, like I’m peeking into your life, I’m peeking
Tyler Martin: into your story. You have a great way of just drawing the reader into what you’re doing. And one of the things that you’ve said is you said before that you don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.
19:06Hiring someone who can do 30% of what you do
Tyler Martin: Now, I’ve heard variations of that quite a bit. For home service business owners out there, how does, because I feel like what you’re doing kind of does apply to any business. Like, how do you think of systems? And if there’s anything we could do that also we could tie it into home services, I think
Tyler Martin: that could help the listeners, how they could also be applying systems if they’re not.
Dave Carroll: I am not inherently a natural systems and process and bean counter person. I’m the opposite. I’m a founder visionary to a fault. But I think as we start our companies, we wear a lot of hats. You know, like there’s a lot of jobs and we do all of them.
Dave Carroll: And I forget the name of the exercise, but there’s an exercise. Every time I’m on a podcast, someone corrects me on it. But it’s the exercise of going, what am I good at? What do I like doing? What am I not good at?
Dave Carroll: What do I not like doing? And just holding yourself to an accountability. Like when you start off, you got to do everything. Right. You have to. You don’t have anyone else. I practice that exercise quarterly. And the way that I’ve done that through my career is just like,
Dave Carroll: I think it was Gary Vee said, if you hire a good employee, you’re looking for someone that can do 70% of what you do. I disagree with that completely. If I can find someone to do 30% of what I can do, I found an amazing individual
Dave Carroll: because I don’t have the same expectations of someone else that I have of myself. And if we look at roles and jobs, and I know before we started recording, we’re talking about EOS a little bit. I think we’re going to get into that.
Dave Carroll: But it’s like people already have this stuff figured out. I’m not an engineer. I’m not an inventor. The thing I say a lot is like steal like an artist. When you look at systems in business, that’s the stuff that’s in the books. It’s on the podcast.
Dave Carroll: People have already done these things. And when you understand at least how we apply EOS in our business, a good manager, in my opinion, can manage 7 to 12 people. And when you have their goals and their rocks and their KPIs and all the stuff that just makes up like,
Dave Carroll: the more simple that you can make the question to any employee in your business, ask them, what is your responsibilities? and one of the things you do during the day that help you meet your goals of your responsibility, it seems so simple when we talk about it,
Dave Carroll: when we’ve already put it in place. And for the listeners, viewers that are like, I just started a couple of years ago and I’m still doing everything. I just start with that exercise. There are things that have to go on in your business every day.
Dave Carroll: What are you good at? What do you like doing? What are you not good at? What do you not like doing? Who do you have in place right now? and just that discipline of looking at your org chart and every single employee of your business,
Dave Carroll: just knowing the three to five things that they’re responsible for so that their job gets done in their offer letter for what you hired them for. And I think for looking at systems and processes that again, this stuff doesn’t come to me naturally.
Dave Carroll: I’ve had to spend years and years and years learning how to apply systems and businesses. But the way I do that is I just get out of the way. I communicate and lay the expectations of what I want done. And then we come up with the roles
Dave Carroll: and the expectations of the employee. And we just manage the systems around that. As easy as that sounds like, it actually is that simple if you give yourself the time to do it.
Tyler Martin: Yeah, because sometimes what I get is owners, once again, in home service space, generally HVAC or plumbing and electrical,
22:40Balancing the nice-guy owner and the helicoptering owner
Tyler Martin: they’re really nice people. I get kind of two extremes. I get the really tough owner that really overwhelms his staff a lot of times, his or her staff. in terms of how he interacts with his team and expectations of his team. Or the other extreme is they’re a really nice guy,
Tyler Martin: and they just really don’t want to pressure their manager or pressure their staff too much. And so they get a tremendous amount of inefficiency. What’s your thoughts around that? And where is that balance? And how do you deal with that? Does the whole, when you lay out this accountability, does that solve all that?
Tyler Martin: Or how do you deal with that?
Dave Carroll: I take the approach in management that you can’t help anyone until you help the person in the mirror. And so like if you’re self-aware enough as an owner, as a leader, as a manager to just understand like where are you at on that spectrum you just explained?
Dave Carroll: Are you kind of the nice guy, non-confrontational, want to be able to delegate it off and don’t really love the hard conversations? Well, if that’s you, you need a firecracker next to you that can go do all that shit that you don’t like doing.
Dave Carroll: And if you’re on the other side, and I tend through my career, I’ve leaned more towards the go-getter, reactive, helicoptering in kind of that. But like, you’ll understand over the years that that doesn’t really work as well either. And so you have to find someone in your management,
Dave Carroll: in your communication to help kind of balance that. I think business is not to get too like hippie woo woo, but it’s like the yin and the yang. And you got to have, as your business grows, there’s more jobs to do that you can then you can do on your own what i’ve had a lot of success with
Dave Carroll: is bringing on managers leadership people team leads whatever it is that just really i’m very self-aware pride myself in that and i try to in any business i’m involved in balance my strengths with someone that is again as simple as it is just have someone around that evens that stuff out
Dave Carroll: because like there’s a book around the topic of what got us here will not get us there. And when you look at some of that startup founder having to wear every hat, you’re doing the sales, you’re doing the customer service, you’re doing the work, you’re putting out the fires,
Dave Carroll: you’re shaking the hands, you’re kissing the babies, you’re doing everything. As you grow, you’re only going to be limited by how much you can get out of your own way. Because the more that is required of you. We’ve all been in positions where we have too much on our plate
Dave Carroll: and like 70% of everything is getting done. And it’s like, how long do you want to live in that? And I think for me, really trying to balance like, we have 110 employees right now at Dope. I have three direct reports in the entire business
Dave Carroll: because what I’m good at or my level of communication or where I’m needed, as much as we’ve grown, the whole team doesn’t need to get exposed to that all the time. And not that it’s just like crazy, whatever, all the time, but it’s just like, I think
Dave Carroll: it’s important as we look at systems and we look at just self-awareness of a business owner to hold ourselves accountable for like where we contribute on the highest level and just put a little more effort into kind of getting out of our own way because that’s
Dave Carroll: where the growth is going to happen. Yes, nothing is going to happen the way we would do it, but that’s a good thing because if we understand our strengths, like for me, not Mr. Systems and Process. It took us a year to even implement EOS because I consciously or subconsciously was fighting so much of it the
Dave Carroll: whole time with the way I wanted to operate versus what that system was created for.
Tyler Martin: Sure. Before we get into EOS, I do want to ask one question. How do you consciously become better at being self-aware? Like, are you doing something? Is that just a gift that you have? Because even like when you just said, you just said you have three direct reports and it’s kind of good that I think the general staff, I’m not using, these are my words, not yours, are kind of insulated sometimes from some of your ideas and thought processes.
Tyler Martin: Because one of the most common things I see is when we’re running a business, we always have these grand visions and ideas and we’re constantly throwing them at our staff. And our staff is like, they’re trying to appeal to us and appease us and they’re going in all these different directions.
Tyler Martin: And, or sometimes they know, you know what, Tyler just brought up this idea next week. It’ll be a new idea. I’m not even going to listen. And so you get all these things. So how do you work on that self-awareness?
Dave Carroll: So one part of it is just, I try to be very reflective and just look at like, what’s the same online almost every day, you know, look back at where you were 10 years ago and ask yourself, do you have most of what you wanted?
Dave Carroll: And a lot of times that answer is yes. Like a version of that. for me, you know, I think a lot of, for men, some of the most developmental years in our life are from when we’re 20 to 25. And I wasn’t out going through my first love experience in the nightlife
Dave Carroll: scene, getting into my career. I was around murderers and rapists in a maximum security prison. And so for me, I think that getting to know myself during those times played a lot into the way that I kind of operate, view the world, you know, but also like I really over the past
Dave Carroll: four years have gotten a lot into self-improvement, health, wellness, and just following the path of a lot of the people that I’ve seen or that I consider successful. And in the past four years, as I reflect on my 16-year career as an entrepreneur, I just look at some of the
Dave Carroll: inflection points or the aha moments or the light bulbs. And most of them had to do with just me understanding the chapter of my life I was in, where I was focused on my goals, where I was operating. And I’m just, again, a walking cliche. I wake up at 4.35 o’clock with no alarm. I spend
Dave Carroll: some time with myself in the morning. I prepare myself for the world. I prepare the world for myself. And I just, I think in the people that I looked up to or that I’ve admired through my career, the consistency has also always been a level of self-reflection, improvement, just growth,
Dave Carroll: because I think the glass ceilings that we hit in business, a lot of the times we break through them are in personal growth. It’s not, I heard Alex Ramozzi on a podcast, or I saw Gary V speak it a thing, it’s much more like I had a conversation with someone, I read a book, I heard a podcast,
Dave Carroll: and then I decided to start interrupting some patterns that were very comfortable to me that led towards the same result. And I’m really, again, not to get too big on the hippie woo-woo meditation, sauna, cold plunge lifestyle, but it’s more just like the more time that you spend with yourself understanding where you contribute or where
Dave Carroll: you struggle, what comes from that is the growth. The discipline is in the reflection. The work that you commit to, that’s where the glass ceilings kind of get broken through if that
29:57Running a hybrid EOS to manage on facts, not feelings
Dave Carroll: answers the question. Yeah, good stuff. So now I want to dig into EOS. You guys use EOS,
Tyler Martin: the system. Do you use a flavor of it or are you like strict in terms of the way they have their, you know, their style of steps and doing things?
Dave Carroll: Sure. So I’m not always the greatest at coloring in the lights. And what we’ve done with EOS is like a lot of businesses that I’ve talked to, it is not super rigid. It is a, it is our version. It is more like a dope operating system than it is EOS.
Dave Carroll: But we took inspiration from EOS. I mean, there are L10 meetings in every department, rock schools, KPIs, issues, the buzzwords are the foundation of it. But we run it as a hybrid that works for us in the way that we operate or our communication style.
Dave Carroll: So not so, like, we don’t have an EOS implementer or integrator outside party. We kind of ran over a couple of those real quick and they helped us a lot get to where we’re at, but we were able to take some of the roles
Dave Carroll: of EOS internally. We’re not saying that businesses don’t need help. I advise anyone to get with a local person, internet person, whatever on their area to look if they’re thinking about implementing EOS. But yeah, we run much more of a hybrid than a rigid
Dave Carroll: if Gina Wickman was assessing our version of it.
Tyler Martin: What’s the takeaway on implementing EOS into your company? Like, what are the, what do you think you got best at? What do you think is the greatest strengths you got from it that’s improved your business?
Dave Carroll: It’s the structure. I mean, it’s the systems. It’s one of the biggest things for us is being a true self-funded bootstrap, no investor, clean cap table startup is like, a lot of times it’s kind of my way or the highway when we’re talking.
Dave Carroll: Right. But I don’t operate like that. I don’t need to be right. I just need someone to be right. Like, I don’t have a big ego and business of it needing to go my way, but I balance that with trusting my spidey senses at times.
Dave Carroll: Now, because of that, you had said it earlier when we were talking of like, you helicopter in, you’re bringing a team into a meeting, talking about an idea that’s not coming out for a couple months. And they’re like, am I supposed to be doing something with this right now?
Dave Carroll: Or is Dave just using therapy to talk out loud to watch the reaction on my face? Some version of there in between, I’m sure. but the biggest thing that we got from eos is being able to to manage employees around facts not feelings because in business like we have facts we have the crm data the reports the high
Dave Carroll: level the hub spot the stuff the whatever whatever’s in the spreadsheets or the crms or the facts but business owners we have a lot of feelings about the facts and i think the feelings of business owners can distract the team. But if you have a seat with a role, with a responsibility,
Dave Carroll: with a goal, the way we’ve set up Dope is an outside consultant. Tyler right now could come into our business and look at someone on a team and buy their scorecard of green, yellow, red. You can tell me if someone’s doing a good job, not me being a slack sniper looking at the customer
Dave Carroll: service channel to decide if someone’s doing good this week. But the foundation of taking the
33:17Neighborhoods over zip codes and getting 7 to 11 touches
Dave Carroll: feelings away from management and performance and having it based off facts, I think was one of our biggest takeaways from. Yeah, that’s good stuff. That’s really good stuff. Okay, last thing I want
Tyler Martin: to cover. I want to spend some time talking about this. Just in the area of marketing as it relates to home services, what are you seeing? What should people, what should businesses be doing? Let’s dig in there. I really want to dive into your expertise and just understand maybe what we’re covering
Tyler Martin: and maybe what we’re missing.
Dave Carroll: First thing going into, we’re filming this middle of October 2025, whenever it comes out. So like when I’m talking to business owners now, or we’re putting together trainings, the number one thing to focus on in 2026 is having clean data in your CRM.
Dave Carroll: Because what’s happening now with the advancements in AI, the CRMs are getting smarter, the marketing agencies or the business owners have access to these tools that just weren’t available three months ago, six months ago, a year ago, 10 years ago. And for the next still one to three years, even as fast as the AI stuff is moving.
Dave Carroll: And let me be clear, I’m not Mr. AI guru. I just learned how to spell AI last year. Like the power in the technology that’s coming out, I believe it’s going to still be another one to three years till business owners are giving themselves permission to implement AI outside of like, run me an email follow up or this text message campaign.
Dave Carroll: There’s so much that can be done with your CRM data, with your marketing partner, with the business owner that’s marketing-driven and does a lot of it, his or herself. If you have clean data in your CRM, you have a name, you have an address, you have the
Dave Carroll: services that were provided, what they cost, when you did them, what the customer journey was there, we’re just in a different time now that you can utilize that information. And when it comes to marketing, to Google, to Facebook, to direct mail, at Dope, we only
Dave Carroll: do direct mail and print. We don’t do digital stuff. But like having data in your CRM now can allow you not even on a zip code level. People think direct mail, they think zip codes a lot. We talked about real estate. There was an example earlier in the conversation.
Dave Carroll: I want business owners to not think about zip codes. I want them to think about neighborhoods or in the real estate space, call them villages. Summit Hill, McAllister, Groveland, Highland Park, Frogtown, like these areas where when you cross a street or a body of water or a train track or the whatever, the people are
Dave Carroll: different across this line. And instead of looking at targeting like home service, what do we want? We want a 35 to 60 year old homeowner that makes over 100K a year. Their house is over 5 million. They have a kid. they buy some stuff. It’s not just that anymore. Like I own a home service business in Minneapolis.
Dave Carroll: There’s 3.5 million people in a seven county area. A million of them own a home. Yes. Do a million of them have a house that I can work on? Sure. But we’ve whittled that down to about 75,000 homes we want to get in front of. And those homes, like the relativity, just burn this in your brain.
Dave Carroll: the relativity of a neighborhood is that buying a home is the American dream. The cliche of the home is where the heart is, is true, but humans are predictable creatures and we like to do what makes us comfortable. And if our home is where our heart is, we’re going to live around people
Dave Carroll: that are probably the same age, have the same type of lifestyle. Kids are doing the same type of stuff. Eight out of 10 people in your neighborhood, you have some level of something in common with just from your lifestyle. And you can rewind back from when you were 18, 25, 32,
Dave Carroll: 45, 60, whatever. Think of the homes you lived in and who your neighbors were. You had something in common. But let’s take it further for home service. Not only do these people hang out, crack a beer, borrow the lawnmower, or not talk to each other anywhere in between,
Dave Carroll: but their homes were built around the same year of approximately the same materials by three to five of the same builders. So when you look at the predictability of HVAC, roofing, plumbing, electric, lawn mowing, care, anything that a homeowner is doing at their home,
Dave Carroll: it’s 10 times more likely that the neighbors of your current jobs are going to need your services other than some baller in some gated community on the other side of the tower where you got three jobs in the past five years or some waterfront property
Dave Carroll: or some cabin land or whatever. And so clean data will allow the technology the tools available to go deeper than a zip code and actually tell you like what neighborhoods you should be advertising in, whether that’s with Facebook, Google, direct mail, door hangers,
Dave Carroll: yard signs, Instagram, whatever it is, clean data leans to like properly thought out data-driven decisions by a business owner. And so I think when we look at trends and marketing and take out the elections, the stuff in the news, the things that affect all interest rates and all that stuff.
Dave Carroll: If you just spend more time as a business owner getting more touches on the neighbors of your current jobs, your business is going to go more predictably. It’s just a fact. There’s no feelings
Tyler Martin: there. That is actually going to happen. So when you say more touches in your neighborhood of where you’re doing jobs, define that a little bit of what are more touches? Is that once a month for like just indefinitely? Is it, well, what’s that strategy look like?
Dave Carroll: So you graduated from Harvard like me, right? Harvard alumni. Actually, I’m multi Harvard and Yale. I’ve got like so many credentials. It’s not even funny. So I don’t have any. I went to nine high schools. But at Harvard, what they told us is
Dave Carroll: it takes seven to 11 touches for a cold consumer to remember a brand. The average home service business is getting two to four touches on their ideal customer. What’s a touch? You already are getting leads, like your Google, Facebook, door knocking, flyers, whatever you’re doing.
Dave Carroll: You already got a touch to gain that customer. But then they saw your truck. They saw your technician at the gas station and their hoodie when they were behind them in line. They saw the yard sign that you put out. They got online.
Dave Carroll: They saw the Facebook ad. These touches that add up. As business owners, I was asked a question in a Facebook group this morning. I got tagged in of like, hey, wrapping up the year, what should my budget be next year as a home service?
Dave Carroll: But funnest question ever, right? It’s a marketer, all of it. Well, the actual number is per million dollars, depending on your growth. Million dollars of top line revenue, whether you’re trying to do your first million, your 10th million, whatever it is, it’s four to 12% of your top line revenue,
Dave Carroll: depending on how aggressive your growth is trying to be. So a company doing a million dollars, 80, 80 grand, 100 grand a year, something like that per million, $8,000 to $10,000 a month. But if you’re seasonal and you only work eight months out of the year,
Dave Carroll: there’s different way, $12,000, $13,000 a month. And when you look at where to spend that money, I go back to the zip codes. Not everyone in a zip code has as much in common as everyone in a neighborhood. And like eight out of 10 home service business owners that we interviewed said
Dave Carroll: they have grown up or at least lived in the area where they own their business for more than five years. So you know these neighborhoods when you call them out in your area. And when we go back to the discipline or the self-awareness in your business,
Dave Carroll: if you just download all the jobs you did over the past three years and put them in a spreadsheet, I don’t even care about if you have their names, just the addresses. Upload those into Google Maps like you’re going to drive there and it’ll put a bunch of pins on a map.
Dave Carroll: And what you’re looking for is just the density of those pins because it’s going to be neighborhoods. And when we look at the touches in a neighborhood, a touch is a brand impression. Your logo, your truck, your face, your mascot, your Dan Antonelli character, your whatever it is.
Dave Carroll: But the discipline is the focus on more brand impressions in the neighborhood. One more stat. While we’re on this call, while anyone’s listening, watching, 3% to 7% of your ideal target customer is searching for you right now, currently, as you’re watching or listening this.
Dave Carroll: The other 93% to 97% of people that could hire you for your services are not in the decision-making process. They don’t need it right now. The event hasn’t happened. They don’t need to hire spring cleaning, whatever. It’s your job as the business owner to get enough brand impressions.
Dave Carroll: So when they go get three quotes, you’re one of them. So those impressions back to the Harvard study are like, ask yourself, when you do a job in a neighborhood, what effort or discipline are you putting in getting seven to 11 more touches and answer your question in two to four weeks of the cycle of the job is what
Dave Carroll: I want to see. seven to 11 touches. And again, that can be a yard sign pulling out of the neighborhood at the stop sign. That can be parking your truck at the Home Depot over the weekend because you know people go there that hire you for your services. Whatever that impression is, TikTok, Facebook, Google,
Dave Carroll: Instagram, LinkedIn, digital, whatever. But the power now of putting a tiny little billboard in someone’s hands and doing that consistently, that’s where I believe the implementation of this strategy is of looking at those tighter neighborhoods, 100 to 500 homes, and asking yourself, if you did the exercise and put all your jobs into Google Maps and saw the pins,
Dave Carroll: how many touches are you getting in your highest three little polygon pockets of jobs over two to
Tyler Martin: four weeks of doing a job. It’s probably not enough. So what does your software do? Does your software dial in these neighborhoods? Like, is that what the power of the secret sauce? And then one of the second part to question this, does it interface with some of the popular CRMs like
Tyler Martin: Service Titan, Job, or House Call Pro, Field Edge, that type of stuff? So outside of DOPE just being
Dave Carroll: like a cute name, DOPE actually stands for data on previous engagement. So through our onboarding process, you either come with a list of customers or we connect to your CRM and we integrate with everyone that you just mentioned and a thousand other ones. The data in your business will tell
Dave Carroll: a story if you let it. And so what we do at Dope, our software, we have strategies for people that have no lists in our brand new businesses and we can help with the targeting based on their industry. We can take a list of your previous jobs and just do what’s called a neighborhood reactivation.
Dave Carroll: You give me 50 jobs, we can market to the nearest 25 neighbors of each job automatically, get that campaign out in less than a week and just be touching them. If you connect your CRM, we can create strategies with that clean data or messy data.
Dave Carroll: We can help you clean it up in your CRM. But then we can also set up automations. So when you like mark a job complete, Tyler can get a gift box, a handwritten note or a postcard, one address, one job, one thing, direct sending.
Dave Carroll: or when you mark a job approved as a HVAC company. Hey, we just got your neighbor approved for a new system. Pardon the dust, pardon the noise. We’re working in the area. Here’s a recent job we completed. Here’s a meet our team. We have the templates, the strategies,
Dave Carroll: like all that can happen automated with our software. So what we do at Dope, because we work in home service is our core. I mean, it’s where I came up. But local business is very relative for our strategy. So what we really focus on is
Dave Carroll: meeting a business owner where they’re at. We have very technical owners that want to just learn how to do it and do it all themselves. We have other owners that are like, I’m in the field or I’m running my company. I don’t have time. Account manager, do it for me. We meet you where you’re
Dave Carroll: at and connect and all from design, targeting, strategy, tracking, implementation, the whole
Tyler Martin: thing. What do you find is most effective using HVAC as an example? Like I get postcards quite a bit. I don’t usually, by the way, get from the same companies though. They’re just random and they’re one-off. But I’ll get, you know, the tune-up one. The tune-up one is probably the
Tyler Martin: most common. Are those effective? What are you seeing? Like, what is the most effective
Dave Carroll: methodology or wording? So, like with any marketing, you’re going to have certain times a year that you can basically do anything and generate work. And sadly, it’s usually when you’re busy to the point that you don’t need all that extra work. Then you have the other time of
Dave Carroll: the year where it’s like, we don’t have enough leads, two of the four trucks aren’t busy, whatever. one of my mentors told me 15 years ago, his name’s Sean, he was like, Dave, you got to always be priming the pump. So you’re advertising during your busy season. So when your non-busy season
Dave Carroll: is there, you put out enough brand impressions to kind of be having some stuff where you otherwise wouldn’t. The reason I bring that up is because I believe in a strategy in the neighborhoods you’re working in that someone should be getting a postcard every week for four weeks in a row.
Dave Carroll: It keeps it top of mind. I mean, look, no one gets a postcard. It’s like, let me stop everything. Call the person now. But when you’re focusing brand impressions in the areas that are simply more likely to need your services, go back to the
Dave Carroll: built around the same years of the same materials of the same builders. When you’re advertising your company, you have branding and you have marketing. Branding is when you’re getting brand impressions out and it might not have an offer. It might not have a deal. It might not have a conversion, but they remember you like we’re at your neighbor’s
Dave Carroll: house, right? The neighbor’s house. Throw that one away. Next week, you’re like, huh, maybe do we need that? Maybe we’ll save this one. Then they see the Facebook app. Then they got their door hanger. Then they saw that you’re playing with that 93 to 97% in the branding side to help them. Now,
Dave Carroll: on the marketing side, a marketing campaign has an offer and a budget and a timeline. We are going to target this area of this many people. We have this budget that we’re going to spend. We’re going to do it for this long. And then here’s the deal we’re tracking to see like
Dave Carroll: we spent this much money. Did we get enough of a result? And you get it all the fun stuff, right? Lifetime value of a customer, close rates, all of that. But when you look at like getting disciplined about these strategies as a business owner? What’s a branding campaign? What a
Dave Carroll: marketing campaign? How does that play into that four to 12% of the money I’m supposed to spend? My advice to any HVAC company, which is HVAC plumbing electric, we put them kind of in the same bucket. You have your high-end ticket. You have your full system installs, your big jobs,
Dave Carroll: your stuff, the cranes are coming, dropping the thing, like big jobs. You have your repair jobs that hopefully lead to getting your foot in the door to have the relationship with the customer to get the sticker on the system to go through. And then you have your maintenance,
Dave Carroll: you have your plans, you have your continued, what we like in the SAS, our monthly recurring, quarterly recurring like our revenue. My vision for any HVAC plumbing or electric company, and I lean into plumbing electric a lot here too, because like the branding of emergence,
Dave Carroll: when do you need a plumber? It’s like when you need a bank. Only when you don’t need one is when you go through. Same thing with electric. When something goes out or you have a project, I think what’s really important for any business owner to understand as I’m going through this is like, if you simply
Dave Carroll: understand where your job density is and you look at that marketing budget and the time that goes into marketing, the passing out the flyers, the doing the yard signs, the other things, getting more disciplined of understanding what’s working well in your business, it’s not going to
Dave Carroll: be the most exciting thing. It’s not going to be the sexiest thing. It’s not going to be the shiniest thing. But when you think about like, what are we doing the most of that leads to the best work? So when you do the $29, $59, $79 tune-ups, how good are your systems in converting
Dave Carroll: those jobs into the bigger jobs? When we get HVAC plumbing, electric owners, roofers that come to us like, I just want more roofs. I want more full system installs. I want my big job. What we ask a lot is like, what leads to that? Is it that the magazines you’re running,
Dave Carroll: the Google ads you’re doing, like they’re asking for the system or is it you actually generate a hundred conversions a month for your maintenance or your repairs and within a month or two, those lead to the systems. And it goes to, we talked about this before, I don’t want to say
Dave Carroll: the business owner getting out of their own way in a mental standpoint, but like, are you really chasing what you want? Because to get a homeowner that’s never heard of you to spend 10, 15, $20,000, like that’s a hard job. You got to have your selling techs, your systems, your upsells,
Dave Carroll: your stuff in place. But if you looked back in your business, one, two, three years, how many repairs or tune-ups or check-ins within what amount of time actually led to the jobs you’re going after and how much focus are you putting in the lower end work and the systems
Dave Carroll: that lead to the bigger jobs versus going to a marketing company or your CMO and being like, we need more system installs. What are we doing on Google this month to get it? It’s finding that balance of what you’re going after and what actually leads to it without getting to marketing
Tyler Martin: ruler. Yeah, no, that’s good stuff. That’s really very helpful. I think that my, one of my big, I mean, there’s a ton of takeaways, but I think one of my big takeaways is just the consistency of being in front of us. Don’t think big so much as deeper in terms of who you’re reaching out to. So
Tyler Martin: that’s a huge one. Hey, as we wrap up here, do you have a mantra or some type of guiding principle that the way you lead your life or your business, the way you lead your business?
Dave Carroll: I do. I picked this up at the beginning of 2024. And even the meaning of it for me has changed over the past almost two years. My mantra is to have control is to give up all control. And like, what does that mean?
Dave Carroll: It doesn’t mean like, oh, I’m giving up control. Like, F it. Let’s just let it happen. What I’ve learned over the past, let’s go 40 years. I’ll be 40 next month. So when you expect something to happen and it happens, you don’t put much thought into it.
Dave Carroll: Like I expected it, it happened, let it go. But when you expect something to happen and it doesn’t happen, depending on your relationship with the person you expect something from, there’s resentment, there’s baggage, there’s I expected this, why didn’t I get it? It didn’t go my way.
Dave Carroll: And what I’ve learned is all expectations are grounded around communication. and if I communicate my expectations, here’s my goal, here’s my vision, here’s what I’m looking to do, here’s what I want to achieve, here’s how I want it to happen, here’s my part of it.
Dave Carroll: If I communicate my expectations to my wife, to my kids, to my team, to my friends, to whoever it is, it puts me in a position to be able to give up control because I communicate what I expect and we’re on the same page and I go through it.
Dave Carroll: Hey, here’s what I want. Here’s what I expect. Here’s how I’m going. Are we on the same page? However long the meetings, the dialogue, the whatever has to go, it has allowed me to be in a position where I can give up control of something because I’ve invested the time,
Dave Carroll: the effort, the communication, the expectations into getting the result I wanted. Now the work, which I’m not great at, is being patient enough in giving people the time to fulfill the expectations that I communicated. So to have control is to give up all control if you can communicate your expectations.
Tyler Martin: That’s good stuff. That’s powerful. Okay. Awesome conversation. So like I said, a lot of takeaways. I love the really thinking of neighborhoods instead of zip codes. I think just having your systems in place, I don’t care what type of company you are, that’s super powerful.
Tyler Martin: EOS, I think it’s okay. What really why I ask you that question a lot of times is I’ll hear things, people that are in EOS, they feel like it has to be this rigid structure. And I do get like, that’s the power of it. But the truth is many businesses, especially in the creative side,
Tyler Martin: I think this is especially true. It kind of has to form around what works for you. And so there, there are some nuances that need to adjust that rigid format. Awesome stuff. Hey, your website. So dope, dope marketing.com dope marketing.com. And then you also have an Instagram, which is dope
Tyler Martin: M-K-T-G. And then as far as your LinkedIn, if people wanted to reach out to you, is that the best place to go?
Dave Carroll: Absolutely. Anywhere you can find us online. I’m very active in my DMs on all platforms, except for like TikTok. I’m not too big on TikTok. But LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, DMs, I’m always in there.
Tyler Martin: All right, man. Hey, thanks so much. Really great conversation. I love your wisdom. I love what you guys are doing. And I know your journey. I believe if I got my LinkedIn post, remembering correctly, your journey is to someday to 100 million. And it’s more about legacy
Tyler Martin: is what you talk about in one of your posts. You talk about, hey, at this level, you’re really doing this. At this level, you’re doing this. At 100 million, it’s really about your legacy. So just what you’re doing is awesome. Thanks so much.
Dave Carroll: Appreciate it, man. Thank you very much for having me today. This was a blast.
Tyler Martin: What a conversation with Dave. His story shows that your past doesn’t define your future. And I love how he broke down the shift from hustle to systems, the power of EOS for scaling, and why direct mail is still a secret weapon for home service businesses.
Tyler Martin: If you’re listening and you want to grow your business smarter, not just bigger, I’d love to help. I offer a complimentary intro call where we’ll look at your numbers, your growth goals, and to create a clear path going forward. You can grab a spot at cfointrocall.com.
Tyler Martin: Once again, cfointrocall.com. Thanks for listening to Profit and Grit. See you on the next episode.
Related Episodes
- How SwiftPro hit 3.4 Million in Nine Months – Tyler Griffin
- From Cleaning Copper Pipes to Tracking Billions in Contractor Revenue – Kevin LeSage
- The Hidden Revenue in Your Pipeline You’re Not Capturing – Ryan Fenn
- Thinking Too Small Is Costing You Millions – Alyssa Rogers
Tyler Martin works with owners on the numbers behind these stories: home services accounting help from a fractional CFO for home service contractors. For where your business sits right now, read the $3M to $15M scaling breakdown.
