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Dennis Collins: Greetings, everyone. Welcome back to Connect & Convert, the Sales Accelerator podcast, where we share small business owners insider secrets to grow your sales faster than ever. I’m Dennis Collins, and I’m joined by my partner today. Hey, Leah, how are you today?

Leah Bumphrey: Hey, doing good. I’m very excited about this this session, Dennis. This is gonna be fun.

Dennis Collins: Well, I agree. We love to have guests. And today we have some very special guests who are near and dear to us. And they have just co-authored a book, which I think our viewers and our listeners are going to find very interesting. No Place Like Home Services. How a Wizard of Ads and his cracker deck copywriter helped America’s best companies sell $2 billion.

Our first guest today is Ray Seggern. I think I met Ray about 20 years ago when he was starting his company. Brand Guys, right? God, it’s been a long time, Ray.  But I love your superpower.

Your superpower is getting to know a business owner quickly and getting to know their issues very quickly so that you can prescribe correctly, a methodology for their growth and for their dominance. I love the word dominance. That’s your superpower.

Ray Seggern: Well, thanks, man. I appreciate you saying that.

Dennis Collins: We want to know more about that. I’m sure the book details that. Can I also introduce the co-author who is here with us today?

She is Monica Ballard. Hi, Monica! I have not known Monica as long as I’ve known Mr. Ray, but I do know something –  Monica is the consummate storyteller.

One description of her I read said if words are involved, Monica is involved. All different kinds of words are involved. Words, be it a song, be it content, be it a speech, I think you’re a playwright, you’ve authored books, you’ve co-authored books. Words are pretty much your life.

You have, as they say, a way with words. So it’s a wordsmith. So, we’re glad to have both of you on today. As I said, the book is called No Place Like Home Services, so I’d like to kind of get an idea of what’s inside an author’s head. And since we have co-authors, we’ll probably have maybe two different ideas.

What was the inspiration for this book? What was the inspiration? What was the reason? 

Ray Seggern: Sure. I’ll jump in on that, Dennis. For starters, thanks, Dennis and Leah for having us today. We’re gonna have a lot of fun I’m sure.

So the idea for No Place Like Home Services came from our considerable experience inside the home services vertical, going all the way back to – it is 20 years ago and some change.  It was Good Friday 2004 when I went into the wacky world of The Wizard of Ads when Roy Williams, founder, hired me to be one of his writers.

And when I went to work for him, he said, there’s this partner network that I’m building, and I’m not going to pay you probably what you’re going to discover you’re worth, but I’ve already planned your exit strategy. Even when I was writing for Roy back at the home office, home services was a thing.

And I can share that with you –  the book generally came from Monica and I hitched our wagons together back in 2012 when I had the opportunity to bring a lot of clients in, in one fell swoop from a particular trade organization. Over the course of the ensuing 10 years, Monica and I collaborated on an article for their publication, right?

In addition to that, we were working on dozens of clients week after week, month after month, year after year. So the sum total of everything we learned across that decade is what’s featured in No Place Like Home Services. You know, we’ve got so many articles we’ve written.

We could take that idea and write a chapter on it. And we’ve got this client, boy, that was a great success story there. So it was just so much material, actually born of the pandemic, but took us a little while to get, so that’s kind of when we decided we were going to start compiling and it took us a minute to sculpt it into what you’ve got in your hands today.

Dennis Collins: That’s great. Monica, you are a writer in so many different disciplines. I’d love to think of a book as something that’s transformative. For instance, there is a before state and there’s an after state. So the proposed reader is in a before state that we’re requiring them to get to an after state.

How do you see that transformation in this current book – in No Place Like Home Services? How do you see that transformation? Where can you be transformed from before to after by using?

Monica Ballard: Yeah,  like Ray says, we started out with these disparate articles, and so we had to kind of go through them and decide which articles do we want to include?

Because of the word count, we really didn’t say enough, and we can expand and expound on and increase the word count there to say what it was we really meant to say in the first place. But because of the amount of column space, just didn’t have the opportunity to say. 

How do we want to couch all of this – package it in a way that is sort of a theme? And the Wizard of Oz theme came about because we’re Wizards of Ads. And the whole point is that a lot of business owners have the brains, the heart, and the soul and the courage that they already have. They just need a map, essentially. They need a yellow brick road to follow to get from point A to point B, to follow that dream to get those answers that when they get there, they find out they already had, what it was that they needed all along. So we found that thematically, it sort of matched the goal that we wanted them to have.

Ray Seggern: No Place Like Home Services. You know what? I had a eureka moment on that. It’s kind of cool. And then, you know, the more we talked about it, it was just there was so much to explore there that it was just a fun thing to sort of leave everything through.

Dennis Collins: Well, it worked for me. I’ve pretty much devoured it and enjoyed it. But I want to highlight one particular chapter, chapter 7.  Story, culture and experience – that rings my chime. You know, a lot of the stuff with the practice that Leah and I are in basically is about storytelling and culture determines the level of flight. How high are you going to fly this airplane?

Your culture has a lot to do with it and certainly your customer experience. But there’s one part, I think towards the end of the chapter that I’m going to cite that really kind of hit me. I think it’s an actual quote from one of your clients.

I don’t know if I want to use his name, but it was one of your clients, I think called Service Champions.

Ray Seggern: Yeah, that’s Kevin Comerford. 

Dennis Collins: He says “Run the play.” Did you come to work with the right mindset? Did you run the play? Those are powerful words. What does Kevin mean by that and why did you include that in the book?

Ray Seggern: Yeah, Kevin has been a great guy to work with through the years, and it really highlights for me the degree to which you stumble across a client every now and then who it’s super clear that we’re bringing something to the table to help them, but certainly, we’re learning a lot from them. We’re always learning – the only reason we’re any good in these industries is because the clients taught us about the business. And then we brought value with what we learned. But yeah, running the play is something that was so powerful.

That’s out of Kevin’s book, which is called Champion Mindset. And the idea that the experience component of story, culture, and experience, we think about how do we deliver an experience? I can go on and on about this, by the way, the whole next book that I’m writing is called Story and Culture and Experience.

So, the idea of “running the play” means if we think of it like we’re Vince Lombardi or Tom Landry and the play says this is how you score a touchdown  and you diagram it on a chalkboard and everybody knows what their role in the play is to achieve success, then that’s what the metaphor works on there.

And yeah, Dennis, like you, I like it a lot.

Leah Bumphrey: Yeah, I was very impressed with it the amount of questions you give to the reader takes some time. I mean, this is not a tome. This isn’t going to take you a few months to go through, but in every chapter, you ask some very reflective questions that any of my clients, I would want them to sit and be thinking about.

Now that comes from both of you guys and is, I would imagine, what you do with your clients. Delve into those questions to make sure that that story comes out.

Monica Ballard: Yeah. And I think one of the things that we excel at as consultants is in those monthly meetings to ask for some good news, always at the top, give us some good news, what good news happened.

And that puts them certainly in the right mindset if they came into the meeting ready to, to kind of “Grrrr,” when we ask for good news, it’s really a transformation for them to kind of flip things and look for those good stories to tell us and then what we try to help them with is look, we’re here in the foxhole with you. We’re here to help you with your advertising and your business. We don’t have all the answers. There are no silver bullets or certainly one cure-all, but as far as advertising is concerned, let’s help you tell that story. Let’s help you with your culture and improve your experience.

Because the stories that we tell in their advertising have to ring true by the time the experience comes along and the technician is in their home doing whatever.

Leah Bumphrey: Home services, that’s the theme. And I know that you guys do tons of business with home services. But when I was reading this, I mean, there’s a lot of wisdom that can be pulled out for other businesses, the way I’m looking at it, what are your thoughts?

Ray Seggern: Yeah. So, I mean, if you look in the second section, the Great Things Come in Threes, which Monica referenced earlier. We’ve connected that to the three tag-alongs in Wizard of Oz, right, but really the first Golden Trinity was strategy, message, and budget because Monica and I just developed a very organic shorthand for describing what is it y’all do? Well, we help you with strategy. We help you with messaging and we have to do with budget, right? And then along the way, I came up with this idea of air, land, and sea, which is air is the airwaves and sea is where the surfing happens.

And then the land is boots on the ground. And a lot of the contractor types can tap into the military analogy there. And then we’ve already talked about experience. All of that applies whether you’re in home services or not. I mean, the fact that you have a strategy that informs the message valuable. 

And we always want to get the highest and best use of that precious marketing resource through budget planning. Now, you know, we’re not reconciling invoices and keeping a spreadsheet week to week, but what we do is once a year, we help our clients plan their budget, right? How much should go into this?

How much should go to that? And the other. So, yeah, all of those are universal, Leah. And I think that, Whether you’re a jeweler, a furniture store, a car dealer, a cosmetic dentist, whatever those same principles would apply.

Leah Bumphrey: Monica, how about for you? I mean when I was reading this book thinking of both of you as authors I know you’re not trying to stop being consultants but somebody could use this as a template for developing their own strategy and their own marketing. You guys bring something a little bit more to it.

Monica Ballard: Absolutely. And as the message developer…I went from being a copywriter for a massive amount of radio stations, too many, to being a message developer for Roy in Roy’s home shop. And I learned the difference between writing copy, banging out copy as I used to do, and being a message developer. And messaging is different than copy in that you help the client develop the message, which is the story of their company and it’s more about bonding than it’s what the sale of a week is or something like that.

So that’s the difference between message and copy and that’s what I try to stress in the book as well. It’s that you need sort of a long story arc to take people from here to there. You’ve got to pull people in and take them along on this journey through messaging rather than just copy

Dennis Collins: I think that’s great that you guys are messaging experts.

I don’t think there’s any question – if it has to do with a message, you will find the message, but I want to turn my attention and your attention now to chapter 11, which is recruiting and retaining.

Ray Seggern: I think the trades have it really hard right now in terms of attracting technicians, but it’s really something that I learned, very early on that the only way any business owner can grow is to attract, train, motivate, and retain team members.

And it goes back to the Holy Trinity of story, culture, and experience is that culture. Any organization that is subject to high turnover is going to have a hard time maintaining culture. So in the relationship of story and culture and experience, you could see how a deficiency in culture undermines your ability to deliver the experience ultimately and translate everything to happy customers, right?

You’re right to hone in on that, Dennis. It’s an important part of the equation, and we knew it needed to be in the book for that particular reason. And I think it’s a really good chapter. I think it highlights our working relationship because while I get credit for a lot of The Big Rise, this chapter really is a lot of Monica for sure. 

Leah Bumphrey: This chapter talks about finding the organization’s rhythm and that did make me think of Monica.

Monica Ballard: Interesting. I won’t say that this was an easy chapter, right? But, it was lessons that we learned from a lot of feedback from our clients about what they do. I mean, a lot of them were just like, “Oh, we just can’t keep people.”

And so we asked them a lot of hard questions about their culture and how they were rewarding and attracting new talent and what that new talent had to say about where they came from and why they left the previous company. And so we were taking all those nuggets and helping our clients with a plan in order to retain the good talent that they had and weed out the bad talent.

And how to look for those guys and reward them. You know, not everybody is all that excited about free pizza Fridays or they prefer time off or they prefer a monetary reward. Everybody is sort of wired a little bit differently. And I think through the years we’ve helped clients see that so that they can retain the best talent that they have and have them really be true to the company the people who employ them.

And we’ve talked to a number of business owners, particularly when the pandemic hit. And it was amazing how many of them were like, “I’ve got to look after these guys. You know, these guys and their families and their mortgage payments.”

And it was really heartening to know how much they were invested in their employees and their lives. They didn’t just look at them as a number on the bottom line. And so that was a relational aspect of our consulting business that I think was really brought to light particularly during the pandemic.

Ray Seggern: One of the things that we’ve realized along the way is the tables have turned. We don’t live in the world of the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s where the business owners have the good jobs, the precious jobs that everybody fights for. Therefore, “do it my way or the highway” more and more.

You’re interviewing employees so they can interview you. You have to decide if they’re going to hire you to be their next boss, because of the great resignation. There are so many side hustles and entrepreneurial opportunities. It’s just a very interesting reflection of the time that we live.

Leah Bumphrey: I was really struck with both of you, the heart that you guys put in, especially in the beginning, when you’re talking about why you got into this. Ray, your story of literally going to the little stores when you were a kid and how that impacted you and small town.

That’s huge. Because I think we all relate to that. And that’s the difference between working with local businesses. I don’t care how big they are, but the local business that you’re trying to help and kind of getting to the nut. I think it showed both of your parts.

Ray Seggern: Yeah, I’m glad you enjoyed that part of the book, Leah.

It was fun for me to write because it took me back sort of in the Sherman and Peabody way-back machine – I got to revisit time with my granddad when I was in third and fourth grade going around. He was a CPA in a small town here in central Texas. And my mom had relocated our family there when my grandma died.

But then, my mom’s going to work, dad’s going to work, they were doing their own things. I spent a lot of time with Granddad. So yeah, running around to all those businesses along Main Street and 2nd Street in Taylor, Texas of the 1970s, it was special for me to be able to share that. And I think all of us, however we got here, that was our yellow brick road, right?

And that was certainly a big part of it for me. My dad, a dump truck driver whose professional trajectory was to go from one dump truck to six and to own a plot of land that the business was staged on. My granddad was a CPA, so I got to experience how he was with his clients.

And then my mom was an English teacher. So, she has a role to play in all of this too. Monica’s heard me say a few times through the years that my English teacher mom may be rolling over in her grave. Sometimes we’ll go in and we’ll see the competitor’s ads, right? The abominations of the English language. But really, it’s just by extension.

Just the fact that so many ads don’t really do anything compelling in them, that really the baseline, Dennis and Leah, how is it we’re this deep into the human experience and there can still be that bad of cliche ads on my TV for car dealers every morning? I just don’t understand.

Dennis Collins: Luckily, that’s where you come in.

You are the anti cliché. You are the ones we go to for new ideas. Ray, you were just telling a story. I also enjoyed your origin story that you shared. Here’s a question that I struggle with. Leah and I both work with some HVAC companies.

And Leah and I, as you and Monica, both believe in stories, but here’s the problem. I have a devil of a time getting some of the outside people, the techs, the salespeople. I have a heck of a time getting them to give us stories that can work. Have you had that?

And if so, have you been able to tackle that?

Ray Seggern: Yeah, it’s a good question. And what we’re talking about here is something that I write about a lot in the book I’m working on. I’ve really honed in on this idea. That story in the continuum of story culture and experience story as we like to tell it and weave it into the marketing pieces, right?

It’s either a mirror or it’s a fairy tale, meaning we are holding a mirror up to something that’s good in an organization. Maybe it’s their culture. Maybe it’s how they deliver the experience, right? Maybe it’s the core values of the owner, whatever it is. But specifics trump generalities. 

So any time you can get specific stories where this is a challenge that the team faced and here’s how we solved it. Or here’s an example of us going above and beyond or anything like that. You know, we love to weave that into the ads.

Dennis Collins: So how do you do it?

Ray Seggern: Man, I don’t know that I have any magic beans in my pocket because that would be the Beanstalk book.

And this isn’t the Beanstalk book. This is the Yellow Brick Road book. But the only way to improve something is through train, measure, and reward, right? So, Ben Franklin coming out unannounced at a staff meeting is very powerful. So I’ve often counseled our clients, Hey, if somebody brings you a good story, let everybody else on the team see them get a $100 bill.

It’s not a silent bonus on the paycheck that we tell them about. It is a hundred-dollar bill coming out of your wallet that you hand in front of the rest of the team that gets everybody’s attention. Maybe I should come back and bring some stories. Maybe I’ll get a hundred dollars. So if you train, measure, and reward, they have to know what to do.

They have to know you’re watching and then they have to know that there’s something in it that they’re incentivized to do the thing you want them to do.

Leah Bumphrey: Monica, what’s the one thing you had to leave out of the book when you were writing that killed you? Because I know you always have stories, you always have these things, and as you’re editing you had to make smaller than what you wanted to.

Monica Ballard: Oh boy, this book was so much about expanding, expanding, expanding. That I don’t think I was tasked with carving something out and leaving it behind. If anything I would constantly come back and post the new version. And Ray would come back and say, no, no, no, it needs to be bigger, bigger, bigger. 

I think in writing the afterward, that was something I was really proud of. You know, Ray got the origin story in the forward and so I kind of arm wrestled to get the afterward and it was really just a story that went back to when I started at Roy’s shop and we had someone who wanted to come in and teach an academy class.

And one of the questions that he asked was, why does someone want to own a business? All of us being the consultants that we were had all of these – “Oh, well, you know, it’s to fulfill your dream of entrepreneurship and to right a wrong in the marketplace.” And we had all of these lofty ideals.

And he was like, no, it’s to sell it and make a lot of money. And that seemed so foreign to all of us that we knew we did not want him teaching at the academy. It was kind of like, okay, this is the wrong fit. We don’t want him near our tribe. We don’t want him near our people. And we pretty much sent him packing.

And that I feel like was an important story to tell as we know why you wanted to go into business. It was to do this and that. It wasn’t just to make a lot of money so you could sell it and make a profit and go and do something else. This book is for the relational business owners who feel passionate about their businesses.

And that is who we wanted to talk to no matter what industry they’re in.

Dennis Collins: Well that in itself is a great story that really defines your book. It also defines the Wizard Academy. We all are devotees, frequent flyers. We still revere what the Wizard Academy stands stands for.

What questions have we not asked that we should have asked?

Ray Seggern: You know what separates the clients that achieve success from those that don’t?

That’s the first thing that’s popping into my head. One of the side jokes that everybody in my shop has heard plenty of times. It’s “Not everybody’s gonna be an astronaut when they grow up.” I would just say that if you talk about brains, heart, and courage, they imply for me, what is the knowledge that we need?

Heart says there’s a difference between platitudes and genuinely investing in how to care for not just customers, but for one another, right? And then Courage says, will you take a little bit of a leap of face and not chicken out before the miracle happens. So if we come back to those three things, it’s one thing to put the ideas of here’s how we did it in a book.

The thing that couldn’t be clearer to me right now and it’s super important to me when I choose clients to work with, we’re both blessed to be in a place in our professional careers where we don’t need the next client. So I think because there have been plenty of times in the 20 years I’ve been doing this, Dennis, where our founding partner, Roy Williams told me early on, he said, whatever puts food on the table with honor and dignity, right?

But sometimes that’s being, hey, you know what? I did it for the money. I was skeptical that this person was maybe not going to be an astronaut – we’ll discover this along the way, but I like them enough and they’ve got employees and those employees have families.

There are a lot of dreams tied up in a business owner, even if they’re not made of the right stuff, right? Or all the best stuff. Cover books have helped America’s best companies, but we helped America’s good, better, kind of okay, and best companies along the way. And it makes it very easy for me.

And I’ll be honest with you straight up. I did a gut check on some clients that I’ve been working with for a long time that maybe haven’t grown as much as I thought they would or they wanted to. I look at it and my side of the street feels pretty clean to me. And so I make a choice. Do I cut them loose because they’re not growing and making me enough money?

Well, maybe, but there’s just as many where I’ve said, you know what, I did everything short of spitting in my hand and taking a blood oath that I will help you get to where you want to go. So it doesn’t feel good to walk away from them just because we haven’t multiplied their income enough to where they’re one of my more desirable clients financially.

Dennis Collins: Sure. Monica, how about you? What what questions have we not asked? That’s quite a heartfelt answer, Ray. 

Monica Ballard: You didn’t ask when the movie is coming out.

Leah Bumphrey: I want to star as Monica. I want to be Monica.

Monica Ballard: We’ve done a gut check on this and we really feel that with the Wiz reappearing on Broadway right now and Wicked coming out in theaters, this is going to be overshadowed and so we really feel like we would be letting people down if we went ahead with the movie project.

Uh, plus Ray, Ray doesn’t want to be a movie producer.

Leah Bumphrey: But this brings up something for me that I wasn’t going to be critical of, but now I have to. And Ray, I don’t really blame you, but Monica, I have a little bone to pick with you. Reading through the book, I’m thrilled. I love The Wizard of Ads.

I love what you’ve done thematically. And then you got to talking about the slippers and you called them ruby red slippers and we all know if we’ve read that book they were not ruby red. They were silver. So that was a little heartbreaking for me so if and when that movie comes out I’m gonna introduce but only if we stick with the silver slippers.

None of this ruby crap.

Monica Ballard: So you’re a purist, you’re an orator.

Leah Bumphrey: I am a purist. Oh, and you know that. We’ve roomed together.

We need to direct our listeners and our viewers, Amazon, anywhere Fine Books are sold, this is what they want to be ordering. This is what they need to know. This is a template. 

Ray Seggern: You know, we have we have soft launched this so so far. Six weeks from now, everybody’s gonna be annoyed that they can’t get it.  So we really just want to thank you guys for having us on and sharing the book with your audience. It is available on Amazon for sure.

And, obviously, a big part of this, to mix my metaphors here, the road goes on forever, but the party never ends. So we’re on this journey and really the book exists for us. Hopefully, people will read the book. The value for me, and I think I speak for Monica here, is not that we become gazillionaires as bestselling authors, although I am not opposed to it. Really, it’s that if somebody, if the book speaks to you, if the concepts in there resonate with the business owner, that’s the right kind of business owner that we would want to work with.

So hopefully they would read the book and go, yeah, these guys get it. They’re my kind of crazy. Sign me up. 

Leah Bumphrey: Perfect. Well, thank you guys. Thank you so much, and we’re looking forward to the next book, but we’ll let you get this one solidly in everyone’s hands first.

Dennis Collins: Our guests today have been Monica Ballard, Wizard of Ads partner and author, and Ray Seggern, Wizard of Ads partner and author, head of the Brand Guys.

No Place Like Home Services. Do yourself a favor and get your copy today. That’s all for this episode of Connect & Convert. Leah and I will be back next week. Stay tuned.

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