Breaking Glass Ceilings One Floor At a time

It all started with an idea. A way that we, my business partner (Kyle Laktasic) and I (Danny Carpenter) could start a business. Our goal was to step away from the door to door lifestyle. A lifestyle that was entertaining and intriguing to outsiders, but from the inside it was like your skin peeling off from the anxiety and expectations. It was one of the greatest ways to grow as a human being, I would do it all over again. It taught us how to be men, to grow a pair of balls, and take a chance on ourselves.

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In the beginning, we did what we knew best. Went door to door selling garage floors and it was impeccable. Selling a product where someone only has to pay for it once, transformations that put a smile on the customers face every time, and to top it all off, it was for our own business. It was all we could ask for. But as success and money came, we wanted more.

 

We set out on a journey to change the way the epoxy flooring industry built their businesses, marketed their companies, sold their jobs and really, change everything. For the longest time it has been the older generation in the contracting world, selling jobs, installing the projects and running the businesses.

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To do so, we knew that we had to start with our own business. In order to scale a massive corporation nationwide, we wanted to have the experience and conviction of doing it ourselves.

As we made the mindset jump from door to door (thinking small) to looking for a marketing company to help us generate leads to close, we noticed a particular trend. These marketing agencies all had what we thought was a massive guarantee at the time of 50 leads in a single month, or we didn't have to pay them. So we hired our first marketing agency.

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It was very clear that generating leads was not the issue. Our phones were off the chain with notifications that a potential customer filled out a form from social media. Yes, we were pumped. Again, something that we picked up on very quickly was that approximately 50% of the leads didn't even have a phone number, or contact information in general. Of the people who did answer they were not interested in the slightest.

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A month or so went by and we only got a few jobs from the leads that came in. Knowing that it was not a sales problem as we are some of the most skilled salesman in the industry, we fired our agency and brought in a business partner (Danny Roy) to take over the marketing from the inside. Build the business with us, lay floors with us, & sell jobs with us. We all wanted to learn everything there is to know about epoxy, handle the marketing, sales, and operations all as a team.

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Roy had previously been the head of marketing for a massive roofing company, been in the marketing world for 7 years and we knew it was going to be a good fit. Roy was one of our friends prior to partnering up. God aligned us with the same visions and goals, we all wanted to do something bigger than ourselves and with people we love.

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One week after coming together as a team, filming advertisements, creating ad campaigns, we landed our first job as a team from digital marketing! What a great feeling, not having to knock on a door and try and sell someone, we had people calling us for a quote. What a great feeling. A few more days go by, we get a call from a commercial cement moving company that they have a warehouse that needs the floor done. By the grace of God, we landed our first commercial job in only one week after launching the new business with the three of us together.

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$42,500 was the ticket, and I will never forget that. Sitting down in the owners office, when we had only coated 3 floors in the history of our company. As we sat across the desk from him with the confidence of a veteran floor installer, we landed the job. Off we go.

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We learned almost everything we needed to learn from one job, it was a nightmare. Who would have thought that the $42,500 job that was supposed to set us up for massive success, almost put us out of business. The floor flooded from a massive rain storm. After redoing the floor, we were excited to get the big paycheck.

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There were some very valuable lessons from this job. For starters, it was a net 90 job which at the time, the owner of the location had told us we would get paid as soon as the job was completed. Being so new to the business we took his word for it. With big commercial jobs, especially with companies who are corporate, we learned that it wasn't even his responsibility to pay us after the job was completed.

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As we learned about how net 90 is paid out, and planning out what our next steps were, we took a look at our bank account to see we were all out of cash. Our credit cards were completely maxed out. We couldn't even go down and buy ourselves dinner. For a lack of better terms, we were f*cked.

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We could not even go door to door and sell some jobs because at the time we had never collected half down deposits to cover the materials, (which we later learned is something that is very important to do for cash flow management.) We had bills coming out our ears, rent to pay, employees to pay, and currently negative about $25,000.

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If you have ever felt a crippling amount of anxiety, the kind of anxiety where its hard to even think straight, this is exactly what we were experiencing. Praying over and over that God could bless us and get us paid, help us escape this situation. On the bright side, we knew that we had a check for $42,500 coming, we just had to keep waiting and waiting. We had to figure out a way to keep the lights on, put food on the table, and get our rent paid.

We sold everything, from dirt bikes, old computers, tv’s, scuba gear etc. We scrounged up enough money just to get by.

 

About a month and a half after finishing the job, we were desperate. Out of things to sell, we had no option. For a week, we spent time researching the company we installed the job for, trying to find a phone number to one of the executives in the company we could try and talk to.

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Finally we spoke to someone who could help. At first they were apprehensive to help, but after a few phone calls they decided to pay us 45 days early. It was nothing but the grace of God, we got paid. We were able to pay off our debt, pay our employees, and have a few bucks left over. A lesson that would help us going forward.

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We were hungry, like a lion who hasn't eaten for a month and a half. We hit it hard. We had a proven system to generate mass amounts of revenue. We funded our next month's advertising campaign, with double the amount we had the previous month. We noticed another trend. The more money we put in, the more we got out with a minimum 10x return. We trusted that if we kept increasing our advertising budget, we would continue to increase our monthly revenue.

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We started seeing the business grow, $60,000, $70,000, $80,000 months... So we went full throttle. We threw down $10,000 on our ad budget in June, 2023. That was the first month we eclipsed $100,000+ in revenue, all from paid advertisements.

Trends are very easy to identify, as long as you seek them out. With surpassing six figures in a month, we saw a trend in the market, and exploited it with a different approach to paid advertising. It paid off in a big way.

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At this point in time we had started catching the eyes of some of our previous co workers that we did door to door sales with and they were blown away at how fast we built our company. They started asking questions like “How did you guys do it? Can we start one?”

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We opened our second location in August, 2023 and within 6 months we were in 13 cities across the southwest. Each time we opened a new location we were not sure if the system was going to work. Well, it did. Each and every time we opened a new location, our system for acquiring new customers got better and better. To the point where our lowest performing location was the one we started in Arizona. Ironically enough, we were happy knowing that everyone is succeeding better than we were, because we were the ones who had to figure it all out the hard way.

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As our customer acquisition system was built, proven, and scaled to the point where cities are consistently doing six figure months. We wanted to pull back the curtain on the finances of each location. Take a look at the most important number, profits.

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Again, we noticed a trend. Yes, our guys were making great money, but as we were looking at the numbers it was clear to see that it was a race to the bottom. Who can install the best floor for the cheapest price. Weekend warrior painters out there charging $4/ft for epoxy was really damaging the reputation of our industry. Lowering the value of our service. We wanted our locations to charge premium pricing, for a premium service. We all were so focused on the top line revenue, when taking a step back to look at the bottom line was taking the hit. Yes, they were profitable but not where we wanted them to be.

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That's when we set out to build a training program, to show everyone how to sell floors at the same volume, and higher prices per foot. Weeks upon weeks of filming and editing, testing and retesting the same sales strategy we used to gross over $1M in our first year in Arizona. We built the sales course and gave it to our offices. Within a few weeks, profit margins had increased, ad spend budgets were increased using the leftover profit from selling higher priced jobs, and more jobs were closed.

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Just a simple closing strategy that would take away the urge for customers to want other estimates, cheaper priced floors causing them to stall out. The

amount of jobs closed, and the price of which they were closed at had increased.

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It was at this moment, we knew that other business owners in the epoxy flooring space could benefit from this. At the end of the day, what epoxy flooring contractor doesn't want more work, and the knowledge to sell jobs at a higher price point? Every contractor wants that. We built out a plan for existing epoxy businesses, providing our sales material to increase their price per foot, and our customer acquisition system, and opened it up to the public in January, 2024.

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Within 3 months, we started working with 30+ businesses. Taking our customer acquisition system and plugging it into each business, everyone saw immediate results. Some businesses closing their first job within 24 hours of launching.

It took longer for the business owners we started working with to understand our sales strategy, and implement it. But as soon as they did, again they saw immediate results. Increasing profit margins, and top line revenue, it was clear to see just how much of an impact we made to each of their businesses.

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Everything we went though, paid off. For us to experience the pain, the frustration, the anxiety and fear, was all worth it. The impact that we have been able to make in the lives of our clients and business partners has been worth it all and we would do it all over again.

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So let's pull back the curtain, and talk about the systems that have propelled us to the heights of success. Specifically our customer acquisition system and sales strategy.

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What is our customer acquisition system? Our customer acquisition system (CAS) is a strategy we built to leverage paid advertisements via Meta that differentiates the business from its competitors. Marketing agencies used to have it easy, targeting any specific race, occupation, home values, genders etc. was a very common way to increase the quality of audience that advertisements would be put in front of.

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When IOS 14 came out in September of 2020, Facebook, Instagram, and Apple's privacy policy became very restricted. The ability to target any of the specifics mentioned a few lines above is no longer available. That led to the cost to acquire a customer to skyrocket. Because of IOS 14, it is very common for someone to get burned by a marketing agency that doesn't know how to work around the privacy policies that are put in place to protect the consumer from data sharing.

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In our opinion, 99% of Marketing Agencies (home service based related) do not know what the significance of IOS 14 is. For example, if you have an Iphone, and download a new application. When you click on an application such as facebook, you will see this prompt. This has caused marketers all around the world to either live with the results of not being able to target their specific audiences, or pivot. That is exactly what we did. We created a system to work around the privacy policy and target the audiences that we want to target.

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That is why marketing agencies, specifically concrete coating marketing agencies fear us. We are the only company (concrete coating specific) who have created a system for acquiring customers at the rate and return that we do. And they know it. Scraping data from platforms into a 3 pillar system, utilizing artificial intelligence to optimize the data that is collected, and computing the numbers into an algorithm. The algorithm is then injected into the backend of each ad campaign to search for the most qualified avatar that we have chosen.

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Think of it like this, the customer you are looking for is a wanted fugitive. Instead of sending local police officers and detectives to track them down, we send the cia, the fbi, all law enforcement agents across the country to one specific location. With an exact description of the person we are looking for. That is why the businesses that we work with are blowing everyone out of the water.

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Concrete coating marketing agencies just don't get it. They set their clients up for failure, lacking the results, and systems to set their clients up for success. Most have never owned their own epoxy business let alone even know what soft bond or hard bond concrete is. Most don’t understand the business, from a numbers standpoint.

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We care about 2 things, and if we can do those 2 things, business will be like every other business we work with. Blowing the competition out of the water.

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The first thing, it is extremely important that we plug our customer acquisition system into your business. The more time that goes by without it, the closer your business is to going upside down. It is a proven system that hits the specific people we are looking for. Lowering the cost per conversion, increasing the top line revenue.

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The second thing, coaching you how we close our customers. Higher price floors lead to higher profit margins. Having higher profit margins allows you to re invest into your business to increase the first thing, top line revenue. We cover TOP to BOTTOM lines, and accelerate the growth of businesses.

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If you have questions or want to learn more about how the customer acquisition system works, you can click this link and book a call with Me, Danny, one of the founders of Uncle Kim’s Coatings and Concrete Coating Acquisitions.

I will be happy to answer any question you may have, and show you how our system works.

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https://concretecoatingacquisitions.com/booking

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