Building Your Business Ep. 35: Aaron Shishilla, Digital Marketing Strategies

CCPIA (00:06)
Thanks, Aaron, for taking a little bit of time today and talking with us.

Aaron Shishilla (00:11)
Yeah, I’m happy to be here. Super, super thankful for you inviting me. So thank you.

CCPIA (00:16)
it’s been a long time coming. We’ve known each other for a lot of years, but we’ve really never sat down and talked. So I’m looking forward to this next little bit of time here to kind of get to know you a little bit more than I already do.

Aaron Shishilla (00:33)
Yeah, likewise, likewise. I’m happy we’re able to actually sit down and talk now.

CCPIA (00:38)
Yeah, it’s so so Erin you’ve got a kind of an interesting story and We’ll get to we’ll get to where you’re at today But I guess we don’t know about where you’re at today unless we knew where you were yesterday so you you always tell some you always say that yeah, you grew up in the business and

As for myself, I used to be the youngest person in a room whenever I walked into a room. But obviously, I think you’ve taken over that claim the frame fame. Tell us a little bit about why you say you grew up in the business.

Aaron Shishilla (01:16)
Yeah, to give like the full kind of background and stories, you my parents worked in the restaurant industry and then 2008 happened and you know, my dad was kind of trying to find his footing in terms of what he was going to get into and there’s a bunch of things that he kind of did. But it wasn’t, it was a few years later that he kind of landed on doing wind mitigation inspections in the state of Florida, which is an insurance related inspection.

He also started doing four point inspections and it just eventually cascaded. And so it became a family business of them doing inspections, insurance inspections, home inspections. You know, they, he, he leveled up his certifications and everything else to where, you know, he started doing commercial inspections. Even there after that, started becoming an instructor, more of a teacher. I can’t even list now the amount of licenses and certifications he has, but it’s funny story. Actually, I never imagined I’d get involved in the family business of doing home inspections.

But I actually was working at Publix, which is a grocery store in the southeastern part of the United States. And I worked in the deli. I never wanted to work in the deli, but that’s where they put me. And I got in a fight one day in the deli department at Publix. And it was after that that I got fired for getting into a fight. You imagine everybody that’s seen me at conferences are like this guy getting into a fight. Aaron would never fight anybody. Lo and behold, I got into a fight and I got fired.

and my dad driving me to my last time I would visit my job to get fired. He said, well, you know, maybe if you do get fired and you can come work for me. And I guess the rest is history after that. That’s how I ended up in the family business. But if you want me to go into the fighting story, it’s a pretty funny thing, but it’s a tangent for sure.

CCPIA (02:59)
So we’ll save that for another time, maybe over a libation somewhere.

I know your parents. We’ve talked many times. I have talked with them many times. correct me if I’m wrong, but at one point, didn’t you answer their phones while you were still in college?

Aaron Shishilla (03:30)
Yeah, yeah. So when I was in college, I didn’t do drinking or partying or anything like that. was pretty, I was a loser. And so I made websites in my free time and that’s what I did for fun. But I, when I got the job over with my parents, I worked as an assistant initially. So I was doing like the whole outlet testing, opening windows, you know, doing that kind of thing for my dad, holding the flashlight for him to yell at me. And then there was a point in time where there were

their person, their office manager, was actually going out on leave. And so I needed to step in or somebody had to step in to start taking orders and do all the phone calls and everything else. So I obviously got, I got trained by the best, my mom. I might be a little bit biased by that, but I would, I I would say that she’s probably one of the best in the country in terms of answering phones and taking inspections and putting them on and scheduling everything. So yeah, I got, I got trained by her and I did the phones for about six months.

All while I was actually studying to get my home inspector’s license on the InterNACHI program online for about three months, three, six months while I was in college, I got my license and then I started doing inspections at like 19 by myself.

CCPIA (04:42)
I guess I didn’t know that story, Aaron, that you actually were in the field.

Aaron Shishilla (04:51)
Yeah, yeah, I was in the field, you know, obviously when I was like 13, 14, following my down around. But when I first started, I started as an assistant and I, you know, tested the outlets, I test the windows, I’d follow things around. And then, you know, I started taking all the pictures, doing all the interior stuff. And I did that for for a while, for about three or six months. And then I transitioned over inside the office to answering phones. I did that for about six months while I got my license.

CCPIA (04:56)
Yeah.

Aaron Shishilla (05:18)
Once I got my license, it still took me another year for me to be at the standard that my parents wanted me to be at, to be on my own. But there was about, I want to say probably one or two years, two years that I was doing inspections by myself with my own license. I’m not licensed anymore. I let my license expire. So if anybody wants to look it up, they can see it’s expired. But yeah, I did that for about two years.

CCPIA (05:38)
So that’s interesting, Aaron.

So you were, and I’m not going to say the L word, but you were designing websites. I mean, there’s not a better way to build an inspection vitae than selling inspections on the phone.

and then you were an inspector, well, that’s probably the perfect transition into forming your business Wolfpack.

Aaron Shishilla (06:10)
Yeah, yeah, I mean, it was it was doing those things and then having so my degree is actually in integrated business from the University of Central Florida. And I had a huge interest in like just growing a business, starting a business and marketing specifically. So all my website experience and everything that I wanted to do was related towards like digital marketing. It’s just for whatever reason, that was like this unique thing to me that I thought was so cool. And I just continued playing with it. So I took all those skills.

CCPIA (06:19)
Okay.

Aaron Shishilla (06:40)
with my parents company that I started doing their own digital marketing and started doing their own marketing. And I was very successful with it. I enjoyed it a ton. And there was a point in time that I actually it was time for me to fly the nest. And I got a job as a marketing and sales manager at another inspection company in Tampa. So my parents are over in Melbourne, Florida, like Cocoa Beach area. And I moved over to Tampa to be a marketing and sales manager for another inspection company called Waypoint, which, you know, they

They obviously did a lot of different commercial inspections. The best story that I ever have actually coming out of Waypoint when I first took the position, it was right before COVID. So it was 2019, think, 2020, right before COVID. I was only there for maybe six months when COVID was hitting. And I immediately wanted to go digital, but we were still doing a lot of the office visit standard marketing that home inspectors do.

I remember specifically for commercial inspections that I was just like, I’m going to make this a huge focus for an SEO like thing to build out commercial inspection pages and really target that online because it’s very difficult to do like in-person marketing for commercial agents. It’s a different kind of kind of thing. And by far, that was one of our most successful things was doing SEO for commercial inspections in order to obtain new commercial jobs. And it just just so happened again, COVID hit.

Everything had to be online at that point. So I was able to kind of get the get the head start on everything. I guess everything kind of worked out.

CCPIA (08:16)
Boy, they’ve never told me that story. mean, when I talk to the boys that were at Waypoint, they never talked about you or their catalyst in the origin story.

Aaron Shishilla (08:32)
I mean, I don’t want to take credit for everything but I will say I I owe a lot to them because they gave me a platform and an opportunity to get me where I am today. So if it wasn’t without them and them taking a chance on me, I would not be sitting here with you today at all. And they’re very, very, very smart people. Austin and Bob and Eddie and everybody at the team at the time, very, very smart people were able to definitely challenge me and

CCPIA (08:34)
No!

Aaron Shishilla (09:01)
I would say in some regards too, able to contain me because a lot of times I could be a little loose cannon.

CCPIA (09:09)
Well, know, passion can feed quite a furnace.

Aaron Shishilla (09:17)
Yeah, yeah, I think that’s what it comes down to is just being super passionate, excited, wanting to do it, wanting to see it through and wanting to see it happen. Especially when it came to digital marketing, like I mentioned, you know, being able to use SEO tools to see like how many people were searching for commercial jobs or home inspections every month and then start targeting those people online.

CCPIA (09:40)
So your waypoint, COVID, move fast forward, you started Wolfpack advertising. So you wanted to leave the nest or leave the, I guess not nest as much as you already left the nest in Melbourne with your parents firm. You wanted to strike out and be your own destiny, obviously. From waypoint, what year did you start Wolfpack?

Aaron Shishilla (09:50)
Yes.

It was actually the same year that I was going over to Waypoint. And so they knew, they knew before they hired me that I had Wolfpack and Austin, who was one of the other catalysts with me that kind of me, brought me into Waypoint. Austin is a co-founder of Wolfpack as well. And so a lot of those early stages, he had a lot to do with that and our initial like upbringing and everything else, because our initial upbringing wasn’t necessarily like all focused on advertising or all focused on SEO.

CCPIA (10:12)
Okay.

Okay.

Aaron Shishilla (10:39)
A lot of our initial stuff was like email marketing based and CRM based, like SMS marketing, relationship marketing through like digital channels essentially. So that was started in 2019 at the same time. And while I was working at Waypoint, Austin and I were working on this side project called Wolfpack. And we were just ultimately doing, I guess, a good job to where a lot of people started entrusting us with their marketing. And about two years after being at Waypoint,

Wolfpack got to a point that somebody needed to take it full time and it needed like somebody’s full attention.

CCPIA (11:15)
So for those watching this or listening or whoever you’re digesting this, we’re somewhere in 2026. So you’re just at about your fifth anniversary of full-time monitoring of Wolfpack.

Aaron Shishilla (11:34)
Yeah, yeah. Longest I’ve ever had a job.

CCPIA (11:36)
Wow.

Let’s see, I’m trying to think for myself. No, it’s close. You know, in the evolution of a business, if you can see your fifth birthday or anniversary.

You’ve got a good foundation and a good solid direction you’re heading. I bet there’s been a lot of really interesting growing points in the last five years of your company. Anything struck out in your head as a wow, I never knew that point?

Aaron Shishilla (12:16)
You know, I think at the end of the day, what I’m learning in the last probably year is it’s not about me anymore. And sometimes, like even now, I feel like I’m getting a little bit like, I guess it strikes a chord with me because at the beginning, I felt like it was like my means to an end, my way to kind of fly the coop, control my own destiny, have my own thing in a way. And it was about me, I guess. But now it’s not. Now.

you know, we’re growing the team, have nearly probably 20 employees at this point. And, you know, we have hundreds of customers, it’s most certainly not about me anymore. It is about our team members making sure that they can take care of their own families provide for their own families can grow their own career can grow their own knowledge, but also have a fabulous time and seek strong performance for our clients. So that at the end of the day, I feel like that’s what I’ve probably learned in the last year is

not that I had to learn a lesson that I needed to get out of my own way, but that my, my why of why I’m doing this and everything else, what I need to go in with the mindset every day has changed.

CCPIA (13:29)
in those early years when you were in your teens and then becoming an inspector and then moving over to doing marketing and now with doing Wolfpack as this is quite a sustainable effort. What do you think the biggest change has been in the way inspectors source work?

Aaron Shishilla (13:59)
I think the biggest by far is more people are considering digital first. At the beginning, digital was an afterthought and you didn’t have to do it, I guess. It was like, yeah, you should do that. That could be a thing. And you know, people were starting talking about their success with digital marketing and those people were like unicorns. Like, whoa, that’s amazing. Like, how can you do that? Like, there’s no way I could do that for myself.

And now just the mindset has completely flipped to where if you’re not doing digital, that is a huge, huge, I guess, handicap for your business. And so I think people are more so putting digital as the forefront rather than what it was of like this, this thing that you could just, you could do, but it wasn’t necessary.

CCPIA (14:52)
It’s a V instead of an and.

Aaron Shishilla (14:56)
Yeah, yeah, 100%. Most people now want to do digital.

CCPIA (14:58)
It’s funny, had coffee

with my former firm a couple of weeks ago and we were just sitting there talking. I that firm is in its, this year will be its 40th anniversary of being around. And it’s on its third ownership group. And I was sitting there with them and they said they are no longer doing any

door-to-door marketing. They’re no longer walking into to stakeholders offices with the box of pretzels or the Twizzlers or the jar of candy or all those things because it’s just not the way we do it now. It’s like, as you say, it’s digital, digital, digital. And…

And I have to echo exactly what you said, that even old dogs, you know, they have to have to change eventually because there’s so many better ways to go out there and solicit work.

Aaron Shishilla (16:09)
Yeah, 100%. It’s so much time. People don’t realize the labor costs that go into door-to-door or visiting offices, but also gas or food, like buying food for people, all of that factors in. And then people go to digital and they’re like, well, I spent, you know, 50 bucks for this, whatever home inspection or whatever else. And it’s like, well, how many hours would it take you to go travel and gas money and food to get one inspection?

CCPIA (16:10)
So.

Yeah.

Exactly, exactly how much how many luncheon learns? I mean, they’re valuable I don’t don’t I’m not negating luncheon learns but how many How many times did you have to go into that space to get them to finally go? Yes, you can have one Yeah

How do you think, well, let me say it this way. How do you believe AI has changed in the way an inspector can look at building their business?

Aaron Shishilla (17:13)
It’s revolutionized it from every every angle. Every single angle. I mean, the whole thought of your business has to be in the mindset, in my opinion now, of first day I and I guess that’s like for a lot of people that might feel like whiplash or like I’m being like too extreme. like, let’s just take, you know,

CCPIA (17:17)
How so?

Okay.

Aaron Shishilla (17:42)
the conversation around digital marketing and when you started that and having a conversation in your business, like it’s not until now that we say home inspectors or commercial inspectors are primarily focusing on digital marketing. Well, it’s at this point now that your primary focus when you’re building your business is how do I build my business with AI on the forefront of that? That needs to be the conversation. So when we’re talking about Wolfpack, when we’re talking about any particular company,

Right. The first question that I go to is like, well, what is AI going to be changing in the next five to 10 years? And how am I going to be adapting to that? Or what can I start doing now to an order in order to make sure I’m set up for position in five to 10 years for that?

CCPIA (18:25)
I love that. I absolutely love that. So, so do you think that there’s a different muscle necessary to market or yeah, I guess this is, this is the marketing side of commercial inspections versus residential inspections.

Aaron Shishilla (18:45)
Like is there a different methodology when you’re going to marketing for home?

CCPIA (18:47)
Yes, you’re

using a completely different step. Is it a different process? Yes.

Aaron Shishilla (18:55)
you know, it’s not a completely different step or process from the digital standpoint. I think that what it comes down to though is expectations, and. Performance metrics. So take for the example, let’s just say, you know, you do like mostly everybody has some, some type of like insurance inspection that they can relate to in their state, right?

CCPIA (19:03)
Okay.

Aaron Shishilla (19:18)
Most like some of the larger states have big insurance inspections that are typically like low value. And even if you don’t have insurance inspections, you might have something like a walk and talk. Right. Those are valued, let’s say, 100 bucks. Let’s say 150. Doesn’t matter what you put it on. Well, the thing is with that is they’re very much in high demand. There’s a lot of them. Right. And there’s a lot of inspectors that are going to be able to take it on and want to do it and be, say, price competitive about it. Right.

So when it comes from the marketing standpoint and I’m looking at the data and the metrics of how to market something like that, right? I need to come into a market a position with it for digital marketing that say I’m maybe pulling those in at $10 $15 a lead Now if we fast forward go over to home inspections Less people are doing home inspections then compared to the insurance inspections and the value of home inspections is higher now We’re talking five six seven hundred dollars for your average fee. So now I’m willing to spend four or five

50, 60, 70 bucks for a lead for a home inspection. And there’s less competition with that, but it’s still like for the most part competitive. And the amount of volume in terms of people looking online for that type of job though, in relative sense, is less than what’s available for insurance inspections. Finally, commercial. Commercial is your big beast, right? You can nail a job for commercial all day long. That’s a thousand bucks, 1500 bucks.

get those every day of the week. But then you might have some super big jobs that you can do and bid on that are 15K, 20K, if not more. Well, what comes with that? Less people can do those types of jobs and there’s less people searching for those kinds of jobs online. So there’s less volume of it. So that becomes a conversation when we transition from a home inspection world to commercial world.

of how we need to go about to marketing, what type of budget we need to set, and then the expectations in terms of the lead volume and the cost per lead. Because I would be totally okay with spending $1,000 to make 20K, right? But for a home inspector, that’s not the ideal. They’re like, $1,000 for an inspection. I’m not spending that. Well, if it’s a $20,000 inspection, you are.

CCPIA (21:35)
Well, and if you really stand back here today, what a great spot to go down in a conversation. If I’m standing back going, my goal is to make $100,000 profit this year after I’ve paid myself and my taxes and all my expenses. And I can average $2,000 in inspection.

I only have to do so many inspections a year and I’ve made my profit. And so if, you’re saying, I have a higher per job calculator, then I’m willing to spend that because it just becomes part of my expense ratio to get to where I need to go.

Aaron Shishilla (22:29)
Exactly.

CCPIA (22:30)
Yeah,

Aaron Shishilla (22:30)
Yeah.

CCPIA (22:31)
I find sometimes when I have these conversations with inspectors, especially inspectors transitioning, it’s like the difference between throwing a hubcap and throwing the manhole cover. you’re still throwing around disk. It’s one’s heavier, one’s lighter. But you know, it’s all proportional to really at the end of the day, what you’re going to try to get in your revenue stream.

Aaron Shishilla (22:59)
Yeah, the way that I would probably look at it is like, if you want to sustain your business, right, and just stay where you’re at, you need to spend about 10 % of your revenues, total revenues on marketing. So if you were to go and say, want to grow within commercial, well, if you want to grow within commercial, obviously that minimum spend mark is 10%. So if your average job fee is $5,000 for commercial inspection, and you nail one every single month, then you need to be spending 10 % of that.

every month, roughly on marketing. And obviously, there’s a bunch of other conversations I can play and they should speak to their particular their their accountants about that, or they should look at their own books to understand their own numbers. But that’s the general consensus that I would give or advice that I would give to somebody is look at 10%. What are the total marketing costs that you would account for? And is that 10 % of whatever your total revenues are, some companies are able to spend and the better business you can build, obviously, the better you are. But some companies can spend

CCPIA (23:29)
500 bucks.

Aaron Shishilla (23:59)
15 % of total revenues on marketing or 20 % of total revenues on marketing. So it’s just kind of like where you line up within that competitiveness to understand like how efficient can I be with my marketing spend and how much profit do I want to take home?

CCPIA (24:15)
It’s interesting, that probably brings me to a conversation about types of spend. I know that there’s AdWords out there. I know that there are Google ads, there’s pay-per-click, there’s social media marketing. I’m sure I’m forgetting some. Can we kind of go down a little bit of list of where good spots are and kind of some pros and cons of each of the type of places to spend money?

Aaron Shishilla (24:42)
Yeah, absolutely. If I were to talk to a brand new company or any company where to come to start talking to Wolfpack, the conversation starts at the ground level, like where you are. And so I need to start at the ground level and we need to work our way up through the different marketing channels. And that ground level is one, do you have a business, obviously, and then do you have a Google business profile and like Google reviews? Do you have the basic kind of reviews online?

Do you have like a Facebook page, your Google business page, and do you have a website? When you have those minimum things, right, and you have good reviews, we can move on to the next step. And so that next step after your website is, okay, now let’s have a conversation around what is our marketing goal here. If our marketing goal is I need commercial inspections and I want commercial inspections quickly, advertising’s your route. Now, if you’re saying my strategy is gonna be a little bit different,

I want to play the long game. want to invest in my business. I want to invest in my asset and I want it to grow over time on that. Well, then your investment needs to change over to like SEO or AI engine optimization would be like the new thing of optimizing for AI models. So those are two routes you can go after that. You start having conversations around email, SMS marketing, and then social media management.

And there’s probably one or two others in there that I’m probably forgetting. But those ones are typically relational or brand awareness or consideration stage. They’re more like, already have customers and I already have a fan base and I want to nurture those people. Or I’m doing it so that way I can build brand awareness about everything online with my network and then have it feed later into my advertising channel. So then that way it’s easier to convert when I go and hit them with the advertisement.

per se. I sometimes the only time I go back to somebody’s website because a lot of people will say like, well, when do you recommend a new website? I typically only go back to that when you’re ready to start investing more time or money into say SEO and your website needs a cleanup or a refresh. If you have a website, good. That’s kind of what you need. Do you have a page that talks about commercial inspections and what you do for that as a service? If you have that, that’s the minimum. We can move on to the next step.

CCPIA (27:01)
often do you think a website should be

burnt down and resurrected.

Aaron Shishilla (27:14)
It’s a difficult question to answer. I would say a good rule of thumb that most people would say is like every five years. Every five to seven years, yeah. It depends though entirely on the individual business and like what you want to invest in and everything else. As a marketing agency, you we invest continuously in our website. And I would say right now we’re in the early stages of actually burning everything to the ground and starting over.

CCPIA (27:20)
Five years.

Well, you’re at five years.

Aaron Shishilla (27:40)
We are at five years. We are. Yeah, that’s a good point, too. I would say there’s a lot of iteration over those five years. But, you know, day to day, though, for the most part, digital marketing changes constantly. Right. Commercial inspections doesn’t change day to day. So the standards in a sense of like you going out to inspect a building, like building codes necessarily aren’t changing as fast as what digital marketing does.

So you don’t necessarily need to go and update your pages and everything else. Outside of that, the only time you need to freshen up the design is usually like I’m ready for the next level of things or I’m ready for, it’s just outdated in terms of technology, because obviously technology updates.

CCPIA (28:28)
I think that’s interesting because when I look at it, we’ve had several other experts and partners in the digital world as guests and.

so many of our contemporaries or colleagues in this business, they rely on websites that may be provided by their software provider or something that maybe is a one page landing page provided by maybe their franchise or anything else. And so I would imagine to your point then Aaron, as you’re scaling up your commercial world,

to more services or more notoriety or more opportunities, that’s probably going to predicate when you’re going to be advancing your website as well.

Aaron Shishilla (29:21)
Yeah, yeah, I mean, think about it this way. Your website is, you know, like if anybody here listening has like prompted AI models before, right? You have to give it the information and the prompt in order to get the right result. So when you think about for a website and you wanna target commercial inspections, you need to be able to put all that information and give it to say AI or Google.

about why you are the authority about commercial inspections in your particular service area. Right? So if your goal is, I’m going to be the commercial inspector in Orlando, Florida, well then your website better have all the right information and be better than anybody else’s that is in Orlando, Florida. Right? You need to have tons of information about commercial inspections. Now, if you’re like, I just want to add in commercial inspections and make it as an option, I want to, you know, sometimes be able to collect those as a service.

Adding that as a separate page on your website is a great start. And just adding in some basic information, basic content about that. But when you’re ready to take it to the next level, it’s about how much information about commercial jobs can you actually put on your website? That’s the challenge.

CCPIA (30:32)
I think you said something, not in this one, but the last conversation pretty succinctly. And let’s see if we can, I want to come back and listen to that a second. You mentioned of where you’re at, and I’m going to use the word scaling up. And you said, hey, if I’m just launching a commercial and I’m just kind of…

I don’t want to use the word dabbling, but I’m just kind of touching into the water. Then you’re going to be building a website with that SEO world or AI optimization world first, correct?

Aaron Shishilla (31:13)
If I’m starting today from scratch with a new business, yeah. Yeah.

CCPIA (31:16)
And then if you were

looking to ramp up with a much faster rate or faster opportunity rate, I use that word opportunity rate versus predictive rate, because there’s no guarantees, then that’s when you’re going to start thinking of the AdWords or the pay-per-clicks or the social media advertising, correct?

Aaron Shishilla (31:39)
Correct.

CCPIA (31:40)
And then, let’s talk a little bit then about that Google ads or the internet search ads that are out there. What do you think or what have you seen that’s a good solid predictor of spend versus reward?

Aaron Shishilla (32:09)
Yeah, that’s a great question. And what I’ll say, the best kind of performance that we see right now, in terms of volume, is going to be Google AdWords, or what we call today Google search ads. That is your OG Google AdWords where you put in your different keywords, such as commercial inspection, and then you put a bid on that, or you do automatic bidding, and then you type in your headline, you type in like the advertising copy, and you send them to a landing page.

That to me right now and by far for a lot of our clients is performing the best in terms of the amount of volume that we’re getting for commercial jobs and in some regards return on investment, but not all the time. Generally speaking, what I’d say about commercial jobs is you need to be prepared to spend about twice as much per lead than you do on the home inspection side. if you’re spending or if you’re getting home inspections on Google AdWords for 40, 50 bucks,

then on the commercial side, need to you need to be prepared to spend $100 per lead for commercial jobs. But at the overall, like at the end of the day, it’s going to iron out and have you have a really good return on investment because your average job is like maybe 2500 bucks. I will say though, secretly, being by far. Secretly, yes, secretly, even though I’m saying it on a podcast. I will say secretly.

CCPIA (33:28)
Thank you.

Ha ha ha.

Aaron Shishilla (33:38)
Bing is actually delivering better returns on investment overall, but much lower like volume. So you get a lot more spam with Bing, but their costs are so much lower because nobody’s advertising on Bing like they are on Google. Everybody goes to Google ads and that raises the cost for everybody.

CCPIA (33:58)
And you’re not the first person that I’ve heard that from. Back in the day when I was running my company, my advisors and my marketing team would sit there in the room and say, you know, you guys should spend this much on Bing. And I’m like, this is what confused me, Erin, was I don’t ever go to Bing.

I type in a Google search bar, I use Google Chrome. My wife uses Safari more than anything else, because that’s linked perfectly to her iPad and her phone all the time. I don’t even have Bing on a device. So who’s out there using Bing?

Aaron Shishilla (34:37)
Yeah

So every PC that is in like the education system or government, or if you go to buy a standard PC today, it comes preloaded with Microsoft Edge, which and Bing as the first search engine. But you want to hear a really crazy story that most people don’t know about. Every AI model for the most part, your primary AI models such as chat GBT, they’re not a search engine. And

CCPIA (34:59)
I do.

Aaron Shishilla (35:12)
they use Bing as their search, as a search engine. So when you are searching something on chat GBT, you’re actually searching Bing.

CCPIA (35:24)
Wow.

Aaron Shishilla (35:27)
And when you advertise on Bing, most people don’t know this as well, everybody’s heard of DuckDuckGo, right?

CCPIA (35:35)
Yes.

Aaron Shishilla (35:37)
When you advertise on Bing, you’re generally advertising also on DuckDuckGo, or you have the option to.

CCPIA (35:43)
That I did not, this is why I love doing these is because I mean, for all the years that we had a marketing team sitting there across the desk on our monthly meetings going, know, hey, great news on your commercial. You know, this was your ad spend and this, how many times does the phone ring? And I’m like, okay, this is how many jobs I booked. Well, then we worked. You should be doing Bing now. And I’m like, they never told us.

that part of the story. So I thank you. And what do you think about that? So if, is the same type of spend and the same type of vocabulary congruent between the Google and the Bing AdWords or the search, I guess you called it search words.

Aaron Shishilla (36:42)
Yeah,

it’s almost one to one, but there’s little nuances. So when you set up your Google search ad campaign, you can input it over to Bing. However, Bing is not very good at all the spam and the junk. So you need to be more restrictive on the advertising campaign. And then not only do you need to be more restrictive about the advertising campaign, you need to be understanding that the lead you’re going to get from Bing

you’re going to have more lower quality ones or junk compared to Google search ads. Google is very, very good, obviously, which is why everybody uses it. Bing’s not as good. So you just have to go in with that expectation. You’re going to get some mixed in junk. But at the end of the day, the numbers don’t lie. And the numbers will tell you that you’re usually going to have a higher return on investment on Bing than you are on Google.

CCPIA (37:33)
So I’m your client. I’m giving you, here’s my spend money. When the leads, whether they’re high quality, mid quality, low quality, whatever it is, what are you going to tell me to be prepared for?

to do with these leads? Am I supposed to sit there and have them be static, go to a website? Or do you want me to be there ready to answer the phone? What are you recommending that I do when I create a campaign?

Aaron Shishilla (38:07)
Yeah. So do you want to go into the detail of like how much money you have to spend? Do you want to have that part of it?

CCPIA (38:15)
Well okay let’s say I’m going to spend $3,000 a month.

Aaron Shishilla (38:21)
Okay, $3,000 a month and you want to advertise specifically commercial jobs. Yeah.

CCPIA (38:25)
That’s

it. That’s all I do is commercial inspections. So what should I be prepared for for whatever leads come in for me?

Aaron Shishilla (38:37)
So at $3,000, I’d recommend splitting between Google search ads and Bing. And the purpose of that is because there are going to be months where you’re going to have really good performance with Google, and there’s going to be months where you have better performance with Bing. Or there’s going to be dry spells with one or the other two. So the entire advertising thing is like a live auction, like you were to go to some auction thing, where everybody’s raising their paddles and saying how much they’re willing to spend on this commercial job lead, right?

Everybody’s bidding. as the market is really good and everybody is feeling wealthy more people are willing to spend money and the prices go up for everybody So when you start diversifying the advertising channels, you give yourself an opportunity to basically diversify your investment So that would be my first step the next thing that I would do Nine times out of ten a lot of people when it’s their first time advertising they kind of have this expectation They’re gonna start getting leads and be able to convert those leads

But we need to shift our mindset a little bit about the leads coming in. Normally, when we start an inspection business and we start doing jobs, we are used to people calling in and they come in through our referral network. They already kind of know us a little bit. They might have heard about us through their friend. And so they’re already kind of interested. And then they just kind of call you and they’re like, yeah, price is OK to me. You speak nice on the phone. Everything that you said was good. So I’ll go ahead and book with this guy.

When you’re talking about advertising, people call and these are people that don’t know you, don’t trust you. So your mindset about answering that phone call needs to be completely different to where now you have somebody that is like at this very cold stage. There is no trust. And a lot of people say like, they’re just, you know, price shoppers or whatever else. I’m not disagreeing that there isn’t price shoppers out there.

But I will say is most people are reasonable and understand that there’s this concept of value or spending a little bit more for quality. Most reasonable people understand that. So when it comes to just answering the phone or taking it into these leads, really need it. People really need to understand that it is kind of like a new challenge that they need to monitor their close rate.

What I found, we actually recently did a study yesterday or Sunday. Sunday I recently did a study. was analyzing some data within Wolfpack. And I was looking at specifically what is the close rates between regular leads that are coming into businesses versus the close rate on advertising leads. And is there a difference between the companies that are able to close on regulars versus through advertising channels?

The average shows a very stark difference. Most people can convert most of their calls, regular inbound calls, at 50%. When you introduce advertising, most people on average, their close rate drops to 25 % on average. But if you take our top 25 % of closers, our top 25 % of companies that are really good at closing, there is no difference between whether they close

on organic referral or they close on advertising. It’s always on average between the top 25 % 50-50. So they close 50 % no matter what. And that’s something that would really, really look at because that’s where the money’s made, honestly.

CCPIA (42:00)
So it’s really, becomes part, becomes, and this is what I drone on and on and on is the role of the person on the company side of the phone more than anything else is inside sales. 100%. And I love the way you made the point of, is a cold stage.

And you have to build that trust instantly. So if we think about that old sales funnel thing, with the top of the funnel, the middle of the funnel, and the bottom of the funnel, these are people way up there in the top of the funnel stage. As Wolfpack and advertising, mean, you’re all things for these companies. Do you help educate your clients?

in those aspects of the inside sales? Are you providing those consulting opportunities or is this something that we need to kind of muscle through on our own?

Aaron Shishilla (43:10)
Yeah, so it’s conversations we do have with them. And if the relationship works like this, you come in for advertising, right? You submit your onboarding form, the team sets up your advertising accounts, and then they send you a video. And it’s a video of them about five minutes breaking down, hey, this is everything that I’ve created for you. Everything’s good to go. Everything’s live. Go ahead and check it out. You have access to everything. You’re an admin on everything. So you can go in and click around.

Whatever, don’t change anything because obviously that would be bad. But go ahead and click around. Let me know if you have any questions or concerns. And then after that first month that happens, right, they automatically they’re getting notifications of the activity. They get update emails about what’s going on from our perspective. If there’s any concerns, any questions, any optimizations we need to make. But at the end of the month, when it comes to return on investment and looking at it, we do that same thing. We create a little video that’s about five minutes of us walking through.

the campaign metrics at a high level and the return on investment at a high level. And we’re saying from those campaign metrics and the return on investment where they fall at each level. So maybe it’s looking at, hey, this is your absolute top of impression rate, right? That’s just the one that came to mind. We look at that and we are looking at that in comparison to the market in terms of your competition and where you stand versus everybody else. And we say, you are doing really well here. Keep it up.

or you are not doing so well here, you need to focus on these specific things, right? We go over to the return on investment side. We look at a couple of different metrics when we talk about that. The first one is quotable rate. Of the leads that you got, how many were quotable? How many could you actually give a quote to? Right, that’s our first metric. The second one is of those that are quotable, how many did you close? What is the close rate?

And from there, we look at that and say, hey, your close rate is 50%. You’re doing amazing. Keep it up. Or your close rate is 25%, 20%. When it happens like that, our conversation goes into like, hey, look, our expectation of you is to hit a close rate of at least 30 or 33%. And I want you to be able to do that because that’s really how you take these advertising, these digital marketing truly to the next level is you’re capitalizing on that.

So at that point, we can open up a conversation to say, what are these leads likes? What’s happening on the phone? And a lot of times what happens is we actually record all the calls and we can tell exactly what’s happening. So we can advise people through email or even through those videos and say, hey, we’ve noticed these specific things. The people that are top closers are doing these specific things on the phone.

CCPIA (45:50)
That’s terrific. I mean, that’s really the key. When I see the way the industry is, in the commercial world, we’re such a newer industry, really less than 10 years. And in commercial inspections, it’s 50, 60 years. So you really have to build basically that education level with your prospective client and build that trust and build those things.

And you being able to shine light in their eyes and illuminate them on maybe a shortcoming to increase their closure rate is going to A, create a sustainable business and B, maintain a partnership of collaboration.

Aaron Shishilla (46:39)
Yeah, I mean, ultimately, what it comes down to is we can do everything we can for somebody that wants to hire a digital marketing agency. But companies have to be able to listen to us because we’re to be able to say where they physically stand within their given market, how the market conditions are changing in digital marketing and what actionable steps they need to take in order to remain competitive.

CCPIA (47:01)
That’s terrific. So I’m just trying to go through my notes here.

If you were to give a recommendation to a brand new inspector listening to this, that’s thinking about getting into commercial, what do you think is the perfect avenue for budgeting?

first year for, that’s not the building of a website because that could be as robust or as, as, as, as basic as they want it to be. But if it, get the bell to ring, what do you think is a, is a decent budget?

Aaron Shishilla (47:52)
Yeah, I feel like it’s a complicated question to answer because I get a lot of people that ask me like, how much should I advertise for this? How much should I spend on that? And my answer always comes down to, like, can give you a number, right? But what first and foremost is what can you reasonably spend, let’s say on a monthly basis and be okay with not that we’re actually doing this, but be okay with it lighting on fire, right? If you can reasonably…

CCPIA (48:01)
Okay.

I think that’s a fair way

to say it. So how about this question? I’ve got a better one. Because I put you on the spot and I apologize. That was my gotcha. No, I appreciate it. I don’t, let’s not go down that way. So now let’s take a practical answer. Because I work alone.

Aaron Shishilla (48:22)
Yeah.

I can tell you a number.

CCPIA (48:40)
And I’m a commercial property inspector and it’s Rob’s commercial inspections on the door. It’s Rob’s commercial inspections on my truck and it’s Rob’s commercial inspections on my website and on my shirts.

most days I’m busier than a one-armed paper hanger. And so I need to make sure that I have the best practices available to me. And so I have taken Wolfpack to heart and you’re gonna help me with this. If you were building my website,

Knowing how busy I am for conversions, do you believe that a request, a proposal, intake form is more valuable than a call me for information call to action?

Aaron Shishilla (49:45)
that’s a good question. First off, I got to say great branding of this, this Rob company. That’s beautiful branding.

CCPIA (49:49)
Just is robbing, you know,

it’s like that was that show the middle years ago, bossing.

Aaron Shishilla (49:57)
I think I think this company is going places to be honest, and I’m not just saying that Yeah So what I’ll say is while they are both valuable The general consumer usually wants to call Generally, I will say the next generations though don’t want to do that So they want to text or they want to submit something and hear something back and after that

CCPIA (49:59)
It’s at least a three-letter word I can spell.

Yes.

Aaron Shishilla (50:24)
then is the opportunity to invite a conversation if they want it. But that’s just the next generation. By market share though, in terms of what people are going to do, most people at this stage are following that generation. They’re going to call.

CCPIA (50:39)
and having a call to action with the phone numbers. If you were helping somebody design an intake form, because I know you have, how many questions on an intake form become fatigue?

Aaron Shishilla (50:58)
The more questions that you add, the less conversions you will have.

You can do a bunch of UX, UI design things to make it super nice and easy, and those things do help. But in general terms, the more questions you add, the less conversions. This is way to think about it.

CCPIA (51:05)
I think.

So Aaron, what have I missed? Boy, we’re almost at an hour here. What have I missed about Wolfpack that you wanna talk about that we haven’t talked about?

Aaron Shishilla (51:34)
I mean, I feel like there’s so much. You know, I feel like…

CCPIA (51:37)
We might have to do a part two at

some point.

Aaron Shishilla (51:43)
I feel like what’s important for everybody to kind of understand and know is like everybody and where their business is at and their individual needs are gonna be so different. And so with what we do specifically at Wolfpack is we schedule a call, just like how you, Rob and I are talking on this podcast, we have a conversation just like this to understand what is it specifically going on within your business? What are you looking for? What are your goals are? And those are the things that tell us what are gonna be the best options for you.

There’s a lot of digital marketing agencies out there or a lot of people that will come to us and say like, want SEO, I want Google Ads, I want this, I want that. That’s great, that’s cool, but that may not always be the best option for you based on how you operate your own business. Some people might come and say, I need a new website, I know I do. Well, I don’t want you spending $2,500 on a new website when instead your website’s sufficient right now and I’d rather you spend that on advertising because then you’re gonna start getting leads immediately. And then you can use that.

and some more money for websites if you want to do that later on. Everybody’s situation is a little bit different. So I would just make sure that whenever they go do something for digital marketing, that they’re ensuring it’s actually fitting their individual business. Not everybody’s a good fit for advertising. Not everybody’s good fit for SEO. Some people, social media is their game and that’s what they do. Everybody’s on TikTok, right? So if you’re into TikTok, I guess go over to TikTok and we do social media as well.

Every game is just a little bit different in what you want to do. So it’s the amount of where you’re to put your money and where you can put your energy.

CCPIA (53:14)
That’s terrific. Thank you, Aaron, for taking some time today. I know we’ll have to resume this conversation at another point because I am sure, just as you said, I mean, we are constantly changing and evolving. And I would imagine in six months from now, half of this conversation will be stale anyway.

Aaron Shishilla (53:35)
Yeah, 100%. It will. Yeah, thank you so much.

CCPIA (53:38)
Stay safe, we’ll talk soon.