Transcription
Want to grow your business using data, software, and direct mail? Then this is the video for you. We're here at Dope Marketing's headquarters in Minnesota. Dope is one of the industry leaders leveraging smart marketing tools and advertising, leveraging direct mail, a bunch of data, and a lot of other stuff.
So, I'm here with Asia and Asia is going to give us a full tour of Dope Marketing's headquarters and then we're going to come back, interview Dave, the owner of Dope Marketing, and we're going to talk about exactly how you guys can leverage smart direct mail for your home service business. All right, Asia.
"All right, let's do it."
"Let's do it."
All right, so when you first walk in, it's usually a little bit louder in this space because this is where our sales team lives. So, they're always on calls, always meeting with potential new customers. We have our dopest of the month wall here. I kind of like to joke and say it's the hall of fame. We started doing D dopest of the month back in January, so new to 2025. It's one of our favorite things now. Um, but yeah, so this is kind of the sales floor.
The demo team lives over here. So this is who sells our software. They meet with potential new clients every single day face to face. It's our print sales team. So they are just always on the phone. I'm very surprised if they don't have their headset on. They are some of the hardest workers here. Um, they like to have little competitions for themselves on the plecco boards. Lots of fun. Back there's our break room. Dave is very kind and how much they feed us. Personally have never packed a lunch. They feed us very well.
"I love it."
Yeah. And I like the leader boards, too. You got the
"I know hustling."
Oh, yeah. And you can like compete with each other. Like you can like It's a whole thing.
"I like that."
You got some conference room. This is Dave's office. He gets the super nice corner one. We just like fully rearranged it. And hopefully I don't get in trouble for being here.
"Dave will be fine."
Um, this is my little favorite little wall of his. He like has all these pop characters. For his birthday this past year, I made him a custom puppet of himself.
"That's awesome."
And he's got the Nipy Hustle painting.
Well, cuz you know he named his son after him, right?
Right. You can tell Dave I dragged you in.
Perfect. Perfect. Some more conference rooms. This is our account management room.
"Hello, account management. What's up, gang? There's like there's 13 on this team. They all live in here. Um these are the AM1s. We got the AM2s and the 3es. They all work very collaboratively together."
"What does AM stand for?"
Um account management.
"Oh, that"
yes,
"I could have I could have put that together."
So, they help all of the clients that use our software, send the direct mail, and they just make sure that everyone's very successful in what they do.
This is very dope, hence the name.
So, this is where all of the magic really happens. This is where we print everything. um and we ship it from back here and so we really have control over every step of the process so we can make sure that the quality is always amazing between the design, the printing and the shipping.
One of the things that like I I want to make abundantly clear here like in my business myself the reason we leverage Dope so much is like I felt like just blind sending out direct mail was kind of dead. And so what Dope does really well just for like blatant use case of how I use it is like when we close out a job in our CRM, the second we click close out, that info goes over to Dope software and Dope can send like the closest 5 to 10 houses to that job a postcard that says like we just did an install at your neighbors and then put them in a drip campaign for postcards. And so it's a lot more smarter than just blindly sending out EDDDMs or postcards. So, with that being said, it's pretty cool to come in and actually see the warehouse where the magic is happening.
This looks like handwritten.
Yes.
And it's actually print.
Yes.
That's so sick. That's so sick. So, a lot of you guys know what I preach, like the difference between doing five figures a month and six figures a month is systems and automation. And so, one of the things that Dope does so well is instead of you manually doing client or prospect outreach, you can automate it with their systems. And so for this one specifically, the way we use these is these are their cookie boxes. And so what they do is they have a system that ties to your CRM when you close out a job and they can actually send thank you thank you stuff like this or you can give them a data set and send it out to your customers. So for a use case perspective, if you have a bunch of commercial clients that are, you know, five figure contracts a year, six figure contracts a year, seven figure, I don't think just sending them a postcard will cut it in terms of client retention and showing them how much you care. So you can do things like the cookie boxes and in the cookie boxes specifically, they can actually make it with your brand on the boxes and they'll send these out, fulfill the cookie drops for you. And you can actually put print stuff in there as well. And so in this one, for example, this is a uh HVAC and plumbing business that's doing, you know, thank you for your business cookie boxes, and they're sending these out to who knows how many people. But and outside of that, like for me in my business, what we do at the end of every season is we take all of our customers that have an average ticket of $2,000 or more, we'll take that data set of all of those customers, their addresses, their names, whatever, and then we'll do automations like this to thank them. If we have commercial clients, we would send them these plus like a little bit more. And it's like, guys, we know the numbers behind how much it costs to acquire a customer. If you can do things like this that cost a tiny bit on the back end, this is how you keep a customer, especially a highpaying one.
We just knock down this part of the wall. So now our two offices connect. There's going to be another entryway up there between the two offices, but we're really excited about that because we've been walking outside and now we can just cut through. We're super excited about it.
So, you guys are getting so popular and so busy that you're knocking down walls and getting more space.
Oh, yeah.
That is what we call economic stimulation, gang.
What is this room becoming?
So, this is going to become basically an extension of what's back there. It's just going to be another production room where we can store like a lot of like this is all of our chloroplast and all of the things that we need to print our materials.
Damn.
So, all the cardboard boxes we use, the chloroplast, it's just a great way to have more of an organized place to store all of that. Um, because with more business, we need more product and with more product, we need more space and there's only so much space back there with all of those machines. So,
no, I love it. This is this is quite the operation. It's so funny like when we order signs for the last 5 years
you just like never really get a vision at like what's actually happening behind the scenes. Very it's like you know
Yeah.
See how the sausage is made.
So this is the quiet room.
This is the cave.
This is the quiet room until Asia walks in the door and then I make it a little loud and I don't know whether they love me or hate me for it but like either way it's fine. This is where some of the most important people in the business sit because we've got the product team who is responsible for everything that comes with the software and just how the business runs. We've got our implementation team who help the customers become like get everything set up that they need to. Then we've got our support team who are just like angels sent from heaven.
All right, Now, this is a fun little extension. This is kind of the lounge area of sweet 200.
Okay. Um, so if you just need a quick brain break, you want to just relax on the couch to debrief a little bit, you also can.
Is this uh is this live?
Um, it totally is live.
Cold brew on demand.
Come on.
Dave and Bren, the owners of Dope Marketing, are also home service business owners. So, what's the what's their business's name?
Lion Share Maintenance. So, lines for maintenance and it's
it's exterior cleaning, it's roofing, it's gutters, all of those. Like, it's a contracting business now as well.
Okay, cool. And they also do Christmas lights.
They also do Christmas lights.
Okay, see
they're getting they're I'm getting Christmas lights from them this season.
Okay, there you go. There you go.
I'm a recent homeowner. Congratulations.
Thanks. Yeah. Got to get some Christmas lights now cuz I'm Christmas obsessed.
This is our team meeting room. So, it's kind of called the training room because sometimes we'll have a training class that comes in that's really large. like we had a training class of like seven or eight people all at once. So Lindsay, our director of training and development, holds like classroom style trainings in here. Um, but this is also where we do our team meetings on Thursday.
[Music]
So this is probably one of the coolest things that Dope does. This is what I deem as wizardry and sorcery in home service or contracting business marketing. This machine writes handwritten letters for you, personalized to the customer's name, taking info from your CRM. So, Asia, will you walk us through this?
Yeah. So, basically, all we do is we create the design for the front of the card to look like, and then we upload it to your system, and then you can set it up as an automation that every time that you close a job, whether it's every single job you close or within a certain price range, then you can send a handwritten letter to thank them for that job. Or if you really want to go fancy, you can send a handwritten letter to every neighbor in a neighborhood you're about to be working in saying, "Hey, by the way, I'm about to be in the neighborhood. I'm so sorry if I'm going to be loud. Let us know if you need me to move out of the way." Anything like that. And it's literally handwritten. It saves the times of your reps because then they don't need to do the handwriting themselves. They get their time back. We do it for you.
Yeah. And so we talk about this a lot on the YouTube and then within HSA as well. It's like one of the really popular campaigns for businesses that have like maybe a job that takes a day or two or three is it's called like the sorry for the mess campaign. And so what some people do is they make postcards that say like, "Pardon our noise. Sorry for the mess. We're doing a landscape design install on your neighbors." And then if you want that to really hit,
everybody knows the data behind handwriting crushes compared to just standard print.
So that's like another way you can leverage this that's incredibly impactful. Asia, thank you so much for having us. This is shattering all of my expectations that were already high when I came in. So, now that we've gotten the tour, what we're going to do is we're going to sit down with Dave, a multihome service business owner and the owner of Dope Marketing, and we're going to do a podcast with him. But, I just want to say thank you so much for having us. Asia, do you have any parting words for the gang?
I mean, pretty dope over here.
We love it. You heard it here, guys. Dope Marketing. They are who I'm using for all of my print marketing, all of my automations because it's not just print marketing anymore. It's you have to get smarter with the print. Four or five years ago, I was just blast sending out postcards on like EDDDM or just blast sending out postcards everywhere else. I think you have to get a little bit more strategic with a plan behind it to make it work. And Dope Marketing's automation tying into your CRM is exactly that. So, if you like this tour and you want to get a one-on-one conversation with the man, the myth, the legend behind this operation, I'm sitting down with Dave right now after this. I'll link it in the video here. You guys can watch it. We're going to go over a lot of strategies on how to actually implement this into your business and then just go highle business on from the top down as well. So, we'll see you there.