Vertical Specialization and Agency Podcasting with Spencer Powell
Key Takeaways
- Builder Funnel grew out of a 40-year-old family direct mail business that went digital after 2008, with the family's own building company as the test client.
- Ideal clients are bucketed by revenue: home builders doing $10M to $75M in sales, remodelers and contractors doing $2M to $8M.
- A year into the podcast, the biggest payoff has been connections with other thought leaders, speaking invites, and exposure to their audiences. Leads are starting to come too.
- A 15-minute booking link in every nurture email and thank-you page replaced the assessment as the first sales step.
- Going all in on one vertical felt scary because it meant turning away other business. Spencer wishes he'd done it sooner.
- Specializing lets the team reuse a library of ebooks and guides across non-competing clients, which raises margins or leaves room to compete on price.
Gray MacKenzie hosted this episode (number 168) with Spencer Powell, President of Builder Funnel, an inbound agency for home builders, remodelers, and contractors in the US and Canada. Spencer covered how a family direct mail business became a single-vertical agency, who they take on, what a year of podcasting produced, and why going all in was scary.
The vertical came from the family’s own building business
Gray opened by pointing out that Builder Funnel isn’t a generic agency name. Spencer said the focus came out of two family businesses: direct mail and home building.
It goes back to my grandfather over 40 years ago starting a direct mail business. He moved from Chicago to Colorado Springs, built that up, and then my dad took over the business in the mid 90s, built that up some more. And then in the late 2000s everything crashed down and everything was going digital. Mail was tanking. So that was kind of our transformation timeline.
They became a HubSpot partner in 2010, and the family’s own building company (four generations of builders) became the test client.
They added a remodeling division. We helped them scale that up from like 2 million to 5 million over a few years, and they said, hey, let’s go help more builders, more remodelers do the same thing. And luckily we kind of saw where all this inbound stuff was going, at least enough to say there’s a million inbound marketing companies, we want to be different, so let’s focus on a vertical.
Ideal clients are bucketed by revenue
Gray asked what a good fit looks like. Spencer said team size is hard to use; revenue works better, and the ranges differ by business model.
For the home builders, I would say they’re typically doing anywhere from like 10 to 75 million in sales. It was kind of a wide range, but the guys that are doing 10, there’s still enough volume there where they’ve got the budget and typically not the expertise to do what we’re doing. On the remodeling, contracting side, margins are different, business models different, so typically like 2 million to 8 million in sales.
About half the time the point of contact is the owner; the other half have a marketing director or coordinator. The website is still the number one lead source. Sponsoring an industry group and going to a couple of shows a year is a distant second, and a multi-year investment.
A year in, the podcast’s biggest payoff is the network
Builder Funnel started its podcast around November 2017 with no real strategy. They planned to interview their own team, did a couple of episodes, then switched to outside guests: people on the sales side, business coaches, other leaders who serve builders without competing with the agency.
We have had several people that say, oh, I listen to the podcast, it’s awesome, and that’s why we’re having a conversation with them. But I would say the most value we’ve gained from doing it is making those connections to those other thought leaders, and getting invited to speak because of that, or just having that connection and then they’re sharing your stuff on social and you get exposed to their audience.
He’d decided up front to give it a year before judging it. A year in, it’s not the number one lead generator, but it’s starting to generate leads and some social activity, so it stays.
A 15-minute booking link is now the first sales step
Gray asked how a lead moves from the website into a sales conversation. Builder Funnel used to push everyone toward an assessment. Spencer swapped that for a quick 15-minute booking link.
We’re putting the meeting booking link into all of our nurturing campaigns and even on thank you pages and stuff like that. So I’ll just walk in in the morning, it’s like, oh, two people booked a meeting with you for Friday and Monday. Great. It’s all automated, and then I do a quick connect, try to do some pre-qualification and see what their interest is.
From there it’s a goal-setting conversation and an action plan. Knowing the industry builds trust faster, he said, because you can speak the language and point to a similar client scenario. The default pitch is a 12-month retainer; when the budget isn’t there, a website redesign or a CRM setup with sales training is the usual project route.
Going all in was scary, and he wishes he’d done it sooner
Gray asked what the vertical decision has done beyond marketing. Spencer admitted the agency took on clients outside the vertical for a few years first.
It wasn’t for a few years until we said, no, we’ve got to just commit and go all in. And it was really scary, it honestly was, because you’re like, man, am I going to be turning down and turning away all this other business? But I wish I would have done it sooner, honestly.
The payoff shows up in delivery as well as sales. Benchmarks from past clients make projections concrete, and premium content gets reused.
We have a ton of a library of ebooks and guides that we can take those and repurpose for new clients… We don’t work with competing clients, so we feel very good about not like, oh, this builder down the street has the same thing. That’s been huge. So it allows you to either increase your margins on what you’re doing for those type of campaigns, or if you need to get more competitive on price, you can.
Looking at 2019, Spencer wanted to treat the podcast and a new YouTube channel as media properties with sponsors (a national window manufacturer was his example), and to add a training academy at around 50 bucks a month for builders who can’t afford a retainer. The retainer stays the core, because that’s where they hone their skills.