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32 minute read
If you put a great HVAC contractor's website next to a terrible one, most homeowners couldn't tell the difference.
Same stock photos. Same generic promises. Same equipment-focused navigation. Nothing that signals: this company actually knows what they're doing.
That's the problem Peter Troast, founder and CEO of Energy Circle, and Ed Smith, co-founder of Amply, set out to solve. We built a demonstration website—a fictional company called River City HVAC—to show what a high-performance contractor's website should look like.
The site is live at demo.energycircle.com, and in this episode, Peter and Ed walk through the key design decisions and why they matter.
The Core Problem: Homeowners Just Don't Know
Here's the uncomfortable truth: homeowners have no criteria for judging contractors. They don't know what a Manual J is. They don't know why commissioning matters. They can't tell the difference between a company that measures and verifies and one that eyeballs a quote on the back of an envelope.
As Peter puts it: "We call this the 'homeowners just don't know' gap. It's not a negative—we're not saying people are dumb. It's just the reality that people don't understand the distinction between a really good contractor and everybody else."
The challenge? You can't solve this by filling your website with building science jargon. That just goes over their heads.
So how do you communicate expertise in a way that actually resonates?
"We Listen. We Measure. We Fix. We Prove."
The homepage headline we landed on was: We Listen. We Measure. We Fix. We Prove.
Why that instead of "Boise's #1 HVAC Company" or "Quality Service Since 2021"?
Because it's specific. It tells homeowners exactly how you're different—without jargon. It signals process, not just promises.
We came up with that by channeling David Richardson, Brynn Cooksey, Kevin Brenner, Hal Smith—all the contractors who've shown us what separates high-performance work from box-swapping. This is what they do: they listen, they measure, they fix root causes, and they prove results.
It's not clever marketing. It's just the truth, stated plainly.
The "Us vs. Them" Chart
One of the spiciest elements on the site is a direct comparison table: River City vs. The Competition.
- "We measure first" vs. "They jump to conclusions"
- "Whole-system thinking" vs. "Equipment-only focus"
- "Test, fix, verify" vs. "Install and hope"
Is it aggressive? Maybe. But Peter's point is sharp: "Homeowners don't have any criteria to judge us versus the others. We have to give it to them."
If you don't draw the contrast, homeowners will make up their own criteria—and they won't understand the details that actually matter.
How far you take this is up to you. But this section is maybe the best example on the whole site of translating building science into language that means something to a homeowner.
Tell Your Founder Story
The About Us page leans hard into the personal story of the (fictional) founder—military background, years working at a big HVAC company, discovering building science, starting something better.
Why? Because every high-performance contractor we've met has a killer personal story. The problem is most are too humble to tell it.
You discovered building science for a reason. You left a bigger company—or started your own—because you saw something broken. That story is what separates you from the PE-backed company down the road.
And increasingly, it's what lets you win jobs without competing on price.
Key Takeaways
- Homeowners can't tell good contractors from bad ones—your website has to make the distinction for them
- Lead with process, not promises: "We Listen. We Measure. We Fix. We Prove."
- Give homeowners criteria to judge you vs. the competition—or they'll make up their own
- Your founder story is a differentiator; don't be too humble to tell it
- The demo site is free to explore: demo.energycircle.com
Timestamps
[00:00] – Introduction
[03:56] – The "homeowners just don't know" problem
[08:22] – The homepage headline: We Listen. We Measure. We Fix. We Prove.
[12:57] – Is River City a good fit? Filtering customers on purpose
[19:48] – The Us vs. Them comparison chart
[26:50] – Testimonials that reinforce differentiation
[30:48] – Problems We Solve vs. Services navigation
[34:22] – The Our Process page
[37:05] – The About Us page and founder story
[41:28] – How to apply this to your own website
Connect with Peter:
Transcript
00:00:00.000 — 00:00:49.600
The problem we were trying to solve is that we have noticed that the contractors that we would describe as high performance contractors, who are doing the very best work, tend not to do a very good job of telling their own story. When you look at their website, which is typically the sort of singular place where people's story about their company gets manifested to the world. What we saw a time and time again is absolutely generic HVAC websites, right? Nothing to separate a high performance contractor using diagnostics from the rest of the every other guy out there that's suing it the old way. So all of that together is kind of what caused us to try to present to the world. Here's an example of how to do it right.
00:00:53.520 — 00:03:30.420
Hey everyone, we've got a fun bonus episode for you this week. So it's Peter Troast, the CEO of Energy Circle and I. Discussing this demonstration website we co-developed. We felt like if we went to great HVAC or Building envelope Contractors website. And we went to an average contractor's website. There just wasn't a difference between the two.
It's really hard to articulate in terms of a homeowner can understand how you use building science, and that makes you different and better fit for them. So we took a crack at it. We wanted to make a website that articulates how a contractor uses building. Science is better and different, but in a way that a homeowner can understand.
And we basically unpack that that website, that demonstration website. The link is in the show notes. If you've ever thought my website was a little bit better sharper, go check out this demonstration website. I think it could be super helpful for you. And we talk about in the episode, we talk about copy.
We like decisions we made. So I think the episode can help you unpack that. Quick note. This episode is going to be cross listed, so Peter's got an awesome podcast. The high performance edge that's going to be there. He's got a slightly shorter, tighter version of this episode. And so if you want to hear us less, go check out his.
If you want to hear a slightly longer form version. That's what we have here, but it's our first cross listed episode, so we're excited. Do you think this is pretty fun? So that's what we cover in this episode. A quick plug. The Building Performance Association is our new podcast sponsor, and I'm excited to say their annual conference is coming up on April 13th to 16 in Columbus, Ohio.
If you are focused on the building envelope or you're focused on HPC, or even better focused on the intersection of those two, and think of yourself as a high performance contractor man, there is not a better place for you to go. I love it. Eric loves it. Peter loves it. We'll all be there. So we hope to see you there if you want to go.
BPA was kind enough to give us a discount code, so our discount code is it's a lot of letters ready NHPC-HPP. So that's short for National Home Performance Conference and Heat Pump Podcast. So NHPC-HPP use that discount code to get the best pricing out there for new contractors. The first time contractors had any of that conference.
All right. I hope to see you at the conference. I hope you enjoy the episode. I hope you get a lot out of the demonstration. Website link is in the show notes. Okay. Enjoy the show.
00:03:34.260 — 00:44:18.240
Peter Troast, good to see you and thanks for joining the Heat Pump podcast. Thanks, Ed. Good to be back. My second appearance, I think you're going to be a repeat guest. I feel it. Ed, welcome to the High Performance Edge. Great to have you very excited about what we're talking about today. It's actually we're both second time guests on each other's pod.
And it's fun to make this our cross listed podcast episode. Yes, exactly, exactly. All right, so, Peter, we're here because we built a demonstration website together. Right. Yeah. We're going to dig into it. But before that, do you want to tell us, like you've looked at a million contractor websites?
What problem are you trying to solve? Why did we make this website? Well, the problem we were trying to solve is that we have noticed that the contractors that we would describe as high performance contractors, who are doing the very best work, tend not to do a very good job of telling their own story. When you look at their website, which is typically the sort of singular place where people's story about their company gets manifested to the world.
What we saw a time and time again is absolutely generic sort of HVAC websites, right? Nothing to separate a high performance contractor using diagnostics from the rest of the. Every other guy out there that's suing it the old way. So that was number one. And I think we have termed this problem with homeowners is they just don't know gap, meaning that most homeowners, the vast majority of them, don't understand the distinction between a really good contractor and the tools and processes that a good contractor uses and everybody else, they just don't have the tools.
It's not a negative. It's we're not saying people are dumb, it's just the reality that people don't understand it. And consequently, as part of telling a good story, we also have to make that distinction between what makes us different from everybody else. I think that I'll say one more thing just as an introduction to this, which is that the problem tends to be before the first visit.
If you figure out how to get that good customer, get them into your process, qualify them. Set the site. Visit. As soon as a high performance contractor walks through the door and starts pulling out tools and starts doing diagnostics. There is an immediate sense for that homeowner. Wait a second. This is a very different kind of company.
The other guys came in and chicken scratch to quote on the back of an envelope. These guys are pulling out all these tools. And so part of the big challenge is getting the invitation right. Is that time in the funnel when a homeowner is just doing some research, they're trying to figure out who they're going to call.
And this is really in some ways, the biggest challenge for the high performance contractor is how do you stand out and distinguish yourself at that early stage before you've had a chance to get in front of somebody? Start using your tools and so forth. So all of that together is kind of what caused us. And it was your idea ad to try to present to the world, like, here's an example of how to do it right.
Love it. It's so tricky to do, because the more I've gotten into this world and come to understand what high performance contractors do. You can't just put a whole bunch of jargon on the website, because that's going to go straight over a homeowner's head, and they're just not going to know what they're looking at.
It's going to be worse than having at least an accessible website that yeah, it looks like everybody else is, but at least the homeowner can understand what you do. Right. Yeah, exactly. If we go into it with too much building science jargon, right. The terms that all of us know and love but are not understood by homeowners.
If we talk about commissioning, for example, and I know we'll get to this. Homeowners don't really know what commissioning is, right? Homeowners don't know what Emmanuel Jay is. Right. So we have to take those. The purpose of those concepts and put them in very kind of homeowner friendly terms. And that's one of the big things we try to do in the site is just give the examples of how to do that.
And I think we did a pretty good job. I think so too. Yeah. And so we have shown it like quietly in a couple places. We were at the HVAC symposium together down in Florida with the Bryan or hosts. I was at a distributor event like the day before that, actually, and showed it to a bunch of folks, and the reception was good.
Yeah. So we're gonna walk folks through some of it here and kind of dig into it. There's more to it. And I'll say, we should probably say this right up front. The link is in the show notes. So if people want to go to it, it's just click on down there. But we'll also share screen a bit here. So if folks are watching on YouTube they can check it out.
But if not they can just check out the demonstration site later. All right. With that I'm going to pull it up. Yeah. Ed. So I think one of the things that we want to talk about right off the bat, and it was your idea for the copy, is what we call this hero location on a website, the top of the page, which is kind of first thing that somebody would see where you want stopping power.
You want this to kind of turn people's heads. And of course, you have to have the requisite call to action, the sort of simple ability for people to get in touch. What I want, however, is you were the one that came up with this fantastic line. We listen, we measure, we fix, we prove. Talk more about what you were thinking and how you came up with that.
There's a couple things. One was I just was I was so tired of going to my customers websites and feeling like their website looked just like the PE owned HVAC company down the road, who I know is not doing this. And so this was just channeling David Richardson from NCI, Brian Cooksey, Kevin Brenner, Hal Smith, like just after whatever, we are, 47 episodes into the Heat Pump podcast, I think it was just like my subconscious chewing on it.
And it felt like this sums up what makes those folks different, right? They're not just walking in and box swapping. That phrase comes up all the time. They're walking in, they're seeing what's there. They're giving you the 20 year newer version. They are really being thoughtful. They're listening to you.
They're absolutely doing diagnostics before and then testing out after, right. Testing and test out and fixing the core problem, whatever it is. And it was just iterating with your team. But when we got to this one, it just sort of felt it felt right. For what sums up the difference between a high performance HVAC and building envelope contractor versus folks who are just doing box swapping.
Yeah, well, listen, I think it's brilliant copy, right? So kudos to you for your copywriting. But a couple of things about this, right. It's just putting things in very tangible terms for homeowners, right. To say first of all, we listen is such a very consumer friendly way to talk about things. Right.
And so obviously we know that to us, what that means is we're going to go deep and really understand your needs as a homeowner, what you are trying to accomplish, what the problems are in your home, etc.. And then we say we measure and we don't have to go very deep to say, like, we're going to run amply. We're going to do blower door tests.
We're going to do all these things you don't need to say. We just say we measure, then we fix, and then we prove right. And like the sub line here, we guarantee our results to create lasting comfort health and efficiency. So it's very straightforward. It's very quick and sort of to the point. And if you get to this place in the website, you're not going to miss any of that.
And you've got a really quick story. And it's worth saying our goal here was to make an 11 on a scale of 1 to 10, right? We wanted to put stuff out there that was purposefully a bit provocative, so that high performance contractors could look at it and say, you know what, I want to dial this down to a nine or an eight.
And so that's not necessarily here in this hero, but I think it will be in maybe the next two sections we talk about. Yeah. There's one other thing I just want to emphasize here, and which is the role of the website as a filter. Right. And I think a lot of we've talked to and worked on hundreds and hundreds of websites for high performance contractors over the years, and I think people tend not to understand that this is one of the ways that you sort of filter out.
You're doing qualification right from the start. I say this because I want to make the important point, which is every business is going to be at a different level of how fine they want that filter to be. If you are Keith O'Hara at Eco Performance Builders in California, you don't want anybody coming through the door who isn't already committed to your full soup to nuts kind of process.
If you're more early in the game and frankly, you need a lot of leads, you may sort of dial it back a little bit and have it not be quite such a filter. And so for example, here, like some people might look at this and say that's too much process, right. I just want to get this problem fixed. Right. I just want to check the box.
We need a new air conditioning system. I just want to check the box and move on. And so it's important as we go through all of this to sort of note that what's right for any individual company is always going to be dependent on kind of where they are and their maturity, what their strategy is, how much they want the website to be a hardcore filter.
Yes. And I have been shocked. And so I'm going to this next section on is River city a good fit for your home? I have been shocked on how the best contractors I've interviewed on the podcast, Eric and I've interviewed on the podcast repeatedly bring up the point unprompted. They know who their customers are and they know who they're not.
Yeah, so I do think it's extremely relevant for where you are in your business. I think the folks who have matured their business have a crystal clear view on, look, who do I want to work with and who do I not? Keith O'Hara is a great example. And so that's why we had this second section on are we a good fit and the get and touch filter.
So Ed this is River city a good fit for your home right. Talk more about what this particular panel in the website is attempting to accomplish. So there's two things that's trying to do. One, there's a bit of copy, which is look, you're trying to bucket your competitors, right. If you're looking for the lowest price in a quick swap, we're not for you.
Right. Which is like you've taken a whole bunch of your competitors and you put them in that bucket. We on the other hand are going to understand your home. So if you want to be comfortable, efficient, healthy, like you're kind of you're separating yourself. And then the second thing we have, which I'm not going to play, although I won't play with sound is all right.
It's me. So people know this is a real demo site, but it's sort of the idea of we've heard this from a few of different folks who have interviewed of the owner just look staring down the barrel of the camera and saying, here's why I created this company. Here's the need I saw in the market. Here's the two decades of experience I had working for someone else, and what I didn't like about it.
Here's why I created this company. What makes us different. If this resonates with you. Like, give us a buzz. And if it doesn't, no problem. Go find someone else. And I just thought that's on a few sites. It's 0.00001% of sites in a way that's delivered. Like, here's what I stand for in a way that really filters out homeowners.
Yes. Potential customers. So that's what the idea for this panel really was. Like the owner saying, here's what I'm looking for as my customer, and here's the company I built. Do you like it or do you not? And it's okay if you don't. Exactly. And I think the beauty of just asking yourself this question. Right.
Putting it out there. Are we good fit for you. Enables every contractor to answer it in whatever way they want to. This is written rather stridently, right? If you're looking for the lowest price in a quick swap, we may not be the best match. It's very clear, right? But you don't have to go that far if you don't want to.
You can soften that language and make it. But I think there's one very straightforward, simple, and incredibly powerful thing for a website is this question answered in a way that's appropriate for your situation, your strategy, and your company? Totally. So if that homeowner comes to this site and says, you know what?
River City sounds like a good fit for me. They come up here and they hit get in touch. Where does it take us, Peter? Yeah. So one of the things that is a challenge in some cases for high performance contractors is that not everybody, before they know anything, right, wants to have a fancy consultation or an audit.
Right. And so what we attempted to accomplish here is the best of both worlds, right? Where we are leaning into the fact that we are going to do a serious diagnostic process, in which case, for that person, we have scheduled my home consult. Right. We dive right into it. But for the person that might be turned off potentially by that.
Wait a second and understand all this process. I don't need a lot of process. I just I don't have air conditioning in my cold climate location. And I hear these heat pumps are really cool, right? That we had a separate fork for, which is I'm just getting started. Right. And so we're trying to sort of accommodate both worlds with something that's not intimidating.
If you're just exploring, book a 15 minute virtual call if you're ready to take action. We'll start with a 60 minute virtual review. So I think this is one of the things about the high performance contracting world for which there is no right answer, right? Every company is going to decide what their diagnostic process is.
And you've got everything from the House Smith approach, which is they don't say anything on the way to the home, but every single one of their consultants has a full set of tools, including blower door and everything in their truck, and they pull it out on the spot unexpectedly versus the Tim De Stasio approach, which is, look, I do the most thorough diagnostic process known to man.
And it takes the entire day and you're going to pay for it. And that's approach. And there's not neither of those is wrong. Right. They're both very successful business models in and of themselves. Most of us are. Some kind of companies are somewhere in between. But this attempt, you know, giving people two choices here, was a way to try to get over that challenge and do it in the least expensive way possible for the contractor to both virtual so there's no windshield time, right?
This is all about vetting a customer in the cheapest way possible. So your customer acquisition cost is the lowest possible. And ultimately, you want your ticket size and your ROI to be as high as possible. And I think it's a bit subtle in here, but you'll share more details about your house up front so we can go deeper.
That means before you get on that 60 minute call, you're going to have to fill out a detailed survey, take some pictures of your home, give me a picture of the label on your furnace or whatever it is. And we've had contractors who do this sort of thing. Say, then the customer has skin in the game. A they know you're more detailed than anyone else are going to talk to you, but B they have invested their own time.
And so now they're invested in you, and it again starts to separate you from the competition with you doing zero work. If someone just clicks this and gets to the point where they can schedule a 60 minute virtual review, they've already spent like 20 or 30 minutes on your company, and that is incredibly valuable.
Now, some people will bounce out immediately, but they're probably not your customer. So again, this is an 11 on the scale of 1 to 10. This can be an 11, but I think it's useful to see what that looks like. I 100% agree. And I you know, both of us spent a bunch of time with John Semel back from the comfort squad in Charlottesville, Virginia, last week.
And John uses this virtual approach. It's a video call that happens first. And I asked him very pointedly, how many people, you know, do you lose because they don't want to go through this? And he's absolutely zero people love this process. And so, you know, that could be unique to his particular clientele and his area.
But, you know, it is I think, you know, it is not saying it is the way to go, but it is certainly a one that is getting a lot of traction. And I personally really like it. All right. So let's bounce back. Let's go to one of the spiciest things I guess here, which is the us versus them. Tell us about this one. Well, so if you go back to my initial point, which is that homeowners just don't know, right?
They don't have any criteria on which to judge the, you know, us versus the others. We have to give it to them. Right. And so what I would sort of say about this is that, again, how much you want to throw the other guys under the bus, right, is a choice that every company should make for themselves, right? This is a somewhat strident right.
They jump to conclusions. They have an equipment only focus. They, you know, use rules of thumb. And so, you know, that's kind of you know, we tried to define, I think, the other side of this in terms of how we described how we do it is in very tangible terms, right. Not building science geekery without necessarily pulling back.
Right. We test your systems. Airflow, pressure and temperature. Right. But we're not talking about, you know, building sciency terms like static pressure or we're not necessarily talking about, you know, blower doors or whatever, but we are saying that we're going to check all these things. And I'm particularly like at the bottom, the commissioning piece here, which is we don't use the word commissioning.
Right. And it's we test, we fix and we verify. And the alternative to that, which is very true of most sort of normal HVAC contractors that don't have any commissioning process at all is we turn it on and you know and hope it works. We if it blows cold air and it blows hot air, it's functioning well. So again, you know, I think this kind of a comparison chart is intended in this example to be just an example that you can use, right?
Define the parameters on which you want to compare yourself and make your own decisions about how aggressive you want the messaging to be, about how the other guys do it and but really clear, very direct. And, you know, again, as we're sort of building kind of a layer cake of messaging here, a very effective way to get that message across.
And this is something that is super common in the software world. If you go to a service lighthouse called Pro, they each have comparison charts like this like feature buy feature, you know, and price by price. But it's not. I actually don't know of anyone in HVAC or built or whole home performance contracting who do this.
So this is one where I think it's super thought provoking, and I think it's maybe the best example on the whole website of getting stuff that is building science oriented, but phrased in a way that matters to the homeowner. So I hope people find get a lot out of it. I'll be very curious to see if stuff like this starts appearing on people's websites, because this I think is pretty darn alien to HVAC.
So I think that's, you know, that's a very powerful part of this. All right, Pete, great. On the US versus them, I think one of the next interesting pieces is the River city difference. Yeah. So what is very typical of most websites is this idea of like various trust symbols. Right. Ed I think, you know, we chose four things, right.
That were kind of important points to make. And then we used a bit of a design tactic to kind of make this more effective. So talk more about this section. This section for me is an encapsulation of my life. My business partner, Eric Fitz, is massively technical, and he is always saying things in jargon that I have never heard of that I'm like, can you please explain that to me in layman's terms so I can get?
And then he tries like three days later, I sort of get it. So the idea here was basically let's pick for things that we know are strong differentiators. You and I both know a ton of contractors. We know some things that make them different. And let's put them on there. And you can have the jargon stuff like Mitsubishi Diamond Contractor, if you go to your local distributor, everyone who works at a distributor know what that means.
Zero homeowners know what that means, right? And so when you mouse over it, you get this text that's very accessible. Lots of companies install Mitsubishi, far fewer diamond contractors. This means I went through advanced training, I've got verified installation quality, etc. it just it breaks it down, which like that same thing for Nate, BPI and ResNet certified three years ago.
When I kind of got into this space, I would see that, and Eric told me like, that's a big deal. I didn't know anything else. Besides, that's a big deal. And I think homeowners probably don't even know that's a big deal. It's just logos that mean nothing to them. And so we broke it down. Is it's okay if you don't recognize these acronyms.
Just know they represent some of the hardest to acquire HVAC in building science certifications. There are like. That's actually pretty darn good translation. And then, of course, one of the last ones we have on here is family owned and local. Yeah. If you're in HVAC, you know what's happening with private equity and like Wall Street versus Main Street.
And I don't think that trend is at all apparent to your typical homeowner, because I can say, you know, I live in the Boston area, there's been a ton of PE activity here, and they leave the original name, the website, like you can't tell it's owned by it, still has that family feel because I think that's part of what private equity is buying, like the multi-decade family built reputation.
And that's part of how they continue to charge those fees. And so we've got that on here. And I think this is nice because yeah, we picked four. But anyone could pick the for that matter to them. And the key is like say what it is on the front and then put it in homeowner turns terms when the card flips. And that really breaks it down nicely.
And I think that could be a powerful tool on people's websites. Yeah. Really powerful. And then, you know, we have a lot of history and a lot of data to prove the fact that, you know, these trust symbols like PPI or Nate or are powerful in that people don't know what they are, but the presence of them improves kind of overall performance.
And the the cool design tactic here is this sort of card flip thing, which is one of the things these are constant, you know, and very repeated mistake that a lot of people make is they put a BPI logo on there and that it's a link off site to the BPI site. You've created this leaky ship, you know, of your website, and you're losing traffic inadvertently, of course, but I've seen it time and time again.
In this case, you know, we just add a little bit of explanatory information, like what does this really mean? Right? And I agree with you. You know, on the family owned right up until the point that you received the check from private equity to acquire your company. Leaning into family owned and local is a very powerful differentiator.
And you know, not to say that that people who have, you know, built a company and built value in it and someone wants to come along and sort of reward you for the value that you've built is not necessarily a bad thing, but up until that day, you have, as a locally owned business, a real competitive advantage that I think too few companies are taking advantage of.
I think we should go and we should talk about navigation. But before we do, I just want to make a plug for testimonials now. We obviously we wrote these testimonials out of thin air and so we could do what we wanted with them. I'll just make a check. People should check out the testimonials, because what I've seen on most testimonials is like, yeah, it's five stars, but it's also the words are basically like, they showed up on time and the system worked afterwards, right?
And so what I think's nice about these testimonials is they are chosen to support the story and differentiation that's on the rest of the website. Now you got to get a big book of business before you have that many testimonials to choose from. I know that being a small company, but I think they really they support the overall story, which makes them powerful.
Yeah, exactly. One of the challenges with reviews and so, you know, so many companies are very inappropriately focused on their Google reviews, their star averages, and the volume and recency of their reviews and methodology that has been proven to be most successful in terms of getting volume is for the technician in the home to make a request of the homeowner, put the consequences of it in a personal terms.
This will be good for my career and what that does. First of all, it produces really good conversion, right? Request from request to actual review being written, but it tends to make the nature of the review much more personal to the person. Right? Agatha was here. She went straight to the basement. She wore booties.
She did a great job. She fixed the problem and she was gone. It doesn't say anything in that example of what happened. Right. And so what's happened? What we're doing here is cherry picking some of those reviews that actually say what, you know, the messages that we want to say, if we're talking about this, let's scroll just up a little bit to top navigation, where we have what we call utility navigation.
So you see about us blog case studies. Contact us. I want to just highlight the case studies piece here because in addition to those shorter testimonials that are very scannable, we big advocates of a longer form example of a real case study that gets allows you to dive in. So these can be again tailored to whatever level of detail you particularly want.
You know, we've seen some that have gone really deep. This is what the air you know, this was the air leakage before we when we got there. This is what it was when we finished. If it is your choice to go down that kind of a road, you can do it. But this one is, you know, goes pretty detailed. The problem. What others miss.
I love that line. What our approach is like. This is how we differentiated us, how we arrived at the right solution. And again, all of this and then specifically what the results are. Right. And you'll notice there's no data in this particular example. Like we didn't say there was in terms of the results that, you know, CFM went from X to X or air changes per hour went from X to X.
But we did, you know, did say like we gave some real tangible things. So I am a big fan of these slightly longer form case studies. And the key thing to to sort of people get intimidated by this. You don't need a ton of them. If you had three and then you built it up to five and then you built it up to ten, might just be enough.
Right? And so this is a very much a sort of what I would describe as an augmentation to your Google review strategy. Super important. But having them here first party on your website is very effective. I have to say, the experience your team has of however many decades wrestling with this like homeowners don't understand the words problem.
Right? And how do you put technical and exceptional craftsmanship into words that a homeowner will get really jump off the page? To me, I thought they did a fantastic job with it. The other thing to observe here about navigation is sort of decided on three primary nav elements, right? So, you know, signaling that these are the most important sections of the website.
And, you know, in this case problems, we solve our services and our process. Right. And so I'll focus for a second on the problems we solve in our services. This is in some ways kind of a search engine optimization approach, but it's also a very human one as well. Some people enter into the sort of the looking for a contractor thinking, I want heat pumps, right.
And so they're going to go straight to services and just say, I want heat pumps. But a lot of people don't arrive with knowing what the solution is. They just know that bonus room is just too darn cold all winter long and we need to fix it. And so one of the things we know to be true for high performance contractors is that the problem focused homeowner tends to be a really good customer if they come through the door with a problem, especially if it's a problem that has lingered over the course of multiple contractors.
They tend to be really, really good customers. And so this is where for your particular climate zone, you can tee up these problems, right, in a way that address, you know, what is typical in your area. What are the things that that get talked about most often, as well as sort of what the problem is, the cause and what the solution is.
So, so this can be super tailored. And again, it very much supports the process approach, the sort of houses a system approach. Like we find the problem, we understand the cause, and we kind of, you know, we produce a solution. So. So again note here that these are not long form answers right there. They are quickened to the point.
Right. Some rooms are hotter or colder. Right. HVAC system runs constantly. It's not comfortable. Heating bills are too expensive. Right. All of the things that again, tailored to your, you know, climate zone and your particular challenge, I think a really powerful thing. And this is proven to be a very good capture, you know, way to capture some of that organic traffic that's out there of people just searching around a particular problem.
The thing I love about this. All right, I haven't seen as many contractor websites as you, but I don't know, I've done something like 1500 sales calls for amply. So I've been to at least 1500 websites because I do that before every call. I'm going to say 95% of contractor websites just list the solution. Yeah, we do furnaces, we do boilers, we do heat pumps, we do traditional ACS, and they're all sort of chunked around equipment.
Yeah, I'm going to say the remaining 5% have a section on problems and a section on solutions. But there's no connection. Yeah. This is the first time I've seen problem root cause solution, which to me screams the differentiation that I have found exists for your highest performance contractors, which is to focus on homeowner education.
They will go in and yell the bust a bunch of tools and take a bunch of measurements. You don't really know what it is, but they'll break it down. You, walk you through it, they'll make you feel like you understand your home, and they'll help you make the right decisions based on what you're feeling, what's actually going on in the root cause and the home is the system, and then get to the solution.
And so I love that it's not rocket science, but I've never seen it before. And I think it's very simply and accessibly done here. Yeah. Great point. And at the same time we have to recognize that, look, every HVAC website needs to have the list of services, right. So it's more that we are balancing the two with, you know, between problems and then what the specific services are.
And so that isn't still, to this day, an important source of traffic. Someone is just searching for a heat pump, right? Or there. We need to capture those searches and we need to address that. But this, as you said, is, I think, a very good approach. The other piece you'll see in the primary navigation is our process.
And this addresses a couple of things, right. One of the things that just we all have to sort of understand and kind of face the facts on is that whenever a homeowner is entering into a relationship with a contractor of any kind, there is a nervousness and fear about how well that's going to go. And in my view, one of the sort of antidotes to that fear is explaining to people exactly how this is going to go right.
When you can say to them, this is step one, this is step two, this is step three, this is step four, and this is how it goes a long way towards alleviating some of that general fear that exists of no show contractors and all the kind of horror stories that you sort of understand. So we've taken this where you can see that we're coming at this process question from lots of different angles.
And if you get to this one, we've elaborated a bit more on everything that we talked about in Ed's famous copywriting genius headline of like, we listen first, we measure, etc. so when we try to put it in tangible terms, what does this mean for you? And so I think, you know, again, everyone has their own process.
You may not want to describe it exactly in these terms, but it is a very effective thing to say. This is how it's going to go if you decide to engage with us. It's an important point there. Like this is not the sort of thing you can fake or make up. Like if it's on your website, you say, this is how it's going to go, then that better be what happens when the project manager, comfort engineer, whatever shows up at the at the home.
And so this is one to make representative of the process that you actually do. And I've seen things like this. Like Paul McHugh was on our pod recently, and he sends a 92nd video to every customer before his comfort advisors get there. And that explains the process too. Like, there's different ways to skin the cat.
And frankly, I think you might want to do it multiple ways. Like to cover your bases. Because homeowners are busy and fragmented. They're not going to read every page of your website. Top to bottom. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You'll note throughout the site that we are, you know, we're always sort of offering up in a way that is unique and sort of tailored to whatever page they're on.
Right. A sort of call to action at all times, right. If you've gotten through the four steps of the process, feel the difference that a better process makes. Right. And so, you know, it's not you've seen on kind of traditional websites, especially some of the PE ones, just this, this sort of beating people over the head with calls to action like this is tangible.
It's contextual. It helps you kind of do it and yet at the same time gives people a way to act whenever they want to. So Ed, I think, you know, one of the things that is, you know, well known about websites is that that oftentimes the second most visited page after the home page is the About Us page. Right.
Very understandable that homeowners land. They're like, oh, that's this is interesting. Who are these people? Right. And so they land over here. So tell us a little bit more about this particular approach to the About Us page and why we landed on the outline and kind of the content elements that we did.
So let me first say, working on this with your team made me realize amplify about us page needs to be radically revised because it's not as good as it could be. But if you're a family owned business and you have been attracted to building science and high performance contracting, you have a story and perspective that's massively differentiated and telling the human story behind that is going to be enormous in terms of letting you win a job and not be.
Not feel like you have to compete on price. Right? So I think that's a huge insight right there. And so with that, we wanted to recap the process, right. Because the owner's vision for how a company should run manifests in the in-home process that they're going through. But then I have yet to meet a high performance contracting owner who doesn't have just a killer personal story, just an absolutely killer personal story that's often they're humble and they have it articulated and they haven't bragged about it.
So my thought is like, we kind of compiled this from a few different episodes we've done. But for anyone who feels like that might be describing them, go to your wife, go to a happy customer. Go to a friend you've known for 30 years and be like, what would you write about me on the About Us page to make me stand out to a homeowner?
And that's kind of what I got to do here with your team for making an amalgamation of a few different folks. But like Mike Townsend from Veteran Heating, cooling, plumbing and electrical is a bit of a case study for this because he worked on heat seeking missiles and like temperature was extremely important.
And from that he got into HVAC. Like it's just the best story ever. But someone else on our podcast, the owner was doing deep sea construction work, like literally like welding metal under. I'm like, that's who I want doing work. And he leads the install team. Well, yeah, that's who I want to do work in my house.
So it's just telling that kind of story in a very personal way, which increasingly will be something that differentiates a family owned business from a private equity owned business. So I think it's just one to get right. But owners are going to have to park the humility for a second and just tell the darn good story that I know they all have.
And that's what we tried to do on this page. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, this comes, I think, from a lot of scar tissue in terms of all the websites that we've looked at over the years of just seeing how what a missed opportunity. A lot of about us pages are right. They have stock photography of generic guy in Yellow Hat.
It's not a real person. It's sort of inherently just sort of general language that could be anywhere, right? And so so when there's a personal story and I think not everyone who is an owner is necessarily comfortable with, you know, like being as direct here as in it's a lot depends on how big your company is and, and so forth and how much you want the story to be about the totality of your company versus kind of you.
But regardless, I think telling that kind of clear story and the culture of the company and your vision, what the vision was, is a huge way to separate and especially to separate from the private equity world. Right. And this is where the private equity world tends to be very clever. Right. They drop terms like all the attention you'd expect in a locally owned company.
Right. Just they're dropping the term locally owned in a way that isn't dishonest, but is is sort of intended to take advantage of people skimming websites and so forth. So it is sneaky. Oh, you it's it's all over. So and they're good at it. You know, we have to give them credit for being good at what they do.
So again really important here. And you know we are again sort of leaning back on process oriented communications here. Test don't guess solve the root cause. Be transparent. Treat homeowners with respect. So love it. All right. There's more to this website, but we're not going to keep reading it to folks.
I think we've hit the high points again. The link to this is in the show notes. All folks need to do is enter a name and email to access it. It's free. It's meant to be a useful comparison, right? For like read this, read your own website and then see what you want to do. Obviously I can't speak highly enough of your team.
I know you work mostly with contractors, but you built amplify website. You all are awesome at what you do. And I have to say, this was super fun to work on with your crew. Yeah it was. It's a thank you for. I mean, you you get credit for the idea. It's just both of us have kind of came to it from the same place. So yeah, just a couple things like this was sort of a joint idea.
We sort of worked on this together, as you can tell. And it's really our gift to the industry now. So it's out there as an example. I would not recommend just going and copying the content. Right. It's Google doesn't like duplicate content, but I do think there is something here structurally that is we hope our pieces parts that you can think about for your own website.
Right? All of these component parts ask yourself, do you have them right? And of course, if you look at this and say that's something, you like it, you think it's going to going to make a meaningful difference in your business compared to what you have now. We would of course, love to help you do that, right?
We'd love to sort of support you and so forth, But you can you know, you don't necessarily need energy circle, right? You may have somebody else locally and you can sort of take some of the ideas here. As we've said, I think repeatedly during this discussion, how each company decides to explain each one of these things.
It should be very specific to you how you do business, what your strategy is, how much of a filter do you want versus, you know, not that much of a filter. Do you want to get more leads in? So in a good application, use this as an example. Lean into all the parts that make sense to you, but do it in a way that is tailored to you, tailored to you, encapsulates what makes you unique.
Because what makes you unique is how you're going to find your customers, and your customers are not going to beat you up on price, right? Because they're going to know that you're unique and can solve their problem. And that is incredibly, incredibly valuable. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. Pete. Super fun working on it.
Good to discuss it with you on the pod. I look forward to this. We've never done a cross listed episode before, so this should be fun. I know. Very exciting. And again, it has been great working on it with you guys and really appreciate you leading the idea. And we're just excited to, you know, get more folks in the industry to see this and hopefully take advantage of it.
Love it. Thank you sir. Thank you.
00:44:21.280 — 00:44:43.680
Thanks for listening to the Heat Pump podcast. It is a production of Amply Energy and just a reminder that the opinions voice were those of our guests or us, depending on who was talking. If you like what you've heard and haven't subscribed, please subscribe in your favorite podcast platform. We'd love to hear from you, so feel free to reach out! You can reach us once again at hello@amply.energy. Thanks a lot.
