Crafting a Captivating Story for Your Facility Management Company: A Step-by-Step Guide

In this episode of the Facility Management Marketing Podcast, host Javier Lozano, Jr. discusses the power of storytelling in marketing your Facility and Property Management company. 

He shares a simple yet effective 7-step framework for crafting a captivating story about your business that will set you apart from your competitors. With live examples of how this framework can be applied in the facility management industry, this episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to elevate their brand through storytelling. 

Tune in to learn how to build a branded story framework and start competing on unique aspects of your FM company that your competitors can't touch.

Transcript

So, you're probably asking yourself, how to successfully grow a facility management company in today's digital age while still remaining profitable? You know that marketing should probably be in the mix, but you may not know the best approach, the newest strategies, or which digital platforms to market on. So, how do you use marketing to grow your effort business today? That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answers.

My name is Javier Lozano Jr., and welcome to the Facility Management Marketing Podcast. What's up, guys? Welcome to our first episode of Facility Management Marketing Secrets. I'm your host, Javier Lozano Jr., so this is our first episode, and pretty excited to dive into this.

So, first of all, you're probably wondering, what the heck is Facility Management Marketing Secrets? Well, I will tell you a quick little back story. I actually started a podcast about almost two years ago, actually, with a company I used to work for called CMI Mechanical, and the podcast was called Facility and Property Management Secret Radio. And basically what we did was we interviewed a bunch of different people in the facilities management industry, from like IFMs to some facility managers, execs, presidents, that sort of stuff, CEOs, and we essentially discussed a lot about just the facility world, and how to grow it, how to get more business, how to just everything, everything you want to experience.

So, moving forward to now, and I've been kind of out of the facility world for a few months, I would say, but I'm still kind of, you know, still in it, just because of what my background, as far as helping some other companies in that space. And so, what I decided to do is launch a new podcast, launch a podcast that is geared towards marketing in this industry, and the reason I decided to launch a podcast for this industry is because I saw that there was a gap in this industry, in this space, where there wasn't really good, strong marketing that I believe should actually work very, very well in the facilities management world. And so, what I mean by that is that a lot of companies are still using the old school approach that a lot of us are accustomed to seeing, and this is not saying that those methods aren't tried and true, and they don't work, I'm not knocking that. But what I'm saying is that there's more efficient ways on how to market your company, your facility management company, in today's day and age of technology.

And what I'm trying to do is I want to kind of help this industry really just start seeing marketing as a sales enabler, as a way of making sales way more easier than what it can be. And that's what truly marketing should be. It should be designed to help you make sales much more easier than what it is. And so, I'm going to kind of give you guys a little bit more of what this whole podcast is going to be about, what it's going to entail, what you can expect, that sort of stuff.

But before I go into that part, I'm going to dive into my backstory, into my background a little bit, so you kind of have an idea of what my origin story is and where I came from. So, I'm going to go back to about, I don't know, maybe 2008. So I started my first company in 2008 during the Great Recession. And basically, as many people probably know, the Great Recession was when the housing crisis took place.

So I essentially started a brick and mortar business and that business basically was least signed in everything was like March of 2008, I believe. And so, went in to this already preoccupied place, the tenants there, they moved to a smaller space. And so, I decided to take over that and there was a lot of work that needed to be done, a lot of renovation in there. So I had to demo a lot of stuff.

And so, what happened is that in September of 2008, we were officially in a recession and it was tough. It was very, very difficult for my business because my business did lean on 100% on families. It was a martial arts and personal training studio. And so, when the housing market crashed, guess what was leaving as well too?

A lot of families, a lot of families filing for bankruptcy, a lot of families filing for foreclosure on their homes. People that were in our studio for a few months all of a sudden just up and gone. And so, that made things very difficult. And so, I had two choices when that happened.

I could either fold and basically just call it quits and say, okay, I'm going to owe $300,000 in debts because I signed a five-year personal guarantee for the lease space that I had. I had some loans that were outstanding, had a credit card debt, all that stuff. So it would have been very difficult. And the reason I said, let's just do this is because I was 27 years old and my thought process was like, you know what?

If I fail, I've got my 30s to make up for all that time and try to make that money back. And the other option was I can just get very, very good and very strategic at sales and marketing. And so, I chose the latter. Fast forward to 2018 and I ended up actually selling that business for multi-six figures, which is not very common for someone in this space.

Typically someone in this space, they don't typically sell this business very easily because it is wrapped around the person that started that business. And so, I was able to really create a lot of systems and processes in that business that allowed me to sell that company at a high margin, at high multiplier as well too. And so, what I decided to do is I took a little break, did a little bit of consulting here and there, trying to figure some things out. And then eventually I got into the commercial HVAC space.

Now you're wondering, well, how in the hell does a guy like Javier go from having his own personal training in martial arts studio for over a decade and then get into the commercial HVAC space? It's a great question. I was just kind of looking around for opportunities and this job kind of came up in one of my feeds I was looking at and it seemed very interesting. It seemed like it was everything that they were looking for was the things that I could do when it came to marketing, when it came to sales, except I approached everything more in a digital format.

And when I was interviewing for the company, they basically were asking about my background, what I knew about HVAC. And I'm like, I know how to turn on a thermostat, that's about as far as it goes. But I was really good at understanding buyers. I was really good at understanding customers and how to market to the space.

And so, basically what ended up is they ended up hiring me. And so, I ended up being there for about 18 months. And it was doing very well to the point where we were generating leads from some of the biggest brands that you can ever imagine. So, I'm talking like Anheuser-Busch.

We were getting leads from Raytheon, from Qualcomm, from Cushman & Wakefield, 7-Eleven, from T-Mobile, from Dollar General. And some of these we closed. Some of them were still being in the works. I mean, as anyone knows, this space is a difficult space to try to win some of this business.

But here's the thing, a lot of these leads, I didn't go after them. I didn't do what the traditional way of facility management companies would do, is they would have a sales team and go after and work after a list of contacts that they get from a trade show or a list of contacts that they buy from a book of business or something like that, or a book of business that came by from somebody else, or whatever that is. These leads were generated online. These leads were basically what I would call as hot leads.

I essentially was doing demand generation, where these people were seeking us out. I mean, to put it to you this way, the facility manager for Raytheon in Denver, I forget his name, but the facility manager for Raytheon in Denver called me on my cell phone, because he went through our website, opted into our form, called me on my cell phone, because the thank you page said, hey, if you need immediate assistance, just call me. And he started talking to me. And where I'm coming from is that this happened on a regular basis.

I would have people reply back to my emails. I would have people set appointments on my calendar to speak about facilities management for HVAC in their facility. Where I'm coming from is that I used an approach that just wasn't very common in this space, in the facility management world. And even my boss at the time was almost like taken aback.

He's like, how are you getting people to set up appointments with you? And he's like, when I can't even get them to reply back to an email, let alone a phone call. And I'm like, because I make it convenient. I send him an email, very to the point, give him a link to my, you know, my calendar link.

They set up a time and this is what it is. And he was impressed. And so essentially, you know, things were going pretty well. Then, as many of us know, the pandemic hit.

Some stuff, you know, turned sideways. And, you know, basically, I no longer work for CMI Mechanical. Nothing bad against them or anything like that. But, you know, that didn't end up working out very well.

So then I did a little bit of just kind of searching here and there. And was looking at, worked for just a short duration of time for a company called Trillium Facility Solutions. Helped them with a couple of things. And then from there, I've been doing some contract work for an Inc.

5000 company as well, too. Can't reveal that company name, but yeah, this is an Inc. 5000 company doing a bunch of marketing for them, getting some great results. So basically, in the almost three-ish years of being in the facility management industry, I've delivered some pretty crazy results in the marketing side of facilities.

And this is something that was, as I was in the whole thing, I realized that there is a gap in facility management and how they market their brand. And what's happening is that these brands are talking about, hey, we've been around since 1974. We've been trusted. We, you know, we work with this company.

What they're missing is telling not how long they've been around. It's telling the story that relates and resonates to a facility manager that is looking for someone to solve their exact problem. Okay. And the same story is being told time and time again.

If you don't believe me, look at all of your other competitors. If you're, especially from the facility space, they all talk about they've been around since. Okay. And this is not a knock.

I'm not saying if you've been around since 1974, good for you. I applaud you for that. That's amazing. But that is not a selling point.

Okay. That is not a reason why people want to do business with you. All right. I mean, think of it like this.

Ford has been around since the 1900s. Right. And there's a lot of people that will never buy a Ford. Okay.

So Ford doesn't necessarily sell that they've been around since the 1900s. Ford sells on what's their motto? Built Ford Tough. Okay.

So where I'm coming from is that I basically saw this gap and I realized that the messaging needs to change. And there's other things as well, too. And as this podcast continues to grow, I'll be revealing a lot of those things and teaching anyone that's interested in learning more about marketing on how this works. So currently right now, I basically am the CMO for a marketing agency.

And so this marketing agency is based out of Tucson. We work with companies that are essentially in the B2C space. I do B2B marketing, but they're in the B2C space typically. And they're more of like your small to medium sized businesses that are local to the community that sort of stuff.

And so I help our company create more pipeline. I help our company create a better brand. And that's kind of what I'm doing right now. So that's kind of my primary focus there.

And then what I also do is on the side as I help other companies in the facilities world increase their marketing efforts, improve their marketing efforts. And so what I want to do is I want to teach everyone on this podcast a little bit more about marketing and how to leverage it correctly. How to get the most out of your marketing dollars, your marketing time. And then what else?

Some other things that you can expect from me. So I kind of give you a brief rundown and a brief background about myself. What I like to do as well too is discuss just a couple of things about just what I was able to do with some of these other companies that I've done, you know, stuff in the past. So, you know, in the past, you know, the company that I owned for over a decade, at one point we were generating roughly 30 leads a month.

And then from there, we were qualifying 15 of those into qualified leads. So what we would call the SQL sales qualified lead. And then from there, I would get about 12 to 13 of those people to show up for an appointment. And then we were closing at roughly 90%.

And so we did that on clockwork every single month. So when it comes to like demand generation and lead generation, that's something that I would consider myself as an expert in. And so we did everything from, you know, getting our sites very well seen on Google, using SEO strategies, local SEO, as well as just a lot of content creation. And then from there, we also focused a lot on doing paid social.

So mainly on Facebook and generated a lot of buzz and a lot of brand through that. And then also, you know, got into doing some paid search as well too through Google and got some great results out of those as well. So those are some of the things that did very well for myself when I was running my company for over a decade. And from there, I didn't stop just doing paid stuff.

I did a lot of nurturing and lead building, trust building via email. And so this is an area that I see a lot of companies fail in, is they don't work their email list. They don't know how to build an email list. They don't know how to nurture an email list.

They don't know how to ask for a sale in an email list. And they sometimes put the emailing on the actual salesperson. When it really shouldn't be that. The way it should look like is that you have marketing find ways to get these people on your email list to raise their hand.

And then when they raise their hand, you have sales go in there and actually start working that lead. Okay. And so a lot of times what I've seen is that some people, some CEOs, some executives don't like sending out emails, even, you know, a few emails to try to start getting these people to start trusting their brand. They expect the sales team to do that when really what they should be focused on is really like working leads that are going to probably turn and convert.

Okay. Prospecting, doing some ABM, you know, stuff like that. But they shouldn't be focused on just the email portion of it. And so this is something that we did very well at my business that I owned for over a decade.

And it's the point where I had people on my email list for 18 months, 24 months, literally emailing me out of the blue. It's like, hey, we didn't sign up for lessons because it was the wrong time, but we've been on your email list for the past two years. We're ready to sign up now. And I'm like, holy cow.

And so what I'm saying is that there's a lot of opportunity that's being missed as we speak right now, like running a podcast. This is a huge opportunity for people in the facility world. Okay. So if you're a facility management company, if you're an IFM and you don't have a podcast, this is a great way to start building that trust.

This is a great way to start building that authority. This is instead of you saying that you've been around since 1974 you can start saying, we host a podcast that's dedicated towards FMs in the restaurant facility space. We host a podcast that's dedicated towards people that are in the C-store space. Do you see what I'm saying?

So you can get really niche. And even though you might do everything, don't be everything to everyone. And so these are things that we'll be talking about in this podcast as well too, is that you can leverage so many different channels and platforms to really start growing your brand and your business and start getting more market share. And this is exactly what every facility management company wants.

They want more market share, okay? They don't wanna be battling for those same leads that everyone goes to for these trade shows. They wanna have their own list of contacts. And so this is kind of what we'll be teaching you about.

Whenever I was at CMI Mechanical, I used a lot of this email marketing strategy and it got us a ton of business, okay? Like it got us in front of doors. It opened up opportunities. And here's the beautiful thing about it.

A lot of it was automated, okay? I didn't send a lot of personal emails. Don't get me wrong, I did. But a lot of the strategies that I implemented was automated, but it looked very clean.

It looked very like, hmm, Javier sent this. And that's the beauty about understanding how to communicate to your audience. And so what I did is when I was at CMI Mechanical, I really paid attention to a lot of people, what they were doing. I was watching how people would sell.

I would just kind of pay attention to like just the industry in general. I would do some research. I would go to like the connects groups, like on the forum that they have. I would start just kind of seeing how everyone was engaging.

And then so what I started doing was that when everyone was going right, I decided to go left. And I approached my style of marketing from what I gained from running a business. And so my business was a B2C kind of business. Obviously, if you're in the facilities world, you're in a B2B space.

And so the communication people think is like, well, you have to talk a little differently. You must talk like, you know, enterprise Javier. Well, here's the thing. The person making the decision is still a human being.

The only difference is that the person purchasing that isn't a person, it's a company. Okay, it's not their money, it's a company's money. And so if you can get that part down and understand that you're still talking to a human being and find something that makes them relate to you or have an affinity for your brand, then all of a sudden you set yourself apart from everybody else. And so it's really important to get this is that, you know, don't look at everyone else in your space and see what they're doing.

Look at someone else in a different space, in a different industry, especially in a B2C space. Why? Because those people have to refine their language so well to get a lead to convert, okay? And so many people in the B2B space talk so corporate-like and so this and that and the other, where most people don't even speak that way, especially today.

And so this is something that, you know, I want to kind of bring out as well too. These are things that we'll be talking about, okay? And so when I was at CMI Mechanical, I really approached my marketing a little differently in that, where I spoke like a natural human being, like how I'm speaking to you now on this podcast is exactly how I typed in my emails, is exactly how I typed in my blog posts. When I would post on social media on Facebook, it's exactly how I would type.

And I would have people comment, you know, like I enjoy reading your content because you say it how it is. You're just, you know, just talking stuff, you know? And it was just me just dumping whatever was in my head. And so where I'm coming from on this is that I want everyone to understand is that I think we need to change.

I'm not saying that you don't have to be professional. I'm saying you have to be human. People need to see that you have flesh, that you have blood, okay? They need to hear it.

They don't wanna see a higher than thou, okay? And this is why I was able to create some success. When I started the podcast, I See My Mechanical, I grew that podcast to over 1,500 listeners. And, sorry, it's 1,500 listeners and downloads.

And which was crazy. I did it in like seven or eight months, which was nuts. People that would listen to the podcast are like, how long have you been in this industry? Because like, you really know your stuff.

And I'm like, 10 months, 11 months. And they're like, no, that's not possible. And the reason I was able to sell people that I knew what I was talking about is because of this. This big giant mic, and I'm talking to people that were in places of authority.

And I was asking them big, critical, difficult questions. And I was having a conversation with these people. And so that's another thing, is that what made me successful in the facility world, as far as the marketing side of this, was I was able to create a brand. And so you're wondering like, I have your brand?

Yes. My brand, that's my reputation. And when people trust my reputation, they trust what I have to offer. And when they trust what I have to offer, they trust to buy it.

And so what this did is when I started seeing how everyone was doing their marketing, okay, and when I was at CMI Mechanical, I realized it was a big opportunity for me to go in here and start making our commercial HVC refrigeration company stand out from everybody else. And so this podcast was one of those things. I mean, to the point where I remember right before the pandemic happened in 2020, I went to a trade show called RIFMA and just kind of walking around, hanging out through the trade show. Didn't have a booth at this one.

And I was the only person representing CMI Mechanical. Interesting thing is that people were stopping me and they're like, hey, you're that guy that has that podcast. And I'm like, what? Like, yeah, you're that dude that has that podcast.

I'm like, I am. And all of a sudden it started opening doors. People were messaging me when they saw me on LinkedIn, like, hey, I saw you were here. Love to chat about that podcast.

I'm expressing that these are opportunities that lie in front of us. And still there's probably, I think, a handful of facility management podcasts right now. Okay, and there's none when it comes to facility management marketing, which is why I started this show. This is why I did it, okay?

I saw an opportunity, an opportunity to change this industry, to help it move forward even faster. I mean, you guys do such an amazing job with what you do, but there's still places to grow. There's still opportunities to improve on. And this is why I decided to do this.

And so at CMI, I mean, I did some other great things where we grew our organic search, meaning if you typed in commercial HVAC CMI Mechanical would show up at the top of the search engine. And I did a lot of really amazing stuff with our SEO. And it's thriving as we speak right now. I mean, you can Google a few keywords.

I think like national commercial HVAC. I think that's one. You'll probably see that in the top three or something like that. Let's see, commercial wireless thermostat.

Believe it or not. Commercial wireless thermostat, Google that. You'll probably see CMI Mechanical at like number one. And it's because like I did a lot of research to figure out how to get traffic to the site.

And no longer were they getting phone calls from like a person that needed to work on their residential HVAC unit. They're getting phone calls from commercial facility managers needing help with their crack unit, needing help with their RTUs, all that stuff. And the reason we were able to do so well was because I saw an opportunity, I saw a gap. And no one was doing this.

And so I started doing that. And I've done the same thing for this Inc. 5000 company that I do some work for on the side. And same opportunity, same thing.

So what I wanna share with you guys that are listening to this podcast for the first episode is that I will be going over a lot of these things. Okay, I mean, I have, oh my goodness. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18. I have about 25 topics so far that I plan on discussing over however many months to years.

Okay, and that's just so far. I've got a plethora of marketing books that I have indulged over the past few years that I will be breaking down. Not the book itself, but strategies on how to implement for your business and how it will work today for your business. Stuff that we call evergreen strategies.

Evergreen meaning that it works no matter how you use it, where you use it. It doesn't work just because it's a tactic. It doesn't work just because it's on LinkedIn or something like that. It works because it's, excuse me, it's so pure.

It's so, it can be reused so many times. It doesn't matter what channel it's on. So evergreen meaning like it can work on LinkedIn. It can work on Google search.

It can work on a podcast. It can work on a blog. It can work on email. It can work on a phone call.

It can work on anything. And that's typically the kind of stuff I teach is a lot of evergreen approaches. Things that can continuously still work. And this is, again, one of the main reasons why I wanna take the time to actually go over all this stuff.

In addition, sorry, I had to take a drink. I will be hosting some webinars in the near future. Do not know when. So please don't ask me, hey, when's your first marketing webinar?

I do have topics mapped out of what we'll be talking about and teaching for these webinars. And these webinars are designed to actually give you actionable items to help your business, to help your facility management company improve in certain gaps or areas, to start taking some tried and true tested strategies that work, okay? That I've seen or used in different industries, but also seen opportunities in this space, okay? So the webinars, I mean, we'll be doing those.

And then finally, I plan on releasing a course on, for companies, for FM companies, IFMs, that may have like, I don't know, a marketing coordinator or something like that, that is qualified, but doesn't have all the skillsets necessarily to implement all of the marketing strategies. And maybe this company may not have the ability of hiring like a CMO like myself to start kind of building out the strategy and then executing it. But this course would give them that game plan. So it's like a playbook on helping your business for marketing.

Everything from organic search to paid, to nurturing, to anything you can imagine, to generating leads, demand generation, lead generation, that sort of stuff. And so that's kind of the layout of how this podcast is gonna kind of look like. And I hope that you guys are in for a ride. My goal is to get as many episodes pre-recorded so that when we launch this podcast, you can start indulging in seven, eight, nine, 10 episodes before everything kind of goes.

And I'm doing this for one major reason is because what I believe is gonna happen is that someone's gonna listen to it and they're gonna want more. You have to wait a week or two weeks before I can load another batch of episodes. You're gonna probably be bummed and upset because just the things that we'll be going over. And so that's kind of it.

That's the podcast kind of format. I don't right now, don't plan on having any kind of guests in this podcast at the moment. Does that mean that we won't have guests in the future? Does not mean that.

However, if we do have guests in the future, they will be people that are either in the facility world that have done very well in marketing or people that have done very well in marketing that can add value to the facility world. Does that make sense? Because I mean, yes, I am a CMO. I work with my agency to help us get more business and more pipeline and more opportunities.

But I can also learn from a lot of others, a lot more people. That's why I read books all the time. I've got several marketing books that I'm always indulging in. I've got podcasts that I listen to quite a bit as well too on my phone.

I network quite a bit on LinkedIn and all that fun stuff. And so that's kind of what's gonna be happening is that for right now, the first, I would say probably two dozen or so episodes will probably just be myself. I won't have any guests at the moment. And then eventually we'll probably start putting guests on the podcast and just kind of start going from there.

And so what's gonna happen from here too is if I can have you guys do me a favor and actually like this podcast. So if you like this content, you're like, you're super excited about this. You're like, you're pumped and amped about this. Just do me a favor.

Just go in, drop a star in the podcast on Apple Podcast or Spotify or whatever podcast platform that you're using to listen to it. Give us a five-star rating, that'd be great. Give us a review if you wouldn't mind as well too. If you're finding value out of this podcast, give us a review.

It would really make my world, okay? If you have questions, just send me an email, okay? And you're like, well, where do I send the email? You can just find me on LinkedIn, okay?

I'm on LinkedIn, I'm very active on there. You can send me a DM on there if you want to as well too. But LinkedIn, my handle is, it's like LinkedIn.com slash in slash Javier Lozano Jr. So my full name, okay?

And you can always connect with me on LinkedIn. You can always follow my content on there as well too. I would really appreciate if you did because that would mean a lot to me. And then the last thing is that I'm part of some LinkedIn groups.

I'm thinking about actually creating a Facebook exclusive group for people that are interested in what I'm teaching. And so that's probably in the, that's down the road. It's a lot of work to do, just to manage the group and all that fun stuff. But for now, you can be expecting to be getting a lot of good value information here from this podcast.

So once again, thanks a lot for tuning in to our first episode of Facility Management Marketing Secrets. I'll talk to you guys later. All right, guys. Thanks for taking a listen to our Facility Management Marketing Podcast Secrets.

This is your host, Javier Lozano Jr. One other ask I've got for you guys is to subscribe to our email list. You can go to bouldermediasolutions.com slash email. And that way you can get updates on some marketing trends that I'm seeing, some strategies that I'm executing.

And more importantly, I'll be actually launching some webinars and training that's gonna help your company use marketing strategies to essentially grow your business. We'll be doing some training, offering some courses, that sort of stuff. So you can always unsubscribe to that email list. It's no big deal.

It's not gonna hurt my feelings. This is more for facility managers, I'm sorry, facility management companies that want to grow their business by using marketing. All right, guys. Thanks a lot.