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Transcript 

Rebecca:

Yeah. Welcome. Thank you everyone for taking an hour out of your day to join us. We are really excited to be here to bring you this great content about landscape lighting. So I'm joined here today by Patrick Laidlaw and Ron Callis, and I'm Rebecca Sternlicht. I'm the corporate marketing lead here at One Firefly, so I help oversee all of our education and other marketing activities. So just really thrilled to be here today to present some great content. We will be sending out a copy of this deck as well as the webinar recording to everyone who's here and everyone who has registered for this webinar. So look for that in your inboxes tomorrow morning. And as Ron mentioned, our chat is open. Our q and a is open. Please drop any comments, questions that you have along the way. If we don't get to your question in the webinar, I will be collecting everything, and we'll do a q and a session at the end. I think, Ron, if you wanna go to the next slide, and I will let, the two of you do some introductions.

Ron:

Yeah. Let's go ahead and get agenda real quick. We're gonna do introductions, and then we're gonna talk about the opportunity, with landscape lighting, with WAC and Aspire. Pro tips for dealers, Patrick's gonna place a lay some knowledge on us and experience from his, learnings over the years, and I'll obviously, all the many, many relationships across the country that he, knows very well. And then we're gonna talk about how to take these ideas. Maybe you're a veteran at landscape lighting. Maybe you're just getting into it. How do you make sure that your customers both your customers are aware of what's possible? And then those in your market that you're not currently working with, but you'd love to be working with, How do we make sure they know, to find you so that you so that you can help them with these cool solutions? We will, we promise, get to all of your questions and comments. Keep the comments clean, people. And but we'll get to all the questions. Rebecca is gonna help moderate at the end. And depending on the situation or the question, maybe we'll even field it live. I'll just say real quick, I'm Ron Callis, CEO and founder of One Firefly. Been in the space a long time, and very honored and excited to be here with the one and only Patrick Laidlaw. I'll let him introduce himself.

Patrick:

Thanks, Ron. I appreciate it. I'm excited to be here with you as well. Patrick Laidlaw, director of business development for integration for the Aspire and WAC product lines. Been in lighting most of my life. Never been as excited as I am now about lighting and what integrators bring to the table with controls, with automation, with, the the new awareness, it seems, on health and wellness, the benefits of lighting to humans. Even the general public started to pick up on some of this now. So I appreciate being here, and, anything I can do to share knowledge, share information with integrators from either my own career or from what I picked up from other integrators across country, that's my goal. So, hopefully, we'll, we'll we'll help some people today.

Ron:

I love it. Rebecca, we're gonna kick this off with a poll.

Rebecca:

Yes. We are. So let me launch this. Question here is how often are you including landscape lighting in your projects today?

Ron:

And, excited to get your, interpretation of these results, Patrick. And and I'm wondering how this audience and kind of their answers are gonna compare to maybe what you see out there in the field that's normal. At the moment, we've got almost forty percent participation. It's going up quickly. We do name names of those that don't participate, so we we do, publicly scorn the guilty. We've all been warned.

Patrick:

I hope I'm surprised, Ron. I'm I'm my my guess is, based on experience, maybe a lot of these people are not doing landscape lighting, but I hope that maybe a lot of them are and just here to get get some additional tips. It's a great opportunity for integrators that is often missed, unfortunately.

Ron:

Okay. Right now, we're sitting at almost around sixty percent participation. We'll give this maybe just one or two more moments. The definition of a moment, I'm keeping that loose. Before we close out this poll, going once, going twice, I'd say let's go ahead and call it there, Rebecca. Alright, Patrick. What do you what do you think about this?

Patrick:

So always fifteen percent regularly if, thirty occasionally, but half of you are occasionally, and ten percent, have never offered it. So that's surprising because there's a lot of integrators out there that are not offering landscape lighting at all. So the fact that forty six percent, if a client asks, are talking about it, I think that's that's actually pretty good. But, also, don't don't forget if a client doesn't know about something, they may not ask you. So we've gotta make sure they understand that you do that. You you're a specialist or have have the opportunity to be a specialist in that category. And and I know that there's a lot of integrators that are missing the opportunity because customers don't think of them for that. You know? Remember, what nine, ten years ago, they didn't think of integrators for shading. And four or five years ago, they didn't think of integrators for lighting. And lighting is part of the outside too. It it all ties into the whole system. So we've gotta make sure they're aware that that we do that.

Ron:

Alright. Love it. Alright. Patrick, I'm gonna go ahead and I'll be your clicker, and I'll move you through the content here, but the show floor is yours, sir.

Patrick:

Great. Great. Let's talk about the opportunity for dealers. Some of this goes back to when we first started in integration, what we learned, and some of this is gonna be very, very current. So low voltage and easy to install, it's really important. And after a dealer's done their first landscape job, I can't tell you how many times we hear, oh, that was easy. It was just like outdoor audio. It's exactly the same as outdoor audio. You have a transformer, you add up the wattage or what we call the VA, the volt amps of all the fixtures. You size the transformer accordingly. You're running low voltage cable out to the fixtures. And if you're already there, here's the here's the thing that's kind of odd. Integrators are doing outdoor audio installs almost weekly, but they're not doing landscape lighting. And you can put the same wire in the same trenches. And even if you only do a few lights around the patio or the out wherever you're placing your speakers, it's an additional add on sale, and you're saving the client a trip back because you're already there slitting the sod and tucking that wire in. So it's a super easy opportunity for integrators because it's all low voltage. The transformers are outdoor rated. They're stainless steel. They can go in a garage. They can go by the pool equipment. They have a six foot cord and plug. They just plug in. So it's super easy for for integrators to deploy. Also, one of the things we heard very early on was, I don't wanna compete with the builder. I don't wanna compete with the electrician. When we talk about indoor lighting, integrators had a little bit of hesitancy. Well, outdoors, builders are not doing landscape lighting, and most electricians wanna get finish the job on the inside, and they're off to the next job. So it's a super easy opportunity for you to to start talking about without competing in those other relationships. Right now, it's defaulted to sometimes the sprinkler guys because they're already putting tubing in the ground. Well, if we go on that premise, integrator should be doing landscape lighting is already putting wiring in the ground for speakers. So and and most sprinkler guys don't know anything about lighting either. So you at least have the power of AV integration landscape lighting companies behind you that will do the layouts for you and help you with the design. And then it's an additional revenue stream. So one of the things we talk about, you'll see this in another slide coming up, is positioning yourself early. The opportunity to drop hints to the homeowners. A homeowner shows up to their dream home, and it's a war zone. There's debris everywhere, mud everywhere, tractor tracks, pieces of lumber, and this is their dream home. There's certainly, after picking out a a builder, an architect, the floor plan, all the wall coverings, the floor coverings, the paint, so many choices, they're not ready to talk about the outside. So you have an opportunity to position yourself early on by saying, hey. I'm gonna run some PVC sleeves under the driveway before they pour concrete under the walkways, under the patios. I'm gonna be your best friend and your ally. I'm gonna tell the electrician to put an outlet down by the mailbox four hundred feet out by the dock. So when we're ready and I know you're not there yet, but when we're ready to talk about the outside, we don't have to tear up your yard again. And they picture this beautiful green grass and flowers and then this war zone outside, and we're really doing them quite a favor. But then when the sprinkler guy says, hey. Can I talk to about landscape lighting? No. I've already got my trusted adviser, my trusted technology person who's already positioned for that, you know, and has that prepared. So when we talk about what's the benefit to homeowners with landscape lighting, there's lots. We're not just adding we're not just doing an add on sale for the integrator. I mean, we have to believe in the value that we're bringing to our clients. And the security is the number one thing that landscape one of the number one things landscape lighting can do. If you call any police department in the country, they'll tell you that lighting is the number one security system you can have. It it deters more crime, and integrators install state of the art security systems. But when somebody kicks a door in or a window in, that that person could already be in the home before that security system goes off. So landscape lighting lighting itself deters crime. So if you look at this picture, and I can't take credit for these pictures, there's a Facebook group called Landscape Lighting. It's a Facebook group by Magna Coletti. It's free to join. She's a lighting designer, and and people post pictures on there. They talk about chats, challenges. They put this somebody posted this picture that was before and after. That is eight landscape lights in the bottom, and the caption is what eight landscape lights could do. Now I don't know about you, Ron, but I know which home I would rather have my wife coming home to or my daughter or son or even myself late at night after a game. If I was of the criminal element, which home am I gonna go to? The one nobody can see me on. And so

Ron:

I have a quick question, Patrick.

Patrick:

Yeah.

Ron:

I'm curious. You know, let's take the audience that's that's tuned in. Sure. Let's say our live audience here just as a random, accounting of of businesses around the country. What how often are they in the home doing work and no lighting is done in the landscape? Either architectural, like lighting the facade or, you know, lighting the overall landscape. Is it is it that someone else is gonna do it if they don't raise their hand, or is that it's often simply not addressed?

Patrick:

In my opinion, it's both. I think that, you know, the the comments I've gotten gotten from some big integrators who don't do landscape lighting is we leave that to the outside people. And I scratch my head, think, you know, with current technology, it's all tied into the home control system too. And why would you leave it to the who is the outside people? Is that the sprinkler guys or is that the landscapers? There are some big hardscape companies that have landscape architects who may specify lighting, but a majority of them don't. So to just make an assumption that somebody else is gonna do it or the homeowner may have, you know, getting the sprinkler guys come, and I've seen invoices from sprinkler people when they winterize some friends' houses, and it says at the bottom we do landscape lighting, and there'll be five hot spots on a house, and you don't even see any landscape. So, yes, maybe it's providing some light on the house, maybe a little bit of security, but certainly not lighting the beauty of what landscape could be. And that Facebook group, again, is called landscape lighting. So if you go to your Facebook, you go in the magnification, it's and Magda, a m a g d a, I believe her name is, Colletti, is the actual administrator on that group. So check it out. It's free, and it's great to to have. So along with safety and security, we talk about safe passage. So we live in a litigious society. It it doesn't matter what happens. I tell the story all the time when we talk about landscape lighting and trainings. My brother went in my pole barn because, again, I live rural in Michigan. He went in my pole barn. He climbed up on a ladder, put something on a shelf, and jostled this big metal piece of art that had been there for years. And when he climbed down the ladder, it had rolled off the shelf and actually hit him in the back of the head, tripped to the emergency room. Long story short, his insurance company sued my insurance company. So it doesn't make any difference who it is. If it's a friend, a family member, whatever, there's there could be litigation involved. So we have to take every precaution we can for safe passage. Also, as people age, they start losing their depth perception. So any changes in elevation, slopes, steps, people do a lot of sunken pathways. They put the stones in the grass. The grass grows up in between. So if you're not doing a faux sod, you know, that grass is gonna grow up in between and it's a trip hazard. And we can guide people with light. So if your house is on a hill, maybe your yard goes down to the lake and you've got a dock out there, you come in after hours, you've been watching the fourth of July fireworks with friends, they've gotta make their way back up to that house. And if we have an illuminated path, they'll follow that safe path. If not, they're fumbling through the darkness across your yard. They can roll an ankle on some landscaping or a walk through the fire pit. You know? Who knows what they could run into? So people will naturally follow light. So safe passage is is a great way to guide guests and and take people around. And then usability. Usability is amazing because we spend the average cost on a high end home will be five to ten percent of the cost of the project for good hardscape and landscaping. So a ten million dollar home might have half a million to a million dollars in hardscape and landscape, and they pick out all these beautiful things, spend all this time, like, on the inside of the home, and then it's dark outside. You don't see any of it at night. It doesn't make any sense. And so water features and statues, particular trees, all are incredibly beautiful at night. But you can also go in your backyard for like the picture shown here, this backyard, you can sit out there with friends and play cards. The kids can run around. You could just sit and relax without glare bombs, these traditional two spotlights coming off the back of the house where you only have glaring light for anybody facing it, and you're sitting in your shadow and can't do anything, if you're facing away from it. So, it's a much better way to enjoy everything you've worked for and just have some unwind time at home and at night.

Ron:

I I'm sure you'll touch on this, Patrick, but I'm just curious. If people have a project, this is their house, their client's house, and they they're your your dealer. You know, they they buy and and install your your your gear. Do you help them design this or recommend layouts that they could recommend to a consumer? And Yes. How does that work?

Patrick:

Yes. We've got a a complete design service. It's absolutely free. We have an intake form that we ask you to fill out to give us some guidance on if they're looking for a static white product or maybe tunable white with color. And then do you want us to only light what they specify, make suggestions, or light it all? And that kind of gives us an idea of what to spend our time on. We like to know where the location of the power is because everything starts from there, but we'll lay out wire runs. We'll do all the calculations, the wattage calculations, and everything. So, really, you have a couple of options. You can go out there and stick different color flags in where accents and paths go so your your team can come and do a quick install. Or if you partner with a landscaper, we'll talk about that in a minute, you can have them come out and install. So it's it's really quite easy, but we we do all that layout for you. And we're also introducing at Ladapalooza next week, a configurator that we've developed where integrators, if they feel comfortable enough, can go on and do their own landscape layouts with this configurator, and it puts the power back in their hands if they wanna be able to control the whole process. So beauty is another advantage to landscape lighting, Ron, for the clients. Again, people spend a lot of money on fieldstone, leadstone, any craftsmanship, workmanship, and we can light that from the outside and enjoy it even in the evenings. So focal points, again, we talk about architectural features. Think about roof lines. There's some crazy roof lines on houses out there because of the way people love their home to look. And at night you drive by and they put recessed in the soffits and it's half a house. The whole top half of the house is gone and you'll see a whole bunch of half houses in high end neighborhoods. And so we have gutter mounts that we make and you can put mini accents on those gutters and light up peaks and roof lines, cupolas. We also put them underneath to light up peaks to fill out the rest of the home in that picture. And we can keep a very tight beam spread so it doesn't go into windows. So it just completes a picture of the architect architecture. And in this picture, you're looking at the left side where you wall wash. You actually put a floodlight against the wall, and you see how flat that surface looks. And on the right, we're doing a technique called grazing where we actually the the light is actually put up tight against the workmanship, anything, the craftsmanship, and all of the stone in the dimension comes out and create some really interesting and beautiful pieces of art out of the materials that's used in the the home, the building of the home. So you can get that resort like feel as it lists there. Now one of the the interior benefits to landscape lighting is extending the living area. And when we say it extends the living area, people really have no idea what we mean. And I wanna tell a quick story, and then I'll, you know, refer to these pictures. But there was a job we did in South Bend, Indiana, and it was about a hundred and twenty five fixtures. An integrator did the job. It was a double lot. It wasn't an affluent area, but a double lot. And in the second lot, they had big oaks and a little water feature and a fire pit sitting area. The neighbors came over about a week or two after the project was done and talked to the homeowners and said, you know, we never sat in our front room. And now every night, my husband and I get a glass of wine. We go sit in that room. We look across at the wonderland. You know, the neighbors even enjoyed the beauty. So when we talk about extending the living area, this is a before shot. On your left hand side, if you're looking at your screen like I am your left hand side is a before shot. This was done in Washington by an integrator, and that you can see in those glass panes the interior of the home. You see some steps going up in that middle panel. The left panel, that bright light spot is a shoulder of the person taking the picture. It's called the black mirror effect. And if you don't have any light outside, you have a black coating on the back of glass creates a mirror, and that's what the darkness does. And then you have that same room on the right hand side. Think about how comfortable you'd be sitting in there if the wind was blowing. You have an organic movie, you know, the trees and limbs blowing around. You can enjoy looking outside. You feel safe because nobody's lurking out there. You can see that it's perfectly safe, but what a beautiful picture in what landscape lighting does to extend the living area. So it's, again, a lot of peripheral benefits. And then with landscape lighting, we can talk about color. We always talk about tunable white first. So in standard landscape lighting, there's specific color temperatures you choose, but that may not always be the right color temperature. Just like inside the home, we have products that have tunable white, and then you have color on board as well. So it's I call it free color. And a lot of times when we're talking to homeowners about color, we lead with tunable white because in Michigan, in the northern part of the country, we have evergreens. And you can make an evergreen look amazing and alive with cooler light on it. But a Japanese maple is reds and has a lot of reds and oranges, and so we put a warmer color temperature. A log home will use a warmer color temperature. A colonial or contemporary home that's white, we don't wanna throw a warm color temperature on there to look dirty and dingy. So tunable white gives us the ability to create scenes on the day to day. And then the color that's included in that, well, a lot of times the the homeowner, the missus, you know, at least my wife would would say, no way. You're not turning my house into a man cave. And because they're picturing Ferrari red, cobalt blue, teen colors, you know, they just picture this this Vegas style scene. And what we can create is backyards like this that could be really warm and inviting like the red on the right, or there's customers that love periwinkle or a soft spa like feeling they can create in the backyard to go out and relax in. So it doesn't have to be these bold statement colors. It can really be relaxing, and a lot of our product their color scaping product will do that. So what's the reason that they would want to buy landscape lighting besides all the wonderful things we just shared with you that you're providing for them and giving to them? Value is one of the biggest. Know, lighting not only brings a property to life, like look at that home, imagine if it was not lit up and that landscape was not lit up to create those tiers and show that depth in that scene. But the National Association of Realtors did a poll or did a survey after COVID, and they came up with a list of the top eleven things you can do to add value to your home. Number one was a pool. And before COVID, people were filling in pools. They were a liability. But after COVID, people wanna spend time outside. They they're at their home more, and they wanna enjoy that space more. They realize the value and the respite that a home can be. So number one is a pool. Number two is landscape lighting, and number three was a new deck. So once people have had landscape lighting, they will look for it in future homes. They don't wanna be without it. It's it's kind of like a a, you know, a gateway drug. You can't watch a movie and only eat one kernel of popcorn. You just keep going back for more, and landscape lighting is like that. So even if you start with a small area with your client, that will continue to grow out around their entire property. They're not gonna like the dark areas when they've had some beautifully illuminated areas. So some pro tips that we've learned some of these hey. I won't take credit for all these. Some of these are integrators sharing stories with me, but position yourself early in the client's mind like we talked about PVC sleeves, talk to the electrician while putting outlets down by the mailbox. You're you're doing your client a favor while the home's already tore up, and you're reducing costs later. It's a lot easier to run a trencher through a bunch of mud than it is through a nice yard and have to repair all that. Partner with a medium small to medium sized landscaper in your area for labor, someone who's not doing landscape lighting. And this was this came from an an integrator. He partners with a landscaper, and he said, what we do is we go out, we lay out the whole job on top of the ground. All the wires run across the ground and strung everywhere. We get everything set up, meet the client in the evening, do final adjustments, and when they sign off, I call my landscaper buddy. He sends out a crew of four people for six hundred bucks, and they bury all the cable, blow off the sidewalks, and it's like we were never never there. So business partners can be good. They get access to affluent clients and high end clients, and you get access to labor that's reasonable while your techs go on to the next project. There's some other things that go along with that, you know, when we talk about we will talk about recurring revenue, I think, in just a second. But also, if you want to be successful landscape letting, get your crew to buy in. We've got a couple of cases. You don't have to use our demo cases. Just order a few things, but we've got a couple of demo cases you can set up at a client's home in less than thirty minutes. We recommend do your house, the owner of the the the integration firm's house, or pick an employee, go to their house on a Friday night and lay it out on top of the ground. We have quick connects and quick fold down stakes that go in the ground. When they see how easy it is and it's just like outdoor audio and they see the difference it makes, they now talk with conviction. And give them homework assignments. Hey. We're gonna meet here. And you can do this with interior lighting, by the way, too. We're gonna have a meeting once a month. I want you to bring three pictures of great lighting and three pictures of bad lighting and watch how their level of awareness gets raised. And you also get examples from around your area. So when you talk to a client, can say, hey. You know down on McKinney Street? If you go down there about a half mile on the right, look at that house. Look at how those lights shine right in your eyes or how you can't see those beautiful outdoor lanterns because they've got them on full brightness and people are gonna trip and fall. But if we you know, the house right next door has all this beautiful so you you pick up tips like that you could talk to your clients about that are local, but you get your team bought in, which is the number one thing you can do.

Ron:

Alright. Love it. Awesome.

Patrick:

Yeah.

Ron:

Pat, you wanna talk to the everyone about the portal?

Patrick:

Yeah. I think Rebecca was gonna jump in here, but I I can as well. We do have a a a brand portal for marketing. You can certainly get images there. Rebecca, do you wanna jump in? Know you were gonna talk about this for Rachel.

Rebecca:

Yes. I know. Message from your marketing teams from WAC and one firefly. WAC Group has a fantastic brand portal. It has a ton of great imagery, logo assets that you are free to use across your own website. In fact, many of the images that you saw during Patrick's presentation are available in this brand portal and are available for you to use. So I've included a QR code here that will take you directly to the login page, and you can follow those steps to get logged in and look through all the assets. This has way more than just outdoor lighting imagery as well. It has all of WAC's product lines for I Spire. And just a final reminder from, Rachel over at WAC as well. This portal does not include any pricing information. This is purely a marketing and imagery and literature and logo assets for you to use to help sell these products.

Ron:

Awesome. Great job, Rebecca, and awesome educational job, Patrick.

Patrick:

I'm gonna I have one quick thing before you

Ron:

get the

Patrick:

quote from her. I apologize. One one tip I missed when we were going through there is the recurring revenue opportunity. It's not like monthly revenue for tech services, but it's an opportunity to get back in front of your clients twice a year. I highly recommend either you or if you partner with a landscaper and prefer they do it, offer a recurring revenue option. So if it's a medium small to medium size, maybe it's six ninety five, seven ninety five a year. If it's a larger scale property, maybe it's fourteen ninety five or nineteen ninety five a year. But for that nineteen ninety five, two, you know, two thousand bucks, you go out every spring, every fall. Your guys clean the lenses off the up lights, clean leaves and debris off any in grounds, straighten out the path lights, the pets and snow and kids have knocked out of a line. But the real thing and make sure the system's working. Our product, you could adjust beams so as foliage grows. You can also if it's tunable white, you can adjust any scenes for them. But also mention, oh, by the way, have you thought about an outdoor TV? Or we've got outdoor screens to enjoy that. Every time that I've had someone back in front of me at my home for any kind of work, I've got a laundry list of other additional things I can add on. So it gets you back in front of those clients, twice a year.

Ron:

It's brilliant, Patrick. I'll even think about my own home. I I built this home. I moved in in two thousand nineteen, and I I put in a a pool in twenty twenty and a a a landscape and a landscape lighting installation. And, admittedly, it is an ill repair. There are broken fixtures from the landscape company. There are bushes and trees that have overgrown over the last, at this point, almost five years. I'm in Florida, so when it rains, things grow like crazy. And, if the installing company had approached me about a annual maintenance or biannual maintenance to come in and refine everything, I would have jumped at that opportunity. As a result, that that company did not do that, and my and I haven't had the time or made the time to go fix it myself because I always have other things on my honey honey do list. And, and the result is things aren't as beautiful as they were on that that first day. So it's really great point.

Patrick:

Yep. Absolutely.

Ron:

Alright. I'm gonna I'm gonna jump in. So Patrick was, giving us a lot of the the reasons that you should get into the outdoor lighting business or you might be further inspired. Maybe you're already in the business and you're going, oh my goodness, but I'm not sure all my customers really know all these benefits. And so I I want you to just be mindful, if nothing else run through the thought ex the the the thought process of what, what are the ways that you want your business to be perceived by your existing customers and those potential customers regarding outdoor landscape lighting, architectural lighting? And are is it possible or conceivable that you could be more proactive getting that message out there? Patrick's just taken us through thirty minutes of really fun topics that you could likely talk with many of your existing clients or new prospects about. And so we're now we're now gonna run through in very rapid fire. We're gonna run through twenty slides here of just framing from a marketing perspective how you could put this message out there to help further drive business. And, Patrick, please jump in on any of these slides, any of these ideas to add your two cents or your, experience as you've been out working with integrators across the country. But I'm gonna I'm gonna just kinda rapid fire through these things. I want you all to remember that if your customer is building a home or or, you know, whether it's residential or commercial for the framing here, I'll I'll speak residential, Or they're they're doing a remodel or maybe whether that's remodel interior or maybe they're remodeling their exterior. That's that was my big project back in twenty twenty. They are at varying points of knowing what's possible. And then when they know what's possible, narrowing down to the types of solutions. And then when they when they gain some clarity there, narrowing down to which company would they use to do the installation. Right? This is often, called the buyer's journey. I want you to think about the fact that there are types of questions and answers that you could provide as those customers or prospects are at all of these stages of the journey. And, you know, dirty little secret that's called marketing. Right? So for you to know that and then provide those answers, that's ultimately gonna help you drive business. Now we have to, first of all, talk about the audience. These are always the the four beats. We call it the the marketing strategy framework. If you wanna think about who is that audience. Again, maybe that's existing clients, maybe it's new. What is the topic? Now Patrick just gave us thirty minutes of topics. All fun, relevant, interesting topics that would appeal to certain, market segments at different times. And the key is putting those messages out there because some of those audiences, some of the time, are gonna find them appealing, and they're ultimately gonna wanna make contact. The action. If you've educated them about the beauty of architectural lighting, for example, or, you know, lighting the home or, you know, that that really fun, compelling, narrative Patrick was giving us about lighting your home, for example, then what is the action that you would want someone to take? Would you want them to visit your website, and maybe read a a thought leadership article about that? Would you want them to schedule a meeting with a a design consultant from your firm? Would you want them to maybe jump over to your website and look at the the WAC, Aspire landscape lighting fixture page where you've got beautiful examples of finished projects and the type of technologies used for those installations. Lots of different fun ways to bring people, to take an action that you care about. And then the key is channel. Channel is like, where are you gonna be doing that communicating? And so when we go to audience, you have your existing customers. It'd be fun for you to look at the existing customers you've already served, maybe over the last five years, and how many of them already have everything they need regarding landscape lighting. The same question could be argued for new prospects. If you want to target a new type of customer or bringing new people in to your business, what are the types of customers that you would wanna bring in? You wanna have crystal clarity of these audiences, and then you wanna look at what story are you gonna tell. What's the topic that you're gonna bring up? So are you gonna talk about the benefits of controlling the outdoor lighting maybe with the, lighting control system that's also tied to controlling the interior? May maybe, why professionally designed lighting as long term value, that value argument that Patrick was making about adding lighting to a home and how it can increase property value, how it adds to safety and security. These are these these topics can be built into what are called narratives, and that narrative then can be communicated out, via the different channels. And then what are the actions? So here, schedule a lighting walk through, visit our website, request a a design consultation, watch this video. Right? Maybe you're producing video, putting it on YouTube or on your website or on social media. Read our blog article. Follow us on social media so that you can see beautiful pictures of our projects as we are posting them every week. Right? These are the channels. So when we're talking about activating channels, you you are unlikely to be excellent at all channels all the time. So what you wanna do is you wanna be selective. You wanna be very mindful of the audience that you're trying to get in front of. And then within your willingness to invest or the time availability you have to invest, you wanna be selective in picking a handful of channels, generally more than one channel, but maybe it's only one to start. And you wanna be as excellent as you can at that one channel communicating. So I'll give you a low hanging fruit. We'll get into tactics in detail in a moment. But let's say your existing customer base, you wanna make them aware that you're in the outdoor landscape lighting business and you have all these fun capabilities. Well, then doing email outreach to your customer base is a proven, highly effective way to get in front of your existing customers. Yes. I say that even though many of you and myself and Patrick get overwhelmed with our inbox and lots of emails. The reality is you're gonna unsubscribe from people that you don't know, like, or trust, and you're gonna likely allow for people to keep sending you emails if you do know, like, and trust them. Even if you don't read every email, you're probably gonna save it. And we have a lot of data here at one Firefly to back that up. They're not likely to unsubscribe from you. So there's lots of channels that you could be active on. You ultimately just wanna be selective in terms of where you're gonna put your message out. That's gonna help you get the best return on investment for your your efforts. So if we focus on those existing clients, I'm now gonna rapid fire through some tactics that you should be mindful of. And number one is your website. Does your website today communicate through messaging, imagery, video, content, education, example projects that you're in the outdoor landscape lighting business? If the answer is no, that's good. It means there's room to improve. So I would take a look at your website and getting that content up on your website. In terms of, producing educational content, we at One Firefly are big advocates of, a couple of strategies. I'll go back to the web strategy. Actually, putting commonly, asked questions and answers in the form of an FAQ on your website. That's great for the visitor on your website. It's also great for the search engines. So that's just generally really good content to to do or to put on the site. And then in terms of outreach to your customers, posting content into a blog, not necessarily for search engine performance, but so that it exists and is easily sortable and findable. And then linking to those articles through your emails and your social media post, you're ultimately gonna be able to basically create a repository or a depth or well of information about this particular subject, outdoor landscape lighting, but it really could be fill in the blank. Any solution, service, or brand that you care about should live in that type of vehicle. And then social media, in terms of, social media, there's really two primary types of formats in, social media. I'll keep it high level here. One is organic posting. You can organic post on pages, in reels, in stories. I don't wanna get too technical here, but it's important to note that the social media platform is gonna drive the visibility of those posts with different algorithms. They're gonna give you access to different types of cohorts from people that either follow you on social media to maybe discovery type audiences, particularly if you get engagement, likes, clicks, comments on your post, then you're gonna see that content get exposed to a wider and wider audience, which can be quite positive. Here's an example, client, YPliance, out of, Seattle, and they're they're driving a WAC outdoor landscape lighting message.

Patrick:

Remember picture of the, black mirror effect? That was a YPliance job that we showed earlier with the into the living room, and then that that was a YPLAYANCE job. They shared those pictures with us and just didn't know why since you mentioned them. There's there's some others that are really good on social media, Capital Technology Group, Soundvision. They're they're all over with some of the landscape jobs they've done, and it's just exploded for them to your point.

Ron:

Now one of the thank you, Patrick. That was that was great. One of the limits to social media organic is that getting your content out to a wider reach, it it's it's hard, and you actually probably have less people seeing that content than you think unless you can really get that or that engagement going and that distribution of your content out through the engagement sharing. Paid social, paying meta is the way to ultimately design target audiences and get your content out to a much wider audience. You'll see that, presented to you as impressions. You have the ability for your content to appear in people's feeds, and paid social media is the proactive way. I'm not gonna go down and say this is lead gen. We haven't seen a great deal of experience with that at OneFirefly for lead gen. I'm not saying it doesn't exist. It's just not the primary purpose, but it's a very powerful way to drive branding and visibility for your business at a very low cost, a very low cost per click. You can drive significant volumes of traffic into your website, for nominal spends, at least if we compare that to, like, Google So it's it's more of a top of funnel strategy than a bottom funnel strategy, but it it absolutely has, value in it, what we would call an integrated marketing system. And then email. I started with email even before we went to the slide. We are big advocates, and and generally any agency, any marketer, any business that is really trying to drive the visibility of a local service business to stay in front of their existing customers and relationships, email marketing is a powerhouse strategy. It's a a a low cost, high impact way for you to do that subliminal plant of your brand and message in front of your audience. Why should you care about this? Because your customers are the ones most likely to buy from you again. They are the easiest next dollar for you. Right? It costs a lot less money for you to sell to your existing customer than to find a new customer. And it is, ultimately, a very powerful underutilized strategy by many, many people in our industry. And so high we're we're big fans, big advocates of email marketing. And then if you want higher levels of performance, you will further segment your list down. So segmenting means designing smaller and smaller cohorts or lists that are more and more targeted. Maybe they live in this particular city or town or neighborhood, or maybe they, maybe they're cuss customers and then prospects. Maybe it's design community members and customers. Right? The more segmented you can design your email, then the more targeted your messaging and the more productive the higher conversion rates you'll see on that that form of marketing. And then if you look at the new audience, meaning I want to bring in new customers to my business. And for many of you, this is a high priority right now. Like, you really wanna bring in new business. Well, then let's look at some of those strategies. One of the best return on investments in marketing for small business is in this term called search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is the concept that your website and your brand it's more than just your website because there's also your local SEO, which is other entities around the Internet beyond your website. But it's that your business is showing up when people are online doing search and research. So I'll just keep it at a high level. You go and do a lot of really good SEO, not the fake SEO, but real original content creation presenting true value on the Internet, then even when you stop doing that, that is a flywheel, a momentum, a flywheel that has mass, and it keeps spinning for quarters or, in many cases, years beyond the initial investment. Meaning, it's driving the visibility of your business and ultimately delivering fruit. Meaning, people find you. They, they they conduct that search. They find you. They make contact. And so the the tail, the dividend to your business from an SEO investment can last years. And for many, many businesses in our industry, it absolutely last years because there aren't many businesses doing it. What has happened now is the game is different. It's and it's different in a very interesting way. And that more and more people in society, maybe many of you so, Patrick, I'm actually gonna look at you and ask you this question. I'll put you on the spot. Yeah. Do you use ChatGPT or Perplexity or Claude or any of these search engine or these LLMs?

Patrick:

With ChatGPT a little bit, I'm not as versed as I should be, Ron. I will tell you that a hundred percent.

Ron:

That that's okay. I'm I'm not gonna make you teach a class on on ChatGPT, but you do use it. You'll use it on occasion.

Patrick:

And I'll give you an example when you talk about websites and how it pertains to this. I live in a very rural area. Tree guys are a dime a dozen, and you never know who's going to show up or what kind of job they're going to do, and I'll search, I'll find a website, and I'll judge a business based on how their website appears to me, versus some guy who's got a card posted in the local bar restaurant and no website whatsoever. But, yes, I do.

Ron:

So the data around this, to keep this high level folks, is that the work that you do in forms of quality SEO work, meaning building quality backlinks, working on your local SEO and directory listings, adding original valuable content to your website, those type of activities are not only driving the visibility of your business in traditional search, think Google, they're absolutely impacting the visibility of your business in all of the AI LLMs. There's dramatic, superlative, exciting data coming out. I'll just give you a couple I'm gonna throw a couple of facts at you guys. Number one is Google search traffic right now is decreasing for the first time in history. Single digit, small, but it is decreasing. AI search is growing triple digits every quarter, and there's now statements coming out from some of the people that are reading the tea leaves that are talking about potentially search traffic volume from the LLMs surpassing Google by twenty twenty eight. And so if if that becomes true, partially true, or fully true, I recommend everyone go into your ChatGPT account, type in a query that represents a customer in their buying journey looking for a service provider in your market for landscape lighting, and do you show up in that on that page one of results or do your competitors? You can run the same query in Google, and depending on what you find, you might wanna put in place a strategy to start impacting your visibility. Highly recommend. Alright. Keep on moving. So Google Ads are still a very powerful way to show up right at the top and the bottom of page one of search. You go back to this diagram if you wanna fully control the experience when a consumers knows they wanna do landscape lighting. They know they wanna light their home, but they don't know either what products to use or they don't know what contractor or firm to hire. They're out there in the world doing search. If you wanna control the narrative, then you wanna be found in all three places. And so that's the concept around Google Ads. Are Google Ads expensive? Yes. They are expensive. But if they are designed and optimized, they should be delivering what's called a return on ad spend. Meaning, should be netting you more business than they are costing you. And that's the key to either an effective campaign, an agency that's managing it, and the the idea that in your market, there are in fact people searching. And so you wanna you wanna look at that as a strategy to drive this. And I think that was the last topic. So here, one Firefly and and Patrick, and I say Patrick's team. Patrick, WAC Aspires more than Patrick. He's got a wonderful team. Partnered. We partnered, last year officially. Press releases and whatnot, it launched these webinars. And, we are we, one Firefly, are providing all WAC Aspire dealers that are accredited at the silver, gold, platinum level and new dealers marketing credit that can be applied to any products or services at OneFirefly. Patrick, do wanna just speak to to why you felt it appropriate to to form this collaboration?

Patrick:

Yeah. There's there's a lot of different reasons, but just to keep it short, Ron, you know, we've seen a lot of times mistakes that are made as people go into a product category, and I shared a story with you earlier, and they won't tell anybody or they don't know how to get the message out. I have an integrator who was in lighting for several years, but if you went to his website, it didn't talk about lighting anywhere. And so getting that message out is so imperative to our success, your success, because we're we're obviously tied to the dealers, and and if they are successful, we are. So one of the biggest mistakes is that people don't know it's a service you offer, and if they don't think of you for that, they're not going to get that. To be able to represent the product in the best possible way, and again, as you said, questions ahead of time. What's the difference between a Home Depot landscape system and what you offer? You can talk about the quality of the systems, programmability, setting scenes. You don't have to do Christmas lights anymore. The system can go red and green on December one and on December thirty one back to the standard white scene throughout. So there's a lot of different advantages, but but this addresses helps the dealer address that because I know that if I own my own integration business, I wouldn't even know where to start when it comes to this this style of, advertising and representation.

Ron:

I I appreciate that. I wanna remind all of you, and, Patrick has a position on this as well that, we can learn from each other. It's why we do these webinars. It's why Patrick and I teach and train all over the country at different events. It is why, we, when Firefly created the podcast Automation Unplugged way back in April of two thousand seventeen, and we've been putting out, at least for the last couple of years, a show every week. So, you can watch it on YouTube. You can watch, read, and watch it on our web page. You can listen. So if you're a listener, maybe as you're you're rolling to your next job site or between job sites and you like to listen, we are I am interviewing, leaders from around the industry. I've interviewed Patrick. Here, you're seeing Tom, the the man behind putting on the Lightapalooza show. Tom is with, former founder of CDIA, but he's with HTSA. There's integrators, consultants, thought leaders at varying levels of experience in our industry that are on this podcast. It's out there to it's just sharing with you all to help you learn and grow from each other. So I recommend if you haven't, tune in to automation unplugged. And, and there you have it. I think what we're gonna do is bring Rebecca back, and she's gonna help us field questions. I'm looking I think we still have maybe eight minutes, of time.

Patrick:

Yeah. Ron, can I share a couple parting thoughts, or are those working shots? Yeah. So a couple of things. When you guys the the other integrators are using successfully, when you do a landscape lighting job and you're out there doing that final adjustment, maybe with the homeowner or or you're done, go knock on the door, the neighbor's doors, and give them a card and say, hey. I'm Rebecca with one Firefly Landscape Lighting, and I'm adjusting your neighbor's lights. And if any of them shine in your yard or shine in your bedroom, if there's any issues, here's my card. Give me a call, aka when you're ready to do your house. You know? If you're five blocks away, I think it's called soliciting. But if you're at the immediate neighbors talking about any, so you could spread the word that way, whether you have a sign in the yard while you're doing it. It's amazing how that starts to grow once you've done one home in a community. So it's a great opportunity, to to consider. And and, again, it's a whole another business for you guys. You just just be sure you tell people you do it. You gotta get the message out there or they don't they won't think of you for that. Sorry, Rebecca, please. No. It's brilliant.

Rebecca:

No. Great. Great insights. And yeah. As the we have a couple minutes for questions. So please, if you have any, feel free to drop them directly into the chat or the q and a. And as a reminder too, you can see both of these fine gentlemen next week in person, live and in person at Litapalooza. One firefight will be exhibiting on the show for Oswald, WACI Spire. So if you think of anything after this webinar, feel free to stop by and ask in person. Yeah. We can have

Patrick:

By the way, I thank you for posting that Facebook site. I have no vested interest in that other than it's a great collaborative of people. It's a non nobody's making any money off it, but to share ideas and and really get the pictures. Use pictures to your advantage. Pictures are worth a thousand words as you saw some of the images we've we've shown. We've got a collection of images. They're not all on the brand portal, but you can reach out to myself or any of the WAC regional managers or reps. We can get you some pictures, and you could utilize those however you'd like to.

Rebecca:

Yeah. Thank you. And let me see someone I see someone in the chat asking for the link to the brand portal. Okay. So Adam already dropped it. Thank you, sir. Alright. We did have a couple questions come in. Patrick, I'm gonna toss this one to you. Someone was just asking about the design element, how to handle design if they're new in this this space. Do they need to have a full time designer on staff in order to do this well?

Patrick:

Yes. And you the answer is no. You don't have to. As long as you can speak to it, and that can be a couple of items you try in your yard, get your confidence, or go out and look dry take them drive around at night and look at some jobs and see the difference it makes so you could speak confidently to your clients. We'll do all the design work. So blueprints are great if you have an exterior plan. If you have an address, we can use Google Earth as long as there's not a big full tree canopy where we can't see the yard. Pictures are wonderful and not pictures real close to, you know, of the one bush, but a picture of the front of the house and here's where power is. And then we can even using Google Earth, we can get some estimates of wire runs and we'll do all that design work for you. So that's not a problem at all. Again, we have an intake form that we ask you to fill out. But as you get comfortable, landscape lighting is artistry. There's there's no, like, one right way and one wrong way to do it. It's all about imagining a scene, a home, and putting a black screen over it, and then you're painting with light. I wanna light this tree. I wanna have some path lights that fill in this picture. I want some lights on the garage, and we're creating an entire scene. And a lot of times, even in a design, the customer will say, there's still a a dark spot right there. I wanna put something there. And so we size transformers to be able to add on to the system. It just continues to grow. So we will help with that. There are other integration companies or companies in the CI channel that do landscape lighting. They offer design as well. You're not out there on your own as far as hiring someone who could just do that. A lot of integrators are moving towards someone who specializes in lighting and getting lighting education, but you have people to lean on for that. We'll we'll help you with that.

Rebecca:

Thank you. And then, Ron, I have a question for you. Also kind of in this category of being new to this space, how how can we position ourselves as credible in landscape and outdoor lighting if it's very new for our company. We don't have any projects or photography yet.

Ron:

Act as if. Act as if. In other words, if someone comes across your brand on your website, on your social media, in any of the places you might appear online, lead and and at a minimum, have the educational content there, the demonstration of of projects. Like, let's say you don't have your own projects, then you could utilize, for example, WAC's image gallery, and you could present it as a landscape, idea gallery. Right? You don't have to say it's yours. They're not your projects, but you have best in class partners, and you're sharing ideas and inspiration. And, yes, absolutely, it's a type of work we do. And then if people say, well, why aren't your jobs there? Well, a lot of our clients don't let us photograph our projects. I don't I mean, I've heard that line from so many people. I think I hear it once a day, and I've heard it once a day for, like, the last eighteen years. Sometimes it's true. Sometimes it's just an excuse. But regardless, it's a good line. And so put it on your website, put it in your newsletter, put it in your blogs, put it on your social media, advertise around it, and you are going to attract what you want, what your clients that are looking for best in class integration companies to do their landscape lighting.

Patrick:

Yeah. I would add too, Rebecca. I know of two integrators specifically that have clients they've done enormous amounts of work for, and they went to those clients and said, hey. By the way, we're moving into the landscape lighting category, and the homeowner was interested and said, where do we start? Let's learn together. And so they maybe will cut a deal on that first project. It's a learning project for them. It's a client that trusts them. I mean, ultimately, the integrator is who they trust, and it's a technology partner, and this would be no different. You're going to follow it through to the end. But the website, I think, is more of an idea of what can be achieved, what you could have, what can be done, the beauty that it brings, and things like that. So there's a couple of different ways I've known integrators to approach that.

Rebecca:

Awesome. Well, thank you both. That is all that we have for questions. Thank you so much everyone for joining us. And as a reminder, I will send out a copy of this recording and deck so that you can have all of this content to rewatch or relook at. Ron, Patrick, thank you both. This was a fantastic webinar. I hope everyone else enjoyed it as well.

Ron:

Look forward to seeing you, Patrick, and you, Rebecca, and every many of you out there next week in Austin at Lightapalooza.

Patrick:

Looking forward to it. Thank you, Ron, and thank you to everybody who took the time to join us today. Appreciate it. I hope this helps you grow your business. Amen.

Rebecca:

Thanks, guys. Have a great rest of your day.

Patrick:

Thank you.

Ron Callis is the CEO of One Firefly, LLC, a digital marketing agency based out of South Florida and creator of Automation Unplugged. Founded in 2007, One Firefly has quickly became the leading marketing firm specializing in the integrated technology and security space. The One Firefly team work hard to create innovative solutions to help Integrators boost their online presence, such as the elite website solution, Mercury Pro.

Resources and links from the interview:

Show Notes:

Links:

https://onefirefly.com/about/press-and-awards/item/aispire-one-firefly-co-marketing-program-2025

https://brandportal.wacgroup.com/