Killing the Founder's Name: How We Rebranded 9 Acquisitions into One

Today we're talking about killing the founder's name, and whether you can actually do that. Turns out you can. In my industry, HVAC, plumbing, and electric, the founder's name is seen as sacred, and I killed nine of them. Names, not people. Not founders. I thought about killing maybe one of them.

I'm the founder and CEO of Highground Service Pros. I started in 2020. ETA story, bought a very small plumbing company. It was me and three plumbers, no staff, $1 million of revenue. Fast-forward five and a half years, we've done nine acquisitions. We've got about 120 team members. We're in three states: New Jersey, New Hampshire, and Maine. We cover those three trades.

With those nine acquisitions, we've done a bunch of tuck-ins, rolling them into existing brands that we own, but we were left with three brands in three markets. The one I started with is in the Jersey Shore market, Guarantee. Sanford in New Hampshire was just those two for a while. Then we recently added C&F Plumbing last summer, giving us three markets and three names.

Over the last two years, I did a lot of self-study and experimentation on brand awareness and brand building. If anyone lives in New Hampshire, maybe they've heard me on the radio under the Sanford name. We did a lot of mass media broadcasts, and it worked. Our business grew, we got comfortable with it, and I wanted to do it across the other brands. But having multiple brands was problematic. It's just difficult to have good creative and good strategy around three brands, at least on a small team.

We also wanted to build a super regional service area from Maine to New Jersey over the next few years. Doing that under multiple names doesn't really make sense. If you're going to move into Massachusetts, what name are you doing it under? It's hard to build a super regional platform on three disjointed names. At what point does it stop, three, four, six different names?

Why did we do this rebrand? As budding entrepreneurs in small to medium-sized business, I think we get taught a lot of the wrong things around marketing. A lot of the vendors we interact with are pay-per-click vendors, LSA vendors, Google Business Profile vendors, and they're very focused on direct response. Return on ad spend, these are the metrics we're told to focus on. That's fine, but it's small ball. You're going to stay small for a long time if that's your focus. If you want to build a big business and try to win, you have to go brand.

Think of it like the black line is base revenue, and the red spikes are the sugar rush spikes you get from promotional direct response advertising. If you're going 100% direct response, your brand is going to atrophy over time. It may not feel like that at a really small size. I started running a million-dollar company, and as soon as I turn on ads, we're growing. But the reality is I'm not actually building the base. I'm getting hooked, because I'm hiring staff and building infrastructure around this new revenue size. Now I have to keep spending, driving my customer acquisition cost up to maintain that revenue because I haven't actually built the base revenue of the brand.

If I have a good balance, I can raise the floor. I have more customers in the market who understand who I am. My base of recurring revenue continues to increase, and I can still supplement with those sugar rushes, but it's additive instead of necessary.

One of the ways we do this is we seek fame. You want to become a household name. When I was working with Sanford as a brand, that was my core focus. I want to make Sanford a household name. When I bought my million-dollar business, the SIM the broker sends you says, "This is a reputable brand, longtime customers, local titans." Dude, this is a million-dollar company. Nobody knows who they are. Nobody knows. Except the guy who has a sticker on his water heater. But the truly regionally dominant businesses in our industries are the ones that have been put in front of you over and over. When your faucet starts leaking, you think, "I'm going to call these guys," instead of going into Google and typing "plumber near me."

Direct response, pay-per-click, LSA, promotions on Facebook, the idea is you're fighting everyone else for the 5% of the market that happens to be in market today. You're not just fighting for that 5%, you're fighting for that last click. That's the most expensive way to acquire a customer, and it's an auction process.

Brand awareness is mass media, radio, TV. Radio, I'm a huge believer for the value, reach, and frequency you can get for a dollar. You have to think of it as an investment in future leads. If you go 100% into brand, you're going to bleed today. So we have to balance it out, invest in future leads while also filling the board today. Know, like, and trust. That's what I keep top of mind when I think about what we're saying around the brand. We want people to know, like, and trust us. You want them typing your brand into Google instead of "plumber near me."

A lot of what we're taught about marketing is wrong in my opinion. Some slick marketing consultant is going to walk into your shop, do some market analysis, and come back with a 14-page deck about your ideal customer profile, 25 to 45-year-old women with two kids who watch HGTV and shop at Lowe's. That is not the only person who spends money on new water heaters in your area. Everyone has a water heater, and we can mass market to everybody. We're expanding our surface area for luck to gain those leads. Niche targeting is problematic and a fool's errand. I'll p**s off some marketers by saying that.

On radio, reach, frequency, and consistency is what we're going for. I was talking to a fellow operator about the Seattle market for radio. Seattle stations reach too many people because Seattle is so big, so it's difficult to get the frequency he needs because he's reaching two million people, which costs a lot. If you have the ability to dial down your reach to expand your frequency, we want repetition and consistency. Three times per week on average, you want the listener hearing your spot. That usually takes 25 to 30 spots on a radio station. Right now we're on 14 stations. We're hitting at least 3X frequency on every one of those stations. We're running at least 30 spots per week across 14 stations, reaching about 600,000 people.

Understand share of voice and share of mind, especially for a small to medium-sized business. Share of voice is how many spots you're running versus your competitive set. If you have four HVAC providers in your market all on the same radio station with the same amount of spots, you have 25% share of voice. But if you have good creative and the other players don't, you might have 80% share of mind. That's what I screwed up when I was doing it on my own before I had professional help on copywriting and creative. My copy was middling at best. I wasn't getting the same share of mind we're able to capture now.

5% of homeowners are in the market today. But if you're doing a mass media broadcast approach, you're talking to everybody. 95% of those people, if you're the plumbing company in my market whose spots are, "Do you need a tub over tub install? Call Daigle Plumbing and Heating, get $500 off," who is listening to this? Everyone tunes it out. But if you can have a compelling story that's entertaining, informative, or heartfelt, now you can actually talk to everyone. The 5% that are in market today, great, but you're also talking to the 95% that might be in market tomorrow.

There was risk to taking these brands, particularly the Sanford brand, and migrating it to Highground. But I saw it as all execution risk. As long as we could execute it and shepherd the transition properly, we would come out on the backside better. For the most part, I think we did execute. I had done two years of experimentation with Sanford. We had done one meaningful tuck-in acquisition locally, a well-branded company, and we were able to roll that into the Sanford brand. That started to build my conviction. To give context, Sanford was the second-largest home service provider in the state of New Hampshire when we rebranded it.

Don't nuke the legacy brands. Some professionals will give you bad advice. Website developers will say, "We want to make sure we don't lose the link juice from your backlinks on your old website. Let's redirect the website to the new one." No. I want the Sanford website, the Guarantee website, I want people who we've serviced for the last five years searching for those brands to land on the old website. They find out about the brand transition when they call me, and I'm able to handle the objections and the narrative. I don't want to send them to a Highground landing page where they're like, "What happened? Were they bought?"

Tell the customer three times. We screwed this up. We have tens of thousands of customers across the three brands. We sent out an email and attempted to outbound, but outbounding has a certain pickup rate. We surprised some of our existing customer base with the new brand and had some upset customers to deal with. One way we messed this up: we have new customers calling under the new brand, and I didn't want them to get an automated dispatch notification saying "Highground, formerly known as Sanford," and have it look weird. We just ripped the Band-Aid and changed all those automatic notifications to Highground. But I had annual maintenances I had booked three or four months prior. A technician got dispatched to their home from some random company they had never heard of. It wasn't fatal. We were largely able to save all of these.

Direct mail is persistent. Outbound, because only 15% of people pick up the phone, isn't great. Direct mail is persistent in the mailbox. You could do co-branded.

One way we handled this brand transition, and I'm a big believer in this, is maintain all your different call tracking numbers and have a system that allows you to know where the call is coming from. Is someone calling from the Sanford website or the Sanford Google Business Profile? Okay, we'll pick up, "Thanks for choosing Sanford. How may I help you?" They have a leaking water heater. I book the entire call, get all the information. Then at the end, when we've established they're going to pay a dispatch fee, "By the way, we're really excited to announce we recently changed our name to Highground. We're still wrapping the trucks, so you may have a Highground or a Sanford truck come out. Is that okay?" Everyone is okay with that. If they're hesitant, we're there on the phone to handle that objection.

Radio is a huge driver for us. 14 stations across four markets. We're reaching between 25 and 35% of the adult population, hit three times on average per week. On top of this, we launched a large direct mail campaign, hitting 300,000 homes a month for the last five months under the Highground name. We didn't co-brand any of this stuff. We did one co-branded thing in the entire transition, a set of billboards in New Hampshire because Sanford was such a big brand. "Sanford is now Highground" on a billboard. Otherwise, all the mail was Highground mail. The radio spots were purely Highground radio spots. We tried to keep that brand pure. Because we're speaking to the entire market, we didn't want to make it weird, like "Oh, they used to be... I think they were acquired." No, this is a new brand.

We paced the physical rollout to minimize operational disruption and spread out the cash outlay. We did two trucks per week per branch. Three branches, two trucks each. We were spending $18,000 a week on truck wraps and felt that was sustainable. We had the Highground website up and kept that brand pure. No allusion to Sanford, Guarantee, or C&F on that website. We launched press releases in each market to local papers. Got some earned media, ended up on business magazines and local podcasts, because everyone thinks I'm crazy for doing this, so they're happy to talk about it. As for uniforms, technician presentation, we changed that day one. Some guys are still in Sanford trucks because Sanford's fleet is pretty big and we're still chopping through it. But everyone is in Highground attire. The presentation in front of the homeowner is all branded.

Early results. We're five months in, launched December 1st. In some ways it's been painful, but less painful than we expected. It can be difficult to measure brand impact, but one of the best practices is branded search volume. How many people are searching for your brand on Google? We track this via Google Search Console. I pulled the volume of searches for the legacy brands, Guarantee, Sanford, and C&F, and searches for the Highground brand. We stopped all marketing for the legacy brands starting in November, and it held flat for two months. Search volume did not decay at all. Then it slowly began to bleed, and right now we're sitting at a 25% reduction in search volume for the legacy brands, 75% of where we were. Highground has inched up and now matches that search volume. We're seeing essentially a 50% lift in total branded search volume between legacy and new brand.

We sort of expected this but not this fast: having a cohesive brand, compelling brand story, and very values-driven brand has helped us close and reduced the amount we had to discount. Prior to the rebrand, our close rate was 35%, now it's 46%. Our discount rate has gone from 10% to 4%. So we're getting more new customers on this new brand, and it's improving our margins too. Lead count was flat months one through four. In month five, partly we're a seasonal business and the weather is improving, but we're seeing a nice uptick in leads after pounding the market for five months.

If you're sitting on a founder's name, maybe you have a holdco of multiple brands, or you're thinking about buying your next brand and wondering what to do, I'll reiterate, I think it's all execution risk. You can absolutely rebrand. Most of us overestimate the brand strength that our small businesses have. Most people won't notice, won't care, but they might care about your new brand if you do it right. I wouldn't co-brand. It's alluring and attractive to try a co-branded marketing rollout. I think it's a mistake. Really lean into that new brand. Harvest the old brand, don't bury it. Keep all the legacy digital real estate live, so when people search for the old brand, they can still find it and make their way to you. It's like planting a seed, and the sooner you do it, the better. I wish I had done it two years ago, but I didn't know enough at the time to do it well. Two years from now, we'll be very happy we did the rebrand this year.

Q&A

Q: Can you talk more about how you identified the execution risk and what gave you the confidence to push through?

It took a while to get there. Education, self-study. I'm not a marketer by trade. Three years ago, I didn't know anything about marketing. I immersed myself in the research of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, Ogilvy, Roy Williams out of Austin. Read everything I could find on brand, then executed some of it poorly on my own. I built a little confidence. The decision to go super regional over the next few years drove us to figure this out. We had to go single brand. Frankly, the plan at the time was to do it all under the Sanford name. We were going to rebrand the other branches to Sanford. That seemed like the most natural path. Sanford was two to three times bigger than the next branch. But the friction we felt was, what story do we tell in the other markets? We take the founder-led brand in North Jersey, C&F Plumbing, and slap Sanford on it. It's hard for that to not look like a corporate takeover or acquisition. "Why'd you guys change your name to Sanford?" "Well, we have this sister company, and they're bigger, and they have their s**t together." Instead, because we changed the name and it's not someone's last name, the story we tell is that we changed our name in line with our values. Every branch can say that same thing and mean it.

Q: Is there a cap on the size of a business you'd buy or distance away where you wouldn't divert to a new brand?

I'm still wrestling with this. If I felt there was any way I could rebrand it to this brand, I would do it. I don't think it would be any harder to execute than what we already did. These are all in the Northeast, but in New Jersey people don't know anything from New Hampshire. They're different markets. What you gain by having a singular brand you can think about, new creative, new promotions, new ideas, new uniforms, it's all one thing. It's so taxing on the brain to think about three. I hated it. Now, if I was going to buy Gettle Air Conditioning in Las Vegas, it's nine figures of revenue and has a massive brand, I'd probably stay off it. But I don't have the money to do that, so I don't have to think about it.

Q: What's your marketing pie? And how do you think about radio if someone else owns most of the radio share?

It depends on their creative. What I like about radio is that if it's not good, I can spend less and still out-compete them for share of mind. Most people do radio poorly. Owning a channel is really important. I'll continue to push further into radio. Right now in New Hampshire, we're touching 30% of the adult population with radio. We'll probably push to 50% before we start TV or spend on billboards. We'll absolutely saturate that medium before we move on.

Q: Why did you choose those metrics, and how do you build analysis for outcomes?

Brand is an ephemeral thing. It's hard to measure. The most quantitative thing I could measure is branded search volume, so that's why I went there. The close rate and discount rate, I wasn't expecting. I uncovered that in the last month. I thought it was an interesting correlation.

Q: Do you do any specific targeting at that 5%? How did you build conviction on radio?

I built conviction on the Sanford brand a couple of years ago. I went radio for two reasons. The reach and impact you can have for a dollar on radio is better than other mediums. The CPM is better. Production is way cheaper. TV might build memory structures better, but it's more expensive on a cost per thousand impressions basis, and you have to produce a TV spot. It's harder. We produced TV spots for Sanford, but they sucked because we were cheap. Cost to produce and reach for a dollar were the biggest reasons. It's also overlooked. I don't see a lot of private equity-backed, big money HVAC companies advertising on radio because there's a belief among marketers that radio is dead and everyone listens to podcasts. That's true for the people in this room, but not for a large portion of the population.

Q: Can you describe your ad?

Highground Service Pros comes from my background. I was a Marine prior to the trades. We have a military ethos and a lot of veterans work for us. We play that angle on the radio. Historically, I've been hesitant to say, "We're veteran-owned, hire us because we're veterans." It's always felt like asking for charity. So we take a different tenor. We're not saying, "Hire us because we're veteran-owned." We're saying, "Here's the benefit to you that we have military experience and a military ethos." Here's how that presents in the home. Military precision. Good in a crisis. Thinking on our feet. One spot talks about how planning is everything in the military, and the plumber coming to your house has a plan to solve your problem and is willing to throw the plan out when the situation changes. These are 60-second spots. I announce myself by name. Pretty much all the spots start with, "My name is Rich Jordan. When I was in the Marine Corps..."

Q: Does it work for B2B?

I'm probably unqualified to answer that. But all your B2B customers are people too.

Q: Why now? Why not six months earlier or wait another year?

I think it was frustration. We were getting good results with Sanford, but I was doing it all myself. The creative was mine, so we didn't change spots often. I was using a marketing agency I didn't feel was a good fiduciary of my marketing spend. They were happy to let me walk off the cliff as long as I had a smile on my face. I wanted to make a change. One educational resource I had leveraged was an agency in the US. I was hesitant to reach out because I figured I wasn't big enough. I just said, "I'm reaching out." Ryan Schuett is my lead with Wizard of Ads out of Austin. They're professionals at branding and brand strategy. We partnered in the summer. My marching orders were, "I'd really like to do this under the Sanford brand because I have 50 trucks in Sanford and a $100,000 sign on the building that I'd like to not change." They twisted my arm.

Q: How does radio listenership break down by age, given media fragmentation?

It's Nielsen data. Part of how I built conviction around radio was learning there's actually data around this and you know how many people are hearing it. Every market in America measured by Nielsen has in excess of 80% of the market that listens to the radio in a light way, and you can exceed 50% in every market by doing some creative things. A radio station gives you reach and frequency for that station, but powerful data streams combine the different stations you're on. Someone listening to you on B100 might also be listening on Z103. The data shows you it's the same person. You can see your cross cumes, so you're not just adding it together.

Q: Are you worried you're investing in radio as it declines?

Probably unqualified to answer. My read is that radio isn't decreasing as much as we think. We're also leveraging iHeart streaming. One of our markets is close to New York City, so it's difficult to run a radio strategy because that New York halo is coming over, and I don't serve New York. We use iHeart to get underneath that umbrella.

Q: How did you decide on the new brand?

Collaborative effort. I was making the case, "If we can make this work under the Sanford name, I'd love to save $250,000." Ryan and his team came to my shop, spent time with us, asked questions, spent time with the team, had whiskey afterwards. Mick is my dedicated creative copywriter, an artist. He went into the hole for three or four weeks. He came out with four options. One was Sanford, another was Strongpoint, my holding company name, and two other brands including Highground. It was basically like a Mad Men pitch. Highground knocked me off my feet. I'm really happy with how it came out.