Joe Simonetti knows it’s not enough just to sell the customer a good steak. The buyer has to hear it sizzle. Simonetti doesn’t run a restaurant — he owns American Minutemen, a specialized drain-cleaning business in New City, N.Y., about 35 miles north of Manhattan in Rockland County. But the principle is the same.
Simonetti built the business three decades ago on canny marketing. Now he’s giving that a major boost. Marketing is a specialty inside the business, right alongside the cleaning technicians and the customer service people who work the phones. He even has a team dedicated to marketing and branding, and he believes it’s already showing results.
Simonetti has seen tomorrow and it’s on the web. “That’s where the future growth of customers is going to come from,” he says. Already, the company is among the few drain-cleaning businesses that allow customers to request service calls online.
The company also markets aggressively with Yellow Pages advertising and targeted direct mail, and Simonetti is looking at broadcast ads.
The company and its 24 employees serve Rockland, Westchester and Orange counties in New York; Bergen County, N.J.; and Fairfield County, Conn.
Birth of the Minutemen
In a way, branding has always been a core strategy for Simonetti. He started the company in 1975 as American Sewer and Drain. His father, Joseph C. Simonetti, had left a franchise drain-repair business that year. While his father went back to being a butcher, his son planned to take over the drain business.
Having watched how hard his father worked, Simonetti wanted to do some things differently. “I wanted to build the business up to the point where we would not have to go on the road ourselves 24 hours a day,” he says. “I wanted to take it a step further.”
The elder Simonetti had a two-year non-compete clause once he left the business. When that expired, father and son incorporated the new business and, in homage to the nation’s bicentennial of 1976, which had just passed, they called it American Minutemen.
“We identified with the fact that the Minutemen were the first out there and they were always ready, back in the Revolutionary War,” Simonetti says. “That was the concept we wanted to get across to our customers: When they were in trouble they could count on us night and day.” They devised an icon for the business — a silhouette of a horse and rider at full gallop — that went on the letterhead and in Yellow Pages ads.
But not on the trucks: In those days, the company subcontracted drain-cleaning work for plumbing contractors. By using unmarked trucks, the company could come in under the umbrella of whichever plumber had referred the job.
Company makeover
After years of hiding a clever brand, Simonetti decided to make a change. “We recently decided that as long as we don’t do any plumbing, the plumbers don’t mind recommending us,” he says. So the company undertook a top-to-bottom marketing makeover. “Within the last year we just decided to update everything.”
Simonetti credits the revolution to Tracye Blackwell-Johnson, brand and business strategist. “Tracye basically sold me on the idea of branding,” he says. She conducted a “business health check” that led to an overhaul of the business.
First came the logo. The older horse and rider silhouette is still part of the look, but now it’s inside a stylized drop of water, punched up with red-and-white stripes that bring to mind a waving American flag. And this time the logo isn’t just in the ads and on the letterhead.
“Now we understand that all of our ads need a similar look, that customers need to notice that icon, and that it needs to look familiar to them,” Simonetti says. “We want it to pop up in front of them in many locations.” The logo is on circulars, technician uniforms, promotional items such as air fresheners, and even uniforms the business supplies to local sports teams. Of course it’s also in the Yellow Pages ads.
But that was just the start. With the hiring of Blackwell-Johnson, the business created a marketing team. Simonetti’s wife, Suzanne, and daughter, Justine, are co-brand officers. They ensure that the logo is included on all company communications, whether to the staff or to the public. They also implement direct mail advertising to specific market segments, evaluate the results, and recommend future promotions.
Simonetti also hired a sales manager, Glenn Rice, dedicated to corporate accounts. Rice came to the business with 25 years in the industry, first as a service technician and later as a sales manager.
Healthy fleet
The marketing supports a substantial operation. American Minute-men has 14 service technicians and 10 office employees. The fleet includes 16 Ford 250 vans, a pair of Ford pickup trucks, and three box trucks (one Mitsubishi, two Ford). As older vehicles are retired, the new logo goes on the new equipment.
The business also has five waterjetters from US Jetting, two trailer-mounted and three mounted on box trucks. Each has a 300-gallon tank and pumps 18 gpm at up to 4,000 psi. Equipment also includes a half-dozen push cameras and two self-propelled cameras, all from Insight Vision.
The company put up a web site several years ago, but on the cheap, and Simonetti admits he never took full advantage of the Internet. No more. “Over the last six months, the team has been working with another company to redo the whole web site, to make sure it not only looked good but helped us bring in business,” he says.
They made sure that key words reflecting American Minutemen’s services that customers might use on an Internet search — drain cleaning, sewer cleaning, jetting, video camera, and more — were embedded in the site so that search engines would capture it.
Even more important, the site enables visitors to book service calls online.
“We feel as though there are a lot of people at work who don’t want to go through the trouble of scheduling appointments on the phone,” Simonetti says. “We made the web site work for us that way.” Customers like that, and it saves the company money.
“If I can have the customer e-mailing me, that cuts down on the amount of help I need in the office,” Simonetti says. “It’s already starting to work. Customers are e-mailing us about maintenance calls.” There is far less telephone tag in scheduling work, and it’s much easier to schedule an efficient day for the technicians, Simonetti says.
And by connecting with customers via e-mail, American Minutemen can send out advertising at a fraction of the cost of any other medium — such as for seasonal specials. “We can let our customers know without having to send out paper and circulars, with stamps and all the time it takes to fold them, by building a customer base with e-mail addresses,” Simonetti says.
A menu of media
Simonetti understands that the Internet is just one part of a comprehensive media presence, but he also believes it’s growing. Eventually, he expects to buy radio and television advertising, although he’s cautious about that. “I know that with TV I’m going to be laying out money over a six-month period before any of the money starts coming in,” he says. “The same with radio.”
In short, broadcast ads demand the sort of patience of a baseball team that wins with a series of singles. While that unfolds, Simonetti also wants to “hit home runs now.” One home run is a recent revision of his customer database with new computer software.
“We’re getting our hands on our customer base over the last seven years,” Simonetti says. “We’re pulling out those names and we’re going to be sending out a mailer to all customers that no longer use us.” The mailers will be tailored to specific kinds of customers — corporate, commercial, and residential. He’s also been hitting restaurants hard, and reaching out to plumbers as a rich source of referrals.
But each circular is narrowly targeted: “I’m looking at a rifle shot, rather than a shotgun,” Simonetti says. It’s a far cry from the days when he had nothing but an all- purpose flyer that went to all prospective customers.
The makeover was implemented in the summer of 2007, so it’s too soon to show hard results, but Simonetti and Blackwell-Johnson see positive signs. One is that business in August remained on track with previous months instead of slowing down as it normally does. They credit several initiatives: the search-engine marketing, a mailer to inactive customers, a Yellow Pages coupon, the web site improvements, and another mailer to local school districts.
One part of the picture isn’t entirely clear: Yellow Pages. For now, Simonetti remains entrenched in that medium, and he is updating the company’s ad. But he wonders about its future.
“One of our counties had seven Yellow Pages books,” Simonetti says. Then those seven got condensed to two, and ads cost $3,000 a month. “Those two books are so big that nobody’s going to keep them in their drawer,” he worries. “I see it going in the closet and not being used. Today, more and more people are simply sitting down and typing it on their computer and, bingo, the name comes up. Who wants to go into the book? And that is pennies compared to what the Yellow Pages are.”
American Minuteman may take its name from the nation’s heritage, and pride itself on old-fashioned service. But Simonetti’s eye is on the future, and he’s positioning his business to get there as fast as he can.
