Mark Mitten  0:02  
Do you want to have an industry leading, prominent national celebrity on your podcast, one who is a respected Kitchen Designer worldwide. You better call Paul

Dennis OZ  0:33  
Welcome back to the remodeler success Podcast. Today. I'm so excited to introduce a guest who is really prominent figure in the kitchen design and known for his really innovative approach to marketing, he shares his insights through his popular blog, and he has also a podcast. It's really rare, but I'm so excited to have another podcast source in my show today, and that's why he's engaging a broad audience with each episode. So we have a lot of to learn from him, so also his creative strategies, and not only earned him the numerous awards, but also respect worldwide. Yes, and please join me today, we will explore this innovations with this industry leader and pioneer. And please welcome the President of mainline kitchen design, Paul mcalary Paul, welcome to the

Paul McAlary  1:24  
show. Thank you, Dennis, it's a pleasure to be on your show. I've listened to some of your episodes, and they're surprisingly in our industry, a lot of the podcasts, specifically about kitchens and construction, are hard for me to listen to, but yours is very good. Thanks. Thanks

Dennis OZ  1:40  
so much. Thank you so much. Hey, yours too. So let's dive in, because I have a lot of questions to ask. I, you know, like a lot of really detailed things that we could ask you today. Can you share how you started in the kitchen design industry, and also you have a great company that mainline kitchen design, what inspired you to establish this company.

Paul McAlary  2:02  
So not what you might think was, I studied Computer Engineering at University of Pennsylvania for many, many years, because I kept on taking off and then going back and taking off, and finally, actually, when I got to the end of my education, by that time, I realized I didn't want to be a computer engineer anymore. What was happening during the times that I was not working on school I started off, I think, one summer building decks. I had built my parents deck when I was, like, 18 years old. I had finished my parents basement when I was 16, and so my brother and I, who were both in college at the time, one summer, we spent the whole summer just building decks. Then I kept on doing that on and off while I was taking off on and off for college. And then eventually we started doing renovations, and then whole house renovations. And finally, when I decided not to be a computer engineer anymore. I just transitioned into it being a full time business and being a general contractor, which I did for over a decade. But eventually I looked at my 401, K, which had no money in it, and found out that the more people that worked for me and the bigger my company got, I didn't make any more money. In fact, a lot of times I made less money and made the most amount of money if my company was smaller and maybe I had two people working for me. So that really made me decide, You know what, I can't afford to do this anymore. I need to go work someplace and get get a paycheck and get a 401, K. So I got the first job I could get, which was at a Home Depot, designing kitchens, and that was in the late 1990s and I started designing kitchens, and I loved it instantly. I really enjoyed it. And I got to implement all the construction knowledge I used to do the drawings and all the blueprints for the jobs that we did. So I got to do that. And then, since I knew a lot of construction, I was able to be a little bit more creative, moving things around and making changes, which really, nowadays, is the most important thing about kitchens. So that's how I got started. And then I went from working at Lowe's, I mean, working at Home Depot, to being the manager of the kitchen department at Home Depot, to being to then going to Lowe's to then starting to go to different private companies that had higher and higher end kitchens, where I worked for other people, until the housing crash of 2010 when I got laid off, when our company went from we did a lot of work for builders and big, big housing companies, and they all pretty much one of the companies even went bankrupt, owing our company a half a million dollars. But we went from doing $16 million in business to like four I got laid off. And then the best thing that was the best thing that ever happened to me, and sometimes when I run into the guy that laid me off at a some kind of industry function. He says you should thank me every time you see me. So, so, yeah, so then I started my own company, and I never would have done it because I had already had my own company and I didn't have a 401, K, and I explained that to my wife, and my wife said, but everybody's a contractor. You're like a really good kitchen designer. Wouldn't it be much different when you're a kitchen designer, owning your own company, then you can do it the way you think it should be done, instead of the way the other people do it, which you think is always bad. And I thought about it, and I said, You know what I think you might be right? And then I started the company, and it was an instantly, you know, took off. And, you know, we've pretty much grown every year we've been in business. This year is a little flat, maybe even a tiny bit down, but then the whole industry is the case for this year. But other than that, we've grown more than 25% every year we've been in business. So this is

Dennis OZ  5:52  
great. We also talk about this year and marketing, all these things, but just wanted to start with the fundamentals. I would like to talk a little more about your design philosophy. How do you think it's evolved over the years? I think you're pretty much different where you have started and where you're today. So can you explain us the difference?

Paul McAlary  6:10  
Well, I just think it's more, even more exaggerated than it over time as prices, the things that we that people buy for the kitchens, the cost of cabinets, the cost of the appliances, the cost of everything that goes into a kitchen, those prices have skyrocketed. And the cost of removing a wall or changing a doorway or something like that, in comparison, hasn't really changed. And so always, because I came from a construction background, moving things around and making changes was always something I was interested in doing, but, I mean, it's gotten to the point where we don't even measure where people's plumbing lines are coming up anymore, because we're just going to move them and make it put them in the best possible location. And it really makes no sense splurging on materials, getting expensive appliances. We sell cabinetry from inexpensive brands up to the most expensive brands people could get. Would be silly for someone to buy custom cabinetry from us and not have the best layout that they could possibly have for their kitchen, because taking out a wall cost $2,000 but you know, getting a sub zero refrigerator instead of a regular counter depth refrigerator is $10,000 at least, maybe more, so you splurge, splurge on the construction aspects of your home first, always maximize that and then get the materials that you can afford. And that philosophy hasn't really changed only it's become more and more and more exaggerated over the 20 plus, well, almost 30 years now that we, I've been doing this,

Dennis OZ  7:48  
yeah. Well, not only this, you also have a lot of awards with your design. So this is, you know, I was looking at your, you know, the all these things that you accomplish already. I'm so amazed. Just want to talk about those projects. So since we have a lot of awards, I'm sure there are some projects that really, you know, started really challenging and it just turned out to be something really rewarding. Can you give us an example about one of these projects? Well, actually,

Paul McAlary  8:16  
one of the projects, which, when we're speaking, it's my background in back of me. Okay? And I picked it intentionally for this call, because that kitchen that we're talking about, I won a bunch of awards for it was very creative. We had to move a staircase from the back of the house to under the main staircase in the middle of the house. We combined the dining room in the kitchen, made another room the dining room, we created a laundry room out of it. We did all these things and won some local awards, but actually submitted it to, I don't know if you're familiar with the crystal awards. It's a it's a national award in kitchen design. So I submitted the same project with all the same pictures, the before pictures, the after pictures, the architects, the my my drawings and the architects drawings, which I did for before and after and everything else, to the crystal awards. And then I actually got back the results. They have three judges that judge you. We didn't win the person that won the award got a total number. Each judge has from one to 10 that they can give you, and the person that won the award got like a 25 out of 30. We had 22 so we were short three points to winning the award. But then I looked at the judge's scorecard, and one judge gave us 10 out of 10, one judge gave us nine out of 10, and another judge gave us three out of 10, and the judge that gave us three out of 10, the comment that he had on his folder was, I don't believe it's the same house, so we had done such a good job. Job designing the space that even with the floor plans and the before pictures, the Dory pictures, the after pictures, this guy couldn't even figure out that it was the same location that he was looking at. So that's a big success. You know, that's one example that I just think is sort of funny. I mean, the great thing about kitchen design is there's lots of these funny stories where people end up getting the very kitchen that they told you they didn't want the you know, in that case, the judge can't even recognize because you're transforming people's houses. And you know, sometimes that really transforms their lives too. And, you know, makes day to day living better, which is stories of its own, too. That's very rewarding.

Dennis OZ  10:42  
Thanks so much for sharing your golden nuggets. So you know, among our audience, we have a lot of people who has like they have sometimes they have a showroom. Sometimes they deal with the they do it like, let's say there by just by themselves, and maybe just starting their business. And I'm sure these things that the challenges and rewards that you shared. I'm sure they are really they're all really big eye openers for these people who is just tuned in today. So let's take the conversation to the little bit of a client, client centric design approach. So let's say you're just ready to meet a client, and of course, we need to deeply understand the requirements and their their goals, about their next project. How do you qualify them? And what's your first approach to this clients?

Paul McAlary  11:28  
Well, this is sort of funny too, because if you're talking about reputation and everything else, we actually don't really have any bad we have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of five star reviews, but we don't have really any bad reviews from anybody that actually worked with us, but we do have a few bad reviews, but they're from people that called up and ended up speaking to me, and they told me what they wanted to do, and then I explained to them why it wasn't a good idea, or why They shouldn't do this or shouldn't do that, and it incensed them, and so they ended up writing us a bad review, you know, because I told them something that they didn't want to hear, embracing the things that clients really want. The reason I really talk to customers a lot of the times before we pass them on to the other designers is to make sure that the customers understand that our process doesn't really vary. And the way our process starts is we come out and measure their space, and then we do the design we think is the best use of the space first, that's not a kitchen that anybody's ever going to buy from us, and we haven't implemented maybe any of the customers, or hardly, only a few of the customers, ideas at this first preliminary design. But if we don't do that, then customers will never understand what trade offs they gave up to get the kitchen that they thought that they wanted. And then as the thing changes, they go, Oh, I understand you. Mean, if I close that window, I get less light in my kitchen. But then we're taking out the wall between the dining room and the kitchen, so I get a lot more light that way. And now I can put my stove on that wall, and now I can do all these things. So we make people see things at least to start that they weren't anticipating. And then as we make the changes, they sort of understand these different trade offs, and it's always their decision. They're always making the decisions to buy the kitchen that they like the most, because we don't make any money unless they buy a kitchen from us, so but we're just willing to sort of jeopardize the relationship a little bit in the beginning, to put them out of their comfort zone, so they're forced to see things that they might not of and then the kitchen always ends up being a compromise of all these different things, and they're making the choices after, you know, they've looked at them. I always describe it as where our job isn't to give people the kitchen of their dreams. It's really to give people a kitchen beyond their dreams, because we have information they don't have, and once we give it to them, they can decide which of these different versions they want.

Dennis OZ  14:03  
Another incredible advice that comes from a true pioneer in the industry. So thank you so much for this one. This is I'm sure that, I'm sure that all our listeners and also the watchers and we are sometimes you're referring something that Paul is just refer his background. Maybe you won't be able to see when you're just tuning in as a podcast, but folks, you will also see this one on our YouTube channels and on our website too. So if you're just really feeling like missing out something, just tune in the Paul is just sharing all his golden magazine today here. So I just want you to make sure you're making the most out of it. So let's take the conversation to the technology and tools that you use. I'm sure you have different tools for kitchen design, different tools for marketing. We're going to talk about marketing real soon, but let's talk about the operational side of things, especially the softwares that you use for design, and also maybe could be estimating or anything that you've. Feel really, really powerful for your own processes. What do you think those softwares are

Paul McAlary  15:05  
to do our payroll? We have a whole excel program that we have and that integrates with our CRM system called Monday. And those things are integral in us being able to track the customer's projects, making sure deliveries are all happening, and all the communication we have between the customers is all being documented, and our office manager, Juliet, is making sure that all the trains are running on time and everything else, if we take marketing out of it, which is a fascinating thing out of its own. You know, for me, having studied in computer engineering. I now, after not being doing computer engineering, now I get to interact and Understanding Computers. Helps me dramatically in marketing and Google Analytics and all the things that we do. But taking that aside the design software that we use, it hasn't changed 2020. Has gotten more sophisticated over time, but thankfully for me, because before there was 2020 which is the kitchen design program that most kitchen designers use. A small percentage use Pro kitchens. Probably most of us use 2020 but when I started, 2020 was a more rudimentary it was black and white line drawings. But the good news for me was it was a computer and I could use it. And then the first day, I designed the kitchen for Home Depot. I sold a kitchen with a customer. If I had to do that by hand, which is how kitchen designers did it. Before that, I would have been in a whole lot of trouble. I can do things and do some drawings by hand, but it takes me a very long time and getting the perspective correctly, and everything else up until, actually, I think it was eight years ago. In order to become a certified kitchen designer, you actually had to take the test doing the drawings by hand. What a waste of time that is. Now. It actually makes it much more difficult for people to change their minds, because you've invested all this time creating this three dimensional drawing for somebody, right? If I want to get rid of the wall, I just click a button and it's gone. If I want to move the stove, I grab it and slide it down on 2020 and I can change the person's design 100% in the span of a half an hour. Whereas, you know, if you were doing this by hand, I wouldn't have been the successful designer I am if I was stuck doing it by hand. And so thank God for 2020. Yeah.

Dennis OZ  17:21  
Well, these challenges are always we always have these challenges. And I see people, I always have a hard time thinking about how these designers are just running their businesses without these computer aided programs, cat programs, before they are ever we were invented. So it's really hard to, you know, even think about the life without them. But so you were talking about it also like when you know some people will call you and sometimes, sometimes when they hear something that they don't really want to hear from you because of the probably the project is really impossible, they're trying to accomplish something really, really hard. They're still helpful in some ways. They're still helpful to make impossible things a little bit, you know, possible. That's what I like to give you. The question, do you, do you use, ever use any software or like on your vision, to make a really difficult project to come become alive? Let's say you may think that in the first glance, you may think it's impossible to do. But it turned out to be something like, really, yes, you know what that was. That was hard, but we accomplished that. Well, do you have any kind of examples other than the ones that you have behind

Paul McAlary  18:30  
there's so many different ways to do things. And it using 2020, it's like, even when I'm at somebody's house, people will say, Well, what are you thinking? What are you going to do? It's like, you know what? Until I get all these measurements, you may be, I might be measuring the whole first floor of their home. Until I get all these measurements on the computer and start playing around with it, it's really hard to know what design we're going to come up with. If you want to another example of a kitchen that I did. I always tell this story my wife, we used to do a lot of kitchen tours, and so before covid, a lot of towns in the area would have these kitchen tours where they'd bring people to all these, you know, luxury kitchens or whatever. And I'm a little rough on people, so I would not be the representative of our company at the tour. My wife is much more engaging and pleasant, so she would be the one at the Tour talking to people, and then she would sort of prepare them for me by saying, Now, you know he's going to tell you that maybe that he wants to do it differently than you're thinking. He'll, he'll still sell it to you the way you want, but he's going to make you maybe see it ways that you haven't thought of. So she'd sort of prepare him for people. And one of the people that she met had been on several of these tours and loved all these kitchens that they saw of ours, and finally scheduled a time for me to come out and measure their kitchen. And when I arrived, the husband, who was a doctor, gave me a 20 page document of all the things that he had envisioned about his kitchen and the addition that he wanted to put on his house and everything it's all spelled. Out. And I said, Well, you know what? I don't need that we can talk about that document after we start working on your kitchen, but to start, we start always the same way, my wife must have told you about it, that we're going to do what we think is the best use of the design first. And he was like, no, no. I spent so many years working on this. Please take this. Please take this. I said it just, I could tell you I was going to look at it, but that's not would be lying to you. So hold on to it. We'll talk about it after we start. And then he just looks at me and he says, You're really nothing like your wife, are you? And I had a lab I said, No, but you're going to get a better kitchen out of it. And then the funny thing was, is one of the things I mentioned is, you know, I know you want to do this edition, but maybe we should think about taking the wall out between the kitchen and the dining room, and then you can see what that looks like, because that's going to be maybe $40,000 less, or 50,000 or $60,000 less than doing an addition. Because I don't even want to do that. Please don't even show it to me. And I said, you know, usually come up with one design. I'm just going to do two for you so we can quickly show you that design. And then he's like, no, no. And then the wife said, just let him do it. Uh, Bob, it's it's okay. So then they come into the office to see these designs. And I said, Well, I'm just going to show you the one that you don't want first, and then we'll just get rid of it. It's the one that, you know, takes out the wall between the dining and the kitchen. And he goes, I told you, I don't want to see that. And then I said, Well, you know, just going to look at for five minutes and then we'll move on. And you know, finally, he agreed. So then I brought it up on the screen, and he took a look at it, and he says, Well, that doesn't look anything like I thought it was going to look like. And I said, Yeah, that's true. He goes, it's really open and spacious. I said, that's the whole point. He goes, Is this really going to be 40,000 or I said, I think it's going to be $60,000 less than doing an addition. He said, well, then we shouldn't do the addition. Let's do this, and then, you know, we'll move on. And I said, Well, let me now show you the one with the addition, because I don't need to see the addition. If that's $50,000 more than this, I don't need to see that. That's crazy. I don't you know, I'm not going to spend 50 more $1,000 this is a beautiful kitchen. Why would I spend $50,000 more? I said, I worked. I took me an hour to do this one. The other one took me two. I have to show you the other one. All right, show me the other one. I showed him the other one. He said, Well, that's not the addition that I was thinking about doing. I said, No, instead of adding a whole bit of eating area. I moved the whole back of your house out four feet. He goes, What's very different? It's a way better kitchen. I said, Yeah. I mean that it is a better kitchen, is. The question is, is it worth an extra $50,000 and he said, I think it might be. And that was the kitchen that he got. So he went at every step of the way, kicking and screaming, right? We dragged it through the whole process. And in the end, everything he picked was the things that he wanted, but only after he saw things that he thought maybe he didn't. So, I mean, that's a great that's a really, I know that's my wife's favorite story, just because whenever later on, after the kitchen was done, my wife came over just to see it for them. And, you know, they might have liked me and might have liked the designs and everything else, but my wife was the nice person. So they said the wife is coming tomorrow. The wife is coming tomorrow. So they were very happy that my wife got to see their finished kitchen. Great.

Dennis OZ  23:12  
Thank you so much for like telling us the story is a stellar explanation too, because you know that this is the stories that we are actually looking for. Our podcast here is really funny. Thanks so much for sharing this, and it's a great like, you know, we, I think all our audiences really learn what you're trying to give it there. So folks, this is how a story just evolves, and you just deliver your final product, and everybody's happy at the end of the day. So that's the main thing. You can't make

Paul McAlary  23:41  
people buy kitchens they don't like. So they're always getting a kitchen that they love. It just maybe is a little bit more work, and they have to think about things that they might have not thought of. Right,

Dennis OZ  23:51  
right? Thank you so much for sharing this story with us. Well, Paul, I would like to take the conversation to the little bit of a talk about I would like to talk about trends in our industry? You know, I'm sure that you, for the many, many years that you have in industry, that you see many trends. And also, I'm sure that you have some thoughts about the future. First, let me ask you the past, what was the trends that you really remember? I said that was really good. And do you have any kind of trends that you have in mind in the future, that might be a trend. It's really hard to predict, but anything that the homeowners might be excited about.

Paul McAlary  24:30  
So I would say that this question I get asked all the time, and the answer is usually not, is not as exciting as you might think. So. I mean, what are the trends in kitchens? Well, for 15 years, we sold white kitchens with white countertops and Shaker Doors, and it didn't matter how many other things we showed people, that was what people bought and what they wanted. For 15 years running. Thankfully, now people are getting away from that, and we get to design different kitchens. But 20 years ago, we designed kitchens in all different kinds of styles and all different kinds of finishes, and contemporary kitchens and French Country antique kind of looking kitchens and transitional and traditional kitchens. But you know, for the last 15 years we've been designing because our company is a little bit in the suburbs. We don't do a lot of really contemporary, modern kitchens, and when we do, they're usually in the city. But for 15 years we've been, we've been doing the same thing over and over again, which is a little bit maddening, but now it's great that people are are getting away from just white kitchens with white countertops and even gray and then navy blue, they sort of went into. But one of the things is people, I think, have also realized that all the painted cabinets that everybody has wanted are not quite as durable as the stain finishes. So people, sort of anecdotally know now even if I really wanted a painted kitchen, like my kitchen is a stained kitchen, because I know I'm really hard on things, and I didn't want that all the touch ups and for having furniture or finishes coming in to fix up my kitchen. So my kitchen is a stained kitchen, but people are now going back to colored stains and different kinds of wood species, so that that's all good. And then always, as far as people predicting the future, everybody always predicts, and has been predicting since the 70s, everybody's going to in the United States is going to suddenly go very contemporary, that we're all going to be going very contemporary. And it's what all the architects and the interior designers, what they all think is it going to happen, but it never happens, right? It hasn't happened. It's been, been predicted happening since the 1970s and just people just aren't that brave that they're going to pick, make those selections. So we'll always be a part of the kitchens that we sell and for us, because we're in the suburbs and not the city, a little bit less percent doing very contemporary kitchens. But the trends for us are just not as exciting as you might think. They're better appliances, better updated knife pull out drawers and all kinds of different things, those kind of updates, and then thankfully, getting away from very static white kitchens and white countertops, or white and black and all the same tile and everything else being the same. Now we have a little bit of more variation, but it won't be as bold as a lot of people think.

Dennis OZ  27:30  
Thanks so much for putting this into this perspective. It is really clear that the you know, it's always a controversial topic, but you know, thank you so much for giving me the information this way and sharing your true wisdom here. Well, just to take the conversation to the marketing it is the most fun part, right? The marketing talk is always fun, because whatever we do, we met, we might have the best product in the market or the service in the market. We have to do the marketing correctly. And you have to reach the we have to reach the ideal customer avatar, or like the correct people at the correct time, right with the correct piece of information and correct copy and correct piece of content. So here, you know, you have a lot of different tools in place that you features that you use, like you have your blog. I'm going to talk about that too. You have your podcast, but overall, in your overall mainline teaching, design, marketing infrastructure, and also, like the whole perspective, how do you look at marketing and what do you think about how do you feel that the current marketing strategy is right now?

Paul McAlary  28:39  
I think marketing is probably, for me, at least, maybe, because I've been designing kitchens for so long. But it's more exciting than kitchen design, and it's a science, but it's a very hard science, because it's so hard really documenting ROI return on investment for any marketing thing that you're doing. But for me, the wonderful part about it is, is that it really it's all about computers, and how computers are able to analyze and how we're able to get information from the people that have been on our site. Yeah, there's all these different social medias, and how can we take advantage of each individual social media platform has its own good things and bad things that you can be utilizing to get yourself in front of people, but the strategy and the implementation of the strategy and the analysis of what's working and not working is really the most fascinating thing, I think, in our in our industry now, it's just incredible. Like I always give a one of the stories I always tell, it's sort of funny, is we geofence a lot of things, and we started doing this, like, almost 10 years ago.

Dennis OZ  29:50  
Could you please tell us what geofencing is? Because most of the people here, they they're just starting marketing. Paul, so let's talk about geofence and what Let's go. I. So

Paul McAlary  30:00  
what geo fencing is is as soon as you could actually identify the location from a computer of a specific area through global positioning, you could only advertise to people's cell phones or people's computer, usually as people's cell phones that are in that a particular radius around that location. So the way it started for us was maybe eight, nine years ago. Somebody asked us, did we want to be in the Philadelphia Home Show? And they said, you know, maybe you get a booth in the Philadelphia Home Show. There's 1000s and 1000s of people walking through the Home Show. You really have to be an aggressive person on the floor of a home show to try to get customers to come in and let them to people that work for me at the time and myself, it wasn't the thing that we did best. And then one of the magazines we were advertising with at the time said, well, everybody at the Home show is going to get one of the magazines that has your ads in it, so maybe it might be good for you to be at the Home Show. And then I had just heard about geofencing, and I said, You know what? Let me call one of the advertisers. And I called them, and I said, here's what we want to do. We want to geo fence the Home show so that everybody's cell phone that walks into that home show is going to start getting ads for our company. We won't even have to be there. We'll get ads. And then the marketer said, Well, we can do better than that. There'll be people from all over the area and all over the country coming to the Philadelphia Home Show. Well, you only want to advertise the people within your area. So what we'll do is we'll essentially infect everybody's cell phone with your marketing plan, and then we'll wait a week, and then we'll see where they're located, and if they're still within the radius of the places you serve, then we'll only advertise to that smaller group, which turned out only to be 10% of all the people at the Philadelphia Home Show. So now we're advertising. They got a magazine with our thing, and we never even had to be there. And we're getting phone calls from people that were at the Philadelphia Home Show. So it started like that, and now we actually geofence individual homes. So when someone buys a new home, that's the most likely time that they're going to actually redo a kitchen. So once a home is sold or goes on the market, we get that information, we geo fence each one of those locations, and then every cell phone going in and out of those locations gets our ads. And we also geo fence our competitors. So every one of our competitors, every one of the cell phones that goes into their showroom is now getting pictures of kitchens that we did and, you know, contact us, and the second they're not happy at that showroom, they'll be calling us. And that's just the tip of the iceberg of all the things that we can do now. And emails, and people subscribe to our blog, and they subscribe to our podcast cast, and when they're on our website, we can identify a lot of those people's email addresses from being on our website, and before it was too invasive to really advertise directly to them. But people aren't too freaked out. Now, if they know, if they've been on a website looking at something, we don't have to, like, say, Hey, I know you were looking at our website, we can just send them some some things on kitchens and some other things. And if we, even if we send them an email, we can send them an email that's helpful, that they can get some information that they probably needed anyway, and then decide if they want to contact us or whatever later. So all those things we're doing, you know, and all of the plat all the social media platforms, managing, I've given some of that away to Juliet or office administrator. It's the marketing part is fascinating. And you know, you know that I'd have to tell you, yeah, for

Dennis OZ  33:45  
my from my personal experience, geo fencing helped me a lot. Back in February in Kitchener Bath Industry show in Vegas, well, we were exhibiting there. Physically, we're going to exhibit like we have the booth there, by the way. This will, this year we'll be in northall. I'm so excited about that because northall was a little bit, you know, more, you know, I like this northall better than the South Hall. So, you know, that's what I believe, that it aligns with our ideal customer avatar. Is another marketing thing, of course, but we use geofencing just to promote people that we are in that booth. And just wanted to share my opinion about geofencing with our audience today, just like Paul shared folks, it's just a really powerful it's marketing on steroids, so you can drive people to you, and these people will not be like if you are. Let's say, if you are talking about a specific gender, age, you can specify, and then your ads will be shown to these people only, to these people in that given area. So it's a really powerful tool, just like Paul mentioned today. Try to use it. And you know, geofencing your competitors is another great idea that we just, you know, talk about that, because these people who. Just went to your competitor. They are in the market. They are looking for something, and you just need to just show what you do. Maybe they just get a quote from this competitor, but they didn't really like the communication, right? There will be an opportunity there. So if you're really good at if you're really good at what you do, it doesn't mean that people will stop by and buy from there, you may create another like, another opportunity, like another opportunity for this client come and meet you, and maybe you will be the one who was just starting that project. So do you see how this powerful marketing techniques that we are here, just like Paul just shared in his also in his experience too. So it's really, really, really interesting to hear from our speakers that they are also engaging with this kind of emerging marketing technologies too. So Paul, let's take the conversation to the blog. You have a like one of the top rated kitchen design blogs over there. So how did you, how did you did this? What was your steps to creating this successful blog? And also, I have the follow up question I'm going to ask you right now, what is your best performing topic over there?

Paul McAlary  36:09  
Oh, so it's no question that now there's one blog I updated several times in 2018 I think was the first year we had it. But in 2018 we rated the top 50 or so kitchen cabinet brands and just discussed what their construction quality was, what their price point was, and then what their overall value was. And that was a blog that I did first in 2018 and then we updated it, 2019 2020 now it's an ongoing thing where it's not a dated blog anymore. We just continue to update it and add more cabinet companies to the list. You know, as many people are on our blog, hundreds and hundreds of the blogs that we have, probably almost half of all those people are on that one blog now that rates kitchen cabinet brands, and it's actually used as a resource more than Consumer Reports, more than JD Power. It's the most used information source for people picking kitchen cabinets in the United States. People call us up all the time. The presidents and vice presidents of cabinet companies call up to either thank us or yell at me because we're not reading their cabinet well. And you know the answer is, is our criteria doesn't vary. These are the things that and how we rate them, and you can fix your cabinet, and then we'll rate you better. And then a lot of companies have, I think master brands, even updated how they did their cabinets, I think partly I don't know it for a fact, because no one from Master brands told me, but I know the bad press that they were getting when they were using three eighths of an inch sides on their cabinets was definitely hurting them. And then they changed, and they made them half inch sides you mentioned in an email that you sent me, just that we try to be transparent. Well, the whole cabinet industry has to get more transparent over time, because the homeowners are just doing more and more research, you know, but that one blog is 50% of all the traffic. It starts for us, usually on one of those individual blogs that rates the cabinet companies. And then, you know, all the other blogs are all topics that I find important. And then the secret to writing blogs, I think, is one to make them not too boring, so that people can get the information and enjoy reading it when they're getting it. And then most importantly is to answer comments on the blog that those popular blogs about the kitchen cabinet ratings that we do several of the those blogs have many, more than 1000 comments on the blog, and I respond to each and every one of them, and I respond usually, or at least sometimes, in a slightly humorous way. So if people try to challenge me or something like that, you know, I've even had customers say I knew when that woman wrote you that did what you said was wrong, you were going to give her a hard time or and it's my personality, but I exaggerate it slightly, because it makes it more entertaining for people reading about these topics and everything else. If they have a question, you answer their question. When you answer it, if you give them information and then make them laugh a little bit, it helps. That

Dennis OZ  39:29  
was really crucial point we just said there. It's really important for for all our marketing efforts here and folks here, we are talking about a about a website, blog on internet. It's not like a social media piece where people just consume so fast. This is a permanent piece of content that is standing there for years. And, you know, people are joining, people are getting updated information. So this is, it's it's really hard to create. That's why I was asking you what. Were the steps when you were creating it? You don't get these kind of a really big exposure and really kind of successful podcasts overnight. How did you get there?

Paul McAlary  40:07  
I think you just keep on writing them, and then different things happen. Every once in a while, something goes viral. We had a video that's on our website that shows a kitchen being renovated in 211 seconds, and it's, you know, stop action video. It's from 2014 so it's a long time ago. At one point, it was viewed in every country on Earth. And same thing with the blog. Some of the blogs, like one of the blogs that I wrote, it's called, it's about the IKEA effect. The IKEA effect is essentially a psychological delusion that we as human beings have that if we actually put work into something, and in IKEA that would be making the cabinets, putting them together, then we value what we did and what we participated in far above what would ever, anyone would ever think was rational So, and that's just human beings nature, So people that actually try origami for the first time. Well, then if they have to look at two pieces of origami, their own creation and one from an origami master, they will rate their own creation as better something like 60% of the time we are not good evaluators of our own product, so the IKEA effect and my whole blog on that incenses people. So if we advertise that on Facebook, for example, not only do we get an incredible response, but a lot of people mad at us too. But that's okay, because if they're really mad at us, they were never going to buy a kitchen from us. They're hell bent on IKEA, but it incenses people so much that, like I'm sure you would what is a good price to pay for someone clicking through to your website, that blog, whenever I run it, it's 10 cents. It's 10 cents a click to get somebody to my website to read that blog from a Facebook post, which is shockingly and then, of course, that we're only necessarily directing that to New Home Buyers, maybe new home buyers between this age and that age. They can't they got to be over the older than 25 because otherwise they can't afford a new kitchen. They got to be this. They got to be that. They got to have be in this particular locations. So we can tailor all of these advertising efforts on these different platforms, and in this case, get people riled up, which is a good thing, because now they're maybe on my website looking around, maybe lots of different things we've got. We had one viral thing, I won't get too specific, but we rate not just cabinets, but we also rated TV shows, HDTV and other TV shows, and gave them ratings, and we incensed one of the people whose favorite TV show we didn't give a good review to, who put it on that celebrity's Facebook page, and that celebrity has one and a half million followers, so one and a half million followers were instantly mad at me, but not liking that particular TV show, and then we actually had to shut down our Twitter and our Instagram account for like a week till the water settled down. But all news is good news.

Dennis OZ  43:13  
Thank you so much for opening the Pandora's Box. Because, you know, things will think that is. Things will think that something is really, oh my God, look at this. But in reality, if you just give people the actual like insights that is all other people are thinking about, right, with just one simple rating, web like infrastructure, there you will just, you know, then other all, millions of people notified about that. So it's, it's a really nice story. Thank you so much for this. Refreshing for sharing it. Well, yeah. Well, block is one part of it. Of course, you also have a podcast, which I believe folks here in on our show, the removal of success podcast. It's, of course we we do the podcast. But I am also a big believer, whoever here is like an audience, it's not really hard to really start your podcast and look you are the actual like the resource of information that people are looking out there. So that's what I'm gonna ask Paul. Paul, what, how did you What motivated you to start your own podcast, which I'm a big believer, that every remodeler, every kitchen, showroom, every design and build company, every kind of that company has to talk about some relevant topics that other people may be engaged, right? You don't, never. You never know where the actual next opportunity is going to go. You don't,

that's true Exactly,

yeah, and what, what was your motivational point that you started your podcast, and how you pick your again, just like the blog plus, and I'm asking, how would you pick your topics for your for your next podcast?

Paul McAlary  44:47  
So it's a both the just like I started my company because my wife said owning your own company is going to be different when it's kitchen design. I started my podcast because of my wife's daughter, who. What we were doing. Our blog got so popular that we were having people call us all day long, all night long, all the time, to ask us questions. And we couldn't, I mean, we just couldn't field those phone calls. So finally I said, What's a good solution here, not to get people mad at us? Many people give us bad reviews because we won't answer the phone. It's just anytime one of these people calls, we'll say when we'll put it on our website too. We'll say, Listen, you have a question, we'll answer it either on our blog, which helps the blog and helps the blog become more popular in comments on the blog, or you can call in on a Friday between two and 4pm and one of our designers will answer all your questions. It was up to like, three or four designers answering people's questions. That's how popular it was, which is a good thing, but it was eating up our time. And finally, my wife's daughter said, you could be recording all these phone calls, and you could be making a podcast out of it. You're already doing it and answering everybody's questions, why don't you make a podcast out of it? And I said, I'll give it a try. And the most amazing thing happened once we started recording it, it discouraged so many people from calling, because maybe they could listen to the podcast to get the information they needed, but also they didn't want to be recorded. And that was great, because now I could field all the phone calls, so now I didn't have to waste three other employees answering the phone to record this podcast. And the podcast was that much better, because it was all me, and, you know, the other employees, even though they're knowledgeable, I mean, I've been I'm the oldest, so I've been doing it the longest. So that created the podcast. And then if you want to really get into the weeds here, now that I've got all these podcasts under my belt, and now the thesis that I rejected doing when I was a computer engineer, that I refused to do, because it was 1987 or something like that, was on artificial intelligence, and I said that that was never that was a waste of my time in 1987 is not going to happen for 20 years. Turns out it's whatever, 40 years, but it was, was a waste of my time. I'm not spending all this time. I'm not even going into this computer industry. So I ended up becoming a contractor.

Dennis OZ  47:19  
But you were right about AI. It's almost like after 1987 it's almost like 40 years here. Yeah, you're

Paul McAlary  47:24  
right now. You can take AI and do so many things with advertising and other stuff. And now that I'm retiring, sort of, or getting close to retirement, we can use the podcasts and AI to have people ask questions. We will do this probably in a couple of years, on our website, and the they can get the answers in my own voice, right? Because transcripts from the podcast will all be downloaded into AI. I'll be long retired and long gone, maybe even who knows, buried someplace, and I'll still be answering in a Brooklyn accent. I'll still be answering people's questions about kitchen design. You know,

Dennis OZ  48:03  
from the beach, from the beach. You see how this, you see this how, like these smart people, just like Paul, looking at the future folks. You see that, right, AI is here to, just to help you. And a lot of controversy about AI. But you know, if you use the smart like Genie genuine way, let's say it's a smart way that are, you can really increase the like you first of all, you'll get a lot of like your workflows. Your workflows will be even easier to run and your customer service. Part of it now, Paul is talking about answering people with his own voice. Why? Because he recorded a lot. You cannot record all like a 3040, 50 hours of podcasts overnight if you were just creating the podcast, putting on there, just for AI to use when it's capable of doing such of things, amazing strategy and amazing like, you know, looking at it like AI in the best way that you are really looking at. So great. So it's great to hear. Well, since I found you, I also ask you another question about, like, these podcasts, I'm sure that you're building the authority is one thing. It's the most important thing. There have you ever think that is also helping you in that way too? Or it's just like you're just creating something for the future? Do you think that the building authority really brings people to you little bit prepositioned to buy, instead of just people just coming to you saying hi from getting from your front door and saying hi, or versus a person who consumed your content a little bit right, tuned into your podcast and read your blogs? Is it easy to sell? Or what do you think about that? Well,

Paul McAlary  49:52  
it's a little bit of a double edged sword. So unfortunately, we give people so much information that people. Do come to us that have consumed all this information, and they're totally prepared for the whole experience, and they're the best customers of all that we get because they've consumed the information, but then so many people too that just want to use the information that they got to avoid actually working with us and doing stuff themselves, and that is a trend. You know, you can't learn how all of the kitchen design and everything that we do. You can read all of the blogs, you can watch all the podcasts, but you need somebody that does it for a living to help you along the way. I mean, you wouldn't cut your hair on your own if your car needs a new transmission, you're not researching how to do transmissions. You're going to somebody that knows how to do it. You know, I don't know why it is that just because people have a kitchen, they think that they don't need anybody's help, but it's a who knows how many 10s of 1000s dollar project you need people just to help you, just to direct you, so you spend your money wisely and on the right things. But we lose a lot of customers that I know that use our website as a resource to not hire us. We just had a customer I spoke to this morning who used our company as a resource for his last kitchen, but finally, now is doing another kitchen and a new home, and now he's decided, You know what, this time I'm actually going to get help from you guys instead of using your website. But we lose some customers to the information that we give them. But to be honest, they're not the best customers. The best customers are always the people that are going to let us help them. We don't have an invested interest in you getting one kind of kitchen or another. We just want to help you get the best value for your dollars and get the thing that makes you the happiest. But we're not going to do it if you don't let us in. So you gotta let us in and let us help you and and at least look at the ideas that we have. So we lose some, we get some. And

Dennis OZ  51:56  
also, it's really disqualifies the, you know, the customers that you don't really don't want to work with. You know, that's, that's like a real, like, good filtration, right? It's just giving you that power our

Paul McAlary  52:08  
website. The positive alienates against people. Mean, there's things in our website that are designed we don't want to waste a click on our website, which is also why we have $150 deposit. It's not to make money. We don't care about $150 we, you know, we rip it up and throw it in the garbage can. It's really just to get a better class of people that are coming to us so that if you really think you don't need our help, you just want you price this kitchen out for me, I don't need your help. I don't need your expertise. If they, if someone invests just a little bit of money, it's $150 we'll give them 10 hours of our time, and by the end of that 10 hours, they'll have learned so much that now they'll know that the $150 is well worth it, and it's rare that they don't actually buy a kitchen from us. If they invest, they've invested nothing. Well, we don't even want to invest $1.50 or 350, whatever it is for them to click on. So even our ads all say right up front, $150 because if that's going to discourage you, then that's good. Just go to somebody else. We want, somebody that values us so that they're a better customer, and that means we're using our time more effectively. And actually, that's really what keeps our prices very competitive and less than our other competitors, because we're pre screening customers through our website and other things, even the name of our company, so the screens customers out a little bit. It's bad because we're very reasonable for inexpensive brands, but the main line, the name of our company, is the rich product around Philadelphia, and that makes people think that we're expensive, which we wish that it didn't really but what it means is that we'll always win the price battle in the end, because we're a little bit less expensive than other people, but it does screen out the people that are absolutely just if you type a word like wholesale or discount, even though we're less expensive than our competitors, our ads won't even come up, right? It's a thing that's the most important to you is, I don't care about design, I don't care about health, I just care about money. If you type cheap wholesale discount, none of our ads show up. You'll never you'll never see a paid advertisement. For us, we have so many negative keywords that we get that anytime we find even a philosophy that we think is makes automatically make somebody a bad customer, it becomes a negative keyword.

Dennis OZ  54:30  
Yeah. One thing about this, Paul, by the way, I just want to share some another example, folks, by the way, I just wanted to tell you that I asked Paul to have, like, a little bit of a 30 minutes interview. You see how this conversation is really, really entertaining and just we are going a little bit over time. Thank you so much for keeping, keep sharing with us. Paul, thanks so much for this one, for this negative cure. Did I, I was, you know, giving an audit to a company back in 2020, and the company. Is, they said we are the best strategy about Google ads. And we are, you know, what we are teaching, we are reaching out to correct audience. I was giving them an audit, and then I realized, you know, I was actually not about giving them, giving the audit about the keywords that they have. I was saying, look, there are people out there. They are looking for donations. Sometimes they use free kitchen cabinets. Keywords, you know, people are looking for donations. Could be a church. Could be like a non profit organization. That's normal. We have to, yes, we have to also have community to, you know, build, to build a better community. There is nothing wrong with that. But would you advertise those people? Right? This is the question. You won't advertise once I put free kitchen cabinets, they were the first one on the search results, and I just told them, like the amount of money that you're wasting for this part of keywords is showing me that you're also wasting a lot of money for different types of keywords. So that was the time that person really understood the power of negative keywords, just like you told well, it's, it's a whole another topic that the how you structure our ads right now you're talking about ads here, paid ads is, of course, it's really one of the other fundamentals here. But yeah, well, so we have, you know, when you look at your marketing, just like Paul said. He said, we have different elements there, right? We have your most amazing thing, I believe here is your own like help to the to your ideal customer avatar, with your blog posts and podcasts and everything. Because, you know, Paul, correct me if I'm wrong, but just like you said, giving that all this information to the people, it's a double edged sword. Sometimes you discourage other people, but at the end of the day, all these informed people will be prepositioned to buy from you because they are looking for an expert in the area, and you're going to support your expert vision for this local people. We are also running some, you know, podcast poll. We are running podcasts for our own clients too, that we are helping some local kitchen showrooms. And once in a while, my client was telling me there were two women in the grocery store. They were finger pointing me and laughing. And because they, they, they watched him on social media that they you know, this is the being the best known in the market is very important. Rather than being the best remodeler in the market, is also being the best known is the most important part, I believe, because if you have the like these strategies and all these great marketing strategies in place, then being the best known will take you to a place where you can be the best remodeling company in your area, because once you have like this exposure, once you have that great exposure, and you bring people to your own funnel and build your authority and tell what you do, that's the ideal scenario. When you look at these things, I'm sure Paul also have a what do you think that Paul Do you think that Jula can add anything to this strategy, bringing people and stellar service,

Paul McAlary  58:08  
having all of these people listening to blogs and being on the podcast and coming to the website? Does the thing that's the most important of all is makes Google understand that we're the authority, and once Google understands that we're the authority, then we're going to come up way ahead of our competitors in a Google search. So all of these things that we do, and all of the blogs and everything else, it's great information to give people out there. It's great information for our own customers to have, but its marketing goal is to establish us as the authority in kitchen cabinets, kitchen design, etc, and then that translates into Google just sending more and more searches in our direction. That's the biggest thing of all. Is that, you know, a Google search, it's more important. Like our company, we don't have a showroom on the street. We have offices in an office building. So you wouldn't know that we have all this samples and displays and everything else and all these things in this middle of this office building, because there's only a small sign on the building outside that we exist because we just decided that, you know what, having people wander in and asking us questions and doing everything else just eats up a whole lot of time that, you know, we can funnel out the people that we want to get over the internet. And now the people that are coming to us are already spent $150 we've already measured their kitchen, we've already qualified them. And now everybody that works for me and myself, we're spending time with better qualified customers, which, again, just translates into us saving money to be able to sell cabinets for less, and then not having offices. You know, if we had whatever we have or it's 1600 square feet of space on the street instead of in that an office building, it would cost three times as much. So, you know, we're saving. Any as far as that's concerned, but most importantly, we're we're just saving our time. We're not wasting time talking to people wandering in. When I used to work in showrooms, the people that would wander in like you'd spend the whole Saturday answering people's questions. You never see any of them ever again, right? Somebody would call up on the phone and just say I was wondering how the process works. That person was the best person you talked to that day all the people that just happened to take their Saturday off and wander around our beautiful showroom when I used to work for another company, those weren't good leads, really, almost most of them, at least. Well,

Dennis OZ  1:00:33  
Paul, thank you so much for sharing all your goals and languages with us today. It was amazing to have you here in our podcast. I have one last question before that. Just wanted to thank everyone who's joining us today. And also would like to thank Paul for sharing Well, I'm sure that you have a lot of like, learned lessons in the past, and you, I'm sure that is something that you would like to share with our audience, because we have among our audience, again, they have a lot of individuals who would like to start their business. Either would like to be a, become like, become a like a really successful Kitchen Designer. What would your what would be your, you know, suggestions for these people who are just starting and thinking about a career in the Kitchen and Bath Industry,

Paul McAlary  1:01:18  
so just starting and thinking about having a career and not having their own company, because you wouldn't start your own company if you're just starting your career, then I would think that the way I started is sort of a good way, because really, the entry point in kitchen design, and a good one is probably a Lowe's or a Home Depot in a home center, because they're going to train you how to use 2020, they're going to teach you some stuff. They're not going to pay you very well. It's funny, but they used to pay so much better. If you went to a home center 30 years ago, when we're in the plumbing aisle, the person you were talking to was probably a master plumber that might have been retired, and the kitchen designer might have been making back then, $25 $30 an hour. That's what they make now, 30 years later. And you know, when I worked at Lowe's 20 something years ago, a designer that actually brought to the Lowe's, he was making $95,000 a year in 2001 and I was making $70,000 a year because we were getting paid commission, and we were selling a million and a half dollars of cabinets ourselves. But that's not true anymore. So both of those places, you're only going to make $35,000 a year or 40 but if you're willing to sacrifice and work at those places for a couple of years, or at least a year, then you'll be able to get a job at the next tier of designing kitchens, which will be a private showroom that maybe pays you a little bit less. And then when you really get good at your job, and you become a really good salesman, well then the top salesman in our company makes $200,000 a year. So you can make a whole lot of money if you're selling a whole lot of cabinets, but the way you sell a lot of cabinets is, first of all, no one's buying a kitchen. For me, unless you're a great designer, and you're personable and people like you, but your designs also have to be very good. You have to learn step by step to get to the point that you can make a lot of money. And that designer that I work with at Lowe's, I know in 2020 he made over $300,000 a year designing kitchens. He's the first designer at Home Depot to sell over a million dollars in kitchen cabinets in the 1990s and then when he when I brought him onto Lowe's, he was the top selling Lowe's designer in the entire chain. He's not even a top selling salesman I've met in my life. There was one woman that had two full time assistants that sold $5 million in cabinets one of the companies I worked with so you can make a great living in kitchen design, you have to be able to sell a lot. You can't sell a lot if you're not good, because if you're not good, first up, all your customers are going to be mad at you because you make mistakes. So you can't make mistakes, you got to be good, and then people sort of have to like you and trust you.

Dennis OZ  1:03:58  
Well, Wow. What an episode it was. And Paul, thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Since you have a lot of like, you know, if anyone from our community, just, you know, from our audience, would like to even have a follow up question, what's the best way to reach out and get some information? Could be anyone like, maybe we will just have, you know, be people who would like to really start or, you know, who would like to build their own podcast. What's the best anybody that has any

Paul McAlary  1:04:29  
questions ever for me can always reach me one of two ways. Write a question in the comment section of one of our blogs, and the reason I answer those questions is one because it shares the information with everybody, whatever your question is, and also it adds another comment to the blog, and can produce a whole bunch of comments which help Google find us. So I'll answer any question you ask. You ask any question you want. If you put it on our blog, I will answer it. And if you want to talk to me in person, 90% of the Fridays every Friday Eastern Standard Time, from two to 4pm we have our podcast helpline, and you just call into the number and 610-500-4071, between those hours, and then I'm answering your people's questions. And usually it's not hard to get on. Of course, people know that they're being recorded. It eliminates a lot of people that are too shy to call in, as long as you're comfortable, and if it was something that came up that was personal, we would be totally fine. Not only a third of our calls end up becoming the podcast anyway, but you can always reach me on Fridays, two to four. That's what we're here. I'm here for everybody.

Dennis OZ  1:05:44  
Thank you so much. Thanks so much, folks. That was another episode of The remodeler success podcast, and we're gonna see you next time. Goodbye.

Mark Mitten  1:05:51  
Thank you for listening to the mainline kitchen design podcast with nationally acclaimed Kitchen Designer Paul mcalary. This podcast was brought to you by Brighton cabinetry, high quality custom cabinetry at competitive prices. For more on kitchen cabinets and kitchen design, go to www dot mainline kitchendesign.com.

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