 When we're talking to architects or designers, the other part of it that a lot of people don't think about is the digital side of it. Welcome to the Smarter Building Materials Marketing Podcast, helping you find better ways to grow leads, sales, and outperform your competition. All right, everybody. Welcome to Smarter Building Materials Marketing, where we believe your online presence should be your best salesperson. I am Zach Williams and we have a great show lineup for you today. We've got Tom Reagan, who is the CEO of Color Communications on the show with us today. He's going to be talking about everything from how they market to architects, how they leverage color to a very fragmented market. Really excited to have Tom on the show with us today. Tom, welcome to the Smarter Building Materials Marketing Podcast. Thanks very much for having me. Why don't you kick us off, give us a little bit of an overview of your organization and how you got into the world of building products. Sure. The company itself is in its 51st year. I started, it'll be five years ago, next month here. Its core, actually, business goes back in the 1930s, the company that they acquired when they started it 51 years ago. I have always made color cards and color marketing materials for the automotive space. Our biggest sector is, you know, you go into Home Depot or a PP or a PPG store, Sherwin-Williams store, Benjamin Moore, and you get the cards with the chips on it, right? So we make the chips and we can print the cards as well. We're in, we do a lot of work for Bayer, Benjamin Moore, Sherwin-Williams. So the big paint companies, PPG, and then an automotive side, we do work with Exaltha, which is the reincarnation of DuPont automotive paint. So anybody that sees color as critical, we also, and I know we'll get into this a little bit, but we've really grown this peel and stick segment. So over my right shoulder, you see some samples of that. And that is, you know, a color matched to the client's color standard. And it sort of brings together the online and the offline world. And so there, Sherwin-Williams has that product. We do a little bit of work for Benjamin Moore. Startup company, paint companies that are online, Backdrop, Claire. There's another one, newer one called the heirloom paints. Those are all folks that we do work for in that sales vertical as well. How have you seen the market change in terms of samples? Because I think it's an interesting backdrop to look at because the way I view samples is it's typically a pretty good leading indicator of, you know, purchase intent and or desire by a particular target audience. What changes do you see that are happening in the marketplace in reference to that leading indicator? If I look at, you know, macro and how are you all trying to combat that or be the front of it? Right. So we're trying to be at the front of it. And I think that the key to it is recognizing that the customer journey is critical and the sample is a really important element in that journey on the color side of things, especially, right? Whether it's your house or second home or exterior paint, knowing that the color is going to match the way you want it to across the spectrum of the day, right, is critical. And so we really have tried to help our clients with their customer journey and accelerate that process. So instead of the old days where the painter comes in and paints 20 dabs of paint on the wall or the husband or the wife goes and gets three or four test spots and ruins the wall with three or four test spots. And then you're looking at for days. That's one of the examples of peel and stick. I could take those samples down and off the wall. If we were having a party or whatever and knowing whatever, know that they were there, put them back up the next day and we can look at them at nighttime, daytime, cloudy, sunny, what have you. So we feel like helping our clients accelerate that process is good for their business and then that obviously is good for us as well. What does your involvement with the architect look like? Because you mentioned a bunch of traditional D to C or B to C brands. What is your understanding of the architectural space look like? And how much do you deal with them? We don't sell directly to architects. Our clients sell a lot of architect kits and we do focus groups with architects so that we have a better understanding of what they're looking at and try and solve problems for them. And so some of the samples over my left shoulder here that that is actually automotive grade color that's coated onto a magnet. Because we had an architect say, I would love it for metal roofs, right? I'd love to be able to have a sample that's magnetized that I could lead behind. And so when we're talking to architects or designers, the other part of it that a lot of people don't think about as the digital side of it, right? So there's, you know, pick a paint company. They have 1600 colors. So how can we help narrow that field? So we do have an online visualizer offering that we have that architects and designers can use. Obviously, it could be a business B2C as well. But we're really trying to focus on a B2B approach and really help people grow their business. The focus groups that you're having with architects, is there anything that's coming out of those conversations that's surprising you? Specifically, you know, them saying, oh, well, this is like, you just given a good example of I want to use this on a metal roof. But like, are there any other examples you can, you can point out where what an architect is asking today is different than it was a few years ago and what they're thinking is changing? In my five years, the conversations that I've had with them, they want to guarantee that whatever you're going to do is going to work. They don't, they don't, they don't want any testing. And so we have a product, we partner with a firm out of Wisconsin that's an exterior architectural, architectural panel that will last 20 years outside because we put an automotive grade coating on it and it's a wood based panel. So when we started doing focus group with architects on that, we had some guys that just said absolutely won't do it. And why not? Well, let me see it 10 years from now. I want to make sure that it works and it doesn't matter. We can say we did the 20 year testing and Xenon arc and all that kind of stuff. Not interested. It's got to work. It's got to work in the field before I'll even consider it. From what I gather from the folks that have been working here longer than I, that's kind of new. Architects used to be a little bit more experimental on those kinds of things and they're really not. Why do you think they've shifted that way? Is there been just a change in the market or people are just more apprehensive in general? I think it's the whole, the whole security thing safety. You know, they just want to make sure that they don't want to take a risk on a product and they have their name associated with something that quote unquote didn't work. And so I think it's it's the old tried and true approach. We're going to go with all works. There's so many variables and I don't want that to sound like I like I'm diminishing that right in their space. There are so many variables that they have to consider these days that maybe they didn't have to consider regulatory, legal, environmental, you know, 10, 15, 20 years ago, they didn't have to have their arms around all that now that they now that they do, they're looking for things that are just let's check the box and make sure I don't have to worry about it. Yeah, they don't want that callback. They don't want your reputation. I want to shift real quickly to pain Tom. Like one thing I like to say, I mentioned this to you is where there's pain, there's margin. And when you look at your audience and you're trying to help your customer sell to their customer, when you hear them talk, your customers talk about pain points in the market or you do market research and you hear from architects or different audiences problems that they're running into. How do you look at that and go, okay, that's just an issue in the market or oh, that's an opportunity for a new product. And what I'm really after here is how do you decide if you should innovate and create new products in the marketplace based upon pain that you hear from your customer? So it's a great question. And it's, it's, it's a multi pronged approach. Try and keep it as simple as I can. First and foremost, inside the company of the innovation team that's run by our director of color research, but it's multidisciplinary. So we have fellows on the team that by and agree with folks that are on the team that are color experts. So it's across the gamut of our organization. We also mandate that there is a sales person at every meeting so that the outside voice is there. And kind of the, it doesn't have to be the sales person. And matter of fact, I kind of prefer that it not be the sales person who maybe has a project in front of the team because they're going to bring sort of a blind outside voice. If you will, that's not a really great analogy. But hopefully, you know what I mean? That, you know, they're, they're really neutral about it and they're looking at it from an outsider's perspective. And then we have a, we have a grading system that I use with our COO. And we sit down and we look at, you know, possible market size and, and really that's how we allocate resources. We're pretty aggressive in our approach. We'll test just about anything. If, if a client says it'll, it'll be an issue, we'll, we'll take time and at least try to fix it. We just went through this approach and Friday applied for a patent. So it's patent pending and I can talk about it. We're pretty excited about a new product. And it's a great example of our process. So several months ago, a client came to us and said, they've got a big line that's a semi-transparent stain. And they said, we're really struggling with getting samples in the marketplace. They're, they're having a chemical issue on their end, uh, shortage. And, and so they want to divert as much as they can to production as opposed to sampling. And they said, if you can come up with a way to do semi-transparent stains, the way you do your peel and stick labels, that would be something we'd be really interested in. And I will tell you that was not on our radar at all. We had never considered it. Uh, we've done opaque stains. As a matter of fact, this sample here is a stain. You can't tell because it's too far away, but it's got a stain green to it. A salesperson brought that to the innovation team. Hey guys, do we have a solution? Can we come up with something? And our director of color research really tackled it one after and came up with the solution. So we have a, uh, you know, this is a good picture of it. So it's just a simple two by four plank. And that's our peel and stick label on each end. So really look at that. And most, most of our listeners, I know you might be going, you're the listening to this, but if you go and check us out on YouTube, you can see the example. How, how has that received Tom? We haven't really been talking about it because we're waiting for the patent to be pending. Um, you are literally the first public announcement about, about the product. So, uh, we had some whispered conversations with obviously the original client that brought it to us. We were giving them updates along the way. Uh, but over the next 30 days, we're really going to be rolling this out. I think it's going to be really warmly received based on the fact that, you know, the peel and stick samples that, that you're looking at, when I started here, they represented, you know, less than 2% of our revenue. And, and this year, they're probably going to be, uh, depending on the mix in somewhere between 15 and 20% of our revenue. Wow. Yeah. So I mean, people love that product for all the reasons that it's simple. Uh, it's understandable. It's, it's matched to the color. They don't have to worry about the quality. We're agnostic to the customer journey. So in Sherwin Williams, they want it to be in store, fine, we'll ship to the store. Some folks want it to be all online. We'll, we'll support that, uh, with legit logistics, or if they want us to ship product to their logistics guy, um, we don't insert ourselves, uh, in their customer journey. And so, um, and, and I think as someone who once ran a marketing company, I think that's really important that they own that process, right? So that they understand exactly what, uh, because they know their customers better than we do, um, we know color and we know how to present it better than most people do. Um, so if those two things go together, it's really a great, a great story. I really like hearing you talk about how you approach these feedback loops from your customer. Like if I was to break it down and go, how do you process size or how do you systematize your product development? It starts with, you've got a plan to listen, but you're also thinking about what are the different parties that are going to pick up on different parts of the product development needs. So you can have a salesperson or someone in product development or someone in research whatever it might be listening to and going, Oh, there's an opportunity. And then you're willing to lean into that. And like you said, Hey, we're going to be aggressive in, in trying new ideas. And I think that that is oftentimes missed in our market is like, how do you build a culture of innovation and trying new things and failing right quickly? Yeah. And then how do you roll out? Is there anything there that I miss Tommy, you think is an important step in that process? Well, I think two things. One, you got to remember, this is, we're all about making money, right? That's the reason we're all sitting there. So you got to make money at this thing. So there is a point where you have to say enough's enough. And we haven't really hit that point on any project that we've gone to. We have said to people, sorry, we tried and can't do it. That's very rare. But we have a project that we're working on now. It's kind of the next project after this one, they were working at the same time. But, you know, I kind of chant the team kind of threw up their arms a week ago and said, nah, we're not sure we can do this. And I said, well, wait a minute, I remember when you told me we did X, Y, Z, why can't we take that X, Y, Z and apply it over here? And they kind of came back with you know what, maybe we could do that. So one thing is we're running the business. The other piece of it is you got to keep the person who had the idea up to date. So in that case, the client was a little upset and said, hey, nobody's told me what's going on. Well, the team was heads down grinding and trying to fix this thing. And I was thinking to myself, oh, this is a big market. This is a way bigger market than anyone realizes, including the team. So I was trying to sort of rationalize that in my head and justify how big that market was. Well, meanwhile, no one bothered to go back and tell her, hey, we're working on this. So she got frustrated and picked up the phone and said, what's going on? You know, I'm mad at you guys. So, you know, we had a meeting with her and said, it's not because we're not doing anything. It's just we've all got heads down. So you got to remember, too, to keep that feedback loop with the prospect saying, hey, this is how we're progressing and or not, right? If you're not going to you can't do it, you can't do it. Sometimes people don't want to hear that. Or the other piece of it is we can do that, but it's going to cost you X. And in today's shrinking budget world, they're not going to Tom, this has been a really great conversation. I want to ask you a question. I try to ask most of our guesses, but, you know, being in your position of an organization you're trying to grow, you're trying to push the limits. What are some of the things that you encourage other companies in the building product space to think about and implement when it comes to being successful over the next year, especially in our current market climate? You know, I think as budget shrink or maybe better said, the scrutiny over budgets is higher than ever seems to me. I think the more granular you can be around why this expenditure makes sense is good and more granular as to the what the end users their experience is going to be with that product. I think a lot of times folks make a product and just think, this is so cool, everyone's going to adopt it. And the reality is the patent for this peel and stick label goes back almost 20 years. We just started leveraging it at length, I would say, you know, three and a half, four years ago. And I think the reason there was sort of a disconnect was we hadn't put together how to make it even simpler. And so we were putting the peel and stick labels on cards and then people are little itty bitty pieces people were taking them off them make sense, right? So once we sort of got to this idea of making them bigger and bolder, that that really led to it. So that's a really simple example, but it goes to the user experience, right? Who's the end user? How are they using it? Get as granular as you can around that and then try and connect the online and the offline. So that those that the story is resonates with them that they can get the sample easier, they can get the product easy, they can see it at a high level online and then make it easy for them to get it physically. And if you can put all those things together, I think that's that's probably the best best way to go. It's all about return on an investment these days, unfortunately, everybody wants to see a return on the investment. And so, you know, you have to keep that in mind as you're developing these things. Tom, thank you so much for taking some time to connect with us. If our listeners want to reach out and connect with you, what's the best way for them to do that? T Ragan at CCicolor.com and Reagan is spelled R-A-G-E-N. That's great. We'll make sure we link to that in the show notes. And for our listeners, if you enjoyed this episode, check us out at Venvio.com slash podcast to subscribe and get more. Until next time, I'm Zach Williams. Thanks everybody.