Austin Gray:  Hey! Welcome back to another episode of the OWNR OPS podcast. I'm your host, Austin Gray, and in this episode, I have Brandon Dixon and Jake Pavelle joining me again. They both have been on the podcast for solo episodes.

Brandon shares his step-by-step process for how he does cold email outreach and how he's used that to grow Cleaner Streets. Then, Jake Pavelle shares some of his cold calling strategies. Brandon will share all the software he uses, how he goes about creating lists to find property owners, how he automates campaigns, and what all he does manually—it's all good stuff, so stick around for the whole episode!

I believe, no matter what industry you're in or what service you offer, you can utilize these cold email outreach strategies and these cold calling strategies to help grow your business.

Without further ado, let's jump into the episode!

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Austin Gray: Brandon, why don't you start us off by just kind of giving us the 101—how did you get into cold outreach? Then, Jake, I'm going to let you just ask all the questions that you wanted to ask about cold outreach strategy.

Brandon Dixon: Yeah, I mean, I’m by no means an expert. We started this in January or February, kind of diving into it. I had a guy on Twitter, Chandler Reed, reach out to me. I knew he had bought a B2B SMB that does commercial light manufacturing or something like that. One of the first things he said to me was, "Hey man, figure out cold email and you can grow that top line fairly easy and have it running behind the scenes without doing a ton of work."

So, that was kind of the initial thing. Then, I just kind of went down the YouTube and Twitter rabbit holes of where you learn things these days. Everything I’ve done, I’ve learned from courses or YouTube or whatever, so it’s nothing crazy. There are cold email agencies and all sorts of things; there’s a whole world behind it.

For us, it started with figuring out who your customer is. Knowing exactly what that profile looks like, down to location, industry, and who in the business you want to contact. For us, we have three or four profiles, like property managers, HOA managers, and anyone who owns a commercial parking lot. Then we have contractors in construction, excavation, dirt hauling, and utility services.

On the other side of the parking lot, we focus on industrial businesses that have their own kind of real estate, like cardboard manufacturers and water purifiers.

I started by going on Fiverr and Upwork, where you can just hire someone to create these lists. It’s fairly cheap to do; you just have to be super specific. Creating good lists is kind of the key here—you’re only going to get results if you have people who are actually interested in your service.

From there, I started using my cell phone and cold calling every single number. I probably got through 3,000 to 5,000 numbers. I was crushing the phones, and finally, I was like, “Man, I can’t do this and run the business. I can’t keep this up and run the business.” So that’s when I was like, "All right, cold email—let's get into this."

We've continued to do cold calling, and that works better; it just takes more man-hours to do.

Austin Gray: Well, that’s great, man! I mean, it's very similar to how I'm rolling right now. The difference is, with what I'm doing, I'm still actively prospecting on Google and in the field, adding those names in the CRM. Then the following day, or whenever I have time again, that's when I'll go call those people because I’ll have jobs in between.

At the stage of business that I'm at right now, I'm trying to figure out how to mass contact the cold prospects. There is a lot of value in that. Of course, having a warm prospect is ideal, but you’re not going to meet everybody or have a mutual connection with everyone. So how do you get in contact with them at max capacity?

I think that is through cold email because I find that with cold calling, there’s a limit that I’m finding is becoming an Achilles’ heel for my business right now. I have jobs for four days out of the week, and then I only have one day to prospect and one day to call.

From my sales background, if you're not prospecting and you're not calling, then you’re not really moving your business forward. At some point, you're going to hit a roadblock where you don’t have jobs or meetings lined up after your last one. Then that’s where the ups and downs start happening because you're constantly on this roller coaster—doing jobs for two weeks and then two weeks of prospecting, and then those two weeks of prospecting lead to two more weeks of work.

It’s that constant ride that I'm trying to smooth out as much as possible in the beginning. So that's interesting how you started with cold calling. You're still doing it when you have time, but you've transitioned that and evolved into being more of a cold email strategy. It’s no different than, I guess, advertisements or social media; it's just a cold outreach strategy geared towards reaching a wider audience.

Brandon Dixon: I think that depends on a few things. I’ll walk you through how we now create lists. Generally, I don’t use Upwork; I don’t really have someone go scrape them; I tend to do it myself. I’m actually creating, this week, a little SOP for our ops manager to start creating lists regularly on a schedule.

So, for the pressure washing side, to clarify, are you dealing with commercial real estate owners or business owners? Who's your main profile?

Austin Gray: The target market is very similar to yours—in the sense of commercial property managers, HOAs, even apartment complex property managers, parking lot owners, and just general business owners.

So, when you were listing off your ideal prospect, I was like, “Oh man, there’s some correlation there!” At a high level, it's more or less the same. We do a few different ones that have worked at different levels.

At a low level, you can pay someone for leads. The next step up would be going on OutScraper, which is great because you only pay for the leads you download. You can narrow it down by industry type and who you're contacting, like getting to the key decision maker or whoever. You’ll put in every city in your service area. It’s pretty self-explanatory once you get on there.

The other interesting one we've done is using a real estate website that offers a free trial. Chris Corner, I don’t know if you follow him on Twitter, but he told me about this when I was looking to subcontract a bunch of parking garages, which are huge pressure washing jobs.

He told me about Romy, which gives you a 7-day free trial to access a ton of filters for real estate owners. You can narrow it down to have parking garages or, for land clearing, you could set it based on acreage—so it has to be a certain size.

For us, targeting the industrial side of things was really effective because typically, the business owner also owns the real estate. We found a lot of luck with that.

I gave my login details to someone overseas to help me scrape all the information, and we got around 30,000 contacts from that. We've been just crushing that list, and while that one was definitely on the more expensive side because I’m paying someone to go into a website and create a CSV of it all, that one has been by far the most effective.

Austin Gray: Wow, that's impressive!

Brandon Dixon: I’m thinking about spinning up another company email just to do it again and to get that free trial again, you know?

With Romy, you can drill down into a specific property that you're looking for, like an ideal space, and it gives you the property manager’s or owner’s information.

It provides a wealth of information, such as when it was last sold, who the last owner was, and whether it’s only commercial real estate. We've picked up three or four recurring jobs from that, ranging from $1,500 to $2,000 a month in recurring revenue.

Finally, one excavation company that we’ve worked with, we’ve done around $20,000 for them so far just this year. So, it’s already paid for itself.

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Austin Gray: How are you crafting all the emails? Do you have a sequence of automation set up on the back end where, if your ideal market or prospect clicks on the email and expresses interest, it might go to a landing page, or is it just like, "Call us today"?

Is there any email automation set up so that you don’t have to craft every email that you send out? For those emails that you do send out initially, are you using AI, or are you writing them yourself to make them personal?

Brandon Dixon: So, that takes a little bit more research to go down, but I’ll share how I figured it out and what we use.

First off, you want to ensure you're sending emails from another domain that’s similar to yours. If you're sending from your business domain and sending out mass emails, Google might eventually think that you're spam, and now your company email isn’t getting into inboxes, which would be a nightmare.

So, we use Porkbun. You can buy domains for about eight bucks a year. For example, we bought GetCleanerStreets.com and TryCleanerStreets.com.

From there, you just want to get creative. You set up a Microsoft Outlook account for each domain. Each domain can have two email addresses associated with it. You also have to pay for every Outlook account you set up. I think we went a little overboard when I first started this.

We set up about 20 accounts! Since then, I've realized we didn’t need that many. We still have them, and I cycle them in and out so they don’t get picked up as spam.

Now, you need to set up URL forwarding within Outlook so that when someone clicks on that website, it routes to your actual website. You want to make it look professional.

Then, you have to set up a few records in Outlook, which I think are called DNS and C-name. Once you have all that set up—your Outlook, your Porkbun and all your accounts—then you use SmartLead.

It’s a software where you can do what you were asking about, where you can send out bulk emails. You can plug in a list of emails—like 5,000 people—and set up the variance of when it’s going to send.

You can set it up to send every three minutes at different times of the day. You want the process to look like a human is sending these emails—that’s the goal.

You have to warm up the emails; you can't just create an email and start spamming people because that raises red flags for Google. If you do that, they can essentially block your email account.

So, you warm it up over a 14-day period, and then it's ready to go. Once you get that, you can plug in a CSV file of all the email addresses and set it up with different campaigns.

Typically, ours are pretty straightforward, such as a subject line like “Hey [First Name], do you guys at [Business Name] ever hire out street sweeping services?” Your goal is just to start a conversation, to gauge interest.

If they respond, well, if they verify that they do use someone, like Bob down the street, I know that one goes into a follow-up call.

Jake Pavelle: That makes total sense. I mean it's essential to know how to structure that first email.

Brandon Dixon: Yeah! So for the first email, I think a good subject line can be something simple—like "Sweeping?" or "Question for [Business Name]."

The key is to make it personal enough that it doesn’t look completely thrown together by automation. The subsequences are automated and only set up if there’s no response.

I don’t want to pester them; I just set it up to so that if they don’t respond after five days, they’d get a reminder email.

Austin Gray: That’s a great strategy!

Brandon Dixon: Anything that gets a response in the SmartLead inbox I can reply directly from there. It will let you know when there's a response, so I'll follow up accordingly. I try to get contact information if I can, too. Like, “Would tomorrow afternoon be a good time to hop on a call?”

From there, my goal is always to get to a conversation or a meeting.

Austin Gray: Is your ops manager managing those responses as well, or are you the one handling that?

Brandon Dixon: I’ve given her the basics. She follows up with those leads, and we've set this up so she can run it while I focus on other aspects, but I’ll step in when we need to push further down the line.

Jake Pavelle: You know, you both have good points about how to navigate these calls. When I get someone on the phone, I want to just ask them questions and get them talking.

Whether it's construction, they need someone because the city is on them and their project could get fined or shut down.

Austin Gray: And that's very true! Both of you have provided incredibly valuable insights.

Jake Pavelle: The point is, I think of calling as a game. I don’t know who the other person on the phone is. If they say no, it’s fine. I just move to the next one.

I take a cool, calm approach. I'm not trying to be pushy or just sell something to them. The goal of the conversation is to find out if they’re interested in talking further, and if not, then I just let them go.

Austin Gray: That’s smart.

What I like about what both of you said is to approach it as if you're not under any pressure to sell. You want to have genuine conversations where you're simply finding out if they have a need.

Ultimately, it may lead to an opportunity. You mentioned campus visits—those in-person interactions are essential.

Jake Pavelle: Exactly! Like the retail center I did, I found the property manager’s contact information just by being observant at the site.

You notice a dirty sidewalk or dumpster area, and when you call, it’s a matter of reaching out and expressing your solution rather than immediately pitching service.

Brandon Dixon: That’s critical! Understanding their needs is key.

When you establish these relationships, you become a trusted resource. And when they need your services in the future, they'll think of you.

Austin Gray: For sure! Both of you shared fantastic strategies on cold outreach and the importance of being proactive.

If you’re considering sending cold emails or making calls, the advice you've provided makes it clear that the action is essential. Whether you send the email or make the call, don’t overthink it—just get started.

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