Our Mission Is Simple
Uncomplicate the marketing landscape.
Help home pros understand the marketing options available to them.
Watch great home pros businesses grow.
Core Values: Build It.
Home Pros Academy is driven by our core values. Our team is passionate about truly impacting home services businesses across the country and helping them navigate the ever-changing world of digital marketing. Every business decision we make is founded in the values we’ve created as a company.
We believe our work is most fulfilling when we are working with home pros who are well-informed and confident in the marketing decisions they are making for their business. That’s what drives our business every day.
Build It.
The core values of Home Pros Academy
Beneficial – Marketing can be one of the most beneficial investments for a business. However, when marketers report on their work in complicated ways, sell their services in canned packages, and under-emphasize the other components of your business that need to be ironed out before launching a marketing campaign, it can make marketing feel like anything but a benefit. We strive to tie everything back to the direct benefits our efforts are having on your business, marketing, and sales goals.
Uncomplicated – Our industry makes marketing tactics unnecessarily complicated to understand. We strive to uncomplicate the marketing landscape and help home pros better understand the options available to them so that they can make informed business decisions.
Intentional – We strive to make all of our business decisions based on our company’s values. We believe in making every business decision to better the lives of our partners. We believe in what marketing can do for a business, but we don’t stand behind what and how some marketers sell. We want our partners to feel confident and comfortable with the investments they make and have the ability to track the impact it is having on their business.
Learn – We believe our sales process parallels what home pros experience when educating homeowners on the differences in product types, levels of service, etc. We strive to work with our partners to educate them on the entire marketing landscape, the pros/cons of multiple channels, and any new updates or changes that have an impact on what they’re doing from a marketing perspective.
Decisive – The specific home services niche you’re in, the market you service and time of year have significant impacts on the marketing investment and tactics a home pro should make. We strive to help our partners make the best decisions for their business — we will never make decisions based off our service offerings or margins.
Impactful – There are pros and cons to almost any marketing channel you can invest in. What marketing mix you choose needs to be based off of how you want to position your brand, your level of risk, your business operations, and the competitive nature of your specific niche. We strive to make an impact on the businesses and lives of our partners by helping steer them in the direction that makes most sense for them. We believe in building lifelong relationships with our partners and strive to have an impact on the lives of our partners while we work with them and for long after the business relationship ends.
Transparent – We believe open, honest conversations and access to marketing information are the best ways to help home pros. We work to expose the pros/cons of every marketing channel and provide our partners with the most up-to-date marketing information on every tactic available- regardless of whether or not it’s something we can execute on in-house.
Our Story
After working for an enterprise level agency for over 7 years and a decade of driving big results for small to large businesses alike, Amanda and Chris founded Home Pros to service a group that was very underserved from the marketing community. As they started building relationships with more home service providers, what they found was shocking. Most of these companies had been investing in some sort of marketing for years- and while some were getting okay results, others were getting blatantly ripped off.
From paying over $5,000 for a website that never happened, monthly SEO services when they didn’t have a website, the hyper-competitive lead bidding on Home Advisor and Angie’s List, and not emphasizing the importance of having basic call answering services before launching any marketing, Amanda and Chris were horrified to be in the same industry as fraudulent marketers who were charging for services that their clients weren’t receiving.
What’s worse is now that we have trusted home pro partners we work closely with, we see how often home service companies are getting pitched for marketing services they don’t need or that are actually too good to be true on a daily basis. Everyone has a “magic offering” guaranteed to give them the marketing results every home service provider needs to thrive.
That’s not to say there aren’t some amazing digital marketers out there doing good work for home services clients. There certainly are. The industry is just making it really difficult for home pros to make the best decisions when it comes to marketing their business. The truth is there isn’t a magic pill when it comes to marketing. What’s going to work for some won’t work for all, and how much you should invest and what you should invest in depends heavily on your individual business operations, bandwidth, market, and niche.
We know we won’t end up working with everyone we talk to. But our mission is to provide as much information as possible to every home pro so that more of you all can get the most of your marketing and better navigate the ever-changing digital world to make the best decisions for your business. We have designed programs to help everyone in home services understand the ever-changing digital landscape. While our modules are created for marketing in 2019, we will continue to update them as algorithms, tactics and channels change, giving home pros everywhere an opportunity to make smart decisions with their marketing dollars.
Meet Chris
,For more than a decade, I have been pioneering innovative and entrepreneurial marketing strategies for clients across many verticals including retail, healthcare, and home services. Unlike many “digital marketers” out there, I’ve been in the trenches working on some of the biggest brands in the country and watching the evolution of customer acquisition using digital marketing.
My wife and I started Home Pros Academy because we’ve seen far too many hard working business owners fail to get the marketing results they deserve or worse get ripped off by shady marketing companies. Prior to entering the digital marketing industry in 2008, I was a partner in a kitchen remodeling company and also flipped houses for three years until the housing marketing crashed. I’ve worked with countless home services professionals who all want to grow their business, but are frustrated by the lack of knowledge to do so in a predictable and successful way.
Prior to starting the Home Pros Academy, I founded the Arlen Agency, which helped small businesses across multiple industries acquire customers. Before founding the Arlen Agency, I was the Director of Media at RMI, a large enterprise level advertising agency, where I lead large teams in the execution of digital marketing for big brands including Home Depot, Floor & Décor, Carhartt, TruGreen, Terminix, Carters, American Home Shield, Merry Maids, and Window World. I’ve worked across every digital marketing channel including SEO, PPC, Social Media, Content Marketing, Display, Analytics, and Web Design.
Prior to RMI, I worked as a consultant to local home services businesses in the Atlanta area including contractors, granite companies, window companies, pool companies, and more. My philosophy has always been to educate clients on the complexities of marketing and offer full transparency into the process. As a business owner, you need to have a basic understanding for how marketing works. Far too many companies try to keep their clients in the dark and in many cases it’s so that they can take advance of them. We started Home Pros Academy so that we could help business owners get real results.
Meet Amanda
In 2017, Chris and I started a home remodel that made me completely fall in love with the home services industry. I have such a high level of respect for the hard work home pros do and the unique challenges they face. The long hours put in, the competitive nature of the business, and the art/craft of what home pros do leaves me in awe.
I am a founding partner of Home Pros Academy and currently serve as the President of the Atlanta Interactive Marketing Association (AIMA). Before founding Home Pros Academy, I spent two years working with small to mid-sized home services businesses assisting with their marketing campaigns at the Arlen Agency.
Prior to the Arlen Agency, I spent more than 6 years in business development and recruitment for digital marketing agency, Response Mine Interactive where I played a key role in the successful development of the agency’s client acquisition strategy.
In these roles, I learned multiple go-to market strategies and helped consult 100’s of medical practices with their sales and marketing campaigns. It was a great job and I learned a lot, but ultimately found that medical marketing wasn’t where my true passion was.
During my time at RMI, I worked with the teams that serviced some of the nation’s largest home services companies including The Home Depot, Floor & Décor, Terminix, TruGreen, Window World, American Home Shield, Ned Stevens, and more.
I’m deeply passionate about taking what I learned at RMI and the Arlen Agency and applying those tried and true principles to help home pros grow their businesses.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of people in our industry who see home pros as a group that don’t have the same baseline education about how good marketing should work and have taken advantage of that to make a quick buck at a hard worker’s detriment. It’s my goal – through Home Pros Academy – to educate as many home services professionals as possible on how to best navigate the marketing options available to them to hit their goals.