What 10,000 Doors Taught Kip About Your Pipeline

The Man Who Knocked On 10,000 Doors Before Breakfast

Kip said something to me last Thursday that I haven't been able to shake. We were doing our morning scrum — coffee getting cold, Lead Scout running through numbers, me trying to keep everybody on task — and someone made a comment about how hard it is to get homeowners to call back these days. How nobody answers. How the market feels different.

Kip just kind of smiled. That slow, knowing smile he gets when he's about to say something that sounds simple but isn't.

"You know what the homeowner in 1986 said when I knocked on their door at six in the evening with a vinyl siding brochure? Nothing. They shut the door in my face. And I said thank you and walked to the next one."

He let that sit for a second.

And then he said the thing I've been turning over in my head ever since.

"The lead was never the problem. The lead was never the point. The point was whether you showed up for it."

Forty Years of Doors

Kip started in 1986. Door-to-door. Vinyl siding. No cell phone, no CRM, no automated follow-up sequence. Just a clipboard, a brochure, and a neighborhood. He knocked on doors in the rain. He knocked on doors when it was hot enough to melt the soles off his shoes. He knocked on doors after people had clearly seen him coming and turned the porch light off anyway.

And he says — and I believe him — that those years taught him the single most important thing he knows about sales: the homeowner isn't rejecting you. They're waiting to see if you're serious.

Think about that for a minute. Because our system has 45,928 leads in it right now. Forty-five thousand, nine hundred and twenty-eight people who — at some point — raised their hand and said, I might need something done to my home. That's not nothing. That is not a small number. That is forty years of Kip knocking on doors, compressed into a database.

And what he'll tell you — what he told me — is that every single one of those leads has a door attached to it. And the only question is whether somebody's going to knock.

What This Has to Do With You

I see contractors come through here who treat a lead like a lottery ticket. Either it hits or it doesn't. They make one call, leave one voicemail, and when nobody calls back in 48 hours, they move on. They say the lead was bad. They say homeowners aren't serious. They say the market's soft.

Kip has heard that before. He heard it in 1989. He heard it in 2001. He heard it in 2008 when everything was actually on fire. And every single time, he went back to the same truth:

"The contractor who follows up one more time than they feel comfortable with is the one who eats."

That's it. That's the whole lesson. Forty years of home improvement sales distilled into one uncomfortable sentence.

Our Carrie on phones — bless her heart — she will tell you the same thing with different words. You'd be shocked how often a homeowner picks up on the third call. Or the fifth. Not because they forgot. Because they were waiting to see if you meant it.

The Door Is Still There

Here's what I love about Kip. He's not nostalgic. He doesn't sit around wishing it was 1986. He looks at what we've built at myEASysystem — the Lead Scout, the Review Engine, the follow-up sequences, the whole operation — and he sees the same thing he saw walking up a driveway with a brochure in the summer heat.

An opportunity to show up.

The tools are better. The reach is longer. We can knock on more doors before nine in the morning than he knocked on in a week back then. But the principle hasn't moved one inch in forty years: somebody has to knock.

So if you've got leads sitting in your pipeline right now — and if you're one of our contractors, you do — I want you to think about Kip in 1986. Clipboard. Brochure. Summer heat. Doors that don't open.

And the one that does.

That's the whole business, right there in one door.

Come find out how we help you knock. myeasysystem.com — or just come talk to me directly. I've got coffee and I've heard every excuse, so don't bother bringing one of those.

Bring coffee instead.