Adapting a 50-Year Window Treatment Business for Today’s Homeowners with Brandon Moss

TRANSCRIPT

William Hanke (00:01)
Welcome to another episode of Marketing Panes. Today’s conversation is part of our quarterly series where we step back and talk about what’s happening right now in the window treatment industry, what’s changing and what business owners should be paying attention to this quarter. My name is Will Hanke and today I’m joined with

Brandon Moss, CEO of a nearly 50 year old window treatment business.

Brandon represents the next generation of leadership.

balancing longstanding values with realities of today’s homeowners and modern marketing. In this episode, we’ll dig into how legacy businesses adapt, what Brandon is seeing in the market right now, and the lessons other owners can take into the rest of this year. Brandon, thank you for being on today.

Brandon (00:51)
Hey, Will good to see you, you handsome little fellow, you.

William Hanke (00:54)
I appreciate that. ⁓ Fantastic having you on. I always enjoy our conversations. Tell me what it was like stepping into a leadership role in a business that your father built.

Brandon (00:59)
Yes.

So a little about my background for the listeners. My wife and I own a manufacturing company. We are in the dairy manufacturing and we manufacture ice cream.

I’m not really at liberty to tell you the companies that we sell to, but they’re very large. There’s a lot of quality control and safety issues that go into that.

I expect the manufacturers of window treatments to follow those same quality issues. about five years ago, my father had suddenly passed away. He started this blinds company in 1979. I grew up in it. I was literally playing in the basement on Graber G71 tracks. These were my toys.

William Hanke (01:31)
you

you

Brandon (01:48)
My

brother and I built forts with them and I would install on Saturdays. When I went off to college, my father bought me a pickup truck, a toolbox and said, while you’re studying, sell blinds. And that’s what I did. ⁓ At some point after college, I went back down to South Florida, worked with my father and his store for a little bit and decided, you know what?

William Hanke (02:04)
nice.

Brandon (02:13)
I don’t want to do this. Let me get out of this business. I came back to central Florida and my wife and I built this factory that makes ice cream. So when my father had passed away, we were closing things up, tying up loose ends and I just fit into it like an old sock, an old glove. It felt comfortable. And my wife took over the ice cream business and I’m rebuilding and relearning this window treatment industry.

William Hanke (02:40)
Nice, nice. So it was always there, but kind of out of mind, I guess. And now.

Brandon (02:46)
Yeah,

I left the industry just as there was consolidation from regional fabricators. And the major brands like Hunter Douglas and Graber were taking over fabrication at their own factories or overseas or, you know, over the borders, whatever they’re doing now.

William Hanke (03:04)
Yeah. What part of the the business that you’re now that you’ve been thrown into maybe voluntarily? What was kind of the hardest part to take ownership on early on?

Brandon (03:17)
I think the pricing strategy has been a real struggle for me. The name of our company is Blinds and Shutters by Discount Mike. And I think that worked in the late 70s and 80s, maybe even going into the 90s. But I think now, unless you want to do high volume on low margin products, there’s not a lot of money in discounting.

I think the consumer is not educated on what a window treatment is, what the product is, what the difference is between a premium brand or an off brand. I argue that 90 % of my customers don’t know the difference between Graber, Hunter Douglas, or ABC Blind Regional Manufacturer. And it means nothing to them. You have to demonstrate it to them. I think…

William Hanke (03:59)
Right.

Brandon (04:06)
You know, I was going off of some advice from some of my father’s old friends and people in the industry. And we had set some pretty high margins. We were losing sales, then we lowered it. And we’re trying to find a happy medium between, you know, 48 % and 60 % for every job, which is difficult sometimes. And you have to walk away. But I’d rather do quality jobs than a whole lot of little junk. I also personally don’t want to repair things.

William Hanke (04:30)
Yeah, that’s great.

Right. Yeah. I’d say probably 85 90 % of our clients don’t compete on price. We do have some that that is what they stand on is that will beat all the competition. But for the most part they are clients don’t want to compete on price.

Brandon (04:51)
Yeah, you’d rather do quality. I agree with that. I think another big challenge that I had was, ⁓

William Hanke (04:56)
Yeah.

Brandon (05:02)
and I didn’t realize this, but it became abundantly clear to me that there’s only so many fabric manufacturers on the planet and everybody basically has the same. the larger manufacturers, I believe they’re all dropping the ball.

I really do.

I think the I’ve come across a couple of regional manufacturers here in Florida that are doing a really great job. They’re providing good customer service. They’re available to answer questions. The challenge is they use different components. And what happens if they disappear? What happens if they have bad management with their money and they go bankrupt? Their lifetime warranty isn’t worth anything.

William Hanke (05:45)
Right. Yeah, definitely makes sense. think along those lines, your dad started this in 1979, you said.

What were some of the biggest things like pricing and like finding different manufacturers? What were some of the things that you found you needed to modernize along the way?

Brandon (06:03)
So my father was paper and pencil, know, carbon copy invoices went to a customer’s house and had the book, opened it up and sat on their table and went line by line. know, seeing that my father was in business for, you know, 15, 20 years just in central Florida where I am, I’m coming across repeat customers. They call, I go to their house.

We sit down at the kitchen table and they tell me about the conversations they had with my father. your father said this and he did that. My father was very, very entertaining. ⁓

William Hanke (06:35)
Okay.

Brandon (06:41)
My father made friends and joined that sit down. Trust was developed because we’re selling. Trust me, I’m going to take your deposit and I’m actually going to return.

William Hanke (06:51)
Right.

Brandon (06:52)
Join that period. There’s trust.

So there’s something to be said about the old charts where you open up the binder and you find the fabric and you come down and you pick it out and then you add the options to it and have your little calculator and add it all up because that’s the time period where you’re developing the trust. So now that I’ve switched to using the tablet and I’m using ⁓ software that has the pricing built in, I’m losing that.

that natural period to have a face-to-face, eye-to-eye conversation with somebody. So I’m finding myself having to stop and find, I love your dog, your dog is cute, and connect with the client to build that trust.

William Hanke (07:36)
Yeah, yeah, I can see that everything’s a lot faster and more automated, more optimized, but at the same time, you’re missing a piece.

Brandon (07:40)
Bye.

Right. Yeah. I think the technology is fantastic. I embrace it. I’m looking forward to the next wave of technology. I think the consumer is changing. The baby boomers are slowly becoming a consumer that they’re done renovating their homes. at the tail end of their lives. Fixed incomes, they don’t want to spend the money. Generation X, where you and I come from.

William Hanke (07:48)
Yeah.

Brandon (08:14)
We’re now starting to think about retirement and where we’re spending money, but you have the millennials and the newer generations that were built on do it yourself, learn how to do it. And they’re going onto Amazon and they’re finding a shade for $150. And they, when you say the same size windows, 400, 500, 600, they don’t want to buy.

William Hanke (08:37)
Yeah. Definitely makes sense the different markets or segments out there. then trying to, again, trying to build trust with all of them, but definitely in different ways.

Brandon (08:42)
Correct.

Yeah, you have to bring a value. If somebody is calling you to do an estimate and it’s just a discovery, you’re not going to walk away with the sale unless they’re an impulse buyer. If they’re cautious about their budget and they really want to know, it doesn’t matter. You come in there with a $5,000 quote, if that’s a thousand or $2,000 too high, they’re going to go and get other quotes.

If the other quotes are along the same lines of the same quality, the same warranty, and the same products, apples to apples,

your follow-up is going to be the most important. Make sure you get them on the phone. Make sure you’re texting them. Make sure you’re closing the deal as soon as possible. Within three, four, or five days of giving the quote.

William Hanke (09:31)
Isn’t it interesting how that’s always like in sales related calls or training that that’s always something people talk about as the follow up and yet it’s the most ignored piece of a sales relationship.

Brandon (09:46)
Yeah, sometimes it’s really hard to do. You leave a customer’s house. This just actually happened this morning. I spent three, four hours at this house. This is a $2 million home in a very prestigious area in central Florida. The quote was only $14,000. It was very reasonable for some motorized cell shades.

I thought that I was walking out of there. I discounted it heavily. It was going to be my last sale of 2025. It was before the new year. It was like December 29, something like that. And they said, you know, thank you very much. So I sent them a text this morning and immediately she said, can I call you? And we had a whole conversation. She removed 25 % of the shades to lower the bid, but I collected a deposit today. So you just never know.

William Hanke (10:33)
Congrats, that’s great.

Yeah, just from a text message. That’s awesome. That’s awesome. That’s great. So as a disclaimer for the listeners, Brandon is a client of ours, and you’ve been a client of ours for maybe a year and a half now, I believe. Yeah. So I wanted to ask you about marketing, but I didn’t want to set this up.

Brandon (10:37)
That’s it, just the text message. Yeah.

God, it feels like an eternity. I feel like you’re my best friend.

William Hanke (11:00)
From a marketing standpoint, what is really driving growth for you right now?

Brandon (11:04)
I would honestly, I don’t want to blow smoke up your skirt, but yeah, mean,

a good portion of it is the SEO work that you guys have been putting in a really good portion of it. I was really surprised. I understand the power of SEO.

I know how difficult it is to do and maintain and you have to have a good foundation for it, which is why I decided to hire you. I just didn’t want to do it on my own. I don’t have the time to learn it.

Running two complicated businesses is not easy. then, you know, doing the SEO. I stick with there’s only one company that I’m doing print ads with. I also buy a mailing list of people that closed on houses and every Friday we mail out postcards. But other than that, that’s all the marketing we do.

William Hanke (11:54)
Okay. What,

what are those postcards say? Welcome to the neighborhood. Here’s 10 % off.

Brandon (11:59)
⁓

Free paper shades, ⁓ congratulations on your new home, and standard stuff, yeah.

William Hanke (12:09)
Okay, okay. ⁓ Do you know if Florida homeowners are asking different questions today than they were maybe a few years ago?

Brandon (12:17)
You know what’s really frustrating to me? Florida homeowners or Florida builders, they are building sliding glass doors larger and larger, and the manufacturers are not keeping up with single roller shades or sizes that can cover those sliding glass doors.

William Hanke (12:39)
Interesting, okay.

Brandon (12:40)
Yeah, I mean, here in Florida, the clientele, have homes on the lakes. They have beautiful views. They want to see their views. They want to cover those windows up to stop the heat from coming in. But the roller shades, even the verticals, they max out at 144 inches. We’re seeing large sliders at 160 inches, 180 inches, spanning the whole width of these 3,000, 4,000 square foot homes.

it’s getting harder and harder to convince people to have a scene. So yeah, so the first thing that people usually ask is, what do I do about this giant door? My solution is to tell them to paint it.

William Hanke (13:14)
Interesting.

You

okay, that’ll work.

Brandon (13:28)
Yeah.

Let’s see. Again, I left the business and came back. I was in the business, it was wood blinds and faux wood blinds day in and day out. Now it’s roller and solar day in and day out. know, wood blinds are stuff that they had in the apartments. When I was selling and everybody wanted to get rid of their mini blinds, which is what were in the apartments or in the homes in the 80s.

Here in Florida, people want plantation shutters. They don’t want to spend the money. think the marketplace is saturated with so many different types of quality and what do they call them? Trunk slammers that they give it to them close to nothing and those are driving the prices down and it’s becoming harder and harder to compete. But those people don’t last long. They eventually go out of business.

William Hanke (14:23)
All

Yeah, yeah, not unusual for that to happen. I know it specifically in Florida. You mentioned the rollers. Are you doing a lot of exterior lanias, patios and porches? We might call them here in the Midwest.

Brandon (14:40)
I just started learning how to do that. I’m adding that’s a new business for me. I’m learning the brands. I’m learning how to sell it. I have found the market is really saturated. My first day out, so to speak, on a sales appointment, I was up in the villages. was selling a, the villages is a giant sprawling retirement area.

It encompasses four counties in Florida. It’s giant. Thousands and thousands of homes. A lot of people are putting these screens on their garage, these retractable screens. These were previous customers of mine. They called me back. They had three other quotes from three other companies. All three of them were selling them basically the same product for the cost I was buying it at.

William Hanke (15:33)
⁓ wow.

Brandon (15:36)
And that made me do a little research on what’s going on and it’s just a very saturated market.

William Hanke (15:45)
Yeah. Yeah. So is, is there anything you’re doing around the pricing side of things to help with it?

Brandon (15:50)
Well, I found another manufacturer. Yeah,

William Hanke (15:54)
Okay.

Brandon (15:55)
I found a local regional manufacturer that instead of a national manufacturer that was able to save some costs. But yeah, there are people giving it away.

William Hanke (16:05)
All right. So that’s a, that’s a good point to, find somebody local. Maybe you’re not paying for the delivery costs, the shipping to land it, that, that type of thing. Got it. Got it.

Brandon (16:14)
Correct. Correct.

William Hanke (16:17)
Is there anything that, that you’ve stopped doing because it just doesn’t work anymore?

Brandon (16:22)
Anything that I stopped doing, that’s interesting. I think I stopped measuring incorrectly because when you measure incorrectly, it costs you a lot of money. No, I’m just kidding. ⁓ I don’t know. I stopped a bunch of advertising because I was just everywhere in all these magazines and it just didn’t make sense. ⁓

William Hanke (16:45)
Yeah. Do you think that was a result

of your dad? Just a little bit more of the old school. You have to be on the yellow pages and you got to do all these other physical things.

Brandon (16:54)
Yeah,

I may have made a mistake after my dad had passed and I consolidated all of my vendors to basically two. I went with my gut instinct and said, I’m going all in on Graber. I’m Graber Springs industry, everything that they have, I’m learning, I’m going to master. You know, every manufacturer has different

thresholds and deductions and motor types and memorizing it all is almost impossible. You can’t have Post-it notes on your tablet to tell you what to do.

William Hanke (17:29)
Sure.

Brandon (17:35)
So, so I stopped selling every single brand, which was hard. I think, you know, letting go of Hunter Douglas was, one of the most difficult things for me because I know working with designers, they sometimes want the Hunter Douglas product. And I, I just, I wasn’t going to pay the money for it. My personal experience was my father passed away and we were running around repairing nothing but Hunter Douglas products. It was exhausting.

So I decided, you know, it was, you know, just after COVID, there was no sales rep in the area. I think we went through four different sales reps since my father passed away. And I just had enough with it. And the people that they’re hiring as a sales rep for these national companies, you know, my dog knows more than them.

William Hanke (18:25)
Fair enough.

Brandon (18:29)
In some cases, I mean, obviously there’s some seasoned reps out there that know a lot, but in my opinion, someone who had to relearn and had a lot of questions, I need to pick up the phone and ask a question right now. My sales rep needs to be available for me and has to have the answers. If they don’t have the answers, they have to be able to call and find the information. And it was very frustrating. I mean, even Graber is the same way.

the experts sometimes don’t even have the right answers or customer service contradicts you. And I don’t mean to put anybody down, but there’s so much detail that goes into this. They need to find a better way to organize it so that it’s at our fingertips.

William Hanke (19:12)
So do you find yourself doing a lot of fact checking? guess just even though you’re getting answers, you almost have to get two answers to make sure, you know, like a second opinion.

Brandon (19:20)
Absolutely.

Absolutely. I would call my rep and, or I would call customer service and then follow up with my rep and then find out what’s going on. Graber just started a couple of months ago, this text to customer service. It’s fantastic. It’s absolutely fantastic because before I would be on hold for 20, 30 minutes waiting for somebody to answer the phone. Now I text within five minutes, they get back to me and

And I’ve really enjoyed that service. I it’s one of the best things that Graber has done. So I really commend them. In my manufacturing business, we manufacture food. Let me kind of go off topic here, if that’s okay with you. We manufacture food and we’re highly regulated. So I have a lab in my factory that we take the product off the manufacturing line. We test it for coliforms and bacteria.

William Hanke (19:53)
that’s great. Okay. Yeah.

Brandon (20:16)
If it doesn’t pass the safety, goes away. Even the raw materials, everything is tested and verified. Somebody could get sick, somebody could die. The quality is really, really important. ⁓ We have ⁓ temperatures that have to be calibrated to verify and validate that everything is done correctly. So many things.

And it’s mind blowing to me that a blinds manufacturer can’t put the correct number of brackets in a box.

It’s just mind blowing.

mean, if we make a mistake, someone gets sick. If they make a mistake, it’s, I’m sorry. So I feel like those inflated prices that we’re paying from these national manufacturers, our orders are paying for their mistakes. So the smaller dealers, you know, my dad used to always say, make sure you’re making the least 50 % of your money so you can cover any…

Mistakes that you may have made I feel like Graber is doing that Hunter Douglas is doing that even Norman’s probably doing that So if a shade cost them, you know 50 bucks They’re charging us a hundred because they know they might have to remake it because of all the mistakes they make That’s my theory. Do I have proof? ⁓ But anyways, so the technology and trying to find information for my manufacturing company

William Hanke (21:27)
Yeah.

Brandon (21:37)
I had coded my own program. I had coded an ERP that helps us work in the exact way that we work using AI agents. It took me a year and a half to put that program together, but I did it. And now my company is running smoother because the information is at our fingertips. I’m not promising anything, but I’ve been experimenting with a blinds AI agent.

And what’s really kind of neat about it is I can put all of the price charts into an AI agent, provide the AI agent through a coded form of customers’ measurements, and it can spit out a quote. But what it can also do, what I’m hoping it can also do, what I’m leaning towards is messages. So for example, let’s say you put something in at 84 inches wide.

or 84 and a quarter inches wide. And the AI agent will be smart enough to know that you are at a price point break on that chart and can give you a warning. And then you could say, okay, I’m an eighth of an inch over. Can I get away? Do they have side panels? Can I save them money by reducing the size of this shade to get the job? Or can I manipulate the price a certain way? The other thing that it should be able to do, let’s say you’re quoting Graber.

It should be able to simultaneously suggest fabrics or products that other manufacturers have and give you simultaneous quotes instantly to offer the client other options.

William Hanke (23:16)
Sure. Yeah. And all that will pop up on your tablet. I mean, conceptually. Yeah.

Brandon (23:20)
Instantly, instantly,

it should take 10 seconds once you tell it to do it. This is important because the customers are getting information while you’re there. You’re measuring their houses, they’re on their tablet looking at Amazon, they’re looking over your shoulders, seeing the measurements. mean, because they’re not engaged in what you’re saying, they’re looking for the best price. So you need to be prepared for that. And I’m hoping that this works. My preliminary tests worked.

are working. The AI agent is doing it. It’s literally creating quotes. So what that means is these older software, these older quoting technologies are database driven. You don’t have to be database driven for an AI agent. You take a PDF of the pricing, put it into the AI agent, and it reads it, just as if you would.

William Hanke (23:58)
Yes.

Yeah, yeah, definitely really cool. I love the AI play. I think customers are going to understand, you know, kind of what you’re doing from that standpoint. ⁓ It probably works to your detriment when it comes to back to what you said earlier about not spending a ton of time with them when it comes to the pricing piece, because you can because things are a lot more instant. ⁓ But that’s the way it’s going. You know, like it or not, right?

Brandon (24:29)
Right.

Yeah, the more, the faster you can measure, the more accurate you can measure. I know I’ve been looking into some Bluetooth solutions and things like that. I’m not quite comfortable with it yet, but I’d like to learn more and see how they work. getting accurate ⁓ laser measurements faster and quicker provides more time to spend time to have a conversation with your client. I think

William Hanke (25:04)
Yep. Yeah, definitely

makes sense. Right. Along the lines of customer expectations, do you see how or how have they shifted when it comes to service, speed, communication?

Brandon (25:06)
I think that’s the key. Be their friend.

Here in Florida, we have lot of retirees. So the response to the technology depends on where they are in their technical life, so to speak. Younger people enjoy text messaging. I don’t think texting and emailing is ⁓ the only form of communication. I you need to make a phone call.

If they don’t answer, then you text. But it makes life easier, especially when we automate it through like lead boomerang. It’s finding that happy medium of not pissing them off and constantly being, texting them, hey, are you gonna buy it? Are gonna buy it? Are you gonna buy? ⁓ But sometimes, there’s the old adage, you keep asking until they say no. But you just don’t, you don’t wanna piss somebody off.

William Hanke (26:11)
Yeah. Yeah. But you also want to stay top of mind, right? Yeah.

Brandon (26:14)
Correct. Correct.

William Hanke (26:17)
What advice would you give to other business owners who are trying to kind of meet some of these changing expectations in today’s ⁓ industry?

Brandon (26:27)
Keep your eye on the ball. Don’t put your faith in one supplier. Make sure you’re spread out and look for the changes. There are a lot of changes happening out there. There’s new product developments. There’s really nice fabrics that are coming to the table, operating systems that are better than the national brands.

It’s the national brands don’t mean anything. They really don’t anymore. And it’s unfortunate.

William Hanke (26:54)
I’m seeing that sentiment on various Facebook groups and things like that, that people are pulling away from them in some obviously more drastically than others. ⁓ But good for the local US-made manufacturers that are out there that now have maybe a little bit more of a chance.

Brandon (27:15)
If they’re organized, they can compete. My Jedi instinct is saying, Graber is moving in the right direction. My Jedi instinct is saying that they are really trying to fix this.

But they’ve got 5,000 people working for them. It’s going to take time. Unfortunately, I’ve got money to make and bills to pay. I have to do what I have to do for my business now. But I’m always…

I’m watching the improvements that they’re making. I wish the larger companies didn’t treat the dealer system as if they didn’t need us. Or I wish

the dealers in the dealer system understood that they need us to survive. Because without us, they’re not moving any product.

William Hanke (27:59)
Sure.

Right.

Do you see any trends over the next 12 months that are going to disrupt a little bit more?

Brandon (28:09)
I think, without getting political, I think that the world right now feels like we’re not standing on stable ground. And many people are uncertain of the direction that the world is going, which means that they are uncertain on how they’re living their life and the choices that they’re making. So people that were in a spending

mode three, four years ago, willing to redecorate or remodel or buy new homes, that might be on pause right now. So I think you just have to pay attention to your community, see what’s happening. Know the builders in the area, know, like Lennar here in Orlando, they sometimes offer blinds, sometimes they don’t. And we all know the builder grade blinds are awful. But you know, you market around that.

William Hanke (29:02)
you

Yeah. Your comment about the people maybe pulling back a little bit. Do you also see that because of COVID, right, there was like this drastic everybody in the world is suddenly remodeling because they have nothing else to do, including me. You know, that was what my wife, hey, why is that wall that color? Right. You know. So are we seeing a downturn because of that also that there’s a lot of people that don’t

Need to be in that mode now?

Brandon (29:36)
I don’t know. I can’t really answer that intelligently because at the beginning of COVID, I wasn’t in this business. So I don’t really know. I know that my father was extremely busy during COVID before he had passed. And I know that we had 20, 30 orders pending to be installed when he did die. And that was 2021. So I was at the tail end of COVID.

William Hanke (30:01)
Yeah.

Brandon (30:02)
⁓ So I don’t know what was happening at the beginning of it. I will say that ⁓ I don’t know what happened in the last, I would say three, four months, but we’ve just been skyrocketing in sales. It’s really strange.

William Hanke (30:06)
Sure, fair enough.

That’s great. ⁓ I mean, I guess that could be part of the fact that people are heading that direction, maybe. And it’s more, yeah, it’s more on their mind, right? we need to get this place fixed up.

Brandon (30:28)
Yeah, hopefully.

It could also be that they just want to give me money to get out of their house. Like the sooner I pay this guy, the sooner he leaves.

William Hanke (30:38)
Ha

You will stop asking questions and go away.

Brandon (30:44)
Apparently

you’re not supposed to go into the refrigerator and take a beer while you’re at their house. The trust only goes so far.

William Hanke (30:51)
Oh, That’s great. So Brandon, thank you for being on today. I appreciate it. I want to just do a couple rapid fire questions to wrap this up and and get you on your way. Is that OK? I know you’ve got an appointment to get to.

Brandon (31:03)
Okay.

That’s fun.

William Hanke (31:12)
What is one business habit that you would swear by? And obviously, if it’s related to window treatments, that’s great. But if it’s ice cream related, I’m fine with that as well.

Brandon (31:21)
Always improve your communication.

William Hanke (31:25)
Okay, always with the cut.

Brandon (31:26)
Yeah. In other words,

with the customer, with the installer, with the people setting the appointments, always improve it. So if I’m finding that my appointments are not in the, you know, communicate, hey, this is what I need or hey installer, you know, read the installer form. This is, this is what’s happening with this shade.

William Hanke (31:45)
I like that. That’s fantastic. What is the decision that felt risky when you kind of jumped into this, but it’s paid off?

Brandon (31:52)
lead boomerang, working with you. I was nervous at first, but it has paid off tenfold.

William Hanke (31:58)
I’m glad your expectations were low. Sounds like that’s fantastic. Yeah, same for my wife. I mean, same kind of situation there as well.

Brandon (32:00)
Ha ha!

I hear you.

William Hanke (32:14)
What’s what’s one thing that helps you reset clearly outside of work?

Brandon (32:18)
⁓ I like to smoke meat. I have a offset smoker, which means I actually build the fire myself. I don’t do this pellet nonsense with a computer. This is caveman barbecue. And, you know, it takes me two days. I prepare the meat and then the following day I start a fire and I smoke, you know.

William Hanke (32:23)
Okay.

Brandon (32:43)
tons of meat over the course of a weekend, know, Saturday and Sunday, ribs, turkey, brisket, and then, you know, freeze what we don’t. I usually eat it while I’m cooking it. That’s the, you know, the hard part. ⁓ But yeah, I enjoy that. ⁓ you know, it lets some air breathe into all of the distractions of work. And then you have a clear head on Monday and a full belly.

William Hanke (32:56)
you

Yeah,

that’s great. Let me know the next time you’re doing that so I can plan my next trip to Central Florida.

Brandon (33:15)
Anytime, you know, when you’re fishing in the Keys, just, you know, bring some of that dolphin up to my house here in Orlando and we’ll throw it on the grill.

William Hanke (33:25)
Fair enough, fair enough. All right, one last question. What are you most excited about over the next 12 months?

Brandon (33:33)
I’m really excited about learning how to sell awnings. I think that’s going to be a fun addition to my business and I want to learn it.

William Hanke (33:41)
Okay.

fantastic. We’ve got a good amount of our clients that are adding on awnings as an exterior option.

Brandon (33:51)
Yeah, I think they’re great products. I think it’s going to add a substantial amount of revenue to our business.

William Hanke (33:58)
You’ve got a couple good manufacturers in the Florida area too.

Brandon (34:02)
Yeah, I’ve been looking. I’ve been looking.

William Hanke (34:05)
Yeah, very good.

Awesome. Well, Brandon, thank you again for being on today. I appreciate your insight. I appreciate a little bit of history about how you got thrown into this and some of your ideas on what you think is going to happen next. Appreciate your time. ⁓ If anybody wants to reach out for other questions, what would be the best way for them to do so?

Brandon (34:26)
they can email me at my email address. I don’t know if you post it. Brandon@discountMikeblinds.net

William Hanke (34:34)
Perfect. We’ll put that in the show notes, of course, below if anybody wants to reach out and ask you some other questions specifically about your brisket ⁓ or the ribs recipe.

Brandon (34:43)
Yeah, shoot me an

email. I’d love to tell you how I do it.

William Hanke (34:48)
Yeah.

Well, thanks again. I appreciate it.

Brandon (34:52)
Thank you. Will

William Hanke (34:53)
So that wraps up today’s episode of Marketing Panes. Big thanks to Brandon Moss for sharing his perspective on leading a legacy business, adapting to market changes and staying grounded while evolving. If you found this conversation helpful, share it with another business owner in the industry and be sure to follow Marketing Panes for more real conversations like this one.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you in the next episode.