Brick Paver to Bootstrap Marketer: Origin Story

👤 by The Bootstrap Marketer // 📅 May 6, 2022

At no point in my life did I think I would be a marketer. In fact, I didn’t even know what marketing even was when I first started doing it.

In this article, I’ll share my journey from being a tradesman, to failing and learning in business. Finally, to helping others successfully with their marketing.

Bootstrap Marketing My Own Business

Rewind back to 2012 and I was Troy the paver (a title I still think of myself as today). I had spent the last few years learning my trade working for my old man, and now I was starting to take baby steps to getting my own work. I needed to to announce the transition to “Troy Reid Brick Paving & Kerbing”. So I went with what I thought at the time was the tried-and-true method for generating work.

I got a business card and stencilled “Brick Paving” and my phone number on the tray of the ute. I did the stencilling with a sharpie.

To my surprise, the phone didn’t ring, and my business cards sat in the box.

So, I blamed my dodgy stencilling, and upgraded to some professional signwriting on the side of the work ute.

Still no phone calls. Lucky a bit of word of mouth was happening with friends / family so I picked up a few jobs, but work wasn’t exactly flowing in.

With a bit of spare time on my hands with a lack of work, I then stumbled across a method to get some jobs. I printed some flyers at home and went walking the streets dropping them off myself. The game plan wasn’t to just randomly distribute flyers, as I didn’t have thousands and they used a fair bit of ink to print in colour. I targeted the homes who had brick paved driveways that needed repair. I didn’t know about it at the time, but I’d stumbled across problem-solution focused marketing.

The Boostrap Marketing Lessons

Fast forward to 2015 and I moved to Perth to follow my other passion, coaching football (soccer). I picked up a job with a company called 123 Tradies due to my trade experience. 123 Tradies was a trade directory trying to establish themselves in Perth. They offered a simple online solution for customers needing a trade; 1 form, 2 minutes, 3 quotes.

I oversaw bringing tradies on board to the platform for a small monthly charge. The problem the business had was not bringing the tradies onto the platform but generating enough leads (customer enquiries) to satisfy them. Being a simple start up without funding, we had very little advertising budget. This was my first real exposure to bootstrap marketing; growing a business and generating leads on a budget.

We did everything over the 3 years we operated to generated enquiries, and to some extent it worked. We grew a platform of 600+ Perth-based trade businesses and were generating 100+ leads per month. Doing this, however, was hard work without money.

We did strategies from hundreds of listings on Gumtree, website content, Facebook ads, trade shows and even spent what little money we had on some TV commercials. There were no fancy systems to automate all of this. I remember Lizzie our young office admin spent hours a day reposting on Gumtree, whilst I used to toil away learning SEO and understanding Facebook Ads. We even had sign written vehicles (a bit better than a sharpie on the back of the ute) and purchased a Despicable Me minion costume for promotion.

We had some success, a lot of failure and a lot of lessons learnt from this adventure. When we closed the doors on the business, I had earnt my stripes as the bootstrap marketer. I’d learnt to run Facebook / Google ads on the cheap, done trade expos, signage, website design, landing pages, content creation, SEO, automations, and video creation. All this was self-taught through the tutelage of YouTube and Google.

Becoming The Bootstrap Marketer

I migrated into working with the founders of 123 Tradies in their insulation business. Here I was full time devoted to running the sales and marketing of the business. Being one of the bigger insulation companies in Perth, I was blessed with more money to spend on paid advertising. Whilst I say “more”, it was still small compared to a lot of companies I’ve worked with since. It still needed to be used wisely, and every dollar spent needed to be in exchange for dollars coming back to keep going.

When attending a trade show for the insulation company, I was referred by one of the owners to another company exhibiting there. Here was my first major client as Troy the digital marketer. Through word of mouth, I picked up numerous small to medium sized businesses and such my agency Piggyback Media was born. I didn’t need to chase the work, as I was (and still am) heavily working for the insulation company where it all started.

All these businesses share the same problem: they need more exposure and work, however, don’t have huge budgets to drive advertising. It needed to be clever, effective advertising that had a return on investment. I’d say this is the problem every business face, but it only gets harder when there are so many platforms and ways to advertise.

I hope that on this site I can share my experience, learnings, and tips to help you and your business in some way. The landscape of advertising is always changing. I hope that I can help make marketing simple and remind you that successful marketing can be done on a budget.

Troy – The Bootstrap Marketer (Formally, Troy the Paver)