At 16, I landed my first job in the water, fire, and mold remediation industry. I was working for a small Austin-based company called A Best, a name clearly designed to win in the era of the Yellow Pages. Back then, marketing was simple: brainstorm a name that starts with “A,” pick a category, call your Yellow Page rep, place an ad, and wait for the phone to ring.
The Simplicity of the Past
I remember watching my boss spend weeks tweaking ad placement and playing with clip art ahead of the Yellow Pages deadline. Marketing, to him, was an annual event. He didn’t see it as an evolving system. And to me, that was all I knew. I was just a teenager, committed to learning the industry and figuring out how to do good work.
But even at that age, I started noticing a disturbing trend: our calls were slowing down. Jobs were drying up. It felt like we were fading.
Then I Bought My First iPhone
Like most people in that era, I was fascinated by what this little device could do. One of the first things I did was type “A Best” into the browser, and what I saw shocked me. A clunky, outdated website that barely worked on my phone. A Google listing with a string of unanswered reviews. No strategy, no optimization, no defense.
I called my boss in a panic and told him we were in trouble. If we didn’t adapt to the rise of digital search, we were going to lose. He laughed it off and said, “Don’t worry. Boomers own the homes. They hate smartphones just as much as I do.”
But deep down, I knew he was wrong.
Over the next year, I kept raising the alarm. I pushed hard for change, for strategy, for relevance. But my efforts were met with indifference. Not long after the release of the second iPhone, the inevitable happened, A Best went under. The calls stopped coming. Yellow Pages stopped working. The industry had changed, and the company hadn’t.
I couldn’t depend on anyone else to keep my job, and that became very clear to me. I had to take control of my future.
I didn’t start All Nation Restoration with a marketing budget, a website, or even a plan. But I had relationships and a hunger to survive. I hit the pavement. I talked to roofers, builders, plumbers, and property managers. For the first few years, that was enough to scrape by.
But there were questions that still haunted me.
How does the internet really work?
How do you show up at the top of Google?
Why can’t these marketing guys on the phone explain it in plain English?
No one could give me answers. That’s when I knew I had to figure it out myself.
About four years into building All Nation Restoration, a close friend and employee betrayed me. He sabotaged client relationships and took as many of our customers as he could when he left. It was a near-fatal blow to my young company.
But in that low moment, the lingering question about digital marketing turned into a full-blown obsession. I had to rebuild anyway, so why not rebuild smarter?
Someone trustworthy and still with me decided to go back to school to help me uncover many of the answers that had alluded me for so long. I needed to understand the digital world from the ground up.
And so we started building something new, right inside All Nation Restoration. Quietly and methodically, we began marketing our own company. Testing, learning, and optimizing. For the first time, I understood how it all worked and why others couldn’t explain it.
The Birth of Rep Lock Marketing
As the years went on, I lost count of how many times people asked me, “How are you getting your leads?” At first, I didn’t want to share the secret. It felt like giving away the Holy Grail; something I had bled for.
But eventually, the pull to help others overpowered the urge to keep it to myself.
So, about three years ago, I made the leap. I separated our internal marketing department from All Nation Restoration and launched Rep Lock Marketing, a locally based, performance-driven, transparent digital marketing agency designed to stand in the gap for people asking the same burning questions I once had.
Since then, we’ve grown strategically and haven’t relied on what some people call “shortcuts”. We’ve chosen our clients carefully. We mentor them, partner with them, and protect them from the confusion that used to keep me up at night.
Stay strong. Stay focused. Stay in business.
