We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful True Lawton. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with True below.
True, appreciate you joining us today. Coming up with the idea is so exciting, but then comes the hard part – executing. Too often the media ignores the execution part and goes from idea to success, skipping over the nitty, gritty details of executing in the early days. We think that’s a disservice both to the entrepreneurs who built something amazing as well as the public who isn’t getting a realistic picture of what it takes to succeed. So, we’d really appreciate if you could open up about your execution story – how did you go from idea to execution?
The “idea moment” was so simple in comparison to getting the business actually going. I remember looking through all the texts of musicians and music industry people who were looking for work and all the texts from my handyman clients asking when I could get to their jobs. I remember feeling like I was standing on a geyser. I also had the sensation of looking up from my day job and seeing a rainbow slowly form towards where I was standing. The “idea moment”’ also was at the bitter end of our families savings. My path that year (2020) included turning down the best job offer i’d ever gotten (because it conflicted with a non-compete I signed) and being stung 42 times in one day during one my pre-handyman mid-pandemic side hustles… all ass and legs, such a hot look.
The very first thing I did was take my idea of musician powered handypeople to some key people in my life. The then dubbed The ATX Handyband, was pitched to family, businesspeople, and music industry contacts to test it, get it poked, and to make it better before I dove in with any serious marketing or brand definition. When I had the idea I was still just working as myself: “True Lawton…also a Handyman!” I was fielding more and more calls and texts from “friends & neighbors” looking for this elusive reliable handyman that they think is maybe named Drew? I was also having musicians that worked with me asking me if there were any more jobs? When I brought The ATX Handyband to my father and uncle; Mike and Than Lawton of Lawton Brothers Painting of Orlando. I heard of the hidden complexity of classic handyman work. How every job is a little different than the last, how you have to kind of know how to do everything, and much time you spend explaining to people that you don’t know where their pipes are either, or some other absurd rabbit trail to your drywall patch job you were hired for. I also heard the wisdom in finding a niche or specialty. Finding something you can do over and over and get better and better at it. I grew up watching my dad magically materialize money from house painting, but without ever really painting the whole house himself. It always seemed like his job was just to be the cool guy who makes it happen. Both my father and uncle found a way to transform happy customers into financial stability for our families as well as all the families of their crews over their 30+ years in business. Another business owner, Rose Vincent of Vincent Land & Light, really impacted me in those first weeks of mulling over the The Handyband idea. I was having a hard time coming to terms with whether or not I was going to do this Handyband thing. I had just spent 5+ years in live events and worked from truck goon to lead finger gun guy. Was I gonna throw all that out to run a handyman company? I couldn’t call my company The Handyband Collective, then just be another crappy handyman company. If i’m going to do this it needs to be as big as it can be. I kept thinking: “just how good is this idea?” Rose flat out told me it might be the best idea and opportunity to ever come my way and I should grab the bull by the horns and never look back. Whether or not that remains to be true over time, it was certainly the wind I needed in that moment. That moment is earmarked by the memory of Rose’s laugh as she welcomed me to the salty but fulfilling life of being a central Texas general contractor! She then handed me over a list of stuff that she thought would be great for any musician to do with some good direction. Lastly, I brought the idea to a music industry friend of mine, Adrienne Lake of Daydream Believer Creative. She gave the cherry. “Call it The Handyband Collective.” Adrienne booked my band when I first got to Austin and she hasn’t stopped booking, helping, and creating music culture in Austin since I arrived. She’s always been on the cutting edge of entertainment and I knew that I’d get some magic dust if I brought it to her. Dead on, and much needed. The list of things I didn’t know was astounding, even if I had a good nose for sales I’d never make it without a brand that could be recognized and beloved immediately. The Handyband Collective is a pain to type every time I type it into one of those dumb credit card machines at a coffee shop, but it also lends credibility to the work we do and protects our ability to remain a mostly part time work force.
Of course what I wanted to do next was start blasting every social media source with my cool idea and start booking work and making money! I didn’t. I knew that I probably had one chance to cash in on the novelty of musician handpeople in a big way before I had to really start proving it with the work. I knew that if any sort of marketing push was to work I needed to create the bucket big enough to catch whatever magic that came out of the geyser I believed I was standing on!
So, before doing any fun press or marketing stuff I painstakingly created a digital capture system that utilized free google form submissions. I used those form submission entries and turned them into almost obnoxiously punk rock pdf’s of our pricing structure, general billing practices, their clients submission info, and all our contact information. I also created a semi-complicated form submission triggered system (again a FREE Google sheets add-on) to automatically email my clients (and me) the aforementioned PDF and a nice personalized email from me: their regular joe rock-n-roll handyman dude.
Other things I did that weren’t fun but totally necessary: Created a Google My Business account, a google drive folder architecture, signed up for a google voice number with a local austin area code (when I did there were only 4 numbers left with “512” area codes), bought the domain name: HandybandCollective.com, and immediately hired someone better than me to make my logo (was totally a musician, too btw). For everything I didn’t know I leaned on folks in my circles. There’s a lot about websites nowadays that I had to learn and if I didn’t have the fortune of my friend James Jean (killer musician, father, pretty damn good carpenter, and IT professional extraordinaire) put together the website and get the hosting and domain locked in the idea probably wouldn’t have been as successful. I needed to jump into the marketplace looking and smelling like a real big pants company.
Are you starting to see the picture here? I didn’t do anything fun, for like months. My first instagram post on @atxhandyband is from November of 2020. I had finalized the idea in early October. I spent two months working as a handyman during the day and taking youtube and Google night courses on how to build free digital business infrastructures. As the number of clients increased for me at the end of 2020 I even had to figure out how to spend less time creating invoices and business intelligence data from scratch for each job. I made spreadsheets that had labor and materials calculators, subcontractor payout information, net profit totals, and could even kick out an invoice PDF with my venmo QR code on it. Of course, everything had a huge rocker metal hand watermarked into the background. I tested how wacky was too wacky and what was cute and fun. I also thought long and hard about what questions and information should be grabbed in the submission form so I didn’t have to immediately turn around and ask the client a question. .
My path up until this point had been: Idea, seek council, create operational systems, get web and digital real estate, and then I finally got to create some marketing and brand awareness strategy. My grand idea was to try and get someone from the news media to pick up a story and then simultaneously blast social media. Isn’t that how stuff goes viral? I asked everyone who was remotely attached to Austin music to share. I wrote a press release titled: “Support local musicians with your honey-do list!” I decided to make a video addressed to musicians who might also want to do this kind of work, and then shared lots of videos and photos from jobs where musicians were doing the work. As a side note: Although a great tool, social media, frankly, sucks. I hated having to learn how to use it. I kind of hate that every platform needs consistent content creation. It’s a 3rd job. The only thing I like about it is that it’s a fun way to engage your community and slice into other communities where you and them overlap.
After beginning to lose hope in the press release idea, I had finally gotten a bite by submitting to a local channel’s breaking news PR acceptance form (gotcha!). KXAN, a local Austin station, had some interest in the story. A producer for KXAN named Todd thought that the idea was really cool and wondered if there was a job he could film at. Fortune again, I was helping the pretty damn good carpenter and killer musician James Jean remodel his family’s home and a couple of musicians actually re-did his front walkway and landscaping. This was November 2020, they ran the story on their website in early December and then it was picked up to be run on Christmas day of 2020. I was spending Christmas with my in-laws at their country property near San Antonio. We we’re all in the Barn-dominium and the story came on, it was cute. Hey look there I am, look i’m a TV guy now, congrats from in laws…real life changing stuff. It was actually underwhelming and I struggled not feeling a little worried that I spent too much messing with forms and websites and whatever. We walked from the Barn-dominium to the “big house”. The walk is 2 minutes long and there’s no service between the buildings. When I got back in wifi range my phone started pinging like crazy. Emails being generated with each new form submission, people responding with go-aheads, and even turning over the photos and information automatically asked of by my automated system. Over the next 24 hrs I received over 200 job submissions. I practically survived my entire first year from that one day. I paid musicians and friends to just pour through my “master spreadsheet” and inbox sending apology emails to people lost in the shuffle and prioritizing all the rest by their chosen urgency ranging from “Yesterday” to “I just want this done sometime this year.”
It was absolutely the time I took before the idea went live that gave me the success I received in year one. It also meant I didn’t need to take on debt or trade bits of my dream for working capital. I had it all right there in the 264 initial “NEW GIGS” perfectly nestled in a google sheet.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
My name is (really) True Lawton. My mom says they wanted to give me a name that built character on it’s own. My most recent endeavor of life is my classic handyman company that is owned and operated by musicians! It was kind of always in the handyman world, it was the way I supported myself as I spent nearly 15 years as a “professional” musician. Although the handyman industry is mostly sketchy truck owners or failed specialists, there is a lot of money to be made just doing simple everyday “honey-do” items. Things like hanging TV’s, repairing fences and decks, or even swapping out a fan or light fixture. The Handyband Collective has one main objective: Give home repair and home maintenance power back to the people who live or work in the space.
Over the last 15+ years as a craigslist hustling handyman I developed a simple method of working through jobs and problems with homeowners: 1). Define, accurately, what the goal of the client is and how involved they want to be. Obviously the issue they’re dealing with is important, but the end goal or vision they have after the work is done is the biggest secret to discover. 2). Explain clearly what is known and unknown about their project or task and what that means for hiring someone to take care of it for them. It’s the worst when you take your car into the mechanic because (you think) your brakes need replacing. You’d say something like: “I think my brakes need to be replaced because there’s this terrible squeaking. A day later and $400 less you have new brakes, but the same squeak. If you’ve ever been in that position you know how that conversation goes: “You said you wanted us to change your brakes so we did.” 3). Make the work fit into their schedule, whenever possible. It’s bad enough to have someone come into your nest, mancave, badass kitchen and mess it all up, the least we can do is be considerate as to when we do it.
The story that I heard over and over from my clients was the same: I can’t get anyone out to give me an estimate, when they do come out I don’t know why it costs what they say it costs, and there seems to be zero guarantee that the person will show up when they say they would… ever.
All of these pain points have a customer focused solution within The Handyband Collective. 1) We take the clients job info, ask questions, get pictures, look at the project in person (if needed) and then create a shared game plan with the client. That game plan is how we’re going to solve the issue AND get to their vision! 2) We explain the assumptions that the estimate is based off of. This is important. Nobody has x-ray vision and nobody knows what the last person did when they were fixing your stuff. So it’s key that we’re all looking at the same picture, be it blurry or obscured. 3). We don’t do “arrival windows” for Handypeople, unless absolutely necessary. We listen and understand the clients life schedule (kids, work, whatever) and then book, with a calendar invite, in the time that works best for the clients.
Lastly, we’re all musicians. You know, the cool ones from the stage. We shred, bump, sing, scream, and swoon people on and off the stage. It’s a shared vision we all have, and we’re just applying it to fixing your toilet as well as melting your face or making you dance.
Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?
My story is of good ‘ole boot strappin’. I share it mostly to give hope to anyone who doesn’t have the opportunity to get money from traditional sources (family, private investors, or a loan from the bank). When I started it was still very much mid-pandemic and although there was a lot of money flying around, it seemed nobody wanted to invest in a company that dealt with face to face interactions every single day. I also just didn’t have the knowledge or time to do anything other than make money to cover bills and food. My wife and I are both entertainment industry people and in 2020 we were scrapping hard to survive!
Since I was constantly living on the edge of financial calamity I couldn’t take any chances where a job would lose money, especially if it was one that I wasn’t directly doing the work on. The question became: How do I construct this business so almost all the effort of the business is attached to services or items that make money. It caused me to start by re-thinking every aspect of how my industry does business and what the customer is wanting, needing, or expecting. What things are really appropriate for me to do for a customer and what should be re-thought. A simple example from my Handyman business was to create a new service role called: The Roadie! Our Roadie Services are used to get the needed materials to the job BEFORE it starts so that the crews can just show up and “knock it out!” It was the easiest target to find, because it’s expected that the foreman, or sub, or owner is supposed to do that.. but why doesn’t Home Depot do that for you? Amazon makes you pay a yearly subscription to do that with their company. Now, our Roadie Service does all sorts of things for people and opened up an entirely new opportunity to find more business and new clients. Our Roadies have taken heavy tiles to a dumpster for someone who couldn’t lift them off their garage floor (left by a previous contractor none the less). They’ve helped people move a couch because it was the only thing that didn’t fit in the u-haul truck. The development of that role has also increased the excitement of my subcontractors to make sure they have the materials and are at the job on time. Who doesn’t want to make a little extra cash for setting themselves up well that day.
I gave each bit of the business that same treatment. What happened was that I was just profitable. Although I am in conversations about funding for the next big growth of my business, I’m also weary of taking the money. We’ve become so strong as a company by just figuring out what works. There’s a lot of value in growing lean. If you’re stressing about money and you’re not going under (like today) then give yourself a couple hours to reconsider how it makes money and how maybe you could be doing it better.
Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?
Integrity. 150% say what you’re going to do, then do what you said you were going to do. My father has an awesome saying, he said it to my now wife when he first met her. “Don’t trip over the bar on your way in.” Brutal, but so real. The bar in the handyman world is just showing up. Not showing up on time, not doing a good job, not even sticking to what was agreed upon. It is literally just arriving alive. When I first started moving from a single operator to taking on more than 60 subcontractors I took a moment to talk to all my customers, but specifically the ones I liked working for, about their past experiences in my industry. It went something like this: You ever hired a handyman before? What was that like? If they said no, I’d ask them: What’s one way that I can make this job a home run for you? I know it’s so cheesy, but it’s genuine and important. The next thing out of their mouth is most likely the key to your success.
After I asked that question about ten times I had a blueprint for how my company could stand out and how to continue attracting the right customers. In my business it was primarily these three things: Handymen as seen by the general public are: Elusive and unreliable and they don’t communicate well. When I asked if they had received some sort of written estimate, digital or otherwise, the best answer I’d get was that they’d get a text with a price, but not a lot more. I immediately started figuring out how my clients could be guaranteed solutions for those two main pain points. Currently, 5 stars across Google and Yelp. It was such a radical difference that if we made a mistake or had a scheduling issue we were afforded grace and flexibility. These practices have also been developed by me over a lifetime of being stuck with such a whacky name too. It’s pretty easy to call out someone for something that they’re named after.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.handybandcollective.com
- Instagram: @atxhandyband
- Facebook: @handybandcollective (https://www.facebook.com/handybandcollective)
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-handyband-collective/
- Twitter: @atxhandyband
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@handybandcollective1325
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/the-handyband-collective-austin