Nu Look

same ad as mine. The only thing that changes is the name; it’s all the same tactics.” So, Nu Look went on a venture in search of its brand and to “establish and find out who we are as a company,” says Fingles. “It’s funny how companies grow organically and they don’t have a real hold on who they are. They think they know who they are, but we’ve been in business for 14 years and we had to hire a firm to come in and survey hundreds of cus- tomers and employees and to try to ascertain the emotional connection people have to the company. We went through a brand initiative to really figure out who we are.” Fingles recounts the initial eye-opening process that he and Bury encountered: “They had taken screen shots and printed them out on paper of not only us, but of our competi- tors, and they taped them up all over the wall – anything they could find online, whether it was a snapshot of our ad, a Facebook entry, knock on a door and you generate interest from a prospect, and then you sell a product. It wasn’t hard to replicate,” he explains. “They relied heavily on staff to drive sales and rev- enue. Being entrepreneurial in spirit, Tom and I realized ‘why should we not be doing this ourselves?’” “It took very little overhead to start,” Fin- gles continues, “just a little bit of grit. It was easy to replicate, but it wasn’t scalable. So, as we started to grow, we had to evolve to the infrastructure that we have now, which is far from the original. There are still some roots connecting to it, but we’ve changed quite a bit. We’ve introduced tertiary advertising ap- proaches and strategies. Canvassing accounts for about 40 percent of our overall volume; the other 60 percent comes from every other line we have in the water – buying leads from a lead aggregate company all the way to ad- vertising on the radio, or putting a billboard up on the side of the road. Marketing is our largest expense, other than cost of goods.” Although the company has thrived on a combination of solid craftsmanship, good customer service, and its ability to get its message in front of the homeowner, Fingles reveals that, in a competitive marketplace, where there are so many companies offering similar products and services, the next step in NuLook’s evolution needed to be about brand- ing. “There’s really no brand positioning in the marketplace,” he avers. “In the home services and home improvement sector, you can take my competitors’ ads, take their names out and insert my name, and it would be the exact NU LOOK HOME DESIGN