His Own Videos Were Sending Jobs to His Competitors (DDP #60)

Ben from Big Pine Decks had 80% of commenters on a local Facebook post recommending his company. A woman saw those recommendations, Googled "Big Pine Decks," found a phone number, and called it. She scheduled an appointment. The person who answered wasn't Ben. She only figured it out because something felt off and called him directly to report it.

Ben had no idea this was happening.

In this episode of the Doctor Decks Podcast, Jason Russell sits down with Ben, co-founder of Big Pine Decks in Bellevue, Nebraska, a composite deck specialist who built a Best of Bellevue award-winning company from scratch with his father-in-law, starting in 2019. Ben breaks down exactly how competitors are allowed to legally run ads targeting your content when you're not running your own, what it costs to stop it, and why a company with two crews and 30,000 social media followers only just found out this was happening to them.

But before the decks, and before the business, Ben was a 21-year-old police officer. The youngest ever hired by his department. He lasted less than a year, walked into the chief's office, and was honest enough about what wasn't working that the chief respected him for it. Then a master's degree, a father-in-law who'd built custom homes for decades, and a decision to niche all the way down to one thing and become known for it.

That's the through-line of this episode: the discipline of saying no to everything that isn't your thing, and what happens to your business when you do, including the problems that come with being known well enough that someone else wants to use your name.