Professional Christmas Lighting: Efficiency, Scalability, and Recurring Revenue

Key Quotes

"I'd taken all the med classes studied for the mcat the whole thing and I said yeah I'm starting a christmas lighting company and my wife's like wait are you sure you don't want to take a job that has health benefits and everything no I'm doing christmas babe we went to the ace hardware bought the ladders and just grabbed lights off the shelf I found a guy who made me this cheesy little flyer and then I walked around the neighborhood of some of the bigger houses in town the phone just went off the hook within the first year of doing it we did 700 000 in revenue and that was in two months"

Dean Lions explains that he pivoted from a pre-med path to starting a Christmas lighting company, a decision met with initial skepticism from his wife. Lions highlights the rapid success of his venture, achieving $700,000 in revenue within the first two months of operation. This demonstrates the significant market demand for professional Christmas light installation services.

"The right neighborhood is typically a well to do suburb where people have more disposable income than free time lots of doctors business owners people don't want to do it themselves they don't want to get on a ladder our direct mail campaign is built around home values we have it down to a science when you land a client in a neighborhood and their house looks great does that then lead to a snowball effect in that neighborhood yeah we have cities that we own because of that anytime you get one good house in the neighborhood lights turning on literally is your number one source of new revenue for bright nights"

Dean Lions describes Bright Nights' targeted marketing strategy, focusing on affluent suburban areas where residents have both the financial means and a lack of time for DIY holiday decorating. Lions emphasizes the effectiveness of their direct mail campaigns, which are tailored to home values. He also points out that a well-decorated client's house serves as a powerful catalyst for new business within that same neighborhood.

"Bright nights works at such a high volume that they manufacture their own christmas lights in china they order them in huge spools and cut them to the perfect length for each house's needs on the roof line it's a custom cut the guys just pull it off cut it bulb it up and then install it and then wire it all in"

Dean Lions explains that Bright Nights manufactures its own Christmas lights in China to manage high volume operations. Lions details how these lights are ordered in large spools and then custom-cut to the precise length required for each specific installation, such as roof lines. This custom cutting process allows for efficient and tailored application of the lighting.

"A 20 foot tree you end up paying about 70 000 for it but it's usually the case that amateur decorators like smith are a bit more creative than the professional installers smith is also the founder of a website called planet christmas which was at one time the largest forum for christmas light enthusiasts on the internet he's spent a lot of time talking to people who run christmas lighting companies and he says the professionals have converged on a very specific aesthetic"

Chuck Smith notes the high cost of advanced decorative elements like a 20-foot pixel tree, which can reach $70,000. Smith suggests that amateur decorators often exhibit more creativity than professional installers. Smith, as the founder of Planet Christmas, has observed that professional lighting companies tend to adopt a standardized aesthetic for their installations.

"The guys that do this for a living they train all their people to decorate the exact same way so you say you want to wrap a tree in lights then we all know that the spacing between the strings of lights on a tree is 4 inches which happens to be the width of your palm and then if you put lights in bushes you put them in a certain pattern up and down or back and forth and the reason they do that is if there is a problem mid season you have to replace a string of lights you can send another employee out to that site the vast majority of professionally done installs are all white lights"

Chuck Smith explains the standardization of professional Christmas light installation techniques, including specific spacing for wrapping trees and patterns for lighting bushes. Smith highlights that this uniformity allows for easy replacement of any faulty light strings by any employee. Smith also states that the majority of professional installations exclusively use white lights.

"Dean lions says that more than 80 of bright nights customers opt for white lights over color and apart from the lights most jobs just involve a wreath or this is kind of like the in and out burger we don't have a lot of different products we do big jobs little jobs shrubs handrails grow everything gets done with just those few items but a simple job can still be tough to pull off effectively take for instance a tree in the front yard we're going to wrap every branch on all the trees and there's not going to be any space that doesn't have lighting because it just looks magical and the more points of light that you look at through your human eye the more joy you feel"

Dean Lions reports that over 80% of Bright Nights' customers prefer white lights over colored ones. Lions likens their product offering to In-N-Out Burger, focusing on a limited but effective set of services like lighting trees, shrubs, and handrails. Lions emphasizes the goal of creating a magical effect by ensuring every branch of a tree is lit, which he believes maximizes the visual joy experienced by observers.