How Rays Holiday Lights Grew From a Side Job to 300+ Homes a Season

How did Rays Holiday Lights start?

Ray started hanging holiday lights as a side job while he was still an apprentice. He is an engineer by trade and works across electrical, plumbing and the other trades. Years ago his mother paid a company to hang lights on her house. They were incandescent bulbs with wires everywhere, and the company charged a lot.

At first customers supplied lights from the store. Ray set them up, took them down and stored them until the next year. He was 19 or 20 and worked for friends and family for a year or two, came up with the name in 2016, and took the business seriously from its second year.

Today the company uses only its own commercial-grade LED lights, cut to fit each house. It also stores each customer’s lights, wreaths and garland in labeled bins and reinstalls them the next year.

When did the business move beyond seasonal lights?

About four years ago, after Ray stepped away from his 9-to-5 as an engineer downtown and put all his time into the company. He added landscape lighting and patio lighting, the kind with Edison-style bulbs.

Permanent lighting took longer, on purpose. These are year-round lights controlled from a phone, with 4 billion colors. Ray said there are a lot of small components because data is constantly being sent down the line of lights, and only a few brands existed at first. He waited for them to perfect their systems, because he wanted to stand behind both the product and the installation.

His permanent installs sit in a custom-bent aluminum track, so only the bulbs show and the wires are hidden. He has done countless jobs removing stick-on “permanent” lights sold by big box stores and online retailers. In Midwest weather the tape only lasts so long, he said, and a month later a few bulbs are hanging.

What do seasonal and permanent lights cost?

Seasonal installs on the homes he does in Northwest Indiana range from $700 and up, and permanent lighting runs three to five times that. The seasonal price includes the lights, setup, takedown, storage and maintenance through the season. A returning customer might pay about $600 in the years after.

Labor is the difference. One crew can do 15 seasonal houses in a day. Depending on the scope, a permanent job may be the only one that day, with fine wires and waterproof connectors throughout.

Ray’s case for permanent lights is the long-run math. One customer had paid maybe $6,000 over five years of seasonal service, then asked what permanent lights would cost. Based on the length of lights he would need, the answer was $5,500. “Man, I could have had those,” the customer said.

As for customers who say they would only use them at Christmas, Ray drives by and sees the lights on for every holiday.

How does Rays Holiday Lights get customers?

It began with word of mouth and now includes paid marketing. Ray was on every job, customers had his direct number, and the work beat their expectations, so they told a friend. As more companies started offering the service, he added:

• Yard signs at customers’ homes, a cheaper first step.
• Every Door Direct Mail campaigns last year, sending a discounted offer to every house in certain towns. It cost money, and he said he got his return and made a few bucks extra.
• Facebook and Meta ads, where he has gone in hardest over the past year or two. A local business runs them for him.

All of that leads people to look the company up, which is where reviews come in. Ray had texted each of his roughly 300 seasonal customers individually and got maybe 10 or 20 reviews. He did not want to text them twice. He now uses Review Harvest for the ask and the follow-up.

How does he keep customers happy?

He focuses on overdelivering. Crews show up when they said they would and clean up on the way out. When Ray drives through a subdivision and sees a house where snow sliding off a metal roof has ripped the lights down, he tells the owner he is going up to fix it before they have asked.

He also tells customers to call or text about a single dead bulb, even at 11 at night. He will not come at 11, but he will be there the next day.

It shows in the neighborhoods. On one block the company does seven neighbors in a row, and his daughter asks which houses are his when they drive past at night. “Lights bring joy to people,” he said.

What would he tell another lighting company?

Do not compete on being the cheapest, and do not cut corners on wiring.

“Your $300 client cost you so much money because they’re going to call back,” Ray said. The customer spending $3,000 wants it done and knows you are going to do it.

He has taken over projects from other installers and found exposed wires, indoor wire nuts and no electrical tape where it was needed. Doing it properly costs a few more dollars, and if something goes wrong the fingers point at whoever did the job. His rule is to leave every job in a state he is comfortable with.

The company now does seasonal lights on a little over 300 homes with one crew. Next he wants a second seasonal crew, a crew whose expertise is permanent lighting, and more permanent and landscape work so his guys stay busy in spring, summer and fall. Half of his business had been in Illinois, and he is looking to expand the Indiana side.