From Contractor to Agency: Marketing Lessons Learned the Hard Way

How do you find a marketing company you can trust?

I wouldn't go with the cheapest. I wouldn't go with the most expensive. Vivid. It makes sense. I would find somebody that relates to my business, knows my business, understands the whole customer journey, the life cycle, cost, all these things. Welcome to the Home Service Hacks Podcast, the show for contractors who refuse to settle for average. Hosted by Bill Brown, licensed H vac contractor, AI and automation expert and founder of service titan Hacks community, each episode features real conversations with contractors, tech founders and innovators who are reshaping the trades from AI and automation to pricing, marketing, and management. If it's working in the field, you'll hear about it here. Let's get into it.

Welcome back to the Home Service Hacks Part podcast. Today I've got Jason Jackson on the show, the founder of Growth Pro Agency and someone who's been in the trenches as a business owner himself. Jason's here to talk about the hard lessons he learned building his own company and how those mistakes now fuel the systems that he builds for the contractors. We'll dig into what really moves the needle in marketing, why businesses don't need more leads, and how the first 10 seconds of a customer interaction can make or break the sale. So this one's packed with real world advice. Let's jump in. Jason, thanks for joining me.

Hey, Bill, I appreciate you having me on, buddy.

Great. So for those who don't know you, tell us a little bit about your background from the contractor to agency owner and what sparked the shift.

Yeah, man. So just like a lot of people, we were fresh out of school and we saw a need. I don't come from the trades. I come from the business side, but my partner comes from the trades. And we saw a needle and we started our company and quickly, quickly realized that there was a lot more to it on the building side than what we were ready for. And like most contractors, phones were ringing, but it wasn't customers. It was people trying to sell us something. The email inboxes were melting. And honestly, just trusting the wrong people made us shift from, you know, just being an owner to actually learning the marketing side of it and what people actually wanted and what we actually needed. And those costly, very costly mistakes we'll get into really shifted it that we were able to understand the marketing side, grow our business. And now I kind of have made position myself in my company where I don't have to be there day to day, and I can help other contractors and business owners do the same.

That's Great. It's great to hear. So you said that you help contractors avoid mistakes you made. And I think that's very natural for a coach to do because, man, you've made. Everybody's made more mistakes than they have had successes. Like, the successes are usually pretty big, but the mistakes really stay with you. Right. Because you're. It's that Monday morning Quarterback Hindsight's 20 20. So can you think about some big mistakes that you made? What were some big ones?

I think the biggest one was, man, just not having patience. We were always chasing that next like, oh, this is it, this is it, this is it. Like, this is gonna make us rich. This is gonna blow our business up. And after five of six of those of buying leads, trusting every SEO company, from cheapest to most expensive, you know, trying to do Facebook for something that wasn't really for our niche, we were just trusting what someone's email said. Looking back and really just understanding that it takes time, it takes commitment, and it takes a lot of effort. Like these seven, eight figure home service companies were not built in six months. And I think a lot of contractors, you know, they, they get into the business because they want to make money or they want to be their own boss, but they don't realize the commitment and the actual time it takes to build to that level.

Yeah, you just see the highlight reel online and people don't post their mistakes along with their successes. You just see, oh, this company's got to 20 million. Right? You're like, well, I should be able to do that. What's different about me? You know, I'm not. This guy doesn't seem like he's much more special than me. I take care of my employees, things like that. And it seems like marketing tends to be the thing that people are extremely impatient with. Right. They want, they want to put money out into the market and have it return right away. And I, you know, I did too. Right. So I had an H Vac business for 12 years and I was, you know, that was a big mistake I made. And I didn't really think about marketing as like an investment. So when you put a hundred dollars into the market, you don't get $200 back very often. It's not consistent. You put it in and you get, if you're happy, you get 10% back and things like that. So with marketing, I feel that I looked at it way too short term, which is the same thing along with you just being impatient.

100%. And it sucks. But it's, I guess it's the reality of it is, you know, these lead gen companies prey on new business owners because I think they know how vulnerable they are, including us. So the full story on us was we thought we would come into a market that wasn't saturated and it was just going to take off. And so we did like most people did. We made some Facebook posts, created a Facebook page. You know, grandma shared it, our friends shared it. It was real popular for the first couple weeks and it fizzled out and then it was like, wow, now what do we do? And then here came the Legion companies. You know, hey, we got 30 people looking for your service and your area. We'll send up to you. And we're, I'm like, well Jake, this is easy. Let's just, yeah, hire these. Everybody not do this weird. How. How special are we? And I'm so, and looking back at it, I, I'm, I'm glad it happened that. But I was like, what were you thinking? And you know, we were in, we're doing a lot of, we do a lot of heavy indoor air quality, so a lot of erv, fresh air ventilation, things like that. And it's not very saturated. And we're, we're pulling the houses and our competitors are pulling out of the driveway from already giving them a bed. It's like, how'd he know? And I was like that.

Just.

If they're doing that for our little indoor air quality niche, what are they doing for roofs? H vac plumbing. They're, it's six, seven people in a ten mile area they're selling these leads to. And it took us about three or four months, you know, and they got us for about 20 grand I think when we were done.

Yeah.

And finally I was like, all right, timeout. This ain't it. Reset. I had to block their numbers. We had to cancel our credit card because they wouldn't let us out of contracts that were supposed to be canceled. It was an absolute disaster.

And it is a mess, isn't it? You get so soured by dealing with these companies and I feel sorry for.

Them and dirty it is. And if you get on like I'm probably like you, I'm in all these home service groups on Facebook and on a given day I can probably see five to 10 people that have got ripped off. And it's like, yeah, no wonder the blue collar industry has their guard up so high and they're scared to invest in this stuff because everybody's got a story like mine almost, I almost guarantee it. And if they don't maybe afraid to admit it, but it's literally that bad for these people. And I could probably count on my hand or maybe two hands of people that I would say, yeah, you're in good hands. Like, they're a good company. I know them and I talk to a lot of my competition because it's healthy to be friends with your competition and learn what they're doing. And I really like, of all the people that I know in the industry, there's probably 10 that I would be like, yeah, you're good. Like, stay where you're at. They're a good company. Like, you just need to have some more patience. You're not going to get your return in two, three, four months. It's going to take time, right?

And I've always liked. It took me probably in the year eight or nine before I met a agency who I had a discovery call with that gave me really reasonable expectations. So most of them would, you know, I You engage for $6,000 a month, which was a ton of money for my little business at the time. We're going to build your website, we're going to do SEO. And as a former computer programmer, I even was a little skeptical about SEO. And we're going to build a website, SEO, do blog posts, create city pages and everything. And you know, we're going to give, I'm going to give you $6,000 a month. But the thing that wasn't really talked about is what do the returns look like on that? How many months do I have to give you $6,000 before things come in? And it was very muddy and unclear and I didn't even know to ask that question. So my expectations were not aligned at all because obviously I wanted the returns a lot faster than they were going to come. And I think that if I were in the agency's shoes, I probably wouldn't want to say, oh, well, once you, once you're about a year in, you'll start to notice regains from what we did. Well, it's very easy to go down the street to another marketing agency where they say, no, no, no, we're better than these guys. We'll do it in 60 or 90 days. And it's just not true. No, it's not true. And it costs me. I'm not sure where you are at with it, but I'm sure that a lot of other listeners can, you know, that are in the same boat. I, I've spent millions of dollars in marketing. That is a waste. And a lot of it was because of lack of patience, like you said. And. But the. The lessons learned from that millions of dollars of mistakes were so valuable. And you do online see the newer startup contractors going down that same path that we went down.

Yeah.

But a lot of them, this will. They'll go out of business because of it. This will end their company. And that's really sad to me.

Yeah, no, it's. It's terrible. It almost. And that's what almost happened to us. Like, we were at a do or die phase where both of our wives were looking at us, and they're like, guys, you're 30,000 in. You're making maybe 10,000amonth here. Like, we're not. We're barely paying the bills. Like, maybe this just isn't it. And it was because we trusted all these predators out there. And, you know, luckily I had a little bit of a business sense to me from school, and where I came from, I wasn't a tradesman. And so I shifted full time into marketing. I learned SEO, I learned Facebook ads, I learned Google Ads, and I learned our website and all this stuff. And it took, even with me doing it, a couple more years of just hard work to be like, oh, we're starting to routinely get organic Google profile calls.

We're.

Or, you know, and that was the thing that finally, like, switched. And I was like, oh, well, then, you know, other people were like, how you guys doing this? And I'm like, well, it takes a long time to learn this stuff. But it was having patience. And that's the number one thing, you know, like any other agency, we've lost clients. And on the outboarding call, I'm like, what could we have done different? They're like, well, you could have got us more lead. Could have got us more leads quicker. And I'm like, all due fairness, you've been with us for 60 days. And the algorithm, we just dialed it in. Like, we just figured out your. Your keywords. We just figured out your competition. We just figured it out. And I 100 respect that. But I said, you know, that was like the 90 of our churn was instant gratification. And, yeah, you know, we almost wanted to start going to, like, yearly contracts because of that. Because I was like, you're gonna appreciate me more if you work with me for a year than if you work with me for three months. I promise you. But, yeah, when you're starting out, man, and you're new, or even if you're established and you're that, you know that that charge is Coming out of the account every month. It just, it works on your mind and emotions start playing. And then you make these, you know, quick decisions that aren't well thought out, and then you're right in the same position where you started, and it sucks.

And if this is your last $5,000 that you're paying to an agency, you're pulling the goalie and you have to, you have to land on red. You got to land those sevens. Then you're, you're kind of, you're in trouble there. At that point, you know, you might as well go to the casino.

You might as well do. I mean, literally, you have, you have a 50, 50 chance of landing on red or black than you do getting that money back from a Google Ad. You know, it's just 3%.

And. Yeah, so for.

Yeah.

I remember talking to an agency and we, and we're really diving deep into having reasonable expectations and patience. And I remember talking to an agency and they were, we were talking about Google Ads, which never worked for me in H Vac in Columbus, Ohio. I never was able to, to justify the ROI on it, But I also never stayed in longer than six months either. So is it, is what it is. Maybe if I would have stayed in for a year or two years, it would have been better. But the first company said, all right, you're going to get. It's going to be $75 cost per lead. And I didn't even know exactly what a lead meant. What is the definition of a lead? So, okay, so I'm thinking 75 bucks and I'm going to be in a customer's home for that. All right, I'll pay $75 all day to get into somebody's house. And then even. And then I remember talking to another agency after I went through a couple of them, and they're like, it's going to be more like 275, 300 cost per lead. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa. That probably is more accurate. And they, in the end now, that changes the whole game. And then educating myself, I understood that a lead isn't necessarily an appointment. You have to convert that lead. And marketing agencies are on the hook for the customer converting that lead. So if we bring a lead, if your company brings a lead to someone and they don't convert it or they don't answer the phone, they go back to you and say, I need more leads. Right. So we talk about that, that myth of needing more leads. Right?

Yeah.

And what, what do you think causes contractors to Say, I need more leads, more leads, more leads.

I think it's just that it goes back to that instant gratification. You know, they're living for today and not for tomorrow. And that's why we kind of shifted to a more of a cons role because our guys were wanting the phones to ring. And I would go in. You know, we use some software where we track conversations, pickup rates, callbacks, things like that. And they wasn't answering the phones. They, I, I'd look at the LSA account and the Google LSAs would just. No answer, no answer, no answer, no answer. And it was quick to realize that you guys don't need more leads. You just need to talk to the ones that are calling you and you know, or call them back or nurturing them, right? They talk to them or they miss their call, they're like, ah, someone else will call. They don't call them back to check on that estimate they sent a week later. They don't call them in six months for a tune up. They didn't have a service agreement in place to, you know, do routine maintenance, things like that. And so it was quick for us to realize that, yeah, you guys may need some leads, but the ones you have, you're only getting 10% out. Like, the lifetime value of that lead is so small. And they, a lot of contractors don't think that way because they're like me and a lot of us when we started, we're just trying to keep food on the table, trying to keep the lights on. And as long as that phone's ringing, hey, life's good. But that's what takes you to that next level or the big guy in your area that you want to be is they have a system in place when that lead comes through. It's followed up with it'. Nurtured. It's the review process. They want to make sure the customer's journey is flawless from the time it clicks on the ad to the time they leave. Then they want to make sure that customer reenters the sales cycle somewhere down the line so that they can double dip on that customer. And then it's another touch point. They have kids, they have neighbors, they have family members, all that stuff. And you're back in that customer's house in six months doing some kind of service. And that's what we had to shift from just making the phones ring to helping them actually, you know, get more out of the phones that we're ringing.

You talk about that customer lifetime value, and that's something that many, many businesses use. Right. Because if you look at a company like a retail company, let's just look at somebody like Walmart. If somebody comes into Walmart and has one transaction and leaves and never comes back, that's it. Yeah, they're looking at this person coming back every week or every two weeks. And so they understand, man, I can spend 50 bucks to get a customer because I know they're going to spend $2,750 a year with me. And then without digging down through all my costs, that's what I can spend is 50 bucks. H vac contractors and home service contractors don't look at that because when they're calculating their return on ad spend or the lifetime value, they're looking at a very narrow window. So one thing that I did in my company, unfortunately after like year 11, is I went in and said, all right, when I get a new customer, what are they worth? Because I had years and years of data. What are they worth after the first appointment and they were worth on average it was like $3,000. And that was heavily weighted by system replacements. Right. Because we had $15,000 services that we did. Well, what are they worth on the second appointment? Cumulatively? Well, now it was another 30% above that. So if I looked at that customer in the first six months of our lifetime, then it was worth 4,000 or so. And then what about a year and a half? What about two years? And I found that 90% of the customer's lifetime value would come within two years. So now I was starting to look at customer acquisition cost. How much money did it take for me to get in that home and establish a relationship? And that is a, that's a very long term thinking because that isn't what puts food on the table tomorrow. If you're, if you're desperate and you're near the end of the line and you're out of cash, then what you're hoping is you throw this money into marketing and it returns $15,000 H VAC system replacements. If you get a diagnostic or a capacitor, only then you're like, well, I can't pay my bills with that. Well, yeah, you can, but in two years. So I was fortunate before I looked at all that to be pretty focused on retention. So I did send out emails to customers. I did send out direct mail. We did sell a lot of maintenance agreements and without doing that, we wouldn't have made it. Without the maintenance agreements, we wouldn't have. Because those, those people, the people that we, that we Got as maintenance members in year 10 or 11 of their systems age. Those became future ten thousand dollar bills without any marketing costs or ten thousand dollar revenue jobs without that. So to have that patience though, you have to have money and you have to have a plan. You know what I mean?

You do like, and it blows me away the amount of people that don't keep track of who they've done work for. So you can go back even if you don't have a system, right? Even if you don't have a fancy AI system or automations. But if I was down to my last dollar, I would go back to every job I've sold in the last two years and I would call them and try to sell them something. I would, I'd be like, hey, yeah, we, we installed an H vac unit two years ago. Have you had it serviced? Hey, I'm doing a special right now for a $99 tune up. Can I get you on the list? And I would go through those people. One, they're already warm, they know who you are. Two, they've already given you money so they have some kind of level of trust with you. And three, it's going to cost me nothing to go through that. And I asked some of my customers, you know, or even my clients, I'm like, hey, so you have like a Excel spreadsheet or a CRM or even your accounting software? Well, yeah, but I don't keep their numbers. I just write their name and address and I just give them an invoice. And I'm like, you guys, like we could literally touch your whole audience in 30 seconds in 20, 25. And I could probably book your whole fall in October whenever you're dying for work and it's 60 degrees and the windows are open. We could be doing furnace tune ups for winter and fill in these schedules. But now we can't because we haven't kept track of anything.

Yeah, if we, if there's no, there should be. Every job needs to have a phone number, an email address and a actual service address or customer address. So you can do direct mail, email and either voicemail drops or text messages. What I found near the end of my company is nobody would answer the phone anymore. My customer base was a little younger, about 40 to 50 years of age. If you called them, they wouldn't answer. If you did direct to voicemail, they would call you back. If you texted them, they would text you back. You know, that's a great piece of advice for any contractor. I don't care how you do it. Write this down, put it in an Excel spreadsheet or Google Docs. Google Docs is free. Get every bit of customer information, no matter if they, even if they didn't buy from you, get it because they found you somehow in the first place. You can go back and still market to them for almost nothing. It's. It's crazy. It's crazy how cheap it is. Do you think that that's the reason why contractors don't reach out to their existing customers as they don't. Don't have the contact information?

I think a lot of it. I get it. Maybe if you've been in business for a long time and you know you didn't have an iPhone in your hand back in the day, it was paper receipts. And I get that. But a lot of these guys that I've seen come into the market in the last five years, there's no reason you couldn't kept a spreadsheet or. I mean, a CRM is a staple in almost any successful company now.

Yeah, and they're cheap too.

And they're cheap. It's not like it's thousands of dollars a month. And I mean, I don't care if you have Service Titan or you have just a free trial of something. I had a client about a year ago. He was on his last $5,000 and he wanted to do marketing. And I said, hey, you've been in business for 20 years and you're down to your last $5,000. I said, let me ask you, do you have customer information of the last two years of all of your clients? And he said, yeah, it's in my CRM and housecall Pro. And I said, perfect. Can you, can you export that to a CSV file and give it to me? We're not going to do nothing but reach out to them. And he was like, well, I don't know about that. I'm like, you got $5,000 to spend. I am not going to go to the casino with your money. I said, yeah, give me, give me that list. I'm going to send. I'm going to text all of your old clients. We're going to do a database reactivation. I said, we're going to do a $79 furnace tune up, as long as you're good with that. And I said, we're just going to text them and say, hey, winners coming. We're offering a special to our existing clients. Are you interested? If you are, let us know. We set it all up, linked it into house call Pro through an API, they could book their servers, tune up all that right there. It populated on his calendar. We probably booked 60 furnace tuneups for October, November and December without spend that money. He and I told him and he's like, why man? I didn't think about this. I'm like, you spent so much money to get this list. Why all of it? All of it that goes back to that 275 customer acquisition that you talked about. Why would you. I'm going to get every 275 out of it that I can till there's nothing left. And then I'm going to try selling it to their kids or their grandkids or their neighbors or their family members. Like I want to stay on top of their head. Whether it's a newsletter, whether it's a mail flyer, we do a ton of referral campaigns for our clients around Christmas because everybody needs extra money. Hey, we're giving away a hundred dollar Visa gift card. If you refer someone to us and they do an install or a roof or whatever my client has, people will go sell for you to get a hundred dollar Visa gift card because it's the holidays and they need Christmas money. You have free salesmen literally working for you for a hundred dollars, $100 a job. There's just so many things out there that I feel like we don't tap into because we get caught in the hamster wheel of SEO, Google Ads, hamster wheel, SEO website. And it's like there are so many old school. I call it the ice cream machine salesman tactic. Like the guy that went around to McDonald's and sold the McDonald's ice cream machines. Like literally.

I'm just hypothesizing here or just speculating, but I've engaged with so many agencies over the years that do not do any sort of retention marketing for their clients. And I think that they're missing a big part here because if they did that, if they ensure that their clients always got that information. So most clients will let you get into their CRM and look and make sure you're capturing that data. If they went through and the agency helped them, maybe get that data from invoices or use their advanced skills they have with AI and knowledge of APIs, they could and they marketed their existing clients, then they could say, look, we're going to your existing clients first like you said, and we're going to use the money that we bring in from that to fuel getting new clients. So we get as much as we can out of existing clients. There's a lot of money left on the table from those. We get that, then we can buy new clients with it. And I think that if the agencies bundled themselves together with both of those things, they would be able to keep clients longer term. Because ultimately for, for me, when my bank account started to get low is when I really, I try to look at my PNL every three months in detail and say, all right, is this, is this particular expense, can it be lowered? Is it bringing a return on investment? Is it, or is it making my employees happy, or is it just making me happy? And if you sort your expenses, marketing is always up there. It's up there with labor, and if we're looking at overhead, it's up there with labor. But one question that you have is, all right, I look at this labor and I have this office staff to want to get rid of one of this, one of these people. No, that's a much more difficult decision. So marketing's up there and you're like, well, what have I really got from it? If it was great, my business wouldn't be where it is today. And so if a marketing company, marketing agency doesn't have kind of all of the options that they can give you for marketing and they just say all we do is SEO and pay per click. Well, now you're going to need another agency because you have to have all of the right options for you. So I mean, I've learned a lot over, over the years. And like you said, you spend a lot of time educating yourself on this. Can a contractor really be successful if they don't understand lead generation and customer life cycle? If they don't dig into that and understand all those metrics and, and create a customer journey or at least find the right marketing agency, but still educate themselves. I mean, I've never seen any contractors who grow, grow monster and go, yeah, we just, we just get leads at such a mountain. That's it.

Yeah, you know, I think they could be successful. I just don't know how successful. Right. How, how much are you going to be able to scale? Because it's, it's just going to be that hamster will affect money coming in. Money go out knowing that you have a, just a database of people that want to give you money or have given you money is the most powerful thing any business owner can have. And that's why we made that shift to more of like a chief oper partner approach was because I can get, I can make your phones ring. It's going to cost money. But if we go in, look at what you're doing, what's. And there's so many dank softwares out there right now and everybody there, I got this, I've got that. And I. We can go in and really see what you have and start carving things out. We almost pay for ourselves in tech stack costs by cutting the fat and being like, hey, here's what you need. Now go execute on it. Being able just to make their phones ring or touch their customers because everybody's busy. They don't have the staff, they don't have the money for staff. And with technology, being able to mass text and mass email and ringless voicemail and all this stuff, you know, working with an agency that understands a more holistic long term picture instead of, you know, like a drug dealer approach, you know, chasing that quick fix, you know, starting out just. Biggest thing is keep track of everybody's information and you know, and just seriously be careful who you give your money to. You, you work hard for it. Just if it sounds too good to be true, Jason and Bill would have already used it.

Oh yeah, yeah, you, all you got to do is shoot it. Shoot me a message on, on Facebook. Shoot you a message on Facebook and I'll tell you how much I lost on that marketing campaign and I'll tell you how I would have done it different. So one of the things that, that I found was, so we talk about those lead generation companies and one of them that's the biggest is obviously Angie's List slash homeadvisor. Angie, you know, bought homeadvisor these. I remember when they used to be service magic man. That's how old I get on that. What I found was, you know, you pay 25 to $35 per quote, unquote lead for a repair or a maintenance, and you pay five times that for a system replacement. And we had very granular data. So we looked and found that after, you know, we had 30 system replacement leads that we bought, only one of them closed. And it wasn't, it wasn't worth it. And not only did they not close, they didn't close a year down the road. So even though we kept reaching out to them, they didn't close. And so that money that we spent was just gone. So I don't know, maybe it was a competitor, maybe they bought from a competitor. Oh, by the way, if you want to know if they bought from a competitor, there is information you can get for that. I think that's important to know if they, if they bought from someone Else. But yeah, we found that the repair leads didn't convert to technician turnovers and systems as much as fast as they did in retail leads or in leads. We got like Google local services or SEO. So we'd look at it and say, oh, man, we got all these repair leads and they're out of all of those leads in the first six months when they got one system replacement. And our marketing cost is 30% of revenue. This is terrible. And we cut it off. Well, I looked back years down the road and said, you know what, let me attribute the original campaign, the original way that we got the customer to revenue, and then go back and look and say, oh, well, these Angie leads did turn into systems because we followed up with customers. It just took longer than it did with organic leads. And so Angie's actually ended up working out correctly. But we wouldn't have known that for years until after we did it. It's wild.

It is. And the biggest thing is you got to think about this. When that phone rings, they charge you. And a lot of these guys that are opting into platforms like Angie and Home Advisor don't have secretaries, they don't have CSRs, they don't have anything. And so they're on a roof, they're in a crawl space, they're in a basement, they're customer facing. They can't stop the conversation. And if that phone rings and you answer it and you're not prepared to service that customer, you're getting charged, they're not giving you credit back. It's over.

And that lead's probably gone forever, right?

It is, it is.

So, but they're still burning those leads, right? They're still setting 300 on fire while they're on a roof. Because that speed to lead really is a real thing. And every marketing agency says it and. But it's true, right? Even though we have these marketing agencies that we talk about that are predatory and you feel take all of your money and some of them do, Speed to lead is no joke. And put yourself in the customer's shoes. If you happen to reach out on Angie's, it's not like you're cheap. It's Angie's has massive pool and massive market and SEO push and you reach out to that. Whoever answers the phone with a friendly voice is going to get that job. And if it's happens to be an H vac system repair, I don't care how much you follow up with me tomorrow, it's already been repaired. It's over. Right. So, yeah, no Joke on speed to lead guys.

No, I mean, especially in H Vac. I mean, when someone calls for an H vac, they're not calling because they're H vacs getting old. 90% of the time they're calling because they got three kids, it's 105 degrees, it's 4th of July and their air conditioner's out and their kids are crying and they need it fixed yesterday. And if you don't answer that phone, you don't call them back, you're busy. Whatever it may be, it's gone. And that customer may be gone forever because the customer that, the company that does answer the phone may have a system in place that keeps it in that pipeline forever. So you literally just lost a lifetime of work by not answering the cell phone.

It could have been $20,000 that you lost.

Could have been very easily.

Yeah. And what would you with the $20,000? If you're doing everything else right, there's your future marketing dollars right there. So you're not to your last 5,000. So, man, the theme of this podcast has really been stepping back, creating, having a customer journey. Not just do I, you know, not just answering the phone, but looking at it and maximizing that lifetime value and being patient for it to bear fruit. I think that a lot of these companies who don't have those processes, if they get a lead and it turns into a big ticket, it's mostly luck that that happened. Not by design. Right. So, you know, and so you go ahead.

Let's think real quick before we move on. I want to talk about the, you know, the lead list we were just talking about. And you and me both know how much private equity is coming into play right now in the trades market. And a lot of these guys are, I, I, the guy I told you about that we did out in Utah, he was in his 50s, looking to exit soon. And his lead list that it just makes your exit value that much more. If you have 300 service contracts, if you have a lead list that you can sell to, all this stuff, I see it every day, hey, how do I sell to private equity? How do I do this? It's no joke what's going on. But if you want to make your exit that much more valuable, having these systems in place and being able to show them quickly how efficient, how much money you make in your customer base, and it's only going to make you that much more money even in the end when you sell, retire, whatever it may be. So it's not just money now it's money later and your kids money later, college money later. Like it is such a compound effect on your customer base of keeping that database clean and accurate.

There's a lot of crap talked about with private equity, mostly on their business practices and how they treat employees and everything. But I'll tell you one thing, these guys know their numbers. They know how to analyze the numbers. They know how to gather data. They're not even in the shop. They're, you know, in New York City. And they know that existing customer is infinitely cheaper than a new customer. Plus you can market to them all year. New customers are only in the market during busy season. Like nobody's going to Google and searching for H Vac in, at least in Ohio in September. They're not, they're not. Right. So private equity. Yeah, they're going to value that because that's what they've done. They look at what kind of things can I pull the trigger on in this business that maximize roi and it's buying equipment for less cost than you would buy because they have more buying power. That puts a couple percent to the bottom line right away it's optimizing operations with, you know, consolidating employees. But a lot of it is on that marketing side. They're not just gonna, even though they can and they do, they're not just gonna go in and say, all right, my strategy is to pay infinite amount of money to acquire new customers.

Yeah.

Why wouldn't they just start a business from scratch if that were, if that's what they were going to do? Yeah, they buy existing business. Yeah.

They go spend 20, 30k a month on Google Ads if they wanted to start from scratch. And you know, that's what their plan was. They run a lean operation and they're going to get every ounce of dollar out of that company before they reinvest in the new.

And that's a lesson to be learned from an existing business owner. Even if you were a technician turned operator turned owner, you should be doing the same type of things that they do. That doesn't mean that you have to do the things that you feel that are negative that they do. You can still take care of your employees. You can still have that family like atmosphere. But there's a lot of lessons learned from business owners. And we all, most of us didn't start out like that. I didn't, I wasn't a good business owner when I started. I was a technician who liked serving customers. What does that have to do with how to take a Lead all the way through the customer life cycle. Not a lot. I was fortunate to always get that customer information though. And if I didn't get it, that would be tough, man, I'll tell you. Brutal.

Very tough.

I don't know, I wouldn't know what to do. I mean, if you have a customer come to you that doesn't have that lead list, what can you actually do for them?

Nothing in the future. You just hope they remember you or you hope they find you and you're just kind of, you know. I know we relate to casino a lot in this, but really you're just betting on them to come back and use you again. And the chances are that an emergency, they're going to find the first person that pops up or who left a magnet on their new fuse panel or their new, you know, air handler or whatever it may be. And that's who they're calling at the time. Especially in the trades when, when action strikes, they're going to find the quickest way to make the paying stop and they're probably not going to dig around for your invoice that you left them three years ago.

There's no way that's gone. It might have even been emailed. And good luck finding anything in your email. Right, yeah, this has been, it's been a great conversation, but we're just women thinking long term for these business owners because that's what business is, that's what investing is. It's really long term. You might have some short term wins, but people that really make it, make it long term. What do you think the most overhyped marketing tool is right now? In. In there, man.

I think just because I get hit up with it every day, I think it's the putting AI in front of SEO.

Yeah, yeah, I've seen a lot of that stuff. I've seen a lot that says I can do your SEO. That's one thing I see. The other thing I see is he optimized for ChatGPT search. Right, I see that too. So are we even far enough down the path of knowledge to know if that's a good investment at this point?

I don't think so. I think it goes back to one of them money grabs. You know, they're just trying to get, they're trying to get somebody on there because they know like a good SEO firm's about 1500-2000amonth and they know if they can come in at 500amonth, they're going to peak interest on cost and then AI is Just the trending keyword right now everywhere. And so they think that they're the latest and greatest tool on the market that, and they can cut a thousand dollars. They're just gambling on it if it's going to work or not. And I, I actually did a demo last week on one because I wanted to see. I'm like, I've been doing SEO for 10 years now I want to see. It was just another plugin on a WordPress that was doing the same thing that we were already doing, but it was just a little bit of content writing that maybe, maybe takes my team five to ten minutes to do. And I called him out on the demo and he's like, well I get it, we're competitors. And I'm like, kind of. But you're kind of misleading here. You're using AI just to kind of like build content here. It's not really doing anything super power here. And you're basically just charging lower margins than guys that are doing proper SEO. But I get five to six a week of cold calls and emails and Facebook messages and it's some fancy AI tool that's going to blow my business up. And I, I, I had to finally do a demo because I wanted to see just how magical it was. And that's the stuff.

It's just predatory tech bros coming in, right? 22 year olds that have, that don't understand the customer life cycle, don't understand our business, don't understand lead generation and, and Roas and they're just coming in. I like Roas, that's, I love it Roas, that's just straight row ass right there. But you know, a lot of these, spending the 1500 on SEO. I think that if you're, well, if you're well positioned, if you're a great operator and you have the cash, aka the profit, you can spend $500 trying out a new tool, but you don't take away the 1500 that got you there in the first place, if that makes sense. So you know, I, I talked to a lot of contractors who were like, well with marketing, you should test this, you should test that. Well, that means that you have a lot of things that are working well that you can add on these tests for. And if you're to the point where all you're doing is testing, you're in trouble.

Yeah, you know, no 100%. And that's just the biggest thing right now is, you know, trust who you talk to, give your money to the right people and do your own part of the bargain, right? That's the thing. These marketing agencies aren't going to fix all your problems. They're not going to do all the work for you. They're going position you to be successful. But you've got to finish it off, you've got to sell it, you've got to fill it and you've got to do your job as a business owner to position yourself to do all those things.

How do you find a marketing company you can trust? What, what is the process for that? I mean, gosh, man. And can it be referrals from people? I mean, what, what would you do if you were going out searching for a marketing company to do today?

Honestly, man, Finding people that are on podcasts like right now, guys who are putting their vulnerability on social media, whether that be with content, whether that be with podcasts, whether that be with blogs and people that are putting their life, their face and they're consistent and that's easy to tell that someone is not only committed, but they're easy to find. You know who they are. You can find a lot of data on them. The people that are trying to sell you this 99amonth Facebook ads or whatever it may be, you can't find them anywhere. Anywhere, right? And you can't find the guys who were selling leads on these Facebook groups. If you go and look for them, half the time it's a fake profile. They're not. They're from another country and they're using another fake profile because they don't want their identity known. Find the guys that are putting their self out in the open. Find the guys that are being vulnerable enough to tell their story. Good, bad, ugly. Those are the guys you want to work with. They're going to cost you a little more, but they know there's. They know their stuff, man, and they're easy to find and you are going to get the results from it. So, you know, if I, if I was starting out and if I had to do this over again, I would wait till I was in a position to heavily invest in marketing and I would do it right again. I wouldn't go with the cheapest, I wouldn't go with the most expensive. Vivid. It makes sense. I would find somebody that relates to my business, knows my business, understands, like what we've talked about, the whole customer journey, the life cycle costs all these things. And if it's too good to be true, it's probably too good to be true. Let's just be honest.

Yeah, 100%. Yeah, that's great. Advice, because finding the right marketing agency is extremely important and educating yourself on the fundamentals of marketing is very important. One of the things that I like, that I found because service titan hacks, we have sponsors in our group. So what I did a few months ago is one of the things I really like to do is I like to find solutions, love to find solutions for my own business. So every CRM, every add on, every tool, every physical tool, I wanted to try everything and find out what provided the best return. And so when I sold my company, I always want, I want to do that for other contractors. So we have a, a, we have a sponsor named Volka that just does referrals. That's all they do. They have a automated system that does referrals. It's very simple. But what I liked about it is the owners of the company are from the home service space. So I found that if the owners are from the space and had the experience of what not to do, they tend to be a little bit better on what to do. They can set expectations a little bit better. And what I've found is all of the people that are sponsors, like, so I'll do a demo with them, like, so Volka, I come in and I'll find out who all their competitors are and I'll do demos with all of them. Because I'm really good at understanding whether or not this person's full of shit or if they know what they're talking about. And the ones who really know what they're talking about have leadership that have been in the space that they're serving. Yeah, that's, that's really a big difference. So who are these people? Anybody can put the name digital marketing agency on them. Anybody can put AI on them that's. It's so overhyped that you, you have to look and dig into who these people really are and look at contracts and things like that and you know, if they set your expectations right, then most likely this will be a good relationship. And think long term with your agency too. Yeah, don't think, you know, don't, don't say, I'm going to give these guys two months to perform now if they don't, if they don't do the, the deliverables that they say they're going to do. Like I've had ones that said they're going to do a monthly call and they don't even do it. That's different. Like you're not even doing the monthly call with me. They say they're going to do two blog posts. Whatever strategy they have, they need to at least do exactly what they say they're going to do all the way. The results at the end, that might not be measurable day one, it isn't. But you can find out if they're going to do what they say they're going to do pretty quickly. Right?

Yeah. And I think another good key indicator is if you see them doing content with their clients, I think that's huge. You know, we've got some companies that we've filmed like Day in the Life videos with or just in person. If I'm. If I'm comfortable enough coming to you and sitting down with you face to face, I'm probably a pretty good company to work with. And there's a couple out there. Yeah, and you've probably seen them too. They go and they film on roofs with people. They go and film, you know what, testimonial videos in person. Because they've basically implemented themselves into their client's business and they're basically like a teammate. And if guys are comfortable enough and committed to doing that, they're going to be committed to growing your business.

Yeah, I really like that. That's a. That's another big thing to have on the checklist. And if you can't afford those people yet, then you probably would be better off not going with the $99 a month1 and spending that money educating yourself. You know, one of the things that I really liked was that when I reached out to agencies that I couldn't afford, some of them said, hey man, you can't afford me, but here's what you should do. One agency told me my website was on one in one when I first started, maybe because they had a deal. They said, here's what you should do. You should move your website over to WordPress. I know your skills. After talking to you, you can easily do it yourself. Own the domain name and do this, get Google reviews. And they did some things that were guerrilla marketing tactics that were for people that had more time than they had money. You know, typically you have one or the other, and at the beginning of a company, you have time. So invest your time wisely. And education is a great way to invest your time. Listen to podcasts, listen to, read books on marketing and understand marketing because it's one of the top core competencies that you have to have to grow a business.

It is.

And you can't, you shouldn't, in my opinion, outsource all of that. You should. You need to be able to Talk the talk with the marketing companies.

No, the first thing we did was I asked my partner for permission and I said, hey, I need to get $2,000, I'm gonna go to Florida, I'm gonna sit in a four day mastermind with some people that, with a marketing company that was holding a mastermind. I literally, I'll never forget it, I sat in a boat hotel room in Fort Lauderdale, Florida with like 20 other, there was fencing owners, plumbers, electricians in there and we were all just absorbing Facebook ads, Google Ads, website, where a contact form should be, where a call button should be. It's all, it's all psychology, things that I would never think of as a business owner. And that was the first step, was just admitting I knew nothing, went and learned it all and then came back and was like, okay, now we have to implement. And I sat down and we started building things out piece by piece. And once you started going, it made so much sense why a contact form should be there or why your logo should look this way and why your colors should be this way and why they should be able to call you every scroll on your website. And so it was things like that. And that's what got me going. And so what I've actually done is about 2 weeks ago I got into school. I don't know if you played around with school yet, but I created a school community and we've just launched it last week. There's only like 16 members in it. But inside that school community I've got videos on how to launch your first Facebook ad campaign, how to launch your Google Ad campaign, how to sell, you know, what is SEO, what is Automations, what is QuickBooks, how to keep your books in order, things like that. And I, it doesn't cost, it's free. I've built all this out because I wish there would have been a lifeline whenever we were 30,000 in the hole and we didn't know what to do. And so I've built this out and I'm pushing it out right now to everybody and it doesn't cost me anything. But my hopes is that you grow your business to a spot where you can afford my services. And then you come to me and you're like, hey Jason, we're doing a hundred thousand a month now and what now? Obviously Google Ads isn't it no more what now? And then I've built a client right for my time. And so it's not really about them being a client because I guarantee you I may get one or two clients out of the whole school community. But it's about just being able to collaborate. I do a weekly call on Thursday nights where I'll go over your website and just tell you, hey, man, do this, do that, do this. A lot of these guys are building them or their wives or kids are building them. And I just trying to give back because whenever I was starting this whole journey, there wasn't a lot out there. And so that we didn't, we didn't have school, we barely had Facebook groups back then. And so it's like I'm just trying to give back to all these guys because I see how predatory it is and I've been down that path and if I can save one or two people from buying leads, then I've done my job.

I wonder if that's great. That's great to hear. And I'll drop that link to your school community everywhere that this podcast has shown so people can educate themselves. I wonder how many good marketing agencies there are out there that also. Or I'm sorry, I wonder how many bad ones provide a lot of free content and education to their consumers. I doubt it. I doubt it. Right. So if you're, if you're a guy who's a fly by night and all you want to do is make a quick buck, you're probably not going to sit down and put together free education. That's the great thing about the marketing, about the agency world is because they are content creators and they understand websites and they have dedicated copywriters. You know, they can provide you with a ton of free stuff today to learn, to learn this skill set. Because that's what it is. It's just, it's a very different skill than what you have as a technician. But it can be learned. It can be. I did. I wish they could have done it cheaper though. Holy crap.

Well, yeah, I wish if I could start over, I'd be in a whole different conversation with you. But, you know, but it's good. It made us, it made us tough. Do we regret it? A little bit. But we learned a lot from the journey and we don't get into business because it's easy. We get into business because it's rewarding and it's a risk and it's always going to be a gamble and it's not going to be easy. But surrounding yourself and your community is great for that. Like surrounding yourself with people that are like minded, trying to solve problems. People that are just stuck on one little thing in service titan and they can ask a question and get 30 responses like that didn't exist, you know, and having the right, you know, private chat channels and things like that, it just, it helps everybody just be that much better. And if we can give back just a little bit, it'll, it's. You'd be surprised how many people really benefit from, you know, I, I film all this content and I just think to myself, like, is it really going anywhere? And then I'll get a message from somebody and they're like, oh man, I, I use chat GPT to do our Ken's Facebook post this Week is your YouTube video. And I'm like, okay, all right.

So there we go. All right. Yeah.

And so that's the thing, man, is like, you're right. You know, the fly by night people, they're not putting out content. They're not holding free webinars, they're not holding masterclasses, they're not holding this stuff. They're just trying to promise you the world and deliver nothing.

Yeah. And you see that and be careful of it, guys. And don't, don't be careful of it. After you've bought so much of it that your business is in dire straits, don't be like me. Yeah, yeah.

Let me tell you all about it. All about.

I don't want to look. I could go back and look at all my QuickBooks and look at all the line items for marketing and go, oh, shouldn't have done it at all. Should have done it longer. It's one of those, right? None of them are. You either need to put more into it or less into it. So you have this 60 minute marketing audit that you give away. Can you tell me a little bit about that? What's it, what's it include?

Yeah, man. So everybody that joins our school community, I give them two options. I can help them set up a Facebook campaign or we do a 60 minute marketing audit with me or one of my teammates and we just look at their stuff, Right? If you're using software, if you're using any of this stuff and you're just thinking, hey, I, I'm paying. I just started working with a roofing company down in Florida. He's a, he's really successful roofing company, does about 10 million a year in roofs. And he had like seven conversation softwares for texting, email, all this stuff. And I went in and I was like, why? Well, my old company told me to do this. I didn't do that. He didn't have access to any of his websites. He didn't have access to any of his ad accounts. I helped him go in, be able to delete old people off of stuff and just get him lined out. And then he ended up becoming a customer because he was just like, for once in my business I have ownership of my business, if that makes sense.

It doesn't make sense.

It does, you know, because he's had so many people's hands in his business and you know, this guy said he needed this, but he never canceled that because he was scared. And that company didn't know how to transfer that workflow over to this workflow and he didn't want his leads to get dropped. And so we're getting ready to launch it next week. But we've built an AI voice and chat platform and we, we. He was one of my, probably my fifth customer on it. And I went in and we built everything that he had out inside of our stuff from hand. We built all the messaging out, all the AI out, the voice calls, all that stuff out. And he's like, well now what? I go, well, you can cancel that. 1900 dollars in subscriptions. And he was like, what? I'm like, no, you don't need this. And that was from, from a free audit, right? And now he's a client, he's a client of mine and basically I cut nineteen hundred dollars where he puts them back into his ad spend from just stacks. And that's just knowledge and not understanding what's going on. Like you're in the field, you're in the business and you think you need something. But in today's world there's so many universal softwares that you don't need five or six tech stacks. You need one main solid program like Service Titan and things like that where you can send automations and service agreements and all this stuff from one platform. You don't need six different subscriptions anymore.

And the less platforms that you have, the more consolidated it is, the more accurate the data is going to be, the easier it's going to be to work. And that's the, I mean I've had the same thing, especially as being a computer programmer. I can't tell you how many pieces of software I had all working together, but yet not working together. Right. They were just a lot of distractions. Right. So that's, that's great information. Would you say that the best way to reach out to you would be through that school platform?

Hey, you can reach out to school. You can follow me on Instagram. It's Jason Jackson, 01 on all my IQ TikTok. I got Instagram, YouTube school. I'm really active on Facebook. I'm in a lot of groups and things like that. Just trying to save people from buying leads one day at a time.

That's great, man. So, Jason, thanks for joining me today. Really appreciate it.

Absolutely, man. I appreciate you having me on.

All right, man, great.

Thanks for listening to the Home Service Hacks podcast. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform so you never miss a future episode. For more information or to connect with Bill, you can check us out on Facebook at Service Titan Hacks or visit our website@servicetitanhacks.com we'll see you next time.