The Ultimate Guide to Growth & ROI-Driven Marketing with Phil Risher

Any business that's kind of been stale and then pushing it 20 to 25% in one year, you're probably bound to break a few things too. When you look at leads, conversion, closing, sales calls, follow up, there's a formula that if you can tweak any one of those little moving pieces along the way, that your end result, which is your revenue, goes up.

If you're thinking about, hey, I'm ready to grow, I want to grow, you need to have a game plan with a budget so that way you can give yourself permission to grow and utilize the funds to help you scale the business foreign.

Good day and welcome to the Wealthy Entrepreneur Podcast. I'm your host, Bob Goverow. It is fantastic to have you here with us today. You know what, we're going to talk about marketing today. I've got a fantastic guest and he's going to bring so much value. We walked through some of the frameworks that he's going to share. I am so excited you are going to put money in your pocket with growing your business today once you hear this. So get ready to take notes. It's going to be super valuable. Just a reminder, the Wealthy Entrepreneur podcast. This is the place where we dissect the elements that contribute to entrepreneurial success, from mindset and leadership to profits and revenue. My special guest today, his name is Phil Rescher. We are going to talk about scaling success digital marketing secrets for the home services business. But I want you to know if you're not in the home services business, it's irrelevant. He talks about some specifics in the contractor space, but I guarantee you, you, you're going to take away at least five to 10 items that you can implement in your business right now to fix some of your marketing, fix some of your sales and fix your conversion so that you're driving your business to the next level. I wanna give a little bit of an intro before I bring Phil onto the show here. He is the owner of Flash Consulting that helps local services business increase their sales and keep their schedules full through data driven digital marketing consulting. After helping a 20 year old $3 million service business scale, it went from 3 million to 5 million in 24 months and they actually exited and sold to private equity. Phil took on that blueprint and now helps home services business grow and scale their businesses as well. Phil's efforts in technology and small business have had him featured on Jobbers, Masters of Home Service, Forbes Magazine, cnbc, Yahoo Finance, Wall Street Journal, all kinds of different areas. I can tell you from speaking with Phil, he's going to bring a lot of value to you in the marketing space. So without any further ado, I'd like to welcome my good friend Phil Risher to the show today. All right, so everybody, I'm excited to welcome Phil Risher. And Phil, before I ask you to maybe share a little bit about your story about how you got into this space. You know, it's amazing when you find somebody who's got similar partners, right? Phil and I are both connected with Jobber. We've, we've been in their universe. We both focus on helping home services businesses with different aspects. But Phil comes with it from a different angle and one that I think is going to be really valuable for my contractor business is not even just my contractors though, right? Like, let's keep in mind that we've got other businesses who the, the ideas and the tactics that Phil's going to share with us today are going to be applicable to you. But he does certainly work and specialize in that space. So, you know, keep your eyes and ears open, team, because we've got some great initiatives and ideas that I think we're going to bring to the table today. So Phil, without further ado, please join us in the show and give us maybe a little bit of the story of how you got started.

Yeah, so. So coming out of college, I worked at Enterprise Rent a Car, which is one of the largest family owned businesses in the world. And I was working at a local service business, an enterprise branch. And I got paid off the bottom line. And So I had 15 team members, $3 million business, getting paid off the bottom line, running this thing. When I was 25, I wanted to go into sales. So I went into the corporate office where we started selling fleet management services to home service companies. And we were focused on people that had 20 or more vehicles. So I was calling, sitting down with CEOs, analyzing their P and L, talking to them about fleet management. At the same time, I started a personal blog about personal finance and I started doing, I, I built a WordPress website, I did email marketing, I started doing SEO, this was in 2015. And I ended up scaling that blog into getting feature on Forbes and cnbc, Yahoo Finance, Business Insider, all these different things. And I had about 30, 40,000 people a month reading my blog, doing email marketing, social content, all this stuff. So I would go into these meetings with the CEOs of Home Service businesses and be like, what are y' all doing for marketing? And they would sit, say, and I'd tell them a little bit about me. And they're like, wow, this is cool. So I actually quit my job at Enterprise and I went and I bought a tiny school bus and I made a little tiny home and I traveled around the country and was doing news interviews, speaking social media, all this stuff. Just like basically influencer before influencer kind of thing. And when I came back from that trip, I was like, maybe I'll, you know, write a book, do speaking, something like that. And one of my clients was an air duct cleaning company that was doing $3 million. And him and I really hit it off as far as relationship at Enterprise. And he was like, hey, I really need someone to come in that has the fire in the belly, that's excited to work with and like, help me grow this thing, you know, I've been in business for 20 years. I just hit $3 million. I'm kind of like stagnant. Don't really know what I'm doing. So I was like, okay, let's give it a shot. When I went to work there, all my worlds collided. Like my Enterprise experience, the management trainee running a profitable branch. Then my, my digital marketing experience on top of that. And in the first year, he went from 3 to 4 million. And I was like pushing so hard. A big jump for someone who's kind of like stuck. I was pushing so hard. He's like, dude, you have to chill. You are, you are going too crazy because this is like, you know, a 20 year old business. And he actually fired me from the, from the company. It was like, he was like, okay, dude, here too. Guess this was after 10 months. He's like, okay, dude, like pump the brakes. Here's what you need to do. You need to go become a consultant. Here's two other businesses, they're my friends. I've told them what you've done and crushed it for us and go work with them. I'll be your first client. He named the company Flash Consulting and he's like, be Flash Consulting, go help these people. And that's basically how I got into like what I do now from an entrepreneurial perspective.

I love that. And so how long have you been doing that now, Phil?

So that was in 2019, so about six years.

Yeah. That's amazing. Well, you know, any business that's kind of been stale and then pushing it, you know, 20, 25% in one year, you're probably bound to break a few things too, right? You know, you, we know as entrepreneurs, you know, we're, we've got our systems and we've Got our processes in place and you know, one of the, one of the great things about our businesses and then one of the challenges is we, we sort of fall into those systems in an area of comfort. And they work when you're not growing or when you're, you've got your consistency. And when you blew it up, I'm sure it blew everything up to go, oh my God, we've got more challenges in this business than we ever thought we had. So hey, I would take that 10 out of 10 though, and it's, it would be more of a how do we figure this out? How do we continue to grow this? So that is pretty awesome. So what, what ended up happening with that business? Did that particular business.

Yeah, so it, it actually worked out great. He became my first client. I still worked with him to push stuff. He ended up going to of like 5,5 million and then sold to a search fund private equity that came in. And we still worked with them. We still worked him to this day. But basically he ended up, he, he didn't right by me and kind of pushed me out to go do my own thing. I helped him scale his thing and then sell for like six, seven time multiple and, and exit. So it was like perfect. He, he literally. I talked to him almost every day. He's like a mentor now. He's like, you changed my life, Phil. Like, you know, it'. Yeah, all's, all's good with him.

I love that. And you know what, the private equity space is hot for the contractor businesses right now. Right. Like they're excited about it. So if you can get to a $5 million business, right. You probably need some marketing and growth expertise team. So just keep that in mind. But if you can substantiate that you're a growing contractor business with the systems and processes to continue to, to operate without the owner after the fact. Right. You need all of these things to come together, but there's great opportunities in that space right now. And Phil, it sounds like you're a really great partner as far as the marketing perspective to help the businesses grow. Okay, so that's really exciting. It sounds like you've got a lot of interesting things going on. What has really started your partnership collaboration with Jobber?

Yeah, so very funny. So when I was at this home service business, there's a, we were working with these pe backed cookie cutter digital marketing companies. If I named them, people would know them. And I was, I had a digital marketing lens and a sales lens and I'm asking the questions like, okay, we're spending $6,000 a month on Google Ads. Who are these leads? Who are these people? How can we pull a return on ad spend inside of my CRM? And then I'm like, okay, well if we get this many leads and this many jobs, let's look at year over year data inside of my CRM. And so I start, most people use, you know, 60% of their CRM to the full extent. They're not actually pulling reports and then plugging it back into their marketing and actually using it to grow their business. So I start asking these questions in that company and that was one of the big things was the data made good decisions and help us pull levers and drive decision making process, which is something that we, that we still use to this day. So naturally, as I started working with more contractors, they were using Service Titan, Jobber, Housecall Pro, you know, all the different ones. Well, with Java in particular, they have a lot of different API integrations and their reporting was a little bit, it wasn't as tight as what you would want if you're, you know, multimillion dollar company. So we used a lot of their reports and we would build our external reports on top of theirs. So the way that I kind of got in touch with them was I was in their Facebook groups and I would just be commenting and adding value to people asking questions. And then they reached out to me and was like, hey, do you want to come on the podcast? I went on the podcast and it was actually one of my episodes. Was one of their number one downloaded episodes.

How amazing.

Yeah. So then, so then it just kind of snowballed from there like webinars. And I'm speaking at the. Their summit coming up with Gary Vee, Cody Sanchez and some other people too.

Yeah, awesome. Now I did not get, I shouldn't say I didn't get the return invite, but I did speak there last year. Apparently they like variety from year to year. But they switched it up. They switched it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I love Jobber and I think they do such a great job. So there's another sort of product that, that I think most small businesses in the contractor space really need to understand is the CRM, the client relationship management software. Jobber, as far as, you know, billing, collecting money upfront, communicating with clients, keeping them engaged. Like if you don't have one. Like we, we obviously Phil and I, we work with Jobber to a certain extent. We likely both work with other people as well. Like Service Titan is another example. Especially if you continue to evolve and continue to grow and scale. But the importance is choosing one and getting it. I don't know about you, Phil, but I remember the first time I started looking at a CRM I had, I can't even remember the names of the Infusionsoft was one. I don't know if HubSpot, obviously Salesforce was in the discussion and there was another one. And I remember I spent months trying to decipher which one is the best one. And it's like none of them are going to be perfect. The one that you use, the one that you use is the best one. And so like as a learning curve for everybody, just take, you know, grab one that you feel fits, don't overanalyze it, because they're never going to be perfect. But it's the one that you fully implement to the greatest extent possible is going to be the most powerful. And, you know, definitely lean on people like Phil who are experts in your market to say, what one would you guide us towards? And I'll say this, and Phil and I did not talk about this beforehand, but you know, when you, when you work with someone like Phil who's got the expertise to help you with your marketing, your client communication, really, when you're choosing a CRM platform, you're finding the partner first and then you're saying, hey, partner Phil, what one do you use to the greatest extent possible? And that's what we'll likely use too, because, you know, if they've got the power to be able to utilize it to the greatest extent possible, that's where you're going to get your greatest bandwidth. Because they are complex, they're deep, there's a lot. They're robust, they can be. So it's finding somebody or having somebody on your team that can really support you with that. Phil, you talked about at the beginning, you talked about creating a personal finance blog. You created, you know, these number of users, which is incredible back when you would have done that, which is pretty awesome. Maybe let's, let's get a little bit deeper on the role of digital marketing. What that even looks like, what would businesses be thinking about and what sort of solutions can they put in place when it comes to digital marketing?

Yeah, for sure. So 87% of searches are starting on Google if they don't know your name. And so on Google, there's four main sections that people need to be shown in. There's Google local service ads, which is the first one. Google search ads is the second one. The map pack, which is Organic, that's off site organic SEO. And then the bottom section, which is on site SEO, which is your actual website rankings. So those four sections are. It's like a monopoly board. You want to be in all four of those sections. Now, a big part of this is, okay, cool, I'm running these ads, but you need to have the return on ad spend data for the first two parts. Google local service ads and Google search ads. Which is why it's very important that your CRM is tied into it. Because if you're just running ads but you don't know if it's actually working, then that's pretty much everyone and it's like a black hole. And you don't really, you don't really know, you know what your customer acquisition cost. Is this working or is it not? You feel stuck and you go to a marketing company and say, I want more leads. And like, well, increase your ad budget. You're like, I don't really know if this is even working. So from a digital marketing perspective, that's like the new customer side, we have three pillars that we focus on. It's visibility, so new customers coming in the door. And there's a couple other strategies. We could talk about conversions, which in that company that went from 3 to 4 million conversions was their number one issue. And we can talk about that as well. And then the last one is retargeting, which is bringing people that already know, like, and trust you or prospects back into your funnel. And we could talk about some of those strategies as well. We've had a lot of good success with that too.

You know, retargeting. I remember the first time I learned about retargeting, it probably would have been about 10 years ago. And not to say that we've maximized all retargeting for the last 10 years, but I remember learning about it and my mind was blown. I was like, you can do that, right? It's, it's so, so, so very powerful. Okay, so obviously I will maybe leave the getting attention for a moment because I feel like that's the one that people are the most aware. And truthfully, to Phil's point, attention is great, but is that attention actually generating business? Maybe. I've got, I've got one quick story for you guys. When I had my first mentor, his name is Rob Nixon. I've. You've probably heard me talk about Rob Nixon before. For anybody who's been listening, he was my first coach when it came to building an accounting business. And I remember we had this Coaching program. We were, there were eight of us. And he said, we're going to focus on marketing this time. And I was like, I'm going to be. I'm just that star customer. You know, I want to be the little brown nose person at the front. I want to be the, I want the gold star. So it's like, okay, I'm going to get ahead of the game. I'm going to hire a marketing person and we're going to go all in on this. So by the next quarter, I'm going to have all these results and everything. So I hire this marketing person and we start setting up social media posts and yada yada, yada. And this was my learning, Phil, and please don't judge me. So we get this going and I show up to the next meeting. And he said, okay, so how many of you have a marketing person in place? I put my hand up. I was maybe the only one, right? Which is typical for my space. And he essentially goes, okay, so are they a lead gen or are they a brand marketing person? And I looked blankly and I was like, I'm not sure I understand the difference. And he goes, well, let me explain this to you, okay?

I.

A brand person is someone who shouts from the rooftops, you got to know who these people are, really. And he said, a lead gen is somebody who converts people into paying customers. And I was like, huh, I think I have the first one. He's like, that's not the one you want, right? So it's like, oh man. You know, it's great to have the attention, but if the attention is not converting into leads, you know, you're just going to bleed yourself dry with, with spending. So really, lead gen is the most important part. So, so keep that in mind. Now, Phil, let's talk about conversions, because I think that's part of it is capturing the attention of the right people. But then how do we actually convert them into customers?

That's right. So same. This is the same problem that most companies have is that they have been in business for 20, 30 years. They have this, you know, brand going on that might be doing handle your A jets. Yeah, yeah, People know about it. You're doing SEO. People coming to their website, they're running Google Ads. People are coming to your website, but they don't know if it's actually converting into traffic. And this is something that I learned all the way back in blogging, which is you get all this traffic from backlinks and people reading your stuff, but you need something to Convert them into website visitors, into email subscribers or something. So that way they can, you can retarget them or into leads. So when I went to the Duckling company, here was the process. They had people go to their website, fill out a form to contact them, to give them an estimate. Then that form would go into their email and then they would print out the email and they put it on their desk and they call the person. They probably wouldn't answer. Then they check next to it that they call them and then they would have a stack of papers and the next day they do the same thing and hopefully they call these people back or something. So the first thing we did was let's alleviate all of that and turn on online scheduling. So on your website, if you use Jobber, for example, Jobber has online scheduling, that's one of the call to actions on your website that can convert leads that are hot and ready to go. Just get them on your schedule. The other call to action that you can have on your website is a chat widget, which. A chat widget is a great tool because people are not going to dig on your site. Most people are spending 30 seconds on your website just to say, is this the right company or not? They're not going to dig around to know if you, if you work in this service area or this service area or you do this service or that service. They want a chat widget to ask a question, to convert it to a lead. Ideally you want that to be a text message. And then the last one, which is a honeyhole, which this pretty much transformed their leads, was creating an estimate calculator. And the reason the estimate calculator is so good is because when people come to your website, they want to know two things. How much is it going to cost and when can you do it? They've done their research offline, they've read your reviews, they got, they got recommended to you, they clicked on your Google Ad and they want to know how much it's going to cost. When can you do it? So if you do an estimate calculator, online scheduling, you're going to convert leads. Now, a good benchmark is if you get 100 people to your website, you should convert 10% of them into leads. That's the goal. Usually websites are producing 2 to 3% of website traffic into leads, but that's a good benchmark for yourself. We have some companies that are at 20, 30% conversion rates. So that's to give you a little bit of idea of what this conversion process looks like.

Absolutely. And it's so important. And I know I'm fortunate enough we've, we've grown to the point where I've been able to bring marketing in house, which is great, great for me because I can have these constant conversations and people are just dedicated to it for, for us, which is fantastic. And these are numbers that we look at every single week, guys. Like, we can't undervalue what Phil's talking about. It's, you know, the number of viewers to the number of leads to the number of book calls, to the number of, you know, follow ups from those calls to proposals said to sign deals. It's like make sure that you understand how your sales process works. And it all starts with getting the right funnel for marketing into converting to leads to booking calls. And you know, the idea of having somebody be able to self book when they're hot and they're excited to buy is so powerful. And you know, having somebody who understands your business, like a Phil as well, who can say, you know, what we can do very quickly is we can change this conversion. And if that's what he did from this, you know, 3 million to $5 million service company that he was working with, how quickly those conversions can change, probably with not a lot changing in the marketing side of things. Right. It's maybe retweaking, optimizing, but yeah, pretty powerful.

Yeah. So I have an example of that exact situation. So we started working with this company. You know, most marketing companies are gonna say, give us three to six months, you know, SEO ads inside of that conversion funnel. There's a couple things that should happen. When someone fills out a lead on your website, they should automatically get a text and an email starting that conversation. There was a study that 66% of forms leads only get called one time and that's it. And 40% of them never even get contacted. So if you can hit them with a text and an email, right away, texting gets 95% open rates. So that starts the conversation. So when you call them and they don't answer, now you have some text nurture sequences, so you got to do that. And then a big problem is people call and say, you know, how much does it cost? Okay, I'll call you back. This whole back and forth, you need to have a cycle that allows people to go into a nurture sequence to follow up with them. So if you're giving estimates over the phone, you could say, hey, let me get your email, I'll send you over your estimate. And that way if you call back and you speak with someone else. We have it on record and it's a verified one from our business or something like that. So you can control that sales process. So we had a company that was converting leads into jobs at 40%. We implemented that text, email after the fact, and then an automation sequence to nurture their leads. They went from 40% to 61% for 21% increase. And it had a 50% growth in revenue just by booking that many more jobs in through their sales funnel. And that's not even fixing anything on the SEO ads. Nothing. It's just their lead management process, which most people don't have one and they're just leaking buckets everywhere.

Yeah, 100%. But guys, did you hear like those numbers talking about increasing 21% from 40 to 61% and that has an impact of a 50% growth in revenue? Honestly, like if there's a formula, which I won't recite right now because I would get it wrong, but you know, when you look at leads, you know, conversion, closing, sales calls, follow up, like there's a formula that if you can tweak any one of those little moving pieces along the way, that your end result, which is your revenue goes up. It's like all of these moving pieces that are in there, we just think, oh, just get us more, more leads to our website or more calls to the office. Well, no, that, that's helpful. It's one of the levers. But then you've got all these in between that, if you can tweak the in between ones, it's powerful. Right. And typically those are the, those are the excited people too.

Yeah, absolutely. There's six parts that we focus on. So kind of the numbers to walk through for the home services. So lead count, you want to know your lead count year over year. If you did 80 leads last year, you want 80 leads this January, for example. So you know, or 100 leads if you want to grow 20% then your booking rate. So you need to know, I got a hundred leads and I booked at 50% or whatever because that's a number that you can benchmark. Service Titan did a report. The average company's at 42% booking rate. The top people are 60, 70%. The bottom people are 20, 30%. So that's some good benchmarks. The third number you want to know is your job count. You want to know how many jobs you did last January versus this January because that's your opportunities of estimates, which then leads to your next one, which is your estimate Count Did I do, did I do 80 estimates last January, A hundred estimates this January, then your estimate close rate. How many estimates did I close? Which again, that's an opportunity for another nurture sequence. Most people don't have an estimate follow up process. They're just going out doing jobs, giving estimates, and they're not following up on any estimates. Yes, that's a whole nother process. And then the last one is your average ticket. That's the sixth one. Because if you don't have a profitable price book and you're not actually selling profitable jobs, who cares if you're selling a hundred percent? If it's not a good average ticket, 100%.

So two thoughts for me on that one. The follow up after an estimate goes out. Oh my good lord. That is the most wasteful area. Guys, I remember we had spent so much time sort of optimizing a bit of our business development process. And I remember looking back at it and going, well, yeah, okay, so we, we're trying to be as quick as possible because people are wanting to act f all the way to the proposal. And then I'm like, and then what's happening? Well, it gets sent out multiple times electronically, like from an automation, I think three times over seven days. I'm like, is anybody calling these people? Is anybody, you know, following up? Are we texting them? Are we like, are we getting them? These, these guys went all the way to the end. You know that, that's like just some. What an opportunity.

Low hanging fruit.

Yeah, low hanging fruit. That's exactly what I was thinking of. It's like low hanging fruit is sitting there. They're just waiting to be, you know, followed up with, reminded about it. And if we're not reminding them about it, it'll likely sink farther and farther down in their inbox or on the note that's on their desk or whatever things. We all get busy. So like, that is just a huge one. Love that, Phil. And love the, the entire process. The other, the other one that I wanted to maybe just touch on is on the pricing side. And so where Phil's talking about the estimates and the conversion and the average ticket item, this is where strategically we have to pay attention to, especially when the economy is being a little funny. Right. Looking at the demand for our services, like, do we. Are we booked three months out? If we're booked three months out, we likely are a little less price sensitive and should probably be pricing and pushing a little bit higher because the demand is higher. And that's just what the Market's telling us if you have nothing booked for next week, we know that you've got some major overhead. We likely are looking at being a little bit more price sensitive and getting some projects in to start building up that supply. But there's some strategic elements that come into that. But looking at the closing rate of those estimates to closing deal, that will give us some signs of whether or not we're pricing fairly or not, or whether or not our sales team is doing what they need to, to get deals across the line. So lots of good data in there and like we live off of that data. From a growth standpoint, if you want to grow your business, you have to get there. And, and certainly working with a partner like Phil is, is going to be able to support you in getting there. And did I miss anything on that, Phil?

Yeah. I'll give you like two other pro tips on the estimate side. First, a lot of people, they, they send them out, but then they don't know if they actually got the proposal. So you want to send a text message, hey, just want to make sure that you got this like 30 minutes after the fact. And then another really good thing is adding some type of an expiration date to your estimate follow up process. That way it's like, hey, these estimates are good for 30 days. And as you get 20, 10 days and you kind of call them back. And on your point, if you, if you have gaps in your schedule for next week, now you have all these estimates, you can call them and say, hey, we actually have a 10% off promo going on right now. If you schedule today that way, now you can fill your bucket and you have these warm leads right there.

Absolutely. See guys, look, we're going to, Phil and I are just rambling, you know, valuable gold here, I gotta tell you. You know, I think maybe I'm just bringing up ideas for Phil to touch on and bring it home. But hey, I love it. You know, let's talk about retargeting because I again, this was, this was an area where I was like, oh, we can do this, especially with paid ads, which was where I was learning a little bit more about that. But can you walk people through what we retargeting looks like and maybe some ideas of how they could optimize that.

Yeah, so paid ads is one of them where you can basically take people that went to your website or customers that you, that you served before and then you can serve them digital ads that says, hey, you know, it's time to reschedule your service. Blah, blah, blah. Or like hey, you didn't, you didn't convert on our website. So let's bring you back into the funnel. There's a bunch of other great things that you can do that's easier that you don't have to try to figure out these pixels and all this stuff. So after the sale you obviously have to ask for a review. You could also send out a referral request and you could make like a little graphic on Canva that says give the gift of clean. Here's $25 off. Forward this to any friend or family member. Now you're bringing that, that into your retargeting plan then. The Gold Mine is a monthly newsletter to all of your clients. The reason is, let's say you do H Vac, plumbing, electrical, they come in for a no heat call and, but you also do water heaters, ductless systems, all these other cross selling opportunities that they don't even know about you. I'm sure you've gone into someone's home and they're like, oh, I just got this new thing. And you're like, we do that. Why didn't you call me? Oh, I didn't know you did that. That's why you need these email newsletters. So we had a company that we work with, they were around 1.5 million in revenue. H vac contractor, they weren't sending out emails to any of their customers. We sent out one per month, so 12 emails. And they generated $263,000 in one year just by sending out emails and cross selling services. Literally, you know, a quarter million dollars on top that they, they never got before. So an email newsletter is home run and then the last one is text marketing. So when they come through your nurture sequence and they fill out your form and they get that text, they go through your estimate process, they get some text. Well now you have the ability to text them to bring them back into your funnel for your shoulder season. And if you're scheduling like spring or fall inspections, we're doing this a lot right now because we're in February, like hey, we're going to be in your area next, in the next week or two doing free estimates on X, Y and Z. Do you want us to stop by and give you one? That could be a mass text to everyone based off a specific city that they live in.

Guys, this is, this is gold. And I, I gotta tell you one of, I've mentioned Rob Nixon, I'll bring him up again. Not that I talk about him every, every time But I, you know, you're just hitting home so many good points. And, you know, one of the things that he told me initially was we were asking about competition. I was like, you're not going to coach my competitors. And he said, first and foremost, if you go and shout from the rooftop all of your good ideas to your competitors, they won't do it. So don't worry about that. Yeah, okay, that's great. But another thing that he said was, you know, if you are not sharing with your clients all of the ways that you can support them in making their life better, you're doing them a disservice. So when Phil's talking about sending out more messaging to say, hey, here's all the other things that we can do, you know, it's not necessarily, and this is maybe an owner mindset, this isn't a massive sales pitch for everybody, although it, it, like indirectly is going to generate sales. But this is a, hey, you know what, You've worked with us before. We've brought you value. We just want to make sure that you know all the ways that we can help you and support you. And if you ever need any of those things, we're here. We enjoyed working with you too. Let's keep the relationship going. And that is such a powerful way to drive higher revenue per customer by offering multiple services. And they may or may not be aware of it. And like Rob would say, you know, if, if you don't let them know that you can help them in this way and they're suffering because they don't have a solution, you're. You're essentially helping them out of that suffering. Like, shift your mindset and your perspective on this to say we're just helping bring more value to our customers and make a greater impact in what we do. So I don't know, Phil, if you agree with that or not, but we.

Have a saying at Flash. You can't get lifetime value without a lifetime relationship. And if you are not building a relationship with your customers and like, oh, they'll call us when they need us, you know, they know what we do. That's not a lifetime relationship. And you're not going to get the lifetime value. That email that I mentioned before, we actually analyzed all the emails that we sent out. We sent out 6 million emails last year. So we analyze all the top producing ones and there was a seven part email framework that, that if someone's like, well, what do I send out? These are the seven parts. First, you need a good email subject line. So people Open it. And there's subject line testers out there that you can use. Second, you want to have your logo and right below that you want call now request service or get estimate, whatever those two call to actions are. The third thing you want is you want a nice blog post about whatever the topic is. So we have these monthly themes every single month and that's how we know what we should be talking about. But for your business, you know, in February I should be talking about this. April talking about this. So you want a blog post educating the customer around that. After that you want to frequently ask question because usually at that point they're going to be asking, okay, well what about this? And whatever that question is, you want to answer that question right below that. And then underneath that you want a strong call to action says if you're interested in this, you can get an estimate right here. Then the sixth thing is you want a customer testimonial that someone had this problem and actually had this service done. And then the last thing is you want that same call now and request service right below that. That's the framework. And to your point, it's not like a super salesy thing, it's just educating them, walking them through a basic framework.

You know what, Phil, that might be one of the most sophisticated solution based marketing approaches I've heard. I love that. Like that is super, super strong. But you know, to Phil's point, it's not a hard sell, but it's answering all the questions, it's eliminating all of the nos. You know, if you walk through that sequence, it was like, oh, I don't know, have they done it before? Boom. Testimonial, you know, well, I'm not sure what the price would be. Boom, here's your price, you know. Well, I, I don't know, I have other questions. Well, here's all the list of questions that people normally have. It's like dealing with all of the objections. So as far as the sale, so Phil has really brought this into the sales process that really all you should have to do at the end of the day is get on the phone and accept money, right? And you probably, you know, honestly the CRM, we could probably send out the square estimate, accept payment without even having to talk to anybody. So you're eliminating the people in the sales process.

You know, one, one like, like bonus call to action is just put right at the top. Say reply yes and I'll send you an estimate like right at the top of the email. Just reply yes and I'll get you an estimate?

Absolutely. You know, and for anybody who's studied any sort of email marketing in the past, you'll know that really what you're trying to do with the email marketing is to get an engagement in one way, shape or form so that somebody's putting their hand up saying I'm interested. And then that's when you can engage with them and say, okay, great. You know, you've got 30,000 people on your email list. Unless you've got something that can be delivered at mass scales, you don't want all 30,000 people to be putting their hand up at the same time. But you want to engage people, like Phil said, with certain themes at certain times of the year where you're starting to build up, you know, you've got a certain amount of maybe capacity to deliver certain services at certain times, like get the demand up. And then if you can do it far enough in advance, you can build up additional capacity to support that. So, you know, I love this, Phil. This was maybe one of the most comprehensive sort of walkthroughs of how you engage marketing. Not even just from an attraction standpoint, but how do we convert these guys and how do we retarget them? Because it is low hanging fruit for all these people who are in our, our universe. They're here for a reason. You know, we're just here to support them.

Yeah. One other way to use that email newsletter, I'll just give you one other one because a lot of people don't do that. So every you mentioned, everyone that opened your email is clearly interested in whatever that subject line is. So if you were to say, you know, get $500 off a new ductless system or whatever, that sounds like they opened it because they're curious what's inside. All those people are warm leads that now you can call, don't be creepy. But you could say, hey, I'm not sure if you saw or not. We have this promo going on for X, Y and Z. We're going to be in your neighborhood next week. Wanted to see if you wanted us to stop by because you know that they clicked on something that they're interested in and you have their phone number that hundreds or thousands of people that are warm leads for your salespeople, that there should be no excuse, that there's no leads coming in.

Absolutely. And again, you know, when we shift this perspective, you know, where people, business owners are very concerned about coming off as like a hard sales agency, this is really just responding to the fact that somebody put their Hand up. It's like they're, they're showing you that they're in need of help and you're just following up on it. So like, if you frame it that way and you're reaching out and saying, hey, you know, we, we saw that maybe you needed some help. We're just here to support. It doesn't have to be, you know, a hard, okay, here's the price here. You know, like you can, you can do it so that it's relationship building as well. And even a nurture standpoint, if people aren't ready, we can put them back into the CRM and we can nurture them if they're not ready. But at least we're touching it and we're showing them that we care. And I guarantee you, especially in the contractor space, anyone who picks up the phone is already the top 1% because so many contractors don't answer the phone, they don't follow up with leads that come through from their email that people are putting in or whatever. So the fact that you've got somebody who's reaching out proactively to say, hey, we're here to help, you are way ahead of everybody else. And I believe the trust factor and the care factor are going to show through. You know, we don't need to be salesy, we just need to actually show up. And it's amazing how the show up is so powerful in that space.

That's right. And in the world of AI, I think it's going to be even more important that people are genuinely reaching out to their customers and building relationships because people aren't going to start to get a lot smarter. Like is this AI or is this a real person or what? So the more that you can build that personal touch, the more you're going to elevate your brand and your service on top of it.

Absolutely. You know, there's some of, some of our ads have been getting comments lately that it's, you know, it's a bot, that I'm a bottle. I'm recording these videos, I'm sharing testimonials that it's like, oh, that's a bot. And I'm like, I take exception to that. I am not a bot. But you know, would be easier if I was one. Phil, this has been so great. I want to ask one last question. You know, what are really if, if you were to think of a new business, who is getting ready to get into growth phase or was excited about getting into growth phase, what's maybe the one thing that they should be thinking about to get themselves ready. Aside from maybe reaching out to you, we'll get there. But, but prior to that, you know, what's something they should be thinking about? Where should they be researching to prepare themselves to get into the business phase of, of growth?

Yeah. So when it comes to growth, and I'm sure you can attest to this, that it takes, you need to be percentage based budgets and you need to have a structure of how you're going to actually grow. It's easy to say I want to grow, but like from a marketing perspective, companies that are growing are spending 3 to 10% of their revenue on marketing. Then they're setting this money aside and then they're deploying it effectively by tracking their return on ad spend and what's generating real return. So if you're thinking about, hey, I'm ready to grow, I want to grow, you need to have a game plan with a budget so that way you can give yourself permission to grow and utilize the funds to help you scale the business. And the last part to this is working with a company that actually will pull your return on ad spend data and give you your customer acquisition cost and new customer data. That way you know if it's working or not. Because a lot of people are just, okay, I have my budget in here, I'm spending two, three thousand dollars a month. But like, I don't know if it's actually working. And I'm just kind of like, eh, I don't want to change. It's a big pain. Those are the two big things. Have the budget, make sure it's working.

So Dill, everything you say, I'm like, oh, I've done this wrong in the past, right guys, I gotta tell you, I've, I, when I first started into this phase, I worked with a bunch of different agencies who just didn't get it. You know, if I go back to my Rob Nixon comment of lead gen versus brand, a lot of the agencies were really, you know, getting the brand, getting the name out. And it's like, that's not what you want when you're building your foundation of, of marketing. This is a lead gen. Generate money, build profitability. And when you're Coca Cola, you can worry about spending, you know, $100 million on a super bowl ad just to show a Coke bottle. You know, we're not there. It's not, that's not what we need to be focusing on. Can we create material that can help support the brand along the way? Absolutely. But we really want Those leads. And you really need to know, and this is where I definitely failed. You need to make sure that anyone you're working with is providing you those metrics so you can see the return on spend because there are a lot of different advertising opportunities. Everybody wants your money. You know, it's. Is the money in an ad going to help us generate more so we can do it again? And you know, Phil's, Phil's bang on with all that. These are all, those are things that I wish I had known when I had first started. I had to learn them the hard way to say, okay, I need to understand what these sorts of returns look like so that I can find the right partner to help me. And I can tell you we, we still work with an agency right now on the media buying side that is 100% dialed in with us, just like Phil is. And it's so powerful because we can turn it up and turn it down when we see something that's working really well. So Phil, this has been an absolute pleasure. Where can my audience, where can they find you?

Yeah. So if your home service business between like 1 and $10 million, we do free marketing audits. We get on a call, walk you through a playbook that the things that we just went through for your business. So you can go to flash consulting.com p h l a s h consulting.com youm just click discuss your business schedule online. If you're not in those benchmarks but you like a lot of this content, you can go to our YouTube channel, Flash Consulting. We have tons of content on there helping you, walking you through stuff, showing you stuff.

Yeah, absolutely. Guys, this is Phil Risher. What a special guest in the marketing space. Especially if you're home service business. But if, even if you're not in the home service business. Everything he just said applies to everybody. I'm in the professional services space. Everything he talked about, you know, I've even got some things like oh yeah, you know, I really need to go circle back on some of those elements and say, are we capitalizing the best way we spend a lot for marketing leads. You know, we a lot of energy, you know, creating content, creating documents, brochures, whatever that is to generate leads. Are we doing enough with those leads to convert the highest level possible? Phil, this has been amazing. Thank you so much for your expertise and guidance on this. For everybody else, I'm Bob Govreau, the host of the Wealthy Entrepreneur podcast. It's been a pleasure having you here today. There's been so much value if you know somebody that would benefit from hearing some of the expertise and the guidance that Phil provided, please share this. We're here on a mission to empower entrepreneurs to have the financial confidence and the business confidence to make informed decisions and change the world. And we can do that together. So please share. We're here to support people. Make sure you give us a follow. We want to see you next week. We want to notify you when we're bringing the next guest expert or the next teaching. We want to be able to once again, support you to get your business to the next level. Thank you once again, everybody, for showing up. Thank you, Phil and I look forward to seeing everybody again next week.