The MOST Overlooked Growth Lever in Home Services

This is one of the easiest things to do and no one's doing it.

This is one of those foundational things that you need to be doing from, from day one.

What is the lifecycle marketing that you're doing to your own customer base? Hey, are we messaging our customers about their upcoming maintenance? Are we following up on estimates?

Like, how quickly should I be reaching out to my customers when they request information?

I buy a lead, say we do the job. This is where most home service companies stop. How are we retouching That file.

Well, talk nerdy to me. What is your tech stack?

So, um, welcome back to Owned and Operated, a top 200 business and entrepreneurship podcast. What we do here is we talk about the home service industry and how to grow your business within it. I'm your host, John Wilson. During the day, I'm the CEO of Wilson, which is a three-state plumbing, HVAC, and electrical contracting business. And for fun, I run this podcast where I talk to my friends about how to build inside the industry. Today, I'm rejoined by my good friend Sam Preston, the CEO of Service Scalers, for our Clicks to Calls series. And we're diving into email and SMS, which is. Like an easy channel, like kind of interesting channel. So Sam, welcome back. Welcome back to the show.

Thanks, John. I went and did a lunch date with my daughter and she gave me this sticker and says, grateful for you. That's a nice one. And so I just wanna let you know, I'm grateful for you, John.

Dog, I'm grateful for you.

Thanks, man.

Today we're talking email and SMS and another word for this, which I actually just heard this, for as much as I talk about email and SMS, I don't know how I didn't hear this, but someone called it lifecycle messaging. Maybe, I don't know, like a couple months ago, and I was looking at an org chart for some PE firm somewhere, and I saw someone with the title of lifecycle marketing manager coordinator, you know, whatever. And, you know, I'm sitting there like, what in the fuck is that? And, but it is, and, you know, it sort of makes sense. It's communicating with your customers throughout the lifecycle of that customer. Makes sense. So that could be email, that could be SMS, it could also be postcards, maybe outbound calling. But like, basically, what is the lifecycle marketing that you're doing to your own customer base?

It's the moment that a lead reaches out to how quickly you can text them and message them, uh, to once they have booked an appointment, uh, making sure that they have what they're going to need, uh, to prep them for the sales rep, so technician, when they get That they're more likely to close their jobs. And then after that, for you to get reviews and stack those reviews so that you can get more leads. And then obviously returning clients and customers years later, upselling them, getting more opportunities. It's a whole thing. It's not a small system.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's pretty important. We talk about it a lot in here and the term we use for it is speed to lead, but that's one part of it. Maybe that's even like the top part of it. The next couple parts are are just as important, if not more important. Which is hey, are we messaging our customers about their upcoming maintenance? Are we sending them promotions that we have or reminders? Are we following up on estimates? There's a lot to talk to your customers about, and what we have found in the companies that we've bought and sort of looked under the hood. This is one of the easiest things to do, and no one's doing it on this. Like everyone's doing it when you're big, but like not a lot of people are doing it. These small companies. So yeah, we've bought three and we're going on four this year of acquisitions into Wilson, and not a single one of them was doing speed to lead or lifecycle marketing to their own customer base. Like Not one. So it, it was kind of like low-hanging fruit, um, that you almost— the problem is it works so well you have to be cautious about how you drop it in. Your Google Business Profiles are either printing money or they're losing it, and that's where Big Reputation comes in. Big Reputation turns your GBP into a true lead machine without adding more work to your plate. It runs in the background with automated posting, review generation, and fast responses so that your reputation compounds over time. And this is huge if you're multi-location. They make it dead simple to manage and scale your reputation across every branch so every location shows up and wins in the map pack. I'm actually using Big Reputation right now as I grow and scale my newest acquisitions. Plus, you get real insight into what's actually happening. You get to spot gaps with location health monitoring, track reviews and sentiment, And see which zip codes you're winning and which ones you're losing. Better insights, stronger trust, more calls from an asset you already own. Go check it out at bigreputation.ai/oao.

Yeah, or or they think they're doing it.

Yeah.

But then when you ask them, oh, do you do speed to lead? Yeah, I do speed to lead. You know, I was like, great. How quickly are you getting back to your customers? First fifteen minutes after they reach out. Like that, that, that's way too long. That might be longer than what you think it is, yeah. That is, that is, sounds fast, it is not. So let's ask that question, John. Like what, what do you mean? Like how quickly should I be reaching out to my customers when they request information about our services?

I think ours is like 10 seconds or something.

Yeah, it should be under 15 seconds, otherwise it's too long.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I think with lifecycle, I think the way to think about this I buy, I buy a lead. I go buy Sam Preston's, he wants to, I don't know, you want to clean your drain or something.

Yeah.

So, Sam gets on, he gets on the Googles or whatever, and I purchase his contact information or I purchase that lead so he calls me, like whatever happened, I get Sam's information. I get his name, I get his number, I get his addy, and we go out there. He books the call with us. We go out, we visit his home, we do the job, we don't do the job. Let's say we do the job. This is where most home service companies stop. And so speed, and that's why I think, yes, speed to lead's a part of this, but it's really like there's a lot more to it because in that scenario, I paid $30 to $80 for your name, address, phone number, and email. Like, that's kind of a lot of freaking money. Like, if it's $30, like, dude, that's like 3 Chipotle bowls. Like, that's dinner. That's 3 dinners.

Yeah.

So what this helps you do is it helps you to get the most out of the customer list that you bought. Like, customers cost money to get them into your database. Like, you're spending money. Sometimes it's like organic through a referral, but it costs money. So that's how we like to think about it. If I add 1,500 new customer files in a month or 2,000, and that's, I think, our rough numbers, like 1,500 to 2,000 new customer files a month, that costs me, I don't know, 70 grand to get those new customer files.

Yeah.

How are we retouching That file. Are we going to email them? Are we going to talk about promotions? How can we make sure like, hey, this one job wasn't the last time that I go out to Sam's place? Can we talk about our other services? Can we be like, hey, I know you called us for drains, but we also have electric. You know, boogie woogie woogie woogie. Can we come out and look at your whatever? So it gets the most out of that thirty to eighty dollar investment and helps you drive more. return through your customer list.

You also don't know when that customer is actually going to buy and when it's going to buy from you again. Uh, we just had our HVAC replaced 2 years ago.

Yeah.

And I remember we went with the affordable option and it was not a good experience.

Yeah.

And now my wife has the other person, like, she'd, like, she's had that conversation with me, like, next time if we ever need this again, like, this is the person we're calling because they did such a good job. And guess what? I'm moving into a new house, so I might have to do this whole thing again and we have the person that we were gonna go with because they did such a good job and they're gonna be the more expensive one. So I mean, then, and that's just like my own personal experience, but like this happens all the time.

Yeah.

With clients that are, you know, remarketing to past lists after a certain amount of time.

Yeah.

Because you can upload that audience into Google Ads or Meta and just target that audience after 5 years.

Yeah.

And then just keep working that. You can also hire SDRs to call out to that list. I mean, there's so many more things that you can do with it. It's not just wasted spend if you didn't close it.

Yeah, this was one of our— I think that this discipline is what takes a company from 11%, 12% ad spend to 7%. Like, how dialed in is your business on farming their own fields? Like, If you've got 100,000 customers in your database, how much revenue are you driving per customer in your database and how frequently? The first year that we started doing this, and let's talk about all the different things that are in this, because it is definitely email and SMS, which were the first ones, outbound calling, postcards to your existing customers, Some people do gifts, but those are probably the 4: email, SMS, outbound calling, and postcards. Those are the ones I see the most often of like, hey, we're spending time, energy, or dollars to reactivate a customer. The line that people use is it's cheaper to reacquire a customer than acquire a new customer. I used to say, Like, why would I spend a dollar to send a postcard to this guy? Like, he's already my customer. And it's like, no, the dude bought a job from me one time. Like, we're sending a postcard so he buys many more of them, which is— yeah, easy.

Worth it.

Yeah, totally, totally worth it. Totally easy decision. So, but the first year that we did this, we started with SMS and outbound calling and the business grew 50% that year, like 48% that year. And it was back in 2024. Like it just like freaking popped from adding this discipline. We we had bought all these companies and we're like looking at this database and it was like 110,000 customer lines and we're just like this is a lot of customers. Like this is kind of crazy. What and and Google was struggling. Like that was you know LSA was starting to get weird. So we're like dude we've got to be just You got to be able to just call them and get appointments booked. And turns out that's exactly what you could do. You can just call them and get appointments booked.

Yeah.

And anyways, it was humongous for us as an organization and it diversified our lead flow channels. It helped fill the board every single day. Now, I think we do 1,000 outbound calls a day. We probably do 10,000 outbound texts a day. I don't know how many emails, but it is an everyday part of our business now. We have turned our lifecycle marketing into a machine. Is this a— like, how are you seeing this in clients showing up? Are people ignoring this? Do you know anyone that's amazing at it?

Yeah, I know a couple people that are really good at it. And so, I always like to brag on my buddy in Dallas, John Rivera. He's got an attic insulation company, which I think is just the wildest company. Like, To be a big company. Like, yeah, who buys attic insulation? But man, he just does such a good job and is growing. And the one thing that I thought he always did such a good job at is, uh, hiring and managing his sales team and, uh, how often he pushes to, uh, uh, reaching out to his clients. Like someone reaches out, he's responding within 60 seconds, and then they're touching them for like the next 15 days, 3 to 5 times a day. And again, like this is not, you know, as big of a need as something like HVAC or plumbing. It's just attic stuff.

Yeah.

And but like, so he touchpoint them a lot and man, does he, he is so good at getting leads out of sources that a lot of people, like a lot of people struggle with Meta. And I think one of the reasons why they struggle is because you get a bunch of bad leads and they don't know how to handle that. They don't know how to reach out quickly. They don't know how to touchpoint over the next 2 to 3 weeks. Yeah.

Yeah.

Right. They don't know how to nurture it. But he does it. He crushes it on Meta. He crushes it on Google. And so yeah, like I, he does a really good job.

I would say like most of our clients— When you nail this discipline, I would say that this is probably one of the most important things you could do in your business. To scale, because when you nail this discipline, every channel becomes accessible. Like if you don't have a good nurture and lifecycle marketing team and strategy and tech stack, you can't canvas because like canvassing leads have high cancellation rate. You can't do home shows because when you leave a home show, you have 400 people to contact. This is the this is the strategy to contact. This is contacting them. This is part of your lifecycle. You drop them in, you basically drop them in the machine and it like churns out stuff over different channels and pops you a lead. And then it turns that one job into many more jobs through the same customer. But this opens up like, yeah, to your point, it opens up windows and opens up doors. You know, hey, we're good at this, so I know we can do Meta. We're good at this, so I know I can do lead aggregators because we kill it at this. Yeah, this is like foundational marketing. is your lifecycle. Like, how do you communicate to your new customers? How do you communicate to people that called but never booked? How do you communicate once they booked but didn't sell the job? And then how do you communicate when they sold the job? And like all those different audiences are, are their own thing.

100%. And you're, you're so right in the sense that it's the thing that's going to allow you to scale. And the best part about it is It's not a set it and forget it, but it's pretty close. Like, it's not like you are reinventing something on a monthly basis. You are setting it up and you are watching how the data goes. And then every once in a while you're making changes to it.

Making adjustments, yeah.

But it's basically set up. And so—

It is for us. It's good to know. This is just a daily— when we first came up with this sort of concept, The sign is still like, I bought the sign and put it on the front of the marketing office, and it was the endless machine of endlessness, because that's how I see this, is this is foundational. If you get this right, your spend goes from 12% to 7%, you get higher ROI on your marketing, your business can scale, it reduces the peaks and valleys of leads. This is a foundational part of your business, is communicating with your customers in some way. Uh, but you're right, it, it is just a machine. Now sometimes it takes greater effort, like if it's especially slow from your paid lead channels, sometimes you need to outbound more, sometimes you need to send a couple extra promos. Um, and our insi— our director of inside ops does an incredible job working with our director of marketing to like push this out, uh, if there is like a needed change. But for the most part, the SMS, you set up the audience, you set up the script, you let it run. The email You gotta write an email once a month or twice a month or whatever, but like not that complicated. Outbound calling, did you hit your number? Like it's just, yeah, it's a machine.

It is. And we, Service Scalers, we don't have that as an offering, but if there is somebody out there that does this for their clients, you should reach out to me. Would love to make an intro to some of our clients that would take advantage of that. But yeah, like, I, I— my assumption is, is that you are setting this up, and unless it breaks or something, like you just start seeing the appointments not getting— your, your appointments rate goes from 80%, 90% to 50% or 40%, like at that point we get in there and go, all right, what's going on? Um, but it's pretty much set it and let it run.

Google keeps getting more expensive and affiliate leads are getting worse, and somehow you're paying more fewer, lower quality leads. And that's pretty much the game right now. So here's something that most operators are missing. Yelp. I know what you're thinking, but Yelp is way more than just a restaurant rating app. Last year, over 125 million home service leads were generated on Yelp, and almost 50 million homeowners are searching there every single month. Here's the real kicker, though. Their data powers answers across ChatGPT, Google AI, Apple Maps, and Alexa— basically everywhere people are searching before they even know your company name. So instead of fighting over the same expensive Google clicks, you're showing up where customers are actually discovering and deciding who to hire. One company, Fuse Service, out in the Bay Area— HVAC, plumbing, electrical— does $20 million a year from Yelp alone. They're closing 75% of their Yelp leads and about 70% their entire customer base comes from the platform. So if you're serious about leveling up your lead gen, go to business.yelp.com/ownedandoperated and book a call. Yeah, there's, um, uh, some of it's pretty high-touch manual, some of it's automated. Uh, so we use, uh, we use Avoca for their, like, they have a nurture campaign. Um, and like, we used to go set— you go set up an audience Like, hey, customers that I did HVAC tune-up for 12 months ago or water heaters 10 years and older or whatever. And it basically picks this audience and it sends a message every day. So you might have like micro audiences, you know, you might only have an audience like 10-year-old water heaters. I might only send 50 texts a day, whereas like overdue tune-ups might be 200 or 500 or whatever. So each audience size is different. But yeah, you go in and you set it up. And you get it done. Now that's like for the initial contact. So like, yeah, that's who we're using right now is Evoca's got like a good speed to lead, but then they also have a good like nurture and audience building. So we're a big fan of that. But a lot of it is just manual too. Like you gotta call somebody. Now there are AI outbounders, but we're still manually calling. You gotta call 'em or you have to interface with that lead once it responds. Like there's still a manual input. But yeah, overwhelmingly the technology is probably the most important piece. When we bought these 3 businesses this year, I mean, it takes like a month. This is actually probably one of the longest things to integrate into a new acquisition for us is the speed to lead and nurture campaign, like this sort of lifecycle marketing strategy, because it— you have to get approved through TCPA, you have to get your phone number approved to text customers, and like you have to go through this whole like rigmarole. So it just takes a long time, which is kind of annoying. That's no vendor's fault. That's just like the government.

What it is.

But yeah, it takes the longest and it's one of the most frustrating because it's so powerful when it's done. You can turn on almost any lead channel and just everything works. Every lead channel in any market is going to suddenly start working better because you have a speed to lead and a nurture campaign. Just like automatic. And then you also can just tag their existing customers and start sending promos. And yeah, very powerful. Very, very powerful.

Well, talk nerdy to me. What is your tech stack?

So, um, yeah, our— so it, it touches 3 teams. I'll talk tech and then I'll talk team. Um, yeah, so the tech stack is Avoca for like speed to lead and nurturing, and it hooks up onto our ServiceTitan. And then we— I actually don't know which side we build the audience on. Marketing handles that. I think we do it on the Avoca side. So they pull the data that we want for aged equipment or whatever the problem is, and then they start automatically SMSing, emailing every day. So it's Avoca and ServiceTitan are really the 2 most important pieces of the puzzle. I know Avoca goes through Twilio or something for their numbers. So I guess I can include that in the tech stack. So it's pretty simple. Like, honestly, it's 2 softwares. It used to be much more complicated. We used to have to use 3 or 4 softwares to achieve the same goal. But over the winter, we were able to consolidate it down to one, which that was, that was huge for us.

That's awesome.

So yeah, like that basically runs with most of it. Mailchimp for email. But you can use anything. Honestly, Mailchimp's probably one of the more expensive ones. I think we've just been on it for a while. The teams it touches, it touches canvassing team, call center, obviously marketing. Marketing runs most of the campaign. They build the campaign and then set up the automations. Call center deals with the interfacing to the customer and handling that. And then canvassing, Is really, they've become a superpower with the nurturing and speed to lead because we almost treat, if it's too, if the weather's too weird or whatever, that team, just because of who they are as individuals, they're very lead-focused. We got to hit the pavement, go drum up some leads. So we've actually started using people on that team as escalation inside our nurture or speed to lead campaigns. because they're so obsessed with getting the lead, they do an incredible job. So they just come in and like, hey, here's the people that we think these leads are high value because of their level of interest or urgency or whatever. So they just go attack those leads for the day. And that has become one of our highest ROI channels is 2 people doing escalations. Or outbound calling very specific high value files inside our customer list. But yeah, so that's the tech stack, that's the team. It's pretty simple, to be honest, it's pretty simple. But it took us like 3 and a half years to get it to be as valuable as it is to us today. Yeah, I mean, today it's probably like 40% of our revenue comes from this.

Do you have any like a use case or a study or what is it called? Like a moment where you like implement it and saw The results of it?

When we first launched it, it was unbelievable. I think most home service companies can relate to this. It feels like leads can feel very like peak and valley where like, dude, we're so busy and then we're dead. And you're like checking to see if the phone's working. Like, what happened? What we found is it, I like to think that this raises your floor. So if my ceiling is 10 leads, And that's my capacity for the day. That's however many guys I can run. And if I don't have this nurture lifecycle marketing discipline built into the business, then I need to go buy all 10.

Yeah.

If you can re-nurture your customer base, your floor might go up 3 or 4. So you only need to buy 6 to 7. And that's how you end up reducing marketing spend so much. Is your board, 30% of your board, which is roughly what happens for us, 30% of your board gets filled automatically every day. Maybe not automatically, we outbound call, we message, it's that contact sport, but we're not buying those leads off Google, Meta, Thumbtack, whatever. They're our customer base that we've already purchased that contact and we're just recycling it. Yeah, I think roughly 30%. And the first year we did it, we grew 45 or 50, somewhere in that range. Yeah. And I think marketing budget was the same. I think we spent $650,000 the year before, and that year we spent $700,000, and we still just absolutely popped.

I like that.

Yeah. So this discipline, to summarize, this discipline is probably one of the most important foundational things you can put inside your business, because when you do this, It allows for success in a lot of other ways. Lead channels become easier. You can reactivate customers that you acquired. If you want to launch a new service, like if I wanted to launch appliance repair tomorrow, I could just like drop it in this machine and we'd have a $5 million appliance repair business in like a year.

And this is the thing we talk about where people come to me all the time saying that they have a lead problem. And they normally don't have, sometimes they have a lead problem, but sometimes they have an appointment problem and sometimes they have a sales problem. And we generally wanna fix those things in that order, sales, appointment, then marketing leads.

Yeah.

And so this is the bucket of appointments. This is how you go from, I have a 50% appointments booked rate to I've got an 80 or 90% appointment booked rate. And that's what we have to try to get to.

What are the thoughts you have on lifecycle marketing?

I mean, I would say like, unlike other channels, this is something that everyone should be doing. Yeah, you know, like some channels you want to wait till you get big enough and you can go hire that, you know, director of canvassing, or, you know, like before you, you know, branch yourself too thin into a bunch of different marketing channels. This is one of those things from like day one, you should be trying to figure out how you can get speedily done How you can be communicating to your clients or prospects often, like even if you are the chuck in the truck, right?

Yeah.

Like this is, go get this figured out and then that'll help you scale everything else out. So yeah, this is one of those foundational things that you need to be doing from day one.

I pretty much agree. I think, you know, we bought a business in January, it was a $1.5 million a year business. We added this in, it took about a month. And I mean, immediate improvement. We were able to hire 2 new technicians on the back of adding this small company, right? Like, so I agree with you. I think like as early as you can do this, add this in, obviously it's going to grow over time. You're going to add app on calling, you're going to add like you're going to add things that require payroll, but like you can go do this service for not a ton of money. and it will move the business forward. And I'm always so shocked when I see $5 million businesses that don't have this, because to me, this is foundational. This is how you go from $5 to $10 in a year.

Yeah.

And it won't feel that hard. You just sort of put it in, speed to lead, nurture, your marketing spend goes down. You can then choose to repush it back up if you want and drive brand or whatever you want to do. But I agree with you. This is just the right decision. Yeah. We're starting to work on this before acquisitions now because we keep going into deals and not finding it. And again, my naive self, I've been talking about this for years on this show. So when I walk into these companies, I'm like, well, how do you not have— this is one of the most important things you could do. Whatever you're doing today probably doesn't matter. You should just go do this. So it's always shocking to me when I walk in and like every— no one has this and it's like not— it's not like it's like $20 grand a month. It's like probably like $1,000 or $2,000 or something.

Even cheaper than that.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Really crazy.

So I think— You can set up for fairly cheap.

Yeah.

And then obviously at scale, once you get bigger, that's when it starts getting more expensive. But I'd be surprised if you weren't spending a couple hundred dollars a month. And at least having some of this stuff set up.

Yeah, yeah. I know for us, like, at this point, all of it's probably like $10,000, $12,000. But it's like, it's a lot of our business.

Well, I guess it depends on like, I know you guys are using Avoca. If you're using that, like, some of those AI call centers to as part of the tech stack, yeah, I think that it can get a little bit more expensive. Yeah. I was just thinking email, right?

Yeah, just the speed delete component. It's probably SMS. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

And so you may not be ready for a system that good yet, but if you're smaller, you can get SMS and email set up at the very least fairly cheaply.

I agree. Go do it today. Any other thoughts?

Get it. Get it. Go do it. What are you waiting on?

Pretty much. Stop. Don't be the guy that I look inside your business and I wonder why the hell this thing Isn't done because it's just not that complicated and it's also not that expensive, but this is highly urgent, highly important. So, that's the quadrant this is in. You should go do it.

Yeah. What do you want? No, no. Invitation? Here's your invite. Go get it.

If you were waiting for a sign, this is it.

We're going to put a billboard up just to let you know. Just for you. Just for you. So, when you drive by, go freaking get this done.

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