A $5M Painting Company's Marketing Was Flying Blind

This is a conversation I had with home service business owners, some just starting, some with up to $5 to $6 million of annual revenue, and from a host of different industries including plumbing, lighting, as well as pressure washing. And some of them have big goals. We're gonna be talking a lot about marketing today though, specifically getting leads, how to do lead attribution when it comes to ads like Facebook and Google, and where you're losing money if you're spending money on an agency to run your ads for you. This is a great episode if you're trying to scale and get more jobs. Without any further delay, let's go ahead and roll the tape.

My name is JC. We're on job 405. We've got 3 guys. I got a full-time ops manager, a full-time technician, and a part-time technician. We do about $6,000 a week top line, and then we take home about $2,000 a week. So our profit margins are very healthy. I guess my biggest frustration is with the customer complaints, and I just saw a post from Mike Andes, or from the YouTube talking about a customer complaining. But my biggest question is more of a grass is greener kind of question. And so my big goal, I have a lot of— I'm very impressed by what you've been able to build. My big goal is to eventually scale to $50 million a year, and I'm just doing the math in my head. And if our average ticket item is $800, for example, and I'm just like, okay, if we wanted to really do $50 million a year, we're talking about over 60,000 customers versus if I moved into a service industry like pool building, home building, remodeling, where the average ticket cost is higher to $50,000, $100,000 a year, it'd be a far less amount of customers. So I guess my worry is, am I in the wrong industry and do I need to stop putting so much gas into all this? And if maybe I'm just wasting my time with such a low-ticket item industry?

Well, you sold 405 jobs for pressure washing. How many remodels and new builds have you sold?

Zilch.

I think, you know, I'm gonna say, right? So yeah, like, yes, you to make $50 million in revenue, which is an arbitrary number, you would have to sell less new builds and remodels. Cool. Your progress on the way to $50 million is infinitely better with pressure washing. And so doing more and better of what you're currently doing will get you there, in my opinion, much better because you have what 99% of people don't have, and that is traction. And to just build on top of that. And so it is always easy to get caught up in a different service, a different industry, etc. But you are already ahead of 99% of people that have never pressure washed another property besides their own. So you're already in the top 1% of humans. You're, you're exactly in the bottom 0% of homebuilders. And remodelers. I'm going to go on a limb and say you don't have a bunch of experience doing that. All right. And so I would just stick with what you're doing. This is why, like, when I dropped out of medical school, I just kept doing lawns. It's the one thing I knew I'd do. And then just kept doing it over and over and over. In 12 years, you wake up and there's like, there's something cool. There's been plenty of opportunities to jump into other services and opportunities of people offering me partnerships and all the rest of it. You just like, no, like, this is what we're doing. And if you do it long enough and you just constantly focus on improvements down the road, it looks cool.

Okay, then I have just one quick follow-up and I'll be done. How do you guys manage the customer complaints? Is it like they just get split into different brackets where one is like, hey, this was 100% on us, and then another one is just like you could give them a golden brick and they complain there wasn't a handle and it just is what it is?

Yeah, like you got to triage between the two. And figure out, okay, which of these are reasonable customers that are— have real complaints. If those are complaints and they're legitimate, those are your hit list of improvements you need to make, right? Like the reason how you build a defensible business is you have all the edge cases and all the problems solved. That's why anyone can spin up a piece of software, but Salesforce somehow is worth hundreds of billions of dollars is because they have had millions and millions of complaints, issues, and bugs they fixed. All the edge cases. So anyone can go pressure wash a house similar to what we just talked about for you. Like, anyone can go do that. You solving all the edge cases over the course of many complaints, issues, customer problems. Okay, this job did not work out because X, Y, and Z operationally. We didn't close this job because of the way that someone answered the phone. All of those solves hundreds and thousands of times builds enterprise value and gets you way ahead of the competition. And so that's why many times it's not, it's not just about time in your industry. It's a matter of number of reps. And so the amount of times you get a complaint and then you solve that complaint because they are reasonable, that's when you get your one leg up. And that's hundreds of thousands of times on your way to, let's just call it, $50 million. The— they're in that— in those complaints are also going to be people that are unreasonable. And those, you have to sift them out. You have to be humble enough to realize that most complaints are your fault. And you want to synthesize it through the Extreme Ownership lens first and see, can I actually solve this? And sometimes The unreasonable customer is how do I solve this problem by never getting them as a customer in the first place? Like, why did they get in? That's a system failure. Like, this person's unreasonable. Their complaints are absolutely illogical. They're crazy. I will never be able to suffice them. You still got them as a customer and allowed them inside the funnel. How can I create a system that prevents that from happening? So every complaint is a problem to be solved, and those complaints solved hundreds of thousands of times, it builds enterprise value.

Sweet, sweet. Thank you very much.

Like, ultimately, anyone here within 2 days could build an AI product that looks very similar to HomeWorks in terms of spinning up some software. It is the hundreds of thousands of tickets and lines of code of engineers that are on security, database optimizations, especially on the security side right now. That's the reason there's value. And so anyone that says, you know, anyone can mow grass, anyone can build a pressure washing company, anyone can build a plumbing company is right. But why haven't they built a $50 million business? It's because they haven't done it so many times. It solved all the edge cases to make it a seamless experience.

Hey, this is Connor. I do marketing for a company called Brush House Painting and Flooring, and there's also a sister company, Brush House Roofing and Gutters. We also do siding. Tom, our owner, is also on the call with us. I believe he's iPhone on the call.

Yep.

So yeah, Tom has been following you for quite a while. You're a big inspiration for the company. Right now we're doing about $5 million a year. In painting and flooring, and we're starting to push on roofing more. A lot of Google advertising, Thumbtack, Angie lead sources. We're trying to figure out what the best way to bring in leads, the best way to manage Google Ads, get our name out, get as many leads as we can in. And then on top of that, how to close, how to raise the close rate that we have.

Cool. What's your, what's your percentage right now of direct response versus organic? Do you know?

I'm not sure exactly. Tom, do you have any insight on that?

I'll be honest, I'll probably say maybe like 50. We've only been in business for about 3 years, so we had extremely fast growth. We're probably projected to be $6 million this year into it. But it's like, it's hard. I don't know if it's like organically or Google's pushing it. I would say it's about 50/50 if I had to guesstimate.

Yeah. So like I would really, before I spend a dollar in marketing, I'm always making sure I have lead attribution set up. The fortunate part is if you have LSA or you have Google, it's very easy to track where they're coming from and attributing it to Google. Same thing for Facebook. If you're doing door hangers using QR codes, for example, allows you to be able to know who— where is this lead actually coming from? So you can run reporting on like what's working. Because if we just are throwing people to the site, I will just continually pay advertising companies, whether it be agencies or advertisers themselves, the platforms, and I have no idea what's working. And so I would really recommend before spending money on marketing, like make sure your tracking pixel is set up on Facebook, make sure your Google tracking code is set up correctly, making sure you have attribution for every single lead. Anyone answering the phone, like instant start— starter conversations like, where'd you hear about us? I need to know that for every single customer. I would do that because at your scale, if you're going to go dump a couple hundred thousand dollars into marketing, you could double or triple the output. And that is— that's the determining factor of, quote, whether or not it works based upon whether or not you even attribute a lead to a specific platform. Okay, real quick, if you're not already doing this, this, you got to, and that is every single phone call that comes in, every single web form that comes in, every time someone scans a QR code on door hanger, you gotta put where did that lead come from. So in HomeWorks, you can just customize all your lead sources, and then every time a lead does come in, you just tell your office person it's gotta be filled out. I don't care if it's a door hanger or a yard sign or they saw the truck or a Facebook ad or Google ad. That's usually the best attribution is just asking the customer Where'd you hear about us? Whether it be on your form, whether it be on the phone, but if you don't do that, you're just getting a bunch of leads and you don't know why. And so when you wanna grow and you wanna put more money into paid ads, you don't know where to put the money. Like, was it the door hangers that worked? Was it the yard signs? Were people seeing the trucks? Did someone see a billboard? You don't know. And so if you don't track it, you won't ever be able to pour more fuel on the fire when you want to grow. So go to HomeWorks, customize what your lead sources are, and make sure your admin is actually asking this question on every single inbound lead. All right, back to the video.

We're definitely keeping track of everything, every lead, every source, Google Ads, making sure it's set up correctly.

Do you have the marketing file in front of you, Connor?

Yeah, I can pull it up right now because we do track it.

I just don't have it in front of me.

Okay, you're cool.

We track every single lead, every single source, the best of our capabilities. Yeah, we have all the pixels set up on Facebook, all the pixels set up on Google. But, you know, when people call and obviously it's not a Google call, so it's not being tracked, they're just like, I found you on Google. It's more than likely it's some type of SEO or organic. We do spend a lot of time on SEO optimization.

And just FYI, one quick, one quick thing for you, Connor. What you might want to do is set up UTM parameters for phone calls so that way when someone goes from Google and they click call, you, you can track that and attribute that lead to Google still versus them say seeing your truck. Mm. So you can use like CallRail, for example, um, and be able to get to where the number changes out based upon if they go through Google or they go through an ad. And then you can then attribute that even because like it's the same thing with us, like 40-50% of our leads still come from phones. And so yes, we can ask them all day long about lead source, but if they're coming from Google or an ad, they can still hit my website and then click call. And so if I can change out that number, it gives me more clarity in terms of where that lead actually came from.

Yeah.

Yeah, we just got set up with CallRail before when we were learning, 'cause we had to, we were working with an agency for Google Ads, and at the end of last year, it kind of went into a tailspin. So we decided to kind of work in-house, reach out to some people on Fiverr, get their suggestions, but a lot of learning ourselves. And it's not, you know, performing the best. I mean, with Google Ads, do you have any kind of recommendations and knowledge with the, um, what the best way to set up for local services would be.

Yeah, the biggest thing is like some of like the low-hanging fruit. I don't know, I know you're, you're, uh, sharing your, your screen here. I can't really see it to be perfectly honest. If there's something specific, feel free to zoom in, but just FYI. Okay, cool. Um, you're good. So some of like the common things with Google is I see people not having good negative keywords, and so you're ranking and getting a whole bunch of clicks and traffic for things that don't actually matter. So negative keywords is just ongoing maintenance. Like, wait, you can obviously see when someone clicked on a specific keyword. I'm scanning that every week and making sure that I'm not getting clicked for random stuff I don't want to be showing up for. So negative keyword management, big thing. Um, and then really looking at what the split of how many people are using Google Ads to call you versus just clicking on a blue link, because it really determines where I spend my attention So for example, Google Ads, we spend tens of thousands of dollars a month on it in Augusta. 80% of the, of the quote clicks were actually people tapping on call them to call us. And so being able to have a distinction of, okay, then I should deploy more energy towards my phone agents and in tracking that compared to just like, for example, optimization of my website.

Yeah, no, that makes sense.

Thank you.

I'd say another thing too, Connor, like if Google Ads are not something you're super familiar with is you can get like an a really good— at your scale, like afford to pay a couple, couple thousand dollars or someone to sit down and go through your ads account and not necessarily be on it with an agency. So it sounds like you guys are bringing in-house. That's why you're coming on, Connor. And so like you can absolutely go into like Upwork, get someone who's been doing this for ages, spend a couple thousand dollars or even say like, hey, I just want you to like look at everything we're doing and tell us where we're wrong. And then they can dive in a lot deeper.

Yeah, we already done that. We have a consultant that works with us. He's at the point where like there's no more optimizations that we could do. It's like, it's just our market's extremely competitive in the field that we're competing in.

And what's your cost per lead right now from Google? Do you know?

It's about like $300, $400.

Okay. And what's your average ticket?

$7,000.

Is that horrible? Because you still have 1 in 20.

Yeah, we have a 49% close rate.

Okay. Yeah. So like, I think the other thing I would be thinking about is, yes, it's expensive, but if you're not tracking the calls from Google Ads, I'm not saying you aren't, but if you aren't and it's like they're going to your website and clicking and calling your office and that's not being tracked, there's a good chance that instead of it being $300 or $400, it's $250.

What's your thought on like, who cares about like tracking everything? My logic is as long as my marketing percentage is below a certain point, like that's— I've always been like under that mentality. Like I don't care how much I spend on Google or Facebook as long as the total cost of my marketing is like 7 to 8%, I could care less.

Yeah. What I'll be perfectly honest, what got you to $5 million is that mentality. And that's why you just dump the money into marketing. What gets you from $5 to $50 is knowing exactly what's working, what's not, so that when you deploy more money towards it, you have better returns. Because if you had more money right now and we spent it on marketing, we would have a blended average versus being like, hey, I know if I spent $100 grand on this one channel, I would get $3 million. That unlocks a huge opportunity as you grow and you take more market share.

Yeah, I mean, that's where we're struggling. This is where we're starting to plateau and we're getting—

it's the most boring part of business, the most boring part of business where all that matters is really data analytics, clean data, be able to synthesize that to make decisions. But I don't know if you saw the post from I made this morning on my socials, like we had like a 51% increase in amount of leads year over year for Q1 at Augusta. That is 100% because all I've been thinking about for the past 14 months is data analytics and it's like, where is it working? What's not working? Okay, move this button. Okay, this form should be this little bit longer. Okay, what should this word be on the form? And so like, not only are we talking about ads, but there's this other thing called conversion before they even become a lead. So getting your website, optimizing all those at your scale and size really matters. It's like everything that Augusta went through the past 12 months of was just all optimization around data. That was it. That's all we did. And so that got us 50% extra.

Yeah. I mean, my background's mergers and acquisitions, so I appreciate stuff like that. But that's incredible. It's a lot of work.

I know. It's so boring too. Great job, guys. You guys are kicking butt. You guys have another question? Feel free to bring it up. Daniel, go ahead, Daniel. Nice guitar selection in the background. Let's go.

Oh, hi, thank you, I appreciate it. Um, I just want to start off by saying, Mike, I really appreciate you. I've been a big fan forever. I've got your, your book here and everything. So I'm starting a— my biggest constraint right now is I'm just opening this business and I need to get my first customer or two or, or 10. Um, so I've done everything free at this point. I have social media up, I've got posts, I've got Google set. I'm on the map. I did— I made some door hangers. I passed a few hundred out at this point, but I just got those in. So I'm just trying to get some customers, you know, and then to be able to— once I show up at their house to give them a quote, I've, you know, I've selected you guys' software so that I can give them that quote. It looks professional, and then I can charge them for a deposit. Right. That's my main goal right now. And my main constraint is just getting that first customer. So if you have any advice for me on that, that would be great.

And so, Daniel, just to be clear, when it comes to lighting the core, are you going into new builds? Are you going to renovations? What's— is this residential, commercial? What's your target audience?

My target audience is both residential and commercial. But what I'm trying to do is Around here in Chicago, you only have a few months for landscape lighting, and so it's really hard to create a business out of that. So I've taken basically that as well as 3 other businesses and combined them into one that I think is actually pretty cool. So we've got the landscape lighting during the summertime, Christmas lighting, and then there's a new emerging business that I modeled that I don't know if you've seen. It's the Porch Pumpkins, basically.

Yeah.

Yeah. So that lady's making a million and a half a year, but that by itself isn't a business. And Christmas lights is like hard by itself as a business. All these are too seasonal. But together I've created what I'm basically framing as front of house, front, uh, concierge is basically a curb appeal. So whether it's your business or your home, you know, and this is for high-end clients, we're gonna make sure the front of your house looks great all the time. We have a maintenance package., for to keep your landscape lighting looking good. We give discounts on, uh, Christmas lighting and fall decor, but you will always have a beautiful front of business or house, basically. And then we can do other stuff in between. Now, I'm a licensed electrician, so I'm really good with installing landscape lighting, and I've done a lot of it. I used to work for like a service electrical company, but I didn't want to start an electrical company because —there's too many issues as far as hiring good help, um, and dealing with inspections and things like that. Whereas landscape lighting is low voltage, you don't really need a licensed person. Same with Christmas lighting and all that. So I can, I can get help, I can scale this pretty easily. I just need— I just— but I just started literally last month. I made the website, I made the logo, I made everything myself, and I just need a customer.

Yeah, so I think the way that this works is going to be having seasonal offers for season-specific services. And so, for example, I would look at every single holiday that you can sell into as entry points for customer acquisition. So for example, Easter, there are people that decor just for Easter. All your ads are just Easter, Easter, Easter, Easter. And then it's like, okay, it's summer break, like, okay, for the kids coming home, like whatever it might be, I would have 10 to 12 of those throughout the entire year that, you know, you're going to promote against. Obviously Christmas is easy. Obviously spring is easy. For landscape lighting. I think permanent lighting would be a great move for you because permanent lighting allows you to upsell customers like, hey, I'm willing to spend $2,000 on Christmas. Like, okay, great, can we get you at $6,000? It's now permanent lighting and you can change it for, you know, the color of your favorite sports team. You can change it for the NFL, you can change it for the college football. Like you can program it, you can sell the recurring into getting new packages of lighting systems for them. I think that it really comes down to the pain at its highest point is usually where services like in home services we stink at because I'm like, I'm landscaping. So like I just promote landscaping. For example, you are in the business of whatever is hot, you go after. No one cares about porch pumpkins in the middle of August, but they care a lot about it in October. And so I would just figure out what each of your seasonal demands are. So the challenging part with yours, it's very seasonal, like you're having like 6 weeks per promotion and then after that's done, you just got to stitch those together throughout the whole year. So you have an actual business.

Business. Yeah, you know, luckily for me, I've— I grew up in the YouTube world, so I can make a promotional video like in an hour and it's great, you know. So I don't have to pay for that. I just make it happen as it needs to be. I think— what's like the next—

what's the next like date of the year that you think you could sell into?

Well, I'm trying to do landscape lighting at this moment, right, and promoting that for the next season or two. And then it would be porch pumpkins and then Christmas decor. Well, what about July 4th? Well, you know, I don't really— I'm trying to create packages and I don't want to just do everything for everyone right now because I'm just going to get lost. So I'm sticking to these 3 things at the moment, you know. So right now, if you're not looking for landscape lighting or architectural lighting of some kind, then I'm probably not going to be able to serve you because I just— I, you know, this is also a side job. I work during 40 hours a week. I work for a fertilizer company doing marketing. So I'm just trying to start this on the side and eventually leave that and just, you know, be a business person.

And I'll put my vote in for this one, Daniel. I think your skill is marketing. I don't think it's— I would highly recommend like each entry point you drive your customer acquisition cost down dramatically. If you go sell structural lighting or even landscape lighting, your cost per lead might be $100 to $200. If you can go and say, hey, I'm going to make your property look incredible for July 4th, here's a $3,000, a $5,000, a $10,000 package. That will crush on marketing. Okay. And you get them as entry points. Now you build this contact database of high net worth people that you know have discretionary income to spend money, and you upsell them during your slow season to things that are more permanent, like the permanent lighting, structural lighting, landscape lighting. But then you get entry points for $30, $40, cuz they, like, it's just the hype of the season.

Sure. Okay. Okay. Okay.

So like, if, if you're like, hey, I'm, I'm getting ready, I got my website, I just gear everything towards July 4th. Have for your promotions, you know, you can run, cuz I, I, I genuinely believe your customer cost be 10 to 20% of what landscape and structural lighting would be if you just get entry points around the decor side. Now, and I actually think that's your unique selling proposition is the decor thing. You get in with the decor and then your backend anchor is the structural and landscape lighting that you can sell in between the hot seasons where, you know, you get customer acquisition.

Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, I like that. That sounds good. And you know, the eventually the goal is to be able to maybe license this package to landscape companies around the country. That's what I've seen done for other types of services. So if I get this down with the systems and then eventually all the different inputs, I could sell the lighting to my licensees. Right. So that's eventually the goal here.

The thing is to keep in mind is your demand curve for porch pumpkins will also flow into your Christmas lights. Sure. And so like we've had owners of us to consider it and some of them do it. But the challenging part is that's also when I can sell Christmas lights because I can sell Christmas lights all October. And so just keep that in mind because a lot of times you're like, I have two services. Like, no, like you could just deploy that same energy towards one of them and get the same output because now you're focused on just one and the demand curve is the exact same, like October, November, December, same demand curve. And so I— you know, Go ahead.

Oh, no, you know, I'm right at the beginning of this and I have like the fork in the road where I could just go lighting, I could do the decor thing. It's— and I don't know what would be better, but I'm in the Chicago area and there's a lot of people who have money and a lot of companies who have money. I think the decor might be fun. And my wife likes decor and it's named— the company's named after my wife, Mackenzie. So I don't know, I feel like it would be like a nice homely thing that people would just enjoy and it might be more trendy. Than lighting.

You know, I think, I think what was very appealing to me, you look at decor as your entry point. Like we look at mowing as our entry point, right? And then you look at your upsells into lighting as your anchor during the off, quote unquote, off season. And there's gonna be 3 or 4 of them, right? So for example, between Easter and July 4th, that's when you go install a whole bunch of lights, right? And then from July 4th to, let's just call it, let's just call it Thanksgiving for the sake of the example. Those, that's when you install lights. But then, you know, you have 4 to 6 weeks where you're just pounding marketing to get customer acquisition. All you're trying to do is get a list of people that, you know, have a ton of discretionary income because whoever's going to spend $3,000 to $5,000 on decorations, you know, they got money. Right, right, right, right.

Yeah, I appreciate it. And I just got to get my invoice looking good and my estimate, you know, my quotes looking good. And then I think I'm set once I get—

once I get some calls. Let's go. Let's go. Yeah. All right. Thank you. Got it. Did you know that when you join Augusta Lawn Care, you don't just get access to lawn care and landscaping, you also get access to AugustaLights.com, and all the training and resources required to be able to do holiday lighting. It's all included in the exact same package. Go to AugustaLawnCareServices.com/franchise and check it out today. Now back to the video. Marcus, go ahead.

All right. I'm in a completely different position from the previous people who were just talking. I'm just starting out my business. I'm waiting for one more piece of equipment to come in before I can really start. My main service will be drain cleaning and camera inspections and any sewage drainage. I've been in the industry for about 5 years, so I know how to do pretty much anything plumbing related. At least from the research I've done, it says that specific, like, specializing is the way to go. You're known for this, so people call you for it. It's kind of your main in into the industry. And like you were mentioning with the lights before, you use that as kind of a jump-off point to provide other services to people.

I have a question, Marcus. Sorry, if you're going into inspection specifically, Are you going to change your name away from plumbing?

No, no, I'm doing camera inspections. Okay, not inspections. Inspections is just how to get my foot in the door, basically.

But what— why would you not name it Drain Repair? I'm just—

I'm curious because I'm willing to do any plumbing as well. So if people are willing to call me for water heaters, water supply, um, gas supply, any repairs in home— you got a water leak in your home, I can also do those services. So I'm willing to do those services. The main service that I'll be dealing with though is Yeah.

Interesting. Yeah. Like, I'm not saying you should do this. I'd just be very interested in you becoming the drain repair guy. Right. Mostly because if I'm looking, if I have a problem and I have 50 plumbing companies, if I have a drain issue, like, am I going to contact the plumbers, which some of them might not do that service, or am I going to contact the drain repair guy? Right. And so I would, I would really like For example, you could test this very easily. Change your door hangers. For example, one of them having the plumbing, one of them saying drain repair. Put a couple thousand of each. I would go venture to believe you will double your response rate if it says drain repair in your name.

My question specifically, because I am going to consider that right now, I don't have the funds to print out a whole new set. So maybe the second time around, once I'm getting my income back in, I can invest in that essentially. But I was wondering if you have specific like references for good marketing because that's not my strong suit. I have a little bit of background in graphic design from high school classes, so it's not much and it's a while ago. Um, but you were mentioning tracking and various sites. Which sites do you recommend? Um, is there some reference videos you know of that I could get sent to take a look at on how to set that up, et cetera, et cetera?

Right now, the unique thing is you could spin up a website pretty easily on a lot of different sites that looks really good. I think right now when you're first getting started, the only thing to care about is getting your first few customers. Kind of like we were talking with Daniel, like, I don't care if you give away inspections for free. I don't care if it's door hangers. Like when you have a limited budget specifically to like, we don't have the money to go like, let's go to set up DataRails and like do a whole bunch of tracking and run Facebook and Google Ads. Like very different. In your case, it's like we need 10 customers and we're going to knock on doors in the areas we know that those services are needed. We're going to, in my opinion, nail the offer. And so whether that be a free inspection, whether that be changing the name. Like, it's so a lot easier to change your name now. If that is the conclusion that increases your conversion by 2, like a double, it's easy to do that now than in— let's just call it even 5 months. Once you have a website, you have decals on your trucks, like that's a lot harder. So like, I would nail it that first before— it's like, like, nail the offer, nail the brand so that when you go put the truck decal on, you know, it converts twice as more, like twice as much. And like, my, my strongest recommendation to you is if you're going to specialize, go all in on it because it will allow you to be able to charge way more. It'll make your marketing advertising way clearer because people just know what you do. A plumbing company, I think you change out toilets and do everything else in my, in my, in my house. If you say you're the drain guy and I have a drainage problem, I'm coming to you over any other plumbing company, even though they could do the service. I don't know that customers don't know the difference between drain problems and plumbing issues. They just think they have no idea. And so I would strongly recommend like nail it before you scale it. And right now when you're doing hand-to-hand combat, which is door hangers, door knocking, going on Facebook groups that are free, you have the flexibility to move more nimbly versus like, okay, I want you to get Home Service Web Design to build a big site for you and get the cost of that, but also like pictures and graphics, and then they're going to put it on your truck. Now, all of a sudden we can't be as nimble. And so I would really encourage like nailing it before you scale it. In this regard, I'd try to nail your branding and your offer and then From there we think about design, website stuff, etc. Okay. Yeah.

I mean, my website right now is just a landing page to get into Homework Software and get in contact with me. So yeah, yeah.

You know, you could spin up a very basic site, even like using a JotForm, for example, just to collect information. A QR code on a door hanger, for example, could go there. Just a landing page, like you said. But like, I'd be very interested in trying to get as many Google reviews as possible, getting your business profile set up. That's all free. That's a good thing. And whether you are doing free inspections for a review, for example, for all your friends and families, hey, if you just let me do an inspection and give me a review, it's free. Like, that's what I'd be really leaning into instead of like design, all that, because you don't even know what works yet.

Yeah. Yeah. Fair enough.

Thank you. You got it. Bob from Denver, Colorado.

Hey there, Mike. Hi, everybody. Thanks for doing this again. Absolutely. I've got— I'm glad that it's a marketing conversation today because that's kind of some of the stuff that I had on my list to chat with you about, starting with— within HomeWorks, we did a text marketing campaign and we're going to do an email campaign from the folks that were unresponsive to the text campaign. How we can track in HomeWorks the success rate of those campaigns.

Yeah, so there's like 5 ways you could. I'd say right now tags is probably still the best. Um, we just have our, our, uh, you could just have your texting department, for example, or whoever's managing your texts that are coming in. They could tag them. Um, the challenging part is with, with a customer that you sell 5 times, do you still want that text, that tag propagating in a year? And so, um, there's no real way to attribute a text to an estimate right now. There's no like tagging of estimates. That's really— that would be the ultimate solve here. Some people have used custom fields though, because you can make custom fields on an estimate, for example. For example, like, you know, did this lead come on upsell? It's like email, text, outbound phone calls, stuff like that. But there's no like clean way of like, hey, if they, if they respond to this text message, it automatically just knows that this estimate is going to be attributed to them. Also, because a lot of times we in our text messages will give the offer and we're just converting it directly into a job. We don't even make an estimate many times. Because we're saying, hey, it's $99 for this service. Would you like that? If yes, let's go. And we're just putting them on the schedule. So we don't have any sort of automatic attribution right now.

Gotcha. And same with like finding like who put us into like using, using MailChimp, I would get reports of X people unsubscribed, X amount of people hit stop or spam. But I haven't seen that anywhere in HomeWorks. Is that correct?

Yeah, great callout. So there's, there's a feature that you can see if you go into, uh, if you go to the support tab at the very bottom, it says like submit feedback and you can see the public board of like where people are submitting new features. One of them is like more of a campaign level. So when you send a bulk text or bulk email, being able to know like how many people actually clicked it, how many people responded, how many people unsubscribed to your point. Um, we don't have that level of data yet. Kind of like a Mailchimp specifically that just does that sending. Gotcha.

Let me see what else I have here. Marketing with Google has been an absolute nightmare for me for where I'm just throwing money out, not having the, you know, I know it's important to keep track of this, this stuff and it seems like I get it set up and then it, you know, I've now changed to HomeWorks instead of my previous CRM and I got to reset stuff up and then we get into these situations where we shut off our campaigns. We're lawn and sprinkler, we're shut down for the winter, and suddenly I'm still getting charged, you know, $500 a month or whatever for Google that we're positive we turned off. And it comes into this bank dispute nonsense and then they won't reload my account. And then we're always getting calls from, hey, I'm a Google expert, you should be hiring. Where are you on hiring Hiring a Google expert, is that worth it in an under $1 million business?

I don't think so. This is why agencies exist, because it's so frustrating and it's difficult to make sense of spending $2,000 or $3,000 a month hiring them just to manage your account. Right. First off, I would say I'd really recommend not making your lead attribution based upon them getting into HomeWorks. I would do it based upon on your website, mostly for the sake of like if they're on an Apple device, a lot of this can get blocked from tracking. But if they, for example, click on the submit button on an estimate request form, I can track that. I might be able to also track a thank you page. That's like the most accurate. So for example, I like to put my pixels on a thank you page. So they submit the form, they click submit, and if they hit that thank you page, I know the only way to get to that thank you page is submitting that form. So I try to not attach it to my CRM at all because a lot of times that is blocked, especially on Apple and iOS stuff. And it's also much more dependable. And so that way, once you set up tracking code and have a pixel and it's set up in the footer and the header of that thank you page, I don't have to usually touch it again. That'd be like my first little thing. I think in terms of getting help on this, Bob, I would just go on Upwork. I'd be looking for a Google expert. You're going to pay them pretty— like, I don't go under $100 an hour for these folks because they should know what they're doing. They show a lot of experience, but they're going to tell you a lot of things that you can improve. But they're not, not on a retainer. They're not incentivized to keep you around paying more. Like, you never want to— in my opinion, I want to get in an agency relationship where they're getting a percentage of my ad spend because now they're just incentivized to spend— make me spend more money. And so I want to be where, hey, you— I pay you when I'm happy with the results you give me, which is optimize this thing, make sure it's set up correctly. And if I have problems, you take care of it so I can focus on running my business, not optimizing some stinking keyword with Google. And so I would lean heavily into that. Either you could go ahead. That's called Upwork. Yep, exactly. You can go on there, you can create a proposal. You have people that will want to do it. You, for this specifically, you have hundreds of people. I'm looking for usually people that have done at least 100 jobs and over $100,000 of revenue through the platform, which narrows it down dramatically. It's, I don't want someone like on the weekend they're doing ads. I want them, this is their job, uh, and freelancer. And it's nice because they're like, hey, if they're doing a great job, I'll hire more. Oh, hey, let's go ahead and put more out, couple more hours on. But if they're not or if there's something wrong, it's really easy to cut them off.

Okay. All right. And then on another marketing question, so the name of our business is Nature's Carpet, Lawn and Sprinkler. We've been around since '99, used to stand out a whole lot. You know, we were around before the internet was going basically. So, so just the different name was, was good. It was beneficial. Now, Uh, we've kind of gone past the carpet throwing people off again, but it's a play on words. Nature's— grass is nature's carpet. Um, I've been seeing more of like being very distinct, and you've mentioned it earlier today as well, with, with what your primary service is. Do we start separating the name of the business to Nature's Carpet Lawn and a different ad for Nature's Carpet Sprinkler, or do we continue running the same track that we're going down where we're offering both services.

What percentage of your revenue is sprinkler? About 60%. Oh, good. Okay. I don't think you need to split it because it's an easy— it allows for easy upsells. This is why we have an S at the end of like Augusta Lawn Care Services, because it allows our owners to be able to do a bunch of different stuff if they want to. It gives them more flexibility. So I wouldn't split it off, mostly because if you have ads running and someone doesn't need a sprinkler, but you could also sell them lawns, something related, I don't want to lose that lead. Or like it's a a waste of money. It also happens that like the person that has a lawn could be a sprinkler client. So usually when you go narrow like this, you have to get more narrow with your targeting, especially if you don't have someone that's doing the targeting for you, Bob. Like that's when I'd be like, hey, broaden the scope a little bit. Hey, we do lawn and sprinkler to get customers in the door and then you can use your upsells to funnel them in the correct way.

Okay, that's, that's the way we've been doing it. So thanks for the reassurance.

Hey, it's worked. You've been around for 27 years. Let's go. Yeah, good stuff. But yeah, you got it. Pretty much. Yeah. Awesome. Appreciate you all tremendously for supporting what we're doing here at Homeworks. And I look forward to seeing you guys in and around the community. So take care. We'll see ya.