How to Implement Pay-for-Performance in Gutter Business

How.

How do you go of hiring people that actually want to show up and work? And where do you find those folks at? Because here in our location, it just seems like, you know, hard to do.

Yeah. Right now, are you turning, like, are you crazy busy? Has it been, like, have you been growing a lot? What. What's the business been like?

So, yeah, so I have a gutter business.

Cool.

And, you know, we've grown, you know, pretty. Pretty decent from last year to this year, and we're staying pretty steady, you know, through this time of year. But, I mean, it's about to get, you know, super busy with the spring rush and everything ahead. So.

You know, it would be nice for me.

Because I'm more, you know, in the cell and running the whole operation as a business. But I. I do the, you know, I do the. The. The groundwork as well, and I have another guy that does the work as well, and then I'm looking for another person to kind of replace me so I can set up a crew for them to do it, and then I can, you know, focus on sales, running the business as a whole, and so forth.

Do you have any sort of compensation for the team based upon performance?

No, not based on performance. It's just strictly hourly.

So that would be the number one thing I'd be looking at, because I think right now, like, if you're paying someone hourly, the longer it takes for them to hang the gutters, the more money they make. The longer the gutters take. Yeah, to hang, it takes. You make less money. So you're going in different directions. You want them to go faster, they want to go slower. And so you got to get everyone going the same direction. And so whether that be, hey, per linear foot, everyone's getting a certain amount per hour on the job, and it's split up evenly. Or if it's a matter of, hey, every job, I quote, I'm doing budgeted hours for that job, and then there's an hourly rate attached to that that comes out to labor revenue, and that's getting divided by the team, whatever you need to do to ensure that them working faster makes them more money. That would be the number one way to be able to. Because ultimately, the short answer to your question is pay them more.

The question is, so where do you find these people? So do you have, like, a specific. Like Craigslist or is there anywhere specific that you go to. To look for people to hire? Is there any, like, specific programs that you use? Indeed, because that's my main problem is finding them yeah, indeed.

Is a great. Is a great place to find them. Facebook. You can make posts on your Facebook page. Trust me, if you make a post that is shareable on Facebook, people will put share in groups. You can go into your local market, look at Facebook groups in your area and there's lots of them for hiring people that are looking for jobs. And I can guarantee that if you have a performance based pay system, they can make 5 or $10 more per hour than the average going rate in your market. People will be wanting to show up and they'll be wanting to work for you. And so making that system is the part that's the key. And whether it be for the per foot or whatever it is, just focus on that.

So that does make sense. And the second question I have is, can you. Would you mind taking a look at my website?

What's. What is it?

Right now it's Pro Gutter llc dot com. All right, let's take a P R.

O. Yep, I got it here.

P R O G U T T E R S LLC dot com.

Love it. Cool. All right. I'm looking at it right now. So the first thing I would say is this is a pretty long homepage. Like in my personal opinion, I would move some of these things off into different pages so that the load time on the first page isn't as long. That's going to hurt your. Your some of your rankings.

Was this site like recently created or when it was built?

Are you. Because I'm on the. I'm on YouTube too, and I'm seeing that you're seeing this. You're on the correct page for one. Do you see like the, the guy in a green hoodie kind of looking at the house with the gutters?

Exactly. Yep.

Okay. Perfect.

I love it. Yeah. Really?

Yeah. So I mean, it's been created for you for the past two, three years. So all this is brand name. Like this is all our. Our guys and our trucks and all our photos.

Cool. I love it. I love it.

I've picked that up from listening to your videos, you know.

Yeah.

Watching your videos and stuff. You always talk about using your brand and that's the main thing we want to do. I mean, our guys are branded in our green shirt, you know, with our green trucks and all that sort of like your little, your yellow style.

So the only thing I would say if you're trying to optimize for sales and then getting more customers is above the fold. Right. When they get to here on your website, you want them to see a Form to fill out their information. Right. Now if they get here, they gotta click contact us, which takes them to a different page. They've gotta scroll down. One, two, three. Okay, there's the form. I'm not really sure, like this is a contact form. It's not necessarily showing the intention of them getting a free estimate. I guess it says at the top of the page here. But like I would make it if.

You click that right here.

Yeah. I would make it painfully obvious though that when they get to this home page, they, they're getting an estimate. Not contacting us, they're getting an estimate. The whole reason they come to your.

Website is not to like make that button. Free estimate.

I wouldn't even make it a button. I would make it a form. I'd make what you see right here, this little form that's nice and small. I would put that right here. I would take out this whole little box here. I just make a form says get a free estimate today. And I put a little form on the right hand side of this screen because that's why you're driving them to the website. Regardless of what ads or whatever.

Yeah, exactly.

They're not coming to see the pictures. Although I really like some of your graphics there about showing the gutters during the different seasons. Love those. But they're not coming there for that. People are coming to our sites to get an estimate and so make that the centerpiece right from the get. Instead of making them go to a different page and scroll down to find it.

So like on the homepage, put that little box right there and then make it obvious like, free estimate.

Exactly. People are coming to our site to get an estimate. That's the only reason they're coming.

Yeah.

Does that make sense?

Yeah. But do you have any other recommendations for, you know, receiving leads locally and are in this type of business, you know, in a smaller area like this? I mean.

Yeah, like the thing about like Google local services. Awesome. The problem is you can't pour money, more money on it. The thing about Google, if you have a small enough market, is there's only so many people searching your keywords in any given time. So spending too much money is a very common thing on Google Ads in this industry. It sounds like you kind of know what you're doing in terms of Google Ads, et cetera. So you're looking now, where can I spend my money elsewhere? This is simply a matter of testing. You have to be able to actually validate where you're spending the money and what your return is. On them. So I would focus. Okay. The next three weeks we're doing a bunch of door hangers. We're going to test it out. We're going to see how many we, how much we spend, how many, how many doors we put door hangers on. We're going to see how many leads come in. Really simple. The next three weeks we're going to do the exact same thing. But now we're going to go to Facebook ads or we're going to go to some other, you know, every door, direct mail or yard signs, whatever it is. Just tracking. It's the most important thing. I would guarantee 90% of people don't have a leads problem though. Like, I know that finding more leads is what everyone wants to know about and I know that I make a video on YouTube, it'll get more clicks and it'll get more views. If I say double your revenue using this marketing tactic, I know that for a fact. If I make a video about following up, no one watches it. But I can guarantee you the lowest hanging fruit in your marketing budget is simply calling the customer on every estimate that you send to them. I can guarantee this. I see the numbers across all of Augusta Nation, inside of Copilot, inside. When people do follow up calls, that's the best bang for your buck. If you spend two minutes doing a follow up call, it's literally costing your admin or potentially you what, like a dollar to be able to do that. That is a whole lot cheaper than spending 20 or 30 or $40 on a brand new customer that you've never done service for. And yet the customer that is warm, that's already literally asked for an estimate, you've given pricing and they've said they wanted to get your job, the job done, you're not following up with them. And so if you can double your, your close ratio from 25% to 50%, you just doubled your business. Like that blows people's mind. But yet they'll spend tens of thousands of dollars trying to double their business by getting more leads when if they could do the exact same end result by simply following up. But guess what? It's not sexy. It doesn't sell. And there's not an industry built around doing more follow up calls. So what do we do? We all think we need to get more leads, but I would venture to believe that 70% of the problems with our businesses are not around leads. I would say, I would say it is mostly follow up and then a little bit more around how operationally you're not doing a good enough job to actually make customers want to keep doing business to you and referring you, et cetera. But the vast majority of people watching these in my videos, they're trying to improve, which means they're probably in the highest percentile of people in terms of customer service and caring about the customer. So I don't really talk a whole lot about that, because most of you really do want what's best for the customer, and that's why I love you all so much. But it is not getting more leads that is going to solve your problems. It is going to be following up and you'll do the exact same thing, but you won't have to spend tens of thousands of dollars in marketing.