How to Make Content as a Home Service Business Owner

If you run a home service business and you're wondering what you should be posting on social media, I'm going to give you the answer in this video. Whether you are a big business doing $3 million+ in annual revenue or you're just getting started, I want to walk you through how you can use social media and creating content to become a better business owner and build your business in terms of revenue. So let's start. If you are just getting started, you're a smaller business and you're trying to get more customers. Creating content does not look like sharing your profit and loss statement and talking to business owners. No one cares in your local market about your business. They care about solving their problems and about the service that you offer. If you're a smaller business, I would recommend doing more of your services and not trying to be a content creator or a thought leader in the industry. If you're running a $200,000, $300,000, $400,000, $500,000 annual revenue business, you you would be better served getting more clients and growing the business. And if your eventual goal is to create content for your industry and for other business owners inside your industry, realize you'll get a lot more attention and people will trust you more if you've built a successful business. So focus on that first. And when it comes to creating content in your local market, I want you to think about how you build trust with your customers. The same way that you would build trust in your industry by building a bigger business. I want you to build trust with your customers in your local area. How do you do that? You become the face that they trust for local news and for everything local in your area. For example, if there is a new tax bill that gets passed and this new school starts getting built, I want you to comment about it. If there's a new restaurant in town, I want you to go and support the local business and interview for 2 minutes the owner. Ultimately, you're trying to become the mayor of your city. If people in your local area start following you, not because of your lawn care content, not because you're fencing content, not because you're flooring content, your service, but they follow you because they trust you for a local news source and they look to you as a way to be able to learn more about the local community. You will become a person and a brand that people know, like, and trust. No one cares about the service that you provide until they have pain. Meaning no one cares about getting a weed-free lawn until they have a whole bunch of weeds in their lawn and they actually see that as a problem and they haven't solved it already themselves. Therefore, my total addressable market, the amount of people that I can talk to in my local area, is much greater if I talk about news, things in my local area. Here's a headline for you: Subway shop opens up. Okay, no one really cares.

All right.

Subway shop opens 2 streets down from you.

Now I got my—

it's got my attention. This is going to impact my life and it's local. And so the best thing you can do as a home service business is lean into the fact that you are a local business and you only service a very small area. Making content that could appeal to the broad audience of the world, like when you post something on YouTube, it can be seen in dozens of countries, and 99.9% of the people watching the video will never do business with you. So why in the world would I try to talk to them? I want to talk to the people in my local area if I'm trying to get more customers for my service. And the way to talk to people in my local area is create content only for them. Most people in the world don't care, but your target market does. I want you to be very focused whenever you make content on who are you creating the content for? Because if you're just going after views, you'll be very disappointed if you make local content. But I don't care about 99.9% of people. I would rather get 100 people that are my ideal customer profile in my market to watch my video and 5 of them become a customer than get 10,000 views, but 9,998 of them don't live inside my service area. Be very careful about chasing metrics around views when you can't even serve the customers that are watching the video. So you might do something that's kind of like ASMR, for example, like plumbing or electrical or something that's cool, like fun to watch on TikTok. But most of the people watching that video are not inside of your target market. You can't even make money from them. So stop chasing views if you're a home service business that's trying to get more customers. If you're small, you should be focused on getting more customers. As you get bigger, what I want you to use content for is a way to refine your messaging and your communication style. I started making content as a smaller business owner and it refined the way that I communicated. I started realizing how much I said, um, and us, because I started recording it. I started realizing like, you talk with your hands a lot. Cool. Let's make sure it's not so distracting that I'm always doing this. And then people that I'm talking to think that I'm nervous when I'm really not. That was the type of thing that when I started recording myself, I started picking up on. So as my business grew, making content became just as much useful for my customers and getting more customers as it was for me to refine the way that I communicated so that when I talk with a team member, I would be able to slow things down, not talk so fast. And I always talk so fast and I always use ums and uhs to kind of fill in the gaps of my communication. And that nervous energy was detrimental, but I only picked up on it once I started recording myself. As a smaller business owner, I want you to focus on using the content to talk to your local market build trust with them about things that are happening in your local area. It doesn't have to be elaborate. You don't need to get an editor to go down to the local sub shop that just opened in your local market, review the food, and tell everyone in your local area about it. As you grow the business, I want you to think about the communication being a benefit to you and a skill to have to communicate with your team, communicate with large stakeholders. So big projects, big commercial contracts, you're not nervous, you're You slow things down. You're better at analyzing the way that you feel and the way that you communicate and how you're being perceived because you actually have recorded yourself. And trust me, it's extremely nerve-wracking and uncomfortable to watch yourself and listen to yourself. Everyone has that. You know all your quirks and idiosyncrasies, and it's probably very— it's like nails on a chalkboard when you have to listen to yourself talk on a camera. I understand that. But it's the only way to get better at communication. Real quick, I'm just going to break in here.

I'm on a turnaround show in a hotel reviewing the footage of me talking next to a dumpster. Brianna, the travel trip coordinator, is right there. And I realized that one of the important parts inside the video that I talked about is just how important creating content is for your communication and the way that you communicate to your team, the way you communicate to customers.

And this is one of the actually the topics inside the school community.

I'll show you real quick. That we have inside Home Service Boardroom. And you can go ahead and if you go to the page, the about page, the link is in the description, you can actually see a lot of the different topics that we cover.

We can see here, show you this, a lot of the different things we discuss, one of which is public speaking.

And the reason for this is because the ability to be able to communicate with your team, whether it be in one-on-one meetings, whether it be team meetings, whether it be delivering bad news, having crucial conversations with your managers when they're underperforming, all super important. And some of those elements are very helpful when it comes to creating content because you get better at communicating and talking to a camera like I am right now.

You get a little bit better at putting your thoughts into words. So if it's of interest to you, you've already built a 7-figure business, highly recommend joining the school community.

Just go check out school.com/boardroom or the link is in the description.

If you look at any professional sports athlete, they take the footage and they watch the game tape and they see how they can improve. Even at Command Center, when it comes to phone calls, the best way for us to train is listen to phone calls. Here's what worked. Here's what didn't. We call it game day footage because it's literally— we're watching film, we're watching how did we perform and what can we do to improve. If you want to use content as you start to grow to become a better leader, very valuable. You'll still basically keep doing what you did as a smaller business owner and is talking to your ideal customer profile, and that is likely people in your local area. Let's talk about though, you start wanting to create content for your industry, you want to become a thought leader or an influencer of some sort inside your industry. How should we be treating content now? If you're a smaller business owner and you enjoy the thought of giving back to the community, helping the previous version of yourself, be able to subsidize maybe a side stream income of some coaching or some selling a course or something like that, don't fake like you're a big business owner or you have everything put together. When I first started making content, the first 2 years of making content, hundreds of videos, was me standing inside a of my tiny little apartment up against a wall. And the camera was literally this far away because that was where my cabinets were from my kitchen. It was this tiny little, like, it wasn't even a full kitchen. It was this tiny little nook. And I just stand against the wall with a whiteboard. And almost all those videos was me talking about things I was going through in my business as I was turning it around. Because a couple years prior, I had gotten in a workplace accident and almost gotten my life taken away because I got my hoodie caught in the PTO of a dump truck underneath, and it was because I didn't have systems, I didn't have procedures, I didn't have pay for performance, I didn't do estimate videos. So I'm stuck inside of a hospital bed videoing my crew to walk them through the next job because I didn't have systems inside of my business. I got out of that and started changing things inside my business, and the first couple years of videos on my channel is just me showing all the mistakes I made and what I was trying to do to fix it. Implementing pay for performance, okay, I take a video every single estimate to make sure I don't have to be there, that if I got hit by a bus, the crew would still have the video to get the job done. And there's no dependency on any one person doing walkthroughs of jobs, which is super inefficient, by the way. Anyways, that was just one system. These were things I was learning and I was just documenting what I was changing in my own business to make it better. I didn't pose as some successful— I have a million-dollar business, I'm crushing it. I was just documenting all my mistakes and what I was doing to try to make sure it was better. And I was constantly speaking to the person that a couple of years ago in my own business, I didn't have systems. And I was trying to speak to that person so they wouldn't end up in the same position that I was, but have a family, have kids, have dependents, and go bankrupt. 'Cause that's what would've happened if I would've had a family. When I got in that accident, it would've been the end of Augusta Lawn Care. And so I was trying to talk to that person and convince them that these systems that I'm trying to make in my business, I'm just trying to show you the numbers. Here's what we did before, here's what we did after. Here's how much revenue I did before, Here's how much I did after. Here's how efficient my crew was before. Here's how efficient they were after. I was trying to do that to help other people that were like me a couple of years prior in my journey. So you can absolutely make content, but the number one way to lose trust with another business owner is to pose as something that you're not, to make it look like you're super successful when you're not. It's okay if you're not super successful. It takes 10, 15 years to become really good in industry. Don't think that the day one that when you pick up a camera and want to talk to others in your industry, that you're going to have it all put together. If you try to tell them that you do, they're going to look through the facade and know you're not telling the truth. As someone that I help a lot of other creators or people in home services that are trying to create content, I have seen the profit and loss statements. I have seen the financials of many of them, and I would never say a single one of their names, um, and it's done confidentially, but a lot of them, their actual business struggles— I would encourage those people to be more in the first camp, which is Here's what I'm working, here's what I'm improving. And it's okay. No one's going to take anything away from you if you just show what you're improving in your business. You don't need to have everything put together and ironed out and perfect before you start making content. You don't. You can get all the benefits of improved communication, the ability to speak to your peers, people that are going to dissect every single word you say, every single number you say. They're going to dissect it because they're likely competing with you. Realize that when you start sharing your numbers, sharing what systems you're doing, your local competition is literally watching what you're saying and they're going to attack you. It refines your communication. You start having to be a better communicator on camera. But keep in mind that if you're going to pose as someone has a great successful business so you can sell your coaching or sell your course, I believe that's the wrong path. The first 2 to 3 years of me making content was not about telling you what you should do. It was about telling you all the mistakes that I was making in my business and what I was doing to change it. I believe that garnered trust with my audience so that as I become more— Mike Andes became successful and started sharing numbers and growing the franchise and making more money, that I had some level of credibility to be able to say, hey, I also was just like you and was making a bunch of mistakes. I was losing money. I was working a ton of hours in the field. It almost cost me my life. And I was able to turn it around over the course of a couple of years using these systems. And so don't believe that you have to pose as some super profitable, super massive, everything put together business, because every successful business owner knows that's not how business works. Every business has hardship. Every business is tough. The bigger it gets, the more complications there are. The bigger it gets, the bigger problems there are. That's what we all expect as entrepreneurs. So to pose as anything different is crazy. I have shared, even as the business began to grow, a lot of the struggles or things that I have done poorly on or the mistakes I have made to make sure that everyone realizes that there is no gold at the end of the rainbow. There's no time you're gonna finish a business and it's just like perfect or amazing and everything is hunky-dory. And I say this for the creators that are out there trying to make it look like they have a really profitable business, and I know they don't. I've seen their numbers. Many of them, I'm not saying every single person, but a lot of them don't have great businesses, but they pose as having everything perfect so they can sell coaching. Or sell a course or be able to do speaking. And like, and I would encourage that person to just make the content of what you're improving in the business now. And you will absolutely get better coaching clients. You will have more trust. You won't have to be posing. You'll just be able to tell the truth. For the people out there that are watching those creators, be very careful to take something that's working for them and think it's going to work for you, because many of them make their money besides outside of the actual doing of the work. They have sponsors. They have people that pay them $500, $1,000 for every sign-up that they might get from a piece of software or a piece of equipment. And they're getting money from the eyeballs that they have on their content. And so it is in their best interest to get more eyeballs and to get more eyeballs and get trust. A lot of them do say certain things that if you were to implement in your business, you would not have the cash flow to be able to sustain. Like, you don't buy new stuff a lot. In business, a truck, if you buy it brand new, should last like 10 years. But when it comes to creators constantly having new eyeballs, new things to look at, new trucks, new snow blades, new mowers, new excavators, new shop space, that is the treadmill of new stuff that they need to be able to get eyeballs on their content so they can sell more sponsorships, more subscriptions, more coaching, more ebooks. Etc. And I'm not against that. It is extremely hard to convince anyone to give you money online. And if you don't believe me, go try to sell a course, go try to sell something. It's hard, very hard. So I don't take that away from them. Just realize I'm saying this for the audience that would be watching them. Be very careful to think that what they're doing, all the things that they're buying, the money that they're spending, is going to work in your small business because they have another alternative, a way of making money. And they have another motive, which is get more eyeballs. And to get more eyeballs, you buy more stuff, more bad stuff happens, like stuff breaks down. You are constantly getting new equipment, you're hiring new people, you're building things that you don't really need. But it's, it's because you're building a media business and it's a completely different business than home services. And it's hard. It is extremely difficult to build. I'm not taking that away from them. I'm speaking to the audience that is trying to take what they're saying and implement in your small business and it's not working. And it's because they have other ways of making money that you don't. And so you buying that same equipment, you implementing those same systems and constantly changing things inside your business will cause havoc. So all of that to say, should you make content? If you're trying to get more customers and grow your business, make content for your local area. If you're trying to speak to the community, share what's worked for you, just be honest to the current size of business that you're at. Don't try to be something that you're not and realize that the moment that you start talking to your peers and your competition, you will be dissected for every single thing that you say. And when you do that, the benefit to you is that you refine your communication. You make sure you don't say stupid stuff that could hurt your team because they can also see it. You make sure you don't say things that are going to potentially damage your brand's reputation. Even things that might get you more views, you pull it back a little bit to ensure that you protect your team, you protect your customers, and you start having to communicate like a CEO. And so I do believe it's beneficial to share what you've learned. And the way that we change the level of professionalism in the lawn care industry or any home service industry is that what you have learned and the things that have worked for you gets passed along to the next generation. And so I am a huge proponent of creating content, being honest to the current stage of business that you're at, whether you're trying to improve, trying to make changes, and you're on your way up or if you have been successful, you have built a very successful business and it is very satisfying to be able to take the learnings that you have garnered and you have won and pass those along to someone else so they can get to where you're at faster. And I hope that the content I make here on this channel helps you do exactly that.