A live call-in show hosted by Mike Andes (March 9, 2024) answering business questions from home service business owners. This episode focuses on website strategy, timing for investing in professional web design, lead generation during the spring rush, and practical advice for small to mid-size home service revenues.
Hello, everyone, it's Mike Andes. I hope you're doing amazing on this beautiful Friday evening. Today we are doing the Call in show. I try to do these at least once a month. If you have a question and would like to ask anything about anything about business, personal life, whatever you want to talk about today, we're going to take some calls. The number here is 361-733-3333. Give me a call. I am going to prioritize those in the call queue and as always at the end of the call we always, always, we almost always have to let people off of the queue and block it. So if you have a question, call in now because I don't have a lot of time and the call queue always fills up that I have to drop everyone. So if you have a question, give me a call, 361-733-3333. And we're going to answer those questions live. Now. We are headed into this spring rush. It is a matter of days, maybe weeks before the vast majority of home service business owners will be in the throes of the busiest time of the year. And so I want to ask answer any questions you might have that I could potentially help you with while we're waiting. Oh, we're not waiting anymore. We have the first caller, very quick on the draw coming in from 8:6:5. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on and being first.
Hey Mike, how are you today?
Good, how you doing?
Good. Good. So my main question tonight is the fact that trying to figure out the whole website issue and I'd like to go with your guys services. I'm just trying to figure out when is a good time to begin with the website.
And so right now what's your total annual revenue? Like what's your projected revenue for this year?
Projected Right now if I don't pick up any clients in spring would probably be somewhere around 90,000 but I'm hoping to do 350.
Okay. So really it just comes down to your confidence level and that's like a huge range, right? That's like a 4x difference. So really it's the matter, like I don't recommend using lawn care web design or home service web design for anyone that's doing less than 200,000 annually because then the math just doesn't make sense. And so you could, if you're going to be doing closer than 90,000, I would say go get Weebly, you know, Squarespace, use WordPress and build a site your own. If you start putting numbers up of like 40, $50,000 a month. It makes a lot of sense to go get a professionally design website that's going to be faster on like the load time, mobile, responsive, etc. But outside of just knowing which service to use, is there a specific question about the website you have?
No, like I'm just trying to figure out as a capital standpoint if it makes sense as in leads and stuff like that. Because I know spring rush is coming and not lying to you, I had zero work until.
Thursday this week and then I had 10 estimates to do from Thursday to Friday. Just completed or not Thursday, sorry Wednesday just completed two jobs the past few days that were big money items.
Let's go.
Yeah, it came out of nowhere and I'm, I'm really looking to invest the money into a website and I'd like to go with your guys services just because I feel like I'd have a better return on the money as in just a basic website to start. Go ahead and start getting some organic leads.
Yeah, yeah. It really just comes down to what you have, what your spend is for marketing. Right. Like if someone was coming to me and saying hey I'm trying to do over 200,000 annual revenue this year, I'd be telling them invest in a website. It's the number one place for all you want to be driving all of your web traffic there, all of your leads there. Like if you're, if you're doing Facebook ads and you're doing YouTube ads or you're doing door hangers, you're doing flyers, guess what they're going to do the first thing they're going to go look you up online. So if you want to have a higher perceived value and be able to charge a higher price to customers, make sure your website looks great. It's like the storefront of your business. People spend hundreds of thousands of dollars making sure their storefront looks good. In retail, us as home service business owners, our storefront is our website and you drive all traffic through that. And as we get more and more digital over the past few years, it's only increased. People are looking up, looking you up first online. And so if you're not ranking well on Google, if you don't have Google reviews, if you're not showing up on the first page, you're just non existent. And so the players that are spending money on their organic traffic coming to their website from ranking well on Google, they get leads for free. Ultimately if you're just getting started, you're going to be paying for every single lead that comes in through the door because they don't know who you are. You have no customer.
No.
You have no brand awareness. People aren't calling you that. Senior trucks, they're not getting referrals. There's not enough traffic. So what do you do? You pay for every single lead, you pay for every single click. The goal is that you get to the point where you're able to upsell existing customers and get referrals and traffic from Google for free. So eventually you don't have to be spending money on marketing, and that's when you become profitable. That typically takes three to five years at least to actually get that kind of brand penetration and brand awareness. But it's a whole lot more easy. It's a whole lot easier if you have a great website because you'll be getting leads for free from Google from simply just ranking well. And so I have a whole bunch of videos about websites and how to optimize them more. And like, whether it be the pictures or the brand side of things, or the SEO, search engine optimization, there's like tons of videos. And so whether or not you use lawn care web design or home service web design, I don't really care. Just have a website. Then if you have plenty of money in.
