The REAL Reason Your Advertising FAILS!

And we're live. Welcome back, everybody. It has been something like four months, I believe, before I just did a live stream on the main channel. So if you have a question, this is how it's gonna work. You're gonna call this. This number right here. I'm only gonna do a few calls today. So if you have a question, go ahead and get in the queue. Until then, I am going to talk about why your ads are not working, whether that is Facebook ads, door hangers, et cetera. I'm going to go on a bit of a 5, 10 minute little. A bit of a teaching training session on that, and then we will jump right into questions. So let's go ahead and make sure this is all up and running correctly. Fantastic. All right, so if you have a question, 361-733-3333 is the number. While I am going on and talking about this, I'm going to go ahead and put this in the chat too. So Here we go. 361-733-3333. Call in with questions. I'm going to put this in the comments. So if you have one, go ahead and get in queue. I'm going to take several today. Call in with questions. Boom. All right, and now I'm going to make sure that actually gets pinned. Oh, I can't pin. Fantastic. Oh, I can. Look at that. Okay, if you have a question.

Call this number right here and let's go ahead and get started. But first, before we do the live calls, I do want to go over why your ads are not working. So this is gonna get cut up later. So I'm gonna show you kind of the behind the scenes of making a video. And then I don't have notes or anything. I'm just gonna talk to you about a topic I've been thinking about. And. And then again, if you have questions in the. On your phone, 361-733-3333 is the number.

If you've been wondering why your Facebook ads, your Google Ads, your door hangers, or your yard signs are not working, I want to explain what I learned the hard way and how you can save hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of time just doing it the right way from the get. And one of the things that I have learned is that it was never a matter of whether or not something worked. It was simply the volume and the amount of energy that I put towards it. And so recently I was looking at our Facebook ads account that had over 130 different types of ads, not different types of Variations, but different types of ads. Now each of those ads have probably five different headlines, five different copy. So you could make the case for the fact that if you multiply by 25, there's probably 3,000 variations of ads. I'm not talking about that. There was 130 over 130 different actual ad creatives, different videos with different descriptions, completely different ads. And this is not something I've done forever. This is a matter of over the past few months just realizing that if it works decently and the math pencils in just do more of what's already working. And I, along with many other entrepreneurs, including yourself, likely with we get distracted by the constant new thing. And recently as of as of recording, this actually equip expo is on for the lawn care and landscape industry. Basically showing a lot of the new technology, new equipment, new trucks, new machines that are mowers, et cetera, that are in this industry. And it's very easy to go to an event like that and just get enamored with all the new stuff. And what I have found after so many years of having to beat myself up and tell myself to shut up in terms of all the new ideas and new things I want to implement, is that almost never has new ideas made my business more profitable. Almost never has new ideas in the short term allowed for the business to be more successful in the short term for allow my managers to be able to be more successful, the team to be able to be better at their job and more efficient. And the reason for that is because as entrepreneurs we have been rewarded in the past for doing something new. We left our job, we left are like I left medical school. But once you've made the decision to start a business, you just need that new thing one time. You just need to switch one time. And it's exciting. And you get a lot of pats in the back on LinkedIn and Instagram and on Facebook like, I'm going to go start my own business. And you like support, everyone's super happy for you. But that's the only time you actually need to start something new. The vast majority of the most profitable home service businesses that I see are the ones that simply execute best. They don't try to do anything fancy, they just execute 1 to 2% better on every little thing in the business. And if you take 100 different things in the business all done 2 to 3% better than everyone else, it compounds the fact that I get 2 to 3x multiple or 2 to 3 times more return than the Average person that's just getting started. And the reason there is so much switching cost in home services to doing something new is because we are dealing with labor, which is the most expensive thing, like for you to divert a time and attention of your team away from something they're already doing. They're in the rhythm of they know how to do it. And you change the process, you change the system. Now we're going to do this new service. Now I want you guys to answer the phone this way. Now, this is a new initiative. New software, new equipment, or new truck set up, new trailer set up. Like, every time you implement something new, it is reducing the effectiveness and. And the efficiency of your team because there's already inherent advantages of them doing the same thing so many times. And so execution has consistently in my career been the thing that I have seen be the thing that actually brings profits. I might new things might add more revenue. New new services, new equipment, new employees, new markets, new industries. They will bring more revenue, but rarely do I see it actually bring more. More profit. And this goes back to a saying Alex from Mosey always talks about, which is more and better before new. And I want to break that down because the reason that your ad campaign is not working is simply because you're not doing enough of it. And when I say you, I'm talking to myself in the mirror. Literally as a mirror, like, I have this glass thing. I can see myself right now. I'm talking to myself because over the past few months, I've realized that for Facebook ads is like, if the math pencils and I'm able to acquire a customer and get that money back within 30 days of them transacting with me, I should keep doing more of it. And the reason I say this is because I have seen consistently where business owners have something that's working well on their ad campaign. For example, I'll give an example of one of the owners at Augusta Lawn Care out in Texas that he realized that this is like, oh, the math works for door hangers. And he did several thousand. Like, they worked. Oh, okay. I should just do this one thing tens of thousands of times. And I think last time he messaged me, he had done something like 120,000 door hangers. This year, he started a new market, new area, and all he's been doing is door hangers because he just knows the math. He's like, if I do X amount of doors, I'll get X amount of leads, and if I get X amount of leads, I'll close X amount of people. And out of those people I will be able to upsell x amount of them. It's just a math game. And I would ask yourself, if yard signs worked, what would happen if you 10x them? It's a light. It's likely that you have 10x the output. And so if door knocking is working, if door hangers are working, if Facebook ads are working and they're producing, okay, Well I get a one nuke lead for $30 and one out of three of them convert to a paying customer. Okay, great. Your customer cost is $90. Okay. And all of those people, I'm able to sell a recurring service but also I'm able to upsell them into a one time service upfront that I'm able to make $500 in revenue and $200 in profit. So I get $200 in profit and $90 customer acquisition cost. The math pencils just do more of it. Just do more and do it better before going and trying to find something new. And so Instead of us 10xing our marketing budget in one area, what we will do, and I include myself in this as entrepreneurs, is we will go find nine other ways to spend the marketing dollars. Oh, like what about if I do this new texting thing? What if I go out and do mail? Every door, direct mail and postcards. What if I do this new strategy where I have billboards. What if I do like I change the graphics on the truck and there's a board above the trailer. Like all of those might be good ideas, but because you've spread yourself out so thin across different marketing channels, you never actually see the real reward, which is if I 10x the input and I know what this channel produces, the output will 10x and there's, there's some areas like for example Google local services, you won't 10x your budget and get 10x the output. Why? Because it's constrained by the amount of leads that it will give to you. It's not going to just immediately 10x and use all of your budget. But in markets that you are interrupting people like Facebook ads like door hangers, like yard signs, like cold calling a lot of places you do 10x input and you just simply run an arbitrage on the math and you get 10x the output. And so if the math pencils just do more and more and do it better. So more part is simply identifying that I have a channel that I know the math and is it perfect? Is there going to be a new channel that will pop up and Immediately I see ads about running Google Ads and how much I can get leads for $5. And then I get all these ideas. When I read a book or I read a podcast or I go to a conference, you get all these ideas. Look, just take the one thing that you actually know the math on and just do more of it. And then by doing more of it, you. You almost always will become better at it. You will see what works. You'll see what hooks work, you'll see what pictures work on the ad, you'll see what videos work on ads. You'll realize that if you're doing a yard sign, that having a fancy picture might not actually convert better besides just plain text on a white background. Or that when you do the door hanger, if you put the price and you cross it out, you get a 5% bump on the amount of people that respond. This is something that, because we do so many door hangers at Augusta and like, we consider a sample of door hangers in a market, 5,000. Like, anything below that is, you know, you're just shooting like in the dark, but 5,000. I can have a test. But when I do that test and when we have done thousands, hundreds of thousands of door hangers now across Augusta, we started to start doing better. It's like, oh, if we put the price of the their lawn service on there, it does better. Oh, if we use an actual Sharpie instead of just printing the price on there, it does better because they feel like it's more customized. Oh, if we cross the number out and then write it in Sharpie over top of the old price at a discount increases our conversion rate that is better because of new. So the nuance I want to add to this is, yes, more and better before new, but I truly believe it is in that sequence. Do more. And by doing more and simply keeping your eyes open and your ears open over the course of a long period of time, not a month, not two months, over the course of a couple seasons, to be able to know the seasonality behind that marketing channel. And then by seeing those trends and then being adaptive and listening, you will do better. You will make the tiny little tweaks. Because, see, when I first did a door hanger, I might have gotten a 0.2% response rate. Not great. Door hangers are horrible. Or over the course of the past three or four years, like, we have constantly made these little tweaks. Now it's 1%. That's five times better. So it's not that I needed a new marketing Strategy. I just needed to get better. And in order to get better, I needed to do more and have higher volume. And so I encourage you. If you think that ads don't work, if you think that the only way that you get customers is through word of mouth, if you think that Facebook ads are dead or. Or YouTube ads are dead, or Google Ads are dead, or door hangers don't work in my market, or postcards don't work in my market, or flyers don't work in my market, I ask you, how many have you done? Can you do more? And when you do more, can you constantly tweak and adjust and make it better? Because I can guarantee you in the long run that will outperform you. Constantly switching from one marketing channel to the next and hearing a video about some other new channel, new platform, oh, it's gotta be. It's all about the doing these. What are they called? Postcard bombs. Okay, nine around. Okay, now we're doing. Oh, I heard about yard signs. We are now doing yard signs. And again, you take all of your resources and spread them across all these different channels and then wonder why you don't have any return. The reason I have any return is you've never done more at any one channel. You've never done enough volume to be able to get good at it better. And therefore, you just constantly go from new to new to new, always looking for the lucky break that's going to somehow give you all the results that the people behind the camera you've watched or the ad you've seen are promising. And here's the thing. They might be right. They might get really cheap leads. They might be able to reach those results in terms of customer acquisition cost, cost per click, cost per lead, et cetera. They might. But they've likely done it tens of thousands of times and for many, many years. And so the results they're having is not because of the new channel. It's because they've done more of it than you. And because of them doing it more for years and years and years, they've got better at it. And you take the same channel and you put someone who hasn't had the reps and has not got better at it. And something like our door hangers that go from 0.2% response to 1% response is simply a function of doing enough volume and then being. And listening enough and being curious enough to how can I improve this process and thereby have better execution? And all of a sudden a bad channel starts to look good.

Okay, we're opening up the phone lines. I'm going to take the calls that are in the queue. Let's go ahead. Bear with me. I'm running this by myself today. First caller, I believe is coming in from Troy, Michigan. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.

Mike, thanks for taking my call, man.

Absolutely. What can I do for you, man?

I just had a question. So I do mowing and snow removal and we do landscaping, but I don't really enjoy the landscaping. And I was just curious, like, would you ever have a location where, like where you're doing mowing but you're not doing, like, mulching and bush trimming? Is that possible to make that work?

Yeah. Like, the question just becomes, like, is there a business that has is the size that you want that does only the one service that you're trying to offer? And so if in your market there are businesses that do a million or 2 million, and you're like, I would love to have that size of business. And they just do mowing, it means it's possible. And so in terms of possibility, it's there. I will also say it comes down to what your goal is. If you're trying to sell a business, I would probably optimize for the valuation. And if you're trying to optimize for the valuation, having those more simple recurring services with recurring revenue with a lot of upsell potential into simple services is probably going to sell a lot more than you do in custom projects.

I did about 90,000 in mowing and about 30,000 with the other services. And what I was thinking of doing is just doing the. Doing the mulching and bush trimming and stuff, like in April when we're not mowing. And then over the winter, we would still do, like, winter services and snow removal, and we still do fall cleanup and spring cleanup. But it just. I just find that it's really hard. Like, during the summer, I get so busy with mowing, and then people are calling and asking us to do, like, projects, and I get overwhelmed, you know?

Yep. Yeah. So this is actually more of a scheduling problem. I think the overwhelm doesn't come from the fact that you're doing complicated projects. It sounds to me like you're actually doing simple projects, and I'm a green light on those. I think what more of is you are scheduling those projects at a time when mowing is at its peak. I would reserve those times to where you're not going to put as many budget hours for projects during the season that, you know, is Going to have a ton of mowing. And so this comes down to prioritization. Like having a first come, first serve basis when it comes to scheduling is the, is the, is the weak link here. And I would, I would actually recommend to not get rid of your landscaping because it's the thing that's actually allowing you to upsell your mowing customers and increase their annual customer value by 50 to 80%. So I don't want you to get rid of it. I think it's simple, right? I think it's great. I think what we need to do is we need to ask ourselves what weeks of the year do we know? There are leads pouring in for mowing and I'm super busy and the grass is growing like crazy and I don't get to the projects because I'm way behind and then simply don't put projects on there and just reserve those weeks for the time that you're going to focus on new and recurring services that are time sensitive. And so the trouble that we have spring rush when you have time sensitive jobs like mowing and you really want them because they're recurring, but at the same time you're throwing in jobs that are one off, one time jobs and they are time insensitive. So you can push a mulch install off three to four weeks, you can install gravel or install plants six to eight weeks from now. It's just going to have to be a different sales motion and sales process to convince the customer to still stick with you. Does that make sense?

Yeah, it does. It does.

And this is, this actually plays into your benefit because what happens when you start putting designated times of the season where you're not taking projects? You then preclude that by texting and emailing all of your customers and saying, hey, what, we are booked out now for eight, nine, ten weeks. We do have next week available. And you do this like earlier before you're booked out and you need work, when you're actually wanting to work in February, March, right after the snow's melted off and you're getting back into mowing. But there's a bit of a gap there. That's when you contact all your customers and say, hey, we are booked out super far, but we're reserving the next couple weeks just for our existing mowing customers. If you have any services, let us know. Any projects you need done, we're reserving this next couple weeks for you alone.

Okay. So yeah, it's really a scheduling thing. I get it. Awesome, awesome.

Best of luck to you. Appreciate you calling in.

Thanks, Mike.

Yeah, you got it. All right. Next caller is coming in. By the way, if you call in and I cut you off, I just drop your call. Don't be offended. It's just a matter of sometimes, like the end part is not super interesting for people to listen to us say goodbye to each other. I still love you. I just want to keep things moving along and easier to listen to. Next caller is calling in from 71 7. Welcome the show.

Hey, Mike. Thank you, Gail. You're awesome. So I wanted to ask you right now, month house cleaning business, residential house cleaning. Just standard in deep cleanings. Right now we're trailing for 4.4 to 4400 monthly revenue. Last month we did 5.8 month of revenue. Right now, having a bit of a problem with our lead channels. Google, lsa, we did like a thousand two hundred dollars and had like a horrible customer acquisition cost. But thumbtack give us a 1 to 9 over the series of five months. And then we just started with Facebook about two months ago and we have like a 1.81 to 1.85 to 1. So we're not doubling on Facebook, but obviously it's only been two months. We'll see what happens. Pretty low conversion ratios on Facebook. So I'm putting in another thousand this month into Facebook.

And really just want to grow this thing and close more deals. Curious what you what you think about that.

Yeah. First off, just to confirm, what's your revenue for 2025 looking like gross revenue.

Now you're tracking? Honestly, we started about six months ago. We did like 1.3k in revenue. And then we've been. Last month we did 5.8 and then this month we're projected for 4.4.

Okay.

I don't have the full.

So you're doing somewhere between 5 and $10,000 a month, is that correct?

We're around 5k.

Cool. So it sounds like you've tested a little bit back to kind of what we talked about the beginning. The thing that I immediately want to talk about, and I question when people say start giving me metrics is how much have you done on Facebook? How much have you done on thumbtack? How much have you done on lsa? And then did we optimize it? Right. Because I know that your Facebook ads. Let's just say you're saying I got a 2x there versus 4x on thumbtack. Okay, great. Is that based on conversion? Is that based upon like the lifetime value of a customer coming from one channel? Being greater than the other, because I know that, for example.

Go ahead. You sound like you have more data. Go ahead.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's lifetime gross profit. So across the last four months, like thumbtack has given us a one to nine. So for what we're spending, it's customer acquisition cost. Lifetime gross profit. For what we're spending on thumbtack, we're turning it nine times. Then with LSA it was like point eight. Like we actually lost money on LSA and this is with about 1500 across each channel. The thousand five hundred dollars in ad spend across each channel.

Yep. So I would just. What's currently working is thumbtack. I would 100% do it. I think there are some risks to doing that because all of your leads are somewhat second sourced from someone else and they can be marketed to separately. Like that's like a long term thing, but at your size. Like originally when I thought, I thought you were saying you do like 5 million revenue. And I was in a big warning on thumbtack. But when you are spent, when you're just getting started, you're going from 505,000amonth to 10,000 to maybe 20,000amonth. If that's the best customer acquisition cost and where great leads are coming from, just double down on it. Like if you can get one to nine in one spot and the other one's one to one, one to two. Like just do more of what's working. And by doing more thumbtack, you'll probably get better at it. Like, you'll probably get more reviews, you'll probably have a higher conversion rate. And just know that I would say I would test Facebook again, I would test door hangers again down the road. Because as you scale, I do think there's a risk to being channel dependent on a source like thumbtack.

Yeah, I, you know, I think about like the nail in scale it motto and I've almost completely turned off thumbtack and I'm really trying to get Facebook to work. I'm doing about just 300 a week. But it's kind of like the lead nurture aspect. Even with automation, it's kind of hard to get them to show up sometimes on the sales calls. So I'm doing like 50 calls a day and I might get up one sales call performed. You know what I mean?

And what, so when you're running a Facebook ad, what are you driving them to in terms of like when you say calls, what is that? Is an appointment at their house? Is that a phone Call with you. What are you driving them to?

Yeah, so it's free cleaning voucher to a landing page. They just give name, number, email that sends them to a little indoctrination funnel. And then they can self schedule via text. And then I'm calling them in 60 seconds. Pretty much everybody's getting called in 60 seconds. If not, if it's overnight, they can self schedule and that's. Yeah, that's it. So I'm calling them and they're not answering. If they do answer, then, you know, thank God.

But are you telling them in the indoctrination period and on the landing page that you're going to call them within 60 seconds?

No, I'm not. I'm not.

Just tell, just.

I'm just getting them to text.

Just change that one thing. So just tell them because then they're expecting the call. So just say, hey, I will call you within 60 seconds. And then you got to make sure that there's some reason why they need to pick up. So like to redeem your voucher, I will call you within 60 seconds of you filling out this form. And then you'll get it. Because they're filling up the form because.

They want, they want the really smart.

They want the free voucher, but what they don't want is an interrupted phone call. So I would do two things. I would split test one, just change the fact that throughout that lead, that lead nurturing process and. Or the landing page, tell them what you're going to do. So that's not a surprise. And then I would also test the. Maybe they don't want a phone call because they're sitting on the toilet at work thinking about their cleaning. They don't want to answer your phone call. Can you do that with your text? Can you send them a link that has a video that's interactive? For like example, like on loom, you can have a link that's there. They can payment the whole nine yards. So I would play with both of those because if the actual constraint is them not answering the phone, that's. That's solvable.

That's genius. I love that. Well, let me not take up too much of time. That's super valuable. You're the best. We watch all your shows. Thank you so much.

You got it. All right, next on the show, we got calling in from 2 to 5. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.

Hey, Mike, this is Robert. I do a pool cleaning and maintenance business in Louisiana.

Let's go.

I have two different directions that I guess because we could take this in. So just kind of based on the sermon you gave before opening it up, I guess I do have a question about deciding on which input to jam on when it comes to developing your customer acquisition. So we've dealt pretty much mostly with inbound organic ranking on Google. We've set up, obviously Google lsa, you work on getting reviews. I can definitely, that's definitely an input. Getting more reviews and trying to do that. But when it comes to one of those channels like door hangers, outreach ads, where you have one input that you know you could use the rule of 100 on and really jam to see what your, what your returns would look like, I've not really nailed down what, what that one would be. We mostly relied on inbound.

Okay.

It's like I would say as a.

Sorry, can you hear me, Mike?

I can hear you. Can you hear me?

Yeah, I can hear you.

Cool. Yeah. Like I would say before you choose a channel, if you're kind of like, hey, I haven't really tested much. I got most folks inbound, I would actually first look at your website. And the reason I say that is because if you're gonna start spending money on ads, this is for anyone listening, it's like your conversion on your website could double or triple by just changing a few things, like having the estimate request form above the fold, having it where it's mobile friendly. Like there's just a few things. So I think you've probably done that just knowing, just off of my intuition of talking to you. You've probably optimized your website. But for anyone listening, do that before you spend a dollar on ads. Whether you gotta get someone in upwork, whether you gotta get a designer. Like we have home service web design, but like, it's a function of fix that first. Because any dollar you spend a lot of times, a couple thousand dollars a month or whatever you're spending could be doubled in impact by just changing your conversion rate. Once they get to your website, they gotta convert. And if you have a really bad website or it's not a good converting website, use the send message button or call to action on the Facebook ad, for example, so that they don't actually go to your website or the Facebook lead form doesn't go to your website. But if you're driving them to your website, make sure your website is actually optimized for web conversions. But with all of that said, give me a little more clarity. Or are you looking for a specific channel that you want me to kind of push you in.

So. Yeah, well, the one that I like to kind of double click on would be you. You seem to be pretty, pretty big on door hangers now. I know with lawn landscaping, every, you know, every house is kind of potentially a customer as opposed to pool cleaning and maintenance. I am running right now. I'm working on getting scraped information on pool, you know, pool owner addresses, even trying to get, you know, addresses, I'm sorry, email addresses, phone numbers to do cold outreach. But you know, that that's definitely one way to go. I'd like to do door hangers, but with how few and far between some houses with, with pools are, you know, to just trying to be as surgical and efficient with your, your process as possible while also, you know, acknowledging that it's going to take a ton of volume to get any type of result from anything. I just wonder if you have a thought on that. On a pool cleaning businesses maybe ideal channel of acquisition.

How many. How many of your leads that come in are dirty pools or look horrible?

So, you know, that's definitely seasonal. Right now it's probably a little bit less, but I'd say maybe a quarter. You know, when it's. I thought it'd be later part of the season, it could be up to three quarters.

I would, I would create a corrugated cutout plastic thing that you hold that has your branding on it, has some sort of slogan that is related to your brand that they hold in front of their after photo of the before and after of cleaning out their pool. I would then do that 10 to 20 times over the course of a season. I would do that on my organic Instagram, Facebook and I would tag them. And then I would take the best performing five in terms of people like that, started liking it, commenting it, sharing, et cetera. And I'd run ads against those on Facebook.

Okay, I really like the sound of that. Let me try to stay back so I make sure we're on the same page and I'll listen back too. So what kind of a cutout are we talking about?

Yeah. So what's the name of your pool service?

Pool partners.

Pool partners.

Yes, pool partners.

Okay.

Digging a little deeper as to why people hire you. They're obviously trying to save time. Are most of them.

Yeah. Smart. Core values are communication, competence, consistency, best customers or people that have been burned by bad service before. Kind of understand the hassle and just want people that, you know, do the things that the typical home service business isn't doing. Answer the phone, communicate, show up professionally.

Yeah. So like, I would, I would say, if I had to guess, 90% of your homeowners that you're servicing are married, is that correct?

Hmm, that's an interesting data point. I don't necessarily have that. I'd probably say probably 2/3 to 3/4.

So I would probably use the language around pool partners, around something like let pool partners help your partner spend more time with you or something along those lines. Like take the partner aspect of their. Them and their spouse. Because what you're going to do is get them in a picture holding the sign in front of their pool. Right. And you can make it really cheeky if you wanted to. Like, we're adding a partner, a partner to our relationship. That'd be a little weird. Like, if you want social media to take off, you're going to tie in the partner aspect with the fact that husband and wife are holding a sign in front of their pool. And then you just incentivize them for the picture. Be like, hey, if you do the picture, the first services on us, you then get 10 or 15 of those and then you basically just put them on your Facebook page and then see which ones take off organically and then put ads only. Only behind the ones that take off organically.

Roger. So just. You think that like organic content is the, that's the, that's. The channel is content.

It is a way to validate. It is a way to validate the creative before you then go spend money on it because you haven't spent money on stuff before. So I don't want you to go do Facebook ads like it doesn't work. So go use your, your channel.

I've done some. Yeah, yeah, I've done some to try to get some, some reviews on, on the PA when it was newer. It does work. It's not, you know, not something that doesn't work. I got bottleneck. Sorry, I did interrupt. I got bottlenecks. Being the person that does sales, a good bit of fulfillment as well, at least in the initial, initial few weeks and then getting them set up with, with the team. But that, yeah, so that, that was kind of the thing, just being bottlenecks by, by demand and then not having the, the input set up. We're working better on that now. But I, I like where your head's at. I think organic content is probably, probably the best thing to do.

Yeah, you have a really good before and after. Given the fact that 25% of people have that problem already when they call. It's a bad looking pool. You take a picture of that, that's the before, the after with them holding the sign. Pool Partners is on the sign. And the reason I say that is because this is what we do with our gym Anytime Fitness. I just simply, we create three organic posts a week. I just simply look at the ones that get shared the most and those are the ones I run ads against and I take the same creative, take the same copy and I run ads against it, knowing that's going to shared, liked and, and propagate beyond just what I pay for. Because if people comment, if they share an ad, that's free. Free reach. All right, next caller is coming in from six to zero. Welcome to show. Thank you for coming on.

Hey Mike, this is Alfredo from Noah Sprinklers. I wanted to ask you a question about marketing. We're a sprinkler company that's about to hit our winterization full swing and I wanted to see what you would say is the top things that we need to do to get as many winterizations as we can. We're trying to build a website, but it's going to take four weeks. So it's going to be a bit. And it's not going to have as much SEO because it's not. It's the first time we've ever had one. But we're putting magnets on our trucks and I wanted it kind of like a ballpark of how much I should spend and what I absolutely, definitely need to do.

Yeah. So I think this is a great candidate for Facebook ads because there's lots of pain. So there's literally a few week window of time where people need this service. And so whenever there's acute pain, you can get very cheap leads. Then just a function of the reason you get cheap leads because everyone that sees the ad, assuming you're targeting is half decent, needs the service at a very acute period of time of the year. Then you just need a system to be able to take cheap leads that usually aren't great quality but then turn them into quality. So for example, whether that be, I would also say just use lead forms on Facebook so you don't have to worry about the website or use the send message. So one of the best things you could do is simply say on your ad, hey, I'm in your area, make it very local feeling cause it's a small business and you talking to the camera very much selfie style. Click the link below, click the button below and send me a DM on Facebook messenger and I'll make sure I get you prioritized first. Thing next week, for example. But use the send message. You will have great assume. I would also like make sure that things ding in like the faster you get back on that Facebook message. The difference between a great conversion and a horrible conversion when you use that CTA for send message is how fast you message them back. I would also say you can automate some of this, but when they send you a message, the bot sends them something to kind of get them in the funnel. And if you're like, well, I don't have a website, great, you could send them to a Google form. You could set up a lead page from a site like leadpages.com it might be leadpages.net or site like that where just you set up a form and like your logo and a lot of times you'll get like free for up to like five landing pages. So I would, I would not worry about the landing page though, because it sounds to me like if you just ran a Facebook lead form or Facebook messenger as the call to action inside of a Facebook ad during this period of time where the next three weeks is your time to do this, I believe you will get leads between somewhere between 10 and $20, assuming it all depends on your creative. Like that could be 50 if you do a horrible picture, a horrible video. Like there's just no connection with them whatsoever. But if your opening statement is attention so and so homeowners, my name is so and so. I just started this sprinkler cleaning business. I have all these expertise. I don't want you to have broken pipes this coming, coming winter when once things freeze, we got a short window time you got to get in now click the button below, send me a direct message and I'll get in your property as soon as I possibly can.

Would you consider Google Ads or anything else or just focus on Facebook as our main one push?

I think, I think when you have a cute pain, you can get so much, so many leads. And right now it's not like you're overwhelmed with leads. I'll say this, if you go do Facebook and you get so many leads and they're like $10 showing up in your doorstep and you can't even get to the leads and you're like running behind. It's a day since you sent them the message you're running behind on jobs. Then go to Google where there's higher intent and there's going to be a higher close rate. So if I had to guess, I'm going to make up numbers. So forgive me, I'M going to guess that your percentage close rate of people that send you a DM on Facebook or fill out a Facebook lead form might be 15 to 20%. On Google, that could be 60%. But it's very unlikely you're gonna get leads for 10 bucks on Google, especially because they're gonna be going to a website that isn't even built. Like, you're driving people from your Google Ad to a website that doesn't look good. The conversions will be horrible. So I would probably stick with Facebook inside of native to their platform, which is the lead forms as well as the direct message inside of Facebook ads. You will get so many leads for everyone out there. CTA send message button below. Because people are in app. It's very quick, it's very easy, and you can set up bots to make it seem very much organic in terms of response. All right, we are taking a couple more calls. Next caller is coming on from 98 4. Welcome the show. Thank you for coming on.

Yo, what's going on?

What's up?

Hey, I was just giving you a quick call. I was curious. What do you think is the biggest, like, mistake that people make going from, like, the 100 to, like, the 500.

In terms of what area of business? Facebook ads. Are we talking to ads or we're talking just in general?

Just in general, like what? Like what? Like do you see that makes people spiral out of control when they're scaling from those ranges?

I think the biggest problem that I see is people trying to work on the business far too soon. If you're going from 100,000 to $500,000, you are still working in the business. And everyone gets so wrapped up. I got to work on the business. I need to work on the business is a function of a sliding scale, which means it's not. I'm working on the business and I'm out of the truck, and I'm not in operations versus I'm in the truck every day, working 10 hours a day. There is a scale. There is a sliding scale. And I believe that the vast majority of people that read too many books or read too many podcasts or even watch my content, like, I got to build systems and I got to be the architect of my business. Like, Whoa, whoa, whoa. You $200,000 in annual revenue. You have one employee. You need to be out in the field producing revenue. I did a turnaround show last week, or not last week, last month for a lawn care business. I believe it was out in Utah. I forget. I think it was Utah. And he had 150,000 in revenue, two employees. And he never touched the mowers, never touched the weed whackers, never touched the truck. He spent 100% of his time off the truck and working on the business. And he had done that for three years. And, and I said, look, this is the time from 100,000 to 500,000. You work in the business. You do most, most of your day is spent doing the business. Now as you go from 100,000 to 500,000, there's going to be this sliding scale of, okay, now maybe 5, 10%, 15, 20% of my day is spent working on the business, creating systems, doing sales, creating better operations manual, creating recordings for your admin person that you're hiring, creating better checklists for your team, better systems inside your software. That starts to become a larger part of your day. But it's definitely not 100%. And I think what a lot of people will do is they'll hear me or someone else talk about working on your business instead of in it, but they'll do it far too soon. As a rule of thumb, $750,000 in annual revenue. I give you the check mark. Again, this is very broad. If you're over 750,000 annual revenue, as a very, very broad stroke, I say you can be off the truck.

As.

Over 1.5 million in revenue. As a very broad stroke, I say it's possible for you to be the architect of the business and be out of daily operations, which means the business runs without you and there are managers in place. So 750,000 until you're there. I think that some percentage of your day should be contributing to revenue, even if that's just during your off season. Produce revenue. If you're at 400, 500,000, like still produce revenue. Once you get above that, that's when I can say year round, you're not touching a, you know, doing actual, any revenue producing work. And then I am waiting until 1.5 and beyond before I say you can be out of daily operations. You got an admin manager, you got an operations manager, you got a sales manager. And they can run the business without you. All right, next call is coming from eight. Oh, wait, we already got this one. Sorry, I can't. I only got a couple more. I can't have. Repeat caller. Next call is coming in from six four six. Welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.

Mike. This is Divya from Huntsville. Just got a question on our business. So we do poor lawn maintenance we have roughly four or five hundred customers, and you've got all those customers from Google. Local service ads.

Cool.

And, you know, the good thing about local service ads is it's working really well. The bad thing is we can't really put the throttle, you know, turn the throttle on. On them because it doesn't really matter how much budget you send. Looks like they decide how many leads to send you. Now, I've made all the mistakes that you've talked about, you know, giving up too early on Facebook ads and door hangers, you know, so I guess my question, Mike, is, you know, obviously I need to get those reps in and try Facebook and. And door hangers again. But what is sort of the cost of acquisition like that you look at or how do you look at it? Like, let's say you're doing a 5,000 door hanger run. Do you look at how much, what conversion you got and decide like, hey, it's good to try again, or how do you think about cost of acquisition and how that plays into how you decide if you've tried hard enough on some of these channels?

Yeah, I think the try hard enough part is very hard to quantify. I think what I'm looking for is improvement. So if I ran door hand hangers and I was getting a 0.1% return or 0.1% response rate, it was a one in a thousand are responding. I would probably look at as a data point and then I would do it again and try to make changes based upon the five things that I learned after that first campaign. And if doing that went from 0.1% to 0.4%, I got myself improvement and is 0.4%, great. Maybe not. But I just 4x my return. And so I'm actually looking, when I look at test, I am not looking at the absolute value in terms of conversion rate, cost per lead. I am looking at can I improve this? Because I know if I add time to improvement, eventually it will outperform. And so whenever you start door hangers, you start the Facebook ads, just have clean data, have a funnel. It's like I paid cost per click, cost per lead, customer acquisition cost, and then how much did I make on them in the first 90 days? That'd be a starting point. If you do that one time, great. There's my. I have data. Do it again based upon the five things you will learn inevitably during that campaign. I think you're smart enough to say, oh, man, if we just changed the door hangers, we realized we can deliver Twice as many. If we do it this way, we realize that people call way more often if we put the phone number at the top. Oh. We realized if we did a QR code, we get more people doing it because they don't want to call. Oh. If we do text, like, these are all the things you start realizing. But that comes over the course of time. So I am looking for improvement before I jump ship. Now, if I did door hangers and I literally got not a single one, maybe I'd say like, let's go try a different channel. But really what I'm trying to do is nail the numbers. So I have a comparative data set to compare my next test to. Does that make sense?

That makes sense. So basically when you're. And you're making a plan for these channels, let's say for 26, you're looking to get in three or four iterations in on both those channels, basically making sure the monitoring is really tight, correct on all the things that are going on.

And what I said at the beginning, what I said at the beginning is really important. And that is as much as I would agree, do a few campaigns, I would say the reason that the best of the best have done this for so many years is because they understand the seasonality that plays into their metrics. And what I mean by that is if you did three door hanger campaigns, you're like, well, my, my return is actually going down well. If you're on the tail end of demand for a season, we should expect that. And so that's why I think multiple years and you allowing me to see the demand curve, that's seasonal, you're not changing that. So I actually need to compare last March to this March and then be able to have a clean data set. So that's why I always think very much in terms like three years of tests. And I know, like, does that mean I'll do three tests, one every March? No, it means I'm going to probably do a March and April, a May and June. Each one of those, I'm probably iterating and improving my ad set. I'm improving my creative, I'm improving my offer, I'm improving my create the design of said door hanger or flyer or postcard or my landing page. I'm optimizing it. But then I'm going to compare that data to last year. Because in home services, so much of our data is so seasonal dependent. And so to think that, oh, my ads are getting better because my, my percentage went up. No, you're going into spring rush. And so you've got to be very careful about taking data and what I just said, and that is like, oh, one from 0.1% to 0.4%. That could simply because the week before it rained and this week it's sunny and you're going to the spring rush. So be very careful about comparing ad sets or ad campaigns against each other in a very small window of time. I'm always looking for multiple years. And when I look at the door hangers that we done in Augusta from the day one, that being like, I now, like, I just like, cringe, cringe when I look at the original designs compared to, like, it's all the little stuff. It's like, okay, use QR code. Use email also. Why? Because some people don't want to call. They don't want to text you. So I'm gonna have it on there, but I'm not gonna make it prominent. And I'm gonna have the, the, the, the price and I'm gonna cross it out and I'm gonna circle things. I'm gonna use a different color of Sharpie. These are all the little things you get to eventually. But it literally took us five, six years of doing that over and over again. Last call for the day coming from 405. Welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on.

Hey, Mike, I have a few questions. I have a weed control and fertilization business, and we also do mowing as well. This was my first year in business, so we're doing just under 100,000 in revenue, but we have about 10,000 in the bank. I say we. It's just me, 10,000 in the bank. And then I didn't go to college. I just graduated in 24. So I have $20,000 in that college fund that I can pull from. And so my question for you was having basically access to $30,000. What is the smartest way I can spend that money and what percent should I put to marketing?

Cool. So I would reverse this. I would first say, am I profitable if I was to hire someone? Because the last thing I want you to do is scale an unprofitable model that once you hire someone, immediately doesn't make you money. So that'd be the first thing. I run a bunch of numbers on that. Then I would set aside. Then I would first make sure that the thing that I'm driving my traffic to is my website. And like, well, I'm not driving traffic to it. They're actually going to call me. People check out your Website. So the number highest leverage thing you can do is have a great design website that actually converts. Then I would then have a budget for testing. I would say I'm going to spend some money to get a benchmark across four channels. You're like, well, doesn't that go against what you said in terms of go deep? No, you have no data. So figure out a data point for four different channels. Run 5,5000 door hangers will cost you 5 or $600 to print and you will deliver them in, you know, a week or two. So like great, do that. At the same time, you're running Facebook ads, you're running Google Ads and you're spending, let's just call $1000 in each of those, maybe 1500. Now does that mean that one of those channels underperforms and is bad? No. You could likely optimize it and make it better over the course of time. But I'm going to take the winner and squeeze the juice from that one. Because at your ad budget, you don't have $15,000 a month, $20,000 a month. Like okay, I'm going to do three of channels and I'll squeeze from all three. That'd be perfect. But that'd be a huge budget. So your budget is likely $1,000 to $2,000 a month tops, even in growth mode. And so I've got to figure out one channel and to to have the best bang for your buck when you have a small budget. I'm going to first test all the channels and see which one is the lowest hanging fruit. Does it make sense?

Okay. Yes, sir. And I have one more question. If you have time, go for it. So we're in an area that not a lot like our. The city, the suburb I'm in is huge. But they're developing this one area that not a lot of other companies are in. And I'm gaining a my shops over there. We have really good brand awareness. I would say we're very consistent. Great website, great branding on the trucks. The yard signs look just the same. And so I know how important branding is, but kind of the marketing, my before you said all that, the way I was going to market was really hit this small area really hard with door hangers. They're already seeing my truck in the area, yard signs kind of on the intersections, every door, direct mail and then, you know, targeting the Facebook ads over there. Would it not be smart to, you know, spread myself out that thin or should I try it in just little doses?

At your size of business, you're going to make a decision on your service area based upon where your customers are coming from. It's not like you have a million dollar business and you're thinking about moving to a new service area. So what you can do is simply where do the customers come from? When you run ads and you include both service areas, does 80% of the customers come from one side and if so, you cut off the other one because it's only 20, 30% of revenue now or less and it's small and let's call it 20 or 30 thousand dollars. Great. Let's go where we had a lower customer acquisition cost, we had way more leads pouring in. When I ran the ad across both areas, one area over delivered, great. I don't know if it's the one that you're currently living in or the one where your current shop is. Regardless if they're far apart. I don't want to be building a business at $400,000 where I'm driving 30, 60 minutes in between service areas, especially with the services that you're offering. And so I would highly recommend see where the leads, where the leads start coming from. When you run this test and when you run the test, I think it'll be very telling in terms of, especially if you consolidate that into like a three to six week window and you're running channel like saying spending three to four grand across a few channels, it'll be very obvious that all the leads are coming from one. And if it's not, if it's really spread out, then you got to have, you got to ask yourself like, where do I want the business to be in the future? Am I trying to boil the ocean instead of just like let's lock in on one, do it well. And then when I have the resource to be able to get a second shop or have a satellite location, then I'll start this other one so I can actually do it efficiently and profit profitably. Because the fastest way to grow revenue is always to increase your service area. It's always to increase the number of services you offer. And so you will make more revenue if you do both of these. And that is why most people will have way too large of a service here. Because on paper you can have a bigger business. But if you just took the puddle and took one of these service areas and doubled down on it and really started to penetrate that market, your strong branding would actually become top of mind because people would see it enough time again, more and better before new. All right, we're gonna cut it there. Thank you all so very much for hopping on the live stream. I appreciate you tremendously and we will do more of these in the future. I appreciate your support in making this happen. We are hiring someone full time to help me with these live streams, to be able to cut them up, turn them into shorts and assist with me what I'm doing with all this, all myself and managing the queue, etc. It'll be much more professional in the future. I love you all. We'll see you tonight. Not tonight. I'm going to church tonight. I will not see you tonight. I will see you the next time we do live stream. Take care everyone. Bye.