There Are Only 5 Things You Need to Build a $1M Business

All right, I'm going on my lunch break, but on this sheet of paper I wrote down the 5 things that any home service business needs to build a million-dollar business. Now, if you're trying to build past a million dollars, these things will not get you there. But if you want to grow from $0 to $300,000, $500,000, $800,000, a million dollars in annual revenue, you just need these 5 things. And if anyone tells you you need anything besides these 5 things, To build a million-dollar business, they're usually trying to sell you something. And so let's get into it. Very first thing is do high-quality service. Now, this seems like an obvious thing, but if your churn is too high or you get bad reviews, you are going to have serious problems because we're in the home service industry. Now, if you break down the word service, it is a function of to serve. And if you don't serve the customer well, you're going to get bad Google reviews, get bad Facebook reviews, you're not going to get any referrals. And in the long run, after your first few years in business, referrals are actually the kind of thing that will drive the business forward without you constantly having to spend money on marketing. Because the part that stinks about starting a home service business is no one knows who you are. And so every single customer that comes in is going to come usually from a paid ad of some sort, whether you're knocking on a door, doing a door hanger, doing a Facebook ad, you're paying for that lead in some way, shape, or form because no one knows who you are. You're just like a blip on the radar. They don't know who you are. They've never seen your trucks. None of their family or friends have ever done service with you. And to be able to break out of that, no one knowing who you are, completely obsolete, you have to usually run paid ads. You have to run whether it be door hangers or flyers, every door direct mail, Facebook ads, Google ads, you're almost all of your leads are going to come from some form of paid advertising. And the only way to ever get over that and get leads coming to you organically is either them coming to you from finding on Google, or hearing about you from their friends and family, people that are also looking for the same service. And you've done a great job for them in the past. And so if you don't do a great job, you just handicap yourself from ever experiencing that level of lead source, which is people coming in and showing up without you ever having to pay for them. And so in the short term, You could probably outspend yourself on advertising and grow a big business without high-quality service. However, you'll rarely ever make it profitable if you're not doing good quality service, because eventually you will run out of money, or you'll have such low profit margins you'll eventually want to quit the business because people don't keep coming back to you, they don't buy other services from you, they don't talk about you to their friends and family. And they actually become detractors and post negative things about you. Like the only, the only word of mouth about your business is negative because you didn't serve them well. You didn't do a good job on their property. They did not like the technicians. They weren't professional. And so we have to do everything possible to serve our customers. And there, if you actually care about serving your customers, here's the painful part. If you actually care about it, you deeply care about serving the customer well. You're gonna mess up because you have humans working for you, and that hurts. The only thing to be able to give yourself a little bit of solace in those moments is that the reason it hurts so bad is because you do care and you do want to serve them well. And there's going to be customers that will be completely— you can't— you can never make them happy. You could do any— you could serve them serve them their service on a gold platter with white gloves on, have tuxedos for your technicians. Everything can be done exactly as the estimate described at half the cost, and they would still find something to be unhappy about. There's going to be customers like that. So don't misinterpret good service for sacrificing good team members and your time chasing customers that will never be happy. With you or your service or your business or any, probably any home service business provider. Don't waste your time on them. I'm not talking about those people though. I'm talking about the 90-95% of people that are happy that you took care of them. They're willing to talk about you with friends and family, leave a positive review, and share your name with their community and with the people around them. If you can achieve that down the road, you won't have to spend money on ads. And this is why people, this the comments, etc. They will say like, you don't need to do advertising, you don't need a good website, you don't need to wrap your trucks, you don't need uniforms, you just need good word of mouth. And to some degree, they are correct. You will grow slower. However, you can build a really good business just off the back of this very first thing. And that's good service. Because if you take care of customers, and you do a great job, they'll talk to their friends, they'll talk to their family, you'll get referrals, and you'll get leads without having to spend money on any other platform. That's why it's the most important. And there is none of these— we don't like home services. In the name is serve. And so if you can serve your customers well, a lot of things take care of themselves. Now, the challenging part with this one is doing high-quality service at scale when it's no longer you doing the actual work. This is why a lot of the people that also say that word of mouth is the only way to grow a business, a lot of times they get stuck in the business being the laborer because they're, they're so good at getting referrals because their quality is so high. But because their quality is so high, they have not yet built the systems to train their team to do the work at that level, at that level of care, at that level of service to the customer. And so when I say do high-quality work, That will get you to over 6 figures. Just you doing the work at a high quality level and getting referrals. Customers will talk about you, leave online reviews, etc. But the real hack to go from 6 figures to 7 figures is going to be doing that high quality service at scale, which means you not— not you serving 10 or 15 customers a week, but now you're getting 10 technicians that serve 100, 200 customers a week. And now them all doing the level of service required to get referrals, get reviews, and get people talking about your business. And that's, that's hard. That's when it comes down to training. It comes down to recruiting great people, comes down to leading, managing, showing them how to do the work, cutting out services, simplifying. These are all the nitty-gritty details that people don't like to talk about. Because doing quality work for, for a lot of business owners, the first person in the business is a given. It's like so second nature to us to do a good quality job. You've never got a bad review. You have never had someone say something negative about your work because you do great service. That's not hard. The hard part is getting that to be replicated in other technicians. And when you start doing it, you start realizing sometimes, oh by golly, I should probably just simplify my business and cut out a lot of the extraneous difficult things inside my company so that as I systematize it and I try to get other people to do the work, they can still deliver the kind of output that I did when I was solo out in the field doing the work by myself. And that's the only way to be able to scale good quality service across technicians and other employees and for you to not be solo operator forever or out in the field forever. All right. So that's the first thing. Do high quality service. At scale. Second thing you got to do is you got to answer the phone. Now, I don't like calling people. I'm also 30 years old. When the vast majority of our customers are 50 years old, 60 years old, a lot of them still are used to phone calls. And still a huge percentage of leads that come into Augusta Lawn Care come from phone calls. We build over— we've built over 1,000 websites at Home Service Web Design, and still the most clicked button is the call button with the phone number. Assuming that that's the main call to action in the top right-hand corner, it still gets clicked a lot, and it's, it's, it's the source of a huge percentage of the amount of leads that are coming into home service businesses. So as much as I, at 30 years old, don't like calling, I would rather text. I would rather have something automated. I don't want to pick up the phone and talk to someone or talk to a robot and then go through 3 different tiers of who to talk to— sales, service, complaint. Like, I don't want to go through all that. I just want to go on the website, check out, go on the website, put a card on file, go on the website, text them. That's me. But for the vast majority of our customers, That's not how they think. And maybe when I— the 30-year-olds of my generation are in their 50s and 60s, texting and the website only will be a way of communication that you can build your business around. But that's still 20 to 30 years away when my generation has the wealth of the country. Right now, the wealth of the country, people that are in their 50s, their 60s, their 70s, they still are used to calling. And so you'll have to pick up the phone. And this one's not fun because it's a reactive task. If someone texts you, if they put an estimate request form into your website, you get back to them on your own time. You can take an hour or 2, you can do it between estimates, you can wait until you're done the current job that you're at and then get back to them. It's normal, like if they leave a voicemail even. But when it comes to answering the phone, that's when you can double or triple the amount of leads that you get. With the same number of leads. If you have 100 people call you, 100 people call you as new customers, they saw your trucks, they heard about you, it's a referral. Like, I got referrals. Okay, great. They called you. And now what? You still need their information and you still have not transacted with that customer. And so let's assume 100 people give you a call. It is statistically average. And I've seen this at Augusta Lawn Care and just industry average. You can look this up on ChatGPT. 37% of people are gonna leave a voicemail, meaning that 63% are not. So right off the rip, almost 2/3 of all the leads that come into your business, if they're giving you a phone call, if you just don't answer it, you're losing them. And so how can I triple the number of customers I'm getting into my business? Just answer your phone. 'Cause if you answer your phone 100% of the time, 100% of the time someone who wants to give you money we'll be able to set up an estimate or get the job done. And so now we're going a little deeper in the funnel. First thing was like, do good service. Obvious, Michael, of course. That's the product we sell is home service. I agree. But now, once we get a lead, once someone does talk about you, send a great review, someone else sees that review, they talk about you at work, and they give you a referral. Awesome. And now when that person calls you, I need to convert them into a customer because they're only a prospect When they heard about you. They haven't even become a lead. I haven't even got their contact information if I don't answer the phone and they just hang up and call someone else. And I don't want 63% of my leads from the phone just not coming in. It is literally the fastest way to triple the size of your business is triple the number of leads you get. And the way to triple the number of leads you get is pick up the phone instead of not picking it up. You're like, oh, I'll just get to the voicemail. You will. And you'll only hear from 37% of people. I'll call people back if I miss their call. You will only get about 40 to 50% of people answering the phone when you call them back. I understand that answering the phone now puts everything on the customer's time schedule, which means they call and you have to answer. That's why we tend to gravitate towards things like text or web forms, is because you're able to get back to the customer on your time schedule. Phones are hard. They are, they are one of the hardest things to crack. It's also why, in my opinion, the biggest businesses that have been around for 30, 40, 50 years, they had to learn the phone. They had to learn how to pick it up. They had to learn how to figure out how to get back to customers fast. They had to figure out what to do if a customer calls their text-only number, etc. All that being said, the biggest businesses of today, most of them figured out how to use the phone, and it's serving them well even to this day. Because the people that have all the money in the country, the baby boomers, 67 years old, have multiple houses, they have discretionary income, they're not gonna pinch pennies on you, they value premium service, and they're willing to pay for it. They take your upsells. All those customers that are in their 60s and 70s, Boomers. They still wanna pick up the phone. And fortunately, a lot of people are much more okay now with over-the-phone estimates. They're okay with instant prices on the website. They're okay with us giving a price without ever visiting them on the property. Big win. Over the past 5 years, we've seen a lot more adoption of customers being okay with not requiring an in-person meeting with an estimator. That's awesome. But when it comes to home services, there's a level of trust that is required from a customer to have them on your property. And in order for you to gain that trust, many times they'll want to talk to a human, even if it's not in person, just on the phone. And so by having a great phone service, by picking up the phone, not only do you get the lead, but you're also ensuring that there's a level of trust that's built with customers, even if you don't meet them in person, even if you sell without talking to the customer belly to belly. If they have a great experience on the phone, and for honestly most people, a great experience on the phone for home services is that you just pick it up. You are ahead of literally 95% of home service businesses if you just pick up the phone, let alone how you answer. Do you try to upsell them? Are you clear and concise? Are you happy on the phone? Or do you know what you're doing inside your software and you're navigating around? The other day I was talking to someone on Comcast. 25 minutes go by. Of them trying to find my account. I have like five accounts with them, and I gave them all my numbers, everything. And he's like, "It's there, but I can't figure out twenty-five." All of a sudden, like the phone just dropped. Didn't call me back. So like that was a bad phone call experience. But if you just pick up the phone in home services, you're ahead of like ninety-five percent of people. You're like, "How do you know that?" Because I call home service businesses about once a quarter, and I'll just choose one random industry, and I'll usually call ten to twenty businesses. And I'll just see how many pick up their phone. And usually it's about 1 in 10 that will pick up their phone. Maybe 1 out of 5 if you're in industries where there's a lot more money or it's a bigger business. For example, like HVAC, electrical, plumbing, they usually do a little bit better job. And then we wonder why they have all the money, why private equity goes after them, why they have better margins than us. They're doing the basics, the simple stuff. They're doing it better than us. Okay, so you just got to answer the phone. Now, I'm not going to talk about all the logistics of how to answer the phone, how to do upsells on the phone, your tone on the phone. Not going to talk about any of that. I'm just going to tell you to answer the phone because you're going to beat 9 out of 10 of your competition if you can just do that. And you're going to triple the amount of leads that you get that you've already done the work for. They've already got a review, a referral. They've heard about you. They've seen your trucks. You already did all of the hardest parts and they call you. And if you don't pick up the phone, 63% of the time you just don't get the lead. So I just need you to pick up the phone. I don't care if you got to get an answering service. I don't care if you got to have it where it beeps super loud when you're out in the truck and like you somehow figure out how to just answer the phone and you'll double, triple the size of this business. I've consistently seen the businesses, the business owners that sacrifice a little bit of efficiency While they're out in the field, you're like, man, I'm only doing $100 grand in revenue. There's no way I can pick up the phone. I'm so busy throughout the day. I agree. I have consistently seen the business owners that just focus on answering the phone and prioritize that over doing the work usually triple their business very quickly simply because the math of answering the phone gets them more leads. And within a year or two, be able to afford an answering service or even an office person. Now, I usually don't recommend getting a full-time office person until you're past half a million. Because the cost— you can't bear a cost of a full-time office person that can answer the phone 10 hours a day. And if you don't— like, well, I can only afford them part-time at the beginning. Great. Have an answering service answer it for the other 20 hours of the day that they're not working. But we got to answer the phone. There's no reason to build a brand, have referrals, have reviews, do great work, have a great website, have trucks rolling around, all of that, and not answer the phone. You're just shooting yourself in the foot. So number 2 is answer the phone. Very simple. Third thing to do, your website, your online presence. So website and Google Business Profile. Like, oh, Google's going the way of the dodo bird because now we have ChatGPT and Gemini, etc. All of these AI tools are pulling even more from Google Business Profile than they ever have because it's a source of truth that's verified. So if you think about in the world of AI, when it's scanning tons of websites and trying to figure out what's truth and what to show their user, because if they don't show good, accurate data, guess who's not going to use their platform? So they got to show good data. What do you think is a better source of data? Your website that you could just make up anything you want and plop it on there, or Google who verifies your address, has you on a map, requires the public to be able to see and verify your services, verify your contact information. Who do you think they're going to use? All these AI platforms, they're going to use the trusted and verified platform of Google Business Profile and certainly Gemini inside of Google itself, their, their AI product. But ChatGPT uses it. All these other platforms use it. This is why for Augusta Lawn Care, for the owners of Augusta, we post for them 3 times every single week. We post for them. We want to give data as much as possible to Google to be able to show to Google that we are open for business, that we're constantly adding new content and new data, and that we're actually keeping the profile updated. And so going through it once a week, uh, once a month, and just updating the services you offer, your service area, your address, get it verified. If you can get your address verified, you're probably going to beat out almost every Chuck in a truck because they can't verify an address. They're just doing a service area inside Google. And yeah, it's a pain in the butt and you might have to go get an office or get— do some free service for someone to be able to do their— do some work for free just so you can verify the address inside Google. But the objective is to be able to differentiate yourself from all the little guys. This is Dean. He's from the command center. He's crushing it. Let's let's go. This is Dean. Let's go on your break. Oh yes sir. Crushing it. How many you doing? Uh, fifteen. Let's go. Good stuff. I'm in the middle of video. No, yeah, it's great, man. Crushing it. Okay, so when it comes to Google Business Profile, it's still super important. I think that the value of Google Business Profile will only become more and more when it comes to the use of it in AI. And so even if you believe that Google Search isn't going anywhere, you got to have a good Google Business Profile, have images, service area at the very least, ideally have an actual verified address because so many of your competition doesn't have that. You look at the— if you go to your local market, type in your service and then your city name, it's going to have usually on the left-hand side 3 to 4 of the different business profiles with their reviews. On the right-hand side, it's going to have Maps and you can show up for free on the Maps and the Google Business Profile section above the native search now for free if you just update your profile and you have a verified address on Google Maps because now Google Business Profile is part of Google Maps. It's all the same thing and that doesn't cost you anything. It just takes you the time and effort to add pictures the same way you would add pictures to Facebook or Instagram, add them to Google the same way that you would check your email daily, weekly. Do the same thing. Your Google Business Profile, it's going to drive a huge amount of leads. It doesn't cost you anything. Okay, so when it comes to your website, because now a big piece of it is like, look, if I can show up on Google Business Profile, awesome. If I can show up on Google Maps, awesome. But I still need more leads. I want to be able to drive traffic. Well, ideally, I show up when someone searches certain keywords, like my services in my area. I want to show up. So that's where Google Ads is useful. Awesome. But I don't want to pay. I just want for now, a website that can generate leads without me spending more money on ads. Because like, you can have a bad website, you cannot answer the phone. You cannot do good quality service and still build a million-dollar business. You're just gonna have to spend gobs of money on advertising and gobs of money on getting more leads because you're never gonna have referrals and reviews coming in from quality service. You're never gonna get 63% of your leads just by answering the phone. And if you don't have a good website, you're never gonna show up on just regular Google rankings. And any sort of even AI search, like AI is the new Google search. And so when we say Google search or search engine optimization, the same thing is going to be true when it comes to AI and AEO and trying to optimize around answers. Same thing is true for your website. It's so important. People are only going to buy more and more from stuff online. They're getting more and more comfortable with buying stuff online. And you've got to show up on your website. So once you've done the free stuff of Google Business Profile, you make sure it's optimized, verified an address, you're constantly updating it, making sure it has relevant information, then I want you to build a website. So this third one is like kind of like your online presence, your Google Business Profile and website. Now if you're just getting started, pay $30, $40, $50 a month or whatever it is and get something like Squarespace or Wix. And you can easily get a decent looking website that's better than nothing. It's not usually going to have great SEO, search engine optimization, but you don't need 110% right now. You just need it 95% because that's a whole lot better than nothing. And it's a whole lot better than having absolutely no online presence besides social media is have an actual website. I think of like your website, like it's a place you own. You own that domain. No one else can buy it. No one else can buy augustalawncares.com. I own it. No one else can buy your domain. And so it's something that you can invest in for the long term because you own it versus Facebook's Facebook ads, Google ads, these other platforms that you pay for, even door hangers. Like, great, you pay for the door hanger, it's on the person's door. But then like, what about next week once they throw it away? It's like there's no residual benefit to that door hanger. There's no residual benefit from buying the space on Facebook ads or buying the space on a Google ad, because once that time's over and you pay for it, it's gone. There's no residual benefit. Your website's different. It grows and compounds in value as time goes on, as more traffic comes to it, as you link to it more, as you add better content to it. And so you got to have a website. Squarespace is going to cost you $30, $40, $50 a month. Wix, same thing. It's not going to be great. Don't expect the best website. It's not— you're going to be able to tell it's new, new or novice. That's fine. If you're going to go elite, if you're going to go past $200,000, $500,000 in revenue, that's when I'd recommend something like Home Service Web Design, where we build a custom site for you. But more importantly, it's the ongoing SEO, search engine optimization, modifying of the keywords, optimization of the design around conversion and getting— when people show up to your website, they actually convert into a paying lead, actually submit their information, they actually convert on the form. That's super important. But if you're just getting started, just use Squarespace, just use Wix. And then you can graduate to something more sophisticated. Because ultimately, every dollar you spend on your website is almost always the best cost per lead you will ever have. For example, last month at Augusta Lawn Care, the average location got about 60 leads per month on average, right? So the average location website got 60 leads coming through their website, so like web forms from their website. I know that having the domain authority and the investments that we made into the domain of Augusta Lawn Care allows us to go from 25 to 28 all the way up to 60. So the difference between that, let's just call it 30 leads, is a phenomenal return on investment if you're spending Let's call it $500 to $1,000 on web design or SEO and getting someone involved in driving more leads to your website and making sure they convert into paying customers and optimizing the keywords, optimizing your service area, optimizing every aspect of design to increase the conversion on the website. It's worth it if you're growing bigger. Okay, so website. Google Business Profile. That's your online presence. All right. Fourth thing, I want you to get organized. Now, a lot of times people wait far too long on this. And this is why we create a free version at HomeWorks when it comes to software to start helping you get organized. Even if you have 10, 15, 20 customers, it's free for up to 50 customers. So you put 50 customers in and just stay organized. Make sure you have your customers in at least a spreadsheet. Well, you have their contact information. Ideally, you're doing some scheduling, you're doing invoicing, you're doing your billing, you have your payments being ran through a software system to stay organized. The difference between you and every other home service competitor of yours in your local area that will also get started this year, because there's so many that do get started, the difference between you and them is you're organized, meaning you're going to just show up. If you ask the vast majority of customers, They have a home service provider. They just want the person to show up. At Augusta Lawn Care, we ask what would make working with Augusta a 10 out of 10 experience? On about 85, 90% of our calls right now, we're asking that question. And so we're able to get a lot of data of what do we need to do to make sure the customer's actually satisfied and stays with us for a long time. And they usually tell us one of two things. One is a very specific thing as to why they left their last provider. For example, I was on the phone the other day. Someone said it was because the previous provider would not blow off the backyard porch. Her dog would go out on the porch and then track the clippings all throughout their house. So she's like, please just blow the backyard off. That's all I ask. Another person was like, could you guys just not mow it so low? Last time someone like my last provider, they kept mowing at 2.5 inches. It caused it to die. I have to water it way more. Could you please just mow it at 3+ inches? Like, that's a very specific thing. Now, the second reason that we a lot of times will hear about when it comes to the 10 out of 10 question that we ask on the phone is they just say the same thing. And that is, could you please just show up when you said you're going to show up? And if you're not going to be able to show up, that's fine. I understand there's weather, there's scheduling, there's issues that come up, but please, would you let me know? And that all comes back to the vast majority of home service businesses don't have any level of organization. And so it's impossible for them to show up when they said they were going to show up because they don't remember when they said they were going to show up. And the challenging part is the fastest way to organize your customers when you have 10, 15, 20 customers is in your head. But it's also the thing that will keep you from being able to stay organized at 50, 100, 200 customers is trying to keep it in your head. And so having an actual process or a system that can keep track of credit card information, keep track of billing information, keep track of invoices and estimates, keep track of when someone's supposed to go on the schedule, what services they accepted, what services they accepted last year. These are all little aspects of HomeWorks or any other CRM. Now, I'm gonna give you recommendations of what to use. If you're just getting started, Jobber is excellent, okay? Really good for mobile devices. So if most of your work on a phone is being done throughout the day, really simple user interface, It's pretty limited by what you can do, but it'll at least get you around and it'll get you started. And you're looking at between $50 and $100 per month to get started by yourself. As you add employees, maybe $200 to $300 to get some employees using Jobber. Now, if you're gonna go past $250,000 in annual revenue, if you're gonna start really scaling, that's when I recommend HomeWorks. That's the software that I've built, so I'm biased there, but it has, more power on automations and more abilities inside the mobile app to do things that are like the dispatch board, other aspects that you can really scale with. At the end of the day, I don't care what you use. There's 100 other options. There's Service Autopilot, there's Aspire, there's Service Titan. There's a lot of other options. I happen to be building one, so I'm biased, but I don't care which one you use. Just please be organized, because I know if you're organized You'll show up when you said you were going to. And if you show up when you said you were going to, you'll keep so many customers. So just get organized, use the software, use CRM, and start keeping track of all these little aspects of your business that usually get forgotten, get lost in text threads or email threads and never get fully executed on. And those customers usually don't complain. They just leave. They don't tell you exactly why. They just say, hey, found someone else, or So-and-so's— my kid's going to come do the property or just want to save some money or whatever. But the real reason is they're tired of constantly calling you and not hearing back from you. They're constantly leaving forms on your website and not hearing back from you. They need an extra service done, but they can't get a hold of you. That is the person who's going to leave quietly. And it's all just because you're not organized in the business. You're like, I'm going to go hire someone to answer the phones. How in the world are they going to know everything inside your brain? How are you going to get technicians to understand all the job notes? Like inside FieldForce, inside the— that's the mobile app we use at HomeWorks. We can show pictures, we can show video that attach to all recurring visits, big projects, so that way our crew always knows what's going on. But there's no way to stay organized with video or pictures, right, if you don't even have any software. And so, um, just use anything. I do not care if it's HomeWorks. We have it for free up to 50 customers. If you're just getting started, try it out. I don't care if you use it for the most basic elements of like just keeping their invoices, estimates, their billing information, their contact information in one spot, your schedule. Just make sure you have some system of record because otherwise you will stall out at 50, 60, 100 customers because that's how much you can keep in your brain. There's some law, I forget the exact law of it. It's like where you can keep like 200 names in your head or 100 names in your head. So you'll be able to do that for your customers and then you'll hit this cap where you will not be able to grow the business unless you just deteriorate service and stop doing what you said you were going to do simply because you can't keep track of it all. All right. One last thing. Number 5, in order to be able to grow a 6 to 7 figure business in home services, you just need one acquisition channel. Not 20, not 50, not 4, not 3. You just need one way to get Customers. Acquire is just get. So when I say acquire customers, you just wanna get more customers. Awesome. We talked about all the free ways to do it. We talked about your website, doing good quality service so you can get reviews and you can get referrals. We talked about answering the phone. Those are all free things that you can do to get more customers. Mm-hmm. But I don't wanna wait 3, 4, 5 years to grow a big business. I wanna be able to grow faster. I wanna invest the money, my profits, back into the business through advertising. And you don't need to do 5 things. Anyone that's telling you you need to do like 20 different things all at the same time, either A, they have a huge budget, or B, they're trying to sell you something, usually advertising services of some sort. Now, I'm a big fan of testing, trying a few different things and seeing what works well. But then once you choose one, just go all in on it. You're like, man, door hangers are doing pretty good. If you just focused all your time on that marketing channel, you'd probably start refining over the course of time and make it really good. Instead of dabbling with Facebook ads, then a little bit of Google Ads, then go get an SEO specialist, then run some blog posts. And then I'm going to go out and do some door hangers, I'm gonna do some yard signs. And then I'm gonna get like call blasts, like you just go from one thing to the other instead of just perfecting one channel. And so I'm a big fan of testing at the beginning. But I don't want you perpetually testing gobs of money on different marketing channels, Whereas if you just took the one that works well at the beginning and then just make it better and better and better and better. That's why there's people that have built massive businesses just door knocking. And someone else goes door knocking like, what in the world? I'm never gonna get a customer doing this. This is horrible. Why? Because one person stuck with doing the same thing over and over and over again, again and again, thousands of times before they actually figure out a system to make that acquisition channel work. And so a lot of times it's not the acquisition channel that's wrong. It's the amount of time that you've put into it, the amount of effort you're putting into it, the amount of reps that you have doing it that prevents you from actually being successful using that marketing channel. So do Facebook ads work? Yeah, 100%. You can also waste a ton of money if you don't know what you're doing. You don't spend the time to really hone in your ads. Do Google ads work? Yeah, absolutely. But you can waste a lot of money if you don't know how to do negative keywords. If you don't know, get someone to be able to Make sure that you're targeting your service area, you're not marketing outside of it, you're not going after random keywords showing up on sites like people playing games on a website and they're seeing your ad, what in the world? No, I don't wanna show up there. So every single marketing channel in my opinion works, it's just whether or not you put all your time and attention to do the required work to become proficient at it. And you can't be proficient at every single one. So choose wisely. after testing different types of marketing channels. And realize that occasionally you have a marketing channel that works really good at one period of time of the year, and you'll have to switch during the off-season or when you start pitching other services, the marketing channel, the best one, might switch. So then I might get a second marketing channel after that. But for now, choose one service and one marketing channel. I don't care if it's Facebook ads and you're like really good on camera, if you're like, Hey guys, this is Mike over at Augusta Lawn Care. Just wanted to show you this new project we just wrapped up here today. If you're really good at video like that, you'd probably do really good at Facebook ads versus the person like, hey, this is Mike at Augusta Lawn Care and we just finished this project over here. Like, the first person is probably going to do better on Facebook ads. And so test your market, do 3, 4 different channels, see what's working decently, and then just apply yourself to it. Become the best at it. And so we have like Augusta Leads, for example. Every single day we have a team trying to optimize the keywords, optimize the Facebook ads. And so when I talk about them, people are like, oh, I tried it, it didn't work for me. My cost per lead was $150, $200, $300. And it's like, yes, but like, I have a whole team doing it. They're optimizing, they're only focused on Google ads and Facebook ads, that's it. And there's someone else that might go out and do tens of thousands of door hangers and they get really, really good at it and then they talk about it And then you go out and try like, it's not working for me. They have done it hundreds of thousands of times. They've optimized where they put the QR code. They optimize what the pricing should be. They should— should I cross out the prices? Should I make an offer? Should I put an email or the phone number? These are all little things they've figured out over the course of doing it so many times and doing so many reps. So it's not a matter of what the best marketing platform is. It's the marketing platform that you apply yourself to and become in the top 1%. That's the marketing channel that will work for you. Work for you. Now, this— everything I've talked about, these 5 things will get you from $0 to $1 million. If you want to scale past $1 million, that's where leadership, management, and becoming the leader that others want to follow— specifically A players— they got to be able to follow you. Like, you're like, I'm a great leader, but your only people attracted to you are B players, C players, D players, and Z players. I've got to change who I am as a leader to be able to attract the best talent. From my competition, be able to retain the best talent once I get them on the team. So I have a huge bunch of, a bunch of churn happening all the time on my team. And that is the most important thing after $1 million. But getting from $0 to $1 million, you only need these 5 things. Comment below if you made it this far. What's one other tip that you would share with everyone else when it comes to growing from $0 to $1 million in home services?