These Lead Gen Services Suck Out ALL Your Profits! [Avoid the Middle Man]

Angie's List, Thumbtack, Yelp and other lead providing services, they're okay in some markets. I've seen people build an entire business on the back of these lead gen services and it's not horrible. But I've also seen people spend 20 and 30% of their total revenue on getting leads from these services. And the thing that I don't like about it is you're basically on this like IV drip from them and if you was to be cut off, your business would collapse. I want to be able to ideally generate enough direct response marketing for my customers to eventually have a great brand and they come to me without me having to spend more money on ads. We'll talk more about that later. However, when it comes to Angelist, Thumbtack and Yelp, if they ever stopped the iv, all of a sudden you've built infrastructure. You have trucks, you have employees, you have office staff, you have all of this overhead expense built around a certain number of leads coming in. And if those leads were to stop because they changed the algorithm, because, because they ban your account, because they stop giving you leads for whatever reason, you could be in a really, really bad spot. I've seen it sometimes where they change the algorithm and the cost per lead goes from 20 or $30 to 60 or $70 and all of a sudden the business model is unprofitable and you don't want to be at the mercy of some other service. There's also been some murky things around, like Yelp reviews for example, where some of them are not shown if you don't spend money on ads. But I just don't like to associate with a company that's going to do that, whether or not they do or not. You can look up and look up online, but ultimately I don't like their sales tactics. People calling me all the time trying to convince me to do more and get me on like contracts. A lot of these businesses require these long term agreements to get you leads, when reality, the thing about seasonal businesses is there's time of the season where you don't have enough capacity to take on more leads. And then other times of the year you would rather double down and get more leads because you need more, more work and you don't have enough jobs in the schedule. And so the seasonality of our services, a lot of times I don't like being locked into long term commitments to buying leads from a provider. And ideally I'd like to control the flow of leads and I'd like to be doing the direct Response marketing. So I build my brand instead of renting these leads from someone else that's going to also give those same leads to other of my competitors. I don't want my mowing customer that I got from thumbtack to. Then when they need a mulch install, they're going on thumbtack again and asking. Five of my competitors are. I got to buy the lead again. I want it to be able to be where people come. I get them initially with lawn mowing or another gateway service and then I'm able to upsell them all the other services on their property without having to go and compete with all my competition. That's what allows me to be able to do, you know, service that might be a little bit lower margin, get people in the door and then I can upsell them into other higher margin services like mulch or trimming the bushes or fertilization. And I don't want to be at the risk of thumbtack, Yelp or Angie's List trying to go to my competition and get them to get the customer and sell off my lead that I work so hard for. Are you tired of paying those lead gen services as a middleman to you getting more customers? If so, I hope to see you at blue collar summit in January 2025. You're talking to hundreds of other small business owners in the home services that have figured this out and have a track record of staying busy all year round.

Go to blue collarsummit.com and see you there. All right.

Another way you can get more customers is through something called every door direct mail. Now, this is through the United States Postal Service, the most reliable branch of our government. Not really, but this would be a commercial mailbox. But obviously every single residential house has a mailbox. And so when I'm trying to advertise my lawn care business, I want to ask myself, how do I get into every person's mailbox? Yes, I could put a postage stamp on every single person's, you know, postcard or flyer, but that's going to cost me like 50, 60 cents a pop. I don't want to have to pay that. So the USPS United States Postal Service and other services in Australia, Canada, they have similar services where you can do bundles of flyers and postcards and give them to every single door inside of a mail route and end up in every single mailbox. Now these are the flyers. These are the different versions that we have on lawncaremedia.com you can also do different sizes of postcards just like this one. This one's for snow shoveling. This is for mowing services. These are all available in lawn caremedia.com now, what's important is that on your design, you actually have a stamp that's printed and it says local postal customer. This is really important. Some different post offices, the people that work there are super stickler on exactly what that postage stamp must look like. So before you go out and order 10,000 of these, go take one of them to your local postmaster and be like, yo, does this work? Is this going to be okay? Because I've seen people get declined and it's not good. And so you can check these out on lawn caremedia.com or at least just go look at them. Get some ideas of how you can design your postcard or your flyer, but make sure you have the correct stamp on it. Now, this is going to usually cost you between 16 and 20 cents per letter location or per address that you're inside of a mail route. What's really, really cool about every door direct mail is you're able to actually see on their software, on their website, exactly how many pieces are going to be in every mail route, as well as the average age and income of everyone that lives inside of that mail route. This allows you to really hone in on like, specific neighborhoods, specific parts of town. Instead of just canvassing the entire city in say, like a newspaper or, or a billboard, we can't control as much who's seeing the ad. In this case, you actually get to control which addresses you're targeting as well as get to know the information of their ages and whether or not they are residential and commercial and how old they are. These are all really important parts of home services because a lot of us want to go after a wealthier demographic that's a little bit older. And so you can see all the information. If you just go USPS EDDM on Google, you'll pull up that tool and you can look in your area and see all of this information from for free. Now, when it comes to every door direct mail, there's a few different things I like to keep in mind. I don't. I'm not a huge fan of just canvassing with a bunch of random postcards and flyers. I like to have one of three things. One, have a very specific killer offer. That killer offer could be a massive discount, like 80, 90% off. It could be your first service is free, something that just really gets people's attention. That great offer, good deal. A second thing I've seen work really well with every door direct mail is having a personal letter. So instead of having it super fancy where it's all color like this, it's actually make it look as if it's a personal letter you're mailing to everybody. And then you can just send it to the entire neighborhood or the entire mail route. The third way that I've seen every door direct mail work really good is if on your flyer or your postcard you have actual pricing. So they instead of having to ask for a quote, they're just actually calling you to confirm the estimate you've given them. Now that only works if you're going to target a very specific area where you know the generalized price for a certain type of house. For example, in 5, 600 houses, all the same, like for mowing, for example, it's like, okay, they're all about 50, $50 per cut. Just put the pricing on there. And then they call and they confirm the price instead of asking for a price proposal.

Most of the strategies we've talked about so far include what I call renting the customer's attention. In other words, every single time I want more customers, I've got to send them another postcard, I've got to put out another door hanger, I've got to put another Facebook ad or a Google Ad up. And ultimately I'm renting the attention of the customer because every if I stop spending money on advertising, I stop getting leads. There's one way to ensure that you have a steady stream of leads and you get more and more of them as time goes on. You build your brand without having to spend money for every single lead, and that's through your website. And that is the number one way in my opinion, in the long term to get more customers. If we think about direct response marketing, that's usually what I associate with things like door hangers, flyers, postcards, even ads that you see on Google. You're asking people to take a direct action, fill out a form, give you a call, fill out an instant price form, and collect and accept the estimate. These are what we call direct response marketing. But branding is a much longer term play. And your website I like to think of as more of a branding play. However, when you think about branding, you think about people getting customers without having to actually spend money on ads. Like Apple didn't convince me with a very specialized postcard sent to my house to buy this iPhone. I just went to the store and bought it because of the brand of Apple. And so when you're trying to create a Brand. Having a great website is the number one way to do this as a home service business. I think of it like owning a house versus renting a house. Yes, I can keep renting a house.

For 30 or 40 years and just.

Keep paying the landlord or I can pay my mortgage. And yes, it costs something. It's not free to have a website or own a house. But now it's kind of putting money in my own pocket because I don't have to constantly be paying rent while once I pay off the 30 year term on a mortgage, I own the house and I can still use it. And so I think of the same thing when it comes to my website. I want to own the customer. I don't want to be renting them from Google, renting them from Facebook, renting them from Thumbtack. I want to actually own the customer. And I believe having a great website with your home service business will allow you to charge 5 to $10 more per hour at least. Simply by having a website that shows your brand, colors, your uniforms, your, your trucks so you're insured separates you from 80 to 90% of your competition. And if everyone's like, there's so many competitors, it's so price competitive in my market, well, separate yourself from the other 80 and 90% of people that don't have a website aren't insured, aren't doing things above board. And if you are, show that on your website. On your website, show your brand, not random pictures off of Google about your home service, but like show your guys, your employees in your trucks doing services at your customer's property. Make sure it's well designed for something like mobile. Cause a lot of your traffic is going to come from a mobile device. Have your estimate request form above the fold. So when customers come to the website and they're looking to get an estimate, they can immediately identify how to contact you to be able to get a quote. They don't have to go to a contact Us page or scroll way down. Make sure when they first come to the site that it actually says what areas of your city or county you service and what services you offer. Otherwise the customer's confused as to whether or not you can even help their problem. If you have five or ten employees and, and they're all working eight or ten hours a day and you're able to get five or ten dollars more per one of their hours, having a great website could literally just from a price perspective, generate tens of thousands of dollars in extra revenue simply because the perceived value of the customer by you having a great website that shows off all of your reviews and shows that you're a reputable company. So even if it didn't produce any new leads, I recommend getting a great website. But also from a lead generation perspective, as your brand grows, as you get more trucks rolling around, as word of mouth is generated. Now when people go to your site, they fill out a form, you don't pay any extra money to get that lead. And all of a sudden you're getting leads for pennies compared to having to go buy one every single time you need more customers. When it comes to building your website, I think about the good, better and best model. There's ways to spend just 50 bucks a month. There's also ways to spend tens of thousands of dollars on your website. Watch this video here. I'm gonna walk you through the entire process of starting a lawn care business. And one of them breaks down exactly how this website should be built.