10 Things That Quietly Kill 7-Figure Home Service Businesses (And How to Fix Them)

Most seven figure home service businesses stall at a certain point. They're grinding every single day, but their growth stalls out and they don't know why. I've identified 10 distractions that usually paralyzes their progress. At a certain point in this video, I'm going to break down how to identify those, how to fix them, and the four growth levers that will unlock growth in your business that you should be focusing on instead of these 10 distractions. Before we get into the 10 distractions that are holding home service business owners back, I I want to talk about the four things that they should be focusing on to actually drive growth in their business. So remove the distractions, focus on the growth drivers. This isn't me just coming up with these things. Actually, Tommy Mello, who is the owner of a one garage door, it's a $200 million home service business, he identified these four things will grow any home service business. And I agree with them because we actually have this tool that I'm going to show you and I'll put it down below. It actually will show you that these numbers are what grow your business. So the four numbers are your booking rate, your close rate, your average ticket, your customer acquisition cost from the different four channels. And I'm going to go through and prove this to you that these are the four things that help you grow. So we have this legal calculator. I'll put the link down below. Basically what you do is you put in your total revenue here and you can look over the last year and you put in your revenue, then you can put in your average transaction value. If you don't know this, just take the number of estimates that you close divided by your total revenue. Then you can get your average quote. This is going to quote, close. So you generated 20 estimates and you close 10. So 50%. You could do that in your CRM and then lead to quote or lead to job, whichever you do. So this means I got 10 leads and I quoted 42 of them or I got 10 leads and I ran 50 of them. The reason that I put these numbers in here is because Service Titan did a report and they found that the average booking rate or lead to job or lead to quote rate is 42%. You should be getting closer to 62% as the top performing companies from what they found. But basically you want to get your booking rate, your lead to job or lead to quote, then you want to get your average close rate and then your average transaction value and that will build up to $1.8 million. One other note on this is when you work backwards, it's actually going to tell you how many leads that you're getting per month based off of these numbers here. It's hard to track leads for a lot of people because you have calls coming in, you have forms coming in. You might even use platforms like Yelp or Angie or messenger or other messaging platforms that are coming through that you can't keep track of. But this is going to help you work back to what it how many leads you're getting per month. Now here's a, here's a trick to actually growth is that if you want to grow to $3 million with a $1500 average ticket, 50% close rate, and 42% lead to quote or lead to job booking rate, then in this specific instance, you need 317 more leads per month. Okay, but this is why these are all growth drivers in your business. Because if you increase your booking rate, let's say you went from 42% to 62%. Well, now you only need 61 more leads per month in order to grow your business. So what should you be focusing on is how can I increase my booking rate? Let's say you get that really good, then it's your close rate. Okay, well what if I, Instead of closing 50%, what if I close at 55%? Well, now only need 13 more leads per month to get to $3 million. Okay, and what if I increase my average ticket? Okay, I'm going to increase this to $1,600. Now I don't even need more leads. I need less leads. So my expenses for marketing are actually going down by fixing these things in my business. Okay, now the last piece of this is customer acquisition cost. And what we do as a company is we dial in this cost per lead. So that way we know lsa, we get this much cost per lead. Google search, Yelp, YouTube meta mailers, Google biz profile, whatever. And then you can figure out how much does it actually cost to get a customer CAC, customer acquisition cost from the four channels, which are free content, organic SEO, social media content, paid ads, Google LSA, Google search ads, Yelp Meta, YouTube, B2B partnerships, warm outreach, warm partnerships to people referring you business. Cold outreach is cold outreach coming into your business or, or you going out and hunting it down and then coming into your business door, knocking, that kind of stuff, going out and texting, emailing, cold calling, that kind of stuff. That's the four ways. So when you think about the distractions, if I just told you that there's only four ways here. And I just literally showed you the four ways to go from 1.8 to $3 million. That's all you should be focusing on. Okay? But these other things are 10 distractions that are killing home service businesses. And I broke them down into three buckets. The first bucket is operational overload. Operational overload kills a lot of businesses, especially in the $1 to $3 million range. We see this one all the time. So number one is being the chief problem solver. So we had a home service business that we worked with. He was around $1.5 million. We started working with him. We increased the number of leads in his business and more importantly, the number of estimates. So we talk about this. We increased the number of leads and we also increased the number of estimates. But his close rate dropped because he. He couldn't. He. He was the number one salesperson in his business, but more importantly, he was a chief problem solver. He was running around doing all this other stuff instead of focusing on hiring salespeople to close the. All the new estimates that he got. And what happened was, is that he went from 70 estimates last year to 140 estimates this year. So double the number of estimates last year. He closed 30 estimates. So a little bit under 50%, which, you know, know, not great, but still decent. This year he only closed 30 estimates of the 140 estimates. Only 30 estimates because his bandwidth was to only close 30 estimates. Why? He's the number one salesperson. He's the problem solver running around in his business. So if you're facing this, you need to solve this problem. The way that you solve it is that you hire salespeople and you build a sales system in your business. Specifically 1 to 3 million. It holds a lot of people back. The next one is tinkering with CRMs and systems. Are you the CTO or are you the actual leader and entrepreneur, business owner, CEO? Are you the cto? This one kills a lot of businesses. People are tinkering here and there with, you know, should we be doing AI this or Reddit this? And they want to do all these things. What I told you was there's four ways to grow your business. None of these involve cto. You do not need to be the cto. You might like this stuff. You might like getting in the weeds with it, but you need to work with companies that are going to help you. You use this stuff. You can think of the ideas or have the ideas or learn about stuff, but you should not be the One tinkering inside of your business. You should be the leader above looking at those numbers that I mentioned before. And then the last one from an operational perspective is trying to do everything at once. Okay, Phil, So I know that there's four things that I need to do, right? I need to fix my booking rate, I need to fix my close rate. I need to fix my average ticket. All of those things have a million different things that you could do to fix these, right? For your, your close rate, for example, okay, we need the estimate nurture sequence to automatically nurture our estimates. Okay, that's one thing that you could do. But I'm also going to go over here and I'm going to talk to my salesperson about doing this and that. Okay, that's two things now that you're doing with your booking rate. Okay, I'm going to come up with this new call script for my CSRs and I'm not going to quote over the phone. I'm going to go over here. Okay, that's two more things that you're doing. So when you start to build all of these things and try to do all these things at once, what happens is everyone gets overloaded and you don't know what you're doing. And that's exactly why I think that if you start in this, the, the, the, the numbers that I told you, which is start with your booking rate and fix this. Because then if you just get more leads, you're going to book more jobs. The sales things, you can fix that next. Then the average ticket is fine tuning the actual sales process. And you can start to work through that a lot of times, like with the guy that I mentioned before, he wanted all these leads coming into his business. He wanted to fix his cac. And notice how I put that force, because if you get all these leads and you know your customer acquisition cost, but you can't convert the leads into estimates and then you can't convert the estimates into sales, you're literally just throwing money at marketing. And it could be good marketing, like my company, but you're just throwing money at marketing and it's not going to help you actually grow your business at the end of the day. So that's what it means by trying to do everything at once is that you don't actually have a predictable pattern to do things. Hormozi has a good framework on this, which is pick one to three things and focus on that good for like six months and fix that in your business and then move on to the next Thing. If you did everything at once, it's not going to work. You got to work inside of the patterns that I mentioned up here. Fix your booking rate, fix your close rate, average ticket. Then you know your customer acquisition costs, and now it's just a funnel and just pile it back on. All right, the next category here is vanity and perfectionism kills a lot of businesses. A lot of it doesn't kill them. It actually holds them back. It kills their growth. It keeps them in this not growth mode, but also paralysis. It paralyzes them. That's what I'm trying to say. It paralyzes them from doing anything. So brand aesthetic and perfectionism. We have a company that we work with that we sent out an email newsletter for them. One month they generated $20,000 from that email. The next month we say, hey, let's send out another one. And they didn't. They postponed sending it out because of one picture in there that they didn't like. They said, I'm not going to send it out. Then they got busy and they didn't end up sending out the email newsletter because one picture they didn't like and they generated $20,000 from the email the month before. This is the brand aesthetics and perfectionism. Could there be a better picture? Could the lighting be better over here? Could this look different? Sure. And there is a sense to being having brand versus lead gen, but if you know that something that you can do is generate $20,000 or more money for your business and you're going to get caught up in the weeds. Nowhere in here did I say make sure that your brand imaging looks correct. I said booking rate, close rate, average ticket, customer acquisition cost, brand aesthetics and perfectionism. There's a component to it, but it's not going to be the thing that grows your business. Especially when you know the other things that are going to grow your business. Number two is overthinking content that doesn't convert. We see this one happen, oh my gosh, so many times, like literally like $10 million. Businesses do this. They're analyzing every single social post and overthinking the content that doesn't even convert. It's just literally, should it say this on the social media post or this on the social media post, that right there is not going to help you grow your business. It might be something that's cute and fun to play with right now, but it's not going to be the thing that actually grows your business. So the color scheme and this, what, what I would recommend is have a brand Guideline with colors. And if you see something that comes across and you're just like, this doesn't look good, or I don't like the way that this looks for my business, cool. But when we talk about what's going to actually grow the business, having a different color over here or saying this word over here is not what it's going to be. There is a fine line, though, with having brand guidelines of what you want to say and how you want to look so that way things can fit in that. But what happens is this is the paralysis bucket that I mentioned, which is you get paralyzed from actually focusing on growth, but by focusing on brand aesthetics and perfectionism, overthinking the content and the color and this and that. A lot of we have some business owners that get fixated on vanity and perfectionism without actually focusing on what's going to grow the business, and it paralyzes their growth. The next thing in vanity and perfectionism, I put vanity because it's like they focus on lead count versus conversion. So they're so fixated on I need more leads and I need more leads, I need more leads that they miss out on the actual conversion piece, right? So when we look at this, instead of, let's say that their average quote to close is actually 30% and their lead to booking rate is like 30%, okay? They're like, I just need more leads, I need more leads. And what happens is that they just spend a ton of money on getting more leads when they could actually spend less money like what I showed you before by just fixing these holes in their bucket. If they actually focus on their booking rate and got that to 50% and they focus on their close rate and got that to 50%, this is going to cut their marketing spend down and it's not going to have so much of a focus on leads, but on leads that convert and good quality leads. And this creates the flywheel of business. A lot of companies don't want to focus on the operational inefficiencies inside of their sales process. And they want to just focus on my marketing doesn't work. My leads don't work. And this is why it hurts. If you focus on lead count and you're not focusing on versions, you're going to get stuck and you're going to get frustrated with marketing companies if you say, no, I convert at 60%. I know that number for a fact and I know that my average ticket is where it needs to be and I just need to fix my booking rate, then go work with your CSRs or I just need to get more leads for my business and all these other numbers are dialed in. That's exactly why you should work with a company like ours, because we help companies fix these four things in their business and we try to keep them off the distractions and focusing on these four things because that's what's going to grow their business. So if you need help with this and you feel like, hey, I need a better booking process or have a good booking process or I need a better close rate or I need help with my average ticket, like, we can help coach you a little bit on that, but we're a digital marketing company that comes alongside you that understands these four things grow businesses. Let's not focus on likes and shares and blah, blah, blah. Let's focus on $20,000 from an email newsletter. Let's do more of that. Let's focus on good quality leads that are converting through your sales pipeline. Let's do more of that so you can go to flashconsulting.com and you can learn more about what we do and see if we might be able to help you. All right, so we talked about vanity. All right, the last thing here is misplaced attention. This one is hard because once you go through, you're not the firefighter anymore. You fix your operational stuff. You're not too fixated on the vanity and perfectionism. You have the attention. You just have it misplaced on the wrong things. Those four things I mentioned are the things that you should be focused on. But here's the common distractions that we see from misplaced attention. The first one is getting sidetracked by reports and newsletters. All these companies, SEMrush, Reddit, AI search, ChatGPT, they're all going to be sending you reports and newsletters about, hey, shiny new thing over here, you should be doing this right. Like a couple months ago was like, oh my gosh, we need to be posting on Reddit because AI search is reading all of Reddit. And then a month later, it tanked and Reddit was no longer in the top 14% of queries for AI search. This is misplaced attention when all you got to be focused on is those four keywords, those four key key levers in your business. But people get distracted by reports and newsletters or shiny objects of new things that they need to be trying. Number eight is ignoring or misreading data. Okay, so we had a company that they didn't know their lead count and they, they just needed to fix this in Their business was, what is your lead count? Okay, they were ignoring the lead count data. And the reason that this was holding them back is because right here, if you don't know what your lead count is and you don't know what a true booking rate is, how could you do anything else as far as figuring out what you want to spend on marketing if you don't know your lead count, if you don't know how many of those people you're actually booking into jobs? So a perfect example for this is if you're spending money on marketing and you're getting leads coming into your business, but you don't know how many leads. Okay, that's one thing that you need to fix. Because if you don't know how many leads you have coming in, how can you know what your booking rate is? You don't. How could you know what it takes to get from a lead to an estimate to a close? You don't. So this is what I mean by ignoring or misreading data is that you think you know your leads, but it's not fully there. And this is some. The reason I'm making this video is because this is not like a quick fix thing. Like, okay, yeah, Phil, I'm hearing you, but, like, how do I do that? This is why you get paid the big bucks. This is why I left this one for last, is because you got to fix this in your business. Because imagine if I came to you and I said, hey, you got 700 leads last month. This month you got 800 leads, and you converted this many into actual sales. It's just a numbers game, right? It's just literally a numbers game. This is why ignoring or misreading data is so important, is that if you don't have good data, you can't make good decisions. All right, number nine, depending on one lead source. Ooh, this one's so good. This is misplaced attention. Fully, we have a company that is so fixated on just Google Ads and just only running Google Ads that they're missing out on those other four things that I mentioned before, which is organic social content, Google business profile, and on site SEO. They don't care about getting reviews. They have a 4.4 rating. They're not getting any reviews. They just keep thinking that right now something's wrong with their Google Ads when their cost per lead is getting more expensive. So your misplaced attention is that you're focusing on. You're focusing too much on one ad channel or one way to get customers and not broadening the scope of what you should be focusing on. And there's. There's really seven drivers of growth in your business. I'll rattle them off real quick, but we actually show you these in our sales process of like what you need to fix in your business. You need to have an organic game plan for free stuff, you know, SEO, social media, all that. You need to have a return on ad spend or ads performance game plan. So you need to know your return on ad spend reporting dialed in. You need to have a B2B campaign for warm outreach inside of your business. So you need to be setting up relationships with B2B partners. You need to have a lead nurture sequence in your business. So when a lead comes in, you need to nurture that lead to convert it into an actual job. You need an estimate nurture sequence. So when you send an estimate out, you need to nurture the estimate through. You need to have an email newsletter for your business going out every single month. And you need to be able to text market your customers to bring them back in your funnel. Those are the seven levers inside of your business. When you just focus on one of those things and you're not, you don't care about any of the other ones, you're stuck. You're literally building a business on one thing and it's not good. And that is the misplaced attention is that you're so focused on one thing that you're misplaced, not focusing on other things. All right, and then the last one is making decisions with bad data integrity. This one I can't speak to enough. We have a company that we work with now. They are spending $25,000 a month on Google Ads. Okay, $25,000 a month, quarter of $1 million annually. When we met with them in the sales process, we said, okay, how did you make the decision to take that $25,000 budget and spend $19,000 of it on this campaign? They have one campaign with 19,000. It was a gut feeling that we had. We thought that this was working well. And I asked them, okay, well, what about the return on ad spend data? Did you have any return on ad spend data that gave you proof that you should be doing that? No, we didn't really know that making decisions with bad data integrity is misplaced attention. You're misplaced because you're not focusing on the right things, which is that CAC number that I mentioned before. If you don't know, I spent $25,000 on ads and I don't know what it produced how do you know what your customer acquisition costs? How do you know your cost per lead? It's misplaced and it's just a gut feeling. It's misplaced with a gut feeling. So I hope this video is helpful if you find value in these 10 distractions. Or maybe there's another distraction like, hey, I face this one all the time. Drop a comment below if you have thoughts on these four growth levers. I'm curious to get your thoughts on what you have seen to help you grow your business. Be sure to hit like and subscribe and I'll see you in the next video.