5 Things Every Business Needs To Grow in 2023

All right, in this video, we're going to discuss five things every business needs to grow. And these are going to be things that you can go on and buy. These are going to be things that you need to implement in your business, and it's going to be very strategic to help you grow over a coming year. Now, my name is Phil Risher. I'm the owner of Flash Consulting. We work with local service businesses to help them increase their sales and keep their schedules full. I used to be the director of business development at one of the largest air duct cleaning companies. And these are some of the strategies that we implement in their business to help them grow 20, 30% year over year. And let's get right into it. So the first thing that every single business needs to grow is a CRM. Sometimes you meet with clients and they don't have anything. There's no way to keep track of any of their stuff. They have a whiteboard and Excel spreadsheet. Now, that's okay. But if you really want to grow, you need to implement a CRM. So a CRM is a client relationship manager or customer relationship manager. And basically what it allows you to do is to, when you get a phone call, you can input the lead into your database. So that way you can keep track of that lead and, and then take it from start to finish through the entire job process. Which this allows you to do is to say, well, what did we book? What came from this? Where was the lead source for this lead? It just allows you to keep track of everything that goes on with your customer relationships. A lot of these ones here are specifically for local service businesses because they also add a component of dispatching, which dispatching is it gives a technician on their iPad. It will allow them to see the jobs, and you can communicate back and forth between the computer at the customer service representative's desk or the dispatcher and the iPad. And so these are really good. So Service Titan, Service Fusion, Service Monster, Jobber, Housecall Pro, Work is these are some of the ones that we like. Service Titan is always going to be the most expensive. Some of these other ones are like 50, 100, 200, couple hundred bucks a month, depending on the size of your business. So we highly recommend, if you want to grow, you need to get a CRM in place to keep track of these things. The next thing is, we want to make sure that we have a website that converts at 10%. So what does this mean when someone goes to your website? What percentage of those people convert into actual leads? Why is this important. The reason it's important is because the first part to getting growing a business is to get more leads. And so if we can create a website that converts at 10%, which is our goal here at Flash, then we know that we can just drive more traffic to the site through ads, through business to business partnerships, through whatever. And what this will allow us to do is to convert those visitors into leads. And here are some of the ways that you can do it on your website. You can add a chat widget button in the corner. We're going to go through a couple options later on when we talk about the fourth thing. Online scheduling. If you use the tool like Service Titan or House Call Pro or some of these, they already have integrated online scheduling platforms that you can put right on your website. This is a great way to convert leads. Estimate requests and estimate calculator. If you can provide a quick estimate. Most people just want to know when can you do it and how much is it going to cost? And so if you can provide some tools that will give them some rough estimates in trading their contact information. Great way to convert leads. Free giveaway or discount code. So maybe you offer like if you do H vac, get $10 off your fall inspection with this code and they have to give you their email or phone number or something like that. Really, really great ways. 10% is, to be honest with you, it's pretty much like the. There's no reason that you shouldn't be able to hit 10% if you implement all these things. We have clients that are 20, 30% conversion rates and they use a lot of these tools. All right, the next thing is coming up with a review generation plan. So reviews are very, very important. We talked about in some of the other videos actually have the slide right here. So I'll pull it up. So on your Google business profile, on Google, when someone searches for carpet cleaner near me, whatever, 17% of the ranking is reviews. So what this means is that if you can get 50, 100, couple hundred reviews, you're going to outrank your competition if they only have 20, 30 reviews. And so coming up with a strategy for getting reviews is very, very important for any local service business because it weighs so much on the local search algorithm on Google. So what are some ways that you can get more reviews and come up with a plan? So sending out a text message review Link. In these CRMs, a lot of times they have some automation so when you close out a job, it will automatically email them or text them some review link that works what we found to be the most effective way is to create a review card with a QR code, something like this, and basically take your. Your Google review link and turn it into a QR code, which we've made videos about how to do that. And then take that and have your technicians be incentivized to get reviews. So what you could do is say, hey, my name's Phil. Thank you so much for choosing us for your. If you don't mind leaving me a review. And if you could put my name in it, it would really let my boss know I'm doing a great job. Thanks so much. And then they go, they leave a review, they say, phil did such a great job, and then I'll get some incentive. Now, the last part to this is coming up with a weekly or monthly goal for Google reviews. And this is so important because a lot of times we see companies, they have spurts of reviews. Like they'll get 20 reviews and they're all for it, and then it just dies off. And then they're stuck at like, you know, 40, 50, 60, and then another spurt another month. So coming up with just a cadence of, hey, this is what we do. This is a part of our business workflow and our process. It helps so much. We've helped Companies go from 30 reviews to 2000 reviews by coming up with the cadence and implementing these strategies. And we know that it works, and it's very important. All right, the next thing, this is the fourth one, and this is text capabilities. I hinted at this before. 89% of customers want to text businesses. That was a recent study that was put out, and nine out of 10 customers said that they will actually switch providers if they're able to text them because people want to communicate via text message. So text capabilities is huge to grow your business. People want to text. No one wants to talk on the phone after hours. People can't text. You know how it is. People want to text. So here are some of the platforms that we like for texting. Podium is a really good one that's out there that integrates with a lot of CRMs. Convertible is a good one that some of our clients use. Swell and Chirp, these are all used in conjunction with CRMs. They have plugins and connections. They're also just good for service businesses. They have proven systems. I've seen, you know, 5, 10, 20 time returns just by implementing text capabilities. And this leads us into our fifth and final one, which is a retargeting plan. So retargeting is very, very important because you have a whole customer database, especially if you do service business. You have prospects, you have past customers. And if you never reach out to them via email or text or voicemail or postcards or just straight calling them, there's a huge gold mine of opportunity to grow your business. And so coming up with a retargeting plan is very, very important. It could be as simple as sending out a monthly newsletter using a tool like mailchimp or Constant Contact, sending special offer emails like, hey, right now is the perfect time to get your spring inspection or to get this or that cleaned up. Doing a referral program is really important. So like thank you so much for choosing us. If you know anyone else that would be interested in our services, can you give them this coupon code? And they get $50 off their service text marketing campaigns. We talked about that briefly with the text capabilities. But text messages get 98% open rate and so it's way different than an email because you get in front of people right away. But there's a bunch of other ones. I'd be curious what other ways that you think people can grow businesses that they should have. I'll be sure be sure to drop a comment below. If you like content like this, be sure to hit like and subscribe. We post content about growing local service businesses and if you need help, we are here to help you. We implement all of these strategies in businesses all across the country. For local service businesses, I'll put a link down below to set up some time to talk and we'll see you in the next video.