8 Myths Keeping Home Service Businesses STUCK

Over the last five years, I've met with over 400 home service business owners. And these are the eight myths that are keeping home service businesses stuck. Number one, bigger ad budgets means bigger business. False. When I was working in the trades, I was working at a $3 million home service business. I had started there as a director of business development, and he was spending $2,000 on Google Ads and he had 36 Google reviews. Now, this was back in 2018, but he had built a $3 million business, not at all by using Google or Google Ads. He was building referral partners. And there are a bunch of different ways that you can grow your business. Google Ads, or ads in particular, is only one of them. You can create organic content, you can do local SEO, building a brand. You can get word of mouth and referrals, or you could just do good old cold calling, prospecting, door knocking. There's a bunch of different ways to grow your business. Ads is only one of them. On top of that, a lot of people spend money on ads, but they don't have tracking into actual return on ad spend in their CRM. So they're just throwing money home, hoping that it actually generates income. The answer, paid ads is only one way to grow your business. There are multiple other ways to grow your business. Bigger ad budgets does not mean big business even to this day. We currently work with $2 million home service businesses that spend $10,000 on Google Ads every single month and $7 million home service businesses that spend $10000 on Google Ads every single month. And they're both very successful, great profit margins, high growth companies. They just have a different mix when it comes to ad spend. Number two. If I have more leads, I would grow my business. This is false. My Mike Michalowicz in his book Clockwork, he breaks out the AC DC framework which is attracting people need to know about your business prospects need to come in the door. The C, which is converting, you need to convert those prospects into actual customers. D, delivering the service, having people to actually do the work. And then C, which is collecting, you have to collect the money. So, yes. Is leads the first step to growing your business? Yes. But a lot of people have a lead management problem, not just a lead problem. They get leads from all over the place. They might, you know, talk to them one time and then it's gone. Or they're missing out on calls and leads from all over the place and they have no process to follow up on leads. That's the problem. What we found with most companies is that they do want more leads. And of course that's great. But even just by increasing their lead management process, by adding in some text messages, emails, some type of a nurture sequence, they can exponentially grow their revenue. So the answer, Most companies don't have a lead problem. They have a lead management problem. They have a booking rate problem. They don't know where the leads are or what the lead stage is, and they're just moving on to the next lead, hoping that that will help them grow their business. The third myth, the marketing director myth, we see this time and time again. Companies that are at the 3 million to $10 million mark, they start trying to bring things in house. And one of them that they try to bring in house is a marketing director. And the problem is, is that to have someone that knows how to do SEO, that knows how to do website development, that knows how to create content, email marketing, text marketing, technology, CRM, all these different pieces are very, very difficult to have in one person, which is why agencies exist. They have put together all these subject matter experts that can fractionally do all of these services for you. What we have seen to be successful is bringing on an internal marketing coordinator, or you could call marketing director, where they do more in person events, helping support the agency with pictures, content, other strategy or ideas. And they work in collaboration with the marketing company to help to make sure that the business is growing. What you don't want to do is bring someone internal. Then you have to train them, make sure that they're up to date on all the new things that are coming out, make sure that you're actually competing with what everyone else is doing. And the landscape moves so fast, which is why it's important to maintain some type of a expert on the outside and then have an internal person if you choose to be your marketing coordinator. So the answer is, if you're 1 to 10 million, you need a fractional person to help you grow your business, that knows your CRM, that knows digital marketing, that knows technology and how to grow a business, which is why I started my company. But regardless of who you work with, you need someone that can help support you in growth. And the fourth myth is that the owner knows everything. They're the best marketer, they're the best salesperson. There's the best operations person, they're the best. They're the finance guru, they know hr, they run payroll. Tommy Mello has a very good quote that is up into a million dollars. You have to be a hustler at a million dollars. The hustler must die and the leader must be born. And it's a big shift in mindset wearing it in my shoes as well. The hustler has to die and the leader has to be born. You have to be putting people in place to help them grow the business that doesn't involve you every single time as the bottleneck because the bottleneck is at the top. And if you're at the top and you're squeezing everything, it's not going to grow. And so at that million dollar mark, you these teams. So what does that mean? Usually at this stage you're going to be bringing on a fractional cfo, not just having a bookkeeper. You're going to be bringing on fractional marketing help, not just some cookie cutter SEO type of thing. You're going to be bringing on fractional HR support, cpa, all these different pieces that's going to help you get to that next level. Once you get to around the $10 million mark, then those fractional pieces turn into real pieces that are full time in your business. But that one to $10 million mark is where you have to take off the hat of knowing everything and start building and being the leader inside of business. The fifth myth and number five myth is that email marketing is dead and outdated. Email marketing is a great way to grow your business. Last year we had a company that generated $263,000 from sending out 12 emails one every single month. Email marketing is not dead. If you do it right, it can generate money for your business. And here's a seven part framework for successful emails. One, Use a subject line tester for a subject to make sure that it gets a good open rate. 2. Put a call now and request service button right below your logo. Three, Create a blog post about the service that you're talking about. Answering questions, sharing how you do the service, maybe some pictures, videos. And then number four, you're going to do a frequently asked question social media post type thing and put that in the email. Number five, you're going to have a call to action that says, hey, if you're interested in getting this stuff done, click here. Six, you're going to get a customer testimonial of that actual service and being done by someone in their community. And seven, you're going to have that same call now request service button at the bottom. Email is not dead, you're just not doing it and you feel like no one looks at your stuff. If you do it this way, it will work. Number six, all traffic is good traffic. We had A company that we were working with that they just came on board and they wanted benchmark numbers and they were saying, well, how much website traffic did we have this month and how much website traffic did you increase next month? If we're going off website traffic, that's not a good benchmark for marketing. Why? Because you could get traffic from all over the world because. But who cares? You want traffic in your local area that's going to generate leads. So you might say, we want to increase local website traffic, but more importantly, you want to increase your leads from your website. And that's the number that you should really be looking at. Because we had a company that was generating a ton of website traffic and they were only getting 14 leads from their website. And we optimized it with the right call to actions, a chat, widget, estimate calculator, quick forms, and they generated 140 leads the next month just by having the right call to actions on their website. So web traffic is one part of it, but leads is really what people should be focused on. The answer is most websites are converting at 3 to 5% of website traffic into leads. The goal should be to get to 10% by having the right call to actions. And instead of focusing on website traffic, increase focus on leads from your website. And the seventh myth, marketing automation is impersonal. We hear this one a lot. Well, that sounds like some robot or AI thing and that's not how my customers want to interact with us. And that's why we don't want to set this up. I get it. No one wants to talk to a robot. That's not going to solve their problem. However, automation is one way that you can deliver great customer service. For example, when someone fills out a form on your website, send them a text message and an email acknowledging that you received it, and then ask a question that starts a conversation automatically and then have your team pick up from there so that they can communicate with the customer. This is great customer service and people want this. They want the acknowledgment that you receive their inquiry and that you're going to be communicating with them. Another really good way to look at this whenever you're doing some type of an automation or mass text or email is just say, hey, this is Phil from Flash Consulting. I was just reaching out because we're going to be in your area next week. Wanted to see if you had any questions or things that we could stop by and look at. That's a really great way way to say, it's Phil, Flash Consulting Whatever your name, your customer's name and your name and start the conversation, it's not impersonal. And you could even use their name in the text. So the answer, automation is not impersonal. It's just all about how you use the automation and set up your team to be successful with automation and with regular humans. And the last myth is running Google Ads will grow my business. Running Google Ads is a way to grow your business, but it's also a black hole of money that you will just throw at the Google Gods. All hail the Google Gods. And you won't even make any money because you don't know if it's working. So what does a good framework look like? You have a landing page that you drive traffic to. You have a tracking phone number and a tracking form on there. Then on that spreadsheet you can go to your CRM and you can line it up every single month and get a return on ad spend. That way you know if it's actually working or not. That is a very basic way to track your Google Ads. There are other ways that's more automated. But worst case scenario, you need to know if the money you're spending on Google Ads actually generating you money. Because just because you spend money on Google Ads doesn't mean that you're actually going to grow your business or even get more leads at that. So the answer is if you run Google Ads, have a landing page set up, have a way to track your Google Ads performance all the way to a turn on ad spend. If you feel stuck and you're not sure how to overcome some of these myths, we actually debunk them all in this video where we took this company to $3 million in 12 months. And if that one's not out yet, check this one out.