9/26 2026 Goal Planning For Home Service Businesses LIVE

Is 2026 goal planning. We're going to be going down. I'm going to. I'm going to share my screen. I'm going to break out exactly how to plan for your 2026 goals and the numbers that you need to know. If you have questions about growing in 2026, you can always drop it in the comments or in the chat. I'm literally live, so I'm going to be answering questions. I have two resources that I'm going to be sharing with you for free, and these are things that when I went to work at a $3 million home service business, I implemented them in the business. And. And we went from 3 million to 4 million, 4 million to 5 million, all by doing this. So I also have a couple questions that our team pulled that we're going to do some Q and A as well, but it's going to be a very, very good use of time. And I guarantee at the end of this, you will have a takeaway of like, okay, I need to do this to grow. So let me switch my layout and I'm going to share my screen, and we're going to get right into it. All right, so we got that. All right, I'm gonna share my screen. I'm gonna share my whole screen. I know I get the infinity screen of death, but it is what it is. All right, so the first thing that we have to do is we have to know where we're currently at, which is why we have this goal tracker. And the goal tracker, I'm gonna share this, I'm gonna put this over here in the comments, and then I'm gonna break down exactly how to do it. All right, so with this goal, the numbers that we need to know is how many leads did we get as a business, we need to know how many jobs we ran, how many estimates that we ran, that we created, how many estimates that we sold, and then our total sales. So you could get this and plug in the information for your business. If you don't know leads, it's okay. Just take Jobs, for example, or even estimates. But it's going to help us significantly when we get to this lead goal calculator. And I'm going to break down exactly how to use this. But really, it's on this, this goal tracker that we need to get the data in first. So I actually pulled together some data over here. So this is some dummy data, but I have, like, leads, I have estimates I have sold, I have total sales. And we're going to go through and do our forecasting. So you can get this plug in your data, go right into your CRM and if you have leads or requests, put them in here for your numbers, jobs estimates. And I'm going to walk you through exactly how to plug this data in. All right, Let me just make sure there's no questions over here. Okay, we're all good over there. All right, cool. All right, so what we do is we get this data, plug it in, then we use this tool, which I'm going to put this tool as well in the chat. Let me just share this. If you're watching this after the fact, it's going to be down below in the description. All right, we got that. All right, cool. All right, so here's what we do. We're going to start down here with our current numbers. So if when you download these, just go to file and you can make a copy right here and you can do this yourself. So final revenue, we're going to go to our goal tracker. So I have some dummy data right here. Let me slide this over so we can look at it all together on the screen. All right, so we're going to first start with our total revenue. So we're going to go 2025. We're going to see we have 1.347, and then I just look at 2024, the last three, and say 406. So presumably if we just do exactly what we did last year, then 1.3, 400,000, let's just call it 1.8. All right. All right, cool. So that's our total revenue. Now what we want to do next is we want to get our average transaction value. So here's how we get this. We get our sold, our sold count. So this is our sold estimates. So that's 1050. And then we divide it by the total revenue that we have. I know this is not exact. You might do residential, you might do commercial. Well, my recommendation would be, is to do this, this exercise broken out for both divisions, residential, commercial, or whatever else you do. That way you get the most accurate data. But we're going to say that we did 1.347 million and we did 1050 sold estimates. Right? We got this number. So that's going to be an average transaction value of $1,282. One thousand, $1,282. So now what this is going to do is going to tell us how many number how many jobs that we need to complete per year, how many jobs we need to complete per month. So Basically, to hit 1.8 million at $1,282 per transaction, we need to do 117 jobs per month in order to hit that number. Now, here's where it gets fun is the quote and then the lead to quote. So quote is basically you take your total estimates created. So total estimates created 1865, and we closed 1050. So 1050 divided by 1865 is a close rate of 56%. So we're going to plug in 56% and then the last one. Now this one is. It can be challenging for businesses if you don't track your full lead count. For example, in this business, they don't track their full lead count. So you can see the leads or request data is 1650, but they generated 1865 quotes. So this doesn't make sense. Sometimes what happens in businesses like this, for example, they might quote over the phone and they don't fully add everyone into their CRM so they don't have the data. So what I like to do with when we're going through this exercise is just say, okay, if I was to give you 10 leads, how many of those leads would you turn into a quote? And it could be 10, right? It could be 10. It could also be a booking rate, right? Like let's say you're H vac, plumbing, electrical, and you have a dispatch fee or something. Then you would count your jobs. But. But this would essentially be. Your booking rate would be, I got this many leads, I went out on this many jobs, and I created this many quotes out on the job site. If you're quoting 100% of the time, which nine times out of 10, you're going to be if you're already on site. So let's just Change this to 90%. Just keep it easy. Okay, now we're done. Okay, this is the cool part. This is the really fun part of actually forecasting. Just make sure there's no questions over here. Okay, this is the fun part of actual forecasting. The forecasting here that we're going to do is we're going to say, these are our current numbers. Now I want to go to $3 million. Let's just keep it like it is, $3 million. And I'm going to keep my average transaction value the same. I'm going to keep my average close the same, and I'm going to keep my lead to quote the same. Okay, so here's where it gets fun. This works all the way backwards and it says, okay, if you quote 90% of your leads. If you quote 90% of your leads into a quote, then you need 387 leads per month to hit this number. Right? Now, in your exact example, if you do 90% quote lead to quote, you need 232 leads. So what it's doing is it's working backwards to figure out what your lead deficit is and how many leads you need per month to increase to hit your goal. Okay, so this is telling us that everything remains the same. We can, we need 155 more leads per month in order to hit this number if everything remains the same. Now let's say you increase your close rate to 60%. I know that's at the top range. 40 to 60 is a good number. And let's say you increase your average transaction to 1500. Now you only need 76 more leads per month. This is why using this forecasting for 20, 26, it takes all the guesswork out of it and it gives you goals. And what you can do is say, okay, salesperson, your goal is to close at 55%, 56%. Continue that. Your goal is to get your average ticket to 1500. And then your CSR or customer service manager, it's to get your booking rate to 90% versus whatever you were at 85%. And then you know, if you execute and hit these numbers, you need 85% more leads. So now you can go back to your marketing team and say, okay, we need 85 more leads per month in order to hit our goal. If you're following this, this should give you extreme clarity on what you need to do to grow your business. This is exactly what we unlocked in my home service business, which allowed me to figure out, okay, all I got to do is just get more leads. So how do I do that? Now over here, what I've done is I put the common marketing channels for home service businesses. And if you work with a good marketing company, you'll know what your cost per lead is. What your cost per lead is. I spent $1,000 and I got 10 leads, so my cost per lead is $100 per lead. Now, we don't want to obviously just stop at cost per lead. If you're working with a good marketing company, they should track your return on ad spend all the way through. However, all that to be said that if you know what your cost per lead is and you have good return on ad spend, reporting like it's actually working, you're not just a black hole of leads, then you can say, okay, Well, I need 85 more leads. So if I were to do that through Google search ads, which is currently $180 cost per lead, I would need to spend $15,000 on Google search ads and that would give me 85 additional leads. I'm not saying go and do that. I'm saying that this gives you the numbers to figure out how you're going to actually increase your lead count. And this might be okay, Well, I need 85 more leads. I'm going to spend a little bit more on Yelp, more on Google search, more on Google local service ads, YouTube meta mailers, and at the end of the day, it comes down to these numbers generating a positive return on ad spend. So you know that you're comfortable spending this money on your cost per lead to get a quick pop like this. Now this doesn't mean, okay, this is the end all, be all to grow your business. Because I'm not like, I agree that ads is a scalable thing and it can scale your business up and it can scale your business down and you can waste a bunch of money on ads. So we also talk about ways to generate more leads over here, which is do email marketing to your past customers. Let's say you have a thousand people. Can you turn five of them into leads every single month? Right now you're chipping away at this. Or can you turn 10 of them into leads every single month? Right. Maybe there's like a 30% open rate and then a 10% conversion rate into leads. Okay, that can chip away at this. We talked about digital ads, talked about you need to track your leads monthly. So when we go back into this other report, if you're not tracking your leads, well then you don't know if you're actually hitting your goal or not. Because you know now that you need to get 331 leads. So every single lead needs to be accounted for. So then you know, if you're actually hitting your goal, you could obviously do website optimization with conversion rate optimization. So for example, on your website, if you are, if you have a thousand people to your website and you're converting 50 of them into leads, well, maybe you need to add a pop up to your website. You need to add some giveaways, some promos, some chat widgets to increase the lead volume that you're currently getting. And there's, there's a million other things I could tell you to do, right? You could get more reviews, you could build B2B partnerships where they send leads in. You could do cold outreach, you could do door knocking, you could run ads on thumbtack and I mean, there's a million things you could do. Social media ads, all that to say this makes it very clear with how you're going to grow your business. And this is the 2026 forecasting that I would recommend. If you have not done any 2026 forecasting or you don't even know what to do for a home service business, this is what you should be doing. So I hope this exercise was helpful. If you have a question, you can drop a comment in the chat. The resources are also in the chat to be able to utilize these things as well. If you're watching this after the fact, they're going to be down in the description below. All right, let me stop sharing my screen and I got some Q&As that we're going to go into again. Got questions about growing your business in 2026. You can drop it into the chat and I'll get to it. I'll pop it on the screen. Let me pull up the some of the questions that our team put together. Let's see. All right. We are a 2.3 million dollar remodeling company and we, we're looking to double our revenue next year. What should we do? So we just went through this exercise. This is literally why I put this together. You needed to be tracking your leads year over year, quotes year over year, quotes closed year over year. And then your average ticket and total sales, you can plug them into that spreadsheet. This is exactly what I did at the $3 million home service business. And this is exactly how we scaled the business. We have to know the numbers a lot of times. Let me just make a really big point on this. A lot of times what this illuminates is that you have a couple problems in your business. You have a CSR problem because if you can't track your leads, if you have no idea how many full leads that you got coming in, there's no way to know that your lead to quote ratio is this. A lot of times good home service businesses, they just say, okay, I want more estimates because that's really what it is. And they'll come to us and say, hey, we need this many estimates every single month to hit our goal. And we're like, cool, I love it. However, you have a part between us, the marketing company and the estimate, and that is your csr, your customer service representative and your lead management. And if you don't, if that's a gray spot and you don't know the actual numbers. Well, that's a big issue because if you, you're going to get frustrated with your marketing company because they're not generating the estimates that you want and you're going to miss this blind spot, which is why you need this lead to quote conversion number. The other thing I will say about this is that you need to make sure that you have a solid average ticket. If you have residential, commercial and you have some $50,000 spikes and then thousand dollar spikes, you need to break that out when you're forecasting. When I was at Enterprise, I used to work at Enterprise when I came out of college and it was a really big forecasting for us year over year. It's literally how we got paid was on the bottom line, profit. And what we would do is we would look at, okay, last year, what happened. Like was there a recall on cars? Is that why this happened? Was there something else that happened which is why this dropped off. We need to figure out what the delta is between last year and this year or the numbers and what's going to skew them for actual growth. So those would be the main things when it comes to forecasting. But if you want to double your revenue, it's just those numbers, booking rate, close rate, average ticket, total sales, lead count and then you're good to go. All right, next one. We are a 1.7 million dollar H VAC contractor with four straight months of revenue growth year over year. Great job. I think we're leaving money on the table still. Here are my marketing questions. All right, they put three in here. Okay, how do we stop web form leads from going cold after one call? Great question considering we're now talking about forecasting. So how do you stop your leads from going cold after one call? All right, we were on a plumbing call. A company with a plumbing call yesterday, their eight figure plumbing business. And they quote over the phone. So someone calls in, hey, I need to get a new toilet put in. They quote over the phone, they say, okay, it's probably going to be around this. You want to have someone come out? I asked them, okay, well what happens if someone says, hey, I'll give you a call back, you know, or I got to talk to my spouse and then I'll let you know. How often does it happen? Oh, it's common, of course. Okay. This is exactly what happened at my home service business too. This is the problem that you need to fix and here's how you fix it. When you talk to someone on the phone, if you give them a price quote. Or even if you get an objection like what this person's saying, you get the one call and then it's gone forever. Here's what you do. You say, hey, Phil, I'm going to give you a quote after this call, but what I'd like to do is send you a formal quote to your email inbox. So that way if you call back in, we are all looking at the same thing. You don't have to try to redescribe all the issues that you're having. And also you have it for your records. So that way, you know, without a shadow of a doubt, this is what I'm doing. And you can compare, if you're comparing apples to apples with whatever else you're going to get, what's the best email to send that over to? Now you get that email so you can start nurturing that lead. When you just get a call, it's gone forever. And are you going to really text someone that just called you? It's kind of weird. With the email, you send them the quote and then the next day or the you follow up with a follow up, which is, hey, do you have any questions about that quote that I sent you over? Want to make sure that you got it. And now you can start to work that lead all the way through. So that's the first thing is if you're getting those types of objections, you need to have a way to capture their, their email and then send them something. The next thing is if you are getting leads and you're calling these people and they're not answering. This is why you need to have text and email set up on your web forms. Because this is exactly what happened with us. People would fill out a web form on Sunday night at 10pm we called them Monday morning, they wouldn't answer, the phone number's bad, and then it's gone forever. What we did was we set up an email and a text automatically. So someone fills out a form, they get a text and an email right away that says, hey, thanks so much for filling out our form. If you have any additional information or pictures, please send them over to us. The beauty of this is that now you move the ball forward and when you call them and they don't answer, you have a text or an email thread open that you can communicate on so that it's not a one and done. If you're paying 150, 200, $300 for leads, you don't want just one shot of 30 seconds or a minute to try to get this person to close. You need to have these systems in place to make the get the most juice out of the squeeze. All right, next, should we switch our Google business profile category for the shoulder season? Great question. This is an H Vac contractor, as I mentioned. So there's three different main categories that you can pick for H vac contractors, and you can only have one main category for whatever business that you are. If you're landscaping, right, you can only have one main category. So it could be sod insulation, it could be long. There's a bunch of different ones. So you want to know the exact thing that you want to be ranking for at that time with your main category. So in H Vac, I mentioned, there's three. There's a heating contractor, there's AC contractor, and there's H vac contractor. What we recommend doing is in your seasons, right? Like right now, we're going into winter. So change your main category to heating contractor. Because if someone is most likely, someone's not searching for H vac repair, they're looking for no heat repair. And being able to target that in your main category is what you want, which is why you need to plan on shifting your main categories based off of the seasonality of your business. In landscaping, let's say it's sprinkler repair, for example, if you do that, or there's a bunch of different ones, but you know, whatever you're. You're targeting in that time frame, you want to make sure that you have it correlated with your main category. For some businesses, it doesn't make sense, right? Like gutter cleaning, air duct cleaning, electrician, plumber. There's. You don't really need any variation. But other businesses, it is important to keep to be mindful of the main category because it is so important. All right? And guys, I'm just saying this again, I'm live, so if you have a question, drop it in the chat. And if you want to, you know, talk about how to grow your business in 2026, curious on what you should do. Any marketing questions? Growing home service businesses. I'm here to help you guys out. All right? And then the last question that they have is, how do we set next year's lead target? With confidence. How do we set next year's lead target? With confidence. Perfect. Watch. Watch this. So the. The lead goal calculator that I mentioned before that we walk through. If you want a lead target, you have to know your other numbers to work backwards. You have to know your final revenue, average transaction value, quote rate, and then work backwards into your lead to quote. And then that's going to give you your leads per month. If you don't know your lead target and you don't have confidence in that number, you're just shooting in the, you know, in the dark. You're just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. And hopefully you grow. But there's no game plan to grow, which is why I make this live, is because you need to have a game plan and the resources to plug things in and get that data. Cool. So I hope this was helpful. If you have a comment, drop it below. If you want to hop on a call, you can go to flashconsulting.com, discuss your business. We'll walk you through the seven levers that you need to pull to increase your revenue in 2026 and look forward to seeing you on the next.