Building a great customer experience through marketing with David Baer | Ep 73

Welcome back to the show. I'm your host, Phil Risher and on today's episode we're going to be discussing building a great customer experience through marketing with David Baer. Thanks so much for joining us today, David.

Phil, thanks so much for having me. I'm really excited about our conversation.

Yeah, likewise. So David Baer is the co founder of the Prepared Group, a consultancy that helps businesses move beyond random marketing, tax tasks, tactics, excuse me. And build a clear strategic approach to revenue growth. With a background spanning theater production, wine industry and digital marketing. And David has spent years helping small and mid sized businesses develop sustainable marketing systems specializing in guiding business owners away from random acts of marketing and towards a strategy first approach that actually drives results. I was on David's podcast yesterday talking about home service marketing and different strategies and I can tell you he has a wealth of knowledge and he's going to share a lot of good nuggets on this episode. So David, can you tell us a little bit like how did you even get into marketing and systematizing and doing all this stuff?

Yeah, I mean it's a journey. It's not a different, very different journey from the one that you had because you were in the marketing world and you recognized that there was a problem and you came in and fixed it. Right. And so I had a similar thing. I was a marketer. I started out as a marketer in the theater industry. I actually was a stage manager in New York City in the theater business. Got into running venues and I had to market the venue. Right. So that's where I first learned about marketing. I'm also side note a huge collector of playbills, like the programs it shows and I have 14,000 plus of them. And what I found fascinating like first I started like, you know, going back and looking at the cast lists and everything, but then I started looking at these older ones and looking at all of these old ads and that sent me down this rabbit hole of a fascination of direct response copywriting. So that's really probably the first place that I got interested in marketing because of the structure and style and ways that ads have been written over time has just always fascinated me. Fast forward to moving from the theater industry to the wine industry where I was a marketer running events. That's how you sell wine to the trade is you do a lot of trade shows in the case of wine tastings. Right. And so I ran big tasting events, got into digital marketing as it started to become a more and more important component in the marketing world. Back in the early 2000s and started a Facebook ads agency. This was before they changed their name to meta back in 2010, 2011, that time period. And then I realized what a lot of marketers do is they specialize not in marketing. I'm using air quotes for those.

Yeah.

But they specialize in promotion or advertising, which is really, in my definition of marketing, really one narrow aspect of marketing and doesn't complete the picture. We talked about this when. When we had our other conversation yesterday. And it opened me up to recognize that I understand what needs to happen after somebody clicks on an ad or responds to an ad in the newspaper and picks up a phone, goes into a business to help the business move that person from curious or interested to becoming a customer, and then an ongoing repeat customer, and then a champion of the business. But my Facebook ads agency isn't structured to actually do anything about it. So that's when in 2018, I shifted the entire business to. To focus not on marketing per se, but how do you grow revenue overall? And that's what I do today.

Yeah, I love that. And yes, it is very similar to my journey of. Yeah, it's not just pray to the Google gods and get leads and then, okay, that's marketing. Like, that's one component of running ads. But there's so much other stuff, and in particular, the direct response copywriting. So the people that's in the show are home service businesses, 1 to 10 million, usually those people. So direct response copywriting, most of these people just kind of gloss over that. But in home service, when you think about customers taking action and doing things, it's a really big part of actually, like getting your copywriting your copyright. Correct. Can you talk a little bit about, like, what's good, what's bad, or some of those types of things.

Yeah. So I think when I talk to a lot of local businesses, service businesses in particular, and I hear them say things like, well, we just gotta get our name out there, or we gotta be seen. Or I was talking to somebody last night who said, oh, I have a home services business that's interested in billboards. And I sort of cringe. And I imagine you would cringe too, hearing that question, and here's why. Because there are a lot of ways to get your business and what you do and what you solve for a prospective customer in front of them. Some are really direct, and that's the concept of direct response, which I'll touch on in a moment. But most are the things that we see modeled by the big businesses that we see advertised Everywhere. Like if you think about super bowl ads or billboards or magazine ads, where it's the product or the name, or maybe sometimes not even the name, but the colors tell you, oh, this is a Coca Cola ad, even though it doesn't say Coca Cola anywhere. And because when you start a business, nobody teaches you the stuff about like, how do you grow your business? How do you get your name out there in a way that's going to be efficient and purposeful in getting, you know, the phone ringing. You tend to look at these things that big companies are doing and start modeling that, oh, I own Joe's Plumbing. I gotta get a billboard that says Joe's Plumbing. Best plumber in Portland, Oregon. And you know what you forget to put on there, how to contact you, what region you serve, except Portland, Oregon. Right. Any of the other things that are going to drive business. And then you forget to think, is this the most efficient way to spend my money to get that phone ringing, get the, you know, the appointments or the emergency calls or whatever else we're trying to do. And it's not. So if you look at the other end of the spectrum of marketing, that's the direct response stuff, which is how do you get what you do in front of the ideal customer who wants your service and is going to see that offer right in front of them and go, oh my gosh, this is exactly for me. So, I mean, in the home services world, you talked about your text idea that you shared with me yesterday, I thought was brilliant and I'd never heard that. But there are very similar things that are historically very common. Like when you're out at a property doing work, especially if you, if you specialize in something like higher end homes, right. How can you get in touch with all of the nearest neighbors and direct mail, door hangers, all these other things, yard signs, things that are totally old school and can be highly effective in putting a direct offer in front of somebody that leads to not only we were here, but we were here. And because we are here, we'd like to extend a special offer to you. And here's how to take advantage of it. Call this number, use this coupon, go to this website, et cetera. That's direct response.

Yeah, I think for a lot of business owners, they just get into the grind of doing everything and they don't think about, well, you, you're constantly coming into contact with potential people all around you and how can you layer in and some type of direct response as you're doing jobs or going places or driving trucks or whatever that might be, which I think is very important. One of the things that I definitely wanted to hit on was this systematizing or you said franchise, it ties.

Not my word, not my turn.

Not your word. Yeah.

I want to credit Michael Gerber, the great Michael Gerber, author of the E. Myth books.

Yeah, franchise it ties the customer experience. Because most of these home service businesses, they are looking at it like, you know, a lead comes in. I booked a job, I go out there, I do the work, and usually it's pretty much done there. Maybe they have some email or text that they do at a certain point. But is there like something that you would walk people through to figure out their customer experience or a customer journey process or what does that look like when you're consulting or coaching people?

Well, one of the things that I mentioned as I was going through that explanation of direct response was specializing in something or having a differentiator for your business. And one thing that we see a lot in home services is the differentiator is either the logo or availability or service area. But it's not things like we specialize in. I give the example of higher end homes. Yeah, we've worked with an electrician who specializes in homes that again, I'm in, I'm in Portland, Oregon, which is why I use it as an example earlier. We have a lot of century old homes here and I live in one. My home was built in 1912 and it probably is in need of some upgrades when it comes to the electrical infrastructure of the home. Well, that is a specific need that a lot of people in this region have. But very few electricians are positioning their business around that kind of thing. Right. So. So there's this ideal opportunity to differentiate by positioning in something very, very specific. Now, I've gone off on this tangent and I've forgotten the question that you've asked me, but that's the setup to answer the question. So remind me what the question was.

Yeah, I was asking you about systematizing the customer experience of what that looks like. And I think it kind of starts with what are you, what's your unique proposition to the marketplace? And the worst one is, is price.

Yes, totally.

So you need to figure out what that's going to be. And I'm guessing once you kind of figure that out, then you can know what your customer journey or experience would look like through the life cycle of a client, getting the client, managing relationship, cross selling, that kind of stuff.

So just, just to circle back on this positioning concept and Your comment about price, the. There are two things that are really, really, really hard to position around right price because it's just a race to the bottom. And, and you think about, you know, what businesses out there do position on price. Walmart was, was sort of the, the famous classic one and they even moved away from it. It used to be lowest prices, now they're low prices always. Right. But if you are positioning around price, you have a really tough time because somebody else is going to try to undercut you, then you have to undercut them. And you're right, you're dealing with that. There was a book written back in the early 80s by a guy, two guys, Al Ries and Jack Trout. It was called Positioning Battle for the Mind. And it was all about how do you position your business in a way that gets when somebody thinks of a safe car? Right. Back then it was Volvo. Volvo had the position of safe car. Right. How do you capture that in somebody's mind? Right. So that they know immediately, oh, if I want a safe car, I'm going to buy a Volvo. So if I want the electrician who knows how to upgrade century old homes, I'm going to go to, you know, upgrade my home, you know, electricians.com or whatever. And so this is a key part of the system systemization or franchisetizing which I'm gonna get to in a moment of a business. Because if you know that what you're doing is dialed in perfectly for a specific audience, the systems that you create can be built around making them recognize from the very moment that they either raise their hand saying yes, you're the ideal service provider for me. You can be super specific in the way that you do your follow up after an inquiry. The things that you put in front of them in terms of why you and nobody else or why act now. So stuff that we would do generically in business and this is stuff you teach all the time. Yeah, yeah, right. If you can get even more hyper specific about that stuff, it makes that conversion from a prospect to a customer that much easier because you're not competing with anybody else in your market in their eyes.

Yeah, I completely agree with my business. It's the same thing. We're 1 to 10 million home service businesses. If you don't fall in that, then it's probably not the right fit. If you do, we're probably your guys because we're the number one person. And I think for a lot of businesses it's just like I'm an electrician. Well, just because we're just using that. Cause you're talking about. But like an electrician, do you do generators? Are you going to EV chargers? Or, you know, like, do you just only do ceiling fans and light fixtures? Or what is, what is your expertise then to even take it further? Do you do residential, commercial? What types of homes? How, how old are the homes? There's so many different layers to it that you want to specialize into.

Totally, totally. Yeah. And so, you know, if we think about the. The idea of systemization, I mentioned Michael Gerber in this concept that you shared earlier of franchise itizing. This is a word that he introduced, book the E Myth, which is now reprinted under the E. Myth Revisited if folks want to go out and find it. And there's actually a E Myth for contractors.

Yeah, there is the. Yeah, there is a contractors.

But the concept is basically how do you build the systems in the operations of your business as a franchise would, so that you, the owner, the leadership of the business, can step out of it. And then the systems that you have built run the business. And those systems are then run by people who you hire to run those systems. So the concept is, if you look at McDonald's, for example, right, they're hiring high school kids or, you know, you open up a binder, you have very clear instructions on what you do. And so building systems around the structure of the business is a key to the success of being able to reproduce the same thing over and over again, even when you're doing slightly different things. For each client, there is a framework, there's a general overall order of operations that you follow.

That's right, Yeah. A basic game plan. So one of the things that you had mentioned before when we were talking was about referral upsells and cross sells and that kind of stuff inside of a system, which I think for a lot of people listening, you know, okay, I get the direct response, you know, I'll be in front of my customers, I'll get leads that come in, and then maybe they have a good customer experience. But that last piece of it, the systemization of referrals and cross sells, what does that look like? What are some ideas there?

Well, I want to work my way up to that and I'll do it quickly because I want to be sensitive to whatever time we have. We systematize the front end stuff really very clearly. Right. How do you attract somebody? How do you move them from attract to capturing their information so you can follow up, nurture that relationship until they buy? Right. But then there's a Sort of second half of the relationship, once they become the customer, once they become a first time customer, that gives you the opportunity to build that relationship. Either for being a repeat customer, an ongoing customer. If you, you know, have a maintenance plan that you can offer, how do you then add value to the relationship throughout the months or years that you're continuing to serve that client? So the first thing I look at is actually what happens immediately after they say, yes, I'm going to buy. And that's this concept. We call it transitioning with ease. But basically think of it as onboarding a new client. How can you do two things at the moment that they say yes? Number one, overcome buyer's remorse. How do you intentionally get them to go patting themselves on the back? I see you writing this down and so you're writing this down. Everybody listening should be writing this down. How do you get themselves patting themselves on the back going, I thought it was just by you know, hiring electrician. I can't believe that I'm actually getting what, what they've just delivered. This is awesome. Good, good. Me, right? You know, what an awesome first step in this new relationship that I have.

So what, what can people do to wow them like that? You think so?

You know, some, some simple things that I think a lot of home services businesses already do but take for granted or don't highlight. One thing that I, I think you probably have riffs on what I'm about to say. Putting little booties over your shoes when you walk into a home. Right? Some just do it. Some don't do it at all, by the way. Right? Some just do it. And some make a show of it. Some lay out, you know, a floor covering and, and they'll be very intentional, not just about doing it, but interacting with the, the customer, explaining why they're doing it. We, we, we respect your home. We want to leave it better than we found it. That, just that kind of thing. Hearing that, that's, that blows some people away. Phil, you probably know this even better than I do, so I want to hear your riff on this for a.

Moment now that you shared this. Okay. So when I was in home service, we did two things. First, our guys all wore booties, but they had the logo, our, our, our company's logo on the booties. It wasn't just the standard blue ones that you would see typically. It actually had our logos on the booty, so it's stuck out. The other thing the owner did was he literally hired a graphic designer to create a custom coloring book for the kids while. While we're at the house doing this work, it's kind of like an hour or two. He left behind the coloring book and crayons for every single kid. And it had the logo on there. It had the guys doing the duct cleaning. And it was like this whole on coloring book that was literally printed out and given to the kids.

Oh, that's brilliant. And if people listening, do not steal that idea, man. You should not be listening to this show because it's not giving you the value that you need. That is brilliant. And that is exactly the kind of thing that I'm talking about. It starts things off in such a way that it blows people away and they go, wow, this is more than I expected. In a good way.

Yeah. I'll give you another one that if you zoom out a little bit now, you got my juices flowing because we're talking about this. But when you zoom out and you think about. I give out estimates. When someone signs their estimate in your company. My company, too, what happens when someone signs that estimate? Usually it goes into process. Like, cool. Sounds good. What if you had an automation that sent out a text message and it was a video of the owner saying, hey, thanks so much for signing up with us. Can't wait to get to work on your project. If you ever need anything, I'm right here ready to help.

So I just had this very conversation with a siding company the other day where she told me, oh, sometimes if I have enough time, after I go in and I do the estimate from my car, I'll record a quick video and I'll text to them, yeah, there you go. And. And I said, okay, well, how can you, A, do that all the time, not just if you have time, and B, how can you support, surprise, and delight them in a way that that's not, you know, just a text to them, but that it's presented in a package. And there's tools out there. Like, you know, we. We use a tool in our business called Dub. But there's another one I called Loom.

Is what we use.

Loom is another one. Borjono or something like that is another one. But that. That you can actually house these videos on a branded page. You can have other calls to action. You could have that video be the first of a video series that does onboarding instructions of, you know, when we arrive at your home, here are the things that you're going to want to have prepared kind of stuff. And you have a little onboarding campaign. So there's all Kinds of ways to play with this. Now, we could. We could go down a rabbit hole and keep going, but this is the first step in setting up their expectations for this is more than I thought that I was getting into. And I am so happy that I said yes to these guys. But that's not where you stop with these things. You then look at how can I continue to surprise, delight, and wow these folks? Because what that additional effort, things like that coloring book are a good example. But what happens after the service is provided that you do? As a follow up, I'll give you a quick story of a kid kitchen remodeler who, when they do new countertops, what they do is they order extra material intentionally so that at the inspection and the handoff to the customer and kind of walking through the place, they'll do something along the lines of, you know, we had a little bit extra material. And so I had one of my guys fabricate. And I see you nodding. So you may know this carousel, either a cutting board or a little cheese board or something to match your countertop. It's our gift to you. Enjoy your new kitchen.

That's right. Yeah.

Right. These types of little moments or photographs. I was talking to a travel agent the other day, and he said, oh, I always send like a little gift afterwards. And I said, what if you had the ability to like, you're planning out the details of their trip, identify some moment in time, some special thing that you arranged for your client, and then send them memorabilia from that moment.

Yeah.

A month later. Hey, it's a month anniversary of you coming back from. From the. The trip kind of thing. Because what that stuff sets them up for is they start telling other people stories about this really cool thing that the company did. Right. So that leads to setting up referrals. Now, there's more to system referrals than that, but that's a great way to kick them off. But it also sets you up for being able to come back and present to them additional buying opportunities.

Yeah, yeah, I completely agree. So I was unsure what what it means. Now I'm very clear on how you do that for a home service business. And I guess once you go so obviously they're like, wow, this company's great. Then you. Is the next step. You go out and you actually do the work, and then you wow them after the work or.

And then, I mean, it really depends on the cadence of the business and, and how far out you're booking and all those sorts of things. And so if you, if you are Booked, you know, several weeks out. And they make the commitment doing some of this stuff in the interim.

Yes.

Getting them ready for. And anticipating in a good way, you know, the, the, the work being done. So, so you really want to. These have to be bespoke. Right. And they have to be natural. They have to feel natural.

Yeah.

Do you, do you know the. I'm going to give you one more and then we can move on. But do you know the, the one that window washers in warm climates do down, down in like, I don't think it could be in your region too, but there's a lot of snowbirds who go down to Florida who own second homes down there. And I know of at least two window washing companies that do some variation of the following. Right. So these are affluent people. They have the second home. Usually they're older and, and I'm profiling here tremendously. But you know, the, the husband is out golfing.

Mm.

And the wife is at home probably preparing for a dinner party. And that's why the date is scheduled for the windows to be washed on that particular day because the house has to look pristine for, you know, the hoity toity guests who are going to be showing up. And invariably the wife has one of these adorable little yip yip dogs that gets really excited whenever a vehicle comes up the driveway. Right. So there's, there's at least two companies that I know of that specialize in a relationship with the dog. And so they, as part of their routine when they book this, they'll check, you know, do they have a dog or do they have some other. And they have a few variations on this, but they have dog biscuits in the van and the guys who show up in their, you know, clean white outfits when they come to the door and the dog is barking, excited, they are there with the dog biscuits. And that's the very first thing they do in their routine.

Yeah, I love it. I, I've heard a, a strategy of the people would put like peanut butter in their pocket so the dog follows them around. Cause people would be like, oh, if the dog likes them, then I might must like them too.

Love that.

Another little sales tactic like, oh, they're pretty trustworthy. My dog really loves this person. But yeah, no, I think that's a great idea for sure. And so it kind of leads right into the referrals, the upsells, the cross sells. So how does that kind of. Obviously you build trust with them, so then it's easier, natural to sell from there.

Yeah. I mean, Part of it is that again, all of this needs to be natural. If it comes off as either trying to sell or it doesn't flow naturally, that's problematic. And so the first thing is that you want to figure out opportunities to be able to introduce something additional. So during, I mean, we talked about maintenance plants. That's a pretty obvious one. But maybe during your process there is an inspection of other things that's included in your process. I'm sure anybody who's ever had their oil changed by, you know, a professional service, they go through a checklist. And I don't know any home services company that doesn't have some form of a checklist. But not all use it as, as directly or advantageously as as they could in terms of being able to expand the, the revenue opportunity and, and develop a deeper relationship with the client by serving them more fully.

Yeah, yes. I talk about this all the time and people don't do this, which I was a technician. I would go into people's homes and help clean air ducts and dryer vents and there's these blinders, right? You're just there to do the job that you have. And the problem is that the checklist allows you to elevate the conversation and to gather information from the customer and it shows that you actually care. If you say, hey, before we get started on this, can you tell me a little about your home? What's the airflow like? What's going on in this room? How's the water circulation? What's it like in a day to day? Is it dry? Is it humid? Even if you don't use any of this for any of your stuff, it just shows them that you actually care and you're going to maybe solve one of these problems. The blessing is that when you learn all this stuff now, you can cross sell more stuff down the line. Like, hey, I wasn't able to solve this problem, but I think that someone else could let me have them come out and take a look.

So this happened to us in our home not too long ago. We had a pest control company that has, you know, traps outside the house, weather changes, the rats are now, you know, going everywhere and, and so there's more activity in our property. Well, we had told him about some problem because he asked, right, anything else I should know? Yeah, what else is going on? Anything, any noises or anything? And he just like gave us a couple of little things that would spark a reminder in our head about something that we might tell him. And, and we said, well now, now Come to think of it, we've had this noise in our walls years ago, and it just came back and we're trying to figure out what it is, and here's what we think, blah, blah, blah. He said, well, let me go up on the roof and just check something out. Well, we had just had our house painted, and because it had just been painted, he identified two places that some rodent, squirrel or rats or something were getting into our home through the, like, this corner of the dormer that was not fully protected. He said, well, I can see it's being chewed right here. And, you know, here's a couple of things we can do about that. And then he had a process by which he gave us an estimate on it and then followed up. And then the information went back to the office and they followed up, packaging everything nicely with the offer and the scheduling and everything else that could have happened. But it all started because he asked some very direct questions that sparked a little memory in us to be able to give him that opening.

Yeah, that's right. I literally just made a video about this on how to get more estimates. And like, it all starts with coaching the technicians to ask the right questions, to build checklists for them, to build opportunities. And if you couple that with a great customer experience, people are going to say, oh, I love this company already, and they're trying to solve my problem, so why would I not use them again for this exact thing?

Absolutely.

Yeah. It's great.

And I mean, one additional thing, and this is, you know, particularly in home services, a tricky thing sometimes in terms of being able to hold talent and schedule your team so that they are developing the relationship directly with the customer. Right. There's pros and cons to that, but if you have. We've had the same folks out from a plumbing company three times in a row. We know the person who comes now, and so we have developed a relationship with that. That person. And they know the things that. I mean, they've been around our house, they see the things that we like. They've made personal connections about stuff that we've actually, from a different company, had somebody, an estimator who saw that we liked a certain type of music and said, hey, I'm in a band. We play that kind of music. Where, you know, every last Thursday, you know, down at this place, come and check us out. And we did. Right?

Yeah, it's so awesome. And we talked about this on your podcast. But so many times, the home service business loses the soul and the heart and the local Vibe. And when it gets bought by private equity or the owner doesn't build this culture, even private equity don't build this culture into their business. You miss that interaction with the actual customer, which is exactly what you're talking about. Which you need to hire great technicians, but you need to encourage them to build these relationships with your customers, because it's going to lead to more revenue, but it's also going to give great customer service and experience.

The phrase build the culture is a tricky one because you cannot create a culture that doesn't already exist, but you can identify a culture that is naturally not necessarily highlighted or optimized. And I think if you haven't read this book, Phil, and I hope your listeners will consider reading it as well, but you definitely should. It's a book that was written by a guy in the restaurant industry. He booked, bought from Danny Meyer, a restaurant called eleven Madison Park. His name is Will Guidera. And you know, the book Always Set.

The Table or something like that.

No, Setting the Table is Danny Meyer's book, but the Will Guidera's book is called Unreasonable Hospitality.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I've heard of this book. I haven't read it.

It is a really good read. And he has gotten out of the restaurant business and into the business of teaching the concept of hospitality to all kinds of businesses and in home services. This is exactly what we've just been talking about.

Yeah, yeah, no, I. I completely agree. When it comes to hospitality, it's like you have to build a relationship and wow the customer and let them know that you value them as a customer. Even in our business, like, we're at 12 people now, and it's like, I'm. You. You said it like you can't. I can't build the culture. The team is building the culture. I can try to guide it and make recommendations and stuff and, like, control a little bit, but the culture is there. It is what it is, and we can only work on it so it builds itself, and that's how it works well.

And back to Danny Meyer's book, Setting the Table. He talked about the fact that he cannot teach somebody how to be nice and care about the customer at the restaurant, but he can teach people how to do the function of working in a restaurant. And so he prioritized hiring great people, even if they weren't skilled at restaurant work.

Yeah, yeah, same with me. The consultants that we have, most of them haven't even been in digital marketing before, but they are excellent business people and great communicators. And will do anything for the customers. We can teach digital marketing all day, but you can't teach someone how to care about someone else and run a business and that kind of stuff. So yeah, I completely agree. What else? From like a systems perspective, let's say someone's listening the 1 to 10 million, they're like, okay, like I want to start systematizing this stuff, but like I don't know what to do or how to do it. Is that something they should try to take on themselves? Or is there something like, hey, just start with this thing or how do you usually coach people through this?

Yeah, I would say that. I mean there are all of these steps and I outlined them before. You attract the traffic or the interest, you capture the lead. So if you're not doing that right, you get somebody who's interested. At the very least figure out how to capture their information. The next thing, and this is where the majority of businesses fail, is the follow up. Once you've captured that information. Hey, I'm interested in an estimate. Great. We'll get that in our files. I'll tell you a quick story. Went to a home show. My neighbor and I have a shared fence and we needed to have the entire thing replaced. I went to three fencing companies and I gave them all my information. I told them, you know, it's, it's these three properties between two neighbors and me. How many of them called me, do you think?

Well, there's actually a stat for home service. It was like 41% of web forms never get responded to. So maybe half or maybe one or two.

Okay, out of three. Yeah, zero. Okay, zero followed up.

There you go.

I mean that was money in their pockets if they just followed up and they didn't. And so follow up is key.

Yeah, right.

So just starting there I think is great. Now we have this charted out completely on, on our, on our website, the prepare group.com in our consulting section. And we, and we talk about, you know, where all these areas that you can just fine tune and just looking at these and going, do I have anything going on here? If not, it's pretty obvious what you need to build to begin with.

Yeah, yeah, I agree. I think for most home service businesses they, you know, they're in the day to day running around doing stuff and they hope that their technicians are doing a great job. But there's also these small things that, that David and I spoke about that like add a video into this process here or think about when your customer comes in. How could you elevate that experience and small tweaks inside of your process that you could do tomorrow that would start the process. But I think when you think about systematizing, as you scale, it starts to unwind if it's not inside of a system or even automated to some capacity because you can't, it's really hard to keep scaling the same thing over and over again.

Yeah. And we see this at different revenue levels like there. And this is also plenty of data on this about when you have a business that is run by somebody who's really working in the business and the types of things that you're figuring out are how do I make myself available, how do I teach my assistant how to do stuff. But then when you get maybe in home services in the 3 to 5 million dollars range, then you need to start fine tuning things like your marketing and your sales process and then, and then additional operational things as you grow beyond that. And these are things that if you have not taken the time or invested the time in figuring out how to really structure this well, that's, that's where you, you look back at where you were and you look forward to where you need to go. And because all you know is where you were, you don't have anything to inform how to build or where to build the proper systems.

Yeah, I agree definitely the that trajectory. There's a book called Buyback youk Time from Dan Martell and he has this five rung replacement ladder for scaling a business. And the first one is admin. For home service you need a CSR customer service representative answering your phones, managing your emails, your lead flow. Second one is delivery. You need technicians out in the field. The third one is marketing. Most people are the marketing lead person in their business. Fourth one is sales and then the fifth one is management. And those are the different rungs to get to like 5, 10 million. So I completely agree with you and I think building out automation Systems is that 1 to 10 million jump. I think E Myth talks about this, but like, or someone to get to 1 million you kind of got to like hustle it out. To get to 1 to 10 million you got to build the systems and you got to become a leader and not be as much of a hustler.

Yeah, there's a, there's a lot of variations on this theme and I think that if you are in a place in your business where you know that you have some hole and you're not sure what to do.

Yeah.

There are folks out there like you, Phil, and some of the books that we've been talking about that are really good starting place for home services businesses to look and get insights into. Okay. I know that there's stuff that I'm not doing that I need to understand exists, and that's a great. That's a great sort of first step.

Yeah. Cool. Well, this has been great. David, I really appreciate the nuggets that you shared. I haven't talked about the coloring book and booties probably for five years, so that was the first on this podcast I think I've ever talked about them. So this is some good nuggets and you shared some good stuff. Got the juices flowing. So where should people go to learn about you and the prepared group? What's the next steps for them?

Well, easy enough. It's as I said earlier, the preparedgroup.com you can see the stuff that we do. We are in the consulting business working on how do we build out a lot of the stuff that we've been talking about and systematize that for our clients.

Yeah. Awesome. Well, you heard it there, folks. David, appreciate you and look forward to continue our conversation and keep up the great work, man.

Brilliant. Thanks, Phil.

Thanks.