Creating a Referral Program For Your Home Service Business With Kendall Hines

Welcome back to the show. I'm your host, Phil Risher. And on today's episode, we're going to be discussing how to build a referral program for your service business with Kendall Heinz. Kendall, thanks so much for joining us today.

Yeah, no problem. Thanks for having me.

Absolutely. So Kendall and I, we connected on LinkedIn, and I referred some people to him, and the companies that we work with, they came back and were like, yeah, this is going to solve our problem. So then I'm like, hey, man, you got to come on our show. He's the owner of Clicky, and he also started in the lawn care space. So he has both sides of the equation, which I always appreciate that because I'm the same way. So, Kendall, can you tell us a little about how you got into home service space and came up with this idea?

Yeah, well, probably. I started, like many of people listening to this podcast. You know, I grew up with my dad. He started a lawn care company, and Since I was 8 years old, I was out there with him, like, on the lawns, like, helping him treat lawns and stuff. And one of the things that he was missing in his business, he was always the technical guy, like, doing lawns perfect and, like, really making making customers happy. But the thing that was kind of missing was the sales and marketing. So I grew up my whole life, you know, like, seeing bigger companies than we were, and I was like, well, why are they bigger than us when we have a better product? And it was because they didn't know about us. So I think it was at, like, 21, I, like, dropped out of school, ended up coming home, and just like, you know what? My parents were really good to me, and I don't have much going for me, so I'm just going to commit my life to helping them and helping their business grow. And I just committed to learning everything about selling lawn care. So I, you know, found the industry leaders, reached out to them. They taught me how to sell lawn care. This all kind of leads into the referral story, by the way, but so I learned. I. So we went from 90 accounts to 300, 300 to 600, 600 to, I think 1200, 1200 to 1500. That business today is doing 1.6 million in revenue. During that time, we, I, me and a partner, I actually bought it from my parents, so retired my parents. We ran it for two years, and then during that time, we got so good at generating leads that we're like, whoa. Like, we have more demand than we can service. We would wake up in the morning, have like 30 Facebook leads come in. Just one example, plus the website leads, plus everything else. If you're in a seasonal business, you know, like there's these power windows that just get crazy and nuts. So we built a tool called Lawnbot, and that is basically e commerce, online shopping for lawn care, pest control, H Vac companies. You might have seen it. It's now called Service Bot. So we grew that business, that software company, really quickly. We had probably 150, 200 clients when we ended up getting acquired by a CRM called Real Green Systems. And six months later, a bigger company came in. This is. I've learned a lot. Like five years, six months later, a bigger company come, comes in and buys the whole damn thing called Workwave. And I'm sure many, yeah. Listening either know or have seen them. So indirectly, Work Wave ended up buying our company. It's now called Service Bot. They're rolling it out to all their pest control, H vac, home cleaning clients. And so that was the second company, and it introduced me to software. I was like, wow. Like, I really enjoy software and the sales and marketing aspect of growing a business. And so I worked at Workway for two years, learned how corporate kind of works, and, you know, enjoyed my time there. And then with some of the proceeds from that exit, we started a brand called Masha Lash. So it's like, how does lawn care and beauty fit together? And I promise you it does. It's like the same customer, the same woman getting her lashes done is the same woman that's ordering lawn care for her home and calling to get her H Vac tuned up. It's the same woman. They have disposable income. I know because the customers at my lawn care business at Lawn Doctor also saw my wife at the Lash and Brown.

That's your wife's business. You. You mentioned.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was just. It was. It was really interesting to me. So that, that leads me to today, where it's like, okay, left Work Wave. About two years later, after the exit, we did the Marshall Ash thing. We were spending about 5,000amonth on Facebook or Google Ads. And I'm sure this is the case for a lot of people listening is if you want to grow a business today, you need to go spend money on marketing. Word of mouth is only going to get you so far. At some point, you need to scale. You need to have predictable lead sources. So we were paying Google 5,000amonth, and it was working. But also, like, who loves paying Google? Almost nobody. Like, Nobody's raising their hand saying, yeah, I want to pay more money to Google. And the thing about it is, is if you've been in the game a while, you understand that the cost has just been going up and up because they basically pit you and your competition against one another. You're bidding for the same keywords, the same spot. The only person winning at the end of the day is Google.

Correct.

So I'm like, I would much rather just pay this cash, this, like, money we're giving to Google and meta to my customers instead. And that was the birth of the idea for Clicky. And it literally started like, pay per click. And I gave all of our customers links and said, hey, we'll pay you a dollar for every click we're paying Google. We might as well pay you. And it was actually geofence to our area. So you're not paying, you know, outside of that geofence, and you're only paying for humans, like verified human one time.

Wow.

And people posted their links and they cashed out. So I. Here I am, like sending hundreds of venmos to people and I'm like, holy crap. This could be like a really. I think this could work. And with doing that, I realized just from talking to people, they're like, oh, that's cool. Like, can I use it? My business, they wanted a full integrated system. So, like, okay, you have the link, but what happens when they click on the link? What do they see?

Right?

And then, you know, you start looking at. Or I, I started recognizing, like, Tesla has these programs, Chase Capital One. They're very common, like other industries where brands give their customers these referral links and they can earn different things for sharing their referral link with friends and family. But we also realized, like, there needs to be like a system here to where, yes, you can generate referrals by sharing your link, but you can also generate them by submitting them via the. It's called that. We call it the Promoter app. Like, what your customers actually use and log into and get their link and cash out. It's like the home for referrals for your business and the people that are involved in these campaigns. So that led us to building Clicky and like, wow, we need to own everything. So we own. Generating the links, hooking up to the business, designing the landing pages, like, helping people set the budget, like, what templates and words to use, like when to, like, launch this in your business. You know, today we've. We've got over 120 companies now, and we've Learned a lot. And we're really excited about the roadmap because we think there's a bigger opportunity here, and that's to help, you know, if you're listening to this business or if. If you're listening to this podcast, then you probably have people in your market that do some, like, don't compete with you. But you guys probably trade business today. And, like, how can we incentivize that even more and build kind of this ecosystem? Because everybody has to go pay Google and Facebook today. We, We. We would think it would be a pretty co. That wasn't the case. And, like, when you think about a P. L, it's like, you're. You're big. The biggest cost for most of us is, like, labor. And then, like, the second biggest cost is, like, S M sales and marketing. So if we can direct that sales and marketing cost to our employees and our customers and maybe even other businesses that are nearby you, that could be a really interesting world.

And so I want to dive in. Yeah, I want to dive in here on these things. So when we talk about building a referral program, you mentioned pay per click of like, literally, hey, click on this link and then I'll pay you a referral. What have you seen as best practices for referrals? Because a lot of people would say, I don't want to pay until I actually close the job because I don't want to get bad leads. Or is it pay per lead? Yeah, click. What does that look like?

So I think what I've learned is clients get really creative with their referral schemes, and we basically have, I guess, summarized it as reward triggers. So now on Clicky, there's multiple reward triggers. We started out with pay per click. We now have pay per lead, which is like, somebody fills out a form.