Do This Now to Explode Your Home Service Business in 2026

Most home service businesses aren't ready for what's coming in 2026. Over the past several years, I've helped home service companies double and triple their revenue by implementing marketing systems in their business. In this video, I'm giving you five things you have to do today to prepare your business for 2026. If you don't put these in place, you're going to be invisible on AI search, stuck in your shoulder season, spending money on ads that you have no idea if they work. Okay, let's start with the foundation of it all, which is content. And if you want to show up in AI search and dominate your market in 2026, you need a content system. So you need to create this content system in your business to rank on AI search. Why is this important? At the end of 2026, there is going to be AI avatars that are on your website communicating with your customer in your sales process. Also AI avatars that are creating content for your business. Right now, the number one thing that you can be doing is creating content that feeds these large language models and these AI avatars and trains them on your business. It's not just about creating a social media post so that you get likes and comments and customers. It's about training these large language models and AI search that your business is the go to company and giving it the information to train it. So that way it recommends you inside a search. So it's very, very important. And here's a system that you should build out is what we call a flywheel of content. So basically, inside of your business you already have subject matter experts saying smart things. You have customer service representatives, you have salespeople, you have rehashing people and a bunch of other people that know a lot of stuff. They are having conversations every single day with your customers and prospects and giving them education and information. You need to extract that information out of your business and plug it into your content. Here's how you do it. All of your calls should be recorded using tracking numbers. Those tracking numbers have transcripts. Any transcript that's over five minutes has gold in it. You need to take that transcript and turn it into a blog post or take that transcript and turn it into hooks to create content off of the real questions that your customers are asking and then educating people through your content. So the flywheel content is take what your experts are already saying and turn it into content. What we do is one hour per month, we take all of your content, we get on a call and we help educate you on how to Create content for your business. What this allows you to do is to create very, very good organic content that trains large language models and AI search. However, it also gives you ammo when you want to run ads, because right now you might be slow and you're like, oh my gosh, I want to run Facebook ads or Instagram ads or some other creative ad. But you're just trial and error and throwing things out there and spending money on creative that you don't know if people actually like it. When you create organic content, you just take your best organic content and then you run ads on it because you already know that people are engaged with it and it turns into leads. This is called amplifying your organic stuff. This is the content system that you need in your business. Not just going to ChatGPT and getting fluff and using that for content. It's about training these AI large language models on your business. This I guarantee you at the end of 2026, if you don't do this, you're going to wish that you had started creating content to build this out in your business. What topics should you be talking about? I'll actually link this down below. We had a webinar where I created this graphic and gave it away and I'll give it away to you as well. It's the 5252 content topics to boost your rankings in AI search. It literally goes through 52 things. One a week. You just go up here, file, make a copy and it's yours for free. The topics inside of there are these five Cost and price how much does it cost to get my gutters clean? How much does it cost to get my H Vac repaired? How much does it cost? Blah blah blah. Problems. What problems do I typically have with this? Should I do this or this? That's the comparisons 1. Should I replace my system or just repair it? How do I know what to do? Reviews here's the top five H Vac contractors in the local area. Here's the top five brands for Da da da da da and then Best in class. This is the top of the line new ductless system that you should be getting inside of your home. Basically, you want to create content that you're the subject matter expert in educating people on all these things. This is from the book they ask you answer by Marcus Sheridan, who's been on our podcast several times. But these are the topics that are unique to you, that you have a unique education on. And if a family member or someone asks you, you're going to know exactly what to say and educate them on this. So once you have content driving visibility, the next step is to create tools that generate leads for you automatically. This is very, very, very important because a lot of people just create content and they get likes and views and blah, blah, blah. Who cares, really? Like, it's nice to make content, but at the end of the day, all you want is leads coming into your business. And you got to make it very, very easy for people to turn into leads with tools. So why is this important? We had a company that was creating content. They're creating blog posts, they're creating social media posts. They had a lot of traffic to their website. However, they didn't get any leads. And. And within 30 days, we added an estimate calculator to their website. And they went from 14 leads last year at this time to 147 leads this year at this time, same amount of traffic. It was all because we added an estimate calculator. So what is an estimate calculator? And if you have a flat pricing or something like that, this works good. But I'm going to go through some other things as well that you can add for tools. So an estimate calculator, I'll just pull it up right here. Basically, you give people some questions. You know, service needed, type of building, number of H vac systems. Usually we see like, three questions is good. So you give them three questions, they fill that out, and then once they get those questions, then you give them some type of a price range. It could be it's going to be 500 to $800. Could you send us a picture and we can get you a closer ballpark price. That's the first message after they fill it out. But when people come to your website, they want to know two things. How much is it going to cost and when can you do it? If you can answer this question with an estimate calculator, pricing guide, both, then you're moving the ball forward for people and you're educating them to turn them into an actual lead. Next, let's say that it's like, no, we can't really give pricing via estimate calculator. Well, then you do a design guide or a quiz. Design guide is like, okay, well, do you like this style or do you like this style? Answer a couple questions and we'll be able to point you in the right direction. The quiz, we actually have a quiz where it'll tell you, you know, you answer three to four questions and it'll tell you exactly what we would recommend to do for the next marketing stuff, and I'll put that link down below. But basically, you want to ask very similar questions to what you had before. Do you have 500 past customers or prospects? Yes. No. Not really. Not sure. Okay, let's see. Then you want to ask them another question. Okay, well, how strong is your referral B2B network? Very strong, somewhat strong. Not strong. And based off of what they say, then you're building a prescription for them to send to them and say, hey, you should do this, you should do that. Okay, well, how do you build these things? There's tools like type, form, price guide, price guide, AI, A good digital marketing company can build this stuff for you. But basically, you want to create these tools that people can interact with and answer their questions and move the ball forward. And they feel like, wow, that was very helpful for me. And now you capture their information and move the ball forward. Last one is online scheduling. I mentioned people want to know, how much is it going to cost? When can you do it? So if you have a CRM jobber housecall pro service titan, you should set up online scheduling with them. So that way people can, hey, I saw your content. I want to set up a meeting. Let me move the ball forward and let me schedule an appointment with you. These are the tools that you need to have on your website. And I'll give you one other simple one that every single person should have is a chat widget to text. This is like, you know, two years ago, you should have had this. So if you don't have it going into 2026, like, you got to do it. But it's a chat widget that turns it into a text message. Someone fills out a chat on your website, capture their phone number. Now you text them back. You got to have that set up. So, okay, but leads don't just come in, right? So, like, in your shoulder season, it's not like people are searching online. That's why it is the shoulder season, because there's this lull of searches and inquiries happening about certain things. But which is why January to March, specifically, we're talking about 2026, is usually a slog for a lot of people. So that brings me to. You have to have a strategy for number three. You gotta attack the shoulder season with a plan. And it's like, okay, failure, dude on YouTube. How do you, you know, what do I. What do I do? Well, I actually used to be director of business development at a $3 million home service business, and I had 13 routes and 28 technicians. And we did air duct cleaning. So. So we were in the H Vac space. So I know for a fact that January to march, I had 28 guys who had to feed their families, who needed hours, who needed jobs on the books. So that way they felt confident in working here and they could continue to provide for their family. And it was my job as director of business development to make that happen. So I know full well how to attack shoulder season and why it's important. Trust and believe that. So here's the things that I would recommend that we implemented in our business to make sure that this, that we got through shoulder season just fine. First is to build B2B partnerships. What does this mean? First, you should start building them now because you want the partnerships to get warm leads coming into your business. So in H Vac, you know, gutter cleaning, everyone faces different challenges when it comes to shoulder season. But I'll give you a good example. Let's say you do gutter cleaning, but you don't do Christmas lights. We'll find a company that does Christmas lights. And when they take off the Christmas lights in December and they're up on the roof or looking at gutters and they can instantly refer gutter cleaning to you. So it's like, hey, you're going to take the Christmas lights off and you don't have anything to do for them in January, February, March. But I do. You could recommend gutter cleaning to those people and I'll pay you for those customers so you can get paid more money off of every single customer that you already have. And we'll work together. Great. And when I do their fall gutter cleanings, I'll refer you because I don't do Christmas lights. And they should get Christmas lights going into the winter seasons. That is essentially what a B2B partnership is. Specifically, when you look at this shoulder season timeframe of you gotta build these B2B partnerships. So that way going into shoulder season, you have a game plan. What we did was we did duct cleaning. So we partnered with H Vac contractors and mold remediation companies that referred us business. So these H Vac contractors would get no heat calls, then they would go out and then they would turn those people into duct cleaning opportunities for us. We'd also have commercial jobs that duct cleaning, residential and commercial, where we would say, hey, let's schedule them January to March so that way we don't have to do it throughout the year. And we have these annual cleanings that we need to do at this time. This leads me to another one on here. Actually, I didn't put it on here. I mean, this is just like good business. These are things that you could do in 2025. But if you have these, these big projects that you do every single year, schedule them January to March, your shoulder season. It will cover your shoulder season and then you free up the rest of your schedule for the rest of the time. Next for attack shoulder season is have a core offer for your database. Okay. The reason that is shoulder season is because people are not searching, right? There's no searching happening. So people don't have intent. There's no interest in your service. So what you need to do is have a core offer for your database. Let's say you do H Vac. Every single person that didn't do the fall inspection with you, you know this because they didn't sign up for fall inspection and they're in your database. Take those people and say, hey, we notice you didn't do your fall inspection. We have a big winter freeze coming up and your H Vac unit is going to be running a lot. You should schedule a winter tune up. So that way we make sure that your stuff's good to go through the winter. We'll give you a discount of instead of 79 bucks, we'll send you, we'll give you 59 bucks. We're going to be in your neighborhood next week. Basically, you need to have a core offer to reach out to people in your database and offer them something. If you do sprinkler service like we have a client, they do sprinkler service and gutter cleaning and Christmas lights. But the biggest issue is that January to March, they have no business. So the core offer that we're going with is gutter cleaning. They're in Texas, so there's no snow or anything. But it's like we're going to go with gutter cleaning. So Christmas lights come off, gutter cleaning goes in, and then we're hitting the database with gutter cleaning offers and offers. And then now we're going to be proactive with gutter cleaning because you got to do that every single year. So we're going to schedule every single person January to March and then maybe right before fall with the Christmas lights. So that way they're good to go. Basically, you need a core offer that's going to get you through shoulder season. Third, do a giveaway. Okay? I'm very, very excited about this. I have a lot of content coming out about giveaways. We might do giveaway for flash. Just a little nugget there. But doing giveaways to get people excited. What does this mean? There's no interest going on. So do a giveaway. A giveaway is this, hey, we're going to give away a new duckless system for anyone in their home that has a cold room in their home. Do you want a new ductless system to fix the cold room in your home during the holidays or during the winter season? Yes. Okay, go here and enter to win. Now, if you refer someone, if they win, then you both win. Ductless systems and set a goal. I'm going to make a whole video on this, but set a goal for the giveaway. I want to get 100 leads, and the Ducklist unit might cost me $10,000. Let's just say it's expensive. One $10,000 for 100 leads. That means that it's going to be $100 per lead. So now your cost per lead is $100. If you're running ads and you're spending $200 cost per lead, well, you just cut your cost per lead in half by doing a giveaway. That's the premise of these giveaways. And then the last one is to retarget, ghost, and close Lost from last year with a promo. You already have opportunities sitting in your database of people that came through your funnel that they ghosted you, they didn't work with you. You. You archive their quote. Never heard from them again. Pull those people out. Your customer service reps are sitting there not doing anything. Say, hey, call these people and say, hey, Phil, I know that we gave you an estimate for gutter cleaning or for a new H vac system. Just wanted to see were you able to get that taken care of, or is that still giving you a problem? We're going into winter, and I want to make sure that you're good to go. No, we weren't able to do it. You know, it's a price thing, blah, blah, whatever that objection is. Cool. Well, we have a promo going on right now because we still have 2025, and we're going in 2026. They're releasing their new pricing in April, and we want to get everyone in that we can. So here's what I think we can do if we can make this work. Let's figure this out. Basically, you already have opportunities sitting there that you need to have a salesperson or a CSR contact them and rework all these leads to get people on the books. I'll give you one other, but this is more 2026 stuff to prep going into shoulder season. One other one is go back to every single person that you served last year. January, February, March. This is what we did. Contact them and say, hey, it's been a year since we did X, Y, and Z. Or it's been a year since we've been to your house for an inspection. It's time to schedule your next inspection. Does next Wednesday or Thursday work? We're going to be in your area. Then you basically take everyone that you did last year, and now you have them scheduled for this year. And all these other things are gravy on top. This is what I mean by attacking shoulder season with the plan. It's. It's why I'm so passionate about it. Because if you get January, February, and March dialed in and you start crushing it, the rest of the year is going to be gravy and you're going to crush 2026, which is why it's so important. All right, so real quick, don't. If you don't have a marketing company that cares this much about helping you grow and crush 2026, I mean, I'm pretty much giving you the whole game plan. There are seven growth levers that you need to implement in your business to make 2026 the best year yet. If you want us to show you, you can go to flashconsulting.com and set up a meeting, and we'll literally show you how to implement those seven levers in your business on a live call to make 2026 the best year yet. All right, number four, of course, you can't improve what you don't measure. You don't know if 2026 is going to be your best year. If you don't know what you did in 2025 or 2024, 2023. And that's why the fourth step is all about tracking. So you want to create a scorecard that tracks these numbers year over year. So you have a plan for growth. When I started working as director of business development, I said, well, we want to grow, right? Yes. Well, how do we know if we're growing or not? I know. Crazy question. So what we did was I built a scorecard with these five things and a couple more. But these are the core five that we do as a company, as a marketing company. Because if you're doing marketing, you're spending money on things, you might as well be growing your business. If you're not growing, then that usually illuminates a bigger problem. So here's the big things, Leads. Last January, I got this many leads. This January, I got this many leads. Great. Our marketing is working great. We're growing our business. Of course, it makes sense when I'm saying it, but a lot of times business owners even that we work with, they're like, well, how am I going to track my calls? How am I going to track my forms? How do I do right? There's a million ways. You got to figure it out. Because if you don't know how many leads you have coming in, it's really hard to benchmark growth. Next is jobs. This is going to be your usually, like your booking rate. So you got this many leads, you ran this many jobs, you got 100 leads, you ran 80 jobs, you're 80% booking rate. Jobs is very important for my business. When I was director, business development, we had leads coming in, a lot of leads. But we track jobs heavily, and we gave our customer service representatives a goal every single month. We said, last year we did 600 jobs. This year we're going for 660 jobs or 700 jobs. If we hit that number, then we're gonna give a bonus to everyone or have a pizza party or whatever. Jobs is important because leads are great. We want jobs on the books. Of course. Next thing to track is quotes created. So if you go out on a job site and you create quotes, but you don't. You haven't made any money yet, you need to track your quotes. Or if you go out on a job and you do like a $200 job, but you have a big ticket, like $2,000 sale or $20,000 sale, you need to track quotes. Because if you're just running 150, you know, $200 service calls, that's all good and well, but you need the big ticket sales, which is why you need to track your quotes. And this usually illuminates a sales problem. So this is usually like a CSR leads problem, marketing problem. This usually means there's a sales problem if you are not generating enough quotes on top of the jobs. And then the Last one, the fourth one, is quotes closed. So I got 100 leads, I ran 80 jobs, I generated 40 quotes, and I closed 20 quotes. So my closing rate is 50%. Not bad. And my lead to quote rate, whatever I said, was 40. So that means 40% of my leads actually turn into quotes. And now I can work backwards into what my actual revenue is going to be. And I know if I increase my. My conversion rate, great. If I go from 50 to 60%. I'm going to grow my business. If I get more leads and I have a really good booking rate, I'm going to grow my business. It's just a numbers game, but you got to track this stuff year over year, or you're not going to know if you're actually doing better or worse or what the issues are. And the last one, literally, I would say everyone misses this. It's tracking new customer growth every single year, year over year. It's all good to get retargeting and returning customers, which we love that, you know, we want to get retargets and returning customers coming in. But if you're spending money on marketing, specifically ads and SEO, you need new customers coming into the funnel as well, which is why you need to track new customer count year over year. Last January, we got 10 new customers. This January, we got 20 new customers. That's great. Doubled the number of new customers coming into the business, coming into our database. So now we can retarget them. This is why you got to track that number. All right? And finally, if you're planning to spend a dollar on ads in 2026, you have to know what your return is, or you're literally flying blind and burning money. I was at a home service business. We were spending $6,000 a month on Google Ads. I went to our digital marketing company and said, okay, we're spending $6,000. What are we getting? Who are these leads? Who are. How much money did this make us every single month? Like, should we keep doing this? I don't know. You know, you need to go on your CRM. You need to figure it out, blah, blah, blah, all that. Then it was like, hey, we're going into shoulder season. We're slow. What should we do? Spend more on ads, of course. Of course. Spend more on ads. That's how they make money, right? They charge you a commission to run your ads. Of course they're going to say that. Of course they're going to say that. This is my heartburn, as you can tell with digital marketing companies, which is why I created my own company to fix this problem. All right. Fifth, create this system to track return on ad spend monthly. Why is this important? I just told you. Annoying digital marketing companies, they're going to tell you to spend more on ads. They're not going to know if it works. And it's just all fluff, right? There's no substance. What you want if you're running ads is you. If you don't know the problem, if you don't know the results. If you spent $2,000, let's say you know you got 10 conversions because they tell you you got 10 leads, but you don't know that you made $10,000 or you made $0 or you made $20,000. That's the part that you have to have. Okay, I can't stress this enough. Like, it's very frustrating to me when I talk to people and it's like, I spent $2,000, but I don't know what happened to that, that money. How do you know to spend more on this or that or this or that? This is basic stuff to grow your business. So here's what you do. You create. You set it. You work with a digital market company that knows how to run ads. Correct. You set up a landing page. So you drive the ads to a page on your website. On that page you have a tracking form and a tracking phone number. Those two things are only for that ad. So there's no way that you can get a call from that phone number or a form from that form if it doesn't come from that ad. Unique form, unique phone number. You have those forms and phone numbers go into a spreadsheet. So they go into a spreadsheet. They call that number that phone number spreadsheet. They fill out that form, that form goes into a spreadsheet. Then every single month, you go to your CRM and you take the phone number or the email address from the form and you go to your CRM and you see what happened to it. Okay, we invoiced this one, we didn't close it. Or we quoted this one, we didn't close it. But it converted into an opportunity. Then you say, okay, I spent $2,000, I got 10 leads, I quoted 20,000 and I closed 10,000. That's great. Okay, return on ad spend 5x. Great, let's do more of that and let's increase our close rate. This is the data that people have issues with. I built automations with jobber and service Titan and for other CRMs, you know, work is housecall Pro, whatever they are. We literally have a team member that their job is to pull return on ad spend for our consultants to make recommendations and strategize. So those are the five things I'm going to recap them for. You create this content system in your business. So you got to create a content system in 2026 for AI search. It's going to train these AI avatars, large language models. You need to build a tool that helps people do something. So create either an estimate, calculator, design guide, or quiz that's going to convert people into actual leads on your website. You need to attack shoulder season with a plan. Don't just sit back and say, oh, it's shoulder season. Do one of these things that I said. Try it. Try one of these things. Like something at least to get through it. If you need help, reach out to us. Create a scorecard that tracks these numbers year over year. Set up a scorecard. It's perfect. You're going to 2026. Go to your CRM January. How many leads do we get? February, March, April. And then track it 2025-2026 and you'll see your growth. And the last thing, if you're running paid ads and you're working with the digital marketing company, tell them, how are you going to track my return on ad spend? Or build this inside of your business so that way you know these numbers. I guarantee if you do these five things, there is no way that you can't make 2026 your best year. If you have questions, drop a comment below. If you like content like this, hit like and subscribe. I'll see you in the next video.