Google's AI Booking & Chat GPT Ads LIVE
Phil Risher walks through Google's new agentic booking feature and potential ChatGPT ads, explaining what home-service companies need to do now: clean up your online scheduling, pricing pages, and reviews. The second half covers lead qualification, Local Service Ads optimization, and when to hire a marketing person.
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We're going to go through with some new updates in the home service space and what this means for your business and how to prepare. I also got a good Q and A list for us of questions that people have submitted that we're going to be going through as well. So if you're live, drop a comment of where you're calling from. If you have a question, feel free to hop in the chat and I'm going to be answering questions live. Really excited about this. I doing a little bit different today where I'm going to actually answer some real articles and go through real articles of how this is impacting home service businesses and then go and then we're going to answer some questions as well. So should be pretty fun. Like I said, if you're here, drop a comment, drop a chat and we'll go from there. All right, so the first thing that I want to talk about is this thing called agentic booking and Google actually just came out with agentic booking and what agentic booking is. It's an agent that's actually booking things for you. So a gentic booking was just rolled out and what it allows you to do is to go to Google AI mode. You have to go into labs and turn it on, but go into Google AI mode and you can ask it to find a restaurant for you in a local area. Right now it's connected with Rezi and OpenTable so you could say hey, I want to find an Italian restaurant in my area. Chat it in. Then it's going to go and it's going to look on resi or OpenTable and it's going to find an available restaurant and it's going to give you a pricing. You know, it's going to be this many dollar signs and they're available on these days. Would you like me to book that appointment for you? Here's why this is mind blowing. Imagine you're a home service business and someone says hey I want to get my gutters clean. Hey I need someone to come repair this. Then it goes and finds your Whether you use Jobber, Housecall, Pro, service, Titan, whatever your booking thing is or even calendly, it goes and finds your actual booking widget. It finds an available time, then it comes back and it says hey, you can schedule here, here and here and here's the best options. Now this is the biggest part to this is that it's not just going to present them with options because everyone might be available. It's going to discern who should I give this person in return, should I give them someone that has a good review status, Should I give them that has pricing page on their website and all this data is going to feed into the recommendation that AI makes back to the user. It's going to say, okay, here's this H Vac contractor, they're available on these dates, their dispatch fee is this amount and their pricing structure is like this. Here's what their reviews have to say and here's a little bit about the company. All of those assets that I just explained, a pricing page on your website, good or bad reviews, you responding to reviews and your perception of how you are from an AI perspective is already available. All we have to do is just connect the dots from an agentic perspective. And that's why agentic booking is such a big deal. Because truly like in the next 12 months, next year or two, all the technology is there. Someone just has to put it together to make this actually happen for home service businesses. So what can you do now to prepare your business for this? Well one, if you don't have online scheduling, you need to set up online scheduling. You need to have somewhere that people can go and book online. I get it, you might not have a bunch of routes, you might be worried about this, but at least have something where someone can go and find a date and book something online. The second thing, add a pricing page to your website. Why AI platforms? Regardless of the take the agentic booking thing out of it, it builds a lot of trust and transparency. What the research says is that the average Google search has 5 keywords, H vac repair near me, very simple searches. The average AI search has 348 keywords, 348 words that people are typing out. They're not just saying H Vac repair and immune, they're saying how much does it cost to get this done? What do you know about this company and can you tell me what happens if this happens? They're asking a lot more questions to figure out if this is the right company to work with, not just taking Google at face value for whatever it recommends to you. So having a pricing page on your website helps build transparency. It also helps answer those questions of like how much does it actually cost? And then let me go and tell this information over here. The other thing you can do is make sure that you're getting reviews, which by now you probably know you need to get reviews, but make sure that you're responding to all reviews. This matters a lot. It matters for Google, but it also matters for AI platforms. Why? Because Specifically for the AI platforms, they are still in the mode of building trust. What I mean by building trust is that you as the user have to go to these platforms and ask it a question and trust the results that it gives to you. You wouldn't go to Google over and over again if you didn't trust the results that it gave you. This is what ChatGPT perplexity clawed. All these platforms, when you're using them in a search or relational perspective, they need to build trust that you know, that if I go there and I ask it this question, it's going to give me the best results. One of the number one ways for it to know if it can trust your business is by getting good reviews and responding to reviews. This tells them that you care about customer service and that you are on these platforms to make sure that your reputation is tight. So by responding to reviews, specifically 1 star reviews, this shows them that you care. It's a good trust signal back to these platforms. All right, so that's agentic booking. If you don't know what to do, set up online scheduling, set up a pricing page, respond to your reviews. And when this does come out, I think it's going to be a big game changer for a lot of people. All right, this kind of leads me to the next thing, which is chatgpt ads. This came up on a customer call and people are saying, oh my gosh, Sam Altman said that he's adding ads to ChatGPT and it's going to come as soon as 2026. What does this mean? Oh, my gosh. So I just want to read this to you real quick. Well, before I read this, if you didn't know, Meta laid off a bunch of people and OpenAI hired a bunch of those people because they're figuring out a different way to monetize Chachi bt. And what Sam Altman said was that we'll likely try ads at some point, but he still has no idea what these ads would look like. And this is literally, as of a couple days ago, Altman doesn't see ads as OpenAI's biggest revenue opportunity. So there might be this huge buzz around, you know, home service businesses setting up ChatGPT ads. My take on it is that it's nice, but when we look at the actual results of where people are searching for home service businesses right now, they're not on ChatGPT, Claude perplexity, any other AI platform, 80% of them still go to Google. And we know this because Bright Local put out a report of this information and I'll even double down on how we know this. If you were to go to your Google Analytics and look up the source of where people are actually searching and coming to your website from. Usually we did the data, we pulled the data on our clients. It's usually around 4% or less of people are coming from ChatGPT opposed to still the normal people. Google, Yelp, Facebook, other platforms, ads. So it's not like right now there's this whole gold rush of ChatGPT for home service businesses. I think in the next year, two, three, there's going to be a gold rush for AI in general because Google is changing their search engine results page. All that to say that yes, there might be ChatGPT ads that are coming in 2026. Do I think that it's like, oh my gosh, you got to go get on this stuff right now? Not necessarily. One other thing that I'll say about this with this article is that Sam Altman said he doesn't know what these are going to look like, but one thing that he knows for sure is that they're not going to look like Google Ads. Ads on Google search are dependent on Google doing badly. This is from what he says. If it was giving you the best answer, there'd be no reason ever to buy an ad above it. What he doesn't like is that when you go to Google they have all the ads up top and then they give you their organic results. He's not going to do this. So the thing's not quite aligned with me. This is what he's saying. ChatGPT, maybe it gives you the best answer, maybe it doesn't. But you're paying it, or hopefully all are paying it and it's at least trying to give you the best answer right now what he's saying is that you're paying regardless if you get the best answer or not the best answer. The goal is just to give you the best answer and to pay it, not have unaligned incentives, which right now on Google that might feel that way for the end user. The point is that Google makes money when results fall short. ChatGPT should only make money when it earns users trust different way. So this last piece hits at home. If Chat GPT were accepting payments to put a worse hotel above a better hotel, that's probably catastrophic for your relationship with ChatGPT. This goes back to the whole trusting that I was just talking about. All right, so why does this matter if all been ChatGPT ad model vision becomes reality. The path from question to recommendation, to purchase could all take place in one single conversation. Brands and businesses will need to figure out how to remain visible in these new search journeys. All this to say what Sam Altman is saying is that he's not just going to have ads at the top of your chat GBT search. What he's saying is that naturally, inside of your relationship with how you're searching, he's going to set up. What he's thinking is he's going to set up a way that they can be compensated for the best recommendation possible via ads, not just spam you with ads on specific keywords. It's a different way of looking at ads and maybe there's a way that's going to happen. So ChatGPT ads 2026, it's a thing. I don't think it's the thing that you should be focused on, but it's something to be mindful of. I think the thing that you should be focused on right now is how to position your company in AI search. And there's some ways to do that. We have an AI readiness checklist on another, on a couple other videos that we have. Basically walks you through exactly what to do. It's. It's pretty long and in depth. So those are the two big things right now that came up in the past week, which was this agentic booking, which I think is pretty cool. And then ChatGPT ads, you know, what should you be doing around that? All right, I'm gonna get into some Q A. So if you are here and you know, have a question, drop it in the chat. Happy to be a resource. And if not, we already have questions that have been submitted from other business owners. So I'll get into those now. All right, so we are a $7 million home service business. How can I make it easier for customers to inquire online without killing lead quality? Okay, what I think that the person is asking is I get a lot of leads, but they're not all high quality. So how can I balance getting leads coming in and also getting high quality leads? So we see this a lot with some of the remodeling companies that we work with. There's these qualifiers that people have to meet. For example, if you do remodeling, you don't want to just go out and, you know, put a new piece of trim on someone's door. You want a kitchen remodel or basement remodel. And so you need some qualifiers in your lead capture. So that way you're not just wasting time calling these people and they're like, oh, yeah, I just need to come out and paint patch this hole. And it's like, okay, this is not the right fit. Similarly, let's say that you do a more tangible service like duct cleaning or gutter cleaning. That's more like the. This is how much it cost. This is the exact thing that I ran into at my home service business was we did duct cleaning and it was very like prescriptive selling. So how many H VAC units do you have? Is it a single family home, townhome or condo? And then we gave them a price. The problem is that sometimes people thought it's going to be $99. Other people thought it's going to be $600. And we would get a lot of tire kickers in our lead process and we could probably qualify them out. So you might feel that as well in your home service business. And here's some of the strategies that we found to be the best to balance lead intake with also not killing your lead quality. First, on your intake form. Well, first thing is start with a basic intake form. You don't know if you don't get bad leads or not. You just want to get leads coming in. So start with the basic intake form. You know, name, phone number, email message. Then from there, if you get a bunch of leads that are just tire kickers, add some qualifiers. So add one qualifier, which would be you could say budget, but there's a better way to say budget, which would be how much have you allocated for this project? Or in what price range should we design for? That's a really nice way to say it. I interviewed a guy on the podcast and that's exactly how you structure it. What price range should we design for? And then people could say zero to a thousand dollars, a thousand to ten thousand, ten thousand to twenty thousand, something like that. So budget, what should we design towards something like that? Then you can also add, let's say you're like, I don't know if I want to get their budget up front because it might turn a lot of people away. That's cool. You could just simply ask what city that they're in, what zip code that they're in. And this could usually tell you, okay, well, I know people in this area. This is one of the higher income demographics in my area. So probably this would make a lot of sense. I'll give you two other things on this is when you go to someone's website, you want to make sure that you have a pop up on their site. So on your website if you have promos or things like that, you want to have pop ups on your site. Usually on these you want to make it so easy to work with you. Just like your name and just phone number, email or even just email and a pop up. Like imagine you go to e commerce sites like hey, get 10% off, give us your email that still has a very, very good use case in this example as well. And here's the thing to that someone goes to your website, puts in their email address. Now what you need to have is some type of an automation that's happening after the fact that so you don't have to have just your qualifiers on your form. You can also have your qualifiers after the fact asking them questions. How does this look? Someone goes to your website, 10% off, puts in their email address, then you start the qualifying process with questions. Hey, saw you got 10% off. What's the budget allocation for this project? A, B, C or D or E. Then they tell you and then you can qualify them in or out. Okay, that sounds good. Someone will reach out to you shortly. Or hey, could you send over some more pictures? Now you can put them into different buckets based off of the information that you gathered. It still it qualifies people, but it captures that initial lead, that's easy. And then qualifies them in or out of your service. The second part to this is on your website you should have a chat widget. The chat widget usually is something that's just a quick like text us and then move through the funnel. What you don't want to do is add a bunch of qualifiers into your chat. You either have a chat or you don't have a chat. And my recommendation is the chat turns into a text. So that way when someone chats in, they get a text back and forth and now you start a conversation. What you don't want to do is try to qualify people right here. Imagine if someone called you and before they even talked to a representative, you started asking them all these questions to qualify them in. Not bad. But also it might not be the level of service that you want and maybe they might not want to experience you that way, which is why you would have a chat to text feature which would allow people to communicate back and forth and you can qualify them in that process. So all that to say, I think there's a blend and a balance. If you feel like you're getting a bunch of leads and they're all not good Leads add a couple of buffer points in your process, but there's different ways to do it, whether it's on your form or inside of your intake process. Next question we have. I own a $1 million pressure washing and gutter cleaning company. How can I tell if our newsletters are actually driving revenue, not just branding? Oh, man, this is a good one. So a lot of people think that they. That emails, newsletters are staying top of mind with their customers is just branding and there's no way to quantify actual revenue coming in. I'm going to talk about how to quantify it and then I'm also going to talk about ways to actually turn it from branding into sales opportunities. So the first thing is, how do you quantify it? Okay, very simple. Whatever platform that you're sending these emails out from, you need to put a tracking phone number in your emails. The tracking phone number is going to be like, call us. Now when they call that number, you know that that call came from an email. You can put a whisper message on that call. It says, this is a call from your email newsletter. Then in your CRM you can say email. The other thing is you can see who clicks on stuff on most email senders. You can see who opens it and then who clicks. The people that clicked, you can take those people and then see if it turned into revenue every single month. You can just take the people that clicked, go to your CRM and see if it turned into any type of revenue for your business and then you can use to make a correlation. There are CRMs and tools out there that automatically do this, but that's a very simple way if you feel like this is just branding. Now, that's nice to have, but most people, I would say, fall into this camp, which is, I'm just sending out emails. There's not really much juice to them and I'm not generating real revenue from them. We had a client that wasn't sending out emails at all, and we sent out 12 emails, one every single month. And they generated $257,000 in revenue just from these emails. And I'll give you what exactly we did. So the first thing is you got to have a good structure for your email. The structure should be something like this, a good subject line, usually four to six words. And you want to be. You want to have it punchy, like schedule your fall, tune up, get $500 off something very punchy. That's to the point that creates curiosity, but also gets them to click. The goal here is to get around 30, 40% open rates. The average is 20%. But if you do these punchy ones, you'll get 30, 40%. Then inside of the email body, you don't want to just put fluff stuff or ask ChatGPT to write a whole long newsletter. You want to keep it very structured. Okay, so you want to have a theme. Let's say that you have a monthly theme and your theme this month is to do fall tune ups. The first thing that you send is, hey, it's time to schedule your fall tune up. Here's a little bit about what a fall tune up entails. Explain what the tune up does. Then right below that, a frequently asked question. Should I get a fall tune up if I just got a spring tune up or do I need a fall tune up or should I just wait? If I have an issue, then I can call you like whatever that question is that probably this person's asking. Put the question in there. Then after that, have a strong call to action. Don't wait until you're, until you have no heat this winter. Schedule your fall tune up to prevent that. Right below that you want to have a testimonial from one of your customers talking about a great fall tune up. And then you want to have a call to action under that, which is like call us now. Fill out a form. This is a really good structure of an email that actually turns things into sales and also stays top of mind. We have some clients that have a little bit of hybrid. What they do is they go in here and they might add like some events or things that's going on in the local community or some pictures of them, something that's nice. But at the end of the day you need to cross sell services. Stay top of mind and make sure that you are letting other people, your prospects and customers know that you also do these other services. So that's the first thing. Get a good structure in place. The second thing to taking this from a branding email to an actual sales email is don't just send an email and then it's gone forever. And like, oh, hopefully people call us. That's more of a farming strategy. We laid some seeds, hopefully they come up and we get some crops out of it. It's fine, but it's not the best way. The best way is this. The people that open that email, you can do two things with them. One, you can call them. Let's say you send an email that says get $500 off a new generator. All those people that opened it clicked on that email to get $500 off. They clicked to see what was inside. They clicked to open that email and figure out what's going on with $500 off. If you were to call them, don't be creepy. And you could say, hey, Phil, this is Phil from Flash Consulting. Not sure if you saw or not, but we have a promo going on to get $500 off a new generator. And I thought of you because we were just at your house last week. I thought of you because was around the corner and you know, pass by your house, whatever the thought of you is, then just say like, hey, I'm going to be in your area next week. You want me to come by and take a look and give you an estimate? This is how you turn your opportunities from an email newsletter into sales opportunities. You don't just let it die out with your farming. You go and you actually hunt it down. The second thing to do is, okay, Phil, like I have 300 people that open this email. Like, I'm not going to cold call all these people. Cold call, warm call all these people. That's fine. Send them a second email. And in the email put subject line in your area and then in the body say, hey, Phil, going to be in your area next week doing an estimate for a new generator. Wanted to see if you want us to stop by and give you an estimate. You already know that they showed interest, so now you need them to take action. This is the whole point of email marketing and retargeting your past prospects and customers. A lot of people do this wrong, which is why it doesn't work for them and they don't generate any money and they feel like they're just wasting their time. And. And they end up actually not even doing emails because of this. So that's effectively how you can take your branding emails and turn them into actual sales opportunities for you. All right, next question. Let's see. We got. I can't seem to get lsas to work Google local service ads. We are only at 1.5x return. What should I change? Sheesh, 1.5x. Which means I spent thousand dollars and I made fifteen hundred dollars. And usually LSAs, Google LSAs for us is like a honey hole. So, all right, with the context that I have, I'll kind of diagnose it with what, what I think. All right, first is inside of your lsa, you can have different types of ways that people can interact with your Google lsa. They can call you, they can message you, and they can book online. So the first thing that I would recommend is to figure out which channels are not good. So for, for example, we had a client that their LSAs were underperforming. They had all three of those channels turned on. So what we did was we reach out to their customer service manager and we said, hey, usually the messages are the ones that don't convert. The messages are a lot of times tire kickers because they're not picking up the phone and calling. They're just asking a quick question in you're getting charged for it, but then you got to try to message back and forth to them and close the deal. That was our hunch and that's usually the case. So we asked her, she said, yep, usually messages are not bad, are not the best. So we turned off messaging. Then we're driving people to either call or book book. Now what this allows us to do is to get real warm leads and then we can figure out is this going to be a customer service representative, a call script issue, or the lead's still not good. So you're starting to like, you know, figure out why the issue is. Now the next layer to this is you could also have business name searches in Google LSA or no business name searches. So what that means is if someone searches for your business by name, you can have a Google LSA ad that shows up right at the top, right next to your Google business profile and says, hey, click here and talk to us. You are also charged for that lead. We default to turn that off because you're being charged for your branded keywords. And if you don't have competition that's rated, that's ranking on, that's running ads on top of your name, then why pay for, specifically pay per lead for a lead that could be 50, 100, $200. It just doesn't make sense for Google LSAs in my opinion, unless it's a very competitive market and people are really spending, you know, thousands of dollars on your name. So that's a, that's the second thing. Turn off the business search. Now, the third thing would be to go through and audit the actual places, the different services that you're running Google local service ads for. For example, we have a restoration contractor that we work with. So they have fire damage restoration, they have water damage restoration, they have mold remediation, and then they have mold testing. All four of those have different price points, just like H Vac repair and H Vac installation, different price points. So if we want to drive leads to a specific place that make a Lot of sense for our business, then we can play with the different categories that we are showing our ads for. So if we want to distill down bad or not good lead quality, then we would only focus on the high lead quality or the higher tickets to drive up the return on ad spend number. There's also a way inside of Google LSA where you can actually set your bidding amount. It's not the best, but let's say you do different services. If it's truly different categories of services, then you can place a bid on them. So you could say, for these types of leads, I only want to spend a hundred dollars. For these types of leads, I want to spend $200. It's not absolute. There are different categories, but these are some of the things that we look at when we're trying to drive return on ad spend for Google LSA is up so 1.5x return. Usually there's going to be something broken inside of that or your call script is not good and your CSRs are not good. But this is why you need a marketing company that's actually going to go in and figure this stuff out and not just say, oh, Google says don't work for us. Oh, who would have thought? No, you gotta dig in on these things. All right, let's see. Next question we got here. How should I think about Nextdoor as an ad platform or a community channel? All right, this is a good question. Nextdoor comes up a lot. And Nextdoor, the way that we look at it, is more of a community channel than an ad platform. And the reason is because when you go on Nextdoor, it's not just like people perusing Nextdoor to just hang out and see what's going on in the neighborhood. Usually people are going in Nextdoor because they have a problem and they're asking the community for like, hey, who should I work with? It's very similar to a Facebook community group where someone would go into a community group and ask for recommendations. That is how we typically see Nextdoor being used. You could run ads on Nextdoor. We have seen that they're not usually they're more branding than like direct response. One big note on this. Imagine on Nextdoor, if you were to ask for community, does anyone know a good painter? And then there was a way where Nextdoor could say, hey, I know some good painters. Here's a list of good painters, or I know a good painter. Here you go. They're not there yet. But if you know that you have demand where people are coming here Asking for a good service. At some point next door is going to be like, hey, here you go, here's a good service. And then you can pay for this ad. It's not there yet. Right now it's definitely still a community channel. What we recommend is have someone internal be in a Facebook community groups, you know, recommending, discussing things and nextdoor as well, inside of their communicating, answering questions. And I'll give you one other bonus tip on this. A lot of times in these Facebook groups or nextdoor, someone's gonna say, does anyone know a painter? And everyone's just commenting names. And you probably your team's in there commenting names. Okay, they're gonna get a list of 100 names. I'm sure you've done it or you've seen it done. Don't just stop there. Go to message and you can actually directly message people in Facebook. You can send them a direct message. Most people stop at just the comment. Go to the direct message and say, hey Phil, I saw that you were looking for a good painter. Just wanted to share my experience with this company. They do a great job. Or hey Phil, saw you're looking for a good painter. I'm actually the owner over here at Phil's Painting company and I wanted to see if I could come by and take a look at your house. That goes a lot further than just a comment and it shows that you actually care. Pro tip. You could actually turn this into a loom video. Like, like a video like this. Just like, you know, take 30 seconds. Hey, saw you in the group. I'm actually owner at Phil's Painting. Wanted to see if I could come by and do this or I'm one of the estimators over here at Phil's Painting. Whatever it is. This, this like guerrilla marketing, you know, but this is really like if you're really about this stuff and this, this company, I think this company that was asking it was like a seven million dollar business. Like you can do this stuff. Like you can generate a lot of opportunity here because the guys that are just man in the van, they're running around, they don't have execution and game plans for these types of things, which is why I like to share. Like you can get really nitty gritty and get a lot of opportunity out of these channels. All right, got a couple more questions on here. We got some people here. So if you guys are in, in on this live stream, you know, feel free to hit the chat or just hang out. It's all good. See, next question. We got what's the best way to reactivate old estimate before prices go up? So right now when I'm recording this, we're at pretty much the end of 2025 going into 2026, and there's a huge opportunity for every single person to go into their CRM, pull the estimates that they didn't close for the year, and send them this message, which is, hey, we're closing out 2025. Going into 2026. Our vendors, suppliers, or hey, we're expensing. We're expecting a price increase in 2026. Wanted to see if you wanted to lock in 2025 pricing and get on the schedule for January, February. Pro tip. This is shoulder season, so it allows you to get on the schedule inside of our shoulder season while also capturing the 2025 stuff. And if you want to take this to the next level, you could offer them some type of incentive like, it's going to be shoulder season, they're going to be slow anyways. So you could say, oh, and by the way, we have a 10% promo going on to close out the year. Prices are going up and 10% promo, you can do one or the other. The prices going up is nice because you don't actually have to give away a promo. If you don't want to cheapen your brand and give any discounts, that's fine. But you could also do it the other way, which is don't worry about if prices are not going up and my prices are pretty standard. I don't have any, you know, cost, then give them something of a promo. Really nice way to reactivate your old estimates before prices go up or before the end of the year or going into shorter season or just any reason why, to be honest. So that works really good. Is it worth setting up virtual estimates instead of always sending someone on site? Thoughts? Yes. I just interviewed James Hatfield from Live Switch on the podcast and I think, like, if I was in home service again and they had this tool, there's no way I would not use this. Basically, imagine someone calls in and says, hey, I have a. My, my boiler is leaking. Cool. Do you mind if we just, if I send you this link real quick and we just hop on this call, you can just show me what it is so that way I can get a better understanding. Way, way different than any other home service business that's out there. Or someone says, hey, I want to get my gutters cleaned. Okay. Do you mind if we just get on a quick call real quick? I just want to do a Quick analysis. You don't have to get up on your ladder, but I'm going to look at your drainage and some other things just to get an idea of what we're working with here. Way, way, way different. And it gets you much, much faster to get to the close because people are like, wow, they actually care. They want to hop on the thing, they can see the stuff and then they can give me some type of estimate or say, hey, let me send my guy out there. We can definitely help you with this. One other cool thing about this tool, Live Switch in particular, is that it actually takes the information and gives you some AI reports out of it. So imagine if your CSR does this, then they get an AI report that they could give to the technician when they go out on site of exactly what this person wants and what they're looking at. I think you can also do measurements and stuff. But anyways, all that to say virtual estimates instead of always sending someone on site. I think that this is a game changer for a lot of home service businesses because the estimator or the salesperson or you as the owner is just going out there over and over again trying to sell stuff when you could speed up that process a lot more and also give great service that stands out. And I'll give you one other pro tip on the virtual estimates. You know, whatever tool that you use, even if you just record your estimates, like you go on site and you just hit record on your phone and that transcript is gold, that transcript can then be used to train other salespeople. It can be used in your marketing stuff, it can be used in your SOPs, it can be used to help train CSRs. It can be used for pretty to turn into an sop. Like there's a million use cases for recording your stuff. And I think that doing virtual estimates gives you the capability to record all your stuff and then take that information and turn it into gold for your business. So lots of opportunity there. My thoughts are I would recommend implementing virtual estimates. And it kind of ties back into the beginning thing, which was like, how do I not kill my lead quality? Which also get a bunch of leads coming in. Imagine if someone hits a certain threshold. If they're below a threshold, then they do virtual estimate. If they're above something else, then they get an on site estimate and then you can buffer it out and then stop. Don't waste your time on the tire kickers and you just do these quick virtual estimates. So good last question here. How important is it to have an Internal marketing champion alongside an outside agency. This one is a really good question and it comes up a lot because there's what we found with 1 to $10 million home service businesses is that there's kind of like three ballparks, there's 1 to 3 million which is the owner. And at this point in the business, no, you do not need a marketing champion because you as the owner can still fill in the void of marketing champion. What you should have is an agency that overlaps and this is the exact void that my company feels like the 1 to 5 million range, which is you can't hire a full on marketing person on your team to kind of run point on things. You as the owner have ideas in your brain and you have automations and things that you want to do but you have no idea how you're going to do them because you don't have the expertise and you're just dealing with these cookie cutter agencies. So 1 to 3 million, no, 3 to 5 million is this gap where sometimes people that have good cash flow, they say I'm not the guy that's going to go to the B and I's, I'm not the guy that's going to go to the chamber of commerce, I'm not the guy that's going to do the home shows. And I need to hire someone to be that person. More of a marketing coordinator, PR type of person, but definitely still have an agency that can support that person. So usually that either comes at the 3 to 5 mark or the 5 to 7 mark is what we found. You have this like internal person who's a coordinator who can work with your customer service team on ideas, deploying them and then work with your agency to make sure that everything lines up all the way through. So I guess my recommendation here is it's important to have a marketing champion. I would say around 3 to 5, 5 to 7, like inside of that gap. You should try to get someone internal who is driving your marketing stuff that can take your ideas, coordinate them internally and then work with an agency that actually cares and directly works with that person to support them. You know this is exactly why my company was built to solve this problem. But that's, that would be my recommendation. The one thing I would caution, we had a meeting with a guy, a 10 million dollar h vac contractor and when he hit $7 million he ended up taking it all in house. He hired an SEO person, he hired a web developer, he hired a videographer, he had it, he, he hired a ad specialist. So Basically, he took on four roles, and he's probably paying each person, you know, 70, 100, $200,000, depending on the various roles that they might help, probably even a marketing director to manage all these people. He told me that at the peak, he was spending four to five hundred thousand dollars per month just on the marketing people that he had, and his business flatline and stalled out. He said the reason was is because he had to keep these people up to date with all the ongoing stuff. There was no learning from this account to go to this account. There was no ongoing training. It was just like where he got these people was where they were at. The second thing is that it's very expensive to carry this whole marketing arm inside of your business when you're a $7 million company. And you could use that money much, much more wisely by hiring salespeople and techs and CSRs and having an agency that could fill the gaps on all these things and probably do it better than people internally. So he got rid of those people and then was hiring an agency. So all that to say, you know, wherever you're at in your business, I would recommend at least don't just settle for cookie cutter agencies. Try to find an agency that cares. Once you get to 3, 5, $7 million, then thinking about bringing on a coordinator to help you out. All right, well, this has been fun. I like starting with the articles. I hope that those were helpful and the context was giving you some stimulation of new ideas and things coming down the pike. And then the Q and A. If you have comments, you can always drop them wherever you're watching this and you can always submit them@flashconsulting.com? and I'll see you in the next video.
