Phil Risher shows how referrals beat Google leads for home-service businesses. He paid $100 per referral to complementary services like gutter cleaners, and generated $2 million of his $3 million annual revenue that way, despite having only 36 Google reviews.
If you could only choose one, which one would it be? Referrals or reviews? Referrals. Referrals are the hidden gem for home service businesses. The reason is you could spend money and pray to the Google gods and give them $100 a lead, or you could go find referrals and give them $100 to give you leads. Most businesses say their number one lead source is referrals, but they don't have a system for it. Here's a system that I recommend. Find complementary services. So if you do roofing, find a gutter cleaning company and reach out to all the gutter cleaning companies in your area and say, Hey, when you're out on the job site, if you see a roof that needs to get replaced, if you send me a lead, I'll give you money for that lead. Now you have warm referrals coming in that are more likely to close, and you're not reliant on an algorithm change or something happening on Google. You're literally reliant on a relationship in your local community to send you leads. So at my home service business, we had 36 Google reviews and $2 million of our $3 million revenue was from referrals.
