Phil Risher warns that home service businesses risk hiring mistakes without clear marketing clarity. He advises tracking four key metrics—leads (year-over-year), quotes, sales (conversion rate), and new customers—so businesses can confidently hire staff and ensure their marketing system supports payroll growth.
This is getting a little scary for home service businesses that do not have the proper marketing in place. When you want to hire technicians, CSRs, full time staff members and put them on payroll and you do not feel confident in the lead flow, the estimates, the sales coming in the door, it gets a little dicey. How am I going to spend money over here? How am I going to hire these people? This is why it's important to track these four numbers. The number of leads that you're getting year over year. This will help you forecast. Next is quotes. Just because you get leads, you need to have good quotes. This is going to help you feel confident. If I bring in a salesperson, I'm getting good quality leads and I can track my quotes year over year. Third is your sales. Just because I get these quotes, I'm actually converting these into sales. And if I hire a salesperson, are they going to be able to convert more quotes into sales? And what's my conversion number? And then the last one is new customers. Because a business that just relies on returning customers is great, you can grow that way. But you also need new customers coming in the door for salespeople, technicians, customer service people to work. So if you track those four numbers and you feel confident in what you're looking at, it's much more palatable and easy to to hire people and bring them on to payroll because you have a marketing system that's actually working.
