I Audited 155 Home Service Companies Last Year — Here’s Where They Lose the Most Money

Last year, my team and I audited over 155 home service businesses doing between $1 million and $10 million in revenue. And in the next few minutes, I'm going to show you where some of them are losing tens, sometimes even hundreds of thousands of dollars in their business. I'll break down the five money leaks that I see over and over again and how the best businesses fix them. By the end of this video, you'll know exactly what's leaking, how to fix it, and what to start on first. The number one leak that we see over and over again is in call handling. And the main reason is because people don't have a call script or a system in their business to answer calls. They just say, that's a nice person, let them on the phones. I know this because I was in their shoes at a home service business and that's exactly what I did with my 4 CSRs. So caller asks for price, CSR gives a number. They say, I'll call back or I'll talk to my spouse and the lead's gone forever. Sounds like I've done this before because this is exactly the issue that I was having at my business. We were generating plenty of leads, we're spending money on leads, getting referrals coming in, all the stuff. But we didn't have a process to turn leads into jobs. Which is why this is bleeding out so much because people think that, oh, I'll just spend more on marketing. When really it's a lead problem in their business. That's lead management problem. And they need to have a CSR process to intake all the leads, even forms. They don't have a system. The CSR calls them and then it's gone forever. So what we see is that they have no follow up permission. So someone calls in and says, how much does it cost? They say, it costs X, Y and Z. And the person says, cool, I'll give you a call back. And then they say, okay, sounds good, give us a call back, it's gone forever. What they should do is, hey, by the way, while you're making your decision, let me send you over a price guide that we made. Hey, by the way, let me send you some more information about X, Y and Z service. That way you have it for your records. This now allows them to have permission to text them, email them, and follow up via whatever chain they send that thing over to. The other thing is that there's no email or text. Someone fills out a form on the website and they call them. It's gone forever. This is exactly what happened to us. What we implemented was a text and an email. That happens right away. So now if we call them and they don't answer Monday morning, we can at least text them and email them on a different communication thread. If they're at work or they prefer to text or whatever it might be. We need to open up the three channels. Text, email and calls. And the last thing is that there's no value exchange. It's just very commoditized. How much does something cost? I have this issue going on in my thing. How much should it cost? When can you get out here? It's very commoditized. There's no value exchange. This is why inside of your intake process, your call script, you need to have a value build. Can you tell me what's going on? Well, let me let you know that you called the right place because that's exactly what we do. And start walking them through. What does a call intake process look like? The beauty of this is that when you fix this, then any leads, any other marketing that you do, it automatically generates more money for your business. This is why I put this as leak number one. Because you don't want to put more water into a leaky bucket and that is your sales process. You got to fix your sales process first before you put water into the bucket. And here's the fix one. This will be in my business. We track the booking rate. We did a very simple X and dash process. Each call that the CSR got, they got a dash. They put a dash on a piece of paper. If they booked it, they put an X. Then at the end of the day they had 10 dashes, two X's. That's a 20% booking rate. They booked two of them out of 10 and they would send me their report. This is how I would track their booking rates. It's very manual. If you use a tool like Service Titan or other tools, you can track booking rates. But this is a manual process to hold people accountable, to set goals. The second thing, you want to make sure that you capture contact info every single time someone calls in. You ask them for their phone number to text them something and their email address to send them something. Even if they want a price, even if they're shopping, price shopping, whatever. Send them something via email and text and start that conversation. Offer a price guide. Explain the price factors, why they go up or down on the phone and add value. Earn the follow up rights. Hey, if I don't hear back from you in a Day. Is it cool if I give you a call? That is a follow up, right? And it sets the precedent that you are going to follow up with them and you want to make sure that they solve their problem. These are the fixes here. The second leak, this one all the time. Any marketing company that doesn't produce a return on ad spend report for you means that you're bleeding money. And this was the second thing that I uncovered in my business was that we're spending all this money on ads and it's bleeding out. In the audits that we do for these companies every single time we ask them how do you track return on ad spend? They don't know and they're bleeding money. I'll give you a perfect example. We had a company that we started working with, he was spending $22,000 a month on Google search ads. We asked him about his return on ad spend reporting. Where do you track this stuff? He didn't have anything. So the first month that we started working with him, we set it up and we realized that he spent $22,000 and he made $22,000. It's a 1x return. It's not good. So we need to start fixing things. One of his issues was leak number one. He didn't have a good call intake process. But this is how you start to make decisions. So you need to know your ad spend. You spend money on ads, you don't know what happens to it. You just operate on gut feeling if it works or not. You're limited by data from marketing companies. They send you their Google Ad analytics or their Google Ads report that says this much conversions, this much cost per lead, but you don't know what to do more of or what to do less of because you don't know the data. This is a telltale sign for us that you are leaking money, leaking marketing budget. And you're just praying to the Google gods that they send you leads without making smart decisions inside of your business. And here's the fix. All of your ads go to a landing page. So if you're running ads for H Vac landing page, if you're running ads for plumbing landing page, on that landing page you have a custom form and a custom tracking number that tracks into your CRM. So now the forms that are coming into your CRM, the calls coming into your CRM all say Google Ads, H Vac, Google Ads, plumbing. Then someone produces a monthly report from your CRM data that says, hey, you spent $2,000, you got 10 leads. So your cost per lead was $200 and those leads turned into $20,000. So you 10x return on ad spend, you should do more of that. Or if it's not that good, then let's go back and see if we can fix your return on ad spend. Is it a problem with your phone handling? Is it a problem with your actual lead quality? What is the issue? And then let's make it better or switch to a different ad platform. This allows you to fix what's low and do more of what works. If you don't have this granular data, it's pretty common where people are just running ads externally. They give you the data and then it's on you as a business owner to try to figure out what this means and try to figure out some type of return on ad spend report if that's you. That's exactly why I built my company, because once I solved that in my home service business, we went from 3 million to 4 million, 4 million to 5 million and then sold a private equity because we had the levers, we knew all the data. Very common leak point number two, pretty much 80, 90% of people we talk to have that issue. Here's another one. Forms ghosted. You fill out forms, you call them, they don't answer and then the lead dies. This happened at my business time and time again. One of the call to actions that we implemented in our business was an estimate calculator. People put in some questions, they got an estimate, and then we were supposed to call them proactively to say, hey, you got the estimate? Do you want to schedule this or not? Every single time we do an audit with someone and we ask them what happens to your forms, they usually tell us two things. One, they go into my email inbox and my CSR is supposed to call them or work them. Two, I don't know exactly where they go, but hopefully someone gets them. What you want them to do is to go into your CRM under request. So that way all your leads flow into one place and you want them to go into some type of a nurture sequence. So that way they get a text and an email and they start to get nurtured through. So what winners do when a form goes out, they do an immediate call in like 60 seconds, under five minutes. You want to call these people, it's on their brain. They want things to get done. So call them. The second thing is if you can't call them, you're busy, your CSRs might be tied up, send them a text and Ask them a question. Hey, thanks so much for filling out the form. If you have a picture of what you're talking about, send it over so we get some more information or hey, can you tell us a little bit more what's going on at your house? Something that gets them to start moving the ball forward so that way when you text them back, you have some leg to stand on. Same thing with the media email. Hey, thanks so much for sending this over. Just want to let you know we got it. We're going to reach out to you and ask them a question as well. Make it short and make sure that it's like a human esque feel, right? You could say like hey, got your stuff? Someone will be reaching out to you from our team. That sounds like a business. But then when you reach out to them, even if it's automated, still make it sound like a human. Hey, this is Phil from Flash Consulting. Just wanted to touch base and see if you could send over a picture real quick. That way I can get a look at it. It sounds like a human, but it's automated. That's what winners do. The forms ghosted. We had a company that we helped them increase their form conversion rate by 10% and it unlocked $20,000 a month in their business just by automating their forms. We put a seven day nurture sequence in so that way they could get more forms into jobs. It crushes. All right, the fourth leak and this one happens a lot as well, probably more often than the Forms 1 because the Forms 1, you know, you call them and there's not as much of a leak like people are going to be on top of it. But the estimates, this one, people get crushed. Inside of our audits we usually ask like what does your sales process look like? A lead comes in, who runs the job? Ben, are you sending out estimates? Is it tech? Is it as a technician selling? Do you have a comfort consultant or a salesperson selling or what's that look like? So here's the usual issue. You send an estimate, it's a random follow up. Hopefully your salesperson, they get commission so they should be following up. And there's no actual system for your estimate follow up process which means that you lose revenue. You get ghosted by people. They're friendly ghosts, they're caspers. But the reason is is because you have limited process. It's just hopefully your salesperson calls them. Here's a couple fixes that we've seen. So we had a company that we work with, they were $3 million. They went to $8 million in three years. So 3 million. Then they went to 6, then they went to 8 million. And they, they were growing their business very, very fast. And their salespeople, they couldn't keep up with all of the estimates that they were doing. So they actually took their CSRs and they turned them into inside sales reps. And they said, hey, obviously answer the phones, but part of your daily task is going to be to follow up rehash on these estimates. And if you close one, then you'll get a percentage or dollar amount of those things. This allows for the salesperson to be outselling and then also the CSR to come in and help close more deals. And it's not just the salesperson trying to follow up over and over again. And we had another H Vac contractor that we worked with, so we implemented an estimate nurture sequence. An estimate goes out. Then we had a 14 day email and text follow up sequence on that estimate. And they increased their close rate by 5%. They went from 47% close rate to 52% close rate. Their average ticket was $3,000. They were doing 100 estimates per month. So they closed 5% more. So five more jobs. Five more jobs times $3,000, $15,000 a month. That's over $150,000 a year just by setting up an estimate nurture sequence. And this is what I was referring to before about when you send more marketing into a bucket with a bunch of holes in it, you're going to just keep spending a ton of money, a ton of money. And this is why you need to make sure that your buckets are plugged. Then you put more stuff into the top of the funnel and that is the math on that. Leak number five, email marketing, random education inside of your own marketing. We were on a call, one of the audits, and the guy said, oh, this is just branding. It's only branding. We just do them for branding. This is not for branding. Okay? These are people that already know, like and trust you. You want to cross sell them different things. You want them to come back into your funnel. You don't want just random education. You don't want to know CTA's right? Just a long message memoir about why they should get their H VAC repair or their spring tune up, whatever. There's no intent in them actually doing anything. It's just, hey, I'm just checking a box here and sending out a newsletter so that I can stay top of mind. And you're basically just missing out on revenue and it's a leak point in your business. Everyone that I talk to says I should be sending out an email to my past prospects and customers, but I don't because I don't know what to send or how to do it. So what works? One seasonal relevance. What we do is come up with a content calendar every single month and then every month we cross sell different things. So you know, in your business, January you should be talking about this, February should be talking about this. That is what your newsletter should be about. And then you want to cross sell the services. And we have a seven part email framework. First get a good subject line, four to six words. Second, inside of your email have two buttons right at the top below your logo. Call now, get estimate. Third, have some type of an educational piece about whatever your seasonal relevance is. So if you're talking about getting a ductless H vac unit, what is a ductless H vac unit? Why is it important? Then the fourth thing you want to have an actual frequently asked question. Someone just saw this, what are they going to be asking based off of seeing this information? They're going to say, well, can you put a ductless system in a garage attic or not? Answer yes you can. The fifth thing is a direct call to action. If you have hot or cold rooms in your home and you want to fix it this winter, get an estimate here. That's a very direct call to action. That's a 15. Sixth is you want an actual review, you want a customer testimonial of someone actually doing this. If they're still like eh, do they actually do this for people? What do they do? Share a real customer testimonial. And then seventh have that call now get estimate at the bottom. And that is the email framework that actually works to generate revenue. And you want clear reason to call if you think that you have this issue. Call us now. I'll give you two cherries on top here. After you send that email newsletter, the subject line, hopefully it says like got hot room, hot or cold rooms in your house or have a cold room in your house. People that open that opened it for a reason, they probably have a cold room in their house. So you can either send them a second email or you can call them. The second email might say in your area in the sub line, hey, we're going to be in your area next week doing an estimate for a ductless system at one of your neighbor's house and want to see if you could stop by and and give you an estimate. They raise their hand for intent. Now you're going the extra step to do a call to action. Second one here, call the opens. Someone opened your email so go and call them and say hey, not sure if you know or not, we're going to be in your area next week or we have a promo going on for a new ductless system. Would you like us to stop by and take care of this for you? This is the cherry on top to turn your newsletters, which are branding into actual sales opportunity for your business. The patterns are that demand exists in your business. You're creating all these opportunities coming into your business, your follow up is failing, your leads are not getting turned into jobs, your estimates are not getting sold on your past prospects and customers are not getting brought back into your funnel. And then when you have money and you're spending it on marketing, you're praying to the Google gods and hopefully that it turns into something and the growth is leaking out. So if you need help with this, this is exactly why I built my business. Because I was facing this at my home service business and when I plugged these holes and I stopped the bleeding and I started actually making decisions on my business that was a tight funnel with good clear data on both sides. Marketing, return on ad spend and email retargeting pack into my business. The revenue started to grow Last year in 2025 our average client grew 27% by implementing a system like this in their business. If you want more information that I'll put a link down below and I'll see you in the next video.