I Diagnosed 10 Businesses Live....Here’s What’s Actually Holding Them Back

I spoke at this private webinar last week with about 10 business owners. Some of them are one to $10 million home service businesses. And I diagnosed their business right there in front of them. I laid out seven playbooks of how to grow your home service business and went back and forth with them with Q and A. And I also gave some behind the scene tidbits of what we do at Flash and how we're growing our business as well. I thought it would be very valuable to share. Let me know what you think in the comments.

Okay, we'll get rolling with virtual campfire. Glad you're all here. Phil, thanks for joining us. And this is exactly what we like to do. So, so Phil was him just kind of doing a check around the room where you're all from. That's great. And I, I mean I, I've been like gushing an email and posts about Phil and his work and Wes said he got a chance to watch the video ahead of time. I saw Phil on LinkedIn and when I, when I see people on LinkedIn and look a little bit closer, you know, sometimes I just discern like, oh, this is like, this is business builder type of, as a business builder type of person, it's somebody who has something to offer and they're, they care about their culture and their team and they're, they're building something that matters. They care about impacting clients. And I, I saw that in Phil and I, I reached out by direct message and that's why, you know, we're, we're here. And Phil, I'm not going to talk a whole lot more than that. I know Phil has a couple resources he's going to share with everybody that you'll be able to action when you leave. And Phil's got a story, a business builder story. And much like all of our virtual campfires, I'm so glad you're all here because all of you being here is what really creates your questions and the discussion we had is what is what'll make it relevant. Right. To other, to other business owners. So thanks, thanks for showing up. And Phil, I'll turn it over to you.

Okay, cool. Usually when it's a nice group like this, I just try to share my quick story and then I'll share a couple resources. But I'm also open to whatever questions that y' all have so I can add the most value I can give you like a quick background. If you didn't watch the quick summary video I used, I, I started when I came out of college. I worked at Geneva. I went to Geneva Colleges near Beaver Falls. It's close to Pottsville, kind of. I started an enterprise in their management training program that and I. And I worked my way up to be one of the branch managers, the top branch managers in D.C. area. And I was getting paid off the bottom line. So off of the P and L I got paid off of. Then I read rich dad, Poor dad, and he said, the number one skill you can learn is to sell. So then I went into their corporate office and I was selling B2B Fleet Management Services to home service companies. So I was calling CEOs of businesses like Kane, like Kevin, and saying, hey, you guys have a fleet of vehicles. Let's set up a meeting and talk at the same time. I started a blog about personal finance and I had no idea about anything digital marketing. But I started writing, this was in 2015, before Chad, GPT and everything, writing three blog posts a day. And my blog ended up getting 30, 40,000 views per month. And I got featured in Forbes and CNBC and Yahoo Finance and all this cool stuff from creating content. And then I quit my job at Enterprise. I bought a school bus, I traveled around the country, made content and did all this stuff. Then when I came back from that trip, one of my Clients was a $3 million home service business. And he was like, hey, I need someone to come in because we've been stuck here for the past three years and help me grow my business. So when I went in there, all my worlds collided between running a profitable local service business at Enterprise and my digital marketing experience. And in the first year he went from 3 million to 4 million, from 300,000 in profit to $900,000 in profit. Then he went to 5 million the next year and then sold to private equity for 8x EBITDA. And then he was like, hey, you need to go help other people. So he actually named my company, introduced me to a couple other businesses. And that was seven years ago. Now we have a team of about 20 team members. We're remote team. In 2025, we won Inc. 5000 Best Workplaces. We're growing like around 60, 70% year over year. And I'm happy to be a resource for whatever is beneficial for you. I do a lot of speaking on AI search on strategy for like, if it's like more remote team stuff, we can talk more about that. And then just in general, like sales and marketing stuff, obviously we do home service. Digital marketing is what my company does. But I'm also happy to help with anything else as well. So with that, I can give you, like, a quick overview of our framework of what we talk to people about, because I think that would be helpful. And I've distilled it. So. So basically, the guy was going to sell his company that I was working at, and a search fund private equity company came to him and said, we want to buy your company. And he was like, been in business for 25 years. The technician that turned into the business owner that knew how to sell but didn't know how to run a solid business. So the search fund guy was like, hey, can we meet and talk? So we all went to lunch together. Me, the search fund guy, and the business owner, and the search fund guy asked me three questions, and that's how he built our framework. He said, how do you get new customers? How do you convert the leads into actual sales? And then how do you retarget your past prospects and customers to bring them back into the funnel? So what we do at my company, and it doesn't matter if it's B2C or B2B, but for us, we focus B2C, but we do B2B for my own business, is visibility. So how do we get new customers coming in the door? And there's four ways to do that. And I'll share this with you. Then how do we convert the leads into sales? And there's three playbooks on that, which I'll share with you.

And.

And then how do we get repeat business coming back into the business? And there's two playbooks that I'll share with you as well. So when we talk about visibility, there's four ways to get new customers. And I didn't come up with this. There's a guy, smart guy, named Alex Hormozi, y' all might know him. If you like content online, he has this core four way to get leads coming into your business. What I did was kind of spun it around a little bit for home service businesses, but these are them. One, you can create free content. So you can create content online. You can get reviews. You can do free stuff that attracts people to your business. I'll just give you the quick one thing. If you don't take anything else away from this conversation, you should do this home service business or anything else. You need to be taking the real conversations that you're having with customers and using that in your marketing content. Okay, I'll say this again. Take the real conversations that you're having and turn that into your marketing content. A lot of businesses go to ChatGPT and ask it to write stuff or do stuff, and it's just regurgitated junk. And in home service businesses, which is the avatar that we serve, we have this conundrum where we have technicians out in the field, we have CSRs in the office saying really smart things. We have comfort consultant and salespeople out in the field, we have an owner who has a lot of smart things in their brain, and it's all over the place and we can't get it centralized. So what we do as a company is we take our call transcripts from our tracking phone numbers and we use the call transcripts to create content, blog content, email newsletters. But you could do the exact same thing in your business if you're B2B, let's say you have calls like this. You can use Fathom, record your calls, take the transcripts, use it for content. If you're like, don't post on social media or do any of this stuff, that's fine. What we do. And John, this is why I asked you if you do virtual stuff, because we do virtual videography. So what we do with our clients is we take their call transcripts, we get the hooks, so we take it to ChatGPT. We say turn this into 10 hooks based off of real questions my customers are asking. Then we get on a call with them and we coach them through how to create content for their business. Then we post the content and it obviously gets views and stuff like that, but it's really about indexing the information into these large language models for AI search. So all that to be said, the number one way to get visibility for your business is to create. Create content for home service businesses. Like get reviews, show up on your Google business profile, but then also create real content, not just chatgpt stuff. The second way is paid ads. And I have a lovehate relationship with paid ads because I was very jaded when I was at my home service business. Every time I talked to my market agency, they said, spend more on ads. And I would say, how do we know that it works? And they would say, our cost per lead is this. This is how many conversions we got. Y' all probably feel the same way if you've ever talked to any of these people. So the number one thing you can do is you can run paid ads, but you can track your return on ad spend. So anytime that you run ads, if you're working with a marketing company, you want to ask them, how are you going to track my return on ad? Spend every single month. And what they should say is that they're going to go into your CRM and pull this data. So that's the second way is run paid ads. This is why I asked Kevin and Kane if they use Service Titan, because Service Titan, they have a campaign summary report. You set it all up, it all goes in there. And then every single day, you can look at it and see your actual numbers. Spent this much, made this much, that kind of stuff. All right, so that's the second way. The third way is warm outreach and partnerships. So in every single business here, there's complimentary services that would refer you business. So at my home service business, when I went to work there, they did air duct cleaning. And what we did was we partnered with H VAC companies like Kane and Kevin, and anytime their technician was out in the field, they would refer us duct cleaning. And we had this partner program, and it accounted for $1.5 million of revenue for our business. So it wasn't like some little thing that someone just gives me stuff. The big crux of this here is if I was to ask every single person probably here, what's your number one lead source? Every single person would say, referrals and word of mouth. But we don't have a plan for it. Okay. We don't have a way to get more referrals or more word of mouth. So if you don't take anything away from this, you need to have a plan for your number one lead source to get more referrals and more word of mouth coming into your business. And that's number three. All of these, I'm just sharing the high level things we can dig into, like the actual things. I'll ask you after, but I'm just kind of going through this real quick. The fourth one is cold outreach. Wayne, is this cool? If I'm just like, kind of like talking like this?

It's awesome. It's awesome. I'm making notes. They're making. Everybody's making notes. I'll be able to ask you then to loop back to a further interest.

Yeah, exactly. Okay. The fourth thing is cold outreach. Now, cold outreach for outside of home service would be like cold calling, door knocking, that kind of stuff. Okay. Cold email, which we do that at my company because we're B2B for Home Service businesses. Cold outreach is, you know, door knocking. But there is a new tool that's out there for home service business called Glass House. And it's this guy named Jimmy who created this company, which it does virtual door Knocking. It will text and email the neighbors of your customers. Kind of like the old clover method with the door hangers, but it's actually texting and emails. That's the fourth way. So that's how you get new customers coming into your business. And those are the four ways. But there's a million different, you know, ways to actually do it. Then once they come to your business, they have to convert through your lead funnel. Okay. And there's three main playbooks here. The first thing is you gotta have some way to capture them on your website. What we ran into at my home service business was that people came to our website and all we had was a contact us form. So people would fill out this form, it go to my customer service representatives. Hopefully they call it. They call them, they wouldn't answer that whole thing. So what we did was we created an estimate calculator on our website where people fill out some information and they get a quick estimate. And we set up online scheduling so people could just schedule their service right online. We also added a chat widget to the website so people could ask questions. Essentially the playbook here is that you need to make it very simple for people to turn into a customer or lead. At my home, at my business now, we have a white paper, it's called a HVCO high value content offer. And we have 11 ways to get more customers for home service businesses. And it walks you through the 11 playbooks to get more customers for your home service businesses. And they put their email in, they download it and they get this thing, then they go into a nurture sequence. So basically in the conversion funnel, once they come to your website or they say, I want to work at this company, make it simple for them to actually turn into a lead. I'll give you one other really pro tip on this, especially for home service businesses. But also if anyone else, it would make sense for anyone. Y' all have probably gone to an e commerce website before and it says, put your email in here, get 10% off your first order. This absolutely crushes it for home service businesses. Many times home service companies have like a promo that they keep in their back pocket with their customer service representatives that says like, or their salespeople, which is like, oh, by the way, we have a promo going on for 25 off this and that. That should be your offer, like right in the beginning when someone comes to your website to convert into a lead. So don't hide your promos, make it your actual offer, like in the front end, like on your Ads and everything, because you want that to attract people all the way through your funnel, not wait till they get there and then try to close them. The second playbook here is to have what's called a lead nurture sequence. So in home service businesses is when someone fills out a form on your website at 10pm on Saturday night and you call them Monday morning at 10am and they don't answer. This is what happened to us. Then what do you do? You get one shot at it. You just pay $200 for this lead and then it's gone forever. Poof. What we recommend is you have a text and an email that goes out right away when someone fills out that value offer or a form on your site and then ask them a question. Very important to ask them a question. So let's say, let's say it's a funeral home situation. Hey, I'm trying to plan for, you know, my funeral coming up, whatever. Then when they fill out that form, you ask them a right away in the, like an automation. Hey, sounds good, you know, what's your time frame for this? Or what is your availability looking like next week? It can be an automated thing, but it just moves the ball forward in the consumer's mind. That's like, okay, cool, like I'm getting something going. In home service, we would ask, hey, thanks for sending this over. Do you have a quick picture? You could send over a little bit more information so that way I can get a better idea. So a lead nurture sequence is the second playbook. Third. This one also. I don't know why people don't do this, but it's an estimate nurture sequence. So you send out an estimate to someone. You need to have a nurture sequence that happens specifically if you're selling something, then you're going to send this out to them. And usually if it's the owner that's doing the sales, they get busy, right? They're spending 10 or 20% of their time on actual sales. And this is like, oh, they'll close if they need us. That's not a good process. Right. You need to have a sales system. So in home service we see this all the time in like the $1 to $3 million range for home service businesses. Because the owner is the one that's like leading the sales charge and. And then they're also leading the business. So all the estimates get pushed to the wayside. We had a company, they were $1.5 million, H vac contractor in the DC metro area. They were closing at 47%. We implemented a 14 day nurture sequence and they went to 52% close and it was $15,000 per month additional revenue in their business just by automatically following up with their estimates. Okay, so then they come through your sales process. Now they're all living in your CRM or some database in a big blue ocean of things. So now is where the real money is made. This is where the private equity guy that I met with all these guys, we had another company that went 3 million to 8 million. And every single time they're like chomping at the bit of how many people are in your database. Because these people already know like and trust you. And time and time again, businesses do not ever touch base with them. And they just say, oh, they'll let us know when they need us. They don't want to be annoying. But I have a saying, you can't get lifetime value without a lifetime relationship. And it's on you as a business to build that relationship with them. You don't want to be annoying, right? Don't text them every week that you have an offer going, but you need to give them something that keeps it top of mind. So what we do is we send out an email newsletter once a month. And what I would recommend for your business is that you have a content calendar. So January, right now you all would know in January what's going on in your business, like what should you be talking about? Then in February, then in March, then in April, like every month you kind of have a gist of like what your theme should be that should drive like your social media content, your blog content, your email newsletter, and then the email newsletter. You want to send out an email newsletter and we have a seven part framework for that. But if we want to talk about that, we can. Here's the whole like opportunity for this. Every single person I talk to says, oh, newsletters are just branding top of mind. They're not. They're actually revenue producing assets for your business. And here's how you do it. The emails that you send out to people in the subject line, you make it very specific. Like in Cane's situation, schedule your spring tune up or have a cold room in your house. That's a very specific subject line that only someone would want to click on that if they were interested in. Yes, I have a cold room in my house. Okay? So first we want to see if they have intent to click on this thing. Then this is the secret sauce. Okay? When you send that email to them, hopefully they reach out to you, whatever. But you want to do the second step. We call it the second. The two step revenue sequence. You take the people that open the email and you either send them a second email or you call them. The second email would say subject line in your area and it would say, hey Kane, we're going to be in your area next week taking a look at one of your neighbors cold rooms in their house and want to see if you want us to stop by and take a look at yours. Very. So they showed intent. Then you go direct call to action. Now if you have salespeople just sitting around, have them call the people that opened it and don't be creepy, but say, hey, not sure if you saw or not. We have a promo going on for a new duckless system. Did you want us to come by and take a look and see if we could take care of this for you? Like, don't be weird about it, but it opens the conversation loop to something that they actually showed intent for. And then the last playbook on the conversion thing is that you. And this is more in the home service side or the B2C side is like doing one to two text messages to your audience per year. And the text would be very specific, like, hey Kevin, I'm gonna be in your. We're gonna be in your area next week doing our spring tune ups. Want to see if you want us to stop by and take care of that for you. A way that this really crushes is in your CRM. You could pull the cities so all of your clients in one city and you could send a text or an email that says, hey Kevin, I'm gonna be in Pottsville next week doing spring tune ups. Since we don't have to pay for gas, we're giving $10 off for any service. Do you want us to stop by? It makes it very specific to where they live and also a direct call to action. You could do this in an email format as well.

And.

And if you don't have like automation tools, if you have CSRs or customer service revenue or people sitting around, just have them do that. So that's like the full funnel approach. You get visibility and new customers coming in, you work them through your funnel and then you retarget your past prospects and customers to bring them back into the funnel. I want to show you guys one other thing and then I'll open this to questions because this thing. And I'm going to put it, I'll put it in the chat and y' all can use it A lot of people, when I talk to them, they say, I want to grow my business. And this allows them to figure out how they're going to do that. Let me just share this real quick. Copy. Where's the chat? All right, so this will be view only, but you can just go to file and then make a copy. And you can use this. It's pretty relevant for most businesses. Basically, what you want to do is down here you would put in your current final revenue. So let's say that you did $500,000. And then over here you'd put your average transaction value. So let's say you didn't know that number. You could look at the total number of estimates that you closed, and then you could get your average transaction value. Then here you put in your average quotes. So let's say that you did 50 quotes and you closed 20 of them. Then your close rate is 50%, and then your lead to quote. So I got 100 leads and I booked 80 of them into jobs. That's your booking rate. So these four numbers right here will tell you how many leads that you need per month. So I can go. I'm going to do this one more time. You put your final revenue in your average transaction value. The way that you can get this is you take your total number of estimates that you close divided by your revenue, then your average close rate. I'm sure everyone here kind of know these numbers. If I asked you about your business, then your lead to quote, and then that's going to show your number of leads. Now this is the part that's cool. If you go up here and you say, okay, I want to go from 500 to 700,000, if you were to increase your average transaction value to $3,000 and you were to keep your close rate the same at 50% and your lead to quote to 80%, notice the difference in the leads per month. You actually need less leads if you just increase your average transaction value. So this will show you what you need to do to grow your business. It's not just like, oh, I want to go from 5,000 to 700,000. It's like, okay, well, you could increase your average transaction value by 500 bucks. You could close at 55%, and then you basically don't need any more leads as long as you just do this. And so you don't have to actually spend any more on marketing. You just tighten up the bucket.

Cool.

So we, we work with a lot of fractional CFOs for home service businesses, and they love this tool because it takes the I want to grow and puts it into actual numbers and then they know that I need this many leads. So how do I get these leads? And then you can go to your marketing company, just say I need to get this many leads. So. All right, I just talked a lot. So I guess Wayne, do we just open it up and like whoever wants to ask questions, is that cool with you?

Absolutely.

Okay.

Who'S got a question I can dig in on?

I can dig in on any one of those specific ones if you want, like real strategies on stuff. Yeah. Dan. Yeah, go ahead.

The automation that you're talking about, I have a form fill on my website. Right. And it's just, it just shows up as an email.

Yeah.

And then we have to do something with it. And so this, the possible scenario definitely exists that somebody hits that on a Friday and we don't react to it till Monday. What kind of automation tools are working behind the scenes to make sure that that's a text message that goes out for sure.

So knowing that you said that you're using Service Titan. So the first thing is that you can set up a form, whether it's like a type form to get dropped into your service titan call booking screen so that it hits that the automation tool, Service Titan doesn't they have Marketing Pro but it's not like a full on automation tool. For home service businesses in particular, there's three. There's Go high level which is pretty much every single person Here could use GoHighLevel. We use it at my company for home service businesses and we white label it. But it takes like an agency or someone to actually implement and use it and it's like customizable, it's the best of the options. But for someone who's going to like DIY it, there's chirp C H I I R P and then hatch H A T C H. The problem is that you have to have your forms zapped zapier into one of those platforms. Yeah. So you probably heard of those tools. So basically you set up a form and then you have a zap that goes into a chirp campaign and then also hopefully gets dropped into your service titan with your marketing channel in Service Titan. So it's all clean. Here's the big issue that a lot of businesses have, which is why I started the company, was that there's three main things that home service businesses face and probably every business, to be honest, is that they have good digital marketing out here. They need that they have CRM data happening over here and then they have automation over here and the owner is usually trying to patch all this together with cookie cutter stuff or do it all. So what my company does is we do all those three things for businesses so that it actually works together. So those are the three pillars and any business has those three needs. And usually like as a business for us, we serve like 1 to $10 million business owners because as you go past 1 million, the hustler has to die, leader has to be born. And a lot of it is like who, not how. And so we fill a lot of that. But that's my 2 cents on it. And those are the different softwares. Yeah. Is there another question? Oh yeah, Wes, with that.

How so I have a client that has salesforce and I'd love to get involved on that side of things and I definitely see that same struggle where it's like everything's separate. But how do you get them on board with it? Usually?

Yeah, with actually like putting it into their salesforce? Well, yeah, yeah.

And getting it involved besides the just like the separate marketing's over here, automations over here getting everyone because like they contact you for marketing but then they're like, ah, we've got our own CRM, we're good with how it works kind of thing.

Well, you're right, but they don't contact you for marketing. They contact you because they want to grow their business. That is really what they want. So if they want to grow their business and you know that the best way to grow their business is to be in their sales force. They think that they want Facebook ads, but they want to grow their business. Right? So like that's the whole thing that I face was like, I don't care, I don't want marketing, I want to grow my business. So it's just a symptom of it. So like for you, if you're like, hey, I know that you hire me for marketing or you. A lot of times business owners are just a driver of the actual result. When they're like going to the doctor and telling that they have cancer, right. It's like, no, like let me do my diagnosis first and tell you what you need and my recommendation would be let me use your salesforce. So I think it's actually like stepping up as the leader and like saying like, no, I'm the expert here. Here's what would be the best outcome for you to help you achieve the goal that you want, which is to actually grow your business.

And do you do you kind of work with whatever they have or do you kind of get them onto a hot go high level instead?

Yeah, good question. So I know the main players, Jobber, housecall Pro service titan from a CRM perspective. So we work, we have integrations with all of those. And then whether they use Chirp, Hatch or go high level with us, I don't care what they use. We have two automation engineers on our team that know go high level and server side and all the stuff. So we're willing to build that out. However, if they have Chirp and Hatch already built out and doing those things, like we will set up the zaps and have it flow into there and have their CSRs and everything. We're just not experts at those tools. Yeah, but we want, we know that like to reach the outcome, you got to have the stuff. So we don't, we don't want to be in like the SaaS business. We want to be in the business growth business, you know. Nice.

Thank you.

Yeah, man. Wayne. Yeah.

Yeah. So I wondered, would you do a little bit of real time, like ask a couple questions and understand what somebody's doing and see what ideas you would have to help them in one of those three buckets, Would that be?

Yeah, sure. We could do it for a, a home service business or we could just pick another one and I could do it.

Yeah. So I was looking at Scott. Scott is. You are working with Odoo, the software platform, and he's trying to. He's B2B. So it's more like. He's more like you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Looking for. That was one case study or kind of situation I was thinking of.

Yeah, for sure. So, Scott, how do you get customers coming in or leads coming in?

Yeah, so we use Google Ad, pay per click. We do, you know, referrals, word of mouth, and. And then I mean, primarily we've had two that have come in in January that were. I think one was pay per click and one was just found us on a search.

Okay.

Those are two solid leads that we're trying to build on.

Yeah. Are you creating any content for your business?

We are.

We're creating content on LinkedIn. We create blog posts on our WordPress site as well.

Okay, cool. And what, what does your software do exactly?

Yeah, so we basically pitch ourselves. Well, we've kind of done a pivot, but we pitch ourselves as, you know, kind of chaos wrangler. The one lead we got was specific to Odoo. Like they had an Odoo implementation. It kind of was a failed Odoo. I've talked to other people in the business and they've done about a third of their business that way. So they bought the tool, bought all the software. They're not using it well. So we've got another one of those actually, that's EDCC kind of does a similar thing. They don't use Odoo, but they have a software tool. They're looking at a big cliff. They got a big upgrade they have to make and they're like, is this worth it? I don't know what to do. Like, how are we, you know, like they're really struggling with that. So a lot of that is really just either they have it, they have, you know, line of business that they, their system. Like they're beholden to their systems because of what they've done.

Right.

As opposed to the other way around. So we kind of come in and help them. Like, okay, maybe you don't want to use this tool, you want to use that tool and use this process instead.

Got you. So people that use Odoo would be a good lead for you?

Yeah, absolutely.

Okay.

Underutilize, I would say, right? Like, hey, we're using this, but it sucks. I have to go in every day, you know, we get this stuff, right? I have to go in every day and reconcile these 500 things manually.

Yeah. How do we automate that? Yeah. Okay, so those four core areas, what I would recommend doing is creating as much content around Odoo and what the chaos looks like in their business. So like YouTube videos with common Odoo questions. Like, you know, you could take one of your sales calls that you had and then say, hey, pull out all the Odoo questions and then go and make a bunch of content on it for YouTube. Because usually business owners are going to YouTube to try to solve problems and then there's an expert that answers it and then it's like, oh, by the way, this is what I do. So instead of just on LinkedIn, create those tutorial type videos on YouTube for sure. Then I would create like a high value content offer white paper of Here's 10 reasons why your Odoo is a mess and how to fix it. So then it's like attracting people, you know, they come and read your blog post or whatever, but then you have something that people can download, you know what I'm saying? So then you convert them into a top of the funnel lead and you could put this, I would recommend put this thing on your Google search ads if you're running like Odoo specific things because maybe people have a specific thing, but this would be a nice, like offer as well to tie in to fill out this form and get our 10 step odoo mess fixer. That would be the content side, the paid ad side. I have to dig in a little bit. My recommendation on paid ads for anyone here is to create so much organic content that you know the best ones that would perform and then run those as ads. So the white paper works really great to run traffic to because you already know that it has so much value. And then if you create the organic content that resonates with people, then you can use that as ads as well. Yeah.

So. So to put that another way, would you say. Right. Pay per click kind of goes hand in hand with the SEO. Really? You got to figure that out to know and understand what's going to work best.

Yeah, it's hard. Yeah. I would say, like, from what I know, from what I'm hearing about your business is that probably people are going to Google and searching for questions and YouTube and asking questions, and then you're trying to show up there.

Right.

So if you were to give them something that was a quick win in there, it would buy a lot more trust with you and give you the more opportunities. But the bigger opportunity, in my opinion, is in the organic side because you don't have to keep paying and paying and paying and paying. It lives on forever and it shows you as the expert. It builds a lot more trust downstream than like super cold. So, yes, I would say that it does work. The other thing I would recommend is like the B2B partnerships is if there's. So for example, Kane and Kevin would know this. There's a service titan Facebook group, There's a Jobber Facebook group. I'm in the group and we answer questions and share stuff in there where it's like, where are all these Odoo people hanging out? And then like, go find them.

Yeah, I just, I've just gotten into the chamber of Commerce here locally, and I'm starting to talk to people and they're like, if you want to get into the acronym groups like that, like, I know people that are in construction and they do this and that local and, and online as well. So that's something that we're. We're looking at right now.

Yeah. And then I'll give you one other secret sauce that has worked tremendously for us. And this is any B2B company. I would highly recommend doing this, create a podcast, webinar YouTube series and only invite your target audience. Okay. Only invite your target audience on there. And it's a podcast or webinar YouTube channel about whatever the problem is that you solve. Okay. So for example, Scott, you might have a webinar YouTube channel series, podcast, whatever you want to call it, where every week you interview someone about their odoo struggles or whatever that looks like you're a target avatar. And then you. What I do is I have a LinkedIn automation outreach to our target audience that says, hey, Kane, I came across your LinkedIn profile. Thought you might be a great guest for our podcast. We feature home service business owners between seven and eight figures. Let me know if you'd be interested in hopping on and sharing your story. Then we get on the video and it's actually a real podcast. YouTube. Right. We're interviewing each other, but the questions that I'm asking him show that I'm the expert. Wow. Like, this guy really gets his stuff. And then it's attracting more people to watch your stuff that have these same problems.

Yeah. We were, we were thinking about like doing a Q A monthly, kind of new kind of a webinar.

Right.

Like just bring your questions and, and that. So I like that you're. You're focusing that more on how to actively use that. That's cool.

Yeah. And it takes it from sales calls to like light discovery calls through a podcast type of feel. That's like a win win for everyone because what we do is like, we cut them into shorts for Kane so then he can use them for his business. So it's like it's a win win all around. And it creates the conversation, shows you as a subject matter expert in that space. It's really good.

Nice.

So then you asked about using doing a service business. Kane's question comes from the world of your normal client.

Yeah.

Kevin Puddle average. Are you here? Can you hear us and interact?

Yeah, yeah. I actually was gonna ask a question then, so I was about to raise my hand.

Yeah. What's up?

Yeah, so this hits on a lot of levels for me. You know, of course, we're, we're right now one doing 1 million to 1.2, you know, consecutively. Consecutively over the past three years. We're six year in business and you know, we're about to hit 1.6 this year with some, with just some more personnel changes. So, but, but you know, for me, you know, I'm, I, like you said, business owner, operator, you know, and doing the sales. You know, I came from the field as well. So you know, built it up from that point. So you know, for me though, it's, it's the estimate, the estimate nurture sequence where you know, I'd like to, you know, just you know, pick your brain out a little bit and you know what some processes possibly to put in place. But you know, it's, it's, it's, it's something that, you know, the numbers are funny because it's, it's exactly how it is, you know, it's right, it's, you know, I was at 60, I'm at 45% and I'd like to get back to 52, you know, exactly. I know and I know it happens often like you said, as you get busy and it's like, well, you know, if they want to still choose us, you know, while I'm busy and you know, not selling a $15,000 job, you know, so, so that's kind of where I'm at and I, and I have several customers for the past three months. I could call back and you know, take another shot at this but you know, time is the essence for a sale and you know, once it get past a certain point, you know, it's, it's kind of lost.

So I'll give you the, the non tech way and then the automation way. So I was at a, I worked at a, one of my first clients. They were $3 million. They went to 8 million and then sold a private equity and they had a very similar situation. They went to $8 million with only one salesperson and what they did was they turn into the rehash person. So they took a CSR and said hey, when you're not on the phones you're going to be calling the estimates and if you close an estimate, we're going to give you an extra 50 bucks for every estimate that you close. So for you that's a really nice way where you don't have to be the rehash person but your CSR can be or someone else in the office.

Which is great because we actually have a part time employee that'd be a perfect opportunity that you know is capped at a certain hour work, so.

Exactly.

And they get great opportunity.

Yeah. And they make more money. They get have upside and you're creating the opportunities and you don't have to do the admin stuff and they are nice on the phone. It's like a perfect win win.

Absolutely.

So do that. The second thing is the automation piece which for anyone here, if you're nurturing any estimates don't just say like, you know, hey, did you make a decision yet? You know where, you know that's annoying. Ask them more about the pain. Like, hey, were you able to fix that hot room or cold room in your house yet? And then they're like, no, it's still on my thing. I got to take care of this thing. Like agitate the pain a little bit more. For home service businesses, it's that piece. But then also like, hey, here's a little bit about our team, here's a little bit about what we do, why we've been in business as long. Here's a customer testimonial about our service. And so what we recommend is like a 14 day sequence, like text and email back and forth. I'll give you two other secret sauce things that really crush it if you set up some type of automation first. Okay? And this, this goes to anyone here inside of your sales process, that conversion funnel. You need to add these four videos in your process. Okay, John, this probably music to your ears, man. All right, so the, so the first video is when someone fills out a form on your website, record a video that says, hey, my name is Phil, I'm the owner here. Just want to say thank you so much for reaching out to us. I can't wait to serve you. I know our team's going to be able to answer your questions and I'll see you on the call. Okay? It's a very simple way for you to get in front of the customer and say thank you. Number two, when you send the estimate, Kevin, this is what I'm kind of getting at. When you send the estimate, you could record a quick loom video explaining your estimate to them and send it over. It takes a little bit of time when you're the owner and you're trying to do this. So you could just have a one time video that you prerecord and that just says, hey, Kevin here, you know, I'm sending over this estimate to you. Here's where common questions come up. Da da da da da da da da da. And I want you to know that we're a local owned business. Like a little bit about you and where the common questions come up, it'll help you stand out. The best way is to send a loom video explanation of it. But if you can't do that, just do a one time thing. The third video is when someone actually approves your quote. There's like this sense of excitement, right? You just signed up for this thing, they signed up for it at 10pm they don't know if you got the estimate signed. So have some type of an automation that says, hey, Phil here. So excited that you just signed up to work with us. Or, you know, here's what to expect next. In the next 24, 48 hours, you're going to get that. It's really nice. And then the last video is after the invoice in your Service Titan, you can trigger this when the invoice happens, send a text message. You're usually probably already doing this for reviews or something like that, but have an email with either. Like from your customer service manager. It could be an automatic email from your customer service manager that says, hey, just checking in. Want to see how everything went when Kane was out there last week? Or hey, this is Kevin, I'm the owner. Just want to say thank you. We are a local business and the number one way that we grow our business is through word of mouth and referrals and we'd love the opportunity to serve any neighbors or friends that you might know. Those are the four videos. So inside of your actual nurture sequence, you can implement those things. The crux of it though is that with Service Titan, you're not using. Are you using Marketing Pro or.

No, we have it available. We are going to be.

Okay. So you can set. Yeah, so you can set all this up in Marketing Pro based off of the specific. Like if it's a ductless system, you know, ductless estimate, send like this and you can go to different routes if you don't have Marketing Pro. Cause it's like, you know, 1500, $2,000 a month, it could be expensive. You can, you can integrate this with like a chirp hatch, go high level or some other tool to also do this stuff.

Gotcha. Yeah, yeah. Good stuff, man. Very helpful. Thank you.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. It's a huge opportunity and like exactly where you're at is the exact issue that everyone runs into. So it's not just you, man. Like everyone has that. Cool.

I had a question.

Yeah.

So I've been doing pretty good amount of LinkedIn posting over the past year or so and seem to be growing the following pretty well. Any recommendations on how to take that? And because I haven't really been doing much on the email side. Any recommendations there? Is that something I could reuse or. And also we have a podcast too, by the way. But any, any recommendations there? Like reusing some of that content?

Yeah. So what we do in our. In a newsletter, this goes for every single person here. Okay. Home service is a little bit different, but it's still the same thing. When you send out an email, you should use your greatest hits from the month. So basically you take your greatest, your best post on LinkedIn, your a review that you got from someone in the local area, your best performing blog post or video, whatever, and then maybe like a quick, you know, words. But it doesn't need to be a whole monologue about things. It's just like a curation of your greatest hits that month. And then that could be your email newsletter that goes out and if it ties to like those monthly themes that I was mentioning, that works even better because then it's all curated and it looks nice. But Neil Patel did a study on this, he's like a big SEO guy that the average email that gets the best interactions is between 149 words and 250 words. Something like that. Basically you don't want to write this long thing. You need to give it like a quick hitters. So that's one way Andy. The other thing that we've been doing is that high value content offer, the 11 Ways to Get more customers for your home service business, which is what we made in our pinned comment on LinkedIn. We say connect and comment playbook and we'll send you this high value content offer and then we send it to them and they download it and they give us their email to download it. So if you are posting a lot of content, it's okay to have a call to action in there. I'm sure you've seen this on LinkedIn where people say comment this thing, send them this thing. If you're doing that, it's a nice way to just like give them some next step to get onto your email list because as everyone here knows, they can make an algorithm change tomorrow and then all your people are gone and you need to own your customer data and that customer data is literally gold.

Yeah.

Cool.

Thanks for those tips.

Yeah, you're welcome.

Who else? Questions?

Oh yeah, I have a question. So when it comes to like, I think what you said is very true for all of us. Like referrals are definitely my number one form of like business. And I was intrigued by, you know, what's the plan to get more referrals And I like the idea of an offer. So like, what were some of your ideas for like formulating the offer? Because I'm sure that it helps to sweeten the deal. But then you don't want to leave, you know, you don't want to give too much Away either. So I was just curious what. What's the balance you try to strike there?

Yeah, for sure. I'll share the home service side, and then I'll share the B2B side, which is like, what we run. So at the home service businesses, this is what we did. We were. There's a 1.5 million part of our business. So I would go out to H Vac contractors like Kane and Kevin and say, hey, do you guys do duct cleaning? Yeah, we don't really want to do it. We're doing installs. You know that it's like they don't want to do this service, but they. They know that they should refer us. So the. The most important thing here is that you need to figure out what's in it for them. So you need to figure you're not the hero. They're the hero that has a problem, and you're the guy that's going to solve that problem for them. So basically, what we would talk to H VAC contractors is that we would say, hey, do y' all do duct cleaning? Yeah. No. Maybe not. Okay, well, what if you. Someone calls you and they want duct cleaning, what do you tell them? We tell them, no, we go call someone else, because we don't do that. Well, you could have got a service contract out of that client. You could have got them into your database as a lead. And what if you could outsource the service to us and we would do that service for you and you would get money for that service so it allows you to secure the client, make a little bit more money. And then the kicker on top of this is every single H Vac technician usually gets paid some type of commission or something if they sell a membership or whatever else. So what if we were to give them a kickback? If they refer a duck cleaning to us, we'll give them 50 bucks as well so they can make more money and you don't even have to do anything and you secure the customer. So basically, we had a pitch for what was in it for them. And then this is the most important piece to this. Instead of just talking to Kane and Kevin and saying, hey, guys, like, we have this program, blah, blah, we would say, let me come in on Tuesday to your technician meeting. I'll bring donuts, and I'll walk everyone through this presentation, and I'll bring these little QR code business cards where all they have to do is just scan this QR code and they can submit a referral to us, and we'll get them Paid. And then we would go into Tuesday morning, bring donuts, answer questions about duct cleaning, pass out a bunch of these things, and then basically like get all of their technicians as our salespeople. That's what we did at for home service. And if, if anyone owns a home service business, it still works if you're H vac, plumbing, electricians, all these people that can refer your business. Okay, in my business, for B2B, we know that fractional CFOs for home service businesses love us because we use all the data and we use that legal calculator, like what I showed you guys, to actually do the numbers. So what we did was we built a giveaway to fractional CFOs, which is like a little scorecard for them that they can use with their clients when they say, I want to grow my business, they can use that lead goal calculator to figure out how many more leads they need and what their budget needs to be for marketing. So then we give this to them and we do the same exact LinkedIn outreach program, which is like, hey, we partner with CFOs and we have this link, this scorecard thing. We want you to come on our podcast and talk about your business and we start building this relationship with them and then they will defer us business. Now, the big piece, John, is what is the incentive that we give back to them? A lot of times people don't want to give like a monthly reoccurring part or something like that. So, like, what we do is we know that our customer acquisition cost is around $1,000 to get a new customer for my business. So instead of paying the Google gods, I'd rather pay a cfo, fractional cfo, a thousand dollars. So we give them a thousand dollars. If they refer us a client, we'll send them a check for a thousand dollars. And then I'll give you all another secret sauce on this. Every single person here has given someone their business card and they're like, yeah, man, I'm going to refer you for sure. And you never hear from them, right? That happens all the time. So what you need to do is take those business cards and put them into your email newsletter because you need to stay top of mind. So, like, what we do for home service businesses is we have one for residential email and one for B2B partner emails. And it's basically like, hey, Kane, right now, while you're out doing your fall tune ups, make sure that you think about duck cleaning. And if you have a referral for us you can go right here and, you know, send us a duck cleaning. It's another way to just stay top of mind with your referral partners to send you leads. So you don't want to just like do a one and done type of relationship. Right? Like, we want to build a long term relationship so we have to be the ones that's the catalyst for these relationships. You get what I'm saying?

Yeah, that's really helpful. No, I appreciate that. I especially like the kind of coming to an understanding of what's the cost of acquiring a customer and using that as basically the cost of the offer, you know, because as you say, like, I would rather pay someone that amount and then instead of paying Google and not knowing what you might get.

Yeah, exactly. And you don't want to be like, you want to make it good enough that like, oh, I just got a thousand dollars from these people, like, wow, okay, great, right? Like, if I was to tell you, hey, I'm gonna give you 10 customers, you know, every week and, and you have to pay me a thousand dollars, you'd be like, yeah, sign me up, you know, whatever those numbers are. So it's like, it makes sense, but it still sounds like a lot of money. But it's not a lot of money if you're getting customers out of it.

We probably got time for one more Kia Lucas, maybe.

Jamie, I have a question.

So you mentioned early about AI search. We produce fresh content for our website and blogs. Lots of social adding FAQs, like, what are your tips for adjusting, you know, from traditional additional SEO for AI search. Yeah, this is the perfect cap on this because this is like literally what I've been doing webinars on for the past three months. So I had Neil Patel, the guy that I mentioned from SEO on my podcast, and I interviewed him about AI search. And I have Marcus Sheridan, who wrote this book, they ask, you answer on my podcast twice about AI search. So here's the thing. AI search is built on large language models. Large language models are trained on content. So what's that been said already out in the world is in these language models. However, as businesses, we have the opportunity to educate large language models on our business. As a subject matter expert, the average Google search has four words. H Vac, repair, near me or whatever that is. Very simple search. The average AI search has 347 words. Y' all know you're asking a lot more questions when you use ChatGPT to try to distill down the answer that you want. So as a business Holistically, the number one thing we can do is educate these platforms with all the information, so that way they recommend us as the expert and the unique person to serve these clients. That's like the thing that's happening right now in the next one to two years. SEMrush is a big SEO platform. They said by 2028, AI search is going to overtake traditional search. The real caveat to this is what's called AI avatars, which this is something that we're building for our home service clients in quarter one is we're taking all of the content that they have and building an AI avatar. We already have one for me, for all the content that I've created. But imagine a place where all the content that you've created lives in a hub that anyone on your team can ask it a question and it gets the answer back and it pinpoints exactly where this came from so they can go and watch that information. But also imagine like your salesperson can ask this thing the question, but the bigger thing is imagine on your website there's something that's trained on all your stuff, in your sales process, trained on all your stuff, and with your marketing company trained on all of your stuff. This is why we're building it. So that way we have all this information. So the AI avatar play, in my opinion, people that are not creating content, it's not for likes and shares and customers and all that, like, that's nice. But it's really to have all the information so that way you have an AI avatar when this really goes live. There's a tool out there called NotebookLM from Google, which is a free tool where you can upload content and create almost like a mini AI avatar for yourself. We have one at my business, we use a tool called Delphi D E L P H I AI where it automatically syncs all the content that I make into one place that anyone can ask it any question on my team and it's going to cite the source for them to go and watch or read this information. So that's my $0.02 on AI search. It's something that's very important. We have clients that get, you know, leads on AI search and all that kind of stuff. But it's really like, how are we future proofing our business? Specifically when we look at home service landscape, still around 80% of people go to Google when they need a H vac repair or something like that. It's not like they're going specifically there, but what is changing? I'll give you one other thing on this, y' all have probably seen this. If you use Google, there's these AI overviews. This is. This. This literally crushes for all of our clients. Your client, Your. Your customers are asking questions on the phone. Just like what I was telling you before, they're asking the questions on the phone. If you take those questions and transcripts and turn them into blog posts on your website, they're not just asking them on the phone, they're also asking them to Google. So those AI overviews are going to be built off the real questions your customers are asking. This is like the whole flywheel thing that I'm talking about. Great question. I should have talked more about that. Thank you.

Lucas.

I didn't really have any questions.

I just got a lot of action items. I really did like how you gave some real examples of some of these type like examples like this is how you word that or say that or do that. But I definitely have some action items, so I appreciate it.

Yeah, man, for sure. Happy to be a resource. I'm glad it was helpful.

Jamie, anything take us out?

No, Same as Lucas.

I have tons of notes here.

I appreciate your time and willingness to share your insights.

Yeah, man. Thank you.

All right. Awesome. Phil, this is great. Well, what do you like a round of applause? But we won't clap in our.

Thank you. Appreciate you guys.

Really good stuff. Phil, appreciate you coming and spending time with us.

Yeah, for sure. Kane and Kevin, if y' all want to have a meeting or something, I can walk you through our stuff. Happy to be a resource either way. And for everyone else, like I usually hang out on LinkedIn, so feel free to shoot a message over there if you have questions with things.

How can we help you? How can we help you?

We work with 1 to 10 million dollar home service businesses. Like that's our bread and butter. So if anyone knows any of those people, then that's a great referral for us also. Yeah, just like connect on LinkedIn, I'm all about like give the recipe, sell the cooking. So whatever I can do to help you guys, I'm all good for it.