I Grew a Business to $3,000,000 in 12 Months to Show It's Not Luck

One of our partner companies went from stuck to $3 million per year in 12 months. And in this video I'm going to walk through the exact sales and marketing tactics that we used so that you can take them and apply them to your business as well. One of the newer H Vac companies that we work with was stuck at $125,000 per month, month over month and have plateaued there for three years. On this graph is their actual CRM revenue. And you can see year after year they were stuck around 1.5 million. And then this last year they jumped up to $3 million using these sales and marketing tactics. So let's start with marketing. What we had in this business was a typical home service business. Going out on service calls, doing repairs, selling equipment, selling service contracts. They had no real plan of how they were going to grow their business. On top of that, they were in a very saturated market with $100 million H VAC Contractors down the street from them. They felt stuck and defeated and they didn't know what to do. Alright, so I'm going to give you the current state of what this business was. Before working with us, they were getting 385 new customers in the door that generated $585,000 in revenue for an average revenue per customer of $1,519 before we made any changes. The real problem was that they weren't optimized on their new customer lead channels and they also had no visibility into what was actually working or not. So the first lead channel that we focused on optimizing was their Google business profile. Before working with us, their Google business profile accounted for $63,000 in new customer revenue. They were never being shown because of those big competitors in the market and they had no strategy. Here are five things we did to fix this. Number one, we established a review game plan. This helped them take their reviews from 208 to 455 reviews in 12 months. We did this in three ways. First, we set up automations so that after a customer job they got a text message and an email asking for a review. The second thing we did was set up an incentive for their technicians. Every time the technician got a review that said their name in it, they would get $10. And the third thing that we did was we set up a technician scorecard so that the technicians could rank themselves against each other to see how they were performing from a review perspective. This helped them take their reviews from 208 to 455 reviews in 12 months. Number two, we optimize their Google business profile. There's a lot of things that you can do here, but the big thing that we did for them was we focused on the niche services that they offer. A lot of times in the H Vac space, people just put H Vac contractor as their main category. What we did for them was in the hot seasons, like summer and spring, we changed their main category to air conditioning contractor to get more niche searches. And in the fall and winter months, we change it to heating contractors so we could get those niche searches as well. This allowed them to be shown outside of the H Vac contractor main category and get more visibility for their business. Number three, we created service area pages. Service area pages are specific landing pages that are designed for cities that you serve. So what we did was we audited the landscape around them and we said, hey, where are the opportunities inside of different cities that we want to target? So, for example, if this company is located outside of Washington D.C. so we targeted other suburbs and cities around them and we built service area pages targeting those cities, making sure their title tag, meta description and H1s all match for local SEO, which then allowed them to rank for these specific keywords. Number four, we created pillar pages. What we did with pillar pages would be took all the services that they offer and we created content that was optimized for local SEO for all the services. These are things like Duck list, H Vac, iaq, indoor air quality, all the different products that they offer, humidifiers, eye waves, also other services that they might offer that they don't necessarily talk about all the time. We created these pillar pages so that way they can be shown up more on Google search engine results page, which then will get them more traffic to their website and convert into leads. And the fifth thing that we did was we create localized blog posts. You can create generic blog posts that's going to get traffic from all over the world, but what you really want to focus on is local blog content. This would sound like, here are five things to do to keep your heating system running in the winter in insert your service area. Localized blog content is huge and a lot of people miss out on this and they get traffic from all over the world, which is not the real traffic that they want. Implementing these strategies took their Google Business Profile new customer revenue from $63,000 to $254,000 in new customer revenue, which is 3x the amount of revenue generated just from their Google Business Profile. The next lead channel that we optimized was their Yelp account Now, I know some people don't like Yelp. They were spending money on Yelp, but they were not seeing any results. In 2023, Yelp accounted for $9,000 in revenue, and they were spending $500 a month. Basically, they weren't even barely breaking even on their spend, which we know is just a loss. So we did these three things to optimize their Yelp, to make sure that they actually have a good return on ad spend. Number one, we set up tracking. We set up a tracking phone number, we set up a landing page for their Yelp accounts, and we set up in to make sure that they have a marketing channel for Yelp. This allowed us to be able to accurately say, is this coming from Yelp or not? Number two, we set up a messaging game plan. We created templated scripts for their CSRs to use in the Yelp messages, which would help them get customers engaged. But then also we layered in a Yelp special inside of that messaging. So then when people call or contact, even if it's not on the Yelp platform, they still say, hey, I heard about you on Yelp. And the only way they would know is, is if they got this Yelp message with this custom offer from Yelp. Number three, we built out projects on their Yelp account, where we highlighted before and after services that they offered with their before and after pictures telling the story of what they did. The results of optimizing Yelp was they went from $9,000 in revenue to $112,000 in revenue for a 10x growth in revenue. They also took their spend from $500 a month to $1,500 a month because they were seeing such great results. The third lead source that we optimized was their Google search ads. Google search ads can be a black hole for most businesses. They throw money at the Google gods and hopefully they get some leads they don't have any visibility into if it's actually working. They also don't know if they should be increasing their budget or decreasing their budget. This company was in the same boat. Before working with us. They were spending $500 a month on Google Ads, which generated $11,000 in new customer revenue. Here are the three things that we did to fix this. Number one, we set up a landing page. That way, the traffic from Google Ads is going to a singular landing page. Number two, on that landing page, we created custom forms and custom tracking numbers. That way, anytime someone turns into a lead on that landing page, we can attribute it all the way back to Google Ads. And number three, we manage it all the way through to return on ad spend. It's great to get leads, but we want to go into the CRM and we want to pull out the data and say we spent this much money, we got this many leads that attributed to this much return on ad spend with this much revenue. And then we go all the way back to the beginning and we say, is this working, Is it not? What do we need to tweak? What keywords are working, what are not optimizing? Their Google search ads took them from $11,000 in revenue to $86,000 in revenue. They also increased their budget from $500 a month to $1,500 a month because they were getting such great results. That's a result of 8x growth just from Google search ads, only for new customers. And finally we had to fix their missed calls. They were missing a lot of calls after hours and on the weekends. So what we did was we implemented an AI answering service. Before they were missing a bunch of calls. So they had zero dollars that was attributed to any type of AI answering service. After they generated $53,000 just from their AI answering service, which would also answer the calls and book the calls into their CRM for them. And by the way, if you're a business owner doing over a million dollars in revenue and you feel stuck and these strategies are helping you out, we actually do free marketing audits to see if we can help you get unstuck and grow your business. You can go to flash consulting.com you set up a free marketing audit there. Worst case, we give you some free takeaways to help you grow your business. Best case, we work together and we help you grow your business and get unstuck. So those four channels that I just outlined attributed to $715,000 of new customer growth. After working with us, here's how it breaks down. For new customers, we took them from 385 new customers to 581 new customers for an increase of 51% growth. For revenue from those customers, we went from $585,000 to $1.3 million in revenue. For revenue per customer, we went from $1,519 to $2,237 in new revenue. The next thing we did was focus on increasing their estimate count and closing more sales through their funnel. Before they sent 275 estimates per year and closed at 46%, we first focus on increasing their estimate count. One way we did this was cross selling in their email newsletters. This sounds like right now is the best time to get Douglas H Vac system if you have a hot room in your house. Or did you know you can get endless water using a tankless water heater. Basically, we started creating demand inside of their email newsletters so that way people would be asking about the other things that they sold so that we could increase the estimate count when they were in the home or on the phones with their customers. Number two, we encourage them to pivot to a technician estimate process. What this means is when the technician goes into the home, they should be giving estimates on everything, not just whatever they're there to fix. They should be going through and doing a diagnosis of the hot water heater of hot and cold rooms in their house and offering estimates up. What this allowed them to do is create a lot more estimates inside of the home while also sending people emails letting them know, hey, we do offer these services so they're already educated when you come into the home. This resulted in 450 estimates for an increase of 52% in estimate count. Now, just because we generated estimates, we don't want to let our closing rate slip. So we need to make sure that we have a strategy to close on these estimates. So let's walk through what that strategy looks like. We implemented a 21 day follow up sequence on all their estimates where we shared about the company, answered frequently asked questions, shared testimonials and case studies, and before and after pictures of customers just like them who who got this exact process done and the outcome that resulted in it. This was a 21 day process that resulted in an increase in their close rate. The results of implementing this follow up sequence took them from 46% before to 58% after for an increase of 12% close rate. Now 46% is really good. Usually 40, 50% is a good close rate. But increasing it to 58% showed that not just increasing the estimate count but also increasing the close rate is going to help them grow their business. Finally, we focused on inviting their past prospects and customers to come back in and use us again using email newsletters. Before working with us, they had sent out no emails to their database. Literally zero. We use this seven part framework to structure our email newsletters. Number one, use a subject line tester. Subject line testers will allow you to test different subject lines to make sure that you're going to get the best open rate for your email that you send out. Number two, in the email you have a main header with your call to actions, something that says Call now schedule service right at the top below the logo. Number three, we share a blog post that we've written cross selling a service, whatever the topic is of that month that would then highlight that specific service or product to get them interested in whatever this is. Number four, we created a graphic that we use for social media that was a frequently asked question about this product or service. That way whatever that question is that they're asking, they got the immediate answer right inside of the email. Number five, we then inserted a call to action to get more information about that specific product or service. Number six, we added a customer testimonial about that product or service that was a real customer sharing their before and after transformation of using this product or service. And number seven was a closing footer with call to actions for Call now Schedule service. What were the results of implementing an email newsletter? Before they had zero emails going out. Now they had 12 going out every single month to their 6,632 people in their database. They got a 43% open rate, a 1.8% click through rate on those emails and it generated $263,000 for their business, all in new revenue because they weren't sending emails before. The main focus of this stage for retargeting is that you can't get lifetime value without the lifetime relationship. You need to be adding value, cross selling services and building the relationship to be the go to company for your business. So we got creative with this business because that's the fun part of what we do. And we created a unique custom offer instead of going through it in this video because it's more high level strategy, we made this video about custom offers and if that one's not out yet, check this one out.