Phil Risher reviews Jobber's Q2 home service economic report and translates its findings into actionable digital marketing recommendations for home-service businesses (landscaping, HVAC, plumbing, cleaning, construction). He highlights five main findings: (1) steady but cautiously growing economy with early-quarter softness followed by a bounce-back, (2) homeowners spending selectively favoring lower-ticket, recurring services, (3) seasonal lift muted by early-quarter declines, (4) digital tools reshaping customer expectations (notably rising digital payments and online scheduling), and (5) (implied) the need to adapt marketing mix toward repair/recurring work and to implement CRM/payment/website tools. The video uses Jobber's aggregated data (≈300,000 professionals) and client case studies to support recommendations like shifting ad spend to repair leads, retargeting for off-season offerings, and adding estimate calculators and online scheduling on websites.
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Every quarter, Jobber puts out this home service economic report. And for quarter two, this one just came out. And in this video, I'm going to break down a couple of the things that stuck out to me and what you should be doing from a digital marketing perspective to support their findings. Now, jobber works with 300,000, I think they said, different professionals across industries like landscaping, H VAC and plumbing and cleaning, they have all this data at their fingertips. So they can see if new work is up, if median revenue is down, and they can put together a picture of what's actually going on in the home service space. Which is why I like this report a lot, because it takes the gut feeling out of it and at least gives you, hey, okay, this is what's going on. If I'm not doing this, if I'm slow right now and I'm not busy now, then it could be. It's not just me, it could be other people, too, which is why I like this. So overall, they put together, like, these five things, and basically this is what I want to go through. So the first thing is steady economy, but growth remains cautious. So what they found in their data here was that overall for. And they break it down by different segments. For most companies, they were down in the first two or three in the first two or three months. So, like the first quarter, but now they're bouncing back. So you can see, like, new work schedule. For green landscaping companies, average invoice, similar. Median revenue was kind of down, but now it's bouncing back up. The cleaning industry, not much there, but contracting, same thing. You could see like a big swing and then they kind of bouncing back. And then same thing with the average invoice. Contracting is going to be like H vac, contractor, electrical, plumbing, same thing with average invoice. This was up, but you can see it took a big hit in February, March, and now it's bouncing back over what it was last year, which is good. See, and then construction, remodel, that kind of stuff, same thing down, kind of got crushed a little bit, but now it's bouncing back up. So overall, what this means for me is the first three months, if you felt like, oh, my gosh, this is crazy, and we're way down and you're not seeing a tick back up over the last three months, then something would be wrong. Because overall, what this says is the first three months, okay, everyone was kind of down and they kind of felt that way, but now people are bouncing back. So if you are not making that bounce back, then I would say you need to start looking at what you're doing from a marketing perspective or sales perspective to get that bounce back. Because overall, 300,000 people, that's what they're seeing from their data. The second thing that they found here is that homeowners are put in spending selectively. Now, people would say this happens all the time, but I think that there's a threshold that happens where people are more willing to spend on bigger ticket items when they have more money in the pocket. And everyone would agree with that. What they're finding is that lower ticket projects, often more frequent, benefiting businesses with reoccurring service models and strong client relationships. Basically what I imagine that they do is they can see, okay, Phil got three different estimates, a high ticket one and a low ticket one. And you know, a certain percent of time he went to the lower ones. So that's going to trigger us to say that the lower ticket projects are often more frequent. How can you use this from a digital marketing perspective? So let's say that you do H Vac contractor, you could be running ads, Google Ads, Facebook ads, whatever, Yelp ads, whatever. And you could be focused on getting new installs because we all want the big ticket jobs, 10, $20,000 jobs. However, in the economy that we have right now, if you're not pulling that back and focusing on just repair opportunities, then you could be missing out on people because they're on Google searching for repairs to try to figure out if they can maintain it first before moving directly to the install opportunity. So we, the H Vac contractor, this was the exact same thing. They were running install, install, install only for their Google Ads. And they're spending like three or $4,000. And they weren't seeing the return on ad spend because the cost per lead was so high. Because those leads, they were a lot of times just tire kickers or there were people that were just price dropping other estimates that they got. So we switched it, we said, okay, let's focus only on emergency repairs or repairs and maintenance. And the next month they went to a 4x return and then they went to a 7x return on that $3,000. Because now they had opportunities going in the door for repairs and then they could either repair it or sell an upgrade on top of it. Same thing if you do roofing or any other big ticket jobs at this point, you can still focus on the big ticket jobs, but maybe also have a blend so that you're focusing on the four ticket jobs and get in and build the estimates on Top. I actually have a podcast episode coming out with Jobber about that exact thing where you don't want to just go and run $200 jobs. You want $200 jobs to turn into $2,000 jobs and making sure that you're getting more bigger ticket estimates on the lower jobs that you need to get big opportunity for most businesses next. We talked a little about the seasonal lift muted by early quarter softness. So you were down 10%. Now you're up 10%. So you're relatively flat for revenue. And they saw this inside of their data. And I would say for the companies that we work with, it was relatively similar. What companies are doing now, from the conversations that we're having, is they're really trying to plan for 20, 26 quarter one. What are we going to do to stay out in front of it? And some of the things that I would recommend is to make sure that you have your retargeting dialed in. So what this means is in Q1, let's say you do lawn care. Well, what the heck are you going to offer these people in Q1? What is it? Is it going to be gutter cleaning? Is it going to be something else? Or are you just going to say, hey, we're going to have three months where we don't make any money? Which is fine, but you need to come up with that now. And then you have to have a game plan from a marketing perspective to roll that out. So for a lot of companies, we a client that does sprinklers and then they did Christmas lights in the wintertime and then they didn't have anything to fill that first quarter and they were in Texas. So we said, okay, well, what about gutter cleaning? Do you do that? Yes, we do. Okay, it might not be prime time to do gutter cleaning, but when you take down the Christmas lights, let's have a gutter cleaning campaign and an opportunity for people removing the Christmas lights and to then say, hey, have you had your gutters clean before? We actually have a promo. If you get Christmas lights, then we'll give you 20% off your gutter cleaning and we can schedule it for the next three months. What's a good day to do it? What I'm getting at is that you have to have a game plan for making sure that next year Q1, you don't have that soft Q1, you're ready to roll with whatever you're going to be doing. Last they found on here was digital tools are reshaping expectations. So digital payments now account in this report is 49% up from quarter one was 47%. And what does this mean from a digital perspective? Obviously we know, you know, you should be taking credit cards and putting them into your system and charging them. Whether it's Jobber or some other CRM like no one is wants to write down their credit card information and give it to you and then you charge it after the fact, which people still do that. But I think what they're getting at is getting less friction than that even. And this is what I used to do. I was at a home service business doing $3 million and this was 2018. What they did was they went out and did the job, but they did a manual invoice in QuickBooks and sent out the invoice instead of tying it all together with their CRM, which that's really what people want. They want it to be streamlined digital payment all the way through. So if you don't have that all clean, then you should look at a CRM that's going to put all that stuff together and make it all seamless for you. The other big piece of these digital tools that I would highly recommend is having tools on your website. One could be online scheduling. People love online scheduling to having an estimate calculator on your website. So if you do a service like gutter cleaning for example, or pressure washing or even electrician, you can come up with some type of a standard price. So that way if someone says, okay, let's just take electrician, because that one I'm sure people will give me pushback on. Let's say it's an EV charger. Well, yeah, an EV charger could be 500, it could be $1500. It could be more than that depending on permits and all stuff that we need. I get it. We built this for electrical contractor and basically we said it's going to be anywhere from 500 to $1,500 plus depending on permits. Can you send us a picture of your panel and where you want the electrical, the EV charger to go? Now you basically give them an. It's not to be $20,000, but it's not going to be 150. It's going to be around this range. But if you give us some more information, we can give you a more exact price. That's all people want. They want to get the ball moving forward in the problem that they have so that they can solve it. And an estimate calculator helps them initially move that ball forward right away because they don't have to fill out a contact form and wait to give you the information. They can give you a little information. You give them a little information and ask for a little bit more and you're slowly inching the ball forward, which helps you convert more customers. So that's this is a basic overview from this report. I hope this was helpful. Curious to get your thoughts on what you're seeing in your business? Drop a comment below and I'll see you in the next video.
