I Tried 100 Strategies..These 7 Playbooks Are the Only Ones That Worked

Most people think the only way to grow a home service business is run more ads. I did too. My home service business was stuck at $3 million until I discovered these seven playbooks. And after implementing them, we grew to $5 million and sold. In this video, I'm breaking down the exact Playbooks that made that possible. The first section we're going to talk about is new customers. There's three Playbooks and new customers that you need to master to grow your home service business. First is organic strategy. What is organic strategy? And this is going to be free Things that you can post online that people find you and they decide to work with you. And there's three main ones for home service businesses. Off site SEO, on site SEO, and social media content. I'm going to walk you through each one of these. So let's go to Google for off site SEO. Let's say someone searches for H Vac repair near me. Once you get through all the ads, then you have what's called off site SEO. This is your Google business profile. So someone searches online, they find you here. There are three main things that you can do to be shown here. First, make sure that your name of your business mentions the service that you offer. So if you notice in all these they mention heating and air, heating and air or air. The second thing is make sure that you're actually located in a geographical area that you're searching in. So all these are in Frederick, Maryland. So for example, if you are in a suburb and you want to rank in the main area, but your business is not located in the main area, well, then you're never going to be shown because there's the three things that it looks at is the name, the location and the number of reviews. So looking at this, let's say that your name does mention heating and air and you are in Frederick, Maryland, but you don't have 1,500 reviews. You don't have 829, you don't have 376. You have a hundred. Well, that's probably why you're not being shown here for off site SEO. But this is free. Offsite SEO is free. You can set up Google Biz profile, get reviews, make sure that you meet those qualifications, that this is from Google Support document and make sure that you're shown here. The second thing for organic strategy is called on site SEO. And again, this is free. You don't pay for this. You're positioning your business to be shown for search engine optimization so that Google knows that you do this service in this area, how this looks. So this is off site SEO. Keep scrolling down. This is called on site SEO. And what you can do for on site SEO is you can set up your pages and to be optimized. So you are shown here. Now this is just not a silver bullet. You're going to set these pages up and be shown, but this is how you do on site SEO. So let's just pull up this business, for example, and we're going to show a real life page of being optimized for local SEO. So what you want to do on this page is you want to make sure that your title tag. Let me pull myself over here. Okay. You want to make sure that your title tag mentions the service area. Also the meta description mentions the service area and the H1, it's the big three title tag meta description, H1. So what you can do is create what are called service area pages, which are pages all around you. Basically creating a web around your, a map around your business, a web for all the different cities that you want to serve as well as the different services that you offer. So H Vac AC services in Frederick, Maryland. Heating services in Frederick, Maryland. Plumbing in Frederick, Maryland. Electric EV charger installation in Frederick, Maryland. I think you get the point. You basically build out these service area pages for local on site SEO. Now the last one here is social content and this one is big because a lot of people right now feel like, oh, I'm just going to post on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok and I'm going to get customers coming in or I'm just going to get likes and who cares about likes because I want customers. Okay, I get that. However, again, social media is free to post content and build brand. But even more important, it's training large language models for AI search. AI search, ChatGPT Google AI is trained on content. So the number one thing you can do is feed it free content for your business. So that way it recommends you. It's another organic strategy is AI search. But you have to build out all the content for it to flow into AI search. So what type of content should you be creating for social? Well, the good thing for you is that Google actually tells us what they want to see. Because about three to four months ago, Google actually started pulling in short form video. They started pulling in short form video into their search engine results page. So when you go to short video, so do the search. You have all this, your normal search and results page, but you can go to short videos. When you go to short videos it's going to show you Facebook, Instagram, basically TikTok. All you got to do is watch this content and see what are these people talking about or making and then make content like this because clearly it's ranking for some reason. Now you don't want to watch these. You don't have these set up. I'm going to give you the gist of what you need to talk about. There's a really good book on this called they Ask youk Answer by Marcus Sheridan. But it's going to be how should things cost this versus that comparison? Should I get this done or that done? What's the best of like rank these things in the top 10 also reviews. Hey, this new product just came out. Let me review this as well. And comparisons. There's a bunch of different content, but that's the gist of the content that you want to be creating. You can also interview your technicians, interview your team. You could go on and on for social content. But this is the organic strategy that most businesses and they might get Google reviews, they might have their off site SEO, Google Biz profile fine tuned. They might be doing on site SEO by building out service area pages, but they're not doing social content which again these are all free things that organically would get you customers coming in the door that you need to be firing on all cylinders. The second thing to new customers is paid ads. So you create free things, then you create paid ads. Paid ads with return on ad spend. Tracking very important. And this is the hierarchy that we recommend. This is based off the interest graph. The interest graph means people are at the bottom, they have high intent and they are looking for H Vac repair. Where do they go? They go to Google if the 87% of people are going to Google. So you want to make sure that you are positioned on Google with your ads so that way they find you. And this is what we recommend. Google Local Service ads, Google search ads and Yelp in that structure. And the reason is if we go back to this search. Let's go all the way to the top here. Let me zoom up, scroll up. All right, so we have Google Local Service ads. Google Local Service ads are free to set up. You just pay per lead. So what that means someone calls this, then call, clicks this button to call, you turn into a lead. Now of course you have to have reviews, you have to have be doing all the stuff. You know. You have to have the right name, you have to have it set up, you have to wrap the right targeting. But you could Set this up yourself or have someone else set it up for you and manage it. At the end of the day, it's pay per lead. So you might not get any leads. You might get leads coming through. But this is the first place that I would max out. Like we have a client that's spending $20,000 per month on Google LSAs and they're getting a bunch of leads from it. Their cost per lead is like 50, 60 bucks because they're dominating in their area for ads. Google local service ads in particular. That's how you recommend start here. Because you only pay when you get a lead that comes in the door. And they're usually warm leads because the first spot that people see on the number one place you will go. The second thing is Google search ads. Now this can be a black hole if you don't have return on ad spend tracking, which is why I qualified it and say paid ads return on ad spend tracking. What you want to do here is you want to set up keywords, have them go to a landing page on your website. That landing page needs to have a custom tracking form and a phone number so you can track return on ad spend. We made a bunch of content on this. But effectively you don't want to just spend $2,000 and pray the Google gods and have a gut feeling that you're growing. You need to track it so that you spent $2,000 and you got 20 leads and you made $20,000. So let's do more of that. If you don't have that data, you're just gambling and don't want to gamble with your marketing spend or your strategies to grow. Which is why this is one of the playbooks you have to master is paid ads. You have to know, if I put this money in, I get this much money out every single month. You got to dial this in to grow your business. And then the Last1, Google LSA, Google Search Ads is Yelp. I know. I used to work at a home service business. Yelp is a scam. They're annoying. They're calling me all the time. Leave me alone. I get it. They, they, they hide my reviews. I get it. Trust me. However, if you notice here, before all of the organic on site SEO rankings, Yelp is listed above it. So what that means is that people go here, they might not click on ads, they might look here. Then where they go right here, they click on the first organic listing. Because this is just how some people are programmed, especially older people didn't have all these bells and whistles before they just scroll right here and click on the first thing that they see. And the first thing that they see is Yelp. They go to Yelp and then they get fed Yelp ads. They have no idea they end up on Yelp. This is why I believe that Yelp ads is a big opportunity for people. We had a client that was spending $9,000 per month on Yelp, generating $117,000 from Yelp because they had a good system. Again, this is why. This is a whole playbook that you need to figure out in your business. So because this is one of those levers, you do the organic stuff, you do the free stuff, right? You get the paid ads dialed in. So that way it's working, right? Then the next one is warm B2B outreach, getting warm referrals coming into your business. What if you could meet the people before they went to Google, before they went to do their research online, and they could get a referral coming into your business from a complimentary service. This is why we talk about building affiliate partners. Whether that's through. You do roofing, find a gutter cleaning company that can refer you business. You do duct cleaning, find an H vac contractor that can refer you business. You do H Vac, find a plumber that can refer you business. You need to build out these affiliate partners. The way that we do it, we build a list of referral partners and let's say that we're working with a H vac contractor. We'll say, okay, who do you want to work with? And we already know. Electricians, plumbers, property managers, fill in the blank. Everyone, basically. But let's just pick one electrician. So we go to our list builder, we say, build a list of 150 electricians in a 10 mile radius. Get that list. Then we send a cold email out in the subject line, says partnership. Then in the body we say, hey, came across your website, looking for a good electrician to work with. Wanted to see if you'd be open to discuss how we could work together, reply to his email or give me a call. Now we're building referral partnerships and, and there's other things that we can do to leverage this, but we want to start the conversation to build our partners. Because if you, if you were going to pay $100 a lead, why not pay $100 for a new customer coming in from a plumber? It's better, it's warmer, it's going to be more scalable. It's a great thing. Now let's say, okay, well I do all these different things. I, I'm an H VAC contractor and I do plumbing, I do electrical. And I don't want to partner with these people because I can't, you know, give them any leads going the other way. So work with a charity or non profit in the local area and do a very similar thing. Reach out to them and say, donations for your charity in the subject line and then in the body say, hey, came across your charity and I think you guys are doing really good work. Maybe there's a way that we could work together and get you some more donations from your current database and from my database. Start there. All your people in your database, you could send them an email and say, hey, for this month only, anytime that you sign up for this, we're going to give this to this. And they could do the same thing for their database. Really great way. A lot of people don't build this warm B2B outreach. They meet someone, shake their hand, and then they say, hey, yeah, I'll send you some deals. And they never hear from them again. This is why you need a playbook for this specific thing because you're going to get leads coming into your business. All right, so this is how you get new customers. These are the first three playbooks that you need in your business. You need an organic strategy for free stuff. You need a paid ads strategy with return on ad spend for these things. Then you need a warm B2B outreach strategy that's doing these things. So that way you stay top of mind and build relationships in your local community. All of those things we call visibility. So there are four ways to get new customers. Post free content. We just talked about run paid ads. Warm outreach. We talked about these three cold outreach. This is door knocking. There's a tool out there called glass House. I would say these are bonus things. Cold outreach is not as scalable. It can work. We work with an $18 million roofing remodeling company that was built on door knocking and then they're layering these other things. So I'm not saying it can't be done, but you need higher ticket for door knocking to actually make sense. So those are the first three. Next is leads to leads to customers. We call this conversion. So once someone reaches out to your business, they need to convert through your sales funnel. This is the exact issue I had at a $3 million home service business was we were getting about 800 to 900 leads every single month coming into our business. We were only converting Those leads into customers at 40%, 40% the other 60%. We were spending money to get leads coming in, but we weren't converting them. When we implemented a lead nurture sequence, which is playbook number four, we went from 40% to 61% conversion 21%. That change in 21% increased our revenue by 51% just by fixing the leaky bucket that we had. Once you fix the leaky bucket, then you can get more customers coming in, you can spend more on ads, you can get more B2B outreach, you can do more free stuff and get more leads coming in. But the lead sequence is essentially this. People are calling your business, people are reaching out to you via web forms and you may be a one and done company, which means you get a call, they ask you how much it costs, they say I'll call you back or I'll talk to my spouse and let you know. Or they fill out a form and you call them and they never answer. This is what you need to do to solve it. You need to have a lead nurture sequence and you need this playbook first. You need to have a good call script. Don't let your CSR just willy nilly talk to people and let them get off the hook. You just paid 100, 200 for that lead. Treat it like gold. Don't just waste it on a 30 second conversation and then it's gone forever. And so there's two things that you can do here. Okay, let's say that a lead comes in and you talk to them and they say I'm going to call you back or I'm going to talk to my spouse about this. Do not let it die there. Okay? You need to have something that you can email them or text them to help them in the decision making process. So what we did is our company was we gave prices over the phone. So we said, hey, how much is it going to cost to do this thing? We would ask a couple qualifying questions and then give them the price and then try to get them to close on that call. Kind of like a one night stand type of thing. However, what we did was we shifted that. We said, hey, I'm going to give you an estimate but. And I'll give you an estimate before we get off this call. But I also want to send you a formal email so that way you have it for your records and that way if you call back in and talk to someone else, we have a record of it on both sides. Does that sound good? Yeah, sure, no problem. Then you ask the qualifying questions. Then you ask the email that you want them to send this formal estimate to. Then you give them the estimate. Now, when you send them that formal estimate, you have a nurture sequence for that estimate, so that way it doesn't die. You have a process. Capture the leads information and then you can follow up with that lead to see if they want to actually close or not. Now let's say that you call this person and they don't answer. They filled out a form on your website. You call them, they don't answer. This is a different problem. This is truly a lead nurture sequence where you need to be following up with them to see if they still have that problem. So you call them, they don't answer. Ideally, when someone fills out a form on your website, you want to text and email them right away. Then when you call them, if they don't answer, you have a text thread and an email sequence that's open already that you can follow up on. How does this look? Hey, Phil, try to give you a call. Didn't hear from you. You're still having problems with your gutters. You want to agitate the problem to make sure that they're still having that problem. Don't just say, hey, I'm just checking in. Hey, just following up. Agitate the problem and see if they're still having that problem and if they are still a lead or not. So that's a lead nurture sequence. You need to solve this playbook in your business, and there's two things. You got to get the messaging right and the flow. So that way your team knows what to do and you got to get the tech stack right. So that way you know how to use the technology and put things in place to make it connect with your CRM. Your CSR knows what to do. This is really hard for a lot of people because it puts the onus on the business owner to try to figure all this stuff out. All right, the fifth playbook is the estimate nurture sequence. So you got the lead, you went out on the job site, Maybe did a $200 job, but you gave them a bigger estimate for $2,000 thing or $10,000 thing. Now you need an estimate nurture sequence in place to follow up with your estimates. Huge opportunity here for a lot of businesses. Usually they just say, oh, well, my salesperson is responsible for following up and closing their leads. Cool. What if your salesperson is busy because you're doing all this other stuff and you're getting them a lot of Leads, a lot of opportunities and they can't keep up with it or they just call, they say it's not that great of an opportunity. There's a million different scenarios of the salesperson just being the only estimate nurture sequence, which is why we recommend having one for the business. And that looks like email follow up x follow up calls, voicemail drops. Having your CSRs be a rehash program for your business. When they're not answering phones, they can be calling out on estimate opportunities and trying to close deals. This frees up your salespeople to go out and hunt more. And it also gives make sure that you have a backstop so that way you're not just relying on your salesperson to close. You actually have a system in place so that you get more salespeople and you have an estimate nurture sequence in place. We had a company, they were closing at 42%. We implemented this in their business and they jumped up to 58% in close rate, which was a part of contributing to doubling their revenue just by implementing an estimate nurture sequence. So in your business you can ask, I sent an estimate. What happens? Who follows up with it? How often do we follow up? We recommend like 14, 21 days. We also recommend having an expiration date on your estimates. So, so that way you can get to a yes or no, not just letting things linger out there willy nilly. Also, an estimate sits there forever. So you need to make sure that you have some call to actions. You still having problems with this? Hey, have you tabled this or is now still a good time to talk about this? Hey, we have 30 days. Hey, we have this promo going on. Something to get the ball rolling and get people energized. In closing, more estimates. All right, so we talked about visibility, we talked about conversions. Coming through, a lead comes in, this big green arrow is the lead nurture sequence. Big green circle, lead nurture sequence. You need to have this so that way you can get to an appointment. Then once you get to the appointment, you have an estimate. Now you need an estimate nurture sequence to get to the sale. All right, you're probably hearing all this and like, oh my gosh, that's five playbooks. I'm trying to figure out what I should be focused on first or how to implement this stuff in my business. The easiest way for us to break this down for you is to hop on a quick call. You can go to flashconsulting.com and we'll literally walk you through how to do this for your Business. If it makes sense to work together, great. And we can execute and help companies grow. We usually work with one to $10 million home service business, but worst case, we'll tell you, hey, do this. Here's what you should do based off of using this CRM, based off this tech stack, here's how you could do this at a low cost amount. Here's how you could do this at a fully integrated, you know, done for you type of system. Regardless, the best way to do it is to hop on a quick call and show you exactly how to do that. And I'll put that link down below. Alright. And the last piece of this is what we call repeat business. So you have people that came through your funnel, they learned about you, they came through your funnel, they either turned into customer or they leaked out of your bucket. But now you need to engage them to bring them back into your funnel. And the sixth playbook is an email marketing game plan. There's two parts of this. You need to have a monthly email to your past prospects and customers and you also need to have one to your B2B partners and real partners. So the monthly email to past processing customers is cross selling different services, staying top of mind and making sure that they know that you do these other services. Time and time again we talk to businesses and they're like yeah, our bread and butter, 80% of our customers do this, the other 20% of people do this. But we have 10 other services that we do that we want to make sure that people know about. This is why you need the email newsletter. You think that people think that you that they know that you do this, but they have no idea. This is why you need to cross sell services inside of your email newsletter to bring people back into the funnel. We had a company that had never sent out an email newsletter ever and we set one up every single month. So over 12 months they generated $253,000 from their email newsletter just by cross selling different services. So it's not rocket science, it's just staying top of mind. One other pro tip to this is create a content calendar with themes to talk about. So the content calendar is every single month in your business, you know what service to you be talking about and you want to make sure that you're staying top of mind by sending out an email for that content. The other thing is take that monthly newsletter and tweak it a little bit for your B2B partners. So instead of saying hey, right now should be getting your fall inspection done, it's like, hey, right now as you talk to your customers, you should be recommending them to get a fall inspection done and they can go here and do that. So just tweak it a little bit and it will land with both people, but it will sound like it's specifically for your rural partners, which is what you want it to happen. So email marketing game plan. I can't stress this enough because we work with companies that get purchased by private equity. Every single time private equity goes in and buys these companies, they just implement this retargeting system and they unlock almost double revenue just because a lot of businesses are just focused on getting new customers coming in, trying to convert them through a decent funnel, but they don't have a lead nurturer estimate. Nurture. It's just kind of like fumbled together. And they're paying cookie cutter marketing companies to try to do SEO and run paid ads, but they don't do any of this other stuff. This is why it's a honeyhole for private equity to buy these companies and implement professional playbooks in their business. So we talked about email marketing and the last one is text marketing game plan. We recommend doing two, three text campaigns per year with a direct call to action. So what this sounds like is let's just take H vac fall tune ups, fall inspections. Hey Phil, we're going to be in your area next week doing fall tune ups. You can hop on the schedule here. Hey Phil, we have a promo going on right now for $10 off any service and going to be in your area next week. You want us to stop by and take care of anything? Whatever. It sounds like you need to have a quick text message that goes out. Ideally this what we did was in our shoulder season. January and February, it's all slow. We had 28 technicians. We needed to keep the job boards full. So what we did was we used that time to hit them hard with our best promo offer that we could. So we go back and look at people that hadn't worked with us for the entire year and say, hey, it looks like it's been over a year that we worked with you. We're going to be in your area next week doing XYZ service and it looks like you need to get on the schedule. You can sign up here or something else that was more promo driven with money off. Regardless, you need to have a text marketing game plan so that way you stay top of mind. The reason that I like text over email is because it gets 95% open rates, but it also you don't want to be blasting people text every single month or every week on random things that you do. That's why you would use emails and promos and then text maybe two to three campaigns per year, but no more than that because it can get a little spammy. And that's the full funnel here. So you do visibility, you get people coming to your business, they turn into leads, they turn to estimates, then you retarget them via email and text marketing and bring them back into the funnel. Now here's the beauty. This right here is like a snowball. So you get people that come through your funnel, you turn them, you cross sell them services, you text them, you bring them back into your funnel and cross sell other services. And they refer you because now they bought more services that you do. And this spins. Now you have fuel on the fire here. A lot of businesses are stuck over here paying cookie cutter marketing companies for generic SEO, random social media, Happy Earth day posts. Some they're running paid ads, but they have no return on ad spend tracking and they're just throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks. Again, if you want these playbooks, I will show you exactly how to implement them in your business. I'll give you the recipe and sell the cooking, regardless if it makes sense together or not. You can set up a call. I'll put the link down below.