If You’re Spending on Marketing But Don’t Trust the Numbers, Watch This

If you're between 1 million and $3 million at your home service business, you're stuck in the most dangerous marketing trap that there is. I know it because I lived it. I was brought in as director of business development at a $3 million home service business that was stuck at 3 million for three years. And when I came in, the marketing reports looked good. They were getting conversions and leads coming in, but there was no data attributed to revenue. Once I uncovered exactly what was broken, we went from 3 million to 4 million in 12 months and then ultimately sold to private equity. In this video, I'm going to show you exactly how to unlock the same clarity so your marketing finally turns into. So in the first three months, I had to take a look and see what exactly the issue was and why our data was wrong. And these are the main things. First, our call tracking was not the truth. Call tracking was just floating out here, and our marketing agency would say, oh, we got this many conversions. But it wasn't really true because the call tracking wasn't correct. So I had to set up call tracking, call tracking, phone numbers, and tracking web forms. I'm going to get more into the actual tactics, but basically I had to realize that the call tracking that was set up was not correct because we weren't using tracking numbers or forms. Next, our CRM was the actual source of reality. I had to focus all of my attention on the CRM data. Instead of focusing externally on these agencies that I was working with, I had to pull all the central truth into my CRM, which means I had to coordinate with my CSRs, my sales team, and my marketing department to try to get all this stuff together into my CRM correct so I could pull the numbers out to grow. And the last thing was, most decisions are made on bad data. I had to recognize with our leadership team, the owner, our GM and our OPS person that this is bad data. So we cannot live or die by this data. We need to clean it all up and we need to have people bought into good data. So the fix was my marketing company needed to use our CRM data and live by that data, not the data that they saw in their Google Analytics or their Google Ads, not the conversion number that they magically made for us and sent us these generated reports. But truly, my CRM data is the live and die by this data. And so the common data problems, spam calls, inflating their cost per lead. A lot of spam calls would come in or out of area or different things that was inflating the Cost per lead. So every time I talk to them, they would say, spend more on ads. But they didn't have my true return on ad spend data, which it was a big red flag. Second, wrong channel attribution. We didn't know where my leads were coming from to attribute them correctly. And my CSRs were just putting down Google for everything. And I thought, well, is it organic? Is it paid? Where is this traffic? Is it Yelp? Who knows? And they didn't have the tools or resources to track these things. And the last thing was that there was no connection to closed revenue. So we were spending money and we were getting leads, but we didn't know if it was actually producing revenue. Which sounds crazy, right? But you probably feel the same exact way. And this is exactly what I felt. So the problem is you get all marketing calls. They have no idea what's really going on with your business, and they just say, spend more on ads when you tell them that you're slow. I played this record over and over again for months with different marketing companies trying to figure out a solution. And the real solution was I needed to use my data in my CRM, and I need everything to tie together to give me that data. So what does real return on ad spend or return on investment tracking look like? Here's how it looks. You want to report with ad spend, and I'm going to give you a template for this. But you want ad spend, you want to know how many calls you got, how many jobs you booked, and then how much revenue you generated. And you want all this tracked from your CRM. Okay, from your CRM. Most important piece, everything needs to live and die in your CRM, and you want clear return by channel. So this is the tool that we use at my company now that we do this for home service businesses. And I'll put the link down to this below. Let me pull this up real quick. So what this is is you can. And you can do this for any channel that you want. So you can have Google search ads, you can have Yelp, you have Facebook, whatever you want to have. And essentially, you want all your leads to flow into here. You want the email addresses, the phone numbers. Was this a call? Was this a form? You want the. Did this lead convert into an actual job? Do we have an open estimate for this? Did we schedule it? Do we invoice the amount? And then was this a new customer? So you want all this data to come in here? What I would recommend doing is setting up a connection so that way someone goes to Your website fills out a form from a landing page from an ad, it gets dropped in here. They call you from a tracking number, it gets dropped in here. Then each month you can see month one. You just duplicate this to the next month. And then you have a rolling list of leads that are coming in. And then you can take that phone number or email address and go into your CRM and see what happened to it. There's obviously automated ways to do this. I'm giving you tools right now that's going to help you. This is what I was building out manually when I was at a home service business. So basically you get all your leads in here every single month and you see what happened to them. And then over here you can go to that channel. So Google search, as you spent $1400, we got this many leads. So my cost per lead was this. This is very important. We booked this many. So we got 16 leads, we booked 7 of them. So our conversion rate was 44% and our revenue, so the actual invoiced amount was $10,000. So we spent 1400, we made 10,000 7x return on ad spend. Let's keep this run rolling. This will unlock clarity in your business and it will help you start to figure out is this working or not. So that is how to track your return on ad spend. The number one thing I would say on this, before I go to this slide, the number one thing I would say on this is you have to be working with a marketing company or have systems that built inside of your business to get the data into here and you have to push them to do this. So what I did and what we do for businesses is we set up landing pages. So we run ads, run them to a landing page. On that landing page we have a form and we have a tracking phone number. The tracking form gets dropped into here, the tracking phone number gets dropped into here. And then we have automations into CRMs, Jobber, Housecall, Pro, ServiceTitan to pull the data out of this stuff and then give us return on ad spend tracking. So that way we know as consultants do this, don't do that, extreme clarity. And it allows you to figure this stuff out. Once I got that clarity, I had to figure out, well, where and how much money should I be spending? Common question most people ask because when they talk to an agency they just say, spend more on ads, spend more on ads. But they don't know the numbers. So the first thing that we always go to when someone asks us this question is, well, I Don't care where you spend the money. But if you're getting 7x return, let's do more of that. In the hierarchy that I would recommend is start with Google local service ads because they're pay per lead and do this return on ad spend tracking. Then move to Google search ads, do the return on ad spend tracking, then go to Yelp, then go to Meta, then go to mailers, YouTube, home shows and start working your way down the list like that. But you want return on ad spend on everything. A good benchmark for you is 3 to 10% of your revenue should be spent on marketing. So once you get that number, let's say it's 30,000, 50,000, 100,000, then you can figure out how am I going to deploy that? Get return on ad spend tracking, Use these channels and then you'll have extreme clarity on the data. And there's no way that you can't grow your business if you know your numbers. Most agencies ignore these things. Google Ad return on ad spend, which we just discussed, they're not focusing on the shift in real content from old school. Old school is let's just throw some blog posts up there, let's just throw some service area pages up there that ChatGPT wrote and then let's just see how we rank. The shift that's coming in the next two to three years is real content has to be created and also seasonal strategy. Most of the time it's just rinse and repeat every single month. There's no seasonality, there's no shoulder season, there's no spring, there's no fall, there's no summer. Right. It all changes. As we know in home service, I had shoulder season as well. The next data points are the big ones that they miss and I'm going to dive into those which is deeper than just return on ad spend. Because if you're spending money on marketing and you don't trust your numbers, these are the things that you really need to focus on. And the next one is full funnel data. This was a huge unlock in my home service business. We got return on admin tracking set up. But this one was probably the number one piece for us that drove our growth. And the full funnel data. So what is full funnel data? Full funnel data And I got this, I used to work at Enterprise. I was, I started there as a management trainee and I worked all the way up to be a branch manager. And one of the reports that we lived and died by was this thing called a bmi. BMI basically showed us Year over year data. When I started at this home service business, I said, well, where's our year over year data? There's nothing. So I built this. So essentially we're tracking our leads year over year. So we go into the CRM or wherever we're tracking our leads and we look at, okay, 2025, we got 50 leads. In January 2026, we got 160 leads. That's good. That's triple the number of leads. This is a positive sign that my marketing is working. But that doesn't mean that they're all good leads. Right, but at least we're tracking leads year over year. Next is jobs. We're running X amount of jobs. If we're running 100 jobs, 2025, and we're 120 jobs, this is, this is one of the signs for me that we're growing our business. We're running more jobs, we're doing more jobs, we're going to produce more revenue. This was a big driver for, for my business in how many jobs are we doing? How many jobs are on the books? And let's keep that going. Next, this is a big one for H vac, plumbing, electrical, anyone that does estimates out on site for bigger ticket jobs or just in general, this number will grow your business. If you did 50 estimates in 2025 and you did 100 estimates in 2026, then nine times out of 10, as long as your sales process is not terrible, you're going to grow your business. And this number right here you can easily track in your CRM because usually this data is going to be easy to find. If you just go to how many estimates did I create last January 50th? This January 100, I'm double the number of estimates. And then you go to number of estimates closed. So we had a situation with an electrical contractor where we literally doubled his estimate count, but he still only sold 30 of them, just like he sold last year. And this means that you have a capacity issue. You got 100 estimates, you doubled your number of estimates. So you know that they were good leads because you created more estimates, but you only sold 30. So you need to hire another salesperson to work those estimates and spend more time on closing them because your closing percentage took a big hit. When you increase your estimate, then so you will look at your estimate count, your est, your sold estimates, your total sales. Obviously we're all going to know our revenue year over year, most likely. And then new customers. New customers is important because if you're spending money on Marketing, you don't want just returning customers coming in. That's nice to have. But you want new customers coming into your business. And this is how you figure out your customer acquisition cost. And you can see year over year, am I getting more new customers coming in into my funnel, which we're going to talk about next. Essentially this goal tracker, I'll put this down in the description, but this right here, this what literally, we still use this for the companies that we work with and we pull the data out of their CRM. We have automated stuff built out, but like this is a manual one that you can build out yourself and just track this stuff every single month. It will give you extreme clarity on your business. And as a marketing company, for us, we need to look at the full funnel data to know what's working and what's not working. For example, if we're a marketing company working with a business and they're getting a bunch of leads coming in, and like in this case, we triple the number of leads, but their jobs rent is still flat, let's just say that this is still flat. This either means that their leads are not good leads or their customer service representatives are not good and they can't handle the lead volume. So we have to go back and either audit the leads or work with them on building out a call script and a lead nurture sequence so that way they can capture the leads. So as a marketing company, we have to look at the full funnel because that's how we're going to grow. And we know that in six months businesses are going to look up and say, did I grow or not? Is this number higher or not? And if this number is not higher, then I need to find another marketing company. So what we do is we look at the full funnel so that way we're on the same page every single month. We're coming to the table saying like, hey, this is broken. We need to fix this. Here's what we should do. It's a much different approach and it's what I built at my home service business to unleash the growth from 3 to 5 million dollars that a lot of times these cookie cutter agencies, right? The whole theme of this video is if you're spending money on marketing and you don't trust the numbers, watch this because this will give you the numbers to help you grow your business. And when you have a marketing company that's aligned with these things, that's actually pushing growth, there's no way that you can't grow if you're willing to put in the work to grow. All right, so I mentioned about this full funnel. So we talked about the full funnel data. Let's look at the full funnel system. So this is the full funnel system that I found to be the most effective for home service businesses. And the way that I came up with this was when we went to sell the company. I was the owner and I, we sat down with a search fund guy. He was like in his mid-30s. We went to lunch with him at this place called Lazy Dog in Northern Virginia. I sit down and he asked me these three questions. He says, okay, Phil, so how do you all get new customers coming in the door? So what are you doing? And there's four ways to get new customers for a home service business. You can post free content. So you can do SEO. You can do social media content on site SEO, off site SEO, whatever free content looks like for your business. You can post free content. Second, you can run paid ads with return on ad spend tracking. This is usually the black hole for most people and they just operate on a gut feeling without any data. So run paid ads. Third, warm outreach and building B2B partnerships. So I told him about our partner pipeline builder where we partner with H vac contractors to refer us business. We also now build this out for home service businesses. And then we didn't do cold outreach. But this is the fourth way to get people coming in the door. So visibility is the first thing. How do you get new customers? The second part is how do you turn those leads into sales? If your marketing company is not asking you about your sales process, how do you turn our leads into sales? It's a huge missed opportunity for everyone involved because there's no lead quality index. They're just sending you junk leads. But they don't care if they turn into sales. And they say that's on you, buddy. That's not fair to the owner. Especially in the 1 to 3, 1 to 5 million. You're going to get trapped and you're going to get frustrated with these cookie cutter agencies because they're not looking at this conversion funnel. So you need to have a conversion process. And we usually have three things that we implement. First, the forms, all the call to actions on the website. Right? We want to convert website traffic into leads. We need all those things dropped into your CRM and have a nurture sequence on top of them. So basically everything on your website needs to go into your CRM and we need to start the conversation with texts and emails to get leads into jobs when we go back to this thing, it's good to get leads, but how can we get those leads into jobs and estimates? We can speed up the process with the lead nurture sequence, emails and text automations that ties into your CRM. Then when we send out estimates, we need an estimate nurture sequence because we're sending out estimates. And if you are getting more estimates in this situation, we need to be able to nurture these estimates to sell more estimates alongside your sales team, especially if they're getting more and more busy. Right, so that's the conversion system. And then when the sale happens, we have to pull all that data back out to return on ad spend reporting. So that way we know what's working. This is the full funnel system that people need to have clarity on their data. And then the last piece, which is most, what most people miss. He asked me, okay, so you've been in business for 25 years. Do you ever reach out to your past prospects or customers? And that is this whole retargeting arm over here. The most important piece here is that you have a monthly email newsletter that's going out to your people, cross selling services with a content calendar. So we mentioned about the seasonality of the businesses. January, February, March, April, all the months you need to have a content calendar theme. That way you're explaining, hey, right now you should be doing indoor air quality, you should be doing your spring inspections, you should be doing your fall inspections, whatever that sounds like for your business. You need to have a monthly newsletter that's going out, that's cross selling these different services. And then you need to be retargeting people to bring them back into your funnel. So text marketing, email newsletters, calls, reactivating people to come back in. And the crazy thing about it, I'll tell you this, this right here, this is like a snowball that keeps on spinning. People come into your pipeline, they might close, they might leak out. They come over here, they get retargeted, brought back in, cross sell new services, set up referrals, this snowball and then this is just fuel on the fire. Where most people get stuck in this 1 to 3, 1 to $5 million trap is that they think that, oh, I'm just going to put more fuel on the fire over here. When they don't have any numbers tracking or return on ad spend data, they don't have a game plan for good real content, not just chatgpt junk. And then they go to their agency and their agency always says, spend more on ads. And it's funny. A lot of agencies get paid a commission based off running ads, which is why it's frustrating for a lot of businesses. And they get stuck because they don't have the full funnel data. And that is a full funnel system that businesses need to be implemented in their business. So that conversion multiplier, so this section right here in that 1 to 3 million, this is usually the missing piece for a lot of businesses to unlock growth. The reason I make this a conversion multiplier is because most leads that you're paying for are already happening, but what happens is that they're not followed up with correctly. There's no lead nurture sequence. There's no estimate nurture sequence. Time and time again, we talk with businesses. Jobber, housecall, pro service, titan, Workiz, whatever the platform is, they have leads coming in and they have usually one CSR or two CSRs or an admin who's answering the phone and they might talk with them, but they're so busy that they don't have a process to follow up with them. This is exactly what happened in my business. We had leads coming in. Let's say it's Saturday night, a lead came in. We wouldn't call them till Monday morning when we got in, and then they wouldn't answer. And then we print it out and we'd put a check mark next to it, and then we call them the next day if we got around to it. And this is not a good process. And nine times out of 10, if you just increase your communication with the customer, you're going to increase your lead book. We had an H Vac business that we work with. They went from 45% conversion rate to 52% close rate. And that generated $22,000 extra per month for their business. So 7% increase in this conversion funnel right here and $22,000 unlock in their business. So $240,000 over a year. That's 10%. They're a $2 million business. So I can't stress enough that this right here can grow your business without even doing anything else over here or over here. Just tightening up your conversion funnel. All right, I mentioned about this website conversion rate. So when someone comes to your website, you want them to turn into a lead, and I'm sharing this with you because the details are in the data and you don't know the data. So you don't know what to ask or where to fix what the issues are. So when someone comes to your website, you want them to convert at 10% is our goal 10 to 15% is high performance. Our goal is 10%. Industry average is around 3 to 5%. So some of the small changes, I just made a whole video about this. Actually. We helped a company generate 83 more leads in one month just by adding some of these call to actions. So a chat widget, a pop up with an offer, a seven second form right below the scroll. But basically, if you don't know what your website conversion rate is and you're just driving traffic to your website and you don't have tools on your website to convert leads, then you're missing out. And this is the whole conversion funnel. You tighten up your lead nurture sequence, you tighten up your estimate sequence, you get better conversion on your website with the people that are already going to your website. This multiplier right here can lead to 10, 20, 30% growth just by doing that, not even looking at your return on ad spend and dialing that in. And then the most ignored growth lever is retargeting. A lot of people think that email newsletters are just, hey, you know, we send out a newsletter, it's just branding. No one hears about it. However, if you're spending money on marketing but you don't know or trust your numbers, then this is the number one thing you can do. If all this sounds like a lot of work, okay, I need to track my return on ad spend, I track leads year over year, I need to track my conversion rate. But if you're stuck and you're like, hey, I just want something that's going to grow my business, send out an email newsletter every single month and you will get business out of it. Here's exactly what we do. We do a two step revenue email sequence. So what we do is we send out an email newsletter. Let's say it's schedule your spring inspection, schedule your spring tune up. Anyone that opens that email has shown interest. What we do is we take those people and we put them into a second email and that's going to be your call to action, which is going to be in your area. And then it's going to say, hey, we're going to be in your area next week doing a spring tune up on one of your neighbor's houses. Want to see if you could stop by and take care of yours as well. They showed interest. Now we have a call to action directly to those people that open that email. If they haven't booked yet, get them on the calendar. It works every single time. We had a business that we did this for that generated $64,000 just by doing this exact game plan. They sent out an offer about generators. So get 500 off a new generator. Then we took those opens, we sent another one. They generated three estimates, $64,000 from those estimates just by doing this simple game plan. The other thing that this allows you to do is activate your existing customers. So cross selling people that already know like and trust you, huge home run. And then driving, repeating cross sell jobs, just like I mentioned before, huge opportunity. Most people ignore this growth lever. And we have clients. I mean, we had a $1.5 million H VAC contractor. Then they generated $257,000 in revenue just by sending out one email every single month. And I mean 257,001.5 million. That's like 20, 30% just from an email newsletter. Huge opportunity for a lot of businesses. All right, so how high performers actually grow? They don't rely on ads alone. They build these six systems in their business, and I'm going to give them to you. And then you can track numbers off of these as well. First, they have a content game plan with real content, no chatgpt junk. They have real content. And what they do is they take their actual customer questions that their CSRs are having on the phones and in their sales process and they turn that into content. This is a big focus for my business because a lot of agencies out there use chatgpt junk and it just, it's not organic and it's not real. And Google ChatGPT knows this, which is why there's a big push for real content. Second system that they build in their business, return on ads, bad tracking on all paid ads. If you don't have this, it's going to be very, very hard to grow. And more importantly, it's going to be on you as a business owner to try to figure this out. And it's very frustrating. And you need to be focused on growing the business, being the visionary, the CEO, whatever you want to call it, and not focused on trying to track your return on ad spend when your marketing company should be doing that. I mean, that's just like pretty basic. The third thing is a B2B game plan to build partnerships. I mentioned about warm outreach. Huge, huge opportunity for a lot of businesses to build out a partner pipeline builder, B2B partnerships to refer you business. Why? Because instead of spending money on the Google gods and you're probably paying, you know, 100, 200 a lead, if you could pay 100, 200 for a new customer, that's a warm lead coming into your business from a local person in your local area. And you could do this on repeat. Basically building out salespeople in your entire company. I mean it's a home run. You should do this. Fourth, set up a lead nurture sequence. When someone fills out a form, calls you, whatever they don't book, they need to go into a lead nurture sequence. Fifth one, set up an estimate nurture sequence. You send out an estimate. You need to make sure that you have a process to go from estimate to sale with emails, text, follow up rehash program. We had a company that we helped do this and they unlocked $144,000 in their business just by setting up an estimate rehash program with text, emails, a 21 day sequence. If you have a customer service representative and they have slow time, this will happen at my business. They would be watching Netflix or something silly. We told them, hey, if you make outbound calls to estimates and you close them, we'll give you 10 bucks for anyone that you close. They're nice and happy on the phone. Now they can make an extra some money and everyone wins. Great way to turn this estimate nurture sequence opportunity in your business. And last, an email marketing system with two steps. Even if you don't do the two steps thing, send one out every single month, cross sell services like you're going to win. All right, so those are the six systems on a high performing home service business. And if you notice, they all tie into this. You need a visibility game plan, you need some free content stuff that's real stuff. You need paid ads, return on ad spend. You need some B2B partnerships. You need a lead nurture sequence, an estimate nurture sequence and an email marketing system. Those six systems will grow your business. There's no way that they can't. And the way that I know this is because last year for us, we grew all these businesses that we work with on average 27% because we implemented this full funnel system into their business. We had some businesses higher growth, some businesses lower growth, but in total, 27% on average by implementing these things. All right, so the real marketing question that you should be asking is who's running point? Who's running point on your marketing? Is it you or is it them? And if it's you, then you're probably frustrated because you're working with cookie cutter agencies. You don't know your numbers. No one's bringing data to the table. They come to the call, they say, how's this working out? And you're running around trying to figure this stuff out or having your admin or CSR who owns results, you or them, if they own the results and they know, hey, I need to hit these numbers, I need to do these things, then they're going to work with you to fix the problem. That's why we pull the data, we pull the leads, the estimates, the sales. Because then we're proactive and coming to the conversation rather than reactive on a call. And everyone's I used to get on these calls like kumbaya, yeah, this is nice. You know, we're going to do this and then the next month is the same thing and then it's 6 months, 12 months. It's like frustrating. So it's like you got to own the results and you got to pull the data from our CRM. And the last thing is what happens when something breaks. I can't tell you how frustrating it is to email support at emails. I will never have a support at email at my business, ever, ever. Because it's so frustrating to email support at and not have someone that actually knows what they're talking about. With my business, why am I telling you what to do? I hired you to come up with ideas. Why am I telling you to update this on my website and then following up with you seven days later to try to see if that happens? Real thing that happened to me. So I will never have a support email. We'll have a consultant approach that knows your business, that's learning about your stuff. So these are real questions that you should be asking for your marketing side of things. All right, so the fix is if your marketing feels chaotic, if you don't trust your numbers, we help clean this up for 1 to 3 million dollars. Businesses 1 to 5, 1 to 10 is our bread and butter. But usually 1 to 3, they get trapped at this. We had a client doing $80,000 months last year. This year he's doing literally $300,000 a month. He bought a new warehouse, hired a full time salesperson. His wife joined the team to help with admin and he's going crazy busy. And we implemented all these things in his business and he's a great operator and takes it to the next level. If you want this for your business, you can go to flash consulting.com, set up a call, we give the recipe, just all the stuff. There's stuff in the description that you can download, but if you want somebody to actually do the cooking for you to implement this in your business, that's what my company does. And I'd be happy to speak with you about how we could help you grow.