I’ll Fix Your Marketing in 53 Minutes

The funnel that I came up with, when you see it, you can't unsee it. So if you want more leads for your business, do one of these. That customer experience is way different than these private equity guys. 3 months ago, Google changed all of that. We have like an HVAC contractor in Colorado who's 10x ROAS. Yeah, well, thanks guys. It was obviously good to get to know your businesses. This is like pretty much a workshop for you on all things marketing. So as I'm going through this, any question that you have, just ask away and I can talk specifically to your business because I kind of know them now. So I can at least like make it very pertinent. And as there's sections in here, I'll speak to like some of those challenges and things that we had. As she just mentioned, I used to be director of business development at a home service business. I helped them scale and then sell the business. I've been doing marketing since 2015. So like SEO, email marketing, automations, all that stuff. I own a marketing company for home service businesses. We have 24 team members. We help clients all across the country. We specifically work with $1 million to $10 million as our bread and butter of home service businesses. And our average client last year grew $250,000 to $1 million in 2025, so about 27%. And the reason that I know this is because we use their CRMs. So we use their Jobber, we use the other CRMs to actually pull data. And it's something that I was very passionate about at my home service business was actually knowing the numbers. So most businesses, as they're trying to grow, face these challenges. And I'm going to go through the challenges and I'm going to break them down inside of the presentation. And answer them specifically so that way y'all walk away with like how to fix these things. So some of the things that we came up with, like not enough consistent lead flow, too dependent on just SEO and waiting for my website to rank, high customer acquisition costs. Um, this pop-up here, not knowing where to spend marketing dollars for the best ROI, inconsistent revenue during slow shoulder season, losing opportunities because of price, turning one-time customers into recurring revenue, getting the team involved in generating new business, building systems and SOPs that can support growth. All of these things we kind of pretty much just talked about, but these are all challenges that we face that I'm gonna walk through inside of a marketing funnel, how to fix all of these things inside of your business, and I'm gonna go through each one. So before I do that, the funnel that I came up with, when you see it, you can't unsee it. So you're gonna say, oh my gosh, someone put this on a funnel for me and I actually get it now. And the way that I came up with this was because, so when we sold the business, was the director of business development, and this search fund guy, he had been an MBA, he got investors to back him, he reached out to our business, and I went to lunch with him and the owner, and he asked me 3 questions. He asked, how do you get customers? How do you convert them into sales? And then how do you retarget your past prospects and customers? And those 3 questions, he ends up purchasing the business for 8 times EBITDA, and this was a duct cleaning company. This was a duct cleaning company. So he had no recurring revenue. And like EBITDA is like profit. So, you know, his profit was over $1 million, and he bought it for 8 times that. And so I'm like, hey, if it's good enough for him to feel confident in this, it's good enough for me to build a system around it. All right, so those 3 things are how to get more leads in your business. Real quick, part 1 is going to be how to get more leads. The second part is going to be like, how do you make this actually happen in a system? Because some people in their business are like, oh my gosh, more leads just means more chaos. How do I actually make this into a system? So the first part is how do I actually get a bunch of leads? We call this the flash customer journey. And there's 3 parts, like I mentioned, there's visibility, how do you get new customers, conversions, how do you convert them into an actual sale, and then retargeting is how do you actually get people to come back into your funnel. So they come in from the top, and they come through here. And this is a snowball that keeps spinning. So there are 4 ways to get new customers. I had some cool things that I had on here before, and then Alex Hormozi came up with his Core 4. If y'all know Alex Hormozi, he has this Core 4 principles, and we're going to walk through them specifically for home service businesses and how to apply them. So the first thing is, one, the first way to get new customers is posting free content. And there's 3 ways to do this for your home service business. The first one is SEO, off-site SEO. So this is going to be like your Google Business Profile, some of the things that we mentioned— get reviews, response reviews, post on there. Do citations. So like making sure your name, address, and phone number matches up across different platforms. Things that if you've paid for SEO before, this is what they should be doing from like an SEO offsite perspective. Again, if y'all have any questions, just raise your hand and I can answer them more in depth. But the first way to do free content is to do offsite SEO. Google Business Profile, Yelp listings, those types of things. The second is AI search content. This is a really big shift that's happening right now. I'm doing a presentation tomorrow literally on the new SEO playbook. The reason that this is so impactful is because we had Yellow Pages in the '90s. That's how people found home service businesses. Then in 2000s, it switched to Google search, and everyone was going to Google typing in 4 keywords, you know, HVAC repair near me, plumber near me, and then Google gave them 10 links to choose from. 3 months ago, Google changed all of that. On their homepage, they changed it to say AI mode, where now you can actually engage with Gemini and ask questions. Fundamentally, SEO as we know it used to be you research some keywords, you make some content, you rank on some stuff, and then people come to your website. That is no longer so. The AI search content game is completely different, and I could dig in on this if y'all want to, but essentially what it comes down to is you need to create what they call non-commodity content. Google tells us this. So that's the second way to get AI search content. Social media is the third. This is the free stuff to do. So when we talk about social media content, there's 2 types of content that we see. One is branding content. So this is like your dancing stuff, you know, funny videos, people spinning around. It's like, yeah, we got some good branding. The second type of social media content is educational content. And this is the bread and butter in my opinion, that builds this entire stack. The reason is, is because in Google's white paper, they said they want non-commodity content, and they classify non-commodity content as content that anyone can make. So if every plumber can make the same content as you, then what's your unique authority-building thing? There is none. So what they want is unique content. So how does this sound? It would be like, in this specific neighborhood in Atlanta, the builder put in these builder-grade toilets and they all go bad after 2 years because they put this wax ring that's this size, right? And you're basically like talking about real things in the local area. This is the type of social media authority content that I would recommend building because in AI mode in ChatGPT and Claude, they also surface videos. You may have seen them actually showing videos in search results. So it's a really big change. Does anyone want me to dig in on posting free content or what any of this means?

Yeah.

The AI thing you said I could dig into.

Yes. Yeah. So what we found is that over the last 3 years, there have been a trend in no clicks. So 3 years ago, it was 54% of no clicks. So basically searches that happen and people did not go to your website. Then it was 58% last year, and now it's at 68% of searches end with zero clicks. The reason that's so important is because if people are searching and they're not going to your website, these platforms— ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude— they're keeping people on their platforms because they want to keep the engagement happening there. So what this means is that if we don't care about— if they're not going to my website, do rankings matter? Does ranking my website matter if they're not even going to my website anymore? And I would argue that what matters more now is being recommended by these platforms. Because you want the people having conversations, like for example, take out a picture of like, let's say it's the roof, take out a picture of the roof on the corner. And it's like, okay, something's broken here. It's like, is there soffit or whatever? And it's like, okay, something's wrong here. Gemini, ChatGPT, whatever, what is this? And then it tells them, you know, here's some information. And then it's like, oh, by the way, Sam has a video about this or a blog post about this specific thing. Now it's sharing your voice. Basically, it's pulling in content that you've created to answer the question, and then it recommends your business.

How does it know that I have that content?

Great question. So you have to be creating content to be the authority in the space. So tomorrow I'm going to share this system, but I'll tell you all right now, and I actually have my playbooks that you can download after this, but it's called the Call to Content System. So you mentioned about Plaud. So for y'all that don't know, Plaud is a tool that you can put like this on you, and you can actually record your sales conversations. You can also record like your CSR call recording system. You can take those call transcripts, and you can use them to create content on your behalf that's unique, because you're out at a job site and you can talk specifically to those things. The issue for me was I had 28 technicians. I couldn't even get them to send me pictures, let alone the stories, you know, that they're going to hear from the customers. So what we did was like, okay, let's take the call recordings and then turn that into actual content and have it running on autopilot. So we actually built an agent that does that. But essentially for you, Sam, is like every single call that you do, that's content and that should be posted because that's unique non-commodity content. No one else can make that content.

Yeah.

I'll give you one other secret thing on AI search that's coming. Sundar Pichai, he's the CEO of Google. He said that 2027 is the year of the agent. So what that means is that right now we're optimizing websites so that agents can recommend us. But I don't have it on here, but tomorrow I'm going to be sharing more about it. Google rolled out what they call Gemini Spark. It's a personal agent that people are going to be interacting with and doing things on their behalf. So imagine they put a picture of a toilet and it's like something's going on here. It's like, do you want me to reach out to a plumber for you and schedule service? I have access to your Google Calendar. and they reach out to the company on their behalf. So I can't fully say this, you didn't hear this from me, but there are going to be booking tools like Jobber has online booking, booking tools that are native booking tools inside of Gemini, inside of ChatGPT, inside of Claude that are going to be coming out in the next couple of weeks.

Oh, really? Yes.

And the reason is, is because if no one is going to your website, And they want to trap these people on these platforms. How do we convert them quickly? And how do we have attribution? Because if everyone is booking online through AI agents and AI search, it's— this is why when I say Yellow Pages, Google search, AI, it's literally the biggest shift that's happening inside of how home service businesses find us, how clients find home service businesses. Crazy stuff. Any other questions or thoughts you want me to go through on this?

Yeah.

How do I sign up? Yeah, well, what I can tell you about AI search content, social media, and SEO is like, you could work with a company like mine, or you can work with another business. Here's the thing, if you're going to be paying for marketing, this is— I can't stress this one enough— is that SEO, as I just explained it to you, is changing. The agencies that are doing $1,500 retainers to rank you on keywords And so like you create AI slop. I mean, how is that going to help you compete if— Blogs don't have utility. Blogs do, but they have to be non-commodity content. They have to be real information because in Google's white paper they say non-commodity content. If anyone can— they literally say this— if anyone could create this type of content, it's not valuable. You have to create non-commodity content. And this is the problem is like as a marketing company, I'm like, okay, You know, how do we talk to these 50 businesses and learn about them if we, you know, like, how do we know their business? The way that we do it is the call-to-content agent that we built. But I'm not saying you have to use my stuff. You can do that on your own. I just hesitate if you're going to be paying for SEO, like, what are you paying for? And is it actually going to help you grow? Or is it just black magic and voodoo? You know, I mean, it's true. Like, this is what it is. So yeah, any other questions about posting content? Okay, cool. Next is running paid ads. So when we talk about the second way to get customers is running paid ads. Paid ads is a fast channel. We all know free content, you could do this for a year. I mean, y'all know SEO, it's like 6 to 12 months. And like, maybe it's gonna work, maybe you have enough reviews, maybe you don't. Paid ads is one of the channels where you can turn it on and get fast stuff. But you got to do it the right way, or you're just gonna waste a bunch of money. And this happens to a lot of people. So I actually list them out in order of how we run paid ads for our clients. Not to say that that's exactly how you should do it, because in some markets it's like you should do this, some markets you should do that. So first is Google LSA. Y'all know what Google LSA is? Google Local Service Ads. It's the top thing Google guaranteed. It's basically free money. Now what I will tell you is that if you have not heard, October 1st they're actually charging for you if you miss calls. So before, they only charge you for leads. So they would only charge you if you connected. October 1st, they're changing that so that they're actually going to be charging you even if you miss the call, if it's a 30-second call. Y'all understand what I'm saying, right? So like, don't miss calls because you're gonna have to pay for calls that you miss and they're not actual leads. So it's a— this is a big shift for them. So this might go down my tiers if, you know, but right now LSA is great because you just pay for the leads.

Yeah.

You don't actually like, you know, pay money for search ads. The second one is search ads. And the reason that Google search ads— caveat here, you got to have return on ad spend tracking if you're going to run search ads. So you got to know you spent $2,000 and you made $10,000, or you're going to just throw money at the Google gods and they're going to take your money and poof, it's gone. You're going to have a gut feeling that it doesn't work. With paid ads at my home service business, The owner, he was like willing to spend, like he was down to do whatever. The problem is like 3 months later, he looked up at revenue and said, revenue didn't go up, that marketing channel sucked, let's get rid of it, right? That's not how you want to do this. What you need to do is have what we call return on ad spend tracking. In my book, y'all have a copy of it, I actually have a whole section on how to do return on ad spend tracking. The quick notes on return on ad spend tracking is this. You got to get all your leads in one place. So how we do it with Google Search Ads and LSAs, all the leads go into one place. So like on a Google Sheet or something where you have all the people that called you, all the forms that filled out. Then we go into the CRM like Jobber and we pull the data out and we put them together. You can just use Claude or something like this, and we put the data together and say match these phone numbers and emails to these invoices, these estimates, and these new customers. And then tell me what my return on ad spend was. So we built an agent that does it, but essentially that's how you could do it. I always hesitate on paid ads. I'm sure all of y'all have run paid ads and felt you got burned or at least frustrated by it. A lot of times the reason is because it's like you don't have the return on ad spend tracking. And last piece, and then I'll continue to move on this. In my book, I talk about this. As you grow your business, let's say like $0 to about $500,000, maybe to $1 million, a lot of it is like referrals and word of mouth. And those types of clients are very, very easy to mess up things or like not get back to them right on time, or like, you know, be— they're a little bit more lenient because they were referred to you and they feel warm and fuzzy about your business. When you start running paid ads, all that's out the window. And the way that these people identify trust is with speed. They identify trust with speed. So if you are running paid ads and they fill out a form and you don't have that text or email like what I was mentioning that's automatic, they instantly don't feel like they can trust your business. If, if you call them and they don't answer, then you feel like, oh, these leads suck. But maybe you didn't text them or email them. And what you want to do is you want to also see your actual potential estimates Versus what actually closed. And the reason is that exact same thing. A lot of cold traffic, it's going to be harder to close than warm traffic. So you can't think like, I'm going to close 55% of all my cold traffic just like I closed 55% of my warm traffic, right? The closing percentages are probably going to go down. But this is why you need to have a tighter sales process when you're running cold traffic. Any questions about that so far?

Okay.

Number 3 is a controversial one, but I'm going to go there. Yelp ads. So Yelp, at my home service business, I hated Yelp. They called me from a Chicago number every week, told me people in my neighborhood are searching, you know, spend more, blah, blah, blah, all this foo-foo stuff. When I started my marketing company, I'm like, I hate Yelp. I'm not running Yelp ads, whatever. They have a Yelp partnership with marketing companies where we actually have our own Yelp partner, and we can rake them over the coals. And we have like an HVAC contractor in Colorado who's 10x ROAS for Yelp ads. So I get you. I think as we go down this funnel, it gets colder and colder of audiences and more and more strategy to convert. But there's a time and place for it. There's also a time and place where it sucks. So I'm not saying you got to run Yelp ads. YouTube ads. The reason that I like YouTube ads and I'm pretty bullish on YouTube ads into the future is because YouTube is the second largest search engine. YouTube also has content that is surfaced inside of free content, and you can, you know, Google search ads and YouTube ads kind of go hand in hand, so I like that, and there's intent behind searches. Meta ads. Now, as I go down this, it gets colder and colder. Have y'all run meta ads?

Yes.

Yeah?

No?

Okay. It's a love-hate. You get tire kickers and price shoppers. You get leads coming in for $10. It can work, it can't work. What I will say is you gotta have a really good sales process when you run Meta ads, and like I mentioned to you, Sam, having that autoresponder in Messenger or something that at least gets the conversation going, it's really important. One other new thing that just came out is with search ads, let me back up to this post-free content AI. I'm talking about this tomorrow, but I just wanna give y'all how quick this is changing. I mentioned about AI mode and people not going to websites. So people always ask me, well, what's going to happen with ads? Because if people are not going to websites, is Google going to show like my keyword in my landing page? Like, where do they show that? And this is a big fundamental change for them. And the change that they're building out is what they call this Business Lead Agents thing. But essentially all you need to know is that they just released this, which is in Google Search Ads. You can now do a text message straight from the ad. You can do a Facebook Meta Messenger. You can do a WhatsApp message straight from the search ad. So it's not to drive traffic to your landing page anymore. It's to open a conversation with your business. It's like changing the whole landscape of these things. So this is happening, like this has happened last week. And then the last one is mailers and home shows. So are you a mailers guy? No.

Yeah. Old people. Yeah.

It's like automatic. Like I know if I send X amount of mailers, I will get X amount of revenue. It's amazing. But it's a target.

Yeah. I would say, and you do mailers too, right?

Yeah.

And it works, right?

Somewhat.

Yeah.

Yeah. We get good.

So with mailers. Sorry.

Like for us, it's because our specific target audience are 55 plus and they check their mail. Yeah, all the time. And nobody else locally sends any mailers. And so, yeah, I'm the only tree guy that's sending a mailer, you know, like where I live in Utah. Mailers suck. Yeah, because everybody does them.

That's what I was going to say. It's similar to Yelp. It's like a market-by-market thing. I would still test it out. Very similar with ROAS on this, so return on ad spend. You want to put a tracking number on there and a QR code to a tracking form. That way you can track it all the way through. Because if not, you're gonna— and it's like 1% conversion rate from your mailers. So I would say that. Now, home show. Who here does home shows? Anyone done a home show? A few? Home shows crush it if you have the right game plan. The game plan is you do a giveaway. And then at the giveaway, you give something away. And then every single person wins a second place offer.

What's a home show?

A home show, like, A builder show, like, hey, come here, and there's like a bunch of different contractors if you just bought a home. And like, there's a painter, there's a drywall guy, there's siding.

Did you say everybody gets a second—

It's a second place offer.

I never even thought of that. That's brilliant.

Yeah.

Which is what, a jacuzzi?

No, no, no. So the first place would be like, hey, we're going to actually do a heavy up or something for you, whatever. We'll do a whole home inspection. The second place offer is you'll get a $150 credit towards X, Y, and Z service.

Gotcha.

Yeah. You did something similar. Yeah, she knows about it. Yeah, Jess, I'm doing it this year too. So this is not my brilliant idea. This is Hormozi's brilliant idea. We did a giveaway. We're doing it again this year where we give away a 6-month partnership with Flash. And then the second place offer is you get— well, this year we're doing waived onboarding fee and videography services. But basically you give them a second offer that's like really good. That's like, why would you not do this? So it works really good. And you don't need a home show for that. You could do that offer inside of your business. The home show is nice because people are already there. And the most important thing about the home show is that you're capturing the lead. So you want to make sure that you have a reason why they would give you their information. So we had like a builder who did this exact game plan. They gave away a $6,000 initial design for like a new build. And then the secondary offer was they gave them a $4,000 credit towards an interior designer or something like that. So there's a lot of different ways you can mess with that. Okay, so that's a, that's the first 2. This is more of a slow, slow channel. This is going to be more of a fast channel. But I would also urge to have return on ad spend tracking so that way you know what's working. Warm outreach. This one is my baby. I mentioned about the B2B partnerships. Um, if you don't want to do any of this and you don't care about the marketing stuff from a digital perspective, This is— doesn't matter about an algorithm, doesn't matter about paid ads. All it matters about being a local home service provider and building community in your local area, which is why I love it. This was my— one of my big focuses at my home service business. You heard me talk to Sam about building relationships with gutter cleaning companies if you're roofing. I like the realtor route. The problem with realtors is that you can't give them any money because it's against the law for their agreements, whatever, their licensing laws. But if you partner with a gutter cleaning company, you can incentivize them. And here's the most important thing about this, is that if you build B2B partnerships— Sam, you mentioned that you have a list of these guys. This is the most important part of this: you are not the hero, you are the guide. So when you go and build this relationship with them, you do not want to come out and be like, let's build a partnership, you know, send me some leads, I'll send you some leads. That's the wrong way to do it. The right way to do it is that they have a problem that needs to be solved. And they have 3 specific problems. Their employees want to make more money, but they can't pay them more. You can pay them more by incentivizing them. Their customers want this service done, but they don't do it. And their customer's going to call someone else to get the service done, and then they're going to lose that contract customer or that customer forever. Now they can do that service without doing that service, so they have stickier customers. And then the third thing is that they may do the service, but in overflow season, let's take HVAC for example, is like, you might do duct cleaning, but in the summer, do you want to do duct cleaning or do you want to do installs? You want to do installs. So let me be your overflow so you don't lose the customer. When you present it that way, you are now like, oh my gosh, yes, please. How do we do this? I want my people to make more money. I want my customers to be happy, and I want to have a second option to be able to serve. So what we did was I did these lunch and learns. So I would basically go— we did duct cleaning. I would partner with HVAC contractors. I would call on these businesses and I would show up to their office and I would say, hey, what I'd love to do is come in on Tuesday morning to your technician meeting and I'll bring donuts and I'm going to just educate them on duct cleaning or whatever service it is. It's a nice continued educational moment for your business. When I went in there, I would have little business cards with a QR code. And that QR code went to a landing page that was myduckcleaningbusiness.com/contractor. And I gave them out to all the technicians. And I said, hey guys, anytime you talk to someone, scan this QR code and just fill out the information. If we close it, I'll send you $50. Now they're armed with everything that they need, plus the QR code, they scan it, And when I started there, it was around $1.5 million. And I ended up getting it to $2 million just based off B2B partnerships alone. Like he had 36 Google reviews like that. And he was a $3 million business. It's crazy. Any questions about the B2B partnerships or want me to break it down more?

I guess my question is like, do you ever get any friction in offering to pay their employees?

Like, do you do that directly? Or do you funnel it through the How do you do that? Yeah, great question. People did say this was like, okay, well, let's, let's say it's $100. We would say we can pay you $100 and then you divvy it up however you want. What we found to be the most impactful is if we pay your team directly, we could even split it up. We pay you $50, we pay them $50, whatever makes the most sense. There are 2 tools that are out there that actually automate this now. One is called Clicky, C-L-I-C-K-Y, it integrates with Jobber. And the other one is called ReferPro. It integrates with Jobber as well. It allows you to create affiliate links for not even just B2B partnerships, like recurring customers. And it allows you to pay them out with their link. Like they could post it on social media and be like, hey, check out this business. And now you're paying them as a brand ambassador for your business. So we have some clients like in the conversion funnel, after they've turned into a sale over here as a referral, we'll actually like every single customer that comes to their funnels like, hey, you're now a brand ambassador for us. Here's your referral link. If someone signs up, you get $50. It just turns it to autopilot. So it's really good. Clicky and ReferPro are 2 of them. Any other questions about B2B partnerships? Okay, cool. And then number 4. So slow, fast, medium, but then fast. Because if you get— if you get 2 gutter cleaning companies and their guys are fired up, you're gonna get leads coming in. And then you get 50 gutter cleaning companies, pressure washing, you know, painters, like, you get carpet cleaning companies. I mean, yeah, you get lawn care guys, heart, you know, hearts, whatever other things. Like, these guys all have opportunities. This can be very fast, but it takes a little bit of time to get going. The 4th one, I don't have experience with this, but Sam does, which is cold outreach door knocking. This is another way to get business going for your business. These are the 4 ways. You can post free things online. You can run some paid ads. You can build partnerships and referrals. And you can just good old cold outreach, door knocking, cold calling. Any questions about new customers?

No.

Awesome. So if you want more leads for your business, do one of these and it'll grow. Do one of these and it'll grow. You got the lead that came in, you scheduled the appointment, you sent them an estimate, and now the ball's in their court, right?

Yeah.

Hopefully they work with you. The problem that we see a lot of times is that we're all so busy, especially if you're doing sales. Who here has salespeople? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Okay, cool.

6.

Okay, so once they send out an estimate, a lot of times if you have salespeople, it's like, yeah, it's on them to follow up. Like, they want— they're hungry for commission, they better close the deal. And they and you guys know, like they're like oh that's just a ten thousand dollar job or that's just a five thousand dollar that guy's tire kickers I'm not going to follow up with them whatever. And we call these people Caspers; they're friendly ghosts. They just like you know fall off into the distance. So we don't want that. So essentially what we do is we set up an estimate nurture sequence. So when an estimate goes out, then we have the fourteen to twenty one day nurture sequence. So it's like a text. emails, follow-up, educational content, meet the team. Here's why we do this. Here's how we do this. And basically educating them through the process. What we found is by just implementing an SMS nurture sequence like what I just told you, you can increase your close rate by 5%. If you don't have that, then you're literally just relying on your team to do it. And we all know if you just rely on your team, it's like, hopefully they close the deals, but I'd rather have a system inside of my business that does it for me. I have a question. Yeah.

Do you have like, maybe it's different based off of type of business and location, but is there an ideal timeframe between each of these that you've kind of found to be a sweet spot?

Yeah, great question. So like in HVAC in February and they have no heat, it's like, don't wait 14 days. You know, like they're probably gonna freeze to death. So yes. Yeah. What I found is like duct cleaning, tree care, gutter cleaning, things that's more like I'm browsing, I'm getting information, the 14 to 21 days is okay. And it's like, you don't got to hit them 3 times a day for the first 3 days. If it's an emergency plumbing job, or like no heat or something that's a big deal, then yeah, you got to hit them pretty hard in the first 3 days, because they're going to pick someone. And so it's like literally speed to lead at that point. For other more, you know, educational type of content, you don't have to hit them as hard.

Yeah.

The nurture sequence, were you saying you would outsource that or have someone in-house doing that?

Yeah, okay, great point. So this was my next game changer piece is, so my, one of my first clients, they were a $3 million HVAC business, and the owner was selling and then he had one sales guy, but the sales guy was busy. And so what we decided was, why don't we have the CSR, customer service representative, incentivized to actually call out on these estimates when she's— when they're slow. So essentially, I'll talk to you about like, yeah, you can build out the automation sequence. But if you have a customer service representative who's not on the phones, who has a little bit of time, this is a really great way to incentivize them to make more money and help you guys close more deals. It works really good because they're already used to talking to people on the phone. They probably even booked them into the call. So it's a natural call for them to be like, hey, how is everything out there? Did you get the estimate? Do you have any questions that were on the estimate? Like, we have a slot open tomorrow. Do you want to get on the schedule? It's really nice. As far as— yeah.

And I know the answer is just do internal notes, but if you put a less qualified CSR on the follow-up process, I see them calling and saying, hey, do you want to get on the schedule? And they say, yeah, but I had a question about the estimate.

Yeah.

And it's something like more particular, perhaps a little out of their purview. Like, how do you— how do you—

I'll just second that one. 100% of the time, that's what happens.

All right. You guys are going to be blown away. Okay? So it's not in this talk, but there are these things called knowledge bases that you can build for your businesses. Okay? So essentially, there's a tool called NotebookLM, Gemini Notebook. And it allows you to create a language model, LM, on your business. So we have this agent that builds this content, it listens to the calls, and it builds a knowledge base for our clients. You can do this on your own where you ingest all the customer questions from your call transcripts and you put them into your own language model. Then any employee can ask this language model that question and it will answer it exactly how you want them, how you would answer it. We have this at my company, we call it FlashGPT. And essentially, my team can just ask it any question that they want. And then it gives them exactly how I would answer it. So that's the first step. The second thing I would say is a very simple, hey, that sounds good. I'll get you the answer to that. Let me have Sam give you a call.

That's what we do. Yeah. And it works fine.

Yeah, it's great.

Yeah, people would rather you say, hey, I don't know the answer to that, but I'll find it.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

And you could literally be honest with them like, hey, I actually have this really cool tool where I can ask Sam the questions. Let me just see what he would say. But I can also give you a call and like at least get you a quick answer. But yeah, I think that's good. You could also just like do a 3-way connect with that person. But yeah, it's good.

So I was speaking to kind of old-timers in business, like sort of advisors. For larger quotes, he was sort of talking about instead of normally I would, you know, get a lead, have a phone call with them, okay, I'll schedule a time to come out and do measurements for say a renovation, $30,000 renovation for basement, right? So I come out, I do these things, I build out a quote for them, and usually I would send that to them.

He was saying, yeah, don't do that. Don't.

Yeah. Do a second Site visit with it maybe printed out or something like that to say, hey, I want to walk through.

Yeah, so Kevin's going to talk more about that, but exactly, like, if your ticket's over $5,000, I would say, or, you know, right around there, like, one, if you send it over email, you're just leaving it up to the gods to, like, deliver it to their email inbox at the right time for them to see it, and then hopefully they open it. The second thing is that then all those questions when they open it and See it? You're not there to overcome those objections. So if you cannot set up a second meeting, I would recommend recording a Loom video, L-O-O-M, where you can record your screen and walk them through the estimate and explain why you exactly did this stuff, and then send that with your estimate. If you don't have the time to do a second meeting, that's a really good way to do it. But I would say if you have these— what do you— how do you do it?

Well, I mean, we explain Exactly, would walk anyone through the estimate because they'll buy from someone they know, like, and trust, right? Yeah. You need to decide you're that you're an expert in this.

So yeah, definitely. Yeah.

Want to sit?

You ever try it?

Huh?

You ever try it?

To sit?

Well, because you're not getting well. I mean, it's okay.

It's different. The Loom video? Absolutely.

Yeah, my estimator has zero technology comfort though.

Yeah, but they build it on Java, right?

If someone's gonna walk them through it and they enjoy interacting with that, well, hey, I'm gonna go with you. I mean, now we have it starting our design.

Exactly.

And we do the estimate as we're designing, so they exactly know that they made the decision.

Yes, exactly.

Exactly. This tree, you know, this this is maybe a problem. Or this is a— my thing is a fire escaping problem. So, you know, you're not trying to oversell them, but you're trying to help them.

Exactly.

You know, and they see that, and they see that, like, the true integrity, and that sets you apart from other contractors.

Exactly.

They're just about the money, but if you're gonna have that heart in it, then—

Yeah, because our lead estimator is like that type of person. He actually really does care.

Then he would probably sell Absolutely.

Yeah, I'll give you— no, no.

For this situation, and we want to you know redo a vanity here and so forth. Then you're coming back with a quote and you're saying we're going to redo the vanity and we're going to do this sort of tile.

Here's the thing: they they love that you heard them, and they love that you took that. And then when you built the quote, you did the exact thing that they told you that they wanted to do. It's building more confidence that you actually follow through with what you say. If you're like, "Hey, I picked this tile because you told me da da da da da," and that's why I put this tile on here for you. It's like, "Wow, this guy actually cares." Like way different.

Like I'm doing a remodel right now of our upstairs, and it's like the first guy quoted us $300,000, right? Like it's a big ticket. And you know, I got 4 bids. The second guy never came back to me. The third guy never came back to me. The fourth guy, he's come 3 times to my home, and he just focused. We're just gonna do kitchen this time. We're gonna spend an hour just doing the kitchen. You know, next time I come Yeah, he heard you.

He sectioned it out. Exactly. Every time you show up and show face, it's like, this guy's here again.

I started thinking about it.

I figured out it's interesting.

It's got a way different approach. And unless my wife says it's different, I think she's going to like it.

So if you don't have people that are good at technology, they can't do Loom videos and everything, there's 4 videos that you actually can bake inside of here. So when someone fills out a form on your website, you can have a video that says, hey, I'm the owner, Phil here. I'm a local guy. Started the business a while ago. My wife and I blah blah blah blah blah. You might see me at the Walmart, so don't be weirded out if you see me. Really grateful for the opportunity. That's a really great video when someone fills out a form on your website. Then when you actually go out to the and give them an estimate, another video. If you don't record another like a custom video, have a video that goes with it. That's just like, hey, I'm the sales manager here. Just wanted to say I really would love the opportunity to work with you. A lot of people have these three questions with our estimates: down payment, timing of the labor, da da da. Here's the answer to them, just like really good experience building. One that every single person misses is when they approve your quote, when they sign up with you, they're at the highest peak of excitement that they're about to get this done. And then it falls on deaf ears. Hopefully this company reaches out to me. I hope I made the right choice. If you send them a video right away that's like, hey, I'm the coordinator here, so excited to work with you on this project. Here's what to expect next. The next 24, 48 hours, they're going to be reaching out to you to get you on the schedule. And just look out for a call from this, and I can't wait to talk with you. Excitement matched. And then the last one is after the sale or job, a video from the owner. Hey, thanks so much for choosing us. One way that we grow our business is through referrals, word of mouth. I'm a local guy. If you know anyone that would be helpful, I just want to say thank you so much for the opportunity to do your job. That customer experience is way different than these private equity guys, is way different than most Chuck in a truck. It's literally building the local home service vibe of like what we're all about. And it's doing it inside of your sales process. So huge opportunity here for most home service businesses. Any thoughts, other questions? All right, cool. I saved the best for last. The thing that I love the most, retargeting. So when we work with home service businesses, we work with private equity guys, search fund guys, they plug us in. All of them— I talk about this in my book— all of them start here, retargeting. And you know this, Reed, when you buy a business, their database is the gold. It's exactly what you want. It's every single piece of the revenue in the future that you can envision. So most people have it all sitting here in this big blue ocean in their CRM, and they never do anything with it. They're constantly spending a bunch of money over here to get visibility without ever doing retargeting to their past prospects and customers. And the beauty of this is that this right here is a snowball. This is literally how a $2 million business stays a $2 million business or stays and grows 10%, 20%. Then they add fuel on top like this and the snowball gets bigger and bigger. But this engine right here is the real money maker for most businesses. And that is cross-selling services, retargeting your past prospects and customers, getting those Caspers woken up to work with you again. So the first thing is review and referral. I mentioned about having some like affiliate program. Another really great tactic for this is go on Canva and create a little graphic that says share the gift of clean, or share the gift of a new backyard or whatever, share the whatever. And it's literally a little voucher that they can forward to a friend for $25 off service or whatever that thing is. So now you're actually saying, hey, you had such great service with us. Now you can give this awesome service and something for someone else. It creates a referral opportunity for you. Obviously, we all should get reviews. Y'all know that. Email newsletters and email promos. Does anyone do emails like monthly, quarterly?

Monthly.

Monthly.

Monthly? 3 times a month? You do some?

Big campaigns.

Campaigns through Jobber? All right, I'm gonna give you all the sauce on this because this is like— we had a client, they generated $253,000 in revenue in 12 months just by doing this. So I know that it works. If you're not doing this, you should do this. So basically what you do is every single month you— and Sam, you might say, I just want it done. It works because people move houses. You could cross-sell other services.

For me, I worry about the spam. Yeah, they're spamming me now after they got my money. That's kind of how— but I'm open to it.

Yeah, yeah. All right, so basically you set up a content calendar. So it's like January, you should be talking about this. February, should be talking about this. An electrician in Florida is like, we're talking about hurricanes in August for sure. And it's all about generators and heavy ups, you know, all the stuff. Basically, you come with this content calendar for your business. Then every single month you pick a service, and if it's the same service, it's fine, but you cross-sell the service. So what you do, and you could have like 3 a month and you don't hit them hard for 3 of them.

We do a lot of educational.

Yeah, yeah, and educational is good. But you still want those, I would say those straight call to action ones, which is like, So like a perfect one, like let's say it's a generator. Do y'all do generators?

Yes.

Yeah, okay. So it would be like $500 off a new generator in the subject line, like a straight call to action. Schedule your spring inspection, like a straight shooter. Schedule your tree inspection, straight shooters. Schedule your holiday deep cleaning, right? Straight shooters. Then inside of the body, you have an educational piece, like why you should consider getting a new generator for your home, why you should do X, Y, and Z. Then you think about the frequently asked question. What's the number one question that they're asking right now? And you answer it. Then you share a customer review about that exact topic. So this customer had this problem and now they have this solution. And then you have a call to action. That's part of where the money's made. The bulk of the money is made on the second email. This is a little bit of a different way of looking at this. So you send out that email. The second email is everyone that opened the email. So they all opened to $500 off a new generator. So they raised their hand that they must be interested in some sort of like, what is this offer? The second email that you send them is an in-your-area email. In the subject line, it says, in your area. Then it says, I'm going to be in your area next week doing an estimate on a generator. Do you want me to stop by and do your estimate? They raise their hand. Now you have a straight call to action. So same thing with tree inspections. Like, we're gonna be in your area next week doing tree inspections. Do you want us to stop by and do a tree inventory or whatever it is? Y'all got that? Okay, it works magic. Like, you should do it. If you don't do it, you should do it. Yeah, I mean, the Jobber campaign thing too, you can see who opened it.

It gives you a list.

There you go.

All right, one other, one other secret sauce. I don't know how I'm doing on time.

Okay, perfect.

One other secret sauce on this. My babies over here, the B2B partners, you don't just— thanks. You don't just reach out to them one time. You don't just reach out to them one time. So I'm sure everyone here has gone to a BNI event and you get a business card. It's like, yeah, I'll call you, buddy. Yeah, sounds good. Okay, cool. And then you never hear from them again.

Right?

Okay. Yeah, we all done that. Don't do that.

Okay.

Take all those people and put them into a B2B email newsletter, a B2B partnership newsletter.

How can you do that without an opt-in?

Great question. So the first thing is you send them an email to schedule their, their technician lunch or whatever, and then basically now they're in your program because you've emailed them and they emailed you back. So it's okay. You don't want to spam them initially, so you got to get a little bit of buy-in and rapport. But what you do is you put them into this newsletter. And let's say— so we do this a lot with arborists. And it's like HOAs. It's a honey hole for HOAs because like, you should be doing your tree inventories. You should be doing your tree inspections. A storm just hit. Like boom, boom, boom. Opportunity after opportunity. So all your B2B partnerships go in here and they sound a little bit different, which is like, hey, gutter cleaning company. By the way, when you're out at the home, Since it just rained, make sure that you're looking for these things. Da da da da. Here's a before and after picture of a job that we did. It's literally just staying top of mind and opportunities with them.

So you have a different distro list exactly per niche.

Oh, I don't you configure that in the market.

I don't have the marketing on job.

It's cool. I'm sure you can. I wouldn't go as far as different niches. I would just have like a more broad B to B partnership one for arborists in particular. HOAs like or property managers. They're kind of like fall into the same category. But yeah, you would have—

You get a property manager and you get like 12 different, you know, $25,000, $30,000 a year businesses.

Exactly. Yeah. So you would have to— so sometimes in B2B, it's like, okay, how many things am I going to do with spamming them? So we'll do like a quarterly email, like in the seasons of it. So you don't have to hit them every single month. But very same thing. It's like, Anytime someone opens an email, if you do not have stuff on your calendar for next week, you need to be calling these people. So let's say you send out an email for $500 off a new generator, you send out the in-your-area thing, and they still didn't book. Now you have things to give to your salesperson to call these people. And like, yeah.

So like, sorry, I guess like we're normally scheduled like 3 weeks out.

Yeah.

Like how would you adjust that?

Same exact thing. Let's say you only have 2 weeks out or you have cancellations on your schedule. Now you give your sales guys or your CSRs a list of people and you call them. Don't be creepy, but just be like, you know, like, saw you open my email. Saw you open my email. You know, like, hey, not sure if you heard or not, but we have a promo going on for $500 off a new generator. I know we were at your house last year and I just wanted to see if it was something that you're interested in because we're gonna be in your area next week.

Boom. Yeah.

Yeah. It creates the opportunities because like as a marketing person in the company, like I had shoulder season. I had 28 technicians. And I'm like, how am I gonna fill these routes? I had 13 routes. And this was exactly how we did it. Like, we would do promos, we call out, we book meetings, and then we fill the schedule. All good. All right. Next is social media. This is why you should be posting content on social media and having people follow your content, because then you can post content on there. And then the last one is text marketing. This one you do need opt-in, and it is very hard to do A2P authentication, but Text messages get 97% open rates. Emails get like 20% open rates. Text messages are sharpshooters. What that means is you should only be doing like 2 to 3 texts max per year of like sharpshooters. And the reason is, is because you can sharpshoot, but like that is spammy. We all know we don't want spam texts from these people every single week. Like, do you want to replace your toilet or something? It's like, I got you, bro. Like, I'll reach out to you. But if you do the sharpshooter, it would be like, hey, we're going to be in your area next week doing a plumbing job. Do you have anything that you need to take care of? Since we don't have to pay for gas, we're giving it a $10 credit towards your service. It's a sharpshooter, but you can't do it all the time. You got to save it in your back pocket for shoulder season or slow times. So usually we run these in February, March, April, and then maybe in August or September if we have a lull. And so this is the whole customer journey funnel. You got new people coming in, you got conversions coming through, and you got retargeting coming on the back end. Any questions about this? Anyone want me to deep dive on this stuff? We're good?

Are we going to get a copy of this deck?

Yeah, so actually I have this in my book. Yeah, there's a section of it in the book.

Can we take a picture of the screen?

Yeah, you definitely can. I don't think it's this like sectioned out, but yeah.

Definitely can.

Yeah, this— when you think about your business, every single business falls into how this works. All right, so when we talk about these challenges, it's like not enough consistent lead flow. Do the B2B partnership thing, go get some leads. Too dependent on SEO, waiting for the website to rank. That's because it's a slow channel. Take another fast channel and do those things. High customer acquisition costs. You might not have a good return on ad spend tracking in there, or you might not have the conversion in there so that way you're not converting everyone through the funnel and it is high customer acquisition costs because you're not converting. Not knowing where to spend my marketing dollars for the best ROI. Do you have return on ad spend tracking or not? You got to set that up. Inconsistent revenue during slow shoulder seasons. Do the email campaigns for sure. Like, you will fill your schedule. Losing opportunities because of price. I didn't mention this, but inside of that sales funnel process, a lot of times people do price objections because they see you as apples to apples to someone else. So inside of that lead nurture sequence, you can just educate through that and your newsletter. Then you basically separate yourself from these other guys. And if you have a pricing guide, it allows you to like explain why this guy's $99 versus I'm $600, and it gets out in front of it. Turning one-time customers into recurring revenue. You got to have that second part of the business for retargeting. Getting the team involved in generating new business. What we did at my home service business was we actually had our technicians Since they were on job sites, they were incentivized to give me leads for B2B partners. So we would be like on a restoration job, and they would be next to the project manager, and then they would be incentivized to send me cross-reference leads. So like in HVAC, if it's like HVAC, plumbing, electrical, it's like, you know, lead gen that's passed across. All right, building systems and SOPs that can support growth, building a business that doesn't depend on the owner. This is the next part. I have 5 minutes, and this is really quick. This is literally why I wrote my book. So it leads right into it is like, read that book. But basically what we find is that businesses fall in the middle, right? Business owners fall in the middle right here. And we call it the 3-vendor trap. The 3-vendor trap is business owners, me included, try to manage a marketing company or marketing stuff happening. So they're doing the campaigns, or they're working with a marketing company that's doing the campaigns. Then they're in their CRM trying to pull the data. They're trying to do the return on ad spend reporting. They're trying to pull the ROAS tracking. They're trying to do the emails inside of their CRM and figure this stuff out. And then over here, they're trying to build automations and nurture for like leads and jobs and sales, and they're trying to build all this stuff out. So basically, they're trying to do marketing, they're trying to do data and CRM, and then they're trying to do automations and nurture. And they're stuck in the middle here not being the owner, but being like a marketing manager, like a CTO, all the stuff. So essentially, What the book talks about is, it literally has this graphic in there, and it talks about how to do this in a system. So I actually, like, I built my business to do this for people, but it also is built in a system, and you can take that and pull it into your business. But a lot of people fall into this trap, and it's mind-numbing because you feel like you're just stuck managing vendors and doing stuff. Any questions about this or thoughts?

I was just thinking, It's not open.

Yeah. Well, oh, there you go. So these are some of the playbooks. So like our call to content system playbook, our ROAS tracking playbook, you can download the playbook right here. And then you could also set up a call here with my team and we can walk you through to see if you're a good fit. We specifically work with $1 million to $10 million businesses. But we do have like agents and stuff that we built. Like the one of them, his name is Turner. So he turns your calls into content, and then we have Trace. He traces your return on ad spend stuff. So yeah, cool. Any other questions that I might be able to answer from like a marketing perspective or even just business in general? Dude, yeah, of course. Oh yeah, man. Dude, I used to be at a home service business, so like I know what it's like. to like see these things. And it's— that's why I try to like make it as valuable as possible and talk to the real stuff. So it's good. Cool. All right. Thanks, guys.

Thanks.