Is Every Home Service Business Down in 2024? REAL DATA & ANSWERS

I was recently on the Jobber podcast talking about how to beat your competition, dominate the market. And a lot of the questions that came up was about lead flow and people being down. And Jobber actually just came out with this report that I wanted to go through and share some strategies of what this means for your business and things that you can do so that you don't fall culprit to what's going on in the market right now. It's currently September 5th, 2024. This report just came out in August. Basically, jobber went through 200,000 residential cleaners, landscapers, H Vac, technicians and companies and more. And they keep track of all their stuff. And they distilled all their data down into a couple key takeaways, which we're going to go through on this video. All right, so the first thing, this is the overall consumer demand of what's going on. So basically what we find here, let me make myself a little smaller, is the median revenue year over year. This is holistically, we'll break it down by, by industry, but median revenue year over year is pretty much flat. A little bit down, a little bit up on a monthly basis, but I would say flat to about 2 to 3%. And you can see how this is trending. So typically, companies, in the first six months, they were going crazy in spring, and then it slowly fades off. This is looking a little bleak going into June because this is trending down. So not too good here. New work schedule, year over year, it's about flat. Last year we were down a little bit, but right now I would say it's about flat and then your average invoice size. Now, this was one that was pretty striking. In January it was way up now, and this January, it was literally flat. And you can see this trajectory here. So what they talk about in this report is that the interest rates going down over. Right now, the interest rates are going down. So hopefully that should help with invoice sizes going up because people have a little bit more discretionary funds or borrowing more money. How does this look from breaking down by category? So when we look at the green industry, lawn care, landscaping, you can see that new work scheduled here dropped way off in May and June. And this is typically when you see the biggest time for this in spring. Median revenue as well is way down, which this is pretty striking considering. January we were way up, February way up, and then a huge hit, March, April, May, June. And this is still trending down for lawn care companies. So I don't want to just like paint a bleak picture. But if you're feeling the pinch and you're like, is everyone feeling this? What's going on? Which we're going to get to some remedies and strategies after this. But I just like to show people this because this was literally 200,000 businesses data that they're looking at and saying, okay, for lawn care companies, it's okay, you're down. Everyone is down flat here. This is the median revenue year over year for, for the green industry is 0%. So if you're flat or down a little bit, you shouldn't be alarmed because everyone's feeling this pinch, not just your business. When we look at the cleaning industry, new work scheduled is pretty much the same as it was last year. Median revenue in the beginning it was, it was way off, but it's kind of steadied out a little bit, a little bit down, nothing too crazy. Now contracting, this is H vac, plumbers, electricians, that those kinds of companies you can see new work scheduled was actually up April, May, June, July, which is, which is surprising to see, but good. And then median revenue is flat, I would say in April it's way up compared to last year, which is great, like revenue wise, but right now it's kind of flat. I would imagine that this is going to either remain consistent here or even go up a little bit, especially with the interest rate changes. And then this is the construction industry. This would be like remodeling companies, residential, commercial, commercial construction. Very good to see here that people are still doing some of these bigger projects. And now it's kind of tapered off a little bit. Usually what we've, what we saw last year was the interest rates were so high, especially for these big projects, that they were getting crushed. And now with interest rates lightening up a little bit, these bigger projects, people are going to do these more hopefully if they have the, the cashing around. Even though there's more work scheduled year over year, the revenue hasn't totally caught up yet, which is surprising. Maybe this is a billable thing that's going to catch up later. But yeah, that's the report that they put together. I think it's one. It can give you a little bit of context about what's going on with your business. I'll put a link to the report down below, but I think it's good just to look at. Holistically. This is probably the biggest study that I've seen with 200,000 businesses. I would say most of these businesses are going to be around a million dollars. Some might be $2 million, others might be 500,000. So that's the range of these companies. Now when you look at like, okay, great, well what exactly do we need to do? So when we look at a good marketing plan, there's really three pillars that every business needs to be firing on. And I want to share these with you because even if you feel flat or down and you're like, well, you know, as a marketing consultant, our company, I tell them, I tell our team, like, don't just blame the economy because you still have a business to run, you still have mouths to feed, you still have customers to take care of, right? You still have all these things. You can't just say, oh, the economy's bad, so whatever, we're going to be slow. You can't live like that. You can't do business like that. So from a visibility perspective, what are some things that you can do? Get Google reviews, you can do some SEO basic practices which you talked about on this channel, like creating service area pages if you don't have the additional funds to run ads. One of the big things I would recommend on this list for visibility is building B2B relationships because it doesn't cost you anything. So what that means is if you're in lawn care and you do basic maintenance, lawn care, mowing blows type things, you could partner with hardscaping companies, gutter cleaning companies to refer you business back and forth. Again, that's free because it doesn't cost you anything initially. And then maybe you give them an affiliate or referral commission when they send you deals. So if it was me, I'll be doing that so that way I can leverage other people's like really hard. I would go out to B2B partners and just try to build a bunch of relationships. That's win win situations for both companies. From a conversions perspective, this is really, really important because now more than ever every lead matters and you don't want to let leads get missed. So you need to have a lead management plan. And what that means is anyone that reaches out to your business, whether it's a call, email, web form, online booking, you have to have a plan in place to nurture that lead. If someone fills out a form at 10 o' clock on Sunday night and you don't get back to them, or you call them and they don't answer and that's a missed opportunity, which that could be a huge job or that could be, you know, the difference between making payroll and not making payroll. So every single Lead, you have to work it. It's not, we're not in the season of, oh my gosh, tons of leads. Everyone has money. I can't find any technicians. Right now. We're fighting for every lead. So you have to have a lead management plan. What that looks like is leads come in, you nurture them through your sequence. Calls, texts, emails, follow up sequences, all the way through to a sale. You have to have a great conversion process and lead management process. The last one, which a lot of people don't do, is retargeting. And again, this is super important because with retargeting you have to do a monthly newsletter to your past prospects and customers, retargeting them to come back to your funnel. A very important part of this is that people, they may feel the pinch and say, oh, you know, my carpet's dirty or my, I really need to get X, Y and Z done. I really need to have my gutters clean. But I'm going to wait a little bit. When they see you pop up in their inbox and share about stuff, they're going to say, oh, you know, I really like this company. I need to get this stuff done. Like, let me go ahead and book this. Out of sight, out of mind. You can't get a lifetime relationship, you can't get a lifetime value without lifetime relationship. So the more that you can stay top of mind with your customers, calling them like, hey, you know, our schedules are a little light. Next week we're going to be in your area, you know, want to see if you have any service. People are going to say yes. They just have to be made aware that you're still, you know, that your services are available. So retargeting is going to be very important. Staying in contact with your customers. What we've seen in like in 2020, when things slowed down as well, the more communication that you can have with your customer, the better. And you want to really lean into the relationship piece during these trying times because what you don't want to do is get distant from your customers because once they have the need, they're going to find someone else. And also the more that you lean in, the more they're going to say, oh yeah, I do need to work with this company. So retargeting is a very, very big part of this equation. So those are the three pillars. Hopefully that this video was helpful for you. Again, this report, I'll put that down below. If you need help and you're kind of stuck, we do free marketing audits and we basically, like, give the recipe and sell the cooking. So we'll hop on a call with you and literally show you, hey, if we were going to work together, if I was a director of business development at your company, here's exactly what I would do. Whether we work together or not, it doesn't really matter. It's more so we do these because we want to help people and and give them strategies, and if it makes sense to work together, they're great. But if not, it's all good. Hopefully you get value out of it and can help grow your business. I'll put a link to that down below. If not, it's all good. Hit like and subscribe and we'll see you in the next video.