Marketing That Converts: My Journey, Marketing Strategy, and the New Rules of Growth | Ep 81

Was recently a guest on my boy Danny D's podcast and we talked all things from digital marketing to actually Flash and my story and also content creation, which is something that I enjoy doing as well. So this episode is packed with my journey as well as what we're currently doing from a marketing perspective and education on content marketing, social media, and overall, like, how do companies grow? And I think it's a really good episode and I want to be sure to share it with you. So here's the episode. Social media is changing. No one cares about your follower count. When you post one piece of content, if it's good, the algorithms are going to push it out there. That's the TikTok of social media. I just closed a LinkedIn client from the content. I follow you. We got on the call. He's like the man, the myth, the legend himself, Phil. It's like, I have 2,000 followers. It's not like anything crazy, but he's been seeing all my content. Doesn't matter about follower count. It matters about staying in front of your audience. Content, content, content.

You don't need to be an influencer. You don't need millions of views. You don't need millions of followers. That if you have the right audience in a good targeted niche, it's all good.

Creating real content that's transparent and delivers a message to your clients, that's what's going to help you stand out.

So tell me the story about why your boss fired you.

All right, so I started working at this $3 million home service business, and when I went there, everything was broken. They were paying digital marketing companies for ads and SEO. It was all blackmagic and Vudu. They had no data. And they also didn't have a good process to convert their leads into a sale or. Or retarget their past prospects and customers. I uncovered all of those issues in the first two to three months of working there. And when we fixed all these issues in their bucket, they started to grow. And within the first 10 months, he went from 3 million to 4 million in revenue. He was making a million dollars a year. I'm like, hey, dude, we need to keep going. Like, we're just hitting the cusp of where we're going to go. And he's like, no, you need to chill out and just relax because I'm making enough money and pump the brakes. And at the same time, he's going to lunch with his friend talking about stuff we're doing. His friends are like, wow, I wish I had this guy at my company. So they would invite me to their team meetings, their manager meetings, and have me sit in and talk about some of the strategies and things that we've been doing. Then we had this novel idea that I know the impact that I'm making on the business and I wanted to make six figures. One way for me to do that would be to spread out my hours over three or four different companies charge $50 an hour. And that was the basic start of the company.

Let's dive in a little bit further here. What were you originally hired for in that home service company that you working in?

I was hired to be the director of business development, which basically meant I was responsible to grow the business. However that looked when I went to work there, they had 36 Google reviews, which for most home service businesses, literally nothing. And it was a $3 million business. The backbone of the company was built off B2B partnerships and referrals. He basically went out and partnered with over 150H vac contractors and built this referral network where they would be sending him leads and he would be sending them money for the leads and then he would be getting all these jobs on the books, running 14, 15 routes per day. And it was just his flywheel. So what we uncovered was that's really great for warm referral leads, but how do we capitalize on all these business coming in and turn that into organic, actual dialed in marketing with a lead process for colder leads and then retargeting people to bring them back in every single year. And that's kind of the precipice of how it continued to grow.

So they brought you in for business development. Well, what was your experience before that?

So my major in college was international business. I went to work at Enterprise Rent a Car because they had uncapped commissions and I was running a local branch. At Enterprise I was a branch manager managing a team of 15, getting paid off of the bottom line of a 2,3 million business when I was 25. So if we had a bad month, I didn't make any money. If we had a great month, I made more money. I was learning how to like read a P and L, how to coach on sales, how to get operations, how to build partnerships, everything. Then I read a book, Rich Dad, Poor dad by Robert Kiyosaki and he talked about the number one skill you can know is how to sell. So I went into corporate and I sold fleet management services to home service companies. So my job was to call on 10 million, $20 million $100 million H VAC Plumbing Electrical Contractors set a meeting with the CEO and talk to them about their fleet management plan and sell them on using Enterprise as their fleet management services. This is how I learned the trades. Plus I also learned how to run a local service business through the enterprise training program. I'm a big like personal finance, payoff debt, that kind of thing. So I actually paid off my student loans when I graduated College in the first year I had 30,000 I paid off in the first year, then I saved up over the next two years and I bought a condo with cash when I was 25. And my wife is a kindergarten teacher and all her friends were like, how did you do this? How did you pay off your student loans? How did you buy this condo with cash? So I decided I was going to make a blog on WordPress. So I, I built a WordPress website. I learned how to do this. This was before ChatGPT. I wrote three blog posts every single week. Email marketing, that's a lot, that's a lot of blogs. I got my subscribers, email marketing, social media content, and I started doing all this stuff simultaneously. I'm selling to these, these fleet managers, fleet management services. So I learned, okay, I need to get backlinks from these high authority websites. I need to get these websites to link to my blog so that Google says, hey, this is a legit blog. And their readers would then click through to my website and I would convert them into subscribers. So I ended up getting featured in Forbes, cnbc, Yahoo Finance, Business Insider, all these cool places talking about my story. My website got up to 30, 40,000 readers per month. But the biggest thing was how am I going to turn these readers into subscribers and then retarget them with email marketing? Kind of similar to what I did at the other company. So when I would go to these meetings with these CEOs of these multimillion dollar companies, I, I would literally ask him, what are you doing for marketing? Because I was just featured in Forbes. One of the guys that I met was the guy that owned that home service business. He was one of my clients and I started telling him about my story. Well, here's where it kind of takes a little bit of a twist. I quit my job at Enterprise and I went to do my blog full time and I bought a tiny school bus and I made a little tiny home and I traveled around the country and I did news interviews, podcast interviews, I made YouTube content, I did email marketing, social media, all the stuff. I came back into town, the guy reached out to me because he followed me on Facebook and was like, hey, you're back in town. Can you come help me grow my business? Business? When I went to start working there, all my worlds collided. Like digital marketing was broken, Local service business, P and L, you know, strategy was broken, Everything was broken. So now all the system that we use is basically a culmination of all those skill sets put together and tell people, grow.

Holy shit.

Yeah.

What is your bread and butter? Like a home service company comes in, they decide, hey, I'm ready to grow. They reach out to you. What does the process look like?

They have to have the infrastructure if they want the outcome. And what I mean by that is the infrastructure means they need to have a customer service representative who's answering the phones. The business owner can't answer the phones because they're going to get too busy. If they're not willing to invest in their infrastructure, then they're not going to get the outcome that they want. So they have to have a customer service representative, they have to have a CRM in place, something to track all their data. Client relationship manager. The reason that this is important is because you have to be able to see your leads, your quotes, your sales, your new customers, and all the data to flow back into your marketing. So they have to have csr, they have to have a CRM and they can be the salesperson in the company. But usually at that point they understand I have to build an infrastructure. So our bread and butter is like 1 to 10 million revenue. Who understands either I need to build out this infrastructure or they have it in place already.

They bring you on board. Like, what the hell could they expect? Because like they need to basically expect like double or triple revenue, right?

When you're like 1 to 3 million revenue, you're usually paying cookie cutter marketing companies to do like Google Ads, SEO, Facebook ads, something more fractionalized marketing. The problem is, and this is what I faced, was that they don't take your CRM data or your CRM into account to help you build automations inside of your sales funnel or use the data to help you actually go back into marketing to help you grow. So what my company does is at a fraction of the cost of what it would be to hire this whole team of people. You get a marketing team that gets bolted into your business, that works with your sales team, works with your CRM, builds automations in your sales funnel, but most importantly, pools return on ad spend data. So that way whatever you're doing for new customers, visibility ads, you have a return on ad spend Every single month.

Rank the channels for home service businesses.

Right now, branding, I would say it's going to be everything else because instead of someone going to Google and saying H Vac near me, they're going to search your name and it's going to be the number one thing. So the best thing you can do is build a brand digitally offline, whatever, so people search for you by name. Second is still going to be local SEO, which is search engine optimization. Because when someone goes to Google, which still 87% of people go to Google when they don't know who to contact. And the best thing you can do is show up when someone asks for H Vac near me. Organically, you have to have number one reviews website that's optimized properly. But most importantly, in the age of AI search which is coming, AI search is pulling from the Google search engine results. We've done a bunch of different studies on this that if you were to go to ChatGPT and say H Vac near me, you would get a list of results. And if you say, well, how did you come up with these results? It says, I went to Google and did a search and this is the person with the number one reviews and this is the one that's optimized. Doing this right stuff for local SEO is going to continue to help you in AI search. The next piece of that would be Google Local Service ads. Google Local Service ads is like Google guaranteed, which is the first thing. It's the number one real estate and it's a pay per lead model. What that means is you don't have to pay and pray to the Google gods that they're going to send you leads. If you give them money, you only pay when they click call. Now that's when you pay for a lead. The problem is is that it's a, it's a crapshoot. Google could show you, they couldn't show you. You don't answer the phone once, they don't show you any other time because they miss out on money from them. So it can be a little bit of a gamble. And then the next one is going to be Google Search ads. These are the four main sections of Google Search engine results page. Google Local Service ads, Google Search Ads, the map pack with the reviews and then your website rankings. So the reason Google search ads are so good is because you can still compete on this. The problem is it's a black hole. If you don't have your return on ad spend data, you that's reported, you're not going to know if it's actually making you money or not every single month. So those would be the top four.

That I would say after Google. What comes next?

Yelp.

Yelp is kind of underrated for home service companies, huh?

Not that it's underrated. People hate Yelp because Yelp sucks. Yelp sucks because most of the times they have bad attribution. They don't know if it's working. A lot of home service people think that they are holding your reviews hostage. If you don't spend money on Yelp, they're going to hold your reviews hostage. And the lead quality is bad. A whole host of other things. They spent money on Yelp and they didn't get any returns. Usually the reason is is because they're not doing the right things on Yelp. For example, like having a tracking number in place, having messages dialed in so someone's responsible for actually messaging back and forth with your customers with in under 10 minutes, working those leads, also optimizing your Yelp profile. And so it is underrated in the sense that most people don't do it because they think it's trash. If I say Yelp, people are like, this guy said Yelp. Like, he doesn't know he's talking about, but I get it, trust me.

What kind of percentage of business is coming in from Yelp?

So we have one H vac contractor. They spent $10,000 a month in Yelp, and last month they generated $115,000 straight from Yelp. That's verified bones, like, in their CRM data. That's like, yes. The thing is, is that they work the leads. They follow up on the messages. They're in there. They have a good sales process all dialed in. The problem is, is that if you don't have a good CSR who's managing your messages, because about 60% of the leads are going to be messages. And the problem with messages is that you might message someone back and they don't respond. And people hate Yelp because they don't give you the phone number for the lead. It's just literally a message. So you could be in there just messaging people back all day, and no one responds. And you're like, well, this is dumb. That's why you need to have a good strategy. And some of the ways you can do that is by having a specific Yelp offer, which is like, hey, for all of our Yelp users, we have 10% off of the first service. Or, hi, this is Phil. I'm a technician at H Vac Service. What questions can I answer for you? So that way I can troubleshoot your job without actually having to come out and solve your problem. This is how you can get stuff going and start a conversation with people that most people are not doing this. They're just saying, our flat rate is $89 to come out and take a look. Let me know if you want to do that tomorrow.

I mean, everybody hates Yelp. And here you are talking about how valuable it can be if you do it the right way. How did you come across the right way to do it?

Yeah, so I was at that home service business, and they always call you from a Chicago number. Is the salespeople's number. So they call you from a Chicago number, and then what they do is they say, hey, you know, there's a lot of searches in your area that you're not showing up for. You know, there's a lot of demand. You should think about increasing your Yelp budget or spending money on Yelp, because there's a lot of people searching for your service and they're not finding anyone that's kind of like their pitch. What I said was, okay, well, we have a blended mix. Like, we spend, you know, 3 to 10% of our revenue on marketing. So what that allows us to do is then to deploy different funds. You know, 2000 over here, 1000 over here, 1500 over here. Then we can track what's actually working and double down on those things. So it was literally through trial and error at that home service business of saying, okay, we're spending $2,000 on Yelp. This is the money that we're deploying towards Yelp. How can we get the most money out of it? And this is the framework that we found was by making sure that you're in the messages. Obviously, you can set up the profile. Correct. And do some other things, but the messages is really the heart of it.

What about social media? Like, I feel like home services, I feel like they don't know what to do with social media. They don't know how to make it work. Does it work? Is it worth the time and effort that it takes? And, like, what's the strateg that you advise your clients?

Here's the problem with social media for home service businesses. Everything that I've said up until this point is all return on ad spend. Very concrete data, numbers driven to generate leads for your business. Right. Social media, throw that out the window, because you could be posting for a year and not have any attribution of real leads coming through, you're not going to know that someone knows about you. So they went to Google and searched your name, went to your Google Biz profile, clicked on your phone number, because they've been following you on social media for years. So the problem is when you talk about social media with home service business, it's so hard to tie the knots together that if you do this, then you get this. That was always my impression as well of social media. Like literally, this guy right here, Tommy Mello, he runs a $200 million home service business. Up until a year ago, he didn't even post on social media. It's not one of those channels that people go to when they need an H vac company. Here's where this is changing is that with AI search, when I say branding is the number one thing that you can do, the number one place that you can do branding is through content. The other flip side to this is that these large language models that are out here, this AI search, they're literally pulling data straight from content that's being created. So as a business, if you give more input of content from your business, standing out as a subject matter expert, these language models are going to say, okay, this company has pretty good reviews. But look at the content that they're creating. This is great content. That's adding value.

Boom.

And this is the missing piece that's going to sneak up on people is that if they don't, if they don't take content seriously and they don't want to do it, they're going to miss out on all the opportunity over there. And one other big note to this, this guy right here, Marcus Sheridan from they ask, you Answer. He had another book that just came out called Endless Customers. There's this layer of being known and trusted company. And a lot of times in the home service space, it's like, you're an electrician. You're an electrician. The only qualifier is review count. This guy has 500 reviews. This guy has 100 views. There's a big difference, though. When you create content and you show up and serve your client like no other contractor. Here's the five things to look for if you're hiring an electrician. Here's the top five questions that you should ask every electrician. Here's how much it costs to do X, Y and Z. That is a big differentiator for home service businesses that they're missing out on from a content perspective. When people ask about social media, I'm like, but if they really get that part of branding and building a sustainable brand over years, it can definitely play out in favor, especially with the AI shift.

Yeah, totally. And I do think that there are ways that they can accelerate how effective social media is for them. For me, if you're a local home service business and you are posting on social media and sharing other businesses in the community, whether that just be the place that you went and grabbed a slice of pizza, or the deli where you grab your sandwiches, or the dry cleaner where you bring the uniforms to, or whatever it is, and people see you as the company that's servicing all these local businesses, people are going to notice, take notice of that and you are ultimately going to be the most recognizable name that people think of when it comes to landscaping. And maybe they don't ever go to the Google search because they're just like, hey, I know who I'm going to go to, I'm going to go to this guy. Because I see the content that they're putting out all the time.

I completely agree with you. The pushback that you're going to get, and this is, this is the hard part is that the guys that are, you know, 0 to 300,000, 500,000 that are in the mud, right, they're out there on the job sites, it's easy for them to make content. A lot of times they're going to be younger too, but they're going to be, it's going to be easy for them to make content on a regular basis. The guys that are running around running these three, four or $5 million businesses, plus they're just trying to keep, you know, payroll going, routes running. It's hard for them to be a founder led marketing of creating content and go out to these job sites or know these stories. And the hard part is working through your team and your technicians, getting them on board to create content for you. And that's the big disconnect is how do you get the time to be able to create this content and get on job sites? That's always the pushback that we get. Some of the ways to get around this is incentivize your technicians to create content for you. Just like you would incentivize them to leave you Google reviews. If they get a Google review, they get 10 bucks. So have them go out and document before and afters and maybe a selfie about what they did at the house. The technicians, you know, along with doing the service of knowing how to fix your H Vac unit, delivering great service to the customer, selling the customer on the things that they need now. They need to be a social media influencer. This is all the stuff that they're trying to figure out all these moving parts and come up with a process.

Probably the best thing to do is just find one person in the company that that's like really into it and just let them run with it and have that person go out, like interview some of their clients and stuff like that. That could work.

I'm laughing because here's what they do. They take their customer service representative, who's a young woman, probably in her early 20s, and they say, you're young and you look nice, you need to go out and be on camera and go out and interview these people. The problem is, is that if it's not a part of the normal process of what you're doing and you don't have a system in place, you're not going to continue to execute on it. And more importantly, that person's going to have no idea what they're doing. They're just a young person who might know social media, who also might be attractive in some sorts.

Yeah, yeah, got it, got it.

It's all about a process. And let me be very clear on this, though. I believe that social media is going to be the biggest differentiator for home service businesses in the next three to five years, specifically because of the AI search side of things and because with AI creating real content that's transparent and delivers a message to your clients, that's what's going to help you stand out. If you don't do social media, it's going to be just like every other person's doing. And you're not going to have that known and trusted brand and you're just going to rely on Google search engine results, which is not bad, but that's what everyone else is doing.

What you have delivered for these home services businesses is incredible. Right? So just give me one story right now that you're like extra proud of. A recent client that you worked with.

This one client last April, he did 80,000. This April, he did $240,000 in one month. So basically, after 12 months, we tripled his revenue. And the way that we did that was really like three things. This actually plays right into this whole social media thing. So from a visibility perspective, to get new customers coming in the door, we crushed it with his SEO. Like, before working with us, he had 200 keywords in position one. After working with us, he had 275 keywords in position one through five. He basically, like went up 30 some 40%, whatever, dominating this. But the biggest thing is he was running Google Ads. He was spending 2 to $3,000 per month on Google Ads. We were running his Google Ads, optimizing it, optimizing landing page, doing all the stuff. And he was generating like 3x return on ad spend, which we want to get like 5x plus return on ad spend. So he's spending 2 or $3,000, maybe making $9,000. Like okay. He also had 11,000 Instagram followers because he did like remodeling type services. And he would do walkthroughs of the funnel projects before and afters and like on it all the time. So what we said was, hey man, we need to double down on social media. Take this two or three thousand dollars that you're spending on Google Ads and go and hire a videographer and like, let's really like ramp this thing. And what happened was over the next 12 months, his social media website traffic, Organic Social from his Instagram went from 500 people to 4700 people. 10x more people came to his website from organic Social just because we pivoted over to that. And what happened in his business was he started to get a ton more leads, a bunch more estimates. He made two really good decisions. First, kind of to circle back, he started building the infrastructure. So he hired a customer service representative because he realized, I'm getting all these leads and I'm missing out on the leads. Second, he hired a salesperson because now he had all these leads. So he had all these opportunities to sell, but he wasn't able to do them all. So he hired a salesperson. And this is the big kicker. The salesperson had six years of experience in this specific trade. They told us on a call, these are the best leads I've ever received in the history of ever working in anything. And the reason is, is because they're warm leads. The prospects know about this business. They're not cold leads from Angie Thumbtack. Random things that you're paying for. They're people that know the content, they read the reviews, they go through SEO, they go to the social media, they are warm, they're ready to buy. So his business literally went from 80 to 240,000 in one year, 12 months, all by implementing those main things.

Let's talk a little bit about your own marketing efforts because you have done a tremendous job of marketing your own business. So give me some of the channels that you are using right now and what's working for you, because it's seems like Every day I talk to you, there's some kind of new opportunity that's presenting itself to you.

Yeah, I mean, you know, it's crazy. About three years ago, I started committing fully to content. And I said, okay, let me just start with this. I'm gonna do one LinkedIn post per day, and I'm gonna do one YouTube video per week. What ended up happening was I read a book by Dan Kennedy, and it's called Marketing to the Affluence. And in that book, he said, as you charge more money, people work with you because of who you are, not what you do. And the call to action that hit me square in the face was, Phil, you need to build that story, and you need to give people the story of why they want to work with you. So what I started doing was figuring out how can I position myself as a subject matter expert, and that was through creating content and getting on podcasts. So the channels that work best for me, because our target audience is like 1 to 10 million home service businesses. These are people that are on the forefront of getting educated, learning from subject matter experts and professionals. And what they do is they listen to podcasts, they hang out on LinkedIn, and they go to YouTube and ask questions. So that's where I need to be present so that way I can be the one that's educating them on things.

How do you keep up with all the content?

I have a virtual assistant. She helps me a lot with content creation and just keeping track of everything that we're doing. For example, when I hired her, I said, your goal is to give me a one podcast per week, reach out to people, figure out what that looks like, get me on one podcast per week. We keep track of it on her one to ones every single week, how many podcasts that we're at. When it comes to my weekly YouTube videos, I basically, you know, every week I record a YouTube video, send it to the editor, edits it, schedules it to go out. Working with people like you to help me cut content efficiently, you know, in one hour, being able to knock out some content. Another really big hidden secret is when you record the videos, take the transcripts, plug them into a chatgpt prompt, then you can get the actual word content. You can turn it into blog posts, you can turn into email newsletters. So you can basically take what you do and then turn it into a lot more content. I would say just being organized. And one word of wisdom that really helped me was I didn't just do all this all at once over the Last three years, I've literally been like, okay, I'm going to do one long form YouTube video and then cut that into shorts and then post that. And I did that for a little bit. So I kind of got into my groove. Then I slowly added another thing and another thing. The podcasting thing has just been of the last year that we've really been getting into that so slowly I've just been chipping away at it. And now I would say I spend about four to five hours per week on marketing.

You've got brand deals, you've got speaking engagements, you're on stage or you're being promoted at events with Gary Vee and Cody Sanchez and all that. So like, talk to me a little bit about like how that has come about over the last couple years that you've been doing this.

I'm still feel like I'm just getting started with being able to articulate my message and stories and telling stories and speaking wise. But as you start doing it, over time, you know, you get a couple of good ones. Good story. That's really helped me a lot be able to like, these people find me, they say, hey, this guy's really into it. I'll give you an example. Like, there's an organization for these air duct cleaning companies. And I created a video three years ago about an ultimate marketing plan for air duct cleaning companies. Last week they found this video, they reached out and said, we love your content. We want to use it in our upcoming feature in one of our articles. I said, cool, let's hop on a call. How can we do a webinar together? How can we do this? I'm asking her these questions and she's like, oh yeah, we should do all this stuff. Well, now I'm getting in front of all of the people inside of their association. When you start adding value out into the marketplace without knowing how, it's going to come back to you, I really believe, like, give the recipe, sell the cooking kind of thing. So I'm just like, you got it all. This is the ideas are going to keep flowing. It's just like, this is the ideas right now.

Beautiful. Do you have millions of followers?

No. It was funny. I was talking to my dad last week and I was telling him like, all this cool stuff and everything. He's like, how many followers do you have? I was like, on LinkedIn, maybe like 2000. On YouTube, we have like a thousand subscribers. On my Instagram, maybe like 5,000. But I don't even like really get anything from Instagram. Or do anything on Instagram. And he's like, oh, I thought you had way more than that. And I'm like, no, this it.

You know, I think that's like a tough unlock for people who are trying to market themselves and get into social media. You know, kind of separating the fact that you don't need to be an influencer, you don't need millions of views, you don't need millions of followers, that if you have the right audience in a, a really good targeted niche like you have, it's all good.

Now. Social media is changing. No one cares about your follower count when you post one piece of content. If it's good, the algorithms are going to push it out there. That's the TikTok vacation of social media, right? If it's good, they're going to show it. They don't care about your followers. No one cares about your followers. That's the first thing. Second, is that on LinkedIn in particular? I just closed a LinkedIn client, probably about $60,000 for in a year. And you found me straight through LinkedIn from the content that I can follow you. We got on the call, he's like the man, the myth, the legend himself, Phil, right? It's like I have 2000 followers. It's not like anything crazy, right? But he's been seeing all my content. So doesn't matter about follower count. It matters about staying in front of your audience. Content, content, content.

I like working with marketing people that have like really great results to share and like, you are never lacking for that. I'm just excited to see what you do next. Like, what's the next thing you know, it's just a testament to like you being like a person that puts themselves out there. Obviously I appreciate that about you.

I appreciate that as well. And I would say, like, if anyone's considering, you know, working with you, I've been working with you for a while now and I would say one, it helps build my confidence that, like, hey, I have someone who's actually in my corner helping me create content and coaching me through that. So I really appreciate that. Then it gives me consistent content to be posting on top of whatever I'm already posting.

Where's the best way for people to reach out to you?

So if you are a home service business owner, 1 to 10 million, and you want to grow your business, you can go to Flash Consulting. Com P H L A S H Consulting com and we have discuss your business. It's a free marketing audit. Get on the call, talk about stuff, help you grow your business or LinkedIn. That's where I hang out a lot of times.

Beautiful. Thank you, Phil. I appreciate you, man.