Phil Risher explains why pouring more ad money into a home-service business won't work if you can't convert leads into bookings. Fix your follow-up system, positioning, and processes first, or new leads just disappear. Measure your booking rate before you scale.
Running more ads doesn't fix your broken follow-up, your weak positioning, and your owner dependency on actually running these leads. Running more ads is not gonna magically grow your business if you don't have a good follow-up process, if you have a bunch of bad reviews, and if you're the one that's bottlenecked trying to follow up on these leads, it's gonna be really hard to scale your business just through ads alone. We were in shoulder season at my home service business and we didn't have any jobs on the books. And the owner said, "Hey, why don't we just increase our ads budget and then we're gonna get more leads and that should help us." The problem is, is that We did not have a good follow-up process. We had one-and-done opportunities. We would get calls, how much does it cost to do this service? We would say, this is the price. And I say, well, you could do that, but you're going to keep putting more money into a leaky bucket. You're going to keep pouring more water into a leaky bucket. The fix is we need to first know what our booking rate is. So we need to know that we got 100 leads and we booked 70 of them. So let's just get more leads because we know that we actually can convert them into jobs. Once we know that, then we know that we have a really good follow-up system And we know we have a good position because people want to work with us. And it doesn't depend on the owner to just remember to do this stuff. Lesson here is if you want to grow your business, yes, you can spend more money on ads. Yes, it will grow your business, but you need to make sure you have those 3 things in place in order to grow.
