MWR #39 - The B2B Partnership Blueprint That Built a $5M Home Service Business with Phil Risher

How do you operationalize that to continue to help people?

It's that you stay sticky with your customers. You still offer them a service, and your technicians or your company can make $100 or $50 for every job that you do with us. And it's just like another channel. But here's the unique thing. The number one way to get referrals coming in is for me to educate your technicians on what we do. You need to have three touch points after your forms happen or a lead comes in. And what I mean by three touch points is three different things. An email, a text, and a phone call. This is something that we faced heavily at the duck cleaning company because what happened was every single person that calls in and probably junk removal to most businesses, they're going to say like, well, how much does it cost?

It was a big reason I started this podcast, actually.

Okay, this is going to be money. So if you're listening, like, buckle up, because this is the exact blueprint.

And we are live. Welcome back to another episode of Marketing Without Rules, the show where we inspire business owners by bringing on guests who exemplify the hunter mindset. The they make moves, they color outside the lines, and they have found creative ways to channel the attention of their community into currency. This show is sponsored by Blue Crocus Solutions, a web design and SEO agency focused on helping home service companies. I am your host, Louis Van Der Vaugh, and today I have the pleasure of chatting with Phil Rischer. Phil is the founder of Flash Consulting, a marketing firm helping home service businesses fill their schedules and scale Fast. After growing a 3 million company to 5 million in under two years, which led to a private equity exit, Phil packaged that blueprint and he now helps H vac plumbing and local home service teams grow through data driven visibility, conversions and retargeting. His work has been featured in many places, including Forbes and Jobbers, Masters of home service. Phil, welcome to the show. Really excited to chat.

Yeah, thanks, Lewis. Likewise. That was a really great intro. That's probably one of the best ones I've had. So thank you so much.

Hey, I'm excited. This is going to be good. And for the audience listening, we were chatting about it quickly off air, but Phil reached out to me because you had. I think it was Clifton you had on your show. Yeah, Clifton Muck Booth, who has been on this show and on my previous podcast before, and he said, hey, you know, had him on. I get people all the time asking to come on the podcast and most of them are just like, you know, Block or spam, you know. But you came on, and I was like, who is this guy? You know, you had a good, good email. And then I followed Phil for a month, maybe even more. Just left him on read, or left him on Read, I guess, and didn't reply. Because I want people that come on the show to be conversations that are interesting to me and interesting and useful and informative and accurate for those listening. So I followed him on LinkedIn. You're really. I. I would say you're the most active on LinkedIn, aren't you?

Yeah, we post YouTube. Surprisingly. YouTube is probably most kind. Yeah. But LinkedIn as well. Yeah, those are the two. YouTube and LinkedIn is probably the top ones. And podcast.

I love it. So anyway, I was following Phil's stuff, and I was like, this is good stuff. Got to see a little bit more of your story, filter through the stuff that you're sharing. And I was like, all right, let's do it. Let's make it happen. So we're here today. I'm really excited to chat because you've had a really interesting story and an interesting journey, and I think I want to kind of start back at the beginning. We'll kind of do, like, hey, give me your intro while also telling a cool story. Because my understanding is you paid off, like, 30k in student debt while you're on, like, a 50k salary. Is that.

Yeah.

Yeah, right? Like, talk about that and the hustle and all of that.

Yeah. When I came out of college, I had an internship at Enterprise Rent a Car in their management trainee program. So I got a job right out, and I was making $48,000, and I had 30,000 in student loans. I was a big Dave Ramsey guy who's, you know, no debt, you know, get out, loan all this stuff. So the first year, I basically just, like, lived off nothing. Paid $2,500 a month towards my student loans. In the first year, I paid off 30,000 out of the 48,000. And then over the next two years, I actually saved up and bought a condo with cash. So I saved up like 60,000, and I bought this, like, really, like, in the cut, like, not the nicest place, but I got a condo with cash while I was 25, and my wife is a kindergarten teacher, so all of her friends know they have their master's degrees, and they. You don't make too much money as teachers. So they're asking me, like, how'd you pay off your loans? What'd you do? And so I ended up starting A blog about personal finance. And then, you know, I built a WordPress website. I started learning some digital marketing stuff from there, but from a money perspective, it was really like the Dave Ramsey paying off student loans and then getting into, like starting a blog and learning what digital marketing even is.

That's cool. That's cool. And then the blog. So then you transition from enterprise into what was the transition? Because it was into. Was that the same company? The accident?

No. So this is a very. This is where it gets a little crazy.

So. So a little fun.

So I was working at Enterprise, running a local branch, and I read rich dad, poor dad, Robert Kiyosaki. He said, the number one skill that you can learn how to do is sell. So I went into corporate enterprise and I sold fleet management services to home service companies. So I was calling on CEOs that are running, you know, 10 million to a hundred million businesses. H vac, plumbing, electrical, you know those guys setting up meetings, talking to them about fleet management for enterprise. At the same time I was doing my blog. So I learned, I built a WordPress website. I learned, I learned how to do backlinking. I learned how to write blog posts. This was before ChatGPT.

What was the purpose of the blog when you started, aside from just telling your friends?

So I would be researching, you know, other people that had. Had paid off student loans or done things. And I saw other people that have blogs and were making money off these blogs. So I'm like, okay, well, I have a really cool story. Like, I bought a condo with cash and I did this. So, like, I feel like I can help people and make some money with affiliate links and like, you know, building an audience and stuff. So that was like the premise behind it. And since I moved into corporate, I had more time on my hands to do things, you know, after hours. So I was selling fleet management, running the blog, WordPress, email marketing with Mailchimp, social media content, writing three blog posts per week that was handwritten. So I learned, you know, how to do all stuff. Well, I ended up.

I like how you classified that because it's like, it's like a badge of honor now. Like, hey, I wrote before AI.

Yeah, but this is in 2015. So, like, this was literally before, like, I was literally writing this stuff by hand. And so then I learned about backlinks and authority building and how to get people to connect with you. So I started doing a lot of cool stuff. I got featured in a bunch of Forbes, Yahoo. Finance, like all the cool stuff on the news and different things. So what happened was I hated my corporate job. Like, I hated selling fleet management services. Just wasn't something I was passionate about. And I was really passionate about creating content and making stuff. So I actually, I was debt free. I quit my job and I bought a tiny school bus and I made a little tiny home and then my dog and I traveled around the country for three months just creating content, doing news interviews, blogging, YouTube, all the stuff. And then this was like in 2018 then.

Were you married at this time?

No, my wife and I, her name's Ashley, we met in high school and so we dated all the way through this process. So I was about 27, sitting down with her at the dinner table. We didn't live together at her dinner table. And I'm like, hey, I'm going to quit my job, this corporate job, nice, cushy job, you know, like making good money, whatever. And I'm going to buy this school bus and travel around the country for three months and I'm going to go full in on this blog and like, see if I can make it work with speaking or doing stuff. And she was obviously like, you're crazy. You know, she's like a really big rule follower, go to school, get good grades kind of person. And so, but, you know, it is what it is. It happened. And I, I went, it was awesome trip, really fun. And when I came back from that trip, one of my clients from Enterprise that I sold Fleet Management to, he followed me on Facebook. Like we got, we were really close through the sales process. And then he saw my whole journey. He saw everything I was doing. He loved me. When I came back, he texted me, I was like, hey, you're back in town. What are you planning to do? And he was a $3 million home service business. And so then he basically recruited me to come work there. I still do my blog some and that's how I kind of got into the home service space of like actually working at a home service business.

That's cool. How did the blog, how did that three month thing go? Like, what was the outcome of that aside from coming back and landing at the 3 million?

Yeah. So here was the big issue from like a business perspective is that I was good at creating content and getting buzzed. Like, people knew Phil as the money guy. People. I was on all this cool stuff. I was doing this. I didn't have a way to monetize. And it almost felt a little bit unethical to me in some regards of like, these people need to pay off Loans and I'm going to ask them to pay me for things. I felt like this weird tension, but then it feels so natural. But I learned a whole set of skills of like, how to get people to come to my website and convert into leads or subscribers. And then how do I actually like, you know, do SEO and how do I actually do email marketing and do good subject lines and all these skills. That was like free AI, but like actual knowledge in the head that's like.

Actually develop the muscle.

Exactly. And that was over four years. I did that. The blog. I was doing it for four years.

That's cool. You said get people to open the emails. Do you have, uh, they were basically subscribing to your email and then you have to keep them opening the email so you still get good deliverability, all that good stuff.

Yeah. And like lead magnets. So I gave away like a, you know, a seven day budget guide that then like had email sequence and like what's my best open rates? What tools can I give these people? What affiliate links can I use? Right. So I'm learning all these concepts in actual practicality without making any real money.

But I like it. Which, which makes you even try harder because you got to really like squeeze the lemon here to get the juice out. Right?

Exactly, exactly.

I like it. So you land at the company what, what it was roofing was that or.

This wasn't a air duct cleaning company and the owner used to work in H vac. And so when I went to work there in the first two months, all my worlds collided. My digital marketing experience of like actual data, you know, looking at Google Analytics, looking at Google search console content, website conversion rates, all the stuff, email marketing and then my running a local service business. At Enterprise, I was a management trainee and I was ultimately a branch manager at one of the largest branches and I was one of the top ones. So. So I knew how to run a local service business.

How many people did you have under you as well? Like do you have that direct management experience?

Yeah. So at Enterprise I was a management trainee and then I worked my way up to be a branch manager and I was at a flagship branch, So I had two locations, a sub location, and I had about 20 team members that were under me. And I got paid off of the bottom line. So I got a base pay and then a percentage of profit.

Okay.

So I was like. And I was one of the top branch managers. So it was like very, you know, management heavy, execution heavy. So I go and work at this $3 million home service business. And I go in there and I'm like, this is a mess. Like all this stuff is a mess because I have the corporate background and then I also have the digital marketing background. And you know, within the first like three months it was like game over. Like basically like you know, feeding candy to a baby. Cause it's like fix it, fix this, fix our lead management problem over here. Okay, we're working with a digital marketing company. Why don't we know our return on ad spend numbers? What happens with this lead management system over here? Why are we not doing email marketing? So it was just like all these holes that needed to be plugged.

That's super cool. So then it was over. What was it, a two year process? The five million?

Well, yes, but here's exactly, here's what happened. So I went to work with this guy and he had been in business for about 20 years and you know, doing 3 million, making more than he ever thought was possible. He barely graduated high school and he's a great dude. I talk to him almost every day. He's like a mentor at this point. About 10 months in, I'm like, so my enterprise mindset is basically like growth at all cost, like whatever it takes, like let's get after it. That's just like my mentality for my corporate upbringing. I go and work here and it's like, whoa buddy, chill out. Like this is not how we do things here. And about the 10 month mark we just like hit this friction point that was like I'm pushing way too hard. And he basically is like, you're going to get, you're, we're either going to not work together or we need to figure out another way to work together. So I say that's very mature of.

Him to have that conversation. I don't know how the conversation actually went down.

But yeah, basically it was this, how can we get the best of both worlds where you help us still grow while then also go out and do your own thing? Because I was only making about 70 or $80,000 and I wasn't even any commission or anything. I just like getting after it. And I was like, I knew the impact I was making on his business. He went 3 million to 4 million in the first year. And I'm like, okay, I should definitely be making at least like a hundred thousand or something here. And so he's like, maybe there's a way you can go and make a hundred thousand and also help us grow our business and go and be like a consultant. And he actually introduced me to two other businesses. So him. And then two other ones, I had three. And he said, just charge us each $50 an hour. You'll have 40 hours, you'll make a hundred thousand dollars and you can work on my business for 20 hours. Their business, 10 hours. 10 hours, you'll make a hundred thousand and you'll help us grow. And that was like at the 10 month mark, how we came to that friction point and how I ended up starting the company, Flash Consulting.

That's wild. So before we get into the name, where Flash came from, was it a mature conversation? Cause I'm thinking of it from a leadership perspective there, like, because that feels very self aware of him to say, hey, you know, I can see you have all this potential. I'd like you to take advantage of that so you can get what you want while still getting me what I want.

Exactly. You know, when I tell this story, people are like, wow, like, imagine that guy who has this, you know, young stud who's like, you know, just like ride this thing as far as you can get it. And he's like, no man, I see potential in you. You need to go out and do your own thing. And then you can help me as well. Like think about how mature and self aware that someone has to be to have that conversation and feel like really looking out for me. But the cherry on top is that I continue to perform for him and took him to 5 million the next year. And when he went to sell to private equity, I was on every single private equity call and actually the guy that bought the company, I would literally go to breakfast with this guy and tell him all the stuff that he should do when he buys the company. And we'll still work with that private equity company to this day.

That's cool. On just that business or with other ones that they're rolling up?

On just that business and other ones that they're rolling up.

That's so close.

So this is the thing is like when you do right by people and they do right by you, it all works out. It's not like just take, take, take. It's like, how can we create win win situations and everyone wins? And that was what I took from that. Which it took him having like, you know, that foresight, that leadership, like what you're saying to be like, hey dude, you should go do this and then it all works out.

Yeah, yeah, that's cool. So Flash Consulting, it's on the wall behind you. It's the name of your company. Where did the name Come from?

Yeah. So we, so we go to eat. His favorite place is Chili's. We sit down at Chili's at the ten month mark. And he goes, he goes, all right, Phil, here's what I'm thinking. I already talked to these two business owners. They want to work with you because you've been crushing it. So go do this. He's like, here's what you need to call the company. Flash Consulting. Your name is Phil. Your wife's name is Ashley. I call her Ash. So Phil and Ash, Flash Consulting and go do it. So he named my company and pushed me and gave me my clients and said, go.

I love it. I'm liking this guy even better because I'm thinking about it from like a leadership perspective as I go through all the pains of that. Right. And it's like, man, he was probably thinking about that for a few weeks or maybe months before, and he was like, all right, cool. I got this all lined up. Yeah. You know, Will's still done right by me and I'm going to do right by him.

That's right. He was so tired of me calling him, being like, man, we need to get this fixed because, like, we're not going to grow. Like, it was, it was a really. It was a. We had a couple, like, tough things, but yeah, it was good.

I like it. So now, you know, you're still doing Flash. What year was that that flash started?

2019.

2019.

Okay. It was actually. It's very ironic timing. We're recording this July 28th. My wife and I got married yesterday. July 27th, 2019, over. Our honeymoon was when I made the transition. So, like I came back from on our honeymoon and it's like, now you're starting your own company. So like I met with him like a couple days ago, you know, in 2019. Yeah, please go do your thing. And then honeymoon and then now you're off to the races.

Oh, that's wild. That's cool. So August 1st is a big, big date for me in 2019 also.

Oh, yeah.

So August 1st, 2019, I bought my first course on rank and rent and not how Blue Crocus started. So I started out doing rank and rent. So I was working on my own projects as well, you know, ranking them and everything and that transitioning to helping business owners. So it's. Yeah. Cool. Congratulations on six years, man. That's huge.

Yeah, thank you. I appreciate that. The first, like, probably year or two, it was, you know, that trading your time for money, getting referrals in and just Kind of figuring it out. I had never worked at an agency. I have no experience as an agency owner or even like operations. Nothing. Yeah, so I had to like kind of figure that out. I worked with a couple like third party agencies, like bolt them into my offering. And then at about like the two or three year mark, I kind of hit my two year mark. I hit my stride. I was doing like maybe 2 or 300,000 revenue and I was like, okay, I'm going to start like really build this out and scale this thing out. And now we're. We have a team of about 15 people and yeah, just like getting after it. So it's really fun.

What all do you guys offer for services? Walk people through that and.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. So the biggest things that I faced when I was at the, the, the air duct cleaning company was first, the return on ad spend. Reporting was just like a mystery. And I'm sure you can appreciate this, Louis, like if you do any type of marketing, everyone wants to know, like, how are you going to track your return on ad spend or return on investment of any kind? And I noticed this right away, which is that the CRM side of things, there has to be some component of that from what I produce. So for my company we are really heavy in people's CRMs. Whether that's jobber, housecall pro, service titan job, Nimbus service, autopilot work is. There's, you know, those handful. Yeah, well, as far as like services that we offer, we do digital ads, PPC meta, Google essays, yo, whatever. And then we track return on ad spend inside of their CRM. So every month they get a report that says this is the actual return on ad spend. And let's make decisions off of this then. Local SEO, so you know, like service area pages, Google biz profile, citations, that kind of stuff, social content. So we have this video content that we produce for clients, which is pretty cool. B2B partnerships, which is very unique to us that a lot of people don't focus on. Which at the duck cleaning company. Focus a lot on B2B partnerships. And I'm doing a jobber seminar tomorrow on B2B partnerships. Then the big.

Can you walk me through. Can you pause on the B2B partnerships for a bit there? I completely agree that that is a huge part that people overlook and they want to just call up an agency and be like, hey, fix all my problems. I'm going to sit here. It was a big reason I started this podcast actually and rebranded it from. I used to have a podcast called the Blue Crocus Experience, you know, a little nod to Joe Rogan, where basically it was using it as a networking podcast for myself. And I said, you know, what I really see across the industry is a need for people to stop being couch potatoes. Or, you know, people at the counter just ringing things up. And, you know, someone calls in and they take it. People don't even answer sometimes. But the whole concept behind marketing without rules was, hey, go out and be a hunter. Don't just be a gatherer. So B2B is huge. I'd really like to hear how you operate, operationalize that for.

Yeah, okay. This is going to be money. So if you're listening, like, buckle up, because this is the exact blueprint. So I went to work at this $3 million home service business. They had 36 Google reviews, no service area pages, nothing dialed in return on Aspen, nothing. But they were $3 million, all because they had 100 B2B partner.

Wow.

Yes. And this is.

How can you talk to people? Break that down into real Layman's term. A B2B partner is a referral partner, basically. Right?

Yeah. So he did. They did duct cleaning. So they would go out and find H vac contractors, restoration contractors, and property management companies, and then they would pitch them on, hey, you don't do duct cleaning. Your clients want duct cleaning, and you need to do duct cleaning. So you should refer us. If you refer us, we'll give you $50 or $100 for this job. We'll come out and do it. And here's the beautiful thing, we don't sell what you sell. You're going to stay sticky with your customers, and then you're going to also make money off of it. So that way you can do the business without doing the business. And we have all these, you know, been in business for years. We did duct cleaning at the White House and all this other cool stuff. Yeah. So it was like, a lot of cool stuff. So basically, that would be the pitch to them. Now, this is the really unique part, because I'm sure, Louis, you and your business and every other person listening meet some guy or some woman out somewhere, and they're like, yeah, Louis, I'll refer you for sure, man. And you never hear from them again. That happens all the time.

Every networking event.

Every networking event. And every time you think about referral partners, that's exactly how the conversation goes. Is like, okay, when I go and talk to them and they never send me. This is the unique part to what he did and what we recommend doing and build out for companies. First you go and you build this relationship, and you need to figure out what the win win is for them. So the win win is not that you just send me leads. It's that you stay sticky with your customers. You still offer them a service, and your technicians or your company can make $100 or $50 for every job that you do with us. And it's just like another channel. But here's the unique thing. You set up a lunch and learn or breakfast and bagels with their technicians. So you say, hey, Louis, obviously I want to have this partnership. The number one way to get get referrals coming in is for me to educate your technicians on what we do. So I'm going to bring donuts to your office at 7am and I'm going to tell your technicians and answer all their questions about why we do what we do. So that way they can sell us out in the field.

You just farmed a whole nother sales team.

Sales team, okay. You know, you just don't farm. So here's what you do. You go into that meeting, you make little QR code things like this. So you get these. Now this is a review one, but you get one that says get, send a Referral and get $50. So you make a bunch of these little business cards and with the QR code, and when you go there, you educate all the technicians and you pass out hundreds of these business cards to all of them. Because what you want them to do is you want them to have them in their truck and you want them to go to people's houses, say, hey, have you ever thought about getting XYZ done? Because we actually work with a company that does this. I can have them give you a call and give you an estimate on this or whatever that process. They go back in their truck, scan the QR code, and here's the other part. They need to go to like a, a form on your website for referrals. So like, like flash consulting.com referral. They go there and it's like a referral form. They fill it out, it goes over to us, and then now you have.

This engine working and it basically tags it in as coming from Joe's chimney sweeps or whatever.

Yeah, there's a bunch of ways you can do it, right? Like you can have a funnel into a spreadsheet and then you kind of have it tagged in. There's ways to automate it inside of CRMs back out. So that way it's Kind of more clean. But that's the premise of going in and kind of building this salesforce all over with all these different people. And 50 to a business owner is not going to mean that much. $50 to an hourly employee making $25 an hour is going to be like, wow, I can make 3, 350 extras every single job today.

Oh, interesting. So is it, is that how it would typically be? It's like you're incentivizing their employees and obviously you've got buy in from the business owner that is referring to you.

But exactly. We would say like, you know, you can because like a business owner, okay, cool, an extra 50 bucks and like maybe they care about that, but it's really about the technicians and then staying deal. It's a big deal. And staying sticky with their customers.

Yeah.

So the stickiness is so important because let's say, let's say you do like lawn care but you don't do gutter cleaning. Well, people are going to call you and say, do you do gutter cleaning? When your guys are out there doing lawn care stuff, they're going to ask them, do you do gutter clean? You're going to say no, no, no, no, no. But now. But then what's going to happen? They're going to call a gutter cleaning company that also does lawn care and you're going to lose that customer because.

They'Re going to be like, I just want to deal with one company.

Exactly. So now you can say yes and make some money off of it. And even if you do gutter cleaning, let's say it's really busy and you don't, and you don't have the staff to do it, you just sub it out to these other, you know, complimentary service.

Brilliant.

And then I'll give you one other secret sauce. So you go, you get all these people to, to fill out this form or send you referrals and you put all those emails into an email newsletter. So now you have a B2B email newsletter where you're staying top of mind sharing before and after pictures. And then now you can gamify it. So you could say like we had March Madness, March Madness, double payouts because that's usually the slow period, the shoulder season.

So when you're saying all those people into a B2B newsletter, I my mind went to, oh cool, a newsletter for your company, but you're actually liter talking B2B newsletter to all the sales, you know, the salespeople you've got in the field from those Other companies. Wow. Okay. Very cool.

Because now in your shoulder season, you're like, march Madness, double it up. Like, send us your deals and you'll double it up. And you have like this monthly, you know, hey, you're going out on your spring inspections. Make sure you look at this stuff.

Training them all the time.

You're.

It's.

It's. I think this is why I did. I did a whole Jobber podcast out in Las Vegas. I'm doing a webinar about it as well. I think if I was going to start a home service business and I didn't want to pray to the Google gods and get cold leads and hopefully this all works out, I would go and just. You don't pay any money until you get leads and customers coming in and they're warm referrals. It's just like, it doesn't make sense. I don't understand.

Yep. So from an agency owner perspective, I'm so curious, how do you operationalize that? So this seems to be less, you know, interesting for the audience, maybe. I was very curious. How do you operationalize that to continue to help people? Because a lot of that know those relationships happen because, you know, Joe in Sacramento knows, you know, Bob the chimney sweeper, whatever.

Yeah, this is. And I'll. And even people that are listening, it's going to be interesting to them as well. Because this, what I'm talking about on Jobber is like, okay, Phil, this sounds cool and all good, but, like, how do you do it? So here's how you do it. What you do. First, you find complimentary services to whatever you do, do lawn care, gutter cleaning, roofing, gutter cleaning. There's, you know, pick like three or four different ones. We had like a custom closet company that we work with. We picked some interior designers. We went to Fiverr F I V E R R. We found a list builder for B2B partnerships. We said, hey, we're looking for interior designers around this specific city. We want the decision maker and their email address. Find them, they build us a list of like, maybe. I think this example was 47 interior designers. Cool. Take those 47 people. We put them into a cold email. Three cold emails. The first one is subject line partnership. The body says, hey, Lewis came across your website looking for a good interior designer to work with. Wanted to see if you're open for a quick call to see how we could work together. So simple as that. Yep. Then they're going to say, cool, yeah, give me a call, use my cell phone or whatever. They Don't. If they don't open air reply, it waits three days. Send them a second one. Subject line, looking for a good interior designer. Then in the. You're like, oh, that's me in the Buy Camera website. Looking for a good company to work with that. Want to see your guitar? Okay, third one. Are you the right person? Question mark. Reach out to you. I'm not sure if you're the right person to talk about this kind of stuff, but I'm looking to build partnerships with local business owners. Want to see if we could talk. That's the cold outreach that we do initially.

So I think this required pretty much zero time on the business owner's part.

Exactly. So this is nothing on the business owner's part, but someone could just do this on their own. But. So we sent out 47. Seven people responded to their initial email. One of them was like, hey, I actually have a project right now. I'm working on it, I need some help. They went out there, got a $14,000.

Job out of it and that happens all the time. That's not, that's not just, you know, a way out there stat that this kind of stuff is very cool and happens all the time.

I would say it happens. There is a little bit level of like building the trust factor because it's cold, you know, super cool. So a lot of times people want to go in and like we offer free on site inspections and we're going to do the best. It's like, bro, like, it's like asking.

Someone to marry them a million times. Yeah, yeah.

You just want like a simple, like let's get to know each other. So then the agency kind of steps away. We can coach them on what to say. And here's what I would recommend saying is call them up and say, hey, we have this partnership program. We work with people just like you, where you refer us business and we give you some money and we, we work together collaboratively so we can be an extension of your business. What I'd love to do is come in, I can bring lunch or donuts and educate some of your team on how we work together, answer some of their questions about what we do and take it from there. How does that sound? Simple as easy.

Simple.

Yep. Then we take all those cold email people, we put them into the monthly newsletter and then we have the monthly newsletter people coming in and we create the monthly newsletter based off a content calendar that we have. So we know what's.

And we do that specific to the industry obviously, so. Or do you do that specific to. So let's say it's lawn care and they're partnering with Gutter with another one that Lawn care. I'm blanking a little bit right now.

But what's in hardscaping companies, Exterior lighting companies.

So you got them all in the monthly B2B newsletter. Are you personalizing it to the specific ones? Like, Hardscape would get a little different than Gutter.

Not. Not that you could go that route, but like, you know, from an agency perspective, you want to kind of. We have like a B2B email newsletter and a B2C one. So the B2B one would be more like high level. Like, hey, check out this project that we did at this person's house. You know, right now people are thinking about X, Y and Z. Here's some freely asked questions. Try to keep it as high level possible.

That's all right. Oh, well, that's the podcast, man. That's great.

There's one which is like, have a form on your website to send referrals to and then have some type of referral program that you can enroll them into.

Because can you talk to nitty gritties? Some people might tune out on that, but I think that would be useful for someone who wants to go do that themselves. Like, walk us through the specifics.

Okay. So you go and you bring lunch and you answer their questions. Right now. If it's like a technician for an H vac contractor, they're not going to like, scan this thing and enroll in this program and text and like, they're busy. Right. That's why we went the QR code route of just like, hey, take these things, put them in your thing and then like, send us your referrals. We'll send you 50 bucks. And then we'll say top of mind. If it's like, like with the interior designer example, it's like, okay, exchange business cards, say top of mind. Put them into your newsletter. You know, that kind of stuff. There are some companies that are really good at this, which they will actually have all of the technicians, emails or phone numbers before from the business owner. Yeah, like, send them a reminder for the thing and then they enroll them into their program. So it kind of is like, how far do you want to take this and get involved with it? I would. If it was me, I would, you know, get them all enrolled right there and get them all signed up in our program and stay top of mind and texting them and emailing them and all this stuff. Also, it can be very, you know difficult and figure out that stuff. So that's my recommendation. But that is pretty simple like how to do it.

Well, it's becoming easier and easier as a business owner to do that sort of thing. You guys use Go High Level, don't you or do you strictly work inside Jobber?

No, no, no. Yeah, we use Go High Level. Go High Level came about because we have, there's so we visibility. We kind of talked about that conversions was a big issue which is leads come in but then there's no lead management plan, there's no estimate management plan, there's no follow up sequence. There's nothing happening for these businesses. And what I experienced at the home service business was Jobber Housecall Pro Service Titan. They're really good dispatch softwares for customer CRM, client relationship. They're not good lead nurture softwares. And it's like there's nothing in there to manage any leads. It's just all customer heavy. So that's why we use Go High Level. But like HubSpot Chirp Hatch, you know, something that's like a lead management system so you could put your leads in and then nurture them into some type of, you know, becoming a customer and.

Then you're syncing back and forth with Jobber Housecall Pro workies, whatever the case may be.

Yeah, Jobber, we have a lot of stuff built with Jobber because we do a lot of work with Jobber and Service Titan House Call Pro Ltd. I would say. But either way like it's going to be connected in some regards so that things happen. But Jobbers like are our main one in Service Titan.

Very cool, very cool. That's, that's awesome. That is such a valuable tip. I usually tell people the end of the episode to go back and do, you know, pick something and do it but like do this. I've, I've talked about it not nearly to the level that Phil has talked about it here, but referrals. So I started a junk removal company in 2021, was involved in that for about a year and a half and got to, you know, try some of that same sort of stuff. I didn't have it down to the science that you have it here. But referrals are everything. They're, they're salespeople that are talking to people. I mean your customers are your referral partners. But you can incentivize realtors and managers and moving companies and all the different people that, that come along. That's so, so powerful. So I appreciate you breaking that Down, Phil, that's. That's hugely valuable. And if you're listening, if you're not doing this already, just. Just go do it. You're. You're gonna thank yourself later.

Yeah, for sure. There's two other things that usually come up. Content that we could talk about in AI search and, like, email marketing. And what do you. Like, what do you do? Any. Anything in particular?

I'd love to talk, like, how you take. Because I know you're big on, like, where leads come from. Lead attribution and then remarketing. What do you. What do you guys typically do for remarketing? So let's say you get a lead, come in, you know, you've got a team in place, they're picking up the phone, you know, you've got all that stuff sorted out. What do you do for all the leads that don't turn into a customer right away?

Yeah, this is something that we faced heavily at the Duckling company, because what happened was every single person that calls in, and probably junk removal, too. Most business, most businesses, they're going to say, like, well, how much does it cost? Every single question that you get, how much does it cost? How much does it cost?

How much?

And you're saying, oh, I got to come out there and look at it. Or you might give them a price over the phone and then they're gone forever. So we had to fix this problem in the business, and we could give out estimates over the phone, but we had to capture something like their email address or phone number to send them a formal estimate. So the first thing that I always recommend to people is you need to have three touch points after your form. Forms happen or a lead comes in. And what I mean by three touch points is three different things. An email, a text, and a phone call. The reason is, like, it's Sunday night, someone fills out a form. Monday morning, you call them. They don't answer. You need to have a text that goes right away and asks for pictures and an email that goes out. Because now you open up those three channels for your business and you can start moving the ball forward right away.

And different people respond differently on different channels. Some people might be text only, some people might be Facebook message to your business page. Some people like, it just depends exactly.

And that's why those three communication channels, you have to meet people where they want to. If they don't want to text, they're going to say, stop, leave me alone. If they don't want to email, they're just not going to respond. If they don't want to talk on the phone, they're not going to answer. But you got to open up these channels because you want to meet the people where they're at. So that's the first thing. Now, the second part to this is let's say you do talk to them, and you need to have some type of lead management. They say, oh, I'll talk to my wife, or, oh, you know, I'll give you a call back. It depends on your business. If you're a business that is more nice to have duct cleaning, gutter cleaning, lawn care, that's like removal.

Yeah.

Junk removal. It's not like, oh, my gosh, my AC is broken. Come fix my AC. Then you can nurture them over, like, seven or 14 days. But if you're H vac, no AC, you got to hit them, like, in the first day or two, you know, three or four times a day, because clearly you got to get to a yes or no. So I would say that's the first part. One business that we work with, they were generating about 840 leads per month. And in the first four months, we maintained their same leads. We didn't even generate any additional leads. Still 848, 40. But we fixed this lead management problem, and it unlocked a hundred thousand dollars in their business because they went from closing, like, 42% to around 60% of their leads into jobs just by tightening up this process.

Yeah. What industry was that in duct cleaning? Oh, nice. Yeah.

But. But in duct cleaning or gutter cleaning, a lot of the questions you get is pricing. And here's some, like, good tidbits is when you fight with pricing, you can give pricing over the phone. But here's what you say is, hey, Louis, so I can give you our pricing. I also want to send you over a formal estimate via email or text, because if you call back in and speak with someone else, I want you to have something for your records.

Oh, I like that. So you're, like, playing devil's advocate there. Also playing their friend.

Exactly.

That's good.

And then they're like, oh, wow, okay, thank you. Not like you need to give me something. So I give you something. It's like that. And then you.

From our errant employees.

Exactly. Or just like, you're going to call back in and it's going to be confusing for you, and you might not know. And then also, if you're going to share it with your spouse, you should have some, like, you know, actual thing than just something written down. Paper. I'll also send you like a video or pricing guide on exactly what we do and just some more educational information. It's just like, comes off way cleaner. So when companies implement that system and then also implement something of lead nurture, like there's no way that you can't grow your business if you actually execute. And sorry, I keep saying one more thing, but there's one other big thing that we fixed in the duct cleaning company and that is this North Star number. So many times, especially with CSR's customer service reps, they're just like, you know, $20 an hour employees just like, you know, taking calls. They don't really like, see the big picture. So what we did was my enterprise days was like, okay, we need to have a job booked total. So in the whiteboard for our CSR office, I would go in there and come up with a job book total. And I would say, okay, last July we booked 500 jobs. This July we're going to grow 10%. So we need 550 jobs. And then every day I'll be track like, this is how many jobs we're at. Here's how many jobs we're at, here's where my jobs were at. And if we hit our goal, then they would win something.

That's cool. Yeah, there's, there's a lot in here and I think, yeah, this, this is a great conversation. I'm going to do a quick rapid fire one. Um, who is a marketing guru that you respect but disagree with.

Neil Patel. Gary Vee.

What do you disagree with Gary Vee? Let's dig into that a little.

Gary Vee, you know, he's, he's not really a numbers guy. He's just like, oh yeah, you know, just branding, Branding, branding. Create content. Create content. Which I'm all about content. You see my content, right? But there's also a layer to like numbers and science behind actual strategic, you know, SEO and growth. It's not just like throw things out the wall and see what sticks and iterate. Um, he, he blasts Neil Patel a lot about like, oh, he's just a numbers geek and all he cares about is like his rankings stuff and it's like there's a blend. But I would say I, I, I fought a lot on Gary Vee for the first like three or four years of learning marketing because of that.

Yeah, very, very solid on the, he, he's got a gut sense now that he might not need numbers as much. He's always like pushing out in the, in the forefront. Yeah, that's cool. Neil Patel, what's your, what's your gripe with him?

I would say on the flip side as well because like Gary came out with the book day trading attention.

Yeah.

And it was like so clearly, you know, create content, run ads on the content. And Neil, I'm Alice in a marketing school and stuff, he's trying his YouTube and he's trying to create content. It's just like he's just so much of an SEO old school guy that's like so much numbers that it's almost hard for him to flip the script.

On branding and just like that out into the.

Yeah, yeah. And that's why I think it's like a healthy blend and that's how I feel like I am. I've kind of grown more towards the branding and content side that I agree with, especially with AI search coming down the line. But that would be kind of the hybrid because people just hear one thing from one guy and it's like, you know, you kind of have to formulate what you believe.

Yeah, yeah. And like you're, we're looking back over six years or whatever it is for you. Right. And we're looking at, okay, you know, now this, all the pieces all fit together differently. It's not like there's no concrete rules in a lot of, certainly not with SEO and how all that happens. What's the biggest BS buzzword in marketing today?

BS buzzword. I would say automation. And I think there's with GoHighLevel, with MarTech. Like I just made a video about this but like anyone could create a marketing company in like a week if you use go high level in a day, within a day, you know, and say you're an automation expert and an AI expert literally like overnight and then it's just like plaster all over and people are just like almost exhausted by all these automation and AI experts that are like 20 year old kids that like they don't get, you know, the big what it is. It's just like that part to me frustrates me a lot because they're selling the dream, you know, over 200 bucks we're going to automate all stuff. It's just that is a big buzzword that's going to continue to happen. From marketing automation perspective.

Marketing is an interesting one. I'm sure you've seen this many agencies, you know, come up and then die over the last six years. I've seen a lot. I've been friends with some of them and there's been some good dudes you know, business businesses come and go, but marketing is an interesting one because you can literally start it in your mom's basement. Basement. You know, it's, it's a, it's an easy thing to start, but it's a, it's not an easy thing to get really good at.

Yeah, I would agree 1000% on that. And I would say for business owners out there, this is very important. Like our company could be called Flash Digital, but it's called Flash Consulting. And I think the future like PPC, SEO, web development, it's all going to be AI, like you know, 75%, 90% of the way there. It's going to be the people that actually like use data, make decision decisions, strategize and implement and create content and help you from a branding perspective and also like know what to do. Those are the companies that are going to win. But eventually like all these go high level guys and all of a sudden it's all going to get washed away and it's just going to be, you're.

Going to be able to code that on lovable in a weekend, you know, everything that is there now.

Exactly. Vibe coding, whatever. You're going to just go to elementor and say yeah, I want to update this picture and it's going to like update it. And it takes a lot of that friction out of the process. And that's why a lot of these agencies are going to die because they don't have the context for us, the home service base of like understanding like what actually happens and what needs to happen to get to a sale. They're just on the, you know, fluff over on Facebook ads.

Right.

It's silly.

Yeah. What's a marketing hill that you'll die on?

So I truly believe this. There are and there are so many cookie cutter marketing agencies out there that just like rinse and repeat, do the same thing over and over again. I face three of them when I was in the home service space trying to find a good company to work with and it's just like it kills me to no end that there are agencies out there that don't care about their customers data that just do the same thing over and over again. That have one person over here that does email marketing, one person over the social and there's just like, there's no like cohesive game plan to learn about the business and implement. And for me that's like my mantra is like I'm almost anti like typical like old school agency model.

So yeah, yeah, I think I, you Were hiring recently for another role. Right. Someone. Someone come in. I think it was you that was hiring.

Yeah, we, we. We just hired a salesperson. We're hiring two more consultants.

Yeah, I saw your consultant ad. That's what it was. And you're basically like, hey, we're looking for someone who's going to become our customer's best friend and really dig in and, you know, get to know what they're. What they're up against.

Yeah. Right now we have three consultants, and we're about to hire two more. And the consultant is like, you know, they make six figures plus. And basically the goal is that they are like, you know, they've run businesses before. They know, like, the business side acumen is really what they need. The digital side, we can coach them on that. But we need people that are going to come into these one to $10 million businesses, which is what we work with and understand the acumen piece and how to piece things together and use the data to make decisions and really be like that partner. Not like a account manager who has a communications degree, is 22, who can't respond to emails.

Like, that was a burn right there. I love it.

You asked about the hill. I would die on. This is the hill.

And he went down with a roast, too, as he was dying. I love it.

There you go.

What's something that we didn't talk about that we should talk about before we jump off here?

All right, so everyone says, okay, well, with email marketing, content creation, SEO, like, how do you know what to talk about or what to do? And what we do is we come up with a content calendar. So let's say you do gutter cleaning every single month. You should have a theme, what you should talk about, and you should have a cohesive game plan. So, like, your emails, marketing, that should be talking about this. Your blog post should be talking about this. Your promos that you're running should be talking about this. Everything should be cohesive. And a lot of times agencies just kind of like, oh, this sounds cool. This looks nice. I think this would work over here. When there's not like a theme based off of the geographical location, based off of what's going on in the business. And it just is very fragmented, and that's why people don't get a lot of juice out of it.

So for.

And it doesn't have to be home service. It's like any business, if you're going to create content, have some type of theme of what you're talking about.

That's huge. Huge. How are you using AI in the agency or for clients?

Yeah, well, there's two sides to this. There's the AI search side of things, which is shifting a lot and then there's the like AI automation, you know.

Day to day tools that really speed things up. Right?

Yeah. So like, like one very cool one. We have a tool, it's through Delphi D, E, L, p, h I.AI and I basically trained it on all my YouTube videos and all my content and then art and anything like podcast interviews. And our team can ask it any question and he would answer it as if it's me because it's been trained on all my stuff, our SOPs and processes and so internally it's awesome because they don't have to ask me, they can just ask my Delphi and then they get real answers. So that's a cool one for any business owner. If you are like, man, I wish I could replicate myself or have my CSR ask me questions. That's a really good one. As far as automation, the content calendars that I mentioned, they have months, we could, you know, we have APIs built, whatever it goes into the spreadsheet, pulls the content calendar, goes, educates and learns about it, goes to ChatGPT, runs our prompts, puts it back into a Google Doc and does a lot of the stuff for us. So there's a lot of these automations that we're building. We have custom APIs with jobber where we, we do different things based off different things.

Cool.

Yeah, I wouldn't say there's any like specific tools but down the line these old school agencies are just going to run go high level or other active campaign and say that it's their own automations and it's not. We're, I would say we're pretty much, we have an, an API guy who builds stuff for us.

That's cool, that's cool. That's. I think that's the future of agencies for sure. But even businesses is having an automations expert who can build stuff custom to what you actually need. You know, any business owner, you and I can go out and learn that stuff, but to actually implement it properly you've got to have someone really in the weeds with that.

Exactly. We have Cheryl on our team, she's go high level certified and we can literally build anything custom and she's our employee. And then we have another consultant who he's not our employee but basically he's like, he's built all of our Jobber API integrations, he's building something right now for us. It's like the more that you can build unique things that's helping your clients. I feel like if you, if you have a business and you're working with the agency, ask them this question specifically, like, what are you doing for AI? What are you doing? And see if they give you some mumbo jumbo or it's something that's actually really cool. That would make sense for your business.

Business, yeah. What do you think is like, if you could only do one thing for to influence how you show up in AI search right now, what would that be?

Content. So, well, so.

So like a hundred blogs a week from an AI generated thing?

No. So the first part would be continue to do all the normal SEO stuff that you do. Because AI, if you go and search on ChatGPT, whatever Google AI, it's going to still give you the same stuff. Like they have the most Google reviews. Like search your service in your area, ask it how it got the results, it's going to tell you. You know, you basically have all the names, the similar SEO stuff. However large language models are trained on content, and content is what you can create that you educate them on your business. So here's what we do, Louis. We go, since all the calls are recorded, because we use tracking numbers, we take any call that's over five minutes, we take the transcript, we plug it into ChatGPT1. We can just make a blog post right from that because it's unique content based off of a real question your customer asked, based off a real answer that you provided. That's not chatgpt fluff. Second, we take the content, the recording, and we ask it for like 10 hooks. Then we get on a call like this and we educate the customer on how to create video content. So that way we can post the video content, which gets transcripts, which then we can create blog posts, email newsletters, and then it educates LLMs. So there's a big shift going on, in my opinion, in the next two to three years. If you're in a saturated market with people that have thousands of Google reviews and you have not that many, you're like, there's no way I can catch these people from a rankings perspective. Where you can catch them is in content. And that's really what's going to shift over the next two to three years, in my opinion is the branding side from AI search and also social searches.

I think you're right. I think it's almost like a new Internet that people have an opportunity to Kind of start again if they miss the last one. Because you can have a website that's not ranking great in Google, that can. Can be showing up in the LLMs and vice versa. Right? Yeah. Very cool. I like that. So basically what I heard and to lay it out so I make sure I got it, and for the listeners is you're basically taking the recordings over five minutes. You're then pulling that transcript out, and then it's becoming, you know, a spiderweb of more content that you're training the clients to give you on top of the content that they've already given you from that call.

It's this flywheel of content that most businesses miss. They go to ChatGPT and ask for a fluff blog post, like what you were saying, thousands of blog posts, and it's like fluff, Right. You're not even going to get in depth.

No one had ever asked any of your CSRs that question, ever.

Exactly. And if they did, the ChatGPT doesn't know the exact answers or stories that you're going to tell that your CSR would be able to tell. Now, if you want to take this a step further, this is what we do as a company. All of our cars calls are recorded in Fathom, every single client call, every single prospecting call. All that is flywheel. So a lot of this content that you might see on LinkedIn is from math. So how can you just have your home service business, all your sales calls, when your sales guy goes out, turn on voice memos on your phone, get the recording transcript, Boom. There's this flywheel that a lot of people are missing when they think of content and unique content that you have inside of your business that you're not pulling out and creating content on. Which is why I think a lot of people are just missing the boat on social, SEO, everything, because they're not doing this.

It all goes together.

Exactly. And I'll give you one other tip on this. All that content I just told you, that can train a Delphi AI AI thing for you. So eventually you could have that inside of your sales process. And then two, you could train a chatgpt, my GPT on your business with all this content. And now you have this thing that you can deploy on anything to create anything based off of your business. So, yeah, there's a lot of ways that you can do this. It's just about buying into the content and a lot of businesses don't.

And you're not having to sit down and do a gruesome you know, day long recording session. You've already going back to Gary Vee instead of, you know, document, don't create is a, is one that I've definitely snagged from Gary is just take what you're already, the conversations you're, you're already having with all your customers and your team and everything and turn that into content. You might have to rerecord it or edit it or something, but you're not like having to come up with a new idea. You've already said it once. Just make it, you know, digestible for people. So this has been awesome. Where can people find you? Where can they follow you?

Yeah, for sure. If you're a home service business and you know, you want to see some of our playbooks in action, we do these free audits and we go through and show you the stuff we're about. Giving the recipe sell the cooking kind of thing. You can go to flash consulting.com and click discuss your business. Or if you just like want to hang out. LinkedIn is good. That's where Lewis and I connected. Or Instagram just. Phil Richer YouTube. We have a good flash consultant YouTube channel with tons and tons of content, over 700 videos on there. So yeah, just happy to be a resource but thanks for having me on Lewis. I appreciate it, Phil.

This has been fun. Really, really great, great conversation. I think we'd have to do a round two. I'm going to say that, but there's definitely a round two. I'm. I personally probably will want to hop on a call and chat more with you about some of this stuff, but great, great episode guys. As always, go back through guys and girls and listen to what was talked about or you know, just pull it out of your bank and say, hey, this is something I'm going to take action on. Phil dropped two or three or four really solid strategies that you can take action on today and then some overarching things that you know can help temper everything that you're doing in your marketing. So go take action on at least one thing or modify something you're already doing in line with what he said and, and reap the results. This is about being a hunter and not a gatherer. We will see you on the next one, guys. Talk soon.