Phil Risher argues that home-service businesses grow by fixing operations, not just spending more on ads. CSR phone skills, technician training, and local community storytelling matter more than PE rollups that lack local roots.
Here's what they teach you at business school. You come to a home service business and you just spend more on ads and you're magically going to grow your business, right? This is what the PE guys tell you. Here's what they don't tell you. You have a CSR who answers the phone, you have a booking rate. Then you have to go out and actually sell something and give good service and close an estimate on the job. And by the way, you need your technicians to know how to sell and get reviews. Then you have to have a great process to install and do the service that you actually have. And on top of that, you have to have a great lead nurture sequence and estimate, nurture sequence that's built out that that ties into your local service business, that tells the story of what you do. Because if you don't have a heart or soul for a local community, then you're just another PE company that's probably going to go out of business because you don't know how to actually build a local service business. What they're teaching you in school is just pull some levers and hopefully grow your business. It's taking the soul out of home service businesses. And in fact, the local service businesses that get it, they're going to be the ones that thrive in the future.
