Smart Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Business | Phil Risher

What's Up Scoop podcast? I'm your host, Erica Kruipen, and on today's episode, we have a guest. We love guests on the Scoop. We have Phil with flash marketing. Welcome to the show, Phil.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

Yeah, actually it's flash consulting, not flash marketing.

Yeah, we do digital marketing consulting. Yes, yes, it's all the same thing.

Oh, goodness gracious. Well, thank you so much for tuning in. Not tuning in. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I got the opportunity to meet you in Vegas. What was it two, was it two years ago?

Like two years ago? Yeah.

That's crazy.

I know, I know. I was thinking about it earlier. I was like, yeah, that was like last October. So almost. Well, maybe a year and a half, but still long time.

It was. I remember when I flew to Vegas, I was so nervous. I went by myself and I didn't have a lot of time. I only had. It was like 36 hours. I flew in, flew out.

Oh, wow.

Like it was nuts. So I didn't get to hang out with any of you guys like afterwards. But I remember you were doing either. You were getting ready to record, but you were in there and you were chit chatting and I was like ear hustling and you were just dropping knowledge bomb after knowledge bomb about like marketing and advertising. And I was like, holy smokes. Like this guy knows what he's talking about. So I'm really excited to have you on and we're going to talk about how to, how to market, how to advertise and get more customers in the poop.

Scoop.

Scoop industry.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, everyone has the same thing. How do I get new customers, how do I keep growing my business? And it's a big problem that a lot of people face. And unfortunately there's a lot of people out there that just like, you know, they, they make it so complicated or they sell them to dream and nothing happens. So hopefully we can dive into what that looks like for, for people.

Yeah. Before we get into it, will you kind of just give us a rundown? How did you start your company? And like how did all that go?

Yeah, so I started actually working at Enterprise Rent a Car right out of college. So I was running a local service business and I was a branch manager. I was one of the best ones. And I ended up going into corporate selling fleet management services to home service companies that were had 20 plus vehicles. So that's how I got into like home service and learning the issues that they had at the Same time I started a personal blog about finances. And I ended up getting featured in Forbes and CNBC and Yahoo Finance and all this cool stuff just by blogging and create. This was before Chachi, like writing three blog posts a week email marketing conversions on the website. Like I was doing all this stuff on my own. And I ended up leaving my corporate job and doing this full time. And I bought a school bus and made a little tiny home and traveled around the country creating content, blogging, news interviews and everything. So that's how I learned digital marketing was literally just like through grassroots, doing it myself. Where it all comes full circle is when I came back from that trip and traveling and doing that kind of stuff. One of my clients was an air duct cleaning company that was doing $3 million in revenue. And he was like, I need someone to come in and grow my business. And he asked me to be his director of business development. And when I went there, the first month that I was there, my whole world collided. My enterprise sales experience of running a local service business, getting paid off the bottom line, coupled with all my digital marketing experience in using CRMs and creating content. Within the first year, his company went from 3 million to 4 million in revenue.

Wow.

And he actually, he fired me. He said, you are. So you're pushing our company to grow so much, you need to go become a consultant and help other home service businesses. And he actually named my company Flash Consulting because my name is Phil and my wife's name is Ash. So he's like, you should call it Flash with a ph. And he referred me to my first. My, my second client. He was my first one. And it was a $7 million carpet cleaning company and then another home service business that was $1 million. And then that's how I got started. And that's basically my background of how I got into the space.

So I don't know if I missed it. What year was that?

Yeah, so 2015 was when I started blogging, and then 2017 was when I left my corporate job. And then 2018 was when I started at the duck cleaning company. And then 2019 was when he fired me and I started Flash Consulting. So that was about five and a half, six years ago.

Whoa. So it's just been like rapid fire, one thing after another. Okay, so when you, you're, you're getting started in this and you're going to start consulting, how. How are you meeting people? Is it just by, by, by the Internet, by doing social media content?

Yeah. So what I found at the duct cleaning company was that most home service businesses, they pay for, like digital marketing companies that do cookie cutter how to things.

Yeah.

And we had a digital market company when I was there, because I'm, I'm trying to grow, right? I'm looking at jobs, I'm looking at booking rates, I'm looking at sales, sales numbers, I'm looking at upsells, like all the numbers that a normal home service is going to look at. And then I'm working with the digital marketing company because I have a background in digital marketing, doing it myself. And I'm like, okay, well we're running these Google Ads. Well, who are these actual people that you claim that we got leads for? And then like in my CRM, how can I correlate attribution into this? And then in my CRM, how come I'm not retargeting people and doing email marketing, text marketing? And then once all these leads come in, why am I not nurturing? I'm asking all these questions, right? And so what I realized was that most digital marketing companies are just doing the work and then putting the onus on the home service owner to say, like, well, you need to track it, you need to figure out if it's working. We're doing our Facebook ads, we're doing our Google Ads, but they're not tying the dots. And so when I was able to tie the dots, we started seeing very quick growth because we started pulling levers and doing stuff that most companies were not doing. So to answer your question, like, how did I get my first clients? The guy that I was driving growth in his business was going to lunch with his friends and saying like, this guy's crazy. He's doing all this stuff in my business. And they're like, well, maybe he can come sit in my EOS meetings with my management team and tell you, tell us what he's doing. So I literally was like an employee. And then I was going to these guys EOS meetings and sitting in their level 10 meetings and telling them like, this is what you should be doing. This is how you should be doing it. And then naturally it just was like, I should go be a consultant and help people do this. So it was just very organic referrals and just getting going with that stuff.

So then what led you to Jobber? Because that's where we met. How'd you get there?

Yeah. So a big part of this is most home service business owners use about 60% of their CRM to full capacity. And when I was, when I was at the Duckling company. They weren't using all of the tools and all the resources to connect the dots with marketing and growth. And so the first company that got referred to the $7 million Home Service business, Carpet cleaning, rug cleaning. He was in the process of implementing service Titan in his business, and he was vetting out Jobber House call Pro work is service titan. And he decided to go with service titan. And I was tasked with the technology marketing guy to onboard service titan for him in 2019. So I onboarded service titan, our next client. They already had Jobber, so I'm like, okay, well, how can we use all this Jobber data and automation and tie it all together from a marketing perspective? And so naturally, I just started using CRMs, all those ones I listed out and just started tying the dots with all this stuff with Jobber specifically, I was in their Facebook group and just like, you know, chiming in on different things. And then they were like, hey, you're. You're dropping some really good dimes here, so you should come on the podcast. And they reached out to me from the Facebook group.

Okay, yeah, that's cool. You. I'm not super active in that Facebook group like I should, but I don't know. I hear that there's a lot of good information in there. It kind of gets a little bit overwhelming. And I don't know if you said this off air, but. Or on air, but you said that a lot of service providers, like, they're doing too much. So you want to talk about that a little bit about.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So when we think about, like, marketing, most people are like, oh, well, should I be doing Facebook ads? I'll be on next door. Should I be doing Google Ads? Should I be creating organic content? Should I be. What should I be doing? They're all asking the same questions. So I'll kind of like lay out the three different things that we look at to grow businesses. And there's three main pillars that we focus on. The first one is visibility. So that's your traditional new customers coming in. Then there's conversions, which is lead to sale process, and then there's retargeting all your past customers to bring them back into your funnel. So from a visibility perspective, there's like maybe five or six main ways that you can get new customers from a digital side of things. You can do SEO, so you can do on your website, you can do on site SEO. There's off site SEO like Google Business Profile. Then you can run ads like Google local service ads, Google search ads. Facebook ads, different ad platforms. Then you could do B2B partnerships with like building relationships like with, with the scoop industry is like lawn care companies, landscape companies, anyone. That's a secondary option that could refer you business in yard signs and more traditional type of marketing stuff. That's really like the main stuff to get new customers.

Right.

You could go to networking groups and we could dive into those different ones if there's one in particular. But I think the biggest gold mine for a lot of companies. So when I went to the Duckling company, he was a three million dollar business. And I want people to hear this. He had 36 Google reviews. Yes, 3 million dollar business, 36 Google reviews. When I went in I'm like, bro, how are you doing this? He had 150 H vac contractors that were referring him business day in and day out. So what he did was he went to the H Vac contractors and said hey, you guys don't do duct cleaning. You should refer me for duct cleaning. And every job that you refer me, I'm going to give you money for it. And this is a really big important piece of the puzzle. Most people are willing to pay for leads. They're willing to pay Google gods, they're willing to pay Facebook, they're willing to pay all these people for leads. What they should do is pay referral partners for leads. Because one you actually, it's a pay per lead model. You don't have to pay Google and hope that they give you leads.

Right.

You just set up relationships with these referral partners and then every time they give you a lead, you actually pay for the lead or even the close completed job. So that's a really big honeyhole. If people are not doing that. That's where I would start. I was just on a call today and I was telling the guy and he's like oh my gosh, I need to do this, like start now. It's free to do. So that's a really good one.

Okay, so like what, what would be a going rate for. To pay for a lead for an in person lead?

Yeah, great question. So the guy asked me the exact same thing. So when, when you think of a customer acquisition cost cac.

Yeah.

There's a formula for this. It's basically your lifetime value of a customer. So let's say it's $2,000, $3,000, it's 5 to 10% of that. So, so let's say it's $1,000. You'd be willing to spend 50 to $100 to acquire that customer. And another way to look at this is your marketing budget should be about 3 to 10% of your revenue. So if you're doing a million dollars in revenue, it should be 30 to 100,000. And that's a good way to look at what you're willing to pay per job, per customer.

Okay. Because there's, like, a range. I would say, for the most part, people that are listening to my podcast, they're under that half a million. They might even be under that 250,000. And they're trying to figure out how to get to that next level. Like, that's me. I've been able to grow my business to 250,000 per year, and I just can't pull it together. I don't know what's going on. I can't get past it.

Yeah. So usually what we've seen with the 250 is there's. There's like, two parts to this. First, the operations. For a lot of people, it gets really hard.

Yeah.

Because you're doing a lot of the stuff, and then you have to build out these teams and got to build out technician. Yeah. I'm sure you. You feel this pinch.

Yeah.

And then.

Or like, my vehicle, that girl crashed two of my cars. And I was like, you know, I'm done. I'm not doing this no more. Like, I'm over it. But lord was like, no, Erica, I got you. We're gonna get through this. And so now I'm like, okay, we can grow now. That's fine.

Yeah. So there's the two parts of, like, the operations piece of getting the technicians. There's a book called buy back your time from Dan Martell, and he has this replacement ladder that he recommends. The first one is admin. So the first thing is hire a CSR or admin person to help you. The second thing is delivery, where you hire technicians and this kind of stuff. The third thing is marketing. The fourth thing is sales, and then the fifth thing is management. And you kind of walk through those steps to get to around a million to $5 million. But to answer your question, like, let's say someone's $250,000 first. You can't be 250,000 if you have. If you don't have a CSR and a technician. Right. You can't answer all the calls and do all the jobs. You're not going to be able to scale.

Right.

And the scary thing is, you know, you make 250, you feel like you're balling out. Right. Like you're making 100 some thousand dollars, you feel like you're feeling yourself and then you have to hire a technician or someone for like 50,000 and you're like, oh snap, my pay just got cut in half. Right.

I'm broke.

Yeah, I'm broke. And like you start like chipping away at that actual profit that you felt and it feels scary. And you have to take that next step which most people, that's the, that's the piece that you have to get comfortable with. And then people say this, well, I'd be willing to do that if I had the leads, because then I know that it's going to actually happen. And I have the supply and demand. It matches up perfectly. The problem is that supply and demand is like this one big piece of this equation. If you have a predictable lead channel that's going to give you leads over and over again, you'll feel a lot more confident in your game plan. And the way that you build a predictable game plan, predictable lead channel is in my opinion, with the B2B partners. Because these B2B partners are going to take their customers and then give you leads that come in. And it's very predictable to be able to go out and get more lead channels. And what you do is then, then you get the reviews from those customers, you cross sell them into your other services or whatever else you do. And now you could build this flywheel of organic SEO with reviews so that you're dominating the search engine results page. And then you layer in ads on top of.

Right. And for those of you that are listening, whether he's saying B2B, that's the business to business. So we're talking a doggy daycares, a vet, offices, groomers, anybody that's in like the, like dog walkers, landscapers, that pet waste space or pet space, that's who you're going to want to reach out to. And I did this in the beginning. I was really good about it because I didn't have any money. Like, I was like, I got, I got money for donuts and business cards. So I'm gonna go out there with a smile and a little pitch and just see how it goes. And I had, I had excellent, like growth with that. But then as you start to grow, you start to get a little comfortable, then you start to get a little lazy. And then it's like, well, throwing money at ads is a little bit easier, but that just cuts away, that cuts away at your profit.

Yeah. I'll give you two pieces of advice. On this and one thing before that. The ads piece is hard because you're spending money to hopefully get the leads. When you build the partnerships, you don't have to spend the money to get the leads. So it's better. But it is easier to just spend the money and then try to get the leads. But the two things to this is first, when you build these relationships with people, drop off some donuts, whatever. I would recommend building a relationship with the actual person at the front desk or the technicians or whatever because those people, if they refer you like person to person, they'll get that 20 bucks or 50 bucks that you're going to give them for the referral. That's a, that's a meaningful amount of money. If you just give it to the actual company itself. Another 50 bucks here, whatever. They don't really care as much, but the person cares a lot.

Yeah, that's a big deal.

They could make an extra 20 or 50 bucks a day just by referring you. The second piece of this is where a lot of people mess up, Erica, is they build a relationship. They drop off the donuts. Yeah, I'll refer you. Yeah, that sounds good. And then crickets. You never hear from them ever again. And this is why you need to do this last piece, which is you need to take their business card, their email, their phone number and put them into a database. And every month you should be emailing them. Hey, Springs around the corner, everyone's going to be going out to their yard and they're going to be stepping on landmines. So be sure to recommend us. Don't forget, you can click here to send us your referrals and you're staying top of mind over and over again every single month with your referral partners.

Are you, are you pretty familiar with the referral stuff that Jobber has going on inside of the CRM? Because I was. Go ahead.

I'm familiar with it. It's a little limited with some of the things that I'm explaining, but.

Okay, well, because I'm not like I try to use Responsibid. I had to, I had to cancel it because it's too techy for me. I just, I can't. My brain, if it breaks, I got to hire somebody to come in and fix it and pay. But I was in Jobber yesterday and they really have some cool things built out to where you can do automations where you can send automated emails to people like in your customers tag specifically. So say for instance, if you were to have them tagged B2B, you could set that automation up to go out once a month.

Exactly.

And so if you are using Jobber, if you're one of my Jobber people, maybe we can have a conversation. I'm going to test that out like I'm going to in the next like month or so, make the connection, send it out and I'll report back to you guys, see how it goes.

Yeah, you definitely should. And if you use a B2B tag, just put them into a segment in Mailchimp and then you can email them as well. Different things.

Well, because you can email them in Jobber now.

Oh yeah, through your tag.

Yeah, yeah, through the tag. And so I. Because I was looking at mailchimp, but that's another thing. That's another layer of complication that makes my brain twitch.

Yeah, so. So there's this company. I actually interviewed the founder on my podcast. It's called Clicky C L I C K I. And it automates the entire referral process for you and not only from a referral perspective, the payout as well. So. Yeah, yeah, so like you could build this B2B army, like what I'm mentioning here. Then you could give them all their, their own links that they could send on Facebook and Instagram and be posting their own links like an affiliate of your company. And anytime a lead comes through, then it will register inside of Clicky and it will pay them out based off of if they closed in Jobber. It's pretty sick.

Okay, so what if though, they send you a lead and they're like, well, I sent you the lead, I want you to pay me. So is it they send you the lead or they send you a lead that closes?

Yes, this is a really good point. You can do not just like with this clicky thing, but just in general. Let's say that you were to run ads and you were to get clicks to your website, you're going to pay per click. You can do the exact same thing with a referral thing like what I'm mentioning and pay per click. And then that people could be referring you all the time. Like you give them $0.01 per click or $0.10 a click. All they have to do is just post your stuff and get clicks and you just give them 10 cents click you could do per lead. So if someone were to give you a lead, let's say it's 10 bucks a lead. And then let's say you were to close that customer, you give them another 20 bucks or something and it kind of like builds off that or you could just say, the final customer. We're going to pay you for that.

Okay. All right, cool. So that. Yeah, there's a lot of options there now. Okay, so this is the other thing that I hear a lot of is, well, I'm getting all these leads and they're coming through, but, like, my prices are too high, so I'm not closing anything. Do you have any advice on that?

Yeah. So two parts of this. First, most people don't have a lead problem. They have a lead management problem. They get leads and they're giving pricing over the phone, and they get one shot at it, and then it's gone. The ball's in their court. So I made a whole video about this, but I'll break it down for you. Basically, instead of giving an estimate over the phone, what you want to do is you want to say you could still give an estimate over something, but you want to put one piece in there. You want to ask for their email address, and you want to get an email address so you can send them a formal proposal. And you can do this in Java or something else. Basically, the word tracking sounds like, you know, hey, how much does it cost for this? Cool, I'm happy to give you an estimate. I also want to send over a formal estimate from our company. That way it's on record in case you call back and speak to someone else. We actually have it on file for you. Cool. No problem. It's going to be, you know, whatever, and then send them the email. Now, you put them into a sequence to follow up on that lead and build the value inside of that. Because people might say, hey, it's too expensive. I'll get back to you, talk to my spouse, blah, blah, blah. All the objections that you would normally get. We got this all the time in the duct cleaning. Everyone wanted an estimate. We needed a process to control the narrative and manage that. The other piece of this, Erica, is there's a good book by Dan Kennedy, who's like one of the famous marketing people in the space, and he says that the more money that you charge, people work with you because of who you are, not what you do. And anyone could do something that's cheaper, but they want to work with you because of who you are. And you need to build up the reason that they say, oh, well, of course they charge more because they're X, Y, and Z for me. Of course they charge more because he was on the Jobber podcast 15 times. Right. Or of course they charge more because they have a thousand Google Reviews or of course they charge more because they're all over social media and everyone's recommending them. Yeah, yeah, whatever. That of course they charge more is. You have to build that up in inside of your business so that people validate your pricing as being more.

So how, how would you say you can do that? When somebody calls and they're like, I just want, I want to know what your prices are and they're cold and you're like trying to warm them up.

Yeah. So we, on our podcast, we interviewed the founder of Power Selling Pros, which is the number one CSR coaching company for home service businesses. And basically there's a couple things you have to do first. When someone just wants the price, you have to back up a little bit and just learn a little bit more about what is actually going on. You know, tell me, what animals do you have? How many do you have? Why are you calling me now about this? Did you step on a landmine this morning and you felt bad about it or, you know, try to build a little bit of conversation in there? Then you want to build a little bit of familiarity like, oh, we actually serviced this house down the street from you. Basically, don't people want the price? But you have to unwind it and get to the reason why they're calling you right now. Then you want to explain what your process is because most of the times people are just going to spit out a price and there's no process. Like, let me explain how we do this so that way you can understand the value of what we do is basically what you're trying to tell them. We have a 10 step checklist when we come out to your house. Every time we do da da. And we do this and we make sure you have to build a value inside of there, then you can get to the price piece. So a lot of people, they don't have a call script, right. They just go off the top, off the dome. Whatever the person says, you know, you got to have a call script so that you can manage the conversation. And this is the hard part. When you're under 250 or you don't have a CSR, you're running job to job in the truck. Oh, text me your address. Yeah, I'll text you back with the prices. Yeah, I'll let you know what that is. It's not a good process and it's not a scalable process.

It's not. And I actually, I've talked about this a couple times where I didn't because my ticket Price is pretty low because I'm just thinking about, like, okay, I'm going there. At the time, I was charging like 15 bucks a week, you know, super low. Yeah, yeah, I was in that mindset. I'm like, I'm not wasting my time having this, like, phone conversation when they're probably just going to tell me my, you know, my price is too, too high or whatever it is. But I wasn't thinking about that lifetime value. I'm not thinking about if this customer stays on with me, their dog's going to last for nine years. And so they're potentially, when my lifetime value is at 5 years, what is $100 a month times 12 times 5? That is worth a phone conversation.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. And one way to get this to the next level is after you talk to them, then send them a text message right away. So if you. If you get the opportunity to send them an email with an estimate, but send them a text right away like, hey, I just emailed you that estimate. Want to make sure you got it? If you have any questions, shoot them over here. Because now you're hitting them in three ways. Calls, texts, and emails. So you have three channels to follow up with. It's really good. And most people don't, they just use one channel, which is the phone call, and then the lead's gone.

Well, yeah. And a lot of times Facebook, we're noticing Facebook leads aren't answering. That's something that we're really struck. Okay, can you talk about that a little bit and set the expectation? Like, what's going on there?

Yeah. So when you think of, like, intent, search intent, people are on Google and they're searching for a company and they want a recommendation from Google. They have high search intent. When they're on Facebook, they're getting interrupted and they're saying, oh, this would be nice to have. Even if they're getting retargeted from going to your website and then on Facebook or something like that, they're still getting interrupted. And a lot of times when people are scrolling Facebook, like, oh, yeah, this is nice. You know, let me. Let me do this and see what it comes. Comes with this. But they're not in the buying cycle. So the two things to overcome this is first, instead of having a lead come through as an actual lead that you would call, set it up for messaging. So, like, hey, shoot us a message to get a free estimate. That way you have the conversation that started right away. And then the other thing is, if you are doing that Lead side of things where you have to call them and they don't answer. Set it up so that when they fill out a form or whatever that is, they get an automatic text and an automatic email that starts the conversation right away. Like the text message could say, hey, thanks so much for sending over what's your address by the way, so I can take a look at your yard or whatever that is. But you want to start the conversation right away because they're in that moment right away. If you call them, you know, an hour later, not going to answer, 10 hours, whatever that looks like.

So how are you building out that automation?

Yeah, so there's a bunch of different tools out there. We have our own tool that we call Flashlight but it's a white label software that we build out custom for different clients that we interact with, intertwined with jobber and other CRMs. But you could use tools like Chirp or Hatch or there's a bunch of different ones out there. And basically you're building these automations so that way when someone fills out a form or does something, it interacts with.

Them right away, which is good because they're hot at that, at that moment. Like you were saying, if you wait an hour when you're able to finish scooping that yard and get back in the truck and eat your lunch, they're gone, man, they moved on.

That's right. You need some automation and, and you could layer in some AI communication back and forth or just have a quick automation. What we found is text message gets 95% open rates so you can easily text someone and they're going to get back to you. But if you call them, you're going to leave a voicemail, you're going to call them three or four times hopefully and they probably won't answer. But text message is very easy. People are willing to just text back and forth because it's less invasive to them.

What's your thought on giving the price via text message?

Yeah, I love it. We build out these estimate calculators for a lot of people on their website where you, you know, put in the square footage how often you want stuff, then it does some quick calculations and then spits over a text price to them. This is all like kind of that custom stuff that we build. But even just a text over the estimate, like for example, the example that I gave when someone calls and says hey, how much is the price? Cool, let me get a couple questions, I got to run it through a quick calculator and I'll text it over to you. Also email it to you after this call. Does that sound good? Yeah. Cool. Then you text it to them. And now you have this text thread open that you can converse with them and say like, hey, did you have any questions about this? Oh, by the way, here's a quick case study of a local company that we or a local person that we helped. Oh, did you check out our reviews yet? Blah, blah, blah.

Okay, now if somebody doesn't have like a text message script or like a phone script, how do you recommend them put something that is like targeted? Like targeted. Good questions. How do you recommend they put that together?

Yeah, I'll give it to you. So if someone fills out a form, you want to say, hey, thanks so much for contacting us. If you have a picture of your yard, can you text that over to us right away? Then it waits 10 seconds and then you send another one that says, oh, by the way, my name's Erica, I'm the owner. And you and you make a quick video. Hey, thanks so much for filling out a form. My name is Eric, I'm the owner. Don't tell you a little about the company. Look forward to working with you. Blah, blah, blah. All that's automated, but it's really great. High touch, good value. Then inside of that, like nurture sequence, you know, following up, whatever. Usually with something like this in particular, it's not like, oh my gosh, I have no AC or no heat. I need to get this solved right away. So you don't have.

This is like a pain point. This isn't an emergency and this is not a pleasure.

Yeah, you don't have to hit them like, you know, three times a day to get this solved. Maybe like after the first day or two, you send them another text like, hey, just want to make sure you got this. Do you have any questions I might be able to answer? And then like the fourth day, hey, I was actually just in your neighborhood the other day and wanted to see if. Or I have a scheduled job in your neighborhood. Want to see if I could stop by and give you an in person estimate? Things like that, that kind of just like nurtures the conversation. That's less salesy, but just trying to open up the communication. Another really good one to that estimate that you gave. If you give like, hey, these estimates are good for 30 days. And then you can count down, like, as it gets closer to the end, it's like, hey, I only got 10 days left on this estimate. I didn't know if you wanted to do this or not, or if you wanted a new estimate or what that looks like and kind of count down to get them to yes or no.

That's good. And even though you're saying that this stuff is automated, I mean it can still be done manually. It's just going to take more time. But it's being intentional.

Yeah. If you're getting like 10 to 20 leads a month or something like you can do all of this manual. It's just about being intentional about things and keeping track of what's going on. And even if you have a VA or something like that, that could help you or CSR that could help manage the leads. It's. If you can dial in that process, all you have to do is just turn more leads on top of it and you can build B2B partnerships to get more leads on top.

Okay, so we Talked about the B2B. We're going to build some really strong relationships in the community. Let's talk about what's the next step? What else can we do to add on to that?

Yeah. So a big piece for a lot of people if they're not doing service contract. Does most people do service contracts like ongoing or is it.

It's like re. Recurring like I don't have any contracts but it's like this is month to month or if you're, you know, you move.

I got you.

Yeah.

What about like upsells or other things that you could cross sell or anything? Anything like that.

So some people offer like deodorizer or sanitizer. Some people. What else do people offer? I don't know. I live in Michigan. So that's very. That's like a small section. We, we have like cold weather most time of the year. But yeah, there's not a ton just like in. In the poop scooping space.

Cool. So there's two parts to answer your question. The first one is retargeting your past prospects and existing customers. And that might look a little different, but you could cross sell them different services. So you might send out a quarterly email or something like that to stay top of mind for people that didn't go with you, but maybe they went with someone else or they didn't make a decision just to keep them inside of a funnel of some sort of.

And you can do that, you guys.

Yeah, you can do that in Jobber. The other piece of this is as you are getting people to come to your funnel, you have to get Google reviews because a big part of your organic rankings from the map section is actual Google reviews. There's. Google says there's three things. It's your relevance. So your name. You want to have something in there that mentions like what you do. Don't have some crazy name that doesn't mention what you do.

Don't you. Your last name? Yeah, I did. I was like, whatever. I don't know.

Yeah, but, but it's pooping scooping, right? Like if someone's looking for dog waste cleanup or something.

I know, but my taxes get messed up because everybody spells my last name wrong. So it just, it made things really muddy.

Yeah. So the first thing is try to have your service in your name because that Google cares about that. The second thing is your location. So if you're located outside of a main city and you're trying to target a main city, it's going to be hard to show up there because you're not phys there. And then the third one is your prominence, which is the number of reviews that you have. So if you did a search in your area and you see other people that have 50, 100, 200 reviews, well, you need to get more reviews than them. That's going to be like your target that you want to try to hit. More reviews than them.

I should have had you do a search on me before we hopped on so you could tell me, like, give me an audit.

Hang on. I can do it real quick. Let me pull it up and we'll just do it live.

Let's see. Yeah. Oh, that would be cool. Another, another thing that people are kind of concerned about with a lot of people coming into the industry using word like poop or crap or dung or dookie. Is Google punishing people for using those like, controversial words?

No, but the, the, the best thing that you can do is go to Google and type in what people are looking up to find the service that you offer, which would be like pest, pet waste cleanup or whatever those keywords are that you would probably know and then you would be able to, to see what Google is showing for those keywords. So like for you, I just did pet waste cleanup in Northville, Michigan for example, and number one that comes up is Croupin's Poop and scooping with 386, five star reviews. The, the closest. Other two have five reviews each. Michigan pest waste removal ace pooper scoopers. So you're dominating the search results and they're nowhere even near to where you're going to be. But if someone were to do this search in their area, they would be able to see the Competition and what reviews, however many reviews that they would need make sense.

Oh yeah, yeah. I've done research too. So when people call me and they're like, well, this company will do it for cheaper. And I'm thinking to myself, like, yeah, they have three reviews, they don't answer your phone, you might not show up.

Exactly, exactly. And those are all good ways to justify, you know, your pricing. But as far as like standing out and doing an audit, that's a really good one, is do that search in your area. So there's two parts to SEO. There's your, your off site SEO, which is your Google business profile, which if you do those things that I just mentioned, you should be shown, especially if you have more reviews. And then the second type of SEO is called on site SEO, which is your actual website rankings. So with your website rankings, there's really like three things that you want on top of this. You want to have different pages built out. So you want to have like dog waste removal page built out like you have on your site under our services. You have your different services built out and you could even take it a step further. You have like waste poop clean spring cleaning, one time cleaning twice a week, cleaning dog waste stations. You could, for hoas, you could have this as separate pages on your website, all just about those specific services. Does that make sense?

Oh yeah. And would you recommend having different landing pages for each city that you service?

Yeah. So you have locations on here and you should have these things that are called service area pages. So like Canton, Michigan, you could have dog waste removal in Canton, dog waste removal, Garden City, Garden, Livonia. And these are. They can't. You don't want to duplicate the content because Google will penalize you, but you want to create many landing pages that all have different service area pages for what you serve. And so if you build those actual service pages like the ones that I mentioned before, you want to have three things on them. You want to have your title tag should mention your main city and the service that you offer. So like dog waste removal in Northville, Michigan, your meta description, which should say, are you tired of pet waste in your backyard? Choose Northville's top rated dog waste removal. Would you have this? And then your H1 should say dog waste removal in Northville and Wayne county, for example, is how it should be structured. You want to make sure that you have your service and your city in those specific areas.

Yeah. And also too, I really wanted to come out in Northville because I was like, they got the money I want to come out here. I found that they're not my ideal customer. They got a lot of time on their hands and their home. Right. And so my. This is not my ideal area. And it's super tiny. That's also something you guys look at the service area before you, like, build all your SEO around a certain area. Because our ideal customer is that Mom. Mom and dad, they're both busy. They got like two kids. Kids are in sports, they work. They're located. For me, it's in, like, Westland, Downriver, Garden City, Livonia. Livonia is a big one for me. That's actually where my business blew up at.

Okay, so Livonia.

Go ahead.

I was gonna say. Yeah, I see Livonia here. So the good thing for you is, like, it looks like you're not located in Livonia, but you still show up because there's not much competition around you. But if people. Yeah, people are really competitive areas. It's going to be hard to be showing up in different. In different cities that you might not be physically located in. But on the organic side of things, you don't. You don't show up. Your website doesn't show up. Like your actual.

How do we do that? What do we do?

So you need to. You need to make one of those service area pages, like what you mentioned, which is Livonia, Michigan pest removal dog waste removal page on your website.

Okay.

Dedicated specifically for Livonia. Like, if you were to do the search Pathways cleanup in Livonia, Michigan, the first result is poop911. And if you go to poop911.com they have a page specifically for Livonia, Michigan Pooper Scooper Service company. And it's a whole page dedicated to just that. They've built out a service area page.

Yeah, I think they're a franchise. Exactly.

Yeah. Franchises do this and. And they do it. And they're not even local. Google will prioritize the local company, but the local companies don't even know to do this stuff.

Right. So what are some other things that the franchises and the big dogs are doing that us little guys don't know about?

Yeah. So, like, once. Once you get this traffic to your website, you're. You're doing this SEO and stuff. You have to have call to actions. And this was a big thing at the Duckling Company and pretty unique to us, which is most people, most digital market companies can drive traffic to a website. What they're not good at is converting traffic into leads. And most businesses, they have, oh, I have my job or Contact form on there. I have a contact form on there. Like they'll contact me if they need me, but there's like a handful of them. And I'll give you some of the best practices. First, a chat widget is a game changer because people don't want to dig through your site to see if you do something. They just want to chat in. 87% of people are doing their research offline. And then when they go to your website, they actually want to just make sure this looks legit and then convert into a lead. So you want to make it easy. Chat widgets make it easy. Second thing is having a pop up. A lot of e commerce websites have pop up to get 10% off your first service or get a free whatever and then you trade your email or phone number for that pop up or promo. A lot of home service businesses don't take advantage of this and they're not capturing all the leads. They're getting people on their site but they're not giving them incentive to convert into a lead. That's a really good one. And I'll give you one other really, really best practices. 50% of people are using your website on their phone. Most business owners never go to their phone, their actual website on their phone, they just look at it on their desktop. So if you go to your phone and it takes you longer than 10 seconds to turn to a customer, there's a problem. And what you want to do is on your phone you want to have a button right at the top that says call. Now like a sticky button right at the top with your phone number and then another one that says get an estimate and that's just sticky across your site. That way people can turn into a lead very fast. It's not hard for them to turn into a lead.

Yeah, because if you have, yeah. If you have to look around, people are going to leave. Do you happen to know like if somebody goes to your website and they can't figure out how to get in touch with you or what you do, how, how fast are they leaving?

Yeah. So this is called engagement rate, which in Google Analytics it will tell you your average engagement rate. Usually people are staying on your site for about 30 seconds to one minute. So that's all you got. That's why it's like you got to make it easy for them because they're not digging through your site, reading all this stuff. People want to think they're reading your story about how you started pooping, scooping when you were six years old. Because Your dog Murphy died or whatever. They don't care about any of that stuff. They want to just turn into a lead very quickly.

I think when people get started, they don't really know what to put on their website, and they don't have content. So they're like, well, I'm just going to talk about me. And that might be fine in the beginning, but as you start to grow and you start to get experience and you learn your customers then, and you have money to invest into somebody like you or somebody that builds out, make those changes.

Yeah. I'll give you a good framework for this. There's a book called Story Brand Donald Miller, which is back here. Basically, business owners think that they're the hero. Right. We come in and save the day. We clean up the poop. But you're not the hero. The customer is the hero that has a problem, that's looking for a guide. And you're the guide. You have to position yourself as the guide. And the way that you do that is that you have a proven plan that's going to solve their problem. So what you want to do on your website is you want to make it so that you're speaking directly to your hero, which is like, stop stepping in poop. When you go out to your backyard and hire a company that's going to come out on a weekly basis, basically you're trying to tell them that you understand their problem and you have a unique solution that's going to solve it. Instead of saying, like, we're the greatest of all time and we're going to take care of this because no one cares. You're not the hero.

Okay. Yeah. Which is very true. It's identifying your ideal customer and not making it so much about, like, me, me, me, me, me.

Yep.

Which is hard to do. All right, so we're talking about the website. We're, you know, maybe doing B2B. We're adding some ads onto this. What about, like, the organic social content that's being created on, like, Instagram or Facebook?

Yeah. So we're actually. We're launching a new service, and we're actually piloting it with Adam Sylvester, so. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So there's There's a lot of cool stuff that's happening out in the space. I'm not going to get too techy on this, but most calls now, if you're using CallRail or some other tracking phone number software, are going to be recorded. And even if you don't record your calls, you will know the common questions that people are having for you. So what we do is since our calls are recorded, you're running ads, we have tracking numbers and stuff, we take the call transcripts of the actual questions that customers are asking. And we take that transcript and we plug it into ChatGPT and we ask for 10 hooks. So we take the transcript, plug it in ChatGPT, say, give me 10 hooks based off of this information. That's also where we come up with blog content and other things that's more unique. It's not just general things, it's unique content from your actual avatar, who's asking the actual questions, and then the subject matter experts giving answers. So from a social perspective, there's a good book called they ask, you answer from Marcus Sheridan and he talks about what questions are your customers asking and then answer those questions. So when we think of social content, it's have a great hook. So take the questions that your customers are asking, come up with the hook. And the hook might be most people think that they don't need to clean up after their dog because it's going to, it's biodegradable, however, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Or most people think that it's not a biohazard and that they can go walk in their backyard. However or whatever those things are, that's the hooks that people are looking for on social. And what you want to do on social is you want to do this type of content, you want to give them the hook, get that out in like five or 10 seconds. Then you want to give them a solution that's not salesy. Right? You're not the hero. You want to give them your solution. Like what you should be doing is having a company come out on a weekly basis to clean your yard, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever that whole process looks like. Then you want to agitate the problem. You want to say, listen, no one wants to go out to their backyard and step and poop. I'm sure you don't want to as well. Then you want to give them your call to action. Shoot me a quick message and I'll give you a free estimate that that will solve this problem for you. And basically it ties that all the way through. So the service that we're offering is like a done for you social media thing where we actually get on a call, we give you the hooks, we create this stuff and then we let it fly and post it on social media.

That's cool because I'm running into a lot of people that they don't know how to Create content. And that's why I created a Coupin's content lab. But I don't have enough time to actually put energy into it yet. So I haven't really done much with it because it's like, yeah, I know how to do the hooks, I know how to do all of that stuff. And it's, it's free. You just, it's free for right now. Like it just takes some time and you can, you can edit this stuff right into, right into the app. But there is a huge barrier where people are afraid to get on camera. They don't like the way they look, they don't like their voice, they don't know what to say.

Yeah, so this is going to be changing in the next year or two. This is the techie side of things. So there are platforms like hey Gen. Which we've, we're exploring using and I use it. It's just not good enough yet to, to deploy it, but it's creating an AI avatar of yourself basically and then, and then taking the content from ChatGPT, that's from your actual calls or whatever, feeding it to this, then having it create these shorts for you. And then there's tools like Opus, which we use Opus to cut content. And it's a free editing software that you can just plug content into. It's going to edit it so it looks really nice and stuff for actual social content.

Wait, Opus is free? I definitely don't have free version. Is it Opus Clip?

Yeah, it's free, but you get a watermark on it. Or you could pay like 20 bucks a month or something and get it, you know, for unlimited.

Yeah, that's what I use because I got three, I think on YouTube, I'm putting out like three clips a day. We're doing a lot of clips over there.

Yeah, it's great. We, I do a lot of content as well. And that, that strategy that I just told you, we use internally. So all my sales calls are recorded, then we take the sales calls, put it into hooks. I get on a call with my va, she gives me the hooks, we record it for an hour, it gets cut and then we let it fly.

So how important is recording your sales.

Calls if you are really looking to scale your business? Recording your sales calls is probably the number one thing that you can do. Not only just your sales calls, but any customer interactions, because it gives you a scalable plan that you can give to someone else so that you don't have to do ride alongs with them over and over again. And you can give it to a CSR and say, hey, here's 10 great calls that you can listen to. And another pro tip is you can take the good call transcripts and plug it to ChatGPT and say, give me an SOP on exactly what I did here. And that way it's a repeatable process. Same thing with your on site visits. You can do the exact same thing even if you just open up a voice memo thing on your phone or something and get the calls turn into a transcript. It's a home run. And a lot of people don't do it, but then they're stuck on the truck or doing ride alongs and trying to train people that way when they should just be leveraging what they already do.

Yeah, and this would work with text messages too, if we're doing most of our communication via text.

Yeah, exactly. Okay.

All right. Yeah, that's cool. You said call rail is what we could use to record our calls.

Yeah. So CallRail integrates with Jobber and it's a tool that's out there to set up tracking numbers and then get calls recorded on a line. Also a lot, I know a lot of people use open phone or these other like voiceover IP type of phone services. They all have call recording options with transcript as well. So I'm sure your phone provider would have something like that.

Maybe we just have to check because I was actually looking into what is it like go high level because I think they have some type of like phone recording as well.

Yeah. So that white label software that I mentioned before, we call it Flashlight is a white labeled go high level that we built out for all of our clients that we record and use transcripts and we have a whole bunch of automation and stuff built out in there.

Okay. Yeah. And you've mentioned a couple times you have a podcast so can tell us what the name of your podcast is and what it's about?

Yeah, so it started as it's on our YouTube channel is mostly where we get most of our views on there. But it's for home service businesses that are trying to scale. I interviewed Neil Patel, who's One of the OGs for marketing, Mike Michalowicz from Profit First. A bunch of like people that are in the home service space that we, that you would know and, and other home service businesses just trying to dissect like what they do, marketing tips and trips, that kind of stuff.

And how long have you been doing the podcast for?

Yeah, so funny. When I, when I went out to Jobber when I used to do my blog. I used to be on the news and do all these podcasts and everything, and it was really great way to get my blog out there. And when I started my business, I was so in the weeds of growing, I wasn't even thinking, like, oh, I should be on podcast. Then Jobber was like, hey, you should come out to Vegas and be on our podcast. And I was like, okay, cool. And then once my episode went live, I got like 10 leads, and I'm like, oh, I just need to do more podcasts. So, but the easiest way to get on people's podcasts is to have a podcast of your own. And so that's why I started it. So I've been doing it for about like a year and a half now.

I would say, yeah, the podcasting is fun, but it is super time consuming because that is. A lot of people ask me that too. They're like, I see you doing all this content. I want to create content too. And I have to explain to them, be like, listen, I had to turn this into a business. So it does take me away from my actual business. So it's kind of like a. It's like a give and take all the time. And it's like, if I give a lot into, like, the social media side of it, then I feel like my regular business is suffering and then vice versa.

Yeah. There's two parts to do this. So if you, you know, you're running a business and you want to do podcasting, one way to do this is to have those B2B partners come on your podcast to build a relationship with them and just use it as a relationship option and not necessarily for, like a whole nother business thing to grow your business, because it's two separate, completely separate businesses. The other thing is, if you are going to go the other business route, you can, you know, build affiliate partnerships, email newsletters, that kind of stuff. But it's a completely separate business. But there is a way to tie it together. One other big part to this is, like, as a local business, if you're going to do a podcast and you want to do it for local, you have to bring on, like, local people because you don't want. You don't want leads from, you know, all over the world. So you have to. You have to be strategic about how you're going to do it.

That's the reason why I redid this podcast studio, because I want to start bringing in other small business owners, like, to start building those relationships, because I had Covid had made me weird. Like, I'm. I'm a sociable person, but I don't know what happened. I became, like, a little bit, like, antisocial. And I'm just gonna pepper this out there. I don't know if you know, but the listeners do. I quit drinking alcohol, and I had to relearn who I was just as a person and even how to interact without with people, without having that crutch. And it was just like, towards, like, the middle of last year, I finally got to a point where I could feel comfortable even going to, like, a social networking event where there's alcohol and everybody's drinking. So, yeah, business ownership changed me a lot, and the Lord changed me. And so I think that getting back into that and this was my way, I'm like, okay, I can bring them into, like, my face. You know, we can have a nice little safe conversation.

Yeah, it's the same for. For us. Like, I'll have, like, prospective clients come on the show and, like, build a relationship, and then they're, like, ready to go, you know? Or, like, other things we talked a little bit about. Like, people work with you because of who you are, not what you do. Well, if you have the mayor or the governor on your podcast talking about whatever you're doing, well, now you have this leverage because it's like, oh, of course they charge more. The governor's coming on their show, the local news guys coming on their show, the top realtor in the country, you know, whatever it is, like, you're building this credibility up. And now you have, like, social proof, right, on your website that you're talking with the governor about your business and how your stuff interacts. It allows you to elevate yourself a lot.

So does that kind of go along the lines of, like, becoming, like, a local celebrity?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. People work with you because of who you are. They validate why you charge more or who you are. Like, oh, yeah, this is definitely the company I want to work with. Like, clearly, they're ethical, and they're saying all the right stuff and doing the right stuff.

Okay. Yeah. Because I'm in this sales training group right now with Eric Triplett, and there's this guy Chris, and he was talking about this specifically, and he was like, just create a video, like who you are. Basically, the same things I talk about who you are, what you do, and how to get in touch with you. Just very, like, passive. Just creating awareness. And I put some ad dollars behind it on Facebook, and I've gotten, like, a Couple hundred new followers on Facebook and people are like, I've seen you in this city. I see you on my neighbor's street. I see you on my street. And so it's literally like five, like $5 a week. Like, it's nothing crazy, but I feel like this is going to be very beneficial for when my spring rush happens and people are posting in those groups. They're like, hey, I'm looking for a pooper scooper. They know, oh, I've seen this girl cribbing, scooping, scooping online.

Exactly, exactly. That. That's what it's all about is from a branding perspective and a social media kind of thing. It's like you want to be top of mind and you want to be the go to person. And I used to not really be into the social media that much. Like, as far as, like growing my business because it's, it's very hard. I'm a very, like numbers driven person. Like, okay, spend this, you got this. But with social media, you can't really see the fruits of it. It's just a natural like aura or brand of you that hopefully it compounds into something. But it does compound. It just takes a long time to do it. It's not just like one time thing. You got to build a whole brand about it.

Yeah, yeah, I built the brand. I didn't really know what I was doing. And so people ask me too. They like asking me calculated questions. I'm like, I don't know what I did. I just picked a color and I just kept repeating. And my name's Erica and I'm the owner of Proven Scooping Scooping. And I scoop dog poop and I would love to service your yard. Like, I just kept repeating that over and over again. I'm like, because that's what, that's who I am, what I do, and how to get in touch with me.

Yeah. And you, you said it right. And when we started talking about this was that a lot of people are just worried about how they look or what they say or how they sound. And at the end of the day, it's imperfect action that it just compounds on top of each other and you can't see it day by day, but when you look back over a year or two or six years, you're like, oh my gosh. Okay. Like, like I've been doing this every single day. It's, it's, it's actually working.

Yeah. And the thing is, is if you do this, you get more customers, you get more money, and you can Fix the things you don't like. I fixed my teeth. I didn't like them. I went and got braces. So now I love the way that they look on camera. So think about that stuff. You know, just.

Yeah, of course, of course.

All right, well, cool. We're coming up to. To 53 minutes. Is there anything that you want to say to kind of, like, drive this home and kind of wrap it up?

Yeah. Before you go out and spend, you know, thousands of dollars to the next digital market that promised you something, think about how can you use your marketing dollars effectively. Think about B2B partnerships, organic search, online reviews, create content. Those are all things that are free. And try to have a marketing budget. A lot of people, they look at their bank account and they see, you know, a thousand dollars, 20,000, maybe 50,000, and they're like, oh, I'm balling. And they just try to spend money without having budgets. That's why we say take 3 to 10% of your revenue and allocate that to give yourself permission to spend money on your business. Not just, like, shooting for random things by the hip. Try to be calculated and run a business as if it was a business that you, you know, are investing in or something like that.

Okay, and then so you're saying you said 3 to 5, right?

3 to 10.

3 to 10. All right, so then if you're dividing it between, let's say, Facebook, Google, and then the B2B.

Yeah, yeah. What was that last part of Cut out? I'm sorry.

Okay. Well, I was talking about, like. Like tracking the information to figure out, like, where you're getting more leads from or more qualified leads because you don't want to just spend money. Like, I spent a bunch of money on Nextdoor. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

Yeah. This is the whole point of tying your return on ad spend and tracking it. If you use Jobber, you can use, you know, marketing channels or tags or something else to try to keep track of your stuff. But at the end of the day, if you're spending money, you want to track the actual return that you're getting from it.

Okay. Yeah. And I know this might sound kind of stupid. It's like, duh, don't you want to track it? But I didn't. I didn't for a long time. I had no idea. And I was like, spending money on stupid stuff. I was one of those people that had somebody call me from the phone, and they're like, hey, we can lock you. We can do all this stuff for you and do all this SEO and they locked me into like a four to six month contract and it was awful. And then they had like all of my stuff unlock, like I had to pay them. There was no getting out of it and it wasn't good. Very.

Yeah. And that's why I'm trying to warn people that there's a lot of companies out there that will do that kind of stuff. And the big question when asked, like, how are you going to track your performance? How are you going to track return on ad spend? Read their reviews if they don't have any reviews or the reviews are bad? Like, clearly they don't understand, you know, local business because they don't have any reviews.

Yeah. So if the, the listeners want to keep in touch with you or get in touch with you, plug all of your socials so they can continue the conversation with you.

Yeah. So it's Flash consulting dot com. Flash Consulting. P H L A S H or Phil Risher. P H I P H I L R I S H E R On all the social medias. You can go there or on YouTube. We have that great channel. There's a lot of good value there. Happy to be a resource. So feel free to reach out.

Yeah. Thank you so much. This was a really good chat. I'm gonna, I'm gonna go ahead and wrap this up. Don't you hang up because I have to get your local download since my Internet is being kind of wonky. All right. I want to say thank you so much, Phil, for hanging out with us. I feel like I could just stay on with you for hours, but I know you have other things to do.

Yeah, for sure. Thank you so much.

You're welcome. Thank you for tuning in. Until next time. Bye, you guys.