Phil Risher describes a home service company that spent $30,000 on marketing in six months but made only $1,000 in revenue. The owner couldn't track lead quality, booking rates, or close rates. Without solid systems to measure what works, bigger budgets just burn money faster.
You know, a lot of people think that the businesses with the biggest budgets are the ones that grow the fastest, and that's not always the case. I was on a call with a guy last week. He spent $30,000 on marketing over the last 6 months, so he's running ads, he hired an agency, he's doing all this content, and he told me that he had only $1,000 to show for the $30,000 that he spent. When I dug in a little bit, I asked him, okay, well, what were those leads like? What was your booking rate on those leads? You got 100 leads, how many of them did you actually book? He's like, I don't really know. And then I asked him what his close rate was on estimates to close. He didn't know. The problem is that he was coming from a private equity company, coming in and buying a home service business. And we all know if you run a home service business, it's not just spend more money on ads and you're going to magically grow your business. You have customer service representatives that you need to answer the phone. You have salespeople that need to go out and sell. You have technicians that have to do a great job. You have all these numbers swirling around that it's not as simple as just running ads to a landing page and people buy your e-commerce thing. Bigger ad budgets does not always mean faster growth. Good systems does usually mean faster growth.
