These 5 Tools Will Grow Your Business in 2026

There are five resources that you need in your business in 2026 to make it your best year yet. In this video, I'm going to break down all five resources and I'm actually going to give them away to you for free. I'll put them down in the description. The first tool that we're going to look at is what's called a lead goal calculator. This tool is going to show you the four numbers that you need to look at in order to grow your business in 2026. So the first thing you're going to do is put in your final revenue. If you don't fully know this number yet, then just wait or just guess based off of your revenue that's that's projected. Then get your average transaction value. If you don't know what your average transaction value is, take your closed estimates and then divide it by your total revenue. And that's going to give you what your average transaction value is. So in this case, let's say it's $1.4 million $12,000 average transaction value. Then look at your closed rate. So let's just say you did, you created 100 quotes and you closed 50 quotes. So that's 50% close rate. So you could pull that straight from your CRM. And then the last thing is your lead to quote. So this is going to be usually like your booking rate. I got this many leads that came in and then I quoted this many people. If you don't know this number, just take a guess, which is if we had 10 people that call us, how many of them are actually getting jobs or quotes? How many of them are actually going on the job site and getting quotes? So let's just say a good number for this service. Titan did a report. They said the average is 42% and the high mark is 62%. So let's just take 55%. So what this is going to tell us is that to hit $1.4 million at an average transaction value of $12,000, then we need to actually do 117 estimates. And that means that we need to or close 117 estimates. So 10 per month. So I'm actually going to lower this because this is not our true average transaction value. Let's just do like $1,200. It's going to be more realistic. So this is going to tell us we need to close 97 jobs per month in order to do $1,200, 1.4. Then it's going to work backwards and say if you're going to close 97 estimates, then you need to create 194 estimates. And if you only turn 55% of your actual leads into estimate opportunities, then you need 354 estimates per month. And now you can work your way backwards to setting goals every single month. Now, here's why this, this is so important. This calculator is because if you want to go to the next step, which is I want to grow my business to $2 million. Well, how can you do this? You can increase your average transaction value. That's one way is increase to 1400. Let's just keep this the same 1200. I could also close more deals. So instead of closing at 50%, I could close at 55%. But let's just keep this at 50%. And then I could also book better. Instead of 55% lead into quote, I could get this up to around 62%, which is on the high mark. So let's just put this. All things remain the same. Same exact transaction value, same exact close ratio, same exact lead to quote. Instead of 354 leads, I need 505 leads to get to $2 million. However, you could. I'm going to show you you could get the exact same amount of leads, but just tighten up your process and hit this goal. And this is why it's so important to get these numbers dialed in. So let's say that you, let's just say you even keep this the same. And let's say you got this number up to 62%. 63, 64. Okay, so $2 million, $1,200 average transaction value. You closed. Instead of 50% of your deals, you closed 64% of your deals. And your lead to quote was let's just kick this at 55% and let's say that you got this up to 68%. Just say 70%. All right, you're not going to be closing at 70%. But let's just look at this. This basically says that if you were to get this number up, then you don't need any more leads. All you need to do is just get more things through your pipeline. The reason that I like this goal calculator is because it allows you to figure out what a good transaction value is. So let's say I want to go to 1400 and I actually want to close 60%. I need to get this number up to 62%. In this example, I actually need less leads in order to hit $2 million. So it allows you to focus on what do I need to fix in the business? Now, all that being said, the next tool that you're going to need, the next resource is. Okay, Phil. Well, I know that I want to hit this goal, and I know that I need to get 30 more leads per month. So where should I get these leads from? Well, I'm glad you asked, because that's the next tool that we're going to talk about, which is spending money on channels to get leads coming in. Now, it's nice to get leads coming from your Google business profile. It's nice to get organic things, nice to get referrals coming in. And that's a big part of what we do. But it's also not predictable. I can't sit here and tell you exactly how many calls you're going to get from your Google business profile next month. And I also can't do specific things to get more calls. All I can do is set you up in the best position to get calls when the opportunity arises. But I can't manufacture leads to come into your business. There's a couple of ways to do this. You can run ads to get leads coming into your business. You can build B2B partnerships with other complimentary services. You can do email marketing to your past prospects and customers to bring them back into your funnel. But the simplest one that most people default to is I could spend money on ads to get leads coming into my business. So in this example, let's say that it costs you $180 to get a lead on Google and you need 30 more leads. 180 times 30 means you need to spend $5,000 on Google search ads. And, and then you're going to get this number. So basically figure out your cost per lead in this. Now, this is the next resource. I don't care about cost per lead. I don't care about impressions, likes, blah, blah, blah. I care about return on ad spend. I would hate for someone to spend $5,000 and not close any more revenue and then they just waste $5,000 a month, which you may have been there. So this tool right here is what we use, which is called a Google Search Ads report template. We can use this for Yelp, we can use for Google local service ads, whatever. Basically what you do is every single month. So down here you can see it says month one. You can duplicate this and say January, February, March, April, May, June, July, whatever. And you put how much you spent? I put fourteen hundred dollars. I got sixteen leads. So this is my cost per lead. So if we go Back here, we can see our cost per lead. Then you can see how many of these that you booked. So 16 leads. Now, there's a couple layers to this. If you're working with a marketing company and they just tell you your conversion numbers on Google, but they don't tell you who the leads actually are. I had this exact issue when I was at a home service business. Then you need to ask them, who are these magical leads that you speak of and how can I get a list of them every single month? What we do is we send them to a landing page. When they click on your ad, they go to landing page, they fill out a form or click a button to call you. If they fill out that form or they click the call button, we have it automatically go into a spreadsheet. So that way we can run these reports for clients. You could ask them for this exact lead list. And then what you do is, let's say this is January. You put in the email addresses, the phone number, and then you can go into your CRM, Jobber, Housecall, Pro, Service, Titan, or whatever you use, QuickBooks, put the phone number in, and then you can see, is there an open estimate? Is there scheduled work? Is there an invoice amount? There are ways to automate this, which we have automated it. But I'm just showing you, like a very basic way that you could get these numbers for your business. So then that would show you that I got 16 leads, you know that number, and then I booked seven of them. So you know that you booked or opened an estimate for seven of them. And then that will show you that you generated. If they actually invoiced amount, that shows you that they invoiced $10,000. Then it gives you your return on ad spend. You can see that it does the math for you. Then you can do this every month. And what this is going to allow you to do is to say, okay, well, we can get cheap leads, but we know that those leads are going to turn into actual revenue. So then you can drive your return on ad spend. Great report. Highly recommend implementing this in your business. This is something that we do as a company because I had this exact issue, which was my marketing agency was just creating random leads out there and conversions without any return on ad spend, tracking or reporting. It was just always spend more on ads. This is why we don't do this. All right, so cool. You know, we got, we know the numbers that we need to focus on. We know that we could spend more money over here. And then we can track our return on ad spend. Great. Now the next part to this is like on a daily, weekly now basis, what should I be doing to prep for AI? Because AI is the big shift that's coming in 2026. And these next three things are going to be big focuses for AI and content creation, which in my opinion over the next two to three years is going to be the next wave coming through. And this is the first thing, which is an AI readiness checklist. So over here you can see these are all one time step things that you need to add onto your website or start doing. These are going to be weekly things that you could do every week and monthly things that we can do every single month. As a company, my company, this is what we do for our clients to help prepare them for AI search. But for you, you can implement this for yourself. One time setup Add online scheduling or booking form to your website. Set up online scheduling. Create a clear pricing page for your website. Add reviews and testimonial section to your website. Ensure site has mobile friendly click to call buttons on your mobile site. Put the click to call button. Display licenses. Add local awards. You can get this, it's going to be in the description and you can go through this and implement it. I want to call out two main things on this. These monthly tasks right here. These are the ones that usually people miss. So you're probably going to download this. You might do a couple of these things or send them to people and say, yeah, let's do this. The monthly tasks are really the things that it takes to build trust with these platforms. Not even just chatgpt, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, whatever you use, it's also for actual SEO. So the SEO stuff that you should be doing currently is going to help you on Google, but it's also going to help you go into the next thing. So I just want to call these things out, which is you should be creating service area content. Service area means if you specifically service Dallas, Texas, you also probably service the suburbs around it. So you should be creating content around those areas as well. The other thing that I would say here is that you want to make sure that you're creating content for your website using real content, not just like fluff stuff that's happening like that you go to ChatGPT and get fluff things, but like do a new testimonial project photo to your website and do some type of content specifically about something that you're working on. The reason is because you want to feed this thing unique content not just things that you say that you got from ChatGPT that ChatGPT already knows. You need to give it unique content that you stand out as a subject matter expert. So you can go through this checklist. Wanted to call out a couple things over there. The next piece of this is, okay, we got our leads over here. We know that we could spend money to get leads, but what are other ways, for example, meta or YouTube or even organic content that I should be creating? So that's why we have this fourth thing here, which is the 52 content topics to boost your rankings and AI search. And regardless if you're preparing for AI search or not, these are the content topics that you should be creating. Specifically what I just mentioned with this AI readiness checklist, which is unique things to you. So you can go through this. I'll just call out a couple different ones. How much does something cost in this specific area? Great content piece that's going to help you stand out as a subject matter expert. Same thing with. There's one on here that I really like which is like this versus that. Comparisons. Yeah, right here. So like, should I do roof repair or roof replacement? Which is better for your home? Should I do this versus that? Should I use this grade thing versus that grade thing? These are the expert advice, specifically in your local area that your customers want to hear. That builds trust. Also, that will help you rank in SEO in general and will help prepare you for AI search. AI search also has this component called AEO Answer Engine Optimization. This is why this type of content works so well. Because the average search on Google is about five words. Plumber near me or H Vac repair near me. They're not asking a whole long conversation. The average search on AI platforms is 357 words. They're asking it a bunch of stuff. They're asking it qualifiers like, hey, I'm looking for a company in my area that's certified in this, that can also do this, that focuses on this. And, um, I want a reasonable price that also does this. Tons and tons of opportunity for you to create content so that it recommends you. All right, so the last piece to this part, and we're talking about preparing for 2026. So you should know your numbers, you should dial them in and set goals. You should come up with return on ad spend, tracking and reporting for your business every single month. So that way you know this is working or it's not working. So let's focus on what's working. You should be doing something to prepare for AI. So you should be doing things on a weekly, monthly and right now basis to help prepare for AI. And then you should be creating content to get organic traffic to your website, to get people finding out about you via brand, and also to prepare for AI search from content. The last piece here, and this is kind of a cherry on top, is in 2026, I believe that there's going to be what are called AI avatars. We already have one for my business. But basically on your website there's going to be a talking head version of you that's going to interact with your customers. I made a whole video about this, so I'm not going to get too far into the weeds on this. But basically what you should do is set up some type of a free language model around your business. And there's a tool that's called NotebookLM. And what you want to do is you want to feed it sources of your business. So you want to set up it's this free notebooklm.google.com it gives you 50 sources for free. And you want to feed this stuff sources. Why is this so important to help prepare your business? One, it's going to help you as a business owner duplicate your mind. It's going to help you get stuff out of your brain and onto a piece of paper that then can train a language model on your business. So imagine you hire a new person, you give them this thing. You have a customer service representative, you give them this thing. You have a marketing company, you give them this thing. This is exact like the things that I went through here, these five things. We do these for our clients and we are doing them in 2026, like building out a avatars for each client because it's going to help us do our job better if we can speak and talk directly like the company and we have our sops and processes to actually do good digital marketing and tie it together with the real business. So you want to build out this AI avatar and the most important reason why is because I believe AI avatars are going to be the thing in the next year or two. And if you don't have an AI avatar that's trained on anything, then you're going to be sitting back like, man, I wish that I did this stuff. And this is why creating content doesn't just say, hey, we might get some likes and shares. It's literally preparing your business for AI avatars and AI search. This right here is preparing your business for AI search and also for people interacting with AI platforms to find your business. This is showing you return on ad spend reporting so you know what's working and what's not and what you can dial up and down. And this is giving you the exact numbers which is average transaction value, average close rate, average lead to quote and then your cost per lead for customer acquisition costs which is going to help you actually grow your business. It's not just likes and shares, it's not just spend more on ads, it's real numbers. So I hope this was helpful. If you're looking for a marketing company in 2026 to help you grow. This is exactly why I built my business at this point. If you have a marketing company that's not looking at this stuff, that's not talking about AI prep, that's not helping you actually grow your business and look at these numbers, you're probably wasting your money on cookie cutter marketing agencies and it's probably stalling your growth and holding you back. I'd love the opportunity to talk with you. I'll put a link down below to schedule some time.