Home-service companies make six and seven figure marketing decisions on gut feeling instead of data. Phil Risher says you need to track spend, leads, quoted value, and closed revenue for each ad channel. Without those numbers, you can't tell which channels actually make money.
The biggest problem with home service businesses right now is that they do not have the full picture of data to make decisions, and they're operating on gut feeling. If you run ads and you spend $1,000 and you don't know if that made you $10,000 or $0, you're operating on gut feeling. The problem when you operate on gut feeling is that you spend money on ads and then you look at revenue to see if it went up or down, and that's how you justify if it worked or not. This is not how you scale your business. What you need to do is every ad channel, you need to know you put $1,000 in, you got 10 leads, you quoted $20,000, and you closed $10,000. That means that you made 10x return, so you should do more of that. If you look at the raw output of just total revenue going up or down and you spend some money on marketing, that's not a justifiable way to say, is this working or not? Because there's a lot of things in between that bucket that have to happen. Booking rate, close rate, average ticket, customer acquisition cost, all those things play into it. This is the biggest issue, is that most people start with just throw money at ads if you want to grow, when really you should start with data.
