This One System Took Us From $3M to $5M in 24 Months (It Wasn’t More Marketing)

I helped grow a home service business from 3 million to $5 million and then sell to private equity. Before that, I was trained at a $27 billion local service business where everything was run on data. If your home service business is stuck between 1 million and $10 million, it's probably not your marketing, it's probably this system. In this video, I'm going to break down the three interconnected parts of a professional marketing system. Why doing more marketing just feels like you're stuck on a hamster wheel and how to fix it, because if you don't, you're going to keep spending money, working harder and wondering why you're not growing. Phase one is setting up the data foundation. When I came to work at this $3 million business, he was stuck there for two years because he didn't know his numbers. When I came in, I said, okay, what do we want to grow to? And he said, I don't know, 20 or 30%. And I said, what does that even mean? I was trained at Enterprise Rent a Car through their management trainee program and I was a branch manager and I got paid directly off the bottom line. So I knew the numbers every single day. They had this report called the bmi. I knew that last January I rented this many cars, I sold this much insurance, I upgraded this much, and this was my average ticket. I knew those numbers because I got paid off the bottom line. So the first thing that I did was I set up year over year data aside from gut feel. So in your business, as you're listening to this, you should know specific numbers if you really want to grow your business. And this data foundation is a non negotiable for any of the companies that we work with because we have to know the data. And this is the first part of this system that's all connected. So when you actually look at your data, these are the numbers that you want to know. How many leads did I get year over year in the rental car industry that I was in that I came into this home service business? It was very cyclical, right? Like people rent cars in July, they don't rent cars in January. February, March, it's shoulder season. It was very similar at the home service business. So if we wanted to grow 20%, then I needed to know that in January we had this many leads and then this January we needed this many leads. So these are the numbers that I would track. Leads, jobs estimates created estimates sold, total revenue, new customers, and all this in your CRM. The CRM was crucial for us because this is the source of truth. As the director of business development at the home service business, I had to go in and pull these numbers and build out this dashboard for us that had year over year numbers. January, February, March, April, May, every single month. And then tracking it, because if we want to grow 20 or 30%, this is the day that I need to look at. The second piece of this is that I needed to turn that into goals. Okay, he told me he wanted to grow 20%. Let's just call it. So I knew in January, if we go back to the leads, I got 500 leads last January. So if I want to grow 20%, I need 600 leads this January. And that's exactly what we did for book jobs. So book jobs. We went to the whiteboard where the CSRs were and I said, hey, guys, right on the whiteboard here, I'm going to say that we need 600 jobs. That's going to give us 20%. And then every single day I would go into the office and say, okay, good, we booked 30 yesterday. Okay, right now we're at 100. And then every single day we'd be getting closer to our goal of $600. This is how you set goals for your home service business and then work towards them with these numbers. And everyone on the team has a goal. As director of business development, I had a leads goal and I also had a revenue goal. Then our csrs had a jobs book goal. Our sales team had an estimate created, an estimate sold goal. I had a new customer goal as director of business development. All this stuff was living in my CRM. So we took it, put on whiteboards, then we looked at year over year, and then we set our growth targets. We did it daily tracking. Daily tracking. And I'll give you one other secret sauce of this. We tied incentive to it. In this business, there was no incentives and no pay for performance on anything. You know, it was 30, 40 team members and there was no one that was paid on performance. So the first thing I did was I said, okay, if we hit 600 jobs, our four CSRs, then we're going to get paid out $600 and we're going to split that amongst the four CSR. So an extra 120 bucks, which they all want to make more money, and they weren't making any more money now, so why not give them the opportunity? Also, you don't know if you're winning or losing if you don't have a scoreboard. So this is the data foundation to actually grow a business. I'll give you some tangible things here that we look at from a marketing perspective that helps accelerate growth. One data will tell us what to fix in the business. And I'm going to give you the quick sauce on this. So if you have a bunch of leads but you don't have many jobs, okay, you got 100 leads and only 20 jobs, that means that your booking rate is only 20%. This tells me when I was director of business development, either the lead quality is bad or our intake process is bad. The call scripts. So I need to go and listen to the calls. That's going to tell me are the leads bad or is the call script bad? So the data will tell you what to fix in your business. If you have a bunch of jobs but you have no estimates created, this is a sales problem because this means that your technicians are just running out doing service calls, but they're not generating any additional estimates. Or they're going out and doing the estimates but they're not selling them. That's another thing. Sales problem. And this could all lead back up to lead issue. If they're just getting good, not good leads in and just trying to force them through this funnel so it allows you to pinpoint what do I need to fix. If you get a bunch of estimates and they're not sold, it's either bad lead quality or you don't have a good estimate follow up process to close the deals. So a good benchmark for this is like 40 to 60%. It should be your close rate. A good lead to job booking rate is around 50 to 60%. Same thing with your total revenue. It's not. Most businesses we talk to is like, yeah, I'm up this much revenue, that much revenue. But when you actually pull these levers, that's how you know the data and know what to fix in your business. So it tells you what to fix. Booking rate estimate CALC customer acquisition cost is huge. So if you go to your new customers and you say, okay, I spent $10,000 on marketing and I got 100 new customers, that will give you your cost to acquire a new customer. CAC customer acquisition cost average ticket. So this one's a really big one too. Total revenue divided by the number of estimates sold will give you your average ticket. Nine times out of ten, depending on your business, this is going to give you your average ticket. So can you increase your average ticket or not? So one of the things that I started looking at in my home service business was okay, if we go out and do a duct cleaning, which is what we did. How many of those duct cleaning jobs get a dryer vent added onto them? What percentage of those numbers? And then if we could get that number up to 30%, we could increase our average ticket without spending any more on marketing with these numbers. So this is the whole crux of the data, foundational piece of it. Many, many times businesses that get stuck between 1 and 10 million, they miss this piece of the data. They just look at their total revenue and they say, okay, yeah, we're growing. But when you really dial in the numbers and figure out your booking rate, your estimate close rate, your cac, your average ticket, those are the levers that will grow your business. And I'm going to give you a nice bow on this at the end. But this is the first foundational piece to getting you unstuck. And if you feel stuck, I would start here, get the data foundation in place. The second part is automation. So this is what happened into my business was we were getting a bunch of leads coming in, but they weren't turning into jobs. And what I uncovered was that all the leads from our website were going into our email and then our CSR, our CSRs would call these people and they wouldn't answer. So I knew that we had an opportunity for automation to turn the data into actual leverage. So speed to lead matters for booking rate. So what I did, I did two things. First, I implemented an estimate calculator on the website. When I listened to the calls, I found out that every single person was asking, how much does it cost? So I said, let me put a calculator on our website where people can put in some information and turn into a lead. That estimate calculator, I built that out like eight years ago. It still generates 100, 200 leads per month for them. Now I know that we can get a bunch of leads coming in. So then I set up online scheduling. Online scheduling allowed to get rid of the CSR booking rate and take people that got their estimate. And then we sent them directly to online scheduling. You like what you saw, go and schedule online. It immediately sped up these process of leads to jobs so that way I could get my team out there to do these things. And it also allowed us to upsell and make different packages. So what ended up happening was the manual follow up fails. People would fill out the estimate calculator. If they didn't book, we would call them and then they wouldn't answer. And then our CSR would print out the actual lead form and have it on their desk and they Would put a check mark next to it to say, yep, call them and then they'll have checks and checks. Now mind you, we were getting 80 to 100 leads per day at some, at some points, like I'm not just talking like forms but like calls, online bookings, yelps, like all this stuff like leads coming in all over the place. That is not a good system. Okay, I quickly uncovered that that was not a good system. It was better than what we were doing, but at least they were getting two or three calls on top of it. What we did find was that automation closes the gap. And especially in that one to $10 million trap, you start spending a bunch of money on marketing and you see if you're tracking leads or you might feel it that your leads are going up. I'm spending more money on marketing but I'm not getting more jobs or revenue coming in the business. And it's leaking out somewhere inside of here. This is why you got to track these numbers because it'll tell you what to fix. But one quick fix for this is automation inside of the lead follow up process and the estimate nurture sequence. At this point, 1 to 10 million systems are greater than heroics. The best system is going to outperform a good csr, outperform a good business owner because the system will help pull people through this funnel. And this is what I uncovered particularly. We went from a 42% lead to job rate to 57% to 15% increase. Now if you think about your average ticket, let's say your average ticket's $800. If I was to give you 15% more of these jobs, there's no way that you can't grow your business and you don't have to spend any more on marketing. This is why I tell people to fix this in your automation. And this is how it all works together. You get the data over here, then you know it's a fix and you plug in automation over here. So what we did was we said when someone fills out that estimate calculator, we're going to send them an instant text message and an instant email and then offer them the online scheduling and then someone's also going to call them and the text message is going to nurture this lead for us. It's going to text them, it's going to email them over a seven day period and it's going to increase our lead to job booking rate by 15%. The other part to this is when you send someone an estimate. So if we go back up Here to the actual data estimate created to estimate sold so many times. For whatever reason, people don't track this number. And, and it's a huge opportunity for specifically like 1 to 3 million. We see that that number falls off because the business owner is the number one salesperson. And when you're the number one salesperson and you do a bunch of marketing, you get a ton of leads and then you get a bunch of opportunities, but you can't keep up with them, so your close rate starts to drop. So this company is exactly what happened to them. They were like 1.5 million. They were at 47% close rate. We set up an estimate nurture sequence. So an estimate goes out. Then that estimate gets hit up for 14 days. Texts and emails, educational stuff, hey, you know you still want to do this top of mind. And they went up 5% close rate. Now they were doing 100 estimates per month. So if you get 5% more closes, that's 5 more estimates closed. And their average takeover was $3,000. So that's $15,000 extra per month. So $150,000 in revenue plus a scalable process with estimate nurture. So you could plug in another salesperson. Now you have this estimate nurture sequence inside of your business. This is the second phase to this, which is you get the data that tells you what to fix. And now you have automation that goes back and forth. The automation doesn't just stop with like lead nurture sequence and also estimate nurture sequence. It also allows you to take your data and plug it into your, your CRM. So for example, let's say you're running ads and you run people to a landing page. Well, well, when someone fills out a form, you want that form not just to go into your email inbox for your people to print it out, you want it to go into your CRM with the correct lead source. That way it is all working together. So you see how I'm kind of building this together. First you get the data tight and you need to layer in automation so that the data is tight. And now you need to use the automation and the data to work together to grow your business. What ends up happening is that phase three, that $1 million tactics stopped working. So for us, when I came in to work at the business, my background was in the local service business at enterprise and running and getting paid off the bottom line and digital marketing. Because I had been blogging WordPress email content creation for four years up until that point. When I came in, what I found was basic SEO stuff. So, like, hey, let's just write a random blog post out here. It wasn't optimized for local SEO. We were paying, you know, $10,000 a month on ads. Yelp, Angie, Google Ads. And we didn't know where any of the money was coming because digital marketing had to evolve. They didn't know anything about our CRM. So we had all this data over here that I was pulling, but the marketing company didn't know anything about it. So there was no return on ad spend data. And every time we were slow, they said, spend more on ads. And I would say, okay, well, how should I spend more on ads if I don't know the data and y' all don't know the data, but you're telling me to spend more on ads? It didn't make sense. The content was pretty generic. I would be the one that had to email support at and say, hey, could you guys update the website? Can you add this estimate calculator here? And then I would get it back. And I was the one QA quality assurance on their work and doing all this. Basically, I was telling them what to do. And what I see a lot of businesses is when you go over a million, 2 million, you're paying for these cookie cutter agencies and this section here, they might do great digital marketing, but it's a segment of the business. It's a segmented thing out. And we had to fix that in the business. So what we did was we had to figure out how to do more than just SEO and ads. And obviously you can do it better, but there's more strategies that you can do inside of your business. For example, B2B partnerships. So we went out and built partnerships with H Vac Contractors to refer us business coming in. Also retargeting our past customers. So one of the first companies that I ended up working with, they had 6,000 contacts in their database, and they had never sent an email out to them ever before. So we sent out one email every single month and over 12 months, that generated $263,000 in revenue just from doing that. And this was like a $1.52 million business. The other digital marketing thing that has to evolve now, which I didn't have back then, but now is huge, is content creation for AI search. And there's this big shift that's happening with real content and not just regurgitated stuff inside of businesses. And I'm sure you face it, with marketing companies, there's just a lot of regurgitated stuff. All right? So let's put all this together. I'm going to show you how this works and this is the real system that businesses need. Especially if you're stalled between 1 and 10 million. The system is this. You need digital marketing that is tied to your data. And you need the data going back to your digital marketing and saying, this is work, this is working. We spent $2,000 on ads, I made $20,000. Let's do more of that. So we had a company that we work with, they were spending $2,500 on ads, but they didn't know because they didn't have it all tied together, that it was generating a 5x return. So the first month that we pulled this data, we said, okay, wow, this is getting 5x return. Let's double that from 2,500 to $5,000. Because we knew the data, we can make smart marketing decisions. So that data, then they 7x their return. So they went to $5,000 and they made $35,000 because we had the data. And this is the part of this. It has to work together. Data from your digital marketing has to come in and go back out. Now when you have the data, you need the automation piece because you have to know what to fix, right? It might be a lead problem, a booking rate problem, an estimate problem, like something like this. Also the data is in. The CRM reporting is going to tell you, hey, all these people haven't used you for 12 months. We need to go and do some digital marketing for them. We need to send them an email campaign, we need to contact them on social media, do some retargeting ads or something, right? Like all this has to work together and then vice versa. Let's say you wanted to do a home show. This is a perfect example of how this all works together. A home show, you need a landing page so some digital marketing so that someone can go to at the home show and enter a giveaway. You need an automation so that way they get a text and an email. You also need that lead to go into your CRM over here. So, so that way you can track the performance and then you need to know your return on ad spend, which then would say that this was a successful campaign. Here's the crux of it. I had to build this system in my home service business because I had it all fragmented out all over the place and I needed all to work together. And the issue is that 1 million to $10 million businesses, business owners, they have this segmented out. They have automation and tech, maybe in their CRM or they know they should be doing more of this, but they don't know how. And they're not a cto, Right. They're trying to lead the company. Company. They have a digital marketing company out here who's doing stuff. Maybe it's good, maybe it's not, but they feel like they're managing that too. And then they have this data and CRM reporting issue, which is like they're trying to pull data and get their team to do it, but they don't have the flywheel effect of it actually producing anything. They're just looking at revenue. Once I put all this together in my home service business, it unlocked growth. We went 3 million to 4,300,000 in profit to 900,000 in profit and then ultimately 5 million and then sold. And what I uncovered was that when I went into another home service business and I implemented this same System, they went 3 million to 8 million and then sold. The reason is because this is a flywheel and an engine that companies need to build inside of their business. And it feels very stalled growth and frustrating when you have different cookie cutter things all over the place and not a whole system that's working together. So if you need this system built out for your business, this is exactly what we do. And I would love to speak with you because I know that we could help you if you're between 1 and $10 million residential focus and you don't have this engine built in your business. I'll put a link down below and I look forward to speaking with you.