EP206: From Hustler to Leader: Scaling Your Home Service Business with Phil Risher

good. That was perfect. Okay.

Yeah, for sure. Flash Consulting. So we work with home service business owners and we help them increase their sales, keep their schedules full. Specifically, we are digital marketing consulting company and help. $1 to $10 million home service businesses grow. I used to be in the trades and I helped a company go from $3 million to $4 million in one year and helped a bunch of other companies grow. And so we basically took that playbook and now we implement it into businesses and help them grow.

Yeah, you know, going from zero to a million dollars, you can basically do everything in your business. You can outwork the next guy. You can outsell the next guy. You can out, you know, do whatever for the next guy. And that hustler mentality will get you to a million. And nine times out of 10, it has to get you to a million because you don't have the resources to allocate to get to a million dollars. So, but at that million dollar mark, there's a pivotal change where now you have resources in the business because you have the playbook and the scalable plan. And you have to let the hustler die. And now you have to be the leader where you're actually scaling the business through systems and processes and numbers. And that's really what it comes down to. So a lot of times people get to that million dollar mark and they kind of stagnate out or they get stuck for a year or two at the million to two million. And they're like, why? You know, I know I can work harder. I know I can do more, but that's really what it comes down to is it's a different mindset shift to go from one million to five or 10 million.

Yeah. So, I mean, I do digital marketing consulting for home service businesses and usually it's in that marketing phase. So Dan Martell, he has this great book called buy back your time and he has these five rungs of replacement. So the first rung is your admin stuff, like someone answering your phone, CSR type role. Then your second rung is actually delivery, like doing the work. Usually to get to that million dollar mark, you have those two phases fixed. The third rung is marketing. The fourth rung is sales and the fifth rung is management. So usually when you get to that million dollar mark, that marketing piece, maybe, you know, spent money and prayed to the Google gods that you're going to get leads. You may have got referrals and you got some good reviews because you do a great job and you kind of have referrals and marketing coming in, but you don't have that step dialed in specifically like your return on ad spend, your cost per lead, your new customers, like those types of numbers. You need to know those from a marketing perspective. That's what's going to scale you to the next level. And then on top of that, the sales, which is the next one, which is you might still be the guy that's selling all the jobs. And that part, to get to $5 million to $10 million, you can't really be that guy unless it's only the big jobs that you're selling. So those are really the two things. It's like you've got to get your marketing dialed in where you have a team that you trust or you have people in place that are giving you reports, giving you data that's feeding the beast. So that way you can scale.

Word of mouth referrals.

Yeah. And this is exactly what it is. So another book, Mike McAllowick, he has a book called Profit First, where you operate your business based off percentages. And if you ask any fractional CFO or CFO for large home service business owners or any home service business owner, that's over 10 million. They're spending three to 10% of their revenue on marketing. And a lot of times businesses to get to that million dollar market, they don't allocate on percentages. They just say, oh, I just heard about this cool trend, or I think these Google LSAs are going to help me grow. They're not operating in percentages. And so they don't give themselves that permission of having $3,000, $10,000 every month to be spending on marketing. They're just saying, well, word of mouth is the cheapest, and I get word of mouth all day long. So to answer your question, you got to have those percentages in place. So that way you feel confident in spending money that's going to actually help you grow. And if you don't have the percentages, you're going to feel that pinch of like, well, this doesn't work or that doesn't work. You got to have that permission piece.

that's right. We call it more of a farming strategy. Like you plant the seeds, what comes up, you might harvest that eventually. It's just farming where you need to pivot to a hunting strategy, which is go where your target audience is, run ads, do things that are profitable, track it all the way back. And you have to have both pieces in place, but the farming to your point is not. it's very unpredictable. You could get 10 referrals, you can get zero.

Yeah. Yeah. So this is the thing that everyone says, Google, Facebook, whatever, any different ad platform. Do you think that it might not work for you, but it definitely works for someone else? Because Facebook and Google are the number one ad platforms in the entire world. Billions of dollars, trillions of dollars in companies. You think it's not working for every single person? No, it's working for them. You just don't know how to do it. That's the question that you should be asking is, who can I hire that knows how to do this that has a true track record of performance?

Yeah. That's the thing is when you are the ones that you're relying on referrals and it's you as the marketing person, then what happens? You're out doing jobs. You're not staying up with the time, staying on top of marketing and the next trend comes in, but that's going to burn out too. That's why you need to have someone that knows what they're doing, in my opinion. You can't just be the only person that knows marketing in your business and operations and finance and HR. Yeah.

That's right. That whole framework of the hustler must die. The leader must be born. The leaders are asking who, not how they're saying, who can I hire to do this? Who should do this? Not how do I do this? Cause the hustler can figure it out. They can YouTube university. It's go down a rabbit hole. Usually Jerry rig something together, especially in the trades, people can just figure stuff out. It's just normal for us, but they need to be asking the question of who. That's really the biggest mindset shift for a lot of people. And it's so hard to do because you're so used to just figuring stuff out.

Yeah, I agree. I mean, even my company, we're a million dollar agency and I'm still the one that's doing sales at my company. But it's because I have the passion and I'm not at the point where I have so many leads that I need to do it. And same thing within the trades. That's exactly how it is. But eventually when you get to like 5 million, you can't 10 million. You outpace the sales. You have too many leads to keep track of them.

Yeah. So we've gone through this process several times. I'll use one as an example. We had a HVAC contractor. They were 3 million and we helped them go to 8 million in three years and then sell to private equity. So usually what happens is private equity, they want to see a couple of things. They want to make sure that when they buy the company, all their leads are not gone. So you need to have predictable lead channels that don't involve you specifically. Also, if you want a higher valuation, do what those private equity companies are going to do in your business. So think about, okay, if someone was to buy this from the outside, what would they do to set this up? Would they set up online scheduling? Would they set up text message chat on my website? Would they set up Google search ads and figure that out? Would they set up Facebook ads and figure that out? Because they probably have a proven playbook. So to get your business ready to sell or to scale, you need to have marketing systems in your business. One, it's going to help you have a better outcome. You're going to be able to sell for higher amounts, but you're also going to build it to sell it even if you never sell it.

Yeah, but I can share a couple more things like more because there's there's really like three pillars that we look at as a business that these private equity companies are evaluating. They're looking at visibility. They're looking at conversions and retargeting. These are the three pillars that we look at from a good marketing plan. So when we talk about visibility, it's like, okay, are you on Google search engine results page in the four sections? Do you have B2B partnerships that are referring you business? Are you running different types of ads? How are you creating the visibility on the first side of people, new customers coming in? Then what is your lead management process look like, your conversion funnel? When people reach out to your business, how do you get back to them? What is your... lead to estimate process? What's your estimate to close process look like? Is there automations and marketing inside of there? And then the last part, which is retargeting, which is all the prospects and customers that ever came through your database. How are you staying in contact with them, inviting them to come back into your business? That's the blueprint for a successful marketing plan that these private equity companies want to see and a good business would have.

Yeah, I'll tell you a quick story. When I was when I was back in the trades, I was at a duck cleaning company that was three million dollars in revenue. And we were working with these digital marketing companies and they'd always ask us, hey, how's how are things performing? How's it going? What's looking like? And I'm like, guys, you're our marketing people. You should be telling us. So a big thing for me was when I created a company, I want someone that's going to use these CRMs inside of the CRMs pulling data. tying the digital marketing stuff to the actual CRM, looking at ways to automate stuff in the CRM. So yeah, it's something that we do. It's something that I'm very passionate about because the CRM is such a big part of what we do. The home service base, the trades, it's like your whole business runs out of the CRM. There's a goldmine of data in there that if you were able to extract it out, it would help on your actual marketing. More importantly, it gives you the actual reporting and data to know what's working and what's not working if you use it right. So yeah, it's a big part of what we do. And I think it's a big missed opportunity for most companies. They're just going through probably using 60,70% of it if they're good. And they're not actually pulling any of the data out or doing anything with automations.

right. Yeah. Good data drives good decisions. And I'll give you one example that everyone falls into. You kind of alluded to it with the Facebook situation. But let's just take Google ads, for example. People run Google ads. They throw money at the Google gods and hope that it gets leads and they don't really ever know. So I'll give you like a quick best practice if it's Facebook, Yelp, Angie, any of these platforms. What you do is you create a landing page on your website for Facebook ads, let's just say. Then you run Facebook ads and all of the traffic goes to this landing page. On that landing page, you have one form and one tracking phone number. That form and that tracking number all attach to Facebook ads. So if you get a call from that phone number, it should say Facebook ad. If you get a form, it should say Facebook ad. Then both of those leads go into a spreadsheet. At the end of the month, you take all the leads and you go to your CRM and you say, what happened to them? And then you have a true return on ad spend on every single channel. That's a simple plan, but that will get you the data that you want. So that way you're not just spraying and praying.

That's right. Yep. And you could even upload your customer list into there and it's going to give you people that look exactly like those people on your ads. So it's great.

That's right. And I was going to say, for home service business or trades specifically, most of the people that are your bottom of the funnel. people ready to roll. They're just looking for the best company. They're going to start their search on Google. There was a report 87% of people start their search on Google. So on Google, there's four specific sections that you want to be shown in. The first one is called Google local service ads, which is the Google guarantee Google screen section. And those are actually pay per lead. So you don't actually have to set up this landing page and go through this whole situation. All you do is just set up a profile and you just pay as leads come in. The second one is Google search ads, which this is the one where, yeah, people. You need to have some finesse and know what you're doing, or you're just going to spend money into a black hole. The third one is called offsite SEO. So it's your actual Google business profile rankings in that little map pack section. And then the fourth one is your onsite SEO, which is how your website is ranking. And the reason that I wanted to highlight this is because the Google search on your results page is where most of the people are starting their search. So they're going there saying, you know, roofer near me, whatever near me. And Google is telling them, hey, these are the companies that we recommend. They're referring you right there. Then you can track them over to Facebook or other places and show them stuff. But if you start on Google, that's where nine times out of 10 people are going to be starting their search.

spending

Yeah. Some of the ways that you can actually spend time with them to like, because they're the number one referral partner in the world. And it's all about building that relationship with Google so that they refer you and building trust with them. So some of the like low hanging fruit ways is to respond to every single review that you get. They love that. because it shows that you're actually engaging with your customers and that you care about the reviews you get, good or bad. The other thing is on your Google business profile, you can post updates. They love that as well because they can index whatever you are posting. And then also it shows that you're engaging with all of the stuff that they're giving you. So those are a couple of quick things that people could do that might not be thinking about.

Yeah, so when you get a review, if it's five stars and there's nothing written in, they basically don't care much about that. If something's written in there based off your exact service, so yes, to your point, you would want someone to share, hey, they cut my lawn or they did X, Y, and Z at my house, so that way they know, oh, well, they... They really do this service since this person said that they do this service. The other thing that they're even more prioritizing is pictures. So if you can post pictures with your review, then that solidifies that that review is not fake because someone could write in there, yeah, they did X, Y, and Z, but they didn't do it. But if you post pictures, that basically tells Google like, there's no way that this could be fake because this is a real picture. One of the things for home service business owners specifically is you need to arm your customer with those pictures to share. Whether that's a tool like company cam or just shooting them before and after pictures of the project, giving them that and saying, Hey, share these in your review. That will help you a lot.

That's right. That's like the, the, the honey hole of reviews.

Yeah, definitely. And you could even put a city county in there like, hey, loved working on this house over in, you know, XYZ County or something like that.

Yeah. Well, from reviews specifically. since whenever you leave a review, it can pinpoint where you're at and know where you're at. So like if you, if someone was to leave you a review from another country and it comes over here, they might even take it down because they're like, why is this person coming over here and getting a bathroom remodeled in Indiana? You know, like this doesn't make sense. So yeah, where your location matters. There's some other things that go on, but I would say I haven't seen specifically like. I haven't seen specifically that that matters, no.

Yeah. That's a good way to get your profile suspended.

So the first strategy is you got to get traffic to your website. And then once they land on your website, our goal is to convert website traffic at 10%. So if you get a hundred people to your website in your local market, you should be converting at 10%. And there's a couple of call to action that you can have. The first one that's just low hanging fruit that every single website should have is a chat widget. And not just a chat widget that someone sits there and chats back and forth with them. One that converts that conversation into a text message. The reason that this is so important is because a lot of times people come to your website and you might do kitchens, but they don't know if you do baths. And they're like, and they don't want to dig around on your site to try to figure out if you do stuff. Or maybe you don't have all your pages built out or you don't do it in this area or that area. They just want a place where they can say, hey, I saw your reviews online, right? 87% of people are doing their research offline. They want to go there and say, hey, do you guys do this service in this area? So that's the first thing, chat widget that turns a chat into a text message. The other reason that's so important is because text messages get 95% open rates. So once they text you, then you have an instant line of communication. It's not just a lead form that you call and they don't answer, but now you have this two-way text back and forth. That's the first one. The second one would be, and this depends on the service that you offer, maybe some type of an estimate request or estimate calculator of some sort that they could fill out, get some more information. And if you do like on-site type of things, an online scheduling would be great. So if you were to say, hey, schedule some time for us to hop on a Zoom call just to learn more about your project or whatever, that's good. Now, one thing I know that you'll probably like is having some type of a qualifier on there, which is your budget or something else in there. That way you can qualify leads in or out. That's something that's really important if you do higher ticket stuff. So you can just set the benchmark of like, you know,10 to 50,000. You don't even have an option that's below $10,000 of a specific job. So those are the big ones. SMA calculator, online scheduling, chat widget. Those are like the main ones that most people miss. And I'll give you one other bonus. 50 to 60% of website traffic is on mobile. A lot of times business owners just pull it up on their computer and they're looking at their stuff. If you go on your mobile site, it's 10 times harder to try to find how to contact you and do all this stuff. So what you want to do is on your mobile have sticky headers, like right at the top, put like call now, request estimate. That way people don't have to search through your mobile, which is 10 times harder than on desktop.

Yeah, that's right. Having some pricing guides or like, hey, this is the bottom tier of what this looks like. Usually this is just this type of material and then labor factored in or something like that. And then you can kind of build out like who do they want to pick based off these different pricings, good, better, best types.

Yeah. There's a really cool tool called CompanyCam, which CompanyCam allows you to take pictures. And then they have a neat thing on the backend where you can actually create these profiles, like a portfolio to add to your website that then you can basically have like a whole catalog of different service and work that you did, which is a really nice thing to do. And one of the other things I think, I love the idea about the Hampshire and different things. You can actually optimize that for local SEO by saying, hey, here's a kitchen remodel we did in Indianapolis, Indiana. And then everything's optimized for Indianapolis, Indiana kitchen remodel. And now you have basically like a mini landing page for that city, for that service. And it's an actual story of what you did.

Yeah. So visibility. So how are you going to get new customers in the door, which you can do SEO, you can run ads, you can build B2B partnerships. There's a bunch of other things you could do. Conversions. Once leads come in, you convert the website traffic into leads. But what actually happens to those leads? A lot of times it's not a leads problem. It's a leads management problem. So how do you optimize all the way through your conversion funnel? And then the last piece, which is retargeting your past process and customers via emails, text, that kind of stuff.

Talking about dating, they're just like swiping right one time and saying, eh, I think this one looks good. And then they're trying to call them. They don't answer. And then they just move on to the next lead. And this was the exact problem I had when I was at the duck cleaning company. We would get, probably 50 to 100 leads every single day. And they'd all go into like an email, you know, info at email, they get calls coming in, and they would literally print them out and stick them on their desk. And they would just check next to it if they left a message and saying that, oh, tomorrow, I'm going to go back through and call these people again. And they never did because it was just an onslaught of leads. And I'm like, there needs to be a better process for managing your leads. Also, someone fills out a form on your website, you call them on Monday and they don't answer and then you get busy and then it's a week goes by and then another week goes by and then that lead's basically gone. So there needs to be a lead management process in place.

Yeah, for us, it's all about setting up automations. And I'll walk you through that. And then I'll give you another like not automated thing that someone could just implement. So the first thing is, there is a study that 44% of web forms never even get called. And 66% of the web forms only get worked one time. So what we do is when someone fills out a form on your website, we send them a text message right away, we send them an email right away. And then hopefully you call them within 10 minutes or whenever that comes. That will at least open the line of communication. Then we do a second text, like pretty much five minutes after. And we say, hey, if you have any additional pictures or information, please send it over. This starts the conversation and they send over pictures. So it begins this whole conversation that's a 95% open channel. So that's the first thing. That's like how we would set up an initial so that we can get the juices going. Then if they don't respond to any of that, they go into a 14 or 21 day nurture sequence. So, hey, we reach out to you. Are you still getting this done? You know, yada, yada, yada. That's one way to do it. If you don't have a ton of leads and you're just, you know, unorganized or you need a better process for organization, just create a simple Excel spreadsheet. Every lead that comes in, just put it in a Excel spreadsheet. Then just have little tabs that says follow up one, follow up two, and then just have your CSR or you just put in the date that you followed up and how you followed up with them. And then you'll have a whole list of all your leads and how many times you followed up with them. If you are a little bit more sophisticated, if you use like MailChimp or some other tool for email marketing, just set up some type of a sequence that will go to these people. And you just send them those emails and that will help for sure.

Yeah, what we found is that usually 60% of the leads that come in don't get booked. So usually it's a 40% booking rate, not just call booking rate, but leads in general coming through. So yeah,60% is gone. So you're spending money on all these leads and then they're gone. Now, if you were to reactivate them, we had a client that was around the 40% mark. We implemented this automation sequence and then helped them with the call script and to get some other information. And then they went to 61% of lead to conversion rate. So increased 21%. And the crazy thing about this is that that 21% increase increased their revenue 50% just because they were increasing the number of jobs, had an extra mental increase in their revenue. So that is just like a quick way that people can fix their lead management and then increase their revenue, not even counting getting more leads in the business.

Yeah, I don't have a specific, I don't have a specific number for that, but I can tell you some like a strategy that we did. So like usually at this time of the year, which is in the shoulder season for most businesses, if you take all the estimates that you didn't convert last year and just send them an email, Hey, right now we have a promo for the first month, $25 off or whatever that sounds like. Not sure if you got this done yet. Let me know if you're still interested in getting the work done. That's a great way to keep your schedule full right now with the leads that you already got.

Like we found somebody else.

that's great. I love it. I'm writing it down because I want to add that to mine.

I agree. I love it.

You know, this kind of goes back a little bit to the hustler and leader conversation, which is when you start hiring people like the CMO that you hired, they got a playbook. You ask the question, who, not how you brought them in. Like, yeah, as business owners, we're smart people. We can figure stuff out. But now you have great people that you have to trust the playbook. You have to trust that they know what they're talking about. You can't always try to put your own spice on every single thing and expect it to actually work.

Man, I think it comes down to maybe like, well, we didn't talk much about retargeting. So I'll just share a quick synopsis about retargeting. Email marketing, a monthly newsletter to your clients is huge. This, like those, those 60% of people that didn't convert to your pipeline, if you hit them every single month with something that you do, like let's say they came in for a kitchen remodel, but you also do bath, you also do walk-in closets or whatever else. Every single month, you should have something, a newsletter that's going out to people that's telling them, Hey, we also do this service. Did you know we do this service? Did you know we do this service? And people are going to come back into your funnel. And especially if you want to ramp up those referrals. This is a great way to stay top of mind in front of people.

Yeah, we have a saying, you can't get lifetime value without a lifetime relationship. So don't shy away from building a relationship with your clients. I love

Yeah, I just read Extreme Ownership, Jocko Wilnick.

Yeah. So that one's great. I just read that. I mean, that one's kind of a bestseller. I would say Buy Back Your Time. I mentioned that. Who Not How is another great book. Yeah. I'm reading actually StoryBrand just came out with a new one. Donald Miller, he just came out with StoryBrand 2.0. So I'm actually reading that one right now, but that's a great book as well.

Sullivan. Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy.

Yeah. So we do these free marketing audits where we can go through and audit all your stuff. You can go to flashconsulting. com. It's P-H-L-A-S-H consulting. And it's a complete marketing audit. We get on a call. We walk you through a blueprint of if we were to work together or not, it's all good. You get a framework to grow your business. And yeah, that's the best way to reach us.