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- [00:00]
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Paul Jamison
Hello and welcome to the Green Industry Podcast, your go to guide for building a more profitable and thriving lawn care and landscaping business. Your host, Paul Jamison is the author of five bestselling books including Cut that Grass and make that Cash and his latest Level up youp Money, all available on Amazon and Audible. Now get ready for more expert insights and practical strategies to boost your business and level up your life. Here's Paul Jamison.
- [01:10]
All right, today we're talking all about marketing with my friend Phil and I met Phil out in Las Vegas a couple of years ago. He blew my mind with his attention to detail on how to market a home service business and I was impressed that he was out of debt. So how to market on a budget. We'll talk about all this fun stuff today. So welcome back to the program, Phil.
- [01:32]
Phil
Yeah, thanks brother. Appreciate you having me, man. Yeah, met out in Vegas and we kid off from there. It was, it was a great conversation when you had me on the podcast back then. Thanks for having me again now.
- [01:41]
Paul Jamison
Yeah, we talk marketing, we talk your debt free journey. How's, how's that? Are you building wealth now or did you go back into debt or. It's been a couple years but I know you were I think on baby Step 7 Last time we talked. For those who know the Dave Ramsey plan.
- [01:54]
Phil
Yeah, no, I will not go back into debt. So yeah, no, still debt free. Building wealth at an interesting point in the business where it's like we have profit and then how much do we invest back in the business versus takeout? And I think everyone can answer that separately, you know, however they would feel about it. I'm pretty much investing most of it back in to try to grow something really cool.
- [02:12]
Paul Jamison
Awesome. I'm impressed with your studio there. Tell, tell me about your podcast backdrop here. It's impressive. I just moved into a new spot so I got like a bare. I don't even have anything on my walls yet. I got my bed in my backdrop. So I'm, I'm inspired by your Studio here.
- [02:25]
Phil
Yeah, well, we just had a kid so we had, we have a three year old daughter and then we just had a son, he's seven weeks. So not getting much sleep. But I had to move from my other office down. We redid our basement. So I was like, I'm gonna actually do a full studio. So like I have a nice fireplace over here, got my Eames chair over here, my nice panels, lights. So yeah, it's, it's nice. It's an actual studio to create content.
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Paul Jamison
That's good. Well, what's new in marketing? I know we got AI happening now. What's the best way to market a lawn care business this day and age?
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Phil
Yeah, so there's a huge shift obviously with AI and AI search in general and a lot of people are clamoring like, well what the heck do we do? How do we rank in AI search? Are people actually searching in AI platforms? And there's a whole bunch of stuff going on I would say for typical home service business. Lawn care landscape company right now Bright Local did a report and still about 80% of people are starting their search on Google for a home service business specifically because they want to read reviews and go through that process. However they put out a report based off of demographic and what they found was that boomers, of course they're still using Google and they're going to continue to use Google. But as you move down the demographic, in fact only 46% of Gen Z is using Google for local service businesses. Now right now they don't own, you know, their, the homes, but they're searching for coffee shops or other things. And so the trajectory of search is trend is shifting. What was Yellow Pages to Google search is now Google Search to AI and there's a whole nother arm that we could go down on this.
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Paul Jamison
Well, let's go down it. Come on. Yeah.
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Phil
Okay. One of the big shifts that we see coming in the next year or two is in what we call agentic booking. And the Google CEO, last name Pichai, he was just featured, this is two weeks ago. He did a big interview about the shift in search of so what Agentic booking is right now in Google Labs. You can actually turn this on and you can ask Google Gemini to go and find you an Italian restaurant for Friday afternoon at 5 o' clock that has the best fettuccine and it's going to go out and it's going to scrape OpenTable, Resi, these other platforms and then it's going to actually come back to you and say hey, this is available, this is available, this is available. And do you want me to schedule it for you? And you can actually schedule it. So what does this mean for home service businesses? Pichai mentioned in the interview that the shift is not searching. It's not keywords anymore or even rankings. It's conversations and recommendations. And there are going to be agents that are going out finding information for home service businesses to get them to work with you. So some of the things that you could do to prepare your home service business, One, you can set up a pricing page on your website that talks about what makes prices go up, down, what makes something more expensive, less expensive, price ranges. And I would recommend doing this for your bigger ticket things, you know, like sod or hardscaping, like those bigger ticket, those bigger ticket jobs. You want to make sure that you're talking about pricing guidelines for these and you can even have separate pricing guidelines for those specific things as pages. The reason is because these agents are going to be pulling in information they already offer AI search. The second thing is having online booking. The reason online booking is so important is because agents want something that they can crawl to find available time slots. They can't do this yet for home service businesses, but they need to have this plugin as well. So those are like the really big things that are coming down the pike. There's other things with content that I think we can get more into as well. But any questions on that stuff so far?
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Paul Jamison
Yeah, let's get, let's get into the content for sure.
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Phil
Okay, now the content piece. So I used to work at a home service business. I worked at a $3 million home service business, helped them go to 5 million and then sell to private equity. And I was like, facebook, who cares? Instagram, who cares? Like, it's nice to post things on there, but am I going to get likes and comments? We just talked about 87, 80% of people go to Google to find a home service business. Maybe they see my Google, maybe. Maybe they see my Facebook stuff or Instagram stuff, but maybe not. Who cares? People still think that way. It's not all about likes and comments and shares anymore. It's about training the large language models and AI platforms on your business. What does this mean? So ChatGPT, Claw, Gemini, whatever. They're all LLMs, which are called large language models. Large language models are trained on content all over the Internet and patterns in content and pattern recognition. So if you were going to try to train a large language model, probably the best thing to do would be to Feed it a bunch of content on your business. This is the most important piece of this whole thing is that right now your marketing company and maybe even you as a business owner are starting your creation of content on ChatGPT or Claude. So you're going to Claude or ChatGPT and say, write me a blog post about the best time to do salt installation. Write me a blog post about when I should fix my sprinklers or turn them on. Like you're starting your search, your stuff over there. The problem is that inside of your business is the unique stuff that's happening that you need to start the conversation there and then educate the large language models on your business. So don't start over here, start over here. Now, here's the whole crux of it, is how do you actually do that? Because are your technicians going to be, you know, giving you content? Are your CSR is going to be giving you content? Is the business owner supposed to be creating content? And here's what we do. So I'm going to give you the way that you can do it, if you're listening. And I'm also going to tell you what the best practice is, what we do. So we built an agent. His name's Turner. He turns calls into content. So he takes your call transcripts that happen every single day inside of your business, whether you use call rail or whatever other platform for call tracking. And we take those call transcripts and he turns them into AEO optimized AEO and SEO optimized blog content, social media posts and video hooks. And we're about like a year or two out. But he's going to also be building AI avatars like this, like me. And he's going to be scripting it out, creating the videos and then having it roll. So basically, and so that's the way that you could do it. You know, you have this agent and all this stuff and we have it automatically posting on websites and other things. But if you're going to do this yourself, use call tracking numbers or some type of thing to get your call transcript, your call transcriptions, take a call Transcript, go to ChatGPT. Now you're starting with the anchor. You're not going to ChatGPT with asking it to make stuff. You're using the actual content from your calls and then start building content from there. So this is the big shift that's happening. You might have experienced, you know, like, oh, social post is just about likes and shares and maybe some branding. It's way different. Now.
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Paul Jamison
You mentioned CallRail. Can you explain what call tracking is and why it's so important?
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Phil
Yeah, holistically, from a marketing perspective, when you talk about call tracking, let's talk about like Google Ads. A lot of business owners, probably 8 out of 10 I talk to, they spend money, pray to the Google gods for leads, but they don't know if they're actually making any money from it. So they're spending $2,000 a month, but they don't know if it's making them 20,000 or zero. And they're just like, yeah, it's just a part of doing business. I just spend money on Google. There's a better way to do it. What you should do is spend your money on Google and send them to a landing page. And on that landing page have a custom tracking phone number and a custom tracking form. So that way when someone calls that phone number, it's only dedicated to whatever it came from. So for example, in Google Ads, they would come to that landing page, it would be a call for that phone number. That's only for Google Ads. When they call the business, there's a whisper message says this is a call from Google. And now you have history of calls just from that phone number that you can easily track into your CRM, your pull, your end of month reports or return on ad spend reporting that kind of stuff. So CallRail is probably like the best company that is well known in the home service space for like getting call tracking numbers and setting that up very easily. But that is what call tracking is. What I can say is if you are spending money on ads and you don't have any way to know. When I was at my $3 million business, I would get on calls with these marketing companies and they would say, yeah, ads are looking good. Looks like we got 10 conversions over here. Your cost per leads this, blah, blah, blah, blah blah. And I would say who are these conversions? Like who are these people? And they'll be like, I don't really know, you know. So if you're not using call tracking number or custom forms and you don't have anyone looking at this stuff, this is the problem. So this is why you would use call tracking numbers.
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Paul Jamison
And CallRail will actually assign so they'll assign the phone number to your Google campaign, they'll assign a different phone number to your Facebook campaigns. You can have a different number for your actual Facebook page, you can have a different number that's on your website. They'll assign you a number for every marketing channel. That way you can take that information and be like, wow, let's keep running this play. We're, we're, we're investing money in marketing here and it's working. Like, let's double down on this and why are we spending all this money over here and it ain't doing no good. Like so, yeah, it's very, very powerful. And CallRail, I see you have a Jobber cup right behind you. So it syncs with Jobber, correct?
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Phil
Yeah. Oh yeah, it does. I'll give you a pro tip on this. So if you are running ads for maintenance and installation type services, small tickets, big tickets, you can have separate landing pages and separate tracking numbers. That way you can actually pull out your blended. Because a lot of times if you get just your Google return on ad spend, you don't know is it 2,000 to 10,000 and it's all small boys or is it big guys or what is it? So you could do multiple different CallRail numbers for different Google Ads based off of the different campaigns that you're running. But yeah, it does integrate directly with Jobber. And so this is kind of like that full funnel effect, which is you get to call transcripts. And a lot of people, they're not preparing their business for AI search. And a very simple way to do this is to get the call transcript, take the call transcript and create content from the real questions your customers are asking. And let's say, you know, in lawn care, you might not talk to your customers every single day, every single week. You might just, you know, be on a rotation. You can also do it in your sales calls. So let's say you were to just turn on the voice memos on your phone and record a sales conversation and get a bunch of the objections. You could take that same transcript and do the exact same thing with it.
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Paul Jamison
So good. You mentioned earlier, Claude Gemini Chat GPT I'm curious what you're using on a daily basis in regards to AI.
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Phil
Yeah, I mean we have a bunch of stuff that we use. What I can say is a lot of people, I'll say, speak for business owners in general. A lot of times the older business owners will see a tech tool and say like, this is cool, but like I don't really interact with it or use it. And the first thing is whatever platform that you use, I would use it as much as possible and just try to keep like filling it with whatever ideas. Like a perfect example of this is, let's say that you're doing, you're going to hire someone. I Talked with a $7 million business owner about this and he's like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. If you're going to hire someone, take the actual job description that you have. If you don't have one, go to ChatGPT and turn on the microphone and tell them exactly what you want and say, create me a job description. Then say, based off this job Description, what are 10 questions that I should ask this person? Then have the interview record the interview, take the transcript and put it back in to that exact prompt and say, okay, is this person a good fit or not? And if they're not a good fit, then what question should I ask them in the second interview? So I guess to answer your question is whatever platform that you use, you need to make sure that you're using it to the fullest extent. When like what we do, we have like there's a tool called Victor. Victor is basically connected to all of our tools and we can slack prompt it and they can basically like run agents for us and do a bunch of stuff. But we use like ChatGPT. We have Claude. I think the biggest discrepancy is everyone right now when we're recording this in April 2026, like Claude is the better than ChatGPT by far. Use Claude. And I don't disagree with that. I think the output is there. I think for a novice person who has no idea what they're doing, CLAUDE might be a little bit overkill to know how to use it or what to do or what to prompt it with and how to do things. Because you need Whisper Flow to be able to communicate with it if you're going to talk to text. So it's another tech stack on top. And then like how do you actually prompt it to do different things? Where ChatGPT or Gemini is more like an out of the box solution. What I would say is that there is another hidden part to this with AI, which is which is a really cool, practical way to use your call recordings as well. And that is there is a tool called Notebook lm. Are you familiar with it?
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Paul Jamison
Oh yeah, yeah.
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Phil
Okay. So NotebookLM is a Google product and what we do is we have the call recordings go into a Google Sheet. Every call recording Google Sheet, that Google Sheet is plugged into their Notebook lm. So now for each of our clients, we also use Fathom to record our calls and we pull them into a Notebook lm. For each of our clients we have like this mini large language model on their business that is educated on their business and we allow them to use this tool to be able to communicate, like give it to their csr. If there's a question, there's a knowledge brain right here that you could ask it questions to a new employee user right here. But more importantly, your marketing company now has a hub of your brain of how you say things, what you say, what people are asking at any given time. So it's a really cool use case. And the reason I bring this up is because Gemini and NotebookLM are both Google products and you can actually, in Gemini, you can prompt your notebook LM to use it to then create content on top. So it's hard to say who's going to win this whole battle and what's going to be happening. All I can say is if you're a business owner listening to this, you should be AI forward and be incentivizing your team to use AI. Like give them the tools and say use it. And I want you to try to build on top of your job and almost like replace your job. So that way you're owning these agents and running agents for your business.
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Paul Jamison
That's good. Now you, you have a marketing company. So the, the home service based businesses that you serve, do you have them all set up with CallRail or how does that work?
- [16:23]
Phil
Yeah, so some of the clients that we use use CallRail. We actually build on go high level and Go High level has call tracking numbers and so we have that built in. But some of our clients do use CallRail. Some of our clients use Service Titan so they don't use CallRail. I would say that I'm a CallRail ambassador as well because when I was at my home service business, we use CallRail because if you don't have an agency or any type of solution for call tracking, CallRail is an easy out of the box solution that you should be using. If your marketing company doesn't provide call tracking numbers or any oversight into it, use CallRail. If you're trying to do this on your own and you're whatever the reason being, use CallRail, it's very simple to set up and you can do it. I think for most agencies they have their tech stack of what they like to do and how they roll things out. And so for us we will use CallRail but nine times out and we'll default to go high level because we're already built inside of that.
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Paul Jamison
Got it. Now with AI, you mentioned Whisper Flow, I just got that the other day. So essentially I can hit a button on my computer and start talking and Whisper Flow will record it and Then send that to the AI. Like, I use different ones, but it will, it will send it to them. I'm brand new at this, Phil. So is there something like I'm missing or like I could be using Whisper Flow better with. Or how do you guys use it? Because it seems awesome. Because I feel like I can communicate more by talking than actually typing.
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Phil
Yeah. There's a tool called Victor that I mentioned that you can actually slack with. The problem is that some of these tools can't transcribe audio. So Whisper Flow is really nice. So that way you don't have to transcribe audio. You can just talk Whisper Flow and then it's going to actually type it out for you, like what you're saying. That's a good use case for it. The other thing I would say is if you need to write something, I kind of like ramble a lot. And with Whisper Flow, it will just like clean it all up and make it really pretty and nice and sound articulate and posting me saying ums and likes and then typing this thing for 10 minutes. So it's a nice. It's definitely a nice tool for that. The other one, I think we might have even talked about this when we were together last time, is this tool Delphi. D E L P H I. So Delphi is basically like notebook LM for your business and it can create like this mini avatar. But I believe that in the next two years on websites, there's going to be avatars of business owners that, that, that, that you can interact with, like an agent can interact with customers can interact with and ask it questions. And so we have to prepare the businesses for those things. And that's why the content is so important to do that. So Whisper Flow is a cool tool. I think that there's some practicality to it, but I also want to make sure that people really lean into that content is so important right now. And then AI avatars are very.
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Paul Jamison
Yeah. Now for the AI avatar using hey Jen or what? Can you walk us through this is next level stuff here. So I'm just picking your brain, but I see it. I know it's going to happen. I already seen examples. I'm like, wow, you wouldn't know that's not a real person.
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Phil
Yeah. So Marcus Sheridan, he wrote they ask, you answer. He's been on my podcast twice now. He's actually writing an endorsement for a book that I have coming out. Oh, great. Like, I think very highly of him. And if you guys know him, they ask, you answer. He's like, really on the cutting edge of this stuff. I asked him a lot of these same questions when I interviewed him. So the two big ones right now is called hey Jen and Synthesia and there's another one called True Gen. When I showed it to my wife, she was like, this is ridiculous. Like, this looks exactly like she like you. So essentially you record yourself like this and then it turns it into an AI avatar and then you prompt it and then it uses your hands and like how you talk and does all the stuff and it looks like you. It's still a little glitchy to know, like, you could look at it and be like, okay, something's a little off here, but in the next year or two, it's going to be great. And so when I, when I think about AI avatars and I think about content creation and what that's going to look like, I believe that the track is going to go. Call Transcript happens, Call transcripts gets turned into script for my agent to then go and create or my avatar to go and create and then post online with unique content that's about my stuff. The connections are pretty much already there. It's just the final output is not to the point of like true professionalism, but it's going to, it's going to get there.
- [20:53]
Paul Jamison
Real quick before we move on. If you're tired of buying equipment blind or running your crew the same way, hoping something changes, get yourself to Equip Exposition this October in Louisville. Test drive the best equipment from every major manufacturer in one place. Come see me at the morning show. Check out Equip's education sessions built for guys actually running crews. Use my code Paul at registration to save 50% on your pass. The link is in today's show notes.
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Here's Megan Koberly from the Landscaping Bookkeeper.
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Megan Koberly
The Landscaping Bookkeeper is a company for lawn care businesses under 300k. We like to onboard you under 300k so that we can educate you on your finances. Many bookkeepers love numbers, but we love the education behind the numbers. So each month we want to organize your behind the scenes, but then we want to meet with you monthly to deliver your statement of cash flows, your profit and loss called the income statement and your balance sheet. And our real goal is to help you to understand how each of those work together so that you can see the health of your business and not just crunch numbers. It's about actually putting them inside a framework so you know when to purchase and what to do with each of those facets of business.
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Paul Jamison
Schedule your free 15 minute call today at the landscaping bookkeeper dot com.
- [22:23]
Got it. So you think, hey Gen, if someone's going to tinker around with those, hey Gen would be, you know, acceptable.
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Phil
Yeah, yeah. Go to hey Gen and get it set up and try it out. I think like, here's a really cool use case. You have Google reviews and their user UGC user generated content. You could take those Google reviews, get a avatar that's already made on hey Gen and have that avatar say the review and then put it on your website. And it's like a video of someone who said they did say something about you. It's just not that person that said the thing. But it's a way to use UGC avatar stuff.
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Paul Jamison
That's good.
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Phil
Yeah.
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Paul Jamison
Well, exciting.
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Phil
Yeah.
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Paul Jamison
Well, the guys listening to my show, Phil, they, they own lawn care businesses and you know, always trying to get new customers. What, what do you think's the best way to market a lawn mowing business in this day and age? Maybe give us your top five.
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Phil
Yeah. So there's four ways to get new customers. This is not me saying this, but I'll give it to home service businesses. This is Hormozy's core four that he talks about. The first one is free content. And we talk about free content. We just laid out like content is training, language models. And it's so important. Not only that, but obviously like, if you're doing SEO, like, like traditional search engine optimization, it's still important right now because ChatGPT, Claude, they're pulling the top rankings, they're pulling the reviews, they're going over to Google and searching and then pulling their stuff in. So like it's not bad, but he has like the more better difference. So do more content, get more reviews. If you're doing one blog post, do 50 blog posts based off your call transcripts. Like do more of good stuff then. Yep. So that's the first thing.
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Paul Jamison
So good.
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Phil
Yeah. The second thing is ads. And when we talk about ads, I'll give you like my hierarchy of ads. But basically if you're running ads, it's all about return on ad spend. So don't just like say, okay, Phil, I'm gonna take these and then I'm gonna just do these ads. But you need to have the flywheel of every single month knowing that you spent 2,000 and you made 10,000 and what to do or what not to do. So number one is Google local service ads. This is at the top of Google. It's Google guaranteed. Second one is Google Search ads. And the reason that I like Google search ads over like Meta or something else is because the intent is there. People are searching for the product or service that you offer. It's not creating demand like you would on like Meta. Then the third one would be Yelp. And the reason that I like Yelp, and trust me, I used to think Yelp was a scam. I hate Yelp. They flag my reviews, all that stuff. We have clients that are getting 10x return on Yelp. So I'm a big advocate if you have a good system to generate real revenue on Yelp. We have a client that was spending $2,500 a month on Google Ads, competing against $100 million H Vac contractors for six months. He could, he could get, he was only getting $400 leads, $500 leads. He couldn't get it to work. Literally the first month we switched him to yelp, he spent 2,500 bucks. He made $25,000 with two different installs. So don't sleep on Yelp. It might have been a scam, you might be frustrated with it, but there is a playbook just might not be working for you at the time after that. I think YouTube ads is good because you can target people based off specific intent. And I'll put YouTube ads, meta ads, Angie Thumbtack, home shows. Kind of like any of those could work for your business. It just all depends on how you actually like your sales process, what you do, all the stuff. What I would say is if they, if you think that meta ads are good, you have to have a really good sales process, like speed to lead vetting, all the stuff. The third way to get customers is B2B partnerships. This one again is slept on because all this AI and mumbo jumbo. But at the end of the day, we're home service guys. Like, it's all about relationships. And take the algorithm, the AI, the all the stuff out of it. I would rather have a guy who does power washing refer someone to me for landscaping all day long opposed to them find me on Google because it's probably a 50% close rate on top. More. So B2B partnerships is one of the. Is a third way. And like we have a whole partner pipeline builder playbook for that. But essentially you go and find complimentary services and you reach out to them to refer you. And the last one is just cold outreach, door knocking, that kind of stuff. So that's like the four ways to get customers. If I was to rank them, I would say you need One fast channel and one slow channel. The fast channel I would do is ads and the slow channel I would do is B2B partnerships. If you're in a really competitive market, if you're not in a competitive market and there's not a lot of Google reviews, I would do just get a bunch of Google reviews and do the SEO stuff.
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Paul Jamison
Got it. In regards to social media, you talk a lot about content. What platforms do you suggest posting? On? What frequency do you suggest posting?
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Phil
Yeah, so last year actually short form content got indexed on Google. So before last year, none of the contents, the content you were making on social media would ever make it to Google's index. So it wouldn't even contribute to their algorithm. That's all changed, which is again why content is so important. When I think about content, I would say the big ones, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube. The reason that I like YouTube the most is because it's with Google. So you can like run ads to it, you can get the intent behind it and that kind of stuff. Um, here's a big shift though. A lot of times when we talk to business owners, so like we make content for clients, we have a videographer on our team. A lot of times they're trying to go viral or they're trying to get more likes and shares and views because they think that's what pays the bills and it's not. What we recommend doing is creating authoritative talking head content based off of your real customer questions, because that helps you rank, obviously for large language models like what I just told you. But also it's going to find, it's going to find the right person to show them what they need at that time. That's the whole thing. It's the interest graph. Now it's not about likes and shares. The TikTok ification of social media is that they're going to show whatever content it is to the right person. So if you make a video of you dancing on a job site, it's like, okay, that's cute. And maybe you're going to get reviews from all over the world. But if you make a video on a job site about how you can look at your sprinkler heads and know if they need to be replaced or repaired, that video is going to be shown to the right people at the right time and then you could put your location on that video and then if it gets a lot of views, you can run ads to that video. So it's a different, it's a shift from just likes and Shares and funny stuff to actually putting the video out there that's going to get in front of the right person and the platforms are going to put it in front of the right people.
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Paul Jamison
That's so good. We mentioned top of the program about your debt free journey. You run your business debt free. Thankfully a lot of my audience has, you know, debt free lawn care, lawn mowing businesses. But a lot of the other folks are kind of drowning in debt and the stress and pressure of all of that. Can you speak a little bit of. Of how you got your business debt free and, and why you run it debt free and what it's like, you know, being on Baby step seven on the Dave Ramsey plan.
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Phil
Yeah. First, as far as being on baby step seven is that I can come to conversations with anyone from a place of abundance and I'm not just trying to like take people's money or something like that. Like, if I can help someone, great. If not, it's all good. Like I'm not. So I, I feel that piece, which is very nice as far as the debt free thing. So Mike McCallowic's profit first. I think you had him on your show or I have on my show. Maybe you had him on your show.
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Paul Jamison
I think too my friend Naylor's had him on his show. I haven't had him on my show directly, but okay. We're in the same circles with Relay and, and okay. Yeah. Anyway, I haven't had him on my. Cool on my show. Like you, man.
- [29:42]
Phil
Okay, no worries. He's a cool dude and he has a great book called Profit first and Profit first allows you to take your profit first and then budget accordingly. I was fortunate to. When I was, you know, I was making like a hundred thousand. I read Profit first because I was like, how am I going to run a hundred thousand dollars out of a bank account? And like, how am I going to pay my taxes? And I read Profit First. I was like, oh my gosh, I need five accounts. That makes sense. So I was fortunate that I didn't do the debt thing. I just started a profitable business right away. But what I do know is that there's like a $7 million business guy that I know who was in debt and then he started Profit first and now he's out of debt based off the principles and actually allocations and things like that. So what I would encourage people to do is one, if you're doing like project based work, this is like most important because if you take like large payments up front and then you have to like base it, you know, allocate it out as it goes. Profit first is going to be a big help for you because you're not going to be running from job to job. And that's usually where a lot of people get this like, can't sleep at night burn piece. And then the other thing would be having a separate tax account, having a separate opex account, and just like spreading things out so that way you can see the actual numbers. And, and don't just rely on your P and L, because we all know we look at P and L and it's like black magic and voodoo, smoke and mirrors. Your person has no idea what they're talking about. So that's my two cents on that.
- [30:57]
Paul Jamison
Cool. Well, is there anything we're leaving out here that that needs addressed or that's burn, you know, passionate, passionately burning on your heart?
- [31:05]
Phil
The main thing that I would say if you're listening to this is that content is not just about likes and shares. And if you are hesitant to create content because you think that it might be a waste of time, it's not. There's a land grab that's happening over in AI Search. And the beauty of it is that the guys that have been doing this for 50 years, that have thousands of Google reviews or that dominate your market, if they're not forward thinking and not creating content, then you have the upper hand and you can go capture that market. It's very few times in the history of marketing that we can actually see these shifts. I mentioned yellow pages to Google. The first move is on Google. They were then, you know, the top people. We had Google from like 2000 to like 20, 22, 23. We're up against that again with AI search. The big shift that's happening. So there's a big land grab that's happening there. So I would really dive into, like how do I rank on AI Search? Am I ranking on AI Search? Is my marketing company actually preparing me, like with a checklist of what I need to do? And those are some of the questions that you should be asking yourself right now.
- [32:03]
Paul Jamison
That's so good.
- [32:23]
Hey, it's Marty, producer of the Green Industry podcast. This episode is over, but check the episode notes for links to products and services that you heard about during the episode. And thanks for listening.
- [32:35]
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