← Owned and Operated - A Plumbing, Electrical, and HVAC Business Growth Podcast
Owned and Operated - A Plumbing, Electrical, and HVAC Business Growth Podcast
#151 - From Leads to Revenue: Maximizing Your Marketing ROI with Sam Preston
00:41:20
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- [00:00]
John
We're at like 10k in January. We're projected out right now to make 2 million this year. Being able to be dynamic and know where your leads are coming from is so important. You need a good website. You don't need the sexiest website ever. Know your numbers, stay accountable. Make sure that you, your team knows that too. You owe it to yourself and your team to get bigger.
- [00:27]
Sam Preston
For going on two years, I've partnered with Service Scalers to do our Google Ads, PPC and SEO and the results have been huge. It's been really exciting to watch as our website consistently jumps up rank as we're using more technology and we're moving faster than our peers who are all using legacy home service marketing companies. We use Service scalers for ppc, our local SEO, our on page website SEO and our lsa. So give them a call if you're looking for leads. Today on owned and operated, we have Sam Preston from Service Scalers and this episode was our livestream from October where we took listeners and Facebook group questions and we answered them live here on the show about basically best in class marketing. It was a great conversation. I enjoyed every bit of it and I know you will too.
- [01:17]
Mitch
Is SEO really needed when it seems to take so long to spin up and be such a long game?
- [01:25]
John
My default answer is yes, but also depends. Where are you at? Are you starting up? Do you even have a truck yet? Probably not, right? Like if you're just getting started, I'm probably not spinning up an SEO game plan. I think SEO makes the most sense when you get to a place in your business where you start wanting to invest in future you. You're like, yeah, right now I'm pretty close to capacity and I can't really get more leads without having to go hire a whole new truck and I'm not really ready there. Okay, well then start investing that, that money that you have into a future version of yourself so, so that you can start driving leads 2, 3, 6, 8 months down the line. That's when I think that you should start. And that's going to be different for everybody depending on your growth path, depending on how fast you're able to grow your team. But I absolutely, um, I think was it 80% of our SEO clients are hitting their target lead volume, meaning they're running SEO with us and they're hitting that cost per lead that they need on SEO. So like people like, this is a game to go win works.
- [02:37]
Mitch
Yeah.
- [02:38]
John
And the thing that makes SEO special is once you get to the top, it's really hard to dethrone the king. Yeah, yeah, Google Ads, we're all paying the cost per click. Anybody can come in and play that game at any point and outbid you. It's really how hard to outbuild bid somebody on SEO? You just have to be better at them at the game.
- [02:58]
Mitch
My context here on the contractor side is I'll hit the last one first. Like, there's a company in our market that was really early to the SEO game 10 years ago, and they're still kicking my butt on SEO. And like, we're hitting SEO really, really hard. Like, it's been. We've done it really effective and they're still kicking my butt. And the other one, I just want to touch on, like, the timelines that you use. Like six, eight months, three months. I feel like that's reasonable and like, correct me if I'm wrong here, obviously, like, you guys, like, helped us with our programmatic and you guys helped us with our strategy on SEO. And when I think about SEO, like, quantity is as much of a part of the conversation now as quality.
- [03:46]
John
Yeah. I mean, if you're only doing two articles a month, literally everybody's doing that. You can't win. It's like investing $10 a month in the stock market. I mean, yeah, it's better than nothing, but you're not going to retire on that. So in our game, we want to, at a minimum, 10 articles. Obviously, after you've gotten all your service pages, after you've gotten, like, all the foundations of what make a good SEO website, then once we get into the organic spot where we're just driving as much blogs to your site as possible. 10 to me is the minimum. I really want to do closer to 30. Just because I'm aggressive, I don't want to play. And here's the thing from my end as an agency, I know that in 12 months, you're going to ask me the question of do I stay with service scalers or do I go somewhere else? And so it is in my best interest to make that as aggressive as possible to get you as results as quick as possible. Because in 12 months, I want you to go, all right, yeah, that was great. Let's do it again. And so that's why we play the little bit more aggressive game. Selfishly, we want you to be clients with us forever. And then it really does help you on that end as well.
- [05:07]
Mitch
Next question. What are the top KPIs I need to track daily for my marketing?
- [05:13]
John
1. I hate this answer. It depends, but like, it really does depend on like what marketing that you are tracking. In my opinion, all your marketing should go back to an roi, should go back to some sort of revenue. And so like whether you're doing radio, TV ads, billboards, all those are going to be different KPIs that you should probably track. However, everything eventually gets to the funnel, which is how many, how many leads do we generate? How many appointments do we generate? How much revenue did we generate from that? Those. And I think if you could track everything to those three numbers, those are the most important. If you don't know those numbers, what are you doing? Is this on our, you know, like even I, like as an agency, I know how many leads we generate. I know many first meetings have sat and I know how much revenue has happened over this last week. So definitely those clicks are good impressions. Good. You can dig into the details and you should know those numbers, but those aren't numbers that you have to have in your head ultimately. How many leads are coming through? How many of those turn into appointment? How much is. How many of those appointments turned into revenue? Well, I guess that's daily for marketing.
- [06:29]
Mitch
Yeah. Yeah, I think. I mean, I basically agree. So daily quantity of leads, how many leads do I need for tomorrow? How many leads do I need for the next day? How do we stay on top of it? And then the big one is like, what's your book rate? Because that's obviously going to determine quite a bit. So. And ideally, book rate by channel, that's what we really like to look at. So hey, if I get a book rate, you know, we had this thing last year where our book rate was like 30% on LSAs, which sucks because LSAs are 80 apiece. So we're getting this like $30 on LSA book rate and 30% book rate. So it's like 240 basically per lead. And then I still have to like, you know, go convert that into a sale. So it's really challenging. So when you can track it by a lead source should be daily service. Titan lets you like figure that out. You can tweak. So like what we did immediately was we dropped our service fee on LSA leads. We're like, all right, anytime there's no say lead, no service fee, that's going to increase our book rate. And it did. Went up to 60 some percent doubled our book rate, which meant we needed way less phone calls to run the same amount of leads. So that was hugely valuable.
- [07:46]
John
Yeah, absolutely. I think that your comment about knowing the source of those leads is super important as well. Right. Like, when we were using universal analytics, it was so much easier to track source. And since Google has gone to GA4, they're limiting how much you can actually tell. And so you still should be able to get pretty darn close. And we actually just ran into. And this is not the first time we read this situation, but the second time where a client has come and said, hey, look, you guys are saying you're driving a bunch of phone calls, but when we aren't, we aren't getting those numbers. And we're like, dang, did we mess with the tracking? Like, what happened? We ended up realizing what he is tracking is every single time a phone somebody calls in, they ask you, how did you hear about us? And so they were taking that and they were like, okay. That is, you know, most people are just coming from us through SEO or directly to the site. And it's like, well, actually most of those, if we actually, you know, use call Rail Service Titan, you can actually tell the source is Google Ads. And so some of that is just making sure you have your tracking set up correctly and you're pulling through from a correct source. Because that situation happens sometimes.
- [09:05]
Mitch
Well, and the right way to handle that, like, there's two different. There's your side where like, hey, we're gonna set that up so we can track to click. Basically, like, do they click on the website? And that's how, I mean, that's how you track it. Right? Like there's an action. Yeah. Which makes sense. And then on the contractor side, best way to do this is you set up a different phone number. So like, if somebody calls and then you just, you can double verify. Right? So because the bigger you get and the more money you spend on marketing, like, you really need to know, like, where those phone calls are coming from. Like I just described, like two minutes ago. I was like, hey, we found out our book rate on this one single lead source. I'm like, 500 lead sources. One single one sucked. And I was able to identify it and solve it because we, because it had one phone number. So we knew exactly where those leads were coming from so we could solve problems. So, like, your. The phone number you have on your trucks should be different than the one on your website, and that should be different from the one on your Google My business profile. And that should be different from your LSA phone number. And all of these should be different numbers. That way, anytime a lead comes in via call, you know exactly where that lead Came from. And there's just no confusion.
- [10:21]
John
Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I had a conversation on Monday where this guy wants to be super aggressive. Just bought this company. He's got four plumbing techs that are just literally sitting on their hands not doing anything. He's like, I need 10 phone calls a day at an $80 cost per lead. What do we do? I was like, well, one, you just multiply that out and that's 25 grand. So we're gonna spend 25 grand. And he's like, great, let's do it. I was like, but I would probably split that between LSA and Google Ads. Right? He was like, no, I want to do everything in Google Ads. It's like, we can, but what happens if LSA actually has a better cost per lead?
- [10:55]
Mitch
Yeah.
- [10:55]
John
If you know your sources. Hey, LSA is costing me $60 cost per lead and has a booking rate of 50%. Google Ads has a cost per lead at, you know, call it $100. And the booking percent is like 20%. It's like, look like double your budget. LSA. Throw it there. So being able to be dynamic and know where your leads are coming from is so important to be able to make sure that your team has as many leads possible with as little budget as possible. Yeah.
- [11:25]
Mitch
And being nimble. Yeah, I totally agree. How do I increase client acquisition and appeal to better clients? Is this a marketing thing? I'll give my quick spiel here, and then I'd love to hear your perspective, but the definition that I internally use for marketing is marketing is the act of choosing who we want to work for as, like, that's it. So, like, yeah, 100%. That's a marketing decision. Like, marketing is who we're sending out a bat signal, and we want a specific customer segment to respond to that bat signal. So, yeah, that's marketing, I think, in a nutshell.
- [12:09]
John
Yeah, I mean, like, I think that there's a couple things that you should be doing on our end that would help with you. If you have the copy of cheapest, cheapest home service company in the area. Like, you're just gonna get the cheap. Like, you get people no money. If you have a higher price point, then you might choose zip codes that can afford that price point. Right. If you're a luxury home remodeler, you probably just, like, want to avoid certain zip codes if you can, to get the most out of those Google Ads. I would avoid big time discount codes like you offering me $100 off my. Whatever, my H vac unit, literally. Makes no difference in my mind. I want somebody that I don't have to babysit, come in, do a really good job and leave. Now. Granted, I'm probably not your average person. I literally know nothing about plumbing. I know blue is cold and red's hot. That's probably the extent of my plumbing knowledge. And so like. But I'm willing to also pay up a little bit more for somebody that is, you know, that, that does a good job. So from a marketing copy standpoint, like what's going to appeal to me is more about like we don't cut corners versus here's your 200 off. Don't get wrong. Those, those coupons can work and sometimes like shoulder season, like those are the things we want to drive more conversations. You're willing to, to give a little bit more discounts to close deals. Fine. On the marketing side, let's make sure our copy matches the language that we want to and the audience that we want to attract once they get in. Surprise and delight is always kind of a good way to go about it. Showing up, you know, looking professional. The language you use to communicate, mirroring the person that you're engaging with, not coming across pushy, doing educational conversations. Like all of those things I think make a big difference on appealing better to those clients.
- [14:18]
Mitch
I think the last item here is just like, where are you sending the bat signal and are you giving content that would, that somebody would respond to that you want? But yeah, the short answer and long answer is 100%. That is a marketing thing.
- [14:37]
John
I would also say like sometimes people put too much emphasis on some marketing that you don't necessarily need to like, you need a good website. You don't need the sexiest website ever. Like this is, this is not shoes on e commerce shop. Right? Like this is not like an overpriced bag. Like, yeah, we're H Vac, we're plumbing, we're roofing. Make sure it's professional, clear and gets the job done. Anytime you create a blocker or a barrier to entry inside of your sales process or funnel, I think those are things that are going to be more of a turn off than not having like the greatest, you know, sexiest website ever. Don't wrong. We can create really beautiful, high converting websites. But also I wouldn't like, I wouldn't go out and spend 50 grand on a website that doesn't make sense to me in this industry.
- [15:35]
Mitch
Okay, this is an interesting one. What is best in class? Cost per lead in cac, which is cost per acquired customer for New install leads across channels. My feedback here is I can give what our numbers are, but what it looks like in northeast Ohio is going to be real different from what it looks like in Chicago or rural bum wherever. So it's, it's really kind of challenging to come up with a great benchmark. Yeah, I have a lot of friends that pay twice what I do for, for, for leads. So I think the on the contractor side, I think it's more important that is it costed in your job, like what's the most you can pay? So we like to think of it whoever can pay the most wins. How about that? So instead of like how do we pay the least amount for a lead, how can we pay the most and how can that be costed into our structure? Because if I'm paying like Angie's List $200 for an H Vac replacement lead and my conversion rate, which means what percentage of leads do I close? Let's say that's 33% for marketed leads. So I would have to get three leads at $500 or $250 apiece. So I paid $750 to acquire that installation and I'm good with that because my average install is 12,000 something dollars for that business unit. So that's 6% revenue and I'm okay with that. So I think that that's the better way to attack it is you work backwards from your average ticket and your conversion rate and what can I afford to pay? And the game should be not how do I pay the lowest. The game should be how do I pay the most? Because if you can pay the most and it works inside your cost structure and you're never going to have shortage of leads.
- [17:46]
John
Agreed. The only thing caveat I would say there is, that's the game you should play, but not the game you should tell your agency to play. Your agency.
- [17:56]
Mitch
Yes, good point.
- [18:00]
John
So go back to your agency and we do the same thing. Like we got a Facebook ads agency right now working with us on ads and we tell them a much lower cost per lead than we need to actually make that CAC work. And that's what you're paying for them to do is to get you a good source of leads and keep getting that cheaper. And if they can't, try to try to figure out why. Right. Is it truly just because, you know, they're not running tests? Is it because they're not, they're bidding on too high of keywords? Is it the market's too high. Right. Like if you're in Las Vegas, there's just no way you're getting an 80 cost per lead. It's just not like, I love that idea. Not happening. Whereas we've got some accounts right now running $15 cost per lead, which is absurd. And it's because they're in a very specific market that there is no competition, and we're just literally running it up. And so, like, your area is going to matter. And then again, the way you engage your agency or your. Even your internal marketing team should be very different than the way you engage or you actually play the game.
- [19:06]
Mitch
Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I totally agree. So I think if we're working backwards on the question just to give people the math one more time. So if I. If I have. If I have a. Let's do a smaller job than $10,000. So if I have, like, a water heater replacement and my water heater pulling up my calculator, my water heater replacements are, let's say, like, 2800 bucks. And this is where you need good data. But, like, what's your closing rate on water heaters? So my closing rate on water heaters is, I think it's 60%. So $2,800. And I'm willing to pay up to 10% of that job to get the job. So I have $280 to spare to, like, basically pay for the leads. Okay. So I'm at $280, and I close two out of three leads. So I'm just going to do times 0.6. So I could pay. I pay, like, 130 bucks for the lead, and I feel good about that. And I could go up to 150 if I need to, because 160 if I need to. Really? Because I am going to close more than half of those leads. So that's. I'm actually kind of surprised you brought it up a few times that, like, people really, like, dive into it sounds like in their engagement call, like, hey, here's what I. You said that one guy was like, hey, I need $80 cost per lead. Like, my quick take. I really doubt that people know what they need cost per lead. So work through the math that I just, like, walked you through, because I think cost per lead is a good thing to know, but it's not the thing to optimize around, because I'm okay with paying $160 for a water heater lead because I'm going to close 60 of them, and that still meets my. My metric. And if I'm saying, hey, I Needs to be under $80. Like what am I, what am I missing out on? What lead channels am I refusing to use? Because I want a very cheap cost per lead. So it's a good metric, but I think it's hard to like declare it. Yeah, okay.
- [21:21]
John
Absolutely.
- [21:21]
Mitch
We got a couple more questions here. Is there such, this will be interesting. Is there such a thing as a business being too small to afford a marketing company like service scalers?
- [21:35]
Sam Preston
We had a couple major pain points earlier this year and those pain points were, how do we contact our unsolved old estimates more frequently? How do we book our membership appointments faster? How do we stay in contact with customers and let them know that we have promotions? And how do we run a speed to lead process for Angie's leads? When looking around for solutions, we saw a couple great softwares on the market, but our favorite one was Hatch. So when we started using Hatch, we had just switched over from another vendor and Hatch's user interface was so easy. It directly tied into Service Service Titan. It automated the workflow of five or six employees a day. We're now in contact with hundreds of additional customers. We're selling a ton of our unsold estimates and it's easier than ever to book our membership follow up appointments. So Hatch has been a really big win for us. In order to book a demo with Hatch, click the link below.
- [22:25]
John
Yeah, I think so. Like if you, if, if John, you and I, we're like, we burn everything down. You and I are going to go start a home service company, plumbing company, Las Vegas.
- [22:36]
Mitch
This is gonna be another, just another Wednesday.
- [22:38]
John
Just another Wednesday. And we literally only have the money we have. Right. We're not going out and investing. We're not getting money. We're starting from scratch. Yeah, like I'm not about to go spend thousands of dollars for someone to manage LSA and Google Ads and SEO. I'm just not like, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to these aggregates and I'm gonna go play the Facebook groups game where I, you know, try to get as many leads as possible and then spend like you're, you're definitely going to be overspending cost per lead on these aggregates. Right? Like yeah, thumbtack Angie's List, you know. Yeah, but like at least your money is going to a cost per lead versus somebody managing it. Once we get into a place where that you are ready to get that cost per lead down because it's worth it, that's when I would go to that So I think if you're only wanting to spend two to three grand tops on all marketing, I think you're probably, probably better off just putting that into the market. Go watch some YouTube videos or join our LSA webinar. We run through exactly how to run an LSA account or message me, man, you and I can jump on. I'll teach you how to run LSA and you'll go on from there. So run LSA on your own. Watch some YouTube videos. So learn how to do it. Get your GP. Google business profile. I'm trying to get the new acronym for. I wouldn't say Google my business. I would get, you know, work on the aggregate. Like that's where I would put my money versus hiring an agency. Once you're spending like five to ten grand a month, that's when I would go. I think that you can get more by having a professional actually manage it.
- [24:25]
Mitch
Yeah, I agree. I think we started, we started having somebody manage it. It was back in like 2015 or 16 when we crossed like four or five grand a month. And that was a big deal. Like I remember, I remember that. And I was like a really. That's a big deal because we went from zero. You know, we'd never spent anything on marketing. Yeah, that was a while ago. Next one. Is LSA dying? Seems like there are a lot of changes happening. Google potentially getting split up by the government. Wow, okay. Got some conspiracy theories. Love it. Will that affect things like GMB and lsa?
- [25:08]
John
LSA is definitely not dying. If anything, Google is pushing further into that. Google wants to do its best to spend as much of your money as possible. And LSA is a really good one because it's easy enough to get on your own. So a lot of people get in there, have no idea what they're doing, and spend way too much money in there when they shouldn't be. And then obviously they just, they make so much money through this. So it's not going to die. It's only going to get more, more into it. There are a lot of changes. You need to be up to date on those changes. Things like your there's no more LSA link. You only have your Google business profile link. It's the same thing. I don't know anything about them split and being split up by the government. I doubt it. They have way too much. They have way too much control to be split up by something as tiny as the US government. Now, granted, we have started shoulder season. We're seeing less search volume right now. And so when we were in a. When we were in, like, the summer seasons, high of summer, like, the clients that were on track to hit their lead vine was closer to, like, 95%. Like, it was just absurd. Since then, we've had a dip in that. We're hitting closer to, like, 65. 70% of all our clients are hitting their lead volume, which hurts and sucks. Right. So we're talking to clients about, okay, hey, how do we move that budget somewhere else? We've talked to clients about, you know, like, just being aware of those situations. Shoulder season. Like, you still want to keep showing up as often as possible and having those conversations. But, like, again, we still have like, 65 to 70 of all our clients who running LSAs still hitting their numbers. So, like, you know, it works. You just got to play the game, right?
- [27:00]
Mitch
Yeah. One, I. I fully agree. And two, I just want to hit that, like, down season part real quick in shoulder season. So, like, September and March, April, like, leads are going to be way more precious. Like, every single lead matters just so much. So, like, keep the marketing machine going always. But what gets more important the bigger and bigger you get is like, hey, shoulder season exists, and there is literally nothing that any marketing agency will ever do for you that's going to solve the fact that April and September are months in the year. Like, that's it. Like, they're always going to be months in the year. I mean, I guess Pluto is no longer a planet, so maybe something crazy could happen. But, like, they're always going to be a problem. So, like, what you have to figure out as soon as you can is, like, okay, if I need 10 calls a day, I just need 10 calls a day. I hit 10, 11 calls a day, no problem in peak, and I just can't get above 7 in down season. That's okay. Like, you and literally every other business in the entire freaking world. And like, one. So here's how you sort of fix it. One, you don't turn off marketing. Like, that's not the problem. Marketing isn't the problem. People need heat. They don't need heat when it's 60 degrees night and day in September. It's, you know, it's a demand problem. But two, figuring out what the gap between your demand and your calls needed is, like, one of the biggest movers that you can have in your business. So when you're starting to dial that in and you're like, all right, I need 10, I'm at 7. Because that's what, you know, that's how Many people have a need for me today. Then how do I find the other three? And the reality is you're not going to find them using conventional marketing. Like, for the most part, you're going to find them without bounding your customers or you're going to find them. I mean, that's honestly the big one. Or like, that's a really great place where a membership plan comes in so you can use it to pick up your shoulder seasons. And you don't have a lull in April because you're doing tune ups. So there's a bunch of strategies around how to solve that. The big thing is like seasonality will always be a thing and you have to have a plan around it. And pushing more dollars into marketing isn't a plan because there's not enough demand. Like, people aren't looking for emergency no heat service in April and like, no one can fix that problem for you. So you just have to find another way.
- [29:37]
John
And that's where, you know, one of the things that I've been talking to certain people on is like, hey, the search volume isn't there. You were prepared to spend five grand in LSA this month. What are your thoughts about throwing that to SEO? And because one of the things that we're trying to play around with is not just have like a standard SEO package where it's like, hey, this is a flat rate. We're just going to do this month over month over month, but like also being able to offer like, hey, here's a keyword, we're at like 10 and I know that if we go buy like three grand worth of backlinks that we could probably shoot up the ranks. Can we have that? Can we have that money? So we go buy these and just get them really quickly or whatever it takes. So like, we're trying to find ways that like, you're not spending the money that you already plan to. You've already have it budgeted, your owners already. You know, if we're working with like a director of marketing, you've already gotten this approved. How can we just take that and help you go rank higher so that when we do hit that season where things are coming in, it's even better. And SEO is one of those things that will help you in that shoulder season.
- [30:45]
Mitch
No, it definitely will, but I'm really into that. I heard somebody earlier today was talking to me about a concept that I've literally never heard of in my life. And this reminds me of that a little bit. And it's basically responsive SEO and obviously SEO takes a second, but this, yeah, this kind of. That's really similar. Honestly, now I'm thinking about what I'm going to do. In April, we launched a. Now this is back to SEO. But SEO ridiculous. Like, if you hit it hard, it's insane. But we. So September, like SEO used to do almost nothing for us. And we did 200,000 of revenue attributed to SEO in September. In September, like, it was insane. So we were, we're working on this SEO project now. We're like, hey, can we pump as much as humanly possible for like 30 days on water quality? And like, how can that create an impact in November and December and January for water leads? And now I'm like, yeah, I should probably do that for like air quality too. I frankly wasn't even thinking. I'm, you know, my own medicine here. But, like, I should be. I should be thinking about that for April. It was a good idea, Sam. It was a good idea.
- [32:06]
John
Take it. Run with it.
- [32:07]
Mitch
I'm gonna call Janelle and get her up on that.
- [32:11]
John
Yeah, okay. Yeah, absolutely. And I will even say that something interesting with the SEO is did you hear about Google changing its API indexing?
- [32:22]
Mitch
No.
- [32:24]
John
So Google, we used to use a bunch of different tools to index your page. What I mean by that, for people who don't know what that is, is basically Google has the entire Internet to crawl and read. How does it know to read your article? Is it gets indexed into its big vast doc systems, filing systems, if you will. We used to force feed it and just basically like, hey, like, eat this. Like, this is the document, this is the article. Go. And so it would take us like one to two weeks to get something indexed. They killed that. So no longer can you do that. So like, everything is now on Google's time. Like, they're literally companies big, you know, multi, you know, $10 million software companies shut down overnight because of it. And so, wow, you can no longer do that.
- [33:18]
Mitch
And that must just be like AI just forcing out so much written content that they literally couldn't keep up.
- [33:24]
John
It's gotta be something like that.
- [33:27]
Mitch
So basically that makes sense because we started. Our ranking, started slowing down for like keywords that we were ranking for. And I've been like, what the heck happened, dude?
- [33:39]
John
It sucks because we were talking, we sold a programmatic. A programmatic build, which is like a thousand pages in 30 days. Yes. Yeah.
- [33:49]
Mitch
Crazy.
- [33:50]
John
And we, like sold it telling the guy, hey, like. And we'll. We have this, we have this software. It'll index this It'll be all like an index within like 30 days after that. And then like they changed it after we sold the first. We went back to like, hey, it's actually gonna take like four to six weeks. Just heads up. He was a nice guy, so he understood.
- [34:09]
Mitch
So. So do you think, like, is that the promise that they've given, like four to six weeks?
- [34:15]
John
No, Google doesn't promise things. We just like, that's the, that's what marketing used to be before we started doing this. So we assume it's just going to go back to that same amount. It might not be. It might take longer. If you know anything about marketing and you want the way to make that happen, make sure you log into your Google console, go to the pages, and then submit the pages and it should run through it. It should help. That's basically the fastest way that you can do it. Also, your sitemap, making sure your sitemap is updated with those pages, that too will help that.
- [34:48]
Mitch
Well, walked away with something new. I think we have time for one more question.
- [34:52]
John
We got a couple questions by Mitch in the comments we asked. Answer those.
- [34:57]
Mitch
Yeah.
- [34:59]
John
So Mitch Kenney says, how do companies get so big so quick? What are they doing to get so many new customers so quickly? My first answer is they're spending a lot. Like the guy, the conversation I had Monday, he's got four techs and he's like, hey, I need to feed them. I need ten leads a day. And I was like, well, you're gonna spend 25 grand this month. So like, that is one way to get bigger faster.
- [35:22]
Mitch
I, I think there's a lot here. So as a company who got big fast, it definitely starts with leads. Like it does. Like, who's got the leads? How do you, how do you manage that? And it, it's kind of interesting because there's, it's, it becomes like cumulative advantage. Maybe that's the way I want to say this. So there's like this cumulative advantage where, okay, if every single day I come in and improve something by like 1%, 1% is a lot of money. Now, 1% is for us, $260,000 a year, a day, or, you know, that's 1%, $260,000. So if I come in and improve something incrementally, the people that we're leaving behind get a bigger and bigger wall of things that they would need to improve in order to catch up. And I think for a couple years it wasn't as noticeable as it's getting. And some of the Advantages that I'm seeing that we have. And I like look around at sort of the competitive landscape and I'm like, wow, we are like, I don't remember getting this big and why didn't you? And then I look at a lot of the stuff we're doing and it is like, it's across the board, it's operational improvement, it's having all the leads. So like Sam said, spending like crazy. Like in order to spend like crazy, you need to have the infrastructure to be able to run and close on those leads. Like spending a million dollars a year doesn't help you if you don't close any of them. Like if you're closing at a 20% closing rate, like, you can't, it doesn't do anything for you. Yeah, operational improvement, cumulative improvement of like, okay, today I'm going to tweak our call booking rate. Today I'm going to tweak our average ticket. Today I'm going to add this new software to do this thing. And now the moat to catch up gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and like big companies, like the bigger you get in our industry, the bigger you get because you get, you have this like ridiculous series of advantages that take years to overcome. So I think, yeah, I think there's a lot there. I think definitely marketing, definitely leads. But like, what's going on in the operation of the business? Like, how are you supporting that? What does your hiring look like? What does your pay packages look like? What's your pricing look like? How's your sales process work? What's your call booking look like? And each one of those is like a 90 day project, if not a year. Yeah. But if you continue to, if you continue to do these continuous improvements and these 1% improvements in October this month we're going to finish up at $2.7 million, which is insane. That beat my previous record by half a million dollars. We hit our first $2 million month in May and we'll probably hit our first 3 million dollar month either in December or January. And that's just us continuing to get better every single day. Get better every single day. And like, focus on the fundamentals that I already listed off. Conversion rate, call booking rate, what's recruitment look like, what's your sales process look like. And then on top of all that, you spend a shitload of money to get as many leads as you possibly can. But sort of like you build, like the machine that you build has to be able to effectively spit out sales once you get those leads. And that's the real thing that you're building.
- [39:09]
John
Yeah. And I know we got like 60 seconds, so I'll keep my answer short, but I've built multiple agencies at this point Serve Scalars is definitely the fastest growing agency that we had. And so we're at like 10k in January. We're sitting, we're projected out right now to make 2 million this year, which is insane. And it's amazing the things that I've done differently. This route is leads. Right. Like I have very good lead sources and multiple channels coming through and then accountability on the team. Right. So every Monday I have meetings with department heads. What are we going to do differently? The 1% Chan difference that we're going to make. We. Every Wednesday we have a leadership meeting with all the different things that we like. Everybody has to say these were the goals for this quarter. And we either on track or off track for hitting those. And then we see our numbers weekly, multiple times a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Everyone has to be accountable for those numbers continuing to go. And that has been huge. So know your numbers, stay accountable, make sure that you, your team knows that too.
- [40:14]
Mitch
Yeah. And like you can, you can also get big. Like you can, like, yes, we've created a big moat but like the moat is passable. So we have to continue to get better because technology is going to keep getting better and it's going to keep giving advantages to people that can move quick and that's only getting faster and faster. Like if something new drops now, like we, we execute with vigor so that we can continue to stay ahead of the curve.
- [40:41]
John
You owe it to yourself.
- [40:42]
Mitch
We feel the pressure.
- [40:44]
John
Yeah. You owe it to yourself and your team to get bigger. Like you need to. It's a lot more security. It's a lot better game to play.
- [40:52]
Mitch
Yeah, no, I agree. This is great. I feel like we saw some, hopefully solve some good questions. If you have any more, feel free to send them in. I think we can answer them on another pod.
- [41:03]
John
Let's do it. Let's do it.
- [41:04]
Mitch
Thanks all for tuning in. Thanks for having me on.
- [41:08]
John
Adios.