Google LSAs: The Easiest Way to Add Leads Tomorrow

Summary

Podcast Summary: Owned and Operated
Episode: Google LSAs: The Easiest Way to Add Leads Tomorrow
Hosts: John Wilson & Sam Preston
Date: January 8, 2026

---

Episode Overview

This episode of "Owned and Operated" centers on the immense and often underutilized potential of Google Local Service Ads (LSAs) for home service businesses, such as plumbing, electrical, and HVAC. John Wilson and Sam Preston break down why LSAs remain the easiest lever to pull to generate leads quickly, share personal experiences in marketing and acquisitions, and dish out actionable advice for owners looking to grow fast in 2026.

---

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. 2025 Recap & 2026 Ambitions

[01:11 – 02:52]

• Both hosts are optimistic about 2026, shaking off the operational and regulatory headaches of the previous year, including issues like refrigeration regulations and unpredictable weather.
• Sam hints at bigger projects: “Going to try to put on a marketing conference. Hint, hint, you know, wink.” [01:51]
• John shares ambitious financial goals: “This year we want to double. But we want to double EBITDA. So we want to go from three and a half to seven.” [02:29]
• Active acquisition strategy: “We closed one 48 hours ago ... and we have two more that we're actively talking to.” [02:52]

2. Acquisitions: Low-Hanging Marketing Fruit

[03:11 – 07:58]

• John loves acquisition targets where basic marketing activities (especially LSAs) are untapped:
  “I get really excited when I see these small businesses that either have not turned on LSA yet or ... have LSA turned on just like not very often.” [04:29]
• Success from simple switches: “They grew 50% last year and the biggest change that they made was they turned on LSA.” [04:35]
• The hosts stress an existing infrastructure (HR, marketing, accounting) makes LSA adoption fundamentally easier for their team.

3. What Makes a Good Marketing Turnaround?

[07:58 – 13:53]

• John’s acquisition playbook: Look for companies with decent Google Business Profiles (GBPs), solid reviews, but underutilized digital marketing channels.
• Sam notes: “It’s so much easier just like increase ad spend. Like, it's just so much easier... those are like the easy fixes.” [07:58]
• Importance of customer lists ripe for reactivation: “I'll find like 6 to 10,000 customers inside a database that have never been talked to once.” [08:37]
• Caution for distressed acquisitions: Both discuss the risks and limits of marketing fixes—John only wants companies with some service presence:
  “If a company had zero service presence, like it was 100% new construction with no service leads, I'd be out.” [12:18]

4. Deep Dive: Google Local Service Ads (LSAs)

[14:51 – 34:36]

What Are LSAs and Why Are They Great?

• LSAs show at the top of local Google results, tagged as “Sponsored” or “Google Guaranteed.” Google even backs jobs up to $2,000, increasing customer trust. [15:13]
• LSA flywheel: “Get phone calls through it, do the job and get a five star review. If you can do those three things well, you can win LSA.” [15:38]

How to Win with LSAs

• Consistency is key:
  • Post regularly
  • Mark jobs as booked
  • Collect five-star reviews
  • Keep your GBP and LSA in sync
• Sam: “If you can do those three things, just that flywheel of consistency, you’ll see your account grow and snowball.” [15:38]

Common LSA Mistakes

• Turning the budget off completely is a critical error: “One of the biggest mistakes you can make in LSA is turning it off even with too many leads.” [19:09]
• Solution: “Just throw a hundred bucks at ... don’t turn down to zero.” [19:24]

Real-World Impact & Underutilization

• LSAs remain low-hanging fruit: “Even in 2025, like, that's still apparently low hanging fruit.” [16:38]
• Both hosts share stories of acquisitions or clients doubling just from activating LSAs.
• Sam recalls: "He had to keep turning it off because he was just getting booked out way too much through LSA." [00:03], [23:34]

Interplay: LSAs and Google Business Profile

• LSA and GBP are now connected—activities in one affect the other.
• “GBP has become like the number one thing for driving lead... You get one review for GBP, it's connected to your LSA.” [20:38], [20:50]
• Recommended: Always run both, even with a minimal LSA budget.

Geographic & Operational Scaling

• More branches and more staff unlock larger lead flow due to the way Google distributes responses.
• John: “Google somehow figures out a way to feed us exactly the amount of leads that we can handle.” [27:05]

LSA Limitations

• Can't hyper-target certain jobs (e.g., high-ticket vs. small-ticket jobs).
• Occasional off-target leads can occur, and sometimes geography isn’t perfect.

Taking Action

• “Go to YouTube, look up how to set one up and start. Like, there's no excuse. By end of today, you should have this going.” [27:27], [33:58]
• The advice is to not overthink—just get it running and reap the almost-immediate lead results.

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “This is the literal, easiest thing to do to just add leads tomorrow.”
  — John Wilson [00:00], [14:57]

• “The whole system of LSA is built around get phone calls through it, do the job and get a five star review.”
  — Sam Preston [00:14], [15:38]

• “If you can do a change today that will impact you today. Like, that’s incredible. Like, that’s the, that’s low hanging fruit.”
  — John Wilson [32:18]

• On the risks of not using LSA:
  “Turning it off is just not, not acceptable.”
  — Sam Preston [00:03], [23:53]

• “It’s not okay for the rest of us struggling with leads, John, we can’t be having people turning off their LSAs!”
  — Sam Preston [24:02]

• On ease of setup:
  “Go to YouTube, look up how to set one up and start. Like, there’s no excuse. By end of today, you should have this going.”
  — Sam Preston [27:27], [33:58]

---

Timestamps for Important Segments

• [01:11] – Optimism for 2026 and business goals
• [03:11] – Recent acquisitions and feelings post-close
• [04:29] – Excitement about companies underutilizing LSAs
• [07:58] – Marketing opportunities in untapped customer lists and bad digital presence
• [14:51] – Deep dive begins: What are LSAs?
• [15:13] – LSA basics (“Google Guaranteed,” review-centric)
• [19:09] – Mistake: Turning LSA budget to zero
• [20:38] – GBP's dominance and its connection to LSAs
• [27:05] – Google’s lead distribution algorithm mystery
• [30:29] – LSAs as the second most important lead channel, right behind GBP
• [33:58] – Final call to action: Just get LSAs running now!

---

Practical Takeaways & Action Steps

• If you’re not using LSA, start today: It’s simple, effective, and can scale lead flow dramatically overnight.
• Keep LSA budgets running, even if minimal: Don’t turn it off entirely—Google rewards consistency.
• Maintain synergy between your GBP and LSA: Activities in one affect the other.
• Don’t overcomplicate setup: Use free resources, like YouTube, to get started fast.
• Consider agency help only after stuck or for scale: Early-stage LSA can be managed in-house.

---

Final Thoughts & Tone

The episode is energetic and practical, urging home service business owners to get over tech paralysis and start using LSAs immediately for quick, scalable business growth. The banter between John and Sam is optimistic, direct, and occasionally humorous, bolstering the message that some growth levers are too easy to ignore. As John puts it: “Business is easy, you know, or it's simple. It's hard, but it's simple. Get more leads, sell more deals, sell more things.” [34:26]

---

If you’re not leveraging LSAs, you’re likely leaving easy money and growth on the table. This episode is a must-listen (or, in this summary’s case, read) for any owner ready to grow in the new year.

Transcript

[John Wilson]

This is the literal, easiest thing to do to just add leads tomorrow.

[Sam Preston]

He had to keep turning it off because he was just getting booked out way too much through lsa. But turning it off is just not, not acceptable.

[John Wilson]

In the eight deals that we've done that have been distressed, I had personally gone in and solved it.

[Sam Preston]

The whole system of LSA is built around get phone calls through it, do the job and get a five star review.

[John Wilson]

Even in 2025, that's still apparently low hanging fruit.

[Sam Preston]

Go to YouTube, look up how to set one up and start.

[John Wilson]

If you can do a change today that you today, like, that's incredible.

[Sam Preston]

What marketing problems are you not willing to fix?

[John Wilson]

Welcome back to Owned and Operated. I'm your host, John Wilson. Today I'm joined by my good friend Sam Preston, the CEO of Service Killers. Welcome back, Sam.

[Sam Preston]

Thanks, man. It's good to be here. It's going to be 2026. I'm done with 2025.

[John Wilson]

I'm super done. I'm super done with 2025. We did like a recap with, with Jack like a week ago.

[Sam Preston]

Yeah.

[John Wilson]

And it was like, yeah, I'm ready, I'm ready for this, I'm ready for, for whatever's next.

[Sam Preston]

Yeah, no, it's, it's 2026 is gonna be a better year for sure. For sure. But I'm also known as the optimist in my family. Like my brother's like, bro, shut up, shut up. And it's like, it's gonna be a better year. So.

[John Wilson]

Yeah, a lot of the challenges for 25 feel like one times like the refrigeration change over. I mean, weather, who knows? Like, we'll see what happens with weather. But yeah, hopefully all one time.

[Sam Preston]

Yeah. I mean 2026 will either be a better year or I'm going to gaslight the universe into believing it's a better year and we're just going to.

[John Wilson]

I think that's the way to do it. Yeah, I think that's the way to.

[Sam Preston]

Do it for sure.

[John Wilson]

What, what do you have big up in 26. What's the goal?

[Sam Preston]

A lot of traveling. Going to try to put on a marketing conference. Hint, hint, you know, wink. We'll see when we announce that. Want to hit a lot more conferences up. Want to double in size. But like, what CEO doesn't want to double in size, right?

[John Wilson]

I wouldn't mind.

[Sam Preston]

Yeah, let's do it. You know, we're still small enough where we can double in size. We haven't gotten like so big that. That's like, bro, that would actually break things. And so, yeah, just a lot of. Lot of new ideas. A lot of new things that we want to do for our clients internally, for our team to just be better.

[John Wilson]

Yeah.

[Sam Preston]

And that's the pursuit. That's the fun part, is just making this better and better.

[John Wilson]

It's awesome. This. This year we want to double. But we want to double ebitda. So we want to go from three and a half to seven, which I actually think we ended a little bit higher than three and a half, which is cool. I think we're. I think we're like, potentially low force, but I. I gotta wait for final numbers. But yeah, we want to get to, like, seven. And the biggest way we're doing that is like, add on acquisitions.

[Sam Preston]

So.

[John Wilson]

So we closed one 48 hours ago, and then. Yeah, so we're like, fresh. So I spent my morning there just like, integrating, switching everything over. And then we announced to their team on Monday. And then we have two more that we're actively talking to, and we'll probably close at least one more in January.

[Sam Preston]

Dang. Do you get the, like, when you make a big purchase, like a car? I've only done one acquisition, so, like, yeah, I'm sure you get this feeling more often than not. But, like, you make that acquisition the next day, you're like, was that a good idea? Like, was that a good choice? Like, just that doubt that creeps in, or is it always for you? Like, you feel really good about it?

[John Wilson]

I feel good about it. Like, closing day is like a big swing. There's like just a. So this. This specific acquisition, we. We went. We closed in, like, I should actually do the math, but it was like 20 days. It was quick, and I had to get it done prior to the end of the year. So we closed in about 20 days, maybe 25. So the whole thing moved fast, which I liked. I thought was good. But no, I've a lot of confidence the whole time. Now there's another one that we're working on that is like a distressed situation, and that one, I'm less. Maybe I will feel regret of, like, what did I do? Because it's going to be really hard work to sort of like, turn that ship around.

[Sam Preston]

Okay, well, let's. Why don't we talk nerdy about that for a second on both of them. But like, that first acquisition where you feel really good. Tell me about the marketing. How was, like, in general, how is the marketing?

[John Wilson]

It's exciting. So, like, I. So our topic today, that we're going to dive into is LSAs. So like we're going to hit that. But I get really excited when I see these small businesses that either have not turned on LSA yet or, or have LSA turned on just like not very often. Yeah, I know I've said this on the show before, but we were talking to another acquisition target and they grew 50% last year and the biggest change that they made was they turned on lsa, which is like, like so easy. Like that's amazing. So yeah, so I get really excited when I look at these little, little brands and you still can do something like so straightforward to just double. Now obviously it, I'm going to put this caveat out there if it's only that easy because we have like a centralized platform to add a location onto. Right? Like I already have hr, I already have a marketing team, I already have accounting. Like we have a robust structure. So for us adding a new branch actually is not that complicated. Whereas like, if that's your main thing, obviously doubling is very complicated.

[Sam Preston]

Right.

[John Wilson]

So I don't want to be like rude, but for us this really is like more leads will just allow this thing to explode. That gets me really excited is when there's almost no ad spend, very high gross margin, very good net margin. That's like, okay, this is, I can do something here.

[Sam Preston]

Okay, so you prefer to come to a company that has very low ad spend but has some like the marketing stuff going, but just like clearly don't know how to turn it up.

[John Wilson]

A lot of home service companies rely on referrals and they just don't have a great way to manage them. Most customers are pretty happy to recommend you, but without reminders or tracking, those referrals kind of disappear. So Referrer Pro helps keep that from happening. It automates referral collection, attribution and payouts so your customers actually follow through and you can focus on the work that matters. Referral leads convert faster, cost less and help your business grow without buying more ads. You can can see how it works and book a [e-mail] or through the link in our show Notes mention owned and operated for 20% off and a discounted onboarding. Because most people are willing to refer you, they just need a little help, remember? So if I'm looking at a company because Google Business Profile and local service ads are like the same thing now. So how good's the, how good is the Google Business Profile? How many reviews? What's the rating? Is it like, is there easy stuff to optimize There, like, can I get more reviews? Can I add the hours of operations? Does it, is it a service area, GBP versus a storefront with the address? So like, what can I just fix? Is the GBP in a good area? Is it in a high wealth area or is it in a crappy area? Yeah, so the one where the one we just bought has 4.9, 400 reviews, they turn on LSA, but they mostly keep it off. So LSA does produce for them. They just for the most part leave it off because they don't have enough people to run the calls, which, like, we can solve that. So like, oh yeah, all those different things are what get me really excited about. Like, hey, this, this opportunity isn't even close to fully tapped out yet. Like, we could just turn on a lead aggregator. We can just add more budget to LSA and maybe we can add three plumbers and you know, double it.

[Sam Preston]

To me, that's, that's the ones where I like, I like where, you know, because we get a lot of home service companies that will come to us and go, hey, Sam, we just take, check out the marketing. Like, is this a good bet? And it's really hard when the, the company they're buying already does a great job in everything. Like, yeah, you can take that and you can grow it. But it's so much easier just like increase ad spend. Like, it's just so much easier. Like, oh, hey, well, like you're just not consistent. You just need more team members. Yeah, like those are like the easy fixes. Whereas like, hey, you actually have the biggest part of the market and you already own the majority of the SEO organic traffic and you already have a robust Google Ads.

[John Wilson]

You're in a highly high wealth area. How big is the customer list is another one. Because what I usually find is I'll find like 6 to 10,000 customers inside a database that have never been talked to once. So, okay, can I put that into a rehash campaign and, and just generate calls here? So yeah, when, when I see, just like that, great, great reviews, good gbp, an underutilized lsa, a decent sized customer list, but doesn't have a tech stack to rehash. That is like, yeah, hell yeah, we, we can do something here.

[Sam Preston]

No.

[John Wilson]

So anyways, so we did do something there.

[Sam Preston]

We acquired them, we did it.

[John Wilson]

We put our money where our mouth was.

[Sam Preston]

Now the other one where you're not as excited, like you're excited, but you're like, I've got a couple of red flags on this day.

[John Wilson]

We're. Yeah, we're it. Yeah. There's a lot of red flags. Distress deals are just their own brand of complicated. You know, what are you coming into? What are the liabilities? What are the unknown liabilities? What's the project? What's the culture like? What's the cost structure that you can't get rid of? What's the cost structure? You can. We have officially completed 10 acquisitions in industry. So we've done a handful of deals and eight of them have been distressed. Okay. So we have like a good handle on how to handle a distressed deal. You know, each one's a little bit different. Like, how did it get distressed? Why did it get distressed? Can it be undistressed? So each one's a little bit different. So we are excited about it. We feel like we have the chops to take it down. But it is in a new market, so that, that adds some complication. The big one is like, in the eight deals that we've done that have been distressed, I have personally gone in and solved it. And in that case, I can't do that. So that's one of the big, like, okay, how do, how do I work through a leadership team with something that is really going to be hard? Yeah, like, it's going to be hard. Like, I have done everything that needs to happen here, but I'm not the one doing it. So how do we do it?

[Sam Preston]

No, that's a good question. I have not gotten there in my own business yet. I bought one company and it was a. Yeah, it was a lot of fun because it was a friend. And so, like, I got the, you know, the dirty insight. And he wanted to stay on. He just wanted to be a part of what we were doing. So it's like, great, come on. And so that was an easy one. But no distressed agencies yet. Maybe one of these days, or maybe I go after a plumbing company, you know, who knows?

[John Wilson]

I mean, hey, man. Yeah, it. Distressed is interesting. Like we, you know, we bootstrapped our way here. Like, we're still us. Like myself as an owner, Brandon, my present as an owner. So a part of the reason we've taken down distressed deals is because that's what we could afford. Yeah, Like, I can't compete in the marketplace for a million dollar EBITDA businesses. Right. I just can't. Like, I'm, I didn't raise a fund. We have to be creative in how we do things. So I think we've just naturally fallen into this rhythm of fixing businesses because that's what we could afford to do.

[Sam Preston]

Yeah.

[John Wilson]

Even the, you know, I bought my parents business and then the second business was we bought like 13 months later and that was a distressed deal. Like revenue was sinking. They were losing 30 grand a year for like five straight years and I was 26 and like we just went in there and like got it done. But if that was profitable, I couldn't have afforded it.

[Sam Preston]

And I'm just going to push this back to marketing just because that's what we're talking about today. What, what marketing problems are you willing to fix and what marketing problems are you not willing to fix?

[John Wilson]

If, if a company had zero service presence, like it was 100% new construction with no service leads, I'd be out like right off the rip. Like I don't want to solve that. I've, I've had to do that a few times now and I'm, I'm a little tired. So if there's a decent service base and it is getting leads somewhere, I'm up for it. So I guess that would be my measurement. Like is there any service even if it's all organic, then I would, I would take on that, take on that problem. But if it's let, if it's like 50, 50 new construction service, like if it's, if it's any more weighted to new construction, I wouldn't even, I wouldn't even touch it because our playbook is shut down. New construction day one, if possible or otherwise, as soon as humanly possible. Get, get rid of all new construction and pivot to service. So ideally you already have a service base to build from.

[Sam Preston]

Is there any thought towards how many channels they're growing? Like this is a really good looking business but it literally only has lsa, doesn't have gbp, doesn't have Google Ads or any other marketing channel. Just like one. So it's like it's very. No, no, doesn't matter.

[John Wilson]

I think I would take that on.

[Sam Preston]

Okay.

[John Wilson]

Just because that stuff's so easy like signing up for, I mean so much of it's the tech stack. So if, if a lead comes in and it gets collected and rehashed, that's all tech stack. So if you have a good tech stack then I mean any lead aggregator can be turned on in an hour. So it doesn't seem that complicated.

[Sam Preston]

Okay. At least one channel driving. Yeah. And you'll go after it.

[John Wilson]

And what's the price like? Price has to make sense. Yeah. Doing deals 20, 26. So we're probably going to acquire four companies next year total, which would be the most I've ever done in a 12 month period. My previous record was three to be records though. Yeah, we're here to beat some records, so should be, should be really interesting. The difference this time is we have a platform that we're building from and when you're in the, like when you're at the size we are adding a new branch is complicated for a number of reasons, but it's also like not that complicated. Like our tech stack is pretty built in. We just plug it in. Our payroll stuff is built in, we plug them in. Our HR stuff is built and it's just a lot of like, let's just plug all this in over here and let them do the good work they've they've been doing. Cool. Let's hit, let's hit LSAs.

[Sam Preston]

Do we, do we start this off with the basics like what is an lsa? Or do we just like everybody already know this?

[John Wilson]

Well, some people don't. I mean like there was that again, the guy that I told you about, he, he didn't even know that this was an option. And, and this is the, I mean this is the literal easiest thing to do to just add leads tomorrow. Like it's very easy.

[Sam Preston]

Yeah. So if you're not driving, if you're at a computer watching this on YouTube or something like that, please go to Google and search for your, your service and your location. Hit that enter button, that first thing that'll show up, it'll be, it'll say sponsored is lsa. It's a local service ad or you'll see Google guaranteed. Google is basically guaranteeing your work. I think up to like two grand.

[John Wilson]

Yeah, I think 2,000 bucks.

[Sam Preston]

Yeah, it might have changed since I last looked at it, but it's guaranteeing you up to two grand your work. And so if Google is going to guarantee your work, they're going to be damn sure that you are good at your job. And so the whole system of LSA is built around can you get a, get phone calls through it, do the job and get a five star review. If you can do those three things well, you can win lsa. The best advice for LSA that I can tell you is to be consistent on everything. Make sure that you're posting consistent, making sure that you are marking everything inside the LSA account for phone calls or booked jobs, making sure you're going and getting five star reviews. If you can do those three things, just that flywheel of consistency, you'll see your account grow and Snowball.

[John Wilson]

It's surprising how overlooked it is I think inside, like the sphere of people pushing. It's a known quantity. But again, I've talked to a few people as we've been talking to acquisition targets again this year and it has come up multiple times of like, yeah, we turned on Google for the first time and we grew. And I'm like, how, how, how is this still low hanging fruit? Which is again, is depending on where you are. To me, that's very exciting that even in 2025, like, that's still apparently low hanging fruit.

[Sam Preston]

Yeah. I was going through the call with the team, internal team, to look at like, how many of our clients are on track. We do that every Friday. Um, and today we have like 93% of our LSA accounts on track, meaning that our, our clients are hitting their goals only 7% on track. Which I don't know if you know, from the agency side, that's high.

[John Wilson]

Yeah, that's crazy.

[Sam Preston]

That's, you know, I'm making an A on lsa and so it's probably the second most important marketing channel you should be running. And what I mean by that is like GBP is your first. You have to have your gbp. But GB is connected to lsa, so you should be doing both. And you should have a budget. Even if it's just a small budget, you should have a budget for it. I, personally, I'm under the impression the way I run my business is I would just have that budget always on, always trying to work it. Even if you don't, you're not getting a lot out of it, or if you're getting a lot out of it and you have to turn it down because you have too much leads, always just have a small budget of phone calls coming through.

[John Wilson]

We do a lot of like turn off. You know, marketing for us is a very active contact sport is what we call it. So like every day, three times a day, we're looking at the board, we're turning down budgets, we're turning up budgets, we're doing like whatever. And I think, I think that is, yeah, the right way to do it. I like the idea of turning down, but something that this company that we just acquired is doing that I'm kind of a big fan of, is they turn it down to like 100 bucks instead of to zero. Whereas we turned down to zero because then I think it probably like shows Google that there's always something versus like on, off, on off, on off. So I don't know. I liked that because it still keeps something coming through, but not like full tilt.

[Sam Preston]

Yeah. One of the biggest mistakes you can make in LSA is turning it off even with too many leads.

[John Wilson]

Yeah.

[Sam Preston]

What we have seen with clients time and time again is they will turn it down to zero because they have too many leads. And then they go, oh, hey, we need more leads. So we turn it on and then.

[John Wilson]

It'S just like a ramp.

[Sam Preston]

Yep. Yeah, it's like a little ramp. And it's like, yeah. We try to warn you, like, hey, just don't do it. Just throw a hundred bucks at. It's a worth a hundred dollars a week of wasted spend of phone calls coming through. But yeah, don't, don't turn down to zero. Turn it down to something you can do. In fact, what I would do is figure out whatever your cost per lead is per like week and just set it to that. So if it's $70, $70 a week.

[John Wilson]

Or whatever that is, your team's doing the work. Big reputation. Make sure that Google knows it. Some of the key areas they help is, are if you have multiple gbps, they can post on every single one of them every day. They can send reviews by your closest GBP to wherever the job was completed. And they have built in SEO heatmaps that show exactly where you rank on the map. Pack in real time. There's no more manual updates, no more missed opportunities, just results. Get started free at bigreputation AI and unlock. 15 free SEO scans today. Yeah. How do you feel like Google's like treating them right now? Pushing them harder? Less like, what do you think?

[Sam Preston]

I feel a little bit of an uptick. Not a crazy amount, but as you've seen over the last year, GBP has become like the number one thing for driving Leap. Yeah.

[John Wilson]

Crazy.

[Sam Preston]

Absolutely insane. What's the problem with gbp? In Google's eyes, it's fraudable.

[John Wilson]

Probably you'll make money for you driving leads. Yeah, that's a good, that's a good point.

[Sam Preston]

You know what they do make money off of lsa. And so what we're seeing is like, you know, a year ago they made this transition to where your LSA and your GBP is like completely connected. You get one review for gbp, it's connected to your lsa. So what you can see is just like LSA is becoming more and more important because of that. And so the activities you're doing under your GBP will affect your LSA and your lsa, your gbp. In fact, we're, we've trained Our sales team that we want to sell both and obviously, you know, greedy capitalist who wants to drive, you know, build his business bigger. You know, we sell as big of a contract as possible. But like there is a tangible difference for when you're doing do to both those activities. So if you are not doing LSA or at least if you're doing it with another agency or if you have an internal. We just want to see the activity happening if we're going to do the other service.

[John Wilson]

I think my sister in law works at, I think it's Yahoo might be Yahoo and they're launching a home service lead generation tool which should be kind of interesting. Like she's on that team that's like launching that project.

[Sam Preston]

That's cool.

[John Wilson]

And it did remind me a lot of a new LSA or it'll be really interesting to see how it actually looks. I'm not sure what Yahoo's like percentage of searches versus Google's but like I don't think Bing has their own search function because maybe they team up with Yahoo. I don't remember how they get their data.

[Sam Preston]

Yahoo is owned by bing. So is DuckDuckGo. But like I would not be surprised if ChatGPT launches its own perplexity type of thing. Yeah, would not surprise me.

[John Wilson]

Yeah, I mean it makes sense. It makes sense. Yeah, it'll, it'll be interesting. GBP definitely became like the dominant monster of 2025. Still is. Like, you know, we've been investing a ton into our Gbps and like every dollar just continues to overproduce. But LSAs are exciting because they can still just ramp. And it does feel like just like pure vibe, no Data. You know, 2023, 2024 people were like, oh my God, LSAs are so like it's, they broke and then it seems like by combining it with gbp, like they're back to good again. Because again there's all these companies just like, oh, I added LSA and I doubled. I'm like, yeah, okay, so it's clearly working for like the small contractor. I mean maybe less for the large contractor. But like everyone I've talked to that did that is a small contractor. Like 2 to 4 million bucks.

[Sam Preston]

Yeah, absolutely. I'm literally having a conversation on Monday with a guy who the issue we had this past year is he had to keep turning it off because he was just getting booked out way too much through lsa.

[John Wilson]

That's what's happening with this acquisition target too, which is just wild. They turn it on and it just Explodes and they have to turn it off like a day later.

[Sam Preston]

I feel like you just have to go figure out that people problem real quick and that you just have to. Because turning it off is just not acceptable.

[John Wilson]

It's pretty lame. Yeah.

[Sam Preston]

It's not okay for the rest of us struggling with leads, John, we can't be having people.

[John Wilson]

I know.

[Sam Preston]

Other mistakes I see with LSA is just turning it on and forgetting it. You know, not posting. That's what we used to do, not doing anything with it. I even have like we on our SOPs, our team will get in there and do like random shit. So like we'll get in like just change the budget up a little bit and then the next day we'll change it down. We want to show Google that we're.

[John Wilson]

At Google wants to see posting in there.

[Sam Preston]

Yeah. You know, obviously the biggest, you know, mistakes we, we see when we're auditing other people's is they have the wrong services selected or the wrong locations. And so you just want to make sure that your locations are set correctly and you know, get detailed with those locations and then services is a tough one. Right. Cause sometimes that you can't be as exact as you want. I have another conversation with a client who's gotten tons of LSA leads. The problem is they're all like low order values and so he wants to go after like bigger order values and he just can't get it through LSA consistency consistently. So we are trying to test out PPC because we can be a lot more choosy over the keywords and what we're willing to pay for.

[John Wilson]

Yeah. I mean LSA is like it. Yeah. You really can't get specific. Like we'll, we'll uncheck all the boxes and, and make it like water heaters only and we'll get faucet repair calls or like drain calls. Like could do it. It just chooses not to. But yeah, I mean, maybe someone searches plumber. I. I don't know how it ends up that way. But like, yeah, we've experimented a lot of like we have it just for water heaters, but we also just got this drippy faucet from lsa. So like walk me through it. So yeah, it doesn't seem to work as you'd imagine.

[Sam Preston]

Yeah, it is a little bit of annoying from an agency standpoint because every once in a while we'll get that angry email from a client who's like, hey, this is. This lead's not even in our service area. What the hell? It's like four hours away and we'll go through and we'll look at the locations and we've selected it correctly. Yeah, it just came through. And that's, you know, I don't want to blame Google for just like trying to get a little bit more money grab. They're not doing it on purpose. They wouldn't do that.

[John Wilson]

Yeah, they wouldn't, they wouldn't do that. Google. No, they're good people.

[Sam Preston]

They're good.

[John Wilson]

Yeah, that's.

[Sam Preston]

We're tight. But yeah, like sometimes that's going to happen and you just got to eat it and just keep working through it. Yeah. Whatever you do, do not sue Google. I've seen that happen and it doesn't go well for them. So. Yeah, don't do it.

[John Wilson]

Yeah, that'd be a huge waste of money. Okay. LSAs at scale, I think we're running, we're not running at multi location. Well, I guess we are. As of two days ago. We used to, we've run it on multiple GMBs for our like external offices. Something that's kind of interesting. A friend of mine says this and I am, I'm just like fascinated by. Because they probably know so so his opinion is, hey, I don't know how but Google somehow figures out a way to feed us exactly the amount of leads that we can handle. Like if I'm Wilson and Joe Schmo down the road is, you know, twice my size or half my size or whatever. Google just seems to know that. And if we both set our budget to a million dollars a month or a million dollars a week or however budget gets set, then it would still send us proportionate amounts of leads. I just think is fascinating. So this was his experience is Matt from kad. He'll he, he's like, yeah, I don't know how but we launch an lsa, they know that we can handle leads for two people. So that's what they send us. And then we slowly add more people and then they add more. But this one over here that has 10 people get sent enough leads for 10 people and, and it is like, I'm like, yeah, that is. Yeah, yeah, that's weird. That is weird. So somehow like staffing is going to be, you know, Google knows just add.

[Sam Preston]

More people to your team. It doesn't have to be real. See what happens. It's the newest experiment.

[John Wilson]

More vans or like yeah, I have no. I don't know but it, it is, it, it is pretty funny. But so ultimately I think like more people equals more. You can either leave it on more. You can accept more or whatever. Whatever. Google's determining to send you more leads because they have this, like, divi system where they spread the leads out. Yeah, Somewhat proportionally versus like a lead aggregator. Five different people can buy the same lead at the same time. Google, like, spreads it depending on how much you can accept. So, yeah, more people is a big part of it. Multi location always seems. Also seems to be a big part of it. Like, this is a good reason to buy another branch or open a satellite office or something because it will give you access to more potential leads.

[Sam Preston]

Yeah, I mean, more. More locations is always better because again, like, they're gonna part of their algorithm to figure out who this lead's gonna go to. Is proximity, like, how close you are, how much you're willing to spend on a lead. You know, how well you do with answering a call and booking that call for a service. All those things matter to Google.

[John Wilson]

So I wonder if Google will like, hit companies if they use AI versus human.

[Sam Preston]

I don't think they're doing that now, but I wouldn't be surprised in the future if there's something like that.

[John Wilson]

Because they. You get dinged for AI, for SEO, maybe? No, I'm thinking about YouTube. Like, YouTube AI videos. So, like, my point is Google has like an AI detection tool, I guess I don't really know what they're doing with SEO.

[Sam Preston]

Nothing that I can tell yet. The big thing from an SEO perspective, and obviously this is not SEO call, but if the more unique your content is, the better it's gonna do. And then read time still matters. So somebody jumps onto your. Your content and just leaves. Like, it doesn't matter how good the content is. It's just like they weren't reading it. So you want to make sure that you're writing content in a way that people are sitting in there and actually reading it.

[John Wilson]

Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Hard to do. Cool. All right, so LSAs, what's your. What's your take? You said second most important lead channel.

[Sam Preston]

Yeah.

[John Wilson]

Feels right to me. Still underutilized. You know, there's these companies that are implementing LSA and growing by 50%, which is just, like, crazy. It's crazy to me. I'm like, is this 2015? Like, I don't know. I remember. I remember when LSA first came out, it was like 2018 or 19 or something. And it's easy. Like, it's easy. It's, you know, put coin in, get lead out.

[Sam Preston]

Yeah. I'm honestly envious. We don't have an LSA for marketing agencies. So maybe like that's the next thing that we develop. But that would be sweet.

[John Wilson]

Yeah.

[Sam Preston]

But yeah, like we have to do the hard work of finding new clients, whereas you can just start this. The reason why I'm going to put LSAs in S tier is one, everyone should have this. Like literally it doesn't matter how big or small you are. I just, you got to go get this. This is like you start the company on Wednesday at 2pm By 3pm, you have a GBP. By 4pm, your LSA is set up and you're trying to send in the papers to get approved. Right? Like that is that, that is the order of the things that you should be doing before you go work with a marketing agency. You're going to YouTube and you're to learn 80 to 90% of what we do from a marketing agency on YouTube. We get a couple of those, you know, secret sauce up our sleeves. But like you can run an LSA successfully without us. Go do it. And honestly, like the biggest reason why you get an agency involved is one, you're stuck and you don't know how to get unstuck or two, you don't want to go hire the person to do the work. It's just cheaper and easier to hire an agency to just do it. So yeah, like those are your two options. And so everyone should have it in my opinion. Everyone should have an ad spend, budgeted for it.

[John Wilson]

Yeah. And doing it pretty much bucks a day or you know, something to just get that one lead, keep it on, keep it cooking. Yeah, I agree. And it, and it's, it's just such low hanging fruit. Yeah, it's like reviews, like you can just go get more reviews and the business will be better. Now obviously, like it's slightly more complicated than that. You have to figure out tech stack or ask people or whatever. But like it's something that you could do today to help yourself today. Which like that's a dream change in a business is like I could do something today and I will get the reward of that today. Yeah, we, we did this, we did this negotiation about a year and a half ago, like 15 months ago on equipment that involved a rebate and discounts and all that stuff. And 15 months ago and next month we get the check from that negotiation. So like 16 months. Now granted the check is really big, it's like 200 grand. But if you can, like that took 16 months. So like if you can do a change today that will impact you today. Like, that's incredible. Like, that's the, that's low hanging fruit.

[Sam Preston]

It's, it's one of my favorite things when we're jumping on because it can be pretty easy, you know, from a setting standpoint, a client doesn't have it right or has never turned it on to look like superheroes by just like turning it on and getting leaf flows in. So it's, it's definitely a low hanging fruit. Highly suggest that you should be doing it. If at this moment you're sitting there going, man, maybe I should. Or like you don't have one. Just pause. Go to YouTube, look up how to set one up and start like, there's no excuse. By end of today, you should have this going.

[John Wilson]

Sweet. Any final thoughts?

[Sam Preston]

No. Welcome to 2026, the year. If you don't already. You are going to get an LSA shape. You're gonna work off that 2025 sweet Christmas pie and get into the LSA 2026 shape and get cracking.

[John Wilson]

Yeah, 2026 for us is. Let's double EBITDA. Let's see how we can do it. It should be fun taking down deals. We're back, baby.

[Sam Preston]

We're back. Business is easy, you know, or it's simple. It's hard, but it's. But it's simple.

[John Wilson]

Get more leads, sell more deals, sell more things.

[Sam Preston]

Yeah, Bill, you're good. You got this.

[John Wilson]

It's a beautiful, it's a beautiful cycle. All right, thanks everybody. Give us a five star review. Wherever it is you listen to shows.