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Service Business Mastery for Skilled Trades: HVAC, Plumbing & Electrical Home Service
How CallRail's Call Tracking and AI Transformed STUFF Junk Removal's Revenue with Scott Patterson
00:44:08
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- [00:00]
Scott Patterson
It's like lighting money on fire if you're not careful. And I spent a thousand bucks this week on Google Ads, but I don't know if that was from Google Ads. You gave me 100 leads. Only five of them turned into customers. Yesterday I called 10 different companies. Only three out of the 10 answered. Maybe they get that text message and they go, okay, this guy's got me. I don't need to call the next company. It costs 150 bucks. But it was so worth it because we were spending thousands of dollars a month on ads.
- [00:31]
Podcast Narrator
Are you looking for valuable business advice to reach that seven figure revenue mark? Do you want actionable tips to properly navigate through every business challenge you encounter along the way? Let Tersh Blissett and Josh Crouch be your guide in getting you to the top here at Service Business Mastery. Tune in as they sit down with world renowned authors in business leadership and personal growth who share valuable insights about management, marketing, pricing, human resources and so much more. Let their nuggets of wisdom gold guide you in owning a thriving, profitable and ever growing business. Here are your hosts, Tersh and Josh.
- [01:17]
Tersh Blissett
Hello everyone out there in podcast world. Hope you're having a wonderful day. You are listening to or watching Service Business Mastery Podcast. I am one of your hosts, TV Tersh Blissett, sitting virtually next to my co host Joshua Crouch. And we have Scott Patterson. The show today, the CEO Stuff Junk Removal out of California and today's episode sponsored by and it's focused on CallRail. And so I've personally used CallRail, Josh has used CallRail and Scott has been using CallRail for a while. So we're going to talk a little bit about VoIP systems in general and the advantages of using something that has some AI built into it. And with that being said, welcome to the show. Scott, if you want to give a quick introduction of yourself and who you are a little bit your background.
- [02:01]
Scott Patterson
Yeah, thanks for having me stoked to talk about how technology works into the service business world. As the old saying goes, if you're what is that saying? If your job may not be replaced by AI, but it'll be replaced by somebody who knows how to use AI. Oh yeah, I love that quote. You, you know, a lot of home service businesses aren't slow to adopt these things, but frankly they're going to get beat by people who are quick to adopt them because it's a competitive world out there, as we all know. So like Ter said, I founder, owner, CEO, president, judge, jury executioner of stuff junk removal, been in this business for about five years. It was a Covid era business that I started.
- [02:39]
Josh Crouch
I'd love to start with your story before we get into some of the other stuff, because I think it's a super interesting story how you transition getting in the junk removal industry.
- [02:46]
Scott Patterson
Happy to share that. So I've been a commercial real estate broker and in the white collar world for about 10 years. And late 2019, I had a commercial real estate business partner. And he had just lost a really big deal, big commission, you know, $100,000 commission. He had worked on it for about a year. He was moping around the office, and I saw walk by his computer and he was looking at dump trailers online. And I was joking with him, I said, what are you going to do? You going to buy one of those? What are you going to do with that? He was like, man, I called 1-800- got junk, and they charged me 400 bucks to pick up my couch. Took him five minutes and they took off. He goes, I didn't have a choice. I had to pay him. And he said, sometimes it'd be nice to like, earn my money and get paid the same day. And, you know, late 2019, I was deep in the commercial real estate world. I was thinking, that would be nice. I'll never do that. And then, you know, flash forward then three or four months Covid happened that I had working on, that I had lost, and I had time for the first time in my life. So called him up. I said, hey, man, let's buy a dump trailer. Let's run some ads. Let's see what we can do with it.
- [03:49]
Josh Crouch
Every great business plan right there.
- [03:51]
Scott Patterson
Yeah, exactly.
- [03:52]
Josh Crouch
Hey, man, let's just try this and see if it works.
- [03:54]
Scott Patterson
We had absolutely no, initially no intention of it a business necessarily. It was just something to do. And it was kind of fun because he and I both had never been hands on, like that kind of doing physical work. So he and I ran around during COVID when there was nice, there's no traffic, everybody was at home. I told Josh before we started recording, you know, know, if you think back, you know, teleport back to what our lives were all like, early 2020, we're all at home, and a lot of husbands are typically working during the day and they got full garages. And they're like, man, you know, tell their wife, I don't have time to clean it out. Well, then they're at home, they have time to clean it out. And the wife is going, all right.
- [04:33]
Tersh Blissett
We'Re gonna do all this.
- [04:34]
Scott Patterson
Yeah, you're just sitting on the couch, so now's your chance. So we got a lot of business that way. And since we were not a organized company that had to abide by the employment laws where, you know, employ couldn't legally work during that time unless you were a essential business. Right. We were the owners, so we weren't employees. So we could do whatever we wanted to do. It was our choice. We ended up being really busy because all of our competitors were legally shut down. Didn't really even understand how good of a launching pad that was at the time. It was amazing. It would be much more difficult to start now, you know, and have the same kind of launch that we did then. So since we got into it with the premise of it being a side hustle, once commercial real started to pick back up, my business partner wanted to keep the junk removal business more of a side hustle and I wanted to scale it into a business. I saw an opportunity. So we had a mutual splitting there and I not basically and completely and utterly restarted from scratch in 2022. New name, new brand, new trucks, new everything.
- [05:35]
Tersh Blissett
Was that hard being that you were already used to the other brand and all that.
- [05:39]
Scott Patterson
There were benefits and it was a.
- [05:42]
Josh Crouch
Double edged sword to feel like some of the lessons you learned in that first two years really served you to jump onto your run your business your way because you kind of learned some mistakes along the way.
- [05:50]
Scott Patterson
It was nice in a way because yes, I knew exactly. Basically I was restarting a business that I already knew what I wanted the business to look like and what it needed to look like. So major advantage there, I will say, you know, your value in the market. I had to start off with zero reviews, for example, and we had built up to 100 and something reviews and so starting off with zero with a major, you know, a hit our customer list because we get 25% of our customers are repeat and you know, based on kind of our split agreement, I didn't want to steal his customers. I didn't think that was right.
- [06:24]
Tersh Blissett
So is he still doing it as a side hustle?
- [06:27]
Scott Patterson
Yeah. Okay. Effectively a competitor.
- [06:29]
Tersh Blissett
Yeah. So that's what I was kind of wondering is if. Because I've, I've. I've been competitors with friends of mine and you can do it. I have other friends of mine who are in other markets and they hate their competitors. Like if you're a competitor, you become enemy number one and I get both folds of it. But I was curious if how that worked out, if he kept it as a side Hustle. Which one of y' all got the customer list?
- [06:59]
Scott Patterson
Yeah, he got the customer list. And you know what I mean? He is a full blown competitor now. We still have a great relationship. Sometimes he refers me jobs, sometimes I refer him jobs. If we're, you know, depending on how schedules are backed up, you can't have a famine mindset. And there's, there's tons of business out there. There's the nature of this business. I mean, we were kind of a case in point to it. There's a low barrier to entry. And, and every other day I just on my way here this morning, I saw a new guy with a truck and a trailer that I'd never seen before that said junk removal on it. And I'm like, oh, I've never seen that one before.
- [07:35]
Josh Crouch
That's the only problem with those businesses that are low barrier to entry. I. It being in the digital marketing space, I literally feel like there is a new competitor every 30 seconds. I'm like, who the hell are you? Like, I've been in all these groups and all of a sudden this person's name is popping up. I'm like, what do you do? You know, so it's, it's the low barrier entry where you don't have to have the license. Like some states with plumbing and H vac and electrical, you got to have licensing. So it does. Even though they do it kind of on the down low on the side, if you will. But they, you know, you get a license to be a legit company. Sometimes that actually helps because it removes the. It raises the bar for who can get in. But junk removal, there's probably nothing like that because anyone that has a trailer and wants to lift things can probably.
- [08:20]
Scott Patterson
Yeah, you can make a website and make it look like you're a legit company and you're just a guy.
- [08:24]
Josh Crouch
Yeah.
- [08:25]
Scott Patterson
Now I. This kind of segues into, you know, call rail and technology. One of the things that I was determined to do was go, well, how can I elevate my business, my brand, so that it is. So that it is at a level that there is a barrier to entry to. So by doing things like, you know, really harnessing in the brand, I invested in nice trucks.
- [08:51]
Tersh Blissett
So with that being said, I mean, your truck brand and your brand in general is part of your marketing. How before you started using CallRail, um, how did you track your marketing?
- [09:01]
Josh Crouch
It was like, I hope calls are coming in. Don't know where they're coming from.
- [09:05]
Scott Patterson
Yeah. And. Well, and that's what drove us to. To search for a solution. Because as soon as we started paying for advertising, which was pretty early on with my original business partner, we were like, man, we're. It's like lighting money on fire if you're not careful. Especially something like Google Ads.
- [09:24]
Josh Crouch
Google Ads gets very pricey very quick.
- [09:26]
Scott Patterson
Yeah. And you're like, man, I spent a thousand bucks this week on Google Ads. And like, the phone rang and like, we did a couple grand in revenue. But I don't know if that was from Google Ads. I don't know if it was. I don't know where it came from. And that I realized that was a problem. And I had a couple of mentors early on that built kind of ironically, the second largest one, 800, got junk franchise in. In the world. The owner of that, he had 25 trucks in Chicago. Shout out to Sam Schick. Great guy, great mentor. Really helped me a lot to kind of understand, hey, if you're spending money on ads, you know, you got to make sure you understand what works, because there's a million ways to advertise a home service business. And I'm a. A big fan of Alex Horozi, and I heard him say this quote recently that was just so brilliant. And it was, it was so simple. He basically what he said was, all advertising works. It does. I mean, if you spend enough money on a certain form of advertising, it will work. You will get some amount of revenue. Now, it may not work well enough that you're profitable and you may be losing a lot of money, but if you spend a million dollars on advertising, you're probably going to make a thousand bucks. So really, it becomes tracking what's working best and really being mindful of your advertising dollars and spending money on things that are most efficient.
- [11:01]
Tersh Blissett
Yeah.
- [11:02]
Josh Crouch
100% real quick. And this always happens because we, you know, we have a plan for the show and some questions, and of course, we never really follow that very well. That's why Carol's. Carol's. Carol is in the background. She's our podcast manager. She's probably shaking her head. Fear. She's like, God damn it, guys, get to the questions I provided you. But I was going to ask so because it's so important. Every business I've ever been in, I know Tersh has had a bunch of mentors and stuff. Like, how did you go about finding a mentor in your space? Because you, you didn't come from that space. You knew nothing about this type of business except for like, let's try it. How did you go about finding a mentor.
- [11:32]
Scott Patterson
Great question. So now I gotta kind of mentally take myself back there and think about how I did that, you know, because you kind of stumble into these things. You're like, yeah, how did that come. Come about? So I was working with a company at the time when I first started that was kind of a outsourced junk removal, a la carte franchise service type thing where they go, hey, if you need trucks, we'll help you. If you need phone support, we'll help you. If you need digital marketing, if. And. And I got connected to. To Sam through that originally.
- [12:13]
Tersh Blissett
Networking is, is key. Like, that's a lot of times when.
- [12:16]
Josh Crouch
You go to these events, you can't possibly talk about it enough. Like, I look at like Church and I, the connections we made through having this podcast. Tertia's been doing almost eight years now. I've been on four and a half or so. The, the conversations, the people we've met, the. The things we. I've learned so much just being a host. I'm like, this is like a kid in a candy store. I get to learn from all these really great people. But just that networking component is so big and it's, you know, everyone's like, they're looking for like a golden nugget. Like, the golden nugget is to find someone who has been where you want to go. That is the gold nugget. Do that and keep finding, keep searching until you find someone that actually is willing to train you back or to help you. Someone that actually is going to take their time, which not everyone will. But find a good one because it's so. It's worth whatever amount of money you want to put towards it because they will help you remove all the obstacles that you will face when you get to a certain.
- [13:12]
Scott Patterson
Yeah. One of the biggest things that I learned was probably the biggest thing was how to manage a P L for a junk removal business. That's big, healthy P L. And you know, because when you start a business like this, you don't know what your cost ratio should be, what your gross profit should be. You don't know what healthy looks. How much can I afford to spend on advertising and still be.
- [13:36]
Josh Crouch
As long as there's money in the checking account, we're good.
- [13:39]
Scott Patterson
Yeah. That's how most, most businesses look at it.
- [13:41]
Josh Crouch
They go, I paid myself and I still have money. That's even better. One of the biggest profitable.
- [13:45]
Scott Patterson
One of the biggest complaints that I hear of of both home services, but really businesses in general is the fact that they're like, man, I, I, maybe I made, I did, you know, 100 grand revenue last month. But like I, my bank account. Yeah, yeah. Where did it all go? Because it just, you know, it's a, because you got expenses and you got to really understand what a healthy. Because it takes money to make money. You know, you can't, you can't earn a hundred thousand dollars in revenue and you know you're going to spend money to earn that. Right. So breaking down the percentages of hey, what should this look like? Like what is the target, you know, in terms of 60% gross profit and you know, what's your labor percentage? What is healthy look like for that? And then, and then kind of further down then now how much, what is your target spend on advertising in order to grow? And you know, in our business, I try to keep, I try to keep our advertising spend sub 25% of gross revenue. It is a lot. But we are in a heavy customer acquisition business.
- [14:54]
Josh Crouch
Yeah, because I think you said earlier, I don't remember if you said this before we got on or, or during, but you said about 25% of your customers were return customers, right?
- [15:02]
Scott Patterson
Yes. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean it's a lot.
- [15:05]
Josh Crouch
Of customers you have to go get.
- [15:06]
Tersh Blissett
What's the typical time frame on them being a repeat customer or maybe you don't know that information. I don't know.
- [15:12]
Scott Patterson
It's random. Because if you think about it, you know, junk, we're junk removal. We go to somebody's house, somebody's business, we get rid of their stuff. Well, we already got rid of their stuff. Like when are they going to call us again? They need more stuff.
- [15:24]
Tersh Blissett
Well, let's be honest. My wife goes to Hobby Lobby. Do you have hobby lobbies where you're at? Okay. And she'll go there right after a.
- [15:34]
Josh Crouch
Season, get all the discounts. Oh my God. My, my 70 off. And then it was like 95 years.
- [15:43]
Tersh Blissett
It was, it was over 1100 dollars worth of stuff. And she got it for like 20 bucks by the time it was all said and done. And so like it was just in our den for like a year. And I was like, never again. Never again.
- [16:02]
Josh Crouch
Even if it was only 20 bucks, it still just sits there and collects.
- [16:05]
Tersh Blissett
It took up space. I had to hang pictures on walls for years. It felt like, you know, the guy.
- [16:11]
Josh Crouch
I need to hire to hang pictures on my wall. Yeah, Scott, I told you I wasn't handy. There's a reason that this picture of my wife and I is sitting on a, on a shelf not on the wall. I have to hire people to do that because I put way too many extra holes in walls. Now, luckily the frames cover them up, but when you take them off and you move, it's like a bunch of holes in the wall. And then your real estate agent's like, yeah, you gotta patch that up.
- [16:35]
Tersh Blissett
Yeah, you gotta fix all this.
- [16:36]
Scott Patterson
Yeah. You know, we live in a world where it's so easy to get stuff. So it's, it's very fascinating when you think about it. You know, the whole, the whole really capitalist marketing and sales and product world is really geared from every commercial to every ad you see on Instagram, everything is geared to get things in your hand, to get you spending money. Right.
- [17:03]
Tersh Blissett
And you get a FOMO too, if.
- [17:04]
Josh Crouch
You don't have it, especially in about a week.
- [17:06]
Scott Patterson
And then if you kind of pair that with like, you know, kind of cost of labor has gone up so significantly. So if you think about, you know, 50 years ago, generationally, most of those that, that generation really, they, they cherished the, the items that they had, whether it was furniture, you know, say furniture, right.
- [17:25]
Tersh Blissett
I literally have a Singer sewing machine. The one in the wooden thing that folds into itself. It's sitting in the hole in our foyer area. It'll never be used.
- [17:37]
Scott Patterson
Man, I gotta give you a card.
- [17:39]
Tersh Blissett
But it's my, it's my wife's grandma's sewing machine that she used freaking 100 years ago. I don't know. But it, like it'll never go anywhere. I know it won't. She won't let me get rid of it. And I, I'm fine with that because it's. Yeah, but that's, that's the kind of stuff that would last forever. Now you get a sewing machine and it's disposable.
- [18:00]
Scott Patterson
That's right. Well, and furniture too. Like, I use this example all the time of my mother in law, just purchased a. She, she lives in a nice house in Utah and she was like, I really want like a kind of like a bar cabinet type thing that I can open it up and it's like, you know, it's nice setup and, and she went on Walmart.com gets this thing delivered to her for 150 bucks. And yeah, sure, it's cheap quality, it's particle board. You got to assemble it. So me and her husband assembled it in one afternoon, put the thing together. It looks amazing. It looks so good. 150 bucks. Now, now if you are in that house and you're going, okay, I'm moving Let's say I'm moving out of state or if I'm moving across town, what does it cost to pay a mover to move that?
- [18:47]
Tersh Blissett
We go to trade shows and do the exact same thing. We'll buy stuff and it costs more to ship it back home than it does to just throw it away and get another one the next trip.
- [18:58]
Josh Crouch
People at trade shows that do all the time with like TVs and they just, they'll get the cheap Walmart one that's like 97 bucks to put a display up at a booth and then they just leave it there or they discard it.
- [19:08]
Scott Patterson
Yeah. I'm not here to say whether that's a good thing or a bad thing for society, but it's the world.
- [19:12]
Josh Crouch
As long as it's. Yeah, I mean as long as they call stuff chunk removal, it's fine, I'm sure.
- [19:17]
Scott Patterson
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we live in this, you know, in this society where it's, you know, the whole marketing engine is, has made it cheap and easy to get new stuff. I mean Amazon is obviously the golden example of that where you could, you know, I can order something on my phone right now really cheap and it'll show up. If not this afternoon, tomorrow morning. And it's amazing. Now you got boxes from that, you got that item. And, and if you're going to pay to move that, it doesn't always pencil out. So we live in, in the younger generation goes, I don't want grandma's old dusty dark brown furniture. It's not, it's not the thing. So that stuff sadly ends up getting wasted. I'm a hobbyist woodworker.
- [19:57]
Tersh Blissett
Do you know what comes back is coming back right now? Corduroy furniture.
- [20:02]
Scott Patterson
No. That's too bad.
- [20:03]
Josh Crouch
They call the pipe jeans. Like the teenagers. They wear the pipe jeans again like we did that in Middle School 30 years ago. The Jenkos and the big baggy pants. Something should never ever come back in style.
- [20:18]
Tersh Blissett
I'd rather she wears Jenkos than some skin tight low waisted jeans. Like that's, that's me as a dad. But the corduroy couches, because we're couch shopping right now, it's, it's hot and heavy. Bedrooms and everything else. It's the new, this is the new thing.
- [20:35]
Scott Patterson
Trends are cyclical. You know, they, they come and go kind of in 20 to 30 years.
- [20:40]
Josh Crouch
The funny thing is everybody thinks it's new. It's not.
- [20:43]
Tersh Blissett
The young, younger crowds do for sure.
- [20:45]
Josh Crouch
If you live long enough, you're like, I've seen This like two times already. Like, this is not new.
- [20:50]
Scott Patterson
It is interesting to see kind of the, the shift. And this is kind of, you know, there's, there's a lot of probably opportunity in, in secondhand sales now because the younger generation, you know, they look at it and they go, okay, I need a T shirt or whatever. You could shop on Amazon, go to Target, go to Colt, whatever. You know, wherever you shop for clothes, everything looks homogenized. It's all the same. But you go to Goodwill and you can get a cool, unique thing that nobody else has.
- [21:18]
Josh Crouch
I got a quick story for you guys. I think it's the craziest thing. So out here in Arizona, like in Wisconsin, it's super easy for teenagers to get jobs, whether it's on a farm or it's anywhere. But here, it's tough. There's a lot of chain restaurants, a lot of chain everything. It's really hard to get a job for someone 17, our oldest, so he started selling his stuff. So he goes to Goodwill. He, he knows what's in style. He buys it for like 10, 15 bucks. He sells it for 50.
- [21:46]
Tersh Blissett
That's pretty common resellers.
- [21:48]
Josh Crouch
He bought a pair of Shoes for 30 bucks. He sold them for 150 bucks. And I said, they paid for that. Like, they, like you actually have money in your account. They pay $150 for these $30 pair of shoes.
- [21:59]
Scott Patterson
He's like, oh yeah, you know what, good for him. You don't have to worry about that. He's going to be okay.
- [22:04]
Josh Crouch
I'm like, it's entrepreneurial. So I'm like, cool, man, that's great.
- [22:07]
Scott Patterson
High five.
- [22:07]
Tersh Blissett
Little hustle there going on.
- [22:09]
Josh Crouch
We do need to talk about technology because that's, that's typically what Tersh and I like talking about. But your story is very interesting and, and we've enjoyed chatting with you so far. Scott. So you mentioned before CallRail, you were not tracking your market performance, but you were paying for ads. You were probably wasting a lot of money. You didn't even realize it. What, what was the turning point? Like, I gotta get a solution in place. And then why did you decide to go with CallRail?
- [22:31]
Scott Patterson
Yeah, it happened pretty quick. Within about two months of running Google Ads. It felt like we were lighting money on fire. And I felt like I was stuck because I knew I needed it. I knew this is how people were gonna find our service, but I was like, I don't even know how to improve it. I don't know if how well it's working. And If I'm going to turn this into a multi million dollar business, I need to be able to harness this a little bit and understand what's working, what's not.
- [23:02]
Tersh Blissett
So did you have a VoIP system before then or where people calling like your cell phone?
- [23:07]
Scott Patterson
Well, initially when we started it was just your cell phone. Right. You know, me and my, me and my buddy, when we started the business, we didn't know what we were doing. And then, you know, he had a cousin who was a digital marketer and he's like, hey, you guys should look at some sort of VoIP system. We tried one that was integrated with this, with the field service platform that we were using at the time. It was unreliable, the tracking was very limited and it was more, I would say it was more cumbersome than beneficial. And then we moved over to CallRail pretty quickly. Had just base level, minimal features. And initially I was like, man, this, you know, it costs a, you know, 150 bucks, couple hundred bucks a month. But it was so worth it because we were spending thousands of dollars a month on ads. And I looked at that and I was like, well, if I don't know what's working and what's not working then, then you know, this is just a cost of doing business. And I, I, I literally have to understand it. So I was actually really impressed. You know, this was four years ago and CallRail, I give CallRail tons of credit because they are on the cutting edge of everything technology and they have constantly trying new features and, and frankly it's come a long way in the last four years. And you know, four years ago is great. Now it's, now it's elite in, in so many ways. And what you can and can't do, you know, I, I don't even use 100% of the features because of the way that my business is set up. But I could even probably get it more dialed than it is now. It's just a, an amazing piece of technology to be able to understand. I mean, I can see as you guys know, you know, if somebody calls me, you know, they go to my web, I'll give you an example of how it works. You know, so we have this, this, this feature called dynamic number swapping on our website. So if Josh and Tersh both go to my website right now, they'll see different phone numbers on that website. And you call that phone number, it forwards to me. I see, you know, I see that Josh or Tertia calling, I'll answer it and then book that job but then I can go back into CallRail and run a report and see exactly what keyword you guys searched, what landing page you hit, what, um, you know, was it through Google Ads? Was it organic? Was it Google my business? Was it through Yelp? And. And how did that customer actually, what was the journey between them in their head going, I need junk removal to them becoming a customer. And in that gap, there is where you figure out where you can now leverage your marketing.
- [25:57]
Tersh Blissett
Would you say that's the most used feature that you use, or is there something else that you use more often that the ad?
- [26:04]
Scott Patterson
Source tracking is definitely the most valuable feature for me because I am in such a heavy customer acquisition business, and we're constantly, you know, like, I wrote a list out the other day, I have it over here, of, of the pipeline of, you know, what's our total addressable market of everybody that needs junk removal in our geographic area. And then out of all those people, what are. How are they finding a solution to their problem? And, you know, you got, obviously, you got Google Ads, you know, Google my business. You got Angie's List, you got Yelp, you got Thumbtack, you got lots of stuff. Yeah. You got referrals. You have all places that want your money, and they all want your money. Exactly. And. And they all. They all want your money because you pay for leads. You know, that's. That's their business is to. To serve you up leads and you pay them.
- [27:06]
Josh Crouch
And.
- [27:07]
Scott Patterson
And to be honest, Call rail, I spent 200 bucks a month on them, but it was a lot. It allowed me to basically call the bluff on some of those companies and go, hey, you act like you're serving me up all these customers. You gave me a hundred leads, only five of them turned into customers. And I paid X amount of dollars. But without CallRail, I wouldn't know that only five of them turned into customers. I might think 50 of them did. When you're simultaneously advertising across these different sources, you got to know what's working, what's not. Because if you got a $10,000 ad spend budget, you got to go, you know, that's. Those are valuable dollars. Obviously, you're spending money and you want to, you know, return on your ad, spend as high as possible. And. And the difficult thing about it is it's not a set it and forget it thing. It's a flavor of the month with, with these different platforms. Sometimes Yelp is working really well, sometimes Thumbtacks working really well. Most of the time, Google Ads works pretty well. But sometimes Like I went through a six month stretch with, with Yelp last year where it wasn't paying off. So I, I cut ad spend on it and redirected that ad spend to another source. Wouldn't have known that without CallRail.
- [28:22]
Josh Crouch
It's so helpful to know, you know, like just understand that stuff and get into that data. And I think, you know, we talked about, cause you know, we shared stories before we got on here where you know, you happenstance just got into this business. Some people have been in the plumbing industry for 30 years. They're a great plumber, they're one of the best plumbers in the world. But they have no clue what h. What happens with their marketing performance. So they just keep putting money behind stuff and then if it's not working, they just keep putting money behind it. It's like, well I gotta keep the, I gotta keep everyone busy. But you can take that money and reallocate. And there's so many platforms today. Like I mean just wait until chat gbt ads. Ads which will probably be in 20. I wouldn't be surprised if it was in 2025, but my guess would be 2026.
- [29:05]
Scott Patterson
But.
- [29:06]
Josh Crouch
And then AI overviews will have Google's version or proposal complexity. They're all going to have ads and that is on top of all the social media platforms, on top of all the lead aggregators.
- [29:15]
Scott Patterson
Like marketing is a overwhelming.
- [29:17]
Josh Crouch
It is a, it's a trial and error testing ground for everything.
- [29:21]
Scott Patterson
You're right.
- [29:22]
Josh Crouch
And I know that sucks. Everyone hates hearing that because the answer, it depends. I, we use that answer a lot because it does depend on a lot of things for how you rank and how many calls you're going to get and all and how many people in your market for potential opportunity. But the, really the, the fact of the matter is that we don't know until you test some markets. Facebook ads are gangbusters. Some Google Ads do well, some LSA do well and you just don't know what it's going to be and where it's going to be until you actually put some real money behind it. Not 500amonth, but like real money behind it. And then you track performance through a call tracking platform that actually gives you the data of like how many calls did you get from that sour. And then you can look in your field service management software and be like, okay, how much revenue did that turn into? And now we know our ROI on that spend versus just like, well I spend $10,000 a month on marketing and it works. We're Growing. So do you utilize any of the AI features in CallRail? Because I know that's really been their focus the last couple years. I know we use some of them for our own internal purposes for tagging calls and stuff like that, because looking through 30 or 40 or 40, 50,000 calls a month, I don't even know what the number is anymore. Doing that manually for clients is. It's painful. So the AI summaries have really helped us because they're actually really good. Like, they're pretty accurate. So, you know, like, did somebody have a problem? Was it someone that they could book? Did they book the appointment, yes or no? And we're able to figure out, like, number of calls to verify leads to number of booked appointments and a booking percentage, and then we can have operational conversations based on that. But I don't know if there's anything else that you really focused on or things that you like seeing, because I know they have some other features in there.
- [31:07]
Scott Patterson
AI, the summaries are great. Just to be able to look at a call that my, you know, rep had and scan through, okay, how'd he do this week?
- [31:18]
Tersh Blissett
And.
- [31:19]
Scott Patterson
And scan through it, look for coaching opportunities and, you know, ways to. To kind of maximize his sales ability is amazing. And then. And then another thing, you know, kind of one of the features that's cool of with call rail is it'll. It'll pull out key terms that were kind of spotted. And if you start seeing certain things that you either like, or more importantly, probably don't like. Like. Like, for example, in my world, the word free is something that. That I want to eviscerate from. From our marketing. So we'll have people call us. You know, it's that junk removal thing. Hey, I want you to come get my. My broken couch. It just needs a little bit of. It just needs a little bit of love to it. I'm not willing to pay. I want you guys to come get it for free because I think it's worth something. Not our business. Sorry. Like, good luck.
- [32:10]
Josh Crouch
I can't believe people even think that somebody coming and picking up their. This isn't like Facebook marketplace where they just come pick up junk and you can give a price to it. It's not the same thing.
- [32:20]
Scott Patterson
It does kind of endlessly surprise me that, you know, this is kind of a insider baseball. But, you know, if you think about in. In America, by and large, if you live in a. In a somewhat developed area, we're so spoiled when it comes to waste management where, you know, we Buy all this stuff and you know, we fill up our trash cans, put it out at the curb and then, and then it's gone. And out of sight, out of mind. And a trash, you know, comes, claws it up, throws it in its bin, it's gone. And it's relatively inexpensive. And then, you know, a lot of people, there's an emotional thing where people think that you get this kind of weird thing where you think that your stuff is worth more than it is because you have an emotional attachment to it and you think somebody else should want your stuff too. But by the time you transport that, kind of like we were saying about moving, you know, by the time I send two guys in a truck 15 miles away, you know, I'm into it for a hundred plus bucks. And can I sell that item for 100 plus bucks? No. And also not my business. We're not resellers like that. We're not a donation shop. So what CallRail does is, you know, I've been able to kind of tie when people call and they go, hey, I'm looking for a free pickup. Well, if I get a couple of those, I can look at at CallRail and go, what ad did they click that made them think that this was going to be free? And what did they search to, to, to end up calling me? So I've been able to then go back to my Google Ads platform and basically, you know, through negative keywords and whatnot, kind of remove that, that targeting so that only the people that are really our ideal customer are actually ending up calling us, ending up seeing our ads and then ending up calling us.
- [34:13]
Josh Crouch
That's a really smart way to do it, to figure out where those customers are coming from and then nip it in the butt on the ad side so you don't get any more of those customers or you change the language. That's where marketing is a trial and error game.
- [34:24]
Scott Patterson
Right?
- [34:24]
Josh Crouch
Because you wouldn't, your, your ad copy probably did not say free, but for some reason it attracted those people. And then you go and change the ad copy and change the targeting on it to remove that.
- [34:36]
Scott Patterson
It's amazingly easy too, you know, if you, if you either work with, you know, most people work with a digital marketing company. I'm, I'm, I've in the past I have, but I've become more hands on in recent years. And what, you know, if you can, you go into Google Ads and you go, you just put the word free as a negative keyword and then somebody searches free, you know, free couch pickup I don't want them seeing my ad and clicking my ad and charging my credit card. That's, that's somebody that I want them to click somebody else's ad that's not using CallRail. And, and they can click their ad and charge them 10 bucks for that click or whatever. So, yeah, being able to hone that another feature, that is massive. And I, and I do want to hit this. You know, it's funny yesterday, kind of knowing we're going to do this podcast and. Cause I do this periodically, too. I call my competitors, pretending like I'm a customer. And Yesterday I called 10 different companies and junk removal companies in my area, and only three out of the 10 answered. Seven of them did not answer the phone. Now, if you're not answering the phone when a potential customer calls you and you're paying for ads, that is, they're going to call the next company. Like, they, they don't even know if you're in business anymore. People are impatient. They go, I got a problem, I want to solve it. So they're just going to go down the list, click the next thing, call them. And out of those, out of the, the 10 that I called, the three that answered were all franchises that were. Had kind of outsourced call centers and low customer service. The seven that didn't answer, two of them got back to me, but. And then five of them. Even now it's been, you know, 24 hours. Five of them haven't even gotten back to me. So that blows my mind.
- [36:30]
Josh Crouch
Crazy. 50% of the competitors you called did not get back to you.
- [36:35]
Scott Patterson
Yeah. Which frankly, I love. You know, I love that.
- [36:38]
Josh Crouch
Oh, yeah.
- [36:39]
Scott Patterson
Well, that's a low. What's hanging fruit to, to be better than that?
- [36:43]
Josh Crouch
Well, what's smart about doing that somewhat regularly throughout the year is just understanding what you. What does a homeowner face when they call these companies? You know, but it's, it is such a big. I see it all the time. And we have a lot of conversations. I post a lot of stuff on social media about booking rates and answering rates because everyone, everyone thinks their team answers 100 of their calls. And I'm like, I, I have hundreds of thousands of calls to prove that you don't. Like, maybe, maybe one particular business will or something like that. But there's always, there's two or three lines in the business and they're all taken up during the day and they miss it. And they don't even almost realize because you got the little beeping sound in your phone. When you're doing that.
- [37:24]
Scott Patterson
Well, it's hard as a home service business, especially when you're starting from scratch and you're not at large enough scale to be able to have a person who's dedicated to just be on the phones. You know, mo. A lot of small businesses, you know, if they're starting out, especially don't have that person. So they are answering the phones and they're doing jobs and they're, you know, maybe they're. You're a plumber, you're under a sink and your phone starts ringing for a particular potential customer, and you're like, I. I literally have gloves on and I'm covered in goop. I can't answer it. So what is the solution to bridge the gap in that point? And one of the super cool things about CallRail that I absolutely love is because, look, I'm not perfect. I miss calls and my team misses calls. But one of the amazing things is an automation that I have where if we miss a call, it instantly sends a text message to the person who called.
- [38:16]
Josh Crouch
And literally just going to get into this. You. You led right to where I was going to go, because that's awesome.
- [38:22]
Scott Patterson
And I. And I have it. I have it sound very personable and not like, it's just like a kind of a generic thing.
- [38:30]
Tersh Blissett
It's.
- [38:30]
Scott Patterson
Hey, this is Scott. I'm so sorry I missed your call. I'll. I'll call you back as soon as possible, but feel free to text me if it's easier. I have gotten so many responses to that text message where people go, thanks so much. You know, give me a call when you can. So at least they know that I'm, I'm. I'm attentive, I'm there, I'm ready to help and, and ready, you know, and they can feel kind of peace of mind. And maybe they get that text message and they go, okay, this guy's got me. I don't need to call the next company.
- [39:05]
Josh Crouch
Yeah. Or they called 10 others and nobody answered.
- [39:08]
Tersh Blissett
And no text back.
- [39:09]
Josh Crouch
Or seven of them didn't answer and they're like, well, God, thank God somebody got back to me.
- [39:13]
Scott Patterson
Yeah.
- [39:14]
Josh Crouch
So just doing. And it's so funny because, like, in business, just doing those little.
- [39:18]
Scott Patterson
It's the.
- [39:18]
Josh Crouch
It's those little detailed things that can save business and grow your company without doing. And that's where. So we didn't even tell you this before, and I don't know what you know about us, but we, church and I, coaching. One of our businesses is coaching Training other people how to use AI and automation. So we do a lot with Zapier, my team on Relentless Digital, we do a lot with missed call text backs, banning call text backs. If there's a voicemail doing a text back. We even do some things that we've shared in trade Automation Pro's community where we're like, web forms come in and you know, web forms, maybe 40% are legit, maybe where they're actually not trying to sell you a Google business listing, car insurance or whatever. But with ChatGPT and layering automation with ChatGPT, now ChatGPT understands the context of those things and can tell you if it's a lead, yes or no. If it's a lead, now send them a text. And so instead of sitting in your email or what, wherever it sits, you can do something proactively and try to follow up with that person. If they don't answer, send another text. If they don't answer, send an email or whatever that looks like for your business. But there's so much power in taking these tools that we use and just doing another step, adding another thing to it. Don't go find another tool that does something similar. Just go a little further with the existing tool and optimize it. And tertia, that's literally something tertiary and I talk about all the time is optimize before you automate, then if you can't automate, you delegate that focal point. It's such a simple message with people like, you can just see their eyes, like, oh, I'm not doing that. I'm throwing a crappy process into someone else's desk. And there's a reason why the output's not very good, because the process sucks.
- [40:51]
Scott Patterson
Yeah. Another Alex Hormozi quote that I love is no silver bullet, just 100 golden DBs. And you know, if I look at like that text message that goes out, am I going to be a multimillion dollar business just because I send an automated text, you know, if I miss a call? No. But you know, that is an incremental thing that will improve my booking rate, my ultimately my bottom line revenue. And if you start layering those things and implementing these different things that are okay, this gives us a 3% improvement, this gives us a 5% improvement. Those things stack and if you can integrate them through something like CallRail especially, it's amazing. Another great thing about CallRail I do for CallRail's sake, I want to say, especially in the home service business, if you're not tech savvy it can feel overwhelming to go, man, like this sounds good. I think I want to do something like this. I just like, it's just, you know, these guys are talking about, you know, keyword searches and tying it and Google Ads and you know, AI transcripts and like, how do I implement that? CallRail makes it so easy. It is dummy proof. And on top of that, their support is incredible. So when we switched from our old field service management that was using the lousy call tracking, I didn't want to lose those phone numbers because they were still kind of out there. And I had three or four different phone numbers through that one. I wanted to port them over to CallRail. CallRail basically said, hey, we got you. We want to help you be successful on call rail. We're going to help you get these ported over. The support was absolutely incredible in helping set me up for success. And I didn't know anything about porting numbers and stuff like that.
- [42:28]
Tersh Blissett
That's like frames. Unless you've done it before, you're like, what you have to do here.
- [42:32]
Josh Crouch
My experience has been the same. We use support all the time, the little glitches or whatever that happen and just go to support and they can either chat, call, email, like this. Guys like every option imaginable and they answer very quickly. We're running out of time here. Make sure that everyone listening to this knows. So for anyone that's wanting to give CallRail a shot, understand what Scott's talking about and shared with us episode today, Carrail does have a 14 day free trial. In order to get that 14 day free trial, you do need to go to CallRail.com sbmpod and that gives us credit too. And just because you love us, you know you want to give us credit for that. So we'll appreciate if you do that. But Scott, it's been really great chatting with you before the episode and during. Like, I've really enjoyed the conversation and your story. So I really appreciate you coming on here and sharing that with Hersch and.
- [43:18]
Scott Patterson
I, yeah, enjoyed it.
- [43:19]
Tersh Blissett
Yeah. Cool man. Well, we appreciate you hanging out with us. Everybody that is watching, we appreciate you as well. I hope you have a wonderful and safe week. Until we talk again next time, we'll see you.
- [43:28]
Scott Patterson
Thanks guys.
- [43:29]
Tersh Blissett
See ya.
- [43:40]
Podcast Narrator
Thank you for listening to this episode of Service Business Mastery. Now that you are equipped with essential business advice from this impactful conversation, you are one step closer to becoming the successful owner of your dreams. If this episode has been helpful to your business journey, don't forget to subscribe to the show, leave a rating and share it with other owners as well. Visit servicebusinessmastery.com to learn more.