← Service Business Mastery for Skilled Trades: HVAC, Plumbing & Electrical Home Service
Service Business Mastery for Skilled Trades: HVAC, Plumbing & Electrical Home Service
Why Contractors Who Don't Own Their Customer List Will Lose
00:46:07
Loading summary
Transcript126 lines
- [00:00]
A
Fractional I think is rather newish concept. The majority of my clients didn't know what it was until they met me. So it is bringing the expertise of an executive who has strategic experience and can help guide you that is going to be accountable for some of the goals that they that you agree to and that fractional person who is going to work at a fractional percentage of their full salary. So you can hire a chief marketing officer five hours a week instead of paying them 40 hours a week.
- [00:30]
B
Today's episode is brought to you by one of our show partners, upfrog.
- [00:34]
C
Upfrog is the OG when it comes to pricing transparency online. They find system replacement leads through paid ads and have developed an entire system to drive those hard to find system replacement opportunities, nurture the leads and book them into sold systems before your team arrives to help you grow your business.
- [00:50]
B
Learn more @UpfrogIO I want to give a huge shout out to Market Storm for sponsoring today's episode.
- [00:55]
C
You've heard of Google Ads, Facebook ads and SEO, but did you know that there's an entire ecosystem like 80% of the Internet that ads can be served on that you barely heard about?
- [01:04]
B
That's where marketstorm operates.
- [01:05]
C
They leverage data science and AI to build customer profiles for your ideal customers and get your ads in front of prospects before they are ready to hire a pro. Planting your brand in their minds early.
- [01:16]
B
And often to chat with a team about how they can help you grow your business. Visit marketstorm AI hello everyone out there in podcast world. Hope you're having a wonderful day. You're listening to or watching Service Business Mastery Podcast. I am one of your hosts, Tersh Blissett, sitting virtually next to my co host Joshua Crouch. And we have Strategic Pete on the show today, Peter Lewis. We've had a really good time learning Peter's backstory and lots of fun facts. I'm sure we're going to dive into some of that in the, in the call today, in the conversation that we had today. But we're going to talk a little bit about AI driven growth and some client loyalty. So Josh, do you have anything you want to add before we get started?
- [01:57]
C
Yeah, customer retention is my that's like something I've believed in since my time in the trades and not enough people. And honestly, as we move towards this, this AI freight train that's coming, dude, just come faster than anything we can we've ever experienced in our lives. Own I was, I was talking about this with Pete when you walked off when we're before we got on here, Church. But owning that audience and being in front of your audience, whatever that audience is, whether you're in a home services space or you're in digital space, like. Like we are. You have to focus on growing that list because search is going to change everything. Digital is going to change. Everything we know and grew up with is going to be completely different. It's already starting to change drastically. So owning that audience and owning your customer list and getting loyalty and buying and stuff from them is going to be more important than it ever has been, in my opinion.
- [02:53]
B
I agree. And there's so much AI stuff that's coming out. I mean, we're. Josh and I, we're heavy in the AI world. Like, we are always doing something with some AI tool. Google did had their meeting last week. One of our team members was there. She's come back with some great content and things. But I've been hearing things through the grapevine. They released new stuff and it's just three. Yeah.
- [03:21]
C
Blowing that thing is blowing everybody's minds. It's crazy. I literally watched. I literally watched. It was a guy and a girl, and I. I don't know if Jen McKe did or some. Somebody posted it like a podcast episode, and the guy said something, the girl laughed, and I'm like, I can't tell that that's not real. I literally.
- [03:39]
A
I'm like.
- [03:40]
C
I was trying to look for, like, facial expressions being off or, like, six fingers or just something that gave it away. And I'm like, that's. It's exciting.
- [03:49]
B
The scary.
- [03:51]
C
Also very scary. Because who knows? Maybe Church and I are just gonna have AI avatars. You're not actually gonna see us. We'll just type behind the.
- [03:58]
B
Might not be over here recording right now. It might be a little AI avatar.
- [04:03]
C
Maybe this really isn't Pete. Who knows? I don't know. Welcome to the show. Welcome, welcome.
- [04:09]
B
Feet.
- [04:09]
A
Thank you. Excited to geek out on all the AI things that we're already behind on because somebody's ahead of us today, right? Tell us.
- [04:18]
C
I don't think there's anybody keeping, like, anybody that's ahead. Like, people say they're ahead. I'm like, nobody's ahead. This stuff's just moving. Literally. I mean, I. I couldn't think of another analogy besides a freight train, like something super fast, something we've never seen before.
- [04:30]
B
Oh. Before you get started, Pete, did y' all hear about the OpenAI? Was working on doing a test shutdown of O3, and it reworked this algorithm so it would not have to Shut itself down. How scary is that? That's crazy.
- [04:56]
C
Apparently it wasn't the first time.
- [04:58]
B
Oh, I didn't know that.
- [04:59]
C
Apparently other tests have been done. I don't know the specifics. This was a post by someone that we. We trust in the space. He's very well connected in the software as a service space, but it's.
- [05:14]
B
Yeah.
- [05:15]
C
Anyways, I got a question for you.
- [05:18]
A
All, guys, for you all, I know it's your podcast, so I'm not supposed to strive for the question, but hearing you guys intro makes me think about how do you all determine what AI information you want to do digest and how often, how soon after does it come out do you start to engage with it?
- [05:36]
B
That's a, That's a really good question, Peter. A lot of times I could. We. It's very easy to. To dive into the rabbit holes, like, because it's every, like every time you turn around, they're like, oh, this is AI driven. What we have learned, and I, and I feel like a lot of other people have learned this exact same thing is most of the times it's not AI. Most of the times it's maybe has like an integration with a chat GPT or a Claude or something like that, but it's not like a true AI platform. So that's kind of. My first thing is like, I want to know how much of the platform is AI driven. And then I used to. Josh and I both used to dive into it. Like, it comes out today, we're diving into it this afternoon. But what we found. And Josh, you. You correct me if I'm wrong on, on this too, but I began learning programs that it was a complete waste of time because they would go. They would be outdated or they would sell to another company and go defunct. There was three different subscriptions that we were paying. I mean, it was 20 bucks a month for one, 10 for the other. I think $50 a month for the other. That went completely defunct. And you couldn't, you couldn't log into the program to stop the monthly recurring payments. So I had to get on with credit card companies to be like, hey, stop payments on this because that company went out of business or they sold to somebody else. So I, now, I wouldn't say I give it a full month. Like, especially if it's something like the new, the Google stuff that just came out, that's something that we'll play with, you know, quickly. But if it's a company we've never, like that. We've never heard of that has no, like, major backing. I usually will wait probably, like close to a month or so to. To play with it.
- [07:34]
C
I try to, too. Unless for some reason there's some sort of wave of feedback on socials and kind of like the ears on the ground networks, like the Facebook groups and stuff.
- [07:45]
B
Deepseek was one of them, and Manuscript were. Was the other one that I jumped on as quick as possible because I wanted to get in there because I knew that they were making waves.
- [07:54]
C
Yeah. Well, in the. We just. I watched a Dan Martell video. I sent it to ter, what, three days ago. Sunday, maybe, or Monday. Sunday.
- [08:03]
B
Sunday, I think.
- [08:04]
C
And it was like the five tools he uses every day. And I'm like, some of these are pretty good. And then. But then it's like, now I got to do a demo of each. I got to get on a call. Like, there's always, like, so many hidden time sucks in those tools. And there's so many of these tools just popping up. Yeah.
- [08:21]
B
And you have to learn something new.
- [08:23]
C
So it's. It's. It's a challenge to say no more often than saying yes, Pete. So that way we can actually get the things done that we really need to get done to further our businesses, our careers, our, you know, our training for ourselves. We do a lot of public speaking and just improving our presence on stage and how we talk and all those sorts of things, so we can really deliver messages that people take home. So there's a lot of things we're doing, and we can get sidetracked very easily. So it's a fascinating question that you started add.
- [08:55]
B
Yeah, I got ADD bad. So with that being said, can you do an introduction of yourself and who you are and what you're doing here?
- [09:05]
C
Of course.
- [09:06]
A
My name is Peter Murphy Lewis. I run a marketing agency where I'm a fractional chief marketing officer for some of my clients or do execution. I'm based in Wichita, Kansas. I've been running this agency for about five years. We're completely remote team of 15. I think I've met three or four people on my team, and every single one of them was trained underneath me at some point, either as an intern or brought them on as a contractor and train them up. So that's kind of what I do. What I do on the side is I do TV stuff. Documentarian. I'm a. I'm a filmmaker. And that kind of keeps my creative energies going because AI has taken over everything that I used to do creatively.
- [09:47]
B
Oh, that's a good point. Like how. How has it affected you in the creative act? But what it's helped Josh and I, because we're not creatives. Like, we, we're not the ones that can think up some amazing, you know, script that's going to get a great reaction. So it's done a great job of making us look a lot better than.
- [10:07]
C
What we actually are.
- [10:09]
B
How, how has it affected you?
- [10:12]
A
I would say that it has helped me in the sense that I can do everything faster, similar to probably everyone else who's listened to this. And then I would say that it helps me do research faster, which is probably everyone else. I would say where it has helped me uniquely different than other marketers or sales teams is because I'm in the empathy world. I'm in the content creation world of humans with video and telling people stories. AI hasn't been able to do that yet. So it actually helps me stand out from other marketers who don't do that. So I've done.
- [10:54]
B
So can you explain what you mean by that?
- [10:56]
A
Yeah. So I've done three seasons of a documentary called People Worth Caring about just in the last year. So we've done 21 episodes on people in health and health care. And that allows me to stand out. So let's just say, you know, a hundred of my peers or competitors in the marketing space, specifically in the health care space, three years ago it would have been hard for me to stand out because we were all doing SEO, we were all doing ads, we were, you know, all going to trade shows. Well, today there's. Of those 100, there's not a single one who's creating video content that's evergreen. They might be doing social clips that are 30 seconds to 90 seconds, but that's not nearly as engaging as long form storytelling broadcast quality documentaries. So now I have an edge because everybody, because AI is, has cut out what all 100 of us were doing three years ago.
- [11:52]
B
What about like, do you think that that would be beneficial to the trades? Like, and if so, like, how, how do you work that in? Like, I, I can't imagine doing it through healthcare. So I imagine you'd figured out how to do it for the trades as well.
- [12:09]
A
Yeah. So it's funny that you say that because the first three documentaries that I filmed were in the healthcare space, specifically in the nursing home space, partially because nursing homes have a bad reputation.
- [12:24]
B
Oh yeah.
- [12:25]
A
Terrible reputation. The best way to change the reputation is through storyte selling of people who go against the grain, who, who actually go against what we think of it. And so And I knew that nursing homes were not nearly as bad as people think, and that's one of the reasons that I was interested in that industry. But my last of my last 10 documentary calls that I've had in the last three months, seven have been from different trades. Right. So I met with a state association in Texas in the plumbing industry.
- [12:57]
B
Oh, yeah, yeah, we're familiar with them.
- [12:59]
A
Yeah. Plumbing doesn't particularly have a great reputation. Right. Car sales don't have a great reputation. So just think of all of the things that have a bad reputation and how you could control that narrative by highlighting the people who have a beautiful story. And, you know, plumbing's one of them. I'm actually speaking. I spoke to one out of Virginia in the solid waste industry. Right. So similar.
- [13:24]
C
So, like, do you.
- [13:26]
B
You have to go find somebody who has a good story. I'm assuming there's.
- [13:30]
A
They. The people who hire me to do documentaries about their industry, all they have to do is tell me who are five members or 10 members or 20 members that they know are passionate about the industry, and then I can find the story from them. It's probably very similar to you all in the sense that if you are. If you are authentically interested and curious in the person, like I can tell you two are, because before we went live and recorded, you both asked me interesting questions. You didn't care about marketing. You were interested in me. The exact same thing works when you're going to do a documentary about someone in solid waste in Virginia or plumbing in Texas.
- [14:10]
B
Okay, cool. So we're. We got a leg up.
- [14:14]
C
Is that something. So, like the, the documentary thing is that's something that's tied in with, like, the fractional services that you offer on the marketing side. So you. So you offer fractional CMO work. Which do you want to just dive into a little bit as far as what that looks like? Because I, I know a lot of people in the trades, know what marketing agencies look like, but obviously the fractional cmo, it's different level of work. Right. Like, you're. You might not be doing SEO or building websites, but you're helping with a. A broader strategy. So you want to go into that a little bit and just kind of explain what that looks like.
- [14:45]
A
Yeah, sure. So fractional, I think, is rather newish concept. The three of us probably know what it is, but I would say the majority of my clients didn't know what it was until they met me. So it's. It is bringing the expertise of an executive who has strategic experience and can help guide you that is going to be accountable for some of the goals that they create that you, that you agree to and that fractional person who is going to work at the percent at a fractional percentage of their full salary. So you can hire a chief marketing officer for five hours a week instead of paying them 40 hours a week and you get all of that knowledge. And that fractional chief marketing officer can oversee your team, which is what I do oftentimes. Or if you don't have the team and you're ready to scrap them or they left or you need to go to market with a new product, a new strategy, you. You can hire my team, I would say about 75% of my clients hire me first as a fractional for five to 10 hours and then they'll hire a percentage of my marketing agency to do execution. And the remaining either just straight up hire my agency or just straight up hire me as a fractional. And I don't do any execution. But I go to leadership meetings and I am accountable for the goals that we agree to.
- [15:59]
B
Oh, cool. I like that concept.
- [16:02]
C
So it's kind of like. It's kind of like adding an executive but not add an executive salary.
- [16:06]
A
Yeah.
- [16:06]
C
And.
- [16:06]
A
And you don't have the HR problems either. Right. So. And then my salary. Then you also get someone that has.
- [16:11]
C
A lot of experience in whatever it is. You know, because we've heard of. We actually went to a show in Florida. Virtual cfo. She's a fractional cfo. And we've definitely. I know our team from Relentless Digital. We've. We work with a couple fractional CMOs and stuff like that where we meet with them and they of hold us accountable to certain results and whatnot. So we're definitely familiar with what that looks like, but I don't think a lot of people in trades know. Knows what that looks like is there. You know, when it comes to somebody wants to. Let's say somebody's like, man, I would love to have someone that can do that to help me with the marketing or help me with the, the bookkeeping and the, and the financial statements. Because those are two areas where a lot of countries just their eyes cross and like, yeah, I don't want to deal with this.
- [16:55]
A
Yeah.
- [16:55]
C
They just like, please somebody else deal with this thing because I don't want to do it. What's. I mean, what, what's a reasonable size either in, in people or structure of the team or in revenue for somebody to start really considering this because obviously they still have to have enough revenue to pay for this position because it's not like it's me and one person in the office. I can hire a fractional cmo. It's not going to work. Right. Because you don't have a team. But what does that look like for most of your clients?
- [17:23]
A
Yeah. So I'll, I'll answer it kind of from experience with my clients who are hiring other fractionals and then also kind of describe it in a way of how do you think about when it's time for you to engage somebody? I, I don't think about it as revenue at the beginning. I like to think about is that is the job that you are doing poorly, taking away from you, making more money in something else else. So it's more about that than it is, than it is about revenue. And you find the right fractional person, you know, those people will engage you an hour a week if you want to. Right. I don't, I don't have a standard. I don't force anybody to engage me at 10 hours a week, nor an hour a week. If I like your mission and I think I can help you, then you're going to be able to find a person. Now that being said, to answer your question more directly, I think, think that if you need strategy, right. So if you need that, that fractional CMO or COO or CFO, you're probably doing over a million to $2 million in revenue per year minimum. The clients that I'm working with are all over $2 million or they are, have venture backed capital. So they have, they have the funding and they, they know they need to get somewhere quickly. If you don't need the strategy, there's no reason you should be hiring an executive at you know, a 10% their annual cost or whatever. You just need to go get a marketing director or marketing manager. If you know where to take it. Just go hire someone at you know, 30 to $80,000 a year depending on where you live in the United States and tell them what to do and the person could execute.
- [19:06]
C
Yeah, absolutely. That's, that's, I mean that's what we did. We're, our relentless is about a 6, we're between 6 and 7 million company. I realized I couldn't handle all the marketing stuff myself. I hired a marketing manager to start and I figured at a certain point you'd start hiring those executive level people to kind of fill in certain gaps and help us understand things from a different perspective and an outside opinion versus someone that's been there done it for 10, 15, 20 years and really knows how to get like, cut through the noise to get to the thing that we need to work on.
- [19:37]
A
Yeah. And I think that's a. I like the two clients that I thought of right now that I've worked with the longest. I work with a residential and a commercial painting company. And they didn't have a single marketer on the team when they hired me. And it's because they needed complete direction on the strategy. Now I don't do any of the execution any longer. There's somebody on my team who does all the execution, but the first six months, we need to figure out what they needed to get to the next level. And the other client that. That comes to mind. Right. They just hired. It's a. It's a premium boutique zoo and they've doubled their revenue in the last two years. And they just hired a fractional cfo. And it's because they got to the. They got to the complexity from a financial point of view that they needed someone way smarter than. Than anybody else on our executive team. And they found a great person. I think he's working two or three hours a week.
- [20:32]
B
Is that Joe?
- [20:35]
A
I don't know. I don't know who Joe is.
- [20:39]
B
The lion guy in his name. Joe.
- [20:41]
A
Oh, yeah. I don't remember. What is his name?
- [20:47]
B
I don't know. He's out your direction though, somewhere, or he was. I don't know where he's at now.
- [20:52]
A
He's south of us.
- [20:53]
C
Yeah.
- [20:53]
B
I think he's in jail now. But.
- [20:56]
A
It. Entry for trying to kill somebody and down in your neck of the woods. Yeah, that's right.
- [21:02]
B
Weirdo. Such a weirdo.
- [21:04]
C
Awesome. Oh, so that's. Hopefully people listen as they start understanding what that looks like because it's. It's something that I think it's from what. Where I sit, what I've seen, I've seen a growing number of fractional. Like, I think we talked to some. Like, it was one of our, like the first year I was doing this church, we talked to Buzz. Remember Buzz?
- [21:27]
B
Oh, yeah, yeah.
- [21:28]
C
He was like the first person I had heard this was during COVID of like doing the. The fractional CMO work and like. And obviously now that we're, you know, it's just like anything you're familiar with it, you heard something like, oh, now I see it everywhere.
- [21:39]
B
Yeah.
- [21:39]
C
You know, if you're not familiar with it, you don't know it exists.
- [21:43]
B
What's the hiring process like? Whenever you're. You're going through this, like whenever you're hiring or when a, when a client.
- [21:50]
C
Is, how do you make sure the client is a good fit for you?
- [21:53]
A
Yeah, both of those are good questions. So how I make sure that the client's a good, good fit for me is I have two to four consulting sessions over a month that I do for free because I won't bring on any client that I can't help. And two reasons. One, energetically I don't like people to fire me and I don't like churn I'm doing month to month. I don't force anybody into a three month or six month contract. So I want to get along with the person and my reputation matters and, and I want to enjoy the work. And then secondarily for anything I do for execution I offer performance based bonuses and payments. So you can engage my marketing agency at 50% the price for the first three months but if you retain me after 90 days, you're going to pay that bonus times to that discount. So there's skin in the game for both of us. So that's where I'm trying to make sure that I can actually help you and meet the goals we agreed to. Now I tend to stay in the B2B space with people who can grow their marketing with founder led or thought leader led marketing. So I look for somebody who's well spoken like one of you and ideally it's a CEO or a board member or an executive and how I can build content that I will not be able to compete against by building up your brand so we don't have to pay for advertising in the future and that's going to be through YouTube, SEO, LinkedIn, conventions, public speaking podcasts. That's kind of my niche and I like to do with people who are doing higher, higher tickets. Right. So like generally speaking it's going to be someone who's selling type of some type of service or product that's going to be over 10 to 20 thousand dollars a month.
- [23:43]
B
Hello home service professionals. Do you want to maximize your marketing budget? Then you need to be using call tracking from CallRail. Let's say you've noticed a spike in new leads this month. To find out what's driving them, you just log into your CallRail dashboard. Is my new Facebook ad outperforming my other ads or is paid search knocking it out of the park? Or maybe it's time to retire those newspaper ads. Since CallRail assigns a unique phone number to each of my marketing efforts, I know where my best leads come from. And which efforts to scrap. CallRail shows you your most cost effective marketing channels so you can get back to business. Go to CallRail.com svmpod and try it for free.
- [24:27]
C
Today's episode is powered by Cirrus Systems.
- [24:30]
B
Sarah is all about removing the clutter and unnecessary touch points to run your home service business profitably.
- [24:35]
C
They use AI dispatching to get the right tech to the right call automatically and job time efficiency to ensure your entire team runs like a profit generating machine.
- [24:44]
B
Get a tech upgrade for your business at Get Sarah Tech Service Business Mastery.
- [24:53]
C
Yeah, that makes sense. So now that we got some, some background stuff and kind of like what it looks like to hire or to on the other end as far as getting hired by a CMO or fractional cmo, you know, we talked the, the topic of this podcast is AI driven growth and client loyalty. So as far, let's, let's talk about the client loyalty part because I do feel like this is a, it's been a consistent weak spot in the trades for as long as I've been in the trades. And I'm sure Tersh can relate too. We are really good in the trades. When the phone rings, answer. Well, most companies are good at, some companies are good at answering the phone. There's a like a 15 to 17 miss missed call, percent missed call rate. But when that phone rings, we put that superhero cape on, we run to that customer, we take care of that customer, we give them everything we can, we get them as soon as possible and then nothing. After we're done, we, we asked for the review maybe or a survey and then we're done. We move on to the next fire that we have to go to and the next fire and we never ever come back to this massive. And even if it's not massive, even if it's a couple hundred customers, we never go back to the same well for those customers. So what does client loyalty look like to you? How are you helping your clients implement strategies to consistently get more out of their existing client database?
- [26:19]
A
I think comes down to a simple concept around repurposing, right? And I think specifically, you know, to your point, what a lot of home services are bad at is they're good at the execution, they're bad at asking for, you know, for, for, for that feedback and then they're bad at setting up systems for repurposing it. Right? And so the systems here is the key part, right? So like if you guys ask me, I recently, I recently hired a company to do roofing for a family Member of mine, big project, you know, $30,000 and the. It was done. I immediately told him, I said, hey, this is fantastic working with you. Everything was great. I'd love to do a testimonial for you. I'm a, I'm a marketer, right. So like can I do a video testimonial? Where are you going to use it? Where can I give you five different reviews type of thing? I think that, you know, your, your contractor, your owner needs to start getting comfortable asking for what I offered and over and over and over. And if you can't, you need to find somebody on your team who can and then you need to set up the systems for repurposing it. I don't think that AI is only here to help us do things faster and more efficiently. I actually think that it's here to help us deliver empathy to other people in an effective manner. Right. So like to, to, to. And that's just a, that's just a fluffy way for saying repurposing.
- [27:55]
C
Right?
- [27:56]
A
So like if, if, if I give you that review, you need to make sure that review is going across your ads. It's going on your business, my profile, on your LinkedIn banner, if you're in the B2B space on your website, your email nurturing type of thing just needs to be used over and over and over.
- [28:10]
C
Do you find that most businesses you work with, that's where they struggle is like they just, they'll go get the one thing, but then they don't know what to do with it and where to, how to.
- [28:18]
B
Just guilty of doing that myself. Yeah, Yeah.
- [28:21]
A
I think that it's two things. So I think that it's one, in general, Americans are bad at asking for things. And I would say that business owners in the home service space are even worse at it. I don't know if it's a, I don't know if it's a masculine thing. I don't know if it's kind of the trade world where I get, I can do it. I don't need anyone's help. Well, you do in marketing and we need your cut when you need your customers help because they should be your number one ambassador. And if you're in an industry where you only have, you know, 10 clients a month or three clients a month, that person's feedback is your way to growing your brand without spending money on advertising. That, that's, that's the first thing that comes in. The second thing is, is setting, setting up systems. And if you're not good at it. Just, just find some peer of yours in another city who's doing a great job. You know that that's not a competitor of yours. I'm in Wichita. Hire somebody in Denver who says hey, you met him at a trade show. You have a good marketer. I've seen everything. Can I hire this guy for 10 hours? I promise I won't steal him and just set up a system and then you can get out, get in and get out and set up the system.
- [29:29]
C
Yeah, I. Church and I use this a lot because I mean everyone. Anyone listening to this knows we put out a. What's a big word like giga. Giga amount of content. I don't know some big word. I exactly. AI would probably much better word load metric. I like that better. But, but we use like there are tools out there that can help you repurpose one video or one. If you do an audio and you just. Let's say you talk to something on audio and you want to use the audio of that. Like maybe a customer is asking you a question or maybe you use Rilla or Lace as. As partners. Lace as a AI call answering program. Rilla's a AI ride along software for like in home sales. And even the testimonials and feedback you get from that because everybody knows that they're recorded. Phone call says you're recorded. The tertia thing says all interactions with our company will be recorded when he uses Rilla. And there's probably a lot of gold even just sitting in there that could be repurposed and put into.
- [30:29]
A
You know actually I was going to.
- [30:31]
C
Ask you as I was going on this point the question begs before I get into it, I've heard people dabbling with this because we have a lot of AI call them actors if you will. Like avatars.
- [30:44]
B
Yeah.
- [30:45]
C
Something that's been floated around, I've considered it is like our clients, they get, they, they. They don't do a good job at getting. Making video content. They'll put stuff on social, very little video content because they don't have somebody that wants to get in front of the camera. But like you know, we repurpose reviews. Church and I do this a lot with trade automation pros is we take a Google review and we'll repurpose it on all the social media platforms. But it's a text based review. Have you, especially since you're in filmmaking and documentaries and stuff like that. Have you considered something where you know, because sometimes it's hard to get a customer to do a video Testimonial of using an AI actor, our AI actress to essentially read the review as a homeowner. I don't know what the legalities on that stuff, but have you ever considered it or thought of anything like that as far as like, hey, I got this great glowing 5 star review. I'm turning this into a video, but I don't have anyone to like read the script.
- [31:34]
B
Oh, that's a good question. I said that out loud.
- [31:39]
A
So I think, I think a version of that that I have done is having somebody read the reviews. I haven't done it with AI. I'm sure it could be done easily with AI. I do use AI for video editing, but not for the actual avatar human. So for example, I'll go through, I'll just record it myself and it'll be, you know, if it were Tertia's it would be, you know, one of the things that I love about, you know, Tersh's painting company is in Q1 the amazing reviews that came in in 2025. And then I just read them out loud and then I emphasize what I want and I just take screenshots of that and my face isn't on it, it's me reading and it's highlighting the words that we want to emphasize. And you don't have to be a face of anything. And you could hire any contractor from, from fiverr.com or upwork.com to do that for less than $20. And you could do it for AI.
- [32:35]
C
But if you're idea too, I really think of that where just read like the, the owner or manager just reads the reviews and kind of puts a little preface with it and it reads some like maybe the top three reviews of the month. Which could be something that's a really easy way to start getting on camera even though you're not really on camera because you can overlay everything.
- [32:53]
B
Hopefully you're getting at least three reviews a month.
- [32:57]
A
Yeah, the two other things that are kind of like repurposing that I see that work is. One is make sure that you're using those in your nurture emails or for anybody who, you know, asks for a proposal and you, you've you, you give it to them but then you don't follow up with them. Make sure you're nudging them by using your reviews to get their attention. And the thing that I do with that is I send them a screenshot so they can see it, but then give them the link so they click on it. Because if they click on it, you're telling they're going to read a lot more. Well on top of it, you're going to tell Google that people want to see this. So Google is going to continue to bump you up higher in those reviews in their algorithm. The exact same thing works in LinkedIn. So when I'm sending out nurture or even cold outbound for my services, I'm not sending them to my website. I'm actually sending them to reviews on my LinkedIn or posts about my reviews. And that's telling LinkedIn, hey, people are coming to this from off site and LinkedIn will then boost that up and the same thing will work in the home service industry.
- [34:00]
B
Do you see LinkedIn being used by contractors successfully?
- [34:04]
A
I do. So right now, especially at the B2B level, at the partnership level. So we're, you know, we're installing tools on our clients websites that identify. We are de anonymizing the website visitors and it's giving us their LinkedIn. And we're taking the founder of these home services businesses, connecting with them on LinkedIn and sending them a message saying, hey, we're always looking for new partners. You know, this is what we do. We're a premium painting company. Please keep us in mind. You'd be surprised how many people reply. And the reason that I think that it works well is because out LinkedIn is actually doing the reminder for you, right? Like if I connected with either one of you today, LinkedIn is going to send you a message, you know, every five days saying, peter's waiting to connect with you. I'm not doing the cold. I don't have to learn the tech. I don't have to worry about spam, right. LinkedIn is doing all of the reminding for me. And all you have to think there might not be there many people in your industry. They're using LinkedIn. That's an advantage for you. That's an opportunity. That means your competitors aren't using it either.
- [35:11]
C
That's cool. That's a, that's a really great point. We may have to. You mind sharing the tool? Yeah, because there's a lot like Tertia. We've been to trade shows where there's people that say they can like the. Yeah, the word you just said. I can't say it. So I'm not gonna try. Otherwise I'm gonna, I'm gonna sound like Teresa Tersh has a speech impediment. I can make fun of him.
- [35:34]
B
So I think you're not allowed to make fun of me because I have a what?
- [35:39]
C
But you make fun of yourself. So I figured I would just jump on the bandwagon. I don't want you to be alone in that.
- [35:43]
B
I appreciate that. I appreciate that. Looking out for me.
- [35:45]
C
I know because especially like we, we talk about positive ways to do more with stuff that happens. Like we get a lot of webs every, most websites and businesses have people come to their website. This don't even know because only a certain very small percentage actually convert at that time. Right. That's why a lot of like e commerce sites have that, hey, I'm sending you an email you forgot to check out. Right. Because they know they're going to convert another 10 or 15% of sales if they do that. But we don't do that in the home service industry because one, the tech's just not there. We just don't know about it. But I'd love to hear more about that because I could think of a few use cases for us for that.
- [36:22]
A
Yeah. So, you know, like I can tell, I can give examples where it works for my clients and works for me and I can give you examples where it's worked as somebody trying to get my attention. Right. So in, you know, insurance, painting and just reminder, LinkedIn is going to remind me every time I log in it's going to show me that person's feed like, oh, I do need, you know, I need new home insurance or I need that new roofing service and I'm going to see that person. Where's my inbox? My email inbox is insane busy or LinkedIn's not nearly as busy. And there's, you know that it's called that golden window or that golden week for the first seven days when you connect with somebody, LinkedIn's going to show you that person's posts more than they show anybody else. And depending on how you engage in it, LinkedIn's going to keep showing it to you. So that, that works very, very well. Now where what, what we are doing to dive into a little bit more details of, you know, where I shared with you with the, with the painting company from the B2C level and the B2B we're identifying who is hitting parts of our, of their website, whether it be commercial, residential and then we are connecting with them and we have, we do interviews with these founders of this painting company where we'll do an hour interview or two hour interview with that person once a month and then we will write up using AI prompts, 30 posts. So there are 30 posts coming from that person's LinkedIn during a month and then we can repurpose those and reuse them three months later, four months later. And then that is just using the LinkedIn algorithm to show your prospects what you're talking about. And that works for B2B and B2C.
- [38:04]
C
Yeah, that's an interesting use case. We know someone that does a lot of, a lot of that stuff. He actually speaks a lot on AI and he's got a 400000 people in his Facebook group. He actually quit his marketing agency like he had a regular traditional marketing scene quit it to like train, coach people on AI which is crazy because he's not like, he's not a young buck either. He's literally like, he kind of looks like Santa Claus. He's got a long white beard and everything else. He's super nice guy. We've actually had him on the show and we've been on his show. But there's so many things that can be done and I think that's the, the core thing that if anyone's listening to this is be smarter with what you already do. Don't look to like try to replace a bunch of things with the technology because there's a lot you aren't even doing already with it. You create one. We talked about a couple things with the reviews. That's a, that is a super low hanging fruit of any. Like just start there and then we can start. I've even considered like interviewing our clients to do something similar where we're like help them create video content because they won't create it themselves. So let's get them. Let's have the Fathom recording, let's have the zoom, let's record it and let's chop it up in here. Here's eight to ten clips. Put them all over the social media. Just start somewhere. Because I know from my time in the trades to relentless to this podcast video content, personal branding makes world. I cannot stress it, it makes a world of difference. There are so many people that reach out. I see your content everywhere. I see your content everywhere. I love your content. I see it. Ever Terse gets this too. Like you see, even though Terse doesn't really actually post a lot on social media, but because the content's posted on behalf of our team, everyone's oh, I see the content was great. Like you don't even realize what's going on and it builds all of the businesses that we have and prop kind of like a rising tide thing because people see us everywhere and we're. We're not going to go away. We're going to keep putting value in front of their face and trying to teach them something. Try to get something from guests like yourself. But if you don't have that, like use the content that's already there. Like you said, repurpose it in emails, repurpose it in pre selling before you go on site, put a video, put a, just put a testimony or something in your. Hey, technicians on site. Just thought you want to, you know, read our last review just to see what this, what level of service you're going to get today. Yeah, little things like that can go so long and getting higher. Average tickets more sales, closing more and it doesn't really take a lot of effort because you already have that content.
- [40:32]
A
Yeah. To continue on with another example of LinkedIn and we can leave from LinkedIn because I'm guessing the majority of your audience doesn't realize that this is a channel but you can, it'll help you understand how you can repurpose and just set up one extra step and make everything cheaper and more successful. Is so the idea I just shared with you a tool that will identify people on your website as long as they have logged into their LinkedIn. Now how many, how many of your listeners pay for ads? Probably 70 to 90% are paying for some type of ad. Right. Either Google Local or Google Search or something along those lines. Now how many of those people don't give you their phone number and their email when they hit you the website? 90%. Right. What if I could identify 75% of the people who are coming from your ads and now on your website? My ads just got a lot cheaper. A lot cheaper because now I, all I have to do is connect with you on LinkedIn and LinkedIn will do all of the retargeting. I don't have to pay for it.
- [41:37]
C
That's, that's a, that's a mic drop thing there for people. Like that's. But just, I mean because the, the applications of that and, and honestly I link we've had someone actually that's like a, like three years ago now about LinkedIn and church and I we actually hired a ghostwriter, someone to help write our content on LinkedIn for us. We give it, we give them content, we share all the stuff that we do and he puts it into like nicely worded stuff and they do engagement and everything because LinkedIn can be overbearing. But LinkedIn also is a great place for partnerships especially like in a local market. Think of it in a way Like, I saw someone the other day, I actually gave him this advice about getting on LinkedIn, because he was trying to look for, like, real estate agents and property managers and people in his local market. And. And he's like, thinking about running, like, Facebook ads. And I'm like, why? Like, if that's who you're looking for and that's who you serve and that's who you want to serve, you got to go to LinkedIn, because that's where the business, the B2B audience, hangs out. Even if you're a B2C company, like most people in the home service industry, LinkedIn is a great resource for referrals because all of your business owners in that area, who all have employees, family, friends, friends, acquaintances, they want referral partnerships. That's where they are. Even if they're not super active, that's where they hang out. Because most people, as professionals have a LinkedIn account. They're just like, yeah, I got one. I don't really use it. Maybe I don't use it that much. Like, you know, but there's. There's just so much. It's just. I think a lot of people use social media and they spray, they. They pray and spray. Like, they just pray and spray a bunch of content, a bunch of places, but they don't actually think about, like, who's on. What kind of marketing channel is this and what am I trying to achieve? Like, we were doing the same thing, but we actually changed our strategy to start trying to find, like, distribution reps, manufacturer reps, like, people that we don't normally talk to because they're not on Facebook. They're hanging out on LinkedIn with other professionals. And it's been great. Like, I've set up several calls with people that I wouldn't have connected with on Facebook or haven't in the past that are regional TMS. Uh, they manage a team of like 10 TMS, or they got different groups that we really aren't. Haven't have no foothold in. But there's a lot of great, really great ways to use LinkedIn. So I'm glad, Glad you brought that up.
- [43:49]
B
Yep, absolutely. Dude, we could talk for days. I know. We appreciate you hanging out with us. I can't believe it's already been 45 minutes.
- [43:58]
C
That went quick.
- [43:59]
B
Yeah. Then, is there anything else that, that. That you'd like to share before we wrap things up?
- [44:07]
A
I think just kind of bringing it back around to AI is if you've listened this and you know that this would be helpful, but it seems overwhelming because you don't want to be creating content. Just hire a contractor who's a generalist marketer to create a prompt for you with your voice and your brand. The language that I use for it is called context library. So just make a two page document inside of Google Docs, which is who are you? What does your company do? How does it help people? What's your unique selling proposition? Write down all of these ideas, what does your tone sound like? How do you want to come across on social media? Put this into a Google Doc and then throw it into the free version of ChatGPT or Gemini or anything like that as your context library. And then say write a LinkedIn post for me regarding the most recent Google review. Right. And it's going to be able to do it. It's just going to pull all of that. So start with the basics of just creating who you are and then you don't really need to know anything much, much about it than AI because I guarantee that's more than the majority of your competitors are doing.
- [45:13]
C
Yep, that's a good, that's a really good point to, to end us with today.
- [45:17]
A
Yep.
- [45:18]
B
We appreciate you hanging out with us, Peter. If there's anybody that needs to reach out, has any more questions, we'll put all of Peter's contact information in the show notes. But until we talk again next time, I hope you have a wonderful and safe week. Thank you again, Peter.
- [45:35]
C
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.