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Everyone's obsessed with funnels and ads and SEO right now, but you're playing with fire if your entire success is built upon Google and meta with algorithms that change daily. Now, the secret to building a resilient business comes from your ability to consistently generate leads. Here are nine boring tactics that outperform digital marketing that anyone can use to scale. The first one is customer referrals. You need to turn every customer into a sales rep. How you do that is number one. You ask them straight up after the time of service, after you've got paid, do you have any friends or family members who might need our service? Their key words here, friends or family members, it narrows someone down. When you ask somebody is do you know of anybody who would need their car fixed? It's like, well, I know a million people that need cars versus if you said, do you have any friends or family who may need new tires soon? We have this new promotion we're running, right? Friends or family and tires like very specific. They're going to think about that, right? And if something comes to mind, you're going to get the referral versus, you know, not thinking at all. You can also have a pay it forward program. So for example, we got this awesome gift card after doing some door at our house where it said, here's $500 that you can use off your next project with us and here's $500 that you can give to a friend or family member. This is a really good strategy that I like because there may be other things in the house they've thought about doing, they just didn't tell you they want to do. And here is a gift that you can give to somebody. So my parents are interested in going to work. I'm going to give them the 1500 hour and I'm going to use the other one because eventually we're going to replace our windows and I'm probably going to call them, right? You could do this in every industry, whether it's home services, whether it's auto repair, or almost ever anyone where it's here's a discount for you and here's a discount that you can pay it forward. There's number two is you want to follow up on estimates of declined work. I see so many business owners, including my own team over time who does an estimate and we never get a decline from a customer. We just stop following up because they didn't answer. Well, a non response is not a no, it's just a I'm busy and I'm not going to call you back right now. So what we like to do is create a pipeline of a tag of like, all the stuff that has kind of gone old that we haven't heard from you in a few weeks. And then, then multiple times a year, we're going to follow up with these people just saying, hey, we're having a special this week on Blank. Are you interested? Are you still interested in getting this work done? You could ask them, why haven't they moving forward? Is it timing? Is it price? Is it. Did they get another quote that was cheaper? But until they tell you, no, I don't want to get the work done, it's still on the table. Don't be afraid to call people. I see it all the time where it's like, oh, I already called that person seven times and they never called me back, so I'm just going to like, kill it. But like, you didn't get a no, and you paid hundreds of dollars for that lead. And if they want you to stop calling you, they will tell you, they'll block your number, whatever it is. But at the end of the day, they wanted to get the work done, and you're doing your job by following up with them. Another one is talking to past customers. So we spend so much money and so much work to get a customer, and somebody who spent money with you one time is highly likely to spend more money with you a second time. It's like a funny scenario, right? We, we spend all this money to get customers, but then as. As soon as we got them, we kind of forget about them. And then we focus more on these cold customers versus, like, in our painting business, if we paint someone's room or. Or exterior of their house, like a year later, guess what? Like, they are going to have more rooms to paint. They're gonna have friends and family members. They might be getting their bathroom redone or their basement finished. I even know owners who it was a complete seven years and they called them again seven years later to do the exterior of their house again because, you know, the times change and they wanted a new look. And so don't discount the value of your past customers. And just what do you call them? Lead with value. Say, hey, we are running a special this week for all of our existing customers that we're not offering to anybody else. Here's what it is. And if you're looking for ideas like what to say or what to offer, you know, ChatGPT can be your best friend. Just put in a script that says, I run a home Service business doing blank. I want to reach out to my customers with an incentive that will make them feel special. Give me a couple ideas, right. And then you can, like, spitball from there. I'd also make sure you're updating your CRM, whatever that may be, to tag customers to take notes because you don't want to follow up someone now and someone else on your team, like, calls them tomorrow after they just bought, asking for more stuff. Like, you got to be cautious with it. And so you need to sure you keep good notes, especially when you're dealing with your old customers. All right, next is referral partners. For some businesses, especially in the home service space, referral partners can be a goldmine of of business for you. You want to build a list, I would say at least 25 to 30 who you have an active relationship with. Right. Great. Targets are anybody else who serves the same customer base. So in home services, that could be realtors, property managers, roofers, insurance adjusters, solar general contractors like the painting company, the floor company, the cabinet guys, the turf guys, like the landscapers. It could be literally anybody else who goes inside the home and does something. The best practice here is to send them leads without asking for anything in return. Because if you send somebody a 5,000, a $10,000 job, they are going to be very grateful. And the next time that your service comes up in an estimate they're on, guess what they're going to do. They're going to send it right back to you because they were. They're grateful and they feel like they owe you. We do this all the time in our turf business because we lay turf. And there's other things around the pool that we do. There's fencing. There is, like, architectural landscaping. There's flowers, lots of stuff that we don't do. There's pools. Right. There's people talk about getting their siding done. So we have built a bunch of referral relationships around the exterior, kind of like, side of the home, and we are sending them stuff. And already a month into the business, we have the biggest pool contractor in town sending us work because we've already given stuff to them. If you lead with value, you lead by trying to pay it forward. They will be the best source of leads that you have, and they will be endless. Right? Because they like you and you do good work and you have a good reputation and you take care of their customers versus other people who try to build referrals where they're just like, calling them, say, hey, you got any leads for me? Got any Leads for me, and you're constantly being annoying and not giving them anything. But for the ones that you build relationships with, for example, our pool builders, we're dropping in, we're dropping them cookies, we're dropping them coffee. We're going to treat them very well because we also want to stay top of mind. But it's not just that. It's money. It's money through leads and building a good relationship. And if possible, if you can get them out of a bind, if they sent something to another turf contractor and didn't go to us, and then they call us saying, hey, this guy screwed us over, are you able to fix it? Instead of being, well, you should have sent it to me first type of attitude, if we can get right on that and we can solve their problem and wait, the customer's happy. We're going to earn their business for life. At least that's the philosophy that I've used to build a my business. And I think that's a much better approach in the long run than being somebody who's spiteful and saying, well, you should have called me and being a jerk about it. All right, next is door hangers. So when you are working at a home, our goal is to tag 10 homes in, like, every direction. So 10 to the right, 10 to the left, 10 across the street, whatever it looks like. And that door hanger is going to be, you know, a price point, says, hey, we're working in your neighborhood. Get a free estimate. It's going to be dollars off. It's something that is going to be like, worth calling for. Right? We sell paint and the average job is $5,000. To give somebody $20 off is kind of like stupid, right? Maybe we can give them $500 off. That sounds a lot more appealing. Or we give them a free accent wall, or there's like some value add thing that we could do that makes it worth it. And with these incentives, you want to think about what does it cost me to buy a customer online through digital marketing? Right. If it costs you $300 to land a digital lead, then why wouldn't you give $300 for a local lead who you may be the only person they call, and that sale is going to be much better. And if it's in a neighborhood that you just finished, they already have a relationship with the other neighbor that compounds together to do more houses in the neighborhood. Like, I would much rather give a $500 off versus my $300 off to get the neighbor of a job that I just did because I know that that is going to be more valuable over the lifetime than a single transaction. So you want to get something that is a good incentive and then you want to put some sort of tracking on this thing for this one. And actually the yard signs. The next thing I'm going to talk about is like we put a specific phone number on these and then we can track that of how many people called and how many leads we got off the door hangers versus all the other ways that we could do it. Because a lot of times when you market, you may layer on marketing, right? We may do a door hanger, we may do a yard sign. The customer may be talking and they might be getting served up some digital ads from Facebook and Google and stuff. But having specific call numbers or tracking will help, you know, like what's working and what's not. All right, next is yard signs. So you want to place yard signs with people's permission in their front yards while you're doing jobs. And hopefully they'll let it stay as long as possible so the neighbors can see. You can also place them on busy streets where there's lots of visibility, knowing that you may get fined, right? Like the township may find you because you didn't have permission. I know some home service franchises that do millions and millions of dollars in revenue off yard signs because they track. They use a specific phone number here on my example, for example, that number is tracked and they know who called the yard sign and they encourage their people. There is like a board that they track the amount of dollars that they've been fined for yard signs in comparison to the amount of money they've made from them. And for them, it's a no brainer to pay a $50 fine to have a yard sign that's getting tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of eyeballs on it. And so I love this tactic. We're about to implement it for my that1painner franchise. Throughout the Philadelphia area. We are going to have the competition of who can get the most signed fines in their territories. When you're designing these, a couple things. One, your name should be bold, your phone number should be big. The QR codes, a pretty good idea you really want like as simple as possible here. Because if it's too complicated with pictures and lots of text, all things, like people are driving 40 miles an hour past your thing, right? Like they're not going to be able to read every one of them. But if you can strategically place them in multiple places kind of in the same area, they may see one and then you have another one up the street and then that one they're able to like tag with their phone or call a number, whatever it is. But same as I talked about before, specific phone number for yard signs. It's different than the phone number that you're going to use on your local tags and also different from the phone number you're going to use in your like digital marketing and Google and all the other things. I like to use open phone to track all these different phone numbers. You can have multiple phone numbers. It costs like five bucks a month per number and then you can track who called every number. And it's super easy. They have AI transcripts. You know, you can have multiple people answer the same phone. It works from your phone, it works for your desktop. You know, we have people in Brazil and Colombia answering those phones and booking those leads. OpenPhone makes it really easy. There's a link below if you want to learn more about OpenPhone. All right, next up is trade shows and local events. People make the mistake of thinking that they only want to go to home shows. But think about it like our customers go to lots of different shows. So for example, in the turf business, like we are going to boat shows because people who like boats generally have money. People have money, are our customers. We're going to gun shows because listen, people like guns, love the outdoors. We're going to pet shows because we're able to install pet friendly turf. Then obviously we're going to home shows. We'll probably go to some sort of flower show. We're going to go to lots of different ones that have our ideal customers. And the topic itself is kind of irrelevant, to be honest. As long as we think that we are going to get the chance to go face to face with people, show them some product, talk to them, build a little bit of relationship and then the goal is to book the estimate on the spot, not to collect the lead and call them later. But it's to like pull up their house, look at their project, have them fill out a form to say, all right, we'll be there Tuesday at 10am and here's a number and here's my number and I'm going to be the one to come and see you. Think about that like you start building a relationship one on one with somebody and then you are the same person that shows up. Like you are going to be way ahead any digital lead that they found of some stranger. You can also do local events. So for example, in my area there's a thing called Food Truck Fridays. So the third Friday of every month or whatever it is, a bunch of food trucks come, there's live music, a bunch of kids are like running around this big field and there are thousands of people that go to this thing. Right now it's mainly food and then there's some vendors selling trinkets and clothing and like all this stuff. But like, why not set up a booth to talk to somebody about getting solar panels or roofing or turf. We could have a little putting green. It says, hey, win put to win $25 or free beer or like whatever it is, like we can have a lot of fun with it. And it gets us out in the community and it gets us meeting people. And so later when they see our stuff, it's not the first time, right? It's not necessarily we want to sell something there, but we want to expose ourselves to the community. And local community events are some of the best ways to do that. Next is networking groups. So there's a bunch of different ones depending on where you live. But one of them is called bni, which is like Business Network International. There's the Chamber of commerce, There might be some local business community event. You're really gonna have to research your area, figure out what makes sense. But these relationships can lead to high quality, high trust referrals over time because you're out there with other business owners. And back to my like referral partner idea, this is kind of a subset of that, but it's more intentional in the group where you join the group with the intention of giving other people referrals. And so if you were to join one of these, you should really attend every meeting. You should have the goal of being the top refer and try to get everybody business because people are going to feel the need to pay you back if you do that. And so they can be draining. Some of them are low quality, some of them are not worth it. But try a couple of different ones. Figure out the one that works for you and then just go all in on that one. That is what I got. Those are the nine different ways that you're able to generate leads without meta, without Facebook. Like you can control these, you can take ownership of all these things and you can start tomorrow. Most of these things are free. If anything, you're going to invest a little bit of money into the paper, but your return on that time and that money is going to be significant. And so if you're looking to build an eight figure business and you want to learn more. Give me a follow. Every week I have new videos coming giving you strategies just like this one. And I'll see you on the next one. Cheers.