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To The Point - Home Services VIP Room Podcast
TTP Micro Episode: 2025 Partnerships & Free Competitor Analysis
00:20:57
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This is to the Point a Rhino experience voted one of the top home services, marketing and operations podcasts. Cutting through the and getting to the point.
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Hey, what's up to the Point listeners. It's your boy, Chris. Are you excited yet for the Thanksgiving season? It's right around the corner. Next week's episode is awesome. I know because we just recorded earlier today. This is going to be another micro episode and you know, I'm feeling a little bit grateful today. Tis the season to be grateful and for Thanksgiving, hopefully you get to be around some family and you get to relax a little bit and do the things that matter most. And that is spend time with your family and reflect on all the good things that you know that you've been able to accomplish or the good things that are ahead for you in your life, your business, whatever. I just want to share and again, this is a micro episode, so it's going to be pretty short and sweet. I just figure on this I'm going to share kind of what's on my mind and you know, for most of you listen to the podcast. Number one, thank you. I'm grateful and I continue to come back and listen. I rarely ever mention Rhino, which is the company that I founded with my wife back in 2007 and we've been doing Internet marketing specifically for home services since then. So you live and breathe in the same world that you all do. It's just that I have lots of views that I work with that I have to make sure we're paying attention to and a fantastic, sharp team that's doing it. So something I wanted to do is make sure that I share with you that though I never promote the business on the podcast because I don't want the podcast to be about that and it's not about that. I do think it's important to at least share with you that we are a hell a hell of a digital marketing partner and we've worked with some monster players over these years and had lots of incredible success. Still having lots of incredible success with some of the biggest players out there, some that have since sold their businesses. You know, I think we had 50 plus companies that are customers of ours that had a successful exit. Like, that's good. That's great news. That made me feel good. But what does that do? It also frees us up some room to work with some others in the H vac. Plumbing, electrical restoration. We've starting to see it take off quite a bit. Roofing. We've been doing quite a bit in roofing. Has been a lot of fun. But I thought, you know what, let me just take the time to, you know, to share with you a little bit of why and what you should expect. Because, you know, we have some really great opportunities to partner with some of you that are listening now, listen, not everybody's going to be a fit for Rhino. We are for sure an aggressive marketing agency. So, one, you can't just come to us and say, oh, I want to grow $5 million this year. Like, you have to actually have a plan to support that growth, like, you know, a good recruiting plan or whatever it is. So. But, you know, the market is aggressive and it's really hard and it's expensive. So this is where I'm incredibly grateful that we've merged, you know, Blue Corona into Rhino to become one. Become one behemoth major powerhouse, the most powerful digital marketing company for home services by combining not only our technology, but also our brains. Because Blue Corona also, it was started in 2007 by Ben, who also focused on the trade. So between the two, we have created a monster to compete with. And we did that because we want to be the most reputable digital marketing company for home services like the Go to. When you think about the goat, that's us. We're the goat. And we want to be the goat and continue to be the goat and whether you're a customer of ours or not, and to be a good, reliable source. And that's why I'm just saying we would love to be able to partner with more of you. And so something I want to give you all is my little early Christmas gift to you all is no strings attached. Okay? No strings attached. I want you to, if you write this down or whatever you do, put it in your phone. If you're. Whatever. I don't know what you're doing right now, but it's pretty simple. Go to free.rhinoss. that's R Y N O S S.com free.rhinoss.com and I want you to click on the link and we'll put it in the. In the content as well. So that way you can. You'll make it easy to click on the link and go to it from the posts, but go to it. It's going to ask you for the markets that you're in. And here's what I want to be able to share with you so that way you can be prepared for 2025 is I want to give you an un. Like an unbiased look at exactly where you stand versus your competitors. In a few of your markets. I can't do it in all of your markets. Okay. Because, like, I am giving this to you, and it does. You know, there is a manual process to this, but I think it'd be really cool for me to be able to give you guys this presence so that way you can see where you actually stand, regardless of listening to, you know, what agencies say. And they all have biased opinion. This is very unbiased. It's legit. Just, hey, let's take the top search terms for your industry that we know the homeowner is actively looking for when they have no business name in mind. And who comes up? Is it you? Is it you? Sometimes? Is it you? Never. If it's not you, who is it? I want to know. And we do that internally here anyway, so let me give that gift to you from to the point, you know, and that way you can kind of see where you stand. So now, how do you combat that? You know, a lot of this year has been about us talking about how expensive leads have gotten and, like, how it, you know, there's maybe less of the, you know, less volume. It's gotten harder, all these things. You know, what lead volume is still. There's still plenty of volume for you to go after. And you at least have to know where are you at and is there realistically an opportunity for you to go and get it? Because if you know that, then good. Maybe you don't. Maybe you actually have great rankings and you don't need anything and you're kind of just set. Well, that's good too. At least, you know, so that's why I'm giving it to you now. You know, I think most of you know, but I'm no longer the CEO of Rhino, which back in the day, the company was called Brickyard Marketing. For those who might have followed me from way back in the day, today it's called Rhino Strategic Solutions. But back in 2019, pre pandemic, I partnered with a guy by name of Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary V. And because I was. I felt like we weren't doing a great job on the social media side of things, which has changed a bunch since. And if you. If you're listening and you played ball in that field and you said, oh, I tried it and it sucked, or I tried it and it was good for a while, then it sucked. Like, there was a lot of change that happened over the last four years in social media, but arguably, Gary was like, the guy, the man. And I followed his podcast for A long time. And the fact that I even got him to partner with us was crazy. That's a whole other story. But I did, and I was able to learn from him. And that's when we went after a voice search, and we learned about how you could go after when people were doing voice search on their phones or voice search on Alexa for services. And we tried to play that game, know, be first to market, to play that game. And we did, because that's the stance we've always taken was how do we beat everybody else to market? Well, the game has changed. It's so much harder now. So the two teams combined, you know, has made us a powerhouse. But what I learned from Gary was how to just move fast, to make decisions fast, what to look for, you know, in trends and how to spot trends. He's such so good at pattern recognition. And then, you know, same thing now. Like, I just text him last weekend, you know, when the jets were playing the Cardinals and they lost. But I text them, you know, just to try and connect with them, thinking he was in town for the game. Point is, is like, I stay connected with him and with any of those that I think are major players or understand my space. Because I'm always trying to take my gut intuition from years of being in this business, listening to my team leaders, you know, whether it be paid ads or social or OTT or video production or whatever it is, email marketing, and then also listening to the market, you know, you, the listeners or the customers of ours. And always trying to be the best at what my new role is at Rhino, and that's Chief Strategy Officer, which I feel like I've always been. That's where I've always been the most comfortable is in that spot. I've worked with a lot of the most successful companies in the country. I have great relationships with them today, and I earned it. But the service I offer is digital marketing. And, you know, the mission statement is we exist to grow your business, period. That's what I love the most. That's what I care about the most. So take advantage of the. Of the free competitor analysis. This isn't a website analysis. We'll do that if you want, but you're gonna have to ask for it, right? Because I tell you, I instruct the team. When you send in the competitor analysis, we send it to you, so that way you can see. And if you need help understanding it or reading it, that's fine. They'll help you. But they are instructed to not sell a thing. So it's our gift to you. So that way you know where you stand. If you, if you say, hey, this can't be right, Chris, because I'm getting my ass kicked. Well, it is right, and maybe you are getting your ass kicked. And maybe the question you'd be asking is like, hey, I've been hearing from, you know, my agency that I'm doing really great. Well, maybe something's off. So if nothing else, maybe this exposes something and helps put you in a better position for next year. That's my hope. That's why I wanted to offer this thing up to you. It's why we built it in the first place. Thankfully, because of the merger of the two companies, we have a lot of staff and a lot of bandwidth to be able to do this for you. So I'm happy to help all of you that are listening and pay you back for listening with this. So take advantage of it. It's free cost, nothing and there's no strings attached. But if you are interested in working with Rhino man, I would be grateful if you give us a look. Especially if you're looking to have big growth next year. Because we're built for big growth. And to give you a little bit of an idea of some of the things that we do is yes, we build websites. They are custom built sites. By the time next year rolls around, we'll be able to build our custom sites in about a four to six week timeframe. How cool is that? Start to finish, boom. That's something we've been working on hard with our new merger to be able to build a website that can rank exceptionally well and build it fast and move quick. Because that's always the biggest complaint is everybody has to sit in the 12, 14, 15 week cycle of a website build and just, it's like, you know, you have to sit and wait. The hurry up and wait phase sucks. So for all of us, by the way, so that's coming quick, but we're going to continue to do paid ads and we're going to be able to do paid ads in a way that can fill your board automatically for you. So if you're running light on drain cleaning leads and as long as we can see what your three day board looks like, you know, or you're in service titan, if you're not in service titan, we might have to create a spreadsheet for you, you know, that you can update. But I want to be able to help, you know, do capacity management, you know, fill the board as you need it without you having to reach out and ask, right? Like that's a big deal. SEO is not dead or SEO is not going away. Like the map section, that stuff is so, so incredibly important still to this day. In the organic section is still incredibly important to this day. You gotta do it. Still the foundation of all things so important. Local service ads. If you're not doing it, you gotta do it. It's only pay to play. Like, you know, I hate some of the changes that Google's made recently where they can't, you know, they won't let us dispute the charges on your behalf. Now they take the process. So it's kind of bullshit. But you still gotta play the game and you should still do it because it is still, even though the cost per lead is going up, it's still very cost effective. So we can do that for you. A bigger piece of it too is our CSR call coaching has really taken off. We've kind of kicked it off with any hour up in Utah as like our guinea pig a couple of years ago, about a year and a half ago, incredibly successful. Then we rolled it out to We Care and then multiple other brands. It's just been incredibly successful. I'm so proud of that team. Because we've been traditionally listening to every single phone call for our customers. The teams know how to, how call handling needs to go, and as soon as they recognize an opportunity for call coaching and we send it over to, you know, the contractor first, doesn't matter if you got one person answering the phone or you got 50, but we can help with that and help kind of get them on a process, you know, with the right scripts, with the right, you know, accountability and tracking in place to help make them book as many phone calls as they can. Because every opportunity coming in right now is a cold mine, right? Especially at today's prices. But the CSR coaching is called traction. It's amazing. If you're asking, can you do that standalone? The answer is yes, we are prepared to do standalone going into 2025. We also do in house video production. Like, video is so big and people forget about it. If you haven't done much video production, whether it's creating a video that shows how you do an installation, or showing a video of your team, or showing a video of you guys doing community service, or even if it's one for recruiting purposes, where it's the owner talking about what it's like to work for their company, or it's one of your technicians who's saying, hey, since I've started Working for this company, you know, they, you know, the wages are great, the benefits are awesome. My family's happy, my wife's happy because I come home happier. Like, whatever. These videos, you know, give so much more to the person who's searching for it versus just, you know, content. I mean, think about how many times you read the information on a website. You look at like titles and images. How often are you really digging deep into the content? I'd say very rarely. So, you know, that's another thing is video production is huge. And video production is incredibly affordable. Like, we'll fly our crew out there that do everything for you from pre production all the way to post production. Meaning we'll script the whole thing for you, we'll prep you ahead of time, we'll fly in, we'll knock it out, we'll come back, we'll edit it, and when you see it, you'll be like, holy shit, that's my team. We look amazing. Especially if you've had a rebrand done, get some new video done. And video is very helpful for a ranking factor. So even if it's how to videos, how to videos of things that you do every day in the field are game changers and most aren't doing it. So guess what? That means there's opportunity for you to make yourself different. OTT advertising over the top, that's streaming video. So if you're watching YouTube, Hulu, whatever it is, and you see those streaming videos ahead of time, you know, the person watching it has to watch at a certain amount of time before you actually get charged for it. So which means they have to see that video and then it's also trackable so you can see who comes from what. So Chad and I, for most of you guys know, my co host and I have a roofing company that we started from scratch in Indiana. And so we, we did OTT right out of the gate to try and, you know, in just three markets. So literally Chad and I were recording our commercials and it was like, hello Carmel. Hello Noblesville. Hello Fisher. Is like, you know, because you can be specific in those ads. You can, because it's only going to those folks in those zip codes in those locations. But you can be specific and they get a lot of great traction and we've had a lot of good, we've had a lot of good luck with it this year. So we do all that stuff in house now too. But most importantly is our Rhino Tracks 2.0 real time reporting that has full integration with ServiceTitan and some of my buddies that you guys know have been on this podcast before or they call the LSD crew until we change the name. But these guys are all high performing big businesses who also aren't afraid to give me feedback over the years and tell me all the things that they wish that their marketing agency would do or if it's me that I would do. And we build these things and the other thing I want to be able to do is I thought we should, you know, not only should we create this Rhino Tracks 2.0, which we have today, that does real time reporting for every lead source, attaches the revenue that you have in Service Titan to that lead source. So we know if it was a booked opportunity or a missed opportunity. What was the cost, you know, per lead? What was the cost per customer acquisition? How's plumbing perform? How are you performing in plumbing in one market versus the next? Like everything and it's real time. Like that's awesome. You can actually manage the business. But how if you wanted to report a certain way that we didn't have it in the 300 different plus metrics that we have that we can report to you to make it easy. Our commitment is to build it for you. That's being a good partner, that's being elite in an elite digital marketing agency is if there's a report that we don't have, we will build it for you. So that way you get it. And it connects the dots between marketing and Service Titan, which is still where a shitload of you miss the. You have a gap of things that can be fixed that are in between those two things. You look at Service Titan and what's in it as a holy grail, but you forget that those CSRs can change that leads. Lead attribution's incorrect so many times we go in there and find that. So we brought that service in house as well. So to continue to help our customers, it was how can we bring in a Service Titan product specialist in house to help find errors and correct them faster. Good news is Rhino tracks 2.0 catches Lead attribution errors before they ever get changed in Service Titan. So it makes it much easier. So even if somebody changes something, we'll be able to catch it and catch it fast and be able to identify which CSR handled that call and why did they change it. Extra layer of accountability right there. Because we. You are making very important decisions banking on those numbers being correct. Am I right? It's like you have 15 pairs of eyes looking at all this shit all the Time. Well, let's leverage our technology to do those things. And your account managers. Right, so that's what we've built over here, is set the bar. You know, I'll run hard at this thing for another five years until I'm 50 years old. But my ultimate goal is I want to be, I want to leave the legacy of like, this was the standard, Chris. Rhino was the standard, is the standard for agencies when it comes to home services. And I hope I'm doing that now. And I hope some of you that are, you know, that are customers of ours now, you know, think that now. And people that I've spent time with the industry see, like, that's what I've always strived to be. I never focused on the revenue of the business. I focused on how can I keep doing, keep growing, keep a good reputation and just keep being like the go to guy for all things when it came new to digital marketing, the guy that you could trust. And I'm that guy still to this day because I care about the industry. But that's a legacy I want to leave and that's the legacy I'm going to leave. So you can always count on me to share everything that I got on the podcast or bring it up, you know, and continue to bring on my friends or other business leaders in the industry who are doing different things, so I can bring them on here to share with you. But at the end of the day, if you need a really good digital marketing partner that you can trust, you can trust me, you can trust my team, you can trust Rhino. And I want to be a part of your success story. So I would welcome you to reach out to our team and connect and at least see is it a fit? It might not be, but let's at least get together and see if whatever your 2025 plan is, that you can't bring on the best in the business, Rhino alongside you to partner and help you accomplish it. So listen, Thanksgiving is coming up, like I said, and I want to give thanks to all of you for the consideration of partnering with my company, Rhino. I also want to say thank you to all of you who continue to listen to this podcast week in and week out. I'm so incredibly grateful. It continues to grow and get bigger and bigger and bigger and it blows my mind. The last thing I'll say is, you know, if you've not left us a review for the podcast, it would mean the world to me if you would. I'd never ask for it. I always forget. But you can just go to the Apple Store or go to like, just leave us a review that would mean the world to me. I really appreciate that. So as you prepare for Thanksgiving, I hope that you do take some time, you know, to slow down a bit and to just enjoy the time with your family, you know, your, your friends. And at the end of the day, those are the things that that matter the most. So love all you. Appreciate you. Thank you for listening to another fantastic episode, a micro episode of to the point you don't got to do everything, but you got to do something. No zero days.