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To The Point - Home Services VIP Room Podcast
Yelp Responds To Contractors' Biggest Complaints | Part 2
00:42:06
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- [00:00]
A
What's up? To the Point listeners, welcome back. This week, I know you've been waiting for it. The second part of the episode with the COO of Yelp, Jed Nachman, and Chris Baish, the CEO of Hatch. This second part is so damn good, I cannot wait for you to hear it. So dig in and enjoy.
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B
What's the password?
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C
Don't talk about it, be about it.
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B
Welcome in to the to the Point Home Services VIP room, where we invite you, the listeners in to hang alongside some of the biggest, baddest and most successful VIPs of the home services industries. You never know which surprise guest will show up next. So let's get this party started.
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A
I am going to transition to lead transparency. And by the way, this is like synonymous to third party at lead AGs. I would say, like, I think this is a. Or even marketing in general. Like, through, like, I ran a digital marketing agency for a long time, almost 20 years, you know, big agency. And I mean, we kind of dealt with some of these things at times, which is crazy because all we did was leverage Google. But it's around lead transparency. So I'm just going to read the question as is off the paper, and once I summed it all up. And again, all these questions came from our listeners and from the industry. So around lead transparency, it says, how does Yelp define a lead? And what metrics should contractors use to determine whether Yelp is actually delivering a return on investment?
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D
Yeah, I will. I'll take the first part of it. Actually, we have the expert of experts on the call right now. And Chris, because that's what, you know, that's what he's doing, he's ingesting these leads from multiple different sources. You know, listen, that is a Matt. You know, everybody defines a lead differently. Somebody's going to be really happy when they get a phone number. Somebody's going to be happy when they can go back and forth on a digital platform. Somebody's going to want to, you know, a text string. Somebody's going to want to have an actual closed deal to define a lead. So, as you know, there's a very wide range in terms of how people define leads. What we want to do is take really material intent. People don't come to Yelp. You don't go to Yelp and type in, you know, plumbing repair for fun. You do it because you actually have a need. Now, our job and where we need to get better and are getting a lot better is to make sure we're matching that lead in the right way. You know, one of the things that I'm most excited about is our Yelp Assistant consumer product, which originally rolled out services and now is across all categories. But it's an interface where you can go in and get really, really detailed and nuanced based on all that content that we have around what your project is. You can send in pictures, you can ask multiple questions, and what that Yelp Assistant is going to do is match you. I call it the needle in the haystack, because you can imagine how many different service pros we have that specialize in different things. And this Yelp Assistant is designed to make sure we're matching you with the very, very best pro. So that is always a continual problem in the industry. We're working it. We're using AI in the back end with our ad system and our. And our algorithms for just natural, organic search. And this Yelp Assistant thing is really cool and is going to allow these service pros, our service pros, you know, to get a better match over time. And it's a. It's a magical experience. You should all go out and do it. I just did it for restaurants. You know, you can go say, I need a restaurant that has a phenomenal wine list but has high chairs for my children. And by the way, you better watch parking on that day because there's an event at Arrowhead Stadium that you might run into traffic with. It's that deep and detailed, and I think that's kind of a proxy for how people are going to go search for information. It's not just going to be like Plumber generic in Denver. It's going to be, what's my project? How deep can we get into it? What are the actual specifics behind it? Can that service pro serve it or not? And you got to have that corpus of content in order to do that. But, Chris, you can talk a lot about. I know. How do you define a lead?
- [04:01]
E
I mean, I think the definition of a lead from Yale perspective, you kind of hit on the other question that you guys had, which is, do I know if they're good or not? I think is pretty interesting. And, you know, I. That's sort of at the core of what, you know, Hatch is. We're an AI lead management platform, really, to help home service businesses convert these things into appointments that then turn into revenue. And so the contractors that I see that take an approach almost like your. Your ad agency, which is like, I'm going to track this thing from the source to. Did. Did they even reply to me if they did reply to me, did they book an appointment? If they booked the appointment, did they end up closing, becoming a closed deal and how much was the deal worth? And I've got to map that whole thing out. And if I can do that, I can start to say, well, Yelp works for me or doesn't, or Google LSA works for me or doesn't. And I think the folks that I've seen go from sort of maybe one or two trucks to like 50, do a really good job becoming a marketing and sales analytics. Like, they think about this stuff and they track this stuff and they ab test this stuff and they, they, they even employ people to monitor and, and interact with the AI to care about. Like it's their job. They incentivize them. And then all of a sudden that gets better. Because, you know, these lead ads, man, I mean, you guys know this one lead might go to five people. How do you deal with that? And that could really. You, that could be a shitty lead or it could be a really great lead, depending on how you manage it, I think is what I see. Yeah.
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C
So is, is the evolution with Hatch, with you guys in this area, from that, to help manage that experience for contractors through Yelp, is that kind of the model? Like, is that going to be that or is that a secondary service? Like, how does that, how does that actually integrate into that process, into the future? For people that are curious about that, like, what does that mean for somebody like me that, let's say, isn't really using Yelp and isn't using Hatch? I mean, I use similar stuff. Right, but what does that look like? How would that benefit?
- [06:07]
E
It's a good question. We're an AI lead management platform and agnostic to any lead source. We do not care. There's tons of them. We partner with Angie, Google Yelp. We, we are going to continue to do that because our mission is high conversion for you guys and understanding which lead sources give the best return on investment. And so. But you know, through our partnership specifically with Yelp, I'm also excited about, we, you guys talked about like transparency over if it's a lead or not. You know, Yelp just announced on, you know, unmasked leads was basically, you now get the phone number of the consumer as they're reaching out to you. Why is that important? Because when we look at the back end data, it actually takes three attempts, phone, text, possibly two texts and email to get a lead convert. So you need this contact information. You got to work them, you know, almost like a B2B company.
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C
Okay.
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D
Yeah. I, I guess I would just add, you know, you think about that expertise being in house at Hatch and we have, you know, all these service professionals, some may not be at the level where they need a hatch in order to kind of manage their leads, but you can bet when you look at our roadmap going forward, do we want to put those tools in the hands of our pros who are maybe just starting out, maybe you're not the lead volume where they need to kind of buy an entire enterprise type hatch system. And that expertise is really, really important for us. We've run in the front end and the top of the funnel and how do you drive leads and, and we think, you know, kind of the most important thing there is. Okay then how do you deal with lead and make sure it converts into business? And you know, across the, you know, millions of businesses we have on Yelp, we think that's going to be really valuable going forward. And obviously to have some expertise in the house, you know, like Chris is, is incredible and will be influencing kind of how we look at our product roadmap going forward.
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A
So, so quick I want to transition into this geography. It's come up a few times this, this geographic performance perspective, you know. So Chad and I also have a roofing business in Redbird Roofing in Indianapolis, Indiana. And the way we look at it as a much, much smaller company, you know, sub 10 million versus their big. These guys business, big businesses is we're kind of at the spot now where the machine is built and we're just trying to get lead source from everywhere in and it's how can we leverage everything? Like how can we, how can we leverage any third party lead act that makes financial sense? Because we're track like to Chris's point, like we're tracking it all the way through. And we want this to be a great option for us too. We're in the state of Indiana and so it's, it's, you know, you guys know who's in the state of Indiana, right? Like okay, so it's not, you know, so we, we, we, you know, it's is that an option is. So when we're looking at all the things it's like let's talk about geographic performance. I think it's important. We mentioned the west Coast a lot of times. I am out in Phoenix. One of our really good friends is Ishmael Valdez. Owned a company called Next Gen. He would swear by his Yelps, like by the Yelp lead service that came. But he's down in, you know, Southern California. He built a big hundred million dollar business fast. And I guarantee you he gives you all, he gives you a ton of credit. Not all because he's him, but he'll give you a lot of credit, I'll tell you that much. But let's just talk about that. Why does, what does Yelp seem to be incredibly effective in some markets but then non existent in others? And like, and what, what drives the difference? It can't just be brand. I get that's got to be some of it. But like what else? What help us understand?
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D
Yeah, kind of. If you look at the evolution of kind of Yelp over time, we certainly, there are some geographic areas where we started out really, really strong and that momentum has continued. Right. You know, California being a great example, some of the west, you know, you know, some of the major larger cities. Now we do have presence in all of these cities. We have, you know, and, and it, it is like any marketplace, you got to have the supply and demand so you need the consumers in order to drive the pros. And you know, we look for equilibrium certainly on our, you know, kind of what are our corporate priorities? We want to make sure we're getting stronger in all of, of those markets today you can still go in Indianapolis and find a bunch of home services pros that are, you know, either advertising or interacting with Yelp on the free tools. And you see a lot of consumers are coming in. So you know, whatever proportion of those, you know, 10 million leads a month that are coming through, they are coming through, you know, your, your Columbuses and your Indianapolis. And we feel good, we do think there's a lot of room to grow there and we've got to do a good job, you know, starting and making sure we're, we're monitoring the dynamics of that marketplace in order to grow it. But you can be very, very successful in those markets. And I would add that like you almost get first mover advantage if you do a really good job in those markets. And everybody wants an alternative to LSA and you know, but, but it is really important to us. I would just also add the first place people go, you know, it's kind of the services comes after restaurants, right from an interaction perspective. And so the pattern that we see is kind of people discover Y in Los Angeles and where do I go find a burrito or take, you know, my spouse out for a date. And over time as they learn more about the platform, we do a good job of funneling people into, okay, you know, it's spring cleaning time. Do you need to go out and, you know, have your. Have your, you know, lawn system repaired? And so that's kind of the model. And we continue to, you know, make sure that's a priority for us. So I'm not trying to go, you know, it just takes a while for all of that consumer demand. And when the consumer demand comes, the supply comes.
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F
Yeah. One of the questions I would have, because as we're talking here, I'm getting more and more interested in Yelp and I'm like, I'm going to figure this damn thing out, for God's sakes. How do I do this? And I think that it would be interesting to hear from your guys perspective, what are Aaron and I doing to be successful on this? And I guess probably better said is like, where should we start? Like, if I have a low rating right now, I've got bad reviews on there. But I want Yelp to be a part of the business. With the amount of leads that you guys say you have rolling through there, I'd be an idiot to not engage with Yelp and try to figure out where I should go. Like, where would you recommend the two of us knuckleheads start?
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D
You're not knucklehead. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, it starts with just. This is going to sound so cliche. I hate it even coming in. You just got to engage with the system.
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E
Right.
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D
Like, there are so many things that we offer. You know, I, you know, I don't know what percentage of your listeners know how many products that we have released out into. Into the marketplace. I think I said 200 since 2020.
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A
But we have things like name them all. J. I will.
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C
You know, this is a perfect example. Name them all. But also, I think that's what Chad's point is that you just said. People don't know.
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D
I'm.
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C
I'm the CMO of our company and, and I know I do all the marketing I run. I have no clue. No, there's no. Been no interaction for me from Yelp to be educated sent like. So I don't even know how I would unless I personally go on a mission to go find it. Right. Yeah. And that I should think that. Right.
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D
I should fire my sales team if that's the case. No. You know, well, I mean, I'm a
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C
large company chiller, Z. I don't hear from anybody from. From Yelp to tell me that. And I'm not trying to get your sales team.
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D
That's our fault example, Right.
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C
Of like, well, we don't know. So, like you. You think the smaller guys are going to know? Probably not. Maybe. Maybe they're more engaged because they can, they feel like they can leverage that against us. Right.
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E
Which they are.
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A
Maybe we approach a question this way. I agree with all this. I think it's made what, like, what are the top performers, what are the service companies, like, the top performers doing? Like, what are they doing that's making them on, you know, but now this gives you an opportunity to not have to give the cliche answer. But like, if you can talk about. Obviously you can't talk about all 200 products, right? Yeah. And that would be a great way to make people drop off real quick. But let's get to like, what are, what are they? What are some of those things? Like, I think we're genuinely saying, cool, we're curious, we want to take advantage. What, like, what are the best doing?
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D
Yeah. You know, a few of the examples that I loved, you know, we have our Yelp Guarantee program where Yelp is going to back up to $2,500 for every project that you go out and do. And so you can see,
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A
you can
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D
sign up for the Yelp Guarantee program and we're going to back those service pros. So that's an example of one of the things we have portfolios where you can do before and after in a really great way. Response times, really, really important. You all understand that's publicly facing. If you respond quickly, that's going to be like one of the biggest factors in making sure that you get leads. Response quality, we coach you through response quality, you know, making sure that you're talking about already understanding the information that that consumer has. Has provided. We have intelligent lead qualification. There are, you know, my favorite is, you know, just making sure that all of your profile is filled out in a really accurate way. All of our free tools, it doesn't cost a dollar to go do it and that you're responding to reviews, you're using all of the free products and that's going to tend to give you a phenomenal baseline when you need to be found not only on Yelp and now that we have these partnerships, OpenAI and Meta and Apple and you know, that's going to carry through there as well. Because I do think this thing is going to change very, very quickly. It's not going to happen overnight. But we all know in our personal lives how we're starting to discover things and it's. I need a plumber who specializes in this by within the next hour, what's going to come up And I think by doing those basics, you're going to put yourself in a position to be cited by some of those major LLMs in a big way. So those are just some of the, some of the things having honest, transparent communication style with those customers through the Yelp platform or when you get them off Yelp, obviously really important as well. Chris, you see a lot of this stuff as well on the back end? I don't know, you know, do you have any other, other advice?
- [16:21]
E
And maybe not just on Yelp, but what I do see a lot of the folks that are trying to break in with lead sources in, in their area is they're setting a budget for each one of these lead sources and then they're mapping out what the customer journey needs to look like and they're tracking it to the end and they're trying to understand, you know, do these leads even reply is one of the first things I see a lot of people miss because reply rate is huge. Are they, are these customers engaging? You know, I see like, I don't know if you guys do Facebook leads at all, but like Facebook leads, sometimes the reply rates fairly low. So you actually have to respond to those leads like five times on average what we see in the back end. Like so if you are, if you're on a cadence set up either through a human or AI to touch those things five times, you might think Facebook sucks and you can't grow that way. You actually can, right? So you know, I just think lead management is a huge part of it. Pick your sources, set a budget, set a map and then measure each part of it to make sure that you want to invest the next source. Sort of what I see play out
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F
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- [17:45]
A
Listen up VIPs. I know you think I'm incredibly good looking. You think Chad's pretty good looking? Aaron, he's okay, he's the older one of the group but you know, he's a pretty good looking for a, a 50 year old man. You know what's not good looking sometimes to you contractors and to you listeners and that's Email marketing.
- [18:00]
G
Why?
- [18:01]
A
If you actually knew how to do it properly, you think it was incredibly sexy. Well, send it email marketing. One of our newest sponsors has got it figured out for the trades. They specialize in the trades. That's why I invested in it. That's why Tommy with a one garage door uses them. Chad with Premium brothers, Aaron with Eco Ghetto. Like, like, these guys don't just use companies that suck. They use companies that actually work and using their existing contact list, spend all that money to get the customer, yet you do a shitty job of monetizing the list. Use, send it email marketing to help you today. It's a low investment, high return or your money back. Stop around and get it done.
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C
In that conversation, just curious with the same Chad, I don't know what you do here, but does Yelp have a spirit, an integration for like a speed to lead function?
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D
Absolutely. We have our Request a quote product, which, if you go on any Yelp services page, you're going to see, you know, request a quote, and on each one of those folks who are participating in Request a quote, you're going to see your average response time that, that, you know, we're publishing out to our consumers, actually. And it's a big factor. And that is one of the key things, you know, what I didn't say before actually should have been very plain. Like, go claim your page on Yelp is the first thing. Like, as a business owner, go in claim your page. That's kind of, that, that's kind of the basics that I forgot to go over. But there's a lot of free tools that allow you to do it. But the speed delete is an important part of, of, you know.
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E
Yeah.
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C
Guys. Anybody listening? If you haven't claimed your own Yelp page, then I don't know where you're at at this point. Right? Like, yeah, let's reset where we're at. But. And, but what? Like, let's be honest. Come on, come on, contractors, guys, through all of our own stuff. Like, let's, let's do those things to win first. Right? But I'm at speed to lead integration from an AI. Like, can AI get that speed to lead and follow up, Chris? Because I don't know that. Like, we do that with a lot of other services right now. We have a lot of, you know, AI speed, delete, follow up, text message.
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E
You can. Yeah, this is. And it's not just hatch either. Like, they, they have an. Oh, you know, their API is open. That API passes through not just the contacts information, but Also, the. The services they requested. Okay. So that content is there, and AI can use that to get back to the customer quickly, continue to follow up and book the appointment.
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C
Okay. So I don't think. We don't. We definitely don't have. We have a lot of other servers. I don't think we have anything with Yelp set up on that. Chad, do you?
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F
No, I don't have. I've got my profile pulled up. Just taking notes over here. Just. We got a little project ahead of us.
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E
Send you my number after this.
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D
Yeah, we. We've done a lot of work on the. On the. On the CRM integrations. And, you know, in certain cases, we have, you know, folks will use directly through our Yelp Leads API. And then in certain cases, we'll. You use Zapier to make sure that it's, you know, compatible with Ever CRM. That was one of the biggest complaints we've had, and probably one of the biggest areas of progress is how do we take friction out of that process to drive leads in the format that you want into your systems?
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C
Okay, that's good to know.
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A
Hey, this is great. This is why you bring on the. The COO and not the CEO. No disrespect, man. You got the guy who's in the functionality. That was a really great stint there for just a second. We were talking about through there.
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B
That.
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A
That's really encouraging. You know, these just things that I didn't even know was an option and the contractors didn't know it was an option. And I want to go ahead and continue to segue. I think we brought. Probably got close to about, you know, maybe 10 minutes or so left to record on here. So I want to get to some of these other questions, and we've talked a lot about this around the trust factor, and it's just, you know, what's Yelp doing to improve trust and the overall experience for service business owners? I. And here's. Here's actually, after the conversation we've had, I kind of want to ask it differently. I think this is a step in accomplishing that. Right. Like, we're trying to have really open, honest conversations about frustrations, about things we don't know as a service industry that we can leverage in the. In the Yelp process. I think everybody would agree great if this thing worked and we could get leads, and they're good leads, and we know they're definitive leads that came from Yelp, and we have a good roi. We continue to use them over and over again, and then we continue to spend as much as we can because the ROI is there. Like, that's the easy answer. But it, what there's. This is a one, like maybe, maybe we do a follow up. Maybe we do a follow up at some point to say, okay, hey, we're X amounts months later and this is, you know, and Chad and Aaron, you know, launch these things and we can give an update. Okay, cool. There's two hits in like a certain time frame. But there's got to be like more communication that. Now I mentioned you have, I'm not sure what you call it, but you have a service pro, you know, advisory counselor, whatever you call. I think Josh Campbell's on that, guys, just by the way down in Texas. I think he participates in that. I can't remember if that is or isn't, but I know he's with everything.
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C
How's this guy get involved with everything?
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A
I don't know, he's. But he leverages, you know, Yelp for his business down there and he's an advocate. But like, what's the, like, what was the ongoing stuff that you guys are trying to do to just continue to build trust, you know, in this home? Because it's, you guys know, it's such a steep hill and you just gotta keep climbing it. There's no other way around. You just gotta keep going.
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D
Yeah. You know, the first thing I guess I'll. Just for the world to hear, I'm screaming it. We are committed to services.
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E
Right.
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D
You've seen it at least in our financial results over the past seven years in terms of what's happened. But we haven't done a good enough job of getting out there and really talking about what makes us a services focused company. You know, Yelp has a lot of different, you know, we serve a bunch of different verticals. The average user wouldn't love it. So. And with that comes education and so, you know, we need you. We have been listening. I think Chris mentioned before, you know, we went out with unmasked number with mass numbers and you know, we, you know, got through that for a period of time and realized it wasn't going to work for our customers. What are the like kind of genesis points of. Yeah, that I just want to like it's important too because we always built for like kind of in our first years for like the mom and pop and then over time what. And we still want to serve that very, very well. Like it's important. Those are the future 10 million, 15, $20 million businesses. But like multi location or you know, larger service pros were like, that's like a second half of Yelp history thing, and we were behind the eight ball in that. And so our tools, you know, have evolved, and, like, over the last two years, we got really, really ser. And that just doesn't apply to, like, the massive players. It applies to, like, hey, I'm kind of. That what we call local popular moving, you know, regional growing really quickly. You know, perhaps there's private equity involved at some level. And so, like, that is kind of right in the bullseye of where we want to be, and we got have to do a better job. We have services summit. We've done a bunch of events. We show up at the service Titan stuff. We do the. You know, and so you hopefully will see us be much more front and center in terms of, like, taking the leadership role there.
- [25:09]
A
Good thing you guys got some deep pockets if you're going to Pantheon, because that doesn't. It's a vendor, trust me. Been there, done that. Sorry, I didn't mean to cut off your flow. That's just the first thing I thought about when you said, yeah, anyway, hey,
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C
Pantheon has become a giant thing, man. And, you know, you know, I got a lot of love for Ara Bah. That's a giant event for home service. I mean, I think there was, what, over 3,000 people at the last one. I mean, it's just been huge, huge event.
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A
You guys should get involved in the freedom event. The home service freedom event. That's at the end of the year. That's another big one.
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E
Yeah.
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A
Chad, I don't know if you want to keep us. Keep us rolling.
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F
I think Jed kind of hit on. Kind of hit on this. You know, I think, you know, every business looks back. I know all three of us for sure. I'm guessing you two as well. But, like, if you. If you're having to look back and kind of what you've learned. You mentioned kind of the, you know, the mass numbers, the, you know, catering to the big business, too. Like, what are maybe some of the other things that you guys would have maybe done differently if you had to start it today? Like, what would that. What would that look like? Or things that you learned along the way? Like, God dang, I know. Me, it's like, God, if I would have started that 10 years ago, I wonder where we would have been. I'm glad I just learned it today.
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D
Yeah, you know, I think we probably, you know, specifically in services would have been, you know, a lot more focused on, you know, some of Our, some of our larger customers, not to the expense of the smaller ones, but you know, really making sure that we had a lens for that, you know, when we started. You know, in a lot of ways it's really weird. We are starting our business over today. I mean, you know my world, you know, when you get out of a day a, I'm as excited as I've ever been, you know, based on a lot of the AI stuff that's happening and kind of the way this whole industry is going to change. I just, I had a startup come in a couple of weeks ago and talk to us and they were you probably, I don't know if you know or not, but I'm not going to mention the name. But they're able to go in and get housing plans based on publicly available data so that if you're an electrical contractor and you're going in, you know, before you even pick up the lead, like what the framework of the house is based on public records and like my mind was blown and you can imagine like how much better does quoting get? How do you take that out of the experience? How you can you kind of make. So like every day I'm seeing so much innovation in the space and I'm sure like everybody like it's, it's both overwhelming and exciting and so like when you ask the question like what would I do differently? Like we have that opportunity to kind of do it today and, and, and that's like what we're thinking about, like what does discovery for local pros look like in three years from now? I don't have a crystal ball, but I know it's not going to look like it does today. And so you know, how do we bring along and first of all our customers educating us and us bringing them along as well and so that we're kind of going in tandem down this path as opposed to being in like you know, disparate paths and not being able to like attack this thing together because it's going to be huge.
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F
For all of us
- [28:14]
G
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- [29:36]
C
I want to bring up one thing on there, Chris, I'm just from Time, but I want to ask a question for you because I do think that all of this, this is changing. I think we talk about this on, on, on this show a few times actually. AI right, zero click where the world's changing customer center has work. Like, how do you see a Yelp? And you know, these platforms that are similar to Yelp, I don't go through all the names of them actually showing up and winning in that area and actually being value propositions because as we go along, like our own content is going to matter a little bit more. The reviews are going to matter, the content's going to matter. But I think over time, like, that's a. So how do you guys kind of help win that or potentially win that? And you know, and why pick Yelp over other ones in this game?
- [30:16]
D
Right?
- [30:17]
C
Because there's gonna be a lot of them. And, and there's some people are gonna be winners and some people are gonna be losers on this one. And that, I mean, that's just the hard truth. And what's. What this game that's changing. So. Yeah, I guess I'll leave that to you right there.
- [30:30]
D
Yeah, we, you know, there's really two ways that we're gonna do it, you know, on Yelp. You know, I mentioned Yelp Assistant before. It's awesome. Go use it for restaurants, you know, you could. And then try it for, you know, a services business as well. And, and, and you'll see. But so there's the, you know, we get a phenomenal amount of internal traffic that comes to Yelp by choice, organically. We want to provide the best experience that is kind of aiified on there. And then the second way is we got to make sure that we're partnering with the best external companies as well. And I can tell you, like, you know, it has been amazing how much attention has been paid to us from some of the bigger players and we've signed actual deals with, I mentioned, it's probably the third time I mentioned it, but all of the big ones, including OpenAI and I think the reason is local is really hard and the nuance is really hard and service offerings are really hard and getting that content is really hard. It's just a hard thing as a massive player for you. You know, what we hope and are going to continue to do is make sure that our content is really valuable for them. So it's a two pronged approach. What can we do on Yelp and what can we do off of Yelp and that ultimately will help our customers. If you just do the basics, claim your page, make sure that your hours are correct, make sure that your service description is correct, all that stuff, you're going to have a better chance of showing up in the, in, in, in the LLMs. And you know, because our reputation has, over time they, they, they want to kind of bring in our content. So it's a really cool, I don't know actually how it plays out over time. These things change so quickly. But you know, we believe that that is the strategy it's going to get and, and, and that the folks who do a good job kind of setting themselves up will end up showing up on, on, on a lot of those outside engines.
- [32:21]
C
Will Yelp have a way eventually to manage and tell us what, what's coming in from LLMs to you guys and actually produce that information to contractors or your, your customer base, I guess, like us, for example?
- [32:32]
D
Yeah, yeah. Yes, I believe so. I don't want to go on record of saying, you know, I can tell, I can tell you this, I'll just tell you, I'll just tell you a story, I'll tell you a story that happened recently. I'm not naming names on this, but a larger private equity owned, you know, a group came to us and said, can you just do kind of a report card on how we're doing on AIO and geo and you know, what are the signals that we can see on our side that would make you more effective in that, that and so that's not been productized yet. And I'm not, I'm not in charge of product. I have some influence here and there, but I, I can imagine that will become a much, much more important in the same way that SEO became a massive, you know, it's going to be how do you kind of peel that onion back and understand what are the factors that are going to make me more likely to show up and, and and why. And so nothing to announce officially, but it's certainly on our mind and, and something that we're talking about in, in the 4WAL. Some let's call it dabbling in that thus far.
- [33:38]
A
I love dabbling.
- [33:39]
C
Yeah.
- [33:41]
A
By the way, you were on record just so that was really an off the record.
- [33:48]
C
On the record.
- [33:48]
D
Yeah.
- [33:49]
C
What Chris does now. Unemployed. Chris dabbling.
- [33:52]
A
I just dabble in that, you know. Thanks Aaron. I appreciate that, buddy. Okay, so. So we're, you know, pretty deep into this thing too. I want to try to go ahead and wrap it up and one. And I appreciate you guys, both to you, Chris and Jed, you know, for just taking all the questions, giving your, you're giving your answers and, and I love that you position this Jed. And like hey, yeah, we actually have the opportunity right now to, to maybe reset differently with what, you know, now to Chad's point on this question. So I appreciate that and I would think that the listeners would appreciate that because it's. If we all can get this thing to work for us, great. And if we get there by answering all the hard questions, great. Who cares how we get there? It's just that we get there that matters. Right? Like that. That's, that's the game. Because with the volume of leads coming in for service contractors, to Chad's point, again, there's, we got to figure this thing out and if we can do it with you, like let's, let's leverage those things.
- [34:45]
C
So yeah, Chad, call me so we can figure this thing out together.
- [34:49]
F
I've got a great, a great.
- [34:51]
C
Now we had judge phone number too, an email. So guess who else is.
- [34:54]
D
Yeah, yeah, I would follow up. I'll make sure I get. But my, the, the best and brightest from our side. Just to kind of walk you through, through everything.
- [35:00]
C
And I would greatly appreciate that. That'd be very helpful.
- [35:03]
F
I've got a great, great title for the follow up episode how we figured out Yelp.
- [35:10]
E
What a thumbnail
- [35:14]
C
sponsored by Yelp.
- [35:19]
A
Well, we just call this one to Yelp or not to Yelp and then that's the follow up. Well, I think this, I mean listen, all jokes aside, that's a really great, great like legit opportunity from two big players who have influence and, and I think that's a realistic, a realistic thing that we, we could do together because we want to, we want to figure it out and we know more now than we know, you know, an hour and 15 minutes ago. So. So boys, I appreciate you coming onto the firing squad and taking it like Champs number one. And giving us just the time and even the attention to the service contractors. Like, I mean, listen, and there's so much. We're still. There's a ton of work in progress, right. And there's still going to be a ton of people that, you know, you're just never going to make happy. Right? But there's legit opportunity here to be figured out. And. And my job, I feel, you know, as a host of this show, is to try and bring the worlds together, to create opportunity for the home services contractors to scale. And this is a tool that they can use as long as it's one that they believe in. So my hope from this is that we were able to accomplish a little bit of curiosity today, right, To. To maybe make those who haven't tried Yelp, to maybe consider it based on what they've learned or those who are, you know, naysayers, to maybe recon. Reconsider. So one thing I asked your team for. Yeah, one thing I asked your team for.
- [36:34]
C
I do. I feel way more confident from today what we could do. I definitely do.
- [36:39]
A
And to. And to Jed's point, you know, about, you know, listening to the. The feedback, I asked for a couple things from. From these guys. Team, Team and jet. I don't know if you know this or don't know it, but your team knows, so I'm just gonna roll out here. Okay. Number one is I asked for a specific line of communication for our listeners to be able to reach out to you guys, and maybe not to you guys specifically, Right. But to the appropriate team to help answer some of these questions. Right. Who will have, you know, a. To just to give feedback. And it's a. And I'll share these in the show notes and the posts and things like that.
- [37:11]
C
But.
- [37:11]
A
But the email is listener, listener feedbackelp.com listener feedbackelp.Com so pretty straightforward. So if you're listening right now and you have more questions, you want to dig deeper into something, boom, there's your email. Now, Yelp's responsibility is to not leave you in the inbox for a week, right? Like, give a little bit of grace, right? Because I'm sure there's probably gonna be a ton of stuff coming through, and I don't know how many people you have manning that. And. And. And Chris, if it's AI, don't say anything to anybody else, okay? Let's just keep it our little secret. Speed delete.
- [37:42]
C
Right?
- [37:44]
A
Exactly. Prove it. And then the last thing I asked for, and selfishly, and I know this kind of actually goes against, you know, what some people do. But I say if someone's curious, you know, let's see if we can give some sort of unique offering on this podcast to maybe push him over edge, to give it another shot. Right. I'm not always a fan of like giving things away for free because people will take advantage of it and ends up like, okay, they take advantage of it till it's not free anymore. They don't really measure the success of it appropriately, like all the things. But I wanted something. So I'm going to read this out loud and I'm going to tell you where you can go and get it. So to listeners, number one, you've got a feedback loop, right? We've given you the email for it. Number two was an offering. I'm just going to read it directly or specifically off my phone so I don't mess up the jargon. So this is for new. Can't do something. This isn't like for every single person. But for new multi location advertisers on Yelp, they qualify for a 20% bonus advertising budget when they start campaigns before September 30th. So you got plenty of time here, meaning Yelp puts in extra ad dollars on top of what you spend. Okay? So if it's free money involved, let's take advantage of the free money again for multi location advertisers. Now, what I asked them to do was create a specific landing page for this podcast. So these are the requirements that I asked for early on to make sure that I can give that, you know, that week, that we can give that to you listeners so that, that I'm not gonna, don't expect you to remember this. I'm gonna say it, but I'll expect you remember put it in the show notes so it's easy for you to click on and fill out. It's super easy. There's like five questions. It's going to take you less than a minute to fill it out, but it's business. Yelp.com forward/home service, VIP. Again, I'll put it in the show notes. You ain't got to remember that because you ain't gonna remember it anyway. Take advantage of it if this, if your curiosity is peaked. Yeah, multi. Take advantage of it. Take advantage of it in general, regardless of size, you know, and by leveraging the, the feedback loop, the email that we just shared. But for whatever reason, you know, if, if you know these guys, I respect that you guys come on here and you take the firing squad Like, I have so much respect for that, knowing what's coming, you know, and, and having been able to do this a few times now, it's what's best for the industry. And I appreciate you guys coming on board and talking about it.
- [39:59]
C
Absolutely.
- [40:00]
D
Been really fun. And thank you all. I, I, I, I welcome the questions and it's, and I know Chris does too. And, and you know, we're, we're here for the, you know, home services industry going forward, I promise you that. And we want to, we want to grow with, with all of our customers.
- [40:17]
A
So any closing statements from you guys, boys?
- [40:21]
E
None for me. I, I had a blast. This was authentic. I didn't see much. I mean, I got to see Jed taking bullets and dodging, but also in it. And so this was awesome to entertain. You guys are authentic and I, I can see the value for all your listeners. So this was awesome. Thanks for having me.
- [40:37]
A
Thanks, Chris.
- [40:38]
F
Yeah, for me, I think you really appreciate the, the transparency on this stuff. I mean, I think, you know, my biggest takeaway is you can't give up on something and expect it to be great. So if we're going to make this great, it sounds like we're going to have to do it together. I know that you guys value our feedback or you wouldn't have come on here, here. And so to me, if we've got open lines of communications, we can make this successful for both sides, which I think is awesome. So I'm excited to, to dive in. You know, I'm not huge on technology, but, you know, in today's day and age, you got to be. So we're leaning in and figuring it out. But yeah, I think all in all, just appreciate you guys coming on here and being transparent and hopefully providing some value for the listener.
- [41:29]
C
I'll second that. I appreciate it, guys. And, you know, I think after this call, after this and even listen to this, I was like, you know, I think there's a lot of opportunity for our business to really re. Engage with Yelp and look at what that looks like and hopefully connect with some of your people to help us, you know, get, get that moving in a better direction. And to your, to his point, like, can't, you know, you want something to be great, but can't give up on it. Even if we've been successful without it, I think there's still a lot more success and the data has proven that you guys have a lot more coming through there than I think we, any of us actually. Really, really, probably even new. And we need to tap into that. So appreciate that, guys, and appreciate answering all the questions today. And it was good. It was good to. Well, I know Jed, we met on a pre call, but to meet you guys, and congrats on all your guys's success you've got going right now in the future together. Yeah.
- [42:12]
D
Well, love to meet y' all in person at one point. Maybe we can do this as, you know, maybe the second version's live, you know,
- [42:20]
C
in Phoenix.
- [42:22]
A
Yeah, no, I have a better suggestion. There's this nice little place in Kentucky. I don't say that very often, but it's called Bourbon Trail Trail, and I'd be happy to meet everybody there and we can go and just explore it together. I don't know. It's just.
- [42:33]
D
That would be great. That would be great.
- [42:36]
C
Journey right now, Chris. Okay.
- [42:37]
F
Come on.
- [42:41]
A
Well, I'll go ahead and close this out, then. I want to just say, you guys mentioned this. You know, we talk about this before, but, you know, you know, I've had second chances. Aaron, you. You certainly have been grateful for second chances in life. We've all had second chances. Like, I think that's. I think that's a big. A, big deal here, and I think this is a great shot at a. You know, at another shot at another chance to kind of get right. And it seems you guys could be very genuine in getting that fixed. So I appreciate you and. And to the listeners, you know, you can. You can continue to have a negative attitude towards it, you know, or you can look at what's the potential here and. Or be optimistic. And this isn't just, you know, with Yelp. This is just in general on things that maybe you tried before and didn't work. Well, maybe take a look in the mirror. Was it also. Was. Were you also part of the problem? You know, but maybe give it another shot, but a more intentional shot. And so at least with some of you, there's a. There's an offering, there's a little, you know, icing on the cake to kind of help with if you have curios on. On Yelp. But just in general, like, just because you tried something once and it didn't work doesn't mean you shouldn't try it again. But also, like, maybe take a realistic look in the mirror. On. Were you part. Were you also part of the. Part of the problem? Right. Because I think we can also ignore that for ourselves sometimes with our pride. So. But listen, again, at the end of the day, the whole reason of this podcast is to help the contractor scale and grow. And that isn't just by, you know, maybe how to run these businesses or what things to do. It's also about the tools to use or the vendors that could help you scale your company. And Yelp certainly can be one of those, it seems like, and we're all just trying to figure it out together. So the worst thing you can do is nothing, right? You got to do something. But don't talk about it, be about it. So to our listeners, until next week, when who knows which VIP guests will have on next or what surprise or if Chad or Aaron will actually show up for it, who knows? Or maybe me, Maybe I don't make it to that one. We'll see. But to our listeners, we appreciate you so much. We'll see you.
- [44:25]
B
What's the password?
- [44:27]
C
Don't talk about it. Be about.