Dialing in Your Systems to Thrive in the Post-Pandemic Landscape

I think that most small businesses do provide a really good product or service. They do a good job in your plumbing.
They do a good job on your roofing. They do a good job in remodeling your kitchen, whatever the case may do.
But they do, frankly, a pretty subpar job on the customer experience. And that's really where it needs to be improved.
Otherwise, they never get to the chance where they can show how good their service really is. And who are they losing out to? They're losing out to a bigger company that's basically providing the same service, but the customer experience is a lot better taken care of.
Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello.
Welcome to the home service expert. Got a guy joining us here from Philadelphia, and technical difficulties is a good thing, and trust me, you have no idea how many i've been in here so gordon henry is an expert at customer relationships marketing and client acquisition he's a chief strategy officer at thrive and he did that from 2019 to present he was the chief marketing officer from 2014 to 2019 he was the advisory board member of SNAS from 2014 to present.
Advisory board of ADZAC from 2014 to present. Lots of other things here on this sheet.
Gordon Henry has been helping small businesses for over 20 years. Gordon is the chief strategy officer at Thrive, the leading CRM for small businesses.

Prior to Thrive, he was the chief marketing officer at Yellow Book, a leading small business

digital advertising company. Gordon is also a host of Winning on Main Street small business

podcast series. Gordon has over 25 years of experience in client acquisition strategies

and marketing, which is my favorite thing in the whole world. In fact, I love marketing with a passion, and there's nothing I'd rather talk about than marketing.
So let's do this, Gordon. Let's let the audience get to know you a little bit and hear your background, hear what you're passionate about, where your life's brought you, and what the future looks like.
All right. Well, first of all, Tommy, good to see you again.
And I want to tell folks that you were on my Winning on Main Street podcast several months ago. So people who want to hear Tommy being interviewed by me can go to the Winning on Main Street podcast and look for Tommy Mello.
It was an awesome podcast. That was great.
I also want to mention, I was in Philadelphia, but I'm now up in the New York area. Oh, yeah, I knew that.
That's all right. Still an Eagles fan, although it was a sad year.
But I've been an Eagles fan, lived 23 years, raised three boys in Philly. So it's all good.
So personal journey. I started my career wanting to be a journalist.
I got out of college. I thought I was going to, I don't know, save the world or something, be a journalist.
And I did that for a number of years. And I started writing about business, got really interested in business.
And so I ended up going to business school. And that really changed my perspective on things.
It really gave me a path. And so it was a worth it thing for me to do, maybe not for not for everybody and i ended up going into the direct marketing field my first real job was with a company if you're old enough you'll remember called columbia house which used to be the big direct marketer of records and tapes if you went into college in the 80s or 90s you probably got 10 cds for a penny from columbia house or 10 a-tracks for a penny or something like that so people who are old enough may remember that it was a great direct marketing organization

it was really kind of like a college for direct marketing anyway i eventually left there and

joined a company called yellow book and yellow book was a leading yellow pages company that

served small businesses with uh really terrific return on an investment for their advertising

and we built a terrific business there not not only in print, but eventually online, doing online directory advertising, website, social search display. We had a great run there, was there for about a decade.
And then the management team there basically exited out and came over to what is now Thrive, the company I'm working with today. Same group of people who were running that company basically moved over to a different company.
There was a lot in there, but have now been running Thrive for almost a decade. And not only selling the marketing services to small businesses, but also software to help them run their businesses.
That's been the big pivot is really trying to get into the area of software to help small businesses run. And as you said, I was CMO at Yellow Book and at Thrive, and then about a year or two ago, moved into the strategy area.
So what are the differences between CMO and chief strategy? I don't know that being in the blue-collar garage industry, what's the... you know as a cmo i was uh more involved in the day-to-day uh particularly things like uh client acquisition which you talked about client retention and i still work in those areas but on the strategy side we're more looking at uh for example how's the company going to expand are we going to do acquisitions are we going we going to be moving into new territories, new countries, alliances and partnerships? Some bigger picture activities.
That's fascinating. So that's really got me intrigued.
I got a lot of questions here, but I'm going to probably shoot off my hip here on a lot of things. So I remember those CDs because there was ways to do it to where somehow my buddies used to be able to get like 10 CDs at a time, but we'd get them like, we could do it 20 times over again.
Somehow they spam the system back in the day. But then a lot of the times what would happen is when you got those, it automatically got you into the membership to where you had to call them to turn it off.
Yeah. It's crazy to anything about that i mean wow yeah and well the trick of that was that a lot of people will remember that you get the 10 cds for a penny and then you had this obligation you probably couldn't get away with that today but in those days you could you were like obliged to buy six units at regular price plus the shipping and handling which turned out to be really expensive but the thing was is that everybody was always trying to not get sent the automatic for each month there would be like an automatic selection like you got to have clapton's new album this month and so you'd open up the mail to x out the automatic selection that you didn't want and while you were in there a lot of times you're like well you know i do have this obligation and springsteen has a new album out maybe i'll get the springsteen album and so it got people to engage with the material and buy stuff you know here's the deal it's understanding how people think and getting in their minds i mean back in those days i used to get a free cd in the mail every day for those of you that don't know it's called aol but yellow book was great for they had a run i mean yellow pages in general had a run for a long time now all of a sudden we're talking about all these things and i want to talk a little bit about marketing we're going to talk about a lot of stuff but yeah back then if you were first the double truck triple truck or even there was a way to cheat it you could get in front of it in a category with the small column ad but hence the name a1 garage doors the only thing before a1 is 1a and that just doesn't make sense but you know nowadays i talk a lot about google has four algorithms in home service you've got lsa gmb organic and then you've got the pay-per-click you've got a yelp you've got angie You've got LSA, GMB, Organic, and then you've got the Pay Per Click.
You've got Yelp. You've got Angie.
You've got the BBB. You've got Thumbtack.
You've got HomeAdvisor. You've got things like Groupon.
You've got ValPack and MoneyMailer and Clipper. And then, of course, you've got affiliate marketing.
And then you've got branding, which is TV, radio, billboards, and vehicle wraps wraps and then you've got influencer and micro influencer marketing and all these things probably know a lot of people are listening maybe like what is he talking about but where do you get started i mean where would you say you're starting a business today it used to be come up with a brand name come up with a logo and get into yellow pages or yellow book. Now, where do you start? From a marketing perspective.
Well, first thing, you know, we're going to get into a little bit more of this idea of automation. But first thing I think that's very important is if you do have a business that exists in any shape or form right now, you got to have a customer list.
It's really important that you have a digitized customer list so you know who your customers are you know your customer information and ideally

it's in some type of system where you can contact them in an automated way what i mean is you got

their information hopefully an email address and you can market to them on a quarterly basis you

can send a reminder that says hey remember i came out and fixed your garage doors you know it might

be time for me to do a checkup again or it's a new season uh spring cleaning you know i can come

I'm not. base so you can send a reminder that says hey remember i came out and fixed your garage doors you know it might be time for me to do a checkup again or it's a new season uh spring cleaning you know i can come out and clean your yard or whatever it is you know you that you have a list of people and you can automate the communication with those who you already have because as everybody knows you know the cheapest customer acquisitions can be your existing customers are getting them come back for more rather than trying to find a new one.
Now, if you're starting from scratch, you talked about Google advertising. You might have mentioned Facebook advertising.
There's always the issue of having a website to drive people to. You can do email marketing if you can get ideally a list in your space.
and trying to do some level of display advertising in vertical areas that are

relevant to you where people will be looking makes some sense so i think you know an important thing with all types of marketing whether it's a small business or big business is testing you know there's not automatically one answer for all people one of the nice things about search advertising and social advertising is you know you buy it in small amounts, you can turn it on and you can turn it off and you can test. And I will say, even though people don't realize it, you know, we still run print directories and online directories and people may think, oh my God, Yellow Page is still being used.
Well, it is still being used mostly by people who are 50 and up, mostly in suburban and rural areas.

And it tends to be for home services and other types of services. And you'd be surprised the ROI that advertisers get on it, particularly certain categories, plumbers, roofers, electricians, maybe garage doors.
So don't ignore, don't just go for what seems trendy. Try out all the available and see what your roi is on it because we do a uh surprising amount of business for a lot of services in even still in the print directors as well as the online and the other things i mentioned i'm excited about this because i'm a data guy i love um visuals i actually have a book around here somewhere i got a lot of them but it's all about visualizations and just it's around here but i just love seeing reporting data understanding the numbers kpis automation is like when you could automate your business to a certain extent it's like exponential growth ai the stuff's coming out using data to make decisions like why just go to every garage door owner why not find the ones that have a great credit score ones that are a certain age the ones that have multiple garage doors that stuff's available so let's talk a little bit about thrive and what it is exactly there's actually a guest here jim andrews just said perfect timing for me i signed Thrive a couple of days ago and had my first onboarding Monday morning.
What can I expect from Thrive? Never used a CRM for over 30 years. So let's talk about Thrive and what it does.
Okay, great. And I just want to say one more word before we leave marketing is it is all about the data, especially if you're a small business.
And don't just go with, you know, your kid says, hey, dad, why aren't you on Google or why aren't you on Facebook? What really matters is what does it cost you to get a lead, basically to make your phone ring, and then how many of those leads convert and buy and come back. And so you really need to track all those things because you may be surprised what seems like the most popular source may not be the best return on investment for you so i just want to get that idea out there and it really is about the you know measuring and the data so what is thrive thrive is what we call really an end-to-end client experience platform what that means is it's a way for you to manage your customer list from really the moment the customer sort of comes in the front door, the front door could be your website, to really the end of the process where you're asking them for a payment and you're asking them maybe for a referral and everything that happens in between there.
So, you know, I tend to think of like a consumer journey. So consumers looking for your services, garage doors, right? Maybe they do a Google search.
They should be able able to click and come to your website they should be able to book an appointment on your website which thrive will allow them to do they should get a notification when they book that appointment saying oh thanks you know mrs jones for the appointment we'll be out to see you on tuesday at 10 o'clock there should be a reminder that goes to mrs jones saying hey it's an an hour before appointment. Don't forget.
Let us know if you have any problem. There should be a way if you're out there through your smartphone to give Mrs.
Jones an estimate for whatever the job is that you're going to be able to do. If she says yes, you should be able to send her an invoice.
She should be able to pay you electronically. She should get a thank you for that payment.
And then again, maybe you want to have it set up so you can send her a request for a referral like thanks for doing business with us please send us a referral write a review and then again you might want to do reminders in the future hey you know four months from now let's send her you know hey how you doing hope you're still happy let us come out and see you again kind of thing so it's a way of automating all those interactions if you think about businesses that do all that stuff manually it's a lot of effort for you and your team and this is a way of taking a lot of that manual effort out of the process and making it frankly a lot easier for the consumer one of the things that we realized in developing thrive again this was already seven years ago we started the world world has moved to smartphones. Maybe you like that, maybe you don't like that.
But let's face it, most people today live on their smartphones, especially anybody who's south of 60 years old. I have three kids in their 20s, and their smartphone is probably never more than a foot from them at any time.
And if you want to communicate with people today and do business with them you got to do business the way they want to do business and that means communicating to them through their smartphone you can't ask people to leave you voicemails and you certainly don't want to return those voicemails so we're not taking out the human element they're up but do it where it's it's adding value not oh yeah i'll see you at three o'clock on Monday. That can be done via calendar appointment on your website.
Yeah. Well, there, you know, here's the deal.
I can't tell you enough. The user experience is everything.
I, my voicemail is intentionally full and people are always texting me. They're like, did you know your voicemail is full? I'm like, yeah, I knew that three years ago when I intentionally let it stay full because I don't listen to voicemails and I don't know who does unless you're like you should see i walked into my office a year ago and they're like yeah i was like are you guys calling these customers back and following up they're like yeah we left them a voicemail i'm like do you know that i think it's somewhere around 99 of text messages get read uh but you know i could say something really nice to you i could say right now I could say, Gordon, I could send you a voice of my face and say, hey, listen, Gordon, my name is Tommy Mello.
I'm coming out here to fix your garage door. I'm stopping off at 7-Eleven.
Don't make me get you a monster. Tell me what you like to drink.
I'm grabbing a Gatorade. Let me know what you're thinking.
Whatever it is. But one of my buddies is like, he's a sales coach at a real estate he does ten thousand dollars a pop he chate he's like that little voice note you could automate stuff like that too and between text message voicemail blast emails automatic follow-ups links to calendly which is just a simple way of finding out when they're available.
Let them pick the time that works for them. These are things that most business owners don't have a clue and they don't realize when you start to re-engage your list.
How much is that worth? That's my question. Gordon, the stuff we're talking about, I've wasted so much time not automating.
There's a thing called Confusionsoft. I'm kidding.
but that's what question gordon the stuff we're talking about i've wasted so much time not automating there's a thing called confusion soft i'm kidding i'm familiar with it and it's like you got all these rules and stuff it's just the simple things there's a lot of simple things out there these days but the thing is you there's very few tools that it's all in one there's active campaign but then you need this you need this you need this so tell me a little bit about how you guys build the campaigns and make it simple. Because I think business owners sometimes are like, man, I'm going to need a software whiz for this stuff.
Right. Glad you asked that, Tommy.
So first thing I should say is the gentleman who you said was doing his first onboarding call in a couple of days. At Thrive, we provide service.
We provide, I think it actually surprises people how much service. And when I say service, what I mean is it starts with the onboarding.
You sign up, you have a person with a name who you can reach, who walks you through the software and helps you get set up. And typically we'll do a couple sessions with them.
It can be three in a row. It could be one, then two weeks later, then two weeks later, whatever is convenient for you.
And we don't try to teach you everything. We try to teach you enough to get started.
And it's not that it's an overwhelming amount, but we know people want to get to what's going to create value. So they may spend 30 to 60 minutes with you, and immediately you're able to do stuff.
You're able to get your inbox set up. You're able to get your appointment set up.
A lot of people don't realize you can automate your inbox so that all the different ways that people communicate with you can show up on one screen. And that's how we do it with Thrive.
So whether they're communicating with text, with Gmail, because a lot of people have a Gmail address, with your business email, any way they're trying to reach you can show up in a single inbox on thrive and you can respond to them with a single inbox and one of the beauties of that is that you have all communications through each customer in a single place so you know you kind of have a profile page for every one of your customers but we make it pretty easy to get started and then sort of move you up the learning curve and you talked about about, you know, like these other devices or other pieces of software out there.

A lot of the people who come to us, you know, they've moved from pen and paper to software,

but they've already used a couple of different software tools.

You know, maybe one thing for a calendar and another thing for email, another thing for

invoice, another thing for payments.

And suddenly they got like four or five of these little point solutions and they're like none of this stuff talks to each other it's really confusing it's a mess and they move to thrive because it's an all-in-one solution and they're like thank god that i can just use one piece of software i don't need five different things yeah i know how that goes you know i'm always asking people i look for a great user interface when i look for a piece of software. Then I say, tell me about the webhooks and API.
Because without having a way to communicate from other systems, I think that that's essential. Because there's always something coming out there that's like a new analytics tool for Yelp or something.
Absolutely. I want to be able to pull that stuff in.
I'm not trying to say, but by all means. We actually have an an app marketplace so if you're trying to make this communicate with your quickbooks with your constant contact with whatever the thing is that you maybe love or have used for years you can do that with a couple of clicks very easy to do the data flows between do you have any companies basically some stories about companies that grew exponentially when they started integrating and automating their businesses yeah for sure so i want to tell you a couple of examples of our customers but you know probably i mean one of the best examples of any business you know like in the whole country that's in the small business space is in the pizza business which is domino's domino's if you remember way back was way back, was just a pizza place.
Their pizza wasn't actually that good. And they were just kind of

like another pizza place. Well, they did upgrade their pizza, but more than just upgrade their

pizza, they upgraded their marketing. And one of the things Domino's did was they developed an app,

which probably now a lot of people listening to this have. And what the app essentially allows

you to do, it's almost like Uber for pizza. It allows you to order the pizza you can have a preset like the one you order every day or you can change it they have obviously the menu and the toppings and the pricing and you can order it and pay for it electronically but then you can see it like made in the store when it leaves the oven when it gets on the truck 29 minutes to your door shows up at your door just like an amazon package and bingo there it leaves the oven, when it gets on the truck, 29 minutes to your door, shows up at your door, just like an Amazon package.
And bingo, there it is. The doorbell rings and your pizza, nice and piping hot.
It's so freaking easy to order this thing. And so sort of fun, almost to watch the journey of the pizza as it makes its way to your house that people just do it like automatically.
And if you follow Domino's stock, it's been one of the top performing stocks over the past 10 years bar none like against anybody and it's actually a marketing and software tremendous story and there's no reason that a company that's smaller than dominoes can't use software to have you know i would say similar types of success because you make it easy for your customers to do business with you. Now, a couple of examples of ours.
One, I like to give this example. There's a dog washing, dog training business in the Detroit area called at Witsand.
The guy's name is Witt. And he tells me he used to drive across town.
It's in Detroit. So he's like, you know, big city traffic.
He would drive across town to take care of somebody's dog, only to show up at their house, and the owner's not there. Oops, I forgot.
Sorry. And the guy just wasted 30 minutes and 40 minutes in traffic just driving over to this one dog owner's house, right? Well, now, through Thrive, they have automation, and they send reminders and notifications, so that same dog owner gets the reminder a couple hours or an hour before, and they text him back and say, oops, sorry, I'm not going to be there at two o'clock.
And he avoids getting in the car and wasting that time. And he can do something more productive.
That's one example. Another example, there's a young woman who runs a hair shop out West called Hair by Sierra.
and she used to basically have all her appointments in a paper calendar and she would forget them about them and she certainly never reminded people of them and then she automated her whole calendar experience and the whole thing became easier for her and she was able to grow the business because she wasn't spending so much time marking up her calendar and calling people.

And now she spends all her time working on the customers, making them look beautiful, and almost none of the time dealing with appointments. So it frees people up to do the value added.
Maybe one way to think about it is your time, whether it's garage doors, doggy cleaning, hairdressing, landscape, your time doing what you're supposed to be doing is maybe worth, I don't know, $100 an hour, $200 an hour. Your time typing things into your calendar is worth $5 an hour.
There's no value add to that. Anybody could do it.
So you've got to minimize the amount of time you spend doing things that don't add value and maximize the time you spend doing things that do. You know, Gordon, I go and get vitamin B shots.
Sometimes I get this facial treatment, microneedling, and my buddy, Dr. Sean and Roxanne, and they work together.
And I asked them if I could be a business partner. I said, can I buy in? Because I know that uploading the database, categorizing each person into one of maybe five segments and getting them on a monthly or if they're a bi-weekly or if they're a bi-monthly and reminding them and a custom message with their name and say, listen, right now is that time again.
The vitamin B, vitamin C, vitamin E shots, whatever it is, vitamin D, you know, as we're going into this allergy, whatever, they got a ton of different stuff. And I think it sent out a case study or whatever, just top of mind awareness.
And I love it because you can get them to opt in via text because they're like friends and they've got a good relationship. And if they get it on some type of cadence they can begin to say i'm going to maximize my entire calendar i can work free they can start hiring around they can have predictability begin to budget properly begin to do and then automate their ordering to where there's a min and max system and i'm like all this through software and automation and this is what gets me so excited is most businesses they don't know how to email market they say i hate to get text messages so don't text me but if i had a text message that said hey listen we're going to come through and do a 29 point safety inspection lubricated just tighten everything on your garage door blah blah blah blah for 62 bucks and you don't even need to be home you can open it from your thing and for the air we'll say hi if you got the camera and uh what's great about it is you can book hit one button and you can book it at a time that works for you and it's it goes off of our capacity planning board yeah isn't that cool and it's the customer journey that gives them options it gives them options and that's what people want I know people my age people in their 20s, I'm in my 30s now

but

I know to give them options it gives them options and that's what people want that's i know people my age people in their 20s i'm in my 30s now but soon to be 40s we want to book the way we want to book i don't really necessarily want to get on the phone and say okay transfer me yeah when can you just tell me what i need to know right here let me get it done totally one of the problems we've found over many years in that old Yellow Pages and Marketing Services, but still do actually, is small business owners don't answer their phone and they don't return their voicemails. It's just been true for years that when you see a phone number, wherever that phone number appears, when you call it, many times that number for a small business, it's a small company the guy may be

under a sink or maybe up on a roof he's certainly not going to answer his phone at that time and so it goes to voicemail okay no problem if he calls you right back but something like you can look in the industry statistics like 40 percent of voicemails do not get returned it's amazing because the small business paid to generate that lead and yet they just don't return it. Well, how frustrating is that for the consumer? So instead of asking people to call you, have a way that they automatically get a response from you.
It can be, hey, I'm up on a roof and I'll respond to you immediately if you intend to call them. Or it can be, click here and go to my appointment calendar and book a time for me to speak to you or see you but nobody wants to wait around expect it i mean that's just not what people do anymore you're right i like what you said and i'm going back to just the old marketing thing of just you figuring out what works and i'll tell you tools tell us how stuff works like you know it's funny because me and Adam were talking, we started this concept called Garage Door Freedom.
And we're trying to explain to garage door companies, this is what you need to do. Here's how your training should work.
Here's an org chart. And I was like, yeah, then we'll teach them exactly how we use so many call tracking numbers.
And Adam tells me last week, he goes, these guys don't even know what a call tracking number is or does i go you got to be kidding me i thought that was like your god-given right to know what a call tracking number is it's like how do you know what marketing is even working if you don't right i knew what that was my first time at valve back in 2006 you know so it's the simple things that sometimes i feel like it's the unfair advantage to use what's out there and now with what's happening even with ai i saw three years ago on linkedin i saw this the ceo of google let the ai book a haircut appointment and it did the voice and everything you've probably seen this where they said oh hello my name's megan can Megan. Can I help you? And they had a conversation.
And she says, I'm sorry, that doesn't work. And it wasn't like a computer voice.
It wasn't perfect. But she said, can we do Tuesday instead? And AI, I've got all these books on AI, too, about like, it's kind of scary, too, because they can start thinking Facebook had to shut down their AI.
But where's the header with this stuff how far will we go well the companies that are at the sort of leading edge you know raise the bar and i guess unfortunately the small businesses have to follow along you know when i mentioned dominoes you talk about uber we've all ordered from amazon today they're the companies that set consumers expectations you know if you order something from amazon shows up in 24 hours at your door now you suddenly expect everything to show up in 24 hours if you go to the airport and nobody has a paper ticket anymore you take your smartphone and you swipe it through you expect to be able to swipe your phone for everything you do why should i have a paper anything so my point is that the expectation gets sent to kind of the best in class and so that's why small businesses have to stay with the times otherwise they start to lose from a customer experience you know i think that most small businesses do provide a really good product or service they do a good job in your plumbing they do a good job on your roof. They do a good job on your roofing.
They do a good job in remodeling your kitchen, whatever the case may do. But they do, frankly, a pretty subpar job on the customer experience.
And that's really where it needs to be improved. Otherwise, they never get to the chance where they can show how good their service really is.
And who are they losing out to? They're losing out to a bigger company that's basically providing the same service, but the customer experience is a lot better taken care of. To your question about AI, I mean, all that stuff is actually coming sooner than maybe people expect.
I think if someone were leaning in that direction to get a little bit more sophisticated, maybe they should be thinking about chat, offering chat on their website. Because the nice thing about chat is somebody can quickly type in a box, they can type in a question, and there's a number of different ways to fulfill it.
Obviously, the owner is not going to do it. You can outsource it, but you can answer simple questions for customers on your website that way.
But even that, I'd say, is beyond what most small businesses really need to be be doing today. I mean, they need to do the blocking and tackling.
You know, what are some small areas of the business that most business owners don't know that they can actually automate? Right. Well, a key thing, you know, I think a lot of small businesses need to realize is they can automate things that have to do with their staff, where a lot of businesses sort of mess up is with their staff because they don't have a system where the staff knows what the boss did and the boss knows what the staff did and so forth and so you want to have this system that allows everybody to be working off sort of the same platform that's extremely valuable you know because let's say you're i don't know know, some type of coach or trainer or something like that, or maybe you're providing some type of training.
You have customers, and they may be talking to your staff, they may be talking to your assistant, they may be talking to you. If all of that information is in a single place, that's not even automating.
That's just organizing on a platform. You can look at what the communications were with your staff.
And so the customer feels taken care of because whatever they said to somebody before is captured. What are some of the things they don't realize can be automated? Some may not realize, for example, even something as simple as estimates and invoices.
I heard a story from one of our customers who's a roofer. He went over to somebody's house.
They just had another roofer there. The roofer had gone back to his office to quote, type up the estimate and they were going to bring it back the next day.
So they literally went back to their office to type it up. Meanwhile, this guy goes over, checks out the job and just sends an estimate through the phone immediately standing there in the front yard.
And the woman who's looking at the estimate, she's like, oh, that looks good, clicks approved, and gets the job. And basically steals the job from under the nose of the other guy who still was back at the office typing it up.
So simple things like that can be, you know, if you want to call it automated or made electronic, that are pretty powerful. Another one we've touched on is things like that can be you know if you want to call it automated or made electronic that are pretty pretty powerful another one you know we've touched on is things like reminders you know i always go back to the birthday you know everybody loves their birthday and you could just send people a birthday greeting how simple is that or better yet their kids ask for your customers kids birthdays and send them a birthday greeting or birthday electronic birthday greeting or birthday card or if you're the kind of business that you can offer something free say come in and we'll give your kid a free whatever it is i remember when i was a kid used to go to basket robbins 31 flavors they give you a free ice cream cone on your birthday how cool was that so today you would get it on your text come in for a free ice cream you know anything like that where you show you care about your customers and you can automate it.
And again, just make it easy for them. When we talk about customer service, I think so often we focus on internal KPIs.
Like what's our booking rate? What's our average ticket? What's our conversion rate? What does it cost us to acquire a client? And there's a lot of other ones. Too often we don't think about the customer experience.
How many does it took could they book easily did we make it easy to schedule how long did they wait to get the install done what was the overall process are we working on the kpis that matter through the client because quite honestly those are our competitive advantages they're not that we do dog tests and background checks and we're open weekends because everybody does that. I read a great book called Competitive Advantages.
I actually had Janie Smith on the podcast and we literally went through the program and competitive advantages are truly historical facts that make us better because we've cut stats on what we've done through the customer experience. And it's a different way of looking at things.
And when you think about this for our internal customers, how many people were able to buy houses? How many people were able to retire? How many people moved up the corporate ladder or just moved up the ladder of their career? How important are those things to track? Again, I go back to what I said before. I think if you're spending money on customer acquisition or customer retention, you want to track everything you've tested so that you can know with some accuracy what was the return on that investment because a lot of times what you think may be better like i'll say specifically like google advertising everybody thinks it's great but especially during the pandemic google advertising is it incredibly expensive for those keywords if you heard google's quarterly, they just came out and they had record results.
Well, that's because people are paying record amounts for that advertising. Your chance of getting a good return on that Google investment is less and less and less.
So yeah, it may be popular or your kid may be telling them that's where you got to be, but it's very hard to get a return on that investment. In contrast, I mentioned something as seemingly old and prosaic as a printed yellow page said, but because the costs of those have come down and you can get a bigger ad than you used to for the same amount of money, you may be surprised that for certain categories, for certain demographics, you may get a great return on investment.
And that's what a small business should be thinking about. So you definitely have to be tracking all of your advertising sources to see what's working and what's not and building out that sort of portfolio of advertising sources that work for you.
In terms of, and I would say the same for email, if you're renting an email list, you know, if you're a local business and you rent an email list, you know, you should be tracking the cost and tracking the return on how many leads did you get and ultimately how many jobs and what was the value of those jobs. You've got to be tracking those things.
And as a service provider, we can do that for you. We can provide that kind of ROI.
In terms of some of these other things we talked about, the automation, while there's not necessarily cost once you have the system, you really want to be be tracking what works and what doesn't you don't want to be sending out emails that you shouldn't you certainly don't want to be sending out text messages that you shouldn't you don't want to be spamming people but if certain types of notifications are working for you that's what you need to continue a lot of the success you have with those kinds of marketing customer outreach is just tracking what's working and doing what is stopping what's not you know when you have the right tools in place what i love is with my tools with my attribution models i can actually tell advertisers that i'll give them a report every day and i want to be on what's pay for performance. And I'll give them a percentage of every job.
So I'll say this, I'll spend a hundred grand with you next year. I'll go into every yellow book you have, every yellow pages, but I want you to prove to me and here's the report.
And I'll tell you this, tell your aunt Sally to book a job anywhere. And you'll see that name come in you can test us use this phone number use this schedule engine code if you want to book it online and what's so nice is there's no way to lie to you you're still the system and it's completely transparent they get a report that gets sent out to them daily so what i love about the automation is i'll say hey what's your money where your mouth is i't say that to Google, but I can say that to places that the Albuquerque yellow pages.
I could say that to certain newspapers and certain neighborhood mailers. And I can say that to a lot of people because I'm one of the few companies that actually could track it from soup to nuts and know exactly the conversion rate and show them.
i think that's pretty amazing and i think that people really really enjoy the fact that i don't need a light cheater still to people let's pay them because here's the fact too that a lot of people don't think about gordon is a lot of people say well google gets all the credit for my marketing and i'm like well then i can't do anything if you're trying to pretend that your marketing is that good and google gets all the credit i'll pay you know a bigger percentage but because people want to go check out your online reputation and see real reviews you can't see reviews what i'm supposed to do print out my reviews and have people trust them people don't you're going to print out the best ones so what's your theory on some of this stuff have you you been involved in any pay for performance in the past?

Oh, yeah, 100%. Yeah, we have that available in certain products we sell today.
If that's something you're interested in, you're talking to one of our business associates, you can ask about pay for performance programs, even with a Google campaign, because you can turn those on and off. I mean, essentially, it's not pay for performance in the sense of, you know, you only pay when you get a job.

But obviously, you can be tracking it.

You can turn it off pretty fast if it's not working for you. The true pay for performance is where you say, I'll pay you 20 bucks a job or 20 bucks a phone call.
And we do have some programs like that that you can inquire about. If it's done fairly for both parties, I would argue it really ends up in the same place as regular advertising because you know we sell advertising that works and we have a lot of trade to your point about the call tracking numbers we have call tracking numbers we've had them for two decades that show you very accurately what's the number of calls that a certain type of order or certain types of advertising generates in a certain category in a certain market for people who don't know call tracking there was just a special phone number that forwards to your regular phone number and so you can record how many and that's the number that special number is the one that goes in the ad and so you can tell how many phone calls or even clicks your ad generated with 100% accuracy.
And so you can see, I spent whatever, $1,000 a month for this ad. It generated 50 clicks.
So it was $20 a click. I converted 10% of those.
So it was $200 a conversion. Does that make you money or not? Let's talk about your business.
Well, I'll tell you what. I work with Gannett and I work with a lot of other places.
And the reason they've learned to love me is number one, I'm in 19 states and it's one decision maker. It's not a franchise model.
So they didn't have to call 80 people to get a decision. Number two is they really say, you're not answering your phone on time or you are.
And if you could have a good call center and a good average ticket and a high conversion rate they'd rather do that model so i've got an obligation to them on performance payer they're going to drop off and number two is all of a sudden all their remnant space they're putting me on the right side instead of the left they're putting me with a better subtitle or adding an extra color to bake that pop so i would say we're trying for each other because i know they'll give me more exposure if i do well for them because they've got an algorithm running in the background saying we can't have 10 hvac guys or 10 flooring guys in here we can't put a flooring guy here flooring guy here flooring guy there so they're gonna they want some diversity but they also want to know who's driving their key performance indicators to make us the most money which will spike spike their algorithm. And they'll say, we're going to give you more space.
We'll give you a header here. We're going to throw you into classified.
We're going to give you a special report. That's kind of like earned media in here on this date.
So it turns out to be a pretty cool thing. And it's not just print.
There's other directories that do, you know, I've heard sites that they'll rent out space on their site. So an example is I've got a motivated seller lead business.
So we love people that are motivated to sell. So there's certain things like, like what about a hoarder site? Some people are going to lose their house that are hoarding.
So why not just take a sponsored ad on there, but give the space away? Because if I'll give them a percentage of like maybe a thousand bucks if i get a sale so there's a lot of ways to do this but without measuring without having automation without having a tool like thrive it's impossible to do what we're talking about it's almost i would beg i'd say losers gordon and i'm sorry if you're out there listening i don't i'm not i saying the losers in general say, all I do is word of mouth because you don't own a business.

You own a job because it takes a lot more to have a lot of employees.

If when you don't work, you don't make money.

That's not a business.

That's a full-time job.

And quit lying to people because you're actually still, you're still a technician.

You're still in the field.

That's not a job.

You just happen to book your own phone calls and be a CSR dispatcher at the same time.

I apologize to you, but that's not a business. A business is when you sleep, you're making money.
So I think it's really, really important that if you're not driving, I used to hate financials, man. I used to hate balance sheets, balance sheet, income statement, P&L, whatever.
I got money in the bank. But when I realized those numbers told a story and I realized what the automation could do and I realized what things meant.
And I'll say this. I want to tell you one more thing here is, is I don't love going to the doctor, but I've heard stories that if they would have known earlier about their cancer or their sickness, they could have fixed it.
So a lot of people hate going to the doctor, but if you know, you get there early enough, you catch stuff early, you could save your business, you could get that marriage back, you could be a better mother or father. And I know this is an extreme, but isn't this really the case when we're talking about these things? Yeah, I mean, all the things we've talked about from being systematic about how you do your advertising, how you measure, making sure that you're spending the money in the right ways.
And then obviously the whole automation of the day-to-day customer experience, all those things are designed to free up your time, create a more predictable customer experience so that your customers are more happy and you're more happy. And I will say something about that last comment you made.

The businesses that depend on the business owner to be there day in, day out, 20 hours

a day are like unsellable businesses.

Nobody wants to buy your business if it depends on you.

They don't want you and they don't want your business if it depends on you.

What they want is a business that you can walk away from and it still works as well or better than before. And the way you create that business is to do what we're talking about, which is really creating systems, creating systems that make the business predictable and repeatable and that don't depend on you.
And so you should, the reason you got to do the things we're talking about is that so you can gradually get yourself out of being so critical to the business that you got to be involved in it all the time. And then you can start working, you know, on the business instead of in it so that eventually you can really recede from the business and sell it.
In my mind, that should be everybody's goal in small businesses to sooner or later to have a business that doesn't depend on you oh yeah well there's a great business called built to sell and there's a an idea of michael gerber that just says work on it to make it better it's like look i look like now i feel like i'm a conductor and there's all these things going on and i get to kind of just help make sure certain times you got the band on this side whatever the flutes or whatever you're you got to work in that section i when i go out of town and sometimes our top guys in the c-level suite we set records when we're out of town and it's like holy crap we set a record and we didn't touch anything at all in operations and it's beautiful when that happens yeah nice this stuff could be overwhelming and i think there's some business owners out there it's just technology and automation is overwhelming where's the best spot to get started how do you even go about this when they're just going to themselves man tommy's podcasts are great but they're overwhelming there's a lot of information i don't even know what to do to get started right what do you say to those guys and gals well i'm a little biased but you know i think our our company thrive does a pretty good job both on the marketing side and on the business automation side that's been the innovation over the years as we started in the marketing i mentioned yellow book we started this team you know 20 years ago helping small businesses advertise and get really great return on their investment we've've continued at this company, Thrive, and we still offer all those services. And then we've helped businesses to automate.
So how do you get started? Go to thrive.com, T-H-R-Y-V.com. Click get a demo, or there's a phone number there you can call if you prefer that.
And you can do two things. You can talk to us about the marketing, or you can talk to us about the automation, or you can talk about both.
But as I mentioned, we appreciate and understand most small businesses, frankly, small business people are not techies. They didn't go into business because they're techies.
They go into business because they're really good at their craft. And the technology piece has sort of become more important over the years and what we've done

is really trying to simplify the whole process of using this software so that you can be really

good at it without needing to be technological i mean most people you know you ask people uh i love

to ask people like do you use cloud technology no no i don't know what the hell is cloud technology

okay do you do you have kids yeah i got kids you have grandkids yeah i have grandkids

Thank you. I love to ask people like, do you use cloud technology? No, no, I don't know.
What the hell is cloud technology? Okay, do you have kids? Yeah, I got kids. You have grandkids? Yeah, I have grandkids.
Do you text them? Do you Facebook them? Do you Gmail them? Do you go on Instagram with them? Yeah, I do those things. Oh, okay.
So now you know about cloud technology. It's not like you have to be a genius.
These tools have gotten much, much easier. Well, Dropbox, Google Drive, I mean, anything really is in the cloud nowadays.
I mean, that's how, what Amazon did so well is they've created their own cloud service where you could, I mean, it's hard to believe that Amazon's done so many things, but so has Elon Musk. But, you know, I got a guy, Justin here, and he asked a good question good question and i'm not really sure but how does this work with service chain or does it work with other crvs if you're on salesforce or zoho or hubspot whatever is there is certain integrations that that work well with it i don't really know the answer to that gordon yeah you can go intorive app marketplace.
Some of those have already been set up to make those connections very easy. It's just a couple of clicks and some of them haven't.
And there's other tools you can use to connect them. There's something called Zapier that connects these different CRMs on their tools.
So the answer is generally yes. Most of these I mentioned before, some of the easy ones, QuickBooks, everybody uses, we connect with that, Constant Contact, many others.
And you can look in there and see if the ones you use are in there. And some of those are complementary, and maybe some of them you may find do similar things.
You know, HubSpot, I find, is more of a marketing automation tool than, you know, it doesn't do a lot of things we do for the day-to-day client experience. You know, A lot of people use HubSpot for content automation or creating content that drives leads to them.
So we may be complimentary to that. The answer is yes to a lot of different products and more every day.
Because we understand, I mean, there's a giant ecosystem of software out there for small businesses as well as big businesses. And these products need to talk to each other.
So we're're well down the road towards making that happen you know justin ask a little bit deeper if the service site does it dial pad does it do automated sms and stuff like that and i i know it does i would say look at what you have and then get a call with thrive and really understand how you want to use it and really describe it to them and they'll tell you the best thing to do and i think gordon if you weren't an exact fit you'd probably say we're not a fit because what's the point of onboarding somebody you know with software i know for a fact service time makes no money the first 16 months you know if they were to do an ipo at a certain time there's a certain value given usually it's 20 to 25 times of revenue but overall you're looking at return on investment if they don't see a good fit they're not probably going to take now it's not a one-size-fits-all for any software right yeah service titan's a good piece of software from what i know it's also really really expensive. And for a lot of businesses in the HVAC space and companies like that, they don't need Service Titan.
Service Titan was really built. It's pretty expensive to use.
You pretty much have to be the biggest guy in town in your space or one of them to make that pay off for you. Now, it may be great for a few, but for many, it's just more than they need.
Another random question here. I got $75,000 and three guys who need full-time.
Can I afford to keep them busy at the moment or wait and work by myself to increase working capital? I'd like to hear you take this. Well, it sounds like you need more jobs to keep your staff busy.
And so I would say, how do you get more jobs? Number one, of course, provide great service. You know that.
Number two, do some of the marketing things that we talked about, which is to generate leads and make sure you do answer the phone if it rings, or you do have a way for customers to notify you that they're interested in the business. Don't let those calls go unreturned.
And then three, as we said at the beginning of the show, a great way to get new business is to go back to your existing customers. If you have a customer list of 100 or 1,000 customers, let them hear from you.
I'm amazed as just as a consumer, how many vendors I've done business with who never contact me just never contact me hey you know can we touch up the painting we did on your house a year ago hey you know i noticed i drove by i noticed a lot of the shingles look kind of dingy on your roof can we fix those shingles yada yada i mean if you have a customer list and reach out to your customers either on a personal basis or on kind of a more of a mask basis like i said before hey spring's coming up can we set up a spring cleaning for you it's a lot of business that people people have been sitting in their homes for the past two years with this freaking pandemic looking at the paint peeling looking at the grass going brown looking at all these problems they have they're ready to spend money on fixing things up they haven't been traveling they haven't been going to restaurants they're ready to spend money on their house go get it for some reason and tell me if i'm wrong because i got a lot of friends that have helped these type of people but the dentist does it right for some reason the dentist have adopted this type of software they need to get their appointments better than doctors better than weight loss better than anything I've ever thought of is the dentist does it well and they'll continue to fire out till you get it booked and for some reason it's like clockwork and i think a lot of people said where could i go where it's the lots of money and really not business heads because the dentist they charge a lot of money but they don't know how to run business. So I was pre-dental and I went and interned with a dentist.
I took biochemistry, anatomy, physiology, organic chemistry, you name it. And I went and interned with a dentist and he said, dude, do me a favor, get a master's degree in business before you go to dental school because I'm 42, he said at the time, and I'm still in debt.
I have a decent house, but I have a lot of debt. And he said, you need to learn to run a business.
They don't teach you that. They teach you how to work in mouth.
They teach you plaque. They teach you all kinds of stuff about what you could prescribe.
And then he also said, go into a specialty. And I tell people this all the time.
Don't just do anything. I do commercial, residential, Home Depot, new homes, old homes.
Specialize in something. The dentist told me because he was in between an ortho and a regular.
I'll tell you, the dentist, the reason they became so good at it is because what does that dentist make for you to sit in that seat for an hour if he's working on your crowns or whatever it is? What is he charging? 300 bucks? It's a lot of money. The hygienist, yeah.
Yeah. So if you no-show, okay, unless there are dentists that charges you, most don't for that no-show, he just lost that money never to get it back, right? That seat is like an empty airline seat.
That seat is gone, right? You're never going to get get that money back so for them to invest in the software to make sure you show up is worth a lot i mean one no show that shows up pays for that software for the month probably that's the way you got to look at it yeah and the deal is is that they're really good and i haven't met dennis to take it to the next level is hey we've got a great deal on refills for your teeth whitening. Hey, you come in and we'll do this plaque enamel blocker.
Hey, listen, we get a deal on this commercial size floss. Hey, listen, we got this water jet system for your teeth.
And I don't want a broken record though. I don't want to hit people all the time text message because there's a certain number that people say I'm opting out of this.
Can you share a couple ideas on client acquisition strategies that not many home service companies are taking advantage of? I believe that when people make certain types of improvements to their home, they have to be filed down at like the local courthouse. For example, I know that if you've got to put in a pool or do some types of construction at your house, depending on the township you live in, you know, there are papers that have to be filed and approvals that have to be gotten.
You could go down to the local courthouse or tax receiver or whoever handles that paperwork for those improvements, get the list of the filings that have been made and then call those people up right and see if they need help you know those are people investing in their home that's one thing you could do just to see people who are working on their homes well there's a thing called construction monitor and what they did is they built an algorithm that scrapes municipality data and what's cool about that is i've've looked into scraping tools. And what's really, really cool is you scrape that data.
Anybody that's pulled a permit or anybody actually that's invested, I can buy data that will tell me anybody that's done a refi on their house and specifically a refi to do an addition. So there's data out there.
There's lists you could buy and you can plug them into a tool like thrive there's certain stuff that are opt-in and out you know you don't want to burn a server out and stuff like that but yeah i agree i didn't mean to cut you out but that that stuff exists yeah i'm in an area where uh if you live in certain parts of the township you know there's a lot of paperwork you have to file because a lot of environmental regulations if you're too close to the water things like that and county monitors all this stuff so that you know it doesn't mess with the land and and drainage and things like that and you file this paperwork and you said you can use a scraping tool and you contact people and say hey i see you're uh what are you gonna pull building a house improving the yard whatever it is so that's one way. That takes a little bit of ingenuity.
And go back to what we talked about. Some of the marketing that you do, you got to think real carefully and test about keywords.
What are the keywords people are searching on? Wherever it is, whether it's Google, Facebook, any online directory, what are the keywords they're searching on? And you should be testing all the time and evaluating what's working for you and not. Don't assume something automatically does or doesn't work.
You got to test and prove it. Your situation may be unique.
Another one, by the way, last one I want to mention while we're talking about automation is referrals. Okay.
So you said you talked about word of mouth, but you can automate your referrals to a certain extent, right? Why not send people a text message after they've done business with you saying, you know, we hope you're a happy customer.

Here's 10% off your next job if you offer me a name or can recommend somebody who ends up doing business with me.

So there's lots of ways to automate it as well.

And some of these things are said and forget it.

And you just let the leads come to you.

So I closed out with three main questions.

Number one, someone wants to get a hold of you, Gordon.

And then one of the things that I've done, things are said and forget it and you just let the leads come to you so i i close out with three main questions number one someone wants to get a hold of you gordon they want to reach out to you they might want to book for thrive they might just have some questions for you what's the best way uh email gordon.henry at thrive.com that's g-o-r-d-o-n dot henry h-e-n-r-y at thrive again that's t hh-r-y-v dot com and i always ask this if there's a few books it could be one could be three is there any books that you've read that changed your life that we can't live without well e-myth was one you mentioned michael gerber but you didn't say the name e-myth i mean e-myth was you know i think a really seminal book covered a lot of things we're talking about here in terms of just working on the business, not in the business. Creating a business that you can eventually leave, that you could sell.
Things like that. I think that's a terrific book for a small business person.
And then finally, we talked about a lot of stuff. We talked about automation.
We talked about marketing. There's probably some stuff we didn't talk about.
And I always like to let you close us out. Maybe there's one big topic, one closing thought that the listeners need to hear.
Yeah. When you think about what makes a small business person successful versus another that is unsuccessful, sure, you got to be motivated.
Sure, you got to be hungry. Sure, you've got to be a hard worker.
Those things kind of go without saying. But I think a lot of small business people have those characteristics.
But the difference between the 20% of businesses that make it after the first five years versus the 75% or 80% that don't, I think a lot of it comes down to planning and then executing on the plan. A lot of people don't sit down and write any kind of business plan, which just forces you to sit down.
It doesn't have to be 20 pages long. What is the service? You talked about how do you differentiate your service? How are you different than any of the other things I can buy out there? What's your plan over the next few years in terms of hiring, in terms of marketing? You can modify that as you go.
It's not set in stone, but starting to think about that. And then a really important one that I know you care a lot about, Tommy, is pricing and margins.
Do you price your product appropriately so that you can actually make money and not just have a job, but have a business? So those things are all really important to do. And I think if you start to think in terms of spending some time planning and then executing against that plan, you have a better chance of success.
I'll end with this too, is Gordon, I got a guy visiting me. He's in the other room.
He's out here for a couple of days, a buddy of mine. And he said, why do you have a separate set of books for when you manufacture doors back here? I said, if I didn't know exactly what it cost me with labor, rent, material, everything, then I could never price it accurately.
So what am I shooting a dart or pin the tail on the donkey? That's why we needed those separate set of books. It's a little bit more work, but that's what our accounting software is meant to do.
So the software will set you free. You guys reach out to Gordon if you need help with with automation if you need help just understanding more about marketing i think gordon's a great guy to help you understand and gordon i really appreciate you coming on um if you get a chance guys winning on the wall street uh for small business podcast winning on main street winning on main street i don't know why i said you're thinking about ipos man my head's on wall street here now that's okay i'm a main street guy sorry i must have yawned 10 times not because of you is because literally what my morning meeting i've had three monsters today and i'm i'm sorry but this was really really good no No, that's great.
It's all good. Hey, really enjoyed it, Tommy, and good luck and love to hear from your listeners.
All right. Appreciate you, brother.
All right. Thanks.
Take care. Hey guys, I just wanted to thank you real quick for listening to the podcast.
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