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

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Otherwise, they never get to the chance where they can show how good their service really is. And who are they losing out to?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Now, your host, the Home Service Millionaire, Tommy Mello.

Speaker 2 Welcome to the Home Service Expert.

Speaker 2 Got a guy joining us here from Philadelphia. And

Speaker 2 technical difficulties is a good thing. And trust me,

Speaker 2 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 the chief strategy officer at Thrive.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Advisory board of EdZach from 2014 to present. Lots of other things here on this sheet.
Gordon Henry has been helping small businesses for over 20 years.

Speaker 2 Gordon is the chief strategy officer at Thrive, the leading CRM for small businesses.

Speaker 2 Prior to Thrive, he was the chief marketing officer at Yellowbook, a leading small business digital advertising company. Gordon is also host the winning on Main Street small business podcast series.

Speaker 2 Gordon has over 25 years of experience in client acquisition strategies and marketing, which is my favorite thing in the whole world. In fact,

Speaker 2 I love marketing with a passion. And there's nothing I'd rather talk about than marketing.
So let's do this, Gordon.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So, people who want to hear Tommy being interviewed by me can go to the Winning on Main Street podcast and look for Tommy Mellow. It was an awesome podcast.
That was great.

Speaker 1 I also want to mention I was in Philadelphia, but I'm now up in the New York area. So, oh, yeah, I hear you.

Speaker 2 That's all right. That's all right.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You know, I started my career wanting to be a journalist. I got out of college.
I thought, you know, I was going to, I don't know, save the world or something, be a journalist.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 everybody. And I ended up going into the direct marketing field.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 If you went into a 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.

Speaker 1 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 Yellowbook.

Speaker 1 And Yellowbook was a leading Yellow Pages company that serves small businesses with a really terrific return on an investment for their advertising and we built a terrific business there 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 That's been the big pivot is really trying to get into the area of software to help small businesses run.

Speaker 1 And as you said, I was CMO at Yellowbook and at Thrive, and then about a year or two ago, moved into the strategy area.

Speaker 2 So, what is the difference between CMO and chief strategy? I don't know that being in the blue-collar garage industry, what's the

Speaker 1 really, you know, as a CMO, I was more involved in the day-to-day, particularly things like client acquisition, which you talked about, client retention.

Speaker 1 And I still work in those areas, but on the strategy side, we're more looking at, for example, how's the company going to expand? Are we going to do acquisitions?

Speaker 1 Are we going to be moving into new territories, new countries, alliances and partnerships, some bigger picture activities?

Speaker 2 That's fascinating. So

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So I remember those CDs because there was ways to do it to where somehow my buddies used to be able to get like

Speaker 2 10 CDs at a time, but we'd get them like

Speaker 2 we could do it 20 times over again. Somehow they spammed the system back in the day.

Speaker 2 But then a lot of the times what would happen is when you got those, it automatically got you into the membership to where

Speaker 2 you had to call them to turn it off. Yeah.
It's crazy to think that I know anything about that. I mean, wow.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You probably couldn't get away with that today, but in those days you were like obliged to buy six units at regular price plus the shipping and handling, which turned out to be really expensive.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 For those of you that don't know, it's called AOL.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And I want to talk a little bit about marketing. We're going to talk about a lot of stuff.
But

Speaker 2 back then, if you were first the double truck, triple truck. or even there was a way to cheat it.

Speaker 2 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 that comes 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

Speaker 2 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 home advisor You've got things like Groupon,

Speaker 2 you've got Valpak and Money Mailer 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.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Now, where do you start?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 What I mean is, you got their information, hopefully an email address, and you can market to them on a quarterly basis.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Or it's a new season, spring cleaning, you know, I can come out and clean your yard or whatever it is, you know, that you have a list of people and you can automate the communication with those who you already have.

Speaker 1 Because as everybody knows, you know, the cheapest customer acquisition is going to be your existing customers and getting them to come back for more rather than trying to find a new one.

Speaker 1 Now, if you're starting from scratch, you know, you talked about Google advertising, you know, you might have mentioned Facebook advertising.

Speaker 1 There's always the issue of having a website to drive people to. You can do email marketing if you can get, you know, ideally a list in your space.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So I think, you know, an important thing with all types of marketing, whether it's a small business or a big business, is testing. You know, there's not automatically one answer for all people.

Speaker 1 One of the nice things about search advertising and social advertising is, you know, you can buy it in small amounts. You can turn it on and you can turn it off and you can test.

Speaker 1 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 pages, is that still being used?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And you'd be surprised the ROI that advertisers get on it, particularly certain categories, you know, plumbers, roofers, electricians, maybe garage doors.

Speaker 1 So don't ignore, don't just go for what seems trendy. Try out all the available advertising and see what your ROI is on it.

Speaker 1 Because we do a 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.

Speaker 2 I'm excited about this because I'm a data guy. I love visuals.
I actually

Speaker 2 have a book around here somewhere. I got a lot of them, but it's all about visualizations and just,

Speaker 2 it's around here, but I just love seeing reporting data, understanding the numbers, KPIs. Automation is like

Speaker 2 when you can automate your business to a certain extent, it's like exponential growth. AI, the stuff coming out, using data to make decisions.
Like, why just go to every garage door owner?

Speaker 2 Why not find the ones that have a great credit score? The 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

Speaker 2 and what it is exactly. There's actually a guest here, Jim Andrews, that said, perfect timing for me.
I signed up with Thrive a couple days ago and had my first onboarding Monday morning.

Speaker 2 What can I expect from Thrive? Never used a CRM for over 30 years. So let's talk about Thrive and what it does.

Speaker 1 Okay, great. And I just want to say one more word before we leave marketing is

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So I just want to get that idea out there. And it really is about the measuring and the data.
So what is Thrive?

Speaker 1 Thrive is what we call really an end-to-end client experience platform.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 They should be 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 There should be a reminder that goes to Mrs. Jones saying, hey, it's an hour before appointment.
Don't forget. Let us know if you have any problem.

Speaker 1 There should be a way if you're out there there through your smartphone, to give Mrs. Jones an estimate for whatever the job is that you're going to be able to do.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 or write a review.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 One of the things that we realized in developing Thrive, again, this was already seven years ago we started.

Speaker 1 The world has moved to smartphones.

Speaker 1 Maybe you like that, maybe you don't like that, but let's face face it, most people today live on their smartphones, especially anybody who's, you know, like south of 60 years old.

Speaker 1 And, you know, I have three kids in their 20s and their smartphone is probably never more than a foot from them at any time.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And you can't ask people to leave you voicemails. And you certainly don't want to return those voicemails.

Speaker 1 So we're not taking out the human element there, but do it where it's, it's adding value, not, oh, yeah, I'll see you at three o'clock on Monday.

Speaker 1 That can be done via calendar appointment on your website.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 They're like, did you know your voicemail is full? I'm like, I knew that three years ago when I intentionally let it stay full.

Speaker 2 Because I don't listen to voicemails and I don't know who does unless you're like, you should see.

Speaker 2 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? And they're like, yeah, we left them a voicemail. I'm like,

Speaker 2 do you know that I think it's somewhere around 99% of text messages get read?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I'm coming out here to fix your garage door. I'm stopping up 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.

Speaker 2 Whatever it is. But one of my buddies is like, he's a sales coach at a real estate.
He does $10,000 a pop. He cheats.
He's like, that little voice note.

Speaker 2 You could automate stuff like that too.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 between text message, voicemail blasts, emails, automatic follow-ups, links to Callan Lee, which is just a simple way of finding out when they're available. Let them pick the time that works for them.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 how much is that worth?

Speaker 2 That's my question. Jordan, the stuff we're talking about, I've wasted so much time not automating.
There's a thing called Confusion Soft. I'm kidding, but that's what we call it.

Speaker 1 I'm familiar with it.

Speaker 2 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, there's very few tools that it's all in one.

Speaker 2 There's an active campaign, but then you need this, you need this, you need this.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 I'm going to need a software whiz for this stuff.

Speaker 1 Right. Glad you asked that, Tommy.
So, first thing I should say is the gentleman who you said was doing his first onboarding call on a couple of dams. At Thrive, we provide service.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 of sessions with them.

Speaker 1 It can be, you know, 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.

Speaker 1 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 the, you know, what's going to create value.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So whether they're communicating with text, with Gmail, because a lot of people have a Gmail address, with your business, email.

Speaker 1 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 the beauties of that is that you have all communications through each customer in a single place.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And you talked about, you know, like these other devices or other pieces of software out there.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And then I say, tell me about the webhooks and API because without having a way to communicate from other systems and,

Speaker 2 you know, 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.

Speaker 1 I'm not trying to say, but by all means, we have, we actually have an app marketplace.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You can do that with a couple of clicks. Very easy to do.
And the data flows between.

Speaker 2 Do you have any companies, basically some stories about companies that grew exponentially when they started integrating and automating their businesses?

Speaker 1 Yeah, for sure. So I want to tell you a couple of examples of our customers, but you know, probably,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Domino's, if you remember way back, was just a pizza place. Their pizza wasn't actually that good.
And they were just kind of like another pizza place.

Speaker 1 Well, Well, they did upgrade their pizza, but more than just upgrade their pizza, they upgraded their marketing.

Speaker 1 And one of the things Domino's did was they developed an app, which probably now a lot of people listening to this have.

Speaker 1 And, you know, what the app essentially allows you to do, it's almost like Uber for pizza. It allows you to order the pizza.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 is, the doorbell rings, and your pizza nice and hiping hot.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 absolutely a marketing and software tremendous story.

Speaker 1 And there's no reason that a company that's smaller than Domino's 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.

Speaker 1 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 Wit's End.
The guy's name is Witt.

Speaker 1 And he tells me he used to drive across town. It's in Detroit, so he's like, you know, big city traffic.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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...

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 That's one example. Another example, there's a young woman who runs a hair shop out west called Hair by Sierra.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And then she automated her whole calendar experience and the whole thing became easier for her.

Speaker 1 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 you know 100 bucks an hour, 200 bucks an hour.

Speaker 1 Your time typing things into your calendar is worth like $5 an hour. Like, there's no value add to that.
Anybody could do it.

Speaker 1 So you 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I asked them if I could be a business partner. I said, can I buy in?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Vitamin B, vitamin C, vitamin E shots, whatever it is, vitamin D.

Speaker 2 You know, as we're going into this allergy, whatever, they got a ton of different stuff and they can send out a case study or whatever, just top of mind awareness.

Speaker 2 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 could get it on some type of cadence, they could begin to say,

Speaker 2 I'm going to maximize my entire calendar. I can work free.

Speaker 2 They can start hiring around and 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 They say, I hate to get text messages, so don't text me.

Speaker 2 But if I had a text message that said, hey, listen, we're going to come through and do a 29-point safety inspection, lubricate adjust tight and everything on your garage or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah for $62.

Speaker 2 And you don't even need to be home. You can open it from your thing if we're there.
We'll say hi if you got the camera.

Speaker 2 And 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 that's i know people my age people in their 20s i'm in my 30s now but soon to be 40s

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah, what can you guys just tell me what I need to know right here let me get it done totally one of the problems we've found over the 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 because 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.

Speaker 1 Okay, no problem if he calls you right back. But something like you can look in the industry statistics, like 40% of voicemails do not get returned.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 have a way that they automatically get a response from you.

Speaker 1 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 expecting 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

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I go, You got to be kidding me.

Speaker 2 They don't. I thought that was like your God-given right to know what a call tracking number is.

Speaker 2 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 Valback in 2006.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 it's the simple things that sometimes I feel like it's the unfair advantage to use what's out there.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 You've probably seen this where they said, oh, hello, my name's 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.

Speaker 2 It wasn't perfect. But she said, can we do Tuesday instead?

Speaker 2 And AI, I've got all these books on AI too, about like, it's kind of scary, too, because they could start thinking Facebook had to shut down their AI. But where's the future ahead of this stuff?

Speaker 2 How far will we go?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You know, if you order something from Amazon and it shows up in 24 hours at your door, now you suddenly expect everything to show up in 24 hours.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 that's why small businesses have to stay with the times. Otherwise, they start to lose from a customer experience.

Speaker 1 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 roofing.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Otherwise, they never get to the chance where they can show how good their service really is. And who are they losing out to?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 To your question about AI, I mean, all that stuff is actually coming sooner than maybe people expect.

Speaker 1 I think if someone were leaning in that direction to get a little bit more sophisticated, maybe they should be thinking about chat.

Speaker 1 offering chat on their website because nice thing about chat is somebody can quickly type a box 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 you know but you can 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 doing today i mean they need to do the blocking and tackling you know that what are some small areas of the business that most business owners don't know that they can actually automate

Speaker 1 right

Speaker 1 well a key thing they you know i think uh a lot of small businesses need to realize is they can automate things that have to do with their staff.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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...

Speaker 1 Let's say you're, I don't know, you know, some type of coach or trainer or something like that, or maybe you're providing some type of training.

Speaker 1 You have customers, they may be talking to your staff, they may be talking to your system, they may be talking to you. If all of that information is in a single place, that's not even automating.

Speaker 1 That's just organizing, you know, on a platform. You can look at what the communications were with your staff.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 They had 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So simple 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Ask for your customer's kids' birthdays and send them a birthday greeting or a birthday, electronic birthday greeting, or birthday card.

Speaker 1 Or if you're the kind of business that you can offer something for ease sake, come in and we'll give your kid a free whatever it is.

Speaker 1 I remember when I was a kid, used to go to Basket of Robins 31 Flavors. They'd give you a free ice cream cone on your birthday.
How cool was that? So today you would get it on your text.

Speaker 1 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.
Again, just make it easy for them.

Speaker 2 When we talk about customer service

Speaker 2 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 rings 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 dug tests and background checks and we're open weekends because everybody does that.

Speaker 2 I've read a great book called Competitive Advantages. I actually had Janie Smith on the podcast, and we literally went through the program.

Speaker 2 Competitive advantages are truly historical facts that make us better because we've kept stats on what we've done through the customer experience. And it's a different way of looking at things.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 How many people moved up the corporate ladder or just moved up the ladder of their career?

Speaker 2 How important are those things to track?

Speaker 1 Again, I go back to what I said before.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 at incredibly expensive for those keywords.

Speaker 1 If you heard Google's quarterly results, they just came out and they had record results. Well, that's because people are paying record amounts for that advertising.

Speaker 1 Your chance of getting a good return on that Google investment is less and less and less.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 In contrast, you know, I mentioned something as seemingly old and prosaic as a printed yellow page ad, but because the cost 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.

Speaker 1 And that's what a small business should be thinking about. So you definitely have to be tracking all of your advertising sources.

Speaker 1 to see what's working and what's not and building out that sort of portfolio of advertising sources that work for you.

Speaker 1 In terms of, and I would say the same for email, if you're renting an email list, you know, if 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 vet, how many leads did you get?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 tracking what works and what doesn't.

Speaker 1 You don't want to be sending out emails that you shouldn't. You You certainly don't want to be sending out text messages that you shouldn't.
You don't want to be spamming people.

Speaker 1 But if certain types of notifications are working for you, that's what you need to continue.

Speaker 1 A lot of the success you have with those kinds of marketing and customer outreach is just tracking what's working and doing what is and stopping what's not.

Speaker 2 You know, when you have the right tools in place, what I love

Speaker 2 is with my tools and with my

Speaker 2 attribution models,

Speaker 2 I can actually tell advertisers that I'll give them a report every day and I want to be on what's called pay for performance.

Speaker 2 And I'll give them a percentage of every job. So I'll say this.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 They get a report that gets sent out to them daily. So, what I love about the automation is, I'll say, hey, put your money where your mouth is.

Speaker 2 I can't say that to Google, but I can say that to places that the Albuquerque yellow pages. I can say that to certain newspapers and certain neighborhood mailers.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And I think that's pretty amazing. And I think that people really, really enjoy the fact that I don't need to lie cheat or steal to people.
Let's pay them.

Speaker 2 And 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.

Speaker 2 I can't do anything.

Speaker 2 If you're trying to pretend that your marketing is that good and Google gets all the credit, I'll pay you, you know, I'll pick a percentage, but because people want to go check out your online reputation and see real reviews.

Speaker 2 You can't see reviews. What am I 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?

Speaker 2 Have you been involved in any pay-for-performance in the past?

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, 100%. Yeah, we have that available in certain products we sell today.

Speaker 1 If that's something you're interested in, you're talking to one of our business associates, you can ask about pay-per-performance programs, even with a Google campaign, because you can turn those on and off.

Speaker 1 I mean, essentially,

Speaker 1 it's not pay for performance in the sense of 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 track to your point about the call tracking numbers, we have call tracking numbers, we've had them for two decades that

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 For people who don't know call tracking numbers, just a special phone number that forwards to your regular phone number.

Speaker 1 And so you can record how many, and that's the number, that special number is the one that goes in the ad.

Speaker 1 and so you can tell how many phone calls or even clicks your ad generated you know with like 100 accuracy and so you can see you know i spent whatever a thousand dollars a month for this ad it generated 50 clicks so it was twenty dollars a click i converted 10 of those so it was 200 a conversion okay does that make you money or not let's talk about your business Well, I'll tell you what, I work with Kinnet and I work with a lot of other places.

Speaker 2 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 don't have to call 80 people to get a decision. Number two

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 They're putting me with a better better subtitle or adding an extra color to make that pop.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 We can't put a flooring guy here, flooring guy here, flooring guy there. So they're going to, they want some diversity, but they also want to know who's driving their key performance indicators.

Speaker 2 to make us the most money, which will spike their algorithm. And they'll say, we're going to give you more space.
We'll give you a header here.

Speaker 2 we're going to throw you in the classified we're going to give you a special report that's kind of like earned media here on this date so it turns out to be a pretty cool thing and it's not just print

Speaker 2 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 um 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.

Speaker 2 So why not just take a sponsored ad on there, but give the space away?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 It's almost,

Speaker 2 I would beg,

Speaker 2 I'd say losers, Gordon, and I'm sorry if you're out there listening. I don't, I'm not, I'm saying losers in general say.
All I do is word of mouth.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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, PL, whatever.

Speaker 2 I got money in the bank. But when I realized those numbers told a story and I realized what automation could do, and I realized what things meant.

Speaker 2 And I'll say this, I want to tell you one more thing here is

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And so a lot of people hate going to the doctor.

Speaker 2 But if you know, you get there early enough, you catch stuff early, you could save it, you could save your business, you could get that marriage back, you could be a better mother or father.

Speaker 2 And I know this is an extreme, but isn't this really the case when we're talking about these things?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, all the things we've talked about from

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 create a more predictable customer experience so that your customers are more happy and you're more happy. And, you know, I will say something about that last comment you made.

Speaker 1 The businesses that depend on the business owner to be there day in, day out, 20 hours a day

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 What they want is a business that you can walk away from and it still works as well or better than before.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so you should, the reason you got to do the things we're talking about.

Speaker 1 is that you 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 have a business that doesn't depend on you.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah. Well, there's a great business called Built to Sell, and there's an idea of Michael Gerbert that just says work

Speaker 2 on it to make it better.

Speaker 2 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, and you got to work in that section.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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 can be overwhelming.

Speaker 2 And I think there's some business owners out there.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 What do you say to those guys and gals?

Speaker 1 Well, I'm a little biased, but I think our company Thrive does a pretty good job, both on the marketing side and on the business automation side.

Speaker 1 That's been the innovation over the years is we started in the marketing. I mentioned yellow book.
We started this team 20 years ago.

Speaker 1 helping small businesses advertise and get really great return on their investment. We've continued at this company, Thrive, and we still offer all those services.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 we appreciate and understand most small businesses, frankly, small business people are not. techies.
They didn't go into business because they're techies.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 simplify the whole process of using this software so that you can be really good at it without needing to be technological.

Speaker 1 I mean, most people, you know, you ask people, I love to ask people like, do you use cloud technology? No, no, I don't. What the hell is cloud technology? Okay, do you, do you have kids?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I got kids. Do 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.

Speaker 1 So now you know about cloud technology. It's not like you have to be a genius.
It's these tools have gotten much, much easier.

Speaker 2 Well, Dropbox, Google Drive, I mean, everything really is in the cloud nowadays.

Speaker 2 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 is Elon Musk.

Speaker 2 But, you know, I got a guy, Justin, here, and he asked a good question. And I'm not really sure, but how does this work with Service Titan or does it work with other CRMs?

Speaker 2 If you're on Salesforce or Zoho or HubSpot, whatever, is there certain integrations that work well with it? I don't really know the answer to that, Gordon.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you can go into the Thrive 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.

Speaker 1 And there's other tools you can use to connect them. There's something called Zapier that connects these different CRMs and other tools.
So the answer is generally yes.

Speaker 1 Most of these I mentioned before, some of the easy ones, QuickBooks, everybody uses, we connect with that, Constant Contact, many others.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You know, a lot of people use HubSpot for content automation or creating content that drives leads to them. So, you know, we may be complementary to that.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And these products need to talk to each other. So we're well down the road towards making that happen.

Speaker 2 You know, Justin asked a little bit deeper if the Service Titan does it in Dialpad, does it do automated SMS and stuff like that? And I know it does.

Speaker 2 I would say

Speaker 2 look at what you have

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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 Titan makes no money the first 16 months.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But overall, if 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?

Speaker 1 Yeah, Service Titan's a good piece of software, from what I know. It's also really expensive.
And for a lot of businesses in the HVAC space and companies like that, they don't need Service Titan.

Speaker 1 Service Titan was really built. It's pretty expensive to use.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 to increase working working capital. I'd like to hear you take this.

Speaker 1 Well, it sounds like you need more jobs to keep your staff busy. And so I would say, you know, how do you get more jobs? Number one, of course, provide great service.
You know that.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Can we fix those shingles? Yada, yada.

Speaker 1 I mean, if you have a customer customer list and reach out to your customers, either on a personal basis or on kind of a more of a mass basis, like I said before, hey, spring's coming up.

Speaker 1 Can we set up a spring cleaning for you?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 For some reason, and tell me if I'm wrong,

Speaker 2 because I got a lot of friends that have helped these type of people, but the dentist does it right.

Speaker 2 For some reason, the dentists have adopted this type of software. They need to get their appointments.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And for some reason, it's like clockwork.

Speaker 2 I think a lot of people said, where could I go where it's the

Speaker 2 lots of money and really not business heads? Because the dentists, they charge a lot of money, but they don't know how to run a business. So I was pre-dental and I went and interned with a dentist.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 get a master's degree in business before you go to dental school. Because I'm

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 you need to learn to run a business they don't teach you that they teach you how to work in mouse they teach you plaque they teach you all kinds of stuff about what you can prescribe and 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

Speaker 2 specialize in something the dentist told me because he was in between an ortho and a regular

Speaker 2 I'll tell you

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 What does he charge you? 300 bucks?

Speaker 2 It's a lot of money.

Speaker 2 So the hygienist, yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So if you no-show, okay,

Speaker 1 unless they're a dentist that charges you, most don't for that no-show, you know, he just lost that money never to get it back, right? That seat is like an empty airline seat.

Speaker 1 That seat is gone, right?

Speaker 1 You're never going to get that money back. So for them to invest in the software to make sure you show up is worth a lot.

Speaker 1 I mean, one no-show that shows up pays for that software for the month, probably.

Speaker 1 That's the way you got to look at it.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And I don't want a broken record, though. You know, 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.

Speaker 2 Can you share a couple ideas on client acquisition strategies that

Speaker 2 not many home service companies are taking advantage of?

Speaker 1 I believe that when people make certain types of improvements to their home, they have to be filed. down at like the local courthouse.

Speaker 1 For example, I know that if you got to put in a pool or do some types of construction at your house, 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Well, there's a thing called Construction Monitor. And what they did is they they built an algorithm that scrapes municipality data.
And what's cool about that is I've looked into scraping tools.

Speaker 2 And what's really, really cool is you scrape that data.

Speaker 2 Anybody that's pulled a permit or anybody actually that's invested, I can buy data that'll tell me anybody that's done a refi on their house and specifically a refi to do an addition.

Speaker 2 So there's data out there. There's lists you could buy and you can plug them into a tool like Thrive.

Speaker 2 There's certain stuff that are opt-in and, 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 stuff exists. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I'm in an area where if you live in certain parts of the township, you know, there's a lot of paperwork you have to file because there's a lot of environmental regulations if you're too close to the water, things like that.

Speaker 1 And county monitors all this stuff so that, you know, it doesn't mess with the land and drainage and things like that.

Speaker 1 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 putting in a pool, building a house, improving the yard, whatever it is.

Speaker 1 So that's one way. That takes a little bit of, you know, ingenuity.

Speaker 1 And go back to what we talked about, some of the marketing that you do, you know, you got to think real carefully and test about keywords. What are the keywords people are searching on?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Don't assume something automatically does or doesn't work. You got to test and prove it.
You know, your situation may be unique.

Speaker 1 Another one, by the way, last one I want to mention while we're talking about automation is

Speaker 1 referrals. Okay, so you said you talked about word of mouth, but you can automate your referrals to a certain extent, right?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 a name or can recommend somebody who ends up doing business with me. So there's lots of ways to automate it as well.

Speaker 2 And some of these things are said and forget it, and you just let the leads come to you. So I close out with three main questions.
Number one, someone wants to get a hold of you, Gordon.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 1 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-H-R-Y-V.com.

Speaker 2 And I always ask this, if there's a few books, could be one, could be three. Is there any books that you've read that changed your life that we can't live without?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Covered a lot of the 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 can sell, things like that.

Speaker 1 I think that's a, you know, terrific book for a small business person.

Speaker 2 And then finally, we talked about a lot of stuff.

Speaker 2 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 a one big topic one closing thought that the listeners need to hear

Speaker 2 yeah

Speaker 1 when you think about what makes a small business person successful versus another that is unsuccessful you know sure you got to be motivated sure you got to be hungry sure you've got to be you know 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.

Speaker 1 You know, a lot of people don't sit down and write any kind of business plan, you know, which just forces you to sit down. It doesn't have to be 20 pages long.
What is the service?

Speaker 1 You talked about how do you differentiate your service? How are you different than any of the other things I can buy out there?

Speaker 1 You know, what's your plan over the next few 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.

Speaker 1 And then a really important one that I know you care a lot about, Tommy, is pricing and margins.

Speaker 1 Do you price your product appropriately so you can actually make money and not just have a job, but have a business? So those things, you know, are all really important to do.

Speaker 1 And I think if you start to think in terms of spending some time planning and then executing against that plan, you know, you have a better chance of success.

Speaker 2 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, buddy of mine.

Speaker 2 And he said, why do you have a separate set of books for when you manufacture doors back here?

Speaker 2 I said, if I didn't know exactly what it cost me with labor, rent, material, everything, then I can never price it accurately. So what am I shooting a dart or pin the tail on the donkey?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 You guys, reach out to Gordon if you need help with automation, if you need help just understanding more about marketing. I think Gordon's a great guy to help you understand.

Speaker 2 And, Gordon, I really appreciate you coming on.

Speaker 2 Um, if you get a chance, guys, winning on the Wall Street for small business podcast, winning on Main Street, winning on Main Street, winning on Main Street. I don't know why I said Wall Street,

Speaker 1 you're thinking about IPOs, man.

Speaker 2 My head's on Wall Street here, not me. It's okay.
I'm a Main Street guy. Sorry.

Speaker 2 I must have yawned 10 times, not because of you, because literally my morning meeting, I've had three monsters today, and I'm sorry. But this was really, really good.

Speaker 1 No, that's great. It's all good.
Hey, really enjoyed it, Tommy. And good luck and love to hear from your listeners.

Speaker 2 All right. Appreciate you, brother.

Speaker 1 All right. Thanks.
Take care.

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