Upgrading Your Digital Marketing to Recover from Pandemic Losses

Speaker 1 Like I said before, I think it's a scenario where you have to look at where your revenue is.

Speaker 1 If you're beneath the 5 million, you should be anywhere between the 7% to 8% of what your total yearly of what you want that year to come to.

Speaker 1 If you're above the 5 million mark, you've got to be thinking anywhere from the 9% to 10%.

Speaker 1 Because now you have those good employees, and if you don't keep the phones ringing and being able to generate the calls that will generate the higher tickets, that generate the better conversion rates, it's going to be a situation where that employee is going to be looking for their next job.

Speaker 1 So, I'm saying if you're above $5 million, you should be thinking anywhere from 9% to 10% of what that revenue goal is.

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 Coming to you live from Phoenix, Arizona.

Speaker 1 I've got a really special guest here. I got a lot of cameramen around me.
He brings his own camera crew, which I would expect nothing less. Absolutely.
You got Bill Rossell here from Pennsylvania.

Speaker 1 And hey, I'm glad you're here. Thank you, Tom.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we've been talking a lot for a couple of years now about a lot of stuff. And let me just do the intro here.
You guys know this is the Home Service Expert Podcast. I'm Tommy Mello.

Speaker 1 And Bill has helped me out in a lot of ways. He's one of those guys.
He's involved with a company called One SEO.

Speaker 1 And he's an expert at online marketing, online advertising, SEM and SEO. He understands social media software, but there's a lot more to it than that.
There's conversion rates.

Speaker 1 There's new things that we've talked about like next door that bringing on new stuff.

Speaker 1 You work with me on things that Andrew and you talked about like the GMB and learning about how to get more out of our Google My Business page.

Speaker 1 You're the vice president of, well, now you're the chief sales officer.

Speaker 1 In the past, you've been the vice president of client relations. You worked with Travel Media Group, where you were the regional sales manager.

Speaker 1 And UK2 Group, you were the global affiliate marketing director.

Speaker 1 He oversees all of the pre- and post-sell relations with clients, making sure the sales teams are setting proper expectations for clients.

Speaker 1 He also leads the client relations managers to directly communicate with clients. to see the return on investment for the customized online marketing solutions.

Speaker 1 He has decades of experience in leading sales and marketing teams for various companies, and he has a passion for leading people and helping them develop both personally and professionally.

Speaker 1 It's a mouthful. So, you know, Bill, I've got to know you for a while.

Speaker 1 Why don't you tell everybody a little bit about yourself, how you got into marketing, and what you've been up to, where you see yourself in the next few years.

Speaker 1 Well, first of all, once again, thanks for having me. I'm originally from Pittsburgh, Blue Collar Town.
I had the opportunity to go to college, didn't do too well there.

Speaker 1 Ended up joining the Navy, was in the United States Navy for close to six years.

Speaker 1 Six years in the Navy, okay.

Speaker 1 And I got out of the Navy, decided to go back to school, started working in a restaurant to kind of supplement my income while I was going back to school.

Speaker 1 And one thing or another, I fell in love with the restaurant business. That kind of took me to a place where

Speaker 1 You got to be at the where the registers are running as far as in the restaurant industry.

Speaker 1 And so for me, I started to have a family and it wasn't a situation where that was going to be good to be on at the restaurant Friday, Saturday, Sunday.

Speaker 1 So I called a buddy of mine and he said, I think I can get a sales job for you. And I said, well, what am I going to be selling? And he goes, print yellow pages.
Aha!

Speaker 1 So in 2001, I started selling print yellow pages. And the way I kind of got the job is a unique story because the person that hired me didn't want to hire me.

Speaker 1 I had to go above that person's head to get the job. My interview lasted seven minutes.

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 1 I went home that night and I was like, man, if I could just get my foot in the door, I'd be in a situation that I know I could kill it doing this.

Speaker 1 I was running a $5 million a year restaurant and it lasted seven minutes. And I'm like, so I sent a shoe to the GM in the mail.

Speaker 1 I said, just let me get my foot in the door and I can spend an hour with you. If after that, end of that hour, it's a scenario where.

Speaker 1 I'm not the right person for the job, then you tell me and then I'll be able to walk away from it. But I can't walk away from seven minutes.
Okay.

Speaker 1 So he hires me and he puts me on the team of the person that didn't want me. Oh man.
So long story short, I said my first sales call, I go out with her on it.

Speaker 1 And it's the worst sales call in my career. And so she tells me, you're going to be done in a matter of two months here.
You will be out of here.

Speaker 1 And so I was like, how do I, I just left a hundred thousand dollar a year job. I'm in a situation where she doesn't want to have me on board.

Speaker 1 So I go and then just like you have in your office here and from the tour, leaderboards. Who did the best in sales, who had the most cancels, who had the most overall numbers?

Speaker 1 And there was one guy's name that stood at the top. And I was like, I want to go see what that guy's doing.
And so I said to him, His name's Lance, who's the CEO of One SEO.

Speaker 1 I said, Let me take the opportunity to see what he's doing on a sales call. So I said, Hey, do you mind if I grab you for a minute and take me out on a sales call? Let's see how you're doing it.

Speaker 1 And he says, Sure, be at my house at 5:30.

Speaker 1 And I said, 5:30 p.m., 5:30 a.m. He goes, No, 5:30 a.m.
tomorrow. He said, This is the way I want my coffee.
Okay.

Speaker 1 And you'd be there.

Speaker 1 So at like 11:30 at night after seven sales calls, it's a situation where my wife called. Well, back in those days, you just got a text.
You got a page on your phone. A page on your phone.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you got a page on your phone. Where are you? I said, I'm still on a sales call with the carpet cleaning guy.
It's 11:30 at night.

Speaker 1 But what he showed me was how to utilize meeting clients' needs and putting them in the best position.

Speaker 1 And so that kind of took us to a little company called YellowPages.com, which we opened up here in the Phoenix market back in 2006.

Speaker 1 17 other offices, 900 employees, 150 million in annualized revenue. He kept saying, come back, come work with me.
I'm going to start my own company. I said, no, we've done our thing together.

Speaker 1 And then he made me an offer in 2015. I couldn't refuse and been there ever since.
I've heard a lot about Lance and I heard a lot of great things about your company, OneSEO.

Speaker 1 And, you know, you guys are doing some really cool things. I think I want to talk a lot about Google because one of the things I was on a Facebook group this weekend.
Okay.

Speaker 1 And, you know, I get kind of sucked into these things. And you went down a rabbit hole, didn't you? I went down a rabbit hole.

Speaker 1 And there's one thing that I know is a lot of companies are price driven, the majority of them. And I got a good book on the shelf by Alan Rohr.
I got a lot of good books about how to price yourself.

Speaker 1 And the one thing that I realized is if you're going to,

Speaker 1 for example, this is the best example I could give you. If you've got a guy, a customer that loves McDonald's, breakfast, lunch, mid-lunch, and dinner,

Speaker 1 and he eats dessert at McDonald's, and then you take him to a steakhouse to say you're paying for the bill. He's going to go, are you freaking kidding me? I'm used to paying $7 a mil.
This is $60.

Speaker 1 This is nine times what I like paying. This is a rip-off.
You guys are rip-off artists. I know how much steak costs.
What the heck?

Speaker 1 But if you're on just Angie, if you're on Home Advisor, if you're just doing Yelp ads, it's survival of the cheapest. Google, on the other hand, in my opinion, it asks for a different client.

Speaker 1 And the clients are more of your steakhouse. I want it done now.
I don't care what it costs. This is an inconvenience.
Fix it right. What is your take on that?

Speaker 1 Because this is like a lot of people that listen to the podcast like my point of view. A lot of people listen to me because they hate me.
It's kind of like David Chappelle.

Speaker 1 Either you love me or hate me. I like them both.
They can both listen. But what are your thoughts when it comes comes to marketing for the right customer, the right avatar? Who are you looking for?

Speaker 1 I'm not looking for Walmart people. Well, I think you have to properly set the demographics to where you want to go and who you want to bring in.

Speaker 1 And it's a situation where when you do the right things as far as your overall marketing, you can't be the best, have the best quality, have the best employees, have the quickest time, and be the cheapest.

Speaker 1 You can't have any of those all be the same. So you have to really look and say, what do I want to do? I want to get great service, great quality.
I might be more expensive.

Speaker 1 And if it's a situation where I'm more expensive, but the quality is there, there are a lot of people that are willing to pay for quality.

Speaker 1 And so I try to say to our customers, listen, we're going to give you a great product at a great price. But we're also going to be in a situation for like your customers.

Speaker 1 We want to target those customers specifically to who we are.

Speaker 1 So we do a lot of different things to target who the customers that we're trying to attract as far as from just like you're trying to attract.

Speaker 1 And when you see the branding, you see the recruitments, you see the timeframe that people get there. Price sometimes doesn't become the object anymore.

Speaker 1 It's being what I want to get out of it, what I'm trying to solve. You know, it's interesting because recently I was at an event with Dan Antonelli.
Yeah. And you know Dan well.

Speaker 1 He actually commented on this earlier. He came up to me and said, you know, Tommy, we're working on some stuff for you.
you know, whether it be yard signs, whatever.

Speaker 1 And he said, I'm sorry that we've taken a long time, but to get the the people that I need, the top level employees that deliver the product that I'm acceptable with, you're going to wait.

Speaker 1 You'll still pay, but you're going to wait. And I respect that because he doesn't turn out crap.
So there's certain artistry that I don't think Van Gogh was like, I need to finish this in a day.

Speaker 1 And there's certain other things like the garage drawer we're very good at. We've got a training school.
So ultimately.

Speaker 1 I'm not sacrificing quality, but people want the experience to happen the same day. You know, I'm always in a rush.
I want it to work.

Speaker 1 What's that opportunity cost if I got to sit in my house in 120 degrees? My buddy did me a favor years ago, and I love him. And he's a really good business person.

Speaker 1 But he did me a favor and he came and fixed the HVAC unit and he said, hey,

Speaker 1 200 bucks, dude, I just replaced the belt motor. Boom.
Two days later, another issue. Three days later, something else happened and it's 120 degrees in the house.

Speaker 1 And at some point, I'm just like, just replace the unit because look, it's not worth it to me. And I know you're trying to do me right.

Speaker 1 And, you know, every time I've done that for a friend, my dad used to run anchotransmissions. And the guy's name was John Lindsay that ran all these different transmissions.
He owned them.

Speaker 1 And my dad would go, hey, your buddy just came in with this Mercedes. He goes, charge him double.
He goes, what do you mean? It's your buddy.

Speaker 1 He goes, listen, he's going to call me at midnight if that doesn't work. For me to wake up at midnight, if it messes up, charge him double.
So I don't mind paying a good price.

Speaker 1 But there's other people out there that charge a double price and they don't deliver the quality. It's a bunch of virtual assistants doing a bunch of crap.
You read the words, they don't make sense.

Speaker 1 You know, you've got competitors probably out there doing that kind of stuff. Well, everybody that graduates from college with a laptop today thinks that they're a marketing wizard.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 And we know that's not the way that it works.

Speaker 1 It has to be a scenario where you take your time, understand what your client, what your customer wants, and being able to have an understanding of where you want to take them.

Speaker 1 The average small to medium-sized business is always trying to figure out how to grow, but they don't put the fuel in the tank that's going to get them to where they want to go as it applies to a percentage of of where their revenue is.

Speaker 1 And the data doesn't lie. People lie about the data.
And so it's really, how do I get to where I want to go versus where I am?

Speaker 1 You know, a lot of times what you'll see as far as I see people that are saying, oh, well, 2019, 2020 was great.

Speaker 1 And thinking that if they're going to think they're going to do the same things in 21 and 22 that they did in 20 with the changes that happened as far as the pandemic, they're going to be standing still on the water and people are going to go flying by them.

Speaker 1 Yeah. What I learned from the pandemic is I switched my marketing focus towards the employees.
And what I've learned about great employees is they get five-star reviews. They close more jobs.

Speaker 1 They charge more because they believe in the product. They go to church.
They go to the gas station. They go to the supermarket and they get business.
They do recruiting.

Speaker 1 Now I'm like, I don't really need to do much. I still spend all the fortune.
I spent at least 9.8% on marketing, 9.8% of revenue. But my point is, I started stacking the deck with eight players.

Speaker 1 And what I learned was, is they turn into affiliates because we pay them on every tech generated lead. They get more five star.
All of it goes good.

Speaker 1 So my whole mentality has been, man, I've been this whole time of understanding marketing. And I went to U of A, got a marketing degree from a master's degree.

Speaker 1 And it didn't mean anything compared to what I learned in the real world. But pay attention to the employees, market for the right employees.
Think about this. You worked for YP in 2001.

Speaker 1 What was Lance doing as far as turning out numbers, if you remember? As far as just the production, what was his numbers? Do you remember any idea of

Speaker 1 what sales he brought in? Well, put it this way. He made more than the top five guys beneath him.
He was the number one sales guy in the country, and he made more than the top five combined.

Speaker 1 Here's the point: is how many sales associates were there? Thousands. Thousands.
So you take Lance and you take the bottom 10% and you look at the disparity.

Speaker 1 And what I'm saying is you could take any business. You got a business of 10 technicians.
Take the top, take the bottom, realize the variance there. And what I'm saying is stack the deck.

Speaker 1 You think getting more customers is the answer.

Speaker 1 The deal is book more calls, raise the average ticket, get higher conversion rate, get more five-star reviews, and turn them into recruiters and turn them into job recruiters like affiliates.

Speaker 1 And all of a sudden, your job gets way easier. And, you know, I'm not trying to take away anything because I want to understand what you do at.

Speaker 1 you know, the SEO company, because is it just SEO? Are you guys doing media advisors? Are you doing PVC? What is everything you guys do and what's your role?

Speaker 1 So we're a full-service digital agency. Everything soup to nuts from design, development, PPC, SEO, social media.
We've now gone into video content.

Speaker 1 Video is huge as far as in our marketplace to Nextdoor, Hulu, OTT. Anything that's under the digital umbrella, we're going to kind of be able to do.

Speaker 1 And we test it on ourselves before we go and roll it out to clients. So OTT is a form of dynamic ads, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, you could do that as well as what you're doing from, like I said, a Hulu standpoint, Pandora, Spotify. I mean, think about it this way.

Speaker 1 Once, let's say March of 2020 happened, right? How many people were driving to work?

Speaker 1 March of 2020. I was probably the only one.
All right. So,

Speaker 1 but you think about it. Where did billboards go? They took a back seat.
What happened? TV. TV.
TV took a spot. Radio and billboards took a backstop.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And so now there's all, think about it, how much streaming is out there? And what percentage of people are now cord cutting across the board.

Speaker 1 And it's moving into the age demographics that you haven't seen in the past being in that standpoint. It's now saying that the greatest number are happening in the 48 to 54 cord cutter category.

Speaker 1 So how are people adapting to that as far as in their marketing? Here's the best one. The QR code in 2017 was dead.
It's back. It's back.
It took a full resurgence. I knew it would be because

Speaker 1 they got to put it into the camera. They just teach it into the tech.

Speaker 1 And so now you shouldn't put any type of documentation out there from a traditional print standpoint that doesn't have a QR code because now you can take that QR code and land it specifically to pages on your website that you want to see where the conversions are coming from.

Speaker 1 And,

Speaker 1 you know, what's really cool, if you got something like HuffSpot in the background, I talk a lot about this, but

Speaker 1 There's a book called ASQ Answered by Marcus Sheridan. I think I told you about it.
And he talks about how he created a buyer's guide.

Speaker 1 And what I love about a buyer's guide is he's done a lot of research that if you spend more than 20 minutes on a buyer's guide, the client, they have over 80% chance of conversion on a new sale versus service.

Speaker 1 Service is easy. So what that means to me is we build a buyer's guide and we're putting it together and it's scoring the client.

Speaker 1 So when I show up to your house versus anybody's house, someone else's house, let's just say. This guy spent a lot of time looking at insulation.
You spent a lot of time looking at glass doors.

Speaker 1 You seem to be more about curb appeal than energy savings. I'm going to be prepared.
And I'm going to have the right guy at the right time show up.

Speaker 1 And the likelihood of closing is going to be exponentially higher because the other guy's showing up, his butt crack showing. He's writing it down in a paper invoice.
He's sweating.

Speaker 1 And the one thing I always ask clients is, is there a comfortable spot where we could go talk about this? I'm the only one getting into their home.

Speaker 1 So I just go back to this employee because I think, look, if you've got a bigger, bigger conversion rate, better booking rate, bigger average ticket, better reviews, you could pay more for marketing, right and more for employees and that's the key is not to have the turnover and you know where do you find that that special mark is is it five percent is it i know it's relative but you do a lot with h5 plumbing electrical i'm sure you work with some companies that are just they don't get it so two things what don't they get usually then what are the listeners maybe they're like what's the biggest misconception how much should they be spending in marketing on average like i said before i think it's a scenario where you have to look at where your revenue is if you're beneath the five million you should be anywhere between the 7% to 8% of what your total yearly of what you want that year to come to.

Speaker 1 If you're above the 5 million mark, you've got to be thinking anywhere from the 9% to 10%.

Speaker 1 Because now you have those good employees.

Speaker 1 And if you don't keep the phones ringing and being able to generate the calls that'll generate the higher tickets, that generate the better conversion rates, it's going to be a situation where that employee is going to be looking for their next job.

Speaker 1 So I'm saying if you're above 5 million, you should be thinking anywhere from 9% to 10% of what that revenue goal is.

Speaker 1 And in addition to that, look at what I have prospects that'll come to us all the time and say, listen, I want to go from 2 million to 4-2.

Speaker 1 And I'm like, there's not a shot you're going from 2 to 4.2.

Speaker 1 And the reason is, is because you don't have the infrastructure to double your business.

Speaker 1 You have to be in a situation where you have the systems in place that will allow that to happen. And then you have an aggressive goal.
You have to have an aggressive budget to market it.

Speaker 1 If I want to drive from here to Tucson and I don't have 150 miles in my tank, I'm not going to make it. I think it's 150 miles.

Speaker 1 But at the end of the day, if you want to do three, five, seven million, you better have a budget that suppresses that or else you're not going to get there. So there's a tough question for you.

Speaker 1 And I don't have the right answer for this because I think it's, and I want to hear your answer before I talk about it. But we do our wraps.
Okay. You've seen what we do with the rap shop.

Speaker 1 We've got an in-house staff that's solely marketing. We do stickers and we spend a lot on PR.
We spend a lot on nonprofits.

Speaker 1 We've got several employees, kids, little leagues that we buy a huge banner and throw a thousand bucks at it. We do golf holes.

Speaker 1 Is all that, the PR, the raising of 25,000 bottles of water for the homeless, is all that stuff, is that tucked into marketing?

Speaker 1 Because a lot of people, what I hate about KPIs, this is the worst,

Speaker 1 is when you talk about your KPIs and I'm talking about mine, we don't have a common foundation or definition. So if I say 10% of marketing, what are we including in that? So it's a good question.

Speaker 1 And I think that that's where you have to look at breaking down everything you spend and what does it bring? Does it bring a conversion? Does it bring awareness?

Speaker 1 Does it bring a benefit to you that you can put a tangible number on?

Speaker 1 Okay, so on that water bottle, is there a specific URL? Is there a QR code?

Speaker 1 Is there a specific phone number that when somebody's drinking and they need to call A1 garage doors, they're calling that particular number because the water bottle is right in front of them.

Speaker 1 There's not a doubt in my mind if we broke out your service, Titan, right now, you have everything down to the nickel. Well, with the tracking numbers, that the software is designed.

Speaker 1 The one thing I love about ServiceN more than anything about it is the marketing because I'm a marketer. Adam loves inventory and a bunch of other crap, you know.

Speaker 1 But I love knowing where the money's going. And that's what that's what a good book by Alan Rohr is: where'd the money go? There's a bunch of little ones that you know, Alan Rohr, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, she's amazing. Not only where does the money go, but what did you make from that money?

Speaker 1 And you know, what's here's what's hard: is I've got a guy in my marketing team who does a lot of things. And the other day I said to him, I said, dude, you've been working a lot on the newsletter.

Speaker 1 He's like 40 hours a month.

Speaker 1 And I said,

Speaker 1 I don't mind what the hours are. I said, but is there an ROI as far as longevity of the employees stay? Does it increase morale? And here's what I said.
I'll make you a deal.

Speaker 1 50% of every activity you do, I need to be measurable in some shape or form. If you do the newsletter, I want to know how many click-throughs and how long these guys spent on it.

Speaker 1 And I want to see a survey that tells me that it's meaningful. But I can't have that on everything.
I don't need to know exactly when we do stuff for the homeless or kids, you know, place for tots.

Speaker 1 I don't need to know everything because some things just give over time.

Speaker 1 But I need 50% of all activity to be traced back to something. And he said, fair enough.
And he started to create a lot of...

Speaker 1 reports but it's stuff there's stuff that's intangible that's very very hard to say listen if i call somebody today a guy had a birthday And I said, last night I actually texted another guy.

Speaker 1 I said, dude, I'm so proud of you. I can't tell you enough how much you mean, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And he hasn't heard that from me ever. He just started a year ago.

Speaker 1 And I don't do that enough, but he said, that means a lot coming from you because I don't say it very often. So that stuff, I don't think I could put that back to ROI.

Speaker 1 You can't, but that's your time. Right.
And you have to look and say, okay, I generated that newsletter. Did it bring me revenue in Service Titan by what you set that newsletter up?

Speaker 1 Oh, it was an employee newsletter. Oh, okay.
Oh, I thought you were talking about rich. No, the employee newsletter.
40 hours on an employee newsletter. At the end of the day, you go back to your KPI.

Speaker 1 Did it increase morale? Did people give you feedback on it? One of the things that we have just kind of implemented at One SEO is an advisory board. It literally is, it's not the first level.

Speaker 1 It's not the second level. It's really...

Speaker 1 the third level employees meeting directly with the CEO to tell the things that are going on within our company that give it that culture and that's that's time, but they're involved in it.

Speaker 1 They want to be a part of it. So those things are immeasurable to keep the aspects that will say, hey, I want to have a good conversion rate.
Hey, I want to have a higher ticket.

Speaker 1 I want to do things that are going to make the company better. You know, I heard you say earlier today, you're looking forward to your next 10 resignations.
I am.

Speaker 1 You know, a couple happened over the last week. And you know why?

Speaker 1 Because

Speaker 1 I, as a leader four years ago, did not give the same expectations I give today. And they didn't sign up for this.
And guess what? I don't like staying out with the old and with the new.

Speaker 1 That's not who I am.

Speaker 1 But I know certain people are like, dude, he wants me to take 18 pictures at every call. He wants me to get a review, a yard sign.
He wants me to start providing my own leads. And I say, fair enough.

Speaker 1 But the thing is, is I told you, and I've never changed from this since I started. We will be ever changing.
We are not going to be the same company tomorrow.

Speaker 1 We're the best we've ever been, but the worst we'll ever be. If you're not constantly evolving, then you're not constantly adapting and you become stale.

Speaker 1 And that's where you have to look and saying, how do I take myself to that next level from a marketing standpoint to say, okay, what's working well? Now what can I find that gap in and trying?

Speaker 1 Because you have to test and target.

Speaker 1 Four years ago, somebody came to us and said, hey, we're going to do this on Snapchat for one SEO. We're going to do a geofencing.
of the parade route for the Super Bowl. Okay.

Speaker 1 And so we spent 600 bucks on it, Right.

Speaker 1 We got our largest client on it because we were the third most downloaded filter that particular day where all we had was an eagle symbol and we had one SEO.

Speaker 1 And people just kept downloading and downloading and downloading it.

Speaker 1 And so what it ended up doing is the head of the Philadelphia Autism chapter called us and we got one of the largest clients we've gone for.

Speaker 1 You know, there's a book on my shelf right there. There's two red ones there.
It's called the ultimate sales machine. It's called the Dream 100.

Speaker 1 And it talks about going after 100 clients, only 100, because the deal is if I take my top client, it's a million dollar client, $1 million.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 Now, if you said 9% to 10%,

Speaker 1 that's about $90,000 to $100,000 I could pay to acquire that client, the gift that keeps giving. Could score 10 of those, which is 10% a year.

Speaker 1 That's $10 million in itself.

Speaker 1 And what the cool thing is, I can take these guys to the best concert of their lives. I can spend 20 grand and not even close to the budget of I'm spending 9 or 10%.

Speaker 1 And it's not about sugar. It's not about just buying them gifts and anything.
It's about delivering ultimate service.

Speaker 1 But I love that concept of the dream 100 because you just said I landed my top client. Yeah, you spent 600 bucks, but realistically, what I love about a SaaS model is you guys, it's software.

Speaker 1 It's not really a SaaS, but it is because it keeps paying. You guys are delivering results as it keeps paying you.
I'm curious when other companies come to you. And they come to you with this website.

Speaker 1 And dude, I had you look at a website for somebody I'm thinking about combining forces with, and I don't want to go into too many details, but it's not good.

Speaker 1 And I'd like to know, so when you get a brand that never really had some good people on it, where do you start?

Speaker 1 Because I think you start with the brand and the makeover and make sure the conversion rate's right. But what is your steps to say, you give me the website first.

Speaker 1 Where do you start if a website? You do all your scans and tests and different things and do the scoring and the domain authority and all that. What do you do?

Speaker 1 Well, I think from our perspective, you know, you work hard on your brand for A1. Everybody's wearing shirts here.
You got your wraps, okay? You work with different people to have that design element.

Speaker 1 And then you put the stock imagery on your website that some guy in blue overalls is doing plumbing. Well, most HVAC companies don't want Mario on their site.
Right. Okay.

Speaker 1 So what you have to do is understand how there's the consistency of your tech doing that job to that particular page.

Speaker 1 So if it's a guy working on a spring because it's the springs page, you want your guy working on that. That's where having photography and videography.

Speaker 1 One of the things we're seeing is a 54% increase when sites have video on them from an SEO standpoint and being able to help from what Google wants because what's the reasoning?

Speaker 1 What's Google's other baby? YouTube. So what do they want to be able to do? They want to be able to have the intent of what's happening on search combined with what's happening.

Speaker 1 from a video and display standpoint.

Speaker 1 And that's one of the areas that we really are seeing a lot of people focus on is how they can use what's called considered custom intent audiences to be able to say, somebody did that actual search for garage door spring repair in Tempe.

Speaker 1 Now it's a scenario when they go to YouTube to see how do I pick a garage door company in Tempe.

Speaker 1 They have that information right in there and you're being fed that particular ad right at that time. And they got really good.
I was talking to somebody the other day about.

Speaker 1 He's 23. I was talking to him about pay-per-click.
And I said, man, pay-per-click used to be dark yellow at the top. No one looked at it.

Speaker 1 They called it the seven-pack back in the day instead of the three-pack.

Speaker 1 And one day, all of a sudden, it showed up and it was super light. And you didn't even know it was an ad.

Speaker 1 And then Congress got involved and made him make it and put an ad on it. But here's something interesting that I want to talk to you about: is I got a call right before the pandemic.

Speaker 1 I'm just going to say the company. I don't care if I get sued, I guess.
Someone high up at Thumbtack called me. Okay.

Speaker 1 And they said, listen, dude, we see you. We all listen to your podcast, a lot of the higher ups there.
And they said, we're wondering why you're not using us in marketing. We'd like to sponsor.

Speaker 1 And I said, well,

Speaker 1 I've done my own Yelp. I've done my own home advisor.
I've actually done my own PPC. I've built links.
I've done my own videos.

Speaker 1 I said, and for thumbtack and porridge, for thumbtack, I used to say, I will come out for free. I will be the cheapest.
Let me know what I can do to earn your business. I can call you right now.

Speaker 1 I mean, I tested 10 different things. And trust me, I'm pretty good at coming up with stuff to get a return.
So, I mean, the minute that thing went off, I was like, please, I'll come out for free.

Speaker 1 Whatever I can say, just to see if it was real. All I wanted to do, and I said, I didn't get a call back.
And this happened over and over and over. And then they said, okay, fine, we fixed that.

Speaker 1 And then they said, but here's our problem, Tommy. They said, we got into the business for the little man.
And a lot of people have made millions of dollars off thumb tech. So don't get me wrong.

Speaker 1 I don't want to like, look, it just didn't work for me and Rogers. But they said, we got into business for the little man.
We wanted to give the little man a shot. And I said, well, that's wrong.

Speaker 1 I said, I hate to tell you, but the little man,

Speaker 1 he's not consistent. His car breaks down.
He goes on week vacations. He cannot get to the clients that he needs to.
He does great service when he can show up and when he gets to the parts.

Speaker 1 But it's a one-man army because I was one. And they said, well, what do we do? And I said, you get a customer like me that'll pay you 20, 30, 80 grand a month.

Speaker 1 I'll keep it and I will sign up for a year contract as long as the leads work. And I'll help you get the little guys and pull them into my company.
But the problem is they can't be consistent.

Speaker 1 They can spend 10 grand one week and no money because they got so busy for the whole year. If they're like a kitchen remodeler,

Speaker 1 they all thought they're, man, we're going for the little man and they were going to pay me to come do a speech in front of all their employees and the pandemic happened.

Speaker 1 But what is your thought about the guy in a truck? Because we got a good friend of ours, Julian, the next star, that said they will not take on anybody if they're still in the truck.

Speaker 1 What is your thought on the guys in the truck? Well, the first thing is I hope that they put a marketing budget that matches where their goals are wanting to go.

Speaker 1 And I hope that they give good service and do the right things. They're potentially not our customer.

Speaker 1 However, there's a lot of content that we do share, just like you share here, that can help them grow. The first thing I would tell the guy, get in the local service ads.
LSA ads, baby. LSAs.

Speaker 1 Google Guarantee. Google Guarantee.
Look it up. You got to, and don't be worried about it because I've never had to get back the $2,000.

Speaker 1 dollars i mean literally like the people are worried they're like oh my god i'm gonna have to give back so much money the customer's pissed it's so hard to get for a client to get that through just do it get your background check and you'll be fine the question comes about is how well do you answer your phone

Speaker 1 because at the end of the day if somebody is calling you because they found you or what they know about you or what you're doing if you don't answer your phone you don't have a shot at that business And that's a budget-based program that you can say, hey, I'm looking to get this many leads.

Speaker 1 This is what I can afford.

Speaker 1 So for that particular client, it might not be the right client for one SEO, but he can get content from situations like we have or Lion's Den or whatever it might be to be able to say, hey, you want to grow?

Speaker 1 You're going to have to have a budget to help you grow and answer your phone. So yeah, your podcast is Lion's Den.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And you can learn a lot because these guys talk straight marketing on their podcast. So check, tune into Lion's Den if you guys haven't.
So this is a great question. And this is what I love.

Speaker 1 This is what I live for. This question right here.

Speaker 1 There's LSA, GMB, Google My Business. So you you got local services, which is a Google guarantee, the three top ones.
Then underneath that, we have two pay-per-click. Those are, they click, you pay.

Speaker 1 The next three, maybe four, are called Google My Business with the hours and the reviews, and one above it might be a sponsored. And then you've got your organic.

Speaker 1 Now, there's a secret sauce to all this called capacity planning. My guys that have the ability to run six calls, I'd rather them run three.

Speaker 1 But capacity planning seems to be the hardest thing in the home service industry. No one's completely figured it out because

Speaker 1 over time, we could kind of start to get, like, I know my payroll within 3%.

Speaker 1 Typically, every once in a while, it's off by 5%. But the greater it gets, the greater employees I have, the more certainty I have.
If you got two employees, it's all over the place. Right.

Speaker 1 So tell me a little bit about, first of all, you said LSA. Let's talk a little bit about LSA, GMB, PPC, organic first to start us out.
All right.

Speaker 1 So number one is what we're seeing across the board is that you get your best return on ad spend from the LSAs. The problem

Speaker 1 when you're paying. Okay.
There are two things that I would suggest with that. Number one is you got to mark your calls booked or non-booked.
Okay.

Speaker 1 The more interaction you have with the LSA dashboard, the better off you're going to be.

Speaker 1 And then in addition to that, we recommend that you do search your reviews on those calls that came out directly through it. At the end of the day, it's going to do two things.

Speaker 1 Number one is it's going to give you interaction with the dashboard.

Speaker 1 And then number two is it's going to give you user-generated content that Google has verified because the email on the review is coming from Google.

Speaker 1 So at the end of the day, they want to control the sandbox. So if you're not playing in the sandbox the way they want you to play, then it's a situation where you're not going to get it.

Speaker 1 What it does now is with that user-generated content, you get the ability now to give review content back

Speaker 1 in the response. And what we don't see enough is they'll say something like, hey, thanks for using A1 Garage Door Spring.

Speaker 1 Whatever you said, we really appreciate the opportunity to fix your garage door spring in Peoria, Arizona. Yes.
It was an awesome garage door repair that we were able to do. Exactly.

Speaker 1 I don't want to stuff the keywords too much, but no, but you want to make it flow. And a nice, quick, long sentence that is rich with content, but also appreciative.

Speaker 1 And it's think about where that reviews, you know, it's being generated is based on the work that your tech did.

Speaker 1 And one we also see is don't see a lot of people that are taking the opportunity to have a scenario where they understand that process of of being able to be on top of it.

Speaker 1 You know, it's funny, you said something just a minute ago where you said, Hey, I know my payroll within 3%. I bet you know your traffic as far as to your website on a daily basis.

Speaker 1 I bet you know your conversion rates. That's crazy.
It's crazy because, you know, Amazon,

Speaker 1 Amazon has less than a 5% conversion rate. Think about it.
I go to Amazon. I'm like 100%, dude.
I search what I want. There was a box in my picture.

Speaker 1 Yes, the box that was a shower head.

Speaker 1 But yeah, you know what I love the most is I love love talking to guys that do e-commerce because they are obsessed with conversion rates. They change images.
They move stuff around.

Speaker 1 They got a heat map. They do so much more than we do in the home service space.

Speaker 1 And when you study what those guys study and you learn from those guys and you A-B test pages, all of a sudden you realize, I don't need to spend a lot more money.

Speaker 1 Like what I'll do is I'll find a manufacturer that went out of business. I do a really nice write-up with the exact stuff on everything.

Speaker 1 All of a sudden, if there's 100,000 grossers out there with the sticker on them, that's free traffic. We go after old phone numbers.

Speaker 1 Every single guy that brings an old opener in here, we test the phone number. We got a way to get that old phone number.
You know, if it's out of business or it's not a garage company, we'll buy it.

Speaker 1 I mean, these little things you said, you know what your strategy with the yellow pages is? You said earlier, tell me that strategy. I love that strategy.
So the double truck. Oh, the double truck.

Speaker 1 When the yellow pages were in big and positioning in the phone book, there were a lot of people that would just say, hey, I know what that book generates.

Speaker 1 You always heard them complain about where price was, but the moment the wrong phone number went in that book, they were screaming up and down. Okay.

Speaker 1 And so what I've seen people do is actually buy companies because of the positioning that they had in the phone book.

Speaker 1 So let me describe that real quick, because once you bought the double truck or the triple truck, there was nobody that could buy it in front of you.

Speaker 1 So if you were first, that was like securing your spot on Google forever. for 20, 30 years.
So what they were doing is buying the position.

Speaker 1 So interestingly enough, in 2007, 2007, I started with Valpak.

Speaker 1 And I knew a lady that worked there. And I knew the owner of the franchise, too, Sue.

Speaker 1 And they said, hey, Tommy, why don't we give you a call tracking number so you can track all your calls? I said, hell yeah. I want to see how I do.

Speaker 1 And I'm an idiot. And I didn't understand what I was doing.
In 2009, I decided to get Moneymailer. They use the same phone number.
Then I got Clipper. They use the same phone number.

Speaker 1 So the gal calls me up and says, dude.

Speaker 1 All of the country is talking about garage doors. I said, what do you mean? She said, do you realize how many calls you're getting off your Valpak app?

Speaker 1 I go, no. And then I looked and I go, it's Money Mailer.
It's Valpak. It's Clipper.
And what do you know? There was four competitors within one week of her telling me that.

Speaker 1 And you could tell me if I'm right or not. And I know I am right, but you could tell me because you used to work there is they give you the call tracking number because they own the data.

Speaker 1 And then they say, listen. This guy's getting so much traffic.
I could get you in the spot ahead of him and you're guaranteed to get this.

Speaker 1 Maybe you didn't do this, but that's that attack that they use.

Speaker 1 absolutely 100 they would say that there's a circulation on this particular book of 400 000 this guy in the lawyer heading had 400 calls from it what would make you any different

Speaker 1 and here's the deal what i learned and take this with a grain of salt but after that i learned never let the marketing company own the phone number

Speaker 1 Never let them own the phone number.

Speaker 1 And here's the thing with me is what I love about it is I've been able to do what's called PFP programs, paid for performance, because when you're honest, see, I do a lot with Gannett and Gannett owns hundreds and and hundreds of newspapers.

Speaker 1 So what I've learned is I've got a buddy in Florida, amazing guy, amazing businessman. And he was doing the same program.
That's how we met. And he was able to negotiate a better price.

Speaker 1 And see, I paid in the teens percentage. So all my marketing, I spent a lot of money, right?

Speaker 1 I spent a lot of money in marketing, but they said, I'll pay for all the marketing in our remnant space. But I want you to give me a percentage back of all the revenue.

Speaker 1 But if my conversion rate isn't good, my booking rate's not good.

Speaker 1 If they're not getting enough money guess what they do they put me in a small page on page 28 right but if it's killing it i'm in the front page and the thing is they've got hat guys they've got roofing guys they've got anderson's renewal they don't have a garage guy you can only put so many anderson renewal windows so they love a different guy like garage or and they love flooring and they love that so i started killing it then he negotiated a better price and he goes dude he goes I'm not getting near the return.

Speaker 1 I said, yeah, they got an algorithm, dude. They want to know what's the best ROI.

Speaker 1 So if you, they're taking total dollars, they're taking how much space that they could have sold versus how much money they're receiving.

Speaker 1 And because you negotiated a better, lower price for them, you're not coming up as high in the algorithm. So you're not getting the spots.

Speaker 1 I could talk about this all day, but let's keep going here. So GMB, you know, I use things like, what is the GMB? It shows you local Viking.
Some advice that I'd give people,

Speaker 1 there's a sandwich shop that you talked about location, location, location with the pizza shop earlier. And this is a private conversation, but I remember you made me think of this.

Speaker 1 It's called Philadelphia Sandwiches.

Speaker 1 And man, we got out of the bars, man. This is when they closed at one.
And dude, there was a line out and we'd wait. And it was right there in Scottsdale.

Speaker 1 And all of a sudden, we come out and we're like, where's Philadelphia? And they're like, oh, they moved down the street. And now they're moving into this great big shop, pool all same open.

Speaker 1 It died. It went out of business.
Location, location, location. So, GMB, in my opinion, Google My Business page, if you've got 85 HVAC companies in this little section of Scottsdale, don't go there.

Speaker 1 Okay. Find the place that has the least amount of commercial building and the most amount of residential and the demo you want.
Well, there's not a lot of competition.

Speaker 1 If you want to rank, in my opinion, that's one thing you can do. And there's, you know, citation sites, building custom maps, making sure you've got.

Speaker 1 a good landing page you're getting the right reviews and i never trust a five-star i won't call a five-star company. I'll call a 4.7 way before I call a five-star.
But tell me a little bit about GMB.

Speaker 1 What do we do for Google, my business? That's where your tech's going to come into play because asking for that review is going to be critical to helping your GMB.

Speaker 1 You think about it, it's a failed social network for Google three times. Yeah.
So, what kind of content are you putting on your page? How are you posting to it? Are you putting more stuff there?

Speaker 1 Everybody thinks I got to post on Facebook and Instagram organically. Why aren't you posting on your GMB page? 91% of all searches start and and originate on Google.

Speaker 1 So you talked about the customer you wanted. Okay.
Yeah. Think about it this way.
It's a real estate land grab. For those that think Google's a search engine, it's not.
It's a money-making machine.

Speaker 1 All right. And what you want to do is how can you occupy the most amount of spots on that page? First page.
First page.

Speaker 1 You know, we have a saying in our world, you know where the best place to hide a dead body is?

Speaker 1 On the second page of Google, because nobody looks there. Oh my goodness.
Yes, finally, dead people.

Speaker 1 At the end of the day, you want to be able to have as many spots as you can because if you're not there organically, if you're not there, and it's usually now, depending upon whether you're on mobile desktop, you're going to see 60, 55% of your traffic going through desktop still, 45% going through the paid side.

Speaker 1 If you're not there organically, and your site isn't ranking for it, then you have to pay for it. You don't have a shot at the business.
It's that simple. You're either there or you're not there.

Speaker 1 And I don't mind paying because you know what? Someone taught me this a long time ago. Organic fluctuates.
There's different algorithms. Things change all the time.

Speaker 1 The one thing that'll never go away is paid. You'll always be able to pay to get to the top.
He who can pay more per lead will always win. That should be right there.

Speaker 1 He who will always, we need to put that up there. So I was listening to Gary Vee not that long ago, and he said, You guys think billboards, TV, radio work?

Speaker 1 He goes, But social media is better. And I'm like, I don't know, Gary, you know,

Speaker 1 there's a bunch of millionaires that do this stuff. And he goes, well, here's why.
He goes, it might take me 110 tries on Facebook to A-B test.

Speaker 1 But then they go straight to the landing page and they call. You guys are all paying the toll booth, which is Google.
What do they do when they see a billboard without a phone number?

Speaker 1 They Google you and they click on your paid ad. So the toll booth always gets paid unless you figure out a way to go from social to the phone call.
What are your thoughts on that? He just said 91%.

Speaker 1 I think that you have to look at your whole program holistically. Yep.
You can't just say one thing matters more than another. Think about it this way.
You're paying for that traffic. Okay.

Speaker 1 96% of all people that go to a website will not convert on that first time.

Speaker 1 Okay. That's why retargeting is such a critical component of anybody.
It's going to be your best cost per acquisition. Retargeting is so cheap.
Cheap. Now,

Speaker 1 okay, so let me ask you this.

Speaker 1 I've got a garage door spring and I search emergency garage door repair versus new wooden garage door now how long do i retarget somebody for a new garage door versus an emergency repair that i'm assuming if it's an emergency they probably got done within 48 hours

Speaker 1 so do you have different levels yeah you want to look at your attribution model as far as what you know and that's one of the things that people don't look as far as where it is because the number of times that i see that when i look at analytics right and people don't look at you know assisted conversions or they didn't look at their conversion paths and they say all my traffic, look, is coming in direct.

Speaker 1 It's converting direct. Well, what ended up happening? You didn't see that it came in onto the paid side, then it came back through the direct side and then it converted.

Speaker 1 So the last step, you want to use the attribution model and your analytics to change around what that model is because everything's last click in GA.

Speaker 1 So you want to change that around to put it into a first-click attribution model and see specifically where the traffic started and generated.

Speaker 1 So basically what he's saying is a lot of times people want to see reviews. They might search a Yelp before they come, but it started out from pay-per-click and then it moves in.

Speaker 1 So if you don't have attribution, which I am, the reason I'm using Service Titan for reviews generation instead of BirdEye, instead of the other ones, is because it's perfect attribution for technicians.

Speaker 1 Because it knows what tech went to the job and it knows when the review came in, it's dialed in. And I want to be able to.
It's one of my KPIs per technician is how many reviews did you get?

Speaker 1 And when the attribution was less than 50% with BirdEye or any of of these other tools, I said, Bill, I think you're doing good. Instead of, Bill, this is exactly what happened.

Speaker 1 And I don't like the word that I think and I feel when I'm talking to a technician about how they're doing. I really feel that things are going pretty good for you.
That's BS. Let's jump to PPC.

Speaker 1 Pay-per-click. I feel like it's kind of dying because I feel like the reason they came out with LSA is to take over PPC.

Speaker 1 I have my own theory that the reason they came out with LSA is to compete with Home Advisor and Angie's list as far as a direct model that they could have on why did they start start it at 22 to 28 bucks.

Speaker 1 Then it went to an open bidding model. Then it went to let Google determine what you want to pay for that particular lead.
Well, here's why.

Speaker 1 In my true opinion, is they have no control of receiving the data from pay-per-click. Now they own the phone number.
They know if you answered. They know if you were nice.
They know if you booked it.

Speaker 1 They control the reviews. They heard what you did.
They own the data. Yes.
They didn't own the data with PPC. They didn't have a tenth of the data they have with the LSA ads.

Speaker 1 And this might be talking over your guys' heads, but this gives me like chills because I love this stuff. So, sorry if you're not enjoying this.
You should be because Bill's the man.

Speaker 1 And if you learn a tenth of this stuff, you'll be able to dominate your market. But this is the kind of stuff that it might not be fun for owners to listen to.

Speaker 1 But if they don't understand it, you might as well sell your business to me or someone else. If you're in a garage-you're a business, let's do business together.

Speaker 1 Well, I think at the end of the day, with PPC, it's a situation where you want to make sure that you're looking at where your conversion rate is, what's your cost per acquisition, how are you tracking is everything.

Speaker 1 And the number of times that people, like I'll say to clients okay can you send me your google analytics prior to coming in and the response is i don't i don't know that and i always say would you not look at your quickbooks on a weekly basis and so that's where when you're spending money you should know and there should be transparency to how that money is being spent for you if you have an agency or somebody that's doing it it shouldn't just be hey let me give you 10 000 and then you come back to me at the end of the month and tell me these are where my leads are and then i'll see them branded non-branded what came in what didn't come in so it's really about looking at the model as an overall whole as far as what's working and what's not working.

Speaker 1 You know, that's an interesting topic you talk about is branded versus non-branded. And I talk about this a lot.

Speaker 1 As Ken Goodrich was in here and he talked a lot to me about Roy Williams' strategy, the wizard of ads.

Speaker 1 And he said, my goal is to get in front of 50% of the population four times a month. 50%, four times a month, in one way or other.

Speaker 1 And what he said was he went from a single-digit click-through rate to 60 some-odd percent.

Speaker 1 And I used to be so against TV radio billboards. I'm like, you can't track it.
It's stupid.

Speaker 1 It's hard to get direct response out of that stuff until I realized my Google shot up like crazy. People searched A1 Garage Road service instead of Garage or Repair Phoenix.

Speaker 1 Talk to me a little bit about that. So let's just go back for one second, because I think a key component is I get a lot of people that will say to me, hey,

Speaker 1 why I improve on my organic? Should I then take my paid down?

Speaker 1 And I'm like, Well, why would you do that? And they would be like, Well, because now I'm in a one-two-three position, I can reduce down the amount of money that I'm paying for the lead.

Speaker 1 So, we actually ran some tests on it. We did a study with Google to showcase that when you had a paid ad sitting on top of a high-ranking keyword that you were going after,

Speaker 1 that user went into the organic section at 55 times greater when the ad wasn't there. So, it was like having a billboard on top of your house, bringing in multiple traffic.

Speaker 1 And so we've also seen where the percentage of clicks are as you increase that's saying, okay, if I just have a paid ad, I'm at this. If I just have an organic, I'm at this.

Speaker 1 Well, when you have number one paid and number one organic, you get a 49%

Speaker 1 lift in the traffic that you're getting. I've seen a study that says, I don't think it had all four.
It had all three. It said pay-per-click, GMB, and organic.

Speaker 1 But what's so cool now is Yelp ranks number one for a lot of the organic. And I don't know why Google's doing that because I don't think they like each other.
And I don't really love Yelp's reviews.

Speaker 1 I don't think anybody really does. And trust me, they have like a danger meter they do.
And the more reviews that are inconsistent, the more the stuff gets filtered.

Speaker 1 So here's my thought about Yelp real quick. Yeah, I'd love to hear this.

Speaker 1 Number one is: if you're in a position as a home service company, okay, where you have prices out of of your window, meaning you might charge some of the most expensive out. Right.
Okay.

Speaker 1 If you're a flat fee where you're going to charge the most in your market because of the service that you're given, we've seen the reviews go up in Yelp negatively because I won't come out or I'll charge to come out for a service call.

Speaker 1 Hey, this is what I'm doing as far as here's my pricing, take it or leave it. And people are getting blasted on it.

Speaker 1 So if that's the type of business you have, I would stay away from putting more information out there on Yelp because what's going to end up happening paying for it, because I think what's here, you're going to see is you're going to see a scenario where it does improve.

Speaker 1 Now, if that's not your model, okay, and you can say, hey, I'm a price conscious type of home service business, then I don't necessarily think that there's a bad opportunity to increase your awareness.

Speaker 1 Okay, let's just talk about a few companies real quick. Service champions, Yelp sucks.
Horizon, Yelp sucks. Gettle, their Yelp sucks.
Parker and Sons, their Yelp sucks.

Speaker 1 But yet there's people out there that say, I got the best Yelp ever. But if you look at their average ticket, I promise you it's less than theirs.
They still might be able to do it.

Speaker 1 They might say it's the best lead ever. What works for you works for you.
And some people, look, I used to get more leads off Yelp.

Speaker 1 There was a time I personally was posting 20 ads a day on Craigslist. There was a time that I was using a thing called Clad Genius that actually moved the mouse.
It was hooked up to a DSL router.

Speaker 1 And it would actually post, it remembered the fields of where they were, and it would hit the buttons based on just a simple pull in the mouse

Speaker 1 oh man those days were the best i could get so many leads all the time

Speaker 1 and i got to tell you now you said tommy do you think you could do this organically and i think i could i think i could build a really big business organically but what i found was i visited my buddy in florida and he goes dude and he bought into this company he goes i can't i can't do anything what do you mean he goes i can't do radio i can't do tv i can't do lsa i can't do ppc i go why not he goes we get too many leads.

Speaker 1 We can't even keep up. And I said, you guys are getting leads for free? He goes, yeah, we're getting it for free.
I go, 30 a day? He goes, yeah, 30 a day.

Speaker 1 I go, I need to go buy companies because there's companies that have been around 30, 40 years that are getting more leads than they can handle. They're not doing any marketing.

Speaker 1 And then you increase the average ticket. It gets me excited.

Speaker 1 It makes me want to just go out there and say, Let's all just get together and work together because when I can do what we do with our business, I've had to work for it.

Speaker 1 I've had to always figure out a way to get leads. But when you're around forever and you used to shake a lot of hands at church and play with babies, you know, kiss babies, all that good stuff.

Speaker 1 Oh, you did good. And grandpa got a little older.
Dad took over, wasn't a good businessman. And now the grandson doesn't want to do much.
That's when daddy comes in or Tommy comes in, I should say.

Speaker 1 There you go. I told you I'd be a daddy one day.

Speaker 1 So you talked about retargeting. Let's go to the final one here.
We got some pay-per-click. I like pay-per-click.
I think it still works.

Speaker 1 I think you just got to pay attention to conversion rate and stuff like that. But you know what I love about LSA and PPC is I could turn it up when I need the volume.

Speaker 1 So it can offset when a clipper hits, they don't need to be on.

Speaker 1 When Valpak hits, and maybe if you don't do mailers, you might have something else that you might have the news hit really hard one week.

Speaker 1 You know, with when you got politics coming into play, that's when you really got to be good at understanding your capacity planning.

Speaker 1 But let's talk a little bit about organic because a lot of people saying organic's debt. They're saying it doesn't matter anymore.

Speaker 1 They're saying you got to scroll, scroll, scroll to find anything organic, but that's not true when you're searching for answers, when you're comparing products, when you're doing a lot of searching, like what's the difference between a torsion spring made out of zinc galvanized versus oil-tempered?

Speaker 1 So, what is your thought process on organic?

Speaker 1 Well, it's obviously a key component of our business because when we look at the data that showcases where people's traffic is coming from, we still see it's 55-60% are coming in on our an organic perspective.

Speaker 1 So, you have to be in an environment where you bring multiple pieces to the puzzle okay and you want to be able to say what's your content strategy are you dynamically changing pages do you have the right showing of you being the authority online now here's the thing when you look at where your organic is how it supports your paid okay so when i land on a page it has a great organic piece of traffic going to it from emergency repair And it, what happens is I'm driving paid traffic to it.

Speaker 1 What will happen is it'll increase my quality score.

Speaker 1 score when i increase my quality score what ends up happening is i decrease my price that i'm actually paying for so that's where those strategies of having it work congruently can really help one another quality score let's just talk real quick a quality score is something that google looks like and if you're a root beer clicking on coca-cola bidding that term up your quality score is not going to be near as high as coca-cola for coca-cola time on page click-through rate.

Speaker 1 So I used to put my phone number in the top and then they penalized me for the phone number because the phone number got a lot of calls, but it actually penalized me the quality score.

Speaker 1 You know, I was sitting there like, oh, I figured out how to beat Google. It's just stupid because they only hire people with master's degrees, which is nothing.
Who cares?

Speaker 1 But they've already figured out a way to maximize the dollar bills. The thing is, be friends with Google.
Don't get mad at them. Yelp, you can be mad at.
You know, they're not going to destroy you.

Speaker 1 Google, I see them to destroy businesses. You know, if you guys want, here's what I'm going to do.

Speaker 1 I'm going to take Bill's, all of his knowledge, and I'm going to put it into homeservice expert.com forward slash Bill R.

Speaker 1 HomeserviceExpert.com forward slash Bill R. You go there.
You're going to find all kinds of resources, a recap of this.

Speaker 1 And I'm going to have him give a lot of tutorials on how this stuff is done and what works the best. And maybe he'll even do something for you guys, like a free site evaluation.
I don't know.

Speaker 1 Absolutely. Not a problem.
You'll do that? Yeah.

Speaker 1 So I talk to a lot of businesses and

Speaker 1 they tend to just use VAs. They sub out everything and they say, we're just going to do this consistently.
And they got an IP address coming from Afghani or somewhere.

Speaker 1 And it's just it's like everybody i know listen there's so many agencies out there that just say they sub it all out someone came up to them and said hey we do seo we'll give you 40 of what you sell so if you're selling a two thousand dollar package they're getting 800 and then the person's taking 1200 and then cutting that in half and then they're taking 600 and applying it talk to me a little bit about how your guys' pricing model is and i don't need to know the price is but just how it's not that because they know it's not that well first of all we don't outsource any of that we have 125 125 employees across from both Salt Lake City to our office in Philadelphia.

Speaker 1 And so content and development are probably the two largest departments that we have within the building.

Speaker 1 Because at the end of the day, we want to be in a situation where we're always putting out good quality content for those particular pages from an SEO standpoint.

Speaker 1 You have to have original content that supports what your brand is all about and what makes you unique to the marketplace.

Speaker 1 So for us, the way we kind of look at it is we're trying to structure it as as far as the disciplines that you have.

Speaker 1 You know, most people think, oh my gosh, I can go to a company and they're going to give me 800 keywords. Okay.
Okay.

Speaker 1 They're going to give me 800 keywords. Well, what they're doing is they're only tracking 800 keywords because the average page is only going to rank for four to five keywords for that particular page.

Speaker 1 And then Google's going to bring back variations of that keyword as far as when you did the right strategy.

Speaker 1 So if you have the right strategy in place for garage door repair across the country, guess what? You're going going to be relevant for that particular term no matter where you go.

Speaker 1 So, you know, for our pricing structure, it's based upon looking at the number of keywords we're trying to come back for you across the board and the amount of content that we're producing for you as far as what's happening on a monthly basis.

Speaker 1 You know what? This is funny. 2009,

Speaker 1 my mom called me up and she said, Tommy, I'm talking to this company. They got me ranking for a search term that Sterling Heights real estate agent, whatever.

Speaker 1 And I go, mom, I can make you rank for that in a week. And I'm not even good at SEO.
She said, what do you mean? I said, that's a long ass-tailed keyword. Correct.

Speaker 1 And the other thing that they promised is we'll get you to number one.

Speaker 1 They don't get you to number one. They get you on the first page.
And that's when they start charging you. I can make anybody rank on the bottom of the first page for search terms.

Speaker 1 There's cheap ways to do that. Look, I could do a press release.
I could do all kinds of things to bump it. And then all of a sudden, those are the gimmicks.
$200. I see that all over, $200 SEO.

Speaker 1 Like the people that fall for that, dude, if you're paying for that right now, send the money to me, make a donation, because that's where it should be going.

Speaker 1 What are some gold nuggets that you could share about helping employees in their professional development and their lives?

Speaker 1 Well, number one is have good, consistent communication as far as with the people that you're working with, both up and down. Learn how to manage up when you have a situation that's going.

Speaker 1 You know, it's funny, a good friend of mine, Keith Mercurio, said, One of the things that misses in most organizations is the one-on-one and how valuable the one-on-one

Speaker 1 100 okay and he always says a bad one-on-one is better than no one-on-one because you're you're able to have that communication so what i would say to the audience is listen if you're not having one-on-ones with your direct reports and having randoms without throughout the company to see what's going on you're probably setting yourself behind and here's a little piece of advice do you know how many apostles jesus had

Speaker 1 how many apostles all of us no well do you know know how many? The 12.

Speaker 1 The original 12. So the original 12.
If God can only have 12, I say he should only have five direct reports because I'm less than half of God.

Speaker 1 So five direct reports is kind of where we start going a little bit. That's where we should be.

Speaker 1 And so those personal relationships, but when it becomes more than five, depending. Now I can manage a team of 20, but it's different.
as far as technicians compared to managers.

Speaker 1 And those one-on-ones, I can't tell you enough. We literally, I've had every manager and I've been guilty of it say, look at, we told them in the meeting,

Speaker 1 but three people out of 100 got it.

Speaker 1 And the fact is, is when I talk to you, Bill, the way that we delegate is we say, Bill, here's what needs to get done.

Speaker 1 And here's why it needs to get done. I need you to understand why we're doing this.
Do you have any feedback? Now, I want you to describe back to me what we're getting done.

Speaker 1 Here's when it needs to get done, by, by the way.

Speaker 1 Here's what happens if you do get it done. Here's the present.
Here's the bad news if you don't get it done. Here's when we're going to check up on it.
L Evi taught me a lot of this stuff.

Speaker 1 And then also, is there a checkup date? When we learn about it, what could we have done better to communicate better? Because if you're like me, you procrastinate on this stuff.

Speaker 1 So one-on-ones, best advice of the day, one-on-ones. If you're not doing one-on-ones with your people, you watch the biggest jump in your business.
I promise you, one-on-ones change the day.

Speaker 1 I go through these questions and I want to start wrapping up here. Look, I love just calling Bill up and just shooting the crap with him.

Speaker 1 I love just talking to him about some ideas because he's one of the guys that'll give me honest feedback and tests a lot of things out and make sure it works. I'm excited.

Speaker 1 He flew out here for this, which means a lot to me from a long ways away. Pennsylvania is not across.
It's not the next two states over. It's a big flight.
So I really appreciate it. Thank you.

Speaker 1 First of all, someone wants to learn more. They just want to get their site looked at.
They want to understand more about Google. They want to understand more about this LSA stuff.

Speaker 1 What do they got to do to get a hold of you at 1SEO?

Speaker 1 Just go to 1SEO.com, fill out a a form and we'll get right back in touch with you now what if i want to talk to bill call me up call you okay 610-955-2991 put it on that page on the uh home service 610-955-2991

Speaker 1 you're never selling that the phone's blowing up the phone's blowing up okay and you know i always ask this question if you guys give away three books

Speaker 1 Let's not do Michael Gerber, you know, the e-myth. Let's not do Ultimate Celebration, How to Winter Nifl with Friends.
You know, there's some real common ones out there that I hear every day.

Speaker 1 But give me three books that really they don't even need to be. I mean, I know you love Green Eggs, Cream, and Ham by Dr.
Seuss, but right, what are the three books that really move you?

Speaker 1 Let me pull up my, yeah, pull up Bonnie Bull on this one. So, what we'll get: Fanatical Prospecting by Jeb Blount, Jeb Lauf.
Yep,

Speaker 1 that's one.

Speaker 1 All right, give me another library. Leaders Eat Last.

Speaker 1 Yep. And this one is one you have to read: Growth IQ by Stephanie Bova, or Tiffany Bova, excuse me.
Growth IQ. All right, you got to read that.

Speaker 1 So we've got financial prospecting, leaders eat less, and growth IQ. So read those books.

Speaker 1 And the last thing we do, Bill, is we had a lot of things and we were kind of analytical because I like to be because I rarely get to do this stuff on podcasts where we actually go through and talk about

Speaker 1 Google. You said 91%,

Speaker 1 91%

Speaker 1 of all searches. If you guys are not focused on Google, what in the hell are you doing?

Speaker 1 Google is God when it comes to home service. Please change your mindset.

Speaker 1 Okay, I said it. Now,

Speaker 1 I'm going to just let you run with it. Maybe we didn't talk about something, but maybe you've got some news to make people move and get off their bus.
Maybe you just have a way to get started today.

Speaker 1 Maybe it's just some words of wisdom for life. Maybe it's about.
taking care of your kids, whatever it is. I'll give you a few minutes to kind of give some final thoughts to the audience here.

Speaker 1 Well, I think, first of all, thanks again for having us out. Yeah, listen, appreciate that.
You coming on. I think that life's short.
You never know where it's going to take you.

Speaker 1 So live it, put it the best you can in each and every day.

Speaker 1 If you're not trying to make your business better by having great employees around you, then it's a situation where your business is going to be stagnant because they're the ones that are going to drive your business.

Speaker 1 You can only influence, like you said, five people. How many people do they influence every day? That guy has 30 calls.
That's 150 calls a week. How many technicians are going out to do those calls?

Speaker 1 How many people are they influencing in your business? So the better you can treat those employees to how they help your business grow is going to be my words of wisdom. So you heard it here, folks.

Speaker 1 Listen, I'm telling you guys right now, that's probably one of the best words of wisdom I've heard ever on the podcast. Take care of your employees.
They take care of you.

Speaker 1 Without your employees, you make no money. You don't get a paycheck.
Love them more. Listen to them more.
More one-on-ones. Thank you, Bill.
Thanks again, brother. Appreciate you.
Thank you.

Speaker 2 Hey, guys, I just wanted to thank you real quick for listening to the podcast from the bottom of my heart. It means a lot to me.
And I hope you're getting as much as I am out of this podcast.

Speaker 2 Our goal is to enrich your lives and enrich your businesses and your internal customers, which is your staff. And if you get a chance, please, please, please subscribe.

Speaker 2 You're going to find out all the new podcasts. You're going to be able to ask me questions to ask the next guest coming on.
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Speaker 2 It really helps us out when you like the podcast and you leave a review. Make it four or five sentences.
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Speaker 2 And we're just, we're telling everybody our secrets, basically. And people say, why do you give your secrets away all the time?

Speaker 2 And I'm like, you know, the hardest part about giving away my secrets is actually trying to get people to do them. So we also create a lot of accountability within this program.
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Speaker 2 It's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash club. It's cheap.
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I really appreciate it.