Transcript for:
How to Get Customers for Local Service Businesses

welcome everybody to how to get customers for local service businesses so there are two four 6 8 10 11 of us in here so who in here owns a local service business this guy does you do you want to right Casey you kind of do kind of yeah what do you do uh I'm a general contractor but I'm transitioning into withing cells and windows and skylights okay so when you do the sales will you be responsible for getting your own leads okay so then this will definitely be applicable for you um Holly you're wanting to start a landscaping company right y I mean you're just getting started but what's like the biggest hurdle you feel like you're facing right now maybe knowing we're at Ground Zero so I mean so knowing where to start maybe to to say what what might be the most biggest hurdle because we haven't hit any yet okay right so getting started that's kind of the hurdle yeah okay cool Colton you said you had a local Service Company too just launched a company called Peak visuals we do high converting ads for companies so your clients would be who I would say restaurants or other service based businesses I guess right okay cool so so I'll give you a little bit of my background so you understand where I'm coming from so um I grew grew up in a construction family I was a carpenter laborer when I was like 16 and uh worked my way up through the trades and probably worked a hundred different jobs in my lifetime in my life so far but would always come back to construction and did that all through my 20s near the end of my 20s I moved to Portland Oregon and I was working as a superintendent for a Remodeling Company and we had this big project we were working on and I was running and then we're about to start Framing and my boss Patrick called me he's like hey gather all the tools up this job's over we're off the job and I was like okay so go back to the shop and I remember standing in there and Patrick's like man I really knew I should have invested in that marketing stuff but I always put it off and I was like I like pulled up my phone and I was like Googling marketing cuz I didn't know what it was and I was like crap like at the time that was my dream job you know I had a salary a truck a a paid vacations like it was really cool and I was like well now I'm going to lose it so I didn't want to lose my job and I started doing research online and I was had just gotten involved in this forum called the fast lane Forum it's like an entrepreneurial forum and there were people there was this one guy selling a course on Google ads and it was like 300 bucks and he's like get you going with Google ads and few hours so I was like cool what's this Google ads thing and so I just did did all this research and the next day I went in and I told my boss I was like hey man like if you'll pay for this course I will work around the clock to learn how to do this Google ads thing and get us customers and he was like absolutely let's do it and so I got the course and I took it and got his credit card and put it into the Google AdWords and spent way too much money generating leads um but got some leads and the leads started coming in I was like well now what am I supposed to do and he's like well we got to sell them now and and so I you know did some Googling and it's like well how do you sell stuff um well you got to have a sales binder so I made a little sales binder I printed out pictures of our past work and um an example of our estimate and just all the stuff and started going to homes and talking to people and um eventually made a sale and then we I was back on the job this particular job was a water damage job and every there was one bathroom in the whole place so every day I'd have to go in I'd have to pull up the toilet work all day and then reset the toilet and I was doing that for like the fourth or fifth day in a row and this toilet was gross I wasn't smart enough to bring like Lysol and like clean the toilet before I dealt with it so I'm like dealing with this nasty toilet and I just had this moment where I'm like you know what I'm way more valuable doing what I was doing before than I am with my head in this toilet so I went home and thought hard about it and mostly I was afraid of how I was going to break the news to my boss cuz I felt really terrible this guy had invested a lot in me he' put a lot of faith in me and now I was going to leave and go chase a whim and so I in inevitably decided to do that I gave him a two-month notice I said Patrick look I'm going to go do this thing I have to do it but I'd love it if you were my first client and he was like of course I'll be your first client and that was 7 years ago and he's still a client today his business is doing better than ever and at this point um you know I I did freelance web design for years um hired my first employee in 2020 now I've got nine We Are One customer away from having 100 clients so most thanks most of my data day is what doing these things called audit and consultations so it's like the step one of working with us is pay a little bit of money sit down with me tell me what's going on let's look at your numbers and we'll look at your market and then we'll figure out a plan of attack and the cool thing about local service companies and contractors And Trades companies is the marketing methods are very mature like there's only a handful of ways to get access to the majority of people who are searching or wanting a certain product or service and most of it's on Google it's like 92 or something percent of of searches on the Internet or on Google and 80 something of uh people 80 something per of people who are looking for a local service business are looking on Google and so Google's the place you got to be and so I'll share my screen and quickly go through the the four areas of Google Now normally when I'm talking to someone I'll I'll first go really try to go as deep as I can and on their numbers at least in regards to leads and sales I want to know like like if I was talking to your plumber client in Tacoma I would want to know like how many customers they had last year how many leads they had last year so I could figure out how many leads it takes for them to close a job I want to know how many how much their how much money they spend per lead which is easy to find on cuz you can export everything and it'll literally tell you and you just average it um I want to know their profit margins and basically I'm trying to figure out like okay if we can figure out how to buy customers is it going to be viable because there's a lot of businesses where it's not viable they if they buy a customer for 500 bucks and they make $600 that $100 does not make up for all the time and effort that they put into it and there's a lot of people operating their business at that level because they don't pay close attention to their numbers so the first thing I do is I go in their numbers and say okay what are your margins are you any are you decent at sales at all if we can get you people to talk to are you going to be able to turn them into money how much money and that will determine how much they can spend and then I can just I can tell pretty quickly if it's a local Service Company because I work with so many that I can just I know how much it's going to cost so if we've like I talked to a guy yesterday who does deck in Toronto and he sells a deck for 5,000 and he has 50% margin so he makes $5,000 per deck great if we can probably figure out how to get you customers for, maybe 1,500 he was happy making $3500 profit on a deck then cool let's see how many we can buy and that's the name of the game um there's ways to get customers organically If You're just showing up magically then it's free if you spend a bunch of money on your website and your Google pres and all that then there was some upfront cost um but everyone has something of a personal Network they have neighbors they have doors they can go knock so there's a lot of ways in the beginning when you don't have anything like like Holly all you need right now is people who are willing to take out their checkbook and write you a check like for anything do you need your garbage taken out like whatever if you're willing to pay me then you have a customer and then that customer will leave you a review on Google and you can ask them hey who who do you know that also needs their yard done and one customer is a really valuable asset it's not just a paycheck it's like what are all the other things that you can get from that customer you can go five doors up each side of their house and say hey I'm doing your neighbor's yard I got all my tools out you want me to do yours I'll do it half price like you know anything you can do to get another person to interact with you any way to help them so that they'll want to help you by leaving a review giving you another customer or better yet paying you some money right so I mentioned those things before we get into Google because those things are really fundamental to business like if you want to be top sales guy ask every single person you talk to who else do you know that needs this and if you just do that for every hundred people you talk to you're going to get a CLE more people to talk to and most sales people aren't going to do that so you'll just leave everybody in the dust okay so let's look at Google for a minute so Google's made up of four areas now um if I'm like a a homeowner and Spokane and I want a plumber I might go to Google type in plumber and Spokane and the first thing Google shows me these days is called Google guaranteed or local service ads and so basically if I I'll I might click these guys I might read need some reviews and this is a plumbing company so I maybe I I have a sink that's leaking or I just need someone at my house so I'm not going to do too much research they got a lot of reviews they got a good rating when I hit that call button that company pays Google probably like 50 bucks or something like that and so this is Google's way of replacing the Angie leads of the world for you guys that don't know who what Angie leads it's home adviser we used to do that in our family company um but basically you're buying leads and so Home Advisor and and Angie and all these companies mainly what they do is they run ads on Google they invest a lot of money showing up on Google they take the leads they get and then they sell them out of profit and there's a lot of them they've been doing billions and billions of dollars and Google saw that and they're like well we don't need them we can just cut them right out and now we have local service ads so from the business standpoint this is a really valuable tool and it's a really easy way to get into advertising because you put your credit card in and you're just paying when someone calls you um they're automating the dispute stuff now so if someone calls you and it's not a real lead then it you don't pay for it essentially so that's local service ads below that this where it says sponsored this is Google ads used to be called Google AdWords this is the traditional payperclick so if I click this right now now this company's probably going to pay like 20 bucks 15 bucks something like that and for every so many clicks they get one person will actually call them and for every so many calls they get they'll get a customer and so by doing the math backwards they can eventually figure out okay it takes us 10 clicks to get a customer a click costs 10 bucks it cost us a 100 bucks to get a customer I'll probably say a lot of numbers because numbers are super important in this and really they're the most important thing cuz if you do all this for a long time and you don't track your numbers closely you'll you'll always kind of be going off of your gut feeling of like well how well is this working I don't feel like it's working very well I feel like it is it doesn't matter what you feel like you just look at the numbers is it profitable enough for you is it not how much time you put into it how much money you put into it is it worth what you're getting out on the other side so Google ads is typically the second thing we see the next thing we see here is Google Maps so nobody these guys aren't paying to be here Google has chosen these companies to show me because it thinks that these are the top three companies to show me for whatever reason and an important thing to note on Google Maps like number one any company ever should be on there because it's free to get on there and it's the best place to get reviews in my opinion because it's going to be one of the most visible things if you can get your listing to show up as one of these three companies and you can have more reviews than your competitors you're going to get more calls than anybody else on Google Maps and it's important to be one of these three companies because I can click more businesses here and I can see a long long long list of companies here and only the ones that are in the top three are I'm those are the only ones I'm seeing unless I'm going to go dig further but why would I because I got plenty of good options right here so like at my company adapt digital solution this is one of the main things we do we get people to show up here and then we coach them on getting reviews and if those two things happen they're going to get calls but like you pointed out earlier like with Angie your client seeing diminishing returns they can't get any more out of it and it's going to be the same on any of these marketing methods that you can do you're going to hit a certain point where you can spend more money but you're not going to get as much return and Google Maps is the same there's only so many people searching for this on any given day or month and a certain amount of them are going to stop here and they're just going to call one of these companies some other ones will click on here so by the time you get down to Google Maps maybe half the people are already found what they're looking for and by the time you get below Google Maps you're dealing with like 15% of the people searching and so this is called the organic search this is the fourth section and this is what Google look for like you know 20 years ago there was nothing else it was just a list of websites and so if you get your website to show up here you were cruising that's what we did your mom built the website and that took care of us for like 10 years and then one day we're like we're we haven't gotten any calls in like a year what the heck and we go online and well everyone else has a website now so it worked really well for a while but the more competitive it got um you know the less it worked for us and so these days days we when I'm dealing with like a new company or basically any company that anybody that comes across my desk who does not already have a good website and a Google listing and is not actively getting reviews that's always the first thing I I push for unless they're going to go out of business in two months if they don't turn it around if they don't have enough of a timeline to work with then you you you don't really want to bother going for this cuz this is it's more of a long term thing it's not an overnight if I sign up for Google ads I could have ads showing in an hour local service ads take me a couple weeks to get through their verification and then I could have ads going and be getting some calls so sure do we have we do we need a mic not meaning to interrupt but um pertinent to that section there is that based on how much you are spending to pop you up in the top to is it based on spend amount or um I would think it is but I don't know not really no no so they don't they don't tell us exactly how they do this but if I click more there's a whole bunch of people here right and if I searched again in a minute I might see some different companies pop up H okay cool and from what I can gather just from using it it seems like they do their best to spread the calls around nice and I you know and I'm I try to think of it from Google's pers perspective they don't want to shove all the calls to one company because then all the other companies are going to stop using it and so they're putting all their eggs in one basket so they seem to really spread these around cuz we'll take a $1,000 budget and put it to 10,000 and it doesn't change the amount of calls coming in oh nice okay very cool thank you as long as a company plans on being around for you know at least 6 months but usually longer I will I will push them to go for the organic first which is this Google Maps box and the website is just a a part of that like every company these days needs to have a website you know I say that there's a caveat there because there's plenty of Trades businesses contractors who don't have a website and who get tons of work but they their work comes from other places network uh maybe they bid online or maybe they get a lot of referrals maybe they have Billboards whatever um but traditionally a website is really something you need and if you want to play online you need one so a website Google listing that gets you here from there once you have that set up and you're getting reviews on a regular basis and you decide you want more phone calls coming in then the next thing I I recommend is the local service ads because what this is is it's just taking your Google listing and it's popping it up here at the top so if you just started your Google listing and you have three reviews and you you show up next to these guys with a 4,700 you're probably still not going to get very many calls you might get a couple there might be people who think oh well the small company's probably cheaper you know but you you probably won't get a lot but the cool thing about it is you don't spend money unless you get the calls so it doesn't hurt you to be here if you get one call a month well you're not spending very much money but it's another call and you're just trying to stack those calls you need you know if it takes you four calls to get a sale then every four calls you get a sale so every call counts once you're signed up for that and you're doing all you can there that's typically where we'll move to the Google ads and Google ads is is not something I I recommend people do on their own anymore um it's just too easy to spend a ton of money and not get anything out of it and I've worked with probably 20 different Google ads contractors and the one I work with now is the only one I've ever seen that is we're past the point where it matters how good they are cuz Google ads this is like eBay for buying leads and so when you set it up properly you're just competing with with all your competitors on buying leads so whoever is willing to pay the most will will get them and as long as you're setting up your account right and managing your budget then you can keep it in a profitable Zone and this is might be kind kind of hard to comprehend it's taking me forever to even start to comprehend it but Google ADS works on the it's like an exponential curve and so everybody the way you set these up these days is you you tell Google like well I want to be on top this percentage of the time well and then this company says well I want to be on top and so when when they're both telling Google I want to be on top the the price of that click goes up and it they're not saying I'm willing to pay this much per click anymore Google's just automatically raising it and so there's a little spot in the Google ads dashboard where it'll project like how many leads you're getting and say you spend a th000 a month and you're getting 10 leads and then it'll say if you want to get 15 leads it's going to cost 20,000 a month and so the curve happens really fast and so there's always a spot on the curve where you're capturing about 80% of the market where that's that's your point of diminishing returns with Google ads and once you hit that point you're getting what you can out of Google ads for your service in your area you can do more services you can expand your area but that you're you're pretty much limited and so any company who wants to grow and keep growing will eventually do all of this stuff they'll they'll try to be in all four places on Google and they'll be asking for referrals and they'll be getting reviews everywhere they can and they'll be they might have people knocking doors and might run Facebook ads if you if it's the right kind of service and all of that but the the sequence of strategies because each one of these sections requires a different strategy this sequence can take a company from zero all the way into the millions just depending on how big their Market is if you're in a big city you know it can take you into tens of millions if you're in cordelane like maybe a million or two but you'll inevitably have to do all the things and you'll have to track your numbers closely enough so that on a regular basis say quarterly you can look and be like okay our Roi on Google ads is this our Roi on Angie is this and where should we put our funds because that'll change it'll change seasonally it'll if one new competitor comes into Google ads and says I'm willing to spend all the money it'll Jack your prices up it'll wreck your Roi and so it requires you paying attention to the stuff on a regular basis the cool thing about the organic stuff is it just kind of works um like let's let's do an experiment if I do like Remodeling Company CA Idaho there's some there's some local service ads and then here's our company here n Kyle construction and so we only have 10 reviews people might be like well what the hell you only have 10 reviews well we haven't really needed customers and years so we don't care but we still show up and we still get calls all the time uh just from being on Google and for a Remodeling Company you know we get a job that takes us 6 months or a year like we don't need that many clients and we get a lot of return clients a lot of referrals and so I guess if there's a key to getting all this to work it's that you're not relying on this the customers that come from this marketing only like you really really need these customers to become referrals and become repeat business because the companies you're competing against are experts at turning these customers into repeat customers and referrals and so if you're running a plumbing company in extremely competitive area you might be dealing with companies who are willing to take a loss on that first job because they know it will turn into jobs later because they can track their numbers and show exactly where all their money came from and if you're competing with them you got to do that that's like the Amazon model lose money for 20 years everyone else goes out of business now you're Jeff Bezos is the second richest guy in the world it's a lot of stuff does anyone have any questions about this all right so I want to figure out just like how many ratings directly affect maybe how you appear on that list with the other companies that have ratings like say for instance someone has 82 five star reviews and then the other person has 10 five star reviews maybe um 82 uh um review person has like a fourstar review and then so therefore it's not as perfect as a guy with 10 with five stars on each um I've heard that statistically 4.8 is the best rating to have because it's more trustworthy than five but it's close enough to five that people assume you're good okay and do the rating that all affect the ranking yeah um I think what affects your ranking more than just the number you have is like how frequently you're getting reviews and how recently you've been getting them cuz Google wants to show companies that are doing things on Google if you have a thousand reviews but you haven't got a new one in 10 years Google's doesn't you're not participating in Google's ecosystem so they're probably not going to reward you okay gotcha all right cool thanks that was my question um one way I like to think of it is like I have an Android phone Android is Google I use Google Chrome on a lot of devices like Google's watching everything we do there was just a leak last month of like 2,000 Pages or something of their search algorithm things did you guys hear about that and this whole time they're like no we don't use these metrics and then according to all these papers they're literally watching what everyone's doing on Chrome and using that data to change their search results but it's like of course they are why wouldn't they they have access to all of that data why wouldn't they use it so you know when somebody searches for a plumber they open up your Google listing they read your reviews they hit the call button and then two weeks later they come back and leave you a five star review Google sees that whole thing and they're like cool this company is making our customers happy let's show them more I'm that's that's got to be a thing all right yeah so they went from the main page to like another sub page and another page and like I imagine they keep track of this data to some extent and they're like okay so they're going they're filtering through Google they're going to the website they really like the website obviously like I guess maybe they don't get to track the data of the website itself but like the actual the transition if there's Google analytics on it they do oh okay gotcha gotcha okay got it thanks yeah I I think those are minor factors but I I think that at this point they're probably using all the data they get to figure it out let see there's so many ways to find you and Google knows everything about you so I mentioned earlier but in regards to tracking like if you're going to be doing sales in your own lead gen um people are always asking me like well what should I track and it just track the source of every lead as it comes in like every conversation you have where did it come from put a note by their name or in the spreadsheet in the CRM or whatever so that you can go back at the end of the year or the quarter or whenever and track down where your money came from yeah that's all you got to do just track the source of the leads I had this company hire me for Consulting they were a landscaping company and they're like we're using Home Advisor for a long time we hate it it's not profitable enough we want to do other stuff and I was like okay well what are your numbers and so we dug through their numbers and they had a really hard time finding them but we eventually discovered that they were making a 7 to1 return on on Home Advisor never heard from them again so it's like the the data is right there it'll tell you what to do the hard part is like when you're in hallway situation you don't have any data yet so it's like you just got to Blitz it you got to do everything you can hustle it and then track it as you go and then after a year you'll be able to look back at 30 clients and be like holy crap 10 of them came from referrals from this one lady let's send her a gift basket and go stop by her house tomorrow so another tidbit I picked up yesterday I was listening to Alex horoi you guys anybody know who that is that guy's a beast for making sales and marketing content lately um but he was talking about like habits of really good salespeople and one of the things that I thought was really cool really good salespeople when somebody books an appointment with them they'll call that person immediately and qualify them and then if they have time they'll just do the sales call right then and they'll do everything they can to move that person up to the today's time slot and free up that time slot later and horos got uh like a big CRM platform that they use for like a 100 companies so they they analyze all this data and they were saying that when people schedule or book calls if you have like a limited calendar someone will book a call but if it's not in their ideal time slot they're not really likely to show up right and so if you can get a hold of them and move them into a another time slot or better yet hit them up right this second and do the sales call like those sales people make like substantially more sales hit up your leads ASAP close them on the spot if you can and um I mean it's kind of common sense but the sales people that make the most sales are the ones that work their leads the hardest I have two salespeople one of them makes four times as many calls as the other and she's making four times as many sales so we're going backwards a little bit um but earlier you were talking about tracking and attribution on Google my business they're very strict with how you portray your information and it has to be kind of accurate and if it's not you have a potential getting suspended what I want to do is I want to use something like um like call Rail and have different phone numbers for something like a truck and then like a flyer or something like that so you can track that have you seen um any hiccups with something like that in terms of getting banned on Google my business no no like Google my business has some sort of built-in call tracking mhm right I think it might be going away I'm not sure um we we've used call rail a lot and we've also used go high level with twilio numbers and we'll use those as forwarding numbers um we we get listings suspended all the time these days sometimes they just get suspended for no reason so go part of our day-to-day is just getting listings unsuspended oh my gosh it's just part of the the job now so like every listing we we start it always requires a bunch of stuff to get get it live and then every time we change something like my project manager has like PTSD he's like no we can't change the name and I'm like dude the business changed their name we have to change it yeah and so just do it and deal with it is it is it like a huge pain to like get those suspensions overturned are they like not really you just have to verify that you're a legit business and that you're really in that location and everything gotcha yeah our clients get about to change their name soon so yeah be careful cuz they just like you used to be able to just change your name I changed the name of Kyle construction like 10 times um we've had a couple clients change their name lately and Google's telling them that they can they have to start a new listing they cannot change their name so dang like we've got one client who he wanted to change his his name but his current listing was getting a lot of leads a lot of business and so what he did he ended up just starting a new company and new listings and keeping his old company and old listing producing and we're just treating that like a new business and spinning it up and getting it running and the day may come where he's ready to just close down the old one or he might just keep it forever as like a little Le gen thing so that's kind of cool you might bid for the same words but that's good you take up more like well if he yeah if he's running Google ads on only one of them that was for organic like Google Maps stuff so that makes sense yeah um yeah those are my questions he could compete against himself though and take up two Google ads spot you're not supposed to do that but Home Advisor does it oh I I have do also when you're working with your clients do you um do you work with getting them repeat customers too in referrals or you just specifically focused on getting them new customers on people in like we we we coach them we don't do too much of that okay it's it's like ask for referrals follow up with old clients like if you need if you need work call all your old clients from last year and just say hey I was thinking about you how's how's your kitchen treating you still everything's still good cool well you were talking about doing an addition he's still thinking about that who else do you know that wants a kitchen you know like if you think about it if you ask someone for referrals every time you talk to them you're just on their mind like they might not know anybody but then they come they they come into contact with somebody and they're like that guy asks me every time I talk to him next time I'm going to say yes yeah I've got a friend named zann who he's he's very zany and Becca knows huh and uh he's kind of a wizard when it comes to like like casual sales conversation and it's fun to listen to him talk about it cuz he'll talk about calling like like he has this dream 100 list that's like like the the list of 100 companies that his company wants to work with and they just call them like every single month and to the point where it becomes a joke it's like hey it's me again you know what's going on you want to hire us yet no okay like so your your daughter's graduating next weekend see you there and you know it just like becomes this joke of like oh it's these guys again but they're not dreading picking up the phone but if you're there all the time eventually the door will open and that's another thing I I point out to um my clients who want to work with other contractors it's like okay that you do drywall and you want to work with home builders there's 50 home builders in your town so you should have a list of all of them put them in your CRM a spreadsheet a notepad whatever call them every single month know who they are make sure they know who you are develop a relationship over time you will 100% should not be working with some of them it's just inevitable um most people don't want to do that they don't want to get on the phone they don't want to talk to people they want to click some buttons on Google ads and get all these customers flooding in but it it doesn't work like that it's extremely expensive to do it that way so the easiest way is to just get out of your comfort zone and just develop the relationships talk to people call to people and just get comfortable with it and adapt did you did you run into issues with your clients possibly not wanting to go that extra mile to be good salespersons and having to sort of like step in during the process at all or are you kind of sort of making sure that you're working with that ideal client scenario every time by step in you mean me step in and do their sales yeah having somebody on your team being sales no I want to but I can't run everyone's business for them yeah um so we have about 100 clients and the we got the whole Spectrum we've got the dude that goes on vacation for half the year but and we've got the guy who like is Johnny on the spot all the time and it's and I just tell people it's like you know we've done this we call it the FMS it's the website and the Google Maps thing we've done it like 150 200 times it's very very clear that if you can go out and get 15 reviews next month like this is going to work great for you we only have one client who has had three reviews for seven years and gets a lot of leads and that's my first client Patrick because somehow I got him to rank number one on Google organic but he has three reviews still wow that's so he doesn't show up on Google Maps but enough people find them organically okay but yeah for the most part it's just like as much as I want to like I do have a client who I've I I coach them on sales a lot I talk to their sales team we've set up all their crms and we do all their marketing um but clearly the bottleneck is their sales processes and it stems from the owner's commitment to like really make it happen cuz it's like one person really needs to take responsibility for making it happen cuz 10 people responsible for something everyone else is going to do it I don't need to do it and so that's kind of what I see um there's there's companies I think Roman you've got a client or had a client who they they have sales teams go into companies and do their sales that's like mercenary sales people um personally I didn't like in the beginning I was uncomfortable doing sales calls I wouldn't in the five years ago sitting up in front of here I would have been so nervous um so I didn't I structured my whole company to have people come to me I wrote articles I made videos I did all this stuff somehow figured out to get people coming to me and I was like okay this is cool I can handle when people are coming to me and I never had to do outbound but if I had to start over today I would 100% be doing outbound because it's the quickest most controllable way to get customers and you can get feedback really quick like I talked to a guy that had this new business idea he wanted to be like a freelance project manager for construction companies and I was like you know I don't really know many fractional project managers that's and that means there's probably not a lot of them so why don't you make a list of all the builders in your area and call all of them and see if anyone will even talk to you about this and he's like I don't want to do that I don't want to call people and so it's been a year since I talked to him and I just hit him up the other day and he's still in the same spot so it's like sometimes you just got to go out Knock a 100 Doors talk to people face to face if nobody out of a 100 Doors you knock will hire you face to face they're never going to hire you over the phone like if you can't sell it in person like that's the easiest way to sell you're like oh you don't need your lawn mode well your garbage can's knocked over can I pick that up for you like what will you give me a dollar to do and that's a Zane thing it's like just give me a buck well I'll do anything make it fun make it late have you noticed any like maybe you've I don't know if you've tracked this but any specific way that's most effective getting the most results in people actually leaving a review so like whether it's asking them in person or it's putting it in the email request or whatever you know what's the most effective way most effective way secure the review is to ask them in person on the last like like when I'm remodeling a home I'm rolling my drop cloth up I'm backing out the front door they are so happy they don't have to see me again tomorrow I'm like hey it would really help me out a lot and it would help other people to know how what it was like to work with us would you please leave us a review on Google everyone says yes cool can you pull out your phone real quick I'll help you do it it'll take like 10 seconds oh I don't have a Google account it's super easy we can get one made like just give me your phone I'll do it like don't leave the house without the review because it's so hard to get it later yeah they'll forget or um we had this elderly lady tried to leave a review like four times and she she would write the whole thing but she didn't know you had to click the stars and so it wouldn't let her submit it so it's like there's a million reasons why they can't do it forget they can't figure it out whatever so getting it in person and then um if you work with other contractors or vendors a good way to do it is to go leave them a review and then be like hey check it out send them like a screenshot or a picture hey I left you guys a really good review here's my link please return the favor I've never had anybody not leave a review immediately followup to review question I've heard that leaving a review with a picture is more it ranks better or it looks makes your company look better then definitely no okay yeah the more content the better yeah the picture reviews are great oh another tip for reviews if you have employees is um offer like like 20 bucks for every review that mentions You by name and that way they're not only asking for reviews but they're like watching them they're like you got to put my name in it help me out come on I need 20 bucks it's totally worth 20 bucks to get a review you're not allowed to pay customers for reviews but I think you could pay employees so someone comes to you and they want to do Google ads they want to do the whole Spiel back to how you were saying you coach people to do outbound Sal training whatever how often do you like turn them away from say the FMS and tell them to do other stuff first does that ever happen when does it happen yeah so the FMS is the organic Google marketing for just for the record and so I I'll ask people if someone comes to me and they're in like Dire Straits I'll ask them like how on a scale of 1 to 10 how sure are you that you're going to be in business in a year from now cuz if they say well we need to make it happen in 2 months or we're going to close the doors then they shouldn't be investing in something that's going to take 6 months to Roi so that's the main thing if they need a quick turnaround ads is really your only way and I tell those people like go knock some doors seriously like if you don't have anything to do go knock 100 Doors yeah door knocking is sick yeah it works great Chuck and I knocked 100 doors and we got 20 people wanting to sell their houses to to us the biggest most ridiculous thing you could ask someone will you sell me your house and that's what we were asking cuz we had no idea what we were doing we knocked the first door like no plan the plan knock the door yeah oh God they answered what do I do now hey uh you want to sell your house yeah that was astonishing how many people are open to that and what's interesting is a lot of those people were like they were like standing on a stack of Flyers that said I'll pay cash for your home and they're talking to us and they're like oh yeah we get these flyers all day we just throw them away we don't look at them but you're the first person to come knock on my door and talk to me yeah so I bet it's the same for so many trades it is um there's certain trades like uh Roofing is huge in the door knocking I got my door knock the other day by Roofing gutters um but not many people knock for remodels um oh here's another cool tip um for like plumbers this one's so good so you get um stickers with with like a tracking number on it so it's a number that's only on these stickers and then even if you just go do an estimate or you just go inspect something you slap a sticker like on the back of their toilet or on their water heater and then you pull them in and you're like hey give break out your phone take a picture of this sticker because this is a special VIP number if you call this you go to the front of the line it's its own phone you don't have to deal with anybody else you go straight to us and we'll take care of you first and so now they have this special phone number on their phone that they can have on them 24/7 and they can send to people yeah for anything it's like this is our VIP number yeah everybody slaps stickers on but the key is it's VIP and make them get a picture of it on their phone I have a I have a client who sells Windows and he does like give them an like a physical estimate he goes in he gives them the whole Spiel shows them the pictures on his iPad he writes the price down on the back of his business card and then he has them snap a picture of it or he puts it on his business card snap a picture of it and then he takes the business card so they don't even have it it's just on their phone and then he'll have people like a year later be like we're ready to do windows oh yeah that guy made me take a picture and then they have it yeah he does that all day long the phone this is like a magical thing cuz everybody has this on them all the time it's like a permanent record so they'll lose the invoice in 10 seconds they'll forget the stickers on the toilet but having it on their phone that's the key last question from me is um I'm not much of a Google guy or an SEO guy does SEO matter and if so what's the best way of implementing it for instance I'm about to launch my products with my beard brand got the labels got everything squared away get getting PR photography right now done um with my other partner uh for Peak visuals he's doing PR photography okay so I already launched like a Blog and I feel like a blog is a good way of kind of like helping that organic reach how does that exactly work um I feel like from C management to others they have a Blog you get a lot of organic traffic um does how long does it take usually for Google to recognize that and is it important to have a Blog and obviously we all know that AI makes it extremely easy to write blog posts mhm so is is having a Blog important with back links to different things well that's a really loaded question because is it important is kind of a nuanced thing but there's a lot of beard brands that are killing it using organic traffic um and so if you're going to go down the blog route there have you heard of hrefs no okay hre is a it's a tool for like keyword research and stuff but they have this free blogging course and I mean I took this thing like 5 years ago and like still to this day this is like if I'm trying to compete nationally or internationally on the wide internet this is what you do this this will teach you um as far as that's that's a that was a great TI to there okay thank you sweet as far as making the content my favorite way these days is like Roman and I make videos um and using chat GPT 4.0 I've been using chat GPT 4.0 to help with like the initial ones just getting it done and so like that's fine but to make high quality content right you take like your own words and stories and then you can use chat gbt as like an advanced word processor I haven't set that up yet but because you use the chat GPT app I don't have the app I pay for the 4.0 though I just so if you pay for it you can download the app and you can use voice to text and it's perfect voice to text and so you can be walking your dog and spend three minutes telling a story and then chat gbt will turn it into a blog post for you okay and now your blog post is actually unique to you it saves me time and it saves you tons of time so much time it probably will take the same amount of time as writing stuff with chat gbt use your own stories and opinions and say you know write me a thousand page or sorry thousand thw uh blog posts on uh this the topic I just spoke about yeah there's right something like that oh man I don't remember oh is it SEO Surfer that's cool you can hit me up later there's a guy on there's a guy on YouTube who uh he's his whole channel is about using AI to rank on blogs thank you yeah yeah um but yeah I mean is it worth it yeah if if you want to go the long route and get get sales that way like there's a bunch of ways you could do it you could do ads you can have a YouTube channel yeah was Tik Tok blog probably have to do all of them there's a lot of beard Brands yeah and with SEO a lot of it is about finding the holes like finding the content people want that isn't already there and writing that yes 100% I use that every day yeah sweet I just used it earlier cuz uh in my on my team we document like everything that we do and it's extremely tedious so I'll just pull out the trat gbt app and just tell it what happened hey this client came back they stopped in 2021 their domains registered here they want to do this this is when we have to do it blah blah blah turn that into some organized notes and use bullet lists and it spits out the thing ni and then boom cool well thank you everybody for being here hope that was helpful if you need anything hit me up