April 22, 2025 • 30 mins
Reaching $500K in revenue is a significant milestone, but scaling to $1 million requires strategic shifts and proven sales techniques. This episode explores essential steps for breaking through growth plateaus, including leveraging partnerships, improving pricing strategies, and building a strong sales process. The conversation highlights the importance of follow-ups, building efficient teams, and implementing systems to handle increased demand. These practical tips will help turn challenges into opportunities for growth. Join host Adam Sylvester, with Bobby Vickers of Doorvana and Kelly Guerrero of Fast Lawnscapes.
New to Jobber? Masters of Home Service listeners can claim an exclusive discount for Jobber at https://bit.ly/4d0KAEh
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
So it's super important to know yournumbers because if you don't know your
numbers at 500,000,
it's going to be messier at a millionbecause you'll have no idea where you're
going. You'll have no ideawhere you need to be. Yes.
Welcome to jobbers Masters of HomeService, a podcast for home service pros,
buy Home Service pros.
We're in Las Vegas and today we'retalking about getting over the hump from
(00:21):
$500,000 to a million dollarsof revenue with some good sales
techniques. I'm your host, Adam Sylvester.
Today's guests are Kelly Guerrero andBobby Vickers. Welcome to the studio,
both of you.
Thank you. Thank you.
Glad you're here. So Bobby,why don't you go first,
tell our audience whoyou are and what you do.
Sure. So my name is Bobby Vickers. I'mthe co-founder of Nirvana Garage Doors.
(00:44):
We are a garage door manufacturer andturnkey service provider for residential
and commercial properties in North Texas.
And I am Kelly Guerrero. I am co-ownerof Fast Scapes in Manatee County,
Florida,
and founder of Home Pro Coachingwhere I help small business owners
grow their business and scale it tomake it the one that they want it to be.
(01:06):
Great. Awesome. Well, I'mglad you guys are both here.
So a lot of our listeners are justplateauing a little bit around that
$500,000 mark, and both ofyou have gotten past that.
So you guys are a reallygood resource for this,
but we want to help our listeners to getover that mark to seven 50 to a million
dollars instead of just hoveringaround that 500,000. 500,000 is fine,
(01:28):
but for those of us whoreally want to keep going,
what were some of the things that youguys did specifically to go from that
500,000 to seven figures?
Well, we formed some partnerships withother service providers in our area.
For example,
we took some pool manufacturers thatwere building pools and we put together a
landscape package for them so that theywould be able to offer that to their
(01:50):
clients. And then that madethings grow very quickly.
We also partnered with a landscapedesigner who she did the designs but then
didn't have anyone todo the installations.
And so forming partnerships withsimilar but not identical businesses as
yours sometimes can really,
it's a different sales strategy thanjust email marketing and the other things
(02:10):
which are absolutelyimportant to do as well.
But forming some good partnershipswith other businesses is one that maybe
people haven't thought of before.
So I would say to that point to justbe clear about who your customer is
and if you have differenttypes of customers, treat them, communicate with them,
market to them differently.
So we work with businessesand so we've developed
(02:34):
relationships and have agreementsin place for builders that say,
build 10 homes a year up to somethat build a hundred homes a year.
And so we have relationshipwith the B2B segment,
but we also go after homeowners,and that's different.
So the homeowner channels toattract new clients are different.
They require differentinvestment more time.
(02:55):
And so I would say to just be clear aboutwho your customers are and once you've
found out that you canservice one really well,
it's okay to go after another and youdon't have to be a one trick pony.
You don't have to just do one thing.
I think as long as those twothings are really tightly related,
you can go after multiple customersegments and be just fine.
I think for a lot of people,
(03:15):
500,000 is a prettytypical number to get to
with one really solid target base.
And so you really mastered howto serve this one customer.
You've really mastered how to deliverit consistently day after day.
You have a team that's really designatedfor that before that probably is a
little too early to start branching offinto different either target markets or
(03:38):
different services. But then, like yousaid, Bobby, once you get hit 500,000,
a lot of times peoplefeel like, you know what?
I think I'm ready for another serviceoffering. Is that what you're saying?
Yeah. So I would say asmuch as to your point, yes,
that's true,
but I guess I kind of thinkearly on you have to go get the
money wherever the money is. So if youreally want just homeowner business,
(04:01):
but your acquisition costs, you can'tafford it, you better find another route.
And sometimes a partnership channel isless expensive because it's benefiting
both parties. You're not taking,
or you're not having to invest so muchmoney because they're getting something
out of it,
or in your case they're already doing itand you're just coming along with them.
So.
It's no cost.
And what we ended up doingwas, since before that,
(04:22):
we hadn't done a whole lotof landscape installations.
We just focused on the maintenance. Soby doing those strategic partnerships,
we were able to get a wholenew skillset under our belt,
gain some experience,
and then be able to show examples ofhow well we did with that type of work.
And then we were able to usemore traditional marketing channels and sell that
(04:43):
work to other homeowners that weren'tnecessarily through the partnered business
that we were working with.
Were your technicians able to transitionfrom maintenance to installations,
or did you have to get a wholenew subset of technicians?
Well, we did sometraining with key people.
There you go.
There were certain ones that have,right, it's a different type of work,
(05:05):
a different, it requires a differentskillset. And so we had some that just,
they were hungry, they wantedto learn new things and do it.
And those were our superstars. Amazing.
We were able to pull them out and thenthey were the leaders that were in charge
of that landscape installationinstead of the maintenance.
Right. I think to your point,
most businesses don't get over 500,000.
A million dollar business israre air, believe it or not,
(05:28):
the Joint Center for Housing Studies,
they put out a report every fewyears about the remodeling industry.
And a few years ago,
90% of all businesses were lessthan 300,001 man operations.
And they went out of business infive years. It was just one person.
Because what happens is, and weknow this from being in the trades,
is that you're good at yourjob and you're thinking, well,
(05:49):
I'm going to go work for myself.I want all the money. Well,
with all the money comes, allthe headaches, the issues,
the people that you have tomanage. And so the skills that you,
a really good insert service providerdon't translate to being a business
owner. And so I thinkgetting to 500 to a million,
it's a huge accomplishment.It's hard to do.
(06:09):
And I've not found anybody that's beenable to get there without expanding into
more than one channel. Sowhenever I think of marketing,
I think of you have SEO, you havepaid search, you have referrals,
you have building relationships.
So I think the biggest thing is getthat one channel that can get you to
500 and then figure outwhere's the next channel?
(06:30):
What.
Proclivities do you have?What are you good at?
Who do you know what'sworking in your industry?
Well,
the other thing too thatyou have to realize when you are a small business owner
is you don't have to do everything.
It would be absolutely impossiblefor me or you or anybody.
You cannot grow a 1 millionbusiness with just you and maybe a
(06:52):
team of technicians.
You need to bring other people in andstop trying to do everything yourself and
delegate some of that other work towhether it's an admin in the office as a
project manager,
somebody to help you duplicate yourefforts and give you more time to focus on
the growth. So then they're handlingmore of the day-to-day operations.
That's a great segue. Cause I think ifwe look at ourselves and we think, man,
(07:14):
I changed a lot from 500,000 to amillion. I had to become a better leader.
I had to become a better business person.I had to make more advanced decisions,
and I had to get out of the day to day,
the grind of being actually in the field.
And so what were some of the things thatyou guys had to look inside of you and
say, man, I need to getbetter at X, Y, and Z.
If I'm going to take thisbusiness to the next level.
(07:34):
That's an easy one for me to answer. Ihad to stop trying to run everything.
I had to stop trying to control andmicromanage and let my team do the job,
do their work and delegate to theminstead of me having to think that,
well, no, nobody else can do invoicingbecause I'm the one who knows what
Everyone's terms are. I'm the onewho knows all of these things,
(07:56):
or I have to do the scheduling becauseI know the routes and I know this and
that to just let the other people do it.
And maybe they didn't doit quite as good as I do,
but something actuallyhurt on this podcast.
If the people that you hire cando 80% as good as you can do,
then you go ahead and you pick up the 20%,
but you've still bought back that muchof your time by assigning those kinds of
(08:19):
things to your team.
What is that Dan Martel?
He's like 80% done by someoneelse is a hundred percent awesome.
Yes.
So I want to be whereyou are. Unfortunately,
as we're nearing $2 million inrevenue, we still do everything.
My business partner and I, weorder, we sell, we schedule.
The only thing we don't doare the things in the field.
(08:39):
And for us that's kind of by design.
We are just not ready to take the leapof being responsible for someone's
family, for their rent, for theircar payments. We are just not there.
We have certain goals we want to hit.
So I can't speak as much as youcan about the delegation aspect,
but I do think what you have to changeis you have to stop being focused on you
and how you elevate other peoplebecause no business, like you said,
(09:03):
got big by themselves. Jeff Bezosowns less than 5% of Amazon,
right? He's the guy, he's the owner,
but he owns very little because itrequired a lot of people in a lot of
investment over time toget where they are today.
So service businessesare no different. Right.
Yeah, I love the delegation piece ofit too, because you're right. I mean,
(09:24):
here's the thing,
every business owner who has oneemployee is delegating something.
But I do think the leadership piece,
I think it's best tolook at ourselves first.
I think it's so important to avoidsaying, well, I want to go big,
and so you guys start doing betterover there, do that thing faster,
answer the phone better, and order bettermaterials. No, no, no. You're the top.
You're the leader atthe top of the business.
(09:46):
And so we have to be reallyhonest with ourselves and say,
if I want to go from 500,000 toa million and then maybe beyond,
I'm going to have to change probablythe most out of anybody every step if I
really want to achieve those betterresults. Because it all starts with me.
I really found that to be the case.
I had to stop criticizing my team andreally take the time to build them.
(10:07):
Instead, I don't have a very large team.
We've got two people in theoffice and a project manager,
so three in the office. But justto see them doing things right,
to catch them doing thingsand doing things well,
and complimenting them onthat and building them up and helping their confidence
grow as team members made themcapable of taking on more and more
(10:32):
aspects of the work andaspects of the project.
And so that really has been what I had to,
my biggest change Ihad to make personally.
And I think a lot of us get into business,not necessarily maybe to be the boss,
but we just have a way that wethink the business should be run.
And maybe at the priorcompany, you couldn't do that,
so you start off on your own. SoI think what happens as you grow,
(10:55):
you don't ever do a reset.
You just continue to goand go and build and add.
And I think we lose sight of antigoals so many times. It's like,
here's what I want, here's what I want,here's how I'm going to get it. Well,
as business owners, nobody'sgoing to come to us and say, Hey,
you need to stop that. You're not verygood at that. So to your point, Adam,
(11:16):
we have to have self-awareness andsay, I have a list of anti goals.
I really don't want to manage theschedule. I really don't want to invoice.
I really don't want to sign off on amarketing campaign. So I think for us,
that's how we have structured the hireswe want to make in the near future
is by going through our anti goals andsaying, we don't want these things.
(11:38):
Let's make sure we have systems inplace and a procedure to do them.
That way when we bringsomeone on, they're not going,
what did I just sign up for? Becauseso many times in service businesses,
it's kind of.
Messy.
A work in progress.
I think that the analogy is you're tryingto build a plane on the way down and
(11:58):
assemble it to flat before it crashes.
Sometimes it can be thatway sometimes. For us,
I know we had a phenomenal shiftwhen we hired a project manager,
a sales person.
And so then their only focuswas to not just sell jobs,
but to sell them profitably.
Because.
Their compensation was tiedto that same, no, they're not.
But their compensation was tiedto how profitable the job was.
(12:20):
And then that freed up mytime significantly that I could focus on the higher
level tasks and the marketing andgetting new customers and building those
relationships with buildersand things like that.
And then the project manager handled allof the quotes for the one-off jobs and
things like that.
This is a great conversation.
I want to pause for just a moment totalk about why we love jobber so much,
(12:42):
guys. How has Jobber helped you deliverthat exceptional customer experience and
convert one time users orcustomers to a long-term recurring
customer?
Well, for us,
we have just started using driver's newreferral program and have seen great
success with that. So a client getsa lawn mowing service, they love it,
and then they refer us to their neighbors,and then they get a little perk,
(13:04):
little discount off theirbill for referring us.
So I have some people that aredownright competitive with that,
with other folks on their block,
and they want to be the one who gets thediscount month after month after month.
So that really has been a great thing.
Love that. For us, I think Jobberhelps us present a very polished image,
our invoices, our quotes,
they're branded that we're able to addattachments, images, and so for us,
(13:27):
it's just really clean and simple,
and it makes it easy for ourclients to do business with us.
Yeah, jobber is something you canturn on immediately, sign up today,
and you instantly look more professionaland more exceptional to your clients.
And that's what your clientsdeserve and what they want.
So if you don't have jobber, youneed to start using jobber today.
Go to jobber.com/podcast deal,
get an exclusive discountand start being exceptional.
(13:50):
Even more exceptional today with Jobber,
this is how I was around 500,000.
I started to think if I get any bigger,
this is going to be really messy.It's going to be really unorganized,
it's going to beinefficient. And basically
if you're sloppy small,you'll be sloppy big.
(14:10):
And so I think something that wasreally important for me to realize is,
you know what? We're prettysloppy in a lot of ways.
I don't want this to be a million dollarsyet. If it was I, I'd lose my mind.
Right?
Sure.
And so did you guys do anything from anefficiency standpoint to make sure that,
so when you went from500,000 to a million,
it actually worked instead of just makingyou not sleep at night and pull all
(14:31):
your hair out.
So one of the things we did was justprice controls around the products that we
offer. So.
What does that mean?
Yeah, so in the past it waslike, find out what it costs.
Don't do a markup any lessthan this, right? Well,
now we have all that pre-built into adatabase that's like all you have to do is
go and check and see whatit is that you're selling.
(14:51):
And it's already been determined basedon the type of customer and the level of
that customer.
If you have a one-off quote from a builderthat we've done business with before,
they have a certain pricingtier, you go to the database,
find out what that tier is,
you can quickly price a project andknow that it's going to make money.
So that's kind of how we do it.But again, it's just the two of us.
So we're always double, triple checkingto make sure we're making money.
(15:14):
But I think the biggest thing for us isjust visualizing what we have to offer.
Setting price tables and price listsup ahead of time so we don't have to
reinvent the wheel with every quote.
Well, most of our work is recurring.
So what we needed to do was make surethat our recurring jobs were also
profitable.
Love it.
So we had to check the time on the job.
Where do we need to be for a manhour per price, per man hour?
(15:36):
Where does that number need to be?
So it's super important to know yournumbers because if you don't know your
numbers at 500,000,
it's going to be messier at a millionbecause you'll have no idea where you're
going. You'll have noidea where you need to be.
We have all the differentcategories, your GNA,
your cost of goods sold andstuff like that. And each one.
What's GNA?
General and admin costs.
(15:58):
And so you have each of those asa certain percentage of revenue.
So whether you're at 500,000 or a million,
you should be probably about 8%depending on your own personal numbers.
But my numbers are going to be differentthan yours because your cost of goods
sold are going to be much higher thanmine. We have gasoline and mower blades,
right. And you've got.
We're buying a hundred thousandworth of cedar every month.
(16:18):
Exactly. That's a very different,
so everyone's business mightlook a little bit differently,
but if you're profitable at 500,000,
you need to take those numbers andkind of get an idea of what percent of
revenue, the different categories ofyour expenses are. And then as you grow,
you want to be checking those numbers ona regular basis, not necessarily daily,
(16:38):
because then you don't get any work done,
but at least once a week or oncea month, probably once a month,
and just to make sureyou're staying there.
That way if anything startsgetting out of whack,
you can make corrections to it beforeit's too far gone and you've got a $50,000
loss at the end of the year.
What about marketing and sales? Let'stalk about marketing sales for a minute,
(16:59):
because it's double revenue.Literally a million is double 500,000.
So you probably need double leads,double everything. Essentially,
all the metrics need to be in line.
And so did you guys have to do a wholelot of extra marketing to get there?
Did it happen gradually?
Were you guys already overbooked a 500,000and so you just hired more people to
fulfill that?
(17:20):
Or was it starting a new business at500,000 where you just got more people,
new hiring efforts? How did youguys go about it? I'm curious.
Well, for us,
I feel like that we had the reviews andwe started really putting an emphasis on
collecting more reviews.
That's.
Actually a marketing tool that I don'tthink people necessarily generally view
as a marketing tool.
But the first thing someone doeswhen they're looking for a business,
(17:41):
whatever it is, garage doors, landscaping,
they're going to go to Google and they'regoing to do a Google search and who
has the most reviews? Oh, well,maybe I should look at them.
And I feel like that's a great marketingtool that people spend a lot of time
doing Google ads, and thoseare all important too,
but your reviews really helps buildyour brand and build your reputation,
and that becomes a marketingtool in and of itself as well.
(18:03):
So we just started doing that,asking customers for referrals,
staying in constant contact viaemail campaigns and things just
exploded.
Yeah, I think there areso many levers to pull.
You just have to decide from a strategicstandpoint, what can you oversee,
implement, and execute and stay on topof? So you could double your price.
(18:24):
Yeah, you could double your price,you could add a new service offering,
you could expand markets. I thinkthere's a lot of ways to do it,
and I think you just have to realizewhat your competencies are as a business
owner that's trying to get fromhalf a million to a million.
So I would say that paid search istough because if you're a business
(18:46):
owner running a half amillion dollar business,
and let's assume that youhire a consultant because you're not going to do this
on your own because youhave other things to do.
And you say that consultant's athousand dollars every two weeks,
$1,500 a month, and you have abudget. Well, if you're not careful,
you could run through your budget ina month and have no net new business
(19:07):
because you have leadsthat haven't decided yet.
So all of a sudden you've spent $7,000and you have nothing to show for it.
You do that two or three months in arow depending on how you manage your
cashflow as a small business,what do you do? So that could be,
you could take what started as a littleflesh wound of spending a few thousand
dollars to now all of a suddenthis is like a mortal issue.
(19:27):
I don't have money because I'vespent, because with Google,
they take your money andyour consultants get paid.
So I just think you have to be carefulabout what channels you go after.
And then I think reviewsare great. Oh my gosh.
There's such a.
Strong signal.
That makes a bigger impact on someonethan whether you're doing a paid display
ad on Google or you've got a hundredreviews and it doesn't happen overnight.
(19:51):
You have to start asking,start asking, keep asking.
And now Jobber does offer that aspart of their marketing program.
And for us personally, wealready had a lot of reviews.
But.
We've seen a huge increase in thenumber of reviews we've gotten since we
implemented that.
One thing, and I love this about jobber,
the copilot where it spit out some KPIs,
(20:12):
it said that 40% of the quotes that wesent over the past six months were not
opened, 40% were not opened,
which means our 40 to 50% closerate was on 60% on a hundred
percent of the jobs. So there'salso a lot of money in follow up.
So you talk about how do you go fromhalf a million to a million? Well,
if you're only selling 40, 50% close rate,
(20:35):
you have a lot ofopportunity to do more. It's.
A lot of waste.
There.
Yeah.
Well, it's interesting too. So I'mhere, my business partner's there,
calls texts are coming in.
I called somebody last night because wedidn't get to them in time. I said, Hey,
I'm sorry we're out of town.He's like, you know what?
I called three companies today. You'rethe only person that called me back,
even though it's at eight 30 mytime. Y'all come out tomorrow. Wow.
(20:58):
So part of it too is if yourback's against the wall,
you've burned the boats, you'rein business for yourself,
now everything matters. Andyou can't let anything go,
even if you don't think it's likely,send the follow up. You never, never.
Following up on.
Posts is absolutely critical.Absolutely critical.
Because sometimes they didn't see it,
it went to their spam folder or hundredpercent, we see that all the time too.
(21:21):
Or no, we're waiting on the HOA togive us an approval for this project.
Thank you so much forfollowing up with me.
Or I was waiting on another quote and Inever heard back from the other company.
We hear that all the time too,
but because we take the timeand follow up and say, Hey,
was there anything youwanted to change on this?
And sometimes maybe the pricepoint was a little bit too high.
They only wanted to spend 3000instead of 4,000. And so, oh, well,
(21:43):
we can whittle that down. We canget that to meet within your budget,
find someone.
New. Just talk to.
Us. Let us figure it out for you.
And the fact that you take the time totalk to the client and follow up instead
of just sending out a quoteand hoping for the best,
they appreciate that so much more.
And then you just keepgetting more business and then that then translate into a
five star review, which thentranslate into somebody else.
(22:06):
Seeing that with pictures ofa project, if you do that,
add pictures to the reviews andstuff like that, which we do.
I highly recommend that as well.And it just becomes its own,
not monster. It's not what I want to say.
It's a good monster.
It is a good monster,A own happy, wealthy.
Monster, happy.
Sales monster, even machine.That's a good way of putting.
(22:26):
It.
I learned this from a sales rep and myprior company who had been in sales for
50 years,
and we were in a sales meeting andsomeone is complaining about a lead
the appointment.
And this gentleman gets up and he happenedto be a music director at his church.
He's very just the nicestman in the world. He goes,
(22:50):
that's disrespectful.
It's disrespectful because you don'tknow what it took for them to save up the
money to do the thing that youmight get a chance to do for them.
We work for them.
And so this was probably 10 yearsago. I remember it. It was yesterday.
Because no matter what,they're partying with money.
(23:10):
If you think about what we do,say our average ticket is $8,000,
that's easily a vacation fora family of five anywhere.
That could be a used carfor someone's teenage kid.
So the money that they're partingwith it's sacred money is hard to get.
It's not getting any easier. Andso I just want to say follow up,
treat people kindly and with respect.And if people say no right now,
(23:32):
that doesn't mean they say no downthe road. That's true. Things happen.
Things happen.
Well,
I also think that the time in between500 and million is a great time to figure
out what really works in your marketing.
I think in the beginning you can justget leads from all over the place and
you're kind of experimenting.It's just kind of a whirlwind.
But then once you get to thatcertain mark, you can say, okay,
(23:53):
let's figure out where ourdollars really give us good ROI.
Let's start nailing some of theselead sources really hard because
now we have a little more margin and wecan experiment some more and actually
pay attention to the experimentand actually really figure out.
So then when you get to the million,you're like, you know what works.
SEO works, LSA works, whateverthe case may be, next door,
(24:15):
instead of if you go to million,
it's going to be hard to get to millionif you don't really know where the
majority of your leads come from.
And it's nice having a leverto pull that. You can say,
if I turn this on within 30 days, I'mgoing to start getting leads for sure.
Those are the kinds of things that youfigure out in that range between 500,000
(24:37):
and a million. Do youguys agree with that?
Absolutely.
And what works for our business maynot be what works for his or anybody
else's who's listening, right?
It may not be the same leversthat they have to pull,
but we definitely learnedwhat works for us.
And sometimes it's somethingthat you may not think of.
It's something less traditional.
We were talking a little bit ago aboutcalling commercial clients that if
(24:58):
anyone wants to get intothat type of a market share,
calling them every four tosix months and saying, Hey,
how's it going with service that youhave? How is that working for you?
Are you happy? Do you want to make anychanges? What's your biggest pain point?
And just listening tothe responses and say,
is it okay if I follow up withyou in three months, six months,
whatever the case? And.
(25:20):
I mean, we will cold email businessesbuilders, and we'll just say, Hey,
if the garage door companyyou're using today,
you don't want for your mom's house,call us. Or another variation is like,
if you need a backup garage doordealer, sometimes just give us a call.
We we're here. We're in the samenetwork that you are. And that works.
And it's a numbers game. If youcall a hundred people a week,
(25:42):
10 of them will take the call. Youmight get one or two deals. Well,
that compounds, you get a coupleof those every week, every month,
all of a sudden you have a milliondollar business and you haven't done that
much more work. You'vejust been more aggressive.
And one thing that I learned in my priorrole was that attribution is really
important, but
(26:02):
you can't be like an attributionwarrior where you're like,
I want to know how everything comes from.
So what I've done forever inmy career is we use HubSpot
automation for form captures because itlets us know the source very clearly,
and it gives us all the page activity.So whenever somebody comes in,
(26:23):
we don't question where it came from.
That information getsported through to jobber.
And so we know that this personcame from an organic search,
and we know that they lookedat 10 pages on our site.
So we now have this information thatwe can go to them with and we're not
wondering how they foundus. And so I would just say,
get the attribution set upproperly in the beginning,
(26:45):
and then just let it do its thing.Like use CallRail or RingCentral,
get your numbers tracked, get those callspushed into jobber, whatever that is,
so that you're not wondering where themoney's coming from because that's not a
good place to be.
It's definitely good to havethat lead source tracked too.
So you know where your marketingdollars are making a difference.
And some of the ideas that we have, itdoesn't actually cost marketing dollars.
(27:08):
It's just time.
It's time that you're investing inyour business to grow that channel,
that marketing channel.
Well,
and the thing that you realize too isthat just because it says this thing on
the form, so we get leadsall the time. They say, Hey,
the HubSpot attribution will say it'sfrom organic search or direct traffic.
When we call them, they'll be like,Hey, this builder recommended you.
(27:30):
And so part of it too is, and again,
I am not an ROI warrior.
I'm okay just getting more business inand making sure our overall acquisition
cost doesn't reach acertain level. So for me,
because I know there's so much variationin where the leads come from says one
thing, but they say another.So that's part of it too.
(27:50):
And I think the biggest thing we found,
and I don't know if this is truefor everyone, but we sell products.
We sell a hundred plus products.
What we did was we made sure thatwe had that product and that service
on our website so that someone didn'thave to come to us and wonder if we did
it. So if you do installations, butyour website says you do maintenance,
(28:13):
well, people don't spendvery long on websites.
So they very quickly realized you'renot for them because you didn't say you
were for them. So for us,
we made it a priority inthe very beginning to make sure every product possible,
commercial, residential, we had it.
Every service is there just so that wewouldn't leave somebody in the lurch
or make them think that they had to gosomewhere else to find good service.
(28:35):
Yeah, the 500,000 market's a greattime to reevaluate your website,
reevaluate your marketing collateral,
make sure it's up to date and accurateso that your clients really know who
they're looking for. Thisis a great conversation.
I'm going to boil it downto three actual items here.
Number one is you need todetermine what your anti goals are,
things that you don't wantto do or you're not good at,
or you thinking you have somethingthat's more important for you to do.
(28:58):
Delegate those things.
Number two is follow-ups on quotes anduse texting and all those different
things to automate the follow-upsequence to nurture clients longterm.
And make sure whenever you send aquote that you send it through as many
channels as you can. Soyou likely have an email.
I would send a follow-up text and alsocall to make sure that they received it
(29:20):
so that you don't have a bunchof unanswered unseen quotes.
Yeah, that's great. I likevoicemail bottoms too.
And number three is partnerships.Partner with complimentary services,
partner with builders in town in yourown industry, figure out what that is,
but partnerships can really take youto the next level of revenue. Guys,
that was great. How do peoplefind out more about you?
(29:41):
I have our companywebsite, fast lawns.net,
or you can find more informationabout my coaching@homeprocoaching.com.
And our company is DOA GarageDoors. Our website is doa.com.
And on all the social media channels,it's also just doa. I like cars,
but for doors.
Great. Well guys, thanks for beinghere. I really appreciate it.
(30:02):
Thanks. Thank you.
And thank you for listening.
I hope that you heard something todaythat will take you from 500,000 to a
million the next level in business.I'm your host, Adam Sylvester.
You can find me@adamsylvester.com.
Your team and your clients deserveyour very best. So go give it to 'em.
So it's super important to know yournumbers because if you don't know your
numbers at 500,000,
it's going to be messier at a millionbecause you'll have no idea where you're
going. You'll have no ideawhere you need to be. Yes.
Welcome to jobbers Masters of HomeService, a podcast for home service pros,
buy Home Service pros.
We're in Las Vegas and today we'retalking about getting over the hump from
(00:21):
$500,000 to a million dollarsof revenue with some good sales
techniques. I'm your host, Adam Sylvester.
Today's guests are Kelly Guerrero andBobby Vickers. Welcome to the studio,
both of you.
Thank you. Thank you.
Glad you're here. So Bobby,why don't you go first,
tell our audience whoyou are and what you do.
Sure. So my name is Bobby Vickers. I'mthe co-founder of Nirvana Garage Doors.
(00:44):
We are a garage door manufacturer andturnkey service provider for residential
and commercial properties in North Texas.
And I am Kelly Guerrero. I am co-ownerof Fast Scapes in Manatee County,
Florida,
and founder of Home Pro Coachingwhere I help small business owners
grow their business and scale it tomake it the one that they want it to be.
(01:06):
Great. Awesome. Well, I'mglad you guys are both here.
So a lot of our listeners are justplateauing a little bit around that
$500,000 mark, and both ofyou have gotten past that.
So you guys are a reallygood resource for this,
but we want to help our listeners to getover that mark to seven 50 to a million
dollars instead of just hoveringaround that 500,000. 500,000 is fine,
(01:28):
but for those of us whoreally want to keep going,
what were some of the things that youguys did specifically to go from that
500,000 to seven figures?
Well, we formed some partnerships withother service providers in our area.
For example,
we took some pool manufacturers thatwere building pools and we put together a
landscape package for them so that theywould be able to offer that to their
(01:50):
clients. And then that madethings grow very quickly.
We also partnered with a landscapedesigner who she did the designs but then
didn't have anyone todo the installations.
And so forming partnerships withsimilar but not identical businesses as
yours sometimes can really,
it's a different sales strategy thanjust email marketing and the other things
(02:10):
which are absolutelyimportant to do as well.
But forming some good partnershipswith other businesses is one that maybe
people haven't thought of before.
So I would say to that point to justbe clear about who your customer is
and if you have differenttypes of customers, treat them, communicate with them,
market to them differently.
So we work with businessesand so we've developed
(02:34):
relationships and have agreementsin place for builders that say,
build 10 homes a year up to somethat build a hundred homes a year.
And so we have relationshipwith the B2B segment,
but we also go after homeowners,and that's different.
So the homeowner channels toattract new clients are different.
They require differentinvestment more time.
(02:55):
And so I would say to just be clear aboutwho your customers are and once you've
found out that you canservice one really well,
it's okay to go after another and youdon't have to be a one trick pony.
You don't have to just do one thing.
I think as long as those twothings are really tightly related,
you can go after multiple customersegments and be just fine.
I think for a lot of people,
(03:15):
500,000 is a prettytypical number to get to
with one really solid target base.
And so you really mastered howto serve this one customer.
You've really mastered how to deliverit consistently day after day.
You have a team that's really designatedfor that before that probably is a
little too early to start branching offinto different either target markets or
(03:38):
different services. But then, like yousaid, Bobby, once you get hit 500,000,
a lot of times peoplefeel like, you know what?
I think I'm ready for another serviceoffering. Is that what you're saying?
Yeah. So I would say asmuch as to your point, yes,
that's true,
but I guess I kind of thinkearly on you have to go get the
money wherever the money is. So if youreally want just homeowner business,
(04:01):
but your acquisition costs, you can'tafford it, you better find another route.
And sometimes a partnership channel isless expensive because it's benefiting
both parties. You're not taking,
or you're not having to invest so muchmoney because they're getting something
out of it,
or in your case they're already doing itand you're just coming along with them.
So.
It's no cost.
And what we ended up doingwas, since before that,
(04:22):
we hadn't done a whole lotof landscape installations.
We just focused on the maintenance. Soby doing those strategic partnerships,
we were able to get a wholenew skillset under our belt,
gain some experience,
and then be able to show examples ofhow well we did with that type of work.
And then we were able to usemore traditional marketing channels and sell that
(04:43):
work to other homeowners that weren'tnecessarily through the partnered business
that we were working with.
Were your technicians able to transitionfrom maintenance to installations,
or did you have to get a wholenew subset of technicians?
Well, we did sometraining with key people.
There you go.
There were certain ones that have,right, it's a different type of work,
(05:05):
a different, it requires a differentskillset. And so we had some that just,
they were hungry, they wantedto learn new things and do it.
And those were our superstars. Amazing.
We were able to pull them out and thenthey were the leaders that were in charge
of that landscape installationinstead of the maintenance.
Right. I think to your point,
most businesses don't get over 500,000.
A million dollar business israre air, believe it or not,
(05:28):
the Joint Center for Housing Studies,
they put out a report every fewyears about the remodeling industry.
And a few years ago,
90% of all businesses were lessthan 300,001 man operations.
And they went out of business infive years. It was just one person.
Because what happens is, and weknow this from being in the trades,
is that you're good at yourjob and you're thinking, well,
(05:49):
I'm going to go work for myself.I want all the money. Well,
with all the money comes, allthe headaches, the issues,
the people that you have tomanage. And so the skills that you,
a really good insert service providerdon't translate to being a business
owner. And so I thinkgetting to 500 to a million,
it's a huge accomplishment.It's hard to do.
(06:09):
And I've not found anybody that's beenable to get there without expanding into
more than one channel. Sowhenever I think of marketing,
I think of you have SEO, you havepaid search, you have referrals,
you have building relationships.
So I think the biggest thing is getthat one channel that can get you to
500 and then figure outwhere's the next channel?
(06:30):
What.
Proclivities do you have?What are you good at?
Who do you know what'sworking in your industry?
Well,
the other thing too thatyou have to realize when you are a small business owner
is you don't have to do everything.
It would be absolutely impossiblefor me or you or anybody.
You cannot grow a 1 millionbusiness with just you and maybe a
(06:52):
team of technicians.
You need to bring other people in andstop trying to do everything yourself and
delegate some of that other work towhether it's an admin in the office as a
project manager,
somebody to help you duplicate yourefforts and give you more time to focus on
the growth. So then they're handlingmore of the day-to-day operations.
That's a great segue. Cause I think ifwe look at ourselves and we think, man,
(07:14):
I changed a lot from 500,000 to amillion. I had to become a better leader.
I had to become a better business person.I had to make more advanced decisions,
and I had to get out of the day to day,
the grind of being actually in the field.
And so what were some of the things thatyou guys had to look inside of you and
say, man, I need to getbetter at X, Y, and Z.
If I'm going to take thisbusiness to the next level.
(07:34):
That's an easy one for me to answer. Ihad to stop trying to run everything.
I had to stop trying to control andmicromanage and let my team do the job,
do their work and delegate to theminstead of me having to think that,
well, no, nobody else can do invoicingbecause I'm the one who knows what
Everyone's terms are. I'm the onewho knows all of these things,
(07:56):
or I have to do the scheduling becauseI know the routes and I know this and
that to just let the other people do it.
And maybe they didn't doit quite as good as I do,
but something actuallyhurt on this podcast.
If the people that you hire cando 80% as good as you can do,
then you go ahead and you pick up the 20%,
but you've still bought back that muchof your time by assigning those kinds of
(08:19):
things to your team.
What is that Dan Martel?
He's like 80% done by someoneelse is a hundred percent awesome.
Yes.
So I want to be whereyou are. Unfortunately,
as we're nearing $2 million inrevenue, we still do everything.
My business partner and I, weorder, we sell, we schedule.
The only thing we don't doare the things in the field.
(08:39):
And for us that's kind of by design.
We are just not ready to take the leapof being responsible for someone's
family, for their rent, for theircar payments. We are just not there.
We have certain goals we want to hit.
So I can't speak as much as youcan about the delegation aspect,
but I do think what you have to changeis you have to stop being focused on you
and how you elevate other peoplebecause no business, like you said,
(09:03):
got big by themselves. Jeff Bezosowns less than 5% of Amazon,
right? He's the guy, he's the owner,
but he owns very little because itrequired a lot of people in a lot of
investment over time toget where they are today.
So service businessesare no different. Right.
Yeah, I love the delegation piece ofit too, because you're right. I mean,
(09:24):
here's the thing,
every business owner who has oneemployee is delegating something.
But I do think the leadership piece,
I think it's best tolook at ourselves first.
I think it's so important to avoidsaying, well, I want to go big,
and so you guys start doing betterover there, do that thing faster,
answer the phone better, and order bettermaterials. No, no, no. You're the top.
You're the leader atthe top of the business.
(09:46):
And so we have to be reallyhonest with ourselves and say,
if I want to go from 500,000 toa million and then maybe beyond,
I'm going to have to change probablythe most out of anybody every step if I
really want to achieve those betterresults. Because it all starts with me.
I really found that to be the case.
I had to stop criticizing my team andreally take the time to build them.
(10:07):
Instead, I don't have a very large team.
We've got two people in theoffice and a project manager,
so three in the office. But justto see them doing things right,
to catch them doing thingsand doing things well,
and complimenting them onthat and building them up and helping their confidence
grow as team members made themcapable of taking on more and more
(10:32):
aspects of the work andaspects of the project.
And so that really has been what I had to,
my biggest change Ihad to make personally.
And I think a lot of us get into business,not necessarily maybe to be the boss,
but we just have a way that wethink the business should be run.
And maybe at the priorcompany, you couldn't do that,
so you start off on your own. SoI think what happens as you grow,
(10:55):
you don't ever do a reset.
You just continue to goand go and build and add.
And I think we lose sight of antigoals so many times. It's like,
here's what I want, here's what I want,here's how I'm going to get it. Well,
as business owners, nobody'sgoing to come to us and say, Hey,
you need to stop that. You're not verygood at that. So to your point, Adam,
(11:16):
we have to have self-awareness andsay, I have a list of anti goals.
I really don't want to manage theschedule. I really don't want to invoice.
I really don't want to sign off on amarketing campaign. So I think for us,
that's how we have structured the hireswe want to make in the near future
is by going through our anti goals andsaying, we don't want these things.
(11:38):
Let's make sure we have systems inplace and a procedure to do them.
That way when we bringsomeone on, they're not going,
what did I just sign up for? Becauseso many times in service businesses,
it's kind of.
Messy.
A work in progress.
I think that the analogy is you're tryingto build a plane on the way down and
(11:58):
assemble it to flat before it crashes.
Sometimes it can be thatway sometimes. For us,
I know we had a phenomenal shiftwhen we hired a project manager,
a sales person.
And so then their only focuswas to not just sell jobs,
but to sell them profitably.
Because.
Their compensation was tiedto that same, no, they're not.
But their compensation was tiedto how profitable the job was.
(12:20):
And then that freed up mytime significantly that I could focus on the higher
level tasks and the marketing andgetting new customers and building those
relationships with buildersand things like that.
And then the project manager handled allof the quotes for the one-off jobs and
things like that.
This is a great conversation.
I want to pause for just a moment totalk about why we love jobber so much,
(12:42):
guys. How has Jobber helped you deliverthat exceptional customer experience and
convert one time users orcustomers to a long-term recurring
customer?
Well, for us,
we have just started using driver's newreferral program and have seen great
success with that. So a client getsa lawn mowing service, they love it,
and then they refer us to their neighbors,and then they get a little perk,
(13:04):
little discount off theirbill for referring us.
So I have some people that aredownright competitive with that,
with other folks on their block,
and they want to be the one who gets thediscount month after month after month.
So that really has been a great thing.
Love that. For us, I think Jobberhelps us present a very polished image,
our invoices, our quotes,
they're branded that we're able to addattachments, images, and so for us,
(13:27):
it's just really clean and simple,
and it makes it easy for ourclients to do business with us.
Yeah, jobber is something you canturn on immediately, sign up today,
and you instantly look more professionaland more exceptional to your clients.
And that's what your clientsdeserve and what they want.
So if you don't have jobber, youneed to start using jobber today.
Go to jobber.com/podcast deal,
get an exclusive discountand start being exceptional.
(13:50):
Even more exceptional today with Jobber,
this is how I was around 500,000.
I started to think if I get any bigger,
this is going to be really messy.It's going to be really unorganized,
it's going to beinefficient. And basically
if you're sloppy small,you'll be sloppy big.
(14:10):
And so I think something that wasreally important for me to realize is,
you know what? We're prettysloppy in a lot of ways.
I don't want this to be a million dollarsyet. If it was I, I'd lose my mind.
Right?
Sure.
And so did you guys do anything from anefficiency standpoint to make sure that,
so when you went from500,000 to a million,
it actually worked instead of just makingyou not sleep at night and pull all
(14:31):
your hair out.
So one of the things we did was justprice controls around the products that we
offer. So.
What does that mean?
Yeah, so in the past it waslike, find out what it costs.
Don't do a markup any lessthan this, right? Well,
now we have all that pre-built into adatabase that's like all you have to do is
go and check and see whatit is that you're selling.
(14:51):
And it's already been determined basedon the type of customer and the level of
that customer.
If you have a one-off quote from a builderthat we've done business with before,
they have a certain pricingtier, you go to the database,
find out what that tier is,
you can quickly price a project andknow that it's going to make money.
So that's kind of how we do it.But again, it's just the two of us.
So we're always double, triple checkingto make sure we're making money.
(15:14):
But I think the biggest thing for us isjust visualizing what we have to offer.
Setting price tables and price listsup ahead of time so we don't have to
reinvent the wheel with every quote.
Well, most of our work is recurring.
So what we needed to do was make surethat our recurring jobs were also
profitable.
Love it.
So we had to check the time on the job.
Where do we need to be for a manhour per price, per man hour?
(15:36):
Where does that number need to be?
So it's super important to know yournumbers because if you don't know your
numbers at 500,000,
it's going to be messier at a millionbecause you'll have no idea where you're
going. You'll have noidea where you need to be.
We have all the differentcategories, your GNA,
your cost of goods sold andstuff like that. And each one.
What's GNA?
General and admin costs.
(15:58):
And so you have each of those asa certain percentage of revenue.
So whether you're at 500,000 or a million,
you should be probably about 8%depending on your own personal numbers.
But my numbers are going to be differentthan yours because your cost of goods
sold are going to be much higher thanmine. We have gasoline and mower blades,
right. And you've got.
We're buying a hundred thousandworth of cedar every month.
(16:18):
Exactly. That's a very different,
so everyone's business mightlook a little bit differently,
but if you're profitable at 500,000,
you need to take those numbers andkind of get an idea of what percent of
revenue, the different categories ofyour expenses are. And then as you grow,
you want to be checking those numbers ona regular basis, not necessarily daily,
(16:38):
because then you don't get any work done,
but at least once a week or oncea month, probably once a month,
and just to make sureyou're staying there.
That way if anything startsgetting out of whack,
you can make corrections to it beforeit's too far gone and you've got a $50,000
loss at the end of the year.
What about marketing and sales? Let'stalk about marketing sales for a minute,
(16:59):
because it's double revenue.Literally a million is double 500,000.
So you probably need double leads,double everything. Essentially,
all the metrics need to be in line.
And so did you guys have to do a wholelot of extra marketing to get there?
Did it happen gradually?
Were you guys already overbooked a 500,000and so you just hired more people to
fulfill that?
(17:20):
Or was it starting a new business at500,000 where you just got more people,
new hiring efforts? How did youguys go about it? I'm curious.
Well, for us,
I feel like that we had the reviews andwe started really putting an emphasis on
collecting more reviews.
That's.
Actually a marketing tool that I don'tthink people necessarily generally view
as a marketing tool.
But the first thing someone doeswhen they're looking for a business,
(17:41):
whatever it is, garage doors, landscaping,
they're going to go to Google and they'regoing to do a Google search and who
has the most reviews? Oh, well,maybe I should look at them.
And I feel like that's a great marketingtool that people spend a lot of time
doing Google ads, and thoseare all important too,
but your reviews really helps buildyour brand and build your reputation,
and that becomes a marketingtool in and of itself as well.
(18:03):
So we just started doing that,asking customers for referrals,
staying in constant contact viaemail campaigns and things just
exploded.
Yeah, I think there areso many levers to pull.
You just have to decide from a strategicstandpoint, what can you oversee,
implement, and execute and stay on topof? So you could double your price.
(18:24):
Yeah, you could double your price,you could add a new service offering,
you could expand markets. I thinkthere's a lot of ways to do it,
and I think you just have to realizewhat your competencies are as a business
owner that's trying to get fromhalf a million to a million.
So I would say that paid search istough because if you're a business
(18:46):
owner running a half amillion dollar business,
and let's assume that youhire a consultant because you're not going to do this
on your own because youhave other things to do.
And you say that consultant's athousand dollars every two weeks,
$1,500 a month, and you have abudget. Well, if you're not careful,
you could run through your budget ina month and have no net new business
(19:07):
because you have leadsthat haven't decided yet.
So all of a sudden you've spent $7,000and you have nothing to show for it.
You do that two or three months in arow depending on how you manage your
cashflow as a small business,what do you do? So that could be,
you could take what started as a littleflesh wound of spending a few thousand
dollars to now all of a suddenthis is like a mortal issue.
(19:27):
I don't have money because I'vespent, because with Google,
they take your money andyour consultants get paid.
So I just think you have to be carefulabout what channels you go after.
And then I think reviewsare great. Oh my gosh.
There's such a.
Strong signal.
That makes a bigger impact on someonethan whether you're doing a paid display
ad on Google or you've got a hundredreviews and it doesn't happen overnight.
(19:51):
You have to start asking,start asking, keep asking.
And now Jobber does offer that aspart of their marketing program.
And for us personally, wealready had a lot of reviews.
But.
We've seen a huge increase in thenumber of reviews we've gotten since we
implemented that.
One thing, and I love this about jobber,
the copilot where it spit out some KPIs,
(20:12):
it said that 40% of the quotes that wesent over the past six months were not
opened, 40% were not opened,
which means our 40 to 50% closerate was on 60% on a hundred
percent of the jobs. So there'salso a lot of money in follow up.
So you talk about how do you go fromhalf a million to a million? Well,
if you're only selling 40, 50% close rate,
(20:35):
you have a lot ofopportunity to do more. It's.
A lot of waste.
There.
Yeah.
Well, it's interesting too. So I'mhere, my business partner's there,
calls texts are coming in.
I called somebody last night because wedidn't get to them in time. I said, Hey,
I'm sorry we're out of town.He's like, you know what?
I called three companies today. You'rethe only person that called me back,
even though it's at eight 30 mytime. Y'all come out tomorrow. Wow.
(20:58):
So part of it too is if yourback's against the wall,
you've burned the boats, you'rein business for yourself,
now everything matters. Andyou can't let anything go,
even if you don't think it's likely,send the follow up. You never, never.
Following up on.
Posts is absolutely critical.Absolutely critical.
Because sometimes they didn't see it,
it went to their spam folder or hundredpercent, we see that all the time too.
(21:21):
Or no, we're waiting on the HOA togive us an approval for this project.
Thank you so much forfollowing up with me.
Or I was waiting on another quote and Inever heard back from the other company.
We hear that all the time too,
but because we take the timeand follow up and say, Hey,
was there anything youwanted to change on this?
And sometimes maybe the pricepoint was a little bit too high.
They only wanted to spend 3000instead of 4,000. And so, oh, well,
(21:43):
we can whittle that down. We canget that to meet within your budget,
find someone.
New. Just talk to.
Us. Let us figure it out for you.
And the fact that you take the time totalk to the client and follow up instead
of just sending out a quoteand hoping for the best,
they appreciate that so much more.
And then you just keepgetting more business and then that then translate into a
five star review, which thentranslate into somebody else.
(22:06):
Seeing that with pictures ofa project, if you do that,
add pictures to the reviews andstuff like that, which we do.
I highly recommend that as well.And it just becomes its own,
not monster. It's not what I want to say.
It's a good monster.
It is a good monster,A own happy, wealthy.
Monster, happy.
Sales monster, even machine.That's a good way of putting.
(22:26):
It.
I learned this from a sales rep and myprior company who had been in sales for
50 years,
and we were in a sales meeting andsomeone is complaining about a lead
the appointment.
And this gentleman gets up and he happenedto be a music director at his church.
He's very just the nicestman in the world. He goes,
(22:50):
that's disrespectful.
It's disrespectful because you don'tknow what it took for them to save up the
money to do the thing that youmight get a chance to do for them.
We work for them.
And so this was probably 10 yearsago. I remember it. It was yesterday.
Because no matter what,they're partying with money.
(23:10):
If you think about what we do,say our average ticket is $8,000,
that's easily a vacation fora family of five anywhere.
That could be a used carfor someone's teenage kid.
So the money that they're partingwith it's sacred money is hard to get.
It's not getting any easier. Andso I just want to say follow up,
treat people kindly and with respect.And if people say no right now,
(23:32):
that doesn't mean they say no downthe road. That's true. Things happen.
Things happen.
Well,
I also think that the time in between500 and million is a great time to figure
out what really works in your marketing.
I think in the beginning you can justget leads from all over the place and
you're kind of experimenting.It's just kind of a whirlwind.
But then once you get to thatcertain mark, you can say, okay,
(23:53):
let's figure out where ourdollars really give us good ROI.
Let's start nailing some of theselead sources really hard because
now we have a little more margin and wecan experiment some more and actually
pay attention to the experimentand actually really figure out.
So then when you get to the million,you're like, you know what works.
SEO works, LSA works, whateverthe case may be, next door,
(24:15):
instead of if you go to million,
it's going to be hard to get to millionif you don't really know where the
majority of your leads come from.
And it's nice having a leverto pull that. You can say,
if I turn this on within 30 days, I'mgoing to start getting leads for sure.
Those are the kinds of things that youfigure out in that range between 500,000
(24:37):
and a million. Do youguys agree with that?
Absolutely.
And what works for our business maynot be what works for his or anybody
else's who's listening, right?
It may not be the same leversthat they have to pull,
but we definitely learnedwhat works for us.
And sometimes it's somethingthat you may not think of.
It's something less traditional.
We were talking a little bit ago aboutcalling commercial clients that if
(24:58):
anyone wants to get intothat type of a market share,
calling them every four tosix months and saying, Hey,
how's it going with service that youhave? How is that working for you?
Are you happy? Do you want to make anychanges? What's your biggest pain point?
And just listening tothe responses and say,
is it okay if I follow up withyou in three months, six months,
whatever the case? And.
(25:20):
I mean, we will cold email businessesbuilders, and we'll just say, Hey,
if the garage door companyyou're using today,
you don't want for your mom's house,call us. Or another variation is like,
if you need a backup garage doordealer, sometimes just give us a call.
We we're here. We're in the samenetwork that you are. And that works.
And it's a numbers game. If youcall a hundred people a week,
(25:42):
10 of them will take the call. Youmight get one or two deals. Well,
that compounds, you get a coupleof those every week, every month,
all of a sudden you have a milliondollar business and you haven't done that
much more work. You'vejust been more aggressive.
And one thing that I learned in my priorrole was that attribution is really
important, but
(26:02):
you can't be like an attributionwarrior where you're like,
I want to know how everything comes from.
So what I've done forever inmy career is we use HubSpot
automation for form captures because itlets us know the source very clearly,
and it gives us all the page activity.So whenever somebody comes in,
(26:23):
we don't question where it came from.
That information getsported through to jobber.
And so we know that this personcame from an organic search,
and we know that they lookedat 10 pages on our site.
So we now have this information thatwe can go to them with and we're not
wondering how they foundus. And so I would just say,
get the attribution set upproperly in the beginning,
(26:45):
and then just let it do its thing.Like use CallRail or RingCentral,
get your numbers tracked, get those callspushed into jobber, whatever that is,
so that you're not wondering where themoney's coming from because that's not a
good place to be.
It's definitely good to havethat lead source tracked too.
So you know where your marketingdollars are making a difference.
And some of the ideas that we have, itdoesn't actually cost marketing dollars.
(27:08):
It's just time.
It's time that you're investing inyour business to grow that channel,
that marketing channel.
Well,
and the thing that you realize too isthat just because it says this thing on
the form, so we get leadsall the time. They say, Hey,
the HubSpot attribution will say it'sfrom organic search or direct traffic.
When we call them, they'll be like,Hey, this builder recommended you.
(27:30):
And so part of it too is, and again,
I am not an ROI warrior.
I'm okay just getting more business inand making sure our overall acquisition
cost doesn't reach acertain level. So for me,
because I know there's so much variationin where the leads come from says one
thing, but they say another.So that's part of it too.
(27:50):
And I think the biggest thing we found,
and I don't know if this is truefor everyone, but we sell products.
We sell a hundred plus products.
What we did was we made sure thatwe had that product and that service
on our website so that someone didn'thave to come to us and wonder if we did
it. So if you do installations, butyour website says you do maintenance,
(28:13):
well, people don't spendvery long on websites.
So they very quickly realized you'renot for them because you didn't say you
were for them. So for us,
we made it a priority inthe very beginning to make sure every product possible,
commercial, residential, we had it.
Every service is there just so that wewouldn't leave somebody in the lurch
or make them think that they had to gosomewhere else to find good service.
(28:35):
Yeah, the 500,000 market's a greattime to reevaluate your website,
reevaluate your marketing collateral,
make sure it's up to date and accurateso that your clients really know who
they're looking for. Thisis a great conversation.
I'm going to boil it downto three actual items here.
Number one is you need todetermine what your anti goals are,
things that you don't wantto do or you're not good at,
or you thinking you have somethingthat's more important for you to do.
(28:58):
Delegate those things.
Number two is follow-ups on quotes anduse texting and all those different
things to automate the follow-upsequence to nurture clients longterm.
And make sure whenever you send aquote that you send it through as many
channels as you can. Soyou likely have an email.
I would send a follow-up text and alsocall to make sure that they received it
(29:20):
so that you don't have a bunchof unanswered unseen quotes.
Yeah, that's great. I likevoicemail bottoms too.
And number three is partnerships.Partner with complimentary services,
partner with builders in town in yourown industry, figure out what that is,
but partnerships can really take youto the next level of revenue. Guys,
that was great. How do peoplefind out more about you?
(29:41):
I have our companywebsite, fast lawns.net,
or you can find more informationabout my coaching@homeprocoaching.com.
And our company is DOA GarageDoors. Our website is doa.com.
And on all the social media channels,it's also just doa. I like cars,
but for doors.
Great. Well guys, thanks for beinghere. I really appreciate it.
(30:02):
Thanks. Thank you.
And thank you for listening.
I hope that you heard something todaythat will take you from 500,000 to a
million the next level in business.I'm your host, Adam Sylvester.
You can find me@adamsylvester.com.
Your team and your clients deserveyour very best. So go give it to 'em.
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