Mastering Local SEO in the Trades: Secrets to Success with Josh Crouch

Welcome back to another episode of The TradeMarke Podcast! In this episode, hosts Sarah Ghirardo and Eric Thomas sit down with Josh Crouch, Founder of Relentless Digital and Host of Service Business Mastery, to discuss his journey from accounting to the trades and the valuable lessons he learned along the way.

Discover the importance of focusing on operations, leveraging AI and automation, and the power of cohesive marketing strategies. Josh shares insights into Google Business Profiles, local SEO, and the evolving landscape of marketing in the trades. Whether you're a trade professional, a marketing expert, or somewhere in between, this episode is packed with actionable advice and strategies to help you succeed.

Don't miss this engaging conversation that bridges the gap between trades and marketing, providing you with the tools and knowledge to make your mark. Tune in now!

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Step into The Trademark, your go-to podcast for everything marketing in the trades.
Hosted by award-winning industry marketing experts, Sarah Girardo from Remarketable
and Eric Thomas from Rival Digital.
Together, we're here to unite the worlds of trades and marketing.
Bringing you insights, stories, and strategies from the heart of the industry.

(00:21):
Whether you're a trade professional, a marketing expert, or somewhere in between,
this is the place for you.
Listen in as we're here for the big ideas, the game changers,
and the everyday successes.
Because at The Trademark, we're with the trades and for the trades.
What is going on, everyone? Welcome back to another episode of The Trademark.

(00:44):
We've got a really good guest for you all today, a near and dear friend of mine, Josh Krauts.
And today's icebreaker, are y'all ready? I'm ready.
I'm not ready. This is an easy icebreaker. This is an easy icebreaker. What
were you doing for work before you got
into the trades before the trades oh
man we're going back a few years i was

(01:08):
an accounting clerk at a property management company for about three years and
actually that experience there i had a local hvac company who posted on craigslist
that was looking for an accountant i'm like what the hell let's just apply because
i was i didn't It was very monotonous,
the accounting clerk. It's the same month over month, year over year.

(01:30):
I knew nothing about HVAC. Eric, I know you know this. Sarah,
I don't know if you know this. I'm not handy at all.
So for me to land in the trades was not a destiny thing for me.
But yeah, I got offered the position after a couple interviews and stuff.
And very quickly, he realized if I wasn't the greatest accountant,

(01:51):
and I was much better at running businesses and diving into all the other stuff
on that side, running a team and stuff.
So it was literally within a month of starting there, started transitioning
into a whole bunch of other things.
But yeah, I was an accounting clerk for about three years.
So he was like, you're bad at math. Let's put you somewhere else.
It wasn't bad at math. It was more so like the CPA stuff.

(02:14):
You get to like the tax stuff. So this first company that I ended up being in
the trades, I didn't know this at the time. So we, the first day I walk in,
they're getting new cell phones.
There's a 20 guys there that was in March.
I didn't realize that they had been paying payroll on time, checks bouncing,
owed the IRS 100 grand, like on and on.

(02:36):
They had a supplier from their commercial construction days back in the early
2010s that Gustav Larson, pretty big distributor throughout the country,
and they owed like $300,000 or $400,000.
I ended up talking to one of the brothers of Larson and got the whole story later on in life.
But we had three guys left by September.

(02:57):
So we had we went from 20 to 3 and we
covered and this is when i
was in wisconsin we covered from madison to milwaukee 90 miles
we had a couple texts we had a couple texts in madison
like one or two guys in milwaukee and yes
we had three guys and then to top that off their first winter was
the coldest winter on record in 30 years so we

(03:20):
literally i didn't we got our asses
completely just i kind of say ass i'm good with that right like you can
say okay yeah we got our
i got my ass handed to me i didn't i was running the office at
that point i was handling the phone calls we were using desco which is pre-service
titan pre any cloud-based program so it's all like you gotta you gotta know

(03:43):
which keys to hit and stuff nobody knew how to use the software because the
company was bought from someone else out of bankruptcy like it was just a It was a mess.
I learned all the things not to do in the first three and a half years of the trades.
That's awesome. Honestly, I think it's ironic that I didn't get out.

(04:05):
But I do think when you get into the trades, like Sarah, you worked at Service Champions.
There's just something about the trade. It's just, you get in and you just,
the people, the connections, and some of the things that go on.
And obviously that's changed over the last 10, 11 years. It used to be a lot
different than it is today.
But the people are really what keep you in the trades. They're such awesome

(04:26):
people like yourselves.
And that's what I tell because a lot of people know that my team is very young.
And I get them right out of college most of the time through intern programs.
You're on that real hiring plan.
Oh, I just tell them, I'm like, look, I know you want to go do marketing for
a boutique. I know that you want to do marketing for a fashion line.

(04:47):
I was like, and I tell them the same thing. I'm like, if you get in here and
you learn Service Titan and you learn the trades and you learn this,
you'll always have a job somewhere.
It might not be here, but you'll have a job somewhere because what you know,
and if you know stuff about the trades, then that's very valuable to someone.
Oh, yeah. And it's like easy six figures, right?

(05:08):
In multiple ways, right? Like it doesn't matter if at a contracting company
or not, or something that supports the contracts.
There's so much happening in the industry right now because,
and I think Sebastian, I mentioned earlier, they talk about how that's happened.
Because AI and some of this technology stuff, the software companies and some
of the other industries don't have the money flowing to it like they used to.

(05:30):
So a lot of the money is flowing into like, oh, home service, because we're still...
What a year or two years after covid was kind of like officially it's not over
but it's like officially over type thing yeah and the money's flowing it like
there's still pe companies even today when we know interest rates are high and
all this stuff like they're still coming,
there's new platform groups there's like non-stop yeah there's podcasts outside

(05:54):
our industry telling people to come buy a plumbing company come like miss ben
franklin plumbing's and the mr sparkies and all that go buy a franchise start
a company because you're always going to have and then of And of course,
they realize how hard it is to run these companies.
It's not as simple as they heard on the podcast.
Yeah. We've talked to some franchisee companies and none of them have had experience

(06:18):
running a company, a resident, our companies.
And so they're learning from boots on the ground as to how to do this.
But it is an opportunity.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the franchise world,
because that's where I came from before Rival was the franchise world.

(06:40):
It's totally different because the franchise world, it's very much so like white
collar professionals that started a home service business and now they're like
learning the trades versus like non-franchise.
There's like blue collar professionals that know how to do the work and are
learning how to run a business.
So it's pretty interesting, just both sides of that even.

(07:02):
The communication styles are totally different too. You got to learn to cuss.
If you're going to be in the trades, you got to learn how to cuss.
I know. Hell yeah.
But I mean, like the tech companies, they do it that way. They just have different
ways. It's pretty interesting.
It's pretty interesting. I mean, they just wear suits and do it behind closed doors.

(07:23):
We do not wear suits. like you literally saw
us you would be like you guys get dressed at all and like literally we do not
work like first time i saw my boss he was in like cargo shorts and a t-shirt
and flip-flops and i was like is this what we and i was in heels and i walk
into the office and the like head of security,

(07:47):
he goes, wow, you walk really loud.
Never wore heels again. I was like, all right, I'm done.
That's hilarious. Yeah, it's pretty funny. I definitely want to dig in and talk
about our best friend in the whole world, which is Google.

(08:08):
Because I know, Josh, I see you posting all the time on LinkedIn and Facebook.
And Sarah, I see you posting a lot in Facebook groups. and there's just a lot of stuff changing.
I know we talked about this in that impromptu roundtable we had a couple of weeks back.
But Josh, I know you're pretty savvy when it comes to the Google business profile
stuff and definitely want to just dig in there because in my opinion,

(08:30):
maps and local SEO is like, that's where it's at.
And I know you feel pretty similar. Of course, you got to do everything.
But I believe the map pack is just like such a gold mine.
So I'd love to chat about that and kind of just you know what you're seeing
some of the changes where the field goal post is currently laying all that good

(08:51):
stuff yeah I mean I think I think maps will probably be the one thing that.
Hopefully, that AI and the AI overviews and the summaries and stuff doesn't
change because I think people are so ingrained.
I was on a meeting with Tersh, which I know you guys know.
He's the host of our show, Service Business Mastery.

(09:13):
We had just a meeting. We're just talking about stuff. stuff and i because
i know he doesn't use google for search for much the
only time he ever uses to see like if a local business is open or to find a
restaurant or whatever in his local area he uses tiktok he uses other places
to search for things which i know is a growing trend especially for informational
type queries i think that's where that's where google's gotten it wrong because,

(09:36):
when it comes to informational stuff like you see a
list of 10 links and a lot of i
mean i'll be great example and and
i'm not bagging on anyone service titan ranks for hvac seo
like number two the only reason i know that is because i pay attention to
it like but they're not a hvac seo company but they
because their their site has so much authority they can rank for you get service

(09:59):
i can rank for whatever they want house call pro can rank for whatever they
want all these other places that can rank for whatever they want because there's
such authority but that's the problem with that is that might not be the intent
behind what someone's searching they may be search for a company and then they
get a list and then of course then they got to go do more research.
But it's interesting and i think sarah you posted about the

(10:19):
ai overviews and then i i couldn't find the
article but when google finally launched
it i don't know if it was april or may where they like just said hey ripping
the band-aid off here you go world yeah and then of course and then of course
stuff went viral about glue on pizza and i can't remember some of those glue
on pizza was the funniest one

(10:40):
and it was like a reddit art it was like a reddit thing from like 2011.
Yeah that went from,
And I think it was like BrightEdge or some really large SEO company that does
a massive amount of data analysis was like 84% of searches had some sort of AI overview.
And now it's down, they've pulled it way back to like 15, 18%.

(11:01):
And local intent keywords, the near me's, the plumbers in my area,
the stuff that, you know, stuff like that has gone almost non-existent, at least right now.
And we can only hope that it stays that way. but it's it has changed i mean
literally it's every month something's going on,

(11:23):
google my business and lsa has been having some stuff
going on like if you're if
you have like let's say your name like i have a client whose name is well i'll
just say heat and air llc i won't say the actual name of the company but heat
and air llc his lsa name is heat and air it doesn't match so google actually
disconnected the reviews and the gives google the business profile from lsa,

(11:47):
and then we had to submit paper yeah this is like a
new thing where they're if it doesn't match exactly the reviews are going missing
on lsa and they're only then using whatever lsa reviews they got which of course
only only had like five it's just this stuff changed like there's no announcements
about this stuff it literally is like well this happens so now we got to figure this out.

(12:08):
Colleen Keyworth called me three days ago. She's like, have you ever seen it
where a business profile just completely disappears?
Like can't find it when the client logs in, can't find it in search,
no suspension notice, nothing. It's gone. Just disappeared.
You know and that's the
stuff that yeah i eric i know you

(12:29):
and i get on calls this is the stuff where even though
we work with google a lot and i know sir you're very well in tune
with this stuff in the whether you're an internal marker external
marker there's just stuff you can't predict like i
know people look at us like hey we're the pros we should know
what's going on but we're trying to control a
third-party entity that doesn't really care what we think they

(12:51):
don't really they're in it for themselves they're a privately held company
one of the biggest companies in the world they don't care yeah yeah and
all those that didn't take away their websites that
do you know when a long time ago they were like google my business website right
they're all 404 pages now i read that yeah well and that used to be that used

(13:11):
to be really like the the domain authority on that link used to be like a 995
or something like oh yeah it was literally like one
of the things we did as part of optimization was like,
Hey, we're going to create this site for you. We're going to link it to all
your different pages and services.
And I don't know how much weight that had by itself, but it's like this one
more thing that we could do. And now it's gone.

(13:33):
Now it's a thorough four. So then it's even worse. Right.
Yeah. So it's like, yeah, they just do whatever they want. I feel like Google. Yeah.
Google's been, they've been very sloppy with
some of that stuff lately here here's here's a
few that i think they're pretty they were extremely sloppy with getting

(13:56):
rid of google domains with that sale to squarespace i think they sent out one
email to let everyone know and then we still get clients that are emailing us
they're just like my domain just got renewed in squarespace i don't have a squarespace
account what is this blah blah blah i'm like oh yeah well we all know because
google People told us just once that this was happening.
And then one day, everything turned into Squarespace.

(14:18):
That was pretty sloppy. I think the entire...
The entire way that they went about business profiles and LSA was so sloppy.
Like, if you have to, like, sync
your GMB to LSA, they should just make it all be managed in one place.
I don't understand why they make you have two separate ones.

(14:38):
LSA lost more than anything I've ever seen in the world.
Yeah, and this may not apply to too many people because some of the contractors
may not get into, like, the APIs for Google and stuff.
But their lsa api is being deprecated at
least some of the endpoints because we do it with some reporting and put
it in a looker studio and all this stuff we have to
now go into google ads api and do that stuff and i literally just found something

(15:01):
like two days ago and it's like the amount of time effort and energy wasted
on like trying to keep up with these changes and then of course you know as
as companies grow like like yours eric and stuff where the ship gets
bigger it gets hard to turn right like even even
these big contracting companies who are 100 200

(15:21):
500 million some of these guys like the tommy mellows of the world so that
ship when something happens on the google side
gets very difficult to turn internally because the ship is so big but again
we know how much google cares right right but they have the content at least
to support the ship turning right so they have the people that can support the

(15:44):
infrastructure okay okay,
this is what we're going to do next. And we just have all hands on deck and let's go.
Yeah. And sometimes they don't, right? Like Tommy, we know he has a team,
but like some of the larger companies, the one I came from, like at that point, we didn't have a team.
It was me and like, and a VP and we were shifting, but it was just chaotic,

(16:05):
especially during COVID.
But I mean, we've been going through these shifts with Google since COVID really,
or before that, but really with COVID.
And it's not like we won't get through them but it's just
a yeah it's a pain in the ass to be honest and you
know seo people are losing their job i was reading
that too today and and that's interesting to me because it's like why like now

(16:29):
is the time that you need to figure out the ai side of seo and and really understand
like how you can leverage them faster because you as a marketer can't do it all.
You need that team. You need these people around you to give you updates.
I think with if anything from we haven't even talked about the Google leak.

(16:54):
There's a whole like if you have no idea what we're talking about just search Google leak.
You're going to have probably a couple hundred articles from different SEO firms
and stuff on videos to look at.
But I think if anything came out of some of this stuff is, and this is,
this has been good advice for a long time, but I think a lot of times,

(17:16):
and I know personally for us, we work with most of our clients are one to 5 million ish.
Some are a little smaller, some are bigger, but that's probably our range where
they don't understand hiring people in all the different facets, right?
The paid ads, the social media, and they, they want maybe one person to do it.
And personally, and I know, I think Eric, I know you do some of the services,

(17:37):
but I think you, we share some, some sentiment on this where there's certain
things where you like, sometimes you just need a specialist to do some of these
things for you, whether that's in house and in house specialist or an external
specialist or a freelancer,
someone that literally does nothing but that for the trades.
He's like, I talked to, I don't know if you guys know who Daniel Miller is by chance.
He creates reels for contractors.

(17:59):
That's, it's actually a side gig for him, but that's all he does.
He loves it. He's a passion for him. He started creating reels for himself. Just funny.
And then contractors, because he's connected, he started doing it for,
we had a mutual client that he did it for and is absolutely loving what's being
done. But that's stuff that I can't support.
Like, I don't know what he's doing and I don't want to go on site to all these
shops and do that for three or four days a week. I don't want to travel that much.

(18:21):
And but you you got to align yourself with people that
are like they know the algorithm so when that algorithm changes they
know what's going on because we're talking we talked about google
and how much they've changed over the last hell the
last three months yeah yeah tick tock
tick tick tock so it's changing instagram facebook youtube
like you just i just can't even stop out right you

(18:44):
have to have a little yeah you need
people and i feel like that's where
because you're an internal marketer i was before i did
this eric i know you did web design was that was for neighborly right yeah yeah
so that's where i think someone internally can really help hold somebody's like
help the marketers that you pay or help them with some of these things and make

(19:09):
Make sure that they're staying on top of it. Most of them are. Most of them care.
Just like anything, there's bad contractors and good contractors.
There's bad marketers and good marketers.
But you got to find someone that keeps up with the changes, even as painful as that is.
Sometimes for us as business owners, you got to keep up with the changes because
three months, you'll fall behind.

(19:31):
Yeah. And that's why I think it's so important to bring your vendors together.
Right. And that's what I started with some companies that like, that's what I do.
Like, how can I bring you all together as a mastermind? And I don't care if
you compete and I don't care whatever your things are. But like,
what's the mastermind here?
Right. Like, that's that's the gold thing.

(19:54):
And I didn't really figure that out until later on in my career when I was working
with a heating and air conditioning company.
And I was like, if we all just came together and just had a real conversation
and had a real strategy where we all aligned, that would make sense to me.
Marketers have to work together.

(20:17):
I was just telling, I don't remember who it was, I was telling someone about
that. I like, it's like a sign, like on these, like a sign that's invisible
on these companies. Like we don't play well with others sometimes.
And we're all serving the same client, right?
Like if you do specialties, like we work with Jen McKee and Key Art and Forrest

(20:37):
Perry and some of these other guys, because we don't do those things.
We have to work together. Like we have to share Google Analytics access and
Tag Manager and all these things because we all, the client is the one that wins if we all share it.
But if someone starts hoarding like oh i'm going to
create my own use case or i'm going to have you're going to have two separate call
rail accounts oh gosh yeah like what
is the purpose you're just you're wasting assets and resources and you're getting

(21:00):
an incomplete data set you know everyone's going to everyone's going to take
credit yeah everyone's going to take credit for their thing and even though
it all works together like it's literally like seo's uh social media is a great example.
We have a client that has been doing their own paid ads for the first two years.
They've got from zero to 700, like the students motivated beyond belief,

(21:21):
zero to 700 reviews in two years of being in business.
But he does a lot of Facebook and I noticed when I was looking up his stuff
on SEMrush and some of the keywords and branding keywords, his company name
and reviews popped up or different variations of that because people were seeing
him on social going to Google looking him up.
And that's the stuff that people don't realize it all comes together and it

(21:42):
plays a major part because that, traffic, Google's like, Hey,
someone to keep people keep looking for this company in this area,
I'm going to start showing them for their other pages, because clearly they're something right.
And that's where the community outreach and the yard signs and the truck wraps
and all of those things really collaborate together to make a company not have

(22:02):
to depend constantly on paying for more ads or paying for different placements.
And I think that's, it's not talked about enough because people don't do those services, right?
We're talking about like so many different things, but a cohesive marketing
plan, I think is really what's lacking in the trade sometimes. times.
Yeah. And that screenshot I'd shared on your post this morning,

(22:24):
I just noticed that for one of our clients where when I searched them by name,
their GBP pulled up and it didn't populate the Google updates or the GMB posts
that everyone thinks help them rank. It was pulling Facebook.
It was pulling Facebook and Instagram posts. Those don't help?

(22:44):
I thought putting Putting keywords in your review replies was going to be the
key to ranking on Google.
Yeah. You just need to ask 20 questions yourself and then go as yourself and answer them.
But it was pulling Facebook and Instagram posts and not even GBP posts.

(23:04):
And so to your point, Josh, if the social media team isn't in sync with the
team managing the Google business profile, the local SEO and all that stuff,
That could quickly change the messaging.
If you're posting one message on Facebook and that's what's pulling into your
Google business profile and your Google business profile is talking about something

(23:25):
else, that could really mix things up.
But if it's all synced up together, it could really enhance just the overall user experience.
Well, and it's interesting too because you think about, let's just say Facebook and Google.
The stuff you post on Facebook is typically a lot different than the stuff you
would post on Google people because the people that are there are totally different.

(23:47):
Facebook, they're just scrolling. They don't know what they're looking for.
They're just hanging out, wasting time.
And so if they see a funny meme or a funny video, like, or a picture of someone
they know that works at your company or something that that's engaging to them,
Google, I'm looking for.
I'm looking to go somewhere, a restaurant, a chiropractor, whatever it is,
I'm looking to do something.

(24:08):
So if, if they have an offer, if they have something that helps me convert,
it's a whole, like, Like, I just wonder how that, the intent is totally different.
And that's why I wonder how that's going to, I mean, I know why that came about
because the European Union is like way ahead of the US government on cracking
down on these tech companies.
So their results are way different than ours.

(24:29):
And I think Aaron Shaw and some of those guys in the local SEO community have
really highlighted that stuff because it's great that the Facebook posts and
the Instagram posts and how we can connect our platforms and stuff.
But if we start showing those posts, we're going to probably give some stuff
that's going to be on Google probably isn't going to be super relevant.
They don't care about who's on your team. Like, I'm looking for somebody that

(24:50):
can come out today to help me.
So it's going to be interesting to see what that looks like.
But again, that's another change in the last three months, probably.
I mean, it's still changing. It hasn't rolled out for everybody yet.
Well, I mean, even the AI overviews are a different intent, right?
They want to, what did they say? Johnny was on there and he said they want to spark human curiosity.

(25:14):
And at SMX Advanced, they interviewed the product manager that made search.
And she kept using the exact same keywords that Sander used in his keynote.
It's about creating helpful content to spark human curiosity.
But that means that if you looked at the AI overview, there's so much content

(25:38):
that no one gets the answer anymore, right? Right.
The curiosity part is, do you see all the links? And the one thing I saw,
I was like, it's not curiosity.
You're just creating confusion and chaos.
You have the wrong C word, right?
I think they'll eventually get it right. They Google tends to get it right.

(26:00):
Eventually they tend to rush to market because they always want to be first
or one of the first for market share purposes.
But right now it's, it's, it's a shit show.
Yeah yeah yeah but yeah
and i think they will get it closer to right
right but it's just so interesting you know it used

(26:21):
to be hey marketers it's at the speed of
search it's at the speed of this and it's about
this and it's about that and now they're like no no we're just
going to change everything today and you get to
guess what we're going to rank for and we're going to leak a
a document and it might be right or it might not be
right or they might not give credit to the

(26:41):
original author right which talk about a
future lawsuit right like yeah i mean you think about how many people like this
could impact so many different blogs especially like those your money your life
type blogs with recipes and all this stuff like if they just give the answer
and they don't have to click the affiliate links in the app like people make
a like the affiliate marketing

(27:02):
industry is enormous. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
And you're talking about impacting billions of dollars. People aren't going
to go down without a fight.
Yeah. Even their own ad revenue dollars, right?
So they'd have to figure out how to monetize, which they already did,
parts of AI overview by getting direct partners with certain listings,
which they discussed a long time ago.

(27:23):
So they will always find a way to monetize whatever they create,
but other people will always find a way to lose out until they find a way to
win, if that makes sense. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
So Google, I know. I mean, one, and this is, and Graham, we still do all the
same things that we've always done.

(27:44):
I think, I think something that's really, and you could see what the rise of
platforms like Chirp and some of these other things.
I think what the big takeaway is from all this stuff and as a contractor who
right now it's 110 in Arizona, you're not probably paying attention to this
podcast or Facebook groups or any of that stuff.
Like you don't know what's going on except for what's in front of you because we've all been there.

(28:06):
You need to fine-tune your operation
always that should always like if you just
take care of your own stuff like just focus
on what you can control focusing on what
lsa is doing today lsa has been a mess for 12 months
like it's just yeah nobody there
is no secret sauce like i hate to tell people that there's

(28:28):
no secret sauce to lsa except for get a
ton of reviews all the time and always answer
your phone like if you can do that and you're not ranking then i don't know what
to tell you yeah yeah no i
was reading this linkedin post and it said who wants to start a podcast with
me called marketing is hard and we're just guessing like that's great i mean

(28:48):
it's really true right we are and i tell people this all the time as a marketer
we are gamblers and we're the biggest gamblers with other people's money yeah
like we know what we're doing.
Sometimes but most of the time we're a test just as everything is a test right
it could work one day and the next day it could not work and it could be an

(29:11):
area and then completely not work in that area and so you know like as much
as i'd love to be like no i'm a genius.
I'm just working as hard as I can to make the best results happen consistently.
And sometimes they won't. And I will fail forward. And as every marketer will. So give it grace.

(29:32):
Give your teams grace at this moment and focus on your operations and make sure
that the calls that do come in get booked and flow through the entire process and journey.
Actually know your real booking rate, not the one that your CSRs tell you.
Like have a third have a third party validate that because
i promise you it's probably not accurate just we've

(29:55):
we've eric and i literally went we went offline i posted
about some stuff that we we did a it was
just a study of our clients that we have on call tracking because we we use
call rail and we have transcriptions and ai summary so for us to go through
you know 40 000 calls over a couple months really it wasn't it's not that big
of a lift because you have those summaries and that technology but the it's
crazy to see first of all the percentage For every 100 phone calls,

(30:19):
there's maybe about 50%, 55% that are meets because there's a lot of junk.
And then from there, you cut it down again from, okay, of those, how many did you book?
And it's close to 50%. Some companies are a little higher. Some are a little lower.
But there's a lot of opportunity just in that. And that doesn't include the
ones that cancel because you booked them out four days.

(30:40):
That doesn't include the ones that suck on the phone. They book the appointment,
but the customer has no confidence in you whatsoever. so ever.
I was actually talking with Doug Wyatt of Synergy Learning Systems about that
because he coaches CSRs and technicians and stuff.
And I took his class in Dallas in April for CSRs.
And just listening to some of the calls, he's absolutely right.
A lot of times, they book them because they're told to book them and that's

(31:03):
their job, but they don't give any confidence.
They don't tell them what to expect when they're on site. They don't tell them there's a diagnostic.
They don't tell them who's coming out to see. They don't any of that stuff. And it just...
There's no trust. So you're not setting your technician up for success,
which your average ticket's going to be lower, your conversion rate's going to be lower.
So you look at that funnel, there's so many drop-off points that you can work on.

(31:26):
If you can just increase 2% here, 3% here, 5% here, and just keep working on
that and make that your focus of your internal meetings, the marketing isn't
going to matter as much as that is.
That's going to make such a dramatic impact on your bottom line.
Yeah. But that's also marketing's job to help with that, right?
We have to create the content to fill the entire customer journey,

(31:48):
especially if you're an internal marketer.
That's what we build the books, we build the scripts. And people are like,
why would I stick to a script?
And I'm like, it's a process and a system.
And it's not that you have to say word by word from the script,
but learn what they're saying first and adapt.
Because Because what a gift. Someone is saying, you know what?

(32:10):
We figured out how to do your job.
Like, here you go. It'll convert. You can just make money, right?
Because you're spiffed off of it. Good for you.
But instead, they're like, I have heard some just the most wildcard calls.
Like the other day, there's two that I have to point out. Because,
okay, so the customer booked the call.

(32:33):
The technician set the lead. The lead ran to a comfort advisor.
The comfort advisor went out and left six estimates and the customer called
back to the CSR and said, literally, she said, I don't know which one to choose.
It could someone, you know, help me.

(32:55):
And the CSR said, yeah, let me get the technician that went out there so that,
you know, they could help, they could help you. And I was like,
well, the technician that went out there confused her so much.
And so I'm like, you got to read the room here a little bit as a person.

(33:15):
And then the other one was my favorite. I just heard this and it went to an
answering machine, but it sounded like an answering machine from a cell phone.
So it's like someone routed it to a cell phone. And the customer said,
you know, I'm having an emergency right now and I would really hope if someone could get back to me.

(33:37):
Click. That's it. Right. You just lost because it went to a voicemail,
like in like a cell phone.
Like there was no name on the voicemail. There was no, like there was nothing.
And it was just like, you just lost.
What's your average ticket? You just lost it.
It gets even scarier when you think about the lifetime value of a customer, too.

(34:02):
Well, it takes so much, right? Working with companies like Eric's, it's not cheap.
It's not designed to be cheap. There's a lot of work that goes into these things.
So when those calls come through, even if you have someone internally,
like, I mean, Sarah, I'm assuming you're paid close to six figures,
if not more, from being marketing for service champions.
I was very similar at professional services. is it's expensive

(34:23):
to have good marketing that is consistent
and always drives leads and grows the business and keeps the ad
costs and stuff down but the the biggest
thing and i know you're a huge proponent of this is and this is where you can
start leveraging some of the technology that's out there i am not saying go
ai everything like i i love we all on this call i think about ai and what it

(34:45):
can do and but you still have to have a human element to it but if someone for example
they left a voicemail and learn or teach yourself or get with a community that can help you.
When a call comes in i mean service titan has a great zapier
connection i think it's the three point i don't remember which version
you guys are on three point something yeah but it has it

(35:06):
has one like the the call piece in there it didn't have that
back when i was in the trades it had like one point i didn't have all those um
endpoints when a call is left as a voicemail
abandoned missed those things trigger a
text message trigger something that gets back
to the customer trigger it to alert everybody in your office so
that way somebody gets back to this customer and you

(35:27):
can probably even have it where it listens to the voicemail and transcribes
it into like a summary for yourself of what's happening and give it an alert
system you can do so much stuff with this i know some of this may be over some
people's heads but it But this is the future of marketing and operations is
leveraging the AI, leveraging automation,
and enhancing your business so that way your customer service is better than the next guy.

(35:52):
Because that post I made about the booking rates and all that stuff,
part of the conversation I had with Doug White is like, well,
all the people commenting on here and all these people in the Facebook groups
that are constantly learning and going to events, they're like the top 10% of the industry.
Industry when we get on calls with distributor reps and those those contractors this is like a.

(36:13):
They're still like paper and i'm like they start
knowing about some of the crms but this is like a different world yeah
because they're not in tune with podcasts they're not in tune with all the youtube
channels and all the things they're in a truck right they're they're in a truck
or they just it's just not the world they live in and they don't want to be
in that world where you see tommy and you follow Tommy and Ish and Victor and

(36:37):
Ken and all these guys or ladies that are doing such a great job.
These are the things that's Gary Vee. That was the, I listened to,
I think you guys turned it into a podcast or he turned it into a podcast after
the Pantheon event was spent 20 hours before.
I think it was October, September, spend 20 hours between now and December 31st,

(36:59):
learning the technology, learning AI, learning.
He, he was more on AI, but automation, just learn some basic skills or hire
someone that knows how to do these things because it enhances everything you're doing.
I mean, who doesn't want time back in their business?
Right. And the goal is to be automated and efficient, right?

(37:21):
Like the more automated you become, the more efficient you become.
And that means you have time because time hits the bottom line.
And so I think that's really where
you will get left behind if you are not innovative with AI in some way.
And even if your phones are going to an AI assistant, there are keywords that
will trigger it going to the person.

(37:44):
And that person isn't losing a job. That person is now moving to a more enhanced,
like a more evolved kind of role where they are learning if the prompt is good enough in the AI.
And so we're teaching, you know, how to leverage AI, how to become better.

(38:04):
A prompt engineer and that just that just
scaled people and i think that's what you have
to also realize is that you know even so like
i run a content team and it's it's
purely ai and we build bots and
we learn prompt and we are prompt engineers but we weren't and so that is something

(38:27):
that we teach so that i can upscale is same with my designers like how can we
make more ai generated images how can we make things with ai there's some really
cool stuff out there right now,
have you i was have you guys heard of hey gen g-e-n i had ai write a rap song.

(38:50):
Are you gonna wrap it for us mine tell me about hey jen what so hey jen i actually
it was a sales call that was on with my wife britney we're talking about who
speaks on ai not necessarily Sorry for the strays, but they have a small plumbing
and HVAC company in Colorado.
And so you record videos and you have to look directly at the camera and you

(39:10):
have to do it for a certain length of time. They create an AI avatar of you.
So now all you have to do is type in what you want the video to say.
And your AI avatar is the person speaking.
So you can do it where you're wearing like a suit coat and a t-shirt and like
you can do different outfits and all that stuff. So you can choose what you want.
So like maybe you want one internal for your team. So now instead of having

(39:30):
to shoot and record a hundred videos for all your SOPs, you just type them out
or copy paste from somewhere else.
And like, it'll play, it'll start the video.
And now you put the video in train you or wherever you hold that stuff.
And then Tersh, you guys probably heard of 11, 11 labs.
Yeah. The voice. So Tersh did this because we were doing a pre-roll for Rilla, one of our partners.

(39:53):
And he sent it to me and I'm like, oh, like, oh, it sounds really good.
The only thing that, like the word Rilla, because typing it out that way,
the AI doesn't understand how to pronounce that yet.
The only thing that made me question if he'd use some sort of AI tool,
because it sounded just like, I'm like, oh, these have sounded really good. Like, great job, Dersh.
He's like, I didn't do any of those. I just typed it into 11 labs and it did it for me.

(40:16):
And it's scary because that, I don't want to talk a lot about election stuff,
but think about the election.
Yeah. Using Trump's voice, Biden's voice. And now all of a sudden it's like
you get those voicemail drops from these, like Donald Trump's calling you and it's his voice.
And it could be, yeah, it could be a really nasty message trying to hurt one of these candidates.
And we're thinking other countries are going to use this technology.

(40:39):
Like it is. Scammers, hackers.
Like I want the businesses to like, they will, they will hack your voice.
Right. From a video or whatever. And then I can just go to YouTube,
download the video and use their voice.
Yeah. And then call an employee and be like, Hey, go do something for me or,
you know, another company.

(41:00):
And yeah, it.
Can go wild, right? So definitely learn the other side of things.
And that's why we have to train our employees about what's going on in the industry
and hacking and security.
Because it's crazy. And it's really important to train your employees about

(41:22):
what the hacks are out there and the scams that are going on because it's real.
On the flip side, you could take your best performing CSR and duplicate them.
Yeah. I mean, there's so many great things about it.
It's just like, you know, even with like SEO, like right now,
like black hat is, it's a search term that's going up, right?

(41:44):
Because people don't know what's going on in the SEO world.
And so like, people will always find ways to manipulate and to find black hat
tricks and then hack and scam. a really cool one, though.
Say you're doing a conference and you want to do an introduction song. It's called Sono.

(42:07):
It's so fun. We made that Johnny. Do you want to hear Rival Digital Hustle? Yes.
I typed in a prompt. I was like, write a hip-hop song about my website,
SEO Services, and it created this.
Music.

(42:29):
Here we go.

(42:53):
I love it. That's awesome. awesome make sure
that is fantastic yeah like
that's that yeah that's i discovered that
one about a you know i think it was a week ago or so and i
was like i've created so many different songs like country
songs and rock and roll songs i'll just
be like sending my teammates stuff like hey i wrote you a song to like

(43:15):
appreciate them it's so funny
wow yeah we did
that in the marketing summit and people just kind of looked at us and
we were like yeah we just want to show you what's possible right
because i was going to use you know how when the kids have baseball games and
you can do that dj ballpark thing where you can announce the songs and things

(43:37):
and so i was like oh let's do that and johnny was like no no no we're gonna
write our own ai songs and i was like what he showed me that and i just died
so everybody had an ai song do you find when you do those and you
have contractors in the audience that's like they see it and they're like,
this is so cool, but they don't know where to start.
Yeah, most definitely. And I think like that's the, and it becomes chaotic, right?

(44:01):
Because, because you're right, they don't know where to start.
And, and there's so much that it can do for them.
So what we do is we get, we have AI throughout every presentation of like,
hey, this is how you can have this use case.
And i made like a whole book about it and i
can tell you that that book probably confused them

(44:24):
even more it got little scans and and
and the sessions the last one we
had was we had a whole session about sge and that
session got the most likes and it
was like but you should already know this right like and there were high level
marketers but they i think they were all just at a different learning curve

(44:48):
because some of us are still stuck in the way that our business and teach us
to run it, which is like, hey, let's work harder,
you know, like, oh yeah, instead of smarter.
And so like we have to just, we have to train people how to,
where to get started, if that makes sense.
Yeah. I mean, honestly, I think one of the biggest things that's going to come

(45:10):
about in companies like Rilla and there's other ones out there, but the analysis piece,
because we think about like, i've done year-end planning when we were a part
of ceo warrior and stuff like that like is.
By the end of that three-day workshop you are yeah you don't want to talk about
numbers again and you still have to like implement all the stuff but like to

(45:31):
get to the point of getting the answer.
Of what are my percentages what is this what is this what is this and now what
can i what's the actionable takeaway from that information that's the piece that,
I think AI is really going to help us get to is not just under,
not just here's the numbers, but what can I do with it? And then you can ask questions.

(45:52):
Right. And I, what, like, what is this telling me?
What advice would you give if you were a HVAC contractor, like all the different
things that you can do with that marketing analysis.
I mean, there's marketing pros and cons. So there's like literally a ton of data in there.
Being able to export that, put it into a chat, at GBT or another tool that maybe
does data analysis and understand where can I improve here? Where,

(46:16):
where was your suggestion where I can improve?
Yeah. And I think that's the best thing to build and you know,
like, but you have to even, so I've built bots like that. Right.
And what I've learned is they're like, well, what do I ask it?
And so you have to put in the prompt of like, you know, So do you want me to

(46:39):
build a marketing campaign off of this?
And then I shoot them a video and I'm like, look, you can just copy and paste
just like the audience link and put it in there and it'll produce multiple levels of a campaign.
But it's still there's just this learning curve, right?
Like, what is the curiosity? Because maybe they don't have that next level of

(47:02):
thinking of being a marketer or at that level of marketing.
So yeah i think it's just i think it's got to be more intuitive
and just you yeah i think
well i think people like they hear like custom gpts or ai
assistance and stuff and they're like oh my god that's gonna be really tough
to build is so easy yeah it like literally because for we're testing this with

(47:26):
one client we're doing emails for we created a gpt for them based on their information
they gave us based on how we started their business that how many years in business why
they start there, all this stuff, their family information,
like what their inspection forms look like, their branding guidelines from Dan
Antonelli, all this stuff.
You can literally just upload these PDFs and then put the information in there,

(47:47):
just like you would normally write an email.
And then all of a sudden you have something you can ask questions to. Have it write an email.
Ask it what would be a good email for my audience, which my audience is homeowners
in this area with a median household income of this.
Yeah, or ask it that. Like, what is my audience? Here's my zip code.

(48:08):
Here's what I know, right?
Yeah. Like, you don't have to know what to tell it to do. You can ask it,
and it will give you information.
Like, it is astonishing the answers it comes back with. Yeah.
Whoa. I'm like, that's really good. I'm going to use. Yeah.
Yeah. Our brains only can take so much.

(48:28):
Yeah. You know, I think we're, we're, we're finding out that there's,
I mean, to take the information we know and then use AI to analyze and give
us answers that quickly.
Like we can do so much more on the creative side.
I mean, there's going to be some jobs that are lost, but I do think it's overall,
if people learn to leverage it for their job,
they will always have a job because the people that don't leverage it are the

(48:51):
ones that are going to be kind of the the old school people are just like they're
just not going to have a job anymore or they're going to find some company that's
still 10 years ago or operating like it's 10 years ago,
but eventually if you want to get ahead it's it's a necessary this is like websites
all over again it's like the dot com thing back in the late 90s and early like

(49:12):
you got to have it it's just yeah Yeah.
But that brings me to a question because both of you build websites.
What about AI websites? Like they could be built in 30 seconds.
Like where do you see this? I mean, I can. They should. They could.
Yeah. Eric, that's a better question for you as a web developer.

(49:34):
I'm not a web developer. I lean on my team for that. So what is your thought on that?
I think that, yeah, I mean, it's kind of like, you know, AI for any of this
other stuff, you know, it's, it can be a really good starting point.
Especially like Elementor, like they're introducing some AI where you can prompt
it and it'll kind of help you. So it can be a really good starting point.

(49:54):
I don't think the output yet at this exact moment is not good enough to be,
you know, a finished live product.
But like Wix and Elementor, like they're starting to have some AI capabilities
that I'll be honest, can be a bit threatening to folks like us.
And even tools like 10Web.
I don't know if you guys have used that before but like on tin web you can paste a url and it will,

(50:20):
rebuild the entire website in elementor for you
and so there's yeah there's some
stuff out there where I think it could be a threat
I think at the moment none of it's really viable enough
to be the finished product but it could be a good starting point but it's you
know it's kind of similar to like these ai images where like some of the stuff
it comes out with is just so freaking bad it's like unreal how bad some of these

(50:46):
ai images are but if prompted correctly some of them are good.
I'm just waiting for Sora to come out to see what happens with the video.
I know. I know. What happened to that? No one's talking about it. Yeah.
Yeah, they probably realized. It's pretty good, though. Have you tried NVIDIA?
I've heard of NVIDIA. I didn't, because I didn't realize they had.

(51:07):
Yeah, NVIDIA, and I think VEED has one, too. That's pretty good.
Yeah. But, so, what happened to Sora? Where did that go?
I don't know. I was so excited about that. I know. That was wild when they showed the videos.
The prompts and then the videos are like, whoa.
This can make a whole movie.

(51:28):
It's that good. You can start making movies. Think of the depth of this.
Does that mean at some point actors go away? Yeah.
I think it's possible. It's possible.
It's kind of like Sona or Suna or whatever it is.
I typed in 200 A 200-word prompt, and it created an entire produced song that

(51:53):
I could use, copyrighted and everything.
Everybody can be a rapper. Everyone can be a rapper now. Anyone can be an actor,
a web developer, a CEO specialist.
Yep. The key is you can only be so many things as one person, right? Yeah.
For the intensive purposes of the people that listen to you guys,

(52:14):
focus on the analysis and the operation of your business.
I promise you just doing that and learning ways to create content for your business
and, and, and do those things like use some pro like do, do things that your
marketers can't do. Create videos for yourself. Yeah.
Shoot videos for yourself. Like this is literally something that like shows

(52:35):
the inner workings of your team and is very hard to replicate at scale as a
marketing company. Yeah.
That's, that's content that has to come from you. It has to come from your team
and that stuff has a massive impact.
Like we're seeing it with Eric, you're the one we kind of shared ideas like
before we used to use like YouTube videos and blog posts and you mentioned TikTok

(52:58):
videos are starting to help with impressions of blog posts.
There's there's ways to help your SEO. And then, of course, that doesn't even
go into the social media impact.
What you can do, what's beautiful about this is you give it prompts,
it comes up with the scripts, you download the scripts, you throw it into BigView,
you can read off your phone, you don't even have to ad lib, you just read off

(53:20):
the script, send it to an editor, have them do something, and you got a great finished product.
Yeah. And it doesn't cost you that much money. Take an hour of your week or
your month and just record 20 short videos and you got a month's worth of content in an hour.
Yeah that's the kind of stuff that i think from a
contractor level needs to be focused on because not enough people create

(53:41):
content good content like stuff that actually matters not not
just your real regular like hey we got a new five-star review everybody got
a new five-star review today so what are you doing that's different than yeah
you know that's that's just like the bare minimum to stay active yeah yeah i
think you hit the nail on the head about still like just focusing on the operation with it.

(54:02):
I think it's important for any business owner to, kind of like Gary Vee was
saying, to explore it and become familiar with it and try some things out to help.
But I've seen a good chunk of contractors or operators that have gone too far
down the rabbit hole and they're neglecting their businesses now because they

(54:23):
want to try to AI everything.
And it's kind of like the websites, like you were saying. I can tell you.
There's been at least 50 to 100 times I've talked
to contractors about a website or their
website and the conversation started with them saying well
yeah I used to build websites back in the 90s because when it first came out
and like the website thing like was a whole thing everyone was dabbling with

(54:44):
it and learning it but eventually it became so advanced that it's like okay
that's not my actual skill set I think AI is going to be kind of similar where
it's like everyone's kind of dabbling early on 20 years from now.
You're going to be hiring an AI prompting engineering agency.
I don't even know what it would be called.
And they'll be like, yeah, you know, I used to dabble around in chat GPT back in 2024, way back then.

(55:10):
Back in the day. That'll probably be like in three years. Let's be honest.
Yeah. I mean, actually. Right.
Yeah. I used to have a Google business profile.
It's true though. I mean, just focus on the things you can control.
Because you look at a call, like, so that data set we did was 40,000 calls.

(55:32):
Of course, it was like, it was a certain like 50 or 60 clients of ours.
One client probably gets, you know, depending on the size, like a couple thousand calls in a year.
If you took your booking rate for the entire year and increased it 5%,
and then you took your conversion rate in the home and increase that 5%,
and then you increase your average ticket by 5%.
Just doing that is going to make you so much more money than worried about replacing

(55:59):
the video, or the social media company, or those fees are very nominal for what you get.
Focus on, okay, maybe we're running Facebook ads.
How do we get in front of that homeowner faster?
Automation. Use GoHighLevel, Chirp, Patch, Podium, whatever the tool is,
it doesn't matter. Get to them quick.

(56:22):
If you do HomeAdvisor, you're doing Angie Thumbtack, there's APIs for all that
stuff. Get to them quick. Or find someone that can help you get to them quick.
There's a lot of freelancers. There's a lot of automation companies popping
up. Tersh and I have a course on not just teaching people how to do automation.
Learn from someone and just get a better operation. Don't take three hours to

(56:42):
get back to someone because you're never going to get that lead.
You paid for it. It's gone.
Get to them within the first 30 seconds. Your business will be a lot.
Happier. Your bottom line will be a lot happier.
And use AI to help prompt those messages. You can have them create text messages
for you. Have them create the first email.
You don't have to think of everything.
Yeah. I agree with you. Right now I would focus on your operations.

(57:05):
I would also say, hey, focus on your drive time, your windshield time.
Because what I'm seeing in a lot of the data is like, hey, we're in a repair
economy or we were, especially for HVAC, and they're everywhere.
And that hits the bottom line as well. So that's part of your operation.
So really think about like, okay, what's your most profitable zip codes and

(57:28):
stay within a five to 10 mile range and then expand.
I feel like, I feel like there, and it's, I know you guys have dispatch pro.
I know there's like Titan technology.
There's, there's a couple other companies. I can't remember.
There's like a group of like three young kids are like still in college.
They met him at HR and they have like a dispatching. like

(57:49):
i feel like ai dispatching and oh yeah creation
speaking of ways to enhance your operation there's
there's multiple ways to do it we're talking about calls and efficiency that way
but what if you saved 20 percent
drive time throughout the year how many hours how
many more calls can you get to if you save the efficiency on the drive time
or the routes and how happy are your techs when they're not stuck in traffic

(58:11):
for 45 minutes between calls every time because they're going from this end
of town to this end back to the top yeah there's just Those are the things that
I think are so important to focus on now.
Get that stuff right. Then you can start, if you want to start replacing different
aspects of things, then go nuts. Hire someone to help you with that.

(58:31):
But that's what we're, I mean, that's the same thing we're doing.
We're focused on our operation. Like, how can we make things better?
How can we constantly improve the experience of our customers?
But I outsource all of our marketing. I do very, I just do the videos and I do social.
That's it. That's the things I like to do. I outsource email,
Facebook, top of funnel, bottom of funnel, Google ads. It's all outsourced. I don't do any of it.

(58:52):
Nobody on my team does it either. And I'd rather focus on my operation and making
it better versus, oh, I'm going
to save $500 by getting rid of this vendor or $800 for this one. Yeah.
Yeah. All right. Well, we should probably wrap this up. It's been an hour. Yeah.
Okay. Yeah. Absolutely. Josh. Yeah. Josh, thank you for joining us today.

(59:16):
For the listeners out there, how can they get a hold of you,
learn more about Relentless, learn more about the podcast, all that good stuff?
Facebook's probably the best way. That's the one platform that I seem to...
I've always gravitated towards that one.
I have someone do posts for me on LinkedIn and stuff, so don't message me on
LinkedIn. I probably won't see it.

(59:36):
What? I'll deal with that.
It's okay. I literally don't mind. Daniel Putnam, the email that I sent out
to people in our listenership, she's like, wow, this email is really good. Did you write that?
I was like, what email? I would love to take credit for it, Daniel,
but I'm not going to take credit for it. I have someone that does that for us.
They ask me questions, I give them my thoughts, and then they turn it into an email.

(59:58):
But it's good. It's efficiency, right? Like, yes, I can write emails and I can write the why.
There's so many other things I can do to grow the business, like be on your
show, be on different things you can do in your community.
And I think that's where, again, Again, I keep repeating myself,
but that's where the focus should be is don't focus on the things that you can

(01:00:20):
control, the things that are going to grow your business and your market.
But Facebook is the best place. You can DM me anytime. I typically am there
a little too much, according to my wife.
Same. Okay, perfect. Awesome. Well, Josh, thanks for joining us.
I really appreciate it. Thanks. Yeah. Okay, we'll talk to you soon.
See you guys. Bye. And that wraps up another episode of The Trademark,

(01:00:42):
where we bridge the worlds of the trades and Marketing, one story at a time.
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Don't forget to join us next time for more engaging conversations and innovative ideas.
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(01:01:04):
colleagues and friends in The Trades and Marketing.
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(01:01:24):
we're with the trades for the trades.