The Home Service Expert Podcast - Automating Your Reputation Marketing to Build Trust in Your Brand And Get More Customers

Episode Date: October 23, 2020

Lars Kristensen is an entrepreneur, marketer, and the founder and CEO of NiceJob, a company that specializes in reputation marketing for small businesses. He also established WindowCleaning.com, a premier network of window cleaners in North America serving more than 900 locations, and Stromme, a Digital Ad Agency delivering results for Samsung, Nestle, and other major brands worldwide. In this episode, we talked about marketing strategy, reputation marketing, digital marketing, entrepreneurship...

So we mentioned at the beginning, the importance of conversion rates. Conversion rates go through the roof when you add social proof, because it's the same psychology as when you're looking at the Google My Business three pack, you're trying to validate your decision based on what other people say. We all do it. We do it with every purchasing decision. Hey, you know, husband or wife, hey, honey, what do you think of this purchase? We're trying to validate our decision based on what other people say. So when we take that social proof and you put that on your website, you can validate the visitor's decisions before they even make the decision. So your conversion rate, how many customers click on call me or, or lead request goes up and therefore you get more sales. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership to find out what's really behind their success in business.

Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello. Welcome back to the Home Service Expert. I'm Tommy Mello. This is a special guest. He's a CEO of an awesome company. He's an expert in marketing strategy, window cleaning, reputation marketing, digital marketing, and entrepreneurship based out of Vancouver, Canada. He's the Nice Job Incorporated founder and CEO. He started in 2015, and he's still doing it. Windowcleaning.com, founder and CEO from 2010 to 2018.

That is an awesome domain. Hatch founder and CEO from 2014 to 2017. And Strom, I believe, it's a co-founder and CEO from 2000 to 2015. Lars Christensen is the entrepreneur, marketer, and the founder, I'm sorry, and CEO of Nice Job, a company that specializes in reputation marketing for small businesses. He was also the founder of WindowCleaning.com, North America's premier network of window cleaners, serving more than 900 locations, and Stroma Digital Ad Agency delivering results for major brands worldwide

like Samsung, the NFL, Nestle, and Danone? Danone, yeah. You've never had Danone water? Is it Danone Danone yeah you've never had Danone water is it Danone Canadian I think it might be a Canadian thing it sounded like you said founder a whole lot in that intro yeah well it did you're the co-founder of the founder of hatch the founder of window cleaning is that yeah yeah but it was just a lot of stuff yeah hey that's cool man so tell us all about yourself you seem like a busy guy you're out of canada vancouver is a cool spot i've heard amazing things tell us all about you yeah vancouver is a great spot uh you should come visit it's uh gorgeous good spot to found a company too yeah it. It's a, it's a great tech

scene in Vancouver. A lot of cool companies starting there right now. I think you, you covered the main point, you know, went through a few different entrepreneur cycles here. My actual first starting point, I had a garbage collection company when I was like 16. So that was a good intro to the service world. I had business cards that said 10 years of dependability because I've been collecting garbage since I was six. Reputation, you know, even when you're starting out, it matters. So yeah, and then went on to other things like Strom and Nice Job Now. But what I'm most excited about chatting with you tommy about is this digital marketing and nice job and uh reputation and and how service companies can use their their

best asset to grow their business their reputation you know most people don't know this lars but i started a reputation management company in 2012 and it was called my best business reviews really I had no idea that you were in the reviews business in 12 yeah cool I was in and then um actually my developers ripped me off I wanted a good case against him in a lawsuit but the lawyer fees exceeded the winnings so but the way it worked is you um i built a gating system and back then it wasn't called gating it was just it would text out through uh the back end and it was built in twilio so we'd fire off a text and then i used best spinner to take the answers in the survey and spin a different review with the keywords in it. So it was pretty,

pretty sweet. And then from there, you could take your whole database and do text and email blast. But you know what the hardest thing is? And I'm sure you've learned about this is getting good developers. It's kind of like getting someone to build a house and making sure it's on time and it works correctly. It's not an easy thing, especially with all these API, you know, these integrations. And now you've got just all these complications. This new code is getting developed all the time. And thank God for Zapier.

Zapier is pretty cool. So why don't you tell me a little bit about, I know all about NiceJob, but why don't you introduce it to the audience here well i think i think it's really interesting that you started with reputation 2012 so back in you know 2012 reputation world was pretty different it's amazing how things have changed but but fundamentally still the same you know my first company the garbage pickup we worked in a grew up in a tiny little farm town in central British Columbia. And we went and picked up rural neighborhood garbage.

But it was all word of mouth. You do a good job and they tell it their neighbor and their neighbor tells their neighbor. And eventually people know you as somebody who's reliable, trustworthy, who's going to do what they say. And eventually the name that you build for yourself becomes more valuable than the business that you've built. And that name is what keeps propelling you forward and keeps growing your business. So word of mouth, cornerstone of most service businesses for the last 2000 years. But now word of mouth has just moved online. And I think that's the really cool part.

Word of mouth is actually more powerful than ever now. It's just we've changed the forum where it's being communicated. Instead of knocking on your neighbor's door and sitting down for coffee and saying, you know, I had Joe window cleaner over. Now you're chatting with him on Facebook. And when you say I had Joe window cleaner over, now a hundred other people see that word of mouth online and can respond to it. So reputation, I feel, has been amplified. You look at the last 10 years, it's just taken your reputation from being a small thing in so much of a silo and expose it to the entire world. So where reputation

might have been something that you could optionally keep to yourself and hide 10 years ago, as we move forward into the 2020s here, it's going to be amplified to a degree that companies that don't focus on reputation will have an extremely hard time trying to keep up. Yeah, you know, they've had Yelp out. Yelp is huge because Yelp ranks good on Google. Google's good, but I don't like Google's filter. I don't like Yelp's filter because quite honestly, I've been to their Scottsdale location. I've been to their San Francisco location. I've been inside of it. I've drank the beer out of their taps, I've been to their Scottsdale location. I've been to their San Francisco location. I've been inside of it. I've drank the beer out of their taps.

I've played ping pong. I've played games up there. I'm pretty familiar with Thumbtack. They wanted me to come speak at some point here pre-COVID. I like Nextdoor. I think Nextdoor is a pretty cool thing that came out of nowhere. And they actually got real verification. And people are interested that are verified. Angie's List's list is okay obviously it's a little bit different now that home advisor owns it it was very powerful for a while when it was a closed network talk to me a little bit about

what sites are the best and why i'm a big fan of getting 10 000 citation sites for every one of my Google My Business pages. But tell me a little bit about what you think is the next few years of reputation management. Elephant in the room. Google has to be right there. Discoverability. Reputation is only as good as how many people see it. Google has discoverability. Nick, because you search on Google and let me try a screen share here. Is this a really, this is a- I think that the Google Guarantee Program, the LSA-

Yeah, we should chat about LSA. Yeah. There we go. Okay, I just did a search, garage doors, Seattle. I just chose a random search here. And this is the discoverability portion here. Google has changed the game. And we can chat a little bit about the SEO portion of this too. So any search now on Google, your top of page, unfortunately, this one does not have LSA, but we'll do another one that does. You've got your Google Ads listings, usually three of them top of page. When you talk overall real estate on this page, we're talking around 60% plus of the

real estate right now is just your ads. You scroll down, you've got your local snack pack. And right off the bat, you're exposing social proof you're exposing your reviews your reputation as the primary deciding factor on where to click you go through this snack pack and that is your primary factor on which one you're going to click through is the reviews and the reputation so we take a look at you know an example of this particular search. Where are you going to click?

The majority is elite going to be on this one. Yep. 160 reviews, 4.9 rating. Dan's is doing great. 33, five-star, solid up-and-comer. But honestly, 160, I'm going with elite. And that's how simple the decision-making has become for the majority of consumers. It's a Google search followed by a local three-pack listing and a single click and a point of sale, which calls into question everything that follows and the

importance validity of it. But that's the discoverability factor that google's killing it on and uh super hard to compete with that for yelp angie's list thumbtack etc okay there's a lot of things here first of all let's talk about a few things here because i want to educate the audience this is what's popping up right now is uh and i'm gonna read this for those that can't read it but they're allowing set max bids for the lsa ads so they're turning it into a pay-per-click model which we knew they were going to do uh they've already done it in the lawyers and stuff like that so that's what's coming out now it's happened me. And then you've got your pay-per-click ads, which are going to be in the home service space, I believe a dying breed, because there's no guarantee of the real review. There's no guarantee of the real following of

Google's throwing this other thing out. So there's four algorithms, so they can pull one out, which I believe is pay-per-click. Now, i hope that google doesn't start charging everybody the small mom and pops that's not fair to take out the gmb ads because that would be kind of a monopolistic play and i don't think the government would allow that i just don't think it's fair because they are at that point a monopoly but i still receive most of my business through organic believe it or not i don't know how but i think what happens is as you're doing your research on a company sometimes you scroll down and you want to look at articles on their website and you search for them and it depends on how you're branded if you're straight into

lead generation if that's all you're going for then have a lot of locations than just gmbs but if you want to get a click-through rate of people to search your company then they start searching and scrolling down organically i don't know what your philosophy is on that yeah how many locations you got tommy we're in 14 states i think now there's 22 locations yeah and i think that highlights the difference right there you're killing it it on SEO because you've ran it as a branding play on a large enterprise. money and effort required to drive a quantity of organic traffic that's going to move the needle will be extremely hard, if not impossible, to do in a cost-effective way compared to LSA. You could gamble and try, but 9 out of 10 guys 12 or 24 months in are going to be far behind the ball as if they just invest that same money in lsa just because for the simple logistics for you to move up one spot somebody else has to move down one spot so you know if you're in a major center you can quickly take a look at the

competitors that have to move down move up find out who's got the most exposure and what kind of catch-up game you have to play, and then take a rough stab at how much money it's going to take to play that catch-up game. And then factor in the fact that that money is money on the table until the lead comes in. So you're not getting any return on that for a significant period of months versus LSA ads, you're getting a return tomorrow. Yeah, it's a hard play if you're a single location on the SEO. You know what I would recommend?

If I was a small location starting up, first thing I would do is find a city that might not be dead city center of Phoenix. I'd probably look at a little honey hole that no one's really attacked. Maybe an area that's more homes, not as much businesses. And I would start, I'd find the only small office that I could put a sign up. And I would put a nice sign up and be local to that community.

You got to find a niche when you're a small business. That's my philosophy. You got to work the night hours when everyone else is working the morning hours or the afternoon. Because at night, the PPC is cheaper. Everybody that's looking for somebody is not... All the biggest companies, they have a hard time getting night shifts. But when you're small, you say, guys, we're just going to specialize at night and I'm going to get you guys more leads without any traffic and you make it a good thing and you pay them a little bit more. There's so many things we're going to talk about. Let's talk a little bit more about digital marketing because I'm a big fan of traditional

marketing to compliment digital marketing. See, digital gets the, they get all the credit for the traditional marketing. Like if you're doing TV, radio billboards, Google's going to get credit most of the time and being in Facebook. Facebook, not so much because Facebook's more about an education thing. So tell me your philosophy about the analytics, the data and digital marketing. Yeah, it's a pretty broad question, but I'm actually with you. I feel like the two need to complement each other. And I lived for a little while in Central America.

And there was this whole thing going on where if one guy sold coconuts on the side of the road, 15 other guys would sell coconuts beside them on the side of the road. So, you know, it's just not an effective strategy. So digital marketing, you've got to find a way to stand out. Your suggestion was great, you know, finding a niche there where you can stand out. But then you also need to measure it. So we do it with other aspects of our business. We measure what it costs to run our trucks on the road. We measure what we cost to pay our crews, what a customer is bringing us in terms of revenue, what the ROI on that is, where we can increase efficiencies on that. And then we go and

put a Google ad up and we don't know our conversion rate. We don't know our traffic sources. We don't know our click-through rate. We don't know our ad quality score. But yeah, we feel like it's an okay investment. So when it comes to digital marketing, we've got to measure those same metrics that we would in anything else and pay attention to them. So let's use the Google ads example because it's a pretty common one. I think a lot of people

have run or are running it. Knowing your conversion rate, your true conversion rate on your website is as important as optimizing your Google Ads and at times much more important than optimizing your Google Ads. Because you could be spending $1,000 a month on Google ads with a 2% conversion rate on your website. And by increasing that conversion rate by 1%, it's equivalent to spending $500 more on Google ads that month. So you can find out the number that matters the most that you can work on optimizing. So I think the key takeaway there is, if you're going to run digital marketing, in a paid or organic sense, you have to know your numbers.

You've got to be tracking what people are doing, where they're doing it, and then try to figure out which is the number that matters the most that I need to work on to be able to increase my results. You know, that's a great point. And I hope the listeners are understanding that the copy and the view that they get when they land on your website. So the time on page, the click-through rate. But I've literally talked to SEO experts, guys that are way above my pay grade.

And by changing one word in the mega tags or whatever meta tags, the metadata, like literally changing certain things, increase the conversion rate by 30% by changing where the phone number is at, by changing it. The mobile optimization has been, you know, mobile get. And I think we've been talking about this for six or seven years now, but it's interesting to see that some people still have not gone and make the changes they need you know what's crazy is a website windowcleaning.com 900 locations i'm just curious i know we're not going to talk a ton about that but it's just pretty cool to me to just kind of hear that story i'd really just want to share it with

the audience too it's just on here i know you got a lot of experience. I mean, from 2010, that's a hell of a website. Window cleaning. No, it was part of the journey to where we are now. So I started an ad agency in Toronto. That was the Strom ad agency, which is my mother's maiden name. It means power in German, but it's a Norwegian background. So anyways, yeah, started that agency in Toronto. And we worked with all these blue chips, you know, like, you know, sports organizations did a lot with the NFL, NHL. And it was traditional marketing. It was all about invest in your ad agency. Who cares about the customers? Not who cares, but you know, secondary thought, we're going to get results if we pay the right person the right amount of money.

That's going to drive results. And I really felt like it should be based on if you invest in your customers, you can build a reputation. And you can use your reputation to drive your growth. And that's where WindowCleaning.com came from. I wanted to vet the idea in a real-world scenario. So I acquired a domain name that was very attractive from a digital marketing point of view. And we started launching franchises where you could get the entire marketing bundle and strategy and reputation marketing software

to power your company and use that to grow, you know, entirely barred off word of mouth and reputation. It worked really well. Yeah, we grew to three and a half years, we were servicing over 900 locations in the US. So it was a good validation of it. But that's where Nice Job came from. You know, this idea where we can take our customers and use them as the voice piece of our company if we invest in them. So back to that whole thing about reputation, investing in your customers, if you can turn your customers into vocal advocates, that is going to be your highest way of growing your company for the least amount of money, because every one of your customers is going to bring you one more. So that's kind of the golden ticket. and that's what nice job's all about

helping enabling companies to do just that i think some people have got a little confused because me and you might have been talking german there just about lsa i just want to go through one quick thing here's the facts guys guys. Google runs four algorithms. The top one that he showed was pay-per-click. You're paying for play to be at the top. If your quality score is higher, which means Google deems you higher, that's going to put you at a cheaper rate. So Coca-Cola could pay less than Mountain Dew.

So Mountain Dew might pay $1,000 to try to rank number one for Coca-Cola. And they could do that possibly, but the quality score matters. So that's why it's cheap to bid on our own keywords. That's why it's cheap. I could bid on other companies' keywords, which seems almost stupid to me that it's allowed. But that's how Google makes money and Bing. The next one is the LSA. And that's the Google Guarantee Program, where Google will guarantee you up to $2,000.

That job will be completed to your satisfaction. Now, the customer needs to jump through hoops to get that money back, but Google controls your account, so they'll shut you down. They've done it lots of times now, but to be part of the Google Guarantee, you need to have a background check on all your employees. You need to have the owner background check. You need advanced verification for certain businesses, but they're going to verify that you're a legitimate business. And that's what Google Guarantee means. That's why they're really trying to start that platform. But then you got the GMB, Google My Business page.

And I think that's what Lars is specialist in. And that's what, those are where the reviews come in. And it's very interesting how the Google Guarantee Reviews and the GMB, the Google My Business Reviews, which are two completely different entities, kind of collaborate the reviews. And then you've got the organic section, which is everything else. Like for example, if you go to TommyMelo.com, Tommy Melo, you'll have to scroll down. You'll see my LinkedIn profile. You'll see the podcast. You'll probably see A1 Garage Doors.

So when you guys search, I say search my company, but I don't want you guys clicking on all my ads. But hopefully- How long did that time be? So hopefully that clears some stuff up because I know some people said they're lost. We will make this shareable right when we finish. Somebody mentioned billboard ads. I'm not a big fan. I'll explain. I've got 25 billboards up. And just real quick, Lars, while somebody asks this,

I think we should, and we're going to talk plenty about reviews are where we're going to go back to, but everything else with direct response, you should make sure you're getting reviews. You should make sure you're educating your employees on how to get reviews. And software is great, but even on top of software, it's asking the customer to leave a review from the technician, not necessarily the company. Because I'll leave a review for a server, but I'm not going to leave it for the company. So a little bit there. We're going to talk about that. But I think you need to hit a threshold of key performance indicators of profitability to where your technicians are trained, your conversion rates high, your average ticket hits a certain point. Then you jump up from a little bit of digital marketing, and then you're going to start to

dabble and pay for SEO quite a bit more. You're going to start to pay for things not so direct response, more brand building. And then eventually when you hit a really good margin, your price right, your conversion rates, your average tickets there, now you can start to pay for billboards, which are going to help your click-through rate. They're going to help you get customers in your conversion rate and your average ticket go up because they're loyal. They love you. They see you in your neighborhood. They've seen your billboards. There's trust. It's called subconscious thinking. The more my buddy Ken Goodrich spent on billboards and tv

and radio specifically radio and billboards the cheaper his pay-per-click costs got because the click-through rate went through the roof and he only had a bit on his own keywords so lars i'm just trying to get back like on the different types of marketing there, I think it's really important for the listeners to see the difference between marketing spend that's to drive leads and marketing spend that's to drive brand. Because there's a major distinction there and you just hit on it with billboards, for example. You've got dollars that you can spend to get an immediate cash back on them. This dollar is going to bring a customer onto your phone and that's going to convert into a sale and you're going to have money in your pocket tomorrow or next week.

And then you've got ad dollars that are going to go into brand building. And when you spend ad dollars on brand building, that's amazing. That's the big game. But you have to have the budget to be able to do that effectively. And that's usually the later step when your business has started growing and scaling, where you can start putting

that money into brand. And then measuring the brand money becomes exponentially more difficult. It's very easy to measure the lead money. KPIs on lead money is super easy. If you're not measuring the lead money, well, that's the bench. You've got to be measuring the lead money. But the brand money, now you've got to start into getting into some more advanced metrics to try to see how is your brand money impacting every other part of your organization, retention, acquisition. But knowing what marketing efforts are for leads and what marketing efforts are for brand building. That's a great distinction. You know that Lars, I love that explanation. And that's exactly the same way is how many people are searching out your brand versus searching out generic Grozdro Repair Phoenix versus A1 Grozdro Service. And what I've learned, and if you listen to the original podcasts,

I've not changed my mind. I just started making more money and investing it. So people type A1 garage door service versus garage door repair Phoenix. Now there's no way you're ever going to compete with, I mean, maybe you could Kleenex has done it, but unless you're a monster brands like Procter and Gamble style, spending a fortune, you've got to do direct response. You've got to do this more of a lead gen side. And then the branding side, you should be doing because it's going to make all this stuff cheaper. You know what I've learned too, is I got to tell you, the people that search for me, they spend more money. I define my avatar. I market towards those avatars and you could get a lot more. Now, billboards are tough, but at least you know where the billboard

is if it's in a nicer area, the eyeballs that are getting on it. But I want to jump into the really the crux of this podcast because you know I love reviews. And in a way, I'm very good because I've asked customers to leave me reviews. And at certain times, I'll ask for them while I'm there and say, I'll tell you what I'm going to do. If you're willing to take the time to go tell me how I did online, I'm willing to do this for you. Sometimes it's blow out the grass. Sometimes it's help you set up your Christmas tree. Sometimes it's, I've got this search protector. You can't pay people for

reviews. So I want to be very clear. You cannot pay people to leave you a good review, but if they're willing to take the time to help you out, their time's worth something. And I want to hear, because reviews are the lifeblood of any company. It's going to be kind of cool. I'll share my old, my best business review stuff because I think you dig it, Lars, because it was so long ago that I made this video.

But tell me a little bit about reviews and how it helps with the Google My Business listings that we've been talking about. So on Google My Business listings that we've been talking about. So on Google My Business, around 15% of your ranking on that algorithm, Google decides who shows up in that three pack because there's three listings underneath the map there. Location obviously is giant. So if you're doing that search and there's somebody who's right next door, they're going to have a huge location bias. So they're going to have a huge uptick in that. But around 15% of that ranking is reviews, which for an algorithm with hundreds of factors, 15% on one single factor is enormous from a numerical standpoint.

So not only is it, you know, we already illustrated the click-through is a no-brainer. We know which one the customer is going to click on. We don't need to dive into that. They're going to click on the guy with the most reviews and the best rating. But visibility, that's driven as well. And it's not just how many reviews you have, it's recency, relevancy, and velocity. So if you're getting a high velocity of reviews, that's going to trump someone getting low velocity. relevant to your company based on, you know, Google does contextual analysis of the text or of the search intent, that's going to help you as well. So bottom line is you can't just

get yourself, you know, a thousand reviews and say, I've won, you know, this is where I'm at. I've won. I'll sit pretty, you know, I'm tucked in a thousand reviews. Those are going to deprecate over time. So you need to make it part of your system. And I think the biggest mistake when we were chatting, you said, what do companies need to do for reviews? The biggest mistake we've seen is leave it to chance. You never leave revenue to chance. No one says, okay, well, I'm just going to leave my revenue to chance and we'll see how we do this month. But reviews being the lifeblood of your business, you can't leave that to chance either. You need a system. I just wrote a system down. Systematize it.

You've got to make it standard rapid procedure. Systematize it. And there's nothing better, in my opinion, than technology to systematize it. One of the things I wanted to talk to you about is it's so much more valuable when you get your customers to write things like, I live in Gilbert, Arizona, and the guys came out and they did a garage door spring repair on my 15-year-old Amar garage door. That's what he meant by contextual is ask them. Some people need to be guided. You can't just say, I had a Moons Over Miami at Denny's and it was delicious. You want to have a story almost, a paragraph, have them really share the experience from when I called in and I saw the advertising, I called in, have them tell a story. The more you

could get the customer to do the better. And not to mention when you take a picture, the newer phones, they automatically geo tag. If you're in front of the garage door, the before and after, and that's just more relevancy for Google. So I would just say pictures, people love pictures. People speak volumes. People really love videos on Facebook. Videos go a long way. And I wanted to ask you a question. This is a selfish question because I've got an idea, but I don't know if it's going to work. But what would your idea be? Everybody's going virtual now. I go into a mattress store. They've got a camera. Someone greets me. They get in with a code.

They're like, go ahead, lay around there, do your own thing there's appointments given and there's almost there's still a human touch because i'm talking to somebody and you can see them on the monitor but what is your take on that as far as i know there's people that used to do multiple gmbs and they weren't real and you know that it's been around for a decade now but as far as real google my business locations just not huge ones but you've got a nice showroom. And it could be for, I doubt it would be for window cleaning, but it would be for more people that are selling products. What's your take on that? Multiple GMBs?

Multiple GMBs amongst one metro, like seven or eight. But you're not having human beings in there, but you're able to go in, the customer could go in and they could shop. And then we do a site check and it's a real company. It's a real brand. Yeah. You're going to get a huge uptick on, on Google, my business traffic because of the huge priority Google plays on, on location. The danger zone would be, is this a real location? You know, you have to make it. Yeah. Yeah.

You wouldn't want to go into the area where you're spoofing a location that's just setting yourself up for a nasty slap by Google. It's just not worth it. But in terms of a real location, the traffic increase you'd get through Google My Business would be substantial because of the value that Google plays to location-specific searches. Yeah. You think you have sending up satellite locations for A1? We've already set up design centers. We actually have staff there. But I'm going, why would I have staff there for the very little traffic? But it's great for the

Google My Business, but it's also great when a customer comes in. You should see our Scottsdale. I've got staff there, but I'm like, man, if I could automate this and have a nice camera, say, and then boom, it pops up. And there's always someone to talk to the customer and say, hey, welcome. How are you? You know, just so you know, we stepped out of the office. We're here on these days.

So we're there really sometimes but i definitely think that i think that i've got a few ideas you know being in this home service expert podcast i've got to meet people across the country and it's weird lars actually i was thinking about this earlier is it seems like some of the smartest guys like my buddy lauren and and there's a lot of Lawrence there in Canada, but there's all these guys that Danny Kerr, a lot of these guys in Canada are just, you're killing it. And they're all doing business in the United States.

It's great. It's nice to see you guys are smart guys and gals. We have long, cold winters. There's nothing else to do. I should mention too, like we've, we've talked a ton about Google My Business. That came out number one. Facebook recommendations aren't to be forgotten either. Facebook recommendations can have a really nice visibility in a different way. So what happens on Facebook, they used to have a reviews

product. It's now called recommendations by Facebook, it acts in essentially the same way as a reviews product. Instead of one to five star, it's binary, it's either I recommend you or I don't recommend you. And then you leave a comment. But when you can get your customers to leave recommendations for you via Facebook, Facebook will, based on their algorithm, distribute that recommendation to all that customer circle of friends. So we know a lot of home service businesses work in tightly knit geographies. And a lot of people's social networks on Facebook are within those tightly knit geographies. If you live in a neighborhood, chances are you're connected with all the neighbors in the neighborhood.

So if you can get the neighbor to or the person you're working for to recommend you on Facebook, there's a good chance that all his neighbors are going to get a notification that says, hey, Tommy just recommended you on Facebook without even having to go search. They're getting notifications on that. So Facebook recommendations, also a fantastic channel for, for driving reputation. You know,

what about this Lars? And you're absolutely, I believe in Facebook a lot, but how do you feel about tagging the person? Cause you could basically search them by their email that they give you into your CRM. So if I was to say, I replaced your garage door, did your Christmas lights or clean your windows or replace your chimney. And I looked you up on Facebook and I tagged you and I said, Lars, thank you so much. Really, really appreciate the chance to come clean your windows.

And I tag you in it. And what an amazing home you have something that's going to make you really want to share it. Is that something that you you'd recommend or is that just too much of a time suck? It's not that look, that's a lot more work for sure. Yeah. So, so we actually, depending on the photo, I will throw the caveat in there. If you're doing indoor work, don't put someone's inside of their house on Facebook. That's just not cool. But if it's street appeal, you know, garage door, outside of the windows, lawn, landscaping, hardscaping, awesome. Street appeal is fantastic.

That's actually one of the things we do with the Nice Job app. We have the ability to snap pictures of your job sites as soon as you're done, automatically get shared to your social media networks, and then you can tag your customers in on those posts so that you're obviously benefiting from that networking effect, getting them back onto that post. And then if you ask them to leave a review, that picture that you took of the job gets sent to the customer to make the review invite really personal. So right away, they get a picture of the garage door that you just put up, looks gorgeous,

ends up on their cell phone via SMS automatically through a nice job right away. Customer leaves a review and that picture gets attached to the review when we share it out to your social media networks. So now you don't just have a review on Facebook. You've got a review with a photo of the work and hopefully the customer tagged in, which gives you a really good exposure and engagement. So that's kind of the holy grail of what you want. Customers coming to your social media pages, they want to see social proof, not what you say about you, whatil of what you want. Customers coming to your social media pages, they want to see social proof. Not what you say about you, what your customers say about you.

So they want to see your reviews and they want to see pictures of your work. So if you can combine pictures of your work with your reviews, super powerful. Yeah, it is. The validation of pictures and videos, I think are just the most important thing. So, you know, there's a

million ways to deliver a views. You know, this space, when I was doing it, I would used to write handwritten letters to people. And I'd say, do you send me back a testimonial? I used to carry the testimonials around. And then I started doing videos. And I'd use videos way before a video was on your camera. I mean, I'm talking like low pixels, but it looked real because it was real. I'd ask a customer. It's so funny because I'm still looking at the old ones. But then this thing called Yext came out. And it seems like Yext was the interface that a lot of the people used on the back end,

just like Twilio for text messaging. And I know that Service Titan, who's my CRM, has built some review stuff. And a lot of it's built on the back of other platforms. Tell me a little bit about NiceJob, because it sounds like you guys are doing some really cool things. And it's starting to be... When I heard of review software, I mean, I literally literally was like if you look up the date of my best business reviews i mean you could look at what is that called the way back machine or whatever i think it was you know when i thought of the idea was 2012 and i had it was before i started the website but talk to me a little bit about how nice job works and how you automate everything because some people are unfamiliar that are listening i'm sure

yeah i guess first thing we talked about you know you need a system for getting your reviews you can't leave it to chance but if you're a typical business owner with crews on the road creating new systems in your workforce is sometimes quite challenging sometimes is always quite challenging sometimes, is always quite challenging. And that's one of the problems that NextJob solves. It uses technology to create a system. So for example, if you're using Service Titan like Tommy is, we'll receive events from Service Titan through the Service Titan API. So basically, we plug a connector into Service Titan. And when Tommy would finish a job, ServiceTitan would send us a job event. And that would basically tell NiceJob, hey, Tommy has finished a job for a specific client. And at that point, NiceJob would take over. So if Tommy's updating his ServiceTitan

account or his crews are in the field, as soon as they've completed that job, the customer is going to be getting a review invitation on their cell phone, likely before the crews even walked off the job site. Because we're really trying to hit it at peak excitement. That's the time when, you know, it's a bit of a science and getting reviews, you need to ask in the right way at the right time and remove the obstacles. So first thing, you know, right time. We want to get at their peak excitement right when they're at that wow moment. You know, what you did looks amazing. This is great.

I'm top of the world. Let's get them the invite on their cell phone the right way at that right time. So a nice job takes care of that in a fully automated fashion. Your crews don't have to worry about it. You don't have to worry about it. It just happens. And then we remove the obstacles for the customer to leave reviews. So we make sure that they don't hit roadblocks like not being logged in. We check where the review is going to benefit you the most. So for example, let's say you're stacking up and killing it on Google reviews. You can start distributing it and getting some Facebook ones as well

to supplement that or on other channels. Let's say they've already left your review on one channel. We make sure to send them to a different channel so that instead of them overwriting their previous review, which is what happens if the same customer reviews you on Google twice, they leave you a new one on a different channel instead when you use Nice Job.

So we take care of that whole process, that system, so that you never have to worry about it. You literally just press play. It happens. You get more reviews. And we take all of that away from you, your crews. You don't have to do anything. The only thing that you can do is snap pictures of your job sites,

which automatically then get attached to your reviews. And that's a huge bonus. When you do that, you get 25% more engagement on social media shares, you get a higher conversion rate on your review invites when you do that as well. So that's kind of step one. Step two is, we feel that reputation is something that you need to amplify. So you get your reviews and you can do this yourself too, but we automate it. So you need to take your reviews and use them to drive your sales pipelines or your marketing pipelines. So social media, we all talked about the importance of getting social proof onto social media to drive traffic from your social media site.

So we automatically take care of all your social media sharing through a nice job. You just turn it on, all your new social proof along with photos automatically end up on your social media sites. And then on your website, so we mentioned at the beginning, the importance of conversion rates. Conversion rates go through the roof when you add social proof. Because it's the same psychology as when you're looking at the Google My Business three pack, you're trying to validate your decision based on what other people say. We all do it, we do it with every purchasing decision. Hey, you know, husband or wife, hey, honey, what do you think of this purchase? We're trying to validate our decision based on what other people say.

So when we take that social proof and you put that on your website, you can validate the visitor's decisions before they even make the decision. So your conversion rate, how many customers click on call me or lead request goes up and therefore you get more sales. So we automate that as well. We get your social proof, your reviews, your photos into a feed directly to your website, delivering the right social proof to the right person at the right time. So that's kind of a nice job in a nutshell. Build your reputation, spread it. So the Google used to have this thing that they didn't really care about a long time ago. It was called gating. And what gating means,

if you'd ask a question, how do we do? Did we do great? Yes or no? No would go to somewhere. Don't leave this online. Tell us how we can do better to leave us some info. Yes would be like spread the good word. That's what's gating. google hates that do you got anything to combat that or how do you guys deal with that yeah we don't gate gating's bad i know yeah no no yeah i'm with you on that one actually just for context why gating's bad for everyone is because gating helps lousy companies win. So if you're a great company and you're doing great work, the only one who wins with gating is lousy companies. So, you know, it's bad for all the great companies. I would say how we combat that is if you don't create a system of asking for reviews, you only hear from the vocal minority,

just the laws of nature. So your primary reviewers are going to be the vocal minority, which is your negative experiences. That's going to be your primary source of reviews. So if you're struggling with getting negative reviews from the vocal minority, you need to enable the non-vocal majority, which is the people who had a great experience, but just weren't sharing it beforehand. So the solution isn't gating. The solution is asking. Ask all your customers to leave a review. And as soon as you do that, those one or two of the vocal minority are just simply going to be buried. And consumers are savvy. Even Google's algorithm is savvy. When they see 500 reviews

with two one stars and 498 five stars, they know you lie yeah you're gonna get one stars look it's inevitable you're gonna get one stars i hate to say it because yeah he's everybody actually one stars are really good because it teaches you what you can do better on most of the time sometimes you're just crazy customers you know it's funny that you said ask because i did a presentation today and uh nice my favorite three letters in the world are ask. All you got to do is ask for it. And if you get a chance, I read this book and I shared this book with my staff and I've been talking about it quite a bit because the lessons in it are, it's called go for no and go for no is just don't be afraid of a no. You start asking is a great thing. But, you know, it's a quick lesson real quick here. My buddy used to meet girls all the time and I'd be like, dude, how the heck do you do it? Then one day I watched him. I actually was like, I'm just going to watch this guy and see what he's doing. And what I noticed is he used to get rejected a lot, but he'd just move along. The difference is a lot of people are afraid to get rejection or afraid to get no.

When people say no, you've got to ask why, and then you should have a reason. If you can't afford it, I've got financing. If you don't think you need it, let me show you why. If you don't trust me, then that's a whole different matter, but at least you can isolate the objection. It's almost like using a muscle, if you ask me. It really is. You start to get this mentality and some people don't we what would you say about rewarding your employees for reviews of good ones

how do you feel about that absolutely yeah but i think this plays into the whole hiring situation right now with covid and how acquiring and retaining employees has been more difficult than ever due to some of the financial incentives to not work. Rewarding employees for their work with that feedback creates an employee that's more desirous of going out there and doing a great job again. It's the feedback loop and it's vital. So you're going to elevate morale around the company. You're going to elevate the standards of work and the quality, and you're going to make your employees feel rewarded for doing great work on a job.

And that reward can be so much better than a financial one even. Honestly, when team members get the reward in a public-facing review from the client, praising their hard work, and the company shares that back as an accolade, that makes them feel good, really good. That's motivating. And then they're going out there the next day with a bigger smile on their face and wanting to work harder so yeah huge fan of it you know i just asked the guys i said i want to hear all your goals what do you like to do what do you want to work on mind body spirit finance work places to go three things they want to learn a piece of advice here is don't always reward people with gift cards and money if If they love to go running, tell them about the shoes, get them a pair of shoes, and here's what will happen. This is from another podcast, but every time they're running, they're going to say, that A1 garage door service is pretty cool. They believe in me. Instead of the money, the money comes and goes, but those shoes will last a while. And it's amazing or a tool that

they're going to be using for the next year or something that I'll just the other day I told all my guys, buy your wife flowers on me. Give me the receipt. Buy your wife flowers. And they all said, why? I said, number one, you're going to go out tomorrow and have the best day you ever had. Number two is a happy wife is a happy life. And I just want you guys to think about that when the flowers are sitting there and a lot of them are out of the guys that did it which very few did i'm surprised is they said man they thought i did something wrong i'm like can you need to buy your wife more flowers you know i got a question for you so the

software is great automation is great there's two questions here one of them is there's certain competitors out there they've been around a long. We don't need to talk about the competition, but necessarily. But is there anything, the differentiators that really, obviously, you guys, you seem like you're a person that listens and you're trying to make things good for companies and give these guys that are good companies a shot to win the game. But are there any things that you would say that maybe it's the hands-on approach, or maybe you guys are developing cooler things that are a little bit different? Or why would someone choose to switch or maybe finally get into it when they knew about other products in the past? Yeah, great question. Number one, results. So we've really tried to figure out what the numerical results difference

is between us and others, because ultimately what's going to reward our customers most is results. And currently we're about two times more reviews on a conversion rate basis than the majority of competitors. And there's a really simple reason for that. We're able to do something that to present the competitors are not doing. And that is we match your incoming reviews to your customer records. So this might seem like a simple thing, but it's actually an enormously complex thing. You know, Tommy leaves a review for Nice Job on Google, but his Google name is HappyCowboy14.

So we get that review from HappyCowboy, but we have no idea who HappyCowboy is, or let's say no one else does. Nice Job does. So we're actually able to match that incoming review straight up with the customer record, which gives us an enormous competitive advantage because it allows us to follow up for reviews in a way that doesn't irritate your customer. So other competing software sends a review request,

but they never know when that request is fulfilled, because they can't match the incoming review up with the customer record. And the result is they have two options. One, stop sending a request or two, send more requests and irritate. Allegedly only when the customer has not yet responded and people forget, you know, honestly, you send a review request via SMS when you're leaving the job site, great, perfect timing, perfect method. But they're busy, the phone's in the pocket, they don't do it. Follow ups are required, but they have to be done in a way that preserves the customer experience.

And that's where we started. We started with solving that problem. And that solving that problem has led us to a solution that that gets more results, two times more reviews than competing platforms. And the second thing that I say is the huge differentiator is our focus on reputation marketing, not management. So there was a huge industry for a long time, reputation management. How do we control our reputation, mitigate negative reviews, and maybe understand the statistics around our reputation? Very valid. Our focus is how do we promote our reputation, take our reputation and spread it in a way that drives results so that each one of your customers brings you one more. So everything that we do is sales oriented. So we're not a reputation

management company. We're a reputation marketing company. How do we use your reputation to win you more sales? And those are the two biggest differences, more reviews, promoting your reputation more. So there's a question here that just pops up. So reviews, you're tracking it to the customer. Is it pretty easy to track that to the technician from that point, depending on your... Absolutely. So right now, if you're a beta user, you have employee leaderboard, which gives you of your team members. So yes, complete attribution.

Okay. So the technicians, and how does that look visually it's a tabular leaderboard showing a chart oh no leaderboard like a crm table except for your team members where you've got team members average rating total reviews sortable so now let me ask you this. So you've got multiple GMBs in one area. Do you have a way to control where those reviews go based on the area? That's a complicated question that most people don't have to deal with. No, I get it. I get it.

Yeah. So depending on what CRM you use, if there's any identifier in the CRM that relates a customer record to a location. Yes. As long as your CRM can relate a specific customer to a specific GMB, no problem. So what we have is we built completely different for each area. Yes. So we built different business units in my CRM. So what CRMs seem to be the biggest ones that you see?

Because look, the more I look at it, there's CRMs coming up everywhere. So let's go through just the biggest ones that you're really integrated into well. Yeah, so Housecall Pro and Jobber. They're probably our oldest two in terms of field service software management. Very similar depths of integrations with the two of them. Both support most different events that could happen in a lifecycle of a given customer. Yeah, so pretty deep integrations with the two of them. Bidding software, ResponsiBid.

Yeah, I know ResponsiBid. ServiceMonster, we have an integration with. FieldPulse, we have an integration with. Workiz, there's an integration coming out. QuickBooks integration on the payment side. Stripe integration on the payment side. If you're using customer communications through intercom we got integral integration coming out very shortly of

course we got a full zapier integration so anything that connects with zapier connects with with nice job yes and then yeah anything and then we got open API yep so Titan kind of came out with their own recently. So I don't know if they want, I don't know if they're going to cut off that or what. What's the probably. So yeah, Service Titan is a little bit of a closed world. We still do integrations with them,

but it's on a per company basis. So for example, you know, let's say A1 is going to use NiceJob, which of course you are, we can plug into ServiceTitan's API and pull all your events there. Their API right now is a little bit... I was talking to the founders last week and they're building some other things, but what's your largest obligation, at least in a corporation, is shareholder value? In my opinion, what Google's focused on is the user experience. And I think that sometimes user experience supersedes because the longer term effect,

it's a separate yourself from the middle. So I don't want to comment too much on that, but I think sometimes being the mediator, for example, Amazon Prime has the ability now to get one-time access to your garage if you've got MyQ. What does that mean? It means that I put a lot of money in Amazon, even though they're already the largest company because they bought a little company called Whole Foods. Now they're going to be able to deliver groceries in your garage, one-time use, fresh daily. Their average ticket's going to go through the roof.

Freaking ridiculous and genius what's happening right now. And it's happening. I think it's going to be survival of the fittest and the smartest here very soon. And you're going to watch the rise of super brands like you're seeing. You've got Amazon. You've got Facebook. You've got Google. And unfortunately, I will say this, out of every platform, I think Google does it

the best because Google still leaves it up to the brands. They don't try to control the marketplace and try to control the products. You see, I feel like Amazon's trying to be a marketplace. You buy the product and you get a person to fulfill it. What people don't understand in the home service space, the product is the markup a lot of the times. I could buy soap and water anywhere. So I got to mark up the labor quite a bit and differentiate myself. And these other businesses are trying to commoditize it.

And it's worrisome for some people. I'm going to ask you, anyway, I got to tell you, first of all, I love your product. I think it's awesome. I love what you're doing. One of the question was, what CRM would you recommend for a one-man show just starting out? You know, I know it depends on the, I'd say it really depends on the niche because that's a loaded question, but there's a lot of them to look at out there. There's no wrong answer. It really is on certain ways you get your customers. What I'd really look at is to make sure you can track your marketing well,

there's good API built so you could integrate into other software such as QuickBooks, and that they've got a tried and true record. And I'd probably talk to some of their staff, more testimonials. But i wanted to ask you i always ask this question you had three books to recommend maybe something that influenced you in the past uh there's three books that pop out to you and sorry for going over no no that's not a problem uh just just tack on to the one crm you'd recommend. Tommy mentioned integrations. If you're a one-man show and you're starting off and you're choosing a CRM,

yeah, I would highly recommend don't choose the closed-walled castle. Choose something that can connect to other companies and promotes those integrations. And the reason being is because you're going to grow and you're going to need best of breed software as you grow. And you need to be able to connect to those other software platforms. And if you're in a closed castle, then, you know, it's going to result in frustrations.

My feeling, at least on the matter. Yeah, three books. Anocracy by Seth Godin, I think is a great one. It's marketing done right, I think, realigns us from what marketing is normally viewed as and what marketing should be. It should be that we're out there to provide a positive change

in the understanding or opinions of somebody else. And yeah, by reevaluating how we're marketing, so that we're marketing to provide a contribution, rather than to take money, actually results in us making more money. So yeah, reevaluating how we're doing marketing, Phenocracy, Seth Godin, great book. This is actually one I just read a couple weeks ago. The Henry Ford story, My Life and My Work. I don't know if you've read that fascinating book about Henry Ford. Yeah, really interesting. You know, this was written back in, I think it was written in the 20s. But yeah, I found it super interesting. And then, you know, probably for anyone who's

starting, if you haven't read the E-Myth. Ah, they knew it. E-Myth Revisited. Yeah, you got to have that on the list. You know, Henry Ford, interestingly enough, is he created competition. He walked out on the floor of the Model T assembly line, which is genius. And that's what I'm trying to create is a rifle shot of each job that they're not relying on wearing a bunch of hats. He wrote a seven one day for the morning shift and the day shift come on and he had they asked what it was and he wrote an eight and the night shift came on and he wrote a nine then the next morning the guys did 10 and by creating competition he figured out a way to really enhance the output of his team.

And it's amazing that the want to be number one, aspire to be number one in the human being aspect. So great books. If someone wants to reach out to you personally, then we'll talk about Nice Job. What's the best way to do that? Yeah, Lars at NiceJob.co. Really easy. Yeah, and if Nice Job yeah lars at nice job.co really easy yeah and if nice job it's nice job.co if you want to reach out to nice job actually we had a chat with frank bork and the landscaping industry a couple weeks back and and we came up with a little idea just kind of

impromptu on the chat but it went really well so i'll offer it here too uh if anyone doesn't have 20 google reviews yet, you know, you're starting out, you're trying to get the ball rolling and you just, you don't even have a small critical mass yet. Give us a shout and we'll take care of you for free until you have that just on us. We want to help small businesses

that are starting out. So, you know, if you're 20 Google reviews or under, just give us a shout and we'll make sure you're taken care of until you have at least that number. If you want to stick with us and say, great. If not, no worries. All good. We just want to help out as you start growing there.

That's a great offer. You know, if you guys get a chance, another great book is called The Consistency Chain. And it talks about being consistent. And I'm in the middle with a trainer of working out. And the fact is, I'm not going to see extreme results for at least 90 days. And they're not the middle with a trainer of working out. And the fact is, I'm not going to see extreme results for at least 90 days. And they're not going to be that extreme. It'll be to where you can start noticing yourself. But you don't start seeing algorithmic change until you leave something working for a long time. So hopefully, you get used to it, you love it,

and you get a lot of results. The last thing I do, Lars, is I'm going to leave the floor to you. Maybe we didn't discuss something. Maybe there's something mind-blowing that we should have talked about. Maybe you just have something to get in action today and get started with. But I'll leave you here to close this out, take as much time as you'd like. Yeah. So I think the two that I would say to take away from this, one, invest in your customer. So we spend all this time and effort thinking about how we can invest in our marketing and

our advertising, which is great. That brings leads to the table. But if we invest in our customer, that can be the number one growth driver for a service business. Because when we create exceptional experiences for them, they tell others. And if every one of your customers can just tell one more person about your company, well, you've created growth that you're not going to come even close to creating through LSA or Google Ads. So invest in your customer. Sit down with your team. Think about what kind of experiences am I creating for my customer right now?

And how do I add an extra star to that? You know, if I feel like I'm creating a five-star experience, how do I make a six-star experience? How do I make a seven-star experience? What does that look like for my customer? And then plan how you can create that. And then the second one is don't leave reviews to chance. You know, if you use a software like Nice Job, great. If you plan on creating a system in your company, great. But don't leave it to chance. If you leave it to chance, you're going to hear from the vocal

minority, which is going to be our negative reviews. And nobody will know about the amazing work that you do. So create a system, implement the system, run the system. And we really hope that companies that do great work, invest in their customers win. So yeah, I think that's my closing comments, Tommy. Thanks for having me. Yeah, thank you. If you guys get a chance, look at the Net Promoter Score. I think you'll learn a lot more about how huge corporations invest in what customers think about them. It's a great thing to look at and research yourself. Lars. Thanks, Tony. Thank you guys for watching guys. Appreciate you. Hey guys, I just wanted to thank you real quick for listening to the podcast

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