The Home Service Expert Podcast - Dialing In On Your Customer Avatar As Your #1 Business Strategy

Episode Date: September 20, 2019

Tommy Griffith is the founder of ClickMinded, a provider of SEO training courses for marketers, agencies, and entrepreneurs. Through ClickMinded, Tommy uses his knowledge and expertise, honed by a decade-long career that includes working with top companies such as Airbnb and PayPal, to teach effective strategies on how businesses can quickly and massively grow their organic traffic and sales. In this episode, we talked about SEO, content marketing, automation...

when you overinvest in the customer avatar and really dial into who your users are, then you go do keyword research. And I mean, really deep keyword research. Really spend enough time on it where you set your content strategy for the whole year. You know exactly what people are searching for and exactly where they're searching for it.

When you do those two things and you overinvest in them, no one ever does it because it feels like you're not working on your business and it takes a lot of time. But every decision from there becomes easier, right? Because you know exactly who you're targeting and you know exactly what they're searching for.

And you don't end up making a bunch of rash decisions. I just know too many small business owners and people with small teams. And they go for the shower thought methodology. They wake up in the morning, they take a shower and they're like, I have an idea. And they just run to their laptop and do it. And it's just not a smart way to do things. 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. My name is Tommy Mello. And today I have Tommy Griffith with me. He is focused on SEO, content marketing, and automation. And he is the most qualified guy I've ever had on the podcast. Today is going to be really fun. He owns a company called ClickMinded, and he's the founder from

2017, and he's still doing that. He was the SEO manager at Airbnb. He was the SEO manager at PayPal, brand new paid search manager, and Formosa medical travel co-founder. So projected 2019 revenue of $490,000 for 10 hours work per week. So I think he's read the four-hour work week. He's taken the lead in managing SEO for two businesses and critical industries, Airbnb and PayPal. I'm sure everybody's heard of those. This is a monster. And he actually has over a decade of experience in SEO, which has made him respected in the field. So Tommy, it's a great name and I'm excited to have you on. It is a great name. That's my angle right there. We got to hold down our Tommy roots. You know what I mean?

Yeah. It's funny. I got into an Uber the other day. Has this ever happened to you? I got into an Uber the other day and the guy looks at me. I'm 33 years old. And the guy looked at me and he was like, so how long are you going to keep going by the name Tommy? And I was like, what the hell, man? Do people ever give you crap for going by Tommy? No. My dad is Tom. My real name is Thomas. And Tommy just stuck with me. There's Tommy Hilfiger. There's Tommy Boy.

There's some good Tommies out there. Exactly. There's some good Tommies out there. So we're on the same path. I like it. Yeah, man. I'll tell you. You've got quite the impressive resume here.

They told me... Gianni helps me get people on. And I've done a lot of research and tell them who I'd like to get. And then he said, Hey, look, Tommy. We've said he'd come on. And that's monster. How do you even land in that role of a PayPal or an Airbnb? Yeah. So it's been quite a ride. I think my start in internet marketing started

exactly what you said earlier with the 4-Hour Workweek. I graduated with a finance degree right when the banks were crashing at the height of 2008. I didn't know what to do. I read the 4-Hour Workweek in a hammock. And going through different product ideas and thinking through things. One of the things Tim Ferriss recommends in that book, he says he really likes informational products because they're more difficult to copy than physical products. If you create a great physical product,

it inevitably gets duplicated overseas or something like that. And so scheming through different ideas, one of the things he says is, what's a body of knowledge you have that other people might not have that might be valuable? And I had this really weird, dorky experience in college. I started a fraternity with a couple of friends of mine. It started off as a joke.

And then by the time I graduated, there was like 100 guys in it. And so I'm reading for our work week. And I used the Google AdWords Keyword Planner to look at search volume back in 2008. And it turns out 1,500 people a month were searching for how to start a fraternity. And so... Oh, wow. Yeah. And so I wrote this really dorky 60-page ebook on how to start a fraternity and started

to figure out like, okay, how do I get this to the top of Google for that term? I figured out SEO, got it to the top. I started selling the book for $10. Nobody bought it. I dropped the price to $5. Nobody bought it. And then I increased the price to $47 and 250 people ended up buying it. And so that was my introduction to internet marketing. I got really into internet marketing. Tried to start a business with a friend of mine that failed miserably. We borrowed a bunch of money from family and friends,

worked on it for a year, and it was absolutely disastrous. I had everything wrong you could possibly imagine. I came home, table to my legs, didn't know what to do. Asked mom and dad for space on the couch again. We're super miserable. And it ended up just being right place, right time. PayPal was hiring an SEO manager for emerging markets. I ended up moving out to

the San Francisco Bay Area. And that was the next phase of my career. I did two years managing SEO at PayPal, four years managing SEO at Airbnb. And it was just this weird experience. I tried to start a business with a friend of mine. I failed miserably. I was running out of money, didn't know what to do. And then one month later, I was managing SEO for one of the biggest sites in the world. So it was nuts. That's crazy, man. So what is it that you did there? I'll geek out with you for a minute. Was it that you guys just obviously focused on really good links? Is that the priority? Is it guest blogging? Or what was the day-to-day?

At PayPal or Airbnb or both? Yeah. Or just a general consensus of managing SEO. I mean, I know there's a lot of stuff that goes into it and different on-site and off-site and blogging and all that. But what was your typical day? What did it look like? Yeah. So it's really interesting, Tommy, from an enterprise SEO perspective. Enterprise SEO is extremely boring. And the vast majority of the stuff we were working on every day is actually fairly unrelated to what someone in maybe home services might be doing or someone doing local SEO or something like that. It's a lot of corporate manage-y stuff and technical optimization.

So throughout my six years of SEO at Airbnb and PayPal, we did almost no guest blogging and almost no link building. Because they're just the types of sites who we would get hundreds to thousands of unique links per day naturally, automatically. I mean, there were moments where the New York Times would write an article about us three times a week. And so the types of links coming in were there.

It was actually a lot more about managing a lot of that link equity around the site, managing crawl path optimization, and also other stuff that other engineers and executives were working on. Really, day-to-day is extremely boring. It's things like doing presentations for executives on why we shouldn't no-index all the pages. Or managing other engineers and product managers' roadmaps to make sure they weren't doing certain things wrong. I think the best, the most interesting way to convey this is that Google has an SEO team. That shows you what corporate enterprise SEO is.

It's a lot of human management, make sure we don't step on each other's feet kind of stuff. Why would Google need an SEO team? Well, it's because they have thousands of employees, thousands of products, and certain things need to link to each other and certain things need to not be no indexed. And certain product managers need to understand the implications of logged in versus logged out and page speed and things like that. So yeah, it actually was counterintuitively probably not whatever you're thinking now.

It's a lot of corporate management stuff. And the difference between PayPal and Airbnb was very different. PayPal was very boring, very slow, and a lot more like a bank with a really slow engineering process. And Airbnb was extremely fast, very design and engineering-oriented culture. And we got a lot done very quickly. So you literally decided you've had these good jobs, I'm sure, in that area. They paid well. And then you started ClickMinded, where you teach others how to do online marketing. And tell me a little bit about ClickMinded. Yeah, sure. So I mentioned that first startup attempt with a buddy of mine after university

that failed miserably. And I was really motivated to pay down that debt. I was one of these guys. I was very blessed. My parents paid for university. I graduated school with no debt, which I know is an absolute blessing these days. And I ended up putting myself into debt trying this business idea. Iorrowed money from family and friends, did everything wrong, financed it wrong, just did dumb things. And so I wanted to start another side project while working to try and pay it off way faster.

ClickMiner was probably idea number 15. I tried so many different things. It just kept failing, kept failing, kept failing. But eventually, it ended up working out. It started as an offline course. So my boss had asked me to do an SEO training course for my colleagues at PayPal one day. I did it and got a lot of good feedback on it. And I ended up turning it into a small business. I would rent a co-working space in San Francisco. And on Saturday mornings, rent it out and do an all-you-can-SEO sort of day. So 9 to 5, teaching search engine optimization, entrepreneurs and marketers would come in and

we would just geek out on their websites and figure out how to get them more traffic. I actually loved this business a lot. I really enjoyed it. But it was a really bad business. The economics weren't very good. It doesn't scale very well. And even if I could charge a fairly premium price, there was a lot of expenses to it. I was doing a revenue share with the co-working spaces and things like that. But I enjoyed it. I really liked it a lot. It ended up just being the right place, right time with this online course, online learning renaissance that we're in right now. So I've been teaching this physical in-person course.

I'm not sure if you're familiar with Udemy. Udemy is an online course marketplace. Yeah. So online course marketplace. And they were really starting to take off. And I ended up taking this offline course, I was physically teaching SEO, putting it online. And that was just

a side project at first. And it started to really grow and grow and grow and grow. And yeah, I eventually moved over to Airbnb and actually used my own product for my own team. So anyone who joined the SEO team, part of the growth team at Airbnb, the designers and engineers and data scientists that joined my team, I would take them through the course. A six-hour HD video course on how search engine optimization works. And it was just this dorky little side project of mine that ended up growing and growing. And after three years, it eclipsed my salary. And then two years ago, I just left Airbnb to go full-time on it. Since then, we've expanded to seven different courses. We have a number of instructors and cheat sheets and SOPs and checklists

for entrepreneurs and marketers now. Awesome. So how important would you say, obviously, to home service? You've got Home Advisor. You've got Anzi's List, Craigslist, where people post. Some people are starting to do Facebook. But in my opinion, I think Google is by far the most important, especially now you've got the Google Guarantee, you've got the 3-pack, and then you've got your organics. So there's a lot going on there. Tell me a little bit about these courses and what you teach and what you believe is important. Yeah, sure. The local SEO game, it's super important to be thinking about this. There's

other ones as well. I'm not sure how much you focus on maybe Thumbtack or Yelp or things like that. But all of these are options for you for sure. Most people, most of the time, should probably be everywhere. At least get basic profiles up on all these things. Make sure your Google My Business listing is fully in place and all that along with every other major marketplace where you are. But one of the other things too, I think that a lot of people that don't do this stuff every day don't think about is, I'm a huge proponent of... Even if you don't want to invest the time, money, or effort into search engine optimization, I'm a huge proponent of actually

going through the steps of doing keyword research. So for anyone who's not at all familiar with this, the basic idea is we can use a bunch of third-party tools to figure out search volume. And this is actually incredibly valuable regardless of whether or not you want to roll out an internet marketing strategy. The basic idea is you can use a tool that will tell you how many people are searching for painters, Santa Fe, New Mexico, and HVAC specialists, right? Chesapeake Bay, Virginia, and roofers, Boston, Massachusetts.

You can get the total search volumes for all these terms. And it's a really good proxy for demand. It's a really good way to size up how... Like kind of overlay demand on a map. And you can start to see, wow, there's actually a lot of demand for this particular type of service in that particular city. And what that can do is even if you decide, I don't want to invest in SEO, it can give you a really good roadmap for what next service should you start offering? Or what should you double down on? Or should you

move? Or should you open up your second or third branch in a certain city? I mean, look, major companies use this data all the time. It's fascinating. Like HTC use search volume data to pick the next color of one of the phones they offer. Google can use search data to figure out when flus are going to break out because people are typing in symptoms.

These are like proxies for human behavior. And so I think it's very advantageous for anyone listening, if they're running a home services business, they haven't thought about this, using search data, search volume data, to quantitatively figure out what your next service should be or where demand is, is a really good way to figure out the next phase of your business

and how you're going to grow. Yeah, that's pretty powerful stuff. You know, it's pretty powerful stuff. You know, it's crazy what garage door repair and then the city name. I mean, it goes for over 70 bucks a click. Really? Oh yeah. Garage doors is more competitive than HVAC. It's nuts. And I had a guy in town. This is crazy. He's still around, but i won't go into names but he uh set up a um what the heck is it called it's a router but it's a uh it would change the location he was doing click fraud on our account and uh it's really driving up our account thousand thousand dollars and it's like you know now you got got guys and I won't say I'm not guilty of taking

advantage of some of the systems out there. Like it's pretty easy to make GMBs. I mean, you know, they have multiple GMBs and everybody, it's like, if you don't do it, it's kind of hard to be, but, but you know, what we used to do is just use our technician's houses back in the day. And kind and those word GMBs. That's where they stored all their stuff. They had a work truck there. So we play a little gray, if you will. And now I just feel like what we really focus on is we've got a great tool to help us get

reviews. We use a thing called BirdEye. And there's a lot of them out there. I don't know. What tools do you use to help generate reviews from customers? Interesting. Yeah. We don't actually have a ton of very specific local SEO recommendations that we dive into. BirdEye, I have heard of and heard great things of. But in terms of soliciting reviews for local SEO, we don't have a specific recommendation yet. That's

a great idea that we should definitely pick our favorite for sure. Yeah. So you've got seven programs here, you said, or somewhere in that seven to 10. Is that right? Yep. Yep. Seven different courses. So is it just like one course is all about where to find citations instead of your competitors or how to do on-site SEO? Do you recommend WordPress only or what? Yeah. So they're all different digital marketing topics. SEO, paid ads, which is mostly Facebook

and Google, content marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, sales funnels, and then Google Analytics as well. And so our models, we try and find world-class people that do this stuff every day. So our social media course is taught by the former head of social media at Airbnb. The content marketing course is taught by the content strategist from Lyft. And that's sort of the model we work on.

Every course might not be applicable to everyone. If you know that content marketing is something you're absolutely certain you don't want to do, that might not be a good fit for you. But we dive into each one of those topics in each of those courses. Nice. So you had a full-time job. I guess it would be a Fortune 500 for sure. And you decided, I only want to work 10 hours a week. And I'll tell you, I probably work 10 times that. But I enjoy work though. That's my problem. So you're 33. You got a half a million dollar a year business, just mostly cash.

Tell me a little bit about what do you do with your free time? What caused you to want to do that? Yeah. You mentioned the revenue and the hours. I wrote a blog post recently just talking about the last two years of my life. And it's the business in terms of the operation. We have automated a ton of it. So it's down to... It basically takes 10 hours a week to run. I'm definitely working more than 10 hours a week. We have a bunch of different new projects we're thinking about and new stuff I'm working on. But that actual business, yeah, takes about 10 hours. But it's really overstating how nice it is because a couple things to think about. The

first is, I'm now on year eight of this business. And a lot of that time was working part-time. I was working full-time for someone else. But it's really nice. If you look at the numbers in isolation right now, after eight years, yeah, it looks great. But you could also argue that I am the slowest growing company of all time. And I have wasted so much time and done this so poorly. I think there's a lot to unpack there. The other thing too, and I wrote about this in the post, is after my third year in the business, so the side project had eclipsed my salary.

And I'm just pulling up the numbers now. So we'd earned $117,000 in the third year of the business. And it was the number of hours were starting to go down. And I was really happy about that. I was really excited. And then while I was writing this post, I was walking down the street and I was walking past a Panda Express, the Chinese best food chain. And in the window, it said, now hiring managers, Panda Express, $65,000 a year salary. And I was thinking like, what? And I went back and I ran the numbers. And even though I've been working on this business for three years, and even though

I thought I had succeeded, I ran the numbers and I would have earned more managing a Panda Express for three years than I would have running this business. And so I think a lot of people... If you're working for someone else, you're thinking about jumping into running your own business, your own home services businesses or something like that. I think it's very reasonable to worry whether or not the juice is worth the squeeze. It can be scary jumping into entrepreneurship. And I'm curious with you, Tommy. It sounds like you've been an entrepreneur for a long time, but there's a lot of survivorship bias in a lot of this stuff. You only hear from the winners and you don't hear about all the dead bodies

and all the stories of people burning all their cash and going back to a cubicle kind of stuff. So I think there's a little bit of a balance there. It's very understandable why some people are a little bit nervous to make the jump because a lot of people do fail. You know what I mean? Lots of people fail. Actually, I got a stat here. If you were to have 1,000 businesses start this year, 400 of them are still going to be around after year three. Less than 100 of them will get past seven figures. Only eight of them will get to eight figures and nearly all of

them have closed shop at year five. So the fact is, listen, I coach a lot of people. What I've learned is it's really difficult to get to the size. You've actually got to, the hardest part is hiring your first few employees and actually getting people to kind of turning them into leaders and teaching them, you know, here's a story is people say, what if I train somebody and they leave and they steal all my stuff? Well, the other side of that is what if I train somebody and they stay? So there is a lot of nightmares, Tommy, I got to tell you. I mean, I hear them all the time. And it's just like these people, I had a guy call the other day and he said, Tommy, I've got six landscaping crews, three people in a crew. He said, so I've got 18 employees. He goes, I work, my relationships are suffering. And he goes,

I'm not making shit because I'm really not making good money at all. And I said, so you got about 20 employees. You're working crazy hours. You've got your own business, but it's not profitable. I said, man, and I gave him some feedback. I think that the smartest thing to do for almost every role in a company is to put them on performance pay. So minimum wage plus performance pay, or like my managers make around 40,000 plus, most of them are making 250% bonuses. So 250%, they're making, you know, 140, 150 grand. But look, they earn every dime of it. And to get that kind of behavior with your people, I mean, everything from CSRs to dispatchers,

I mean, to really get those qualities out of them, you have to compensate them. And you got to do other things too. Culture is a big thing. I mean, how important was culture at Airbnb for you? Yeah, night and day. And that was one of the toughest parts too. I know a lot of people,

if you're working a job you don't like and you're listening to the show, thinking about jumping to do your own thing. A lot of people, the kind of decision tree they have, the decision matrix is... The big factor is they hate their job. Their job sucks. The problem at Airbnb was I really liked my job. It's a good problem, I guess. But yeah. And a lot of the tech companies, they're doing that. They're these... They really pride themselves

on the culture and Airbnb was no exception. It was just a cool place to be that was growing pretty wildly. The first week I joined, we were subpoenaed by the state of New York for our data. And then the last week I was there, I worked on a Super Bowl commercial and Beyonce had stayed in an Airbnb. It was just a crazy time to be there. The business doubled every year I was there, four years in a row. I joined with 100 something employees and by the time I left, it was 2000 something. And none of my friends had heard of it when I joined. Everyone had heard of it when I left. On top of that, it was just all the classic tech company stuff like breakfast, lunch,

and dinner, beanbag chairs and the MacBooks, that nerdy stuff. So the culture was huge for them. Everyone travels. They give everyone an Airbnb credit every three months and everyone has to use it and stay in Airbnbs and keep using the product and improving and stuff like that. And there's a ton of fun. But yeah, it attracts top performers and surprise, surprise, everyone's working 60 hours a week as well. And it turns out breakfast, lunch, and dinner is there so that you don't leave the office. So there's kind of a double-edged sword to it and a lot of burnout as well.

So it was great. But every company and culture is going to be a little bit different. Smaller local businesses and home service businesses, it makes absolutely no sense to have a culture like that. It'll really just depend on who you're catering to. But I'm curious with you, either with the home service expert business or lead geeks or anything like that, do you guys focus on that stuff a lot? On the culture and how to retain people and all that? Yeah. We actually, we've got over 200 people here day one and we do a lot here too.

I mean, we got employee of the month. We try to get at least one catered meal a week for the employees. And I call them my coworkers because they are my coworkers. We do fun things like gift cards every week. We do most improves. We do, we've got the management team once a month

where we go off site, whether it's bowling or top golf or somewhere to kind of bond and just talk about ideas for the future we've got i always say we build leaders within the company because we've got these checklists that people come in and they present to us so all my direct reports present to me once a week and they tell me their ideas how well they did last week or they rate their what they what they've got done, one out of 10. And if I agree with it, usually it's based on key performance indicators. But it's crazy that a culture could exist within a home service. I mean, we don't think of it like the Googles and the Facebooks and the Yelps and all these things.

But, you know, I've gone to Yelp. I spent a lot of time. My friend worked at Yelp for a long time in San Francisco. So I used to go there quite a bit and, you know, they serve beer there. It was a cool place to just kind of hang out and just, they've had video games and ping pong. And so we've got ping pong here. We've got pinball machines. We've got golden tea. We've got arcade games. You know, the guys always play NBA jam. It's this old game. And, nice. We just have fun. You know, that's the thing is people don't mind coming into work. And we're on course to do around 40 million. I'd like to get this business to a couple hundred million in garage doors. And then Lead Geeks is a whole other thing, as well as Home Service Expert and Home Service Millionaire, my book.

That stuff is just because I enjoy doing it. And I love Lead Gen because Lead Gen scales. And Lead Gen scales much faster than you could ever scale people. Which has been tough, but we've built a learning management system and really been spending a lot of time trying to grow the processes out like you said standard operating procedures checklist manuals and really making sure that people live by them that's the difference is a lot of people have manuals and they dust it off when someone comes in. But we live and breathe by our procedures and checklists. So it's fun.

But, you know, some days I just, some days it's fun to just relax and take a break. Today I took a half day. I'm here at the shop, but I was, like I said, I was getting ready for that presentation. And, you know, I come in on the weekends. But, you know, my problem, Tommy, is I enjoy work. I really do. It's a high-quality problem, right? I mean, it's interesting.

And this was what jumped me, if not at the same scale at all as A1. But I tried a number of different side projects in order to find the one that I really loved. And some of the other ones I had that started to generate revenue, I just hated working on them. There's this really prolific tech investor,

Naval Ravikant. I don't know if you know him. He's been tweeting a lot about his views on life. And one of the things he says is, what feels like work to other people should feel like play to you. And if you're doing that over the long term, you can't really lose.

If it's always going to be work for your competitors and it's going to be play for you over a long enough time horizon, you're always going to win. And it sounds like it's not a huge surprise to me if you love what you do, that your business is up to 200 employees and absolutely destroying.

So that's not a surprise to me at all. It's pretty interesting. I certainly wouldn't view that as a problem. No. Eventually, when I get married and have kids, it will be. But right now, I keep telling myself I'm still young, but that's not... Every year that goes by, it's not really... I'm still staying that way. I got a question for you. I was thinking, because I'm working on a pretty big project that I think is going to be a game changer for all the home service industry, for every industry in general. I think it's just as big as Uber.

And the question I have is, how did Airbnb or PayPal, how did they make that a household name? Was it PR? How does everybody know? So quick, Uber came to the scene. Then Lyft came to the scene. There's another one called Sideways or Side Rail or whatever in San Francisco, but that one never took off.

And I'm just curious, what do you see? And maybe home service companies could use this too as they go national. Is it a lot of marketing? Is it just straight public relations? What do you think really makes it go crazy? Yeah, it's really interesting. And this is... I mean, I basically spent six years thinking about this stuff all the time. I was on both the growth team at PayPal and Airbnb. And so I was a specialist. I just do one thing, which is SEO. But we were talking about and working on and helping with other tactics all the time.

And I was one of the earlier guys on the growth team. But Airbnb was approaching household name even before I got there. Yeah. There's very specific tactics we could talk about that are in the weeds and really nerdy or there's high-level stuff. I would say though that both companies really weren't doing a ton of mega-brand Super Bowl commercial-level marketing. Towards the end, late in the game like 2017 plus, yeah, Airbnb started to do a few of those things and sponsoring marathons and getting the blimp in the sky kind of stuff, right that mega, mega budget stuff.

But in the early days, a lot of it was just person-to-person virality, word-of-mouth virality. One very simple classic hack that everyone cites that PayPal did in the early days was the refer a friend for five bucks sort of thing. If you had sent someone money with PayPal or asked for money, in the footer of the email, it said, open up a PayPal account and get $5. And you get $5 and your friend gets $5. That kind of thing.

And that was... That's like the Dropbox thing. Yeah, exactly. Exact same thing as Dropbox. The key though was that this was like 1998. And so that really worked. Yeah. The Dropbox for a friend and get one gigabyte

or whatever it was is the cleaner, more modern version of it. It was really well done. But PayPal was one of the early ones to do this and that worked really well. For Airbnb, it was interesting because the big thing they did and they came out of a startup accelerator called Y Combinator. And Paul Graham, the guy found was that A, all of their initial users

were in New York. And then B, all the listings that had a really nice photography were performing way better. So what they ended up doing was they flew to New York. They emailed all their hosts in New York and they said, and this would have been back in 2009 or 2010. And they said, Hey, we'd like to offer you free professional photography for your listing. Do you want it? And everyone that said yes said yes. They flew to New York and they themselves, the founders, were the professional photographers.

They went into their users' houses and they took a bunch of photos and they made all the listings way better. And they just concentrated on this one city. And they started talking about a couple of things. First of all, that doesn't scale at all. But Paul Graham, the guy who started Y Combinator, he wrote this post called Do Things That Don't Scale. And the basic idea is that if you focus on a small number of users, make them super happy and really dial it in and figure it out, you end up finding a way to

make it scale. Now they have 1,000 or 2,000 professional photographers all over the world and they let all their hosts take free photography, but they needed to sort of figure it out first, right? The other piece of it too is that they just focused on that one city and it turns out like all these people were visiting New York all the time.

They stayed in an Airbnb. It was such a weird, unique experience that they loved it. And then they went back to wherever they're from and they started spreading it via word of mouth. So they picked just one location because the product was inherently viral. And so it turns out that every one user that joins Airbnb ends up eventually referring to friends within one year. And that's just like the magic formula. So it's just focusing on that one city where everyone was going

to and then they would go back to wherever they were from and spread the word like a disease, like a benign disease. And so yeah, I think that would be the two of the tech-focused pieces of feedback. Word of mouth, finding reasonable ways to get your current customers to vouch for you, and then doing things that don't scale in order to dial in your offering and make sure that your users are absolutely obsessed with whatever your product or your service is. I love that stuff. It's just thinking outside of the box. And I like what you said. They went there, they got their hands dirty. And sometimes it's just a catalyst that gets the business going.

And man, I was out there in 2010 with my old digital camera doing testimonial videos and posting them on YouTube. I still have them. The good news is they're not professional. And they're real. People say that now, they're like, don't make them professional. Just use your phone, get real ones though. And, uh, you know, it's pretty interesting because right now we're working on a project that I think is going to be pretty cool for home service businesses. And I'm not, I don't know if I'm going to make it available or not, but what we're doing is we're building an API. We're talking to the developers at BirdEye, and we're having them develop some more integrations, kind of higher qualified

into ServiceTitan, which is our CRM. And then what we're doing is we're creating a point system for our technicians. Every time they get a video testimonial, every time they get a picture, every time they put a sign, every time they get a Facebook. And it tracks Facebook, Yelp, Google, Nextdoor. It tracks every one of the review sites, BBB. And any ones they don't track, we're building it so it tracks it. So all the technicians get a point system, and it's divided into three things. And I'd love to hear your take on this because... Yeah, it sounds really interesting. Well, we're just kind of shooting from the hip here, but the points... So let's just say for...

Take an odd number. You got nine points. So you split them into three. You got three points to use here, which is cash. Each point equals $5. So you get $15. The other three points you could use for swag. So it's A1 Garage for swag.

You can buy hats, coffee, mugs. You can buy socks, underwear. I don't... It's all A1. Your whole family is going to be wearing A1 stuff. I'm actually doing a contest right now. And then the third way is you actually get to go on an outing with your group. So we've got all the guys split up into six guys in each group.

And they can go bowling. You know, if each guy's got, let's say, 25 bucks and there's six of them, they got a couple hundred bucks there to go, well, $150 to go out with that night. But it adds up to be a lot of points. But here's six of them. They got a couple hundred bucks there to go $150 to go out with that night, but it adds up to be a lot of points. But here's the cool thing. The most they can make on a job is $20. And that's by having the customer do everything. And if they do everything, I figured out if I was to max out, I'll be spending right around $90,000 a month, but I'll end up getting over 40,000 reviews and videos online a month. Wow.

I think it's a fair value, but that's just what we're working on. That's very interesting. Yeah, this is going to be the next phase of it. Yes, scaling reviews, making sure they're as authentic as possible. That's going to be the next battleground. I really, really like that move. I think it's worth it to take a bunch of different shots

at this kind of space, especially given your background and what you've been working on. Before and after, people are visual. They love to see this stuff. What I recommend is everybody listening out there, get some pictures of the before and after of the hot water heater and tag what you got to do. Put it on your business page, share it to your

local, share it to your personal Facebook page, and then tag that customer if you can find them online. And you should be able to find them because you got their email. And for a garage door, it's your curb appeal. So people love that stuff. So if it's a front door, windows, whatever it is, I mean, this is easy stuff, but it's hard because people that are listening are like, yeah, when are we going to find the time to do that? I can't even find the time to hire somebody. But it's all about processes. You said earlier, you mentioned SOPs. So I'm curious, tell me a little bit about your standard operating procedures that you do for one of your courses. Yeah. So we're so obsessed with SOPs. We actually created a product called the SOP Library. We have all these digital marketing SOPs. We're using them for ourselves. And we turned around and said,

Hey, users. We have more than 10,000 businesses and marketers and entrepreneurs that use our stuff. And we said, Hey, do you guys want this? And they said, Yes. And so now we have this library. We want this? And they said, yes. And so now we have this library. We keep them all up to date and updated. It's a bigger deal in the internet marketing world because the Facebook advertising UI changes or the Google My Business user interface changes or they start changing buttons, the top navigation disappears. And so we keep all this stuff up to date. And yeah, we have this SOP library. It's like 75 different SOPs. We add a few every month.

And we just started to use it for ourselves. Some of them are as short as three pages and some of them are 50 pages. They can be as simple as how to add a conversion event in Google Analytics all the way to how to run a guest blogging-focused link building campaign for a particular topic. And we're obsessed with them. The entire business is run on them. The basic formula we say is, if you ever have to do something twice,

write an SOP for it. So if you ever have one task that gets duplicated, it'll probably, in all likelihood, someone else will need it at some point. So just make an SOP for it. And it's cool. As an entrepreneur, as a business owner, the basic idea, like many things, is you do it first.

You set the example for the team. And so I wrote all the initial SOPs. And then I wrote... The key is I wrote an SOP on how to write SOPs. And then give that to the team and then they take it off from there. So I think that's the key to making it scale. I'm not curious how you do it with your business, but my team now writes all the SOPs for themselves. And that to me has been the key because I was a huge bottleneck before then. Yeah. Yeah. SOPs... I live on whiteboards. Oh, okay. I got a whiteboard in my kitchen. I got one in my office.

I got one in every room in this whole office, and it's a huge building. And what I do is when I spend time to create, I have this phrase, and you've probably heard of it, people do what you inspect, not what you expect. Oh, interesting. So I spend a lot of time figuring out how to keep score. I keep score of everything. And I keep score of my top five KPIs per role in the company. I mean, from everything from recruiting to I got a guy named Bruce that puts out all the fires because, you know, when we're servicing over 5,000 houses a month, someone's going to be upset. Someone was late. Someone left the carpet dirty. Something happened. So we really tend to, as much as I spend time building these analytical tools, I spend more

time figuring out, how am I going to keep track of this? How am I going to know without spending a year in Excel building pivot tables, what's going on? So everything I do now, I spend just as much time figuring out how I'm going to monitor this behavior. So for example, like stickers in the garage door, we actually work with service time to develop the code. So when they take a picture in their checklist, they can't upload it. It has to be a new picture. So before they were uploading old ones. So the guys figure out how to break things all the time. So I try to always break things myself. And if we figure out how to break it, but I got some smart guys, man, my guys figure out how to break things all the time. So I try to always break things myself. And if we figure out how to break it...

But I got some smart guys, man. My guys figure out how to break everything. That's awesome. So good to hear. That's really cool. Yeah, man. This is cool because I just think that the lifeblood of every company is marketing. I really believe that that's my passion is marketing and lead generation and

getting in front of customers. And I give my guys, so I have tracking numbers for every one of my technicians on their business cards. So when they hand them out, it still goes to the office, but they get $50 if that job gets ran. So how cool is that? I've got all these guys, I've got a hundred technicians out there handing their business cards out at gas stations, at restaurants, to friends, neighbors, family, and they make money in the process. I mean, I think it's the coolest thing to actually build your staff into little marketers, you know, and I teach these guys how to post on their Facebook wall and use that phone number. And, uh, you know, some of these guys are making three to 500 bucks a week extra.

That's great. That's amazing. That's really cool. Fun stuff. So what else? So you teach social media. Tell me a little bit about social media because I think that's one of the untapped resources that us home service guys and gals don't really take advantage of. Yeah. It's interesting. Well, actually, one of the things we recommend in the course is that you really should evaluate whether or not every channel is right for you. And if a lot of your guys aren't taking advantage of social media, I'm actually not fully convinced everyone should be on it. Some people, some types of businesses are much better with really strong searcher intent. Like someone googling HVAC specialist Detroit or whatever it is.

Whereas a lot of social media can be used for things after the fact. It can be used... It's not necessarily a great channel for some industries for sales, but it can be a really good channel for people in the bottom of the funnel, or retention, or soliciting reviews, like you just said. So even if you're in a business where social might not be good for initial sales, like you said before, your customer is almost always findable on these social networks. So soliciting positive reviews from them, getting before and after photos, getting referrals from them, these

kinds of things can be really, really helpful from a social media perspective. But I do think it's worthwhile to figure out who your customer avatar is and figure out where you want to be, right? If, you know, just because a new social network appears, it doesn't mean you need to show up on it. If you're an HVAC specialist in Detroit, just because Snapchat appears, which is, you know, 15 to 25-year-olds in Los Angeles,

it doesn't mean you have to set up an account right away. You know what I mean? Yeah, and I think that's like where you just get overloaded and you need to pick one. And I think it says in the book, Traction, as he says, there's a lot of channels out there, but focus on one. And I focus on Google, but I do like to build automation that... Are you familiar with Hootsuite? Yeah, for sure. There's a million of these different ones, but you just figure out how to work smarter, not harder.

It's important to be, I think, in certain ones, but a lot of people come to me and they say, Hey, man, I'm really working on this Facebook thing. I'm like, wait a minute. You don't even have the Google Analytics tool on your website. It doesn't load fast. It's not mobile friendly. You don't have the mega tags right. Let's focus on this first. Let's get you some reviews. Let's call your past customers up and tell them to get you

some reviews. Let's get you a YouTube channel. Just put some videos on your website to get people to interact with it. It's like, oh my gosh, man, it's tough for me when I, I just think in the home service space, for the most part, you should be focused on Google and therefore you'll end up good on Bing. And yeah, if you want, if you got somebody at your office, I was like, you know, I think girls are really good at social media. I don't know why, but they spend more time, I think, overall than men. But I'm not going to lie, I'm on there a little bit myself. But the fact is, sometimes people could geek out on there and just let them do it. If you got a five person at your office,

just pay one of them to do it and say, look, go have fun with it. It's tough, man. You mentioned Yelp. I got to tell you, my overall impression of Yelp, they just switched to 10 ads they show paid before they show anything organic. Really? Wow. They had the worst earnings ever in Q2. And so what do they do? They went from five paid ads to 10. Yikes. It's almost reminds me of service magic when they had to switch to HomeAdvisor because they got such a bad name. And Yelp's new algorithm, they literally filter. And trust me, I'm a Yelp proponent.

I made a lot of money with Yelp. And I said, they got to be a Yelper. They got to have their Facebook account attached. They've got to be around for more than a year. And they've got to be logging in regularly from their cell phone. And it will stick. But I've been having a hard time, man. What is your take on Yelp?

Yeah, I mean, and this is one of the other pieces But I've been having a hard time, man. What is your take on Yelp? Yeah. I mean, and this is one of the other pieces of search engine optimization that I think is worth thinking about. SEO, everyone thinks SEO is just Google on your desktop. And the reality is it's not true. SEO is the act of moving pages up on any site that has a search engine. So, of course, we know mobile is big, but there's so many other non-Google search engines.

You can do SEO for Yelp, for Pinterest, for Amazon, for eBay. You can do SEO for the App Store. You can do SEO for Airbnb, technically, if you're an Airbnb host. And so any modern web application that has to rank documents has this SEO problem. The engineers and product managers behind the application have to figure out what's most relevant for our users. With Yelp, it's the

same thing. In general, the way we kind of describe it is Google is, in general, the most difficult, most ranking signals, most complex sort of animal. And then every sort of one underneath that has fewer and fewer ranking signals with kind of one core sort of signal that we think. So for example, sales is a huge driver of Amazon's rankings. Pins is like the driver on Pinterest. With Yelp, it's interesting because my business originally started on Yelp as well. And over the last few years, we haven't been on Yelp. But for me, in the early days, what seemed to help a lot was at least one review from Yelp Elite. And then like you said before, a lot of those signals around actual real users. So I think everything you just mentioned before, yeah, a lot of those signals around actual real users. So I think everything you just mentioned before, connecting Facebook, making sure you're logging in from mobile,

multiple genuine reviews over some timeframe seem to be very important to sticking. But a lot of it's just going to depend on your business. One other thing too I think that's worth considering is looking at Yelp's rankings within Google. So yes, ranking high on Yelp for a particular keyword is nice. But also keep in mind the act of... We like to call it barnacle SEO. That's when a different web application is already ranking near the top of Google. Getting to the top of that application gives you an advantage.

So if you type in your primary keyword and there's a Quora thread at the top of the results, go try and be the number one upvoted post on Quora. Or if Yelp is ranking number one, go try and be the number one rated business on that Yelp page. There's another matrix to think about in terms of how to generate traffic. It's also like being a barnacle and latching on to another site's rankings. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yelp actually, this is interesting. I love this stuff because Yelp's number one thing. I have a guy in San Francisco that specializes in Yelp rankings.

And really what it is, is it's clicks, believe it or not. I mean, you can have someone with one review or no reviews, outranking a person with a thousand reviews. And the way that they do it is they have their own network of people that just click from their phone and they have like 10 devices and like the mommy blogger type thing. And then one time, this is a few years ago, but I could actually manipulate the autofill in Google. So when you typed in garage door repair Phoenix, it would say A1 garage after it, they would autofill. So then all my listings would show up, my citation sites, my thumb tag, my

Judy's book, my, you know, all the different ones. And that really wasn't really Black Hat. That was just, that was just getting searches, like the autofills, but it's not, it's not easy to manipulate now. And you're right. It's not Black's not easy to manipulate now and you're right yeah it's complex man google is google's a machine that's just uh we've got a manual penalty on lead geeks on one of our main money sites about two months ago so we spent a lot of time and money figuring out what links to disinvile. And the funny thing is, you're familiar with the PBN? Yep, yep, very familiar. PBNs pretty much are useless now.

And I'm sitting here with a thousand of these good sites that are rebuilt and they've got good trust flow and citation flow and they're all good sites. And I'm like, Dustin, my partner's working on moving them right now. But I'm like, man, it's like they catch on very, very quickly. Yeah, for sure. That's the cat and mouse game that Google is for sure. No doubt about it. And I'm not saying black hat. I'm just saying, I guess you got to kind of just... What's nice about getting BirdEye set up and what's nice about my business is the size now where the reviews come naturally, the testimonials come naturally, and it's just getting in front of some of the bad stuff.

And yeah, it's fun. So what would you recommend? I mean, if a person's only got five people in their company, where do they start? I guess that's kind of the big problem. How do they get going? Yeah. I think the big thing for us is we really recommend making sure to focus on your keyword research and your customer avatar first because all your decisions flow from this. We had this moment where I didn't care about this. And a lot of entrepreneurs, they hate doing it because when you're working on creating your customer avatars,

it feels like you're not growing your business. It feels like you're not doing work. And it sucks. And it's hard. And no one does it. And I understand why because I didn't want to do it either. But what happens is when you figure out who your customers are... And the way we did it was these really long, brutal

interviews. We'd get on the phone with customers and long interviews. Who are you? What kind of education you have? What's your salary? Are you married? Where do you live? What do you do on weekends? What are you motivated by at work? Really intimate, personal questions. And we started to find who exactly our customer avatars were. And I mean, detailed like name, age, income, hopes... Male, female, even ethnicity a lot of the time. Yeah, ethnicity, hope, wants, dreams. And it's interesting. So at ClickMiner, we focus

on entrepreneurs, in-house marketers, and consultants or agencies. And I thought that, okay, of all the users using our product, I thought that the majority of people were, for example, agency owners, I thought they were using us to increase sales. They wanted to learn more digital marketing, maybe sell more services and increase their sales. And towards the end of one of these interviews that we did, probably 40 or 50 customer interviews, towards the end of one of these interviews, this guy started to say, Yeah, you know, really the reason why we use you guys, I use you guys to train up my team.

And it's because I want to spend more time with my son. And I don't want to have a hallmark moment here. But it was really interesting because I thought we were trying to increase the guy's sales. And the reality was we were selling time. We were giving this time back. And so when you overinvest in the customer avatar and really dial into who your users are, then you go do keyword research. And I mean, really deep keyword research. Really spend enough time on it where you set your content strategy

for the whole year. You know exactly what people are searching for and exactly where they're searching for it. When you do those two things, and you overinvest in them, no one ever does it because it feels like you're not working on your business and it takes a lot of time. But every decision from there becomes easier. Because you know exactly who you're targeting and you know exactly what they're searching for. And you don't end up making a bunch of rash decisions. I just know too many small business owners and people with small teams. And they go for the shower thought methodology.

They wake up in the morning, they take a shower and they're like, I have an idea. And they just run to their laptop and do it. And it's just not a smart way to do things. Dialing in your customer avatar, dialing in the search volume, and then setting a content strategy or a digital marketing strategy based on that for the entire year is a much more efficient way to go about it. And I'd even add another layer to that that I don't think most people are thinking about is I know we track with the phone call, the job type, the search term, all the way down from the search term to the revenue. So even though something gets a lot of searches like garage door remote controls,

we're not making a good profit on that. And the funny thing was, is I'm involved in a lot of different marketing and I've got paid for performance deals. Part of my paid for performance deal with one of the companies was, I got to spend money on their PPC team. And I've already doing my own. So I gave them one city and said, give it a shot. And they gave me four times the amount of leads that I was getting before. The problem was they weren't turning into money. So a lot of times we can be fooled

as small business owners and says, look, I got you 50 phone calls. Well, guess what? Those phone calls are crap. So really analyzing it and making sure you're making profits on it. Because look, people search different things all the time that don't turn into money. So I feel like one of the things to

look at is there's really a lot of smart companies out there. So if someone's bidding a lot on a word and they're in the exact same industry you are, chances are there might be a good place to start on where you're going to try to do the SEO side. And in the beginning, if you want to make money quick, go long-tailed like Broad Shore Repair, Sun Lakes. The longer it is to rank. But that's all good stuff. And I agree with you. You've got to do your homework. And there's companies out there that you can give your whole customer list to. I use a company called Gannett and they literally told me like 72% were women of my list. I think the husbands put the woman's name sometimes too, but it showed me their average income, showed me all these analytical tools and where I was getting

the most jobs from. So it really is, sometimes you could actually hire a company for pretty affordable. They want to get some of your business, but they'll do it and say, look, they'll do that for free. They'll analyze your avatar. And then from there, at least you know what you're trying to advertise to. And it's tough though. I tell you what, garage doors or, you know, HVAC plumbing, electrical, roofing. I don't know. A lot of times people think, well, it's the guy that might make the decision. But a lot of times it's the woman because she's at home earlier or maybe leaves

for work later. Right. Right. Interesting. That's really cool. So let me ask you this, brother. If you had to give me three books right now, what would they be? Three game changers for you. Ooh, interesting. First one is I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi. Have you ever heard of this one? No. It sounds like a scam, I know,

but it's a great personal finance book. It's just about automating your finances. What's the guy's name? Yeah, Ramit Sethi. R-A-M-I-T-S-E-T-H-I. And the site is IWillTeachYouToBeRich.com. It's an amazing story. I've been reading him since college. He basically had a personal finance blog that he turned into a New York Times bestseller. And now he's got all kinds of different courses and products and things like that. But it's a really good book just

on automating personal finances. I really like this book, Sapiens by Yuval. It's actually not a business book, but it will kind of blow your mind in terms of why we're on the planet. It's really crazy. It's basically a book about the story of humans and how we are basically just monkeys that have taken over the world by storytelling.

Everything in the world is just a story. Country is a story. Money is a story. Human relationships are just a story. Everything around us is us lying to each other and telling stories to each other and our faith in each other, which I think is absolutely fascinating. Not kind of related to internet marketing at all, but absolutely fascinating. And then the third book, hmm, I really like Mark Manson's book. I don't know if you read this guy. The Subtle... I don't know if we can swear on your podcast.

Subtle, I'm not giving a fuck. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I love Mark Manson. And that's a great book as well. So if you get a minute, Tommy, if you like this book, Sapiens, read the book. Have you ever heard of Bold by Peter Diamantes? No.

Bold? No. What is it? It explains how there's been revolutions, like the Industrial Revolution. And the next one that's happening now is there's what's called linear steps of growth and we we've been a civilization that's grown linear but now we're growing we're growing so fast right now they said the next evolution is the 3d printer

it's changing the game it's it's once we get this down, everything changes. Everything. So because now we can actually print in space. We can land on a crater, take the raw materials, and grow exponentially. So an exponential step. So if I take one step, and then I take another one, and another one. If I take 15 steps, I'm 15 feet away. But if I take exponential steps, I'm in feet away. But if I take exponential steps,

I'm in New York and I live in New York. So you're building upon stuff so much faster, but I think you'd get a good kick out of it if you get a chance to read it. It's not a short book,

but it's not too crazy. Interesting. I'm looking at the reviews now. It looks pretty cool. This is definitely up my alley, for sure. I'll check this out. I knew it.

I knew it. Tommy likes it. One of the things I like to do at the end is just kind of give you an opportunity to speak to the crowd. Maybe one good takeaway, one action item or whatever you want to say to kind of close us out. Yeah, for anyone...

And this took me way too long to figure out. But for anyone that's working for someone else and thinking about starting their own business, their own home services business or something similar, there's this trope going around entrepreneurial circles now called the thousand-day principle. And the basic idea is, it takes about a thousand days when you start something new to replace your current salary if you're working for someone else. And a lot of people don't... They get really depressed when they don't see success right away, especially if you're using Instagram and reading entrepreneurship stuff all the time.

There's a ton of survivorship bias in it. And there's a ton of people that are always killing it. And everyone you see is always the richest, hottest person you've ever seen in your life. And to be honest, it's just mostly BS. 100% agree. Yeah. And so I think if you're starting something new, I have really bad news for you. It's a long road. And I wish someone would go back in time and smack me and tell me like,

Hey, man. Yeah, this is going to work, but it's going to take a lot longer than you thought. And curious with you, Tommy, I know you've been on a long journey. Curious about what your trajectory was. But for me, it was about a thousand days. And for anyone doing the math, that's about three years to replace my side project with my full-time income. And then obviously it's growing since then. But I think it's just good to set expectations. Like people's expectations are so crazy

when you open Instagram. Like the reality is it's going to be more of a slog than you think. You know what I mean? Dude, you nailed it. That was amazing. You know, I'm looking at my Christmas light business. This is the third year we're going into it.

And I'm like, we're actually going to make a really good profit this year. We've got a lot of things figured out, but I went in and I'm like, man, I know how to run a business, but this business was so much different. It was seasonal. You got to hire people. It's hourly versus commissions. There's all these different factors, different types of insurance, vehicle needs. So it's been about the thousand days and we're gonna make some really good money. So hey, this is uh, This is killer man. I appreciate you coming on and I just love when we get a Kind of just see a different perspective and just think about it Like a lot of people think you get into the home service business and you're going to be rich

and uh It's a lot of hard work and don't let anybody ever tell you anything otherwise For sure. Yeah, really appreciate it man. Thanks so much for having me on the show It's a lot of hard work. And don't let anybody ever tell you anything otherwise. For sure. Yeah, really appreciate it, man. Thanks so much for having me on the show. Thank you, my man. I appreciate it.

Hey guys, I really appreciate you tuning into the podcast. I want to let you know that my book is available right now on Amazon. It's called The Home Service Millionaire. That's homeservicemillionaire.com. Just go to the website. It'll show you exactly where and how to buy the book. I poured two years of knowledge into this book and I had 12 contributors. Everybody from the COO at Home Advisor to the CEO of Valpak and of course, Ara, the CEO of Service Titan. It tells you how to have the right mindset and become a millionaire and think like a millionaire. It goes into exactly how to turn on lead generation.

Have those phones ringing off the hook for the customers that you want to be calling where you can make money and get great reviews. It also goes into simple things like how to attract A players. Listen, if you want a great apple pie, you need to buy good apples and you need to know where to buy those apples. And it also talks about simple things like knowing how to keep the score.

You should have your financial check every week. You should know exactly what's coming in and out of your account. You should know when to cut advertising that's not working. And more than anything, you should know how to cut employees that aren't making it for you. Listen, you might have a big heart, but this book is going to show you how to make decisions built on numbers. I hope you pick up the book and I really appreciate everything. I hope you're having a great day. Tune in next week. Thank you.