The Home Service Expert Podcast - Getting Consistent Traffic by Making SEO Work for You

Episode Date: May 10, 2019

Ryan Cote is the director of digital service and partner at Ballantine, where he specializes in finding that special balance between print and digital marketing so that businesses can maintain a strong presence on both fronts. He has nearly two decades’ worth of industry experience, and has worked with the New Jersey American Marketing Association, Clark Mccain, Conrad Direct. In this episode, we talked about SEO, Data, Digital Marketing...

Before we get the podcast going, I wanted to let you guys know that the Home Service Millionaire book is available now at homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash success. And it's for free. All you got to do is pay for shipping. It's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash success. And it's a hardcover copy. And I put a lot of extra things in this book. So please be sure to order your book. And I also made it available on audio. Go to homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash audio and download your own audio book. Thanks. This is the Home Service Expert podcast with Tommy Mello. Let's talk about bringing in some more money for your home service business.

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 Ryan Cote. It's spelled C-O-T-E, but it's Cote. And he does print marketing, digital marketing, brand awareness. He's Director of Digital Service and Partner of the Ballantyne Corporation. He started there in October 2003 till today.

He volunteers at the New Jersey American Marketing Association. He's an assistant account executive at Clark McCain and the assistant list manager at Conrad Direct. Nearly two decades worth of industry experience, he started and continues to handle all the digital marketing division of Ballantyne and specialize in finding that special balance between print and digital marketing,

so business can maintain a strong presence on both fronts. They started doing direct print back in the 60s, so they know a lot about both ends of it. I think you need to marry both of them to be successful. Ryan, how's your day going? Hey, Tommy. Going really well. Happy to be here. So tell the audience a little bit about... I know you work with a lot of home service companies. You also work with huge companies like BMW and such. Tell them a little bit about how much you guys do versus print versus online and what you specialize in.

Yeah, sure. So the company was started in the mid-60s by my great-uncle. So we're family-owned. I'm third generation. And like you said, we do both direct mail and digital marketing. The company is split, though, because on the direct mail side, for example, we work with, you mentioned, BMW, Royal Caribbean, Celebrity Cruises, and just very large companies, companies that need help. They do a lot of direct mail. On the digital side, however, it's mostly small businesses. So home service businesses, contractors, builders,

manufacturers, service businesses, like insurance and wealth management. And essentially, they're using us to get leads. So we become an extension of their team, essentially become their marketing department. And we help them with all things digital to help them get leads. So that could be SEO, PPC, social media, email content. It varies from client to client.

But we have the whole team here of in-house specialists. And we basically just build their dream team and get to work for them. That's great. I love the digital side of things. And I think that's where we're going. And a lot of people in the home service niche, I have a guy that I'm really good friends with that said, he turned on pay-per-click and he could not make a profit.

He said, when I had it on, and I hope he's not listening because now he's doing billboards, wrapping buses. He's on every bus stop. And I feel like you got to match, if you're going to spend that much money on your brand, you need to be at the top of Google doing pay-per-click. And he decided to do pay-per-click before he did branding.

And I'm not going to insult him and say he did it wrong, but in my opinion, that was a mistake. But you're managing all this digital marketing as well as super involved with the mailing side of it. Tell me a little bit about how you got started and why you decided to come up with the digital side of things. Me personally a little bit about how you got started and why you decided to come up with the digital side of things. Me personally, I went to school for marketing. And then out of college, I didn't know I wanted to get into the family business.

You mentioned Conrad Direct and Clark McCain. Those are two marketing companies I worked for outside of college. And then, I don't know, it was like two years, I started thinking about the family business. My brother had gone in, so maybe that prompted me. It was like 15 years ago, so it's hard for me to remember my exact thought process. But I spoke to my dad and my uncle. And yeah, I basically became the first marketing person they ever had. Most of their... They never really did marketing before. It was just straight outbound sales.

And did the marketing position for about 10 years. And then about five years ago, my background is in digital. So even from college on, I always had my own websites, sold things on eBay, taught myself SEO, did some pay-per-click, just dabbled in all things digital. And I said to him, let's add a digital division to Ballantyne. Because a lot of companies are using it more and more now, and it's just something else we can offer our clients.

And we started off just doing SEO because that's what I knew best. And it was literally just me for the first year or so. And then fast forward today, we have a whole team. Now we offer all things digital. But that's the transition from marketing director to just offering SEO to then building out a team and just all the learnings to happen along the way. I love that. I'm probably the largest advocate in the world

for search engine optimization. And the crazy thing we get confused at now is there's a Google Guarantee Program, there's your local, which is the three-pack, there's the regular organic, and there's a pay-per-click. So can you talk to me a little bit about your experience with each of those?

Because Google, let's face it, it's the monster of all monsters. It's, in my opinion, for home service, it's bigger than Facebook or Amazon at this point. Yeah. I mean, SEO is always changing. So you probably remember back to 2012 and early 2011, they started doing the Panda and the Penguin. And that's been a whirlwind of different algorithm updates. So

SEO has evolved. It's how crappy they were. You don't have to worry about anchors. Any of that kind of stuff is more the merrier. It was honestly quite easy. And fast forward to today, you have to be much more sophisticated, more comprehensive.

So meaning, to get more specific than that, yes, links are still important, but quality over quantity. You're on page, which means making sure that the keywords are in the right spots in your website. So title tag, meta description, body tag, image tags, all that.

You need to be good. You just have to really... No broken links, no duplicate content. You just have to look at what Box is now with SEO. And it's just much more competitive now, in addition to all of Google's updates. So you really just have to be more comprehensive. And then, yeah, you mentioned local.

I mean, making sure that you've got strong Google reviews, your Google Maps listing is fully filled out, you're using the post feature that Google currently offers, making sure that your citations, your name, address, phone number, Maps listing is fully filled out. You're using the post feature that Google currently offers. Make sure that your citations, your name, address, phone number, they're consistent. You're constantly building new citations,

maybe using a tool like Yext if you want to. So it's just become much more sophisticated. And really, so has pay-per-click. I mean, people assume that because pay-per-click is... The traffic is immediate, that the results are immediate. But even then, there's a lot of just fine-tuning you need to do with the way you set up your campaigns, the keywords that you're bidding on,

the negative keywords that you're building out. It just takes time to really fine-tune the campaign to where it's predictably bringing in leads. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I've done everything

from my own pay-per-click management to working with companies like Yodel or Reach Local that have algorithms built out to people that exact versus broad term. And right now, I've got an in-house guy that literally came in. He spent over $70 million in the garage door industry alone. See, what makes a really good person in marketing, in my opinion, is they pay attention to the booking rate. So he said, Tommy, I'm not going to give you great results because the average call is taking 40 seconds to get to. So I can tell you before I turn up the PPC campaign,

let's fix the problems. What's your conversion rate? What's your click-through rate? What search streams are converting into a phone call? What's the average ticket on those phone calls? So to have that... I mean, Ryan, I know there might be some of your clients that have that data, but to have a CRM, so he knows every single phone call, the search term that dialed that phone call and the revenue and profit brought in

from that search term per city. So, I mean, the data that we have is much more powerful than most other companies have. You know what I mean? Yeah data that we have is much more powerful than most other companies have. You know what I mean? Yeah, that sounds pretty sophisticated. I mean, we really do try to lean on our clients to give as much data as possible about the lead quality. We track all clients' phone calls, of course. We record them when we're allowed to.

And we'll even listen to the phone calls. We've even made suggestions to clients. We have some that just don't answer the phone the way that they should. So we'll try to give them feedback about how to answer the phone. And without tracking and without the data, it's hard to make improvements. You can't improve

if you don't track. Yeah, I see. You can't win the game if you don't know the score. You can't win the game. And this is what I live and breathe. Let me ask you a question that I want to give as many gold nuggets If you don't know the score, you can't win the game. And this is what I live and breathe. I mean, let me ask you a question that I want to give as many gold nuggets to our listeners as possible. So for me and you, some of this might be just everyday talk, but some people listening, they might want to really understand the core of it.

So I use different things. I can tell you I use a lot of different data companies. Very rarely now do I use InfoUSA. I think that that's probably not the best one for guys like us that are buying stuff all the time. But I use Adams Data. I use ListSource. I do some skip trace. I got TLO to find certain types of data. If I'm a home service company, and let's say, for example, I sell garage or storage solutions. Well, 90% of people buy storage solutions within the first year they move in a home. What would be your recommendation if I wanted to hit every new homeowner via mail, and then maybe

do a drip campaign that I email them, and then I Facebook pixel them to where I'm hitting them at three. I layer it. You know what layering is? Yep. Exactly. What would you recommend? Because I think I just want, this is so powerful for someone that's never heard this before and how this works. Yeah. So I'm going to, I'm going to actually throw a curveball here. So we actually, we actually do use info USA.

It's mainly because our rep there, we've known for 20 years and we get really good service from him. And a lot of times our clients have their own data. So if they have their own in-house list, we work with that. But if they're looking to rent outside names, we'll use Info for postal, for email. And obviously when we get that email address,

you can upload it to Facebook and you're going to run ads to the matches. So essentially, what we're trying to do is if a client's doing a postcard campaign, the person's getting the postcard in their mailbox. And then we're uploading that email data to Facebook, finding the matches, sometimes LinkedIn if it makes sense, finding the matches, running ads to them in their social feed. And then we're sending out emails to them. So they're an inbox as well. So it's sort of at that multi-touchpoint process, wherever they turn.

And keep in mind that we're driving them to the website, which then we're remarketing them on Google's network and in social media as well. So when they leave the site, they're seeing our banner ads. So it's really just completely saturating that lead list with emails, postcards, banner ads, and so forth. Yeah, I love that. And that's layering and that's hitting them from eight different ways.

There's a thing called gmass.co and it allows you to send mass emails to a list that didn't subscribe. And it's a tool that I found very powerful. So gmass.co for the listeners out there. Are you familiar with that? No, I'm actually writing that down as you speak. Gmask.co. Never heard of that before. Yeah, it's pretty cool.

So you can send out 250 emails at a time to people that haven't subscribed. And it's a very, very powerful tool. There's a subscription. There's a free version. It goes all the way up to like 120 bucks a year or something, but it's affordable. So I just feel like SEO is a long-term where print is more of a direct response.

And I'm a big fan of direct response, but I love SEO. Where do you find the balance for a home service company? And what kind of questions do you get? And what are the misconceptions out there for a roofing or HVAC company that you got to convince them otherwise of? Yeah. So we're starting to get a lot of our digital clients asking us about print. Traditionally, the small business market wasn't something that we service for print,

but we're starting to get more and more requests for print. And some of our home service clients, what they're finding success that we're helping them with is basically project spotlight mailing. So for example, a builder client in the area, and they're buying a list of homes in the area and showcasing the home that they just built or the kitchen they just redid or the siding that they just installed. And so basically featuring the project with postcards

to the local market. That's an effective way. Of course, it goes back to what we said before about taking a list and then doing things with it digitally, uploading it, emailing it, etc. That's a really effective way to feature a project that a home service client just completed. Yeah. I feel like a lot of us, and if you know the home service companies,

I'd say 99% of us don't do anything with our list once they're a customer. And for garage doors, we fix the door once, we think we're done with them. But there's so much more we could do with that list. I have 203,000 customers in my database. And I bumped into a buddy of mine. His name is Austin. He has a pest control company. He said, Tommy, at the gas station, this was months ago, but he said, I started re-advertising to my list. He goes, dude, we got more business than any other campaign ever has.

We literally have got hundreds of customers back per month. And I think he only had 7,000 in his database. So by adding several hundred customers, I mean, it's mind-boggling. Have you noticed that same trend that a lot of people don't do anything with their existing customer list? Yeah, man. And that's why we sort of force them to at least do an email newsletter.

So every channel has its usage, I suppose you could say. And email, for us, it's all about nurturing. I mean, of course, email could be acquisition as well, acquiring customers. But even a simple email

or sharing blog content that you wrote to build up your authority and provide value to the list, showcasing projects that you did, or a new garage door you installed with beautiful photos, video. Obviously, that's huge. Taking video of the work that you've done, sharing that in your email. Email is so key for nurturing. So we, when at all possible, we really encourage our clients to have us do an email newsletter as well because it's that nurturing. It's so important, upselling, and just keeping your brand in front of the customer.

What do you say to most business owners that say, I can barely get my guys to show up to work. Now you're telling me to have them do videos and do all this stuff. I mean, what do you say to somebody like that? Because I hear this stuff all the time, and I don't have the right answer to them except for, you know, get better management and hire better employees to do more training.

Yeah. There's like, I guess there's only so much you can do. I mean, obviously if you're high and I'm not trying to pitch us right now, I'm just saying if you're hiring a professional, if you're paying for it to get done, it's going to get done.

As far as you could say, you're paying their salary, but they're not salaried to be the marketing person. So it's a little bit different, but I think, yeah, I think if you can't get them to do it, You could say you're paying their salary, but they're not salaried to be the marketing person. So it's a little bit different. But I think if you can't get them to do it, you either have to hire a professional or do it yourself or hire someone in-house that's a part-time marketing person that one of the responsibilities is going to the job sites,

taking video. You might be able to find someone that's a freelancer that's looking to build up their portfolio that will do it for free for a few times. Different ways to make it work. Yeah, that's interesting. I used to... You'll love this one.

I'm sure you're familiar with it. But what I did is I used to offer a scholarship for $1,000 a year. And I'd get a ton of EDU links. At the same time, I'd get a ton of videos. And I'd pick the best video and i could if you're going to submit it i get to use it you know what happened with that is they they started disavowing those and not allowing that those edu things that way yeah yeah it's like guest posting in forbes you know and like huffington post google's caught on that the

new people are paying are selling those links where you can buy $1,000 to get a guest post on Forbes. Google's not dumb. They can sniff out those things after a while. Look what they did with the whole private blog network industry. Once Penguin started coming out, and then they started off their private blog networks, they just took down whole sites, networks of sites

that were being used for link building. So, you know, Google. Well, with PBNs, I think there's a couple of things you have to do if you're going to run it. You should have different hosting accounts. You should buy sites with a high trust flow. You should make sure there's really good content

by using archive files. And also you should generate real traffic to it because what's happening now, what I truly believe with SEO, this might bore people and I'm sorry, I'm going to go down this rabbit hole for a minute. But if the reason why guest blogging is worth money is because the more traffic that site gets, the better it is looks to Google. Well, it's just like Instagram right now. They don't care how many followers you have. They care how many page views you get.

So when you start looking at it, if you can get traffic to make that PBN network into all traffic sites, now you're basically selling guest blogs. And here's what I would do. If I wanted to get on your site and I said, I'd call you up and I'd say this, Ryan, here's what I want to do.

I want to give you $500 to any one of your nonprofits. I'm going to send the check to you. You put it wherever you want. And all I want you to do is post my article about how garage doors and marketing agencies work together to create an amazing alliance. So I make it about your site and I push it to garage doors.

And I know companies that do this full-time and they literally have the money because this is what politicians do. Politicians literally buy all their links, but they make sure that you scratch your back, I scratch mine, whatever. And they go to these power sites. See, I'm a contributor at ForbesInc.com, Huffington

Post. And that nailed me too because I'm like, man, I put a lot of good content. I had all these great links. But you know, it always changes. And that's what's cool about talking to a guy like you is we can share thoughts and ideas. And I went to Thailand. I don't know if you know who Matt Diggity is, but he's pretty well known. And what he does is he buys websites. He makes them rank better, but he takes all the data, the retargeting data, the visiting data, and he sells it to another useful

industry that, like medical supplies, he sells it to a medical inventory specialist. So he sells, he figures out three ways to sell the data and still makes the site rank better. He holds the site for four months and then triples the price of it.

He buys it for 50, sells it for 150. It's amazing what's out there right now. But I kind of went down a rabbit hole. I just think it's so cool. Some of the stuff we're talking about is how powerful these home service companies could get by just understanding. And the biggest mistake I see is I talk a lot about certain KPIs,

which conversion rate on the phone, right? Conversion rate when you're out there, average ticket. And what I'm learning more about now, more than ever, because we book 200 calls in a day is your capacity. You can only handle so much capacity, right? Yeah. You got only so many techs could only run so many jobs. I remember two years ago, I got a Christmas light business. We did a lot more marketing than we should have. We had 500 leads that we didn't even call back. 500 leads for the season. Wow.

And so right now, this is on the down low, but I don't mind talking a little bit about it, but I'm working on a way that every lead that you can't use, you know, they're just calling the next customer on Google, right? Or the next customer on HomeAdvisor, the next person on Craigslist or whatever.

If you had a way to book the phone call and make it available for another home service company in your area to take that call and get paid on it still, I don't see who wouldn't do that. Would you do that? I mean, it's going to go to waste anyway, right? It's going to go to waste, yeah. I mean, definitely.

That sounds like a good idea. It's something that I've been working on and I'll have something in about a month and it's going to go to waste anyway, right? It's going to go to waste, yeah. I mean, definitely. That sounds like a good idea. It's something that I've been working on and I'll have something in about a month and it's going to be a game changer. But so there's so many things going on. I mean, we talk about online presence here. What do you find the biggest mistakes are when you get involved with someone's website

and the digital world with them, especially in the home service niche? Yeah, we have a fair amount of clients in that space. I'm still surprised at how poor some of the websites are even nowadays, like missing call-to-actions. Even stuff as basic as a sticky header where the header follows you as you scroll. The poor experience on mobile, load speed, which is now a ranking factor in Google. A lot of the sites we take on, they're just missing the proper call to actions

to actually get someone to convert when they land on the site. So oftentimes we take on a new client, the beginning part is spent on just making some improvements to their website just to make it convert. I'm still seeing that more and more. I don't know if you're seeing that, but beyond that, it's just not tracking enough. I'm surprised too. We have one client in particular who gives us all the data. We know exactly how many leads

are getting from digital, that they're turning into clients per channel so we can refine our efforts, but that's not the norm for us. We don't usually get that kind of data, which surprised me because it makes us do our job better. Those are the two things that stand out to me.

I mean, I got 36, right now, 3,600 call tracking numbers for every single zone I do in Valpec, Money Matter, Clippers, Rogold, You and Your Home, Welcome Home, every single Google campaign, every single Craigslist ad, every single one of my Facebook ads,

they all have a separate phone number. Even my technicians have a tracking number that they make money. If they refer us, they get 50 bucks. So that is the next level though. This is what I want people to understand from this podcast is they might think it's confusing, but if you're not part of it now, then you're going to get left behind because I've got better data. I know what's working. I know what's not. I know what I could pay per lead. And what's so cool is this data allowed me to renegotiate almost every contract in the last year. I renegotiate the crap out of my contracts because you know what people do that don't know the facts? They go, dude, I don't think I'm getting that many calls. And they go, well, I got you on a call tracking number that says you got 43 calls.

And I'm like, well, actually, we did get 43 calls. 22 of them were opportunities. We converted 83% of those. The average ticket was this versus my other sources, which seems to be that we're getting a lot of remote calls from your advertising. It was reached local. This was four years ago. They said, we're getting you $22 average leads. And we looked at it and they were all remote calls. And remote calls are high. I need to buy a remote. That's what I mean by remote calls. And we're like, your algorithm figured out a way

to get the cheapest price and the worst quality. What are we going to do with these? Like the people want to buy a remote. We'd have to charge them 60 bucks and charge them what Home Depot charges saying? What are we going to do with these? Like, the people want to buy a remote. We'd have to charge them 60 bucks and charge them what Home Depot charges. So what are we going to make there? Break even? Like, it's not even an opportunity.

So sometimes I think you got to pay for quality. And if you're not keeping track, you can never win. What would you say to somebody that said, yeah, yeah, all that website crap. It never worked for me. I tried it for a few months and all that, you know, Yelp and Facebook and now Amazon Home yeah, all that website crap. It never worked for me. I tried it for a few months. And all that

Yelp and Facebook and now Amazon Home Services and all that crap, I don't believe it. I mean, I think it's a mistake because everyone's going to Google and Bing and Yahoo, I suppose, to search before they're making a purchase, especially in the home service niche. They need to have a website that's going to showcase

your skill sets and your work that you do and the quality of the work. And so everyone's going online. I mean, print's obviously not dead. We do a lot of it. But digital, it's where you can find your audience, where people are, just where they're searching. And so you need to... I mean, look, to use an example, it sounds like you're generating just a ginormous amount of leads.

So obviously, it's working. And our clients, too, they're getting leads. So you just have to figure it out. Whether you have the right people in-house or you have the right agency, you just have to figure it out. And it does work though. You know what I love about Google the most about pay-per-click is I can freaking throttle it. I can freaking hit the gas on it. I can say, you know what? We're slow this week. We don't have ValPack or MoneyMailer or one of our big mailers hitting. Let's crank it up. And then we hit like, holy cow, we're booked up for the week. Let's turn it down now. It hurts the algorithm when you turn it off and on and do different

things with that. And I understand that, but it's the only lever that I could really control for the most part. And that's why I love it. Yeah, you're right. We have a lot of our home service clients will adjust the budget every month based on just the seasonality of their business. We have one client who does home remodeling, kitchen, bathrooms, windows, doors. And they have phenomenal Aprils, I guess because of tax refunds, I suppose. And so every April, we just jack up the budget and they're just saturated with leads. And so we found that to work. So that is the beauty. So I started out, like I mentioned before, in SEO.

That's my thing. That's what I started out with. But I am intrigued by PPC because you have so much flexibility. Like you said, it's the more immediate traffic and you can really play around with it, test different keywords, different landing pages,

different ad copy. It's just a lot of fun. You know what it is? It's like yin and yang to SEO. I always tell that to people. SEO takes time. They're both going after keywords. They're both going after potential customers that have intent to purchase your product, your service.

But SEO takes time. You're at the mercy of Google, even when you do things perfectly, but you're not paying for every click. And it can scale very fast too. As soon as a lot of your blogs start ranking your product and service pages, PPC can scale as well too.

You're paying per click, you have a lot of flexibility, a lot of control. Traffic is quick, not long-term, not slow like SEO. It's very yin and yang. That's why we always tell clients to do both

because as soon as you start spending money, you want instant results. And not that PPC is instant, but it's a lot more instant than SEO. And then once you've got PPC dialed in, then the SEO kicks in and boom, you've got two spots on the first page of Google. That's when things start to get exciting. Yeah, and I try to get like five spots. I'll have the number one spot on Yelp. I'll have my website.

I'll have the city page on my website. I'll have the three pack and I'll have the PPC and the Google guarantee. And that's when it's like, you know, it's like, holy cow. And they say, if you're two times on the same page, the likelihood is about four times. It's like one plus one equals five type things. So yeah, I was just about to mention that the landscape of Google search results is not what it used to be. Number one ranking for Google, it's not what it used to be because of the paid ads at the top, pushing everything down. You've got the rich cards and it's just video is more. People also ask those dropdowns you see and the Google Maps. It's not as simple as it used to be.

So you can't rely on just one channel. You can't just rely on SEO. And like you said, trying to get multiple rankings for your different properties is really important because being number one for Google is not what it used to be. Yeah, it is proximity-based. There's the GMBs, which I'm very familiar with.

And what I figured out with GMBs, and let's put it this way, there was a time that I've had thousands of GMBs, but I won't say anything more about it. But I will say this, one of our strategies, which I think is absolutely genius, and it's not,

I didn't come up with the whole entire process. But if you have a showroom in multiple areas, so Phoenix, if we were to split it up in four grids, we've got north, south, east, west, and we've got them far away from each other. And we set up a really nice showroom with a camera and a punch go to get in each, by appointment only. When you're setting up that GMB, you have pictures,

you show everything, and you literally say, this is a place where people could come in. That's completely legal by Google. And then one of the tips I would say is hire an accredited photographer from Google because that ranks more. Make sure you're geotagging those pictures correctly and doing all the little stuff that adds up. Like you said, those paid citation sites. Personally, I mean, when I was at a lot of GMBs, I was getting for those paid ones that you were talking about.

What's the name that you're a partner with for those citation sites oh yext yeah yes i think i was down to you're probably not going to believe this but the guys i was doing it with we had cumulatively 20 000 gmb so they got down down to six bucks a month per gmb for all of it but wow i mean i mean it's a complimentary way but you sound like like you're like a nightmare for other garage door companies in your market, your local market. Well, I could be, but you know what I've learned more than anything now is do things by the book.

Don't do any black hat stuff. Figure out what they'll allow us to do. Like literally like when the game that they allow you to play, you know, there was a time I used to post 10,000 ads a day on Craigslist. Now they make us pay for it for five bucks. So we only post a couple a day because we're the only ones posting. And it's just super cool with what you learn from experience.

And I'll tell you, nothing can give you the experience or the expertise of being and living through it. The changes... Mobilegeddon. Remember Mobilegeddon? Yeah. And people still don't get it. And mobile get in? Yeah. And people still don't get it. And it's the ultimate advantage. So I should say I'm a technology marketing guy that landed in garage doors. But I think me and you have a lot in common. So a lot of times we have a limited budget, right? Like if you were to say, somebody said, a lot of the people listening have two, three guys. They don't have

this $10 million budget a year. What would you say is a good spot to start if they're just getting into digital? Yeah. I mean, if you have more time than money, then you have to focus on things like building authority through content, video, writing blog posts, social media, engaging with your target audience and social media. Things that just take a lot of time. But there's ways to cross-pollinate. For example, you create really good content that a homeowner is going to want to read. Well, you SEO optimize that, make sure the right keywords are in there, and some of them will rank well.

Then now you're into the SEO territory. But for me, what I would say is, if you want to tie the money, it just really comes down to content. Taking nice videos of all your different projects, making sure they're all on the website, they're up on YouTube, they're all keyword optimized because YouTube is the second largest search engine, and then just creating really good content that's

going to set you apart from your competitors, the ones that aren't going to take the time to put a lot of effort into creating content that's going to position you as the person that they need to hire. I think that's super powerful. And that's exactly... SEO is a long-term play.

And you know what I found? And this is really interesting. You know your stuff, Ryan. And I got to tell you, I'm super impressed. I find that most people selling SEO are pushing it off to a third party. They're just a middleman. And it's just... it's a wham,

bam, thank you, ma'am. There's 10 VAs working for this place. They're doing it in India or the Philippines. And they're like, we're going to make 10 citations a month. We're going to work on your online reputation. We're going to build, you know, a couple links and that's it. And they're charging 500 bucks or a thousand bucks for that. And what would you say to look out for when you're picking somebody for your online marketing? Um, specifically for SEO? Yeah. I mean, SEO, but I feel like most of the people that are doing, there's just a middleman. They're taking 300 bucks off the top.

And you know what I mean? How do you, how do you spot that out and how do you know that? I mean, look, even Valpax selling SEO now. And I know I love Valpak. I believe in them, but that's not their forte. These guys, most of the average franchise owners, I spoke at their event, they're older. I mean, I'm not talking crap about them

because some of them really know what they're doing. But for the most part, they specialize in Valpak. Yeah, I mean, I would say, and we just went through this today, we have a client who's considering us and they wanted to meet the team. So we did a video conference and they saw the team. So they could see that we actually have live bodies in here doing the work.

Now they want to speak to references. So ask for references. So I would say just ask to speak to the salesperson. Ask to speak to the team. Meet the team that's going to actually do the work. That right there is probably going to get you where you need to be. Ask for client references. Ask for samples of their work. I think you do those three things, you'll definitely vet them correctly. online too a lot of times. What's so funny, what I found about online marketers is they very rarely work on their own stuff. It's like the cleaning lady that doesn't clean her own house. The plumber with the leaky sink. Yeah. Exactly. It is true. You see that. I'm not sure why that... So we treat Valentine as a client.

So we'll SEO for our own site and we run our own campaigns. And so we try to treat us as a client. So we'll do SEO for our own site and we run our own campaigns. And so we try to treat us as a client because we assume... First of all, it gives us leads. So there's that. But secondly, we assume that a client is considering us. They're going to check us out. And so we want to make sure that we're active on YouTube and social and SEO and all that. So it's really important.

So let me ask you this. I feel like there's so many things to be looking at right now. And Gary Vee talks about Snapchat. I know that Instagram is coming out with some crazy algorithm changes. Facebook is a super powerful tool to create an education. The sales cycle is longer, it's higher in the funnel, but it could create demand when there was no demand. Google has these different algorithms, Google Guarantee coming out. YouTube is the second largest and one of my favorite ways to get found.

And if you utilize everything correctly, it becomes this superpower, but it just seems overwhelming and daunting to somebody with a few trucks trying to make ends meet, working 12 hours a day. And I know you said you could hire out for it, but where do you think is the main focal point to begin with if you don't have a holistic approach to start with? If I wanted to say, right now, I need to learn about something. I'm bootstrapped. I want to do it myself. Where would you tell them to invest their time and energy?

What I would say, Tommy, is there's really... If we're going to look at things to start with, I'd probably look at SEO and PPC just because we see more leads from it. It's more leader stage cycle, meaning that a potential customer, they know

what they want and they're going to Google and they're searching for it. So it tends to convert higher as it should because the person is actively looking for a garage door or whatever. But those two are pretty technical. You just have to put in time to learn it because they both are pretty technical. And then once you're comfortable

with that, then you look at more of the brand awareness and the nurturing type strategies, which would be social media. And I know you could turn social media into a lead generator using Facebook's lead formats to click off email opt-ins. So I know that works, but I'm just trying to speak in general terms. So social media and content for more brand awareness and maybe targeting research-type phrases like, if you're a kitchen remodeler, home design ideas or something like that. So maybe someone's kitchen design ideas,

someone's in that research stage, and you go after those types of keywords. But if we're just talking about starting out, I would just say put in the time to learn SEO and PPC because you're going to capture the people that are looking to buy, or they're very close, and you should see more leads.

And that includes Google My Business. Make sure that that's fully rock solid. Yeah, and that's basically... I mean, it's fairly cheap to do the Google My Business. I'm working with a program right now. I'm basically just in the middle of learning it. But it goes on to Facebook on a personal profile. So my Tommy Mello profile and it goes in.

So there's all these cities, there's 32 cities in my County, which is Maricopa County in Phoenix. And there's Phoenix, Costa, Levine, Gilbert, Chandler, Mesa.

I keep going, but you go and you join all those groups of their personal profile. And then you join all the groups where you think your avatar would be like architecture, building, builders, real estate agents. And you join, let's just say you join 200 of them. What this does is it goes into each group and you got to get kind of creative and have, I've got three graphic designers on staff

where we designed some cool stuff that doesn't look like too much advertising. It's more of top of mind. And it just says like, look at how this garage door improved. And it's got A1 Garage on the bottom, where we designed some cool stuff that doesn't look like too much advertising. It's more of top of mind. And it just says like, look at how this garage door improved. And it's got A1 Garage on the bottom branding us. But it's not like the moderators are going to kick us off of the group for it. You know what I mean?

As long as it brings value and it's not soliciting. So this post, as many times as we want per group per day. Wow. Is it working? Well, I know a guy that made 10 grand extra last month i just he said it was i made 3 000 bucks per hour i spent so i'm pretty excited about it it's just these tools for me it seems like so much like for some reason i just love it but for a person, I know they must be like, dude, this is too much. But I agree with you, Google. What do you think about online chatbots?

What do you feel about those? I've gotten too much into those, to be honest with you. Yeah, I really can't speak on that. It's something that we haven't gotten too much into. We're starting to get more into, and this isn't a live chatbot, but Hotjar. If you're on Hotjar, it lets you take video recordings of people

on your site. It lets you poll people as they come onto your site. We're also experimenting with push notifications. So basically getting people to allow us to send them push notifications. I'm surprised people allow it. It makes me think, do they know what they're allowing? But they can opt out. It's not like they're allow it. It makes me think, do they know what they're allowing? But they can opt out. It's not like they're locked in.

So we're experimenting with different things right now. But chatbots is something that we have not gotten into. Did you say it's Hotjar? Hotjar, yeah. It lets you take video recordings of people on your site

so you can see where they're struggling with and where they're getting held up at. So you can make changes. It takes scroll maps of your site. Also lets you... I think it does live chat,

but it lets you also poll people. Like, why did you come to our site? Or what do you think of our site? Whatever the question is, you get feedback from people to make changes and make improvements. I was at LeadCon, and there's this software that if you fill out the form,

it'll actually... So there's this software that if you fill out the form, it'll actually... So there's autofill. So a lot of times people will start filling out autofills and they get off the site. So they record that and they don't charge you a penny unless they got that customer's info. And it's pretty cool because the abandonment rate is fairly high. It's not as high as it would be in an e-commerce site. But to get that information for literally pennies on the dollar of what you would pay for a lead.

And then do you know the exit pop-ups when you go to exit or you're browsing towards the top of the menu towards it, like a pop-up that says, wait, we're willing to give you a 10% discount if you call right now type thing. Do you believe in stuff like that? Yeah. And that's actually something you can do with Hotjar too that we've been playing around with. Nice. Yeah, the reason I think that a chatbot works is the quality score of your pay-per-click

depends on how long they stayed on page. So your average time on page goes up when they're chatting with you, if you can keep them on. And I think that SEO, I mean, their algorithm's pretty complex now, but I think that pay-per-click and SEO are not super far off as far as, I think there's some quality factors,

the same that time on page, click-through rate, stuff like that is taken into consideration. Not so much on SEO, but I still think it's a factor. Yeah, I've heard someone say this before. I don't remember who said it, but they said, if you just make sure that your page is the best answer for the question being asked, you'll do well.

I mean, more for SEO, but I think it applies to PPC as well. Just making sure that if you're trying to rank for garage doors in Phoenix or whatever the case is, that page you're trying to rank, it's like the best absolute page for that person, for that query being searched for. Photos, videos, a lot of information,

how the process works, all that. And then make sure that the usability of the site, the user experience, you're keeping them on the site. They're not bouncing right back, which Google can see. Your title tags, the meta description, it's getting the click from the search results. And then it's keeping the pages, keeping them on there. If you focus on the quality of the page,

the rest of the stuff, a lot of the rest of the stuff will take care of itself. You know, it's thinking outside of the box. Like, look, I'd give a customer a $50 gift card. There's a place called Fountain Hills here in Arizona. And there's this huge springs that's like a huge, I don't know what you call it, it shoots up in the air. It's just place called Fountain Hills here in Arizona. And there's this huge springs that's like a huge, I don't know what you call it. It shoots up in the air. It's just water that shoots way up. But everybody knows that's Fountain Hills. So if I gave one of the customers,

get them in front of his new door before and after, and then in front of that springs and make a 60 second video, everybody that lands on there, the thumbnail is a Fountain Hills in the springs. They see it and they play it. They know this is the real deal. This is a real customer. They might even know them because it's not a huge city. But those are the type of things that people are like, wow, this is so much better than every other page I landed on.

And there's the proof is in the video. So I think thinking outside of the box, coming up with answers that nobody else is. And I call it the A1 applause program where I give you 10 bucks back for everything you do. If you put a sign in your front yard, we'll give you 10 bucks back. If you like us on Facebook or share your before and after, we give you 10 bucks. If you do a video recording, we give you 10 bucks.

If you do Nextdoor, which Nextdoor I think is becoming super powerful, we give you 10 bucks. If you leave us any review on Google, Yelp, or Facebook, or BBB, we give you $10. We're not supposed to pay for it, but we're not asking you to leave us a five-star. But typically, if you're going to go out of your way to do it and you're part of the A1 Applause program, you're probably going to give us a good review. We tell our home service clients,

you know, set the expectation with the customer. Tell them that you're aiming to deliver a service that's a five-star review so that you're planting the seed that they should leave you a five-star review if they fulfill their part of the bargain, you know? So just kind of planting that seed as to... Because a lot of people,

a lot of customers just won't do it if they're not prompted to. So you just want to, to from the beginning set the expectations that you're gonna do your best to earn their five-star review and so you know please leave me one if if that is the case yeah what we try to do is i heard a company i stole this so it's not authentic to me but you know our goal mr williams is is to deliver a five out of five service. If any time during your experience falls below a five out of five, please let us know because we want to rectify it. But we're basically planting that seed for a five star. We say five out of five and we don't say anything about a review.

And then at the end, we say, did you receive five out of five service? And if they say yes, we say, we really want to spread the good word. 40% of all of our jobs come from referrals. If you can spread the good word on social media, we'd really, really appreciate it. Then we send them the links to make it easy. Yeah. I love this stuff.

I mean, we're kind of dorks, aren't we? Yeah. Yeah. You must be swimming in so much data. How often are you checking your stats? Is it a constant thing? I mean, right now I got the CRM open. See, this is what separates me is we've got a CRM that is so far advanced. It's called Service Titan. It's a $2.5 billion company. We are pushing them every

single day to come out with new things. Like right now, in May, they're coming out with a new phone system. And what it does is you don't need any phones. It delivers right out. It's an online phone system, VoIP system. And it tells the inflection in your voice. And it literally transposes every single thing the customer in the CSR says. And if there's a buzzword like price or unhappy or late, it'll literally notify a manager. It tells us where in the call it went south.

And it says it the exact time so you could go right to that spot on the call. I mean, this is the kind of stuff that's just, it's crazy how powerful you can become when you're exercising technology. You know what I mean? Yeah, we haven't used it yet, but there's a service called Gong, G-O-N-G.io.

And it sounds like it does the same thing and analyzes your phone calls. And I think I just got an email from them saying that now they analyze emails too, looking for just kind of scanning for those kinds of things like tonality and positive conversation, negative conversation. So you can give your sales team feedback

on what they did right and what they did wrong. So it's just technology is crazy. It's so powerful. It's fun. And it's also daunting at the same time because I truly believe that we're going to go through a time here in the next few years of survival of the fittest. And there's going to be aggregators that are just, it's kind of like when,

when Home Depot came into town ormart came into town in a small town they shut a lot of the local businesses down and it's scary but at the same time it's fun if you're part of it and what's cool about this podcast is we're warning you we're teaching you we're telling you we're talking to the top people in the top industries like yourself about what's going on out there. And the best thing about it is, Ryan gave you great advice. Talk to the company, talk to their customers,

meet their team, find out what kind of report you're going to get on a monthly basis, what kind of results can you expect, and what kind of KPIs are true that you... You know, my mom, a long, long, long, long time ago, probably 2006, maybe. It was not long after Google 2004, I think was when Google came out. It might've been like 2008, but she called me and she said, you're not going to believe this, but I ranked number one for real estate, best real estate agents, Sterling Heights, Michigan. And I go, mom, this doesn't get any searches.

I go, they made you rank for something that's getting no searches, but you're happy because you could type in the stuff and see that you're number one. And that's one of the biggest misconstructions is it doesn't matter what you come up for. If it's not getting any traffic and turning into revenue. Yeah. You have to do keyword research. There's a free tool called Uber suggests that that Neil Patel is making better and better. And it's not perfect, but it's getting really good and it's free. Of course, you've got the keyword planner as well,

but you have to have a Google Ads account for that. But there's a lot of tools out there that can tell you this information and like Uber Suggest is free. So there's no excuse not to be targeting the right keywords. Yeah, I think we used, I forgot. It was called something Samurai. It was back a couple years ago. Oh, yeah. I heard that name a long time ago. Market Samurai, was it? Market Samurai, where we stole all of our competitors' keywords. We ran a campaign for

a month, got rid of the negative keywords. And literally, I've done this with homebusters. We buy the houses because I got this real estate business too. And we took all of homebusters search terms that they spent 10 years creating and used our data to make it that much stronger, get the click-through rate higher, have a higher quality score. And here's what's crazy too, is you don't have to be number one on Google. Yesterday, I went in and talked to my guy and I said, dude, I need more jobs in Dallas today. I got one of my best guys out there to prove a point. And I said, I need it packed. He goes, well, Tommy, we're at $37.

We're at the average placement of $2.1. What do you want me to do? I said, dude, I don't care what we got to do, but you better figure it out. I don't care if we pay $200 per acquisition, but I need him filled up. So this morning he called me up and he said, did you see the schedule today? I got it filled. So it's just kind of funny the talks that we have here

in the background. There's so much stuff here. Is there a couple more gold nuggets that you think that you could give some of these? We're going to talk about how to get a hold of you and probably your favorite books that you have and stuff like that. But is there some more gold nuggets we can tell the crowd?

Yeah, I've got one that comes to mind. This is something that we've been using pretty effectively. In fact, I haven't seen it not work as of right now. Of course, that could change with Google. But as of right now, it has yet to not increase organic traffic. So basically, make sure your site's hooked up to what's called Google Search Console. It gives you...

There's a lot of things, but one of the things it does is it gives you analytics on the keywords that are generating clicks and impressions for your pages of your site. And so what we do is... You have to have blog content for this. So basically, what we do is we look at Search Console

and we analyze all our clients' blog content and our own blog content as well. And we pick out the ones that are doing very, very well in terms of impressions, meaning Google is showing it, they like it, and they're showing it as a result. So we pick out the blogs that have high impressions. And that number is going to be dependent on your own. It's going to be on a per site basis. But pick out the blogs that have high impressions. And then basically, don't touch the title tag. Don't touch the meta description. Don't change the content. Just add content to it.

So look at the keywords. Look at the queries, the keywords that Google is showing that blog post for. And Search Console shows you that. Add content to that blog post using the keywords that are in Search Console for that particular blog post. So let's say the blog post is the keywords that are in Search Console for that particular blog post. So let's say the blog post is 1,000 words. Maybe add another few hundred words to it using the keywords from Search Console. And you basically give Google more of what they already like.

And like I said, every time we do it, organic for that blog post goes up. So that is right now my best nugget. I love that. That's my best nugget. I love that. That's super, super powerful. I was going to tell you, so I'm a regular contributor. Like I'm on the team for Inc.com.

So they give me the titles with how many impressions. Each title, usually I look at the top 100. So what I do is if you go, and I have access to this data, it's not hard to get, but what's cool, you can go on, there's so many different sites to find out the top. They give me access to this data. So I wrote a blog about Amazon not going into New York and I made it similar to the same title that got 800,000 impressions. This one, I actually rewrote another article for a different syndication. And then basically, you make sure that everything passes Copyscape.

You don't want to copy anybody's stuff. So Copyscape is a really strong tool if you're going to come up with your own content. A lot of times people... I still believe in spinning content and having somebody review it, but run it through Copyscape. But these title tags and the first three sentences

are what make a really, really good blog. So think, work as hard as you could on making an attractive title that people are going to want to click on. And then make sure your three first sentences are very, very powerful. And they can even start out with a question, is what I would add on to what you just said. So you don't have to reinvent the wheel. You can just modify it a little bit or just go into the airport or wherever you're at and look at the title of the magazines, like the

Cosmopolitan and stuff. They've done all their research to know what people are going to want to buy based on the cover. So I think a lot of times we pick these stupid, stupid titles and no one would ever click on that. So I think you got to make sure you're being outside of the box thinking and get something that is clickbait, basically. You want them to click on you. And if you get more traffic, Google will rank that better. Yeah, and to go back to what Uber suggests, you can even put a domain name into the tool, and it'll tell you. I mean, it's not 100% accurate, but

it's pretty decent. It can tell you what are the most popular pages on a particular website. So you can pop in your competitor and you can see if they have any blogs, for example, that are just on fire. And then see if you can publish something along the same topic and just make it

twice as better. If you have higher domain authority and you're just a better site, that's why I love blogs because we have so much, I don't believe in much as much as PageRank more, but a trust floor, all that stuff. But it still matters because we get so much traffic. So I know I could jump ahead of somebody.

And blog posts, I use a lot of pictures. I use a lot of different data on there to show people. And I go on Fiverr, I'll spend 30 bucks and make the baddest ass blog post ever. And then I'll link out to all these other really, really high page rank sites. So really good outbound links. And I have a business partner. He did... So this is crazy. For Garage to Repair Phoenix, it's 60 bucks a click for the number one spot. 60 to 70 bucks. I told him I want to Repair Phoenix, it's 60 bucks a click for the number one spot, 60 to 70 bucks. I told him I wanna see how fast he could rank

one of our sites for that from start to get go. It took him two months and he said, Tommy, all I did is I spent two days creating the baddest ass blog post of all time. And I didn't have to do anything. I got social signals. I shared in the right spots. I did four press

releases for it. And two of them were not paid. Two of them were paid. He did a Google press release for it. And they got so much eyeballs and shares and likes that this made the site ranked number one for that search term. So that's nice. Blogs are very, very powerful if they're done right. And I think that there's a science behind it. Is there any books that you'd recommend, Ryan, that have made a big impact on your life? Yeah, definitely the one that I recommend. It's not marketing related, but it's what I definitely recommend. It's called Miracle Morning. Are you familiar with it? Oh, yeah. I read that. The five things you start with every morning. I probably do that one day out of a quarter.

Yeah. So I, I had my morning routine off, uh, right. Using a set list of things. I kind of adapted to my own, I guess my own preferences, but I still start my morning off with like meditation, uh, gratitude practice, uh, a little bit of exercise. I've even started, I don't think they mentioned this in the book, but my wife thinks I'm crazy, but I've even started taking cold showers just as a practice of doing something that you don't want to do. I take cold showers because I don't want to take cold showers. And there's some health benefits, supposedly. I'm not a doctor, but supposedly. But I do it more just to make myself uncomfortable. And so I've got this whole morning routine, like a crazy person

that starts my day off right. And I recommend it to everyone. Miracle morning. Well, they say you should end your shower with cold because it closes your pores. I hate cold showers, but I think I'm going to then I end it like the last minute or two minutes. It's ice cold. The point where like the only thing coming out of the faucet is cold. The first time I did it, I was like screaming and my wife comes running into the bathroom. She's like, what's wrong?

I'm taking a cold shower. She's like, well, we're out of hot water. I'm like, no. She's like, so you're doing it on purpose.

And she's like, you're so weird. And she just walked out of the bathroom, you know, buddy. I love it. I love, you know,

what you're preaching about is self-discipline. I think accountability and self-discipline are probably the most two powerful, most powerful things in life. And, uh, you know, I used to do cryo, but I didn't see a bunch of, like you go in there for about a minute to two minutes and it's like 40 below. Wow. I don't know. D.

Gray. So Joe Polish and all those guys talk about it. I did it for a few months. I actually worked a deal out. I did SEO for the guy's site and he gave me free cryo. But, uh, it's so funny because we set him up with an auto email and Hey, we haven't seen you in a while.

And so I still get the emails that we set up. Yeah. Like three reviews. Now he's got get the emails that we set up. He had like three reviews. Now he's got like 150. That's good. It worked. Yeah, that's one of the other things too is if you've got a storefront, I think you should always put people love us on Yelp.

Be sure to check us out on Yelp. Do whatever you can to let people know because people will take the time to leave bad reviews, but they rarely take the time to leave good ones unless you ask for them. So you got Miracle Morning. Is there any other ones you recommend? Let's see. I mean, I read a lot.

I think another one that comes to mind is The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy. And that's more of a reminder. You're doing... Even with the marketing, if you're starting off slow and you're doing little things every day or weight loss, you're trying to just eat a little bit less or what have you, it doesn't really feel like you're making gains when you're looking at it on a daily basis.

But it's a reminder that look at the month past and you'll see that you've actually made some big gains. So just not to lose sight that you don't give up because you're not seeing daily improvements. You know, remember that you stick with it. The compound effect of the things you're doing every day, they add up to a lot when you evaluate results monthly, quarterly, whatever the case is. And that really applies to anything from marketing to weight loss.

A hundred percent. You know, Einstein said it the best, the most powerful thing in the universe is compound interest. Yes, sir. Compounding. Okay, so here's one of the last questions. If I want to get a hold of you interested in getting involved with marketing, whether it be

online or offline, what's the best way to do so? Tommy, we set up a page for your audience. It can be found at Ballantine.com. So that's spelled like the beer. B-A-L-L-A-N-T-I-N-E.com forward slash home service. On there, you can connect with me on LinkedIn.

That's our site, so you can check us out. There's also an offer for a free video analysis. So basically we take a look at your video and your online marketing and various stats and we do a little screen share and send it to you for free. That's great. It sounds like, you know, I have a lot of people that come on here and it sounds like you are definitely one of the top

people I've talked to that know about you're on the latest, the greatest. You've done it yourself. You've got a personal team. You're not just subbing it all out to a va so i definitely recommend if you're listening to this right now and you feel like you need help i definitely would take ryan up on his free offer for the video analysis and probably go through it if anything just ask him if you're getting a good price for what you're paying for tell him what you're paying now have him look at who you're getting a good price for what you're paying for. Tell them what you're paying now. Have them look at who you're working with. And if it's not

a good deal, he'll tell you. I don't think... You know what I like too, Ryan, is you didn't come off as salesy. You're not like, me, me, me, me, me. We're the best. You're just like, look, we can help you. Great. Right? Yeah. Just try to provide value. I appreciate you having me on. I appreciate everyone listening too. Hopefully I... If I leave the audience

with one last thought, what would it be? One last thought and this kind of tie. Well, a couple of things. Marketing, measure everything, stay consistent, don't give up. Okay. Results sometimes aren't instant. And I think going back to my miracle morning,

focus on self-growth, your health. You know, it's really important. The stronger you can make yourself as a person, whether it's your health, your mindset, it just trickles into all areas of your whether it's your health, your mindset, it just trickles into all areas of your life, including your business and your marketing even. So that's what I recommend.

Awesome. Ryan, I really appreciate you having on. I hope everybody got a lot out of this. I did. And we'll definitely have you on soon. Cool. Thanks, Tommy. Thanks, everyone. 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 HomeAdvisor 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.