The Home Service Expert Podcast - Having the Right Mindset and Strategy to Earn $1 Million in Sales on a $40,000 Budget

Episode Date: January 19, 2021

Peter Lewis is an entrepreneur based in Ephrata, Pennsylvania. He is the president of 7XDirect, a firm that specializes in lead generation and advertising for HVAC companies. 7XDirect’s long-term vision is to become the best marketing for home services that money can buy. In this episode, we talked about marketing, blogging, data analysis, social media, lead generation...

A lot of guys in this space and guys in my business group and stuff just don't bother with Facebook that much. They don't see it as very important. A lot of people, 40 plus, don't have Facebook. And if you don't have Facebook, then it's hard people on Facebook aren't serious. If someone's looking at videos and pictures and memes and stuff, they're just not serious. Well, if you're saying people who use Facebook aren't serious, you're saying 80% of the American population just isn't a serious buyer, which you and I both know that's not the case, because 80% of the American population is on Facebook. So there's a lot of homeowners, very wealthy people in there that are just amazing leads. And secondly, yes, I would say you've got to try it. 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 a guest visiting us from Pennsylvania. He's an expert in marketing, web development, blogging, data analysis, social media, and lead generation. Seven Times Direct owner from 2018 to present and twin Pine Ford marketing manager from 2017 to 2018. Peter Lewis is the president of Seven Times Direct, a firm that specializes in lead generation and advertising for HVAC companies. The company's long-term vision is to be the best in marketing for home services that money can buy. 7xDirect is continuing to improve its internal processes and procedures and is aiming to add more new accounts by the year's end. Peter, it's a pleasure to have you on today.

Hey, Tommy. Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. And I will just say, just for clarity, it is 7xDirect, but no problem, my man. That's how most people pronounce it when they don't hear me. It's a pleasure to be here. And I will just say, just for clarity, it is 7X Direct, but no problem, my man. That's how most people pronounce it when they don't hear me. No, I'm sorry. 7X, 7X, 7X, they both work. All good, man. All good. Listen, you're an expert and you're kind of new in the marketing as far as you don't really work on the old school Valpak mailer ways. You learned how to master paid media.

And what I love so much about paid media is if you could pay to play and still win, you'll never lose that marketing form. You don't get fluctuations like inorganic. You don't need the shares on social. I love the idea of paying and determining how much I can pay because Google and Facebook are never going to not let us pay them if we want to get to the top. So it sounds like you had a

pretty good, amazing career so far. Do you want to tell us a little bit about your experience, where you've been and where you want to go? Yeah, absolutely. 100%. So ever since I was a kid, I was doing marketing in some way, shape or form that started when I was about 15, 16 years old. I was actually homeschooled. So I had a lot of time to pursue things that I wanted to do. And one of those things was getting into the music industry. So I started doing a lot of social media marketing and networking through that, got a little bit into web development. And I got my job. I hadn't gone through marketing college or anything, but I got my job at the auto dealership

because I had initially cold called them and I was trying to sell them a new website design. So I was like, hey, your website sucks. I can make a better one. Let's work together. But it just so happened they were looking for someone to manage all of that in-house. So they snatched me up and they hired me because of that. So as time went on, my ambition grew. I realized I could make a lot more money working for myself. And the owner there at Twin Pine was very much an inspiration to me. Very entrepreneurial, very smart guy. I just love the way he talked and I love the way he thought about things. And so that was a real inspiration to me. And so after working there about a year and a

quarter, I staked out. I didn't have any savings, Tom. I didn't have any clients, very little experience marketing for home service, obviously, since I was marketing cars. And so I knew I needed to specialize. I knew that if I wanted to be good at something, that I was going to just have to do only that thing. I think a lot of mistakes that a marketing company makes when they first start is they want to be all things to all people, right? They want to do the website, the SEO, the Google ads, the social media, the paid ads. And what happens is you quickly get stretched too thin. And it's hard to be good at all of those things at one time, especially when you're just starting out. Now, since I was in survival phase that first few months, I didn't take any project I could

get with the goal in mind of specializing. So I worked, the first three months were pretty rough. To be honest, it got to a point where I was selling my own blood to just kind of make ends meet. So I had to really hustle. I went out and just visited local businesses in my area. And then once we got our first few initial projects, things kind of started picking up from there. And once we got past the survival phase, that's when I decided, okay, now I'm going to specialize in HVAC, just going to do HVAC. I know I can deliver a lot of value to this industry and make people a lot of money very quickly. So that's how I got to where I am today. Moving forward, we will continue to specialize in HVAC. Now, I think there will come a point where we'll have clients in pretty much all the

territories in the US that we can handle before they start bumping into each other too much. And there's just not really much room left in the market. At that point, I would say maybe two to five years from now, somewhere between that timeframe, we will have to pivot into doing additional home services. So who knows, maybe you'll be hitting us up eventually to do marketing for garage stores. But we want to kind of take what we have and put it in different verticals eventually, but staying focused on HVAC as long as possible possible and as far as long-term goals i mean go big or go home man we want to build this thing up to to be a 50 million dollar a year company you know i was interviewing someone they said something really profound they i asked them

what the difference between good and exceptional is and what they told me was that good is a good start. And I love that. Good is a good start. It's a good starting point. But what you really want to focus on is being exceptional. And so we want to continue working on our specialization. And we want to be the best marketing that money can buy for home services in the long term.

So we're just kind of getting started. We're hungry. We're in it. And we're excited, man. It's been a ride so far. And I can't wait for what the future holds. So what's the secret sauce? I mean, there are people that I've interviewed all over that HVAC is by far, I think, the most established. I know I've had 10 people on that do over a hundred million dollars in HVAC. I know guys that have done a lot more than that. It's a pretty aggressive field. It's seasonal. Obviously it goes next to plumbing and electrical, but I'm just asking, what is the differentiator? Why are you, because a lot of these companies have years and years of data. They specialize

as well. What are some of the secret sauces that you bring that you think that you could do better than a different agency? Right. So a lot of agencies that I've talked to like to focus on the SEO, the Google, similar things. And those are great if you know how to do them. It's nice to get those customers

that are in kind of later in the buying phase, their system is out, they want something right away and they'll go Google it, they'll talk to your company and they'll buy within maybe a few days or a few weeks. People don't really know. So the agencies I've talked to, when I talked to them about Facebook, their answer is kind of, well, Facebook doesn't really generate serious buyers. It's more of an awareness thing. And it's just because they don't quite know how to tap into it. Because what we found with Facebook, Tom, is that when you're generating customers,

it's typically not the customer that their system has broken down and it's 90 degrees in their house, right? If it's 90 degrees in somebody's house, they're going to go and Google it. They're not going to wait to see something on Facebook, right? And as a result of that, the sales cycle of the leads that come through Facebook tend to be a little bit longer. They tend to be a month or two months or three months. The pro to that, though, is that you typically generate leads

year-round rather than your lead cost just absolutely spiking in the fall. HVAC is very seasonal. And you have some mild seasons where if you're trying to buy leads from Google, you're just going to have a very rough time with it. So just the fact that we use Facebook, the way we do it, apart from the typical social media where you're trying to boost things, you're trying to get likes organically. And the way we do it is a pretty big differentiator for us from different agencies. Because at some point, they've dabbled in it, they put their feet in it and said, hey, is this going to work? But not quite understanding that it's a little bit of a different type of customer. They haven't been able to pull it off the way we have.

Yeah, I like that. When people ask me why I'm the best, I definitely don't mind telling them. One of the biggest mistakes I think is people tend to say I'm the best because I'm nights, weekends, and I do all this stuff extra. And I think it's really, for us, it's culture. I really feel like our people, they want to fix it right. We've become doctors and we diagnose the person first and the customer. And I like to call them clients because it's a long-term relationship. And I want to do what's best for them and find out what's important to them. Is it bugs getting in the house? Is it the fact that, you know, you could save a lot of money on your energy bill with

an insulated door? Are you using it a lot and the kids are going to bang it up? Is it the fact that you're looking for 40% of your curb appeal to be better? Is it the fact that you just want the peace of mind that it's going to open if you have an emergency? So identifying with the customers is probably the best thing we teach on. But I really, I love talking about marketing and that's, people tell me, dude, if you only talked about marketing and sales, that's where you should live. And I'm like, I love culture and I love other things, but I love hearing about a longer cycle

life. And I think millennials, they bought more houses last year. And I've talked about this a lot on the podcast, but they bought more houses, more than baby boomers last year. And it started to trend up and the buying decisions are starting to change. And people spend a long time on social. So I wanted to talk, I understand the sales cycles longer and I understand that there's certain times to get in front of more eyeballs. And I understand there's, if you were to take a pyramid, there's one to 2% of people that need us today. And there's layers, there's a few more layers. And some of the people that we'll market to don't know they need our service., what's going to get my attention?

How do you really build that demand to want to click through and fill out that information? So the key thing to generating demand, getting people to click, is having a rock-solid offer. You have to have an amazing offer. So if you're posting ads on social media or you're running the paid ads and your hook is that, hey, well, we've been in business 50 years and we're professionals, call us today, right? It's like, okay, so you might get a few people to call or click, but it's not going to capture a whole lot of demand. Whereas if you're posting something like, hey, finance a new system with us and you'll get $1,000 cash upfront. And you can just raise

your price a little bit on the back and it doesn't matter. But having something that really just captures the attention of people and something that looks like a great offer is the key to getting them to click. And then also what happens after they click, right? A lot of people will, in addition to the terrible ad saying, Hey, we've been in business for 30 years, they will link people directly to their website page, or even a landing page within their website. When people go to a website, it's extremely distracting. Even if it's just a landing page that's kind of by itself, if you have all those links or whatnot it's going to be very distracting versus if you're sending them to a separate landing page that has no links literally all they can do is submit their information so kind of those two things a separate landing page and just having a rock solid offer that has some urgency to it

captures your attention is going to be the key driver to get people reaching out to you with paid ads. So I've heard that there's certain times that work better than others and things like that. So first of all, I'm going to ask a lot of questions here because this is fun for me. So you've got lots of different sources. You've got Twitter, Facebook, you've got Instagram, you've got things like TikTok now now and I don't think you're going to be buying much HVAC units but I like my business crossroads because some people will be like oh my gosh the before and afters and you can make funny stuff and and I wouldn't think TikTok is going to be something today but people could just spend hours watching people's videos oh my gosh it's pretty cool it's pretty cool to watch. And it's a Chinese company.

Like in 2019, I'd never even heard of TikTok and all of a sudden freaking everybody's on it. I think today they have what, like 80 million people? Yeah, I think it's growing. Yeah, past that, but it's freaking nuts. So let's talk about this. So there's all these different social medias. First of all, how do you pick one? Because I feel like what you said is you're a specialist. So first pick one. And I think Facebook's probably a good one, but what are your thoughts? Yeah. So Facebook is what we use right now. So far, it's been by far the best return on investment. However, we are looking into YouTube

next. And I have actually started dabbling just a little bit with TikTok. I think that's coming up probably sooner than we expect if they don't get, you know, there's been talk of them getting banned, but it hasn't actually happened yet. So, you know, as long as they keep trucking, then I think those are kind of some good next ones to look into. But for now, Facebook has been the best for us by far. I think Twitter could work as well, But what you just have to keep in mind is the density of the population on Twitter is a lot less than it is on Facebook. So you want to make sure you have at least, you know, two to 500,000 solid users target, right? So if you tried to target on Twitter, and it's kind of a remote area, you're in somewhat of a rural area, it's going to be a lot

tougher for you to get in front of enough of an audience than it would be with Facebook, for example, where 80% of the US population is on Facebook. Yep. You do need that bigger audience. So let's go over what's a really freaking amazing offer. What's something, and you don't have to give me the exact details, but maybe one of your top five that have... So number one is like a smoking deal at a certain amount per month, right? Like a financing deal. What other key attributes would you want in an ad? Right. I don't mind telling you what our best offer is because someone can go out there and copy it and not be able to provide exactly what we provide because we have our own systems. So what we've found generates the best quality lead and the highest quantity of lead as a national average is a 0% APR for 60 months. If you can offer a 0% APR for 60 months. Now, here's the thing there, Tom. Do you prefer Tom or Tommy?

I prefer Tommy, but my dad's like, Tom is like, hey, let's go golfing, Tom. But a lot of people call me Tom. So I'm a big boy. I'll call you Tommy. I just ask because people call me Pete sometimes and I much prefer Peter. So kind of same deal. So anyways, what was I saying? Yeah. So you're saying 0% APR over 60 months.

0% for 60 months. Yeah. Now here's the thing though. So most financing companies that offer that, they will gouge you on the percentage. They'll want to take like 15% or like 18%. So you either have to mark up your prices accordingly, or you just use that offer to get in the door and then offer something that's better for the customer and better for you. Something that serves the customer even better than the zero for 60. But you're using that to kind of get in the door,

if that makes sense. So that's what works best on a national average. But we found in individual markets that sometimes having a low monthly payment offer, like, hey, you can get a new AC for as low as $109 per month, right? We found in some markets, some random markets, that that one is actually the one

that produces a higher quality lead. But if someone's listening to this and they want to go experiment and dabble and try themselves, I would recommend starting with the 0% one for sure. And then as far as the funnel goes, I've heard a lot of the success that I've heard is it's a funnel that fills out a form that actually text messages someone live and they get right back to them. They've got the autofill feature. And I heard that that works. I always just hit autofill. I don't care. I don't care who has my information. I'm really good at screening. Yeah. So text is extremely important. We see probably somewhere between 20% and 40% of our leads actually get booked through text versus through call or something else. So I just want to make sure to touch on that. But yeah, as far as the landing page,

so we are playing around with both. So far, our staple go-to has just been using Facebook's built in landing page. It's called a lead form. It's extremely fast, extremely mobile optimized. It's right there. They don't have to click to another site. And people are worried about, oh, what if it's not a high intent lead? Listen, if you have someone's email address and you have their number, would you rather have it or not have it? So you can try to filter only for the highest intent quality leads, or you can build up a massive database of leads and have a corner in your market because you're constantly dripping on them with text and email. But in any case, we found that not to be a huge issue with lead quality anyway. So again, if someone's going to go experiment with this, I would definitely recommend trying the lead form within Facebook. And the next question I have is, if you had to pick

a city, would you pick like a Houston or Phoenix or a monster LA city? Or would you say a smaller populated is more effective because you're not as much competition? What is your overall take on that? There's pros and cons to both. The pro with a smaller area, like you said, is that there's not as much competition. So usually the lead cost might be a little bit less in those areas from what we've seen. As long as there's over 100,000 people, you should be good. Now, with a larger city, there's more competition. So your lead cost is going to be a little bit higher. However, since you have, you know, Dallas-Fort Worth area has

like 8 million people, right? So even though your lead cost is going to start off a little bit higher, once the system gets working for you, you can scale your budget to 10, 20 grand a month and still be generating leads and generate a massive, massive volume of leads rather than maybe capping out a little bit more quickly in a smaller market. But both markets are worth it for the money for sure. You know, I've got the weirdest problem. And I think a lot of people that are listening have this problem is marketing's not my issue. But here's the little spin I'm going to do for you. Most people don't consider marketing hiring. And I consider marketing being effective at recruiting. And everybody says,

I'm so good at getting the leads. My phone's ringing off the hook, but I'm not getting, I don't have the technicians. I don't have the call center and all of this, that, and the other. So what you don't think about, what I'm challenging people to think about is marketing is truly finding great talent because with the right talent, they're always recruiting new customers. They're always recruiting for you. They're getting smiles and great reviews. They're getting higher average tickets. They're getting higher conversion rates.

I mean, talk to me a little bit about, and I know this wasn't on our questions, but I think it's so important because we leave this out. We say, I'll spend 25 bucks on Craigslist every month, and hopefully some good guys come in. But yeah, I'll spend 10 grand on Facebook, 20 grand on Google, do the SEO. I'll do the LSA ads. I'll do all these different things. And I think that's a huge mistake. So if you were to build a campaign today to try to get amazing people, you want them,

I would say young, willing, and able. I want to start fresh, clean slate, teach it from the ground up, get great people that love to smile, that love their life, and give them some life skills and teach them what this career is all about. Do you have any insight into that? thing is that companies are getting really, really competitive as far as what they're able to offer their employees and the culture and how they're treating their employees. So you have to... Well, first of all, I hope you're doing that in-house. You should be. If you're not, you're going to have a really high churn rate with your employees. But you have to market your company to prospective employees just as much as your other marketing. Now, I'm not saying the same spend, but you have to market your company to prospective employees just as much as your other marketing. Now, I'm not saying the same spend, but you have to have the same attitude towards it. It's that they're a customer of your business in a sense. And you have to make sure that if you have the right benefits, the right culture, maybe your prices are a little bit higher. So maybe you

have a little leftover to offer better pay. Whatever it is, you need to realize you can't just sit there and say, oh, well, my market sucks and there's not enough people in it and blah, blah, blah. If you fall into that mindset and complain about the problem, you're not going to fix the problem. So the mindset needs to be, okay, I'm not getting the traction I want. What do I have to do? What do I have to be able to offer someone? Is it better pay? Is it better benefits? Can I talk up the culture? And is the culture really going to make a big difference

to want to get people on? So I would say at 7X, we're in the mindset that we're always recruiting because we want to get really good people through the door. And so our website, we have our mission statement on there. We have kind of what we do all over the place. And we want to make sure that we're attracting people to our culture

and with the opportunities our company presents. So yeah, I'm not saying you spend the same on hiring as you do on getting leads. But you want to have at least the same attitude towards it. You are trying to sell employees to join your company. You know what I mean? Yeah, it makes sense. I think that there's the mindset of the people listening. I hope that they understand the stronger you build your

foundation and the people matter. And it's the process in which you find the people. I mean, I've got a pretty complicated process, but for the most part, what I find is if you treat the people like gold, you go out, you buy ice cream, you do some fun stuff, you record it, you share it, you get it on social, you give them a reason to go find friends, you turn your employees into mini marketers. You can do a lot. Actually, I've been thinking about teaching people Facebook like a Saturday class and saying, look, I give you guys $1,500 to find an employee and I'll give you a percentage of every call that comes through your lead source, which we can track through our CRM. So I'm like, shoot, if I could teach an eight-week class, every Saturday they jump on for an hour, hour and a half. I teach them how to do next door,

log on to next door, build a bunch of pictures, say you're the neighborhood expert, call me if you need anything. Teach them how to post on Facebook, bunch of before say you're the neighborhood expert call me if you need anything teach them how to post on facebook bunch of before and afters join different groups around your neighborhood truly find people that would be our avatar maybe if you got to build a different type of account you know what i mean not your personal account but more of a a branded account i just feel like there's so many ways to make money and so many ways to drive good leads and these people are just they want you so they're building a mini business with all of our systems and they're making great money. I mean, shoot, they'd walk away with 30% of the ticket if they got their own lead and fulfilled it. I mean, that's amazing. So yeah, we've got some ideas here day one, but it's fun

just thinking about this. I love thinking about ways that are not the norm to make money. And I'll tell you, I was telling you earlier on this call, there's so much more to worry about. I mean, a lot of people worry about marketing, but I had 50 cancellations yesterday and that happened because our dispatch department is not where I think it should be. And quite frankly, with COVID, we're very, very busy. We're understaffed and the distribution centers are not, they're not keeping up with our growth. So I'm not going to make excuses, except that it's internal mostly. So we're going to fix it. But, you know, you mentioned the long term vision of the firm is to be the best marketing for home services that money can buy.

Let's talk a little bit about email marketing. What have you found to be effective? Because I always thought, do I send an email every month? Is it better to send a newsletter once a month or once a quarter? What's the best way when it comes to email marketing? So I can't talk about email marketing without talking about text marketing as well. Because if you're not doing text marketing, you need to do it. Okay. Hold on. Because I love text and voicemail blast. I've talked to three different lawyers about this. So you have to have consent with not a verbal consent, but you're supposed to have initials or an autograph of I'm able to text you. Although I get them every day and I get opt-outs, but there's a lot of compliance issues. So I'm in love with SMS marketing.

Twilio is my favorite thing in the world and I've done it, but I just don't want to be one of those guys that ends up paying $100 for every text I sent out. So I want to be very careful how we go about telling people to do this. Yeah, absolutely. So make sure you're compliant.

Make sure there's some verbiage that people know that when they're submitting their information that you may text them. I would also say with whatever your compliance verbiage is, also try to make it as concise and quick as possible. Because the last thing you want to happen is have less people opt in because they have to read through all this stuff that sounds scary, right? Like we will freaking text you and how... No, you want to give it concise. But yeah, obviously, don't start text marketing unless you have some kind of compliance there, of course. But now as far as frequency goes,

you asked, do you drip on them? How do you do it? So what we found works good is yes, you want to keep dripping on them with an email once every couple of weeks or once every month. You can even have a sequence of, I don't know, let's say 20 emails that say, hey, just checking in or here's some recommendations. Make sure you're getting your air filter checked. Just some very... Maybe things that build value, just some good advice. Because each time they see that email in their inbox, even if they don't open the email, they see your business name. So you have that awareness.

Now, as far as reactivating them, you do also want to have periods where you're... Let's say your traditional marketing slows down or something like that, where you freaking just blast them all at once. So think maybe 2 weeks, 3 weeks, you're sending them 10 emails, 10 texts, just really blasting them within a specific time period. And then all the ones that don't convert that, do the same blast a few months later. So you're dripping on them with something that's very basic and not pushy at all, just so they have your company in the top of their mind. But then you are also taking those times to just make sure that you're

aggressively blasting them as well. And you can get creative with it. You can put some kind of offer in there. If you have 1000 people that you've quoted and they haven't closed down, heck man, just send them an email or send them a text and say, Hey, we're going to offer you an additional $200 off your system. So long as you're still making your margin. So we do it really aggressively for the first week or two. Then we just kind of taper off and they'll get an email maybe once a month. And then after that, we'll just pick specific times if the client is a little bit slower on certain months, then we just hit them with a reactivation campaign and get a lot more leads coming in through that. So if you had, let's just say you're an HVAC company

mid-size doing 10 million, and you had it this month, you had a certain budget. Let's just say, we're just going to pick a round number. I said 10 million, we'll just say 100,000 for paid ads. How much would you put into Facebook versus pay-per-click versus any other paid source of digital? I mean, there's all kinds of stuff I could get with programmatic and all kinds of things. But as far as social versus Google versus Bing, what would that

$100,000 be allocated? Right. I know pay-per-click leads can be pretty expensive sometimes. I've heard somewhere in the range, maybe $100 plus. It depends on the market, Tommy. But I would say with Facebook, it's pretty typical. If you're doing it right, it's pretty typical to get leads for somewhere between $20 and $60, depending on your market. National average is about $30, $35 for us. But yeah, somewhere between $20 and $50 of a good cost per lead. Okay. Yeah. The thing I like about Google leads is those are genuinely, like you said, they need it done right away and I can fluctuate it on a daily basis. So if I know I've got a mailer hitting this week and I don't love mailers either. There's nothing I don't like though. I'd say I

don't love Google because there's things that have happened in the past. And right now you can't even get advanced verification to do pay-per-click in a lot of areas. I mean, because of COVID, it's just tough. You know what I mean? And garage doors and locksmiths need advanced, advanced verification. So Google's kind of a pain in the butt sometimes. Mailers, sometimes the customers are cheap. Door-to-door is a tough one because you don't get the value and the attrition rate's bad. So there's a lot of things here to unpack, but you got to stick with something. And I'd say organic takes a long time. Word of mouth takes a long time. It's something you've got to continue to work on. Reputation management takes a long time. So the paid ads is almost like,

it's a buffer that's able to come on strong when you need it. And it's a buffer that, oh my God, we're booked out till next week. Let's turn those down. So that's what I love about paid. And that's why I think it's so important to be good at it. And paid ads, it's a double-edged sword too. Because so first of all, if you're doing it right,

again, you're getting the direct response leads. So you're getting a great influx of leads. But also, you're getting your name out there to 10, 20, 30, 40, 50,000 people every single month. So to go back to what you were saying about hiring, if you're generating your leads through social media, you can put a little blurb in the ad somewhere. Hey, we're one of the top rated, blah, blah, blah. Here's what makes us so great. And potential employees

are seeing that as well. So you're building your reputation for clients and employees, and you're generating the leads as well. So it's a double-edged sword. Love it. So tell me the story about how your team generated more than a million dollars of revenue for one of your clients in the last six months. Yeah. So I love this guy. So Buddy Smith is a great client. It's interesting, Tommy, because we can generate a hundred leads for one company. They'll get almost no results from it. We'll generate a hundred leads for a different company and they just freaking crush it. And Buddy is one of the companies that crushes it. And what I've noticed about his attitude is that he loves our services, right? But he doesn't just rely on, okay, you guys make everything happen for me. You guys just generate business

for me, right? What I love about his attitude is that he is constantly trying to improve everything he can on his end, even without our input sometimes. I think that attitude has been a big contributor to his success because he's always looking for better ways to do it, better ways to book more leads and stuff like that. So we didn't do anything super special for Buddy. That's just part of our general program. He basically started getting leads.

He sold a few systems within his first couple of weeks. So after a few months on the program, he's like, hey, well, let's ramp this thing up and spend, you know, somewhere between three and five grand a month, I think is what we're spending now for him. But, you know, he got the system down, his team got acclimated with it, and then he just scaled up from there. And I think he spent about 30 or 40 grand now to get that $1 million in sales.

And keep in mind, that's just the leads that have closed down already. This is a longer sales cycle type thing. So I would guesstimate there's probably another half a million easy in some of those old leads. So what's Buddy's secret that separates him from everybody else? I mean, I'd love to know, is he just more tenacious?

Does he have better systems? Because we're spoiled. I'm spoiled with SEO. My phone rings. I mean, we booked so far today. I'm just going to click on... So far, we're at 200. Well, we've gotten 280 leads today.

We booked 243 of them. And I've still got a full day left. I mean, what is the secret, I guess, to make sure... And I think I get too many leads. I got to slow it down a little bit, but I'm in growth mode and we're still making a pretty healthy profit. So what is the secret that Buddy has? So I touched on it before. And if I had to sum it up into one word, I would say attitude. His attitude is to take full responsibility for his success or failure. He's been super great about being on top of his team. He started using our automated system that texts and emails the leads. Before he wasn't doing that, he had a great process with his team, but he's felt like also our automated text and emails going out has helped

a lot with that. So attitude and proper follow-up is absolutely the key to making this work. Attitude and proper follow-up. So the people that you see, do you have any clients right now that you're using the text and email follow-up that just they're not getting a lot of results? I mean, because of the attitude, I guess, but what else is it?

Yes, because... So we send out automated text and emails, but you also have to make sure that when someone responds, that you respond back to them and you set the appointment and you sell the deal. So we've had some clients before that have... The automated text and everything is working great.

A bunch of people are responding. Yes, I need help. Please call me. And no response from the company to the customer. And you could attack it at the surface and say, Oh, well, you need to make your follow-up better. But I found that so many of those things just come back down to the attitude.

And that's why I say it's the most important. Because if your attitude is, oh, well, none of these leads are serious, and I blah, blah, blah. If that's your attitude, eventually that's going to dictate your actions and you're not going to be quick to respond. You're not going to be as ready to serve these customers.

So I hope that kind of clarifies that a little bit. Now, how much access, without going into any details on your clients, but have you had access to listen to some of the calls on how they deal with objection handling and train their employees and consistency and how to handle objections and how to get over the no. Have you seen and heard and been part of that? Yeah, so we did a little bit at first. We haven't monitored a ton of calls lately. However, I will say that I have seen some really good and some really bad examples of how to do it. I've seen some people answer the phone and sound like they're grumpy

and they're just kind of trying to get off the phone as quickly as possible. And then I've seen some others that sound amazing. And I think the key to that, Tommy, as well as making sure that you have a process. You don't want to just kind of tell the CSRs, okay, here's how to book the appointments. You want to give them a script. They follow the script the same way every time. They know how to start asking questions right away and immediately gain control of the conversation and get people to book that way. And obviously, the very friendly attitude is what you want. So yes, I have seen that make a difference. Yeah, it's amazing what happens. I'd recommend everybody on this listening right now to listen to a couple of their calls. And if they can't listen to them, they need to pick a CRM in which they could. A very affordable one is just something as simple

as CallCap. I have a good relationship with Susie Boyder over there. She's pretty cool. Some of the stuff they build. For many people, social media is mainly a tool for maintaining non-business relationships. How do you convince somebody? Is it just you got to try it? Or what's the deal? Well, what do you got to do to get them over Is it just you got to try it? Or what's the deal? Well, what do you got to do to get them over the ledge to get them to give it a go? Yeah. So it's interesting. A lot of guys in this space and guys in my business group and stuff just don't bother with Facebook that much. They don't see it as very important. A lot of people, 40 plus, don't have Facebook. And if you don't have Facebook, then it's hard to see the value of it.

But I think the biggest hurdle is what you hear when somebody doesn't want to try Facebook is that, oh, well, people on Facebook aren't serious. If someone's looking at videos and pictures and memes and stuff, they're just not serious. Well, if you're saying people who use Facebook aren't serious, you're saying 80% of the American population just isn't a serious buyer, which you and I both know that's not the case. Because 80% of the American population is on Facebook. So there's a lot of homeowners, very wealthy people in there that are just amazing leads. And secondly, yes, I would say you've got to try it. Now, with it in mind that it is, you do have to have a good process.

You do have to have good follow-up. You do have to have some things in place. I wouldn't recommend it for a company who is maybe just starting out. And if they spend the five to 10 grand in ads to give it a shot and make it work, I wouldn't necessarily... If they can't afford to lose that money,

I wouldn't recommend just doing that right off the bat. You have to be willing to spend some money, spend some time and take some time to figure it out because it is a process. I'll tell you, when I first started marketing for myself on Facebook, oh boy, I'll admit it, dude, I was not that great at it at first. I probably went through, let's see here. I think I went through about 150 leads or almost 200 leads of people that scheduled an appointment with 7X before I closed a single one down. It was very hard for me to learn. But once we learned it, we had a freaking money-making machine and we've grown significantly since we figured that out. So yeah, you just got to take the time.

One of the things I want to add, you said something pretty significant there, is I don't have a jack of all trades. What I've been trying to do is get someone, if they're going to work on anything in the company, whether that's, I mean, I try to split it up into tiny roles. I've got multiple stages of dispatch now. I got ones that work on doors versus service.

Because some people say, I've got these people in my office, they're the dispatcher, they're the CSR, they handle every level, install, service. Because some people say, I've got these people in my office, they're the dispatcher, they're the CSR, they handle every level, install, service, they're in multiple areas. I'm like, well, what are they rated on? How are you judging if they're doing good or not? And that's the interesting thing is a lot of people try marketing, they try Valpak, they try Google, they try SEO, they try a radio commercial, and they don't have any KPIs surrounded around it. They're a jack of all trades. They don't have anything to see if their stuff's working. And I just think it's a big mistake because when you got to hone in and focus

on those 150, 200 leads on Facebook, and that's all you worked on, you got really good at it and you made a career out of it. And I just think that if you can start to think that way in business and start to get more and more and more specialists, it'd be a big deal. One mindset I try to have is that everything can work eventually, right? And you can make almost anything work eventually. You can make almost any offer work, but you have to keep testing, keep testing, keep split testing different processes around it, and you can figure it out eventually. But the part about being smart in that is that you just have to figure out and commit to, okay,

how long am I going to try this for? How much money am I willing to spend on it to see if this thing works? You know what I mean? And then you have to give yourself a significant amount of time and stick to that. Let me ask you a little bit about before we start going into the final phases here, the podcast is, is there any more secret sauces or golden nuggets that you might have for us that I maybe didn't ask or left out? I mean, we covered quite a bit. I would just say, you know, take some of the stuff we've talked about and implement it. If you don't want to do it say, you know, take some of the stuff we've talked about and implement it. If you don't want to do it yourself, you know, unfortunately, we only do HVAC. I know there's

a lot of companies out there that like you do garage doors or plumbing or electric or roofing and whatnot. If you're going to hire a company to do it, make sure it's a company that specializes because if you hire kind of the jack of all trades, like Scorpion to do it, I don't know if I'm allowed to, but I don't think you're going to have as much success as with going with a specialist. So I would just leave you with that word of caution. Sure. Well, let me ask you this. If we want to get ahold of you, what are the best ways to do that? Yeah. So the best ways to do it would be to schedule an appointment directly from our website. It's www.7xdirect.com. That's the number seven, the letter X, direct.com. And then just hit the schedule appointment button. And if someone wanted to reach out to you personally, they just said

not as much marketing, but maybe just wanted to just talk to you about some life experience with Facebook. Do you have another way of reaching out to you? Absolutely. You could shoot me a text at 717-636-2751. Perfect. And I've got a few other things here. Do you have three books in your life that you've got a ton out of that really changed the... Could be self-help, could be business, could be just philosophical, but three books that stand out. Yeah, absolutely. So first book, I'm a man of faith. I got to tell you the Bible, you know, it's influenced my life in more ways than I can imagine. And Proverbs in the Bible has a ton of great business advice. We used to read

as a family when I was a kid, we'd pick a chapter on each day of the month. And a ton of great business advice. We used to read as a family when I was a kid. We'd pick a chapter on each day of the month. And a lot of the best business stuff I've learned is actually from the Bible, believe it or not. Secondly, Secrets of the Millionaire Mind taught me a lot about mindsets. I see a lot of people that struggle with the same things in their life over and over and over again. And it's easy once you do that to kind of blame something else, right? So blame your upbringing or blame the economy. And really what it comes down to, if you're struggling with the same thing over and over and over again, especially in the area of making money, there's something deeper.

There's some root in your psyche that maybe your parents tell you that rich people are bad. You kind of get my drift there. But Secrets of the Millionaire Mind really helped me out in that area, just making sure that my mind was clear and I knew where I was going and I knew why I was doing it. Third book, Atomic Habits by James Clear. It talks about how to build good habits, adjusting your environment to keep those good habits. And I've taken so many things from that book that have helped me a lot. Love it. Atomic Habits, Secrets to the Millionaire Mind and the Bible, Proverbs. Amen. All right. The last thing I do is I'm going to give you a few minutes to finish this off. Anything we may have missed, any last take action steps, anything about living life better, spend time with family versus work or focus, whatever you might have for us to just kind of

end us out on. Business-wise, take your email list, take your whole customer list and do a reactivation campaign. If you're a little bit slower right now, just blast them with 10, 20 emails in the span of a week. And you will see some more business come through that. You will book some more jobs. If you're a little bit riskier, you can text them as well. However, we don't recommend that unless they've specifically signed something. But that would be a...

It's free money that's just sitting there in your database. Family, just buy your wife some flowers every now and then. It adds a lot to her relationship. And yeah, just find a nice way to surprise your wife and it's going to be good. Happy wife, happy life is what they say. Peter, this has been great, man. You know, I love drilling in.

You're an expert at what you do. I definitely recommend people reaching out to learn more on Facebook advertising. Lots of great pointers there. I really appreciate you coming on and taking the time today. Hey, thank you so much, Tommy. It's been awesome.

Hey guys, I just wanted to thank you real quick for listening to the podcast. From the bottom of my heart, it means a lot to me. And I hope you're getting as much as I am out of this podcast. Our goal is to enrich your lives and enrich your businesses and your internal customers, which is your staff. And if you get a chance, please, please, please subscribe. You're going to find out all the new podcasts.

You're going to be able to ask me questions to ask the next guest coming on. And do me a quick favor, leave a quick review. It really helps us out when you like the podcast and you leave a review. Make it four or five sentences. Tell us how we're doing. And I just wanted to mention real quick, we started a membership. It's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash club. You get a ton of inside look at what we're going to do to become a billion dollar company. And we're telling everybody do to become a billion dollar company. And we're just we're telling everybody our secrets, basically. And people say, why do you give your secrets away all the time? And I'm like, you know, the hardest part about giving away my secrets is actually trying to get people to do them.

So we also create a lot of accountability within this program. So check it out. It's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash club. It's cheap. It's a monthly payment. I'm not making any money on it to be completely frank with you guys, but I think it will enrich your life season further. So thank you once again for listening to the podcast. I really appreciate it.