The Home Service Expert Podcast - How To Maintain Good Credit And Avoid Being In The Red

Episode Date: September 27, 2019

Bill Hillestad has conceived, started, marketed, nurtured and grown well over a dozen companies, with combined revenues north of $1 billion. Bill uses his over 25 years of professional experience in the real estate, mortgage, financial services, and marketing industries to help businesses maximize their growth and increase their earnings. In this episode, we talked about capital, credit auditing, digital marketing...

see, here's where they make mistakes. People go out and they try to advertise to all of Phoenix, but David Ogilvie said it in the 1950s, the father of modern advertising. The key to advertising is reach, frequency, and impact. You got to reach the right people and you got to do it frequently. Well, you can't afford to stay in front of everybody in Phoenix. You got to understand your demographic, your avatar. Well, you got to, yeah, you got to get it down to a small enough audience that you can afford to be in front of them all the time. And 80% of your content is for them, not for you. It might be a meme or something funny or some tip or some whatever. Just reminds them your logo's on it. You mentioned the

business, but you don't have to be selling all the time. I just want to, oh yeah. So that when the time comes, like the sticker on the inside of my garage door, when the time comes, I'll remember you. 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. Hey, my name is Tommy Mello, and this is the podcast, The Home Service Expert. Not sure if you ever heard of me, but right now we're in 10 states, 17 markets, 200 employees, and doing the best we can. I can tell you this. My friend here, Bill Hellestad,

just did something for me that's literally earth shattering what happened in the best we can. I can tell you this. My friend here, Bill Hellestad, just did something for me that's literally earth shattering what happened in the last six months. So we're sitting here in this beautiful new building. We went through with the SBA process and I'm sitting here thinking about where I used to be, right? I was the one guy out there. I was serving tables, bartending, painting garage doors and fixing them. And, you know, I drove a 1995 Nissan. And I mean, look, it was tough. Look, it didn't start out. I didn't get a bunch of money from my parents. I didn't have anything. I started with busing tables and serving tables and bartending. That's the money I had. Wow. And it just reminds me, that's why we started this podcast is to give

back. And I interview guys like you that are marketers and just really smart business guys. And I wish you would have met, I wish you would have been doing what you're doing now back when I started in 2006, because literally this is a game changer. Okay. This, what happened with what you've done and helped me get done is why I have this building is why we're able to do good things for our employees. And I'll tell you what, if I would have known what I know today with what you can do, I would not be in 10 states. I'd be in 50 states. It'd be a game changer. So if you're listening, you got to pay attention because this will change your business. What do we all need? We need access to capital. And we got to, what do we need to get access to capital?

You need a lot of things, but the most important one is your credit. And the reality is we pay business managers, stockbrokers, financial planners, all these people to manage our money or our assets, but nobody manages our liabilities. And that's where you make it or break it in the business world. You got to have access to the capital. And we're not talking about just credit and credit repair, but it's the overall picture of how do I, how do I get the money I need at the best terms possible to grow my business? Well, look at this. This is months ago, but here I am low 600s. And that's a little embarrassing because here I am bragging about how big we are.

And we're going to be in 50 states. I promise you that. But you know what? I'm going to stop here. That's a really important point because you have good credit. It's not like you had a lot of problems, but if you're successful in business, you're using credit. You're using creditors. You're getting your credit checked by suppliers, vendors, and all the inquiries are going to drive you down and everybody's going to miss a payment here. And they're just out of being too busy growing your business. Dude, I've seen your house. You don't have financial problems, but you had a mid 600 score. It's not really fair the way it all works because a lot of times the most successful people I know are the ones with the credit problem. So I'm not going to let you off on that one. Well, look, you know, the house is great. Everything's great. But I also have nice

warehouses in every city that we're in. And guess what they do when I have to sign a lease for a warehouse? Well, guess what? The one thing they do. Pull your credit. Well, there's 30 of them. There's 30 of them right here. And when I looked at that, you know, I've tried credit repair. And I went through 10 years ago. I actually paid for my community college, Mesa Community College, with a credit card. And I didn't have the money to pay it. Of course, if I could go back, yeah, I got an education. But I slapped myself because I didn't realize how bad it could be and what I did in my credit

back then. So I went to one of those traditional places. And they said, we can't get rid of these hard inquiries. But look, I have two. I have two now. And I went from the mid 600s to the mid 700s within 30 days. Yeah. And that's the key.

And you mentioned the old fashioned company that you went to back then. The problem with credit repair, when you want to talk about credit repair, is that they charge a monthly fee and they just send out, you know, canned form letters every month by certified mail. And the longer it takes, the more money they make.

The industry is just wrong. And so they got, you know, minimum wage employees or offshore employees and, you know, cube farms pumping out these letters. And they got to get you enough results to keep you hooked, but not really. Well, you know what? It doesn't have to be that way. If you get real experts that really know the laws, that really care about helping you, they can make huge impacts in 30 days or 60 or 90, but it should never take longer. But it's not just the credit score. It's the inquiries. A lot of times I see a credit score hardly move at all. But when the inquiries go away, that makes you look better. And there's

just so much more to it, Tommy, because once we get through the credit, now it's about how do we access the best loans? And then how do we get our paydex? And how do we get our Dun & Bradstreet? It's a lifelong cycle and little businesses, you got to know marketing, you got to know your business, and you got to manage your access to capital. And that's why we're here because hopefully a lot of these people are going, yeah, I need access to the money too. Well, there's one word that comes to mind right here, Bill, and that's leverage. And it's using other people's money to grow. And most of us never had access to a low interest rate loan to grow the business.

Now, what I like what you do is you kind of consult so people don't go under. You know, you get this loan and it's a low interest loan. I mean, it's hard to get a low interest loan to grow a company, but there's a lot of people that go out and you know what they do? They buy a boat. Then they buy the little race car. Then they play video games. But here's the thing. I'm hoping that the listeners out there, the small business owners, big business owners, midsize, you got access to this capital. You're able to remove 30 hard inquiries like I did. That you use the money in a good way. And, you know, I've got these loans.

And, I mean, we're growing like crazy. But I don't mind having these loans because I have more assets than I have debt. And a lot more. Plus the business is worth money. I mean, there is an asset. I'm worth about seven to eight times my EBITDA, which is my earnings right now. So there's my net. So talk to me a little bit about this process because it was so simple. I paid for a credit report and we talked and you said, ding, ding, ding, this is what will happen in the next 30 days. And that happened. And then the score jumped. And I thought, you know, look, this isn't fake though. This is why I would never advocate to any of my listeners if this didn't work and I didn't try it myself.

Yeah. And you know what? Don't have too high of expectations because there's only so much that can be done, but there are legal remedies to remove things from a credit report like inquiries or derogatory accounts or whatever. You can't manipulate a credit report. I can't put things on there that don't belong. If somebody doesn't have any good credit and we take off all the bad, well, they're going to have no credit. It's not going to help. But if somebody's strong financially, yeah, I'm doing pretty good, but the credit doesn't reflect it. That's the person that can be helped the most. If somebody is in financial distress and they can't even make their bills, they need the debts to go away. They need consumer credit counseling or something else.

And that's just the credit repair piece. And really at the end of the day, that's just step one. And you hit on something that I just really want to drive home, I don't think anybody should access this and access the capital if they're not making it a point to listen to all the interviews and the shows and the programs you do with all the other service industry leaders, because it's about knowing what to do with that capital. You got to make the right decisions. We can give you the fuel to put in the car, but you go drive it into the wall, race not going to be won. Well, you know, I talked to a guy two days ago and he's probably listening to this podcast right now, but he said, Tommy, I'm working six crews, landscaping crews, three guys a piece. He said,

he's working 60 to 70 hours. His relationship with his wife and his kids are struggling right now. And he said, you know what? The first question I said is how much are you paying yourself? He said, well, how much is the company making? And I said, no, no, no. How much are you W2 employee you paying? He's like, well, I take money from the company and it's not a lot. And I said, so you're not paying yourself to work in this many and you've got 18 guys full time. I said, first of all, you're spending way too much money. When we looked at it, this is a 10 minute call and way too much money on we looked at it. This is a 10-minute call. Spending way too much money on labor. So when you do get this access to capital, one of the things I'd recommend is I'd jump on a call for 10 minutes and make sure your numbers are right. Because I like to put money.

Me and you are the same. Let's put this money into marketing. And it's just nice to have an option that when the guy, like yesterday, he needs access to two more trucks. He does a cleanup, you know, he's got the junk hauling. Oh yeah. Yeah. So he said, man, the truck is like 60 grand that the dump and all that stuff. And he just said, look, if I had two more trucks, I could grow. We figured out how to get leads at the right price. And I said, man, you got to call my buddy Bill. So, you know, the deal is it's just, it's deal is it's a game changer and it's doing the right thing.

And I remember the lady called me from the SBA, Bill. This is funny. And she goes, listen, they kind of want to know why your credit is a little bit lower than we think it should be. And I said, well, check it again. And guess what? It jumped. and guess what it was jumped and i know it's not going to jump for everybody but mine did but more importantly all those inquiries from 30 to 2 was just mind-blowing and the cool thing is it wasn't like writing all these certified letters like i did before yeah no no the way the service is done

essentially you go through you do a review you identify everything on your credit that needs to go. And then they'll guarantee that everything will be gone. And they either get it off or you don't pay. So there's no risk in it. They're very motivated to get it done fast, as opposed to the guys who are motivated to take years. Yeah. No, no, no. We don't earn the money. It's not officially ours until. So it just works. But like I said, you got to remember to take the extra steps. You got to do those things. No matter what, everybody should go through the analysis piece and just have somebody look at it and go, what could happen? What could I get? How much capital could I access if I were to do this? Provided you know what to do with the capital. That's the big one.

Don't bother if it's just going to help you dig a deeper hole. Yeah. And last year, I thought I was so cool. I had my credit karma. And I'm like, oh, I just moved up five points. But credit karma, it's not very accurate. And what we were able to find in my report, remember, you said, what is this? You missed four payments. And I'm talking, this is one of my smallest businesses. It's an e-commerce site. I said, darn it. My CP or, you know, my controller missed that one. I remember that last year. And it was just small. It was a small little payment, like 20 bucks on a credit card. And, but we got those removed. And that's what was a cool thing is we got these little smudges taken off.

And, you know, there's certain things we couldn't get taken off, like my mortgage for my house in Michigan, which is understandable, but that's not, the banks don't look at that and go, wow, this guy's an idiot because I have 50% equity in that house. It's paid, you know, I don't pay the PMI. So there's just a lot of cool things when you actually go through the credit audit. And here's the cool thing. You guys will sit down with anybody listening. If you go to homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash credit, I'm sorry, homeserviceexpert.com. You should go to the book too, buy the book. Homeserviceexpert.com forward slash credit. And you do a free audit and you guys are cutting what, 30% off to the listeners? Yeah. Yeah. I got to admit, I'm a little surprised by

that one myself when it came down from the finance people, but yep, 30% off. Same insider good guy deal you got. Well, look, I think that everybody here that's listening or watching this video, it's a game changer. And I think what I love the most is that, yeah, you should have good credit, but access to that capital, that extra $100,000 for those two extra trucks for this guy is going to cause a 300% growth because we figured out how to get them leads. We didn't know how to buy these trucks because look, I'm not signing for them. I've already got my own debt. Yeah. Nice building though. Love the studio. So what else could you tell us? Is there any

other secrets? Well, first of all, one of the things I always ask, we share an Audible account with 1,200 books. Give me your top three because I do this on every podcast and I'd love to hear. That's a tough one. Yeah. Put me on the spot. What is it? Men are from Mars and women are from Venus? No, but it's probably in there because I've got a wife in there and some daughters and I didn't buy Fifty Shades of Grey, just for the record.

But classics. Classics would be the E-Myth. I've probably given away a hundred copies in my life. I love the conversion code by Chris Smith that's recent. The sharing economy, learning about the new economy stuff.

How to be a capitalist without any capital, which is kind of a silly title. That one really worked for me recently. Dang, I can just go through. I can list hundreds. I couldn't name three top ones. The hard thing is traction. There's all these great books. Yeah, great one.

So what about you? Oh, man. Give me three books I should read. Three books. Well, there are, you already have them. See, that's the problem. So, you know, I think that some of the books that I go for now are truly, I can't read fiction. Can you read fiction? Do you still read fiction? I try. You know, there's a good book. It's called Alexander the Great. And we do have that in our account. And it's a pretty good book. But it's one of those because, you know, Alexander the Great was the second most dominant

person in the world. Number one was Genghis Khan. He took over because of the bow and arrow. But Alexander the Great took over most of the world. It's a good one. It's a good book. And it kind of explains who he was, how he treated his

fellow fighters or whatever yeah so there's it's too hard to pick but another good one that i uh the ultimate sales machine by chet holmes is always on there as well i always read that one once a year oh wow and uh there's a good book by uh oh raving fans it's a short little book yeah easy to read on a plane it's a it's an hour-long book. And what's that other one he writes? The mice one where they got the two mice. Who moved my cheese?

Who moved my cheese? Yeah. He's a hell of an author, isn't he? Yeah, and he's got quite a few. The One Minute. One Minute Manager. Yeah, One Minute Manager. That one's great.

We're actually reading that in the company. Oh, go to The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey. That's the sequel. It's great. You'll dig it. It's all about the management of monkey, the monkeys on your back. But yeah, it's that everybody should be an addict. Too bad we couldn't share our Audible account with everybody.

But either of us have those going in our car, exercising, working out anytime. I've always got a book going. See, I go two times the speed. He goes at three. And see, my girlfriend is like, this is gibberish. She thinks I'm listening to a Russian. Yeah. No, my wife refuses to listen to this stuff with me. She'll get in the car. She'll be like, shut that off. Can't even understand it. Yeah. I know that is. All right. Rambling, extra stuff. Well, no, this is great. I think that

we could talk a lot about marketing. And, you. And real quick, I just want to touch upon this because I want to deliver as much value as possible. You've really learned the art of Facebook marketing. And if we could just speak to that for a minute, because anybody who's watching this, go to homeserviceexpert.com for credit, get your credit report, see what's on it. And it's free. I mean, they're going to go through it with you. And it's something that can be a game changer because access to capital is what causes growth. But I want to kind of switch it here because I love what you do. You said, we were talking earlier before this podcast, and we talked about breaking the code and you learned to break it. I mean, you

said big clients, small clients. Yeah. What's the deal? Give us a good gold nugget here. I'm just telling you straight up. I've been doing marketing for 30 plus years since you were probably in diapers and can point to well over $30 billion in sales that I've generated. Fortune 500, Fortune 100 companies, you name it. And nothing, nothing in my entire life even comes close to Facebook, which is ironic because I don't really do Facebook. I'm an introverted nerd. I'm a recluse. So I change my phone number every couple of years so people can't find me. I don't want my

phone to reach. But Facebook, if I had one tool, that would be it because it's a knob you can turn for as much business as you want in any industry you want if you take the time to learn how to do it. And it's just so simple to go in and use the simple little add to. And the key is don't advertise all the time to people. See, here's where they make mistakes. People go out and they try to advertise to all of Phoenix. But David Ogilvie said it in the 1950s, the father of modern advertising, the key to advertising is reach, frequency, and impact. You got to reach the right people,

and you got to do it frequently. Well, you can't afford to stay in front of everybody in Phoenix. You got to understand your demographic, your avatar. Well, yeah, you got to get it down to a small enough audience that you can afford to be in front of them all the time. And 80% of your content is for them, not for you. It might be a meme or something funny or some tip or some whatever. Just reminds them your logo's on it. You mentioned the business, but you don't have to be selling all the time. I just want to, oh yeah. So that when the time comes, like the sticker on the inside of my garage store, when the time comes, I'll remember you. So if you do that and you get your audience down and you're

like, well, who do I market to? You start with all your friends and you start with the people, because when I give a little budget to Facebook and I boost it, and then I share it to my, my own profile, Facebook's looking to spend my money. So they're going to hit all my friends. And then my friends are going to engage with it a little bit. And then they're going to hit the friends of my friends. And pretty soon I'm keeping a nice tight network. And gosh, we should do a specific strategy sometime, maybe even come up with some tests. Well, we are. And defeat it.

So A-B testing is probably the most important thing. Because you told me in the beginning, you throw out 50 campaigns, see which one does better. I did a crowdfunding campaign. We took 36 tries before it actually started giving an ROI 36 and the 36 time. And here's what we did. We nailed it. We scaled it. And you know, I'm just as passionate about Google as you are about. That's his favorite book, by the way, nail it, then scale it. That's top five. That should be on everybody's list. Sorry. No, it's cool. So you've been doing marketing. And I remember, this had to be eight, 10 years ago, I walked into your building and you were setting up the green screen. You were buying cloth and you were buying these microphones and you were working with

mortgages. And that was my first green screen. Really? Yeah, I got it from you. Oh, wow. Look at this, though. This is cool. This is fun. Incredible. So, Bill, what I like to do is I want to give you the floor and I want you to talk to the listeners about one thing, one major thing they could take away today from this whole thing. Obviously, get your credit, get access to capital. Wow. That's a big one, but you know, give them with one final thought, something to do to take action today. Wow. All right. For starters, I keep a resource center on my own website with all the resources. And I also do weekly trainings. So if you want access to any of the things that we're talking about or tutorials or explanations, my website's Bill Hillis dad, but the resource Center, I just put it up. I smell that.

Well, I put it up at marketing3.com to make it easier because nobody can smell Hillestead. Marketing3.com. It'll take you straight into the Resource Center. Everything I've ever, because people are like, can you send me a copy? Do you have up? It's there.

I put it all there, copy of everything, over 50 tutorials, how to do it. But here's one tip right now. Tommy mentioned doing split tests. And I can show you examples, have them up on my site, where I was at $193 a sale for an event. And I took the video that I was using and I put a six-second clip on the front of it. Because the video was people talking, talking head. Nobody stops their scroll to look at it. So I put a funny little clip on the beginning to just stop the

scroll. $3.81. $190 to $4 was effectively the drop in sale cost with one little split test. I do fix and flip loans for a client, sell those. And I had a before and after flip picture. And we tested different ones. And I've got one, and again, I can show it to you. It's up there. One at 80 bucks a lead and one at $13 a lead. And the only difference is the picture in the ad. So here's your tip. Go to adespresso.com and get a one month free trial or whatever. And then what I do on Ad Espresso, they put up Facebook ads. Go into Ad Espresso and I write headlines because I never know what the people are like, give me a good headline. I don't know what a good headline is. I try all kinds of bizarre crap. So I'll throw out 10 headlines and they're like, now what picture should I put my ad?

Do I want the guy picking up the door? I do it with the woman standing in front of the door. I pick five different pictures. And I stick them up there. Yeah, the bikini one. Or sometimes it's the big chubby guy that sells better. You never know. So I'll pick five pictures.

I'll write five headlines. And then I'll maybe do a couple different text things for my post. And then I hit go and AdEspresso will take five times five times three or whatever I did. Permutations and just... I got 75 ads up. Okay. And it's also going to track who's converting. Like, yeah, if I'm selling marketing services, here's one for you, man.

If you're ever selling a marketing training, something, I've learned that I won't market to people who are actively seeking a relationship. My conclusion is you can want love, you can want money, you can't want both at the same time. Chase and tail, chase and dollars. So I won't market to anybody

who's seeking a relationship. That's one of the statuses on Facebook. When I'm selling real estate investors, I get double the ROI selling to Android users that I do to iPhone users. I don't know why. Wait a minute. You can put seeking a relationship on Facebook?

Yes. Yeah, because people are interested in. But I see all this stuff and I see the people that follow Tom Ferry don't convert for me as much as the ones who follow Brian Buffini trainers in the real estate industry. But all that comes from, but I run 75 ads and I'll put a couple hundred bucks.

I'll put those ads up and then immediately they start turning red. These aren't working. And this is all an ad express. Yeah. And then I'm shutting them off and I'm shutting them off and I get down to the few bets and the $80 leads gone $13 leads. And now I don't need my ad espresso account anymore. I can take my few good ones because I've found the best pictures, the best headlines, the best everything. Listen, this is a marketing three.com. I'm guessing there's about a hundred little

like what to do. Am I right? Yeah. A lot of stuff on there. A lot. Ridiculous. Well, listen, guys, if you want to know more about spending some time getting to know Bill and his people, go to homeserviceexpert.com forward slash credit and get to know Bill. Bill, I want to get you back on again. I want to dig into the bolts next time. We'll actually go on and we'll do a free Facebook account for me. Yeah, that'd be fun. Oh, I got one more form. Can I get one more? Yeah, do it, do it. All right.

Go Google Facebook profile migration. There's a link that will come up in the Google search to a secret Google or excuse me, a secret Facebook feature. Because a lot of times it's like this. I have a thousand friends on Facebook, but I have a Facebook page that only has a hundred followers. And so I'm the same way. Okay. So every day you get these invites from people going, so-and-so wants you to like their page and beg.

That's how we get people to follow our page. We go out and beg. And there's bots that do that and stuff. So instead, if you use the migration tool to set up a page, all I do is I click that link. By the way, it's also at that marketing three, it's row four. You go to row four, click the link for the migration tool. Facebook will jump up and say, hey, do you want to convert your profile into a page? Oh, yes, please. Okay. Here's all your friends. Which ones do you want to follow your page? Select all. Great.

Are you ready? Yes. Click. Boom. I got a page. And literally, I just took somebody from 130 followers on a page you've been working on for over a year to 2,200 followers. And it took less than a minute.

2,200 followers. And then you have two weeks. Everybody you like for the next two weeks will automatically follow your business page. But now your business page has that solid start that it needs to get going. Oh man, that's awesome. If you don't have any friends. You know what? You did two, so we got to end with an odd number. Give me a third one. Yeah. The third one is for all of the service providers out there, because too many of them

are men and they don't have Facebook. They don't have friends. Here's your hot tip. Tell your wife to go on a friend bender. Tell her who you want her to go on a friend bender for. Go meet these kind of people because people just accept requests. Get the influencers, all the businesses in your community. They're the best referral. But once you have a little target, send your wife out doing that for a week, two weeks, convert her page into your business page instead of yours. I'm not going to suggest that you merge them, but if you do, and I'll tell you that you mentioned mortgage, loan officer has 150 friends, wife has 2000, his processor assistant has 1500,verts them into separate pages. It takes time and effort. You've got to watch the tutorials. And I'm not saying this is easy,

but they merge them. They made them all into business pages for his business, merged them all. Everybody's included in the picture. And now he has six thousand followers. There's one little tip. I'll give you one more. I want this. Yeah. Make a video about taking care of your garage door, about how the spring, whatever, a boring video. Okay. Just any video. Don't be stiff. Don't be professional.

Nobody likes professional. They like real. So make me a one minute video. And then you put that up on Facebook, target everybody, anybody between the ages of whatever. And you boost it with some good money, maybe 500 bucks and you let it run. And what Facebook will do then is you go in and you say, build me a custom audience. And you just click on audience, custom video views, and then say 50%. Anybody that watches 50% of this video, it's kind of digging you.

And then you tell Facebook. And so we just did this, like with the credit stuff. We took anybody that watched a five minute video and built a lookalike audience. Because then you go back and you say, Facebook, give me a lookalike. And they'll give you an audience that looks like the people that watched you for a long time. And my lead costs on that particular thing fell by over 60% in one step. It is thousands of dollars a week. What if you made a good video? Like I made a pretty good video. No, it can be good. But the point is, it's got to be you because you want to market to people who like you. And the best, if we went to a bar and we were single and the goal was to get a phone number, you're going to go for the phone number

from somebody you caught checking you out across the bar. That's your best odds. Well, this is somebody who caught checking you out online. If somebody watches your garage door video or your plumbing video or your roofing, whatever it is, if somebody watches your video, and I don't even care if it's about garage doors. If somebody watches you for 30 seconds or more, because then Facebook will take that and they'll take 400,000 variables, everything about them, from political to religious, their behaviors, how much they spend online, where they click on what kind of video stuff you can never, ever begin to replicate. And they'll give you an audience that is 22 to 25 times more likely to do business with you. 22 to 25 times. And now you've got, so you don't market to everybody in Phoenix. You market to 10,000 people

that are just exactly like the 100, 300. You got to start with 300 people that you know dig you. 300 people that you know dig you. Then you go to the lookalike audience. Then you're done. So what you said earlier is a topa, right? Top of mind. What is this? You always want to be top of mind. Topa. Top of mind awareness is just being in front of that same person. You know, a lot of people buy radio ads and they dribble it all over instead of owning that audience. And I think I love this stuff. Guys, we can go. One last thing. I'll ask you this last thing. Facebook Live. If you're a business owner, how can you use Facebook Live to make you a lot of money?

And Facebook Live, it's no different than regular Facebook. Facebook just treats it better because they want it to be a big deal. So they show it to more people. But then you're going to continue to use the video. So here's your tip. Okay. Go out Amazon and look up Samsung Gear 360. You know, the virtual reality videos. Yeah, those ones that you... Yeah, you take your phone and go like this and it's like you're inside the house. Yeah. Well, that's the future of video. Okay.

Facebook knows it. Google knows it. YouTube. And so they spent hundreds of millions supporting it and building the infrastructure for it. So they give a very preferential treatment. Okay. Facebook knows it. Google knows it. YouTube. And so they spent hundreds of millions supporting it and building the infrastructure for it. So they give a very preferential treatment. Okay. So those little 4K virtual reality cameras, they're about this big. I put them on a selfie pole with a little tripod on the bottom, set it in the middle

of the room. It's the only video you can't screw up because there's no aiming. There's no framing at the right. No, it's filming every damn thing. Yeah. And then you stand back about four feet and you do your video. But because it's a 360, well, example, we did an open house post for a realtor. Regular photo, didn't even do a video, just a photo.

Regular photo, 900 views. Did the 360 photo, 1900 views. But here's the kicker. The regular photo had two engagements because Facebook's measuring your engagement to say, are you any good? Two engagements on regular photo, 226 on this photo. Because every time somebody's scrolling,

Facebook will make it move as it scrolls. And then if they Twitch, they'll be like, oh, check it out. That's so cool. And then they, well, they just engage. They just control the video. So if I was shooting a video about garage door stuff and I set one of these little bad boys, and then I just, I don't, again, am I in the frame? No, you're in the frame.

The tripod's in the frame. The rafters are in the frame, whatever. And so, so then I'm going to go blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the tracks and you need to oil and you get, and I'm going to do my little video, but it's three and people can look around and they can check it out and it it will double the results of all of your posts by using this hundred dollar camera there are i used to be thousands of dollars i'm going to buy this who knows that i'm going to buy this the minute i walk away by the way they're awesome because like it's my job a dad to like be the gopro dad when we go skiing and stuff with the kids and so it used to be gopro here and you're trying to ski and look back where you go and then did you get my crash no sorry i missed i mount this little thing on top of because it has

a gopro mount on top of my ski pole yeah i hold my ski pole up and i just ski and they're like did you yep got it got because then you can go pull out the regular photos of the regular videos and you get everything. Hanna bar mount for my motorcycle or my bicycle, neighborhood tours, kill it. But it's the only one that I can make work. I know there's a couple that are supposed to, but the Samsung gear 360 does Facebook lives. So imagine this, you, I, Dustin, Jim, whatever. We get a couple people, set it in the middle, and we do a roundtable. And have a conversation live.

And people can look around and be like, I don't know. You guys got to. But it'll blow up. You do Facebook Lives with the 360 and four people. Go around the room, introduce yourselves, whatever. Testimonial video. Hey, would you guys mind? And just set it down.

I want to do this. You know, we got 5,000 customers. How much? Because we give our technicians a little bit of a stipend for if you get a Google review, a Yelp is worth more if they get a video. Oh my God. How much do you think these videos are worth?

The before and after and a video and a testimonial from a customer. Just a simple one, not a professional one. Just like, hey, anyone showed up. Professional doesn't work. If Forbes said a real one, not a professional one. Just like, Hey, anyone showed up. Professional doesn't work. Authentic is the new sexy. When we produce videos for Facebook, we wouldn't do this because it's too professional. Although you and I are kind of, I am dorky anyway, but, but authentic is what sells and they're priceless. If you didn't post them

and here's the secret. Great. I got a customer. I do a before photo with the 360. And then I do an after and I got them in there and I'm just talking to them and I make it a one minute video. And then this is what I would do. I would post it to my business page because they're saying nice stuff about you. And I would say, you know, just want to thank the Johnson's so much. It's such a pleasure to work with them. You don't tag them. You share it too because it's on your business page. So the first thing you do is you share it a personal timeline because you always want it on your personal too. And then you share it to their, if you're friends with them, you can share straight to their timeline. When you put it

on your business page, you put a boost on it. 20 bucks. But I'm going to get 5,000 a month. 5,000 videos, man. Why not go all out? I got 5,000 customers. Bottom line. Go ahead. Go ahead. And I have examples up on my site. $20 boost. $20 boost, but you share it to their timeline. So you say share to friends timeline, to the Johnsons. And then Facebook shows a post on average to 16% of the people's. And I have 4,000. So 16% of them will see it. But what's going to happen is I put it on my page. I put some boost budget on, 20 bucks.

Now Facebook's going, I got to spend that 20 bucks. Where do I spend it? And then I share it to your timeline and you're in the video. And I'm saying, it was so awesome to work with you guys. I love your new door, blah, blah, blah, blah. And hopefully some call to action. If you guys like their door, hit, you know,

click like or share this, whatever. Send them a comment. Tell them what you think of their new door. And a bunch of your friends are going to action. If you guys like their door, hit it, you know, click like, or, or share this, whatever. Send them a comment. Tell them what you think of their new door. And a bunch of your friends are going to engage. And now Facebook's going to go, oh, look, here's a little sweet spot of engagement. And they're going to follow your friends to your other friends, your other friends. And the most common testimonial I get, most common testimonial is I just got a deal from somebody I went to high school with 30 years ago.

And I'm not even friends with them on Facebook because I hit your high school friends who hit that. And so everybody you went to college with, high school with, go drinking with, go to church with. Six degrees of separation, and now you're out to tens of thousands. Boom. So every time I get a testimonial, that's what I want from customers, right? I want them to tell their friends, but they don't know how to tell their friends. It's like, they're going to go out and drink. Hey, by the way, any of you guys got a garage door problem? Because my buddy, I can't do that.

But if I have, I'm saying nice things about you, you're saying nice things about me, and now all my friends see me going, this guy's awesome. And you're a cool guy. And it's, look, 360, I can check it all out. Oh, they should really clean up the cobwebs over there. And it's just cool. That is so cool. And if you did that post, by the way, we have like realtors do that. We tell them put a hundred dollar post on,

and you do that on every closing. Give them a little thank you gift. We average a little over 10,000 views of video per video. 20 bucks is. 20 bucks is going to get you over 2,000 views if you do this right on every closing. You're such a hard guy to pin down, but I might fly out to California. Well, listen guys, this is so good. You're coming back down. We're going to give,

why don't we just do like 20 bill tips next time? But hey, I appreciate it. Oh no, this is the funnest thing ever. Cool, man. Well, hey, thanks for tuning in. Catch you next time on The Home Service Expert. Don't miss the rest of these. These are important for you.

Follow this. Hey, guys, I really appreciate you tuning into the podcast. I wanted 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 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.