The Home Service Expert Podcast - Taking Your Marketing To The Next Level

Episode Date: October 10, 2018

Josh Elizetxe is an internet advertising veteran who started his impressive entrepreneurial journey at the age of 13. He has since built an 8-figure online business portfolio, and is currently a sought-after company advisor and angel investor in the advertising and technology industries. In this episode, we talked about influencer marketing, hiring, customer service...

This is the Home Service Expert podcast with Tommy Mello. Let's talk about bringing in some more money for your home service business. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields, like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership, to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello. Hey, guys, I'm here with Josh Elizechi, and Josh is actually one of my business partners,

but he's a lot more than that. Josh, how's your day going today? It's going fantastic, Tommy. Hey, I'm really happy to have you on. You know, just the audience, so you know out there, It's going fantastic, Tommy. Amazing guy. I met him going on probably 10 years ago. We trained at the same trainer at LA Fitness. We knew a lot of the same people and we decided to jump in the business together on an e-commerce site that actually is selling home service products, especially in the garage door niche. It's called Garage Door Nation. And the whole concept was is Josh is a mastermind when it comes to online sites. He was on the show MVP.

It's kind of like Shark Tank, but it's got the pro. It's got Liddell on there for boxing. It's got all these. Tell us a little bit about the MVP experience, Josh. I'll let you describe it because I'll butcher it. No, no, no, that's good. You got it right. It's like it's modeled after Shark Tank. It has celebrity athletes, kind concept there is most valuable partner.

So play on words there. And really what it is, is instead of injecting straight up cash, it's focused around the celebrity and the social media followers. And nowadays, social media is so powerful for business that in exchange for participation in the business, in this case, my teeth whitening company, we are able to promote the product to their audience. So Rob Gronkowski and Chuck O'Dell, actually everybody went in on the deal, including the host.

So it was the largest deal done on the show. And it was nice because I think I was, I don't know if I was the youngest on the show ever or among the youngest, but it was fun. It was truly a great experience. We went last. It was just me going up and presenting and it was the end of the day and I was cooped up in the, in the green room for 14, almost 14 hours.

And it went out there and it went incredibly well. I couldn't have asked for better. And so far we've been activating those partnerships. That was about seven months ago that we filmed and they aired a few months ago. And so we've seen not only an increase in sales, but we've also seen an increase in the way that we're and it aired a few months ago. And so we've seen not only an increase in sales, but we've also seen an increase in the way that we're investing in this business and growing this business. And so it's a very successful multimillion dollar business. We're in our second full year of selling, and we really are just barely tapping the top of the iceberg of $11

billion a year that's spent on teeth whitening in the U.S. every year. That's incredible. I think that's amazing. teeth whitening in the U.S. every year. That's incredible. I think that's amazing. When we talk about home service people, and whether you're in landscaping, plumbing, HVAC, you name it, you don't realize these strategic partnerships. And there's a thing out there called Nichify, and it's really taking advantage of social media followers. So somebody might have a million followers, and then LiftMaster, who's a garage door opener, might promote them of maybe just knowing that their garage door is closed or knowing that it's open with their new technology.

Tell me a little bit about this influencer marketing, and tell me how that works and how that applies to the home service niche, Josh. Yeah, absolutely. So I would say that, you know, influencer marketing is, has really reduced the barriers to entry for, you know, home service businesses to be able to find influencers that are either local, that could be national, that either are, maybe they're interior designers, or maybe they're known for something around house remodeling, whatever that is, figuring out how can I inject my brand, my company, into the conversation that they're having with their audience.

So if it's someone that is known for cooking, maybe they're a local micro-celebrity on Instagram and you go to Instagram and you search cooking or you find someone, oh, wow, she's really known for making really interesting food. Well, you can inject yourself in that in that conversation with the audience by offering to retile her kitchen or to redo the granite or to put a slab of granite on the island that she uses when she's taking photos. And now in exchange for offering her that either for free or at a discount, or many times you don't have to go through all of that. You can literally just send an email over to her and say, Hey, you know, I'm the local kitchen

remodeler. I love the recipes you make. Is there any way that we can either sponsor a post or share with your audience the type of work we do. Well, in that case, even if she only has 1,000 followers, 10,000 followers, 100,000 followers, now we're working with everyone from one follower to, right now we're working with people around 7 or 8 million followers. So anywhere from one follower to 8 million, obviously the pricing changes depending on that. But a home service company can say, who is my audience and what are they watching on social media that is somewhat related? I'm going to give you an example

because people like to overthink this and particularly in the home service space, because they say, oh, that's for products, not services. Totally not true. But let me give you an example of one of the posts we did recently. There's a guy named Beetlejuice. He goes by Beetlejuice. His real name is Lester Green. And he's known for being on Howard Stern. He was on Scary Movie 2, the comedy. Anyway, this guy is known for losing his teeth over the last 15 years, and he hardly has any teeth now. So why would a teeth whitening company ever want to work with Beetlejuice? Well, he's got a very, very connected audience because he makes people laugh. He's really well known. And the first thing you think about when you think about him is the fact

he doesn't have teeth. So it comes to mind, the teeth, that's all that matters for me. So that people are thinking teeth, they're thinking Beetlejuice. Oh, he's using teeth writing, that's funny, makes me laugh, typical Beetlejuice move. So I injected myself into that conversation. And that post got almost 40,000 likes, you know, in the span of a couple of days. And it drove directly and indirectly 10, 20, 30 times the value that we paid for that, for that partnership. And now we're thinking of different ways to expand that partnership with someone who doesn't have any teeth. And so that's just, I bring that example out because it shows how you don't have to overthink about it. Just have fun with it. If you do garage door services, who has really nice cars or who can I send them a garage door

opener, whatever it is, just talk to them or just pay and you say, Hey, can I pay you to talk about my service if you like it? Oh, absolutely. And so those are just ways to do it. And I've seen companies all the way back from Nike sponsoring Jordan and figuring out that partnership there to today, you know, Coca-Cola and the big guys are known for doing it. But now small businesses, I'm talking the smallest of the smallest businesses can now afford to take advantage of that influencer effect at any scale. And that's never been possible before. Yeah, it's incredible. And I was going to bring up Nike because when you look,

Tiger Woods lost his sponsorship, but you look at Roger Federer, you look at the top players, Nike built an empire around influencer marketing. And that's what you see in the clothing lines. I think it's absolutely incredible. And, you know, Josh, I didn't really give a big background about you. I think it's amazing incredible. And, you know, Josh, I didn't really give a big background about you. I think it's amazing your story, what you're doing these days to help out other people that maybe don't go there for a year college. You're actually such on the leading edge.

I mean, talk about how old you are, how old you were when you got started. I know your parents were having trouble with keeping the home and you were an affiliate. Kind of just tell us your story, lay it out there for us so people know who they're talking to here. Yeah, for sure. I started really in necessities and mother of invention. And I was 15 years old. I just turned 25. So that was 10 years ago. And I learned initially, I learned how to program because I was trying to get a job and I wasn't old enough to get hired anywhere. And I was trying to make some extra money to just have a little bit more money in my pocket. And I also wanted to learn a new skill.

And really, I learned programming not because I wanted to learn programming. It actually was I stumbled into this. I didn't want to be an entrepreneur. I didn't want to learn programming. I knew that I wanted to make a little bit of money. I wanted to help my family out. And I was at the public library at the time. And there was a reading program where you read a book, you take a test, you get points,

you can cash those points in for baseball tickets and all kinds of swag and all that. And so I was hanging out there when I wasn't playing football and I wasn't involved in track and field. So it's kind of the off season. And during the summer, I would spend a lot of time at the library and I was naturally competitive. And so I saw this program. I said, how can I get more points? Well, if I read boring books, I'm going to accumulate points a lot more quickly than if I read what everybody else is reading. And one of those books I picked up, it was a four dummies book and it was, you know,

how to make websites for dummies. It was interesting computers for sure, but I was kind of interested in like websites. I didn't know you could make them. I didn dummies. I was interested in computers for sure, but I was kind of interested in like websites. I didn't know you could make them. I didn't know, I thought you had to have a degree. Anyway, long story short, I read every book on that shelf, learned how to program and develop and design websites. And then word started to spread even at my high school

that I was able to make websites. And so of course, teachers were like, oh, Josh, my friend owns a cupcake shop and she needs a website. How much do you charge? And I have no idea that you could charge for this. So I went to Google, that was my, when I realized Google would become my best friend, and I typed in how much to charge for websites. And just one thing led to another. And people started to find out that there's this kid who can make websites really quickly in a weekend, they look phenomenal, they work perfectly.

And then one day a client came to me and said, Josh, do you know how to drive sales? It's, it's a beautiful website, but I'm not really getting the sales that I was hoping for. And I was like, Oh, I didn't, I didn't know that's what you hired me for. I don't even know what that is. So they said, if you learn that, you're going to be really powerful in the world of business. So then I went back to the library, read every book I could on sales and marketing, advertising, copywriting, everything that went really went over my head

at the time. But I was just so hungry to learn and to make a little bit of money to help my family. I started to make a few hundred bucks here and there from doing websites. I really felt empowered. And so that was my moment where I realized I wanted to be, I didn't know if I wanted to be an entrepreneur, but I just want to do this for the rest of my life. And it turns out that I was, I was becoming an entrepreneur. And so, so I ended up building that business up where we were, we were building websites. I started to hire people online. I was going to college at Arizona State University. That business ended up becoming very, very, very successful. And I sold that business. We had a bunch of people outsourced and offshore that we would use. And I finished college in two years. So I was 20 years old and I graduated my bachelor's

degree and then spent the next two years after that working pretty much 18 hours a day, seven days a week. You know, I put on a lot of weight and anyway, I ended up signing that business. And then I looked back and I said, I've always wanted to give back and help out in the community and be an inspiration for people that may not have that. And so one of the things we do, and I spend a lot of my time on, is called the Fleischer Scholars Program. And that's the largest summer program of its type. And it's at Arizona State University, which is the largest public university of its type. So what we do is we take underserved or underprivileged students that have a lot of ambition, a lot of fire in the belly. They really want to be something great. A lot of them want to

be in business. A lot of them want to be entrepreneurial. It is based at the business school at Arizona State. And this summer, we're planning on having 150 students, four or five different week-long sessions. They stay in the dorms. They learn about business. They learn about entrepreneurship. We have entrepreneurs come and talk to them. They learn what it's like to live on campus, how to fund scholarships, loans, federal aid, all that stuff. And so now, by the end of this summer, we'll have about 700 students that have gone through that program. And we're now at University of St. Louis. We're in University of Arkansas and obviously at Arizona State University.

And we're looking at expanding that to help more students that are really someone like myself that had a lot of fire in the belly and want to be something great, but didn't necessarily have a ton of role models around me or support or anything like that. And so that's something that I'm really, really energized by. And between that and running my holding company, which has several brands beneath it, between those two, I feel very, very, very, very balanced in my life. Yeah, that's great. I mean, at 25, you've accomplished more than most people out there in their whole life. So congratulations on that. I mean, there's so many things that I could talk about.

It's incredible everything you've done. But, you know, I'd say Josh is an expert at building funnels. And what a funnel is, especially in the home service industry, is just a way for people to find you other than going to Yellow Pages. So a funnel is, when we talk about top of the funnel, they haven't quite made it into the engine yet. If you think about what you fill, you get the oil and you put it in a funnel right at the bottom of the funnels when it's right about to make it into the engine. Well, that's when

people are ready to buy. Josh is good at hitting people at every single point of that funnel. And I really want to talk a little bit about because I know Josh is a master of this. He deals with high debt solutions. So that means if you've got high school debt, high credit debt, whatever your debt might be, he's also invested in a company that does that. He spends a fortune in Facebook. And I think in the home service industry, Josh, we really don't understand exactly how that works. And I know that you hit them at the top of the funnel. You educate them with lead pages, and then you convert them into a client. And I want you to really talk about your process

and how that could be applied to the home service niche. Yeah, absolutely. I think after having spent well over $100 million, mostly through clients' money that we were managing, I got to see very quickly patterns. You'd have to be a complete fool after 10 years and managing hundreds of millions of dollars to not recognize some patterns. And luckily, I've recognized some of those and now we apply them within my holding company and the investments we make. And one of the things we're always constantly tweaking is what does that funnel look like from the start of a business when the marketing budget is zero to, you know, now we spend several million dollars a year with Facebook through my own companies.

And we're rapidly growing that. But it's the same principles, the same concepts apply at zero than they do at 10 million a month. It's the exact same principles. And so what I like to say is one thing that I would say works really well, and I'm kind of famous for is, is really taking something and saying it differently or doing it differently. So for example, the home services business, you may have 10 competitors that are all offering the same set of services you are. And everybody's got, you know, you've got to compete to the level where everybody's got the BBB logo everyone's got the Yelp logo everyone's got all this stuff but it's so hard to differentiate beyond that and so what I like to do is I like to find what is something that we can do or say that is so different and

you look at you and I'm not this is the furthest I'm going to go into politics but all I'm going to say is if you study any politician, including our current president, what do they repeat over and over and over again? What is controversial but intriguing and it really stands out? That's what sticks in people's minds. It gets them talking. So now all of a sudden you have people talking about your brand, advocating for you, or maybe they're advocating against you, but they're talking about it. It doesn't matter. And so if you're, let's say you're in the garage space and it's like what we've done, it's like if you can't afford to hire a service company, maybe there are things you can do maintenance-wise to keep your garage door lasting longer. Or you look at tile and you say, you know, if you tile your home, you'll boost the value 8% and then go and talk on, you know, if you can get on any radio stations, podcasts, blogs,

or even just as you're meeting people and you say, instead of just saying, yeah, I do roof, I repair roofs. It's like, uh, okay. That's, that's kind of boring. Right. Versus saying, you know, really I'm a roofing scientist. Like I study roofs and the style, the shape, the materials we use. And we, we are obsessed with roofing. And all a sudden, it's like, wow, this dude is really passionate about roof. Even just the way you speak about your business, the way you present yourself, even if you're meeting one person. And then online, you translate that. For example, with our teeth whitening company, we say, okay, we're in the business of selling

confidence. And what we do is we ran a survey and we say, okay, why do you want a wider, brighter smile? Well, I'm single, I'm dating and, you know, social media and the set is popular than ever. So I don't feel as confident as I used to about my teeth and I can only make one first impression. So it's okay, we're going to take that and we're going to put it on the front of it. And we're going to say why Americans are obsessed with white teeth and it's like oh that's kind of intriguing that's but i'm not obsessed with it but let me see and it just grabs that so why phoenix residents are obsessed with redoing their roof or you know just taking that kind of

angle and as long as you can back it up with a good service i always say if you got a good service and you can back it up and you're not falsifying anything, you can highlight the truth. You can be an extremist. And you'll see it sometimes, you know, like we have a company, they're ring-a-ting. And I see all these things that stand out. And it's like, if you put a bigger monkey on your truck, that's one way to stand out. But another way to stand out is how you present your brand. And so when we talk about our debt solutions, we part with a lot of churches, and we are even down to the call center reps that we're hiring. We have a very Christian, faith-based angle.

And so a lot of times we'll, even if that means going through a prayer through the phone, I tell our guys we're not looking to sell anyone anything that they don't need. And if it can help them, then absolutely explain it to them and why it will help them. If they see that with you, great. If not, we'll call them back or they can call us back. We're not worried about slamming it down their throat. We're trying to stand out in their mind so that when they're looking across different funnels, nowadays people click your ad, your competitor's ad, the other competitor's ad, and they're trying to see which one stands out to me. So, yes, of course, you need the logos that everybody else has, sure. You know, they do carry some value. But at the end of the day, it's what stood out to me the most.

And so just think about your business. I know that sounds general, but think about your business and say, how can I do something, something completely different? Even if you look at Christian Louboutin, who makes the red bottom soles, women's shoes and guy's shoes, just by painting the bottom red and it stands out. Or when Apple came out with their ear pods or headphones, they made them white so that they stood out when people were carrying them in their pocket. Like, oh, what is that? What do you have? Oh, it's an iPhone. What can you do, even at the smallest level, to make you stand out? Even with the leave behind, instead of a magnet, is there something else that

you can leave behind that's different, unique? That's what I'm constantly thinking about, is how can we stand out in the consumer's mind? And that'll help you funnel all the way through, in our debt business, we say, okay, we'll help you on every type of debt you have, and we'll restructure it for you. We'll live and hold the payments for you. Well, since you've put the consumer in a position where they have no option but to say yes, and they feel good about it. And if you really have a good service, you can do that. So ask yourself, I would say, ask yourself in the home service market, how can you do something slightly different, or at least start today by speaking differently about what you do. Don't just say,

you know, I do X. Why do you do it or how do you do it differently? Start leading with that. So when people talk about you, they're going to carry that message along with them. I like that. It's all about differentiation. And, you know, one of the things that I thought was really clever is Josh will lead into the Facebook page, how I changed my credit score from a 420 to a 680 or a 422 to a 686. He was very specific in less than six months and they click on it and it's more of an educational process. And then they say, this is almost like a how to, and then it says, look, if you want help and you need help with this process, we can handle it for you.

Call us up. And how long does it take to convert that person that might end up looking for credit repair at that time? How long does it take to convert to a buy? Like they actually use your service? So usually, usually what it'll do, the way you know, I just want to mention something because I got this question the other day. How do you know if you're a good salesperson or you're a good business owner?

It's being able to take someone who may not be looking for exactly what you're looking for or what you're talk to that person and sell them on the benefits if it makes sense, if they truly agree with it. They say, when's the last time you looked at how much debt you owe across other companies? Oh, I haven't really looked at it. I get the bills and the mail and that. I say, what if it was more than you expected? And what if there was a way for you to save a few hundred dollars a month by doing that? They say, oh, wow, that's interesting. So usually it's anywhere from a day to a month.

I mean, up to a month. And sometimes it's longer because we can retarget that person for 180 days. It's just like if you talk to someone on the phone, they're thinking about redoing their roof, and it's a big purchase for them, it's a big decision for them. They may not be ready that same day to say, yes,'m ready now that would be the ideal situation but you can't give up on them and i think i think especially in the home service industry the art of the follow-up is so so powerful yeah follow-up is key i was just talking to josh before we started this about text messaging and how we started following up with our customers with text messaging and it changed the game.

We're getting a 30 to 40% response rate and everybody opens their text messaging. So I really think that there's something there with the new technology and just getting with people. You've done everything from Facebook to SEO to pay-per-click management. When we talk about marketing and you've built a lot of websites, we've done a lot of stuff together, where do you think most small business owners, you know, the ones with three or four

guys, where do you think they need to get started? If you were to go sit down with a business owner today and you said, look, this is stuff that's going to take some time. If you had to go from A to Z, tell me the flow of where to get started and what big ones to knock out of the way, the 80-20 rule. I would say number one for sure would be make sure your business is everywhere,

especially if you're a local home services business. You want to make sure that you're on yellowpages.com, yp.com, you've got a Yelp listing, you've got a Google Maps listing, and that's totally free. It just takes time. You know, if you spend an hour a listing, you've got a Google Maps listing, and that's totally free. It just takes time. You spend an hour a day. And you can go on Google and you can search some of your competitors and see where are

they at and make sure that you're on those places as well. That'd be like the lowest hanging fruit. The second lowest hanging fruit would be on the retargeting side. So there's a ton of companies. It's very easy to set up. You don't have to be a computer whiz at all. There's companies like AdRoll, A-D-R-O-L-L.com, and there's 100 others, Perfect Audience. Even Google's got their own.

Google AdWords has a retargeting solution. You know, and it takes five minutes to set up. All you're doing really is you're adding a little line of code to your website that allows Google and Facebook to tag that visitor. So maybe you only have five people a day come into your website. Maybe you have 500. Those people are not going to make a decision in a heartbeat. And if they leave your site and they never come back and you never follow up with them, they're gone.

And so that's the second low-hanging fruit would be set up a retargeting. You only pay when the person clicks. And here's the deal. Someone already raised their hand and said oh i'm looking to get my roof redone on my kitchen remodeled on my cabinets to be done they raise their hand they're clearly interested they come to your site and then if you never follow up with them you essentially did all that work the hardest work and they're going to end up going to your competitor because your competitor is going to either captivate them

more quickly or they're going to do the follow-up and that's when the decision is going to end up going with your competitor because your competitor is going to either captivate them more quickly or they're going to do the follow-up, and that's when the decision is going to happen. So I would say retargeting costs maybe a few bucks a day depending on how many visitors you're getting on your site, of course. But it could be as cheap as a few bucks a day or even less. The price is not really a concern because even if you spend a few hundred bucks on it and you're able to close a few more deals, that alone makes it worth it. So I would say billing, what I like to say is leaky bucket analogy you're you're currently your efforts are a leaky bucket how can you fill as many holes with the fingers that you have already and don't over complicate it if this is too difficult okay start start with the the yelp listing the google listings you have yellow pages insider pages city, city page, all these places,

make sure you're on there. Second, when they're coming to your site, make sure there's a way that you're tagging them and following up with them. And you just have to be any fancy. It can literally just be a simple little text ad that says, come back and get $100 off your first service, or come back and get free coffee mug.

I mean, really anything to just say, hey, I'm still here when you're ready to make a decision. Yeah, that's that's so amazing. I mean, retargeting is something most people don't talk about it. And in Facebook, they call it pixeling. And it's being able to show up again and again. And, you know, they say it takes us seven times to save someone's name and actually put it into memory. Well, a lot of times people need to see your ad more than once for them to act on it. And that's what retargeting allows us to do. And I love that advice.

Seven out of 10 baby boomers are gonna be getting out of the industry in the next 10 years. And a lot of them don't know how to get ready to sell a business. And I gotta tell you, it's not very appealing to me to wanna buy a business that doesn't have a CRM, that is not using iPads, that is not monitoring call recordings of their call center.

I think that it's a huge leap for a lot of business owners out there that might have been just used to doing yellow pages 15, 20 years ago to now have to change all this stuff right before they're getting ready to retire, maybe even as close as one to five years before they're ready. What's the best way to kind of digest that and get the ball rolling with that? Yeah, I mean, that's a good point. I was just earlier today, I was with my great friend, mentor, and partner in the nonprofit foundation, Biker Scholars Program, and he's 81 years old, and he's got an iPhone.

He's on email. He uses that iPhone almost as well as I do at 81 years old, and it's because he's removed the limiting belief. He has three public companies. Warren Buffett's one of his business partners on the business side, and he already has $16 billion in the capital market. The reason why he's so successful is because he's never stopped learning. He's never made excuses saying, I'm too old or I'm too good to do this. Still at this day and

age where I'm at, obviously, I'm a little more tech savvy than the average bearer, but I'm learning things that sometimes that I maybe shouldn't be learning, quote unquote, I should be delegating before even learning them. But I like to know about what we need to be doing. And so I challenge anyone. I don't care if you're 75 years old and you're trying to get out of the business. You're 80 years old. If you're like my buddy, he's on his iPhone.

He's doing it. He checks his email. He's researching on Google. He's sending me articles. And he's incredibly brilliant. But the fact that he never makes an excuse for not figuring something out. We were even having conversations

about cryptocurrency, Bitcoin. And he caught on, of course, right away, but still asking those questions. I think a lot of business owners become complacent. They say, oh, well, I'm used to doing things this way. Word of mouth is all my business, and it costs me zero. Why am I going to make excuses and you feel overwhelmed and you don't want to spend an hour a week learning a new skill in this new world of small as you want and say, how much would it cost for you to set up all the websites like Yelp? I want to be on all of them. Or how much would it cost to update our website so we can retarget people? Oh, $500?

Okay. I'm going to make that money back 500-fold because what you mentioned, Tommy, is it's not just the return on investment you're going to make on the ad spend of what you're actually spending, but you're building value in the business. And if you're going to exit, and I'm the same way, I buy businesses not as often as I was a couple of years ago, but I'm buying websites, I'm buying businesses. And I'm looking at two things. I'm looking at what have they done to keep up with the market and the competition? Am I catching a falling knife or am I catching a rising star? And two, are there areas in the business that they're not currently capitalizing on that I'm an expert at that we can activate and make the business much more valuable as a result of that? So I'm looking at both sides though. I'm not just looking at one, I'm looking

at both. And if I see a business that has been all it's all word of mouth, there's no CRM, there's no online presence. Yes, that gets it on one side. Yeah. It gets me excited because I say, oh, that's my specialty. We can really turn this business around. But it also doesn't excite me because now I'm like, ah, it's like so much work. I'd rather find another business that has the ball rolling. They've got retargeting. They've got the stuff going, I'd rather catch a rising star than a falling knife. Even though I can turn the knife around, it's a lot more dangerous and a lot more labor-intensive for me to do that. And so I would recommend each and every one, everyone listening,

to really think about how can you level up your business. And if you're not leveling up, that means you're being complacent, you're leaning on word of mouth, and all this stuff. I hear it all the time. Oh, that's not for me. Oh, I don't have someone that could do that. Oh, I'm not tech savvy. You can either make excuses or you can take action.

But I'll tell you what, time and time again, I gladly overpay when I buy a company when I know that they're a rising star because they put the things in place to do that. So don't think of just, oh, if I'm going to spend $5,000 and I don't make that exactly back, what other value are you building in your business that when you want to sell it, someone's going to be impressed by that and not haggle you on price so much because they're impressed by the balls that are in motion. Yeah, that's so true. I mean, I look at their online assets now. I think that's such a big deal.

And honestly, at this point, I'm looking for people that at least have a culture that's built for change, meaning that they're OK with tablets. But I'm not looking for that company that's got all the management and everything figured out because I will pay a premium if they do figure out their stuff. I'm looking for guys that are kind of unorganized. They don't have meetings regularly. The staff, they know what you expect of them a little bit. You don't monitor them.

You're not keeping track of the calls booked or their average tickets. I mean, those are the perfect companies because I go in there, it's decent, throw in some systems, really dump all the trash that they're marketing with because they don't know what's working and what's not. So you throw some SKUs on there, some call tracking numbers, and all of a sudden they're doing 200% what they were doing three months ago. And you're

monetizing tickets better. You're using their stickers that have been out there for two dozen years. It's fun. And I just don't want the people listening to be one of those people that someone says, look, you didn't even switch to iPads. You have no idea what your call tracking is. You don't know what your average ticket is. You don't know what your conversion rate is. You don't know what Google is retargeting. Your website hasn't been updated in 12 years. It's not worth a lot. I got to tell you, Josh, I think we're headed into a time here that it's a whole paradigm shift.

And it's going from mine and your type. We're kind of the same. I shop everything on Amazon. I like things that I don't go to my neighbors and ask them. I typically will go online and do research before I'll hire somebody. And, you know, I look at a couple of companies and I don't want to go into too many names, but there's some carpet and tile stores out there that have a really bad reputation on Yelp. But they do a lot of TV and radio, mostly TV, and they crush it.

They absolutely crush numbers. But guess what? They're not very moral. I don't think they're going to make it through this change. Last year was the first year that the millennials bought more homes than baby boomers. And as that starts to change, I want to talk to you about what you think we need to do to get ready for this change in the home service industry. I'll tell you what, I would say that nowadays, back in the day, you could get

away with the brand not having a voice. And now because of social media and the fast response times that people expect. And millennials want to be able to live chat. They don't want to pick up the phone and call. They want to live chat or they want to text or they want to email. They're not hopping on the phone anymore like they used to. They're not asking their neighbor. They're not picking up the yellow pages and sitting through an encyclopedic amount of options.

They're online. They're doing their own research. They're working their way through the funnel on their own versus setting an appointment with you and you're walking them through the funnel from the top to the bottom. The nice thing about that is that it's made selling so much more efficient and scalable and so if you can, someone's going to educate your customer and if it's not you it's going to be much harder to sell them at the bottom of the funnel than it will if you're the one teaching them.

So if you're creating YouTube videos, I don't care if 10 people watch them or not. I don't care because you're creating content that is evergreen and you're putting it out there on your website, you're putting it on your social media, your Facebook pages, you're updating them. And what millennials want, people in general, they want to be able to hop on your website. They want to feel that it's user-friendly. It answers their questions right away. No fluff.

They can hop on live chat with you. They see real people. Humans are behind it. They see your Yelp reviews because now it's like if they mess up, you know, I can go on Yelp and I can leave a bad review. I mean, that's just the truth. It's an insurance for people now as they're shopping. And if they come to your site and they see helpful information, they see an ROI calculator, they're able to live chat. If they call, you know, you pick up the phone, you can text them. The more that you meet your customer where they're at, and it's changing at a rapid pace.

And I see, not just millennials, every consumer now is wanting to do everything, all the work from their iPhone. They want to research. They want to go to your website. If it's not mobile-friendly, they're going to run away because they said this is a sign that this business is probably sloppy or they're probably out of business because their website looks so crappy on my iPhone. There's no live chat option where if your competitor has that, all of a sudden it's like, huh, now I'm at work. I can't hop on the phone right now, but I can certainly get on live chat. Oh, wow, let me book an appointment right through live chat.

And once that appointment's booked, you've lost that customer. I don't care what you educate them. And there's solutions that are totally free, like t-a-w-k.to, talk.to. It's 100%, 100% free live chat solution it's phenomenal even if it's you doing in your spare time in between projects or jobs or customers or your downtime whatever you can be sitting there talking to your your audience and it'll just ring or ever notify you and someone wants to chat with you but being able to have that touch point just imagine how

many people are coming to your website or coming to your pages or or wanting to interact with you but they can't because you only have one option for them you can't text you can't live chat you'll have to call and for me i like to be able sometimes i'm at the doctor's office in the waiting room and i'm on live chat setting up an appointment for whatever it is even for my uh like i get massages here and there. I've got chronic back pain. I get massages. And Massage Envy just revamped their entire system where you can book the schedule or you can book the massage and see the schedule online. I don't have to call anymore.

I don't have to ask, oh, is so-and-so available? What time is she available? I can see her right there. And guess what? I'm doing all the work. Instead of your front line of having people on the phone, the customer is doing all the work, and they're actually happier. I think to me it's nuts. It's like how Costco – you go to Costco, and they have all the stuff out there from the pallets.

It's not even nicely presented. It's just there, and people love it, and people buy more of it. And it's like, wow, I can get the customer to do all the work for me, and they come to me with their credit card out. And now I don't have to talk to them. I don't have to sell them. My website can do all the talking. My videos can do all the training and education. And all I have to do is how would you like to pay today, sir? So that you're either going to spend a little bit of time, not really even money, but spend a little bit of time and money to upgrade and update your business, or you're going to fall behind. And so as a business, if you don't adapt, you die, and you can't track what you don't measure. And so you

always want to be asking yourself, am I missing something on the table? Am I working so much in the business that I'm forgetting to work a little bit on the business? Well, guess what? In this cutthroat market, I don't care how fast growth it is, someone is trying to eat your lunch. And so you always want to be figuring out ways. It doesn't have to cost money, but figure out ways to stand out. So you're continually ahead of the curve. Yes, sir. I got a couple of books right here that I'm showing on the thing here. Purple Cow, Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable. The other one's called Raving Fans, a revolutionary approach to customer service.

Both those books talk about differentiation. And to create a fan is not good enough anymore. You want to have a raving fan. Customers need to have this day and age with technology. There's so many choices. You know, Josh, I used to have an IVR. And an IVR is basically press one, press two, press three for accounting, press four. Well, what I found was that only works in businesses that you're stuck with, like your alarm company or your cable

company. You call a garage door company, it feels like a national company and people hang up right off the bat. And we stopped that. We answer phones now, we're averaging six and a half seconds per call and people are super impressed. And I got to tell you, technology has changed the way we do business. I mean, it's just, it's remarkable. And I don't think a lot of the people that are retiring in the next 10 to 15 years realize that if they don't jump on board, their company is going to be worth less and less and less each year. And they say, no, no, I've heard this before. I've heard this before. Well, I can tell you, my number one source, well, wrapping my vehicles was the best thing I ever did. But the people remember my wrap and then they recognize me from Google. They go to Google, they go, oh, that's the guy with the wrap trucks everywhere. They still go to Google. So they work hand in hand. Google, Facebook, Amazon. I mean, you talk about power hitters. I went to LeedsCon this year, Josh, and I learned a lot about data.

And I'm learning a lot more about data. Tell me why data is the most powerful thing in the universe for a business and building a list of clients. Well, I would say without data, you're really shooting blind. And I'm not saying you have to track every single thing. We try to track as much as we can because we know that that's how Walmart came out of the business. One of the ways it came out of the business, and that's now how Amazon is trying to take Walmart out of the business. We're talking hundreds of billions of dollars a year in sales. They are using data better, and Netflix took out Blockbuster.

How? With data. They figured out what are people watching? What do they like to watch? How do we get them to watch more of it? And Blockbuster was just like, huh, come on in, look around, figure yourself out, spend three hours trying to find a solution for a movie you want to watch tonight versus Netflix says, no, you know what, Tommy, we know exactly what you like to watch. Here's 10 options based on your data. You're like, ah, actually, this is really good.

So using the data like that is so, so important. So, for example, if you're able to know ahead of time what does the customer's home look like, what does the demographic look like, and you can even model this out on an index card that you give to all your sales guys or anyone on the phone and say, okay, if it's someone who we recognize is a veteran or someone we recognize lives in a two-story versus a one-story house, how do we talk to that customer differently? How do we utilize that data? And how do we drift that all the way back to the marketing on the top of the funnel? So for example, one thing we do is we have a female landing page and a male landing page. So if someone identifies themselves as female, we're going to talk to them about the benefits that are specific to a female. So for example, a financial services company that I own, what we

do is we try to figure out, okay, does this person have college debt from student loans? Are they a mother? Are they a father? Are they married? So we cater our messaging to them and say, spend more time with your kids or be able to, you know, what would extra $250 mean to you and your kids if you could save that every month and we could guarantee that? So we're crafting our angle of marketing messaging to that person. And you can do it at a micro level, literally a one-to-one. If I look over, I look at my girlfriend and I see she's not in the best mood. I'm not going to say, let's go and party or something. I'm going to say, you know, I'm going to ask a couple of questions. Are you hungry? Are you tired? You want to take a nap? Yeah, I'm kind of hungry. You know, I'm kind of grumpy. I'm kind of, I haven't had a chance to eat today. Oh, great. Well,

what are you feeling? And I'm going to cater my conversation to my audience. And we do it on a day-to-day basis. We're just not very cognizant of it. And so I try to be very deliberate in the way that we write our website copy, the way that we talk to customers on the phone, the way that I present myself to anyone that I meet. I'm constantly catering to my audience. And I think that we get so stuck in the monotony of our businesses sometimes that we forget how powerful catering and targeting can be. Yeah, that's very powerful. I agree with that.

You know, I wanted to spend a few more minutes with you right now. I just love these conversations because they're so powerful. And we don't get a lot of people on here that are so driven by technology. And you just know that stuff like the back of your hand, it comes second nature to you. But I've seen you literally walk into my office and shoot a video on your iPhone with a little mic and have it edited by the time you get home in the car. And it's good enough to use online. And I think we just touched upon it earlier, but you got to start out with the seven or the 10 largest questions you get over the phone and build FAQ videos on your website and demonstrate yourself as the powerhouse. Lawyers do how to build an LLC. Look, I'll show you how to do it, but it's easier if we do it. And it really does help

present you as the authority in the industry. And I think that's where a lot of companies make a mistake is they don't grab that ownership. But, you know, Josh, the biggest problem I see in the home service industry is hiring. And I'm wondering from your technological background, if you were to hire need 10 good employees, what would be the biggest way to throw out the biggest funnel or the biggest rope there to catch as many people as possible? Well, that's a good question.

So what I've been having a lot of success with lately is I've been looking at who are my competitors, or they don't have to be direct competitors, what are local people I really look up to? And so, for example, if I hire the designer uh web designer or graphic designer I'm thinking which local company has really good billboards really good website or really good graphics and then I go on LinkedIn I find their their profile for free the company's profile so

let's say it's Pizza Hut I love Pizza Hut Hut's design. I'm going to find their design. Obviously, Pizza Hut is massive and they probably use the agency, but I'm going to dig around and I'm going to spend an hour or two looking for the people that I want to hire because I'm going to pay a little bit more for an A player that is going to get me to where I want to go to. So I'm looking at which company is at least one or two levels above me and who are the people that helped get that company there and how can I get them interested in working with us. And so I'll go and I'll essentially poach through LinkedIn and send the message. And, you know, I think we pay LinkedIn, I don't know what it is, a hundred bucks a month or something for

the access to be able to send a bunch of messages. So you can go on. Yeah. Yeah. In mail. Yep. And so we'll go and do that. That's one way we'll do it. That's been really effective for us because we can do very targeted, again, all about targeting, hiring the data, go and say, oh, I really love this company. They're bigger than us. They're not a direct competitor, but I'm looking for this type of role.

And I'll message five or ten of them, of the people directly, and say, hey, I'm looking for a programmer, or, Hey, I'm looking for an executive assistant. And I was wondering if you knew anyone that would be interested. Here's a little bit about our company. Really appreciate it. And then I usually get, you know, 20, 25% of people that respond and they'll either say, no, I don't know anybody or, Oh,, actually, you will say, oh, actually, I'm interested. And by the way, the other follow-up is you really want that person. You should always be in the market for great people. And so following up with those people as well and say, hey, just want to let you know we just got on the Inc. 500 list.

Or, hey, just want to let you know we just won the best Phoenix plumbing company, you know, literally just following up with your talent, your potential talent as well is huge because you can't grow to a massive size or even a substantial size. And I'm talking, you can't even grow to 10 million without having the people, a million or even a hundred thousand, because at the end of the day, it's either you or the people. And eventually it's the culture and the team that you're building that is really going to help you propel you into success. And that was something I had to learn very quickly as an entrepreneur that if I wanted to scale, I need to hire really good people. And honestly, I could talk about other methods, but LinkedIn is so massive.

And I'm talking any, literally, if you're looking for a janitor or you're looking for anything, you'll be surprised what you'll find on LinkedIn. And maybe you won't find the janitor directly, but you'll find someone that knows someone there. And it costs a few bucks to message someone and a little bit of time. And you can find amazing people versus posting your job ad on 500 places. You can do that too. Totally fine. But usually when I do that, I get an influx of hundreds of people. And now we have to sift through them, got to interview them.

I kind of like to go for sniper shots if possible. It depends on the position I'm hiring for. But that's been the strategy that's been working best for us. Yeah, I like that. Anytime I'm out at a QT or a restaurant and I see a busboy or a doorman that's overly amazing. I mean, they go out of their way. They're smiling. They're comfortable with everybody. They're working their butt way. They're smiling. They're comfortable with everybody.

They're working their butt off. They're making things work when most won't. I give them a card and I say, look, if you're ever looking for an opportunity, you would kill it in my business. And that's one of the ways that I incentivize my employees. We're all over every single place. The problem is, Josh, there's too many people out there that are looking for jobs that just are trying to fill out an application. So you say, respond to this with with I love garage doors in the summer. They don't do that. They're automatically not. They didn't read your ad.

So you have it in bold letters. And rather than say what the job is and what you're looking for, tell them what they're going to get. You know, people are selfish. So you're going to get the benefits of working here. The culture, the drive time is less. Everything that you're going to get from working for us and what our main vision is. We're a growing company looking for very competitive, strong people to grow it with. There's no limit to your success. And when you explain what's in it for them, you get so much more out of it. You know, Josh, we're running a little short here. I wanted to ask you, you read a lot. You know, you, we're running a little short here. I wanted to ask you, you read a lot, you know, you're a big Audible fan like me. I wanted to ask you a couple of books and I don't care what they're pertaining to, whether it's home service or SEO or anything, or even a biography. What are some books that you've read in the last year that you'd recommend

for the listeners out there? I would say one of the books that is very not known at all. I think they brought it up a couple of times that really was a good one called Six Tires, No Plan. It's a biography about the founder of Discount Tire who passed away, unfortunately, a couple of months ago and talks about how he has 70,000 employees that all were very service-oriented. You know, they did one thing very well. They changed tires and make billions of dollars a year in revenue doing that thing, but they do it better than anyone else.

And it was really interesting to see how he started out with no plan and kind of evolved it, and really the people aspect. I would recommend Six Tires, No Plan. And, of course, there's other ones like Shoe Dog. I mean, I read a bunch of books, but I would say one that's kind of off the beaten path a bit. Really something that a home service entrepreneur would really gain a lot from. I would recommend Six Tires, No Plan. And I forget the name of the author, but it's the story of the discount tire founder.

Yeah, I'm buying it right now. It's let's see here. It's by Michael Rosenbaum. Yeah, that's it. Really good stuff, Josh. There's one thing to leave the audience with as we're parting ways here. I'm going to talk to you a little bit afterwards, but what's one final thought to leave them with?

You know, there's so many things going on. They've got to hire. They've got to think about CRMs, marketing, all the changes going on, iPads, websites, retargeting. How can you break this down for them? Tell us some final thoughts and not to make it so much to think about. Yeah, exactly. I would say this. There are only two or three things a year that you need to focus on that will substantially move your business forward. And so figure out what are those two things this year that you're

going to focus on and drown out the noise, right? So just pick the two things, focus on that, and momentum leads to more momentum. That's it. Yeah, it's kind of the 80-20 rule, right? If you could just find one thing, even this week, and don't take on anything else until you accomplish, it's kind of like when I read a book, like get through the first book before you start another book, unless they're completely opposite and one's more of a novel that you're just read on the weekends. But, you know, I agree with that wholeheartedly as we take on too much and you can't fix one thing at the same time as another thing because you drop all the bolts. Butosh look as always it's always a pleasure to

have you on i really admire you as a business partner and a friend i remember when you just turned 21 and you showed up at tequila at one of my uh parties about ah it was probably four years ago actually but i've known you for a long time got a lot out of every conversation we have and uh unfortunately we don't get to spend enough time together, but thanks for coming on. And I'll have you on again soon, okay? Yeah, thanks so much, Tommy. I appreciate it. This was the Home Service Expert Podcast.

Now I've got some great news for you. You want more money, time, and freedom? If yes, I put together a free training session where I reveal my four-step process to grow your service business up to eight figures without having to compromise your freedom. Check it out at homeserviceexpert.com forward slash webinar. If you're working too hard and you're not getting results, you better watch this training session now. Just go to homeserviceexpert.com forward slash webinar.