 Hey, good afternoon everybody Tom Stewart here our guest host today is Carrie Knight filling in for Liz and our guest today is Michael Grigory Hey Michael, how are you today? I'm doing fantastic Tom. Thank you so much for having me. Hey Karen's good to see you again, too Good to see you as well This is really awesome because this is the first time for Michael to be on smart business moves And we were chatting a little bit before we went live and we've got some really cool stuff We're gonna be sharing with you today. I mean it's More focused on marketing and sales and it's really timely for that because somewhere through this whole process We're gonna be sharing a marketing calendar as well. And guess what? It's the end of the year getting ready for 2023 We start thinking about calendars So, you know, we plan this out in a really, you know, thoughtful way It's gonna be awesome And I'm being sarcastic because you guys know we never plan anything. It just kind of happens Oh, you could have got away with it Tom. We get lucky. We get lucky every once in a while Michael you want to take a few minutes and just share with our audience a little bit about yourself Yeah, absolutely. It was gonna get awkward. You say planning is gonna be awesome Because I don't know like one out of ten people enjoy the planning process. They like the doing part, right? It's like going to the dentist. Yeah. Yeah, so yeah, thanks again for having me Tom It's awesome being here. So yeah, my name is Michael Grigory. I own a marketing company called click call sell I'm also a business coach through the conquer program I've been in home services for the past 12 years I started into the franchise world of the franchisee that a marketing director a brand manager a digital consultant I left franchising in 2019 to start my business click call sell as well as start conquer coaching that's how I met Kerry and Fast forward to today our company has over 200 active subscription clients across the country or three countries in only home services And I'm a data nerd. I love just taking numbers and analyzing them and figuring out what the best way to put that data into action would be Wow, so you started off as a franchisee What uh, what service were you offering? Exeter cleaning. So it's a national home service franchise called window genie When I started with them. I was like franchisee probably 28 29 I did that for about 11 months and became really close with the founder. He's retired now, but Still one of my mentors a great human. Um, so realize that the issue was in marketing I was doing digital marketing before franchising for real estate And when I applied the principles of digital marketing to window genie Like we were the first franchise who had over half our sales coming from market like the internet in 2012 So rick this just said well, we need to do this for everybody So shifted me into marketing and then we went from 25 to 125 locations of about five years And that's where I just basically learned everything about franchising home services They were acquired by neighborly. I think everybody's heard of neighborly They own all the misters. Mr. Handyman. Mr. Rooter. Mr. Electric grounds guys molly made and for them I was a brand manager digital consultant and just learning from some of the smartest most brilliant minds at home services for a couple years And decided I could help small businesses outside of the franchise world. So I left Holy cow, you know, I guess most of us as as cleaning business owners Have some level of of of experience with, you know, marketing and in the digital world Within our own companies, but you've kind of been doing it for Hundreds of companies. So the things you've learned through that experience We're gonna this is this is really cool So 2012 and you were kind of like breaking new ground with with the type of marketing that you were doing What did what did their Typical what did the marketing playbook look like before you started, you know working your magic? Yeah, nobody's asked me about what we did in 2012. I haven't thought about that in a long time Yeah, so before a digital it was they were still in the yellow pages 2011 like you still had a yellow pages ad a lot of direct mail For us to be money mailer just hit right now um networking b&i chamber of commerce um And that's pretty much what they did. I mean they're the google existed But people weren't really on google ads in 2011 2012 like they are right now and so we launched a pretty aggressive google ads campaign in the Cincinnati location where I was and uh, just Set it on fire. I mean it was amazing what the results were and so we just I'm not sure if we were the pioneer of Google ads, but we'd launched that for all the locations and that's what really was the catalyst for the growth From you know 25 to over 100 locations. Well, Michael, you got me reminiscing now. Carrie. You remember the yellow pages Oh, yeah, absolutely Yellow pages, uh, you wanted your company named to be like a one services So you showed up right at the top. So that was your No It was a it was a love hate relationship working with the yellow pages was at the beach, but It was easy. You just spend more money than your competition. You get that full page ad and you just set back to your take orders I miss the irony is now with google if you spend more money than your competition You just take orders. So it's pretty much the same thing just digital. It's a little more complicated though I guess that's a good thing for you. That's why you have a business doing this, right? Yeah, good point. Some people just don't want to do it. You don't know how to do it for sure right so How did you um make the transition from You know, basically doing the doing the marketing for a number of franchise brands and turning it into to You know a business for yourself. Was that was that hard to do? I mean, no, not really. I mean they really taught me so much and when I first started I was a marketing director for windows uni I was helping small business owners and that was always my passion is you know watching especially in franchising Kerry was in it for a long time. I'm not sure if your background is wrong But you watch people that like they have a corporate job They save up this nest egg of money and then they leave to do their own thing and be a you know solo for new entrepreneur light whatever you want to call franchising and these Some of these people like their whole life savings They start with 100 grand then it goes to 50. They buy the franchise 40 30 10 and to just watch them You know build that back up and build a business and a legacy for themselves and their family in the individual level I love that and um I mean if anybody from neighborly ever listens to this, they'll know why I left and it's you know as I Progress and neighborly I stopped working with individual owners and I started working with brands and presidents and vice presidents and Coos and I saw the other side of the business and it wasn't about the individual It was about the company and you know what the company could do and it just I lost a little bit that passion that I had of helping the individuals And so that was one of the main reasons I wanted to start you know click call sell is because The small business owner that that person that's put their heart and soul into the business They're the ones that are doing it for their family and their legacy and that's why I started to do it but with neighborly to answer your question specifically um They're three billion dollar company or probably more than that now. I have no idea multi billion dollar company and um They've got huge teams and so I literally got to see firsthand and coach these people that are doing this in building an agency essentially for 3000 people so leadership systems processes structures I built some of them I've learned some of them and we've just applied a lot of those principles So we are run very much like a large franchise organization as far as like organizational chart goes um, but we are structured in a way that we care deeply about the individual We only work with a couple of franchise brands that have become franchises after we started working with them We don't seek seek out or try to acquire franchises as clients Cool How many how many clients do you have right now? I think like 212 just over 200 and how many people are on your team? 18 Okay, and so one of the questions that cleaning business owners always Have or one of the issues that they face is that people will say to them Well, the reason your ads aren't working is because you don't have a strong enough seo presence How much of that like can you talk a little bit about the importance of seo when you're You know trying to build your brand with with adwords because I I always heard that You know our seo wasn't strong enough. Yeah, that's a really really good question carry Um, so this is I'll get a little bit of an opinion right now I'll give the opinion. I'll give the data. I'll show you the data So there's a direct correlation between brand awareness and conversion rates So when you think about organic anybody listening if you can visualize like a google search like search made service house cleaning near me Whatever you're going to do and you'll see the google local service ads and the google ads and then the google business profile map pack And then organic and you'll hear some people say, oh, I just don't click on the ads I know their ads and just going to scroll to the bottom right Well, and then you ask those people why are you scrolling to the bottom and the answer normally is well I'm looking for something so if they're looking for something they're probably looking for a brand They recognize something that feels comfortable and safe to them because they're not the risk taker, right? They're not the one that's going to click a spammy ad and get retargeted They're the person that feels safe and when they feel safe they want to click for a brand they recognize And so to me, this is the opinion now seo is like the final frontier and like the last step of what you do because you want to increase your brand awareness Because if people know your brand you're going to get more clicks It's that familiarity that people are looking for So the first step you do is really just get reviews like your life depends on right reviews And then you leverage those reviews to do branding ads Whether it's a facebook ad direct mail boots in the ground Whatever it is just start to introduce that powerful brand that you've built Then you can track how many people are searching for my brand name Once you get to a comfortable number there seo then becomes a better play because just ranking in the first two Or three places organically doesn't mean you're going to get a click And once you get the click you have to build enough trust to get the phone call Then you got to close the jobs you're really three steps away from ranking ranking to get the click to get the call to get the sale So ranking doesn't really mean anything. It's all about the conversions, right? And you just hit on something that was really powerful. He said get reviews like your life depends on it That is so powerful and so many people just don't They just don't take they don't listen to that message. So Uh, can you add a little bit more to that? I mean because it's so important in the residential cleaning industry Oh, absolutely. Yeah, there's certainly like trust signals just things that make customers want to buy from you And uh, a big mistake people make is their brand is all about them, right? The back of somebody's t-shirt cleaning a counter, right? I mean, I'm on a made website I I clearly know that you clean houses So how can I make you feel like your house is clean and you do that through reviews through quality content images Short video snippets to really create emotion and connect that emotion because people have a pain They don't want to clean their house. They don't have time to clean their house They don't have the desire to do that And what can you do as a business to show somebody like hey? We're the best person to do this because this number of people trust us and gave us this number of reviews Or here's a group of all of our teammates like the arm and arm having a really good time It's like company culture So reviews are one of those buying signals or trust signals that allow the person on the other end Your prospective customer that's going to decide whether or not they trust you enough to give you that phone call absolutely Michael you mentioned video how how important is video in the in the marketing mix today? Oh my goodness. Yeah, it can't be overstated. I mean think about I mean I have tiktok. I resisted it for the longest time longest time But that algorithm is insane how powerful it is and how many if you follow Or if anybody's on tiktok and watches it and if you are really in a home service It's like how many times do you see like the lawnmowering or pressure washing or just like the little snippet videos of things So content is everything I mean it will be the future of what happens I'm not sure if anybody follows Mr. Beast or even like alex hermose because I mean he talks about this all the time is The future the next generation is the people that can build an audience and then leverage that audience in some way So mr. Beast is a huge youtube star hundreds of millions of followers He's starting a chocolate company a hamburger joint like all these different businesses because of his following that he's gotten So the same thing with our businesses Good gary I don't say wow. I never heard of a mr. Beast. Oh my goodness. Yeah, it's wild This is the guy you've definitely seen videos of him. He gives away like $10,000 at a time $100,000. He gives like an island It's wild. This dude's crazy. Wow Well, I'm alex hermose. I know he's yeah alex hermose used in like one of his podcast things like mr. Beast as an example of what the power of content is But I'll give one nugget though for the listeners and we've we've done a lot of studying with this So there's a um on everybody's website. You either have a contact form like on your home page like where people Can fill out directly there or you have a contact us page. We've seen uh Incredible success rate by putting a short 30 45 second video on that contact us page Explaining exactly what's going to happen when they fill out that form when they schedule the estimate is who are we We're going to show up. We're going to do these things in the first cleaning These are the continued discounts. We have just really build and establish that trust and you'll see the ratio So if you have google analytics, I don't get too nerdy. You said it's like the view and this is getting super nerdy now But We can go there too Okay, if you have google analytics, you'll see like how many visits to my contact page or contact form that I have And then you should be able to see how many people fill that out That ratio is really really important and the video to get people to fill that out to just give that 30 45 second push To say this is what's going to happen. We're not going to sell your data Like that's the kind of comfort that you're going to fill to build that trust. Yeah, yeah Wow It's good stuff. I'm making notes why I call I talk really fast. I have to slow it down sometimes. I'm sorry. No worries. No worries So in terms of you know the content and and and and brand awareness You know, I know most home service businesses certainly, you know, the residential cleaning world, you know, there's a It's getting a little bit better, but things are still pretty much supply constrained There's more work than there is labor to do it. Yes Is there does this kind of translate over? Can you use some of these same assets to to help you recruit as well? Oh hundred percent. Yeah. So in the cocker program, we focus heavily on recruiting It's it's marketing. You're just marketing instead of to customers. You're marketing to get people and What I've learned since you know working with home service businesses for as long as I have but especially in the cocker program for the last four years is that you really want to focus your Recruiting on culture and once you get and tell me if you guys agree with this It sounds like you have a lot of experience too Once you get that core group of people the two three four people They start to attract Mori players The hardest part is just to get those first couple of people that are there and then identify who they are like avatar them And then start to write your job ads and your copy and all of your recruiting is about around just like building on that foundation Because even if there is churn, which there's definitely churn between cleaners it happens But we get that that identifier that avatar that we can continue to hire that person over and over again That's where our job ads that's where our you know, they're working interviews or whatever you're doing You bring them into this kind of culture that you've created based on that core group of people that you started with yeah So You know you mentioned conquer a little bit you want to uh speak to that for a minute michael for for some of our audience they might not I imagine most of them are but a little refresher and explanation of what that's about would be useful Yeah, so honestly conquer is like the catalyst for why I left neighborly um I was invited to an event called the automate grow cell experience with the guy named josh latimer He literally owns a castle in michigan and has this mastermind group with home service businesses that are there and I was invited to uh go just as an attendee and um I saw like all the processes and systems and this was like one of the first um exposures that I had to people that were growing with really good systems and teachings that was not part of a franchise organization so anyway, I get to this three-day event and um, they launched what the what is now the conquer program Um, it combines accountability community and clarity. It's basically if you're part of a franchise organization It's very much uh like that where you've got a coach a group of people all in the same size business all home service industries Working together to achieve whatever their goal is everybody kind of has a different destination um And the accountability is weekly monthly quarterly Accountabilities that you set for yourself based on your growth plan Uh community is all people kind of growing in the same direction trying to grow their home service business And the clarity comes in documents. There's hundreds and hundreds of documents budgets spreadsheet templates for job ads Um marketing calendars anything you would need to like practically grow your business You don't have to reinvent the wheel is in there and so once they launch conquer I literally cornered granted bond who started conquering josh uncomfortably cornered them and told them I need you to be a conquer coach Thankfully, they let me and fast forward to today. I'm still coaching even some of the same people that I did a few years ago What year was that when you uh stumbled on uh, so I met josh in 2016 oh, wow podcast and um, sorry my phone could bring it through his podcast And actually invited him to speak at a window genie event And that's how we became close after that. Uh, so just kept following him that's how I got invited to the event and then just basically Enforced myself into being a conquer coach nice And is josh still involved with conquer or is he still doing is he doing kind of more of his um, uh Video he's a video company. He's got all the war plans. So war plan studios kid war plan Like he's branding this whole war plan idea. Josh is one of the greatest marketers. I've ever he is He's just such an incredible marketing mind. He's he's amazing. Yeah, he is So I don't know what his involvement is directly with conquer But conquerors are directly related with josh like through his thing So he's like, you know, you build a tribe you build a following and like no matter what josh does You know half of conchers gonna run and you can jump on it. Yeah, he's amazing So if people wanted to sign up with conquer, do they are they only allowed in like certain times of the year? Like if you wanted if they wanted to say work with you, how would they be able to do that? Yeah, so there are 20 some coaches. I don't have any openings, but every coach Currently owns or has owned a automated seventh or figure business or larger in the home services space Um, so they're all they all have really good resumes There's a lot of people who currently own a home service business that they've pretty much got automated And they just enjoy coaching and helping. So that's what they do Um, I'll have put in the link here at conquer now.com is I know for sure the website of the conquerors I wasn't prepared for that question. So I don't know The actual link to sign up for conquer unfortunately. I'm kind of embarrassed But um, I'll make sure that I give it to you so you can put it in like the notes or follow up So what you're saying is there's a waiting list to work with you specifically Yes, I was saying that okay Nice, there you go. That's it. Yeah, look at that. Tom found it So there's the link right there highly recommend anybody that wants to grow Truly wants to scale their business, but it's kind of stuck. This is I can't think of a better program than this Especially from zero to about one and a half million dollars. It's really geared toward that I had 12 people that I coach break a million dollars last year in sales Wow so How many people are you currently coaching? Uh 19 or 20 Holy cow. How do you have time to uh run your marketing business? Uh, like I said, I built it all with systems. So we have leadership in place I had leadership in place pretty much from day one. My operations manager is a total rock star He's the one that runs like all the account managers and media buying and SEO teams and everything Um, I still do a lot with sales and uh admin We have a director of admin though So I do like the strategy and planning the budgets and bonus structures and all that Um map runs all of operations And I just set my life up to do what I love doing and that's talking to small business owners all day So this is literally my life. I love it Yeah What I want to do and get paid for it and you're good at it Michael. You're really good at it So, you know, we've talked a little bit about The building the brand part and like building building your audience and you know if How does that translate if I'm like if I'm a cleaning business owner? I mean not everybody's gonna just Be able to build, you know a half a million You know followers on on on on on youtube so subscribers on youtube. So What advice could you give to your typical home service, you know operator in that regard? Should we all be trying to To build an audience to help promote promote our business No, yeah, absolutely. I mean what I I have this nerdy phrase that I always say But the success of a home service business is based on the size and the vitality of their database Which really means like how many customers do you have how often do they use you and what's a lifetime value? And so Yes, you need to get customers into your database and the beautiful thing about house cleaning maid service industry is that Demands really high so you can get people into your database and a customer that you lose once is not a customer that you lose forever Right a cancellation or attrition today doesn't mean they're not ever going to use you again So we need to be marketing to our audience in our database It may not be a tiktok channel or a youtube channel by any means, but you certainly want to Collect emails and phone numbers for every single web inquiry every single phone call every single person you come in contact with to have some sort of nurturing Accounts for people who aren't an active customer and account for your active customers to keep them engaged with your business So 100% there's a great book. They ask you answer um Highlights the most common questions that customers are asking you and the answers that you give and how to Put that data into action. So what questions you being asked? How can I create content around those most common questions? There you go? Work is shared and it's awesome. He's uh been on our show before he's uh quite a talent Yep, and so that just follow that book And answer the do that for your brand. You don't have to be a pool company. Just do it for maid service Do it for landscaping. It doesn't matter right we we've talked a bit about like Paper click, you know, google, you know ad words as being part of the the marketing mix seo is important Are there other and and certainly you want to get reviews like uh, like, you know As many as you possibly can are there other You know parts of the marketing mix that that that we would want to be focusing on Absolutely. Yeah. So first google ads and google local service ads specifically google local service ads or maybe google guaranteed If you're not using that stop what you're doing right now, we'll finish listening to this And then go and get started with the google local service ads It's crazy It's the most powerful thing that google has done maybe ever because it's so much smarter than google ads is so Maybe you've talked about this before but google local service ads is like a verified purchase on amazon If you've ever been shopping on amazon, you've seen like the verified purchase reviews Because they're able to through call tracking know if you answered the phone know who called you You're able to track the names of the people that you're doing business with through their dashboard And it's so intelligent that if you get a review through google local service ads or google guaranteed google knows that and they're going to weigh that review heavier and because google's job is to show the Eric votes best result They will show the company they feel is going to have the highest chance of doing the best job And so if you are answering your phone, you have a good closing percentage You're offering a good experience of getting good reviews from your clients You're going to dominate google local service ads in an industry with as much search volume as cleaning does There's an almost unlimited supply your capacity is going to be your infrastructure and your Technicians your cleaners over anything else. So local service ads Do that immediately Okay, so that would be one after after the shop After yes, please So the next one is so I as you first before you decide like what lead sources you want to do You have to decide uh first what your sales goal is like how much do I want to do in sales? And then second is what is my target customer acquisition cost? How much am I willing to spin for a customer? and um I'm going to go crazy and say let's just do it one exit clean So my average take is 190 bucks a million has been 190 to acquire a customer Which might seem crazy, but if you can do a good job of retaining that lifetime value is huge Yeah Yeah, so let's just say it's 1x so 190 bucks and um It doesn't from that point in time It doesn't matter how you acquire a customer whether it's google ads local service ads Shaken cement and gas station yelp and use let's your home advisor thumbtack craftjack It doesn't matter as long as I can identify what my max customer acquisition cost is Acquire customers until either a you reach capacity or b you start to see one where there's a point of diminishing returns It hasn't been met as an example local service ads is crushing it. You're not spending enough money there You're getting customers for 60 bucks, but angeles is 200 and 185 dollars I'm gonna turn down angeles and turn up local service ads and just move those dials So having the ability to track where leads are coming from and the customer acquisition cost is critically important But you start by identifying how much can I afford to acquire customers step one Step two turn on the engines and see where you're at and then Optimize from there Those are the things that click costs our company It does our account managers are trained to do analyze that data and help home service business owners Because that's not a skill set that a lot of people that I've found to work with are really good at No So, you know the total lifetime value would then be a function of what the churn rate is on your You know recurring client base and having that data is really important too We've we found on the mid central side that We've got you know a number of companies on made central that are spending meaningful amounts of money on like Google ad words on a monthly basis and paying You know larger amounts per click than what you would have traditionally even considered a few years ago But they can do the math and figure out that you know It's going to take me a number of months in order to recover my investment But they're going to be with me long enough that in the long run. We're going to be more profitable by Making that spin. So You know are are you seeing are you seeing that ad words is becoming a bigger and bigger part of the marketing mix? For some people. Yeah, absolutely. Like I said, there's a direct correlation between brand awareness and conversion rates So companies that are more well established longer in business more brand awareness are going to do better With google ads and somebody who's just brand new and starting out. That doesn't mean you don't do it You just have to have maybe a more aggressive offer a more aggressive call the action Just something to build that trust quicker because if you're a you know Benefits of 20 years your household name and people have seen you and heard of you There's enough trust there to get the phone call because if you think about it Wait, why do customers call your brand? And I asked this question all the time and the number one answer that I get is because they want their house clean Or you know because they want to service them but that's a silly answer because there's a hundred made services Why they call you not the other 99 people and they called you because you've done something To earn their trust and have them believe that you can solve the problem Which is why 99 out of 100 customers calls you excited and they're optimistic about the chances of you cleaning their house Um, and then they get turned off for some reason price or availability Whatever it could be but you get those calls from prospects or you're like, hey Hey, my house cleaner hoping you can do it and then something happens throughout the process to get to a no But when you get that phone call, they're excited about that And so you have to create that excitement either you've done it through the 20 years you've run the maid service and built that trust up to where it's already there Or you're brand new in the marketplace and are doing something and offer a special Process something that's going to make them believe that you can scratch their itch right Good stuff How does Like you mentioned tiktok. Do you you see home service providers advertising in tiktok? It's emerging. It definitely is emerging. We don't offer tiktok as a service But there are definitely agencies that are doing it. I haven't seen it I've seen it for house cleaning a little bit but mostly just for like Like extremely dirty houses or people that like go into these crazy special cases But for other services that are more like Eye-catching pressure washing, you know the time lapse videos is something that's just absolutely gross getting clean Works really good for the concrete coatings industry in slow-motion videos Anything that just can be eye-catching Absolutely, you see that happening I was going to ask this question a little bit later But since we kind of touched upon it, I'll do it now that you know I've observed over the years how I mean you we started off talking about yellow page advertising as being a big deal and you know Even what you were doing in 2012 up to now digital marketing and everything has evolved and that has I'm sure Has changed a lot over the years What's happening moving forward? You know if we you know moving into 2023, you know and beyond do we need to be looking at You know what's changing? What do we need to know about about marketing moving forward that would be useful to us? Oh, that's such a loaded question, Tom. Yeah Yeah, that's deep It's really because there's two factors like we think about like what's happening. What's in the future? So if you do a swat analysis your strengths and weaknesses are internal like what are you good at that as a Person or a business but opportunities and threats are external right and where things we necessarily can't control And so like there's two competing factors that we've got to Going on right now and one like the economy, right? So you say what's happening? we've been in this period of prosperity for like 10 years now and You're in the space. How many more maid services exist today than 10 years ago? How many more open up every single year because it's really easy to start a business because There's huge abundance of demand in a shortage of Workers so there's a lot of like owner operators and smaller companies in all industries now so personal opinion This is not financial advice But I do believe that the because of the rise of interest rates the quantitative tightening that's happening with the government It's harder to get money. It's going to be harder to get leads and effectively grow your business in 2023 So what we've seen is this huge successful awesome economy this rise of competition And then what's going to happen is when the recession finally does hit us Which it takes longer because we're a multi trillion dollar economy when it does hit There's going to be this point in time when all these starving hungry home service owners or Maid services are just trying as hard as they can to get work But they don't have a lot of cash. They don't have a strong brand They don't have like the the foundation of a strong business and those people are going to fall off really quick so there's going to be like three to six months of really really difficult times for Businesses saying what's going on because there's a lot of really hungry owner operators are just doing whatever they can to stay alive But what's going to happen then is they're all going to go out of business You're going to be able to buy assets and get employees really cheap and there's going to be this low Just like we had 2008 before I was really involved with everything I've read and heard about Where there's just this period of time where there's not a lot of demand because there's not a lot of money floating around the economy But then things are going to pick up and once that Uptick happens again, there's going to be a disparity on the other side There's going to be way more demand than there is maid services because they've all got out of business So what you need to do is be strong from a cash position You need to make sure that you're doing everything to stock and save cash now to weather the storm that's going to happen We there's mastermind groups that have started on this. There's education recession marketing. You see it all over the place So just prepare yourself So if it does get, you know, three six nine months of all these scrappy Owner operators just doing whatever they can stay. Oh, you know in business You've got to weather that because once they're gone now, there's a lot more demand for a lot less people Happening at that time. So that's the economy. That's one piece and I don't want to talk for 11 minutes in a row So I'll just leave it there for a second. That's good. I mean I was doing this back in 2008 and prior and I remember that and I had some some pretty good coaching and one of the things that I was advised to do them, which was really good advice is Take every credit facility every line of credit everything that I have and basically max it out Because when things get really bad banks pull those things away and It's going to be a little bit different now because interest rates are higher now than they were then so You know, you're going to be paying a little bit more for that But if you don't have a lot of you're not setting on a lot of money But you've got like lines of credit and you're thinking well, I'm not going to touch it until I need it It might not be there when you need it that There's some people who advise go ahead and take that money while you can and you're going to pay some interest on it, but You know pay it back in a year or two once things Go down then come back up again Yeah, and I lived through it too. I mean that time period and what you described is exactly what happened I mean the phone did not ring um It was it was really bad bleak everything about it felt terrible But then there was this day where like the sun came out and then everything just changed So if you can hang on Long enough, you know, what's on the other end is is You know, it's it's abundance. So it's just have to hang on long enough Yeah And I've coached a lot of home service business owners in the last 12 years and one thing I've learned about Low barrier to entry industries made services the perfect example is a lot of people majority not everybody majority of the people that start a low barrier to entry industry have never really had a lot of money in their life And so when they have a 40 50 thousand dollar month and they made 18 thousand dollars that month is They don't think I should probably stalk them away Just to have some cash for like operating expenses and things go bad And they keep their operating account really low is Unconquer I always try to get people to have three months of operating expenses Just in an account that it could be you can fluctuate But we're going to get it back to that level that way especially if you're a seasonal business like You know painting or landscaping or extra cleaning And you've got that seasonal nature you need that money to weather that three months slow time So you're not going into debt because what happens is you go through this cycle slow period goes I go crazy and debt I spend the first three months of the season paying that debt back And it's just this vicious cycle of below zero to just a little bit So just get in the habit of whatever three months of operating expenses is That should be your baseline just to happen in the bank and that'll make you feel so much better Good advice Yeah setting here, you know a few weeks away till we start the new year, you know I know a lot of businesses are kind of doing their year in planning and getting ready for 2023 so Um, I guess that should certainly be part of the part of the consideration, right? You know what all I need to do financially Given the the least the possibility I I heard something We're like 98 of the CEOs in this country believe that win for a recession next year That's up 95. That's up from 95 percent when they took the survey a month ago So you just see all the warning signs happening and the economy's so large nothing happens overnight Right, you just see these these steps and progression just happening and the interest rates keep going up Every time the interest rates go up this the stock market takes a hit money is getting harder to come by They're intentionally trying to increase unemployment So you just see all of these things happening and when it finally does hit It's going to be bad and you have to be as a home service business prepared for that yep yeah, and um heard jamie dimon the CEO of one of the larger banks talking yesterday that The consumer is still strong. They have like 1.5 trillion dollars still left in the bank And that money is going to be gone by the middle of next year And if it hasn't gotten bad by then it'll be getting bad shortly thereafter yep credit card debt supposed to be really high too It is yep Just be smart as a business as a business owner in general You have to be smart with your money to be able to continue to reinvest Don't buy the fancy tesla until you can afford it with the you know consistent passive income that's coming in right So one of the things that we talked about um Early or before we started the show is that you have a pretty sophisticated marketing spreadsheet like a budget Some kind of marketing calendar a calendar. Yes. Is that something? click also.com forward slash calendar Um, and there is just free resources like I mentioned it I just I truly love helping small business owners. And so I've just got some resources here that um are Really helpful for all home service businesses, but I have a regular marketing calendar Which you can kind of forecast non repeating business Um, and then for high frequency services like main services There's one called the service for high frequency. I'm not sure what it's called Looks like tom's trying to get on there right now. It's just the website.com forward slash that shouldn't be it That's embarrassing if that's it There we go forward slash calendar Uh, you're on resources Yeah There you go Okay, and uh video tutorial, um that one up top is a just general marketing calendar that you can use to kind of decide so I have this really, uh uh acronym ace anticipate capitalize extend And so if every home service business should be practicing this ace acronym So anticipate knowing when your busy season is so that you can get um like pre front load your marketing To really get to capacity as quick as you possibly can The beautiful thing about the cleaning industry is you don't have this lull that pest control does or this other industries do So when you think about getting to capacity it takes a tremendous amount more effort to go from zero to full Then it does to like just maintain full because you have to sell more jobs than you can do to get to capacity So anticipating is making sure that we're prepared to be up to capacity Capitalized is running an efficient business Actually when you're in the peak season the spring season preparing for holidays gift card if you do those When you know, you're just going to be absolutely slammed you can actually lower your budget A little bit because you're at capacity So either increase your infrastructure get more bodies to clean or you can drop your marketing spend just to Cover the churn and cancellations that you're going to have and then extend is Knowing when you're going to have those slow periods of time usually like vacations summer time That's when we're going to load our marketing up again to get us through those busier times So if I can you know six three six weeks before I know it's going to slow down super charge your marketing again That'll help me mitigate that That um slow down that you could possibly have in your business So that marketing calendar is a way for you to be proactive in your marketing It's got some places to do like weekly. So if you want to do like voicemail bombs or text blasts or whatever You can identify which weeks you're going to do those things and then it's got digital print networking just a whole bunch of different sections And just use it it's a cool tool and if you scroll down tom there is a Right there sales planning for high frequency businesses This is a spreadsheet that will help you calculate What your current mix is of cleanings. So we this was specifically for maids So if you've got you know 100 cleanings in a month, we've got of those we're we're going to project 20 of them They're going to be one time we have just set 20 Weekly cleanings and the rest we're like just set. We know where we're at we can forecast our projected monthly spin based on You know what we have recurring So then you just decide like where do you want to be and how many of those jobs So I need to sell to get there and this spreadsheet will kind of help you forecast How many leads do you need to get what is your average ticket closing percentage? How many weeklies monthly's biweeklies one time? So you have to sell in order to hit that sales. Well, that's what this planning calendar does for specifically made services Yeah, I don't care. That's good stuff. Yeah Nobody's the people You give things away for free put it behind every put it behind a paywall Then it just takes more time to like explain to people give it for free then they can use it if they want to So Do I mean you work with home service? companies I guess there there's a A lot of different verticals there. Do you have some some clients that are in the house cleaning industry? Oh, yeah several. Um, so mostly services not trades. So we only have a couple of people in services um Primary industries extra cleaning made services painting landscaping Those are our primary like core services we work with and Going back to the beginning our discussion where we touched upon yellow pages as as as a primary marketing tool, you know back in the day It was simple then I mean you had to write a relatively big check But it didn't and then you could forget about it for a year That was the other thing that was really cool um My experience is a lot of cleaning business owners that don't really even have the time to to tend to all of this You can put a plan together, but but executing it when the when the whirlwind hits and You know mrs. Jones is upset because you know there's a hair in her bathtub and You know Sally didn't come to work today because her cat's sick and all of those things that you just you know The important and urgent things you get overwhelmed with things that seem to be urgent And the important stuff doesn't happen um So even if you think that you know how to do it and it's a lot harder to know how to do it now than you used to be Just being honest and looking in the mirror and say do I really You know my committed to putting the time in this to do it um Leads me to believe that for for a lot of companies It would make sense for them to reach out to a company like yours Michael for for for help with the marketing because As we touch, you know, that's how you you you grow your business That's how you maintain your business and if you do it well, you can even get more employees by a strong marketing program Yeah, and even more we've trained our account managers Not necessarily just to be the guy that buys or the girl that buys your google ads or facebook ads Whatever it is, but to analyze the data and be an extension of your marketing team like we All you're any i'm not us, but your agency the person you work with should be like your partner is they There shouldn't be anything they can't do like if you want to change an image or get a new call to action or an offer is The agency doesn't know as well as you do you wake up and live this thing. It's your identity every single day so having somebody that can look at the data analyze it with you and Work together to find what the next thing is going to be because you don't have to be a website coder or designer You just have to be able to say this this zip code this neighborhood is where we're getting a lot of leads Let's make a promotion for that and having somebody that can just Explain the insights explain the data so that you can do something with it That I believe is what is the value of an agency is going to be because there's so much information that you collect From the internet that you can use offline right if I can tell you what day of the week What time of the day what city zip code what services people are looking for where they're looking for what time of the day or What day of the week you can use that for an edm campaign or a network a mailer joining a net referral group There's so much information you can take from the web and use it offline right so if I'm a cleaning business company and I I reach out to your firm to Help with my marketing what Is there anything in the in the area of marketing that you guys don't do that? That cleaning business would have to do for themselves or fine You know somebody else to handle I mean I'll tell you what we do and not what we don't do because I'm sure yes. There are definitely things we don't do um yeah, so Google ads local service ads and yelp ads. I know yelp is like a really bad People's mouths a four letter word. That's a four letter word. Yeah, that's a bad word But they give some crazy insights that we have access to like how many searches are happening How many leads are your competitors getting how much money are they spending? um And that if you have this big void if there's a thousand yelp searches and nobody's paying for it That's a gold money you could be sitting on now I personally am not a fan of yelp and angeles and home advisor But they're billion dollar companies for a reason and if you don't play the game You can't win and so at least know what the rules of the game are before you jump in so for that reason We we do offer yelp ads, but I mean Not nearly as many people run yelp as other services because it just doesn't make sense If you're a middle america person In house cleaning, it's probably not even make sense. But if you're in los angeles yelp is probably a pretty big league generator for you um, so google ads will go service ads yelp ads facebook ads sco website building and blogging and social posts so pretty much like the core services an agency will offer We we're not a like a sales company. So we really just want to understand Where you are in business what your goals are like I mentioned sco sco is not for everybody It's expensive and it's not something that a brand new company should be focusing on they should be focusing on building their brand So we really kind of understand like where you are in your business what your budget is And what what the next logical step for you to do in that progression of hitting your goals for your business Very good. Yeah So you mentioned facebook is that is uh, you know, we're talking about trends and you know It seems like facebook was a bigger deal A couple of years ago than it is now some changes to how apple does things maybe is Oh, yeah, that was such a pain in the butt. Yeah, um, yeah, so the tracking still isn't totally fixed and facebook is um actively working to make it a better experience, but Yeah, so facebook is uh interruption marketing and that you've had a lot of people I'm not sure if you've talked about like the aida method of marketing so awareness interest desire and action So if you think about uh, I'll just go through it like awareness is I'm aware that the service exists. Most people know that professional made service house cleaning companies exist Um, and then or awareness of I know that your company exists So making sure that yeah, I know a house cleaning company exists, but do I know that your company exists? Then you have interest So the facebook is where interest happens. Nobody logs into facebook Well, I hope nobody logs into facebook thinking come on show me house cleaning yet. Come on This doesn't happen But you show like an image or you show something that is going to say ooh that looks interesting My bathtub is always disgusting. Um, I certainly would like to have somebody clean that for me So you get people in the interest phase Whereas google uh or referrals is the desire phase They're going to google house cleaner near me and you're getting people who already have the desire You just have to make them take action So facebook is phenomenal You're going to get a tremendous amount of impressions for your brand for a very very low cost Nothing's a lower cost impression and you're also going to be able to draw up a lot of interest It may not be your avatar may not be your customer that wants the service But you're getting a lot of engagement So highly recommend facebook for anybody that's trying to build a brand Just to get awareness up because cost per impression Really low And then it becomes a sales process issue So you have desire google ads is desire and then action getting them to take action And that's when they decide to you know give you a check and give you their money Cool That is awesome Wow, um so if A cleaning business wants to know more about how to you know commission your service I was just no more about your service. Is it best for them? Is there a preferred way? Yeah, yeah, so I intentionally don't have a phone number on our website Well, yeah, we had a brand manager that was in charge of that that left us about a month ago All the phone calls went to him. It's getting you into our database is always the step And so talk to an expert gives you a form There's automation in the back end of that form Because regardless of what happens you're going to have to fill out that form anyway Just to get into our database And that form right there will allow you to schedule a 30 minute call with me because I love talking to people And decide whether or not we're a good fit and if not just turns into a little coaching session I talked to a concrete company yesterday in Fort Worth that brand new in business six months in It only sold a couple of jobs. Was it ready for a service? So I recommended other people that could help him based on his budget and where he needed for a logo, etc So like this is my life. I love talking to people and helping where I can we're not for everybody Our avatar is our client is usually You know 400,000 and above with Probably 2,000 and above to spend on advertising And that's county management and wants to grow like this is somebody who really wants to grow and work with a company for marketing and just data analysis where as much of like a Data analysis company is anything else is helping you understand the information that your website is collecting And do your analysts like meet with your clients? Do you do like a monthly review or a quarterly review? What can they expect? Yeah, so we actually stopped doing the preset calls. You can relate to this carry I'd say 60 of the people that we had preset calls but didn't show up because So, um, yeah, I was interfacing a ton of time for the account managers and was really frustrating for them So now it's just open-ended. Uh, we prefer to set calls, but You can call them contact them whenever you want email Whatever method is best for you. Uh, everybody has their own phone number Yeah, you're you're based you're the our clients are basically like an extension Our our account manager extension of the other marketing teams Okay Very good. Yeah, and and we also talked a little bit about Conquer if anybody is interested knowing more about conquer. I guess there's an application Processing tactic. Yeah, and that's Brandon Vaughan. If you don't know who Brandon Vaughan is like seriously google his name map to a million as a youtube channel he started uh All the people I know in home services personally Brandon is the apex of all of them It's remarkable. So because it's cleaning Brandon doesn't like and I don't think he's in the cleaning phase as much So Brandon started conquer and then just to prove that the the The accountability and the clarity of conquer works like the conquer system of scaling home service company works um, Brandon decided to start a company that he nothing about end up being concrete coatings and um From zero to a day zero like didn't even know what brandy was going to start to 12 months I don't know if I can like he's a franchise like did a very very high number in sales Started franchising and sold multiple franchises in less than 12 months all doing the same principles and concepts that conquer is so uh Yeah, it's a remarkable program and Brandon's systems and processes that he's used to build Multiple seven bigger businesses. He's like an open book that over shares everything And conquer really just uses the same principles that he's used to scale so many businesses That's really cool kind of proof of cons not dating his own cooking Yep, he did and as a youtube like a whole youtube series He didn't call map to a million like episode one is what business should I start? I helped him with this so there was didn't know what business he was going to start He literally like interviewed people had to google map to a million or go to youtube to have map to a million And so, uh, he interviewed like landscaping and h-bag and these different industries Finally, so what's one million? I'm trying a million like m a p map Yep And so, uh, yeah first episode is Hey, uh, want to start a business? Let's go figure out which one I want to start and talk about like frequency high frequency low ticket high ticket low frequency services Um, and then it went on to Okay, I picked a company. Let's get a name So then he shows how he picks a name looking at like any trademark name and make sure it's protected And then he built the logo and uh, we built his website So I'm actually on one of these videos because we do um all of his marketing for him or we don't do his facebook ads, but everything except facebook um, and uh, then he built the website and he hired people and like it just see it all it's really cool Um to watch it all happen. Yeah Very good. I dropped the link to that as as well. So very very very well produced series of videos So cool. Yeah Oh Michael, thank you so much for being our guest today on smart business modes. You know, I loved your energy. It was great. Thank you I had uh, uh five hour energy before I started just getting Oh, that's the secret. It's a la cruelly. I'm super Okay But uh, you know, we're we're getting close to the top of the hour here So, uh, I think that we're about ready to call a wrap for today. Um, We're going to be back next wednesday five o'clock eastern again, if you want to Hit Michael up you can uh, find the website to click call sell in chat go to forward slash calendar and download some of those awesome tools. Um, Or conquer that is uh in chat as well if you want to know more about Opportunities to get some awesome coaching for your business Um, I guess we're good for today. Again, Michael. You are awesome. Guys very much appreciate you sharing with our audience Keri, thank you for pitch hitting today at the last minute filling in for liz. That was awesome. Thanks for having me Thank you time. It was nice to meet you as well. We will uh, see you next wednesday five o'clock eastern. Bye All right. Bye. Bye