The Hidden Trifecta Driving Growth in Top Home Service Companies - Brennen Smith

Brennan Smith reveals how top-performing home service businesses unlock hidden revenue through simple yet powerful changes to their lead management process. Companies earning $2-20 million look beyond traditional lead generation to maximize their existing sales pipeline.

• Responding to leads within 60 seconds during business hours drastically improves conversion
• 43% of contact form submissions never receive any response—representing massive lost revenue
• Top companies implement systematic follow-up across multiple channels (call, text, email)
• The shift from lead-centric to relationship-centric business models creates sustainable growth
• AI tools for call handling and customer communication are creating competitive advantages
• Tracking call quality, response times, and booking rates provides actionable data for improvement
• Most home service businesses underutilize their existing customer base for recurring revenue
• Speed matters, but consistency in follow-up creates the winning formula
• Companies that implement structured systems outperform those relying on talent alone

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Chapters

• 0:28 Welcome to Profit and Grit
• 0:51 Unlocking Hidden Revenue
• 7:02 When Marketing Agencies Miss the Mark
• 15:02 High Intent vs Low Motivation
• 20:48 Customer Lifetime Value Strategy
• 29:57 AI in Home Services
• 35:39 The 43% Response Problem

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

And a lot of home services. You know, if you're only in one area, like, you've only got so many people to serve, so you probably should take a long term approach to these customers right. You're going to run out of people, especially like there's only so many people within the city and there's so many companies and so there's competition. So how do you start to think more long term, not just like today's leads, tomorrow's leads, this week's leads, this month's leads?

Speaker 2: 0:28

Welcome to Profit and Grit with Tyler, where blue-collar owners and insiders spill the real story behind their hustle, building businesses that thrive through sweat and smarts. We'll dig into their journeys, from scaling chaos to growing the bottom line, with lessons and grit that pay off big. Here's your host, the blue collar CFO, tyler Martin.

Speaker 3: 0:51

What's really stopping your leads from turning into book jobs? It's probably not your ad budget and it's not always your pricing either. This week on Profit and Grit, I'm talking with Brennan Smith, a fractional CMO who works with home service companies doing $2 to $20 million in revenue. His specialty Finding the revenue that's already sitting inside your business and unlocking it. Brennan shares the three things top performing shops are doing differently they respond to leads in under 60 seconds, they follow up like pros, not just once and done, and they create a customer experience that keeps people coming back. We also get into why some marketing agencies miss the mark even when they're good, how AI is already showing up in service businesses and why 43% of form submissions never get a single reply.

Speaker 3: 1:49

If your marketing isn't turning into real work, you need to hear this. Let's jump in. Hey, brennan, welcome to the Profit and Grit podcast show. How's it going? Going well? It's a beautiful Friday. Yeah, nice to have you. Where are you located? I'm in Charlotte, north Carolina. Charlotte, north Carolina. That's a really growing place. I have a few clients there and I definitely have more people over the last few years reach out to me than I have in any other time period. Yeah, it's a beautiful state. It really is. It really is hey. So love to start out just kind of learning what you do professionally, and then part two would be learning something about you personally.

Speaker 1: 2:28

Yeah, so I'm a revenue-focused CMO for Home Services and the Trades. I spent the last 10 years running and starting a web design and digital marketing agency and now transitioning just to be fully focused on the CMO activity. And personally, I have a family of two kids, a boy and a girl. Um, loved to backpack and I'm actually from kind of your neck of the woods, uh, northern California, new Rica.

Speaker 3: 2:52

So nice, nice. Yeah, that's a couple hours away, I think two, three hours for me. What's the trigger to go from having your own agency to going in the CMO world? Is there something encouraging you to do that? Is there a reason you're going in that direction?

Speaker 1: 3:06

Yes, A big part of that was just feeling like I wanted to take it a step beyond just the digital marketing and being able to help drive revenue across sales, customer service operations, all that stuff. And in the agency world I was working with software, retail, franchise, medical, but home service is really where my heart is. So I have a new partner that's running the agency now and I'm still involved, I'm still an owner and really I just wanted to kind of get on the ground level, be able to dedicate like my time and hours to these companies and help them grow Got it.

Speaker 3: 3:44

So I'm sure there's people out in the audience going like you know what exactly is a fractional CMO. When does a fractional CMO fit into a home services company? Can you kind of give us your perspective in terms of when a company can get the most benefit from it and exactly what it is?

Speaker 1: 4:01

Yeah, I'd say most of my clients probably in that two to 20 million range. Two would be on the lower end. Most of the companies. They have to have a marketing agency or at least an internal person.

Speaker 1: 4:16

Now the thing that becomes hard with that is managing an agency is not easy. Holding them accountable is not easy. Having the right expectations, actually knowing what they're doing, tracking what they're doing, all that stuff is difficult, and so my experience is a lot of home service business owners that don't have that expertise. They want to grow. They're not necessarily sure what's working, what's really driving the jobs, what's driving the profit, and they're kind of shotgunning approach and and marketing is for a lot of people and one owner is just like a black box, very mysterious. There's a lot of crossing fingers, hoping, you know, just doing random tactics, uh, relying on the agency heavily, and you know rightly so. There's a million things going on in the business. So part of it is just feeling that pain of being like I think we we should be doing better, but I don't know what to do. I feel like we should be doing more. I'm trying to do traditional marketing, like how does that play in? I got this agency that are doing digital stuff, but is there more? What more could I be doing and what's really driving results? And so when you start to ask those questions, that's kind of where, like a CMO, and in my, in my particular expertise and how I want to help owners is, you might be getting two, three hundred, four hundred leads a month, but are you doing the most with those? Are you listening to the calls? Do you know if you're you know CSRs are actually handing the call? Well, do you know if there's a ton of missed opportunities there? You probably have a huge amount of goal within your CRM. Some people don't have CRMs at all. So there's all these systems and things in place that really there's a lot of hidden revenue and I know, as a finance guy, you love to find the hidden revenue and that's really my goal is to help these smaller companies.

Speaker 1: 5:58

And when you look at the big companies, they're doing all the basics right. They're tracking, they're recording their calls. They know their booking rate. They know how fast they're tracking. They're recording their calls. They know their booking rate. They know how fast they're responding to leads. They know how many calls they're missing. They're tracking all these bait. They know what their close rate is they're tracking all these basic metrics and then they slowly improve them and just a, two, three, four, ten percent in some case increase and result in multiple millions of dollars, depending on your average ticket. So long winding answer is that if you feel like you should be doing better and should be doing more, but you don't really know how to get there and you don't have any of that expertise or leadership, anybody talking to you about this stuff that's when a CMO can come in and start to take a look and see the opportunity that you might not see.

Speaker 3: 6:45

I certainly don't want to talk about agencies, but bad about agencies.

Speaker 3: 6:49

I do want to say one thing, though, and feel free to tell me I'm totally off base here what I see a challenge with agencies. A lot of times this is not true with all, but I would say quite a few they get very comfortable in the relationship with the client and they just kind of go through the motions of the relationship. So and I've seen this time and time again you know they do, they check all the boxes in terms of things they're supposed to do, but there's really no strategy to it, there's no analysis. I mean, they might give a fancy report once a month saying you know, you're getting great return on your investment, you're making all kinds of money, but when you look under the hood of those numbers, it's like, well, it's not actual conversion and ROAS, it's more of just clicks you're getting, and clicks really don't necessarily lead to revenue. And so my point is that I feel like sometimes, when it's an agency involved, it does need someone to steer the ship, and I'm thinking that's where you come in. Is that a fair statement?

Speaker 3: 7:43

Yeah, absolutely, and do you agree with that assessment a little bit? Once again, I don't want to put anybody down, but that's what I see often.

Speaker 1: 7:50

Boy. I mean, I know there's a lot of companies that feel burned by agencies. There's good ones out there, there's bad ones out there. Most are trying to do a good job and sometimes the business owner themselves and their systems become the limiting factor of like, well, like you're using some random crm that like we can't get access to, we can't actually track the jobs from google ads all the way through, so there becomes some limitations. But I definitely think like having someone that then knows how to push or what the expectations should be. Yeah, and I think there's good ones out there, there's bad ones, there's medium ones.

Speaker 1: 8:29

But the main part is like, how do you push and work together as a partner and really try to figure it out yourself? You know, try to figure out what. Where is the roi coming from? Now, marketing is multiple touches right, it could be. It could be the facebook, which leads to the Google search, where they see your name and the ad and the map, and multiple times right, so attribution could just say you know SEO, all those things play into that. But I think having somebody just be able to push and know really what to expect and then setting up the systems, like some of these companies are using a lot of different tools. There's Housecall Pro, there's Jobber, there's Service Titan, there's Spreadsheets, there's Buildertrend, there's all kinds of CRMs, and so getting the agency in the CRM to be able to attract to jobs is important.

Speaker 3: 9:19

Yeah, that's good stuff, hey. So doing a little research on you, I've seen you've mentioned home services as high intent. Can you talk about that a little bit and could you also tie in, like, why do you have a love for home services? So maybe actually start with that, why did you go on the route of home services? I mean, why is that your love? And then I also want to talk about this high intent too.

Speaker 1: 9:41

My dad has been like a carpenter and contractor for uh, most of his life and he's done tiling and pretty much everything he could build a house from start to finish. He always loved that. I I love being involved in the industry, seeing him do stuff, but he worked so hard, very smart, and my love of the industry really came when I started like working with some of these marketing clients and it became the avenue where I felt like I could deliver the most value. Home services is so essential but it has very low motivation. People don't want to pay for their crawlspace or their foundation to get fixed. Everyone's going to wait until something's broken. But it's essential and I like the long-term viability of the whole industry. It's not going away anywhere. It's just where I feel like I can add the most value.

Speaker 1: 10:33

It's so practical, like all the things that really help home service businesses grow. It's not crazy rocket science and yeah, it just became a place where you know we started to see I've seen great results with home service some you know some generating 20 30 million pipeline in a year, and so it just became well, and that's just digital marketing. What about if we, you know, get involved in traditional? Or what if I get involved in traditional and customer service and all those little things, how much more can I help these companies grow? So that's kind of where where the love came from, and I think being able to like specialize in industry gives you a lot of different perspective, a lot more understanding of how to like deal with the challenges, what the challenges actually are and how to keep building businesses that that help home service businesses grow.

Speaker 3: 11:24

So yeah, good stuff. How about high intent? High intent like, yeah, what's that? So it tends to be a high. I've read this. I think maybe even my research might be wrong, but I thought I saw it in your wording too. What is like a high intent industry? What does that mean exactly?

Speaker 1: 11:39

Well, like, if someone's foundation's cracked or their floor's popping up, they foundations cracked or their floors popping up, they have to get it fixed. Or the ac is broken, right, it's like and it's the summer, a super high intent like someone's they're gonna go on google, they're gonna find somebody and they're gonna call a couple of these companies. But it's such low motivation, right, like people are gonna wait until something is broken, right, and there's so many companies out there doing this stuff, right, so they have 20 people on the Google search, on the map they could call. And how do you set yourself apart? I believe really comes down to that first phone call, initial communication. How do you actually nurture and treat them like gold, especially now things are tightening up. People are spending less old, especially, you know, now things are tightening up, people are spending less. You know, obviously, like in economic uncertainties and whatever, you have to treat everybody like gold and it all starts with that first phone call and first conversation.

Speaker 1: 12:34

Uh, in your marketing and yeah, so it's, it's super high intent you have to. Someone fills out a form, uh, at 12 o'clock on their lunch break. You need to call them back very quickly, right? If you wait two days later it's likely they've already talked to three or four other people. Yeah, so true. So everything is, speed is super important. You know the top gun. You have a need for speed. Right, you gotta be speedy, you gotta be. People are gonna move on if you don't ride it quick enough.

Speaker 3: 13:01

Yeah, I think not only just the speed. So I think of myself as a homeowner and when I have something go wrong, why do I choose who I choose? And, to your point, speed's important, but I think follow-through is important too in terms of that speed. Like a couple of months ago I had our water heater went down and it started linking middle of the night. I hear this noise and I go out at 1.30 in the morning and I got water everywhere. It's not exactly what you want to experience in the middle of the night, but I immediately turn it off and I make a couple of calls and I got in the middle of the night and I got an AI assistant on one and the AI assistant said, oh, we'll call you back at 10. And then I got another one that said, oh, we'll call you back at eight. And then I said well, you know, I'm just going to call in the morning, I've got to turn off, I've got nothing to worry about. So I called a person in the morning. Nobody called me at eight, like the one that said that they would. So I called at eight. I did wait actually to see if they'd call me, because I was going to give them the first opportunity. They didn't call me, it was like 8.15, blah, blah, and I'm like, wow, that's easy, they're going to. They've already said they're going to be here at 930 and everything. Sure enough, they showed up at 930 on the nose, charged me exactly what they said they were going to do, seemed to do a good job and it was like, wow, that was easy.

Speaker 3: 14:16

So for me, like when it's a consumer that knowing I always think about this a lot, I don't necessarily want to, I don't need the cheapest, but I don't want to get screwed I'm always worried about are they going to screw me? You know, am I getting? Am I paying way too much? Are they all sudden?

Speaker 3: 14:30

One time we had a guy and sorry, I know I'm going on here, but I had a guy come out to fix my dryer and he said this fuse is dead or something. I had another person come out about an hour later because I didn't trust this guy, and the guy said there's nothing wrong with your fuse, it's just this little wire needs to be reconnected. Charge me 50 bucks. And the guy was straight up like just trying to scam us Like it wasn't. Even so, I think there as a consumer, and I don't think I'm that unique. We're just always worried about you know are we going to get speed, are we gonna get quality, and then are we I'm not getting screwed on the price. That's really what's going through my head, so I echo exactly what you said yeah, I mean follow through communication, like we had.

Speaker 1: 15:11

you know, we had some drainage issues at our house so we called a couple companies come look out, all of them with vastly different solutions. All from like let's just like, regrade your yard. I'm like what like to like, there's not really a big problem here. You could do this that there's about three or four companies. After we got a quote from all of them, only one company followed up one time after that. Wow, and we decided not to do anything. We did like you know, I did something just myself. But the fact that they sent an estimate out and they never even texted or called or even tried to get the business anymore, I mean like, think about how often that is happening.

Speaker 3: 15:52

To your point. That's happened to me. I need my fence right now replaced and what you said, I'm waiting until the last minute. It's like on the verge of falling over. It's probably one storm away from falling over. I need it replaced. And I got some quotes and not one of them followed up with me. There were three quotes. I got Not one of them followed up. Hey, were you interested in moving forward? I don't know. Is that because they're so overwhelmed or they just don't have a process?

Speaker 1: 16:16

Yeah, they don't have a process. Likely they're not tracking how many times they're actually following up. If they're a little bit bigger, they might have like inside salesperson whose job it is to follow up with that. But like what tends to happen is, you know, you kind of give up right after a few calls and they don't answer, but like that person could be at work or or they just don't feel like talking about their fence right now and like you have to follow up.

Speaker 1: 16:39

And you got to try email, you got to text, you got a call like maybe they, maybe they'll start answering you with a text, and then like why don't you add them into a campaign where you know if they haven't responded in 60 days, let's just do. Let's give them a discount, shoot them a text and say you have until this time and we're gonna give you a discount on whatever you know. Um, but they don't have the system and they're really focused on. Everything is so immediate. You can only see what is happening today, what's on the board today, what is happening, the quotes going out today, and you kind of just forget about what's happened in the last two or three weeks and then you get on a cycle of just chasing the leads, yeah.

Speaker 3: 17:20

You almost become a victim of your own industry because everybody's need is immediate. Yeah, you almost become a victim of your own industry. Yeah, because everybody's need is immediate, you start to just think immediate rather than how am I building a business, a pipeline and a longer term type of strategy? Yeah, interesting.

Speaker 1: 17:32

At home services. You know, if you're only in one area, like you've only got so many people to serve, so you probably should take a long-term approach to these customers right You're going to run out of people, especially like there's only so many people within the city and there's so many companies and so there's competition. So how do you start to think more long-term, not just like today's leads, tomorrow's leads, this week's leads, this month's leads, and how do you start to like really think about you know long-term customer value?

Speaker 3: 18:04

Well, you know you're getting into one of the topics I want to talk about, so we should talk about it now. We have that lead mentality, but you advocate think about lifetime value of your customer. So let's talk about that a little bit. What does that mean and how do you make that switch I mean, obviously, with a guy like you, but what are things that you should be looking at when changing your vision from just a lead company to how do I get good lifetime value out of my customer?

Speaker 1: 18:31

Yeah, so a lot of home services is project-based. There's not necessarily recurring, unless you're doing like a membership, which I encourage. You know all the companies to figure out how to get on some type of annual maintenance plan or something, and so being able to think of that, right, like new leads are expensive but your existing customers are under leveraged, are you? If you do a really good job and you have customer, well, maybe if you're doing crawl space or something like that, something that's big and it's probably you know, they're probably not going to have another job or they hope they have never have another job again for another 15 years. What about annual maintenance? What about turning those people into like referral partners or referring their neighborhood, referring their neighbors and all of that stuff? How do you actually think about the customers and how much they pay you over time and not just one single job, and maybe it is doing a small job first, right, if you're HVAC, maybe it's just like a quick repair. But how do you actually keep them in your system, nurture them? So when it is time for them to do a new system, you're the first one they call they've signed up for the membership. They know you're the first one they call. They've signed up for the membership, they know you're trustworthy, all of those things, and so not being you know everyone's obviously going after, like you know, complete new install of HVAC, like it's high ticket. But maybe you need to get in on just a small thing and really build some trust and reputation and think about well, we got them down, how do we communicate with them on a monthly basis? Get them familiar with us so when they do have a bigger issue, they're calling us and not just another new guy like they've forgotten our name and they're calling something else.

Speaker 1: 20:08

So you need a customer base that buys again and refers others, and it it really depends on the specific service, because sometimes you know big ticket items that only occur. You know, like you know, roofing, for instance, right, it's a. If you're doing a whole new roof, you know how do you? You know you have to think about them differently, right, but if it's hvac or plumbing or something like that, or as control, those are obviously a little bit different. But being able to think of like how do I keep this person for 10 years, how do I build a relationship? So when they move to a new house and they need a new roof at that house they call us. How do you keep that going and start thinking about people that live in the area as long-term customers and not just new ones all the time?

Speaker 3: 20:53

Right, right Now. That's good stuff. And then, how do you quantify? How do you quantify, like if, when you're talking to someone and they're thinking more of like, they've got a lead logic to them in terms of man, we got to get the lead in, we got to cover it quickly which we've already discussed is important but really get them also to thinking of that lifetime value. How do you, when you're working with a client, how do you get them to reframe, or how do you find that there's a problem and they're not, they are just thinking more of like go from lead to lead as opposed to the bigger picture? How do you diagnose that? And then what's that conversation look like?

Speaker 1: 21:25

I think, yeah, the quickest way is to see, like what's their cadence of communication with their customers. If I quickly notice like they basically never communicate beyond just like we're done with the job, then there's a problem there. It's like are we sending? Do we have them segmented as like, all right, this is a good customer, they've given us this much money, they're on this list, they get an email every single month. They they remember our names. They don't necessarily need us right now, but we're staying top of mind, and so I think the biggest thing is that I know when you're just focused on like leads, leads, leads, leads, and you're you know on that treadmill is really your communication and how you're thinking about customers and are you actually building relationships. I mean, it's pretty, it doesn't take a lot. I can just see the systems and the style of communication and know pretty quickly if you're thinking long-term or if you're thinking just like what's right in front of your nose got it?

Speaker 3: 22:20

yeah, okay, and do you find most home service companies that you start to work with? Is that an area typically they're not really focused around? Is the ltv, is that pretty common, or is that more of the exception, would you say?

Speaker 1: 22:35

I would say pretty common because, like it's project work right and I think yep and lead gen is typically the conversation. It's like I need more leads, how do I get more leads? I need more leads. I get more leads, I need more leads. But it's like why are you taking care of the ones we're getting? Yes, already when you shift from lead gen to ltv, like I think business gets more profitable and less stressful because you know there's ways for you to book jobs when things are slow. You have a crm place, you have communication going out, so I'd say it is pretty common. Now they know what their average ticket is usually, which is good and should be tracked.

Speaker 3: 23:14

Sometimes you know that's that's not tracked as well yeah, good stuff, good stuff, okay, taking kind of the same direction, but a little bit deeper. Where is AI and automation in your mind fitting into not just your role, but home services, like, where do you think what's that looking like? Are there some things people should be doing, thinking about, and how much is it involved in what you're doing for clients?

Speaker 1: 23:38

Yeah, in what you're doing for clients. Yeah, I think there's a huge opportunity, especially for the companies that start to experiment and try to use it now. Home services is notorious for being very slow in technology, and there are a lot of really fast-growing AI companies in the space now, and you can kind of look at some of these bigger companies that are, you know, 20, 50, 100 million. They're using it. You can be using it for your call center, right, if you're missing a bunch of phone calls, you know, using a tool like same day or evoca, to be able to, like, actually take those calls and field them, to record them. Um, and actually, you know, say what's the sentiment on these calls? How's your csr actually doing on these calls? Are they empathetic? All those things can be used for coaching, and then, I think, on the AI and the automation side, with chats or booking appointments or follow-up sequences, there's so much opportunity and a lot of revenue that's going to come from that.

Speaker 1: 24:41

I think the key, though, is not like, not thinking like it has to be implemented everywhere, but trying it somewhere in one particular place, in a controlled environment, and don't just, like, you know, let it run free and just get rid of everybody and just use ai, for you know csrs, but like, try when you you know, try it on when you're closed or whatever, and start and start to just experiment and that's the only way you're going to be able to start using it. Just don't get overwhelmed by all the potential out there. There's so many tools and but I don't think it's wise to not use it. Yeah, but you just got to, you know, figure out how that's the best way to use it what is your opinion of this ai automation for your CSRs?

Speaker 3: 25:23

And like, after hours, people calling up. I personally experienced it and it was actually not bad, like I stayed on the call and I went through the process. It didn't like cause me to stop talking to them but, honestly, their AI handoff to human handoff was really poor and I think that's why I didn't end up hiring them. What are you seeing in that space? Because when I bring it up to clients in the home service space, I usually get pretty emotional reactions. Like, usually the reaction is, oh, I'm not going to do that. This is a people business. I will not use AI automation to answer the phone. So what are your thoughts? What's the pushback you're getting? So what are your thoughts? What's the pushback you're getting? I like how you said, test it and try it, but when you get that response, it says, oh man, I'd never do it. I want human interaction. What's your response to that?

Speaker 1: 26:07

yeah, I mean I, I agree. Like at one point, you know you ask a question and yeah, it's like thanks, how can I help? You know? It's like super delayed or something. Yeah, yeah, but it's getting better and better and there's actually a tool, sesamecom that is definitely the best like voice. It sounds just like you're actually talking to a person.

Speaker 1: 26:29

They got ohms and ahs in it and I think it's just getting better and it's getting to a point it's going to take some time now, if you're. I think it's, I think it's just getting better to the point where we won't really be able to tell right, right, and if you are like questioning it, you can ask them. Then they'll say yes, I am, or whatever. But it's super valuable. Like if you have tons of calls coming in but you don't have enough people to answer and you're missing calls, it's a lot of missed opportunities and so being able to have like a tool that's able to take those calls and book appointments for you A lot of times conversations aren't super long or don't need to be Right, and so I think, yeah, if you resist it, that's fine. You just, you know there's going to be companies out there that are taking advantage of it and using it and have smaller teams and more profits.

Speaker 3: 27:14

You know so and, brandon, I would even take it one step further in terms of, if you know, some people might be saying, oh, I'm not getting too many calls, but what does happen is, if you're having a human answer the phone, sometimes if that person is doing other tasks this is particularly true during the day Well, it could even be after hours. If it's a person doing other things, they might not ring until the six ring, or they might let it go to voicemail or whatever. And I do say the beauty of automation is it's guaranteed to answer.

Speaker 3: 27:44

It's guaranteed to answer quickly, and a lot of times that's really just, honestly, what people want initially is just someone to talk to, even if potentially, it's a robot. It just gives them that instant like hey, I'm talking to someone and the problem's starting to get resolved, or at least I'm on my way to solving the problem. Yeah, yeah, it's a big one. Yeah, I do think you bring up a great point, though as it continues to get better, I think it'll force the hand of people that are a little bit resistant to it.

Speaker 3: 28:12

I think right now it's still at least as of when I did the water heater one and maybe it's already progressed because things are changing so fast but when I did it it was, it was close, but it was enough that I could tell it was automated and it was kind of very loop, orientated, Right Right, you could just tell. But I imagine, if not already, it's going to be it becomes so conversational. I mean I don't know if you've ever done chat, GPT by voice, but I mean you literally can carry on conversations. So I mean we're there. I guess it's just a matter of how does that get implemented into software for answering calls?

Speaker 1: 28:45

Yeah, no, it's great. I take walks and talk to the chat GPT about different ideas, and it's great. I think a lot of people don't use it enough, I think honestly. I think that's where we're at right now is like there's a lot of talk about ai but not a lot of people like that are actually using it like it's capable. And in a year or two we're gonna look back and be like whoa, like there's a lot of stuff that you can actually do now, well, we made fun of it. You know, two years ago I was like, oh, this design is terrible or whatever it is. You know, it's like oh. Now it's like oh, it's like oh, it's pretty good, it's getting good. You make videos.

Speaker 3: 29:23

It's funny. I do the chatting with it too, and occasionally I'll mess with my wife. She'll be in the car and I don't really want to chat with it with my wife in the car, but just to mess with her I'll go. Hey, chat GPT, how do I make my wife agree with everything? It was funny the first couple times. Now it's not so funny, but it's amazing.

Speaker 3: 29:45

The you know just the interaction that you can have with it. And, uh, one thing I will say, though nothing to do necessarily with our conversation, it is interesting you got to be careful because chat, gpt or any of these services, most of them will agree with everything you say, even if your idea is relatively not that great. Yeah, they're kind of programmed to kind of, I think, be positive and encouraging. So I just say, be cautious when it's always, uh, yeah, giving you positivity, because sometimes you know it's probably better if it's actually kind of questioning, yeah, some of your decisions and stuff it is wrong sometimes, like because I'll be like wait, I don't know, I don't think that's actually how you calculate that.

Speaker 1: 30:16

It's like oh yeah, you're right, this I'm like it's okay, no-transcript, those are like the hourly options and those can scale up or scale down. And then the other thing that I'm doing is basically putting together like these cohorts so somebody you know maybe they're not sure putting together 10 to 15 home service business owners, and we do like multiple sessions like this, and I kind of start to uncover broadly, like here's where hidden revenue is. Let's start to get everyone's information about where are you tracking, what are you not tracking, where's visibility, and start to give them clues to like here's how you actually recover revenue without spending more on ads. So those are kind of the two, the two offers, basically. And the other one is just, like you know, I could do a bucket of 10 hours of coaching to start to, to get a sense, but usually within you know, get a few hours and actually get into the business and know what's going on and then be able to set up like a three-month plan and then you can uncover more.

Speaker 1: 31:47

I'm gonna have more ideas for how to continue to improve, but I think the benefit is like let me just take that marketing burden off your shoulders as the owner and be that voice on the leadership team of like, how do we actually grow this business with marketing? How do we track what's working, how do we cut our costs? Like what's not working, we're spending tons of money, and how do we get scrappy and like, think about traditional and tv and print and digital and think about all those things together, and so sometimes it's the owner themselves that doesn't have that marketing expertise and it becomes a stressful point for them. So, yeah, that's, that's the model now and those are basically the, the offers. I do have like a project roadmap, like it's just a project that'll take me about a month to deep dive, but, um, preferably, you know, doing some type of hourly retainer yeah, it sounds like you've got a lot of different entry points, yeah, depending on the client size and how much help they want.

Speaker 3: 32:45

so that that's cool, okay. And then last thing I want to wrap up with what about I'd love a tip, a marketing tip, and it could be something we've already talked about. But just to kind of drive it home, is there something that you could give us that maybe we could apply to our business?

Speaker 1: 32:56

today If you don't have service Titan, whatever the tools you're using, call rail is an option, you know start setting up phone numbers for your Google ads, for your Facebook ads, for your Google my Business. Track the calls, listen to the calls so you can get feedback and see if they're actually doing a job, good job. Track those calls to actual jobs to be able to time, to revenue. And now you have a nice starting point to see like well, what is actually working? Where are we getting some some roi from, especially if you're doing multiple, multiple channels like google ads, lsas, google my business. Do you actually know if your lsas are leading to jobs? Are they just people calling about work like that they want to work? There are those leading into jobs?

Speaker 1: 33:45

Is that spend actually making you money and a profit and a return on ad spend? You have to think about those things in terms of what does it actually cost to acquire a new customer on ads and across the board in general? And so, basically, for every dollar you spend, you want to be making three dollars. That's like bare minimum or not the bare minimum, but that's, like you know, standard. Where you want to be at yeah, where you want to be at. Yeah, and it's not really a tip, it's more of like a project. I guess I'm kind of giving this.

Speaker 3: 34:17

No, that's okay. I do have one question. You mentioned track your calls. You know there's now these AI tools where they review your calls and then they give you feedback in terms of how the calls were, and I've seen them. Now they're now for home services too. Have you seen any of those? Do you have any thoughts on them? I imagine, like the other AI stuff, it's probably improving, but is that a tool that's helpful, you think, to a typical home service business owner?

Speaker 1: 34:45

Yeah, I think so. I mean if, if you can get like sentiment and feedback and so be able to provide coaching to csrs or whoever's answering the phones and there's additional tools that will you know, like relo or whatever that will actually record while your salesperson's meeting with the person in their home and giving feedback. So, yeah, I saw that it's advancing and those are really helpful coaching tools and some of them will like point out they know the specific insights from it. But even just having it recorded and having somebody on your team who will listen to them and know like wow, there's a lot of missed opportunities here or not. I think it's definitely worth a look and can be extremely helpful for business.

Speaker 3: 35:25

Yeah, yeah, I totally agree with you. I'm a big believer. I've said it so many times on this show many years ago, when I managed a sales team, we would record the calls and then we'd go over them. We didn't quite have the tools that we have today. I mean, we'd manually listen to everyone and sometimes we'd pay an external service to transcribe them. But the value in hearing how people are handling situations and being able to train them and give them feedback on their own personal conversations with with potential clients is huge, like it has. It's just when you listen to them. Sometimes you're even surprised if it's obviously not your own call, but if it's of other members, you're kind of surprised Sometimes how they're handling the calls. It's not consistent with, maybe, how you've done the training or what you would think they might say in situations, and it's just if done professionally. It's a very healthy way to help people grow.

Speaker 1: 36:13

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. I did think of a tip like an actionable tip. I read this stat, for home services specifically, that 43% of contact forms aren't responded to. Wow, so I mean, that's about half.

Speaker 3: 36:31

Yeah, one out of two.

Speaker 1: 36:33

So a lot of people that are calling, but some people do fill out the forms and so, like an action item would be to take a look at your form fills. What's your actual process for that? To take a look at your form fills, what's your actual process for that, and if you can have a system for, like, quickly following up with that with that form fill. You know we could call that speed to lead right, but like and start to figure out how to actually have a system where when a form fill comes in and then you know when it's actually been followed up with and when that first call went out, and I would say, like an ultimate goal would be 60 seconds during the day.

Speaker 1: 37:08

It's going to take time to get there right, but if you go from taking five days to respond to five hours, you're going to see a bump and the amount that improves conversion rates just by speeding that process up is pretty astonishing. So ultimate goal if someone fills out a form, does someone from your team in your office call them within 60 seconds, because you know they're hot. Right, they just fill out a form, they're thinking about it. You could probably book that call within 60 seconds Now. Two hours later they might be eating Chick-fil-A or something or mowing their lawn, and they don't answer when you call or or someone else.

Speaker 3: 37:45

They already got them or someone else already took. Yeah, which is what usually happens. Someone else gets the 60 seconds and then they don't. They're not as interested anymore. Yeah, yeah, that's a big one, man. I can't believe 43, but I guess, as you said, some probably call, so that number might be lower. But even if the number is 30%, that's still a little hard to believe that three out of 10 people you potentially are not responding to at all and everyone's like well, someone else has got it.

Speaker 1: 38:13

You know like there's no, like no. They get an automatic email, a phone call and text message as soon as they fill out a form or whatever. It is like setting those up and that's what the big companies have grown to do is they focus on these small, these small things that you know really matter in getting new customers.

Speaker 3: 38:41

One pushback that I know, when you say like the 60 seconds to call back that I've heard a lot is they'll say, well, whoever's responsible for it you know the whatever individual they'll say, well, I'm doing other things, or I'm in the middle of stuff, or I can't stop what I'm doing. Is there some answer to that? Like what's the? You know what do you do? Do you just say drop everything you're doing and take the call and call them back? Or how do you handle that so you can do it in 60 seconds?

Speaker 1: 39:08

I think if you have some barriers to actually getting a call to them, at least set up like an automation for an email on a text, because then you know they might. Just maybe they're not actually going to answer your phone, maybe they don't like to talk on the phone that's why they fill out the form but they might talk to you on a text and if you shoot them a text saying hey, we got your, you know how can we help? When do you need somebody out there? Whatever it is, you can start a conversation quickly and then anybody else can pick that up. But they know like, oh, this company's on it, right? That's a simple way if you have barriers to actually getting. But if you have a csr team, start to figure it out and start to like figure out a system for how you're going to get to 60 seconds, one of those people calling them that quickly, and I guarantee jobs will get booked really fast yeah, that's good stuff.

Speaker 3: 39:56

I like the. At minimum have the automation in place, because that is instant and it does kind of cover all the bases. Okay, good stuff. Your, your website compass fractional. Your website compass fractionalcom. Once again, compass fractionalcom. I'll put that in the show notes at profit and gritcom. If people wanted to reach out to you, is that the best spot, or where else would you like them to go?

Speaker 1: 40:15

Yeah, that's good, and I'm very active on LinkedIn, so connect with me there, send me a DM and we can chat and set up a call.

Speaker 3: 40:23

Hi man, so super. Appreciate your time. A lot of good stuff here. Look forward to talking to you again in the future. Yeah, Thanks so much for having me. Yeah, Thank you. Take care.

Speaker 3: 40:34

What stuck with me from that conversation with Brennan? Leads aren't the problem. Follow-up is Speed, trust, consistency. That's what turns interest in income, not just throwing more money at ads. Here's my take as a part-time CFO If you're not tracking how leads convert, where you're losing them or what each one is actually worth over time, you're building on sand. Fixing cash flow isn't always about cutting costs. A lot of times it starts with tightening up your sales process so that your pipeline actually turns into profit. And hey, if your growth feels like chaos or your team's too busy putting out fires to follow up, let's talk. I help service businesses build financial systems that bring stability, clarity and real scale without running out of cash. You can book a low-key intro session at cfomadeeasycom. That's cfomadeeasycom. And hey, if this episode hit home, do me a quick favor, leave a review. It helps more home service pros find the show and get the straight talk they need. Thanks, as always, for listening to Profit Grit and I'll see you next week.