Profit & Grit with Tyler

Scaling Smarter in Home Services - Sam Preston

• Tyler Martin • Episode 14

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Sam Preston transformed from failing at three different agencies to building Service Scalers, a $5M+ marketing agency for home service businesses by focusing on what he does best and hiring people who excel at everything else.

• Sam's early agencies failed because he tried to be everything to everyone - "I'll be your influencer, marketing, email marketing, website, social media"
• Success came when he niched down to specific services (PPC, websites, content) then further to home service businesses only
• For businesses under $1M in revenue, DIY marketing makes more sense than hiring an agency
• Customer acquisition is the most important aspect of any business - it starts with traffic, then leads, appointments, and closed deals
• Your 3-day call board should show exactly how many appointments are scheduled to keep technicians productive
• Marketing spend should be adjusted based on appointment numbers to ensure technicians are fully utilized
• A 98% team retention rate comes from prioritizing people's personal lives over work
• Sam hires through requiring Loom video responses from applicants and asking values-based questions like "tell me about a time you broke the rules"
• Sam empowers team leaders by removing himself from spending decisions
• Use call tracking numbers to see which marketing campaigns are actually working


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Speaker 1:

So before that I had built probably three different agencies that all failed and failed is probably a bad word. But I built an agency on the back end of I can do everything for everybody. I'll be your influencer, marketing your email marketing, your website, your social media. I'll be everything. And signed some big contracts from that and then just hated myself for making that decision. It was just terrible because I wasn't good at it. I was okay, but I wasn't great at that thing.

Speaker 2:

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:

What happens when you build three businesses and walk away from all of them. That's where Sam Preston's story starts and, trust me, he doesn't sugarcoat it. Sam's now running Service Scalers, a $5 million plus marketing agency focused on home service businesses, but before that he was broke, winging it on a $500 Wix site and figuring it out, like the rest of us. In this episode, sam and I talk about why trying to do everything yourself will keep you stuck, the right time to outsource your marketing, and when to wait, and the numbers you need to track if you want your call board full and your techs busy, whether you're in year one or pushing 10 million.

Speaker 3:

This one's packed with no BS lessons from someone who's actually in the trenches. And, since we're talking about smart growth, this episode of Profit and Grit is sponsored by none other than Service Scalers, the home service marketing pros who focus on results, not marketing fluff. Stick around for this week's Marketing that Scales tips, where I'll share a practical move you can use today, powered by the team at Service Scalers. Let's get to chatting with Sam now. Hey, sam, welcome to the Profit and Grit Show. How are you doing, man? I'm doing great man.

Speaker 3:

I'm excited about this. Great to have you here. I want to start out learning a little bit about you. Two things One, what do you do? First part is what do you do for a living, and then part two is maybe some little personal tidbit about you, maybe even that people might not commonly know.

Speaker 1:

Love that. Sam Preston, I am the CEO of Service Scalers. We're a home service marketing agency. Personally, I've got two kids that I absolutely love. I am a massive nerd when it comes to books. Like, if there's not like some sort of space force or magic else dwarves, like I don't want to read your book. Like give me, give me the magic so big into that board games. I play basketball a couple of times a week. So yeah, you know, that's that's. That's me in a nutshell.

Speaker 3:

So I'm getting here a little bit out on the French here, but are we like Dungeons and Dragons type board games, or what are we talking about?

Speaker 1:

I wish I don't have time, or the friend community group, to get into Dungeons and Dragons, okay, but one day I really do want to, I'll dress up in everything. Well, let's go, holy cow, okay.

Speaker 3:

Okay, I'll be on the sidelines for that one, but good to know.

Speaker 1:

Love that Next podcast. We could talk about that. You know Exactly exactly.

Speaker 3:

That'll be my sci-fi one. Okay, so I want to learn about you first and just your whole journey of being an entrepreneur, and then from there I want to get into how we can help the community that listens for their own home service businesses. You have a lot of valuable knowledge in terms of marketing and lead generation. It's obviously a huge topic, but let's start first Like where did you get the whole idea of being in business for yourself? Was this something you always dreamed about? Did you fall into it? Did you have a family that was very entrepreneurial? Where does it all start?

Speaker 1:

It all starts on a air trip or a drive to the airport. I was taking my cousin and I was talking like I want to, I want to do some kind of career, I'm going to go work at a job. And I was really just confused on what I wanted and I remember just sitting there like you know, you don't have to do any of that, you can literally do whatever you want. And I was like no, you have to follow the rules. You go work at a job, that's W2. That's the game. And he's like here. Let me introduce you to my friend, tim Ferriss 5-Hour Workweek. And yeah, I read that and of course that changes everybody's life when they read that.

Speaker 3:

It is so amazing to me how there are just certain books that are like just life changing, Like Rich Dad, Poor Dad's one. I don't know if you ever read that, but that was a huge one, Changed a lot of people's lives. I'll have people on my podcast that now have like $10 million businesses and they'll be all oh yeah, I read Rich Dad, Poor Dad and that decided to be a business owner. You know, I think another one is Alex Ramosi, literally the guy I literally just got off the podcast with. He followed Alex Ramosi at a very young young age. Get this. This guy is a multimillionaire doing scooping dog poop and, I swear to God, $2 million a year. Business.

Speaker 3:

And he now has increased a course he's included a course. He's got $870 a month, members that so another million dollars roughly just doing courses. And so it just and it's all from Alex Ramosi Well, not all, but you know he used to follow him and followed a lot of his methodologies. And look at, I mean, it just blows my mind when you think these different resources are out there and then people apply them.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I mean, I think it's all about, like, finding people that you want to be like and go. Oh, I want to be like them and listening, seeing what they do, and then just do what they did to get to where they are Right.

Speaker 3:

That's good stuff. Okay, so you read four hour work week. How do you go from that whole four-hour workweek concept to I'm going to have a business, to I'm going to have a successful business? How does that chain all work?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I mean. From there I decided, well, if I want to own my own business, I should get into sales. I should learn that thing, Because if you don't know how to sell, I mean you can't do business right. I mean you can, we can talk about that. But, like for the most part, you have to be able to sell an idea at least.

Speaker 1:

And so I went to software sales and I was doing a lot of BDR work, outbound, trying to find new clients for the software. They changed my job from outbound to inbound where I was doing webinars and stuff like that. The moment they did that, my commission tanked by about 10K a year. I was making 55K and so from 55 to 45, living in Denver, Colorado, I mean this is back in like 2017. So that went a little bit further, but like but still it crushed. It crushed us. And it was just me and my wife in a little apartment. We could barely afford to live. And so I went to a networking group and someone said they needed a website. I said I could build your website. How much? $500. Done so, literally struck up a deal, built a $500 website, decided I could do this game because there's a lot of bad marketing agencies out there, so I wanted to try to get it out and see what I could do.

Speaker 3:

But was this website that you built? Was it kind of fake it till you make it type thing? Did you know how to build a website?

Speaker 1:

Oh yeah, full on. Fake it till you make it. I was just gonna hustle hard. I don't even know if the website's still out. It was on Wix, wow, and my wife and I did it. Yeah, it was good for $500.

Speaker 3:

It was a phenomenal website for that price. Wow, what a cool story. So then it just kind of gave you belief hey, I can probably do this. And then obviously you didn't. Now you're specializing in home service, but you didn't start out doing that. At what point do you go? You know, maybe I should be niching down and being in a certain space, like how did that evolve?

Speaker 1:

So before that I had built probably three different agencies that all failed oh wow, and failed is probably a bad word. But I built an agency on the back end of I can do everything for everybody. I'll be your influencer, marketing your email, marketing your website, your social media, I'll be everything. And signed some big contracts from that and then just hated myself for making that decision. It was just terrible because I wasn't good at it. I was okay, but I wasn't great at that thing.

Speaker 3:

Wait, wait, wait. You kind of lost me. I'm sorry, because I think there's a lot to learn from this. So, the three agencies that you didn't do too well at what was the reason that you didn't think you excelled in those areas? Was it contracts that you signed, or is that different than the? Is that all related? No, that different than the.

Speaker 1:

Is that all related? Uh, no, no, Good question. So it was a twofold One. I tried to be everything. So, instead of specializing like one thing, I was like I will run all your marketing. I'm just somebody who believes that I can make a new thing, sure, sure. So I never specialized in one thing personally to get good at it. Two, the way I built the model is all on my back. How good is Sam, you know like, let's see if Sam can do this. What problem is is you don't have team members, and I'm, quite frankly, not the best at everything, and so it just it could not scale. It was not a business. It was Sam, as a freelancer, who found somebody that would pay him a lot of money to do work. I got okay results, not phenomenal, nothing like wow. I took this company from you know two to five million, but I got okay results and just decided that wasn't a business model, so burnt that down, tried something else, got it and that try something else.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, when did the? I'm sorry, when did the actually go with? Try something else. I'm sorry for interrupting you.

Speaker 1:

No, no, you're good. So the one thing that I found a lot of success in with working on those big contracts was I was good at PPC. I got this figured out, so that's where I went and built just a PPC agency, and that's all we did for several years.

Speaker 3:

Wow, and then is that where service scalers? Was that service scalers, or was there another level until you got to service scalers?

Speaker 1:

So two more levels. I built out a website agency.

Speaker 1:

Okay, good for you Mostly because I would drive PPC to websites and it wouldn't convert. So I was like, all right, I got to build a website so that we can convert these leads and then built out a content agency. All three of those agencies still stand, Wow. And then I decided I've niched down based on vertical, so PPC for everybody, content for everybody. I've niched down based on vertical, so PPC for everybody, content for everybody, website for everybody. And then I was like what if I niched down even further and went just home service businesses?

Speaker 1:

And that's when I decided to test out some running, some podcast ads on an owned and operated podcast and man podcast ads, crush and newsletters. It's doing so well for us and now it's not the only podcast that we advertise on Sure and it does really good for us. So that is the birthplace of Service Scalers is we wanted to try to niche down. I threw up a website in two hours for just home services, tested out some ads. It was like, wow, there's leads here, let's go Wow. So why home services? Tested out some ads. It was like, wow, there's leads here, let's go Wow.

Speaker 3:

So why home services? Like, why did you decide to niche there? Is there any reason or anything that pushed you in that direction?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I mean I want to say that I love home services with a passion and that's why. But really it's because I had success with a couple of home services clients. I'd been working with John Wilson and his company, helping him drive leads, had success there. John was a friend and I knew I could throw some ads up on his podcast and so literally it's just like this is all falling into place. Let's just see how that works.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, okay, that makes a lot of sense, and John, of course, is the host of Owned and Operated, so did that relationship from you being an advertiser? Is that how that relationship built? Well, actually it sounds like you did. Well, did you do work with them after you were advertising or before you were advertising?

Speaker 1:

Before we were advertising, we were working on marketing and then, after he snipped out that we wanted to test this in, he was like can I invest? I was like sure let's go.

Speaker 3:

He's part owner. Wow, that's very cool. So let's give wow, he's a. He's part owner. Wow, that's very cool. So let's give this context too. Like I believe I read at one point you were like a 10k agency, and I don't know if that's annual or monthly, but now you're, at least as of my last data, probably on like a five million run rate annually. Is that a fair statement?

Speaker 1:

yeah, so in january of 2024 we had received our first $10,000 in revenue. By the end we had hit $2 million collected.

Speaker 3:

I like $200 million by the way.

Speaker 1:

I know it sucked. It should have been it, and this past quarter we did a million dollars booked, so not collected, know booked out for the next 12 months and on our way for five million. My goal right now is by august, september, to be doing a million dollar months and that's one of those big things that I'm working towards, right wow.

Speaker 3:

and so what's your client profile? Is there a certain size client you're looking for? Is that just trying to understand to be able to do? Be a 12 million dollar a year company, million dollars a month in the home services space? I'm thinking you must have a pretty wide net in terms of that profile of who they could be. What does that look like?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I would say that you should probably be doing at least a million dollars to be working with us. Anything smaller, I tend to go hey, go to YouTube, figure out how to run LSA and do that, because you could do 80% of what we do on YouTube for LSA and GMB. We can get onto those marketing things. But there's a lot that you can do on your own before you start working with an agency, because otherwise your marketing spin gets tied up in agency fees versus ad dollars and you shouldn't do that unless you're at a place where you want to do that or you're ready for that.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, yeah, there's nothing worse than when a client comes to me and they'll say, oh, I'm spending $4,000 a month in advertising. And I'll say, okay, that's cool. And then, as I drill in, it's like a thousand for to Google and then 3000 to the agency, and I'll be like I don't think those numbers really make sense.

Speaker 1:

I'll be like I don't think those numbers really make sense? Right, exactly, so that's where you go. You should spend $4,000 in LSA fees alone, like literally throw all that to Aspen or aggregators, right? So your lead partners Yelp, angie's List, things like that. I would rather you spend that there and get leads than on management of services, right?

Speaker 3:

And then just for clarity, for the case anyone in the audience has no local service ads LSA and obviously in the home service world, where we're serving local markets many times, that's kind of probably like the golden ticket in terms of trying for lead generation. Is that a fair statement?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so if you go to Google right now and you search plumbers near me, hvac near me, roofers near me, whatever. You go to Google right now and you search plumbers near me, hvac near me, roofers near me, whatever you want, the first listing there will be a sponsored and it will be the Google guaranteed or local service ads. The ones after that will be Google ads One. After that you'll see the map pack and then everything below that will be SEO, and so if I'm, you know, sub a million, my first thing is trying to set up an LSA campaign and throwing as much money as I can to those LSA accounts.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So you do think someone with like a small budget kind of just YouTubing it to start out, kind of is there any threshold like number of technicians Does that matter at all? Is it more of just more like a revenue? Hey, if you're over a million bucks, I don't care how many technicians you have. We might be able to support you. Or does number of technicians play into it? Capacity, things like that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I mean, for most of the services it's more of a you shouldn't be spending your time doing this. You should hire this out, got it Like LSA and GMB and some of these things you could absolutely do on your own. You probably shouldn't be. And then you have things like SEO and Google ads, where you actually need experts in the field to make those things happen, and there's other. Obviously I'm talking mostly about the services we offer, but like sure you know, I think, facebook ads or TikTok ads and things like that. You probably want somebody to, you know, come alongside you and help you run those.

Speaker 3:

Yep Makes total sense. You know one of the number one things you hear almost every home service business owner. They're going to say to you we don't get enough leads. What's your thoughts when you hear that?

Speaker 1:

No, most people don't so that's a great.

Speaker 1:

You know the customer acquisition is the most important thing you've got to figure out in your business. It's more important than anything else. You figure out customer acquisition, you've won the game. You can figure out fulfillment, and so leads is just a funnel problem. That funnel starts with traffic. That traffic can come from anywhere. That traffic can come from Facebook or SEO or LSA or Yelp or billboards or radio.

Speaker 1:

Traffic is the first thing. You're gonna push all that to the second stage of the funnel, which is leads. Right, that is phone calls. That is a website form fields appointment scheduled through the website. That next step in the funnel is appointment scheduled. You know how many people called and then turned into an actual appointment on your three-day call board. You know you should know when those people are set up and then, after that's closed, one deals right.

Speaker 1:

So that is the four-step funnel you have got to master and it all starts with traffic. And so if you're not getting enough leads, it's because of either your traffic source, your leads that are coming in that aren't converting, or they're not turning into appointments. Those are like the three things that I would focus on. Traffic sources can be as simple as paying money right, throwing some money at, you know, throwing some money at a you know I don't do billboard at this point, but like, throw some money at Google or something to drive traffic to your website, and then, if you're getting traffic to your website, how many of those people are turning into leads? And so it literally is just the three-pronged approach of the funnel and you need to figure out each step.

Speaker 3:

So where do you guys fit in? So you bring the leads into the gate, through the gate? Do you work on that conversion part? Or is it like hey, because one of the things I hear a lot of times is, yeah, they do always say they're short on leads, but then, cause I get into some deeper conversations, I'm on the financial side and I'll be like, okay, well, what's your conversion rate? Uh, I don't know. What are you doing to follow up? Well, we call them three times a day. We get the lead. Okay, what else do you do? No, that's really it, that's all we do. Okay, do um, where are you putting them in? And a CRM? So where do you guys like in that chain? Where do you like? How much are you handholding through that process? A lot of it, okay.

Speaker 1:

And sometimes we're very much limited by like the cops. And literally the other day the client was like so what's our return on ad spend so far? And I was like, great question. Let's look at your CRM. What do you use it for? A CRM Google calendar, that is not going to help us here, bro.

Speaker 1:

So, first off, make sure you have your CRM in place, but second off, our job is to make sure that we can deliver a cost per lead that makes sense for everybody. Our team is literally judged on how many clients you have on track or off track for hitting the cost per lead that they need to be able to work. And that's as simple as how many phone calls did we deliver based off of the ad spend we are working with. Now that second part of the conversation I would say 45% of our clients get, which is the appointments. How many leads turn to appointments? That is really how many qualified leads did you get?

Speaker 1:

That I would say again, like 60, 55% to 60% of our clients do not get us that information, whether it's because they don't have the right setup and service Titan or they're using you know calendar for their, their appointment. But it literally will change your game overnight. Just getting that information back to your marketing of you know, hey Craig, 10 calls yesterday. Seven of them were crap. Oh great, cool. Well then they're coming from this campaign. I'll turn that off and we'll try something else. So it's very important as far as being able to get good results from your campaigns.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, do you have you mentioned ServiceTitan, which generally is for larger home service businesses? I guess as well say, without getting too detailed, but do you have certain tools that you encourage, like for CRM? Let's say, they're not using service site, is that? Do you have any other tools, or do you have any certain tools that you think are beneficial for home service business owners to have?

Speaker 1:

I mean I would, I would use the, the, the normal ones with house cold pro jobber. I mean those are good places. I will say that if you changing over from jobber to service site and as you get bigger is a real big pain in the ass, so like I would just go ahead and like spend it. But also I was the guy that bought Salesforce and just absolutely hated it and now like transferred back into go high level and we're just going to. We're wrong with that.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, yeah yeah. Service site is interesting. They won't even really talk to you unless you're a certain level anyway. Now I know they have like a more introductory product but it's a lot less functional. I think it's more of like a job or equivalent, or maybe a house call pro equivalent. But I agree with you that transition. I've had clients go through that and it's a big deal. You have to be ready for it.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I will say if you have something else and you don't want to use service Titan cause you know to each their own you could use something like CallRail I think there's Dialpad maybe and effectively what you need is to be able to see these calls came in from these keywords and these campaigns and they turned into appointments and so you can do it. It is a little bit of a piecemeal situation, but we have clients that use CallRail instead of signing up for service, and I think it's like 80 bucks a month, so it's reasonable.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, where do you think, like with automation, ai and stuff? Where is that kind of fitting into this in terms of your own workflow and helping home service business owners with lead generation?

Speaker 1:

Dude, I'm so excited about this. We are actively working on this for a number of different ways. One is building AI agents to live inside our clients' accounts. The ideas that I have right now is like anomalies. So what happens when, hey, you're just not spending anything today? What happened? All right, so notify the team so they can go work on it. Or your cost per click went up from $5 to $10, literally doubled. What the heck? You know? Those are the things that we don't see until we get into the account. And so something to be able to sit in there and just monitor. Hey, this is what's going on.

Speaker 1:

I love the idea of it helping us with more testing and more like A-B testing and reporting and being able to pull out like, hey, you've been testing this one keyword for three weeks now. This is the data behind it. Now, you should make a decision based off that. One keyword for three weeks now, this is the data behind it. Now, you should make a decision based off that, because what we have to do mostly because you're you're running so many keywords is you test out keywords and then, as you get a feel for the account, you're making adjustments. But if you could write in something that has rules. That would be amazing. We're already being able to push out more content because of ai in a much quicker path same thing with seo. We're able to push out more content because of AI in a much quicker path Same thing with SEO. We're able to push out a lot more changes early on, quickly. So there's a lot that we've got cooking in the backend.

Speaker 3:

So what do you think about? Like, there's a few companies now that are introducing where you take your phone and you record the call when you actually go out to the client site and then they analyze that call and kind of give you feedback on what went well or what didn't go well. Have you heard about that and do you have any thoughts in terms of where that fits and is it effective?

Speaker 1:

I've not heard of that, but if it can help you close one more deal, that sounds pretty epic, right? Yeah? Yeah, I know Avocaai is doing a lot of that on calls, call centers.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but they also, from what I understand and I can't remember the company, I'm so sorry there's a couple of them, but they also have you take out the phone too, which is kind of interesting. Seems a little awkward, or could be. Yeah, but to your point, like, if it helps you be able to convert calls more, it's just a numbers thing. Like if it makes you convert more, it makes sense to have it 100%. Yeah, yeah, good stuff, good stuff, okay. And then back to your own like company, because I think it could be helpful to home service business owners doing research about you. You have a pretty high team retention rate. I've heard like 98%. I'd love to kind of know, like, like, what are you doing that's working within your own company? What do you find effective and how do you keep that retention rate so high?

Speaker 1:

yeah, obviously it's surprising. Um, I I was. I was talking to somebody else and they were talking about having trouble with retention. I was like clients, uh, yes, no, no, team members, like I've not dealt with that problem in my company. Honestly, I think it's a. It's a little bit of luck, right, I've just got some amazing team members that really are awesome.

Speaker 1:

I also think that we have some values that make people want to stay. You know, the thing I always preach is one of these days you're going to be on your deathbed and you're not going to wish you worked harder for service scalers. You're just not Like you're going to wish that you could be in a really cool place with the people you love one more time and that's what actually matters to you. And so for situations like you have family members sick, your kid gets, you know, has to go to the doctor Like that is always going to be more of a priority than service scalers.

Speaker 1:

Of my attitude and the company's attitude to, or wanting to take care of the people when, when they're in you know needing that, I feel like we've gotten a really loyal following of people that just absolutely love working. They work so hard and it's just fun. I would say there is a decent amount of sarcasm that happens inside. Uh, the slack channel, the gift game is on point and it's a lot of fun, but we, we really it's important to us. Uh, now I will say retentions is probably a tricky word. Yeah, I don't have people leave us. We've had to let people go sure, and that's a whole another game.

Speaker 3:

That is, since you're in, you don't want to leave us, you're scared so I guess that would be my question, though how, what do you do? Do you do anything in terms of vetting or process to make sure the right people get in? Or is it more of like hey, occasionally some people get in that aren't a right fit and we're just going to make sure we help them out so they don't create any toxicity or anything?

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So I literally hired somebody in April it's like March 29th and I let them go by April 15th. It was just like very clearly really early on signs of like this is just not a good fit, we're gonna have to let you go. I also have had a situation where I hired somebody. I was so excited about them and the first two months was bad and I was like, oh, what is going on? We put that person on a PIP and I swear he is like one of the best team members we have in the entire company. So promoting him right now.

Speaker 1:

I have found that PIPs work really well and being on their team for it too, like we want you to work out. You got to be careful with PIPs, because sometimes that pushes them to go find another job in that process and then you're out of person. You're like what do I do? But PIPs have worked really well for us on getting that hiring fast, firing fast, but it's just really not a good fit, and so I really do put a lot of emphasis on my team leaders. So I'm probably one of the more like hey, it's not working out, let's move on and they will go. I really believe in this person Just can I have 30 more days and I'll go? Yeah, go for it. You know like I want them to feel ownership of their team and that's worked out pretty well for us as far as retention and finding really quality people.

Speaker 3:

All right. Now it's time for this week's marketing that scales tip, brought to you by Sam and the crew over at service scalers, the home service marketing pros who focus on results, not marketing fluff. If you're not tracking your phone calls coming from your website or your ads, you're missing key info that could help you grow smarter. I work with a lot of service business owners that pour money into marketing but have no idea which campaigns are actually bringing in paying customers. Setting up a call tracking number is a simple move that shows you what's really working so you can double down on the right stuff and cut out the rest. If you need help dialing this in, reach out to the team at Service Scalers. Tell them Tyler sent you, mention Profit Grit and they will hook you up.

Speaker 1:

I want them to feel ownership of their team and that's worked out pretty well for us as far as retention and finding really quality people.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. Is there anything you do on the front end in terms of do you just have a typical interview process where multiple people interview the person, or do you do any type of personality testing? Anything that helps you maybe identify right fit versus not right fit?

Speaker 1:

There's a couple of things I do. So one is we've done personality tests. I always found that didn't help. This is cool information. I just don't know how to apply it Right and maybe we're just not hiring at a volume that actually makes sense for it.

Speaker 1:

But one is when I run ads we do LinkedIn and Indeed for the most part Yep the first thing I do is I send them a little loom video of myself. Same video that every time it's like hey, my name is Sam, I'm like in my car, in the CVS drive. They're like this is super casual. I expect a loom video from you. That's super casual. Let me tell you a little bit about my team and who we are, why you should even want to work with us. And then my expectation is they send me a little video and so pretty quickly we can get through, because we were sitting on 15 minute interviews with a bunch of people were like I could have told you in the first five seconds this wasn't going to be your favorite, yeah, yeah. So that little video back for us is really helpful to kind of get a vibe from them.

Speaker 1:

And then on the interview I have a couple obviously like do they have a skill sets Like I want to know that. But I've got a couple value questions and it always aligns with something like tell me about a time you broke the rules at your company. Ah, and, because I want to know I've broken the rules. I mean, I was sure, sure, chick-fil-a when I was like 14 and I you know pretty girl walked in, wanted some fries. I literally just handed her fries, didn't charge her a thing, and so like oh, the curse of a pretty girl yeah, I know right, uh, and being 14, so yeah, like I've broken rules, tell me, like, give me the dirt.

Speaker 1:

And a lot of people will either lie about it and it's so bad, it's so obvious when they do so, like that's clearly not a good fit. Or or if they tell me a real story, like like hey, I was managing this guy. We were on a vacation, freeze, no one could get time off, but his grandma died and so I got him off. I never told the company about it and I covered his shift. That's the type of person I want working for me, the person that's going to go above and beyond for his crew, like let's go all day. You don't even have to lie to us, you can just tell him you did it. Like, let's just go. So I want to find those questions that really like make them stand up for something that they believe in and tell me about it, because that's the type of people with the strong character that we want.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, that's good stuff. So when you send the loom of, I think you said you're at the Burger King drive-thru or whatever, wherever you're at CSV CBS, you send the loom, Do you say hey, send me one back in that loom. Now, if they don't send it back, are they immediately disqualified, or how do you handle that?

Speaker 1:

Okay, we literally do not. It's just like this part of the interview process and it's honestly just because we get so many people that are applying yeah, and it's just like I only look at the next step, which is did you send me a Loom video?

Speaker 3:

When you're sending that Loom video I'm assuming that's just a one you just do that video once and you don't say their name and you use that with multiple people. Is that a fair statement?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and if anybody wants it, just message me on X and I'll send it to you to see what it is.

Speaker 3:

It's a great idea. I mean, it's just really novel. And the fact that you're really low key the thing that was striking me as we were talking because that's the first time I've met you via conversation like this how authentic you are and that's before you even brought up the loom thing. And as soon as you said the loom thing, it like it's so goes with your personality, like that. That, to me, is another extension of the authenticity that you know. That, to me, is another extension of the authenticity that you know you're just. This is who I am, this is what we do. Tell me about you.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate you saying that. That's. That's really nice, but also like it's what I look for in in my team members as well. It's like are you authentic? Are you a real person, not a robot, corporate type of person Like we? We want real people.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, yeah, got it. So let's talk about just service, delivering service. Do you see, in the home service space, competition has obviously improved things. But do you see, with some of the clients you work through, their delivery isn't that great in terms of meeting clients' expectations. Do you get involved in that in any way or how do you deal with that? What are your even thoughts on it?

Speaker 1:

first, and then how do you deal with it if it does come up? Yeah, so it's fun because I like to think of our, like, delivery as a restaurant. Right, does the food taste good? Is it a good vibe If you could do those two things? You're crushing it as a restaurant. Same thing with homes. You know a marketing agency like can we deliver results? And then did you have a good time while we did that? So everything I'm doing over the next actually I've got some big changes that I want to make for, but, like you know, I'm limited to time. So over the next couple of months really going to be focusing on those two things, on how we can get that better.

Speaker 1:

I normally don't get involved. Individual accounts Sometimes I do right, like, hey, someone reaches out to me and says, hey, like I'm working with you, I'm not getting the cost per lead that I was hoping to or I'm having. I'm struggling with an account manager In fact I had one which is like literally why we let go and replace that person, right, which is good. I need that feedback. I can't know unless I get that feedback, but I usually stand out on a holistic. How usually stand out on a holistic? How do we get all of our clients better Now with that?

Speaker 1:

Like I was saying, every single account manager has to report. We call it our daily huddle and it meets every Monday, wednesday, friday, which is amazing. It's the type of company we are. It's just too much fun. Every account manager has to report on how many clients they have and how many clients are hitting their on-track goals. The cost per lead Wow. So literally they have to be accountable to the results that they are getting their clients in front of the entire team Wow. And so we are very much tied in to that.

Speaker 1:

Now there's a couple of things I'm doing now to just continue to get better results is I'm hiring somebody who's called an auditor and his literal job is just to run through accounts and see how are our teams doing.

Speaker 1:

He's not tied to a client, he's just tied to making sure that they're doing a good job and so, super excited about that person, we'll bring them on over the next 30 days and then my leaders in the accounts will focus on clients that are underperforming, off track, and it's cool because you get to really see how good these marketers are when you hire them. Like, literally, you see the difference on, you know, this week you started with clients at 80% on track and you're ending the week at 91. Let's go. Uh, you know, I had a girl who took a week off and her accounts went from 75 to 69%. It was like, oh well, that's what happens when you take time off. Let's get back in here, let's get to work. So yeah, that's how we keep track of how our team members are doing, keep accountable and keep things moving forward and getting better.

Speaker 3:

So two questions. One that huddle, is that over Slack or is that in a Zoom meeting? Zoom, zoom, okay.

Speaker 1:

So we just changed this. On Mondays and Wednesdays it's department focus, so sales and marketing meets, paid meets, seo meets, website meets all separately, and then on Fridays it's the entire team Basically everybody in the company gets to come and listen to. What did we do that week to hit all our KPIs?

Speaker 3:

Got it Okay, and then you talked about your marketers improving or having impact. Do you do anything? As you have more account managers and more marketers on your staff? Are you doing anything that the team can kind of feed off the collective experience in terms of raising skills within the group? How do you guys do that? So maybe one person's doing something very effective, how do you get it? So you maybe get everybody to do that? So you know, maybe one person's doing something very effective.

Speaker 1:

How do you get it? So you maybe get everybody to do that. Yeah, good question. So, um, there's a couple of different things we're doing.

Speaker 1:

I would say the the biggest one, the one I'm most excited about, is that we make loom videos. So we call a small and big wins. So every week, every week to two weeks, our account managers are finding small and big wins inside their accounts and they make a Loom video of what they did to get that. And then they are pushing that to a Slack channel where anyone can go and listen to those things. And then, more importantly, our builders people that set up and build campaigns from the start are watching those so that they can go, oh, that's what's happening, because the builder doesn't know, unless he can get feedback loop on hey, I built this and this is the results of those campaigns when it first got launched.

Speaker 1:

So those are, I would say, big ones. And also, just again, like watching how successful certain marketers are and so, uh, we have one guy who just absolutely crushing it, like just hands of gold when it comes to google ads, and so, like he is like watching other people build accounts and like, oh, hey, why did you do that? So, like some of these things are, you know, just getting more experts in people that are better at the job, and then obviously those loom videos and the small and big wins really makes a big difference but that that's gold.

Speaker 3:

I mean you can really do that in any business. I never really thought about it this way before. Make them short, snappy loom videos that essentially are training videos. Disguise this training videos. I'll say, but you could basically, you know, hey, something that's effective. I mean you can really do it in the industry where you've done something good or something that could help the team. You drop that in a short loom video and then you throw it. It gives you visibility Plus it. You drop that in a short loom video and then you throw it.

Speaker 1:

It gives you visibility, plus it helps the team as a whole. That's really cool. I love it. I love it. And then what we do on Fridays we have a standup which is like 15 minutes of like the company come together and just kind of having like a cultural moment and we get to give shout outs. And so people get up and are like, hey, anne-marie just crushed it this week, she. And oh, did you see the website Francisco put out Like it is badass, like it's so much fun.

Speaker 3:

Very cool. Okay, let's go back over to home service business. How can we help them? What are you? Give me some a little bit of tidbits or wisdom here. What are you seeing? What should we have them focusing on? Give me kind of some ranges of and we're obviously talking someone that would be at your service level but what should they? Probably 2 million plus in revenue. What should they look at? Where are we going with the market? I'm asking probably too broad of a question, but just give me some feedback of you know, something that would give them something to think about.

Speaker 1:

I mean, first off, you got to know your numbers right, like even the way I'm talking about my business, like my accountant and managers know their numbers. My marketer knows how many. You know how many scheduled meetings they always have to have in the future for our sales rep. So my marketers always know they have to have 12 scheduled meetings every Monday through the week. 12 is already set Every Wednesday, 12 is already set Every Friday. There's 12 in the future. That's their number that they have to hit every meeting and so if it's 10, we know we need to work extra hard to get 12.

Speaker 1:

So for you as a home service business, you absolutely have to know those numbers. You should have a three-day call board where you know tomorrow I've got the number of appointments that are coming up and then the day after that I have half of those and the day after that half of those. If those numbers aren't hitting the metrics you need, you need to turn up ad spit. You need to throw a little bit more money at Yelp or Google Ads or whatever to go hit those numbers to feed your technicians. The worst thing you can possibly do is have technicians going home early or sitting on their hands because they don't have work. That's waste, can't have that. So reverse engineering. You have to know your numbers, specifically on how many appointments that you have scheduled on your call board or of the next week, and then figure out what levers you can move to get you more appointments if you're not hitting your numbers.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so when you say call board, do people now they still literally have a board on the wall where they're looking out there three days where it's listed or I'm assuming it's mostly automated. Most of your clients, is that fair to say?

Speaker 1:

Mostly automated. Okay, we're actually looking at like building a call board. I feel like that's so epic that you could just have like on your phone or something like that. But a lot of people like we're at the Wilson company poor, you know office and they have it like big screen TVs and you know exactly what's going on. That's what we used to do.

Speaker 3:

Really. Yeah, it was. I mean people, it was effective, like we had this, you know, back then. It's not a small TV, but it was like a 60 inch TV I think nowadays like everything's a hundred inch or whatever but we used to have a rolling 60 inch, 55 inch, whatever it was TV and we would like literally it would be a screensaver kind of, where it would rotate and it would have that data point and it fired the sales team up Like they would love to see, like oh, you know, I've got five closed deals for the week and I'm supposed to have whatever number and it just it was a great motivator. I mean some obviously the people that aren't performing well didn't always like to see it, but the ones that were doing pretty well it was fun, it was a motivator.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I mean, and the people that aren't performing well, they'll either move on or they'll move up, right, like one of the two things will happen, and that's really what you have to do anyways, but that's so epic. I'm honestly jealous because we're all digital Everybody's a digital nomad at my company, so like I have like I can't, just I couldn't, but what am I gonna do? Yeah, yeah, times have changed. I was telling my uh sales team I was gonna put like a little light on their desk and if it's green we're good, if it's red, it's bad.

Speaker 3:

Go get more sales you have control of that light from your remote palace. You're green exactly.

Speaker 1:

They did not bump that in. That got vetoed. So you know, that is what it is.

Speaker 3:

That would be fun. I just want to tweak with them sometimes Just hit red. Make sure you're paying attention.

Speaker 1:

Exactly.

Speaker 3:

I'm kidding, of course, but okay, that's good stuff. And then what do you think about? Like you know, a lot of times I'll see people want to do it themselves and so they'll have either an in-house team and I won't even say I'm saying team loosely, but they're just kind of doing things on their own and it's a little bit haphazard. Any thoughts around? When you see a home service business owner doing that or a team doing that, what do you usually find? Are they ineffective? Is it not very efficient? What are your thoughts?

Speaker 1:

One. I love it right Again, selfishly. Customer acquisition is the most important part of your business. If you get good at that, you've won business Right In my opinion. So I love that. When you have that At some point, it is not worth your time, right At some point. You should not be doing that. So hire that internally, go hire an agency, whatever you want to do, but you shouldn't be spending your time running that. You need to go figure out things that I'm figuring out, like how do I have a million dollar months, like that's the big thing I've got to figure out, and you should too. You need to figure out as a company, how do you do that. So that's one.

Speaker 1:

Two there are a lot of services that you at some point should bring in internally. I think Some are harder than others, but at some point you're a $30 million, $100 million HVAC company. You probably shouldn't outsource your GMB. You should just bring that internally. If you want to pay me to do it, I will do it for you. I'm not saying don't come pay me guys. That's not what I'm saying. I'm just saying you probably should. Same thing with SEO. Seo is one of those things that I have to hire four different experts just to run your one service. So it's probably not worth it early on to go hire those four experts. Just hire an agency to do that.

Speaker 1:

At some point, if you're getting nationwide, you might think about bringing that internally. The only one that I would say never to do that is Google ads, because my you know account manager will run 25 different accounts and so they're running 25. And so when they see something work over here, they're like, hey, I'm going to try this over here on him and so, like you can see those again, like the loom videos, we, we, we get a lot of good feedback and see what works. It's hard to do that on your end internally, but other than that, like there is at first, you 100% try to do as much as you can by yourself. Don't run Google ads by yourself. Everything else run by yourself. At some point you want an agency to come in and take over, and then at some point you get to the other side. You probably want to bring it internally.

Speaker 3:

It's just my opinion come in and take over and then at some point you get to the other side, you probably want to bring it internally. It's just my opinion. Okay, where do you think like sometimes I'll hear there'll be an external agency like you and then they'll bring in like a fractional CMO as they're scaling and the CMO will kind of sit on the strategy and kind of lead you guys in terms of direction. Have you seen that? Is that an effective model? Is that like oh man, that's just one more person I have to kind of go through? Or what are your thoughts around that?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I don't mind that model. It's probably not what I would do, honestly. You just don't need it as much at this level. This type of company right Got it, and mostly because you shouldn't be depending on size. This all has context to it.

Speaker 1:

If you're below 5 million, I don't think I think that's a bad use of your money. I think what would be better use of your money is to go hire a marketing manager. You can't find this person offshore, relatively, because what we need is a really strong project manager who will, has no problem holding third parties and vendors accountable to what they say they're going to do and then can kind of manage your money. So, hey, our cardboard isn't going okay, we're going to push that money to Yelp or Angeles or wherever we get leads when it's not full and it's not hitting the KPIs it needs and it's meeting with vendors to make sure they have everything and they're doing what they say they're actually said they're going to do and things like that. Because I think, again, you can get that first for relatively cheap.

Speaker 1:

Say three grand, four grand a month is probably on the higher end for a marketing manager. That's pretty dang good and can manage those people. So once you get higher and I'm going to say I'm going to talk out of turn here because I've not run a $20 million HVAC company but having conversations with my clients, they say they don't go towards TV and radio and some of these other services until they really start struggling to spend on Google ads and SEO. Once you cannot get that search because you can't spend enough, that's when you start going to other services and other channels. That's when I think you could probably go get a CMO to kind of take you to that next level.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, okay, that's cool stuff. That's good feedback. I like I hadn't really thought of a marketing manager, an outsourced marketing manager, overseas marketing manager. That makes a lot of sense, though. Someone that has enough skills can kind of manage the third-party vendors to make sure they're focused doing what makes sense, but then they're also skilled enough to kind of add some domain knowledge within the company too. It's good stuff, I think that makes sense.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, that's good stuff, I like that. Okay, just before I wrap up here we're almost done, but I do want to talk about you kind of view yourself now assuming this is accurate as a badass entrepreneur. Talk to me about that man. Like what brought on that transformation, you know?

Speaker 1:

it didn't always that, it wasn't always that way. I remember telling my business partners that I felt like I was going to be the Steve Nash, and they were LeBron and Michael Jordan. My job was just like get them the ball so that they can hit, and that definitely the mentality has switched and I think it just happens to be because I've won. You know, like I've built a back end of success behind me. So I'm going forward. I'm like I'm actually pretty damn good at this. I can go do this.

Speaker 1:

I think that's part of it. It's just like I've had success. Therefore, the confidence has come. Uh, I'm a basketball guy but, like in basketball, you can't shoot the three and make it until you think that you are a shooter. If you don't have that confidence like I'm a shooter and I can hit this, you're not going to make it. So you almost the confidence has to come before you can be a shooter. And so in this case, I think it's because I've had success, but because I believed I can do that and it's worked out. So I don't know if that's a helpful answer, but that's legit.

Speaker 3:

I love it. I love the self-reflection that you even feel that way, because I agree with you. The mindset is a big part of it, and if you believe you can't do it, there's a good chance you probably can't do it. If you believe you're a badass at it, there's a good chance. You're a badass at it, exactly exactly. Love it, love it. And I can relate to you on the basketball too, especially with playoff season right now I'm particularly into it. Yeah, hey, just in closing up, wrapping up here, can you give me one tip, just one thing that really sticks out? I want to know from your entrepreneurial journey something that you've learned, that maybe there's some people out there in the audience, particularly in this home service world, that they could apply and maybe make themselves a better business owner from it.

Speaker 1:

I mean hire people that are better at you with the jobs, like that's probably the thing that's made me the most successful is just like I've hired people that are literally better at I am at all these different parts, and so what I've been able to do is catch vision, really care about people and get people to buy into the machine that we're, that we're building. But if you, you, you know, I I talked about customer acquisition be pretty damn good at that, you also have to be really good at finding people that that want to go on a journey with you and get them to to buy into the message.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, and then I'd say part B of that, cause I see this happen occasionally hire people that are better than you, but also let them be better than you, because a lot of times we get in our own way and in our egos or whatever. We're just not comfortable with empowering people. We hire good people and then we just don't let them be great people. We handcuff them by micromanaging or getting in their way and it sounds like you've kind of mastered empowering people, with the exception of the idea of the multicolored light on their desk of red, green and yellow, which might not qualify, but aside from that, the rest does.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, absolutely. The thing that makes me really special and good at what I do is this abundance of unearned confidence that I just have innately right. The problem with that, as you can imagine, is I think everything's going to work out, we're all going to be good. So I have learned in my personal life I'm not allowed to just buy things right. My wife goes hey, we have a budget, we have to stick to this. You live in, you know, a service, scaleless lands. When you spend, you know hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. We don't. We don't make that money. So, like you, can't just buy this.

Speaker 1:

I do the same thing in my own business. So right now, my director of fulfillment is now in charge of the spend. Her job is to keep cost of delivery in a place where profit margin actually makes sense, and so what I'm doing right now is, anytime someone wants to spend money, I'm like I would love to make that decision. It's not on me, it's on Anne-Marie. She needs to go make this decision. Tell her you can see me in, but she has to make that decision because her incentives are based on her ability to keep it profitable and keep clients long-term. So that is one of the things you have to do is you have to find people that are better than you at their things and then just let them run with it.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, that's huge. Are you, do you guys, are you familiar with an entrepreneurial operating system EOS and if so, do you, do you use that within your own business?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's. It's tailored to our own business, so very much like not it.

Speaker 3:

I've always wanted to hire one of their coaches to come and have not done it, but I've read the book probably 10 times at this point and applied what I think is a good part, so the reason I ask is you're the classic visionary and you just articulated that you kind of get it because you know that you're the visionary and that, left to your own devices, you know you can be a little rogue and probably do your own thing. That may that may be counterintuitive to your overall mission and so by empowering other people you're kind of doing that. You're like you know you're, you're creating guardrails so that the right people are in the right seats and they're making the good decision and you're just probably relegating that. You're going down the right path but you're not getting in the way.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, 100%. I definitely see myself as the visionary and I've got people that I think are what's the other term? The integrator sorry, integrator yeah yeah, so I very much have people that I'm like you're my integrator. You don't know it yet, but you are yeah, and so, yeah, you gotta be good at that.

Speaker 3:

I love it. I love it, man. Okay, this was a great conversation. Your website is, servicescalers, a great place to go If people want to reach out to you or talk to you. Is there anywhere else you want them to go, or is that the best place to go?

Speaker 1:

Hit me up on X, hey, sam Preston. Hey, sam Preston, you could hit me up on LinkedIn, but like it's filled with people just applying for jobs, I don't. It's hard to find a connection there, so LinkedIn is probably the best way.

Speaker 3:

I'm going to echo that.

Speaker 1:

I made the mistake of trying to connect with you on LinkedIn and I'm still waiting. I'm still waiting for a response.

Speaker 3:

I'm joking with you, man, I'm just giving you a hard time. It wouldn't be a good conversation if I wasn't able to do that. Well, thank you so much, sam. I love you. Know what I? I got a lot of things out of this conversation, I think the big thing for me one I love your visionary aspect. I love your authenticity. I love just hearing about your growth. It's like so exciting, like and once again, it's a classic story. You didn't start out as a you know, $5 million, hopefully $12 million a year company Like you had three agencies that you did before you even got to the point of where you saw your direction and focus, and I think people gloss over that. They just always want to talk about oh, he's $12 million. Yeah, it's not like that for me. Well, guess what? You had to try three times before you hit the three. So awesome stuff, I mean. Can't thank you enough for being here.

Speaker 1:

Thanks, Howard. No, this is fun, I really appreciate it. And yeah, if you ever need anything let's, let's hang out.

Speaker 3:

Okay, man, Thanks so much and have a good one. Okay, cheers, all right, what a fun episode. Sam's one of those guys you feel like you could just talk to all day long. He's easy to talk with, he's got a lot of charisma. Funny, just a great conversation.

Speaker 3:

You know, something that really stuck to me is if you don't know your numbers, your texts go home early. That's a waste and you can't afford it. That kind of clarity most business owners are missing. Sam didn't build a $5 million plus company by accident. He won by tracking the numbers, testing what works and hiring people who are better than him at specific roles. That's how real businesses scale not by grinding harder, but by building machine that runs without burning out the owner.

Speaker 3:

Here's my take as a part-time CFO. Most business owners hit a wall when they grow, but it's not because they lack leads or hustle. It's because their systems, spending and team structure can't keep up with the pace. If your growth feels messy or unpredictable, let's have a conversation. I work with service companies to build financial strategies that support growth, not fight against it. The links in the show notes if that sounds helpful and if this episode gave you something to chew on, and I hope it did. I'd be grateful for a quick review. It helps more owners find the show, and that's my mission. Catch you next time on Profit and Grit.

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