How to maximize your Repeat & Referral Business

All right, well hello and welcome. Thank you so much for joining us on today’s session, we’re going to be talking all about how to supercharge the repeat referral business in your plumbing hv AC, electrical home service business. You know here at plumbing a track SEO, we’re all about helping you maximize your lead flow via the internet websites, SEO Pay Per Click social media, but our mission as a company is to triple the size of 1000, plumbing HVDC and home service companies. And so a lot of times that needs to expand beyond just internet marketing. And we’ve found in working with our clients across the country, the ones that are doing best really have their internet marketing dialed in like to generate lots of leads from SEO Pay Per Click social media, but they’re also very strategic with how they, how they connect with your existing customer base, how they take that one time customer and turn them into a multiple buyer and how they turn that one time customer into something that refers to the friends and family, you see if you can get that piece of your marketing strategy dialed in, it makes every other aspect of the marketing that you do exponentially more efficient. And so a couple years ago, I connected with Brian cask Gaussian from g4 marketing group, and this is what he does, right? We do internet marketing, he does customer retention and customer relationship management and really putting systems in place. And we ran a beta test how long ago was it now Brian, when we ran that beta test, you know, for a couple of our plumbing HVC clients, I want to say it was probably four years ago, three or four years ago, three or four years ago and we just like let’s just test this out. Let’s see if this helps them grow their business. Let’s see that has an impact. And we found that the the the results were significant. And so I was like all right, Brian, time for you to come on, share this with our community and really help you guys. Not just generate more sales really maximize the relationship with your customer base. So without further ado, I’m going to hand it off to you, Brian so you can share your screen and and kick things off. You know, what’s awesome to Josh is that most of them that were in that, you know, kind of that initial test phase that we did, they’re still clients four years later with him. So, yeah, this stuff works. Alright, so um, Thank you, Josh for, for having me. Welcome everybody. And let’s just jump into this. So let’s just make sure that we’ve got everybody here that that should be here. You’re definitely in the right place. If you’re in plumbing, h HVAC, electrical handyman, or any other home service business those the marketing for those businesses is all very, very similar. If you’re spending way too much money on advertising And you want to grow your business profitably, you’re in the right place. And and then finally, if you want to maximize your profits from each and every customer that you bring in, then again, you are definitely in the right place. Obviously, you can drop off if none of this stuff is important to you, but I would imagine that making money is is probably important to most everybody. All right, so what are we going to cover today? So I’m going to show you our proven five step action plan for getting your customers to keep coming back to you over and over and over again, to show you how you drive more five star reviews and referrals into your business. And we’ll also show you how to get this done without spending a ton of money without hiring more employees. And without doing a lot or really you you have the option I’m not doing any of the work yourself. So those are the things we are going to cover today. Now, I’m ultimately, what what I want to help people do, especially that are in this space, is I want to help you get the majority of your business coming from the relationships that you develop with your customers. Why do we want to do that? Well, if we do that, right, we bring our overall marketing costs down, our profitability goes up our business value, our business equity value or brand value goes way up. And maybe maybe most important in all of this is that your long term business security goes up. Now we all know as business owners that there isn’t a whole lot of security in anything and look at what we’ve been going through the last few months, but the reality It is there’s always something, there’s always something. And if we do this part, right, the majority of our business coming from the relationships that we develop from our customers, then it doesn’t matter what’s going on out there. Because we have a group of customers that are raving fans that are going to stick with us, and support us, and help us to achieve our goals. If we do all of this, right, and I think again, you know, I’m all about profitability. I’m all about, you know, creating a bigger business, but also we really want to look at how do we build a business that’s got some stability, some security to it, so we’re not susceptible to all the ups and downs, you know, erratic ups and downs of the marketplace. Now The reality of it is you don’t have to do any of this stuff. There are plenty of companies out there that do no follow up. They don’t care about their customers, they don’t care about getting referrals, they might say, Oh, I care, but they’re not willing to put in the investment, they’re not willing to put the resources behind it. They’re not willing to come on to, you know, trainings like this to learn about how to do it, and they survive. But I would imagine that most of the people here don’t want to just survive, you really want to grow as an enterprise, and you really want to thrive. But again, the reality of it is you don’t need to do any of this stuff. You’re just not going to make anywhere near the amount of money you can make. You’re not gonna have anywhere near the level of success that you could have, and you’re not certainly not going to have the level of wealth that you can create by doing this by doing this right. I’m not going to go into I’m going to tell you a little bit about my story. I’m not going to go into a whole lot about my background, I’ll just touch on a few things that I think are important. So at g4 marketing group, I come from the Home Services business. And again, I’ll share my story, just a little bit of my story, and how it relates to this in a couple minutes. But we work with since 2009, we’ve worked with some of the top home improvement and home service companies around the country, essentially providing them with these relationship marketing services. Interesting stat, you know, over the last couple months, Josh, you know, we’ve had, we’ve had some extra time on our hands. And one of the things that I did was I went back and I asked my team, I said, Hey, I want to know what our clients have done in terms of jobs over the last 12 months and this was from a couple months But still, when we looked back 12 months, our clients collectively have done over 100,000 jobs. And that translates to a minimum of between 750 to $900 million. So there’s, you know, there’s a lot of activity and we are behind the scenes working with these people. So we know a little bit and the reason I share that with you is we know a little bit about how you know how this topic works. I also some of you may know the wealthy contractor podcast. You should all be listening to Josh his podcast because it’s awesome. But the wealthy contractor podcast, if you’re looking for another one would also be very good for you. I wrote a book called the seven secrets to becoming a wealthy contract. I won’t bore you with all this stuff, but you know, there’s a book that double your profits book where some of this stuff that we have are going to be covering today lives in. And I wrote a book called The Definitive Guide to relationship marketing. There was one that I did for plumbers also, I just didn’t, wasn’t able to put my hands on it to show you guys, but we do have other resources for the Home Services, space and profitability. And then, um, one of the other things that we do is we put on a big annual event every year, it’s called accelerate live, and our next one is happening in January, late January, right here in South Florida. Um, so so that’s kind of where I’m out today. Um, anybody that reads this book, the seven secrets to becoming a wealthy contractor knows my history. And basically I started off in the carpet cleaning business. And from there I I added on another service business which was bathtub refinishing. And then from there, I started a handyman business and we ended up actually franchising that around the country at 30 something offices across North America. Our in our office, we had three offices, we employed over 100 people out in the field every day working in Home Services, and we did a lot of plumbing. Don’t hate me for it, but yeah, we did a lot of plumbing work. But what also happened was at 40 years old, I lost, everything went broke. Now, the journey to getting there, um, one of the things was I learned that just doing the work good was not enough. You could do the work great, but still not really make a whole lot of money. And I met this guy, Dan Kennedy. In fact, Josh, I was thinking it’s because of Dan, that you and I know each other, not directly, but indirectly, it’s because of this guy, a lot of great I can make a list of all the great things that have come about as a result of that dude right there. And one of them way up on the list is my meeting. You know, this guy, Josh, Josh Nelson. Um, but when I met Dan, I was a struggling home service company, just like probably a lot of you guys. And what I didn’t understand about the business was the marketing side of the business. And what I really didn’t understand was how to create a business that I could scale and I could scale profit. doubly, and so I’m in 19 I want to say it was like 1996. I bought that product right there, which is actually still right here. Oh, Josh, you’re gonna love this. Okay, so look, this is like the original kit. Look what’s in the back? What are those two cassette tapes? You know, you’re saying is way too young. She doesn’t even know what these are. Hey, I know. Yeah. So um so in that among the many, many other things that I learned, I learned this and it became kind of became my mantra. Or you was that for me, Josh? is gonna keep going. It became your mantra. Okay. You You must be focused on making the sale to get the customer not getting the customer to make a sale. I hope everybody gets that distinction. I mean if you get nothing else from this today, make this a part of how you do business. You want to get the sale so that you get the customer you want to make the sale so you get the customer. Why? Because the customer is the business. Yes, we have we sell plumbing services, we sell HVC we sell electrical, whatever. The real business though, is the customer. Right? And the only thing that has any real long term value in your business is your relationship with your customers. If you want to get have profit if you want to have wealth from your business business, you have to have a system for creating relationships with your customers. Again, when you have that, and your business, a majority of your business is coming from those relationships, not only are you saving money on marketing, not only are you more profitable, but also this is what’s going to give you real equity in the business. And it’s what’s going to give you real security. And when I learned this, it caused me to change everything. And and so that’s some of what you know, some of what I learned is what we’re going to share today. So again, we’re going to go over my five step action plan for getting your customers to keep coming back to you over and over again. We’re going to talk about how to drive more five star reviews and referrals and we’ll show you how to get this done without spending a ton of money and you’re not having to do a whole lot of work yourself. So After, you know, years and years of studying with Dan, which I still do, by the way, Dan and others, you know, there’s, you know, me and Josh are still, like crazy students of marketing and business development and sales and profitability and all of that. My first love though, uh, sorry, I said absolutely 100% 100% him more than me, by the way. as a marketer, you know, one of my favorite things is, is is the marketing side of the business. So what’s interesting is when I got out of the home services business, the handyman business, I really thought about, well, what am I going to do next and, and the part of what I did for all of those years that I loved the most was the marketing. What I was best at was the marketing. And so when we when I looked at Hey, where’s one You know a lot of people offer SEO services and a lot of people offer all these you know new fangled things out in the in the marketplace and I thought there aren’t a lot of people that are focused on the back end, on on. on, you know, the topics we’re talking about today repeat referral reviews, and quite frankly, it’s not sexy, internet marketing, super sexy. Dealing with a customer after you’ve sold them and after you’ve done the job, not so sexy. But I’ll tell you what, as a marketer, I love the plumbing and HVDC business love it. Why? Because it’s a relatively simple business to market. I didn’t say easy, I said simple, right? The beauty of plumbing h HVAC, electrical home, Andy man, what have you is it’s a what I call a break fix model. So people have a problem now. They have to solve that problem now. All right. And so the way that you are successful in that is you want to be where they are looking for a solution. And that’s where Josh and plumbing and a track SEO comes in. They’re the best in the business, on the front end, on making new leads, right, using internet marketing, SEO, Facebook, all of the strategies that they use at plumbing, an H fac, SEO, the whole idea is for you to be where people are looking for a solution to their problem. Okay, most people kind of stop there or try and figure out the next pieces and fumble their way through it and think, Well, let me just pour more in and just get more and more and more and more and more customers. The smart ones realize that Okay, once I get that lead Now I convert them into a customer, I need to provide an experience that they’re going to love and experience that they’re going to want to go talk about to other people, they’re going to want to go brag about to everybody that they know, right? Because that’s what’s going to help create that word of mouth and bring those referrals to you. And then, once you’ve done that, now you’ve got to do everything that you can to nurture and protect the relationship with that customer. So they keep coming back to you, year after year, month after month. Right and they send their friends and their family and their neighbors and their co workers and everybody to you. So I say it’s a relatively simple business to market. Yet, there are still a ton of people out there that are doing this. They’re just flushing money down the toilet. Guess what? I did this. I messed this up. All right, big time when I started this business handyman network, so I had the bathroom finishing business and I had the carpet cleaning business, which by the way, both of those businesses are very similar to all of what you guys do. Okay, this one is the most similar but it was very similar. People had a problem they needed to get it fixed. We needed to, you know, make sure we were there where they, they needed something. Anyway. When I started this business, one of the first things that we put into place was a customer keep in touch system marketing system. So after the job was completed, we did our happy calls. We would send out a little Thank you know, we started in month one, we have a company newsletter and Then what happened? We started to get busy. And we started to get really busy. And then I thought, well, I could just spend some money back then I spent a lot of money on newspapers. I can put ads in newspapers, today’s PPC, right? I could put a lot I could put my money into newspapers, and I’m going to get a ton of phone calls. And guess what? I was so focused on getting those leads. Guess how, what happened to the newsletter? It went away. And it went away fast. I forgot. I used to know what it was. But I think it was like, I did three of them. And then that was it. And I realized we broke up a few years later and realized, Hey, wait a minute. We’re not following our own advice. And for me, marketing marketing is really all about effectively and profitably creating customers, keeping customers and multiplying customers creating, keeping and multiplying. You could do good with just the one the creating, and you can make money. But when you get good at the keeping in the multiplying, that’s when you really start to make money and you really start to see success. And so we saw what was funny as we were going, going, going, doing this doing this doing this, by wife became part of the business. She’s my business partner now at g4. And she looked at this and she said to me, she said, Wait a minute, we’re spending all this money on front end lead generation. But what are we doing on the back end, to keep those customers to get them to come back again, and I was embarrassed, I looked at her and I’m like we haven’t done anything in a while. We’ve just been busy. Anybody else had that same thing been busy? And we just kind of let this go. So she comes in and she says, Well, let me go after that. Let me help fix that. Mike had added. She tripled our results. So we were getting at the time. It’s embarrassing to say, but we were getting somewhere around 15% of our business in repeat and referral. And that was all purely by accident, right? There was no real strategy behind it. There was no, you know, nothing to make it happen. It was just happening by accident. So she came in and she put a system in, and that system ended up tripling our results within a very short period of time. What did we do? Well, we designed a better customer experience. So we looked At every point in the process and we look at, okay, how can we improve the customers experience with all of the interactions that we are having with them? That was the first thing. The second thing was, she put in a formal Thank you, system, if you will. And the thank you system was that when the job was completed and it came in in the morning, we would do an outbound happy call. And then we would we went back and we would write the handwritten notes, and we would send out the thank you cards. And she even started on the bigger jobs, she would go out and hand deliver gifts to our customers. Now. When you’re Talking Home Services, it’s impractical to go see everybody. It’s a amazing strategy. But it’s impractical. You can’t go see every single customer that if you have more than three trucks, you’re there, that’s all you would be doing all day is running around from one house to another dropping off gifts. So she had to be strategic about who she did the gifting to. But that was a big piece of it. Back then reviews weren’t a thing. You know, we’re talking about the mid 2000s. So reviews weren’t the thing but what was was getting customer feedback and testimonials. Okay, getting feedback and getting testimonials because we would use those in our marketing. And then we brought the newsletter back and then we started to stay in touch every month. We were in touch with our customers in touch it stayed in touch and stayed in touch and stayed in touch with our customers. And ultimately, we started to look at Well, why don’t we focus more of our time, more of our money, more of our resources on our past and current customers, we still did the front end lead generation look, you got to have Josh. Right? Every single day, when somebody is typing in, you know, fix my toilet, you better have somebody like Josh, that makes sure that you are right there front and center anywhere and everywhere you need to be so that they come to your website. But once they do that, and once they’re in, you got to focus your some of your time and some of your money and some of your resources on the nurturing and all of what needs to happen in order to turn that from creating the customer into keeping and multiplying the customer. So from that experience, we took all of that experience. And we then in 2009, started g for marketing. And we based our entire platform on what we today called, we didn’t call it this back then. But today we call it the four pillars of relationship marketing. And now, there’s four. But there’s, you’ll notice as we go the if you look all the way at the bottom, there’s actually five. But the fifth one is not a pillar. It’s actually a foundation. Okay, customer experience. The entire foundation for all of this is customer experience. Because if you don’t have that, right, none of the rest of it matters. None of it. You can give if you provide your customer with a crappy experience. Guess what? If you send them a box of cookies, and a thank you card, they’re still not they might be a little more happy. But they ain’t coming back, because you didn’t give them a good experience to begin with. So none of the rest of this stuff matters. You can, you can ask them for referrals, but they’re not going to give you any, you can ask for reviews, they’re going to give you bad ones. Right? So that’s why the foundation for the whole thing is customer experience. All right. So let’s assume that all of you have that, right. Because I know that I know that most of the people that are here right now are probably, you know, really focused on delivering a great experience. So assuming you’ve got that right, what are the what are now what are the four pillars and what do you need to do? So the first thing is customer appreciation. Okay, so after the job is done, we got to say thank you. And how do you do that? Well, you can do that through a gift. You can do that through with a card. You can do it with an email. You can Do it with a phone call. It’s best to do it with all of them. Right with all of it. The next thing is once you’ve got, you know, the thank you set up, now it’s okay, now we’ve got to get online reviews, we’ve got to get our customers feedback. And if it’s good feedback, we’ve got to push that to reviews. I’m not going to talk a whole lot about reviews because you guys are have been way ahead of the when it comes to Home Improvement space. We do a lot of work with roofing companies and window companies and bathroom companies. They are years behind you guys. In terms of reviews, we have to help them a lot more than we have to help you guys. But and so you understand the importance of a five star review on Google. Right? It’s a currency now. It’s an asset, those reviews that you’re putting there, they are asset. And by the way, one of the things that we knew going into this was that if you gave somebody a gift They were more likely to give you a review, they were more likely to give you a referral, not as the the thing is not the gift is not an incentive. Right? You don’t say to them, oh, if you give me a review, I’ll give you this. You don’t ever want to do that. When you send out a thank you, and a gift, and you ask for their feedback and their review, we did a study last year, there 350% or three and a half times more likely to give you a review where it matters, not just an internal review, but an actual review on Google or on Facebook or on Better Business Bureau where it really matters. Okay, that’s the second piece. The third piece is you’ve got to have a referral program that’s always working. always working one of the big mistakes that gets Make when it comes to referrals? Is they treated as a two hour or a two day event. Right? The job is done. And oh here. This is our brochure on referrals. If you give us referrals, we’ll send you something, right. That’s what a lot of people call their referral program. Well, then I asked them Well, okay, so you’ve got this referral program. And so tell me, when does your customer See it? Well, after the job is done, we give them this brochure. Okay, and that brochure goes with what? Oh, it goes with the paperwork. Okay, where does the paperwork go? That’s it and then it’s like, well, what do you mean where does the paperwork go? Well, what happens to that paperwork? Well, it goes into one of two files. It goes either into the round file, garbage or it goes into the drawer file, never to be seen again. And there’s no follow up to say, a week later, a month later, three months later, a year later, Hey, remember us? We appreciate referrals, we reward referrals, we count on referrals to keep our business going. Nothing, right? So just having a brochure that you give to somebody doesn’t mean you have a referral program. Right? The reality is you’ve got to stay in front of people and stay in front of people and stand in front of people look, they’re going to forget about you. hours, days, weeks after you leave. You’re out of sight, out of mind. Right? And it’s not their job to remember you. It’s our job to make sure that they don’t forget us that they know these are the solutions that we provide. Right. And this is how you get ahold of us. And it’s, and it’s the same thing with repeat business or with referrals, you got to stay in front of them, stay in front of them and stay in front of them. So once you’ve got, you know, the thank you in place, you’ve got driving them to online reviews, you’ve got this robust referral program that does not end after a couple hours or a couple days. Now you’ve got to make sure that you’re in touch, in touch, in touch in touch and in the services business. You’ve got to be in touch constantly. And you got to use all all of the media that’s available to you email. We use a ton of email, but we also use a ton of direct mail a ton, right? direct mail is very effective in your space on the relationship marketing side. Okay, so those are our you know, Four Pillars of relationship marketing. If you really want to make this happen, if you really want more of your business to come from the relationships that you have with your customer, then those are the pieces that you need to have in place. Now, what I’m going to show you here is how we do it for our clients. Okay, I’m going to kind of pull back the curtain and I’m going to show you here are the things that we do for our clients. Now, this is meant to be instructive. And and quite honestly, maybe a few of you will look at this and say, Man, I think I want them to do it, which would be great. But, um, but also, it’s, it’s meant to be instructive as well. Okay, because since doing starting this now, 11 years ago, we’ve learned a few things about what works and what doesn’t work. So thank you. So thank yous are really important, right? So what we want to do is we want to make sure that after the job is completing some package goes out in the mail to the customer. It’s important that they understand, hey, we appreciate your business. And we want to develop a long term relationship with you. And so these are just I just grabbed some examples of the cards that we send out. I mean, one of the things that’s really important is personalization. You want to make sure that you’re using your customers names in whatever you are doing. So we do this on a mass scale. So it’s a little more complicated, but if you are, if you’re in your office and you’ve got people in your office that can write out thank you cards, make sure that you’re using that customer Name. Thank you, john and Mary, dear john and Mary, you know, you want to make sure that these things are personalized. Okay? Also, what’s important is if you’re mailing things out to people, please do not use something that looks like a bill. Don’t make the envelope look like a bill or junk mail. You want to make it look like something we call it, something coming from grandma. So we use what we call our grandma envelope. I didn’t put a sample of it here. But imagine the you know, for a lot of us imagine the card the birthday card you used to get from your grandmother when you were a kid, right? It was some sort of color, and it was handwritten. Right and it had a live first class stamp on it. Really important. You don’t want to send anything to a customer that looks like junk mail. You want to make it look personal. Okay, some of our clients actually send out boxes. And inside of there not only as a thank you card, but we actually send out cookies to say thank you. And this is good for bigger jobs, jobs over, you know, 3000 or $5,000. We send these out because that’s a lot of money to most people, and they deserve to get something. And the beauty of you know, by the way, the thing we didn’t talk about with appreciation is nobody does it today. What was the last time you got a thank you, from anybody that you gave your money to? It’s so rare. So doing this, it’s not only about the Thank you, it’s not about the cookies. It’s about the gesture. It’s about staying top of mind about that customer remembering who you are, and what a great experience they have with you. Right? Real quick guys if it’s helpful to see some of these examples post the comments say thanks for sharing examples I think it’s great to see somebody like and we want to send a thank you we want to send a box but to see a visual of it really helps to connect the dots so give me a thumbs up or a yes or a one in comments if it’s helpful to see some live examples. Yeah, cool. Here’s another thing that we discovered and implement with especially with home service companies is it’s all about the second sale. So if I’m if all of our campaigns are all focused on getting to the second sale as quickly as possible, why the answers on the screen because if you can get your customer Okay, so new customer, right, they came in through the internet, let’s say however, You created that customer, your job is to get them to come back a second time as quickly as possible. After the second time, get them back a third time, and then get them back and fourth time. Okay? If you can get them back four times within pretty quick succession, within a few months, you got them, chances are very good that you’ve now created a customer that’s going to stay with you for a long time. The other thing is, is that each time they come back, it gets easier and easier to sell them. Right? But it’s also about creating that sticky so that when they think performer they think you Okay, and you need to do this, you need them in your house, or, yes, you need to be in their house four times. And so we are hyper focused on making this happen. The way that we make it happen is on every thank you card. We use a gift card. It is an actual plastic gift card. Okay? And you’ll see, I don’t know if you can see that or not. It’s got actual like embossed numbers. It’s like it, it feels like a credit card. It’s the exact same size as a credit card. And it goes into each and every card that we send out, because we want them to use the card for their next service. Okay, and the beauty. So look, I told you before, a lot of our clients are in the roofing business. Right? So and we use these for them. But what happens with these in most cases, they give them to their friends because the game in roofing is getting the getting a referral in your business. Yes, getting The referral is important. But what’s more important is getting them back as quickly as possible. And we see these cards when we start up with new clients. We see these these cards coming back within four weeks, we start to see the cards coming back. Now by the way, here’s just a little trick I’ll share with you. You’ll notice that this card is a little bit different. See where it says it doesn’t just say thank you. It says thank you. Again. Thank you again. So from the time number two on we want to make sure that they’re not getting just a regular thank you card that talks to them. Like they are a new customer. We send them the thank you again card that talks to them as a longtime customer. Right. So in that, that is that is how we get people to you know, to keep coming back. The next thing that we look at and again, I’m not going to go into reviews a lot, I could show you our review platform. We actually for some of our clients in the in the Home Services space, it is integrated into everything that we do. For some that are with you, Josh, I think they have you they use your review platform. It doesn’t matter to me. So, referrals, what do we do with referrals? So referral is a tough lead to make. It’s a very tough lead to make. There’s so many things that will contribute to or detract from you getting a referral. Trust needs to be in place confidence needs to be in place and you got to be there you got to keep asking asking, asking and so we start a referral campaign. About a week after the thank you goes out so we send a what we call our fake check. letter, hey, here’s a check for 20 bucks. Obviously, it’s not real. But if you help me spread the word about my company, I’m going to send you a bunch of $20 or 25 or $50 checks. We run a contest every quarter. Every quarter, we run a new contest, and we give away a new cool prize. Why don’t we do a contest every quarter? Because it gives us an excuse to show up every three months and talk about referrals. And we do campaigns around every one of these of these contests. And again, we’re doing all of this is because people are busy, people are distracted, your customer is not sitting around all day thinking about you. Right, and so we have to keep staying in front of them and staying in front of them. Okay, so we take this stuff really seriously if you want to get more referrals, sorry, but these are the things that you’ve got. to do. And then finally, there’s the long term nurture piece. So we do email, we use email. Some cases, we use texting, we use direct mail. We do newsletters. We do all of that stuff. So month after month, year after year. We’re touching those customers and communicating with them in a friendly and engaging way. We’re using email campaigns, we’re doing review requests. We’re sending out referral rewards, program, contests, new contest, contests, reminder, this person won the contest you could be next. You know, we have campaigns for all of that stuff. We use direct mail, different, you know, different types. My favorite though, my favorite direct mail piece, and the one that we do a ton of is the company newsletter, the company newsletter so we have weekly We wait for our clients, we create a happy home Gazette newsletter, both print and email for for them as part of as part of what we do. But again, these are all things that you guys could could do on your on your own. And if it’s done right, and if it’s done right, you’re going to get more referrals and you’re going to get more repeat sales and we already know that, you know, there’s a lot of good stuff that happens from these types of leads, you know, you blower your advertising costs, you increase your sales conversions, your customers are out marketing making leads for you. What do you think referrals are, it’s your customers out there working to make leads for you. Right? They’re also helping you sell those jobs, more profit per customer, I do this whole thing on for Home service companies on profitability what are the four ways to increase your profits in a in a home services business? This is one of them, get them to keep coming back and buying more from you. Right? Why settle for five or 600 bucks when that customer could really have a value to your business of 4000 7000 $10,000. Right? And then again, I keep coming back to this but it’s important, developing an asset with long term sustainability and ever increasing equity value. Look, you guys all have trucks out on the road, you have equipment. Well guess what? All that stuff is depreciating every single day. Its value becomes less every day. Guess what’s value becomes greater every day. The customer that is an asset that you can get rich on. Right. And again, ultimately, this is about making money. More money. Right? So, Josh? Um, I don’t know, do we have a Do we have any questions I’m going to show them. I’m going to show them if it’s okay with you, Josh. Some people here may be interested in in working with GE for and learning more about what we do. You’ll also be asked interrupt. I don’t see any questions in here. A lot of people said, this is great, great presentation. Thanks for the information. Guys. If you’d like to hear a little bit about Brian sounds like about kind of how you could do this for them. Yeah. Just give me a yes or Yeah, let’s hear it in the comments. You could just turn key have these thank you notes and these emails and this whole nurture process done for you. Yes, I do. Michael says Absolutely. Please post. Let’s do it. Yeah, let’s let’s dive into it. Yeah. So a lot of people now wonder well, I you’re seeing all of this and you’re I know Know what’s going through your heads is, I’m already busy enough? How the hell am I going to do all this stuff to? How do I actually make this happen? Well, lucky for you, you know, there is a fast and easy and affordable way of doing it. So of course, slow, hard and expensive, which is you trying to cobble all this stuff together yourself. But that’s what we do here every day. And the way that it works is really simple. Once you’re all set up with us at g4. If you have something like service Titan, which I would imagine a lot of you do, what happens is on a on a pre determined schedule, we get that information right out of service type and we pull that data we get your customers name, address, email and phone number that goes into our proprietary CRM called activate and then once it goes in there, then we execute on the customer appreciation for you. We execute on a feedback review and request, if that’s going to be part of your program for you, we enroll your customers into your very own referral rewards program that we are going to set up for you that’s going to be yours. And then we immediately begin developing that long term, Top of Mind, nurture campaign. All you have to do really all you have to do is make sure that you’re delivering the good customer experience, and we’ll take care of the rest. This is what a sample kind of campaign looks like. You know, step one is electronic, we send out a welcome thank you and welcome email, we asked for a review, we could send out a text message. Step two is the appreciation piece including the bounce back, step three is starting the referral rewards. And then step four is the long term nurture program. We would meet with you and You know, take the parts and pieces of this that makes sense for your business and put it together and put it together for you. We have a lot of plumbing and a track clients and quite frankly, I want a lot more because I you know, I love what you guys do. I love working with Josh’s clients too. I know a lot of you are Josh’s clients. And if you’re not you should be because they really are the they really are the best in the business and we work really well together. Again, they’re, you know, they’re here I actually created a slide for you. I mean, we’re kind of it’s kind of a complete approach, right? If you look at it, they are all about leads in right leads into your business, the lifeblood of your business’s leads, and I’m never going to tell you to not continue to work to make leads. The next piece of that is on your You, you create that customer and you service that customer, you give them a good experience, and then turn them over to us. And we’ll nurture that relationship for you. And remember, it’s about create, keep and multiply, create, keep and multiply, you put all three of those together, and you win, you win this game. Right? So, um, Josh, if you want to launch that poll, let’s see if anybody’s interested. Go ahead and and answer this, this this poll, and I’m happy to stick around and answer any questions, but what we offer is just 10 minutes. That’s it just a 10 minute disk, what we call a discovery call, because quite frankly, I don’t know if we can help you. And I don’t want to suck you into a, you know, one hour and a half for, you know, one hour or half hour strategy session. When we don’t even know each other yet and whether or not we can help So my man there Pete big Pete as we call him, his new his new nickname is, is he you can call him this big big daddy from Cincinnati. This is his. This is his new nickname. But anyways, he’s a sweetheart of a guy he’s he’s been with us for for a while. He knows the industry inside and out. And we would, we’d love to just just have that just that 10 minute call with you and if we determine on that call, yes, we can help you. Then we’ll set up something that where we go into the whole thing we designed our program we share all the pricing with you and all of that. I will tell you this though, as far as investment goes. And this Yes, I am going to do a little bit of selling here. You will be shocked at how little we charge to do this. In a lot of cases, it is like what you would pay a part time intern to come in. It’s what we do this for and that’s it. And really because we do this for a couple hundred clients around the country. So there’s certain economies of scale that that we can take advantage of. So if you’re interested, hit the Yes, please. No, that’s okay to just hit the No, but fill out the survey just so we can me and Josh can get a good sense of where you guys are at. That’s it, Joshua, unless we’ve got questions. Oh, wow, there’s a lot that you’re filling in the form here to kind of letting Brian know whether this is something you’re interested in learning more about. This has been great. Thank you so much for sharing a lot of cool ideas, strategies. Look, whether you decide to hire Ryan’s company or not, when you absolutely should, you get some good insights now on the thought process, right, just changing the way you approach your business from I’m going to generate a bunch of leads to I want to generate leads, convert them into customers and really focus on nurturing them to, to repeat and refer right just that paradigm shift can have massive ramifications in the growth of your plumbing HVDC electrical Home Services business so if you don’t take anything away from today’s session I hope you take that on you got some very specific examples right technically speaking you could do this yourself and Brian gladly shared the the model right after the service call drop them a thank you card in the mail. Right handwritten thank you card would go a long ways if you can put a like a special incentive to use you again or refer you at that moment in time. All the better. Right? Just doing that what have massive ramifications now to do what he’s talking about. Beyond that is really where the power is. And it’s where you know, you need a little bit more automation, you need a little bit more sophistication to pull off. Right. what he’s talking about here is a thank you card right after the service, a sequence of emails that touches them A lot in the first week and then perpetually for the rest of the relationship. And they tell you until they tell you to stop emailing them, dropping a physical newsletter into the mail once a quarter that way, you’re in their mailbox on a consistent basis. And then really putting a system in place where they’re incentivized to refer you to others. I’ve seen this implemented like Jeff Hager is on here. You saw some of the other clients, I’ve seen this implemented. And I’ve seen the impact this can have. And the reason a lot of people don’t get it off the ground is because they think to themselves, yes, this makes a lot of sense. I’ll do it myself. Right. I’m going to hire someone to print out the thank you note. I’m going to hire someone to send it out in the mail. I’ll figure it out on my own. And just like Brian said, when he was doing this in his business, maybe you do it for the first week. Yeah, okay. We’ll get the letters out. Yeah, we’ll get these newsletters out. But what happens is, this is not your core business. Your core business is taking the call dispatching the guys providing a great experience. You have to get into a completely different mind frame to think about, I’m going to now be a mail house, I’m going to now be an email marketer, I’m not going to set up referral programs and follow up on all of that stuff on a consistent basis. So knowing that right, the slow in the fast way, knowing that the probability of you doing this long term is probably one in 100. But knowing that if you do implement it, it will work and it will generate an ROI. I really want to encourage you spend a couple minutes with Brian’s team figure out how much this is going to cost and, and give it a shot. Right I mean, to me, if you’re spending money in marketing, you’re doing websites, you’re doing SEO, you’re doing pay per click, you’re doing any type of marketing and you don’t have this follow up aspect where you’re creating more pizza for a business. You’re leaving money on the table. So that’s my you know, that’s my two cents on this whole on this whole matter. Sorry to take over the the closed part here is great. That’s great. Jeff is Jeff is so far Bad. I love Jeff. Jeff is one of those clients from three four years ago. Can I tell everybody what he said in the chat? I didn’t see it. Yeah, I’ll read it. Oh my god, this is so funny. So, before we showed Big, Big Daddy from Cincinnati, the guy that was in that, you know, the three step that was Jeff Hager from Nick’s co plumbing. And he writes in, look at that sexy guy on the screen. And then right after that, right when I switch to this, he goes, No, not this guy. The other one boy guy, not this guy. The guy before that is funny. So let’s see any questions on this? You know, like, you’ve got Brian here. He’s a wealth of knowledge. Any questions on repeat referral business, creating a world class customer experience? Um, you know, marketing in general. Let me see. I don’t see much. I think you did such a great job answering all the questions. There’s not a ton of time. questions here? Yeah. Actually See, see er said text follow up in review program for service techs on the job. Any suggestions? text to follow up after the service call. There’s lots of programs that do this. Brian does yours use text? You’re awful? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. on the field here by now, which is what we usually put in place for our clients. If you use review boards, both of these have some type of, you know, Hey, thanks for your business, click here to write a review. And let’s pull that review onto Google. Let’s pull it on the you know, Angie’s List, let’s get into the public sphere. But that’s a great question and a great thought you should be thinking about, you’re gonna have a much higher open rate and response rate on text message than you are on on email for sure. We use it we use it a lot. And it’s actually it’s one of, you know, if you have one of those systems that you’re paying extra for, it actually is included as part of as part of what We do for our clients. It’s the review platform is included in what we do. Just asking if you send me a got to say you sent me unmute yourself. This is my voice. Hi, guys. Hey, doing together this afternoon. This is some great information. Brian, thank you so much for sharing. I mean, you get to the details of all of the steps that you guys do, and the history of where you guys came from. It’s just great. Thank you so much. My pleasure. All right. questions here. Ryan. It was easy in closing. No, I hope everybody is from from what I’m seeing. Home Improvement is kind of through the roof. People are home. They they’re spending money. They can’t spend money on you know, going out They can’t spend money on vacations they can’t spend money on, on whatever they would normally have spent their money on pants. And they’re spending money on their houses. So I hope everybody is busy. And this gives us a great opportunity right now while everybody is home. I’m speaking of Jeff. I mean, Jeff is one of the most successful guys I know in the plumbing space. And this guy year after year, quarter after quarter. He’s sending out you know, newsletters, print newsletters to his customers. And I got to think it works because if it didn’t, Jeff wouldn’t be, you know, paying for that stuff. But people are home they’re more likely to be you know, looking at emails they’re more likely to be looking at at direct mail. And so now is a great time to jump on all of this stuff and whether we do it or you do it or somebody else does it. It doesn’t make a difference. It’s the bottom line here is to do it in a And make it happen in your business so that you don’t have to work so hard. Hundred percent. Well guys, thank you so much for joining us on today’s session. I hope you got great value. We’re going to leave the poll open for one more second, if you want to talk with Pete on Brian’s team just hit yes. Otherwise, we’re going to wrap up today. I look forward to seeing a lot of you guys next week on on a on another session we’re going to be running. And Brian, thank you so much for sharing the information and the insights. And we’ll we’ll talk to you guys soon. Thanks for having me, Josh. Nice to see you. Fine, great seeing you as always. All right. See you Josh. Thanks. Thank you.