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[00:00:00] It was not happening

[00:00:01] Here, so, OK, you go on. Cool. All right, we should be live now or in the next few seconds, depending on what Facebook does over here. I think we’re good now. Cool. All right. So I’d love to hear if anyone has any wins. I shared one yesterday. That was a good win for us in the agency side of things. So we had a client whom that was about fifteen hundred dollars a month when we brought him on. I shared this in the group, but just go over quickly. So he’s actually in the like. They’re remodeling and deck building niche, and I’ve never really had a client in that niche, but we started him off with our at the time, which was our company minimum of fifteen hundred, and now it’s been 12 months. So we built multiple sites, we built one in the remodeling space and then we built another one in deck building and looks like he got over one hundred leads last month between those two. So those leads range. If you look at the Home Advisor pricing like I showed on the previous week, those leads range from like between 60 and one hundred dollars. So I actually think we’re still kind of like underselling it a bit, but we took them from fifteen hundred to four thousand five hundred. It’s a tough thing to do when you’re like, Hey, client, pay three times what you’re paying now. Start like starting immediately, right? It’s not, really. How the conversation is generally going to go so you don’t want you’ve got to preserve the relationship when you have this conversation, that’s important, right? So you want to stair step it and that’s what we did.

[00:01:33] We said, Hey. Well, like I initially said, what if we did? We spread it out over two months? And he said, You know, the value is one hundred percent here. It’s just hard for me to make that kind of jump that quickly. So I said, Well, let’s spread it out over four months and then we could reevaluate if, if necessary. And he was good and he was left feeling as if, like his voice was heard. He was that that we were understanding that we were kind of accommodating him. But he also was like aware that hey, like one hundred leads a month in this industry is it’s worth way more than fifteen hundred dollars. So I’ve got a little whiteboard over here and I just kind of look through. Lee generated regularly to find my list of leads and we look at what people are paying. And we’re kind of cross-referencing those to see who is who, who is time to, to adjust for because it’s not like the clients ever going to come to you and say, Yo, you guys are doing awesome, how can I pay more money? Like, at least that’s never happened to me. I don’t know. I actually had that happen this week. You did. Yeah, it was the weirdest thing. Somebody, actually, he emailed.

[00:02:44] He goes, You know what? We’re only paying you eight percent for revenue.

[00:02:47] We should pay you more. We’re going to start paying you 10. We want to start this month. Wow, that’s I mean, that’s that’s amazing. You must be doing a phenomenal job for these people and they must really. And he said, Do you do it in other parts of the country? I’m going to give you all my buddies from other parts of the country. So it was like a double win. Yeah. You know, Shannon, that is a big part of how we grew so quickly is we got into a national manufacturer within a niche and they gave us their best people from around the country. Right. So I would absolutely pursue pursue that once you and we talked about this on the last few calls about when it’s time to actually niche down. And my advice is don’t niche down until you kind of have a client in the niche, you know the niche a little bit before you kind of go all in on it because you’re going to learn things and some of the things you learn you may not like and you don’t want to be committed to that with like 40 sites or something before you realize that. So for those of you that are kind of in that phase, where would say like maybe get two or three sites in each, each of these niches and then kind of let the niche pick you to some extent where it’s like, which one am I really enjoying? Which one do I like these clients? Because you’ll notice like we’re always taught, it’s bad to stereotype people, right? But stereotypes also exist for a reason, and some of them are going to, like certain people, are going to be more common in certain niches, right? Like, you would imagine that the person who runs a tow truck company, if you picture what that person looks like.

[00:04:23] Now picture the person who like, sews for a living or bakes cakes, right? Like, our visions of this is probably different. Like, there’s two different visions and those exist. They’re more common. Obviously, there’s there’s phenomenal people and there’s bad people in every niche, right? But there are certain things that you’re going to learn along the way and you don’t want to be locked into it because you’ve invested so much time and money until you really understand all the dynamics of it. And it’s not just something about the people of the niche, it’s also the niche itself, right? So but once you it sounds like Shannon, you know the niche now. So like, maybe it’s make sense after you’ve kind of played in it, you know, you maybe can make that decision to start to go and after, especially if you have a hot sauce of these people. That’s that’s one thing that that we’re really works for Jeff and I as we’re constantly getting hot leads in the same niche that that we know very well, right? So I know that when I was at the J-K event in Twenty Seventeen and I looked around at the people that were successful, that one of the things they had in common is a lot of them had niche down, right? So I think some people did it wrong, and I think that’s the mistake they made.

[00:05:33] So I would just start slowly and I think I think it can work really well. But when you start bouncing between all these different niches, it’s it’s a lot harder. Well, let me say it this way. When you niche down, there’s a lot of benefits to it, right? Like for the niche that we’re in, mostly it’s a tight knit community. So a lot of people know each other. Like sometimes we got we got a referral for Missoula, Montana, and the lady did, like four months of research in our name, got recommended like four or five times to her. So she had like, so when she got to us, what do we have to say to not close that deal where it’s like, these are the best people in this industry for this? Like, she hears that from five independent people before she even talks to us. It’s it’s pretty easy to close that person. We know exactly how to build the sites, we know the value of the leads. We know what pages. We know some of the backlink sources. Our content writers know the content we could use. We can even send links from our own sites to other sites. And it’s in that niche, right? So just a lot of benefits, a lot of benefits to to niche and to something I definitely recommend.

[00:06:43] Ok, cool. So that was a nice that was a nice win for us, so we like I said, we spread it out for so right now there are fifteen hundred May 1st degree to be at 20 to 50, then three thousand a month on June 1st and thirty seven fifty, and then finally four thousand five hundred on August, August 1st. So another thing that I really like to do. I know I think some of you guys do this already is we try to align all of our payments so they come out on the 1st of the month. I think that is just simplifies everything when you’re going through and you’re trying to see if somebody didn’t pay you and you only have to do it on one day and you get this kind of like big chunk of money that you’re like, OK, here’s my expenses. Here’s what I can budget. I’ve got everything in my account because you start budgeting on things that money that hasn’t collected and then those people, whatever they flake or who knows what happens, right? You, you look at it differently. So I think it is just a lot easier to manage when it all comes in for some of you, maybe you want to do it like have everyone come in on the first from the 15th? So simply what you do is just pro-rate, right? Like, so if they come in on the 10th and fifteen hundred dollars a month, then you just charge a thousand because there’s two thirds of the month left right for two thirds of the payment.

[00:07:48] So that’s something that I think is simplified it within within our agency quite a bit is having most of this stuff come out on the first. We still have a few people that are over there. Obviously, you know, you may not want to do that the first month. For some people, if you got that kind of like weird feeling like, I don’t know, like we sent this person all this stuff, and it’s so hard to get in touch with this person. I don’t want to, like have to track them down again to collect another payment. So but I think as it goes, goes forward, it’s easier to just have it all come out on the first. You guys aren’t using HGH in your agencies are growing. I think that’s something that you should definitely consider. Not everyone’s going to be up for it. People like their credit card points, but a lot of times is free. If you go through Stripe, you can run through Stripe. It will be five dollars for the transaction. So as we move our clients up, those numbers can get bigger, right? So on fifteen hundred dollars, it’s like fifty four dollars a month, right? And let’s if you’ve got 20 clients, that’s over a thousand dollars that you’re going to be spending in credit card fees versus one hundred dollars if you were to run them all through. So just something I think that you guys should think about.

[00:09:02] But one of the things I want. How do you set that up for me? I mean, where is it in start? And I’m going to go back?

[00:09:12] There’s somebody that good

[00:09:13] Storytelling when Cameron

[00:09:16] Got him. Ok, OK. So Dave, you’re saying where you set that up inside Stripe? Yes, so in the area where it says, like, specify the default card, there’s like a bank account option, so you set it there and then what happens is it will be like two or three days. They’ll send a like a micro deposit, so you’ll have to get that information. I think there’s another way to do it called plaid. I haven’t used it that way where you can do it instantly, but I haven’t. I haven’t set that up. We are working towards a stripe integration within our system so that you can manage a lot of the stuff in there because what I really want is I want lead cost averaging for everyone. So I think I’ve talked about this to maybe on this, on this call. I know I’ve mentioned it to other people, so it gets cloudy in my mind, whether it was on this call or just to some random person. But what we’re looking to do is you can specify your niche and then if you’re handling your payments through our system that we can determine like the average cost per that niche. And if you decide that you want to share this data with the system, it doesn’t mean you’re going to be sharing it with other users. We’re going to like, see your information. But if you decide to share that information with the system, we’ll give you that option of whether you want to make it public or keep it private. You decide to make it public. You’ll get the advantage of seeing and getting alerts when your lead average is deviated too far from whether it’s too high or too low, it could be a problem on both both ends.

[00:10:39] Sounds good if it’s too high and your clients cool with it, but probably I would say you’re the longevity of a client when you’re charging them too much, it’s going to be a lot shorter in that relationship is probably going to be looking over your shoulder all the time. So what I’d like to do is have it sit and alert where it’s like, OK, this payment was processed through like for those of you guys that use Stripe, myself included. There’s a lot of things that are missing that I would love like, OK, this payment was declined. Then I want to get an alert. Like, So what if we got a text message when this payments declined rather than having to like, go through and check it and be like, OK, because I’ve actually had it where I didn’t realize it for a few weeks, and then I’m look back and I’m like, We just go back here and make sure, oh, this person didn’t pay. And now I’m like, Your card didn’t go through and then they’ll pay, but like to be able to get that in real time and this type of stuff. But having it say, like, Hey, you’re in the plumbing niche, the average speed cost is seventy five dollars based on the amount of leads. You had more leads this month or something. Your lead cost is now fifty dollars, so it can alert us to try to reach back out to the client and make us like more efficient with the leads that we’re providing for my more profitable. Does anyone have any questions on that? I’ve got a few things. I got a

[00:11:57] Couple of questions. Sure. So going back to the original wind that you were talking about,

[00:12:03] Yeah, you,

[00:12:05] You were uncommon. You’re clearly uncomfortable making that call, right? So. And that’s OK, I mean, I know this stuff is necessary, but on the other hand, is there anything in hindsight that you would have done differently to set that up, to set the client’s expectations up earlier on? That would have made that a simpler process for you. I’m not trying to second

[00:12:28] Guess you here.

[00:12:29] You know, I’ve had that call a lot of times, so I was uncomfortable because I know it’s a conversation they don’t want to have, and I’m a very empathetic person. I wasn’t uncomfortable from like. Like, I don’t know, I feel pretty comfortable communicating, so I set the expectations from the beginning that as this grows, the price adjusts, so it wasn’t going to be a shock to him in that regard. It’s just when I’ve had this conversation in the past and I can hear, like, it’s just there’s a lot of times I’ll talk to the client and they’ll be like, Man, you guys are killing it. Everything is awesome. We love it. Like, we’re so happy. And then this conversation, the tone is just very different. It’s like, Yeah, I get it. It makes sense. You guys are doing really well. So like, it’s just not a conversation I really enjoy. I enjoy after work, after it’s over and I’m like, OK, now we’ve like tripled it.

[00:13:23] But what was your pricing methodology for this guy?

[00:13:28] Well, we have a minimum that like, that’s how it starts out with is. I’m just like. And I think I’ve shared this before, but I’ve learned a lot over the last year, year and a half. How we did it in the beginning was I would set a minimum. And we just kept on moving our minimum up, right? Because like,

[00:13:48] It’s the company, not not for a client. I’m sorry, you’ve moved. You keep you keep continuing to up.

[00:13:56] As a company, you’re going to find that your clients are going to be they’re going to start off at your company minimum, right? And I don’t feel like our close rate has gone down and Jeff and I have actually changed that. So now we’re looking at, you know, we’re restructuring things. But if I had to do it again, my company minimum would probably be at least three thousand a month now. But I it just so happened that everyone agreed to our company minimum where I’m like, Well, this is, you know, when you get someone in the situation, if you can, if you can prove your value enough, then like the minimum doesn’t matter so much because it’s just like, OK, I understand I’m going to spend this, but they believe they like, truly believe in you, that you’re going to give them more than that back then. That first number doesn’t matter so much, right? It’s just a lot of us. We struggle with that first part of the equation. It’s like, how do we get them to believe that part of it is you have to have some experience, you’ve got to be able to speak with confidence. We can show results, we get referrals like all these things start stacking up and there’s zero smell desperation when when I have the conversation, like when Jeff has a conversation, it’s like, This is our minimum.

[00:15:06] This is what we do. We’re going like if you want us, we’ll absolutely come in here and obliterate the competition. And if the minimum is going to go up over time, and if that doesn’t seem like it’s your style, then that’s totally cool. I know there’s a lot of other companies out there that can offer services, but we’re we’re designed to work with companies that want to take over the entire city and just like grow a multimillion dollar company. That’s that’s who that’s who we are. And you know, I’ll say to him like that and like, like it’s I think the whole everything is consistent through and through for them, especially now, it’s great to get to the spot. And this may be where Sharon will go as she gets like referrals if she’s got like a whole referral pipeline. Like all you know, all your friends are telling you the same thing about, you know, Harry, you got to really, you’ve got to meet Jeff. He’s like the best guy, if everyone tells you that. And then like you go in meeting Jeff to you is not like walking in to meet a stranger. It’s like you already think good things about it. So that’s kind of like. So.

[00:16:10] And they’re not all winners, either. Some of those guys, they don’t they don’t have the capacity to grow. I was on a call with somebody a few days ago and Mitch and they just been in the business 30 years, and I try to find these guys who have been in the business for a long time because they know their stuff. And I try to sell them on the opportunity to be sort of like the kingpin as I call them and just go out and sort of farm it out to their crews and really be a real business owner. This guy’s been in business for 30 years. He hasn’t even broken that level where he’s got more than one crew running around. He’s just he’s running around, right? So he doesn’t have the capacity to do it. He can see the vision. And it’s like, OK, well, the next step is, do you have do you have anybody recommend because you’re my guy, you know?

[00:16:58] So what was the fifteen the fifteen hundred deal? Was that a flat rate for the month?

[00:17:03] I don’t like to do like flat rate is the way that I go. There’s times when we start where we go with like pay per lead. Personally, I avoid percentage deals. My business, the way I’ve structured this is to scale, right? So I’m thinking about that all the time is like if I have to do pay per lead, like we have about ten thousand leads come in a month in our agency. So if I’m trying to do paper lead, like, what does that look like for us to go?

[00:17:31] I already know. Right?

[00:17:33] It’s horrible. Or the percentage deal to like. Right.

[00:17:37] So anything you have to calculate at the end of the month the pain in the ass.

[00:17:42] So here’s kind of how I do it. Like, how do I determine if we’re on a flat fee? I’ll go and I’ll find out what the lead cost is. And I’d like to use Home Advisor as a baseline and honestly. Our leads are so much better than home advisers look like for three reasons, right? But you know, the person is coming through a Google search, so their buyer intent is so much higher. Right? It’s it’s not a it’s not a shared lead. Right. And the leads are coming directly to them in real time. Right. So there’s three reasons make our lives a lot better, but I’ll use it as a baseline. These people are used to paying for home advisors nonsense. So then I can calculate OK, like if I sent, like with this guy, the lead value is between 60 and a hundred dollars. We set him one hundred leads. So that should be like. Uh, whatever, seventy five hundred dollars, I guess, would be the average. We took it, I told him like this could easily sell for six thousand five hundred. I don’t want to like spike this on you or drop a bomb on you. Let’s I want you to have a great deal. So we put it at forty five hundred.

[00:18:57] And I mean, I’m OK with that. The sites weren’t that tough to build. Yeah, maybe I could redline them and get them out of bigger number, right? But it becomes mailbox money when when you don’t redline them. We’re just like, these people aren’t on the threshold of like where this is profitable or not profitable. Like the referral zone to like he’s he’s now. If you give them like a really good deal, like they want to refer people, right? If you if you’re going to make you happy. Yeah. And you know, one of the lines in the language that I use when I’m talking to my clients a lot is, look, I know right now you probably view us as like a marketing lead generation company, but we’ve grown a big business and I view this as more of a partnership where I’m like, How can I help you? Like, what can I do? So if you got like technology problems, whatever it is like, like just let us know, like we’ve grown a big business, we’ve scaled, right? I’ve got thirty two people that work for me, and that didn’t happen overnight. That happened because we had systems in place and we like we set things up and like, I went to business school, I and then after that, I’ve studied books.

[00:20:04] I’ve been to seminars like so all this knowledge, the knowledge that I share with you guys is some of the knowledge that I’d like to share with my clients, too. It’s like, how can I was like, How can we be of service to these clients? And if you do that and you’re not redlining them, I find that and you deliver. You just like, really crush it for him. Referrals really just start to come in. Right. So there’s no magic formula it’s part of. It is just like, be a good person to these people. And like, like, you know, if someone goes just like you, if someone goes out of their way to help you in a situation, then you’re more likely to recommend for someone. If someone does like a phenomenal job you like, take your car in to get fixed. You get it back and they washed it like, and then someone’s like, Do you know anyone that could fix my car? They’re like, Oh, this guy over here, man, this is where you like. So that’s the situation we try to put these people in. Like we had a couple one of our clients had who was that Dave? Was that his dad or somebody like

[00:21:00] That was, that’s Jason.

[00:21:05] Yeah. Someone passed away and we sent them flowers, you know?

[00:21:09] Oh, oh, oh yeah, yeah, right, Dave. No, that was that was Bruce. Dave had a friend pass away. Yeah.

[00:21:17] Yeah, we’ve done that a few times, you know? It’s like I think a lot of people try to treat their clients like their clients and, you know, you definitely want to keep that that like buffer. But at the same time, like we’re all we’re all humans trying to do our best in this world. And if you kind of treat them like other humans, like

[00:21:36] There’s something you can do if you’re reaching out to them for whatever reason and they’re in a bad spot like this guy, Bruce in particular. He and his girlfriend are a really tough time when when her father passed. And so he’s letting me know like, so when you get on a call with the client, they’re venting about their personal problems and you know, you have a tight relationship. He’s inviting us to go ride the Ferraris and four wheeling and stuff like that. So he’s a cool guy. So I let him vent and I go through it and then I send him some flowers and it just kind of closes the route. So it’s really good stuff to be able to do that. Hey, Patrick, I have a question for you. Just so you guys know that I don’t manage all of the clients in Patrick’s agency, I will manage the ones that I manage. I know how I keep up and kind of see the comparison between the leads from the last month to the next month. How do you do it with so many more sites that you’re managing, Patrick? As far as seeing an opportunity like this to level up somebody who’s monthly, how do you track a role that I think might be helpful for people?

[00:22:37] Yeah, I mean. I guess in a perfect world, I’d probably talk to these clients more than I do. I’ve barely spoken to this guy since he came on. I’m just like touched in. This is the guy I think I shared this a year ago, maybe in the J-K group. I close this guy through Facebook Messenger without even having a phone call. He came through as a referral, so we didn’t actually have our first phone call until a few months in. And I didn’t do a great job of keeping up with how he was doing. But I saw the leads and we have we have someone who answers are like kind of like audits, the calls and stuff like this. So, you know, just paying attention inside will be generated dashboard to the leads that were coming through and then looking like. I know exactly how much every client we have pays us, so I can look at the leads and I’m like, That seems like a lot of leads for what you’re paying, right? You know, if you like here, here’s another thing. The busier you make these people a lot of times, the less you’ll hear from them, like they’re not going to like be if they’re sitting on their hands all day and they’re paying you. They’re going to reach out to you. But if they’re like busy with work nonstop, then like. Like, it just becomes I’ve got clients we haven’t talked to in a few years that every month their credit card gets billed, I see the leads, I see that like they’re being handled like the calls are being answered.

[00:24:05] So I don’t know, does I spend a little bit more time on it? Patrick’s running an agency in the software platform or whatnot, so I’m doing sales, so I have more time to kind of dig in, see where they’re at. You know, I try to touch base with my clients every at least once a week. It doesn’t always happen, but if they need something little or there’s something we can tweak and improve the process or the results, then then I’m always trying to do stuff like that. And so when you get as many clients as this agency has, it can be really, really cumbersome to to be able to manage clients that way. And that’s a that’s a scaling issue, right? Because you have the ability to instead of go get more clients like Triple Client where you have. But if you don’t know you have the capability to do that, then you do the other thing and go get a new client, start all over.

[00:24:56] Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think it’s you’ve already built a strong relationship of trust with these people. I think it’s important we have I don’t know how many clients we have, to be honest. I think somewhere between like 50 and 70, we’ve we’ve like fluctuated and, you know, keeping keeping your eye on this leads that are coming in. So if you guys aren’t taking advantage of the qualified call filters are something that’s maybe we don’t talk a lot about. But in our agency, it certainly makes things a lot more valuable and I’m going to go over what that is exactly so we can see it. I’ll pull it up.

[00:25:35] And just real quickly, like when I reach out to these people, like I kind of tune in into what’s going on, like if I have a client who’s about to have a baby, you know, I’m trying to. I’m trying to plant the seeds of expansion. Like, When are you going to be ready to expand? Like there’s there’s going to be a time when you’re going to want to go into the next market or go in, you know, add another niche or whatever. But I know if this client’s got a baby come in the next couple of months like this is not a good time to start trying to amp up the fees or expand or anything like that. So I try to tune in as much as possible so that we can hit them at the right time with that expansion or additional fee. So it makes sense, you know?

[00:26:11] Yeah, I think it’s really important for you to know the vision of your clients, too. That’s one of the things that I like to get down to right away is like, what? What, how do they foresee this? And this isn’t necessarily like, I know that sales, they talk about this like understanding the vision, because then you can sell them, sell. What I’m talking about talking about is I understand their vision. And then how can you help them get to that spot? Not just like, like, sell them on getting that? Like, what actions can you take to get to that spot so that when you come at it from that angle and you’re not sitting there as a salesperson trying to sell them on this and you’re like, What do you want to do? And you know, a common answer might be like, you know, I’d love to have like three or four crews and why? Why that number? Because then we would have this many jobs. So OK. So once you have like three or four crews, what is that going to mean? And eventually a lot of times where you’re going to get with this line of questioning is that they would like to have other people running the show for them so that they can, like, go on vacation and like, have enough money coming in to be able to pay someone who’s good at what they do that they can trust and count on, right? So their vision is really to build, to scale and like pull themselves out of the business to some extent.

[00:27:33] Like if these contractors, they probably like a lot of them, like a lot of them, they’re going to want to move from doing the work to doing the estimates because a lot of these guys are like doing this, like Labor Labor’s work, right? And then when they can move in and they can have crews at different houses or different jobs doing different things, and they just like check in on the crews and they go and do the sales and the estimates, and then eventually they get to a spot where they can have an estimator, who’s doing estimates right? And like, I’ll tell them, as a part of the sales, I’ll tell them the stories of the clients that we help get there. Like we have a guy in Boise, and he spends a lot of his time in Mexico on vacation, and he’s got multiple crews, multiple estimates. And that’s where they want to go. And we were part of how, like he told us his vision and I remembered that vision from the beginning I like made that a part of my story. And you know, one of the ways that we were able to scale is that we have managers within our agency and the managers get assigned a set of clients.

[00:28:33] And I’ll tell the manager like, Hey, this is the guy from Boise. He’s got two kids. He’s married, he’s been in business for like 12 years. He wants to be able to like, go on these like vacations. Like, maybe it was this guy. He wants to be able to go to Mexico and hang out while work is still being done here. So this is what this is. Our goal. This is what we need to do. This is what we’re working towards, right? So that is not just something that brushes off my shoulder when I hear it, and I think that kind of. Embodiment of their goal, becoming a part of our goal and taking that as a part of partnership has made us better at what we do, and it’s made the clients feel like they’re in this because I’ll remember it when we when we, you know, a year later, like, Hey, this is what you said, that you wanted to do. Where are we towards working towards that? And they’ll be shocked that that. But if you if you’re not just like, if it means something to you, then it’s easy to remember, right? So what’s up, Dave?

[00:29:29] So with with that in mind, I mean, you’re you’re telling somebody you work with all of this great information. Are you also tracking this in a CRM or is this all in your head? Is this on a spreadsheet? I mean, how I just got the picture.

[00:29:46] Like, if you’re if you’re someone who can’t remember it, then I would certainly write it down. But you know, I remember I’m a people person. I remember talking to you in Vegas outside the bathroom, right? Just for like 15 minutes, right? I remember that like, I like these events, they affect me. And so but if you find that you can’t remember it, then I would absolutely write it down and I would.

[00:30:09] I take notes. I mean, sometimes it’s really tough to keep track of two or three hundred different people that you’re working with and then to have to transfer that over to somebody else that you’re working with. I wondered what it was that you were doing to to keep track of all that and transfer it right?

[00:30:30] I mean, we’re we’re definitely not working with two or three hundred people. We’ve got like somewhere between 50 and 70 clients. And, you know, like at that volume, I guess I haven’t had an issue remembering like the key things that are important to these people. And that’s might just be a an idiosyncrasy for me, right?

[00:30:51] I track every call, every time I call I, every time I communicate with a client, I track the high points of the conversation so that I have it to reference because I’m more of a big picture guy. I don’t get into the details as much as accurate. So I’m just kind of like going have to clog up my brain with it, just like I’m sure everybody else here does. I mean, clients, customers, however you want to term it. At some point they become family. So you get some of those intimate details. And it’s like, I’m saying, I mean, sometimes they call, they just want to vent about their day or whatever. And it’s like, that’s what I got. The thing, you know,

[00:31:35] Moments later, she’s calling back and like, We’re getting some feedback here.

[00:31:41] So, yeah, I didn’t know if you had a magic bullet for that, Patrick, or even you just so I

[00:31:48] How Jeff says it, if you’re like, if you’re asking the question, then I think you probably need a system. And I think Jeff does a phenomenal job. One of the things that we’re doing is we’re going to be within our system. We’re going to start introducing a lot of custom fields for the client. So right now, we have this limited thing, but we’re going to be having notes. You can add whatever fields you want, similar to how you can kind of build a website for where you can put in all these fields. We’re going to be doing the same thing with that for clients, for companies, for jobs and then making all that stuff searchable and sortable so that you can kind of like, have it in there, it’ll be tied into the pipeline system that we’re going to be releasing soon. I was going to bring something up on regenerated and now I can’t remember what it was. Does anyone

[00:32:32] Lead the lead filtering, really managing the

[00:32:36] Qualified call field? Yeah. So let me just share this real quick. This can help you guys out if you guys aren’t taking advantage of this. I think it’s something that you should probably check out. So if you go in to a company, we’ll just go with this company here and then you go to the edit company area. There is you guys probably noticed that we redid these screens to kind of set things up for expansion. But if you go to the phone part of it, there’s this qualified call filters. Ok, so what this means is as calls come in, what is going to be added as a lead, right? So naturally, when things come in, they’re kind of held in this quarantined area here where the all calls. I don’t have any dummy calls in this account right now, but so they will be held here and they won’t be added as leads. Which is good because it helps preserve our lead count, but it’s bad because obviously a lot of the calls are going to be real leads and we’re not counting any of them when it’s that way. So if you were to come in here and turn this on like this, then every call that comes in is going to be added as a lead because there’s no qualifiers for it. But when you can do is you can say, Hey, I want to only count it if it’s a first time caller. So I’ll tell you what we do in our agency as I set this to 90 seconds and I’ll leave it like this.

[00:33:58] So that means if a call comes in and it lasts 90 seconds, then it’s automatically added as a lead. So then when I’m going back to count my two, count my leads and find out what is a real lead and where I am with our clients. Now I’ve got a pretty good estimate of like how many actual leads we sent. So we so we know the foreign submissions are going to be like, we know whether those are real or not. For the most part, by looking at them, the spam filters should be crushing those. And if you guys, if you if you guys are getting a lot of spam, then like, let me know because I know there’s a couple of users that I need to circle back to that the spam filters aren’t working for them as they’re working for us. But for us, we’ve got it set up and we get almost no form submission spam, right? So we have like only our real forms and then we’ve got calls that are 90 seconds or longer, so I can quickly go through and be like, OK, this person’s had seventy five leads and then I can go use that Home Advisor sheet to look at it and say, OK, they’re charging this. My leads are better. I should probably be at least somewhere near this times, however many leads, and that’s where we’ll set our flat fee, right? And I will like I said, I won’t redline them right towards it.

[00:35:09] So one of the other things that I wanted to talk about is how we’ve changed over time with our billing and what I’ve learned, right? So when I first started doing this, I would try to get the money from people as soon as possible and then get them on a monthly fee. And so that was like version one. So what would happen is a lot of times around the three month period, I would lose the client because we weren’t able to get them leads fast enough. I think it’s great for us to just use this like three month as this like rule of thumb, but that’s not been my experience. I think usually it takes longer. We’re really like before the leads are really coming in. Especially like for us, it’s a double edged sword with the referrals because a lot of times we’re getting pushed into harder markets because we don’t get to choose the market right. So it’s just like. But for those of you choosing it, don’t feel discouraged. If it’s not happening in the first three months doesn’t mean that if you need to do everything to try to create it. I don’t want that to be an excuse of like, OK, Patrick said. It hasn’t happened in three months. That’s cool. Just saying like, you should have like GMB, set up your citations pages, backlinks, all this stuff should be done in three months, but you know it may take six months.

[00:36:21] We had one in Raleigh where it took us a year to Rec. Ok, so you lose the client after three months. It’s not really a great experience for us. It’s not a good experience for the client. And then what we decided to do is we’re going to like we’ll charge them from the beginning and we’re going to take that money and we’re going to put it on Google ads. So that way we can I think the go fast look sexy or whatever it is, method like, well, then what happens is we end up losing money because we’re spending almost all the money towards the ads to try to pay for, to try to keep this client happy. The lead quality is not as good as if it’s coming through organic. When it’s coming through Google ads, there’s just like not as many people click on the ad section. So a lot of times client would stay happy, but we would lose money so we would keep the client. And then the thought process is we’re going to make it up on the back end because like, we’re going to get the site to rank and then like after three to six months, then we’re going to have this client for years. So that was kind of my mentality. But when we started scaling really fast, now we’re losing money on more clients at a time which made like, that’s not fun, right? So then version three, which is what we’re doing now, and I’m much happier with it as I charge like a startup fee of maybe two thousand.

[00:37:37] And I’m like, You’re not going to pay anything else until we have leads coming in. So we’ll take that and then we’ll build the sites and we’ll communicate with the client. Like, Hey, like, we’re going to build multiple sites. You need to have some skin in the game. We’ve got other people that are waiting for our services. If this doesn’t sound good to you, that’s fine. But this is how we do it here. So we build the site, it takes the pressure off of us. They know like they’re not paying anything else monthly. We’ve shown them the sites we’ve built. We can show them the rankings improving over time. And then once they start to come in, I probably like, it’s not like I’m going to say like the first thing comes in or all right. You always want to know, Well, I’ll wait until there’s like a decent flow starting to come in and then we’ll start them off slower and I’ll let them know like, Hey, this is going to ramp up. And this is where we’re starting right now, because like, we’ve worked really hard to get it here, but as it moves, we’re going to move it up, right? So. You know, it’s starting to produce, so it’s worth something. So that’s kind of been version three so far. I think we started that with that December 12th, I

[00:38:39] Think at the end of the year and we’ve had a couple of clients go through that that whole process and it seems to be working out a lot better.

[00:38:46] Yeah, it seems much better. We’re not losing money on these clients.

[00:38:49] Yeah, not losing the

[00:38:51] Startup fee covers a lot of our build costs and everything. And then, you know, managing Google ads is a lot, right? It’s a lot to handle. The minute you got to watch you to be effective with it, you need to be in there every day and then it’s an auction. So the prices are always changing. It’s just a really it’s a hard thing to be good at. So we still have some people on ads, but I’m looking to phase them off the ads, right? I don’t want to be spending money on ads. For those of you people that are spending money on ads, just a little tip. There is a chase credit card that gives you a three point multiplier. So you should be running your ads through something like that. So we’ve been doing it for a year, and I think we have like six hundred thousand points now, which is worth a good amount of money. So it’s like it’s almost like a discount on your Google ads. So I would highly recommend that if you’re someone that is running a good amount of ads through your agency, I can find out the name of the car to anyone. Just just shoot me a message if that’s something you’re interested in. But I personally don’t like having that be a part of our agency, and it’s

[00:40:02] I don’t like it either.

[00:40:03] Yeah, it’s just less client satisfaction. It’s more to manage. It’s and honestly like. What I’ve said this several times, and I don’t know if everyone believes it and everyone’s like so quick to try to like, like try to like, let me get money coming in. You don’t you’re not going to be profitable until you have ranking websites. That’s what I’ve learned is like, that’s the most important thing is, like I say, like build, like it’s because you want the ranking websites. That’s where money, that’s where you start to take money away from this, right? You can run ads. You’re not going to make money while you run ads or your client’s not going to be happy. Or maybe you’re like one of the best in the world. Those are. Those are, to me, the three options, right? So what I’ve learned is like once the once the site is just really ranking, well, that’s when it’s profitable. So how do I get there faster? And prospecting is great and finding these people, but it’s also true when you have leads coming in, it’s not hard. It’s so much easier to sell the site.

[00:41:05] Oh, much easier. I mean, I have the luxury of Patrick’s hard work over the past few years where he’s built this portfolio, and I’m basically sitting here with, you know, referral clients falling in my lap. But also, it’s like all of a sudden a new site starts to pop and it’s like, Hey, niche location, let’s go find a client. And so your leads in the hand most of the time. So my job becomes a lot easier at that point, as you can imagine.

[00:41:30] Yeah, like the the little analogy that I give is if you want to sell, if you want to sell a Ferrari and you’re sitting on the corner and you’re like, Hey, I’ve got this car, this is what it looks like. It’s really fast. It’s awesome. You’re going to love it. I can’t show it to you or you have the Ferrari sitting there parked and they get to look at it and try it, drive it around the block. So that’s like it makes the sales process easier and it’s way more profitable once. That’s the beauty of the business model that part of the business model. All this other stuff is like to get to that spot, right? So you don’t need a client to get to that spot, but obviously you’re going to want to choose. You’re going to want to choose the choose the niches and that are going to allow you to have a good selection of clients. But I think the real value comes from just having that machine that just cranks out something that’s worth money for you every month, right?

[00:42:28] So we have a few things in the chat over here on Facebook. First of all, just shout out to Sarah Souza. She’s got a lead gen win on a landscape landscaping trial. Client closes first job and then AJ is saying that he was working with a tree tree guy last year that flaked on him. And now he’s like sitting around waiting for business. So he called him back and started sold him on a pre-sold region for him in a different market. It’s amazing. And then Adam was asking about if we charge for extras, we don’t. So we have a one one fee for all in and we provide whatever, whatever our clients need. Obviously, if they’re starting to ask for more, we’re going to charge more. But we don’t nickel and dime and say, Oh man, it’s going to be this and that and the other, whatever. So we do one fee and that in that sense. And then the last question was Erik Gustafsson is asking about reputation management and whether it’s HIPA compliant. I haven’t even thought about that, Patrick. I don’t even know if it’s an issue. Have you thought about it?

[00:43:30] I haven’t thought about it. I know there’s a lot of reputation management softwares out there. I’ve known a lot of people using different ones. I’ve never heard that topic brought up, but that doesn’t mean that, like, I’m not an attorney on this. I don’t know the ins and outs of that. For me personally, my gut says like not to worry about it, but everyone’s got their own different thresholds for risk and in that type of thing.

[00:43:56] So yeah, I would think if it’s a doctor’s office or something and they’re running stuff through a third party system to get reviewed, I don’t know that sounds. It sounds a little questionable to me, but the doctors will know Eric. So yeah, I think it’s up to them as far as their risk tolerance. I don’t think that you would be the one at risk here. It would be the one the person with the license or the office or whatever. I think my sense.

[00:44:23] Cool. Yes. So congrats to you, to Sarah and A.J. A.j. Awesome work and you know, I don’t know if you guys Neal from from Florida, who’s been like a regular on these calls for a while. He’s currently battling COVID, so he let me know he wasn’t going to be here, but just kind of wishing him the best. It sounds like he’s having a tough time with it. It seems like you’re a really good guy. And you know, any of you guys that are that are friends with him, maybe just like, send him some positive vibes. So are we kind of the

[00:44:57] Thing I miss here is Eugene Song was asking, How do we find these guys who want to scale? It’s, you know, it’s it’s hit or miss a lot of times, but you kind of once you’re doing it like for me, anyway, I’m doing this on a daily basis. I kind of get a sensibility about who I’m looking for, who I’m looking at when I’m prospecting, and I can kind of get a sense. And it’s not like if I have a landscaping site like, you know, probably not looking at somebody who’s really hyped on doing seven figures, maybe. But you know that it’s more for higher level niches, so you can kind of sort through people that way. It just kind of depends on not all of our sites and opportunities are going to be seven figures. We have a site in a very small like 60000 population area in the back, you know, the stick somewhere. And I don’t see a lot of opportunity for growth there. We’re already stepping on one of the other major players. So in the niche, as far as like, he’s getting the same calls and trying a client, so there’s different situations that are out there. But on a bigger population city and a higher level niche like we’re always looking for. One of the top players, I mean, Patrick is very competitive, but we’re going for the top player. You know, I’m the one who’s got to try to figure out who that guy is so that your company is. So it’s it’s kind of a work in progress. As far as like, do we get the top one? We want to go for the top one as much as we yeah, that’s right.

[00:46:27] When you’re when you’re the bruiser in the kickball game, you don’t want to choose the weenie to work with, right? And you know, I’m not trying to tell you guys to be judgmental of these people, but you need to. Assess these people as you talk to them, like, hey, how long have you been in business? Oh, I’ve been in business for seven years. How many employees do you have? It’s just me. To me, that’s kind of a red flag. Ok, like you are the average of this decision. All of us, we’re the average of the decisions that we’ve made. Right. And for those of us that are a part of this group or other groups to try to get to a better spot, it requires us to change. And that’s why we’re participating in this. And that’s why we’re doing this stuff for these business owners that they haven’t made that decision, that they’re going to put in the effort to make that change or they haven’t done it to the point where they’re effective and that’s going to be a red flag for me. I’ll ask them what their what’s their goal? How are you going to get there? What does that look like if they haven’t really put thought through it? I don’t think they’re super serious about it, just like you. My apologies. So you can start to recognize that like you’ll start to recognize patterns and the way people operate. And you guys probably already can do that. And when we want them to be who, we want them to be this rock star, then I saw this thing from Elon Musk today. We’re like, he thinks that wishful thinking is one of the biggest problems because it will blind us from the truth.

[00:48:03] A lot of times where it’s like, we want something to be a certain way, then like we hope it is and we just like, think it is. But we need to look for evidence, right? That’s like it’s great to have like the power of positivity, but there has to be like a basis in realistic. So just because like you talk to a client who’s a nice guy like that might not be the best fit, right? We have to make these tough decisions. And if you decide to go with somebody who is just because they’re a nice person and they don’t really have the chops, it’s going to create problems. When you blow up their business, they’re not going to be the right person unless they can change, right? And so it’s always like a little bit of sacrifice, and I’m all for helping these people. But, you know, maybe you can help this person get to that next step, but they’ve got to be. You know, they’ve got to be willing to make those changes, they’ve got to be like taking the actions on their side. You can’t like these people that are only willing to work 40 hours and they have like a business that is not growing like it’s probably not the most important thing to them to grow the business right? Or they would be putting in more time. They’d be thinking about it when they’re not like, like, I can’t remember the last time I worked 40 hours in a week, but like, I’m trying to grow something big here, so I’m willing to put in that extra time. So you’re just kind of like,

[00:49:15] Are you still sharing your screen? I’m not sure I’m getting. Oh, yeah, yeah. I don’t know if you can see it or not, but yeah. Yeah, no worries. So Stephen Andrew’s asking, When will we be able to text out leads from lead generated anytime?

[00:49:32] Yeah, I’m coming very soon. Uh, coming really soon, so we’re working through like the costly texting stuff, so they’ve created some connections for us. So they’re kind of making that possible, and we’ve got a lot of it working on our end and it’s I’m absolutely excited. I’m really excited to get it to that spot and we’re almost there. So I’m hoping in the next and it just seems like every time I think it’s going to happen, then other stuff happens. But hopefully in the next few weeks we’re going to be able to get that live because we’ve already got it working in our development stuff. When we get our when we get our mobile applications ready to release, then that’s something that’s going to be able to be done through the mobile application, almost like Facebook Messenger, where you can like, send a message, but on the other end, it can come out as a text, right? So this is going to give us a ton of flexibility where like a text message comes in and we can have it be sent to a client who has the mobile application installed as a message and get a push notification. And then they can reply, and then it can be routed from the tracking number back to the person who texted it. Right. So a ton of I just think it’s going to be really, really powerful when we get that in place. So version one is not going to include that part of it, but it is going to have texting with like reputation management, texting this type of stuff.

[00:50:55] So Lisa’s asking if she can ask a couple of questions, Lisa, are you wanting to

[00:51:01] Go for it?

[00:51:03] Hey, how’s it going, guys? Yeah, it’s nice seeing you. Just a quick thing. First, I wanted to start off with and just thank you so much, guys for doing this like every week. I really appreciate it. I’m sure everyone in this group really appreciates this. I gained so much value from this. So, yeah, I have a couple of questions. First question is I am struggling to find a good way to prospect with leads and advance during my day job. It’s not like I can just make phone calls as much as I want to like. I cannot do that. So what I’ve been doing has just been like texting, and I haven’t really found a good way when it comes to just like text messaging, especially like in the construction industry of how I can like go ahead.

[00:51:53] You on Facebook when you’re at work and you can get on Facebook,

[00:51:56] I can get on Facebook too. So I just spent like texting on my phone, you know, like I do like a lot of my press by day. Like, I’ll pull like, you know, people off of like Google ads, for example, or off of like Facebook groups. And then I just like, text them.

[00:52:10] Yeah, I do quite a bit of Facebook prospecting, actually, and it works really easy because I have a lot of stuff to sell. So I, you know, and I like change, so I don’t get stuck on one site like I want to cycle through and like, offer it to different people and then go to the next one and then circle back the next day and whatever. So I would go into Facebook groups and I would just say, Hey, or even if I find somebody on Craigslist, I’m going to text them or some other number that I want to text. I’m just like, Hey, are you guys? Are you guys open to some referral work and XYZ Z location? And usually most of the time they’re like, Yeah, so I just keep this super simple, super short. I’m like, Yeah, I get some stuff. Once in a while, I could send you a couple and see if it’s a good fit. What do you think? And I’ve already checked them out, obviously online, like I know who they are. So it’s not Jimmy in a pickup, usually depending on the niche. But you know, I try to try to do it that way. And, you know, if I do that in a higher level niche, a lot of times they won’t respond. So because they don’t have time, they’re on the run, right? So I’ll do that to three to five of them in one at one time, and then I’ll just throw it out there.

[00:53:22] I’m throwing lines in the water, right? So then I go to the next one and then it’s kind of eventually somebody starts to respond. They’re like, Yeah, I could take on some more work, like, what do you got? And I’m like, Well, I just have this little marketing thing set up and I get some leads. What’s a lot? I can’t make any promises, but you know, I don’t know if it’s the type of work you do, but I can get them into a bigger conversation. It kind of depends on how desperate I am to sell it, meaning how many leads are coming in. If I have three leads a week, then I’m not as desperate to sell it. I’m trying to just kind of, you know, get somebody to trust me enough to work with me because I’m probably going to need to ask them for money because it’s kind of hard to monetize something with that low number of leads. If it’s getting 30 leads a week, well, that’s different, right? So I want to I want to try to get those people on the phone. So then I would be like, Well, hey, I’m getting a bunch of work here like this could just blow up your business. Like, let’s get on a phone call. So that’s kind of the way I do it.

[00:54:16] Hey, Lisa, first, thank you for the appreciation. I’m glad that it’s been useful for you. Second, and don’t feel any pressure at all to answer this, but do you want to share the niche that that you’re talking about is is this something that’s like obscure or is it something that’s kind of mainstream?

[00:54:36] It’s more mainstream, but honestly, it’s like several niches that have leads coming in. The problem is with these different niches is, you know, one is like event planning, right? I’ve had this up for like a year now. And finally, with Coben starting to like end, I’m starting to get more leads coming in for event planning. Well, with event planning, that seems a little bit different when it comes to texting versus like the construction. Because what I notice with the construction industry is that they don’t really ask you for many details or just be like, OK, I’ll give that person call with like anything outside the construction industry, like event planning. It seems like they keep harassing me for more details because it’s like, I want to keep it simple, but then they’re like asking me for, OK, like, who are you? Like, what do you do? And like all these things, and it’s just like called this referral. That’s like, that’s all you need to do. And then I get asked, like 18 questions, and then it’s like, I feel like I’m scaring them off and I have to answer the truth.

[00:55:37] So here’s the strategies that I would take for these different ones, for event planning and for the construction. I would be joining some big Facebook groups and I would be posting in there like, can anyone make a can anyone recommend somebody like that can handle this type of event in Austin, Texas, or wherever, wherever the city is right? I would post that in there, and you’re going to get a lot of different responses. Ok? And then send them the lead when they respond like, Hey, I could be interested. Like here, here’s you maybe want to have a conversation or you might just like, throw it in there like I’ve got. I’ve got a lot of these coming in, just like you just pretend that the conversation has already happened where they agreed, like, Hey, would you be interested in a wedding that is not the type of events that it would be like a wedding or like bar mitzvah or something like that, right? Mm hmm. So like this, would you be interested in that when they say yes, just be like, throw the information in there. That’s one way to do it, you’re not really vetting them out very much, which like, you know, you may want to look at them a little bit and make sure they’re not like an axe murderer or something.

[00:56:43] But like you can just like, throw it in there. And if they close it or they get a good conversation and then you give them another one, like, it’s not going to take them long before they’re there, like they’re going to be wanting more of this right if they’re getting value from them. You’re in a niche that, like I like to call, is a waterfall niche. And I love those. So you the leads that come in for this can be so much more than the initial lead if you structure this correctly. Ok. Yeah. So you could be lining up like table and chair rental. You could be lining up jars and cakes and caterers and like, I don’t know, clowns like all kinds of different things that can are associated with these events. You need to be turning this niche into like five or seven leads for each lead that comes in. So I understand step one is like getting the event planner person because that’s what the actual lead is for. But and that may be something you need to like. Step around a little bit where maybe the event planner has already gone in like they have their own legions, and now they’re like getting money back for each time somebody rents chairs from this place or something.

[00:58:02] I was going to say that they probably are legion effectively, you know, because I’m sure they have that to people that they use and maybe they get kick back something or or whatever.

[00:58:13] Um, yeah, so the construction one, I would also be like I had tremendous success by just like doing a simple post like, Hey, can anybody recommend a wedding planner in like Philadelphia? And like if the group is big enough? And that especially if it’s like a tight knit like if it’s an industry where people are going to like trade shows and that type of thing, and they and they know people in these different areas, then a lot of times you’ll get people making recommendations about these people.

[00:58:45] And that a lot of times you don’t even have to make the post like you just go in and search the niche keyword and somebody’s already made a post like that sometime in the past and is lined up right there for you, right?

[00:58:57] Is are your legions in the time zone that you are in?

[00:59:02] Yes, yep.

[00:59:03] Ok, so most of the time, business owners are going to be pretty busy between nine and five. Right. A lot of my conversations with clients happen after their business hours. So like most of these people, it’s not the worst thing to message them when you get off work or or even on the weekend, right? If they don’t like, if they’re especially like, if they don’t, if they don’t answer, then as long as long as you’re not calling them at like 3:00 in the morning, like you call them at like noon on a Saturday. It’s not. I don’t think that’s like too intrusive personally. So I would be using those I’d be using, like probably until like seven o’clock, seven 30. Being able to reach out to them, I’d be combining it with, like Facebook post. And then, you know, you can make the post in the morning and then maybe on your lunch break, you could go and see, see what it’s got or like, Jeff said. Just like message these people within Facebook chat, and I think that it has a really high open rate when you message someone on Facebook versus like sending out a bulk email or something like that, I know that Mike has some like Crazy Ninja email stuff. But yeah, I’ve had tremendous success, just like using Facebook and Jeff has as well, and I know a number of other people have to. Is anybody is there anybody else that has stuff to add to that?

[01:00:22] For Lisa Adams, asking about waterfall leads is passing the leads on to multiple industries, OK, if the lead is only giving their details for the initial minutes?

[01:00:32] Yeah. So what you can do, first of all, I don’t I don’t think it’s. That’s maybe a gray area. Right, I don’t think it’s like a terrible thing to do, but what you can also do is you could just have a checkbox on your form or, you know, if you’re handling the calls for them, like, Hey, you know, we work with a lot of you seem like a nice person. We work with a lot of people that we would recommend. Would you be interested in hearing from these people if it’s on a phone call or you can just have them by check a checkbox on a form? And you know, you’ll know like when you’re in this, like, for instance, Lisa here. Maybe if they choose wedding, then you could have like the the check box or like they check a check box. You can have something else pop up that says, like, OK, are you interested in any of these other stuff? You could potentially get a discount if you know, if you like to use a few of our different vendors or something like there’s ways to do it right and the the lead value is probably not going to be. Like if if you were to get like a lead and it was worth 20 dollars and you do it this way where they came in for a wedding, maybe that leads only worth seventeen dollars or fifteen dollars because it’s like, I don’t know, they weren’t asking for it.

[01:01:40] So but that is absolutely multiply that times. Five. I mean, like, I think it’s I had this idea a while ago to just like focus on these like waterfall industries because I’m just like, oh, five x. Every lead that comes in, if I choose the right industry, it’s like, you can’t do that. For some niche like roofing, for instance, it could have been a roofing lead comes in like, I don’t know what else you can sell them. Maybe there’s like water damage or something like this. But like for for this one is just like we know by the type of lead that they need all this other stuff, right? So I really like that that idea. Lisa, I don’t think like I wouldn’t personally go into the event management space unless I was doing that, because I think that the price per lead is just not worth as much as some of these other ones. And I think it’s going to be more competitive than than other ones. But if you’re going to be able to waterfall it, then then that compensates for those other deficiencies in my mind. Um, was this was this helpful, Lisa?

[01:02:47] Yeah, no, this was definitely helpful. I guess my other thing is it seems like that Facebook prospecting and just messaging them on Facebook is more personal maybe than just like texting these different phone numbers and they just don’t have like a face to a name.

[01:03:05] It’s a pattern interrupt. It’s not where they’re used to getting hit up by marketers. Right? Like, they’re used to like people calling them and they hang up on them or getting junk mail. But when you get like a Facebook message, especially if you keep it casual, then it doesn’t seem spammy. Right.

[01:03:25] So yeah, I keep it real, casual and short. You know, it’s like, I’m busy. I have something of value here. If you’re interested, let me know. You know,

[01:03:34] I use it a lot and it works really, really well. So I’ve never had any objections or complaints.

[01:03:42] Yeah. Ok.

[01:03:44] Awesome. Jeff, are we caught up on questions? We are all caught up. Ok, cool. So. Um, a few things I wanted to I kind of wrote down some things on my whiteboard here. Ok, so for those of you guys that are having post get rejected, we’re getting more and more information from Google on their rules for post. Most of the time, what’s happening is generated is not what’s failing on the post is what’s happening is we’re putting the post out there. Google accepts it and then Google evaluates it and pulls it down. So it’s want to make sure that’s what happens. Like, I don’t know when the last time I found a situation that was different than that, like it may have been four months since like a post didn’t post on our end, so it seemed like Google is rejecting it. Some of the things that they’re rejecting it for is having the phone number in the post, a URL in the post and a call to action in the post. Like Give us a call today. So these are the things that we’re learning that they don’t like about these posts when we try to post them. So I wanted to just kind of put that out there and make that clear. We learned something in our agency this work this week that we had a listing that was suspended and we’re trying to get it through and we were talking to Google. We’re kind of like doing our harass Google strategy, and they told us that we need to do adjust our service area because our service area included things that were more than two hours away.

[01:05:15] So I’ve never heard that before. I didn’t know that was the thing they said, adjust that to be less than two hours, so we adjusted it and then it went live. So when you guys are setting this up and you’re like getting that, maybe something you want to consider is to keep it less than two hours, which is like. What does that mean? That’s such a subject at what time like to act like if you’re in New York City, then maybe it takes like two hours to go four miles at? I don’t know, but take that for what it’s worth, they said two hours. So that’s some kind of internal. My gauge that they’re using on some level, right, so after all these conversations that we’ve had about suspensions, I’ve never heard that and that appears to be something that they’re looking at. Another thing is it appears that Google is starting to almost phase out the site command. So like we were looking at where we thought we were having a lot of issues with index pages because they weren’t showing up when we use the site command. So just to be clear on what I’m talking about, I will share my screen and. Let me choose the right one here. Ok. All right, so let’s say. Going to find hopefully there’s a Bob’s roofing company out there, I think there is. All right. So this is Bob’s roofing company here, right? So typically what we used to do is we would go through here and we would put site right here and we would get a list of the index pages so you can see that there’s 52 results here.

[01:06:53] But if you would go through and you click it says fifty two, but it’s it’s almost always wrong and I go here and I’m three, it’s actually twenty five results. Ok, so apparently from what we’re understanding within our agency, Google is phasing this out because this is inconsistent. So the way that we found it to be more successful is using the search console. Right. So if you guys haven’t set up search console in your site, then it will give you a list of your pages and can tell you if there’s like errors and problems. We’re actually as part of updates that we’re going to be starting soon. We’re going to be integrating the Google search console and Google Analytics directly into lead generated. So we’ll have that information in there for you. But just like a heads up something that that we’ve been struggling with is getting pages indexed and we weren’t actually having indexing issues is what it felt like. What it seems like now, but what the site command is just not seem to be working. And then we’ve read articles about how Google plans to phase us out because they’ve had issues with inconsistency or they don’t like it. Or maybe they just want to push people towards search console for whatever reason. So a couple just like tidbits I wanted to share with you guys.

[01:08:01] I’ve got an update on. We are working through our campaign builder stuff, so it’s not. Ready. Obviously, it’s going to be probably a month or more before we have this thing in there, but I just think this is the most exciting thing we’re working on right now. So I wanted to share this with you. This is kind of a prototype of what it’s looking like right now. So if you were to click on here, you’ve got a few different triggers. So a trigger could be like a form submission, a phone call, a text message, lead status. So that would be like we’ve got all our forms right and they have the different lead. Fields, but if you could set one of those fields and then assign a value where it says like, OK, if the lead has this status, OK, choose your status. So that would be I don’t think we have this part of it setup, but you would choose the field and then you would choose the status. And then based on that, you can assign all these different actions, right? Like a workflow that could follow. So we’ve got a review received, right? A pipeline stage, a task. So task are something that we have working in our development server that we haven’t pushed out for you guys, which is the same as contacts and campaigns. So with these, we’re building this and we’re going to be pushing this out soon. Tasker is kind of like the ability to, OK, I need to like do this for this company, and then I’m going to set a reminder to do it.

[01:09:23] And so that’s a piece we’re going to be introducing. So a lot of these are kind of related, so we’re going to be rolling them all out together. So those are the triggers and then the triggers can trigger an action. So an action could be like, Hey, wait, 15 minutes like. So I was on a call earlier today with Brendan, and he was showing me a really cool piece of software where you could have like a bad review or feedback comes in. You can automatically have it send a message to that person kind of apologizing, and you wouldn’t want that to happen instantly. So you put like a wait time in there, right? Where so you kind of build these workflows like this, right? And you could send an email. So this could be whatever email you want. So each one of these, once you click on it, is going to have like options under it. So I could be like, send an email to the client or it could send an email to myself, or I could send an email to the person who filled out the form or whatever it is like. That’s a part of the contact, right? So sending text messages, moving things to different campaigns, moving things to different stages, assigning it to a user. So this assignment to a user will fulfill the like like if you combine, if you start thinking about this a little bit deeper and you say like, OK, so we have the ability to look at lead statuses and we have the ability to assign it to a user.

[01:10:48] So you could essentially set up conditional logic where it says if the lead status is one of these zip codes then assigned to this user, if the lead status is this then assigned to this user, you could. And what we’re going to be adding in here is like weighted weighted averages and round robins as well. So this is the this is going to change a lot of things and we generate it. It’s a huge piece, and I just want to keep you guys kind of updated on where we’re going with this because like, this is probably going to change the auto forwarding. We’re probably going to phase that out and use a system like this and we’ll give you guys kind of starter campaigns where like. Templates, I guess, is a better word, like, hey, this is like send email to client syntax to clients and both like we’ll give you a series of templates and then you can assign these to companies and is another part of this is like you’ll be able to kind of snapshot a company once like once you start building this stuff, it’s going to rely on. Putting in some some effort to kind of get things set up, so our thought process is if you can kind of snapshot this and then copy it over as you set up a new company, like now you’ve got all these different steps set up automatically, right? So this is where we’re going.

[01:12:01] I’m like, That would be super cool for the waterfall strategy to send an email. Perhaps when you get a lead into one of those types of properties that kind of ask you to check check boxes for additional services or something like that. Probably two different ways to do it.

[01:12:17] Yeah, absolutely. I think this automation is it’s it’s I think it’s going to be carrying the work of a few different VAS at once. That’s what I think. I think it’s going to and it’s not going to make mistakes, right? It can’t, right? If you guys put in the right rules, then and it’s always going to be working. So really excited to get this in. Here we are. I think we’re about an hour and ten minutes now. So if there’s anybody else that has any questions or anything else before we hop off, then I’m happy to answer it. Otherwise I’m going to call it, call it a night. Ok, I’m not hearing anything, Jeff. I see Henry’s got it. What is the harrass Google strategy? So yeah,

[01:13:06] I kind of answered with the request for real estate and then play the buffoon and just keep hammering on them until they cave in. It’s not a hundred percent, you know, but oftentimes it works. They might ask for some additional information.

[01:13:20] Yeah, so just kind of just like keep like if you get a suspension or you got one that’s stuck in pending, then. Then just keep just contact them every day and like, Hey, you know, this is costing our business a lot of money. What can we do? How can we get this resolved? Is there anything you can do to help me? What do we need? Like why? Why is this happening? Or see other companies that are in our in our industry that are on here? But we’re not. And I don’t know, why are they? Are they better than us? Like just asking stupid questions like this that are like? You kind of you just have to get lucky once and get it to go through. Right, so. That’s what we call the harassed Google strategy within our agency. Ok, cool. I think we’re all caught up on questions, I don’t see the chats. So, OK, cool. And, you know, if you guys are struggling with things and you want to like. Ok, cool, Henry. Good to hear. Hopefully, that works out for you, man. So if you guys are struggling things and you want you want me to go over it on the calls, then let’s throw it in the group.

[01:14:32] And you know, I’m doing my best to try to understand where we’re like, how we can apply the most value. And sometimes I feel like I’m guessing. So, you know, if there’s if there’s some strategies that that you guys are struggling with things that you’re stuck with, things that you’d like to see and we generated that aren’t here. We’re going to be setting up a voting system pretty pretty soon here where we can kind of vote on these features. But you know, Brendan, my call, Brendan, earlier today, he gave me some, some really good recommendations. And I want you guys to know that you guys fill these tickets out and we pay attention to every single one of these feature requests. I’ve got a list. A lot of the things that have come in this system have come from you guys. So we appreciate it. And anything that you guys can do can help make make this better for all of us.

[01:15:20] So I think we’re starting to think about it in terms of like, what can you outsource to this system? In other words, like if you have a challenge in scaling an agency like not not just how to do it, but who can do it? And then can you make that an automation or some kind of AI or something? So thinking in those terms, like how how many people can this system replace?

[01:15:48] Cool. All right. One more thing before we go. Normally I get to hear Lawrence awesome French accent and I haven’t got to hear it, so maybe you could just say hello or tell us, how are you doing? Are you doing, guys? That’s the stuff. Awesome, awesome doing well. Ok, guys. Well, have a great week and let me know if there’s anything I can do for you guys and we’ll we’ll see you in the group. Okay?

[01:16:16] Good evening.