@AKASpencerScott I sell a premium and luxury service to a zip code that houses a decent concentration of the richest people on the planet and put a branded yard sign in every customer’s yard at job completion.
There are also numerous 8-9 figure home service brands where yard signs are a massive
“When you start your business you’re going to get a call from the golf course scorecard guy… it is very important that you say no” https://t.co/Tnh3oXEDqi
If I was a pool service, pest control, or any other route-based recurring business owner I would have the nastiest automations tied to new home sales in my service area.
If any of those services knocked on my door right now in my new place I’d sign up on the spot. Zero question.
We did a home show for my permanent lighting company this weekend.
2/3 days completed so far, 8 quote appts scheduled.
The home show game is a different beast. Unless you have super aggressive people at your booth… it pretty much all comes down to your display and promo.
If someone could train a ClaudeBot or some AI for me to capture the Zillow/Google Maps street view photos of our customer’s closest 5 neighbors and automatically create an AI photo with lights on the house (all automated) I’d give you a large sum of money
@rathbunholdco @erealander That’s so sick but it feels too temporary lighting-ish to send those photos in good conscience for perm.
Plus it would need to be automated as it’s a mass-cold outreach play
@BowTiedDolphin This is wild stuff. Let me finalize my machine to exactly how I want the sales flow to look and then I’ll def hit you up for this portion
@ToddLlewellyn Actually you’re in a very yard sign friendly market from what I’ve seen.
You could probably get away with branded signage the whole way through
@rampulla_andrew I would challenge that postcards probably didn’t lose you as much money or even the money you thought.
Postcard attribution is next to impossible even if you have a decent offer.
Gut tells me a substantial portion of your “organic” traffic is mixed in with pos…
I was red-pilled on attribution not being the North Star when my sales guys pulled up to multiple quotes this year that said they were from Facebook ads in our CRM, yet they were holding our mailer and talked to their neighbor about us next door and saw our sign in their yard. ht…
Every year I automate a handwritten (in pen) Christmas card to every one of our customers for Valley Christmas.
I made a video about it too but you guys should def do this https://t.co/6QMWYSVqZk
Another holiday lighting season come and gone🎅 🌲
Cleaning up a few installs, but we should end the year comfortably between $1.15-1.2mil
Lead volume always just drops seemingly overnight around 12/5
I’ve been running the same business for 6 years.
Here’s how season 6 went: https://t.co/EwBGw5W1Bn
1. I’ll start with where we can improve:
-Sales reps are very difficult to find. Hired 4, ended the year with 2. (Fired 1, 1 got sick)
-Quote building process is still too clunky at our scale
-paid ads got SUBSTANTIALLY more expensive this year
2. Where we cooked this year:
-Ops setup we had this year could have easily installed $1.5-$1.75mil. I just don’t have the sales/lead volume for that.
-Retention and upselling past customers was zesty this year (last season was our best customer experience for sure so that
3. Where I personally cooked this year:
Being that I’m the sales and marketing fella…
I saw all these 18 year old info sellers in the offseason selling courses off of PROJECTED numbers in these Facebook groups for this year and I knew the ad market was going to be cooked…🧠
4. So I pivoted old school.
Went heavy on print marketing. Spent about $16k and returned well over $100,000 in directly attributed sales.
I say directly attributed because postcards are very tricky for attribution since most people just google you anyway.
Biggest win we had.
5. Google PPC and Meta both were profitable and I’ll do final numbers when I have them.
Total new sales for FIRST TIME CUSTOMERS (not upsold past customers) landed about $430k… we’re still selling so that can go up.
I’ll do videos with final numbers soon.
6. As far as cash on hand… currently have about $340,000 on hand on a 1.15-1.2 mil year.
That net % should be pretty accurate even though we’re selling a few more jobs these next couple days and then I’ll bonus my guys out.
7. My payroll is extremely expensive and I sometimes wonder if we’re as efficient as we could be… or are things just cake because I have such a dialed in sales + marketing process that it buries my payroll woes a bit.
Idk that’s def my weak spot as an owner
8. Last thing I’ll say about market conditions:
The middle class is not spending money like they used to.
The upper class and mega rich are spending just like they have been.
Merry Christmas
@dylthorn Thanksgiving being so late this year and last year made install demand unusual.
I loved 2 years ago when normal people had essentially an extra 6-7 days to think about getting Christmas decor up.
Kind of a sad reality of reaching a certain scale of your business is that individual marketing channel ROAS becomes less and less of a factor.
Obviously Google PPC, FB forms are super easy to track.
But even then… attribution becomes messy.
Here’s what I mean:
Closed a job the other day…she’s in our CRM as organic SEO lead from our website.
Sales guy gets on site… she’s got a postcard in her hand.
Then tells us her neighbor told her we are the best and she looked us up on IG and saw her best friend followed us.
How do I attribute
The brutal reality is at a certain point you reach a slight bit of brand omnipresence in your market when you start spending money to gobble up market share.
I’m spending $70,000 across FB, Google PPC, postcards, and SEO over 2 months.
These all help each other perform better:
Example: lady has seen our funny IG ads for 3 weeks.
Then gets mailer.
Doesn’t scan QR, decides to google us instead.
Clicks a Google PPC landing page and opts in there.
Again… attribution at the LAST point of contact is not telling the full story.
Machine becomes greater
I am once again here to tell you that if you don’t have a meta + postcard campaign honed in on the richest zips in your market you are missing out on so much 🍞
Our middle class area sales + avg tickets are way down this season
Guess which areas aren’t down at all this year? https://t.co/xQ0sf801p5
@NoRiskNoParty Not when you want to make sure the same people in those neighborhoods getting blasted by meta ads are also the same people getting postcards in their mailbox weekly 😏
@DogArtFilmCo @Bobbyvickers I don’t believe in mass canvassing entire areas with flyers or door hangers by foot. I don’t think that’s efficient.
Our model has people do the closest 5-10 houses of an existing job with a “sorry for the mess” type door hanger while we’re doing ever…
We had a Home Service Accelerator member join and first thing they did was just bite the bullet and order the A-Frame with our template to put in the street during jobs.
Booked an estimate first week that paid for HSA membership right there.
Many such cases.
From the boots on the ground:
Sold $30,000 more work before 9:30am today.
Leads came from:
-$10k referral from another job
-$10k from a mailer
-$7k from @irentdumpsters Google PPC ads https://t.co/p9vNiEvLWW
So many people in the home service world stop scaling a marketing avenue too early.
100 signs in a month worked? That’s not the time to pivot to Angi… it’s the time to double down on signs.
$50 a day on meta worked?
Do $75.
$75 worked?
Do $100…
My home service paid ad power rankings:
Sub $500k/year rev
1. Meta ads
2. Google PPC
3. Google LSA
4. Paying for local SEO/backlinks
5. Yard signs
$500k/year or more:
1. Google PPC
2. Paying for local SEO/backlinks
3. Meta ads
4. Google LSA
5. Dope marketing strategic mailers
@BrettLawrence Generic ones with forwarding numbers on public street corners (entrances to gas stations, neighborhoods, etc.
Branded ones in customer yards
I was sent here by the gods to remind you guys that postcard campaigns are absolutely not dead if you sell a high ticket service
$7800 spent with $63,000+ sold.
Same 3300 homes, hit 3 weeks in a row.
We didn’t see sales until between the 2nd and 3rd mailer…
Lesson there… https://t.co/8CFVPW2agb
@harrisonkbonner I think they can if you have an incredibly dialed in sales process.
I’ve never seen it firsthand in a lower ticket service campaign so I am slower to say something on my socials that I haven’t 100% seem pencil out positively.
🧵 for the first time in my small business’s lifetime, we’ve started to achieve a bit of brand omnipresence locally.
This concept is hardly ever talked about on socials so I hopefully you can read this and then make more money in your business somehow:
For context I run a temporary lighting business in Arizona. Did $800k in about 50 something days at slightly north of 30% net while growing.
To my knowledge, we do more RESIDENTIAL temporary installs than anyone else in our market.
But we have a problem: I cant spend ad $…
I run meta ads at about $350/day to an audience of less than 150,000 people. When I push spend higher on meta, CPMs (cost to reach 1000 people) and frequency (amount of times an individual person sees your ad) get out of control and don’t scale well.
So I moved to Google in the same service area. I give Google $800-1000 a day budget and I don’t even hit it.
I swallow up all the clicks in my market in November and there literally isn’t enough to go around.
So I’m tapped out the two MAIN paid customer acquisition platforms
So I had to get creative
Started going back to the basics with yard signs, started dumping money into traditional SEO again to maintain my top ranking as a lot more comp opens (backlinks and all that lame stuff s/o @irentdumpsters and @andy_wlker )
But then I went old school…
I modeled this season off of a $1.1 million dollar top line number ($300,000 growth YOY).
Doing traditional marketing math i can conservatively spend $100,000 on marketing and still be profitable. (I don’t need to, but I could)
But I want to grow FASTER so I’m okay w/spending
So this year I pulled aside about $20,000 in marketing budget for postcard mailing campaigns.
I want to hit these 3500-4000 homes 7-8 times with postcards. I just viewed it as a place to park marketing dollars.
But here’s what’s happening (3/8 mailers have delivered so far)
My sales people are going out to quotes that are in our CRM as Facebook leads, and the prospects are saying “oh yeah I got your postcard too”.
Or they’re going to quotes for people in our CRMZ tagged as postcard leads and they’re laughing about how funny our ads are on IG.
So what is happening is instead of marketing over a 40 mile + radius… I’m concentrating ALL of my effort into this area with about 4000 homes.
And we’ve become a household name.
But the problem is:
This “brand omnipresence” theory helping our close rate is completely anecdotal. All I can do is look at 2024 October and 2025 Oct
We don’t have the backend tracking and attribution systems to see places a prospect visited before buying (like a hyros/triple whale platform)
But here’s what we’re seeing results wise:
-$400,000+ more booked as of today than there was last year on the same date
-Avg ticket higher on new biz (trust indicator)
-referrals way up
-organic inbound calls to GMB outpacing every other tracking number on the internet
Conclusion: I would rather be a household name to 4000-10000 rich families in a home service business than try to compete with 50 other competitors for a pool of 1million+ people over a 40+ mile area
