.png)
He’s back! John is joined by Sam Preston, the dynamic CEO of Service Scalers, a marketing powerhouse specializing in helping home service businesses scale fast, for a recent livestream Q&A for the Owned and Operated Facebook Group. If you’re looking to grow your business and dominate your local market, this is an episode you won’t want to miss.
Learn more about Service Scalers, get your own home services business website, and dominate the SEO and Google Ads game, then check them out today.
Sam and John look into the strategies that took Service Scalers from $10K to a projected $2 million in annual revenue within just a year. They discuss the importance of understanding where your leads are coming from and how tracking the right KPIs can make all the difference. Sam shares why a simple, well-optimized website is more effective than a flashy, expensive one, and why investing in SEO is a game changer—but only when your business is ready for it.
The conversation also covers:
- The role of Google Ads, PPC, and Local Service Ads (LSAs) in driving qualified leads.
- How to effectively track and measure your marketing ROI to avoid wasted spend.
- Why knowing your book rate by channel can help you optimize your marketing dollars.
- The importance of being nimble and dynamic with your lead sources.
- Sam’s take on the latest changes in Google’s API and what it means for SEO indexing.
Episode Hosts: 🎤
John Wilson: https://x.com/WilsonCompanies
Jack Carr: https://x.com/thehvacjack
Episode Guest:
Sam Preston: https://x.com/heysampreston
More on Service Scalers: https://servicescalers.com/
A SPECIAL THANKS TO HATCH
Turn communication into conversion with Hatch and its AI Agents, ready to handle follow-ups, reminders, email blasts, and more for your home service business. Save employee hours and book more leads with the power of Hatch.
Learn More About Hatch Here
Owned and Operated Episode 151 Transcript
Sam Preston: We're at like 10 K in January. We're projected out right now to make 2 million this year.
Sam Preston: Being able to be dynamic and know where your leads are coming from. Yes. Oh, important. You need a good website. You don't need the sexiest website ever. Know your numbers, stay accountable, make sure that you, your team knows that too. You owe it to yourself and your team to get better.
John Wilson: We're going on two years. I've partnered with service scalers to do our Google ads, PPC, and SEO. And the results have been huge. It's been really exciting to watch as our website consistently jumps up rank as we're using more technology and we're moving faster than our peers who are all using legacy home service marketing companies.
John Wilson: We use service scalers for PPC, our local SEO. our on page website SEO, and our LSA. So give them a call if you're looking for leads. Is SEO really needed when it seems to take so long to spin up and be such a long game?
Sam Preston: My default answer is yes, but it also depends. Where are you at? Are you starting up? Do you even have a truck yet?
Sam Preston: Probably not, right? If you're just getting started, I'm probably not spinning up an SEO game plan. I think SEO makes the most sense when you get to a place in your business where you start wanting to invest in future you. You're like, yeah, right now I'm pretty close to capacity and I can't really get more leads without having to go hire a whole new truck and I'm not really ready there.
Sam Preston: Okay, then start investing that, that money that you have into a future version of yourself. So that you can start driving leads 2, 3, 6, 8 months down the line. That's when I think that you should start. And that's going to be different for everybody, depending on your growth path, depending on how fast you're able to grow your team.
Sam Preston: But I absolutely I think what is it? 80 percent of our SEO clients are hitting their. Target lead volume, meaning they're running SEO with us and they're hitting that cost per lead that they need on SEO. So like people like this is the game to go win works. Yeah. And the thing that makes SEO special is once you get to the top, it's really hard to dethrone the king.
Sam Preston: Yeah. Google ads, we're all paying the cost per click. Anybody can come in and play that game at any point and outbid you. It's really hard to outbid somebody on SEO. You have to be better at them at the game.
John Wilson: My context here on a contractor side is, I'll hit the last one first. There's a company in our market that was really early to the SEO game 10 years ago, and they're still kicking my butt.
John Wilson: On seo and like we're hitting seo really hard like it's been we've done it really effective. And they're still kicking my butt and the other one I just want to touch on like The timelines that you use like six eight months three months I feel like that's reasonable and correct me if i'm wrong here Obviously like you guys like helped us with our programmatic and you guys helped us with our strategy on seo And when I think about seo like quantity Is as much of a part of the conversation now as quality.
Sam Preston: Yeah. If you're only doing two articles a month, literally everybody's doing that, you can't win. It's like investing 10 a month in the stock market. Yeah, it's better than nothing, but you're not going to retire on that. So in our game, we want to add a minimum 10 articles.
Sam Preston: Obviously, after you've gotten all your service pages, after you've gotten, like, all the foundations of what make a good SEO website then once we get to the organic spot where we're just driving as much blogs to your site as possible, 10 to me is the minimum. I really want to do closer to 30 just because I'm I'm aggressive.
Sam Preston: I don't want to play. And here's the thing from my end as an agency. I know that in 12 months, you're going to ask me the question of, do I stay with ServiceGalers or do I go somewhere else? And so it is in my best interest to make that as aggressive as possible to get you as results as quick as possible, because in 12 months, I want you to go.
Sam Preston: All right. Yeah, that was great. Let's do it again. And so that's why we play that a little bit more aggressive game. Selfishly, we want you to be clients with us forever. And then it really does help you on that end as well.
John Wilson: Next question. What are the top KPIs I need to track daily for my marketing?
Sam Preston: One, I hate this answer.
Sam Preston: It depends. But like it really does depend on what marketing that you are tracking. In my opinion, all your marketing should go back to an ROI, should go back to some sort of revenue. And so whether you're doing radio, TV ads, billboards, all those are going to be different KPIs that you should probably track.
Sam Preston: However, everything eventually gets to the funnel, which is How many how many leads do we generate? How many appointments do we generate? How much revenue do we generate from that? Those? And I think if you could track everything to those 3 numbers, those are the most important. If you don't know those numbers, what are you doing?
Sam Preston: It's this, even I as an agency, I know how many leads we generate. I know many first meetings have set and I know how much revenue has happened over this last week. So definitely those, clicks are good impressions. Good. You can dig into the details and you should know those numbers, but those aren't numbers that you have to have in your head.
Sam Preston: Ultimately, how many leads are coming through? How many of those turn into appointment? How much is how many of those appointments turned into revenue? I guess that's daily.
John Wilson: Yeah. Yeah. I think I basically agree. So daily, quantity of leads, how many leads do I need for tomorrow? How many leads do I need for the next day?
John Wilson: How do I stay on top of it? And then the big one is what's your book rate? Cause that's obviously going to determine quite a bit. So, and ideally book rate by channel. That's what we really like to look at. So Hey, if I get a book rate we had this thing last year where our book rate was.
John Wilson: Like 30 percent on LSAs, which sucks because LSAs are 80 a piece. So we're getting this like 30 on LSA book rate and 30 percent book rate. So it's 240 basically per lead. And then I still have to like, go convert that into a sale. So it was really challenging. So when you can track it by. Lead source should be daily service.
John Wilson: Titan lets you like figure that out. You can tweak. So what we did immediately was we dropped our service fee on LSA leads. We're like, all right, anytime there's an LSA lead, no service fee, that's going to increase our book rate. And it did went up to 60 some percent doubled our book rate, which meant we needed way less phone calls to run the same amount of leads.
John Wilson: So that was hugely valuable.
Sam Preston: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think that your comment about knowing the source of those leads is super important as well. Right? There when we're using universal analytics, so much easier to track source. And since Google has gone to GA4, they're limiting how much you can actually tell and so you, but you still should be able to get close to it.
Sam Preston: Pretty darn close. And we actually just ran into, and this is not the first time we've been in this situation, but the second time where a client has come and said, Hey, look, you guys are saying you're driving a bunch of phone calls, but when we aren't getting those numbers and we're like, dang, did we mess with the tracking?
Sam Preston: What happened? We ended up realizing what he is tracking is every single time a phone, somebody calls in, they ask you, how did you hear about us? And so they were taking that and they're like, okay, that is, most people are just coming from us through SEO or directly to the site. And it's actually, most of those, if we actually use call real service time, you can actually tell the source is Google ads.
Sam Preston: And so some of that is just making sure you have your tracking set up correctly, and you're pulling through from a correct source. Yeah. Because that situation happens sometimes
John Wilson: And the right way to handle that there's two different there's your side where hey, we're gonna set that up so we can track the click basically do they click on the website and that's how that's how you track it, right?
John Wilson: There's an action. Yeah, which makes sense. And then on the contractor side, best way to do this is you set up a different phone number. So if somebody calls and then you just, you can double verify, right? Because the bigger you get and the more money you spend on marketing, like you really need to know like where those phone calls are coming from.
John Wilson: Like I just described like two minutes ago, I was like, Hey, we found out our book rate on this one single lead source. I'm like 500 resources. One single one sucked and I was able to identify it and solve it because we, because it had one phone number. So we knew exactly where those leads were coming from.
John Wilson: So we could solve problems. So like your, the phone number you have on your trucks should be different than the one on your website. And that should be different from the one on your Google, my business profile. And that should be different from your LSA phone number. And all of these should be different numbers that way.
John Wilson: Anytime a lead comes in. Via call, you know exactly where that lead came from and there's just no confusion.
Sam Preston: Yeah, absolutely. I've, in fact, I had a conversation on Monday where this guy wants to be super aggressive, just bought this company. He's got four plumbing techs that are just literally sitting on their hands, not doing anything.
Sam Preston: And he's I need 10 phone calls a day at an 80 cost per lead. What do we do? I was like one, you just multiply that out and that's 25 grand. So we're going to spend 25 grand. And he's great, let's do it. I was like, but I would probably split that between LSA and Google ads, right? He's no, I want to do everything in Google ads.
Sam Preston: It's like we can, but what have, what happens if LSA actually has a better cost per lead? Yeah. If you know your sources, Hey, LSA is costing me 60 cost per lead. And as a booking rate of 50 percent Google ads has a cost per lead at, call it 100 and the booking percent is like 20%. It's look, like double your budget LSA, throw it there.
Sam Preston: So being able to be dynamic and know where your leads are coming from is so important to be able to make sure that your team has as many leads possible with as little budget as possible.
John Wilson: Yeah, I'm being nimble. Yeah, I totally agree. How do I increase client acquisition and appeal to better clients? Is this a marketing thing?
John Wilson: i'll give my quick spiel here and then i'd love to hear your perspective But the definition that I internally use for marketing is the act of choosing who we want to work for As that's it So yeah, 100%. That's a marketing decision. Like marketing is who we're sending out a bad signal and we want a specific customer segment to respond to that bad signal.
John Wilson: So yeah, that's marketing. I think in a nutshell.
Sam Preston: Yeah. I think that there's a couple of things that you should be doing on our end that would help with you if you have the copy of. Cheapest home service company in the area, like you're just gonna get the cheap you're gonna get people no money if you have a higher price point.
Sam Preston: Then you might choose zip codes that can afford that price point, right? If you're a luxury Home remodeler, like you probably just want to avoid certain zip codes if you can to get the most out of those google ads I would avoid big time discount codes like you offering me a hundred dollars off my Whatever.
Sam Preston: My HVAC unit literally makes no difference in my mind. I want somebody that I don't have to babysit, come in, do a really good job, and leave. Now, granted, I'm probably not your average person. I literally know nothing about plumbing. I know blue is cold and red's hot. That's probably the extent of my plumbing knowledge.
Sam Preston: And but I'm willing to also pay up a little bit more for somebody that is, that does a good job. From a marketing copy standpoint what's going to appeal to me is more about we don't cut corners versus here's your 200 off. Don't get wrong. Those coupons can work.
Sam Preston: And sometimes shoulder season. Like those are the things we want to drive more conversations. You're willing to give a little bit more discounts to close deals. Fine. On the marketing side, let's make sure our copy matches the language that we want to, and the audience that we want to attract once they get in surprise and delight is always a good way to go about it, showing up, looking professional the language you use to communicate mirroring the person that you're engaging with.
Sam Preston: Not coming across, was she doing educational conversations? Like, all of those things, I think, make a big difference on appealing better to those clients.
John Wilson: I think the last item here is just are you sending the bat signal and are you giving content that would that somebody would respond to?
John Wilson: That you want, but yeah, the short answer and long answer is 100%. That is a marketing thing.
Sam Preston: I would also say sometimes people put too much emphasis on some marketing that you don't necessarily need to like you need a good website. You don't need the sexiest website ever. This is not shoes on e commerce shop, right?
Sam Preston: This is not an overpriced bag. Like we're HVAC, we're plumbing, we're roofing. Make sure it's professional, clear and gets the job done. Anytime you create. A blocker or barrier to entry inside of your sales process or funnel. I think those are things are going to be more of a turnoff than not having the greatest, sexiest website ever.
Sam Preston: Don't go wrong. We can create really beautiful high converting websites, but also I wouldn't like, I wouldn't go out and spend 50 grand on a website. That doesn't make sense to me in this industry.
John Wilson: Okay. This is an interesting one. What is best in class cost per lead. In SCAC, which is cost per acquired customer for new install leads across channels.
John Wilson: My feedback here is I can give what our numbers are, but what it looks like in northeast Ohio is going to be real different from what it looks like in Chicago or rural bumfuck wherever. So, it's really challenging to come up with a great benchmark. Yeah. I have a lot of friends that pay twice what I do for for leads.
John Wilson: So I think the, on the contractor side, I think it's more important that it costed in your job? What's the most you can pay? So we like to think of it whoever can pay the most wins. How about that? So instead of like, how do we pay the least amount for a lead? How can we pay the most and how can that be costed into our structure?
John Wilson: Because if I'm paying like Angie's list, 200 for an HVAC replacement lead and my conversion rate, which means what percentage of leads do I close? Let's say that's 33 percent for marketed leads. So I would have to get three leads at 500 or 250 a piece. So I paid 750 to acquire that installation. And I'm good with that because my average install is 12, 000 and something dollars for that business unit.
John Wilson: So that's 6 percent of revenue and I'm okay with that. So I think that's the better way to attack it is you work backwards from your average ticket and your conversion rate. And what can I afford to pay? And the game should be not, how do I pay the lowest the game should be? How do I pay the most?
John Wilson: Because if you can pay the most and it works inside your cost structure, then you're never gonna have shortage of leads.
Sam Preston: A agreed. The only thing caveat I would say there is. That's the game you should play, but not the game. You should tell your agency to play you're a
John Wilson: good point.
Sam Preston: So go back to your agency.
Sam Preston: And we do the same thing. Like we got a Facebook ads agency right now working with us on ads. And we tell them a much lower cost per lead than we need. To actually make that CAC work. And that's what you're paying for them to do is to get you a good source of leads and keep getting that cheaper.
Sam Preston: And if they can't try to figure out why, right? Is it truly just because, they're not running tests? Is it because they're not they're bidding on too high of keywords? Is it the market's too high, right? If you're in Las Vegas, there's just no way you're getting an 80 cost per lead.
Sam Preston: It's just not I love that idea. Not happening. Whereas I've, we've got some accounts right now running 15 cost per lead, which is absurd. And it's because they're in a very specific market that there is no competition and we're just literally running it up. And so your area is going to matter.
Sam Preston: And then again, the way you engage your agency or your, even your internal marketing team should be very different than the way you engage or you actually play the game.
John Wilson: Yeah. So yeah, I totally agree. So I think if we're working backwards on the question, just to get people to math one more time.
John Wilson: So if I have if I have a, let's do a smaller job than 10, 000. So if I have a water heater replacement and my water heater on my calculator, my water heater replacements are, let's say 2, 800 bucks. And this is where you need good data, but what's your closing rate? On water heaters.
John Wilson: So my closing rate on water heaters is I think it's 60%. So 2, 800 and I'm willing to pay up to 10 percent of that job to get the job. So I have 280 to spare. It's like basically pay for the leads. Okay, so I'm at 280 and I closed two out of three jobs. Leads. So I'm just going to do that times 0. 6.
John Wilson: So I could pay, I'd pay 130 bucks for the lead. And I feel good about that. And I could go up to 150 if I need to, because 160 if I need to really, because I am going to close more than half of those leads. So that's, I'm actually surprised you brought it up a few times that like people really dive into, it sounds like in their engagement call hey, here's what I, you said that one guy was like, hey, I need 80 Cost per lead.
John Wilson: Like my quick take I really doubt that people know what they need cost per lead. So work through the math that I just walked you through because I think cost per lead is a good thing to know, but it's not the thing to optimize around because I'm okay with paying 160 for a water heater lead because I'm going to close 60 percent of them and that still meets my metric.
John Wilson: And if I'm saying, Hey, I needs to be under 80 what am I missing out on? What lead channels am I refusing to use? Because I want a very cheap cost per lead. So it's a good metric, but I think it's hard to declare it. Yeah. Okay. Absolutely a couple more questions here Is there such this is this will be interesting Is there such a thing as a business being too small to afford a marketing company?
John Wilson: Like service killers, we had a couple major pain points earlier this year and those pain points were how do we contact our unsold estimates more frequently? How do we book our membership appointments faster? How do we stay in contact with customers and let them know that we have promotions? And how do we run a speed to lead process for angie's leads when looking around for solutions?
John Wilson: We saw a couple great softwares on the market, but our favorite one was hatch So when we started using hatch we had just switched over from another vendor and Hatch's user interface was so easy. It directly tied into Service Titan. It automated the workflow of five or six employees a day. We're now in contact with hundreds of additional customers.
John Wilson: We're selling a ton of our unsold estimates and it's easier than ever to book our membership follow up appointments. So Hatch has been a really big win for us. In order to book a demo with Hatch, click the link below.
Sam Preston: Yeah, I think so. If you if John, you and I. We're like, we burn everything down.
Sam Preston: You and I are going to go start a home service company, plumbing company in Las Vegas. This is going to be fun.
John Wilson: Just another Wednesday. Just another Wednesday.
Sam Preston: And we literally only have the money we have, right? We're not going out and investing. We're not getting money. We're starting from scratch. Yeah.
Sam Preston: I'm not about to go spend thousands of dollars for someone to manage LSA and Google ads and SEO. I'm just not what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to these aggregates. And I'm going to go play the Facebook groups game where I, try to get as many leads as possible and then spend you're definitely going to be over spending cost per lead on these aggregates, right?
Sam Preston: Thumb tack Angie's list, but at least your money is going to a cost per lead. Versus somebody managing it once we get into a place where that you are ready to get that cost per leak down because it's worth it. That's when I would go to that. I think if you're only wanting to spend 2 to 3 grand tops on all marketing, I think you're probably.
Sam Preston: Probably better off just putting that into the market. Go watch some YouTube videos or Joe join our LSA webinar. We run through exactly how to run an LSA account or message me, man. We'll you and I can jump on, I'll teach you how to run LSA and you'll go on from there. So run LSA on your own watch some YouTube videos to learn how to do it.
Sam Preston: Get your GP Google business profile. I'm trying to get the new ackerman form. I want to say Google my business. Would get you know work on The aggregate like that's where I would put my money versus hiring an agency Once you're spending like five to ten grand a month That's when I would go.
Sam Preston: I think that you can get more by having a professional actually manage it
John Wilson: Yeah, I agree. I think we started having somebody manage it. It was back in 2015 or 16 when we crossed four or five grand a month. That's been, and that was a big deal. Like I remember that and I was like a really it was a big deal.
John Wilson: I, because we went from zero, we'd never spent anything on marketing. It was, that was a while ago. Next one is LSA dying. Seems like there are a lot of changes happening. Google potentially getting split up by the government. Wow. Okay. Got some conspiracy theories. Love it. Will that affect things like GMB and LSA?
Sam Preston: LSA is definitely not dying. If anything, Google is pushing further into that. Google wants to do its best to spend as much of your money as possible, and LSA is a really good one. Because it's easy enough to get on your own, so a lot of people get in there, have no idea what they're doing, and spend way too much money in there when they shouldn't be.
Sam Preston: And then obviously they just, they make so much money through this. So it's not going to die. It's only going to get more more into it. There are a lot of changes. You need to be up to date on those changes. Things like your there's no more LSA link. You only have your Google business profile link.
Sam Preston: It's the same thing. I don't know anything about them split and being split up by the government. I doubt it. They have. Way too much. They have way too much control to be split up by something as tiny as the U. S. government. Now, granted, we have started in shoulder season. We're seeing less search volume right now.
Sam Preston: And so when we were in a when we were in like the summer seasons, high of summer, like the clients that were on track to hit their lead volume was closer, like 95 percent was just absurd. Since then. We've had a dip in that we're hitting closer to 65, 70 percent of all our clients are hitting their lead volume, which hurts and sucks.
Sam Preston: So we're talking to clients about, okay, hey, how do we move that budget somewhere else? We've talked to clients about, just being aware of those situations, shoulder season you still want to keep showing up as often as possible. And having those conversations. But again, we still have 65 to 70 percent of all our clients who running LSA is still hitting their numbers.
Sam Preston: Like, it works. You just got to play the game.
John Wilson: Yeah 1 I fully agree and 2, I just want to hit that. Like down season part real quick in shoulder season. So like September and March, April, like leads are going to be way more precious. Like every single lead matters just so much. So keep the marketing machine going always.
John Wilson: But what gets more important the bigger and bigger you get is Hey, shoulder season exists. And there is literally nothing that any marketing agency will ever do for you. That's going to solve the fact that April and September are months in the year. That's it. They're always going to be months in the year.
John Wilson: I guess Pluto is no longer a planet, so maybe something crazy could happen, but they're always going to be a problem. So what you have to figure out as soon as you can is okay, if I need ten calls a day, I just need ten calls a day, I hit ten, eleven calls a day, no problem, and peak, and I just can't get above seven, in, in down season, that's okay.
John Wilson: You and literally every other business in the entire freaking world. And one. So here's how you fix it. One, you don't turn off marketing. That's not the problem. Marketing isn't the problem. People need heat. They don't need heat when it's 60 degrees night and day in September. It's, it's a demand problem.
John Wilson: But two, Figuring out what the gap between your demand and your calls needed is like one of the biggest movers that you can have in your business. So when you're starting to dial that in and you're like, all right, I need 10. I'm at seven because that's what, That's how many people have a need for me today.
John Wilson: Then how do I find the other three? And the reality is you're not going to find them using conventional marketing. Like for the most part, you're going to find them without bounding your customers, or you're going to find them. That's honestly the big one. Or that's a really great place where a membership plan comes in.
John Wilson: So you can use it to pick up your shoulder seasons. And you don't have a lull in April because you're doing tune ups. So there's a bunch of strategies around how to solve that. And the big thing is like seasonality will always be a thing and you have to have a plan around it and pushing more dollars into marketing.
John Wilson: Isn't a plan because there's not enough demand. People aren't looking for emergency. No heat service in April and no 1 can fix that problem for you. So you just have to find another way.
Sam Preston: And that's where 1 of the things that I've been talked to certain people on is hey, the search volume isn't there.
Sam Preston: You were prepared to spend 5 grand and I would say this month. What are your thoughts about throwing that to? And because 1 of the things we're trying to play around with is not just have a standard SEO package where it's hey, this is a flat rate. We're going to do this month over month, but also being able to offer hey, here's a keyword where it pin.
Sam Preston: And I know that if we go by 3 grand worth of backlinks that we can probably shoot up the ranks. Can we have that? Can we have that money? So we go buy these and just get them really quickly or whatever it takes. We're trying to find ways that You're not spending the money that you already plan to.
Sam Preston: You've already had it budgeted. Your owner's already, if we're working with like a director of marketing, you've already gotten this approved. How can we just take that and help you go rank higher so that when we do hit that season where things are coming in, it's even better. And SEO is one of those things that will help you in that shoulder season.
John Wilson: No, it definitely will. But I'm really into that. I heard that somebody earlier today was talking to me about a concept that I've literally never heard of in my life. And this reminds me of that a little bit. And it's basically responsive SEO. And obviously SEO like takes a second, but this, yeah, this kind of, that's really similar, honestly, now I'm thinking about what I'm going to do in April we started we launched a, this now this is back to SEO, but like SEO is ridiculous.
John Wilson: If you hit it hard it's insane. But we so September, like SEO used to do almost nothing for us. And we did 200, 000 of revenue attributed to SEO in September. Like it was insane. So we were we're working on this SEO project now we're like, Hey, can we pump as much as humanly possible for 30 days on water quality?
John Wilson: And like, how can that create an impact in November and December and January for water leads? And now I'm like, yeah, I should probably do that for like air quality too. I frankly, wasn't even thinking, my own medicine here, but I should be thinking about that for April. It was a good idea, Sam.
John Wilson: It was a good idea. Take it wrong with it. I'm going to call Janelle and get her up on that.
Sam Preston: Yeah. Okay. Yeah, absolutely. And I will even say that something interesting with the SEO is did you hear about Google changing its API indexing? Google, we used to use a bunch of different tools to index your page.
Sam Preston: What I mean by that for people who don't know what that is, is basically Google has the entire Internet to crawl and read. How does it know to read your article? It gets indexed into its big, vast doc systems, filing systems, if you will. We used to force feed it. Basically hey eat this. This is the document.
Sam Preston: This is the article. Go. And so it would take us like one to two weeks to get something index that killed that. So no longer can you do that. So like everything is now on Google's time. Like literally companies big, Multi, 10 million software companies shut down overnight because of it.
Sam Preston: And You can know what to do and
John Wilson: that must just be like AI just forcing out So much written content that they literally couldn't keep up.
Sam Preston: It's got to be something like that. So Basically, that makes sense
John Wilson: because we started our ranking started slowing down for like keywords that we were ranking for and i've been like what the heck happened,
Sam Preston: dude You It sucks, because we were talking about Programmatic programmatic build, which is like a thousand pages in 30 days.
Sam Preston: Yeah, crazy. And we like sold it telling the guy, Hey and we'll, we have this, we have the software. It'll index this. It'll be all like index within 30 days after that. And then they changed it after we sold the first, we went back to Hey, it's actually going to take four to six weeks, just heads up.
Sam Preston: He was a nice guy. So he understood.
John Wilson: So do you think is that the promise that they've given you like four to six weeks?
Sam Preston: No, Google doesn't promise things. We just that's the, that's what marketing used to be before we started doing this. So we assume it's just going to go back to that same amount.
Sam Preston: It might not be, it might take longer. If you know anything about marketing and you want, The way to make that happens, make sure you log into your Google console, go to the pages and then submit the pages and it should run through it. It should help. That's basically the fastest way that you can do it.
Sam Preston: Also your sitemap, making sure your sitemap is updated with those pages that too will help that.
John Wilson: Walk away with something new. I think we have time for 1 more question.
Sam Preston: We got a couple of questions by Mitch in the comments. We ask answer those.
John Wilson: Yeah, so
Sam Preston: Mitch Kinney says, how do companies get so big so quick?
Sam Preston: What are they doing to get so many new customers so quickly? My first answer is they're spending a lot. Like the guy in the conversation I had Monday, he's got four techs and he's Hey, I need to feed them. I need 10 leads a day. And I was like you're gonna spend 25 grand this month. So that is one way to get bigger faster.
John Wilson: I think there's a lot here. So as a company who got big fast, it definitely starts with leads. Like it does, who's got the leads. How do you manage that? And it's interesting because there's It becomes like cumulative advantage. Maybe that's the way I want to say this.
John Wilson: So there's like this cumulative advantage where, okay, if every single day I come in and improve something by 1% 1 percent is a lot of money now. 1 percent is for us 260, 000 a year a day, or, that's one, that's 1 percent is 260, 000. Come in and improve something incrementally the people that we're leaving behind.
John Wilson: Get a bigger and bigger wall of things that they would need to improve in order to catch up. And I think for a couple years it wasn't as noticeable as it's getting. And some of the advantages that I'm seeing that we have. And I like look around at the competitive landscape. And I'm like, wow, we are I don't remember getting this big.
John Wilson: And I'm like, why didn't you? And then I look at a lot of the stuff we're doing and it is it's across the board, it's operational improvement. It's having all the leads. So like Sam said, spending like crazy, like in order to spend like crazy, you need to have the infrastructure. To be able to run and close on those leads like spending a million dollars a year doesn't help you if you don't close any of them.
John Wilson: If you're closing at a 20 percent closing rate, like you can't, it doesn't do anything for you. Yeah. Operational improvement, cumulative improvement of okay, today I'm going to tweak our call booking rate today. I'm going to tweak our average ticket today. I'm going to add this new software to do this thing.
John Wilson: And now the moat to catch up gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And like big companies, like the bigger you get in our industry, the bigger you get, because you get, you have this like ridiculous series of advantages that take years to overcome. So I think, yeah, I think there's a lot there. I think.
John Wilson: Definitely marketing definitely leads. But what's going on in the operation of the business? Like how are you supporting that? What does your hiring look like? What does your pay packages look like? What's your pricing look like? How's your sales process work? What's your call booking look like?
John Wilson: And each one of those is like a 90 day project, if not a year.
Yeah.
John Wilson: Um, but if you continue to if you continue to do these like continuous improvements in these like 1 percent improvements. Like in October this month, we're going to finish up at 2. 7 million, which is insane. That beat my previous record by half a million dollars and like we hit our first two million dollar month in May and we'll probably hit our first three million dollar month either in December or January and that's just us continuing to get better every single day, get better every single day and focus on the fundamentals that I already listed off conversion rate, call booking rate.
John Wilson: What's your group and look like what's your sales process look like and then on top of all that you spend a shitload of money You get as many leads as you possibly can But it's like you build it like the machine that you build has to be able to effectively spit out Sales once you get those leads, and that's the real thing that you're building.
Sam Preston: Yeah, and I know we got 60 seconds. I'll keep my answer short. But I've built multiple agencies at this point. Serve scalers is definitely the fastest growing agency that we had. And we're at 10 K in January, we're sitting where we're projected out right now to make 2Million this year, which is insane.
Sam Preston: And it's amazing. The things that I've done differently this round is leads, right? I have very good lead sources and multiple channels coming through and then accountability on the team. So every Monday, I have meetings with department heads. What are we going to do differently? The 1 percent chance difference that we're going to make.
Sam Preston: We every Wednesday, we have a leadership meeting with all the different things that we everybody has to say, these were the goals for this quarter and we either on track or off track for hitting those and then we see our numbers weekly, multiple times a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, everyone has to be accountable for those numbers continuing to go and that is been huge.
Sam Preston: Know your numbers, stay accountable, make sure that you, your team knows that too.
John Wilson: Yeah. And you can you can also get big, like you can like, yes, we've created a big moat, but like the moat is passable. So we have to continue to get better because technology is going to keep getting better. And it's going to keep giving advantages to people that can move quick.
John Wilson: And that's only getting faster and faster. If something new drops now. We execute with vigor so that we can continue to stay ahead of the curve. You owe it to yourself. We feel the pressure. We feel the pressure. Yeah.
Sam Preston: You owe it to yourself and your team to get bigger. Like you need to. It's a lot more security.
Sam Preston: It's a lot better game to play.
John Wilson: Yeah, no, I agree. This is great. I feel like we saw some, hopefully solve some good questions. If you have any more, feel free to send them in. I think we can answer them on another problem. Let's do it. Let's do it. Thanks all for tuning in. Thanks for having me on.
Sam Preston: Adios.
Get more Owned and Operated on YouTube, on Twitter, or with our weekly newsletter.
.png)
.png)
