(upbeat music)
-: Welcome to The Sharpest Tool podcast,
where we take the sting out of marketing.
Here's your host, Josh Smith.
-: Hello everyone, and welcome to The Sharpest Tool podcast.
My name's Josh and I am your host,
and I'm really excited about today's episode.
We actually have Timothy Flynn from Winters Home Services.
Can I call you Timothy?
-: You call me Tim.
-: It sounds weird-- -: Tim, Timmy.
-: We're gonna go with Tim.
Timmy, I like Timmy. -: Flynn.
-: So everybody call him Timmy if you see him out and about.
This is Timmy from Winters Home Services.
Tim, welcome to California and to the booth.
-: What a spot you all have here.
My God. -: Yeah, you enjoying it?
-: What a building.
-: (laughs) How's the weather change for you?
You're probably chilling up over there.
-: I love it. -: Yeah?
-: I love it.
Back home right now, it's probably like 45 degrees.
-: 45 degrees.
I just got back from Tahoe and it was like 30 degrees,
but that was up in the mountains, snow.
Being in the city, I think we're at what, 65 degrees here--
-: It's a tough day in southern California.
-: Rough, real rough.
Well, Tim, why don't we,
I want to start out by you introducing yourself
and how you really kind of
got into the home services industry,
built your business,
you have a thriving business in the Boston area.
Where did you come from?
How did you get into it?
And what were some of the milestones you took
in order to kind of grow your business that you can recall?
-: Well most plumbers like me,
we start working for somebody else.
And I think the first thing that I realized
was the guy that I was working for,
I always felt like I could do it better than he could.
He was very disorganized, lots of papers all over the place,
really beat up trucks, and nothing really pretty.
So I started my company in a pickup truck,
in a wooden cap that my brother
made for me to put over the top.
So if you can imagine like a wooden cap
on top of this black pickup.
When it rained, everything inside it got soaking.
So I started there, and then I bought a van, one van.
And then what I really started to do is think about
how plumbers would retire.
So I created an exit strategy for older plumbers,
so that I could buy their businesses.
So when I started to buy,
I think I've bought seven companies,
put them all together under the Winters Home Services name.
-: Okay.
-: But they're all over geographically,
because people in my time,
people were doing business with people
just by the phone number.
So I was buying phone numbers and their customer database.
Whenever there was a problem, they'd just call the number.
So I built it up slowly from one truck,
to three, to five, to seven,
now we're at about 20, 21 trucks.
But the business has been very good to me.
And when my grandfather was alive, he said,
I think it was because my other two brothers
were smarter and they went to college,
so my grandfather said to me,
"You know what, you can always be a plumber,
"a carpenter, or an electrician.
"You'll never go hungry."
I said, "Okay."
So I picked plumbing.
So I owe him a lot of thanks
for steering me in the right direction.
But it takes a lot of self education
to grow and rise up from one to two trucks to 20 trucks.
-: What was the biggest growth point
going from one to 20 trucks?
Where did you find one of your biggest bottlenecks
and how did you overcome the challenge?
-: There was a lot of humps.
I think a million dollars in sales
was the first major milestone you want to get over.
-: Sure.
-: And so that million dollars nowadays is really,
it's not that big of a deal anymore,
but I'd say the biggest milestone getting over
is understanding that you have five or 10 employees,
and your revenue's just gonna follow.
Training and teaching was something I realized
that was more important than revenue.
Education and keeping employees engaged
even more important than revenue.
But every time there was the most
uncomfortable feeling that I could go through,
I knew I was going through change
and something had to happen.
-: Yeah.
-: And that uncomfortable feeling is something like
you could recognize it by not sleeping.
You could recognize it by getting frustrated and yelling.
But when you're in that moment, you have to understand,
okay, I'm in a growth spurt right now.
Something's gonna happen, something's gonna change.
-: Sure.
-: Going from three employees to seven employees
is probably the biggest change
because at that seven employee range,
you're gonna need inside staff,
you're gonna need a manual, you're gonna need
pay checking-- -: Processes.
-: Processes, everything.
And I had to get self educated on process
and implementation and training and teaching.
I actually had to become a teacher rather than a plumber.
-: Was that difficult for you?
That change and that transition?
-: It's a stretch, it's a stretch.
If you get so comfortable going out and fixing things
and dealing with people one on one,
you can get comfortable and be happy there.
You could be fine.
But if you wanna grow,
you have to get out of the field,
and you have to learn how to be a teacher
so that you can teach others to do things your way,
and then get it done your way every single time.
-: Yeah, you know I wanna pick your brain
on a thought that I know a lot of our
home service industry professionals are going through.
And that's this idea of how to hire the best talent
and retain that talent over time.
And obviously with the growth that you've been able to see,
you've been able to probably do that.
Probably not without it's challenges,
but what's some of the advice that you can give
some business owners who are dealing with
the kind of tech struggle right now,
where their techs are being poached by other businesses
or they're having a hard time
retaining the talent that they do have.
-: There's a lot of poaching for talent.
One of the ways you need to go at it,
there's gonna be many ways to go at it.
The first thing you have to understand,
they're not going to come to your door ready to go.
They're just not, it's not gonna happen.
You have to build people.
You have to invest your time.
You have to invest your money,
and you have to handle...
People always say,
"What's the lifetime value of a customer?"
Right?
And so, you can put money on that
over 15 years or 20 years, whatever.
What's the lifetime value of an employee?
I was taught a long time ago,
if you train people,
they could leave and go work for somebody else.
But what if you train them and they stay?
Right?
So the lifetime value of an employee
is worth way more than the lifetime value of a customer.
So to look at things and say,
"How am I going to change myself
"so that I can become more invested
"in the people that work for my company?"
'Cause if you take care of your employees,
they're gonna take care of your customers,
it's gonna create a full circle.
-: That's awesome.
-: So I've been able to implement processes, savings,
I coach all my people on retirement.
I coach them on personal stuff,
reading, education, self education.
I fly them all over the country to learn different trades.
So invest, invest, invest and they'll stay.
-: Yeah, I think that's so key.
And I wanna kind of transition a little bit
over into the online aspect.
Obviously we're in an online digital age.
We have to adapt our marketing.
You mentioned having a phone number
was all that mattered years and years ago.
Whereas today, we're able to get in front of people
in so many different ways
and people are engaging with businesses
in a completely different way
than they were 20, 30 years ago.
So what are the top three things
that you think you get out of your website today,
that other people should really be paying attention to?
-: In no specific order,
right? -: Sure.
-: There are things that other
marketing companies would say to you.
All right, you've got to pay attention to page views.
You've got to pay attention to this.
But in reality, what you have to pay attention to is
how many times does the phone ring?
Where did it come from?
How many times did you convert those phone calls?
What did you convert them for?
For money, right? -: Yeah.
-: So your website, I mean when I came back,
I was Yellowpage guy. -: Yeah.
-: And those people would deal with you
from a position of fear to say,
"Well, if you don't put this big ad
"and spend $20,000 a month,
"someone else will take it and you'll be out of business."
It does happen a little bit in the digital side,
except for here, it doesn't happen here.
On the digital side, knowing about page rank,
knowing about page speed, and knowing about conversion
are huge assets for an owner.
And taking your time to understand
and asking a lot of questions,
and if anyone's evasive about not telling you
or sharing information with you, run.
-: Yeah (laughs). -: Get away,
because it's all about being transparent nowadays.
-: Definitely.
-: It's all about how you could
get the most ROI.
-: Yeah. -: Right?
And so another piece of information that I was taught
is never spend, overspend.
So if your marketing budget's 10%.
A lot of people would say, okay,
I want to do three million dollars this year,
so my marketing budget's gonna be 300 thousand.
And they start to allocate and spend that way.
But if you're not hitting those numbers,
you're overspending.
Never spend any more than
the previous month's sales as a percentage.
So if you did 300 thousand in one month, spend 30 grand.
But if you did 200 thousand the next month,
you can't spend any more than 20 grand.
-: Sure. -: Right?
-: Sure.
-: So you'll never overspend with that piece of information.
And that was taught to me by a friend of mine out in Utah.
So that was a lesson learned about 10, 15 years ago.
-: You've been around the block
with a few different marketing companies--
-: Are you telling me I'm old?
-: No, not at all.
Just you change as the seasons change.
-: I have been through a bunch of marketing companies.
And like I previously said,
if anyone tries to keep you--
-: Yeah. -: You know,
you look at all the page views you have.
Look at all the time on site,
and what's your bounce rate?
I'm like, "I don't care.
"I don't care about that.
"How many phone calls did I get?"
-: Yeah. -: Right?
That's what's important.
And with phone calls, you can budget.
And with the budget you can go to work.
And then if you have a...
People think about budgeting with money,
I budget phone calls.
If the phone rings a thousand times,
500 calls get answered, all right?
'Cause half of them are gonna be Google bots or some other--
-: Sure. -: Right?
Somebody trying to sell you something.
So now you have 500 calls.
And if you take those 500 calls
and give them to your technicians
and they convert 70% of them, right?
So now you get 350 money calls
with an average sale of $500,
so that's 150 thousand, no, 1.5 million.
-: Right. -: Okay?
So now you have a real budget.
That is how you could, if you wanna increase your budget,
increase your people, all you do is increase the calls.
Right?
Increase, and there's three or four pieces of information
that you can improve on pretty quickly.
Answering phone calls, converting,
selling calls and average ticket.
So the average sale is very simple.
You just take the last 10 sales, and divide by 10.
-: (laughs) And there's your average.
-: And there's your average.
-: When you look at defining
a quality lead for your business,
what does that look like?
-: It used to be,
when I was working with other marketing companies,
they would market in areas
that were not where my customers lived,
because of the demographic.
And the close rate would go down dramatically.
And like if we ran 100 calls and closed 20,
that's just unacceptable, right?
-: Mm-hmm.
-: So, a good lead is someone that finds us online.
Click to call, that's fantastic.
I think that's really good.
Somebody who wants something done now,
something done today.
-: Yeah.
That would be a most ideal
lead. -: The most ideal, right.
And then if we can handle them today,
we'll either try to schedule them for another day
or whatever time's convenient for them.
But people are now calling us and saying,
"Hey, we found you online, I saw you had 250 reviews.
"Something must be going right."
And it is, right? -: Yeah.
-: Especially on the Google Business page.
Something's going really right there,
and they'll find you very quickly.
I think there's more credibility in 250 leads,
if you have, out of five stars
I have maybe a four and a half star rating,
with a couple hundred reviews.
Which I believe is more credible
than a five star rating and seven reviews.
-: Yeah, absolutely.
-: I would say that to anyone listening
that working on your reviews
absolutely, positively, one of the most important things.
There are many things to work on.
There's never gonna be one pill to take.
There's multiple things to do in your business.
-: Yeah.
Especially on the marketing side, with how everybody,
why do you think reviews have really kind of come back
from an online perspective in terms of being
one of the most important things
that businesses should focus on?
-: Well, word of mouth was the other way,
right? -: Yeah.
-: So the new word of mouth is reviews.
-: Totally.
-: So people may not take a lot,
just like if I recommended somebody to you, right?
-: Yeah.
-: You might listen and say, "Yeah, I'll give him a call."
But if you look at reviews,
people read the reviews and then they'll make a decision.
Right?
So the reviews are great.
It's a constant battle or an ask with your staff.
And you have to incentivize people to ask, right?
And you only want to incentivize,
you can incentivize good behavior or bad behavior, right?
Whichever you choose, right?
I prefer the good behavior.
And I want my people to get reviews with their name on it.
I'm encouraging them to build their book of business.
That's what I'm encouraging people to do.
This is your own little business.
I give them their own little,
I give them a truck,
and they have their own compensation system,
and they can make as much money as they want, right?
I'm responsible for the marketing.
I'll deliver the calls.
You make sure you do really well.
I'll train you, and I'll send you all over the country
to get whatever you need for training and expertise.
But take care of the customers.
-: Right? -: Yeah.
-: So then, that comes full circle every single day.
-: Yeah. -: Right?
So reviews, five star reviews, gotta have them.
We get some bad ones too.
We just handle them.
-: Yeah, and you deal with them
and it adds to the authenticity really, right?
-: Without the bad reviews you can't improve.
-: You can't.
-: And if someone's frustrated, and you go,
oh, they're a jerk.
If I wasn't being recorded I'd call them something else.
But those are the ones you have to say,
all right, what's going on here?
-: And that's the big thing.
You know, not every bad review is a jerk.
And in the bad reviews really lie, like you said,
the process for improvement
or the objections that you need
to work on handling with your clients
to improve the experience overall.
-: It's funny too.
In my past, the marketing company that I chose,
I never saw any reviews on them, right?
If I only knew, right, I would be a lot smarter.
But I never saw any reviews,
and they're always telling me what?
"You've gotta get more reviews, man."
Well, where are yours?
-: Yeah.
You know, I think when it comes to
the marketing companies you've dealt with in the past,
a lot of business owners are probably feeling the same way.
I know we get it all the time at Scorpion,
just in terms of clients that come to us and they're like,
"You know, I've just been burned.
"I've been burned by so many people."
And like they're focusing on all the wrong things,
like you mentioned.
What have you found to be really successful
in your relationship with the good marketing companies
that you've dealt with in the past?
To have the best working relationship,
what's that relationship look like?
-: That's a really good question.
I think that if you went back and talked to Michael Sauer,
when I met, he'll tell you, I said to him,
looked him right in the eye, "I don't like you.
(laughing) "I don't like
"anyone in your business because
"I've been burned so many times."
And until I as the owner got
very specific about what I wanted,
how many calls in each department do I need,
how much money do I wanna spend?
Too often back before Scorpion, I was like,
all right, how much is it gonna cost me
to get this many calls?
It's gonna cost you 20 thousand dollars, Tim.
It's gonna cost you 25 thousand.
I was so desperate to make the phone ring,
I would throw any amount of money at it
just to keep my people busy.
And man was that a mistake.
Some lead generation sources that I can't mention right now,
on a national level that
sell leads to multiple people at the same time,
will take your money and charge for you this
quote unquote, air quote, "lead,"
and it's just BS.
And if you're not on the phone
calling people back right away,
which we always do,
I think within five minutes is pretty reasonable.
But in today's response world,
if you're not calling somebody back within 30 seconds,
they're gone.
But you overpay for things like that.
That's a waste of money.
Invest in a really good website,
and invest in your people.
Winning combination.
-: Absolutely.
What information did you come to
that you presented with Michael
and that allowed you to have extreme clarity
on exactly what you need?
How did you break down the information
to a level that is specific enough?
-: So I think everyone would be like
if you're in a service industry like I am,
we're gonna give our guys three calls a day.
Sometimes those calls are good,
sometimes they're bad.
And so you wanna budget for good and bad.
But nowadays, the calls are just good.
So you can budget less.
So when I talked to Michael, I said,
"I need drain calls,
"I need sales opportunities,
"and I need service."
And I flew to Dallas and I met up with Jamie
and I met up with a whole bunch of other guys
and I put on a presentation about what I wanted,
and what it means to me, and my average sale,
and how I close this, and how I close that,
and it's basically what we're talking about today.
But I did that almost two years ago.
And I can honestly tell you
that it's really worked out well.
And I got what I wanted, and that's so weird.
I'm like, I finally got what I wanted
from my marketing company.
And I'm sure if anyone's listening,
been through a lot of marketing companies,
and you make mistakes.
Shrug it off, right?
And just pick yourself back up
and get specific about what you want.
-: Let me ask you this.
From your perspective,
when dealing with a marketing company,
a lot of business owners are looking for that silver bullet.
The thing that's consistent every single time
no matter what, they can expect the exact same result,
no matter what, the minute that the person signs you on.
What level of flexibility or organic movement
with your marketing campaign
do you find you need to have in order
to really make it successful,
like adapting to changes,
changes in the market,
additional marketing products,
consumer behavior changes.
What level of adaptability do you think
you really need to have as a business owner
from your marketing perspective?
-: That's another good question, Josh.
I haven't felt that way for a long time.
-: Okay.
-: I used to feel that way all the time.
You just took me back to a spot
where I would always like
I need to change seasonally for this business, right?
We have to start doing no heat calls,
and no heat stuff.
It's done now for me.
-: So from a business owner perspective, it's done.
-: I'm gonna answer your question,
based upon before Scorpion.
-: Okay.
-: So I would have to, in seasonality changes,
I was advertising in the
national lead generation pool of fish,
and I was generating on my website.
I'm not ashamed to tell you
I was probably spending on my PPC budget
something like 25 thousand, 30 thousand.
Trying to bring up my budget,
I want my budget to be like say, at that time,
probably 500 thousand a month.
But I wasn't hitting it, I wasn't getting it.
And now I spend less, and I'm getting my budget.
So it's a contrast of time.
I haven't worried about what you asked me
in about 18 months.
-: Wow.
Wow.
-: Yeah, that's actually great for me
because I used to worry about it all the time.
So nowadays, before then, it was like, okay,
I'm not making budget, I have to spend more money.
I need to have another vehicle to generate more calls.
And it would be almost a desperation.
Send out a mass mail, send out email,
send out yard signs, send out door hangers,
send a kid out to a shopping mall
and go put business cards on every car.
And then at one point I made like yellow post-it notes
(laughing)
to make it look like a UPS delivery was on the front door,
but it was really like hey, call me.
You know, it was one of my one, two, three things.
$30 off or something like that.
But I used to do multiple layers
of marketing all at the same time.
But I haven't done that in quite some time now.
-: Is there anything you can attribute
to that particular success?
Is it a level of communication with your marketing team?
Is it the specificity of what we just talked about,
knowing exactly what you need?
What do you think was one of the catalysts
and the difference maker?
-: I'm gonna try to say this without stumbling.
The level of specificity starts at the beginning.
And then, like taking care of anything,
you kind of go over it, look at it,
talk about it every month.
Your marketing team is available as much
or as little here as you want them.
And every day you're getting emails, plural,
about something.
Every day you're getting something to look at.
I just got my SEO report from Kate.
It's probably the best I've ever seen.
-: Here, meaning Scorpion?
-: Scorpion, yeah, sorry. -: Yeah, okay.
-: Kate's my handler. (laughing)
And so it's a little bit of a worry.
The silver bullet doesn't exist, right?
It just doesn't happen.
And the silver bullet,
if you're specific about what you want,
you're gonna get it.
But it's not gonna be like flipping a light switch.
It takes time.
It takes time to build.
And I think if I had to give one piece of advice
to most owners is try to be patient, right?
Because there is no such thing
as just getting it done overnight.
If it is, it's probably not a good thing.
You have to build like a relationship.
Anything you build over time stands the test of time.
-: Absolutely.
You have to have a foundation--
-: Right on.
A foundation of trust, yeah. -: 100%.
We're in business.
Everything's built on trust, right?
-: This is one of the first businesses between
Winters Home Services and Scorpion
that has been built when I absolutely,
positively insulted Michael Sauer and I said,
"I don't like you.
"I don't like anything about you."
(laughing)
And then from there, it got stronger, right?
So that's what happened.
-: Sometimes you have to have those real conversations.
-: And we did.
And he wasn't afraid of it.
-: Yeah. -: Yeah.
He called over Matt, he goes,
"Matt, come here, we're gonna talk to him."
So he says to me, I'll tell you quickly, he goes,
"So Tim, so tell me,
"I know you've had some tough time with marketing companies,
"I hear it all the time.
"What do you spend?"
And I said, "You know, I spend 60 thousand."
He goes, "Yeah, well 60 thousand dollars a year,
that's a lot of money."
I said, "60 thousand dollars is a lot of money."
I said, "But that's what I spend in a month."
He goes, "Oh!"
Thank God I don't spend that anymore.
-: Yeah, I know, 'cause it's smarter right?
Smarter campaign, more dollars.
-: Well, it'll help me buy a race car.
-: Yeah (laughs), that R eighth.
-: It's gonna help me buy the R eighth.
-: There we go.
Explain closing percentage for a business
and average dollar per sale.
-: Sure.
-: Break that down a little bit.
I know we have some business owners
who are probably still writing
their numbers on napkins,
or they're just it's all hand written stationary.
They haven't adopted a CRM or anything.
-: Yeah, I'm glad you asked me to slow down,
because that's actually a really important thing,
because I was writing it on
anything I could get my hands on.
So every time you want to do something, the phone rings.
-: Yeah. -: Right?
What number did they dial to make the phone ring?
That's the first thing you need to know.
So if the phone rings, who's answering it?
I wouldn't recommend going into like a voicemail
or something like that.
You want a live person.
My business picked up dramatically
once I had a live voice.
So once that live voice answers,
did they convert it and bring it into the call board?
Right, so you can have a technician run the call.
So if your technician goes out and runs the call,
and all of a sudden they don't sell anything
or they don't repair anything,
did the need go away for the call?
The need didn't go away,
somebody dropped the ball along the way.
Some technician, whatever.
If someone calls into the office,
back it up a little bit more.
If someone called into the office
with I have a leaking something,
and someone on the phone didn't handle it correctly,
did the need go away?
No, we just blew it.
-: Yeah.
-: So you have to listen actively to what the call is,
coach the person taking the call
to get the conversion to the next guy.
-: Definitely. -: So one begets the other.
-: Yeah.
-: So if you're training your inside staff,
and you're training your outside staff,
then you'll get to a sale.
If your average sale is $300 which is great,
what was offered in that $300 sale?
Could there have been a service plan offered?
Could there have been an additional service offered?
Right?
How do we raise that sale?
Right now I think my average sale is probably,
it went from say 350,
I think I'm probably in like the $900 range now,
thousand dollar range, pretty significantly.
It's a really good increase.
-: Absolutely.
-: But once you get the phone call in,
everybody has to work together
passing it down the line.
-: Definitely.
-: And then, to end the call, you have to have a review.
-: Yeah.
-: That gets the next person to call.
-: Back in. -: Right.
-: It's a big cycle.
-: Big cycle.
-: How did you go,
was it just a matter of training,
going from a $300 average ticket value to nearly a thousand?
-: No.
I've done a lot of training with the Ritz-Carlton.
I've done a lot of training with Dale Carnegie.
And so the Ritz-Carlton just allows you to
have great indoor, I mean, inside staff skills,
answering phone calls.
It's a pleasure that you called.
Just all these different niceties you can add to a call.
-: Sure.
-: I think that how to deal with people
is the biggest piece of training that you can get.
Because it's not about whoever's,
it's all about the person.
It's all about the customer, right?
-: Always.
-: And so, a lot of plumbers just don't realize that.
A lot of plumbers are like,
oh, they're wasting my time.
Oh, these people don't want anything, right?
Whereas we're just probably not listening.
Listen, listen, listen, right?
So I was taught one time mouth to ear ratio.
You know, the one mouth, two ears,
(laughing) use it proportionately.
-: Yep.
-: But training comes in many different forms,
just like marketing.
So you could do Ritz-Carlton training.
You could do training from Dale Carnegie.
You could take your own.
There's a lot of guys out there that do training now
for technicians and owners.
I think the biggest piece is that you have to
train the owner first.
-: Yeah, absolutely.
-: Without that piece done, the rest won't happen.
-: You've got to level yourself up
in some way, shape, or form,
so you're getting better.
Otherwise your people won't get better.
-: It's a good word, level up.
I like that.
-: Yeah, absolutely.
Let's talk about LSAs for a minute.
-: Sure.
-: Kind of the newest marketing thing,
and for those of you listening,
LSAs stand for Local Service Ads by Google.
So it's Google's attempt at a pay per lead product
that is now showing up in the search results.
So you're involved in LSAs.
What's been your experience
and should business owners prioritize that?
-: I would.
-: Yeah.
-: So LSA went from, I think it was GSA,
it was Google-- -: HSA.
-: It's been a few words,
right? -: Mm-hmm.
-: So in most of the major markets,
it started in San Francisco with a test, a beta test.
And then it spread over to the East coast.
And so we got in when it first opened up,
and we had to kick up our game.
We had to level up our reviews, right?
-: Yep, there you go (laughs).
-: So we had to really do a really good job,
and I put the call to action out early on,
maybe about two years ago, we have to add more reviews.
And so what Google wants is
Google wants to give the user what they want.
So if someone enters on their phone plumber near me,
Google is gonna go, okay, you're in Cambridge,
and we have a couple of companies we can recommend for you.
I may not be the number one company.
I might be number two, number three, but I'm there.
And so Google actually has,
okay, what kind of call did you want today?
What's the nature?
And they actually, people are using their fingers to find
oh I want drain service.
What time is right for you?
Is this company open?
And then boom, they put you in front of
the person that wants your services.
It's absolutely brilliant,
and I think the fee is like $35 or something.
It depends on-- -: Really cheap, right.
-: It's really cheap.
I was like, "This is gonna put Scorpion out of business."
(laughing)
No, but that's not gonna happen.
-: Yeah, yeah.
No, the LSAs is definitely the next big wave
of what we're seeing.
And I know it can be a process getting involved with that.
Did you find that as well?
-: So as far as the process,
all of your employees have to be background checked.
Everybody has to submit documentation
that they're who they say they are, right?
And I'll use it again, you've got to level up.
You've got to raise your game.
If you want the very well qualified leads
of who wants your services today,
you've got to play a different game.
The game is changing, so.
Actually the game's already changed.
And so that means that the owner
has to get background checked.
All my people, everybody in the company.
And you know what?
It's like a little bump in the road.
It's not a big deal, just get it done.
And they even pay for it, the background checks.
All you've got to do is just submit them online,
everything's fine, right?
And then for people that,
even like the average smaller company,
the one truck guy, if you're in Boston,
it's crazy for you not to use Google Home Service.
It's crazy not to do it! -: Yeah.
-: Because the phone,
you talked about a few minutes ago,
the spikes in business, going up and down,
this takes the spike out of the business.
And you can turn it on or turn it off whenever you want.
That's like, it's freedom.
-: Absolutely.
You know, what's interesting, tying this all together,
I always love this, I heard it put one way,
don't look at it as the end all be all either.
It's another notch in your belt
of a potential opportunity to get leads.
And so when you start looking at it through that lens
and really going back to your point about
being extremely specific about what you want,
then you can put together the right tools
in your tool kit to get you what you need.
-: The thing of it is,
is that everything you're saying now is true.
It's not a sales pitch.
It's 100% spot on.
So I used to do direct mail.
I was sending out maybe like 300 thousand cards.
And you know what a really good reply was?
Half of one percent.
(laughing)
So if you send out almost a half a million cards,
you're gonna get 50 calls.
I'm brilliant, right?
-: And you're spending a couple thousand dollars doing it.
-: Not even a couple,
it's probably like 30, 40 grand,
to send out that many cards.
But usually what would happen with those cards
is that the postman would see them and just take them all
and just chuck them in a barrel somewhere.
-: Yeah (laughs). -: You know,
so I'm sure it was like starting fires all over Boston.
-: Well, we covered a lot.
-: It's really good information
for owners to think about though.
-: Really.
I want to kind of tie it up with a little bow.
What would be the one thing,
if a business owner is listening to this right now,
had to walk away with one thing
that they could take back to their business
to change things up for the better
and progress towards their goals.
What would you say that would be?
-: Ask more questions, and get reviews.
Ask more questions, you know, hit me up.
I'm available.
Send an email.
-: That's the one thing I love about you, Tim.
You're always willing to help out
everybody else down the road when it comes to--
-: I've got a lot of--
-: You've got so much experience.
-: I've got a lot of stuff to share,
and I don't want any of my brother and sister companies
to get screwed over, 'cause we have all been there, right?
So I'm not the protector of the universe.
But I can tell you not where to step, right?
And that's really what it's all about,
not stepping on the land mines
that somebody else knows that are sitting there.
Because people get lied to every day
'cause someone wants to make a sale.
-: Absolutely.
-: Right, and that's not the reason why
you wanna do what you do.
Never lie to make a sale, right?
You've just gotta tell the truth.
And if you're out there doing business
with people that are doing that,
just run, run away.
-: Right, absolutely.
Well, Tim, this has been awesome.
-: Well, thank you so much for inviting me.
You have a beautiful office, great spot.
-: Absolutely.
-: Everybody here is so gracious and very professional.
And you can wave to everybody, they all say hi back.
(laughing) -: That's a good thing.
-: Maybe it's a California thing.
-: Maybe it is.
-: 'Cause in Cambridge, they'd give me the finger.
(laughing)
-: You guys are a lot more harder on the East coast there.
-: Yeah, they're a little different.
-: Well, Tim, we appreciate you.
Thank you so much for being on the show.
-: Thank you so much.
-: And for everybody listening,
definitely check back on the website
to get more updates for future episodes,
and we'd love to hear your feedback.
Definitely reach out to us here at Scorpion.
And I'm gonna redo that exit,
because I wanna mention the website name.
Cheryl, do we have an official domain?
(Cheryl speaks faintly)
Okay, so I'm not gonna mention it.
I'm just gonna sign off really smoothly without, all right.
And so thanks again, Tim.
Really appreciate having you on the show.
And for everybody listening,
if you're listening on YouTube, iTunes,
are we not saying that, right?
Let's start over.
-: You could say subscribe on your favorite--
-: Subscribe on your favorite thing.
I know we were changing that.
Perfect.
Thanks again, Tim.
Really appreciate having you out here in California
in the booth on The Sharpest Tool.
And for everybody listening,
if you're enjoying all the content
and all the value that we're bringing here,
definitely hit the subscribe button
on whatever your favorite podcasting app is,
and you can be sure to get more of this awesome content.
From all of us here at The Sharpest Tool,
we'll catch you next time, thanks.
(upbeat music)
-: Thanks for listening to The Sharpest Tool,
brought to you by Scorpion Internet Marketing.
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