Crafting Your 2025 Carpet Cleaning Business Marketing Plan: Your Path to Success

Carpet cleaners should adopt an omnipresent marketing approach, leveraging digital platforms while engaging in traditional marketing to maximize visibility and reach the correct target audience.

John Clendenning [00:00:00]:
A part of the joy, peace, and happiness in life is also knowing that we’re running a great business that’s growing, and it’s meeting our goals and objectives. You didn’t get into business to work a job. You got into business and become self employed for specific reasons, usually a lot related to the lifestyle and the freedom being able to go to dance class and recital class with the kids and and, you know, and maybe go fishing and maybe take some time off and still have an entity that works for you and makes money, builds an asset value that someday you can sell for, you know, sizable gains because we don’t have retirement accounts and 401ks when we’re self employed and stuff like that. So we have to do all of that ourselves. I know from 30, 35 years of being self employed, but, you know, I’m painfully unemployable, as they say. I’ve I’ve been self employed since, since high school and grew multimillion dollar businesses in the cleaning industry. So how does that happen? That’s what we’re gonna talk about today.

John Clendenning [00:01:35]:
One of the themes is how you can actually double your business in 2025. So, you know, maybe if you’re doing a half a $1,000,000 getting from a half a1000000 to a1000000 might be a bit of a stretch, but maybe not. Like, there was 1 year that that we did exactly that took the business from half a1000000 to a1000000 by acquisition and growth. So it can be done. But even if you’re at a 100,000 and you wanna go to 200,000, you’re at 200,000, you wanna go to 400,000. Is that doable in a year? Well, I think it is. And I think I’m gonna be able to show you improve that to you as well. Again, it’s the theme of this, this year, how to double your business in 2025, how to double your business in 1 year.

John Clendenning [00:02:11]:
And it takes a different mindset. It takes a different level of planning and being an entrepreneur. So if that sounds like you’re ready for that, roll up your sleeves. My sleeves rolled up. Put your phone on mute. Let’s get let’s jump into this. If you’re in the cleaning home service industry and you’re serious about getting better results, plan the next 60 minutes or so to be a really, really, transformational working session. This is the most important training of the entire year.

John Clendenning [00:02:43]:
We do the first part of it here, and then we do a part 2 a little bit later in January to really solidify and cement our plans for the year. So that’s what we’re gonna be talking about today. We’re gonna be mapping out our 2025 strategy. So creating a tailored action plan, that’s our ultimate goal here, together for ourselves, you know, get learn some of the must know marketing trends to stay ahead of in 2025. What the heck is AI gonna do to our businesses and our marketing and our competitors? And what are we planning to do? And do we know anything about it? What what else is changing? Is SEO changed? Is keywords changed? Is marketing changed? Our world is changing around us faster than you can ever imagine. It’s scary. I actually heard somebody say the other day that 99.9% of humans on planet Earth are not understanding the transformative and disruptive impact of AI in their lives, And and that includes data scientists and just your average everyday, individuals. How much AI is a massive game changer? So, again, part of it is do we lean into it? Do we give it some reverence? Do we give it how much do we give? You know, where is it going? And we’re going to talk a lot about that over the course of this year.

John Clendenning [00:04:01]:
But we’re going to we’re going to tie it into how it plans helps works into our plans for 2025 right now as well. And we wanna leverage the three cornerstones of marketing success so that we can double our business in 1 year. It’s totally doable. Watch it happen. Consulted businesses have done that as well. Done it myself. It’s totally doable. If you’ve been stuck at the same point for for a number of years, then then we need to, you know, kinda cattle prod you out of that out of that that rut, out of that stuck, and teach you the things that you need to be thinking about and doing that will to x the business.

John Clendenning [00:04:37]:
So, you know, I’ve talked to business owners. I talk I talk to cleaning business owners 5, 10, 15 a week. Some of them clients, some of them people looking to work with us and things like that, and some just looking for a consult. And what I realize is that, you know, as things change, things stay the same. There’s a group of people that kind of get to a certain point, 10 k, 5 k, 15 k, 20 k a month and pause. That’s as far as they can get it. They might get there. It might take them a year to get there.

John Clendenning [00:05:08]:
Might take them 5 years to get there. And then they just cap cap out. There’s other people that kind of get themselves up to half a $1,000,000 business and cap out. There’s other people that understand that if you’ll get get the mindset and the marketing right and understand the role you have in the company, then going to half a1000000, 1,000,000, 2,000,000 is just part of the path. It’s just part of the journey. If you’re in a small town, you go wide. You build you buy competitors. You take over other industries.

John Clendenning [00:05:40]:
You become the marketer of those services, if that’s where you wanna go. If you’re in a bigger town, you go deep. Right? You you you do your one core set of services and then maybe you do them in, you know, in different, areas creating area expansion so your business can expand over to here and expand over there. And how do you hire? How do you train? How do you deliver a world class service experience every single time? Right? That’s the role of the entrepreneur. So we’ll get into a little bit of that as well because it all plays into the into the into the hands. So let’s get over here. There we go. So if you stay to the end, we’re gonna give you our resource kit.

John Clendenning [00:06:17]:
So the most important one right now, this time of year, is the checklist. You wanna go through the checklist. You wanna double check your marketing, and, it’s sort of a junior checklist. When we work with clients, we we go through a much deeper assessment of their business, with them. But you’re also gonna get a bunch of other resources, low cost grassroots, marketing, things that you should be doing in the off season, things you’d be doing when it slows down, things you need to double down on, if there’s a recession or anything like that, or as the market is changing and the middle class is sort of having less and less discretionary income, and the, upper middle class and upper class are having more discretionary income, and that class divide is becoming even wider just due to our economy and inflation and a whole bunch of other reasons, you wanna make sure you’re marketing to the right people. Because if you’re marketing with people that have less and less discretionary income, you’re gonna say that everybody’s price conscious. And if that’s your thought right now, I’m telling you right now, you’re marketing people with who have less and less income. If you’re marketing to the upper class and middle upper class who’s for who whose investments in 401 k’s and stocks and portfolios grew massively even if their wage didn’t that much and well outpaced the interest rates of their trucks and their cars and their gas and and all of that at those other higher costs, then you’ll realize that that crowd is not noticing things are more expensive and they’re not price conscious at all.

John Clendenning [00:07:40]:
In fact, almost the opposite. So they’re buying more stuff. Right? And that’s what’s happened over the last 4 years of of of hyperinflation due to excess money money printing and all the other things that we have to deal with around the world. It’s not it’s not a Canada, US problem. It is a global problem. So, anyways, some of these resources kits can really help you think through some of that stuff. Low cost grassroots is one of them, but we’re gonna talk about some of the rest of these as well on the call today. So who am I for any of the newbies on the call? So if you’re brand new to this, my name is John.

John Clendenning [00:08:12]:
Hey. Nice to meet you. I’ve been in business since 1990 while still in high school. Shy kid, couldn’t talk in class. My buddy Scott did the presentation for extra brownie points. We took the business presentation to the local bank and the bank manager at the time, Ray Seed, lovely fellow, said, hey, why don’t you why don’t I just give you guys the money? I understand it’s a school project. Why don’t you do this? It was a window cleaning business. Why don’t you buy the van and the ladders and all that stuff? I’ll give you the money.

John Clendenning [00:08:38]:
So, and that started our career. 3 years later, high rise jumping over the store the side of 40 story buildings, office buildings and stuff like that. Scott went off to college, and I decided to join get into carpet cleaning. And I actually got into janitorial services then carpet cleaning and was in the truck for about a year, a year and a half in my early twenties in a town of 30,000 people and said, hey. Love this industry. Don’t wanna be the guy in the truck. I wanna market the business and grow. So got out of the truck, hired employees in small town, shy kid before the days of the Internet, built the business up to $10,000 a month in the 1st year, 1995, and grew from there, bought a, competitors out town 1 town over, 2 towns over, did all that, bought some main franchise businesses, licensed and grew a janitorial company from 40,000 to $600,000 in 3 years, helped them do all of that, as part of our office, and grew a multimillion dollar cleaning business, just by learning some of the stuff I’m gonna impart on you here today.

John Clendenning [00:09:41]:
So I’ve taught, lectured it, been speaker for the Chamber of Commerce for a couple of years running every single month, on all different topics around reputation, stuff like that. I’ve been flown around the world to teach the experience economy, how to deliver a client experience, how to how to kinda change your position in the marketplace, how to manufacture reality as we call it, because, you get to manufacture yourself as why you’re different than the competitors. And so ran a high end small boutique cleaning company and a bunch of other services, duct cleaning, company separate stand alone, maid services, janitorial as I mentioned, all of that kind of stuff, and the carpet cleaning businesses. And finally, almost three and a half years ago it’ll be 4 years in May, sold the business in the middle of the pandemic and exited out to do this here full time. Teach, train, coach, provide services, and help companies grow like crazy. So that’s what we do. So I had time to write the book on it. So beside me over here, you can’t see it, but on the screen, the complete guide to Internet marketing for carpet cleaners.

John Clendenning [00:10:44]:
So if you don’t have it yet, it’s available on Amazon. Go look it up. Number 1 bestseller in the carpet cleaning space. As I always say, it’s not a not a hard space to be the number one bestseller in. So I think it was the only book on the shelf for a while in the carpet cleaning space, at least the only new book on the shelf. So, we do have another one coming out soon, but, just another another bunch of tactics and marketing trainings and stuff like that as well. What I’ve done for years, became industry leader of the year last year, 22,000 and 23, for CleanFAX Magazine. Good buddy, Jeff Cross now.

John Clendenning [00:11:17]:
We do monthly take 5 with CleanFAX, giving lots of great tips and stuff like that. And we’ve got something special coming up in the next month or so and have shared the stage with Howard Partridge and all those good guys that I learned from when I was a young fellow. So that’s important. But more important is how we help fellow cleaners take their business, get their marketing right, grow like crazy, and help them achieve what they want. What are their goals? Do they wanna get out of the truck? Do they wanna expand the business? Do they wanna be in the truck and hire an office staff? Like, what is it that they actually wanna do with their business? What is their growth in, you know, 3 year, 5 year goals? We help them get there. So and it’s it’s not just one thing, and that’s what you’re gonna learn. There’s no one thing that’s gonna help you get there at all. I think there’s been a lot of marketing misinformation by Internet marketers and what I, you know, what I kinda call bro marketers that take a course and learn how to do social media management or things like this and say, oh, that’s how that’s that’s what I need for carpet cleaners, but they’ve never owned a business in the industry.

John Clendenning [00:12:23]:
They know nothing about it. They don’t know what the ideal clients are. They don’t know what pricing and target is. So they do what we call marketing incest. They go check around, see what everybody else is doing. Oh, you need to do that. Your prices need to be down like this. I did some market research for you and you’re, you know, the best offers in your marketplace are like $99.

John Clendenning [00:12:40]:
So you need to be that. And, you know, if you’re if you don’t know how to sell 3, 4, 5, 6, $700 residential services in a market where there are $99 competitors, then you’re gonna think that that makes sense. And you’re gonna say yes. If you understand the difference and how to manufacture reality and build your own business, build your database, and the lifetime value of a client is the only thing that counts. Your database is the most important asset you own, and that kind of thing. We’re gonna talk all about this stuff. If you get that, then you understand why we’re even doing this training today, why we’re talking about planning all of 2025 right now, the whole year. Right? So that you can set up a path and and and plan for that.

John Clendenning [00:13:20]:
So that’s what we’re gonna talk about. So what do we do? We help our clients become the top carpet cleaning brand in their local marketplace so they can attract the best clients. They’re able to charge out the top rates for their services, and they’re booked out weeks in advance at those top rates. Clients that are 5, 6, $700 average jobs. There’s a reason for that. In a residential carpet cleaning where competitors are $99. How do you do that differently? Well, you do that, you know, understanding the 3 core principles of omnipresent marketing system. So the 3 core principles of marketing in general all lead into becoming omnipresent.

John Clendenning [00:13:56]:
The best known cleaner is the most, is the busiest. Done well, the best known cleaner if you’ve if you got a great market reputation, great market position, and you’re best known in your marketplace, you are the busiest. The best known plumber is typically the busiest. The best known, you know, HVAC company, the best roofing company has is everywhere. The ones that get most of the calls. They are the best known for the right reasons. So omnipresence is the name of the game. You’ve gotta stand out in front of wherever your ideal customer is.

John Clendenning [00:14:27]:
You’ve gotta be there, at every location, not any one location. So we’ll talk about that. So that’s the whole idea of maximizing your opportunities to generate a qualified lead. You have to define what qualified is. We’re going to we’re going to do that a little bit here today because we’ve got to we’ve got to actually make these numbers make sense. So we’ve got to make these ideas make sense. So you’ve got to figure out who is your qualified inquiry and where do they go? Online, offline? You know, where do they hang out? Where do they, you know, get their information from? Where who do they talk to? Who is a trusted source to them that you can maybe piggyback on top of once you understand who a qualified inquiry is? I like the word inquiry better than leads. Qualified inquiry, then how do you find more of them? Who else has them collected together and gathered up that you can maybe have a conversation with and do a a joint venture with.

John Clendenning [00:15:23]:
Right? So you wanna maximize that. You wanna maximize your brand impressions. So Google talks about z mod zero moment of truth that, you know, consumers see a brand, interact with a brand emotionally and mentally 11 times before they ever choose to purchase from that brand, whether that’s standing in front of a store picking, whether, you know, which shampoo you want, which breakfast cereal you’re gonna buy, whatever, or the services that we that we’re we look for. We rarely look once see it once and make a one time decision. And the more important it is, the more sacred it is. Good word. Because, you know, there’s times as as us cleaners, we’re in areas of people’s homes that they don’t even let their best friends go in the bedrooms, in the closets, things like that. And they have to some people care about that decision.

John Clendenning [00:16:13]:
The ones that don’t care about that decision, that that just want it clean, they’re either deciding between a rental machine or a discount carpet cleaner. They’re not the ideal client anyways because you only make your money. The real money in in carpet cleaning is the second, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 10th time you see that same person and the referrals they give you. The first time is transactional, and it doesn’t even matter if you lose money on the first transaction. If you’re targeting the right people at the right price point, it’s the second, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 10th time you’ve been in the home. That’s where all the money is. The first time just paid to get them into your database and allow you to market to them. Right? So brand impressions start that ball rolling.

John Clendenning [00:16:50]:
So a certain percentage of your marketing budget should always be towards your brand impression side of your marketing. Let people more and more people know about you. Your ideal target prospect should know about you and see you. So where where where is that? What is that? We’re gonna talk a little bit about that as well. And you wanna maximize your conversions. So we always talk about this. It’s the missing link that most people don’t talk about. They might be able to generate traffic to your website.

John Clendenning [00:17:17]:
They might be able to generate traffic to an every door mail and offer, all of that. But if you can’t convert them, if you don’t have scripting that converts, you know, 70% where you were converting 50% prior, that extra 20% could be a $100,000 this year in your business. Right? If you don’t have a nurturing sequence and follow-up that the people that didn’t say yes today, they might not have said yes to anybody today. They’re just in the process of looking. Did you follow-up or do you are you arrogant enough or ego driven enough to think that they’re just gonna remember you? Because when’s the last time you remember the name of everybody you’ve ever interacted with if you call call around to get prices on flowers or something like that? And then you go, who was it that had the best price or who ones to have the the yellow roses, you know, and that kind of thing? We all do the same thing. So he who follows up best wins. Right? So, that’s important as well. So with all of that in mind, what is the hardest part about growing your carpet cleaning business? Right.

John Clendenning [00:18:15]:
Anybody wanna put something in the chat? I will try my best to look over at the chat. Let’s see what we got coming in. Just making sure that the chat I’ve got it turned on show. Oh, there we go. I’m gonna have to. There we go. I can actually show it on the screen. I didn’t know that.

John Clendenning [00:18:35]:
Okay. Anyways, so yeah. So what we’ve got is what are some of the things? It’s yeah. Understand, like, finding new customers. That’s definitely one of them. What is another challenging thing to grow your carpet cleaning company? Marketing. Advertising. Yep.

John Clendenning [00:18:54]:
Yep. Those are all good words. Yeah. Finding employees? Absolutely. Absolutely. So what I’ve what we’re gonna talk about is there are so many marketing options. So not just understanding how to market, But where to market? What’s the right message in the right place? Right. It’s unclear where to spend your budget.

John Clendenning [00:19:17]:
How much is your budget? Do you have a budget set? Do you even know what a marketing budget should be? Have you thought through that? So I understand. Yeah, it’s there’s a lot of options. So like online SEO, paid ads, Google Maps, social media, offline, every door mail and direct mail referral marketing, you know, door hangers and yard signs and back of busses and billboards and, you know, carpet store visits and referral partners made services and interior designers and you name it. There is lots and lots and lots of choices. Where do you spend your money? Well, in fact, this is just a small list of all of the places where carpet cleaners should be getting work. Every one of these should be checked off. If you go, Well, I’ve got Google Ads, John. Okay.

John Clendenning [00:20:07]:
Do you have flooring stores referring you? Do you have interior designers referring you? How many? Are you adding 1, 2, 3 new realtors, referral partners every quarter, every month? Like, what are you doing to outreach? Have you is your Google Maps ranking? Do you know if it’s ranking for all the service terms that a map shows up? So you might be ranking for carpet cleaning near me and you might check that all the time. Carpet cleaning, oh, look at me. Right? Well, you’re standing inside your office. Maybe you’re only ranking for a 1 mile radius for that term. That happens a lot. What about 2 miles, 3 miles, 5 miles out? Have you ever done a heat map to see that? Has anybody ever done that for you? And what about upholstery cleaning and tile cleaning and area rug cleaning and all the other derivatives of those names that pull a map up? Just because you rank for the one keyword you type into your phone on your phone that’s checked out a 1000000 times from inside your office is absolutely meaningless whether you are actually growing a wider and wider footprint in your marketplace. Do you know when you’ve capped that footprint at about 10 to 15 miles out in most dense populated areas? Sometimes it’s only 5 miles out is about where you can cap it because of the competition. Do you know what to do if you’ve capped your Google Maps radius, which also caps your local service ad radius? Are you doing local service ads? But all of those are kind of capped by a radius.

John Clendenning [00:21:21]:
Do you know what to do to expand your area? Did you know that you can have if you can expand your Google Maps footprint, you can generate another $100,000 or more over the course of a, you know, build it up over the course of a year. It becomes its own $10,000 a month, $15,000 a month, entity because it’s closer to another group of ideal customers. Right? So and the ones that check Google Maps and check local service ads, there’s a crowd there. That means that they don’t check social media. They don’t maybe find their carpet cleaner by door hangers and and whatever other people do. So it’s a mix of everything. Right? So you wanna make sure you have all of that. You wanna make sure you’re doing social outreach.

John Clendenning [00:22:03]:
So, you know, Facebook, for example, the ideal demographic of Facebook is a 35 to 55 year old college or university educated skewed mostly towards women or more so towards women. That’s interesting because that’s also the exact demographic of an average residential carpet cleaner or home service provider, pressure washer, carpet cleaner, window cleaner, all of that. So are you sharing out happy customer stories of people that are just like them in your marketing? Do you do any awareness campaigns? Are you creating that that brand impression on platforms that act like billboards? Are you using billboards? Are you using backup buses if you depending on what size your business at? If you’ve got the right budget, if you know what your budget is, are you doing any of these things? Right? So, repeat clients. Do you have a repeat client nurturing system? So do you know how to get your clients to come back more often? So the average carpet cleaning client thinks they come back once every year and the average is over 2 years, somewhere around 2.6 years before the average comes back. Some you’ll never see again. Others you’ll see more often but the average. So how do you get them from over 2 years thinking they’re coming doing it once every year because you’re not reaching out to them or you send text messages every 3 months. Most people don’t need to be text messaged that often.

John Clendenning [00:23:12]:
But, what are you doing otherwise? Are you picking up the phone and calling and just checking in? Are you sending nurturing messaging every single month, staying in touch? Do you have any newsletters that come to their door? Like, what are you doing to stay in touch to build that fence as Dan Kennedy likes to say that that fence around your ideal customers to keep your competitors out. Your competitors are like wolves. You wanna keep the competitors out so that they don’t go, oh, I can’t remember the name of my guy. Let me go, oh, what about these guys, honey? And off they go and you’ve just lost them. How do you make sure that you’re always in front of them in a meaningful way? Right? So you gotta ask yourself those types of questions. And you gotta get referrals from these clients as well. Your best clients should be telling other people about you. So you again, you don’t wanna rely on repeats and referrals as the only core of your business because then you’re not marketing to new people.

John Clendenning [00:24:00]:
So then you’re stale as well and that’s another reason why a lot of businesses go, well, I only rely on repeat and referral business. Well, when’s the last time you added a new truck to your service? Have you grown? No. Because that that’s one way to stay the same. And if your if your database starts getting older, if you don’t market to them, you rely on repeats and referrals generally generally word-of-mouth but you have no systems in place, That is a recipe to, you know, the market goes down, you drop massively. You might get a little bit of uptick when the market goes back up again or whatever, but it’s not it’s not a strategy. It’s not something you can rely on. It’s not something you can sell. How do you sell that to somebody else? When you go to sell your business, you either sell the asset value of your business or you sell the equipment.

John Clendenning [00:24:44]:
1 of them, you’re going to get 100 of 1,000 of dollars, if not 1,000,000 of dollars, depending on the size of your business. The other one, you’re going to get tens of 1,000 of dollars. So, yeah, you’ve got to build systems that generate predictable return on investment. We generated on average a 17 to 20, percent 20 to 1 ROI, not percent, but 20 to 1 ROI for every dollar we spend. We got 17 to $20 depending on the year back from our repeat and referral marketing systems for our database, for our residential clients. So do you have that tracked well? Now you’re getting strategic partners, JV partners as we call them. So flooring stories, interior designers, realtors, maid services, complimentary services of any kind, or anybody that has your database collected together. You gotta get those.

John Clendenning [00:25:26]:
Is your website designed to convert? We’ll talk a little bit about that because, again, you can drive tons of traffic to your website. Are you looking at your Google Analytics? Are you looking at your Google Search Console? Do you know if you had any pages cannibalizing each other? Do you know what’s ranking for what and why that’s driving traffic? And is that traffic converting? Do you have conversion optimization built into your website? Are you retargeting people that come and leave? Because 90% of people will come look around and leave for a whole bunch of reasons. If you’re not following them, they forgotten about you. Right? Are you on all the online directories? Because some people go there, but they’re also a great way to anchor your your entity. So entity SEO is the new SEO. If you go back a couple of months to the SEO conversation, topical authority content, s e s entity SEO using, Google’s generative AI search that Google has been adding to search to use AI as as of March of or May of last year when they did the the the announcement of the presentation. Google’s added AI into everything and it changes the way people find you. Do you come up as a not a featured snippet, but a citation source in generative AI? Is your content on your website written to show up like that? Are you considered a topical authority in your local marketplace because you create topical authority content clusters around your pillar content? Right? That’s all part of how you show up properly and stand out and become the best known cleaner in all the different places where people look.

John Clendenning [00:26:54]:
Right? And then offline, a frames, yard signs, door hangers. You know, if you got a door hanger that says 3 rooms in a hall for a $119, that’s entirely different than, hey. I’m John. I own this business. Here’s my wife. Here’s my kids. Here’s my family. Here’s my dog.

John Clendenning [00:27:06]:
Here’s my cat. Here’s why I wanna be your carpet cleaner. Here’s what got me into this business and why we do things differently. Which one is gonna get you your ideal client? Is your ideal client somebody who only spends a $120 on carpet cleaning, and the next time they need cleaning done, they find the next cheapest guy? Oh, look, honey. There’s somebody that does it for a $110. Or are they the people that spend 3, 4, $500 find their people and don’t that that extra couple $100 once a year, twice a year is meaningless because it’s more about finding somebody who does it right, safe, healthy, and adds value to their lives. Right? So is that what your postcards and your door hangers and your yard signs and your material that you hand out, and your referral rewards programs and all of that stuff and your website and everything, is that what it speaks to? You gotta know that. Right? And you can create how to videos, helpful articles, press releases, all that stuff that anchors your s entity as an authority in the marketplace.

John Clendenning [00:28:03]:
Google’s algorithm, e e a t, experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness all anchored together by your entity, your entity branding around the web. That’s that becomes your online directories and a bunch of other stuff. And then you as the authority that has the experience, creates the weekly content. You don’t have to people go straight for it, but your content, your Google’s business post, your social media post, your website, all of that ties all of this together into a cohesive marketing package and you add reputation marketing where all your feedback and reviews are syndicated out everywhere they look and turned into videos and images, and and now you’ve tied an entire message together that’s different than the competitors. Now you’re not worried about price anymore. So hopefully that makes a little bit of sense. So marketing is a major investment. Lots of things you need to do, moral of that story.

John Clendenning [00:28:56]:
But sometimes you don’t have much to show for it. Do you know how to track ROI, your return on investment? Do you know how to see when you spend this dollar where it goes, what it’s feeding into, and how much comes back? Right? That’s part of being business owners. We’ve got to track what works so we can do more of it and we can trim what’s not working. And we got to know the difference. We can’t just feel it. We can’t just guess. We actually have to see the numbers. Right? So, when you fail at this, you don’t have a clear plan.

John Clendenning [00:29:24]:
You can overspend or worse, underspend. Right? Yeah. You can overspend on marketing. But If you overspend on marketing and land a life like in a lifetime value clients and they’re worth 5, $10,000 to your business. Yeah, it’s just a waiting game, right? You just you know, if you’ve got other things in place, if you underspend and underperform, time is passing you by. There’s no catching up from that. So, you there’s a lot more you you there’s a lot more effort needed to go forward, if that makes sense. So so what you can do is download the workbook.

John Clendenning [00:29:56]:
It’s 2025 dash workbook. So carpet cleaner marketing masters.com/2025 dash, minus sign, workbook, and you’ll get a copy of the workbook. You can download it now. What you’re gonna do is you’re gonna print it off. You’re gonna sit with it. So you can come back to the replay on this if you need to, but you’re gonna sit with your thoughts, stuff that you’re gonna learn here. Just kind of absorb it. Take notes.

John Clendenning [00:30:18]:
Make some ideas. You don’t need to download this and write in it yet, but what you’re gonna do is use this as your guide to work your way through, planning your growth and marketing efforts for for 2025. So where’s the opportunity? Well, if you have a clear plan with goals, targets, I want a second truck on the road, key performance indicators, I want our average job to go from $200 to $350 average job this year. Okay. Well, that’s great. There’s a how are you gonna do that? How many jobs do you average a day? How many workdays a year? There’s 220 workdays Monday to Fridays in the year. Do you work Saturdays, and do you have crews working Sundays as well? Like, what is your goal, and how do you break that down? We reverse engineer that back to how many jobs you need, your average job to meet that goal. If you wanna take your business from 200,000 to 400,000, yeah, it sounds like you just need to double the amount of leads.

John Clendenning [00:31:12]:
That’s not true at all. Leads are meaningless. In fact, you might have the other $200,000 buried in your business right now. You might be database marketing is the missing piece. It might be upping your prices is the missing piece. It might be adding add on services. It might be packaging your services packaging your services into 3 separate packages and letting the customer upsell themselves to a 50% increase in average ticket just by having 3 choices for them and knowing how to present those. Right? There’s a million ways that you can grow your business that has nothing to do with get more leads.

John Clendenning [00:31:44]:
In fact, more leads is typically not the problem. So you wanna generate enough leads to hit your goal and your business growth for sure. But, again, as I said, leads are generally not the the the main core problem. You wanna have a great return on your investment. That’s what we wanna see. So what are your goals for 2025? Have you written them down? If not, write them down right now. Like, what did you do last year? What was your revenue level last year? What was your average month? What was each month? Because if you’re obviously, you know, in the northern part of United States or into Canada, you’ve got seasonal. You’ve got winter where people just hunker down and do less.

John Clendenning [00:32:23]:
How do you market in the winter to keep the lights on, to keep things going? You might not do a $40,000 month that you can do in the middle of the summer and in the fall, but you should be doing 20 to 25,000 then in January, February, March. When it’s slow, how do you do that? Well, you double down on your marketing. You don’t hide away. You do more. And it builds that momentum, and that momentum carries forward into the spring, the summer, the fall, and that’s how you grow your business. Right? So you set goals. And as Brian Tracy says, success is goals. All else is commentary.

John Clendenning [00:32:57]:
So we wanna make sure that we’re setting our goals. So with no direction, you’re dead in the water. Right? You need to have a direction and you need to have wind in your sails. You need to have momentum. Momentum comes from marketing. One pole in the water, 2 poles in the water, 5 poles in the water, 10 poles in the water, 20 poles in the water. Every one of them is a standalone marketing event. They can tie together and create that that congealed, comprehensive marketing program, and outreach.

John Clendenning [00:33:28]:
But it all starts with making sure that you have multiple poles in the water to get that wind in your sail. So Harvard did a study. I always love this. I love the sharing this one every year. So in 1979, they interviewed the grads to see who had a goal. This is grad people’s graduating people graduating Harvard Business School. Right? So Ivy League University, one of the best in the world, 84% had no specific goals. They took a course.

John Clendenning [00:33:58]:
They spent tens, 100 of 1,000 of dollars and had no idea. They had no specific goal. I just wanna get a job in my field. 13% had a goal for their life and their career, but they hadn’t written them down. They just had them. And 3% had clear written goals and plans to accomplish them. Right. That was the breakdown of the class.

John Clendenning [00:34:19]:
What was the result? They met back up with these people 20 years later. The 13% of the class who had goals who had goals were earning, on average, twice as much as the 84% that hadn’t thought of their goals, hadn’t written them down, hadn’t made a plan. That’s staggering. But even more staggering, the 3% who had clear written goals were earning on average 10 times as much as the rest of them put together. That’s how much written goals matter. And it doesn’t mean you’re gonna accomplish the goals. It means that you wrote them down, you have a plan, you have a path, and you can now adjust. So one of my favorite phrases actually on the wall over top of the, the monitors is ready, fire, aim.

John Clendenning [00:35:09]:
Not ready, aim, then fire, ready, fire, massive and perfect action. Aim, fire, aim, fire, aim, fire. And eventually you’re aiming at the bull’s eye every single time, but not the first time. So creating goals helps you create that that aim. So let’s set some clear goals. You need to have written goals. You need to set a minimum of 1 year. I’m not a big fan of 5 year goals, 10 year goals.

John Clendenning [00:35:37]:
1 year, 3 years out is sort of the bigger picture. 1 year is where you’re going to go by this date, December 27, 2025. Where do you want to be? What what happened to your business? Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. If everything went absolutely smoothly, talk to yourself 1 year from now. What happened in your business? How much did it grow? What did you get out of the truck? If you’re in the truck, did you buy a new truck? Are you fully wrapped vans, branding yourself in the marketplace? Like, do you have radio ads going because you’ve got 3, 4 crews on the road? Like, what have you done to expand the business? What what does it look like? What does your lifestyle look like? Are you on holidays at Disney with your family because you can afford it without worrying about the slower winter months? You’ve saved up more than enough. Like, what picture what this looks like. Those are your goals.

John Clendenning [00:36:36]:
Put the write them down. Where do you wanna be? Because then we’re gonna work our way backwards and figure out how to get there. Right? So you must have a stopping point at the beginning of every year and the end of each quarter to reflect on how you did based on what you set for your goals and where you’re going so you can adjust. So it’s not just once a year and go, oh, didn’t make that. Let me do that again. Right. It’s no different than New Year’s resolutions. People don’t set.

John Clendenning [00:36:58]:
They set renewed resolutions and then they fail on them 99% of the time within the first couple of weeks because there is no accountability. They haven’t set proper goals. They haven’t set themselves up for success. They don’t know what they’re going to do to achieve them. They just came with a pie and sky idea. Right. We don’t want that. We want to make sure that we we we actually set ourselves up.

John Clendenning [00:37:20]:
So what is your revenue target? How much is that per month? Have you done the math? Grab a calculator. How many jobs will that require? So if you know what monthly it’s going to be now, how many jobs is that? If you know that certain months of the year have are 20%, 30%, 40% lower than other months of the year, have you got that mapped out? Are you using Excel or a spreadsheet or, you know, have you built a table? Have you just, you know, paper and pen? Have you written that out? We’re business owners. We gotta figure this stuff out. How many jobs will that require? And what is your average job value right now? Like, you should know that number hard and fast. If I say, what’s your average job number? And you don’t say 346, 413,522. And last month, it was 512 and, you know, blah blah blah. 3 months ago, we were 608. We got we’re going to get back to that blah blah blah.

John Clendenning [00:38:11]:
You don’t know those numbers well. How how are you managing the business? You’re kind of just dead in the water. You’ve got to know what your average job residentially, commercially, separate them out. What’s your average carpet cleaning job versus your average upholstery cleaning job? What’s your average client worth? How many how often does your average client come back? Right. Some people never show up again. Some people repeat twice a year. If you manage that over a 5 year window, just 3 years or 5 years, whichever one you wanna use, and go back and have a track of everybody from 5 years from today or this month. What you’ll know, what your average client is worth.

John Clendenning [00:38:51]:
How many did you do? How many repeated? What was the average ticket across in like individual people versus individual jobs? Right. So you might have an average job ticket of $350, but an average, client value in that 3 year window of $900 because some of your clients have come back 3, 4 times because you have good marketing. Do you know that? So what is your average repeat rate and attrition rate? These are all good numbers. So say, for example, here’s just some good math. You wanted to get to $550,000 just over half a $1,000,000. Well, did you know divided by 12, that is $45,800 per month? If your average job is $375, you need a 122 jobs a month to hit that monthly goal, to hit that annual goal. So you know when you’re on track or not, either you can you can do less jobs if you take this number up to $425. How do you do that? Well, you have packages, you have upsells, you have you train your technicians on adding on value added services, not not scamming anybody, but, hey, while I’m here, would you like to get this other work done for a bit of a savings? Right? There’s a value to the customer if they say yes.

John Clendenning [00:40:07]:
Right? So a win win situation. So you can up your average job and therefore you need less of them to get to that total. You could do more jobs, more volume at less ticket. That means you need more employees and more work to get to that total. So do you know your profitability in these numbers? Right? Knowing all of that as well. So what is your average conversion rate from inquiry to book jobs? Do you know if somebody is a repeat? Is it a 100%? Is it 95%? Is there times that you lose them and why do you lose them? If they’re a referral, is that 90% is that 80%? Are you able to influence the referral person that came endorsed from the customer? So and then if it’s cold traffic, there’s there’s there’s obviously warm traffic, referred traffic, and then cold traffic. People that have never reached out to you before. That number though, the cold traffic, what is your average booking? Usually it’s about 50% or less.

John Clendenning [00:41:05]:
And a lot of people tell us, oh, yeah. I book it, like, 80% of the calls that come in. I I book the calls. We listen to every single one of them, run the math and go, no, you don’t. In fact, you book, like, 95% of your repeats. You only book in about 75% of your referrals, and you’re booking 20% of your cold calls. And you’ve missed, like, 15% of them that you just never answer. So knowing your numbers knows where to find the holes to fix.

John Clendenning [00:41:34]:
Right? So what you wanna do is you wanna divide your call target by your conversion rate. Right? So if we know that we book at 50% and we go back a little bit and we know that we need a 122 jobs and we book at 50% across all of our clients. Some of them are repeats and referrals at different percentages and some are cold traffic. But all in, we’ve run our our general math at 50%. As an example, if you know that, then you know that we need 244 people, right? 244 leads. Average conversion rate was 50%. You need to have 244 inquiries from repeats, referrals and cold traffic to hit your goals. How the heck are you going to get 244 inquiries? Now you’ve got a plan.

John Clendenning [00:42:22]:
Now we can work on that problem, right? So where you want to go is carpet cleaner marketing masters.com/2025 Worksheet. Right? The other one is workbook. This is worksheet. We’ll talk more about this in the next training. So we’re not gonna pause too long in this right now. We’re actually we’re not gonna go to that at all right now, but, we’re gonna go a little bit deeper into the math of this and the marketing campaigns and stuff like that. But this is a way to really do what we just did on a calculator we built. So you’re gonna make a copy.

John Clendenning [00:42:48]:
You’ll see at the top of the page, kind of up above this area, it teaches you how to make a copy. So you can make a copy and type in your own numbers and play with it and make it yours. So go grab that. Grab the workbook. You have stuff, homework to do before next time. Right? So we’re gonna set our goals. What is your goal for 2025? And how many inquiries will you need monthly to get there? Now we’ve got some numbers in our head. Right? Hopefully, you wrote something down.

John Clendenning [00:43:11]:
You’ll come back to this, but hopefully, you’ve thought this through. So with that, now we got to talk about who we’re going to who we’re going to message. Right. Because the fundamentals of marketing now apply. Now we know where we want to go, who who’s going to get us there, who are the customers are going to get us there because we’ve got to know what market. That’s the who. We got to know what message. What are we saying? And we got to know what media, what do they look at? What are the different places that our ideal person looks to to find a carpet cleaning company? You know, is it low income who need, you know, dog pee taken out of the carpet and they only look in the coupon clipper? Right.

John Clendenning [00:43:56]:
We need to see how that works. Or is it, you know, people on Golf Course Road, maybe the house manager of the of the the the largest state and they’re looking to maintain everything, keep it smelling nice, looking nice because of the big labs that the the the homeowners have and stuff like that. They need the upholstery clean once every month or 2. They need the area rugs taken out and cleaned regularly, and they’re maintaining the home. And every now and then every, you know, 2 or 3 months, there’s massive parties, and everything needs to be prepped ahead of time and then cleaned up afterwards. And where do they look for the average when they’re trying to find a quality reputable company that’s not gonna screw them over because they’re the house manager and they’re on the hook. You need to do this right. Right? So they’re gonna be looking at referral sources.

John Clendenning [00:44:44]:
They’re gonna be calling interior designers. They’re gonna be, you know, trying to find who somebody else recommends and get a recommendation, not just wing it. Right? 2 totally different crowds of people. You can’t be both. Right? So who is your ideal customer? You wanna figure out what their pains and frustration, fears, goals, desires, and dreams are. Because if you know who your ideal customer is residentially, if you know who your ideal customer is commercially, you’re not just trying to, you know, shotgun market everybody. You’re gonna have a message that resonates with them. Are you stressed out, busy, career oriented, you know, homeowner, got kids and dogs and and all other kinds of stuff to take care of? And the last thing you need to worry about is finding a new carpet cleaner every single time you need carpet clean because they all seem to be going out of business and, you know, just offering discount low end fly by night services.

John Clendenning [00:45:37]:
We get you. We offer we’ve been in town for 25 years. We offer a premium cleaning. We’re the most referred, and we offer the best guarantees in the industry. You will get your carpets cleaned properly by us or you don’t pay. Right? We might not be the cheapest. We’re not the most expensive, but we’re guaranteed the be the best. You can talk to the right person with the right message if you know who the right person is.

John Clendenning [00:46:01]:
So we talk about demographics. Right? For a lot of us, not all of us, you might be different on this, but your average your your ideal customer is a homeowner. They tend to be 35 to 55. Over 55, they might be downsizing. They might be in condos. They might be cleaner. They might not need you that often. Maybe.

John Clendenning [00:46:21]:
Right? 35 to 55 is sort of that sweet spot. We earn most of our income in our forties. Right? So a little bit more discretionary income, family growing, messier. Right? Typically female, occasionally male, married with 2 to 3 kids. Again, that should be annual household income of our ideal client depending on the marketplace is not 65,000. The annual household income in fact, I should change that slide right now because that’s I’ll I’ll change it afterwards. But it’s probably closer to about a 120 to 200,000 depending on what part of the country you’re in. Right? That’s the annual household dual income of our ideal client and it’s gone up in the last 4 years.

John Clendenning [00:47:02]:
The average income of the ideal client because the middle class, the 70, 80, 90, a 100000 household income crowd has less discretionary income for cleaning services. It’s just a natural fact. Their truck payments, gas payments, food, medicine, everything has gone up. Well, maybe we might get a bit of a break in the price of, metformins and things like that, but still family oriented, reliable. Most of them own pets, cats, dogs. That’s good to know. Therefore, on your social media, are you talking about pets? Do you have stories of other customers? You know, how you solve pet accidents? People love their pets sometimes more than they love their children. It sounds funny, but, you know, they’re less mad at their pets than their children And, you know, they care about them.

John Clendenning [00:47:49]:
And so you don’t talk about the, you know, the oh, yeah, the, you know, dogs and cats, they ruin carpets. I would hate to have them in my house. I don’t have any. That’s not the conversation you have with your customers. They’re not calling you back ever again. Right? They love their pets. Hey, I understand the old girl’s got, you know, a little bit of some issues and stuff like that. No worries.

John Clendenning [00:48:07]:
We can get it cleaned up. I’ll leave you a bottle of this stuff. The, you know, the enzyme as well. You can treat those spots if you need us. Yeah. No, that’s that’s really common. You know, we’re here to make sure that, you know, you can enjoy the old girl without without worrying about, you know, the mess that they make. Here’s a here’s a tip sheet on how to, you know, help train them to stay out of the, you know, put up gates and stuff like that and stay out of the the the area rugs and the things that, you know, that are a little bit more difficult to get the urine out of.

John Clendenning [00:48:33]:
So, you know, here’s a bit of a story around that. And you teach them, you help them, you become part of their world. They’re not going to somewhere else now that is offering $99 quick clean. Right? So they take pride in their home. They like to help others. They expect the same returns. You’re gonna be very helpful, like gardening and crafting and, you know, talk about those things when you oh my god. You have a beautiful garden, ma’am.

John Clendenning [00:48:57]:
You know, that kind of thing. You know, again, ideal customer. Talk about these types of things as well. Show happy customer stories of people just like them. They take an interest in the community. Should you be joining community events and charity events? Your ideal customer has an interest in the community. Are you helping to sponsor things in the community? If you are, you’re being seen, even silent auctions and stuff like that. If you’re not, you you you you look tone deaf.

John Clendenning [00:49:24]:
Right? Their pains and frustrations, they can’t get somebody on the phone. Everybody’s go, oh, just put my, you know, hit myself booking button. I don’t want to talk to anybody. Just book yourself. The ideal customer doesn’t necessarily just want to book themselves. As an example, if they’re repeat, maybe you can give them a way through. But a lot of people want to ask questions and understand why you over somebody else and they’re not going to get that from a self booking button. Right.

John Clendenning [00:49:49]:
So, you know, they’re too busy to deal with it. They’re worried about their situation. They want to make sure it’s done right. They don’t know enough about the subject matter. Their fear of being ripped off, paying too much, having faulty workmanship. That’s why they read reviews and all of that kind of stuff. So hand them more of that. When they reach out to you, follow-up with them with even more happy customer stories, things like that.

John Clendenning [00:50:12]:
Being inconvenience, trying to coordinate the cleaners, they don’t, you know, they don’t wanna be the cause of a disaster in the house, and they wanna know that they can they can afford the bill. So no surprises. That doesn’t mean you give quotes on the phone because how are you giving a quote site unseen? Right? So you wanna give estimates. You wanna come out and do on-site quotes. You wanna, you know, things like that. How are you structuring your company for this ideal customer? Not the average customer, the ideal customer. Right? What are their goals and desires? Taking care of their family. They want to preserve their wealth.

John Clendenning [00:50:47]:
Maybe not more income and wealth, but you know, I just wanna preserve it. You know, do they wanna live in a nicer, more luxurious luxurious home, or do they wanna preserve this home because the market’s changing around them? Right? Do they wanna drive a nicer car? Do they wanna keep the car lasting longer? Maybe that’s why they wanted the interior clean. And you can have that conversation with them. Spend more time with family, have respect to their friends and family, peace of mind. So if you can see Joe Jones through Joe Jones’ eyes, then you can sell what Joe Jones buys. So you might not be your average ideal customer. So don’t put your own brain in your marketing. Don’t put your own sentiments and feelings into your packaging and pricing and services.

John Clendenning [00:51:30]:
You’re not the ideal customer. Your ideal customer might be somebody who earns double your income. Doctors and lawyers and and, you know, politicians and, you know, accountants and, you know, engineering firm owners and and and. Right. If that’s your ideal customer, that may not be you, but that that means if you can see them through their own eyes, what they care about more, and talk to them about that. Right? So you wanna craft your message once you figure out who your ideal person is. Now you can try and craft your message. Why should somebody choose your business and do business with you versus your competition? Right.

John Clendenning [00:52:09]:
This is in the workbook, but write it down. What makes you unique? What is your compelling sales proposition? Right? Unique is fine. You can be the only carpet cleaners that dress up as clowns. That’s unique. Nothing compelling about that. But you could be the only compelling, the only carpet cleaner in town that guarantees, a 200% money back guarantee. If you’re not happy with the cleaning, we’ll come back and clean it within 24 hours or less. No questions asked.

John Clendenning [00:52:33]:
And then you honor that. Right? Domino’s, you know, 30 minutes or it’s free was their their hallmark for, like, there was their slogan for for years that built an entire empire. Then they got rid of it. They didn’t need it anymore. They built brand recognition. And it was never about great pizza. It tastes like cardboard. The box might taste better than the pizza that was in it.

John Clendenning [00:52:53]:
But it was there quickly. If you needed a meal and you didn’t feel like cooking, food was on the table in 30 minutes. Right. That was their promise. So, why should somebody do business with you? Is it safe, effective, safe for children and pets, guaranteed the best results, guaranteed to make your carpets last longer? Blah. Like, what is it? Like, what do you do that’s different? How can you carve yourself out against everybody else? Because if you can’t, you’re a commodity. And what benefits do you offer, that your customer will resonate with? Right. So warranty claim assistance, if it’s brand new carpets, You meet and honor their warranty.

John Clendenning [00:53:30]:
If, you know, protection to prevent spills and stains in future and traffic lane problems. Do you talk do you invest in, you know, check out their vacuum cleaner and give them tips on on setting their beater bar so it’s not so deep in the carpet that it’s grinding the carpet. You know more about carpets than they do. You need to set your beater bar up so it just tip bounces the tips of the carpets as an example. Are they using a vacuum cleaner that just spits the dirt out into the air? Are you are you helping like, what are the some of the benefits you can provide? Are you providing your own bottle of spot remover refillable for life every time that that you’re in the home? What are things that the the customer can find value in, and how do you layer that into your business? Right? How do you layer that into your messages on your sales letters and postcards and door hangers and and and and. Right? So safe, natural, eco friendly. People want they don’t want harsh chemicals. They don’t want toxic products.

John Clendenning [00:54:22]:
They don’t want, you know, things that are banned by the EPA and or should be banned by the EPA. They wanna know that it’s safe and natural, but still effective. 100 100% guaranteed satisfaction or it’s free. We can’t just say that we do a great job. How do you word that in a way that’s different than all of your competitors? Becomes your risk reversal guarantee, becomes your number one marketing position done right. Highly trained technicians bonded and insured trustworthy pictures of them on your website. On the way over, you send a you know, the technician sends a text message with a picture of himself and and things like that. Has a business card with his picture on it that he hands out at the door.

John Clendenning [00:54:55]:
Like, do you have that? Can you show that in your in your messaging that we only hire, you know, bonded and insured technicians, do a full criminal background and drug test on them, and you will be introduced to your technician before he even shows up. And you’ll know who he is, who’s coming to your home. Right? Your phones and chat are answered live during business hours and emails are responded to within 2, 3 minutes or less. You have honest pricing. So you have packages, no sales gimmicks. You’re not not about having to give a quote, not about being low. You just have honest pricing. It’s not fly by night, bait and switch or anything like that, but you’re also not trying to run so low.

John Clendenning [00:55:31]:
Well, I’ll never bait and switch. Well, the bait and switch guys bait and switch because their prices are too low to ever earn income. I’ve seen other people going, I I’m never gonna use bait and switch. But you’re you’re starting at the price that they that they bait and switch from because they can’t earn earn enough money to, you know, pay for the longevity of the company. The vans eventually rust out and nobody’s got money for it to repair the vans and the equipment falls apart and all that kind of stuff. And they’re buying stuff on on buy and sell and swap because they can’t afford to lease something better, newer, whatever because their pricing is too low and because they don’t wanna be the bait and switcher, but they’re matching the bait and switches base price. That doesn’t make any sense. Right? So you wanna make sure that your price can be justified with education.

John Clendenning [00:56:11]:
Education based marketing always works. So can you make the case for same day? Right. Cleaning or estimates. Right. Say money saving offers could be bundle and save. Get your carpets and upholstery done at the same time and save 20%. You know, leave the job site cleaner than, you know, squeaky clean. Do you use, like, leaf blowers and blow off the front porch in the walkway so that, you know, you can actually say to the customer, hey, not only will I’m I’m here to take the dirt out of your home, I won’t be bringing any dirt in.

John Clendenning [00:56:44]:
I’ll switch into my indoor shoes when I do the cleaning. I’m gonna put a mat down, roll out the red carpet, do all these kinds of things. But you’re also gonna notice when I go to leave, you’re gonna hear a noise because I’m gonna be blowing off the front porch and the walkway because I wanna make sure even the next person who arrives here isn’t bringing dirt into your home as well. That’s how dedicated we are to making sure that we clean your house leave your house cleaner than we started. That’s what you’re gonna wipe up the you know, if you spill and dribble in the front entranceway or on the hardwood floor, you’re gonna put matting down throughout the whole house so that you’re not leaving anything worse off even the stuff that you’re not there to clean. You’re not leaving anything worse off than than than before you arrived just because you came in to clean the carpet, the upholstery, or the mattresses, or whatever. Right? So you wanna have those great guarantees as well. So, what’s your message? Think about it.

John Clendenning [00:57:29]:
Why are you different? How do you stand out? What can you say about your guarantee? What can you say about your services? What can you say about your 22 step process, your 17 step process, your 3 separate packages to serve, you know, so there’s always a, you know, a package to serve you best. You know, all of those things. What are they? Have you called the top your top 10 competitors, mystery shopped all of them, asked all the questions that the average dumb client’s gonna ask on the phone, and figure out how they fit into the marketplace so that you know how you can fit in around them. How can you stand out in a crowded marketplace? You need to know what that message is. And then you can look at the media because now you know who you’re going to market to and what message you’re going to market to. Now, it’s pretty easy to figure out where because where do they collect? Where do they go? Look, that’s where you want to be. You don’t want to be everywhere. You wanna be where your ideal customer’s already looking.

John Clendenning [00:58:23]:
Right? So if you’ve got that right, now you’ve got your marketing messages out in the marketplace, why you’re different, you’re gonna stand out, you’re gonna generate more inquiries and more phone calls and now you need to have good scripts that follow-up, tell that story. You need to have in home service experiences built out. You need to follow-up campaigns. You wanna market them from the moment they call to the moment you show up so that in between there, you don’t they don’t have, you know, booker’s remorse. So it’s almost like buyer’s remorse where they they they cancel out of your schedule. If you got a lot of cancellations, it’s because you’re not indoctrinating them well enough to make them wanna keep that job. They think they’ve made a bad decision. So you gotta figure out why and how you’re gonna deal with that.

John Clendenning [00:59:01]:
Part of that is helping things convert better. So part of it is telling a better story. So your website is still the hub of your storytelling. Sure. Instagram is one of the best places to put before and after pictures and and in the image gallery of your company. Facebook is one of the best places to tell stories of happy customers and share out some stuff. Twitter and Pinterest and LinkedIn and all that have their place. Google Maps is a good place to create posts and put images for the day the person is looking on that very specific day for a carpet cleaner and they see you and or they they’ve been referred to you and they find you and you’ve given them some context in your Google Maps listing.

John Clendenning [00:59:39]:
Sure. All of those things apply. But your website is the hub of your storytelling. And all all links lead back to your website. Your website should link to all of your other socials and properties and stuff like that. So if your website is the hub and you’re when you go and meet commercial referral partners, you meet commercial cleaning, like, maybe a church, maybe a old folks home, maybe condo hallways, whatever it is, you’re gonna leave some information behind. You’re gonna talk them up. But what you’re gonna do as soon as you walk out the door, they’re gonna Google you.

John Clendenning [01:00:10]:
They’re gonna look at your website. They’re gonna look at your Google listing. They’re gonna look at maybe your social media. What is their where do they go look? But they’re gonna end up on your website, and your website has better convert. Right? So is your web website set up to convert visitors into inquiries or leads? Have you got it set up where the phone number is up in the upper right corner? Your logo clicked on takes you back to home. You almost don’t even need the home in the navigation anymore. Everybody knows to click the logo to go back home. Are you telling your risk reversal guarantee? Do you have social proof, like the pop ups in the corner? Do you have the ability for them to fill out a form or start a chat? Like, all of the things.

John Clendenning [01:00:49]:
Have you built your website even just before you even scroll down? Have you told a complete story? Right? Is it authentic? Do you have real pictures? Right? See, organic ranking should be considered a core asset of your business. Paid ads can be turned off. And as soon as they’re turned off, you’re invisible. You never existed because the person who looked yesterday is probably not looking today, and they’re definitely not looking in a week from now. You only influence the people that paid that that showing looking today because you paid today. That’s it. Right? Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t because there’s people you need to influence that never make it down to organic. But your website and Google Maps is the organic side of your digital marketing.

John Clendenning [01:01:33]:
And offline, your door hangers and, you know, your referral partners and all is the organic side of the offline part of your business. You need to work those. Those are the assets. Those those build you build them slowly over time and they pay you for years years to come. They become the asset when you go to sell the business. You can sell your business for more because you’re ranking better than anybody else. Right? So need to consider all of that. Oops.

John Clendenning [01:02:03]:
So is your website set up to convert? Does it have authentic images? We see this all the time. Babies lying on carpets and families and dogs sitting smiling are not authentic images. It you know, stock photography does not sell anybody anything. You need to be using authentic images of you, yourself, your team, why they should choose you, what it’s going to look like to have you in their home. If you do authentic images, your your your website will convert twice as much instantly because you’re telling the real story. Does it speak to your target avatar? Are you addressing the fears and frustrations we just talked about? Are you at saying, hey, I’m a homeowner too. I understand. I’ve got I’ve raised kids.

John Clendenning [01:02:42]:
I’ve got this. I I I I rescue dogs, you know, whatever. I fully understand, you know, where you’re coming from. That’s why I built my business to be dog and kid friendly. Blah blah blah. What does that mean? And we do this and this and this and this differently. We guarantee this and this and this. Right? You can tell a different story.

John Clendenning [01:02:59]:
Does your does your website include video elements? Right? You should introduce people, like, at the top. If there’s a face picture of yourself right below, it should be a video. Some people like to actually have a video of themselves welcoming people to their website, a video on their carpet cleaning page, a video on their, you know, all the pages around where they’re they’re just welcoming, you know, hey. Thanks so much for stopping by the carpet cleaning page. Let me tell you a little bit about our carpet cleaning services. Fairly unique in the industry. We have a 22 step process, blah blah blah. That video, you can say it on the website too, but that video is gonna get people to stay on the website longer.

John Clendenning [01:03:31]:
It’s gonna start giving nurturing them and warming them up to your personality and character. They’re gonna make decisions as we do as humans based on that that they wouldn’t have made if they didn’t see you and hear you. So you can have all of that kind of stuff going on, but even just a little bit of it makes makes them watch the video. And the longer they watch the video, the longer they’re on your website. The longer they’re on your website, then, a, the more they’re influenced to buy from you. But, b, Google’s watching that and the longer somebody sits on a website, the better your website ranks for that page, for that service, for those terms. Does it showcase your online reviews? Right. Are you syndicating feedback and reviews from around the web onto your website that they click on and it links right back to that review so it’s authentic.

John Clendenning [01:04:17]:
Again, authenticity is key. Does it make it easy for them to take action? Every time they scroll down the page, are they finding more call to action buttons? So are we treating our clients like goldfish? They turn around, oh, where am I? I’m lost. Nope. Here’s a button right here for you. Click on that. Oh, I get to call this guy. Right? You gotta play those games a little bit. Does it have the basics in order? Phone number, upper right corner, you know, ensuring that you have web forms that customers can fill out.

John Clendenning [01:04:42]:
There are some customers who just wanna fill a form out. John, when customers fill out a form, they don’t convert as well. Yep. Does that mean taking the forms off can force them to send you a text or pick up the phone? Nope. That’s a person who wants to fill out a form. What do they do instead? They hit the back button and find somebody else. Oh, John. My phone calls and my text messages are are, you know, converting way better now.

John Clendenning [01:05:07]:
Thank you. Are you getting more of them? Well, I don’t know. I didn’t check my numbers. Okay. Well, if we look at it, you just have less inquiries. Why? Because all the people that want to fill up forms didn’t find a form. So you got to think through the psychology of people. You can’t force them to do things they don’t want to do.

John Clendenning [01:05:21]:
Some people want to fill out a form. So what we do, we have smart forms. So when they fill out a form, the business owner’s phone rings during business hours, the office rings, the office picks it up, the robo voice says, hey, missus Jones is interested in carpet cleaning and upholstery cleaning. Press 1 to connect with her now. They press 1, her phone rings, and it says right on her phone, you know, ABC carpet cleaning. Oh my god. I just filled out a form on their website. If she’s not shy, she takes the phone call, speed to lead, you book the job.

John Clendenning [01:05:46]:
You got a 263% higher chance of booking that job. Right? Aberdeen Research Council did that those every single year. They do those studies and determine all of the stuff based on, you know, hundreds of thousands of data points. So it is the faster you can talk to a lead, the better chance you are booking them. If she doesn’t take the call because she’s shy or you don’t take the call because it’s after hours or you’re busy on the phone, your office girl’s busy on 2 other calls, can’t take the call, it’s totally fine. They get a text message. Hey. Thanks so much for filling out the form on our website.

John Clendenning [01:06:17]:
We’ll get back to you soon as we can we can. In the meantime, I got a couple of questions for you and automation starts talking to them. What does that mean they don’t do? They don’t go and look at the other websites. You’ve started the conversation. They feel good about it. Right? And off they go. Do you have credibility like elements of Better Business Bureau, Angie’s List, Chamber of Commerce, things like that? Are the calls to action on each page speak to the customer? Tell them exactly what to do next. Are you leveraging offers? Again, doesn’t have to be discount, but new client offers, you know, book more than one service and save, things like that, like, all that kind of stuff, so that they the customer absolutely knows that there is ways that they can bundle more and save and that kind of idea.

John Clendenning [01:07:00]:
Are you giving them opportunity for two way chat? So I like chat to text where it ends up right on their cell phone. They can walk away from the website and they don’t have to sit on the website and have a chat. They don’t have to leave it open in their browser. It is actually a chat that they can go away, come back, and they didn’t, oh, crap. I closed that. Now where is that, you know, kind of idea? So two way chat works really well when it’s done as a chat to text. Are you leveraging marketing automation and SMS and email marketing and phone calls and reminding yourself when to get back in touch with people again so you don’t have to remember manually? There’s a system in place that reminds you if you got all that going on. So so oops.

John Clendenning [01:07:42]:
Go back. Carpet cleaning website done properly. Then again, stick around to the end. You can get a copy of this guide. You can read right through it. But where things should be on the website, how it should be laid out, there is actually heat map formula behind this, constantly being tested. We’ve got hundreds of client websites that we’re constantly testing what’s working versus what’s not, what what’s changing in human psychology, what people expect to see where and when. Font sizes have gotten bigger because people tend to wanna see bigger fonts, not just even on their computers, but, they are not just on their cell phones, but on their computers as well.

John Clendenning [01:08:17]:
Things like that used to be that you’d pack as much into the screen as possible. It looked like a brochure. Now it’s gotta tell a proper story. It’s gotta read down the page in the psychology of where they’re of of what they’re thinking, the questions they’ve already got in their head. Are you answering them 1 by 1 by 1 down the page? Things like that. If you’re doing that right, then then you’re moving in the right direction. So look at your website right now. Pull it up.

John Clendenning [01:08:37]:
Bam. Just go over to another tab in your browser if you’re watching this on a computer. And is it built to tell your story? Do you start scrolling down and, hey, what’s in it for them? Why they should choose you? Who you are? What you stand for? These are all parts of the story you need to be telling right at the beginning. What services you then provide? What customers say about you and those services? And then they can click deeper to learn more, which teaches Google’s algorithm that Google only ranks pages based on 1 or 2 major like, one topic, 1 pillar content, and, you know, 1 or 2 sort of topical authority, not even keywords anymore, but topical authority clusters. So your page can be ranking for cleaning services, but your carpet cleaning page should be the only one ranking for carpet cleaning, your upholstery cleaning page, only one ranking for upholstery cleaning, things like that. But you they’ve all got all got to tell a story in pictures and in words that is authentic. And it’s got to also tell the right story that Google can read the 1,000 1500 words per page, which is about the average you need on a page nowadays for rankings to happen. You need to have, the right schema and the coding on your website for Google to bounce through and know what it what it means, all of that kind of stuff.

John Clendenning [01:09:54]:
So even even prior to that, is your website got the right headline? Are you saying a 100% satisfaction guarantee? Does that mean your competitors are 90%, 80%, or are they also a 100%? Is that really the best message, or is there something unique to you? Is there a risk reversal guarantee that you can put that is very unique to you? Are you the only one that is certified by the local Asthma and Allergy Association or something like that? Is there anything that’s, you know, that you can say that’s unique about the clients that you target? So what are your takeaways so far? Like, just let’s take a quick little regroup here. We got about 15 more minutes, so let’s just take a pause and see where we’re at. Have we learned anything so far that’s gonna help us set these goals? That’s gonna make a plan. We need a better website because it’s the hub. We need to have the right message to the right people. Where do they hang out? So once we know our ideal customer, we know we can start thinking of are they on Facebook? Do they are they in certain groups? Are they where do they hang out on offline? You know, is there certain types of businesses and establishments that they go to regular that you could have a conversation with the business owner and maybe do a sort of a joint venture deal and things like that so they can promote you, you can promote them, and and those kinds of things. So there’s once you know these answers, now marketing starts to make a lot more sense. Right? So, unconverted leads is one of the biggest challenges.

John Clendenning [01:11:15]:
Right? Because 60, 56 percent of inbound leads do not convert. They that’s somebody who filled out a form, started a chat, and didn’t convert. 90% of web forms tend to fail to convert because you don’t understand the long term game. It’s not about the web form landing a customer tomorrow. The long term game is you’ve just somebody just raised their hand. I’m one of these crazy people that buys carpet cleaning from somebody. Might not be you this time, maybe next time, maybe this time. Might not even buy it right now.

John Clendenning [01:11:46]:
I’m kind of shy and I’m just poking around going, maybe I need my carpets cleaned. Can you answer these questions? Right? Does that mean they’re bad people? No. That means they’re one of the few people that actually pays for carpet cleaning. You want to know who they are and you want to build a database of leads that you market to until they either buy or unsubscribe. Right? So leads that are not followed up within 5 to 15 minutes go cold. So if they filled out a form, 5 minutes, period. Right? 15 is too much. The average customer must be followed up with 5 to 7 times before they book.

John Clendenning [01:12:15]:
Are you following up 5 to 7 times, or is that why your web forms don’t book? Think about it. Right? Today’s customers prefer to interact with text message versus phone call and email. We know that. So if you give them that option to text and walk away from your website and still get text, you can have that conversation over a couple of days with them. They can get distracted and come back to it. So think of it that way. What we’re talking about is the difference between lead generation and lead nurturing. Lead generation is just finding people that are interested.

John Clendenning [01:12:47]:
Right. Lead nurturing is staying in touch with them and warming them up over days, weeks, sometimes months before they become a customer. If you don’t do that, they go somewhere else. If you do that, you can now double your business. Another way that you can double your business in 2025, nurture your leads better, have a system in place that does that for you on autopilot. Right? So what, you know, what do we define as follow-up steps? What what have you defined as yours? How many initial touches before you put them into long term nurture? What forms? How many are phone calls, emails, SMS? Do you send direct mail to somebody who inquired? Have you figured out how to get their name, address and phone number? That’s all available data and the right sources. We’ve got data plans where we could find out anybody who’s searching for carpet cleaners right now in your marketplace that didn’t click on anything. Anybody that landed on your website and left that didn’t click on anything, not just run an ad to them by putting a Facebook pixel on them, but knowing their name, their address and their phone number like that data is available.

John Clendenning [01:13:54]:
Now you’re not you can’t call them. You really you can mail them. You can send a piece of direct mail. There is ways that you can ethically email them and stuff like that or or or put messages in front of them, but all of that data is available in today’s day and age. Are you using any of it? But are you following up with the ones that you do know, like, when they, you know, when they pick up the phone? Hey. Thanks, man. I’m just looking here. Is this the best number in case we get disconnected? Awesome.

John Clendenning [01:14:17]:
I’ve got blah blah. 222-777-3555. Alright. Is that the yep. Perfect. Okay. Now is that, is that your cell number or or a landline? Might as well ask that question. Cool.

John Clendenning [01:14:28]:
What information can I get for you today? Great. And what research have you done on us so far? Have that conversation. If they’re not ready to book, can I send you an email with all the information we just discussed so you have it handy? I’ll also give you the 3 questions you should ask any other carpet cleaner in the area so even if you don’t go with us, you’re definitely finding a quality operator and not some fly by night company is gonna make the carpets worse and look just as dirty in 30 days. Oh, yeah. I don’t want that, Tom. Yeah. Yeah. What’s that email address? I’ll send all that information over.

John Clendenning [01:14:54]:
Now you got their email to drip on them happy customer stories. Pick up the phone and call them in a day or 2. Hey. It’s been, you know, 2 days. Maybe you do it 2 days. Maybe you do it one day. Maybe you do it 3, but have a plan. Right? And then monitor the plan.

John Clendenning [01:15:06]:
How many people, when you call them, book. What is your booking percentage? Try it a day earlier. Try it a day later. Try a different message. Now you’re creating numbers that can explode your business. Can you do that while you’re out in the truck trying to answer the phone in traffic and, standing in front of a customer and missing the phone calls? Absolutely not. Wanna double your business? Get somebody to answer your phones. If you’re out in the truck at all, hire a phone somebody to answer your phone.

John Clendenning [01:15:30]:
Stay at home mom. We’ve got call center that we refer that I used for 20 years. Rachel and the girls at the call studio, you know, let them know that we sent you. You can you can get a free trial month just to try out their services. They only answer phones for carpet cleaners. That’s all they’ve done for 20 years, and they’re great at it. So, you know, you can book twice as many customers from the exact same leads that are coming in just by having somebody not distracted answering the phones, who just understands how to book and only gets paid when they book. Right? So, yeah.

John Clendenning [01:16:02]:
Again, you wanna maybe do a quote, a site visit, a quote. You wanna continue to follow-up. You wanna lead nurture and lead nurture and lead nurture. So you wanna have a plan in place. Right? You wanna leverage automation to follow-up with web forms within the first two minutes. Right? That’s that, you know, as soon as they fill it out, the phone rings. Right? You wanna automate follow-up. So every prospect gets touched at least 5 times and engage in and gives them the option to engage in two way texting, to download for your pores.

John Clendenning [01:16:31]:
I I say that you’re probably in touch with them 7, 8 times over 2 weeks. And then you put them in the long term nurture where they get touched every 2 weeks to 4 weeks, perpetually, until they unsubscribe or buy from you. It looks like this. It’s just an automation workflow. Every single possible communication source, including Google Messenger website, you name it, all comes into a hub. We call that hub carpet cleaner lead pro. Oops. Let’s load the whole page.

John Clendenning [01:16:59]:
Oops. And show the whole thing. But as an example, lead nurture, this is how the math works. 1 of our clients, this is real data, they are booking at about a 30% cold, inquiry conversion rate. So 70% of the people said no, 30% said yes on the phone. So they would average this was on on average a 164 inquiries per month from all of their sources. If they only had one source, that would be down to 30 inquiries. But because they had organic, Google Maps, paid ads, Facebook ads, directory listings, local authority marketing, social media referral programs, all that digital marketing campaigns out in the marketplace.

John Clendenning [01:17:39]:
They were generating a 164 cold inquiries of new customers, new interested customers, and they’re booking about 30% of them. So they book about 50 jobs. Seems pretty good. Right? Couple trucks on the road. They have their repeat clients, their referral clients, all the ones that come direct, and then these are just the cold ones. So a 100 64 leads, 30%, 50 jobs, 49 jobs. Average job was $325. They made about $16.

John Clendenning [01:18:04]:
Not bad. But once we put in a lead nurture automation, carpet cleaner lead pro, all of a sudden we over doubled the business. Just the cold lead traffic alone. Same 164 leads. Only difference is instead of 30%, they’re booking 45 to 50% within the first couple days because the follow-up, the next day phone call, the next reminder to do that, the next day email, the text message a couple days out, another phone call at a week, happy client stories put all the way through. Now they are booking at about 70%. Some of the people came back within a week or 2 and said, yep, I wanna go with you guys. I’ve checked around.

John Clendenning [01:18:40]:
Well, they were influenced by the lead nurture. But other people, maybe a week later, 2 weeks later, a month later, 2 months later, 3 months later, that made a decision yet. They were just reaching out. Now they’re ready, but you’ve been in touch and stayed in touch. Now they book as well. All back to that original 164 inquiries, say, in September. By December, 70% had booked. 114, not 49.

John Clendenning [01:19:06]:
Still $325 job average. They haven’t changed that. Now they’ve made almost $40,000, not 16. Nothing changed except their ability to nurture the leads. So lead nurture automation makes every lead way more valuable. Hopefully, that makes sense. So key takeaways on that, you wanna make sure you have your lead nurture and conversion math right, and you wanna have it in your marketing plan. And then you wanna know your KPIs.

John Clendenning [01:19:36]:
You wanna know your numbers. Like, again, another one of our clients. We do all of their ROI reporting for our clients. So before looked like this. They were averaging a 35.43 percent conversion rate. Right? This is over months, 303,317 sessions in their Google Analytics, from 2,934 users. That was their bounce rate, organic sessions versus pages versus new users, page drive it. They they’re booking 35%.

John Clendenning [01:20:06]:
Right? 1st quarter on carpet cleaner lead pro, October to December, 367 leads, that’s in a quarter, up their conversion rate to 65%. So 367 leads at 65% is 338 booked jobs. Average ticket, 4 15. Average so the the total they they generated in 1 quarter is $98,000. So the return on investment from organic inquiries, paid traffic, Google Maps traffic, web form fills, all of that that generated 367 total leads, grand total of $6,677 including marketing management budget and their ad spend budget, average cost per lead, $18, which is really, really affordable in carpet cleaning, and for that 6 almost $7,000 generated almost $100,000, which is a massive return on investment from organic, paid, all sources. Right? Paid ads is usually about a 3 to 1 to 4 to 1 ROI and the rest of it is coming from organic traffic being built up. Less cost. It’s a slow and steady wins the race.

John Clendenning [01:21:23]:
You don’t pay big bucks to play in there. You pay a management fee of people writing content and creating topical authority clusters and entity SEO and, all of that kind of stuff and the right schema and the right authorship and all that. And you build that out in the right posts around the web and and, entity signals and and and. You do that right, and it’s just a slow and steady, eventually generates Google Maps calls and organic calls that grow and grow and grow, but it doesn’t affect your total investment. That’s a flat rate every month. Right? So paid ads, you want more of them, you have to pay more. The cost, the ad cost goes to Google, Facebook, Nextdoor, whoever you’re running the paid ads on. So 15 to 1 ROI.

John Clendenning [01:22:05]:
That’s insane. Right? And, again, we know 4 to 1 is paid ads, so the rest of it’s coming from the organic, which is massive. So they they captured net new from their old from their old 3 35% to 65%. Net new is an additional $50,000 per quarter. That’s insane. Right? So do you have clear goals? Do you have clarity around your market, your message, and your medium? We’ve made sure that your website is optimized to convert people and tell your story and be authentic. Have you set your KBIs and tracking dashboard? Do you know what numbers? Something as simple as just a pen and a paper or a Google sheet. Learn it.

John Clendenning [01:22:44]:
Read a book on it. Watch a YouTube video on it. Give us a call. We’ll talk to you about it. But you need to be tracking numbers. How many calls you’re getting per day? How many bookings? How many are cold? How many are repeat? How many referrals? What’s your average job worth residentially? What’s your average job worth commercially? What’s the lifetime value of your client? How many times do they repeat? This is math you need to know because now you know the math. You can change things that change the math, and it will dramatically change your company. If you don’t know the math, you’re guessing.

John Clendenning [01:23:17]:
So key trends for 2025 Must be omnipresent. Best known cleaner is the trademark, our term. You wanna become the best known cleaner in your marketplace, you need to be everywhere they’re looking. Online, offline. You need to have understand talk to people that understand what omnipresence marketing is, how your social media ties into your your Google Maps, ties into your your paid ad campaigns, ties into your, brand impressions, ties into your conversion principles, ties into your reputation marketing, and how all of it works together with happy client stories, database marketing, and outreach, and your ability to actually pick up the phone, call, and set up coffee appointments with realtors, interior designers, made services, stop into carpet stores, and all that stuff. Right? Omnipresence marketing, it all works together. You will double your business in 2025 if you get that message. You want video, video, video, and more video.

John Clendenning [01:24:07]:
You wanna take some videos. You wanna take videos of, you know, before and afters on the job, using the equipment, telling stories if you can. Like, start it’s it’s hard at first only because it everything’s hard at first. It was hard to ride a bike at first. It was hard to walk at first. It’s it’s hard to do anything. It’s hard to start working out at first. It’s you know, you name it.

John Clendenning [01:24:26]:
It’s hard to play pickleball at first. Right? But, eventually, you you get good at it. Good enough. You don’t have to be great. You’re not trying to be, you know, some sort of media mogul. You’re not trying to be Mr. Beast or, you know, pick your social influencer. You’re just trying to help people out by tell goods, good stories about how to take care of an area rug better, how to take care of a spotter stain on the carpet, how to what to do immediately when when Fido pees in the corner of the room, blot it up, use some vinegar and water, Dilute it.

John Clendenning [01:25:00]:
Put a put a towel on it with a weight on top of it. Something to cause it to absorb up. Get as much of it out as possible. Take a shot back. We know what to tell them to do. Get get rid of as much of the load as possible. If you’re still after the smell, call us. We can use our enzymes and, reducers to get rid of the ammonia and the odor.

John Clendenning [01:25:20]:
Right? Now you’re teaching them. You might be able to deal with it yourself. That’s great. If they’re willing to deal with it themselves, they’re not gonna call you anyways. But now you found out made a friend and when they are ready for something else, you’re their go to resource. So it’s not by helping them out you lose work. No. By helping them out you gain work.

John Clendenning [01:25:38]:
Just so you know. So, you know, build your plan. Go download the resources. I’m gonna give you that link in a second. You’re gonna figure out how many of these poles in the water you have and how to get the rest of them. You’re gonna make figure out how much each one of them is generating you in income, how many clients, which one is considered a, a brand, you know, maximizing your brand impressions, which ones you know, again, you wanna put about a 10% budget 10% of your marketing budget towards, you know, building your brand impressions, but you wanna put 80 to 90% of your marketing budget towards things that have a direct ROI. Even if that ROI is 2 to 1, there are places where you can down you can download, you can you can acquire an ideal customer at breakeven where where your competitors aren’t willing to spend that much because you’ve got a lot of money coming in from all your other sources, your repeats, your referrals, your database, all that kind of stuff, and now you can use more money in your marketing and, you know, get an average $400 client and say you you land them for $200, two $200 ad spend, cost of solution technician and time is probably roughly around 50%, $200. There’s your $400.

John Clendenning [01:26:47]:
You broke even, didn’t cost you a dime, and you landed a customer that’s gonna give you $5, $10,000 over the lifetime value of the company because you’ve got that built in. You understand what that means. You’ve got that marketing message in place. So you’ve landed a new customer on Golf Course Road that’s gonna use you all over the place and refer at least 1 or 2 people to you because you have a referral reward program. You’re not passively hoping it’s gonna happen. You’re actively, right here, actively entice you to refer you for brownie points and bonuses, things like that. Right? So you wanna build your own custom plan. You wanna start by finding out where you are.

John Clendenning [01:27:18]:
So you wanna start with at least the ultimate internet marketing checklist for carpet cleaners. That’s available in our kit. Right. Do you want to set your goals for 2025? That should not say 2024, Krisha. She’s not on the call, so we can complain to her. You want to have you want to understand the 3 fundamentals of marketing success, maximize your, your, opportunities to generate an ideal inquiry, maximize your brand impressions, and maximize your conversions. Get those 3 right and you’ll double your business. You wanna optimize your website? You wanna have the big picture on all marketing channels, online and off.

John Clendenning [01:27:52]:
How do you add that in based on your percentage of revenue that goes towards marketing? 15 to 20%. I don’t suggest you drop much below 20%. 15% to me is treading water. And that includes wrapping your vans, putting your uniforms on, taking people out for lunch, but it also includes your digital marketing, and it includes your ad spend, and it includes your door hangers. And so as you start small, that budget starts small. You do 10,000 a month. You have 2,000 as a marketing budget. That’ll get you to 15,000 a month.

John Clendenning [01:28:20]:
Now you have $3,000 a month. That’s still 20%. And now you’ve got $3,000 to invest in your marketing. That’ll get you to 20,000, right, if you do it right. Now you got 4,000. At 20,000, that’s still 20%. When you hit a 1,000,000, you’ve got $200,000 to invest in your marketing over the course of the year. That includes radio and things like that because you can start blending around massive brand awareness.

John Clendenning [01:28:43]:
But maybe, again, 10% of 200,000 is only 20,000. You put 20,000 towards a radio campaign. You got a 180,000 goes towards database marketing, Internet marketing, all of that kind of stuff to continue to grow your $1,000,000 business to 1.21 300,000. Right? That’s the way you need to think of it. So you wanna develop your action plan. So takeaways. Did we learn anything today? Hopefully, we did. How do you wanna implement this in your business? Because learning is passive.

John Clendenning [01:29:12]:
Implementation is active. You wanna create goals. You wanna target 1, 2, 3 key things and work on them until they’re done. We call it 90 day sprints, part of EOS, and then you work on the next and then you work on the next. That’s how you make a plan. Right? So what are the top three initiatives that you’re gonna implement right away to start hitting your goals? I would suggest you pick one for your business that is your lead generation business before the sale. You pick one that is for your service delivery business during the sale. You wow people there, and one for your client retention and referral business after the sale.

John Clendenning [01:29:50]:
You have 3 separate businesses. You have to market them separately with your cohesive message, But market think of the marketing individually, put time and attention, money and influence behind all three of those. Right? So that’s how I would think of it instead of doing everything about after the sale or everything about new leads, new leads, new leads. That’s great. But if you suck at service delivery and delivering an ideal service and you suck at follow-up, the new leads are gonna be useless. Right? So if you deliver a great service but nobody knows about it and you don’t follow-up with them and they never come back, your great service is useless. And I know a lot of people that deliver amazing, amazing carpet cleaning service and all the customers love them but they don’t find new customers very well and they don’t follow-up with their customers and they don’t come back. Some of them do but most of them just never show up again and they don’t even know because they don’t run their numbers.

John Clendenning [01:30:37]:
Right? So if you’ve got all 3 categories, pick 3 things before the sale would be your website. Right? Implement conversion optimization. During the sale would be scripts on the phone, would be delivering a client experience, would be, you know, gifts that you bring to a client to the door. After the sale would be recipe for recovery, we call it, where if you’ve if you’ve caught you know, if the customer has a complaint, how are you gonna make it so over the top wow that they, you know, they’re almost happy they complain because you’ve just knocked their socks off and you’ve recovered the entire relationship. You don’t go, oh, I guess I have to come back. No. You’ll never see that customer again. You go back with bells on and bring gifts and apologize profusely and do all of that kind of stuff and solve the problem.

John Clendenning [01:31:20]:
You do that, you’ve got a customer for life that’s gonna repeat and refer like crazy more often than not. Right? So what you wanna do is go to carpetlandmarketmasters.com/rewards. That’s a folder on Google Drive. And, again, remember, there’s 2,002 2025 dash workbook, carpet clearingmarketmaster.com/2025workbookand2025.worksheet. One of them is the spreadsheet. One of them is the workbook to set your goals. And then you’ve got this where you’ve got the checklist. You’ve got the Google Maps guide, how to optimize your website, and you can actually have the 1 pager, infographic on how you should layout your website properly and be able to read all the words on the side.

John Clendenning [01:32:00]:
So hopefully that made sense. I know we took over an hour and a half this time. This is a big, big topic, but setting goals and planning is something that you take time at. So get it in your head, think it through, put it in place, plan, run your numbers, and adjust your plan. If you ever wanna ping your plan past me, I I geek out in the stuff. I would jump on a call with you. I knew none of it as a 20 some odd year old carpet cleaner. I had to learn all of it.

John Clendenning [01:32:27]:
It all was books and and audios and courses and, you know, to fix my brain mindset stuff, keep me motivated, keep me positive, and and also understand marketing. And that’s what we need to know. So, if you wanna have a conversation, carpet cleanermarketmasters.com/schedule. What we’ll do is a deep dive on your business and your competitors, see if there’s a way we can help give you a game plan, help you aim at the stuff you need to do. It’s always collaboration with a marketing company is what it should be. If you ever if you’ve got a marketing company that doesn’t ask you to contribute, doesn’t ask you what you’re doing, doesn’t ask you, doesn’t talk to you about the scripts, doesn’t listen to your phone calls, isn’t helping you out, they don’t know your industry. They don’t know how to help you. They’re just doing they’re a commodity service themselves.

John Clendenning [01:33:16]:
They’re doing pay per click. They’re doing they built a pretty website, but they know nothing about the industry and the conversion. So if you wanna have a real conversation with somebody who’s coached, consulted and run multimillion dollar cleaning businesses over the last 35 years, jump on the schedule. There’s there’s appointments available. I do charge an hourly rate for my consulting. These are free sessions that I do from time to time just to help out. If there’s anything we can help you with with our digital agency, Carpet Cleaner Marketing Masters, that’d be great. That’s great.

John Clendenning [01:33:45]:
If you want to join our Facebook group, Carpet Cleaner Marketing Secrets, just go to, carpet cleaner marketingmasters.com/joindashgroup. Confirm that. Just give me a quick second. I believe that’s right. Without Croatia, we’re lost, aren’t we people? Yeah. Join dash group. I’m right. And you can sign up there and join the carpet cleaner marketing secrets.

John Clendenning [01:34:11]:
We’re gonna be spending a lot of time talking about AI in 2025 and giving away some custom chat GPTs where you can, dial in your ideal customer avatar and you can learn how to prompt better to create offers and and articles and content and things like that. Right? There’s things that you can do to contribute, but you can also use AI to create training plans for your employees and you can use AI to create procedures and, you know, end of day procedures and all of this kind of stuff. So as you grow, you know how to get out of the truck. You can learn it, which is great, but you can also use AI. And we’re gonna help with all of that kind of stuff as well as we go forward to become a consultant on that. So, give me a quick second. Let’s get back on there we go. So, anyways, I want to thank you all for joining.

John Clendenning [01:34:59]:
We’re going to go deeper into the spreadsheet next time. Maybe not quite as long of a call, but we’re going to go deeper into the spreadsheet next time. But, ultimately, thank you for spending time with me on your week between Christmas and New Year’s on your holidays. Part of holidays is sitting down with a glass of eggnog or wine or coffee or tea and also planning your business. Right? There’s there’s, you know, no rest for the wicked. We gotta work our butts off to grow our businesses, and part of that is understanding all of the stuff we just talked about here today and how it all ties together. And if you understand that cohesive message, then it’s entirely different than just needing more leads from Facebook or needing more leads from whatever. You need to build a business that generates awareness, market position, sells at a higher price than your competitors, and builds all of that authority.

John Clendenning [01:35:53]:
Now you can double your business in 2025 and it’s totally doable. So if you’re looking at doing that, reach out to us, carpetcleanermarketmasters.com/schedule. We can definitely help you with that. Otherwise, stay in touch, stay in tune, be part of the podcast, be part of the master class webinar series like this, jump on these calls, buy the book. You’re gonna learn a lot of information there. Join carpet cleaner marketing secrets Facebook group and just kinda enter our world, and we will help you as much as we possibly can. But until next time, thank you so much everybody for joining, and we shall talk again.