Best 2025 Marketing Ideas for Carpet Cleaners: 2X Your Business This Year!

Planning in advance allows businesses to align their marketing goals with a clear vision, particularly in crucial months like December and January. It helps to strategize growth and optimize resources effectively.

John Clendenning [00:00:00]:
So preloaded year. We we went really, really deep, last last time. We’re gonna do a quick little recap. I don’t wanna spend a lot of time on it. Worth watching. If you haven’t seen that yet, go back. We went about an hour and a half, try and get through this one a little bit quicker, but it really is the most important part of the year that sort of, you know, December end of December, January so you can plan all your marketing. I used to love this period of time when, like, again, for 30 years, I ran my own cleaning businesses, finally sold them all off over a period of time, multimillion dollar company running in small towns, and it was planning the year in advance.

John Clendenning [00:00:35]:
So, again, obviously, I didn’t start that way. I didn’t know what I didn’t know as I learned and focused on what my role was in the company, which was the chief marketing officer, director of the company. I was out of the truck within a year and a half, in my mid twenties as I realized I need to grow the business, and that’s what we’re gonna talk about here.

John Clendenning [00:01:29]:
But if you once you get some ideas, once you’ve been around the the, you know, ground for a little while, you know, 1, 2, 3 years, You’ve got things that you know worked. You’ve got things that you’ve tested. You can split test. You can just become the tactician of growth in your company. So it’s not something you can hand off to somebody else. When you’re the chief marketing officer, it doesn’t mean that you need to be the one that knows how to push all the buttons. Doesn’t mean you need to know how to print, you know, postcards and and and and door hangers and yard signs for, you know, offline stuff. You don’t need to know how to be the creative.

John Clendenning [00:02:06]:
You can hire those people. You need to know the strategy. So what we’re gonna talk about today is the strategy so that you know who to hire, what they should be doing, what to invest, what sort of budgets involved. Like, let’s just clear it all out of the way. Right? So that’s what our goal is today. So if that makes sense, let’s let’s roll into it. We’re gonna be talking about charting your course to extra growth. So what are we talking about to extra growth? There’s a lot of stuff gonna come out this year about how you can double your business in a year.

John Clendenning [00:02:32]:
We’ve had a lot of clients double your business. I’ve helped carpet cleaning clients and homemade services and stuff like that. In my consulting side of things go from, you know, as low as 510,000 a month revenue, which I got to in 1995 in a town of, 30,000 people as a shy kid in a town I didn’t grow up in because I was too shy to open a business in my own town. So I got to 10,000 a month before spring of or by spring of 1996. And, ultimately, we’ve helped businesses go from, you know, 5, 10000 a month, 15, 20000 a month to whatever their dreams are. Half a 1000000, 3 quarters a 1000000, a 1000000 and beyond. You know, whether that’s buying, you know, getting marketing right and then buying competitors, and other complimentary services. When you’re in a small town, go wide.

John Clendenning [00:03:20]:
That’s that’s one of the things we talk about. If you’re in a big town, go deep. You know, you can just focus on 1 or 2 things and just go really big with those and and dominate and become, you know, a $1,000,000 business. Being the entrepreneur working on your business, not in it, as most of your day, that’s what you do. You you build the systems. You build the processes. You manage those. We’ll talk about that.

John Clendenning [00:03:44]:
So if that makes sense, if that sounds intriguing, let’s let’s let’s go down that road, shall we? So turn off your cell phones, turn off Facebook, unless you’re streaming this on Facebook. Again, I’m not sure if we figured that out yet. I do see a couple of people streaming right in YouTube, so don’t turn YouTube off. If you’re in the cleaning home service business and you’re looking to get better results, again, double your business in a year, totally doable. It’s there’s nobody gonna do it for you. It’s a two way street. You need you need to have, you know, your role and vendors and people that help you and that kind of thing. So you need to be have the strategy.

John Clendenning [00:04:19]:
So if that makes sense, let’s take the next 60 minutes or so and really bang this out. So, we’re gonna talk about, like, last time, last training, we talked about, you know, setting your goals. What is those what are those number goals? We’re gonna kinda just quickly run through that again so we can sort of set the groundwork for anybody who might have missed the last call, and then, you know, unlocking the profit power, crafting winning winning marketing budget and plan, creating, the marketing pathway to attract fresh customer inquiries, and keep your clients booking and coming back. And if you notice the language right there, that’s language that I’ve used all my life. A customer is a one time transaction. You should not be running a transaction business. Nobody makes money running a transaction business. So you can you know, to try and constantly land new customers, new customers, new customers, isn’t isn’t your goal.

John Clendenning [00:05:12]:
You’re trying to find clients. Clients are your ideal customer avatar that use you once, dip their toe in the water, and go, wow. Finally found my guys, and use you for years years. Like, when I sold the business there, coming up 4 years ago now in May, I handed over customers that were 2nd generation. We found them. I found them, you know, 19 95, 6, 7, 8, 9, you know, like, 1999, 2000, and all the way through. But they grew up 20 some odd years later. Their children, if they stayed in the same towns, you know, which a lot of them did, all of a sudden we’re now cleaning for the children and the parents have, you know, either downsized, moved into a condo, and now there’s a really cool condo strategy that you can play with because you’ve got clients that have loved you.

John Clendenning [00:06:03]:
Guess who puts you in touch with superintendents and condo managers and stuff like that? So there’s a way to do it. You know, outreach takes a little bit longer. There’s a way to do it with a, you know, with warm introductions as well. That’s all marketing. Everything I just said is marketing. So, yeah, customers, clients, yay. That’s what we wanna talk about here. You build a business you can hand off and sell for, you know, 100 of 1,000 to 1,000,000 of dollars by building clients, right, and building lists.

John Clendenning [00:06:32]:
So you wanna tap into online marketing channels to maximize your your lead flow and grow faster. Not everything’s online, not everything’s offline, not everything’s referrals, not everything’s repeats. It’s a mix. And we’re gonna talk about that mix because, you know, the $1,000,000 is at the at the other side of the mix, if that makes sense. Okay. So if you stay to the end, we got a little resource kit to give you. You might have already got it. We keep adding stuff into that folder.

John Clendenning [00:07:00]:
You don’t need to when you get in there, you don’t need to ask for permission to edit any of the documents. It’s Google Drive. And so we’ve got some PDFs in there. We got some Google Docs. There. You can look at them on the screen. You can make a copy. You can print them off, things like that, but you don’t need edit access.

John Clendenning [00:07:15]:
So every now and then well, not every now and then, pretty much every month when we give away, you know, different resources and stuff like that. All of a sudden they get ping, ping, ping, ping, ping. Can I have edit access? No. We’re not we’re not letting you change our the words on our page. You have view access. So just so you know, but you can always click the file, make a copy at the top corner or, you know, again, print a copy off and hang on to it if you’re old school like me. So anybody new here? We do get newbies every month. So who am I? So career business owner since 1991, still in high school.

John Clendenning [00:07:48]:
So, but a shy career business owner, if that helps, owns, you know, several cleaning franchise businesses, independent service businesses, ecom product lines. I I I sold over $50,000 a month on Amazon of utensil sets and things like that just to look because I understood marketing and just chose another avenue to to give that a try, and, and started up a consultancy, co did speaking, got flown around the world, while still running all my cleaning businesses and expanding, and, started a digital marketing agency to help a flood restoration company that grew to 15 locations. And they grew and sold off, you know, in the in the the the late 20 just before 2020. So about in 8 years 8 or 9 years in and out. So I’ve done all of it and I’ve consulted and advised all of it while actually running the business. So So one of the things about building a great business and understanding marketing and writing the book on it as well, it’s transferable then because it’s it’s a strategy. It’s a mindset. It’s not hard to find customers if you’ve got the business set up properly.

John Clendenning [00:09:04]:
We’re gonna talk about that. It’s just marketing, and it’s just numbers, and it’s just math. Like, all marketing is is math plus psychology. So if you could put the psychology in place properly and penetrate your marketplace with the right ideas, the right mix, again, the millions are in the mix of the marketing mix. So, if you can do that well, you can grow, you can expand, you can buy competitors, you can move a town over 2 towns over, start again, you can, I did that many times, just drop into a new market and know that within a year from now, that’s gonna be an extra 10, 15, 20,000 a month in revenue because you have a plan, and you know how to dominate and, and that kind of thing? So, again, that’s what we are. We’re business owners. We if we wanted to be technicians, cleaners, even general managers, we could get a job without all the hassle and the headache. Wanna be business owners, we take on the hassle and the headache.

John Clendenning [00:09:57]:
We should get out of the 25, $30 an hour work, which is, you know, in the truck, running the office, things like that, maybe 40,000 or $40 an hour general manager type position in our cleaning industry depending on the side of business. We wanna get out of that and we wanna get into the 100, 200, $500 an hour entrepreneurial tasks. Right? So that’s what we that’s where we wanna be, and let’s chart the course to get there. So you’ll see a lot of stuff coming up with CleanFAX Magazine, over the next couple months or so. We’ve got some really cool initiatives going on with them, but I was industry leader of the the the year in 2023 on the front cover there. I do a monthly check-in with, Jeff Cross. If if we talk quickly enough, it’s take 5. If we take a little bit longer to get the strategy and the conversation out, then it’s, their other one is it on the page here? Oh, I can’t remember the name of it right now.

John Clendenning [00:10:55]:
That’s that’s embarrassing. Anyways, take 5 is what we’re actually designed to record, but sometimes it takes a little bit longer, and it goes into a a a longer longer session. So, straight talk. There we go. Sorry, Jeff. If you’re watching, I got it right now. So that’s the ISSA as well. Everybody should join the ISSA.

John Clendenning [00:11:11]:
It is the association for us cleaners. Lots of resources, lots of cool stuff, and they’ve been around a 100 years this year. So kinda cool as well. So, and again, on my own with them, I’ve been on stage with, you know, and spoke at events and been on webinars with Howard Partridge. And and we know, Dusty Roberts and, Mark Sager and and and and all that kind of stuff. Wrote the book on it. We’re on the podcast, Carpet Cleaner Success podcast. We simulcast this back onto the podcast as well.

John Clendenning [00:11:41]:
So we have the master classes on, but we also do interviews. Anybody out there wants to be on an interview on the Carpet Cleaner Success podcast? Great for the industry. We just ask about your business and and get some really cool info. But just so you know, there’s a whole media kit you get around it as well. It doesn’t cost you a dime, and we promote the crap out of your business of in, you know, all over with links and all that kind of stuff just for having a 30 minute conversation and asking you 4 or 5 questions about your business and just having a little banter and stuff like that. We don’t go live. So, you know, if there’s a flood, never been. I’m okay with, you know, having mistakes and stuff such as life.

John Clendenning [00:12:15]:
But if there ever was, we could actually edit it out if we needed to, but really good for your business. So if you go to carpetcleanersuccess.com, there’s a place to request, you know, to be a a guest on on a on an episode, and it’s just great branding. You can put it out in your marketplace. We show you how to put it out on Facebook, in your on your page, and in your local marketplace, and other places like that, and it just helps to attract more attention. Reason why I’m mentioning it right now is not just a shameless plug for for the webinar. We’re gonna talk about it. We’re gonna talk about how all of those types of things actually help you grow your business as well and help you stand out over anybody else in your marketplace, which hopefully is your goal, is to not sort of slide into obscurity or try and keep, you know, hold on to some customers as they’re leaving or moving out of the area and get new ones, but is to grow and expand and dominate so you can hand off to your family. You can sell it off, you know, because, you know, if you don’t work in corporate, you don’t have a 4 zero one k.

John Clendenning [00:13:12]:
Maybe you wanna sell the business for half a1000000, a $1,000,000. Not about the equipment, but about the value of the business you’ve built. The person who’s buying it doesn’t wanna sit in a truck. So, they might not even wanna be a general manager. They just wanna buy a business that’s already running. If you can set it up where you’re needed less and less, that’s what I’ve taught people to do for years, then, yeah, that one of the strategies is to make sure that you’re omnipresent in your marketplace. We’re gonna talk about that as well. And because, you know, again, do it right, and you get to be one of these cool people.

John Clendenning [00:13:43]:
Lots of cool people that we’ve talked to, helped, coached, and worked with. So how do we do that? We talk about this every single time. I’ll rattle through it quickly, but there is three principles to growing your business, to being omnipresent. So why do you wanna be omnipresent? When you’re omnipresent, you’re known by everybody. You are the best known cleaner in your marketplace. As Grant Cardone says, it’s not about being best, it’s about being best known. If you’re omnipresent, that’s what that means, you’ve been able to maximize the opportunities to generate a qualified lead. So where are the opportunities? Where do your leads hang out? Talked to somebody the other day.

John Clendenning [00:14:18]:
John, can you give me a hand running Google Ads? Yeah. One of the things we can do. What else? Oh, no. That’s all I need. There’s nothing omnipresent about that. That’s a small part of the you know, that’s one, as I like to call, poles in the water. That is one pole in the water. That is a small trickle.

John Clendenning [00:14:35]:
Do you want more trickles to make start turning into a faucet, you know, and growing the business? Yeah. You don’t wanna be any one spot. You wanna be maximize your opportunity to generate a qualified lead. You wanna maximize your brand impressions. So, you know, in the world of direct response marketing, one of my favorite is Dan Kennedy. I trained under him. I know I I I I I’ve spent a weekend with him in in, won a contest. I spent a weekend with him in Florida years ago, just tearing apart my business and got me into coaching, actually.

John Clendenning [00:15:04]:
That was his suggestion and things like that. I also learned from everybody else in the marketing world all the way up to the modern Alex Harmozis and Russell Brunson, who all learned from people like Dan Kennedy, Jay Abraham, Michael Gerber, the E Myth. There’s lots and lots and lots of places where we can learn. And in the world of direct response marketing, brand impressions, it’s like, you know, sometimes they say, yeah. If it doesn’t earn its keep, it’s probably shouldn’t be used. What you know, some some avenues. Other people understand, like, again, there’s a there’s there’s a fine line between that. If you put about 10% of your budget, your marketing budget we’ll we’ll get into what a good marketing budget is.

John Clendenning [00:15:45]:
If you put 10% of your of your overall marketing budget into brand impressions, online, offline, everywhere, omnipresence, then that 10% doesn’t have to show up as, oh, that generated a phone call that because it’s it’s brand awareness. It’s like, why do why do plumbing companies the best plumbing company in town, the the lawyers, the real estate agents go on back of buses and go on park benches and go on billboards and things like that offline and online, you know, you’re you’re trying to watch a YouTube video or you’re streaming a TV show on a streaming service and all of a sudden they show up. Hey, are you looking to buy a house in the local area and you’re going, holy crap, how did you know? Right? They’re trying to be omnipresent. Why? Because they got a part of their budget to go towards that one. They got the direct response budget and all of that kind of stuff. So if you know your budget and you know how to do that math, omnipresence, you have to have brand impressions because those are, Google’s zero moment of truth called Zmot, go look it up, people need to see 11 impressions of your brand before they consider buying it, picking it off the shelf, know the product. We’ve always heard 5 to 7 impressions before they start to know you, like you, and potentially trust you, things like that. So those numbers are still within that realm, 5, 7, 11.

John Clendenning [00:16:54]:
Whatever the studies are, it’s not one. So, oh, I put out flyers or door hangers or or postcards. That didn’t work. How many did you do into the marketplace? 1. We know why. Right? You have any brand impression in that marketplace? If you do, maybe the one hit on 20 other things you’ve done. If you don’t, now we know why. Nobody knows, likes, or trusts you yet.

John Clendenning [00:17:17]:
And that’s how we decide when you are going to find, you know, something that you put a little bit of thought into. Do you do it on, you know, a kick of the can? No. That’s the cheap discount. You don’t care about stuff. Is your ideal customer cheap, discounted, and don’t care about you? Hopefully not because that’s not a client. That’s just a one time transactional customer. See how these things all mesh together? So and then we also wanna maximize our conversions because we can be seen everywhere. And with brand impressions, we could be maximizing our opportunities by everywhere somebody who’s looking today can look and find you.

John Clendenning [00:17:49]:
Anybody who’s not looking today but the right crowd to impress upon for later so that they are looking. Oh, I know those guys. Right? The 2 connect together. But if you can’t convert them, which a lot of people can’t, as well as you think you can, if you can’t convert them and it’s not about price. If you can’t convert them at, like, one of the highest prices in your marketplace, you don’t know how to convert. So I always suggest call around your the top end competition, the best, most expensive, the one that everybody knows competition in town, the top ten, and make sure your pricing is at least in the top 1 third by start and then give options that go up from there. Right? Premium options and stuff like that. So there’s a way to sort of grow that way.

John Clendenning [00:18:31]:
The discount crowd, you’re always just looking for transactions. You need huge volume, and as soon as the volume drops, you’re on a business. And I’ve seen that far too many times. When you build a really, really elite boutique type business in the right avenue for your marketplace, if your average household income is a 120,000, that’s different than if your average household income in your area is 50,000. Those numbers are available online. Every time we talk to, you know, somebody who’s interested in a consult and things like that, that’s one of the first things we do is before we even jump on the call, our team goes out. And for me, research is the entire area, the average household income, demographics, what’s happening in the marketplace, is it a growing marketplace, is it a shrinking marketplace, is there new stuff coming in, is there all that kind of we do all that. You should know that you’re a business owner.

John Clendenning [00:19:13]:
There’s more than enough times I’ll walk into that conversation, mention all that, and I go, oh, I didn’t know that. Wow. That’s crazy. Yeah. I think I heard about that new whatever Amazon plant or, you know, Cisco office or whatever if Cisco’s still around, but, you know, that kind of idea. So knowing that and knowing what’s going on in your marketplace can, you know, help as well in in growing your business, but you need to be able to convert the right people to choose you. And conversion is a psycho psychological condition. Right? It’s not a low price.

John Clendenning [00:19:47]:
So what’s the hardest part about marketing carpeting business online? We’re gonna rattle through some of the stuff we talked about last week just to get our our bearings here. Lots of options. Where do you put your budget? Where how do you market? Like, you know, John, Google Ads. I tried. It didn’t work. Local service ads. Try Facebook ads. Tried it.

John Clendenning [00:20:05]:
Worked for a while. Stopped working. Did it? You know, I tried postcards. I tried this. I tried that. Right? You You know, you might have something working for now and then it stops. Your business goes up and down and up and down, and you’re basically just on a roller coaster. You know, if you put a line through it, you haven’t changed in 5 years.

John Clendenning [00:20:21]:
Right? Your business should be like the stock, you know, the stock market currently, but it should be, like, over time, the stock market is traditionally straight. Put a straight line through the middle up into the right. It goes up and it goes down. It goes up and it goes down. There’s there’s fluctuation, but, you know, it’s hilarious, but, dead investors actually do the best. It’s weird. But, you know, there’s people that have just invested in the S and P 500 index fund and then died. And they have they outpaced the average sophisticated investor by a lot because they just got in and wrote it.

John Clendenning [00:20:54]:
It was time. Right? Time in market. So same idea. You wanna make sure you know where you’re at. So we’ve got things like SEO, PPC, website, social. That’s, you know, all the online stuff, local service ads. And we’ve also you know, I kinda use the billboard here for offline. That’s door hangers and yard signs and a frames and postcards and and and and.

John Clendenning [00:21:14]:
Right? Lots lots and lots of stuff. So it’s a major investment to market. I get that. And you’re not sure if you have anything to show for it. We’ll talk about how you track that in the first place. But right? So failure, if you can’t have a clear plan, you’re overspending or worse. I actually say worse, underspending and underperforming. So, what we gave away the last week or last month as well, carpet cleaner marketing masters.com/2025 workbook.

John Clendenning [00:21:44]:
You’ll see there’s a workbook you can download afterwards and just do some thinking. Sit with your favorite coffee, glass of wine, whatever it is, and in a quiet spot, listen to the jazz music or classical, something that you know, nothing loud, nothing, you know, something calming and and, you know, resonating well, you know, that kind of thing, and just just settle into it. Take a deep breath. No anxiety. Calm down and write down your your your your plans and your thoughts for the year if you haven’t done that already. It’s it’s part of being a business owner. Let’s do that. Right? So what’s the opportunity? Get a clear plan, goals, targets, KPIs, key performance indicators.

John Clendenning [00:22:22]:
How do we know we’re on track? Don’t know you’re on track. We don’t have a performance indicators. What how many calls did we get last week? How many do we get next week compared to the year ago? You know, how many do we get in this month, in this quarter? Inquiries, calls, and messages, and where did they come from even? Like, is it is there a changing or did we get a lot of messenger messages last year? Now we don’t. Is there a problem there? Like, if you’re tracking, the more you can track in your business, the more you can adjust. You know what’s working, not working. You you see the signs before you the cliff shows up. Right? You don’t wanna be falling off the cliff and going, oh, crap. Everything slowed down.

John Clendenning [00:22:57]:
What happened? You should have been marketing based on the signs months ago. Right? Years ago sometimes, but months ago for sure. Right? Nothing shows up out of the blue. So, enough leads to hit your goals. Right? And, again, I hate that word leads, inquiries. You got enough people coming phoning in, repeats, referrals, new customers that you’re gonna turn into clients because you’re ideally targeted, all that, you know, to meet your goals. You have a return on your investment. Again, knowing full well that about 10% of your marketing budget should go to that omnipresence, that that brand awareness, not the omnipresence part of it, but that second step, the brand awareness because then it feeds into everything else.

John Clendenning [00:23:34]:
Right? So, again, brand impressions are your van. If you drive around in a white van with a magnet or you drive around in a fully wrapped van that just tells a story and makes people go holy crap. Right? There’s a right way and a wrong way to do all that. Do you have a great brand, impactful brand messaging? That is the logo. That is the wording. That is your tagline. That is your promise. Right? Do you have that? Because if you have that and it’s on the van, then it doesn’t matter if you’re in the drive through at McDonald’s or your team is.

John Clendenning [00:23:59]:
You know, you’re driving around. I used to drive slowly through the richest neighborhoods in town on Saturdays. I’d have maybe one job in the morning. Or if the technicians after I was out of the truck and the technicians had jobs, I would hop in one of the other vans. And we always had a backup van in case the van went down. It was kinda weird, but we we always bought off lease and then had sort of had a the the backup one looked nice, but would have been, you know, a little bit rougher, on the the inside and stuff like that. Just so that if anything went down, we had backup equipment. We had so we we didn’t stop cleaning.

John Clendenning [00:24:29]:
We just moved transition. So I would jump in that and drive slowly around neighborhoods and stuff like that as if I was looking for a house number to go clean or whatever. But I did it because there’s everybody out cutting grass. There’s everybody out the kids are out playing and stuff like that. And I was just putting myself, like, around the golf course, road, homes and stuff like that. Right? So, just other strategies. So what what you wanna get out of this is there is actually a blueprint. There is a master plan for this.

John Clendenning [00:24:57]:
I’ve trained on it. I’ve coached on it. There’s a $1,000,000 blueprint. How do I know? I ran it. I built it. I perfected it. I looks like this. Here is a blueprint.

John Clendenning [00:25:07]:
Right? It’s what to do on leads. What is your what is your foundation? Without that, none of this happens. What is your lead generation? Look at how many there are. What are your lead generation sources? What are your secondary response sources? Do you even know what that means? Do you have a prospecting funnel? What is your direct content routine or contact routine? What and then from there, what do you do from that? What are you trying to sell them? Right? There’s you’re not selling them one thing. You’re not trying to book a job always. Right? That’s that’s sort of the the holy grail. I wanna get into your home. But is there a secondary? Well, what if I get in to do a quote? Well, John, I don’t like doing quotes.

John Clendenning [00:25:43]:
I just wanna go out and clean. The average job was 5, 6, 7, $800. Do you mind and you’re not doing it as technician. You got technician doing it because you’re out meeting people smiling sweetly, smelling nice, creating a routine, and finding the very best people that you will clean for for the rest of their lives. Now, will you do a quote? Maybe. Right? So and do you have any sort of like what I like to call a reclamation funnel? So maybe they got some information. They don’t want a quote. They don’t want a, an in home quote yet.

John Clendenning [00:26:14]:
They don’t wanna they’re not ready to book a cleaning. Good. Did you get all their information so you can drip on them and drip on them and drip on them with the right messages until they’re ready to buy. Right? And then did you deliver a show when you showed up? Did you call on the way over? Like, we we I I taught on this around the world delivering a a client experience. I know there’s a bunch of guys. You guys do this, and there’s some of you that never even thought of it. You show up in jeans and a t shirt and wonder why you don’t you don’t get referred. Customers love me.

John Clendenning [00:26:39]:
I’m sure you’re a great person. That’s not gonna work with technicians, and that’s not how you grow a company. There’s a reason why the bigger companies wear uniforms. It wasn’t just because they felt like it. It it creates a professional appearance. My guys went out in shirts and ties for many for decades decades, probably only the last 5 or 6 years, we kind of went down to high end polos and stuff like that, but they wore dress pants or khaki pants. They had their indoor shoes, their outdoor shoes, the booties, roll out the red carpet. We all know the the game, but you gotta play it and you gotta teach it.

John Clendenning [00:27:09]:
You gotta call on the way over. You gotta get right over the van. Don’t text the girlfriend. Don’t teach the technicians. You don’t sit in the van for a while while the customer’s getting pissed off looking out the window. When’s he coming in? No. Right out, knock knock on the door, like strangers ring the doorbell, friends knock, knock on the door, take a giant step back. Normally it’s big guys, small women, you know, that’s usually the mother-in-law answers the door, you name it, whatever.

John Clendenning [00:27:32]:
We don’t wanna be imposing. Business card handed out with our face on it, big smile. It’s a good good good way to start. Wait to be invited in. Like, there’s all these like, we teach all these humanics, all these little mechanics in humanics to make them go, oh my gosh. These guys are great. Then when you recommend and suggest higher end packages and services, they go, yeah. That sounds right.

John Clendenning [00:27:52]:
And they mean it because you actually reason advised them. You’re not scamming them. You advise them. You’ve got dogs. You’ve got pets. You’ve got kids. You’ve got this and that. I recommend that we go with this package that protects and sanitizes and deodorizes and refreshes.

John Clendenning [00:28:05]:
I’m gonna give you these freebies, and and you get this 1 year warranty and all this kind of stuff. That’s much better than our basic cleaning. Oh my gosh. That’s great. So that’s the show. Then you do your follow-up for your on the immediate follow-up, ongoing retention to create a repeat client and back into direct contact again because your repeat client is messaged and messaged and messaged ethically, warmly, where they’re not feeling overwhelmed. We used to message our best clients 48 times a year without them ever, like, maybe one out of a 100 or 200 to go, John, that’s a little much. Okay.

John Clendenning [00:28:40]:
We’ll back off on for you. The other 99 to a 199 never said that. Right? They kept getting the messages and they did the the only one that they cared about was the one that hit them when they’re ready to to, you know, to to to get services again. Right? But all the other ones just impressed upon. All those are my guys because they’re warm, welcoming messages. Right? So and it’s not just emails. We know what does that mean? Well, I text message my customers once a year. Really? 48 times a year, monthly newsletters, weekly, you know, mailings on 3 step campaigns at different times a year.

John Clendenning [00:29:13]:
We’ll talk about a couple of campaigns that are good right now this time of year, things like that. Like, you put that all together and you’ve now touched on a check-in phone call to make sure they’re happy, a reminder sequence at the end of the year, not one mailing, but an actual sequence that goes over a couple of months. You know, month 10, 11, 12, 13 is how we used to do it. So early birds and then, you know, anniversary and then extended 1 month only. Sorry if that makes noise when I’m hitting my mic. But, anyways, you wanna have all those in place. That’s a blueprint. We’ve defined the blueprint.

John Clendenning [00:29:40]:
So let’s set clear goals quickly. So we talked about last time, with no direction, you are dead in the water. With clear goals, you’ve got wind in your sails. You know what to aim for. Now you can adjust. So ready, Fire, aim. Fire, aim. Oh, there’s the bull’s eye.

John Clendenning [00:29:54]:
There’s the bull’s eye. Right? That’s how we do it. So, yeah, that’s what we talk about. So, you know, as Brian Tracy says, another good person to follow on business marketing and mindset. Success is having goals. All else is commentary. If you don’t have goals, you’re winging it. Right? If you’re winging it, nobody’s ever really been successful winging it.

John Clendenning [00:30:19]:
They get lucky for a little period of time. I’ve talked to guys that that ran Facebook ads for a while, and we’re doing $20,000 a month in Facebook ads. As soon as it dried up, they’re almost out of business again. Why? They didn’t build a business. They had a customer transactional customer churn. And as soon as that source dried up, they’re trying to find another source. Again, roller coaster. But if you put a line through it, they have not done anything.

John Clendenning [00:30:41]:
So right. So you need to have smart goals as we talk, specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time based. So what are those? I want to grow by this much. I wanna have this process in place. I wanna add these you know, the you know, I wanna have, you know, $50,000 worth of a new service by the end of the year. Okay. That’s specific. Is it measurable? Yeah.

John Clendenning [00:31:07]:
$50,000. Is it achievable? Well, what was that breakdown to if your average service is $500? You know, you need, what, a 100 of them. Right? Athrate. Yep. So so is that achievable? Can you get a 100 people at this $500 new tile and grout service and this new, you know, hardwood floor cleaning? Maybe that’s worth 800 or a1000, whatever that is. But can you add $50,000 this year? That’s now achievable. How much money do you wanna make from the service? Oh, a lot? Not a smart goal. Right? You want it relevant? You don’t wanna be saying, hey.

John Clendenning [00:31:41]:
I wanna make $50,000 in selling my wife’s Mary k cosmetics on my carpet cleaning jobs. That’s not relevant. Right? You gotta make it relevant and time based. We just said within a year. Right? By this time, by the end of December. Right? Okay. Cool. Can we do that? Now you have a plan to implement.

John Clendenning [00:31:56]:
You know it’s gonna start slow and go, so now what are you gonna do to make that happen? Right? Then you can set deadlines. That’s the 1 year goal quarterly. Well, the Q1, you know, I might want to have in the Q1 $5,000. So 10 customers. Can I get 10 customers in the Q1 to get the ball rolling, take some before, during, and afters, create stories? Yeah. Right? Now that’s doable. Now you’re now you’re partway there. Now you maybe the next quarter, you wanna ramp that up to 15,000.

John Clendenning [00:32:24]:
So the combined is 20. Oh, half a year in and I’m at 20. I’m almost at my goal. Right? So now you’ve got a plan. You can work your way backwards and that gives you the monthly goals as well. And you must have a stopping point every quarter is is what we like to do and then at the end of the year, but every quarter let’s reflect. Are you tracking to make this happen? This sounds like a lot some to some of you for, oh, I’m a just a I’m a carpet cleaner. How’s that no.

John Clendenning [00:32:47]:
No. No. You’re a business owner. You’re the market of cleaning services first and foremost. The technician is the carpet cleaner. If that still happens to be you right now, okay, you got 2 jobs. Right? So what are your goals for 2025? Revenue targets. We talked about this.

John Clendenning [00:33:00]:
So say, for example, your revenue target is $350,000. How much is that monthly? That’s 29,000. What is your average job value? Do you know that? Are you using ServiceMaster? Preferred. I like ServiceMaster. Hi, Joe. If you Joe’s the owner, by the way. Marquette, pretty good. Housecall Pros, not a big fan.

John Clendenning [00:33:23]:
It’s good. It’s just I find it kind of compared to the other ones, not quite the best. Right? For a bunch of reasons, but they try hard. So but they’ll tell you right on the home screen what your average job is right now, what it was for the last quarter, what it was for the last year. Again, for anybody in the north, we’re running into winter, you know, and it’s been freaking cold. Right? Like, you’re you’re getting, you know, you’re getting into, for our Canadians, minus 20, minus 30. For our Americans, that’s still minus 10, minus 15. So at minus 40, they actually both converge.

John Clendenning [00:33:57]:
Celsius and Fahrenheit is the exact same thing, just so you know. So, yeah. So maybe your average job in this time of year is a little bit smaller. That was the Q1 of the year. So you can have them factored out that way. Go, oh my god. My average job’s going down. Compared to what? Well, my year.

John Clendenning [00:34:14]:
Okay. Well, what about the quarter last year? Oh, you know, good numbers. Right? So how many jobs will that require to hit those numbers? Right? What’s your average job conversion? Do you know from every source? Should be a 100% from repeats, should be at least 90% from referrals. Right? There should be, but what about those those customers that aren’t clients yet? The first time they found you, they’ve seen you once, they’ve seen you 10 times, they’ve got the z mod, 0 mona truth going on in their head. You have entered into another thing called their Dunbar numbers. There’s only certain people that you know, there’s only about 1500 to 2,000 sort of names, people that we will we remember at any time, and that’s at the best of us. So less than that in the rest. So how do you fit into somebody’s Dunbar numbers? Their family takes up the, you know, the the best.

John Clendenning [00:35:02]:
They know you they know the name. They know the face. Friends, acquaintances, they can remember a face, maybe not remember a name, and then it goes from there. And you just become more and more obscure because people can’t remember everything. So that’s you know, do you know your average inquiry from source? Right? Then you divide your job inquiry target per month by your conversion rate. So if you know what your conversion rate is from, you know, either all sources, average, the the the split of each of them, now you’re in the game. Right? So if your average is about 50, should be on cold, like, oh, I booked 90%. We get into the back end, listen to calls, see it, and, no, you book 90% of repeats and referrals.

John Clendenning [00:35:51]:
You book 20% of, you know, local service ads or Google Ads. We see that. Facebook Ads, even less. So do you have a plan to get about 50%. So now you can run some math as an example. So in that scenario, you would need 244 leads. So what we can do right now is let’s just switch over and do a quick little bit of math. We’re gonna go in and out of this calculator.

John Clendenning [00:36:12]:
You guys got access to it. But it’s the, the other one was the workbook. This is the 2025 worksheet. So let me make sure I can switch over. Let me double check my screen that I did switch. I switched over. Good. Well, look at me.

John Clendenning [00:36:25]:
Right. So say again. Oops. I get to there. Sorry. Okay. So here’s an example. Right? We’ve got a lot of tabs across the bottom on this, so you can get access to this at the end.

John Clendenning [00:36:38]:
So just wait to the end as well. It it will actually be in that bundle as well, but you can just write down the URL. Don’t get distracted. But, say, for example, you know, if you’re doing a 100,000 right now, are you gonna be able to do 450,000 this year? No. Maybe. But no. I buy a couple of businesses. I was gonna try and get to there.

John Clendenning [00:36:55]:
If you’re doing 10,000 a month, I think a good goal, a 100, 120,000 would be to double. Right? So let’s you know, if you’re doing 200,000 right now and your goal is 400,000, let’s put that in. Right? Just put that number in. Right? So your monthly target is 33,000 a month. Now we do know that we can break that down by, oops, months, and there’s certain months that could be like, so I I’ve made that available. You can adjust to get to the you know, it’s a little bit slower in the winter in the north. It’s a picks up in the second quarter, goes like nuts in the 3rd Q4. So you can adjust that way.

John Clendenning [00:37:35]:
Right? But what is your average job? If you know that your average job is $200, right, you need to have as your you know, you need to have a 167 jobs, $200 jobs. If you can do 4 or 5 a day, right, and there’s about 22 workdays in a month without working Saturdays Sundays and beating yourself up, work life balance, maybe you do Saturday morning 1 job or something like that, Maybe. But, again, technicians should be out there doing it anyways. But if your average job is $200, you need a lot. 167 jobs to hit that goal. So and so that’s probably 2 trucks on the road, if not more, because you could really only do if you do 4 on average a day, 5 days, that’s 20 a week. That’s 80 a month. That’s half of that.

John Clendenning [00:38:23]:
So you at least need 2 trucks on the road at best and definitely $800 a day. But if your average job is 500 like a lot of our clients, you only need 67 jobs. That’s one guy, maybe with a helper. Right? That’s one truck on the road, 1a half. Right? So you could be doing a 200, $250,000, $300,000 per truck, and when it’s really busy, have that second van available, that backup, have 2 guys split off into a separate and come back together, things like that. So lots of lots of ways to play this game. That’s with a 50% conversion rate. What if your conversion rate, you get really good at it, you follow-up really well, you chase people down, you stay in touch with them even if they didn’t buy this time so they buy next time.

John Clendenning [00:39:05]:
So your conversion rate of the inquiry, the original inquiry, your conversion rate is not 50%, let’s say it’s 60. Right? Now you see the number of inquiries you need. We said the word leads there. I am going to change that to inquiries right now because I’ve meant to for a long time. Right. So how many inquiries do you need? Now you need a 111. But say you only have 40% because you actually track your numbers and you realize across all avenues you only have 40%. Right? Now you need a 167 inquiries to hit the exact same 67 jobs.

John Clendenning [00:39:41]:
So knowing this number becomes very, very critical. And then what’s your average cost to generate an inquiry? Right? Again, I will put inquiry here because I hate the word lead. Okay. So given the end of this calculation here, you need about 18% of your revenue and I always say the numbers between 15 20% and I stuck really close to 20% my entire career once I learned this, of revenue. Made a $100,000, 20,000 went to marketing, so that’s 10,000 a month. 2,000 goes to marketing. Why? Because I got you to that gets you to 15,000 a month in a few short months or less. And now you’ve at 15,000 a month, you’ve got $3,000 20 percent to go towards marketing.

John Clendenning [00:40:28]:
All your marketing. Now your mix gets a little bit better. Right? The millions the millions are in the mix. Right? So and then you go up to you know, that gets you to 20,000 a month in revenue on average, like your average consistent revenue. Now that’s 4 grand in marketing. When I was doing over $1,000,000 a year, that was 200,000 in marketing. Why? Because that grew us up to 1,200,000, 1,300,000 on and, and, and. We started selling off some of the business entities after that as I was planning my exit, sold them off in chunks because we had separate business brands, part of the strategy to actually make more money.

John Clendenning [00:40:59]:
But, anyways, that’s the idea, 20%. So you wanna stick around that. So this works out to where did we get that 36 from? Little tab over here. Pay per click. The average cost for it to generate an inquiry on pay per click. I’ll run the math for you in a little bit. How do I why do I say it’s that much? Right? So the average is about $55. If you book half of them, you spend $100 to buy a customer, and that’s good.

John Clendenning [00:41:25]:
And carpet cleaning, we can debate that all day long. I can prove that that was good 20 years ago. Right? If you run a great company, the he who spends the most to generate an a qualified prospect, qualified inquiry wins. Right? So Google Local Service Ads, it could be on average about $40 these days. You might be in a market that’s a little bit less, but on average about $40. Facebook ads, if you’re running those as in a brand awareness done properly, then about $25 generates the average inquiry through all of but you got tons of brand awareness in that. Repeat and referral, and, again, Facebook ads works also on Nextdoor ads and a bunch of other cool stuff. Repeat and referral, that you’re you’re gonna spend money.

John Clendenning [00:42:08]:
To get people to come back, you need to mail them. You need to have a budget for every single customer. So 15 to $30, like, $2 a month, $3 a month at the most, you know, $30 out of the job they just gave you to get them to come back again, right, that’s not that much. Right? So on average, say, $2 a month worth per per client to get them come back once a year. Right? That’s a client now, not a customer. We’re turning them into a client. SEO, it’s gonna be the biggest game chain in your business. Google Maps and SEO as it grows and ranks and expands and matures and stuff like that.

John Clendenning [00:42:41]:
That will be where most of your inquiries come from. That’s a major part of your omnipresence. Right? And do you have any other sources as well? There’s other things that you do? Put them down here. Put your numbers in. Right? When you get a copy of this, you can go get a copy. Make a copy, and plug your own numbers in. Right? You find out that your average cost, $36, that just fills in right here automatically from that other page. Now we know minimum required monthly budget would be about $6,000 to generate enough inquiries at that price to generate that many inquiries because of your conversion rate.

John Clendenning [00:43:16]:
Because of your conversion rate to generate that many jobs at the that job average. And as you change these numbers with the little arrows on them, you you can watch how everything adjusts. And then you can figure out where to put your budget allocation on the 3rd screen. So figure that out figure that out. And then what kind of marketing you do? There’s an entire year’s marketing calendar for you built on our, our digital dominance method. Right? So and we’ll talk about a few of those here in this call as we get going or as we’re we’re wrapping through. So anyways. So hopefully that made sense.

John Clendenning [00:43:48]:
Hopefully, there’s a lot of unpacking there that kinda made made sense in your brain. So, a lot of people talk about not enough leads, and, again, I don’t agree with that. A lot of times, it’s just not enough conversions, but where are they coming from? Let’s fill that gap in. Are you thinking multichannel? It’s no longer about one thing. One thing. Every your hub is your website, so it better tell your story really, really well and convert. Your website is a key conversion principle, and it starts building that organic that ranks. Right? The neighborhood marketing in the ideal neighborhoods, do they know you like nobody else? Do you have JV partners that are referring you because you work that? Like a dog, you work that hard, hard, hard.

John Clendenning [00:44:37]:
Right? Do you are you on social media in the right way because the average demographic of social media is 35 to 55, college university educated, higher slightly higher income adults. Kids don’t go on social on Facebook much anymore. YouTube even. Kids aren’t a lot of kids are on on YouTube. They go to TikToks as we know and, you know, the ban has been, you know, extended 30 days, and they go on other platforms, Instagrams and things like that. So, no. These are where the adults are. Right? So and, eventually, when your business gets big enough, there’s a reason why the best businesses in town are on drive time radio.

John Clendenning [00:45:10]:
Maybe you want videos pre roll on YouTube, but also on streaming apps. Anybody who searched for carpet cleaning in the last 7 days, we have a data source we know if they searched. They didn’t find you. They didn’t click on anything. We just know that they searched, and we can in front of them on streaming apps, we can have your video pre roll like those real estate ones we talked about. That’s how they do it as well. Are you looking for a home in the Wichita, Kansas area? Oh my god. How did he know? Right? Well, he knows because of this data.

John Clendenning [00:45:41]:
That data is available to carpet cleaners as well through marketers and so that. Are you email marketing to stay in touch? Are you direct mailing? Because that at least guarantees to get eyeballs on it, especially if it’s got either, you know, naked mail, which is a postcard that gets their attention right away. Doesn’t need to be glossy. It just needs to be attention grabbing. A lot of times funny. And then you’re running paid search. Right? You need to be have that all in perspective. Why? Dan Kennedy.

John Clendenning [00:46:05]:
These are just I think he’s got more books than this now and training courses. I’ve probably invested the numbers north of 50,000, probably even close to a $100,000 in marketing, training and courses and conventions and and boot camps and stuff over 25 or more years with this man alone, not to mention all the other ones. Right? So, yeah, you need to learn. I was a mark I was a my craft was marketing cleaning services. I needed to learn from the best. Right? So this was examples. But one of his quotes, the simple truth is if you aren’t deliberately, systematically, and methodically, very key words, or rapidly and dramatically establishing yourself as an authority, at least to your clientele and target market, you’re asleep at the wheel, ignoring what is fueling the entire economy around you. You understand why people watch, 18 year old girl on YouTube or on TikTok or whatever do their makeup.

John Clendenning [00:47:02]:
Do you understand what causes the influencer culture? Do you understand while when somebody is an influencer, good, bad, or ugly, however, I don’t this isn’t a political judgment, but can launch a meme coin on crypto, Trump coin, and do $80,000,000,000 in a day and a half, 2 days. That is an authority figure in a mindset. They have captured authority in a mindset. Right? You wanna do that in your small scale. Right? We’re not gonna get that big. So a couple of the quotes by Dan that just, I I mean, they’re plastered around my office or up over, you know, anywhere you look in my office, but, the entrepreneur’s real job is marketing. Thank you, Dan. Marketing the product or service that their business offers.

John Clendenning [00:47:47]:
The guys and gals who master marketing are the ones who make the cash register ring and live a good life. Once again, your products and services are not your business. You are not a carpet cleaner. You are the marketer of the products and services. You are in the marketing business if you wanna own a business. Marketing done well does the majority of the selling for you. All businesses succeed or die on effective marketing systems. What you think marketing is determines on how well this these sentences land.

John Clendenning [00:48:24]:
If you go, oh, I know people that don’t do any market, I guarantee you we can have a conversation on what marketing is, and I can prove to you that they do market. They have a couple of poles in the water. They’re just one of the many ways of marketing. It isn’t just one thing. It isn’t just advertising. It isn’t running paid ads. Marketing is everything you do that impresses upon the public and your ideal clientele that you are a choice if not the top choice. That’s your goal in marketing and that marketing impresses upon them, gets you their attention.

John Clendenning [00:48:58]:
The greatest day in a business owner’s life is when he or she stops doing the doer of the thing and become the marketer of the thing. I was lucky to do that before my 27th birthday. Started at 25. Within 2 years, I realized I was the full time marketer of the thing in carpet cleaning and then all the other cleaning businesses. Your product or service is not your business. Your real business is marketing, advertising, and selling your business’ products and service your business product services. If you have a barbershop, for example, your job is not cutting hair. Instead, it’s marketing and advertising to find new clients who want their hair cut.

John Clendenning [00:49:37]:
That makes sense. Dan Kennedy, all these are his phrases and words, just so you know. So what it kinda looks like, again, we’re talking about all in perspective, you want organic. You want organic growth. Right? Organic takes the longest, but it’s the best. So you gotta get started. If you wait, oh, I haven’t started anything. Organic offline is shoe leather to pavement.

John Clendenning [00:49:58]:
Who do you know? Right? Are you knocking on doors? Are you walking in every single month? Are you doing the Howard Partridge delivering food and and coffees and and just, you know, who are these guys? Who are these guys? Oh, you’re back. Oh, oh, hey, Tommy. Like, that might have happened. Took 6 months, but eventually, you’re not a who. You’re a, oh, guess who gets referred? Because you put in a little bit of effort, little bit of cost. Not a big deal. Social. So online organic is your website ranking for everything everywhere in your marketplace.

John Clendenning [00:50:31]:
It’s your Google Maps ranking wider and wider. Well, I feel like my Google Maps, I’m number 1. Where? There’s no way you’re number 1 everywhere. Guaranteed. Don’t believe me? Call us up. We’ll run heat maps for you. We’ll prove it. There’s no way.

John Clendenning [00:50:46]:
You are within a mile, 2 miles, 3 miles, 5 miles, 10 miles, and all, like, the blobby map and everywhere else, you don’t show up in the 3 pack at all, and that’s for one term. What about all the terms people search for? Right? Organic is showing up everywhere online and offline where your ideal client is looking. Offline as well. That’s your job. Right? Social media is also social. Social is, you know, the Chamber of Commerce, the DNIs, again, meeting and greetings. Right? So you might walk into businesses and offer to do quotes and free cleanings and demos and spottings and stuff like that, organic outreach, you might walk into referral partners, real estate agents, interior designers, maid services, things like that, and get to know them. Join the chamber and be social.

John Clendenning [00:51:33]:
You might join Facebook groups of other business owners in your marketplace. Why? Because you’re being social. So there’s an online and offline component to that. Right? And press releases and branding all fit into that and that takes you know, you can jump through that quicker, but it still takes time. A lot of people start with paid ads to start with. I don’t I’m the point is and you don’t stop them, If this chart was really good, you’d see, like, sort of the yellow haze through here. Again, like, the is doing good there. It’d be sort of right? Paid only does so much, and it’s your most expensive new inquiry.

John Clendenning [00:52:05]:
It’s your most expensive new customer. This is cheaper, takes longer. This is the least expensive, takes the longest to build up. Right? You can pay your way in here, but 3 or 4 to 1 ROI depending on how good you sell and what your average price is, that’s all you can expect from there. So where do jobs come from? We talk about filling in the gaps. There is 45 different spots right here on this chart alone of where jobs come from in the cleaning world. So you gotta be able to start checking them all off. You say, well, I do Google Ads.

John Clendenning [00:52:36]:
Okay. Well done. What else? That’s about it. Do you see why you don’t have 2 or 3 trucks on the road? Whether you’re in a town of a 100000 people or a 1000000 people. A 1000000 people would just be the most expensive beyond compare. Town of 100000, 200000 people, you can still have 2 or 3 trucks on the road. You’re gonna end up buying out the competitors and stuff like that. The older guys that are retiring, you go, can you buy my business? No.

John Clendenning [00:53:03]:
I want your database. I don’t want your business. I’ll take the truck and sell it on, you know, the buy and sell kijiji or whatever. But, yeah. I want I want your customers and I wanna, you know, let let me take a look at that. So, that’s kind of what you need to think about. So you wanna set that realistic budget. We talked about that 15 to 20%.

John Clendenning [00:53:22]:
I say 15, you’re not trying hard enough, 20%. If you’re starting a brand new business, I would have enough money in your back pocket where you could be 25%. I knew a guy that built a business from 0 to over $1,000,000 a year in less than 5 years, brand new, never stepped in the truck even once because he had a $100,000 marketing budget to start with and a really good business acumen. I actually he became a mentor of mine years ago. I learned a lot of stuff from him, but he he started that business that way. And, he reinvested all of his profits because he did he had income. He did not need to be earning money originally from the company. So, 0 to a $1,000,000 business in 5 years by just prolifically mark prolifically marketing and reinvesting all the profits.

John Clendenning [00:54:12]:
Profits, so probably about 25% revenue, 30% revenue, depending on where like that, back into the business. Right? So he had his 20% marketing budget and then he the rest of it got dumped in again so that he then he could back off to just 20%, glean the rest off the top, and the rest off the top was a couple 100000 a year take home to not run the company because he was never in the truck. He hired people to answer phones and book jobs and do all that kind of stuff. So, anyways, it is possible. So yeah. So you gotta think about that. So one way to think about sort of budgeting, I know we talked about sort of making sure you have multiple poles in the water and how you’re gonna do your budgeting. I just wanted to share one of the things that we run through with our clients.

John Clendenning [00:54:58]:
I’m gonna pop back over to this here. We do talk about where to allocate your budget online, offline, repeat business, repeat business, how to break that down, how to think about it based on the numbers on that homepage, and the 20%, and and and and, but let’s say, I get asked a lot, pay per click. John, how do I know how much to invest, or what what kind of pay per click budget? I don’t know why that keeps disappearing on me. What kind of pay per click budget do we need to consider? I’m going, it’s just math. Right? So let let our team run a report. What is the average cost per click for the ideal target keywords in your marketplace across all of them? Like, say, for example, it’s $9. We’re able to get it down to under $3 sometimes over teaching the algorithm, great landing pages, just great ad copy, but that’s an algorithm that it it takes a, you know, it takes a statistically significant amount of data to teach the algorithm. About 5,000 conversions to a call starts teaching Google.

John Clendenning [00:55:58]:
That’s their own math, starts teaching Google properly, and that’s gotta come fairly rapidly. So you can’t have a $300 a month budget, $10 a day on on pay per click, and expect, you know, well, I want 5 phone calls a day. Doesn’t happen. Why? Because the average cost to even click on your ad to get to your landing page in carpet cleaning is about 8 or $9 in most marketplaces. Right? We can take that down a little bit, but let’s just start with sort of averages. And then so weekly budget, how many days a week do you want to run the ads for? Say you only wanna run Monday to Friday. Right? 5 days a week. So now you know that you need about $1,000 a month because there’s about 4.2 weeks in a month on average because there’s 52 weeks and only 12 months.

John Clendenning [00:56:52]:
You do the math, you divide it, it’s 4.2. So you’re you need about $1,000 a month to run a decent pay per click campaign because Google tells you you need about 5 clicks a day for them to like you. So you need about $45 a day. Now if this can start coming down over time to say maybe $5, right, maybe you can lower that down a little bit, but you might wanna do 6 days a week or or whatever. But you need at least 5 clicks a day or Google is going to say, you know what? If you only need if you if you have $10 a day and it’s $9 a click, you get that click at 6 o’clock in the morning, your ad is off for the rest of the day. You wanna be sure that you’re running it at the optimum times. Right? So now we’ve got that. So what is your website conversion rate? How many people show up on your website and either phone you? Do you have the ability for them to fill out a form? Do you have the ability for them to chat? I would not put a self booking widget on a landing page or or a website for people that don’t know you yet.

John Clendenning [00:57:59]:
Because if your prices are right, they should be a little bit shocking compared to your discount competitors. If they think, well, carpet cleaning is $99 to do my whole house, my neighbor’s house, my my cottage and blah blah blah, you know, like those deals that we see people running who don’t understand how to run a business, how can they justify your when they look at your prices and, you know, they they do a calculation of their guesstimate. They’re trying to get a quote. Automated quote, should never be a quote either, should be an estimate until you show up and test, look, measure, see. Anyways, they’re trying to get a quote, and the quote you’re giving out is $350. These guys are really overpriced. That’s ridiculous, and off they go. If you can have the conversation with them by text, by email, by phone explaining that discount pricing is a bit of a bait and switch scam or they’re going out of business and they don’t know it and they’re using the cheapest solutions and products and all because they cannot afford anything else.

John Clendenning [00:58:55]:
They might not even have insurance. All that kind of you can have that really good conversation properly with scripts that get that out, right, then now you can book at higher prices. So, anyways, a little rant there. But I just so you know, the average landing page, converts when done really well at about 20%. We’d love it to be higher. I’d love it to be higher. You’d love it to be higher. It isn’t gonna be higher because there’s people that click and go away.

John Clendenning [00:59:20]:
There’s people that click for no reason. You don’t actually even be one wanna be number 1 at the top of, Google’s pay per click if you’re running pay per click because it gets more of the garbage clicks because people go, oh, good. Oh, no. I don’t want that. Right? And you just paid for the click. You actually kinda wanna have them have to scroll down and think a little bit. So 2nd, 3rd spot’s actually a little bit better. Strategic pay per click, point right there.

John Clendenning [00:59:40]:
Right? Then how many do you book? Do you book 50% like we talked about? Right? And what is your average job? Say your average job is $300. Now, we know for our $1,000. Right? Average cost to buy a customer is inquiry $45, takes 2 of them to get one job. You’re gonna have about 10 bookings in the month. Now you’ve got the math. The average cost per sale is gonna be 9, $210 minus the $90 that cost to buy the customer the first time. Average monthly revenue, $31100 from this one pole in the water, this one source, minus your ad budget that got you there, and you now have a gross profit margin that you pay your technicians out of, your gas, your solution, all that kind of stuff of $2,200. Right.

John Clendenning [01:00:31]:
So that kind of helps you figure out. You say, well, I want more. Well, maybe there’s more room to up your budget and and get more. The average cost per click, the daily budget is 45 dollars to get 5. We can actually take that and say, but what if we wanted 10 clicks a day, double the budget, right? Everything else stays the same. You’ve just you’re still a 3 to 1 ROI. That didn’t change. But you’ve now grossed $4,000 if there’s enough people for 10 clicks a day.

John Clendenning [01:01:08]:
Right? So it really comes down to your budget and the volume in that one pole in the water. It’s just one pole in the water. Are you gonna break the bank at $4,000 or $2,000 a month? No. But if that’s one of 20 poles in the water and each of them are making a 1,000 to $2,000 a month, you just ran got $40,000 worth of work from poles in the water. Right? So it’s a matter of scaling to that. So hopefully that makes sense. I just wanted to share that pole in the water example, and we’ll get back to where we’re at. K.

John Clendenning [01:01:41]:
So how do we do that? How do we stand out in a noisy marketplace? Pretty simple. We, our goal, is to become the best known cleaner. That’s actually a trademark term we have now in our company, but the best known cleaner is our marketing program. But the best known cleaner is the one that everybody knows in the marketplace. It doesn’t happen overnight. But you get on podcasts. Ah, why did John say that at the beginning? You get on podcasts. You have door hangers and flyers.

John Clendenning [01:02:08]:
Every every house you do, you you’ve got you do the 20 around a minimum. You put a yard sign and you leave it behind. Right? Ask missus Jones, can I leave that in your front yard? You have an a frame at the end of the street pointing down to where your beautiful truck is so everybody can see connection. Oh my gosh. These guys are in my neighborhood all the time. As you get bigger, that 20% of revenue, your half a $1,000,000, that 20% of revenue is a $100,000. That’s not all to online and offline and database and and taking, you know, and do and doing get building referral partner relationships. Some of that is sponsoring the local soccer team in the higher end areas of town as well.

John Clendenning [01:02:44]:
Some of that is because you’ve that that’s the, you know, you know, when you see, like, Windmars and and plumbing companies and and you name it, stuff like that, that sponsor, like, the local hockey arena and they might have a sign on the board or, you know, the steps going up to the entrances all have their logo on it. Why? Because it becomes brand awareness out of that 10% of their overall marketing budget because as they grow a bigger company, that number gets bigger and bigger and bigger. So you become the best known cleaner. You start from the beginning and you build your way up. There is a blueprint for that. So that’s how you do it. How do you become the best known cleaner? You follow a blueprint. Pretty simple.

John Clendenning [01:03:20]:
What I will show you, that’s all part of our coaching and stuff that we do, but what I will show you is the foundation is the most important. You need to have a compelling sales proposition. This is where you get to manufacture reality. We all live in the matrix. You get to manufacture the reality of your business. You get to call your packages. I would have packages, by the way. You get to call your service packages.

John Clendenning [01:03:46]:
Carpet cleaning has 3 packages. Upholstery cleaning has 3 packages. Why? Because the best customers will at will want more of what you’ve got. So give them more options. Right? Anyways, you give it a name. Right? You could have a package that’s called, you know, new mom package and have a bunch of things plus a gift plus a whatever. It’s the same cleaning you always do, but it’s given out to new moms and you get it put into the welcome wagon and you give it a like, you give it a a a name around that. You could have a a a package for new businesses in town and make sure all the real the the real estate agents and and mortgage business mortgage brokers and business real estate agents, are referral partner with you.

John Clendenning [01:04:24]:
You give them gifts. You take them out for dinner. You do stuff like that. You give them rewards every time they refer somebody, and you have a package for new businesses to get the a great cleaning when they be when the place is empty, and then maybe right after they’ve set up all of their their workstations and whatever else, you’ll come in and do a touch up cleaning of the of the traffic lanes or something like that. You build a package around that. Compelling sales proposition. Why you over everybody else? Why you’re different? And what you named things. Risk reversal guarantee.

John Clendenning [01:04:53]:
Don’t hide. What you do has to be guaranteed in today’s day and age. If they’re not happy, you will have to go back or you’ll have negative reviews all over the place. So make that your biggest selling position. We guarantee our work so much that that if you’re not happy, not we’ll come back and re clean it, no questions asked, within 24 hours, one business day, and I used to take a gift. We called it our recipe for recovery. That’s like blueprint for success. Actually, right down there behind there is the recipe for recovery training, and we brought gifts.

John Clendenning [01:05:23]:
We did a whole song and dance if we had to come back and do a because of a complaint. Instead of going, oh, we’re gonna go back and then Jones does those again. It’s like, hey. Got the gift ready. You guys going? Yep. Let’s go. Call on the way over. Get it done, and it’s within one business day.

John Clendenning [01:05:37]:
Solve the problem. If they’re still not happy, probably set bad expectations. It’s our fault. We didn’t set the expectations correctly. Even if we thought we did, we still gotta take ownership of that. We give the money back. But we also said if you could find anybody else who could get the stain out or get the area cleaner, we’d pay their bill for you. We had such a great risk reversal guarantee that we could mark it out.

John Clendenning [01:05:58]:
Hey. If you’ve got cleaning by anybody else in the last 30 days in this neighborhood, we are so confident we can clean better. We’ll come and clean your house. Take off of our bill what you spent with them, and show you the dirt we could get out that they couldn’t. Why did we do that? Because in any neighborhood we marketed to, the number of people that had carpet cleaning in the last 30 days was small. The number of people that thought that that was an amazing guarantee and you guys must be amazing and took us up on the offer was large. So it happened a couple of times. We went in and cleaned and how could we make that offer as well? We’re always more expensive than the competitors.

John Clendenning [01:06:33]:
So taking their $99 off of our bill, cleaning the carpet again, and showing them dirty water, not that hard. Right? So have a founder story. Why did you get into this in the first place? And then your impactable brand brand messaging. If you have all of that figured out in-depth, all the rest of this is super easy. You can build all your systems out. Your website’s the hub and tells that entire story. Your website tells that story. Compelling sales proposition, risk reversal guarantee, founder story, and your impactful brand messaging, and there’s actually a storytelling framework to the right websites that convert better twice as much as a website that doesn’t have this figured out.

John Clendenning [01:07:11]:
Right? So people are going, oh my god. Can I trust these guys? What are they all about? Your brand? Your risk reversal guarantee. Easy to opt in. That’s a good website. And then start telling the founder story. Looks like this. There’s actually a science to it. So it isn’t going to Wix or GoDaddy or Chad’s EPT or any of these tools are coming on.

John Clendenning [01:07:30]:
Go build me a website. K. Well, what’s the strategy? Anything anybody can build pretty. Right? You’re gonna hire a designer to build pretty. Can you hire somebody that knows how to build strategically as well? And then does it is it SEO optimized? Are you doing a 1,000, 2,000 words a page? Is it is it using what we talked about in the SEO webinar and trait master class about topical authority cluster, the topic of authority content? Now entity SEO, not keywords. Keywords are dead. Entity SEO, generative AI. All of these things is the new SEO to get ranking.

John Clendenning [01:08:02]:
Are you baking that into your website and updating it every single week? Yes. I said every week. Does your website speak to your ideal target avatar? Is that a 35 to 55 year old college, university educated, 80% skewed towards women who have children and pets. Is that your ideal customer for the majority of your business? Of course, you wanna do some commercial and stuff like that maybe. But is that the is that the main focus to kinda get people in the door, best known cleaner, largest volume, and then sell the rest. If it is, your website should be talking to them. Are you a busy, stressed out, overworked, homeowner? You’ve got kids and pets to deal with, spouses, that make a mess as well, and you just wanna keep a clean, healthy home that you can be proud of. There’s your message.

John Clendenning [01:08:49]:
Pretty simple. Right? Does it have real authentic images? Right? A picture says a 1,000 words. Stock imagery says you have no interest in showing them what you’re all about and sends them away. Conversions drop by half when you use stock photography, just so you know. Does it include video elements? Can you put a video on every page? Hey. Welcome. You know, I’m Tommy here from Tommy John’s carpet cleaning, and I wanna let you know, all about our tile and grout cleaning service you’re gonna see down on the page. I wanna let you know, hey.

John Clendenning [01:09:22]:
Welcome to my website. Check it out. Look around. All that kind of stuff. We wanna be your carpet cleaner. We’re not the cheapest. We just guarantee to be the best and the last one you’ll ever need to to to find. So if that sounds good to you, give us a call.

John Clendenning [01:09:34]:
We’ll come out to your home, do a full thorough assessment and audit of your carpets, your upholstery, your tile, anything else like that, and a full maintenance plan and a healthy home audit. And not only is that free and complimentary, we’ll pay you for it. What does that mean? Give us a call. Tell you our the whole story. Right? Something like that. Right? So, again, I’m rattling off a ton of marketing stuff because I do this all day long, but this is what you need to do. You want videos on each of your services. You want video explaining why somebody should contact you versus the competition.

John Clendenning [01:10:00]:
Does it showcase your online reviews? Does it make them take action? Does it have the basics in order like I showed on the last screen? Right? Are there calls to action? Every time they scroll down, pretend they’re a goldfish. They forgot what to do. Oh, I get to click that button and call. Oh, I get to click that button and fill out a form or start a chat, whatever. Right? Are you leveraging offers that match the page that they’re on? Not deals, not discounts, offers. You can add extra stuff. Free bottle of spotter, 1 year warranty, free spot removal service for a year, like, what you know, new client offer. Didn’t cost you it’s not less.

John Clendenning [01:10:40]:
It’s actually more stuff for your high price. Right? Two way chat. I like chat to text. They fill it out. Their phone goes right in their chat app. They can walk away, and you’re having a conversation there. We use AI to start the conversation. We’ve built our own platform and we’ve now got AI voice coming as well and stuff like that.

John Clendenning [01:10:57]:
Again, a lot of services are offering AI everywhere, training it to understand how to speak properly and tell your story, not give prices, not not not try and sell, try and influence so that they let you call them back, reach out, do whatever. That’s the right way to do it. Are you leveraging automation? We talked just about that. Right? So good website has all the features before they even scroll down. They are just an example of a really great website laid out properly that tells the right story right from the top. And as soon as you scroll down, you know, why you should choose us and who we are. Tells the next part of the story. So we’re near wrapping up.

John Clendenning [01:11:36]:
I know we’re gonna go over 90 minutes this time as well. We always do every year. So we got about 15 minutes left to go through the last little bits. We’re gonna talk about the rule of 3 to transform your business. If you want to double your business in the next by December 31st, like, you wanna have your average monthly revenue be double by December 31, 2025, this is how we do it. The rule of 3 is everywhere. Right? Threes there’s their plays have 3 acts. Matter has 3 states.

John Clendenning [01:12:06]:
Well, now they talk about plasma as a 4th state, so maybe I should change that. Chess is a game of 3 phases. Sales offers, you know, or best with 3 product types or 3 packages is what that kind of means. You know, McDonald’s started that, but good, better, best. 3 is best. Right? There’s 3 is perfect. Right? That’s the, you know, omni triumperfectum. The Latin means everything comes in threes is perfect.

John Clendenning [01:12:32]:
So holy trinity, there is a rule to 3. So did you know that you own 3 businesses? You’re operating 3 businesses, a client attraction business, a service delivery business. Once you attract them, you better be doing a great job here, and that’s separate. And then a client retention, again, client. So that might actually be customer attraction, service delivery, client retention. I was gonna use my language incorrect. So before the sale before the sale, omnipresence, best known beats, best every day. We talked about that.

John Clendenning [01:13:03]:
Market is market your list relentlessly. Grassroots outreach, local referral programs, partner programs. Do you have referral partners? Are you growing? I ask people all the time, do you have any real estate agents? Yeah. Well, my buddy’s a real estate agent, refers me. Oh, yeah. I got a couple. Cool. How did you get them? I don’t know.

John Clendenning [01:13:19]:
I just kinda knew them. I did some cleaning. They’re happy. Cool. Did you leverage that to get 10 or 20 more? No. Wonder why. Don’t know. But if you’ve got 2 or 3 real estate agents referring you or property managers referring you or hair salons and chiropractors and and and and referring you to their customers because you asked them to and you had a program in place, why wouldn’t you get their endorsement? I like to do it on letterhead, and in fact, half the ones I ever got, more than half of them, I wrote it I wrote out the endorsement, went back and said, hey.

John Clendenning [01:13:58]:
So you you know, here I’d I’d like to share an idea with you. I’d like to have more great referral partners like you. I’d like to go talk to more real estate agents. I’d like to go talk to more property managers. So here’s my reward to you. Here’s my gift. I often took them out for lunch. I offered often offered a free cleaning Their entire home absolutely clean for free up to $500 or more.

John Clendenning [01:14:22]:
Right? Just as a as a as a give to get. Bob Berg, the go giver. Go give to get. Right? That was just another book I read. All the books we should read as business owners. That was one of them. Oh, I can do that, and created entire marketing strategies around it. Right? So you do that, you give to get, you get a letter, I brought the letter and said, you know, tweak any words you want.

John Clendenning [01:14:45]:
Right? Do you got a copy of your letterhead? Can you like, if I was at their office or can you send me one? PDF? I just like to if if you’re okay with these words, you know, strike out any lines you don’t want, change anything you want, but this was sort of my little wording of what you said to me last, right, and I would do that. So you wanna be able to do get referral partners. Weekly outreach and awareness campaigns to your marketplace, referral partner reward offers, so programs and reward offers, weekly commercial outreach and follow ups, neighborhood brand awareness, digital SEO, Google Maps, Facebook, Google Ads, local service ads, in market data, set people search that you can actually get into their inbox, and run ads towards pixel, your all your websites and run retargeting campaigns. There’s lots of Nextdoor is becoming a great platform to to run some ads on if you can do it strategically. We’ve got a very very high end Nextdoor ad rep partner within Nextdoor for our agency. So it’s kind of a neat one as well. But, lead chase and nurture like crazy. That is all before the sale.

John Clendenning [01:15:50]:
During the sale, call scripts, messaging scripts. Do you know how to chase somebody? That first 2 weeks, if they don’t book, what do you follow-up with them? Next day, wait 2 days, wait 4 days, wait 6 days. That’s called the chase. And then, you know, finally final, you know, final message after 2 weeks, we used to pop it in the mail. Mafia offer, we called it, mailed them out a great offer they couldn’t refuse. And then if they still refused, we put them in long term nurture and stayed in touch with them till they as we always like to say, buy or die. Right? So that’s an you wanna indoctrinate them to sell the service experience. So if they do book or a quote or a job, what’s it gonna look like? You start marketing during before you show up.

John Clendenning [01:16:30]:
Deliver the service experience. Have you got it built? Right? You talk about it. You show it. You do it. Sell by chat, all that kind of stuff. You know, crafting your quote visit for success. Can you double you know, can you get, like, your quote visits from, you know, 80% to 90% to 95% booking even at prices really high? Are you crafting a remarkable there that wasn’t a mistake. The word re there is remarkable in home cleaning experience.

John Clendenning [01:16:58]:
Why? Because you want people to remark about you. Are you anchoring your expertise, standing out as the best known cleaner and their go to source? There’s ways to do that with follow-up as well and cleaning tips and spotting tips and healthy home tips and best cleaning products and how to make your own, you know, window cleaner and spot cleaner so that you’re not using chemicals in your home and stuff like that. We can teach all of this stuff really easily in tips and drips and emails and newsletters, print newsletters and and all that stuff. If you’re not doing it, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to get into their mind, get into their Dunbar numbers, you know, stay fresh in their mind. Referral rewards to introduce you to others because now that they’re all happy with all of this, of course, I’m gonna tell people about you. How do I do that? You have to remind them and remind them and remind them and have VIP clubs. And then after the sale, build a fence. Right? Sell the feedback.

John Clendenning [01:17:53]:
Tanker the experience. Sell the referral to share the experience. Sell the repeat to reexperience the experience. That’s what I train on. That’s what I’ve been flown around the world to teach is how you do that. Service visit follow-up routine. What do you do the day after? What do you do like, are you calling the next day? Do you have a survey for them to fill out? Right? So you have to have a follow-up for success. That’s That’s what we call it in our blueprint for success training.

John Clendenning [01:18:17]:
After service, next service, upsell opportunity, can you get back within 30 days? Did you know that if a customer uses you once, the chance of them using you a second time is only about 20%. If they’ve used you twice, their chance of using you again goes up to 50%. By the time they’ve used you 4 times, if the experience is equally as good because it’s crafted, it’s done well, whether it’s you, whether it’s somebody else, their chance of ever going anywhere else is down to 5%. Restaurants, same idea. After 4 visits, you’re pretty much a regular in most restaurants. So their goal, the smart ones, and I’ve coached some restaurants in the past as well, their smart ones are how do you get the person back 4 times as quickly as possible. We actually have a program that tries to get you back in the house within 30 days for something else right from them filling out a feedback survey. Right? So and then a recipe for recovery, we talked about that.

John Clendenning [01:19:11]:
Database follow-up, ongoing nurture, quarterly check ins, annual reminders, seasonal promotions, VIP package upsells, lost client reactivation marketing, some people call it the miss you marketing, all that kind of stuff. So power of threes is what you do is you pick. You’ve got 3 separate parts of your business. You pick one thing in each part as well. So now your business is in threes. Pick one thing in each. Lock and load it. Learn it.

John Clendenning [01:19:35]:
Lock and load it. Make it repeatable. So it’s not about this or that, it’s this and, and so you go around your whole business, you build it up, and it never ends because then you come back and make it better. Good, better, best, best, best, best. That’s how you grow. What marketing lists are you building and nurturing? You are the keeper of the lists. Like, the Lord of the Rings, keeper of the ring, you are the keeper of the lists. Customer lists, commercial lists, the services each person has, whether they have pets and children, that’s all part of it as well.

John Clendenning [01:20:06]:
Property managers, leads, that’s your customers. Leads, inquiries, are you keeping that list? Referral partners, list, list, list, list, list. You wanna have lists for everything and a marketing plan to stay in touch with them. Right? So and then those lists are built by your ideal customer avatar. If you can see what Joe Jones so you can see Joe Jones through Joe Jones’ eyes, then you can sell what Joe Jones buys. What does a property manager buy? What does a hotel buy? What does a residential carpet cleaner on a golf course road buy versus somebody in a condo building? And and and you start seeing them, you can start understanding how to sell them. Right? So your ideal customer avatar, we talked about that last time, and then you put that into all of your messaging. So a little bit of a recap there.

John Clendenning [01:20:53]:
Lead nurture automation. You can generate inquiries and leads, but are you nurturing them? It’s entirely different. 50 to 60% of inbound leads leave unconverted on average across all the businesses we’ve looked at. 90% of web forms fail to convert. Why? Because a web form is shy. A lot of people go, oh, take the web form off my my website. The people nobody nobody wants to book from that. You understand that the people that filled out the web web form are a little bit shyer.

John Clendenning [01:21:23]:
That’s why they filled out the web form. They need more nurturing. They need to know about happy customer stories. You need to tell them about you need to share testimonials. You need to do a, you know, videos are good, you need to drip on them because that’s why they chose the web form. It wasn’t that if you take the web form off, all of a sudden they became bold type a personalities and picked up the phone and called you. No. They went to another website with a web form.

John Clendenning [01:21:47]:
You just kick them out of your entire world. If the lifetime value of your average client is 5 to $10,000, you just lost another 5 to $10,000. How do you know that? You run your math and figure that out. So, leads that are not followed up with within 5 minutes. Phone’s got to be answered within the first three ring rings, period. If you do not do not answer your phones in the van, do not answer your phones in front of jobs, do not answer your phones when you’re out on the road at all. If you are on the road, which you should be, not cleaning, but as the business owner doing quotes and meets and greets and, you know, picking up area rugs and solving problems and checking on your technicians and all the things that you should be doing most days out of the office. And when you’re in the office, close your door and be strategic and build stuff.

John Clendenning [01:22:29]:
Right? Build marketing programs and plans and go through numbers and all that kind of stuff. That runs a great business. But if you are doing all of that, who’s answering your phones? Well, it shouldn’t be you. Who’s answering your text messages? It shouldn’t be you. There are services for that. There are people for that. So call us if you need help with that. There’s I did a great podcast with Rachel at the call studio.

John Clendenning [01:22:48]:
Anybody who mentions carpet cleaner marketing masters actually gets a free month with them. So, and they only answer carpet cleaning phones and I used them for 20 years as a rollover to help on, you know, at the end of the day, they they would they would carry into the evening and on the weekends, and they also ended up doing it full time when Heather went on maternity leave and through COVID and stuff like that. So, they’re great. They’re great. We have dozens of our clients that are using the call studio. So go back to one of our podcasts or reach out to us if you’re interested in that, but and they only charge you for booking a job. They don’t charge anything other than when a job gets booked. They have a minimum.

John Clendenning [01:23:21]:
It’s pretty small, but it includes the same number of job bookings. Do they just say if you, you know, you can’t hire them and then not forward your phones, that kind of idea. But they’ll they’ll run inside our tool and text message and email and all that kind of stuff as well, and they’re really good at it because they only deal with carpet cleaning customers. Right? But you gotta follow-up with leads that are inquiries that are not phone calls, that are text messages, emails within 5 to 15 minutes. Period, because everybody believes that it’s like a phone call nowadays. Right? You gotta sometimes follow-up 5 to 7 times. You gotta drip on them to get a hold of them. That’s why people go, oh, when people fill out a form, they’re terrible.

John Clendenning [01:24:01]:
They never get back to me. How many times did you try? How many different modes and modalities did you try? Right? So you wanna make sure that’s all in place as well. You can leverage automation to do that so that when somebody fills out a web form, their phone rings within less than 2 minutes called smart connect. That’s how our carpet cleaner lead pro works. Text messages, you can actually get AI to start start the conversation, then taken over by a human when you’ve got a second, but go back and forth, all that kind of stuff, so that you can start getting those touches in and you can start dripping on them happy customer stories and all the things that convert. When you do that well, I’ll just fold it put this right in. This is the one the example of one of our actual clients. They had all of this in place, but we had not invented carpet cleaner lead pro yet.

John Clendenning [01:24:46]:
They were getting leads from all the poles in the water that we did, plus all their own poles in the water, generating a 164 inquiries. We were, cold inquiries, and their average conversion rate on the cold inquiries who didn’t have a name in mind and reached out, was 30%. No follow-up. They would book 49, 50 jobs a month out of that average and do about $16,000 just from our our sources. Yay. We we seem amazing. Right? Now, what we did when we when we built Carpet Cleaner Lead Pro, it was just based on all the leads attraction systems that I ran in my own business for years, all my businesses, the maid services, carpet cleaning, duct cleaning, all of it. Janitorial, how did you chase people down? Right? How did you stay in touch? How did you drip on them? What did you send them? What did you say the next day, 2, 3 days later? When you built all of that out, all of a sudden it’s now 70%.

John Clendenning [01:25:40]:
You know, it went from 30% to 45% within that first 2 weeks, 45, 50%. The other 20% comes a week, 2, month, 2, 3. Maybe 9 months later, that inquiry still came in in September, but now they’re calling you because you stayed in touch, nobody else did, and they didn’t get it cleaned or they cleaned it with somebody else. Didn’t like them. That person didn’t stay in touch. They’re ready to try better. Right? And now all of a sudden, that exact same amount of marketing that only that brought in 16,000, not only, but brought in 16,000 now brings in almost 40,000. Nothing changed in your expense.

John Clendenning [01:26:16]:
Nothing changed in your in the the the number of inquiries that started the whole thing. Same number, same September. By the end of, you know, every month that much, now you got 70% conversion because you’re willing to chase them down. So, hopefully, that makes sense. Hopefully, that’s clear that you can actually double your business just with better conversions alone. And it looks like this. This is just all your communication sources come into one platform, app, and desktop, and then there’s automated messages, smart messages, connections, all that kind of stuff, and it just you know, if they answer this one, they go into that funnel, all of that kind of stuff. You just move them across where did you get a did you talk to them? Cool.

John Clendenning [01:26:53]:
Move them into I talked to them pile. That’s you know, you made a direct connection. Did they book a quote? Did they book a cleaning? They’re just gonna think about it. Cool. That’s all different messages. Right? Have they been kind of thinking about it for a week or 2 and you’ve been sending messages and you haven’t heard anything back? That’s a different bucket. Right? So that’s what it’s all about. So you’re gonna build your plan.

John Clendenning [01:27:13]:
Take your takeaways. We’re wrapping up here. Which of the 40 plus job producing poles in the water do you have implemented and running in your business? Right. You wanna build a custom plan? You can start off by getting the checklist and seeing what you don’t have on your Internet marketing. That’s a good starting point. As well, you’re gonna take 3 action items away, and you wanna implement a blueprint. You want to know what you’re doing to grow your business. Again, go to carpet clearingmarketmasters.com/rewards and get all of this kind of stuff.

John Clendenning [01:27:50]:
I did wanna kind of take a quick minute for any of you who wanna stick around for a second. What I do I know we’ve been an hour and a half. If you wanna stick around, I do wanna show you one of the coachings and trainings I’ve done in the past on if it’s the winter, if you’re slow, you know, or if it’s just a slow season, what are the things you should be doing right now? And I kind of just popped up winter slow season marketing opportunities based on some of the programs our clients have available. That’s the actual sales letter I used to use that worked brilliantly. There’s a copy of it. Right? That in Word file that you can like, it was literally a 4 page sales letter for the winter for our our winter volunteer clients. And then it was followed up with with, landing pages, little simple landing pages with the offer on it and an email campaign. That’s just an example of one of our giveaways.

John Clendenning [01:28:44]:
Right? One of the things that we do to our, our our members. Right? So oops. Let’s go back to this here. So winter volunteer, what is that? That is people from, you know, from 6 months ago in January to 24 months ago. Right? So that’s an 18 month window. What you wanna do is take all of those people and say, hey, did you know winter is the slowest time of the year? You know, especially in the northern climates or rainy, mucky clients, or time of year, sorry. And you you you send out a mailing, you chase it with a phone call, you chase it with an email, 2 weeks later, you send out a second notice, call it second notice, you pick up the phone and call, hey, did you get our mailing? You you work the phones, you work the mail, you work the system. You’ll actually get more people going, oh, yeah, and booking in on the second one.

John Clendenning [01:29:43]:
But where do you get all the buzz? On the third one. The third and final notice is extended 1 week only or expiring soon. Any of the not false urgency, real urgency because spring is here. So we used to we run we used to run them from the 2nd week of January, did all the after holiday cleaning, stayed fairly busy. The mailings dropped the 2nd week of January, so about a week ago, all the way through for 6 weeks into March. And we would get from our database, we would cherry pick our database, the people, you know, that were, like, not rentals, not, you know, the low income areas and stuff like that. We already knew who they were. We always rated our clients a, b’s, and c’s, and this went to the a’s and b’s.

John Clendenning [01:30:28]:
That’s all. Right? And we would do that. We also did what we call our miss you miss you campaign. Jim Woolverton was a was a friend of mine back in the day, and he and I worked on this. I had a lot of questions around it, and we dialed in some really good marketing on the on the miss you. And that was the 24 month to 36 month crowd. So 2 to 3 years. So just after this one so right now this goes back to, from again August or July of 2024 back to January 1, 2023.

John Clendenning [01:31:07]:
This is right now. That’s what you’d be running right now. This is January or December 31, 2022 all the way to January 1, 2022. That would be the crowd right now out of your database. And if you go, John, I don’t know those people. Why? Well, my database is on my phone. You’re not running a business. You’re guessing.

John Clendenning [01:31:25]:
Right? Oh, I use QuickBooks. Can you really pull this data? You needed a database software. Why? Because marketing, building your database is the most important thing. That’s your list. That’s your job. You’re marketing to it, and you can’t market to it if you don’t know who they are, what they did, and anything about them. Do they have pets? Do they have kids? How much do they spend? How many times have they been back? It’s not in your head. It’s it’s data.

John Clendenning [01:31:46]:
Right? So you run your miscue campaign. And, again, same idea. What’s the miscue campaign? The final one was actually the, what we call the, okay, okay, you win. That was what, again, Jim Woolverton and I came up with. That was hilarious. And that was the final message, one free room, no strings attached. So we targeted people that had more than one room cleaned or one free armchair, no strings attached. You know? One free area rug, no strings attached.

John Clendenning [01:32:11]:
Not because they every they’ve got one last time. It’s because they had a whole house of cleaning before and it’s been over 2 years. Either we didn’t impress you or we didn’t impress upon you why you should clean more often. That was the message, but the message started in a 4 page letter. Usually, actually, with my face up in the corner with my me, my wife, the kids, the dog, the cat, you know, all that kind of stuff. Right? And and that kind of thing. But that’s that’s an example of the types of mailings that we would put out. Right? Every 3rd room free, best of the year, things like that.

John Clendenning [01:32:45]:
Right? So winter volunteer, miss you. You have the commercial mock mailing, I used to call it, and that was for any of our commercial clients. We mailed them and then we stopped in. That was a mailing and a stop in. Right? And that kind of translates to this over here, but and mailing and a stop in, and the stop in was just to make sure they got and we took a copy of the mailing, the brochure, and we did we did a mailing, we did an email, and we did a stop in, and then we followed up with a, you know, a phone call and and stuff like that. What that was was we’ll clean for you right now and provide free protector upgrade for free, here’s the value, to all of the areas to protect your carpet from the the muck and the dirt and the winter slime and all that kind of stuff, and then we’ll come back before the end of May would be the requirement, sometimes the end of April depending on when we got this out the door, and do a traffic lane cleaning at half off. So free protector now, traffic lane cleaning at half off at the end of the you know, at the end of it all so that your carpets survive another winter and last years longer. You can ruin your carpet in one bad season, you can save it for 20 plus years if you get it maintained properly.

John Clendenning [01:34:11]:
Let us be those people. Right? That was the mailing. And it’s just it’s just a law of numbers. You work and work and work the system. Right? So that that’s another database mailing program right there. I can go through a bunch more, but let’s just jump into here quickly because I know we’re we’re over time now. Grassroots. While you’re doing the winter muck, right, why not do 5 around? Oops.

John Clendenning [01:34:38]:
What I used to do, shy kid, I would stop off at this place that I knew and I go to the business around, hey, I was just over at one of our clients there, you know, ABC shoes and just about our winter our winter muck program. Right? And we had a better name than that, but that’s the the example of it. You can use chat gpt to come up with some cool names that you wanna call it. Brand it to your own brand. If you’re elite carpet cleaning, you know, or something like that, use that in it. Right? Use use use your own your own brand, impactful brand messaging to really dial it in. Make it your own. Right? So you’ve got all that, now you got the you can do the 5 around commercial.

John Clendenning [01:35:23]:
You can reach out to, property managers or, you know, or or condos, sorry. And I would actually start with the, if you don’t know anybody in the building, you don’t have a client in the building. If you do, I’d have a chat with them. I’d make well, I used to pick up the phone and call them, hey, Martha Stewart. It’s John here, the owner of of Acclaim Carpet Cleaning. Oh, yeah. It’s John. Yeah.

John Clendenning [01:35:43]:
Anyways, Bob, yeah. You know, I just want I don’t I don’t wanna bug you. I just know that you live at 31 Front Street and, just trying to get a conversation with superintendent Reg and the property managers. We’d really love to do the hallways, and we got a really cool program that, you know, any any tenant like yourself that does a cleaning, if we’re doing the hallways, you get a little bit of preferred pricing, so a little bit of savings, but we also put some of the the what you give us for your cleaning towards the hallway cleaning. So there’s a maintenance deal involved. So your condo fees go farther because you’re not spending them all on us. Oh, wow. That’s amazing.

John Clendenning [01:36:18]:
I’ll definitely talk to them. Cool. Give me some phone numbers. If you don’t mind making the introduction, here let me show you how, but give me some phone numbers in case they ghost us, they go quiet, we can at least reach out. Right? Well, there’s about 4 or 5 of our customers in the building and I just thought, you know, you know, you’re very friendly, you probably know the right people. Oh, thank you, John. Anyways, again, go after condos. Then when we’re in that one building, go to other condos that are in the neighborhood because they’re usually in little clumps, ring the buzzer, and talk to the superintendent.

John Clendenning [01:36:54]:
I just put super in there. Don’t have enough room for the attendant. Now you’re doing grassroots outreach. Right? So you do that as well. So you got commercial muck, you got the 5 around commercial, you got the condos, you know, these are all things that you can do all day long. There’s a couple more that we teach as well. And then strategic partners. What you wanna do is you wanna take all your partners out for lunch.

John Clendenning [01:37:19]:
So I just call it partner partner lunch. 1 on 1 in the winter, have a chat about referrals and how their business is going and stuff like that, and ask them if there’s any other, you know, any other, remind them to refer you. Sorry. It’s referral reminder. Right? Referral reminder. And then ask them if there is anybody else in, in their industry, any other real estate agents here as I am, blah blah blah, that they can introduce you to and get an intro. All good stuff to do in the winter. It’s actually good stuff to do all the time.

John Clendenning [01:37:54]:
We actually teach it as a full program. I don’t know why my bullets aren’t there. Anyways, let’s forget the bullets. So, yeah, you can do partner lunches, strategic partners. There’s lots and lots and lots of things you can do and it’s all built around your, the stuff that we talked about, which is your risk reversal guarantee and your, there we go. Sorry. I’m picky that way. And all that kind of stuff.

John Clendenning [01:38:18]:
So and it’s built around your brand, your risk reversal guarantee, your founder story, and your compelling sales proposition. So that’s just a little bit bonus. If you’ve stuck around for that, great. Cool stuff. If you wanna learn more about this, you know, schedule. Just jump on carpet cleanermarketing services.com/schedule. We’ll do a deep dive into your bit your your area, your business. We’ll do run a whole bunch of reports.

John Clendenning [01:38:41]:
We’ll do those heat maps. We’ll do all kinds of cool stuff, and then you’ll jump on a call with me. It just takes about an hour, sometimes a little bit longer if we get chatty, and we’ll find the gap and how to fill the gap. If it makes sense that we can help you, I will suggest that we can help you in some of it, but it’s done together marketing. There’s no done for you, it’s done together marketing, but you’ve gotta get your stuff right as well. So there’s a bit of coaching that’s needed as well, usually. So we’ll get you started on that. Like, we’ll just I’ll give you some free stuff.

John Clendenning [01:39:07]:
That’s all it is. So, that’s why I do these webinars for free and stuff like that as well. You learn a lot. You can go back to them. You can take notes. You can do that. I get messages all the time going, holy crap. I put this in place.

John Clendenning [01:39:16]:
I put that in place. Whatever. That’s great. That’s that’s I appreciate that. As you grow, maybe you need our services. Right? So there’s I scratch your back, you scratch mine. That is totally fine. So, anyways, hopefully thanks for sticking around that little bit longer.

John Clendenning [01:39:29]:
Didn’t mean to go that much longer, but I really wanted to show you some of the marketing programs. If you are struggling or slow right now, all of those ideas will land 5, 10, $15,000, $20,000 over the next 4, 6, 8 weeks, and that’s that keeps the lights on. That keeps business going in the slow season until you’re ready. When it’s slow out, you are busier because you’re the marketer of cleaning services first and foremost. So, hopefully, you found value in this. Hopefully, it was something that was good. I thank you for your time. And, again, I love this webinar, the the planning, the training, and then the implementing.

John Clendenning [01:40:02]:
That’s what we just did. Planning, training on last one or the planning and goal setting training on the last one. A little bit more hands on implementing and tearing it apart on this one. So, anyways, hopefully, you found that valuable, and I will bid you a fond adieu, and, enjoy the rest of your day. Thanks so much.