Momentum Matters! Your Playbook to Finish 2025 Strong in Carpet Cleaning

The industry leaders allocate 15-20% of gross revenue to marketing—split 70% online, 20% offline, 10% on database and client retention campaigns. Under-spending is a silent business killer.

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Hey, how’s it going everybody? Welcome back. It’s uh been been a month have since I’ve seen you on here. So, thanks for showing up. Anybody live? Message in the chat. Sure is over there. Um just make a a quick hi right now. Let me know that you are here. I got a message on the private chat to make sure she’s around.

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 Um I sent a hi to her and see if we get a hi back. Can you hear me? Can you see me? All of that kind of stuff. So, just give a second to make sure we get a few people chatting in. There we go. Thanks, Ser. Just just say hi, chat, whatever. Anybody watching this on replay or listening to the podcast, hey, thanks so much for showing up.

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 Whenever you’re listening to it’s live today, can you believe we’re halfway through the year already? Like, it’s like we blinked and six months have gone by. So, that’s how it feels to me anyways. I don’t know how it feels to you guys. So, u and it’s a what a crazy year so far.

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 like every year is different but this rapid pace of change um in the world around us there’s a lot of reasons for that depends on which theory you believe if it’s the Strauss how generational theory 80-year theory we’re getting into the the end of the fourth turning you know there’s 18.2year two-year real estate cycles.

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There’s a four-year liquidity cycles on planet Earth. There is on and on and on. We’ve got all kinds of chaos going on. We’ve got a disruption in world order and world power. We’ve got economic monetary world policies and COVID policies and all of that coming home to roost that we keep talking about.

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 And we’re we’re just trying to run a carpet cleaning or home cleaning business. Like you give me a break here, right? But what we have to do is we have to respond to all these things. We got AI disrupting everything and it will be the biggest disruptor in our lifetimes. It would be one of the biggest disruptors on planet Earth until they I don’t know figure out teleportation or hyperdrive.

00:01:49 – 00:02:07

I don’t know. I can’t even think of what would be a big bigger disruptor than this. We had we had the um industrial revolution massive changed the entire face of the planet. People moved from, you know, a rural society agrarian society to, you know, to working in factories and industrialization in big cities and all of that kind of stuff.

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 uh and kind of kind of coasted from there. We had other disruptions and stuff like that, but really really really big monumental disruptions happen like generationally at most, you know, the invention of fire is one of them. Obviously, the invention of the wheel, things like that, right? So, we’re in that kind of world.

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 I know it’s like it’s, you know, there’s euphoria, then there’s the pit of despair kind of idea, and then there’s adoption and off we go. And we’re kind of riding that that normal wave, but way faster, way compressed, and it’s taking jobs. It’s there was was it done in Brad Street or one of the big no Goldman Sachs Goldman Sachs came out there two weeks ago now two and a half weeks ago um saying that AI will replace permanently 300,000 US middle management white collar jobs this year before the end of 2025. They just not needed anymore. the AI tool sets, the AI um assistance, the AI just just in inside CRM and inside all these, you know, corp for Fortune 500 corporate culture, all of that will replace the need for people to run reports and people to do interesting but permanently replace. They don’t have anywhere else to go. So where do you

00:03:29 – 00:03:45

think they’re going to show up? What happened in 2008 910 when there’s a slowdown in the economy? What happened in 2001 23 when there was a change, a changing of the guard, whatever you want to call it. Well, some of them decided they could own carpet cleaning businesses and made services and service businesses.

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 Some of them went out and bought franchises. Right now, franchises are getting um higher and higher numbers of people inquiring about buying a franchise. Good for them. A lot of them are service- based franchises, right? So, you know, we also have to say, “Oh crap, did we do enough? Did we do enough to put a fence around our customers, turn them into clients?” Good languaging.

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 customer to clients and and keep them. Did we do enough? I don’t know. That’s a decision you’re going to have to make. >> Welcome to the Carpet Cleaner Success Podcast, a show created to inspire carpet cleaning business owners to build their own thriving residential and commercial cleaning business. Your host, John Clintenning, has built and sold successful cleaning businesses for multiple six figures over his 30-year career and is the founder of Carpet Cleaner Marketing Masters, a digital agency that turns your online marketing into a lead generation machine. Tune in as John shares proven tips, strategies, and expert interviews to help fasttrack your success in the carpet cleaning industry. [Music] So, what are we doing today? Let’s get into it. Today, we’re going to be talking about the um momentum matters. You’ve got to keep momentum going. So,

00:05:10 – 00:06:11

we’re going to talk about the playbook to finish 2025 strong. So, couple times a year, we stop and check in, right? at the beginning of the year at the like the end of at the end of the last year, we stop and check in to see what what what happened in the year. What did we learn and what are we going to do for next year? What what goals are we going to have? What KPIs we’ll talk about all of this um are we going to have? And then at the beginning of January, we actually so we kind of do a duel right around here. Um let’s do a check-in. Let’s let’s do a recalibration. Let’s take a deep breath. What you know what’s working? And then let’s make our plans. Right? That’s the second part of the session. You know, instead of doing a four, two, three, four hour marathon, we usually split it up and we tell you then, we’re going to come back in June and see where you got to. Make adjustments, right? It’s not about ready, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim. Oh. Oh. Hesitantly pull the trigger. Oh, no. It’s ready. Fire. Oh, missed. Aim. Fire. Missed aim. Oh. Oh. Oh, there we go. Now

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I got it. Ready, fire, aim, fire, aim, fire, aim, and you dial it in. And that’s what we’re talking about. So, there’s ways to do that, and we’ll talk about that today. So, I’m going to change screens here. You can see him up in the top corner, and we shall get started.

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 And let’s walk through again what I would consider one of the most important things that every business Hey, up here, every single business owner, this going to be one of the most important things that every single business owner should be doing. and the fact that you’re here, you showed up, you’re thinking about this, understand that you’re one of the top one, two% in the industry.

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 Most people just fly by the seat of their pants. Everybody’s trying to we’ll talk about this, you know, oh, get AI to answer my phone, get AI to message, get AI to book my jobs, right? Again, I’m a massive, massive, massive AI geek. In fact, every single Friday I am I have another podcast called AI Marketing Experts with four of my very best AI marketing friends and agency owners.

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 And all we do is talk about this. We build AI systems and and internally and externally. And like again, we’re all in. And I do not believe that owning a business is set it and forget it. Go eat Cheetos and watch Netflix. If you want to do that, work for somebody else. like go get a a greeter, a job greeting people at Walmart or as I said I think last time or a couple times ago, you know, with our knowledge owning a cleaning business, we could get hired as a as the mainten maintenance manager of a condo corporation or a an office building or something like that and make 80, 90, 100, 110, 120,000 depending on what city you’re in and where you are a year. Cool, right? You go home at the end of the day. Um, you know, do you have job security? I don’t think that exists in today’s day and age. But yeah, or you can build a business, build an asset that you can sell to somebody else for multiples, right? You can build something that you can retire or semi-retire, work on your business and

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not in it after 55, 60, 65. Keep it as as like a rental income almost like as as as a rental properties. Um I’ve got a couple rental properties now and grow and growing that portfolio and that’s really nice. You know, you got to deal with a few tenant issues from time to time.

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 You get property managers to help you out, but you’ve got you make money. Like somebody else pays the pays the the mortgage and the equity. You make a little bit of cash flow, but it’s not about the monthly cash flow, but you can and you build this asset and equity. You can take that then once it’s fully paid off. Think of this as your business.

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Once your business is mature and running and you’ve built it out in a small town, you’ve gone wide. You’ve built your sevenfigure business. in a in a in a big big town. You’ve gone deep with your with, you know, really really focused as as as the the the best the top operator getting five, seven, eight, $900,000 per average residential job and and way more for commercial.

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 And you have built a business and put an iron fence around your customers, right? And now you you’ve got something that you can have somebody help manage. You watch the numbers. You go out and meet the people, you know, kiss the babies and shake the hands, all that kind of stuff, and continue to grow the business, continue to keep the business going, earn your paycheck.

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 When you’re ready, you sell the whole thing and cash out your your value, your your asset value, right? So, that’s available. Just like rental property, owning a business has that availability in it as well. Only if you build it right. So, this is one of those moments. We’re going to talk about building it right and how that should all look and play.

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 So, um, let’s get into it. I’m excited about this. This is this is the kind of stuff I geek out on. So, um, again, I’m just one of you. Spent 30 years owning carpet cleaning companies, was in the truck for the first year and a half as a 20some year old kid and said, “Hey, this is great. Don’t want to be the guy in the truck for the rest of my life.

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” In a town of 30,000 people and figured out how to go from zero to 10,000 a month to 20,000 a month again in a town of 30,000 people 30 years ago. eventually grew a business that had carpet cleaning and duck cleaning and maid services and and janitorial and all that. And we were doing well over a million a year. Um quite a bit more.

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 Um in the heyday of it and then just started selling off and getting the asset value out of the ones that you know we could move out and four years ago sold the last brickandmortar business. have been co coaching and consulting since 2007, helping other people build million-dollar cleaning empires if they want or at least doing what they want to do in their cleaning empire, getting it getting their their marketing right, getting their messaging right, getting the business right because I just geeked out on it. I just had to figure it out, right? And this is where we got to. So, turn off your cell phones, turn off Facebook if you’re cleaning home service business, ideally, but again, this works for anybody. Um, if you’re serious about getting better results, let’s let’s spend the next 60 minutes together and get that get that figured out. So, what we’re going to cover today, we’re going to do a a uh first half flashback, right? So, we’re going to look at um how you did, you’re gonna we’re gonna think through that a little bit. Um we’re going to talk about trends, what’s hot in carpet cleaning marketing and home cleaning service marketing. Um we’re going to we’re going to talk about those, you know, those inbound calls and and boosting all of

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that kind of stuff, how AI is disrupting things and what you need to look at. Um and we’re going to talk about how to become that local legend in in your in your area. So, and for anybody new here, we’ll do this really quickly. Who am I? So, John Clintenning been in business since 1990 while still in high school as a shy kid. It’s my buddy Scott.

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 Did all the talking. I just kind of was the brains behind it. Solid C student in school by the way. So, you know, brains, you know, wasn’t wasn’t uh um you know, that’s kind of a a little bit of an oxymoron there, but um yeah, I didn’t apply myself in school as well as I applied myself in the rest of my life.

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How’s that? Um so, I’ve owned franchises and businesses. Um, I’ve lectured, I’ve spoken on stages. I’ve I’ve speak with the Clean Facts magazine and Jeff Clark Jeff Cross on a regular basis, things like that. I’ve written the book on the subject. You can see it there on the screen. I got a copy beside me here.

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It’s on Amazon on internet marketing for carpet cleaners. New version coming out hopefully by this fall, all with, you know, AI implementation mixed in and stuff like that. It’s in the works. Um, just a really busy guy trying to find time to finish that out. um bought, systemiz, and sold businesses and all of those kinds of things.

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 So, so that that’s who I am. Um again, Clean Facts magazine industry leader of the year. I also run the carpet cleaner success podcast. You might be listening to this on on there. We interview business owners and and key thought leaders in the industry as well. So, if you are a business owner of a cleaning business, you know, reach out to the team.

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 It’s very beneficial, especially in today’s day and age, to get your brand out there as an authority. And one way to do that is actually show up on podcast, talk about your business. We show you how to do that. It’s not just a podcast. We we actually give you an entire media kit and show you how to uh actually become more wellknown in your marketplace as well and lots of other really cool stuff around that.

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 Um, and we do all that for free because we want to have more guests on the show as well. So, it’s kind of a, you know, a win-win for all of us. So anyways, um, more importantly than me is what we do with our clients, right? We want our clients to be seen everywhere, number one everywhere, best known cleaner.

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 Why? Because we want the to attract the best clients in the marketplace, not the three rooms in a hall for $99. That is not carpet cleaning. That is marketing incest. You want to be charging three rooms in a hall, 250, 300 bucks. Whole house, 800, 900 bucks. And have customers pay for that.

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 If you’re going, “Oh my god, John, nobody in my area will do that.” Call me. We’ll talk. I’ll show you who will will. And that you don’t need a lot of them, right? You need the right ones in the right way. And you need to build the business, right? And there’s a way to do that. There’s a proven way to do that. Um, you want to be able to charge top rates, whatever that is.

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 And again, there’s a way to actually there’s a really simple formula to figure out what that is. Um, and let your clients buy more from you. Just give them that opportunity. And you want to be booked out weeks in advance. You actually want your your your ideal clients, your repeat clients to book a year in advance in your schedule.

00:14:26 – 00:14:54

 When I learned that 2001, that was game changer for me. We had all of our clients, almost all of our clients, we had all of our clients pre-booked a year in advance in our schedule, anybody who got a cleaning, and we had most of them honor that appointment or adjust it within a couple days or a week of when we booked it in. and our ability to show up in a customer once twice a year, three times a year instead of once, twice a decade, uh just transformed our business.

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 So, it’s just another one of those levers you can pull. And what are those levers? Well, you want to be omnipresent. In fact, the only way AI works nowadays is if you are omnipresent. Search engine optimization, we’ll talk about this as well, is changed massively in less than a year. If you have not completely updated your website, completely updated your code, if your webdev team hasn’t been asking you for all kinds of new information and data and and and and stuff, they don’t know what they’re doing. I’m going to be as brutally honest and blunt as possible. We have invested tens, hundreds of thousands of dollars by this point and thousands and thousands and thousands of hours and do still spend invest hours every single week understanding the transformation of the human condition and how they’re searching for things because it it’s the same psychology. They’ve just got a better place to be and this has happened

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multiple times. So you want to be omnipresent, right? So you want, you know, the three principles of the omniresence marketing system. Maximize your opportunity to generate a qualified inquiry. What is qualified for you? We’ll talk about that today, right? You need to know that. This is part of your your goal planning and KBI planning. You need to know this.

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Maximize your brand impressions. Google has a thing called ZMOT. Came out 10, 12 years ago now. 8 somewhere in that range. Anyway, zero moment of truth. And they said at that time it takes 11 touches, 11 instances with a brand before you grab the shampoo off the shelf or call the carpet cleaner. You need 11 involvements with the brand.

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You start got to start knowing it. Well, that was then. Now Google is saying that that that number isro approaching 30. And interestingly, so 30 interactions and and impressions of a brand. But if we go, you know what, I should try those guys. Or, you know what, I should try that cereal, right? And we’re less trustworthy.

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 So now we’re swinging all the way back around and we’re actually going to the very first iteration that we learned about it and that becomes our gateway in, but we spend all this extra time really really thinking about the smart people, the the intelligent consumers are putting a lot of thought and intelligence behind their purchasing decisions, right? It’s the number one reason why um like everything from like we’ve we got all your toothpaste brands on the market.

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 The number of people that are opting out of toothpaste with with fluoride and SL SLS in it. Don’t even know what that is. Go look it up. I’m one of these people. Um has grown dramatically because people are learning their own stuff and going that’s garbage. Colgate should not be selling me that as an example.

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 Now we’re starting to take it out of the drinking water and like fluorides and stuff like that as well. But this has been known and slowly creeping in the background for a long time. There is there is alternative ways to do just about everything. Um, and there is we’ve been kind of railroaded down away. You want your brand impressions out in the marketplace so people know about you.

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You want to make sure that people are finding your story and you’re telling it in a really good way. And so part of your marketing has to be not direct path to sale, not transactional. You have to put part of your marketing budget and part of your marketing towards building up your story in the marketplace.

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 Your ideal customer will see it and start to think highly of you until they’re ready to buy from you. And number three, you want to maximize your conversions. That’s a different thing than getting inquiries. There is a lot of traffic that can come to your website. about 5% if you have I’ve I’ve talked to some people that you know I’ve I’ve spent $2,000 $2,500 a month on SEO for the last six months.

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 Just talking to a fellow yesterday. Last six months. I’m going I’m looking at your website. You average about 10 visitors a month. A they don’t know what they’re doing. The SEO company, they haven’t figured out the new the new AEO, GEO, whatever you want to call it. And B, 95% of your traffic to your website will leave and do nothing. That’s just normal stats.

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 So even if you get a 100 people, you’ve got five phone calls or five form fills. Unless you’ve got this part right, do you want to take that five and 4x it and call it 20? You’re still going to have 80% that you want to now retarget and chase around because they just came for a different reason.

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 Not everybody that shows up on your stuff is ready to buy from you. They are somewhere either in the discovery phase, just learning more, just thinking about it. they’re not necessarily ready to solve a problem yet. Your marketing has to tap into people at every phase, right? So, maximizing your conversions once they’re there, how can you get them into your world? How can you share some stuff with them? And how can you drip upon them all the lovely stuff you’re about and why you’re different, your foundation, everything about you, why you’re different so they can choose you and not somebody else or otherwise you are a commodity and you do not want to be a commodity because that’s a race to the bottom. Lowest price wins, right? So, what are you most concerned about in carpet cleaning and service business for this fall? What have you got your attention on? There should be things that you’re thinking about right now. Was the January, February, March slow for you like it was for about 80% of the industry. Um, did you do a really good job marketing your database and leaning into it because you you saw the signs of a slowing down in October, November, December, and you doubled down on your

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marketing like we were recommending everybody do. Um, some of our clients did that and saw growth in the first part of the year when their competitors went stale, right? So, you know, did you double down in January, February, March? Did you ride it out? Did you are you did you notice a resurgence in spring because everything all the seeds you planted in January, February, and March during the slower time, you had a lot more free time to do outreach and knocking on doors and and all that.

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 Did you find that that all of a sudden catapulted into, you know, people just got a little bit out of their heads and you know what, I don’t think this economy thing is going to be quite as bad or whatever the feeling is. Like the stock market, it’s feeling based, not reality based.

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 Did they start feeling better and turn their attention towards you or start feeling better and turn your attention towards a competitor? What are the things you’re most concerned about? Are you falling behind on digital marketing? Are you following behind on AI implementation in your whole business? you know, are you falling behind on growth? Like, what is it? Think about that, right? Um, you want to go and download the workbook.

00:21:24 – 00:21:52

 We always have a workbook that goes along with this. Um, this is the the 2025 version. So, carpet cleanermarketing masters.com/2025 workbook that will take you directly to um a PDF. I think it’s a PDF version that you can u make a copy of or just download and print off and it sit down later today, tonight, this weekend, glass of wine, your favorite peppermint tea, whatever.

00:21:52 – 00:22:13

 Um Royos Royos tea with um um with um peach. Lovely, lovely, lovely tea. Anyways, um if you’re not a tea drinker, then that that wasn’t a thing for you. So, you want to sit down with that and think through this is your mid midyear check-in. So, let’s grab that. We’re going to be talking about the kinds of stuff you need to think think through.

00:22:13 – 00:22:32

 Um, and we’ll go from there. And there’ll be a replay of this out next week as well. Some people actually come back and study it again and again and again. So, um, what to plan for? What are we planning for? Economic uncertainty, AI disruption, unclear where to focus your budget. I put the word budget in red with an underline.

00:22:32 – 00:22:55

 Do you have a budget? Do you know exactly how much you’re investing in marketing every single month and what percentage of revenue or expected revenue that is? If you don’t, you’ve missed the memo. That’s how you start. So, we’ll talk about what that looks like. Again, I stroked out a SEO here. Search engine optimization does not exist.

00:22:57 – 00:23:15

Search everywhere optimization is one way to talk about it. Answer engine optimization. People are now asking really long, thoughtful, deep questions to find a carpet cleaner, to find a toothpaste, to find a plumber, to to find a pair of shoes, whatever. Um, they’re doing deep research. They’re using Gemini in Google search.

00:23:15 – 00:24:15

 They’re using C-Pilot in in Microsoft stuff. They’re using Chad TPT. A lot of people have the app on their phone now and are just talking to it. learned how to take pictures of the fridge and to figure out what to have for dinner and you know put all their supplements in there and say hey which ones of these are helping for these conditions and am I taking the right quantity? What what do we know about this and not getting a answer getting thoughtful in exchange and stuff like that done well with good prompting all of that people are starting to get used to more and more and more. Do you show up as an answer in those AI engines? Your website, your social media, your Google maps, your stories in the marketplace, your reputation, all of it. Even being on podcasts, all have to be on point or AI doesn’t even know who you are and that’s who’s answering the questions. And Google is switching their entire model over to to that as well. Some people call it generative engine optimization for you know generative search which is Gemini

00:24:18 – 00:24:41

stuff right anyways so little rant on that but pay-per-click local service ads website social reputation like online marketing offline marketing referral partners like what is it like it’s all of it I’m not just talking about digital marketing I’m talking about how do you grow your business there is lots lots of things to think about right if it was easy everybody be doing it it’s not supposed to be easy it’s just it’s just a process It’s got to be a process.

00:24:41 – 00:24:58

 You got to you got to work it, right? Are you investing strategically in marketing? Marketing is never an expense. You don’t think of, oh, I can’t pay, you know, I’m I’m running out of money. I should stop marketing. It’s the last. It’s the only thing that puts money in your pocket.

00:24:58 – 00:25:16

 Maybe sometimes maybe tomorrow. Sometimes maybe it’s planting the seeds for next month or two months from now. But if you stop now, money dries up there. If money’s already dried up, I guarantee I can go back and find out when you stopped doing the things that you did that worked well or never did at all that you should have been doing.

00:25:16 – 00:25:35

 Right? Understand what business you’re in. You’re the marketer of your services first and foremost. You are the keeper of the lists. You have built databases of happy customers that you want to reach out to and and nurture and love and care for. So, they want you back again. They want to tell your friends about about you even at prices higher than your competition.

00:25:35 – 00:25:51

 and they want you back more often because you’re just reminding them of what you do and how important it is in their lives. Oh yeah, I should get that guy to do that thing, right? Like I should get that gal back over, right? That investing in marketing is strategic. You have to invest strategically and there’s a very specific um way to do that.

00:25:51 – 00:26:11

 There’s a very specific structure, right? So failing failing is this. It’s if you don’t have a clear plan, you can overspend or worse under spend is what we find. We don’t find too many people overspend on marketing, right? We find that they grossly underspend on marketing because they don’t know what to do.

00:26:11 – 00:26:29

 They they put all them all their eggs in one basket. They they went all in on Facebook ads. And that might have worked a few years ago when nobody else was there and and also the cost of cost per impressions were were lower. It was just a little bit of a a window. Groupon was had a little bit of a window when it first came out.

00:26:29 – 00:26:50

 Um, you know, there was a little bit of a window with cheap backlinks from Russia in the early 2000s that would get your site ranked over somebody else. Then it became mini sites where you got had a little website for every single one of your topics or services. That was a little window until that window got closed. And you know, cheap clicks, paid ad clicks was a little window on one of those platforms or poles in the water that closed.

00:26:50 – 00:27:53

 Local service ads kind of came out a few years ago and it became a cheap way $17 to $20 to buy a phone call. Right now we’ve got clients that are paying as high as $75 to buy a phone call. Know your numbers. You can make $75 phone calls. Insanely profitable if you know your numbers. We run ROI reports for them and show them that here’s where your front end client or customer customer ROI is 3:1 4:1 ROI because they got all their other systems right upsells and stuff like that and their average job sits close to $400 to $500. They’re booking at 40 to 50%. We track all of this right. You should be tracking it too. And then on the back end they have a lifetime value of a of their ideal client sitting at around 8 to$10,000 and they can track that. They know that number. So, can you spend $75 a phone call if you know that every two of them books one job? That’s $150 to buy a new customer. You turn that customer into

00:27:55 – 00:28:20

$10,000 lifetime value client from that $150 interaction. Well worth it if you know your numbers. Absolutely not worth it if your average job is three rooms in the hall for $125. Can’t even do it. You can’t even play the game. So, most people under spend and underperform. So that creates an opportunity, massive opportunity we’re going to talk about, right? You want to refine your plan with goals, targets, and actual key performance indicators.

00:28:22 – 00:28:45

What numbers do you track that knows that that that let you know that you’re on target, right? How do you know that your, you know, your ads are combining together that that your your impression in the marketplace, your great brand, the van that drives around, the yard signs, the door hangers, the like, you know, again, not a discount marketing, but a high-end marketing service is on the go.

00:28:45 – 00:29:05

 And how do you know that that is contributing to the fact that more people are are calling you through social media, right? How do you know that? You know that by KPIs. You know that by running good data, right? So you want to generate and convert enough inquiries to hit your targets and keep your trucks running.

00:29:05 – 00:29:29

 So what was your goal at the beginning of the year? Was it realistic? What what were you planning to do more of, do better, learn, implement, hire, figure out to hit the target? you say like I’ve had people saying, “Yeah, John, I did uh $300,000 last year and um yeah, I really just want to I want my business to hit a million dollars this year.

00:29:29 – 00:29:55

” And I’ll go, “Oh, okay. So, you want a three over 300% increase in your business. 3x sounds small. 300% or whatever that works out to, right? You want that. Okay. So, what’s your plan to get there?” And I usually get blank. Oh, I don’t know. Right now, the odd person I’ve talked to said, “Well, actually, I’m looking at buying these two other companies and adding it in.

00:29:55 – 00:30:10

 They’ve got databases of this and this and this. Here’s my investment pro um profile. I’m also looking at um you know, upscaling our clients and making the average job not worth 300, but worth 450. And here’s my plan to do that.” And when I map it all out, I think I should be really really close to at least being at a run rate.

00:30:10 – 00:30:28

 You know, 300,000 a year is 25,000 a month roughly. I I’m going to be at a run rate of closer to $85,000 a month by the end of the year. So, I might not make a million dollars, but I’m on a million- dollar run rate. I’ve had that answer like once. And I’m like, dude, how can we help you, right? You’ve got it figured out.

00:30:28 – 00:30:43

 You understand the game. Now, let’s just play the game. And you’re going to have to iterate along the way. But you need to know what that number was, what you’re planning to do, and how you’re going to get there. And that’s what we’re doing today. We’re going to talk about that. So, you want to continue marketing to generate bookings.

00:30:44 – 00:31:07

If the economy is tougher, you double down on marketing. offline, online, outreach, your role, vendors roles, people that are helping you, all of that kind of stuff. You you double down on marketing when when things get tough. That’s what we do. What that does doesn’t mean not everybody grows, right? You look at the stock market over time, it’s definitely up and to the right.

00:31:07 – 00:31:26

 It’s been growing, but it’s had dips and valleys. How far down do you dip determines is is based on you. Have you called your entire database every, you know, call call your database every three months, chat to them like anybody who’s hit three months since the last cleaning. Hey, I’m just double checking on the work we did.

00:31:26 – 00:31:43

 6 months, nine months, and then you start your reminder program. Have you are you in front of them with newsletters? Like, are you are you are you working your database? Are you working your referral partners? Are you stopping into all the commercial jobs you’ve cleaned for just to bring them a coffee, some donuts, chat them up, see how everything’s looking, take out some free spots, carry on your way, and make them go, “Ah, those guys are nice.

00:31:43 – 00:31:54

 I’m glad we hired them.” as opposed to hm I wonder who who we should hire next time. We got to get our upholstery done. Do we know who anybody does that? Yeah. No, I don’t. We had our carpet cleaners. I don’t think you know. I don’t think they do that. Well, if you stop in, they definitely know you do that.

00:31:54 – 00:32:09

 Hey, do you ever need a quote on the upholstery? Do you ever need a quote on the tile floor? Right. Actually, I got a friend of mine who runs a business that does window cleaning. Do you come by and do a quote and you take you get a a commission for helping him find get a a customer? There’s things that we can do all day long.

00:32:09 – 00:32:29

 So, you want to continue marketing. So, that’s what success looks like, right? success is maximizing your your calls and message flow to hit your sales goals for 2025. You got to maximize that. So, we got to work on that. One of the thing that we teach our clients that I’m kind of peeling back the the curtain a little bit on on two things right here.

00:32:29 – 00:32:58

 Um there are seven essential marketing resources, online marketing resources every local business needs. Are you do are you maximizing all seven? You need to have a personalized conversion focused website. So it does actually have to be written in a way that SEO AEO search engines can find it. So there’s there’s coding things called schema coding and FAQ coding and um even now there’s LLM coding that you need to have on the website.

00:32:58 – 00:33:12

 You need to have each page have a target keyword topical authority cluster and then you need to have second secondary supporting pages around that cluster. I know I get it’s deep. I we’re geeking out for a second, but you need to have all of this kind of stuff. You need to have a homepage that that talks about your main category.

00:33:12 – 00:34:14

 And then you need to have service pages for every one of those service, and they all have to have about a thousand to 1500, sometimes 2,000 words on it. You need to have happy customer stories. You need to have FAQs, as I mentioned. You need to have pages for every single one of the cities you service, every single one of the neighborhoods in those cities you service, and point of interest and stuff like that to really, really, really teach the uh the search engines what you do and where you do it. Then you need to take pictures of all that kind of stuff. And it’s got to be personal. Babies lying on carpets and dogs and families sitting on couches don’t sell your services at all. They make people go me. Seeing your real team smiling, doing a real job in real uniforms with real vans with real graphics on showing that you really do care and the owners stand behind their work make people go, “Huh, these guys feel different.” And it’s a good starting point. It’s just a starting point, right? So you need that. you need to be ranking on um on on Google business profile. And did you know to do you know has anybody done heat maps for you? Do you know that when you know most people rank about one or

00:34:16 – 00:34:32

two miles away from where Google sent the postcard and they don’t oh look every time I check I’m number one. Yeah. Go get your buddy’s phone and go five miles away and check somebody who’s never googled your business before. And don’t Google your business name. Just look for carpet cleaner near me. Any of those kinds of things.

00:34:35 – 00:34:59

Google’s a proximity based engine as one of the many things. You need to teach it where you go. You need to understand there’s a limit to that. 10 miles in a very densely populated area, 15 to 20 miles in a little bit more rural area. And then you need to start building a second hub and a third hub because you need to start ranking for Google Maps because every one of your Google Maps listings should generate between it and paid ads we got down here.

00:34:59 – 00:35:16

 Local service ads and and and should generate about 10 to 15 grand once it’s fully mature. Is that a year from now, two years from now, I don’t know how much work are you going to put into it? But once you’ve fully matured another hub, it should be 10 to $15,000 a month minimum, right? Minimum. We’ve done this for decades.

00:35:18 – 00:35:31

We’ve done this for years. We’ve done this with clients. We got some clients that have four and five of these hubs now and and that kind of thing. So, you want your Google maps, right? You want your search engine optimization. Again, probably should change the slide at some point because again, you’re still optimizing, but search everywhere optimization.

00:35:31 – 00:35:53

 You want to be optimized to attract um and and be seen and be found and show up in the organic rankings, in the AI recommendations and answers and things like that. You want to be running paid ads as some of your poles in the water, not your only poles in the water and definitely not the ones that you try and pay your mortgage on. Paid ads will not save your business.

00:35:56 – 00:36:11

Let me say that again because I hear that way too much. Paid ads will not save your business. I’ve talked to guys that were doing 15 and 20,000 a month with Facebook ads 5 years ago who are broke now because they never built a business. they had a transactionalbased service and that transaction dried up.

00:36:13 – 00:37:14

People that used to do thumbtac or bark or home advisors and all that stuff that you’re probably rolling your eyes on if you’ve ever tried it, right? Um and yeah, it it it dries up. It’s it’s it’s just a flash in the pan. Good marketing is about being seen everywhere. So you can run paid ads to your ideal target market with a an expected 3 to one, maybe 4 to one ROI if you’ve got all the pieces right and it just generates another happy customer that you’re going to turn into a client market to and get the $10,000 lifetime value out of it and then you are willing to spend $1,120 $150 to land them. Now they work and they work really well because they just build a business nice over time the right way. active on social media, right? We’re in a content creator world. You have to be active on social media. So, there’s a lot of really cool content you can create. You’ve got to build your reputation, not just reviews on Google. What if somebody doesn’t go to Google?

00:37:17 – 00:38:18

Think about that for a second. Oh, I’ve got 552 reviews on Google. Okay, they went to Yelp. They asked somebody on on on on Facebook. They like there’s a a bunch of different about about 60% of the population who does not have a name in mind has not had a zeot zero moan of truth does not have a name in mind they’re not far along and go I’m thinking I’m thinking I’m thinking about these guys I’m still thinking about these guys they don’t have a name in mind they don’t type your name about 60% of the population who does not have a name in mind goes to Google and that number is now dropping because of chat GPTs and AI but goes to Google to find somebody in your category, right? And they’ve got local service ads, pay-per-click, Google Maps, and organic, and a million different ways they can type that in that you you you need to try and show up if they’re near you, maps, if they’re local, you know, like the there’s a whole bunch of games to play. But that’s and then, you know, the other 40% almost half of them don’t

00:38:21 – 00:38:42

go to Google. So, while your Google reviews are important, they’re very static. They don’t do anything. You got to build your reputation. and happy customer stories, feedback from customers that you share out into the marketplace. Anywhere they look and everywhere they look, they should see happy customers explaining and telling why they love you, right? Reputation marketing works, always has worked, always will work regardless.

00:38:42 – 00:39:03

 And AI actually uses the sentiment of the marketplace to determine how they suggest and that’s becoming more important. So, not just reviews, sentiment everywhere. And then you need to automate. You need to have do need lead nurture and you need to automate that lead nurture. Right? We want you to walk through the million-dollar growth plan.

00:39:03 – 00:39:20

 This is our million-dollar growth plan. There’s an actual blueprint for that. I’ll show you that next. But we want to walk like if you’re zero to 100K 10 0 to 10K a month, you’re in stage one. There’s exact things you should do. And there’s a whole bunch of stuff you shouldn’t do. If you’re in stage two where 120 to 250 Oops, got an extra zero there.

00:39:20 – 00:39:52

$120 to $250,000 a year, right? Then you need to be doing another layer of things layer stacking. You don’t stop this. You just do more like you have your role and you you you you have more budget because a very specific percentage of revenue should go to marketing. You do more and then you from 250 to half a million. Any business in any town can get to that size easily within two or three years if you’ve got the right growth plan.

00:39:52 – 00:40:08

 Maybe you’re buying out a competitor. Maybe you’re like as well, maybe you’re going wide into other services. You figure out how to run a business properly. You put in the homework. You you listen to the right things every single day. You feed your brain. You feed your knowledge. You come on podcasts like this and it ain’t hard at all. It isn’t hard.

00:40:08 – 00:40:23

 Go hop on a call with us. I’ll talk to you about it. I’ve coached and consulted on this for 20 years. And then if you want to go from half a million to a million and a million plus and beyond, there is a full-scale program that you need. there there are things you need to do even at the next level.

00:40:23 – 00:40:43

 There’s things you need to know. Cool thing is it actually gets easier to run the business as you get here. So anyways, um there is a plan for that and there’s a blueprint that gets you there. So you can go back to some of our other trainings. We talk about the blueprint training, build your foundation, get your lead generation, right, secondary response and then um you want to have your your referral partner prospecting and all going.

00:40:43 – 00:41:00

 You want to have your direct contact and then you want to have the indoctrination before you show up and then the follow-up, the ongoing retention, the repeat and referral engine and then cycle it back around. And you just get more people in the front end and you just cycle them through this this um flywheel. Very, very simple stuff.

00:41:00 – 00:41:17

 So, let’s talk about it. Let’s review our goals. So, success is goals. All else is commentary. Brian Tracy, good guy to follow. One of these people to listen to. Listen to Brian Tracy. Um, clear goals are wind in your sales. As we say, if you don’t have wind in your sales, you’re sitting stagnant in the water.

00:41:19 – 00:41:39

Just take that picture. When you’ve got wind in your sales, now you can actually fly. Harvard study, and we talk about this. 1997, they interviewed the grads. 84% of them had no specific goals. 13% had goals, but nothing written down. And 3% of them had clear written down goals and a plan to accomplish them.

00:41:39 – 00:42:18

 Just did an interview. 1979 Harvard did an interview of everybody graduating that year. What were the results 20 years later? the 13% right this these 3%’s part of that right if you add that up um the 13% of the class who had goals were earning on average twice as much as the 84% who did not right so 84 133 even more staggering the 3% who had clear written goals were earning on average 10 times as much 20 years later as the other 97% combined, right? Go back and read the go find the the Harford study.

00:42:18 – 00:42:37

 Really, really cool study. They just if you have a goal and a focus and you think about it, it again, some people call it, you know, like remember the the movie The Secret Manifesting and stuff like law of attraction. I just think it’s as I as I’ve said before, you know, you you you go to go to buy a red car, all of a sudden now all you see is red cars everywhere, right? It’s your your brain aligns to that.

00:42:37 – 00:42:54

 People are having conversations around you all the time when you’re paying attention, right? If you’re on YouTube and you’re you’re you’re thinking about investing or creating some passive investment with ETFs and covered calls and and blah blah blah. Gee, wonder what’s on John’s brain.

00:42:54 – 00:43:13

 Right? If you’re thinking about that, guess what? All the videos start to the ones you notice, right? You don’t notice the ones about other topics. You don’t notice those. You know, oh, there’s, oh, wow, that’s interesting. And next thing you know, even the algorithm aligns for you. you know, and now you’re you’re having coffee with somebody and they mention something.

00:43:14 – 00:43:30

Hey, tell me more about that. I I haven’t heard about that, you know, um you know, Templeton ETF, like what’s that all about? You wouldn’t never even ask that question if it wasn’t on your brain. So, I firmly believe this 3% is really not necessarily the universe putting it out there.

00:43:30 – 00:43:54

 I think it’s just the more you focus and on the right things, the more the right things um you you pay attention to them when they show up, right? So, you need to have written goals. You need to you need to set a at least a minimum a one-year progress. That’s what we do. Quarterly implementation of rocks. What are you going to get done? What are the two, three, four at the most biggest things that you’re going to get done this next quarter? So, July, August, September.

00:43:57 – 00:44:10

What are you going to get done by the 30th of September? Think about it. What are the two or three big things? What do you need to overhaul? Are you going to raise your prices? Are you going to add a new service? Are you going to offer three packages? Um, you know, good, better, best packages to the customer.

00:44:10 – 00:44:25

 Are you going to upgrade your your service delivery experience in the home? Are you going to upgrade your scripting? Are you going to upgrade your your your website? Are you going to do more marketing? Are you going to like what is it? Like what are the things you’re going to do in the next three months? What what can you tackle? You can’t tackle all of it.

00:44:25 – 00:44:49

 So, some of it and then you want to have monthly milestones. So, one-year progress and result goals, quarterly implementation goals, and monthly milestone goals. You want to have those broken down. There’s a really cool program called EOS, entrepreneur operating system, by Gino Wickman. Our company is now an EOS company for the last 18 months, 20 months, something like that. Um, it’s transformational.

00:44:49 – 00:45:09

 I wish I’d done it decades ago in in all of my other businesses as well. It aligns the team. It aligns us. We’re all thinking about the same thing. We’re all rowing in the same direction. We put our big rocks in first and then worry about the little daily stuff afterwards, right? So, we know what we’re all targeting and going towards and everybody makes their own quarterly rocks on the team that align to that.

00:45:12 – 00:45:24

You could do that with technicians. You can do that with the office gal. Um, you can do it with your spouses. You can do with the family. EOS works for everybody. So, yeah, I would suggest you take a look at that. The book Traction, a little bit of a tough read, worth doing.

00:45:24 – 00:46:25

 Um, get a grip would probably be the one I I would start with. talks a it’s a little bit more conversational but there’s a whole bunch of books in the US world just to get the mindset around you know quarterly sprints annual goals three-year plan right and you have to have a stopping point to audit reflect so at the beginning of each year we do that at the end of each quarter you should do that on your own and midyear calibration hey John we’re here that’s what we’re here for and the items you review how did you do based on the targets you set what did you implement what did you not implement right it’s either done or not done. There’s no eh sort of no. Did it fully get done and implemented or not done? Did you have clear goals with clear targets and it’s either achieved or not achieved? Did you implement? Did you meet a a revenue goal? Did you have a plan in place how to reach your revenue goal by implementing these strategies? You know, I’m going to outreach to 10 commercial businesses and 10 referral partners every week. That’s a great um milestone that you know that you did monthly on on track or

00:46:27 – 00:46:41

not at the end of the quarter. Did you did you implement that? When you do that, you’re going to get better scripts because you’re just going to you’re going to have enough repetitions that you’re going to go, I can say this, but oh, everything’s going to get easier. Everything’s going to happen with a smile, right? Um what did you learn? You want to write that down.

00:46:41 – 00:47:44

 What did you learn about each of those? And what are you going to do going forward? Are you going to keep it? Are you going to scrap it? You going to improve it? you can make that decision and then come back to it. Failing to plan is planning to fail. That’s not just a fancy phrase. So, what were your revenue targets? As an example, what did you plan to hit by six months into the year, first six months of the year? How much is that monthly? What is your average transaction value? How many bookings will that require to hit that revenue target? Right? So, based on those numbers, you can figure this out. And we’ve got a really cool calculator for you that we can help you with. What was the average conversion rate from inquiry to booking? And the source repeats should be 100% 99% unless you don’t have a spot in your schedule because you’re just way too busy and then you’re going to be hiring people. Uh referrals 90% 85 90%. Sometimes referrals still kick attire a bit. Okay, so that’s by source. What about local

00:47:46 – 00:48:07

service ads versus door hangers versus QR codes on your on your yard signs or the QR code that’s on the side of your van? Like like what like what is your what is your um um inquiry to booking rate on pay-per-click? What is your inquiry to booking rate on on a Facebook contest with paid ads running? Right? Are you doing all of these things? You should be.

00:48:07 – 00:48:27

 Um, so you divide your booking target by your conversion rate and that will tell you if you divide your booking target how many you need to hit your goal at your average cost per job, your average job divided by the conversion rate, not times divided. So time, you know, divided by 75 if your conversion rate is 75% point whatever.

00:48:29 – 00:49:30

Now you know how many you need. So I would get a blended aggregate of this number know it by source blend it together as an average and then multiply your booking target right so you want to set realistic but marketing budget for that do you know do you want to grow or just maintain that’s how you know what the marketing budget there is a budget you need for growth and there’s a budget you need for treading water and maintaining and there’s a budget you need to say I don’t really give a crap and if this whole thing falls to crap I will go get a job at Walmart and be a greeter right do you know what those budget numbers are because they exist, right? When when crap hits the fan and you go, “Oh crap, my business just dropped by 50%.” That was a U problem 6 months, a year, 2, 3 years ago. That wasn’t now, right? So, what is the mix of marketing channels, poles in the water, I like to call them. How many do you have? Do you have 20 or 30 poles in the water that are getting you one, two, three, five, 10 inquiries a month? Qualified inquiries a month. If you don’t, if you’re trying to get one or two poles in the water to do that, again, you are just a SWAT analysis. strength, weaknesses, opportunity, and threats. You have a huge threat right

00:49:31 – 00:49:49

there because that any one of those two poles could drop off, right? So, um, average inquiry volume, conversion rates on the front end. Again, customers versus transactional customer versus lifetime clients. You want to run all those numbers. Um, what should your database communication cadence be? And in what ways will you reach your database? That is really important.

00:49:49 – 00:50:07

 You are in the database retention and marketing business. You are in the you’re the marketer of your services. And the most important thing you market is your database. You are building a group of people that like you and will tell other people about you and use you. Again, if you’re a transactional business, you are spending way too much money.

00:50:07 – 00:51:08

 These guys are 20 to one, high as 30 to one, low as 15 to1 return on investment. Your database done well. 3 one is 4 one is the best you’re going to get on paid ads. How many of these do you want? How many 20 to ones do you want to make up for the the 3 to one that just keeps dropping them more of them into this bucket? Cuz some of them do move, pass away, whatever, right? So, how many how many are you dropping into the bucket to to keep the the ones that are falling out? And um is it a leaky bucket? Right? You got to know that as well. And what investment are what investment in growth assets versus pay-to-play lead sources are you willing to build out over time? What do I mean by growth assets? Most people don’t invest enough in their organic rankings because it’s more expensive at first until it’s less. It’s it’s it’s more upfront investment because you’re trying to influence search engines, influence the marketplace slowly over

00:51:10 – 00:51:22

time. There’s no light switch in marketing. It’s not it’s marketing, not magic. These are all really good phrases, right? You want to invest in growth assets over time. You want to be telling happy customer stories into the marketplace. One of them isn’t going to do anything.

00:51:22 – 00:51:41

 Your hundth one will do a lot. How do you get to a hundred? Well, you got to do a 100. There’s no easy easy button to that. You just got to do them, right? So, you’ve got to be reaching out. Your hundth outreach to property managers is going to your business is going to be an entirely different place than your first, fifth, 10th outreach to property managers, right? So, it’s a volume.

00:51:41 – 00:52:00

 Growth assets are things that you invest in with a longer term vision. Payto play are things that might take, you know, 30 days to mature, teach an algorithm, and then they they they they work to their their their benefit. So, um, we’re going to go here for a second, right? We’re going to go to carpetclairmasters.comworkbook.

00:52:04 – 00:52:26

Oh, this is actually this one should be worksheet. Um, sorry, Ser um in the background. She typed she she built this for me. So, we’re going to go to worksheet. So, what I’m going to do is um I’m actually going to show you. Let me let me pull up a a window right there. And then I’m going to go to carpet cleaner marketing masters.

00:52:29 – 00:52:49

And then we’re going to go to worksheet um 2025. The workbook is the first one. And again, you guys can download that. Um, actually, it looks like this. I just pulled up a copy. Just click that link. And there’s the workbook, right? Everything we’re talking about here today, how to do these calculations.

00:52:49 – 00:53:10

 You go through that. It’s a free resource we’ve made available to you. Um, gez, it keeps going and going and 18 pages. Yep. Anyways, um worksheet, make a copy. Follow this along. Hit file, make a copy so it’s yours cuz no, don’t ask me to share it with you. This is mine. You’re going to make a copy.

00:53:10 – 00:53:30

 Now you have a copy of it. And then you’re going to click here to listen to how to craft your your growthbased marketing plan. There is a training right there that you can watch. And then you’re going to start using look at all these tabs. Look at all these tabs. Right. So second tab, what is your marketing sources? And you keep adding them.

00:53:30 – 00:53:53

 What is the average cost to generate a qualified inquiry? Right? Pay-per-click average is about $45 to $55. Some markets lower sometimes a year different, but you know, low-end 40, highend 70. That’s typical for carpet cleaning, right? To generate a phone call or a form fill. Like holy crap, that’s not a job.

00:53:53 – 00:54:08

 That is just to generate an outreach. Local service ads 30 to 55. That’s going up, right? So the average is about 43. Facebook ads 20 to 30, but you need way more of them. There are they are tire kickers. And again, Facebook ads should be done in a very specific way, which is not necessarily worried about lead genen as much. Oops.

00:54:10 – 00:54:24

So you guys can change these numbers all you want. Um, and actually these are formulas. So you can just change these low and high and it’ll average for you um on your copy once you make a copy. Um, repeat and referrals. How much do you spend? like do you spend do you mail them every single month a newsletter? So that’s about a dollar.

00:54:24 – 00:54:45

 Um and a couple other things. Is it about $15 or $30? I’d say ride towards the higher end maybe spend $ 20 $30 on every single customer a year on retention. Right? And then SEO, how much are you investing in to get inquiries growth over time? And then any other sources, right? So what that does is that fills this number in down here.

00:54:45 – 00:55:14

 So say you wanted a $700,000 a year business, right? That was your goal. You need to do $58,000 a month to get there. Is your average job $450? Check the front page, the front um dashboard of um um Service Monster or House Call pros, right? That’ll let you know if you don’t have a database, if you’re trying to run this on your phone, on a piece of paper, or QuickBooks, it’s a hobby.

00:55:14 – 00:55:32

 You haven’t tried hard enough yet to be in business. It’s it’s 2025. You needed a database in 20 in, you know, in 1995, 2000. Like we’re 30 years out from that. Like every every business needs to know who their customers are, how they came in, how often they showed up, how much they’ve given you, on and on.

00:55:32 – 00:55:49

 You need a database. Like that’s the only way you’re going to know because you want to split your your customers. Sift, sort, and stream screen them and market them independently, right? But we know now that we need 130 service calls, bookings, jobs per month at $450 to hit that amount.

00:55:49 – 00:56:24

 What if you only did $350 average? We now needed 167. Eek. What if you only have $200 job average? You need 300 292 jobs if you wanted to be $700,000 a year, right? But 450 good average number in our industry done well. You only need 130 easier, right? What is your average conversion if you know this number, right? What if you only book it, you think, “Oh, I book at like almost all my jobs.

00:56:24 – 00:56:53

 At least the ones that at least the ones that want me, John, I book 100% of them.” Yeah. Okay. When we listen to people’s calls, we see them as bad as like below 30%. Now at 30% you need 432 inquiries a month to get 130 jobs. How are you getting 432 inquiries? You have to answer that question, right? But if you’re booking at 50%.

00:56:53 – 00:57:20

 You only need 259 inquiries. Much better. Average cost per inquiry across all sources is the data. That’s a minimum amount you need to spend minimum a month marketing investment of the $58,000 or to get to the $58,000 you need to spend at least $9,000 in marketing and that’s only 16%. And I warn you right down here if that number is not between 15 and 20%.

00:57:23 – 00:57:52

Then your estimated lead genen cost is too low. That’s not right because it is about I I strongly suggest 20% of revenue goes to marketing and then you allocate the budget properly 20% 700,000 you spend $140,000 on marketing. Why? Because that will keep you growing or if the economy is really bad that will keep you retaining way better and then when the economy turns around then you have a massive bump because you you stayed around when everybody went out of business.

00:57:52 – 00:58:12

 And then you want to do about 70% on online marketing if you’re residential focused mostly and 30 20% on offline marketing and 10% database. Pretty simple math. We know where to spend our money, right? And now we know how much each month, but you can adjust it. If there’s certain months of the year where you want to spend more or less, it’s still got to hit 100%.

00:58:12 – 00:58:44

 Again, that’s a formula. So, you can change these numbers, but how much a month are you spending on online, offline, and repeat to try and get to that number? Pretty cool. And then what are we doing? How much are we putting into SEO? Um, yeah, let’s let’s update this right now. Let’s do AEO. Let’s see if I can I don’t know if it’ll gonna let me forat text striketh through.

00:58:44 – 00:59:04

 Ah, it’s gonna do the whole thing. Never mind. Okay, I’m not going to do that. So, um, I got to get rid of the strikethrough. We’re going to get rid of the SEO and we’re going to call it we just put a dash SEO AO. Um, pay-per-click or paid ads. That’s just paid ads. It’s not just pay-per-click, but paid ad marketing and display retargetings and things like that.

00:59:04 – 01:00:04

 So, we kind of know where the where the split should be as well. And then even here, there’s an annual example of an annual marketing plan for every single month of the year planned at the beginning of the year. We’re now in June. What are you doing for July? What is your marketing goal? What are you having a summer sizzler um offer? Are you having a back to school offer in August? Are you having um home prep for the fall? Are you having a spooky stain removal offer? Are you having a holiday home prep dos and don’ts? Are you having a last minute cleanup touchup visit and a you know a after holiday um free recan clean bonus? Like that’s what we did. These are c campaigns we ran to our database campaigns we ran into the marketplace or to our referral partners and then you you name it. These were these these were campaigns that we ran um every single year successfully very very you know one you know run it have an abslit test against something else we’re trying you know in a smaller amount um and if it worked better next year we did a little bit more of it next year we did you know

01:00:06 – 01:00:26

and we just that was you know we we we didn’t reg one year we might have only had three or four marketing campaigns the next year we added another one the next year we added another one now now we had one every single month and and we knew what we’re going to do and we knew exactly how we’re going to optimize do what we’re going to do for SEO, what we’re going to do for social, on and on and on.

01:00:26 – 01:00:46

 So that’s what we want to see for you guys as well. That’s why I give away that all of these massively val valuable resources. So hopefully you found that valuable, go dig through it. If you ever want to jump on a call and talk about this in detail, you got me. So goals, what is it? What is your goal for the last half of 2025? How many inquiries will you need to get there? That’s all we’re trying to figure out here.

01:00:49 – 01:01:04

Now, you want to achieve omnipresence. That’s one of the main ways you’re going to get it. And it’s one of the main ways to teach AI who to recommend as well. So, you want to be the best known cleaner to all of your ideal customers. Anywhere they go, people are talking about you and your brand.

01:01:04 – 01:02:05

 We are in the world of brand marketing all over again. So, starts with the fundamentals, right? We need to we need a good message. We need a market and we need a media, right? What are we going to say to who are we going to say it and how are we going to get that in front of them? So how is the your customer’s mindset being changed today by AI by answer engine by the world around them by the economy by you know what are they what are their fears and hopes and wants and dreams and all that kind of stuff that is called your customer avatar. Who is your ideal customer? Have you done that exercise? Have you sat down with chat GPT and said, “Hey, I want to figure out who my customer avatar is. Ask me any questions. Let’s have this conversation.” Right? We teach I teach um I learned from Jeff Woods um AIdriven leadership. Really good book. I’ve seen Jeff speak a bunch of times. Um and Jeff talked about um his very simple crit framework, which is what I teach as well. You give so anytime you prompt AI,

01:02:08 – 01:02:24

you give a context what it is you’re all about, right? what what’s going on in your world and just talk. Like literally just press the microphone and talk. Then you give it its role. Who do you want it to be acting like? So that it can say I know everything in the world. Oh, you want me to talk about this channel? Okay. Right.

01:02:24 – 01:02:51

 And it just refineses its thinking. You can have it act like a certain person, act like a type of person, act like a a a job description. Right? You can you can give it a very very defined role. And it just helps just helps a little bit, right? Um and then you want to give it um the I in crit stands for interview. Ask me, you know, three to five clarifying questions so that you are you have um 95% topical knowledge to be able to give me a good answer and then you give it its task.

01:02:54 – 01:03:14

Now with all of that information, here’s what I’m looking to to get to to do today. Right? That’s that’s how you can use AI to help you with this stuff. Right? So, but what you want to do is figure out who your ideal customer is, what their age group is. This is an ideal carpet cleaning, home cleaning service customer, 35 to 55, typically female, married with two to three kids, head of the household.

01:03:14 – 01:03:35

 Um, this again, I got to change that. That number is way too low. U annual household income is about over $100,000 in some marketplaces, over $200,000. Um, would be the ideal demographic for for our clientele. um family oriented, reliable. 75% of them own pets, take pride in their home. Um home decor, likes to help others, um gardening, crafts, things like that.

01:03:36 – 01:03:50

They’re into things as hobbies. They live in the suburbs, upper middle class, upper class. Um and they take an interest in their community, their pains and frustrations. They can’t get anybody on the phone. Everything’s AI. Everything is just answer machines. They get pissed off about that.

01:03:50 – 01:04:51

 Um they need to get things clean. That’s a frustration, obviously. Um and they’re too busy to deal with it. worried about what’s going on in the home, right? We know who they are. We want to talk to them. So, they’re worried about being ripped off, paying too much, not getting the service done, right? Home damage to the home, allowing somebody into areas of their home they don’t even let their best friends, um, all of these kinds of stuff, right? So, we need to allay their fears. We don’t allay their pricing fears. Again, pricing is usually about fourth or fifth on the list. In fact, they’re more worried about being ripped off and inconvenience and stuff like that. They just want it to be reasonable and we don’t we don’t allay the pricing fears by being the cheapest. That’s not how you do it. These people don’t want cheap. In fact, they don’t trust cheap, right? They just want to have good value for the money. So, they you know, they want to maintain a healthy home. They don’t want to replace the carpets on a regular basis. They are more likely to clean more often if you teach them education-based marketing. Uh they want to put the issue behind them. They don’t want to keep having to find their people, right? They want to keep their homes and make it nicer. They’re not

01:04:53 – 01:05:08

necessarily looking to level up right now and the economy is a little rough. They want to keep everything looking good. So if you can see Joe Jones through Joe Jones eyes and you can sell what Joe Jones buys. So you want to see your ideal customer, not your friends and family, right? Your buddy Jim, lovely guy, think he’s amazing.

01:05:08 – 01:05:27

 You can go out and have beers with him, play golf with him, right? Jim works, you know, a nineto-five factory job, love his wife, love his kids, all that kind of great. He may not be your ideal carpet cleaning. You go go clean his house for free and he’ll fix your car for free, change your rad, whatever. Yeah, nice gym.

01:05:27 – 01:05:52

 Jim is not your ideal customer. That’s not who you’re marketing to, right? You want to craft your message to that ideal person. Why would somebody choose to do business with you versus your competitors? You got to be able to answer that. What benefits do you offer your ideal customer avatar that will resonate with them? Are you safe, natural, and eco-friendly because they want that? Or do you go, you know what, no, I don’t use the eco-friendly stuff.

01:05:52 – 01:06:14

 In fact, you know, I I use, you know, high VOCC toxic chemicals. Well, I wouldn’t put that in your ads, right? But are you meeting them where they’re at? Right? Do you target a skeptical crowd that isn’t eco-friendly? I don’t know. Right? But, you know, that kind of thing. Um, do you have a 100% satisfaction guarantee, riskreversal guarantee? Right? Again, I wouldn’t even word it like that.

01:06:14 – 01:06:38

 I would word it in such a way that it’s like they have have trouble not calling you and saying, “What? You guarantee that? Holy crap, that’s amazing.” Right? They should keep you awake at night, right? So, highly trained technicians, um, trustworthy, background checks, business cards, um, and phones.

01:06:38 – 01:06:55

 Um, you want to make sure they’re answered live. Again, AI, answering your phones is not a thing. It’s great for the third number rollover. I know I’m a bit of a contrarian with that. There are a lot of marketing agencies, oh, just AI your business. That’s all you need to do. You can go home and eat Cheetos.

01:06:55 – 01:07:13

 It’ll all run itself. No, it won’t. No, we’re not there yet, right? People want to talk to people. Humans can influence humans properly. Hire somebody in your office or hire Rachel’s team at the call studio. Give us a call. We’ll put give put you in touch. They’ve answered phones for carpet cleaners for over 20 years. That’s all they do.

01:07:13 – 01:07:30

 They only charge you if they book the job. Up your prices by a few few dollars a customer and they’re free. Just put it in, you know, you should be upping your prices anyways. Um, honest pricing, no sales gimmicks, no hidden costs, just give people packages and choices. Offer the offer to sell them more.

01:07:30 – 01:07:46

 And some will say yes. This is just common sense stuff, right? How will you adjust your messaging in a tight economy, right? You talk about preserving the largest investment in their home, furniture and flooring. Don’t replace that area of the couch list. Renew it. Save time, money, and hassle.

01:07:46 – 01:08:02

 Get, you know, done right the first time. Right? So, again, you might find somebody who’s cheap. Do you want it done cheap or do you want it done right? That’s a really good message. We fix $99 carpet cleaning. That’s a really good message. Um, right there it is right there. And value bundles.

01:08:02 – 01:08:20

 Get XYZ cleaned and we’ll also do ABC there at no charge. So, you can bundle. That’s the best. That’s the way we used to do our offers to our database. VIP offers to our our database. We would bundle to save, right? So, at the end of the year, if if they haven’t, you know, if they haven’t booked mid year or anything like that, we get to the end of the year, it’s the reminder campaign.

01:08:20 – 01:08:41

 Well, we started at month 10. Learned this from a good buddy of mine, Vance. We started at month 10. And um that would be the early bird special. Month 11 would be early bird light. Some things got taken off the table. They saw it, too. Big stroke line right there. Ah, you don’t get this anymore. Those are all gone.

01:08:41 – 01:09:05

 But these are still available. Month 12, anniversary month. What’s the bundle and save? Month 13 extended one month only. We had our best response on the month 13 mailings and phone calls and it’s multistep. It’s not just it you you email, you you phone call. I don’t text message a lot. Um my little my little rant on text messaging, you know.

01:09:05 – 01:09:23

 Oh, John, I just tried text message marketing. It works so amazing. It just filled my schedule up. I said, call me the fifth time you’ve tech text messaged people. Tell me how it’s doing. We let people away with it the first time. We don’t like it the fifth time. So, it’s got to be very light. It feels intrusive after a point.

01:09:23 – 01:09:40

 You weren’t invited to text them. You don’t you you keep it on the way over. Hey, I’m going to text you on the way over like the dentist. I’m going to text you and remind you of your your point. Yeah, do that. Thanks so much. Right. That’s fine. But then if you get 10 more texts from them or five more texts or two more, you know, whatever.

01:09:40 – 01:10:00

 Now you’re going, “Okay, stop.” Everybody finds it. Text message marketing has to be used properly as well. So anyways, that was just a little rant on the side. Apologize for that. You want to speak to your audio customer in the ways that you want. So why will you love us? Why will we be different? We have exact appointment arrival windows.

01:10:00 – 01:10:16

 We don’t tell you sometime on Thursday. You know, some visitor will call you in the morning and give you, you know, a more exact time or what we used to do 90minute arrival windows. We don’t want to rush the job before you just like we don’t want to rush your job and we don’t want to rush through traffic to have to hit an exact arrival time.

01:10:16 – 01:10:29

 So, we give you a 90-minute window. But here’s what we do. Our technician will give you a call just as he’s wrapping up the previous job to let you know how long his GPS says it’s it’s going to be till he’s he’s there so you know he’s on route. If he’s running behind for any reason at all, he will call you earlier.

01:10:32 – 01:10:51

He will let you know that there’s been a delay for some reason, traffic, um customer issue earlier in the day. whatever all that kind of stuff. So that can be talked through on the phone, but we tell them we got exact appointment windows, honest pricing. We don’t, you know, like u world-class staff and what that means, you talk to your ideal customer the right way.

01:10:51 – 01:11:10

 And then you have an all-in perspective. You don’t do any one thing. Your website is your hub, but you got to market your neighborhood, market your JV partners, market social media. Once you’re over half a million, be on drive time news talk radio where your ideal customers are listening on the way home and you’re just giving education, not ads.

01:11:10 – 01:11:29

 Education how to take care of stuff. You want to be video is really important in today’s day and age. Everybody’s got to be a media producer of in some sort. So, is there an easy way to do it? Yeah, we’ve got some easy ways that we do it for our clients where it’s, you know, it again the best would be grab a phone and just start talking, you know, once a day, once a week.

01:11:29 – 01:11:46

 Hey, just, you know, I’m back here again. And I got a couple questions about or you know some things I see on the regular basis. I just thought I’d touch base with you. Again, not everybody wants to be an influencer. So there’s ways around that in today’s world. You want to be email marketing again all the time, but understand only 30 40% will ever get open.

01:11:46 – 01:12:06

 That means 70 60 70% hit the trash, right? Direct mail absolutely. And naked mail too, postcards, not discount discount discount. No. Hey, here’s me. Bought the business, took the business over from dad. Here’s mom and dad. Remember those guys? Yeah, we just took the business over. Blah, blah, blah.

01:12:06 – 01:12:21

 Here’s why we want to continue to be your carpet cleaners from our family to yours. You don’t need an offer a discount with that message, right? So, and paid search, you do it right. You have all your poles in the water. We won’t spend too much time on this, but we that’s that’s we talk about this a lot.

01:12:21 – 01:12:45

 You want to make sure you have all of your poles in the water so that you’ve got 30, 40 things generating one, two, three, five qualified inquiries a month. And that Zmont zero moment of truth, you’re getting those 11, 20, 30 touches in on all different things. Google paid ad, they saw you there, then they saw you on social media, and then they they they real estate agent, interior designer talked about you.

01:12:45 – 01:13:01

 Then, you know, then they went to your website and you started retargeting and following them around. And and then they they went to next door and they see that you’re on next door and you’ve got some ads running there or you’re in front of them there and then they noticed your neighbor got the cleaning done because there’s a yard sign and they got a door hanger all about you and your family and they and then they called you.

01:13:01 – 01:13:22

 Hey, how did you hear about us Google? That’s why you never asked the question, how’d you hear about us? Strategically, you you asked them what information they’d like from you today and what research have you done on have you done on us so far? That’s part of script training and neural linguistic programming to get more conversions because you track your conversion numbers.

01:13:22 – 01:13:39

 And you know, you just went 40 from 42% to 49% and that’s going to equate to another $80,000 this year in business because you upped your conversion rate because you know your math because we’re in business, right? So, make sure you your hub converts. Your website is your hub. It has a very Oops, let’s go back.

01:13:39 – 01:13:57

 I thought there were some words on the side of that one. Um, apparently no words on the side of that one. Anyways, your website has a very specific layout it needs. It has to tell a story. Donald Miller story brand. Very very good um very very good book uh to to read. Um and hey, I just see that question there from from Justin.

01:13:57 – 01:14:13

 Hey Justin, how’s it going buddy? U do I have an audio version of my book? I do not. I have not paused to read the thing into u we could probably get AI at this point now to to do something where it’s not so robotic and and create an audio version. I haven’t done that yet. I apologize.

01:14:13 – 01:14:31

 Um but yeah, um best way to use the book anyways is again the the complete guide to internet marketing or for carpet cleaners. Um the best way to use it is, hey, I’m thinking about pay-per-click. I’m thinking about hiring somebody to do my pay-per-click. Um what do I need to know? Read the chapter. Take you 10 minutes, 15 minutes.

01:14:31 – 01:14:48

 They’re not right. It’s 17 chapters, but know like as you’re you know, hey, what does our website need? This graphic is actually in that that book as well. What does my website need? read that chapter, right? And just just use it as a study guide, more of a of like, you know, sort of like going to college and, you know, we don’t need to go through all of it.

01:14:50 – 01:15:03

We just need to go through the pieces at a time. Bookmark it, dog ear it, highlight in yellow, do all that kind of stuff and just just use it as a study guide. That’s kind of how we wrote it anyways. So, we the Wii is me. I don’t know why we’re we’reing that one, but um anyways, you want to lay out your website.

01:15:03 – 01:15:25

 You want to create trust signals. You want to have a primary and secondary um way of them getting a hold of you. And then even a third one with chat popups and and and you want your website to tell your story properly and all of these elements like so we’ve got what we call smart forms. As soon as somebody fills it out the phone rings and they can pick up the phone and and know that they’ve got filled out a form and what they wanted information on.

01:15:25 – 01:15:44

 If they can’t pick up the phone then an an automation happens or an AI now can can be plugged in to start talking to them. not book the job, but just have a conversation and move them to a time where some real human can actually get a hold of them and and and help them out. Um, chat to text, so they don’t have to sit on your website.

01:15:44 – 01:15:57

 They they text here or they start chatting here, their phone goes ping, we’re going to carry on this conversation in your normal texting app. Don’t worry about staying on our website. They close everybody else’s down and they they can carry on with their day and have a a back and forth conversation.

01:15:57 – 01:16:17

 and your brand, you’re you’re showing them reviews and happy customer stuff all the time, right? So, you want you want to have authentic images, project pages, happy customer stories we talk about. You want to speak to your ideal customer avatar. You want to have video elements on it. You want to showcase your online reputation and reviews.

01:16:17 – 01:16:32

 You want to make it easy for them to take action. You want to make sure you have all the basics in order. Phone number in the upper right corner. You want to have a web form above the fold. the old days of newspapers, above the fold was what you saw when you walked past the newspaper stand. The other side of it was below the fold, right? And then you had to open the paper up.

01:16:32 – 01:16:50

 Above the fold was the headline, the big story, right? You know, the war is over, whatever it is, right? You want your above the fold to to talk to what their biggest fear, what what their biggest question in their head is. Um, so, you know, you want to enter a conversation that’s already going on in the customer’s head. Marketing 101, right? You want to have calls to action.

01:16:50 – 01:17:05

 Every time they scroll down, treat them like a goldfish. A goldfish turns, they say a goldfish forgets every second, 10 seconds, whatever that is. Turns around, oh, I’ve got a castle here. Yeah, you’ve been in the freaking fish tank for 20 years, buddy. You know that’s the same castle, right? I treat customers similar.

01:17:05 – 01:17:22

 As they scroll down, assume they don’t know what to do next and put another call to tell them what to do next all the way down the page. Hey, time to give us a call. Whatever, right? leverage offers that that match on the page and give them an opportunity for the two-way chat and leverage marketing automation.

01:17:22 – 01:17:40

 You want to do all of these things so that your website is and you want to make sure it’s optimized for answer engine optimization as well. So, let’s go take a look at your website right now. Pull it up. Is it built to rank and convert? What do you need to tweak? Right.

01:17:40 – 01:17:59

 And let’s before we get into that last section, I know we’re going a little bit long, but why don’t we do that? Let’s take a look at I don’t know if you guys are on the call, Paul or Diane, but let’s go take a look at your website for example. Phone number top right corner. There’s that form, right? What are we interested in? Carpet.

01:17:59 – 01:18:13

 Sorry, I got other things running at cleaning. Fill it out. Soon as they fill it out, phone rings during business hours. After hours, there’s an automation that says, “Hey, so sorry, nobody’s available for you. Um, we’ll get back to you as soon as you can. In the meantime, let me ask you a few questions.

01:18:13 – 01:18:34

” and it starts a little bit of an automation which an AI can be added to can be added to. Um here’s the chat detects all powered by carpet cleaner lead pro our AI and automation tool that we’ve had for what five years now um and constantly build on every single month 10,0005 to $10,000 worth of development into this tool um just to keep it modernized running and adding all the new elements into it.

01:18:34 – 01:18:50

 Right? So, you want they fill that out, their name, their phone number, what they’re interested, and press send. And their cell phone goes ping. And now they have a conversation back and forth on their cell. Look at this right here. Right? There’s their most recent Google reviews.

01:18:50 – 01:19:52

 And anything they’ll have a if they have ones on Facebook, it’ll say Facebook. If they have ones that came in as surveys because they survey their clients first, um, getting feedback first, reviews second. There’s a huge tip right there. Um, that they would have a little star right here. you click on it right to that person’s actual um face or Google profile and and the fact that they they they use that service like insane right so and again all above the fold we haven’t even scroll down yet now we scroll down and learn about them there’s our video element >> there look at every single picture about them that’s just the homepage pro happy customer stories right if they’ve given us any happy customer stories they’ll be actually sitting on every one of the pages. Blog posts every single week. The blog posts, right? This one’s from last week. Let me open it. Oh, I did open it already. Scroll down. Paul didn’t write the blog post, but according to the world, Paul wrote the blog post and all these other ones because we want to

01:19:53 – 01:20:13

teach the internet that Paul is the expert. He is the authority. His business, Paul and Diane, their business is a brand entity with brand entity coding deeply embedded into all all the pages. Every service has a page. Every city has a page. Every neighborhood in each city has a page. We don’t need to show them on here because they’re actually supporting underneath.

01:20:13 – 01:20:35

 That’s how you do it, right? So, you want to create the right hub. And then you want to make sure that they convert. 60% of inbound inquir um inbound um traffic leaves unconverted. How do you stop that? 90% of web forms fail to convert on national stats because most people don’t follow up and if they do, they wait a day or two.

01:20:35 – 01:20:54

 You should be following up within five minutes or less. A chat or a web form is considered a text message from your best friend that you’re going to get back to right away. Right? leads are not followed up with and they need to be and they go to the competition. The average customer must be followed up five to seven times before booking.

01:20:54 – 01:21:09

 Do you call them back the next day? Right? The ones that didn’t book today, maybe you’re amazing on the phone and you booked some. What about the ones that said, “H, let me think about it. Did you call them back tomorrow?” If you did, you’re part of about 5% of the the the the business owning owner crowd.

01:21:09 – 01:21:33

 Did you call them back three days from now and then 10 days and then on day 14 with a mafia offer? In the meantime, did you send them emails and text messages? The odd text message, but an email letting them know a couple of them about why you started your business, why you’re different, here’s what our customers love about us, and build your use that reputation to market to them so that you’re starting to get into their head even if they go with somebody else.

01:21:33 – 01:21:53

 And then they they’re not happy with that decision. You continue to drip on them long term, right? You want to leverage market automation and AI assistance to follow up on all of this stuff within minutes. Google local service ads. If you do not answer the phone on the fir on within the first or second ring, they start demoting you.

01:21:53 – 01:22:08

 Oh, my Google local service ads not working well. Do you Well, we don’t always answer our phone. Sometimes it goes to the answer machine. Yeah, Google doesn’t even show you anymore. Automate the follow-up so that every prospect is touched five or more times. I actually say way more than that.

01:22:08 – 01:22:27

 Um there’s a program a chase routine it’s called for for business sales and it’s um eight touches over 12 14 days. Um and you want to make sure you have all those and they got to be warm friendly touches, right? Um and then you want to build your lead list of anybody who did not say yes this time so that you can market to them directly.

01:22:29 – 01:22:49

And you want your lead list to be 10 times bigger than your customer list. Right? So lead generation versus lead nurturing, two entirely different things. When done well, when you have conversion optimization locked in and automation, you could have the exact same number of inquiries.

01:22:49 – 01:23:08

 These are exact numbers from one of our clients. Um, they had all of these lead sources, multiple poles in the water, and they we were generating digitally 164 leads, inquiries a month on average, not from their repeat database, but from cold sources. They were booking about 30% because we’re tracking it. They had no follow-up.

01:23:08 – 01:24:09

 They made they did about 50 jobs from our work. Hey, thank you very much. And their average job was 325 and they made about 156,000 a month from that. Right? on average these numbers were their average month difference whatever this was actually one month this was October two years ago was where we got this I got these stats from but it’s very indicative a lot of our clients right we turned on carpet cleaner lead pro lead automation what we found and we also taught them how to do scripting better and and followup so their manual follow-up plus our automated follow-up and reminders for them to follow up plus better scripting now they went from 30% booking to about 45% booking not quite 50, right? But the drip, some more people came back two weeks later. Oh yeah, I want you guys. I’ve decided to go with you guys. Thank you for sending me all those happy customer stories. They don’t call them that. That’s what we call them, right? Some of them came back three months later of this crowd. Some of them came back six months later, right? So that one in that one zero moment of truth that got them in now

01:24:11 – 01:25:12

they got dripped on and then they tried somebody else didn’t like it or their washing machine broke down and had to wait and you’re the only one that stayed in touch. And what we found is that their average conversion grew to 70% from the original inquiries. So you might have been getting you might be getting jobs right now that came in from February because you’re still dripping on them, right? And that that job with good lead nurture goes back and counts as a February lead that is now booking now. That’s where we get these numbers from. And there instead of 15 grand almost 40 grand. Same crowd. No additional spend in marketing. The only additional lift for that extra $20,000 from the exact same lead flow is just following up better. That is growth. That is $200,000 a year in found money. $240,000 a year in found money that lived inside their business already, not new money, right? So, you want to make every lead more valuable. It looks like this. Lots and lots of coding, lots and lots of automation, lots and lots of workflows.

01:25:14 – 01:25:35

If they do this, then do that. Blah blah blah. Lots of API connections into House Call pros and service monsters and things like that to know when you book them so that they they can get out of one routine and put into another. Again, we’ve got AI modules we can add on. Now we got customer database reactivation models we can add on modules we can add on now but carpet cleaner lead pro is one tool that allows automation to happen like crazy.

01:25:35 – 01:25:59

 We still recommend and train and coach that you have a role to play as well. Pick up the phone and call um put them into you know a rotation of getting a ma a piece of actual physical mail in the mailbox. Don’t shy away from spending a bit of money because you have a budget to spend. you have 20% and of your revenue goes to that and 30% of that marketing budget has to go to um offline marketing.

01:25:59 – 01:26:20

 10% of that is database marketing. So put it in there, right? So that your schedule looks like this. This is actually back end of one of our clients. This is all the new inquiries coming in. How many have been talked to, haven’t booked yet? How many are ready? How many have quotes? How many have jobs booked? And so you have all of that smart lead follow-up, stale lead alerts.

01:26:23 – 01:26:40

If they’ve been sitting too long, hey, have you called them? Let’s get them moved along. Um, cold lead nurture campaigns, ongoing campaigns. So the takeaways, what three conversion elements are you going to implement on your website automation? Are you ready for that? Like what are you doing next? Know and track your KPIs.

01:26:40 – 01:27:04

 Do you know your average conversion rate across and how many sessions, how many users? We share all this data with our clients, right? What is your actual source and then by source, right? So, we’re actually in in development building a whole new dashboard out that’s even more granular that uses AI to determine the lead quality and a bunch of other stuff as well.

01:27:04 – 01:27:23

 Just go nuts with this because it’s the most important is to know your data. So far, we’ve reviewed your goals, found clarity around the the economy, messaging, and media, made sure that your website is optimized for AEO and conversions, understand your need to have effective AI implementation, and lead nurture automation. There’s a role for those.

01:27:25 – 01:27:37

It’s just not what you’re being pitched by the marketing companies, right? Again, I’m talking as a as a carpet cleaner here, not just the owner of Carpet Cleaner Marketing Masters, because Yeah. Are we a marketing company? Yeah, sort of. We’re a coaching company and a growth partner.

01:27:37 – 01:27:59

 We just happen to know how to do services really well for the industry, right? So, we know how to adapt and change because I needed to do that for my own business and I needed to hire the right people and learn it and then built entire companies around that, right? So, you want to commit to using KPI tracking dashboards to know all your numbers and stay in touch.

01:27:59 – 01:28:22

 You want to be a business owner, right? key trends. You got to do more video, how-tos, case studies, updates. You want to share more stories, happy customers, projects, behind the scenes. You want to share more video. Share more stories on social and anywhere you can. Um, and to your database and to your lead list and to your referral partners that we are storytelling creatures.

01:28:22 – 01:28:38

 Tell more stories. Um, you want to shift from phone conversations to message conversations and then get the message people to then, hey, is it okay if I give you a call? It’d be a little bit quicker. We can wrap up a few of these points and see if they’re willing to be a little bit more bold and not as shy and show up on the phone.

01:28:38 – 01:28:58

 Um, and there’s all kinds of scripts and and ways to do that. And when you do message people, you want to use influence, short, snappy messages, but not you’re still not, hey, how much does it cost to clean a 5×7 area rug? 127. Oh, it’s too much. Thanks. Click. Did you influence anything with your price? Well, I got to give a lower price next time.

01:28:58 – 01:29:15

 No, no, no. Hey, that’s great. Yeah, tell me, do you know a little bit about the area rug? Like, what kind of material is it made of? Um, actually, I’ve got a couple more questions. Is it okay if I give you a quick call? Um, I just want to just clarify a few things about the rug so I can be very accurate. Half the people go, “Yep, now you have a conversation about the rug.

01:29:15 – 01:29:30

” You know, and you find you tell those little stories. Hey, so how long have you had the rug? Cool. And what was the reason why you bought it? Just as you’re figuring stuff out, right? You have those conversations and you find out it matches the decor of the entire Well, we bought the rug and I’ve built my entire decor around it. Oh, okay. Yeah.

01:29:30 – 01:29:54

 So, yeah, there’s a bunch of different ways you can get that cleaned. I understand that it’s a microfiber. I understand that it’s a um um olin. I understand that it’s a nylon. I understand that’s a a Persian cotton silk blend. Blah blah blah, you know. Um I understand it’s viscous for gosh sakes, right? you know, um, but here I want to tell you that there’s, you know, a good, better, best way to clean.

01:29:54 – 01:30:14

 We believe in doing it the very best way. We’re not the most expensive, but here’s why we do things differently and what we do. And you start telling them about it. If you can’t do that by get them on the phone, you better be showing pictures and telling and and little stories in in your message conversion because it really isn’t about price, right? You want to have a must an all-in perspective.

01:30:14 – 01:30:38

 You want to have your website and everything you do, your entire search everywhere optimization optimized for answer engines, generative AI. You want to have paid ads running to fill the funnel. You want to have social media to tell your stories. You want to have email marketing and direct mail and and and and you want to you want to make sure that economic and AI concerns, they’re going to dominate the news cycle.

01:30:38 – 01:30:55

 How are you going to deal with that? You’re going to dominate the news cycle for our customers, too. They’re going to lose their jobs to AI is what they’re all believing. and 30 to 40% of the economy is worried about jobs right now. So, right. So, you want to have live chat on your website. You want to be incorporating Facebook DMs and all that into one dashboard so you don’t have to look everywhere.

01:30:55 – 01:31:14

 You takeaway, you want to make it easy to connect with all your chat sources in one place. We do that with Carpet Cleaner LeadPro, not just on the website, but DMs on Instagram and photos and stuff like that. people that message you on Twitter, people that reach out to you on on Messenger, all come into one dashboard.

01:31:14 – 01:31:33

 We collect all of their information. We can use AI and automations to start talking to them, hand it off to you, and then if they don’t buy, we can put them into drip campaigns that nurture them and teach them your story. That’s the right way to do it. So, you want to update your plan. Which marketing channels are you going to add in the next three months? What is your what is your 90 90day goal? Right.

01:31:38 – 01:32:39

Website is it built for AI and to convert you are you the authority with authority content all over the internet so the AI can find it so your ideal customers can find it so your referral partners can find it and trust you. Um are you optimizing your Google maps to go farther and wider? Do you know about having um add-on areas and territories? Are you focusing on online reputation? Um are you sharing the real customer stories? Are you doing a mix of online, offline, and database marketing every single day? Are you market? Are you the marketer of your cleaning business first and foremost? Everything else second? Are you doing strategic paid ad campaigns, social media, email marketing, lead nurture, and are you tracking everything to know what’s working, what’s not working? That’s it. That’s how you run a million- dollar carpet cleaning company. Not that hard. Um, a lot of work, but there’s a process to it. Um, you’re going to create your um, you know, review your customized plan. We do have this checklist right here. Um, you can go to our website, carpet cleaner marketing masters, and get a copy of the checklist. Um, you should probably sign up for our our

01:32:41 – 01:32:57

monthly uh magazine as well. We have a weekly Monday Monday hot minute newsletter that just what to think about this week, what’s been going on. Then we have a monthly magazine that goes deep on all of these topics. We have these webinars. Like we just give away a ton of free stuff to help people grow their business.

01:32:57 – 01:33:15

 So review your goals regularly. The three fundamentals of marketing success. We talked about the omniresence, how to optimize your website. We talked about that. The big picture on online marketing should be tapping into maximizing your lead flow. You want to um the latest trends you need to focus on for the last half. We talked about a lot of those.

01:33:15 – 01:33:37

 And you want to review, tweak a custom action plan that’s right for your business. All of it makes sense. If you implement none of it, that was a great waste of your time. So most businesses fail not because they don’t have great ideas, because they don’t execute on them. So you want to the key to growth is take immediate action on one high impact shift right now. Today write it down.

01:33:37 – 01:33:58

 Do it this afternoon. If you got go do something right now, do it tonight. Start the momentum. That’s humans. It’s momentum. We don’t run we don’t start running a marathon. We start by putting our running shoes and shorts at the end of the bed and then we guarantee that we’re just going to put those on in the morning and stand outside the front door and that’s it.

01:33:58 – 01:34:16

 Right? That’s what we got to be doing. So the best businesses are not the best operators. They are the best marketers who then need to refine operations to scale. Good marketing creates operation problems. You fix the operation problems. It creates the need for finance and data and then the whole thing cycles.

01:34:16 – 01:34:34

 Right? So, what top three internet marketing initiatives or marketing initiatives in general are you going to implement to hit the goals that you set at the beginning of the year? That’s where we’re at right now, right? There’s a blueprint for this. We we provide coaching and consulting with our clients.

01:34:34 – 01:34:49

 We call it just in time coaching right now. I used to run an entire coaching wing, blueprint for success, until I got hired away to help a flood restoration company grow and sell um over a eight-year period. And um then we started the digital marketing agency and we find that we spend most of our time coaching.

01:34:49 – 01:35:04

 We have our success coach Gerard um who can reach out to any of you guys and any of our clients jump on calls have a conversation with you see if you how you fit in. One of the ways to get that started if you want to become the best known cleaner and you want to be help have some help with that.

01:35:04 – 01:35:24

 Again getting the seven core these six plus your lead nurture the seven core um marketing functions that you need to have in place on all that kind of stuff. Reach out to us. Carboncleermarketingmasters.comschedule. Fill out a quick little survey. Gerard will give you a call or cere one of our team will call you. Have a chat with you about it. See if you’re an ideal fit.

01:35:24 – 01:35:44

 If you are, they’ll put you in my calendar. Have a conversation. It’s a co coaching session, not a sales call. Anybody who’s been on knows it’s it’s it’s I love chatting about running a really really powerful business. It’s a coaching session. What are you doing right now? Where do you need to be? What’s the gap? How can you fill the gap? Right? Where can we help? If we can.

01:35:44 – 01:36:02

 If we can’t, here’s what you need to do on your own. When you’re ready, come back to us. I have those conversations as well. I charge $500 an hour for my consulting time when I’m hired to do consulting. And I don’t put that many hours in my schedule to do that. I provide an hour of value for and pick my brain absolutely free.

01:36:02 – 01:36:23

 Some of you guys know that it can go on longer than an hour. I usually free up a little bit of extra time because if it’s if we’re having a really good conversation, I’ll keep it going. So anyways, if you want to want to see if there’s ways that we can help you grow through that scale, if you want to go through that that life cycle, that growth scale of a business, um yeah, we’re we’re absolutely here to help.

01:36:23 – 01:36:45

 Uh that’s what we love to do. Um remind you what I’m talking about with the scale. Um it’s just one of our behind the scenes graphics, but that right there, right? You want a million-dollar business? There’s a process for that. There’s a blueprint for that. We just got to get you there, right? So, if that sounds interesting at all, reach out to us.

01:36:45 – 01:36:58

 If you got it nailed, you got this figured out, this is easy for you, just want to come on and sharpen the saw, we appreciate having you here as well. We’d love to have you on the podcast, learn about your business, uh help you become the authority in the local marketplace by promoting it out for you and giving an entire media kit.

01:36:58 – 01:37:15

 There’s no cost to that at all. Uh just hit up the team or go to carpetcleanersuccess.com. That is the name of the podcast. You can go to carpet cleanersuccess.com and fill out a a guest application there and you’ll get tons of value for your business on that alone. It’s just, you know, it’s like being interviewed by the newspaper on steroids.

01:37:15 – 01:37:25

 So, let’s let’s have a conversation. Let’s see if there’s a way that we can help you build your million-dollar empire or whatever goal you have. Yeah. Until next time, I appreciate your time. Thanks so much for showing up.