SPEAKER_00: 0:00

This is the Empowering Healthy Business Podcast, and I'm your host, Cal Wilder. Each episode, we'll dive into topics important to folks who want to run businesses that are both nicely profitable, sustainable, and scalable, and who want to achieve balance in their lives and realize their potential inside and outside of work. The show is sponsored by SmartBooks, provider of bookkeeping and accounting for businesses. Let's get started. So, as you know, here at Empowering Healthy Business, we're all about uh providing resources to business owners to help them grow successful healthy businesses. And part of that is being able to market and sell services effectively. Um, and I've learned over the years there's a big difference between, you know, marketing, you know, a B2B SaaS product and local home services. And today I really want to focus on what home service business owners can do to grow their businesses effectively using marketing. So today's guest is Sean Garner, who has a firm that focuses mostly on that. So welcome to the show, Sean.

SPEAKER_01: 1:06

Hey, thank you so much, sir. It's great to be here. I'm excited to share and hopefully add some value to your audience today.

SPEAKER_00: 1:13

So, how did you uh kind of come to have this focus in your firm?

SPEAKER_01: 1:18

Yeah, so I actually started out uh in the fitness industry. So my wife and I, we used to own several gyms. I did a lot of stuff in the online fitness space, and I kind of had to figure this marketing stuff out on my own. There, there was, I guess, a little bit even more backstory. Whenever we had the gyms, I worked with lots of marketing agencies and was always frustrated by how they did some of the things that they did, as far as I felt like they took too much ownership of everything. They didn't really give much feedback as far as data and reporting of what they were doing. They kind of locked my website down. I didn't control it. So I was always frustrated by that. So whenever I started to do stuff in the online fitness space, I knew I needed to figure this marketing thing out. As I started figuring it out, I uh guess I got pretty good at it because I started having friends and colleagues and other people in the fitness space ask me how to do it. So I started doing this whole fitness business coach thing where I was trying to teach other gym owners and personal trainers how to make money online with training like and running their gym because that's what I was doing. Then I quickly found out that I would tell them everything that they needed to do. But just like every other business owner, they're busy. They're they're in in the day-to-day trying to do the thing. They weren't actually actually able to execute on anything. So then what I started to do is I started realizing I gotta help to truly serve the people I'm called to serve, I need to be able to do this stuff for them. So I started uh the agency that we have now, and it started out very small of just me working with some part-time contractor works and building websites and sales funnels. And then COVID happened, and my wife goes and decides to start her own functional medicine practice. And she's like, hey, you've been doing all this marketing stuff for for these gym owners and fitness professionals. Like, don't you think it'd work for my medical practice? Like, yeah, absolutely, let's do it. And so we built out all of her uh her sales funnel and her all of her marketing and SEO and everything for her medical practice, and it did very, very well. And then my attorney comes to me and he's like, Hey, like, you're doing all this stuff. I saw you do it for your wife's clinic, you're doing it for everybody else. Like, don't you think it would work for my law firm? I was like, well, yeah, it actually would. It's the same stuff. And so we started doing that. And so over time, the agency really has grown and has evolved into what we do now, which is a full service marketing agency for professional services. Because what I realized is good translates no matter what the industry is. So there's certain foundational things and overall marketing strategies that transfer from industry to industry. And then there's individual tactics that you need to do that are maybe more specific, whether you, like you said, B2B versus B2C type stuff or specific industries, but good strategy transfers. And like for it was very easy from going from fitness to professional services because at the end of the day, fitness people are trying to book assessments, they're trying to get people to do free trials, join the gym, book a consultation. And that's exactly what professional and home services are trying to do. They're trying to get schedule consultations, they're trying to book quotes, book assessments, and get all that stuff, book your book your free call, book an appointment, whatever it is. Um, there's a main call to action where you're trying to get your customers to take action. So when you understand a really good framework, you're able to plug it in and despite whatever industry it may be.

SPEAKER_00: 4:21

Yeah, I mean, we work at SmartBooks, you know, we do accounting and bookkeeping and tax work for businesses and certain segments of our clients are, you know, roofers, plumbers, contractors, HVAC folks, handymen, and you know, the ones that seem to have cracked the nut with marketing are growing nicely. And then there are others that are struggling uh to figure out marketing or to get over the hump to want to spend money on marketing. Like, you know, I'm kind of a one-man person and I'm doing good, making decent money. I'm, you know, I can't afford to hire somebody, but you know, if you don't grow enough to hire somebody, you're never going to make any more money. So they're kind of stuck and you know, hit their ceiling unless they can figure out how to keep growing the business because they don't want to hire somebody unless they have confidence. Um, that at the same time they're hiring people and incurring more payroll costs that they're growing their revenue through more customers, right? And then there are others that um, you know, you know, kind of had a nice run for several years, and now their revenues dropped in the last year or two, and now they're spending more money on advertising, but the revenue is still dropping a little bit. So whatever they're spending money on is not working, right? So I'm curious, maybe, you know, what do you see? Just, you know, I guess other question, what do you see as like some of the differences between marketing home services, local services versus more broader geographic services?

SPEAKER_01: 5:39

Yeah, great question. And I might give a way too long answer on this because I want to I want to give a lot of value here. So what I would say is is I I love the the analogy and the thought process. Because one thing I've found a lot with our home service businesses that we work with is they're almost both those examples that you just gave, we see all the time. Because sometimes they're almost afraid to grow because they say that, well, I'm just I'm just one, I just run one truck, it's just me, it's it's a small time operation. So I don't want to have to turn people away, but at the same time, like I want more business. Like, okay, we gotta pick. Like, I would much rather be in a position to where I have so many leads coming into me where I say, hey, I actually can't get to you, or I'm having to quote extra long wait times than have to worry about where my next lead and everything is coming from. The other part of what you've said too, which we've seen happen a lot, is the people that were very successful for a long time and now they're starting to see things drop off. What I have found with the home service businesses that we are working with specifically is what's typically happened is they are with a previous agency that they were with for a really long time. They had some really good foundations, but they haven't pivoted as the digital marketing landscape has changed a lot over the past several years. You see so much more with AIO reviews and people looking for things inside of ChatGPT and these LLMs and stuff like that, and just the different marketing tools that are available. The old school ways of a lot of these home service businesses growing, where they'll spin up a website on WordPress, they're gonna hire an SEO agency to dump a bunch of content and some keywords and hopefully get an opportunity to rank and maybe do some pay PC ads and pay-per-click ads on Google, and now we're gonna win, doesn't really work that way anymore. So, what I have seen, what separates people from the ones that are struggling versus the ones that are continuing to grow, is the ones that understand you don't need to piecemeal things out, or you can't just do one aspect of marketing and expect to be successful. You need to have a holistic strategy of your business and of your marketing in order to make sure that you're not leaking leads. So for us, we do this with a framework that we call the marketing domination framework. And with that, there's three parts of that. The first thing is, is it all revolves around the concept of a sales funnel. And so for us, a sales funnel is not a software tool, a style of landing page. Like it got super popular with the software click funnels or high level and some of these other software automation tools. A funnel is not one of those platforms. A funnel is a customer relationship journey where you take someone from not knowing who you are to a super fan customer for life. And there's several different aspects of your marketing to build out this sales funnel from the words that you use in your branding, your website, having some type of a lead generator or a way to capture somebody's information, follow-up email sales sequences, and just a CRM tool to put all that stuff in. And that's our first phase of marketing domination is you have to have all of that stuff and you have to have this whole sales funnel in order before you can even start doing marketing. Or if not, you're just gonna be spending money bleeding leads and wasting time. The second thing that we're gonna do once we built this sales funnel is then we're going to fill the sales funnel because just because we build it doesn't mean people are gonna come. We fill that we personally, especially for local service business owners, we are going to start with organic SEO content before we go into paid ads, because we don't want to pay for something that we can get for free. And we we want to make sure that our funnel is working before we start dumping a ton of money in and ads. Then, whenever we do want to start going on ads, especially for professional services and local service businesses, the biggest return of investment for paid ads right now is local service ads or LSA ads. If your business um qualifies for that, that is the best investment to get started with paid ads because it only shows your ads to a specific market for the specific service that you offer, and you only pay for the lead. It's not like Google PPC ads where you're paying for the click um and then you're having to convert them on the website. You are paying for the lead. So it's a higher cost for those things, but it's a much more highly qualified lead. Then you can start looking at things like PPC ads and then maybe Meta or Instagram or YouTube ads if it makes sense.

SPEAKER_00: 9:51

So LSA is a particular uh particular program within Google. Oh, yeah. Okay. Yep.

SPEAKER_01: 9:58

If well, we're gonna come back to that because if you don't know what LSA ads, that's gonna be very important, especially for what you do at smart books. That that would be huge for you right now. Um, so this so then we're gonna get into other paid ad sources and stuff. We might even look at uh local media if it makes sense, billboard advertising and stuff like that. And then we're gonna fill the funnel. And then the third step is that's whenever we go into optimizing the funnel. So we're big believers on data analytics and uh automations. So, what are the repetitive tasks that we can automate within our CRM as far as follow-up, nurture, and everything else? And then what uh based upon the data reporting that we've built, how can we go back through and optimize everything so we know what's actually working? I tell clients all the time we don't make decisions based upon personal preference or emotion. We make it based upon data. And so we should have all of our data set up to make this whole, like bring in the whole marketing domination framework of build the funnel, fill the funnel, and optimize the funnel.

SPEAKER_00: 11:25

So tell us more about this LSA program. Maybe folks from the audience, some of them may be familiar with it, others maybe not be.

SPEAKER_01: 11:32

So LSA ads or local service ads are specific types of ads that are available for professional services on Google. So if you can see this yourself, um, it is the best ads that you can do if you are doing a local service business because they're honestly the easiest ones to set up. What you do is you can just go to Google and just type in Google Local Service Ads. And I think it might be like ads.google slash local, something like that. But just go to Google, type in local service ads, and then you'll be able to see if your industry and your market is available. I will tell you, it is available in most markets for accounting and bookkeeping. It's available for all home services like roofers, um, uh estate planning attorneys, you know, plumbers, electricians, general contractors. They're all eligible for this. How it works is you create your account on there, and then it is connected to your GMB or your Google My Business profile. And then you will select your service area, and then you will select the services that you provide. Your ad only gets shown to people that are looking for your specific service or uh in your area or they live in your area looking for that service. So let's say I was a plumber in Dallas. If I am in Oklahoma, but still looking for a plumber in Dallas, that ad has an opportunity to show up. Or if I'm in Dallas and I just type in plumber near me, that ad has an opportunity to show up. Where these are very powerful is because they are very hot leads. Somebody is looking for a specific service that you perform that business in and that you do in that area. So how it works is whenever the ad pops up, they're not going to a website or landing page. So you don't have to worry about conversion rate optimization and making sure you have all that stuff happen. It has one of two options. They can either call the person or they can send them a message. And whenever you're setting this ad up, you can make it do either one. Um, and so how it works is they will call and you only pay if it's a if they call or message you. You don't pay if they see your ad, they click on your ad or anything. You only pay for the lead. And the other thing that's nice about it is Google even has a screening process. So let's say you get a spam lead of somebody trying to sell you something. Well, Google has through their AI, they have a way to say, oh, that was not a legitimate lead. So we won't charge them for that. Or if you do get charged for it, there's an easy one-click dispute that, hey, this was not a qualified lead for me. And so you don't have to pay for that. Um, these are amazing. And if you are a local service-based business out here, like this should be something everybody should set up. And uh this is where you can see, and this is where these types of ads show up. If you go to Google and you type in like roofer near me, and you see the very first section of ads, they will they used to be uh called Google Guaranteed, where there's like a little check mark by them. That's the local service ads. It'll typically show the top two results, and then you have to expand and open up to see the rest. But those are the LSA ads, and that's where every local service business should start before you even do PPC, because that is almost a guaranteed customer, and you're just competing with everybody else for how you rank within your LSA.

SPEAKER_00: 14:51

Okay. So let's say um, you know, I'm selling uh bookkeeping accounting services across the country. So I've got you know an approach that's kind of agnostic to location in general, although maybe I should look more into LSA to see if I can capture local leads that through that program too. Um but how how does the the sales funnel differ when you're building one for you know your local plumbing company compared who's working you know in your local geography versus an accounting firm working across the country?

SPEAKER_01: 15:24

Yeah, great question. And so the one thing to understand, the strategy doesn't change. And and one thing that I would say specifically to a business like yours with the accounting firm, everybody you want to start local before you try to go national because it's a lot easier for you to win, you know, uh let's say Dallas accounting firm than it is small business accounting firm. And so if you want to win on SEO, SEO works by stacking little wins on top of each other. Because what how how I explain SEO to clients, if they're if they're not super familiar with it, all it is is being very clear and proving to Google or these search engines what should be going on. So a lot of people think that SEO is tricking Google, like, oh, I'm gonna do something special, and now I'm gonna be ranking number one. Like, no, no, no. Google is or SEO is taking what's really happening in the real world and making sure that Google knows that it's happening in a digital form so they know how to rank you. And I have to have a lovingly heart-to-heart talk with clients sometimes. Like, if you're a brand new business, don't expect and you have zero experience, don't expect to be number one overnight because you can't lie to Google. It's got all of these algorithms and way of ranking things to know your reviews, your historical history on um your domain and how old it is, how many other people are linking to you to rank your website. So SEO is about taking your real world experience and putting it in to Google so that way it knows how to rank you and the goal, and so with that, most businesses don't do it properly. So that is how newer businesses are able to jump some of those ones, like you talked about the earlier, where they're kind of starting to trend down. It's because they've kind of let their foot off the gas and they don't realize that you have to keep up with all of these different things because SEO is very much like working out. You just can't do it once. You got to keep doing it if you want to see results. Um, so you want to start with all of that with local first to be able to stack those wins before you can start going after bigger, more competitive national rank keywords. Where I might be more specific with the sales funnel process is how I am is the words that I'm using on the page. But the the framework for the website, the framework and the strategy for the whole sales funnel process is the same. Both businesses need a brand. You need to have your logos, colors, and fonts. And then for us, we're we're certified story brand coaches. So we use the story brand framework to use certain words to create a story that we are, that's our customer story that positions us as the guide to solve their problems. Both businesses need that. Both businesses need a website that's wireframed to collect leads or make sales because I always tell clients if your website's not making you money or getting you leads, it's just wasting money. You don't need a digital billboard. You need something that's your greatest salesperson. That's what your website should be doing. Both businesses also need a lead generator. They need different ways to capture those leads. It can happen a couple of different ways with a local service business. It might be a price estimator calculator. Well, hey, enter your name and email real quick, type in a little bit of information about the job you're wanting, and we'll send you over a free price estimator. So you don't have to worry about, you know, having a tech in your house or anything like that, to where you can catch that lead and follow up with them. To where it's somebody more, somebody like you that is serving local and national might have more of like a uh a small business self-audit checklist. 10 things you need to do to make sure you're paying less money to the government and your taxes, like keep keeping more of the money you earn, something like that, where it's a little checklist that they could earn. And if you wanted to, if you wanted to start with that local, you could talk about maybe like uh 10 tax saving benefits that most Dallas business owners are missing. And you could take that same guide and you could tweak it to make it more localized based upon certain markets that you're you're needing. Then both of those also need a follow-up process, whether that be follow-up automated sales emails and text messages. And then both of those businesses need a CRM or a tool to store all of those leads. So they both need the same thing for the structure. Now, how you go about filling it would be, you know, are you eligible for local service ads? And even if you are, like a business like yours that is also serving clients at a national level, you still want to work with the local ones, right? So why not at least why not at least start there? And then you can start looking at expanding on everything nationally, because that's whenever you can affect things like PPC ads, like pay-per-click ads and other Google form, uh uh other paid for ads that you can do. And then what also changes is your SEO or your search engine optimization, you're targeting less key local keywords and more national ones. But I I still I've seen it firsthand, especially in the accounting niche, because you can work with clients all over, is um you want to win local before you start going national. Because if you try, what I've seen people do is they try to start off going national and then back up and try to go local, it's it's it's too many things to pull apart, and and it's really difficult to do to go back then and try to win some local stuff.

SPEAKER_00: 20:20

Yeah, it's certainly easier to win business locally. Everything else being equal, people want to work with somebody else who's local too.

SPEAKER_01: 20:26

Yeah, they they feel like even though you are you know the bookkeeping financial accounting expert, people feel more confident. It's like you're in their neighborhood. Like, oh, he gets me, he understands me. And so why not be that that guy, that girl starting out, even if you can serve people nationally, um, before you start just start growing out low or uh nationally.

SPEAKER_00: 20:47

Cool. So I've heard uh some anecdotal stories of home services businesses where they, you know, kind of migrated from they take a phone call or they get an email, they hand it off to a sales rep or a service rep, and their job is to kind of manually follow up with it. And of course they follow up once or twice, and then nothing happens after that if they didn't win the business. So you kind of lost that lead. But other firms have kind of built in using technology, kind of automated follow-up and nurturing. So if you provide a quote, you know, there's some follow-up on that quote for several months, and then there's kind of you know, periodic contacts, maybe every six months or something, whatever the so it's kind of taking it out of the uh somebody's you know, personal list of responsibilities that's hard to quality control and make sure it gets done into more of an automated system, right? So I assume you set those things up, right?

SPEAKER_01: 21:39

Yeah, great question. So, with that, one of the the I would say the just like I said, LSA ads are the first ad that you should start running if you're a home service business or professional service. One of the first automations that you should build is something that we call a missed call text back. So think about, I say this with love. I always tell clients or prospective clients, you're not that special. And what I mean is, I'm sure you're really nice, your mom loves you, all that stuff. But what I mean is how you do business is exactly how your clients do business. So if you are looking for a plumber or a roofer or a general contractor, you're probably going to Google and you're typing in plumber near me, best plumber near me, top plumber near me, plumbing service near me. You're typing something in, then whatever pulls up on the top of the map, you're probably just gonna hit dial. Call the number, do they pick up? And then if not, cool, go to the next one, dial, call it. So, what you want is if you are busy, if you are a one man or one woman shop and you don't have a full-time like CSR customer service rep that's handling all your fill phone calls and booking appointments and stuff for you. You want to schedule or you want to create an automation that's called a missed call text pack. This is the first thing that we set up for for these local service-based clients. So, what that does, when somebody calls your number, if you don't answer, the automation is set to fire off a text to where it might be like, um, hey, uh uh, this is Cal from Smart Book. Sorry I missed your call. Uh, how can I help? And so it instantly starts that conversation with the client. So now they've stopped for a second and hopefully they've stopped going down the Google dialing list, and now they're responding to you because what they're looking for is somebody to fix their problem. And with local, with service-based businesses, especially home services, that's not something that people, it's not like a car or a house where people are casually shopping or yeah, maybe we'll do it eventually, or kicking the tires. Typically, they need a roof, a GC, um, a plumber, electrician. That's a right now type of a thing that they're looking to get solved. So there is a what they call it, what we call a speed to lead uh uh timing that we want to get really, really quick on. And the quicker that we can respond to somebody, the higher the chances of conversions. With our larger home service-based companies, like let's say plumbing companies that are doing 10 million plus a year, they will have multiple full-time people that their job is 24-7 to either pick up the phone or call a lead within 60 seconds of it coming in. Because they know, with all of the stats and data, if they don't return that call or that lead within 60 seconds, you're it drops, it's like an exponential drop of chance of closing them each minute that goes by because all they are doing, all these customers are doing is they're not sitting down like I just called this plumber and they're just sitting by their phone, like, oh, I hope they call me back. Like, no, they're going to the next one on the list, and whoever's gonna pick up the phone or return their message the quickest, that's most likely the one that's gonna get the business. So that is the hands down quickest thing that you should be doing is you need to call. If you have, if you don't have an automation setup like that, I would suggest doing it. Um, it's just called miss call text back. You can do it with your with uh depending on what CRM you're using or anything like that. If not, you need to know that you need it would probably be worth having somebody that is calling every lead within 30 seconds to a minute whenever they come in. Or on when if you have a website form where they're like requesting a quote or requesting an appointment, calling them within that 60 second window. Obviously, like if you're on a job, you're a plumber, you've got you know, toilet you've torn apart and stuff, it might not be feasible, but you do need to realize the importance of it, it would most serve you greatly if you would just pause, even if you're on a job site for two seconds, just to quickly return that call, because you not taking that quick pause could mean the difference between closing the client and not.

SPEAKER_00: 25:36

Okay. All right, so number one, LSA, number two, missed call, miss missed call text back. What's number three?

SPEAKER_01: 25:44

Uh number number three is what I would say is you need just you need a funnel. I would say where I see most businesses succeed versus um fail is you you have to understand. Uh I I was in the fitness industry for a long time, so I relate a lot of things to fitness. You can you can go to the mall and you can walk laps at the mall like the old people do, and that can be working out. Or you can hire a personal trainer that you're in the gym five days a week, you're doing meal prepping, you're doing proper supplementation, uh, getting proper sleep and hydration, and that is working out. What most businesses do in their marketing is they want the results of working out five to six days a week, but they're putting in the effort of mole walking. So they're checking the box, like, oh yeah, yeah, I've got a website. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've got that. Oh, yeah. I mean, yeah, we do emails. Oh, well, I mean, we post stuff on social and they're saying they're doing those things, expecting what the bigger results should be achieving. And so what you have to realize is, and this is a simple way of looking at it, what this is the question that I ask myself about my business, and I tell my clients to ask themselves too. What are the top people, not in your area, but in your industry doing? What are the, we we use the word dominators. What are the industry dominators doing? They're not, look at the world champions. What are they doing? They're not mall walking, they're training. And so a lot of times people are frustrated with why their marketing is not working, but the things that they have in place are either they were, they did it by themselves and they're not professional marketers. They did it for as cheaply as possible, and then they get frustrated that it's not working. The biggest thing that I see is you don't have the complete full sales funnel, and you don't find value in one, oh, email, you don't find value in one aspect of email marketing doesn't work, or I don't like email marketing. Doesn't matter what you like, it works. Or national multi-million dollar companies wouldn't be investing in marketing, uh, in email marketing. They wouldn't be investing in SEO. They wouldn't be investing in these uh AI overviews and stuff. Like it works. So if you truly want to dominate your industry and grow your business, make sure you don't have any leaks in your bucket. It you shouldn't have a website that looks like you built it. You should have really clear messaging. Most people, the words on their website suck. They they're very clear, they're very unclear. It's very confusing on what services and products they actually provide. There's no clear and direct call to action. They go to their website and it's things like learn more or contact us. Like customers don't want to do that. They want to book an appointment, they want to schedule service. Like you need to be very direct with what you want them to do. They they have a website that looks like it's full of a bunch of stock images. There's no life or personality to it, it doesn't stand out from their competition. So, and then they don't have any of the follow-up processes and stuff like that in place. And so when a customer doesn't know you and they come to your website for the first time and they see those things, they are judging you. And the only thing they know to judge you on is what you are showing up. They don't know the years or decades of experience, the hundreds or thousands of lives and families you may have worked with and helped with, unless that stuff is presented on all of your marketing online in Google reviews, how your website looks and stands out. If your website looks like, you know, a back alley, shady restaurant, that that's what they're gonna assume the rest of your business is. So the I would say the main mistake that I see is they don't have the complete package and they've put minimal effort in, and then they're wondering why they're not getting good results with it.

SPEAKER_00: 29:29

So one of the things that uh used to scare me off a little bit was the need to come up with a whole bunch of good content. Because yeah, in the past, I've had folks um in my businesses just pump out a lot of pretty much junk generic content and put it out there. And I've sometimes I've from time to time been embarrassed about what got put out there and it probably wasn't that effective. Better than nothing, I guess, but not that effective, right? Um, but in order to do stuff that looks really spot on, that's thought out, that demonstrates expertise, you know, business owners kind of have to do that themselves, is how I've always felt about it. But there's got to be a middle ground where you can build out the uh the sales funnel with all the content in a way that distinguishes you a little bit, but doesn't take all of your time every week to do, right? So how do you how do you go coming up with good content?

SPEAKER_01: 30:20

Yeah, great, great question. Because I will say this isn't this is a service that we don't offer because of that. I I think that a lot of business. Businesses, when they say they've invested in marketing, they've invested in a firm or an agency to create a bunch of social media content and everything for them and post it on their socials and then wondering why it's not generating business. And again, remember, you're not that special. So think about you. How do you engage on social media? Do you get super excited about watching a bunch of pre-made stock Canva images and graphics and stuff like that? Like, no, you don't. You're looking forward to connecting with the businesses. You're probably watching a ton of short form video content, learning quick, helpful tips and everything else like that. That's difficult to outsource and to do well at a high level. So what I tell businesses is there's two ways, two things to think about on the content standpoint. There's content on your website, which can easily be outsourced, which we do do and provide that service with uh blogs, adding FAQs, landing pages, and building out the content on your website so that stuff can be distributed and stuff, because you don't need to be the one that that writes that. We can interview you or somebody else can interview you, understand your perspective on that content, and then we could be able to generate that content for you. Social media, when it comes to that part of content, you need to think about how you're going to use it and leverage it. So with social media, there's kind of only really two fronts for it. One would be billboard, and then one would be for as like a sales associate. So you need to think about your goal of social media. Billboard is honestly how most businesses should think about their social media. You just need to, like you say, you do just need to throw something up because nobody is scrolling on Instagram, exciting about the looking forward to the next um social media post from their plumber. They just need something because now social media is another storefront. I call them your digital storefronts. It's another digital storefront that prospective customers might be dropping by to make sure that you're legit. You do need something better than nothing because if it looks like there's, you know, 12 posts that were posted 10 years ago and you haven't really done anything since, a customer's mind might think, oh, they're not an active business anymore. So you should at least have something, I would say, at least, like for most home service businesses, at least throw up something once to twice a week, uh, a job site before and after progress photo, a quick tip. But you need to think about your use case. Your use case is not to grow a large social media following, it's just billboard content. So as people are scrolling by, they go to your website or they've searched for it, because even now these with um even with Google search, like Instagram posts, um, LinkedIn posts, and Reddit and stuff like that, that pulls into the the search algorithm. So you can still show up for that stuff. Um, and so you need to think about how it's being used that way. So you do need to have something, but don't like stress out if you're not creating content all the time. The second aspect of it would be if you want to use it for sales. So you would have a much different opportunity than a plumber, for example, because you could have uh with with plumbers could do this as well, because we actually have a roofing company that creates this kind of content and it does well for them, but you have a lot bigger opportunity to use social media for sells, to where you can create more thought leader type content, to where, I mean, especially something like yours, I'm not gonna give my money to somebody or let somebody um I should say this, I'm not going to see a generic social media graphic on Instagram be like, oh, I need to give Cal my money. But if I've sat there and I've consumed lots of little like tax tips and small business bookkeeping tips and stuff from you, and I've seen your face, I'm gonna feel like I already know you before I get on a call with you to handle my business finances. I'm gonna build trust, you're gonna build trust with me, and I'm gonna learn from you, I'm gonna see you as an authoritative expert. Then that is going to make me want to give you money. So it's how you're using and creating that content and what your purpose is behind it. Now, when it comes to the how to do this, this is what I think should happen, Cal, because I think there's several different ways that you can do it. I'm gonna give you the long way and then what I think is the best way. The the way that's gonna take a little bit longer of your time would be go to ChatGPT, go to Google, and type in what are the most common FAQ questions for insert your home service here. And you're gonna get a list of questions. The other way that you can do this is just Google your service. So you could Google Small Business Accounting, um, Plumber near me, roofer near me, and then scroll down to the people also ask on Google and just start opening those up and looking at all the other questions that people ask. Then what you're gonna do is you're just gonna whip out your phone and you're just gonna answer those questions as FAQs. There's a short question type content. Don't overthink it. I tell clients, if you have to think about the answer, don't write videos over it. If you are really good at what you do, Cal, I probably wouldn't have to, you wouldn't have to script out and think about what your favorite bookkeeping software is. You wouldn't have to overthink and script about three things, three tax mistakes most small business owners make. Like, right? Like you just know this stuff because you're an expert. There might be some stuff and topics that you want to greatly like research a little bit more, but for the most part, if you're really good at what you do, that that's I should have backed it up with that. Only create the content if you're actually good at what you do, because if you're trying to fake it, people are gonna see that really, really quickly. Um, but but create those types of videos so that way you don't have to feel like it's overly scripted and it's not awkward. That would be one way to do it. Just make some short form videos. There's apps that you can use, like CapCut or the captions app on your iPhone to where you can easily throw the text on screen, and you can just post those types of videos to your social media, and you can do that a couple of times a week. I would batch record this to where maybe I'm doing, um, I'm gonna spend one to two hours a month where I'll film all the videos and edit them, and then I've got a month's worth of content and I'll do three posts a week. That would be the one way of doing it. And then the other way of doing it would be like seeing all the little trendy little meme type content, and you could have more of like uh humor and stuff like that. And I I like to position myself more of like thought leader kind of content because I like just giving helpful tips and everything. If you wanted to do it the right way, and this would be teeing you up for a home run here, Cal, what I think the best return of investment for your time for professional services is to do a video podcast. Reason being is this is what you can do, and this is how you can leverage it. There's one is don't think about it as a podcast, even like this. Think about it as a format of content. If you open up your social feed right now and you scroll through it, within 10 scrolls, you're gonna see talking head podcast style videos. Doesn't even mean it was an actual podcast. It's a way that the content is looked, looks like, and people are used to that. Um, there's even like real estate agents that will do podcasts in their car where they're just holding a little microphone and talking about it. So there's lots of ways to shoot that kind of content. But because you're busy and you don't want to spend all this time doing it, what you're going to do is that same principle for research. You're gonna get all the common FAQs and you are going to interview yourself and you are just going to sit there and you're gonna answer the questions. Hey guys, welcome to the you know, Smart Books podcast. Today we are gonna talk all about XYZ. And then I'm just gonna start answering these questions. And I'm gonna after I answer those questions, then I let's say I spend 20 to 30 minutes answering all these questions. I have now answered a ton of questions. This is how I'm going to leverage the heck out of this to get all because if you do these other short form video content, you're gonna get a quick hit of on the social media algorithm, maybe, but after three days, nobody's ever gonna look at that video again. By doing a video podcast, this is how you can leverage the thing. What I'm gonna do is now I have that as a long form YouTube video. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. If I optimize that video, I link it to my website and create that backlink back. I'm now going to get even more authority to my website. Then what I'm gonna do is you can shoot this easily in a program called like what we we always have our clients use something called Riverside.fm. You can film it inside of there. It auto will even create like these auto clips for you to where it'll automatically cut up these little short form clips for you. So now you've got all the shorts done for you. Then I'm gonna take that video uh and I'm gonna add it as a page on my website to where here's those transcript and show notes, which is all that again, more content on your website. Google likes it. I'm gonna embed that YouTube video on there. Then I'm gonna take all the content that I talked about. I'll feed it into uh a chat GPT and say, hey, based upon the content specifically I talk in this episode, create blog post using my unique perspective and stories I shared only in here to create this into a blog post format. So you don't want ever, ever using Chat GPT, just like the spin up content with no context and stuff. Like it's gonna get really good, unique content that, yes, it's AI generated, but it's your content. They're just rewriting it for you. And then you're gonna create a blog post over that. Then what you're gonna do is you're gonna do that same exact thing. And hey, we need to email our list on a regular basis. And we can't just email them, buy my stuff, buy my stuff, buy my stuff. We want to create helpful value, evaluable emails. So then we're gonna take the tips and topics that we talk about in this podcast, and we're gonna create helpful tip emails that position us as a thought leader, their go-to expert in emails that they actually want to open and not just buy my stuff emails. Then we take all those short forms, we post them on YouTube Shorts, TikTok, Instagram, Reels, Facebook. And so I've taken a 20 to 30 minute recording. I got a YouTube video, I got a podcast page, I got a blog article, I got three to five short form videos, I've got an email, I've got a LinkedIn post, and I've got maybe probably I could do the exact same thing for like a Reddit post for 30 minutes of my time. And it wasn't overly edited or overly polished because it was just me as a thought leader and expert at what you do, answering common questions that you probably get customers asking you on the phone or on the job side all the time. That's one way to do it. The other way is using the exact same format. But I know some businesses, real estate agents in specific, like, okay, well, nobody's gonna want to do that to buy a house. The other thing that you can do is you can also then, if you have this podcast, it's a way to grow your network and get more leads in. So what you can do is you can interview people that also have your customers bring them on the show. And so you don't have to answer all these FAQs. All you have to do is connect with them and ask them questions. So I've got a client who he is a real estate appraiser. And what he does in this is he gets a lot of his referrals from real estate agents. So he has created a, he, even though his service he sells is real estate appraisal, what he's done is he knows his business comes from real estate agents. So every real estate agent wants to come on and talk about themselves. So he has started this show where real estate agents come on, they talk about what they're seeing in the local real estate market. He takes that content, does the exact same way. So now those real estate agents are sharing that content on their page, tagging him, and he's getting uh more uh trust built up with his referral source, which is the real estate agents. He knows that nobody's gonna be listening to this real estate agent and want to get their home appraised, but he's built up all this trust. So what he's done is maybe a real estate agent didn't want to meet him for coffee. Let's hear about how we can get referrals. But hey, would you like to come talk about yourself in my podcast? Oh, absolutely. Then afterwards, now they think that they're best friends, and so he's getting tons of referrals just from using the podcast as a method to network with people.

SPEAKER_00: 42:12

Yeah, I was talking to a podcast production company called Ringmaster and Casey Chessar, the owner and founder of it, um, a few days ago. And I I made a comment to him like, it feels like podcasts are the modern day version of the kind of the one-on-one coffee meeting, but there's a lot more value that both sides can walk away from, um and a lot less intimidating than sitting down with a vendor for 30 or 60 minutes getting a sales fix at Starbucks, right?

SPEAKER_01: 42:36

Yes, it yeah, so it's it's just how you use it. So, anyway, that's a very long answer to your question, but there's lots of opportunities. The problem is, Cal, is it's not ideas and it's not opportunity, it's action. And most small business owners are just so busy they don't have the time to take action on this stuff because they're just trying to do the day-to-day. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 42:56

So, how can you get, you know, a local home services contractor kind of over the hump? They kind of like the sound of all this, but it's very intimidating. They're a great plumber, they're a great roofer, whatever they are, but uh they don't know much about this marketing technology stuff and these apps that you keep mentioning. Like, how do they get over the hump?

SPEAKER_01: 43:16

Uh I mean, well, shameless plug, I would say that's where we come in. And so I mean, that that that's that's honestly what we do and who we serve, and we want to work with is we want to work with people that are actually skilled at what they do. They're not trying to trick or, you know, game the system. They're really good at what they do. They're passionate about who they're called to serve. They're just struggling with the marketing aspect. Our whole mission with our company is our goal and our mission is to help the people that we're called to serve be found by the people they're called to serve. So, so that's what that's what we do. Um, if you want because there's honestly two different options. You with with doing this stuff, it's either done with time or money. So it's either you are gonna have to do it yourself and invest time, and your time is valuable, right? Or you're gonna have to hire an agency like us in order to be able to execute it out at it for you. The to doing it yourself, you have to flip the switch and think about it for your potential customers. Plumbers, electricians, GCs, they can watch YouTube videos and learn how to plumb a toilet, learn how to install a receptor or an outlet or build their own deck. And they could probably get it done. But you know, after seeing jobs where they try to do it themselves and you went in and you had to go clean up and fix, you've been doing this for so long. There's certain things that the YouTube video is just not going to tell you because you learn by experience. And so, if you do want to do it yourself, that is just one thing you need to know. Is there's probably a lot uh that you don't know, especially if this is all new for you. So, depending on your level of drive and also how how how important and urgent this is for you, you can do it yourself. And it would be good probably because probably you would learn something, and something is better than nothing. And I do think it is important to self-educate yourself, because unfortunately, on the flip side, is when you do go to hire uh a marketing agency to do it for you, I uh am sad to say that a lot of my industry is becoming like the used car salesman. And so there's a lot of bad actors in the marketing agency realm because business owners, especially I see this in the trades and the home services, they are not educated on marketing. So it's really easy to get taken advantage of because, oh, I paid some guy to build me a website, or I paid SEO services, but they don't realize that what they paid for isn't really what they need, or they're just getting these spun-up templates, or they're working with these big national agencies where all they're doing is changing the city name and the services that they're providing. And so it's just it's not actually working for them. And like I said earlier, it's just not quality stuff. So they're like, oh yeah, I did that stuff, but it's not at the level that they need to truly compete online.

SPEAKER_00: 46:07

Well, this has all been great, Sean. You've shared a lot of valuable information. Um, if folks want to get in touch with you, or what's what or do you have uh resources they might be able to download or look at to help them along this journey? Um Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 46:19

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So so if this resonated with anybody and you're saying, man, that's exactly what I want, I would love for you to book a call. You just go to our website, seangarner.co schedule a call. It's gonna be with me. Let's dive into your business, see what you got going on, what you're looking to do, and see if it even makes sense for us to work together. I promise you this. If this podcast was valuable, our call is gonna be even more valuable because it's gonna be specific to you and your business. And even if we don't work together, you're still gonna get loads of information. You're gonna know what your next step is gonna be. For your audience, specifically for these local service-based businesses, if they want to go to seangarner.co slash EHB, um, EHB, making sure I enunciated well, on that website. That's going to be something that is gonna be specifically impactful for local service-based business owners. The biggest way and quickest way to grow online uh for local services is to make sure that you uh are getting more Google reviews. So we're gonna put our Google review scripts on there where we actually have the automation that we build out and the exact messaging templates that we use for our clients to get them hundreds of Google reviews online so they stand out in that Google Map pack by having more reviews in their competition.

SPEAKER_00: 47:27

Awesome. Well, thank you for doing that for the audience, son. Really appreciate it, and thank you for your time today. Yes, sir. Thank you. So this has been another exciting episode of Empowering Healthy Business. We'll see you all next time. Stay on for a minute here. Another episode in the books. Thank you so much for tuning in. For show notes and more, visit empowering healthy business.com. If you would like to have a one-on-one discussion with me or possibly engage smart books to help with your business, you can reach me at cal C A L at Empowering Healthy Business dot com or message me on LinkedIn where I am easy to find. Until next time, this is Empowering Healthy Business, the podcast for business owners, signing off.