Full transcript10 chapters · 11,790 words
0:00Josh's path from nine years in HVAC to building Relentless Digital
Josh Crouch: A guy called three different contractors live, pretending to have a 20-year-old system that was dying in 95-degree heat, and only one contractor even picked up the phone, and none of them asked this one question that could have saved the sale.
Tyler Martin: Welcome to Profit and Grit with Tyler, where blue-collar owners and insiders spill the real story behind their hustle, building businesses that thrive through sweat and smarts. We’ll dig into their journeys from scaling chaos to growing the bottom line with lessons and grit that pay off big.
Tyler Martin: Here’s your host, the blue collar CFO, Tyler Martin. A lot of trade owners assume the answer to slow growth is more leads and more marketing. But Josh Crouch makes a strong case that one of the biggest opportunities may already be sitting inside the business, starting with what happens when the phone rings.
Tyler Martin: Josh has analyzed hundreds of thousands of home service calls. In this episode, we get into why actual booking rates are often much lower than owners think, how missed calls, pricing objections, and poor follow-up quietly drain revenue, and why even small improvements in booking rate can have a meaningful impact without increasing marketing spend.
Tyler Martin: We also talk about where Google and AI fit into home service marketing today. what owners should look for in a marketing agency, and how AI call analysis is giving HVAC plumbing, electrical, and other home service companies better visibility into opportunities they may be losing. Let’s chat with Josh now. Hey, Josh, welcome to the Profit and Great Show.
Josh Crouch: How are you doing? Good. Thanks for having me on. Appreciate it, Tyler.
Tyler Martin: Well, thanks for being here, man. You’re one of my goats, I’ll call, in the marketing space. I follow you religiously, particularly on Facebook, you have done a great job at posting valuable content. Like today you posted, oh man, you posted something about Google changing their rules as it
Tyler Martin: relates to HVAC owners. And you talk about, or not HVAC owners, home service owners, excuse me. And you talk about, hey, you don’t have to worry about this, but this is what you know if you have multiple different types of businesses and this is what you need to do. And you’re constantly
Josh Crouch: posting stuff like that. Yeah, it can get a little exhausting, especially with all the AI updates that have been coming there because all the Google thing about, Google’s got so many properties that people don’t even know that’s like, they’re all changing all the time. So it’s like, I constantly
Josh Crouch: have a news feed that feeds me and I’m trying to figure out like, okay, what does this mean for contractors now? And then turn it around so people have somewhat of a trusted source because we all know that there’s good sources and bad sources online, just like in any industry, but just trying
Tyler Martin: to be as helpful as I can. Yeah, you do. You do a great job. So I just want to commend you for that. Now, for the audience that may be a new name to them, can you tell us a little bit about what you
Josh Crouch: do? And then I’d love to know something on a personal note. Yeah. So I was in the HVAC industry for nine years. I’ve been in since 2013. And the industry got its claws stuck in me. And I’m still here today. I’m just serving it in a different capacity now. For the last six plus
Josh Crouch: years, I founded and started Relentless Digital, which is a digital marketing agency that serves just HVACD, plumbing, electrical, and roofing companies, and started that with my wife. And along the way, I joined Tersh Blissett with the Service Business Mastery podcast, which some people don’t even know I own a digital marketing agency. They’re like,
Josh Crouch: oh, you’re a podcaster. I’m like, no, that’s actually a side thing. I don’t actually do that full-time. We’ve been doing that for five plus years together now. And then recently just started, I shouldn’t say recently, it’s actually been like two years in development. It’s just,
Josh Crouch: we’re finally at the point of actually talking about it. PhoneTap, which is an AI call analysis
3:58Moving to Arizona and making health non-negotiable with a trainer
Tyler Martin: and revenue recovery system that obviously uses AI and support. Very cool. How about on a personal note? Do you guys, I know you post a lot about your diet and really just staying healthy. Anything
Josh Crouch: stand out there that you could share? Yeah. I mean, we moved to Arizona. I’m born and raised in Wisconsin, grew up there for the first 30, 37 years of my life. And we moved to Arizona, my wife and I and our kids about four years ago with the goal of living a healthier life.
Josh Crouch: So obviously that’s easier to say than do, right? Because you got moving and all the stuff that comes with that. But that following January after we moved, we made it a goal of every day, walking 10,000 steps. We got a gym membership. The thing that really changed for us,
Josh Crouch: we ended up losing, both of us lost 30, 35 pounds. And now we’re working on just gaining muscle and tweaking things, that sort of thing. But is we put it on our calendar, we made it non-negotiable and we hired a trainer. And we did that because we have tried for years, oh, every January 1st,
Josh Crouch: hey, we’re starting at the gym. We’re starting at the gym. This is going to be the year, right? And by February, like most of the country, those goals are dead. It’s like, especially in Wisconsin, it’s cold, it’s snowy. It’s like, I don’t want to go brush my car off.
Josh Crouch: I don’t want to go warm the car for 15 minutes. I’m just, I’m not going to go today. Today turns into the next week and all of a sudden you haven’t gone for a month. And you’re like, shoot, any little progress I made is completely lost.
Josh Crouch: Maybe next year.
Tyler Martin: Yeah.
Josh Crouch: So those are the big shifts. and honestly, there’s a lot of business lessons in that too because I think we all think we prioritize things properly, but then we say, oh, we don’t have time for that. I don’t have time to podcast. I don’t have time to create video content.
Josh Crouch: I don’t have time to do marketing. I don’t have time to train my team. Yet you keep having the same problems that you’ve always had because it doesn’t go on your calendar. And so that was a big turning point, not only for just my health,
Josh Crouch: but just our business as well as just learning how to properly prioritize the most important things, not all the little tiny things that take up that you can easily get distracted on all day, but the things that really move the needle.
Tyler Martin: Yeah. And I wasn’t going to go in this direction, but I think it’s such a huge topic. It really spoke to me when you mentioned the scheduling it. How do you get to the point and when you’re applying it in your business where you are prioritizing, like what’s your system
Tyler Martin: for saying, hey, this is a priority. I mean, I see it all the time in HVAC and plumbing, electrical companies. They’ve got a list of a thousand things. And a lot of times, those thousand things that they’re actually working on are not the ones that are going to
Josh Crouch: move the needle that much. Oh, yeah. There’s a great book called Scaling, or the Science of Scaling. I think it’s what it’s called. And you can go to scaling.com, get more information. It’s a Ben Hardy book. I can’t remember his co-author, but it’s a really
Josh Crouch: great book about removing all the distractions and all the things, like really focusing on maybe the two to three things you are really great at and going all in on those and putting blinders to everything else. That means turning down other opportunities to focus on those things.
Josh Crouch: And for me, priorities, like for us, one of the things the first couple of years of business,
7:05Running EOS down through every department, not just leadership
Josh Crouch: we didn’t really have an operating system in a set system that we ran our business off of. So we integrated with EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System, Gino Wickman, and I feel like there’s someone else, probably a really important name I’m missing that helped them with that. But
Josh Crouch: But really, they have a ton of books on that system. But so every week on Tuesdays, our leadership team meets for 90 minutes. We talk about our biggest issues, headlines, just anything that’s important about the business. And then, of course, to-dos and stuff come from that.
Josh Crouch: And now we’ve got to the point because we’ve been running for a number of years, all of our departments have those same L10 meetings. So all of our strategists and mid-level leaders, they all meet every single week to talk about the biggest issues in the department, how to solve them.
Josh Crouch: and just keeps everybody focused on the most important things, not all the minor things that just get in the way. If we have time, we do the minor things. If not, it’s just the highest priority items.
Tyler Martin: Yeah. I have several clients in the home services space that use the EOS methodology, and it is so good every quarter. They’ve got their rocks that they’re trying to pick their biggest things that they want to work on and get through, their analytics on the scorecard.
Tyler Martin: It’s just a great system. And it’s cool to hear you guys say you’ve rolled it out to departments so because i think sometimes people think they get too big for it and i just don’t think they think about breaking it down into departments and it’s just each has their own little ecosystem
Josh Crouch: ecosystem that rolls up to the main leadership team well and then they know that they have a place that they can talk about the things that come up throughout the week so like our seo team meets our ppc team meets our web team meets you know and then of course we have the leadership one
Josh Crouch: where we have a leader from every department that goes so that way if we have these you know cross-departmental issues. If you think of like a trades company, sometimes the office dispatch service and install, they have issues, unresolved issues, communication issues a lot of times,
Josh Crouch: especially with the field in the office. Office wants something, field bitches about that, or I don’t know if I can say it or so, complains about that, and vice versa. They just all complain about each other, and I’ve lived that. But being able to have a
Josh Crouch: structured meeting where we can talk about why are those things happening? How do we solve them? How do we better prepare our team to those issues don’t happen and make a happier workplace where team members are working together and not butting heads all the time?
Josh Crouch: Because that’s just not a great environment for anyone when they call in. It’s Sarah again. I don’t want to talk to Sarah today. She’s always on my case about something that I did wrong. It’s not a fun place to work, and people start looking for other places to go.
Josh Crouch: So I think EOS is fantastic, especially for home service businesses. I mean, outside of the gargantuan ones that we’ve all known and heard of, they’re all small enough where EOS works very, very well.
Tyler Martin: Yeah, I agree. It’s a great system. Hey, so you just mentioned something about like, you know, dispatch and CSRs and they’re all there’s just this kind of everybody’s maybe on a little bit of a different page sometimes. As a market from your marketing agency angle, you know, people are hiring you to generate more leads, more business, whatever.
10:07Why marketing and operations have to work together on booking rate
Tyler Martin: How often do you, when you walk in, you’re like, you know, the problem isn’t necessarily leads. There’s some things here that might be a little bit beyond my reach. Like how much do you get into that and how, or do you even at all?
Josh Crouch: We try to do as much as we can without being a business coach. And what I mean by that is, you know, I mean, most people aren’t looking, searching for a marketing agency to help with their operations, but it’s such a undervalued relationship between
Josh Crouch: marketing and operations working together. Because if we generate a lead and they call, and let’s say the call gets missed or doesn’t get returned or doesn’t get booked because of a pricing objection, because the person on the phone is not trained not to handle that pricing
Josh Crouch: objection, you just spend probably at least 0 or 0 just to get a lead. And if you do that, multiply that times hundreds or in some cases, thousands of calls per month for some of these contractors, it is huge revenue leak in their business. And so one of the things that we did
Josh Crouch: when we first started Relentless was we focused on… We hired a team offshore, somebody who’s ran a call center before and had a bunch of people that understood call flow and what a good lead looked like. And we built their own system to call take. The problem with that before AI was
Josh Crouch: our data was seven, eight, nine, 10 days behind because you can keep up so fast if you’re listening to all these calls. Technology has helped us move a little faster and we’re getting close to really focus on all just analyzing with AI, with human in the loop. But I mean, a lot of these
Josh Crouch: contractors think they don’t miss any calls. Literally for the last four years, when I look at the annual data, it’s between 14 and 16% of calls are missed. And that’s across, we have plumbers, electricians, roofers, HVAC companies. We’ve got a couple other home service industries.
Josh Crouch: It doesn’t matter. It is very, very consistent. Even with all the AI answering services and the human answering services, they’re still missing 14 to 16% of calls. And that’s just the ones that they miss. A lot of people also think their booking rate’s 85%, which is mostly
Josh Crouch: a lie. I know some people are like, oh no, we track that religiously. The problem, especially with certain we talk about service type right service is the big behemoth in the industry right the gatekeeper the person holding the keys to your booking rate is also the person that
Josh Crouch: gets performance review based on how well they book on the phone if we think about that it’s probably not the best system but it is the system that we’ve been given by the technology that’s available to us and so these especially when you think about we’re recording this right now it’s
Josh Crouch: end of July, it’s hot pretty much everywhere right now. Very hot. And if I’m a CSR and we can’t book because we’re booked out, I don’t want that to ding my call booking rate. So I might not classify that one properly. Oh, that one wasn’t a lead. That one wasn’t a lead. That was
Josh Crouch: a price shopper. Well, a price shopper is a lead. And so we find, and Service Titan did a big study on this, I want to say like two or three years ago, but, and our findings are pretty accurate with that is right around between 54 and 56% of qualified leads are booked. Think about like
Josh Crouch: 100 calls of 100 leads, what’s that, 44 to 46 of them don’t get booked. It’s a huge number. And we’re all paying for those leads and those opportunities. It’s one of the biggest black holes of revenue loss in the entire industry. But we all focus on the technicians, the salespeople,
Josh Crouch: are pricing focus on the people that actually pick up the phone and making sure that they are well served to do their job well So that way their customers are happy and they can set up the call to get a higher average ticket if they good at it That one of the biggest things I say I see is when you go into service site and using
Josh Crouch: them as an example, and I’ll actually listen to some calls periodically just to see, you know, what’s it sound like, quality control, whatever. And I’ll either be blown away by what’s actually said to the prospect or just how the call was actually classified or in some cases not classified.
Josh Crouch: And it’s just like money going down the drain. And I get to see it. I get the benefit where I get to see the full financial. So I know exactly what the financial position of a company is. And it does surprise me a little bit because I’ll have companies that have come to me and they’re
Josh Crouch: really struggling financially. And then you go in. And when I say struggling financially, I mean low gross profit margins, things like that. Not necessarily worried about paying their bills, but just not optimal. And I’ll go into server site and then I’ll listen and I’ll do a little
Josh Crouch: bit of analysis. And it’s like, wow, it’s just a lot deeper than just a lead problem. Oh, yeah. I would challenge anyone listening to this. If it has been a while since you’ve listened to the last 25 phone calls that your team has gotten, do yourself a favor,
Josh Crouch: block off 30 minutes or 35 minutes and listen to the last 25 calls. Just see what happens. You most like, even if you have an AI answer search, I’d listen to those ones too, because I’ve listened to some of those when we’re doing some,
Josh Crouch: some audits on LSA accounts because phone responsiveness and booking are super important there for good. Cause Google’s actually rewarding you if you’re really good at these things. And it’s, it’s really mind blowing. Like you can literally hear like just the AI gets confused because,
Josh Crouch: AI on an answering service is essentially an automate. It’s a, it’s a fancy automation. It is told, ask for the name first, ask for the phone number, ask for the address, ask for what they’re, you know, what they’re, and obviously you can change the flow, but it is essentially a, it’s a, it’s a fancy automation wrapped in a sweet sounding voice is what it is.
Josh Crouch: and uh it’s still like last uh new year’s eve my wife and i went to arby’s which was like right across the road everything was closed early and she just wants some fries she just wants something to hold her over until we went to dinner and they had an ai order taker and so she she gets the order
Josh Crouch: and then like at the end um they say what’s your name she said oh shoot can you get some ketchup with that she forgot to ask for ketchup with the fries well it thought that her name was oh shoot Can I get some ketchup?
Josh Crouch: It printed it on the receipt because it’s just a fancy automation. It doesn’t, it’s not like if I said that to you and you were taking the order, you’d be like, oh yeah, sure. Of course. And what’s your name again? You would know just because like now some, at some point, yes, AI will probably be more like AGI and be able to understand that, but we’re not there yet.
Josh Crouch: And I think people mistake what they’re hearing because it sounds like a human. they should be able to talk to me like a human and understand all the very fine nuances of conversation. People are irrational. Things pop into their head at the most random times on the phone,
Josh Crouch: and it’s just not the same. But it is helpful because at least you can pick up all the phone calls. And if worst case, that should be probably the base use of it. Just make sure all the phone calls are picked up and someone or something is answering them.
Josh Crouch: So at least all the money you spend, someone is picking up the phone to try to get that customer booked. Yeah, you at least have an at-bat to see if something happens.
Tyler Martin: And by the way, on your advice listening to 25 calls, be prepared to cringe a little bit, I’ll say too. Because whether it’s AI or humans, I’m always amazed when you listen to them. AI is a good example. I had a client several months back, so maybe this is better.
Tyler Martin: But he had turned on AI for after-hour calls. and I started listening to calls and the AI had this gap before it would actually start to talk. And it was like, it felt like an eternity to me, but it probably was only like a second or two,
Tyler Martin: but it was just weird because someone would call in, it would answer and you get this dead silence. You hear the person go, hello, hello, hello. And then the person would kick in. And it was just, it’s not the way like your first greeting you want to have when people are calling in.
Josh Crouch: Yeah. I mean, it’s better than, and I don’t have any specific examples, but I’ve listened to calls This was probably a couple of years ago when we had some really small clients and the wife was answering the phone. You kind of tell she hated working at the business with her husband.
Josh Crouch: Hello? Yeah. What do you want? It’s just like, you guys, you guys are paying us to generate leads. And that is what your customer is hearing on the phone. Now, I know that’s probably an edge use case, but even still, we surprised that some of these CSRs, if you don’t pay attention to how they’re answering the phone, if they’re having a bad day, a bad week, they’re not trained well.
Josh Crouch: They know nobody’s paying attention. Because they’re not not incentivized. So if they do a bad job, they don’t lose money. So they get paid their hourly rate no matter what. And it’s sad because these guys, especially with the explosion of PE and spending more money on Google Ads and LSA
Josh Crouch: and all this different stuff that’s available to us, the contractors spend a lot of money on it to get a lead, to get a new customer. And they just blow it as fat. It’s just like light money on fire.
Tyler Martin: Yeah, no, you’re right on. And honestly, Josh, I think it’s even, it’s a lot. I mean, I’ve listened to enough calls now in my, you know, I don’t have a giant client base, but I probably have a population of at least, I don’t know, I’d say a hundred
Tyler Martin: different home service companies and probably half of those I’ve listened to their calls at various times. And even your most seasoned CSRs, it doesn’t necessarily have to be the disgruntled wife. It can be the most seasoned CSRs that, like you said, it’s a bad day or it’s just their style.
19:38The real booking rate is 54-56%, not the 85% owners assume
Tyler Martin: You know, I’ve heard things like they’ll want to go, someone will call and say, I’ve got an emergency. I need to book. And they’ll say, sorry, we don’t have any openings.
Josh Crouch: And you know what’s worse with that example? Because this is happening right now in the summer.
Tyler Martin: Yeah.
Josh Crouch: And we actually did this live. We did this with a CSR coach on our podcast maybe two years ago. It was like literally, it was really hot. It was here in Phoenix. He’s like, I’m going to call three different contractors live. I’m going to see if any of them asked the age of my equipment before they tell me they’re too busy.
Josh Crouch: Not one of them did. Now, only one picked up. One of three. She was pretty good, but she didn’t ask for age of equipment before she said we couldn’t get to you. And he was going to say, I had a 20-year-old system. Wow. And you just think about it.
Josh Crouch: And for those that don’t know, Billy Stevens is kind of like a go-to in the industry. He’s been around a long time. He was a sponsor of our show. He started Sarah Systems. He’s actually one of the first that I’m aware of that actually sold to PE back in 2012, 2013.
Josh Crouch: He was one of the first to sell into what is now known as the wrench group. So we learned a lot from Billy. And Billy, he harped on it because everything Billy thought about, he just thought differently than a lot of business owners do.
Josh Crouch: It’s like, why wouldn’t I prioritize the biggest potential repairs and replacements? Even if someone’s got a maintenance and it’s 95 degrees outside, I’m sorry, that maintenance is getting kicked. If that means we lose that customer, we don’t, that could have been a two-year-old system, could have been a 10, 50, you don’t know.
Josh Crouch: But the repair is a 15-year-old system and we’re in the South here. That’s probably getting replaced today, most likely. Or it’s at least ,500 repair versus an maintenance that we booked. And you just, we only have so many hours in a day to maximize our tax, maximize our people, because we’re essentially trading labor hours for money.
Josh Crouch: Like, so if we traded with an tickets or we traded at ,500 tickets, you can see the difference in revenue pretty quickly. And it’s just a different way to operate. Billy talks about this much more eloquently than I do, but it’s stuck with me ever since he mentioned that.
Josh Crouch: And like, why don’t more people do that? I’m like, why didn’t I do that when I was in the trades? Why didn’t I think about that? I wish I would have because we had days like that. And I was always kind of like trying to keep those maintenance customers and moving around the board and trying to keep them happy.
Josh Crouch: And I’m like, at the end of the day, we might have kicked, we might have lost a potential customer that bought a whole new system for a maintenance of a three-year-old system. This is what makes sense.
Tyler Martin: Yeah, that’s huge. I mean, that is a big one. And by the way, Billy Stevens, that guy is so entertaining as well as very educational. I think he’s got a YouTube. I don’t know if he has a podcast on YouTube, but I usually watch it on YouTube.
Tyler Martin: I think he just does a YouTube. His home service shift, I think, is the… Yeah. So good. Great show. Yeah, I’ve tried to get him on the podcast. So someday he’s on, he’s on, he’s on my, he’s on my bucket list. He’s, he’s got one hell of a ranch in Texas that he is a player.
Tyler Martin: And so I don’t think he’s super available. Okay. Well, I never say never. It’s well-deserved though. So Billy, if you hear this, it’s well-deserved and I hope you’re enjoying it. That’s awesome. Yeah. He’s got that big when they’re doing their, they kind of just riff man.
Tyler Martin: And there, but he’s so real and raw when he’s answering questions. I mean, he doesn’t put any like bold BS. He just goes straight at whatever the issue is. Yeah, absolutely. Anyway, okay. Hey, so I want to dig a little bit deeper around like what the lead data actually is telling us, you know, because a lot of times the first thing you’re going to hear from a trade donor is, hey, I need more leads or I need, you know, I need more business.
Tyler Martin: Especially when it’s not like summertime right now and it’s maybe like a shoulder season. So could you kind of like give me a situation where you’re seeing data that’s different from what a gut feeling of an owner is? Because a lot of times owners say, oh, I have, you know, I know I’m doing, I’m paying for this radio advertising and I know it’s doing really well, but I don’t have any data that supports that.
Tyler Martin: So what do you typically see that might be a little bit different than that gut feeling?
Josh Crouch: Well, based on your example, like I think, I think we have to realize that there are, there are different channels for different goals. Okay. Radio, TV, even Facebook ads really kind of falls under like a branding. Yes, you can generate leads and someone can call and be like, hey, I heard your radio spot and the special you got. But at the end of the day, you want people to remember you. Like I think about all these, especially, and I don’t, it’s probably everywhere, but these injury attorneys here in Phoenix, every time I turn on the radio, my goodness, I hear every single one of them.
Josh Crouch: But I know all of their names because I’ve heard their ads so many times. I’ve never needed or hopefully will never need an injury attorney. But if I do, I will know a short list of people to call instead of going to Google.
Josh Crouch: I’m like, well, you kind of cut Google off at the knees if you have a strong brand. And I know there’s guys like Dan Antonelli out there from KickChurch who you can read his books and he talks about that extensively and he does a very good job of it.
Josh Crouch: But when it comes to lead generation and people that don’t know where to hire someone, it’s such an interesting ecosystem these days because we’re in this transition from traditional search to AI search and there’s overlap. So there’s a lot of gray areas even on the tracking side for us.
Josh Crouch: If someone goes to Google and gets the AI overview, which is essentially like a summary of the answers, I can’t tell if they went to your website from an AI overview. I can tell they went from Google search, but I don’t necessarily know what they typed in and how they got there because
Josh Crouch: Google hasn’t quite unlocked the keys for us there. And there’s such a, now that we have
25:04Listening to your last 25 calls and cringing at AI and human answers
Josh Crouch: Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, we have all of these platforms. It’s getting really hard to figure out exactly where leads are coming from. So what they end up looking like in your reports is, oh, that’s a brand search. And it’s probably a brand search because they went and they found
Josh Crouch: five companies that were recommended by an AI search platform. And from there, they looked up all five on Google and they looked up your brand to see what it said about you, to see your reviews, to see what other platforms said about you, those sorts of things. Maybe check out your social
Josh Crouch: profiles, see if you’re someone they want to do business with. And so it’s becoming more challenging. I think a lot of people think, you know, search and all that kind of stuff is dead, but like the internet’s just this massive place where people search everywhere. Facebook groups show up on
Josh Crouch: page one of search, Reddit threads. A lot of people don’t still even know what Reddit is in the traits, but Reddit threads show up on page one all the time. And all these things show up now and people are not paying attention to it. They’re not focusing on their brand. They’re not monitoring
Josh Crouch: Facebook groups in their market. And it’s just, it’s, I know it’s not really your, your, the question you asked, but just the, the search landscape in general is not like it used to be where it was like, Google was here. Bing was here. Yelp was, you know, like all these
Josh Crouch: different places where their own like uh walled garden if you will they’re all like cross-pollinating with each other and it’s it’s caused kind of a tracking nightmare when it comes to like knowing your roi per channel like everyone wants to know how many leads am i getting from chadjumeteer
Josh Crouch: problem is the tracking’s not there yet like it’s not good enough to tell us like you can still you can see some if they go to your website but from there you don’t necessarily know if that was the they converted from your website yet. So there’s just things like that that are really difficult to
Josh Crouch: fully understand from a tracking perspective. So knowing your ROI to the dollar for every dollar you spend, it is incredibly challenging. It’s next to virtually impossible just because you talked before the show here, you see me on Facebook a lot. We’ll get a lot of Facebook
Josh Crouch: leads, but then they come through the website. Maybe they convert through an ad. Maybe they convert through a webinar or a newsletter. We have to nurture them in so many different ways. And that’s something I wish that trades would take more seriously is the nurturing of their
Josh Crouch: existing customers Because those existing customers are a goldmine of referrals They a goldmine of other networking opportunities because some of those customers probably have businesses and they might be able to refer business back and forth And then of course you got your existing customers who are just they already know
Josh Crouch: like, and trust you. So, reconverting them into another service or something that they haven’t
Tyler Martin: done before is a lot easier than going to find a new customer. So, Josh, given that there’s like this transition that’s happening and we’re kind of caught in the middle of it, where should we be? Is it still LSA and being on Google and paying for that is still number one?
Tyler Martin: Or is it, I mean, should we be testing Google chat GPT search in that area if we can? Or where should we be? Should we be on Facebook? And I’m talking from a trade standpoint. What would you, if someone said, hey, because I’ll have clients come to me and they’re like in 20 different things or 10 different things.
Tyler Martin: And to your point, like they’re not really getting any data that necessarily says, hey, this channel is the best or this channel isn’t performing. So what would be kind of your most simplified guidance of at minimum you should be here?
Josh Crouch: Yeah, I think I mean, Google is still king. And honestly, their local ecosystem with the Google business profiles, local service ads and just the fact that for the last 30 years we’ve all been addicted to Google. I know it’s popular to think Claude or ChatGPT are going to overtake Google.
Josh Crouch: Google’s connected to so many different things, and they have so many more billions of data points than these other platforms do. I don’t see it happening. I literally just read the other day that Google search with the AI overviews in there now, people are searching more than ever.
Josh Crouch: So I think people correlate like, well, if ChatGPT’s search volume goes up, Google’s goes down. and it’s not that way i mean i think about from how i use it i use google for search sometimes if it’s like a how-to search i will look at chat gpt because i just want to like the instructions on
Josh Crouch: how to do it um if it’s claude i use claude to analyze a lot of data like i use them for different things just based on experience of what i find is working better for that particular topic but i think people search more than ever like when we were my wife uh two kids i went to italy for two
Josh Crouch: weeks and we were on chat GPT all the time. Like, what is this? And then like taking a picture of the menu, like translate this for me. And we reviewed like all the time, like, why do they do this? What’s the history behind that building? And we were just constantly just searching stuff up
Josh Crouch: just to understand what was going on. It wasn’t, it wasn’t because we were trying to do business or anything. We were just trying to understand what was going on around us, but it does make it easier. So now we search more than ever and more times per person, but Google is still king.
Josh Crouch: Google Business Profile is still king of organic. Because even with AI overviews, Google Business Profile, that’s where they’re pulling the information from. So you need to have a great setup there. Local service ads is still a huge lead driver. I would still focus there.
Josh Crouch: Google Search, I wouldn’t get into Google Search until you have your booking rate and your operations dialed in. Because you can start lighting money on fire really quick if you don’t know what you’re doing. So those two areas for sure. And then generally, a lot of the good practices you do on Google will carry over to other platforms with some nuance, some like technical nuance type stuff.
Josh Crouch: But those are the big core ones. You know, outside of there, it’s all testing and tweaking. Some markets next door is popular. Some Yelp is popular. California, you got to be on Yelp. Just is what it is. Or big metro areas. Other places, like I have some people, some clients who Facebook groups get some a ton of business.
Josh Crouch: and I have some contractors in Florida, Facebook groups are where all the worst customers hang out. So it just depends on your market. But for me, I would focus on like, especially if let’s say you’re a little smaller and you’re starting to like, where do I start?
Josh Crouch: Start with like one or two channels. Go all in on those channels. Don’t worry about being everywhere all the time because you can grow into that. Like, for example, like I focus on content marketing for Relentless Digital. I didn’t start getting into meta ads and YouTube ads
Josh Crouch: and Google ads and all these different things for us and doing webinars and stuff until later until I start having a team that could help me with those things. So don’t worry about doing everything all the time, but just focus on a couple channels
Josh Crouch: that you think can do really well in your market. Go all in, try to really optimize that channel deeply. Then once you feel like it’s optimized deeply, maybe you can hand that off. Whatever work you’re doing for that, go on to the next one and go on to the next one.
Josh Crouch: That’s what I would do. Unless you have some money and you can spray and spray and then figure out based on the data. But most contractors are not the most data savvy people, unless they came from like a white collar background or private equity background or something like that.
Tyler Martin: Right.
Josh Crouch: You know, going back to booking rate, because we brought it up a few times. Can you think off the top of your head, what are three things or four things, whatever happens to come in your list that an owner can do to improve their booking rate?
Josh Crouch: Because I hear that a lot. Like, okay, it’s supposed to be at 80% and, you know, I’ll go into Service Titan and it’s 45% or 55% or whatever that number is, when do you kind of say, hey, it’s red flag, this needs to be improved?
Josh Crouch: And can you think of a few things off the top of your head that we can do to improve it?
Tyler Martin: Yeah, I mean, everyone’s gonna have a different number. I mean, 80% is the gold standard.
Josh Crouch: Sure.
Tyler Martin: But I think a lot of people need to accurately track it first
32:50Billy Stevens' live call test and prioritizing old equipment over maintenance
Tyler Martin: before they make decisions because that’s the beauty. And this is where I feel like AI really shines is the analyzing of large sums of data, call recordings, financials, things that can really help us like analysis of our marketing campaign, like just vast sums of these huge spreadsheets
Tyler Martin: that we have in Service Titan, House, Call Pro and all these different CRMs.
Josh Crouch: But understanding the actual real booking rate first so you’re not lying to yourself. Then from there, typically it’s pricing objections is number one as far as if we had something actionable to work on from our team. And that’s everything from just different strategies on how
Josh Crouch: to handle those because homeowners by and large do not understand why you have to charge them to come out. They don’t get it. Well, I already know it’s broken. Like, what do you mean? Like, it’s just a diagnostic fee or a dispatch fee or service fee. They don’t understand it.
Josh Crouch: And I would have some strategies and this, and this is where some people, this is a lot more work, but it’s a lever. If our schedule is slow and I’m getting someone kind of pushing back on a service fee, guess what went away? The service fee is gone. I’m getting in the door today because
Josh Crouch: I need to book a job. If it’s busy and I’m slammed, I’m qualifying based on the age of the equipment first. And then I’m trying to get there, whatever it takes to get there, especially if it’s an old piece of equipment. If it’s not old and we didn’t install it,
Josh Crouch: and it’s one of those things that they’re going to give us a pricing objection. I’m probably not going to waive that for them just because it’s not a priority. But this is where you can really use the strategy and steal other people’s customers
Josh Crouch: because what happens is a lot of times these big companies, I’ll think like Parkinson’s, Gettle, Huffman Brothers, all these huge , 0 million companies that are out there, they have customers they can’t get to because of all the branding they’ve done. They just cannot get to them.
Josh Crouch: And all that falls off the cliff and kind of goes in for the rest of us, the breadcrumbs, if you will, but those are big breadcrumbs. Those are opportunities for you to steal a customer and never look back. And that’s for you to grow your business and then to lose.
Josh Crouch: And I think if you do it smartly, you can compete with the big guys because you can find the right customers that you want, not all the customers. Because the big companies are probably not trying to serve two-year-old pieces of equipment when it’s hot.
Josh Crouch: They know better. They have CFOs and other people telling them, that’s not a smart business decision. But pricing objections and then making sure you’re staffed appropriately for demand times, which I know is tough because sometimes the demand doesn’t come. But people will literally, someone calls in, and you’ve probably heard this, within the first 45 seconds, yeah, we’re overbooked.
Josh Crouch: We can’t get you until two days, three days, four days. I’m like, well, nobody’s going to wait. And at least when it’s hot. or if the plumbing, plumbing especially is kind of interesting. People don’t wait more than a day or two for plumbing issues when they call.
Josh Crouch: Like if you’re not there same day or next day, like the whole three-day call board thing that I know the HVAC industry has been trained and a lot of other people have been trained on, it doesn’t really work for plumbing. You need to get there fast.
Josh Crouch: And there’s just, there’s a lot of optimization opportunities in there that I think people overlook just because they don’t know or have a strategy or been coached on the strategy. like, oh, that’s a great idea. Like, let’s focus on the age of equipment
Josh Crouch: before we go out there. Why don’t we do that? So I’m not going out to a one-year-old water heater. That’s under warranty, and I’m going to get just, you know, labor from the manufacturer. That’s not worth it for me. I didn’t install that water heater.
Josh Crouch: So that’s what I would say. Those are kind of the big things. There are other objections, and I can probably get you some of that stuff to put in, like, show notes and stuff as far as, like, our top five objections we get on the phone.
Josh Crouch: Because we’ve analyzed hundreds of thousands
Tyler Martin: of calls at this point, but those are really the big ones. Yeah, that’s awesome. That’s really good stuff. Okay. I want to move to the next thing. That’s really good. There’s a lot of meat in that.
Josh Crouch: I want to go to my segment I call the number. And what I usually try to do is get into either one number or a couple of numbers that are really important. And I think the one we want to talk about today is a phone call conversion rate. So I want to just kind of talk about that. I think
Josh Crouch: this also probably plays into how phone tap.ai plays into this. And so I’d love to just hear what your thoughts are around that metric and then maybe also the problem you’re trying to solve.
Tyler Martin: Yeah. And I would say 55% would be the number because that is the average booking rate we’ve seen. That’s from humans tagging calls over the last five years. It’s very similar when we’ve done it through AI call analysis. It’s just faster. Okay. But you think about 55% when everyone’s
Tyler Martin: says that they think they’re at 80. It’s a huge gap. And it was a year-end webinar I did. It was like digital marketing planning for the next year. Some marketing companies will do that to give you all the strategies and things are working, things are coming. And I built on
Tyler Martin: Bolt.new, which was one of the first bi-coding tools that were out there before Lovable got popular and some of these other ones. And I built a calculator to help people understand what happens if they just tweak a few numbers in their business, one of them was the call booking rate.
Tyler Martin: And then the next stop in the funnel is the technician’s conversion rate of turning an service call into something above and beyond an service call. And then their average ticket. Those are three levers that any business can pull. It doesn’t even matter if they’re the trades.
Tyler Martin: It’s your conversion rate and then your pricing. So we looked at, I put in some numbers if I was a million company, I figured that’s a good round number. and we changed the booking rate by 5%. We went from 55 to 60%.
Tyler Martin: So it added like 0,000 based on their same average ticket, their same tech conversion rate. It was just because we had so many more opportunities. And if you think about it, a lot of times you don’t really have to add people at that point, at that size.
Tyler Martin: You can probably keep the same amount of people so you don’t really have much more overhead. And then if you did the same thing
38:57Google still rules as search fragments across AI platforms
Tyler Martin: on the tech conversion rate And then the average ticket, you increase all those 5% to 10%. You pick a number of what you think. And it just changed. All of a sudden, this company got way more profitable without changing anything else. They just focused obsessively over these two or three numbers.
Tyler Martin: And the same amount of leads. So we didn’t have to spend any more on marketing. So that means our customer acquisition costs went down because we booked more of the people that came in. And it just changes the game. And you can grow really easily.
Tyler Martin: There’s a stat that, and I heard this third hand through somebody else, but Tommy Mello stated this. He knew a 1% booking rate increase for his company was million in added revenue. Now, granted, his size is a little different than most contracting companies, but the point remains the same.
Tyler Martin: And the fact that he knew a 1% increase in bookkeeping is million. All your overhead, everything else is covered. So think about where that’s not going to all drop down because there’s some materials and stuff in there. A lot of that’s going to drop down to the bottom line for a company because their overhead’s already paid for.
Tyler Martin: They just got to pay for the labor, for the tech, and then the materials. So whatever their gross margin, the rest of that’s going to drop right down to the bottom. And it’s just a huge difference. And I think the shift for people need to focus on these numbers more.
Tyler Martin: And if you were on an EOS or even if you don’t have these two or three KPIs every single week presented to you or you figure them out yourself. If you’re really small, you don’t have someone to help you. But figure about yourself and have these numbers in front of you every single week.
Tyler Martin: So, you know, and you can obsess over them because it will change your business and you will all you won’t you won’t be worried so much about what the marketing company is doing or what’s changing in the in the industry. that sort of thing, you’ll be worried more about your own performance and you’ll be able to control
Tyler Martin: your own performance. Wow. So when I hear that, Josh, like I hear like 5%, let’s just start with 5%. That is so doable. Like it’s not this crazy jump. And what I also hear when you talk about those three levers, let’s say on a million company, we’re moving the needle by half a million
Tyler Martin: dollars by moving those three levers. I mean, you’re literally talking about 10% to your bottom line And if you talking about 10 to your bottom line a lot of times when I talk with clients they go hey I at 10 not profit margin or I at 15 How the heck do I get to 20 that everybody always talks about Well there it is
Tyler Martin: right there. I mean, that literally can be the 5% to 10% move to your bottom line without increasing costs, without really, it’s just operationally improving your company. It’s just tightening things up. And you think about, like, you know, because I know obviously there’s a lot of private
Tyler Martin: equity in the space and a lot of people are in the trades now are thinking about building a business to sell it, even if they don’t sell it. But if you add that margin at the bottom, well, guess what also increases. So that 5% or 10% that got added to the bottom turns into,
Tyler Martin: I don’t know the actual math on this, but you’d be times 5 to 8 for a multiple at minimum in the trades. So let’s say we made an extra 0,000 off the same spend. Well, that turns into, what is that? .5 to million in your pocket if you do sell potentially. So it’s a big number.
Tyler Martin: It’s a big potential number for you.
Josh Crouch: And I think the more people that start thinking this way, it’ll change what happens instead of people missing calls and having AI that goes off the rail and doesn’t do what it’s supposed to be doing. Or maybe there’s a three-second gap. They actually listen to a call and be like, hey, that’s not right.
Josh Crouch: I’m going to fix that. And then they just keep tweaking. There’s always something to tweak, but you got to listen and analyze that stuff or have someone in your team that does that for you.
Tyler Martin: Yeah. Yeah, you remind me of, I recently interviewed Paul Kelly from Parker and Sons, and his whole mantra was around, or one of his mantras was around just making simple adjustments to the business, but doing it consistently. I think he calls it ta-da. It’s in his book, Ta-da Moment.
Tyler Martin: And it’s just doing these little incremental improvements, and they all add up to something big. And it just makes me think of that when you, what you’re talking about. It’s not, it’s not like major no shiny objects no crazy stuff it’s very doable stuff it’s just like when
Tyler Martin: i started my going going to the gym four years ago like i didn’t get in the shape i am now in a week or two weeks it’s been four years of consistently going five to six days a week walking watching what i eat tracking my food like it’s it’s consistency anything is can anything you
Tyler Martin: want to achieve a life is possible if you’re consistent. The problem is everyone wants an immediate solution. That’s why GLP-1s are everywhere because they’re like, I just want to lose 30 pounds in the next two weeks and I don’t care how I lose it. And then they realize that they just
Tyler Martin: gain it all back when they’re off the GLP-1 anyways. So it’s just the consistency has got to be there. So it’s a great point. Yeah, that’s good stuff. Okay. I know we’re running out of time here. I want to cover the last thing. I want to talk about why agencies get a bad rap. So we hear
Tyler Martin: a lot. I’ll give real world example. I hear this frequently. Clients not necessarily getting the return or feel like they need more leads. They’ll go back to their agency and their agency say, well, you just need to spend more money. You need to spend more money. You increase your budget.
Tyler Martin: And, you know, and there’s really not a strategy or reason for that. What are your thoughts? Why do you think agencies get a bad rap? And what are things from the owner standpoint that they could
Josh Crouch: do to make sure that they’re selecting the right agency? Yeah, I think agencies get a bad rap because of what you said about always have, they’re always asking for more money. But the problem is this entire show that we’ve talked about.
Tyler Martin: Yeah.
Josh Crouch: That’s usually not the problem. Like there’s a lot of times, and my wife tells us, she does a lot of the sales calls for us now. We’re showing it on and she’ll start asking about numbers and tracking and we’re the source, what’s your best lead source, how many calls you get, all that sort of thing.
Josh Crouch: And she’ll go, because she already know the answer. This is a little bit like a lawyer approaching someone on the stand and they know the answer to the question, but they lead them to where they want to go. The website, the Google business profile,
Josh Crouch: some of their other marketing channels have the same phone number. And she’s like, she leads them into, oh, you’re using call tracking? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. And then like, well, why do you have the same number on your website, your GBP and whatever other tracking source she’s looking at?
Josh Crouch: And they’re like, you know, I don’t know. And because there’s just a lack of knowledge with those things, like just simple things. Like these are really simple fixes. is your Google Maps profile should have a tracking number. Your LSA should have a tracking number.
Josh Crouch: If you’re doing Google search, tracking number. Website, different tracking number. Like all of those things should have a tracking number. So you know how many calls came in, what revenue was received on those calls. So you can actually make a decision on your agency
Josh Crouch: or whoever’s doing that work for you. And I think a lot of times agencies just say spend more money because they want to see you have more leads, but then they don’t really pay attention to what’s happening on the calls you get. Like, I feel like most of the time I’m talking to my team
Josh Crouch: about like when they ask someone slow, I’m like, well, what’s the booking rate? It’s the first question I ask, what’s the booking rate? Can we go back and try to recapture any of those opportunities? Can we go back to any open estimates and try to close those through a text message
Josh Crouch: or email sequence? Just little things that make a huge difference because you’ve already paid for that lead. You got an open estimate. And there’s been, I mean, Chirp has got a ton of case studies on about going back and reaching back out to old estimates.
Josh Crouch: All of a sudden, you don’t even have to try to say, hey, would you like to close on this estimate? just reach back out to them and see if they have any questions oh yeah i’ve been meaning to do that like it’s just it’s wild people they didn’t forget or well maybe they forgot but they didn’t
Josh Crouch: it’s still there they still have to do it they just probably nobody followed up with them so like yeah i’ll push it off till later because we’re a procrastination species like we permit we’ve been procrastinating since middle high school you know to we cram before the exam
Josh Crouch: and get it done but there’s just so many operational things that can be fixed and i I think that’s where agencies get a bad rep. It’s not necessarily that they’re bad people. They’re not trying to screw you. Like I know a lot of these guys are not trying to do those things.
46:59Fixing pricing objections and staffing for demand to boost bookings
Josh Crouch: They may not keep up with the times and what’s going on, and they may not be great at what they do. But it’s the operation and marketing coming together to work together is what’s missing in the trades.
Tyler Martin: Yeah. So is there anything in someone’s considering a new agency? Would you say, hey, these are the few things you should make sure that checks the box. Anything stand out for you?
Josh Crouch: Yeah, I mean, they should be asking for your numbers, like your current marketing numbers and call book careers. They should really want to know that stuff. Because if you book at 30%, which sounds ridiculous, but there are companies that book at 30%, no amount of marketing is going to fix that, period.
Josh Crouch: There’s probably a few other things. they should really be asking about your location on Google and looking into your location on Google because there’s a lot of weight to ranking on Google Maps based on where your location is. And a lot of people don’t know this.
Josh Crouch: They have a post office address that’s in, let’s say, Phoenix, Arizona, for lack of a better example. But practically, if you look at the map, the Google map for Phoenix, Arizona, their location is outside of the city limits. And what happens there is Google’s like, well, they’re in, let’s say, Scottsdale versus Phoenix,
Josh Crouch: but they want clients in Phoenix. It’s just not, it’s going to be very difficult and uphill climb because you’re working against the algorithm the way it’s structured. So things like that can be, doesn’t matter what marketing company is, you’re still going to be against the algorithm.
Josh Crouch: So you might have to move your address or you might have to get a second location. And those things are just, be surprised how many times like, oh, nobody’s told me that. You hear that all the time on calls. And so these types of things,
Josh Crouch: make sure you’re set up to win based on how the algorithm works. Don’t try to force whatever you got going on to work to the algorithm because Google’s king. They’re not going to change what they’re doing for you. And then make sure the company cares about your operation.
Josh Crouch: Make sure call tracking’s in place. And they’re talking operations with you at least a little bit. They don’t have to be an operational coach or anything like that. But they should, if you have a bad booking rate, they should probably want to tell you you have a bad booking rate so you guys can work together to fix that and come up with some strategies to fix it.
Tyler Martin: Got it. Okay, one last question, then I’ll wrap up. AI websites. Are we doing those or is it not ready for that yet? What’s your opinion?
Josh Crouch: I don’t believe it’s ready.
Tyler Martin: Okay.
Josh Crouch: I’ve seen so many people that go build their own website after they had a profession, don’t want it in their rankings and everything just tanks. I think what AI websites can be good for is landing pages. So if you run, let’s say you run your own meta ads or you run a direct mail campaign
Josh Crouch: and you want like a specific page for that. I think that’s a great place because you’re not sending a ton of traffic there and it doesn’t need to rank. in ChatGPT or Google, I wouldn’t make your main website with AI. But landing pages,
Tyler Martin: 100%, that’s fine. I think that’s totally. One thing I’m noticing with AI websites too, is they have an AI look to them. You can almost tell, like I was looking at- You can tell the same thing even when you get like a downloadable report. It’s like,
Tyler Martin: wow, that looks like a cloud. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Josh Crouch: We pick up on those tendencies. I’ve done that a lot. I’m like, that looks like something from ChatGPT. Exactly, exactly. So you can pick up on it and people will get smart to that stuff at some point.
Tyler Martin: But I mean, even that’s a great point.
Josh Crouch: But even like if you think like you want your own branding to have its own look, you want it unique. I mean, that’s the beauty of kind of like a WordPress ad. You know, it loses that if it has like that clod feel to it.
Tyler Martin: But anyway, OK, I want to wrap up because I know I’m really bad on time right now. I want to one. You were awesome. I really appreciate everything you’ve shared your websites. I want to be sure to share them all. relentless-digital.com is your agency website. Your podcast website is servicebusinessmastery.com.
Tyler Martin: And then your venture that you got going on is phontap.ai. Do you have a couple minutes just
Josh Crouch: to share with us what that’s trying to accomplish and who that might be good for? Yeah, phontap was born out of us call tagging at Relentless Digital and a need for AI call analysis. But it’s it’s really a revenue recovery system. And what I mean by that is not only do we analyze the calls,
Josh Crouch: but we go back and analyze up to five years worth of your service type and data to understand your customer’s lifetime value. Because customers don’t spend all the money that they’re going to spend with you in the first year, but they do spend like 60% to 70% of it in the first year.
Josh Crouch: Which was interesting. Like some of this data is really interesting and we’ll have more to share on that later. But with that, there’s that first call that you get with a new customer is a great opportunity for you to make 60 to 70% of them,
Josh Crouch: all the money you’re going to make from that customer over this lifetime. And so what we focus on is when those opportunities are missed, giving you a dashboard of like the most important opportunities for your team to go work off of. So that way, when they’re not on the phones taking inbound calls,
Josh Crouch: they can outbound. And then our system can actually detect if somebody reached back out with an outbound call. So you can hold your team accountable to be like, hey, there’s 30 leads that we didn’t book. and we only reached out to five of them.
Josh Crouch: And you can see who reached out and then whether that a job got booked within the 72 hours afterwards, because usually after 72 hours, that customer’s probably not going to book. So we really focus on the revenue recovery side and because there’s just,
Josh Crouch: there’s so much money left on the table. And we want you to see the value of focus on these leads, like how much money you’re recovering by focusing on the right things. And then of course, understanding what’s happening on the front end. so you don’t miss those opportunities. You can fix your system so that there’s less of those
Josh Crouch: as time goes on. And then looking from your website, this communicates with ServiceTitan. Is that correct? Is it listening to their calls and then is it doing something in ServiceTitan or is it doing it in your portal, so to speak? So the leads that are open, the ones that don’t
Josh Crouch: get closed, we actually send those back to ServiceTitan. So you can actually work them right out of your leads dashboard in the ServiceTitan if you want. It doesn’t have quite the same look and feel, but you still work on there. But it’s a two-way sync.
Josh Crouch: So we’re pulling data. We actually also fix your call booking rate inside of Service Titan based on the analysis of the calls. So if it’s misclassified, we’ll reclassify it for you. So you can actually trust the data from both systems because it’s accurate in PhoneTap
Josh Crouch: and it’s accurate in Service Titan, which is huge. So now we can actually trust the data instead of like, why does Service Titan say this and this one says this? And then you start, I don’t know. Then you just kind of give up
Josh Crouch: because you’re like, I don’t know where to start even at this.
Tyler Martin: Good stuff. That sounds like a great tool, a great product to add to increase your revenue at the end of the day, your conversion and revenue.
Josh Crouch: That’s the goal.
Tyler Martin: Yeah. Awesome. OK, Josh, you were amazing. You shared so much. I feel like this is almost like a mini masterclass of stuff that you shared. Can’t thank you enough for being here.
Josh Crouch: Awesome. Thanks, Alec. Take care.
Tyler Martin: One of the biggest lessons I got from this conversation with Josh is that more leads are not always the answer. A lot of home service companies may already have plenty of opportunity coming in, but they are losing revenue through missed calls, weak booking rates, pricing objections, and
Tyler Martin: poor follow-up. Josh made a great point about how even a small improvement in booking rate can create a significant impact without spending more on marketing. When you start tightening up the numbers you can control, you may be able to grow revenue and improve profitability with the same lead volume you already have. The same mindset applies
Tyler Martin: to the financial side of the business. You need timely and trusted numbers to know where the money is being made, where it’s slipping away, and what actually deserves your attention. And if you want a better handle on the financial side of your business, that’s where Profit and Grit CFOs can
Tyler Martin: help. We work with trade owners to get a better handle on cash flow, margins, profitability, and the numbers behind smarter growth decisions. Head on over to profitandgrit.com and book your free CFO intro call. And as always, thanks so much for listening
54:52Why a 5% booking rate bump can add hundreds of thousands to the bottom line
Tyler Martin: and I’ll catch you on the next episode.
