#190 How AI and Automation Are Revolutionizing Home Service Marketing

Looking to supercharge your business growth through smarter marketing, AI integration, and automation? In this episode of Owned and Operated, we sit down with Sam Preston and Ethan Wright from Service Scalers to dive deep into the strategies that are transforming small and medium-sized businesses. Whether you're just starting to invest in digital marketing or optimizing operations with AI, this episode is packed with actionable advice to drive profitability and efficiency.

Sam and Ethan share what’s working right now in digital marketing—from leveraging long-tail keywords to integrating AI agents that improve customer service and business operations. You’ll hear how to build a brand that stands the test of time, how automation boosts lead generation, and why customer retention is more important than ever for scaling sustainably.

🚨 In This Episode, We Cover: 
🔹 The real advantages and challenges of implementing AI in marketing 
🔹 Why strong brand-building is critical for long-term success 
🔹 How to optimize your lead generation process for profitability 
🔹 Customer retention strategies that fuel sustainable growth 
🔹 Automation tactics that streamline operations and boost efficiency 
🔹 Emerging marketing trends: long-tail keywords and AI agents

💼 Shoutout to Avoca AI!

Looking to train your call center and improve technician performance? Avoca AI helps teams identify issues, improve call quality, and drive results from start to finish.

 🔗 Schedule a demo: 

Shout Out to FieldPulse 🚀

FieldPulse is an incredible Field Service Management platform that helps you save hours each week while keeping your operations running smoothly. If you're looking to streamline your processes, stay competitive, and focus on what truly matters, FieldPulse is a game-changer!

📅 Book your demo: 

🎙️ Episode Hosts:

🗣️ John Wilson – @WilsonCompanies

🎙️ Episode Guests:

🗣️ Sam Preston
🗣️ Ethan Wright 

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John Wilson, CEO of Wilson Companies
Jack Carr, CEO of Rapid HVAC

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 3:00 Discussion on Marketing Strategies and Budget Allocation
• 12:00 Operational Enhancements and Call Center Efficiency
• 33:40 Leveraging Customer Reviews for SEO
• 39:06 The Role of AI in Business Automation
• 45:43 Challenges and Opportunities in AI Adoption
• 1:06:53 The Importance of Landing Pages
• 1:24:15 Choosing the Right Marketing Partner

Transcript

Episode 190 Transcript

John Wilson: [00:00:00] Reducing marketing budget is 

Sam Preston: dumb. Like it is dumb. Google is not your friend. They are trying to spend, your money will be literally just lighting money on fire. Yeah. We 

John Wilson: got like 300 hits on it in the first 30 days and we sold $250,000 of shit.

Today on the show I have my good friend Sam Preston and Ethan Wright from Service Scalers. Welcome guys to the show. 

Sam Preston: Awesome. What's going on? Thanks 

John Wilson: man. This will be fun. We did an in-person with Sam last July. Yeah. Different setting. 

Sam Preston: Yeah. Very new studio. That studio was so small. 

John Wilson: I know. 

Sam Preston: I'm pretty sure we were like 

John Wilson: touching knees the 

Sam Preston: entire time.

It was cute. Honestly, it was intimate. It never felt closer. 

John Wilson: It was nice. Obviously, uh, you know, if you've listened to the show for any amount of time, service Scalers has been an awesome partner to us since. Like 2021, which has just been amazing. But for the folks that haven't heard yet, you guys want to give a [00:01:00] quick description of what you guys do.

Ethan Wright: Go for it, Ethan. I wanna hear it. Yeah. Awesome. Uh, service scalers, we essentially are a, uh, home services focused digital marketing company. Uh, our job is ultimately like match your goals and, and what you want out of lead generation, whether that's organic, paid the whole nine yards and taking you from like, idea all the way to lead, uh, involving your website, everything like that.

So we'll get, we'll get into a ton of it, but leads, at the end of the day, is what we care about. That's what we do. Sell leads 

John Wilson: at Wilson. We've saved a stupid amount of money by having AI help out with our call center. And the best tool out there that's making that happen is Avoca. So look, you've probably heard the buzz about a i, CSRs.

They seem to be everywhere, but not all. A i CSRs are created equal and Avoca seems to rise to the top. Every time they answer every call in the first ring, they sound just like a real person and they don't take breaks. But here's what makes Avoca really interesting in the real world. If caller's getting heated, like they're getting frustrated or annoyed, [00:02:00] Avoca knows it hears the tone, emotion, and hand the call to a real human.

So you can still save that call. And this has been huge for us here at Wilson. There's no more churn or people yelling representative into the phone and the backend is tight. It directly integrates into ServiceTitan at the gold tier level. That means it can handle reschedules, check, tech, arrival times, and lookup customer info.

It even helps with capacity planning. It's basically a CSR with perfect memory. On top of all that, it consistently makes our team better. We get post call analytics, auto tagging and coaching tools so that no matter who's on shift, we deliver for our customers. If you're curious, go to avoca.ai, av, oc a.ai, book a demo and tell 'em owned and operated, sent you.

That is, uh, that's awesome. Uh, so we have a couple topics up for today and we're gonna be riffing. We're here because we're, it's the breaking five workshop. Yes. 

Sam Preston: Yep. So it should be a lot of 

John Wilson: fun. You know, the bigger the show has gotten, the more, for a while, a lot of our audience [00:03:00] was people interested in buying home service companies or like just bought it, or like, pretty early on, like revenue wise.

Mm-hmm. So like sub five was what we saw a ton of. What has been really interesting, and I think it's like we got more active on LinkedIn basically, but uh, much larger and more sophisticated, um, operators have been popping up. So we're gonna try to sh as we sort of talk through this, we'll be talking about it from, I think all levels.

Like, Hey, what's it look like at, at my level and how I think about stuff? What's it look like if I'm in my first 5 million bucks? And, and, um, anything in between. Cool. Awesome. That's, let's do it. A fun game plan, uh, would what I think would be interesting just 'cause I feel like, and any time in the past five or six years you could say, man, we're at a weird period.

It's volatile, it's whatever. Yeah. Uh, so I don't, I don't want to use those words, but hey, it's kind of weird, right? Like, we've got ai, [00:04:00] we've got Trump doing his tariffs situation, um, potentially recession, and I've got to imagine that some of this stuff. Comes up. And what I've always wanted to do is, uh, I've wanted to be a spy.

Hmm. So I've wanted to know what do my, what are my peers thinking about today? 

Hmm. 

So when they're getting on calls with you guys or some of your active clients, like what are people thinking about and what are they concerned about as they're approaching 2025? 

Ethan Wright: Yeah, I think, uh, a few things, but I think one of the things you hit on the top, um, AI is huge.

I think on, kind of on two sides. One is how do, uh, how do we market in a world where AI is, you know, some people say it's taking all the search and like, yeah. Like everyone's just gonna have an AI agent and next week doing all of its chores, doing all the chores for them and everything. [00:05:00] Um, so how do you essentially market in a world like that?

And on the other side, it's. How do I as a company utilize AI myself to be more efficient, to make sure that, like, for us, like if I do get a lead, 

John Wilson: yeah. 

Ethan Wright: Uh, am I responding to it quickly? Is it serviced well? How do I keep up with it? How do I, you know, things like that. So, I mean, we could probably spend some time specifically on ai.

Um, you know, other things like always on the top of people's mind is like, you know, especially for paid ads and, and paid leads as like costs and kind of how to think about that. You know, not all leads are the same. And then even like two companies can have the same cost of lead, but their return on that is very different because of different things.

And so people are constantly asking, how do I get better cost of leads, but how do I actually take advantage of a lead in general? So that, um, the more leads that come in, I actually sell more on, um, kind of taking the conversation just from a lead to actually [00:06:00] close revenue, which I think is ultimately 

John Wilson: Yeah.

Ethan Wright: Where a lot of like. Sometimes marketing companies can miss. 

John Wilson: Yeah. Is, 

Ethan Wright: oh, hey, we got a click. Someone looked at your website and you're like, great. But like, 

John Wilson: where's the dollar 

Ethan Wright: doesn't do anything for me. Yeah. Um, and so I think those are a couple of 'em, but probably AI is probably the number one thing that I'm hearing, um, from our clients.

And then also just on calls that we're taking. Well, 

Sam Preston: one thing you, you mentioned the tariffs. Tariffs is interesting because we get so many people have different opinions on it and the ways they approach it. Like half the people are like, Hey, let's, let's pull back a little bit on our marketing budget because, so, so that's been a 

John Wilson: conversation.

Sam Preston: Yeah. I mean, some people are legitimately trying to go, go find money. They're like, Hey, like this is gonna be an issue. I need to create a little bit, you know, less so like I'm gonna spend a little bit less on marketing. The other half of the people are seeing that happening. 

John Wilson: Yeah. 

Sam Preston: And going, well, this is the chance to spend more, more and market summer's right around the corner.

Yeah. Yeah. Like, this is where we spend the most and people are pulling back, let's go in it, you know, let's double down [00:07:00] one of, and 

Ethan Wright: whether, whether it's tariffs or not, too, it's like it's always something. It's always something. And so that's always the question I get, we get all the time is like, uh, it's a slower month now.

Like Yeah. Should I pull my spending back or Yeah. And then the other side like is, oh my gosh, it's a slower month. Like, this is the time I need to lean in. Yeah. Or whatever outside, you know, outside your control thing is happening. Um, it is funny 'cause it's like there's usually, there's not one, there's rarely someone in the middle that's like, yeah, let's just keep steady.

It's like either like, I'm all right, let's push on the gas. Or like, Hey, do I need to back conserve 

John Wilson: when one of the most, uh, like memorable. I've, I've always been a never turn the marketing off guy. Yeah. Now I, I do want to preface. Two things. One, like we think of lead gen marketing kind of different. Like we turn it off and on every day.

Yeah. 

Mm-hmm. So like when I, when I mean turn it off, I mean like modulate the amount that I'm willing to spend over a certain period of time. 

Yeah. 

Not like if, you [00:08:00] know, if I'm full for the next five days, I should modulate my, I should turn my LSAs off and give 'em a break. Yes. Yeah. That's an important distinction.

Um, and I don't even remember my other one actually. That's good

lead gen. Yeah. That's probably the big one. Anytime we've ever had like an opportunity, we are a, oh, let's double or triple down. Mm-hmm. So one of the things that, um, so we, we were working on like brand, uh, last year and getting ready to do this big rollout for TV and, uh, we're doing billboards and stuff.

Yeah. And when we went to go, uh, do it, Jesse was trying to figure out why has our search. Volume increased over time and uh, like what does that mean? What were we doing in that time period? Like, why does it, why does it work? And it's all back to this one decision I made in 2020 when the world shut down in March of [00:09:00] 2020 and inventory opened up on radio stations.

And I got this, I still have the same pricing today, but I have price. I got insane pricing. Yeah. I got this like, crazy discount on, uh, on the flight schedule. So we ripped it and like that decision was made when we were $4 million company and it still drives our brand today at 31. 

Yeah. 

And I think anytime there's an opportunity where there's blood in the streets, if we're going off of like, you know, Warren's thing for financials, but anytime there's blood in the streets, like to me, shutting off.

Or even slowing down isn't the right answer. I maybe like shift things around. Uh, I think that was my other point, like, oh yeah. That, that wasn't the other caveat is like if something's not working totally, you know, figure out another way. But like, reducing marketing budget is dumb. Yeah. Like, it is dumb.

It is like a markedly dumb thing. Um, [00:10:00] dumb. I feel like every book in the fucking world tells you that. 

Ethan Wright: Well, and it, I mean, that's like kind of where you go, like you can learn all the right things and then like, it's the behavior. Something punches you in the face. Yeah. And it's like, okay, how do I actually react?

And, you know, uh, yeah. It's, it would yeah. Be greedy when others are fear. Fearful. Yeah. Fearful when others are greedy. For sure. Um, yeah. It, it is, it is funny too because like obviously you don't want to double down on something that isn't working. 

John Wilson: Yeah. But it's not like, okay, 

Ethan Wright: something's not working now we just don't have a.

You know, a place to spend this dollar, it's how do I best spend my dollar at all times? Right. And yeah, even like the way that we, that we have like structured over at service scalers is like, we're never really incentivized to like spend more money. Like we don't, you know, we can get more Yeah, because you guys aren't percentage of like Yeah.

So yeah, for like paid, 

John Wilson: yeah. Scorpion used to be like 10 or 12% of ad spend. I think average. 

Sam Preston: I mean, I know average just spend like 35%. So like Yeah, average is higher for sure. And, and 

Ethan Wright: [00:11:00] insane. Yeah. And so, but, but either way it's like, it, it's nice because I can sit on a call and be like, Hey, I think you should keep your spend the same.

And like, maybe it changes where you're spending it or what you're investing in. Um, but there's, there's always somewhere that you can make the best use of it. And it's, it is interesting with Covid, well, it's not 

John Wilson: even keep it the same, it's like other idiots will reduce their spend. Supply and demand. So every lead just got cheaper.

Like your favorites, your favorite storage just went on sale. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Water heater fucking leads just went from a hundred dollars to 60. And you want to cut your budget. Yeah. Like, it makes it, it just makes no sense. And there, there are times 

Ethan Wright: where, and I think it's obviously it's company by company, so like you have a certain situation that comes out.

No, be strong, Ethan. Well, I'm saying you're wrong. No, I'm not saying in terms of cutting marketing spin, but more so like what makes the most sense. Like, yeah, not everyone needs to spend the same amount on paid versus organic and things like that, but it is always like, there is [00:12:00] always gonna be the opportunity there.

Um, for sure. So that, that's like, that is really common. 

Sam Preston: Well, I think that, that, there's actually a really big problem, um, that I see from home service business owners and their connection directly into marketing agencies that they're working with, is that there's this big disconnect. Yeah. So they just see like, Hey, I spent five grand total and this is how many leads I got.

What they're not looking at is what, what that cost per lead is and how much they can continue to push that. So let's say you're getting a hundred dollars cost per lead, right? That's that great. Why not keep spending more money in that one service? All right, so you spent five grand. Yeah. So a hundred dollars cost per lead.

So you got 50 leads there. 

John Wilson: Yeah. All 

Sam Preston: right. Great. Now spend 10. 

John Wilson: Yeah. 

Sam Preston: Now spend 15. Keep pushing that number out until you can't go, like, once you spent 25 and suddenly that cost per lead jumped to, you know, one 50 or 200. Okay. Now reduce that budget. Yeah. But what I see a lot of people, 'cause they don't actually know those numbers, they're not having those conversations with their marketing, [00:13:00] uh, account manager or Yeah.

Whatever their, their, their person of, you know, point of contact is that they go, okay, I've, I'm doing Google ads, let me try something else. Facebook ads too. Yeah. It's like, you should do that 100%, but you've not maximized mm-hmm. What you can get out of Google Ads, so don't try something new yet. 

Ethan Wright: Yeah. Yeah.

It's, it's also, you know, I think that goes back to like. Knowing your numbers and syncing with your agency. But at the same time too, like, do you know what a water heater lead costs you versus a leaky faucet? 

John Wilson: Yep. 

Ethan Wright: And what's your strategy behind both of those? Yeah, because like that's a really, honestly, like a common, um, thing that will come in, you know, a new client will come in, we'll go and clean up their ads account or their strategy or whatever.

And, uh, it's kind of set to spend the same no matter what the lead type is. Yeah. And no matter what the revenue that comes out of it is. Yeah. And like specifically with like an ads account, it's also never been like those offline, uh, conversions, never [00:14:00] like sent back in. Yeah. And so you're, there's no feedback loop, right?

Mm-hmm. So like I want you to tell me how are leads, how are you anecdotally and from your side and what you're tracking, how is lead flow? How is lead quality? What are you actually closing? I. In revenue and then on our side, because you know, I can make your cost per lead look a lot lower. 

John Wilson: Yeah. If 

Ethan Wright: all I went for was 

John Wilson: Oh yeah.

Ethan Wright: Low quality, low revenue 

John Wilson: leads. Well, I remember thinking this when we were like small and I remember seeing HVAC replacement leads and they were like $200. Mm-hmm. And like, it'd be like HVAC service leads were like 20 bucks, 30 bucks, something like that. But like one in seven service jobs turns into a replacement.

Yeah. So we actually have to buy seven leads for $210, which is the same as the $200 install lead. Yeah. And I was, I was too focused on cost per lead. And I really think, I think we've said this on the show before, but whoever can pay the most for the lead wins. Mm-hmm. Like who can pay the most? Like [00:15:00] who's got the best economics, who's got the highest average ticket, the highest closing rate, and how do you walk confidently into that?

If we have business units, we pay $500 a lead for, but our closing rates 55% and our average ticket's $12,500. So that job at 500 bucks cost me $900. Yeah. Which, like, that's 8% of 12,500. So like I feel pretty good about that number. 

Yeah. 

Like, yeah. Yeah. But when we were smaller and just focused on cost per lead, yeah.

We were missing the forest through the trees. Well, the thing is people don't 

Sam Preston: know those numbers. 

John Wilson: Yeah. Yeah. 

Sam Preston: Like we, we have conversations with owners all the time and they're like, no idea. 

John Wilson: Yeah. 

Sam Preston: Uh, the other day we, I was on a phone call with a guy who was like, Hey, I'm not getting good leads through, uh, through Google Ads right now.

I was like, 

John Wilson: fuck, you weren't. 

Sam Preston: I was like, okay, cool. Can I listen to those phone calls? Oh, we don't, we don't record in those phone calls. Yeah. What do you mean you don't record those phone calls? Yeah. How do you know those are quality or not? Yeah, because Ethan, you were telling me the other day, [00:16:00] uh, you should tell him about the, uh, you should tell 

John Wilson: me.

Sam Preston: Yeah. You should tell John. You should tell 

John Wilson: me, 

Sam Preston: uh, about the, uh, the, the, um, one that started listening to phone calls and started realizing their CSRs weren't actually selling appointments. Yeah. Yeah. 

Ethan Wright: That, I think that's one where, you know, uh, yeah. I, I, I kind, it's almost like, uh, marketing companies have like, made all service businesses only think about, Hey, here's what I could get your cost per lead to like, let me get you the lower cost per lead.

John Wilson: Yeah. But 

Ethan Wright: like, this example was great was we were having a conversation and um, and, and I was brought in, it's like on our end it's like, Hey, it seems like your account's actually performing really well, but like the revenue's not producing. Yeah. Like we think it should, Hey, let's listen to these calls together.

And it would be something, you know, it, uh, the C source just weren't trained well, yeah. At the end of the day. Yeah. And so a good lead would come in, but it would be, Hey, can you service us today? Nope. Yeah. Instead of, Hey, we're full today. Yeah. Here's our next [00:17:00] availability. Like, how do I incentivize someone to, to wait a little bit, like if they can.

Mm-hmm. Um, and because I mean, if you could, if your CSR is booking, let's say three outta 10 calls, but that could be five, that's massive. That's, that's, that could be hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue at the end of the year. Yeah. And so there, I mean, it's that, and then like how are your, how is your service team actually servicing?

Yeah. And converting and upselling, like you're saying like, Hey, if one in seven Yeah. Service calls turns into a replacement, um, well, what if that actually could be like one in five and a half? 

John Wilson: Yeah. 

Ethan Wright: And it's just a little training there. So it's like, you know, knowing every step of the funnel. Um, but what's, what's even funny is like we have some of our best success stories are actually people that have come in.

There's one specifically I think of, um, where he was, he was really focused on cost per lead, but it's, it actually. His cost. Cost per lead wasn't that bad. But he thought like, that's the only way I can get a better return is if everything else stays the same, I'm gonna get the cost per lead lower. 

John Wilson: [00:18:00] Hmm. But 

Ethan Wright: we actually went in and his cost per lead with, with us reduced by like 8%.

Like nothing crazy. But when we went and looked at the account, um, there was like two obvious opportunities. He was converting at such a high clip for, um, for these higher revenue jobs than, uh, than like, what was industry average, and then pretty much the same conversion as these lower ticket jobs. Mm-hmm.

But they were still being spent on equally. And there was a certain area, like a certain town that he performed really well in, and these other ones that just weren't converting, like, just like whether it was lower income areas or whatever. And so we go, this is like, um, are, are we? This is almost too easy.

Mm. And so we go, Hey. Higher revenue jobs, the cost per lead is proportionately, you know? Uh, 

John Wilson: yeah, 

Ethan Wright: yeah. And then, and then, hey, let's double down on the areas you, you do well in. And his roas, which as far as like return on ad spend, uh, uh, more than doubled because his [00:19:00] revenue more than doubled. Oh, yeah. And he actually decreased his ad spend by like $2,000 a month.

Yeah. He was spending 22 grand, he dropped it to 20 grand, but his revenue doubled because it's just this holistic view. Right. And then he knows, Hey, my CSRs are dialed in, my service guys, or sales guys are dialed in. Mm-hmm. But then also, like there's, the marketing arm is actually looking for, uh, every lead's not created equal.

And how can I send every dollar to its highest and best use at all times? Yeah. And that actually takes, like, effort and attention. Yeah. It takes a lot of work and thinking about it, but, um, you know, that can just make a massive difference. Um, and it's, and cost per lead wasn't even his problem. 

John Wilson: Yeah, I feel like, um, you know, as we were talking about like the operational enhancements, um, on one hand, like, you are right.

Like, it, it's, and I'm not, not dogging on it. It's like, yeah, you don't know this. And, and, and, [00:20:00] and I'm like just having gone through the whole journey, like we're not as big as we're going to be, but like I remembered not having call center dialed and I remember my call takers responding that way, and I remember how much work it took and, uh, and I remember, and it's sort of like if you, that's why I get really like, obsessed, uh, and I mean really obsessed about this just three point system inside our business where like, how do we focus on each problem one at a time?

'cause what you just said to like totally, absolutely true. And as an owner it is so demoralizing too. Listen to your calls that you spent so much money on. Yeah, yeah. And hear them just like completely butchered. Like it is painful to listen to. Um, and I've had just had to listen to a lot. So, so we, what I like to focus on when I think about [00:21:00] improvements, 'cause what you just said is absolutely right, but like you, you gotta eat it one bite at a time.

Yes. Yeah, totally. So like, you've got your lead, you have your sale, and you have the install the fulfillment. So like, this is the three pillars that we run our business by. I know we've shared it with you guys a lot, but like the lead is like this all encompassing, like there's a bucket of things inside the lead.

Yeah. There's, okay, well what's your, what's your brand? Yeah. What are your trucks, what are your uniforms? Um, what's your hiring practice? What type of customers do you serve? And like we haven't even talked about spend yet. Yeah. Um, and like all the way down to included in leads we consider our call center.

Mm-hmm. Like that's a part of the lead system. Like, hey, we got the lead now how do we book it? What do we do about the lead? Yeah. Um, and if it's in text format, what do you do? So it's complicated. So yeah, you focus on the lead and like, everything that touches the pre-revenue lead or pre-appointment lead.

Yeah. Uh, [00:22:00] the second one, like, okay, what will your technicians even do a good job when they get out to the house? Maybe, maybe not. And like, that's the sale. Yeah. That's the sale piece. Are we talking about how to upsell? Are we talking about options? What's our accountability there? How often are we training?

There's a lot going on. Like years of things to work on, on just that step. Yeah. Um, and then the fulfillment, for better or worse, that's, you know, 'cause 'cause the customers you guys tend to probably work with are the smaller contractors. That's probably the only thing that they're actually good at is that final thing.

It's like, well, I can plumb up fucking anything, but I, you know, I don't know how to do the other two. 

Yeah. 

Um, so I don't know. Like, I, I think it's easy to say, but just remembering like the last nine years of my life, I'm like, oh my God. It, it took us a long time to dial in. 

Sam Preston: Yeah. Yeah. 

John Wilson: Feel, I mean, right now I feel like we are good.

Yeah. Yeah. Like, we're fucking good. And the [00:23:00] only departments that we're not good are the departments that we, that we've changed from this like three step process. So we actually have two departments right now where we're like overhauling because they have four steps instead of three. And like, it breaks Yeah.

At four steps. Uh, that's the magic number. Yeah. I think, I don't know, or at least it's how my brain works. Field Pulse is the all-in-one field management solution for growing home service companies. Field Pulse is designed to simplify your day-to-day operations by combining everything you need into one platform.

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That's Field, E-U-L-S-E. Head to their website to learn more. Field pulses.com. So what, 

Sam Preston: what does, what's the size then of a company that should be starting to focus on that for, for example, like we, when we look at SEO, we sell SEO, we love SEO. You should absolutely be doing SEO. 

John Wilson: Don't do it until you're at least 1.5 million.

It just doesn't matter. Yeah. I mean, probably. I mean, SEO is like crazy. Yeah. Um, it's crazy game. And I know I'm talking to game two. Yeah, I know, I know. I'm talking to two like SEO guys, but like it does work. We, we threw, um, we threw this tool up on our website to like help capture, uh, like customers. Yeah, you can check it out.

Go to my website, check on my website, better call wilson com. Uh, we check out my website and we put this thing on to like sort of walk through a cart [00:25:00] like experience and we, we no paid. Yeah. And zero paid to it. Pure organic. And we got like 300 hits on it in the first 30 days. Yeah. And we sold $250,000 of shit off of that.

That's pretty in the first 30 days. Pure organic. Okay. Like, that's, that's awesome. Freaking crazy. And that's SEO that's us showing up when we need to show up. 

Yeah. 

Uh, it, it is a wild game. We started when we were like two or $3 million probably. 

Yeah. 

Um, it, and just like everything else, like we just, you know, obviously it came up as like a question mark of why are we doing this?

But like, I'm sure for Tommy Melo it's even more stark where he's probably driving millions a month. Yeah. Yeah. Off of his, 'cause I'm driving in the two hundreds now we're on our third or fourth month of 200 plus attributable to our org organic site. So we're, uh, but Tommy's probably in the millions. Yeah.[00:26:00] 

Like a month. 

Ethan Wright: Well, and it goes, it kind of goes back to like, um, what's the best use of your dollar today? 

John Wilson: Yeah. 

Ethan Wright: Um, 'cause I think when Sam says like, Hey, I, you know, organic or SEO is great, but maybe not when you're. Like smaller, that that's not necessarily saying like, Hey, if you had an unlimited budget, of course you're gonna do that.

Well, you have to 

John Wilson: handle Yeah. You like, you have to handle 

Ethan Wright: today and you have to handle nine months from now. Exactly. And, and some companies are in the spot where it's like, I'm so, you know, I have to choose one or the other based on the budget I have. And so Oh, you 

John Wilson: always choose today. 

Ethan Wright: Yes, exactly. Get the plane off the ground.

Yeah. Yeah. And then usually it's like, okay, once, once we use the fuel, usually like the analogy is paid ads off the ground and then you start to kind of shift the, to where you're in the air. Yeah. And you can kind of reallocate budget differently. Yeah. But of course, organically is 

John Wilson: best fuel. I mean, we think about, you know, the way you could, the way, uh, like a framework you could use is what percentage of my budget is paid?

Uh, [00:27:00] lead versus branded. Yeah. For this sake, we're gonna consider SEO to be branded, but you know, it's gonna drive organic traffic. Uh, so that is how we approach it. So our budget, like we actually track it daily. I wish I could pull it up. On the screen, but, um, next time, do you? No. Okay. We'll, we'll do that.

They'd be sick. But, um, so we track our spend every day and it's, I think 68 to 73,000 is how much we spend on leads. Just the lead a month. So that's our expected spend. Yeah. So is that three grand a day or something? And then we add another 40 grand on top for branded spend. Yeah. So that's gonna be our SEO work, that's gonna be our, uh, like TV ads.

Yeah. Radio. Yep. You know, we're doing billboards. That'll be another 10 on there. Um, so we break it out into those two categories and that really helped us a lot figure out like, [00:28:00] Hey, we need this lead for today. Yeah. We literally need it. Yeah. But in nine months from now, how do we grow the pie? Yes. And that's this other section of the budget.

Yeah. 

Ethan Wright: We'll usually like Got it. Similar framework when I talk with a lot of people, but it's, it's almost, um. Where are you capturing demand on one side where it is today, and then like, uh, not, not, I don't know if created demand's the right, the right word, but like Yeah, yeah. It is. You're, you're hoping you're generating 

John Wilson: demand.

Ethan Wright: Exactly. So like when someone sees your billboard, you'd get really lucky. Yep. The moment that they saw your billboard, their, their wife called and said, Hey, our water heater went out. Right. Yeah. 

John Wilson: Yeah. 

Ethan Wright: But if, if someone's in the shower and it turns ice cold, they're, they're going to search. They're, they're presenting their demand.

Yeah. There. Right. And so that SEO is kind like, depending on what you're thinking about it as can be kind of in both. Yeah. Because if someone's like, wa, you know, 24 7 Yeah. Plumber. If you can show up organically for that, that's still like, you're capturing demand where it is. And then what's really cool is like, [00:29:00] you can do that in a lot of different ways.

It can be your website, but it also can also, you know, your Google business profile. Like I know we've seen. Like a ton of your calls and, and leads, like, we'll drive from that too. And yeah. 

John Wilson: G b's crazy. Yeah. 

Ethan Wright: G's crazy. And it's, and it's another thing where, again, usually on, I'm talking to a smaller business, I say, Hey, your dollars today should probably go towards leads for today.

John Wilson: Yeah. But 

Ethan Wright: the things that you can do that don't necessarily scale or how you can actually grow your organic right now. Right. So it's like, how do you in incentivize your team to, uh, to get reviews? 'cause you can grow your, your GMB, there's a lot you can do other than this, but you can't grow it at all if you're not constantly getting good reviews on it.

Right. And so those can come from, hey, it started as a paid lead that then is also contributing to my organic. And so it's like, um, you know, like you said, like, hey, the, the smaller. Companies we might work with. Like Yeah. What they're great at is fulfillment. Like they do a great job. Sure. Yeah. Like, 

John Wilson: I mean, they're, they're plumbers, they're 

Ethan Wright: [00:30:00] electricians.

Yeah. Yeah. And so, and so they are doing five star worthy work. 

John Wilson: Yeah. 

Ethan Wright: But they're not always thinking to actually go and make the ask for that review. Yeah. And that's one of the simplest things you can do, but I always tell people it's so 

John Wilson: overpowered crazy. Like, know it's crazy. The larger, the larger companies that I talk to, it's almost like, um, I feel stupid half the time when I talk to these guys.

'cause like, it's so clear how much I overcomplicate stuff. Uh, but I was talking with, uh, Tommy Mellow in January and like one of his big strategic goals. Like, I was like, Hey, we were just talking about our goals for the year, and one of his like three was to add, it was like 40 more Google my business profiles.

Yeah. And like that was, that was the goal. And that was like an organizational moving goal. And he has a team built around adding GMBs and like that is so important to what they're trying to do, and it is literally something [00:31:00] that anyone can do. Now, granted, we can't all add 60 and we don't all have a team, but like add two, just Yeah.

How are we thinking about GMBs? Yeah. Is it optimized? I have this, uh, I have a friend who's like, he, I get a lot of inspiration from him and how he thinks about GMB and even like the words inside your responses for reviews. Yes. A hundred percent matter. For local SEO, 

that's what we do. 

Yeah. The, yeah. The product descriptions updates.

Q like crazy, QA, 

Ethan Wright: everything. 

John Wilson: Yeah. Like there's an infinite and number of things that you could work on. Just on your GMB. Yes. Like, it is wild. 

Ethan Wright: Well, and that's usually, like, there's two things I tell people Earl, that are earlier on too. Um, one is like, the best money you can spend is whatever it takes to get your team to get more reviews.

Uh, to gather more reviews. So if that's like, Hey, it's a, i I spend 500 bucks a month or 300 bucks a month on a reward for some internal competition we have for the most reviews. [00:32:00] Oh, man. Like, if you get, you know, 50 reviews out of that, how, what, three bucks reviews. We're literally 

John Wilson: doing a Rolex right now.

Ethan Wright: There you go. And, and I'm literally, how do I sign up for, 

John Wilson: so we have two different goals. So like on the sales side, because, because our whole, I, first off, I believe so firmly in the lead, uh, sale fulfillment that we actually reorged last year, and that is the structure of our org chart. Like every sales falls, falls in there.

Yeah. That's the, that's the directors of each vertical. Uh, so like on the sale and fulfillment side, we created a quarter two program where like, hey, all we care about for the next 90 days is reviews. Yep. The winner from this team gets a Rolex. That's the sales team, the winner. And, but like the install guys.

I love bls. Like they could not give a fuck about this Rolex. They're like, dude, what the fuck am I, I'm gonna, I'm not gonna, I'm gonna get like dirt on it. 

Yeah. 

So we were like, so we created a separate price for them and it's like a $5,000 Milwaukee tool Shopping spend. I was gonna say. Cool. I was gonna say like [00:33:00] a grill, A smoker.

Yeah. Smoker. Second price. Smoker's second price. That's amazing. But no, I, I totally agree. Like, we literally put a Rolex on the line. 

Ethan Wright: Well, and, and think however many reviews you, you guys generate, like, let's say the numbers, like you be thousands and, and you're gonna end up spending like three bucks for five star review.

Yeah. If I was a company that could somehow sell you five star reviews, you would empty your pockets for that, right? Oh yeah. So I always tell people like, that's, that is illegal. Yes. 

John Wilson: Don't do it. Yeah. Keyword 

Ethan Wright: if, um, but, but then secondly, like what I tell people is, um, yeah. Best money you can spend Yeah. Is on those is on getting your team to care about reviews.

Yeah. Yeah. And then two is like. There's so much you can do on your profile, like you said, like it's crazy. And, and that's like something that we do there. There's, but I always tell people like that I show how like updates q and a keywords in your review responses. Yeah. I mean, it's money. If you can get a somehow customer to leave keywords and pictures or like pictures.

Can you give him to leave a 

John Wilson: [00:34:00] picture? Yeah. That apparently counts as like the old LSA gold reviews. Yeah. If you have pictures. Yeah. 

Ethan Wright: So it's just like all these things that it's like, uh, if you really need to be like lean and mean, like go do these things now. We, we love to help people with your, with their gps 'cause there's some other stuff on the back end and like, you know, whatever you can do.

But really a lot of what it comes down to with Google is like, hey, they built out all these features on their profiles and like the q and a section, like. I don't care about it. You don't care. Like you just gotta do it. Your consumers don't care about it. But Google paid some engineer way too much money to build it so they care.

Yeah, yeah. And so like go use it and use it in a way. Play Google game. Exactly. And, and so it's like if 

John Wilson: they suggest it, 

Ethan Wright: do it. You do it, do it. Which is funny 'cause even in like ads accounts, you'll see like, they will tell you if something is like good or bad or not. Mm-hmm. And so many times you do these PPC audits and I'm like, here, I'm here to tell you all the things that, like Google isn't telling you, but it's kind of crazy that when you look in this account, everything says it, it says you're doing is bad and like [00:35:00] nothing's been changed yet.

Yeah. It's still full stack. Yeah. Well, I think 

John Wilson: people are convinced it's wrong, but like they have the data. You know, we, we started getting, um, we've been, guys, we're going on, we're, we're on YouTube now. Oh, I know. We're pushing really hard on this. I've seen hell over, let's go. And Google like, offers us up like recommended topics.

Yeah. That people like, Hey, you showed up. In this amount of feeds and the people that are you're showing up for in those feeds also search something like this. 

Yeah. 

So we got, um, oh yeah. A lot of Air Pros questions. Yeah. How to grow a plumbing company was one, which was like every, a uniquely well-suited topic.

Yeah, 

yeah, 

yeah. Uh, but it was interesting. So what we started doing was like, Hey, I mean, Google knows, like they have the data. So the moment we get those suggestions, like yesterday we ripped one in like 20 minutes from John telling me we had this suggestion. 'cause like, hey, if they're saying it like, yeah, you should, let's just do 

Ethan Wright: it.

Great. Should do it. And it's, and it's interesting too because I think like on this side of the fence, there's certain perspectives or thoughts about [00:36:00] any search engine. Like let's use specifically Google. 

John Wilson: Yeah. 

Ethan Wright: Um, but what you have to think about with Google is like they also are thinking of the consumer.

John Wilson: Yeah. 

Ethan Wright: And so, uh, an example is like you get in your ads account, you get rated on your ad relevance. That is a factor in, if you will show up, like even sometimes the cost, you, what'll cost you to actually get a a, a click. Um, and so if Google sees that you're, uh, running, you know, a very general plumbing ad, but someone specifically is looking for like 24 7 drain repair mm-hmm.

And you don't make mention of 24 7 or drain Yeah. Google's gonna say this is an average rated ad because they want the most, it's mid. Exactly. Literally you guys are mid, pretty mid. And so the, and so they want to serve their consumer by serving them the most relevant ads. Same with like your landing pages.

Google keeps coming back, Google will tell you 

John Wilson: Yeah. 

Ethan Wright: Is your landing page relevant? Like, they're not gonna let you, they're not gonna send consumers to your site if you're running violin [00:37:00] lesson ads to a, you know, a safari whatever experience website. Like those are totally separate things and Google doesn't wanna waste their consumer time.

So, so similar to, uh, like going at your q and a section and things like that on your GBP. Uh, people may say like, oh, that is a waste of time. Like, who actually uses that? Why would it be a ranking factor? Or like, the Google suggested things, why would I do it? Or products. Yeah. Or products. You know, products is 

John Wilson: kind of a weird one, but like, you gotta, all of that is things that show up.

Ethan Wright: And, and it's because Google ultimately is saying, okay, how much information are you giving to a consumer? How helpful Do you see how relevant, how authoritative on these things? Not just because they're like, we're Google, so like dance the way we want to, but ultimately they want to retain as many consumers as they can in their search ecosystem.

John Wilson: Yeah. 

Ethan Wright: And so they're trying to force you to play the game that they think will keep people with them. 

Sam Preston: Yes, yes, yes. And, but, and, but, and buts, Google is not your friend. They are trying to spend your [00:38:00] money. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. So there are things that it will suggest you do. Yeah. Yeah. That will screw you.

I've been on so many of these calls with these Google reps and they're like, Hey, we need to turn all these, these keywords to broad. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I'm not gonna show up for just anything. Google thinks I should show up. Mm-hmm. For, so, especially when it's a word you already know it's performing well, you're like, I don't need to add to it.

So you're absolutely right. Google's gonna have its ratings and some of those things are very key. Like ad relevance is super key. You should always look that your, your your keyword copy. Yeah. It's rating is so good on that. Yeah. But there are certain things in your account, it's gonna say, we wanna see this.

And if you do that, you will be literally just lighting money on file. Yeah. A lot of times 

Ethan Wright: it is with the things that it's like, will this affect how much I actually spend? Yeah. Yes or no. Okay. Then maybe I'm, maybe it's not something as much That's funny. 

Sam Preston: So it, it, it's both you. It's, and that's why Google Ads is more complicated than something like L-S-A-L-S-A get in there and turn it on.

Uh, optimize it for sure, but like, it [00:39:00] is not nearly the skillset required for Lever as Google ads. Yeah, yeah, 

John Wilson: for sure. I wanna, I wanna hear a little bit about, uh, what you guys are doing internally and what you're thinking about externally on ai. I know you brought on Automations team. I'm, I'm just interested right now in people who are doing automations internally.

Sam Preston: Yeah. 

John Wilson: Like we've, we've done this. Are you guys using like Rep or Lovable or N eight N how much is it pronounced? N is it like NA or like how am much supposed to pronounce that? 

Sam Preston: Uh, na no, I don't know. NANI think is what it is. Okay. Um, doo Yes. So, um, if you don't know, NAN is a, um, kinda like a Zapier or a make.com.

Yeah. Uh, automations platform. It's a little bit, uh, more complex than those. So you could do a little bit more as far as like AI agents, um. So, which again, I don't, I don't know how much, how much nerding I'm about to start doing right now. I didn't. We 

John Wilson: should do it. I will at this conference. I'll like, I'll preload you at this conference I [00:40:00] was at.

I hosted it. It was a lot of fun. It was so cool. Cool. The best conferences I've ever, the best conferences I have ever. Huge. The hosts we're amazing. Good looking, just incredible, very handsome. Great. Comb over. One of them was short. Um, so, so we had this, uh, one of our, one of our speakers and it's HoldCo Comp.

So buying businesses, incubating businesses, like how to think about that, how to approach it. And one of our speakers, uh, is Brian Rand. And Brian is just like an awesome speaker. Uh, he's a lot of fun to listen to. Uh, fun anecdote, like we're giving away Rolexes for our reviews contest. And his sales manager for one of his companies is the third largest purchaser of GWAS in the us.

No 

way. And they give, they give their gwas, he buys 13 a quarter and he gives 13 gwas every 90 days to his highest performing sales reps. That's amazing. So, uh, [00:41:00] we're in wrong 

Ethan Wright: industry. Yeah. Don't get any ideas either. Absolutely, 

John Wilson: absolutely wild. Um, a lot of fun to listen to, but one of the things he's focused on right now is, uh, AI and how it can be used for like overhead arbitrage.

Yes. 

So, if I'm wanting to buy a plumbing company in Georgia, or even like, you know, whatever, if I wanna buy a plumbing company two hours away, how can I take their expected overhead and instead of it being 35 to 40%. How can I make it 25 to 30 and like, what's the arbitrage lift that I can get on that? So like, the way that we're approaching that, we've talked a ton on the show about like, we have, well, like we, we are now in a remote first hiring mentality where, uh, which is still shockingly innovative for the industry.

But if we're looking at hiring, like we're looking overseas first, um, and now we're adding in automations on top of that. Yeah. So like, [00:42:00] how are we reducing lift? How are we like take finding friction points in the business and reducing those friction points. 

Sam Preston: Yeah. 

John Wilson: Um, so yeah. How, how are you guys thinking about this?

Sam Preston: So, when I think of ai, I mean we literally just hired an a, a, a team for this, right? This is a, a massive, uh, opportunity for us specifically in the marketing industry. 'cause we're a hundred percent remote. Everything is digital for us. It's not like we have to go. You know, plumb a house. Yeah. Right? Yeah. We are a hundred Who's missing 

John Wilson: out?

Sam Preston: Yeah. I, I actually have done it once, but never again. Um, so when I look at this, uh, from, from our standpoint, one is I want to increase the results that we get for our clients. 

John Wilson: Mm-hmm. 

Sam Preston: Um, and two is I want to increase the capacity of my team. 

John Wilson: Yeah. 

Sam Preston: Right. So if I can get, because you know, our game is all about how, how do we keep people for as long as possible?

Yeah. Well, the best way you can do that is get them good results. 

John Wilson: Yeah. 

Sam Preston: Um, and so the, what I'm looking at it [00:43:00] to do is, um, have very specific AI agents that live inside of our client's accounts. Uh, and so looking for one specific thing, so where are we, where, where do we see keywords that have been, have enough data behind it that aren't converting to alert us Now?

Uh, I want one that is basically just sitting in there that's like. Hey, like if there's any kind of big time movement, like ad stop spending, uh, something like that, like just alerting us at any time of, you know, hey, something's looking off on this account, let us know our team's in there three times a week, uh, anyways, at a minimum.

Mm-hmm. But if you have something that's always in there that can catch problems be before they become real problems, um, things as simple as like, it, it's job is to find, you know, you're talking about landing pages, always connecting ad copy to landing pages and always just making sure 

John Wilson: that 

Sam Preston: hey, these, everything is good and when it's not alerting us.

John Wilson: Yeah. 

Sam Preston: Um, we're looking at it from a [00:44:00] capacity of being able to audit our clients' websites. You know, I want to at some point get to a place where the kickoff meeting that we have with our clients, we have so much already built out. Because we're able to automate, like, Hey, this is our client's, you know, local area.

These are the top three to five biggest competitors in the area. This is what they're doing wrong. This is the opportunity gap that you, you're not even taking advantage of. So Ethan goes to the sales meeting, uh, and had, and, and closes that deal, uh, because we're able to show the client or the prospect at this point, look at all this opportunity that 

John Wilson: Yeah.

Sam Preston: That you don't even know about. And they're like, wow, Ethan, how did you get all this done before call? 

John Wilson: Almost like opportunity arbitrage. 

Sam Preston: Yeah. And then the second thing is the, the capacity, right? Like, how can we get more done, right? Mm-hmm. You know, we're, we're in business to make money, so we wanna be profitable as possible.

Mm-hmm. Um, and so how can we take one person, [00:45:00] uh, spend a lot of money on someone that's super talented? At strategy and then take all these other jobs that that would be a part of their job. 

John Wilson: Yeah. 

Sam Preston: And automate it. 

John Wilson: Yeah. 

Sam Preston: Right. Like there's no reason that we should have an account manager writing up a report on a weekly basis.

Yeah. That should be all the data that's aggregated from the CRM to the ads account, to their overall marketing goals pulled in for them to review it and go, 

John Wilson: yeah, 

Sam Preston: this makes sense. Okay, let's send that off. Um, versus them having to type something out. 

John Wilson: Yeah. 

Sam Preston: You know, it would just save hours. So like that's the type of stuff that we're trying to go like, Hey, how do we automate this so that, uh, we can get better results at a, at a higher capacity.

John Wilson: Yeah. I think, uh, we, we were, we had our quarterly this morning and it was quarter two and one of the pain points that came up was, uh, capacity of our leaders. And it was interesting how much LIFT is going [00:46:00] into reporting and analytics. Mm-hmm. Every day, week, month. And I think that only accelerates the bigger you get because you need, you just need a lot of information.

Yeah. To run this type of business, like there's 50 sales reps, we have to know what's going on. Yeah. With those 50 sales reps, we get hundreds of leads a day. We have to know what's going on with all of these leads. So it is interesting. Um, yeah, that's one of our approaches too, is how do we gain leverage for our existing team and how do in instead of remote first, so the, the way that I've compared this is you, you can hire American, you can hire remote, or you can put in a software in place.

Alternatively, now some type of ai mm-hmm. Yeah. Solution. Yeah. But yeah, the automation, we, yeah, we see a big opportunity in it. But we're, we're, we're, we still feel like we are fumbling in the dark. Yeah, we got our [00:47:00] first app out. Um, let's go. Yeah. I made it internally it and functioning nice. Like it went live Monday.

Nice. Very cool. Um, that's amazing. And it is, uh, it's a response time app. So for hr, accounting, fleet marketing and accounting, IT dashboards are time to respond and are time to resolve Yeah. Issues, which is apparently something that we needed. Yeah. Because once you start like growing, like you need to track it more.

Um, but it was, yeah, it's a, it's cool, but like we're trying to figure out what to do next to get the highest lift. 

Ethan Wright: I think too. Like it's just gonna become, um, you know, another investment column on the, on the spreadsheet. Um, and where we even had the conversation 'cause we were like, had a few different positions we wanted to hire for.

John Wilson: Yeah. And we were kind of 

Ethan Wright: in between two and one of 'em had to do with automation and it was kind of like, well. If we hire the automation one, do [00:48:00] we need the other one? Do we need the other one? And also it will probably free up enough money to hire that person faster. Yeah. Than, than vice versa. Right. And so it's like, yeah.

And what's cool too, is what we're finding is a lot of the things that ultimately make our team productive are also the things that produce better results for our clients. And so, like nothing real, like a lot of these for us, uh, solutions kind of just go hand in hand. Um, 

John Wilson: well, yeah. I mean the, the more like friction you guys reduce, the more time you can literally spend doing the most valuable human only parts.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's how we see it too. It's, Hey, can I remove this four hours a week of reporting off your plate? And that four hours a week can go to like, working with your team. Yeah. Which that is way more freaking important than, you know, the four hours a week to look at it for 20 minutes today. 

Ethan Wright: But, but I even think like, you know, someone might look in like a digital marketing.

Like online world and be like, well of course y'all are doing a bunch of ai. I just think in, [00:49:00] and I'm sure like you're already doing this, but I think in like three, five years it's gonna be like every plumber or every trades business or service business is going to have some sort of literal, I think like a, a person on their team that it's just like they are the, whatever it's called, AI automations agents side.

Because I think both there's gonna be internal things that can be fixed and helped. And then also, uh, so much is gonna be changed externally that it's like, how do, how do, how, how do we fit our business into this different ecosystem that is, that is changing and adapting? Um, and so it's just like one of those things where I think it can seem like, oh, it's for another industry, or That's really intimidating.

'cause that's not really how our industry works. Mm-hmm. But like, it's really not as I. Uh, some things. It, it seems like, I mean, it is a 

John Wilson: bit intimidating. It's, I mean, co coming from my perspective, we felt pretty out of our depth Yeah. Uh, when doing it. But, um, and we still do, [00:50:00] like, we only have one person on the team.

We're getting ready to bring on our second. You guys have two? Mm-hmm. Yeah. We're getting ready to bring on our second. Um, and the first one was like a custom dev. 

Mm-hmm. 

And now we're getting ready to bring on an AI specialist, uh, to help support them. But it is, it does. It's weird. Yeah. I mean, it's a weird thing and it's hard to look at sections of your business, at least because I'm not used to it.

I'm sure I will get better at it with time, but it's hard to look at sections of your business if you don't come from a background that has anything to do with tech. Yes. And say I can automate that. Yep. Like task management for us. Um, if you look at it, it's. Simple. Mm-hmm. Like, it's a dashboard that shows how many tasks are open.

It's not that complicated. We could probably buy something like it off monday.com or something. Yeah. But getting all the APIs to, uh, work was more complicated. But it, yeah. I think it is. [00:51:00] It's unusual. It is. Yeah. I, I feel like in the next couple years though, it'll be very normal. It'll, it'll be normal. Yeah.

And I think you can do it small. Oh, yeah. Like, I, I think companies sub $5 million, you could figure out a way to bring on somebody part-time or, uh, you could do something Yeah. To help facilitate. 

Sam Preston: I wouldn't, yeah. If anybody wants to dip their toes in it, just go to Upwork. Yeah. Right. You can find somebody that's, you know, that does Zapier or make.com for 50 to a hundred dollars an hour that you just bring in and go, Hey, I want you to audit what we have and tell us what you would automate.

Right. Yeah. Like having that small conversation. Um, I was the one that really pushed it internally, uh, that team. Well, I feel like someone at the top 

John Wilson: of the org chart has to push it. 

Sam Preston: Yeah. 

John Wilson: Like almost every leader that I know is trying to figure out, they're either personally driving the bus on it or they're trying to figure out where do I even begin.

Yeah. 

But every [00:52:00] it's on their, it's on our, everyone's brain. Yeah. Right. And I think it has to come from the top. Uh, otherwise it, you know, doesn't seem to work as well. 

Sam Preston: Yeah. So when I'm, when I went and pushed it, my first thing was, guys, this is gonna increase capacity and increase, increase pro profitability.

Yeah. Here are the few things that I think we could Yeah. You know, immediately see Yeah. Three to five grand a month of savings. 

John Wilson: Yeah. 

Sam Preston: Uh, in the next, you know, 30 to 90 days, which is automating these things. So like, if you're trying to figure out like, does this even work for vestment? Go see if you can like, Hey, if I didn't have to have somebody do this Yeah.

I could free up 20 hours a week of their time. Yeah. And that would save me $500 a week or, you know, a thousand dollars a week. Suddenly they, okay. That's four grand. 

John Wilson: Yeah. 

Sam Preston: Great. Right Now you've already, you know, because I think you can go find offshore talent to do this. Yeah, I know you can't. 'cause I hired that person.

Yeah. We did our, 

John Wilson: ours is in Brazil. 

Sam Preston: Ours is in, uh, Columbia. 

John Wilson: Yeah. 

Sam Preston: And so, uh, yeah, you can absolutely. And it wasn't just one [00:53:00] person. It was quite a few people we had conversations with. I will say the one thing that is tricky is that, um, not everybody knows AI to that depth. 

John Wilson: That part has been hard. Got it.

Yeah. We, we, our custom dev, I mean, devs been around for a long time. 

Yeah. 

Uh, but. It was much harder to, anyone can say they're an AI expert and who's gonna call 'em out. I mean, everyone has the most 

Sam Preston: same amount of experience. Two 

John Wilson: years. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Like yeah, we're all, yeah, we all have exactly two years.

Uh, yeah. That's funny. Um, but yeah, no one's gonna call 'em out. Yeah. Because no one really knows what expert is right now. 

Yeah. 

Uh, but when, when we went to go hire the, like AI specialist to add to that team. Everyone's an AI on, on any of these, like remote hiring. Everyone's an AI specialist. Yeah. And it means that they've used chat GBD once.

Yeah. 

Yeah. 

Um, so that has been challenging. How, how did, like what were the metrics that you used to find yours? [00:54:00] Um, 

Sam Preston: so it was off of Ransom LinkedIn ads. Um, lat Am because just like there, there's a lot of great talent there. Um, and I just called it an AI specialist or an AI wizard or something like that.

Auto, uh, no, AI and Automation's Wizard. Nice. Is my title. And it's 

John Wilson: two people? 

Sam Preston: Uh, yeah, two different people. Yeah. Um, and who reports 

John Wilson: to who? 

Sam Preston: Uh, everyone reports to me. Um, so they're, they're flat. Yeah. Right now they're flat. They, they, so they report to actually my director of fulfillment. Yeah. Because ultimately she's in charge of Yeah, yeah.

Uh, capacity and, and ops, which is where they're working underneath. Yeah. We, we do the same thing. We do leads, sales ops. We actually have our, our fourth bucket is hiring or team management. Um, like people, um, I'm gonna say 

John Wilson: something that makes me. If not sound like a boomer. Definitely feel like a boomer.

Say it, say it. Just the amount of people over my career that I have heard say, oh, we're building custom software for that. I've created a lot of content [00:55:00] that's probably pretty easy to find on my, like Twitter or whatever. I've just like, that's the stupidest time I've ever fucking heard. But, but now, uh, when we're looking at team leadership, yeah, because I got a lot going on.

I don't have, I have, I can give the resources to get this started, but someone needs to be like the te the how do I find friction person. Mm-hmm. They have to, and for us it's physical because we're physically, you guys are remote and dispersed, but. We're physically located somewhere. So someone has to walk around, I think, and like feel and touch different sections of the business, work in each department, find the friction, and then lead a team to develop solutions for that.

And that's what makes me feel like a boomer is I'm, I'm this, I'm like the CEO that has to hire a young whipper snapper to lead AI into his fucking business. And I'm like, God, damnit, how did I get to be this age? Oh. But yeah, it does, it does make me feel very old. 

Sam Preston: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, [00:56:00] well, it's also moving faster than anything else is ever moving.

Yeah. It's, 

John Wilson: it's, it's fast. And the opportunities out there, I mean, all the, all the apps to support it had been really fun. Yeah. Um, yeah. But we're just making almost no use, like the first year of ai we spent, we, I mean we're, I think there's layers. 

Yeah. 

Like maybe there's three right now. I'm sure there'll be more.

But the first layer is like, are you using AI at all? 

Yeah. 

Uh, the second layer is, are you custom developing solutions to solve your problem? Yeah. And the third layer is are you replacing people? Yeah. And we are def we've been on layer one for a while. Yeah. Like, we were implemented in every team all, at least eight months ago, maybe more like even field team.

Um, we are, we've been using it in call center, like a lot to support our call functions. Um, haven't really replaced people with it, but just now the custom part. [00:57:00] So on one hand I feel like we're barely scratching the surface of ai and on the other, we're using more AI in our business than most other plumbing companies that I know.

Yeah. So it, it does feel kind of weird, but it's, 

Ethan Wright: it's one of those things where it's like we are talking and so we feel like everyone knows what AI is and like. Has tried all the different models and whatever. And then for me it's like I go talk to my dad and he's like, 

John Wilson: what? Yeah, what do you 

Ethan Wright: mean? Um, and so it's like the fact that people are having the conversation or thinking about it in general is good.

And then I think even to go back to the, you know, it being kind of an intimidating piece, and I think John, you were kind of like, Hey, how, how do you vet if someone is actually good at it or not? Like that can be a lot, especially for a much smaller company. Um, but I, what I'm also seeing is there's like the custom company by company, uh, use case where it's like this is very specifically answering a very specific problem for us.

But I'm also seeing that like a lot of the AI today. [00:58:00] Acts kind of like a software would anyway. Yeah. Like a very efficient Yeah. And, uh, and you know, forward thinking software and a lot, there's a lot of these solutions that are maybe more general, right? They're not a perfect, like only Wilson had this issue.

Yeah. But if you're a smaller plumber that I, I just, or smaller, whoever I, I don't know how to vet this or whatever. Like, there's so many tools now that are coming out that are, that are more like, hey, this is kind of a one size fits all. It will fit you. And it's making it more approachable, more efficient, more 

John Wilson: yeah.

Ethan Wright: Uh, cost effective. And so at the very least, like keeping up with what's happening. Not saying you have to go code your own app every day or anything like that, but just, um, 

John Wilson: well, I'd be like rethinking potential solutions, like the things that made sense two years ago suddenly don't make sense. Yeah. You know, we're, we're looking at, um.

I'll give an example in accounting, but we're getting ready to switch to, uh, an ERP, like a more robust accounting [00:59:00] suite. And the natural progression in our industry is QuickBooks and Sage Intact. Yeah, Sage Intact has a really, uh, strong integration with ServiceTitan. Suddenly, uh, there are much better, cheaper, faster, smoother options that are AI driven and that is a new thing.

Yep. So just be really thinking about on, on top of keeping up. But are there other solutions that may not yet be the common Knowledge thing? Yes. Yeah, because Sage intact is 50 grand to start. Yeah. And then 50 grand a year. It's a lot 

Ethan Wright: of these incumbent enterprise softwares. Yeah. 

John Wilson: Yeah. This is not a great time to be there.

Ethan Wright: Yes. 

John Wilson: Uh, but yeah, this new one, and it takes, so I'm gonna run through, because this is crazy. It takes six months to onboard onto Sage int or NetSuite. You can't test it, so you don't know if it's gonna work for you. It cost 50 grand to an outside party. Yeah, like it's a spread, maybe it's 30 grand, maybe it's 80, but ours was 50, so it cost us 50 grand to [01:00:00] integrate over six months.

And it was actually gonna be such a lift for my team that my controller was gonna have to hire an assistant controller, so 80 to a hundred thousand dollars to support the accounting department while he transitioned the rps. And then it's 50 grand a year. And you still don't know if it's gonna work or like did they do a good job integrating it could be a total cluster.

Fuck. So companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars migrating to these antiquated solutions. We found a solution that's AI driven, they can move us from QuickBooks in five days. Five fucking days. Yeah. And it's half of the price annually. Of Sage Intacct and there's no integration feed because they've designed the workflow and tech stack to do it in five days.

So there's no cost. It just, they just do it. 

Sam Preston: Hey John, I've got this great business idea. 

John Wilson: It's crazy. It's crazy. So sudden, 

Ethan Wright: anything that takes six months to implement, that's a business idea. [01:01:00] Oh, totally. It takes six months in on that six 

John Wilson: months and 50 grand. It's, yeah. Yeah. No, it's to, it's totally crazy. So, so like we were getting ready to like cut our $50,000 check in, uh, Q3, like we're gonna begin integration and now we're like deciding, hey, do we want to integrate this week or next week?

Uh, I got a couple things going on this week. Well, again, what's great 

Ethan Wright: is. 

John Wilson: We didn't have to design, play around rep and Yeah. Didn't, we didn't have to do anything. Like there's just solutions that are starting to come out Yeah. That are just simply better, cheaper, better, faster, 

Ethan Wright: more efficient. Yeah. Yeah. And so that, that's where I'm like, you don't even have to Yeah.

Be, you know, the AI wizard. Yeah. Or, or know how to 0.1 out. But you, you will see cost reduction, efficiency improvements, things like that. And so it really is just like, where is there friction in my business? Whether that's sales process, I mean friction, more excess Cost. Cost. Exactly. Like, like 

John Wilson: ServiceTitan.

I hope somebody comes up with a better solution and like they probably can like just [01:02:00] really AI driven because anyone in the industry that has a massive fucking budget is spending money on, like, that costs me 28,000 a month. Yeah. I would move. Yeah. Find me a better solution. I would move. Yeah. Like with what's the, your margins My opportunity.

Uh, the AI is your OPEX is my opportunity. So's no opex to fucking develop 

Ethan Wright: US software anymore. E. Exactly. And so it's just like friction in my business. Yeah. Like what, what, yeah. What has cost me outlandishly and can I either automate part of it or find someone who has figured that out? Like, I think that's, because then like ultimately like Yeah.

Drives your profitability, but then also like gives you an edge on what you're able to price at. Oh yeah. And so you're winning more. Yeah. And ultimately that's gonna drive your total, you know. 

John Wilson: Yeah. 

So someone's gonna come up with a ServiceTitan killer. I mean, it's just too much money. 

Ethan Wright: Yeah. Well, or, or it's gonna force, uh, yeah.

Or it's gonna force people to rethink how they price and how they deliver and all that. Like either way it's gonna be a net win for [01:03:00] it'll Yeah. Consumers or users. I don't think it'll be one ServiceTitan killer. 

Sam Preston: I think it'll be lots. Yeah. Um, the way I see is AI is gonna become a wrapper Yeah. For marketing.

Yeah. Uh, and then basically you're gonna have, instead of like one or two services softwares, you're gonna have. My stomach 10 growling. 

John Wilson: Yeah. You're hungry. No, I had sushi, but like, I feel like Ethan's just like listening to my stomach, just like, Hey. Yeah. You better hope 

Ethan Wright: these mics aren't, aren't that good?

Yeah. 

John Wilson: Thankfully. Thankfully. They're so good that they block all this out. I believe I was gonna, yeah. That's amazing. That mic won't pick up me talking at it. That's so wild. Yeah. That's wild. 

Sam Preston: Well, one of the, the, the problems that I'm actively trying to solve in our business is, um, speed of feedback loop.

So how quickly can our clients' results? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Get back to the marketing team, dude, that's wildly important. Yes. It's 

John Wilson: so important. 

Yeah. 

So, and I think, go ahead. [01:04:00] I just, my feedback as a contractor, I actually didn't realize how important that was until we were in our mid 20 millions. Yeah. So my suspicion is most people don't.

Yeah. 

But like, hey. This stuff doesn't come outta the box working. Yeah. No. Like Angie's List, PPC, even LSA, like nothing just is gonna fucking work. Yeah. Like you have to give data back mm-hmm. In order to understand what is working. Like back to your story of, hey, we found this zip code with this one service that delivered all of our roas.

That takes feedback. Yeah. 

Sam Preston: And no one, not your internal marketing team. Yeah. Not your sales team will know that intuitively. Heck yeah. So you have to consistently give good feedback, uh, on, on things. Yeah. And so we're, we're looking on like, how do we build an AI agent that like lives in inside our clients individual CRM.

Yeah. That just always is giving us feedback and pulling in data for the crm. Yeah. And from their Google ads and for their LSA and then wrapping it into something [01:05:00] tangible for us to be able to use. Yeah. Uh, which leads me to, I think we might, you know, I don't wanna speak this over, maybe I shouldn't say this on a podcast, but like.

I could see us getting quickly into, Hey, we actually create AI agents for plumbing businesses and here's like 10. Do you need any one of these tens offer? Yeah. So, um, anybody has any ideas or problems they want to be well solved, you should reach out and we'll, we can solve it. There's 

John Wilson: that one business that does that.

Sam Preston: Which one? 

John Wilson: Uh, yeah, there's probably a lot, but there's one that has like 10 little, yeah. I'm not naming 'em. Yeah, I'm, I've caught myself like five times this episode. Like, ah, I can't name them. Can't name them. I'm really working on that. Uh, you know. Would you say no free promo? No free promo. Celsius. Celsius.

CELs hides the Celsius. We have an official studio guys now a real podcast. Um, but yeah, there's a business we started using. I don't think it works very well. It'll probably get better in time, but it is these. It's the earliest [01:06:00] version of functional AI agents that we've seen. 

Mm-hmm. 

And there's eight to 10 and it's very specific roles.

So this is a marketing bot, this is a, and I think all they do is respond to emails. Yeah. It's not that robust. Uh, this is a sales bot, which I think is like clay wrap to, you know, just does outbound. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, it's not very good, but it's early stages of what you're talking about. And it doesn't cost a lot of money.

I feel like it's like $200 or something. Yeah. So, you know, I dunno. 

Sam Preston: Yeah. There's a lot of different ways being that it also barely work, so 

John Wilson: who knows If it's good, good spend, 

Sam Preston: I also don't really want to get into that game. Yeah. So if there are other options, I'd rather go that direction. Yeah. We just 

Ethan Wright: have to point people like, here, this is great.

Come, go use this one. 

Sam Preston: Yeah. I'd rather do that. But also it's, sometimes it is. I mean, that's why we got into, we did, we didn't wanna get into the website game. We actually tried to avoid that and just do our services. I think just have, I mean, 

John Wilson: the landing page is just so 

Sam Preston: important. 

John Wilson: Yep. 

Sam Preston: That's where we came into problems is we'd go, Hey, we're gonna run ads to your page, but [01:07:00] here go, go, go create landing pages.

And they're like, yeah, but we don't wanna spend 30 grand. It's like, why are you spending 30 grand on our website? It's like, well, that's what the agency quoted us. I'm like, no. Yeah. Don't do that. You don't need, you don't need a new 

Ethan Wright: website. You need a landing page. 

John Wilson: Yeah. 

Ethan Wright: Yeah. It is actually kind of wild how many people you'll talk to spend a significant amount of money on paper Click.

And send it to their homepage or something. They have a a, a service page with all of their services on it. Yeah. And it doesn't work. And it doesn't have a phone number button on it. Like, like, like unless you scroll down, you can't call or think like things like that. So, but 

Sam Preston: you know that their dad started this in 1965.

Well, and their home. 

Ethan Wright: But it's also funny 'cause I'm like, you know, you're paying someone a lot of money to manage that and you're putting a lot of spend into it. And that person never even brought up. I don understand 

John Wilson: the, the sections. It's holistic. Yeah. They, they don't understand how it relates. And we've all been trained as an industry like, Hey, Angie's List doesn't involve my website.

LSA doesn't care about what's [01:08:00] on my website. Why would PPC? So I, I think it just takes education of, Hey. Exactly. PPC sends someone to your website, then what will they see? Yeah. And like, that's the whole question. Whereas LSA is a phone call. Like, that's it. Yeah. Angela's list is a lead form. Yeah. 

Ethan Wright: Yeah. Can they, when they see they land on their website Yeah.

Do they know. I'm on the right, I'm in the right place. Yeah. This is for the right service. Yeah. And I, oh, all they have is a call button, but I don't really wanna talk to someone on the phone. Yeah. Is there a way to, there's no form or, or vice versa. 

John Wilson: Yeah. 

Ethan Wright: I can't find the phone number and I, I need to call somebody now 'cause there's two inches of water on my kitchen floor.

So like those, it's those little things again, it's like a lot, they seem so small, but when you go from specifically on spending, like, you know how much a click costs. Yep. How, how many of those convert on your website from a click visitor to a lead, how your CSR handles that lead and their conversion rate into a, uh, appointment and how many times you close that appointment to a [01:09:00] job?

Yeah. Like if you, it's just compounding. If you improve each of those by Yeah. 2%. I, it's crazy. And so, well, we, 

John Wilson: we call it, we have a, we have a, a framework for this, but we call it the circle of accountability. And it's nine prongs, 10 prongs. But it's like, obviously I focus on the three lead sale fulfillment, but even deeper into that, what, who's in front of you that has to do a good job for accounting at the end of the day to distribute profits.

So like market marketing comes first, then next is call center. Do we book it? 

Yes. Like 

literally do we book it dispatch, does it go on the right tech technician? Do we sell it installer? Do we do a good job installing it? And we, we go around and there's a couple more, but it, like, basically everyone really only has one or two things that they have to do.

Yes. Um, now you have to do 'em Well, yes. But yeah, we train on it in our leadership because, hey, this is the section of the pie that [01:10:00] you own. Like you have to do a good job here because everyone after you relies on you to do a good job. Yeah. 

Ethan Wright: Marketing can crush it and uh, and sales can flop or Yeah. Or booking or whatever.

And 

John Wilson: sales can be incredible. But you have no leads. You have 

Ethan Wright: no leads or bad leads or lower quality. Right. Like you wanna be the premium. Price in your market, right? But you're only getting leads in a less than, you know, premium area, whatever. 

John Wilson: So we spent a ton of time talking about AI inside our, uh, own businesses.

How are we, I spend a lot of time thinking about this. I've gotten absolutely nowhere with it, but I, I do consume hours. How are we feeling about AI in search and like, what that looks like and what, what we, what we should be safeguarding against? I mean, one 

Sam Preston: thing that we're, we're seeing is just a change in how people search now, right?

Um, like it used to be. And, and people still do, the majority of the searches you're gonna get is like, plumbers near me are plumbers, Los Angeles, HVAC company in Dallas. Um, but there [01:11:00] is starting to be a little bit more of like a conversational narrative. Ative. Yeah. Yeah. Like, Hey, what are the best plumbers in this area with at least five star reviews?

Uh, type of conversation that you're having with these search engines. 

John Wilson: Huh. 

Sam Preston: Um, and so, I mean, honestly, more long tail keyword type of searches are gonna become more relevant. Um, which is gonna be, I wonder if that's 

John Wilson: why we're like doing better than ever. And maybe 

Ethan Wright: that's 

Sam Preston: why we 

Ethan Wright: rock. That's always, I mean, that's always been a thing like, hey, who actually takes the time to add in long tail keywords instead of just plumber near me?

Yeah. Plumber Akron. Yeah. You know, but, but more so now. 

Sam Preston: Yeah. So I think that's gonna be a big deal going forward. Um, I'm still 

John Wilson: a staunch Google user. Yep. Yeah. Uh, I don't know why. I just, like, every time I use it I'm like, why am I doing this? It's interesting. I've gotta get you on 

Sam Preston: perplexity. 

John Wilson: I'm, I know. I, I just haven't pivoted, but I do.

It is very conversational search. Totally. It's servicing up a lot of Reddit. 

Ethan Wright: It's interesting. Yeah, that's for sure. And it's [01:12:00] interesting to, to me too, 'cause I'm a little bit similar. Um. I am, if I ever need to think through something to figure something out, like I was trying to like calculate something for taxes.

It's like I'm gonna go use GR or chat GBT because like I'm gonna be able to, when there's a ton of inputs I have that I need something to work through, it'll do it. But if it's like, that was a humble brag, 

John Wilson: no, I'm working on my taxes. There's just so much input. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, 

Sam Preston: no. So many commas. I really struggle when 

John Wilson: I got that third 

Sam Preston: comma.

Ethan Wright: No. Um, but then if it's like, gosh, I really want some Mexican, but I'm here in accurate, like, okay, Mexican restaurant. And I look at, I look on Google, right? And uh, and so like, it's interesting because I would even say like we are probably in like the top 5% of people that think and use ai. Yeah. And it still is hard and fast in that way.

And so, like you think of older generations. Oh yeah. And the general consumer is still, you know, using Google regularly. It, it's, it's interesting though, 'cause I actually, I had a cool conversation [01:13:00] with a guy. Who, uh, is actually buying a, a, an HVAC business. Oh yeah. Yeah. He's under LOI and, um, let's go. But he has a big background in AI and so we were talking through the marketing side and then I finally just gotta ask him like, Hey, I like, this is how I kind of think through it.

Like, am I thinking through this correctly? And what, what did you guys see? Because he was head of AI for a Fortune 200, I think. Um, or like a director that was doing a lot of stuff with ai. And it was interesting because, um, but there was a few things, 'cause I kind of asked him, I was like, here's how I'm kind of trying to figure out how AI works, which is like a very big thing to try and do.

But, um, I'm always trying to learn so that I can keep our team updated mm-hmm. And our clients and whatnot. So I'll just go search like, uh, I'm in Dallas and I need a new water heater. Who should I use? And then it'll gimme a list of names and it's always changing and, and. I just keep asking questions. How did you get that list?

Mm. Okay. Here's the things that factored. What, what, [01:14:00] what did you weight the heaviest in this decision? Right? Yeah. And so it breaks it down. It's like, well, you know, I used the proximity from your location along with, uh, you know, the reviews that I pulled from these three websites, you know, Google, you know, may maybe the BB, B and Yelp.

Mm. And so you kind of learn like, here are the inputs that currently matter to ai. But the interesting thing is that is constantly changing. 

John Wilson: Yeah. 

Ethan Wright: And, uh, so in this conversation with, uh, with this gentleman, you know, he's like anyone who says they've figured out, like any marketing agency that tells you we have cracked the code on ranking for ai.

Well, yeah. No one knows. Well, because it's also changing literally every second because it's learning and iterating, right? Yeah. So he is like, he's like, the search SEO game for AI is gonna be weird, and who knows how it'll end up. Yeah. But he was also like all, most of these, uh, either search engines or like the Perplexities Chat gpt.

They eventually need to monetize, like how do Google monetize ads? Yeah. And so will there be an ad element? [01:15:00] 

John Wilson: Well, that, that's like Thumbtack on Yes. Jazz. GBTI feel like we're gonna see a lot more of that. Yep. And frankly, it works. Like the ROAS on that is good. Like wildly good. I think we're at 11 or 12 times.

Well, well that, 

Ethan Wright: yeah. And that's wildly good. That's fucking wild. Yeah. And, and, but the most interesting part was I was just like, how do you, how should someone think about, like, optimizing for ai, whether it's content on your website? And he said, I, he said, I think that search is probably gonna stay similar in terms of how you rank.

It's gonna be helpful, content, relevant to the user, all those things. But he said eventually there'll be a switch and that will still be the most important. But instead of being the most helpful and relevant to a consumer, it's gonna be the most helpful and relevant to an AI agent. 

John Wilson: Well see that I texted you about this yesterday.

I actually think that that went into effect. That was an update that just happened a day or two ago. 

Ethan Wright: Yeah. Google was like, had slowly rolled out some updates and things 

John Wilson: like that. Yeah. And it, and it was making SERPs so that, Hey, does, [01:16:00] are your pages more relevant to AI bots? Well, I don't, 

Ethan Wright: but I I'm not even talking about just the content.

Yeah. I'm talking about and and what he was talking about Yeah. Is that eventually people will, not, not AI searching for them, but AI actually booking the appointment for them. So an agent Yeah. That is John Wilson's personal agent. That exactly. Um, that you go, Hey, I, I, I need a water heater replacement. And I, you know, same day.

Yeah. And what website is set up so that a, it has AI on it that can communicate with AI 'cause it's much faster, uh, ease of use for scheduling all these types of things. Now that's, that's pretty far in the future. You know, not, not crazy far, but like your grandma does not yet. Feel the need to have an AI agent, but there will probably come a time where most people are using some sort of service like that.

Yeah. And so less, you know, 'cause a lot of people will be like, SEO is completely dead because AI has it all and all that. And it's like there's no data that you actually see that, especially, [01:17:00] especially in the local service. If you had like a website has website, well 

John Wilson: it has to draw the data from somewhere.

Exactly. Like AI literally has to pull that information from somewhere. Yep. 

Ethan Wright: And, and so like if you got a recipe website now, it could just pull your recipe. And so it's like they don't need to go to your website for ads anymore. Yeah. But it's not like, Hey, I need a water heater repair. If they pull your information up there, that's not a bad thing.

'cause they're still gonna have to find someone to do it. And so, um, in, in the local service business, like it's changed the way people are searching, like Sam said. But it's not like cannibalizing what your website's SEO efforts have, have been. It's more so eventually we're gonna have to change it. Like 

John Wilson: Yeah.

Ethan Wright: Instead of catering to a human audience, it'll be, how do we simplify this for an AI agent to come find book and schedule. 

John Wilson: Yeah. 

Ethan Wright: Um, which was really interesting because, you know, um, again, it's like you'll see people on wherever it's X or LinkedIn, like, we've cracked the AI code and they've got a screenshot of one of their clients showing up in chat.

[01:18:00] GPT. Yeah. It's like, well, if I go search today, that could be totally different. 

John Wilson: Well, I mean, even if I search minute by minute. Yes. Like, I'll get different results. I ran a search for, like, I was, this was something I tried to Google and I couldn't, so I was like, fuck, fine, I'll use chat GPT. And um, it's still like produced bad results.

But I was, I was looking for a hyper-specific book. I was like, Hey, can you give me. A book. Uh, and I don't like consume video or audio really. I just make it apparently. But I, I, I just tend to read a lot. So I was like, Hey, I need a book on how to go from like, what are the steps involved or give someone's journey on 20 to $150 million in multi-location.

Like it's some someone's written that book. 

Yeah. Yeah. 

I don't know who, it's probably really small anyways. I searched it like four or five times and like, same exact words, different results, like just continuously. Um, so, so yeah. I, I feel like there, there's no cracking it yet. And I do think [01:19:00] what, what thumbtacks done is what it will probably continue to look like.

Yeah. 

Um, and eventually, yeah, it'll be probably paid, paid ads on. I mean, that's, that makes the most amount of sense. If you're gonna replace Google, then you start selling ads. Yeah. 

Ethan Wright: And then go and too, it's like how. Realistically how much, how many consumers are gonna move away from Google? And if it's not a mass exodus, then it's not in Google's best interest to cannibalize their own revenue maker, which is LSA and ads, right?

Yeah. And, and, and then the engagement of their platforms like maps and, and so forth. So, um, it's definitely something that we're always keeping up with and like, I love to share when we find stuff and like what Sam was saying, like whether it's, Hey, is there enough of a similar pain where we can go build an agent that then like our clients get to use and benefit from?

Or like, I'm, we're really all about, like, we know what we're good at and what we're not good at too. And so if there's like a tool out [01:20:00] there where we can go, like, it doesn't really, we don't really benefit from this, but like, you will benefit from this. Like, we want, we just kind of think of everything as we're partners.

And so the better your business does, the better, you know, we'll ultimately do. And um, and so yeah, it's like we just, we wanna stay on top of this stuff. That we are being effective, but also so that we can actually add a lot of value outside of just like the small world that we live in within, you know, the, the grand scheme of your business.

John Wilson: Yeah. I think the core structure is gonna remain the same. 

Yeah. 

So regardless of what happens with ai, even what happened with Google or whatever, businesses have to be listed somewhere and they will be indexed and they will be searchable. And wherever that can happen, someone's gonna sell ads. Yeah.

Because like, people wanna grow. Yeah. So I feel like the way we're trying to approach it is just to be flexible, um, and like keep an eye on it. [01:21:00] But it, it's, there's a lot of talk about what could happen and like, people concerned, but like, what's actually happening is not much like really inconsistent results from chat GPT.

We've added Thumbtack, which that's been kind of cool. Mm-hmm. Um, like Google's still just more consistent. 

Ethan Wright: We're gonna look so dumb when this is all wrong and AI's just taking over the world. Yeah, 

John Wilson: yeah. I mean, but they're gonna sell ads. 

Ethan Wright: I know. I, 

Sam Preston: I, I'm mostly kidding, but also caveat. Yeah. My guess is it's gonna turn very much into Amazon.

Uh, so you think about like, uh, running ads on Amazon. Yeah. It's very much product centered. Yeah. Uh, and then it's SEO based. And so instead of, because you, you're only gonna get so many of these spots, so you're gonna run ads on chat GPT. Yeah. You're gonna run ads on perplexity, you're gonna run ads on Clot, or whatever the search engine of choice is, and you're just gonna have to run it the same way you do Google ads, right?

Like, you drive traffic to your website and phone calls, or make it super easy for them [01:22:00] to book appointments and then make sure that there's an actual feedback loop and a return. And if there is, you throw more money at it. If you don't, you'll kill it. But you're right. Like they're, they're going to make money off of this.

They're gonna make a lot of money off of this. They're not gonna mess it 

John Wilson: up. 

Mm-hmm. 

Sam Preston: Yeah. 

John Wilson: Yeah. I wonder what, I wonder what the value of like home service advertising is. Um, it's a big industry. It's a big industry. It's 

Ethan Wright: massive. 

John Wilson: I mean, it's just so ridiculous. Think of 

Ethan Wright: LSA, right? There's only so many categories that they Yeah.

Actually made I'm sure that 

John Wilson: publicly reported. Yeah. Like what the revenue on that product is. Are you Google it? You can, because you can 

Ethan Wright: be, I mean like if you're, because like, 

John Wilson: let's just say ad spend is 10% of like, uh, total market size, which I thought the market size, I mean, I don't want to overstate it and sound ridiculous, but I remember it being like fucking crazy of 

Ethan Wright: Google's like market of their revenue 

John Wilson: share or what?

Like the size of the home service market in general. How much [01:23:00] revenue is driven through home service and home repair? 

Sam Preston: Hold on. We're, we're using Chad GBT right here. Oh damn. Marketing services. Okay. So I. Um, it looks like, uh, the home and, uh, so excuse me, the home service industry is a $700 billion little small in industry.

Yeah. So 

John Wilson: 70 billion, yeah. Ish. 80 billion of advertising spend that, like the vast majority of that is gonna be digital. Yeah. Wild. Like that's crazy. That's fricking crazy. Good business style. So, yeah. So yeah, to me, like yeah. Good. Yeah. Great business owner. Yeah. I, uh, yeah, I think be flexible and I think, you know, get ready to spend and if you're large enough, focus on brand.

'cause brand is, brand is sort of like a new moat. It's kind of interesting. Uh, whereas like for the past five years, and I advocate ignoring it too, until you're a certain size, but for the past few years it hasn't had to [01:24:00] matter because cost per lead has been so low. Yeah. Like $80 leads are like, that's cheap.

Yeah. So, um, but like brand is now suddenly a thing again. 

Yeah. 

Totally. Um, this was great. Before we end, I wanna do a couple quick hits. Okay. This, I'm a small American plumber, just a, just a plumber from Akron, just a plumber. And I'm thinking about bringing on a vendor. What should I be looking for? A marketing partner.

Sam Preston: Start there. Pardon? Uh, one that you can afford. Um, good price. And so what I mean by that is don't spend too much. Don't spend too little if you Oh yeah. 

John Wilson: Off camera. I, I'll say it so you guys don't get in trouble, but what local IQ or Yeah, local iq. Local. Like you, I think it was 

Sam Preston: look like 

John Wilson: they were, like they were charging someone 37% ad spend.

Sam Preston: Yeah. We audited that account, 

John Wilson: that insane. And then I know Scorpion for us, I, I don't remember, I don't remember what it was, but I. 

Ethan Wright: I think average when you think of [01:25:00] percentage of ads, but it, it'll be somewhere from low end would be like 15 from what we see in high end. We'll be in, you know, 30 and maybe more.

Yeah. 

John Wilson: Um, well I actually think our, our LSAs were what was 10 with Scorpion. Yeah. And our PPCI think was 20. Yeah. 

Ethan Wright: Well, and that's like one thing, it kind of goes into like, what do I look for in a event? Or like, even maybe red flags. But yeah, we are just big on like, uh, incentives and Yeah. And being aligned.

Uh, what is it, Charlie Munger? Like, show me an incentives. I'll show you the outcome. 

John Wilson: Well, that was my story with Scorpion. It's what pissed me off so much is because they commissioned my LSAs at a lower dollar. They refused to allocate budget to it. Yep. Because they got 20% on PPC, but they got 10% on LSA, so three years ago, or four years ago when we were still working with them.

They couldn't figure out how to spend $200 a week on our LSAs, $200 a week. I spend 15 now, like zero issue. And we turn it off. Like we could spend more. Yeah. Yeah. And they just, I mean, now looking back, once we [01:26:00] switched and we understood what their like structure was, we're like, oh, you just didn't, because it was 10% here.

Yeah. And 20% here. Yeah. That is bullshit. Yeah. And so, 

Ethan Wright: and, and there's kind of like two levels of incentives to look for. It's, it's like on a company level. So like an easy example is ad spend, right? We don't charge a percentage of ad spend e that's somehow the industry norm, but it never really made sense to us because you want us to spend your budget in the best possible way.

John Wilson: Mm-hmm. 

Ethan Wright: And we would grow our revenue if we constantly got you to spend more money. And so the question then is not how can we get John's cost as good as possible? It's how can we keep John's cost just good enough that we can ask for more and spend. 

John Wilson: Yeah. 

Ethan Wright: And so that's like a company level, but that usually trickles down even into like the account manager.

The typical role of an account manager is they're a generalist and so they're like, they don't actually know Pay Per Click or LSA or SEO or website. They're just kind of like a [01:27:00] salesperson, customer relationship manager. A lot of times their bonus is tied to the total revenue they grow. So that does two things.

Yeah. And incentivizes them to try and get you to spend more on ads. And then also when you think you're getting a better deal 'cause you have a smaller budget, so hey, I'll pay a percent and so my fee will be lower. Well, you represent much less of their total goal, so you get less attention. And so we always try and think, like, we try and reverse engineer like, okay, if John knew how to run a PBC account or how to build an SEO campaign, what would he optimize for?

And what would he think about? And then we try and actually like pay our people based on that. Yeah. So the happier the client is and the more aligned with the strategy our account managers are, the better they get paid, the happier you are. And then hopefully for us, we're like, that's just gonna keep a long-term relationship.

Yeah. And we even, like, we remove that generalist account manager role. Like if you work with an account manager with us and you're doing PPC, [01:28:00] you're working with someone who is working in your pay per click account that morning, uh, that actually sets a strategy that actually knows how to talk about what your results have been.

So when you get on a call and you go, Hey, what's the deal with this? It's not, well, let me go email someone on the team. We'll get back to you. It's, well, let me pull up your account 'cause I actually saw that this morning too. Um, and so what we've found is like we have certain metrics and requirements of how often an account manager has to do.

Certain things and check certain things and and whatnot. But they usually end up doing more than that just because they wanna make more money and their, their pay is tied to the results you actually care about. Yeah. Not vanity metrics, not just, we got you a bunch of clicks and impressions, but your revenue was produced and here's your return and your cost per lead looks like, and so on and so forth.

So a big one is, um, is definitely incentives. Another big one, I think you've talked about it before, but ownership, um mm-hmm. Whether, I think the most common thing that we'll see people get surprised by is when they don't own their [01:29:00] website. And so they've been, that was a big shock. Always a painful conversation.

Well, it's like you pay someone to build your website and then you, $28,000 for us. Geez. And then you, but then you pay them to do SEO work on that site for years. 

John Wilson: Yep. 

Ethan Wright: And then you wanna make the decision that actually the results or whatever you've given us have been great. Yeah. The relationship's not good.

We wanna leave. Well, not only do you not own your website, everything you've paid for multiple thousands of dollars a month mm-hmm. Goes down the drain. Well. And so 

John Wilson: do you own your website? Chrome does have a look back machine. It's true. Yeah. So I say, if they fuck you, you fuck 'em back. So that's what we did.

Yeah. 

So we actually hired a VA to replicate the site in 24 hours, which we copied the entire fucking site, which we 

Ethan Wright: help a lot of people do that. Yeah. As well. Um, like really common for us to, to build those sites, um, and, and keep the traffic and, and the, the SEO intact. Yeah. Um, but even like a lot of people don't own their own ads accounts.

Yeah. And there, that's a big problem for two reasons. There's no transparency. Mm-hmm. So you're relying on second party data for Yeah. [01:30:00] All your metrics, but also I. Like, you can't even go in and see if there's any activity in there. Yeah. And how well they're doing. Yeah. Like we do free audits a lot of the time for PVC accounts and I go, Hey, can we audit your account?

Well, how would I get that access? Well now you don't even know how well it's going. And then on the flip side, um, all the data that you build up over time in that account, that's actually useful. You don't get, if you ever switch. 

John Wilson: Yeah. And 

Ethan Wright: so I'm always honest with people. I'm like, if you don't own your account, you're gonna go through a little period where like you, we don't have a ton to work off of.

So we're kind of, we're having to backtrack a little bit. Yeah. So I always tell people like, if it's, if you work with us, we'd love it. If not, just make sure you own everything. Yeah. Own your stuff. Like reread your contract three times, make sure that everything that's produced is yours and you have the keys.

Yeah. And can, can go with it. So incentives and ownership are like the two big things. 

John Wilson: Yeah. Those are good ones. Uh, final one for you. What are some trends that we're seeing right now in marketing? Doesn't have to be Google. It's even better if it's not, [01:31:00] uh, that are exciting. What are we seeing? What do we like?

Ethan Wright: I think brand, I, the thing you mentioned about brand becoming a moat again is, is good because that's one of the few things that will, uh, that's less up in the air works through uncertainty. Yes, exactly. Less up in the air. Um, there's some people doing cool things, um, that's almost a little more like gorilla marketing on the organic side with like platforms like Facebook groups and next door.

Mm-hmm. Um, that have been really cool. Oh yeah. Because it's a little bit of local brand building. Yeah. Um, as well as, uh, we, 

John Wilson: we have a play on that. We haven't talked about it publicly, but we're like 60 days into it and it's really interesting. It's amazing. Well, even, um, we launched like a local brand. When the camera's off.

Yeah. I'll tell you 

Ethan Wright: about it. Well, even, um, I actually connected with a, with one of the marketing guys at Brown Roofing, um, oh 

John Wilson: yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Ethan Wright: And I know you had the CEO on a weeks ago. Yeah, he was cool. But he, uh, his marketing guy said, he's [01:32:00] like, my job is to make, uh, our owner and our name locally famous.

Yes. And every market we're in. That's awesome. And he, uh, he has talked about it before, but he's like, I have 37 lead channels because it's like, not just paid, but it's like, you know, next door, Yelp, Facebook group, Facebook page, like all these things. And they're just, uh, they have built a brand around their owner and around their, um, you know, name and slogan, um, in non-traditional ways.

So I do think there's this like, cool opportunity for arbitrage to just think outside the box. Yeah. And really, I always tell people that are, you know, like, we're doing this breaking five workshop, so like, you're, you're still smaller. You feel like that's a disadvantage. But a lot of times it's like that's the time you can do the things that don't scale.

John Wilson: Yeah. 

Ethan Wright: Right. Like, um, there's a guy. Yeah. 

John Wilson: I mean, if you're competing against, we've talked about it here, but like if, if you're competing against a bunch of companies that are like under 30, under 50, [01:33:00] I know this sounds shocking, but a lot of companies north of 20, north of 30 are still very unsophisticated.

Yes. Businesses. Yeah. Like, they don't actually know what the fuck they're doing. Um, I would say that we still don't know what the fuck we're doing and we're like, we're learning every day. Yeah. But I, and I, I feel when I look around some of our peers, like same size, I'm like, holy shit, we're miles ahead of this company.

Yeah. Yeah. And they've been at 30 million way before us. Yeah. So, yeah, I, I do think, uh, at 5 million you can meaningfully compete if you're scrappier. Yeah. 

Ethan Wright: Well, and there's, there's a, actually a friend of yours who, who we're working with now, but he, he told me, um, he eventually hit a point where he couldn't do it, but for a long time him and his wife delivered cookies every month to a new, to every new customer that got nice.

Yeah. And he was like, yeah, I can't do that. Yeah. Well, and he's like, I actually noticed a, like, I tracked, our retention rate dropped significantly once I got to the point where I couldn't do that anymore. But the people we did, they're customers forever. Right. And [01:34:00] so there's, that's actually like a good 

John Wilson: idea.

I wonder if I 

Ethan Wright: could do that 

John Wilson: there, there, because we bring on, like see there is, you can automate a lot of that stuff. There is a size where like. And, and we're just crossing into it where like dumb shit starts to make sense again. But like at $20 million, you actually don't have that much resources. I know it sounds like a lot of money, but like you, you sell a lot of costs.

Costs and don't Yeah. You really don't. And like the team is still too small to like waste a roll and waste payroll. I'm the cookie delivery guy. Yeah. Like, it's just too complicated. 

Ethan Wright: There's a, um, there's a car dealership cookie delivery guy. 

John Wilson: I'll tell 

Ethan Wright: you offline. There's actually a company that does this for 

John Wilson: No, we, we've looked into it.

Um, I think they're pretty expensive though. Yeah. 

Ethan Wright: Yeah. Um, but in Texas there's a group of car dealerships, um, called Sewell and, uh, and their, their like tagline is Customers for Life. And, and the guy who started Sewell actually wrote a [01:35:00] book about that. 

John Wilson: Yeah. 

Ethan Wright: And it's crazy because they charge more than other people.

They don't negotiate on price, but their, uh. Attention to detail and service. And really that customer for life, uh, allows 'em to charge those premiums. And like I am usually someone who will always go to the best price on anything. I go and buy from Sewell anytime I need to buy a car or have anything done in my car because of their honesty, uh, the, the quality of their work and then their brand.

And really, I mean, that's in my head, customer fault. Like, like they are great at that. So, and that started a long time ago. 

John Wilson: Yeah. 

Ethan Wright: Um, but they have somehow scaled, it's almost like Chick-fil-A, right? They've all, they've somehow gone to a scale where they still have that value run through every single person who works there.

And they just slam that so hard. Um, that even some of the things that they don't do anymore, that they can't do anymore 'cause they don't scale. Like the spirit of that [01:36:00] is in still in everything they do as they go. Um, and so I just think of that and it's the same thing, like if I have a plumber. Who comes and is, you know, does a great job and is, is thorough.

Like, I'm willing to pay more and I'm never gonna forget that person. Like I'm going to call them every time. I love when I have someone I can do that for. So, um, so it's some of those things that you do when you start small that maybe the exact action doesn't scale the same, but like what are the things that initially don't scale that you can keep the spirit of as you go?

Yeah. Um, I think, I think is a big, you know, leg up, just, it's maybe a little less marketing, but I think at the end of the day, like lead retention Yeah. And customer retention is kind of solve part marketing too. Solves, solves a lot of lead problem too. 

John Wilson: Yeah. You have any, is that it all? Sweet. This was a lot of fun guys.

It was. I appreciate you coming on helping break in the new studio. It's great. I like it. I don't know how many episodes I get to still call it a new studio, but I'm on number going, I'm on number three and I'm still [01:37:00] calling it that. Um, this was awesome. If people wanna connect, where can they find you? I am on X.

Yeah, I'm 

Sam Preston: on LinkedIn. Um, service scalers.com. Yep. Oh yeah, right there. So guys, you wanna connect, I'm on x I'm on LinkedIn. Uh, service scalers.com. Slide into your dms. My cell phone number is four six, I'm awesome. Yeah, 

Ethan Wright: same for me. X LinkedIn. Uh, if you contact us, contact us at service dealers. We will probably have a conversation, so that's easy enough.

John Wilson: Sweet. Uh, well thanks for joining me and, uh, everyone else, thanks for joining us too. If you like what you heard, check out owned and operated.com and make sure you subscribe so you can get more stuff exactly like this.