So it's super important to know your numbers because if you don't know your numbers at 500,000, it's going to be messier at a million because you'll have no idea where you're going. You'll have no idea where you need to be. Yes. Welcome to jobbers Masters of Home Service, a podcast for home service pros, buy Home Service pros. We're in Las Vegas and today we're talking about getting over the hump from $500,000 to a million dollars of revenue with some good sales
techniques. I'm your host, Adam Sylvester. Today's guests are Kelly Guerrero and Bobby Vickers. Welcome to the studio, both of you. Thank you. Thank you. Glad you're here. So Bobby, why don't you go first, tell our audience who you are and what you do. Sure. So my name is Bobby Vickers. I'm the co-founder of Nirvana Garage Doors. We are a garage door manufacturer and turnkey service provider for residential and commercial properties in North Texas.
And I am Kelly Guerrero. I am co-owner of Fast Scapes in Manatee County, Florida, and founder of Home Pro Coaching where I help small business owners grow their business and scale it to make it the one that they want it to be. Great. Awesome. Well, I'm glad you guys are both here. So a lot of our listeners are just plateauing a little bit around that $500,000 mark, and both of you have gotten past that.
So you guys are a really good resource for this, but we want to help our listeners to get over that mark to seven 50 to a million dollars instead of just hovering around that 500,000. 500,000 is fine, but for those of us who really want to keep going, what were some of the things that you guys did specifically to go from that 500,000 to seven figures? Well, we formed some partnerships with other service providers in our area.
For example, we took some pool manufacturers that were building pools and we put together a landscape package for them so that they would be able to offer that to their clients. And then that made things grow very quickly. We also partnered with a landscape designer who she did the designs but then didn't have anyone to do the installations.
And so forming partnerships with similar but not identical businesses as yours sometimes can really, it's a different sales strategy than just email marketing and the other things which are absolutely important to do as well. But forming some good partnerships with other businesses is one that maybe people haven't thought of before.
So I would say to that point to just be clear about who your customer is and if you have different types of customers, treat them, communicate with them, market to them differently. So we work with businesses and so we've developed relationships and have agreements in place for builders that say, build 10 homes a year up to some that build a hundred homes a year. And so we have relationship with the B2B segment, but we also go after homeowners, and that's different.
So the homeowner channels to attract new clients are different. They require different investment more time. And so I would say to just be clear about who your customers are and once you've found out that you can service one really well, it's okay to go after another and you don't have to be a one trick pony. You don't have to just do one thing. I think as long as those two things are really tightly related, you can go after multiple customer segments and be just fine.
I think for a lot of people, 500,000 is a pretty typical number to get to with one really solid target base. And so you really mastered how to serve this one customer. You've really mastered how to deliver it consistently day after day. You have a team that's really designated for that before that probably is a little too early to start branching off into different either target markets or
different services. But then, like you said, Bobby, once you get hit 500,000, a lot of times people feel like, you know what? I think I'm ready for another service offering. Is that what you're saying? Yeah. So I would say as much as to your point, yes, that's true, but I guess I kind of think early on you have to go get the money wherever the money is. So if you really want just homeowner business, but your acquisition costs, you can't afford it, you better find another route.
And sometimes a partnership channel is less expensive because it's benefiting both parties. You're not taking, or you're not having to invest so much money because they're getting something out of it, or in your case they're already doing it and you're just coming along with them. So. It's no cost. And what we ended up doing was, since before that, we hadn't done a whole lot of landscape installations.
We just focused on the maintenance. So by doing those strategic partnerships, we were able to get a whole new skillset under our belt, gain some experience, and then be able to show examples of how well we did with that type of work. And then we were able to use more traditional marketing channels and sell that work to other homeowners that weren't necessarily through the partnered business that we were working with.
Were your technicians able to transition from maintenance to installations, or did you have to get a whole new subset of technicians? Well, we did some training with key people. There you go. There were certain ones that have, right, it's a different type of work, a different, it requires a different skillset. And so we had some that just, they were hungry, they wanted to learn new things and do it. And those were our superstars. Amazing.
We were able to pull them out and then they were the leaders that were in charge of that landscape installation instead of the maintenance. Right. I think to your point, most businesses don't get over 500,000. A million dollar business is rare air, believe it or not, the Joint Center for Housing Studies, they put out a report every few years about the remodeling industry. And a few years ago, 90% of all businesses were less than 300,001 man operations.
And they went out of business in five years. It was just one person. Because what happens is, and we know this from being in the trades, is that you're good at your job and you're thinking, well, I'm going to go work for myself. I want all the money. Well, with all the money comes, all the headaches, the issues, the people that you have to manage. And so the skills that you, a really good insert service provider don't translate to being a business
owner. And so I think getting to 500 to a million, it's a huge accomplishment. It's hard to do. And I've not found anybody that's been able to get there without expanding into more than one channel. So whenever I think of marketing, I think of you have SEO, you have paid search, you have referrals, you have building relationships. So I think the biggest thing is get that one channel that can get you to 500 and then figure out where's the next channel? What.
Proclivities do you have? What are you good at? Who do you know what's working in your industry? Well, the other thing too that you have to realize when you are a small business owner is you don't have to do everything. It would be absolutely impossible for me or you or anybody. You cannot grow a 1 million business with just you and maybe a team of technicians.
You need to bring other people in and stop trying to do everything yourself and delegate some of that other work to whether it's an admin in the office as a project manager, somebody to help you duplicate your efforts and give you more time to focus on the growth. So then they're handling more of the day-to-day operations. That's a great segue. Cause I think if we look at ourselves and we think, man, I changed a lot from 500,000 to a million. I had to become a better leader.
I had to become a better business person. I had to make more advanced decisions, and I had to get out of the day to day, the grind of being actually in the field. And so what were some of the things that you guys had to look inside of you and say, man, I need to get better at X, Y, and Z. If I'm going to take this business to the next level. That's an easy one for me to answer. I had to stop trying to run everything.
I had to stop trying to control and micromanage and let my team do the job, do their work and delegate to them instead of me having to think that, well, no, nobody else can do invoicing because I'm the one who knows what Everyone's terms are. I'm the one who knows all of these things, or I have to do the scheduling because I know the routes and I know this and that to just let the other people do it. And maybe they didn't do it quite as good as I do, but something actually hurt on this podcast.
If the people that you hire can do 80% as good as you can do, then you go ahead and you pick up the 20%, but you've still bought back that much of your time by assigning those kinds of things to your team. What is that Dan Martel? He's like 80% done by someone else is a hundred percent awesome. Yes. So I want to be where you are. Unfortunately, as we're nearing $2 million in revenue, we still do everything. My business partner and I, we order, we sell, we schedule.
The only thing we don't do are the things in the field. And for us that's kind of by design. We are just not ready to take the leap of being responsible for someone's family, for their rent, for their car payments. We are just not there. We have certain goals we want to hit. So I can't speak as much as you can about the delegation aspect, but I do think what you have to change is you have to stop being focused on you and how you elevate other people because no business, like you said,
got big by themselves. Jeff Bezos owns less than 5% of Amazon, right? He's the guy, he's the owner, but he owns very little because it required a lot of people in a lot of investment over time to get where they are today. So service businesses are no different. Right. Yeah, I love the delegation piece of it too, because you're right. I mean, here's the thing, every business owner who has one employee is delegating something.
But I do think the leadership piece, I think it's best to look at ourselves first. I think it's so important to avoid saying, well, I want to go big, and so you guys start doing better over there, do that thing faster, answer the phone better, and order better materials. No, no, no. You're the top. You're the leader at the top of the business.
And so we have to be really honest with ourselves and say, if I want to go from 500,000 to a million and then maybe beyond, I'm going to have to change probably the most out of anybody every step if I really want to achieve those better results. Because it all starts with me. I really found that to be the case. I had to stop criticizing my team and really take the time to build them. Instead, I don't have a very large team. We've got two people in the office and a project manager,
so three in the office. But just to see them doing things right, to catch them doing things and doing things well, and complimenting them on that and building them up and helping their confidence grow as team members made them capable of taking on more and more aspects of the work and aspects of the project. And so that really has been what I had to, my biggest change I had to make personally.
And I think a lot of us get into business, not necessarily maybe to be the boss, but we just have a way that we think the business should be run. And maybe at the prior company, you couldn't do that, so you start off on your own. So I think what happens as you grow, you don't ever do a reset. You just continue to go and go and build and add. And I think we lose sight of anti goals so many times. It's like,
here's what I want, here's what I want, here's how I'm going to get it. Well, as business owners, nobody's going to come to us and say, Hey, you need to stop that. You're not very good at that. So to your point, Adam, we have to have self-awareness and say, I have a list of anti goals. I really don't want to manage the schedule. I really don't want to invoice.
I really don't want to sign off on a marketing campaign. So I think for us, that's how we have structured the hires we want to make in the near future is by going through our anti goals and saying, we don't want these things. Let's make sure we have systems in place and a procedure to do them. That way when we bring someone on, they're not going, what did I just sign up for? Because so many times in service businesses, it's kind of. Messy. A work in progress.
I think that the analogy is you're trying to build a plane on the way down and assemble it to flat before it crashes. Sometimes it can be that way sometimes. For us, I know we had a phenomenal shift when we hired a project manager, a sales person. And so then their only focus was to not just sell jobs, but to sell them profitably. Because. Their compensation was tied to that same, no, they're not. But their compensation was tied to how profitable the job was.
And then that freed up my time significantly that I could focus on the higher level tasks and the marketing and getting new customers and building those relationships with builders and things like that. And then the project manager handled all of the quotes for the one-off jobs and things like that. This is a great conversation. I want to pause for just a moment to talk about why we love jobber so much,
guys. How has Jobber helped you deliver that exceptional customer experience and convert one time users or customers to a long-term recurring customer? Well, for us, we have just started using driver's new referral program and have seen great success with that. So a client gets a lawn mowing service, they love it, and then they refer us to their neighbors, and then they get a little perk, little discount off their bill for referring us.
So I have some people that are downright competitive with that, with other folks on their block, and they want to be the one who gets the discount month after month after month. So that really has been a great thing. Love that. For us, I think Jobber helps us present a very polished image, our invoices, our quotes, they're branded that we're able to add attachments, images, and so for us, it's just really clean and simple, and it makes it easy for our clients to do business with us.
Yeah, jobber is something you can turn on immediately, sign up today, and you instantly look more professional and more exceptional to your clients. And that's what your clients deserve and what they want. So if you don't have jobber, you need to start using jobber today. Go to jobber.com/podcast deal, get an exclusive discount and start being exceptional. Even more exceptional today with Jobber, this is how I was around 500,000. I started to think if I get any bigger,
this is going to be really messy. It's going to be really unorganized, it's going to be inefficient. And basically if you're sloppy small, you'll be sloppy big. And so I think something that was really important for me to realize is, you know what? We're pretty sloppy in a lot of ways. I don't want this to be a million dollars yet. If it was I, I'd lose my mind. Right?
Sure. And so did you guys do anything from an efficiency standpoint to make sure that, so when you went from 500,000 to a million, it actually worked instead of just making you not sleep at night and pull all your hair out. So one of the things we did was just price controls around the products that we offer. So. What does that mean? Yeah, so in the past it was like, find out what it costs.
Don't do a markup any less than this, right? Well, now we have all that pre-built into a database that's like all you have to do is go and check and see what it is that you're selling. And it's already been determined based on the type of customer and the level of that customer.
If you have a one-off quote from a builder that we've done business with before, they have a certain pricing tier, you go to the database, find out what that tier is, you can quickly price a project and know that it's going to make money. So that's kind of how we do it. But again, it's just the two of us. So we're always double, triple checking to make sure we're making money. But I think the biggest thing for us is just visualizing what we have to offer.
Setting price tables and price lists up ahead of time so we don't have to reinvent the wheel with every quote. Well, most of our work is recurring. So what we needed to do was make sure that our recurring jobs were also profitable. Love it. So we had to check the time on the job. Where do we need to be for a man hour per price, per man hour? Where does that number need to be?
So it's super important to know your numbers because if you don't know your numbers at 500,000, it's going to be messier at a million because you'll have no idea where you're going. You'll have no idea where you need to be. We have all the different categories, your GNA, your cost of goods sold and stuff like that. And each one. What's GNA? General and admin costs. And so you have each of those as a certain percentage of revenue.
So whether you're at 500,000 or a million, you should be probably about 8% depending on your own personal numbers. But my numbers are going to be different than yours because your cost of goods sold are going to be much higher than mine. We have gasoline and mower blades, right. And you've got. We're buying a hundred thousand worth of cedar every month.
Exactly. That's a very different, so everyone's business might look a little bit differently, but if you're profitable at 500,000, you need to take those numbers and kind of get an idea of what percent of
revenue, the different categories of your expenses are. And then as you grow, you want to be checking those numbers on a regular basis, not necessarily daily, because then you don't get any work done, but at least once a week or once a month, probably once a month, and just to make sure you're staying there. That way if anything starts getting out of whack, you can make corrections to it before it's too far gone and you've got a $50,000 loss at the end of the year.
What about marketing and sales? Let's talk about marketing sales for a minute, because it's double revenue. Literally a million is double 500,000. So you probably need double leads, double everything. Essentially, all the metrics need to be in line. And so did you guys have to do a whole lot of extra marketing to get there? Did it happen gradually? Were you guys already overbooked a 500,000 and so you just hired more people to fulfill that?
Or was it starting a new business at 500,000 where you just got more people, new hiring efforts? How did you guys go about it? I'm curious. Well, for us, I feel like that we had the reviews and we started really putting an emphasis on collecting more reviews. That's. Actually a marketing tool that I don't think people necessarily generally view as a marketing tool.
But the first thing someone does when they're looking for a business, whatever it is, garage doors, landscaping, they're going to go to Google and they're going to do a Google search and who has the most reviews? Oh, well, maybe I should look at them.
And I feel like that's a great marketing tool that people spend a lot of time doing Google ads, and those are all important too, but your reviews really helps build your brand and build your reputation, and that becomes a marketing tool in and of itself as well. So we just started doing that, asking customers for referrals, staying in constant contact via email campaigns and things just exploded. Yeah, I think there are so many levers to pull.
You just have to decide from a strategic standpoint, what can you oversee, implement, and execute and stay on top of? So you could double your price. Yeah, you could double your price, you could add a new service offering, you could expand markets. I think there's a lot of ways to do it, and I think you just have to realize what your competencies are as a business owner that's trying to get from half a million to a million.
So I would say that paid search is tough because if you're a business owner running a half a million dollar business, and let's assume that you hire a consultant because you're not going to do this on your own because you have other things to do. And you say that consultant's a thousand dollars every two weeks,
$1,500 a month, and you have a budget. Well, if you're not careful, you could run through your budget in a month and have no net new business because you have leads that haven't decided yet. So all of a sudden you've spent $7,000 and you have nothing to show for it. You do that two or three months in a row depending on how you manage your
cashflow as a small business, what do you do? So that could be, you could take what started as a little flesh wound of spending a few thousand dollars to now all of a sudden this is like a mortal issue. I don't have money because I've spent, because with Google, they take your money and your consultants get paid. So I just think you have to be careful about what channels you go after. And then I think reviews are great. Oh my gosh. There's such a. Strong signal.
That makes a bigger impact on someone than whether you're doing a paid display ad on Google or you've got a hundred reviews and it doesn't happen overnight. You have to start asking, start asking, keep asking. And now Jobber does offer that as part of their marketing program. And for us personally, we already had a lot of reviews. But. We've seen a huge increase in the number of reviews we've gotten since we implemented that.
One thing, and I love this about jobber, the copilot where it spit out some KPIs, it said that 40% of the quotes that we sent over the past six months were not opened, 40% were not opened, which means our 40 to 50% close rate was on 60% on a hundred percent of the jobs. So there's also a lot of money in follow up. So you talk about how do you go from half a million to a million? Well, if you're only selling 40, 50% close rate, you have a lot of opportunity to do more. It's. A lot of waste.
There. Yeah. Well, it's interesting too. So I'm here, my business partner's there, calls texts are coming in. I called somebody last night because we didn't get to them in time. I said, Hey, I'm sorry we're out of town. He's like, you know what? I called three companies today. You're the only person that called me back, even though it's at eight 30 my time. Y'all come out tomorrow. Wow.
So part of it too is if your back's against the wall, you've burned the boats, you're in business for yourself, now everything matters. And you can't let anything go, even if you don't think it's likely, send the follow up. You never, never. Following up on. Posts is absolutely critical. Absolutely critical. Because sometimes they didn't see it, it went to their spam folder or hundred percent, we see that all the time too. Or no, we're waiting on the HOA to give us an approval for this project.
Thank you so much for following up with me. Or I was waiting on another quote and I never heard back from the other company. We hear that all the time too, but because we take the time and follow up and say, Hey, was there anything you wanted to change on this? And sometimes maybe the price point was a little bit too high. They only wanted to spend 3000 instead of 4,000. And so, oh, well, we can whittle that down. We can get that to meet within your budget, find someone. New. Just talk to.
Us. Let us figure it out for you. And the fact that you take the time to talk to the client and follow up instead of just sending out a quote and hoping for the best, they appreciate that so much more. And then you just keep getting more business and then that then translate into a five star review, which then translate into somebody else. Seeing that with pictures of a project, if you do that, add pictures to the reviews and stuff like that, which we do.
I highly recommend that as well. And it just becomes its own, not monster. It's not what I want to say. It's a good monster. It is a good monster, A own happy, wealthy. Monster, happy. Sales monster, even machine. That's a good way of putting. It. I learned this from a sales rep and my prior company who had been in sales for 50 years, and we were in a sales meeting and someone is complaining about a lead the appointment.
And this gentleman gets up and he happened to be a music director at his church. He's very just the nicest man in the world. He goes, that's disrespectful. It's disrespectful because you don't know what it took for them to save up the money to do the thing that you might get a chance to do for them. We work for them. And so this was probably 10 years ago. I remember it. It was yesterday. Because no matter what, they're partying with money.
If you think about what we do, say our average ticket is $8,000, that's easily a vacation for a family of five anywhere. That could be a used car for someone's teenage kid. So the money that they're parting with it's sacred money is hard to get. It's not getting any easier. And so I just want to say follow up, treat people kindly and with respect. And if people say no right now, that doesn't mean they say no down the road. That's true. Things happen. Things happen.
Well, I also think that the time in between 500 and million is a great time to figure out what really works in your marketing. I think in the beginning you can just get leads from all over the place and you're kind of experimenting. It's just kind of a whirlwind. But then once you get to that certain mark, you can say, okay, let's figure out where our dollars really give us good ROI.
Let's start nailing some of these lead sources really hard because now we have a little more margin and we can experiment some more and actually pay attention to the experiment and actually really figure out. So then when you get to the million, you're like, you know what works. SEO works, LSA works, whatever the case may be, next door, instead of if you go to million, it's going to be hard to get to million if you don't really know where the majority of your leads come from.
And it's nice having a lever to pull that. You can say, if I turn this on within 30 days, I'm going to start getting leads for sure. Those are the kinds of things that you figure out in that range between 500,000 and a million. Do you guys agree with that? Absolutely. And what works for our business may not be what works for his or anybody else's who's listening, right? It may not be the same levers that they have to pull, but we definitely learned what works for us.
And sometimes it's something that you may not think of. It's something less traditional. We were talking a little bit ago about calling commercial clients that if anyone wants to get into that type of a market share, calling them every four to six months and saying, Hey, how's it going with service that you have? How is that working for you? Are you happy? Do you want to make any changes? What's your biggest pain point?
And just listening to the responses and say, is it okay if I follow up with you in three months, six months, whatever the case? And. I mean, we will cold email businesses builders, and we'll just say, Hey, if the garage door company you're using today, you don't want for your mom's house, call us. Or another variation is like, if you need a backup garage door dealer, sometimes just give us a call. We we're here. We're in the same network that you are. And that works.
And it's a numbers game. If you call a hundred people a week, 10 of them will take the call. You might get one or two deals. Well, that compounds, you get a couple of those every week, every month, all of a sudden you have a million dollar business and you haven't done that much more work. You've just been more aggressive.
And one thing that I learned in my prior role was that attribution is really important, but you can't be like an attribution warrior where you're like, I want to know how everything comes from. So what I've done forever in my career is we use HubSpot automation for form captures because it lets us know the source very clearly, and it gives us all the page activity. So whenever somebody comes in, we don't question where it came from. That information gets ported through to jobber.
And so we know that this person came from an organic search, and we know that they looked at 10 pages on our site. So we now have this information that we can go to them with and we're not wondering how they found us. And so I would just say, get the attribution set up properly in the beginning,
and then just let it do its thing. Like use CallRail or RingCentral, get your numbers tracked, get those calls pushed into jobber, whatever that is, so that you're not wondering where the money's coming from because that's not a good place to be. It's definitely good to have that lead source tracked too. So you know where your marketing dollars are making a difference. And some of the ideas that we have, it doesn't actually cost marketing dollars. It's just time.
It's time that you're investing in your business to grow that channel, that marketing channel. Well, and the thing that you realize too is that just because it says this thing on the form, so we get leads all the time. They say, Hey, the HubSpot attribution will say it's from organic search or direct traffic. When we call them, they'll be like, Hey, this builder recommended you. And so part of it too is, and again, I am not an ROI warrior.
I'm okay just getting more business in and making sure our overall acquisition cost doesn't reach a certain level. So for me, because I know there's so much variation in where the leads come from says one thing, but they say another. So that's part of it too. And I think the biggest thing we found, and I don't know if this is true for everyone, but we sell products. We sell a hundred plus products.
What we did was we made sure that we had that product and that service on our website so that someone didn't have to come to us and wonder if we did it. So if you do installations, but your website says you do maintenance, well, people don't spend very long on websites. So they very quickly realized you're not for them because you didn't say you were for them. So for us, we made it a priority in the very beginning to make sure every product possible, commercial, residential, we had it.
Every service is there just so that we wouldn't leave somebody in the lurch or make them think that they had to go somewhere else to find good service. Yeah, the 500,000 market's a great time to reevaluate your website, reevaluate your marketing collateral, make sure it's up to date and accurate so that your clients really know who they're looking for. This is a great conversation. I'm going to boil it down to three actual items here.
Number one is you need to determine what your anti goals are, things that you don't want to do or you're not good at, or you thinking you have something that's more important for you to do. Delegate those things. Number two is follow-ups on quotes and use texting and all those different things to automate the follow-up sequence to nurture clients longterm. And make sure whenever you send a quote that you send it through as many channels as you can. So you likely have an email.
I would send a follow-up text and also call to make sure that they received it so that you don't have a bunch of unanswered unseen quotes. Yeah, that's great. I like voicemail bottoms too. And number three is partnerships. Partner with complimentary services, partner with builders in town in your own industry, figure out what that is, but partnerships can really take you to the next level of revenue. Guys, that was great. How do people find out more about you?
I have our company website, fast lawns.net, or you can find more information about my coaching@homeprocoaching.com. And our company is DOA Garage Doors. Our website is doa.com. And on all the social media channels, it's also just doa. I like cars, but for doors. Great. Well guys, thanks for being here. I really appreciate it. Thanks. Thank you. And thank you for listening. I hope that you heard something today that will take you from 500,000 to a
million the next level in business. I'm your host, Adam Sylvester. You can find me@adamsylvester.com. Your team and your clients deserve your very best. So go give it to 'em.