When you log in, you can literally, instead of cost per click, change it to cost per conversion. That's going to be your cost per lead. You have to know that number because that number is going to tell you everything. Welcome to Masters of Home Service. I'm Adam Sylvester. Today we're talking about how much you should spend on new leads. This is a podcast made by successful home service pros for home service pros, all to make your business more profitable and more efficient.
Today's guest is Phil, richer, owner and founder of Flash Consulting, and he's an expert on lead generation. Phil, tell us more about you and what you do. Yeah, well, thanks so much for having me.
We partner with local service businesses, home services, lawn care companies, gut cleaning companies, moving companies, carpet cleaning, a bunch of different trades, and we help them increase their sales, keep their schedules full through partnering with them, doing digital marketing, consulting with the business owners. This is definitely great. Okay, so first question I have for you. A lot of our listeners were just thinking through what kind of leads am I going for, how do I get 'em?
But what are you seeing in the home service industry in terms of what are the best lowest cost leads that have the highest return, the best value? Yeah. What we found is on Google, Google is the search engine results page number one referral partner in the world. There's really four core sections. There's your top section, which is called Google Local Service ads, and Google actually has a calculator.
If you were to look up Google local service ads cost calculator, they would tell you how much a lead is going to cost in your area specifically for Google local service ads. So that's the first one, and we can dive into all these. I'm just going to go through, that's usually one of the lowest cost, like if you're going to pay per lead,
that's a low cost option. Then you have your Google search ads, which is the next section, which is where you kind of see your name and other people's names and it says sponsored. That's usually the most expensive lead on Google because it's a search ad. Then you have your local map pack with your Google business profile. That's going to be a very inexpensive lead. It's just truly organic traffic and you can increase your visibility by getting Google reviews.
And then the last section of Google is your website ranking where everyone's websites are ranked out. And again, this is going to be a low cost lead as well because it's more organic side of things. So I would say if someone's thinking about doing leads and getting leads specifically Google local service ads is a good option for inexpensive leads, but it's also can be tough to get into that position to get the leads.
What about the competition matters? The price goes up, I'm guessing if your competitors are big against the same clicks, right? So explain that a little bit. Yeah, so with Google local service ads specifically, if you don't have enough Google reviews or someone else has more Google reviews than you, Google's only going to show the best company. So it's very competitive in there to try to be shown. So yes, you're absolutely right. For the Google search ads perspective, it's based off your bids.
So if you were to be running Google search ads and other people are bidding on the same keywords as you, then yeah, it's going to drive the traffic up because Google's going to try to spend your money and outbid other people to show you there.
But the thing with Google search ads that we've seen a lot is that it can be a black box, a black hole of you set your budget at $2,000 and Google's going to spend your money, they're going to drive traffic to your website, but if your website's not optimized to convert into leads, then you're going to get crushed and you're just going to be spending all this money and not have any real results from it. No, I totally experienced that and anyone listening who's done any kind of Google
search, it's a black hole of spending. Google will be happy to spend your money. The LSA is, or some people call it Google guarantee, that's what it was called in the beginning, LSA local service ads. Those are the best value. Let's camp out there for a little bit. So how does someone start running LSA ads? Yeah, great question. So you can go to Google, type in Google local service ads.
They have a specific landing page for Google local service ads. You go there, you click start now and you put in your information for your business. It's going to ask you to give your address, your name, your email, all that kind of stuff, and then it's going to try to connect your Google business profile with your Google Local service ads account. So you kind of go through the prompt. It's pretty straightforward.
Once you get the Google Local service ads account set up, then you actually have to do a background check for you. And so you have to go through, it's called evidence, you have to click on, it's going to say do a background check, click on that, do the background check. Then in some industries lawn,
in some states there are lawn care licenses that you have to submit. I would say that it depends on your industry, but you will have licenses that you have to submit to Google because to your point, it used to be called Google guaranteed. Google was screening people and putting that little green check mark next to them, and the way that they screened them was by getting the background check and then also getting the licenses in there. And then one other thing,
you have to have a certificate of insurance. So really that's the three things. License, certificate of insurance, and then background check. So if you go through that process, typically we've seen, it usually takes about three to five days to go through that entire cycle. If you submit everything, then you'll get a notification in your inbox that says, Hey, you've been Google screen and approved.
Now you just set up your budget and then at that point you're kind of off to the races with your Google local service ads account. And these ads are displayed to the very top of Google before anything else. So basically it'll say window cleaners in your area and the ones that are Google guaranteed or LSA ads have that green checkbox and everyone loves a good green checkbox check mark.
And so people who are searching for window cleaning in their area, they're more likely to click on those ads because they're attractive, they're guaranteed by Google, all that kind of stuff. And you're going to spend, I don't know, 20, 30, 40 bucks a lead, but they're simple leads. That's what I like about 'em. They're simple leads and it's very easy to monitor the results of them as opposed to the black hole of spending on Google search ads, which is much more complex.
Yeah, I'll give you a really good example. About three months ago we started working with a lawn care company there in Long Island, and when we first started working with them, they probably had like 30, 40 Google reviews, and what I would for people out there is go to Google type in whatever service that you do in your area and you'll see what the competition is. So in their area, they had a true green that had about 50, 60 reviews and they had a mosquito joe that had something else.
So we went to the business owner, said, Hey, we need to get our reviews over 75 reviews, and then we're going to turn on Google local service ads because we're going to have the number one reviews in that area over the next two months. We went, got his Google review link, gave it to him, said, get as many reviews as you can. He got to 75. We turned on that Google local service ads for him, and now he was outranking true green and out ranking mosquito Joe.
So now to your point, he was the number one spot on Google and he's paying $17 a lead right now, and he's loving life. He's killing it. That's a great return. So you mentioned the map pack. How do you get in? Our listeners know shows the map and it shows the three best results, but sometimes I see a fourth one snuck in there at the top and it says sponsored or something like that. How do you get into that? Yeah, so Google is playing around with the search engine results page all the time.
So they're taking your search ads or your Google local service ads and they're plugging and playing different spots of where they can show people On Google search though, you can run ads and it can allow you to show them on different display networks is what they call it. So it would allow you to then have a second ad in your local pack. To your point, yes, that's how you can do that.
But to answer your question about how do you get in there from an organic perspective, because that is a relatively quote free option for a lot of people, and so the main thing that you can do is to get Google reviews, and I'll give you some other ones, but Google reviews, what they found is about at 17% of your ranking is Google reviews. So if you have a hundred Google reviews and someone else has 50 Google reviews, nine times out of 10 you're going to be shown there.
The other things that you can do, and this is a really, really important one, is that if you don't have a physical location in the city, let's say that you want to rank for somewhere in Dallas, but you're outside of the Dallas, if you don't have a physical location in that area, you're not going to be shown in the map pack because you don't have a physical location in Dallas, for example.
So your location and proximity takes a lot of that into consideration, which taking this back to the Google local service ads, which is why it's so important because let's say you want to rank for Dallas, well, in your Google local service ads, you could select 20 different cities that you want to be the number one spot for. So you could be in a suburb but then still show up number one for a main metropolitan area, and we see that to be extremely effective for a lot of people.
Going back to the mat pack, though, we talked about Google reviews is very important, making sure that your primary category is set for what you do. We have an example of a company that was a SOD company and they were trying to get SOD jobs, so they put that as the main category, but really they wanted lawn care jobs and we switched it to lawn care and they went to number one ranking for lawn care. Then they could cross sell the saw jobs.
So it's extremely important to get that primary category right. Okay. A few other free things I like maxing out the profile for. I like asking clients to post on your Google profile for you. They can leave a five star review, but they can also post a photo of the work they did that you did for them and they can give a description. Those are really powerful too. I also like the q and a on Google. You can submit questions to Google,
you can even do it yourself. You can ask your friends to do it, and then you can go in and answer those questions and Google likes that. So there's some free things out there. But I want to continue on this lead cost theme because I want to know what is customer acquisition cost? How do you know how much a lead does cost and really should cost in each individual industry?
Yeah, there's a lot of things that we can talk about on this side of things, but let's just focus on customer acquisition costs. Then we can talk about how to build a marketing budget, that kind of stuff. So customer acquisition costs, the way that we look at that in the industry is how much is your marketing budget and then how many new customers that you got? So with Jobber, for example, there's a report, it's a client information info or something.
It's a report that you can pull all your clients' info and you can put a column in there for created by and inside of that report. Then you can see all the customers that were created in a specific month. So for example, you could say, okay, this month I spent a thousand dollars and I got 10 new customers. So presumably my customer acquisition cost would be a hundred dollars, a thousand dollars spent, 10 new customers,
a hundred dollars customer acquisition cost. So if we just keep it very simple, how much did it cost to acquire new customers and whatever your marketing spend is versus how many new customers that you got. So customer acquisition cost is different than return on ad spend investment. So you might get 10 new clients, but they might only pay you $10 and that's not worth it. And so it's important to know how many new clients you're getting.
100% it matters because those clients are upsell opportunities in the future. Once you get a client in the door, they're much easier to sell to in the future, but you also need to make sure that those clients are paying you enough. So how do you calculate the return on the ad spend? Yeah, absolutely. So when we look at coming up with a marketing budget or what's a good number, ideally we see companies spending between three and 10% of their revenue on
their marketing spend. So let's say that you make a hundred thousand dollars, then you should be spending 3000 to $10,000 a year on your marketing. And so if we zoom out or we zoom into specific jobs, let's say that your job is a thousand dollars. Well, you don't want to spend more than a hundred dollars to get that job because then
your job costing is going to be way off. So to answer your question, you can kind of set the numbers based off of whatever your average ticket is, and then you can say, okay, I feel confident spending $200 to make $2,000 or whatever the numbers are. Yeah, yeah. So how do you track that from a practical standpoint? Obviously it matters what software people are using. Our listeners are mostly using jobber. How does a layperson go about That's pretty tedious, I imagine.
I know personally that it's genius. How do you recommend someone who's listening? How do you track this stuff? There's a bunch of ways that you could do it. I would say the easiest way is to try to get a tracking number through some call tracking software. CallRail is a really good one that's out there. You can get a tracking number through CallRail.
Then what you do is they have a script that you can put on your website and you can say that if someone comes from Google search ads or organic or whatever channel that they come from, then it's called Dynamic Call changing, something like that. Basically they changed the phone number. Then when they call that number, it would register in CallRail that you got a call from Google search ads. So that's one way to do it.
The other way to do it is if you have forms on your website, you can track the source of the forms, and so then you could say, okay, this came from Google search, this came from Google Organic or whatever, and then in your platform that you use like Hi Jobber, you can select the lead source and ideally at the end of the month, then you could go through all of your completed revenue and see the campaign that it came from or the lead that it came from, and then pull the number, what you're saying.
Well, but Phil, a lot of our listeners are saying, well, I just ask asked the client when they call, how did you hear about us? And here's the deal. That's fine in the beginning when you just ask them, Hey, oh, I saw you on TV or I Googled you. Most of the time they'll just say Google. But here's the thing, you can't really trust your clients once you start spending big money on ads because they might tell you all kinds of crazy things.
The only way to really know is by tracking it the ways that you're talking about. So I would say if we're going to divide our listeners into two groups, group number one is people who just aren't spending very much money at all or zero, that's fine. Just ask your clients and just trust them. But once you go into the second group, which is spending money, quite a bit of money on ad spend, you can't trust your clients anymore.
You have to have mechanisms in place to make sure that the data is accurate, because people tell us all the time, well, I think I saw yard sign. No, you didn't. You Googled us and you spent $30 on a lead, and that matters. We have a company that we work with and we try to pull these numbers because we want to make good data, makes good decisions, and we can recommend, Hey,
do this or do that. And every time we go in, it says the lead source is existing customer, and we're like, man, there's no way that every single person down here is an existing customer when they were just created, they were just created this month, and they're all existing customer, something's not adding up here.
So to your point, if you're going to spend money on your ads, then you need to make sure that you have it on the data behind the scenes because a lot of times it falls through the gaps. I think we should also maybe talk about what are some of those numbers that you should be tracking. I think that's also very important for people if you're going to be spending money. So let's pretend we're in Google search ads. We're doing it, we're doing it. What numbers matter?
Because a lot of times people get sold a bill of goods on what numbers to attract in Google ads, and they don't matter at all. What really matters? Yes, the number one number that you should know as a business owner is your cost per conversion. This is basically your cost per lead. So if we're looking at a cost per lead model of doing marketing, then we're trying to say, okay, if I close 50% of my jobs, if I were to give you 10 leads and I close five of them,
that's 50% closure rates. I know that if I get a lead, I need two of them to get a customer. So if my cost per lead is a hundred dollars, then it's going to cost me $200 to get a customer. I close at 50%. So anyone that runs your Google ads or when you log in, you can literally, instead of cost per click, change it to cost per conversion. That's going to be your cost per lead. You have to know that number because that number is going to tell you
everything. It's going to say, it's too high, it's great. You need to focus your ad budgets on this or that. Another example of that is let's say you're lawn care and you do sawd and you're running Google Ads for your sawd installation, and then you're running them for your normal jobs or something, just basic jobs. Well, your cost per conversion might be different on every single keyword that you're
running. So you have to be able to look at that and say, well, my cost per lead for SA is a hundred, but I'm happy with that. You know what I'm saying? A hundred dollars on a 10,000 side job is one thing, but a hundred dollars on a small mowing job is not good. Definitely make a difference between the two. So I know that one thing, a mistake I made in the beginning was I would only look at the data inside of Google Ads, so I would look at cost per click, which kind of matters, but not that much.
But the reason that I didn't look at cost per conversion is it was harder to get that data. It can be in Google Ads if you really set up properly, but that requires more work on my end to make sure that my CRM and Google are talking to each other, so I know because that keyword conversion is all the difference. It's like, well, Google doesn't know if, so-and-so became a client. They don't know that kind of stuff. Any thoughts on that? Yeah. So two parts to that.
The first one is that Google has changed from universal analytics to Google Analytics, and not to get onto all the jargon, but it's very easy now to add a Google tag manager to set up a conversion. You could watch a YouTube video and figure out how to do it. It's not rocket science. It used to be you have to put all these codes and all this stuff.
It's pretty straightforward now, but a lot of times to your point, there needs to be some intermediary between your Google search ads and then what do you actually get because just because you get a conversion, well then people always say, well, who was the conversion? What was their phone number? What was their name? Because it's just a bunch of bots sending me leads.
And so there's a bunch of tools out there. We use one called What Converts, and basically what that allows you to do is to kind of tie all the pieces together to the end so then you can see, well, what exactly did they search? When did they turn into a phone call? When did they turn into a actual web form? That kind of stuff. Yeah. What converts basically is the bridge. It's like the liaison between Google search and your CRM, because what comes in is Google to Google as a number,
just a random number in cyberspace. It goes into your CRM as a person, but then those can't talk to each other until you have an app. What converts, what converts then goes back into Google and tells you that cyber number just turned into Jane Doe because now we know it helps communicate between the two platforms, which I like, which is really important. And CallRail has a component of that too.
So there are components in there that CallRail allows to do what conversion just makes it clean and easy to see. Okay, gotcha. Are there any other relevant numbers in Google search so we should pay attention to on top of conversion? Yeah, you mentioned cost per click. I think that there is, you want to try to shoot between three to $5 your cost per click, and that's just a fluff number that's out there, but if you see something crazy like 14, 20, $30, it could be alarming.
It just depends on where you're at in your industry. Cost per click is basically telling you that how many people go to your website or click on something.
So if you're trying to get a hundred people to your website that if you get a hundred people, you're going to get 10 leads out of it because your website converts to 10%, then you know that if my cost per click is $5, then I have to spend X amount of dollars to get a hundred people to my website, and you can start doing some of the math there, which is why it's important, but it doesn't give you a true lead number,
which is why I like cost per conversion better. The other number that is very important, that is typically, again buried in there is called your search impression share. The reason search impression share is so important is because let's say that for the SOD job, let's say that your search impression share is taking the total searches that happened in your area, and it's saying how many times were you shown on that specific keyword?
So if there was 10 searches and you showed up two times out of those 10, your search impression share is 20%. So what that means is that you have 80% of the time that you're not being shown, so you could increase your budget and be shown more. And on the flip side of that is if you're at 90% search impression share, well, maybe you need to scale that back a little bit because you're being shown every single time, but you're not actually converting at the spot that you need to be.
So I would say that's an important one, but really. Is there a sweet spot there? 50%, 80%, or is it completely dependent on the industry? It dependent on the industry, but if you want to dominate search, which good. Luck I do. Yeah, if. You want to dominate search, then yeah, your search impression share, if you're going to be like 70, 80% on all of these ones,
it's going to cost a lot of money. But yeah, you want to take your targets service like I saw a job and you want to try to ramp that up as much as you can with search impression share. Yeah, I mean you want to dominate on the right keywords. You and I were having a conversation last week because one of our keywords was spending a lot of money, and I was like, man, our ad spends so high. And he said, well, what if we just turn off this one keyword?
It was good repair. And I was like, oh, yeah, I don't want those leads. Anyway, so we turned that off, brings our ad spend down on bad leads anyways, and so now if we wanted to, we could actually take that money and spend it on even more on other leads or just save that money, but there's a lot of ways that you can tweak it so that you really hone in on the exact things that you want to get leads for. Yep, exactly.
And to kind of tie this back together is the reason I like Google local service ads is inexpensive leads and there's not all this jargon of cost per conversion, all this stuff. It's just like, click this button, call me, and then you're going to charge me for a lead, and it's just very clean. There's no random algorithms and keyword research and all this stuff. Yeah, I like LSA because it so simple. You go into Google Ads and it's a mammoth of a platform and
you don't understand any of it. Basically, most people listening just have no idea what any of that stuff means, including myself. But LSA, you go in there and it asks you what services you do, what's your service radius, what's your zip code, and then you basically click the big blue button and you're done. It takes 10 minutes, which I like, and I think that's really key. And also, I mean it's at the top. That's important number one. Yeah, it's at the very,
very top. Google prioritizes that. First, let's pause the conversation here to talk about why we like jobber so much. Phil, what do you like about Jobber? How does Jobber help people scale their businesses? Yeah, the two things that I really like about Jobber, the first one is the online scheduling. It allows you, if you're running ads, you can drive traffic to your website and then people can just schedule right online. So you don't even have to call them or go through that whole process.
You just schedule right online. I love that they also rolled out a bunch of new reports and it gives a lot more clarity to walk through the cycle. You can see clients that have come in quote requests and ultimately all the way to the end so you can see that life cycle of the client through your funnel. So I really like those things about Jobber to help you scale.
Online booking is so key. Eventually, LSA, we've been talking about this this whole time, is going to connect into your online booking, and so people are going to say, Hey, Siri, since I'm going to cut my grass tomorrow straight into jobber, straight into online booking, that's coming, and our listeners will be ready when that comes. I personally like the new marketing tools that Jobber released. You can now email within jobber client with upcoming work.
In the next say week or so, you can say, Hey, we're coming to your house next week, and then you can give them some bullets on upsell services or make sure you ask your technician about clean water systems or whatever the case may be, and prep them. Get them to start thinking about those upsells. Really, really key. If you want to give jobber a try, new users can get an exclusive discount by going to jobber.com/podcast deal. You need to try jobber.
It's going to make your business so much better and you can scale with jobber. Go give jobber a try. Generally speaking, Phil, what is a good expected return on marketing our listeners? What should they expect If they put a dollar in, what should they get back? Yeah, ideally you would want to shoot for five x return, you spend a thousand dollars, you get $5,000, that's going to be good. Great is obviously 10 x is like, wow, this is absolutely crushing it.
Three X is like, okay, this is all right. Maybe we'll give it a couple more months and see if we can really work this, but if you're spending a thousand dollars and making a thousand dollars, that's a dud that's not working. So three x five x, 10 x, that's kind of the thresholds that we look at.
The other thing to calculate in this is you want to look at the lifetime value of your customers, and you might not have that data, but at least you can make a best guess that this person's going to come in for a year long service contract or whatever, and then eventually they're going to get this job. So really it's not just a thousand dollars and it's done or $500 and it's done. It's maybe $2,500 now that I got this person. There's different ways to look at your return on ad spend for sure.
Well, you touched on this. I want to go this direction now because return on marketing spend, it doesn't necessarily mean today or tomorrow. It could be a month from now. It's a long game. We're in business for a long time, and so a client or a future client might go to website and not convert right now, but they're still in our system. We still have their information, and so we can mail them postcards, we can show them banner ads and Facebook and Google and all these different things.
So how do you guys recommend keeping these people on the line, so to speak, if they don't convert immediately? Yeah, I mean ideally you would have some type of monthly email that's going to these people that's staying top of mind because a lot of times, let's say someone come, they fill out a form, so it is, you did get a lead, right? You paid Google, you got a lead out of it, but then you send them an estimate and it's not the right time or it's too high
or whatever, and then they're basically gone. Well, if you have some nurturing sequence, like an email every single month, for example, you'll say top of mind, or if it's a quarterly blast of a special or something like that, you'll stay top of mind. So just keeping it very simple, I would start with something like that where I think jobber,
they have something that's really nice. You go in, you can set up a quick campaign and send it out to people at least just to stay top of mind, do a blast of a special that works really good. Trying to stay in some type of a cadence is really important. A lot of times we see, oh, I'm slow. Lemme send out a blast. That's great, but it's also good to have a consistent flow staying top of mind for sure. Yeah. What I have found is, and this is all mental I think, but broke salespeople smell bad.
If you send that email blast out when you don't have any work tomorrow, it kind of smells a little bad, but if you send that out when you're fine, it seems like more people respond. I dunno if that's true or not, but you want to send that when you're not desperate. The other thing I would say in that is if you're not emailing your clients on a regular basis, you're losing money.
Email marketing is an ATM machine and sometimes you'll get 10 leads, sometimes you'll get one, but they're both worth it, and so if you're not emailing your clients regularly, then you're just missing the boat on one of the most fundamental ways of growing your business, which is by reselling to your existing client base. I agree, and I have a great example of this. So typically around the holidays people are like, oh, I'm really slow.
It's Thanksgiving, it's Christmas, so I am not going to be blowing up my people and emailing them and stuff, when really that's the optimal time to be emailing people because you get referrals, so you can stay top of mind for Thanksgiving and share something about it, but then when they go to their Thanksgiving dinner and someone says, yeah, I really need to get some sod this spring in my whatever, then it's like, oh,
I actually work with this great company. So to your point, you don't want to be trying to jam something in there. You just want to be adding value and staying top of mind during the slow points and during the busy seasons as well. Same thing. Yeah, I'm a huge fan and I like jobbers new platform. They've introduced a version of MailChimp into their software, which I love.
I've already used it a couple, Anna. It's really handy. So Phil, any final thoughts to leave with our listeners on whether, maybe two things, one, for someone who's just getting started and then maybe a pretty good hack for someone who knows all this stuff and they've been a business owner for a long time, they're may be doing a couple million dollars, what would you say to them?
Yeah, so first, if you're starting out, and also if you've been in business a long time, a lot of times when we meet with business owners, and these could be multi seven figures, they haven't gone through and figured out what their marketing budget is, and so it's hard to recommend things because we don't know how much money that
we're playing with here. So even if you're just starting out like, Hey, I had my best year yet and I want to start doing marketing, but where do I begin and how much money do I spend? So ideally what you would do is set aside three to 10% of your monthly revenue or yearly revenue, and you would designate that towards marketing, and it could be so small as a hundred or 200 bucks a month, but then just say,
I'm going to pick and I'm going to start with Google local service ads. I'm going to start with whatever else, Yelp or Better Business people, or Angie or something, Thumbtack, whatever you want to do, just start with something and then you won't feel the pinch of like, oh my gosh, I need to get money back from this. Every single time you'll at least feel confident that this is my budget for this thing and this is what's going to happen,
and I might need to move this budget around. That's the first thing. Have a marketing budget. Second, a super pro tip that I would say is on LSAs specifically, you got to go in and make sure that you're moving stuff to the right buckets and responding, answering calls within 30 seconds or however that much that is. The reason that this is a pro tip is because Google LSAs only makes money
when someone answers the phone when they give you a lead. So if you don't answer the phone, then Google's going to move you down in their rankings because they're going to say, Hey, you're not answering the phone, so we're not going to show you because we're not making any money off you. We're going to move to the next person that might answer the phone.
So that's the first thing. Second thing is inside of Google LSAs, you can move things from active to completed to, they have a couple different sections. If you go in and actually move those things, you're basically giving Google triggers back that says, Hey, I'm actually using your platform and I'm using it to the full extent, so send me more leads because I'm actually doing what you want me to do. That's a great tip.
I would say in terms of my final thought on this is in terms of marketing spend, most service companies are spending three to 5% on marketing. The really aggressive ones are spending six to eight and the really aggressive, maybe slightly too aggressive or at 10, I know I'm at seven or eight right now. I'm trying to be really aggressive. That is percentage of your revenue. So if you want to do a million dollars a year,
then your marketing spend is 80 grand that year. Now, here's the key for me, if it's 8%, then that's the same thing as a commission rate for an internal referral. So if one of your technicians or one of your workers, there's that Lowe's one day and someone walks up to them and says, Hey, I see your uniform, and they get that person on board and booked, and that person becomes a client because of your employee, give them 8%. I love that.
Because it's the same cost to you, and it creates army of people who are pitching your services. A lot of business owners are narrow minded and think, oh, that's just a free lead. No, no. Reward your people if you want them to do that again and again and again. Yeah. One thing that we've seen that companies take it to the next level is they actually build an army of people that will go out and sell for them.
They're building relationships with other companies. If you're a lawn care, find a roofer that then give them 4% or 5%, something like that. I think that that goes a long way. Well, this is great. Thanks, Phil. I'm going to try to summarize these in three actual steps. Number one is LSA, Google's LSA. Ads are really the best value and the simplest way to start doing basic ads. Make sure your primary category is correct and just get moving on LSA ads.
Number two is make sure that your Google business profile is fully maxed out Q and as. Photos, photos from clients, correct, address all that stuff. Make sure that's all fully built out. Lots of photos, the more photos, the better. Anything to add there, Phil? The number one thing that you can take and implement that's going to be free, that's going to help those two things specifically is getting Google reviews and it's free. Go get as many Google reviews as you can.
It's going to help you with your Google LSAs. It's going to help you rank higher on your Google business profile. Adam, you'll be shocked how many people don't have their Google business profile even filled out. They don't have a website, they don't have a phone number, they don't have any reviews. They don't respond to their reviews. So just use the free tools that are there and build the trust with Google, and it's going to help you tremendously in the long run.
Awesome. And number three is once you start spending more in the first group, you're just asking people how they found out about you, but once you start spending the big bucks, you need to have actual mechanisms in place to be able to actually properly and accurately track where all your lead sources are coming. I'm a big fan of jobber using all this stuff. Jobber has an awesome marketing tools. You can email past clients, future clients. You can email your whole list all within Jobber.
It's a new feature. Love it. Great. Jobber on that, Phil. Thanks. PRA being here. How do people find out more about you? Yeah, we do free marketing audits that are pretty custom. We build out a custom plan for you whether we work together or not. You can go to our website slash consulting.com, P-H-L-A-S-H consulting.com. Just hit discuss your business. We'll set up a call, and we're happy to help you. Thanks for being here. I really appreciate it.
You can find me@adamsylvester.com and I hope you found something valuable to make your business more profitable, more efficient today. Your team and your customers deserve your very best, so go give it to 'em.