From Panic to Profit: A Contractor's Guide to Managing Lead Droughts
The primary focus of this podcast episode is to elucidate the crucial steps contractors should undertake when experiencing a downturn in lead generation, emphasizing the necessity of refraining from hastily investing in additional advertising to rectify a problem that may stem from internal inefficiencies. I expound upon the common tendency of contractors to panic and flood the market with ads, which often exacerbates the situation by increasing costs and diluting return on investment. It is imperative to first diagnose the nature of the slowdown—whether it is a market-wide issue or a self-inflicted predicament due to faulty systems. I provide a systematic approach, comprising four essential steps that contractors ought to follow to optimize their existing resources before considering any new financial expenditures. Ultimately, this discussion aims to empower contractors to work more effectively with their current assets, thereby fostering sustainable business practices and avoiding unnecessary financial strain. Contractors frequently encounter periods where lead generation slows, often prompting a hasty response characterized by increased advertising expenditure. This reaction, however, is often misguided. The discussion emphasizes that in times of reduced leads, contractors typically panic and oversaturate the market with advertisements, inadvertently escalating costs and diminishing returns. I advocate for a more strategic approach, urging contractors to first assess the nature of the slowdown—whether it is a market-wide trend or a specific operational issue. The initial step should be to ensure the existing leads are being effectively managed rather than hastily investing more in acquiring new leads. This entails scrutinizing the responsiveness to incoming inquiries and ensuring that every potential client is adequately followed up with. By focusing on internal systems and processes, we can often remedy the situation without incurring additional costs, ultimately leading to a more sustainable business model that does not rely on reactive spending.
Takeaways:
- Contractors often react to a slowdown in leads by increasing ad spending, which can exacerbate the problem.
- Before allocating additional resources, it is crucial to assess whether leads are being effectively utilized.
- Systemic issues within a business can often masquerade as market-related slowdowns, leading to misdirected efforts.
- Effective lead management requires prompt follow-up and a structured approach to nurture leads over time.
Companies mentioned in this episode:
- Contractor Freedom
- Ringcentral
- Angie
- Nextdoor
Transcript
Here's what most contractors do.
Speaker A:The second the leads slow down, they swipe that credit card and spend more money.
Speaker A:And that's almost always the wrong move, because when it's really slow, it's slow for everyone.
Speaker A:So what happens is contractors panic.
Speaker A:They flood the market with more ads and the costs go up.
Speaker A:The click prices go up, the competition goes up and the ROI goes down.
Speaker A:You spend more and you actually get less.
Speaker A:So before you spend a single dollar, here's the rule.
Speaker A:Don't spend money to solve a problem that you created for free.
Speaker A:So today we're going to talk about exactly what to do when the leads slow down, or worse, dry up.
Speaker A:We're going to talk about them in order so you stop bleeding money and you work the assets that you already have.
Speaker A:There's four steps, and step four is the one that everyone jumps to first.
Speaker A:And we're saving that one for last on purpose.
Speaker A:Welcome to the Contractor Freedom Podcast.
Speaker A:I'm Jason Phillips.
Speaker A:If you're tired of feeling trapped by the business you worked so hard to build, you're in the right place.
Speaker A:As a multimillion dollar contractor and founder of Contractor Freedom, I've learned that freedom comes from mastering yourself, leading others, and building systems.
Speaker A:Each week, I'll help you build a business that serves your life.
Speaker A:Because the goal isn't to build a bigger prison, is to build a business that creates freedom.
Speaker A:Welcome to Contractor Freedom.
Speaker A:Let's go.
Speaker A:Now, before we do anything, we have to figure out what kind of slow this is.
Speaker A:And it's different for each step.
Speaker A:If the market's really slow, then it's slow for everyone.
Speaker A:Or is it just slow for you?
Speaker A:Maybe check in with some competitor friends in your market, look at your search trends, look at your calendar.
Speaker A:Or is it a seasonal slowdown, like for exterior work in the winter?
Speaker A:Is it just the calendar causing it to be slow?
Speaker A:If that's the case, the fix may be shifting your service mix from exterior to interior or repairs and carpentry, not necessarily spending more money to buy leads.
Speaker A:Now, this could also be a self inflicted slowdown, and that's a systems or marketing breakdown, not a slowdown in a market dressed up like a market problem.
Speaker A:But it's a system problem and this is the most common one.
Speaker A:Again, don't pay to fix what you broke for free.
Speaker A:So here is step one.
Speaker A:Before you spend money or chase one more new lead, make sure that you're not leaking the ones that you already already have.
Speaker A:We've got to get the basics.
Speaker A:We've got to go through the basics, first of all, is the phone ringing?
Speaker A:Is it ringing through?
Speaker A:Are the calls answered consistently?
Speaker A:Are they answered quickly?
Speaker A:How many times does it ring before they're answered?
Speaker A:Are they going to voicemail and just hanging up and calling the next contractor you know?
Speaker A:Is your speed to lead under five minutes?
Speaker A:That's important in today's world.
Speaker A:People want it now, especially if they're getting quotes from multiple contractors.
Speaker A:I talked to a contractor, well, this was about a year ago.
Speaker A:His speed to lead game was not speed to lead.
Speaker A:It was, hey, I'm going to follow up whenever I feel like it.
Speaker A:For his person in the office, that one thing cost him a million dollars in one year.
Speaker A:A million dollars in revenue in one single year because the leads weren't followed up on properly.
Speaker A:This is a big deal.
Speaker A:Speed to lead.
Speaker A:Now are the leads coming through the system?
Speaker A:Are they getting route routed correctly?
Speaker A:Are they just sitting there and nobody owns them?
Speaker A:It's just a pile of leads that, that you've already paid for?
Speaker A:Are they just sitting there rotting?
Speaker A:They're going to rot on the vine like a piece of fruit.
Speaker A:What's your follow up cadence?
Speaker A:How many times do you touch base with them in the first hour, in the first day?
Speaker A:And what do you do day two?
Speaker A:How quickly do you let them get away?
Speaker A:Most leads need at least five touches, but too many people are just quitting after one or two phone calls, or even worse, only text messages.
Speaker A:Because it's super easy to automate text messages.
Speaker A:But not everybody wants a text message.
Speaker A:How about this?
Speaker A:Are your phones covered after hours or on the weekends?
Speaker A:Are they going to voicemail?
Speaker A:Or do you have maybe a missed call text back feature where they can click a link to book an appointment immediately?
Speaker A:And are those things working?
Speaker A:These are all places where your money is just wasting.
Speaker A:If you have broken systems or holes in your systems.
Speaker A:Let me give you an example.
Speaker A:One year we were just off of a holiday and we'd intentionally routed our inbound phone calls to a holiday voicemail box.
Speaker A:And that was on purpose.
Speaker A:So Monday and Tuesday after the holiday, whoever configured it, reconfigured it, set it up wrong.
Speaker A:It was supposed to be automatically on a schedule set to Sunday night switch back before Monday morning business so that the phones would ring through the normal route.
Speaker A:Well, the result, because that didn't happen, was that every inbound call went straight to voicemail.
Speaker A:It went straight to voicemail in a voicemail box that wasn't configured to even email us.
Speaker A:But it was a regular workday and it wasn't the holiday anymore.
Speaker A:We were hurting for leads.
Speaker A:Here's the problem.
Speaker A:It took us a day and a half to even notice what was going on because some leads were still pushing into the CRM.
Speaker A:It just looked like things were slow.
Speaker A:It's not like everything was cut off.
Speaker A:But here's the deal.
Speaker A:The cost was huge.
Speaker A:It cost us a ton of paid for, ready to buy inbound leads.
Speaker A:They were gone.
Speaker A:Well, they weren't gone gone.
Speaker A:Technically we were able to respond to some of them, but now we're, now we're a day and a half late.
Speaker A:A lot of them already had enough estimates or appointments scheduled and we didn't get to set as many as we wanted.
Speaker A:This is what a self inflicted slowdown looks like.
Speaker A:But it felt like the market was off and it wasn't.
Speaker A:It was our own system silently failing.
Speaker A:And if I'd have just gone in and added more to our PPC or Facebook or spent more money, it would have just put leads back into the broken system.
Speaker A:It would have cost us even more.
Speaker A:You can't outspend a broken machine.
Speaker A:And I talk to contractors all the time who may not have this big of a breakdown, but there's breakdowns in their systems.
Speaker A:I see this on a regular basis.
Speaker A:Listen to this.
Speaker A:We didn't have a lead problem, we had a system problem.
Speaker A:And since then we now immediately after that we implemented control.
Speaker A:And for a while there was nobody but Jason that was allowed to go in because we were using Ringcentral.
Speaker A:We still use Ringcentral.
Speaker A:And it's a very complex backend.
Speaker A:Until I had someone that I had trained, trained enough that I could trust that they could do it right.
Speaker A:I actually held on to that for myself because there's so much, there's so much at stake.
Speaker A:Here's another one.
Speaker A:And man, gosh, these things are embarrassing.
Speaker A:I'm going to be honest.
Speaker A:These things are embarrassing.
Speaker A:And I'm sharing this with you so that you can avoid these mistakes and you don't have to pay this price.
Speaker A:So one year leads from one particular source.
Speaker A:And it was one of our major sources.
Speaker A:We're probably getting maybe half of our leads from this one source.
Speaker A:It was a City wide magazine with a distribution of over 800,000 copies.
Speaker A:And we had a full page ad.
Speaker A:The phone wasn't ringing.
Speaker A:We had it in our mailbox.
Speaker A:We knew it had been distributed and delivered to the mailboxes.
Speaker A:So we investigated and here's what we found out in our phone number.
Speaker A:One single digit was off.
Speaker A:How in the world did that happen?
Speaker A:Well, here's what happened.
Speaker A:Our marketing manager skipped his checklist.
Speaker A:That checklist literally says, pick up the phone, look at the number on the proof that you're about to send off to the printer, dial the number and make sure someone in the call center answers it.
Speaker A:That's what the checklist said.
Speaker A:He didn't do it because this was an ad he placed every month.
Speaker A:And he was just updating and changing some calls to action and some photos.
Speaker A:He skipped that one thing.
Speaker A:Those ads cost us over $10,000.
Speaker A:But it wasn't even about the cost of the ads.
Speaker A:It was the missed opportunity that we didn't get the leads.
Speaker A:And that cost us over $100,000.
Speaker A:Over $100,000.
Speaker A:One single digit.
Speaker A:I don't want this to happen to you.
Speaker A:I don't want this to happen to you.
Speaker A:Here's the lesson.
Speaker A:We had the system.
Speaker A:It existed.
Speaker A:The checklist existed.
Speaker A:And it wasn't a knowledge problem.
Speaker A:It was simply an execution problem.
Speaker A:A checklist that wasn't run.
Speaker A:And if you don't run your checklist, it's just a piece of paper collecting dust.
Speaker A:One digit cost us six digits.
Speaker A:How about that?
Speaker A:Okay, so here's the next step.
Speaker A:Are your digital ads live and running?
Speaker A:Did something turn off?
Speaker A:Did your credit card expire?
Speaker A:Did you go over your credit limit?
Speaker A:Who knows?
Speaker A:Are your digital ads actually working?
Speaker A:Did you miss that email that came in from Facebook that said, hey, there's a problem with your account?
Speaker A:Update your credit card before this date.
Speaker A:Did you miss that?
Speaker A:Maybe you did.
Speaker A:Do you have a constant stream of reviews coming in?
Speaker A:Because you need a velocity of reviews and you need a healthy rating.
Speaker A:What if all of a sudden your rating tanked because you got several bad reviews in a row and your ideal clients are looking there online and they're seeing, you know, you know, 4.8, 4.8.
Speaker A:Now you got a 3.7 star.
Speaker A:Who are they not going to call?
Speaker A:They're not going to call you.
Speaker A:You have to have a healthy star rating, and it doesn't have to be five stars.
Speaker A:Five stars is unbelievable.
Speaker A:You can't please everybody.
Speaker A:Are your web forms actually pushing into your CRM?
Speaker A:Okay, here's another story for you guys.
Speaker A:This one hurt, too.
Speaker A:Leads were down again.
Speaker A:We realized it wasn't across the board, but it was leads that were sent to the website that were supposed to be pushed into the CRM.
Speaker A:What happened is our website form, the integration to the CRM, it broke.
Speaker A:Something happened.
Speaker A:Someone updated an API somewhere and it broke.
Speaker A:Broke.
Speaker A:But.
Speaker A:So the submissions came in, but they Never landed where our team would see them.
Speaker A:In the CRM we're investigating, finding what goes on.
Speaker A:So we log into the to the web form portal and sure enough we saw that it had been filled out multiple times.
Speaker A:And here's what saved us.
Speaker A:It was also logging every form submission and we were able to download those and import those into our CRM which, actually, which actually really helped us.
Speaker A:But we were still super slow on speed deletes.
Speaker A:We were not able to to book as many of those or even reach as many of those as we normally would have been.
Speaker A:A lesson that we learned from that is we turned on something called dual delivery.
Speaker A:That means on our web forms it would push to the CRM but it would also send us an email every now and then.
Speaker A:This happened again.
Speaker A:Someone in our call center is like, hey, we're getting the emails but it's not pushing to the CRM.
Speaker A:And I'm like, I'm so thankful.
Speaker A:We turned on dual delivery so we had a backup route that let us know and it was right there on our radar.
Speaker A:So we can't let a broken pipeline connection tank our business.
Speaker A:Here's the lesson.
Speaker A:We've got to build some redundancy in because when you've got your whole machine running, you've got overhead, you've got payroll, you've got staff, you better keep those leads coming in or else you're not going to have work for those people.
Speaker A:You're not going to have the money to pay those people.
Speaker A:It's vital that we manage and nurture and guard our lead flow.
Speaker A:We have to guard this.
Speaker A:We absolutely have to guard it.
Speaker A:You know, we didn't lose those leads, but it was only because we had the backup and without it they'd have vanished and we would have.
Speaker A:What do we have done?
Speaker A:We would have blamed the market.
Speaker A:Where are you blaming the market when it's on your end?
Speaker A:And you know, I talked to some of these digital marketing agency owners and they get frustrated because they feel like they're giving good leads to the contractors, but the contractors don't have the systems to contact them quickly and get the appointments set.
Speaker A:That's why they're into helping coach call centers and things like that sometimes and giving you a free go high level account because they don't want their work to be wasted either.
Speaker A:Here's the next thing.
Speaker A:How about people that come to your website and they don't come convert?
Speaker A:Are you retargeting your website visitors?
Speaker A:Do you have dual delivery set up?
Speaker A:There's some other things that we're not going to get into right now like your set rate, your set rate by source, your issue rate, your cancellation rate, your demo rate, your closing rate, your NSLI by source.
Speaker A:We're not going to dig into all of that today.
Speaker A:But if your systems are broken, more leads just means more waste.
Speaker A:Here's the next step.
Speaker A:We still not ready to add any new channels.
Speaker A:We've got to squeeze everything out of what's already working.
Speaker A:What lead sources are performing for you?
Speaker A:Can you pour gasoline on those?
Speaker A:Can you add more budget?
Speaker A:Can you expand your service area?
Speaker A:You know, maybe you only said we're going to do, you know, exterior or this project type A, maybe you can add project type B.
Speaker A:If it's something else, you can do it more frequently.
Speaker A:If it's radio or television or direct mail, you could maybe do it more frequently so you can adjust and tune up your existing sources that are working now.
Speaker A:What about that?
Speaker A:What about the sources that are losing?
Speaker A:Well, you can cut them off entirely or you could cut them back and work on improving them.
Speaker A:Why isn't this lead source working?
Speaker A:Is our offer compelling?
Speaker A:Is it inspiring people, compelling them to call right now?
Speaker A:What about if it's a magazine or in the feed?
Speaker A:Are our competitors running ads that make ours look terrible, undesirable?
Speaker A:So are they getting all the calls instead of us?
Speaker A:And here's something that.
Speaker A:Something so basic I'm surprised that more business owners don't understand this.
Speaker A:It's a marketing framework.
Speaker A:It's really a way to measure and design all of your ads, whether they're on the screen or whether they're, you know, in print.
Speaker A:Offline marketing.
Speaker A:And it's this.
Speaker A:It's called Aida Aid.
Speaker A:A.
Speaker A:What does that mean?
Speaker A:The first A stands for attention.
Speaker A:So it's attention, interest, desire and action.
Speaker A:What that means is when someone's scrolling, your ad needs to grab their attention so that they what?
Speaker A:Stop scrolling.
Speaker A:Now you've got just a short period of time to grab their interest now that you have their attention.
Speaker A:And then if you've got their interest, they're going to look at that and they're going to say, oh, I think I want that.
Speaker A:I want that fresh garage floor look.
Speaker A:I want that new roof or newly painted kitchen cabinets.
Speaker A:You know what?
Speaker A:I'm going to hang on to this.
Speaker A:I'm going to screenshot this and put this in my camera roll so that when I get ready and when I get the money, I'll call them then.
Speaker A:No, we missed the last piece.
Speaker A:Action.
Speaker A:Why do they need to call now, today, instead of waiting till tomorrow or next month or next season or next year.
Speaker A:So that's ada A I D A.
Speaker A:You should grab each one of your ads, your digital ads, your ads that go in the mailbox, every one of them, lay them out and say, does this grab attention immediately?
Speaker A:Does it get their interest and draw them in?
Speaker A:Does it make them want it?
Speaker A:Does it appeal to their emotion?
Speaker A:And is there a strong call to action, a reason that they should call now instead of call later?
Speaker A:That one little thing right there will improve your ROI on what you're already doing.
Speaker A:So we've got to look at the whole funnel also, not just the ad.
Speaker A:How about the landing page?
Speaker A:If you're sending users to a landing page, how is that landing page converting?
Speaker A:If you're advertising kitchen cabinets, are you sending them to a kitchen cabinets page?
Speaker A:Or are you sending them to an interior painting page?
Speaker A:Or even worse, just a painting page, a homepage.
Speaker A:We need to connect them with what they were specifically searching for.
Speaker A:Again, you're spending the money on the click, but then the click, they click on your site and they're like, eh, let's try at someone else's company.
Speaker A:Then they click on an ad for kitchen cabinet painting and it takes them directly to a kitchen cabinet painting page.
Speaker A:They're going to have a higher conversion rate because of that, you know.
Speaker A:And of course, is your Google business profile tuned up?
Speaker A:Are you in the local pack?
Speaker A:Do you have reviews coming in?
Speaker A:And what's your rating again?
Speaker A:You have to ask yourself, honestly, would your ideal client actually respond to your ad?
Speaker A:But instead what we do is we're like, hey, do you like this ad?
Speaker A:Do you like this ad?
Speaker A:I like this ad.
Speaker A:I like this ad.
Speaker A:And we like those ads because we design, typically owners design ads that make them feel good.
Speaker A:And just because the ad looks beautiful doesn't mean it's going to compel action from your ideal clients.
Speaker A:Now this is where everybody's leaving money on the table.
Speaker A:Re engaging your old opportunities.
Speaker A:You have a CRM for a reason.
Speaker A:CRM, Customer relationship Management.
Speaker A:Instead, most contractors have a CRM, a Terry CRM cemetery.
Speaker A:Their leads go there to die.
Speaker A:That's what happens.
Speaker A:Their leads just go there to die.
Speaker A:They're not re engaging anyone.
Speaker A:Let's look at this.
Speaker A:How about the people that contacted you yesterday for an appointment?
Speaker A:They're interested in XYZ service.
Speaker A:You try for a few days and you can't get them booked and you give up.
Speaker A:Well, why not automatically re engage them two weeks later, 30 days later, 180 days later, they reached out to you for a reason.
Speaker A:Maybe the time was bad.
Speaker A:Maybe they bought from someone else and there's a good chance that they weren't happy with what they got.
Speaker A:And they have another project coming up.
Speaker A:How about the proposals that you gave recently that didn't buy and you stopped following up on them?
Speaker A:How about reengaging them?
Speaker A:And we're not going to talk about, hey, I'm just calling to follow up.
Speaker A:No, we're not going to talk about that right now.
Speaker A:That's a whole nother story on how to follow up properly.
Speaker A:Re engage them with a rehash program.
Speaker A:Text, email, voicemail.
Speaker A:Send them a letter, handwritten letter, a postcard, a thank you card, and then call them back six months later to see what their next project is.
Speaker A:Just because they didn't hire you, just because they think you were too expensive doesn't mean they won't hire you next time.
Speaker A:You have to manage this relationship.
Speaker A:Customer relationship management, that's what this is.
Speaker A:Then.
Speaker A:Then let's look at the next set.
Speaker A:How about people that bought from you?
Speaker A:Do you think they have other projects?
Speaker A:Have you done and exhausted every project?
Speaker A:They may have.
Speaker A:Maybe they moved.
Speaker A:Maybe they have a new home.
Speaker A:One of the things we do is this is called closed loop marketing.
Speaker A:When they come into our CRM, we are forever going to be marketing to them and managing that relationship.
Speaker A:Unless they say, hey, stop, leave me alone.
Speaker A:We're going to be calling them, we're going to be emailing them, we're going to be texting them, we're going to be sending them things in the mail, the US Mail, forever.
Speaker A:And it's just going to grow and grow and grow over time.
Speaker A:So for instance, how about if every time you finished a project for someone and they paid in full six months later, what if they got a phone call from you?
Speaker A:And what if in between there they got an email from you or a letter every 30 days and you're now managing and maintaining, investing in that relationship, saying, we still care about you and we're still here for you, keeping your company top of mind.
Speaker A:So that when they or their neighbor or one of their acquaintances says, hey, I need XYZ done, they immediately think of you because you've stayed in touch with them instead of ghosted them after the fact.
Speaker A:You know, maybe they did exterior, you can do interior, maybe they did roofing, now they need gutters or vice versa.
Speaker A:Or maybe they just need maintenance and annual maintenance.
Speaker A:Find a reason to step on their property.
Speaker A:Chances are if you go look at 10 properties that you did in the past, you're going to find some other need that they have and maybe you've got a new service that you've launched.
Speaker A:And here's the thing, it's cheaper to revive a lead than it is to buy a new one and start building trust over from zero.
Speaker A:Here's the next one.
Speaker A:How about referrals?
Speaker A:Are you actually asking for referrals?
Speaker A:Are you just getting referrals by accident?
Speaker A:Do you have a real referral program?
Speaker A:Are you asking there at the moment when they're the happiest that they'll ever be for a referral?
Speaker A:You may be asking for the Google review.
Speaker A:Are you asking for referrals?
Speaker A:Ask them.
Speaker A:You could even reach out and every now and then those people that you're emailing and calling and sending letters to, you can ask them your past clients for referrals and you can ask them for reviews as well.
Speaker A:How about also like, let's say centers of influence that could bring you multiple projects.
Speaker A:Realtors, insurance agents, property managers, and any anybody else like that that has a network of ideal clients for you.
Speaker A:How about this?
Speaker A:Are you like mining the neighborhood?
Speaker A:And when you're working in an area, are you knocking on all the doors?
Speaker A:Are you putting out flyers all around?
Speaker A:Are you making a big splash with your yard signs?
Speaker A:Now these days most everybody's got a nicely wrapped truck and that's great.
Speaker A:But are you using that to do all of the heavy lifting?
Speaker A:Some people may not see your truck because you're already gone for the day when they get home from work.
Speaker A:And if you've got one client in that neighborhood, there's probably a lot more that needs you.
Speaker A:So go knock on those doors.
Speaker A:Okay, so now we're at the very last step.
Speaker A:We're at step four and this is the last resort.
Speaker A:And we've kept it last on purpose now and only now after steps one through three are done, they're dialed in.
Speaker A:Now we talk about spending more money.
Speaker A:What channels are we not using yet?
Speaker A:Some quick options.
Speaker A:Most people aren't doing door to door.
Speaker A:Most people aren't doing direct mail email newsletters.
Speaker A:And some people aren't doing ppc.
Speaker A:Some are doing meta or ppc, some are doing both.
Speaker A:But those are both options.
Speaker A:There's lsa, local service ads.
Speaker A:Those are high intent clients.
Speaker A:How about high intent prospects?
Speaker A:Rather, how about nextdoor?
Speaker A:And I'm gonna, how dare I say this, Angie?
Speaker A:Now I say that like that because that's the consensus where the way most contractors feel.
Speaker A:But there are genuinely I know a number of contractors, mainly in more rural, smaller communities where Angie is a home run for them.
Speaker A:And they make great ROI on Angie.
Speaker A:It's worth trying if you haven't tried it.
Speaker A:A lot of people haven't even tried it because they have a bad name out there.
Speaker A:And again, we're not currently using Angie for good reasons based on data.
Speaker A:The other piece is you could even try telemarketing.
Speaker A:It's easy to go swipe the credit card.
Speaker A:Do you want to go out there and compete with everybody else or do you want to generate leads?
Speaker A:Knocking, like knocking on the door and telemarketing?
Speaker A:Maybe they're not even shopping.
Speaker A:And if you find someone that has a need or a want at that moment, they're not even getting other quotes.
Speaker A:They're just looking at you.
Speaker A:So we've got two rules.
Speaker A:Here's the first rule.
Speaker A:Don't scale the chaos.
Speaker A:So we're going to fix the machine and then we're going to add fuel and we're going to test small.
Speaker A:When we add new lead sources, we're not just going to go put thousands and thousands of dollars into a new untested lead source and we're going to test small before we scale it up.
Speaker A:We're going to fix the machine and test small.
Speaker A:Those are the two rules.
Speaker A:Set a target.
Speaker A:Hey, we're going to spend X amount of money on this per week, per month, or per day, whatever, for six weeks, three months, whatever it is, and set some criteria by which you're going to measure that.
Speaker A:And if it doesn't work, kill it.
Speaker A:And yes, marketing is indeed marketing is a risk.
Speaker A:You are literally risking your money.
Speaker A:That's part of it.
Speaker A:That's the game we're in.
Speaker A:So when your leads go slow, here's the order every time.
Speaker A:One, diagnose what kind of slow it is.
Speaker A:Two, fix your leaks.
Speaker A:Three, maximize what's already working.
Speaker A:Four, reactivate what you've already paid for.
Speaker A:And then, and only then, consider spending more money.
Speaker A:Contractors skip straight to step four.
Speaker A:And that's exactly why they stay stuck.
Speaker A:They stay broke.
Speaker A:It's because they're busy doing the wrong thing.
Speaker A:I want to invite you to subscribe right here on this platform.
Speaker A:And if you want want help getting unstuck and taking your business to the next level so that you can live with greater freedom and purpose.
Speaker A:Check out our coaching program.
Speaker A:The link is right here with this podcast episode.
Speaker A:Be on the lookout for the next episode.
Speaker A:I'm Jason Phillips.
Speaker A:This is Contractor Freedom.
Speaker A:Go build something that lasts.
Speaker A:If today's episode helped you.
Speaker A:Don't do this journey alone.
Speaker A:Join thousands of other contractors inside the Contractor Freedom community at Contractor Freedom and start building the business, the team, and the life you really want.
Speaker A:We'll see you next time.
