Transcription
So, we own a home service brand that specializes in lighting predominantly, but now we are in the permanent lighting game, thus working year round instead of just temporarily. We've scaled this business to over seven figures a year now in 2025. And in this video, for the first time, we're going to run through the entire process of the business from start to finish. And what I mean by that is how we acquire leads and how we do our marketing. How we set appointments, the exact process behind that and the systems we use. How we actually sell jobs for a super high ticket. Our average ticket is $3,800. On the permanent side, it's even higher. And then actually how we fulfill the jobs and do everything else on site to turn one job into two, two jobs into four, and so on and so forth.
So, in this video, we're going to break down every single process of the business for the first time on YouTube or anywhere else and show you guys exactly what we're doing from start to finish. So, right now, we're in the car driving to the job site. Jack is already there doing a permanent lighting install. And so, we're going to go over specifically all the processes that he goes through on the operation side and then how we blend operations with marketing to actually get a ton of the work from the neighbors and everything like that. So, stick around. This video should be a really good one. and then uh reach out to me on Instagram or anywhere else if you have any questions after.
So, here's the house we're installing today. We're out here in beautiful Phoenix, Arizona. It's the middle of April and it's probably 100° already and we're doing a fencetofence permanent coloranging smart track lighting installation. So, basically, this is these permanent Christmas lights that are getting more popular. We're doing this in the offseason to drive a lot more sales into our business and then it actually ends up helping our temporary lighting business long term. So, we're going to run through the process here later in the video, but let's go back to the office and showcase exactly how we got the job up until this point from marketing to nurturing the lead to getting the appointment, closing it, and then scheduling this install. So, let's go do that and then we'll pop over here and interview Jack.
And so, for my process and any home service or contracting business's process, it comes down to these five things. You can try to over complicate it and add a bunch of different other stuff, but it really comes down to nailing these five things. The first thing is obviously marketing and branding. That speaks for itself. If you don't put your name out there, you're not going to get calls. But the part that a lot of people miss is step two. And it's the actual marketing to appointment setting and quote setting. It's not just marketing straight to step three, which is sales. You have to be good at converting leads to appointments. And this is the part a lot of people miss. So number two is obviously appointment setting, quote setting, making sure we actually get the chance to have an atbat to close somebody with a quote. And then step three is the actual sales process. how we do all of that, the things we say, how we say it, how we position ourselves with the client, how we overcome certain forms of sales objections and get down to the root cause. And then the fourth thing is obviously once the people close on the job, how we fulfill them, how we actually do the job properly, our standard operating procedures for doing the job. And then the fifth thing, and this is the part that I see the majority of home service and contracting brands miss, is what they're doing on site after they're done with jobs and during jobs to move the marketing forward. And so, a perfect example we have is last week we did about a $5,000 lighting install. Because of all the stuff we did on site with the A-frame, the signage, the gift card campaigns, everything like that, we landed another $2,800 job from the job we were already at in person. And so when I talk about number five, I'm meaning there are so many processes that you can do while you're out doing an existing job that's already booked and closed for you to get more business from the neighbors, whether it's the neighbors in the neighborhood or the neighboring businesses. And that's the part the majority of people miss.
So let's dive into each piece. So for step one, marketing and branding. I have a ton of YouTube videos on marketing, sales, branding, all that jazz. I'm not going to take like 45 minutes to go through each one of these in depth, but I'm going to go high level. When we talk about marketing, there's basically four or five places we get the majority of our leads. And those four or five places are the Google Maps pack, like the Google Maps listing, uh Facebook and Instagram ads, Facebook and Instagram organic referrals from past customers, and then in the Christmas light business, we do a lot of Google pay-per-click. But outside of that, everything else comes from systems and processes from word of mouth, referrals, and other things like that. And so marketing is just simply how do I get as many leads as possible into my business.
But number two is the part that I really want to dive into. And this is the biggest part that I changed in the business when we went from 490500K a season in the Christmas light business to 800K the next year doing $400,000 in two consecutive months. The biggest thing we changed was when I added SnipyLead. What SnipyLead does is when a lead comes into my business, whether it's from Facebook, Instagram, or my website, any form of ad, any other place that people could put their name and info into our system to get a quote, the thing that we were missing out on is automated nurtures. All of the big brands were doing this, but we were still doing it super clunky and old school. I had sales guys or even three, four years ago when I was doing everything myself, a lead would come in, I would get the email, I would get the text from, you know, the website host, whoever was doing it, and I would instantly try to call them and then if they didn't answer, I would send a text and then I would wait for them to get back to me or maybe I'd follow up in a day and nothing was structured and automated.
What we did now with Snipy Lead is when a lead comes in, regardless of where it comes in from, it immediately the second that customer clicks submit, our phone rings. Whether it's the sales rep or whoever is running our office, the phone immediately rings and says, "You have a new lead. Press one to get connected." They press one, that system automatically attempts to call that prospect who just submitted on our website instantly. The reason that's so important is because if you think about what's happening when a client is submitting something on your website, now they're waiting for you. If they're not calling you, they're waiting to get back. So, what does almost everybody do when they submit something on a website for a home service brand? X out and they're going to go to a competitor and ask for a quote from them and then they're going to go to another website and ask for a quote from them. If you can get your response time, whether it's trying to call them or anything else to under a minute, and that's what Snipy lead does, you can stop the majority of your prospects from going to option 2, 3, four, and five in your market because you give them what they want immediately.
If the customer does not answer their phone, it automatically drops a voicemail into their mailbox. Not like they're not sending a voicemail. It's pre-recorded and the voicemail just says, "Hey, it's Steve with Valley Christmas Lights or Steve in this case. Hey, it's Steve with Valley Premier Lighting. Uh, saw you reached out for a quote. Sorry we missed you. I'm going to shoot you a text. Feel free to reply to that text. We can get this thing going." Then that voicemail drops and then an automated text goes to them and says, "Hey, here's the text promised. Feel free to reach back out and we can find a time to get connected." And then if that prospect doesn't respond to that text nurture or call back, the system sends another text 12 hours later within business hours that says something along the lines. And you can customize it. Our text says something like, "Hey, are you still working on this? Would love to get you dialed in." And then if they don't respond to that, 24 hours later, we just send another text that says, "Hey, just following up, making sure you got this taken care of." You would be stunned at how many people convert on that second and third text. Some people think, "Oh, Steve, that's kind of annoying. That much follow-up might piss people off. They're already not your customer. They're already not doing business with you. I've already paid for the lead. Whether it's the work I did on my branding or the actual Facebook ad spend, Google ad spend, whatever else I'm doing. I am going to make sure that I get in contact with as many of those as possible. And if you reach out to any big home service brand, they're all doing automated follow-ups as well. So, take it from me and take it from the companies that are doing seven, eight, nine figures, they all have that feature.
So once we get that, what that does is from marketing, we get leads. Then in step two, we nurture them properly and we get a higher percentage of leads converted to appointments. So now if you know your close rate on sales, the more appointments you get and then you know your close rate, the more at bats you're going to have to actually implement your close rate, thus close more people. And so then the sales process is really simple. I'm going to make an entire separate video about that. But for our business, because our average ticket is $3,800 or higher, depending on whether it's commercial or residential, we do a ton of in-person sales, but we pre-qualify them on the phone to make sure they know what they're getting at. That way, my sales guys aren't just running around all day long. And so, what we do is we try to close them in person. We try to get all the true reasons why they want to buy. And then we attempt to convert them there. If they don't close in person, we send them the quote. We have follow-up sequences with that all through the system as well to make sure we get them across the board. When we implemented Snipy Lead, our close rate from 2023 to 2024 went up by about 10 to 15%. That equated to mid to high five figures more of book sales from the same marketing that we were doing before. It was incredibly impactful to our bottom line. You are already paying for the leads. You need to have a system and process that generates more appointments which turn into more quotes which then turn into more closed sales for you. It's all just one big math equation.
So step four is fulfillment and actually completing the job. There's a ton of things you can do there to make yourself more efficient operationally. We'll talk to Jack more about that. And step five specifically is what you do on site to get more jobs. It's the most important part that the majority of brands are missing. We'll walk through that entire process with Jack out there, and we'll show you exactly what we do to turn one job into two, two jobs into three or four, and keep the compounding effect going there. Let me just preface this again. If you are just relying on paid ads to get you appointments, to get you jobs and everything else and not capitalizing on step five, you will be stagnant and you will be on the paid ad and paid customer acquisition hamster wheel and it's a terrible place for your business to be. My business was there for multiple years. When we exploded was when we actually did step five properly and structured and we'll talk about it there.
So, Jack, tell me a little bit about uh specifically tell us a little bit about your standard operating procedures and everything you do the second you get on site in terms of like talking to the customer, doing all those things. Give us the full rundown. I just confirmed the design with the homeowner. So, I'm going to the front door, making contact. They've already confirmed when they sign the quote and see the design and everything else, but if they're here, like to go over it again. Um then after that I I have a system that I do um for each of these permanent installs. So I begin planning out my track starting with the corners first and then obviously I know where my power is during the quote and all that stuff and start running the lights from there. Okay. Interesting. I want to hone in on that though. The reason behind confirming again so the customers already confirmed when they approved the quote. They already confir confirmed during the sales process. Then when you come out before doing the job, you confirm one more time in person before you do the entire job. Why is that? Because it's a permanent product and we want it to be what they want it to be. The last thing we want to do is leave the customer with questions um about what they're getting. They need to know exactly what they're getting and then we give that to them and there's no room for, well, I thought it was this. I thought it was that. So, we do what we're supposed to do and they do what they're supposed to do. Yeah. And the funny thing about that is all of those procedures that we have operationally typically come from a mistake that happened one time or another and then you make a new standard operating procedure so it doesn't happen again. And so for instance, going and reconfirming with the customer, walking the site again at sales process, doing the job, and then right before the install as well, because at some time during the entirety of running this business, we probably had a scenario where a customer thought one thing, we did the entire job another way, and then they came back and were upset at us. And so that's what we did is we built in a standard operating procedure that Jack implements to make sure that that exact problem doesn't happen again. So that's a huge part of the operational efficiency is if something bad happens once, especially if it happens twice and it happens three times, you know, you have an operational inefficiency that you need to build some sort of process and system around to fix it. And so that's exactly what Jack's doing here, walking the customer through doing all those things. It sounds so simple, but a lot of you guys that own businesses know that when you actually go out to do a job, sometimes you're so concerned about just doing the job that you skip some of the steps. And so step four is a lot about having operational efficiency. And a lot of it is just about giving yourself checklist style formats to make sure that you're not relying on your memory or your crew's memory to check all the boxes that you need to on a job site. So things like walking the customer through, giving them the gift cards at the end of it, certain safety measures we have with the vehicles, the toolbox put back in the same spot, is the map of of the van and the way we want it set up properly the same way that the day ends as it was when the day started. All of those things are the operational checklist side that Jack is the expert in.
But then where I think that our brand really stands out is the molding and the merging of between operations and sales to market to the people in the neighborhoods that we're doing the jobs at. And so what I mean by that is a lot of companies when they get bigger, so like for us when we peek out, we have about 30 employees. And so what happens is you can get so focused on marketing just doing marketing and installs just doing installs that and they should be focused on their main jobs. But what happens is there's a lot that the install guys can do to actually help the marketing team out and the sales team out and vice versa. So the sales team can help out the install guys by not selling terrible jobs or dangerous jobs or anything like that. And the install team helps our marketing team out by doing the five-step process every time we get to a job site. And so I know on this job site our van that's getting wrapped is in the shop. So we don't have it right now. But basically what we make sure we do every single time we're on a job during Christmas season and now during the permanent light season as well. So, we do the five things. We arrive in the branded vehicle. We put out the A-frame that you guys have seen in my other videos that explicitly invite the neighbors to come talk to us. We give gift cards to the customer when we're done with the job for them to give to their neighbors that tracks the customer that was that was just given the gift cards on the back. So, for example, this customer, we give her two gift cards with her name written on the back and it says gifted by and then the customer's name. So now when she goes and gives them to the neighbors, we know that we can track it back to her from giving it to the neighbors. So when those get redeemed, we tell her that, hey, we're going to send you a gift card to a steakhouse every time these get redeemed. So now she's incentivized to go give them out. The fourth thing we do is we make sure we get a Google review. She came out and was so thrilled with us already that we already got the fivestar Google review with a picture and the job's not even done yet. And so I'll put that on the screen here. And then the fifth thing we do is depending on where you're at and what the neighborhood is, we like to either a door hang the closest couple neighborhoods or b for us during Christmas season, we didn't we didn't feel the need to do that quite as much. But what we did focus on was getting the photo reviews and getting local Facebook reviews and handing our business cards out to the passerbys in the neighborhoods. So if you're in more of a transactional trade, you can doorhang the closest 10 to 15 houses or in pretty much any trade. The reason I was just wanted to be honest about our process is like when we're in Christmas season, we don't have a lead generation problem anymore. We have a fulfillment problem. And so the one thing that I could take off of the operations guys plate last year was doing those door hangers after every job because we didn't need it explicitly like most new businesses do now. And bonus points on the door hangers. If you write a handwritten note on the back of them, they'll perform at like probably two to three times better rate. So when you build that process in, I mean that like now you have operations doing some of marketing's job for them because we want to capitalize on the social proof, which is the neighbors seeing us do the work at someone's house. And that's the part that most brands are missing. And Jack's really good at that. Everybody always when they come in, they always say, "Oh, I talked to your crew. They were so sweet. They gave us this, that, and the other." That's what you want. So if you think about it this way, if someone is paying you for your services and you are out at their house, the chances are that their neighborhood and the people living around them are also in similar economic circles, meaning they probably also can afford your services and want your services. So you have that going for you. And you have the social proof, which is the most important part that's building trust. And the trust that's being built is they see you doing the neighbor and so they already know the neighbor vetted you for them. And that's like the most important part. So if you haven't built that part into the business, you're missing out on a ton of opportunity.
So you've seen the entire process of how we acquire a job from the marketing and lead genen side to the lead nurturing and appointment setting side, the sales side, and now the actual installation and closeout side. If you want more info on how you can do this specifically in your business, you can watch the free cycle training where we go over all of the marketing and selling for a home service business at homeserviceaccelerator.com. And then if you want more help from our team and how we actually implement this in your business alongside you like we've done for 260 plus other home service business owners to date as I'm filming this, feel free to book a call with our team after and we'll help you out. Otherwise, just keep consuming the YouTube and the Instagram content and keep building those businesses and we'll do it together. Peace.