Transcription
No matter what happens in this world with the advancement of AI technology or anything else, home services are here to stay. Now, they might look different with the advancement of AI, technology, and everything else.
But in this video, I'm going to talk about everything I did to build my home service business to do over a million a year in sales with most of our sales coming in a two-month period where we do $400,000 a month in two straight months. It's a seasonal business.
So, if you don't know me, my name is Steve Hunaker. I'm the founder of multiple home service brands and I'm also the founder of the Home Service Accelerator where at the time of filming this video, we've helped over 450 home service businesses run their own Facebook and Instagram ads and run their own Google Maps SEO and set up a bunch of automations and systems in their business without paying monthly retainers to agencies.
So, let's go over everything that I would do differently if I started at zero right now knowing how much the landscape of home services has changed in the last 5 years. Let's dive in.
[Music]
The first thing I would do differently is I would ignore every boomer who has been in business for 15 or 20 years talking about how they grew from word of mouth. If you're starting from scratch, or you're doing less than $100,000 a month, I promise you in every home service business, you are going to need to throw money at advertising. Now, whether that's Facebook ads, Google ads, yard sign campaigns, signage campaigns, truck wraps, whatever it is, you have to do it.
And so the problem is in a lot of business owners is they get advice from somebody who's been in the industry in 20 to 30 years. And the issue with that is their advice was relevant at that time. But if you talk to somebody who has started a business past 2020 or 2021 even the difference in how you have to run a business, even compared to 5 years ago and now is so night and day. But if you operate from that advice from people who when they started their business, Google Maps didn't exist, Google SEO was barely a thing, word of mouth truly was the best way to market because there was about a tenth of the competition as there is now, then that's going to be terrible advice.
And so as I go now, these are the things that I would change differently and emphasize way more from day one. The first thing is the Google Maps listing. I would put all of my effort and resources into finding a way to get a Google Maps listing, but also get a pin on my Google Maps page and not be a service area because Google is incentivizing the businesses who have a pin and an address visible for the proximity search. We've seen this across the board in all different types of home service businesses. It's not just opinion anymore at this point. It's fact.
The second thing that I would change is I would put a lot of effort into social media ads and organic social media and local businesses. Now, I'm going to be a realist with you. I don't think at the stage that most of the people that watch my YouTube channel are, it makes sense to be like a daily organic social media poster. You should do that. You should try to post as much organic content as possible. But I'm a realist to the fact that a lot of the people watching my channel are owner operators still or maybe have like one or two employees. And so what I would say is you have to get really good at running Facebook and Instagram ads in a home service business because once you make a couple good converting video ads, they actually do a really good job of supplementing organic growth on your page and operating as a lead generation source.
And so if you're just like running around and trying to go viral on TikTok locally with your pressure washing business or your roofing business or something like that, yes, if you do a video a day, you might get some results. And I don't think that that's a bad thing. But I'm also a realist to know that most of you will watch this video, tell yourself you're going to post an organic post once a day, which would be 365 posts a year. And from my data and from everything I've seen at Home Service Accelerator, most of you guys will not even post close to twice to three times a week. And so I would rather just be real with you and channel that into actually putting a lot more effort into Facebook and Instagram ads. And then when you make good ads, they also double as good organic content.
And so what we do with a lot of people in home service accelerators is we have them film a few really good creatives. And what I mean by creatives is like really converting video ads, really good like branding videos that tell your story in a good way that makes you seem like a human across the camera to the potential prospect. And then what we do is we actually use it multi-purposely. And so what I mean by that is it runs as an ad on Facebook, it runs as an ad on Instagram and then we have them cut the call to action or the CTA at the end of the video and post it on their Google business page as well because then it's just an intro video talking about like why your business is different and it's another piece of content there. And then they could post it as a YouTube short as well. They could post it as a Tik Tok. They could post it organically on Instagram and Facebook. All sorts of things.
And on the other side of things, organic doesn't have to be this Steven Spielberg level, highly edited performance every single time you do an organic post. It could be something as simple as you're at a customer's job site and you're just explaining what you're doing. And so when you make organic content, and I've talked about this in other videos, it really comes down to three things. Do you educate? Do you entertain them? Or do you provide social proof? As long as you do one of these three things in organic content, you'll never run out of ideas for organic.
And so when I say educate, tell them what you're doing on the job. If I say entertain, make a satisfying video of a before and after, put some music behind it, whatever else. Make a funny video, make a funny Tik Tok trend, whatever else. And then social proof is just show proof. Whether it's a testimonial from a customer, screenshots of Google reviews over like pretty before and after photos, whatever else. Social proof is just other people saying they've used you and saying you did a good job. And that's an incredibly impactful lever you can pull on your social media content. But sometimes it can be as simple as just you getting an interesting look at a job site you're on.
And so again, I'm just a realist with the fact that like you're probably not going to become an influencer while running the dayto-day of your business. And I don't necessarily think it's the best use of most of your time until you have maybe massive staffs and operational staffs that are doing a lot of the fulfillment for you. And so at the bare minimum, you should do that.
The third thing that I would say is I would actually have got my vehicles branded and wrapped earlier in the business. When you're at the early stages of the business, it's hard to quantify whether a three, four, $5,000 vehicle wrap is actually going to be ROI positive. I promise you it will. But the difference is the mechanism of how you brand them matters. Like if you're going to wrap a vehicle and make the base color black and you have a home service business or the base color is going to be white, I would actually tell you to just get decals and move on with your day and save 23 $4,000. But what we did and one thing that's working really well for us is like my Christmas light company is like a ugly Christmas green wrap and there's like really fancy logos and there's like Christmas light strands and it looks really good but it stands out on the road.
And so I'm filming this on a random Thursday in our warehouse but just yesterday we closed a job where the guy pulled up next to our truck on the road stopped at a light somewhere and he was just talking to his wife earlier in the day about how he was disenchanted with a company he used last year. Lo and behold, my boys pull up next to him at the light. He snaps a picture of our truck because it stands out and our brand is strong on it. And then that turned into a $5,000 job. And so that truck wrap has already paid for itself. But the issue with a newer business is it's really hard for you to predict how fast you're going to buy back that money. And so I understand that like three four $5,000 at the early stage of your business is scary. But this is even one of those things where like I'm pretty against financing. I'm pretty against like blasting highinterest credit cards to like get your business off the ground, even though that's what I did and it caused me a lot of sleepless nights in the first couple years. I think you need to get a truck wrap as soon as possible. And a lot of people on Twitter will disagree with me, but I promise you most of the people that disagree with me have smaller businesses than me. And I don't think that's coincidence, and I'm not trying to say that to brag. I just am presenting the data.
Don't take it from me, though. Go look at every massive home service brand in your market. Go look at the A1 trucks. Do you think A1 Garage Door is running around with white pickup trucks and black text decals on them? In my market, do you think uh Green Mango Pest Control, who had like 150 trucks on the road in one single market, thought that truck wraps weren't worth it? Every single one of their vehicles was sitting on 22-in rims, matte black wraps, their logos clean, and all that jazz. Like, success leaves clues. So, I'm telling you, listen to the companies that are massive and built the businesses that are your dream. Don't listen to the people on social media who have one truck and are telling you it's bad advice. And that goes double in the Facebook groups.
And this leads me to number four. You need to be really careful about who you get advice from. And so I think there's a time and a place for the Facebook groups. There's a lot of value in there. But there's also a lot of terrible advice because those groups are free and anybody can post in it. And so one of the things that I saw early in my business was a lot of the guys giving advice in those Facebook groups were giving advice to me, but the results that they had after 20 to 30 years in business were not the results that I wanted. Sometimes some of the loudest people in those Facebook groups is a dude in his 40s and 50s that's had the business for 20 and 30 years and he's still in the truck and he never hires because he says people just don't want to work anymore. Meanwhile, 20 year olds and 30-year-olds in his market are scaling to 10, 20, 30 employees in their market doing the same thing he is. So, you want to be really careful about who you take advice from.
And so, for me, I'm not sitting here saying I'm the end-all be-all and I'm the home service guru. If you notice, all of the lens that I film and record this content in is like I just hit a million dollars for the first time in a year. I'm not pretending to have the $150 million exit. I share from the lens of this is what has worked for me up until this point. If it worked for me, it's probably going to work for you, too. But notice I'm not just like sitting here guruing everything to you and saying like, "You have to do it this way. You have to do it this way." I just share from the lens of like, "This has done pretty well for me so far. This has not done pretty well for me so far."
And so, just be really careful who you take advice from. And honestly, that goes for life in general. I'm not going to take life advice from a guy that I don't like the way his life turned out. I'm not going to take relationship advice from the guy who's on his third divorce who says like all women are hoes and all this other stuff and blah blah blah blah blah. And I'm not going to take financial advice from a dude who has a sub 500 credit score and is drowning in six figures of debt, but he's really opinionated on what he knows. And so you want to just be really careful with that.
And number five, I didn't do this wrong. This is actually one of the few things I think I nailed early on is your employees will only care as much as you do. And your employees have to know how much you care about them specifically. And it's not about how much you tell them you care. They don't care how much you tell them how great they are. They care how much you show them how great you think they are. And a lot of the time you have to show them in ways that really stress you out as an owner in the early stages of the business. And so a lot of that comes down to communication.
So take Jack for example. Jack was my first employee ever in all of my businesses. He started doing junk removal. He then moved to Christmas lights when he was in college. Now he's the director of operations of Christmas lights. And now fast forward to year five, he's a co-owner with me, a 50/50 partner with me on the permanent lighting business. And so one of the things with Jack is Jack and I have talked about this all the time. I didn't have a massive business to pay him a six-figure salary early on in the business. And so I had to incentivize him in ways where a lot of the profit that I was making at the end of the year. I bonused him probably a lot more substantially than a lot of like mentors or gurus would tell me to bonus him because it probably wasn't the smartest thing for the business. But what it did for me long term is I had a guy who was dialed into the vision of the company and my dream for the organizations was big enough for him and his wife's dreams to fit into it. And so his income has grown every single year, but also his impact has grown every single year accordingly.
And Jack would be the first person to tell you this, the level at which he performs now in 2025. Like if you look around at the warehouse and how organized everything is and how when I came in here last night and he didn't even know I was coming to the warehouse, every single truck was completely clean. Every single thing in the truck is placed in the exact same way. All of our warehouses organized in the exact same way. There's checklists everywhere. There's SOPs everywhere. His crews seem to love him and want to work for him. Like this version of Jack is not the version of Jack that existed two, three years ago when he was still graduating college. Like just like I have progressed as an owner in the way that my skills have progressed, he has progressed as an employee and then eventually progressed so hard that now he's also an owner.
And so you don't get people to buy into the vision of the company early on unless you show them with your actions that you care about them. Because just saying it is and people will leave the second you stop taking care of them or the second it gets hard because they're not bought into the bigger vision. And so could I have bought a fancier car earlier? Could I have bought a bigger house earlier on in the business? Could I have taken more profit off the top earlier on in the business? Yes. And there was times where I was a dumbass and did those things and it hurt the business long term. But as I got really serious about the business in year four, right about the time that Jack was graduating and decided to come full-time into the business and not just like go get a career somewhere else. He wanted his career to be here. That's also when I really started taking it serious and taking it to the next level.
And what I've gotten in return from that, if you want to call it selflessness or whatever else, is the business can only grow so far with me. The business can only grow so far with you as an owner. You have to get dialed in employees and managers, directors, and then eventually if you want partners because you can't do everything yourself and you'll plateau at a certain point. And so, yes, does it sound like I'm being really selfless and giving back to my employees, but it's also self-serving because the businesses grew a lot bigger when I had employees dialed in everywhere else. That goes for my sales department with Kyle. That goes for Natalie and the op side and the back end of the business as well. Goes for Jake and the video team where like when Jake came in and Jake's behind the camera right now, he was our only employee in media and now as the entire business has grown now Jake's been able to hire an editor under him and now Jake is managing people and Jake's salary has grown and everything else and like I had the same conversation with Jake a year ago was like hey this is how much I have in the business right now because this is the size of the business but I promise you if you stick with me we will grow the business you'll be able to hire employees we'll be able to creep up your income and everything else and we've stayed true to that promise.
But the difference is you also have to grow the business to be able to pay employees. So if I'm talking to somebody who's just getting their first employee, you have to find the reasons why they want to work for you outside of just a paycheck and just hammer into those reasons and let the employees know that like whatever your vision is can fit their dreams and goals into it as well.
And number six, if you do not ask, the answer is always no. And so one of the things that we did really bad and I think it was because I was just a little bit more insecure earlier on in the business was I was like a little sheepish to like aggressively ask for referrals from paying customers because maybe I wasn't super confident with the level of quality service we were doing back then or maybe I just wasn't as confident with myself as an entrepreneur. But I'm telling you the best lever you can pull in the business is to super aggressively ask paying customers for referrals for five-star reviews. Go even further and ask them for reviews with photos. Ask them to post you on these neighborhood Facebook groups, these mommy vlogger pages with like all the moms in the neighborhoods are on, all that jazz.
And so it goes down to like the better work you do and the happier your customers are, the much more receptive they're going to be to giving you referrals. Because what I think I notice a lot in 2025 as I talk to I mean in Home Service Accelerator, we talk to hundreds of business owners a week. So I have a pretty good feel for what's going on out there. I notice that the trend with this new era of home service entrepreneurs is they're so obsessed with lead gen and like paid ads and things like that, which obviously you need to do. I it's like my entire business is like I'm all about paid ads. But when I look at myself and the other businesses in Home Service Accelerator that have exploded into like high six figures a year, seven figures a year. We've got a few guys in there that have businesses way bigger than mine that do even eight figures a year. Like the trend is those businesses are really good at getting referrals and organic leads that convert to jobs.
And so if you just stay on the paid ad hamster wheel, you're going to constantly be putting money in, money in, money in, and you're just going to be constantly hoping you hit you hit a 5x return on ad spend, a 7x, an 8x, whatever. And so it's not going to be like that every week. And so when you supplement repeat business and referrals into it, it's a really clear indicator that if you're getting repeat business and referrals, your business is really healthy. If the only way you're getting jobs is one time from cold traffic and then they never come back again or they never refer their friends or anything else, you need to take a long hard look at your business's operations and see why that is. Usually it's a service issue or it's a lack of system to ask them to refer you or use you again.
So, if you like this video, you got some value from it, please leave me a comment. Tell me which portions you like. Tell me what styles of videos you like. I film these two, three times a week, and so I can make whatever types of videos you want, whatever type of content you guys want. I want to hear from you guys in the comments. And then, if you have a home service business, feel free to click the application in the comment below and in the description if you want to do an application to join Home Service Accelerator Pro. That's where we come in. We have a huge community. At the time of filming this right now, we have like 450 home service business owners in that community of all sorts of different types of businesses. And that's where we come in. We teach you how to run your own Facebook ads, Instagram ads. We do a bunch of Google Maps SEO for you. We fix all of your systems and automations, the stuff that you see the big companies do and you wonder how you do it. You can actually we can actually help you do it in your business. And if you're eligible for that, we'll tell you on the call. And other than that, please watch me on Instagram, follow me on X, and then subscribe to this channel, turn the notifications on. We're posting twice a week right now. So, we'll see you in the next video.