Latest / Contractor Business Builder Podcast / Your Website Won't Matter In 3 Years (Here's What to Do Instead) with Phil Risher

Transcript

Your Website Won't Matter In 3 Years (Here's What to Do Instead) with Phil Risher · Contractor Business Builder Podcast

• 0:00
  Welcome to another great episode of the Contractor Business
• 0:02
  Builder podcast. Today we have the honor of
• 0:04
  having Phil Richer. He's the president of Flash
• 0:06
  Consulting and he's going to be telling us how to improve lead
• 0:10
  generation and get more business into your business.
• 0:13
  How you doing today Phil? Great man, excited to be here.
• 0:16
  Thanks so much for having me. Definitely.
• 0:19
  I, I know you guys do a lot for contractors and always something
• 0:23
  new and exciting in the way of helping them build out their,
• 0:27
  their lead generation and client acquisition for their for their
• 0:30
  businesses. Can you tell us a bit about your
• 0:32
  background and the work that you do with your company?
• 0:35
  Yeah, for sure. So I used to work at a home
• 0:37
  service business, $3,000,000 and I was Director of Business
• 0:40
  Development. So my job was to help increase
• 0:41
  revenue and profit. And my background before that, I
• 0:44
  had run a local service business through Enterprise Rent-a-car
• 0:46
  and their management training program.
• 0:48
  And I had also built a website blog about personal finance and
• 0:52
  that blog had like 3040 thousand readers every single month.
• 0:55
  I got featured on Forbes and CNBC and a lot of cool stuff.
• 0:58
  And I ended up at this home service business that was
• 1:00
  $3,000,000 in stock. And I knew how to run a local
• 1:03
  service business and I knew how to do marketing to get people to
• 1:06
  my website and convert them into leads.
• 1:08
  And within the first year, he went from 3 million to 4 million
• 1:11
  in revenue, but 300,000 and 900,000 in profit.
• 1:14
  And then the year after that he went from 4 million to 5,900,000
• 1:18
  profit to 1.2. And then we ultimately sold the
• 1:20
  company for like 7-8 times EBITDA and he's like, hey man,
• 1:24
  you need to go help other businesses build a growth system
• 1:27
  inside of their business. And so that's what we do now.
• 1:29
  We, we have about 23 team members.
• 1:31
  We work with home service businesses between 1,000,000 and
• 1:33
  $10 million. And we are basically like a
• 1:36
  fractional marketing team for their business that looks at
• 1:40
  three things. Data from their CRM, so like
• 1:43
  return on ad spend data year over year, data automations and
• 1:46
  building automations custom to their CR and their their tech
• 1:49
  stack and their workflow. And then good marketing based
• 1:52
  off of the data. So data-driven marketing
• 1:54
  altogether so that the owner is not the one in the middle trying
• 1:57
  to pull vendors together, but can actually grow the business.
• 2:00
  Yeah, that's, that's amazing. The marketing lead generation of
• 2:04
  a company is like the fuel, the engine as you mentioned, nothing
• 2:09
  happens if if that's not not up to where it needs to be and the
• 2:13
  cause of a lot of stress for the contractors who have
• 2:16
  inconsistencies or or low, you know, leads coming in all that
• 2:20
  stuff. I, I know the pain of not having
• 2:23
  someone in, in their corner like, like you.
• 2:25
  So it used to be that if you had a website, you were kind of
• 2:28
  ahead of the game, you know, maybe a couple of decades ago.
• 2:31
  You're, you're saying now websites don't really matter
• 2:34
  that much anymore. Can you explain why that is or
• 2:37
  what you mean by that? Yeah.
• 2:38
  So over the last six months, Googles done a couple of things
• 2:42
  that have pretty much shifted the entire playing field for
• 2:45
  home service businesses of the playbooks that they need to be
• 2:48
  running. The first thing is Sundar
• 2:50
  Pichai, the CEO of Google, said that 2027 is the year of the
• 2:54
  agent. More importantly, what does
• 2:57
  that, what does that exactly mean is that agents are going to
• 3:00
  be working on behalf of people to research, find information,
• 3:06
  schedule services. And Google wrote out what they
• 3:09
  called Gemini Spark, which is their agent.
• 3:12
  That is a personal agent that can do all those things.
• 3:16
  Now that's like, OK, cool, Foo Foo, pie in the sky, like
• 3:19
  agents, whatever. But then the biggest shift
• 3:21
  happened, which is for the last 25 years of Google, you would go
• 3:24
  to Google and type something in and then click search.
• 3:27
  And when you click search, it goes to the 10 blue links and
• 3:30
  you have ads and the website rankings and all that stuff.
• 3:34
  Three months ago they changed that to instead of search, it
• 3:38
  says AI mode now, and when you click AI mode, it doesn't open
• 3:41
  the 10 blue links like we're used to.
• 3:42
  It goes into an AI chat with Gemini and starts answering your
• 3:47
  questions and trying to make recommendations.
• 3:50
  What has happened is that clicks have fallen off a Cliff and
• 3:55
  about 68% of searches right now and with 0 clicks.
• 3:59
  So if these agents and the new AI mode experience on Google,
• 4:05
  which let me say is 87% of homeowners go to Google when
• 4:09
  they're looking for a local home service business.
• 4:11
  If the website is not the end goal, but their recommendation
• 4:15
  and the trust on these AI platforms is the goal, then
• 4:18
  actually having a website, it's not the end hub of like people
• 4:22
  going to your website. It's just a data layer inside of
• 4:25
  your knowledge that these platforms know about you.
• 4:27
  Yeah, interesting. I like the stats there.
• 4:29
  It's it's great to have phenomenal that such a high
• 4:32
  percentage of searches don't end in clicks.
• 4:35
  Now, what does that mean for builders that are utilizing like
• 4:41
  Google ads essentially paying for it for clicks or or SEO, you
• 4:47
  know, like what what does this mean for the actual technical
• 4:52
  implementation of the strategies?
• 4:54
  Yeah, so there's two parts there.
• 4:56
  The first one is ads. So I had a video that I did on
• 4:59
  YouTube and it it went viral, has over 300,000 views about
• 5:02
  this topic. And one of the common objections
• 5:04
  was, well, Google will never do that because their main bread
• 5:07
  and butter is ad revenue. And if they're not, if they
• 5:10
  don't have any cost per clicks or any ads to serve up, how are
• 5:13
  they going to make any money? And it's a valid point, right?
• 5:16
  If they don't, where are the ads going to live?
• 5:18
  So the first thing is ads. So Google write out what they
• 5:21
  called a business agent lead ads.
• 5:24
  And so a business agent leads ads are is inside of AI mode.
• 5:28
  Imagine IT services information and then it says start a
• 5:31
  conversation with this business. And when they click start a
• 5:33
  conversation with this business, it pulls in your Google business
• 5:36
  profile knowledge about your business and then allows you to
• 5:40
  answer, allows that knowledge base to answer your questions
• 5:43
  from that business. And then you can either transfer
• 5:46
  it to a live person via a call or you can schedule based off of
• 5:50
  the booking link inside of your Google business profile.
• 5:52
  And this is how they're gonna be serving up ads.
• 5:54
  They double down on this by actually combining Google local
• 5:58
  service ads and Google search ads into one dashboard.
• 6:01
  Before you had two separate dashboards, Lsas over here and
• 6:03
  Google searches over here. Now it's all together.
• 6:06
  And the reason is, is because they are trying to build this AI
• 6:10
  search ads platform. So that way it's very easy for
• 6:14
  people to use. And it's not all LSA over here.
• 6:18
  Search is over here. How do I do this?
• 6:19
  What do I do? It's going to be just one BLOB
• 6:21
  of information. Now, when I talk about this,
• 6:23
  people are like, one, this sounds crazy, but two, more
• 6:26
  importantly is like, how do I prepare my business so that I
• 6:28
  can do these things? 1 is like if you're paying for
• 6:31
  marketing or doing things, hopefully, you know, having some
• 6:33
  type of conversations about what the future looks like.
• 6:35
  But more importantly, and this is it kind of ties into the SEO
• 6:39
  piece as well, is this for the past 25 years, me included at my
• 6:45
  home service business, I didn't really care about creating
• 6:47
  content like on Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and TikTok
• 6:50
  and always places because my buyer would go to Google to
• 6:54
  search. 87% of people go to Google with the intent.
• 6:57
  So why would I go and create some silly Facebook video if I
• 7:02
  might get one like or nothing And like no one ever goes there
• 7:05
  and like my buyers are not there.
• 7:06
  Valid. However, right now, if you think
• 7:10
  about SEO, don't think about a search engine optimization,
• 7:13
  think about it as search everywhere optimization.
• 7:15
  These AI platforms, they're not just going to your website as a
• 7:18
  data layer. They're looking all over the
• 7:20
  Internet. They're looking at Facebook,
• 7:23
  Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, your website, any other platform that
• 7:28
  you can create content on, you know, Yelp, Angie, whatever.
• 7:30
  And they're pulling in jesting all the information because it's
• 7:34
  not about it's not about being the click anymore.
• 7:37
  It's about being the recommendation, the trust.
• 7:39
  So what could you be doing from ads perspective is creating
• 7:42
  content based off of your real customer questions that now you
• 7:46
  have that you can put into this knowledge catalog.
• 7:48
  That's real customer questions with real answers and real
• 7:51
  stories from your business in a catalog or a knowledge base with
• 7:54
  content. This kind of plays into the SEO
• 7:56
  piece, which this one is a really big shift.
• 7:59
  The playbook that happened before was you wanted blog posts
• 8:02
  and things on your website to have keywords jammed in there
• 8:05
  because you wanted to rank number one.
• 8:06
  Well, I'm telling you that rankings don't matter anymore
• 8:09
  because there's no rankings in AI, right?
• 8:12
  There's no like #1 #2 right? It's just like, here's the
• 8:15
  answer. So if we think about the shift
• 8:18
  from keywords to conversations, I'm sure Derek, the way you use
• 8:23
  Chachi, BT or Gemini are Claude is very conversational.
• 8:26
  You might hit the voice button and talk to it and ask it
• 8:29
  questions and help you with things and upload pictures and
• 8:32
  documents and everything. That's not just you that uses it
• 8:35
  that way. Everyone starting to use their
• 8:36
  platforms this way. And Google actually did a study
• 8:39
  with AI mode that they found that the average keyword is 3
• 8:43
  times longer now with AI mode than it was before.
• 8:47
  So what does this mean for SEO? It's not just about jamming
• 8:51
  keywords into a blog post. It's about creating the content
• 8:55
  that your customers are actually asking and making sure that it's
• 8:58
  real. Because Google put a white paper
• 9:00
  on on this and they said that they don't want, they want non
• 9:02
  commodity content. They don't want 7 reasons to do
• 9:06
  a kitchen remodel this summer. They want the real customer
• 9:09
  question that you would have, which is like should I put a
• 9:11
  kitchen island over here? Or should I do this angle or
• 9:13
  that angle like whatever the real stuff is.
• 9:15
  So those would be the two shifts adds to SEO when we talk about
• 9:18
  like they're shifting to AI mode.
• 9:21
  Yeah, great insight there. Thanks for highlighting all of
• 9:24
  those, those different aspects of it and typical play.
• 9:28
  I mean, at first it's sort of free and they put it in your
• 9:32
  face. And then later, like they're
• 9:34
  going to have a strategy for, for how to monetize and, and
• 9:37
  make it make sense for, for their, you know, ad ad
• 9:40
  generation for, for Google and things like that.
• 9:44
  So this sounds like a lot of work.
• 9:47
  You know, I'm not just worried about blogs or something on my
• 9:50
  website. Now, you know, social media, all
• 9:52
  of this, how do I stay ahead or get ahead of other people,
• 9:57
  especially with AI generated content that is Google taking
• 10:01
  that the same way as you know, if if everybody can create blog
• 10:06
  articles in matter of minutes, how do we actually get something
• 10:11
  useful to to generate that it's going to take our company over
• 10:14
  other ones. Yep.
• 10:15
  So the way that, so the old way of doing this was you would hire
• 10:19
  a marketing company, they would do keyword research.
• 10:23
  They would say, hey, I think we should do a blog post on this.
• 10:26
  They would write the content and then you would glance at it for
• 10:28
  10 seconds and say, yeah, it's good.
• 10:30
  And then they would post it on your website and hopefully it
• 10:32
  ranks. I think we can all say that.
• 10:34
  OK, so then when AI came out, it was like, wait a SEC, I can have
• 10:39
  a I do my keyword research, I can have a I write my blog post
• 10:43
  and I can do this a lot faster and I can ram out content for
• 10:49
  Google and rank on all these things.
• 10:51
  So Google said, OK, well, we can't just have a bunch of AI
• 10:55
  slop that's coming in here. So how do we actually draw the
• 10:57
  line and where we draw the line? So This is why they put out
• 11:00
  their standards, which is we want non commodity content and
• 11:03
  what is non commodity content is real stuff.
• 11:05
  So I'll give you the breakdown. So a lot of people, if you pay
• 11:08
  for SEO or pay for content or try to do content on your own,
• 11:10
  they go to chat TBT or Claude and they say, hey, Claude, I
• 11:13
  want to write a blog post about that.
• 11:15
  What is the common questions people ask?
• 11:16
  What should I do? They start there.
• 11:18
  Then they might talk to it a little bit and give it maybe you
• 11:22
  know, some stories or some experts or you know, excerpts of
• 11:24
  their stuff or whatever. And then they'll take it and
• 11:27
  say, OK, this is my unique content and I'm going to post
• 11:30
  this. What we do as a company and what
• 11:31
  I would recommend is to flip that the other way, which is
• 11:35
  take the real customer questions that are happening on your sales
• 11:38
  calls, on your phones and any other place that it happens.
• 11:43
  Take those customer questions like take your call transcripts,
• 11:46
  pull out the real customer questions.
• 11:49
  Then what we do is have a knowledge base or some type of
• 11:53
  information about the business that you can create real content
• 11:56
  from. If you don't have that, then
• 11:57
  just answer the real question as if you were at a family cookout
• 12:01
  and someone asked you this question.
• 12:03
  Like tell them the real stories, what to look for, blah blah.
• 12:05
  Then you can fill in the blanks and the cracks with AI on top.
• 12:09
  This is how you create non commodity content.
• 12:11
  What we did a step further was we actually created an agent
• 12:15
  that does that for people and businesses.
• 12:19
  It plugs into their call recording software.
• 12:21
  It builds a knowledge base around their business.
• 12:23
  And every call that comes in it, it takes the real quest,
• 12:27
  customer question, builds off the knowledge base, and then
• 12:29
  layers in through the cracks. And it ranks #1 in AI overviews
• 12:32
  because it's such unique content and it's real customer
• 12:35
  questions. Wonderful.
• 12:37
  You're definitely getting into the things that I like as far as
• 12:41
  systems go. Don't get too technical or nerdy
• 12:43
  about this, but it sounds like that's an easy way to utilize
• 12:48
  conversations and information that your business is already
• 12:53
  utilizing or turning out or, or you know, they they're having on
• 12:56
  a day-to-day basis. And then using AI to then create
• 13:00
  really customized specific content around your business,
• 13:05
  the people in it. And then also the the type of
• 13:07
  clients or prospects that you're getting to pull useful
• 13:10
  information and definitely the right approach.
• 13:12
  The, you know, just couple of words or running through a
• 13:16
  prompt of like, I want to create a, you know, a blog article
• 13:19
  about this. Please give me 7 ideas.
• 13:22
  Those ideas are going to be available to every single other
• 13:24
  person that's writing that blog article.
• 13:26
  So you need to prime it with specific knowledge.
• 13:29
  Ideally, you know, client questions and things like that.
• 13:33
  And I like the recording part of it is, is if you can record, you
• 13:37
  know, the initial discovery calls or phone calls that you're
• 13:40
  having with prospects, obviously make sure legally everything is
• 13:44
  all right and you have their permission and all that and
• 13:47
  stuff. But, but that's the way to go.
• 13:49
  Now. Can you tell us a little bit
• 13:50
  more about your AI or how you use it in your business and and
• 13:55
  with your clients? Yeah, I'll tell you about the
• 13:57
  agent and how how we use it in soft.
• 13:59
  But before that I want to give if you're listening to this like
• 14:02
  a practical way that you could set this up yourself.
• 14:04
  So this is what we did before we built an agent.
• 14:07
  We took our customer call transcripts.
• 14:10
  So if you do, if you use call tracking phone numbers for ads,
• 14:13
  for example, you'll have call transcripts.
• 14:15
  If you record your sales calls with like voice memos on your
• 14:18
  phone or you use louder than any other tools to record things, we
• 14:21
  would take those call transcripts and we put them into
• 14:23
  a Google Sheet. And then on that Google Sheet,
• 14:25
  we'd have all these call recordings.
• 14:27
  And then we use the tool called Notebook LM, which now it's
• 14:30
  called Gemini Notebook. It's a free tool.
• 14:32
  And essentially you can build this second brain for your
• 14:36
  business for free. You can set up a Notebook LM or
• 14:40
  Gemini Gemini Notebook and you can plug in fifty sources for
• 14:43
  free. So you could plug in that Google
• 14:44
  Sheet with your call tracking. You could plug in your website,
• 14:48
  you could plug in any other things that you want, any other
• 14:50
  stops or things. And the beautiful thing is then
• 14:53
  you can actually ask it questions about whatever you put
• 14:55
  into that model. So this is a really simple way
• 15:00
  where you can create this type of knowledge base.
• 15:02
  You could give it to new team members, you could use it to
• 15:04
  create content, you could ask questions.
• 15:06
  This is what we did before we built an agent.
• 15:07
  So I wanted to kind of tie it up because like I'm not here saying
• 15:10
  like you got to use my agent only like there's no other thing
• 15:12
  out here. Like you could go and build
• 15:13
  something that's like decent to at least get it off the ground.
• 15:16
  What I wanted as a company was most marketing companies create
• 15:19
  the slop and if we have 5100 clients like how do we do this
• 15:25
  automatically and ingest all the information into an agent for
• 15:30
  this business? So that's basically what we
• 15:32
  built with this was if you use like call rail, what converts,
• 15:36
  you know, other automation tools, whatever.
• 15:37
  With call tracking, you can plug it into this tool and then every
• 15:41
  single call, it analyzes the calls and is looking at over 3
• 15:44
  minutes and then it pulls out the questions, edifies the
• 15:47
  knowledge base, creates content, and then it has a tool just like
• 15:50
  the notebook and where you can ask it questions.
• 15:52
  So one other thing to do with this would imagine you're going
• 15:55
  to run meta ads or Google ads or write an e-mail and you want to
• 15:59
  know what are my questions customers actually say about
• 16:02
  this service? What's the main pain point?
• 16:04
  And then you can use that in your ads because now you have
• 16:06
  the actual language from your customers.
• 16:07
  So there's a lot of use cases, but essentially that's what it
• 16:10
  is. Yeah.
• 16:11
  And all generated from specific conversations, very intrinsic
• 16:17
  types of information for your business.
• 16:19
  So you know, it's not going to be slop, it's not going to be
• 16:22
  generic like, you know, every other contractor in your area
• 16:25
  that that's putting out content. Now we've talked about creating
• 16:29
  the content or getting the ideas and things like that.
• 16:32
  How how do we get this out? Like do you just plaster it?
• 16:35
  Everywhere you. Possibly can How do you do this
• 16:38
  in a, you know, without taking a lot of time posting everywhere,
• 16:41
  creating articles, or, you know, updating the website constantly?
• 16:45
  What's the the process behind actually getting this in front
• 16:48
  of? People.
• 16:49
  So I'll share this with you and then it actually leads to the
• 16:51
  next thing, which is agent to agent communication, which I
• 16:54
  believe is going to be in the next two to three years.
• 16:56
  Just talk about that in a SEC. But basically what what what our
• 16:59
  AI platform does and what I would recommend if you don't use
• 17:01
  our thing, if you do this yourself, it is because we know
• 17:05
  the customer questions, then we can see how many times customers
• 17:08
  ask that question. So let's say that customer asked
• 17:10
  that question 10 times, then we can go to the website and say,
• 17:14
  do we have any blog posts or content that's talked about this
• 17:17
  topic at all? And if it's like no, then it's
• 17:19
  like we need to add that to the website right now.
• 17:23
  We need to create, you know, short form content and videos
• 17:25
  and all this stuff about that topic.
• 17:27
  So like what our agent does is it analyzes that and then
• 17:30
  figures out what do we need to do and then it posts the stuff
• 17:32
  for us automatically and does that for you.
• 17:35
  Let's say you don't have that. You can literally think about,
• 17:37
  OK, well, I know for a fact that my customers always ask me about
• 17:41
  pricing and they always ask me about pricing about this thing,
• 17:44
  and I always get stuck on this thing.
• 17:46
  That would be a great content piece that you probably don't
• 17:48
  have online that a lot of people are asking.
• 17:50
  So that type of those types of thinking things when you could
• 17:53
  build an agent to like figure it out for you.
• 17:55
  But that would be the first part.
• 17:57
  The second part is this agent to agent part of communication.
• 18:01
  And the biggest part here of that video that I mentioned, one
• 18:04
  of the biggest objections was AI just hallucinates about things
• 18:08
  like it just says whatever it wants.
• 18:10
  And the reason is, is because most businesses don't know their
• 18:15
  knowledge gaps. And what knowledge gaps are is
• 18:19
  when a customer is asking a question, but then you've never
• 18:22
  answered it online. You never created a video about
• 18:26
  it, you never answered it on your website.
• 18:28
  Maybe your CSR's don't even know the answer to it.
• 18:30
  And they don't. Most businesses do not have
• 18:33
  visibility into the knowledge gaps because they can't see the
• 18:36
  full picture, zoom out. So like what we trained our
• 18:39
  agent Turner to do was here's all the questions, but more
• 18:42
  importantly, here's all the answers and then here's the
• 18:45
  gaps. And the whole goal is that we
• 18:47
  don't want any knowledge gaps. So that way all the stuff that
• 18:50
  people ask has been answered online.
• 18:52
  And this allows us to then make sure that when these agents are
• 18:55
  asking questions, we have information to give it and we
• 18:57
  can talk more about the agent to agent protocol and all the stuff
• 19:00
  that they laid out. But essentially, that's how
• 19:02
  someone could figure out, well, what should I be posting and
• 19:05
  should be posting it. As far as the cadence go, I
• 19:07
  would recommend like maybe one or two blog posts a week.
• 19:10
  I would recommend creating as much content as possible because
• 19:14
  there's such a big land grab because most contractors have
• 19:18
  not cared about social media or content.
• 19:20
  They just care about leads. And it's really shifting from
• 19:23
  the clicks to the actual recommendation this.
• 19:26
  Makes a lot of sense. Thanks for laying that out.
• 19:29
  Now you mentioned, you know, Agent Asian, we don't need to
• 19:32
  get into technicalities and everything as as far as that
• 19:35
  goes. But you, you sort of mentioned,
• 19:38
  you know, a year from now, two years from now, what is the, the
• 19:42
  future look like for businesses that can actually implement and,
• 19:45
  and utilize these this new, you know, technologies and stuff
• 19:48
  that's coming? Out Yeah.
• 19:49
  So sometimes people are like failure to woo, woo, you know,
• 19:52
  tinfoil hat guy. And I'm like, I'm just following
• 19:54
  the bread crumbs that Google is knowing us.
• 19:56
  And at Google's conference, they talked about this, a protocol
• 20:00
  that they built. And basically the reason they
• 20:04
  built this is because they wrote out this Gemini Spark, which is
• 20:06
  a personal agent that people are going to start utilizing.
• 20:09
  They're going to slowly adopt this in 2027, in my opinion,
• 20:12
  from what they told us. And what Gemini Spark is going
• 20:14
  to be able to do is to go out and research and find
• 20:16
  information and make decisions and schedule and do all these
• 20:20
  things on their behalf on maybe people's websites or whatever it
• 20:24
  is. Now, what Google told us was.
• 20:27
  A lot of big companies are building agents for themselves.
• 20:30
  So imagine Target has their own agent that you can go on to
• 20:33
  target.com and do an agent thing.
• 20:35
  Then you go to UPS, they do an agent thing.
• 20:37
  But what was never built was agent to agent protocol where
• 20:41
  agents can communicate with other agents.
• 20:43
  It was still human to agent interaction.
• 20:45
  But now if we have agent to agent interaction, how would
• 20:48
  that look? So the example that they use is,
• 20:51
  let's say that you have Gemini Spark and it's like it's Google,
• 20:54
  right? And you say, hey, I ordered
• 20:56
  something on Target the other day, but it hasn't come yet.
• 20:58
  Then it can go to Target agent and ask you questions and go to
• 21:03
  UPS agent and ask you questions and come back to you and say,
• 21:05
  here's the answer. Here's where it's going on that.
• 21:08
  It's pretty cool, right? Like that needs to be built
• 21:11
  because this is the way that we're going with these agents to
• 21:13
  interact with agents right now. They're just on each platform.
• 21:15
  So with that being said, what does that mean for the everyday
• 21:18
  contractor home service business owner who's listening to this?
• 21:20
  Do they need to have an agent for their business that Gemini
• 21:22
  Spark can interact with? Now?
• 21:24
  I believe that this whole website craze that happened 1520
• 21:27
  years ago is going to be very similar with agents.
• 21:31
  And I believe that your website is going to be one part of the
• 21:33
  data layer that you can build into an agent of some sort that
• 21:37
  can interact. But your agent is going to have
• 21:39
  to know how to do online scheduling.
• 21:41
  It's going to have to know how to how to answer pricing
• 21:43
  questions about your service. It's going to have to know your
• 21:45
  certifications. This is why that knowledge
• 21:47
  catalog that I mentioned, which is like all the information
• 21:50
  about your business is going to be so important because you're
• 21:52
  going to have a repository that you're going to be able to
• 21:54
  deploy. So this agent knows everything
• 21:57
  about you and it's verified. There's technical things we talk
• 22:00
  about. That's essentially what it is.
• 22:01
  Yeah, another reason to start to get plugged in with recording
• 22:06
  transcripts. Duckling.
• 22:08
  Getting that base knowledge from your company is easier than
• 22:13
  ever. There's widely available tools
• 22:15
  even if you're like, I don't have time for this.
• 22:17
  I'm not building out a bunch of agents and and getting stuck in
• 22:21
  this market. But as long as you can, but you
• 22:23
  should start thinking about at least getting the information.
• 22:25
  I tell us what my clients, even if you're not planning to run
• 22:28
  Google ads or or Meta ads, you know tomorrow, still go get the
• 22:31
  pics on your website. Put it up there so that it's
• 22:34
  collecting some information. It's knows who's who's going
• 22:37
  there. You can see tracking so that
• 22:39
  when maybe six months from now or a year from now, when you
• 22:43
  are, you do have an ad budget that you're going to put
• 22:45
  together for whatever platform that information is there.
• 22:49
  Exactly. This applies similar sort of way
• 22:51
  where like start recording your calls, get blogs out there with
• 22:55
  basic information for your website, FAQ's, all that stuff.
• 22:58
  Because when you do need to build these AI and you can just
• 23:01
  hire someone to do it, you're going to be much farther ahead
• 23:04
  because you could just bring in all that data you get organized
• 23:07
  and you know an agent that can easily get created around it.
• 23:11
  Yeah, and one thing that I'll say is like, I used to work at a
• 23:14
  home service business. The owner of the company, if I
• 23:17
  was if he was next to me, Tom, and I'm like, dude, you need to
• 23:19
  get agents and all the stuff he like, I have no idea what you're
• 23:22
  talking about. Like leave me alone.
• 23:23
  I, you know, crazy. What I would recommend is
• 23:25
  someone who's listening to this is I'm not saying you have to be
• 23:27
  a Claude master. You have to have agents running
• 23:30
  your whole business, whatever. You need to wear meta glasses
• 23:32
  every day or something silly, right?
• 23:34
  What I'm saying is as you evaluate people that you want to
• 23:37
  work with, just like you would ask them, you know, who's on
• 23:39
  your team, What SOP's do you have?
• 23:41
  What what playbooks do you use? Right?
• 23:44
  Agents is going to be a part of their stack of like how they're
• 23:47
  showing up and you want to make sure that they are using AI.
• 23:51
  I'm not saying you have to know everything that's going on as a
• 23:53
  business owner, but you want to make sure that you're at least
• 23:55
  deploying the most recent functionality.
• 23:57
  And I'm not just saying from marketing, I'm saying from any
• 24:00
  partner that you want to partner with is like, how are you
• 24:02
  leveraging AI and how are you going to help me and my
• 24:05
  business, George I in the future?
• 24:06
  That's more So what I would recommend doing.
• 24:08
  Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Builders, contractors out there,
• 24:12
  you know, you don't want to, I say waste your time, but you
• 24:15
  don't you don't want to spend your time necessarily learning
• 24:18
  all the ins and outs this. If it's interesting to you,
• 24:21
  great. But just as as people hire you
• 24:23
  as a professional contractor, reach out to someone like Phil
• 24:26
  here who is knowledgeable at the AI stuff been implemented for
• 24:30
  your business and and give you that road map so you're not
• 24:32
  overwhelmed or scratching your head and trying to figure all
• 24:36
  this stuff out. And never.
• 24:37
  But I think it there's also a lot of animosity around AI and
• 24:42
  really it is going to be an amazing leveler of people and
• 24:46
  businesses as far as giving lots of powerful tools to people.
• 24:51
  Regular average people are going to have at their fingertips
• 24:55
  agents essentially like assistance, whatever they need
• 24:59
  essentially. And yeah, instead of looking,
• 25:02
  searching on Google for HVAC company to come fix their
• 25:05
  furnace, they're just going to ask their AI, hey, book someone
• 25:08
  in on Saturday at the 2:00 PM or, or Monday at this.
• 25:13
  If it's over this price, you know, let me know kind of thing.
• 25:16
  And, and they're just going to run with it.
• 25:18
  It's, you know, maybe that's not here yet, but that's probably
• 25:21
  where, where things will get to at some point.
• 25:23
  Just convenience continues to get better and better and AI is,
• 25:26
  is very convenient. Now.
• 25:28
  Could you give us a quick run through of a client you worked
• 25:32
  with, maybe recently or in the past of where they started, some
• 25:37
  of the things you implemented and what the results?
• 25:39
  Were for them yeah, for sure. We have an HVAC contractor.
• 25:42
  He's about like $8 million. He started working with us in
• 25:45
  January, so 7-8 months ago. And he came to us because he was
• 25:50
  stuck in the middle. Like he was the one that was
• 25:52
  pulling together vendors from marketing.
• 25:54
  He was didn't know his data from his service Titan stuff.
• 25:57
  He had no automations and the automations he signed up for, he
• 26:01
  was the fractional CTO in his business trying to like piece
• 26:03
  together Chirp and Hat and all these other tools.
• 26:05
  And so he was like, hey, I need someone, a consulting team to
• 26:09
  come into my business. I need a consultant that
• 26:11
  understands my service, blah, blah.
• 26:13
  So we plugged in a lot of our systems.
• 26:15
  We use Turner, the agent in his business to help him rank.
• 26:17
  Like it really crushes that. That in particular, but more
• 26:21
  importantly was like, he's running Yelp ads.
• 26:23
  OK, how do we know that this is working for us?
• 26:25
  Let's track return on ads bent. You have 7000 people in your
• 26:28
  database. Are you cross selling them
• 26:30
  services every single month and bringing them back into your
• 26:32
  funnel? You have leads coming in.
• 26:34
  Are they going into your service Titan?
• 26:36
  And then you have a lead nurture sequence, like all these things
• 26:38
  that he wants to do but has no one to actually help him do it.
• 26:41
  That's essentially what we did for him.
• 26:43
  So six months into his business in June, he hit his first
• 26:47
  million dollar month. So last year he had done about 3
• 26:51
  million, three-point 5 million in the first six months.
• 26:54
  This year he was at 4.5. And then he did it again in
• 26:57
  July, another $1,000,000 month. So 2 back-to-back highest
• 27:00
  revenues ever. And I think this is a testament
• 27:04
  to 1 when we work with a good business owner that's
• 27:06
  understands buying back their time who not how and is focused
• 27:09
  on growing the business not they don't want to be the CEO, they
• 27:12
  don't want to be the lead marketer.
• 27:13
  They just want to grow their business and not not be the
• 27:16
  hustler, but be the leader that's perfect for us.
• 27:18
  And then the other thing is like were built specifically for
• 27:20
  1,000,000 to $10 million home service businesses because it's
• 27:24
  not just like e-mail support at you get a consultants cell phone
• 27:27
  number, e-mail, you know, they're a call, text, e-mail
• 27:30
  away, whatever. So it's it's a really nice
• 27:32
  partnership when we get the right people.
• 27:34
  Yeah, wonderful to see that and encouraging when you're working
• 27:37
  with someone and they break these milestones like you know,
• 27:40
  having the first million dollar month, had that with the client
• 27:43
  recently. They reach $1,000,000 month yet
• 27:45
  but reached a significant revenue milestone in their
• 27:48
  business and it's just like nice to see after in this particular
• 27:52
  case, you know, they've been under that for about 7 years and
• 27:55
  then it's. Like, yeah.
• 27:56
  You know, you work with them and, and they're able to break
• 27:58
  through some of those kind of places they got stuck or
• 28:02
  stagnant. So fantastic.
• 28:03
  What's the best way for people to reach out to you, your your
• 28:07
  team and and learn more about how you can help?
• 28:10
  Them yeah. So if you're one million, $10
• 28:12
  million home service business Flash consulting.com, it's PHLAS
• 28:17
  hconsulting.com. And even if you're not in those
• 28:19
  thresholds, but you're interested in Turner, the the AI
• 28:22
  agent that we built, you can go there, set up a meeting, we'll
• 28:24
  walk you through it and show you and and try to help you grow
• 28:26
  your business. We're all about give the recipe,
• 28:28
  sell the cooking. So if it makes sense to work
• 28:30
  together. If not, at least you'll have
• 28:31
  ways to grow your business. Wonderful.
• 28:33
  So put the links to the website in the description of this audio
• 28:37
  or video, wherever you're checking it out from.
• 28:39
  Go take a look, get some better marketing for your company.
• 28:42
  Reach out to to Phil's team here.
• 28:43
  And thanks so much for coming on and sharing your your wisdom
• 28:46
  with us today, Phil. Yeah, thanks man.
• 28:48
  Always good to connect.