The Business Bullies Podcast

Website: https://thebusinessbullies.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thebusinessbullies Instagram: @thebusinessbullies

Website: https://thebusinessbullies.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thebusinessbullies Instagram: @thebusinessbullies

Website: https://thebusinessbullies.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thebusinessbullies Instagram: @thebusinessbullies

Website: https://thebusinessbullies.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thebusinessbullies Instagram: @thebusinessbullies

Website: https://thebusinessbullies.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thebusinessbullies Instagram: @thebusinessbullies So something that you could be doing right now in January and February to really be building up your year is to go back all of 2020, and if you have at 2019, review all those leads that you got in. A lead is any time somebody makes an inquiry. You should have information on them. A lead is not just when you give someone an estimate. So what you have to start doing right now is gathering information.

Website: https://thebusinessbullies.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thebusinessbullies Instagram: @thebusinessbullies We get confused sometimes that sales is not marketing. Marketing is the attraction, the awareness, the engagement, getting someone interested and then selling is turning them into a customer. And I think some people are great at both. Some people are good at one. Some people aren't good at either.

Website: https://thebusinessbullies.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thebusinessbullies Instagram: @thebusinessbullies On this episode of The Business Bullies, join myself, Gary Geiman, Dave Carroll, and our good friend David Sessions as we discuss strategies to grow your business in the slower seasons, let's listen in.

Website: https://thebusinessbullies.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thebusinessbullies Instagram: @thebusinessbullies For so many people that follow the three of us their home service business is a huge staple. Whether it's in their community, it's the first business they started, they just started yesterday, they've been open 20 or 30 years: One thing that's been very, very interesting this year is the fortitude of these home service businesses and watching businesses almost taking a year like this year and having the opportunity to grow from it.

Website: https://thebusinessbullies.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thebusinessbullies Instagram: @thebusinessbullies We talked a lot about sales today. We are here with David's sessions. We are talking about how to figure out your hourly labor rate and figuring out how to price out estimates. So if you're going to go through the trouble of generating those leads, you need to figure out how to bid them correctly so that you can have success and make money.

Website: https://thebusinessbullies.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thebusinessbullies Instagram: @thebusinessbullies The three basic things for SEO that you need to be doing on a monthly basis is one, creating blog content. And when someone says that, if you're not someone who enjoys writing or likes to write, like your eyes will start to glass over and you know, you'll get really like, you'll start foaming at the mouth, things like that because blogging can be a pain in the butt, but I want to give you an easy way to create blog content.

Website: https://thebusinessbullies.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thebusinessbullies Instagram: @thebusinessbullies How to build your brand on social media is a topic that can go kind of broad, but we'll keep it to a minimalistic approach because there's a lot there's a lot you can do. When you look at building your brand on social media, the biggest thing to understand is consistency of content. First off on social media, you need people to pay attention. What makes people pay attention to your brand on social media? When you're talking about things that your audience cares about, it's when you're providing value. So when you can approach how you want to put your company on social media, one of the first things you want to do is make a list of things that your customers care about.

Website: https://thebusinessbullies.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thebusinessbullies Instagram: @thebusinessbullies Speaker 1: (00:30) What to do when you're slowing down? If you're in the cleaning exterior cleaning space or home services in general, this year has been kind of weird. Look at local businesses. I mean, just when we were driving around Covington, coming back from breakfast, you see attorney's offices are closed or they're slow. I think there's a bunch of media around dentists, like you can't go to the dentist right now to get your teeth cleaned because that's a hot spot. You gotta be agile in business.

Website: https://thebusinessbullies.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thebusinessbullies Instagram: @thebusinessbullies So what we're getting into in this episode is one of my favorite topics, because it's something I don't enjoy doing a ton, but a big part of business. And that is hiring employees. How do you hire employees? No, it doesn't matter what business you're in. Employees are necessary to run, grow and scale your business. So what we wanted to cover in this conversation are three different ways that you can hire employees for your business.

Website: https://thebusinessbullies.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thebusinessbullies Instagram: @thebusinessbullies We're talking today about how often should you be contacting your customers. A lot of people get this wrong because of the way they feel. There's one thing about being a business owner that you have to remember, and it's removing your emotions from your decision making: Being selfish for your customer and not being selfish for you as the business owner. It's not about your ego. It's not about how you feel. It's hard at times to take your emotions out of how you think your customers are feeling. What a lot of us need to realize is that our customers don't give a shit about us until they need us.

Website: https://thebusinessbullies.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thebusinessbullies Instagram: @thebusinessbullies A wise man once told me that instead of reinventing the wheel, I should try to do something that I had done before. Why try to figure out something totally brand new to me when I can instead look at some success that I've had and just duplicate that success. And it brings us to our topic of this conversation, which is the neighborhood focus, building up areas one at a time.

Website: https://thebusinessbullies.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thebusinessbullies Instagram: @thebusinessbullies Customer lists. Let me just say this: the most valuable resource of any business, hands down. It's your goal. It's what you invest in. It's what your marketing dollars go towards. It's the reason why I sold my business for a ridiculous amount. You have to differentiate a lead from a conversion. A lead can still go into your customer list. But if you have the ability to actually collect the information from all the people that requested bids from you, that's another powerful list, right?

Website: https://thebusinessbullies.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thebusinessbullies Instagram: @thebusinessbullies The age old statistic of business: it's 10 times easier to get someone to spend money if they've already spent money with you, right? As opposed to a cold customer. And so when you look at the ability to leverage jobs, especially for home service businesses, local businesses, whatever type of business you're in, if you can approach a job and say, how can I take this job and get more work from it? We are both very familiar with running local home service business. Let's just dive right in one of the first things that you can do: If you know that you have a job going in a neighborhood tomorrow, the night before you do that job, pop out some yard signs and go place signs at the stop sign.

Website: https://thebusinessbullies.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thebusinessbullies Instagram: @thebusinessbullies If you have two weeks and you need to generate some revenue, which one are you doing? Text or email? So if I had to look at our current customer lists, there are people that I should text and there are people that I should email. When I look at a residential customer list that has gotten work done for my company before, I'm texting them all day before I'm emailing them because I have their cell phone number and we have some rapport. They understand if I said: "Hey, this is Dave" they would know who I am because they've interacted with our company. If I'm looking at a commercial list or prospecting lists, It's going to be email because one, I might not have the cell phone number of my commercial contacts. If it's property managers or building owners or anyone that I'm prospecting that's a business owner, I might not have their cell phones so I might not have the ability to text them. So I'm going to send an email and then probably do a follow-up call and ask them if I got their email. But if you gave me a list of homeowners in a specific area that I had done work for before, I'm texting them all day before I'm emailing them.

Website: https://thebusinessbullies.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thebusinessbullies Instagram: @thebusinessbullies Facebook strategies under $50. For purposes of the discussion, I think we want to look at this on a, a per campaign basis. So I have a service I provide: I do painting, I do lawn care, I clean teeth, I do whatever it is. How can I spend 50 bucks on Facebook and actually get in front of people, instead of just thinking that because I paid Facebook and it got in front of people that it was worth the money? Sometimes that's not the case. We manage a group, Don't Suck at Facebook, and a lot of times we'll get posts from guys that are like, "so how did I do?" And they'll show "I boosted a post for 50 bucks, I got in front of 4,721 people and this little bar filled up and did I do a good job?" And the answer to that question is kind of simple. The answer to that question is what were you trying to do? What was your objective?

Website: https://thebusinessbullies.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thebusinessbullies Instagram: @thebusinessbullies What do you suck at in your business? What are you conscious of in terms of your abilities versus others? That's where you talk a lot about when someone gets a tax ID number, it gives on this persona that they're like fucking Superman or something, right? They know everything. Everyone knows this guy. Like you get online, you're on Facebook and one of your industry groups or somewhere in an online group and you're talking about an issue or a situation and the same motherfucker has an answer for everything. I mean everything. Like what equipment should I use? He fucking tells you that. How should I market? He tells you that. What CPA should I... He tells you that. As a business owner, you can't be that jack of all trades but master of none, That doesn't work.

Website: https://thebusinessbullies.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thebusinessbullies Instagram: @thebusinessbullies We all have something in common as business owners, whether it's me, you, Donald Trump, the CEO of Enron, a homeless guy - we all have the same amount of minutes during the day. Where do you choose to spend them? Where do you choose to delegate them? A lot of people have heard the saying, your time is your most valuable currency. If you could look at your day and say, how do I delegate where I'm going to spend my minutes. If I had all the money in the world, all the employees in the world, all the systems in the world, what would I be doing? I think it goes to the level of business. We have small businesses or new businesses that are doing either under a certain amount of revenue or they have a certain amount of employees. You could have medium sized businesses, which you and I have operated a bunch of those - a couple hundred grand, a couple million bucks a year. And then you have very large businesses, tens of millions, hundreds of millions. You have to be very self aware and understanding your role in your business to be able to understand where to spend your minutes.