Speaker 1: A lot of contractors ask me how do I find jobs you know how do I get more customers and I tell them that you don't really find jobs unless you're like working for the government or working on big commercial projects where people put out a listing and then you submit a bid along with 50 other companies that's the only case I can think of that you're going to find customers. Normally for the average contractor the remodeler, electrician, plumber, water well driller these kind of people get found by customers when they're looking for them right and in the old days before the internet this was all done by word of mouth so Joe Schmoe would want a remodel and he'd ask his neighbor or his friend or his family member hey do you know any good contractor and then they They would either get one of two answers. They'd get, sure, I know a great contractor. Contract this guy. Or they would get the whore story of, oh yeah, I worked with a contractor last year and he burned my house down and fled with my wife, or you know, whatever. There's either whore stories or good stories. But these days, word of mouth is slowing down a little bit. It still works, and by all means, it should be one of the ways that you get customers. If you're not getting customers by referral, then you're probably not doing a very good job. Because if you do a great job, people will hire you back and they'll tell their friends and family about you. Because it's tough to find a good contractor. And this isn't some kind of minuscule transaction. Like you're inviting somebody into your house, they're working on your home, which is probably the largest investment you've ever made, and you have to live in it all the time. So it's a pretty big deal for people. And my family, or my dad started a remodeling company about 25 years ago. And I'm in my mid-30s, so I worked on that thing for almost the last 20 years. And 10 or so years ago, we used HomeAdvisor. I'm sure you've heard of HomeAdvisor. And we would buy leads from them. And 10, 15 years ago, it was great. We used to get a ton of contacts every week. We only paid like five or 10 bucks for them. And we got a lot of work from it. But as time went on, more and more people that we called wouldn't answer their phone. And the leads got more and more expensive. And we even found that we were getting a lot of other contractors information. Or we were getting people that already had a bid and they were just trying to verify the price. You know, we were getting all this stuff that just completely wasted our time and drained our bank account. So we had to look for other ways. And you know, back in like 2013, 2014, things were pretty slow. And that's when we created our website. We built a really ugly old website. But back then we were like the only ones who did it in our area. So we got tons of customers from that. And that really kept us busy for a few years, but just like HomeAdvisor, over time it started to dwindle and dwindle until we weren't getting very good results from it. And that's when I, out of necessity, learned about this stuff. And I learned that the reason that we weren't getting found through our website anymore was because there was a bunch of other contractors in our area that built better websites than us. up on Google on the top of the first page and so they were getting all the phone calls. People weren't looking at the second or third page of the Google search results and finding us. So I had to figure out how to A, get my website to look professional and look modern and show up well on these smart phones, you know, and B, I had to make sure that people could actually find us when they were searching. So I spent hundreds of hours, thousands of hours at this point learning how this stuff works and applying it to our our own business and after some time we were able to get phone calls coming in again and at this point in time we're booked out for about the next two years we haven't even accepted any appointments in the last few months because we're just so busy and all of these people are finding us through Google and our website and over the years you know I didn't want to spend all my time doing this so I put together a team to do it for me and once I had this team I was like well I have all this potential here but I mean my projects pretty much on autopilot at this point it only takes a few hours a week to maintain it so let's help some other companies out there and so for the last few years my team has been working with contractors all over the country doing the same thing that they that we do for me which is build a professional website make sure people can find it on Google the only other Another step really is to get some good reviews so that when people go and find you on Google they can read some positive things about you and compare you to your competitors and hopefully get a pretty good message about you. But you can still use things like HomeAdvisor and if you take a look at Google search you'll see that HomeAdvisor, Angie's List, Thumbtack, Porch, Howes, Yelp, Better Business Bureau, All of these companies, which I call lead reselling middlemen companies, they dominate the first page of Google. These companies' main goal is only to collect people's contact information so they can sell it to you. That's the only value they add. They don't want you to know that if you just had a professional website and made sure that you were found on Google, you wouldn't need them. You can get these phone calls directly from the customers without having to pay per lead. And they're also a lot better, because if you buy a lead from HomeAdvisor, they're selling it to five other contractors at the same exact time. So you're instantly competing with six other contractors. On top of that, people that put their contact information into HomeAdvisor are not necessarily ready to even talk to anybody. HomeAdvisor does not make it clear exactly what's going on. You click onto their website, they're going to ask you for all of your information before you even see anything. They make it sound like you're going to see a list of contractors so you can compare and contrast them. But really you don't get to see anything until you've put all of your contact information on it. And as soon as you hit send on that form, your information is being sold to multiple contractors. even only through HomeAdvisor, but Angie's List owns HomeAdvisor now, so they share the same contact information. So looking at page 1 of Google, you've got all of these companies that are almost pretending to be contractors so that they can get contact information to sell it to actual contractors. And the thing is, is if you're an actual contractor, you have a huge edge on these companies if you just get a professional website and a Google Maps listing. If you can be found with or above these companies in the Google search, you're going to get shitloads of phone calls. And I'm not exaggerating, you know, our clients get hundreds of phone calls every month. And, you know, we don't. We only get maybe like five to ten a week, but that's way more than we need and way more than we want, quite frankly. So, you know, this is where it's at compared to, you know, getting your own leads compared to buying them. You know, there's just a ton of benefits to it. First of all, the lead quality is way higher. You're talking to people that found you, that already vetted you. They're almost ready to hire you already. All you got to do is get them through the process. When you get a lead from HomeAdvisor, you're calling them along with six or five other people. They're They're not even wanting to talk to anybody and that's why most of them don't answer the phone. Number two is you control it. If you have a website and a Google listing and everything, you can control the lead flow. You can turn it up. You can turn it down. You can use advertisements. With Home Advisor, you're getting what they give you. At any time, they can remove your reviews or they can let somebody post a fake review about you. they can change their policies, they can raise their prices, like you have zero control over what HomeAdvisor does. So if your business is relying on them, then you're pretty much at their mercy. And so, I mean, it's pretty clear for me, and I'm trying to get this word out there because I get so many calls from people that are like, oh, should I use HomeAdvisor or should I use Angie's List or should I use this or that or this? And look, they're all the same. They're just companies that are desperate to grab people's contact information and sell it to you. And you pay the prices. It's very expensive for them to show up on the first page of Google. They pay for advertising, they invest heavily in search engine optimization, which is what's required to get their website to show up, and they pass these costs on to you. And that's why their prices go up year after year after year. So look, that's how I do it. That's how most successful companies do it. There's nothing wrong with using HomeAdvisor, but it shouldn't be your main source of new customers. So if you have any questions, leave them in the comments. Also, I'll leave the link to my website in the description, so if you wanna learn more about what my team can offer you, head over there, and thanks for watching.