Adam (00:22):
Welcome to Masters of Home Service, the best podcast for home service pros like us. I’m your host, Adam Sylvester, and I want you to crush it in business. We’re going to get into it teaching you how to have a plan to dominate your clients neighborhood because that’s the best way to grow your business. So Keith, Daniel and welcome to the show. Thanks for being here. Keith, why don’t you tell our listeners who you are and what you do. 

Keith (00:44):
Hey, what’s up? Thank you. I’m Keith with Kalfas Professional Services. We’re in Sterling Heights, Michigan. I’ve been in business for 14 years. We do landscaping, property maintenance, and window cleaning. I love my business. We’ve served 5,000 happy clients, and I love my business, and I love taking care of customers. 

Adam (01:00):
Awesome. Thanks for being here. That’s great. Daniel, go ahead.

Daniel (01:03):
Daniel Dixon. I’m the CEO at SendJim, and that’s a marketing automation platform that integrates with Jobber, and I also own home service concrete coatings company and have owned other home service businesses as well. 

Adam (01:17):
Great. So we’re talking about getting more jobs and dominating a neighborhood, and you guys are both really good at this. What do you think is the main reason that so many business owners overlook this marketing strategy? 

Keith (01:30):
Service business owners, especially I’m a landscaper, they get incredibly busy and so tied up and it’s called context switching. When you’re wearing one hat, you kind of get zoned in on that hat, and you’re so concerned of where you have to be next and your schedule’s tight that maybe you haven’t even scheduled in the time to do that. Just ask for the positive review, talk to the neighbors, make sure you can deal with any walkups or quotes, and think of the neighborhood as like, let’s dominate this neighborhood. So when you open your mind and you think you become more aware of it, then you start planning that into the jobs. Especially if you have some employees working, you’ve trained them, that frees you up to spend time marketing to the neighbors or doing a Facebook marketing campaign, finding out what the local Facebook group is in the neighborhood, and locking down that neighborhood. So it’s walk a mile, see a mile. 

Daniel (02:18):
When we start our home service businesses, you’re just happy to get a job no matter where it is. And the number one way to pay for customer acquisition is probably through Google Adwords or pay-per-click campaigns, or social media. And we can’t really control the neighborhoods that we’re in, or we think we can’t. And so we just become accustomed to taking the lead no matter where it is until we get large enough to where we could actually say, “Well, I don’t go to that area, it’s not beneficial for me.” But by that time it’s like our client base is kind of all over the place. So I think it’s a product of where we start, and we don’t ever really focus on building enough route density. 

Adam (02:59):
Yeah, yeah. Also, I like the idea of what Keith said earlier about let’s make some time into this whole idea instead of having to rush off to the next one, let’s bake some time into where we knock on the door, give door hangers out. What are some other strategies that you guys have found, like some really practical things our listeners can do today when they’re on the job site? What are some things they should be thinking about and planning for when they’re on the job site? 

Daniel (03:22):
I had a carpet cleaning business. It was my very first home service business, and we did actually a hundred thousand dollars a year in one neighborhood, and we would do it year after year because we really focused on only serving that neighborhood, and we honestly didn’t do pay-per-click advertising or anything like that until much later. And a couple things that we did to really dominate the neighborhood. One, we integrated Jobber to SendJim, and we started doing neighbor mailings. And if you’re not familiar with what that is, statuses in Jobber, like when an invoice gets paid or when a job is completed or a job is scheduled, those can trigger mailings to the neighbors of your customers. When we talk to business owners, one of the biggest things that they say is, “I want to get more clients like my clients. I want to get more jobs like the ones I already have.” And the most-like your jobs or your clients are their neighbors. Entering those people into drip marketing campaigns with postcards goes really well with knocking on the door asking for reviews, right? Research says that you have to, a person has to see your brand seven times before they remember it and recognize it. And so the yard sign’s great. The wrapped vehicle’s great, the uniforms on your employees are great, but how do we get the last three or four touches? 

And so if we can stay in front of them for another three or four months with a series of drip postcards, that’s a really powerful thing, and it’s automated and it doesn’t require any time or thought. So that’s the first thing. The second thing is a little secret that I don’t share very often,  but I’ll do it for Jobber. But it’s saying at the end of a job, “Hey Mrs. Smith, reviews are super important to us. If I took $25 off your job today or $50,” whatever makes sense for your business, “Would you leave me an honest review in your neighborhood?” And that lives forever, right? And the number one place that I see my neighbors and myself going to find a home service business now is the Nextdoor page in our neighborhood or the Facebook page that’s dedicated to our neighborhood. And so there’s really no better investment of marketing dollars than having your customer post in the neighborhoods that you want to work in. 

Keith (05:32):
I like that. I think in terms of, there’s a great book by Michael Masterson called, Great Leads. It talks about cold, warm, and then hot clients that are ready to buy yesterday. And so I also like to move that forward in psychology with customers, because in my YouTube channel I talk to people that are more empathic. If it’s emotionally draining to you to do all of the work, to constantly talk to customers—how can you start to use software automation technology and use things to do some of that heavy lifting for you? But when you do talk to people, if you’re kind of more empathic, you might spend more time than just a five-minute quote. You might spend an hour with a customer and end up praying with them or something. I learn how to identify just over the phone when I talk to a customer to qualify them. Is this my customer or not? Slow down a little bit and be more present with the clients that you have, and then you can sell way more work with those clients. 

Adam (06:32):
This is great. So I want to talk about, let’s focus on the employees are on the job site or maybe the owner you’re on the job site or listeners are, should they knock on doors? I hear about five rounds, we go knock on the five closest doors, or are you asking your clients for referrals next door neighbors? Are you looking for like, oh, that guy’s lawn is overgrown, he needs my services. What kind of things are you doing on the job site or really empowering your people to do for you in a systematic way to increase your presence in that neighborhood? Are there any other things? 

Daniel (07:03):
Yeah, I think the more of those things that you can do and build into the system and process of your business, the better. Because how do we get to those seven touches and doing the things that other businesses are afraid to do is a perfect way to stand out and to grow your business. An example of that, so we should do door hangers. That’s not that scary. A little bit scary. You got to walk up to the door. It’s pretty passive though. The knock on the door, a lot of people are scared of that, and a lot of homeowners don’t like it, but you don’t have to do it in an aggressive manner. It depends on how you do that. It could just be a knock and just say, “Hey, we’re going to be doing this at your neighbor’s house. I just want to introduce myself. If you need anything like that, be happy to take a look. If not, have a great day.” Something along those lines of just, “Hey, we might be around the yard, just didn’t want to worry you if you saw me walking on this side of the neighbor’s house or whatnot.” So it can come across as a very helpful and a very good service that your company’s providing, and a thoughtful and caring company. As opposed to I’m trying to sell you something, but that might just provide awareness. It’s a marketing touch, and it might lead to another sale. 

Adam (08:09):
Or, “If we’re working, we might be too loud or our vans are in the way, I’ll come move ’em for you.” You can take different approaches on that, so it doesn’t feel like it’s a sales knock, so it can be very un-salesy for sure. I agree with that. 

Keith (08:23):
What I do is I do a lot of the administrative, but all the sales and marketing and I teach my employees a fourstep training system basically to be able to do the job well without me having to do anything except tell them what to do and they can do it so that way I can step back and just go sit in the truck, which is my mobile office, and I have wifi in there and my laptop. I put a thing over the windshield to block the sun, and I could just jam out, call customers, do email blasts, anything I need to do to keep the marketing machine going while they do 90% of the work. And so that’s worked for me very, very well. 

Adam (09:01):
I also think a hack for our listeners is, especially in the beginning, working on Saturday is a huge benefit if you’re trying to get more neighbors. Because think about it, if you’re there on a Wednesday morning, everyone’s at work, nobody’s at home, but if they’re on a Saturday, everyone’s home, everybody’s playing basketball in the cul-de-sac and their kids are out riding bikes and they’re out cutting the grass and you’re going to get so many more walk-ups, so much more attention if you’re working on Saturday. Or if you can, especially in the very beginning, if you can work, maybe you have a full-time job and you’re trying to get this side hustle going and you’re working the afternoons and evenings, that is a huge, huge advantage. And so don’t disregard that because time of day matters life. You’re knocking on doors during the day, you’ll get one answer. If you knock on doors on Saturday or in the evenings, you’ll get way more attention.

Daniel (09:48):
And depending on where you are in your business and how badly you want to get into a specific neighborhood, another really good way to do that is to give away free work or heavily discounted work. If you know someone in that neighborhood, or you’re even willing to door knock or you have a customer in that neighborhood and said, “Hey, do you know anyone else in this neighborhood that might want 50% off their job? I’m just trying to get more known in this neighborhood.” And people say like, “Oh, I don’t discount my service or I won’t give away free work. Don’t ever do that.” But if you look at it as an investment in marketing, that job might cost you a hundred dollars or $200 to do. And if I said, “Hey, if I gave you $200, we’re going to generate three or four more clients in this neighborhood, would you do it?” “Of course.” So it’s a really effective high-ROI form of marketing your business in a neighborhood, and it’s just another opportunity to hang the door hangers for people to see you out there, to your point. And it can be very, very powerful. So if you’re new in business and you’re looking for jobs, do not sit at home. Do not wait for the phone to ring, go out and work. You’re already paying for your technicians. The cost is already there. So go out and market yourself by actually providing work, getting the reviews. 

Adam (10:58):
Yeah. Daniel, I think what you said to begin with was, depending on how much you want to do this, it really comes down how much do you want it? How hard do you want to hustle? Keith, I know that you know the hustle game really well. It matters how hard our listeners really want to do this, and if they really want it, they’ll do it. 

Keith (11:15):
Bro. I love what you said about the working on Saturday’s thing. Now, the first five years of my landscaping business, maybe four years, I worked Saturdays, but there was a point I was like, wait a second, if I can work Sundays too. 

Adam (11:29):
Sundays are home as well. 

Keith (11:31):
Yeah. So now I was seven days a week. I did that for about two years straight until I burned out. And if you have a family and stuff, it’s probably not a good idea to work on Sundays only, ‘cause it’s only so long I could do that. But I believe everybody should have a two-year period where they go all in on something and become in a positive way, completely selfish, and they put out the blinders in just two years straight and they can really blossom and create a lot of fruit in your life as long as you’re conscious about it. But I did notice what you said. I’m glad that you said that about the Saturday thing because everybody’s home. I noticed I got the most amount of customers on Saturdays and Sundays because everybody was home. I remember I was working on Saturday and I literally couldn’t do anything but just walk around the neighborhood, of all the customers that were stopping their cars and coming up and walking up. I mean, we booked out for months and tens of thousands of dollars in work in this one neighborhood because we were working on Saturday. So if you want to grow your business really fast and get a lot of customers, I know you have to give up some time, but the reward is insane. 

Adam (12:33):
Yeah, I remember I cut grass on a Saturday the first day of mowing season. It was a Saturday for me, and it was a gold mine because everyone needed a new vendor and everyone was getting, “I just moved into town and you’re the first person I’ve seen”. And so even more specifically, if you can work on Saturdays, if you make those first Saturdays at the beginning of the season, if you’re mowing, if you’re a seasonal business, make those first couple of workdays Saturdays. It’s like a diesel engine. Diesel engine works on compression. When you put so much pressure into a small amount of time, it explodes. And so for you for two years, you just went after it seven days a week, just bam, bam, bam. You created so much pressure, it exploded. And that’s how diesel engines work, bam bam. And so I think for our listeners, especially if you’re trying to get started, the more activity, the more you do, the more you’re out there, the more doors you talk, the more clients you talk to, just the more—you’re bound to succeed. You’re bound to. 

Keith (13:30):
Work creates work. And so when you’re out there with a truck and a trailer, you got logos and phone numbers, hat, shirts, hoodies, you name it, business cards. I have this little trick where you get a cell phone pouch wallet, you can even from the dollar store and you could stack about 50 business cards on your hip. Everywhere you go, I locked down a client, we did tens of thousands of dollars just I always ask, “How did you hear about our services?” I was in a Jimmy John’s and I walked out and said, uh-uh, my rule is I can’t walk out of a place of business, if they allow and not walk out without leaving a business card. So I left some business cards on the corkboard, and we locked down a client from that work. Definitely creates work. And when you talk about generating activity, I like to look at it as throwing mud at the wall to see what sticks. Even if you’re not getting the pricing that you want right away, it can be frustrating because you’re doing so much and you’re learning a lot at a rapid pace, especially the first one to three years. Do it all. And once it’s like the marble carving the statue of David, your subconscious mind reshuffles the deck and you learn these deep lessons where the truth starts to reveal itself of where the value lies. 

Adam (14:44):
What about this idea of people are like, well, I got busy, so you stopped marketing, and I think that’s the kiss of death. What do you say to someone who’s like, “Well, I put marketing on pause from it dominating the neighborhood. I’m too busy right now.” What do you think about that? 

Daniel (14:57):
Yeah, it’s crazy. You never stop marketing. You always market. And a lot of home service business owners do this because it feels intuitive, but it’s actually what you’re supposed to do is counterintuitive, which is when it’s slow and they need jobs, they spend most of their marketing budget. The problem is it’s slow, and they need jobs because people aren’t buying during that time of year. And so, for example, my concrete coatings company is slow in the wintertime, so the worst time to market is the winter. People are not responsive to your marketing. They don’t want to empty the garage, they don’t want to go outside, they don’t. And so you want to market when you are the busiest because that’s when you’re going to acquire the most leads. You want to make sure that you’re able to cherry-pick, right? And how do you do that? You get so many leads that you can only take the jobs you want, 

Adam (15:48):
The best ones. 

Daniel (15:49):
Right, and so we need to acquire our customers in our busiest season, and then they sustain us through the slow times. But you really should never stop marketing, but you should actually market more in the busiest times of the year. 

Keith (16:01):
So there’s a strategy. I was actually at a live event. I was speaking recently. There was a guy who was in his first year of his business and he was frustrated because he was doing very well, and then it dried up. He had no money, no jobs. He’s like, “There’s this lull in the certain time of year and I don’t know what to do about it.” And he felt trapped. And I was like, well, what if you, you’re marketing hard in the really busy season, and you offer customers some type of incentivized discount if they’re not so urgent to get it done. “Hey, can we move this to September or this time of year?” And now what if you only stacked 8, 10, 12 jobs? Depending on his average ticket price to that time of year? He goes, “Well, not every customer.” I’m like, “I didn’t say that.” Every customer is going to do that. Just a few. What would eight do that time? He goes, “Bro, that would change everything.” And then he lit up. He was like, “I’m going to do this immediately.” It’s just like a little strategy. I the late fall and landscaping, you wrap up the season. Spring comes, we call it cutthroat season because everybody’s scrambling for work. Well, I learned this from my friend Stan Genadek. He said “In the fall, you keep marketing and advertising and doing quotes all the way to pass. Everybody else has quit and you’re selling big ticket jobs and scheduling them for next spring. So when spring comes, you just roll right into the season into high-profit work while everybody else is scrambling.” It’s just a simple strategy. 

Daniel (17:28):
I want to say something too about what Keith said about doing everything with marketing. A lot of business owners, when they’re trying to get into a neighborhood specifically and they want to dominate the neighborhood, they make the mistake of, “et me try this in the neighborhood and then I’m going to stop doing that, and then I’m going to try this thing in the neighborhood and I’m going to do all these one-off things one or two times and try to figure out what works. Just do it all. Right? And then don’t even try to understand. I mean, you can try to understand what is the thing that really works, but the danger is people try to get too perfect on what exactly is it that is driving the leads instead of if the recipe is working and generating leads, don’t take out an ingredient. If your pancakes taste good, don’t be like, “Well, what if I took out this just to save a little bit of money? Maybe they’ll still taste good with that.” It’s like, no, keep doing all of it. It’s good. And so that’s another mistake that I see is like, “Well, I’m going to try this then if that doesn’t work, I’m going to try this.” What you said, spot on. Do everything you can. 

Keith (18:30):
Can I tell you my little quick micro story of a tiny newspaper ad? 

Adam (18:34):
Yes. 

Keith (18:35):
And it’s not the Don Lapre, the guy on the beach from the nineties, who is an infomercial guy. But so I’m in the car with my wife, second spring of my landscaping business. I needed customers. Running a newspaper ad sounds insane, but I’m like, I’ll try it. I’ll do anything. It was like 37 bucks, but I forgot my debit card. I’m on the phone with the newspaper, and my wife pulls out her debit card. She’s like, “I’ll pay for it.” I was like, no, no, no, no, you’re not going to pay. She goes, “I’ll pay for it.” So I took her debit card, 37 bucks, ran a tiny little ad in the newspaper, and 10 days goes by and I get a call from a nice little old lady. I show up. It’s like a $70 little tiny, maybe it was 40 bucks. It was so small of a job. I was like, but I did it and I made the lady totally happy. But the neighbor came out and she wanted all her shrubs trim and property maintenance. It was like $700. Boom, we do that. Then the little old lady recommends, refers us to her nephew who owns 25 real estate properties. We lock down to do all his real estate properties, all the gutters, demos, window cleaning, tens of thousands of dollars worth of work. He refers me to his brother-in-law. We do a whole demo job for like seven grand, and he’s been a client for years off of one little tiny $37 newspaper ad. So it’s interesting how marketing works like that. 

Adam (19:57):
This is great guys. I’m going to pause for a moment to talk about how Jobber empowers us to dominate our neighborhoods and market better. How has Jobber helped you guys dominate your neighborhoods and just make your marketing process so much better? 

Daniel (20:10):
Yeah, for me, the great thing is that it integrates with a product like SendJim, so I can automate a lot of my marketing. We also use the Jobber campaigns feature to send out emails. Another thing we didn’t talk about, but Jobber helps my business look really professional. So when those quotes go out in those high-income neighborhoods that I want to be in, it gives our customers confidence that they’re hiring a company that has their stuff together. 

Keith (20:35):
Yeah, one way that has helped my business is the email marketing inside of the marketing platform. I love email marketing. We can send out one blast and you should send out way more than that, but to your client list. And sometimes even six weeks later, there’s clients reaching out saying, “Hey, I got your email.” They’re probably just busy, so we’ll close $20,000 in work off one email blast. That’s how important it is to capture customer’s information. So you just have to train yourself. Whenever you answer the phone, I like to pull over and put on the flashers. I open the Jobber app immediately, take down all the client’s info with their email and everything. So it’s constantly building the list and being stored into the database. So when you do do an email blast, it’s incredible. 

Adam (21:18):
I like to email past clients who haven’t booked with us over 12 months. Just dig ’em up and you never know what you find. People come out of the woodwork, “Yeah, I’ll hire you,” and it’s been over 12 months. So Jobber is great. If you’re not using Jobber, you need to use all the marketing tools and get more clients. Go to jobber.com/podcastdeal, get the exclusive discount and start marketing with Jobber today.

(21:39)
Guys, we’re talking about winning more jobs and dominating the neighborhood. How do you choose what neighborhood to go in? Is every neighborhood the best? I’m curious how you guys go about determining truly the best neighborhoods for you to spend all your time investing in. 

Daniel (21:53):
I would try to understand the neighborhood’s total opportunity. So how many houses are there? Can I keep an entire crew busy in this one neighborhood? How much work can I do there? What’s the average size job in that neighborhood? How close is it to my shop? All those things are going to go, and as a factor, those are the types of things that you really want to look at when selecting a neighborhood. I don’t know if you would add anything to that, Keith. 

Keith (22:18):
Yeah, you can just Google average income per capita per zip code, and you can zoom in and it’ll show you the average income per household all over the place. And then sometimes you could zoom down to specific neighborhoods, wherever the lines of the zip codes are, and you can find out and then build your customer avatar by taking all the customers you’ve done work for already and find the commonalities of the ones that were the best, the rockstar clients. And that customer avatar can be a $750,000 household to one million. They probably have college degrees. They drive these type of vehicles, have vacation homes, and what is their landscaping or whatever their home service look like. And then now you think about that and say, how can I create my marketing, my website, the images and pictures of my social media? For instance, if you wanted to lock down houses like that, you probably wouldn’t want to shoot a YouTube video or put a big picture on a website of an $80,000 broken-down house in the ghetto I grew up in. Because we grew up so poor. But it’s like the preeminent strategy. You position yourself in a way so that when they’re ready to do service and they find your website, they find your positive reviews, it all matches what’s already going on, the colors, the tones, the fonts, everything. The alignment of the website speaks like this is like a white-glove service or whatever type of customer avatar you want to create. And the more you attuned to that is the more you reflect that in your marketing and it starts to attract magnetically the type of customers that you want. 

Daniel (23:51):
Yeah. I’ll add to that. So a little plug for SendJim here. You can go inside SendJim once you’ve identified those neighborhoods and it can help you identify the neighborhood, it’ll show you a Google map in there and you can outline the neighborhood. You can say, I only want owner occupied. I want this agent up. I want this income and up. I want this home value—whatever those demographics are that are important to your business. And then you can enter those homes into a drip marketing campaign. So, in addition to the neighbor mailing, we can get hyper-targeted on the homes that you want and get really granular on the types of people who live in those homes and whether we should be marketing to them or not. 

Adam (24:30):
I’ve literally done that many times with SendJim, so I second that wholeheartedly. Do you think it makes a difference if the postcard literally says the neighborhood Forest Lakes. Do you think the conversion’s higher when the actual name of the neighborhood is on there? 

Daniel (24:43):
Absolutely. And to what Keith was saying is it really needs to match. The cohesiveness needs to match your website. The door hangers should look like your website. It should look like the same branding that’s on your vehicle. All those things should feel cohesive. Otherwise, they’re going to look at this postcard and be like, “Oh, that’s a different company. I never heard of them,” but they may have seen your van, right? Or they may have been on your website, but they don’t even realize it’s the same company. Another really cool thing about SendJim is they have variable data, is what you call it, but inside, when you trigger those neighbor mailings through Jobber, it can actually, you can have a variable data that says, put the customer’s street name on here. So when that goes out, let’s say you live on Main Street and I just did your house, SendJim’s going to choose your neighbors, and it’s going to say, we just did a job for your neighbor on Main Street. That’s right. And then people, when they even read the tagline, they’re going to only look at your card for a second before they recycle it or throw it away, but they see their street name on there or a picture of a house that looks like theirs. Or I’ve even gone to neighborhoods for our radius bomb tool, where you’re going to target the whole neighborhood and take a picture of the entrance to the neighborhood, or there’s a big fountain in the neighborhood that we do a lot of work in. I take a picture of the fountain and I put it on the postcard because even if they don’t read it, they see that and they can visually recognize that’s my neighborhood, and they can associate with that really fast, and then they’ll start reading, “What is this person? Why is my neighborhood on this postcard?”

Adam (26:04):
Yeah. A lot of takeaways here for our listeners. I think the best three that we have today is number one, do you want to bake time into your day to create space for conversations with neighbors. You’ll have people walking up to you wanting a quote. You go to their house or you go knock on doors. Now, if it’s a big job, maybe you send your salesperson there while they’re doing the work, and you go talk to the neighbors, or you just stand there for an hour and you handle walkups, but there’s different ways to make sure you have time to do that kind of stuff. Number two is use SendJim, I’m a huge fan of automating postcards with SendJim. Send the five closest neighbors a postcard. We just went to your neighbor and put their street address on there, a photo of the entrance to the neighborhood. There’s different ways to customize those to make them really, really pop. And number three is, especially in the beginning, when you’re just really hustling and really scratching and clawing, work Saturdays, work in the evenings, work when people are home You’ll get way more business that way. Guys, that was great. Thanks for being here. I really appreciate it. Keith, how do people find out more about you? 

Keith (27:05):
Oh, you can check out my podcast, The Untrapped Podcast—Apple, Spotify, any of your favorite podcast platforms, and also on YouTube, just type in Keith Kalfas. I have a couple thousand videos on how to start and grow landscaping business from zero to 100k 

Daniel (27:19):
If you want to find out how to connect your Jobber account to SendJim, go to sendjim.com— S-E-N-D-J-I-M dot com and start a chat, and we’d be happy to help. 

Adam (27:31):
Cool. I really appreciate you guys being here. Thanks a lot. 

Daniel (27:33):
Thank you for having us. 

Adam (27:34):
And thank you for listening. I hope that you heard something today that will help you dominate your neighborhoods. I’m your host, Adam Sylvester. You can find me at adamsylvester.com. Your team and your clients and your family deserve your very best, so go give it to ’em.