Show Information
Episode Number: 88
Date: May 19, 2025
Duration: 26:40
Host Contact Information
Host: Justin Deese
Website: JustinDeese.com
Contact: Justin@JustinDeese.com
Guest
Sam Preston
Contact: Sam@ServiceScalers.com
Website: www.ServiceScalers.com
Summary
In this episode of the Freedom Blueprint podcast, Justin Deese speaks with Sam Preston from Service Scalers about the intricacies of digital marketing in the home service industry. They discuss the importance of customer acquisition, the role of AI in marketing, and the need for businesses to understand their conversion rates. Sam shares insights on how to effectively manage marketing channels and the significance of geographical strategies. The conversation emphasizes the necessity of mastering customer acquisition and the impact of social media marketing.
Takeaways
- Service Scalers focuses on high-converting websites for home services.
- Niche marketing can lead to significant growth opportunities.
- Understanding ROI in digital marketing is crucial for success.
- Conversion rates often reveal deeper issues in business operations.
- AI can enhance marketing strategies and efficiency.
- Customer acquisition should be the primary focus of service businesses.
- Master one marketing channel before expanding to others.
- Geographical targeting is essential for effective marketing.
- Social media can be leveraged differently based on the service type.
- Enjoying life while growing a business is important.
Chapters
- 00:00 Introduction to Service Scalers
- 01:04 The Journey into Home Services
- 03:57 Understanding Digital Marketing ROI
- 06:50 Identifying Conversion Issues
- 09:55 Leveraging AI in Marketing
- 12:29 The Importance of Customer Acquisition
- 14:50 Mastering Marketing Channels
- 18:41 Geographical Marketing Strategies
- 21:30 Social Media Marketing Insights
- 23:43 Closing Thoughts and Wisdom
Keywords
Service Scalers, digital marketing, home services, customer acquisition, AI in marketing, marketing strategies, conversion rates, social media marketing, ROI, home service industry
Transcript
Justin Deese (00:01.634) Welcome to Freedom Blueprint podcast. I am getting to hang out today with Sam Preston from Service Scalers. So, Sam, good to have you, Sam Preston (00:10.816) Let's go. Dude, it's good to be here. Happy Friday. Justin Deese (00:15.532) Yeah, yeah, happy Friday. Yeah, the time of recording. It's Friday and how's the weather up there? Sam Preston (00:22.156) it's beautiful. It's gonna be 70 degrees outside. You know, I'm gonna have to get on a walk. It's sunny. It's great, because we just had like the snow apocalypse like last week. It was like a whole like two inches and everything shut down and broke everything. So, glad to get past that. Justin Deese (00:37.688) Yeah, I'm in the panhandle of Florida. We got 10 inches of snow. So pass on that ever again. But it's been interesting because my wife and I get to have those conversations about my daughter's a senior and I'm like, you know, Key West in Aruba, it doesn't snow there. you know, so, but she's, she's not in for that. So Sam, tell us a little bit about what, what is service scalers? Sam Preston (00:45.726) Yeah, yeah. Sam Preston (00:56.444) Yeah, let's do it. Sam Preston (01:04.341) Service Scalers is a home service marketing agency, digital marketing agency, focused on all things search into a beautiful high converting website. And so think your normal LSA, Google Ads, SEO, Map Pack, Google Business Profile. all pushed to a website that helps you convert effectively, we want to capture the market that's already searching for you. So anyone that's gonna go to Google and say, hey, plumbing company near me, best roofing company in my area. We want to show up and help our clients drive that traffic and ultimately make sure that that traffic turns into appointments and that turns into revenue. So yeah, mean, that's in a nutshell. Justin Deese (01:51.022) Well, and that's, that's the trick though, right? When you're spending dollars on, uh, on digital, any marketing, but digital marketing, you you've got to make sure you're getting a solid ROI. It is, and I'm sure you've seen this a lot. It is easy to throw money down, down a giant pit. And then you're like, where, where's, where's it coming from? Yeah. So how, how did you get started in the, in the home service space? Like what, what would, what was that journey like? Sam Preston (02:00.495) yeah. Sam Preston (02:07.826) Yeah. Sam Preston (02:11.807) Where's this going? Yeah. I've done it myself. Sam Preston (02:20.981) Yeah, I mean, I would love to say here and say that I had a absolute love and passion for plumbing companies. That was not it. Just a dirty rotten capitalist here. I built several agencies at up to this point. I looked at the home service space. What I built is I built like a website agency for everybody. I built a PPC agency for everybody. I built a content agency for everybody. And I was like, that's cool that I've niche down and just built those individual lines of service. But what would it look like if I niche into a space? So we're looking at different spaces. Home service looked interesting. Won't name names, but there are a couple of big juggernauts in this space that people absolutely hate. Like just go to Reddit and it's just like mind blowing how much hatred there is for these big companies. And so I just saw an opportunity to jump into the space and take a decent amount of market share in a short amount of time. And so we started running podcast ads, you know, this is, and it started driving a decent amount of leads, like right off the bat, 40 leads in a month. And I was like, wow. this market looks like it needs something. So we spent like two hours, we threw up a website and quickly, quickly saw that there's opportunity. So in 2024, we are sitting at 10,000, and we are just north of 2 million right now on our path to 5 million by the end of the year. Justin Deese (03:57.87) Very cool, that's amazing growth. As my buddy John Lee Dumas says, the riches are in the niches. And it's one of those things where you can't be all things to all people and you as a marketing guy knows, there's one thing to go after it with a shotgun approach, which I think is a lot of what, when you get started as an entrepreneur, Sam Preston (04:06.357) Dude, I haven't heard his podcast in a while. Justin Deese (04:22.002) And I can say all of us, even if you're a, even if you're a plumbing guy, when you get started, you say yes to whatever you're like, Hey, will you do this electrical plumbing? Like, yes, I will do whatever. Cause your, main objective is to, is to bring cash in the door, which I know that's Sam Preston (04:34.505) Hm. Hm. Justin Deese (04:41.218) I know looking back at that, it's easy to say, maybe that's just not a good idea. get it. But at the same time, you're like, got bills to pay and families to feed and whatever. but it is something magical when you get to like niche down into really one thing and really learn about the home service. Cause I mean, emergency services is different than anything else. You know, it's not like you're selling a cog or you're like, let me, this widget needs to be, I've got six months to create this thing. It's emergency services that customer searching now. may not be searching an hour from now. Sam Preston (05:14.695) It also is super helpful because I've been able to hire for that reason. So like the, head of PPC right now, he worked in a private equity equity for home service companies. And so he was really running PPC ads for those companies. My LSA, you know, one of my best LSA team members worked at Mr. Rooter for five years, just running their LSA accounts. And so like, it's like, I get to add in these team members that are already specialists in this field. And it's like, Justin Deese (05:41.197) Yeah. Sam Preston (05:43.721) Look, don't learn e-commerce, don't learn SaaS. All you have do is do this campaign really well and you've done this a hundred times. So just go crush it. Justin Deese (05:52.664) Yeah. So to kind of go back to the part you talked earlier about, know, there, there is definitely this, home service business owner versus digital marketing. Like it's this David and Goliath and, and, sometimes in, and I'm sure you can test this. There's times you look at a campaign and you're like, w what, what in the world were they doing? Like that one one things they're not even doing, but then there's other times you look at it and you go, well, wait a minute. If you look at your conversion rate and you look at your calls that are coming in, you're booking at a 20 % rate. It is not a digital marketing issue. You, you got to fix the hole in that boat. Cause if you're booking at 20%, you're not doing yourself the digital marketing, your technique, like you're doing no one, any service whatsoever. Um, so I'm guessing you see that a lot because I think a lot of times the first reaction that business owners have, especially in the emergency services. Sam Preston (06:34.346) Yeah. Sam Preston (06:41.674) Yeah. Justin Deese (06:50.539) is to go up digital marking problem. Sam Preston (06:53.302) Yeah, actually, I literally just had this conversation last week. client reach out, Sam, hey, this is not working. We want to our losses, cut the contract. And I looked into the campaign, was like, hey, we sent you 60 leads. And he goes, well, only five booked. And I was like, okay, that's a big gap. I would understand if like, you know, 80 % is a high number. That's what we want to see. 80 % is good. I would understand even 40%, but five, that's super low. So we just went in and we started listening to the phone calls and we realized their admin team when they're answering it was not doing a good job. The lady would go, Hey, what's your hourly? She'd like, it's $200 an hour. They're like, Oh cool. I don't want to do this. Of course not. Don't tell them the hourly say, Hey, it's going to cost this much for us to come out and take a look or We do free, but then we'll take a look and depending on what the service is, we'll let you know. You're not the salesperson. Your job is just to book the appointment. Don't go selling on that situation right there. Or we have people that like just don't care as the, like they just say they don't care. Their job is to answer the phones and move on with their life. They're not commissions or incentivized by booking appointments. So we do a lot of that where it's like, we try to find where the leak is and then figure out how we can solve that problem. And sometimes it is a digital market. Justin Deese (08:12.994) I've done shop visits before where the phone rings and really there should be this sense of excitement in your customer service department when the phone rings and you're like book the call like that's the drum you should be booked the call and I've done some shop visits where I've been in there and the phone's ringing it's almost like the phone's ringing like are you kidding me? What are you talking about? Answer the phone. Sam Preston (08:20.831) Mm-hmm. Sam Preston (08:26.57) Yeah. Sam Preston (08:34.247) Ugh. That's such a bad vibe. Yeah. That's it. Yeah, no, absolutely. But yeah. Justin Deese (08:45.996) So now in this scenario, you're talking about with the, leads versus calls booked. Do you have anything in place to kind of, I'm going to say educate because that's really what it comes down to is, is it's an education issue with a lot of business owners. I mean, if you're not keeping an eye on your booking rate, holy cow, that is like number one thing you need to get a handle on. And even if you don't have the service titans or the seras or whatever one, even if it's pen and paper or spreadsheet, like something in order to kind of keep an eye on that. there anything that you guys can do? I'm gonna say trust, but verify that a little bit for the owner. Sam Preston (09:26.067) Yeah, so we do have like a listening service where we listen to every phone call that kind of comes through and then give you that rate. And that's super helpful, specifically because it's good quick feedback for our ads team. Because if we start saying, hey, like you're a window company and you're getting a lot of people calling in for broken glass, well, people don't need repair. They don't want a repair. They want a replacement. They want somebody that's looking for like, hey, I to redo all these windows. And so like getting that feedback back to the ads team is just a much quicker cycle. And then we can get it to your team. Hey, you had an 80 % broking rate this week. Oh, you went to 70. Oh, now it's 60. Hey, is there something going on over there? Cause like, is it the ads or where's the problem? The second piece of that is we are definitely pushing into the AI world. and starting to work with AI agents trying to, how do we have AI take a listen to every phone call that's coming through, then look at your CRM to look at what's actually booking, then look at your ad campaigns, see what keywords are coming through and tie that all together to give you a report. That's not today, but that's something we're working on and it's, dude, it's so epic. It's literally tomorrow, we're hiring for it for sure. Justin Deese (10:38.446) But it may be tomorrow. Justin Deese (10:44.13) We, so one of the things I noticed this past year, you know, I, attend a lot of conferences and, there was a couple towards the end of last year that I was, that I was walking around the show floor and I remember, just thinking, my, like there is AI companies everywhere. Like it's almost the majority. And some of the stuff was like, I don't even know. I don't know how that would fit into my business, but, AI is definitely a really exciting. tool could as long as as long as used correctly. Yeah. Sam Preston (11:16.693) would say that, yeah, I would say every business at this point should start looking at that. Whether you're a plumbing company or you are a digital company, there is so much, like you should hire an AI specialist. And they don't go by that. No one's an AI specialist right now. They are a Zapier specialist. They're a technical person and they have an interest in AI. So you can't hire for the AI, but you go, hey, Justin Deese (11:23.565) Mm-hmm. Sam Preston (11:42.228) You like this, we're happy to pay you and then train on this stuff. And then I would assign them a number. Like your job is to save us X amount of money. and you're gonna do that by making this team more efficient, or you're gonna do this by making our conversion rate go up, but that's what we're doing. We're bringing this guy in, we're like, we wanna make two things. We wanna better results for our clients and therefore, and a better experience. So this is one aspect of what you're working on. But the second thing is I want you to make my team more efficient at what they do. Again, because I wanna make money and I wanna grow. And so you definitely should find it. Justin Deese (12:21.11) And you don't do that unless your client's making money and growing. So it's definitely a win-win scenario for you. Sam Preston (12:24.073) Exactly. Sam Preston (12:29.521) Exactly, exactly. Justin Deese (12:31.778) That's interesting. I don't think I've talked to anybody about hiring an AI specialist, which to your point, that's not a thing, but man, that's new. A year ago, nobody was talking about that. Sam Preston (12:45.002) Yeah, we're working with a... It's crazy. It's crazy. So we're working with a talent agency that's good at recruiting this and they've done this placement for themselves. I'm good friends with the guy. So he's done it for himself and now he's helping us do it. I mean, highly recommend. Justin Deese (13:05.262) Hmm. That's, that's very interesting. Yeah. Keep, keep us posted on that. Cause I have never thought about that yet. Now I will. And now I won't forget it. So now Sam's got that stuck in my head. So let me ask you this. So obviously working with a lot of clients, uh, seeing a lot of, um, doing a lot of demos and that kind of thing. What's, what is one of those things that you see most home service businesses forget to do or miss? Sam Preston (13:12.851) You should. This is all you're going to be thinking about now. Justin Deese (13:35.559) or something that you go, man, that one little tweak can make a really big difference in your campaign. Sam Preston (13:42.134) Yeah, I think I see this in a lot of plumbing companies, specifically when it's not a private equity firm that's coming in bought. When they are somebody that's built from the ground up, they are first a plumber. And then like that's what they think their business is. And you're not, you're not a plumber. you are in the business of acquiring new customers. That is the most important thing that you do in your business. The fulfillment side of it is great and you need to be good. You got to go get those reviews. But if you're not good at acquiring new customers, you will lose out. And so what I mean by that is, I had a conversation literally two weeks ago. where this guy said, hey, I want to pause LSA and I want to persist all the PPC. It's just not working for me. I was like, yeah, like, hey, it's not working for you. Let's not do that. Let's push into something else. But out of curiosity, how much did you spend last month? How many leads did you get? How much revenue did you get? And he said, we spent $400. We got six leads and I don't know how many I don't know how much revenue we got. And I was sitting there like, that's a $68 cost per lead, bro. Like. Justin Deese (14:50.348) Yeah, it's pretty good. Sam Preston (14:51.922) What do you mean it's not working and why don't you know how much revenue you generated from that? So that's the thing that I see all the time. One is make sure that your leads that are coming through all have a source and that should be tied to a close one deal. You should be able to say PBC drove me $80,000 of new business this year, this month, right? Like you should be able to have that conversation. If you don't go solve that problem. And the second thing I told him is to train your team to use LSA, right? Anytime they get a booked appointment and they knew it, no chems came from LSA, that should be attributed in your CRM, but then you go back into your LSA account and say booked appointment. That way LSA knows that you booked appointment. And then the third thing is to increase that aspect. So at a minimum, I would increase that by whatever your cost per lead is. Justin Deese (15:25.882) Mm-hmm. Sam Preston (15:46.516) So you spent $68 per lead. Next week, you're going to spend an extra $68. If you got seven leads from that, now we're going to go another $68. Like you're just going to keep to see if that trend continues. I promise you, if you hire us and my team member just increases ad spend, we're going to look like superheroes and all we did was increase your ad spend. So you might just try increasing it. So all that to say, you are in the business of acquiring new customers. Get really damn good at it. Focus on that. Because that is the easiest way to scale any business. Justin Deese (16:23.803) I think for the smaller shops, that's a toughie. Sam Preston (16:28.895) for the... yeah. Justin Deese (16:29.07) I think that's a tough thing to wrap their mind around. It's 100 % true. And I think as your business, if you're in a business where you're growing and scaling, I think that resonates and you go, well, yeah, I'm in the, yes. I think for the smaller shops, I think it's hard for them to wrap their brain around, because I mean, without customers. You don't need anybody to answer the phone. You don't need technicians to go do anything. Nobody's got anything to do. So from a hub and spoke, which is really what our business is, that acquisition is dead in the center. And if it's not tight, then your wheel's going to be a little bit wobbly. Sam Preston (16:51.114) Yeah. Sam Preston (17:05.949) Yeah, well then for smaller shops, let me tell you this, don't spread yourself too thin, right? Agency, I obviously want you to do as many services as possible. My sales rep promise you we'll try to get you to do as many as possible. But don't spread your ad spend too thin. Don't do LSA and Google Ads if you haven't mastered LSA. Don't go to Facebook when your Google Ads is only, you're only spending five grand a month on Google Ads. Just keep pushing, like master one channel really, really well and then move on to the next one. I see a lot of people do that where they've got Google Ads and they're spending 2,000 a month. They got Facebook and they're spending 3,000 a month. The problem is you're also paying that management fee. So that ROAS is just so much harder to get. And so stick with one channel, master that, then move on to the second, or at least have only a small portion of your budget, what I call discovery, like you're trying something new, but everything else, you should really push into a channel and try to grow as much as you can in that channel before moving on. Justin Deese (18:13.304) Great answer. So let me ask you this. What about geographical area? Like what do you think? What would you say to somebody, especially, I don't know, let's say $3 million shop. I mean, obviously you've got to know your numbers. So you need to know what your percentage of spend is. Otherwise you could end up spending 20, 30 % of your revenue and you're not going to make any money there either. But as far as a geographical area, What would you recommend somebody that's like, let's say I'm 2 million and I'm about to get started and I'm about to really start spending money on, LSA and PPC and some of that other stuff. Sam Preston (18:53.108) Yeah, two million, then you've probably got $16,000 a month maybe to spend. That would be my guess is what you have to spend. I would say one, in a local area, try to max out LSA. Like that's one of the easiest ones to go out and just do really well. GMB is also one that I think that you could easily do start doing those activities to try to grow. I would say 70 % of what we do, maybe even 80 % is on YouTube. Go YouTube it, like just how to do GMB and just do that. Like not that complicated. Justin Deese (19:12.834) Mm-hmm. Sam Preston (19:35.798) Honestly, like you would come hire us to do your LSA and GMB, not because you couldn't do it yourself, but because it's cheaper than hiring someone in-house to do it. And we're experts. So if things go wrong, you go, Hey Sam, what the heck? And we're like, Hey, we're accountable. We'll go make that happen. But those two are really easy for you to do and grow fairly easy. At that point, I'm probably pushing into Google ads. You could do some SEO and I love SEO. SEO is always going to be a long game. You're doing SEO for 2025. You're doing it for 2026 to be big. So I think you're in that like two to three million is probably when I start doing some SEO. The only way I would change that is if I do see a big gap in the market. know, hint, hint, like I'm in the Charleston area and I see some key words because I do the searches and I'm like, there's some plumbing searches that nobody's jumping on right now. Justin Deese (20:04.16) Mm-hmm. Sam Preston (20:33.086) So obviously I'm a marketer, know that kind of stuff, so like that's why I would take advantage of it. But again, I probably wouldn't go that direction. I would probably stick with things that are driving direct searches into your business. I might even tell you to do more of the, what are they called? The home advisor, the, I would play around with those as well. Sometimes you get terrible results. Sometimes you get nice results. That cost per lead will always be higher than it is other places, but you can easily turn it up and turn it off and just see how it goes. So we have seen a success in those. Again, try all the different ones in your area. Try to max it out. And then once you get, again, a little bit bigger, once you get to three, four, $5 million, then you should be probably doing everything as far as digital goes. from a spin. Justin Deese (21:32.076) Well, you never know. People have different habits. Sometimes people go to Facebook for everything. Sometimes people don't Google anything. Some people go to Bing. Some people go to Instagram and YouTube. So yeah, definitely want to show up when your customer is looking. Not just when they're looking, but where they're looking as well. Sam Preston (21:56.81) Yeah, I mean, we don't personally do Facebook ads. Not yet. Anyways, one of these days. want to go acquire that business. I do not want to build that one from scratch. But I've got friends who are in the, you know, home service industry and they swear by Facebook ads being so great for driving low cost per leads. I've even seen some people do TikTok and have success there. Justin Deese (22:19.79) I know some people that do tick tock really well. but it, but it is, I think people forget sometimes. Tick tock, Facebook, Instagram, whatever it is, their social media, which means they're social. So running just ad after ad after ad is not going to capture, as, you know, you run some of these funny videos and some of these goofy clips that that's what people are there for. and that seems to convert really well. And it works too for, you know, for the recruiting aspect. Sam Preston (22:23.86) Yeah. Sam Preston (22:45.331) Yeah. Justin Deese (22:50.092) is usually a pretty good way to get people to come in. They're like, look how cool you guys are. Sam Preston (22:52.246) It also depends on what... Right. And to that point, it depends on what type of company you are. Plumbing, you really don't need sexy images on your Instagram. No one's going to your plumbing account like, man, look at that, I want that on my house. But if you're a window company, you probably should. If you're a Christmas lights company, you better be doing that. So, I mean... Absolutely do it. And I definitely for those type of companies I would be playing the social game because it will matter. Justin Deese (23:31.224) Well, cool. Well, Sam, it is awesome to meet you. It was awesome to have you on the show. I was trying to think of how we even connected. I think John Wilson is who connected us. I want to say so any any kind of closing thoughts, words of wisdom that you might have for the listeners? Sam Preston (23:43.487) John. Good guy. Sam Preston (23:52.99) Yeah, I mean, be good at customer acquisition. That has made my life so much better. It's getting really good at that. Know your numbers. Have fun. You can still enjoy the heck out of your life and grow a business. You don't have to set hard boundaries. We do what's called hang up and hang out. So, 5.30 every night I hang up on business and I go hang out with the fam. make sure you're taking care of yourself. To me, people stressed out on business. It's not that serious. It's just life. enjoy it. Enjoy it. Justin Deese (24:25.678) It's to be fun. Cool. So if anybody wants to get connected with you, Sam, how would they go about doing that? Sam Preston (24:32.371) I mean, I'm on Twitter X, I don't know what to call it. Hey Sam Preston, if you want. You can find me there if you want to do work with service scalers or chat there, servicescalers.com. You could find me on LinkedIn. Those DMs will be much harder for me to reach out to. I don't enjoy LinkedIn as much. But yeah, find me. Let's do it. Justin Deese (24:57.88) man, appreciate you coming and hanging out and sharing some knowledge. I think the acquiring new customers is gold. think that for anybody listening, make sure to kind of keep that in your back pocket and just remember that is your business. You've got to have customers before anything else happens. So Sam, thank you, man. It's amazing to meet you and I'm sure we'll catch you soon. Sam Preston (25:18.56) This is fine, Justin. Thanks, man.