Good Service Isn't Enough to Grow Your Company

**John Wilson** (0:00)
I think that home service is a marketing and sales business, and that most owners have it wrong. Before everybody gets mad, you still have to do good work, you still have to do a good product, and you have to be experts, you have to be an expert plumber, you have to be an expert HVAC technician, or electrician, or whatever it is. Bad service will kill you, but great service itself is not going to grow the business. Marketing and sales is first. I have to get the lead, I have to sell that lead. It doesn't matter if you're Jesus with a pipe wrench, you still have to get and sell the lead. My name is John Wilson, and I run a plumbing HVAC and electric company in Ohio, Indiana, and Tennessee. And for fun, I talk to my friends on the internet on our podcast Owned and Operated about how to grow their home service company. Let's dive in.
To state the obvious, bad service creates refunds, angry customers, bad reviews, maybe even employees that don't want to work with you and your business anymore. But good service doesn't solve every single problem in the world. You can have the greatest service in the world and still go bankrupt. Most small plumbing HVAC electric businesses do incredible work. That's almost never the missing piece of the equation. What I always hear, it's never like our work is bad. It's always I don't know how to get the phone to ring. I don't have enough money in the bank account. I'm not sure how to grow. Like those are the problems. And guys, that's marketing and sales. That's not we install the best water heaters. It's getting the phone to ring. It's closing those jobs. It's allowing the business to grow and knowing how to reinvest. So are we plumbers or are we running plumbing companies? Good work is the cost of entry. If you're doing good work, that allows you to market. If you're doing good work, that allows you to sell.
If you're doing good work, that allows you to grow. If you're doing bad work, does the exact opposite. The formula is simple. Marketing creates demand. Sales is going to convert that demand and operations fulfills the demand. You do need all three. Most plumber turned business owners only have operations. You got to learn the other two.
A lot of owners think that this business is just the technical work, but once you start running a business for a little while, you realize like, hey, that's actually a pretty small piece of the puzzle. I have to pay vendors. I have to collect from my customers. I have to figure out payroll. You have to really figure out all of this baseline stuff. And on top of that, I'm telling you, you have to figure out marketing too because your guys need work tomorrow. A better way of thinking of it is we are a marketing and sales organization. We happen to deliver plumbing HVAC, but we could do roofing, fencing, concrete, whatever it is that we want to sell to the same customer segment that we know how to market and drive leads to.
Nothing happens until the phone rings. And the harshest reality is that as the business owner, this is your job. If the phone's not ringing, you can't pay your employees. If the phone's not ringing, you can't pay your vendors, can't pay your vehicles off, you can't pay your rent. So that makes that the most important problem in your business. Marketing is the engine that creates the opportunity for your company to exist. Every technician needs calls. Every CSR needs phones to ring so they can answer and book that call. None of this exists without the phone ringing. And the phone ringing shouldn't be reaction. We have to be proactive. Like we don't want to be victims. We want to be aggressive. We want to grow our business and take control of our life. Marketing isn't just spending money. Marketing is driving a lead and measuring how many times did it make that phone ring? How many times did we go out to that house? And how many times do we make a sale on it for how much? That's the whole process of marketing. Even big businesses get stuck in marketing is just spending money. Whereas if they sort of retooled their marketing department, started really measuring, really analyzing what they were doing and bothering to learn, then the business would explode.
Once that lead comes in, someone has to sell. I think this one's kind of funny to me because people are so convinced that sales is like a dirty word, like, oh, it's gross, it's whatever. You're already selling something, you're already doing it. It's just you're probably doing it badly. All a sale is, is getting someone to pay you money to do something. Avoiding sales doesn't make you honest. It honestly makes you kind of bad at your job and often deceptive to the customer. We've walked into situations where someone didn't want to sell something or appear salesy. So they just kept offering repair after repair after repair. And suddenly people are spending thousands of dollars a year to repair something that they could have placed for a much less annual payment. Not selling is just as dishonest as being overly pushy. Good sales is education, options, it's creating trust with the homeowner. It's urgency when the urgency is real. But if the urgency is not real, you don't have to be pushy. You just want them to communicate clearly what the options are that the customer has.