Welcome to Close it now, the podcast that's revolutionizing the H Vac and home improvement trades industries. Get ready to dive deep into the world of heating, ventilation and air conditioning. We're turning up the heat on industry standards and cooling down misconceptions. And we're not just talking about fixing vents and adjusting thermostats. It's about the transformative movement that's reshaping the very foundation of H VAC and home improvement. We're the driving force, inspiring top performers who crave excellence not only in their professional endeavors, but also in fitness, nutrition, relationships, and personal growth, proving that we can indeed have it all. This is Close it now, where excellence meets excitement. Let's get to work now. Your host, Sam Wakefield.

All right, welcome back to Close It Now. Sam Wakefield here. It has been a minute since I've had a a guest on and I'm excited about this guest. She has been on before, if you remember, the Profit rocket series in 2023, the buildup to that event. And I'm super honored and blessed to have Ms. Jennifer Bagley today. She is the founder and owner of CI Web Group, as well as does a ton of different things, especially in our industry and our trades. One of the just absolute powerhouses and is a woman in our industry, which of course, we need more women in the trades. So a huge. As you know, I'm a massive promoter of that as well. So thank you for being on the show again, Jennifer. I appreciate you for being here.

Thank you so much for having me. It's been a year. I was in this same house. I live half the time in Seattle, Washington area, and half in Texas. The last time we were on the show, I was in a different room but the same location, which doesn't happen very often. So good timing on that. Thank you so much for having me back.

Love it. Love it. Absolutely. Yeah, it was funny. I was doing the math earlier. We came to that same conclusion. Like, wait a minute, it's been. It feels like it was just the other day, but it's been a year, which is why. Which is proof, everybody, power of consistency. The time will pass either way. If you're not doing something, take a step. Take even just one step every day. It'll time's gonna move along, so make some progress. So we, before the recording, everybody, we were, Jennifer and I were kind of brainstorming a handful of things. There's so many topics that each of us could cover that overlap. How you know, how digital marketing and how your SEO and how all of Your web presence overlays with sales. Right. Because we could do a great job of getting leads. And if nobody knows how to sell anything, then, well, that is equally as bad as somebody being the best closer in the world and have nobody to talk to is also equally as bad. So how do these work together and those kind of things? So it's part of why we're on today. But there's really some cool stuff you launched since last year. So you want to give us a quick get it for everybody that's never been introduced to you or CI Web Group. Love for you to just give a super quick highlight reel of that and then tell us what you've been up to this last year. I know you've had a lot of, lot of innovations going on. So fill us in.

Absolutely. So CI Web Group, we've been in business since 2006. We just celebrated our 18th year, 18th anniversary. So it's been a wild ride since then. I think we became one of the largest digital marketing agencies in the trade space. Specifically that focuses on trades. So we've got about 300 people on our team and thousands of customers and freaking love the trades. I love the trades. I love the trades. This is just, this is. It was the best decision we ever made. In about 2008, we decided to focus all our energy on the trades. So here we are this year. This is, we're in a crazy time, right? We're in a normal time. It's an election year with there's product shortages, there's demand challenges, there's the introduction of AI across almost everything in every space. Consumer adaption of technology has been wildly evolving at a more rapid pace than it has year over year over year. So consumers tend to adapt to technology changes way faster than companies are adapting to them, which creates a bigger and bigger gap as you go. So this has been, this has been an interesting year. I think AI overall has been the single handed, most influential catalyst on everything. I mean everything. And you're in that space where you know, you got like, are they going to be iRobots jumping out of a building and shooting everybody up there? Because over the world we've got so.

You know, to go back and re watch all the Terminators, right?

That's gonna happen. So be it. But in the meantime, let's take advantage of the efficiencies that it can create.

Exactly. I'm with you. Let's embrace technology and not fight it. If you, if you fight progress and evolution, you're, you better get used to being Extinct because you're going to become a dinosaur.

Yeah. I mean some, some piece of. You have to have a little bit of a lazy mentality. I'm an overachiever, like come hands down. But I'm also an overachiever with a lazy mentality, which means I don't want to work that hard if I don't have to. So I'm going to figure out how to utilize technology in order to create efficiencies so I can focus on more high leverage activities, things that produce a better result. It doesn't mean I'm going to slow down or become lazy. It means I want to be lazy about the tasks I don't have to do because I know there's a better way and AI is going to. AI is it?

I love it. That's funny. I heard a quote earlier. Be quick but don't hurry. John Wooden, the famous basketball coach. And it so much reminds me of that. It's like we have massive. I'm the same, I say telling people all the time I'm the laziest salesperson you'll ever meet but I guarantee you, you will not outwork me. I'm just more efficient than you. Absolutely.

Give me the freedom to focus on something that's bigger, more complex, that has more value.

Yeah, 100%.

Take a little stuff off your plate.

I like it. So let's dive into that a little bit. How has AI affected what you guys do? And you'd mentioned it's been in several different, lots of different elements of it. But what's that look like?

Yeah. So my gosh, where, where to start is difficult. So we were obviously very, very early adapters of AI. I don't know for anybody who's a good miniman, a dyken dealer. I've had a workshop that have been providing prior to ChatGPT launching by 3 years talking about AI. So no one attended those or registered for them. But I grew up with a developer as a father so it's always been something I've been really, really interested in. Chat GPT. I was sitting in Hawaii when IT pop came out and I remember my kids said you got to get in the beta. Get in the beta, get in the beta. This large language model is ridiculous. Right. My kids are grown but so AI biggest impacts right out of the gate. And this is. I'll throw this out there. Over 60% of the digital marketing agencies are utilizing AI to generate the majority of your content right now. That's happening right now. A year ago I was saying be Careful, be careful. Right? Because obviously AI is based on old data and you have to train it and it takes time. And if everybody's using the same tool in order to create the same content, how do you stand out and there. Right?

Yeah. That's what I'm kind of feeling in the training space with Rilla and with Ciro and all these going on with the. Everybody's turning into the sounding exactly the same in the house. So there's no differentiation now. So what do we do?

100%. So let's say all things are equal. SEO really hasn't changed other than Google has now pronounced that content is content is content. It wants the most unique, most beneficial content to its searchers who are online looking. So it's not saying you can't use AI, it's saying that it needs to. You can't use AI to generate content that looks like it's suspicious. And for SEO purposes, it has to be valuable with the intent to help the consumer who's online searching. So now that that kind of hasn't unveiled and the lift has been taken off and they're not saying no AI content. The AI content, you know, evaluator tool is going to say whether something is or isn't. You're in this interesting space. So we've had to build this, obviously we already had this huge team of content writers and now util AI as a part of content creation. And then how do you merge the two? How do you utilize AI to be able to produce a larger volume, more content more frequently, and then utilize human beings to make those modifications? And ideally you use the client to contribute content that makes it even more personal. Right. They've got content and videos and their own things that are not going to be generated out of a third party content writer or AI. And that's, that's the ideal situation. But if the, if the playing field is, is the same, what's next? Right, so we can talk branding, which I know there's the giant branding phase, right? Giant branding fad, where that even becomes, if all the branding looks the same now, how do you stand out? Is the white truck with some weird sign they painted in their garage now the standout? Right? If they all look exactly the same. So we have all these things that are making things look more and more and more and more and more the same across the board? And I think we need to be cautious about going down that rabbit hole. So in our space, we went to brass tacks and we started looking at, okay, if all things are equal let's look at the technology that's supporting those equal things. Because where we can compete is site speed. Where we can compete is user experience. Where we can compete is instead of building a website every two years because they degrade over time.

Right?

Because you're sitting in like 99% of the entire industry is in a WordPress website.

Right?

That made sense. WordPress was the largest content management system on the planet. Everyone and their brother can build a WordPress website. It's got some dev experience and design experience, but the challenge with it is it's an open source platform, it has hundreds of plugins, it degradates over time, PHP needs updated, MySQL needs updated. There's all of these things that degregate over time. Over time. So companies have gotten used to the fact that when they spend this 10 grand or whatever it is on a new website, they have to do that every two years.

Right.

And they also have ignored the website as if it doesn't exist, when in actuality, this is the best possible salesperson you can have, other than someone standing at the front door of someone's house shaking hands with them, smiling. It's got a cupcake in it, whatever.

Exactly. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Anybody that doesn't believe that, just do a tiny little bit of quick and dirty search on click funnels. That will prove it to you, period.

Yeah. This is. So we've really taken a different philosophy. We have invested very, very, very heavily in bringing on an entirely new team of developers that grew up in the low code, no code environment, which is a very different philosophy. Being able to utilize AI to evaluate competitor websites, evaluate structure, evaluate performance, evaluate load speeds, evaluate time online, evaluate all of the complexities, how many pages they have, the word count per page. There is so many different. Not giving the entire list on this, sure.

But I can imagine the list is probably 18 times as long as what you just named anyway, Right?

So if you can utilize AI to deconstruct the best of the best of the best in your neighborhood, right. In your market that you want to compete with to a greater extent than I now have content faster, but now I have from code structure, right. What do we need to compete with now? We also have the ability to utilize AI in a low code, no code environment. Get out of WordPress and put people in a platform where we can launch websites faster, they load faster, better performance. From a technical standpoint, when Google's evaluating what's happening on a mobile device versus what's happening on a desktop, Advice now If all the content's equal, but you got there faster, you now have something that performs quicker from Google's technical requirements. Now we're in an environment where, in a low code, no code environment, with a website that's based on a modular componentized development strategy, not building a static website, right now you have the ability to take that budget that you would be putting towards having to build a new website every two years when WordPress craps out and starts being insecure and having issues and breaks and all the other stuff that comes with it. Now you can take that and you can turn it into a monthly investment or quarterly investment that allows you to make incremental data driven decisions to improve performance, increase conversion volume, increase lead volume, increase performance, be able to launch promotions faster. Now you start treating your website like you would treat a salesperson. When you, when you're training salespeople, you're, you're going through, and correct me if I'm out of line, but you're going through and analyzing what are all your strengths, what are all your weaknesses, what are all the areas of opportunities, where do you really have issues? What are the threats? Right, right. Well, imagine applying that same logic you have with coaching a salesperson to get them to peak performance and applying the same logic to a website, your digital salesperson. And instead of waiting two years to make those changes that are necessary to improve performance, do it every quarter when you've got data from analytics, data from competitors that tells you how to be, how to be able to make incremental improvements over time. And it's built like an app. If you look at Tesla's website, it's built like an app. If you look at any major new website, they're not using WordPress, they're built like an app. They're not using free plugins from all over, built from Vlad in Ukraine or Russia or wherever they are. Right. They are building a very well constructed componentized app. It gives us the ability to make those changes very, very, very fast. So this was a hard change for me because We've been a WordPress development team, we've done Joomla. We've been a content management based, not a headless based web development team for 18, 17 years. And to say we're gonna bring in all new talent, redo every single process from beginning to end across 15 different departments and over 100 resources, that's what we've been doing for the last 12.

Months, that is a massive change.

I have to tell you something. So yesterday I had such a headache from not sleeping. I went into the kitchen, I grabbed the Advil, popped it in my mouth, I looked at the bottle and it was PM and it was 3 o' clock in the afternoon.

Oh no.

Sorry. Total be real.

But it's all good.

When you're working this many hours on something this big. Don't take at, in the middle of the day at 3pm, right.

Yeah, no kidding. And I love this, this topic so much and obviously the work that goes into it is huge. But it reminds me and it makes me think a lot of the trend that's going on. And it's not like this is new, it's just we have this ideology now in our current society that we have to put a label on every single thing. But the call by call management movement that's going on for technicians and for salespeople and that kind of thing, it feels similar in the way that it's almost like a call by call website management just with, you know, instead of being real time like in the moment, it's a three month turnaround. To be able to make these changes is kind of in the web space. It's kind of like being real time in the moment. So I love this, this model that we're talking about.

Yeah, you're hitting it on the money. So we have the research to be able to compete. We have the infrastructure to be able to compete. The content that goes into to be able to compete. The next step before you get to the call by call is we now have clients that are, have chosen AI CSRs. I'm going to say in some instances over any CSRs. In some instances they're doing both. They've got our ASI AICSR team that is managing all evening and weekends, managing all holidays and any kind of overflow and our AI CSRs are booking appointments like freaking rock stars.

I love it. Do you have a feel for what the, the book rate is on that?

So we're seeing around 60% book rate with our AI and 28% book rate with our anybody who's not using it. So 28 to 30% booking rate compared to in upwards of 60 plus percent match rate in the CRM is higher, booking rate is higher, appointment completed rate and we're able to now track that the, the close rate on the appointments that were set for from the AI booking system are closing faster. Not necessarily higher, they're closing faster. So we see that these are getting through. So when you, when you take it one step further than that, you have the automation for booking. So that you're not missing calls after 5:00pm or at midnight or at 2:00 clock or 1:00 clock, those are getting booked. And then you add AI to the follow up process on your open proposals, on your booked leads, on your quotes where they've chosen quote but haven't picked an installation date. When you're adding automation to all of those as well, that's when you start to see some really significant differences in it's where in the supply chain. If you map your supply chain out, beginning to end, at what point can you use automation to be able to get a 1%, 2%, 10% or 30% in some instances improvement on overall production. Again, this isn't because we want to replace all the people. Take those people and put them on something that's a lot higher leveraged activity than those tasks.

Sure, yeah. It's get rid of the, you know, the silly data entry and stuff that people are much more better suited for higher value activities. I love this and this is super intriguing to me. I'm actually in this phase right now with the coaching company is building out these processes and bringing in trainers and building some trainer training modules and that kind of thing. And it constantly. And we're a year later still talking about this and I know we talked about this a little bit before and even a year later, 13, 14 months, it still blows my mind almost on the daily of all of the new ways that we're thinking of to be able to use to use AI that a year later we're still surprised like oh my God, I never thought of that. And so it's just really fun to have this conversation because I think the innovation we're nowhere near even getting close to starting with the things that can be innovated by implementation of this.

Imagine taking your entire budget that you had on all these inefficiencies, duplicate processes, redundancy agencies, manual tasks and move it towards actually investing in your people who are in the home at their front door and ready to make that sale. Imagine putting it where you need to. Right. That's a high leveraged activity. If you can get the technology to do the majority. The the challenge is like I'm going to turn off like 80% of the people that are listening to this. They're going to be like crazy. This too complex, Whatever.

Sure.

The challenge is, is when we're only looking at our data, we make our decisions through a lens that's this big. So when you're sitting in an environment as a business owner, contractor or, or in the trades, in a marketing position or sales position. When your vantage point is this, your decisions are based on that blind, all the blind spots that's around you right now world. When someone gets on a call and tells me how it's going to work and I'm like that's they're coming to the table like this. I have thousands of customers that I have the ability to see an actual picture with no blind spots. I can tell you for a 50 million dollar private equity group, a million dollar startup, I can tell you for someone that's trying to get from their 3 million to 5 million, I can tell you the exact numbers of every single contractor that says I only do business by referral and that's all I'm going to do. And I know that you're never going to see more than $2 million in sales unless it's commercial. Like I can tell you every one of these knowing and making decisions based on data is wildly critical. Wildly critical. And most of the time when we are jumping on strategy session, we're asking very basic fundamental questions and there's no answers to those. Right. What's your total lead rate? What percent of them are uniques? What's your current booking rate? What's your close rate? What's your match rate in your CRM? What's your average conversion? What's your cost per lead lead for each type of marketing that you have? What's your lifetime value? I mean these are, these are really critical pieces. You know, even when I am asking what's your gross margin, how are you budgeting for marketing or how are you pricing? If we don't have answers to those, we can't have marketing discussion about paid advertising because I don't know if you can afford based on your pricing to be able to pay a premium to be able to get a lead in the door. Right. There's a difference between what does it cost to put somebody on the ground knocking on doors and getting in front of consumers. What does it cost for branding activities that don't actually generate leads, but consumer awareness? What does it cost for an SEO lead, a Google business lead, a GLSA lead, a paid ads lead? There's a different number for every one of those. And if we don't have it right from the beginning, you don't know if you can acquire that and for what duration of time is it going to take you to be able to get where you want to be. So I think this is just math.

Yeah, it makes it so simple. When we know Our numbers. Right. I heard something and I'm not exactly sure where the quote came from, but my business coach that I've had for several years has always said a problem well defined is half solved. And this is exactly what this is. If you don't know your numbers, if you don't measure it, you can't manage it. And these key components of, of the foundational metrics, I know you and I both, we probably a huge portion, majority of the people we talk to have no idea how to even start tracking some of these things to start with. And then, then just then to get, you know, some help deciding where the priorities are. Where do we start? Because if you just throw $7 into 85 different categories, you're not going to make any traction anywhere. So where do we start? Right, right.

Dilution of effort, which I see that all the time. They're diluting their efforts. If you don't have the budget to maximize your effort in one category, don't take a small budget and dilute it across 10 categories. I just met with someone yesterday that their marketing company convinced them to create three different websites for the same business because there's a state line 20 miles away. Like you just took every dollar and split it in half. Worse than that. It's worse than that because time is a part of that. Right. You're extending the total time it's going to take for those dollars to become effective, which is much worse than just 50% loss. It's bigger than that. So I know there's so many, there's so many elements to this. And this is. You said the quote earlier. And I, I say that on social media all the time. On one hand, I'm telling people to compete in today's environment, you got to make significantly more rapid decisions. And on the other hand, I'm telling them in order to compete into team today's environment, you need to slow the heck down. You need to get, get a grasp on your numbers. You need to put in the proper infrastructure. You need to slow down so that you take the time to learn about what you're investing in before you just start bouncing around from company to company and software to software and technology to technology and coach to coach to coach and trying everything under the sun like it's, it is not easy. I don't, I don't envy business owners, you know, in today's environment because I feel like five years ago, five years ago, five before that, I was always talking about that business owners are moving at a rate significantly slower than consumer Adoption of, of different tools and technologies and that time frame that it's taking for that gap to grow, it's shrinking and shrinking and shrinking. The gap's getting bigger, much, much faster.

Right.

It's a tough position right now.

100% agree. And that's exactly why. Well, one of the things, especially what I'm doing, I know that I'll never to some degree not be out in the field doing ride alongs to get very real time, finger on the pulse of the consumer. How are they thinking right now? So we can constantly be innovating. What's our language like? How are we communicating? I think in the last year since we talked, I've. The script, the sales script that I train in, our sales system has been adjusted two or three times already strictly on to stay as current as possible with the consumer. And if we're, if we're not doing that in any industry, then, man, they fall behind so fast.

That's why I go to events. I personally live in two different states for 50% of the year, so that 50% of the time I can attend as many events as possible. One, because I want to contribute to training and education and information. But the flip side is it's just the one on one conversations with our customers contract to see where their headspace is, where's their mindset and that I know that this webinar is not gonna, or this podcast is not gonna help because being at the events, I know I need to slow it down a little bit and take an easier process. I have team members that are much better at having these conversations than I am and slowing it down for this.

The purpose of this though, we're good. We can, we can rock out as much as we want. People can just hit replay.

Oh my gosh. I think part of it is also like, don't get overwhelmed. You know, it's easy to listen to a call like this and be like, oh my God, I'm just going to quit now.

Sure.

Either that or I'm going to put a giant defensive wall and I'm going to create 6,000 reasons that I pretend are the truth that are my reasons why I'm not even going to approach these things. Things like, right, this is incremental. This is choose one thing to improve, choose two things to improve. That's it. And put all of your energy into those until you master that piece and then add another one and then add another one and then add another one. I mean, there's a lot of times someone else, There are a small Percentage of people that listen to something like this and they're like, I just listen to the podcast and I want to do everything. I want it all. And I'm like, no, no, no, slow down.

That's the recipe also the recipe for failure.

Yeah. Be careful what you wish for. I know it's exciting, but we're going to create a plan. But when you create the plan, you got to have precision, patience and persistence. And you have to show up, suit up and participate. You personally, the business owner, don't pawn this off on your team. Don't not. Don't have your spouse jump on these meetings and, and become the stakeholder for this. This is your business. You need to take accountability for the direction your business is going. And this is complex. And the more out of the loop you are on all of these elements, more frustrated you'll get. That's when you make irrational decisions and start just bouncing and turning stuff off because you don't understand it yet. I think that's first.

Yeah, 100% agree with that. And so when we're in that place, so we're the business owner, we're engaged, wanting to do the right things. Where's a couple places to start? And you'd mentioned a little bit earlier and something that I want to the segue into is what we were talking about. How do we overlay the digital world with the more boots on the ground, guerrilla style marketing in a way that they complement each other and not compete or fight against each other. So the left hand knows what the right hand is doing and how they work together. But kind of on the way that to that conversation, if we're right now in this place of overwhelm, I want to do everything and I'm not doing anything. What are always the first couple places that you, you know, recommend? Yes. Knowing the numbers. Yes. Step one. But once that's in place, what are the first couple steps for a company to. And how would you marry that together a little bit moving forward? Where. What should they do first?

There's a lot to unpack there.

Yes, there is. Okay, so let me take the pieces that you want to take.

All right. I'm going to take just these pieces. I know my brain is a list of bullet points. So first on the, you must know your numbers. So that by itself even has to happen in stages. So you're not going to know all your numbers. Like you're going to identify your pricing first in margins, you're going to get to know fundamentals for financials. Then we get into budgeting and then we have the ability to start marketing. And once you have traffic, once you have lead volume, once you have something to measure, we need to measure the performance of that. The second you have a multifaceted marketing, advertising and branding strategy, whether it's digital or boots on the ground, you need to go all in. Once you're there, like no excuses, hands down, you need to create a budget in your. A portion of your budget needs to be carved out for more expansive and effective reporting across the board. Now you need to know your numbers across everything.

Sure.

So that's that. Those are phases, Right. When it comes to digital, had everyone done this accurately, if you got to start over, you would have met with a business coach, you would have discussed your future goals. You would have chosen your brand based on the potential of how you want to grow your business, that you want to potentially sell it, that you want to do more than one trade line. You would have had all of that figured out. So you didn't name your company a AC Repair and Blank or Bob's Blank.

Blank or Bob's and Sons.

Yeah, right. You would have figured all that out in the beginning. Like I wish we could roll back the tape because you don't want to invest in a ton of marketing and then go through a brand change and lose 10 years of effort and investment and start over. That's a horrid feeling. So ideally you get branding straight, then it's digital, right? Well, let me back up. You need, when I say digital, I mean you need a digital billboard. You need, your website needs to be in existence, it needs to live, it needs to be available, it needs to be connected to your Google business listings. Those are two things you should get out of the way then like every entrepreneur who starts their business without a big bucket of cash from grandpa or where however people get their money, you need to buy yourself some tennis shoes, get some incredible training and you need to hit the street. Myself included. I started this business. No one funded me. I was a single mom and I started this business and I did the exact same thing, but in heels. And I went to every single event I could. I shook hands. Networking events, anything that you can. So in the direct to consumer, in the B2C space, it's different than B2B but it's same principle. You better get out in the community and if you can't do it, you got to get somebody that can because you got to feed your family. And if you don't have any business, you're going to run out of friends and family. That's usually where people start. And next you need to go community and you need to get enough money that you can create a marketing budget. But if you have no, if you got no cash, I wouldn't want to see somebody driving up their credit cards and going into debt, trying to market without having put in the labor that's necessary to get on the street and go right get in front of humans.

100% agree with that. And, and for getting into the community, everybody that can look like a lot of different things it doesn't have. There's no one correct answer for everybody. Just, just like with digital, there's no one magic bullet or in cells. But so getting into the community looks like something that I've been working on. And if you go back, and if you want to know more about it, go back and listen to the six part series I did called Becoming a Hunter. I broke down the five different steps of a door to door pitch for H Vac. So hitting the doors, go knocking doors is literally the one of the very cheapest and fastest ways to get business quick. I can guarantee you if you have a hundred conversations, you knock on 100 doors, you're gonna set somewhere between 10 to 20 appointments. That takes five hours, 20 doors an hour, you're gonna set roughly somewhere between 10 and 20 actual legitimate qualified appointments. Tell me where you can spend marketing dollars and do that and I will. We'll send it right like at, at zero customer acquisition costs other than the cost of the one person knocking on the door. But there's lots of other ways too. So go back and listen to that. And there's community events. There's, I'm sure, obviously Jennifer, you have a thousand ideas for how to get into the neighborhood, right?

I don't know how to get into the neighborhood. That's not my specialty.

Of course not.

I'm B2B.

No, it's not good. But I mean at the same time it's cool though because as a woman homeowner, you're in the next door groups, you're in the community Facebook pages.

Yes.

When you know somebody in your neighborhood decides to set up a cool tent on a Sunday and have a ice cream giveaway to everybody in the neighborhood that just happens to have all of your company branding on it. Now the neighborhood is introduced to that company and they.

Eagle pipe in Washington, in Bremerton, Washington. I wish to set the community and they're our client. And it as soon as I saw them at the event, they were at A Vikings event on the water. So, yeah, they're big Eagle in his big costume. Yeah, absolutely. There's so many things you have to do that, like if you decide you want to get into business. I remember talking to my dad. I was a senior executive in the retail industry. Vps, supply chain management. And I remember telling my dad, I'm gonna. I have always had a goal to be an entrepreneur. And I was like, I'm gonna. I'm gonna do it. Like, this is it. I'm already recruiting my employees out of my company. I'm gonna get fired soon, so I've gotta get this. And I remember his only advice to me, or his only words were, he said, okay, it's gonna suck. And I, you know, now I understand that completely.

But.

But those first few years are pivotal. And if you don't have the bandwidth and the grit and the. Whatever it is to get up and get out and go get business, go hunting. That's the perfect title for that. Like, you got to make that happen. You. You can't. In the digital space, there's not really a good solution for a small budget. It's not. That's not B.S. if somebody's trying to sell you something, they're like, oh, I'll get you tons of leads for 3.99amonth. No, like, I.

It's.

There's billions of competitors online. You have Google business listing with no reviews. You probably faked it with the P.O. box and don't have a physical address. Like, that's going to get shut down soon. You probably have an inexpensive DIY website you built yourself that's never going to perform. Not enough content. You invest in SEO on a crap site that's never going to perform. All these things, like, are all the lessons everybody has to go through when they're first getting started. And the reality is you got to put in the work. You got to get out there. Like, I've seen companies launch their. Launch their H vac Businesses that have the same mentality or partnered with a company like yours and got people right in front of people right out of the gate, and they were able to build their business. They've got two or three trucks. They now have a budget. They now have the technology. They're working on a field management system now they've got QuickBooks online. They have the fundamentals of running a business are all set up, and now they start investing in. All right, let's get rid of the DIY website. Let's roll. Right? It's time to go I'm going to create an SEO budget first. That's my game plan. But I have a system in place for generating business while SEO is starting to work. I'm not solely relying on something and pretending like it's, you know, the easy button and it's going to happen tomorrow.

Absolutely. And I'm such a. And every single time we think we get really comfortable having a main lead source, something happens. Like it wasn't that long ago all of meta shut down. And for a good. I mean, the billions of dollars in lost revenue strictly every single hour it was shut down. But how do we know? How do we know that's not going to happen? How do we know that? We don't. Worst case scenario. I mean, I saw a news article two days ago about Kim Jong ills talking about a nuclear attack on the United States. How do we know we don't get an EMP and all digital stuff dies for a month? We don't. Right. So having multifaceted sources, our referral partners, our affiliate partners, massive SEO, digital presence, that type of thing, boots on the ground. It's like we've got to really think outside. I love that we have very similar thought process in the way that if our industry is this box, I literally choose to live outside of the box. If everybody's going left, I'm going right and vice versa. And I know you guys do the same thing too.

Yeah. My philosophy is I take the road less traveled. I'm going to pivot before any of our competitors do in this industry. They're all going to be in WordPress a year from now. I refuse to build another WordPress site. The 1:55 left in our pipeline when those babies are done. That's it.

Well, that's cool. Well, we'll have to talk. And a huge shout out, everybody. I didn't bring Jennifer on to give her a massive spot or plug or anything, but they did build my website and go check out closeitnow.net it is gorgeous. And all I ever get from when people reach out to try to sell me websites or anything is, man, you've got a great website. But here's one thing I think I found that maybe you could use some help with, which is so different than what it was like before. So go check out closeitnow.net and they do a great job. But I am excited about the change because mine is on a WordPress site because we did it a year ago and so it's all good.

I like every website when we launch it and I Hate it within six months to a year later because our standards are so. I hate the websites we built here.

It's fun because I have so much of the same feeling in. You know, I love the. Every single training I've done, every single place I've been, we've made friends and they've seen great results. But I feel so bad for some of the first ones. I wish I could go back and, like, replay and do it all over again. Because every single time it's better in the process. The system is better and the verbiage is better and engagement is better. And it's like, oh, let's. Let's do it again.

That's the quality we all need to have. Right. Sometimes we're all looking for perfection. Like, forget that. Any production in progress.

Yeah. Something that's 80% completed but usable. I will take that every day of the week. Beside something that's 100% and, well, we haven't gotten there, so we haven't used anything yet.

Yeah. I always laugh when somebody's like, well, I have a friend that does websites and he's gonna rip my website apart. And I'm like, there's no one that can rip apart my work more than me. Trust me. We're never done. It's never done. It's not a project, it's a lifestyle. And you have to commit to that. 100 be improving.

Yep. Lifelong learner.

Yeah. It has to constantly be improving. We can't look at things as, this is a start date, this is the end date, and we're done. Like, what's next? In my team, everybody has a little sticky note on their thing. It says, what's working, what's not, what's next? Next. Like, open up meeting. What's working, what's not, what's next, what's working, what's not, what's next? What am I not doing yet? And make sure you have people around you that will pick out the blind spots that you can't see. So you don't come to the meeting like this.

Right.

You don't have what's next. Then you don't have the right people around you pushing you to do better.

Absolutely. And that. That's so for everybody listening. And I've done the same thing too. I. For everybody listening, have yourself invest in a coach. It's a business. What it find. Pick your. So there's a expression. I actually was talking to my business coach earlier today. I hired an implementation coach. And the expression that I've always heard, which comes from the military. Slowest smooth and smoothest fast. But I'd never heard the last line of it and it really impacted me today. And it applies to in our development is that slow is smooth, smooth is fast and never faster than the slowest man. And I was like, wait a minute. That applies so much to our business journey, our growth journey, our success journey. When we're. So everybody out there pick the thing that needs the most work and that's the thing that gets the focus to get it up to speed. Right up to everybody else's speed. And it just hits so hard like when we're working really getting granular on these different components of your system and your process. And it's just powerful to remember that have move fast and move quick decisions, but not rushed. We make them intentionally. So that's so much. So much of that is so important.

Yeah. I think you add and have a level head like watch the emotionally driven decisions where you crap out instead of work it out. Don't crap out, work it out.

Right.

Like figure out how to work it out. If you haven't fully committed to something and then you crap out, it's even worse.

Right.

In the first part you got to be all in on anything that you're going to do. Right. I mean.

And here's a good lesson for everybody listening to. I just had a big we'll call it learning moment. It was a. Some people would call it a failure. It was more of a moment of like realizing that you don't shortcut this process. Right. So when, when you have or developing the system, when you're developing your processes and growing your business, don't skip steps. I had a client recently. We were excited. We signed up for the big 12 month program. We do one site visit and realize we are absolutely not at all a fit. And canceled right away. And it was a great parting of the way. It's more like wow, this was. Thank you for this learning experience. But the problem was I skipped my steps. I shortcut it. We were in a hurry to get there and get the training done and I skipped the steps of the due diligence of. Let's have some conversations around what does success look like for you guys? All those kind of things. And so when you skip your step there always, always there's something that disconnects. So I feel like for whatever reason somebody needs to hear that from this episode is establish your systems, establish your processes and then stick to them. Don't. Okay, I made my system and now I. Because I know my system. I can shortcut it where I feel feel the need. That's not how business works. So just reinforcing that a bit today.

Yeah, I mean if anything, if you are looking for a shortcut then you need to do an AB variant test. You need to define another process, keep your current one, define a new one and test them simultaneously to determine the outcome and then make a decision on what are you going to keep from each or are you moving to this one? If you decide you want to change it, modify it, skip steps, again, define another system. So it needs to be a systematic decision making process, not an emotional or flighty decision making.

Yeah, very data driven at that point.

Yeah, yeah.

Love this. Well, cool. Well, it is time to land this plane and gosh, again it's been so great to, to have you on. We've got, we have so many topics that we've been discussing that I feel like we're going to do a, a good portion probably of some recordings coming up. So make sure everybody is. Yeah, we get everybody up to speed in all of the ways that it's so interesting. Every single step of entrepreneurship or just even in sales as technician, wherever you are in your journey, every single step. I heard this years ago. It's like every new level has new devils and it's like, okay, so it's fun to go back and think about, okay, at this level, let's talk about what's going on here. Okay, at this level, here's what's happening. So I feel some of that definitely is, is coming along and any last minute, any last minute nuggets you want to drop for everybody or any teasers you want to put out there or just what, what's, what are you as, as Jennifer Bagley and also excited for personally and for the business.

Well, I've got 45 days left before it's travel time, so I've got, I feel sorry for my team because the list that I want accomplished between now and September 15th is huge. It's not even 45 days, it's like 15. No, just for you. I want to say that there's a lot of people in the industry. You're a really good human, you're really good person and I appreciate that. You're not flashy, just down to earth level headed and you've got a mission to help contractors and entrepreneurs, more importantly entrepreneurs accomplish their goals and their dreams and you put a lot of time and energy into it and I commend you for that. I think it's amazing and I like Your style. So thank you. You kind of have a undercover on the. On the download version. So thank you. And for everybody who's listening, I know this is a lot of information and I know it can feel overwhelming. Especially it's kind of like showing up and there's 500 circles on the wall. The more you participate in stuff like this, you're going to have those little circles start connecting into things. It's going to start making more sense and making more sense and making more sense. So you've already done an amazing job by listening to an amazing podcast host and consistently, you know, giving your time to investing in yourself and your knowledge and challenging yourself to think differently. So try not to live in overwhelm. Try to look at this as an opportunity to expand your horizons. Maybe do some self reflection and figure out what's working, what's not, and what's next.

Love it.

Do that on a regular basis.

What's working, what's not, and what's next. I think that's going to be the title of this episode, in fact.

All right, I love that.

Let's do it. That was fantastic. So, well, thanks for being here. Again, everybody go check out the again. Go check out CI web groups, I guess past work and know that what you see@closeitnow.net will is probably not as cool as whatever the new stuff that's coming is. But I can tell you I freaking love my website and it's gorgeous. So I can't wait to see how it can improve.

Oh, the next version that I actually I just thought of like three things I would want to do on your next version.

Well, we'll definitely have to talk about that offline, but give it some time.

To rest for a minute.

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. But yeah. So everybody go check out closeitnow.net to see it. Just one to go to check out. Learn about the coaching programs. It is coming up time for company events, for holiday parties, all those types of things. If you want to find out how to hire me as your speaker for your company's event, you can find out about that@closingnow.net I've got potentially three book launches coming in this probably within this next 12 months. So everybody pay attention to those. You will hear a lot about it on the podcast and otherwise, everybody just go out there and become someone worth buying from. Focus on growing yourself. Take care of your. Put your own oxygen mask on first and then take care of everybody else. If you don't do that, you're pouring out of an empty cup there's nothing left to give. That's why our industry has so many. The classic joke at the conventions, as you know, is like, how many heart attacks have you had and how many wives have you you on? And I hate that, and it grosses me out. So everybody, pour into yourself first. Pour into your family. We do what we do to be able to do it for them. We, we work. We work so we can live. We don't live to work. And change your mindset around that and your whole life will smooth out. So that's my message today. And thanks again for being on Jennifer.

Thank you so much.

Absolutely. Everybody go become someone or be someone worth buying from.

You've been listening to the Close it now podcast. Our passion is to dive headfirst into the transformative movement that's reshaping the very foundation of H Vac and home improvement and at the same time, covering fitness, nutrition, relationships and personal growth, proving that we can indeed have it all. We hope you've enjoyed the show. If you did, make sure to, like, rate and review. We'll be back soon, but in the meantime, find the website@closeitnow.net find us on Instagram, herealcloseitnow and on Facebook @CloseItNow. See you next time.