Austin Gray: Hey, welcome back to the OWNR OPS podcast. I'm your host, Austin Gray, and in this episode, I'm hosting Andy Walker. He is a co-founder of Striker Digital. Striker Digital specializes in SEO services for home service businesses.

Andy and Bod, his partner, have been helping me with Bearclaw on our SEO, and they have been absolutely crushing it. This was a super fun episode because we dove into some of the details about how they are getting us to the top of the search results in our home state.

So, stick around for the whole episode if you want to learn more about SEO services for small, local home service businesses. We also got into the general topics of how they're thinking about building their business. This one was a lot of fun! I hope you stick around for the whole episode; I think you'll learn something from them.

Like I said, they are crushing it for us! Once again, if you are listening to this and you are interested in starting your own local service business, check out OWNR OPS at www.ownrops.com (O-W-N-R-O-P-S.com). We help people start local service businesses.

So, without further ado, let's jump into the episode!

Austin Gray: Thanks! Real quick, I wanted to share with you two agency partners who have helped me grow Bearclaw Land Services. Striker Digital manages all our SEO services and they've got us to number one on Google for specific search terms within our local service business. Cedar Digital Consulting manages all of our social media and YouTube, and they make it very simple for OWNR OPS like myself. All I have to do is take photos and videos in the field, upload those on my phone to a shared iCloud album very quickly, and they handle everything else from there. They edit and publish; I don't have to worry about it; I can focus on growing my business.

So, if you're looking for SEO services, check out Striker Digital at stryker-digital.com (S-T-R-I-K-E-R-D-I-G-I-T-A-L.com). For social media, check out Cedar Digital Consulting at cedardigitalconsulting.com (C-E-D-A-R-D-I-G-I-T-A-L-C-O-N-S-U-L-T-I-N-G.com).

Austin Gray: Alright, welcome back to the OWNR OPS podcast. I'm your host, Austin, and in this episode, I've got Andy Walker, the real wizard behind Striker Digital. You guys have heard Bod before, but Andy is his business partner, and he's the one who makes things happen on the backend.

So, welcome to the show, Andy!

Andy Walker: Thank you! Yeah, I'm definitely more behind the scenes. Bod's definitely more front-facing; everybody knows B. I'm on the backend, more hidden, just on the operations. I want to be more front-facing, but I have to recognize what my skill set is, and it's definitely better on the backend than it is on the front end.

Austin Gray: I guess I shouldn't refer to you as the real wizard, but you all are doing great things together, and it's been really fun to work with you guys.

Andy Walker: Yep, I agree. It's great to have people that are long-term oriented for our client base. Our goal is that we don't want to just work with somebody for four or five months and get some results, and they're like, "Oh, I'm going to move on." No, we actually want to work with people for a long time and get significant results. I just had a conversation with a client we've been with for probably like a year and a half or almost two years even.

When we started with them, they were a dumpster rental company out in California, and they were doing about $2,000 a month at that point. We started running their ads, and now we do their SEO. Now they're doing $50,000 to $60,000 a month! We were talking about how cool it’s going to be when they’re eventually at $150,000 a month.

You know, we've been their primary lead generator. Obviously, word of mouth comes into play, and the way I view lead generation is that if you do SEO or you do Google Ads, you're just generating leads. That's what you are doing, but you're providing people the opportunity to build a brand and get word-of-mouth referrals because you simply have to get people through the door, and then you provide your excellent service.

Then that leads to building a brand. A brand is actually how you get big; you clearly understand that with Bearclaw, with the equipment you have; you're wearing the hat right now. You understand the importance of a brand. It's not just about getting a customer in and then focusing on the next customer.

The one customer that you get can bring so much more value to your business over the course of one or two years through them using your service again or them recommending you to other people that need your service because you did such an excellent job for them.

Andy Walker: And it's so true! I'm glad we jumped into this. So, this dude, Jake, with Colorado Power Wash, the website you guys helped build, we were talking about that. In the beginning, nobody is going to know this brand, and you either have to physically go out and knock on doors and tell people—

Austin Gray: Which you should be doing in the beginning when you're starting a business anyway!

Andy Walker: But you can rapidly accelerate the growth if you hire a professional like you and Bod to do what you guys do well and get those leads in the door. When you're starting a business, you're just at baseline. Nobody has seen your brand; nobody recognizes the brand yet. But every single eye that gets on that brand gives you an opportunity to further your exposure.

I made this decision early on when I started working with you guys. I’m going to go knock doors, but I'm also going to pay the pros to do what they do well and start getting that traction online and getting that exposure. You guys are crushing it!

You have to do both; if you want to build a big business, you have to do both. I see people who want to come to us, and they only want to do SEO—that's it. That's the only marketing effort they're going to do. I’m like, “Okay, this is going to get you some business, and it can be sustainable, but there are going to be periods of time if you're solely relying on SEO.”

There might be one week where you get five calls and then ten calls, but then you're going to go dry for a week because it's just the nature of it. You can be ranking up top, but how many people are searching for your service and making a decision to buy in that period of time in your local market? There's variability upon it.

So, when one goes dry for a week, then Google Ads is working for you.

Austin Gray: I just recently put out a video about this, which you're kind of alluding to. It's about being on the offense because SEO and Google Ads are, I consider it, kind of like midfield position in soccer. You're up on the attack and you're back defending at times. It’s a sense of defense because you're waiting for people to search for your service.

A lot of times, like pressure washing, for example, people don't realize the benefit that it can have to their home and extend their roof life. You have to be on the attack and make people aware of this. Build brand awareness by getting out in front of people and talking to them.

You can’t just sit behind your computer waiting all day long. SEO and Google Ads are just one part of the strategy. It’s a singular part of it, and it can get you an okay-sized business. But if your goals are to have a big business, you're going to need everything firing together at some point.

That’s how if you can put together the big plan, if you can play offense, if you can play midfield, and if you play defense, everything starts working together. What happens is if people see your trucks wrapped or your equipment wrapped driving down the road, and all of a sudden they see an ad on their phone—this is specifically happening right now—and then they see you the next time they search for tree services or land clearing, your brand pops up.

It all works together!

Austin Gray: I’ve just been super excited that you guys are delivering at the rate you are. I went into this whole thing with a two-year plan for SEO.

Andy Walker: Yeah, and I don't want to set the wrong expectations for people here.

Austin Gray: Yes, but you guys are like—when I started working with you guys, it was like, “Holy crap! You're just crushing it right out the gate!”

Andy Walker: I mean, our goal is—this is something I do during an onboarding call with a new client. I’m like, “Our goal is we want to get you winning as soon as possible, but we also have to do this safely.”

We can go get you some quick wins; we can do some things that will get you quick wins. But if your goal is to take Bearclaw, for example, it's going to be big. It might be in Colorado right now, but there's clearly an opportunity.

It just takes time to get there. Time and consistency are the only factors at this point. We're trying to set people up for the next decade. We’re doing things like acquiring the right links and doing everything right because I've seen it too many times where we have people come to us, and whoever they were working with before tried to do it on their own.

They have these terrible link profiles. We see backlinks from like, “WeBuyPeretsOnline.com,” and things like that. Those aren’t what we want. For you, Bearclaw—I sent you that update yesterday, and I’m like, “You know, we’re in a good position. We just need to maintain and protect where we are.”

We don’t need to be super aggressive, knowing when to dial back a little bit. We don’t want to do anything that could potentially harm us in the long run. When we're already there, let’s just maintain. There’s not a ton more to do other than protect what we have right now until maybe we expand into a different state or further away.

There are some markets we come into, like in more rural areas, where it’s two to three months, and our clients are super thrilled. But if you're competing in places like New York City or Houston, Texas, you can't expect—it’s definitely going to take like a two-year timeline on that one because you're stepping into a market that you haven't done anything in yet. There are tons of competitors, and there are people in those markets who have been investing thousands and thousands of dollars with really good people for a long time.

So, if you think you're just going to step in and take over, you're in for a rude awakening—that's for sure!

Austin Gray: So, let's talk about that because Bod and I have talked about this a couple of different times. He’s mentioned, “Hey, these are sweet spot markets that I like to go in, and I know that we can just crush in these markets.”

If somebody is starting a business right now—many of our listeners are people trying to start a local service business—what would you recommend that they consider from a geographical perspective as far as which location targets to go after, in relation to those big competitive markets?

Andy Walker: Yeah, so talking about the competitive markets first, what's going to happen is you're going to get swallowed up. If you're a pressure washer and you're coming in, and this is your first business or your second business, but you don’t have these super deep pockets, if you can't spend $20,000 or $30,000 a month on Google ads, you can’t compete.

To rank in these markets, it’s going to take an extraordinarily long amount of time to get there. Just to get reviews, because you need to get Google reviews too, which is a major factor in the process as well.

When you're like—there’s some sort of mile radius or so, but most people are going to be able to think this through themselves. For example, if you're in Philadelphia, you probably want to compete just a little bit outside of Philly. Most of the people with money travel into the city for work, the same with New York City and other locations.

Here in Fort Lauderdale, people travel to Miami for work. There's a lot of wealth concentrated here, and there's a lot of competition. But when you can go a little bit inland to where these people aren't competing because they’re focused on this major market—or there are 10 million people in a small location—then they're so focused on this, and their teams are here, their trucks are here.

They don’t necessarily want to go driving two hours out of their way to take their team to one job for one location. They don’t want to compete in these markets because those markets aren't $100 million markets for the big guys. They're more like a $5 million market.

So, for someone like us, a $5 million market that you can win without that competition is a great place to be! That's a great win, depending on what you want—what your goals are.

If you just want to play the game for the fun of it—it eventually just becomes like, it's not even about the money—it’s just a scoreboard! It’s not even necessarily about the money; it’s more like, “What level can I play the game at? Can I play this at the highest level?”

But once you get that first win in one of these smaller areas, now you have a budget to compete here. I still don’t know why you would—but we both know, Austin, Linny, right? He talks a lot about how he has an HVAC business in a pretty rural area.

They cover a wide radius, and the cost-per-click on Google Ads is like $5. If you did that cost-per-click here in Miami or Fort Lauderdale, you'd probably pay like $40 for that click because of all the competition and all the people competing.

Andy Walker: So, I know that’s kind of just providing information but not really answering the question. But I think that’s the best way to help people think through it.

I've seen a lot of people who are just like, “I’m going to start this business,” and they just start it without even looking at the market at all. You know, the least you can do is go on Google and type in what service you're providing and see what companies are already competing there.

Try to do a basic level of market research and think to yourself, “Can I compete with these guys?” There are operators that can come in there and compete with them. We did a podcast with Casey, the pest control guy in Colorado.

I have no doubt in my mind that he could come into any market and make a dent for sure. People always talk about, “Oh, the market's saturated; this market is saturated.” I don’t believe every market is saturated. If there’s a way to make money, every market is going to be saturated; there are going to be people doing it.

But somehow, time and time again, over and over again, someone comes into the market and makes money! Nobody thought like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter—the big guys—how can you possibly break in? Then here comes TikTok!

It happens, and that’s competing at the highest level. Those aren’t even just local service businesses, where the bar to excellence is much lower in the local businesses.

Austin Gray: I love Casey, man! I would place my bets on him all day long, even in a big market. Just the reps under his belt! He understands how to drive revenue and understands his unit economics.

To further the point, he started in a secondary market.

Andy Walker: Yeah, probably even a third-tier market! He started competing in Grand Junction. I haven’t studied the market, but I think you could go and try to start a service business in Grand Junction. It’s not going to be as hard as starting a service business in Denver.

Austin Gray: Yeah, definitely!

Andy Walker: So, that would be a market that I’d love to start a service business personally because, yes, you probably have some very well-established businesses—but a lot of them are probably Boomer owners. They haven’t invested a lot in the digital space; I’m just taking a wild guess here.

If they were to move a little bit outside of that Grand Junction market, their specific areas right outside of it, you could scoop up pretty quickly.

Austin Gray: And that’s where I'm going with this conversation. Let’s talk about how, tactically, you and Bod have been working on projects. I keep feeding you guys ideas because I've got unending amounts of ideas for service.

I'm not losing focus on Bearclaw; all of my focus is on Bearclaw. I literally did nothing with Colorado Power Wash other than create the brand and let you guys do your thing. You guys are already proving that you can get leads there!

So, let’s talk about something like Colorado Tree Service. If you were going to brand a new business going into a new market, how would you coach me specifically from the SEO side to create a brand? Would you go at a statewide level branding? Would you go with something more general? I saw some guy on Twitter create something like Fast Tree Service or something that’s like a general brand like that to scale up.

Or would you say, “Hey Austin, pick the exact market that you want to be in”? Let’s take Winter Park, for example, or Steamboat in Colorado. Would you coach me on going with something like Steamboat Tree Service? I'm just using it as an example.

Andy Walker: Yeah, I’m actually helping another person with this as well for a painting company right now. They want to target a wider area, so it’s like state painting service dot com (statepaintingservice.com) because if you can match what people search for in your domain and also on your Google Business Profile, you're starting ahead.

In these competitive markets, like in Denver, people know this already. If you look up “painting company” and “Denver,” it’s going to be “Colorado Painting Company” and “Denver Painting Company.” People recognize that, but in these second and third-tier markets, people don’t recognize that.

Those are quick wins! For example, we have a client in Hawaii who does carpet cleaning. They want to add pressure washing to their services. Their business name on their Google Business Profile is carpet cleaning.

I’m like, “You know this is going to be terribly hard to rank a Google Business Profile for pressure washing when you have the term ‘carpet cleaning’ in it.” We searched for “pressure washing” on the island where he is, and the first one is “Pressure Washing Island.”

No matter the quality or quantity of backlinks we get, it’s going to be tough to compete with them because they have the matching name in a competitive market like that.

The weird thing is, sometimes if you’re trying to build a big business for the long term, you want to brand it differently. A name like Bearclaw is something you can build a brand around.

You definitely can do it with location and name, but if you’re trying to be multi-state or national, then you’re going to get multiple different brands—because then you have to have California Power Wash and then so on over and over again.

You can definitely get quick wins if you can have the exact match. The more highly targeted it is, the better. Where I'm from—I'm outside of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, which nobody's probably ever heard of—but if I did pressure washing in Williamsport, there's no competition.

We already work with someone in that area, and they’re number one across the whole place because there’s no digital competition at all. There are people that provide the service, but they don’t have the foresight to invest correctly with the right people to do it.

When you do that, you’re also communicating with the algorithm. Everything we do is to communicate with Google’s algorithm exclusively.

One page of content that we build for this service and this location is to communicate to the algorithm. Every single location, every single service area you have—build content around it to communicate to the algorithm to force them to see those pages.

Get these pages indexed and then improve their rank in SERPs, which will help translate to your Google Business Profile rankings. If you can have exact matches that are highly targeted, that’s even better. Both are going to be beneficial.

Both are going to be good., but the more targeted you get, the better.

Then we run into the issue that most people aren’t just going to service one town; they’re going to service surrounding towns, which can look a little goofy when your name is only this location.

Austin Gray: Definitely! I used and guided this one guy who owned this company—I won’t give away his company just out of privacy—but he was in the construction industry. His name was literally “Colorado” plus the service. I went to the website, and it literally looked like it was built in the ‘90s, but he built a business that he exited for like $10 million from it.

I was like, “Why did you choose that name?” He said, “Dude, it’s simple. If you just choose the name of your state plus your service, people immediately associate you with being the leader in that space in the area. Psychologically, people do that.”

Then I went and tested it. I launched Colorado Hot Tub, a website here. I just put a Google My Business on Main Street, and I was like, “Holy crap!” Within two weeks, people were calling us as soon as we got the Google My Business profile launched.

I had a professional website and a professional brand. I can remember we went to Florida for Thanksgiving, and my phone was ringing. I remember telling my wife, “Honey, I think we’re in the hot tub business now!”

That was when the lightbulb clicked, and that was several years ago. We’ve all done it a couple of times since then.

But I'm really interested in this concept of picking a location plus a service, then going and building a business specifically off of that—because here’s the thing: if you're just starting your business, your first time, yes, you may have a goal of creating a national business. But if this is your first, just get your feet wet in one local market and learn how to run a business, right?

And I can say this to those of you listening: you could build a long legacy business by owning one state. If anybody else tells you differently, I will argue to the death on that—unless your goals are to become a billionaire with a "B."

But for most people who want to create a great business that puts cash in their pocket, that strategy, in my mind, is fairly foolproof. Would you agree or disagree, or add anything or take anything away from that?

Andy Walker: I think you just changed my perspective a little bit when you talked about that construction guy saying when you attach the state name to it. People recognize you as a leader; it kind of looks like you are the state’s company. You are the representative of the state for this service to an extent.

I’m not talking about being government-recognized or anything, but there’s definitely something about that state name that has some prestige attached to it.

If I were to start a home service business, I would do the same thing. I would probably go for the state name because like you just mentioned—if I want to be a billionaire, I'm going to have to go crazy. That also means you’re not going to have any work-life balance. You’re not going to see your kids, you’re not going to see your family, and all that type of stuff to reach that level.

It depends on what you want! But you definitely only need to own one market, and you can have a great life. You can go on vacation, live on vacation, have three vacations a year, have a nice home, buy your kids a baseball bat, buy them new cleats. You don’t have to worry about that.

We can definitely live that lifestyle by owning one market in a 20-mile radius. That’s very possible to do.

It all just, like everything we talk about, depends on the goals of the person when starting this business. As I was starting to move and take off, I communicated to my wife that I have the opportunity to make a significant change in our life forever for the next three or four years.

I try to be the best husband I can, but you’ve got to understand I’m going to sacrifice time in this short period because this is going to benefit us 10, 20 years from now. She’s on board with that as long as you communicate that to your partner.

You have to ensure that you’re also aligned with your business partner too. Something I really love from someone I look up to, from the “My First Million” podcast, is Sam Parr.

I love that podcast! He sold his business to HubSpot. He had “The Hustle” as a daily newsletter, sold that to HubSpot, and did some other things afterward. Then he started his new business, which is his legacy business. He’s probably going to have this business for a long time.

He started with his partner, Joe—I can’t think of Joe’s last name—but they started a community for founders. You can't be part of this unless you're doing a couple of million dollars in revenue. They put you in a certain pod with people who own similar businesses to you and are at the same growth rate/revenue levels.

There are people in there from like $5 million businesses to billion-dollar CEOs. But when they started this business, they independently wrote down what they wanted—the lifestyle they wanted, the size of the business they wanted to build.

If you have a partnership, it becomes a marriage. A partnership can be the best thing that ever happens to you or potentially the worst thing that ever happens to you. Just like Bod and I joke that we're married; we often talk to each other more than we talk to our significant others.

It has to be that way. I thought it was really cool that they laid out everything they wanted—the lifestyle they wanted, the ability to spend their time, the type of amounts of money they want to make, what they want the business to become, and how long they want to run it or if their goal is to exit it.

Then they came together and asked, “Will this work? Will we be able to do this together?” The fact that they did this logically is an excellent way to go about it.

I think a partnership in business—this business couldn't be doable without Bod. He could do it without me. It gives you so much leverage when you find that partner.

I think it’s extremely difficult to find, but personally, I would never want to start a business without a partner. It’s more fun to do it together in a team environment. If you want to do it, you have to start by yourself a lot of times—but eventually, you're going to run into somebody.

Once you build something to a certain level, partnerships are hard to bring someone in and give ownership. It’s a bit weird, but this is a little off-topic of SEO, but this is where my mind was going.

Austin Gray: I love it, man! You hit so many nails on the head! Whenever you're starting, just write out the lifestyle you want to live. You can take it as far as you want to go in this business thing.

For me, I don’t want to give up the family time and the leisure time. I live in Colorado for a reason. I want to go ride my bike, snowmobile, shoot my bow for elk, and go fishing. That’s why I moved here and why I stayed here!

Building the business is fun—of course, way better than the corporate job for me! But I know I want to be at the local and state level, and I know that can provide a great lifestyle.

That’s just me! I think everybody who’s starting has to define that. Sounds like you and Bod have done a really good job of defining that. Obviously, you guys got on the same page pretty quickly because you're growing fast!

Andy Walker: Yeah, and we're having a blast doing it! I want to touch on what you said about the ability to have leisure time and family time, fishing and skiing.

What I realized is that the way people feel about that can depend on the environment they’re in. I went back home to Pennsylvania, where it's very rural. It’s so rural that it’s about 20 miles to get to Walmart from my house. There are not even stoplights somewhere.

When I was there, I felt like I was about ready to not grind as hard; life is slower. But when you live in a place like Fort Lauderdale, where Miami is directly connected, the culture is hustle, hustle, grind—like as hard as you can!

That’s just how it is here, so I feel that pressure. Before the podcast, I said there’s something magical about this place. You come here, and you somehow level up. You feel like you're forced to because of the people that you're around. Just to afford to live here and go out to dinner, you have to!

But then when I went back to that other environment at home, I recognized, “Oh! You don’t have to be like that.” It’s a matter of the environment you're in that plays a significant role.

Austin Gray: Yeah, definitely!

Andy Walker: So, what are some of your goals with Striker? You guys have carved out a niche in the home service space.

Andy Walker: Uhm, I don’t have like a written down goal for this. But what we talked about earlier—it’s like how far can you take this game now?

Some background on me: I’ve never ever been able to just sit back and tread water and be comfortable. I don’t know if that’s something that’s like—I sometimes think entrepreneurs are running away from something because we keep ourselves so busy and so stressed about the next thing—the next thing. Is there something I mentally need to deal with that I’m running from right now?

Since I was a little kid, I was always like—I used to spend a lot of time at the skatepark and rode a scooter. Scooters weren’t popular back then; they were just starting to come up. There was one company out there that made these parts, and at 12 years old, I built a scooter team to make YouTube videos with and got stickers.

I wanted to learn how to weld to make bars, but I kind of fell to the side as I got into sports. Wrestling was the only thing I thought about 24/7. I would go to wrestling practice, come home, and watch wrestling until I went to bed. The same thing every day.

Then that ended, and I became a bodybuilder. You won't believe it looking at me now, but I was legit then! That was the only thing I did.

I only worked out and stopped going out and hanging out with friends because my sleep would be messed up, my food messed up, because I had a goal to achieve!

I recognized that it’s hard, even growing these businesses. It’s hard to do it, but it’s simple. It’s not super complex. There are other people that have done it. Just find out what they’ve done and do it! You have to sacrifice things to achieve it.

Now, Striker is the only thing I do and think about all the time. The goal is to grow and provide the best client experience. An issue I recognize with most agencies is that you have your own slack channel 24/7; the team is in there anytime you have a question.

The goal is to get a response time as quick as possible. Other agencies communicate with you only by email. You send an email and get a response two days later—maybe it’s a request for your website that will take place a week and a half from now, and then you’ll get an email back.

With us, you have your own independent slack channel, and you can communicate with us. We will respond to you on Saturdays, Sundays, Fridays at 10 PM. We're responding to messages!

It’s hard to keep that pace forever, but right now we can. I think that’s a major thing in differentiating the client experience because when people feel that you actually care, they say, “Oh, these people care!”

This is my reputation; this is my face on this business!

I deeply care about you and everybody else. I don’t want people to leave Striker feeling like we didn’t do everything we could to help achieve their goals.

When they leave, I want to ensure they think we did everything we could—at a bare minimum.

From a dollar amount goal, we want the number to go up naturally, but I don’t have a specific number in mind. It’s the problem-solving aspect of the game that is so fun. Sometimes it’s stressful, but I realize that placing that stress on myself requires me to get better.

So I don’t have a concrete answer to the goal question, but for the things I enjoy about the process of the game, I love—and like I said, I don’t tread water well! I need to be moving forward or I feel like I’m going backward.

Austin Gray: I think the reality is we’re all running from something! I don’t know what mine is yet; I don’t know what yours is yet. But most of us are wired similarly, right?

You were part of SPS; you’ve exercised; you take weightlifting seriously. We all come from the same mold. For a long time, I tried to fight it. One of my friends—you’ll love this story—he hit it big in crypto and had life-changing money. He could have not worked a day in his life!

But he chooses to build a single-family real estate investment portfolio at scale while living in Ohio part-time, Colorado part-time, New York part-time, anyways. He figured out that if he’s wired like us, he needs to go all in on something or figure out a way to be all out.

He said at some point, he either needs to go on a lifelong meditation retreat to disconnect from everything or he’s going to go all in on building the best thing that he possibly can.

The game is fun! Every single day, you're challenged with something to get better at. It’s no different than lifting weights; you have to stress that muscle to get growth out of it.

You and I are so aligned on that. Every single day, I’m challenged to get better. Is creating a business hard? Yes! Is creating an SEO agency hard? Yes! But news flash: that’s why you like it; it’s why I like it!

We secretly love the stress!

That’s why I like working with people like you as an agency partner. When you guys are responding that fast, it’s like, “Yeah! We're all in different businesses, but we have the same expectations inside our business.”

When we get an inbound lead, like you guys are getting, we create the same type of standard in our company. Our response time should be now—that’s what we’re aiming for. If we’re not at that, you're already late. If you wait past five minutes, whenever you get an inbound lead, you've already lost.

But if we call that lead now, we get the job. The same thing goes for you guys; response time is huge.

It’s awesome being around people who want to get better every single day. Thanks for what you guys are doing!

Andy Walker: Thank you! It’s good to hear because when you’re in the business, you can only think of the negatives. Like, “Oh, this happened.” But a lot of times in my mind, when we get someone results, it’s like, “Oh, that must have been luck! I don’t ever step back and think maybe we’re actually good at what we do.”

You feel like you can never be good enough, and if someone has a bad experience, that’s the only thing you can think about.

It takes 20 years to build a reputation, but it takes one second to ruin it!

We tend to spend more time thinking about the negatives and not reflecting on the positives.

Austin Gray: 100%!

Andy Walker: If I’m starting a new local service business, and I come to you and say, “Look, man, I've saved up—I’ve got a year’s worth of salary in the bank, I quit my corporate job, and I'm going all in on this business,” where do you recommend I spend my marketing budget?

Austin Gray: Number one—you should absolutely have somebody build your website for you; don’t build it yourself! This is your first impression. When you go to meet someone—whether it's a girl at the gym, at the bar, or wherever—your first impression is going to make or break everything.

The way you approach your level of confidence, the way you speak—the way you dress, how you look—that’s your website! Your website is your digital real estate. It’s your 24/7 salesperson that operates all the time while you sleep and never shuts down. That needs to be on point first!

I mean, that should be obvious to most people; I feel like I shouldn’t even have to say that. But in order to get digital leads, you need to have one of those! You want it designed correctly to convert customers.

Website first, and Google Business profile is absolutely necessary. There’s no way around that. That’s number one; there’s no way around that!

Then it’s a decision based on what’s going to be right for your timeline and the amount of capital you have. If you have a year of salary already saved back, SEO is an okay investment to make at that time.

It all depends on your service and the way people will find it!

Andy Walker: For example, cleaning companies and pressure washing and junk removal—ads are going to work really well because it’s a high-volume service. SEO works for you as well, even though it’s not quite as high volume of a service for what you do.

You do bigger jobs; they are higher ticket sizes. It still works, but a major part of your business—and I’m assuming this from what I read and what you've told me—is that, like you said, SEO is a way to get you a customer that you get to provide an excellent experience for!

You’re talking about on Twitter getting your trucks wrapped. You provide this service for someone, and the neighbor says, “Oh, I could use this service!” That’s the whole idea!  

But initially, it’s a website and a Google Business profile. Those are absolutely necessary—no way around that!

Then the decision is between SEO and Google Ads. Or I would mention both if you can afford both! That’s the best.

We work with a roofing company nearby, and I was in the area that the service. I searched “roofing companies near me.” Guess what? They were number one on Google Ads, number one on Google LSA, and number one on the MAP pack. I’m like, “At this point, how do you not get the call?”

There’s only one other person you could possibly call! They’re going to call you. Your website is beautiful—way better than the other guy. It will impact their first experience because your website is a representation of quality. People assess the quality of your service based on how your website looks.

You want to be professionally branded across the board—from the shirts you wear to your website.

Andy Walker: Long answer to the question, but those are just thoughts you put into it about what is best. I say Google Ads and SEO together because of the example of the roofer. If you can get seen in Google Ads and in the map pack for the organic results, and then you go into the actual website organic ranking section and you're there as well, the probability of you getting the call over someone else is much higher.

Austin Gray: If I can add something in there—I talked about this a couple of times online. I would ask you the question: If you're listening to this, would you spend $18,000 to get—what was it, I can't remember the number here. Let me do the math real quick. Would you spend 18 to get $350k back?

The answer is yes. Then I would recommend going into a long-term game with the SEO strategy, picking one location and one service, and owning the search results for that. I can say that from experience because that happened to us last year.

We went all in on this SEO thing: I think we spent $18,000. That’s $1,500 a month on one of your packages, and I cannot tell you—that converted a job! I’ll tell you the story right now. It’s a commercial general contractor who searched for our area + our service and popped up.

Now, you have to put a sales plan involved and you have to standardize, but he called us from our Google My Business account and our website—one of the two, and that ended up being a big project for us in the first year and a half of our business.

In my perspective, yeah, maybe there's some luck there, right? But at the same time, one could argue that if you own one area in one search term, at some point you're going to get that call. You never know when that call is going to come!

So, I encourage you, if you have a long-term perspective in mind, SEO has paid dividends and it's still paying dividends. I won’t even mention the $20,000, $30,000, $40,000, or even $75,000 jobs we’ve gotten; that investment coupled with and we’re doing ads too, as well.

It’s still working together, but I’m trying to hammer that point home. Would you put $18,000 in to get several hundred? If the answer is yes, and if you have the capital, consider investing that with a professional.

All I can say is my experience with Andy and Bod has been great—they’re getting me results!

Andy Walker: Thank you! Yeah, and it’s a logical step. If you can put $1 in and get $3 back—you should do that every single time, forever!

But you have to have the foresight to see the process through to get to that point, which is a major—it goes back to the point that if I was starting a business and you have this amount of capital, it’s the same thing in stocks.

Everybody is a long-term investor until the price drops, and then everyone’s worried about the next three weeks!

If you don't have the capital and need the leads now, you're going to be super stressed. You’re going to be down on yourself, and you're stuck in this negative feedback loop that you don't want to be in.

Austin Gray: Something I want to talk about—and I don’t know how much longer we’re going to go, but I want to talk about doing things that don't scale.

There’s this guy, Paul Graham. I forget the name of the company that he started back in the 2000 tech boom or so; he sold it for $800 million, started Y Combinator, which has led early investments in Stripe, Uber, DoorDash, etc.

They're like the startup accelerator. If you can get into the Y Combinator season 21, where you come and go through their startup school, just give you some background about what he's built—Sam Almann, who is now with OpenAI, eventually replaced Paul Graham in that position and left to build OpenAI.

You can see how prestigious it would be to take part in this, and he built it. He has a website; I think it’s just PaulGraham.com. It’s so old, like pure HTML.

It’s composed of bullet points that link to essays he writes, and he has this one called “Do Things That Don't Scale.” The premise is that the things you think won't scale actually scale your business. You saw a tweet from you in the past because you go on-site and meet the person, shake their hand, you know, build a relationship, give the estimate, and quote in person.

You also sent a message from Google Maps for a period of time. What happens is this: This is the competitive advantage of a new person. Once businesses get to a certain scale, they think it's not scalable to go do these in-person things. They’ll send it from afar, and the close rates drop considerably because they don’t get to meet you.

Trust establishes when two humans meet; that’s just the reality of it. There’s always room for someone to come in and do that.

Austin Gray: Am I going to be able to do a thousand of these a week? If we reach a certain scale, maybe not. But do it as long as you can. Train someone else to do it too, because it does scale!

As a singular person, can you do that? No. If you’re just starting a one-man pressure washing company, can you knock on doors every day forever? No, because eventually, you’re going to get jobs and have to fulfill those; you can’t knock on doors anymore!

So it doesn't scale, but it gets the ball rolling.

Something we did when we were first starting out was that we had no credibility, no trust—barely any Google Business was our only case study. There wasn’t evidence of what we could do.

So, something I did was go on Facebook. I looked up tons of local businesses; I found ones with very bad websites. But I was specific: I wanted to make sure they cared about their digital presence.

So, I would find out if they were active on Facebook, had a website, because if they didn’t have a website, you’re going to be harder to sell a website.

I would make them a landing page—just a homepage—and I would send this to them. I’d say, “Hey! My name is Andy from Striker Digital. I created you this website!” I would attach a loom video, showing them the design, walking them through why I did this—how I did this, the purpose of it, and how it will benefit them.

It worked! Can you do that forever? No, you can’t do that forever!

Andy Walker: But is it a good way to get your first 10 customers? Sure, it did happen.

That’s a digital business example, but there are plenty of examples out there for physical businesses that can do pretty much the same thing!

Austin Gray: Definitely! It’s such a good point. Thank you for bringing it up.

To dive deeper about those tweets you mentioned early on: I mentioned when I got that call, I handled all our sales when I was starting the business. As soon as I had people in the field, my main focus was if someone called and a lead comes in, I had all these automations set up where I get texted the lead.

As soon as they came in, I would literally click the number and call, “Hey, it’s Austin from Bearclaw! I just saw you filled out the form on our website—how are you?”

Then you stop. Here’s my point—if you’re getting the response from the customer, something along the lines of, “Wow, that was fast!” If you're not getting that response, that means you're too slow.

I would get that response so many times, and I just set that as a standard.

Going back to your point earlier—it’s how you can get better at something. So, I was doing that for the first 18 months of the business. You helped me—Bod helped me launch that location in CCK, which is an hour away, two and a half hours away from where we are.

So, we did that to have work in the wintertime—when the snow is here. When the snow hits, I had to drive three hours for a sidewalk cleaning job—it blows my whole day, right?

I was getting to the point where I was like, “Dang, I did like three or four tire kickers,” who didn’t look on the spot; I was down. So, the next lead I got, I would pull up on X Max maps, thinking, “Alright, how can I do this better?”

I’m going to automate this—I would send it on Google Earth and all this stuff, then I’d give them a fast estimate.

I lost like five in a row. So, then I was like, “Screw this, man! This is not working in this type of business!” People want to deal with people.

At that local level, to your point—and some of those tech-minded people think those kinds of things aren’t scalable—but yes, they're not scalable for you to drive three hours.

Andrew Walker: But guess what happens—if you win a $50,000 project, is it worth your three hours driving down? Yes, absolutely!

That’s my point on the standards for local small business sales. If you just show up in company-branded apparel and answer your phone, you book the sidewalk within 24 hours, you drastically increase your chances of winning that job!

Austin Gray: I want to add one thing because what we're talking about at this point is human trust and credibility. How do you get more of that? Because, you know, like you said, people want to do business with people, they want to do it with someone they can trust.

If they feel like they really like you and trust you, they want to spend money with you. That leads to referrals, too!

You can leverage your existing customer base to grow if you're doing a good job for people; you need the referral. But they don’t always do it. If you put an incentive in place, say a double-sided incentive program where if you’re a cleaning company and you’re providing an excellent customer experience, you send them an email or a text—whatever.

It’s like, “Hey! We’re going to give you your next free clean if you refer us to someone,” and if they book a clean, we’ll give them 10% off their clean!

Andy Walker: Now, you’re leveraging your customer base to go get that customer for you.

That's one thing. But something I’m really big on—a lot of home service businesses don’t have this— there are only like two or three I think we work with that have it. One’s a car detailer; he has a ceramic coating that’s incredibly high-end, and he just had one professionally made, which is beautiful.

It’s going to work so well! I’m so happy for him. It’s a video sales letter. If you go to stryker-digital.com, you’re going to see there’s a video. It’s me talking about our processes, showing some of the results—probably need to get it redone; it's over a year old at this point.

It handles objections; it lets you know we truly understand. It gives credibility, for example, about Bod’s dumpster business. We’re not just marketers; Bod physically owns a dumpster rental business and deals with the same problems as you.

We’re building trust by showcasing our face and voice.

People are going to judge us because we need to determine if they’re a threat or not or if they can trust them. It's not right or wrong, that’s just what will happen.

You can’t deny reality; that’s how it is. If you put a two-minute video on there of you explaining your services, you handle objections during this video as well because what’s going to happen is people are going to come to your site and think, “Oh, I don’t think they can handle this.”

If they watch your one-minute video and it’s highly engaging, you can actually get them to go through your services, and you’re showcasing proof that you’re coming to their house to provide this service.

Most people listening are home service businesses. When you’re coming into someone's home, often where their family is there, and their children are, and their valuables are— they want to trust you. They want to know who’s coming into their home!

Andy Walker: You don’t want to invite just anyone in.

For example, we had a problem with our new hot water heater. I had no idea who was coming, and my wife was going to be here; I had things to do. But I had to push those things back because I can’t let my wife be here with someone I don’t know coming into my home.

Even if I did know him, I probably wouldn’t let it happen! But still, I feel more comfortable.

You need to build that trust factor! If you build the human connection, AI and automation can never replace that when you’re transacting with a human.

Austin Gray: It’s so true; it’s unbelievably true! I’m glad you brought that up.

I think this is one area I used to care a lot about. It’s like, “Man, what are people going to think about me if I get on camera and do an ad?” If I hold a phone and look like I’m doing a selfie video to talk about our service—what are people going to think? What are my friends going to think? What is my family going to think? What is my local community going to think?

I used to care deeply about that. I finally just got to the point where I said, “Do I care about this business succeeding?” If yes, what do I need to do?

I don’t care if I’m uncomfortable. I’m going to push through that and start showcasing, “Hey! This is our team! This is who we are! This is what we deliver!”

I would encourage everybody listening: if you’re starting a business, or if you currently own one— if you are the owner or one of the leaders of the business, put yourself out there! It pays dividends!

If you truly care about delivering, we do! I care so much about delivering the best product possible, and it probably has a lot to do with that ego thing we were talking about earlier.

I don’t care if I’m lifting weights or wrestling, playing football, or whatever—I want to be the best that I can personally be because it's a personal challenge, right? But at the same time, in striving after being the best I can be, I strive to give my customers a phenomenal product, right?

So, I care so much about that!

Andy Walker: Yep!

So, whenever you’re starting—what we mentioned about the video sales letter! If someone lands on your website, if you can add some video there… I know this is an area that a lot of home service businesses could do better than this.

We need to do better about this on the Bearclaw website, but a lot of home service businesses could benefit from either the owner, a key leader, or manager saying, “Hey! It’s Austin from Bearclaw! Here’s our team! Here’s our leader! Here’s our field crew manager! Here’s our sales and estimating manager! This is the person you’re going to be dealing with whenever you hire us! We are committed to delivering a five-star service!”

I’m interested to see where the next evolution of service business websites goes, and it seems like a lot of them could benefit from something like that.

Andy Walker: Oh, I definitely think they will evolve!

So, this is Internet marketing knowledge: I think we’ve talked about this before; I think you’ve read Russell Brunson’s “DotCom Secrets.”

In that book, he talks about the importance of a video sales letter to handle objections and things like that. But what you were talking about—the type of video setup for you, with the trucks wrapped—people could see that.

That would not just make a killer video for the page, but that would be a killer video for a Facebook retargeting campaign!

You know, if you go to an e-commerce store and you're looking to buy a shirt, and then you open Instagram or Facebook—and, “Oh! There they are again!” They’re retargeting you! That would be an excellent retargeting video because it’s pretty personalized to an extent.

If a random person lands on there, maybe they watch the video, but you want people to see you multiple times.

Something I want to do for Striker, in order for it to go big to the next level, we need to suffocate people with our content to the point they can’t go anywhere without seeing our face.

Whether you know we’re going to send you a cold email; you’re going to come to the website; it’s going to be a good offer; it’s going to share social proof.

You’re going to come to our website, watch the VSL; then you’re going to open Facebook and Instagram, and we're going to be there again. You’re going to open YouTube, and there we are! That’s how it works!

Those are the biggest businesses; if you’re talking about digital businesses, physical businesses can do that to an extent. It’s very possible to be done!

There’s a guy I really look up to on Twitter; I’m in his coaching program called Client Ascension. His name is Daniel Fazzio—he’s called email wizard on Twitter.

He is Russell Brunson 2.0. He’s a beast! His YouTube videos are so entertaining as well. If you’re a home service business owner, you can watch these and get plenty of value out of them— even though he only talks about marketing and building agencies.

They do everything right! Just to nerd out on this for a bit because you might find it interesting: something they do—when they started out, he made a cold email course. He sold it for super cheap—probably $300, something he should have charged $3,000 for.

That course blew up! He was one of the originators pushing cold email abroad.

Then he partnered with people working with cold email lead generation agencies; they were running into a ton of problems.

They built software around it that solves that problem, and that software is called ListKit. Then they build a coaching program for agency owners that sets an absolute standard for what a coaching program is!

There are like 30 coaches in there; you get assigned your student success coach you’ll pay for it. It’s basically college, but if you go in there and do the things they want to do, there’s no doubt you’ll get a return on your investment.

It would literally take you to mess up to not be successful going through this program. I joined for the networking, and I didn’t go for the whole program; I just paid for some friends.

So, what’s really interesting is they have the software, and one issue is that to really scale the software, there aren’t enough cold emailers out there.

They build the coaching program to teach you how to cold email. They’re creating a total addressable market! You need to buy your leads from somewhere, you need to get the emails.

You can get them from other sources, but they want you to use their source. They started this ad campaign that’s a done-for-you cold email setup; they’ll set everything up for you, so all you have to do is press go to get it started!

You get loom videos of how to do it, and everything you need will be solved in there.

They run that ad campaign; when they sell it, it pays for their ad costs, but they need to keep getting more leads to send to and need to buy them from somewhere. Therefore, you subscribe to their software to do this.

It’s just full circle! It’s so freaking smart! It’s amazing, but you can take these lessons and translate them into other businesses.

You should be able to pull the best of certain areas and bring it in. For example, I’m reading a book—I’m not even a football fan— I watch football but I’m not big into it at all. But I’m reading Nick Saban’s leadership principles right now, and the way he runs his team is the same way you run an operation; you run a company to be the best in the world.

It has nothing to do with my agency business, but I can pull info from that and apply it!

For example, I’m reading a book—I’m not even a football fan.

Austin Gray: Nick Saban's Leadership Principles?

Andy Walker: Yeah, that's what it’s called.

And I’m only like—when I read books, I typically only read half of them, and that’s not even relevant. Most books could probably just be written with 100 pages; they don’t need to be 200 pages.

It’s like someone has a standard number and feels like they have to hit it, and I’m like, “I don’t think so!” I think most of these could be summarized in 100 pages.

Austin Gray: For sure! I used to listen to a lot of Tim Ferriss, and one of his hacks was to read the first and last page of every chapter and get the essence of the book.

Andy Walker: You can do that! That is true!

It’s interesting you bring this up because I’m really interested in how does Nick Saban—and so like what Alabama does.

When I was in college, our offensive coordinator came from Alabama. He came to be our head coach, and he brought a lot of those principles. I think about many things he talked about, and I’ve been interested in studying what Alabama does.

This will also help your life and business, and I just am about to check out that book too. I’ve got one more for you before we wrap up. This has been so much fun! Thanks for being on; I’m having a blast!

Austin Gray: If you were starting a service business right now, which one would you do? You can only pick one service.

Andy Walker: I think about this a lot, but I’ll give you a couple of the ones I like, and then I’ll try to narrow it down to one. One of the issues I see with a lot of people is you want a service with at least recurring revenue or decent-sized ticket prices.

Or else the volume has to be insane!

For example, these businesses can be successful. We work with junk removal companies that are super successful, but you have to constantly hunt to eat. It’s not recurring!

Once you get one customer, you have to get the next one and then the next one. I don’t really love that model. I think there’s something that’s more sustainable.

But, for example, roofing—you have to get the next customers, but that’s okay, because your ticket prices are extraordinarily high. You don’t need to do the volume to run a good-sized business, whereas when your average ticket size might be $300, you need a lot of volume!

So there are three that I really like: pool cleaning, pest control, and roofing.

I think pool cleaning and pest control are easier than a roofing company, where there’s way more risk involved. You have your workers on a roof; that’s a big danger.

You’ve got all these people up on the roof! There’s tons of insurance. There’s much more overhead and equipment and everything that you have to do; the logistics are probably much more intense than cleaning a pool or going and spraying for pest control.

Roofing would be something I’d be interested in, but if you’re looking for lifestyle, I’m going to push roofing out right now.

Even though I would be excited and interested in it, I would narrow it down to pool cleaning and pest control because they’re both recurring services!

Once you lock in a customer, for what reason are they really going to turn out of your service other than they can’t afford it?

You know, pool cleaning is discretionary spending!

You don’t have to do it just like a house cleaning—you don’t have to do it!

I think you can find really good texts—people to work for you within pool cleaning and pest control, where, what I notice when I talk with—this happens in every business, but we work with many cleaning companies.

You need to operate in an area that has a lot of wealth concentration. There’s a labor pool close by that’s willing to do this work on a 1099 basis.

You can’t always find that! Sometimes that labor pool isn’t going to be the most reliable, but it would be easier and more sustainable to have employees in pest control than pool cleaning businesses.

But after talking to Casey, I’m doing a podcast with him. I think pest control is on my top one right now!

Austin Gray: When I interviewed him on our podcast, I think that might be the title of this episode: Is pest control the best home service business model?

Because he was saying one tech can service $400,000 of revenue.

Yeah, and I know that they’re heavily invested in their Salesforce too. But that dude is going to build a big business, and I’m excited to watch him!

Austin Gray: Alright, so who are the top five best operators that you're working with that people should go follow and check out online to learn from, starting a good home service business?

Andy Walker: It’s tough, because some of them don’t share a ton. Although they’re very high-level operators, I’d say PJ McGarry for cleaners is really high-level. He’s really good; he understands that doing things that don’t scale—whether he thinks of it in that concept or not—he does that.

His business is very successful because of that. Then there’s Malcolm—who you had on from Poolology—he’s very high-level. I meet with him once a month and we talk.

It’s about SEO and things, but I try to squeeze in some time to pick his brain and learn from him as well while I have his time.

You’re obviously in the top five there. I’m not looking for a pat on the back, but if I was trying to start this, I would be following you!

There’s another guy we work with—his name’s Lou from NextGen Power Wash—and he's from my hometown area, which is that person we have ranking number one across that area.

He’s not on social media, but he was one of our early clients, and I learned a ton from him because another thing about these guys is he’s very concentrated on client experience, making sure every service is delivered exceptionally!

He will talk to you for an hour after a job to show you around everything he did.

He’s a pressure washer, so he’ll walk you around saying, “Here’s what was here; I took care of this!”

He told me this one example of how he had a well-built truck—he put everything away. He thought he was done, and he was showing the person around after a long job.

They were getting to a place where he said, “I missed that. I missed that.” He said, “I’m going to do this again in an hour. I’m going to take care of this!”

Some people would push off what they were doing and say, “I don’t want to get all that back out! I already got paid!”

He’s willing to do that. So, those types of aspects make him a high-level operator!

Other than that, if I had a list prepared, I could name some off, but I would say those are the top ones for now: PJ, Malcolm, and you; I think Casey is another really good one!

There’s another guy—Sam Alsop. I don’t know how to pronounce his last name. He owns a roofing company.

Austin Gray: You were saying earlier that he had a gym or something like that, right?

Andy Walker: Yeah! He had a gym and sold that gym; he got into corporate for a bit and built a marketing agency working primarily with roofing companies.

He’s very high level!

That guy, Jos Singh—he has been putting out content. He did one on Bod; he did one on Sam, and his story was amazing!

He’s great!

Austin Gray: I think that’s been a great wrap-up for this podcast. Thanks for being on!

Andy Walker: Thank you!

Austin Gray: Alright, guys, you've been listening to another great episode of the OWNR OPS podcast. Just like in building a service business, we talk about it all the time. Five-star reviews are super important! So, if you are enjoying these episodes, if you’re getting some value out of these, would you mind to take 30 seconds to leave us a quick five-star review on Apple or Spotify?

Then if you’re listening on YouTube, would you mind just liking and subscribing to the channel?

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We just launched a Bearclaw-specific YouTube, so I'm separating the two. I’m doing more business-related content on this YouTube channel and also, for Bearclaw, I'll be doing more project-specific content.

Once again, thanks for listening, and we’ll see you guys in the next episode! Don’t forget: Work hard, do your best, and never settle for less! See you guys in the next one! [Music] [Applause] [Music]