The 4 Systems of a
Local Service Business

Coaching a business from ‘in the red’ to ‘in the black’

Leads System

LEADS when you need more new customers to find you.

The ways to get strangers to find you are wildly vast. Many companies have thought of (let’s say) 50% of them and yet are probably doing about 3% of them.

1. Someone needs your service but doesn’t know who you are

2. They search

3. They find you because your Leads Operating System rocks (you’re welcome)

4. They submit an estimate request

Now you know who they are.
This is when sales starts →

Sales System

SALES when you need a higher conversion rate.

Sales starts the moment a new prospect finds you and enters your system. Now you know who they are. Everything before that is lead gen.

Let’s say you need 10 jobs a month to cash flow.
You only land 5 jobs per month but you deliver 80 estimates each month. You don’t have a LEADS issue you have a SALES problem.

A proper Sales Operating System creates expectations and fulfills them over & over again throughout the entire process to produce the highest conversion rate feasible.

I wouldn’t change my offer until I got that part down.

Congrats! The customer approved the estimate and became a client. It’s time to process and fulfill the job →

Product & Fulfillment

We do not coach this system. It’s grayed out for a reason. This is everything you do as a service business, split between crew and office.

Crew is the actual labor it takes to do your job in the field. PMs, superintendents, and technicians.

Office is split between admin & coordination:

Admin for invoicing, HR, bookkeeping, etc.. All the fun stuff.

Coordination to dispatch crews to specific jobs per schedule.

We’re not here to teach you how to do your job better. If you’re an electrician, a painter, an arborist, etc. it’s your job to be excellent at your trade. And it’s your job to run your office legally & ethically.

Now that you’ve earned revenue and incurred expenses you need a Performance Operating System to monitor the past and lead into the future →

Performance System (the Dashboard)

BIZ DEV when it’s time to decouple the owner from the daily needs of the business (going from “owning a job” to “owning a business”).

The Dashboard is paramount to the success of business development. You need to see every KPI that helps leadership make decisions to build a profitable company.

Accounting is the language of business. If you don’t know how to define the difference between revenue and gross profit you better change that.

Profitability ≠ cash (ask me how I know later)

Imagine driving a car. You look down and the speedometer isn’t moving, the gas gauge is stuck, and the tachometer is blacked out.

Most companies are worse yet. You look back up and the windshield is iced over.

Let’s change that.

We coach LEADS, SALES, and the DASHBOARD. Below is a framework of how we do that.

Product & Fulfillment is the actual function of your service. If Product & Fulfillment doesn’t occur, it’s impossible for the business to generate any revenue. We do not coach this function of the business. Why is that? We’re not here to teach a master plumber to be a better plumber.

Why Scale

Props to you if you made it through reading all 4 of those systems.

Listen, building a business is hard. But if you do it right it can be so worth it.

Truth is, you’re good at Product & Fulfillment:

  • Answering sales calls on your personal cell phone

  • Building the estimates yourself with no tactical closing process to speak of

  • Waiting to hear back. Some approve. Some don’t.

  • You do the jobs yourself or personally oversee them with a minimal crew & subcontractors

  • You deposit the checks and send receipts to a bookkeeper

  • Every now & then you’ll post a pic of the job on your site or Instagram

  • That’s your company in a nutshell

And hey, you’re good at it and can make an honorable living. But you’re learning the difference between having a job and owning a business. The skill of building a business needs to be thought of as its own trade. Imagine going from a tree care climber to becoming a plumber. You already know how much time & effort that will take. You know you’ll have to learn from experts who’ve gone before you.

Learning the trade of building a business is no different. The difference is you thought it’d be easy because it’s not manual labor. It’s not easy. It’s freaking hard.

Are you tired of being the guy or gal the crew and office depends on all day?
Are you tired of getting to the end of the month and barely having any cash or time left over?

That’s why we scale.
A company needs a team to decouple the owner from the daily needs of the business.
A company needs the revenue & margin to cover the payroll to attract & keep top-tier people to run these systems.

Leads Coaching

By far the most accessible way to start is for you (yes you) to learn lead gen.

If you’re not yet at $1M per year in sales (and you’re not flush with cash) what are you waiting for?

  1. Learn what makes an SEO-driven website

  2. Learn how to pair this with Google Ads

  3. Learn to make the shift from lead gen to sales easy for your customer with online booking