Steve Hunsaker: Meta ads, you have to be willing to set some money on fire to figure it out. There's two types of people in the world, people who say Facebook ads don't work and people who've tested five or more creatives. 

Austin Gray: In this episode, I have Steve Hunziker joining me. Steve is the founder of Valley Christmas Lights down in Arizona, and also the founder of Home Service Accelerator. We talk all about how to grow businesses with basic blocking and tackling, like setting up your Google Maps properly, and specifically running Facebook ads for service-based businesses. 

Steve Hunsaker: The only thing that matters now in 2025 is the creative that is 90% of it. Did I target home and gardens interests? Did I target age groups? Like none of that. 

Austin Gray: Steve drops a ton of value here. He is an incredibly sharp marketer and. He's built multiple businesses to the seven figure market. 

Steve Hunsaker: So if he was charging me a hundred dollars a lead, but every single one of those was a lay down Christmas light install for 3,500 bucks, I'd keep running them all day long.

Austin Gray: So if you want to learn more about running Facebook ads like we do here at Bearclaw, like Steve does for his Christmas life business, stick around for this episode. 'cause it's value packed. When people are like, Hey, I'm gonna start with $10 a day, I'm like. It's, I don't know, just go knock on doors and hand out flyers at that point.

Austin Gray: All right. Steve, you wanna give us a rundown? Why should local service businesses or home service businesses consider running meta ads? 

Steve Hunsaker: Themselves or just total meta ads , at a high level? 

Austin Gray: Yeah. Meta ads in general. Like  why? 

Steve Hunsaker: Yeah. So I think meta ads overall, if you start at the ultra high level and you just look at the platform, it's okay, Facebook has 190 million active weekly users and Instagram has 169 million what other platform can you reach the general masses  of the world, but really the US and with local businesses like that route better than meta, the easy answers like Google Pay per Click or anything else. 'cause those are high intent. What happens is, like a lot of people actually would benefit from on the outside of just generating leads on meta. What a lot of people sleep on is when you run meta ads a certain way, you can actually like hyper target into higher income areas only and build brand at the same time.

And so that's like my use case for it is like when we're in our business and where the light bulb really started to click for me is I own a Christmas light business in Arizona. We do a decent amount of sales, , over a two month period every year. And that was like my jump into home services and I built a lot of it off Google Pay per click and all that jazz.

But what I started to realize when we started scaling meta ads and adding a decent amount of friction to the questions being asked before the conversion on meta so that it wasn't just a bunch of turds. What I started to see is like when we started running video ads, specifically with a maybe one or two still images mixed in with a lot of video.

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Steve Hunsaker: What was happening is you're building a crazy amount of subconscious trust if you run the meta ads a certain way in your market. And so the way we run 'em a across the board is like when we do a meta video ad, it's, I choose like a city that I want, or a county or whatever that I want to target, and then I go super aggressive. The first words out of my mouth are to like, stop the scroll, make the people feel seen. And so if I'm in Scottsdale and I'm running a campaign to like the Paradise Valley area, which is like the mega rich area, the first words outta my mouth are gonna be like, what's up Paradise Valley homeowners.

My name's Steve. I'm a local Arizona born and raised guy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I own Valley Christmas lights. And then I go into some basic like ad copy of just who we are, what we do, why we're different expiring value proposition at the end. And so obviously we were generating leads.

Just like any other platform where they give you first name, last name, whatever else, phone number, whatever else, get 'em going. But the other side was like, my closers would go out to jobs. And we have one specifically that we do that's a $30,000 residential job. And I tell this story 'cause it puts a bow on why I'm so bullish on Meta for local home service businesses is our ads are funny. Like they're well made, they're filmed mostly with iPhones, but they're good ads. And, , my sales guy goes out to this job and it's for a Fortune 500 CEO that every single person on this chat would know who it's, and we do a $30,000 temporary Christmas light job for them on their house. And my closer goes out there and in our CRM it's coded that it came through Google Maps, like Google Organic.

So my closer goes out there, starts talking to the wife, and the wife is oh my gosh, your guys' Instagram's so funny. And my closer was like, oh, I thought you, , like I for some reason it says in my system that you called us from Google. And she's oh yeah, no, I just I, I kept seeing your ads, so I Googled you after. And so the thing that like wraps it up for me is she isn't even in that 10 11 X ROAS number because she's attributed to coming from Google Maps, but we got her from the brand recognition and the building of like profitable Facebook ad campaigns. And then that came off the side. And so if you look at all the massive home service businesses in the country, so if you look at like a one garage door, like ghetto plumbing, like all of these massive, like multi, multi, multi a hundred million home service businesses, you notice at a certain point they get really aggressive on radio ads, billboards, and everything.

And like TV ads, right? And part of that is because they want just like full blown brand recognition. I think that meta, you can do that at a smaller scale and buy brand while getting leads at the same time. So first name, last name, phone number, email, whatever else. And so on one side of the equation, it's like generate leads, get your closers out there, close 'em, generate leads, get 'em on the phone, close a job, whatever your trade is. But the other side is people watch and when you run them profitably on the lead gen side, you're essentially just buying eyeballs at scale within the platform. So just because it's if it was just lead gen, I'd still think it wins. If it was just like gathering leads, just like Google Pay-per-Click does, I would say it wins.

But then on top of that, you start to build that like local celebrity, whatever you want to call it, presence. And then that's where I see it like mega scale. So when we're in Christmas season, like for perspective, when I run a campaign on Google Pay per Click to just Paradise Valley, Arizona, which is like my spot that like we get the majority of our work from, it's one of the richest zip codes in the us. I can only spend about two to $300 a day on Google Pay per click before I just run outta clicks. Like I'm swallowing up all of them in that city. I am outbidding all of my competition. It's the Dan Kennedy thing, the business that spends the most to acquire customers gonna win.

And I think that's Dan Kennedy, right? And so knowing that I've, Dom I've squeezed all of the juice outta Google Pay per click I can in that small city. So then it goes to meta and it's like I can do the same thing there. But the difference between Google Pay-per-click and meta is the pay per click's not building campaign or building brand. It's just direct response. Like we either close that, we either convert them from the landing page, bring 'em in and sell 'em, or it's gone. Facebook, Instagram, I'm hitting these people, like my frequency on some of these campaigns gets up to three, four x. Meaning like one individual phone is seeing my brand three to four times.

And , that's the same concept of why people buy billboards. It's the same concept of why people buy everything else. So that's why I'm super bullish on Facebook ads. To put it in a nutshell. But while anybody's listening, the caveat is people say the quality of lead on Facebook is terrible, right? And there's nuance to everything. We find that we actually add a lot of friction on Facebook when we start to scale campaigns. So people who say Facebook ads are turds, a lot of the time they run messaging conversations. I'll never run a messaging campaign ever. Only run lead forms or landing pages, like drive the traffic to a landing page, and then as long as the creative's good, like I'm gonna get super aggressive on it's not just first name, last name, phone number, whatever else I'm gonna grab.

What are you looking to do on your house? , what is your, , what package are you interested in? And so like on our Facebook ads it says like before they convert during peak Christmas season, we don't want a bunch of turds in there 'cause it'll add a bunch of operational lag to our sales team. And so we will even say, which of these are you more interested in? It says $999 minimum. And it says roof line only, and then it's a thousand to $$$2,500. Then it's roof line and some landscaping. And then it's $$$2,500 plus and then it's like brightest on the block. And so what happens is, if you were going to convert from my Facebook ad and you were thinking that I was just like the neighborhood crack head hanging Christmas lights in the back of a Ford Fusion, which I did in year one, you would never convert once you saw that the minimum was $999. 

So that's how we sift through the quality problem is we add friction to the Facebook ads. But the part where I get really annoyed where I got really annoyed with Facebook ad agencies specifically I'm not saying all agencies are bad, and I'm not even saying all Facebook ad agencies are bad, but what happens when an agency, specifically in Facebook has never run a business, they don't understand what lead quality means. And so what happens is like a lot of these agencies that go after home service businesses that are doing less than probably a million a year is they're like, I got you so many leads, Austin. Like Austin, we got 14 leads yesterday. And you're like, dude, I made contact with one of them because you're not adding any friction.

And so then. I used to tell these agencies like two, three years ago, can you just make a campaign where you target just Paradise Valley, Arizona? Can you make a campaign where you just target Scottsdale? And they'd be like, oh, no. 'cause like we can't do that because of the algorithm. It's no, you can't do that because then you don't wanna just generate two, three leads and then have the owner be like, why can you only generate me two, three leads? 'cause you wanna be able to go to the business owner and be like, look at how many we got you. Why can't you just close? And so that was always my beef. So that's my long spiel on why I'm so bullish on Facebook and Instagram ads. 

Austin Gray: Let's break it down. How to qualify again, you touched on it already. Yeah. But I really wanna dive deep into that because that is something that is so crucial for running Facebook ads here. 

Steve Hunsaker: For sure. Am I allowed to share my screen on here? Yeah. Can I do that? So let's just take my landing page for the temporary business, right? This is my website. Let's see if it's sharing. Is it  sharing? Okay, cool. Gotcha. It's like this is my website, right? Pretty. The second they go in to get a quote, even on our website, because we like want to get quality, they're answering like a decent amount of friction. So first name, last name, phone, email, the full address, city, state postcode, and then what can we light up for you? Roof line, roof fly landscaping, roof line landscaping, wreaths, and then brightest on the block, $$2,500 plus. So this is the kind of friction I'm talking about. Now if I'm running cold traffic on Facebook, I'm doing a little bit less than this.

Like on Facebook, I probably won't ask for the full address. I'll ask for a zip code. 'cause that's like almost you. You start to teeter on the line of too much friction for cold traffic. 'cause you still wanna sell a little bit, but there's like a balancing act. And so on Facebook for Christmas season, I'll do like name, phone, email, zip code, and then the qualifying questions. What can we line up for you? Do you have anything you want us to know? And then they have to acknowledge this disclaimer, which says, I have read and understand that Value Christmas Lights is a premier service provider for holiday Christmas lighting and it's fully licensed and insured in the Save Arizona.

Because of this, I acknowledge and have read that the minimum charge starts at $999 with no exceptions. So like you are being pre-framed that this is not the neighborhood kid hanging lights. Now on this same token, if I'm running, if I'm running just like standard Facebook ads in a business that like has a longer sales process, I'd probably have a little bit less friction or like a higher ticket. It's just the fact that Christmas is like the amount of people that think they'd be interested in Christmas lights versus the amount of people that would actually be a target customer for us. We have to add that friction. But if I was like you Austin, I would probably in land clearing for like a Facebook ad, I would ask like first name, last name, phone number, email, and then like maybe one or two qualifying questions, like maybe something like that's per, that's pertinent to land clearing. Are you wanting to get this for, , a home or a business property? And then something else that's just enough to get them to not just click autofill and go forward. And then that's like that sweet spot. Because if you take my permanent lighting business now and you see our Facebook ads on that business, we're not asking as much questions in the middle of July for permanent Christmas lights because the demand isn't there.

But we still ask enough to where people don't just autofill through. And it's a bunch of 'cause we're in Arizona, if you like have autofill on and just ask for first name, last name, phone number, you're just gonna get 50% of your leads are gonna be Spanish speaking in Tucson. So like you have to have a little bit of friction there, but nowhere near the amount of friction that I have for Christmas. So every business is a little bit different in that sense. 

Austin Gray: Yeah, definitely. And I'll agree with you on the friction piece. So let's break it down. For listeners who don't understand or have no experience conversion, what would be the least amount of friction for an opt-in form? An email.

Steve Hunsaker: Absolute bare minimum. Bare minimum is the ask for email. 

Austin Gray: And then the next step is email and first name, right? 

Steve Hunsaker: Yeah. And then from there, once you start layering in phone number, address or zip code, more information means more friction. And more friction is not a bad thing. Friction equals intent. Like you have to understand the game behind meta is meta will show your ad to the guy under a bridge with a smartphone like. That's just the reality. It's not like Google will also, but like they had to go search land clearing Phoenix, Arizona to get your Google Pay per click ad or like what your LSA, whatever else. Meta is interruption marketing. They're scrolling for, cute dog videos and they're scrolling for like cooking recipes.

You interrupt them and then you have to get them to take action. So because they weren't looking for you, you can generate leads because it's cheaper to reach, you reach a thousand people for a hundred bucks or whatever it is on like meta for like CPMs, which is cost per millionth or whatever, the cost mark Zuckerberg charges you to reach a certain amount of people. That's what the CPMs are. , But because of that, you wanna have a little bit more friction because you know that your ads will be shown to low income communities. Your ads will be shown to anybody regardless. And so a lot of people that spend a lot of time on their smartphones have no interest in buying from you. Sometimes they just want to chat. And so what happens in the worst case scenario actually, is when you're running like a meta campaign and you don't have enough friction, the pixel, which is like your algorithm yourself, will actually learn poorly and not know who your target customer is if you don't have enough friction.

And so meta, I was watching a Jeremy Haynes video a while, but I think it's 80,000 or a hundred thousand individual touch points go into the data points, go into the algorithm for meta. So it's like whether like maybe you interacted with a fitness page and you interacted with who's the bodybuilder with the lisp? Chris, whatever, , whatever his name is. Like maybe you interacted with his stuff. And then you also like frequently look at your gym's organic page. Meta's gonna take all of that data on you. And then if I came in and was running like a protein supplement company, meta has your behavior over here, which was like gym related, whatever related.

And then it has all other 190 million people that are active on the app's behavior. And it starts to see what interests can we see in this algorithm that would also make him convert here. And so that's why the friction in a local campaign matters because like when my campaigns start running and pe the only people converting are people that understand that it's a $999 service, they're acknowledging that they own the home, like they're all that other stuff. After about 20 to 50 conversions, meta's gonna start showing it to other people that are similar to that. And maybe like this is all just complete Guess no one knows how the algorithm works, but like maybe it's a bunch of people that also interact with a really expensive steakhouse.

Maybe it's the people that like the Porsche dealers Facebook page down the road. Maybe it's the people that are a part of a bunch of neighborhood Facebook groups in those areas, like stuff like that. That's why like the friction is so important, not just to not fill your CRM with turds, but also to train the algorithm a little bit more clearly on who you're reaching.

Austin Gray: Talk to us about how to capture attention. We're talking interruption marketing right now. People are scrolling. What do you do as a marketer or as a home service business owner to capture that attention? 

Steve Hunsaker: The biggest thing to start with is the fact that the average American right now scrolls. On TikTok and Instagram reels the equivalent of three Eiffel Towers a day. So that's how much the average American scrolls on TikTok and Instagram and Facebook, meaning they scale with their hand three Eiffel Towers a day worth of, in increments of the size of your iPhone. So that's the number, that's a real number three Eiffel Towers a day. So if you know that, then the most important part of ads now is capturing attention. How do you capture attention? It is in the first three seconds. So when you're running a local business ad, what is the one thing that you can shout out? The first words outta your mouth that will grab the attention of somebody in your market? It's going to be calling out where they live. Because this, like if Austin, if you get a Facebook ad right now from me and it says what's up Philadelphia homeowners next.

It's not relevant to you. But if you got one that, what's your hometown? What's your city? , You can just call it Denver. Okay. Yeah. So if you're in Denver and like I would even try to find like a smaller county that all the rich people are in and go right to there and target it there. You'd say what's up Denver homeowners? My name's Steve and I would film it at some sort of landmark that is the subconscious queue that you're local. So what we do in some of our ads is like my best performing ad last year, the background is me on my balcony at my place. And the background is like the Red Mountains, that's like very synonymous with Arizona, right? So even the visual queue is that I'm in Arizona now. It's not every ad I'm just saying this is a piece, but then the first words outta your mouth are. The location you're targeting, who you are. So I'm Steve, I'm the owner of Valley Christmas Lights. We've been doing residential and business, high-end, white glove, Christmas light displays for five years. And then I would go into what makes us different. , And then at the end it's the call to action, which is like the CTA. And on the end of that ad, I would say I would have some form of an expiring offer to get them to take action. So if you click, get quote now and submit the form, we'll give you $300 off, , your install by the end of this month or something like that, that drives action.

And that's like largely the structure we play at like the beginner level. Once you get like a little bit more savvy, like I have some ads because I'm like a good ad buyer now in my business, I experiment with six second banger ads that are like very low CPMs so they reach more people, whatever else. But that's like the really basic rundown of grabbing attention. And so it's like you have to be brutally self honest with yourself about the ad. It's like, why would they stop and watch it? And this is why I've been like anti still image because yes, still images convert because the CPMs, the cost to reach a thousand people is a little bit cheaper and they can read 'em at work.

That's the other thing. So if you're running a video, you gotta have subtitles because people, I think it's like close to half of the reels are watched on mute, and so you have to have subtitles. But the thing that's different with this model is like we want to make them feel immediately like it is a local business in their neighborhood, run by local guys and gals, bonus points of it's family owned.

Austin Gray: I recently got back from launching a land clearing business down in Austin, and this last winter I launched a snow shoveling business alongside Bear Claw. In both businesses, I've implemented jobber as a way for us to efficiently manage quoting job schedules and invoicing, and even collecting online payment. Why? Because it's worked so well for us in Bearclaw and it's saved us a ton of time and headache. So if you are looking for a software that can help you manage the back end of your business, look no further than Jobber, you can visit Go dot get jobber.com/owner ops O-W-N-R-O-P-S.

Steve Hunsaker: And then once you grab their attention in that first three seconds, five seconds, then the rest of the ad you can experiment with whatever else. 

Austin Gray: What are some other parts of the ad that are important as far as the structure goes? 

Steve Hunsaker: It's interesting, if I pulled up our best performing ad, that's like the, so that structure I just gave you, call the location, introduce yourself, who you are, what you do, why your different expiring value proposition at the end with a call to action. That's the basic structure. In the middle, that's where like kind of becomes a testing thing like a little bit. So what I mean by that is if I take my winner, like my best ad, I can take a guess on like why did this work really well? And it's probably a variety of different reasons.

So once I find like a winner because I'll post, when I make a new campaign, I'll post like 2, 3, 4 A or three to four ads at a time. Different creatives. Like one video, I'm here, I'm saying this one video, I'm here, I'm saying this, whatever. Then meta will find the winner for you. The algorithm will find the winner.

And once I find that winner. I don't care what made it a winner, it's just the winner. And so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna make slight variations of that ad. So maybe I make, after I found the winner of those four, I'm gonna go say that exact same script in a different location with a different background. Or maybe I call out something different, or my value proposition went from, we're the only Christmas light company in the valley that I know of that only does Christmas lights. We don't have an add-on service to another business. All we do is Christmas. Maybe I change that little like value prop in the middle to something quicker.

We're locally owned by some Arizona boys who grew up and went to school here, like something like that, and you could switch 'em out. So the middle is probably like the least important part. As funny as it sounds, the most important part's, the beginning. And then tell your story quickly and then grab 'em with a hard call to action at the end. And the beauty of all of this is like you can make these on cap cut. Like you can pay a Fiverr editor, whatever else to throw in, whatever for you for 30 bucks a video and just get a bunch of creative tested out. Or you can get to our size now. Now I have a, because of home service accelerator and the Christmas Live business, I have a full-time videographer now.

So we go film ads, like we rip 'em, like we still do some on iPhones, but I have a full-time videographer, like he edits everything for me now too. But that's like the baseline is like that middle portion is the part you can have some wiggle room with. I'm not like married to saying you have to say you're locally owned. Everybody says that. But the one thing I will say that works for me really well is humor. Humor is the ultimate disarm in ads. So they already know you're local and you like made 'em smile a little bit. That's the winner. So one of my best performing ads where I start on the balcony last year, I say I walk back into my apartment.

I sit on my couch with my crack head looking Italian Greyhound dog, and I have a glass of wine in my hand and I sit on my couch and say call the Valley Christmas boys. And I like lean back and I like put my leg up. I like lean back and put my leg up and I have like my dog on my side and I say so you can sit on the couch with your pets and the boys will, whatever else. And like that just works. And so I'm not married to that, but that's just the one that converts. So I keep doing variations of that. But the humor portion we seem to find grabs attention because the sooner you realize that you're not special at all. And that's a rule of life in general, but specifically in ads, like the moment you realize that like they don't care that you're like been in business for five years, they don't care that all the competition sucks, but you like, , they don't do 1% of the thought that you put into the ad.

So you have to just lay it out, give them a reason to be excited or convinced. And I use humor. We have a ton of people in home service accelerator that run their own ads, that don't use humor, but I just have always leaned on that and it works well. Do you use humor in your natural conversations? Yeah, I like to have a good time, but the other thing that we've seen too that's interesting is some guys have accents and they're like, oh, I don't want to talk on camera because I have an accent. And we don't see, as long as what they're saying is legible, we don't see people not get results because it's like a little bit broken or anything like that.

Because what I think the underlying thing with local service businesses more than anything is deity in the ads, like coming off genuine and so some, like we have, , electricians that we've helped set up ads and stuff like that for, and the dude's terrible on camera, but he's so bad. It's funny and it just feels like really real like dude that is clearly the owner and not like a Hollywood actor. And there's something about that's like endearing. And then the other side too is like younger guys crush on these ads. Like we got window cleaners in the program that are, like, I had him on my YouTube, , Caden, one of our members, he's 21 years old, 22 years old, doing like 50 KA month window cleaning at 65, 70% margins.

Like insane business. Like one of the most profitable window cleaning businesses I've ever seen. And he looks like a child in his ads. Like it looks like a kid is running the ads, but it prints so it's, there's like you just gotta play the hand you're dealt and run with it. 

Austin Gray: One commonality I'm seeing across everybody I've talked to in this space is that talking head video ads. Outperform across the board. Are you seeing the same thing? 

Steve Hunsaker: Yes. However, I think meta heard that recently. The algorithm's changing all the time, so that's why like we constantly are making new creative 'cause you don't know what they're doing on the backend. But yes, the universal law for me has been video converts better. Now this is gonna get a little bit in the weeds here, but so to answer your question, yes, video, in my opinion, if I had to choose one or the other, I would choose video seven days a week and twice on Sundays. Now with that being said, for any of my business owners out there, you'll understand this, which I hope is most people listening you cost per lead is not the deciding factor of whether a campaign is working, right?

When people, like I have an ad that's running right now for home Service Accelerator and I say these are the three best ways to run Facebook ads. I recommend running video. I'll get a mobile detailer who clearly does not have an employee, whatever else, comment on my ad and be like, I'm running Still image. And it's great. You're wrong still. Image is great. I'm sure you can get results from still image. I'm not saying that still image is dead by any means. It used to be, I used to say still image was completely dead. It's since, come back a little bit, but a lot of these guys are like, oh, I'm getting Facebook conversations in messaging ads for $5 a convo.

The last time I ran lead formats, they were $25 a lead. So messaging is better. So then I would say the next logical thing you have to look at after cost per lead is what is your cost per appointment? What is your, it doesn't matter what the cost per lead is, it's what's the cost per appointment, the cost per given estimate or quote. Then what was the close rate on those? Like at the end of the day, the only thing I care about is how many dollars did I give Mark Zuckerberg and how many did he spit back out to me? If he was charging me a hundred dollars a lead, but every single one of those was a lay down Christmas light install for 3 3500 bucks, I'd keep running 'em all day long.

So cost per lead is a guiding metric, but it's not the only metric. And I think that's where beginners that run their own ads start to really lose their way is they'll run a campaign in a really ritzy area only and their cost per lead will be $40 a lead and it used to be 20 and they don't even give themselves like two, three weeks to see dude, what if, like if it's 50 bucks a lead and you used to pay 10, but so like you got 10 leads for a hundred dollars that are messaging conversations. You only got one appointment outta those 10. You bought the appointment for a hundred bucks. That's just what it is. You spent $10 a lead. You got one appointment outta 10, you bought the appointment for a hundred bucks. And then the other campaign was $40 a lead and I got three leads, so I spent $120 on it.

But two or three of those converted into appointments. I actually got an appointment for $60 in appointment. In that case, that's actually a better campaign. They just like, they, people get so caught in the cost per lead conversation that they don't even let the campaigns run their course. And the other thing that's interesting is like the more I talk to big agency owners, the one common trend like our friends at ad class, friends at everywhere else, like even Bodhi and them work with a lot of bigger businesses in different trades, is like good agency owners, working with businesses that do like a million, 2 million, 3 million plus a year, whatever else.

They're much slower to make changes to campaigns. Like they're much more patient with campaigns like running out. 'cause we have a guy that's in a home service accelerator that's a landscape, , design company. He started a campaign like 10 days ago and he got on a call and was like, Hey, I'm at like a 3.5 X right now. Should I shut it off? And I was like, how many quotes do you still have outstanding? And he is oh, I've got three or four out. And I was like, dude, don't kill the campaign right now. 'cause you're a landscape lighting business. Like your sales process is longer. Like you might be at a 3.4, 3.5 x right now today.

And then a lead you generated eight days ago makes a deposit on a $10,000 job. That campaign is now a 15 x roas, but you killed it before you even really let the thing run. And that's been an interesting thing. Facebook, Instagram ads. Like meta ads. You have to be willing to set some money on fire to figure it out. Not a lot, but you gotta be patient. Let the thing run its course. 

Austin Gray: That's why like when a lot of people reach out and they're like, Hey , can you share with me what your Facebook can, what you're doing on Facebook? And I'm like, yes I can. But at a very minimum, you gotta have three months worth of $50 a day. At a very minimum in my mind.

 Austin Gray: Stryker Digital specializes in SEO services specifically for local service businesses. Bodie and Andy, the two co-founders, have helped me get Bearclaw Land Services to the number one search result on Google inside my state for my specific search term. If you wanna learn more, visit stryker digital.com. That's S-T-R-Y-K-E-R digital.com.

Austin Gray: Yeah. What would you recommend? 

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Steve Hunsaker: So I've worked with 350 something people in the last year in home service accelerator. That's what I do in the off season of Christmas. We talked about it a little bit. It's if I'm talking to a window cleaner, like some of these guys rip at 30, 40 bucks a day, they're like younger cats, like business is smaller. They can get it figured out. But then I had a guy come in last week who's like a gutter installation company. They're doing like low six figures a month and gutters and permanent Christmas lights. That's like their service stack. And , he comes in just off rip 'cause he's way bigger off rip testing campaign.

He's spending like a hundred to 150 a day and he's just getting results faster. If you're spending more per day, you're giving the algorithm more chances to show your ads out to people and then gather back the data and learn. And so his campaign's ripped in five days, whereas like sometimes guys take seven days, 10 days, whatever else 'cause it, it takes a while for the campaigns to learn. So it's a mixed answer there, but it's like dependent on the trade. But I get annoyed when people join and they're like, I wanna spend $20 a day. I am like, no. 

Austin Gray: That was my point here. When people are like, Hey, I'm gonna start with $10 a day, and I'm like, it's, I don't know. Just go knock on doors and hand out flyers at that point, or go send direct mail. Yeah. And I'm curious to hear like where you recommend is like the bare minimum people start. 

Steve Hunsaker: Yeah, I think you just need to zoom out and say what is my marketing? What would I be comfortable with setting on fire this month at a one-to-one roas? So it's okay, if they're doing, let's say they're for easy math. Let's say they're a window cleaning, exterior cleaning business, and they do $50,000 a month and they have decent industry average margins. So they would like, , someone would say okay, you should be able to park five grand a month in meta ads to try to make it work. That's reasonable. Depending on what their other ad spend is, let's just easy math. Let's just call it five grand a month. So I would look at that and say, okay, if you have budgeted five KA month, like on your first campaign, if it's a 30 day month, start your spend at 75 to a hundred dollars a day.

Just start it there. Start to see some results. Great. We start to find some creatives. Great. Then you can start scaling it. You can start throwing some extra dollars behind it, whatever else, and keep it going from there. It's like when guys try to throw $10 at it, I'm like, dude, if your CPMs are a hundred dollars per thousand people and you're spending $10 a day, your ad's gonna hit a hundred people. Is that math right? Yeah. That math's right, it's a hundred people a day. You're not gonna get any juice from that. You're not even giving the algo a chance. 

Austin Gray: Yeah, and so another thing that. Yeah, I'm curious to hear your perspective on this, but like when I first started running Facebook ad I viewed this completely as an investment. 'cause once you understand that the pixel gets smarter or the, what do they call it now? Dataset. Gets smarter with time. You just have to view it as the upfront investment to get in the game. But once it starts getting to a certain level, and I'd be curious to hear some of your success stories that you've seen. It's is there like a curve that is hit to where it's okay, now it's really working for some of the people you thought if I, yeah, dude, 

Steve Hunsaker: That's a great question. So if I look at like our, 350 something, I think it's 360 now. I don't know, something like that in the last, let's call it 12 months. If I look at every time somebody has messaged me or my staff on Discord, 'cause remember for everybody listening, we teach home service businesses and their staffs how to run them themselves. Like we're somewhat the anti agency model for home service businesses for meta, not pay per click, not anything else, just meta. So if I look at like the amount of times people have said, my campaign's not working, it's been two weeks, I'm losing money. The most common factor is they didn't follow instructions and they only ran one creative or two creatives. On the contrary, if you look at the success stories we have in home service accelerator, Caden from the window cleaning company that went from , I think he came in doing like 10 K a month, door knocking.

He's doing like 50 K a month now at good margins. Tom from Dandy painting, he was doing like 30 K a month in painting and now he's doing two to 300 KA month, like repeat and painting. Like guys like that. If you look at their ad accounts, they tested like. Started with three to four creative, like three to four individual videos, photos, whatever else in their first campaign. Found the winners made variations. Like the best ones are the ones that keep testing and trying creative to find what sticks because every single thing we talked about, lead forms, websites, landing pages, anything else? The only thing that matters now in 2025 is the creative. That is what? That is. 90% of it.

It's the creative. It's not did I target home and gardens interests? Did I target age groups? Like none of that. It's the creative itself. How well does the creative tell the story? And we had a window cleaning company in Canada join last month. And they did a campaign and their first three creatives completely flopped. They spent like 50 bucks a day, went like 10 days, 500 bucks sank. Like they didn't even get like a lead. Then their next campaign, they did three different creatives. It was two videos, one still image, and it's printing. So it's like they got six creatives in before finding one that works. But the reality of it is you're gonna make 3, 5, 6, 7 creatives. You're gonna find one, maybe two winners out of those six, seven, like truly you're gonna find like maybe one or two, and then you're like, okay, now we have it. Then you make a mega campaign with those two, and you shuffle in one more variation of that. You make a mega campaign with those three creatives, because then what happens is, like the reason meta gets people to convert is they'll show somebody one creative, they might watch the video for 30 minutes.

They might open the landing page and not convert. They might open the lead form and not convert, but once they took a tiny bit of action or they watch the ad for a little bit longer, they'll then serve that same user, another ad and then another one. And so if you only have one creative, it's just gonna fatigue like crazy. If you have two or three, it can start serving them multiple creatives at a time. That's when it starts becoming I haven't seen these guys everywhere. All right, I'll check 'em out. That's the magic.

Austin Gray: What are some metrics that are important for people to look at? What are the main things that people should be understanding to understand when an ad is winning. 

Steve Hunsaker: Cost per appointment. How many of these became a given quote is like the first one. Pre-qualified, like given quote, and then return on ad spend. That's it. Everything else, like cost per lead will drive you to cost per appointment, which will drive you to, whatever else. The other thing that I think is really interesting about what, 'cause what you're asking is what can make a successful campaign? Like how are you judging it? The funniest thing about this, and it's actually the reason that I never started an agency, is if you gave me a hundred leads for Christmas lights in November. Then you gave my competitor, who is an owner op, the identical a hundred leads at the exact same time. I have a speed to lead system that's insane. Reaches out to them and they get a text. The second they submit, they get a phone call in under 60 seconds from our staff all automated. The other guy doesn't have any systems like that. His sales process is worse. His nurture process is worse. We could get the exact same a hundred leads at the exact same time.

My systems will probably get me a 10 x and that guy might get a three or four. And so it's like we could talk about cost per lead, cost per appointment, cost per whatever all the time. But the way you get cost per appointment down is you have better systems. It's like you have an instant connect feature where the second they click submit on your website or your lead, your sales guy's phone rings and it says you have a new lead. Press two to get connected. The system automatically calls them. If they don't answer system, sends 'em a text. What's up Austin? It's Steve with Valley Christmas sites. Saw you reached out on our website. When's a good time to connect? Feel free to call me back here or text me back here and get you started.

Like then when he responds via text, it moves in your pipeline to hot lead call now and you're like stages of your pipeline. If a business has that set up and like their system's fast, their sales guys or their staff gets estimates out to people fast. All that jazz if you don't have that part of the business dialed in, you could have Apple's branding, you could have Alex Hormozi running your marketing campaigns, and you could have the perfect mix of every sales guru in the world, Andy Elliot, mixed with Grant Cardone, whatever, running your sales process. If they're not getting in front of people, the within 24 hours or 48 hours with appointments like Lead comes in on Monday, you better be there Monday afternoon or Tuesday afternoon if you had a business like that with the best closers and best marketers in the world. The business that has really good systems and speed to lead in home services will run circles around that. That other scenario with Apple and Hormoz and Grant Cardone, like it's just speed. It's just speed and follow up that that's the difference between a four x campaign and a 20 x campaign. 

Austin Gray: You shared a photo recently on X, and it's something that I've been talking to with some of my other marketing friends about the speed, delete that percentage, that Harvard study. Can you talk about that? 

Steve Hunsaker: Yeah. So they measured a business or a bunch of businesses that are all in the service sector. So a lot of these were like service-based businesses from my understanding. And what they did is they were like, okay. Let's calculate the percentage of book appointments and , and close sales on a business that takes 24 hours to reach out to people or longer. And then they use that as the baseline. And then what they did is they went back and they have measurements on 18 hours from first touch to reach out 12 hours, six hours, three hours, two hours, one hour, and under one minute. The businesses that had systems that reached out to people in less than a minute had a 391% higher chance of closing, , compare a 391% increased chance of closing whatever that metric is compared to the businesses that took a day or more to get back to people. Now people can say, oh, that was service-based businesses like tech, that was whatever else.

Even if it's half that, like even if it's a quarter of that, what happens with a user, with an end user, your prospect, the second they click submit on your leads, Austin, what's the next thing they do? They went on your website, they said, I wanna get land clearing quote, I wanna get a quote on land clearing. They gave you your, their name, their email, their phone number. They click submit. It says, thank you so much, we'll reach out to you. We'll reach out to you soon. What's the next thing that prospect's doing? 

Austin Gray: So this is an area I wanna jump in. If you have a thank you page, which I'm a big fan of, a thank you page video right there.

Hey, it's Austin from Bearclaw. Real quick, just I'm gonna show you some next steps for what you can expect in our process. One of our team members is going to be reaching out to you here shortly. He's gonna be calling from this number right here, and then I put the number right down below. If for whatever reason you do not hear from him, please reach out to that number because he's probably in a site visit right now. Otherwise I don't remember exactly what else I say on that, but it's basically just like showing them next steps to grab their attention and then keep them on there. Because what you're asking, and I think the answer you were looking for is when they hit submit, they're going to the next Google provider or searching for land clearing services.

They're probably going to number two, number three, number four, number five. And they're looking to fill out their forms. So to your point, and I don't know if this is exactly where you're going with it, but what we try to do is we try to catch 'em before they go to service provider number two, three, and four, because we can catch them, especially on the phone. We've distracted them. One from that process. We've two showed them that we're a professional company and we've three started our sales process. Hey, it's awesome with Bear Cloud Land Services. I just saw that you filled out the form on the website. Wow. That was fast. And I tell our guys all the time, if you're not getting that answer, wow, that was fast, then you're too slow.

Because when I was doing sales, I was getting that answer all the freaking time. Oh yeah. 'cause I have every single automation set up to my phone to where it's like text, boom, click, call, like five seconds. You know what I mean? From the time it hits my phone. Yeah. And like that, the tenacity to do that, takes people away from going to 2, 3, 4, and five.

Steve Hunsaker: Exactly. Yeah. This is in beta. Like we haven't rolled this out yet, but it's cool that you said that. I know we're audio, so I'll make it, I'll describe it as well as I can, like over this. But like after they, this is for cold traffic only after they get submitted through like a Facebook ad or an Instagram ad or anything like that, we put them on like a landing page. That's like a thank you page. Can you see my screen? For some reason it's not popping up on mine.  Here you go. Oh, cool. So this is after they submit, it's optimized for mobile. That's why it looks weird on here. I just tried to show you the whole thing. I mean it's in like test mode right now. So after they've submitted their info to us, so let's just make sure we're clear.

After they've given us name, email, whatever we said thank you, it redirects them to this page. This is me greeting them on what to expect with value premiere lighting. But the step further that I took. I built an instant book calendar on top of it for them to self schedule estimates. So even though everybody won't self schedule an estimate, what I wanted was the ability for people that are super, super hot, like super hot opportunities to then come get more info and be able to do their homework and stay in our sales ecosystem. And so these are like, some of these are dead links. Like we just, , filmed the videos for this, but this is just a video of me, really gross, like talking through like our processes, like what to expect. This is a home that we do whatever, and then it's oh, you wanna see our reviews? Cool.

Click this. We'll take you to our Google page. You want to get a tour of the mobile app? Quote? Cool. Check that out. You wanna see our services? Great. It'll take you to a our service page that talks about it. I agree with you, I think  the first like knee jerk reaction to running any form of ads is keep them in the ecosystem as fast as humanly possible. But at the same time, it's have a system set up that immediately, automatically calls your salespeople, whoever are assigned to that first touch. Whether you have an appointment setter or a salesperson  and connect with them immediately. 

Austin Gray: Oh yeah, for sure. Yours is even pretty, yours is even prettier than mine. I still have to like pretty mine up. It's like bare bones. I made it last Saturday. But yours is exactly so one thing I would add to this right here is click, click play below. 'cause when you embed a loom, you do have to play click play here. So I would be really clear with like click play to watch the video for next steps right here. But it's just me. It's just Hey, I'm awesome with brick law land services. Here's how this process will work. One of our sales, don't call 'em salespeople. , Our project manager will give, be giving you a call here shortly. 'Cause nobody wants to be sold. Yep. And then I just. Tell 'em like, Hey, our goal is to understand the vision you have for your property after a job.

Well done. Keep an eye out for an email, phone call from our office manager. If you don't hear from us shortly, feel free to call this number. And then I hit 'em with the social proof. Here are some people we've worked for B2B, right? And then I just do the review scroll right here. So to your point, the idea that we're trying to do is just keep them in the system until we can get them on the phone. 'cause if we can get them on the phone, then the next step, and I won't steal the show, I'll let you take it from here, but it's like what's the goal of that phone call? And I know we both agree on it, 

Steve Hunsaker: Barbecue  chicken from there. The second you get 'em on a on the phone and you're like assemblance of competent, it's barbecue chicken from there. Set the point. Because if you think about as a consumer now your trade is gonna have a smaller percentage of people that just rip with the first guy because your average ticket is so big, but it's much more of an impact and feel thing for you to win that bid. And so whereas like mine is like strictly transactional, I would say if I had to guess, I would say a quarter to half of our customers don't even get a second quote. 'cause they're high end luxury services. Like they just want to check it off the list. Holy crap, this company got back to us that fast. Fantastic. Let's just rip it. Now that doesn't mean that everybody will just instantly not quote you out because you were fast. But like the first guy there wins at if you look at, a thousand inbound leads, whoever gets there first over time, and they're within reason and their sales process is decent, they're gonna win long term.

Then the people who are trickling in second, third, and fourth. 'cause once that homeowner gets, and they go through the estimate process with company number one. They hear all this, they hear all that, then they're gonna have to go do it again and then they're gonna have to go do it again. And the second guy was 30 minutes late and ah, then it's okay, remember the good guys and then it becomes a follow up thing and everything else. But for any transactional trades listening that are like a quicker sales process, like Christmas lights, windows, stuff like that. We're aggressive with trying to get a deposit in person. We like to get, like when we're in mid Christmas season, like my guys are like trying to get a deposit and book a time in like process that credit card in person on the quote. 

Austin Gray: You also have urgency working for you too there. So there's why not ask for that? Yeah. Because like people want it. There is a short timeframe, so why not ask for the deposit?

Steve Hunsaker: I think that other brands that don't have naturally built in urgency can find a way to fabricate urgency a little bit. , You probably already do this, but if I was like starting a land clearing company, my sales guy's scripts would be aggressive about okay, we've got, two crews running right now. Currently. They're, three to four weeks out, I've got a slot here at X date and I've got a slot here at X date. I've got two more sales guys that are out doing the, or excuse me, two more project managers out doing these. , If you want to grab this spot, , it's first come, first serve or something like, just even though it's not gonna be anywhere near the the level of urgency that I can, I have naturally built into my business.

That's one thing we do in the permanent lighting business. The other thing we do to build urgency in, , in the summer months is we have a discount stacking calendar that's four, it's four it cartoon images of tickets, and it says, may discount. So we explain to them in the sales process like, Hey, 90% of our calls are gonna come in October, November. We pass the savings onto you. If you wanna get the permanent Christmas lights in May, in June, whatever else, here's our discount stacking program. If you make a deposit before the end of May, you get 20% off. If you make a deposit before the end of June, it goes down to 17. If you make a deposit before the end of July, it goes down to 13.

If you make a deposit before the end of August, it's 10%. So if you guys know you wanna do this during the holidays this year, you might as well do it now and save a few hundred bucks. And that's like a super genuine, real feeling way that we built urgency where it's just even though the co like what we were finding and we just started permanent lights this February, we were temporary for five years. What we were finding is like people would be hyped on it, but there was so little urgency because it was eight months until Christmas. It was nine months until Christmas that like we had to fabricate some form of carrot to grab them. And that has seemingly got people to take action. 'cause what we'll do is towards the end of the month, like we will in the next three, four days, send a text reminding everybody outstanding quotes, Hey, just so you know, discount stacking periods, , wrapping up, if you guys knew you wanted, do this. Here's the reminder. Let us know and then we'll just trickle in some deposits. 

Austin Gray: I love it. What else do people need to know about Facebook ads, Steve? 

Steve Hunsaker: Oh gosh. I think that I think that the automation of Facebook ads is like the most important part. If you're gonna run lead format ads, lemme just give you some quick hitters Facebook ads. There's two types of people in the world. People who say Facebook ads don't work and people who've tested five or more creatives. That's the only two people. So that's number one. Number two, if you're running lead form ads where it means like they're filling out the lead forms within Facebook and you feel like a lot of people are submitting and giving bad info, turn off lead form, autofill, turn that setting off in the lead form autofill, if they like, for example, on Instagram and they've given fake info to other companies, Instagram's got that preloaded in there. Like in my Instagram, if I interact with an ad that has a native Instagram lead form, the autofill option pops up and it's a fake email and fake phone number that I've put in for someone else that's saved my Instagram account. So you're running lead forms turn off autofill. Other than that, I highly recommend, if you've run Facebook ads in a 30 square mile radius, , I would highly recommend testing Facebook ads in a smaller radius than you think. So what I like to do is I like to go on the US Postal Services EDDM tool. Find like the highest average income zip codes in my market and run a test campaign in just those zip codes. Even though it's proximity based, people will disagree with me. Oh, but the car's driving in and out, that's great.

The people that live in those zip codes are rich. So I don't care if it's not gonna be perfect, but you can target it a little bit more. Go that route. If you are running a Facebook ad and you're doing any form of like algorithmic advantage plus or anything like that and you're getting people that are from four hours away, five hours away you can either a turn off Advantage Plus and go old school targeting, or you can go into the backend settings of your Facebook ad account and permanently ban other states. So what was happening with us when we were testing different types of campaigns is we would get like leads in El Paso, Texas, which is like. A little bit east of us and we would get leads in Santa Fe. I blacklisted the entire state of Texas, the entire state of New Mexico. , The city of Prescott, Arizona, the city of Flagstaff, Arizona, all that jazz.

And my campaigns cleaned up a lot when we did that. Still image is not dead per se, but if you gave me the choice gun to my head, I would be running video ad all day long. , And I would be branded and in front of a uniform. My best performing still image ad is fully created by chat GPT, so don't overthink it. That's my quick hitters. 

Austin Gray: What was the prompt you used? 

Steve Hunsaker: Dude, G-P-T-I-I fed chat,   📍 GPT a picture of a completed permanent lighting install. And I said make me an ad, , for Facebook placement. This is a permanent lighting business, whatever else. And then it was like, make me a $300 off promo or something like that. And they did, and it looks good. 

Austin Gray: I love it. I love it. 

Steve Hunsaker: We, one thing we didn't touch on is like we got in October and November of last year. I know we talk about Facebook ads a lot. Like obviously I'm a massive fan of like backend automations. Like when you close out a job in your CRM are the closest five to 10 houses, , are they getting, are the closest five to 10 neighbors of the job you just closed out? Are they getting a mailer drip for the next four weeks saying we just did your neighbor, or installed your neighbor or did a whatever else?

Like I'm a big fan of like automations like that. I'm a massive fan of Google Maps. If you're doing less than a million dollars, there's a lot of, like all of the home Service Accelerator people, we have a 15 module Google Maps bootcamp that I actually made with Bodhi from Stryker Digital.

And then if they're like, typically the way it works is if they're in home service accelerator, they're probably doing like less than 2 million a year. And so what happens is like we get them there and then they go use Stryker after, like that's the idea. So I think we funneled one guy or two guys from Home Service Accelerator into Bodhi or something like that. But so I'm a massive fan of Google Maps, I am not like impartial to Facebook. We will do branded yard signs and customer's yards, A-frames outside of the vehicles, fully wrapped vehicles, , crazy gift card campaigns for referrals with if you give us a referral, we'll give you a hundred dollars to a steakhouse, , like aggressive, stuff like that.

So I know the conversation was largely about Facebook and Instagram, but 55% of our income for my Christmas light business last year came from organic. Five years ago, 95% of it was coming from paid. So it went from all of my traffic in year one. All my leads obviously were from paid, , 95%. And then it went in like the eighties in year two, seventies in year three, sixties in year four. And then in year five it was 45% was paid ads, 55% was organic, meaning like you can talk about ads all day long, but if you don't have one, you're not doing a good job. And you're not asking for all of the basics, photo reviews, gift card, campaigns, automations, all that jazz, then don't even bother.

Austin Gray: I'm with you on that. So the way I like to think about that is when I started my business, the first thing I needed to do was get my website in place. So it's boom, get the website built by a pro. If you've got the background, I don't know if you build your own, but like for me, I just didn't wanna spend my time. It's like 1500, 2500 bucks. Whatever. It's like way better to just move faster, in my opinion. Get it built right. Get the SEO optimized, especially for your basic service pages. Then go set up your Google business profile. And I'm a huge fan of Google business profile listings, like with a pin in the area.

And the reason I go in that order before ads is because you wanna have that baseline set, because that's gonna be the foundation for where you ask for your reviews for sure. So youre gonna create this flywheel, right? And you gotta set your foundation. Then once you set your website, Google Business Foundation. I knew that SEO would be powerful three years down the line and the best time to start SEO was yesterday. So I started SEO right out the gate. I told Bodhi and those guys what I wanted to optimize for. Here we are, we get a ton of organic at this point too. But then the next step was going to paid because you can get, once you crack the paid code, you can start getting leads faster.

And to your point that you talked about in the beginning, which is why I knew I was gonna love this conversation. You're getting brand awareness as well. I can't tell you how many times we have a website lead. They come in and they're tracked as a website lead. And I don't have Hiro, so I can't specifically track this. Our sales person though, does ask the people, where did you see us? They're like, oh, we see you on Facebook all the time. The awareness that you can grab inside local with Facebook and Instagram ads. Just builds this flywheel. So you're gonna get leads, like you said, to your point, and you're gonna get more people talking about the business.

So then whenever you actually go get the leads and close the jobs and provide the five star service, then you get the review on Google. Now that algorithm starts working for you. Exactly. Over here. You've got the paid algorithms working for you as well. If you're doing all of this, my bet is that very few people in, especially in local service business, especially in your industry, in your market, very few people are doing this on like covering all the bases. So if you do this, your chances of success drastically increase. 

Steve Hunsaker: Massive. It's the bigger businesses that I talk to, like the guys that are really they're very big about like the difference between like front end selling systems and backend selling systems. Like it's not quite a backend selling system, but it somewhat is like you get the customer from one thing. How are you squeezing the juice out of that customer into a thousand different things? Like you got 'em from organic, but now you're getting the Google review with the five star, with the photo, whatever else. And now it's just it keeps building and building. But it's, dude, it's really funny. Let me show you like before we go, we talked about , I just like to be super transparent about my business. I know my competitors will probably watch this. I don't care. I'm already a step ahead baby. , if you look at my, , map ranking, so this is my Christmas  light business that I've had for whatever, I have 68, 5 star reviews, but there's a ton of photos.

This is how I rank for commercial Christmas light installation, like pretty good. Then this is the permanent lighting brand. I started three months ago. Like we're already ranking like one to five in the vast majority of the place we wanna rank for permanent Christmas lights. And I started it in March. Like March. But I just follow the structure. It's like every customer leaves us a not every, actually, I can't even, that's an exaggeration, but like we are aggressively trying  to get photo reviews. Like we are aggressively trying to get thought out reviews we're explaining to the happy customers at the end of the job, just how impactful that is for us.

And then explaining that to them. And because you did such a good job at the job, the law of reciprocity is coming in and they're like, the least I, these guys are way over served, least I can do is write 'em an ice review. And they told me that photos are really important, honey, go snap a photo tonight. And like the fact that we went from zero to that ranking over. Three months on Google Maps is like pretty telling.

Austin Gray:  I wish Buddy was on here. Or to jump on and we'll have to do a live with the three of us here. But I think I saw a post from him lately, and I believe he's told me this in the past, like, whenever you're taking photos, get your equipment that's branded, get your trucks that are branded, get your crews who are wearing the branded shirts, the branded hat, and make sure that you're taking that photo from that location. I don't remember if it was Bode or Andy who told me this, but if I'm not butchering it, it's the Google algorithm reads the geolocation data associated with your photo and where you took that to further verify whether you're an actual service. Provider in that service area that you say you're providing services in on Google Business profile and your website. And so when you do that and match it all up, you're just like music to the algorithm's, ears. 

Steve Hunsaker: Yeah. The backend of like, when you take a photo on an iPhone, the latitude and longitude coordinates are tracked in the metadata of that photo. And Google definitely sees that. Yeah. Wild. Wild. It's a good time.

Austin Gray: It's a fun time to run a business, that's for sure.

Steve Hunsaker: Yeah, it's, there's more competition than ever, but there's also more bad competition than ever.

Austin Gray: So how long do you think we have in this window of home services before? 

Steve Hunsaker: It's just completely like cost per lead just goes straight through the roof.

Austin Gray: Not to be impartial to what I talk about cost per acquisition. 

Steve Hunsaker: Okay. No. You're right. But like here's a, here's an interesting sort of pushback on that. What takes more skill? Hiring the professional agencies that run Google Pay Per Click and Google SEO for you, or, , creating a high converting like meta ad and testing. A bunch of creatives probably take making the meta ads. And so the only reason I say that is because all of the experts know how to set up Google Pay-Per-Click campaigns. Everybody's on Google Pay per click. The thing that's working right now really is a lot of the like owner base, like more aggressive marketing, right? Like the more aggressive call out video marketing. And so I always tell the guys in home service accelerator, like in anything, in, in any business, it's like, what lever can I pull that? Like for any Star Wars fans out there, if you haven't watched episode three, it's 20 years old, so I'm gonna spoil it for you.

When Anakin and OB one are fighting at the end and he is Anakin, don't jump. I have the high ground. And he is I hate you. And then he cuts his legs off, he becomes Darth Vader like that is OB one has a unfair and strategic advantage there. It is unfair in that setting. I firmly believe that my skill on Facebook and Instagram ads and my processes are unfair versus my local competition. I have an unfair advantage against them. Like you cannot run with me. Locally, you can't even if you got a similar Facebook ad side, like I'm maxing the spend in on Google too, like I'm maxing it, and then on top of that, I'm hiring two more sales guys. I'm gonna have three in-person sales guys this year going out all over town.

And you're trying to quote virtually on the $10 million house in Paradise Valley. Like, all I'm trying to do is I'm trying to find unfair advantages. And that is like the best example is I think that the owner's ability to generate and consistently make good ad content is going to be the great equalizer.

Austin Gray: Hey, what's your perspective on in-person site visits versus over the phone quotes? 

Steve Hunsaker: So if I was not positioned in my business as the high-end white glove service targeting the richest people in the state, , I would be more open to, , virtual quoting and just volume. So the reason I don't, while I was talking about doing in-person quoting, there's probably Christmas light guys out there listening, being like, that makes no sense. My average ticket's $3,800, your average ticket's $$1200. It doesn't make sense for you. It makes sense for me because my average ticket's $3,800. I would not go in person and sell if my average ticket was $1200. And so what guys hear is they say oh, in person wasn't scalable for me. 'cause it didn't work.

They were going too far over town. They weren't building a brand in like the high end areas or anything like that. And so I'm gonna go in person because I have multiple five figure residential ins installation jobs that there is no chance in hell they're ripping that over a phone. Like they're not ripping, like they're just not maybe you could get some of it, but you're not getting at scale what you want. Because I quoted virtually in year one. And our average ticket was like, I'm gonna butcher these. There's videos about this other I have done PowerPoints like this on YouTube before, but our average tickets from year one to year five went from like incrementally from like 17 or $1800 bucks in year one to 3,800 in year five.

So it's like $1700 to $2000 to $2,400 to $3,100 to $3,800. Like I changed to a in-person selling model between year three and four, knowing that I could get more out of it. So I'm an in-person guy, and when I speak at Christmas, like conferences or anything like that, a lot of guys push back on me at that, to which I will say, this is not arrogance, it is not bragging, it is not whatever. There are plenty of ways to skin a cat, but my next point being like, if it if remote works for you, great. My next point was like, what's your average ticket? And then they're, oh, our average ticket's $1,500. You are correct. You should not be quoting in person. My average ticket is $3,800. I will continue to quote in person. That's my soapbox on that. Love it.

There's so many different models though. Dude, there's, I'm not even that big. Like we do $800,000 in a two month period. I have met guys that have businesses in the Christmas light space that are doing high seven figures a year, and you've never   📍 heard their names or seen a single piece of content about them ever. So there's levels to this thing. Those guys are probably not selling in person. 

Austin Gray: Oh, you don't think so? 

Steve Hunsaker: No. I, a lot of these guys got really good backends. Like some of these guys quietly went to China, got their own, like once they got big enough, they got their own volume. So they're getting product for, 50 cents a foot, 60 cents a foot. They're selling it for $4 a foot, $5 a foot. Their numbers make sense. They got 10 99 employee or 10 99 crews that are just subbed out like crazy. Completely different model than mine. Completely different model. But shoot, there's a commercial guy in my market that's doing like high seven figures a year, all commercial, going all over the country. They go to Washington to do a commercial job out of shopping mall for mid six figures. They'll go to they'll pay for 20 crew members to go stay at a place in September in all over the country if the ticket calls for it. So there's a lot of different ways. So when I make, when I give this advice, you have to also, or like my feedback, you have to also understand just because it works for me doesn't necessarily mean that it's like the rule book for what you should do. I'm just sharing just simply off of this has worked for me and I don't think my opinion's gospel. We probably do a lot of stuff wrong too. 

Austin Gray: That's the only way you figure out how to do stuff is to go and do it wrong. Facts. I've done plenty of Facebook ads wrong, but when you find the one that's working, it's just pour gas on that fire. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, one thing we didn't talk about was setup on the backend. I know you mentioned, , the advanced, what's it called? Advanced placement. Oh, for Facebook ads? Yeah, for Facebook ads. So are you just picking the zip codes and then targeting based off that? Or are you using that advanced feature? Like what's your It's kind of area dependent. 

Steve Hunsaker: I like to go, I like to go zip. I like, sometimes I even I don't hate the pin dropping either. You drop a pin on like the map. But I think a lot of people overthink it. So a lot of people think oh, maybe I did the location wrong. Oh, maybe I should have done city instead of zip. Maybe I should have targeted just 30 year olds to 60 year olds. No, your creative sucked 90% of the time your creative sucked. And this is also from a guy who I have an online business that spends a lot of money on Facebook ads a day. Like a lot, like I have ne I will never pay for a flight again.

That's how much we spend on Facebook ads a day. So I'm also coming to this from I run ads at the national level to everybody in the US in one business, and I also run ads at the local level. And I can tell you both sides very little about targeting at this point. It's all about the creative. But , to answer your question, it's a lot of like zip targeting, pin radius targeting whatever else. Some guys like have trades where they want to target the whole city. Like some, sometimes it makes sense, like it's kind of area dependent. But I would recommend starting smaller than you think and then expanding. 

Austin Gray: And when you say starting smaller than you think, are you getting neighborhood specific?

Steve Hunsaker: It's harder to do that. Like it's harder to do that and it's so much of it's testing. Like I, I push back on like your audience is. Everywhere in the country. And so like somebody in, rural West Virginia is gonna hear me and this doesn't make any sense. And then somebody in Houston's gonna hear me and be like, oh, like that makes more sense. So I would say like rule of thumb is like start in the, go to chat GPT or whatever, download like the highest earning zip codes in the cities you typically like to target that are close enough to each other. Put all those zip codes in, go zip code targeting first. If you don't wanna get that granular, just drop the pin, like the physical pin in the area you want to be in. Then just shorten the radius to five, 10 miles. It'll tell you what your estimated audience size is on the bottom and then just go from there. 

Austin Gray: Nice. Okay. 

Steve Hunsaker: But like for example, advantage Plus targeting, I have a campaign ripping with Advantage Plus targeting on, and then I have campaigns ripping with it off. So it's what's the one factor? That's probably the difference. My creatives not bad. 

Austin Gray: Okay. Give people like three different, or a couple different ideas of creative, just like real quick and I'll, I can go first. One thing that's worked for us is before and after, Hey, does your property look like this? And you want it to look like this? Keep your face in it. Keep the back of the property where it's like messy. This is specific to land clearing. And then where it's cleaned up, like showing that grabs attention. What else you got? Let's riff. 

Steve Hunsaker: Yeah. One of the best ones we've seen work in every single window cleaning company we've ever , worked with outside of like maybe one or two turds who just never did it, went and filmed it. There's this model, we don't even have a name for it, but it's. What's up, Lackawanna County or it's , if you live in Lackawanna County, and right as you say that, we flash the map of the county on the screen for two seconds. If you live in Lackawanna County, and then the map of that county pops up onto the screen and your windows look like this. And then there's a shutter noise and it's three photos that are dirty windows. It's like dirty window one, dirty window, two, dirty window three, we've got the solution for you. And then it goes, the solution is called insert cleaning company. Here's what you'll get. Then it goes over like a full front to back window cleaning.

Like you just go into what you do full track cleaning, full whatever else. This is just for windows. And then it just closes with and right now the, this is like some gross marketing big brain stuff. Like the next 10 people, it says the next 10 people that respond to this ad will get a hundred dollars off lifetime discount every single time that they get their windows clean. Because these window cleaning companies are selling in our program are selling, maintenance plans like quarterly plans by whatever plans they're trying to get 'em the a hundred dollars off quarterly plan anyway. So it's like a hundred dollars off lifetime discount is just them signing up for the quarterly plan anyway, so like it primes them to get into their quarterly clean MRR product anyway, so that's a good one.

The other ones we've seen work really well, , is like I already hit on a little bit, is like stand in a landmark. Call out the location, who you are, what you do, why you're different expiring. Value proposition at the end, stand in the landmark, whatever's important, whatever is relevant to those people. The other one is once you get better, we have a quick hitter ad that like crushes, it's six seconds. It's a video and it says , Scottsdale Homeowners, the Future is here. And it's my director of operations for the Christmas light business. My co-owner in the permanent lighting business.

He has like a old pair of string lights, like old gross looking Christmas lights and he snaps it in front of the camera and it snaps. And then we do a jump cut and it turns into the track on the permanent lighting business. And it plays like a Drake song at the end. It's so it's like Scotts, Arizona, the future is here. Which, and then it goes to that and it says sign up to, or get a quote for a permanent lighting, , install today. And that is obviously the CPMs on that ad are a lot cheaper 'cause it's six seconds long. So that one just nurtures Theno out of the marketplace. 'cause it's a quick hitter. Boom boom. But that's just off the top of my head, like a few good ones. 

Austin Gray: Great. I love it. Steve, why don't you just give a quick, , overview who you are, what business do you run for all the new people joining? I don't even think we did an intro on this one. 

Steve Hunsaker: No. , My name's Steve Hunsaker. , I've owned three home service businesses. I just turned 30, I started my first one. I was 24. Hi. I have a Christmas like company that is to my knowledge, the largest residential installer in my market in like the cities we are in. We do about 800, a little over $800,000 in a 52 day selling period. Have about 30 employees at peak season. And then in my off seasons, I own the home service accelerator. Basically what that is I take all of the processes and systems that I do marketing and sales wise in my business when I have the junk removal business, when I have the Christmas light business now, when I have the permanent lighting business as well. And I take every single process and system that I have in my businesses. Our Facebook ad strategy, our Google map strategy, our signage strategy, our nurture strategy, anything like that. And I, me and my team essentially come into all different types of home service businesses and implement those exact same systems in their businesses.

So the big drivers Facebook ad strategy, we're firm believers that you do not need to pay an agency a monthly retainer if you're doing less than a million dollars a year in sales. Unlike larger trades, probably even lar probably even more, because the current state of Facebook ads is so creative driven. Even if you sign up with an agency, the first thing that they're gonna do is have you go film content. So if you're paying an agency to click a few buttons that you can click in a day, , 12, $2,000 a month, $24,000 a year to run Facebook ads for you, we're a firm believer that you can learn it yourself.

And the reason I started this business is I did do it myself, and I turned around and productized. What I discovered through pain in five years of hiring dog dooo, Facebook ad agencies, and was like, other home service businesses need this too. So we're essentially a teach you to fish and hold your hand to learn how to fish as a business. And then as opposed to you getting ripped for a two to $3,000 month retainer, , for the rest of existence, to just do something that you're gonna have to do yourself anyway. So that's the model as a whole. 

Austin Gray: Sweet, this is what the third time we've been on the phone today and we've riffed for an hour each time. This has been so much fun. There is so much yet so little to Facebook ads at the same time. Like it's pretty simple whenever you break it down. And what I've heard from you today is one, be willing to allocate enough budget, which is what I heard you say, at least $75 a day. 

Steve Hunsaker: It's all trade dependent, like absolute worst case, like $50 to $60 bucks a day. Yeah. But you just have to realize that it's gonna take you longer to get the results you want the less you spend. 

Austin Gray: And I believe the other thing I would add to that is it's gotta be market dependent as well. We're in a small town, we run 50 bucks a day. I think I've just stuck with that since I've started. We just don't have a lot of competitors in the space. Like very few businesses are even running ads here. So I think if you're in a market like that, you're probably gonna get data faster with the lower spend. But if you're in a market like you are in or if you're in a big city, like you're gonna have to spend some more to get the data. And I guess the thing that I would add here is just understand that this is an investment and it should be viewed as a long-term play. Like it's not just gonna be a quick hit fix of Hey, I need to flip on Facebook ads this month and get some leads. This should be, if you're gonna dive into it. You should be ready to allocate some time and effort and energy into figuring out what you've just talked about, which is creating the creative, define creative for us real quick for people who don't know the definition of that. 

Steve Hunsaker: Yeah. The creative is in its simplest terms, the end thing that the prospect or customer that is scrolling through Facebook or Instagram sees it's the ad itself that they see. So it's the video, the image, and the text associated with your ad. So that's like everything you're targeting everything. That's the backend, like all the creative is what is the video image and text that the customer sees as the ad on their timeline. 

‍Austin Gray: And then the last thing I heard you say today is, if you're gonna jump into this, be willing to at least test three or are you saying a minimum of five different forms of creative?

Steve Hunsaker: Worst case. Three. Three creatives. Like worst case you're gonna get ideally I'd say four, but if we look at the people who get the best results in home service accelerator, it's the people that's, that have put out the most creatives. That's like the universal law.

Austin Gray: Cool. Cool. All right.   More people are joining almost at a couple hundred here. 192. 

Steve Hunsaker: It's up. Gang. Welcome. Welcome in. 

Austin Gray: It's all from X too. We've got four people from YouTube here 188 from you. , From X. 

Steve Hunsaker: Oh, that would make sense why no one, does X even offer them the ability to ask questions on X? 

Austin Gray: It does. What's interesting though, that you asked that when I initially. Got this platform, I thought that it was marking out X and the last time I did a live stream, somebody from X commented and Bodhi commented from X here Owen. Oh, and you got a stump grinding business, right? 

Steve Hunsaker: Yeah. It says stump biz. Yeah.

Austin Gray: Oh, and you have any questions specifically for Steve?

Steve Hunsaker: I feel like the stump business  on meta ads would crush. I feel like that's like the easiest 'cause you have the satisfying, you have the satisfying thing in your business like. The toughest business to run ads for, in my opinion, is like a business that doesn't have an amazing before and after. Like junk removal is hard to run Facebook ads for because the befores are so disgusting that it's oh, what are you putting on my screen? So but like dude, a stump grinding. I watch those Twitter stump grinding things all day long. Who's the one? , Is it Ty? Ty Tyler Mumford.

Austin Gray: Tyler Mumford. 

Steve Hunsaker: I met him on the podcast a couple times. He's awesome. Tyler. That dude is so awesome. That guy. I was DMing him today. That guy has the best owner generated content on X. No one even comes close. I love that guy's content. 

Austin Gray: Yeah, and he's just, he's an even better person too. That's what makes it so awesome. He is like such a genuine dude, and he literally just shows up every single day and puts in the work, played college sports too. And it's just there is no secret to this, right? All these things are. Like Facebook ads are tools to help you succeed, but nothing even including Facebook ads is gonna substitute for you showing up and putting in the work day in, day out. If you gotta see Ty, he's blowing up because he's literally doing multiple jobs a day, hustling as hard as he possibly can. Like the dude's slamming an energy drink in the middle of the day. He'll, he sent me pictures before and he is guess I'm living the contractor life now. But he'd like, he's so amped up for it, and it's so awesome to watch because he is literally out there creating a great lifestyle for himself and nobody's holding him back and he's not making excuses, which is awesome. 

Steve Hunsaker: Yeah, no his content is it's incredible. There's someone else on Facebook, or excuse me on X I've been watching, I've been seeing a ton of their stuff. I can't. I cannot remember who it is, but if they come to me, I will give them a shout out. 'cause I'm new to X. This is this is probably like month four or five on XI, it's been a good time. It's by far the best like small business, midsize business community out there. No other social platform even comes close. I don't know what it is. It's like the four you page is just better. I don't know, but X is the leg goat. 

Austin Gray: I also just think it's that's where people like us are hanging out, meaning us as small business owners who are actually in the local service or home service space. I think I agree with that. And I don't know about you, but dude I haven't logged into my Instagram in years at this point. I only go on Facebook marketplace when I'm taking my morning crap just to look for, , like skid steers and trucks for our business. It's the only thing I use Facebook for, like I'm a firm believer in like right now, you're either consuming or you're creating. So I consume my content on X because there are a lot of other smart people on the platform who are offering, like they, they're just freely brain dumping their strategies that they're using to grow their business. So I view this entrepreneurship thing as a long-term game. I'm looking to get better every single day. And so I actually think spending time most of the time on X, as long as it's curated, is a good use of time or to kill some time here and there. But I will come back to like your only. You can only be doing one of two things, either consuming or creating. So if you're consuming the Facebook or Instagram content as a consumer, you're likely just getting fed a bunch of fluff unless Steve's trying to sell you Christmas lights.

Steve Hunsaker: Dude. Yeah. I will say like I, maybe my Twitter algorithm, my Twitter a is getting dark. Like I gotta, I really, it's dude, it's like half, , business stuff, half like wild political commentary. Like I, which I don't, which I want less of, so I gotta start clicking do not disturb, but I know or do not show me this or whatever. But I know when they're showing it because I interacted with it. I just do, I'm not like retweeting stuff, but I know I'm getting it because I interact with it. But no it's mostly business content for me, which is good. But dude, I was actually, one of the things you just said was interesting.

You were talking about , X is like the best place to, for guys like us to get around. I was thinking about this the other day when I was walking my dogs, like I was thinking about like the amount of free information that I have access to as an entrepreneur now in 2025 is like absolutely unmatched to even somebody like 10 years ago, but really 20 years ago. The fact that like I can go on YouTube or X or anything like that and I can go from your podcast or your show or your YouTube videos straight over to an Alex from Ozzy video, go back to x and see a thread of an e-comm guy that built a $200 million e-comm business. And just like he's brain dumping on a timeline like 20 years ago. You just didn't have access to that. Like it, it's, so I was thinking is it more and I'm curious what your take is do you think the baseline competency of competition now is just so much higher in business and more competitive than it was 10, 15 years ago, solely based on lack of info? Or do you think it's just there's more pretenders now than ever before?

Austin Gray: Oh, that's a good question. I haven't put a ton of thought, , into it. I still think if you're willing to show up every single day and block and tackle consistently, and by block and tackle, do all the things that everybody talks about on here. It's run Facebook ads, set up your Google business profile, build a website professionally, reach out to leads fast, do in-person site visits with them, ask for the job, and then be absolutely tenacious about delivering five star service. That's the playbook right there. We could just stop the podcast there. If you just do all of that and you repeat that over and over, and over again, and you don't stop, yeah you're gonna win in your market because while there's more information now, I think more people are less willing. I'm hesitant to say this. I do think as a general society, most people are getting lazier, and I may get some backlash for that. What I mean with that is like we have so much distraction that it's really hard for people in today's day and age to be as productive, like physically as they were 10 or 20 years ago.

And so I think that there's more distraction, which leads to more inaction. And so I wanted to clarify like what I mean by laziness there. So what I'm saying is and it goes back to what I talked about. You're either consuming or you're creating, right? You're either scrolling or you're doing, and if you're willing to do all those things that we just talked about. And if you're willing to do that day in, day out, just like Stump guy Ty. Yes. Even though he's taking a few minutes to film his videos. The dude is still banging out like three to five, maybe six or seven, eight, I don't know how many jobs, but like the guy's doing like several thousand bucks a day some days just as a solo owner operator with one piece of equipment in his personal truck, make no more excuses.   

The opportunities are out there in every single market, and this is why I started the podcast because I truly believe that home service, local service, whatever you want to call it, is one of the greatest opportunities right now for people, especially millennials and Gen Z, who have been a part of the let's go run an agency. Let's go do an e-commerce company. Let's build a SaaS business, right? I'm sure plenty of you who are listening to that have had those thoughts or have even tried to start those businesses. I sure did. I can tell you this, home service, local service is way easier. Why? Because the competition. The bar is just set much lower. Yeah. That's just facts. 

Steve Hunsaker: Yeah.   I, and I say that to I don't come on these as like some guru who's got it all figured out. But I will say the stage that I'm at now, like financially comfortable, like everything, everyone need, whatever. But if you look at five years ago I was like super obese. I was like in a psychiatrist's office being diagnosed with depression, which was completely false. I was just lacking. I wasn't doing anything. It was not depression. It was like an animal being trapped in a cage willingly to not do anything. And like I look at now and it's if I look at the five years, it's like I tried to over five years, like I failed at a lot of stuff. I tried to be a professional poker player. I tried to be a Twitch streamer. I tried to do some like business lead gen for a mortgage company. I did tech sales. I was, I didn't fail at tech sales. I just wanted to jump off a bridge. , I did tech sales. I, , started a business in COVID before my Christmas light business called Flock.

And what it was supposed to be was it was supposed to be, , virtual team building for enterprise businesses. I never got a single sale, I never even got a conversation with a company about that. So I still, that LLC is buried somewhere. Like I have ma started and whatever and failed in five different things. But then I found Christmas lights, and it's not because Christmas lights is the thing. I don't think Christmas lights is actually even that great of a business model. It's like I just did something a bunch of times until I found something that worked. That didn't mean I was like bouncing from thing to thing. It was just in my mind. Oh, I, oh, I also started a sports blog that never took off either. I was like, in my mind, I had all these things in my early twenties that was like,   when everybody says just follow your passions. Follow your passions. I followed every passion and realized that I didn't wanna monetize the passions.

Do your passions on the side, like passions don't make money. , What is the Scott Galloway quote? Scott Galloway, , has the stat. It's it's 90% of people in the entertainment industry that are considered like actors, actresses, whatever else, , can't even qualify for some health thing because they make less than $20,000 a year on average. Like on average. So it's like following your passion is what rich people tell. What rich following your passion is what rich people who made it through something that wasn't their passion tell poor young people to do, but they didn't even do it themselves. So my passion though changed. Like my, I started the Christmas life business to make money. I, every business I've ever started was to make money. Anybody that says they started the business to help people and doesn't say and is just full of, you know what? Because if they were just starting the business to help people, then why aren't you just at the soup kitchen every weekend? But I'm a firm believer that it can be both.

Start the business to make money, and I've employed 30 people and in my Christmas life business, , five, five of those, , 30 people have been with, of all the leadership positions have been with me for four years now. Like friends, wives, whatever else, like all of that kind of stuff. That's a new passion that I found that I didn't start the Christmas life business thinking like I could create jobs in my community and have people hitch their wagon to this thing I created outta thin air. That's not why I started it, but that became part of the passion. Then it's the same thing with Home Service Accelerator. I started Home Service Accelerator to make a little bit of internet money on the side outside of Christmas season. It quickly turned into I got dude's wives calling me, telling me like I was about to make him hang it up and go get a nine to five.

That's passion now. And so it's also like we employ people. I have eight employees in that business now, so it's that's also started as a money maker, which is fine, but it can be both. And like my pet peeve dude is when I see these entrepreneurs that are like a hundred million dollar tech companies say I just started sheba.enu.net because I had a passion for blah blah. It's like you started it to make money. You didn't start it so that you could eventually donate 0.1% of your proceeds to the Humane Society. It's not why you started it. So anyway, that's my rant there. I don't know how we got on that, but I'm a firm believer in, like, when I started the Christmas light business, I was fat, unhappy, depressed, and like literally a loser, like a loser.

I was 30 pounds, 40 pounds heavier than I was in college. I was like 50 pounds heavier than I was at all time. I was by every definition of the word, a loser. I had low self-esteem, low whatever else, but I read and I, this is not an it actually is an endorsement. I don't even wanna go woke here. I don't care what he talks about politically. Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules of Life Book is the most life-changing book that a 20 to 22-year-old man can read at that age if they are lost. Now, I'm not talking about the rest of the politics. I don't want to get into it. I don't care. That book is the single in the frame of mind I was at that time in my life.

If I read it now, probably not that impactful at that stage in my life. That book is what I was reading while starting the Christmas life business like. And the baseline message of that book is imperfect action trump's waiting and planning and trying to have the perfect plan that is like. The 200 pages of that book summarized into one sentence. It's just do something. Stop watching every Twitter live. Stop watching every YouTube live, even though we're on it. Stop, like you've watched all the self-help content you need. You've watched the 30 hormo videos. You've watched maybe some of mine, you've watched a ton of Austins, you got the info.

There's nothing else you're gonna get there, but you're spending 30 minutes, an hour and a half, two hours, like mentally. You know what, like mentally pleasing yourself through videos because you think that's work because the dopamine hit you get from like self-help and business content feels like doing something, but it's not. And like I did that for two years. Just like consumption. But it's even a, Ozzi talks about it. If you watch something that's 20 minutes long, 30 minutes long, and you don't make a change. From what you watched, like you don't implement something from it, then it was a complete waste of your time.

And I even think about that still now. Like how many times I get in bed and I turn on the YouTube app on my tv, and I just blindly watch like either some of your stuff Hormoz stuff, , Jeremy Haynes stuff. , Ryan Clog. I'm in Info. So like Ryan Clogs, I've been watching a lot of his stuff. But if I go back and say like, how many of these things have I actually implemented into my day-to-day? It's very few. So that's my soapbox. Just go do something. Anything. I did junk removal for three years. I was picking up people's trash while the Christmas light business was already working in the off season, like going into people's homes, going into I did junk removal jobs for people I went into to college with I was going in and picking up a PI's garbage for him, but it was action. And I learned a lot from that business. I learned a lot about not wanting to be in the junk removal business anymore, but I learned a lot about in general, like from just doing that action versus what I originally thought with Christmas was I was just gonna work three months a year and then retire nine months a year.

That was also depressing in and of itself. But the action, like we are not meant to just sit around like we, like I'm a young man, so I'm gonna speak from the perspective of a young man. Like I do not believe that men young dudes should be relaxing like very much at all. I very rarely take a three day vacation and feel really good by day two. Like very rarely, like I am at my happiest and my peak as a man in like mentally, physically, spiritually, emotionally, whatever. When I am grinding so hard that like, when my head hits the pillow, I'm like, hell yeah. And when my feet hit the ground the next day, I'm like, hell yeah. That's like the stage I wanna be in. I don't get that when I relax. I don't get that on vacation. 

Austin Gray: Me either. Me either. Not at all. I love waking up in the morning. I'm an early morning person, so I get so excited when we get to get up and work and you hit on something, multiple things there. I just believe young men especially are meant to work. It's if you're feeling depressed and yeah, thanks for bringing this up. 'cause I haven't brought any of this up into the podcast before, but dude, I was in the same state I was in, I was seeing a therapist and it was like, dude, why am I doing this? I know what I need to do. I've consumed all the content, I have read all the books. I can tell you right now reading the next book isn't gonna get you to your goals. It's like putting down the books and taking action on the past 20 that you've read and actually doing the thing is going to get you to your goals. And it didn't change for me until I made that, , change. And whether or not I know a bunch of, very successful people still read a lot of books.

I haven't read a book in three years, but it's been because I've been working on my business so unbelievably much. There's nothing more important than just taking the next step in the startup phase. And if you've built a business and you're listening to this, like you probably understand that, but like in the early days, you as the founder are the only one that is going to push that boulder up the hill until you start recruiting and hiring. And then it starts to get easier. And we were talking about this earlier in our, , first call. Like once you start getting people in place on the team. Yes. What did Hor Mozy say or what did you mention? It's like technically easier to run. A hundred million business. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Like they talk about , like they talk about like acquisition.com.

Steve Hunsaker: I am like, I'm the biggest Hormo fan. I get that like he's reached that stage of fame where now it's like cool to shit on him, which is I see it on Twitter every once in a while. I'm like, you're insane. Like you're insane. 

Austin Gray: Anyway, like you can't doubt his work ethic, right? 

Steve Hunsaker: No. No. And like his content, like there's a reason he's the most famous finance influencer probably ever outside of Robert Kiyosaki. He's probably it, he's probably the most famous of this generation. Like he talks about like when they got to a hundred million, the business itself was easier to run at a hundred million solely based on the fact that they could attract and hire killers in every role. And so it became less about like brute force at that point and more about tact and like filling positions and strategy and everything else. I think about like sometimes I feel like my content resonates so well with like sometimes younger guys because three years ago my Christmas like company was doing 300K a year and I didn't have home service accelerator or whatever else. So I can sit in that a little bit, like I can sit in that stage a little bit and I can tell you like since we're talking about like personal finance and everything else here, like my income has grown more in the last, let's call it 400 days, like than it did in the other five years behind that combined or I guess 25 years from that combined.

And it's what's really interesting is it's not that I just am working way harder now. It's like the first step is be the operator. Then the next step is like brute force as the operator until you cannot take it anymore. Then you hire your first employee and then it becomes like, it's not brute force anymore. Now, like no one's keeping you accountable in the office to focus on sales when you have, somebody doing some of the fulfillment for you of the trade now it's oh, I gotta relive, I gotta retool. Like I could just go lay in bed for five hours right now and the job's still getting done, but I'm not moving the business for, that's like how it changes.

And so like now I'm at the stage where both of my businesses do over a million dollars each separately. And so now I'm at the stage where like my best use at , of my time now is not getting on a sales call. Unless I'm testing something or I'm like actively working out a kink, best use of my time is not getting on a sales call, it's not going out on an estimate. Like it's not any of, it's not going and doing a repair of a roof, whatever, like else like that. And I think that's the hardest part because you got this positive feedback loop in the building stage of just brute force work. Then when you like have to take the next step as an owner, you feel like you're being lazy because the positive feedback loop was coming home at the end of the day, covered in dust, and it was like coming home at the end of the day.

And you're like, like I used to have blisters on my hands from screwing in bulbs. Like my fingers would be like rubbed raw from screwing bulbs or like wrapping trees or like picking up people's trash. Now it's like I have to be effective with my time and that's the new challenge that I battle every day. And I'm not gonna lie to you, like in the last six months it has felt like a little bit of like a funk because I'm not getting that like dopamine hit of going on a sales call and closing it and then getting on a Christmas like call and closing it. It's like I have people doing that now and it's really it's a mind fudge. Like you gotta be dialed. 

Austin Gray: Gotta be dog. Let's go back to the early days though. Like for that person. And I know that there are plenty of people, because I've talked to so many people who are in this phase, it's what did you do to just, what did you do to start? Like people ask that all the time, and I'm curious to hear your answer to this, but for me it was, I just made the decision to take the first step towards it, and then I just kept making the decisions to show up every day and keep taking action towards it. And to your point on what you just said, it's yeah, you look back past the last 365 or 400 days and you're like, wow, my income has grown this much way more than it did over the last three or four years. But that's because of momentum, and that's because the boulder is being pushed up the hill by multiple people. But you didn't get there by reading another book. Or listening to another podcast you got there because you were actually willing to start push the boulderer yourself and get the ball rolling. 

Steve Hunsaker: Yeah. And dude, I think you nailed it and it prompted something in me with the imperfect action conversation. I think you nailed it like in the early stage you just gotta do, but I think you and I both probably do the comparison game. 'cause with your podcast and like my stuff now, like you and I both talk to people who are like at the way next tier than you and I are currently. Like you and I are like very similar spots. And I remember when I was depressed and I really want to sit in this because I remember telling myself when I make it, like when I get out of this. I will remember how this felt when I eventually have people ask me to come on their shows. Like I had this internal conversation five years ago. Nobody wanted to talk to me five years ago. I always wanted to talk on podcasts. Like I, I love yapping. Like I wanted to do that, I wanted that. And I remember five years ago being like, when I get there, like I am going to acknowledge that like when the guy gets up there and he is worth a hundred mil and he just says work hard.

I'm like, I'm trying to work hard. Like I am trying, like I'm watching this content. There is nothing that I desire to my core more than to not feel how I feel right now. That was me five years ago. Like floundering, like you said, you were talking to a therapist, dude, I talk to multiple therapists. Like I, like you cannot tell me I did not want it bad enough. This is all I thought about every waking minute of every day. And I'm not sitting here saying I'm a hundred million dollar guy with a house on the beach. I'm saying like, I am rich now because. Five years ago, the only thing that would've made me rich was not feeling that way anymore.

So I am as rich as I ever need to be right now because I don't feel that way the way I did five years ago where I knew that I was gonna I knew that I should have been like the guy, like I knew that I should have been like living in the place that I live now and getting the attention from the girls that I wanted to, that I couldn't get attention from back then. And because I was fat and everything else, like I knew that I was capable and deserved that, and I was so mad and anxious and depressed because I couldn't get there. And so I wanna make sure that anybody listening, this might sound like a little corny, like cheesy, but it's I remember watching like rich people go on Logan Paul's podcast five years ago, or go on Alex Oz's podcast five years ago, or something like that and be like, it's just all about hard work.

And I'm like, dude, no it's not. It's not just about hard work, like it's really not. It is like it is about putting blinders on and like being in this stage of even though this is probably not what I'm going to do forever, I'm going to 110% this thing right now because the alternative is sitting on my ass and still feeling that way. That's the alternative. There's only two choices if you've been depressed or like floundering or oh, in college I had friends and everyone loved me or whatever else. And now you're like at a job you hate or you're not making any money, you don't have a business or whatever else or the business just sucks.

Like I can tell you if it's been happening for more than three months, what you're doing right now is not the answer. So the only logical answer is just brute force do something. And so for me that something was the junk removal company. I knew even in the first day I started, I would not be doing junk removal in a few years. That was like, I had a pickup truck, like I'm just gonna brute force this thing until I get into a better financial situation. I had no idea a YouTube channel was gonna be a thing. I didn't know an Instagram was gonna be a thing. I didn't know home service accelerator was gonna be a thing. I didn't even know Christmas lights was gonna grow to where it did at that stage.

I just knew do something here, something and then just rip it and whatever happens down the road will happen. So everybody's situation's gonna be different, but it's like you just gotta do something. Whether it's the stump grinding, whether it's like you gotta drive for Uber for eight hours at the end of the day at your nine to five to get enough for your stump grinder or your, whatever. You gotta buy Christmas lights, whatever it is, just do something dude. And I just hated hearing like quasi successful or people with a platform say I just worked hard. I was like, man, f you. It's not just about work hard. I've been trying to work hard this whole time. So that's my rant on that.

Austin Gray: Well, Steve, this has been good stuff. We started with Facebook ads. We've, , we've ended with I would ultimately say it's like taking action. So if anybody is in that phase, I've said this on the podcast before and I need to say it more often. I genuinely hope that if you have that burning desire to start the business, and if that hasn't gone away for the last several years and you're continually going to your wife or your girlfriend and be like, oh, I just need to start this business. It's like nobody else is gonna start it for you. You've gotta make the decision to put down the books, take out the earphones. Go do the next thing. I've said this before on the podcast. I hope that this is the last podcast that you listen to before you start taking action. I don't even care if you don't listen to the rest of my episodes here.

Steve Hunsaker:  I hope And the action is ugly or you, what's that? And the action is going to be ugly in the beginning. Yeah, it's gonna be ugly. You're not gonna have, you're not gonna have the branded truck. You're not gonna have you're not gonna have the two, the F two 50, the $$2,500 ram. You're not, like a lot of these guys starting it from scratch. Dude, I hung the Christmas lights the first year outta the back of a Ford Fusion with a gorilla light. Like it's not pretty. 

Austin Gray: No, it's not. No, it's not. Dude, I blew up a , Toyota Tundra because I was pulling my skid steer with a tundra. You can call me an idiot now, right? Nobody does that, and everybody knows you shouldn't do that, but it's some days you gotta be scrappy, right? And the, I got this work truck and it was this old beater Dodge Ram diesel to pull around the trailer and that had issues. And so I, one day I needed to go get a job done and I literally latched the skid-steer on at elevation, and I was driving over to Denver and the freaking thing blew up. Call me an idiot. Like we all do stupid stuff and it's all messy, but it's all part of the journey. And it's what I won't beat myself up over is the fact that, you know what, that was just part of taking action and I was trying to do the next thing to get the job done and do what's right for the customer, right? Everything is gonna be messy to your point in the early days, and it's gonna be like that for a little while. I don't know how we landed on this spot. I'm gonna leave you guys with something. I want Steve to leave you guys with something. I gotta go pick up my daughter from daycare here, and we're gonna get to the rest of our evening, Steve.

We'll have to do this more often on a regular basis. Thank you guys for tuning in. We got 228 people here majority from X. So I do appreciate you guys tuning in. If there is anything specific that, , you have questions on for Facebook ads, I know Steve would love the questions. Feel free to reach out to him on X. What's your handle? , 

Steve Hunsaker:  I just messaged in the chat. Thanks for having me on. , It's at Steve Hunsaker won. Okay. Like Steve Hunsaker, like Atilla of the hun. S-A-K-E-R. 

Austin Gray: So perfect. All right, so I'm gonna leave you guys with one thing. Take the headphones out, put the book down. Go take action if you truly want to do this. Steve, what do you got for 'em? 

Steve Hunsaker:  Oh, you stole mine. I would just say the. The end all phrase is imperfect action will always be planning. Like you have the access to the info. If you're on this podcast like listening right now, very small chance. This is your first home service podcast you're ever listening to. So if that's the case, go rip it. And then the other thing is just if someone else has done it, then that should be every piece of social proof that you should ever have that you can do it too. So it's if you see these branded wrapped vehicles in the business of your trade you're in and you can't get yourself off the ground, they probably know something that you don't 

Austin Gray: rock and roll. Have some fun with it. Y'all, we're gonna wrap this one up. We'll do this again. And , Steve, thanks for joining, 

Steve Hunsaker:  Dude. An absolute pleasure.

 Austin Gray: And listeners, thanks again for listening to another episode of the OWNR OPS podcast where we talk every single week about starting and growing local service-based businesses and services and trades. If this is your first time listening to the episode, go back and listen to some of those episodes where we do have a school group. If you are starting or looking to start your. Own service business. You can join the free school group at school.com/owner ops. That's SKOO l.com/owr ops. Look forward to seeing you in there. Don't forget, work hard, do your best. Never settle for less. 

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