Austin Gray:  Hey, welcome back to another episode of the Owner Ops podcast. This episode's gonna be a solo episode. I just wanted to do an episode to give you guys an update on where we're at, what I've been working on last several weeks. We're getting excited for Bear Claws busy season to come up. We've got a lot of projects on the books.

We added on a dirt crew for this year, and we're adding in some more equipment. I believe we're gonna go with a Bobcat T 76, and it's either gonna be an E 50 or an E 60 for the dirt crew. A lot of the jobs we're getting are. Like smaller residential driveway and septic jobs, and so it doesn't really make sense for us to go into a big machine yet at this point.

We haven't fully made that decision yet, but we're optimizing for the ease of mobilizing at this point. Yeah. For those of you who still mobilize your own equipment, you know that it costs a lot of money to get a heavy haul rig, and we've got a F five 50 and we've got a gooseneck. Tandem dually trailer that we haul our skid, our chipper around and mini excavator with grapple for our forestry crew.

And we wanna be able to do the same with the dirt crew. So we're gonna make a decision by next week. I also just got back from Austin, spending a week down there. I was doing some consulting, helping a land clearing business get started for another entrepreneur who I feel very fortunate to have been able to spend some time around.

He runs a $90 million internet business, and he's a specialist. He's just a great marketer and great at sales and he runs around in the same circles that Hormoz he does. They use the same media buyer and I got to learn a lot from him. And yeah, I initially had an idea for how to do well. I was gonna like document that process.

I was gonna do a daily episode each morning when I woke up and then I got so far deep in the weeds of just building that business that. I totally just forgot and didn't even think about like recording content once I got there. So I believe I recorded an episode on the first day and we published that.

But my hopes and aspirations of having a daily morning podcast episode just went down the drain once we got into it. Yeah, got to go hang out at his office in the mornings and just go through like different funnels and offers and. How to run paid ads, got to go out to his ranch and film some content. I recorded all of our paid ads on iPhone and yeah, I was just trying to soak up as much as I possibly could.

And so here are several things that I learned from someone at. That level of entrepreneurship. It was interesting because I went down there with total boots on the ground owner operator mindset, I'm gonna bootstrap this thing and I'm just gonna go get jobs. So like we had been running Facebook ads for, I don't know, several weeks at that point, and we had several leads in the pipeline and I was just calling and nurturing them and like scheduling 'em for that week that I was gonna be down.

And so once I got down there. I met with several of the leads and showed up on site, had one that would have moved forward. But when you're building a business, you always have this chicken and the egg problem where it's, okay, I have to do one thing and then I have to go do the next thing. So we didn't even have a truck and a trailer.

We had a skid steer with a forestry mulcher down there. But I went and I had this deal. The job, like ready to roll, and I think I was gonna have to make a deal on it. In those early days. You give them your price, you quote it, and then if they're ready to go, like. When I was starting mine, I was just so ready.

I was like, look, I'll give you a screaming deal. Like I'll go knock this out for the next three days for you and I'll charge X amount. My goal is to deliver five star service and I'm just gonna ask that you leave me a five star review. 'cause that's the most important thing for any business that's starting.

And I was just like upfront with like probably my first five or 10 customers like that when I started Bearl and whatever. Some people are gonna disagree with me. Oh, you shouldn't discount your prices. I'm like. The most important thing when you're starting is just to get momentum going. And so that was the approach I was taking.

I was like raring to go. I'm like, Hey man, we need a truck. We need a trailer. You good to go tonight? I had it all lined up with the dealer. I had found some stuff on Facebook Marketplace F five 51st to go buy a big tandem goly, duly gooseneck so we could haul through the mulcher. And I had it all lined up and I go meet up with the guy I'm working with down there.

And we take a left instead of a right. We end up going out to his ranch right around on the side by side, and he says, look, 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.getjobber.com/ownrops O-W-N-R-O-P-S. Here's the deal. It was almost like this. Listen here, young grasshopper, because I'm just geared to go right? I'm geared to just go a million miles an hour. He's like, take a step back. Let's build the system. Let's focus on building the system. That was my main takeaway from that night. We spent probably an hour just driving around on the side by side around the ranch.

If you blaze a million miles an hour, I appreciate the hustle. I appreciate you being willing to go make it happen, but build the system and put the right people in the right places was what I took away from that. So he is like, meet me in my office the next morning. So I went, met with his office and I literally felt like it was, I went to a RN event.

It was all about nailing the offer. It was all about putting together the paid ads, putting together the funnel, and building the sales team, and his perspective was. If you can build your marketing or your inbound lead funnel, and if you can build your sales process, you can go hire people to fulfill the work.

It's just an interesting concept, and that was a big reason why I didn't even think about recording podcast episodes. While I was down there, I didn't even think about documenting the process. Why? Because when I learn something new, it takes me a while to just sit and process. And so for the next few days, all we did was we worked on building the funnel.

We got the ads team in place, we got ads filmed. I worked on recruiting, hiring salesperson and Trey, if you're listening to this, I'm excited that you're on the team power of the internet, right? It's like I did a couple ex posts and had multiple people reach out. Oh yeah, I'm interested in the Austin business.

One of the guys, I won't share any personal information, but like some very interesting and like unique and very talented prospects and we were able to leverage kind of the podcast as a business network to just go build the team. So for me, like my mindset has just opened up to. Obviously the guy, like if somebody runs a $90 million a year business, I have a ton of respect for him 'cause that guy hustles like he's still involved in the day-to-day, like actively marketing, actively thinking about offers, actively thinking about how to build ads. And man, just to learn the lessons from somebody like that was incredible. So here are some lessons that I took away, and here's what I've been working on since I got back last week.

The main thing that I took away was you gotta have your system right, and if you're gonna be in the marketing and sales business, you have to know where all of your leads are coming from. So making sure your tracking is set up. It's very important in the beginning. So since I got back, I've hired a Google tag manager and analytics specialist, and I have them going into my business websites, bearclaw and owner ops, and I'm having them set up custom conversions for every single event.

And look, guys, like if this sounds like a. Craziness to you, like it sounded like craziness to me. I'm not an expert in this. I've just learned up to this point that especially with remote talent, if you can leverage chat GPT to tell it enough about what you need, it can give you an outline for a job description, and then you can go recruit the pro on that.

So I used Upwork, one of the episodes that I recorded last week, actually when I got back. Thomas Rudy with Data Shopper, which that's an interesting business as well. If you're interested in retargeting your website customers. I'm highly looking into it and I would recommend you guys look into it too. I haven't vetted it yet, so all I'm saying is I looked into it and it's very interesting.

Essentially you can retarget with direct mail from website visitors, but back to my Google Tag manager, I just went on Upwork and. Yeah, I hired a guy out of Pakistan for 15 bucks an hour, and I'm having him go extensively through our site and update Google Tag Manager so that we can have custom events, and I basically just interviewed them all.

I'm like, Hey, how do we do this? Like, how do we do this from scratch? Do it like you would on a website that has. Never had any sort of tracking installed, but just know that our end goal is that we want to track as much as we possibly can.

Stryker Digital specializes in SEO services specifically for local service businesses. Bodie and Andy, the two co-founders, have helped me get Bear Claw Land Services to the number one search result on Google inside my state for my specific search term. If you wanna learn more. Visit strykerdigital.com. That's S-T-R-Y-K-E-R digital.com. So he's working on that. The second thing I'm working on is our jobber account.

So inside Jobber I. You can tag your clients based on the type of services you offer. So for us, for those of you who know us and our business, we offer multiple services. And the reason is because we live in a small mountain community. When I started this business, I felt like it was necessary to offer multiple different services at multiple times of the year.

So I have snowplow clients, I also have tree clients, and I also have dirt. Clients. So between forestry and fire mitigation is our tree crew. We've got like driveway repair and septic services on our dirt crew, and then we've got snowplowing in the winter. The interesting piece is that all of these customers can be remarketed to for different services, which would increase the lifetime value of the client.

If you don't understand what lifetime value is, go watch Alex Ozzy's latest video. I just watched one this morning and last night. I've watched it like two or three times, but he coaches this guy on all the way from customer acquisition to defining lifetime value. The second main thing I took away from a week in Austin was that you have to tag your customers and understand who needs what service next.

So if we did a tree service for somebody last year, or if we did fire mitigation work, I. We know that they have a gravel driveway, then I need to be sending them an email campaign, a drip campaign this year that is dripping the different types of services that we offer on our dirt side. So it's like, Hey, thanks so much for your business.

Last year, we just wanted to inform you that we now have a dirt crew and we offer gravel driveway services or septic services, so we need to be dripping out email campaigns based on that. I'm gonna have to wrap this episode up here and jump into dad mode in a couple minutes. But the last thing I learned was that the most important thing you can do as an entrepreneur is spend your time figuring out how to get more leads or better leads.

Meaning if you can get more leads, you have a better chance of converting them to more customers. So where I've been spending a ton of my time is. What does our, what do our Facebook ads look like? What do our Google ads look like in the past? Be transparent. Like I've delegated all this and I've expected the people who are handling that to do a good job of it.

Now I'm understanding that this is a very important thing, and like last year I wrote some of the ad copy. I wrote some of the funnel copy and things like that, but this year, what I learned last week was that you need to be tracking that. Diligently. And if you go back and listen to Sam Sup's episode, this is how he has doubled his roofing business every single year.

Every single morning, the guy inputs how many leads he got and where they came from, and then he tracks specifically each lead and which ones converted to an answered call an estimate. An accepted estimate and a booked job and a paid invoice, so that way he's able to attribute. His paying customers all the way back to where that customer came from.

Did they come from Google? Did they come from Facebook? Did they come from this ad in Facebook? Like he is dialed on that. And so I had an episode probably two weeks before I went down to Austin, and then I got the concept was reiterated by a guy who runs a $90 million business. So I came back saying, this is the most important thing I can focus on right now.

So I wanted to share. These three things that I learned with y'all in hopes to encourage you to one, implement tracking on your website. Just go to your Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager. You can utilize Upwork. Just go search for a Google tag manager expert. You can hire somebody for as little as 15 bucks an hour, all the way up to 150 bucks an hour.

But the most important thing is that you get somebody to implement this on your website or websites. Number two, you want to make sure that all of your client information in your CRM we use jobber and it does a really good job of this. I actually just posted a YouTube video about this called How to Utilize the Tagging feature in Jobber Ty Stump.

Guy Tie was asking me since he just signed up, how to tag. Clients between front yard and backyard jobs, and there's a little intricacy within his business on why he has to delineate between the two. This episode is brought to you by dialed in bookkeeping. Ben and his team provide bookkeeping services, job costing reports, and accurate financial information for the home services industry.

If you're looking to keep your books up to date. Visit dialed in bookkeeping.com/owr ops. When you use this specific landing page, you'll get your first three months 50% off. So I did a how to video if you need to see that. Go search, how to use tags and jobber on my YouTube channel. And then finally, the most important thing.

Right now, at least for me in this phase of business, is to focus on the system and the paid acquisition funnel. So I hope this is helpful for y'all. And I'll do another follow up episode because I know I'm leaving you on a cliffhanger with the paid acquisition funnel. If some of you have not are are not familiar with hor MO'S videos and what he talks about as far as like acquiring customers love him or hate him, the guy knows how to grow businesses.

A hundred million dollar offers a hundred million dollar leads are two books that I have been. Devouring recently, and I've also been watching his case study videos where he coaches other entrepreneurs on how to take people from the million dollar mark to 30 million or the 500 K mark to 5 million. He offers content for how to get more leads, how to bring people in the door, how to build your sales process, how to create offers, and.

The reality is this stuff can work for any business. So I encourage you to go look into that stuff and we'll see you guys in the next episode. Don't forget, work hard, do your best. Never settle for less.

‍