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a lot of contractors ask me how do i find jobs you know how do i get more customers and i tell them that you don't really find jobs unless you're like working for the government or working on big commercial projects where people put out a listing and then you submit a bid along with 50 other companies that's the only case i can think of that you're going to find customers normally for the average contractor the remodeler electrician plumber water well driller these kind of people get found by customers when they're looking for them right and in the old days before the internet this was all done by word of mouth so joe schmoe would want a remodel and he'd ask his neighbor or his friend or his family member hey do you know any good contractor and then they would either get one of two answers they'd get sure i know a great contractor contract this guy or they would get the horror story of oh yeah i worked with a contractor last year and he burned my house down and fled with my wife or you know whatever there's either horror stories or good stories but these days word of mouth is slowing down a little bit it still works and by all means it should be one of the ways that you get customers if you're not getting customers by referral then you're probably not doing a very good job because if you do a great job people will hire you back and they'll tell their friends and family about you because it's tough to find a good contractor and you know this isn't some kind of minuscule transaction like you're inviting somebody into your house they're working on your home which is probably the largest investment you've ever made and you have to live in it all the time so it's a pretty big deal for people and my family or my dad started a remodeling company about 25 years ago and i'm in my mid-30s so i worked on that thing for almost the last 20 years and 10 or so years ago we used homeadvisor i'm sure you've heard of homeadvisor and uh we would buy leads from them and 10 15 years ago it was great we used to get a ton of ton of you know contacts every week we only paid like five or ten bucks for them and we got a lot of work from it but as time went on the you know more and more people that we called wouldn't answer their phone and the leads got more and more expensive and we even found that we were getting a lot of other contractors information or we were getting people that already had a bid and they were just trying to verify the price you know we were getting all this stuff that just completely wasted our time and drained our bank account so we had to look for other ways and you know back in like 2013 2014 things were pretty slow and that's when we created our website um we built a really ugly old website but back then we were like the only ones who did it in our area so we got tons of customers from that and that really kept us busy for a few years but just like homeadvisor over time it started to dwindle and dwindle until we weren't getting very good results from it and that's when i out of necessity learned about this stuff and i learned that the reason that we weren't getting found through our website anymore was because there was a bunch of other contractors in our area that built better websites than us and they were showing up on google on the top of the first page and so they were getting all the phone calls people weren't looking at the second or third page of the google search results and finding us so i had to figure out how to a get my website to look professional and look modern and show up well on these smartphones you know and b i had to make sure that people could actually find us when they were searching so i spent hundreds of hours thousands of hours at this point learning how this stuff works and applying it to our our own business and after some time we were able to get phone calls coming in again and at this point in time we're booked out for about the next two years we haven't even accepted any appointments in the last few months because we're just so busy and all of these people are finding us through google and our website and over the years you know i didn't want to spend all my time doing this so i put together a team to do it for me and once i had this team i was like well i have all this potential here but i mean my project's pretty much on autopilot at this point it only takes a few hours a week to maintain it so let's help some other companies out there and so for the last few years my team's been working with contractors all over the country doing the same thing that they that we do for me which is build a professional website make sure people can find it on google the only other step really is to get some good reviews so that when people go and find you on google they can read some positive things about you and compare you to your competitors and hopefully get a pretty good message you know about you but you can still use things like homeadvisor and if you take a look at google search you'll see that homeadvisor angie's list thumbtack porch house yelp better business bureau all of these companies which i call lead reselling middlemen companies they dominate the first page of google and these companies main goal is only to collect people's contact information so they can sell it to you that's the only value they add and they don't want you to know that if you just had a professional website and made sure that you were found on google you wouldn't need them you can get these phone calls directly from the customers without having to pay per lead and they're also a lot better because if you buy a lead from homeadvisor they're selling it to five other contractors at the same exact time so you're instantly competing with six other contractors on top of that people that put their contact information into home advisor are not necessarily ready to even talk to anybody homeadvisor does not make it clear exactly what's going on you click onto their website they're going to ask you for all of your information before you even see anything they make it sound like you're going to see a list of contractors so you can compare and contrast them but really you don't get to see anything until you've put all of your contact information on it and as soon as you hit send on that form your information is being sold to multiple contractors and not even only through homeadvisor but angie's list owns homeadvisor now so they share the same contact information so looking at page one of google you've got all of these companies that are almost pretending to be contractors so that they can get contact information to sell it to actual contractors and the thing is is if you're an actual contractor you have a huge edge on these companies if you just get a professional website and a google maps listing if you can be found with or above these companies in the google search you're going to get loads of phone calls and i'm not exaggerating you know our clients get hundreds of phone calls every month and you know we don't we only get maybe like five to ten a week but that's way more than we need and way more than we want quite frankly so you know this is where it's at um compared to you know getting your own leads compared to buying them you know there's just a ton of benefits to it first of all the lead quality is way higher you're talking to people that found you that already vetted you they're almost ready to hire you already all you got to do is get them through the process when you get a lead from home advisor you're calling them along with six or five other people they're not even wanting to talk to anybody and that's why most of them don't answer the phone number two is you you control it if you have a website and a google listing and everything you can control the lead flow you can you can turn it up you can turn it down you can use advertisements with homeadvisor you're getting what they give you at any time they can remove your reviews or they can let somebody post a review about you they can change their policies they can raise their prices like you have zero control over what home advisor does so if your business is relying on them then you're pretty much at their mercy and so i mean it's pretty clear for me and i'm trying to get this word out there because i get so many calls from people that are like oh should i use homeadvisor or should i use angie's list or should i use this or that or this and look they're they're all the same they're just companies that are desperate to grab people's contact information and sell it to you and you pay the prices it's it's very expensive for them to show up on the first page of google they pay for advertising they invest heavily in search engine optimization which is what's required to get their website to show up and they pass these costs on to you and that's why their prices go up year after year after year so look that's how i do it that's how most successful companies do it there's nothing wrong with using homeadvisor but it shouldn't be your main source of new customers so if you have any questions you know leave them in the comments um also i'll leave the link to my website in the description so if you want to learn more about what my team can offer you head over there and thanks for watching