169. How to Make $2M/Year with Local Lead Generation - No Experience Needed!

0:00Are you ready to turn a simple idea into a million dollar business without barring a single penny? Today, we dive deep into the world of entrepreneurship with someone who did just that. From humble beginnings to a thriving cleaning empire, this episode is a goldmine for aspiring business owners looking to make it big with limited resources. This is Ryan Atkinson and you're listening to Helpful Podcast where we uncover the secrets of building and running successful businesses. Today, I am so excited for this episode. We have Ryan Knoll, an entrepreneur who bootstrapped his cleaning business from nothing but an idea to over$2 million annually.

0:35With a background in SEO and digital marketing for Fortune 500 companies, Ryan's not just about cleaning homes, he's sweeping away the competition and he's here to show you how you can do the same. Ryan, from one Ryan to another Ryan, I am super, super excited to have you on here today. It's gonna be an amazing episode, so thank you for being here. Thank you so much, Ryan. Yeah, it's a Ryan Sandwich podcast episode. Let's go. Everyone buckle in for it, because we're in for a good one. So you have Tidy Kosta now, but that wasn't your first business. What were some of your first business ventures that you got into?

1:05Because we were talking before the podcast, like people need to know like your first business is out, it was your last business. So talk to us, what was Ryan Knoll's first business? I just started doing it on my own. I just absorbed books. You know, I got Rich Dad, Poor Dad and Think and Grow Rich and The E-Myth and I just started diving into these books and then just keeping my mind open to opportunities. I eventually got my hands on these like really nice cameras. They were called Canon XL2s. It was like a$5 ,000 camera in like, you know, 2000. And I was like so excited. I started making videos for like the school, like newspaper or whatever, morning announcements.

1:40And eventually I had a friend and this was like maybe a little bit after high school when I tried a couple other like really janky, weird businesses in high school that just didn't go anywhere. And then I had this friend that was like, hey, I've got this guy who's like a, had a weird title that his name is Foster Williams. And he was the change manager for a company called Allied Waste, which was a really huge at the time, the number two garbage pickup company. So waste management's like the number one. And they needed training videos. And I had these really nice cameras. And then my buddy, Andrew, didn't.

2:18So we partnered up together, started this stupid company called Xanadu Digital. So I had this filming business, websites, SEO, all this other stuff I tried, I eventually just ended up getting a job. Having a clean house was always something that was important to me, just as kind of like a high level. I hired a house cleaner to clean my apartment at the time. And I remember it took me like months to find somebody. And it was like, back then, call somebody, they come over, they do a quote, then they'd send you the quote like the next day. Like it was this really arduous process. And this was well into the age of internet and Uber and everything else, right?

2:55So I figured there has to be a better way. I got on Craigslist at the time, which is where you would find employees back then. Sounds sketchy now, but you're good on Craigslist, post an ad, found a couple of cleaners. Before I even really knew, I just really lucked out with the first two. Well, one of them was a terrible, the other one was great, like one of the best cleaners I ever had. And I just lucked out getting somebody really good right away. And then because I had this background in SEO and website design, video production. Like I just applied all those skills that I'd picked up over the years.

3:25I made really nice testimonial videos, had a good website, did some SEO on it and just started cracking. And it like launched it. And the only thing that I was really doing in the beginning was some light SEO, Google AdWords and a little bit of Yelp. I was kind of trying a couple other things like Thumbtack, paying attention to what worked and what didn't, cut everything else back and just went straight ahead with the things that were working, which was local SEO and Google AdWords at the time. So you launched this company basically because you understand the process. Like it's a little tedious.

3:56I see an opportunity here. So it sounds like you really doubled down on like the SEO, good customer testimonials, like that type of stuff. Let's talk about revenue in year one. You're doing all this, you're getting launched, you're hiring. What did revenue in year one look like and how has it grown since then? That first year we ended up, you know, between July and December, I literally had my Stripe page up, so I'm trying to give you as accurate as numbers as I can. I think we made about 40, 50 grand. That's pretty good in that short amount of time. Yeah. But by the time we got to December, we're doing about five grand a month.

4:28And it was just because we were doubling down on our revenue and we had a really good cleaner. And I think that's a piece that a lot of people miss is that really good cleaner, people didn't want to go anywhere else because she was doing such a good job. And I hired her as an independent contractor. I didn't really give her a lot of training aside from a checklist that I had. I don't even know what I was doing making a checklist. I didn't know anything about cleaning. I literally knew nothing aside from me cleaning my own house, which is not enough. But yeah, so that was year one. And then by year two, we were doing half a million.

5:00Wow. Half a million dollars in sales in your first basically full year of operation. Yeah, that's crazy. I want to hit on the point. Like, how did you grow from that essentially from doing 5K a month to doing half a million dollars in revenue a year? Was there one marketing tactic? Was it just figuring out? I want to get technical for people that are listening on how do I actually grow like my cleaning business? So talk to us about that. Give us the gym secret here on like how you grew to like half a million dollars in revenue. Yeah, I don't know how in the weeds you want to get. I can give step by steps.

5:29But the most important thing, in my opinion, is people hear something like, oh, you should be doing social media. You can get a lot on Facebook. You can do a lot on whatever. And they just go dive in and they start doing it. The most important piece to marketing, whether you're hiring an SEO person or pay-per-click or social media, is you really need to keep track of your numbers. And what I mean by that is just understanding, I spent this much and I made this much back. So when I started, I didn't know what I was doing. And I would give this same advice to anybody right now. Okay, I'm going to do this$1 ,000 thing I'd have made$10 ,000 on and just keep doing it, like kill everything else.

6:11Just do that one thing until you hit the ceiling. And it'll become pretty obvious like, oh, I'm doing really good at Google AdWords. Spend more, spend more, spend more, grow, grow, grow. And then you hit the ceiling and then all of a sudden your ROI starts inverting and it goes from I'm doing 10 to 1 to now I'm doing 5 to 1. And that's when you have to just kind of turn that back to wherever that 10 to 1 was because eventually there's no more demand outside of what you're spending. So you have to kind of turn it back down to wherever that comfortable spot is where you're paying what you should be paying.

6:48When you hit that ceiling, that's when we can start looking at that list I gave before. There was some, I doubled my money, I 10X my money. If we had the 10X my money, we hit the ceiling with that. Let's go find the doubled my money one and start investing in that. And when you're very early, that's what makes sense. As you get bigger, you can start doing radio and TV and things like that that are like brand awareness. You're not tracking as much, but that makes all your other ads more effective. But in the beginning, it's direct ROI. I'm spending money on this. I made my money back. Nothing else matters because you're gonna burn through your cash so fast if you're not careful.

7:25Hold up, before we continue with Ryan, let me ask, are you finally ready to launch your first business? If you said yes, I want to introduce you to the Uflip Academy. Unlike other business programs out there, the Uflip Academy is designed to practically guarantee our students to get real results. Take Damian Kohler, for example. He has landed more customers than he can handle in only two weeks. That's because inside the Uflip Academy, we provided everything he needed to succeed. And now we're offering the same thing to you. I'm talking about programs taught by real entrepreneurs, a community of people who won't let you quit, and so much more.

7:59To get all the info and start your 10-day free trial, click the link in the show notes below. I'm curious, now if someone's starting a cleaning business, what would you advise them if they could focus on one channel because you have seen consistently, obviously it inverts at some points, but what's one channel consistently for you that has worked just so people starting a cleaning business knows here's kind of an idea to try out right away. So my biggest thing, when I'm starting a new business, I've purchased a couple in the last few years and done things like this. The first things that I always go to is local SEO.

8:31And this is specifically for home service businesses. Like if you've got a retail shop, a bar or whatever, anything that's local based, and I tend to gravitate towards local companies just because of less competition because you're only competing against homies in the hood, not homies nationally, right? So local SEO is very important to me. And I always start that right away. Don't expect to see return on investment on that right away, but you can get away with doing it for very affordably early on and you can almost learn how to do it on your own like there's plenty of youtube videos out there teaching people how to do it if you hire a company it'll be like 600 bucks a month or so you could probably learn how to do it on your own but it just depends on where you are in life you're either paying for somebody to do it and that's just paying for their time or you're putting your time into it i suggest putting some time into it just to kind of learn a little bit but that local seo piece is really important And what that means when I say local SEO, because you'll go talk to an SEO person and they'll be like, yeah, we do quote unquote local SEO.

9:35But they're talking about like the keyword pizza in Nashville, not the word pizza ranking in the map pack in a smaller radius. And I think it's become more popular to do that kind of stuff. But I've seen a lot of SEO companies that are like, this is a$2 ,000 package that I'm going to give you. And they're not even going to touch the stuff that I'm talking about. So when it comes to ranking in Google Maps, stop me if I'm just getting off on a nerd tangent here. But what you want to do is make sure that you've got your website connected. If you're a home service business, have an address. And people fight me on this all day long.

10:16but having the address gives you the ability to do the second thing or the third thing which is citations a citation is anywhere on the internet that your name address and phone number appear so if you're on yelp that's a citation it'll say tidy casa it'll have my address it'll have my phone number anytime you see that name address phone number the nap information that's a citation you think like oh i'm gonna go build two or three of those you really need like 200 to start ranking so there are services that can do that for you and they're very affordable or you got to find an seo person that's at least got that as part of their zeitgeist of i'm going to do this for you so that's the one thing i would ask if you're hiring an seo person but i would just focus on getting yourself into that map pack because it's a very prominent spot in the search and i can't stress it enough like it'll take three to four months to get into there but once you're in there you're getting calls and you're making money.

11:11The other piece there is you want to have more than 40 reviews. So 10 reviews is like where I started doing some optimizations. 40 reviews is where you really start getting calls at like 10 X's after 40 reviews. And it's like a chicken and egg thing. Like, how can I get 40 reviews if I don't have 40 reviews? Like I'm just stuck in this limbo of I've only got 30. I literally made a fricking spreadsheet of all my family and friends that I hadn't talked to in like 10 years, like from high school, like, Hey, Justin, remember when we were like in art class together? That was so fun. Hey, can you leave me a review real quick?

11:48I love that. And it worked. Like, you know, I was getting a lot of natural reviews, but like literally my first review is my mom. I was just like, Hey mom, I need you to leave me a review. The moms will always support. You always want to get mom's support at the gate. And it like felt awkward, but I got over that 40 reviews. And as soon as I hit 40, I went from, I was getting two or three calls a day that I was getting like 10. Like it was a big, big jump. So if you can just focus on getting reviews on that Google local business thing, it's called your Google business profile, build citations, make sure you've got an address.

12:19So that citations do something for you. And then make sure you have all that information on your website, name, address, phone number, and what you do. That's a really weird thing to say. Like put what you do on your website. I did SEO for years. I was managing an SEO company that had a thousand small business clients. I remember one time I, um, we're like, why isn't this client ranking? I was taking a look at it and it was like a Italian restaurant and you go to their website and they're like, we're just four guys that got together and had beers. And we thought it would be really cool to start a business together.

12:52And they literally had like 10 ,000 words that said nothing about what they serve on the restaurant. So just make sure like every service that you offer, like I do home cleaning, deep cleaning, spring cleaning, move in, move out cleaning, all has its own page. And you write some content on that. Give me like a thousand words about what's a move in, move out cleaning and why is it important and whatever. You do that stuff, you're going to be ranking locally. That's amazing. I want to talk about that specific piece as well. If I go to your guys' website, I think it's like personally, I think it's very well built out.

13:26The branding is there. It looks clean. It looks really good. I'm assuming this is mindful. To stand out in this industry, an easy way to do this is to make a website where it's easy to book. It's easy to get in contact with you. The branding looks on point. Talk to us about that mindfulness that you had when building out the branding and how other people should take that into account as well. It's a really, really great question. so the one of the biggest things that you learn in digital marketing is it's so many business owners go in and just say like oh no you can do that feature on my website you just have to click here and then click on this menu and then go down here it has to be so freaking obvious like literally what i do is i just kind of like blur my vision like just get everything out of focus and then look at the website and say do i know where to click if my vision is not in focus like can I be intoxicated?

14:18Like, can I be three Jack and Cokes deep looking at this website and still book a service? That's kind of the first piece going into it. Like, make sure that it is dead obvious. Like if you go to my website, not on a desktop, but if you're on a mobile phone, there's a little button that pops up that's right next to your thumb that's got a phone on it and it jiggles. And I put it right next to if you're right handed and you're holding it at the bottom of your phone right next to your thumb on your smartphone so you can click and call. It only is there during business hours because, you know, so if you're looking at 1 a.m., don't be like Ryan's lying.

14:51It's only there during business hours because that's when we can actually pick up. Otherwise, we're pushing people very much to just book online and answer other questions there. So that's the first thing, is to make sure it's easy. Don't assume they know anything. Don't assume they know anything about your service or what's entailed or what the next steps are. and don't do the like, hey, click to give us a quote. Just give them the quote. Oh, interesting. Like whatever it is, right? That's kind of the first piece is make it dead simple, dead easy. I love it. The second piece is you'll do all this work to set that up and then you'll go away.

15:25You'll get to work doing something. Things will change in the business. Things will move around and then all of a sudden things kind of stop working as good. Maybe we put something in place or something changed. We added a new rule and things start to get messy and it'll happen when you're not paying attention. So my big thing is to make sure that you go through this process as if you are a customer regularly, like just book and use your own service as much as you can. So I get a cleaning from my company, Tidy Casa, once a month. and I wasn't doing that for the longest time because my instinct was if I'm cleaning my house, that's one less opportunity for me to go out and make money cleaning somebody else's house.

16:17So, you know, I'll still pick like a spot that's very inconvenient. Like everybody wants Fridays. I don't go on Friday, right? But just going through that process, I was like, huh, this text message that I'm sending doesn't really get me on the information I needed or this email could have had a link to add this to your Google calendar and it didn't. So the more you go through that and just live it as a customer and just make it a habit, like once a month, just try to go through and book your own service and see how hard it was, see how much friction was in there and just remove any of the friction, remove any of the confusion and just make it a regular practice to not get lazy on that.

16:52One question that I have in mind is talk to me about like new business that you guys get versus like recurring clients. Like is this model set up to get you guys recurring clients? Talk to us about that. Like what percentage is new business versus existing business like monthly? Yeah. So about 70 % of what we do is reoccurring. Wow. And this is like really where the rubber hits the road in this business because it's small margins. It's a lot of people. It's kind of a low ticket. our average cleaning is about 250, which is pretty typical for the industry. That's not outrageously high or low. It's just kind of right in the middle, but you only grow with the reoccurring.

17:30And I think that is such an important thing when you have a ticket that's sub a thousand dollars is it's so hard to push for sales on something that's$200 and making a lot of cash. So, you know, I also own a carpet cleaning business. Very different model because it could be a$200 ticket, but it doesn't have that reoccurring. So you got to get that ticket price up to somewhere over$1 ,000 with upsells and packages and, you know, buy 10, get, you know, the last one free kind of things to try and push that ticket price up. So for us, what we've had to learn to do over the years is 100 % focus on the reoccurring.

18:12Nothing else really matters. The one-time cleanings are kind of okay for sort of filling in the gaps occasionally, but they're more work. They're more challenging customers. We're dealing with people that we're not familiar with. We haven't been to their home. When it's a reoccurring, it's less customer service. It's less marketing. Like our marketing costs, like we used to have it. It was like 20 bucks. We could get somebody to call. Nowadays, it's like 40-50 just because inflation or whatever's happened. Google's trying to worry that ChatGPT is going to eat their lunch. They're just trying to, you know, rake us all over the coast.

18:46But cost per acquisition has gone up substantially. So especially when that happens, reoccurring is where we make the money. One reoccurring customer is worth about$3 ,000 to$4 ,000 a year. A one-time customer is maybe worth$400. Interesting. So I'm curious, is this like a weekly thing that people are doing then? Is it monthly? I'm curious just from that specific part of the business model as well. Monthly is the most popular. And then it just kind of goes down from there. So we offer monthly, bi-weekly, and weekly. Weekly is almost too aggressive for most people's houses. Like you kind of want to give it some time for the dust to settle.

19:24Otherwise, the before and after contrast just isn't quite there. And it gets really expensive for paying every week. because like we're not going out to somebody's house really for less than like two or$300. So monthly is the go-to. That's kind of where I've got some dust. I can see some before and afters. It feels good that I paid for this service. So listeners, we're going to dive into our fan blitz questions here in a sec, but Ryan, I just want to ask you like one more question. Let's build out like a three quick part plan. Like let's say someone wants to start a clean business. Ryan, you just crushed the marketing part of this.

19:54Like I am ready to get going on this. What are the steps like I need to take to land my first 10 customers? Sure. So no matter what business you're starting, well, let's just kind of, I'm going to zoom in on home service. I would do two things. First, the fastest ROI you can get is building yourself a good website and starting Google AdWords. It'll take like a month to kind of figure it out. No matter who you work with in AdWords, it always takes like a month to like spend a grand and then customers start calling. as long as you're doing that same thing I was talking about at the beginning, pay attention, make changes, right?

20:31I would start with Google AdWords just because you can just basically buy them. It's gonna be really hard in the beginning because it's expensive and you have to pay money to learn the mistakes and all that. But I like getting that started. If you've got a budget to do that. If you do not, joining a referral group like BNI is amazing, especially if you're like a plumber or a real estate agent, or if you're doing roofing, BNI is a amazing resource that will make you money. The trick with BNI is join a good BNI group. They're not all great. Yeah, I feel that. Yeah, they're self-managed. So you can join ones that are just stink.

21:12And you can join ones that like, hey, I got three or four referrals this month off of that BNI group. So I'm a big fan of that. Outside of that, I would start doing local SEO. and local SEO also takes three to four months to really get working sometimes six depending on where you're starting at but just building up that google business profile it feels like so much business moves through that right now so with this carpet cleaning company I took it over maybe about a year ago and that was the first thing that I did they had a little bit of a google business presence but hadn't really done any SEO I started doing a little bit of very light local SEO, building those citations and things like that, fixing up the website just a little bit.

21:56Then we went from getting like one or two calls a week from that Google page, which is a pretty good Google page to like, we're getting five or six a day now. And it didn't take a lot. It was very light effort and not like even the full Monty of like everything you can do with like pinned images and things like that. I like it. Well, Ryan, that has been an awesome episode right there, but we are going to move to our fan blitz questions. And these are our last five questions submitted from our community. And guys, if you want to join on world-class entrepreneurs, go to www.youtube.com slash upflip and submit your questions there.

22:31But Ryan, ready for our last five questions here? Let's go. Number one, what did you wish you knew before starting your business? Well, I mean, it goes back to, you know, little high school Ryan, right? Like I wish I knew sooner, don't do the work, work on your business and in your business. And it sounds like advice you've heard a million times, but it's there for a reason. It is impossible to grow. You can't do everything in your company. And what makes a company good is the people in it. So get some people in your business. I love that. Number two, 99 % of people don't know this. The first thing that's coming to my brain is about the power of pinned images for local SEO.

23:11That gets very technical. So the other piece that I would say, at somebody with ADHD, something that I've had to learn for myself, being productive can be challenging for me. I have way too many distractions. I got like three monitors in front of me and there's like YouTube on one and video video games on another. I mostly run my business from home, so even more distractions, right? But what I've learned is the very first thing I do in a day has to be something that's hard. And what I mean by that is taking a cold shower, going for a walk, going to the gym. when I start with something that's hard, no matter what it is, it motivates me the whole rest of the day.

24:02And it's a magical thing that happens. You really just have to try it for yourself to feel the effects. But like, if I spend like an hour in the shower, like light a candle and like, you know, just like soap there in the steam for like an hour, my whole day's ruined. Like I don't, it's not productive. Like I just, I'm in that mindset the whole rest of the day. If I go for a jog first thing, whole rest of the day, I'm jogging still. Like mentally, I'm engaged and I'm active. So especially if you're battling with ADHD or trying to be productive or not being productive enough, you know, make your first thing just something that's challenging.

24:38Gym, walk, cold shower, you know, but it's something that you're like, oh, I don't want to do that. And if you can bring yourself to do that, the whole rest of the day is great. That's great advice. That is phenomenal advice. I really like that. Number three, you have that answer this, but again, these are our fan blitz questions. How involved are you in the day-to-day operations? Well, it's been going back and forth. So what tends to happen is you get it to a spot, you put the systems in place, you put the people in place, then it grows to basically it's, you know, you basically kind of build a little jar and then you fill it up and then the jar is full and then it can't get any fuller.