How we generate leads – TRF Episode 21

Rhiannon
Hello and welcome to another episode of The Real Franchise, a video series designed to deliver real information, real answers, and real insights into franchising. The series is brought to you by James Home Services Australia. I’m the CEO and Justin is one of our owners and our head of new businesses. Together in this series, we tackle all of the big topics completely unscripted, unplanned and unfiltered.

It’s no sales and no fluff. We just give you information straight up. Today’s topic is all about how we generate leads in this network. Justin a very big topic. Where do you want to start?

Justin
Well, I think a good place to start is the last few weeks I’ve been on holidays and was on holidays. You were, I guess, filling in my role for for some of the time and handling, you know, the we’ll have two weeks or 200 odd people in quite. One of the things you commented on was had almost every conversation that topic comes up, you know, how many leads do you guarantee us or weight of the leads come from?

Or, you know, how do I get my leads? How do I know you’re going to give me leads? And that has got us talking because I think at James, we have a very different process. I think a smarter process for long term healthy business. So I was wondering particularly because leads people often think marketing and you oversee a marketing and James so how did you answer those questions when people were throwing that question at you?

Rhiannon
Yeah. Good question. I realized within the first 3 or 4 phone calls that every single phone call, one of the questions I was going to get was how many leads will you send me, and who is responsible for generating those leads? And I will say, I kind of assumed everybody at a high level sort of understood the franchising model.

And it was it was really interesting to learn that people. There was like three key areas that people always asked about. One was price, which we’ve already done a video on. The second area was leads, which we’re talking about today, and a third area was, how will you help me stand out in the marketplace? And I think we should do another video on that area and keep just two leads to that.

But the question about leads came up almost every single call. And the number one question was, people actually firstly asked, how do you generate leads and who is responsible? And then as a follow up, they asked how many leads could I expect to be sent from you? So I answered along these lines when someone said, how many or how?

Who is responsible for generating leads? I always would laid out with a very open statement around. This is a team effort in our network, and there’s some really good reasons why we say it is a team effort. So, you know, I’ll just give you a high level overview of of what we do and why we do it the way that we do it, because it is very different.

It’s a team effort in that, you are responsible as a business owner for owning, operating, your business. And one of the responsibilities of a business owner is lead generation and growth. And so part of the answer is you are you are responsible for generating the leads. But the other part of the answer is, so our way and the way that I explain the delineate between what we do and what we teach you to do, is that we do all of the tricky stuff.

We manage the website. We pay for all of the social media, advertise. We set up, pay for, and manage all of the Google advertising across our whole network, as well as individually for specific businesses as well. We do things like the call center and the software that sits behind sending automatic lead generation notices out to people. So we do everything that’s tricky.

We also do all of the brand design, all of the marketing collateral design. If you have an idea for marketing your business, we can make that happen. We do all that stuff. We do the tricky stuff, the paid stuff, all the stuff that requires genuine expert knowledge. And we teach you how to do the stuff on the ground.

And I call these boots on the ground, which is physically, you are in your area. We are not head office works all over our beautiful country, supporting our franchisees all the way from Victoria up through to North Queensland. And we can’t be physically on the ground in our franchisees territories. But you are as the franchisee, and what we teach you to do is how to leverage your presence.

And their a I won’t go into the specific strategies today because I feel like that’s like a little bit of our secret, what we actually teach people to do. But also it’s not rocket science. It’s not, complex stuff. Remember that we do the complex stuff. We teach people to do the basic stuff on the ground. The stuff they probably think, oh, that’s really simple, but it’s so effective when it’s done consistently to our system.

So that’s how I answered. It’s a team effort. We do the tricky stuff in the paid stuff and you do the boots on the ground stuff.

Justin
Yeah. Very simple. Like I said to people have we do we the we’re the ones that spend money on marketing you our franchisees. You don’t have to spend any money on your marketing in a blog. I don’t know too many people in any work that spend over and above what we spend money on, on their own marketing. But, one of the great things I think we’ve done since we’ve owned the business is the course I think you put together 51 ways to Generate leads for Your business, and I think we might have done an episode on on that earlier on.

But yeah, all those practical things you’re talking about. It’s, it’s it’s what’s the little things that make the big difference. It’s no one thing. There’s no silver bullet that’s going to generate all these leads. And I know from talking to thousands of people over the last couple of years, this like this, there’s like this perception, I find that some people have a franchising of the business model that.

Well, no, the franchise should supply all the lights and you should be able to guarantee me a certain number of days, you know, like I’m sitting up here with the canes with a pocket full of customers where you live, like it’s just not reality. And the flip side of that argument, because there are a few business models out there that that will guarantee rates.

And I really want to encourage people listening to this that understand that that comes at a cost. This, you know, I see a few things why I don’t like that particular business model, not because it’s not our model. We could go down that track, but if if you’re going to be fed leads, that means the business that’s generating those leads is spending the money and they’re charging you for that.

You know, and I know there’s business models out there that charge 50 to 60% of the revenue of the job that you do. You have to pay them if they’ve generated the leads. So you’re paying for it, right? The other thing that I didn’t like, because I was a franchisee myself, I looked around, is in that business model, you have no control.

You’re sort of sitting. You’re like the beggar sitting there with your hands out. Please give me some leads and oh, great, if you get lots of good leads and good prices. But what happens? It’s out of your control. And if you want to grow or if you’re not getting enough, what do you do? What I love about the James model.

And one of the things that really attracted me to it a long time ago was we help people like the skills we teach people. At least 51 ways to generate leads don’t just work in these businesses, do they? They’re relative in any business you go to at any in the future.

Rhiannon
It really is anything.

Justin
Think you can carry with you?

Rhiannon
Yeah, yeah. You know, I did I I did a podcast interview where I was interviewed by, a man called Jackson Milan, also known as the wealth mentor, very successful businessman in Queensland who focuses on helping small businesses and their owners to understand how to use the business as a vehicle to financial freedom. And Jackson was interested to, interview me because he had previously been a franchisee in a franchise network.

And his experience was that when he joined the Franchise Network, they fed him all of the leads. And then what happened was head office changed their strategy, and they severely cut their marketing budget pretty much overnight. And he described to me that it was like the tap turned off and his business essentially evaporated overnight. And he stood at the fork in the road, stood at a fork in the road.

And he had two choices. Do I allow this to happen in my business case, or I’ve got to step up and figure out how to generate leads so that I’m still generating an income. But he found himself in that position because he’d sat back and just accepted the leads from the head office, and they hadn’t necessarily afforded him the opportunity to learn how to generate leads for himself, making him more sustainable and resilient to changes in strategy.

So it really highlighted to me when that was his experience. He was very interested to learn what we actually do as a franchise network. And I will say you asked me some very hard questions and some very direct questions. Because of his experience, he was quite critical of franchise networks like, do you guys just deliver up leads? And what happens if you get to change your strategy?

Are you about to rip the rug out from underneath your entire network, so to speak? Because that had been his experience, and I felt so proud to be able to say to him, actually, our model is totally different, and that wouldn’t have happened to you under how we operate, because what we do is we teach you how to stand on your own, to state we we send you leads.

We absolutely do. We market so hard at head office nationally for our business, but also for all of our individual businesses as well. But that that is happening parallel to us teaching you the skills to be able to generate leads. And it’s critical for that exact reason because he is an absolute example of that rug being ripped out from underneath a franchisee.

It happens, it happens. It just happens. And in our network, we make sure that our model allows that not ever to happen to you. Because if you’re following our system and you’re implementing our training and our guidance and you’re working with your business coach, then you know how to generate leads. And if you want more work one week, you just go out and implement some marketing strategies.

If you reach capacity and you don’t want to grow any more, okay, pull back on your marketing for a period of time, or make a decision about whether you want to bring stuff into the fold. And we can help with that too. But it gives you options and it gives you control, and it’s. My thoughts are that if you want a business of your own, nine times out of ten, you’re seeking that control and that freedom and that flexibility because you’re not getting it.

Being an employee. Yeah, but you also don’t get it if you simply step into a model where you’re basically just acting as a subcontractor, and there are models out there that are essentially just that. And I mean, anyone that says, yeah, we’re just going to send you all the leads, just kick back and chill. You know, you don’t have to do any marketing.

It’s totally fine. We’ll send it all to you. You kind of just are acting as a subcontractor. You know, you get sent work, you go do the work, you get paid for the work. That’s it. But you’re not really in control. Not at all.

Justin
Yeah. You know, and then like, as we’ve seen in some of the trials and stuff that we’ve done where those sort of leads come from a generally the lower end of the market that people, you know, your customers are just customers that are just customers because of price. You know, they and and those sort of leads very hard to make a profit out of looking like an income earner.

The other thing that Rand leads, you know, because then when, when I answer people this way and you might have felt the same, the concern is, well, how do I know I’m going to make money? When I joined James and I sort of go, well, you know, we’ve done this hundreds of times before now starting people, particularly in the last 12 months with the subscription model being able to start so many people, we’ve learned so much and and it’s why we give every one of the income guarantee, because we’ve learned that if they’re doing those things, we teach them combined with the money we’re spending because the two work together, they feed off each

other to generate leads in that area. We know that by week three, you know the business, the momentum is going to be happening. So we give a guarantee for everyone that starts from week through that. There’s an income guarantee to support you like a safety net in case you have a slow start. But you know, if people are doing that stuff, it happens.

You know, the lead stuff, what it is you follow the systems and the training and converting quotes into jobs and etcetera. And yeah, like we don’t we don’t often have to pay out on the guarantee. Okay. Now we should.

Rhiannon
Maybe I mean for total transparency maybe in the first couple of weeks. Right. But as you say, we’re starting a business from scratch. Right. So to go from 0 to $1000 a week in a couple of weeks, but that has happened before in our network. It’s absolutely possible. But most people, you know, it takes a few weeks to get this.

So look, sometimes in the first few weeks we pay out on that. And we have absolutely no issue in doing that when someone is following our system. Because honestly, I know I’m not going to be paying out on so long. I you know, I know that after those first few weeks, I’m not going to see an income guarantee application come across my desk from that person if they’re doing all of the things and following the system, because we just don’t have I just don’t have an example where someone has legitimately followed our system in our guidance and failed.

I just we don’t have an example of that in the network under your ownership in the last four years. So you know, that income guarantee is there because we genuinely back that our system works when it’s implemented. You mentioned something before, and I wouldn’t mind just going back to it. You mentioned that where business is just simply, or the perception is that some potential franchisees think that we’re just going to have work in our back pocket to hand to them when they stop.

And it’s a really interesting thought process. And I’d like to, like, step through that, because I think about things really logically and I think, okay, I don’t have a franchisee in your area. And so and you’re inquiring and you’ve asked me, hey, is there a whole stack of customers in that area just ready to go? And we’re saying, well, no, there’s not.

And the reason we’re saying that is because, well, why would there be? We’re not marketing in that area. But you take it a step further. And the reason we’re not marketing in that area is because we choose to spend all of our marketing budget in areas where there are actually business owners who can do the work. Yeah. So if you flip that concept and you think about other networks that say to you, oh yeah, mate, I’ve got leave sitting in my back pocket, and when you start, I hand them to you.

What does that mean? That actually means they’re marketing in areas where they don’t currently have business owners. So it means that your franchise fees are paying your franchisor to market in an area that you can’t service them. So I like to think about things logically, and I like to think, well, no, we don’t have lights in our back pocket, back pocket to hand out to a new franchisee.

But the reason is because we spend our whole entire marketing budget only focused on areas where there are actually franchisees in our network, because if we allocate a marketing budget, I want every cent of that to be working as hard as it possibly can to generate leads for our business. I don’t want it generating leads that we can’t service that serves no purpose to us.

It serves no purpose to our franchisees, and it kind of means that we’re wasting franchisee money, to be honest. So that’s not how we operate.

Justin
Yeah. And the other thing is it’s it’s bad advertising. You know, if we’re advertising in an area and someone responds and goes, oh great, here’s this, James, that can help me. And I inquire and I get told, oh, sorry, we have no one in the area. Like if I’m that customer, I’m sitting and going, what is it with these guys?

I advertise and then like, yeah, help me.

Rhiannon
Then why did you market to me?

Justin
Yeah, exactly. So they’ll never inquire again to James. And so then when someone does start in that area they starting from behind the eight ball. What literally yesterday I had to go in Brisbane looking at a own business ring up and his exact words were oh. So this would come obviously with an existing customer base. And it’s like, well, and I just said him.

I said, okay, the answer is no. But think about it logically. Like, how can you have customers if you can’t look after them? Right. Because those customers, it got me, they launched it. They’re going to go find someone who can let that go on because we can’t. So you can’t have customers without someone to do it and you’re the person to do it.

We like it’s a chicken and egg question. So you did right. We start advertising when we have someone in the area. Because the other question people say is, oh well, with your system then can you send me like how many leads are you getting in my area at the moment? And I say, well, I don’t know unless I looked at the system, but probably none, because we’re not advertising there because there’s no one like it’s a chicken and egg thing.

Rhiannon
It really is. Yeah. And I you know, I really like the idea that, well, our advertising budget is genuinely spent in areas where we’re generating leads that can be serviced from, you know, because our franchisees are paying into the advertising budget and then head office also allocate some of our other operational budget to pump up the advertising budget, because it is really lead generation is really important.

It is a critical aspect of what we do. But I really like to be able to say to people, well, we only spend our advertising money where it will actually generate a lead. And we really do push our advertising money as far as it possibly can go. When I was, when I was super young, back in my very early 20s, I worked alongside, a marketing expert who, we were opening a museum and she was head of marketing, and, we had all of like $10,000 in a marketing budget to open an entire regional museum with the and the way she made that money work for us was just incredible.

And she termed it as crisis marketing, i.e., you don’t waste your budget on superfluous stuff. You only spend your money where you know you will get a return on that investment. And I honestly have carried that concept. I mean, I don’t now term it crisis marketing because that, you know, that’s kind of sounds like we’re in crisis and that’s not the case.

Crisis marketing from her perspective, really was making sure every single dollar was earning you ten, 20, 30, in return. And I really carried that notion forward. And now overseeing the marketing for our company. It’s something that is very important to me that every dollar I spend on marketing, we are getting the absolute best bang for buck. And we are we constantly switching up budgets.

I’m constantly saying to you, hey, just as an FYI, I’m pulling budget from here and I’m putting it here because I’m getting a better ROI. Hey, I’m going to stop doing this, but I’m going to start doing this because I want to test the ROI. I get on that. So we really are focused on making sure we’re getting outcomes for our business owners.

But it is that joint effort. And we go to we go to great extremes to try and get them money working as hard as it possibly can to generate leads. But at the core of it, our philosophy is not just hand people work and hope for the best. Our philosophy is skill building. And you touched on this before in that what we teach people, it goes beyond just having relevance in our network and our model.

What we teach is skills that can go into any other business or any other career beyond James, because at a point, you know, you’re going to have it. If you have a James business, you might have it for five years, you might have it for ten years, you might have it for 15 years. But at some point you and James will separate and our philosophy is really making sure that when that time comes, you leave us with so many more relevant skills.

Then you came to us with. We’re not just about shoving you leads and then saying, off you go. That’s our responsibility. Done. We really, actually, genuinely want to build your skills as a business owner.

Justin
Yeah. That’s good. Yes, exactly.

Rhiannon
Yeah. Well, perhaps that is a natural place to leave this discussion for today. Anything else that you wanted to add? Any other, observations or comments that you have about lead generation in terms of franchised networks or you think we’ve covered it all?

Justin
Well, I can talk for hours. But I think this is a good spot. You know, maybe a whole nother episode is on those lead generation companies out there, because with some of the people I’ve been working with recently that they’re looking at joining us, they’ve already started their own business. They’re buying leads, spending a fortune buying leads and just, frankly, in their words, getting rubbish, you know, and they’ve been battling along in their own business trying to make.

And they just can’t make it all. And they’re just burning money. And you know we used to sort is lead generation companies to and we just felt like you were just talking about the arrow Oil on investment. We now know with our skills and and what we’ve learned over time, we can generate better and more leads ourselves. And so we’ve shifted the spend from that to yeah.

Rhiannon
Yeah, yeah, I know the numbers tell us that for what we used to spend on a lead with those lead generators, I can generate three of a much higher quality executives. You know, data tells us that that’s a much smarter thing to do, is to invest where we know we’re going to get a higher ROI. And that’s the sort of thing that our franchisees don’t have to think about, because we take care of the tricky stuff in the paid stuff and the stuff that requires genuine expertise, and we teach them the boots on the ground.

So that they remain in control, and so that they are not going to have proverbial rug ripped out from underneath them. If we change our strategy or our budget at any point in time. And I think a lot of people come to us because they want flexibility and genuine control. And when you build somebody’s skills and you teach them how to fish for themselves and go generate those leads for themselves, they’re far more in control of their business and their turnover than if they’re simply sitting back getting leads from somewhere.

Justin
Yeah. Okay. So all right.

Rhiannon
Well, let’s leave the conversation here for today. If it was helpful to you and you’ve listened to all the way through, thank you so much for spending half an hour of your day with us. Hopefully you join us for the next episode of The Real franchise.

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