The Home Service Expert Podcast
Building Trust in a Digital Age with Marcus Sheridan
Mon, 05 May 2025
In this conversation, Marcus Sheridan discusses the evolving landscape of marketing in the home services industry, emphasizing the importance of video content, disruption, and building trust with customers. He shares insights on how businesses can adapt to changes brought about by AI and commoditization, and highlights the need for transparency and innovation to stand out in a competitive market. He also discusses the evolving landscape of sales and marketing, emphasizing the importance of adapting to new consumer preferences and leveraging technology while exploring the significance of self-service tools, pricing estimators, and the psychological factors influencing buyer behavior. Don’t forget to register for Tommy’s event, Freedom 2025! This is the event where Tommy’s billion-dollar network will break down exactly how to accelerate your business and dominate your market in 2025. For more details visit freedomevent.com Show Notes: 00:00 The Future of Media in Home Services 02:11 Navigating Change in Marketing 04:31 Disruption and Innovation in Industries 09:50 Creating Trust Signals 13:39 The Role of AI in Marketing 17:11 Commoditization and Differentiation 19:03 The Power of Transparency 31:05 Building a Trusted Brand 37:01 The Future of Selling: Embracing Change 40:50 Self-Service Tools: Revolutionizing Buyer Experience 46:35 The Power of Pricing Estimators 52:34 Understanding Buyer Psychology 56:02 Building Trust Through Personal Connection 01:01:21 Leveraging AI for Business Growth
Chapter 1: What is the significance of video content in the home services industry?
You have to start thinking like a media company. I do not care how big or small you are. Every single job that you do is a litany of videos that you could be doing. And video is our future for home services, home contracting, etc. It is now a video first industry. And there's a very strong argument that your YouTube channel will be more important than your website in five years.
It could absolutely happen. Prepare for it.
Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello.
Before we get started, I wanted to share two important things with you. First, I want you to implement what you learned today. To do that, you'll have to take a lot of notes, but I also want you to fully concentrate on the interview. So I asked the team to take notes for you. Just text NOTES to 888-526-1299. That's 888-526-1299. And you'll receive a link to download the notes from today's episode.
Also, if you haven't got your copy of my newest book, Elevate, please go check it out. I'll share with you how I attracted and developed a winning team that helped me build a $200 million company in 22 states. Just go to elevateandwin.com forward slash podcast to get your copy. Now let's go back into the interview. All right, guys, welcome back to the Home Service Expert.
I am feeling a little under the weather, just a little cold, nothing bad. It's day five, so I'm very excited about today's podcast. This is actually our second round. It was a long time ago, probably five years since we did it the first time. I got Marcus Sheridan in the house. He wrote one of the best books of all time on getting clients. He's got a new one coming out, but they ask, you answer.
He also wrote the visual sale. He's got a new one coming out, Endless Customers. His claim for fame was River Pools. He saved the company from an economic crash. He's one of the best at content. I'm working with him. He's actually out here to work directly with A1 on a new content strategy, and I think it's going to blow our minds. We're meeting all day tomorrow.
And you've got a lot of good things going on. You do a lot of keynote topics on sales, marketing, AI, leadership, communication, multiple companies, Impact River Pools, Marcus Sheridan International, Question First Group, PriceGod.ai. Just a plethora of great information. I'm going to bring the heat today, and I know he's going to bring the heat.
So, Marcus, talk to us a little bit about what you've been up to lately and what's new and exciting for you.
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Chapter 2: How can businesses navigate rapid changes in marketing?
Yeah, there's so much going on, man. First of all, it's so nice to be here with you live. This is great. This is very, very fun. I think for, it seems like, you know, I've had river pools since 2001. So I was pretty much right out of college almost. And I can tell you in the last three years, there have been dramatically more changes in those three years than I saw in my first 22 years.
It's extraordinary. The rate of change right now is like nothing we've ever seen. You know, it's interesting too, just from a general marketer's perspective, just to talk about that for a second, for 20 years, roughly, we didn't really change marketing very much. There was Google, there was search, there was paid, and we did it for the most part the same way for 20 years, and that game's changing.
So I'm thinking about that all the time. I'm constantly in the sandbox right now, which I think everybody should be. It's like your fiduciary, as you know, as a business owner, as a leader, to get in the AI sandbox and to learn a lot about it. I'm obsessed constantly.
More than I've ever been with today's buyer and how we connect with them how we earn their trust I think about that in weird ways and in ways that people do not I'm also thinking constantly about how we can break rules and industries and disrupt them Yeah, which I think there's plenty of opportunity there and hopefully we'll talk about that today because I could even like we could talk about some just like hacks that anybody could take and
if we're allowed to use that word, if you want to disrupt your industry and just really get known very, very quickly, I've got some ways for you today that are going to work every single time.
Well, let's dive into that because that's an exciting topic.
Disruption?
Yeah.
Okay, we'll go there first because there's just some fun things. Can I give my quick background just so people understand where this comes from? So I started River Pools with a couple buddies in 2001. Things were going okay for us. We were focused on mainly fiberglass swimming pools. Then we had the crash of 2008, 2009. look like we're going to lose the business.
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Chapter 3: What are effective strategies for industry disruption?
So let's talk about just some quick ways that you can disrupt. And I'm just going to take it back. I'm going to go way back in time for a second on this, because I think this whole conversation will probably have to do with a little bit of disruption.
When we started installing fiberglass pools... Now, by the way, when I give an example today, for you as the audience, it is your job to hear the principle of what I'm saying and then apply that to your business, regardless of what we're talking about, because it's very easy for anybody to listen to this and say, but that might have worked for him as a pool guy, but that won't work for me, which, by the way, is the death of creativity and innovation in business.
Don't be that guy or that gal, please, for the love of all that's pure and holy, right? So... When we started with fiberglass pools, here's how fiberglass pools were built.
You dug a hole, you put a base of sand at the bottom of that hole, you set a fiberglass pool shell on top of that sand, you backfilled all the way around that pool with sand and filled it with water, and then you poured a concrete patio around it, and you called that a fiberglass swimming pool. Now, any doofus knows there's one fundamental structural flaw with what I just described.
Because we learned in some book 2,000 years ago that you don't build houses on sand, and you certainly shouldn't build pools on sand. But yet they're building pools on sand. And so what happens as a byproduct of that, right? So sand settles and sand washes. So fiberglass pools were moving and they were shifting. Nobody was doing anything about it. So we said, this is dumb. What is going on?
And I started creating videos and articles that essentially said, there is a major problem with the way fiberglass pools are installed. And we put our stake in the ground. We said, this is wrong and it shouldn't be this way. We're the first company in the world to talk about this. At the time, over 80% of all fiberglass pools were installed on sand. Now,
We did this and suddenly I started getting calls, Tommy, from like pool contractors around the country. And they're saying to me, Marcus, you're killing me here because I got this homeowner that once they're pooled, installed on gravel, but it's going to cost me a thousand more bucks to get gravel instead of sand. And so like, what's going on here?
And I said, what's going on is the fact that you're settling on an inferior methodology to do your stuff and you shouldn't be. Make a long story short, the whole industry changed. because we spoke up. Today, it's a complete reverse of when we started. Roughly 80% of all pools, fiberglass pools, are built on gravel, some type of crushed stone.
So, one of the easiest ways that you can disrupt your industry, and this happens in almost every industry, and I'm sure this is happening in garage doors. There's something about the way a lot of people do garage doors, let's just use you as an example, that annoys the crap out of you. That you're saying to yourself, it shouldn't be done that way. Like, why is that allowed?
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Chapter 4: How does AI influence marketing strategies today?
So like, okay, it's getting a lot of traction. People are getting noticed. They were getting calls about these different shapes that I had mentioned. And so now they started to reach out to me and they said, they said, Marcus, we think we have some shapes here that would go well in your awards next year. Would you come out to the factory and view these different models that we have?
So suddenly I was getting invites out to these places and I was just some 30 some year old little kid in their mind, but suddenly like I was having this influence. Then I was seeing, and this is the funniest part, major competitors on their homepage were, were telling the world that they had won an award for best fiberglass pool in class. Linking back, of course, to my website.
So before I know it, I'm just like getting all this traffic from these major manufacturers. And this is a classic example.
And they have super high domain authority.
Oh, yes. And this is another way that River Pools just blew up. So this is a classic case of how does... The digital David slay Goliath so easily because you don't have a board where you have to sit there and get approvals for everything. You don't have a bunch of red tape. You can be fast. You can be nimble. You can be quick. I mean, it is when someone tells me, I don't know, I'm just so small.
Like, I just can't. I don't have this big board. I don't have eight people on my marketing team and I don't have this and I don't have that. I'm like, well then count your lucky stars because that means you have no limitations and you can just do stuff all day long and everybody's like, I can't believe you did that. And then that's how you make waves in an industry.
We're in a time period where you've got to create what I call trust signals. And we can obviously get into this, but trust signals, because for 20 years, 20 years, like I said, we had to really make two groups very happy with us and recommend us. First off, the homeowner had to recommend us, right? That's been true. in the last decades and it's always going to be true.
But then, 20ish years ago, for the first time, Search engines had to recommend us. Google had to recommend us. And we've been fighting that battle for more than two decades now. But suddenly AI comes out in November, 2022, and now there's a third party that has to recommend us, which is AI.
And the thing that everybody's sleeping on, Tommy, and the thing that worries me to death about all these home services companies that I'm meeting with all the time and are saying to me, yo, Marcus, I'm doing paid, but it's just not working. Like I'm spending more on paid right now than I've ever spent. I'm getting less results than I've ever gotten.
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Chapter 5: What role does transparency play in building trust with customers?
Yes.
Okay, good job. GE. Now, this is how David wins again. Because... Who do you think has more trust in the marketplace? Steve Shonkoff, Yale Appliance, or GE? Steve is willing to go where no one else is willing to go. And because of that, he's the gatekeeper. He's the trusted leader. He is the trusted advisor. Pick any phrase that you want. But that's audacious. And many people don't roll that way.
And that's why they don't do extraordinary things. That's the way Steve rolls. And that's why he started off with me at $30 million. Today he's doing over $150 million. And this is in a time when everybody's saying kitchen appliances and retail in general is dying because Amazon's taking it over and you can't be successful. And Steve's like, y'all keep saying that and I'm going to keep blowing up.
And he's just crushing because he's doing it differently.
You know, I think about that. The old Maytag, I'm putting out a commercial. You know Roy Williams, Wizard of Oz. Yeah, yeah. He's one of the best writers. I don't work directly with him, but I know a lot of people that work directly with him. He's getting older. He's retired kind of, but he still works for certain clients. But I'm always thinking of what's going to tell a story?
What do people want to do business with? What's going to affect the market? Because when you know I can trust somebody before you go there, like my buddy with Gettle. He creates commercials where people are calling him up going, first of all, I'm mad at you because what you did for Wendy, your wife, on Valentine's Day outdoes me. But it's very rarely – he doesn't make it transactional at all.
He tells stories. And people are like – I started crying when I heard your commercial. Your dad passed a torch when you used to hold the flashlight for him. And so this whole idea, but I'm thinking about all these ideas. And people used to call up Gettle when Ken was always on the air and say, we don't have an issue yet, but the day we do, we're calling you. And Price was irrelevant.
And this idea, though, of Maytag back in the day. My grandma had Maytags. Like, those things would have run forever. Anybody with an old yellow Maytag, they're still going.
Yeah, somebody that's listening has got one in their garage right now. It's still rolling. They've replaced the one in their house like three times.
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Chapter 6: How can home service companies differentiate themselves in a commoditized market?
Because if you can do that, then you're going to start to get a lot more attention and people are going to say, I want that. Or they're going to say, I want to absolutely make sure that when we get our thing, it has that and you say the name of the thing. Just like I want to make sure my pool's on gravel and not on sand.
So an install process, you know, we put a scale under every single door to make sure it weighs zero. It's installed correctly. There's certain things you could almost say, if it's not done this way, it's not the right way.
That's right.
This install process, and you go through that, and you educate the customers on it. And you do that through articles. You could do that through... Videos, you could do that on TV, radio, billboards, all kinds of stuff. What's still economical? Because billboards, I was with Gary Vee about five years ago, and he goes, forget billboards.
He's like, if I do 500 tests on Facebook, I'll find one that will outperform any billboard. better ROI. And now he's talking about a lot about LinkedIn and these different channels. And I think that's the hard part for most business owners. They're like, oh, you're talking about X. You're talking about TikTok. You're talking about Instagram. You're talking about Facebook.
You're talking about all these different things. And then you got, now you got Marcus Sheridan talking about AI. Then we still got to get found in the, get reviews, still get found in the map section, the three pack. And what about, they say the newspaper still works and the yellow book still works in Albuquerque and you get inundated. And they're going, well, I need to know my KPIs.
I need to mission, vision, core values. I need to make sure I get those trucks, the perfect trucks, because otherwise can I depreciate them? And there's all this information.
It's pretty overwhelming.
It's way more overwhelming than it used to be.
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Chapter 7: What are the pillars of a known and trusted brand?
They would vomit in their mouth. It's that strong because they don't realize this, but yet it's been done the same way for so long. This is the norm in the industry. And one last prediction, then I want to hear your thoughts. And sorry for the rant. No, no, good. And that is this.
Actually, I'm not sorry because I believe in this and I think it's extraordinary the impact that it can make on people's lives. Because I've looked over that cliff of bankruptcy and it's not fun. And I want to help people find that financial peace. And this is that serious to me. We've had so many companies do this now. And what's wild, let me give you one example.
I had a shed manufacturer in Scotland. that had been doing the Ask-You-Answer. They had pricing articles. They had pricing videos. They had a price list on their website, Tommy, a price list of their different models. And so they said, Marcus, I think I want to put price guide on there. I want to put that estimator tool on there.
I'm like, I don't know if it's going to really work because you have price lists, but okay, fine. Suddenly they have five extra leads from that day and it's never slowed down. In their first six months, they did over a million dollars in revenue from it. And here's what we realized.
Anytime someone does an interactive tool on your site, that's the key phrase, interactive, there's this thing called sunk cost fallacy. You're very aware of it. The more time they spend working with you... the more they're invested in you and the more they desire to find a way to work with you. That's the power of estimators. And man, they're changing the game. Final point. My prediction is this.
90% of all home services... are going to have an estimator tool on their website within the next five years. Mark my words. The question is, are you going to wait until everybody does it and then follow the lead because it becomes the norm in the industry? Because it's already happened in roofing. You're already starting to see it with some grass-cutting businesses. So you're starting to see it.
It's going to happen. It's going to be standard. Don't wait. Lead this conversation and don't be led by your competitors.
So a few things. Number one is if you're buying a roof, if you're buying a pool, that's a really large ticket. I'm going to do my research. Number one, here's the deal. A pool is where I'm going to spend a lot of my summers. I'm going to spend with my family. I want to make sure I get the right pool. If I'm looking at a broken spring, I can't get out of my garage, right? I'm stuck.
I got to go to my daughter's ballet practice. I need to make a phone call. I'm going to look at reviews very quickly. I'm not going to go to a configurator or I'm not going to go, let me really do a lot of research. I got a broken pipe. Let me do a lot of research of who's the best pipe fixer.
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Chapter 8: How can businesses leverage trust signals effectively?
It just is like, wow, they're very considerate. I'm going to steal that one, Tommy. That's good stuff. It's the smallest things. And we actually built a tool to make sure guys are doing it. Because all the calls, if you hit the client number, it actually rings their cell phone and connects to the client. So now I have figured out a way to make sure this is getting done. Because one day, 2018.
We place stickers on the garage. That's like the future of our business, at least today, is like the stickers there. It says warranty void if removed, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We put one on the door, one on the opener, and we put this little nice thing above the wall button.
I go into Service Titan, and I see every picture looks the same from one of my technicians, and I realize he could upload it. He could just upload the old picture. He's lazy. And so I called Service Center and said, no longer could we upload. Can you make it? You can't upload from your gallery. You've got to now take a new picture. These small things. And he's not a bad guy.
He just was a little lazy. And so all my things need checks and balances. As long as I take to come up with a system, I take a lot longer to make sure I've got data integrity to make sure it's the right things happening. And I think a lot of people are like, Tommy, I sit down, I do everything. I follow Marcus's advice. I told the guys what to do. I listened to you, Tommy.
And like, it's just not getting followed. Cause I'm like, what's the system to ensure that you're getting data integrity, that it's being followed. And that's where a lot of people fail. It's like, and then I realized even with videos, I've been doing it so long. I'm a natural. Like I've been asking customers, I'm like, listen, let's just do this real quick.
Some people are like, I need to do my makeup. All these things need to be perfect. But my techs hate being on camera. So I've got to get them comfortable being in front of camera. What's the best time to do that? In training, have them video, video, video. And it's almost like role playing. Get them on video a lot to where they feel comfortable doing it. And then what's in it for them?
Why would I make a video every time? I'm working on an AI tool that says if this hits all this criteria, same thing with reviews. I'm making it dynamic. You'll get $10 for a review, but if you get this, this, this, and this, plus you know how many clients call up and say, I've gone through your reviews. I want Michael out here. He looks like the best.
I say you're building a future for your family. Demand, baby.
Yeah. I want to talk with the guy on the camera. That's exactly right. To your point, though, we can't just throw our team on camera and suddenly expect them to be great. A little bit of training can go a long way, and it's just really, really simple things.
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