AI & Marketing for Home Service Pros

This is AI & Marketing for Home Service Pros — the show for contractors who want to grow without wasting time or money. If you're in roofing, HVAC, plumbing, or any home service business, we break down how AI and modern marketing can help you book more jobs, close more leads, and build a business that runs without babysitting every task

AI & Marketing for Home Service Pros is a business podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 56 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Unknown Host hosts AI & Marketing for Home Service Pros, a business show with 56 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

• 

  Episode #58

  AI Gives You the Average Answer | Jim Johnson, ContractorCoachPRO

  Sep 8, 202656 minS1

  Ready to grow your home service business with AI and marketing that actually works? Book a free strategy call → https://www.contractormarketingpros.net/calendar Jim Johnson asked a room of about a hundred contracting owners in Columbus how many were using AI. Every hand went up but one. Then he asked how many had ever architected, designed, or written software in their life. Not a single hand. That gap is what this episode is about. Jim has spent thirty years in the industry. He owned a contracting company, built a software product that AccuLynx acquired, spent five years as their Director of Sales, and has run ContractorCoachPRO for nearly fifteen years. Between both roles he has been inside the back offices of roughly twenty five hundred contractors. In this episode you'll learn: • Why the answer AI gives you is the average answer, and what changes when you tell it what stage your business is actually in • The five stages of a contracting business, and why companies at level one or two keep trying to execute level five moves • Why the marketing coach usually gets blamed for what is actually a broken sales process • The full AI ladder, from a browser tab to desktop projects to API connections to a database with agents on top • Why a project you built in a desktop app is a silo that knows nothing about the rest of your business • Constraint and outcome, the framing Jim gives contractors for prompting anything • Why you have to define the role AI is playing before you ask it for anything • The security problem Jim thinks is coming, and why tools built without that foundation are a ransomware target holding your customer data • The Big Squeeze: price resistance from above, materials up 20 to 30 percent and labor up 18 to 20 percent from below, and overhead built for demand that never came • Why several private equity rollups in this space have gone under in the last year • What the companies gaining market share right now actually have in common, and it isn't AI • Why 80 percent of the leads at Jim's coaching company now come from AI search • Why your best salesperson is the wrong sales manager, and why the B player is usually the right one Jim also shares pricing and the website for what he has been building publicly for the first time on this episode. Mentioned in this episode: Mauricio's Calendar

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #57

  Chaos Creates Revenue, Discipline Creates Profit: Brian Gottlieb

  Sep 1, 202655 minS1

  Ready to grow your home service business with AI and marketing that actually works? Book a free strategy call → https://www.contractormarketingpros.net/calendar Brian Gottlieb started with three thousand dollars and a plastic folding table in the back of a friend's warehouse. His first show produced one appointment, and he knew that if that homeowner in Green Bay didn't buy the sunroom, the business was over. That company became three companies doing $150 million a year in combined revenue. He sold all of them, and at exit was spending north of $20 million a year on marketing. In this conversation, he argues that most contractors are solving the wrong problem. They chase documented SOPs when the real gap is that no one has told the team how to think about the work. His framing: an SOP tells you what to do; a discipline tells you how to think. In this episode you'll learn: • Why chaos can create revenue but only discipline creates profit • How Brian became excellent at selling things his company made no money on, and why that's a common trap • The core marketing discipline that changes how everyone treats an inbound call: the lead is sacred • Why no single lead source should ever exceed 20% of your business • Why the home service market is in a K-shaped recovery, with companies either running away with it or quietly struggling • The accounting discipline of closing the month within seven days, because a P&L read three weeks late is an autopsy • Why every person in the company should have a daily KPI tied to variable compensation, including admin roles • The reason business owners being excellent problem solvers is actually a growth constraint • Why Brian replaced his desk with a flat slab of wood and no drawers • What a marketing manager at scale actually does, which is vendor management and math rather than content creation • Why hiring an in-house SEO or paid search person usually produces worse results than using a specialist • Bullets before cannonballs, and how to test a new lead source without committing real money • Why you should ask any new marketing vendor for a pay-for-performance deal, and what their answer tells you • The 30 to 60 day window Brian uses to decide whether a source stays or goes • How his peer group went from $100 million in combined revenue to close to $3 billion • The three camps contractors fall into on AI adoption right now Brian is the author of Beyond the Hammer, with a second book, Beyond the Script, arriving this fall. Mentioned in this episode: CTA Mauricio's Calendar

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #56

  From $15 Million to $4 Million: The 7 Mistakes | Mauricio Cardenal, Contractor Marketing Pros

  Aug 25, 202631 minS1

  Ready to grow your home service business with AI and marketing that actually works? Book a free strategy call → https://www.contractormarketingpros.net/calendar A contractor was doing $15 million in sales five years ago. Then $12 million. Then $8 million. He's at $4 million now, and when Mauricio asked him what changed, he had no answer. He'd cycled through agencies, spending $15,000 a month, and couldn't say where a single lead came from. Three weeks into a new engagement he handed the strategy calls to his office manager. That's the mistake, and it sits underneath the other six. Mauricio Cardenal started Contractor Marketing Pros in 2017. Since then the agency has worked with more than 500 contractors, generated over 250,000 inbound leads, and driven more than $150 million in sales for clients. That work means seeing inside the business: the CRM, the sales process, how fast a lead actually gets a callback. In this episode you'll learn: • Why you can outsource deliverables and execution but never the strategy or the results • Al Levi's rule from The 7-Power Contractor that there are two seats an owner cannot hand off, marketing and financial decisions • Marketing is one of four pillars alongside sales, operations, and finance, and it's the one contractors skip • Nine out of ten contractors cannot connect their ad channels to actual revenue • Why a $300 lead that sells a $4,000 job beats a $40 lead every time, so leads are never simply cheap or expensive • 95% of the businesses Mauricio talks to never connect their CRM to their marketing • Speed to lead is a discipline problem, since the tools that solve it have existed for over ten years • ServiceTitan surveyed over 1,000 contractors and found demand rising, with the gap sitting at lead to appointment conversion • The four fixes: automatic text in 60 seconds, missed call text back in 30, an AI receptionist for nights and weekends, and smart routing • Why contractors take pride in not following up, and what that costs • Ryan Fenn of Chiirp looked at over 500 million text messages, and the lesson was to text like a human rather than a marketing department • How reviews now drive four things at once: local SEO, the map pack, Local Service Ads placement, and AI recommendations • Why Facebook is where a smaller company can still compete in a market where Google has gotten expensive • The ego tax, and why revenue is vanity while profit is sanity Every mistake on this list is fixable in about 30 days. Mentioned in this episode: From $15 Million to $4 Million: The 7 Mistakes | Mauricio Cardenal, Contractor Marketing Pros Mauricio's Calendar

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #55

  You're Either Recommended or Rejected | Best of the AI + Marketing Show

  Aug 18, 20261h 10mS1

  Ready to grow your home service business with AI and marketing that actually works? Book a free strategy call → https://www.contractormarketingpros.net/calendar For twenty years the job was making the homeowner happy and making Google happy. Marcus Sheridan opens this episode by explaining what changed. When an AI gives a homeowner one answer instead of ten blue links, you are either in that answer or you are not. There is no page two. This is a best of episode pulling the strongest moments from six conversations. Marcus Sheridan, who built River Pools on radical pricing transparency. Steven Van Horn, who with his partner Chad grew a heating and cooling company from $3.5 million to $27 million in five years. Chris Lee, who runs on two funnels and nothing else. Lance Bachmann, who has sold seven companies. Austin Rosenbaum, founder of Demand IQ. And Ed Rollins of Rooftastic, who calls his company a marketing and sales organization that happens to do roofing. In this episode you'll learn: Why Google is becoming what Austin calls an outcome engine, and how its agent may already be calling your office to gather a quote for a homeowner Your phone system is now a ranking factor, because if Google's agent cannot get a clean answer from you, your position drops Marcus breaks down the three reasons contractors refuse to post pricing and dismantles all three, including the line that your competitors do not pay your bills Lance disagrees with him directly, and explains why an estimate that is off by thirty percent hands your salesperson an uphill battle Chris Lee's math on why every inbound call is worth $4,000 at a 33% close rate, a $20,000 ticket, and 60% gross margin When your cost of acquisition is out of line, only three things can be broken, and Chris names all three 78% of homeowners go with the first company they have a full conversation with, not the first company that reaches out Steven's team found their booking rate had slipped to 43%, and the story of how they got it into the mid nineties Ed keeps his cost per appointment under $300 and explains why cost per lead is the wrong number to watch How Rooftastic built 1,500 reviews at a 4.9 rating, and why Ed personally calls anyone who leaves a bad one Why Steven recruits from restaurants instead of competing for licensed techs, and what happens if you don't invest in people who then stay Chris on why your social media is the net rather than the hook when you are recruiting Lance on what private equity looks for in diligence, and why they are hunting for reasons to say no This one is for the home service owner who wants to hear six people who have actually built something argue about the things that matter instead of agreeing with each other. Mentioned in this episode: CTA Mauricio's Calendar

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #54

  Free Facebook Posts, 75 Reps, Sold in 7 Years

  Aug 11, 20261h 8mS1

  Ready to grow your home service business with AI and marketing that actually works? Book a free strategy call → https://www.contractormarketingpros.net/calendar Todd Price had no marketing budget and no idea how to build one. He was not running SEO, did not know how to post to YouTube, and never bought a lead for years. Facebook was the only thing he understood, so he posted every single day, and then he pushed every salesperson in the company to do the same. At the peak that was 75 reps posting several times a day, all of it free. Seven years after he started, he sold Perimeter Roofing to a private equity backed platform. Todd came up through the gym industry starting at 16, moved into personal training at 17, and competed in bodybuilding for close to twenty years before retiring from the stage at 38. He started his roofing career while that fitness life was still going, running the two alongside each other rather than trading one for the other. His first roofing employer gave him two leads and some magnets for his Jeep and taught him nothing else. He has since resigned from Perimeter, and he is back in the gym industry today while coaching operators across roofing, pest control, water mitigation, and construction. In this episode you'll learn: • How Todd replaced a marketing budget he did not have with free Facebook posting, and how it scaled to 75 reps posting daily • The 25/75 content rule he still teaches, where only a quarter of what you post is about your business • Why posting ten times a day does not burn out your audience, and who the only person is who sees every post • The four-word engagement post that outperformed everything else he tried, and why it made his business posts reach more people • How his partner built a steady referral pipeline off real estate agents after knocking exactly one door in his life • The reverse math that turns a revenue target into a daily number: two claims approved traces back to three adjuster meetings, ten roof inspections, and about 60 doors • How to read your own ratios to find the exact place you are losing deals, whether it is at the door, on the roof, or in the claim • Why Todd deliberately kept majority share instead of splitting evenly with his partners • What most contractors get wrong when they say they have systems and processes, and why claim steps are not systems • Why some private equity owned companies get run into the ground, and what has to survive the transition • The thing almost every coaching client struggles to do, and why you cannot sell a company until you do it This one is for the home service owner who thinks they need a budget before they can grow, and for anyone who wants to build something that runs without them. Where to find Todd: Group and one-on-one coaching at https://officialtoddprice.com Mentioned in this episode: Mauricio's Calendar

  ListenShow Notes

Based on semantic analysis of episode topics and host coverage, this show is a strong guest fit for executives in:

Industry fit is computed by PitchCentric using vector embeddings of the show's episode catalog.