Your Customers May Never Visit Your Website Again

Google is deploying agents that are going to be interacting with websites and other things on the internet, not humans. Is this going to change the way our website look? Yes. Where's the website still going to look nice? So how does that leave a home service business, a local guy who has no idea what's going on? This is the whole crux of 2027, where Sundar Berchai said it's the year of the agents, where businesses are going, and I believe this through and through, that businesses are going to have their own agents that can interact with other agents. I'm Dominic Rabino. Welcome to the episode. Today, we're going to be talking to Phil Risher about your websites and how they're changing. Now, if you're nodding your head already, if you're shaking your head and you're like, look, I can't afford to put any more money into the website. Stay tuned to the end of the show. I've got a tool that's going to show you how to have an unlimited budget for marketing. It is true. Other companies use it. You might not have heard about it yet. Also, at the end of the show, make sure you stay tuned because I want to say thank you for everything that you've done to help this community in Nicaragua, just by the sharing and liking all of the episode details. I know I'll show you more about that at the end of the show. In the meantime, let's get to Phil and see what he has to say. Mr. Phil Risher, how the heck are you? Hey, what's up, man? Good to be back on the show. Thanks for having me. Great to be back on the show. You've been an influential guest to say the least. Thank you. Appreciate that. Yeah. You're that little nexus, that little thing that makes other things happen. Thank you. I know last time I was like, hey, why don't you come on the job or podcast? I've been on there a couple of times. I know some people over there and it was made some connections and it blossomed into something even more, which is amazing. Yeah, which is pretty cool because now the host of the job or podcast after I met him through you, I mean, this is a while ago now, but he's one of the coaches on our team, which is kind of cool. So some of the people listening to this show are actually being coached by Adam. Wow. The world comes full circle. Yeah. And he's actually a client of ours. So it's like so many web intertankles. All these different things. But I think that's nice to hear. You know, one of the challenges that I have, and I think a lot of people have in this world, because today you and I are talking about websites are changing. You got to change too. Yeah. But when we start talking about websites, I have to tell you my big concern when somebody contacts me and they say, hey, we're an SEO company. We're an online marketing company. We specialize in contract. They all want to be on my show because they want to talk to the audience. Of course. I don't get to use this word enough. Charlotent. I love it. I used to work at a home service business. So I was a director of his development. So I felt the exact same way. I never worked at a marketing company. I don't even know what the marketing is. Like I just know how to grow businesses. But I felt the exact same way. So I get it. Yeah. But it's painful. And I think everybody listening here, look, everybody comes to this show with like a clean heart. Their name is on the contract. They're making promises to customers. And they want to find more good customers. They want to take care of their staff. They want to make some money at the end of the day. They want to have time for their family. The same thing we all want. And sometimes we go out there and we find vendors or suppliers who let us down. And it's just it then their heart falls. My heart falls. Yeah. My point is I'm glad to have you here. Thanks, man. I do my best. I believe give the recipe, sell the cook in. I'm not here, you know, I just want to help people grow their business. So I'm happy to be your resource. Well, you've been on the show at least twice. So that's a good indicator. There you go. So, but you kind of caught me by surprise when we first started talking about this topic. You said websites are changing. Now, I can't I mean, you've seen the whole scope of everything. There's companies out there who take their website and everything they're doing with it very seriously. There's companies out there who are like, we want to take it seriously. It's hard to get great photos or get good testimonials. Then there's other ones who are still running a great business who say we put no effort into our website. I wish we could. Yeah. The whole sort of yeah, spectrum. What guide us through this? Why are websites changing? What does that mean? What are you seeing? And by the way, is it really changing? Because everybody says websites have changed and they've been doing it since websites came out. Yeah, absolutely. So what I'll say is over the last six months, there's been three pivotal changes that people need to know about. The first one, the Google CEO, Sundar Pachai, he did an interview with Stripe and basically what he said is that in 2027, it's the year of agents. So with agents. So what that means is that Google is deploying agents that are going to be interacting with websites and other things on the internet. Not humans. After that interview about two months later, Google changed for the first time in 25 years their search bar. When you go to Google.com and use to search something, it said HVAC are apparently near me or remodel are near me and then it said search and you would go to those, you know, blue links, the typical thing that you would see with the map pack and all the stuff. Right. Google changed that. Now it says AI mode. When you click AI mode, it opens up their agent, Gemini conversation, which fundamentally shifts how SEO marketing companies people need to think about how their customers are interacting with Google where most people 80% of people go to find local vendors for their home. That's the second shift. Okay. The third one, which is the one that is even more concerning is Google wrote out what's called Gemini Spark and Gemini Spark is their personal agent. Remember, he said 2027 is the year of the agent Gemini Spark is their personal agent where it can do a couple things. It can research. It can schedule. It can buy things. It can reach back out to you all without you having to do anything. Right. So imagine before people would be optimizing their website for human interactions. Right. Looking at photos or what to click on. Exactly. Now, if no one is going, if the search on Google is not even taking people to people's websites and it's going to AI and it's interacting with AI mode and Gemini, people are right now, there's a stat that just came out 68% of searches and with zero clicks. 68% of Google searches ends with zero clicks. So that means people are searching, but they're not going anywhere. 68% of them are searching to find answers, but they're not going and clicking on anything. They're using it as a way to communicate and ask questions. It's a shift from keywords to conversations, just like you would use AI platforms and ask questions. That's exactly the shift that's happening. So at what point am I getting resolution? Let's say I need to buy, let's say I want to buy kitchen cabinets or I want to buy, I need a plumber. You know, whatever a trade is, we're all trades people here. It doesn't matter what the trade is. Exactly. This is about the business of the trades. So I need a trades person. So I go click whatever that trade is. Now I'm in a conversation, but does it give me a phone number or who's available 24 hours or who's the greatest designer in the city? Yeah, well, great question, because the actual fundamental way that people are searching is changing. There was a Google put out study that with AI mode, that new change that they had, the average query that people are typing in is three times longer. So instead of someone typing in cabinet repair or cabinet installation or kitchen remodel or near me or whatever that keyword is, they are asking conversational questions like, oh, I have this island here. Can I replace this island with something else? Oh, I have this fill in the blank. They're asking questions in a conversational style. So so basically, it's not about being, you know, the it's not about being the keyword result. It's about being the answer. Hmm. Okay. So we've got a change that Google said is going to happen. And let's let's land on the fact that Google is the main search engine that everybody use. Correct. Like we could have that discussion, but I don't think we need to. Correct. And then there's there's so Google says something's changes. They're going to have agents maybe for people who don't understand pointing at myself with this. Yeah. What's an agent? What are you talking about? Yeah. Yeah. So an agent does a couple things. First, it has a trigger. So it does something on the behalf. It's something on your behalf when something happens. So let's say you wanted to plan a trip or you want to plan a date with your wife. You give it a trigger. You say, can you go and find an Italian restaurant for me and my wife to go to on Friday? So it has a trigger of some reason. Then it goes out and researches, finds information, analyzes like a virtual person. It's like a it's like a virtual book me a Italian restaurant person or find me a closet designer person or find me a 24 hour plumber person, whatever. Exactly. Exactly. Okay. That's what an agent is. It's like a it's like a tiny little human that does one task. Yeah. But but the last piece is the most important part. That's what's changing is that before it would just you would tell it to do something it go out and research and come back to you and say here's what my thinking is just like you would traditionally interact with AI right now. The agent piece, which is the most important part is that it can actually take action on your behalf. It can actually schedule for you. It can actually reach out for you. Okay. Yeah. I haven't used it for that. So maybe that's why I'm getting it confused. But let's land on on kitchen remodel. That's a nice trade that we all understand. So if I need a kitchen remodeler, it's going to go out and book an appointment with a kitchen remodeling company. Yeah. So two months ago, I was back out in Las Vegas with Jobber and their head of product development was there. And I did an episode about this there. And I was talking to him about it. And he said, Oh, we actually have an integration with our online scheduling with Jobber that we are plugging in to Gemini Spark. So that way businesses can have a place on AI chat to schedule appointments and never go to a website. Wow. Yeah. I was wondering when that was going to happen because right now AI is essentially free. I mean, I've got, I have two of them. I've got Claude. I've got chat GPT. Gemini is always in the wings. It's the, you know, it's no offense Phil. You've got red hair, but it's the red headed step cousin. Yeah. I just don't use Gemini, but everybody's got their flavors. But it's, it's essentially free. And I'm like, you know, one day when I'm addicted to Claude, it's going to say, click here for one penny. And I'm, yeah, I'm just going to do it. It's just a penny. And I'm now paying for, you know, that I agree or I'm paying to be the end end node. I'm paying to be the result. Exactly. Here's the thing that people have to understand about specifically Gemini, because to your point, people get pushed back to like, Gemini is the ugly red head step child. Nobody uses it. Sorry, Phil. For those of you who can't see the YouTube channel, Phil is actually as red hair. We should probably use a different example, but all good. They're all good. Yeah, that's cool. So, so Google has bet billions of dollars on the shift to AI mode. And what they have done very strategically is not ripped the bandaid off for all the boomers who traditionally did Google searches and went and did their research. They slowly dripped in this new way to use AI mode. So people don't even know that they're using Gemini when they're getting AI overviews, when they're getting AI mode on Google, it's just happening. They don't actually go to Gemini.google.com and use that as a separate language model. They're just, it's embedded in the ecosystem. Okay. Now, Google AI mode has over a billion users per month. Chat GBT has over a billion users per month. And they both have two separate strategies for local search. Oh, good. But this is the thing is like all of these things are happening. And people still want to make a shiny website that looks nice to humans. When humans might never even go to your website. So, okay, that is a great transition point. Let's switch over to that. We've got a great website. We have great pictures of our work. Let's just stick with the kitchen remodeler. Just down the middle for all of our examples right now. And that doesn't include anybody else, but just a kitchen remodel. How do I change my kitchen remodel website? Or how do I plan what the change needs to be? Tell us about that. Yeah, for sure. So there's two phases that we're doing with our clients. And the first phase is this. If what I just explained was the shift from keywords to conversations is true. And you believe that which how could you not with everything that I just outlined. But if you believe that is true. The old way of doing marketing for businesses was trying to rank number one on Google. And the way that you did that was you use keywords and you created blogs. And you try to, you know, you try to game the system to be the best ranking thing with the best keywords. But everything is changing from keywords to conversations. So the number one thing that you could be doing as a business is creating content from real customer conversations. When customers ask questions, you take that and turn it into content. And right now a lot of people are still paying for marketing or SEO or the past thing that they've done to try to rank for keywords and website rankings. When what I mentioned before, you don't want to rank number one. You want to be the answer for the conversational question that people are asking. So let's just make up a conversational question and everybody listening. I'm making this up. Let's just say the conversational question I ask is, do I have enough room to put an island in my kitchen? Yeah. All right. So how do I make that if that's accurate or if that's pretty close? Yes. What's the action that I take on that? Yeah, great question here because there's two ways to do this. There is what a lot of people do. And I would say marketing companies do this as well, where they might not even have the question. And if they have the question, they go to clawed and they say or chat GBT and they say chat GBT. Can you help me write a blog post about that question? And they start with what is called AI Slop. And Google put out a white page on this and they said that SEO still matters. And what they want is non commodity content. And they say that commodity content is seven reasons to replace your kitchen island. Anyone can make that content. They want real, real content, not commodity content. So to your point, there's two ways to do it. You could go to AI Slop and create something from there. And then so start with chat GBT. Then you could layer in maybe a story or two about your thing. And then you could post that. What I recommend doing and what we do for clients, we actually built an agent that does this. We take their customer conversations from their tracking phone numbers. So let's say that they track their phone numbers or they have call recordings. We take those call recordings and we build a knowledge base on their business. So basically we pull in their website information, their YouTube information, their brand documents, their client meetings with us. All of their call recordings. So we start with the customer question. We then build off of the knowledge base with real content. Then we fill in the gaps with AI on top. And what we found is that when we do it that way, it crushes ranks content. Like literally within 10 days, I was just looking at a case study today because it's the real questions from customers. So let me let me go back and and I'm completely new to this. So I'm probably sounding like a lot of people out there right here shaking their head and blinking twice. Yes. What I think you said is put a system in place to record your incoming phone calls from customers. Yes, which is easy, easy to do, right? Yes. A lot of us have that already. Then use those recordings to capture the actual questions from customers. There you go. Which is, you know, is there a way to make my kitchen brighter it so dark in here or can I catch an island fit whatever people say in your market right now it's going to harvest all of those questions. And create answers for those that are real and put put them back on my new version of a website. Yes, but there's one layer piece there. Of course I miss something Phil. It's okay. You got it. You want real customer questions and then you want to use those customer questions to create content. It could be a video. It could be a blog post. But what I would recommend and this is more that this is phase two, but phase three is the thing that we're going to talk about next, which is actually having what what Google calls a knowledge catalog about your business. Because your website right now is what they call a data layer, but what you really want is you want a digital twin, you want something that knows everything about your business. So that way it can help you make content. And the reason is because phase three is going to is agent to agent conversations, which we could we could get more into that, but basically you need that knowledge layer about your business. Right. I'll give you one other thing on this. The reason that most people are going to struggle with this is because I was the same way my home service business. I always thought as creating content as a waste because my clients are not on Facebook. They're on Google. My clients are not on Instagram or TikTok. They're searching Google when they need something. And I would just think creating content was for likes and shares and it was a waste of time. And what I'm telling you is creating content is now what these AI platforms want because they need the unique information to site as the go to source as the expert. Yes. And it has to be unique. You do not want commodity content because it's going to penalize you. Can I over share right now? Yes. Yes, I feel very unsmart in this conversation. I'm sorry. It's well, but it's it's a level of it's easy to understand, but my mind goes to the connectivity. How am I going to implement this? How do I put it in place? That's the hard part. You know, we can talk about it. Yeah. And then but what happens is when people hear about it, like this change is coming. And there's a lot of steps. And there's a lot of little steps to get started. So you put it off. You're like, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to go work on something I can understand. Like adding nitrous oxide to my family car. Sounds easier right now. But my point is, you know, what do I do first? Like if I'm a business owner, I'm already busy. We're getting, you know, good lead flow. We're not getting the greatest. We don't have the greatest clients. We tend to get people still hammering us for money. They want free estimates. They compare us to people who aren't really even the same quality or caliber of tradesmen that we are. How do I now shift use this information to shift myself up market, better client, less competition, et cetera. Yeah. So another stat that Google AI mode found was that when AI makes a recommendation to a business to a homeowner, they are 10% more likely to use that company. Because they trust that AI has done its due diligence and that it knows better than their research. So what I believe is that when you answer your customer questions and you can explain their problem better than they can. And you show up every single time that they have a question in your market. You are, in fact, marketing to the affluence, like Dan Kennedy says, you are the go to source that they can justify why someone would charge more money. Of course, they are because they're the experts that all roads lead back to them. You you you quoted something there that I've heard many times before and it's true. When I understand my customers problem better than they do, they know that I have the answer. Exactly. It's it's the same as if I'm building fences, building kitchens or building high-end architecture, my work. When I understand the problem of my client better than they do, they automatically go, OK, this is the person who clearly has walked this path before. And kind of everybody else just falls to the wayside or there, there, even if they choose somebody else, they know they're choosing second best. Yeah, exactly. And what I would say to take it even a step further to what you said was those content pieces that you create, you should use them in your sales process. So when you send an estimate, you already know what the questions are, people ask because you have the call recordings and you have the content. So now you can use those to overcome every single objection that they would have. You know, there's a crazy number, maybe a secret number that you probably don't know about. Now, my self and my coaching team have heard about this number for years, you know, even for myself, I've talked about this number in mustard stations, construction trailers, boardrooms, buildings under construction buildings about to be blown up. We've talked about it all over the world. If I say North America, obviously the States, Canada, Mexico, down in South America, Brazil, I mean, the list just goes on and on. It's a number that most people don't know unless they're big companies. And I want to share that with you now. Smart contractors already use this number and they learned about it at their kitchen table when they were a kid. And that is exactly why so many of us feel like we're behind the eight ball. Now, as you know, I'm here to get rid of the secrets in our industry. So here you go. They heard comes the secret number is your revenue responsibility per hour. We call it your RRH. And the reason to need that number so you can protect yourself from making the wrong decisions. When you understand this number, you can delegate with confidence, you can ignore things with confidence or heck, double down on the things that matter with confidence. Of course, you also want to face the reality of your business so that you can get to the next level, whatever that is for you. It's not a money for everybody. For some people, it's time. Well, this number is critical. I want you to figure out your revenue responsibility per hour so you can understand your goals and your bottlenecks and you can start making the money you deserve. And of course, have the time off to enjoy it. If you want it pretty simple, just text me the words revenue responsibility per hour. Or if you want to get all fancy, you can say RRH and we'll know exactly what you're talking about. It's a PDF. It's a worksheet like everything we do here is. We're trying to educate you. I don't want any more secrets in the industry. This is a massive number. We were just talking about it this week in our coaches meeting internally. And I thought we should remind you that we have it for you. Here's my cell phone 315 660 2973. So let me let me go back to this step one in my mind. Yeah. And again, let's use that simple question. Will a kitchen island fit in my kitchen? Or can I fit a kitchen island in my kitchen? Yeah. Where do I put that on my website? Is it just an FAQ section or is it a blog post? What's the actual thing? Yeah. So it kind of opens up another can of worms or a bigger question, which is before you used to care about keywords and tracking rankings on keywords. Like do I rank two on this? Or do I rank three on this? Right? If I'm saying that there's no rankings in AI mode, right? Because there's no rankings. There's no like number one, number two, number three. It's just the answer is how do we evaluate the content that we're creating and where do we put it? So that way it can be seen, right? So I tracked. I want it to see on the track. I want to know that it's so for instance, if the kitchen island question gets the most heat or pulls in the most people, I know what I would do. I would create 10, 20 more kitchen to island based questions or light in my kitchen questions or skylight in my, you know, whatever it is, I'm going to chase that. Exactly. Chase that bunny. Exactly. And that's why I have to open up that conversation before I answer your question because we have to understand how we're evaluating performance and what we should do. So to answer your question is there's two metrics to track that performance on AI mode. It's called share a voice and mention rate. Oh my goodness. So to give you the context here, share of those are new metrics. They're new metrics. And share voice share a voice and mention rates. Okay. So share a voice is when a prompt happens like the prompt question that you just brought. How many times do does that platform find your information and share what you had to say? So to answer your question is yes, you can put as a blog. You can put as a social media post written. You can put as a short form video. You can put it as a long form video. You can put it as a real as a tick-tock as a Google business profile post. All of those are different opportunities to have a share of voice for for for the AI platform to share whatever content you have in whatever format. So let me guess. But I want to be corrected if I'm wrong. Now when the AI when somebody types in will can I fit an island in my kitchen? And I show up under LinkedIn, YouTube, YouTube, short, Instagram, TikTok, blog post, whatever. All they're going to see is Dominic Rubino's kitchen island company just showed up nine times. He must be the expert. Exactly. And then the next key to this is called mention rate. So share of voice is how much content are you putting out there? Mention rate is how much authority do you have? Because mention rate is if they say, here's all the information, you should reach out to Dominic's cabinet company. That's mention rate. Do they trust you as the authority to say reach out to this person? So like we use a tool right now. It's called bright local and bright local is a local search tool. And basically in there, you can put in prompts. So you can put in the most frequently asked questions from your call recordings, which is what we do. Then we have the frequently asked question prompts. And then we can see mention rate and share of voice for those prompts in that area. So then we can see is this working or is it not? And how are we performing from an AI perspective? Okay. Yeah. So is this going to change the way a website looks? Yes, the website is still going to look nice. You know, because somebody that does a nice roof or very proud of the roofs they do, they want to have nice roof pictures. Somebody that does cabinets or architecture mill work or like I said, renovations, you want to show the addition or the ADU. Is that going to change? Well, and so this leads to phase three, which is under that assumption, we have to assume that humans are going to go to websites. But if agents are doing all of the research and ultimately scheduling service for people, there's another layer here where we need to have what Google wrote out at their Google Cloud next conference, which is called a to a protocol, which is agents, their Gemini Spark, communicating with other agents. So the example that they gave was, imagine Gemini Spark, their agent, personal agent. And imagine Target and UPS. And Target's spending millions of dollars to make their own agent. UPS is spending millions of dollars to make their own agent. And imagine you as Gemini Spark, hey, I ordered something from Target and it hasn't shown up yet. Up until now, there's never been a protocol for agents to interact with other agents. So Gemini Spark could not go out and interact with Target's agent. It was only internal use. So Google wrote out what they call A to a protocol where agents can interact with other agents. So you ask Gemini Spark, it can go to Target's agent, and then it can go to UPS's agent, and then it can come back to you with an answer because it's all going to be connected with agent to agent protocol. This is the whole crux of 2027, where Sundar Brechai said it's the year of the agents, where businesses are going, and I believe this through and through, that businesses are going to have their own agents that can interact with other agents. Gemini Spark. My website is going to have an agent. Your website is going to be a data layer that educates your agent. It's not going to be the agent because imagine you need YouTube content. You need whatever information you gave it. You need your online schedule and your CRM. You need all these things in an agent that interacts with their agent. Interesting. And these are virtual agents. It's just like having a virtual chatbot, but it's going to be a virtual agent. The way that I present it to to clients is imagine you have a digital twin of your business, not even just your brain of your business online that can interact with other agents to do things. Crazy. Yes. And no, go ahead. I was just going to say, this is why websites, it's like, yes, do you want them to look nice? Yes, do you want pictures on there? Sure. But if we know that 64, 68% of searches end with zero clicks. And we know that Google is now transitioning to AI mode and having conversations and answering questions and wants to keep people on the platform. Yes, websites are nice, but they become less and less relevant over time. Yeah, I can only imagine what the future holds in this. That there's somebody out there who's going to have really good content, but a really slim website. Exactly. And really accurate. A question that always comes up on this is like, what about ads? Because Google, if you're shifting away from search, the traditional search ads, LSA, all those things, and you're going to AI mode and answers, how do you actually make money, billion dollar company at Sundarfe Chai, right? Right. So Google actually rolled this out for home services of what's going to look like. And on your Google business profile, you're going to have a knowledge catalog, which is what I'm telling you you need to build. And inside of AI mode, you're going to be able to talk to the business through their knowledge catalog and their Google business profile. And this is how Google is going to make money is by keeping everything. They're going to charge me for initiating or hosting that conversation. Exactly. So does that mean paid ads are going to over time slowly go away and conversations are going to exactly? Because if we're shifting from keywords and costs per click and landing pages and all of that stuff, and we're shifting to AI mode and interacting of agent to agent, what do you think? that's where they're going to, that's where the, the most going to come. Yeah, of course. This is interesting and a little disturbing, but you know, I've got to look back, Phil. Look, I'll tell you, last year at this time, I didn't use AI at all. Yep. And I don't know if I'm like everybody else out there, but my usage of AI per day has gone from x, which x in this case would equal zero to x times 10. And by the way, we have a policy in my company and I still have to correct my team. We don't use AI images. We don't use AI writing. Like everything's got to be done by a human or edited heavily by a human. We're not going to be run. We're not a fake industry. Humans talking to humans and that's not going to change. Right. And I can tell by the way, there's certain news shows I listen to. And I'm like, they just mispronounce that word. That's AI. You just, that's how I tell, but it gets harder every day. Yeah. And I don't want that for us. So I want, I want my clients to understand or sorry, that everybody listening to understand. I guess this change is coming. Yeah. What I can say is that a billion dollar company in Google realized that they have to change how they're doing things because they were losing so much to chat to BT and clone. They had to change to AI mode and roll it out probably sooner than they wanted to, but they couldn't rip the bandaid for boomers and they're slowly doing it. But they are making the change. So you could say you don't want to do AI. You don't want anything AI. But fundamentally, how your customers finds you is changing. It's like literally yellow pages to Google, Google to now AI. And it's like, there's only, you know, 20 year increments that this happens. And there's a big shift. The silver lining here is that if there's big players in your market that are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on Google ads and all these things, and they don't care about creating content, they don't, they, they're just, you know, singing Kumbaya. There's a big land grab opportunity to your point of someone who has a thin website, but has a lot of content and is the subject matter expert. Right. So you've got to go back and find real customer questions, real customer opinions, real customer, real things to talk about. Things people would say like, my kitchen's too dark. How do I fix it? Or I need a kitchen island. Or yeah, you need real things, but more importantly, real stories and real, unique things to say about it. Because at the end of the day, you could get 50 questions from Claude and everyone's going to get the same 50 questions. They're not going to answer it the same way based off of your geographical area, your unique experiences, exactly how you do things. And that's really the secret sauce. The questions are one part, but then the knowledge base of you is the second part that's the secret sauce. Right. Because a customer, I guess a user wants to see that this answers from the flathead valley or Callis Bell Montana versus, like you said, generic seven things to know about a new kitchen island. Nobody cares. But when I see that it's Callis Bell and I'm in Callis Bell Montana, I'm like, well, they're the expert here. Exactly. So like the agent that we built that I mentioned is like, we just got a call from someone over in the Lakewood community. And they were talking about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like very specific to that call and that unique thing built on a knowledge base on top. Wow. Yeah. My head's a little bit stuck. I don't mind telling you, I don't, I don't claim to have all the answers. I have a lot of questions. I have a lot of curiosity. But in my mind, I'm thinking about the kind of thing that any leader would think about. What's the impact? What's the implication? What's the cost? What's the risk? Right. So the impact, if I don't, let me run through this, looking for you to argue or say correct me. Right. So the impact, if I do or don't this, don't do this is I'm going to see lesser or more results. You're already seeing less clicks to your website from now. But if you're, if you're doing SEO, SEO, the old way and you're trying to get clicks and things to your website and you're not answering questions, you're going to see a dramatic impact of leads from your website dropping off. Yeah. It's funny because I remember years ago hearing that long tail keywords, right, which is a longer question, not like kitchen island ideas, but best kitchen island ideas in callus bell. Yeah. That's a long tail keyword. That's like extra words. But now with the amount of speech to text, we do or talking to, I talk to chat GPT in the car sometimes. I just want to find out about something and this is exactly why share a voice and mention rate matter so much because it's not necessarily about one blog content piece, like what it used to be. Let me create a keyword rich blog post that's going to dominate, right? Like that is the old like 10 years ago, right? Now it's, I need to be the authority in the space talking about these things over and over again, sharing my expertise in real stories so that it trusts me. It's the trust. It's not about one thing that's jammed with keywords. Right. There's a lot here. And you know, the challenge for I think everybody, because everybody listening as you and I both know are the owners of companies, they're already busy. Yeah. This is another thing they have to put on their plate. And at some point you're going to have to hire somebody, whether it's your niece, do it, who just came out of college doing this or whether it's somebody like no offense, Phil, somebody like you or you, like, yeah, any variety of choices, right? For sure. As there is for all of us, including me. But at some point, you can't do this yourself. I think the, I'll tell you the insanity that we often see as business coaches is when a, when a customer gets a new idea and thinks they have to implement it. Like they've got to be the one implementing this new software or they've got to be the expert of that CRM or they've got to be the expert at this new SEO thing. I'm going to, this is business coach Dom talking right now. I'm calling BS on that whole thing. Stop because your highest use as the owner is actually figuring out the need and delegating it to somebody who you can hold accountable to making sure it happens faster and better. Exactly. Does that sound? Yeah. I know it sounds over the top and you can hear the tone of my voice, but I'm 100% committed to that answer. It's revenue responsibility per hour. You're never going to be the greatest in the world at, for instance, what you, I'll never be greater than you at what you do, Phil. Yeah. Mostly because I haven't spent my life doing it. Exactly. No offense, but you're not having vice versa, right? Yeah, exactly. The who, not how principle, I think that was a big shift for me in my business was like, when I stopped asking, how do I do this and said, who do I give this to? It freed me up. I love it. Yeah. That's a great point. And for everybody listening out there, let me just do a little, can I do a little business coaching, interlude? Yeah. Yeah. What Phil and I are talking about right now is this concept that you've heard on the show before called revenue responsibility per hour. It's a very simple number, but it's very powerful. And it only appeals to one person in the company, which is the owner or the president. If you've got partners, of course, it's split it into. But it's a very simple number because you just take your last year's sales and you divide it by how many hours you worked. Very simple, right? So I'll use very brief, simple numbers. If you did a million dollars in sales last year and you worked 40 hours a week for around 50 weeks a year, you did approximately 2000 hours. Choose the math according to yourself, right? So very simply a million dollars divided by 2000 hours means your time as the owners worth 500 bucks an hour. Now that doesn't mean if you go install crown moldings, you charge out Mrs. Bradley at 500 bucks. It's not what we're talking about here. It means that your job, your responsibility is the owner of this company is to make sure you're asking and answering questions at the $500 level. Which means that I need to delegate anything that's $499 or less. There's some more layers to that fill, but I don't want to take the interview away from you and go into my my soapbox is groaning under my weight. Oh, good. So one one thing that I think would be really good to talk about is let's say someone has listened to this and they just want to quick. I'm not going to say DIY, but just like a quick roadmap of like how I would do this if you weren't going to hire someone to do it and like have a simple playbook. So I would recommend using a call software recording thing like call rail or something else or there's these tools called plot. You can actually stick them on your iPhone or I watch or whatever and you can record your conversations. I would start there. Then I would use it used to be called notebook LM, but now it's called Gemini notebook. But it allows you to plug it's free. It allows you to plug in 50 sources of content and have a knowledge base about your business. Oh, this is what we were doing before. So we created these notebook LM's for our clients, but you could do that for your business right now and you could use this to give to new hires to team members to ask questions to and you could build your own little brain. Right. And then if you wanted to create content on top of it, you could literally ask this brain for information or content ideas, but it gives you kind of like a free way to start building this into your business. Start building it into the business. I mean, intuitively, I think anybody who's listening to the show is already running a successful business. So they know the most common questions that customers ask, but what you don't know is the way they ask them or the stuff on the set. Right. Yeah, no, go ahead then. That's exactly right. You know, like, but the one that you said to me, but like examples that we've seen is in HVAC for example, people will ask the question, why is my thermostat on, but my fan is not blowing cold air. Yeah, that question, if I were to ask a HVAC business owner, they wouldn't necessarily ask that. They would say there's a ringing in my HVAC system or how often should I get serviced on, but they wouldn't know that exact scenario or like, I just had a baby and I have a fan blowing over top of their crib. Do I need to get my air ducts cleaned? Like that question, right? That's a perfect example. Yeah, you're not going to know that question, but people are asking that online. Yeah. The one that we hear. increasingly. And I'm thinking about kitchen renovations and cabinetry is my mother-in-law's moving in. What height do we need to make it for her walker and wheelchair? The countertop. Because you have to deal with aging parents and bringing them in-house or whatever it is. So that one comes up and that would be a very very long tale keyword. Now and some renovators and cabinet shops won't hear that at all. Another one that comes up is what's called an ADU accessory dwelling unit in one jurisdiction, whether it's a municipality, a city, a town, a shire, a county, whatever, is called a carriage home in another one. And it's called something else in another one. So whatever the neighbors and the city that you live in is calling that, I'll call it an ADU, or small home or tiny home, whatever it's being called in your city, you're, I guess you're going to need to match that keyword or you're going to keyword yourself out of it. That's right. So I literally just pulled up the tool. I just said keyword and you told me not to say keyword, but I'm okay. I'm still stuck in my ways. Yeah, I just pulled up the tool and we have a cabinet company. So like how to cover and expose cabinet side in a specific area. Where do I place a cabinet, a pantry cabinet next to a fridge? How do I hide kitchen clients without a garage? Courts countertop tiers explained bathroom vanity size has explained how to cut fridge panels to fit during cabinet install. I mean, these are all from calls, you know. Those are all from actual calls with actual customers in the field. Yeah, yeah. That's from the tool that I told you that we had. That's all the stuff. He's all the content. Oh, you're looking it up right now. That's what you're doing on the screen. Okay. Yeah. Best bathroom vanities for small bathrooms flat front for shaker cabinets, easy clean kitchen. I mean, it's crazy. Oh my goodness. Yeah. There's a lot here, Phil. When when is um decision day? Like when when is this no longer easy to ignore? Yeah, I think what's going to happen? And if you're listening to this and you're already seeing a decline in lead volume or visitors to websites or you feel that's getting stagnant, a lot of times it's because you're not the one that these AI platforms are recommending or choosing. I think right now it's still not that well known what we just talked about. But in the next six to 12 months that phase three is going to be like the chopping block when it's like agentically and ads are rolled out inside of AI platforms. And it's just like a whole new reality of a world. And this is not me saying this. This is Sundar Bachai the CEO of Google who's saying 2027 is the year of the agents. And it's like as a I have a responsibility to our clients and my team to prepare them for the future. And so I believe that like I'm not saying it's Doomsday right now. I'm saying in the next six to 12 months, you're going to start to feel it at least in 12 months. Like there's no way that you can't feel it and in within 12 months. If you're tracking it and measuring it. Exactly. Like if you're looking at your leads year over year, your job count, your estimate count. I mean, right. Yes. So let me let me ask you this question. Because I know some people are going to be thinking this, okay, well, I've got a certain kind of customer right now. But I'd like a better different kind of customer. And maybe we're doing too many small jobs that like bigger, more profitable, larger jobs. But by definition, then I don't have a ton of those bigger, more profitable type jobs calling me. So I don't have their questions. What do I do in that kit situation where my target client isn't actually calling me. So I can't harvest their questions. Yeah, that's a great great point. So I would recommend at that time going to a cloud or chat to be see and saying, here's the questions that I have. But these clients are too small. What are the questions that these types of clients are asking using this as a base? Oh, yeah, basically taking the question that you have from smaller jobs and then elevating them into bigger jobs of what that one looked like. Look, hey, you know, your numbers don't lie, but they don't necessarily talk either. That's why we use checkpoint 90. It tells you what the numbers are trying to say. And it's the only report built for contractors, not for the accountant, right? Very simple systems, red, yellow and green. You'll know in minutes where you stand and what to fix first and what to ignore. That'll save you some time. If you want to do checkpoint 90 or you want to know how other contractors are using it right now, send me a text, very simple, just say checkpoint 90 in the text message. My cell phone number is 315 660 2973. I don't want to get too fancy, but then would you consider creating an avatar? Let's say that let's say that I specialize in selling to homeowners in callus bell Montana. And just for everybody listening, I'm going to simplify it back down to kitchen remodels. Again, it could be any, could be roofing HVAC cabinetry clause. It's doesn't matter. We're business people in the business of the trades, right? So I'm in callus bell Montana. We do kitchen remodels. Can I create a couple, a man and a woman, like a typical nuclear family and say, I've got Carrie and Corey, they own a six, let's say a million dollar home in callus bell. They drive this kind of car. This many kids go to this type of school. Tell me everything about them. And can I get AI to build me an avatar, like a fake Carrie and Corey? Exactly. So like what we do with the knowledge base, as I mentioned, was in our kickoff call, we ask who the target audience is and we get very granular, like a stay at home, I'm 40 year old single family home, whatever. And then in that knowledge base, this is exactly where you would add an avatar. So then when you say, Hey, based off of my avatar, do this. And then it's all in your knowledge base. I love it. Yeah, you know where I learned that? It's the most interesting place and it was a hundred years ago. Now, I'm exaggerating saying a hundred years ago. Yeah. But a long time ago, when I had more and darker hair, I was the business coach for one 800 got junk out their head office, which is a franchise junk removal company. They do painting. They do home cleaning and all that stuff, right? They would invite anybody that wanted to to come to their huddle. And when you were in the room doing their huddle on the wall, they had posters. And so the one 800 got junk avatar, like the fake people that they thought about, let's say that got junk starts with G and J. So they would say that the avatar was Gary and Jenny. So they'd have a picture of what Gary and Jenny looked like. Then they had one one 800 while one day paint. So then let's say day and paint. So they got a Dan and a penny. And they've got a picture of Dan and penny, right? Then they've got Shaq Shines. They're going to have Steve and Sandy. So they had posters of these people all around the office because they wanted their people in the company to understand when we're talking to Steve and Sandy. That's what they look like. Yes. I love it. And that that has been working for a long time for top companies because you want to understand your customer as best you can because we're here to serve the customer. Exactly. Yeah. So all we're talking about now is creating an AI version of what I say, Steve and Jenny, Steve and Sandy or Jenny, whatever it is. Yeah. I love it. Yeah. Okay. That's, this is pretty cool. You've got my head spinning and I can imagine a lot of people out there are shaking their heads and blinking twice. Like I don't know what to do with this. So let me, let me ask you this, Phil. If somebody needs to have a private conversation with you or find out more, I know you do a lot of podcasts. I know you know Adam from Java. So you've been on the home service expert podcast. But how do we find you in this big wide world? Yeah. Well, if you're a home service business between $1.10 million, $1 million, that's a bread and butter. You can go to Flash Consulting P-H-L-A-S-H Consulting.com. Our average client last year grew 27%. So like $250,000 to $1 million in revenue in 12 months. So go there, set up some time to talk about your business. And if we're a good fit, great. If not, at least we'll be able to tell you like, hey, you should go do these things. And if you're not in those, those numbers, it's all good. We have a YouTube channel Flash Consulting P-H-L-A-SH Consulting. And we have about 10 or 11,000 subscribers there and really good content. So go check us out there. Yeah. Now Phil, I want to do you a favor here. You said Flash really fast. Because it's not spelled like Flash. It's spelled like your last name. Yeah. Kind of like your last name, Phil. So my wife's name is Ashley. And I call her Ash. Right. And my name is Phil. So P-H-L-A-S-H Flash. Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah. Like those those power couples in Hollywood. Yeah. Even though my wife is a kindergarten teacher and has no idea what I do. So that's the best. Yes, exactly. Phil, thanks for coming and joining us here. I'm sure you're going to get questions from people. And you probably need to get questions from me as well. That's good. Thanks for being here. And as you know, you're going to be back again because you've already been on the show before. Just keep doing what you're doing. For sure. Thanks brother. Appreciate you. All right. Thanks, Phil. Have a great day. Well, well, well, Mr. Phil, Richard, thank you so much for joining us here. Talking about how websites are changing in the use of AI and how that's going to impact things. Look, we can stick our heads in the sand, but this is happening. And what we do about it is going to make a difference. And if you're thinking about the growth of your company, you can't just be thinking about today and tomorrow. We have to have that long-term view, which is of course why you listen to this show. Because we're here to talk about the business of the contracting business. It's a very different way than we started when we started this company. And we thought, hey, I'm really good with my hands. I'm really good in the trades. I'm gonna go start a business on this. Well, now you're at the point where you're sort of standing up, stretching your back, looking around, saying, hey, I've built a real company here, and I want to keep growing a real company. So these are the investments in time and brain power that you and I are gonna have to make. So I appreciate Phil coming and joining us. Now, for those of you listening, thinking, I can, how am I gonna afford this? Maybe I'll just ignore it because I can't afford it. Which is a logical thing to say. I'd like you to get a download. We have not talked about this download in a very long time, so you probably haven't even heard about it from our library of professional development tools. This one's called How to Have an Unlimited Marketing Budget. If you want it, just send me a text message. My cell phone number is 315-660-2973. I'm just say unlimited budget, and that way, you'll get this document, this tool that shows you how to have an unlimited marketing budget. Now, you might already know this in the back of your mind, but might not have thought it. Other companies are already doing this. They don't have huge marketing budgets by accident. They do it on purpose, and this document, this professional development tool, will show you how to put that system in place in your company. The way we've built it is the way I've built everything. I'm that guy who's bootstrapped every single company I have run. That means I've started them with no money, and I made them run on their own as a standalone entity. That's the kind of companies I run. I start them from nothing, and I build using clients money and profit from jobs. This is the tool that I use to do that. So I understand that investing in somebody like Phil, or somebody like Phil, let's just be honest, right? It's going to cost something. It's going to cost you time. It's going to cost you money. It's going to cost you the opportunity cost of not doing something else. Those are all real costs for us as business owners, especially if you're listening to this show. You're at that point already, where you understand there's real costs to this stuff. It's not fake, it's real. There's going to be money or time changing hands. So before we do that, we have to make sure it's a wise use of that time. And I think that's totally fair, and I hope you appreciate me bringing it up first. This tool called How to Have An Unlimited Marketing Budget for Growth shows you how to do that. It shows you how I and many other people have bootstrapped. As a matter of fact, there's a story in there. For those of you who've read my book, which is called Construction Millionaire Secrets, there's a story in there about a guy named Doug and something I learned standing at his kitchen counter when his son came home from selling donuts for hockey fundraiser. That same Doug shows up in this tool, and it's how he has always learned how to grow businesses. Now, this friend of mine took a business that I think when he bought it, it was around $2 million in sales. And he built it to the point where he sold it for $42 million. So if you want to get an insight into how a guy like that thinks, that's this tool. Now, maybe you didn't get a chance to learn this at your kitchen table as a kid. I certainly didn't. I grew up in a household that we all did. Lots of love, lots of food on the table. My dad worked overtime. Over time, all the time, my mom worked for the city. Just a normal, I think for me, a normal house, but we didn't talk business. In Doug's house, they talk business. And Doug is a result of what he talked about at his kitchen table. Use this tool to change the way you see your kitchen table. Pass this on to your kids and your family, but also use it for yourself. Anyways, I've already told you how to get in touch with me. Anyways, you know my phone number. It is 315-660-2973. All you got to do is send me the keyword. Just text it on your phone. Just say unlimited marketing budget. And then I'll know exactly which document you're looking for. And we'll send it off to you. Boom, you got it, just like that. Before I let you go, one other really cool thing is the water project in Nicaragua. Massive thank you to everybody. Now, things are a little bit quieter because of the summer. So we haven't had as many people liking and sharing and subscribing. Subscribers actually on our YouTube channel have just hit a new high, which is pretty cool. But overall, our numbers haven't increased as much. And I think it's 'cause it's summertime right now. But based on all of the likes, comments, shares that you guys have left on the show. Remember, every time you do that, we donate water to this community in Nicaragua. Right now, the donation amount of clean water to this Nicaraguan community that lives next to an open pit dump is 23,400 liters. They measure things in liters in Nicaragua. If you want the conversion into gallons, it's 6200 gallons. Sorry, I'm looking away and so I'm not talking into the microphone. If you wanna know what 6200 gallons looks like, 'cause I didn't know what it looks like, it is 124 50 gallon rain barrels. So if you've got a rain barrel in your garden, it's 124 of those 50 gallon rain barrels. And I said, well, let's look it up some other way. How else does this look? What if I fed my horse out of a bathtub? How many bathtubs would I fill? Well, it's also 124. Turns out a bathtub must be 50 gallons. So if you wanna visualize how much impact in terms of water, fresh water that you, my friend, have had just by liking or commenting or sharing an episode, it's actually a big deal. And the people down in Nicaragua appreciate it. By the way, I am going to Nicaragua this January and February. I wanna see the site where these donations are happening. And I'm also going to be building two homes while I'm down there. So that'll be pretty interesting. And I'm hoping that it becomes a place that maybe you can join me in the future. And maybe you and I will finally have a chance to meet, like I've always said, over a table. Now on that table is gonna be chips and salsa and chicharrons and maybe a cold drink of some fashion. And we'll get a chance to build together. Won't that be fun? Anyways, until that happens and you know I'm looking forward to that more than you will ever imagine until that happens. I appreciate you listening and we'll see you on the next episode.