Quick & Dirty Lead Generation Article
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Quick And Dirty Lead Generation Article for Appliance Repair Servicers
FAST LEAD GENERATION PLAYBOOK
Core Principle: Word-of-Mouth Is the Endgame
Build experiences so good people feel compelled to recommend you.
Free, high-quality leads become automatic once trust compounds.
Hardest thing to build, hardest thing to scale, but the most powerful long-term engine. And there's no competition in this arena too. Very little competition. This is extremely hard to institutionalize. This is my playground. We make fervent promoters of our company. It's that simple but very difficult foremost think about running a marathon. Very simple. You just put one foot in front of another until 26 miles have passed, very simple but difficult and most will tap out. It is like that.
When You Need FAST Leads Use Every Major Lead Platform
(Ignore the complainers — negativity bias clouds reality)
Yelp/Angis/Thumbtack, etc Pay for 2–3 months → stack reviews → stop paying → enjoy free Yelp leads.
DO NOT PAY YELP/Angis/HomeAdvisor IN THE LONG TERM - NOT RECOMMENDED
ServiceDirect
Google Business Profile Your most important digital asset. Set hours 5am–11pm, 7 days/week for maximum catch. You do not have to answer — wide hours create voicemail volume.
Repeat this for all the major platforms: HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack, and Angi List etc. The whole key is just to pay them for a month or two because if you do this, you will get a professional from their side to make you a nice listing and get the ball rolling. Just stop paying them forever. That's what I do anyway
A SPECIAL NOTE: Thumbtack. This is one I think is worth paying for in the long run. I've had nothing but good results with Thumbtack. Again if only half the leads work out on Thumbtack that's okay. Your whole job is to be built repeat customers from these sources which will pay it forward indefinitely
A SPECIAL NOTE: Home Depot Pro Referral is excellent. You get a lot of old people who don't know how to use the internet so they go to the Home Depot counter and ask for recommendations. These are some of your most patient awesome customers. So you'll get emails saying "please call me, do not text or email me". Amazing old fashioned customers from Home Depot Pro Referral
Principle: Nobody Has “Cheap Buyer Tire Kicker Buyer Platforms”
No lead company curates “bad customers or cheap customers or price shoppers ” — it’s impossible.
Negative experiences get overweighted in memory, not reality. Use extreme caution about adopting other servicer's negative experiences as your own. I say find out for yourself.
Even if half of the leads were cheap, the other half is gold.
You’re mining. Dirt is expected. Gold pays for all of it. 1 valid lead negates 9 bad ones. ( It's been said the tailwind from the lifetime value of one lead and all the referrals is worth $8,000 over 10 years. So yes, 9 bad leads are worth the one that works out. )
Even if the leads are horrible from the sources I mentioned, it doesn't matter. At some point, you can wean off them once people realize a loss more. So even if only 10% of the leads are valuable at these other lead generation places, those 10% will be the ones that start referring to their friends and family who are of the same quality that they are. So ignore the advice that certain platforms suck. It's just not true
When you hear people claim that these platforms suck, the customers are cheap, they're tire kickers, this is your positive signal to join immediately because this is wide open for you
Again let's reverse engineer this. If it was your job to make a platform that only cheap people aggregated to, how would you accomplish this? You can't
Bidding Strategy For Any Platform
Bid the highest if you have a great budget
Bid the lowest. If you don't have a great budget, this is what I did. Set minimum bids on every platform.
The goal is a low average cost per booked job, not winning every bid.
Low bids + wide hours = leads at odd times with less competition.
This is my personal strategy but other strategies work here too
Availability Strategy (Dragnet Method)
Set business hours 5am–11pm.
Leave Sunday open even if you never answer — people book and leave voicemails. And a lot of people especially old people will just wait until their voicemail is returned. They will not call another competitor. Some will some won't. The ones that wait are the best customers anyway. They're patient.
You wake up Monday with a full slate.
Website Conversion System 24/7 Booking Agent
1. Install ZenBooker
24/7 self-booking widget.
People book while you sleep.
If the time doesn’t work, call them the next day and adjust.
Even if you're using a different system such as Fieldpulse, it doesn't matter. Just use ZenBooker as a front-end. It only takes a few seconds in the morning to transfer everything from ZenBooker to whatever your CRM is, whether that's Fieldpulse or Housecall Pro, etc
2. Add Missed-Call Autoresponders ( SEE GRAPHIC AT BOTTOM )
When someone calls and you don’t answer, your system automatically texts them.
Include your ZenBooker link.
This alone recovers a huge amount of “lost” leads
Overarching Strategy
Cast the widest dragnet humanly possible.
Use every lead source without prejudice.
Let the complainers complain — they’re focusing on noise, not data.
Your job is simple: Capture every opportunity. Filter later. Profit always.
How to Start the Pure-Gold Referral Engine
Call every appliance repair company in your area.
Tell them you handle the jobs nobody wants — washer bearing jobs, nightmare repairs, anything time-consuming or miserable.
Tell them you’ll pay for any leads they send your way.
Keep it human: no texts, no emails — phone calls only.
After the call, immediately mail them $25 Cash with a handwritten note: “We got a lead from you — thank you very much!”
Even if they didn’t send one yet, send it anyway. The gesture proves you’re serious.
Sit back and watch the unlimited leads roll in because you just became the guy who pays, handles the tough jobs, and respects the relationship enough to pick up the phone.
I MISSED AdWords, SEO, Google Guarantee...
Actually I didnt. Why I Ignore AdWords, SEO, Google Guaranteed, and All the “Normal” Marketing
Yes, those channels work, Many people use them .
No, I don’t use them — and I don’t need them.
When your pipeline is overflowing, you don’t chase what everyone else is chasing.
If everyone’s doing it, no one’s doing it. The advantage disappears the moment the herd piles in.
I only pursue strategies almost nobody else touches, because those are the ones with ground-floor leverage.
Think of lead generation like setting explosives in a building: most companies are placing all their dynamite on the third floor (SEO, Google Ads, social media, AI ads).
I put mine on floor one: real conversations, human trust, personal networks, partnerships with other repair companies, real estate agents, friends, community hubs — the foundational orbits everyone else ignores.
When you dominate the bottom floor, you literally remove the need for the higher floors. They collapse under their own weight because you own the base layer.
I am not disparaging these sources. Some people have great luck with these. Personally I don't need them. So add these to your playbook if necessary
Proof?
I'm just a guy on the internet. The proof is in the pudding. I don't have marketing costs anymore. At this point my marketing costs are negative. That's correct. I generate so many leads I sell them to the competitors now. While some companies are spending $5,000 to $10,000 on marketing a month, I'm actually making quite a bit selling excess lead spillover. Here's a screenshot showing my system. I actually send leads to my competitors and I charge them. I sell 100-300 leads a month as I get so many of them.
I use a program called WhatConverts to track leads that I send to my competitors. It offers a full-fledged portal where I can log in and see what's being charged, and also the buyer can see what they're being charged.
Conclusion
There is no silver bullet. I get leads from 30 distinct sources, and most of them are so unique I'm pretty sure no one else in the United States is doing them right now. I will explicate this more as time allows . For example there's one lead generation source I'm doing right now is like a nuclear bomb for leads. It's pretty amazing and it's really cheap
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#1 Free Lead-Gen Lever in Appliance Repair: Expand Your Hours
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