Imagine running a company that generates over a million dollars per year in an industry where your competition barely has a clue how to keep up with you.

What would that look like?

In today’s episode, I interview Jeremy Yamaguchi, founder of GoldenShine.com and in this interview, you are going to hear Jeremy tell the story of how he started his company as a side project 3 years ago, and, thanks to some very smart online marketing, combined with some clever automation, the business is on track for 7 figures this year.

And to think, it all started because his wife was laid off.

This is a fascinating interview, and the lessons that Jeremy is going to share are applicable to virtually any local service business.

In this interview, you are going to hear Jeremy explain:

how he came up with the idea

what the first version looked like

how he knew that the opportunity was bigger than he originally thought

what he did next to capitalize on that opportunity

how he drives organic traffic to his site

how he’s expanding into new markets (and driving traffic)

and so much more…

More About This Episode

The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.

It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.

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Transcript

Trent: Hi there, Bright Idea hunters. Thank you so much for joining me for

this episode of the Bright Ideas podcast. I am your host Trent Dyrsmid and

this is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to learn how

to use online marketing and sales automation tactics and strategies to

massively boost their business. And on the show with me to tell you exactly

how he has done that is my friend Jeremy Yamaguchi. Jeremy, welcome to the

show.Jeremy: Hey, Trent, happy to be here.Trent: All right, after much trouble I think we have the sound figured out.

So, for the folks in the audience, Jeremy, who don’t know who you are,

please tell us who you are and what do you do?Jeremy: So, my name is Jeremy Yamaguchi. I have a background in user

interface design, web programming, new media marketing, branding, and logo

design, somewhere along those lines. I actually ran a website design and

development firm for a number of years and I’m currently running a company

called Golden Shine Cleaning Agency. And what we’re doing is we’re taking a

high-tech, high-touched approach to a traditionally low-tech sector of

being household cleaning services.Trent: All right. So, gut reaction. Now, I know the story, so I know

there’s a big story here, but somebody listening might be going, “Household

cleaning, yeah, what’s the fun of that?” But you’ve achieved some pretty

phenomenal results, so talk to us just real quick about the business model,

how it works, and how much revenue you’re generating, and how many

customers you’ve got.Jeremy: So, it’s essentially housecleaning. That’s what it comes down to.

It’s as interesting as it sounds, let’s say. And the beauty of the business

model in and of itself is that it’s recurring in nature, so you don’t have

to continually replace your client base. Once you sign up a customer, you

can retain them for years, assuming you’re doing your job well. And in

terms of our performance as a company, we have been revolutionizing the

local industry, to put it simply. We have been around it for about three

years and we have over a million dollars in projected revenue for 2012. We

have over 4,800 customers and really we’re disrupting the space.Trent: Four thousand, eight hundred customers, that’s plenty of customers.

And you really the core of your business how these customers are finding

you, and the whole marketing, and that’s why you’re on the show, is

everything is happening online, is that correct?Jeremy: Oh, absolutely. That’s where the high-tech part of high-tech, high-

touched comes in. Yeah, that’s a story in and of its self, and I’m sure

we’ll talk about that.Trent: Indeed, we will. All right, so for the people – there’s going to be

people in this audience who maybe haven’t started a business yet, and there

are some people in my audience who are already running a business. They

always want to know more about the guest and your background. I know you

just alluded to it very briefly, but what were you doing before you started

this company?Jeremy: Well, I do have a background in web development and interface

design, so that spans prints, old media, new media, all of that. I ran, and

actually still continue to run a new media marketing firm. We build

websites. We do branding. We do SEO. We do all sorts of stuff. I handle

social media campaigns, and that’s my background. I would traditionally

work with I guess you would call it, “clients in more sexy industries,” as

it were.And that is really where the opportunity came in is applying that sexy to

what is probably somewhat less than sexy of an industry – housecleaning.

So, that’s really my background and where my skill set comes in.Trent: Do you think, though, how much of having that background enabled you

to be successful in this business, because building your websites are not

particularly tricky these days?

Jeremy: Sure. Well, let’s just say that we build a lot more than websites.

Part of our advantage in this business – it’s multifaceted. There are two

sides to it. There’s the client side, which is our advertising advantage

and the fact that we can present ourselves in a fashion that a lot of our

competitors can only dream of. And then, there’s the operation side the

back end. And that’s where being a web programmer has been very

advantageous.

I built an operations management system. It’s proprietary web-based

software that automates a ton of our processes, and it not only makes us

more efficient and builds our profit, but it also allows us to provide

profoundly better service than our competitors can through the use of

technology. You know that’s our distinct technological advantage.

Trent: Okay. So, let’s walk through – well, I want to start at the

beginning. So, I know you got this idea I think when you said your wife was

laid off. She – correct me if I’m wrong – she said she liked cleaning

houses, and so originally, you just kind of threw up a quick site, put some

ads on Craigslist and you got some leads and some business from that, is

that correct?

Jeremy: Exactly. It’s a classic recession story, almost. My wife was laid

off for a day at work. We needed to fill that gap and said, “Hey, what do I

like doing? I like cleaning, maybe that’ll work.” And I said, “Why don’t I

build a website and see what kind of traction it gets.” And we posted it to

Craigslist, got a substantially larger number of leads than I expected, and

that’s where I guess the – that’s where it clicked, as it were. And I

realized that this industry is in fact pretty ripe for disruption, and

we’ve been going strong ever since.

Trent: All right. So, the key take away from that, that I really wanted

people to understand is your first version was really cheap and really

fast. Throw up just a bare bones – you didn’t build any of this back end

automation or any of this fancy stuff, correct? You just put up a basic

website, put an ad on Craigslist.

Jeremy: Sure, absolutely. Yeah, it was I mean I’m not going to say it was

hideous, because as a designer and something of a perfectionist it was

okay, but it was okay in that it was built in a day, so you could take that

as far as you can, but it wasn’t amazing, no.

Trent: The point is, is you were able to get a lot of real validation that

you – that this business had plenty of opportunity before you invested a

bunch of money. And that’s something that I think is very – it stands in a

lot of people’s way, in that they think that they have to do too much and

put too much capital at risk. Where they spend doing market research, and I

think that the best market research in the world is to throw up a shingle

and say, “Do you want to buy?”

And in your experience that’s exactly what happened, all right. So, you did

that for a while, and then you figured out, “Okay, we need to grow this

business, and bring in some automation, and some more advanced technology.”

So, kind of walk us through that process. What happened next?

Jeremy: You know it’s not so much as a single next step as much as it is a

continual iterative process of improvement. It goes from improving our

marketing on the SEO front. That’s a story in and of its self. You know how

to rank great, and as someone familiar with SEO you know that all too well,

improving on our rankings, getting a lot of great leads through web search,

through other advertising channels. And then it’s also iterating on the

back end.

Really, it’s in a sense kind of akin to the whole lean startup approach of

building as you learn. You do something. You assess its impact on your

business, and you either replace it with another test or attempts or you

keep it if it’s performing wonderfully. And you have this feedback loop

where you continually try to improve all aspects of your business from your

presentation from the client side, to the operation side, and it’s a daily

process. I don’t think I’ll ever stop working to improve this business on

every end of it.

Trent: Yeah, that’s the joy of being online is that we never lack for data

on what’s working and what isn’t working.

Jeremy: Sure.

Trent: So, what was the next step? And so we’ve got business coming in from

Craigslist, and then you realized that you – did you realize you needed

more business or did you realize you needed more automation, because you

were already finding inefficiency with the first business that was coming

in?

Jeremy: Well, it was probably more business, because while I originally

built this site as an experiment to see, “Hey, can I get my wife a cleaning

job or two?” You know I quickly realized that that wasn’t the end goal,

here, and that there was much greater market and opportunity that I could

pursue. And at that point it was – it started drawing a lot more of my

focus from my other business to this, pursuing all the marketing efforts,

all of which have – well, most of which have been totally web-centric, up

to this point.

And from Craigslist we basically started an SEO campaign. Built out a

sizable website with a lot of great content, and started doing various

things to rank. That was essentially the next step, as far as I remember.

Trent: Okay, okay. That’s what I was looking for was that next step. So,

your SEO strategy was it – well, you go ahead and explain it, I’m assuming

it’s probably a long-tail strategy of some kind, but I’ll let you explain.

Jeremy: You know it’s actually all of the – it’s all of the tail. You know

if you search for the generic term “housecleaning” at the moment, and

you’re in San Diego, Google considers that to be a geo-specific search

term. So, it’ll give you a local result, and we have the number one result

for the head term “housecleaning” if you’re searching from our service

region. Also, we have targeted a ton of long-tail. I mean long-tail being

what it is that it’s hundreds and hundreds of keywords that we ranked for

that are more obscure, but that do add up to quite a significant amount of

traffic. So, we’ve targeted that, as well.

Now as far as how we target that it’s the whole smorgasbord of SEO

optimization from getting authoritative articles and back links, to we’ve

created some amazing info graphics that have actually received some great

traffic for us across Twitter, the social media sphere. And that’s resulted

in some great traction for us, and a definite jump in rankings. We really

tried a lot of things and a number of them have worked sufficiently well

that we are now ranking amazingly for the terms that we care about.

Trent: And how much content is on the site, currently? How many posts?

Jeremy: I couldn’t answer that off the top of my head, but I would say

we’ve probably got 60 blog posts, and we’ve got maybe 40 inner pages across

the site. It’s not a shallow website. It’s got some depth to it. Of course,

it could be. It’s not 10,000 pages or anything like that, but we also have

somewhat of a stringent quality standard that doesn’t allow us to just

explode out with tons of copy. We don’t release anything that doesn’t sound

– that doesn’t have the tone that we’re aiming for as business. We try to

control that – our message very, very tightly.

Trent: And in terms of ongoing content, so do you have an editorial

calendar? Are you continually adding new content, and if so what frequency,

and how long are these articles that are – that make up a post.

Jeremy: Yeah, we add content on a regular basis. We’ve actually expanded.

We’re not just in San Diego. We’ve expanded the operation now Orange County

and Los Angeles, and each of those expansions come with their own website,

complete with unique copy, which is a lot of copyrighting, and their own

blog. So, we try to post at least every other week to our blogs, and those

are three blogs, at the moment.

As we continue to expand we’re going to have maybe five or six blogs

running concurrently, and that’s a lot of high quality that you are going

to have to create. We don’t post anything that doesn’t – that isn’t

awesome. And maybe, it’s not all awesome. You can’t expect everything to be

amazing, but we have very high standards for the stuff that we release, and

that has proven to be one of the greatest challenges that we’ve faced, is

coming up with really great high quality and contextually relevant content

to post across our various websites.

Trent: So, you mentioned more than one blog. You mean GoldenShine.com not

the only blog, now. There are others?

Jeremy: No, as we’ve expanded to other regions we actually have – there’s a

few different you can take on SEO when you want to target various

geographic regions you can go with the subdomain, or the subfolder. So, you

could do GoldenShine.com/orange-county as our Orange County recommended

profile. I opted to go with whole domains, so we have

cleaningorangecounty.com is our Orange County website. We’ve got

hellocleaning.com as our L.A. website, and as we expand we’ve gone the

route of standalone domains, with very geo-specific content. As I tend to

think that that is a better approach to ranking across geographic regions,

rather than just creating more targeted content under the goldenshine.com

domain name.

Trent: Okay, and for the listeners who are listening to this and don’t have

access to the web right now, I’m just pulling up some of those other sites,

and the name on them is still Golden Shine, and the branding is still

consistent. So, you’ve kept that consistent across these various blogs.

Jeremy: Oh, absolutely. It’s an optimization effort. In a perfect world

we’d be under one domain, with one brand, but this was something that I

decided to pursue as I think it’s more advantageous on the rankings front

than going with Orange County subsections under the goldenmshine.com

domain.

Trent: Okay. Now, you talked a lot about just a minute or two ago, about

producing this high quality content. So, talk to us a little bit about how

it’s produced. Are you using 1099 riders? Are you going to Elance? How are

you getting it done?

Jeremy: Actually, I’ve tried just about everything. I’ve used professional

copywriters. I’ve used Elance. I haven’t tried Fiber yet, as I’m not

certain that the quality that you would get for five bucks would be – would

meet our standards, but I have a – actually we have some employees who

we’ve hired for a variety of functions, one of which is good copywriting

skills. And they actually write a lot of the copy for our blogs. And we’ve

been very lucky in that they’re pretty good. And they’ve been able to

consistently deliver high quality content, that has been to our standards,

and that’s how we actually get a lot of the content that we post, now.

I do also work with various 1099 copywriters, and freelance copywriters, as

well, because we are kind of an insatiable beast when it comes to web copy.

We can use as much as can get. So, I really – I’ve used most of the options

available at the source for great copy, and while it’s hard to find, you

can find the people who do, in fact, write very well at reasonable rates.

Trent: And are you when you decide to add a new piece of content, are you

choosing the keyword first, and then creating content around that keyword,

or how do you decide what you’re going to write about?

Jeremy: You know honestly I think our foremost concern is to create

something that is interesting to our customer base, and also that’s

contextually relevant. You know that has to do with cleaning of some

variety. Maybe it’s cleaning tips like how to clean your wooden floors, and

that’s somewhat of a niche article in that not everyone has wood floors,

but we found that that’s interesting enough to our client base that we’ll

get some decent interaction from our audience both in the form of shares in

other social media distribution.

And that’s really how we enter into all of this. We want to create

something that’s interesting to the read first and foremost. With SEO being

the secondary benefit. We’re not just creating posts for the sole fact that

we might be able to get some long-tailed keywords stacked up a random

searcher once a year. It’s more that we want content that puts us in a

position where we are authoritative. Where the reader and visitor does

understand that we know what we’re talking about. That we have experience

in this industry, and that boosts our credibility and it also provides a

value to the reader. It’s genuinely valuable content that they will take

away good information from and hopefully share with their friends.

Trent: Plus it’s going that when you have good quality content you’re going

a long way to nurture your needs. I was interviewing a fellow by the name

of Jay [Baer] yesterday, and in the interview we were talking about this

topic of lead nurturing and he said, “You know everyone has questions that

they want answers to before they’re going to buy anything from you. And

there are some people have three questions, some people have 10 questions,

some people have more than that, and your content, if it’s well-written,

I’m assuming for you guys, is doing a good job of helping to answer these

questions, and therefore establish trust credibility and rapport with your

perspective customers.

Jeremy: Sure. Yeah, that’s one of the goals, and certainly, I would say the

primary goal of any content that we write.

Trent: So, in looking at, and I’m on Hello Cleaning, right now. How much of

the traffic is coming to these sites from SEO versus say paid media buys?

Jeremy: Well, it varies per property. So, for goldenshine.com, which is our

San Diego website and really the mother ship, if you will. So, it’s

majority organic. So, we get a lot of traffic from organic search, because

we’re ranking so well, organically. The other sites because they’re recent

expansions, organics can take a while to do and materialize, regardless of

how well you optimize. So, that’s a mix of PBC and other media buys across

the web, as well as some offline marketing, actually, some old media stuff

that we’ve been piloting and seeing how it works out.

So, it varies from property to property, but I would definitely say we’re

paying more for our visitors on the newer websites than we are on Golden

Shine, which happens to rank much better.

Trent: Okay. So, when I arrive at Golden Shine, however I get there, I’m

going to land most likely on a blog post as opposed to the home page, if

I’ve come organically pending upon the search term that I punched in. Would

you say that that’s accurate, or where are people landing most commonly?

Jeremy: I think the whole site is pretty well optimized, but the home page

is the authoritative page on the website, as you would expect. So, it

definitely sees the most traffic of any given page across the site, but I

guess that’s the whole long-tail versus head term question. Does a long-

tail add up to substantially more traffic than the head term, even though

the head term in and of its self, it worth more than any individual long-

tail term. I would say that it’s probably almost 50/50. We get as much

traffic from the head terms, the housecleaning, or the San Diego

housecleaning, or housecleaning San Diego, San Diego maid service stuff

like that, then as we do from longer tail terms, like how to clean hard

water deposits, or stuff like that.

Trent: Yeah, so let’s talk about the conversion process. The traffic’s

coming to me the call to action looks like the “get a quote” button or the

phone number. Both are in the top right hand portion of the screen. Is

there another call to action that I don’t see, or is that it?

Jeremy: That’s our ultimate goal for any given visitor. We want them to get

a quote. And they, yeah, they can call us. They can do it through the

website its self, that’s their choice.

Trent: Do you have metrics on the percentage of leads that you’re getting

from the “get a quote” button versus the phone number?

Jeremy: Yeah, I think we get about 50% of what we get by phone that we get

from web based conversions. So, you know if 100 people convert online,

we’ll get another 50% back on.

Trent: Okay. So, when you talked earlier in the interview about automation,

and that’s the area that I want to dig a little deeper into now. Because in

a service business like this where you are using a large number of

subcontractors, are they subcontractors or employees? Because I know we

talked about this a while ago. You had an incident, you had – so, which one

is it?

Jeremy: Yeah, they are independent contractors. We are what’s called the

domestic referral agency, which is a specific big business-type that we can

form in the State of California. And it allows us to refer independent

contractors to homes across Southern California.

Trent: Okay. So, you have a – there’s a reasonable number of people in that

pool of subcontractor so you have a lot of moving parts to manage,

scheduling, quality assurance, payment all that stuff. So, can you talk a

little bit about some of the back end automation, how you’ve made this

business more efficient so that you can actually turn a decent profit at

it.

Jeremy: Well, the system that I’ve built it’s called our operations

management system, for lack of a better name. But it automates things from

scheduling to it’s a CRM, so it handles customer records, feedback. It

handles alerts. It’ll e-mail our customers before their jobs, and they’ll

know to expect our housekeeper, which reduces the lock-out incidence rate.

You know so housekeepers don’t show up and have no one there.

It handles all sorts of stuff from reporting both on our conversion

tracking, and performance on that front, as well as it has some pretty

awesome feedback loops for housekeeper performance, as well, which allows

us to provide better, higher quality housekeepers to our customers.

So, because it allows us to analyze their performance and continue on with

those who are doing amazingly and give them preference when it comes to new

clients. If someone who has a great record and gets like some of the great

feedback, requests a job, they’re going to get it over someone who has a

lower quality performance record. So, that ensures that we’re sending the

best possible housekeeper to our clients, and it’s a great quality boost on

that front.

Trent: So, if I’m understanding this correctly you’ve got for lack of a

more detailed explanation, kind of an Amazon type rating system where your

customer is coming back after the fact and saying, “Hey, that was a four

star cleaning, or a five star cleaning, or no that wasn’t a very good

cleaning.” That information’s then going into the database and in some way

interacting with the record for each of your subcontractors, and assigning

them a score. Would that be fair to say?

Jeremy: Yes.

Trent: And then, when new jobs go into the schedule, and these

subcontractors are receiving I’m guessing some kind of notification that

there are new jobs for them to go and grab, somewhere in the math you have

made it so that those subcontractors who have a higher score can take

precedence in some way shape or form to get the job or do they get the

notification? How does that work?

Jeremy: Well, as part of the system it’s not just on our end. This

operation software actually is extended out to the housekeepers that we

work with, and plus jobs. So, as the job comes in it’ll be visible to all

of our housekeepers and they can say, “Yeah, I want that Thursday at 9:00

a.m.” And we will see that six or seven housekeepers requested a specific

job, and we can dispatch to the highest performing housekeeper as opposed

to just sending to the first person who contacts us and say they want it,

so then – go ahead.

Trent: Okay, so then. That’s what I was trying to understand the dispatch

process is that still a human interaction process where someone on your

team is saying, “Hey, we’ve got this job. It came from 123 Some Street in

L.A. and here are the six subcontractors that are bidding on it. This one

has the highest score therefore I’m going to assign the job to that

person.”

Jeremy: Exactly. Yeah, there has to be the human review, because you’ve got

to make a judgment call and say, “Is this the best person for the job?”

There’s also an additional factor in here, which is that across the level

of good housekeepers, there are fast housekeepers who are just very

efficient and get through homes real quickly, and that there are really

slow but incredibly detailed housekeepers that will clean things with a

toothbrush.

And what constitutes good, is somewhat relative to the [home]. So that’s

where our office staff has to come in and do a great job. And they do a

great job of this, of pairing housekeepers to customers for their tastes.

So, it can’t simply be boiled down to ratings, the five star housekeeper

always gets the job, because you might have a few five star

housekeepers requesting a job and it’s a matter of interpreting the needs

of the customer, and pairing them with the best possible housekeeper for

their needs. And that’s how you get great result, all around.

Trent: And repeat customers.

Jeremy: Precisely, which is the bread and butter of the business.

Trent: All right. So, we could probably continue on down that rabbit hole

of automation for ever and ever, and ever, but without people being – for

those who are listening to this – without seeing interfaces and so forth,

it would probably be not as beneficial. So, I’m going to shift gears here

and I wanted to ask you about the product launch. Did you have any kind of

formal launch for this? Or was this very much just an organic, it just kind

of built slowly over time?

Jeremy: It’s entirely organic and that’s probably due to the fact that it

was a secondary pursuit for me for a long time, because of the demands of

my website design and development firm. That sucks most of my attention,

and this was something that I saw as an opportunity and pursued kind of

with gradually greater interest. You know as time progressed and then as I

saw more and more traction, and began to realize the opportunity, I was

able to devote more and more time to it. But it wasn’t something that I

spent six months building, and then tech-crunched out of the gate to get

things off. It was very organic in that sense.

Trent: And how about the new site in Orange County, and L.A? Was there a

launch strategy for those? Was there anything you did in particular or did

you just simply put the sites up and then start to purchase traffic, start

to optimize by creating content, and over time traffic just sort of built?

Jeremy: That’s mostly what we do. I mean we’ll throw out a press release

and let people know, but given the noise it’s not exactly brand new news

that’s going to be repeated everywhere that you get your news that a

housecleaning company expanded to another geographic region. So, we haven’t

beaten too many drums over the patch, but it is definitely something that

we throw some stuff out there and we get some interest. And it’s mostly

just launching all of the region is the primary effort there when we do

build a new site and expand into a new region. It’s a lot of work and it’s

getting all of that set up and humming along smoothly that’s really the

launch, effectively.

Trent: Are you building a list of perspective customers with this? Like, I

don’t see what you see is so common. As you know, “Hey, download free

report, give me your e-mail address, that kind of thing.” Are you doing

anything like that? I just haven’t seen it, yet?

Jeremy: No, we don’t have any white papers or anything like that. In a

sense our credibility builder as it were is our blog or our various blogs,

and that’s where we build an audience. That’s where we establish ourselves

as experts in the field, which we quite frankly are. And that’s what we do

in lieu of a download or something like that.

Trent: But, without a list if you wanted to offer a special or a coupon or

this or that or the other thing, you can’t reach out and say, “Hey, come

get this discount coupon for this weekend.” And I know in my business the

list is everything. It’s the most valuable asset, so why wondering why you

chose not to go down that road.

Jeremy: Well, the thing is, is that we do in fact have a mailing list, and

it’s first and foremost we have our mailing list which is our existing

customers, and up until very recently we had an opt-in box on the website,

“sign up for our mailing list for news, tips, tricks and deals from Golden

Shine Cleaning Agency.”

And we did see some interest there, but that was a call that I made to

remove that sign-up list, quite frankly because we didn’t have the time to

reach on the regular basis to our existing list. We weren’t essentially as

much advantage of it as we could. And being that that was the case and had

been for some time, I made a call to remove the mailing list call to action

from the site, because it did detract from our primary call to action,

which is to get a quote for your home.

And as the saying goes, “When you emphasize everything, you emphasize

nothing” and I wanted to reduce the things that we were emphasizing and

kind of pitching to a website visitor in order to focus on the things that

were really the most important to us.

Trent: Okay. Every business owner has a period I call it the, “Oh, beep

moment.” Where stuff hits the fan, things go drastically wrong, and I’m

wondering if you had an incident like that at all in the last three years,

or maybe you had more than one?

Jeremy: The Valley of Sorrow. Yeah, you know we – yeah, I’ve definitely

been through that. In our particular case it came in the form of a letter

from the employment development department letting us know that we were

being audited for employment classification purposes. So, they just wanted

to make sure that the housekeepers that we work with are correctly

classified as independents, so we’re operating under all the regulations

and that we’re in compliance with the civil code that we operate under as a

domestic’s referral agency.

And thankfully, we were. We passed that audit just fine, because we were in

fact compliant, but it’s never a pleasant thing to receive a letter from a

state or government agency, particularly if it has “audit” in the title.

And that I would say is definitely the “Oh, bleep moment,” as it were, so

far. I’m sure there’s going to be a few more occasions where I have my day

promptly ruined by something I received in the mail, but as of yet, that’s

been the primary source of stress. But that’s behind us; thankfully I’m

proud to report.

Trent: So, we’re going to wrap up here quickly – fairly shortly rather. I’m

having trouble speaking today – fairly soon, and before we do that a couple

things. I want to know in case there are people who are listening to this

who are thinking that, “Hey, maybe they want to be able to do some kind of

business with you, or they want to partner with you.” What are some of your

plans for this future, and how can people get a hold of you?

Jeremy: Well, right now it’s now of what we’ve done to date. We are working

on expanding out to other geographic regions. We’re currently focused on

California for the moment, but we certainly are interested in scaling on a

more national level given the opportunity and the time, really it’s what it

comes down to.

And then, we’re also still at the continual process of improvement,

iterating on what we’re currently doing, and figuring out a way to do it

better, whether that’s our customer service, and the way that we deal with

problems when they do arise, or the way that we attract new clients in our

marketing, the client facing end of things. That’s something that I think

there’s always room for improvement on that front. And that’s something

that we are definitely pursuing on a continual basis.

If people feel like they can help contribute in that sense, I am all ears.

I’m always open for new ideas to see what kind of products people have that

can help move us forward in any of those various directions.

Trent: Okay. One last question just popped into my mind. The software, are

you using open source, and putting existing objects together or did you

just start with Note Pad and write from scratch?

Jeremy: Blank slate.

Trent: Really?

Jeremy: Yeah, white screen writing it up from scratch. That’s not to say

that we don’t use tools. We use stuff like JQuery and existing libraries

that developers provide to help make programming easier, but we haven’t

built off of preexisting CRM systems or anything like that. This is all

built from the ground, and it kind of had to be that way I think because of

how specific our needs are. It’s allowed us to tailor things very well to

fit our needs and that isn’t something we could of necessarily could have

done if we went with and out of the box solution.

Trent: Did you look at Infusionsoft in any detail before you built your

own?

Jeremy: The CRM?

Trent: Yeah.

Jeremy: I didn’t. Although, I did look at Salesforce, Zoho, and a few of

these other various CRM systems, and they’re great as far as CRM’s go, but

we needed something that is like a CRM on steroids. The CRM is probably

only about 25% of what our system does. The automation that comes in on the

provider side, on the scheduling, and on the reporting side is something

that it’s too specific to our needs to have been solved with an out of the

box solution, I think.

So, we programmed it. Yeah, it was absolutely a great investment of time.

It’s been years in the making, but it’s our distinct technological

advantage. Having built it, this is what separates us from the competition.

Trent: The only reason I bring that up is there’s going to be some people

who are listening to this who would be daunted – overwhelmed by the idea of

maybe building their own custom solution. If that’s you I don’t obviously

know Jeremy’s back end business processes, but I’ve interviewed quite a few

people that use Infusionsoft. I use Infusionsoft, and it is a CRM system on

steroids, and it is amazing what you can do in terms of customization, work

flows automation.

So, don’t let the fact that Jeremy built software from scratch discourage

you from getting into this or any business where you think that you want

that back end automation, because it can be had without being a programmer.

And there are obviously more than one platform. I just happen to be

familiar with Infusionsoft, because I use and again, because I’ve

interviewed a lot of people that have used it.

Jeremy: Well, I definitely agree. I think you can certainly choose an out

of the box software that will solve your problem for 90% of the use cases.

And it’s just we chose to go this direction to get to the 99%, but if you

can get 90% of your problem solved without investing years into developing

custom software, that might be a better decision, arguably.

Trent: Yeah, okay.

Jeremy: Yeah, do not feel daunted.

Trent: Last thing is how do people – what’s the best way to get a hold of

you, Jeremy?

Jeremy: You can actually contact me at Jeremy@goldenshine.com. That’s

probably the best way to get a hold me. You can also just LinkedIn me,

Jeremy Yamaguchi, and I’m pretty accessible through that format, as well.

So, pick your choice.

Trent: Okay, terrific. Jeremy, thanks very much for being a guest here on

the podcast. It’s been a pleasure to have you on.

Jeremy: Thanks for having Trent, appreciate it.

Trent: All right. Take care.

Jeremy: Bye-bye.

Trent: All right, if you want to get the show notes for my interview with

Jeremy, just go to brightideas.co/19, and the other thing that you’ll want

to do is head over to brightideas.co/massive-traffic. If you enter your e-

mail address there you’re going to get free instant access to my massive

traffic tool kit.

So, here’s what the tool kit is. It’s a compilation of all of the best

traffic generation strategies that have been shared with me by my guests

here on Bright Ideas. And the best part about it is you don’t need to be an

SEO guru to be able to implement any of the strategies. So, you can get it

at brightideas.co/massive-traffic.

So, that’s it for this episode for the Bright Ideas podcast. I am your host

Trent Dyrsmid. If you enjoyed this episode, please do me a small favor,

head over to iTunes and leave us a five star rating along with some

feedback. Every time that you do that it helps the show to get a little bit

more exposure in iTunes and with more exposure we can help more

entrepreneurs to discover Bright Ideas to help them massively boost their

business. Thanks so much. It’s been a pleasure. We’ll see you in the next

episode.

Recording: Thanks very much for listening to the Bright Ideas podcast.

Check us out on the web at brightideas.co.

About Jeremy Yamaguchi

Jeremy started as a web designer and developer, as the founder of Aeron Creative. Jeremy has a strong design aesthetic and the ability to create highly functional web apps. These skills have provided him with a distinct technological advantage when applied to the household services sector.

As founder and president of Golden Shine, an employment agency for household-related services, over the course of a few short years Jeremy has grown the business to seven figures.