Clarence Fisher: Welcome back to Local Market Monopoly. I am Clarence Fisher, your host, and I've got quite a bit of correspondence, emails, smoke signals asking, where have you been? Listen. Think about the plumber you'd call tonight if a pipe broke. You already have the name. You didn't shop, you didn't compare. The name was just there. Somebody owns that spot in your head. The question for the next 20 minutes is whether anybody owns it for your business.
Welcome back to Local Market Monopoly. It's Clarence Fisher. I am your host. And look, I've gotten, I'm not going to say tons of correspondence, but correspondence like, "Bro, where you been?" All right, look, I answered this a couple of episodes ago. Go back, listen to The Comeback Episode. I have come back. I explain everything right there, seriously. It was a serious situation. Now it is taking a bit more work to get into the groove of things, but we are getting in thus said groove and thus here I am. So that is the biggest... Now I have the biggest reason to never lose momentum because it's... And you know this, you got to keep momentum because it's hard to get it back, but we're getting it back. Today we're going to talk about your zone, your five mile zone as a matter of fact.
A zone, your zone. Your zone is not the city. That's not what this is. The cities are the lines. There are lines on the paper. Customers don't think about that. The zone is not your whole service area. It's not where you'll go, where you'll jump in the truck, the van, wherever and go service. Zone is where you win. Five miles means close. And this is where this came from. I just looked it up to make sure that I'm telling you... I know I'm telling you the truth, but I just want to make sure that the numbers didn't change. But it's actually like 6.6 miles or something like that. If you have a brick and mortar, most of your business is coming from definitely no more than 10 miles, but the majority of it, it's between five miles and 10 miles. The majority of it is 6.67 miles.
So if you're spending advertising, this is a real quick win for you. Call your ad person, if it's not me, and say, "Cut our ads." This is if you have a brick and mortar, okay? Cut our ads down to 6.67. No, down to five miles. 10 miles at the most. I'm telling you, anything more than that, and you're wasting money. So this is the hard part. A zone is small on purpose, and you can't let your ego get into it and say, "I want to rule the city." I know you can rule the city, like join the chamber or something. When you're running ads, and when I say ads, it's not even ad, it's also like your direct mail where you're going to show up, where you're in the soccer games, all of that stuff. It's within your zone. So you want to pick that out.
And here's what own it means.
You are found. When somebody in the zone goes looking, you are there. You get chosen. When they find you, they believe you. The photos, the reviews, the real people that you... Real people, not stock photo people, your recent work that you've put out there, and you can be reached when they call or they text or they fill out a form, a human answers. I know we're the big voice AI, AI receptionist is our big thing right now, but you have humans on there. It's the funniest thing when we listen to calls and people go, "Human, human, human." So now we have the voice AI explain that there's like three people who work here and they're all busy. And believe me, the way that you're yelling, I would definitely hand you over to a human, but I can't right now. So what do you say? I go ahead and book your appointment for you.
Well, okay. I think people are just so used to calling big companies and they say human and then they get to a human. Well, listen, the technology has gotten now to where your neighborhood chiropractor has voice AI. And if you want it, give us a call. All right? Anyway, back to... I digress. Back to what I was talking about. So you can be reached and you'll be kept. They'll keep coming back. They'll tell somebody else on the street about you. They'll tell somebody else on the street about you. So here's the test. Go down to four. Found, chosen, reached, you're being kept. They will keep you and just say it out loud and listen for a yes or no. Can you be found, right? Yes or no. Is this your zone? Most owners get two out of four.
Many owners get two out of four and many, many more never own one. And the reason is they try to be everywhere. Trying to be everywhere means you're going to be known nowhere. You're running ads across three different counties. You're not known really on any single street and buying attention before you're worth calling. I'm going to say they, not you, okay? They buy attention before they're worth calling, meaning running ads to send strangers to a page that gives them... It's not built out. There's no real reason for anybody to believe them and then leaking the leads that they already have. So the phone rings on Saturday, nobody calls back on Monday. And that's not a lead problem. That ends up being what we call a leak problem. So this is why you'll see the framework of the nine steps of the framework.
It's claim your zone. It's know your score, get trusted, get found, be reached, get reached, follow up every time. Get repeat sales, get referred and own your zone.
Now here's the point. Trust comes before ads and you have to fix the leak. Fixing the leak comes before buying traffic. You have to build trust before you buy the ads, fix the leak before you get more traffic. So that brings us to step one. That's where we're at right now. Step one, you can't take the score what we're going to do next without anything ever being bounded. So every step after this gets measured inside of a line that we're going to draw. I hope I'm keeping you. This is the very first step to own your zone. What I'm going to do is over the next, I'm going to say several, the next many episodes, I just gave you the framework. I'm going to lay it all out, give it to you free.
And once you have it, word will travel faster. Listen, word travels in small areas. You know how people say small town all the time. Word travels quickly in small areas. When you're on the ball fields, the same church, the same street, your crews will drive less so they'll do more. Your ads will stop paying. You'll stop paying for ads to reach people that are 45 minutes away, an hour away. I would say in some cities 30 minutes. 30 minutes ends up being... I'm laughing because I remember one time we were in Texas and I was younger and hadn't really traveled much, but visited a friend, Mindy, what's up? And she was like, "Hey, let's just go right. It's just right down the street." And we were driving for, let's see, we stopped for lunch and let's see, then probably used the restroom three times. No, it ended up being 45 minutes, an hour away and she considered that down the street.
In Tulsa, everything's about 15 minutes, 20 minutes away. So if I say you're advertising to get someone 30 minutes away, that is a long way in our city. And so you're going to stop doing that. And the biggest one, this is the biggest, biggest, biggest. Once we get where we're going here, you're going to stop competing on price because the first name that they think of doesn't have to be the cheapest. It just doesn't. So take the own your zone scorecard, nine steps. It's nine scores. It takes about 10 minutes and you're going to find out which step is costing you the most. All you have to do is go to ownyourzonescore.com and take the test. Over at localmarketmonopoly.com, we've got that button where you can let me know what your lowest score is and I'll tell you what I do to fix it.
We're going to go through every single step and you may hear me mention it, but you can reach out to me right there. So next week we're going to draw your zone on a map, okay? Right now we went over what owning your zone is, but next week we're going to draw the zone on a map. Until then, go own the block.