S3: E11: Deep Dive-How To Capture And Close More Pressure Washing Leads With AI

If your phone rings while you’re on a roof wash and you can’t answer, that missed call isn’t just a lost job, it’s a crack in your brand. We’ve both lived the “text a price and hope they reply” workflow, and it works… until you’re spending serious money on Google Ads and trying to scale past the $300k to $500k range without burning out.

We map out a modern lead funnel built for a pressure washing business that wants clean handoffs and real lead tracking. We explain how we’re using Go High Level as the top-of-funnel system to capture every lead source (calls, website forms, Google Business Profile, Facebook, chat widgets, texts), trigger automations for missed calls, and even use an AI agent to gather the basics fast. Then we push qualified leads into Housecall Pro so quoting, scheduling, and customer follow-up stay organized inside the CRM where the work gets fulfilled.

From there, we talk numbers and growth: cost per conversion, close rate, average ticket, and why tracking turns ad spend into a decision you can measure instead of a gamble. We also share how these systems free up time for higher-level moves like commercial pressure washing outreach, property management relationships, and longer deal cycles that require consistent touch points. AI is a tool, not a shortcut, and the contractors who combine speed, tracking, and a human experience are going to separate fast.

If you want more deep dives like this, subscribe, share the show with a washer who needs better follow-up, and leave a review so more contractors can find it.

Transcript

Why A Deep Dive Today

SPEAKER_00 0:31

What's up, guys? It's Matt Jackson and ClaytSmith, and we are The Watch Bros. If you noticed today, uh Clay's going to be at the races, so I figured instead of re-airing a previous episode, I'm going through a lot of cool uh stuff in my business with growing my whole process from the front end. So if you guys are like me and you're always trying to figure out how to optimize your systems and you are learning a lot of stuff you want to share with other people. So I figured as we grow this wash bros, as Clay's at the track enjoying his day, I don't want to try to loop in an older podcast episode. Uh, if you guys are avid listeners, you've already heard it. So with this one, it's gonna be super relevant. It's gonna be what I'm doing as we speak in my business to uh really grow, position ourselves to kill it in 2026. So this is gonna be episode 11. Episode 11 of season three. And uh let's talk about the modern lead funnel. Uh, this is a thing I'm passionate about. If you guys follow me for a while or you listen to the show, you know I like the sales and marketing and all the like nuanced stuff. So what I think we're gonna be doing, um, especially when Clay and I are busy, uh, try to do more like deep dive episodes. So I've I listened to a lot of podcasts like you guys do, and and I find like, yeah, it's awesome to have a guest, it's awesome to talk and you have your guys with you. But you know what? Sometimes you want to go heavier into a topic. And if you guys have listened to us and you see, oh, like I I hear you talk about a funnel, I hear you talk about ads, I hear you talk about this, I hear you talk about that, but like, can you break it down in more detail? And so we're gonna start doing these deep dive episodes. And like me being the nerd, I love doing this stuff. It helps me process, helps me work through things. As you guys probably know, I have a couple books out. Not only do those books help you guys, but it helps me process and it helps me really dial in my own systems. So I'll make it simple. We're gonna do a screen share with this. Um, forgive the uh lack of creativity here, but you know, we're all pressure washers, we're very much about getting the job done. Um, and uh, how do we do it as simply as possible? So, this is gonna be uh the modern lead funnel for a pressure washing business. If you guys are business guys, you probably know this stuff, or if you hire a marketing agency, like what I'm discussing here is gonna be what a guy is gonna charge you at minimum, like five to ten thousand dollars a month to do internally. So, this is what we do, this is what we're evolving into with AI, with all the all the apps and the systems available to us. This is how we're getting ahead of the competition. Because as you guys know, pressure washing, it's something where anybody can do it.

The Real Cost Of Missing Leads

SPEAKER_00 3:05

You get a pressure washer, you go door to door, you say, Hey, I'm hungry, I won't work, I post in a Facebook group. But okay, what do you do when you're past that phase? What do you do when you're making $100,000 a year? What do you do when you're making $250,000 a year? What are you doing when you're at $500,000 a year and you're looking to make your next moves to make a million plus? This is gonna encompass everything important. So if you're at the beginning stages, these lessons are gonna be awesome for you. If you take 10% of this, you're gonna get a huge gain in your business. This is just what I've learned over time. And with all these super cool AI tools, I'm able to run a lot of models and I'm really able to lock in my systems. And if you follow guys and you see stuff about like Go High Level, or if you see stuff about AI agents, or if you see stuff about tools, this is gonna be a great episode that breaks everything down. I got a little slideshow that way you guys can follow if you're watching live. And if you're listening to the podcast and you want to watch this live, make sure to go to our Wash Bros page, whether it's on YouTube, Facebook, and uh watch the replay of this. You'll have all the information there. And join the Facebook page because like we're gonna start dumping this stuff a lot more heavily in our school community. So we're gonna put that out for free. As Clay says on other episodes, we're not making any money doing this. We do this because it helps us grow in the community, helps us like do our tithe to you guys, help help everybody else out, but it also helps us internally. And I know personally how I work, like this stuff helps me um study and learn it myself. So, like, this is gonna be our process from the front end, how we use Google Ads, AI, Go High Level, and House Call Pro to capture, respond, and quote, and close leads automatically. So, what we're gonna be doing is discussing like how you guys probably do this. If you're an old school guy or if you're a new to business and you're a technical guy, a lot of you guys are blue-collar-based, and I mean that's great. But like I came from sales, I came from college, I came from having a business degree. I read, I over the years I've probably read, I don't know, a thousand or so books. Like Klay likes to joke if you go upstairs in my house, I got pretty much at a library. Me and my wife like to read, we have like 3,000 plus books. So that's kind of part of my life. And uh the important thing with business is taking all that knowledge and then putting it into something, packaging in that uh to something that you can best utilize and and and make your business grow. So, like, one awesome thing for me recently has been I got all the knowledge in my head and all this in the world, but like how do I build the modern technology systems, the AI, not just to spit out more nonsense, not just to give me more unnecessary tasks to do, but how can I spit the information out into an AI system, have it understand me, have it understand how my brain works, and how how have it understand how my goals are needing to be achieved. That way I almost follow the processes. So uh if you're old school, it's pen and paper, you answer the phone, somebody's like the leads, the leads come in, they get overwhelmed, you send a text message. This is what I was doing even up until last year. I would text somebody and I would say, Yeah, sure, price, we can do it for 500 bucks. I got available availability next week. And if they didn't close on the spot, I had to rely on them texting me back at a later time. Yes, they would do that occasionally, but I didn't really have a lot of tracking involved. So this year, in order to grow, in order to invest all the money that I spent on ads, because like I spend a decent chunk of money on ads, I think we're in a heavy growth phase, and our objective is to really grow. So my ad spend is probably like $60,000 a year. Sure, you spend $5,000 a month on Google, Facebook, etc. If you don't have a way to track it, you're just wasting money. And if you don't have a way to nurture those clients and nurture those leads, you're really wasting money. And that's the thing, uh, with the help of Clay, of course, because he started implementing this through our CRM House Call Pro a little bit earlier than I did. So it's one of those things like the power of the Wash Bros. Him and I both help each other. We have blind spots, we have ways of doing stuff that may work for us, but until somebody shows you a better solution, you don't know what you don't know. And that's again one thing that I'm working on this year to really grow and uh share the systems that I'm doing with you guys because you guys rock and I mean Clan are both the same as you guys. Like we're we learn as we go, so we share our information and we we help everybody. And it's like the quote rising tides raises all ships. So back to the point. Old problem is hey, I'm on a job, I can't I can't get to you, but I'll call you back. Well, in today's world, you're you're gonna have to respond to a lead probably within five minutes with a quote, or that's a lost job. And this is the problem you see in small businesses, whether it's pressure washing, landscaping, window cleaning, etc. That's why these guys are selling you the same formula, repackaged as a mastermind. You got a missed call, slow quote,

The Pre-CRM Gap To Fix

SPEAKER_00 8:05

no follow-up, leads are not tracked, there's no systems, owners overwhelmed, growth capped. Yeah, you can do that for $300,000 a year solo. You can do that for half a million dollars. You're gonna be completely swamped, and your inability to scale is gonna really be evident. And that's why you see guys cap out or they burn out or they're hard workers. And look, we all work hard. But the objective here, the the beauty of living in a capitalistic society is like you don't have to work hard, you have to work smart and hard. So, like, don't work as hard as you can because that's gonna be the limit of your capacity, which is the limit of your knowledge. Our objective here is to how do we push through this and grow with all the resources available and what guys are doing. And this is kind of a growth stage for me at the moment, and that's why I think it'd be super cool to do this deep dive with you guys. So I started implementing a different process before House Call Pro. If you guys are like me, we use CRMs to manage. Um, and if you guys have been listening to the Wash Bros, yeah, you get an information, you send a quote in your CRM, your invoices to the CRM, and then you got uh your customer base. So we set up automations there that sends email follow-ups, we send postcard follow-ups. We want to thank our customers, we want to get that Google review, and we also want to give them a nudge, like in a year or 18 months to get back on the schedule. That's great. But what I was missing out on was what happens before House Call Pro. What happens before I get the job, quote, in the system? There was a huge section that I was missing out. And that's where this year implementing Go High Level as kind of like the first touch point really is fixing that gap that I had of growth. Because like we get slammed, um, I we're we're we're getting tons and tons of leads, tons of phone calls. I have a virtual assistant. I had to have a process that would manage everything from the first touch point, which is where your brand starts. The first touch point is where the customer gets the opinion of I like this company or I don't like this company. So if you fumble it or if you don't get back to them in time, it's not only a missed opportunity, that is lowering your brand in the community down. People are like, oh yeah, he looks great online, he looks great on Facebook, he's doing all these jobs, but he's too busy for me. That will spread quicker than you know. So the objective here is to not allow that to happen. So the beauty of Go High Level, I've I've been hearing about this forever, and I really started getting into it because um I was trying to figure out a solution of my phone ringing with a virtual assistant and then like call forwarding, and occasionally like it would drop. That was kind of dinging my customer experience, that was dinging my LSA score. And so, like, I I I pretty much have implemented an AI agent, and the cheapest and the best way to do that is to run it through Go High Level. So we created a new

Go High Level And AI Agent Setup

SPEAKER_00 10:55

Google um or a go high level uh phone number that call forwards off my main line, and then it can be accessed through the system. So that was the discovery process I made to learn and go like super deep into go high level. A lot of these top guys are running this in their system. So any type of lead. So we have like our Google leads, our website leads, our business profile, our Facebook leads, we have chat box set up on everything. So any anything starts out and it's gonna go directly into our um our pipeline funnel. So let's let me just show you kind of where it would be. This is a newer funnel, but we have different phases. So you have like a missed call stage, right? With go high level, I'm able to send a text back, even if I'm not answering it. So there's an automation there on a missed call. So if somebody is to call in and doesn't want to speak with the agent, the agent captures all the information. So I get these emails to my Gmail about cool, um, this guy spoke, this is his name, his address, the service needed. That's a touch point. And then it and it lets them know that, hey, we're going to reach out to you as soon as possible. Again, AI is everywhere, there's nowhere, you're not gonna be able to run away from this. So think of don't think about this as like, well, I'm only gonna answer my phone and and and people want to talk to people. Yeah, absolutely. But the alternative in this case is you're missing a call. And it doesn't matter if you want to be like humble and human, if you completely miss that opportunity. So what we do, we capture that lead via the AI agent. And if the AI agent doesn't capture it, we send them a text message saying, hey, look, we missed your call, we're on a job today. I'm more than happy to help out. That's when you introduce the human connection. And then from that stage, we we put it down to the new lead stage. And whether it's me, my virtual assistant, or one of my teammates, we figure out who needs to reach out and we we start tracking everything through the new lead. Once we let everybody know it's contacted, it's gonna be there, needs a quote, and then we send it to our house call pro. So this is filling that void that I was talking about before house call pro. And there's a lot of cool automations, it's capturing that initial inquiry. And that's that's what we pretty much use Go High level for. And it's it's pretty fascinating. Once you figure out the closing percentages, once you figure out your cost per lead, once you figure out all of this, you can start tracking better. And then once you get your tracking down, you can start printing money. If you listen to marketing guys and they're always selling this and that about like, oh, this is this is your all you gotta do is put money into it and you get an ROI. Yes, if it's tracked. But if it's not tracked, you're just throwing money into a hole. And like how I'm structured and set up, I have more capacity with my trucks and my employees where I can lean more into growth. And into growth is requiring tracking and locking down these systems. It's one thing if it's like, oh, I know everything about pressure washing, like my team knows everything about pressure washing. We have done thousands and thousands. I think I'm on like invoice number like 4,500, something like that. So like we clean everything from TPO roofs of 250,000 square foot hotels in different states to new new construction stuff to a lot of residential. So you get to the phase where we're at and it becomes very overwhelming. So, like for me, this implementation is super exciting, and this is gonna like win the 2026 year for me. And and so, like, dialing off of that, let's kind of go into okay, so that's the high level, that's the processing. We use go high level, it's super good. With AI, you can figure out how to use it. Just ask a basic question, send send it screenshots and structure yourself this way. So we're running all of our paid ads and our um our funnel to the start of uh of that, whether it be via our automations that come from the lead forms that instantly go to House Call Pro that's set up through our website, or a message from our chat bot that's on our website, or a message from uh a customer via text, everything goes straight into that go-high level set up off the top. So you can already see where the huge opportunity of growth now exists because we have all the information. And if you guys are like me, whether you like to handle

Tracking Ads And Lead Metrics

SPEAKER_00 15:15

it yourself, you're the sales guy, you're the operations guy, you have your text in the field making your money, or you have also, like me, you have a virtual assistant. It it got to the point where he would be doing posting. We would I would be shooting him stuff, but there was no organization, there was no setup, there's no process. They're like these helpers you get are amazing, but they're only as good as the system you create for them. And you can't just say, do this, do this, do this. You have to boil it down to like this phone call came in here, we classify it as a Facebook lead. We're gonna put him through the entire sales funnel. And that's where I think if you guys are new and listening and you want to go super granular with this, we can we can carry the conversation like deeper. And that's what like the school community is gonna be for, our Facebook community is gonna be for. Or if you're just listening and you're working, like I think most of you guys do, you're just on the podcast, listening, and I mean it's it's great because this is just like straight from straight from the brain, straight from the process. You listen to it, you're driving, it's an hour or something like that. You're gonna get one or two pieces of information from this, maybe looking to go high level, maybe look into like just the theory behind what we're talking about today, and it's and it's gonna greatly increase how you run your business. You're gonna start running your business as a true business versus just like, oh, I get a lot of leads, word of mouth. Again, great. Clay and I talk all the time. Like, we get a ton of business off of word of mouth. We could shut everything down and still probably run $200,000 a year off of word of mouth. Our objective here is to how do we accelerate your growth so you can find your true potential and put employees and teams in place and then build the beast. And like once you build that system, you got to feed the system. So you've you guys have already made that decision. Okay, I'm committing to pressure washing. Cool. If you're doing it part-time, that's amazing. That's great. It's great side money. But once you make that jump to full time, as we discussed on our episodes in the wintertime and the slower season, you got to absolutely kill this in the summertime. Otherwise, you're gonna go bankrupt. This is a very expensive business with cash flow. So, like everything we're doing here is to protect the business. And you could say, Oh, I'm busy, I'm busy, I'm busy, but this is where you run into the trap of I got so much money in July, I got so much money in May, but come October, November, December, I'm struggling, and it's that vicious cycle. And then by the time it's April again, you're finally caught back up on your bills, and then you have a certain window where you're making money. The objective here is to create that system up front where we're tying down information, we're tying down customers, and like we're being extremely intentional, just as we are with the pressure washing, with knowing, hey, we got to pre-wet our plants, hey, we gotta make sure our injectors are washed out, hey, we got to make sure our services are tied. Like, hey, we got to be perfect with the customer, we got to be perfect with the pressure washing. We have to be perfect with our marketing systems. So that is going like just understanding that you're gonna be light years ahead of most people who do this. Most people don't have a system, most people are flying blind, most people have all the ideas in the world but aren't implementing. Like, once you get a system built, it's pretty easy to follow. And um, that's what this episode, the deep dive, is gonna be about. Let's just talk about our systems with like our lead sources. Like, we use Google ads a lot. This is just kind of a screen share what I got going on. So, say last year last month for reference. Like, this is the slow season. I'm still dialing in some things on uh a couple campaigns I have. One campaign's a little higher than the others. So we spent $3,000 on our Google ads. Uh, we got 46 conversions, 340 website clicks. I don't care too much about that. Uh, cost per conversion is the thing I like to look at. So these conversions are set to run upon our lead film. So, like, we got 46 leads through our website in February. So, like, we're getting a lot of data. It's super important that we're using the data in our system that we just discussed, otherwise, it's gonna get gonna get wrecked. So, once we once we throw all of our data, our Google leads, our calls, it goes to our house call pro pipeline. And what we will do here is just put a quote in, and then um, like you see, I have some waiting, and then they go through these quote sequences. So it'll tell you, like, at the moment, recently just shot out 10,000, 30,000 and rejected. I got 11,000 on hold. So those are pretty much jobs that waiting on pollen, or we're waiting on um approval, or like the job project needs to be there. So, pretty much

From Residential Grind To Commercial

SPEAKER_00 19:55

that right there is gonna be like the beginning before the CRM. So, like, just to summate everything and give you guys like a high-level view of what's going on, like go high level, super cool. Uh, gives you a like a 30-day trial. I'm not trying to sell it, I'm still in the process of learning it. I I know guys like push this stuff all the time. And if you are in the pressure washing scene, you see them selling you the solution, that is just what go high level is. So if they're they're promising you like an AI agent, they're probably promising you automations, all that stuff's available from Go High Level for like $99 a month. You can set it up, you can customize it however you however you want to do it, or if you want to use a different software. But I found uh, especially recently, like in order to grow and track past that, say $500,000 mark, you can't just do it on pen and paper. You can't just do it on texting via your phone. Like you can bring on a virtual assistant like we do, and they're great, but you have to give them like an exact blueprint to follow. And by using a system such as Go High Level, that's gonna be like the pre-funnel, the beginning of the funnel, the top of the funnel, you're capturing all these customers. You need to figure out a way for them to track it down for you. And and this AI agent thing is super cool. Yeah, it sounds like a robot, but it's definitely in the future. So you don't want to be following up in a year from now and trying to compete as a human versus somebody like me or somebody like Clay or some of these other guys who are utilizing technology. And if I know, hey, I have a $60, say like on my Google ads, if it's a $60 uh cost per conversion, and I can convert 50% of that, and I can charge an average ticket of $600. That's the simple math there. Your return on ad spend is pretty good, and that's just one marketing funnel. So, like, we implement all these different strategies, and then we can um track them. And that's that's great because like as I'm evolving in my business this year, my push, as you guys have heard, is gonna be from like the residential domination of like churning the business. You guys, you guys know what I'm talking about. You stay busy, but it's hard to catch the money up because like it just takes money to make money. And you're always busy to more like strategic growth with commercial partnerships. So we're we've been able to utilize these tools that you're seeing right here, whether it be go high level, um, whether it be a virtual assistant or all this before we even get to House Call Pro to run it like a professional company. And that allows me to like focus higher level stuff, whether that be commercial outreach, trying to network with guys, setting automations for commercial, finding a lot of data. Super cool tools.

Don’t Buy Hype, Build Systems

SPEAKER_00 22:35

Um, another tool I've used recently is called Perplexity. I don't know if you guys are familiar with that, but it's similar to OpenClaw, um, where it's like runs computer tasks. I'm able to upload like pretty much my entire business strategy to it and an outreach agenda. So it's it's scraping LinkedIn, it's scraping data, it's scraping lists and is compiling names, addresses, property management groups. It's allowing me to get more information and funneling funneling it out into like a spreadsheet. So I'm able to dump all that information into Go High Level, personally go out there, whether it be a touch point, calling, uh, calling to introduce myself, showing up at the property, offering a test spot, or just um creating text campaigns or creating phone campaigns. Like this is what's gonna separate you from everybody else this year. So that's kind of all I have to say. I know clay's out, but don't be afraid of AI and then don't fall for the traps of people selling you this because most of the time they're doing everything we're talking about in this episode, but they want to charge you a $500 a month retainer and it's gonna run itself. For us, AI is gonna be the very front end. We get the customer information, the human goes out, interacts. We use follow-up assistances. Most people don't follow up. I look at some of my commercial jobs, they take about a month plus just to land. Some of these bigger projects, it's almost a year. Keep up with the touch points, keep them in the funnel, and then still create that human element. Um, that's that's gonna be all I have for this episode. I appreciate you guys listening. I just wanted to share what we're I was working on personally and uh what my objective pretty much is gonna be for going forward with the Wash Bros, having some deep dive episodes where when Klay and I are not here, we record these and we divvy them out. That way we're constantly delivering value to you. And if you guys are using House Call Pro, or you guys are using Go High Level, and you have some recommendations, or you guys are doing more like direct mail campaigns, all that can be tracked in here. So, so much fascinating stuff. The biggest thing is at the end of the day, we're still pressure washing, we're still showing up as we did, whether we have AI or not. Like business doesn't change. This is a tool. So if you guys aren't utilizing the tool, you're gonna be replaced by somebody who is still pressure washing, is still competing with you on that human level, is still doing the results, but they're using this new tool in the toolbook tool belt called AI. And it's fascinating. If you guys want more and you want to connect and and grow together, check us out at the Wash Bros podcast. You got Clay Smith, you got Matt Jackson, follow

Community, Books, And Next Steps

SPEAKER_00 25:20

us personally, we'll we'll talk to you. We all we love talking to you guys. And then give us a follow. Helps us out, share this video, and uh just leave a leave leave a comment and connect with us. We we got this school community, we're gonna we're trying to slowly grow and uh really trying to do good and help everybody else out. Because if you are new to this and you're catching this episode and you're saying, wow, that's like super high-level stuff, go back to episode one. Clay and I both started pen and paper. I had a Google sheet and some Facebook neighborhood groups and a free pressure washer. So we're at a different level just because we've invested time and we're about seven years ahead of you guys. But if you want to catch up, make sure to catch all these episodes. You can get our book on the Wash Bros, uh, Wash Bros Blueprint, and you can also get the no pressure pressure washing book that's available on Amazon. So kind of different ways of consuming information, whether you want an audiobook, you want a physical book, or you listen to the podcast. We're here to help. Make sure to like, subscribe, and we will see you on the next one.