As a shop owner, Ryan Bennett walks about twelve miles per day. From the desk to the bays to the lot of United Auto Care and back again, Bennett is as busy as they come. He took over from his father in 2015 and the company’s best year up until then had been about $294,000.
“If I don’t do that in two months, I’m ready to pull my hair out,” he says. Success is stressful. Averaging about $2 million revenue per year with four technicians and a pair of service advisors, Bennett is bursting with work and hungry for more. But it wasn’t always that way—his hectic schedule is a result of good work coupled with incredible marketing. To that end, he credits Leads Near Me.
Local Focus for Maximum Exposure
Leads Near Me is not your typical marketing company. They don’t just cast a digital net and troll the easiest SEO waters hoping for bites; rather, they focus on one client per category per area.
“We’ve turned down other shops in the area to focus on Ryan Bennett,” says Ryan Burton, founder and CEO of Leads Near Me. “It’s not a perfect system but we do our best to focus on one per area.”
“Overall, we deal with hundreds of shops in 37 states and two countries,” he says. Burton is a media and marketing veteran of 30+ years and uses his extensive knowledge to help the best of the best, focusing mostly on Google ads, local SEO and shop website integration. In his words, “we are the people who make the phone ring from Google.”
And ring it does. It wasn’t always as robust, though—when Bennett took over, the shop was on its last legs.
“My old man is really old school and believed in word-of-mouth,” Bennett says, “and that’s how things were done and that’s how it went. I knew there had to be a better way.”
Bennett describes just how much Leads Near Me was able to help his business. They rebuilt the website and then suggested more websites and three different company brands. Bennett now has three side-by-side shops—general auto, Euro and diesel—with ad campaigns targeting each specific market. United Auto Care enjoys great success with all.
“Leads Near Me and Burton’s team built my phenomenal websites, manage my Google Ads, SEO, call tracking and analytics, and they do my social media. We meet regularly and have very in-depth discussions about where our business is coming from and we adjust as needed. Over the past four or five years, I’ve seen a direct 20 percent gain from working with LNM. It’s a factual difference I can see with my own eyes.”
Burton says it is critical for Leads Near Me that clients get great service and communication. Bennett can track his ad spend and ROI “dollar for dollar, customer for customer,” and see how they’re spending. He says it took about three months to really see a difference, but by the second quarter with Leads Near Me he could see where things were going.
“And by year’s end we were dialed in,” Bennett says.
“Every shop around me is slow while I’m on a three-week backlog. Looking ahead, we have beyond busted capacity. We’re full. We would love to hire more technicians but we have no more bays to put them in and the average car count is insane.”
Thankfully, Bennett’s lot has space to build and that’s exactly his plan. He sees no end to how busy his shop is and he accounts for that growth directly to Leads Near Me.
“I trust them so much with my advertising that I call monthly and ask, ‘Do I need to up my spend?’ It’s their job to generate leads—and they're extremely effective at it—and then the onus is on us to repair the vehicles and get them back in the shop. This business marriage is amazing; Leads Near Me does an amazing job getting visibility and we do our job to make sure our customers never go anywhere else.”
Bennett was at first skeptical. He says he had seen the dog and pony show from other companies before, but everything about his experience with Leads Near Me has no precedent.
“I can remember Ryan Burton’s words the first time I talked to him—he said, word for word verbatim, ‘your troubles are over. You’ve called the right place.’ As a business owner, I thought that was crazy. We kept them on a really short leash but soon handed the complete marketing over to Leads Near Me.
“They take care of literally everything. I can focus on running my business.”
To see how Leads Near Me can galvanize your marketing and let you focus on your business, check out LeadsNearMe.com.
