Kendall Hines on paying your customers instead of Google

The first version of Kendall Hines’s referral software was Kendall himself. Every Friday he counted the clicks on his wife’s customers’ bit.ly links and paid them $1 per click on Venmo, until Venmo canceled his personal account for sending so many payments. When we recorded, his company, Clicki, was paying out about $50,000 a month to homeowners, affiliates and other promoters, and Kendall doesn’t touch any of it.

Clicki’s tagline is “Don’t pay Google, pay your customers instead.” Kendall didn’t dream that up alone. On almost every demo, owners tell him LSA costs are through the roof and they’re spending more on Google Ads for fewer results.

We spent the first half on referral math and how a good program runs, and the second half on AI and the software pest control companies rely on.

Who is Kendall Hines?

Kendall Hines is the co-founder and CEO of Clicki, referral software for service businesses. At the time, about 300 businesses used it, and a lot of them were pest control companies.

Unlike most people selling software to home service companies, Kendall has run one. He grew his family’s struggling Lawn Doctor franchise to seven figures, learning to sell door-to-door, by telemarketing and at trade shows, and it was later sold to his brother. Back then he wanted to own the biggest lawn care company in Michigan.

Monday mornings there started with hundreds of leads, and Kendall wondered why more of those people couldn’t just sign up online. So he built Lawnbot, which he calls Shopify for lawn care, where a homeowner gets measured, quoted and signed up with a credit card on the company’s website. Lawnbot was at about $50,000 a month in recurring revenue when Real Green came along, 19 months in, to talk about an investment and offered to buy it instead. Six months after that sale, WorkWave bought Real Green, and Kendall went from a 6-person startup to a company of 1,300. He stayed 2.5 to 3 years through the earnout.

Ad costs come straight out of your margin

At Lawn Doctor, Kendall ran his own Facebook ads for about $15 to $20 a lead, and he thinks that attention is way more overpriced now. When he helped his wife launch her lash and brow studio, Masha Lash, they paid Google $5,000 a month for pay-per-click while costs went up and results went down. One day he asked her why they weren’t paying her hundreds of happy customers instead, and that question became the 2023 bit.ly experiment.

Say you pay $150 to $200 to land a customer worth $400 or $500. A big piece of that revenue goes to the ad platform, which leaves less for technician bonuses, less profit for the owner and less to invest in other growth. Clicki’s average referral bonus is about $50, and that money stays local instead of getting shipped off to big tech.

His brother’s company had spent about $70,000 on Google and Facebook ads so far in 2025. Kendall wonders if that money would do more as bonuses for technicians who sell upsells and bring in referrals, or as payments to customers.

Take your referral program out of the spreadsheet

At best, Kendall says, a company’s referral program is a spreadsheet and a form on the website. Someone in the office has to track who referred whom and issue the credit, and eventually a payout gets missed. At his own lawn care company, a customer called in to say they’d referred 5 people and never been paid. He doubts that customer ever referred anyone again.

Kendall walked me through how Clicki runs at Nice Pest Company, which uses FieldRoutes. (Jonas wrote up how co-founder Travis Bottoms got to 500 accounts in 5 months.)

• Clicki connects to FieldRoutes and sends texts and emails at the moments that fit Nice’s customer experience.
• A customer taps a magic link into a referral portal with no login, then submits a referral, shares a link on Facebook or pulls up a QR code for someone standing in front of them.
• The referral goes back into FieldRoutes with an alert so Nice can follow up.
• When the new customer gets serviced, Clicki pays the referrer and tells them they can cash out.

Kendall used me as his example. Say a company works with me on SEO and gets regular leads. Referrals can turn each of those customers into 10. Companies want it done for them, so when we recorded, Clicki charged $1,000 for white-glove setup, landing pages included.

Start the bonus at $50

Kendall gets asked how much to pay on every demo, and the answer depends on your industry, your price and what a customer costs you today. Some Clicki customers pay $200, some $100, some $50, and some pay a percentage.

If you don’t buy digital ads, he said, you have no concept of how expensive they are, and $25 might sound like a lot. It won’t move the needle anymore. He treats $50 as the entry level, and $50 to $200 is common.

You can also turn it up for a push. Around Labor Day, Nice Pest Company raised its bonus to $100, sent a big blast to customers and dropped back to $50 afterward.

Give realtors their own campaign

Jake, Jonas and I teach strategic partnerships in our coaching program, but I hadn’t thought about running partners through referral software. Nice Pest Company recruits real estate agents as referral partners and keeps them in their own realtor campaign in Clicki. Nice can add agents by hand, send a realtor office a sign-up link or upload a CSV.

Reward technicians and customers separately

Clicki built Bravo from customer feedback. Companies were running Clicki next to another vendor’s after-service surveys, so homeowners got several texts after every visit, and those companies basically begged Kendall’s team to build it.

Clicki is for paying people outside your company, like customers, partners and affiliates, while Bravo rewards employees for Google reviews, tips, upsells or anything else you want more of. A referral that comes in through a Bravo survey lands in Clicki with the tracking intact. They kept the brands separate because technicians and customers are rewarded for different things and shouldn’t share an app.

Referrals work best for a business people already like

I don’t tell owners to do only SEO or only Google Ads. You should be doing SEO, something like Clicki, Facebook ads and maybe paid directories. Kendall called Clicki one tool in the tool chest, and said the companies that do best with it already have a super referable business.

“It means I’ve seen your truck before. You have a lot of Google reviews. You actually take care of your customers.”

On the sales report his brother had just sent him, Clicki was the fifth-biggest source of new customers, behind channels like Google and Facebook. Kendall is obsessed with making it number one, and his big idea is a local network. In Grand Rapids, 5 Clicki companies that don’t compete are already asking for a safe way to promote each other, and the people who bought lawn care from Kendall now buy lashes from his wife. He figures the network needs about 1,000 companies across industries, and it’s on the roadmap for the next 24 months or so.

Taste matters more when anyone can build software

Kendall isn’t sure how long vertical SaaS like FieldRoutes, ServiceTitan, PestPac and Housecall Pro will last in its current form. Those CRMs were built for people, not AI agents, and many charge what he calls outrageous API fees, plus revenue shares from vendors like Clicki that integrate with them. At a big software company, a customer’s request passes through an account manager, a product manager and a designer before an engineer sees it. Clicki puts requests into AI coding tools like Cursor and can ship a feature the next day.

I told him I think everything has been democratized. I started as a copywriter and thought I was screwed when ChatGPT came out, but when it writes copy for me, I still feel I could do it a little better. What separates you is trust, which is why I think things are heading toward podcasts and companies with a real face behind them.

Kendall added taste to that. He built Bravo in about 2 months with an AI coding agent, work that would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars before, and he credits his taste and knowledge of the workflows for how it turned out. He expects everybody to start building everybody else’s stuff.

“The technical part is not the hard part anymore. It’s the relationship with the customer. Do they trust you? Do you have good taste? Can you deliver?”

I compared it to Don Draper in Mad Men, who leveled up until he had marketers and copywriters working under him. Let the AI agents do the work, and be the Don Draper who brings the taste and checks what they did. Kendall told Jonas more of the Bravo story on the PCM podcast, in how he rebuilt a competitor’s product in 2 months with AI.

Small businesses are the fabric of America

I asked Kendall for his message to pest control owners, and he gave me what he called his TED talk. Owners, he said, are the fabric of America. A company doing $1M in revenue might sell for around $1.5M, depending on multiples, and that’s generational wealth for a family.

He doesn’t want a world where Nice Pest Company and Pest Badger are gone and Wall Street-owned conglomerates are all that’s left. He knows my partner Jonas personally and sees a Pest Badger truck in his neighborhood. To Kendall, keeping ticks and mosquitoes away from kids is about the least AI-disruptible work anyone could be doing. He hasn’t forgotten the hard days either, when 3 people walk out and you’ve already made 12 other promises. When a big Texas owner thanked him at a trade show, Kendall thought it should have been the other way around.

“If those companies go away, ServiceTitan goes away. Those companies go away, FieldRoutes goes away. So we got to make those people successful.”

My take

I meant it when I told Kendall I’d rather give my customers money than Google, even at the same cost. For a small owner, the question is ROI. If you have a few thousand dollars a month for marketing, ask whether referrals could cut your acquisition cost in half before all of it goes to ads.

It’s almost heartbreaking, but I turn down a lot of owners who aren’t big enough for SEO yet, because it won’t work right away. I point them to strategic partners, free Google reviews and tools like Clicki first. Those reviews keep helping later, when they push a Google Business Profile up the rankings. And once you’re running Google Ads, a referral program means each customer they bring in can send you the next one.

When Kendall talked about small businesses, I thought of my parents. My dad owns a flooring company and my mom owns a therapy business, and that’s a big reason I care so much about this industry.

Where to find Kendall

Clicki is Clicki Referrals on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, and Kendall goes by his own name on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.

• Clicki: joinclicki.com
• Bravo: launchbravo.com
• YouTube: Clicki Referrals
• LinkedIn: Kendall Hines
• Instagram: @kendallmhines
• Facebook: Kendall Hines