How to Build, Track, & Scale a Referral Program For Your Business with Kendall Hines

Home service business owners know the struggle:
You’re spending more and more on Google and Facebook ads, cost per lead keeps climbing, and your marketing agency’s only suggestion is… spend even more.

But what if there was a smarter “third door”? One that actually lowered cost per sale while increasing conversions.

That’s exactly what Kendall Hines, founder of Clickie and Bravo, is building. Kendall’s no stranger to the industry he grew his own Lawn Doctor franchise to 2,000 customers before selling, built Lawnbot (later acquired by WorkWave), and now focuses on creating tech tools that home service companies actually want to use.

I sat down with Kendall to unpack his journey, the launch of Clickie 2.0, and how his newest tool, Bravo, is helping service teams close more jobs without burning out their techs or CSRs.

From Lawn Care to SaaS Founder

Most referral software founders have never run a home service business. Kendall has.
After scaling and exiting his own franchise, he saw the same problem over and over again:

• Ads were expensive.
• Referral programs were clunky, hard to track, and often an afterthought.

So he built Clickie, an operating system for referrals that lets businesses pay customers or partners instantly for new leads. Think branded referral links your customers can share on Facebook, via text, or anywhere else and you can track it all.

Today, over 300 companies use Clickie, and it’s 100% bootstrapped.

The Clickie 2.0 Upgrade: Built for Speed

When Clickie first launched, it was a minimum viable product good enough to work, but light on design and functionality. Six months of rebuilding later, Clickie 2.0 is a full refactor with a cleaner UI, better analytics, and a Leaderboard feature that makes referral contests easy to run and promote.

The real game changer? Development speed.
Kendall’s team uses AI-powered dev tools so that if a customer requests a feature in the morning, it can be shipped that same evening.

As Kendall puts it:

“If a technician can submit a lead in the morning and take home money in the evening, that’s the ball game.”

How Businesses Are Using Clickie

The Great Wolf Lodge Giveaway is a perfect example.
A pest control company created a contest where each referral earned customers an entry to win a trip. Clickie handled:

• Tracking every referral
• Showing customers their position on the leaderboard
• Making it easy to share their unique referral link

The result? More engagement, more referrals, and more new customers without spending another dime on ads.

Bravo: Incentives for Your Internal Team

While Clickie focuses on external incentives (customers, partners), Bravo is built for internal incentives techs, CSRs, sales reps.

Bravo lets you reward your team for:

• Google reviews mentioning their name
• High NPS scores
• Spot bonuses
• Upsell leads from the field

Everything flows into a Tech App where employees can:

• See their earnings in real time
• Track the status of upsells they’ve submitted
• Cash out instantly via Venmo or other payment methods

Why it works: The faster the payout, the more motivated the team. No more waiting until payday or manually tracking bonuses.

Creative Campaign Ideas

Clickie and Bravo open the door to unique, branded campaigns, like:

• Fundraiser tie-ins: A turf care company partnered with a local lacrosse team, donating $100 per referral. Clickie tracked every lead and payout, complete with co-branded landing pages.
• QR code partnerships: Give a partner business (like a hair salon) a printed QR code to refer customers to you and pay them instantly for results.

Who Should (and Shouldn’t) Use These Tools

If your business does under $500K a year, you probably shouldn’t spend thousands on referral software yetkn ock doors, hustle, and grow first.

But if you’re a $1M–$10M+ company already investing in marketing, Clickie and Bravo can help you:

• Lower your cost per lead and cost per sale
• Increase customer referrals
• Motivate techs and CSRs to upsell and get more reviews
• Streamline payout tracking and compliance

The Big Takeaway

Referrals are the most trusted form of marketing, but they don’t just happen you have to design for them.

With the right system, you can:

• Make referring effortless for customers
• Make upselling effortless for your techs
• Track every dollar in real time
• Turn marketing dollars into direct revenue instead of disappearing into ad spend