2024 Home Service Industry Predictions Because Economists Don’t Lie! | Mischa Fisher

In this episode with Mischa Fisher, we explore essential economic insights aimed at guiding business decisions, whether you're a seasoned entrepreneur or contemplating starting a venture. Drawing lessons from the past two decades, we analyze the economic downturns of 2008 and the unique dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Despite historical parallels in industry shifts and GDP contractions, the pandemic's economic impact showcased a distinctive pattern—rather than a sharp decline, we experienced a temporary pause followed by a noteworthy boom. Examining the current landscape, we note the influence of inflation, rising interest rates with a likely stabilization, and increased home values contributing to elevated equity, while a dip in savings rates prompts considerations for financial planning. As businesses navigate this nuanced environment, the cautious approach of homeowners towards large-scale projects becomes evident, emphasizing the importance of a clear path to life improvement in decision-making. Tune in for a comprehensive understanding of these economic variables, empowering you to make informed and strategic business moves. Did you know our amazing voices can go beyond just the microphone? Yes, we have video! Subscribe to our YouTube channel here!

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Mischa’s Links:

•  LinkedIn | @mischafisher

•  Website |  https://mischafisher.com/ 

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GOLD NUGGETS:

(02:51) - Career Path From Science to Economics 

(09:41) - Impacts on Housing Market

(12:47) - Interest Rates, Elections, and the Economy

(19:40) - Federal Reserve’s Impacts on Economy

(29:28) - Unemployment Claims and Global Economy

(37:11) - Demographics and Supply and Demand

(43:04) - Home Design Trends and Sales Expectations

(51:43) - DIY Nightmare Stories and 2024 Planning

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Previous guests on The Small Business Safari include Amy Lyle, Ben Alexander, Joseph Sission, Jonathan Ellis, Brad Dell, Chris Hanks, C.T. Emerson, Chad Brown, Tracy Moore, Wayne Sherger, David Raymond, Paul Redman, Gabby Meteor, Ryan Dement, Barbara Heil Sonneck, Bryan John, Tom Defore, Rusty Clifton, Duane Johns, Beth Miller, Jason Sleeman, Andy Suggs, Chris Michel, Jon Ostenson, Tommy Breedlove, Rocky Lalvani, Amanda Griffey, Spencer Powell, Joe Perrone, David Lupberger, Duane C. Barney, Dave Moerman, Jim Ryerson, Al Mishkoff, Scott Specker, Mike Claudio and more!

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If You Loved This Episode Try These!

• Moving Titan Shares His Secrets for Elevating the Entire Industry | Wade Swikle

• How Seasonal Businesses Can Propel You up to the Mountain Top | Matthew Efird

• Essential Tips for Recruiting in Home Services Businesses | Tina McKenna

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Have any questions or comments? Connect with me here!

Transcript

Alan Wyatt: 0:00

I looked at him on Twitter and there were a lot of interesting posts, but one was a I think it was a mountain lion that was going across your property.

Mischa Fisher: 0:08

Oh yeah yeah, that's one of my Properties in Colorado and I was. I was doing some some foot, some some some footing, inspections and Left and my game camera picked up a curious big, big, big cat.

Chris Lalomia: 0:24

Yeah, dude, I've seen some very large cats up there.

Mischa Fisher: 0:25

There you go, the big cat hunter, economist be AAAAAAaaAAAAAAAAAA go the Big Cat no-transcript.

Chris Lalomia: 0:29

There you go, the Big Cat Hunter. Economist PS Fisher.

Alan Wyatt: 0:33

I love it.

Chris Lalomia: 0:33

I'll go find him. Welcome to the Small Business Safari, where I help guide you to avoid those traps, pitfalls and dangers that lurk when navigating the wild world of small business ownership. I'll share those gold nuggets of information and invite guests to help accelerate your ascent to that mountaintop of success. It's a jungle out there and I want to help you traverse through the levels of owning your own business that can get you bogged down and distract you from hitting your own personal and professional goals. So strap in Adventure Team and let's take a ride through the Safari and get you to the mountaintop. Hey, small Business Safari, we are back, we're ready to roll. And if you are not ready for this episode, stop, pause, wait, hang on. All right, now you're back, you're ready.

Chris Lalomia: 1:18

You want to know what 2024 is going to look like? We're not going to tell you, but we've got an economist who has admittedly said we can see what's going on in the past. We can only kind of tell you what's going to happen in the future and it's up to you to figure out how to make it happen. We have Misha Fisher on, who is an economist who I've listened to speak at a number of conferences in the home services space and clearly has one of the best and most unique perspectives on economy and where it's going, without saying hey, look, man, I know exactly where it's going to go because he even said I think I've even said hey, if I already knew, I wouldn't be here talking to you guys about it. So, misha, welcome to the Small Business Safari. We're looking forward to having you on and kicking around for our audience.

Mischa Fisher: 1:59

Well, thanks for having me on and looking forward to the conversations.

Alan Wyatt: 2:02

So you guys met in Vegas, right.

Chris Lalomia: 2:04

So I met him out in Vegas. Actually, I listened to him talk, I did introduce myself to him for a minute and I did.

Mischa Fisher: 2:09

I had two pages of notes of what I was done, Misha did you lose that yeah he's the first and last person to go to Vegas and take notes.

Alan Wyatt: 2:17

That's true, I'm assuming you were trying to drag Misha into the sports books so you could just pick his brain and all the data analytics. Right, I'm not, you're just vicious on a fantasy league team.

Mischa Fisher: 2:29

No, I have the good sense to try and avoid it. It's the sort of thing where you go up and then you go to zero if you get too confident. So I do my best to breathe.

Alan Wyatt: 2:37

That doesn't stop Chris. That doesn't stop Chris at all.

Chris Lalomia: 2:40

Oh no, yeah, no, in fact, I had come off my heater the night before at the poker table and came back to exactly $100 down. So no heater, yeah, no, of course not. So, misha, before we get started and talking about economics, when you grew up and you were growing up is that what you wanted to be? A guy sitting there saying I'm going to look at the economy all the time?

Mischa Fisher: 3:00

No, not really. I actually had wanted to go into the physical sciences. I thought science, engineering, that sort of thing would be really fun. You know, build telescopes or howitzers or something along those lines. I thought it'd be a lot cooler.

Chris Lalomia: 3:13

Telescopes or howitzers Long-sighted cylinders.

Mischa Fisher: 3:15

Look at the cylinders. Blow people the hell off.

Chris Lalomia: 3:17

Let's go One or the other, or both. So how did you get into the study of economics?

Mischa Fisher: 3:24

Well, it's quite interesting. So I studied it in college, which is you know how most people get into it. And then I ended up doing something I hadn't planned to do, which was spending almost a decade in Washington DC working for the US Congress. So for all the taxpayers listening, I'm sorry. I did my best but the goal was to, you know, just go there for, you know, a couple months and kind of figure it out, get any experience. But I ended up staying for the better part of a decade and then knew I didn't want to do it forever, didn't want to be a lobbyist. So I thought, well, what's a good sort of force multiplier for that existing experience? But is something different? And that was, you know, go study statistics in graduate school. So that's what I did, and then went into economics afterwards.

Alan Wyatt: 4:06

So was it? Was it just frustrating being in Congress and I think you were also the advisor to the governor of Illinois? Is that correct as well?

Mischa Fisher: 4:13

That's correct, yeah, one of the ones that did not go to prison.

Alan Wyatt: 4:16

Okay, Well, good job, Kept them out of prison. But to you know, give them all this information and then just see them either ignored or go a different direction. I'm assuming you saw that all the time.

Mischa Fisher: 4:26

It sort of depends in terms of the level of frustration, which your expectations are. So I mean, you know Congress, people look at it and they expect it to do things. But remember, the institution is designed to prevent things from happening and if you put it at that framework, that part's not frustrating at all because the place is designed to sort of vent energy but to prevent us from doing things that cause more harm than they do. Good, you could quibble about how effective it is at that, but certainly that was the perspective I had about it. And you know, I mean I feel like in the time there it was pretty rewarding in terms of some of the things that we were able to do, and it's all marginal. You're not making any big sweeping changes to anything, which again is probably a good thing because that's what is designed to prevent from happening.

Mischa Fisher: 5:11

But you know, we did some really cool stuff and, like the last year I was there, we did a bunch of work where we changed laws around getting veterans who driven trucks to have a streamlined access to being commercial truck drivers. Right, it didn't exist in the law. We found a way to say, hey, people have experience, let's not bog them down in bureaucracy. Let's find a way for people who've been doing this for the military to be able to go do this in the private sector without a lot of headache. And that was, you know, it was pretty cool, and so you make those sorts of changes.

Alan Wyatt: 5:40

Oh well, see, that's what I think is pretty rewarding.

Chris Lalomia: 5:42

I actually had a guy in college who so I was in college during the first war, first Iraqi war, and he was a reservist. And you know, again in the late 80s nobody was getting called right here comes the war and we had to stand by the phone. We actually put a note by the phone saying Don't be a, don't be a dick, answer the phone correctly. Because he only had 24 hours to report and he was a driver and you know the first war was driving, driving in. So he's going to school to become an engineer that's where they're for but his specialty was driving and now I could see where you're right. There's no reason to make this hard. They know how to drive and they know how to drive some pretty crazy stuff.

Mischa Fisher: 6:16

Yeah, yeah, exactly, and so you know that part of it was actually pretty rewarding and pretty cool and it does allow you to touch on a lot of different aspects of the economy that are that are pretty interesting. It's a lot of exposure to that Normally wouldn't get. When you know you're two, which is when I started it. I was pretty young and Congress is. You know, this is something we don't talk about, but Congress is kind of run by pretty young people. In terms of all the staff work. People are, by and large, in their early mid 20s. If you're in your late 20s as a congressional staffer, you're kind of ruled by the, by the standards of the place. So maybe that explains a lot in people's minds or maybe they view it as a good thing.

Alan Wyatt: 6:51

I know it's. My son was an intern up on Capitol Hill and we got a tour of Congress and and, and it was crazy it was it's just a ton of young people answering the phones and putting together reports and then all of a sudden the daughtering old senator comes in and they just hand him a stack of things and then they go vote and then they leave and go get a cocktail.

Mischa Fisher: 7:10

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's pretty much it and it used to be. It used to be more pronounced, but yeah, it's definitely. There's a lot of heavy drinking. Goes on to All right.

Chris Lalomia: 7:18

So let's just summarize the first opening act of Misha's discussion. The government is designed to not do anything, so with that expectation things are great and a lot of young people come up with a bunch of stuff, so a lot of old people can go vote quickly and go drinking Pretty much.

Mischa Fisher: 7:30

Yeah, yeah, that's it. Sign me up. I think it's going to be my next career. Don't do anything.

Chris Lalomia: 7:34

Don't design Never to do anything. You make sure I get a cocktail quick, yeah.

Alan Wyatt: 7:37

Probably get a referral for that gout and DC for you.

Chris Lalomia: 7:40

Yeah, perfect, all right. So, misha, you move out of DC. You, you moved in. Well, you moved on and went to college, and then what was your first economic job out of, or a kind of a job. What was that?

Mischa Fisher: 7:52

So my intention was just to go right into the tech sector and do math for for a company, because it's a pretty demanding, compelling work in the sense that it's intellectually quite, quite hard to do. But then when I was coming out of grad school I was offered a spot to go lead up the research department for the Illinois Department of Commerce and thought that would seem pretty cool in terms of trying to change and improve and the overall economic climate in the state. It's got kind of a reputation for not being the friendliest state for economic investment, to put it mildly. So I thought that would be pretty neat and you know similar sorts of things. There's some frustrating aspects of it, but it was pretty compelling in terms of trying to reshape tax incentives and trying to reduce bureaucratic burden and trying to reduce costs of just sort of standard overhead to encourage people to invest more. You know that was, that was a pretty neat couple of years. I don't miss it, but it was neat to get to do it.

Chris Lalomia: 8:44

So obviously, our audience a lot of us were entrepreneurs, either aspiring entrepreneurs and you were in the middle of what is probably the largest bureaucracy we could even think of. When you went into your first job, did you feel like you had an entrepreneurial spirit as you jumped in there, or did you feel like, you know, I'm here, I'm here to do my thing. I'm going to be a cog in the wheel and grind it out and make a difference.

Mischa Fisher: 9:04

It was a little bit of both. So I definitely came from sort of small town entrepreneurial environment, grew up on a farm and didn't have any existing social exposure to these environments, so it was a matter of gradual exposure in terms of how things worked and I did enjoy it for a little while. But eventually that nature of saying, well, we're not actually doing anything, we're trying to marginally improve things for people who are doing things, but you're not a doer yourself, and eventually I kind of got tired of that and that's what made me want to get out of that environment was going and doing something entrepreneurial. And you know, be a be a doer, not a talker.

Chris Lalomia: 9:40

Yes, to talk about that. What was that first or first for you into doing that work?

Mischa Fisher: 9:45

No, the. I mean the first for me into it was was as a youth. You know I worked in a. You know I worked for the power company vehicle yard when I was, you know, probably younger than I should have been early teenager. Then I worked a little bit of construction, grocery store distribution, all sorts of you know standard sort of blue collar jobs, all through high school and college, the whole thing, you know, basically starting in the eighth grade and going through the end of university and then the government stuff was kind of a break from that and then I went back to it when I was the chief economist for Angie. So that was my back into sort of doing things and trying to make a business that works for people in this competitive. And then now I'm at another tech company where we're doing the same thing.

Chris Lalomia: 10:30

So right now, your current role is your chief economist for a tech company, but also you're an adjunct professor at Northwestern.

Mischa Fisher: 10:38

Yes, so I teach applied stats at Northwestern. I was Angie's chief economist. Now I do less of the public facing economics work at a tech company. So it's all internal, it's not external facing, but that's my day job.

Chris Lalomia: 10:48

Gotcha All right. So you got a wealth of knowledge, and that's one of the big things that I really enjoyed as you put it all together. One of the things that I enjoyed in your talk that I'd like you to touch on a little bit more is that in the last 20 years you're here on 23, from 2001,. 23, let's call it 20 years. Was that good math for this?

Alan Wyatt: 11:06

It is for us, but not for me, chef, I probably blew it tonight. I'm wearing glasses, so I look smarter. Okay, I saw that. That's nice. That's a nice call.

Chris Lalomia: 11:14

So we've had two big events right. We've had the 2008 recession and COVID, and you talked about how that impacted specifically the housing industry. But I'm really interested in your take on looking back historically on those two events as we look at 24, 25 coming up.

Mischa Fisher: 11:29

Yeah. So, and just to give listeners a little bit of context, when we were last together talking about this, if you look at a chart of global GDP, it's just up and to the right for the whole thing, except for two drops that appear, and those two drops are COVID and the Great Recession, both of which had a very, very strong connection to the US housing market, right. This is that's not true for all recessions, but in this case, both of those have a very, very deep connection, the first being that it kind of originated in the housing market right. We had a debt boom and people debate about the reasons for it. So we can, we can, we can bypass the debate or jump right into it, but we had a crash in housing prices and then a very slow recovery, and when we had that crash, we had a lot of people exit the industry. We had a massive decline in the number of houses being built you know like dramatic 60 to 80 percent drops depending on different parts of the country and house prices went down and homeowner equity, as a result, went down. So consumers felt poor, people weren't working in the industry anymore and people stopped building new supply. And then the second big dip was COVID, and none of those things were true With COVID. What happened was interest rates were dropped again, but the labor market held up and because we've been under building supply, we preserved that overall bottom of the housing market.

Mischa Fisher: 12:47

And it's important for people to remember that the price of a house isn't just a sticker price, right, it's really the cost of the asset, what you buy the house for and the interest rate. You have to interact those two things to see what the actual price is, and when you act, rack those two things. Houses became cheaper than they'd been in, you know, decades at the early onset of COVID, when interest rates dropped and so people did the smart thing to sort of buy more, but nobody was around because of that first big drop, nobody had been in the industry and we hadn't been pulling people in for the last 10 years. And so it's the combination of those two things really left us in an interesting spot right now in terms of the market, where asset prices are up. We haven't pulled people in.

Mischa Fisher: 13:25

And then the second order things that are coming out of that right now are the interest rate lock in. That's now starting to get a lot of attention in terms of nobody has any incentive to sell their house because they have a cheap mortgage but there's no existing supply and because of that lack of volume transacting the asset prices are being held up despite rising interest rates. So because of interest rates have shot up so much, we should have expected to see a decline in house prices, but we haven't. Because of those other things you ready, alan you want me to jump in?

Chris Lalomia: 13:56

Yeah, go ahead.

Chris Lalomia: 13:59

So I think, that's the important parallels. Those were two very significant events over the last couple of years, very significant events over the course of 100 plus years, whenever GDP first got marked in and you're able to distill it down into a supply demand based on assets of the homes and the supply we've got. Now, as we get ready for 24, right now, I think we're all pretty much resigned to the fact that it's going to be a little slower than it has been over this boom. We're going to have that hangover a little bit. It's going to be a little slower. It's an election year. It's always slower for us in the hosting business.

Alan Wyatt: 14:31

I want to ask him about that. Well, I hear you say it and I hear a lot of other business people. It's like, oh, it's an election, things are going to slow down, and I don't know anybody. I mean, once in a while you hear somebody like today we were, I'm in commercial real estate, we were at a shooting range and yeah, if I'm assuming if a Democrat takes over an office, maybe I don't want to expand my shooting range, you know, but most people, I don't know anybody that makes an economic decision based on an upcoming election. And yet I hear it all the time. Are we just lemmings as consumers, misha? I mean, do we just? Is it that simple?

Mischa Fisher: 15:13

It's not necessarily that simple. So there are effects that do happen in election years and the first is that, whichever party is in the White House some subset of the consumers who are members of the other party you see their overall economic sentiment go down. That's pretty persistent and structurally there's no reason not to right. People are bummed out that their preferred candidates not in the White House and, as a result, they feel less good about things, and that has a non zero impact on overall spending in the economy. I don't think that explains most of the negative sentiment. Most of the negative sentiment that exists right now is inflation. If you draw the correlation line between the price level and what people are feeling about the economy, that's where you see a very, very strong relationship where the price level started going up and people started feeling very pessimistic about it because people don't like getting poorer. This is one of the things that really holds up from behavioral economics. Behavioral economics, you've got to sort of do a careful job of filtering out what works and what's just designed to sort of be interesting and sell books. But it's actually very good science and there's a non-zero percent of that field that's in there, but one of the things. That really is good. Science is that people really, really don't like getting poor, disproportionately more so than they like getting richer. So if I give you an even odd chance of getting $10 or losing $10, you don't wait the two equally, even though statistically you should. You rate the prospect of losing $10 is worse than gaining $10. And so that's the main route of the negative sentiment. You should expect some switch in terms of overall economic sentiment following that.

Mischa Fisher: 16:47

The only thing I'll say right now is that you do see a persistent drop in sentiment, and this is something that I don't think an economist talk about. That came on around the Afghan withdrawal. When we did that, consumer sentiment dropped and it stayed down there. It's just been lower persistently over that last couple of years. So I could see a reset effect happening if the White House changes hands, but that's only, it appears, because of a small subset of the electorate, not because it's the entire thing.

Mischa Fisher: 17:19

Obviously, elections. If there's a change of expectation around inflation, whether or not whoever's in the White House actually changes policy, that can impact people's expectations around inflation. So there's two pieces of it. There's what the actual policy is and then there's what people's perception of the policy is, they can both have impacts on people's expectations around inflation. That doesn't necessarily mean that they will have the exact same impact on what the actual outcome is. So you can imagine people saying well, because there was this change in my expectation around policy, I'm gonna expect prices won't rise as much next year and as a result, they don't. Economists will argue about the size of that effect, though.

Chris Lalomia: 19:17

How about I didn't even think about the Afghan reset, the pull-off? I?

Alan Wyatt: 19:21

can't even imagine that that would impact that many people mentally, just because I know so many people that are oblivious to what's going on. Yeah, but it sounds like.

Chris Lalomia: 19:28

the data supports it. And again I mean that's why Misha's on, because we didn't know it. Yeah, and now we do, yeah.

Mischa Fisher: 19:34

I mean, if you look at the, it was a pretty big news story at the time. We're not talking about as much anymore, but it's, it's, it's, it's, it's and I don't want to overstate the magnitude of it, but you can see it in the, in the trend.

Chris Lalomia: 19:45

Yeah, I would have. I would have actually said not impact. I mean I just yeah, I was there, but just like a lot of political noise, you know, sometimes for people.

Alan Wyatt: 19:51

It's gotta be an interesting time for you, because, you know, the economy has just been so heated super heated maybe and here you have the government trying to shut it down and yet people don't want it to.

Alan Wyatt: 20:03

I mean, people want inflation to go down, they want their interest rates to go down, but they don't want to stop spending. And I don't know, do you look at this dispassionately and you're like, oh, this is kind of an interesting dynamic, we've never seen before, or you know any comments on that In terms of the interest rates? Just the fact that it's just to me, it's. You know, I've been on the planet for 60 years. I've been through a lot of recessions and this is the first one that I remember where the government is just intentionally trying to just crush the economy temporarily and they're trying to time it just so that it slows down. But doesn't, you know, crater and you know so it's just a very interesting dynamic to me, where the economy doesn't want to be killed and the government's trying to kill it just so that we can get inflation under control.

Mischa Fisher: 20:54

Yeah, yeah, it's a. That's always the challenge, and you can get into some really interesting debates about the role of the Federal Reserve and the economy. But and just to get listeners on the same page, in case you're not familiar, the way I like to phrase it as the Federal Reserve it's the price of the most important thing in the world and that is the US dollar. Right, it's the most important commodity in the world is the United States dollar, and they set the price effectively. I'm oversimplifying it, but that's, I think, a useful heuristic for how you envision it. And the argument is the economy was running too hot, so we got inflation, and so then, to tamp down inflation, they are going to make the price of dollars more expensive, so that it's harder for you to borrow and grow your business, it's harder for you, as a consumer, to expand your spending and, as a result, you cool down the economy.

Mischa Fisher: 21:37

The challenge is, every time we do that not every time, but almost every time we do that we create a recession, because what happens is people get shocked and then you stop spending, and then your supplier stops having something to sell you because you've stopped buying it, and so then they lay off their staff, and then their staff stops spending, and you end up with a negative, reinforcing cycle, right? So the staff have stopped buying because they just lost their jobs. So then other people have fewer people to sell to, and then they lay off their staff right? So that's the the runaway effect of how you get a negative cycle, and the inverse of that is the positive cycle.

Mischa Fisher: 22:09

What's been surprising about this one, though, is that we've raised interest rates at a faster rate than we have our half before, so everybody was expecting this to cause a recession. It's still open-ended about whether or not we will have one. My argument is we're kind of in the middle of one. It's just so spaced out we're not calling it that so it's hitting different sectors at different times, and traditionally, it sort of has to hit a bunch of sectors at the same time. And, again, this is the thing that we'll debate about it and then come to an agreement about what actually happened in three years, when nobody cares more anymore.

Mischa Fisher: 22:41

That's right, so this is again the distinction between being a doer and a talker. So we'll see what happens. I will say that the overall level of interest rates, while high, aren't as high as they've been in the past and the economy still finds a way to function. And because the biggest thing that people face with interest rates is their mortgage cost, and because most people have 30 year fixed rate mortgages, we're less susceptible to that. If you're talking about other countries Canada to our North, for example they have by and large floating mortgages. So there's a whole bunch of people out there who pulled out pretty expensive mortgages and had that great 2% something rather mortgage rate and now they're having to refinance at five or six. So that economy is gonna have to respond more immediately to the rise in interest rates, whereas for us it's like okay, well, you're gonna have people buying new houses at a lower rate, but most people in any given year aren't buying a house right. Overall house volume transaction is like four to six million a year, whereas you've got a hundred plus million people in their homes that they own. So it's less responsive. It's only a tiny subset of overall households that are in that process of buying.

Mischa Fisher: 23:54

At the current rate, refinance activity tanked and has gone by the wayside. That'll come back up as we go back through another rate dropping cycle. But you know the the short version is it's an interesting cycle, but they all are right. Every single one is a sample size of one. You know my personal, on the record forecast is we're in a recession right now, but it's spaced out, so we're not calling it that. It's hitting different sectors at different times. Yeah, to back that up.

Chris Lalomia: 24:19

I would to bring it to Main Street. You know, as a remodeler and a handyman here in Atlanta with you know we'll do six and a half million this year, so we see a lot of houses. What what I've seen is is that in neighborhoods back to Misha's point is that all sectors got hit. So when 2008 hit, it was real estate. But real estate blood into package shipping, real estate blood into it just crept into all these other industries. It didn't creep, it happened overnight. Yeah, it happened fast. Yeah.

Chris Lalomia: 24:45

But here what's happening is, if you go into a neighborhood, no, these, these 20 people don't work for UPS here in Atlanta. These 20 people don't work for Coca Cola. These two people work for Amazon out of Washington. These two people might work for a tech company out of Arizona. These two people might move from New Jersey. He may be laid off, but his neighbors are still working. So he is going through a household recession, but the other two are still sitting there spending money. So I'm definitely seeing that because we are off this year, coming off our high, our leads are down about fill and probably at 15% Now. Our revenue is up. That's because I leaned into the recession that I thought was coming this year, and we advertise a lot more. So we're going to end up having a really good year, but now we're looking at 24. And here we go again. If you were in the home services space, what would you recommend? Do you lean into this? Do you advertise more? Do you buckle down and batten down the hatches? Lean it up? What should we do?

Mischa Fisher: 25:38

I would say, have a higher variance strategy. So what does that mean? It means be able to be flexible where the opportunities come up right. If something is broad based, then you don't have a lot of options. But because it's selective, like what we were talking about, maybe you can advertise more if you find some channels that are suddenly discounted relative to where they were because they're going through their own little localized recession in that area and you can and you could say, okay, well, this is a good deal on on that market channel. Same thing for you know, whatever your, your marketing channel happens to be whether it's a leads based marketplace, advertising, etc. So find those opportunities there and then, on the actual what you're doing side of it, make sure that you've got a strategy there to say, well, I'm going to take advantage of. There's a shift in the market and people now want to hit this price point instead of this other one that I was over indexed on. So be flexible.

Mischa Fisher: 26:30

There have relationships with more suppliers than maybe you're accustomed to and I've noticed a huge amount of variance there. So some people say, well, I know every single supplier in my metro and some people sort of have their one go to. But you might be able to find more of a gap there in terms of what you're sourcing things at. Then you have in the past because different people are exposed to market fluctuations at different rates, like I remember sort of the inverse of during COVID, when, because the price of certain types of lumber had gone up so much, lumber yards were already been bothering to stock it because they didn't want to buy at the top and then be stuck holding that inventory that they that they acquired at that price. They just didn't bother. And so now you're finding, you know, potentially more fluctuation there. Like for consumers, the big advice right now is make sure you're shopping around a mortgage rates, because you're you're finding a much wider spread across different mortgage providers than you have in the past. So some people are still at eight Now, like some people, you can maybe get my sixes. I've seen some people doing points buy downs into the fives. So you've got a much higher gap than you have in the past.

Mischa Fisher: 27:32

Do the same thing with how you're sourcing your materials and then the final thing is labor flexibility. If you do find demand go down. The industry learned the hard way that it's really painful to just lay everybody off and lose people from the sector. Right, maybe that makes sense for you individually, but for the industry is terrible, because you lose all that skill set, you lose that training. People don't want to come back.

Mischa Fisher: 27:54

So come up with dynamic ways to to reward your labor, that impact some of the or that that allow you to hedge some of the revenue risk that comes up, right.

Mischa Fisher: 28:04

So if you're concerned about revenue being down 20% next year but your index entirely on, like you know, certain forms of fixed payroll, that might be pretty expensive for you on your margin. But you know you mentioned tech, right. So tech's gone through kind of a recession over the last year. But and it could have been worse but a lot of tech companies do is they tie employee compensation to equity and so company valuation drops, employee comp drops, but they don't have to lay people off right, because their overheads dropped too. So I think that more sectors can kind of learn that lesson about finding ways based off of demand, whether it's bonuses, whether it's. You know, if you're large enough, maybe you could find some sort of like private incentive ownership deal that incentivizes people to do it. But there's a lot of room to innovate in the sector in terms of how we pay the individual people doing the work, and so I think that it's also going to be a rewarding year to figure those things out.

Chris Lalomia: 28:56

If you know, people are looking at 20% less revenue, I know if you're driving around in your car right now you're going to hit pause and you're going to go back like three minutes and re listen to that one, because there's a lot to soak in and not to figure out. Because if you're, if you're doing what I'm doing, which is at the end of 23, I'm trying to plan out my 24 year and trying to do my prediction and see what's going to happen. What I just heard was where you advertise. You probably want to make sure you're still flexible and how you do it and really monitor it, and the other thing I'm going to do is I'm going to we're our single source supplier.

Chris Lalomia: 29:25

We actually Home Depot is 60% of our spend because of our handyman biz and then 20% comes from a major supplier windows and doors here probably going to go look at them after what he just said, and so that's the kind of stuff you get when you get. Somebody is looking at this broad picture and looking at the major economic structure here and you're sitting here on Main Street just taking care of days. Okay, well, I know I'm spinning, dude. I am so sorry I've been writing like a bean again.

Chris Lalomia: 29:51

You know you actually had another gold nugget for everybody mortgage rates. You know everybody probably listen to this podcast has a house, and so it's time to. If you're shopping, shop hard, because there's a wide variance there and that was something that was not true two and three years ago, I mean it was you'd be lucky if you can get an eighth anywhere. You know difference, and so that's also, I think, another big gold nugget for everybody. Misha, let's shift gears a little bit and talk about one of the things you mentioned that I really enjoyed was if we had one indicator to look at. What indicators should we look at and how could we react to looking at that one?

Mischa Fisher: 30:28

weekly unemployment claims. It's the clearest answer he'll ever get from any economist, right?

Chris Lalomia: 30:33

I know when he said that I'm like I actually nudged. The guy said, dude, that's like the first economist ever who just directly answered a question.

Mischa Fisher: 30:41

Yeah, most people like to answer bets and not be wrong. Weekly unemployment claims it comes. You don't need an economist to interpret it. If you just Google the you know weekly unemployment claims, you'll see it. It comes out every Thursday and it's late about 10 days if I remember correctly. So it's not quite leading.

Mischa Fisher: 30:56

But the reason why I recommend that one is it gives you a sense of how many people lost their jobs in the last week, again with a slight leg. But you know lots of data is lagged, significantly more than that. You're talking about six to eight week legs on the unemployment numbers because those numbers come out the first Friday of the month. So already it's monthly instead of weekly, and then most of the data comes from the prior months, the first two weeks. So you're looking at like a six week leg on it and it can kind of mask the story, whereas right now, you know, in any given week 200,000-250 people lose their jobs.

Mischa Fisher: 31:32

Sounds like a lot.

Mischa Fisher: 31:33

That's a big country, it's a big economy and if that number starts spiking then people start panicking in a way that causes them to really halt spending and then it makes the problem worse, whereas if that number sort of stays relatively even, you know, so it doesn't spike up into the high threes or something like that.

Mischa Fisher: 31:50

Then people, by and large, say, okay, well, you know it's, it's plotting along at its normal rate and it's just the most real time single thing. You can't pay attention to the stock market. That's a terrible thing because so much other stuff is going on and it tends to start recovering before the economy gets bad, because people are looking six, nine, 10 months ahead and saying, okay, well, that's where the update gets, so I'm going to buy it now. People are trying to anticipate the future there, so it's not a great indicator. It's also it's you know, it can be pretty volatile you can just get like 10% swings in certain days and it's also trying to anticipate what the interest rates are doing and bond rates and all sorts of other stuff. But just, are people losing their jobs, yes or no? And I can see that every week with almost no time delay. That's a great indicator, and so that's the one that I recommend.

Chris Lalomia: 32:32

I love that one and it's easy, yeah, easy. Even I could look at that and figure it out, even you, even I can figure that out.

Mischa Fisher: 32:40

And you know, and if you want to get more complicated, you can do that you can use it as a gateway drug to say, okay, well, that's initial claims. How about continuing claims? So how many people are still filing after you know? Like 10 weeks, right? So are you seeing a lengthening spell of how long people are jobless? You can then look at the unemployment rate and the labor force participation rate, and you can look at all that stuff later if you want to, but that, I think, is unnecessary for most people's purchase, which is just hey, what's going on? How many people lost their jobs last week?

Chris Lalomia: 33:07

There you go, fascinating. I love this stuff, so I. You said you had a lot of questions. I'm going to keep rolling if you don't know you can go ahead and keep right, I've got obscure questions.

Chris Lalomia: 33:17

Okay, so just for a minute. Global economy people started talking about that, so I started my business in 08. I left the financial markets. I was in financial services and I went with a business because I had read a book called the world is flat by freement and I did not want to get outsourced because I didn't feel like my business could outsourced overseas. In the world of global economy, which I think has been used now for what? The last 40 years, what do you think our triggers are going to be from a global economy perspective to here we are, starting our own businesses here in the US.

Mischa Fisher: 33:52

So just to clarify the question, you mean like what's going on with outsourcing, or can you elaborate a little bit? So the global economy.

Chris Lalomia: 33:58

So where do you see, where should we be worried about the global impacts to what we're doing here in the US?

Mischa Fisher: 34:04

Oh, in terms of what could her supplier demand?

Chris Lalomia: 34:07

Yeah, what could hurt us, Knowing like the Ukraine war popped up, boom, there goes cabinets. I don't know if you guys knew this, but it was cheaper at the time to cut down oak trees here in the US and Canada, ship them over to Ukraine, have made cabinets, brought them back and we would install them here in the US. Well, a lot of the birch plywood came out of there too, right? Yeah, they weren't just the wheat basket of the world, they had that going on. So that's, I mean, I know it's a big question, but you can't say, oh, there's going to be another war in Asia.

Alan Wyatt: 34:36

Let me tell you, here's what I predict, but we got the Middle East going on right now, yeah, so how much or little should we be paying attention to that?

Chris Lalomia: 34:44

I?

Mischa Fisher: 34:44

mean I think people should pay attention to it, not just because they're bottom line, but also just to be a good civic citizen in an independent republic to do that. In terms of potential risk, you know this stuff is unpredictable by nature, but it does speak to having a diversified supply chain and being flexible. A lot of people really got burned. Imagine if you could hit supply at the peak of the COVID demand but you couldn't because your cabinets were, you know, overseas and, you know, independent of the war before that even happened. Just the supply chain bottlenecks.

Chris Lalomia: 35:15

Oh yeah. Right, so I was just talking to somebody who said did you know that I could have installed three more kitchen? No, I'm sorry, 30 more kitchens. Except all of my stuff was sitting out. The containers off the sea couldn't get it in. Yeah, I'm like area brother, I know yeah.

Mischa Fisher: 35:30

So you know, people are very bad at factoring that into their cost savings when they say, yeah, but I'm, you know, on margin, I'm improving my margins by, you know, 2% by getting my, my cabin at tree from somewhere else. So certainly some folks have larger players in a lot of industries have figured this out and so you see more diversification of supply chains, stuff. That was, you know, early on with the lockdowns in China. A lot, you know, some of that production has been shifted over to Vietnam. That's a that's a big classic one that we've seen.

Mischa Fisher: 35:58

Obviously people right now are responding to Ukraine, you know, hopefully the, the, the bull case there is, the word gets resolved and then all that supply comes back online and that risk is removed. Yeah, nothing's, nothing's guaranteed, but you know we can, we can hope that, that the, that doesn't get worse. Same thing for some Middle East. Obviously we hope that that, you know, gets better instead of getting worse. But you know it's one of the things where you have to Build some flexibility and never expose yourself.

Mischa Fisher: 36:25

You know I am, I, you know, on a personal level, I do some investment in in rural Colorado stuff. People respond like wildfires aren't a thing, but they are a thing. So build that into your investment plan or you're being pretty reckless with With your plan. Just because no wildfires come through that area in a hundred years doesn't mean it couldn't, and it's the same sort of principle, regardless what your business is. Obviously, if you're not doing property investment in rural Colorado, you don't have to worry about wildfires necessarily, but you should worry about whatever. That Unlikely but quite devastating thing could. You know that could happen does happen. So have diversified supply chains, have multiple relationships, have relationships that are good enough where you can get to the front of the line.

Chris Lalomia: 37:03

If there is a backlog and it's up to somebody's discretion if you get the material or somebody else does, yeah it's synthesized that one Having good relationships saves your buns when things go the wrong way, but diversifying your relationships it's a lot more work and it's harder to manage, and it's your right guys. You're probably gonna have to work a couple hours extra a week, but welcome to the world. That's what we got to do. If you go out there and solve the problem and you're in a better position when something comes up that you had no idea was gonna happen, like what?

Mischa Fisher: 37:29

what's the net dollar value of those 30 extra kitchens?

Chris Lalomia: 37:32

Yeah, I mean, let's look at that number 30 kitchens, bro. That's massive. He finally got. He got him going and the next thing hit, which was couldn't get appliances, but what he did to solve that one. To give you an idea, you can't get a Certificate of occupancy doing a kitchen here in Atlanta, well, of course, across the US without having a working in appliance. And so a lot of these appliances that he was putting in where the 36 or 40 inch big ranges, he was taking 30 inch standalone ranges, plopping them in the the $300 GE special and waiting for his stuff to come in from overseas, like so loner ranges. He's getting loner ranges.

Chris Lalomia: 38:08

Yeah, yeah, yeah but he bought 15 of them just to finish it off and get the CEO. Yeah, of course, because now he's got no extra money, so I think that was a hell of a solve on the problem. I thought it was really cool.

Mischa Fisher: 38:18

Yeah, yeah, that's a great practical solution.

Chris Lalomia: 38:21

Yeah, all right, so we're coming to the end here and I just got so many more questions. But as you look forward to, let's say, I don't know how far you said I think I remember you saying anybody who predicts more than three years, it's just flat out lying. They're not even an economist.

Mischa Fisher: 38:37

I think I wrote that well, they could be an economist, but but they're definitely being disingenuous about the nature, not a good one.

Chris Lalomia: 38:44

So what do you see? Major drivers or things that we hadn't talked about in the next one or two years. Well, I'll just take one, really.

Mischa Fisher: 38:52

Demographics is the big one that's the most persistent, above all this stuff right, I mean interest rates are powerful, but they do go up and down and then they get moved by other things. But something that's remarkably stable but also not random in terms of how it interacts with the economy over time so it means that it has a persistent effect is the overall demographic distribution of the country. We don't have an even space of people at each age group, right? 1% of the population is not one years old and 1% is not two years old, 1% is not three years old and 1% is not a hundred years old. You actually get these spikes where 2% are 38 and Half a percent or one. That's the sort of. So you can get like four times as many people in one age group than in another, and that curve is shifting over time. It's less of an impact for us than for other countries, because we pull new people into the country at a rate that other countries don't. So that keeps us a little bit younger than we otherwise might be, but that is changing. We have fewer young people. Right now. We're sort of golden, going through a golden era for the market, where there's still demand from baby boomers and from millennials who are forming houses. But that's gonna decline a little bit over the next 10 years but it's gonna open up new sources of demand, right?

Mischa Fisher: 40:04

So I think that the new sources of demand are twofold. The first is you've got tens of millions of people in the Boomer age group who are gonna want to age in place and you know, like, the price of health care, the price of elder care, all that stuff is crazy expensive and getting more expensive. So you might see some unit economic shift where it's worth it for people to retrofit their houses. I think that that could be a growing sector in certain portions of the country. Right, this is obviously a very regionalized story as people move around. The other thing is, you know millennials as a cohort are Pickier about where they live. They're doing okay financially people like to say they're not, but they're doing okay financially and Are going to prioritize certain lifestyle components of their demand and are now sort of hitting their peak professional years, where their discretionary income Is gonna spike, and also peak child formation years to and family formation. So both of those two stories are very much a demographic driven piece and At the same time demographics also interacts with the supply side and in the trades.

Mischa Fisher: 41:00

You know the smart money tends to work for itself. So you've got to be very creative around how you satisfy that demand. And you know the idea that you can pull in unskilled labor and Not pay. You know a really nice wage premium is gonna get harder and harder for the sector, so you have to come up with more creative ways to keep scarcer people in the industry. As older folks retire out of it and as systems get more complicated too, that's another thing. Right, complex systems.

Mischa Fisher: 41:29

If you're talking about Modern buildings, every single component has to work right. Right, your rain barrier, your vapor barrier, your insulation, your Electrical all of these things are more complicated than they were in the past and the consequences of somebody screwing them up has gotten a lot more expensive. You know, if you've got a house that was all framed with solid wood and wasn't very well insulated and you know the plumbing pipe burst, the, the wood will dry out. But now it's a real problem if you've built a airtight house out of, you know, osb and other sort of laminated wood products that don't respond very well to water and now somebody screwed up your pecs fitting. That's a very expensive proposition and that's gotten a lot worse for the sector, and so you really want to make sure that your Training people well and holding on to them, and demographics are gonna make that harder. So it's a long-winded way of saying demographics on both the supply and demand side.

Chris Lalomia: 42:25

Love it. I actually I'm partnering up with somebody here locally on the aging and play stuff is where the and training the guys on how to do this stuff, because I'm seeing it in the land. I didn't see it 10 years ago. I definitely see it now, though, that more and more people are moving mom and dad into the basement, or Mom and dad want to stay in their house that they grew up in and that they raised their children in, and they want to stay there. And then millennials that the other thing, you're right, they're doing just fine when it comes to financials, and I my big thing is, I say that's a bad word. The millennials, they're bad, they're doing what they're doing, but they're the first person to say, hey, what do you guys want to eat tonight? I'm like, well, let's go get something. No, we'll just call Uber eats. Okay, so you guys are wanting to pay ten bucks to get your food delivered? Oh yeah, no problem. Okay, our hourly rates 185 for the first hour and oh no, that's too much money.

Mischa Fisher: 43:09

Yeah, yeah. It's pretty funny how people make those distinctions. Somebody tell you, tell somebody they've got a hundred eight dollar bar tab, they wouldn't take twice about it. But you say you $100 for you know a qualified home service person to not burn your house down. Oh, that seems expensive.

Chris Lalomia: 43:21

Well, that's too crazy, I'll find someone else. That's awesome. That's, that's a great pull on the demographics. I think that's incredibly interesting, and we're seeing it here in Atlanta. I definitely am seeing that. So all right, alan, you need to talk more.

Mischa Fisher: 43:37

Well, we'd love to have speechless.

Alan Wyatt: 43:38

I know no, no no, no, I mean I just, yeah, I had questions that weren't quite in your groove because you're you're staying in the home services space.

Chris Lalomia: 43:47

But all right, well, I'm just curious about now.

Alan Wyatt: 43:50

just you know you do data analytics in consumer behavior and I'm just kind of curious what the role of social media is in that, compared to the way consumer behavior was driven in the past.

Mischa Fisher: 44:03

Yeah, I mean it's huge in terms of the fact that we are all you know we talked about earlier kind of mini lemmings, right, so you can see trends change faster. So I guess, meaningfully mapping the question to what a listener might care about because you know, obviously people have social media, they watch it it can change things.

Alan Wyatt: 44:20

He's making my question. A good question is what he's doing. I know I love that we should.

Chris Lalomia: 44:24

That's a great rephrase of the question, yeah.

Alan Wyatt: 44:26

Not a very good question, Alan. Let me make it a better question.

Mischa Fisher: 44:30

Trends can change faster. People can have different expectations around what it is they're doing. Right, that's, that's the biggest one. And people now expect nicer homes than they have in the past. Right, because before you might you know. If you picked up a copy of you know some fancy magazine somewhere, maybe it'll change your opinion. But now you see it constantly on social media and if it engages well, you see even more of it. So people's expectations around having nicer homes is more pronounced. A broader array of features right, Because if you see some novel thing that's going to perform well in the algorithms and now all of a sudden people want, you know, pick some whatever exotic product that they didn't know they wanted before and now they know they do want it. So wider range of trends and a faster change in terms of how people are expecting to get them. Right, so everybody's into white cabinets right now, but that could change more quickly than it would in the past, and so you're going to see, I think, both of those two things being the big consequence of it.

Mischa Fisher: 45:27

I'm not quite sure what are the other practical things? I mean, I think if you're in the selling business, obviously that's a new channel. Whether or not it's a profitable channel is a separate story, but more social media companies are really pushing oh you saw this post will here by the product, and that applies to home services just as much as to consumer goods. Obviously, it's going to be lower volumes because of a higher price point, but it's still going to apply as an additional channel that you can pursue. But like all channels, it might be profitable, it might not. You've got to use your own discovery process there to figure out if that's the right channel for you.

Chris Lalomia: 46:03

Well rephrased and well answered.

Alan Wyatt: 46:05

I'm going to put my glasses back on so I get smarter.

Chris Lalomia: 46:07

There you go, all right, I think we got to jump into the final four. Yeah, all right, but before we do that, misha, how can people follow you, see what you're doing out there and see the work that you're doing? Because it's phenomenal stuff and it's really helped me formulate my 24 plan. Sure, so I mean I post research out there.

Mischa Fisher: 46:25

The easiest way to find it is just to track me down on LinkedIn. That's usually where I tend to put things. It can be a little sporadic, depending on what I'm making public content, depending on what I'm making publicly available and what I'm not, but that's the easiest spot. So just track me down on LinkedIn. If you're not a LinkedIn guy, then you know, I know, sign up for LinkedIn and just follow me only.

Chris Lalomia: 46:43

That's it LinkedIn.

Alan Wyatt: 46:45

I looked at him on Twitter and there were a lot of interesting posts, but one was I think it was a mountain lion that was going across your property.

Mischa Fisher: 46:53

Oh yeah yeah, that's one of my properties in Colorado and I was. I was doing some some foot, some some some footing inspections and I left and my game camera picked up a curious big, big, big cat. It was huge yeah dude. Yeah, I've seen some very large cats up there. There you go.

Chris Lalomia: 47:16

The big cat hunter, economist Misha Fisher.

Mischa Fisher: 47:18

I love it. I'll go find him.

Chris Lalomia: 47:19

I think that's awesome. All right, Misha, what is a book you would recommend to our audience to help them either in their personal or business life?

Mischa Fisher: 47:27

This is one where people usually have their favorite business book, but I tend not to recommend business books. I think you can get that from fun conversations at the bar, most that wisdom, or you just have to learn these lessons the hard way. So I usually recommend classic literature to people and you know, pick, pick a book, but you know, pick something from 1950 or earlier, and you know read or or listen to that. So you know I've read a bunch of good ones, but you know I tend to really enjoy old fiction. So here I will go off the wall and recommend something that I don't think anybody's going to read but they've also never heard the recommendation before, and that's of human bondage by Somerset mom. It's not a racy book, even though the title is like that, but it's Somerset mom, you know, classic author from the last century. It's considered kind of his magnum opus and it's just all about humans making stupid choices in their personal lives. You get a lot of wisdom from that and even though it's not a business book, that's that's what we recommend.

Alan Wyatt: 48:25

I can say that's a recommendation that will never be duplicated, that one is not the email of my friends no email.

Chris Lalomia: 48:32

Oh, email of human bondage. What? What are we listening to? Well, it's true crimes. You didn't realize we switched over to the true crimes genre here at the Smolvitz and.

Mischa Fisher: 48:39

Sparrow or you know, you could pick up some Dostoevsky too. I mean, it's hard to do worse than a crime. Punishment that's another great one.

Chris Lalomia: 48:46

Yeah, oh wow, that's a big, that's a big poll Boy. Warm peace.

Mischa Fisher: 48:50

Now the Russians wrote some great, some great stuff. They, you know a lot, a lot of suffering mean a lot of great literature.

Alan Wyatt: 48:57

So what do you think about Atlas Shrugged I?

Mischa Fisher: 48:59

read Atlas Shrugged. I enjoyed it. I recommend people do it as a pairing with Upton Sinclair's the Jungle Sinclair's the better writer, but he's a little bit cartoonish and it's sort of the exact flip side, right. So the jungle is about this Hungarian immigrant who's just abuse and taken advantage of by all the evil capitalists in the Chicago meatpack industry. And then Atlas Shrugged is about, you know so, the innovation and and freedom you get from making choices and being empowered. And I find reading the two is a great one, because I think Rand's ideas are quite novel and you don't see enough of them. Sinclair is a great writer, even though his, his character arcs are a little cartoonish and over the top right, like every bad thing that could possibly happen happens to the protagonist in the jungle. But to do together make a nice coverage of something that people will debate forever.

Chris Lalomia: 49:46

I love that answer. That is, that was solid. Epic epic answer. All right, now we're going to get into more stuff. What's? The question be your, of your home or homes.

Mischa Fisher: 49:57

A fair future of my home. I installed a home gym over covid. So you know I like to, I like to lift, so I installed a squat rack and treadmill and all that sort of stuff and that's that's probably my favorite. I need to move and have a sauna. That's, that's, that's my future, our favorite feature, but I just don't have the space.

Chris Lalomia: 50:14

Oh, good sauna. Yeah, oh, I love that too, especially in Colorado. You jump out in the snow, jump back in. That's what we used to do up in Michigan. Yeah, but I was thought it was going to be the camera, the game camera as it finds more mountain lines.

Alan Wyatt: 50:25

Yeah, you got to see the thing it's massive. Yeah, it's big.

Mischa Fisher: 50:28

I don't post a lot of research on Twitter. I'm very, very inactive on Twitter, but if somebody wants to track me down, there you can see the game. The game camera footage Love it.

Chris Lalomia: 50:36

That's, that's good. What's a personal pet peeve of yours when you're out there and you're the customer?

Mischa Fisher: 50:44

The. That's a good question, I mean, I think the the biggest one I've run into in the home services industry is lack of follow up. That's still surprisingly common and I just don't think there's much of an excuse for it. I think people have to solve that problem.

Chris Lalomia: 51:00

I think that's so funny.

Mischa Fisher: 51:01

It's on things and just not heard back from people.

Chris Lalomia: 51:04

So we have an automated quote follow up system in my CRM and the responses I get from some people are just absolutely classic. One just said after literally two years of getting an email from us every week, please stop. I'm like that's all you had to say. That's all you had to say.

Chris Lalomia: 51:23

Yeah it's just please stop. After two years You're like come on, man. So yeah, you're right. And when guys don't follow up after getting out there, it's something I write on my estimators all the time. You just got to do that because you, you think you just gave them a free, you know your consultation for free, but what they said they're looking at is you know the opportunity to evaluate your services and what you're doing. And he said you're there, our next ambassador in our system. You guys have got to deliver.

Alan Wyatt: 51:50

Any kind of follow up. It's, it's, it's crazy to me what's happening in our society. So I'm in commercial real estate. You don't make money unless you sell a building. So you don't make money unless you return a phone call. And it's amazing how often I'll reach out and try to call an agent who's got a listing. I don't even get a call back. Amazing.

Chris Lalomia: 52:12

Unbelievable, and that's the only way they make money, and it's the only way they make a motion. Yeah right, that's what absolutely flirted. It's a hundred percent commission business. Brother, that's what you're in. You know how you make money. You give them a quote and then you are doing that.

Alan Wyatt: 52:25

Well, how would you feel as the person who actually entrusted this person to sell their building, and they're not calling people back now, you know you know, I do understand why people get there too Because consumers can be flaky.

Mischa Fisher: 52:37

I get it, I get it. So consumers don't respond to. They've got, you know, wildly unrealistic price expectations. But some things are just asymmetrical and that's just one that if you're in that sales role you've got to. You got to eat the fact that a bunch of people are flakes, but you still have to follow up.

Chris Lalomia: 52:51

That's right, baby.

Mischa Fisher: 52:52

You got to eat the place.

Chris Lalomia: 52:54

That's what I took away. Was you got to eat the flakes? All right. Snowflake, All right, let's get back to it. So last one, give us a DIY nightmare story.

Mischa Fisher: 53:03

Yeah, why not my story? You know I've personally never had one. I grew up on a farm. I've done a lot of DIY stuff, but call this unearned hubris or earned hubris. But you know I've done a lot of DIY stuff and I've never screwed it up. Wow.

Alan Wyatt: 53:19

So for our listeners he's cocky talking, yeah, cocky talking, cocky talking, nobody's allowed to ask me that question.

Mischa Fisher: 53:26

I love that one.

Chris Lalomia: 53:27

That's a great one. All right, misha, this has been great and I'll tell you for our listeners. If you didn't pick something up, man, you are totally missing the boat. You're probably going to go back, as I just had somebody tell me the other day. I went back and re-listened to this other episode. I said, yeah, you go because there's so much to unpack. I was sitting there in my truck listening to it. I had to go back to my office and re-listen to it. This is the one you want to go back and re-listen to, especially if you're not doing 2024 planning. This is 2023. You're missing the boat If you didn't do it in January and you're listening to this thing. You still got time. But you better put that 12 month plan together, because a good plan violently executed is better than an excellent plan never put in place. Go out there, make it a big day. Let's get up that mountain top and watch out for those big cats on your way up to the top.

Alan Wyatt: 54:09

Cheers. Thanks, misha, thanks varsa foarte.