How To Make Your Business Run Without You

Hosts Stephen Olmon and Collin Trimble unpack how technology builds sellable, scalable security & life-safety companies. They reveal how connected systems—CRM, billing, and field service—create a “Customer 360” that boosts customer experience, drives predictable revenue, and reduces key-person risk.
 If you want to exit someday (or just stop living in spreadsheet hell), this is your roadmap. From tech stacks to tactical CRM setup, you’ll learn how to modernize your ops and build a business that runs on systems—not you.

✨ What You’ll Learn

Build to Sell: Why every business should be built to be sold—even if you never plan to exit.

Customer 360: How integrated CRMs and connected tech personalize service at scale and increase retention.

CRM as Backbone: Why your CRM—not your inbox or spreadsheet—should be the center of your customer experience.

Avoid Key-Man Risk: How systemized processes make your company more valuable and acquirable.

Homework: Step-by-step setup—pick your CRM, load your top accounts, connect your website, and start tracking customer data today.

💼 Extra Special Thanks to Service Scalers!

We’ve been partnering with Service Scalers to maximize our Local Service Ads (LSAs) and optimize our Google My Business profiles, and the results have been incredible. With hundreds of thousands in sales and 900+ calls in a single week, GMBs are now our top-performing organic lead channel.

 Want to learn how Service Scalers can do the same for you?

 🔗Check Them Out Here 

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 Stephen Olmon
Collin Trimble

More Entry & Exit — https://www.entryandexit.co/

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction and Importance of Systems
• 0:00 Meet the Hosts: Colin and Steven
• 0:40 Leveraging Technology for Business Growth
• 3:34 Choosing the Right CRM and Billing Platforms
• 20:20 Integrating Billing with CRM for Better Insights
• 21:56 Avoiding Spreadsheets and Embracing Technology

Transcript

E&E EP 5

Collin Trimble: [00:00:00] If someday you want to exit your business, your systems have to be bigger than you, 

Stephen Olmon: you can't grow your business without a really strong customer experience. 

Collin Trimble: We can build that by using technology to help personalize your experiences. So your CRM should be the central backbone. You should build a business to be sold like even if you don't sell it.

But systems are easy to sell because they can be repeatable. 

Stephen Olmon: We're saying those things from experience, unfortunately.

Collin Trimble: Hey y'all. Welcome to Entry and Exit. I'm Colin. This is my co-host Steven. We are here to unpack the security and life safety industry piece by piece and give you guys. Tactical ways that you can grow your business. We're gonna start with a quick 60 seconds or less. Steven, hold me accountable. 60 seconds or less.

Recap on who the heck we are and why we're talking to [00:01:00] you. So I'm Colin. Started off in the industry a little over 10 years ago as a manufacturer rep. Uh, got to spend a lot of time with independent security operators, just like Steven and I are now. Just so happened I met a guy along the way, a dealer of mine, uh, of a company called Alarm Masters.

Fast forward many years. Went through the software industry, worked@salesforce.com and a couple other software companies. Learned a lot about enterprise selling and managing sales teams. Became an entrepreneur about seven years ago and my buddy Brian Turner at Alarm Masters comes back around and says, Hey, I'm ready to retire.

You said you were interested. So three years ago we purchased Alarm Masters and we have been on the rocket ship. Ever since, how'd I do? 60 seconds. It's gotta have been less. 

Stephen Olmon: Less than great. Really impressed. Alright, I'm Steven. I started out in management consulting at KPMG at 22. They had a very healthy hourly rate that they charged for me.

To a well-known telecom [00:02:00] company, and I don't really know what I did, but, uh, it's on my resume. And then I went into, uh, enterprise software sales in the healthcare space for about four or five years and experienced, uh, what it's like to go through an acquisition. Um, and then over seven, eight years ago.

Went into entrepreneurship and I've started and bought a handful of different businesses, um, including a couple with Colin. And we really have kind of invested heavily and are kind of all in on alarm Masters and. You know, Colin convinced me on a whiteboard three years ago that this was a great idea and at times I've questioned him.

Uh, but over the last year or two, I feel like we've really figured it out and, uh, we're in a, in a really good spot and excited to continue to share more. 

Speaker 3: Hey, everybody knows that leads are tough to come by, but what if they weren't service? Scalers is the no BS marketing team. Just for home service contractors, they run [00:03:00] S-E-O-P-P-C-L-S-A and GMB campaigns that actually bring in customers and not just clicks.

They've delivered me tons of leads tied to real revenue, and they can do the same for you. If you sign a 12 month contract, your first month is free. Click the link below to get started. 

Collin Trimble: I think yours is longer than mine. I'm just saying I think it was longer. 

Stephen Olmon: Well, you know, more profound. Yeah. And so, um, so today we're going to, um, really focus on technology that drives predictable revenue.

Mm. Um, and talk about kind of the, uh, from a high level, the, an entire technology roadmap, but really center on. CRM today. I think that some people oversimplify what that even means and ultimately, uh, kind of unpack why it is so crucial to building a business that, um, becomes desirable as an acquisition target down the line.

Collin Trimble: Yeah. Let's jump in. I think, uh, one very salient point about technology is that if someday, um, [00:04:00] you want to exit your business or you want to have. Healthy, scalable, repeatable growth. Your systems have to be bigger than you. You can't, Mr. Or Mrs. Operator, do it all yourself. You can't spend all the plates forever.

You're gonna have to use those systems to help you scale and build your business. And just like you invest time and money and resources into people and training and enablement, you gotta do the same thing with your systems. You gotta invest time, money, and you gotta build enablement and process. To help those systems make you successful.

So we're gonna talk more about that today. 

Stephen Olmon: Yeah. I think a lot of people really wanna make one buying decision. Then hope it just works forever. Yeah. And that's not reality. Um, it's not reality. You think a lot of companies rebrand and they kind of recreate themselves over the course of time. Maybe you update a reface, a website, uh, whatever it may be, right?

Technology's no different. You have to continuously invest in it, [00:05:00] improve it, um, and, and also take advantage of. New technologies, uh, and, and just the kind of every evolving nature of, uh, those platforms that you might implement. And, uh, so I think that, um, we, we wanna start with kind of why ultimately is it worthwhile?

Such a significant effort and focus. So, um. Ultimately, you're trying to grow your business and we'd say that you can't grow your business without a really strong customer experience. And customer experience is dictated by several things, but you may not even realize how much technology ultimately is driving the end result of that customer experience.

Um, you wanna. Dive into that, Colin. 

Collin Trimble: Yeah, I do. Um, I think that it is becoming more important now than ever before that we, as. We'll say [00:06:00] service providers, whether that's in the security, fire, plumbing, hvac, whatever space you are in, if you're providing a service to your customers, we provide personalized experiences for our customers.

Um, and I think you see that a lot with when people say, I, I love, I've got a local guy, right? Like, you see, do you have a plumber? Oh yeah, I got a local guy. I love him. Why do you love him? Well. His price may be good. Um, he may do quality work, but he provides a personalized experience for you. You probably text this individual.

He probably knows, you know, something about your house. He knows about your funny dogs at bark every time you walk in. He provides a personalized experience because he's one guy and he, he likely has a small number of customers that are very loyal. We can build that with scale by using technology to help personalize your experiences for your customers.

Ultimately an operator can't do it all. They can't remember everything about every single customer, [00:07:00] and it would be impossible for them to try to do that. And so technology enables you to do that. So, so how does that work? Right? So if you have connected technology, which I think is probably the best place to start, if you've got connected technology and, and lemme give you some very tactical examples of that, if your billing system is connected to your CRM.

Your field service application is connected to your CRM and all that's connected to your email and your VoIP system. You have very connected technology. And when you have connected technology, you will get, and this is a very enterprise softwarey seller word, which is the C3 60 or customer 360, which means you have a 360 degree view of your customer.

There's, here's a tangible example of that, because before we had really robust connected systems. We had our sales guys go out and sell something to the customer. Sometimes, not often, but sometimes the customer would walk in and or the sales person would walk into the customer and they would say, Hey, don't, don't you even know that right now I'm [00:08:00] really frustrated at y'all because my billing hasn't been correct, or You guys double billed me for something and the sales person was.

On their heels now, the whole thing changed and they were not realizing, oh wow, I'm coming in here for a customer service situation. 'cause they didn't know they, how would they have known there was no, they're not in that department. Um, and so connected technology enables every person that has any type of skin-to-skin contact with your customer.

Have a perspective on that customer. So now when the salesperson can walk in, they said, Hey, I know we're working on a billing case for you. Can I just give you a two second update on that? Here's what's happening. Bellin's already working on giving, uh, giving you an explanation of why it looks like you were double billed.

It actually wasn't double billed. You have two locations, whatever. Then they've just bought a whole bunch of credibility. One, it shows that the salesperson cares about the account, and it also shows that they came in with context. So ultimately why technology matters and what we're going for is to get that [00:09:00] C3 60 so that we can deliver better experiences to our customers, but not just on the sales side.

We want that on the field service side. We want that on the billing side. We want that on the customer success side. Anytime a customer calls in for customer success, they could say, Hey, we know that we just had a technician out there that was working on X, Y, Z. How did that happen? How is, did everything go okay?

Hey, did your invoice go? Okay? Hey, we saw that you had a burglar alarm three weeks ago. Everything all right there when you can bring up better experiences for your customers. You're gonna drive longer term customers, stickier customers, more profitable customers. So I would say, Steven, that's the most important thing, is how do we get our technology connected so we can get a 360 degree view of our customer and ultimately drive better experiences for those customers.

Stephen Olmon: So there's two core benefits that we'll discuss today. One side of, of having this more kind of integrated, uh, technology platform in your business. And, and [00:10:00] this is something just to be clear, that we did not have when we, when we walked into alarm masters, um, post acquisition. It was, it was not anywhere near that.

And the business was healthy and there were a lot of good qualities about the business, but the reality of, um, kind of a, a lack of connectedness hit us squarely in the face within that first 30 days. So this is something that we have. A lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of energy on, and so we feel very well equipped and experienced in, um, in both choosing to bite the bullet and spend the time and money on it, but also reaping the benefit.

And so we can say as practitioners like. We've done it, we've walked through this. Yeah. And man, been there. It's not perfect today we've been there, but being mostly on the other side of it, it is [00:11:00] night and day. We are so thankful that we made those choices. So there is the, um, the operational excellence, the customer experience, but all of those things ultimately equate to a more desirable business to be acquired.

Yep. By a buyer. That's right. Even if you, I, I like the, you know, axiom of, um, you should build a business to be sold. Like even if you don't sell it, yeah. You should still build it to be sellable. Yeah. Well there are many different elements of a desirable business, um, by strategics or private equity family office.

One of them. Absolutely. One of, I would say probably the top two or three criteria is really strong systems that create an environment where there is no key man risk. Yeah. It's a fully functioning company that is like well-oiled machine. [00:12:00] Um, there's not a lot of confusion. You have a lot of clarity, you know, um, people's tasks and assignments and the customer record and, oh, where's that contract?

Like desperately searching through some drawer. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt. Not anymore though. And so. Th those are the sorts of things that an acquirer will be looking for. And so even if that's not something on your personal roadmap right now in terms of, you know, having interest in selling, you will be grateful that if in seven years from now you decide, you know what?

I think I might be done that seven years prior, you started taking really specific steps to that end. 

Collin Trimble: Leave it to Steven to talk about the value of technology as it relates to m and a and selling the business, and leave it to Colin to talk about all the mushy customer experience C3 60. This just unveils who we really are and our [00:13:00] roles at ALARM Masters.

You're just getting a crystal clear look into that. I, uh, but I couldn't agree more. I think, uh, whether or not you are going to sell your business or pass it on to your kids or friends or whatever, or you wanna hold onto it. Indefinitely. Um, you want to build a business that could be sold and not just as an insurance policy, but it's also a business that can be sold for a high value is a business that is growing and profitable and, um, is stable.

And, and just like for a second, put your, you know, kind of put your feet in the shoes of somebody that would wanna buy your business. Imagine you were going to buy a business. You would wanna know that the thing that scares everybody the most is where is the next dollar gonna come from? If I close on a business on January 1st at 8:00 AM at 8:01 AM where do I go find the second and third dollar?

Uh, and that is, that is what everybody is trying to figure out. And relationships, [00:14:00] unfortunately, are difficult to sell and difficult to market within a business. There's a lot of risks around that. But systems and playbooks and process are easy to sell because they can be repeatable, and there's a track record there.

So regardless of what your plans are, but in particular, if you're planning to sell, start now. Start working on this and just know like you're probably gonna fail on one or two. Software purchases just like you failed hiring, you know, an employee that didn't work out. And also know that you're never gonna stop investing in technology just like you are never gonna hopefully stop hiring employees 'cause you're gonna grow, hopefully, uh, you're never gonna stop investing in your technology to create better experiences, to help you automate tasks and, and create more repeatability within your business.

And I just, I think that that matters. Um, and we've talked about this on. Podcasts in the past, but we hear this, this is the single most, uh, asked question, and this is why we did the podcast [00:15:00] today from our listeners and from some friends and peers in in industry is, man, I wish I had the technology stack.

You have. It seems too far outta reach. I don't know where to start. It makes my head spin. I'm not good at all that stuff. We want to talk very tactically about how to get there. You just have to make the decision. Are you willing to commit to it? If you're willing to commit to the journey and the effort of doing and putting in the time, you will get to the return.

And, uh, you know, like we always say, if you ever have any questions, we'd love to help. We'd love to answer some of those questions. We, um, but we're gonna start, we're gonna jump in today. Steven's gonna kick it off for us. We're gonna talk very tactically about what technology you should be looking at, where to prioritize, how to be thinking about it.

And then certainly can recommend brands. If you wanna reach out to us directly, we're happy to do that. Um, or, or really help in any way we can. 

Stephen Olmon: The reality is, is that many local and even maybe kind of light regional operators don't have this dialed, or [00:16:00] it's like completely absent. And so if that's you again, like.

That's okay. We were there. It doesn't have to be daunting. So we're, we'll, we'll start with just kind of talking about what are the different categories of technology. Yep. We are going to park on CRM today, and we will address some of the other categories over the course of time, but just to kind of talk through, especially in this industry, what are the core categories?

So, um, you've got CRM, you've got billing. We've got field service. Um, you know, you can, you can think about, there's some things we can talk about from like a pre-sales perspective estimation. Um, what else am I missing? Email 

Collin Trimble: your phone. Email system. Building's a good one or not. Billing a quoting was one.

That's a good one That wasn't on my list that I had written down prior to the podcast. Super important, super important. So many in this industry, there are these custom built. [00:17:00] Quoting applications that live off of the CRM we've worked with, with businesses in prior lives, uh, that are in the industry that had pretty robust CRMs, but their quoting was done entirely off the CRM.

And so you really got zero insight into, um, the financials of the quoting and how that impacts a deal. And I think that that's important. But I, I would say we're not gonna spend a lot of time on that because that's, that's not where I would start. Um. And I'm gonna jump into CRM really quickly, and, and I will say most people don't have a CRM, and if they do, it's a spreadsheet.

Um, but I, I think if you're, if you're sitting here listening to this, uh, and you're an operator, go ahead, raise your hand if, if you have started on a CRM, a free version of HubSpot or Zoho. Yeah, Zoho. And, and you were really at Pipedrive and you were really into it for seven days. And you told your salespeople, put [00:18:00] everything in here.

Then the first time you had a customer interaction, you skipped right through that dad gum, CRM, and it died that day. And listen, we've done that and we've been there and like we, this wasn't like a home run hit for us. We have the background, like we have the background in technology and this was not just a, a initial home run easy thing for us.

Uh, it is tough. I understand. But I do wanna just dispel one myth about CRM. Everybody, not everybody, a lot of people think that the CRM. Is just where you store your sales and your pipeline. Oh, well, yeah. CR m's. Cool. It's where you put your deals. That's great. It does that. But CRM stands for Custom Customer Relationship Manager.

CRM is a house for all of your customer touchpoints. You have relationship with customers on your billing, customer success, sales field service, all the things we talked about. So your CRM should be the central. Backbone [00:19:00] for your tech stack. It should be the central back, the central backbone, and, and here's the reality.

Your CRM today may not be the CRM that you're going to use in two to three years from now, but you should make an effort to pick a CRM today. That will be your CRM in two to three years. But just hold it with an open hand because you're, you just don't know what you're gonna encounter. But as you're thinking about this, one thing you really want to be processing is a technology roadmap.

And that's a fancy word, but really all it is, is, hey, if I'm gonna invest in a CRM time and effort, and I'm gonna upload some data in there and I'm gonna hold people accountable, and ultimately I want it to be the one place where all of my customer information is stored. Then you probably wanna make sure that it's integrated with some billing platforms and some field service platforms and some phone systems.

'cause what you don't want to do is spend all this time and money and energy putting it into the crm, getting everybody [00:20:00] trained. The system is great, and you find out that it cannot integrate with a billing platform. And then you, then you're pretty frustrated. So it's okay if you have to make a switch at some point.

I would say it's more important to start than it is to to, to belabor a point of trying to find the perfect CRM. But I would advise you to spend a little bit of time trying to do a, a light technology roadmap and look, I'll throw out some names for you, some names that you can kind of look at. Uh, you obviously Salesforce is the one we use.

Great platform. HubSpot, great platform. Very, has lots of integrations. Really robust, not super expensive. Um, you've got ServiceNow is another great one. ServiceTitan is another one. There are several out there that have field service billing. CRM customer success. Zoho actually does, is growing and has a. Um, has kind of some good applications that they can integrate with.

Um, you want to kind of, in my opinion, I would stay away from [00:21:00] very industry specific CRM and billing platforms. I know that sounds kind of, kind of counterintuitive, but what happens is you get locked into an ecosystem. So, um, if you go with something that's very niche and very custom to the industry, they may only have one option for a VoIP provider.

But what if that VoIP provider really is not a fit? For your business? Well, you're kind of stuck. So we really prioritized, um, a platform that had unlimited amount of integrations. And so, you know, the big ones are ServiceNow, HubSpot, and Salesforce. Those are the really big ones that are integrated to just about everybody.

Um. So we, I would say start with a CRM. I would, I would definitely focus on where do I go for a CRM. Um, another technology that I would, um, really begin to start thinking about is your billing platform. Many of you probably use QuickBooks. We did too. Um, you use QuickBooks for all of your billing, and in your brain you're like, [00:22:00] Hey, it's just invoicing.

Oh, it's just invoicing. It's integrated straight into my, uh, you know, into my chart of accounts. I don't need to, it's okay. My salespeople don't need to see invoices and recurring revenue and all that. And, and I would argue, uh, that is probably the second most important piece of technology to spend some time on thinking about how you can connect it because it will uncover insights for you.

So let me just give you an example. I have, uh, salespeople that are always trying to cross sell into our existing account. One of the things I tell them is to go find customers that are in our top 100. What's top 100 mean? Top 100 is who is buying the most stuff for us, but not just the stuff that's raw dollars.

What if that was one project from one customer? I wanna understand customers who over time have have MO done service with us project, and have spent subscription dollars with us, and those are [00:23:00] very valuable customers. That's the top 50, top 100 customers. The only way your salespeople can do that is if the billing is connected to the CRM.

That's the only way they're gonna be able to see that. It is important for them to understand the dollar value of the account. Prior to walking in the door. So if you can't trust your salespeople to look at that, and you don't have to expose all the data, but if you, you need to help kind of create a measurable way for your sales folks to be able to understand how important this customer is.

Conversely, on the customer success team, you may have a set of SOPs that says, Hey, we're not gonna dispatch somebody on a service call if this customer has an open balance. I can tell you what, right now I've got 10 customers off the top of my head. I do not care what their open balance is. We will dispatch the second they call us.

They're great customers. Long history. I know them personally. I know their owners. I, we've just, they've been with us for 30 years. If you hire a new customer success agent and they [00:24:00] don't have access to any of that history, how are they gonna know? They're not is the answer. So you want to get that billing system connected and it can get connected into the CRM.

And it doesn't necessarily have to be the CRM that's doing the billing, but the data needs to flow back into the CRM. Um, and so the titer, you can make that. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna stop there for a second. Steven did. Do you have any thoughts on that? I know we've talked a lot about the billing and the CRM, but I know that you've kinda had a lot of experience on the marketing side as it pertains to CRM as well.

Stephen Olmon: You don't wanna live in spreadsheet hell. Mm-hmm. And that's what a lot of people do to themselves. And there's so much opportunity for user error. Oh, send me the updated sales pipeline, and oh, it's a old Excel file from, you know, 32 days ago and it's not actually the updated one, and now your numbers are off and you're thinking about your business incorrectly, or whether it's billing data or whatever.

You do not want to live in spreadsheet. Hell, and it's a very real hell that a lot of people live in and they get used to [00:25:00] it, and they have their own weird little systems for keeping it on their desktop in this little folder. And don't do that. Yeah. It's immature. It's not gonna lead to growth. It actually, you're, you're hurting yourself by doing that.

And you think it's easy. You think that you kind of have control over it. No, you don't. Don't. It has control of you. That's right. The other thing I'd say is also, whenever you lack integrated technology and you lack insights and real time customer information, you are making the rest of your team, and I'm speaking to owners, listening, you're making the rest of your team too important and you are increasing your pain.

If one of them walks out the door with a ton of tribal knowledge. That you didn't really have saved and stored, commented out that you can go reference. And so by also like not doing this and investing in it, you're gonna [00:26:00] hurt your future self. Um, and you're creating future pain that is avoidable. So, and, and we're we're saying those things from experience, unfortunately.

Yeah. So, yeah. Both, both on the spreadsheet side and just people walking out the door with lots of knowledge and information that maybe wasn't as dialed in as, as we would've liked into our systems. And so, um, that's just kind of, you know, I, I'll, I'll be the bad guy and kind of a word of warning or caution.

So, um, don't do that to yourself. It's not, it's not fun. Um, so from a marketing perspective, also. We talked a lot about cross sell upsell. Colin was talking about, you know, go find your, um, top 100 customers, whatever it may be. There's a lot of creative things you can do, especially if you're selling multiple services.

We have five or six core services on the commercial side, so we can easily now at this point, slice and dice and see, you know, who, uh, uses [00:27:00] services one and two, but not three and four. Mm-hmm. Right. Not a problem. Really easy. Do you have that? Like, are you able to quickly, uh, identify which customers might be upsell opportunities and then deploy a marketing campaign to them same day pro?

You know, if you can't, then that's just another reason to go down this road. I think that's, that's another thing I want to say is. Building this foundation allows you to do the more fun, sexy stuff. We, we haven't even gotten into some of the things, and we probably won't today on, um, I don't even want to say ai, but just kind of advanced, uh, advanced approaches to different parts of our business.

Yeah. Using technology in, in ways that are really sophisticated. Yeah. We're doing some, we're kind of in the middle of Yeah. Uh, growing in some of those areas. You can't even begin to do that. Mm-hmm. [00:28:00] If your core technology infrastructure doesn't exist or is super, um, kind of living in disparate places.

Yeah. So yeah, that's great. Going through that whole path and that entire roadmap allows you to get to kind of the later stages of a roadmap that's much more innovative, sophisticated, and can lead to higher gross margins and, you know, those sorts of things. So, um, we'll, we'll get into that in, you know, later.

Podcast, but, um, you have to do kind of the, the hard work, the foundational technology work to be able to get to some of those things. They actually be methodical. Process driven. Yeah. Scalable and effective. And not just some random one-off that. Like your nephew built some random thing in chat bt Yeah.

That you tried once and thought it looked cool. Like Yeah, we're not talking about that. I'm sure Jesse, your nephew's like super neat. But it is, it is not what we mean, you know? So. Yeah. Um. Yeah, that's [00:29:00] my, yeah, that's my, uh, soapbox. 

Collin Trimble: That's a really, that's a really great point. I wanna just, I wanna stop for a second.

Again, I'm always cognizant of how do we. How do we become more tactical and like take real world steps? What does this mean? This is not some theoretical thing. Okay? Here are the, the technology stack. We talked about this again, but this is the technology stack that you want to be shooting for. Set a goal for yourself, say in 12 months from now, 18 months from now.

I want to have all of these on here. You want to have CRM, which includes pipeline and sales and leads. You want to have your billing, your invoicing, your RMR, your, your, uh, service work orders, uh, dropping in on your billing platform. You wanna have an email that's connected. That means that every email that goes to a customer is stored on that customer account.

So you have a history that is a timeline of every customer email tied to a customer account, who it's going to. You wanna have a VoIP system, that means all of your calls. Their transcripts are [00:30:00] tagged on that same timeline. Okay, so again, I did not have this access when we first started, but imagine the power for a second of staring at a customer account that shows you every single customer interaction, text, phone, email, every interaction they've submitted for tickets.

For changing their invoice information, the number of burglar alarms that they've had, the number of service tickets that they have had, the number of times they've interacted with your website, and you have one central place where all of that is uh, connected. That is the future. That is possible, that does not require.

Millions of dollars to do. You can do this and a lot of this stuff can actually be done by you, at least in the initial stages. One thing that I think is really important to understand, and I don't want owners to be kind of gun shy about this 'cause they may have experienced this. You are likely going to pay for subscriptions that are ongoing and you are also likely to pay [00:31:00] for implementation, which is a one-time setup fee, and you may even pay for what's called managed services, which is once that implementation has been done.

You're gonna wanna make changes, and these are changes that will just make a huge difference, and you don't really know about the changes until you're on the system. So there's kind of three categories of expense that you need to be prepared for, which is implementation. That one-time cost to set it up and get it configured.

Don't try to do that yourself. At least when you do a large robust rollout, when you're doing an initial CRM, you could probably figure that out. Um, then you've got your subscription fees, and then you've got some type of managed service, or at least some bucket of hours out there that you can work with the implementer to, to do some additional changes down the road.

So again, I just wanna make, I wanted to be really crystal clear about that because that is what the future could look like for you. We, and here's a, here's that example of a future statement, and we're doing this today. Okay? We're doing this right now and we've seen major impact. We've talked about this before in a [00:32:00] little bit in past podcasts.

We are ingesting monitoring signals from our customer accounts, their panels into our CRM, and we're getting everything from low batteries, which are indicating, Hey, we need to go out and try to do a service call to go, Hey, this customer's got a low bat. We should go out there and do that service call.

Another one that we do is, and this is a big one, is the burglar alarm. So this is just a connected experience. Okay? So we will run a report to say, Hey, we wanna identify all of the customers who have had five false alarms on their account in the last 60 days that have both burglar alarm and video surveillance.

Why? Because we are gonna go sell them one very specific thing, which is video verification. Video verification connects your burglar alarm with your video. It reduces false alarms, it helps create more urgency, uh, with authorities if there is a real, uh, situation going. And sometimes you can talk down [00:33:00] those customers are prime candidates.

So I could either go email them in particular and literally use it, the data that's in my CRM to say, Hey, you've had six burglar alarm events in the last 60 days. Have you guys looked at X, Y, Z? Or you could be like everybody else that sends a mass email blast out to all your customers and says, have you heard about this new service called video verification?

That is a reality that you can get to without a tremendous amount of lift. We would be happy to help with that and kind of share our thoughts and point you in the right direction and make introductions to people that can help do that for you. But that is something that you can do and I'm just, I'm painting that because I think some of this technology stuff can sound kind of nice to have.

But these are real world tangible things that have driven revenue and have gotten us ROI back on the technology investment we've made. So I just wanted to park there for a second. Sorry to take a lost track. 

Stephen Olmon: No, that's fine. And those are things that ingratiate your customers [00:34:00] to you. Um, and again, what was that like?

When we originally bought the business? It was some random spreadsheet. Yeah. Okay. It wasn't beautiful. Today it's pretty dialed in 'cause we took the time to work on it. So, um, those are things that are worth the time and effort. Devil's in the details, but it's totally possible. And talk about sticky customers, you know, that are loyal.

You know, some of those things are going the extra mile and you get the win of the ingratiated customer, plus net new revenue opportunities. So I like that. Yeah. I'm a, I'm a big fan of that. Yeah. Um, so let's, let's shift, uh, let's shift to 

Collin Trimble: homework. This is the time where you get some homework. We love assigning homework because we only reason we do this.

Uh, is because we wanna be [00:35:00] influencers. No. The only reason we do this is because we like to help and we get a lot of questions and we figured, hey, let's do it all in one place. So we're gonna give you real tangible things. I'm, I'm like this, I'm action task oriented. A lot of operators are, we like, give me one thing or two or three things to do and I'm gonna go do those things and give me, make it time down.

Okay? So by the next, by the next time you listen to our next episode, what I want you to do is I want you to pick a CRM. Pick one CRM. Sign up for it. Think a little bit about, Hey, do some digging. Google the CRM name and field service. Is there something that pops up? If you Google, uh, HubSpot and Field Service, is there a couple options?

Great. Okay. Check Google, HubSpot and billing does it. Okay, great. Now, alright, so your your beta version of your technology playbook complete. Now pick your CRM sign up for the free account. That's number one. Your second thing is I want you to load in. We'll say 250 customers. If you, if you can't do that, [00:36:00] pick your top 50, even if they're just the ones you're currently working with.

Pick the top 50 and by that, I want you to load in customer account, name, shipping, and or billing. Address one, contact their title, email and cell phone number. Then I want you to put a note on there for what services you currently offer them. I try to keep those services pretty high level. So think, you know, video and access control, you know, don't, don't put in brio intercom, whatever, like pick, pick just the high level scopes of work.

And then the last step is connect your email and your website to that CRM. Connecting your website would mean. Connect the lead capture form on your website to flow into that CRM uh, pretty easy. Here's a tangible step. If you go to the CRM and you go to the settings and you look for web to lead, that's probably the name, you're gonna get an HTML block.

Go to whoever your developer is and copy and paste it. You can load that lead [00:37:00] straight onto your website. So every time somebody submits a lead, it flows straight into your CRM. Nothing like keeping you adopted. The stickier you make your CRM, the higher your adoption will be. Okay? So if your leads are flowing in there, guess what?

You're gonna spend a heck of a lot of time in that CRM working those leads. The next thing is, as it's kind of part. Part B of this is, um, integrate your email and all your teammates email to said CRM. So, uh, usually there's like a Google or Microsoft Office connector. If you look in the settings, you can connect, give it authorization to your calendar and your email, and then it'll start tracking how many meetings and start logging your emails.

Or there may be a like a, B, c, C email address where you can, it'll give you a custom BCC email address that you can include as a rule in your email. It's another way, a lot of 'em do it. So again, three things. Pick your CRM load, 50 to 250 accounts in there. Connect your website to it and connect your email to it.

Okay? If you can start there, and you can do that in the next seven to 10 days, [00:38:00] you've done the hardest part. So I would say that's your homework for the next couple days. 

Stephen Olmon: We'll, we'll be talking more about. Um, various parts of the tech stack and just that entire technology roadmap, but I think this is, was a really good start.

And, um, so, um, as always, if you haven't, please like and subscribe and give us five stars, man. Give, if you're on a podcast 

Collin Trimble: app, hook it 

Stephen Olmon: up. Yes, please give us please, five stars, please. Come on. We're doing the Lord's work. We are. We're out here. We're out here. Yeah. Come on. Jump in. Um, and, uh, we appreciate you and, and we also really look forward to feedback and constructive criticism, which mainly is Colin talking about himself too long.

So as always, thank you. Thanks.