AI Is Completely Changing The Handyman Game | Feat. J.R. Crowell

Most handymen waste time with the little details… and don’t know how to fix it.

AI doesn’t mean sacrificing your talent. .

In this video, we break down:

• How AI can take out the guess work
• Optimizing your business to grow with AI
• Tracking your numbers to stay on top of things

If you're tired of wasting your time with paperwork, forgetting clients, and want better clients who are ready to pay — this is for you.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:06

Thanks for joining us, friends, on another episode of the Home Hero Podcast. Today we are joined by JR with Steady Home Maintenance. He's out of Jackson, Mississippi area. He's got about 7.5 team members. We'll have to ask about that 0.5. I hope they're okay. And also just to further get a lay in the land, last year uh JR's company did about$800,000 annual revenue. Um he started the business in 2022. Uh, so he's certainly one of the larger privately owned handyman businesses out there. Um JR, thanks so much for joining us today, man. Uh, if you don't mind kicking us off with like how what led you to start steady home maintenance?

SPEAKER_02 0:46

Yeah, hey, thanks for having me. Always a pleasure to talk to you. Uh so we started three years ago in the Jackson market, um, somewhat planned, somewhat, yeah, it was, it was it was planned, but we were flipping houses and still do that's still a big piece of of what I do. I've been an investor here for five or six years, I guess. And during that time, the the three years leading up to starting study, the real estate market was was nuts every everywhere. Um it was it was here too. But we kind of saw a change coming in the volume of flipping we were doing and knew ultimately that we always wanted to be in the home service space. That was always a plan, wanted to be in that, in that, in that place. Um, thought we would do it by way of maybe buying uh a sub, like a plumber or an electrician, something else in the trades. We thought that was going to be the path and just couldn't make any of those work and then realized, well, we're already we're already pretty familiar with subs. We've got a good relationship with realtors, we see a gap in the handyman market. And honestly, I think about that time was probably when I discovered the Facebook group too. The and I'm alluding to the one that that we're probably all in.

SPEAKER_01 1:53

The uh yeah, the handyman journey mastermind. If anyone listening is not in there, it's kind of the handyman business Facebook group.

SPEAKER_02 2:01

Yeah, and it was um, I don't remember the age of it at the at that time in 22, but I feel like it was pretty dang active even then. Uh anyway, so I kind of jumped in there and got to looking around, and handyman just seemed like uh it seemed like the the gap that was missing, which is I think everywhere. I mean, that's just uh there's a lot of good folks out there doing this, but you just can't find them and it's just one person. So anyway, we thought, okay, well, let's just take that and make that the launch pad to to what we might want to do. And so um that's the I guess that's the lead up short version of how we got there, um, somewhat by necessity because we also needed someone to do small stuff on rentals and things like that. But then two, because we were so ingrained with the real estate market uh with buyers and sellers, we saw that there was a gap for somebody to handle that. And then, you know, we have I'm licensed builder and contractor and and and do bigger projects. So we we have a knowledge of of how the house goes in, which we felt like makes us even more lethal for how it needs to be fixed. So kind of trying to marry those and and create something out of it.

SPEAKER_01 3:02

Cool. Um, so you're uh you guys don't really have a big focus on the remodels and like the larger jobs, even though you have that licensing. Um, do you mind kind of explaining a little bit of the rationale there?

SPEAKER_02 3:14

Yeah. So we started with handyman focus, period. And uh the goal was to get our hands wrapped around that, whatever that meant, however long that took. And then we would look at potentially doing remodels, but we never wanted to kill the focus, which was focusing on the smaller repairs. I mean, that's that's I think what happens, especially in our market. Uh people will get into the home, the home maintenance handyman side, the smaller jobs with the intent of scale. They don't ever want to stay there. They want, or they they don't get the systems right and kind of have to get out and then they find themselves doing bigger work because they have to take on whatever comes their way. Well, before you know it, they've scaled past this, the the small jobs. And once you get into bigger work, the remodel side, that's a whole different animal as far as leads are concerned, as far as how you run it. It's a different, if it's it's a different personality of the people that are on site for both of those. And so we we were very, very adamant that we were going to own the small job space. Um, I mean, made it all, made it all of our marketing, everything. And it was kind of funny because we I've I've kept flipping, kept crews going. We we still do that under a different, under a different name. And so anybody that knew me was like, hey, can you come you know do a remodel? It's like, no, I can't. That's not what we do. It's like, well, yeah, you do. You can you got more house flips going. Yes, you do remodel. I'm like, yeah, but but this business doesn't do that. We we we can't do that. Um, I mean, it's and it took us three years, I feel like, to get our hands around what we consider to be something we can now put gasoline on. Now, we probably still did, I would probably do three, three to five rehabs a year through steady. But when I say rehabs, it was like it was small stuff. It was less than 20 grand, you know, maybe even 10. Like a rehab for us was, you know, pulling out a couple of closet shelves and putting some new ones in and maybe doing a countertop here or there. Um, we would mainly just handle the paint and we would sub everything else out. So, like just those one-off things that came through. And then towards the end of year two, I got to be, I'm in a home builders association here, and I've got a really close group of remodelers and guys that I meet with once a month through that, kind of like a mastermind. And uh me and one of the guys in there got to be just really close and kind of got to analyze each other's businesses and what what what what he may struggle with and what I may have struggled with, and just areas that we make a team up. And so we kind of started working together some, started subbing more work to him, right? Just to start getting a feel for the process. And in the interim, we got to be really good buddies over about a two-year run. And then we officially kind of merged in together last November, and this is what March when we're recording this, March 26th. So four months ago-ish, five months ago, uh, we officially started a remodel division. But it's completely separate.

SPEAKER_00 6:05

When when you were getting started, was it tough to to say no to some of those those people that were asking for the for the bigger project, saying no to money?

SPEAKER_02 6:13

Maybe, maybe yes or no. I'm gonna say no. Um, I feel like it's been a little bit harder lately, but in the beginning, no. I um, and I'm a little bit different than a lot of folks. I did not start this really with just me on the tools in a truck, uh, running leads. Like we we made it a point to I'm I'm a I'm a business nerd just as much as a tool nerd. And so I had I'd kind of studied and I knew that processes and procedures and getting myself out of the way as fast as we could was the biggest thing we could do. And so when I got started, I just made the, I guess I made the investment and said, okay, we're gonna float this thing however long I can. I'll have to flip more houses, you know, to make it work, but we're gonna go ahead and build it with people first. And so because of that mentality, the goal was always do not veer left or right. The center is do small jobs. And so but even within that, it's handy, man. It's catch-all. How do you how do you not how do you how do you niche that down any? And so we've really had to work the last even up until just last week, I feel like in the ops meeting, we were talking about some things that we didn't want to do anymore. That was time to niche away from. And so while we didn't have a hard time saying no to remodels, uh, we probably had a harder time saying no to the stuff that we just like gutter cleaning. Like we that was something that we did. That was probably the second job we ever did was cleaning the gutter. We don't really do that anymore. But that was it felt like an easy thing. It was on every punch list that came through a realtor's hands, and it was like the, oh yes, yeah, we'll do that too. Um, and so those things were harder to say no to. And the idea was the kind of the I guess what kept us diligent with that, kept us focused was if we say yes to this thing that we're not very good at and don't want, because we're not set up to do remodels, right? We're just not. And so if we tie ourselves up for that, and then the marketing starts to work, which it always does if you give it a minute, when it starts to work, and now we're tied up on these big jobs, and now we can't be the company that we said we were going to be. We just lied to everybody. We're not can't do it because in the beginning we guaranteed a 24-hour turnaround, regardless. We always said that. And that was because I kept tools in my truck just in case nobody could get to it. I could go run and do it real fast. And we just kind of made that our thing for a long time. We're still really fast, but it's not 24 hours, so that better not end up on a TikTok somewhere.

SPEAKER_01 8:26

No, no worries about that. Um, yeah, it makes sense that it it's easier to say no from your perspective of you know, you went in as as a starting a business and hiring some labor and you were creating the marketing machine and generating the demand, getting the systems in place. A little bit easier to say no to stuff when you know you're sending a guy that he took the job to do all these small jobs, right? Not to do the work models. Um, so in that vein, JR, um like what what are your kind of like bread and butter focused services that you're running right now with Steady? And and also I'm curious, you mentioned gutter cleaning as one that has been kind of cut and it's hard to say no now. Um, but what are some services that even you guys don't do now that maybe originally when you started, you never fathomed cutting those out and and the reasons for that?

SPEAKER_02 9:15

Yeah, so uh core services now, we do a ton of rotted wood repair, fascia, soffit, um, door jams. We install a lot of doors. And and really, probably on the handyman side, I would say installing doors is probably the biggest thing we do. That would be that was the largest task. And it's kind of our you know, because it it covers everything from drywall to framing to painting to it kind of covers everything. And so that's kind of what we would call one of our tier three. We break our text down into tiers. And I said that's a tier three level thing because of what all it involves.

SPEAKER_01 9:46

Okay. We'll get into that structure, by the way.

SPEAKER_02 9:49

Okay, yeah, yeah. So uh a lot of doors, uh, a little bit of drywall work, uh, not hanging full sheets, you know. We're we're doing patches, um, painting lightly. Uh I mean, even a full room is a stretch. Anything that ties us up for more than a day and a half is is no good for for the handyman schedule. It's got to be a day and a half or less, really one day or less is kind of the plan. Installing lights, um, assuming it's a light for light swap, installing plumbing, light for like swap, toilet swap outs. Um, even like in the trouble, we don't do any emergency work. So anything troubleshooting-wise, if if it gets much past what we can see right there, that's not that's not what we're gonna do. We're gonna refer that to another sub and and kind of keep moving. Um and then the second part of your question was things that we don't do anymore that we used to do. Yeah, let me think of some of those. Um, I think used to, we would try to do some decks and stairs inside of the handyman business because it seems easy-ish. It's oh, it's just deck boards. Like, why not just toss those on there and keep keep it moving? Well, we know, and we're in the south, and so uh decent amount of moisture throughout the year, lots of humidity, pretty tough on decks. And so you always end up messing with framing and then you get it apart and you forgot exactly how it went. So now we're back to running code again and figuring out how to lay this. I mean, it's just a it always got bigger, so we still do those, but it's not, it does not happen inside the handyman. Um, fences, we used to repair a lot of fences, and we still get a ton for some reason. We SEO like crazy for fences, we get calls all the time. And so thankfully, we've got a really good fence sub that we work with now. But we used to find ourselves doing fence repair. And man, when you start pulling a post and you got to pull panels back, and all of a sudden, same deal, like the deck, it just kind of keeps working its way backwards. And so we don't do a ton of that in-house anymore.

SPEAKER_00 11:45

Is your is your is your pricing structured in a way where if you you get into a can of worms like that, like you quote a job replace deck boards and you end up getting into framing and stuff, how does that work with your with your pricing structure?

SPEAKER_02 11:58

Yeah, we disclaimer everything. So we we do a lump sum outcome-based pricing. Um, I mean, it's built off of hours and materials, but it's presented as as an outcome-based. But you know, if we if we if the job is to replace the deck boards, the top boards, and then we come in and the framing's rotted, that's clearly a separate scope. And so then it's presented as change order. Like, what do you want us to do? Uh, because we're not gonna lay the new boards back on top of the rot.

SPEAKER_01 12:25

So yeah, and if anyone listening doesn't have just a little disclaimer on all estimates that you send out that hey, if things come up, then this is not gonna cover those unknown things. Uh definitely add that really simple way to set that expectation, share truth and transparency with all the jobs you're going out to. Removes that anxiety too, of like, oh gosh, you know, oh, I found all this stuff I've got to do after, you know, pulling out that rotted woodboard. It's like, well, they know I I've communicated that there could be things, especially for jobs that are prone to those kind of unknowns.

SPEAKER_02 12:58

Yeah. Well, and it's empowerment, right? That's the other piece of it, is in all of our on the handyman side, it's all tech-led estimating. So they're all estimating their own work, selling their own work, doing their own work. And when they're trained, especially when they've been doing it enough, our team now is is pretty savvy and they've been doing it a long time. And so they know that behind that piece of fascia that's rotted is probably going to be some rotted rafter tails or something else. And so they may not sell it that way, they may not price it that way because we don't know yet. We can't see it, but they know enough to go, okay, listen, I've done a lot of these client, and when I pull this back, I will probably find rot, just FYI. And they may even start having some basic discussion about price. Um, but they can start putting it in there to your point to lean back on and go, remember, I talked about it, here it is, this is what I got to do.

SPEAKER_01 13:45

Yeah, I love how you use the word empowerment. Um, because at the end of the day, when you especially when you have techs going out there estimating pricing, like doing all their own work, uh, surrounding them with that transparency, uh, the support training. I'm sure you know you hire guys with relevant experience based on the tier that they're in. But I love that word you use to empower your team so that they feel comfortable, confident going out there and doing the work that they need to do without causing business problems for you know badly priced jobs or lack of transparency on the change orders.

SPEAKER_02 14:16

Man, yeah. And that's and that's the only way to get scale. I don't care what widget you're selling. You know, if you're the bottleneck that has all the answers, that's no, that's no bueno. You're you're not gonna grow. And so the if growth is your idea. And even if you're a single person, like with AI and tech, which is where we're headed with a lot of this discussion, like that you we shouldn't have to be manually making a lot of these decisions. We should be giving the playbook out to say, okay, this is how this is this is how you win in the seat for an employee, anyway. And so that's what we've tried to do is create those environments.

SPEAKER_01 14:47

Cool. Yeah, I mean you're already using EOS tech uh terminology. I definitely want to ask about that. I've never heard any kind of handyman talk about implementing EOS. So that'll be a whole I've got things noted to ask you about that, JR. Uh we use the system in our business, super powerful. Um, so kind of leaning into the the tech side of things. So you've got 7.5 employees. Um, like what is that employee makeup as far as office admin technicians? Um, and then from there, I'd love to kind of hear like these empowered technicians that are generating their own work, they're estimating it, they're pricing it. I'd love to kind of hear about how how you've got that structured.

SPEAKER_02 15:27

Yeah. So we've got um office admin slash ops. She's making a pretty, pretty hard detour towards the operations management side at some point. Her her seat's got about three people within it, really. And so we're as we grow, she's gonna split into three different seats. Um, so we've got one office, if you will, uh general manager on the handyman side that's still 40% billable time, 30% billable time. And then the rest of it's in the office uh or coaching or training or you know, those kind of things, checking profit margins and all that. Um, a lead tech that's uh a full-time lead, so he's full-time billable. And then we have a uh currently a uh tier, he'd be an apprentice slash tier one, but he's moving to a relationship manager role. And so he's actually already started doing some of that for some uh heavy outbound sales with some of our referral partners, and then doing a decent amount of uh the the quotes that don't get accepted on site. He's staying on top of those and keeping those pushing through the funnel. And so we're currently hiring for another tech that'll be uh has to be a tier two, and I can go into why that has to be that way if you'll ever if you'll want to go into some of that. Uh then remodel side, there's a remodel manager um that that pretty much manages projects. That's so new for us. He's he's still in the field a decent amount because most of our remodel techs are pretty green, and so he's there to just get our hands around what that training schedule feels like, and then send in two techs over there with him. And then we have a sub, that's why I said a half, and we may be at eight and a half now. But we have a sub that's he's three and a half, four days a week with us a lot, and then we may go a week or two without him, but then he's back on there for a eight or nine week run, just kind of depends. But we're actually that that could be a whole nother podcast in and of itself on the remodel side. We're we're actually playing with going to a hundred percent sub model over there versus W-2's um just from a maybe a means to an end up or something else we're looking at, but that's a whole nother podcast, probably.

SPEAKER_01 17:29

Awesome. So so you mentioned these tiers for your technicians and that they're estimating their their jobs, they're pricing it, they're kind of siloed and everything runs. Uh I'm guessing the structure is the technicians out there doing their day-to-day, they have questions or problems or need help. The GM is above them, and the GM is kind of the blocker for you, if you will, so you can focus on your kind of running the ship and making sure you're moving forward. Um, but love to hear how that technician day-to-day is structured, how they're estimating pricing, kind of running their own day.

SPEAKER_02 18:00

Yeah, and I can kind of tell you how we got there too. We were a centrally led, like central estimating uh shop. So I did most all the estimates. And back then, we probably only went to two to five percent, maybe ten percent of the jobs before we sold them. We would do everything over the phone. We would get photos, basic measurements from the client. It was kind of our way to get a bought-in, you know. Hey, if you're serious about this, get me all this stuff and then we'll we'll quote it. We never have to come out and we'll just show up and do the work. And that sounds awesome, and the clients loved it because it was fast and all that good stuff, but that doesn't scale past how many I could physically do in a day or another estimator could do in a day. But then the main problem that it created was this log jam of information. So tech would go out and we used company cams and we had tons of photos. And if it was a big enough job, once it was sold, I may go out and do some more like takeoff stuff on site and then load all that to our system. But if they had questions, they had not talked to the client yet. So expectation could not, they didn't know what the expectation was, right? And so obviously, in in our world and in the repair world, if it's a broke fix, there could be something that's repairable. It could also be replaceable. And like both of those answers could be correct in that scenario. But if they didn't really understand what the goal was, they may overrun the materials and not even mean to. They because they have they have no handle on anything. And then I'm I'm estimating it based on what I think it's gonna take, not not how long it's gonna take them to do it. And I may be too slow or I may be too fast, right? So anyway, um, we worked with Ben uh out of Dallas, I think he's in Dallas, right? Um anyway. Yeah, Ben Alexander. And yeah, what was that?

SPEAKER_01 19:38

Yeah, Ben Alexander. He's on our uh uh handyman success podcast, and yeah, very accomplished in the kind of the big scale handyman space. Shout out to Ben if you're out there listening to that.

SPEAKER_02 19:47

Yeah, shout out to Ben. So we worked with him for he and I, he was one, it was two guys that I talked to early on that had scaled way before we ever started. They were kind of nice enough to kind of open up the playbook and tell me some things. And so um a lot of what we do is loosely based around some of their stuff, mixed in with our little our little flair to it. But but the we swapped over to this model where the techs are reading the estimate, which is no different than any other trade. Like all the electricians, all the plumbers, they all do it this way too, right? And so basically when they go out to estimate, all they're doing is that they're estimating time and material, uh, but they're but you're not getting a time and material quote. You're getting a lump sum. Here's here's what it costs to get the outcome you're asking me for. And so they're not riding your clock by they're not riding mine either. And so the idea is it promotes efficiency, hopefully, if you've got it structured right. Now, with that, you got to have they all have a base salary plus that, but it's got to be set the right way, otherwise the salary overruns what their commission could be. And so it's a there's a whole science to it. Um, but what that allows us to do is again empower them in the field and allows you to go after after guys or ladies that are doing it already, that are very good at what they're doing day to day, but they don't want to deal with what's going on in the back end, which Whitney in our office loves to do. So, like she loves the back office stuff. Let's let's let her do that. Um, and so that's that's a another big reason why we would do why you would set it up that way. And then we have tier levels, uh, tier one, tier two, tier three. And and some of this would go a little bit rogue on how we do it versus the way maybe Ben had taught it, but um, it's got a set of skills with each one that that that they should be able to do to be classified as this.

SPEAKER_01 21:28

Can you translate that to basically like set of skills basically means they can do these jobs we're selling? Is that kind of the simple kind of framework that yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:36

Yep, yeah, that that job or whatever that job needs, example being um if you can assemble a desk, you can probably assemble a chair, so assembly. Yeah. Um, but you may not be able to assemble a generator, right? That's got an engine to it. So that's not the same. You can't lump them that way, but if it's furniture style, maybe. But so it's it's got that. And then it's also tier one, you know, all of our guys are required to. Bring their own tools with the exception of specialty tools. We have a list of tools they have to bring to work here. And tier one has a whole different requirement than two and three. Tier two and three has to have like the big name brand stuff, the good stuff. And then tier one can still be DOI grade and get by. But not just skill, we took it a step further. And just because you can install a door doesn't mean you can install it without help. Like I can go with one of our guys right now and install the door, but if he goes by himself, he's going to call us five or six times, let's just say, you know, to get it done. And so to be a tier three, tier two or tier one, you have the skill, but then you've also got the amount of touches that you need to get that job done. So a tier one person, we expect to get four calls a day back to the office, you know. Tier two, you might get one a day, two a day. Tier three, you may not hear from them half the week. Like they're gonna kind of do their thing and then and get on. But so if we've got from an operational standpoint, if we've got six tier one guys in the field, only one tier three, man, that GM is about to be worn out because they're gonna be calling the whole time. Because not only are we having to help with technical issues, we're having to help with, oh, the customer said this. I don't know where to go from here. What am I supposed to do? They don't they don't have all that yet, you know?

SPEAKER_03 23:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 23:21

And so we have to be very careful about like right now, we actually made the move to move that one, the tier one guy to a relationship manager. One, it's a way better personality fit. Um, he's crushing it over here. But also, we were losing money with having a tier one tech because most of our tier one jobs turn into tier two real quick. Like there's very few tier one jobs out there that don't, because we're pretty good at finding things to help with. And it's kind of natural if you got a good process, you get in their home and they they felt good getting there, which marketing is a piece of that. And then when you like, oh yeah, by the way, I've got all these things that I want you to look at while you're here. Well, that quickly goes to tier two, tier three. You know, we learned that a tier two was going to be worth 175,000, our bottom line just by bringing one into the house and into the shop. And so it was like, no-brainer, put this guy over here to go find more tier two jobs and let's hire a tier two tech, and we'll we'll make this thing go the way it should. So we really don't need a tier one until we have probably three or four full billable tier two and up guys on on the street.

SPEAKER_00 24:27

What would what have you done that's worked well to to find these types of guys that you can trust in the field that have experience?

SPEAKER_02 24:35

Ask me next year, I'll let you know.

SPEAKER_00 24:38

It's a it's a tough thing. A lot of people, you know, they struggle with you know finding finding the help, and and especially guys that already know what they're doing that aren't just you know calling you every second of the day or you know, botching work.

SPEAKER_02 24:50

Yeah. I'm a big fan of the non-traditional hire where possible. So my GM, Colby, he's also been my best friend since we were like 10. He uh, but he was a school teacher. So that was his, he did that for right at 10 years, I think. Um, but we both grew up together, small town. He he could do his family, it was a fixed family, they could do anything. And so I knew he was handy, I knew he could do all that kind of stuff. But he would kind of come, he came in the summers and worked with us a little bit just here and there, and kind of got got his hands on it and decided teaching was not going to be the path. And so he was a non-traditional hire, right? He didn't come from the trade side. I didn't come from the trade side. I was a banker, so that was my background was sales and banking, and then got into the home services space. And so I think there's a ton of me out there that are that are looking to do that, to get out of whatever they're doing and and take that skill they've already learned. Like you think about a guy who was teaching seventh and eighth graders and making them all focused on getting to the end goal the right way. I mean, that's a that's a skill that can be heavily tapped into for what we're doing here, right? To triangle, to implement a training program to make sure that everybody's hearing the same voice from top to bottom on the culture, et cetera, et cetera. So that's that's one. We try to look at non-traditional stuff. My our main handyman, uh, I'm in a B and I group and we can go into how I feel about that later, but um I'm in one and I just threw out a charge one day and said, Hey, I'm looking for people. If you've got anybody that's been working on your house, anybody you know that that you like, like here's what we're building, it's a cool place to work, would love to talk to him. And he was a referral out of that group. He's been with us a little right out of almost a year maybe now, or getting on it somewhere in there. And um, but he was already doing the work. He was he was doing some of this on the side, not so much full full time, but he had a book of business and he had been operating on his own. And so that's been great. Um, Chris Lalamia calls those lone wolves. Chris is out of Atlanta with Trust the Toolbox, and he he says, find the lone wolf, find the one that likes to be alone, that likes to do their work by themselves all day, and then just give them a place to land. Is I probably butchered it, sorry, Chris, but it's something like that. And so that's that's kind of what I've I'm trying to find some of those lone wolves now. And so part of that, too. I'm in that, I'm on the home builders association, I'm on the board there. And so that's allowed me to get really close with a lot of other builders and contractors and all these people. Well, my remodel manager was from that group, but he was just kind of tired of doing it on his own, been doing it by himself for 15 years, and it hadn't done well, but it kind of hit some hit some glass ceilings, I think, and uh had not quite cracked the whole scale thing and and not been able to find people because we're all looking for people. And so um, that's been another avenue that I didn't see coming that has allowed us to to hire people. I think we're gonna have another little merger coming in in the next six months or so that's gonna come with some people. And so that was I mean, it's just a happy accident because I've been in this group and gotten to know these people. And so that is not really one that I can put a uh, well, here's the playbook for that. It's just get involved and get around people. But I think the next phase that we hadn't tapped into yet is our social media, and so we've really been pushing our content and how we do that, and that's just getting more eyeballs on us. It shows some of the fun stuff we're doing, it shows how we operate. I think the next move is gonna be to turn that on to be a recruiting tool. Um, and we've tried some of the Indeeds and things like that. We've got a power washing business too, and we hire a lot of people off of Indeed from there. Um and one thing, Jason, I don't know if I mentioned this on the last call, but we we uh try, have been trying for two different school systems in our area. We've been trying to set up a pipeline of students from those schools to to kind of interview them throughout the year. It's almost not we have votech, we have trade programs, but this is more for the students who don't qualify for that because they're in sports or something else and they can't, they don't have time to give up three class periods to go do tech school. They've got this little program they're trying to create where they give up like two free periods a week. And then we would get them for that amount of time and and kind of interview them for a whole year, basically. And we're we're trying with that, but the funding's just been off. And so we're starting to get hooks in the water, you know.

SPEAKER_01 28:59

I I see more of that naturally developing through economics, if you will. Actually, just the other week, uh, that massive one of these massive investment firms that control lots of retirement funds, BlackRock, um, they're investing a hundred million dollars into into training programs for trades, uh electrical, plumbing, um, because they they see uh you know from the data side the lack of uh supply of quality tradespeople. So I think naturally there's gonna be more funding and training outlets in the next five or ten years. That's just my my feel.

SPEAKER_02 29:33

Um well, BlackRock, if you're listening, 601-416-6162, we'll take a million of that. That's all we need, just a million of the hundred, and we'll we'll put it to work here, we'll train them, whatever, you know.

SPEAKER_01 29:45

Just one percent. Um so uh one common denominator that I've learned since uh you know being in the industry since 2017, 2018, uh, what you exhibit so well, JR, is that there's this underlying success factor of business owners that are naturally in their community. You create relationships, you're you're in the home builders association. Um so it creates relationships to find these non-traditional hires. It creates obviously relationships for referrals and just naturally builds up this kind of like hometown reputation for your business. Um, and I think that you do that really well. So I commend you for that and just want to make sure our listeners understand that this there's this web underneath it all that if you are naturally a part of your local community, it's like this secret sauce that goes on top of everything that you're doing.

SPEAKER_02 30:37

And well, thank you for saying that. I'll tell you, I thought that for a while though. So I um coming out of the banking world, you kind of have to be in the middle of everything. You just do all the chamber stuff, all the things, shake the hands, do the B and I's it's just what you do. Well, then when we got into flipping houses, um, you know, I did that for three or four years before we did maybe five before we started the handyman. But that's a that's a fairly autonomous act. You know, we're not really, I'm not going to the chamber and asking people to let me buy their house. We're doing direct mail. And so it's just kind of direct to seller. There's not a whole lot of community involvement there. And so when we started the handyman, I was so adamant about being, not being the bottleneck, not being the center, not being the focus that I kind of got, I kind of disappeared for a while, you know, like doing doing our house flips and starting that. I kind of went under the radar for a minute to get it all built out. And then probably last now, home builders, I was always involved in. That was a little bit different. It was an association, you know, from a political standpoint, it does a lot for the home building industry and which is what we touch. And so I wanted to do that. Um, but from like being out front in the community, it was probably not until halfway through year two of steady that I kind of came up for air, you know, and I was like, hey, I need to, and then not that I mean I was involved already with like church and different things. So like been here 10 years, we were connected, but it wasn't until like coming into year two or mid-year two where I made a decision to go, hey man, I think you need to show your face a little bit more and like remind people that you're behind this thing and that you well, here's what you're doing for your community, et cetera, et cetera. And so now we've made a further push into that. And now I'm at a point, even with the socials, where I'm trying to find out, you know, how how deep do I go with that? Do I do I continue to be the face of everything? If we're really going to scale this thing statewide, which is the plan, you know, I got to start weaving some more characters in here somewhere, is what it feels like. Maybe not, maybe I don't. Um, so that's kind of an internal battle, I think, that we're struggling with.

SPEAKER_01 32:36

Yeah. I think if you really enjoy like the content and video creation, you can almost plan for that to be a big part of your role, if you will. Um, I think statewide, probably doable, nationwide, you probably need to uh, you know, add some more hours to your day.

SPEAKER_02 32:51

Yeah, yeah. Uh yeah. So the the community piece definitely helps. There's a lot of little ancillary benefits that you don't think about coming from that. And it's yeah, and I think really what it is, if anybody's listening on that, if we're, you know, if you take a marketing approach to this, it's just when you're starting out, you don't have a lot of money anyway. And so the only thing you got is is you. And so you just gotta you can't be in all these groups at one time. Like we weren't in B and I for several years. We were just in our home builders, and I had a nice network of subs, and that's who I throw business to is those guys for the most part, you know. And so if you join too many of these groups, at some point you're lying to one of them because you're not gonna be sending every plumber all the business, right? If there are four groups or four plumbers, like you're not, you just gotta pick one and go deep. And so the the association thing that I'm in that home builders, it's I don't I wouldn't say that we get a lot of business out of it, but it's been great for my business. Um, from having guys around us that are doing good stuff, being in those rooms that we otherwise wouldn't have been in with developers and and just hearing how they think. Um and then, of course, some of the hires that we've had recently. I think I've made two or three hires out of that group, so or or mergers or partnerships or however you want to put that.

SPEAKER_00 34:01

I think that's interesting. You said you didn't get a ton of work out of the groups, but you still got a lot out of it. I had a similar experience with BI, the local home builders association I was in. We had a professional remodelers organization. Um, and I don't know over the you know the five years if if we got maybe two projects, you know, out of some of those relationships. But there was a ton of business-to-business relationships. My CPA was in our B and I chapter, um Everydoor Direct Mail. There was a marketer in the chapter. So there was a bunch of relationships we were able to establish um in those groups that didn't necessarily lead to more to more work, but still helped in the business. So that that's interesting. It sounds like you had a similar experience.

SPEAKER_02 34:45

Yeah, for sure. Yep. And I think B and I serves its purpose for us, but there's a and we did about 24,000 out of it last year in our B and I chapter.

SPEAKER_01 34:54

Let's talk about you mentioned B and I. Let's I'd love to get your personal experience uh as far as SETI goes. Uh and I know you're involved in a lot with the flips, and you it's a lot of stuff, guy, our to our listeners, JR does uh, you know, that's not in STEDI. So I'd love to hear your uh perspective experience about BI.

SPEAKER_02 35:11

Yeah, yeah, and we can talk about my insane web of things another day because there's I have some pros and cons to all that stuff too, all the other things that we touch. Uh, but BI, I thought that for a while. Um, that's a business networking group, business networking international, I think is the actual acronym. And and the idea is you're in a room with one person from each business, each type of business. So there's one handyman, one plumber, one electrician, one attorney. It just runs the gamut. And you you mentioned a few marketers, all those things. And so you have your protected seat. And the idea is you only share business with each other and you're you're kind of working for each other essentially. And you meet once a week. Huge time commitment. Uh the money's not a the money's a few hundred bucks, but it's the time. You have to meet an hour and a half every week as a group, and then you're supposed to be having a certain amount of one-to-ones, like one-on-one meetings with with people in the group. So it's a big time commitment. Uh, but we did 20 something thousand last year out of that group. So, I mean, not not not a bad, not a bad piece of the pie, but if you look at the time invested, I don't, I don't know if that's my best place to be. Um, and it's kind of a catch-22 because B and I likes certain chapters, and it's chapter specific now. So, you know, ours has got 17 to 21 people depending on time of year. Some chapters really like it if the owner is there. They're not a huge fan if you don't own the business. They don't really, it's almost like they don't. But I but I I and I disagree with that because I just feel like if if the right person's in there that can make the right decisions, then they should be there. Like if I hadn't trained my guy to be empowered enough to sit in that room, then then they then they won't like him. He can't make a decision, you know. So anyway, I but as an owner, if I look at that and what we're looking at long term, I don't know that that's my best. I I think we will probably always do it in each market, but it won't be me that's in the group. I think it's got to be somebody a little bit closer to the fire. Because even now when the referrals come in, I'm sending them straight to the office so we can get to them faster. Then I don't I don't need to be in the middle. I'm not going to do the work, you know.

SPEAKER_03 37:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 37:11

Um, but it's giving me a good resource. You know, there's a the electrician there's become a really good friend of mine. He in turn has joined home builders, he's become our go-to electrician. And there's a many a time where me, the electrician, the plumber, the roofer, and the group were all in the same project at the same time because we're we're working together. And so it gives you a cool little networking group.

SPEAKER_01 37:31

Yeah. Was what was your experience with B and I, Kobe?

SPEAKER_00 37:35

Su super similar. Um I I didn't get anywhere near 20,000, you know,$20,000 worth of work out of it. Um but some of those relationships, I mean, my drywaller was in our B and I chapter or HVAC guy was in the B and I chapter. Um, like I said, my CPA was in was in my chapter. So um, you know, a lot of those business-to-business relationships um, you know, that that made it worth it for for the the year that I was there. Um, but once I established those, you know, those relationships with those people, or I was like, you know, is this really worth the extra, you know, two and a half, three hours a time a week? And when I'm got not getting business referrals from it, I've already got the relationships with the people in the group. So I ended up stepping back from it. But um, you know, it it was a net positive for the time that I was that I was there, but it's super chapter specific, um, depending on your location, what chapter you're in. They all have kind of a different personality.

unknown 38:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 38:29

Well, and if you're by yourself, like what we've seen in our group, we've we've had a power washer roll. Like we it did not do well for the power washing company that we own. It just didn't, it did not go well. So we we've had another one of those guys come through. We had a tree guy in there, and there was one other one, but they were there were all three like solo operators. They may have had one assistant helper or something here and there. And for a solo operator, it it became like in the beginning, you got to do everything to get hooks in the water, so you think. And so you join all these groups, you got all these chamber things, you try to be everywhere, and and that's there's nothing wrong with that, but at some point the dam's gonna break. And when you do have estimates that have to be done, that hour and a half matters, like you're still trying to make it home to see family and and all that stuff. And if you're performing and estimating, at some point you got to start cutting it, you know. And and so I think that could be also why we didn't do it early on. We just didn't have the people to be able to allow anybody to go do that. So some of these things take a little time.

SPEAKER_01 39:21

Yeah. Awesome. So um I I'd love to talk about uh there's quite a few other things we got here, but um how like walk me through like how are you guys generating leads? Um, and and then also I'd love to hear that that like real example of like a lead comes in, it goes to this tech that's that's estimating and selling the job. Like um if you could kind of flesh out firstly the marketing, how are you guys generating the leads? Um, and then I guess we'll pause there, but I'd love to hear like practically how that lead gets sent to the right tech, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_02 39:53

Yeah, so generating leads, you want to go there first? Um yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 39:57

Let's talk about marketing and how you're generating, you know, uh enough business and having you know eight, nine, ten people and you know, moving on from there.

SPEAKER_02 40:05

Yeah, and it's it's taken a lot of forms. We're I mean, we're that's something that gets constantly evaluated. But today we have uh we do Google Ads or PayPal Click and we do LSA. Um we post on all the socials, but we're not doing Facebook ads. I've done a lot of those in the past. I could talk about that. Um and then we do uh we sponsor a local real estate publication called Central Mississippi Real Producers. It's part of the what's called the N2O companies. And so they're focused on creating a space for the top 300 real estate agents in any market. And so we sponsor their publication, we go to their monthly events, um, and then we that gives us a list of those top 300 agents, plus there's a magazine at each month. Wilkes that's in there, that's our relationship manager, reads all the articles, emails all the features, talking about their article, what he liked about it. It's almost like a homework assignment. He's got to go read it, internalize it, say something back that was meaningful, you know, be be be positive and be genuine. Um, and then he goes through and looks at all the all the ads that are in there, you know, if there's a home inspector or whatever, it's like, hey, saw your ad again, thought about you, et cetera, et cetera. And so that one's hard to measure, harder to measure. It's hard to measure ROI on that. It's just be there, be present. But um, we've done some direct mail. I do that once a month, I mean once a year, maybe in the home in the handyman space. I do it a lot with the flipping. Um, and then we do some newsletters to existing clients inside of Jber. Uh I think that's it. And then we'll sponsor like some local events here and there. And that's but that's more just because we want to we just want to help. I wouldn't say that we do that because we're gonna get business.

SPEAKER_01 41:49

Sure. Um that's a good heart to hold in business. Be in your community, have a heart to help people. Um, in my experience, when when you kind of maintain that posture, it builds up this traction and this demand for what you're providing because people recognize like the best businesses, they truly just want to help.

SPEAKER_02 42:07

That's right. Yeah. And then, of course, all of our trucks are wrapped trucks and trailers, and that that does a ton for us. Um, and then we're starting this year, we realize that, and we may be headed here too, but we realize that long-term clients, repeat clients are worth like 6.8 times more to our business than well, no, they're worth 13.2 times. Referrals are worth 6.8 times more. Once they stick, they're worth 13.2 or to 14.6, what uh one-time clients are worth. So now we're looking at, okay, how do we generate more referrals? What's the referral program? Because saying you've got all word of mouth, that's not very good. I can't, I can't reproduce that until I make a system that reproduces that. And so that's what we've been digging into this quarter and next quarter.

SPEAKER_01 42:51

That is super sweet. Um, I I be I definitely got to go into that. Um, so any of our listeners, check out Steady, what's that? No, go ahead. Sorry. Check out Steady Home Maintenance. Like give them a Google search, their website, their personality, their culture. You're you're gonna see like this underlying current of this attraction that comes into their business. That of course there's website marketing, mailers, reviews, all this stuff, but it's surrounded by this authentic, amazing brand and personality that that you guys have created. So uh you're one of my favorites to share in that vein, JR. So 13.2, the value of a repeat client is 13.2 times like a one-off client, and then 6.8 times value of a one-off client is a referral. I I that kind of tracks in my brain if I had to come up with some estimates of value. Uh, how are you getting these numbers and this data?

SPEAKER_02 43:49

Yeah, well, before we go there, we got to plug you because y'all do our website and y'all y'all took it over, I guess it was probably a year ago. And then y'all do so. I mentioned we Do a newsletter outside of Jobber, but y'all do a newsletter as well to our whole list. Y'all do um a feed that goes into our galleries. So, like there's a ton of stuff that you guys do at HandyMail Marketing Pros for what creates that vision. And so um, I don't have the data right offhand on what the website might bring in. I don't care if it's zero, because when people go there, it does tell the story, right? Because they are going to check it out. Whether they're filling out a form or not, they're going to that website and they're seeing these Google ads, which all have helped us craft and talk through and figure out how many we should be doing. Like there was even one time I sent, sorry, I gotta say this, I sent an email to, I guess it was Taylor or somebody in your office and was like, hey, I'm thinking about doing this. And I and I didn't really ask, I was more saying here's what I'm about to do. And she very lovingly, like y'all always do, said, Hey, maybe we should consider not, but she didn't say it that way. She was like, Well, maybe what if we just looked at this data right here and like then didn't do that? I was like, Hey, I I I see what you want to say, which is JR, please don't do that. Please, please just stay the course. And so um, we have people better than us helping us make some of these decisions. And so if you're not dealing with Jason, y'all should be.

SPEAKER_01 45:07

I appreciate the kind words, JR. And and uh I I think you explained it in so many ways of how our clients would say, like, yeah, they do some posts and some feeds and the website. Uh, it's really orchestrating this, like underneath the surface is SEO rankings. People you mentioned, you know, SEO being really good for fence repair. That's a big kind of secondary target. Uh, there's all these, this, this algorithmic, this tactic that we know works, we just kind of hook into your business, deploy that on Google through the website so that we can start to build up more traffic, find uh have more people find you for handyman near me, stuff like that. So um appreciate the kind words, man. Um, there's so much that goes into great marketing. And I do know doing this so many years, when we have a client that has the media and photos and personality you guys have, the amazing, authentic five-star reviews that come in, uh, it just makes good marketing great marketing uh when you're pushing out amazing people and amazing culture.

SPEAKER_02 46:03

Yeah, I appreciate that. It's uh and it takes time though, which which is a good segue back to your last question of this data, this number I spit out of, you know, 13.2 or whatever it was. How do we have that? What man, we're three, it took us three years to get this data that I'm about to talk about. And we have it because I'm ruthless with tracking numbers. Like I'm just even in the beginning, and I'll tell anybody this, just track everything, even if you don't know why. Just start a spreadsheet and start tracking this stuff. And one day you might need it, you might not, but if you do, you've got it. And so aligning yourself with a good CRM of some sort, something that you can track what's coming in and what's going out. Not I'm not talking about PLs at this point, I'm talking about just leads coming in, estimates and invoices, jobs, those kind of things. Having the data is key. If you've got data, man, you got power. You look at any of these big companies in the country that were probably all invested in the stock market, and most of them are their data. They've got a lot of data behind them. And that's really what they're generating is the data. And that's what's powerful, not just the widget. And so the data helps you make a decision. And I knew that very early on, which is why it's really hard in the beginning. And this goes back to one of your initial questions, Kobe, of how did we stay the course? Well, I knew that we had to get to year three, like that's just where we had to get. So it's just like this some of this stuff matters, but in year three, we're really going to have the things that we need to start making decisions. And so now, because we track everything meticulously as it comes in, and we're and we're still refining this. Like it's, I think we're pretty good at it, but we still refine it almost weekly sometimes when we're tracking. But about, I guess it was the end of last year, we would have had enough customers to cycle through for three years. And so now I know what the lifetime value of a customer is. I know what the customer acquisition cost is, and I know what the lifetime value is because they've had a chance to cycle through. But they can't be a lifetime, you can't get a lifetime value if you're in the first six months. That's it's not going to be very good. But our lifetime value on average really is is closer to the number I gave you was a rolling 12, but on average, for the for the since in business, it's like 14.2x.

SPEAKER_01 48:07

So the and just to be clear for our listeners, you're talking about a the value uh of a repeat client is 14 times more than a one-off client. Is that correct?

SPEAKER_02 48:19

Bingo.

SPEAKER_01 48:20

Like they just have you one time.

SPEAKER_02 48:22

Yeah. And then the referral-based leads, and we're talking about two numbers really here. We're talking about the repeat client, which is the 14, they're worth 14.2 times more. So if new client pays me a hundred bucks and they stick around, they're gonna wind up being worth 1400 bucks, right? 14,000. I went to public school, 14 times whatever a hundred is. Yeah, 1400.

SPEAKER_01 48:49

I was like, school in Arkansas, brother.

SPEAKER_02 48:52

Yeah, so 14x. And then if they are a referral lead versus a just came in off of Google, the referral is worth 6.8 times what the standard lead is for us. Now, and 62% right now of our business is coded actually as referral-based business. We have a lot of referral business. Um, but we don't know where it all comes from, or we didn't. And that was a big deal to us coming into the end of last year, trying to figure out what our rocks were gonna be for this this year, this quarter. Was going, okay, well, how it clearly that number is huge, right? It's think about it well, what that is worth. Well, if if if we know that a referral is worth 6.8 X, and if they stick around they're worth another 14, then what are we doing? That's where we gotta put our money.

SPEAKER_00 49:47

You know, and and that's what we gotta figure out. Not only are they they worth more, they're gonna drive more more revenue, but you you don't have that repeat cost to acquire the customer. You already paid to acquire them once, and they're just coming back and referrals are off the top of your head. Do you know what your average LTV to CAC ratio is? Your the lifetime value to cost to acquire a customer is?

SPEAKER_02 50:09

Yeah, yeah, it's 14.2.

SPEAKER_00 50:12

That's awesome, man. Um above 10 for anybody listening, is you're you're you're doing pretty dang good.

SPEAKER_02 50:19

Yeah, it's it's crushing it. Um, it does when I was trying to look real quick. I actually got a whole we can keep talking while I look for it, but I've got to do that.

SPEAKER_01 50:25

Yeah, so um what so my my more direct question is is like what is a basic rudimentary exercise like any listener could kind of figure out this for for their business. And and I want to I want to also emphasize that the numbers, even if you don't do the exercise, you can rest assured knowing that your repeat clients are uh incredibly valuable than the one-offs. The referral, everyone knows, oh, that referral lead is so much higher quality. They're much ready, more ready to hire, if you will. There's less of that friction in the sales process, price, et cetera. Um, and I also understand these numbers has this like grounding effect when you start to grow, when you start to invest in more marketing, that even though you know your cost per lead and and Google ads last month might have spiked to like$60 a lead or whatever a high number might be, you know that in there there's gonna be some repeat clients, there's gonna be some referrals that are generated. And so you're planting these seeds that are ultimately gonna produce this 13.214 times value client that's calling you back, you know, four times a year. So, Jim, how did so you're connecting to into Jobber? Uh, what would you say a really simple practical application? If someone wanted to know this for themselves, if they were curious about their own numbers, uh, what would be a good like place for them to start and start to kind of get these numbers for themselves?

SPEAKER_02 51:51

First thing you got to do is track your leads coming in. So, how many, how many folks get keyed in as a lead? Now, for us, we don't not everyone that comes knocking on our door gets put into a job or as a lead. Um, once they're qualified. So we have a little bit of a filter in there that says, oh, wait, they called about a roof. We don't do roofs. Like there was a that that's not really a we're not gonna be able to do that. Um, we don't screen them too, too hard, but if it's a sure enough heck no, they get pushed out. But you got to start by tracking your lead number one. And then you've got to track from there to get one of the numbers we just said was uh the CAC or CAC, as you hear people say, customer acquisition costs. And so that's not cost of lead, that's cost to get someone from the door to a paying customer, right? And so from there to there, there's a couple of steps you've got to hit that you got to know. So you got to know the lead came in, boom, track that. The lead got a quote, boom, you don't want to know that. That's like a pull through to a quote. The quote accepted or didn't accept. That's another one. The quote goes to a job, the quote goes to an invoice. And of course, did you get paid or not? That's pretty important. But though that data right there from lead to invoice is what gives you those numbers that we just talked about. But then you got to be inside of a CRM that lets you go back to that same customer and run a job under that same profile. Otherwise, you can't track the repeat number, the which one was already a customer. And then, of course, inside of that, we track lead sources. Was it a realtor? Was it word of mouth? Was it Google? Um, etc. And then that lets us know, of course, which one is worth the most to us, you know. And so another way to think about that that cacta LTV that Kobe just mentioned, that's telling me for every dollar that I spend to acquire a customer, what's coming back to me, right? So if you look at it that way, for every dollar I spend, I'm getting 14 back. How much money can I spend? Like, here's a here's an open check, put it to work, please. And that's what you run into in a smaller market, though, is at some point you you you you kind of tap yourself out and you have to start getting creative on where do you spend the money. And so we've had to get creative lately on how we spend the money. Because I I was only at um, and that's an average right on the value. So there's there's some months that we were way ahead of that, then the 14.1. But I I'm only at five percent of my revenue on marketing, and really in the way we're trying to grow, I need to be at like eight. That's where I'd like to be, but I don't know where else to put it.

SPEAKER_01 54:20

Yeah. So that's a good transition, man, into like knowing your territory. You're in you're in Jackson, uh Jackson, Mississippi market. Um, you know, you mentioned before we hit the record button, it's a lot smaller than Dallas or Los Angeles or whatever. Um, so like in that vein, um what are kind of your thoughts on because it is a battle because you see other people doing like like in your case, like, well, how do I get to that multiple millions with a, you know, wait, like three X more trucks on the road? But backdropping that with the reality of, you know, you're just in a smaller market. Um, what are your what are your thoughts on that?

SPEAKER_02 54:58

Yeah, two things globally, and then we can look at the at a number piece. There's, and this is again, regardless of what widget or what you're looking at, you could be looking at somebody who's just a successful person. They're in a different race than you are. They they started at a different time, it's a different track, there's different resources, different connections. You cannot look at someone for comparison. There's there's danger all over that, obviously. As a as a measuring stick, as a what's possible, okay, maybe. You just got to have a bridle on that's pulling you back, saying, hey, don't compare, don't compare, it's dangerous. Um, but you also can't look at them and go, the other way is, oh, well, I'll never get that because I'm not in Atlanta. I can't do that. Now, wait a minute. That's that's limiting belief. You can't do that either. So it what I've always probably followed more dangerous is is and gotten us in trouble going, oh, well, they they they got to 3 million in two years. Why can't we? You know, let's we're going to 3 million in two years, dang it. Well, then you don't get that. And if you'd analyze the market data just a little bit more, you'd realize what wasn't possible. Like your 3 million was 700,000. That that is the equivalent of what that person was doing in their market with the same resources. You got to get it back to what you're doing. Um, there's probably some analogy for dollar cost averaging in the stock market right there, looking at inflation numbers and saying, okay, well, the dollar today is what in 10 years? It's kind of a similar deal. Like, what is, you know, whatever Chris is doing in Atlanta, what is my version of that here? If I'm firing on all the cylinders he's firing on, if I've got a 68% close rate and I've got X, Y, and Z, what's going to be our cap out right here? And so that's that that was a big thing to remember starting off. And I kind of went in the very beginning, I went too far into trying to be Chris, you know, here. And then thankfully I went and sat with him for a couple of days and watched them operate. I'm like, oh wait, there's four million people in Atlanta. This is a big market, you know. We're we're playing with a few hundred thousand um total, not who we want to do business with. Who we want to do business with is way less. And then you got to look at income. So not just not just the data of how many people are here, but what's the income level here? And then just go ride through your target, your territory. If you're a handyman, go ride around. Do people fix their houses or don't they? If they don't, if if the care is not there, you may have a hard time fishing in that pond, you know. Uh so that's you have to you have to do all of that research too, so that you can be realistic on what's ahead of you. You know, there's nothing worse than than picking, especially like in a sales world, if you're if if you move the goalpost on Kobe every six months and didn't, you know, and didn't have data behind it, just thinking, oh yeah, he's he's gonna sell a million or it's not gonna work. Well, man, what if what if he was what if he could only sell half a million? You know, now there's a there's a funny story here though. There's a I heard this one time, it was a um lady goes to a sales conference and she um sits in the back and the guy says, Hey, we gotta, you know, everybody that comes through here gets a 70% close rate. And she's like, Okay, great. Well, she goes home, she starts working on her craft, working on her craft, and she gets to like 62, 65, 61, 64. Like she just can't hit 70, and she's frustrated because she's great at what she does. She comes back to the conference and she goes to the front, sends over, she says, I got a bone to pick with you, man. You told me 70% guaranteed, and I'm I'm only hitting 65, 68. He said, I said 17. So she heard what she wanted to hear, 70, and she broke the barrier. So that's why I say you can't lean on, oh, well, I'll never do that because I'm not in Atlanta. No, you can do everything that person's doing and more. You can crush your market. You just got to know what what the real parameter is, and you gotta be able to dial that up. You can't just go, like even somebody who just heard us say that my cacta LTV was 14.1 X. Well, there's way more to that number once we dive into it that may make that that way. You know, we have incredible relationship with realtors here, and so I don't have to spend as much to get some of those. And those those tickets may be six, seven thousand dollars, and and they're they're they're pretty big. Um, and then that person moves to the next house, and I also get the move-in punch list, and then I get the remodel. Like there's there's some things there that you got to look into my market versus somebody else's. So you can't even take that that number and go, okay, well, I got to get 14.1 because that's what he's doing. I wouldn't do that. We should probably talk some more, you know.

SPEAKER_00 59:18

People got to remember, um, you know, you're bringing a lot of those relationships from prior experience and you know, you're flipping houses and relationships with with agents before, you know, starting this business, also. Um, you know, so somebody who who maybe doesn't have any relationships coming into it, coming from a completely different industry, um, starting from from scratch, you know, everybody starts from a different spot. So, you know, comparing based on on timeline, not not a good idea. Yeah, everyone's on their own journey.

SPEAKER_01 59:47

Enjoy it, man. You only get to do it one time. So uh uh embrace that journey in whatever situations you got, but being honest with yourself with the parameters and being honest with yourself on your work ethic and you know, all the different things of of being responsible with what's before you to be able to accomplish. And um, you know, all the guys out there listening, you know, it's in your heart to do something great with this business, whether it's owner operator or multiple people, enjoy the ride and and learn from people that are where you want to go. Um, and and that perspective is going to be different for everybody. So at the base level, enjoy the journey, guys. Uh, there's always more. Um, so this is a great transition, man. And uh into like, you know, we looked at the numbers. I'd love to learn like how you are using AI, new technology to be efficient. I know we kind of scratched the surface of our last uh Handyman Success podcast interview. If anyone listening hasn't listened to that, it's already out. Um, Handyman Success Podcast with J.R. Crowell and Steady Home Maintenance. But JR, what like you mentioned jobber CRMs, you know, a lot of our listeners probably are using those. Where else have you taken this technology, this uh with automations and making your business better?

SPEAKER_02 1:01:01

Yeah, so we've we've been in a long deep dive on that lately. So we uh I feel like I was a fairly early adopter to tech and AI, I've always understood the power of it. But then I also feel like I'm also I still feel slow. Back to what I just said. If you look at other folks, you know, to to some, man, I'm just I'm way down here on on what AI can do. But then to others, I'm I'm way up here. So whatever, pick your hard. Um for for us, the the the main things we've been looking at lately are what what makes us, which sounds simple, but it's not. Um what makes life easier? Okay, because AI is only as good as what you can tell it to do. It can't just be your silver bullet. Like you've got to be able to understand the power of it and understand when it's wrong, understand when it's right, know when to use it. So um we we have done two, I guess two or two or three big things lately is we were looking at growth, specifically back office, because AI itself, it's it's coming for a ton of knowledge work if you're not ready to adopt it. Like if you don't learn to run with it, it's gonna take you over, right? And so for a lot of like what we do sales-wise, even the organic stuff, there's things that we were doing that I thought, man, how many keystrokes is it taken for us to do this thing right here, whatever it is? And there's got to be a way to make this faster. And so that was probably our first thought into how do we deploy technology from an AI perspective, just that first. And we can go back and look at like what does our tech stack look like from you know, CRM to pictures. And you asked about lead flow earlier. I'm sorry, I don't think I answered that question, but it may come back up in a second. Yeah, you're good, JR.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:37

No, uh, and also I just want to zoom out real quick and hit on something you said there to make this uh like to really set the tone for our listeners because it is a daunting, overwhelming thing um when you look at AI technology, and it's easy to feel left behind. It's easy to feel like I'm not doing enough. There's gonna be people are doing more, there's gonna be a lot of people doing less. Um, and that's where recognizing your own journey and just trying to do things better is great. But you mentioned making life easier. My encouragement to anyone listening, no matter what road we go down and what JR shares here with his tech stack and how he's deploying AI and um making life easier, making business easier, um, is look at the most what what are your pain points? Like what are you struggling with? What maybe takes way too long and start with one process, one specific thing, and then work to solve that in a in a sustainable way uh that truly solves a problem, makes it quicker. So um it's easy to get overwhelmed and feel this uh FOMO, uh, to feel left behind. But I promise you, if you just start kind of learning how to use these AI tools, Claude, ChatGBT, or whatever, um, use the paid versions and then start with your actual pain points, it alleviates that anxiety because you're gonna start to see it come to life uh in your business. And then there's gonna be new tools that come out that implement in that make it even easier. So all that to say, don't feel left behind one step at a time and focus on real pain points that you can tangibly solve. So would love to hear JR, like what what pain points have you just, if not solved, at least alleviated using uh technology?

SPEAKER_02 1:04:12

Yeah, so the the the main thing we've looked at is what is from from a back office first, is what we kind of start attacking was okay, what we were when you get the amount of leads that we we get roughly it it averages 28 to 30 leads a week, something like that, that they're coming into our company on a on an average basis. And uh then we have you know handyman that may do 12 estimates a week, they may do five and be on jobs the rest of the time. The schedule's moving a lot. And so when you have that amount of volume coming into a handyman, at some point you're outrunning what one person can do. And if they're answering the phone, you know, because that's for now, that one person has been handling all dispatch, all phone answering. And so um, what started our big journey was uh I ask her, I said, hey, where all are you looking for our client communication? Like what is give me your let me back up. We do quarterly task audits, especially in the back. I do it all myself, and then I have Whitney and Colby do it quite a bit. And I have a Colby, not a Kobe, but a Colby with an L. And uh we we do task audits to make sure that things have not crept into our scope that shouldn't be that seat's problem, right? Because it's very easy, especially if you're go-getters, to go out and handle that. And then before you know it, that's become normal. And that's not that wasn't part of your job. Doesn't mean you can't do it, but you taking that away from another seat means that seat doesn't get to do what they're supposed to do. And so we audit that regularly. Well, during one of the audits uh audits, I was looking at Whitney's audit list and I was like, dang, she is checking like Google and Facebook and this and that. And there's like all these different things she's checking, trying to see how clients are communicating. It's like, wouldn't it be great if there was just a dashboard? It's like, how do we how do we fix that? Number one, because I can't I'm looking at well, if I had to hire somebody just to start managing some of that, it's like I can't really justify it, didn't feel right. Like that number doesn't matter, and that's a whole other set of numbers. No. And what your dollar per revenue should be on your labor costs. So there's all that that comes into play too. So again, a data-driven decision going, we can't afford that, didn't make any sense. So what's the next option? And so then we started playing with AI. And so my, I guess my first dip into AI really was kind of using like glorified Google. That was how I got started. And then it turned into where I use Claude as, and they're all good for certain things. So Claude for me is great for writing code if we're doing anything with technology, trying to connect systems or whatever. But he's also my thinker. He's like my fractional CFO. It's my uh board members. It's it's all that kind of think work. I literally spend an hour and a half every morning with Claude thinking through stuff. That's that's that's how I start my day. After I read and do Bible study and stuff, it's an hour and a half with Claude thinking. And that's where I solve a lot of big problems. Um, so I started using it there and like building out what do we see. Or I may take all of my reports out of Jobber, throw them into Claude and say, give me the rundown that I need for the month, as if you were my going to a board meeting. And he starts spitting out all these numbers that I just gave you. Um and so like data crunching manually is still a good thing, kind of like learning long division before the teacher gave you the TI calculator, you know. Doing it manually, especially if it's your job, like it's my it's Colby's job to understand job costs. And so he still looks at every job one by one every month to see what's going into them and what's coming out of them to make sure that we're not just trusting data and not catching catching patterns. You know, he can catch patterns. There's still things that AI can't do, which is that feeling about that kind of stuff, about the people doing the work. Um, so we use it a lot for that, crunching data, things that took us a little bit of time, unless it's stuff that we shouldn't touch. Well, then we started looking at okay, well, if we want to grow, dealing with customers is what I mean by that is the customer flow. The lead comes in and it works its way to the tech and it gets on the schedule and somebody's got to call them. Well, then once we do the quote, if we don't close them on site, these quotes start stacking up. Well, the further away from yes you get, the further from like being on site, uh, you know, 10, 15 days, 20 days, 30 days, the less excited anybody is about that quote that you gave, the client and you. And so there's there are good reasons why they wouldn't say yes on site. So we got to find a better way. Well, if if our handyman that quoted that on Thursday goes into Friday and he's got two jobs and then two more estimates before the day is over, and then Monday starts and he's got five jobs that week and six more estimates. Like, he's forgotten about this thing. This not because he was had malice, it was just because he he had a lot going on. He can't keep that in front of him. Yeah, so I was like, Well, we can hire somebody, but they're gonna just sit there and call. Half those people aren't gonna answer. Let's just be honest. They didn't accept it, they're gonna get two weeks down the road, but they're they're still important. We still want to keep them warm because the other half are going to it. We don't know which half that is. They don't have a button that says, I'm gonna do it if you call me twice. Yeah, I wish they did, but they don't. So we're looking there's got to be something. So then we started looking into AI for that, and we ended up using hatch, and then we just we're in month three-ish. We just got it fully deployed. So I don't know if I give it a fair shake yet, but sure. Um, we're we're using AI to follow up on quotes until somebody raises their hand and says, yes, I'm still interested. Then it goes to a human. Uh, we're using AI to be the first touch when somebody fills out a form. They immediately get a it doesn't matter where it comes from, it all leads into hatch, and they immediately get a response that says, Hey, Jason, I saw you wanted to get your door repaired. We can't wait to help you. Uh, and they may ask a question, like, is this an exterior or an interior door? So it makes it, it feels very real. And and we've coached it and taught it what to say. What also this does is if this comes from LSA, that's Google local service ads, LSA measures how fast you respond to a lead, and then that determines how much they show your ad, right? And so if you look at, if you Google handyman near me and you look at the first couple that pop up that say responds in one hour, responds in two days, that's that's Google tracking that. Well, if somebody calls on a Friday, we're not open Saturday and Sunday. They call Friday at five, already closed. It's gonna be two days before we call them back on Monday, right? Or respond back to them. So now Hatch 24-7 is talking to people. If if we don't answer, it's sending them a message, hey, sorry we didn't answer, you know, we're away from the phones at this time. Here's our normal business hours, whatever. We've also deployed Hatch voice, though. So they're actually gonna be answering the phone whenever we don't answer too. So there's another piece of that coming. But what that does for LSA is now it says responds in seconds, not minutes, not days. And so it's just now go back to that whole, I need to spend a 3% on marketing, but I don't know where to put it because my budget, I had a high budget for LSA, but it wouldn't take any more money because it wouldn't show my ads enough. And that's as much of my explanation as I have an LSA. Jason, you step in and can explain if that works any different. But that that's my short-term version or my ignorant version of how I think LSA works. And so now that I can answer faster, they in theory should show my ad more, which means I should be able to spend more on my budget and I should get more leads in. This is how I've taken that.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:25

Yeah, speed to lead, uh, so it sounds like you're like, okay, I'm spending 5% on marketing, I want to spend 8%. And the the thing that I it sounds like you've realized, and and a lot of it's good for people to realize is well, what what am I missing on my current leads? Because my speed to lead is low. Like I'm not answering the phone. Um, my off hours, I don't I don't have an off hours answering service or AI phone service. Um, the amount of people are gonna say yes because you got back to them right away, even if it was AI assisted in some way on the front end. Um there is so much untapped revenue from how businesses are fielding their current leads and being data driven and updating and watching that process. It sounds like you're deploying one thing here, one thing there. You're gonna start to see that that value start to come in from this investment in hatch. Um we're looking at our own kind of baking in this kind of AI assisted speed delete service within website marketing, um, because it's so dang important. Um, when, especially in your case of I want to spend 8%, but I don't know where else to put it. Well, let's invest in how we're getting back to our current leads. Um, and the last thing I'll say before we stop yakking here is absolutely anyone running Google LSA, um, the connection rate, like you answering the phone is close to 100% of the time during your business hours, is a big ranking factor as far as your ad showing at the top and then getting back to people with the speed delete answering, or if they send a message, having that automated and get them like that confirmation at least back right away. It does factor into advertising showing, um being like on the top advertiser, being shown more frequently, and it ultimately maximizes your cost per lead, as in it makes it as low as possible when you have these speed-to-lead systems in play.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:15

Yeah, and so with that too, I'm gonna tie both of those together. We've talked a lot about like what's in it for me as a customer, but for the for the client with AI, the what that's doing for them in the in the handyman space specifically. So we have two different types of clients inside the handyman and for real in the handyman and remodel, but you've got the broke fix and then you've got the the luxury upgrade, is kind of how we break them down. The broke fix needs it now. They don't even, they don't really want it, but they gotta have it. And so they're they're not always gonna be the happiest, they're gonna be pretty urgent. And now again, we don't do emergency work, that's a whole different category. This is just these. But if they reach out on a Sunday and we don't, we don't answer, we don't respond to them or anything, and it's hot on the it's hot on their mind right now, they're gonna just keep working Google. And somewhere, somebody's probably gonna respond with the text messages. It's gonna ring right to the owner's pockets. That's I guess that's the downfall of us is it's not going to the owner's pocket, it's going to the system. So may or may not get somebody that day. Well, whoever they get is going to get to come out first. Well, the same thing if you know, I just I kind of rattled off some numbers earlier about the leads that we have coming in, and that's great, but if you can't service the leads, you're wasting money. And so we got to that point last year at some point. We were having leads that by we were one and a half to two weeks out even getting to their house to look at the thing. Well, if we got there and it ended up not being able to be done in the same day and it had to be a one-day project, if we were then two weeks booked out, well, now they've waited four weeks for us to do this thing. It only took a day, but we were so but the speed to lead was slow. We we talked to them very quickly, but we couldn't get to them and turn them fast enough based on the way the schedule worked out. And so, and then what made it even worse is if we got there and it wasn't even a good fit, like we didn't vet them good on the front end because we were too busy because too many leads were coming in. And then if too many leads are coming in, you're really not worried about even closing the one you got because you know you got three more after them. So your techs aren't treating them like gold, like they should, if there's more coming. And so it's such a chicken egg approach, right? So that's what we got to dig into that, and we really saw it more with remodel. Um, we saw remodel leads falling off after they had to wait too long for us to get there because those are more luxury, they're they're not as urgent, but they do have the money and they've saved it and they're excited about spending it. So they want to have a good experience. And if you make them wait weeks before you come see them, not it's not good. Now, the ones that come off of Google, be honest, those are like Google leads are like our lowest tier leads. They're not great. We we get decent money from it, but they're not our highest ticket and they're not the most loyal um by as especially compared to a referral. But once somebody's in the system and they've trusted you and bought you already, they don't mind waiting just a hair longer than somebody who's brand new. The ones that get you, like we don't want them to, but they can. It's the newer ones that are coming in that really like they'll just disappear from you. But even though they're lower tier when they're brand new, in a revenue standpoint, they can still very easily become the ones over here, which is what we want. And so this experience has got to crush to get them inside the house. And then once we're here, now we still gotta we gotta keep crushing it to keep them, but we really got to get this right. Otherwise, we're not gonna get the five-star review, we're not gonna get the referral that we're gonna ask for, we're not gonna get any of that stuff. They're not gonna listen to what we say when we get there because they're upset. So, like that stuff really matters. And so then all of that working back to, you know, why do we start down AI? How do we get to the stuff we're doing? It's we were trying to fix some back office log jam, some busy work. How do we take care of some of that? Then it was how do we make the customer experience better? Well, we got to be able to talk to them faster, let them know that we got them quicker than three or four days, you know. Even if we talk to them on the phone, they need answers faster. So how do we do that? Well, then AI is doing that. And then we went, well, I'll I'll pause. Yeah, sorry.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:10

I was just gonna say, I think I think one of the most important things you've said about AI so far, um or point that you made is you're you're identifying problems in the business that need a solution, and then you're looking at AI to find the solution. Instead of getting caught up in, man, I'm hearing about AI all the time. I need to put in my business, and I'm creating problems that don't exist to start injecting AI into. Um, so it sounds like you're doing a great job with that, starting with the problem and then looking at what's the best tool to to solve this or improve this process.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:43

Yeah, because some sometimes you don't like no tech is better than high tech sometimes. Like we still use a whiteboard on job sites for and for a very specific reason. And and you creating the problem, like it is always fun to get the new thing. And if you go look at YouTube, and I fell victim of this last year, we had a false start with AI a year ago because I tried, I got overwhelmed, and I was like, man, I'll never learn this. Why would I why would I even try if it's gonna keep changing? And these guys are building all these bots and they're coding. I can never be a coder. Like, what am I even doing? And I got frustrated, I didn't handle it, you know, versus just waiting until and going, okay, what is our problem? So EOS, Jason, is what helped with all that by running EOS and having our weekly ops meetings and going, well, this is the problem we're trying to solve. Well, if you don't have any, if your money's tight, then let's be honest, we're three years old, man. Money's tight. Like we're just we're everything's going back into making the thing grow. And so hiring another person that doesn't produce revenue hurts. Like that's a tough one. I need to get techs on the road. So, what is my cheaper option that's even better for the customer?

SPEAKER_01 1:18:48

And it's yeah, for some of that's been a uh and that's where the win-win. It's it's cheaper and it's better for the customer. So, one takeaway, huge, huge takeaway that I want to emphasize for anyone listening, uh, JR was going on, or he was talking about uh like speed delete and creating a better experience. So let's say without this hatch system, without this like great customer experience, every month you're creating five new repeat clients. So it's 14x value, you know, they're gonna be calling, referring great clients. So say without the speed delete and you know, this emphasis on customer experience before they pay is not in place and you get five repeat clients a month. If you invest in these kind of systems and giving someone a great experience, say you can turn that five a month into 10 or 15 per month repeat clients. Every single month that it compounds. You got that compounding effect. So when you look at year one, year two, year three, if you've generated three X more repeat clients because of these systems that you can implement to answer the phone, to get back to people, to follow up with them on estimates, get that first experience for the best quality client that they're so happy they accepted the estimate and they're gonna call you back in a few months and refer you. Yeah, I hope that our listeners can understand the investment and the long-term, huge investment value that is born from systems that come into play that turn out more repeat clients, more referral work. Um while Google is certainly the best quality of leads online, compared to referral, compared to repeat client, maybe they found you on Google, maybe not. Um it's just so incredibly valuable. So I want to encourage our listeners one step at a time, but if you focus on that customer experience and building more repeat clients, uh not letting those fall through the cracks when things are busy, you are gonna be doing your business one, two, three, five years, 10 years from now so much favor uh by taking into account these things that can be done systematically to provide a great experience.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:49

Yeah, that's yeah, because you we know, I mean, you as a marketing company, if you if somebody wants to make it rain leads, you can help them make it rain leads. But if your system is terrible when they get in, to you wasted all that effort, they wasted all that money, and then they may say it doesn't work when in fact it did work, you know, but they just didn't close any of them because they were upset by the time they got to them because the systems weren't any good.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:14

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:14

And the good deal is technology's huge, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:17

Yep, yep. It's what March 2026. Uh I know voice AI right now, some people are still, you know, it's it's it's almost mostly there. Um, so I would imagine certainly by the end of this year, 2027, there are tangible solutions for any owner operator, even if you're not tech savvy, in the same way that someone would hire someone to do website and SEO, you know, doing this kind of like speed delete, these systems, it it will be easier even for the non-techie. So uh a lot of hope there, uh, no matter what size your business is.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:48

But I'll and I'll tell you so here's the so that that kind of goes into some of that can become pretty elaborate, like the hatch build out and those things took Whitney three months to get that deployed. Like that's a ton of work. And so solo operator listening to this doesn't have that kind of time. They they can't afford to go three months. So that's so maybe let me go back and talk about some of the maybe even more of my favorite ones that I feel like are the most beneficial for us in the field and they're super easy to deploy, inexpensive. You want to go that route, maybe?

SPEAKER_01 1:22:18

Yeah, let's cover, yeah. Sounds perfect, man. I definitely want to uh pin a note. I want to transition, talk about your your experience uh implementing EOS, but absolutely let's hear it.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:29

And that'll that'll be a great that'll be a great ending to this next piece. So lower level um tech that's still still very high tech in my opinion, but it's it's easy to deploy and you don't need to camp out for months to do it. So one is something called Plawd P-L-A-U-D. Not to be confused with Claude, who is what I mentioned is who I kind of like a chat GPT, but Claude is a listening device, and I don't have it in my office, but it's about the size of this mic that I'm wearing.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:02

I was wondering if you were wearing your plod, if one of the devices.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:06

No, he's listening. I have him on my desktop too. So he's he's on the desktop, but it looks like a little, just like a little microphone. Honestly, if you put it by your collar, you can't even see it. But and there's different different versions, but the one I have is that it's called the Plaud Pin, P-I-N. And it is a first off, it's a listening device, it's listening to what's going on, but the power is behind it. It's an AI software that's it's transcribing what's being said in a conversation with you and your customer. This is the main thing, that's the most important piece. And then once you get back, uh you can pull it up on your phone, look at the transcript, and from there, it's gonna just out of the box, it's gonna break down a summary of what you and your client is gonna put the names on and tell you JR said this, Kobe said this, and Jason said this. It's gonna go through what was talked about, it's gonna pull out measurements, it's gonna pull out any kind of notes that you said, do room by room. It's very smart. And then it gives action items. Say, this is what you have to do next. This is what Kobe's got to do next. And then you can go a step further and you can go in there, just like with chat, people have built templates that said, okay, I'm in construction, I do project management. When I look at my recap, I want to see the amount of board feet, I want to see the amount of square feet on the walls, I want to see the total number of you know, stone countertops going in. I want to see all this stuff. There's different breakdowns of templates you can put your transcript into and it gives it to you in that format. And so what you just did was talk about customer experience. You just took away this right here. You have no more pen and paper of you going, hang on just a second. Okay, go ahead. Hang on just a second. No, you're locked eyes with this customer the whole time, going, got it. Yep, keep going. Yeah. So you want something with a view. Okay, cool. You don't want to miss the sunset over the 18th drain out of your back porch. Got it. So this tree's kind of in the way. Got it. Like you're just you're just taking it all in, right? You don't have to stop. When you're measuring, you're just calling out measurements. You know, now it's only as good as what you say. So you got to remember you're going to be the person reading this thing on the other side of it. So you got to you got to be clear. Now, we got a pretty heavy southern dialect around here. And so we've had to learn that 80 might come out as eight. And so, and whatever. And so some of the you still got to go back and read it, make sure you got it right, you know. Um, but so that's step one is if you just if you only did that today, that's like 200 bucks, I think, for that is nothing. Go get it. And that makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:31

All our listeners can imagine like that estimate process and like imagine not having to take these notes and those little tiny details, like, oh, uh, I I'm not gonna forget, we're gonna get that tree trimmed up so you can see the 18th green when the sun sets. Like, that is that next level uh experience. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:48

Do you do you tell or do the text tell the client, like, hey, I got this thing on? That's listening.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:54

Oh, yeah, I guess we should disclaimer that too. Uh we're a one-party state in Mississippi, so only one person's got a consent to being recorded. I've consented, therefore it's fine. So I don't know, check your state laws if you could even do this or not, how that is. But yeah, I tell them anyway, because when I do a scope eval, like a bigger one, um, and our all of our guys are the same way. We're gonna talk to the client first, then we're gonna go back and do our own walkthrough. We tell them, hey, you're gonna hear me talk to myself. You may hear me repeat some things to you, but I've got a device on that's making sure I don't miss anything because I don't want to come back and waste your day again. So if you hear me talking, I'm not crazy, it's my pen listening in. And so there, nobody's ever told us no, they actually love that. Because the other piece is there's a there's a cover your booty component to this, right? Where if, well, wait a minute, Brian said that y'all were gonna do this. I'm like, well, I know he didn't. I'm looking at the transcript, and this is exactly what was said. Um, or like on the big remodel scopes, because that's about all that I even go to these days. I don't go to a ton of evals anymore, but I may go do a remodel walkthrough. And there's a lot of detail being covered. And so I can take that whole transcript and just drop it in the notes of Jobber. And if somebody's trying to figure out on site what was the expectation for this vanity, you know, or whatever we were doing, they can go back and read the transcript too.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:10

So that's that was where my mind went that you know, as soon as you were you started talking about this. All I can think of all the times where you know, I'd have a client that'd be like, Well, I thought you guys were gonna do this. We we talked about this. I'm like, I don't remember us talking about it. It's not in the the quote or the contract, and um, you know, there would be some good um, I don't want to say ammunition, but you know, just like you said, cover covering your butt there.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:33

Yeah, even if you decide to do the work anyway, you can go, hey, look, it's not in here, but I hear you. Like, maybe I said something incorrectly. I get it, things happen, you know. You can at least let them know it doesn't say it here.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:45

Um that's a good way to handle you know client stuff kind of in general, I think, is like, hey, it's it it wasn't included, you know, we didn't bill you for it, we're gonna do it for you anyways, you know, as as a favor. Um but you know it wasn't in the Help build some of that goodwill.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:02

Yeah. And so the second piece of this, though, and this goes back to what you said a second ago, Jason, we're we're identifying problems and then and then putting something on the problem. And so one big we're we're big on how fast we get the quotes out. And so the handyman quotes for the most part should be done on site. We shouldn't leave the driveway without sending that quote unless we're needing to get a price on special material or or something. Um and on the remodel side, even then, I kind of argue that things shouldn't really hang over past the day. Like if we've got all of our ducks in a row on pricing, we've walked enough of these, especially if we're just in the early phase of, hey, your budget was 50,000. Let me see if we can even, let's just see if that's even a thing. Let me see if we can get there. If I'm just trying to rough a budget, I don't really need that long. It just takes a second. But the hardest part of any, whether it's handyman, but especially remodel, when I got to digging into why are the quotes taking too long, the big part is you're when there's a long list of things to think about, you know, if it's an inspection punch list, it's got 35 items on it, the brain, I don't care who you are, the brain just starts to scramble thinking about all these things that it's got to do. And you just, it's hard to get it started in the right direction. Well, if you've got a remodel and you got a, you know, you need 65 joys hangers and you got to factor, you got to figure all that stuff in, right? You're trying to figure out your spans and your all those things. Well, if we could shortcut that, if we could shortcut that piece of it, the what you had to think about, what I would call the first level thinking. If you get rid of that and become a decision maker on what needs to be done, then you could speed that up. And so the second phase of this is taking the plot transcript. And then I built a bot inside of Chat GPT, so a chat bot. And it's got, you know, it's got six or seven thousand words of instruction built into it. Now we just kind of kept crafting, kept crafting, kept crafting. But its job is to take that transcript, I immediately take it and drop it into chat, into the bot. And he starts going through there and building out a remodel scope based on how we've told him we want to see it. So it goes from client summary to all the components that we need, goes to a materials list. And then if it's if it can be bought at a local big box store, it starts pulling part numbers next to it and putting those there for us to make a whole list we can order from. Um it goes into and gives a how to do the job from a trade standpoint. So demo, plumbing, electrical, the rough ends, the framing, the finish work. It goes step by step. And then it goes to uh things to look out for. So if it picks up, and we put pictures in there too sometimes, but it may say, hey, parking was tight, be careful of the crate myrtle on the right-hand side of the driveway. It says things like that. And then the coolest part is it says things you didn't talk about, but may want to consider. And so it's like, hey, you were working on the so-and-so wall. If you touch the door facing, you may end up damaging the one around the corner. So, whatever, possible upsells, right? Is another way to say that. And then it's a whole list of the stuff that you don't know yet that you have to know before you can do the job. Things like how many lights specifically are going in, what's the paint color, all the stuff you don't know. And so it takes away all that stuff that you're having to think about as the contractor, right? Now you don't make that the scope, but now you get to be the decision maker. You get to be the licensed guy that goes, Yep, that's right, that's wrong, that's right, that's wrong.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:22

Yep, just review it. So um, to make this like uh like so I'm understanding this correctly. Do you have like a project set up within Chat GPT that has this context and instructions and things that then in these new chats are you're uploading like a specific plot transcript with like the estimate information and it's helping create that scope of work, that estimate? Is that how it's technically set up?

SPEAKER_02 1:31:44

Yeah, it's it's set up like uh no, it's more, it's actually a I can send you the link. Anybody can use it. It's a public bot. So chat it's called a GPT. It's a GPT. Yep. Okay. And so when you log into it and load it, it's specific to you. So I can't see anything you put in, you can't see what I put in, just goes to the left. But you can go back and start talking to it. Like once you submit your first question, it's now inside of your chat GPT and you're you're you're rolling with it. Yeah, you're talking to it. Um and ours is built around Mississippi. So the second piece of that is I built a um a code bot, same thing. Because sometimes when you're on sites, you can't get your brain to work fast enough to think about what was that code on double wall pipe that came out of event stack. I can't remember what I was supposed to what was that? What was that number? And sometimes you don't even know what to Google. And so we built another GPT for code that is specific to us, and we we we fed it all the code and we fed it the links, and we fed it county specific code, et cetera, et cetera. And then we um, as we loaded that in, now our guys in the field can even just take a picture and go, oh, well, here's a this P trap doesn't look right. And they'll take a picture of a P trap, load it into chat, and chat starts pulling plumbing code back. I mean, you were, I mean, Kobe, you were a contractor. So you think about this. If you have that tool where it's listening to your conversation, and then all you got to do is drop that in chat. Like, how many estimates can you do a day now? Oh, as many as you can drive to?

SPEAKER_00 1:33:13

Yeah, I mean, way way way more. Um, and you mentioned the the code stuff. Um, what what I ended up doing is I created a custom GPT, but I went and paid the you know 120 bucks or whatever it was for my state Michigan, the the code book um for the PDF version, uploaded that into Chat GPT into a custom GPT. Um then I gave all of my field guys access to this custom GPT. So instead of them calling me you know 40 times a day asking me um you know how many nails go into two by four framing this this home edition, right? They can ask chat gpt and and get it figured out. Um and another important thing that I think it's important for people to realize who uh may maybe don't have hardly any experience with AI is like you're not gonna jump into Chat GPT into a regular chat and say, hey, make me a uh write write an estimate for a you know a four foot by eight foot kitchen and it's gonna spit out an estimate you can send to a client. Like there's there's work that goes into it. It's a it's a tool that's gonna you know take some weight off your shoulders, help you get organized and kind of yeah, clean things up for you. But you know, it's it's not it's not something that's just gonna automate your entire life, you know, right out of the box.

SPEAKER_02 1:34:27

Uh-uh. And even like on that code bot, the thing is like even your guys in the field, they they probably know the answer. They just need to be reminded. And that's like if you if you track the amount of phone calls that come to you or to back to the office, nine times out of ten with ours, they are just looking for clarification. They just need to bounce the idea off of somebody. And so if you can build a tool that can be approved that we can trust, and you got to teach them how to use it though. It's like, hey, this thing isn't gospel, like it can make a mistake. And so you you need to know enough to know when to recognize the mistake. And so we've got some rules built around how do we use this. Um, but it's most of the time, like the nails in the two by four, they go, Oh, yeah, it was four. That's right. Like they knew it, they just needed to be reminded. That's it. Um, yeah, and it's a little smarter than Google. So like we should just go to the smart, especially if you fed it. And now the third phase of this that'll kick off next quarter, it's been reading all of our estimates for the last three or four months, learning it, checking out our pricing. I've been feeding it pricing data. And so the next step is it will create, and this is just for remodel, not for handyman, but for remodel, it'll create a rough draft quote. So it goes from plod to the GPT that builds the scope. The GPT then runs over to Jobber or Job Trail, whichever one we're using at the time, and it starts to building out the quote. And we're never gonna let it send without us looking at it. That'd be crazy right now. There may be a there may be a day when that happens, I don't know. But but the builder still got to go in there and look at everything and make sure you're making the right decision, right? Um, but then it builds everything out. Well, man, again, as many estimates as you can drive to in a day, that's how many you can do if you're doing that system right there.

SPEAKER_00 1:36:12

Yeah. That's that's another good point about um, you know, all the data you're giving it. The the more that you're using, you know, ChatGPT or Claude, whatever model um is your preference, the more context it has, the more data you give it, the better the responses and answers and outputs are gonna be.

SPEAKER_01 1:36:29

Yeah, um a couple couple takeaways too. Um uh thanks for breaking that all down, JR. Um first is like a practical super easy application for using ChatGPT Cloud for helping it be your estimate assistant, if you will. Um, if if you don't have a GPT like like JR said, uh within a paid account, whether it's cloud chat GPT, whatever it is, set up a unique project. And it's in the left-hand menu, create project, and then you can add context to that project. So documents, Google, uh, Google Docs, whatever, with your price list, um how you estimate jobs, all about your business, focus services, et cetera. And from that point, you've got this context-fed, like basically chatbot, if you will. And then if you're using something like Plaud, and imagine too, you on that estimate, you know, picks up all the conversation, all the details. Um, thank you, Mr. Customer. Yeah, I'll give you an estimate here within the next 15 minutes or whatever your deadline is, next 24 hours. Um when you get back to the truck, just audibly download any other you know, thoughts and information that you want captured by this AI listener that you can essentially button up that estimate. And then if you upload that transcript to that GPT project that has all the context about your pricing and your business and focus services, it's going to start doing better, especially over time. JR mentioned it's been reading your estimates three or four months. Uh over time, it's gonna get better at referencing, oh, well, a couple plumbing projects ago that we estimated, you know, here's a potential issue. Uh, do you want this kind of noted or whatever? But at the base level, at least my second encouragement here, which is if you're just using this stuff right now, it's like the equivalent of using a Google Doc that's ultimately gonna transform into a repeatable process within your CRM. Like you have the base data and you're you're filling this AI agent with information about your business. Well, then in the future you can connect it with technology that's gonna add another automation layer that's gonna make things more efficient. But at the base level, you're giving it some data to work with, even if it could be technically more efficient this way or that way. Um just getting the data out there, you could always hook it into systems in the future. So I encourage everyone to, you know, lean on it for your thought partner. And I think estimating jobs are really great uh practical example of how to level up your estimating process and make it faster.

SPEAKER_02 1:38:59

Yeah, and here's another practical and there's there's folks out there charging a bunch of money for this, and you're about to get it for free. So here you go. Take plaud or or or it doesn't matter, take your your iPhone, your whatever, if you're a weird one that uses Android, I guess you can use that. Um, and go to the voice recorder. And when we're talking about systems, if you're about to bring on a new employee, the reason I say plod is good is because it's just it's it's it's right here and you don't have to touch it or cut it on, it's just hanging out. But if you've got a new employee coming on and you're in the field and you're trying to teach them how to patch drywall, and I'm assuming you don't have metaglasses, if not, you should get some of those too for this very reason. But if we're talking about building processes, you take that plod and you just start talking while you're doing the work, just braindump everything you're doing, and then take that transcript and throw it in chat and say, I need a SOP for doing drywall for a new employee that's never done it. Make it so easy, a ham sandwich can follow this and do it. And he will give you back, or whatever gender you've given this thing, it'll give you back a full SOP list of how to patch drywall based on how you do it, not how the internet said do it, the way you do it in your company. And that right there is an SOP. And I'll be dang if that didn't just take you five minutes. It didn't take you a year, it didn't cost you a thousand dollars. That's all you had to do. You just had to do it, you just had to cut on and talk. It's it. Um and if you're using company cam, there's a bunch of other cool tools in there that can just help build these things out. But so there's one application for in the field and getting the client experience better. There's another one that if you're planning to grow, or not even that, like let's talk to the solo operator for a minute. And because you don't have to grow to make money in this business or have a cool life. You don't have to do that. That's just the route that I chose. And there's a ton of headaches on this route too. So it ain't for everybody either. But the solo operator, you may just need some convictions on why you do what you do. I think you need a playbook regardless, even if you're by yourself. And so you may just want to know why is it do I that I repair drywall this way? Why am I this good at it? I don't know. Record yourself and then throw it in chat, let it give you an SOP, and then now you'll know forever why you're good at it, you know? Um, and then the sounding board piece, the, the, the claw or chat, whoever you use, if you're struggling through questions for business, now again, you gotta know, you gotta know enough to know what to ask it and what it's telling you if it's right or not. You can't just trust it. But if you're just trying to think through, I mean, it gets kind of expensive to go sit with a consultant early on. It gets kind of expensive to call your CPA over and over and over again. It's expensive to call your attorney, all those things. If you wanted to get a little bit further in the conversation before sitting down with them, that way you're not having to get the elementary. Because here's the other news flash, they're all using chat already. When you email them, they're taking the little question right there, they're going to regurgitate it with their language, but they're going to chat first too. So, like you can at least get the first level out of the way before you have to go spend a thousand dollars an hour to get a couple of answers.

SPEAKER_01 1:41:55

So, man, we've been talking for almost two hours, DR. Thank you, Kim, for your time, man. Uh, because things here. I would love to, I it's EOS has never been talked about in the realm of the handyman business, to my knowledge, uh, which is awesome. We just self-implemented uh last year, and it's been a game changer. Um, so uh I'd love to hear your experience about EOS uh in your handyman business. And let me first uh explain to our audience EOS stands for entrepreneurial operating system. It is very much an operating system that essentially bundles up your business and forces you to be organized and um what's the word, committed to what you're setting out to do this this month, this quarter. So it keeps it very focused and essentially puts guardrails around our OCD, ADHD business owner minds. It forces things to be a little bit more organized in a very sensible like way. Um, so I I'd love to hear, JR. Like, what do you think about EOS? How have you applied it? Um, when would you recommend it for a handyman business? I would love to hear your thoughts about your implementation of EOS.

SPEAKER_02 1:43:07

Yeah, so EOS is another one of those tools that I've known about it for a long time. And we we ran it in another business previously, but it's one of those that I wanted to use it way before I was ready. Like I could not wait to be able to use ZOS. But and I'm gonna I'm gonna kind of give two sides of this opinion. You kind of need to be a certain size for it to really work the right way as it's presented, but the principles of it can be scaled back and used even as a solo owner operator. Um so the main thing, especially in growth phase, I mean, when you're trying to grow and get things right, it just the stuff we've rattled off today, there's millions of things you could work on. There's so many things. And if you're just like, well, I just want to work on leads, that's great. There's another 25 things inside the leads bucket that you could work on to try to make it better. So you're trying to drill down to that one thing. So as an owner, there's just planes everywhere, right? The planes are just trying to land, and so this is just giving you a system to get them to to the runway or to send them to the ocean and never come back again because some of them don't ever need to get anywhere near the runway ever.

SPEAKER_03 1:44:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:44:19

Um, so the what we did um, we found it only worked once we had a a true leadership team. So me, the admin slash ops, and then general manager. Um and really GM has really been more service manager up until uh I would argue that we still share some of the GM task a little bit on like cash flow decisions and things like that. So it really only worked until we had those three. And so the idea is we um every every quarter we pick rocks, goals, whatever you want to call them, that are needle moving tasks for the business, needle moving goals. So it can't be like, hey, make better Google ads. Like, eh, that's not really that's not very specific. It's not measurable, and it's that that doesn't move the needle. So whatever it is, the big problem or big idea we're trying to solve, we start looking at what helps us get there, and then we identify the biggest one that gets that thing going in the right direction.

SPEAKER_01 1:45:25

Example that you talked about was speed delete. How are we answering the phone 24-7 and getting contact with these people? That's a great rock, a quarterly project of how can we like how can we master speed delete?

SPEAKER_02 1:45:40

Yeah, it started off as the the rock actually started off as like better integration with AI. Well, that's not very specific. And so we kept looking at well, we went over to what we call the the parking lot, which is where all the all the things go that we hadn't gotten to yet. And we I would say we've we used, we've self-implemented EOS, but we've kind of put a little bit of our own flair to it, maybe with terminology, because we were already doing a mini version of it. And so we kind of kept some of our terms. So we call the, I don't know what I can't remember what they call it in the book, but we call it parking lot where things are that we hadn't gotten to yet. Ideas or problems that are not so much issues, but they're things that we know would help the business. They kind of go over here until we're ready. And so when we start picking out rocks, that's what we're going for was okay. We want to implement AI. What does AI solve in this problems list, in this parking lot list? And we started finding the ones that had like a high rating because we rank them all inside of a database. And it was the speed delete, it was just Whitney having to manage seven different chat channels. You know, it was um trying to get more five-star reviews to get more referrals. That's customer experience. So, how do we make that better? And so all that kind of meshed into where Hatch came out of. That's where it came from. But what it does is like I'm I'm relatively uninvolved in the day-to-day of Steady. Like I don't, I don't know how many leads are coming through. I don't know the jobs are going on, and I don't know all that. Unless I happen to be sitting in the office, which is rare, because if I'm in here, I'm the kid that talked in class. Like I'm gonna talk to you if you're out here. So I if I need to get work done, I can't really be here if people are here. I got to go somewhere else.

SPEAKER_03 1:47:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:47:13

And so, yeah, so that Wednesday for that key three meeting, that EOS meeting, that's level 10. That is the touch point that I get for the week to get my finger on the pulse of the health of the company and then any issues that have not been solved yet that need to be talked about with us three as a group, because they're all seeing different sides of it too. Kobe's seeing the field side, he's dealing with the people. Whitney actually lives in Indiana, so she's completely remote. And so she's dealing with customers coming in, customer interaction. She pretty much runs her entire day by data, stuff that she sees on spreadsheets, on the credit cards, all the things. And so I kind of in my head, I'm like, well, she's the data. Kobe's got more of the feels of the discussion, and I've got more of the practicality strategy piece of the decision. And so we marry those three, and that's how we work through our list. And so we sit down, look at a scorecard of KPIs that we've identified are the things that are healthy for us, what we watch, which is a lot of what I've already described, right? Leads, quotes, what the amount of close rate on site, uh, cash flow for next week. And we do our meeting on Wednesday, by the way. So if cash looks light next week as far as on the books, we got two days to get more people roped into the system. We can spool up some organic marketing, try to get some jobs in. Um then we go through our rocks, and each only one person can own. You only need to have one or two rocks as a person. We just try to make it be one. And then sometimes we'll share a rock to two seats might share a rock, but the company can't have but like two or three to be effective, really, maybe four. So we usually do three and an alternate. That way, in case one ends early, we can pick that alternate up and start working on it. Um then we go through an issues list, which is little problems that have popped up, either that maybe they got solved during the week, but it's relevant to bring them up because it may have been a pattern. Maybe with an employee, hey, you know, Jimmy underquoted the same type of job four times in a row. Somebody needs to coach him on that. But Whitney usually picks up on that. And that's what's cool is she's the data person of the group, even more so than me. And so she's watching data just because she likes data, and she may pick up on a pattern and go, ooh, that looks like that could be a problem. Somebody should say something. And that comes out during the whole key three things.

SPEAKER_01 1:49:30

I love that accountability that or that that ownership, that uh uh what's the word you used uh earlier in the conversation? Like you just empower empowerment? Yeah, they're just empowered to make decisions and to see things and act. And I absolutely love that about your leadership, JR. I think it's just huge for any growing company. Um, so to kind of put a like out practically application, I think anyone listening, owner, operator, or bigger business, you should read the book Get a Grip. That's kind of the more narrative that there's a lot of takeaways. You can maybe find some application. I think owner operators out there, core values, setting core values is very important, in my opinion. Um, and maybe one or two other kind of operational things just to check on every week. But practically, as a business gets more like the 400, 600,000, certainly 800,000 annual revenue, I think it's a great time to start to fully implement EOS to put some guardrails around your business uh with data, with these structured projects that make everything better every quarter with your rocks. Um, it's just a really productive business growing system that kind of creates accountability and ownership for your whole team.

SPEAKER_02 1:50:44

Yeah. And don't get, and I think I mentioned in the very beginning of the EOS discussion, there's a there's a way to do it if you're solo and you're at 250. The principle of it being you can't work on everything at one time. Like if you're the only person doing everything, you have to go do work, you have to go do estimates, you have to invoice to get paid, you got to make deposits, you got to pay bills, like all that stuff's non-negotiable. And all the things you would like to do, like get better marketing, make more content, all these things, they're all great. They're all good for your business. You just gotta pick one. And so I think what this would allow you to do if you read that book, even if you're not ready for it the whole way, it's you could start creating some kind of system that's like, okay, I've got these five things I'd like to do this year. This is the only one I've got. This is the one right now. And so I would I would piggyback that book and say, go read the one thing by Gary Keller, where it's it's it's the one thing you could do right now that makes everything else kind of non-existent or or takes care of everything. And so that may be a great piggyback for the solo guy to go, okay, cool. I got this whole list. What's the one thing? If you're having a hard time figuring that out, read that book. Um, but then you got to have somewhere to put all this stuff. Like, you know, the notes section of your phone kind of gets a little gets a little hairy and you can't find it, right? So how do you track it all? It's not sticky notes. You can't put those on your dash, you look like the other guy that pulled up, you know, and you can't find anything. So we use Notion for that, but you could use Todoist or any of those. There's all kinds of Asana, whatever, depending on how much you want to get into the tech. But we use Notion, we've got databases built out for that that help us because these ideas, again, some are good, some are terrible, but you can put them, you can get them out of your brain and put them in a parking lot. And then once a quarter, you can go get coffee. You can if you can't give up a day to think about your business once a quarter, you you you don't, you just you're never gonna get there. You gotta give up some time somewhere to go go through this parking lot and figure out what the next thing is you're supposed to be working on.

SPEAKER_03 1:52:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:52:44

Awesome. Well, man, we've been on for over two hours. JR, thank you so much for joining us, man. Uh, we could probably talk for at least another, you know, 20 hours, I'm sure, if we had the time. Um thank you so much for you're so generous, man, um, and hanging out with us.

SPEAKER_02 1:52:58

Yeah, I appreciate you having me.

SPEAKER_00 1:53:00

Thank you for joining us for another episode of the Home Hero Podcast brought to you by Handyman Marketing Pros.