Episode 106: How Every Leader Can Use Data Strategically To Grow Their Business, with John Horan

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And engaged teams, stronger sales teams is right where you need to be. Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop superpowered sales teams. This is going to be a treat today, the episode that we have. I am sitting across the computer screen from a man who I would say is close to being a living legend in the renewables industry, certainly in Australia. And his name is John Horan. So he starts, started a little, little solar and electrical business many, many years ago. It was about 20 years ago now called Horan and Bird Electrical. And I mean that on its own right, to start your own business is a deeply courageous thing to do. Right, And a lot of us have done that. But from there he built that into a $35 million business by 2015, which at that point in time in the Australian renewables market was one of the top few businesses. It was very much still a fledgling market that was finding its feet. But John was able to really scale that business and then sell it out to Origin. And then from that point, Origin actually became the largest commercial solar installer in the country. And I think that story is pretty well known from people that are within the industry. What I really like, and I guess is the twist in this story is that last year John, or in 2024, John actually bought his business back from Horn and Bird with his family and he's now running it again. And then for me, that's not everything you need to know about John. He was a national president of the Master Electrician association of Australia. So you've got to be seriously good at what you do to be able to do that. He's still a director there and he's also on the Board of Solar Accreditation Australia. So in the last 20 years, I think he's won the Master Electrical association business or installer of the Year five times. He's won the Master Electrician of the Year five times. And in 2012 was winner of the Australian Small Business of the Year. So some serious capability in horsepower sitting across the computer screen from us today. John, welcome to the Strongest Sales Teams podcast.

Yeah, thanks, Ben. Thanks for those kind words.

Oh, my pleasure. You know, we've been trying to meet for quite a while and we finally got calendars to align and probably a bit of persistence from me and, you know, we got there a few weeks ago. So I'm looking forward to talking to you today. Before we do, please tell me a little bit about Horan and Bert and what you're doing.

Yeah, it's been, you know, we got the business back last year and I brought it back with my family. So it's been an amazing. Well, you know, it's been a big brand change. You know, Horona Bird's been for the last, you know, 10 years almost, it's been a pretty corporate business. So trying to turn that back to a family business and then gather momentum again to scale it again has been quite the challenge. But however, you know, the last two years, no one's realized how much I've spent in AI, and it's been absolutely remarkable, to be honest.

Yeah. Well, it surprised me when we were talking, and we're going to cover some of that today, just how advanced you are in terms of not your knowledge of AI. I think there's a lot of people out there that know a lot about AI, and I don't think that's necessarily unique anymore, but I think practically applying it to your business, I think a lot of businesses globally, like, we talk about someone like Accenture, right. Which is. I think last year was 10 times their revenue on AI consulting. Right. Just shows how many people are starting to dip their toes in.

But.

But I think you're using it, and we'll go through it today really meaningfully in your business. And that's gonna be the topic for today, right? How to use data to make really good strategic decisions. And no doubt AI is gonna come through. So why don't we start if that's okay with you telling us about your experience with AI and how you're using it to help your business.

Yeah, it's. Look, it probably started two years ago. I started with Jasper, so I was trying to, you know, always trying to write articles and blogs and things like that and making things a lot easier. So I started with Jasper, which I don't use anymore, but it was a great way to start using AI and learning a lot of things. But to me it was like, how can I take away every pain point out of my business? The jobs that people absolutely hate doing. So it was debt collection, it was lead generation, it was the 247 support, you know, having people on call all over the weekend, spending all that money looking and training people, you know, continuously. So when, when a customer calls up, it was taking those things out. So I put 20 years worth of horn and bird DNA into training bots really and systems and processes to take all that away, you know. And you know, having a business that used to have 140 staff, I'm pretty much running the same size business now with 15 to give you an idea. Yeah.

Wow. Well, what's that? That's a, I mean let's be conservative. That's an 85% reduction in staff numbers. Wow. And so what's changed specifically that's allowed you to do that?

I didn't need the 30 person call center anymore. You know, straight away. You know, the thing about call centers is that consistently like one, they're high overheads, they're very expensive, but you're consistently training them as well and you keep on having to train. So you know, I was able to use all the scripts and everything that I've always had and put that through bots and having that just fine tuned. So that was the best one. So one legion lead gen became a problem of no more. The hardest. The number one problem with the biggest challenge in the industry, in any industry is lead generation. As far as I'm concerned, that got rid of that problem. Second one is database nurture. We've got 30,000 customers. How do you keep on making sure that your customers keep on coming back to you? Because I've worked it out over the last 20 years that the average customer is worth about $40,000 to you over 25 years. So it's not just selling a solar system. Day one is watch those, all those little things that you can sell to them the next 20 years. So this just makes it so much better and easier, that's for sure. And look, the other one is admin support. So you know, admin support, there's always a huge team, especially in solar. The backend support for admin is ridiculous. So this got rid of, you know, I would say 80% of that.

Yeah. Okay. Okay, fantastic. Look, I think for me a number of people will still be back at that piece around lead generation. I do tend to agree with you. Within the sales function, lead generation is often the hardest. Is there anything you're Happy to share around what you've done. That's really helped that lead generation piece.

You can do 10,000 calls an hour if you want to. But, you know, I think, look, there's a lot of people out there trying to do AI bots. I can see it. You know, I've heard in America you can have. You can take up to seven phone calls a day from a bot. Like it's going a little bit crazy. But you don't want to hide that you're using a bot. People still want to talk to a human and have that human touch. Basically, I have just put in assistance. So they're real assistants. So you're ringing up on behalf of. You know, so for example, I have it for me. Look. Hey, this is Emily. I'm ringing up on behalf of John Horan. He was wondering if you had time next week to have a chat about solar. I know that you're interested in this six months ago. However, if anything's changed, he'd love to have a chat because we've got some really good new products that he'd love to share with you. That's the sort of thing.

Yeah. Okay, so we're talking about really scale here. I mean, helpful when you have databases to market to. But I mean, to be honest, to build out databases isn't that hard anymore to build out target lists. There's so many tools out there where you can scrape everything online, everything digitally and find out. Okay, so I'm hearing volume is a big player. Yeah, absolutely. And I'll say I've tried one of your AI bots myself. It was great. I get. I got to have a Persona about having a different type of solar system to what I have. And. And I got on board. And I know that we kind of mocked that up, but once the call got running and it was purely listening to the bot do its thing, or her thing, is the lady that I spoke to. It was quite a good experience. I would say I got 90 to 95% of what I needed out of that, which, in fact, you know what? I'm going to be a bit more conservative. I'm going to follow this up with something. I would say I probably got 80 to 90% of what I needed, but it's not often that I get 80 to 90% of what I needed speaking to a human. Right. The difference between the best and the worst. Right. When you call up is I'll often not get 20% of what I need. And I think to get 80 to 90% of what I Need from a human is not a bad result. Right. So, and someone asked me about that, what happens to that degree of personalization? And for me I think that the future around AI is that it's not going to solve everything. And I suspect there's certain times when you can't use your AI bots, but it's going to allow for a much more consistent service for people. You know, you're not going to have the ups and downs of new people within your team or people are having a bad day or people who forget to do something. Have you experienced any impacts on your customer service levels as a result of doing this?

Well, what I couldn't believe was the amount of phone calls my team was still missing. Even if you have, you know, I've got three girls full time, you know, answering calls, but it was still an incredible amount of phone calls still getting missed. And that usually goes to, well, it doesn't get answered or it'll go to a, you know, answering machine and then you got to call them back. So it's always this wasted time. Look, I was still missing between 30 to 40 phone calls a day.

Wow.

Yeah, couldn't believe it. So Emily, you know, I call her Emily some. This is where it gets pretty funny. Sometimes I name them after ex staff that used to work for me for 20 years.

If you're listening Emily, please call in.

Yeah, but we take those calls. So if it's a call about, hey, look, I don't think my solar system's working well, you know, this bot is so smart. I've been training this specific one for nine months. It knows every fault code imaginable so it can guide the customer through pretty much anything there and then summarize this email and then get the customer to send their power bills and everything. Anyway, so this saves at least a 10 minute phone call for one of my staff. And then it summarizes, it sends the email and then my team then come in after everything's been done and sort it out if it needs a human touch. But it's grabbing jobs, it's booking quotes, it's moving schedules, it's, it's doing all those things. So I think if anything it's great. But the best thing for me was it was the first, this was my first Christmas where I let it off, you know, like this was, I want to have a holiday. This year I had 24 7. This thing was taking calls 24 7, sorting out people's problems and, or taking leads and booking quotes and working, you know, coming back to work on that Monday was just insane. Not one call I took. I never took one personal call for the whole of the Christmas holidays.

So two weeks.

Yep.

Yeah. Wow. Yeah. And given the database of installations you have, I think that's quite significant. Right. We could sit here and salespeople and go, yeah, I didn't get them either. But this is a scale of business that has tens of thousands of installations. Where I have that. Right?

Yeah, 30,000 customers, mate. Yep.

Yeah, yeah, yes, 30,000 customers.

Right.

So those 30,000 customers aren't going dormant over the Christmas period. Okay, great. So what I'm hearing is customers calls are getting answered quicker. Anything else you're saying from a customer experience?

Change calls getting quicker? They're getting their answers quicker. A lot of the times, like during a cyclone, we just had a big event, we had floods here in North Queensland where people don't know what they do with their solar systems. So, you know, it's a matter of they're ringing through. It's guiding them through it. They're guiding them how to turn a solar system on, Turn the solar system back on, guiding through all that. That's really cool. Look, every now and then someone might say, they might think it's a bot. And I don't. I said, I don't try and hide it. I don't try and hide it at all. Sometimes we get really funny with it. Like, sometimes we try to go over them. For example, I don't do it anymore. But the first time I got pretty funny with it and someone said, hey, you're a robot. Well, you know, we had one script there. We don't do it anymore. But the one script said, look, Astro Boy was a robot. Everybody loved Astro Boy and he saved the world. You can get funny with it, but we don't do that anymore.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you can infuriate some people there. I wasn't Astro Boy fan, so it wouldn't have worried me. Okay, so let's keep going. I was almost gonna make a reference to Astro Boy, but we won't. So have there been any negative experiences? And I don't mean one off experiences. Right. But has there been any downsides to you to rolling this A out? And then I want to talk strategically about how you use data.

Yeah, it's. It's fine tuning. Right. So where things can go wrong is if it doesn't quite get the person, if someone says Tuesday, but they say it too fast and they're the things. So, you know, it might be booking the person on the Wrong day so that, you know, then out. But then again, you know, our sales guys are going out to see the customer anyway. So it's a matter of making the call. But I, and just changing it around. It's consistently fine tuning and you know, it's never perfect. Nothing's ever perfect here. But I, I have a team that is always going through those conversations and making sure that it becomes perfect. So we're just fixing it 1% every day. I think the biggest thing I said with AI for person that uses it is you get your life back. The single piece there is get your life back. And if you're a small business where you are the installer, you are the lead gen, you are the salesperson, the ability to just divert your phone to this while you can just get your job done, it's just unbelievable.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, for me, I sit here and think about the number of not so much sole traders. I'm thinking the number of businesses out there that have that five to 20 staff, but they're still integral in running the business. But the sheer capacity of phone calls. Right. It's not about their capability, but they've just exceeded their capacity because the phone's constantly ringing. Because they are still that key person of influence. Right. They're the key man or key woman in that business. Yeah, I could certainly see that working and I could certainly see it with teams on scale businesses that have those big call centers where you get a lot of repetitive calls coming in. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so by now I'm imagining you're sitting on lots of data from these AI bots and probably you've probably had this anyway, right. With your 30,000 customers. How are you using data strategically to give you an advantage in running your business?

I've been using data. I'm an electrician with an, with an mba. So like I was, I've been. And the first thing you learn is measuring it and using data. I'll take it all the way back. I've been, you know, I'll go back to 2005. I measured every single job I ever did. I knew I called it a pph, so I called it profit per hour. So if I had five tradies out there, I knew that the maximum amount of hours I could invoice for the day was 40 hours. So what I found out out there is that I was doing all these jobs. Some jobs would average making me $20 an hour profit. Some are making me 40, some are making me 200. Most people don't know unless you measure it. So I figured out very quickly that the jobs that were making me $200 an hour per guy were the jobs everybody hated doing. So how do you pivot your business into becoming the person that does the jobs everybody hates doing? They're still trying to keep tradies to do it. But what I found was the jobs that were making me the most money were older homes. And I knew exactly the suburbs are in. So I was able to have it put all my sponsorships into that local netball team or into that local paper focusing on those homes. That was simple to me. Look, it's big numbers, you know, I had a 20 person team. So could you imagine a 20 person team if you could lift your average up just $20 an hour over those 20 person team? It's like, it's like about 700 grand a year in extra profit tier. You know, imagine if you can lift it by 50. So 50 was like $2 million a year. So I worked that out really early which jobs may be the most profit. So then you can use data that becomes significantly strategic. So I knew old homes made me the most money because you would rewire them, you could charge a premium and you put new switchboards on. So strategically what drove new switchboards and rewiring was air conditioning. So I deliberately used air conditioning as a loss leader. I started my own air conditioning business there just so I could get more air conditioning out there, so I knew I could make all my money in switchboard upgrades. And we were wiring old homes, then solar came. So then I realized I could make more money on solar than I could rewiring old homes. So again it was what was the lead gent for me to get more solar on the roof. So it was again, it was air conditioning. What was the loss leader today? These things are, my opinion, are EV chargers. So we're going hard at EV charges knowing that people need more solar and they're going to want more batteries and more wiring of homes. That's the data that you work with. And AI today can just make that tracking even better.

Yeah, I think the first thing I was going to say to that was you don't need any fancy tech to know your business. In fact, what you're just talking about is knowing your business. And the number of times I'll sit down with people I work with and say, Brian, tell me your job P&L's. Tell me where you're making money, tell me where you're losing money. Less than, less than 5%. Notice these are not inexperienced or incapable business owners or sales leaders. These are really intelligent people that just don't have the bandwidth or have chosen, I should say, not to focus on understanding that business. And once you do that, yeah, the power of play there is so, so impactful. Okay, so then when you roll it in with AI, right, we're starting to see a whole lot more efficiencies. And have you found that AI has helped you get even clearer on where you can make, you know, the biggest bang for your buck in your business?

Well, because I've been measuring it forever. I just know which ones are. So AI just makes it easier to. I call it. You know, my favorite TV show was Opal Back Out Opal Hunting. You know, people that go through and they buy those opal mines and the new ones get in there and they can't find anything and then the people go back into those old mines and they're finding great opals. So I call my database that. So I am opal hunting through my database with AI finding all the people that had the best houses that could take more solar they could put a battery on, should have an EV charger. I know from stats that these people are going to buy an evidence first and I know which ones to target first. That's the cool part about AI, you know, but also you can create great strategic plans. So if you can predict when times are going to get tough, when the economy is going to be tough and people haven't got a lot of money to buy a solar system and a battery that you can go all in on, products that you know that people are going to need. So for us, you know, Power Purchase Agreements has been our number one seller of a solar and a battery for a very long time where the customer can get a brand new solar system and now a battery on their roof with no capital at all, you know, and they don't even have to own the system and they can, you know, save, you know, hack their power bill usually by not having to even buy a solar system. For me, that's the number one product.

Love it.

And going very hard on that today. But can you think of a better product to have in a cost of living crisis where people have no cash? Yeah.

Absolutely nothing up front. You're just saving money straight away. Yeah. Okay.

Okay.

I really like that piece around going through your database and finding those pots of gold, those little gold coins along the journey as you're heading to wherever your destination is. Okay, so if you were, and I don't want to keep you too long Today.

Right.

Cause I know you got 30,000 customers to look after. Oh, no, sorry, you don't anymore. You got AI helping you do that. So. But if you were to be sitting there now with a business leader or a sales leader and you were giving them a, you know, and let's just say the sales leader wanted to turn on the growth tap this year, so they wanted to grow revenue. Right. What piece of advice would you give to them around thinking about for the next 12 months?

For me, it's about, first of all, go back to the beginning, which really, really understand which products that you sell make you the most money straight away. And you need to know exactly. And then run the numbers to say if every salesperson that you had was selling that product, what would that look like? And then reverse engineer it. What do you have to do to bring more of those people to the business? So you really, really need to understand your data, understand what your customers are and how you get more of those. That's the best way. And look, you can't do it all in one hit, but even if you can just lift your average point of sale up by getting an extra 20% of those customers, it makes enormous difference at the end of the day.

Yeah, yeah. I talk a lot about prospecting with intention. If you can just get clear on what you're doing. Generally we see about a 5 percentage point uplift.

Right.

So if you're at 20% success rate, it'll drive you to 25%. Right. So that's a, it's a 25% uplift on your 20%, but it's a 5% baseline number. And you run those numbers in even just plus 5% right across your, your revenue and your profit for the year. It's truly impactful. Okay, great. Thank you.

Sorry, mate. The last one was efficiency. So if you can, you, if you can use AI, if you've got sales guys out there that, that you need to be seeing more people. So if you can take out their, their database, they're nurturing and trying to lead gen. If you can remove that from, from them. And so they're out there talking and selling to more customers. Well, it can only lead to more money.

Yeah. Yes. Yeah, I like that. Okay, great. So we've got a few things in there. Do you want to repeat those themes again?

For me, it's making sure you know which products make you the most money, which customers are those people, and then it's becoming efficient. So using AI and tools to make your sure that your sales guys are Talking to those people more often.

Yeah, yeah, Perfect product. Customer efficiency. Excellent. Okay, great. Thank you. So what's next in the John Horan journey?

Well, yeah, we're sort of in that scale to. Look, there's no doubt we're about to scale back up again. Sometimes you ask yourself why. But look, I think there's an enormous gap. I think there's an enormous gap in. In the market in our piece. I know that every electrician in Australia needs AI. They just need to get their lives back. So, you know, I've got. I've created the AI electrician, which we will be taking the market. So if someone's out there that's interested in using, it's not just electrician. It can be used in any way, but I strategically call it AI electrician, because, you know, I'm part of the master electrician network. And if I can help them out and help them get more sales and if they can get their life back. Oh, that's it. That's great. Great.

Where can they find that?

I'll put on the link. I'll send it to you on the link there so you can look at the podcast.

Okay, great. So, for everyone listening, what we will do is put this into the transcript. If you want to get in touch with John Horan, of course, Horan and Bird Solar is another way to do it. Give him a call. You might not get straight to John. It might be Emily or one of his other bots that you get to. But I'm sure if you ask to speak to John, you'll find a way to do that. But yet it'll absolutely be in our. In our transcript of our show notes. Fantastic. Well, thank you, John. Anything else from you today before we wind up?

No, that's it. That's all good, mate.

Excellent. Well, thank you very much for taking some time today. For me, the first episode we've done, we're into about 106 here, where we've actually spoken about real, practical ways to use AI. And for me, that really justifies our tagline around. Please keep living in a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve. Thanks, John. Bye for now.

Thanks, Ben.

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