Stop Tech-Stack Bloat: Build a Real Technology Roadmap w/ Jenny Benbrook (Powerhouse Consulting Group)

Why would we not take that same mentality to software that we're inviting you in to help run the business to a certain extent, which means we have to feed that technology our business, our businesses processes, our goals, our team members. We might utilize tools differently depending on our internal capacity. That's just implementing is ensuring that the tools are set up for your company, not just out of the box. Plug and play.

Welcome to the Home Service Hacks Podcast, the show for contractors who refuse to settle for average. Hosted by Bill Brown, licensed H VAC contractor, AI and automation expert and founder of service titan Hacks community, each episode features real conversations with contractors, tech founders and innovators who are reshaping the trades from AI and automation to pricing, marketing, and management. If it's working in the field, you'll hear about it here. Let's get into it. Welcome back to Home Service Business Hacks Podcast. I'm your host, Bill Brown, and today we're diving into one of the most important and confusing areas for contractors. Technology. You know, every shop today is being bombarded with new software and tools. Some of it can truly move the needle, but a lot of it just ends up wasting time creating headaches. And to help us sort this out, I have Jenny Benbrook from Powerhouse Consulting Group. Powerhouse is a service titan, titanium partner and one of the top consulting firms in the industry. Jenny and her team have worked with hundreds of contractors to optimize servicetitan, build technology roadmaps, and help eliminate wasted spend. Today's episode, we're going to cover why technology roadmap is just as important as having a marketing budget, how to strategically build your tech sac so it supports your business goals and some common pitfalls that contractors fall into, like duplicate tools, unused licenses, things like that. So, Jenny, thanks for joining me.

Thank you so much for having me, Bill. It's always fun to chat with you.

It is awesome. Ben, you guys had a booth at the front of. Front and center of the show right when you walk in. So there was no excuse for contractors not at least seeing your brand. And then you had two sessions that you did right. And I both of them. How did the show go? I would imagine you got tons of interest there.

We did. We did so well. First of all, I, like I said after our first, our first session, it was awesome to see you in the audience. I, I think I told you, I locked eyes and I said, ah, a friendly face. Okay. So, you know, when you're on stage, it's always good to find one or two people that you can spe speak directly to so. And we've had so many thoughtful conversations about tech in the trades and what contractors are going through. So. So it was great to see you supporting that message at Pantheon. We really appreciate you being there. But to your point, we. We kept saying, I'm not sure what we did to get so lucky to have that booth front and center, but it was a wonderful entry point for contractors before they entered the mass trade. Tech was everywhere. New products, AI, everything was just to sort of walk by our booth where we had the chance to remind them, you contractors, you have an advocate. You know, you're going to see a lot of stuff, a lot of it's good, proven products that will truly operationalize parts of your business. But understand, be diligent, know what works for you, know what you need, and sort of go in with blinders instead of going in and getting completely overwhelmed by what was in a trade show. So the positioning could not have been any better.

We were really thinking, yeah, if. I would think that even if somebody didn't, if someone didn't stop by your. Your booth and talk to you, they would have been incredibly overwhelmed by AI and all these options. And if they did talk to you, then they would have gotten. Been able to relax, not get attracted to that, the shiny new object, and just say, okay, I know I need some of these tools, but we should probably be real strategic about implementing them, you know.

That's right. That's right. And that's really the theme that we went with this year at Pantheon was the whole concept of shutting out the noise. And so at a high level, the stage that we set on stage was that technology has evolved so quickly over the past few years where businesses have gone from implementing and managing one to two pieces of software to run their business to now we have 10, 15, 20 plus. Actually, we were just looking at the survey results, you know, the survey we took during the present.

Yeah. Which was great, by the way. Not everybody had that survey. Those. And I documented or took a note. That's Aha Slides or something.

Yes, it's Aha Slides.

Yeah. So I'm going to use that for a talk that I have to give in Miami next, next month. So thank you for that referral.

Let us know if we. If you have any questions. We've been using Aha Slides for quite some time, but it's great. Engage with the audience. To know. Well, to know or to validate that the message that we're giving is going to be helpful. And so one of the questions that we Asked on that survey was how many different software tools are you currently using in your business? And 80% of the respondents were using six or greater tools. That's quite a bit. And then we had it was like 10% using 11 plus. I can't remember what the exact numbers were, but it definitely validated that there are many tools that a contractor is faced with in order to run their business today, not just their primary FSM like service titan, Field Edge, whatever your, your call taking and dispatch software is, but, but also all of your marketing tools, your financial tools, your sales and proposal tools, your inventory tools. And now we have the concept of AI which sort of blankets over everything. And so we have all of these AI based reporting tools that are claiming to pull data. And what's happening is it's a snowball effect of misused or underutilized software starting at the foundation. So not getting the most out of Service Titan paying 100% for it, but.

Only 100% all in. Right.

Or not knowing what these tools can use. And so when you do hear about a shiny new tool, you know, maybe somebody on Facebook spoke about it or this influencer talked about it, you say, oh my gosh, I need that for my business. You sign up for it, you implement it, and six months down the road you find out you already have it, you know, or you implement it without a plan and you're not using it. So we've seen this snowball effect getting bigger and bigger where contractors are really experiencing a lot of software or technology bloat in their business. They have too many tools that overlap that aren't implemented correctly. This is causing a lot of waste in their profit. So if you think it's wasted time from team members trying to figure out wasted sales in the field because you don't have consistent workflows or processes that you're following. And of course the wasted spend, the investment and all of these tools that you may or may not need for your business. And so what we wanted to do was stop the noise, just stop the noise and remind contractors that technology is something that can be built out on a plan and used as a lever of growth for your business if that's done intentionally. So instead of buying every product that you see or every new tool, develop a plan for your business and then you know what you need and it helps you sort of block out any of the other influencers or, or tools that you have.

Sure, yeah. I mean not, not all tools are applicable to the size business that you are. Right. You know, like wink Toolbox who somewhat someone, a company that you guys work with has this OCR scanning tool that works for inventory. Well, not all contractors are going to be big enough to have a very, you know, well set up inventory. When I was a contractor, we were about 4 million in revenue and we can have Service Titan's inventory module turned on and, and perfect. We had some inventory, but not enough to need a OCR scanner tool. So I think that I know that working with a company like you for a implementation plan and an onboarding plan would be really beneficial for contractors because I've done it myself where I've got a new tool and I've given it to someone on Stack and said, here's this new software, here's the login, kind of figure it out. And that was okay at first to do that, but then they don't adopt it. And then every time you do that over and over again, they go, oh, here's another tool that he's given me that he's not really serious about using. He doesn't really know anything about it. And they don't put a lot of effort into understanding how it fits. So after a while, what I did is I, I spent more time figuring out if it was good for the business and I did a lot of the onboarding and then I was more prepared to be like the internal support for the tool for the, for the people. But that was back before AI and all this other stuff. And I mean, as a contractor today, it's, it could really be a mess for your business to just start adding all these things and hope that they plug right in, you know, and you.

Make a really good point. I'll sort of continue to use the same inventory example that you use because of course we have what's natively available in Service Titan, for example, but then we have other vendors, you know, like ply that offers enhanced reporting and inventory capabilities or you know, WINK reports, as you mentioned. And what we find is there's a huge interest. Once a contractor reaches a certain size, there's a huge interest in implementing a proper inventory system. That's another huge waste on your P and L. And so having that process in place and early on we became preferred implementers for Service Titan's inventory module because it is complex. A majority of contractors that would come to us and say we want to turn on the inventory module, the desire was there, the understanding that this would help mitigate inventory loss on their books, all of that was there and in place. But what was not was the understanding of what foundation the inventory module needed. So is your price book set up? Well, you know, do you price book is what we call it internally. Have you, you know, do you have a purchasing process in place? Do you have point stakeholders at your company who are going to own these different processes, the warehouse point people or your purchasing and what does that look like? And so before saying yes, we're going to turn this on, it was first, let's build your foundation so that when it is turned on you, it's successful. And when we think about the opportunity that's in front of us with AI or really anything that these, these new technologies promise us, it's all built and reliant on your foundation. And where Powerhouse comes in or teams like Powerhouse, there are so many great consultants out there. Where we come in is to find first ensure that a contractor's foundation is in place. So how are you using Service Titan? How are you not using it? Well, which parts do you not use? Where do we see issues in your workflow or your data? And so really evaluating the core piece of software before we start layering on. Because if you layer on that shaky foundation, yeah, all of that doesn't mean anything. And to your point, it's not just how is it implemented, but who is implementing it. Are we documenting the processes so that as the company grows and changes, everybody's still doing the processes the same way, ensuring the long term validity of these tools. So it can sound quite overwhelming. As you experience in your own business, there's a lot of ownership that is involved with getting the most out of software. None of it is plug and play, none of it.

I think that there is the, the wish from contractors that it was right, like the same wish that you have that you wish you could bring an employee into your organization and you don't have to train them and they just hit the ground running and they understand your software and your, and they can adapt to your processes or maybe even make your processes better without any training or anything. I think there's that myth around AI that it's going to, if you have no process for it, it's just going to create that for you and guide you along and just basically take over and connect everything together. And that is not true at all today. Maybe it will be someday where we have AGI that will be able to come in and almost be like a consultant. But if you don't have, like you said, a good foundation, even processes that you can write out on paper, you can't automate them and then you can't add AI to that. You can't. And, and so that's why the implementation of these tools has to be really slow and well thought out. And that's why I did a post on Facebook the other day that said that not all, every company is ready for AI. Some of them aren't ready for it at all. They shouldn't, they should just stay away from it. Shouldn't even say, yeah, and, but it's, it's so AI is very, very noisy. Right. And talking about that Service Titan, you know, they had their atlas, which I believe would be an AI agent. That's how you would kind of categorize it. And they're trying to bring all of these third party tools and all of the AI into Service Titan system, which I like because I would rather have the least amount of tabs open in your browser, the easier it is to manage it. But do you think that what they're trying to do with this atlas is maybe too big? You know, like, can they pull this off, this full automated everything to the point where you don't need as many third party tools? What do you, what do you think about that? I mean that's a, that's a mountain. It's all, you know, knowing what I know about AI, sure. Wow. One company to do that, that would take, that'd be pretty serious.

Let me think how I want to answer that. Do I think they can pull it off? Yes, I do think they can pull it off. But I think what we will see is exactly what we see with Service Titans tools today. It's not one size fits all and while it will prove beneficial in some areas of the business, it's going to be lacking in other areas. And we will find products that will need to either enhance or fill gaps in what that's currently offering. So I think it will certainly revolutionize what's being offered today. And of course the idea is to aggregate as much of these tools as possible, but the reality is the tools only cover so much of what a contractor needs and we still find ourselves in a position where there's third parties that all they do is focus on this one area of business. And for some contractors that may be a better option. So I think it will streamline it for a percentage of the market. I do not think it will be the overriding solution for all.

Yeah, that would be, that's the dream, right, where you've had an AGI that would do all that. And I think that what you talked about before really comes down to someone has to own in that in the company has to own that process. Whatever that tool is doing, whatever that AI is doing, they have to know what the inputs and outputs are and they have to check it and make sure it's working correctly or they're just relying on the software to do it. You know, and that comes down to your documentation documenting and adding sops to the company. That this is how this actually works.

Yes.

And you can look at this and see how it works.

You mentioned something earlier and, and I was happy to hear you say it because I've often as of recent, I've drawn this comparison and, and I've actually, whoever I'm talking to, I'm like, try it on with me, see if it feels right. But if you think about your software as one of your employees, so when you bring on your employee, as you said a little bit ago, you don't just set them loose and say, hope you make it. You know, you can read my mind and do everything that we want and know the business.

Right.

Why would we not take that same mentality to software that we're inviting you in to help run the business to a certain extent. Which means we have to feed that technology. Our business, our businesses processes, our goals, our team members. We might utilize tools differently depending on our internal capacity. So that's just implementing is ensuring that the tools are set up for your company, not just out of the box, plug and play. I really think of any that are out of the box and plug and play.

To be quite frank, I have one that I created that's out of the box, plug and play.

Do you. Okay, mother.

Yes, I do. Right. But all it does is take a Service Titan call recording. And as a recording is available in Service Titan, our AI grabs it, transcribes it, goes through the AI assistant that I built after. Oh man, a long time to make sure it was perfect. Gets summary and sentiment, sends it back into the job. So it goes in a job note or a customer note. And if the sentiment is negative, if there's a potential for an upset customer, it just sends a either a slack message, Google Chat or an email to the CSR manager and says, hey, you might want to review this recording. What I like about it is there's no onboarding to it. Just those things just start showing up. But that is not how most tools are. They require.

That's very you and far between indicative of a tool built by a contractor.

Yeah, right. Yeah. Like how much management do I have to.

Right.

Do I have to have a separate person to manage just this tool and sometimes you need that. Right.

And well what we see a lot of is if, if you'll recall we, we laid this out in that presentation and it's, it's what we aspire with our software. What we aspire to. So when we think of software we efficiency, you know, lower overhead, higher profit margins, lower job costs. Right. So we think about all these different things that technology supposed to give us but then the reality that we experience are frustrated team members, you know, lost jobs, higher overhead and so we can kind of get into that. But when you're implementing these tools out of the box without building processes or workflows that are specific to your company but also identifying who owns this process, not just the implementation but the ongoing management of it. So one tool that comes to mind and it's available both within Service Titan and then of course there's third party tools is the AI sales coaching tool. So oh yeah, like Sales Pro or Rilla. I mean really, really slick technology. We understand how important, how important ride alongs are and cocaine best practices groups have taught this and required it for decades. So we know it's important and now we have technology that can help us to scale. So in rad of taking two or three days out of the office to go on you know, 20 different ride alongs. Now you listen to 20 different ride alongs in 20 minutes. It's fantastic.

Yeah, it's incredible. This wasn't available before AI you could not do this to scale.

But here's the interesting thing Bill and I know that, that you'll know where I'm, what I'm talking about here is it's the, the thought of these products is incredible. We all love them and get excited about what they can do but the reality that we're seeing is a lack of accountability on the contractor side. So now that we have access to all of this data, who is monitoring it, who, who's taking the data and coaching to it?

That's what data is for, right? It's to help you make decisions. And you're right. Like you could still have a service manager that just doesn't even log in to Rila, a sales pro and just. And these the guys are going to. The service techs aren't going to just get better themselves. Maybe some of them will look at it but it's almost like the service manager wants to have the technology do their job for them compared to well.

And max when think about change management and the idea of adopting a new process if you haven't had specific and clear training and instruction. It's almost a hard concept for the service manager to know, like how do I use this tool? And so we're partnered with both and that's an example of having software advocates like powerhouses. When we implement these new tools, it's not just implementing, but it's also setting the teams up for success in using them. So how are you going to use it? How are you going to read the data? How are you coaching to the data? So ensuring that we're actually getting the most. So back to the, back to the analogy of think of software like one of your human, living, breathing team members. It requires constant attention. So you're going to monitor it to make sure is it working the way that it should? So is it doing the job I hired it for? If it's not, what needs to change? Do I have to create a new workflow? Do I have to retrain the team on how to use it? Was there a release update? We see that all the time. With software moving so quickly, you could have everything built out and perfected and then service titan sends out a batch of release notes and.

Right. Who reads that? Who made changes things? Right. Who's the, who's the point of contact? Yeah, well that's great having somebody that, I mean you're an extension of the company. If, if a contractor doesn't have someone in house with the service titan and third party tool knowledge like you guys have, then they're always going to be having a difficult time implementing these things. You know, one of the things that it, that comes up is like you said, the, you know, the expectation versus the reality. So we take product like Rilla. I would imagine that, you know, during the sales process like anything Rilla's going to be like, look at this tool. And they've navigated through it so many times they can show the dashboard. And so the expectations of the manager, the owner is that we'll have this up and running quickly, easily and it'll just start working and making or saving money for the business. And I think it's nice where you guys would come in and say no, this is what Rilla really takes to get successful. You can have it on and working and collecting data but you're, it's really a two month onboarding process. Right. So just helping the contractors set the right expectations for the tools because we always like just with digital, same thing with digital marketing. I think our expectations when we add a marketing company or add a new tool is way out of line. And there. And people have to. Someone who's an expert has to bring us down to reality.

Right. And I think so setting expectations is something that I say quite a bit. Listen, we're all humans and if we're told up front what something's going to take, how much of an effort on our end it's going to be, we can make reasonable decisions for our business. So you know, if we're told, if we're told, Rila is a two month onboarding plan, it's not. But we're just going for that example. But so if we're saying that it's, it's a two month onboarding and I'm an H VAC contractor here in Austin, Texas and it's, you know, July, I don't have two months to onboard that right now. And so if I'm told that, that it's going to require that much of my time, then I can make an executive decision for my business and say, got it. I love the product but we're not going to start it until October, until it's a cooler month for us when I can actually dedicate the time on my end. But I really want it right now. I need it right now. That's where you say, okay, if I don't have the time and I know it's going to take me this much. That's when you bring in a third party professional services. So you bring in somebody who's an extension of your business, who knows the industry, knows your company and knows the technology and will help be that intermediary for you, making sure that it's being implemented and that your teams are being trained. And I think that's probably a lot of what we run into with software and even digital marketing. I have a background in marketing for the trades and so of course I've seen that quite a bit. But it's all just setting expectations. I mean, how wonderful is these marketing companies said, wow, you want to show up number one and you know, paid every time, every day, all hours of the day. Fantastic. It's going to cost you 250 grand a month. Like set those up.

Yeah, right. And you won't get any leads for six months or something. Right. Like that's things you can believe as a contractor. Right, right. You usually don't get that from digital marketing companies. Companies.

Well, it's a lot of sale, sales, sales, sale. And that's where I love what you do. I love what we do in the market and I think a lot of that it comes from both Having a background in the contractor world is understanding the nobody wants to be sold and nobody wants to be sold. They just want to know what does it mean? How will it work for my business? What's it going to cost and what can I expect? If you can just be open and reasonable about that. That's where we find you build the best relationships is setting expectations and standing by what you say you're going to do.

Yeah, that's it. It's very simple. And like you said, I think that only if you've been in the trenches as a contractor, you really know that. And I know from myself that when I engage with digital marketing companies my expectations were out of bounds. But they didn't want to tell me that because it's a, it's a fine line to say no, that's not as good as you wish it would be. They want to sell you on their service and hope that, that you either lower your expectations or they hit it out of the park. And it took me a while to work with con with work with software companies and understand these tools and work with marketing agencies to, to lower my expectations because I felt like they didn't do that for me. But I get why they didn't, you know.

Yeah. And that's, I've said that this word so many times and I'll say it again. Find your advocate. Find your advocate. Either you're your advocate for your business and so that's a lot of what we try to do is, is provide the education necessary. So for example that Pantheon presentation we provided the blueprint for tech stack evaluation even down how to build a budget and helping outer and what that look like. So either advocate for yourself knowing it's a lot of work, it's going to take diligence planning, it's going to take vetting of vendors. So a lot of work where you're your own advocate or you bring in a party that you can trust who can advocate for you.

Do you think that where service patent is today and the capability of most companies that they really should start with third party support right from day one, even before they go live? Do you think most companies could actually set it up and really be prepared to go live doing it on their own?

No. And I'll tell you why and I can confidently say this and we have proudly partnered with Service Titan 4 or 5 years. Personally I think they provide a tremendous amount of support for a SaaS company. And that's something most contractors don't realize is I know their support is lacking. It's maybe not proactive or strategic, but if you go to like QuickBooks or sales, nothing. They have a phone number. Yeah, they certainly don't have the CEO passing out his cell phone number. So Service Titan really does strive to provide a lot of support. So I want to start by saying that just to align expectations. So if your expectation is I'm going to take on a lot of this work, I'm going to line up resources internally, I'm going to have project leads and the service time and resources are going to be sufficient. Fantastic if yours. If you want a project manager, if you want somebody to provide a strategic roadmap of what you need to implement, if you want a developer to help migrate your data and you know all, then you have to reset expectations and say I'm going to pay for that kind of support. But the, the analogy that I'll give you is we outgrew our payroll software here at Powerhouse last year. And as our company grew, you know, we're, we hire from across, from across the entire country and so we have different payroll complexities. And so it was time for us to graduate into a more robust HRIS platform. And Bill, we are literal software experts. Like this is what we do on a day in and day we were not software experts in Rippling, which is the HRIS we onboard.

Is that what you're using now?

It is.

It's nice, isn't it?

It actually it is and it's robust. So think of it akin to Service Titan. It's incredibly powerful what it can do for our business. And so my partner Pam and I onboarded and implemented Rippling into our organization A year later and we are still finding Easter eggs. You know, things that either surprise extra fees, you know, we were told about them in the sales process but maybe never told it would cost more or aha moments. I didn't know it could do this. Or we're still learning and the reality boils down to you only know what you know. And so when you're in implementation, we may not think to ask all of the questions that will be relevant to our business because we just don't know what to ask until we cross that bridge. And our implementers or our onboarders just have a very standard guideline of how they're implementing all companies. And so to answer your question, I think bringing in a third party expert in that particular software can help mitigate frustration and loss in the long run because you can ensure that you're getting everything set up correctly upfront for your business.

I Wonder if, and I love calculators, I'm all about what if scenarios. Right. So let's say you purchase Service titan and it's $5,000 a month. Let's do something even, which is a very reasonable service patent payment. Right. And you go three months into it or six months into it. Right. And if you would have hired a third party support company, you would have been as far into the software and as knowledgeable in half the time.

Exactly.

Doesn't it kind of make the third party companies free?

If you think about it in that context? And you. And that's where we're bringing in the realization of tech waste. Because drawing onto it's all of those hidden, we call them hidden profit killers. But the hidden costs that you don't think about and what you'll experience over time from either a core implementation or underutilizing the tools. So in large part, these implementations cover the core basics of the platform and then over time you develop more advanced workflow and configurations or bring in automation. Of course, that's a lot of what you do to really enhance what the tools can do for you. That doesn't all happen out of the box. So you want to make sure that you have the best onboarding experience, which is an investment. And then you also have a strategic roadmap of how you're going to continue to build that software to get the most out of it. And so when you think about that, if you're Talking about maybe 5 to $10,000 investment upfront, maybe more, you know, depending on company size, what is your time and your team's time worth in lost productivity and frustration and lost revenue. Think of how that compounds over the first year that you're using that software if you go into it without a plan.

And I was talking to, I talked to a lot of contractors and I talked to some before they get on Service Titan and they'll ask me, you know, should I, should we switch over to Service Titan? Which software would you use? I said it depends on the size of your company and it depends on your, your staff skill set on, you know, adopting software, their ability to understand and then really, can you afford a third party company to help you?

Yeah.

So one of these guys I was talking to who was a service manager at a company at an H VAC and plumbing company, decided to move the service site. And I said, are you going to use third party support? And he said, yeah, we'll get somebody. And I said, well, these are the companies you should use. Budget like $20,000 for it. And the owner found some, found somebody to help that was like $1,500. And I'm thinking, well, and you're spending $8,000 a month on the software. And turns out the $2,000 person wasn't able to help very much. So they took the service manager and made him the onboarding person for it. So he's learning the software and he's doing the onboarding, but he's not doing his service manager job. So I just look at that like that hidden cost you're talking about. What did it really cost to have this 125, $150,000 a year person spend 75% of their time learning a piece of software. And then what did it cost for the company to. Right now they're about six months into it. Like how far behind are they? Because he's doing that job. Oh my gosh, it's way more than the payment to service type, so.

It sure is.

Yeah. Way more.

Yeah. Fractured attention and they're not focused on revenue producing activity. And that's, that's what we want from software. We're a, we're such a, we're a people centric industry. You know, there's a lot of fear is technology going to take our jobs, it will change them in the trades, but it's never going to replace people entirely in the trades. And so taking that out of your mind and thinking, what do we want our people doing producing revenue? We want the technology to do the operations and to streamline operations and we want our teams. So when you take your teams from producing revenue to try to figure out your software, that's where you start to see the loss in cost. And one of the, you know, you bring, you talking about that, the service manager and the decision to bring on the, the more affordable option. It reminds me of the pictures that used to go around the trades. And it was high, I'm going to butcher this. But it was something about higher, cheaper at first and you pay more in the end, but you then it would break down. Like if you're hiring just on cost, you're either getting faulty equipment or core installations or uncertified technicians. It's the same concept. Knowing the software as closely and robustly as we do, it requires certification. So we go through hundreds of hours of testing in order to know everything contractors may not know about the software. And then we retest and then feature updates come in. We retest on that. And so it's this continuous process of certification that we go through. So that when you hire us, it might be more expensive than a fifteen hundred dollar person, but you have access to certified individuals who are going to notice, who will not lead you down the wrong path, who will set you up for success immediately so that your service manager is actually producing revenue.

It should just be more expensive at first. Right. You know, and then if you were to look at the, the revenue loss versus revenue gain, I mean, you're right, that's tough to calculate those numbers to really say what if I would use powerhouse versus having my service manager in this? But because they're not calculable does it very easily, doesn't mean that they still don't exist.

Right.

So you have to kind of put some numbers towards it. Like so what is that service manager's time worth? Just in general. Right. So very, very interesting stuff. And I, I really like Service Titan, but I know that they sell to a lot of contractors that are too small and these contractors can just afford the payment to Service Titan each month. So they're not getting anything out of the software. My feeling, when we started with Service Titan we were about, oh, maybe less than 3 million in revenue. I felt like we were too small at that point to really take advantage of the full platform and that we should have waited probably till that 5,6 million in revenue as an H Vac contractor. And when I first went to Service Titan years ago and wanted to switch over because I've tried every fsm, they told me you're too small. And I was a little like. But they were right. They were right. They didn't want unhappy customers. But as they got bigger, they sold to all, you know, all of the 10 million, $10 million contractors either invested in their software or they're just not going to. So if what size contractor just for H Vac do you think would be about the size you want to make that Service Titan switch? What do you think it would be?

Minimum 3 million. Anything below 3 million I would say is, is pretty tough. And then when you're looking at about that 3 to 6 million range and you're in growth mode, this is where we get into a bit of business discovery. So what are the company's goals? You know, what's your growth trajectory? Are you planning to add new services? One big one is do you hope to sell? If you hope to sell, it may make sense to prematurely get on the software because that's when you start building the processes and you have your tech stack set up, which is incredibly attractive. As you're aware, new private equity and so you really have to go through a bit of diligence on your own and say, you know, do I really need it at that point, probably not. But depending on what the business's growth goals are, it may make sense to make that investment up front. And so we, we try to stay away from, we try to, we, we stay more brand agnostic, software agnostic. When it comes to a contractor's FSMs, one of the things that we're also huge proponents of is making what they have work. Unless it's completely out of line with their business, it is so much more affordable to make what they have work than it is to switch an fsm, the switching software, over and over again. It causes delays in the business, it causes frustration with the team, it causes issues in the field. And so when you think about that, our goal is, okay, if you're on Service Titan and you're really unhappy, let us show you what it can do first. Let us show you, even if maybe you don't feel like you're large enough, let us give you quick wins. Let us show you how we can use Surface Titan to automate processes in your business that will make it make more financial sense. So being more brand agnostic gives us the freedom to do that where we're champions for what the contractor's on because we know the true cost of trying to switch over and over again.

Yeah. So if you're on House Call Pro or Field Edge, would this be. Do you guys have a service where a contractor could have a call with you if the contractor's thinking about switching the service site and you can go give them advice and say, oh, I probably wouldn't do that. So you have these things in place first, right?

We do. So that would be our contractor Resource Planning, which is really the whole premise of a lot of what we've spoken about today. So just to quickly, to succinctly hopefully identify our two different services, our primary service and what we started in business with was optimizing Service Titan, helping contractors get the most out of that tool. That was five years ago when we started. And as I mentioned, the ecosystem has changed so drastically just in the past few years where we went from one or two, maybe a couple marketing tools to now hundreds and hundreds of options all on top of this FSM you're not using correctly.

So there's just going to be more right coming out, just more right training.

That is not staffing. But. So we developed a Service Contractor Resource Planning which allows us to meet with a contractor, evaluate their business Identify what their technology budget needs to be to get them to the growth path that they're looking for, but also consult and advise on which tools they should be using, whether it is their fsn. If they're in the right FSN platform, we'll evaluate how they're using that first and foremost before we start adding on additional tools. So the result, and this kind of goes back to what does the investment look like? One of the pieces of research that we shared at Pantheon was the average contractor experiences about a 25% waste in their tech spend each year. And that's from duplicative spend, underutilization of tools. We find all the time contractors, like, I forgot I signed up for that. And they've been paying for this tool. Right. So if you think about 25% loss annually just because you're not using software correctly, that's massive. So if you can meet with us once a year, evaluate your business, evaluate the budget, and then build an evaluated tech stack, that is what's going to be your vehicle for growth. So under that contractor resource planning, we would provide that type of assessment and analysis because then we have that deep business discovery.

What do you think is next on the roadmap? What do you guys. Guys have some. Something coming up that's real different. What, what's. What's next? What's the, what's the future look like? If you want to. If there's even any clarity on the future, given all this AI, you know, what do you guys, what do you guys have coming down the pipe?

Yeah, yeah. So I mean, AI, right. AI is coming down the pipeline. And the way that we see it is really in the data realm. Everything that we do truly relies on data. The validity of the data, the access to the data and understanding what the data means and then creating plans from there. So we'll be using AI and data visualization tools pretty heavily in the future to not only report on operations. So think of operational KPIs, but also your financial KPIs, having those married together for a true picture of health for the business. And then we think about now, how are we managing all of these tools? How does all of the data come together and create a story of what needs to be worked on today? Where are my opportunities? So that's really what's coming down the pipeline and that we're building out in beta right now, is reporting utilizing AI.

Yeah, which is great. I think that AI is great at scrubbing data and grabbing insights from it. That if you were working in Excel would take a long time to get.

Yeah.

Hopefully AI doesn't make stuff up with that. So there have to be some guardrails set up because I know it never likes to say, I'm not sure it just makes up AI.

It just makes to Hub. That's right.

It just makes up.

Really. We see that and why I mention what's on our roadmap with an understanding that there are tools in the market that do similar reporting functions or data aggregation functions. The missing component though is trusting the data. And so if you're using a fancy tool layered on top of Service Titan and Sage intact or whatever, and pulling together all your data, but none of it's actually right, if you have broken workflows and books don't make sense, well, then everything that is being reported on is quite useless in helping your business. And so taking the product expertise, the contractor expertise, ensuring that systems and data are correct, and then layering on the reporting, that's really what we need to take into account when we think about the, the future of data.

It's still, I mean, there's nothing worse than putting a dashboard up on a screen and going over it with your team. And everybody says this is wrong. Yeah. You know, you'd be better off not having a dashboard at all and just going on your feelings of how the business is operating than putting up the wrong data. I've done it before and if they see something wrong on it, they just dismiss that dashboard completely. And now the meeting becomes where everybody's just trying to verify data by clicking around Service Titan. But, but Service Titan, you can, you can put bad data into it. It's possible. It's a big system and I would imagine a lot of contractors, I think that that would be pretty common where they can't trust all of the data and then the reports are bad and then the dashboards are unusable.

And that's probably one of the number one things contractors come to us with is a distrust of the data that they're seeing. You know, and they're, they're very quick things that, that we can look at. One of my favorites is when we see CSRs that have 100% call booking rate.

That's good. That's good stuff. Yeah. When you're incentivized from that. Yeah, we, but if you, I mean.

Even little things like that. But you know, some of the, some of the bigger, more egregious ones, like think about memberships, how much is unknown and that's when there are not definitive processes in place for how to sell a membership or membership tights. I mean, the membership cleanup projects that we've done are incredibly expensive, but that's just an example of it's a systemic misuse of the product and it leads to clunk, clump, clunky data over and over. And now you're going to try to put a reporting tool on top of that and it's trying to pull out information from this pile of bad data that you have. That's where we see the tools not matching what they're intended to do. So, you know, if I'm an owner operator, everything's going to be fine. When I have access to all of my data, I'm going to be able to hold people accountable. I'm going to be able to report to stakeholders and. But you know, to your point, when you're reporting bad numbers, that's your one shot and your team's now lost trust in you and the software. And so it just can get very bad. And regardless of the tech that's in front of us, that element of, of nurturing and managing your software will never go away. Just like it will never go away that you nurture and manage your real employees, your human employees.

So, but as an, I mean, wouldn't it be nice if you could just, if I could just send my credit card information to a software company and then my business just starts running. Sort of like a drop shipping, right? Or buying Airbnbs. It's a, it's the desire for humans to make a lot of money without having to do any real work. You know, don't we all want that?

Maybe that's the next thing we shouldn't, we should invent is, is the, the true plug and play all in one software.

I thought about how that might work and I was going back and forth with ChatGPT and asking ChatGPT if the technology exists for it to do it. And it said it's not ready yet. But I thought that what it would be is it would be a interview. It would start out with an AI agent that's interviewing the company and all the key players in it. And it would build the software based upon the company's current processes. And if they, if they're pro, it would also interview them based upon those processes and help them refine them if they weren't ready to go. And if they didn't have a process for it, it would utilize best practices. So I'd imagine a, if it's still in a browser, a service Titan interface that is completely customized to the workflow of that particular company. And I believe that AI will be able to do that in the future. And then on top of that would be an AI agent that would understand users, keystrokes and mouse movements to understand their intent of working around the software and basically say, okay, you're not using this, right? This is how you use it, right? Or I think you're trying to do this, this is how you do this. Basically like having a staff member from your company sitting next to every person, coaching them and everything. I don't. I would think that that would be something that could, you know, exist in the future, obviously stages. But that's kind of what I believe people think AI is capable of and what it does.

But it's not, right. I think we're still a ways away from it.

No, yeah, definitely. Definitely some ways away. But you guys, I'm sure, will be one of the first people to know if something like that exists, because you must have to evaluate a ton of tools.

Yes, tons.

All day evaluating.

We have a team member and that's all he does. That's all he does is he is very much an expert first and foremost, and service tie in. So the critical component, as we said, is knowing exactly what service titan can do, trying to keep as much natively as possible. But he researches the market, interviews vendors, vets, vendors, interviews our clients, our contractors. His sole job is understanding what's in the market, how it works, if it's a valid product, if they have a good reputation, if they do good work, and if we'll welcome them into our partner network. And so a big part of the way that we see ourselves as being an extension of a contractor's business is when we make a recommendation, we need to know this is a product that will work. This is a product that will share in a partnership with us where if it's not producing what we thought for any reason that we'll collaborate together, we'll come together to make it make sense for the contractor instead of just watching that turn of tools over and over. So that is something that's critical to the success of that CRP or contractor. Resource planning is.

Pardon me, right. Like contractors do that themselves, they evaluate tools through demos. That's takes a real skill to understand if that tool is going to apply to your business. And you really would have no way of knowing if it. If the tool does what the salesperson says it's going to do, because there's not like a lot of reviews out there on every tool. Some of the Stuff. If you search online, unless you have experience using it, you don't really know. And someone like that staff member that you have, like, that's a. There's a lot of skill and a lot of experience in being able to evaluate those tools. And I think that would be very important too, for contractors to be able to lean on that instead of trying to do it themselves.

Yeah. And so let me give a little, little tidbit or piece of homework, I guess, to your listeners. When you're evaluating a tool, you know, evaluate two or three vendors. Don't just interview one, but have a list of questions. Maybe it's this five questions. Ask those same five questions to each of them. So, like end to end, what does a product do for me to have access to everything you just demoed? Is it included in the cost you share me?

Yeah.

Or is there additional fees? That's important because you have to run a cost benefit analysis. You might really, really want that tool. And I rehab promises. But if it doesn't fit in your tech budget, in the budget that you set forth, you can't have it adhere to the budget, you know, grow into that tool. Otherwise you may not realize the return on investment that you want. So write down the same five questions. So why am I seeking this tool? What's the problem I'm looking to solve? And then write down the five questions that you need to know. What will it do? How is it implemented? What type of ongoing support do you provide? What's needed on my end, you know, how much of my time do you need? Am I given a project plan? How much does it cost? Are there any hidden fees? So that's our recommendation is when you are diying this research, always interview multiple vendors. Don't just stop at one and then ask the same questions to each vendor to ensure that you can make a good decision.

Gosh, I think it would just be easier to have you do that. Right. You know what I mean? Like, that sounds like a lot of work. It's so much easier to click a button for a half hour demo, show up not prepared, get excited about what it can do in the end result, and just click buy it. Now. That's so much easier. Right? So I think it would be better to just have somebody have the pros tell you whether or not this is good or bad.

I do think that's the future that we're headed toward. Bill. It's not that it can't be done. It's just that requires a significant time investment and a learning curve. And so taking that learning curve and applying it to every piece of technology for your business, it can become very overwhelming. And like we talked about earlier, it could take your attention off of other parts of your business. So as the owner operator, is that really where the time is best sent? Or can have a trusted advisor that knows your company that can do this heavy work for you and then present you with a plan.

This is relatively new in our space to have to analyze an entire tech stack and look at all these AI tools. Before it was just a couple of different things, but we outsource all of the things that we know professionals can do. We don't do our own accounting, tax preparation. We outsource that to a cpa. And so now that we're using these software tools, there's a lot of stuff we should be able to out. You should outsource with that too. I don't know why contractors don't do it. Maybe they just don't think that they, that they should or that there is professional help for this. I'm not, not sure why they don't.

Yeah, well, so we were, we were really on the, I, I would say on the pioneering front of service titan consulting. Being one of the first to partner with service Titan and grew quickly alongside them. We saw a large change in the market from five years ago when we started. It was such a new concept of bringing in third party support for service titan. Now it's really commonplace. You know, I think most contractors understand that there are companies that specialize in service titan that can help them. Yeah, the idea of tech stack evaluation and planning is completely new. So we're introducing this to the market because I, I've called this a huge unspoken problem. It's like we can all feel the weight of the, the technology overwhelm, but nobody's really articulating why it's happening or what's going on. And so we started trying this concept on probably two years ago, maybe two and a half years ago, when our clients, our service titan clients were coming to us saying, should I buy this tool? I just heard about this new company or I just signed up for this, can you implement it for me? And we look at them and we'd say, well, why did you sign up? Yeah, we're already doing it. And what I realized is it's all of these flashy, shiny sales tools and objects and everybody has good intent. You know, these tools shouldn't, I'm not villainizing them. In fact, as I mentioned, many of them are our partners and they offer Incredible products and services into our industry. But you have to know when and how to use them. And that's where it starts to get difficult and confusing. And then as we talked about over the show, you start layering those tools on a shaky foundation and then all of a sudden you're like, well, that tool's not working for me. Well, it's not working for you because you were feeding it bad data. So it goes back to your foundation.

It keeps going over and over again with every tool that you buy. And I think a lot of contractors are going to get kind of sour to AI because of every tool that you buy today has AI in it somewhere. But if you don't adopt it correctly and you don't have the plan like you said, eventually you're going to stop believing that AI works well. Right. And that's, that's not true. It can be incredibly beneficial. It's used right, but then also really bad if used wrong. So I don't want contractors to get to think that this is some hype technology that's going to pass. It's not. It will always be there. It's just not. Not something you can just press a button and you're good to go.

Right? Yeah. So one of the leaders, a leader of one of the prominent coaching groups I love when he talks about the reality of business coaching. He's like, oh, it's not sexy. And it's like technology. Love it, it's fabulous, it's shiny, it's attractive. They've got the greatest salespeople and the coolest websites and, you know, very sexy. But like the work to get it to work for you, all of that, you don't see that. You're so blinded by this. And so the reality is it the work that we need to put into these tools to get them to do what they promise will never go away. And so we have to approach technology with that mindset. It takes work. And then the decision is, do I have the capacity internally to give it the work and the attention it needs or do I bring in a third party?

That's something that we just haven't thought about as contractors yet. I think other industries have been down this path before. Right. Any company that's ever adopted something like Salesforce has had to understand that. But this is very new to us. I would imagine that the PE companies, the PE owned companies understand about this or maybe really? Oh, that's right.

Yeah. So we do, we do contractor resource planning at large scale as well. Because that's a whole other level of complexity when you're looking at rolling a tech stack out not only the parent company or the corporate level, but also down to the subsidiaries. And so the concept itself, to your point, it's not new. It's enterprise resource planning or erp. And we so if you now see contractor resource planning, we do it specifically for contractors. But the concept itself of building a tech stack is not at all new. It's new to our industry. Because if you think about we were slower to adopt technology in the tr.

Oh yeah, we really were.

I mean, I think I still had people wanting to find tax me stuff in 2020.

Yeah, yeah, really. I mean, how long was it till we adopted cloud based software and iPads in the field? Well, I'm glad that companies like yours exist that can help contractors out. I love it. Love that. So awesome. Thanks for listening to the Home Service Hacks podcast. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform so you never miss a future episode. For more information or to connect with Bill, you can check us out on Facebook @ServiceTitanHacks or visit our website at ServiceTitanHacks.com we'll see you next time.