The Power of OCR Technology with Timothy Wood from Wink Toolbox

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 to pricing, marketing and management. If it's working in the field, you'll hear about it here. Let's get into it.

Tim with Wink Reports. Welcome to the podcast today. How you doing?

I'm doing great. How are you doing?

Awesome. I'm doing great as well. Happy to have you on the show and we're just going to dive right into it. Okay, sounds good. Can you give me the backstory of Wink reports? How did the companies start?

Yeah, so our CEO and our CTO were the original owners. They were working for a technology company and saw that they, you know, had a lot more opportunity creating their own software and doing it within the unique business like their clientele. Meaning they first started with inventory and eventually branched off into home service companies and found that that was a lot of their nich. And now that we've partnered up with Service Titan, that's been a lot of our clientele is people who are utilizing Service Titan to the best of their ability and want to get that extra 20% that Service Titan just can't quite get done and they need someone to help them with that. And so really Wink is basically a connector. We connect your products together to produce reports, dashboards. We can import, export, for example. We have quite a few of our clients who are using Service Titan but want to connect that with a Google sheet or an Excel sheet and provide live data. And so we, we, we are able to do that. So that's kind of a little bit more about Wink.

And I know you guys do a lot of things, but what Today we're going to talk about a very specific problem that you're solving, this OCR technology. Can you kind of tell me high level, what is this technology you guys.

Have developed as far as the OCR product? This is something that I'm really passionate about because my background is accounting. I was the controller for a larger plumbing H VAC electrical company as well as the general manager at, at one point and I saw the struggles of trying to keep up with the backend side of things. Your ap, your accounting. And it's a lot of data entry and a lot of just mind numbing work of just importing, you know, PDFs of your, of your bills and Entering that for job costing or for calculating commissions. So it's, it's something that me seeing the backend work and how, how, how hard it is. The OCR product can for the most part automate that for you. What it does is it takes all of your emailed invoice PDFs. You would basically forward those over to our email. It will then take a scan of that PDF and it will extrapolate the data off of there into data templates that we can pull. And this is an AI, so it's a smart product, meaning it can learn data. If you correct it, it's going to learn those corrections and start to automate those corrections anyway. Once it takes that data set, it can then import that into your Service Titan and it can upload that PDF and it can get that purchase order into Service Titan for the job costing. If you're using the AP side for Service Titan, it can then, you know, put that into, into there for you to batch and export into your accounting software. But what I like about it a lot is not only does it integrate with Service Tie in, but we can integrate with your accounting software in most cases. So sage intact, QuickBooks Online, we can not only send it to Service Tie end, but we can also send it to your accounting software where then you can reconcile it out of there. So two different ways of doing it. You can do either one or you can do both, which most products aren't able to do. So. So that's what really gets me excited about it.

Yeah. And that excitement definitely comes from the operations and accounting standpoint of it. Right. From talking to contractors, it seems like the accounting section and inventory section of Service Titan is really challenging for them. It seems like it's one of the last things that they're able to set up and it's always a work in progress. So right now, how are contractors even solving this problem without using the technology that you guys have?

What I've seen companies doing at the company, which was Black Diamond Experts, we were part of the Any Hour group. What I saw with them and with a lot of the people in the, in the group is it was kind of a two part tackle where they would have a system where their technicians were required anytime they made a purchase. Let's say it's Home Depot, they would have to add that into their job as a material or as a purchase order. And if they did it right, which was not very often, I'm sure that as a contractor you. I've never seen one company that has their technicians do it A right and B do it all the time.

That's that 80% done right that we might as well have zero percent.

Not only that but a lot of times companies are, they're paying commissions off of the profitability of the job. So in a lot of cases the technicians is they are decent advised to attach those purchase orders because then their materials are down and they get paid a higher commission. So it's almost like a double edged sword where you were expecting them to do it but at the same time they're decent advised to do it because they get paid more if they don't attach those materials. And so that's one of the steps that is required. And the other step is kind of the backup which is a lot of companies have an accounts payable specialist which they will then have to find all those invoices and if the technicians or the warehouse put the correct purchase order number, try to match it to the correct job and then they have to manually enter that purchase order into service. Tie in. If they do it right they should be attaching a per a PDF of that and correct they if your price book is correct and your back end, you know it should be going to the accounting your GL that you're matching it to. A lot of times they don't. And so it can mess up your accounting if you don't get that side done correctly as well. So it's kind of those two sides and if both sides aren't doing it perfectly then your gross profit isn't reported correctly, you're overpaying on commissions or sometimes you're underpaying which I found with payroll. I was the one who calculated all of our commissions, ran our payroll for many, many years. If you screw up once your technicians or your your straight commission people, comfort advisors, Amber techs, they don't trust you if you mess up their pay paycheck one time. Now they feel like they have to watch every single time. So it's kind of one of those things that you've got to get it right that 100% of the time. Otherwise you get unmotivated technicians because they don't trust the system, they don't trust your. They think you're trying to cheat them out when really maybe it was their fault that their commissions weren't right. But still they're going to come back at you. So it really is massive issue and we're just wink is there to assist where you're not only getting it right but then also you're saving money and time And a lot of headache.

So if you're a smaller contractor, you don't even have the budget to hire people to manually do this, right? So you're the, the company that you worked for, you, you, you had in house accountant, you had general managers. And so these contractors that are on service titan, that are your 3 million, 4 million annual revenue guys, you're going to have one person that has to do this once a week that isn't even, and might not even have an accounting background, right?

Didn't even get to, I feel, another major benefit of the ocr. So we touched on the accounting accounts payable. But as the controller or the general manager in either one of those positions, one of my fears was always that we didn't have someone who understood the pricing. They, they never, they didn't understand what the parts are, they didn't understand what the equipment is, they didn't know what the pricing should be. But they're the ones that are pushing those and approving those and sending those off to get paid. So you, I was worried, hey, you know, are we paying the right price? Because, you know, you, you quite often when I go personally shopping and it says 499@ the sticker and you go and you scan that when you're checking out and it comes up at 6.99, you're like, oh, I'm getting overcharged. And then you might complain. Well, guess what? That's not just, you know, your Walmarts that are having issues with that. Your suppliers are having issues with that as well. So while I was doing payroll, I used to manually job. I was the one manually job costing every single one of the jobs because we paid commissions off of the, the gross profit of the job. And they were quite often where I would go into the job and I would look at our PDF of what we were getting charged. Let's say it was whatever, a 80% furnace, a Goodman 80% furnace. And I knew our price should be around $600 for that $700. And yet our invoice was showing $1600. And right off the bat, you know, red flag would come up because I understood the products, I understood our costing because I'd been in the industry for so long that I was like, all right, something's wrong. So I go to our supplier, our rep, and like, hey, you're charging us sixteen hundred dollars. I'm looking at our price pricing, and we should be paying $600 for this. What happened? Oh, crap, something happened. I'll go ahead and give you a credit for that thousand dollars. But if someone who doesn't understand that isn't having eyes on those consistently, you're just sending that off and you're paying that extra thousand dollars. Yeah.

Who knows?

Yeah. That makes a massive difference on the profitability. A what the technicians getting paid. They're going to be pissed because now they're not getting paid what they should. But then also the company is just paid an extra thousand dollars for nothing. You know, what could you have done with that thousand dollars? Invested it into a bonus plan, invested into marketing. There's quite a bit that thousand dollars could have done that would have propelled you forward. So what our ocr, in addition to everything I've already talked about, what we can do is we can have your price book in our system and we can have, once we scan that and get that price extrapolated that data, it would have been able to see you're going to charge $600. Your price book says $600. Do you want to update your price book or what do you want to do? And you can then dispute those with your suppliers because it will give you those red flags. It's comparing those. But if it is that your price book is incorrect and the invoice is correct, you can push those changes into your price book and automate your price book updating. So that's like a third thing that I forgot to talk about, which I feel is, you know, I mean, I, I've never seen any other product or software that can do even. I've only seen ones that can do one of those three things, but not all three.

Right. I've never seen it either. I understand that OCR is the right technology, but historically has not been really easy to set up and have accurate. I tried to do it with standard OCR technology and it took a very long time to get it even close with an invoice format from one supplier. And then it was 80% accurate, which meant I have, I still had to check everything. And so this technology should pay for itself. We were talking about how this technology needs to be programmed and taught a little bit. It's not something where you just turn it on and it's perfect out of the box. But the other day Wink told me that they do have a human reviewing it for a while until it gets right. So kind of tell me a little bit more about how that human review process works for the final step to make sure it's a hundred percent right.

Yeah, I mean, we're confident that it's going to be you know, very accurate. However, there's always going to be hiccups in the system. So we do have a real person, this is not AI. We do have a real person from Wink who is going through each of those and they're just looking at the PDF and looking at the data set and making sure that it looks right, that it is right. And if they find an error, they will make that correction. And then like I said, the AI will then start to correct whatever. Let's say it has like a 001 at the end of the invoice and it didn't recognize that 001. And we put that new invoice number or purchase order number with the 001. It's going to now recognize it needs to remember those last four or three numbers and the decimal. So it is going to remember those changes. And that's to make it where, you know, you're not having to worry about it as much. Instead we are making those corrections to help train the AI bot along the way. So, yeah, but yeah, we have somebody in house who is reviewing those. I would hate that job. But someone, someone's doing it.

I, I, you kind of did that at your last company though, right? You did it roundabout.

Yeah, I feel bad for her. But at the end of the day it is, we want to stand behind what we, what we are promising and we understand that there are hiccups and we want to make sure that we fulfill our end of the bargain as to the best of our ability. And having that human element to just double check stuff and help the AI along the way is the best way we can do that.

Yeah, that makes sense. So if a contractor were to have you set this technology up for them, about how long would it take to get, to start getting these invoices to go from the distributor into their system? And on average, about how long does it take for it to, to be, you know, getting near that, a hundred percent accuracy and everything.

So typically it depends on how many suppliers you have and whether your systems are, you know, set up. But what we normally are finding, the OCR does take a little bit longer than like setting up dashboards or reports. I would say normally three to four weeks for the complete roll through of making sure that all of the invoices are getting sent to the right place and the forwarding is working. And then we have all the rules in place of how you want it. Because there's so many different ways that people set up their service, tie in, in terms of what, where they want things. To go the GL mapping, whether they want it to go just to Service Titan, order accounting or to Both how the PDFs, they want those attached. So there's a lot of rules that need to get put in place. So, yeah, it takes about three to four weeks to get the full implementation. And we do. We set up quite a few meetings where we are assisting along the growth path to get it to the finish line. And then from there, once it's implemented, I would say probably longer than some people would like, but I want to be honest, I would say probably three to four months before that. I really does learn a lot of those corrections and is where I would want it to be.

You still have a human checking it, so just maybe the speed of it being perfect isn't there. But on the flip side, if you're hiring a person to do this, they're not going to. It's going to take three or four months for them to get it right. But they also can't really check themselves. Yes. Somebody else within the company has to check it right. So now another thing that I've noticed is that Wink is, is now a certified Service Titan Coach.

Yeah.

Is that. Is that how you describe it? I forget. Like your Service titan, not just a technology partner, but a coaching partner. So will you be able to help contractors set up some of those parts within Service Titan? That might not be right, you know, because you told me that everybody uses Service Titan a little bit differently.

Yeah.

Well, certainly there are some best practices. And you and the team over at Wink using Service titan on a $30 million company you probably had your styled in, would you be able to, you know, offer some of that service to help them kind of fill in those missing parts?

Yeah. Yes. Coaching, like being transparent, that is something newer to us. But what I take pride in, which most of the softwares you're dealing with, they understand software and they don't understand your industry as well. What I'm really loving about Wink, which is why I partnered with Wink and came over here, is we understand the home service industry, like, really well. We understand Service Titan incredibly well. So that is why we decided, hey, you know, why not pair our knowledge of the industry and Service Titan and become a certified coach? It is a rigorous program to become certified. Yes. We are coaches and we can assist companies not only to get the software working, but, hey, here's kind of what we've seen as best practices. Like, I've actually done calls with customers and, you know, we talked about, like, how the OCR works And we found that they had maybe some process issues. And I was like, hey, here's kind of what I've seen. Best process issue or best process practices. And here's what I would recommend you morph it into. That way it not only is going to help your business, but then also is going to assist with this OCR getting implemented quicker.

Okay, yeah, that makes sense. So Wink's integration with ServiceTitan, you have the OCR, you have the dashboards, you also have Automations and things like that. It's a pretty comprehensive connector. And also you guys, you guys create custom reports, right, which are actually pretty sometimes pretty difficult to do in Service Titan when you're grabbing data from a couple different places to get it to work. Right. Do a lot of your customers utilize the custom reporting feature as well?

Yep, Yep, we actually were. I was just talking with the, with a client yesterday where they had built. It was an incredible Excel sheet. But they had to the problem and I'm, I was kind of our analyst I would call it, where I was the one who built all of our reports at Black Diamond. And it is a struggle because you have to pull in a whole bunch of data and then you have kind of like your master sheet that does formulas to calculate what we. What you need. The problem with that is it's never live. You constantly have to refresh that data set. Maybe your formulas are pre predetermined, but then you're constantly had to to update the data sets. With Service Titan, the problem is, is they have different data templates, meaning you pull sales and it can't pull CSR data off of that template. You have to create two different data sets export vault to get the full information that you need. What Wink can do is we can pull all the data sets and we can merge, we can do merge reports and then create formulas from there. And so you can basically create what you're doing with this massive spreadsheet in one sheet. And you can make it update as often as you want, depending on what, what you want Wink to do. But you can have it refresh every, you know, every minute if you want, where you're constantly giving light data.

I would imagine that 95% of listeners, no matter what CRM they are on, have some gigantic spreadsheet that they're rocking. Right. Like I've talked to companies that are a hundred million dollars in annual revenue with a giant spreadsheet. And it's kind of like my little company spent $6,000 a month on Service Titan. And my hope when I started was to get rid of so many giant spreadsheets, man. Because I had spent, I was fortunate. I spent either fortunate or unfortunate the way you, depending on how you look at it. In my twenties I spent like seven years at a company and learned Excel very, very well. But you have to hire an Excel master and you guys kind of solved that problem. I actually, when I was using Service Mate, Wink was the reporting partner for servicemate. And so in, in that's how I originally found Wink was years before I started Service Titan. And you guys helped a lot with my reporting because you had pre built reports that were not available in Service Mate and it saved me tons of time. And I remember having my office actually work within Wink and I was able to sunset some of those ridiculous spreadsheets that we had, you know.

Yeah, so we did.

Yeah. I mean it's like, wow, I've got Service Titan as this giant data hub and then now it becomes a spreadsheet that can be broken very easily with these formulas. Right. So you know, you have this OCR technology. You got the dashboards and reporting. What kind of things do you guys have coming down the line? Maybe some products that are in beta or some things on your roadmap. What do you have that's, that's kind of what's going to be next for Wink?

It's a good question. I. We actually in the leadership team at Wink just had our quarterly and we're working on that. But it's most likely going to be very AI related, meaning where you can build your dashboards and reports using AI. You can just tell it exactly what you want and it can basically build it for you. I not saying, you know how close that is, but that is what we're looking at is utilizing kind of, you know, the future. Some people get scared with it, some people are like fully on board. But the future of AI is getting incredibly smart and impactful. And so we're going to lean pretty heavily on AI to assist us and assist us being able to take care of customers.

You guys, it seems like you have a ton of little tools and you actually call it's Wink toolbox. Right. So all kinds of little things that would benefit contractors. So they can, maybe they start with the OCR and look at the other kind of things that you guys have.

It's often that I'm talking to a client and we, you know, they're after one thing. For example, that that customer who I was saying, who had that big fancy spreadsheet spent three hours a day Building that. And it was a daily report. You know, let's say 40% of their day was spent building a report that told them their efficiency by technician, as far as how much we were paying, how much were paying them versus how much revenue they were bringing in. And kind of a billable efficiency type of deal. And so that's something that we could completely automate, save that person three hours. But at the same time we started going like, hey, we could actually help you with this dashboard. We can help you with this. So people sometimes don't come to us thinking we're going to solve one problem and after we have a meeting, they figure out that we can solve 10 problems for them. And so that, that is common where like a lot of customers of ours don't even know that we have OCR yet. They just know that we build reports or dashboards. They have no clue that we have this APOCR scanning feature. And that's why it's so important to, you know, schedule meeting with us, figure out how we can help you. Because realistically you don't know what you don't know. And until we have meetings, it people aren't going to realize how many toolboxes we have.

Yeah, that, that's great. That's awesome. To be able to get solve multiple problems within just one connector and one technology so that you don't have to add up and have a bunch of 399, 499, 999amonth pieces and parts or technologies connected to service titan. Next thing you know, your $6,000 a month, month service titan bill is $9,000 to get it to work the way that you originally thought it was going to work.

Right? Yeah. How many times have you. Well, it. I haven't been with a ton of companies, but you start with a new company and you're like, oh, you need to learn, let's say service time. So you start learning service time. Oh, now you need to learn this other marketing tool. Oh, now you need to learn this podium. And then you need to learn zapier and you need to learn and you're trying to learn, you know, 20 different softwares that the company utilizes. Whereas if you went with Wink, you, you could, you know, we could A, do it for you and B, we could probably do quite a bit of those under one system that usually learn one. So.

And learning all those things really isn't a process. Right. If the process is in the mind of a person, then the skill set that that person has leaves with the company and you have to start over from the very beginning. If you hire someone new, if those, if that person leaves or if you want to scale. So I've gone into, into contractors and seen, you know, they have their web browser up and there's 10 tabs open, each one with different software like you're talking about. And you go, and you talk to the person, you go, okay, so how's all this working? And they look at you like this is just a shit show. I make it happen despite the way that it works. And that's a lot of stress on people and AI, the more you get to dig into it, the more it's able to consolidate that down and make it so you have less tabs. So the goal is less tabs in your browser makes, makes it much easier, you know, going back to manually doing that report, that takes three hours. From what I've talked to, that's a really high level person that does that because they're the ones that are accountable for that, that data when they go to a meeting. You can't just subcontract that out to someone in the company because ultimately it's, it's your responsibility. You have to know your numbers as, as the person, as the manager. And so a high level person spending even an hour or two a day is incredibly expensive, not just in their salary but in opportunity cost. Right. So I look at that as even being in that position as I really want to get rid of any of this, this manual going through numbers kind of thing. Right. So for you going, working at Wink and going through it as a contractor, what advice would you give to a contractor who thinks that they have their numbers dialed in but you know, hasn't experienced any of this automated reporting?

That's a good question. I guess if I could kind of do it over and look at what I should have learned quicker is I guess a, anytime that you know that if you, if you're a company who is constantly feels like you're making decisions off data that doesn't quite feel right, that that's a problem. Like you have to have clean data, good data to be able to make good decisions. So if you don't trust your data like that, that's a big problem. And so you do need to figure out how to trust your data, which again not trying to sell link too much but you know, we can assist you in making it where you trust your data. So and not only that, but if you do have it dialed in, you know, that position, let's say your controller, a high Level controller. They are constantly like I don't know if you've done the training where it's about the four quadrants of where they're spending their time. And if there's seven habits, yeah, they're effective people. Urgent, urgent, but yet not important stuff. More urgent and important. And they're constantly putting out fires and you need them to make progress in higher level stuff. If you're paying, let's say you're paying this person a hundred thousand dollars a year but yet they're spending 50% of their time doing stuff that either A could be automated or B could be done by somebody who is making half the cost of them. That's a problem. Like you do need to do a cost analysis on your employees like and figure out hey, this person realistically needs to be doing a hundred thousand dollar stuff which means I need to take away these job responsibilities. The reason why they're doing is because they don't trust the data or they don't trust the person who's putting it together because it's complex. Leave the complexity to a company who can do it, you know, and automate it for you and that's their skill set. And raise that person up to focusing on building up your team and building up the sales team or building up, I don't know, maybe it's funding that you're looking for to grow and scale your business.

Like those quadrant two, not urgent but important activities.

Right.

I love that you said that because I, in my office I had a, I had printed off that matrix and I had it on the wall and I told people so people I hated being in, in quadrant one activities I was in, I said look guys, I'm in fire prevention, I live in quadrant two. So I'm sitting there and for the people that don't know where that comes from, this is a great thing that I recommend that everybody looks at. Grab a copy of Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. And it's really a foundational book for, for management and leadership and you'll see why it's very important for the people at the top of the companies to live in quadrant two all the time. But as you, as you said the in data driven decision making companies which we all want to be, that Q1 is going to continue to pop up. If you have a meeting tomorrow, you have to stop the planning phase and, and the you know, thinking about the roadmap in the future of the company and even having like one on ones with employees though that's A non urgent but important activity. So Nan, I love that you brought that up. That's such a great, great thing.

Q2, baby. Yeah, that was something that, yeah, like learning more about leadership. That was something that I think the smaller companies eventually figure out. But it took me a long time to realize that the more I, me or manager, the management or the leadership was focused on just putting out fires instead of really zoning into that quadrant two and spending more time there, which for me and our leadership team really came down to elevating the employees. Elevating employees and making sure our customers are ecstatic and want to, want to do business with us again, want to refer us and then want to leave a review. And so if you're constantly in the weeds and in the fire putting out fires, it makes it really hard to elevate the team because you're you. I heard it all the time when I, you know, whenever you hear, hey, I have a bad manager, it's probably because they're in the fire and you ask them for help or you want to be elevated and they don't have time to elevate you. They're not develop, they're not spending time on training and you know, elevating their teammates. And so zone in on those one on ones, zone in on, you know, quarterly reviews, zone on training, which is all that super important stuff that we always put to the back burner because we're putting out fires, which putting out the fires for a lot of people entails not trusting the data. And so you're trying to figure out why it's wrong and then, or creating data and spending a bunch of time.

There and you're not, you're the leadership activities. You're right. Are those quadrant two activities and you can't. I agree with you. I've been in the, in the fire mode before. An employee comes to you with something that they feel is urgent and now it's just another thing on your plate. So you're not bringing your best mindset, your best attitude to employees. And that's, that's also where you get, have retention issues. Right. And you have turnover because who wants to go to somebody that's kind of always a little pissed off? The person that should be the least busy in the company is a manager, leader, CEO. They should, they should not seem to you like they're busy doing busy work.

Yeah, right.

And it takes, you're right. It takes in today's day and age, good, accurate data. And I think that probably back when everything was on paper, it Was probably, even though it was slow and inefficient, it probably was more accurate than today where everybody just assumes it's right. And until you bring it up in a meeting and you look at it and we all look at each other and we're like, this just doesn't feel right. I would rather have no numbers than the wrong numbers.

Yeah, right.

Because then the. How much of the meeting is spent on deciding whether or not the numbers are right or even trying to audit or fix those during the meeting. Wow, what a mess. If you're in your reporting trying to fix it during a meeting, that's. You just created a fire in a meeting. Right. So that's great, man. That's, that's great. Great advice and great insight. So for those who are. Want to spend time doing leadership activities or are in leadership positions, having accurate automated ready to go data allows you to spend time doing those. And those are more meaningful.

I mean that's, that's where the scale, that's what I found is when the scale really happened, when we were able to zone in the future, zone in the, the processes and systems. I did have one more thought and this is, I don't think is talked about enough, but there's. I see a lot of owners or managers who feel because they've got person X who creates, let's say it's payroll system, you do not want to lose that payroll person. So you feel like if they quit your, your company is going to be absolutely destroyed. You put so much onus and responsibility on one person. Imagine if you didn't have that fear of losing that person who is, you know, either creating a report that you use every single day, let's say a daily huddle report. Not to say, you know, you want to devaluate the person, but this can create a lot less stress about retention if someone quits. But you know, Toolbox is already doing that for you. So all you have to do is say, hey, I need you to continue on this, show me or schedule this out for me versus that person leaves. And now you feel like your company's gonna crumble. But then not only that, but we can create those like we have those sops of what that looks like how we get it done. And then now if someone else comes in new, it's an easy training process versus them trying to teach them how they're creating those 5, 10 reports in person and scheduling all those meetings and overwhelming a new, a new employee. So it does reduce the fear and it does, it speeds up the Training process. If you utilize a company and it's.

A lot of pressure on that person because they know how integral they are to the company working. I've seen those people. They are massively stressed, which also hurts retention because they didn't. Typically, those people aren't compensated to have that level of stress in their position. And the reason that they're, like you said, that they have that stress is because they're not working within a process. They're continuously kind of reinventing it. And, you know, one of the things that I noticed as a. As a leader and as an operator was the more that I relied on that person to operate or to operate a process that wasn't dialed in, the less accountable I could hold them. Because. Because.

Great point.

To truly hold somebody accountable, you have to be willing for them to. To not follow what you say. And then that process is performance improvement, you know.

Yeah.

Plans and then ultimately termination. So you basically, you have somebody in your company that you can't hold accountable because you can't let them go. So a great process has. Makes happier employees, happier managers, and ultimately that person, if they have a better opportunity in another company, I'm okay with them leaving and going to pursue that opportunity. I. I want everybody in the company to be replaceable, and that's not something personal against them. But hey, man, you've got. You've got a company that does millions and millions of dollars, and everyone that's on payroll in that company relies on you as the owner to grow the company, to grow opportunities for them to. Plus all of their family. And now there's just a couple of people within the company that can just sink that whole ship. That's scary for everybody, right?

Yeah.

And that's where scale does not happen. So if somebody wanted to learn more information about WINK and all the. The different services that you guys have, what would be the best way to get started?

I think the best way would to schedule a meeting with us. So we, we. Bill, I'm sure that you can share a link.

I will. I'll drop it in the podcast so that somebody can just go in and schedule that.

Yeah, we'll sketch. Just schedule a link. It's going to be probably either Lindsay or myself joining that. We can go through all the different features and benefits and the products that we offer. We can get to know your. Your systems and how we can better suit you and how we can help you scale. That's really what we're about, is helping companies scale. So, yeah, that would be. I would say the Best way otherwise, you can go to our website, which is Winktoolbox.com you can schedule a free trial where you can actually trial our product for free. And then from there, if you. If you aren't able to do it yourself, then we can help you along the way. We. We can build out those reports, dashboards, ocr, whatever you're looking for. If that free product, if you're not able or you don't want to take the time, do it yourself. Yeah, give us a call and we can definitely take care of you, man. No, I, you know, I'm really excited about Wink. I'm really excited to take all what I've learned as a general manager. At one point, I was an owner of a home service company and applying that to finding solutions for people, because there are a ton of solutions that you don't even realize that are out there. So I'm really excited to talk to other people. I'm excited to meet with people. This is definitely something I'm. I'm a. I guess a geek or whatever. And so this gets me excited. Some people, they probably hate it, which is probably more reason to talk to me. But outside of that, I just want to say that, you know, I. At the Any Hour Group, the previous CEO of the Any Hour Group, he was consistently saying how he. He wants to build up the trades, meaning sometimes, you know, the world, I think, looks down upon this industry and the trades and it doesn't get the recognition it deserves. So I just want to tell everybody that's listening to this, if you're an owner or if you're part of the trades, you know, be proud of yourself. Be proud of the industry you're part of. It's an incredible industry, and I absolutely love it.

Well, I agree with you. That's great. That's great feedback. The people that work within the trades really love it and value it. It's more of the outside looking in where people kind of look down on it. And for those that aren't in the trades, go ahead and just notice that your really good service tech makes six figures a year, and it's probably not good to look down on him because you also don't want to mess with the person that fixes your toilet. No. So, yeah. Awesome. Well, Timothy, thanks for being a guest on the podcast today. I hope everybody had some great takeaways from it and from you and Wink and reach out and Wink can help you dial in those numbers and make your life easier. Thanks, man.

Yeah, it's been an honor. Thank you, Bill. I appreciate your talk.

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 @ServiceTitan Hacks or visit our website at ServiceTitan Hack hacks.com we'll see you next time.