Why Most Contractor Referral Programs FAIL (and the One That Doesn’t)

Welcome to Home Service Hacks, the podcast where we explore the cutting edge innovations that are transforming the home service industry. I'm your host, Bill Brown. After running my own Inc. 5000H vac company for 12 years and spending 25 years in the industry, I'm passionate about helping contractors leverage technology to work smarter, not harder. Today I'm excited to introduce you to Brendan, co founder of Volca AI. His company is revolutionizing how contractors generate and manage referrals through intelligent automation with the seamless integration to Servicetitan. Of course, if you've ever struggled with consistently capturing referrals from satisfied customers, you're gonna want to stick around. For those of you joining us from the Servicetitan hacks community, you know we're all about finding those game changing tools that save time and drive growth. For new listeners. Welcome to your new resource for practical tech solutions in the home service world. Now let's dive in with Brendan and explore how Volka is transforming the referral process for contractors across the country. Your. Your company's in New York right now, but you went to school at Denison. You know, just kind of shooting the shit a little bit. What? What had you go to Denison? It's kind of a middle of nowhere school.

It's definitely in the middle of nowhere. I grew up in Maryland and so played lacrosse in high school and went to Denison for lacrosse, so. Oh, really nice campus. It was a bit of a change from the east coast, which I liked even though it wasn't that far away. Up in a hill in the woods, awesome campus, great academics. So I thought it was a good fit across the board.

Did you know that Steve Carell also went to Denison? Right. I don't know.

My roommate played on the club hockey team which also played on.

Yeah, awesome. Yeah, he went on to be pretty successful, I guess.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He comes back and surprises all the hockey guys and then he was in one of the acapella groups or one of the acting groups I think, and he'll just come and show up at their shows, which is really cool.

That's awesome. Yeah. Heck yeah, man. Hadn't seen him meandering around New Albany. So where I'm from is what, maybe 15 minutes from where you went to college?

Yeah. Really close. Yep.

Sweet. Awesome, man. So let's get into Volca and the first question I have is, you know, what led you to realize there was a strong need for a solution like this in the market?

Yeah, so I, I think there were a couple things that led to it Honestly. So my co founder and I grew up together and I grew up in a trades family and so all my summer jobs were on. We're doing contracting and renovations, flipping homes. And so I was always doing kind of the weird things in between the lines. Grew up with my friend. We did landscaping together as well, worked in facilities. And so we had a background to us and we had a general understanding of the industry. Both of us worked in tech the past couple of years, but basically came together last year. He was crushing referrals at his company. He sold a product to Shopify brands. So like Under Armour and New Era, Buck Mason. So these E commerce brands and what they did was their biggest source of lead gen was through their referral program. So he came to me one day and he was like, this works very well for us. Where do we think this could stick? And where do we think we could build a product around it? It took a couple months and it took hundreds of conversations, but we realistically knew the entire time that home services was probably the top option for it, just from our background and our understanding of the industry. That was spring of last year and so we spent the entire summer cold calling home services business owners, basically just asking them, hey, what do you think about referrals? What do you think about Legion? What would you do better if you could wave a magic wand? Things like that. So there was no product, there was no sales pitch or anything. It was kind of just like an audit of the market while we had free time outside of work.

That's great. Just asking the people, having some sort of solution and idea and then verifying the. What they usually call in SaaS, like the product market fit, Right?

Exactly Correct.

You know where, where a lot of SaaS, the businesses just create the product because they can, and then, then they try to find the audience and try to sell it to them. Whereas if you can just ask them, you know. So that leads into the second question. So before something like this, what were contractors doing to get referrals and was it. Were anything, any of the items that they were doing effective?

Yeah. So I think the majority of the market in some way, shape or form was advertising a referral program to their customers, to these homeowners. However, I don't think many people had structure behind them. It was more of a, hey, if you ever have a friend, please send them to us, we'll pay you. That's great in theory. It's really hard to scale that though, because that's an empty promise if you can't do it. The way that we found it looked like after all those conversations, hundreds if not thousands over the summer and fall, was that people told homeowners as part of the checkout process they had a referral program or they would send them a text blast or an email blast after saying, we have a referral program. From there it was on the homeowner to send leads to the business or to talk to a friend. The friend needs a service. And then they're like, yeah, tell them when you sign up that like, I sent you over because they have a referral program. Again, great. In theory, really hard to scale, really hard to actually do in practice. When things came into the business, everything was manual logging and CRM. It was the CSR saying like, hey, did somebody send you our way? If it was a web form, they were hoping that somebody left a note that said they got referred. Everything was being logged in CRM, like Service Titan housecall Pro by the staff internally. So nothing was automated. It was kind of a pain in the butt. And then from there, if they ever wanted to pay people out, they had to know when a deal closed, they had to know if the deal came from a referral. And then at that point, stacks would stack up in the back office on people's desks, or the business owners would have to go get cash from an ATM and go deliver it to somebody in person. Just had the high failure rate. People were not able to keep up with their own referral programs, which basically led to most of them dying. You don't want homeowners to be told that they'll get something in return for helping your business out, and then they get nothing because you can't scale that process internally. And so that's what we found was the big theme of referral programs in the market.

So I think we talked about this before where I was trying to build a referral program and I went about it many different ways. So I had a heating and air conditioning company for 12 years and you know, to give a homeowner $25 to have their friend do a service with us, or even up to $200 if they did a full system replacement was a no brainer because that was lower than our customer acquisition costs. But what was the formal process to do that like you were talking about with scaling? Because, you know, anything that's great that works well needs to be able to be scalable, at least in the, in the short term. Something sometimes that isn't infinitely scalable, but it'll get you to a certain volume before you have to, before you have to upgrade it. So I started looking for solutions online like I always do, and the solutions that at least the companies that were good with SEO and things like that were E commerce based, where they were really easy to track because there was, you got your own link and everything. And there was a company called Referral Rock or maybe Referral Hero, something like that, $200 a month. And they had a similar workflow to what you guys do, but just designed for if you're on the computer. So it just didn't seem to work right. There wasn't any text messaging that, that went out at that time. I feel like text has just got huge to the point where don't call me, just text me. Right. So I tried to make that work. I couldn't make it work. And so what ended up happening? Well, another thing going back, we had like a referral link that was a QR code on the thank you card that we gave clients, which I think was helpful. I think that was a good second, like second step. Right. I think that's like the best you could do without the right technology, something like that. But I know that there wasn't an official way to pay out on these, on this and track it. So I would look through Service Titan and I'd look at the lead source and sometimes it would say referral. But it wasn't, it didn't always have the previous customer's name attached to it. And then you had to search that name and, and then like you said, you had to make sure that you actually did the work for that. And so this is really bad. But here's what happened. Customers would sometimes call us later, like the actual person who referred and go, hey, my friend bought a system from you. Can you send out the referral money that you know? And we did a $200 gift card system. And it's like, oh my gosh, how sloppy is that? That's total crap, you know, So I just kind of abandoned it. That was something that just. We couldn't use the right technology to, to get it. And it wasn't available in Service Titan. It just wasn't. Yeah, it was not. We, the customers didn't get paid and the referral program was not as strong because of that, you know?

Yeah.

So I feel, I feel the pain.

I think something you said too, that's important is those other ones were built for e commerce brands. Not only that, but they were built for a web experience where you probably had to sit on them to do a Lot of work. I think in our case, in home services in general, no technology is good technology. And what I mean by that is we don't want people sitting in Vulca all day long. Volka exists in the background and it's doing jobs for you and it's populating your CRM and running this entire referral program on autopilot because we don't want you to have to click a button to prompt anything. The entire program should run on autopilot and work extremely well. And I think that's necessary for home services because you have people going in and out of the office every day. It's rare that anybody is sitting on a computer for the entire day. And so it's a priority. Like, if you can't build something that can operate in the background, chances are it will not be adopted. I think two good examples are ProBook. ProBook is the automated dispatching tool. And then Pika, both of those, they work in the background. They do the jobs of people for you. Pika. In terms of automated rebate filings, like you don't need somebody back office, somebody in the sales team doing that. It takes care of that process. And then ProBook is just smart dispatching, sending text to the right jobs. Those two things get things done very quickly without somebody having to man the tools basically all day.

Yeah. I mean, the software.

Yeah.

The software that has little to no onboarding is the software that gets adopted. Right?

Correct.

You know, and you, if you go look at a back office person, you look at a CSR dispatcher and they have 10 tabs open in their. On their computer. That's just such a disconnected system right there. And from what I've seen, yes. Anything that you can plug into your process that either can't be bypassed or is which like you have like this can't be bypassed. It just works in the background. So I think that is very important because as contractors add all these Basically plugins to ServiceTitan, if you give them more work to do and then you put that work in the hands of a human, now you have to make sure that you monitor it and manage it. And, and a lot of times managers are just kind of like they pick their battles. Right. Of what they want to. If you have a list of 30 things that somebody needs to do and you adopt a new technology and now it becomes 35 things, then a lot of times that those aren't going to get done. Right. So I think that is important that it just gets done in the background. So, yeah, awesome. Man. So, yeah, they don't really mess. They don't really spend a lot of time in Volka's system, which is just similar to a pipeline, but they can get the information out of it to make sure it's working. That's great.

Exactly. I think when people spend time in Volka, it's to look at the reporting and the analytics, basically look at the big picture, which is great. We do want people to manually do that. That's not something that's an automated job. Like you want somebody in your office to review how well things are going. Aside from that, they don't need to be in the platform to push things along with their referral program.

That's great. I really like that. I think contractors will really like that too. So I think your inspiration and creation, the third question I have, I think you addressed that at the beginning, so I'm going to move on. So how does Volka simplify the referral process? And what do you think makes it unique to other solutions? First of all, I mean, is there anything else out there like this for contractors at all?

Yeah. So for referrals, there's not. The way we think about our product is our entire referral program product is built around a single phone number. That phone number we call the referral hotline. So thing I addressed at the beginning was businesses told homeowners, hey, we have a referral program. Please send us a lead if you ever have one down the line again, rate where do they send it to? Because if they don't know where to send it to and you have referrals coming in in 15 different directions, it's pain in the butt in your back office. They're not going to know where to tag them, track them, manage them, anything like that. So what we do is we have technicians basically sign homeowners up in person as part of the checkout process with that phone number, get one to one marketing consent. Homeowners then know because they're prompted with instructions, this is where I refer leads in the future. I can make money doing so. And this is how I actually do it. And all they do is they text in a lead. They say, hey, my buddy Bill Brown moved in down the street, here's his cell. He needs a new H Vac system installed. Once they send that text message in, what we do is we pull information out of it. That's a new booking and service title. So your sales, your CSR team, whoever it is, they're contacting Bill Brown. They're saying, hey, Bill, Brendan sent You over or Brendan sent your information over. We heard you need a new system installed. Mind if we swing by late this afternoon or tomorrow morning? Again, nobody's sitting in Volca. Volca is not being used. It's that phone number. From there, what happens is anytime leads close or jobs are sold to people that got referred and are tagged as vocal referrals and service tenant again, something we do on their behalf, payments are automatically shot out to whoever referred them. So you buy a $10,000 system. Second, you do that and it's marked as closed one or sold in service Titan. If the program's advertising up to $300 for a referral and that's the text message I'm sent when I sign up for the program, I'm immediately getting texted out and saying, hey, thanks for referring bill. Here's $100 for doing so. We appreciate referrals more than you know. Hope we can do this again. And I click on that link and I get paid that $100 via Venmo, Cash App, PayPal, Amazon gift card, Visa, gift card, bank wire, whichever I choose. So it's end to end. Fully automated company isn't doing anything happens in the background. But it hits on all three of those points that we learned were massive pains over the summer, which is people don't know where to send leads internally. It's really hard to manage and create those leads in your CRM as a business. And then third, how do you know when to pay people out? How do you know when jobs close? How are you going to pay people out for the jobs? Are you going to do checks, you're going to write checks, Are you going to go pick up cash from the atm, et cetera? All three of those points are addressed and automated when you use Volka.

That's great, man. It's so simple though, right? Doesn't it sound so simple? And solutions that I've adopted that are, you know, in my business that are really simple are the ones that are really like hacks. Right. Something that's real simple that returns a lot of either time or revenue or savings. Right. So this is a, this is a revenue generator and then it's also a savings because the cost per lead is lower than. And the conversion rate's much higher on a referral. Right?

Yeah, it's time saver too in the back office staff, which is good.

Can you share with me like a real world example of a contractor who kind of adopted this and saw and came back to you with a feedback?

Yeah. So we actually had A customer In Ohio, H vac contractor, 16 or 17 technicians, I think first 30 days fully onboarded on the platform. I believe they got, was it 14 referrals? I believe 10 of them were qualified and turned into estimates. And then from there. I know initially when we did the report, they had closed at least 50k in revenue just in that 30 day period, just from those new referrals created out of nothing. And again, that was all coming from signups. So I think they got 100 referral program signups that turned into 14 referrals and into open job estimates of 10k plus ticket sizes. I believe they were all installations. So it works very quickly and very efficiently as long as you can get people the phone number and get people to sign up for the referral program. The referrals come in, it's just a matter of time.

You just have to put it in your checkout process. Similar to way that you ask customers for reviews, right?

Exactly.

Do you guys also have anything for reviews at that time or is that something you're thinking about adding?

Yeah, so we're actually just coming out within the next couple week. Our reviews product, it's going to be very similar, but hopefully better than what Service Zone is doing for reviews. And it's all going through that Volca phone number on behalf of the business. So we have reviews, we have referrals, and then we're going to have a bunch more all going through that phone number. With the goal of kind of something I say internally, like we build software for homeowners even though they don't know they're interacting with us. Like we want to make the review process better for homeowner. Referral programs, communication of the business in general, all of that is targeted with the homeowner in mind. How do we make that experience better? And then also in the back end, like how's that shaped out for the business? If we make the experience better for the homeowner, it will undoubtedly make the experience better for the business as well.

That's a great statement because I've talked to a lot of contractors, I talked to a lot of tech founders. I just like to talk to people and people sometimes they'll go, well, how did you come up with that? And I said, well, I try to keep the homeowner in mind and I think that contractors especially, I think they take their employees, they consider their employees when making changes and the business. But I don't think that they think enough about the homeowner and the homeowner's experience. What the homeowner, how they feel when they wake up and they, it feels a little warm. And they walk over to the thermostat and it says 80 degrees. That because as a contractor you don't experience that level of anxiety or emergency, it's hard to have that empathy for the customer. And so then you kind of just, you know, it's just another person with an AC that's bad. It's just, that's every day for me. But for the homeowner, that's once, maybe in a few years. And so I think, getting, I think that the great, the really good contractors. I know that the really good contractors make decisions based upon the homeowner in mind.

Yeah.

Because those are the people that pay for everything, right?

Yep.

So that's great.

Yeah. Same thing with us. If we build products that are not a good experience for the homeowner, we're never going to catch on. Contractors never going to buy us once they realize we're no different than everybody else that's in the market. That's Churn immediately. So we don't want to be like that for sure.

So when it comes to Churn and things like that, your, your system, is it month to month, is there a sign up fee or anything like that? How's that work?

Yeah, so we charge off the number of technicians at a business. We found that that's the best way to judge the size of the business. Today we don't do rev share, so if you generate 100k in sold revenue or sold jobs through Vulcan a month, we're not charging off of that. It's a agreed upon price that we discuss with the business up front, just off of generally what the size of the business is. From there, we'd be happy. If somebody's paying us $20,000 a year and they make $400,000 in jobs from using Volka, Great. I would love to lose that battle. That means we did a very good job with them.

Yeah, right. That's the. When the ROI is that high, then people are gonna stay with the platform, right?

Exactly. And so that customer in Ohio was one of our first customers, paying us a very small amount, basically the minimum, because we worked with them to build out the product, do a ton of things, they dealt with us a lot. And for them to make 50, 75, 100k in a month, month and a half, that's great. That's the best thing ever that could happen to us because it makes a really big and loyal fan out of somebody that's using us.

It feels good as somebody who's created it to watch somebody use it and benefit as much as you were hoping that they would. Right. I mean, you don't want to build a product that when you get it in the hands of the person, they're. They think it's crap. It's almost. It's almost like, it's almost hurtful when that happens.

Right.

It's like, we don't know. How did I miss the mark so much that this person's like, doesn't want to keep it every time.

Exactly.

Every time I lost a customer, especially at the beginning when I didn't have very many, I used that as like a serious lesson learned. I was like, man, that's. This is terrible. How could I lose this customer? And in a SaaS company and a technology company, that's super important is the quantity of customers you have. So when you were working with this company in Ohio, what kind of challenges did you come up with or did you see that kind of came out of left field because, you know, every product that you make has a curve ball. You couldn't anticipate it. What are some of those that you saw that you had to get past?

I think it's kind of a unique thing, and it's super unique to home services in that most of the businesses are pretty similar, but also at the same time, most of the businesses are entirely different. What I mean by that is they all function in a very similar fashion, but the people that work at the businesses are quite different. So if we talk to technicians at a shop in Ohio versus technicians at a shop in Florida, one of those shops might have technicians that are super confident at running through a sales pitch at the end, whether it's for a membership program or asking for a review or asking for a sign up for a referral program, that's great for us. They might do not as good a job on the house as the team in Ohio, but the technicians in Ohio might be awful at talking to homeowners. And again, this isn't describing our customer. It's just the way we think about it is we need to understand how the people at each of our customers work. Because we cannot onboard or implement the same across the board without understanding how those people are, how they operate, and kind of tailoring that experience to them. Generally, when we have a full understanding of how the personnel at our customers work, the onboarding experience is easier, implementation is easy, and the results are seen quickly. If we lack the understanding, ignore it and skip past it. We are in Trouble. That's. We found that out very quickly.

So the solution is what it is. It's the same solution, but being able to convert that in the language that the customer understands, gets excited about. That's true. So it's not a one size fits all. Not a one size fits all onboarding process, even though the end product is the same. Exactly. So what's the onboarding look like when somebody signs up? How's that process go?

Yeah, so when somebody signs up, we collect certain information so we can facilitate referral payments on their behalf. So we can build out the web application, buy them a phone number, things like that. That's usually a day or two of work on our end to do that. Aside from that, we try to get on a plane, get in person with all of our customers on board, and implement them in person. Because like I said, if we want to truly understand the personnel that work there, we got to meet them. And it's really tough to get 20 technicians on a call at 7 in the morning when they're all being dispatched out to jobs that day. It's a lot easier when we just go to the office at 6:30 or 6 in the morning and meet them all, bring in breakfast, get to talk to everybody so they know why they're using the product and then we know who's using it. That way we make the entire process smoother down the road. Because I can say, oh, actually, this is a real example. We just onboarded a company in Denver and never would have known this if I didn't go in person. Went in person, joined their 7am meeting with the techs. One of the techs was talking about how he was excited the Steelers drafted Will Howard. And I was like, oh, are you a Steelers fan? He's like, yeah, I shouldn't be, though. And then he explained to me he was from Maryland. And I'm like, oh, that's funny. I'm from Maryland too. And we found out we lived or we grew up 20 minutes away from each other. Similar age, grew up right next to each other. I never would have known that if I was on a zoom call. And because of that interaction, I talked to him during the onboarding meeting. I got more information out of him and the rest of the guys in the room because it was a normal conversation. I wasn't some startup guy on a zoom call. And it made the entire process easier. And so we try to have that for every single customer that we onboard. Be in person, talk to them, level set, be normal, don't be the super techie people coming in the door. I think part of that we can attribute back to, like, my family background being come from contractor and construction and real estate development. Like, I was around these guys growing up. I don't want to flip on, like, the tech guy Persona ever when I'm around these people because, again, it's like, it's something I had to do working in tech for a couple years, but it's not what's natural.

They don't resonate with that, right? No, you know, they just don't. So, yeah, I feel you on that as a tech guy and business owner, operator. And I went to school for computer science and H vac. Not at the same time. It was a very different conversation you'd have with the frontline workers. And I really enjoyed it. But they. You're right. Getting a team of people to get in the room at 7 o' clock and be awake and conscious, man, I hated doing that remotely. It was not. Yeah, like, you just saw a bunch of heads in there and they're just kind of like looking around. People are walking in and out of the room because they're nervous about getting to their job on time or they're talking to installers. And it's just those morning meetings. You have to have a person in there that's leading them over. Zoom. It's just. It's a mess, man.

You know, I think the process is the same too, and I'm trying to get over it where we have a call and they're like, all right, come Monday morning and onboard us. And so I get on a 8pm flight Sunday night. I fly four or five hours. Time zone difference. It's like one or two in the morning, I'm going to bed, I'm like, oh, my God, this is awful. And then I go into the meeting and I talk to them and I leave and I have the best time ever. And it reminds me, like, this is why I'm doing this. Because every time we do this, we walk away feeling great and like, we're going to help a business. And then we have months and hopefully years of working with them and doing what we promised in that meeting. So it's always a good feeling once you walk out the door.

That's awesome. So getting a chance to actually meet your customers in person with that. There's a lot of events in the heating, air conditioning, home services space. Is Volka going to be attending any of these events, having a booth or doing any speaking?

Yeah. So we just sponsored our first two this spring, which was cool. We sponsored Rilla Masters and then Epic in Orlando, which is an H VAC event for this fall. I know we are sponsoring Pantheon. We're a service site and official partner. So we're sponsoring Pantheon, we're sponsoring Service World Expo. I assume there's probably at least five more in that mix. TBD on which ones we'll be going to. I saw a couple other that are happening in Vegas, I believe.

So Vegas seems to be the place, right?

It does, yeah.

Have you ever been there before?

Rilla Masters was in Vegas, so that was the first time I ever went.

It's a wild place, man. It's just.

Yeah.

What I found is you have to stay in the hotel of that the event is in. Because a quarter mile in Vegas, if you're walking is far, many, many miles. It's.

If you're driving in the traffic, it's. It's brutal. But, yeah, that's what the real interest the real event was. And I learned that quickly. I was so happy we stayed in the hotel that the event was at, because if not, it would have been.

A nightmare for sure, man. Yeah, I'm going to be going to Pantheon. I probably will go to Home Service Freedom, which is earlier that month.

Home Service Freedom is another one.

It's in Vegas. I just like talking to contractors. That's what I like doing. And I also like going around to vendors and seeing what new products they're coming out with, because you can't really see that in a demo. And sometimes it's also difficult to find those solutions. So when you go around a conference or an expo and they have all these vendors, I learned a lot of different things of. Of what I could offer my customers from those vendors when I was a contractor. So I always love going to those.

Events, you know, Home Service Freedom. So last fall was we hadn't quit our jobs yet and we were walking around trade shows in jeans and T shirts. Didn't have a company. We had no product, anything. Just to meet people and learn what was going on. And I credit a couple people at home service freedom 2 that immediately come to mind. Will Gao at Rila and David Zhao, who's one of the founders at Pika. Immediately when we walked in, we're like, go talk to that guy. Go talk to that guy. Go look at that startup. Learn what they're doing with their product. They set the stage very quickly for us. I think without those two conversations happening, this probably wouldn't happen. We probably would have been lost, like headless Chickens walking around that event. So the people in the industry in general are great as well. Whether it's a contractor or somebody young working in a startup that really cares about these contractors. You can find good, good people across the board, which is good.

I don't know if every industry is like that. I've been in this industry forever and it's a very small, tight community of people. They do. It's really small and very tight. And most of these guys who have these really impressive businesses, I mean, where they are, have more revenue than I could possibly imagine that me ever having when I started out, are really helpful and genuinely want to help other contractors. It's not, they just, they don't see it as a competition thing. Now maybe, maybe in the office, if the person's in your same market, there's always that healthy competition, but there just isn't a lot of bad talking about one person to another. And this is a big reputation game. And I think that the Internet's made that smaller, you know. Yeah, I think, I think it's just the struggle of running a contracting company and how even though it's simple, the idea behind it, it's really, it's really, you have to hit everything right, you did everything right and maybe a little luck too. And so I think that we kind of look at each other as all being in the battle. It's like if you have ever done CrossFit or anything like that, or worked out really hard after you, you go through a brutal workout, you look at the other person, you're almost like brothers in arms.

Right?

And so that's kind of what the contracting space is like. And at least from my experience, we're all just kind of like, well, here comes the summer, we ready for this? Right? It's like getting running on, catching up on a fast moving train, or getting run over a bus. It. And sometimes it feels like both.

Right, I agree. And one thing too. I worked in AI for the past couple years and the one thing I really hated about working in AI and B2B SaaS and tech in general is that the entire industry was remote and there were no genuine interactions between people. You never wanted to actually care about what somebody was saying on a call. Whereas in home services and working with contractors, it's the opposite. Like we get invited to family golf outings with our customers. Now we go visit them, just have fun. Like it's a great experience doing that and none of it is fake. It's all a legitimate feeling that we have that they have it's It's a good bond that you can build with everybody.

Yeah. Then no matter what, with technology, AI all this, the human relationship is going to be the thing that we crave the most. And, and that brings us the most, the most pleasure, I'd say, at the end of the day and.

Exactly.

And. Yeah, I know. I see. I never see those events being replaced by zoom or anything like that because meeting somebody in person is just such a. So much bigger of a difference.

And it's the best experience. Yeah.

The other thing I'd say about contractors is that one of the things that's really fulfilling doing it is that a lot of times the, the majority of your employees who work in the field, it's kind of a second chance industry. Whereas, not that they're felons or anything like that, some of them are, but, you know, it's. That's how it is everywhere. It's a lot of times they come from backgrounds where they didn't have the greatest opportunities. They, they didn't have parents who stayed together or parents who were educated or made lives easier for them. And you get to see them go from barely being able to afford to come to drive to work, barely being able to afford to make their car payment. If their car breaks down, they're on the weekends fixing it themselves. Right. To being able to go through that progression of having money, having a family, learning skill, and it's really, really enjoyable. As a contractor, I think that's a lot of the reason the contractors do it is because they get to see such a big impact. Whereas we're talking about this. AI A lot of these people coming in as even the frontline workers, I'd say in a tech company, they're educated, they've had opportunities. You don't see that as big of a contrast or difference between where you're at and where they could be. So I think that kind of makes it better. And I didn't know I would enjoy that as much. But as my company got bigger and I started to hire more people and we started to, you know, be profitable and, and provide raises, that's what kept me going. And when I moved and operated the company remotely, I lost that state. I was like, I just lost it. I was like, I.

You don't have the connection anymore.

You just don't. Right. They're just, they're just a person and they become more of a number. And these, there's some of these contractors that are huge that still focus on making it a great place to work and you know, so that's pretty, pretty awesome.

So the best people you can be around, which is why I enjoy it so much.

Never leave this industry. I'll never leave it. I just do different things in different capacities. Right. And I, I wanted to start a new contracting shop in the future when after private equity starts, you know, offloading their, their companies or messing them up and things like that, um, just to get back to that point with the people and being able to implement all these new technologies like what you have, that just make your business crazy profitable. Crazy profitable, right? Like, where could you buy something like this that has that big of a return?

It's crazy.

It's crazy.

So I think we see it not even people using us. Like when we were really fresh to the industry, the best businesses were using four, five, six tools across the board. But they were four or five or six tools that operated on their own, on autopilot in the background just to make everything smoother and faster for them. And they crushed. They're very, very profitable for sure.

Man, it's awesome. And today with, with AI, those tools come out so much faster, they evolve so much better, and the onboarding's quicker and it's awesome. So talking about that future, you know, you being in the tech space and being connected to contractors, what do you see? How do you see AI helping contractors or changing this industry in the future?

I think there's two ways to think about it. I think one is there's going to be a lot of AI startups that enter this market that do not understand home services people or contractors in general. And they're people with MBAs and really good degrees, or they're coming from investment banking or consulting or private equity, and they see home services as an edgy market. They're like, let's go build a product for it. That's going to happen. There'll probably be 20 or 30 of those by this time next year. On the flip side, I think there's going to be the companies that really understand contractors and home services professionals in general. And they're only building things that they are hearing as pain points and that they're getting feedback on from customers. And so I think that's the bucket we would like to fall into. And I think that's what we've done a good job of to date, is our product roadmap. And our AI theories and ideas are strictly dictated on what we hear from customers and what we hear from people at trade shows. That is what dictates and builds the future of Our company, not what chatgpt says we should be doing or not. What some huge VCs market outlook look like, looks like for AI and home services. Like, I get it, I get why they're doing something like that. It's not what's happening when your boots on the ground and you're talking to people. So I think a lot of what this AI wave is going to be around is replacing tedious manual tasks in the back office. That's one side. There's going to be making sales an easier thing to scale because that's a challenge, huge challenge. And I think there's going to be a lot of tooling built around technicians and the technician experience in general. And that's something we for sure want to dive into more as technicians and then obviously sales and marketing. But I think that technicians are the pride and soul basically of all these businesses. What can we do to make life easier for them and to make their job a more profitable thing?

I agree with you with applying technology to technicians because the technician's job is the most difficult in the company. Let's be honest, what we need to face is so much. I need you to be very proficient technically and if you're new to the industry, I need you to also be good at customer communication at the same time. So I need you to learn right brain and left brain things, skills in tandem. Man, that's a lot to ask from somebody. So you think about, you think about like a H vac tool, like most of the guys would know this who are listening like a pair of digital gauges, right? And that's just something that you give to a technician, you teach them how to use it and it, it increases their confidence and helps them become more accurate at their job. And now instead of spending all this time dealing with the, the actual hard skill for it, we can put some of that time into the sales and customer communication. But from what I found, there's not a lot of tools to help with that at all. And your buddies at Rila are one of the first that have come up with technology that helps the communication side. And I'm very interested to see how that progresses moving forward. But like you said, whoever comes up with that and refines it is going to need to do it inside of a lab. And that lab will be contractor shops and that will be in the truck.

Alongside people, in person with the end users.

Right. And the companies that are not willing to do that real research, which is being with the end user and seeing them operate your tools, they're not going to be the ones that make it. There's no way.

The ones that sit at home and they don't. Yeah, the ones that, the startups and the AI companies that sit at home and they run their businesses from the shadows and remote, they're not going to go anywhere. It doesn't matter how much funding they have, what their backgrounds are if they're not in person with all of these contractors and home services guys.

Yeah, it's going to take too long. It'll just be luck if they get a product market fit that also has good onboarding and becomes sticky and doesn't have that crazy churn rate. It'll just be lucky, right?

Yep.

And yeah, you can't, you can't just throw money at everything. And it helps, though. I'm sure it helps. It would get you visibility. But at the end of the day, the way that contractors make decisions as far as buying products. Because we spend a lot of money. Right. I mean, some contractors unfortunately spend more money than they bring in and, and we're just so shy about adopting products in general that we usually end up asking our peers, what kind of experience did you have with this? So a lot of it is referral based.

Exactly.

Which is interesting that we go from homeowner to contractor. You know, kind of ties it all together. Volka is the referral engine for that. Well, that's how we make a lot of purchases too, you know, especially on the tech side, so.

Absolutely.

That's awesome, man. So I'm excited to see what's, you know, how this, how this changes the landscape and how this makes money and saves money for contractors.