Why We Built PhoneTap: The Call Center Problem Nobody Is Fixing

I did.

Welcome back to another episode of Service Business Mastery. You know, I finally got to do that to somebody. Tersh has done that shit to me multiple times where I'm talking mid-sentence and then he goes live and I don't know he's doing it.

And you just cut me off, man. I was telling you.

Yeah, we just cut you off, Bill.

Got back to exercising. That's all right. It's fine. Yeah.

And we're actually Tershless today. He is at an event in Florida at Jared Williams' Wealthy Plumber event. And so we have a— this is a very special episode. This has been a long time coming for Bill, Tersh, and myself to announce PhoneTap and then talk about why, why we are launching PhoneTap, why now, all that sort of stuff. But before we get into that, for those— because Bill, I don't think you've ever been on the show— could you introduce yourself and your experience in the trades before we get started today?

Yeah, my name is Bill Brown, uh, lifelong tradesman. So it's been 25 years now, man. So that, that goes to show my age, even though I look much younger than that. So I've, uh—

Are you saying you look much younger than me because my beard is all gray?

Is that what you're trying to tell me? You got this. You got a nice— like, so I'm wearing—

right, mine's white. Like, it's white. It's like Santa white. Yours has got like a little salt and pepper look.

My daughter always tells me how old I look. I'm like, I'm not worried about it. I'm 45 years old. I really This is just how it is, you know. I'm not— I'm not—

you'll look like that.

That's why I got married. Females don't look old, right?

Females don't because they color their hair forever.

That's true.

Guys kind of give up.

Yeah, we do. I don't want to do that. That's crazy. That's crazy. But, um, I still got my hair, so I'm thankful for that. But, um, I'm not sure how I did after having a business for 12 years. So just a little history: went to school for computer science, and then after that went for HVAC because I Realized that I really liked working with my hands and started a residential HVAC business in Columbus, Ohio in 2012. We grew it, uh, really good over the years, um, reached the Inc. 5000 in 2020. And in 2020, I moved to Florida and started operating it remotely and sold it— man, it'd be 2 years now. You know what, it might be 2 years to the day. It's wild.

I feel like I just remember that announcement not that long ago when you told us.

It feels like, it feels like forever because right when I was done with it, I was on to the next thing, which is—

Sure.

AI, man.

I, I feel like that's kind of the smart— I feel like with all the distractions of the world today, I feel like that's kind of the move for people. It's like they sell one thing but they already got something else cooking. Most people don't sell and it's like Now what? They have something else that they're interested in doing. And, and fun fact, actually, um, Bill was one of my first 5 customers at Relentless Digital. It was like May of 2020 or something like that.

Okay.

I don't know if that's right after you moved, or I can't remember. I think we started working with the brand that you opened up in Florida, right? And then we might have taken over the one in, in Ohio for a little bit or whatever. But it was long. It feels like literally a lifetime ago because I was The only employee at that time.

You were so cheap too. I had to use you. You were so cheap at the time. But you remember that my office was across the street? I don't mean it was across the parking lot from a well-established HVAC company. And then that whole entire street was just all AC companies, right? Because it's, it's South Florida. And you're like, oh, this Google Maps is gonna be a little sketchy because The map has you basically, has this company basically on top of yours. And I'm like, oh man, but hey, I think you figured it out.

Well, these, you know, these are all the things that most people, we won't get into the marketing stuff too much today, but like it, I learned what the Possum update was from Google, which was a couple years prior because lawyers and some of these, you know, these buildings where you have multiple offices and stuff, lawyers were cheating the system. They were renting out 3 or 4 offices so they could get the top 3 spots of Google Maps. And so what Google did is like, no, you only get one spot. I'm gonna hide all the other ones. Yeah.

So when you're—

I think you were like 200 or 400 feet away from this company that had been there for years with— had a lot of reviews and stuff, and your map was like red right where it should be green, like right at the center of it. I'm like, what the hell is— I literally threw— Bill, you made me do a lot of extra work that year. I, I freaking threw the kitchen sink at your profile until we could overcome that.

I appreciate that. Appreciate you taking a loss on me, taking one for the team, man.

But that's how all good businesses start, right? You solve a problem and then you just realize like there's much more to the problem than meets the eye. And that's really what has brought us here today, um, is the launch of PhoneTap. And we've been very patient through this process because we've had to go through the ServiceTitan Certified App process. Um, and then of course that's not even— that's After we had the app built and functional and had customers before we had to do that.

Yeah.

And we're trying to solve one of the biggest problems in the trades that doesn't get talked about, which is so, it's odd to me being a digital marketer because that's like the first, like marketing is hand, is dropping a lead off at your door, right? It's knocking on the door, say, hey, I need service. And then from there it's onto the operator or the business owner and their team to do something with that lead. And that's where a lot of times marketing spend goes to waste.

Yeah.

What's— what was your experience with that, Bill? Because I know you've obviously had marketing companies and you've ran call centers and stuff like that. What was your experience when it came to where you found some opportunity for your team to grow without having to spend more money?

I mean, that's the goal, right? When I first started, I was bootstrapped like a lot of, uh, small service companies. So every lead was precious for me. And it's me, it's me answering the phone, right? So I'm not saying I was great at at converting the leads, but I did answer the phone. And once I hired my first CSR, which was probably maybe 6 months into it, she's sitting right next to me in the office, right? And so I'm, I'm listening to what she says. I'm, I'm still on top of everything. And, uh, so if she said something to the client that I thought would hurt conversion, I would get out of my chair and go over and say, wait a minute, don't say that. And what it did is it, it led me uh, to creating better processes. So I got like a call script and, uh, you know, made a— I may remember making a form on like Google Forms that was like a conditional call script. So if they say this, do this. If they say this—

Before you could do that natively inside of like Phones Pro or something else. Yeah, you could build the stuff inside the system.

Well, I was always crazy about, you know, um, operations and getting things to be very structured. So I wanted to know where the lead came from, what their need was, uh, so I had her fill out this form. I even remember early on, uh, having her ask customers, how old is your, uh, AC system? How old is your furnace? Because I'm like, that— I think that'll be great future data. But anyhow, with that, um, It was easy to keep my finger on the pulse of the call center because it wasn't a call center, man. It was one person.

It was you and her.

It was me and her, right? It was her and I. And then as I grew and we expanded, we moved offices and my office was not close to the CSRs. And then we got multiple CSRs. And so I lost the visibility of what was happening on the phones. And with that, the visibility was now just in metrics, right? It was just in the metrics. So quantity of phone calls, booking rate. And what I found was I didn't have really good metrics on it. So because I didn't have them, I just went by gut feel or kind of like, kind of ignored them, right? I mean, there wasn't any metrics. I didn't know.

Is it, Do you think it's kind of easy to take for granted if your schedule's full? Like, hey, schedule's full, I don't really care what's going on because I need to make revenue, I need to keep these guys busy. It may not even be the best opportunities I'm keeping them busy with, it's just I'm— they're busy, so I'm happy. I don't have to lay anyone off because that's always like a big concern, especially as you're growing a business. Like, I don't want to lose my guys, right? Because we know we need them to produce revenue in the field.

Uh, yeah, 100%. I mean, if you feel like you're— if you're first place in the race Are you really gonna run and drive faster? You feel like you're winning it. And with HVAC, especially in Ohio, it was feast or famine. So, you're sitting there in April and you're running your tune-ups. If you're a new company, you don't have tons of members and you're marketing for tune-ups. All of a sudden in May or June, whenever it got hot, people turned the AC on and now you're— it's Christmas time, right? You've got the feast and you're not super worried about marketing at that point. Now, one of the things I did early was I would call— because I was answering the phone, I would qualify people when I got at capacity, right? So what do you mean?

Can you go into that?

The question of how old is your AC was highly correlated to how much they spent on that first visit. So what I found is— and I, I asked them Uh, the form would be 0 to 5 years, 6 to 10, 11 to 15, 16 to 20, and 20 plus. So I'd— we would just ask them about—

For those in the South, in the Midwest where I was from, Wisconsin, you did have systems last over 20 years.

It was so frustrating.

I know it doesn't feel like it. I'm in Arizona, I'm like, I'll be lucky if that thing lasts 10 because it's on like 11 months a year. Yeah, but it does last longer in the Midwest.

It would be a different range for South Florida, but in Ohio, yeah, you could easily get furnaces that last that long. Which I hated, right? But because I gathered that data, I was able to go back and correlate what— when somebody called and they had a need and their system was this old, what did it correlate to as far as revenue? And I found that systems that were between 11 and 15 and 16 to 20 were a lot more valuable than all the other. Um, all the other systems. Believe it or not, I'm gonna have you guess. What do you think the worst cohort of that was? The people who spent the least. What do you think?

Out of the 11 to 15 and 16 to 20?

Out of all of those. So the 0 to 5.

I would definitely think it's 0 to 5. I mean, it's under warranty, they just bought it, they don't want to pay any for any repairs, they don't— they think everything should be covered. That would be my guess.

It was the 20+ that spent the least.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

And do you have a theory on why that is?

I had 1,200 data points that were very consistent on that over a couple of years. And my speculation on it— now mind you, I didn't record all the calls, you know, like you can today. Um, I had different techs over, over that time frame, so that wasn't 100% consistent, but I think that these customers had an opportunity and to replace their system during that 11 to 15 and 16 to 20. So they definitely had some repairs from then, from that point. And I think what they did is they just— they're just the type of people that are like, can I get another year out of it? Right. So they were, let's repair this thing forever. Either that or they just didn't have the money to do it. But I thought that the 20+, when I first started gathering that data, that the 20+ would be the, the highest, right? But it would make sense. And then the 6 to 10s were great because they were, they were likely to be, uh, replacements soon, right? Uh, but the 0 to 5s weren't as bad as you think they would be unless you were the one that installed it, unless it was us that installed the system.

Okay, then I guess I was thinking like 0 to 5, we installed it, that's not gonna make anything more than some tune-ups or some, like, IEQ products or something. But if it's 0 to 5 and you didn't install it, there is definitely some potential to fix ductwork or do other things to enhance the system that they have.

We all want that replaced.

Those newer systems, they do— it's, it's like anything, right? Like, you buy a new car, you wanna make sure that car lasts at least for that first year or 2. It's like, I take care of it, I wash it, I clean it, I do all these things. I make sure the oil change is on time and the tire rotations. And then after a while, some of that stuff starts to fade. You're like, yeah, whatever. It just starts becoming like, I'll get to it. It's not as important anymore. But when things are new and you just bought them, they do seem to get more attention from the person that bought it.

We were really, um, tried to be really surgical on marketing. And one of the things that we did, and I actually got this, you know, I met you at CEO Warrior, maybe 2018, 2019. Back then before you had Relentless. And man, I remember it was New York— or it was, it was New Jersey. It was cold. Mike had us out like at 2 o'clock in the morning.

Well, and he had that room at 62 freaking degrees, dude. I luckily, I had some texts that had gone out there beforehand. They're like, bring a coat. And I'm like, seriously, for like training?

I brought—

so I started hearing stories before I went, so I brought a coat. I brought a beanie, a hoodie, like I, I was layered up. It looked like I was sitting outside at Lambeau Field in the middle of winter watching a football game, like I was so bundled up because that place was crazy.

Bring some Adderall and some, uh, some Red Bull for— I mean, I'm an, I'm an early rise, early to bed guy, and at 2 o'clock in the morning I was pretty gassed out physically and mentally, but I remember, um, the first event I went to was right after I had rotator cuff surgery, and I'm out there and what are we doing, like shooting paintballs? And I'm, I'm one-armed. It was, it was wild, man. It was, it was crazy stuff. But, um, crap, we got— you got me into that. Lost track of thought. Where you at? Help me pick up. Yeah, I mean, so, so no, the surgical, uh, targeting. So I used something called Melissa Data, which is a data enrichment service, and took all of my best customers at that time. So what it was is people that had spent over— I think I just, I cut it off at like $2,000. So if you spent $2,000 or more, then I would love to have more people like that in, uh, in the pipeline. And they looked at like 150 metrics from these people, and they weren't just quantitative, they were qualitative as well. And one of the things was, it was funny that a large majority of my customer base, like their favorite sport was ice hockey. So that would tell me that sponsoring the Columbus Blue Jackets would be a good idea. But one of the metrics that I thought was interesting was, how long did your target prospect live in their home before they became the target prospect? How long did they own it? And it was right at 4 to 5 years, was like right at the chunk of it. So we figured your system has to be of a certain age and you have to be in this home for a certain period of time. And what that did is just whittle down who we would target. And at that point, we would find neighborhoods and we'd do geo-targeted Facebook ads and direct mail and things like that. So it was, it was fun gathering data and using it for marketing purposes.

It's more fun now because now you can take like a Zillow data report. I got one of those at Professional Services too through Mike, and, uh, it was like 120 pages long or something like that. And I'm sitting here read— trying to read, you know, it's one thing to get a lot of data and then you look at it and you're like, What is this telling me? Because that's, that's a huge problem in the trades. Like ServiceTitan, you got data for days.

No problem with data. No problem with it.

No idea how it connects to, you know, that you can't connect all the things together because there's just a lot of different definitions. And it's, it's not that anyone tried to do it. It's just the way these softwares are built. Like they, they're trying to give you all this information so you can make decisions about your business. But I, I found myself being more paralyzed by looking at this stuff. And this was before AI, of course. AI obviously can help make sense of that stuff because you can feed it a 20-page report and be like, give me the top 3 things I need to know about this.

That's it. Right.

But really, we're, I mean, looking into data is how I started Relentless because we had ServiceTitan and I realized Google Business Profiles, our leads from there were spending an average of $800 more Per time we went out. They weren't price shopping us. We weren't getting bid— they weren't getting a bunch of bids because they trusted us because of our reputation at that time. This is, I mean, this is before now where there's like companies with 30,000, 50,000 reviews. This is when reviews were still like the smart companies were getting the reviews and blowing everyone else away because LSA was new. Google Business Profile was still— it wasn't like it is now with the AI overviews. But looking into that data really became— that was like my first inkling. I was like, wow, this— and you start going deep into that. And then I remember I was like, you know, I wonder how good— because when I first started a professional service, it was myself and Mo. Mo was actually our bookkeeper for like all of my businesses now. She has her own business, but she and I were the only ones in the office. So again, kind of like your situation, we either answer on the phone or I could hear. Like one of us could hear what was going on. And we always, I mean, just because there was 2 of us and we're both very experienced in what we were doing, we had a pretty good booking rate, but we did not, we took it for granted the data, what was in ServiceTitan. So our booking rate, when our answering service would answer, would always go to abandoned regardless if the call got booked or not. So our booking rate in ServiceTitan was like 30 to 33%. I'm like, there is no way that's accurate.

Right.

So what we did, we hired, we got to the point of hiring someone else. And she was either taking calls or literally going back through thousands of abandoned and calls that were misclassified and reclassifying them so I could get a real booking rate so we could figure out how much can we spend on marketing? Because is our, do we have a problem? Are we good here? Like what leads are doing well, what leads are not? To your point of like trying to get more data so we could make decisions.

But that took months.

Yeah. Because we had thousands of calls and during the summer, like she's not making any progress on that. She's just picking up the phone just like we all are. And it just became, we could never get in front of it. And it was such a problem.

Yeah.

Like it just, we never got in front of it the whole time I was there. And so when I got to Relentless, we got to the point where I was gonna grow a team. I'm like, we are gonna make sure we have people that like literally a team to listen to calls to understand booking rates. Because I know just from being in the trades, there's so much opportunity that gets— we drop it at the door as a lead, the door doesn't get answered, or the door gets answered, it's like, yeah, hello? It's like someone doesn't even want to be on the phone. You— it's usually someone related to the business owner, like they're just there because they had to hire somebody and they're cranky.

They just don't—

they don't have a— they don't have that like nice bubbly smiley voice.

Handheld hire.

And like, I've listened to some of those and it is, it is hard to listen to. You're like, and you're—

It's still hard to listen to calls anyway. It's brutal. You're just, you kind of want to go, all right, let's tell me what I need to get out of this call. You look at it and it's like 6 minutes long and you're like, okay, did they book? Is there any opportunities? What did they need? But before AI and before transcription, you had to listen to the whole thing. So that means you had to have somebody listen to all of them. And you're— and to your point, you had a team of 8 people that would listen to calls for what, like 100 companies now? But they couldn't do that live the same day.

Well, so that became the next problem, right? So we started reporting on this stuff, but during peak season, so May to September, October, and then again sometimes when there's really big cold snaps in the country. We'd have 10,000, 15,000 calls a week to try to list. We were always 5 to 7 to 10 days behind depending on volume. So by the time we, we reported to our clients of, hey, this is what happened last month, it's like, well, that was last month. Like, that's great. I know I have a problem, but I can't do anything about it because those leads are gone. They hired someone else.

Mm-hmm.

And it just be, it was like, man, this would be—

It's still better than nothing. It was better than nothing.

It's better to know that you have a problem Mm-hmm. But better than that is knowing you have a problem and I can fix it right now. Like, yeah, I can drop everything. Okay, this lead was a, you know, let's say a 15-year-old system. They didn't book because they were price shopping. I'm gonna get a manager on the phone right now because I know that they didn't book.

Yeah.

And I can try to save that opportunity cuz most likely you paid good money to get that, whether it's through an agency or just internal employees, you paid good money to get that person to call you. And then they fell through the cracks. And then, then what? Who even knows that they fell through the cracks? It's the business owner, especially if you're remote and you had CSRs in Ohio. Did you, did you really know?

I mean, unless you had no idea. I, I thought about it and I thought about it and I'm like, I have no idea what's going on with my call center. And I don't think I can really get that information accurately because same thing for you. I was looking at booking rates And then I would just take a sample of like 10 calls and look through them and listen to them. And I'm like, all right, uh, 6 out of 10 of these are accurately classified. Okay, maybe it's just this CSR. And I go to another one. Maybe it's just— maybe it's just her. No, she's 5 out of 10. Well, maybe she's— maybe she's doing it wrong or doing it purposely. No, I could see why she would pick that, right? And then I had relationships with other contractors at that time because I had done some integrations and automations in my, my company and decided, you know what, I'm on ServiceTitan, I'm coming up with all these solutions for my company, let me start a Facebook group and share those with other contractors. And so some of them I got, I had really good relationships with. I said, Hey, do you mind if I go through some of your calls? And went through like 30 to 50 calls for 6 different contractors, and they all— their numbers were all terrible, all off. The best I saw was 60% accurate. So I, I put a spreadsheet together. I said to them, this is the call, this is a link to the recording. This is how it was, um, category or classified. So was it abandoned, excused, not lead, booked, unbooked? This is the reasoning as it is in ServiceTitan. And then here's what I found, and I sent it to the owners and, and I said, do you agree with me on my classification of it? And they're like, yeah. And I'm like, okay, well, this is data that you have that cannot be trusted. And if you have data that cannot be trusted, um, I always thought it'd be better to go on gut feel than it would be on the wrong data.

That only works in like— that doesn't— it used to work in like baseball only. Like these, all these like old-time managers would go on their gut instinct. But even now, like, they literally have every data point imaginable. That's why these teams— like, I'm a big Brewers fan, small, one of the smallest markets in baseball. They literally have some of the best—

they're still around. That team's still around.

Yes, they're the first place— they're the best team in baseball this year, so I'm pretty excited about it. Yeah, beating up on the Cubs right now. So, um, but it's, it's crazy when you start thinking differently about data and the stuff that comes through your business. Now, when you're small, it's probably really hard for you to do this. You're just worried about making payroll Yeah. Getting guys to the next job, you know, just making sure you pay your supplier. As you start to evolve as a business owner where someone you can actually, like, you're not on the phone every day all the time and you can step back and start looking at your ServiceTitan or Housecall Pro data and be like, what's really going on with my business? How can I take something that— how can I get a benchmark metric? Doesn't even matter what it is. It could be in Warranty calls, it could be in callbacks, it could be in purchasing, it doesn't even matter. You take one metric, figure out the benchmark, and then figure out how to make it better. Just 1%, 2%.

I think that's a good point. I, I don't like using industry averages. I like to know exactly where am I at today with this metric. First of all, is this metric accurate, right? So if I were to run a report in ServiceTitan. And for example, one of them would be how many options do my techs give on a call, right? How many estimates do they build? Well, I never trusted any data, so I would grab a sample of, of, uh, of calls, of jobs, and I'd look in and I'd make sure that what, what the report said matched what actually happened. I did find about 35 different situations in which metrics could be inaccurate in ServiceTitan. But anyway, you look at that and you go, okay, I'm at 1.6 options on average. That's what we get. We're not supposed— we're supposed to give more than that. Okay, who's giving the most options? Who's giving the least? And then from there, uh, let's train each person to give more and more and move those metrics up. Rather than going, well, the best people give 3 options, uh, we're not there, we need to be tomorrow. Just getting a little bit better every day and moving those data points up to where they need to be every day. And, and so I, um, I always tried to think about what was possible, not what other companies were doing, if that makes sense.

Yeah, no, that's a, it's a, I think Because if you add— if I, if I put a thing on Facebook right now and you did the same, Bill, and we said, hey, what's your booking rate? Most people would say 75, 80%. Like, I've seen that. I've seen people, and some people brag, they're like 90%, 92%. I'm like, one, you can't get to all those calls. So they're like, no matter what you— for a trades company like plumbers, plumbers, I know the 3-day call board really doesn't work for plumbers because people will not wait 3 days for plumbing. HVAC, they might unless it's really hot. Like I've just seen it over and over again with clients because like I've talked to them about it and they're like, yeah, 3-day cover doesn't work for me. It just, it's too slow. I need to be out there like today or tomorrow, period, for plumbing. And so there's always opportunities that are going to get missed. It's not that your team is bad or it's like, but you need to know what those things are because that helps you with hiring or maybe it helps you like Weed out, again, to your point, like you knew which age systems were the best ones. So you made sure that was a question early on. And then that decision tree becomes, okay, which jobs can I be most profitable on and make the most revenue on so I can maximize my team's time? Because we only, every technician only has the same amount of hours. I mean, unless you work 'em like a dog, which they probably won't stay real long.

Yeah.

They have the same amount of hours per year. So we need to, again, find how we maximize the hours. Through the types of jobs that we do. If they're doing little ductwork jobs or those things are great. Like in Florida, I know some, some companies that are really well run, they do duct replacements October, November, December, January because it's not as hot. Yeah. In the summer, they're like, not touching.

You're like killing my— We'll put—

we're kicking that can. And then some of these guys will book out for like 2 or 3 months with duct replacement jobs when the attic's not 160 degrees. But you don't know unless you start looking into data. And I think the problem that I noticed in the trades, one, now we have gotten a lot more savvy since COVID and since there's been a lot of money thrown in the industry, there's a lot of training. But a lot of people, they're good with their hands. They're a good technician. They're a good salesperson, a good installer. They just don't want to work for someone anymore. So they start a business and they have numbers and data and KPIs sound like the most boring things in the world to them. To the point where like they just will not look at them.

Right, right. I mean, and those guys aren't gonna make it long term, right? You have to know your numbers with everything.

Yeah. And I find that like even with Reynolds, from the time when I started with you, I was literally pressing the buttons, doing all the work. I was the person that everyone talked to, to the point now where I'm literally spending— when I have time throughout the day is like annual planning. Going by department, meeting with my leadership team. I'm focused— like, the things I focus on now are very different than what I did 6 and a half years ago. And that's for anyone listening to this, as you should always want to be trying to level up to the point where you're looking at the whole of the business and not picking up the phone to be like, yeah, what do you need? Oh, okay, we'll run the part out to you. Like, you're the bottleneck if you Are answering the phone and taking care of those things. Now you may have to do that for the this period of time right now. Like Tersh shared that story. I don't know how many times he had one day where he had like 125 phone calls from his techs, just asking them silly questions. They hadn't started diagnosing anything. They're just like, "Yeah, hey, I'm having this problem with the system," and he'd be like, "Well, what have you checked?" Well, nothing. They're just calling them to try to diagnose the problem.

You just go, yeah, airflow.

He finally started telling them that day, it was like he finally had had enough and he decided, he's like, if you don't call me, if you call me and you do not have options on what to do next, I'm hanging up on you. And of course nobody thought he was serious. So then they called and he's like, what have you done? Nothing. Boom, click. Guy calls back, hey, I think we got disconnected.

Nope.

Click.

I remember I put together this, uh, until it—

until they got it, because he became the bottleneck and he couldn't focus on the— where the business was going. He was just— it was just existing and he was growing by default. Like Mike, Mike Aguilario, if any of you guys know him, he always said grow by design, not by default.

It was one of those— Which can still happen. You can still grow by default, especially if you're hard— you're in a good market.

Yeah, for a period. But I think—

It's painful as an owner to do that though. Like, that's not the— when people want to start a business, that's not the business that they're talking about having. When they go, oh my God, you're a business owner, it's not that type of business. The one that they're talking about is like the one that you have where you're in those— what's that Stephen Covey's Quadrant 2 activities? Ones that are important but non-urgent, the planning, And the non-firefighting type activities—that's what you want to do as a business owner. But I don't think you—you can't really get there day one unless you have—I mean, you just can't.

Unless you have money.

It's what you learn. Yeah, unless you have money. Even then, to be honest, give you money if you've never done it before, right? Well, we're dealing with that with PhoneTap.

Like yeah, we so we'll get into that in a little bit. We're already thirty minutes in. We haven't really talked about it. So PhoneTap one. It came about one, Bill was doing, Bill and I were trying to solve the same problems. I was, I was taking calls with a human team. ChatGPT came around in what, December, November 2022? I can't even remember how many years it's been since then.

Is it '22 or '23? I don't know. I've been on it since the day it came out.

It feels like way longer than 3 or 4 years ago. Mm-hmm. But I was trying to solve the same problem. So Church and I started developing PhoneTap over 2 years ago already. Like the initial goal. So like Church and I had basically just the money that we had paying a development team, trying to get this to work. And it was just slow. We had to go through 2 development teams. A lot of it was just on us because we never built software before. And then we saw that you were building Phone Call Recap, trying, literally doing this, solving the same problem and trying to figure out how we can, like, should we just team up?

Yeah.

Like, we haven't made any money, we have no customers. We're— wait, like, you're yourself included. Like, you were out money and time and investment. You had a couple, I think, paying customers, but it was a pretty inexpensive, uh, subscription. And it was like, this was like Service World Expo last year.

Yeah, it's been about—

Talked a couple times, and then it was like, I don't know if you asked or we asked, I'm like, dude, should we just team up? Like, this— we needed a technical person, someone that understood product, how to build, how to, you know, work with a developer and tell them, like, speak the language. Trish and I don't speak that language, even though we love automation. And so literally, we're over 2 years into this thing and have made no money and have spent well over 6 figures to try to figure out how to make it work because we knew we had something. Everyone's gone into like AI chat, AI voice, even ride-alongs, right? But for some reason—

I know all of those are great too. I think I love—

Oh, they're fantastic. Yeah. If, if I started a, a new contracting business, I had the money, I would 100% have them, all of those things. But the thing that we kept noticing, and, and maybe you noticed this too, Bill, is like nobody, I don't know why the call center never gets the love, even though 80%, I think Searchlight put out some data recently, like 80% of conversions for contractors are still via phone call.

It is. And that might, that might not be— that might be the quantity, but maybe not the revenue. Because here's the thing, like, if I have an AC system that's old, I still think that— and I don't have a company— that I'm going to want to pick up the phone and call them, right? So like the more expensive that something is going to be in my mind, the higher touch I'm gonna be about it. It's not going to just be a text or a form fill. I'm going to get on the phone and, and make a call. And we still see, looking at all the metrics, because we've looked at hundreds of thousands of calls now with PhoneTap, there's a lot of money that happens over the phone, a lot of revenue. And And that's just inbound calls, still extremely important for companies.

Yeah. And, and you, you know, one thing I was gonna mention before, 'cause we started going into, you mentioned the technicians you had and the, the number of options they were giving. And, you know, you start with one metric, right? Like one metric is usually the high level one. It's like, oh, on average we're giving out 1.6 options. Yeah. Every metric, metric, oh, it's like a tree every time. There's always like, okay, Well, now how I have 5 technicians, let's look at all 5 technicians separately.

Yeah.

And then from there, the base, try to come up with a conclusion of like, of those 5 and the number of options they're giving, how much revenue do they produce per job? So you can start understanding what the data is telling you. And I think that's an important point for people that, you know, 'cause metrics are, you're gonna get lost in 'em. Like it's just part of the learning process. But every, there's like 3 or 4 layers of these metrics every time. Like for instance, call booking rate, that's the one that everyone throws around on a Facebook group. But the first layer is, was it a new or existing customer? That's a big— because everyone throws a blended, we throw blended booking rates. Mm-hmm. Which are, they're not lies, but they're hiding information. Can you go into a little bit about what you've seen as far as like what information is hiding behind that blended booking rate that we don't know exactly?

exists. Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, let's think about like, um, it's March and you're an HVAC contractor and you have all these inbound calls coming in, right? And they're for existing customers that are booking maintenance appointments. Uh, well, yeah, you're going to book those calls. They're prepaid. So you're giving yourself an equal amount of credit for that Versus a new customer who's calling and maybe has a price shopping issue. So if you have a lot of existing customers, that's going to pump up that booking rate, the blended booking rate. So I look at, I mean, an existing customer and a new customer, they're both important, but they're very different. So you have to split that booking rate between new customers and existing customers and analyze them differently. The existing customers, the bookings are almost given. And we see that. We see 85 to 95% booking rates across all these companies on existing customers. And, uh, on new customers, we see, uh, between 45 to 65%. But that's just the percentage. If you add the quantities up, and you have thousands of maintenance, uh, maintenance calls, you're— you could be 95/55, but you could have a 90% blended booking rate. And if you're at 90% and you see that in your ServiceTitan, what action are you going to take, right? You're going to go do a lot.

You're gonna say, damn, my call center is amazing. Yeah, my call center is amazing, right?

So I mean, I remember, um, After analyzing all these calls, uh, from different contractors I was telling you about that I manually did it, I grabbed a meme of a guy holding a cardboard sign and I said— I put on the meme, uh, your, your booking rate and service Titan is bullshit. And that's— and I got like 6,000 views and a couple hundred comments. And, uh, I did that, I posted that in the Service Titan Hacks group. And I think most people agree that it is bullshit, but what are you gonna do about it? How are you gonna solve that, that data quality issue, right?

Nobody's gonna spend 40, 50 hours or like, we actually have some clients that had a full-time person reclassifying calls and they still were only like 70 to 80% accurate on—

Well, there's also bias in it, right? So when, when AI came out, One of the things that came out was a model called Whisper that ChatGPT had. It was expensive, but it would take audio and transcribe it to text. And once you had the text, you could analyze it through ChatGPT as well, right? So what— when that came out, I'm like, this is perfect because this is a perfect job for a robot to do. It's very— I want it to be extremely consistent and fast. And I want it to be fully unbiased. So if you have somebody working in your company who's analyzing calls, uh, are they going to analyze calls the same way every single time? And what if they have somebody they're analyzing calls for that they don't particularly like or get along with? Are they going to be—

Or on the flip side, someone who's their favorite person in the office?

Especially if you're if you're rewarding your CSRs based upon that booking rate, right? Or if that's one of the metrics you actually look at, well then that number becomes incredibly important because now you could be making changes to your staff based upon that, right? So I thought this was a perfect thing for AI to do.

Yeah, and I, to your point of where you mentioned like the blended booking rate, It makes sense. Existing customers know, like, and trust you. They've already done business with you. They've paid you. They know the techs. They just trust your company, right? So most of the time you're not gonna lose too many of those unless you're just too busy.

Mm-hmm.

But it is crazy seeing the new booking rate because, you know, we think about, think about how much money, especially with, we all talk about rising costs with advertising and Google and, ChatGPT and everything else, how much money we spend to go and find a new customer. And then we find out the booking rates for new customers is between 45% and 60%.

Mhmm.

And a lot of times those are the pricing objections. Those are things that can be overcome. Those aren't the usually too busy or I can't get to you until, like, next week type things. Those are usually maintenance calls. But these, these are like, I don't really know you. So, and you got to really sell yourself on the phone instead of just taking calls. Right? They're, they're, they're, it's a, it's a coin toss. And it's the same thing with AI, with AI voice. It's no different. Because again, new customers, that's the first time they've heard your call center, whatever your call center sounds like. And they're like, this doesn't sound like a person that didn't really tell it. Like, it's just, There's a lot going on inside of a customer's head or a prospect's head when they call your company. They're just trying to, like, something that makes them feel something. And they have, like, if they just press back on their phone, they have 4 more companies sitting there just to call. Like, you're, you're in a race.

Yeah.

Like, I literally saw someone, I think she's in the financial sector of the trades. She called 5 garage door companies yesterday.

Mm-hmm.

By the time she posted, nobody had answered or gotten back to her. And we all take that for granted. We all think all these calls we miss, oh, those are spam or this or that. Like, Searchlight's put out a lot of data on the raw booking rate, and what they've shown is that out of every 100 phone calls, just doesn't matter what the phone calls are, out of every 100, about 40 to 45 are bookable opportunities. And that is consistent across— they have over 1,000-some companies that they they look at that data for. So out of every 100 missed calls, there's probably 35, 40, 45 that your team is not getting to. And we look past that number. It's like, oh, that they hung up before I could get to 'em. Did anyone call 'em back? Do we have a system for that? Do we have a process for that?

Mm-hmm.

Like at professional services, I, I'll be honest, if, cuz ServiceTitan sometimes has a weird, um, delay. On the phone, like there's like a 5 to 7 second delay. It would hang up or I'd see the green bubble pop up and then like the phone wouldn't ring. And I'm like, okay, whatever. That was weird. They just hung up. I would— we had no system. I didn't call 'em back.

Mm-hmm.

As you know, as good as you think you are, sometimes you look back and you're like, I could have probably done a lot better. We could have probably saved some customers that we were paying for just by understanding what is actually happening in my phone and having a system. If they call, if something called us, we got to call them back. I don't care what it is. I don't care what they're calling about. We can always tell them to fuck off on the phone later. Um, if they're, you know, a warranty salesman or whatever, or someone from Podium.

Sure.

It's Podium. Podium still reaches out to me as I'm a contractor. I'm like, dude, I haven't been in the contracting world in like 5 years. You guys gotta update your list. But it's, it's wild when you start getting that data. And I feel like nobody wants to— we all don't want to have more software subscriptions, right? Like it's not something we want to do. But for me, is it better to use my time to try to vibe code my own solution because I know the problem and there's an opportunity cost there, right? Because I'm spending time on something I don't even know if I can accomplish it. I don't even know if it's gonna do it well. Mm-hmm. Or you purchase something that's a done product and can move faster. You can log in, it's connected, you get your data, you can go. And I think that's where a lot of people are struggling right now because I see, I see contractors all over the place. They're trying to like— you start seeing them in the comments, oh, I vibe coded this thing, or I built this thing, or—

and I'm like, yeah, do you want to be a software company or a contracting company, right? Is that Vibe coding by saving a couple hundred dollars a month and you having to support it, is that what's gonna finally tip your business into success? And there were, there are people that had $100 million businesses and they used pen and paper, right? I, I've, whenever I was looking for, for software solutions, I always tried to find, is there something existing that is out there that I could buy, and if not, then I'll make it. But I have a computer science background, right? So it was fast for me, it was easy for me. Now, I'm not saying that some contractors can't do that, but usually it's, it's, uh, I don't think it's going to be a great solution for most people.

I, I've told people this. I— so when OpenCLAW came out, um, and Hermes and all that stuff afterwards, I I literally kind of locked myself in this office that I'm in right now for 4 or 5 weeks because I had like 7 or 8 ideas of things that we could do that would really help us. And I wasted a lot of time. I literally— I built it and it started working, and then I don't know what— I really don't know what I did. It failed and I couldn't get it back. Like, I, I fucked it all up. I have no idea what I did wrong.

Yeah.

And then I— so I'm like, oh, gotta redo it. So I redid it again. I've set up a different structure for it. And then I was like, this— it wasn't working all the time. And I'm like, I've spent so much time trying to connect APIs and MCP servers.

Yeah.

And going into like Google and like— because Google, like, Google literally has an endless list of APIs for all of their products to try to figure out. And sometimes they have 3 or 4 APIs for like one product and you're trying to figure out which one it is to give you the right data. And you look at Endpoints. And I'm like, oh my God, I'm just gonna hire someone to do this for us because I cannot waste any more time on this. And since then, I've been a lot happier because I'm not stowing away here trying to build a bunch of— like, I have a lot of ideas just like everyone has, but sure. It took me— it took my eye off the ball for a good 6 to 8 weeks where I wasn't focused on how many leads do we get, how many we close, what's our turn rate, like focusing on the things that are actually going to grow the business where I wanted it to go. And it taught me an important lesson about unless I am the only person that can build this and it's not already built, like literally just hire someone to build it or pay for a software. And we still do, we still pay for, I mean, some softwares we've been able to come back on 'cause I have a team now that can help build stuff.

Yeah.

But it's not worth the time to lock yourself up and try to learn this stuff unless you literally are gonna sell your business and you wanna learn something new and you're like, Okay, I'm 6 months away from an exit. I'm gonna, I'm gonna start learning something new because I don't really care about this business anymore. I already got an LOI signed and stuff like that.

Was it, uh, Steve Jobs that said that focus is about saying no to 1,000 things, right? Not saying yes to things. So like, because as entrepreneurs we can do whatever we want, we can, we can spend our time however we want, right? That's the nice thing about it. And one thing that I've done, and I had the same thing, uh, same experience as you with scope creep. I can build, I know how to use AI well. I built software before AI. I can churn out products every day. But one thing that I learned was, and Claude, both Claude and ChatGPT are really good because the way I have it dialed in is I use AI to tell me what not to do. So whenever I have an idea, I, I'd say, all right, I want you to tell me how could this blow up and how— if, if it's likely to. And then also, what am I not going to be able to do while I'm doing this, right? So I only have so many hours in the day. Should I work on this? And most of the time Claude or ChatGPT would, would convince me not to do it, especially when I was building PhoneTap. I think you remember there were like 60 different things in the beta menu and the beta menu was hidden. Oh, I remember. It was hidden. I was the only one that saw it because I, I built it with the thought of how overwhelming ServiceTitan is and how many tabs and how many dropdowns. I want our customers to see the least amount of information and only what's important. So anything in beta I was working on and I was— I would go down a path and I'd spend 4 or 5 days on this and I'd go, all right, should I really be doing this? And so that's, that's where I got in that habit was discussing it with AI about why I should or shouldn't do this. And most of the time it— they said it said no. And so you'll notice that the beta hopper is very small so that we can focus on what it is that's most important all the time. And when it comes to calls, it's, is it a lead, yes or no? So was it bookable call, yes or no? Uh, if it was bookable, did they book, yes or no? And booking for me, for us, is not verbal. It is— it can be verbal, but I want the source of truth to be, is there a job in ServiceTitan attached to this? I don't want it to be where, um, a CSR verbally promised a job or appointment that never happened. I need a job number attached to it. So lead, yes or no, book or unbooked. If it's unbooked, I need to know exactly why it was unbooked. Exactly. And one of the things we found is that every contractor has a different set of unbooked reasons in their service type, just like they have different business units, they have different, different job types. And I spent— gosh, I don't— you probably wouldn't have seen it, but I know that Raina had I spent forever figuring out what are the different unbooked reasons and how can we have the least amount of them that cover all of the, of the areas. I think we got it down to 12 now. And now that we, we have it very accurate— booked or not booked, or lead or not lead— if it's unbooked, what exactly was the reason? Now we have that data and we can train to that reason. And price shopping is a, is a, a big reason, right? And that's where another thing where I see the, um, these booking rates are bullshit because it's like, well, how are all of these people overcoming all these price shopping objections? And they're not. I see, I see this, I see AI, I see, uh, Humans, they're not overcoming them. But the— what we're gathering now with the data is what happens when they are overcome. So we gather every won and lost objection within every call. So one objection would be that they had a price shopping concern, but the job ended up booking. Well, that's what builds the playbook for their company. So you go in and you'd say, all right, well, how do we fix price objections? How do we book more calls when they have that? Well, this is exactly what you say, or what we say at this company to overcome those objections. Let's copy and paste that and keep doing it. I always thought when I had— I had some technicians that were great, I had salespeople that were great. I would grab that, like you look at those different options, right? We were talking about that. I look at the technician that does 5 options, or 4 or 5 options. And I, and I'd pull them aside and said, how do you do it? What do you do? What do you say? And right, the options would correlate to higher average tickets, uh, because they put those options together. How do you do it? Okay, that's how somebody does it well in my company, with my customers, in my area. Can I— let's copy what it is that you do to everyone else. For everyone else right there. And so that's how we're doing it in PhoneTap.

And think about as a business owner being able to— regardless of whether you give PhoneTap a look or use Rilla or use any of the other softwares, imagine you come in for the day, you can look at this very quickly, and you can decide what my team is training on or where they need work. And if everything's good, box checked, I'm moving on to the next problem in my company, right? And you can literally go down a series of maybe 4 or 5, like, big metrics because there's only like 3 to 5, like, real drop-off points in the marketing funnel and the trades. How do I fix that gap? There's one stat, and I reposted it like last week because Tommy posted it. This stat has stuck out to me for years now, and it's, it's changed because this company's gotten bigger, but he literally said a week or two ago, A 1— now granted, this is an extreme example— a 1% increase in booking is $3.7 million to his company.

Mm-hmm.

Imagine knowing to the, the almost the dollar amount at when you're a $200-300 million company. We all saw his exit valuation and stuff. He knows 1%. So think about that. He's trying to get 1% better there. He's trying to get 1% better probably on each objection. He's probably trying to get 1% better on tech conversion, maybe 1 to 5% better on average ticket, 1% better on getting reviews. You do those things over and over again. Success— you're not lucky. Success comes to you because you're focused on the right things that are gonna move the needle in your business. And I think that's where, if you're gonna invest in any software for anything, Stop investing in these like $49 tools that don't really do anything. They're just like a subscription that they hope you forget about. You don't really log in. Invest in the things that are gonna get you the data so you don't have to analyze the data. You don't have to pull reports. You don't have to export. You don't have to throw a sheet in there. You don't have to do anything. You don't have to listen to calls. You get the data in front of you. Now you can make a decision.

Mm-hmm.

And now you don't have to do the thing you don't like doing. You can do the thing you do like doing, talking to your people, training them, coaching them, making sure they're better. And you can reward them, especially like let's say you got five CSRs and somebody is better at the pricing objection. You'll know that now that person can train the team on what they say, not you. You can have that person just like your best technician, your your best technical tech. He's the one that trains the team on how to diagnose electrical systems because he's the best or she's the best, and use your team, and then they get to escalate or. you get to uplevel them. So it's not just you, the business does not rely on you. It relies on your team to continue to facilitate that information. So that way you don't always have to be the hero and you can really grow the business. And I think that's really the point of what we're trying to get to. And that's why we've launched PhoneTap. I'll let Bill here in just a second, just kind of go like a quick 30-second intro. We are taking demos. It is only for ServiceTitan clients. You can go to phonetap.ai/demo. We'll put that in the show notes and get that out. But we're really focused on solving one problem that is, we have found through, to be transparent, like, because we had to wait through the ServiceTitan process, we got like 12 or 15 clients right now. It was all before that. So we had to like completely stop and shut down for like 4 months until we got through that process. We couldn't add one more single tenant.

Yeah.

So it was kind of a, Wasn't the best way to start growing a company, especially when you don't have any investment money to put into marketing. But our goal is to get someone 1%, 2%, 3% better, because I think what we've found is usually like a 1% uptick pays for, pays for PhoneTap.

Well, yeah, I'm looking at it. Well, I mean, at the end of the day, when we, when we put this together, it's all about ROI. I wanted I mean, for me as a business owner, when I buy a SaaS product, I, I don't just spend the money because I like the, the company. I spend it because I expect a return on either my money or my time, right? So what we found was that— so what I wanted to do, we go— our demo, we go in and we pull your last 30 to 90 days of calls. We listen to them, we categorize them, we put them through our system, and we tell you Exactly what is your booking rate? And we do, uh, some human review to make sure that it's accurate. What's your new customer booking rate? What's your existing customer's booking rate? What exactly is a new customer worth to you in the first 12 months of them becoming a customer? And I go back— That's a big number. That's a big number. It takes a long time to run it. It's not cheap to run it, but, um, what I found is, uh, between $1,500 and $2,500. The best company I've ever seen is one that we have a demo for next week. $2,500 is what they're worth within the first 12 months, a new client. Now there's a lot of nerdy math behind it. We cut off the the outliers at the top and at the bottom, because, you know, you can get a client that's a commercial client that'll, you know, be a half a million and skew that data. So I wanted to be conservative on what the value is. But if you start thinking about a new customer and what they're worth for the first year in your business, that— I think that really puts it in perspective on, uh, your return on investment on uh, your marketing spend, right? We do go all the way to a 5-year trend, so we calculate what the value of an existing customer is based upon how long they've been a customer. But the new customers obviously, uh, spend more in the first year than they do in subsequent years. If you have multiple trades, that trajectory looks better because You get them for HVAC, they purchase a system, and you know maybe they'll do a water heater and some plumbing the next year. So we see multiple trades that have a better trajectory with that. But what we've the most I've seen, the highest I've seen for a company to be able to pay for phone tap is 0.90%. For breakeven on it. That's how much.

So not even a 1— not even a 1% lift.

Yeah, right, not even a 1%. So the one I'm looking at here now, um, it's just their breakeven is 0.27% and their 12-month customer value is $1,384 and is a decent-sized company. They get 431 monthly new customer leads. And these are not— yeah, yeah, it's a big company. These are not leads that are categorized by ServiceTitan. I don't trust any of that data. We start over. We grab the transcript, we transcribe it, or we grab the recording, transcribe it, uh, send it through some nerdy rules and AI that I've spent forever on and get you these real numbers and do that during the demo and just show you what we found. And, um, and if you think you can take this system and increase your booking rate by at least a percent, uh, then you're good to go. And so I send out, um, ROI reports, um, that will show what kind of lift people are getting. And I, I step back, I just want to show them the data, and then they can make decisions from there, make the decision from there. But we're talking about—

Yeah.

Going back to those unbooked reasons. I know we're over time. Some of those are, um, like policy-related decisions or reasons, right? So a price shopping customer might be calling for a quote on something and you as a CSR cannot give them a quote, that's against your company policy. So how are you supposed to handle that if they want a quote and you cannot give it to them and you don't book the call? Who, who's to blame? Is it the CSR? Is it the company policy? So what we have to do is we give them that information of exactly what happened and they can make a decision. So some, some companies have decided, like one of our customers decided to do over-the-phone quotes on septic pumping because they have an idea of how much it'll cost. They were losing a lot of, of leads because that, that people were— that was their number one reason for unbooked within septic. And, uh, it was able to increase their booking rate by giving over-the-phone pricing specifically for that trade and that service.

So another thing we do is so granular. Like, I'm just thinking, I'm like, I'm like, man, I wish I had this information with all the different things that we did in the trades. Because, uh, at Professional we had HVAC, and then we've gotten the generators, we got into, uh, duct cleaning, IAQ, some other things. Like, man, it would have been great to know not only by marketing source, new or existing, by CSR, but also by like the type of call. What, what are they asking about? Like a bucket for that so you can fix— like, that's a, that's a very specific problem that that company had that they didn't even probably know. They're just like, oh, pricing issue. Like, but that, that's a bucket as a whole because pricing an HVAC system versus plumbing or, uh, giving a price for pumping your septic, a couple hundred bucks. Like, it's a big thing. And even that—

Yeah.

You can even take that information because if those questions are coming up and that data is showing to you, put it on your website. That's a marketing tip for me. Put it on your website, make a YouTube video about it, feed the LLMs so you show up. So that, so we can go into that a different time, but—

100%, man.

Take those things that are problems like that, put out content about it over and over and over again, because then all of a sudden you're gonna answer that question before they even have it. And you're gonna be the preferred contractor answering those questions online, which is gonna be, make you the one that gets cited in the AI search stuff. So, but yes, we are well over time. We usually go about 45 minutes.

Yeah, I could talk about this nerdy stuff forever, man.

It's, it's so granular. And that's the thing I'm so excited about is, is one, I, I love seeing the data. It's also gonna help me with relentless customers. It's gonna help me just like, this should help business coaches, consultants, like, Everyone should want this data for every little nook and cranny of the trades is trying to figure out where we can get a little bit better in all of these little areas. And all of a sudden we're gonna have very profitable companies that are growing. They're happy. We can pay our people more. Like all of the things are gonna come from really squeezing that lemon as much as we can and get as much juice out as we can. So we are taking demos now.

Yeah.

Bill, was it phonetap.ai/demo, I think is the URL. You just got to fill out a little bit of information. It is for Service Titan customers only right now.

So I know you want to do it for other other ones, but I said, "Look, man, I want to go super deep with Service Titan. We have to know this perfectly and get this data accurate before we go to any other FSM or VOIP system." And for anyone that's that I'm the one that's gonna read these calls. I gotta know it's.

Yeah, for anyone that built Bill, Bill makes fun of me a lot and gives me shit because I am constantly like, well, what about this? Well, what about this? Well, what about this?

I put it in Claude and Claude's like, tell Josh to shut the hell up and stop doing this. Now I always think about what can go wrong with it, you know?

Yeah. So, but if you are interested and you don't have Service Titan, just reach out to us and let us know because we are make— we are keeping a mental note of future ads for this and future places to build off of. We just need to see a little bit of a trend first.

I need to see the data, Josh. I have to know.

Yeah, we need to— exactly. If you didn't get anything from this episode, is you need to see the data. That should be the, the headline of it.

But that's right, Bill, this was— it was good. Go ahead. It's good, man. Yeah, one thing you can— as one thing that I found is you can only work really, really work well on one thing at Right? The multitasking isn't great. One person can work on one thing at a time. And so what we're trying to do is figure out what is that exact one thing that you need to work on your call— on in your call center, fix it, move on to the next one thing. That's it.

Yeah. And then make it— you have a checklist every week. You can come in, you check off those boxes, and then focus on the one or two things that are broke that last week. Okay, what happened here? And then you can go right to the source and figure it out.

So it's a lot less pressure if you only have one thing at a time to work on too.

Yeah, yeah. So Bill, appreciate you coming on because I, I can't believe we haven't had you on even just to talk about AI and automation because that— we could talk probably even longer about all the different things that you can get yourself involved in versus what you can't. Um, but please, if you guys are interested, reach out to us. You can reach out to Bill Tersch or I Or just email us at hello@phonetap.ai. It's a group inbox. We'll all see the the email, but we look forward to hearing from you guys. And this will be out a week from today from the recording date. And we're also having a launch webinar where we're actually going to go in. We're going to show you data statistics, how it works. We're going to go a lot deeper than we did today, and that's phonetap.ai/launch to register for. that. And there will be a recording of that as well. So we're gonna have a lot of stuff putting out here. Looking forward to hearing from you guys, seeing your questions, and then seeing you guys on the webinar.

Awesome.