How CRM's Ensure You Win the Job with Gabriel Pinchev

Hey, everybody, it's Jim Johnson here, the head coach at Contractor Coach Pro and your host here on Contractor Radio. And today we have an awesome episode for you. This episode is about CRMs and how we can use those CRMs to become more efficient and really more effective, so. So that we win deals a little bit more often. And we have a special guest today that recognized a need out there. His name is Gabriel Pincha. He's the CEO and all things knowledgeable on technology when it comes to CRMs in his space, and I'd like to welcome him today. Gabriel, thank you for joining us. He is with fieldpulse and he also has this cool tool out there called Simply Sense. So welcome aboard.

Thank you for having me on.

Yeah, no problem at all. No problem at all. One of your guys actually reached out to us and I was like, I don't know if I'm going to have this guy on or not. I've never heard of these guys before. And then I kind of started looking into you. I was like, man, this is pretty neat what they've got. And I actually watched a couple of your videos and I was like, this guy's actually got a little bit of a magnetic personality, so let's put him on there and let's share with people why he did what he did. So, Gabriel, could you just share with people as they're watching and listening to the podcast here today, kind of what started all this for you? What was the, like this light bulb moment that, man, I should create a CRM. Yeah.

So for me, it's a little bit of background and more on the software side. So typically, I think when you start a company like this, you either came from the industry or you came from a software background. And for me it was more of a software end, but I still had a lot of exposure to contractors in different ways, including just as a customer and working with them, whatever. But I was doing work as a IT consultant in the mobility space. So I had a large focus on mobile applications, small businesses, stuff like that. And so I saw a large gap in applications for small service businesses, especially companies that needed good mobile applications. A lot of the stuff that was already out there was designed for much larger companies or was mostly a desktop application, not as much of a mobile facing application for small contract that's easy to use, easy to get going and affordable. And around the same time as I was looking at this, I was actually dealing with different contractors. And I still remember specifically the biggest aha moment for me that I kind of bring up and mention is one contractor who I was having a patio door replace, sat on my floor and hand wrote the estimate or the proposal. And I took a picture of him sitting on the floor, and then he showed it to me, but the math was wrong. And so he had to go back and redo it all over again. And not only was it the looking unprofessional sitting on my floor doing it, but the math being wrong, the time spent redoing it and doing it in the first place, I realized all these different issues that he was facing, others were facing, could really be solved with a software. But the key was it had to be designed for smart service businesses. And so I decided to start fieldpulse. And we started fieldpulse with a mobile first design. Our first prototypes were actually on iOS, so that for these small companies where a lot of the managers are out and about in the field running around, they have the information right at their fingertip. And of course, we have a web application as well. But starting the design on mobile was important for us.

That's really cool. Like, you are a customer, you were dealing with a contractor. And you can see why there's coaches, too. Like, we saw the same thing. Like, there's still, you know, it's 2020, and people are still like, handwriting estimates and things like that. And we, as customers nowadays, we don't expect that. I'm like, how can I pay you online? How can I sign something on your iPad? How can I. I don't want to see any paper. I don't want to see any envelope. How can I make this faster? Because my life is busy. I mean, that's really what it's about is we have busy lives and want to try to expedite things as much as possible. So I ask everybody that I interview a question early on in the conversation. So I'm going to ask you. And it's one of those things, like, we're really trying to see kind of what you're all about. And it's more than just finding out about your product. I want to find out about you as well. What's your greatest achievement to this point? And it cannot be family or anything like that. None of that stuff that's easy. Getting married, having kids and all that other stuff. But aside from that, what's your greatest achievement today, Gabriel?

Well, then I'd say it's got to be starting Field Pulse. I think anytime anyone goes out on their own and starts a business, as I'm sure all your audience knows, it's scary. It's exciting really at first. And then you start to get into it and you realize what it's all about. And it's not all lollipops and chocolates all the time. There's a lot to it. There's a lot of stuff you don't know and you learn along the way and you realize that you wish you knew when you started it. And you have to think very differently as a mentality, especially in service businesses, you often go from a team member where you're kind of looking at your time against work. But as a company you have to look at overhead and all the other charges and you have to run your business very differently than simply looking at time and material, for example. But I guess going back to the original questions, I'd say the biggest achievement I think was going out and starting it and really feeling good about what you're doing or what I do. I think what I love about doing this is that we're helping real small businesses that are dealing with my friends and families, neighbors, people in the community, and they're doing this to feed their families. It's a very tangible product or customer that we deal with and it's really core, kind of the American value of having a small business that's really cool.

There's a reason that we do the coaching that we do. Our whole thing is about empowering people to believe you can buy all these silver bullet systems and this out of the box type thing, but if you don't have some kind of involvement with it or buy in with it, you didn't have some part in it, you usually don't have that belief aspect of things. So when we coach, we help them get that buy in by working with them to do it. And we have a contractor ignite program just for guys like your ideal client. So tell me like who your clients would be. If I was going to say, hey, this is one of the type of contractors that would use fieldpulse, who would that be?

Yeah, so we kind of define as a mobile service contractor. So I think the big three that are mostly brought up in most of the market is agency, H Vac, plumbing, electrical. But really any type of small service business, we have a huge wide range of customers that come in. I would say they're typically under 30 man companies and we have some that are on the very small end of single man or husband and wife teams as well. But industry wise, we see a ton of different types of customers. We have beehive and swarm removal, we have Chimney sweeping all the way to. I think the craziest one I've seen was death cleanup. But really any type of service contractor and service business or specialty contractor, we probably got it.

Funny story. I'm actually familiar with death cleanup. My company was a contracting business. We did roofing, siding, gutters, that type of thing. But we focus both in insurance restoration type stuff as well as retail. And as we got into the insurance restoration, we got into fire and flood and some of that kind of stuff and then mold and remediation into that. And then there was like, wow, there's these people that are like dying in their houses and nobody wants to go remove them. The insurance company's paying for it to get done. Maybe that's something to check into. So we, we did all the, you know, crossing T's and dotting I's and kind of getting it all figured out. And then we went to some of our crew members and we're like, hey, we're thinking about getting into this. Would you guys be up for. We'll pay you more because we're going to make more. And they're like, absolutely not. And so we finally went. I think we'll go ahead and skip that. It was going to be a difficult labor problem to go in there and scrape people off of the floor in their houses is really rough deal, man. It's not a good one.

Yeah. And when we brought actually that customer on, they were very particular about no one accessing any of their files and photos for obvious reasons. Oh yeah, Yeah. I mean, it's all very sensitive stuff, but someone's doing this type of work. I think that's the reality of these businesses is that there's so much different type of service work to be done that there's a company for it. You even see dog shit cleanup. Sorry, dog.

I know you can say that word. It's okay. It's a podcast, man. We're allowed to say that stuff.

Yeah. So if there's a need and there's a service, you do it. And these companies can use software like FieldPulse to help manage their business.

That's super awesome. Like, we haven't had that one yet. We've had quite a few different contractors that we work with because we work with them all across the board. We're pretty heavy in the roofing world, but we've had all kinds. Painters, fencers, you name it. So it sounds like it would be something that would work for them. Does it have any kind of like forecasting or anything like that? Pipeline, Is it any of the seals front inside of it much or is it more for the production and invoicing, estimating that kind of stuff on the back end.

So a little bit and you could using our reporting with estimates, looking at what you've got outstanding. But for the most part in the CRM portion around sales, most would be around tracking the lead through the different process. So starting as an opportunity, moving them over to a lead, then a current customer and lost one to be able to track that as a sales process. We are actually about to start working on a sales tool that will encompass a few different aspects, including graphical proposals, good, better, best options tied with financing as well and fixed price, price books and stuff like that. Depends on the industry that may or may not use it. And so we actually want to gravitate a bit more into helping sell better and forecast and track things. But otherwise kind of the main functionality of FieldPulse is also around job scheduling and dispatching, customer management estimates and invoices, payments, employee timesheets, communications, stuff like that. But obviously we get into some of the sales parts, especially when they're creating estimates. We help them track commissions for salespeople and stuff like that.

So what are some of the things that contractors struggle with whenever it comes to a CRM? Like they may not have ever used one before. You're bringing them on and onboarding them. Do you find anything that's kind of uniform with them that they're struggling with and maybe some tips of how they might be able to get past that if they're thinking like. I think a lot of these guys are just scared of it. I think I'm just scared because like technology, I've been writing on a pad for years and I've been doing it that way. It works for me. But they don't realize that they're probably missing out on a lot of jobs. I'm going to bet that guy that was filling it out on the, on the floor at your house didn't get the job, did he?

No. But you have to think about why you want to do it. I think that's the key part. Why do you want to stay organized? Why do you want to capture this customer information? Why do you want to capture the lead source on the customer? It ties back to different things. It ties back to being more prepared for that customer for when they come back or the repeat business or they have an issue and you're trying to find comes to tracking sources so that you know what marketing tools are effective and what got you, this customer, how many customers did you get through this channel, tracking things like that, and ultimately reusing your customer list to do marketing to them, to do email marketing. And being able to really remember and track and tag what type of work you did for them, what type of work might be interesting for them in the future based on what you see when you're in their home, on their home, what type of equipment they have, if it's roofing, what type of roof you did, if you're fixing a part, where else there might be issues, if there's issues, possibly with a chimney or flashing, going into different parts of the home that you saw issues with, you could do email marketing in the future with. So being able to really organize and track that data, specifically with the CRM portion of, can be really critical to things like marketing. We have to step back and say, why do you want to do this? I think always off the bat, being organized is much more effective. The customers never want to call in and call back to you and say, oh, this is Gabriel Pinchev. And you can't look up what type of work you did for them, who they were, how much their old invoice was for, especially if there's something you need to look up. And that's just the start of it.

I can remember being a contractor before there was such things as CRMs and stuff like that. And we talked before this, that, you know, I've got a CRM background as well. And one of the reasons that I got involved in it and why I was all about it is because a homeowner would call and they'd say, hey, where's my job at? What's the progress on my project? And it would be like, can you hold, please? And you'd hang up the phone and he'd be like, hey, hey, has anybody got Mrs. Jones's file? You know, you're like, trying to find that file in the building. Oh, Billy's got it. It's in his truck. He's over on the other side of town and stuff like that. And it's just like, how could we possibly be that dark ages in the 2000s like this was, you know, not.

And now imagine you're on the road, right? How do you do that? Right? And that's where the mobile app becomes really helpful, is that you can just look it up on the fly and be like, oh, yeah, I remember that job we did for you where you're looking up on your phone. It might have been like four years ago, but you have notes, you can put notes about their spouse, anything about their home, whatever. And I know some customers use the CRM to actually record personal information for the sake of being more friendly with their customer. Maybe they talk to them about their family, their kids, whatever. And these are notes you can keep to maintain that relationship. Because in the end these customers are people and creating that relationship with them is important. And it's hard to keep track of them if you have thousands of customers. But you can develop more personalized approach if you take notes.

Yeah, so that's a note taking aspect of things. Taking some notes, putting a comment on a homeowner's or a customer's file photos. Okay, cool. So you've got all that stuff too. So that's pretty common in CRMs. What would you say makes FieldPulse different from the other ones that you've seen out there?

So if you're looking at like a straight up CRM, let's say Salesforce or something like that, where we have the different components, so you have the job scheduling, the estimates, the invoices, the timesheets. And what's important is that all of these components tie back into the CRM so that they're all linked. Because we have a lot of customers that are using maybe Google Sheets to manage your customers, or basic standalone CRM or another free estimating invoicing tool or Google Calendar for scheduling. But none of them actually interact with each other. And so when you're on a job and you're opening the job record, you need to easily be able to click open that customer, look at all the estimates, invoices, previous ones, files and photos. And it's really important that all these aspects are interrelated. While if you have a standalone CRM, you don't know the jobs that were done, you don't necessarily have the estimates, invoices, the emails that were sent out, the files and photos. So we position FieldPulse as an all in one solution so that you have all their interrelated objects with each other and you're not chasing in between different applications. Cool, cool.

All right, so if you were going to tell a contractor, say, hey, Mr. Contractor, you're thinking about getting a CRM, what would be maybe the top three things they should consider in looking at one?

Yeah, I think you need to look at relative to your company size, is this software designed for your segment of the market? And I think that's if you've heard of Servicetitan, they're kind of the big player in the space. They're not best geared towards the smaller end of the market, in my opinion. They're not priced that way, definitely, they're ten times more expensive. But the way they operate, the setup, the onboarding, how you run it, is really geared towards larger companies. And so I would first start with looking at, let me find software solutions that are designed for my industry type and my company size. The next part is how you do your work. And one thing we realize is that a lot of these companies do their workflow a bit different and some of it is just stylistic choices, but others is just as simple as do I actually do written estimates or are all my estimates verbal? And it really depends on the industry. Right. Because sometimes you're coming out for a service call and you're doing a verbal estimate on spot with the idea that if they say yes, you're going to go ahead and do it right then while other industries, you maybe are doing an estimate, going home, getting approval and coming back another day. And so that changes the workflow, but finding one that can suit your workflow or you can make it follow your workflow and how you operate. And one of the things we do in fieldpulse is that we allow you a little bit of flexibility so that you can make it adapt to your workflow. And so if you want to create customer before an estimate, you can do that. If you want to create a customer during an estimate, you can do that job, customer, estimate, whatever. You can choose the order of operations for how you run your business to make it fit. While some other solutions might say, hey, we're very geared towards this workflow and you need to fit it to this. And it can also make it actually simpler to do that. Right. If you follow specific workflow. But we found that getting pigeonholed into someone else's workflow can cause issues if you don't like to do it that way.

Yeah, flexibility, it's a big one. I've worked with tons of CRMs and there's all different kinds of thought process about it. There's closed systems, open API systems. There is a variety of different choices to make there. And, and if I was going to give a contractor one piece of advice about a CRM is that really and truthfully, once you get past it, does this work for my business? Part of it. So now I've got it down to three or four, that kind of work for my business. Which one are you going to commit to? Which one are you going to say, hey, I'm going to literally change the way I do my Business. I'm used to doing it this way over here. But I'm not going to be scared anymore. I'm going to get past the fear and we're going to fully integrate this thing. Because the thing I always saw is like they would use bits and pieces of it. It would be like, hey, the estimating things, pretty cool. So I'm going to write my estimates in there. But then they wouldn't do all the rest of it. So they didn't have the full power of what that CRM was designed for. Which if I was going to really kind of put it down into press tax of what a CRM is designed for is to create better efficiency, communication and effectiveness. So when I'm out in the field, I become much more effective at closing the deal, earning more jobs, winning more jobs. And if it doesn't do those three things for me, I should kick that thing out the door and move on to the next one. Do you find similar things in your, in your segment of the market?

Yeah, definitely. And so we do have some customers that say, hey, I'm going to use this only for job scheduling and CRM and create my estimates and invoices elsewhere. I think they're doing a little bit of a disservice to themselves and using fragmented solutions because they're using different tools, their guys are learning multiple applications, they don't connect with each other. And so we do think the most successful users of the software are the ones that at least use kind of our big three of scheduling, CRM estimates and invoices. While we have other add on modules like timesheets and project tracking, custom forms. Really keeping the three main components of it intact in one system really makes you much more efficient and keeps your business much more organized because everyone's centered around one application, all the objects relate to each other and you're not scrambling between other applications. I think it's really important for service companies especially because when you're out in the field you need everything easy to do, easy to access in one application, not scrambling around, which is something that's still pretty common.

Yeah. So it's unique because I see a lot of these softwares come into this industry and it's built by contractors for contractors. You hear that statement and then I sit there and like, is that who I want building my software? Like, is that guy a software engineer? Like that kind of thing. And have they invested the time, the effort and the energy to understand architecture and UI and all the things that go along with truly being a software? So Is that some of your background, like, is that where it comes from is you had that background and you could take that to this world and just learn kind of what we do as contractors?

Yeah, definitely. And I think, and I don't want to kind of dog the other side, but yeah, either come from industry, you come from software. And there's value in knowing the industry. But I think it's. If I were to pick one, I'm biased. But I would rather have my software designed by software guys who learned what's needed from customers rather than the other way around. Because I think it's easier to learn how an industry needs to do business rather than the opposite. And I also find that if you come from the industry and you're trying to build software, you're going to be very biased about how it works. While even though you do things one way doesn't mean the millions of other service businesses want to do it the same way. And so you're going to try to design the software pigeonhole to how you ran your business. And that's not ideal if you're trying to appeal to people who have different workflows. So when we come in, we're looking at it, we're talking to tons of customers and learning how the different ways are done and then designing it using best practices, best UI and UX that we know and trying to take that to the industry to make it fit well. But there's still a lot of exposure and learning. But you're not being pigeonholed into what you know as a contractor and how you did business.

Yeah, I'm one of those contractors that helped build some software and I thought, boy, I know exactly how this needs to go and it needs to go exact back into the way I say it needs to go and built that thing and soon found out that not everybody does things the way I do. So you're right. Like you need a good balance between those two of knowing the software side of things and then knowing you kind of learn that the hard way. You spend a bunch of money to learn that the hard way is what I learned. But it was great in the end because it was cool to bring something to market that was helpful to contractors. It sounds like you've done much the same. Do you have any success stories, like guys that have started using FieldPulse and it changed their business for them?

Yeah, definitely. I mean, the one that I kind of look at the most is actually one of our first customers. He did junk removal and he comes back every now and Then and chats with us. And he always says the same thing. He's like, man, fieldpulse has helped me get my company to where I could have only dreamt of. And that sounds. It almost sounds fake. But he does say that a lot. But it's great because I think the reality is it's very tough to run these businesses. And we recognize that. And one of the hardest aspects is managing team members. Hiring team members we know is very difficult. We hear that a lot. But also managing these team members that can be unpredictable, can be inconsistent and a ton of other issues. I mean, I've heard the craziest stories from customers about their employees. So trying to grow your business and add these employees is very difficult. And I think software like this definitely helps you scale and manage these team members better and hold them accountable and track them and trace them much better. I think that's where his kind of feedback came from and how or why it helped him grow his business. Because when he started he was a one man shop and now he has several team members and is running a much larger operation. And I think basically what he's saying is that it would have been impossible for him to manage those team members without something like this.

Awesome. Okay, so you mentioned something there and it kind of caught my ear. What's the craziest story you've ever heard from a contractor? Don't name names. We won't get them in trouble.

There was one, he told me that three of his employees died in one year from opiate overdoses.

Oh my goodness. Oh man.

And I mean, there is a crisis and that's obviously. But like. So I don't. I haven't had to deal with stuff like that in my company, but I can only imagine how difficult that is. It's just crazy to think about. But it's a reality, right? Managing team members is tough and people could be unpredictable and it's. It's something you have to account for. I couldn't imagine having to deal with that.

Could you imagine like having those people that they're out representing your company then and they aren't on some kind of CRM or something where I know what's going on with them and they do not exist anymore. What happened to all that stuff? Where is all that stuff? How do I know what's going on with any of my customers? So yeah, that's like I'm, I'm from the roofing world, mostly. Roofing, siding, gutters, windows, that kind of stuff. And it's funny, sales guys are just vanished. Like, you'd never hear from them again. Just not show up and never come back again. They got 20 files with them. You're like, what the heck? Where'd they go?

At least if it's in the software, you'd retain it. But I think that's a huge part of what these software do, is it helps keep employees accountable. So if they're clocking in and clocking out, it tags their location so you can actually verify where they were when they clocked in. Because we know a lot of concerns from our customers and business owners are, hey, is my guy lying to me? Is he saying he's there when he's not? Did he leave an hour ago? But he says he's still there because we don't have a way to verify that. But this allows you to do it. Attaching files and photos. That's a huge one. Our customers force their guys to take finished photos of the work to prove that they did it, because otherwise they might just not leave. Right. And so a lot of what fieldpulse helps with is accountability with employees, because that's one of the biggest risks the company has, especially in this segment.

So how do you hope to. I got two questions, two more for you. One would be business, and then one I. One I'll surprise you with. How do you want FieldPulse to change an industry? What do you want to. What's the dream?

Yeah, I think what we've kind of looked at is we want to make it. I want to lift the industry as a whole. I think, personally, it doesn't get a fair shake in terms of how it's perceived. I think the industry can make a lot more money than it does. And the industry often shoots itself in the foot with things. The biggest thing that I talk about, actually on podcasts and stuff, are free estimates and how. I think they're completely detrimental to the industry. I think there's a lot of little things like that that hurt, that if everyone improves on it, can really help everyone make more money. Because it is skilled labor. And I think it's sometimes taken for granted by customers. And it starts with free estimates. Why are people doing free estimates? Why are you going out, driving to their home, teaching them about what you would do, educating them, creating an estimate, sending them, chasing after them for free. And I could talk about that for half an hour.

I'm like, high five you through the video here, because I'm the same way. I'm like, why? Now I could understand saying, hey, I have an estimate, and it's 149 bucks or whatever, because I'm going to be there for an hour and I'm going to give you all the stuff that you need to do to do your thing. But if you decide to go with us, we'll include it.

Right?

Like part of it. But I don't want to waste my time. Why would I do that?

No. And it just kills your margins in general. And it also rewards bad customers. So in my opinion, what you charge doesn't even have to be that high. It could be something like 15, 30 bucks. But it's enough to weed out bad customers that are tire kickers, that are just going out and getting 10 estimates and are hurting the industry. And it would reward the better customers that are maybe doing three estimates or willing to invest $600 total in estimates to get the right one and actually value it and get rid of the bad customers. And so little things like that, I think can help the industry. And so we want to get it to a place where just making more money, making more profit, cutting down on costs, mistakes, doing things better, making customers happier. And so it's much so that it's a much easier business to manage because we know it's not tough, it's very difficult. But I think collectively, people kind of bring, not intentionally, but bring the industry down. Because all of a sudden free estimates have become kind of a standard. And so you look at it well, how do I not do free estimates if everyone else is doing free estimates? How do I charge? And so everyone as a whole kind of has to take it up a level. Charge a good rate for your work, not always looking at price, trying to differentiate with quality rather than price. But it's not an easy thing. It's easier said than done. And I realize that. But I think that's how we want to help. And one of our new large partners, we talked about that as well. It's the Reis Group, which is the largest plumbing supplier in the world. We talked about how do we as a whole kind of uplift the industry and make it better.

That's super cool. That's what we're all about. That's why we started this whole coaching thing in the first place, is to raise the bar.