AI Sales Tools For Home Service Businesses with David Zhao

Welcome back to the show. I'm your host, Phil Risher. And on today's episode, we're going to be discussing how to use AI to grow your home service business with David Zhao. Thanks so much for joining us today, David.

Yeah, so great. So great chatting today. Thank you for having me on.

Yeah, for sure. So David is the co founder of Pika Earth, which is an AI tech platform for home services. We're going to discuss a little about what that looks like. It's actually backed by Sequoia Capital, which is a large investment firm out in Silicon Valley. If you don't know, he used to work at Google and the last year and a half that he worked at Google, he was on the home team and working on the Nest platform, which I'm curious to learn about. And he literally majored in AI from Stanford, master's and undergrad. So he knows a thing or two about AI, which is, which is very exciting for us because we have him today to ask questions to. So with all that being said, David, can you tell us a little bit like how did you get into the home service space from Google? And I think you worked at YouTube too, and the AI background, like, how did all this happen?

Yeah, absolutely. So the kind of short story is that I was at Nest. I was specifically leading product for a team that worked on grid services, so home energy management. And a lot of the folks that we worked with on the Nest team were Nest pros. So I had exposure to a lot of contractors as well as that overall H Vac business through my time at Nest. And one of my big realizations was that, hey, a lot of these contractors are still very much reliant on pen and paper. When we pushed out new products that were able to help contractors in the field, there is a really positive response and why wanted to kind of further explore that through my time at Pica also growing up, my dad for many years actually worked for an appliance and H Vac manufacturer. So had a lot of experience just having random appliances in my home and just had an understanding of just how big of an industry and how just important of an industry it is. I don't think the average person, obviously the listeners to this show probably understand how much spend in the US alone goes through services and home services in particular. But the average person I talk to, especially in Silicon Valley, has no idea how big it is. Right. And how important it is both to your comfort, but also to everyone's pockets. Right? I mean, you spend a lot of money when you get A new AC system. So that's really how I got into this space.

Okay, so you were at Nest and then you and maybe some co founders were like, hey, we should maybe create some software in this specific area. And then you kind of got going with Pika, Is that right?

Yeah. So my co founder Ryan and I, we were in the broader space of services businesses and we were exploring a couple of ideas. We actually started out and we're building out some software for managing fleets of vehicles. But over time we realized just talking to these, to these people and these business owners that the pain, the number one pain point that they told us like what they were like. If I had a magic wand, I would ask for this was a better in home sales experience. Like that was the thing that was lacking. That's what's top of mind, especially these days with tighter homeowner budgets and kind of a slightly weakened macroeconomic environment. So we ended up realizing that this is really the thing to pursue and the thing to focus on.

Okay, so in home sales experience, when you think of all the trades out there, lawn care, painting, carpet cleaning, H vac, electrical, plumbing, it's like you go into the home, you're trying to sell something, you present a price and hopefully they sign up or maybe you funneling through your PDF thing or something. So what did, what exactly did you all uncover from like an AI tech perspective that was going to transform the way that presentations happen?

Absolutely. So the funny story here is that we expected there to be a lot more AI or just at least interest in AI from the get go in improving that in home sales experience because a lot of data makes it more helpful. But actually what we found and talking with some of the largest, most successful shops across the US is that they've moved off of tech back to pen and paper. We were seeing 60 page booklets that were printed out with full gloss color paper showing you all the benefits and all the guarantees and all of the install processes. And I mean people were happy because it allowed them to sell in value and show the brand value and the value of their business. But what it didn't allow for was dynamic data driven AI enabled insights. Right. Or kind of help during that sales process. And pen and paper for us feels like a complete like return back a couple of decades. And I think that is where we see we need to build the fundamentals so that we can actually bring in AI to help that in home sales experience. So that's what we started off with our in home sales presentation tool.

Yeah, I think one in preparation for this, I listened to some of the podcasts and did some research on the Pika Earth. One of the unique ones was like, we'll talk about H Vac, but then we can talk about some of the other trades. But like in H Vac, it's like, okay, you're going to get this new unit. Well, what does that mean as far as, like, when are the temperature, you know, is it, is it at this point or is it at this point throughout the year? How often is it above 90 degrees? Does that can affect your efficiency? Is that going to affect the proposal that you put together? And how can we use AI to tie this in with your geographical points? Or like in landscaping, it's like, okay, well this year the rain is down, which is why your grass is more yellow or whatever. And then next year, on average, it's like this. So that's why it's going to look like this. Is that kind of what you're talking about, putting these plots together and building a case for why you should sell something?

Absolutely, yeah. I think the best way that we think about it internally is twofold. The first is around these contextual data that you're mentioning, right? Things like weather, things like rebates, things like being able to take advantage of incentives to help reduce that upfront cost and making basically abstracting away all of the pen and paper, back of the envelope math. Like you as a salesperson in the home, you shouldn't have to do math, right? You should be focused on building that in person relationship. That's what you're exceptionally, exceptionally good at. We want to support you with AI and with technology to make sure that you don't have to do calculations and then open up that calculator app on your iPad anymore. And then the second part around AI is around personalization and time savings, right? So on the personalization front, we realized that today as you're creating quotes, I mean, you want to make the customer feel handheld through the process. You want them to trust you, you want them to feel like you care about them in particular as a customer. And today what that looks like is you've got templates for summaries and blurbs in your notes app, and you're copying and pasting them in and in front of the customer. You're literally just typing, you're filling out information. But we have all of that context around the customer, around what they care about, around their Persona. And based on that, we can automatically with AI. And this is where I think LLMs in particular, large Language models are incredibly powerful. We can automatically tailor a lot of this content and embed it kind of natively into that presentation so that that customer feels heard and they feel seen and they're like, wow, no one else has written a cover letter to me. Right. And another example here is. And that saves you time so you don't have to write the other example. Go for it.

Yeah. I just want to ask you one question. Is this like recording your conversation or the summary that the CSR got with the problems that they're having? Then when you go in for the sale, before you go in for the, hey, here's what it costs. It's a summary that's kind of curated for you by AI and saying, based off of this issue that you had over here, this is the solution that we're offering because X, Y and Z.

Yes. So whether it be transcripts from a CSR conversation, whether it be previous sold estimates and invoices, whether it just be notes from, from the last person who is at that home for an on site visit, we take all of that context and information as well as information about, hey, where does this person live? What city are they in? What's the current temperature outside, what's the season? What is their Persona like? We actually let the salesperson define and select, hey, is this someone who's motivated in a buying decision by savings over time, bill savings or upfront cost savings, are they motivated? They've got a test and Prius in the driveway. They care a lot about environmental impact. You can select those Personas and with that context as well, we can really personalize that summary. And it's helpful to your point both for the salesperson as they're about to walk into the front door, to have some context around that homeowner and what to focus on during that in person conversation. But two, directly to the homeowner as well. When they get the quote now they have kind of a bit of a cover letter, right. It's a block of text that explains exactly who they are and why they should buy from you specifically and, and personalized to that customer, that homeowner.

Yeah, it makes complete sense. One of the ones that you hit on was rebates. So I know in the H VAC world it's like pretty heavy with rebates from manufacturer, that kind of stuff. But there's also, you know, government and rebates that are given out for home improvement, EV chargers, that kind of stuff. How can you use AI to help with that side of things?

Absolutely. So one of the biggest pain points that we see is that rebates are spread out across so many different levels. You've got rebates to your point on the manufacturer level, especially in H VAC plumbing. You've also got local utility rebates. Like, a lot of people don't realize this, but your local utility is incentivized to give you rebates on higher efficiency systems, especially in H VAC plumbing. There's also state level, county level, city level, and then finally the federal rebates that I think a lot of folks are aware of. And those are typically tax credits. The issue though is especially as you go downstream to the state, city, local utility level, these rebates change all the time. If you imagine, I mean, your local utility, they've got a budget, it runs out of money, or they change the requirements for these rebates. Keeping up to date with that is incredibly difficult. We saw this actually happen last year in Massachusetts. And this is an H VAC specific example. But they have what's called a qualified products list. And it's a list of tens of thousands of systems that do qualify, but the thresholds changed starting January 1st. And as a result, all the lists changed, but they didn't update that list, that Excel file that you could download until a couple of days later. And as a result, there is a bit of a gap. Like, people were like, oh, can we sell this system? Does this still qualify for a very significant couple thousand dollar rebate? So where AI actually comes into play is that we're able to keep tabs on all of these rebate programs to see if there are differences day to day. Right. We can see if they've made updates to the requirements through the documents that they require to publish online. And as a result, we can flag these proactively. So it's not like your customers like, oh, I just applied for this and they came back to me and said, hey, sorry, you applied three days too late, we're out of money. We can actually tell you that kind of on the spot, every single night. We make sure that our programs are up to date. And I think ingesting and that would be really tough to do at scale if it was humans doing it. Right. Like, your average human will only be able to go through a certain amount of websites or check a certain amount of requirements every day. But with AI, with automation, that's where we can dramatically scale up that process to reach nationwide scale without sacrificing on accuracy.

Yeah, it makes sense. I think I heard you explain this before. That the back office side of things like Jobber, Housecall Pro Service Titan Service Fusion, that helps you kind of run your dispatch and that kind of stuff where what you're building is more the front office, like sales, customer facing stuff. Yes. To help close deals, but also maybe to help with the customer interpretation of service or that kind of stuff.

Absolutely, yeah. Back office tasks we don't focus on today because we know there are great software players out there who solve those problems. But it's that interplay between the best in class procurement and inventory management software and actually what the customer sees. There is a bit of a discrepancy that we've, we've seen and heard today in the field.

Yeah. So one of the hard things I think for the trades like H Vac, it's pretty easy, especially like a new system is like my system was broken, I got a new system. It works fine.

Yeah.

For other trades or even just like service calls and stuff. Is there a way I think some of the products that you're coming up with to like articulate the value that you're providing to someone and show the transformation from start to finish or the customer journey from start to finish. Are there things that you're building for that or other things like Nest, for example, it ties this to your customer. You have a lot of data coming back and forth.

Yeah, absolutely. So specifically today, our focus on H Vac and plumbing means that we've built out some features including retrospective energy savings calculation where we use physics based modeling to my earlier point and historical context on weather data to give you really accurate month by month breakdowns of savings that isn't applicable necessarily outside of H Vac and plumbing where those are huge energy usage. Although for something like a home appliance install, repair, your washer and dryer definitely use a lot of electricity as well, especially if you're going for a heat pump electric dryer. So we can definitely be. And for an electric vehicle charger is another great example here where we can apply a lot of those same principles and those same features and kind of extend that beyond our current focus. But I will say to your point around that end to end customer journey, especially showing the words I think you used is that transformation. We realized that humans are very visual creatures. Right. And your canonical PDF or pen and paper, what you lose is that visual experience. And I'll give you an example here for especially for something like garage door replacements. I mean it primarily is a visual experience. Like does this garage door pattern in this paint and this would in this design, does that match the rest of my house? So being able to easily see and mock up, hey, how can this look with my house specifically? And we can for example, pull in images from Google Street View, which we do already today because we know the address of that location. Can we easily mock up what that would look like? Or back to actually the HVC example, can we mock up how that new system will actually look in your backyard? Because people don't realize this, but some of these condensers are massive and people don't realize how much of an eyesore they can be, especially if they're placed right next to a patio or window. So I think from that visual perspective we absolutely see. And that's also where I come AI comes into play. There's a lot of opportunity there to make it a more compelling visual experience.

Yeah. So let's say someone's running a million dollar business and they're like, okay, this is all good. I'm the one out here running sales calls or I got one or two other people. What are some like low hanging fruit AI type things that people could do, like go to ChatGPT, plug in your location, create a summary cover letter for your sales pitch. Is that that basic, are there other basic things that people could do or simple to do?

Absolutely, yeah. So I mean that personalization, being able to very quickly and effectively send a follow up after the visit is also really important. I personally went through a bunch of contractor experiences in the recent few months and I can count on a single hand the number of people who actually followed up with like a, hey, here's what we talked about, here's the next steps, here's the things that you said that you're going to get over to me or that I said I will get over to you. It happens so infrequently. And I will say, like I went with the people who followed up because I actually almost forgot about the people who didn't forget who didn't follow up with me. There's so much else going on in day to day life that it's easy to drop the ball. So I think taking in all of the context from what was said and what was kind of presented in home in terms of options as well as follow ups and making that a quick automated text or email, that is something where a large language model like ChatGPT could be very helpful. I think another place, and this is more on the behavioral analysis side, is today we know that humans in general, especially if you're selling into a particular neighborhood, they love one upping their neighbor, right? You go to them and you tell them, hey, like George down the street bought X system or they bought X package, the premium package. And then more likely than not, this person will be like, oh, if George trusts you and George bought the premium, like, I'll buy the premium, or maybe I'll buy the ultimate. I'll buy the supreme package. So what that actually means in practice though is that if you're using some sort of FSM platform, you likely have a lot of context that is location specific and even to the neighborhood level of like, what have other people bought in, say the last 90 days from you? And that is really helpful stats to bring up when you're in home. Because one, it provides credibility. People love trusting who their neighbor trusts, but also it gives you ammo. Specifically when you're proposing systems, especially if you're doing like a good, better, best, regardless of what service you provide, you can say, hey, 20 people in your neighborhood bought this package. That's the most popular one. And likely the person you're in front of will choose that one because of that social proof.

So this is like, okay, go into your jobber service site and housecall Pro, download your customer list out, put in an Excel spreadsheet, go and filter, you know, do a pivot table or just filter by zip code and then you'll be able to see in that zip code you did all this work. Then you go in and you're kind of armed with this data to say you had 100 people this last year or something like that. That's kind of what you're saying.

Absolutely. And pivot tables, I mean, if you're in Excel Wiz and if you know how to use Excel, it's definitely a very effective way to do that. But I will say on the point of AI, recent AI models, especially some of these newer LLM models, are actually sophisticated enough to perform fairly basic data analysis from an Excel or a CSV file. So you can actually just download all of your past open estimates in a specific zip code, pipe that in, and ask it a prompt like, hey, could you tell me what's the percentage of people of sold estimates that had X package? And it'll be able to actually do that computation actually writes code, it shows you the code, it executes the code, and then it computes that for you. Of course, there may be times where it's a bit inaccurate. AI is not yet at least going to take over the entire world. But it does give you a really easy Way to compute this if you, for example, don't have the time to go into Excel.

Yeah. Okay, so you could take a step further, download all your files out, put it into ChatGPT or something like that, and ask it those types of questions. How many people got this? How many people converted in this specific zip code or this street, for example, how people did this thing? And it's pretty. It will give you, for the most part, decent information back out.

Absolutely, yeah. I mean, if there are queries that are a little bit too complex or prompts that a little bit too complex, oftentimes they'll tell you, hey, sorry, we can't actually find an answer to it in the time allotted basically for that specific prompt. And I think that's where we come in. Right. We want to be able to allow you to actually do very complex analysis because we're able to kind of both through code and I summarize very complex queries like, okay, who are people with similar home sizes to this person in their neighborhood with similar Personas as them? What did they buy? Right. So like when you start layering on these if conditions or these if statements, that's where we can provide a lot of value.

Yeah, that makes sense. And another one that you hit on was having the recap after you go out. I think if you even just created a basic template of what this is going to look like and then, and then had like, okay, what are the three issues that this customer had? What are the three solutions that you offered? And then write a follow up email for me. Then you have that and then you just plug that in and it's basically done for you. Just plug and play.

Absolutely.

Yeah. Okay, cool. Well, while we have you, I'm curious, I have a couple other questions about your experience on things. Typically, people that listen to the show are like 1 to 10 million in revenue. You obviously work with some big H vac contractors and plumbing companies and other businesses as well. What would you say, like, if someone's trying to make that jump from 1 to 10 million, or, or you see these $10 million companies, what are they doing different that other companies that are smaller might need to be looking at holistically, not just like with AI or anything?

Yeah, no. Phenomenal question. And I'll first caveat that I've never been a contractor or an owner myself, so this is only from the limited experience that I've had working directly with them. But what I have seen in terms of those kind of success factors to scaling from 1 to 5 to say 5 to 10 plus. Is that at that roughly 5 million mark? That's typically where you are now scaled in terms of team size and even from the sales perspective, the sales team size to the point where you can't, you're not really constrained by labor hours anymore. Right. Like you're obviously, your phones are hopefully ringing off the hook with inbound leads, but now it's like, how do you effectively allocate and distribute staff and your team members to be most effective in actually closing deals? And whether that be, hey, finding someone who really specializes on service to sale versus someone who really specializes on no cools. And being able to build that sense of almost standardization in sales practice is really, really important because if everyone is selling in a completely different way, then it's really hard to benchmark. It's really hard to breed accountability from, from both the management level, but also from the individual level, the individual contributor level.

So yeah, we, we, sorry, we had Chuck Toki from Top Rep, he was on and he was saying that the best companies that are doing high 7, 8 figures, they standardize their sales process all the way through. It's not this guy doing that, that guy doing that. It's like, you know, this is our sales process. And I think that kind of ties into Pica. What you're saying is like, you can't, this guy can't use his PDF that he custom made and he had his daughter do this PowerPoint presentation and this guy's doing this thing. It's like, we got to have a process here that we know works, that is predictable process so we can roll people out. So I just wanted to hit on that because we just had a couple episodes about that that hit the nail on the head.

Yeah, Right on the money there. And I think another second order benefit there is that once you have a standardized process, it makes training new people so much easier. Right. Because they have a playbook they can follow and it's not like, oh, wow, I as a new comfort consultant have to go in and figure out how to sell with this new company that I'm joining. It's like, okay, now I know what I'm going to follow. And even just like a sales script that I'm going to follow and that we think is really, really powerful. We also think building robustness around understanding and retargeting your existing customer base is very important. Right. And this actually kind of goes into that follow up conversation that I rarely, rarely see contractors, at least from a personal homeowner perspective, follow up with me down the road. But I actually think that would be very helpful. Right. I mean, it's why you put a sticker on the furnace or a sticker on the AC unit, because you want people to reach out to you when they have a problem. But if you proactively reach out to them, highlight. Okay, we're running a deal right now or we're running a free inspection, a free checkup, a free tune up. That is really powerful. Especially if you know the past history of that customer and you know, hey, they're probably likely going to be looking for a replacement pretty soon. Like it's pretty old home. When we last checked in on them, they didn't choose to replace it. We should probably proactively reach out and we find that that is a really nice, it's almost an easy way for you to get new qualified leads with someone you already have a pre existing relationship with, which is, which is really powerful.

Yeah, I agree. And anyone that knows Flash consulting, we drill this home that everyone's missing out on this opportunity. To your point, we have a saying, you can't get lifetime value without a lifetime relationship. You got to keep top of mind. And this kind of ties in with what you were talking about before is like you could take all your data, put it into a chatgpt or something and say, hey, give me everyone that hasn't worked with us in the last year who has a home older than 20 years or that only did this service and then they give you the segment. And then now, even if it's a manual text or you know, a call with your CSRs, that's slow. You at least have a database to reach out to of people that already know, like and trust you, that can come back into your funnel and be a customer again. And so I definitely think that's a very, very big thing. And we've seen it too. Like we have a client that with H Vac they went from 3 million to 8 million. The only way they did it was by retargeting their past customers and cross selling different services. Like that's it. They, they had no salesperson. It was, it was, their texts were out there. It was crazy. And they literally just did that. So yeah, you're absolutely right. I think that's, that's correct. I cut you off though. Was there anything else that you see on your end that you're like, hey, this is good stuff?

Absolutely. And that's really, really cool to see and congrats to that company. The last part that I want to hit on that obviously I Know, this probably won't be much of a surprise or most folks know this distinction is that the transition from kind of selling on price, especially when you're smaller and more local focused and really just looking to get in and out of homes and kind of spin up the flywheel on sales to selling on value, right? Like we commonly see. And we've actually seen this transition where at some point a shop gets to a scale and size where they're like, okay, we're not necessarily going to be the cheapest. In fact, we're probably never going to be the cheapest bid out there. And as a result, we need to start focusing on how we can convey that story to the customer so that they look at our quote and they don't just go immediately price, shop it around. And they're not like, they don't come back to us and say, oh, can you, can you lower this by 20% because I got a cheaper quote. They just immediately see the value of going with us and paying a slight premium here to go with us specifically. And what that looks like in practice, right, is that, I mean, you talk about your history, you talk about your accreditations, you talk about really solid case studies that you have, how you helped similar customers in the past. You also talk about guarantees, you talk about install process and professionalism, right? We see this happen a lot where customers are like, this is a big purchase. This is something that's going to impact my comfort from a day to day perspective. I know a lot of folks who've had unfortunately bad experiences with bad contractors in the past. So they might be a little bit jaded coming to the conversation. How do you get their guard down? How do you convince them that you will give them a really great first class experience end to end. And I think that is a really, really crucial change that needs to be made because otherwise, if you're selling a more expensive system compared to other quotes and you're not sharing that value directly and upfront with the customer, you're likely going to get beaten out by those lower price points because the customer just doesn't know why they should go with you.

Yeah, I completely agree. And I think this ties in again to, you know, knowing the history of your company and the case studies and stuff is the same thing. Like how many people have we done in this neighborhood? How many people have we done in this zip code? And educating your team, your salespeople, yourself. So that way when you're out there talking to people, you know what you're talking about, you know the current rebates, you know, by the day. Because you have a process in place to manage rebates. I think that speaks to the level of service that you provide. And I also. You didn't say this one, but I think this is very important, is that when you have a clean process for sales and a clean presentation.

Yeah.

That customer journey is like, wow, okay, this company's tight. If they take this so, so serious, imagine what their work's gonna look like when they actually do it. And it's not just like some thrown together, slimy sales pitch type of thing, but it's actually like a full on customer journey I think is really good as well.

Absolutely. Yeah. It's the professionalism from the moment you step foot into the door.

Right.

I mean, everyone knows you got to put on the shoe covers. Right. Although I've actually had contractors come to my house and just walk straight in with their boots. I was like, oh man. Like I actually gave them slippers. But that also applies to the sales presentation itself. So appreciate bringing that up.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. One of the other questions I had on here was, so your company's backed by Sequoia and if you don't know what Sequoia is, if you don't mind just like sharing a little bit about, like they have some other cool people that they back as well and then, but more importantly, like, what was the process like for someone's trying to maybe I know you don't have experience like selling a company to private equity, but like if they want an infusion of capital or presenting their company for. To get, to get money of some sort, like raising money and stuff. Can you talk through a little bit of that process, what people should do and stuff?

Yeah, absolutely. So happy to give the quick spiel on Sequoia. So fairly large venture fund based, actually globally, but headquartered in Silicon Valley. They were some of the initial backers in folks like Apple and Nvidia and they've been around for a very, very long time. We're really thankful to be partnering with them. And as you mentioned, Phil, I've never sold to private equity, although I have been on the other side of the table looking at kind of what the acquisition landscape looks like from a buyer perspective. And what I will say just on, on the capital infusion side is that looking at the trend lines, there was a lot of private equity consolidation that happened kind of in the late 2010s into early 2020s, obviously with interest rates where they are today. The last couple of years have seen A slight drop off from those kind of peak highs in 2020, although we are seeing a resurgence even this year in terms of acquisition activity. So really excited to see that bounce back. And there's absolutely buyers in the market, both from the large scale private equity shops, but also individual folks who are looking to raise a small amount of money, buy a single shop, be very hands on and then kind of scale that over the next five to seven years. So those kind of search fund type acquisitions we're also seeing happen quite a lot today. But I will say like from even from our perspective in the technology world and talking to our investors, we've seen an increase as of late in folks and just funding sources that are typically meant for technology companies. Be very excited and interested in investing in contractor businesses and services businesses because one obviously very recession proof and recession resistant. But also they all see the value of how technology can dramatically impact and improve and change a very, very, very large business and kind of market segment. So we're seeing a lot of interest, kind of inbound interest from people being like he we're looking to deploy some capital, we're looking to acquire some businesses. We'd love to kind of talk about that and understand your thoughts there. So I'm by no means an expert but we're seeing a resurgence in activity which is always very, very exciting.

Yeah, I think AI can't fix my toilet and which is true. So definitely the money realizes that the trades is where it's at because you got to have people out there, boots on the ground. You can't, AI can't do that.

So 100%.

What about as far as like raising money? Like I think data, having clean data and stuff is important. Can you speak to like when you were going out trying to raise money, is that something that people ask you a lot about? Like what did that look like?

Yeah, absolutely. So from the, from the technology perspective. Yes. Having data both on and this is actually relevant to contractors as well. What is your market? Have you sized the market effectively? Do you understand the different segments within that market? You're basically your target buyers. Just like for us in software and our buyers, it's the same for a contractor business and their buyers, the homeowners, the business owners in their local area.

Sorry, is there like a simple way that you could say, you know, hey if you're trying to figure out your, your tam. Yeah, total addressable market and then you know the different pillars there are easy way to do that with ChatGPT or AI. I'm sure there's a huge way to do it. But is there a simple way a contractor could figure that out?

Yeah, absolutely. So I think there's kind of two canonical ways of calculating tam. One is more of a bottoms up method and by bottoms up it's like looking at each individual sale and then figuring out what are the segments and how that bubbles up into a top number. And there's also more of a top down metric which is just like given the what we know to be the overall spend in the US Alone, can you segment that down into by state and then by local region? I think both options are valid and valuable and ChatGPT can definitely help with both. I think what would be probably most exciting is like you have context, you have historical data as an owner around what are the average ticket sizes, what are the average close rates in your local area? Another interesting piece of information that you can pull into something like ChatGPT would be housing starts. We know that houses when they get built and there's obviously ebbs and flows in the number of houses being built in a certain state or certain area year to year. We know average lifetime of these Systems roughly the 10ish years. So you can actually chart out like there was a spike 10 years ago. Can we forecast out what the next year is going to look like and pulling in that data, getting that data and analyzing that data, Absolutely, you can do in ChatGPT, but grounding it, I think in your real numbers is by far the most important because we know there's huge regional variation in terms of pricing and that is probably the biggest factor that goes into these calculations is like what are you able to charge and what are you able to sell at?

Yeah, makes sense. Was there anything else before I cut you off? I'm sorry, was there anything else that was like, hey, these are some things that are for contractors and for you guys?

No, no, I think, I think we covered it all. Yeah.

Okay, cool. Well, where should people go to get in contact with you or learn more about Pico? What's the best place to get in touch with you?

Yes, so my, my email is David D A V I D at w I T-H-P-I k a.com that's with pika.com and feel free to reach out to me. I promise I'll get back to you as quickly as soon as humanly possible. But yeah, always excited to chat and continue the conversation with folks and. Yeah, yeah.

So who would be an ideal person to reach out to? Like it would be a business owner who's looking to use AI, Maybe streamline some of their processes from a sales perspective. Doesn't know what to do.

Yeah, Business owners, like general manager types. Sales managers. Those would be the folks that we typically work with most today.

Yeah. Okay, cool. Well, David, thanks so much, man. This has been great. I really appreciate getting to know you and learning about your business and hope to keep it going.

Yeah, likewise. Thanks so much, Phil.

You got it.