How Smart Home Service Businesses Are Using AI to Scale

Welcome back to the show. I'm your host, Phil Risher, and on today's episode, we're talking about how to leverage AI to make better decisions that scales your business with clarity instead of chaos. Joining me today is Chris Kiefer. Thanks so much for joining us today, Chris.

Yeah, super excited to talk to a fellow, um, nerd or expert. I don't know how, what you define yourself as, but I, I gladly take on the title of nerd. So I'm excited to, to talk about all things AI and, and home service business.

Yeah, love it. Chris and I actually connected via Marcus Sheridan because we both had him on our podcast. And so we're like, hey, let's get together and talk about stuff. So Chris, could you give us a little bit of background about like your home service side of things and then like what you're doing now and how you help people? You know, a couple minutes.

Yeah. So it's actually, I engineering background started, I tried it out engineering for 6 months after college, hated it, quit, started a marketing company. ran a marketing company for 5 years. And we were your stereotypical millennial marketing company that we're like, oh, we can figure out Facebook ads or Google ads or make your website or make videos. Like we just did it all for small businesses. And because of that, like lack of focus and also just learning entrepreneurship on the fly, that lasted about 5 years and we were doing great stuff, but I had this opportunity to jump ship and become Essentially the in-house marketing agency of a rapidly growing painting company. And so, I got to do exactly what I was doing in my small marketing business, but inside a $10 million company that we scaled to $21 million while I was there.

Awesome.

And so, I hired copywriters, videographer. We outsource specific, really technical things. But what happened while I was there was I was trying to figure out how to spend a million-dollar marketing budget annually and get the best return on that ad spend. And what started like very quickly within the first 5 months on the job, it was like this report that I'm looking at, you'd start asking questions around the office and people would be like, yeah, I don't actually know what that metric means or who puts the data in the system. So then I went on this rabbit hole of like, I'm just trying to figure out better ways to spend marketing dollars.

Hmm.

And I think it was my engineering background and trying to like go track down Kelly at the front office and be like, hey, when someone calls, do you fill out the source field? Or is this from the web form that they submitted? Or like, does the sales rep do that? And there wasn't processes for most of this stuff. It would be like, well, sometimes I do this. And so it was like, okay, if I made it super easy for you to do this, could you make sure that you always get this piece of information for me? Or what else is miserable in your world that I could maybe automate so that you have more time to get this stuff correct? And then, so that was one piece. Then I go talk to production and it's like, if not only do I want to know what the cost per lead is, but which types of work are we doing are the most profitable for the business? And we also didn't have great, like, talk back of our job costing processes, which were good, but getting that tied up to which lead sources.

Yeah.

have better profitability or higher average job size than others and things like that. So it's like, that was the problem that I was trying to solve as a marketing director for this rapidly growing home service business. And in that journey, I would be in masterminds with like, this company was part of a global or national consulting firm. And so they'd have like the mastermind of all the marketing directors from all the other $10 million painting companies around the country. And we would just be sharing ideas on like, hey, we were trying out this new tool or this new product or this new vendor. This is what we tried. And so I just started sharing, like I was watching YouTube videos on Zapier and Make, and this was before N8N, but just those no-code automation tools. And that was the like ramp into, so I was at this company for about 3 and a half years. And then it was in talking to other like marketing people from other painting companies, they were like, could you just set up like the entire integration and tech stack that you guys have? Could you just do that for us? And I was like, actually, that actually, I love like the, my, I was always analytical from a marketing standpoint. And I was like, that is 100% like a dream job for me. And so I left, I like, it was a proposal and my, that company became my first client and then I started Started taking on, like, my previous employer became my first client with my new business. And I've been doing like painting automation consulting and implementation for the last 4 years now. Wow.

Very, very, very cool. I think a lot of people, so I used to work at a home service business. We were $3 million and my CSRs just used to put Google in everything. So I get it.

Oh yeah. They're like, yeah, they said they found us online. So Google, like that's online, right? It's like, yeah, which again, it's just like so many of the processes are like, you just need a definition. You don't have to do what other businesses are doing, but you at least have to make sure that everybody in your office defines that word as the same thing. And there's a dozen of those things that can totally mess up your metrics because you're operating on one assumption that is not what the other people are assuming that that means, you know?

Yeah, for sure. So I'm curious about this because a lot of people listen to this show, they're going to use like, Jobber, Housecall Pro, ServiceTitan, maybe Paint Scout, maybe JobNimbus or something like that. Those are like the, the, the most, you know, main ones. A lot of times the issue is that those CRMs are more like client dispatch tools and it's hard to get it all connected. So do you layer in on top of those tools and then build things inside of their workflow, or how does that work?

Yeah, great question. So this is something that I'm very Like I've spent way too many hours on and I'm just, it's fun for me to think about. But I feel like a lot of consult or a lot of home service businesses, I mean, obviously you start from nothing and you go, and I think it's a pretty consistent trajectory that if you look at like a zero, I always say like zero to $20 million is the bands that I'm looking at.

Mm-hmm.

But at zero, you could run your business on like in your head, honestly. And then a couple hundred thousand dollars, it's like, maybe I should get some paper and put stuff down, use Excel. And as you grow, it's just like everybody has experienced, like there is a need to start systemizing the stuff that you have in your brain or the 2 or 3 or 4 of you that are working have in your heads to like document it and make it more scalable. And so that's a natural progression. And I would say it's pretty hard at It, it probably, I'm sure it happens, but at $1 million that you have software in your business, like guaranteed there is a, there, like you are not running a business without some software. And then it's somewhere between $2 and $4 million that every home service business has now 5 softwares, probably at least if you count like email, calendar, some sort of CRM or all-in-one, there's an accounting package typically. You might have other marketing tools, just like that tech stack starts to grow.

Yeah.

And, and so at the 2 to 4 range, there's this thing that starts happening where the, um, the data moving between softwares becomes very cumbersome and manual. And so you have people whose job in the business is to like translate or copy and paste data from this tool to these tools.

Yes.

And that's where automation comes into play. So I always describe it for painting businesses. We exist to bridge the gap from that $2 to $4 million, and it's going to depend on if you're commercial or residential. But in that range, you have this problem that pokes its head up and it gets bigger and uglier and nastier the larger you get. And it's damn near impossible to get past $5 million without some sort of integrated tech stack and solution around automation.

Yeah.

And so that we're the gap between like the $5 to $20 million company that can't afford a CTO to come in, but is able, like they need some technical assistance just making their life less hectic. Because a lot of times the biggest complaint that I'll hear is like, oh my gosh, like we do not need, I can't even consider another software because my life is like, we already have 7.

Exactly.

And I feel like I'm jumping between 4 different systems as it is. I just want an all-in-one. I want one system to simplify my life and it's like, nice idea. I would argue that what you're actually wanting is just a, not, it doesn't even matter if you have 10 or 15 or 20 softwares, you have to have one integrated system that's comprised of softwares and is like easily flowing data between your marketing channels and whatnot into your CRM, into your estimating tool and production. And if you do that right, it's, it is, I'm, that is how all large businesses run.

Yeah.

Like the Jobbers, the JobNemesis, all of those tools, they are designed to solve the problem for the largest addressable market.

Okay.

And that happens to be, if you just look at statistics, it like contracting businesses under $2 million is like 98% of all home service businesses, you know? So it's like, They're building tools for $0 to $2 million problems. Like that's what they are. So when you get outside of that, they're like, trust me, I talked to a $12 million painting company last week that's using Jobber. And I'm like, that's impressive that you made it that far without really anything else. They've got some Google Sheets, but they don't have anything else that's integrated into that. So we're coming in and talking to them about what other tools would be nice to add to make, like, they've, there's just like a lot of manual stuff that doesn't need to be manual, but they just don't know a better way and it's working and they keep growing. And so that's like how I think about it is in that band, as you grow, there is a need for integration and intentional design as it comes to your data in the business.

Yeah. Makes complete sense. What we see is like, So we serve $1 million to $10 million and like $1 to $3, Hormozi calls it like the swamp, which is like you're the number one salesperson, you're trying to build systems and stuff. And then like the $2 to $3, like what you're saying to $5 million, exactly what you're saying is you have to have dashboards with data, with good data integrity that you feel confident in because you get so far away from the numbers that you don't know and the feel of it. You just start operating on gut feeling instead of data. And then you just keep butting up against $5 million or trying to grow, but you don't know how to grow and you just throw money at the Google gods and you think that's how you're going to grow. And like, that's not how you do it. So I, exactly what you're saying resonates exactly with me because I was at the $3 million business and went to $5 million and a lot of it was data integrity. So I'm curious if you were to like, let's just say I'm at a $2-ish, $3 million business. What are those like, if there's maybe there are like 4 or 5 numbers, 10 numbers that you're like, hey, this is what everyone butts up against is like this name number or this data integrity piece. And like maybe we could pick 1 or 2 that's like, here's how you could solve it. Yeah.

Uh, one acronym that I like For just auditing the data in your business is is the word data or data data. So is the like you know that you have clean data when you have these four elements documented, meaning that every metric or thing that you need to have to pull a report or answer a question exists as a documented variable in your system. Somewhere, right? Second one is accurate. So like I can look at it and not only does it say 81 hours, but I trust that it actually is 81 hours. Not like, well, it's probably ballpark, you know, within 10%. It's like, no, it's all my data is accurate. T is timely. So I don't have to go, you know, call Susan, have her export the CSV, ship it over. It takes me 2 days to pull the quarterly numbers. It's like, no, you should have, and it is 100% possible to have a dashboard that I can go look at to see timely, up-to-date information on my business whenever I want, not on a monthly or quarterly basis. And then the last one is actionable. It's like, there's a lot of data that's really entertaining to look at. Like, ooh, I wonder if there's a correlation between the moon phases and customers calling our business. It's just like, cool.

Yeah.

Yes, we can document that. We can make it accurate and we can show you numbers, but like, what are you going to do about that? It's just like, is it, is this thing that you're tracking actually going to be able to be useful to solve one of the problems in your business? So that's a, just like a simple framework that you could look at a business and be like, do I have these 4 things in my, like in the information inside my business? And generally, as you can imagine, it's like, yes, I do in this part, but not here.

Of course.

And so that's the other piece of like, I feel like the biggest— well, that's, I would say that's the first topic. I don't know if you have any follow-up and then I have a second idea for another, another thing.

So I completely agree with all of those things. The number one piece that I ran into and that a lot of people run into is lead count year over year. And the reason is, is because like you'll get calls coming in, then you'll get a Yelp message, then you'll get an Angie message. Then you'll get an email, then you'll have a Chirp or Hatch and you have a text message thread, but there's no centralized like lead number. Is that something that you help people solve? Yeah.

You're saying just tracking like what's the total leads?

Yeah, exactly.

100%. Yeah.

Yeah.

Actually, that's a, um, I have, this is a marketing is, and just lead, like what are the lead sources that you do track? This is something that I am, because I ran the marketing and I got very bullish on this thing. First of all, when you have humans that are in charge of entering sources into your system, you are an absolute idiot. And I do not say those words lightly. If you have more than 10 sources to track for a human to enter.

Yes.

Trust me, I love granularity on like the digital fingerprints of which campaign, which ad, which like time, day, everything. When did they click digitally? Yeah, it's excellent. Get all of the detailed stuff that you can get. But I'm telling you from talking to dozens of CSRs that answer the phone, and it's human nature that when I start getting more than 10 sources to track, like you can ask them in the 80/20 rule, the Pareto's law, it applies to everything.

Yes.

And so you have, you think you're smart because you've got So many all this detailed granularity, and it's like you go at like run the numbers on all of your sources for the last twelve months, and you're going to see that twenty percent of the sources that you track have eighty percent of the leads in them, and the other eighty percent of sources distribute those twenty percent of leads. Of course, and it gets even worse where there's generally three or four that in out of. 4,000 deals, there's usually 3 or 4 sources that have like a combined total of 7 deals or something ridiculous.

Yeah, of course.

So it's like the main takeaway is do not make the tracking, like you have to put yourself, like system design always comes back to, there's still people running it until robots are actually the ones doing all the work and they never make mistakes and they follow the rules exactly. Like you're, you have to think that Kelly, who answers the phone, she just gets into her habit and she's like, oh, they said this and that probably is web search. So I'm just gonna throw it in that bucket. And if you have like Google, you know, LSA, Google click, Google, uh, or YouTube, like all these different things.

Yeah.

Awesome. The cut, you're trusting the customer to articulate that well enough to another person that then interprets what they said. And they're not gonna have a 5-minute conversation to figure this out. They're just gonna be like, okay, great. And where do you live? And just move on.

Yeah.

So what I, from a marketing sources, and I made a YouTube video on this particular thing.

Okay.

I, I believe that the right way to do that is again, back to that acronym of DATA. What is actionable in your marketing analytics? And I would say the, for example, one, I, I put a cap or a category that's just called brand. So brand is what I define as passive leads that we get from running a professional business. What does a professional business do? They wrap their vehicles, they put yard signs out, they wear logoed uniforms, they pass out business cards, they have leave-behinds. Those are all things that are, you just, just do it. Trust me, it's worth it. Like a wrapped vehicle is the lowest CPM price that you're going to get of anything you could do, it's worth it. So just do it. But the number of people that are like, I want to track how many people called because they saw our van.

Yeah.

It's like, okay, I got good news for you. You had 20 leads last month that called you from your van. So what are you going to do with that? You're just going to go tell your guys to drive their trucks around like unnecessarily? You're not going to do that. So you just need to know All of those things, again, that's where I would say that's entertaining data. It's like, makes you feel good about your investment, but that problem has already been answered. It doesn't need to be tracked and proved by another thousandth company to be like, oh, actually it is. We did make it worth it. You know?

Yes.

So I say all of those things that are just like brand professionalization moves, just throw it into a big bucket that's called brand.

Okay.

Because the thing that people mistake or the mistake that people make Is that they waste human capacity and that's your CSR trying to figure out which of these 18 different buckets do I put as the lead source. And it's like, it doesn't matter. It's a passive thing that we're not going to change anyways. Put it into brand because I do want to know how many passive leads do we get every month.

Hmm.

And then I want to know of the sources that I'm paying money or time for our people to do. So like emails, great source. Texting, Google Ads, Facebook Ads—those are all paid things that when I tell you your average cost per lead on Google last month was $74.63, you could theoretically say, "Okay, so if I spend another $700, I could anticipate I'm going to get about 10 more leads, which is what we need to hit our sales goal for." You know, like that's the that's the way to think about it. So it's simplifying. the metrics because humans are the ones that are running your systems and there's so much noise. And that's, I'm using marketing, your marketing guy.

Yeah. Yeah.

That's the way to simplify this of like deploy that human brainpower towards something else that actually matters. And that is a, yeah, that's an example of like every business that I talk to, I'm just like, there's this debate and I'm like, if you just trust me on this for 6 months, I'll still be able to tell you how many passive leads you're getting. And then we can look at that as a bucket that we can trust is going to happen if we keep being a professional organization. And then we'll figure out how to move the levers based on the actual useful, you know, channels that we track after that.

Yeah. Okay. I love it. Good takeaway for people listening is have under 10 sources that you have to manually track. The brand, that's a golden nugget right there, is like wrap that up into a nice thing because to your point, it's not an actionable takeaway. It might be nice to know and tickle your toes, but it's not going to be the actual thing that's going to— what are you going to do with that? There's nothing to take away. So I love that. What are some other numbers? They don't have to be marketing related, just like in a business that are good, that are the actionable numbers that people are missing, that they don't know that number, so they don't know what to do. Are there any like really good ones there?

This is one that's just top of mind because we've been doing a lot of research on this is that the average home service company actually will ask you first because this is, this is entertaining. What do you think the average spend of the average home service company is on all technology in their business as a percent of revenue?

As a percent of revenue? Um, I'm gonna go with Maybe 1 or 2%. It also skews on the size of the business, but I would say like maybe 2%.

Yeah. So it's 2 to 3% is like the national average. Obviously you're going to have some people that look at their numbers and they're like, hey, I only run on 1%. Interesting thing that I found is that, and this you can look up on, look this up with Claude, higher growth companies. Do you think they spend more or less than 2 to 3%?

If they're higher growth, well, their revenue's gonna be skewed. I mean, I would say that they're gonna spend less as a percentage base, but it might be more. I don't know.

Yeah. So it's, it's higher growth, meaning their growth year over year, getting bigger. Oh, okay. Yeah. So getting, getting bigger, not like the, if it's a $10 million company versus that, but in general, higher growth companies are going to spend more on technology. Of course. And the other thing that I, this is, I was mentioning to you before we started recording, I listened to The Founders Podcast by David Et cetera. And you can go back and there's, I love these bits on like the oil barons and the railroad tycoons, all these people, like they invested so heavily in technology because they were looking at it as leverage on the cost. Like the most, the biggest expense in your business outside of taxes is human labor. They, you know, they're saying your profits walk on 2 feet.

Yeah.

Like if you can minimize the number of people that are needed to execute, then you are going to be more profitable. And the best way to do that is to figure out how to have technology offset the cost of your labor. So exactly like you can, in my mind, it is knowing that you should spend 2 to 3% on technology. That's the average. We did an audit of, and we'll ask people, a lot of times people have no idea because they're not tracking this.

Of course.

But it's not uncommon for, you know, I'd see businesses in like the 1.5, 1.7 range. And it's like, they're almost like, there's a balance here because I'm not saying just go spend money ruthlessly, like needlessly on cool, like shiny objects. But I don't, I think it's foolish to celebrate that we got our tech spend down to 1%. Yeah. It's just like, okay, like, and what's your overhead percentage as compared to the industry average? It's like, it'd be the same thing of like, You're a construction company or a landworks company and you're like, we only spent 5% of our total revenue on machinery and equipment.

Yeah.

It's like, you're dumb because that means that you spent a ton of labor shoveling holes when you could have just paid for an excavator, got the job done in a couple of hours instead of days. It's like, that's the, it's the same exact thing, but now we're getting into a place where we have machines that you, that if you have people that are doing a job at a computer, the AI is getting to a point where it's doing everything that humans can do at a computer. And it's getting better and better and better. And even like the trajectory of how things have changed in the last 6 months is absolutely bananas. It's so crazy. And then when you talk to people, They're like, I talked to a guy a couple days ago who's another AI consultant and he heard a statistic that was all AI jobs like you and me, you're also marketing, but like theoretically there is projections that everything that I am doing for businesses right now, 94% of it will be able to be done by AI within 3 to 5 years.

Yeah.

So that means like on one hand, I'm going to be out of a job. And the way I look at it is like, well, yeah, the stuff I'm doing now will be like, we're trying to get as much of our work done by AI as we can already, but I don't know what's going to be created and what's going to be needed, but we're going to be in a good place to evolve our business into that next thing. But the point is that like, if you're running a business, I think you should be trying to find ways to spend technology or spend money on technology wisely. So that you can scale without increasing your headcount.

I completely agree. If I was going to give someone listening to this an actionable roadmap to this, Dan Martell has this framework for buy back your time. The bottom one is admin. So what Chris is saying is all the admin tasks go, you don't have to build these yourselves. Go and find agents that you can deploy that can do admin tasks. This could be bookkeeping. This could be whatever. Then it's delivery. Are there things in your delivery process that agents could do? Go and find agents that people are building that you can plug into your business. Then it's marketing. Go and find marketing agents that you can plug into your business. Then it's sales. Go and find sales agents that you can plug into your business. When you're listening to this, we're not saying you have to go out and build agents. What we're saying is that there are agents out there that cost a heck of a lot less than your payroll does that do things a heck of a lot better. And you don't have to fully manage them like you would a team member. And so I completely agree with you, Chris, but I also know that smart guys like you and I are building things for these people so that they don't have to build them and then they can leverage them inside of their business. So the tech thing, 2% is like, you got to be spending more than that and you don't have to be the one that's building it, I would say for sure.

Yes, exactly. And the way I think about it is like, Yeah, like probably goes without saying, but the goal is like, oh shoot, we're at 1.5%. Let's spend another 50 grand on something. But it's like you, there is an opportunity and you are probably overpaying human labor to do something if you're spending under 2% is the idea. And according to Claude, it says that even like very like, and this is in home service. So obviously like if you're in a technology company, it's going to be way higher.

Right.

But for home service business in particular, the numbers I'm talking about, there are companies that spend 5 to 7% on technology. And I think that it's, again, it's not a, I guess I would look at it kind of as like an indicator of how forward-thinking is the business. But obviously if you're going to increase that, you'd want to be just destroying the market averages on overhead because you're trying to get some leverage there.

Yeah, for sure. So So what does the end output look like when someone works with you? Is it like you give them like a Power BI dashboard or something and everything's connected and then they can set up their numbers and it's like, cool, this looks good?

Yeah. So basically, like, because we only work with painting companies, so the number one thing that I tell everybody is, so we don't do marketing for businesses. And, um, I joke that that's like, I have PTSD from running marketing for a $20 million company. And it's like, yeah, I just, I, I've And it's so, your job that you do for people is just like, it's incredibly difficult and algorithms are changing all the time. And I feel like the only time that I hear someone say that they like their marketing vendor is when they just started working with them 3 months ago.

Yeah.

Because it's like, it's just, people are just cycling through these and it's just, it's a really tough job. So I don't do marketing, but what I love doing is being the marketing company's best friend. And that's by getting really good, like cleaning up the data inside the business to give them great numbers, not only for marketing, but marketing is one of the big, the big benefactors of that. Um, but the other thing I would say is, um, yes, as far as like, what's the scope of what we do? We position ourselves as a partner in the business, like a technology partner.

Mm-hmm.

So we, our favorite way to work, if it's a good-sized company, and we don't do this with everybody. Because there's lots of factors with just like the leadership and do we actually, how closely do we want to be tied to this business as our compensation? But we actually have started charging a percent of revenue, including technology fees. So we are going to manage and tell you where you should be spending your money on technology. And so we'll take a flat percentage of gross revenue. Because so we want you to grow revenue. And also minimize technology spend, or I would say spend it efficiently. And so what does that mean? It's like literally anything that comes down, like touches technology, and that includes training your people how to use it, configuring it so that, you know, like, so it's set up to win in your business. If we have to do software migrations and to get you off of an, an archaic CRM that doesn't talk to anything. Like, we'll do that.

Yeah.

So it's, um, the scope is, it started, and this was an evolution over 4 years. These are all things that we've done. We have 26 clients that we work with currently, all painting companies. Um, and, um, yeah, we like, initially it was like, we're gonna build out some Zaps and integrations with you. And then that evolved into, hey, we're doing that pretty well. Like, we can help you with a software migration because this tool that you're on doesn't work very well. So we've done that dozens of times. And then it was like, hey, we're starting to see like a tech stack that is like a winning formula. So we recommend that you just adopt the softwares that all these other painting companies that you want to be like are already using because we know they work. It doesn't mean that they're the only way to work or to use software or the software stack that you have to use, but it's just proven. It's already— it eliminates unknowns. But as you get larger, there are some Like the swapping out a CRM is a much bigger deal and much more painful the bigger you get.

Yes.

So we try to minimize, like we're not just swapping out softwares for the sake of it, but there are lots of situations where you just have a tool that's like the source of truth for your business and it has really poor APIs.

Yeah.

And we're definitely in a world now where I care Like, I don't, I literally, I don't even, I feel like interfaces and like what the dashboard looks like and how I can manipulate stuff as a human is like a 1% factor when considering software now. It's all about how much could I have an agent manipulate and do in this system? And then I just need the human to be able to like see what's going on. And then audit and make sure that they agree with what the agent did. And so that's like, there's this whole new wave of like observability is a big thing with all tools. And so I think about it from that perspective of like, as a business owner, you need to be, I think a lot of business owners go hunting or sorry, the biggest problem that I see with software is that Business owners go shopping for software and they are like, you know, perusing and getting pitched this thing and that thing. And there's all these shiny features and widgets and they're like, oh, that would be cool. And a much, I feel like that's the equivalent of if you're building a house of just like going around and like having a bunch of vendors pitch you on the sink and the bathtub and the carpet and all these things and like fire pits and just stuff that you could have that are like really cool.

Yeah.

But it's like, you haven't even designed your house yet. Do you know how many sinks you need or where the fire pit or how big of a fire pit you could get? Like, is it going to be— there's like all these things that you need to figure out before you start shopping around for flashy, like, widgets.

Yes.

And once you design the, the, like, I think about it from, okay, how big are you today? How big are you going to be in 3 to 5 years? Like, what's your— how fast are you growing? And then let's design a system That, that 3 to 5 year business in the future is going to need to run because you're going to be able to, to get there faster if we start with the end in mind. And then we go back to like, okay, that's the end state. And when I say like, what do you need? It's like, what functionally does software need to do for you at that size? And so this is talking about like routing problems and scheduling jobs and what's the workflow of someone look like who's in charge of getting a backlog of 150 projects assigned to the right crew with the right skills. And how do I visualize that quickly to be able to do that? And then it's like, and then you layer in AI on that and it's like, what is AI going to help with and what is it going to be making recommendations for that person? And if you can start there, then you can come back to say, okay, right now we have this tool. Does it meet these boxes? No, it doesn't. Okay, what is it missing? And now I can go hunting for this exact specific tool or software that I need. to plug into my tech stack and I have the list of prerequisites and requirements that have to be true for this tool to work. And then I can plug that tool into my tech stack because it fits exactly what I need. And it's so often that businesses do it the other way around. They're just like, I got a problem. And then they go schedule demos and they're getting pitched by sales guys that, again, I'm not hating on software sales reps, but Yeah. They're incentivized to just sell the largest package that they can, and they don't know the full scope of what your business needs. So it's just like, it's never going to go well. As opposed to if you do all the research, you'd build the spec and the requirements, and then you go, hey, really quick, do you guys do these things? And they can say, no, we don't. Be like, okay, thanks. Next call. Like, it just doesn't matter if you don't have a good API.

Yes. If you were sitting across from a painting contractor right now, what would be like the ideal tech stack? Or you don't have to give it all, you know, or if there's just like, hey, this for this, this for that, this for that.

Yeah. I tell, it's on, this is on my YouTube channel, so it's not like a trade secret of ours, but I'm a big fan of HubSpot. And then Paint Scout is the most popular estimating tool right now. Paint Scout, if you're listening to this, please continue to make your API better. That's the one thing, like I've got a number of clients that are, Literally looking at rebuilding their own or switching to different tools just because of the API, but they are a great platform and their API is good. There's just like some things that are annoying, but they're the best that I've seen for paint estimating currently. QuickBooks is like kind of the standard. I don't love Intuit, but again, it's like they have a good API and it works. So we we go with that for production. Airtable has been the, like, a nice no-code database tool that we can build what we want on top of. And so that's like the core.

Yeah.

CompanyCam's the other one that I would say is pretty common, but there's lots of businesses that don't use it. And then I would say there's a number of tools. There's a really awesome tool called Carbide that does Route optimization and salesmen assignments to incoming leads. So leads can book their own appointments and get onto the right time slot that's optimized for the region or the market or the appointments that the sales rep has. You Can Book Me is another booking tool that we use often. It's kind of like Calendly. Slack. I'm a big fan of Slack. We use Slack. There's just like lots of Internal communications than a business, I think Slack is super cheap and really worth it. Nice. What else? Yeah, a bunch of time tracking is kind of, I just, there's lots of different time tracking tools that as long as it's got a really good API and you can do everything that a human can do through the API, then like that's my requirement for time tracking. And then as far as dashboards go, I'm honestly seeing more and more people just use AI to build the exact dashboard that they want because everyone has so many different preferences on it. This is just an example of a dashboard that we built for a client that is, it's all built. This is, was vibe coded.

Yeah.

But there's lots of stuff in here that if you were a painting company would be really useful to you. But like when you're looking at this year, I can see projecting out into the future if I want to look by week or by month, exactly how much work do I have scheduled on the week of September 7th and those projects that are listed, or if I want to see how did my managers do and if they're managing the lead painters. So it groups all the projects by this manager, Alex did 189 projects. I can drop that down and see these are the painters that did those projects for, you know, under Alex. I can see Alex's GP, each individual painter's GP. I can expand it down into, you know, this particular project was at this GP. Nice. And then I can drill in further and looks like my screen is not— there you go. So I can drill in further to see how did I actually do. And then if I want, I can even open this up in HubSpot or open it up in Airtable. So I'm a big fan of like dashboards. I like all big, uh, like all-in-one tools. They have their, every dashboard tool is built the same way. It's like little building blocks. I consider it like Legos where it's like you've got 8 tiles across the top that you can put either a number, a chart, a graph, whatever, and you can like customize it.

Mm-hmm.

Theoretically can do everything that I'm doing here. What this does really, really well though is I would say AI is basically giving you a 3D printer instead of Lego bricks to build the dashboard that you want. And so we even have like on the owner side here, the data in the business of like, this is the entire breakdown of the funnel. So from the top marketing, You were talking about leads, like, yes, it's exactly how many leads did we get? What was our set rate on those leads? What's our set appointments? How many of them did we lose or canceled? And then how many estimates did we issue from that? And then it goes into like, what was our revenue per estimate, our sales target, our— so everything is in here. And just like I said before, I can go look at any metric. I can click on it, drill down, see every single project. And this is to me, like, I don't know why you would ever use an out-of-the-box, um, like dashboard when you can connect all the tools. So like in this, we're connecting HubSpot, Airtable, and QuickBooks. So we have marketing spend data, expense data, um, all the production data, and then all of the marketing information to be able to, um, it's great. Yeah. To do that. So I'm, that's the, I don't remember what the question was, but just, I think As far as the tech stack, the reporting tools, the answer would just be Claude Code or Replit or Lovable or some, something that can just like allow you to see exactly what you want with the coloring. The dashboards to me are like, how can I fit the maximum amount of information into a screen with colors and flags and things that dynamically pop up to quickly tell me where to look? Yeah, it's like planes that have modern planes now are all like computer screens that can do so much more stuff than just like analog, like 65 different, like pressure gauges and things. It's like, I only need to see the pressure gauge when it's out of range. And if it's in range, then just don't show it to me.

Yeah, exactly. I love it. Um, man, that was awesome. I think anyone that is running a business would want that. So, um, But awesome for painting companies for sure. So if someone's running a painting company, and they feel all of these pain points that you're talking about, where should they go to learn more about your business?

Yeah, so paintos.app is the— that's our like the PaintOS is our like flagship tool that if you want to just run like most businesses run, that's where I would say like, there's occasionally where people are like, I want custom stuff. But paintos.app Is the landing page. And if you go to /ai, paintos.app/ai, that actually is a fantastic way to get into— I'm gonna pull it up here and show you what this looks like. It's actually an AI assessment that we put together that you can do in— it takes you 5 minutes. You can have multiple people in your business do this. But the thing, it's just like low barrier. Take this and you can jump into the assessment and it basically, in a matter of 5 minutes, you can see where are you at with it on the technology side.

Awesome.

And there's a whole formula that it breaks down, like how we think about using AI in your business from a data perspective and then operator perspective and then leadership and stuff. I'm a big math nerd. So if you don't know what this equation means, it actually, if you do know what it means, you'll be like, wow, That's smart. But it basically gives you a breakdown of your operator score as an individual, but then also the data side of the business. Is your data like routed correctly, connected, integrated? Because AI right now is just a component of like, yes, you can be a really good user of AI, but you're going to get pretty bad outputs if it's not, if it doesn't have access to the data and the context to give it the, the like really rich information that it needs. But if you have great data, you can show a low-level user some pretty simple commands or skills and they can do incredible things if the, if the AI that they're using has access to the, the systems.

Yep. Good data, good decisions. That's how it all comes down to. Uh, cool. Well, Chris, thanks, man. This has been great. Um, I really appreciate you hopping on the show and I think I'm coming on your show, so I look forward to talking to you again soon and appreciate you sharing all your wisdom on this.

Absolutely. It was fun, Phil. Appreciate it. And anytime, I'm always happy to chop up AI or technology. So, it was fun.

Love it. Thanks, man. See ya.