Full transcript10 chapters · 7,737 words
00:00From Key West to selling phone book ads to HVAC shops
Jenny Benbrook: Most contractors use about 30% of the software they’re paying for. We help them get ROI on the other 70%.
Tyler Martin: Welcome to Profit and Grit with Tyler, where blue-collar owners and insiders spill the real story behind their hustle, building businesses that thrive through sweat and smarts. We’ll dig into their journeys from scaling chaos to growing the bottom line with lessons and grit that pay off big.
Tyler Martin: Here’s your host, the blue-collar CFO, Tyler Martin. If you’re paying for powerful software, but still feel like your business is harder to run every year, this episode is for you. Today, I’m joined by Jenny Benbrook from Powerhouse Consulting Group. She spent years inside Service Titan and other field service platforms
Tyler Martin: helping contractors fix the problem almost nobody wants to admit. They’re only using about 30% of the software they pay for. We talk about the super user risk that can cripple a business overnight, shiny object syndrome in home service, and how to build a technology plan that actually supports growth instead of creating chaos.
Tyler Martin: Let’s get into it with Jenny. Hey, Jenny, welcome to the Profit and Grit Show. How are you doing?
Jenny Benbrook: I am doing excellent today. Thank you, Tyler.
Tyler Martin: Yeah, I’m super excited to have you and I appreciate you taking the time to be here. Would love to learn, just to start out with, what do you do professionally?
Jenny Benbrook: Professionally, I help contractors make sense of software is the easiest way that I can say it. But I also have the esteemed honor of leading a team of some of the most incredible minds that I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. And that, of course, is our team of consultants
Jenny Benbrook: that really do the work in helping contractors understand their software.
Tyler Martin: Yeah, it’s such an important topic, especially, I mean, it always is an important topic. But right now, I think with the evolution at the pace of AI and all these different automations and things, it’s just an amazing time period. And a resource like you, I’m sure, is having a lot of fun with this.
Jenny Benbrook: It is, yeah. It was certainly a gap that we identified in the market as we saw the emergence of cloud-based field services management technology entering the space. And I think having been in the industry, as long as I have, I’ve seen several waves of technology come through.
Jenny Benbrook: And it’s always met with a bit of skepticism or even hesitation as to, do I really need this? That was sort of the antiquated way of thinking. But what’s really neat is over the past few years, we’ve seen a complete mind shift in contractors and owner operators.
Jenny Benbrook: And it’s not necessarily the resistance or the hesitation to technology that we used to see. It is now I want all of the tech that my business can handle and I want it all at once. So as quickly as these solutions are entering the market, we see our contractors getting
Jenny Benbrook: very excited about them and buying them up.
Tyler Martin: Yeah, that’s so cool. It’s fun to see the change. I mean, it’s fun to see this evolution of efficiency and thinking bigger in terms of how we can serve people.
Jenny Benbrook: That’s right. It is. It’s exciting. It’s completely revolutionizing how we, not only how we run our businesses, but it revolutionizes how we take care of our team members, how we serve homeowners. So it really is changing everything that we used to know about running a contract in a shop.
Tyler Martin: Yeah, I love it. Before I get into the first section, I want to talk with you about, I’d like to know one other thing about you. Do you have like a personal tidbit or anything you can share so we can get to know you a little?
Jenny Benbrook: A personal tidbit. So I, fun fact is I am born and raised in Key West, Florida. I am a sixth generation. I think that’s probably one of the coolest tidbits that people find when they meet me. And my favorite tidbit is that I built my career in the trades.
Jenny Benbrook: So I sort of fell into the wonderful world of HVAC not too long after I left the island and have been in the industry ever since.
Tyler Martin: That is so cool. And that takes me right where I want to start. So I believe how you started your business, Powerhouse, was someone said to you, hey, it seems like you know so much about Service Tite and can you help me get it going?
Tyler Martin: Can you kind of give me that story? I know I’m leaving out details. I’m probably glossing over too much. So just give me the story behind it.
Jenny Benbrook: Yeah. Well, I’d love to take a few steps back to sort of set the stage for how I had that conversation. And you’re exactly right. That really was the catalyst for founding Powerhouse was a conversation I had with a contractor. But as mentioned, I’ve been in the trades for quite some time, started on the marketing side, serving contractors with more traditional marketing services.
Jenny Benbrook: And what I mean by traditional is this was before internet marketing was a thing. So we were still placing ads in the phone book and direct mail and billboards and all those traditional modalities for marketing. And so I had the pleasure of calling on contractors and really getting to know their businesses and taking more of a strategic focus to planning a marketing calendar.
Jenny Benbrook: So if we understood a contractor’s desire was to grow their memberships that year, their service department, we would have a heavy focus on that. And what are the modalities we would use to drive service business? Or are we looking for more AOR sales?
Jenny Benbrook: And so we’d focus marketing efforts there. But what it came down to was really a numbers game.
05:51Why she couldn’t trust the data coming out of the platforms
Jenny Benbrook: We had to know and trust the data. And I know you can appreciate this being honest. You see me writing. You’re like numbers that is hit my target. And so what it came down to was really making sure that we understood the data, not just that we were planning some fancy creative. A little secret is
Jenny Benbrook: I’m actually not a creative marketer. I’m a very much a data driven marketer where I understood the power of aligning business goals with efforts and outputs. And if we could do that, that’s where we start to see measurable growth in each department. And so, again, when I started with
Jenny Benbrook: contractors, most were on pen and paper, a large majority were on pen and paper. And as we started to migrate to these cloud-based systems, of course, Service Titan entering the market in, you know, 2013, 2014 timeframe, that really started to revolutionize how we manage customer
Jenny Benbrook: records and how we managed our data. It gave us more access to reporting, more insights into what was happening once a lead came through. Where did it go? How did it convert? What campaigns could we attribute it to? And so it opened up a whole new world of possibilities as far as strategic
Jenny Benbrook: marketing is concerned. So I ran that part of the business for several years. I was a fractional CMO for several contractors across the country. And just like I always had, we relied very heavily on data. But what we found was we could seldom trust the data coming from these platforms.
Jenny Benbrook: And it was our job to figure out why. Why could I not pull a report on active members? Why could I
07:47The client who lost his Service Titan super user
Jenny Benbrook: not trust that number or marketing campaign status? And that’s where we started to peel back the layers of the onion. So in order for me to get accurate data on this report, I have to take several steps back to determine what is the workflow? Is it set and certain? Is it being
Jenny Benbrook: followed by every individual who owns that process? And that was what ensured we had good data hygiene. So after having that level of insight alongside this, one of my contractors had also lost their internal service titan super user. So that’s a term your listeners are probably very familiar with.
Jenny Benbrook: This is the individual at a contractor’s organization who owns the knowledge. This is usually an office manager maybe or lead CSR. And this is the individual who implemented the software and who has sort of stood up to take ownership. What my contractor found was this was a very risky position to have one person internally owning all of the knowledge on a platform that virtually ran his business.
Jenny Benbrook: And much to his concern, this individual left his company. and he was stuck in a position of, do I rehire for that role? Which of course is very risky or could I just outsource it to you? He said, at this point, you know a lot about the software.
Jenny Benbrook: I don’t need a full-time individual. Can we set this up in a fractional manner? The way that we do your marketing services and that was where the light bulb went off. And my partner Pam and I sat down and really started to think about the opportunity
Jenny Benbrook: and what we recognized as a gap in the market was no one was advocating for contractors when it came to software. So there’s all of these incredible tools that are promising efficiency and greater profits and everything that comes along with technology. But there wasn’t a service or an individual who was saying, let me implement it according
Jenny Benbrook: to your business. Help me. Let me help you set it up. Ensure that your teams are trained. make sure you understand the reports that you’re staying up on top of changes. And so it was that contractor advocacy that really excited us and led us to officially forming
Jenny Benbrook: Powerhouse. Once we launched Powerhouse, we very quickly became partnered with Service Titan. We’re still partners with them today. And then we began to partner with some of the best practices groups that represent the industry, just really taking that educational approach to implementing and optimizing software. And I know we’re talking about service title a lot, but there’s other
Jenny Benbrook: field service management tool software that you also support or will provide guidance on. Is that correct? That’s right. That’s right. So there are several layers of software now, and that’s, I’m sure we’ll get into that as we continue talking today. But when we founded Powerhouse,
Jenny Benbrook: we focused primarily on what we call the foundational layer of technology in a contractor’s business, and that is your field service management software. The two platforms that we are partnered with on the residential side are Service Titan and Field Edge. Of course, there’s a whole host of other options out there. Depending on your shop or your stage in business,
Jenny Benbrook: you may prefer one over the other. For the level of consultation that we do, we are officially partnered with Service Titan and FieldEdge. And so that’s really the foundational layer, the operational software. And then of course you have your financial software. That’s your
Jenny Benbrook: foundation. The second layer is now the entire ecosystem of tools that have entered our industry. And these are the third party tools that integrate into your foundation, whether it’s to provide enhanced reporting and visibility, enhanced marketing capabilities, the options are endless. And what we found over the past few years is that the emergence of all of this new tech in our
Jenny Benbrook: industry, while it was very exciting, it was also incredibly overwhelming. Which tools do I need? You know, am I even using the tools I pay for correctly before I start buying new tools? And so we saw this general sense of overwhelm, which led us to expanding our consulting services
Jenny Benbrook: across the entire tech ecosystem. And again, taking that contractor advocacy from just making sense of their foundational software, their FSMs, and ensuring that they had a streamlined and intentionally built tech stack that covered the entire business.
12:49Write the SOPs before you lose the person who knows
Tyler Martin: Yeah, good stuff. What do you see nowadays? Because I still see a lot of times you had brought up your first client had a key person working for them, and then they left. And even to this day, a lot of times you’ll see that.
Tyler Martin: What do you recommend when you run into a situation like that? If you ran an HVAC company tomorrow and most of the domain knowledge is under one person that’s an employee, would you coach the owner a little bit? Hey, you want to diversify your risk a little bit?
Tyler Martin: Or what would that conversation look like?
Jenny Benbrook: Well, the conversation’s different for every operation is the unfortunate answer. There’s no easy button there. But what we would immediately coach on is process documentation. Because some organizations may have the capacity to spread that knowledge across multiple team members. So this is where we have departmental knowledge.
Jenny Benbrook: So, you know, you have your warehouse manager who owns the inventory process and you have your service manager who owns and so on and so forth. And what we do is advise that each of these processes are documented in an SOP, which is a training file that lives within your organization so that as your company grows and changes and people move in and out of roles, your processes still stay the same and you’re onboarding for that new role in the same fashion.
Jenny Benbrook: So whether it is one person in the organization who takes the lead or it’s slid across multiple people, the most important thing that a company can do that an owner operator can do is start working on those SMPs today before they lose that person.
Tyler Martin: Yeah, that’s a great one. Now I want to switch gears into the utilization of software. A lot of times I’ll see people come to me and they’ll be,
14:51Why most contractors only use 30% of their FSM
Tyler Martin: hey, I’ve got service tight and I got field edge, whatever it happens to be. And you look at it and they’re like using 10% of it or 30% of it or a very fractional part of it. When I say that first, what are your thoughts on that?
Tyler Martin: And then two, how do we overcome that? Or what’s the approach to overcome that? So they’re really getting better utilization of what they’re paying for.
Jenny Benbrook: Yeah, so you’re exactly right. Most contractors are only utilizing an unfortunately small percentage of a software that they pay 100% for. Our experience shows that on average, most contractors, when they come to Powerhouse, are utilizing about 30% of their primary FSM platform. So imagine that, paying 100%, but only using 30%.
Jenny Benbrook: And so it’s in that delta that we’re really missing out on opportunity to operationalize our company and really get the benefits of what technology is supposed to provide us. So taking a step back, why does that happen? Because these tools are incredible. It’s a matter of how complex they are.
Jenny Benbrook: how overreaching is these primary FSMs really touch every aspect of a business, and how quickly technology changes, how many updates there are to the software, how are we consistently staying on top of them. And so what we find is when companies come to us,
Jenny Benbrook: the number one, I mean, really like nine out of 10 contractors who come to us say the same exact thing almost verbatim, and that is, I don’t know what I don’t know. So they have a feeling that I’m not using the software to the fullest potential, but I don’t know where to start.
Jenny Benbrook: I’m not sure what I’m not using, what features could be available to me. And that was something that we discovered very early on as a consistent feeling. It was a general unawareness of the capabilities of a software. And so what we’ve done internally here at Powerhouse is we’ve developed
Jenny Benbrook: an initial starting point for contractors, which we refer to as an assessment. And that allows us to evaluate how they’re using the software so that we can educate them on what opportunities are in front of them. Once contractors have that information, then they can make business decisions.
Jenny Benbrook: appropriate to them or to their goals. So they can say, okay, now I see the big picture, everything I have in front of me, let’s start to prioritize what I want to build out and what I want to work on that gets me closer and closer
Jenny Benbrook: to using 100% of this software.
Tyler Martin: Yeah, that’s great. Now, one thing that you said, that assessment, now this is for someone that already is probably utilizing some software. Do you also like run into, like if someone says, hey, I want to start using ServiceSight Is there an assessment process in that?
18:01Picking a platform for the shop you actually have today
Tyler Martin: Or how do you evaluate like, hey, this is a good fit for someone? Or even do you get into that level of whether it might be the right fit or not?
Jenny Benbrook: We don’t often get into that level of discovery. That’s typically on a contractor where they’re evaluating the different tools that they will use. Typically, when a contractor engages with Powerhouse, they’ve already selected their platform of choice or they’re already on their platform of choice. But I do have recommendations.
Jenny Benbrook: What, and this is applicable not just to your primary FSM, but any tool that you’re evaluating for your business, is understand where your business is today. Be very realistic about that. So if you are just starting out and you have one technician, you’re probably not ready for a software like Service Titan.
Jenny Benbrook: Sure. It really would not make financial sense to invest in that at this time. So you may want to go on a more rudimentary platform that’s easy to set up, easy to manage, a low cost, and then graduate into a more advanced platform.
Jenny Benbrook: So first, be very realistic about where you are. Once you know that, be realistic about what your goals are. So what are your growth goals? Whether it is financial, increasing your revenue, if it is perhaps to grow your business, to sell it in a certain amount of time, there are definitely things to consider there to
Jenny Benbrook: make your business attractive to private equity or other buyers. So know where you are today, know where you want to be, what your growth goals look like, and then understand what is needed in your business. So is it on-demand support? Is it advanced reporting functionality?
Jenny Benbrook: Get a list of those questions and thoughts together and ask them to every vendor that you interview. That way you’re making a very clear decision, taking out any emotional bias or any of the, what we call noise in the market, what all of your peers or influencers say
Jenny Benbrook: that you should be using.
20:16Shiny object syndrome and treating tech like a marketing plan
Jenny Benbrook: And you’re making a decision that makes sense for your business.
Tyler Martin: You mentioned third-party products. Now there are like so many shiny objects, I’ll call them, out there right now. I mean, and some of them are great, but I think there’s just so many that they can quickly become overkill. How do you, within your own client base,
Tyler Martin: how do you kind of contain your contractors in terms of, yeah, this makes sense versus, yeah, this is a shiny object. And, you know, I don’t want to name anything because I’m not really picking on anyone, but it can quickly get out of hand.
Tyler Martin: Like you can have a Service Titan Pro version and then you’re also getting a third party version and there’s some overlap. Does that make sense? I’m asking a lot of different things and hopefully you can synthesize that.
Jenny Benbrook: I think I can. I think I can because this is a problem that we started to see a few years ago with the emergence of these tools. And I will say as a preface to this response that there are some awesome tools on the market.
Jenny Benbrook: that really make tremendous impacts on a contractor’s operations, conversion rates, margins. So this is not a say no to technology. On the contrary, technology is good when it is implemented intentionally into a business. And so what we see is right now, it’s sort of this
Jenny Benbrook: shiny object syndrome. I was joking with my partner about this yesterday. She’s sort of coined that term and we call it the SOS, the shiny object syndrome, because technology is fun and it’s exciting. And we’re in an age where there’s more information than ever before coming from
Jenny Benbrook: peer groups, from user groups, from best practices groups. Contractors are getting this information everywhere they turn around the next greatest product, how it revolutionized this guy’s business. Well, I want it to do the same for mine. And so tech seems so easy, right?
Jenny Benbrook: So when we say I purchased this tool, I’m going to implement it and voila, it’s going to change my business. And so aspirationally, you know, that’s what we think when we think of tech is easy, streamline automation, increase profit. But the reality that we’re seeing, because all of these
Jenny Benbrook: tools are being adopted without a plan or ill implementations or low adoption internally, we see the exact opposite effect happening. So instead of creating all these efficiencies, We see the tools leading to loss in productivity, leading to underutilization, duplicative tools, which of course is a lot of waste, financial waste.
Jenny Benbrook: And so when you really think about what’s happening, technology has very quickly become a profit killer in our industry. And so we wanted to get ahead of this. So again, going back to our original goal, our passion truly is advocating for contractors when it comes to technology.
Jenny Benbrook: And what that means is we now have to bring a completely new school of thought into a contractor’s business, which is treating technology like any other business plan that you would implement into your organization. So let’s use marketing as an example, because that’s my background.
Jenny Benbrook: So most companies, when we talk about marketing, they understand the importance of marketing. They know that at the end of the year, at the beginning of the year, somewhere around that time, I’m going to build out a marketing plan. And that marketing plan is what’s going to help me get to the growth goal that I want to see.
Jenny Benbrook: And it’s very intentional where they have a specific budget allocated to marketing. They have different partners that they work with. for marketing. So, you know, your digital marketing partner and your print partner and so on and so forth. So it’s a very intentional business plan made for the company to achieve their growth goals.
Jenny Benbrook: We have built the same thought process for our contractors with technology. We assert that technology, your software, should have the same intentional plan because technology today is a lever for growth in your business. And so by understanding what you currently have, how you’re using it,
Jenny Benbrook: and then where you wanna take your company in terms of growth, then we evaluate the marketplace and we either fill gaps in your primary software or we pull tools in to enhance certain parts of your software. But it’s very strategic and intentional. that helps sort of shut out the shiny object syndrome.
Jenny Benbrook: So we’re not just buying stuff that we don’t need or aren’t implementing. So this allows us to go in with a very strategic focus that builds, evaluates a contractor’s current technology stack and builds a tech stack that will be their vehicle for growth.
Tyler Martin: Yeah, and you do that annually or is that a quarterly thing, that technology plan?
Jenny Benbrook: We build it on an annual basis. However, we do recommend monitoring these tools.
25:53Vacant licenses and the 25% of tech spend that is waste
Jenny Benbrook: So I’m really glad that you asked this and I’m going to answer it in sort of a rapid way because this goes to a lot of the waste that we see or the misuse that we see in tools. The thing about tech is that it changes.
Jenny Benbrook: It changes very quickly. And so tools that we bought into in July are already different. new features, new functionality as we enter into November. It happens very quickly. And so it’s important, again, we invite our contractors to think about this in a different mindset,
Jenny Benbrook: instead of a tech or a tool being a set it and forget it. And we ask our contractors to think of tech as a living, breathing employee in their organization, that you’re continuously monitoring. to ensure, are they still doing the job I hired them to do? Do I need to institute any new training,
Jenny Benbrook: any new features? So if you think about it that way, you’re continuously doing checks on your tools, but you’re not doing any major overhauls until the annual review.
Tyler Martin: Yeah. When you talk about it, it drives profit. It’s easy to spend too much money on tech because of the SOS, the shiny object syndrome. Is there like a typical, like when you walk into a client that’s maybe somewhere between four to 10 million a year, is there like, Hey, they’re throwing an
Tyler Martin: extra 10% into technology that probably isn’t getting them returned. Is there any kind of baseline metric? I may be asking too much here that you often see in terms of quote unquote waste
Jenny Benbrook: in terms of waste. Yes. We find that the average contractor loses about 25%, 75%, which is tremendous. So if you think about where that waste is coming from, I’ve mentioned a few of those earlier, but we see waste in underutilization of tools. So think about this.
Jenny Benbrook: Everything is a subscription basis right now. And most tools are on a per technician count, whether it’s your FSM, we all pay for a technician on Service Day and FieldEdge. So whether it’s your primary FSM or if it’s, I don’t know, let’s say an AI tool,
Jenny Benbrook: these are all the rage right now. So there’s some great tools out there that do AI sales call coaching. So they’ll go on your technician write-ons. All of these models, these business models are set up on a subscription basis per technician. When a technician leaves the company, you would not believe how many times their license is not transferred to the next technician that comes on.
Jenny Benbrook: Rather, another license is purchased. And we see time and time again contractors with vacant licenses that they’re just continuing to pay for and they don’t even realize it. So that is one large example. Others are duplicative tools. So we see a lot of functionality that a primary FSM is providing, but then we’re buying into
Jenny Benbrook: a third-party tool because, I don’t know, maybe their buddy told them it was great, or they had some wonderful sales representatives. And so they bought into this tool going back to the I don’t know what I don’t know. They bought into a tool not realizing they’re already paying for it, but it’s not being your
Jenny Benbrook: thought. So we see a lot of wasted spend attributed to situations like that. And it’s really egregious. And again, I sort of bring it back to that subscription model. It’s very difficult to stay on top of all of these subscriptions, which goes back to validating the importance
Jenny Benbrook: of a plan. Now, as a part of planning, it’s also understanding your budget for technology. And so this is another new concept that we’ve been introducing not only to our clients, but really hoping to educate the industry on is the same way you have forecasting. And again,
Jenny Benbrook: I’m speaking your language. The same way that you have forecasting for other initiatives in your business, whether it’s, you know, what’s my sales quota to bring on a new technician or what is my marketing budget? These are all levers that help you reach your growth goals.
Jenny Benbrook: Have a budget, an intentional budget dedicated toward technology that correlates with your
Tyler Martin: growth goal. So two things. One, I want to just reemphasize, you talked about licenses and having, you know, just buying another license when you add another employee rather than transferring it. I mean, you’re literally talking like somewhere between three to $10,000 a year for one employee.
Tyler Martin: And if you have someone, maybe a four or five that are not getting their license is not getting terminated. I mean, it is serious dollars. Like, you know, in the olden days, it used to be like Microsoft Word licenses and Excel licenses. It was going to be a couple hundred bucks a year.
Tyler Martin: Now we’re talking like literally it could be $100,000, $200,000 if you’re really careless in how many employees you’re leaving on that license roster, correct?
Jenny Benbrook: That’s right. And let’s think about how that happens, too, because it’s the reality of running a business and being an owner-operator. And so you have your bookkeeper internally who pays the invoices when they come through. And most of these invoices aren’t breaking it out by text to name.
Jenny Benbrook: You know, that would be really nice. We could quickly see. So it’s a normal cost. They see it and this is what they’re used to paying. So the bills just get paid. And that’s where it really becomes a systemic issue. Nobody realizes it until you do an audit, for example, or bring us on board and we run
Jenny Benbrook: an audit across your tech stack and we can bring that to your attention. Or have a process, to your point, that says, hey, when someone terms, these are the steps that we take when they term. And one of them would be checking licenses or terminating licenses.
Jenny Benbrook: That’s great. That’s gold.
Tyler Martin: Now, my second part question, you brought into budget, which is the next thing I want to talk about, tech budget. What do you generally see, or how do you allocate, let’s say, a $5 million, $10 million business? What should they be allocating in terms of budget for a tech budget?
Jenny Benbrook: So again, we call this a rule of thumb. And we’ve done a tremendous amount of research and application onto this to come to this figure.
32:46Budgeting 1% to 3% of your growth goal for software
Jenny Benbrook: So going back to our marketing example, I keep doing that because all contractors are comfortable with marketing, right? This is something that has been ingrained in us. How do we plan for our marketing budget? It’s a rule of thumb. It’s a certain percentage in relation to your growth goal.
Jenny Benbrook: So 5%, 7%, 9%, 12% is that rule of thumb, depending on where you are in your level of aggression toward growth. So you spend more, the more quickly you want to grow. Same concept with software. The spend is a bit lower. We find the percentage is between 1% to 3% of your annual growth goal.
Tyler Martin: So just to put that to number, $6 million company, it wouldn’t be crazy somewhere between like $60,000 to $180K annual in just allocated tech
Jenny Benbrook: budget. Am I understanding that correctly? It would not be crazy at all. And in fact, you’ll find most contractors are spending in this range. The reason the range is so important is this is our gauge for, are we spending appropriately in our market
Jenny Benbrook: to achieve our goals? So if you’re spending sub 1%, you probably are not using the tools that you need to meet your employees where they wanna be met. So think about employee retention and company culture. That’s a lot of what technology invites is streamlined processes, less administrative work, right?
Jenny Benbrook: That’s less of a burden on your team. It enhances company culture. So either you’re underspending and you’re not taking care of your company processes internally, or you’re not meeting customers where they expect to be met. You know, maybe you’re still writing paper estimates in the field
Jenny Benbrook: and different things like that, or you’re grossly overspending. And this is more common, if we’re honest. for really for that six to $10 million shop that you asked about, we find that they’re spending more than the 3%. And that’s where we’re seeing a lot of that redundancy in tech waste.
Jenny Benbrook: And so consider that your guardrail, that’s your sweet spot for your business. And spending on the upper end is where you start realizing more of the benefits from technology in enhanced productivity, greater profit margins. So we like to see realistically between two to 3%.
Tyler Martin: How do you, you brought up the fast changing, literally your example was July to November, which is pretty accurate. I mean, things just are changing so crazy fast. How do you kind of decide or help a client decide what should be in that one to 3% budget?
Tyler Martin: Like, cause there is that shiny tool. So now we’ve got AI attendants, we’ve got agents that are helping in our sales process. How do you do that? Is there a way to evaluate that?
Jenny Benbrook: Yes. It all starts with a business discovery. So the first step in our process and our tech stack evaluation, step number one is business and budget discovery. We have to know who the contractor is, where they are today, and what their growth goals are.
Jenny Benbrook: And again, growth goals aren’t only increased revenue. Growth goals can be adding a new vertical or expanding into a new market. Technology plays a role in any of those or all of those initiatives. And so going through a business discovery not only helps us understand a contractor’s
Jenny Benbrook: aspirations, but also where they’re at today. So what pain points are they experiencing today? For example, do they have extremely low call booking rates? That could be an indicator that we might want to look into leveraging an AI call center to offset or enhance their human CSRs.
Jenny Benbrook: So we go through a business discovery and it’s through those results shows us where their good fits for which tools.
Tyler Martin: Got it. You just mentioned low booking rate, low call booking rate. Is there a general metric in your mind like that when you define low, what that low would be? Is it dependent on business, location, anything come to you, come to mind on that?
Jenny Benbrook: Yeah, well, I mean, it is location dependent. It is vertical dependent. So we see a lot of variance there. But anything below an 80% call booking rate is something we would really want to look into.
Tyler Martin: Okay, good. Good feedback. One other thing in this budgeting area, is there any type of return metric or anything that we’re saying, hey, if we budget 1% to 3%, we should expect to see this level of return? That’s the million-dollar question. I’m good with those.
Tyler Martin: I just never have the answers.
Jenny Benbrook: Yeah. Well, so yes, you should expect returns both on the bottom line, but again, also in other areas that we’ve depicted throughout our conversation today. So some returns are quite immediate when implementing these tools. For example, when we implement marketing tools and those are set up and functioning correctly,
Jenny Benbrook: we see an immediate return in revenue and lead generation booked revenue. So that is a very tangible result. When we implement an AI bot for a call center, we see more immediate turns either in call conversion rates or in number of calls taken and booked because now we’ve expanded the capacity
Jenny Benbrook: of the call center hours. But there are others that perhaps don’t provide as immediate of a return, a tangible financial return. And this is where we look at, for example, utilizing automation. And here what we’re doing is we’re eliminating redundancies within an organization. So,
Jenny Benbrook: we’re cutting down on laborious tasks by automating. And so there’s not an immediate revenue return, but now what we’ve done is we’ve opened up your hours for your team where they can
39:26Getting techs to accept AI call coaching by explaining the why
Jenny Benbrook: focus on revenue producing activity. So it’s very difficult to say what the exact return on that investment is, but you do start to realize and feel the benefits immediately. Yeah, that’s good.
Tyler Martin: Hey, one last area I’d love to cover. I think one of the things I see the most common is when you’re introducing new tech is a lot of times technicians aren’t into it. Like they’re just, you know, I’ll hear owners, contractors say to me,
Tyler Martin: hey, I tried coaching software. Let’s pick on that. I tried coaching software. None of my techs really care. They don’t, they’re not really interested in self-improvement. And that’s the way the contractor and the techs view it. What are your thoughts around that? Or iPads, for example,
Tyler Martin: you’re introducing service site and for the first time, and I have a client that’s very used to doing things a certain way. And a lot of his techs are pushing back on being a little more automated in that sense. I know that’s part culture, part leadership.
Tyler Martin: There’s a lot of things there. But what are your thoughts when you hear that?
Jenny Benbrook: I think it’s completely normal. Everyone is hesitant and resistant to technology at first. And that is really what we call the forgotten path. And so we’ve talked a lot about identifying the right tools for your business, and that is very important. But the forgotten path is now that we’ve identified those tools, it’s implementing
Jenny Benbrook: them and ensuring adoption throughout our organization. And so that’s the second part that we really need to focus on. And what we see is exactly what you, what the picture that you painted, which there’s a very large resistance to either utilizing new tools, whether it’s hardware like an iPad in the field.
Jenny Benbrook: That was a huge mountain we had to crawl over only a couple of years ago. Sure, sure. To now today, if we’re implementing new tech, like the big resistance today is the AI call coaching software on every technician call. Techs don’t want that.
Jenny Benbrook: They don’t want to be recorded home. You know, there’s all sorts of concerns. And what we find is if we can educate, it’s all about education and awareness when it comes to technology. If we have the opportunity to work with these departments, to work with your team of technicians
Jenny Benbrook: and help them understand this is what the tool is, this is what it does. But most importantly, here’s how it’s going to affect you. Here’s why you want to do it. Here’s how it will help you be more efficient. Maybe you can run another job that day, earn extra commission, right?
Jenny Benbrook: So when we can tie in the why behind these tools, instead of just coming in and saying, we’re going to record all your calls now, whether you like it or not. So when you can explain the why, that’s when we can break down the fear and start to ease
Jenny Benbrook: adoption. So that’s the approach that we take here at Powerhouse with any software that we implement is not only identifying the software, building the workflow, documenting the process, but then training the teams and making sure the teams are actually using it.
Tyler Martin: Yeah, I love that. It’s the what’s in it for me type mindset is helping your employees see what’s in it for me. And then it probably makes a little more sense for them.
Jenny Benbrook: That’s right, exactly. That’s a good one. Okay, one last thing I wanna wrap up on. I’d love to talk about, do you have some type of mantra or saying that either you live by or you share with people as a form of driving yourself
Jenny Benbrook: or driving your business?
Tyler Martin: Yes, yes, I definitely do. And I’m so glad that you asked that. I live under the premise of continuous improvement. It is striving for success always. And success is varied in its interpretation or its meaning to individuals. I find that success in setting goals is identifying a need, creating a solution,
Tyler Martin: implementing that. And this could be in my personal life. This could be the way I work with my children or work with my team members or work with contractors. It is once we found that solution and we start implementing it, continue testing it.
Tyler Martin: Continue seeking to see, is it still working? Can I still grow? Can I still learn? What is next? And I find that that’s a really exciting way for me personally to live with the idea that we’re always learning and always growing. So that mindset of almost the flywheel, the continuous improvement is what we seek, not
Tyler Martin: only on a personal level, but especially here at Powerhouse.
Jenny Benbrook: I love that. That’s a powerful one. Okay, just wrapping up here. So many really cool takeaways. Process documentation. it protects your business. I think that’s a big one that jumps out at me that you shared. I don’t know what I don’t know. I know there’s a ton of people out there listening that feel that
Jenny Benbrook: way because I hear it within when people come to me for financial guidance. They’re like, man, I just feel like I can’t keep it in my head anymore. I just don’t know what I don’t know. So that’s a huge one. I loved your SOS, shiny object syndrome. I think that’s something where clearly
Jenny Benbrook: you help people hopefully stay on path. We attribute that to Pam Duffy. I love that. Hi, Pam, by the way, Pam. I saw you up here, Pam. Just a couple more here. The annual technology plan, that’s the first time I’ve ever really heard of it in a smaller business environment
Jenny Benbrook: to be doing that. I mean, super powerful. I’m sure a ton of value for the folks that do that. The 1% to 3% tech budget, it’s a great metric to kind of just be aware of. One thing I think I got out of this is just be more focused around, because I do that in a lot of other areas,
Jenny Benbrook: be more sensitive on the tech budget of what we’re investing. And then I guess the last one that I got out of this is really giving your techs the why behind the tech adoption. What’s the reason that what’s in it for them, I guess is the way I’d say it. Anything I left out or anything that you want
Tyler Martin: to add to that lengthy list of bombs you gave us? It was a great summary. Yeah, that’s awesome. Okay.
Jenny Benbrook: Your websites, mypowerhouse.group is your main company site, mypowerhouse.group. I’ll put your LinkedIn personal link in the show notes. If people wanted to reach out to you, is LinkedIn the best way or is there, where would you like them to go?
Tyler Martin: Yeah. Would love to hear from anyone over LinkedIn. You’ll also see several touch points to contact us on our website. You can either give us a call or send us an email at hello at my powerhouse.group. We would love to hear from you and talk tech, figure out how we can take this burden off
Tyler Martin: of owner operators and make sense of their software.
Jenny Benbrook: Well, thanks, Jenny. I love what you guys are doing. It’s so cool that you were kind of on the cutting edge of being able to support contractors in this space. Thanks for sharing all your knowledge.
Tyler Martin: Thank you so much for having me, Tyler. This has been great.
Jenny Benbrook: So one of my biggest takeaways from this conversation with Jenny is simple. Technology isn’t the problem. It’s the lack of plan is. When software lives in one person’s head, when licenses pile up unnoticed, or when new tools get layered on without intention, tech stops helping and starts quietly draining profit
Jenny Benbrook: and energy. I see this constantly in growing home service businesses. They’re spending real money on systems, but still feel overwhelmed because no one is managing the technology like a business asset. If this episode made you realize your systems might be adding friction instead of leverage,
Jenny Benbrook: and you want a second set of eyes around your numbers behind the growth, I’m happy to talk with you. You can book a no-pressure intro call at cfointrocall.com. That’s cfointrocall.com. Hey, as always, thanks for listening. I will catch you on the next episode.
Related Episodes
- How to Fix Your Messy Data Before It Kills Your Margins – Bernie Ollila
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- The Rules You’re Living By Are Costing You Millions – Laura Kelly
- Marketing Mistakes Costing Trades Businesses Thousands – Adam Rich
Tyler Martin works with owners on the numbers behind these stories: HVAC accounting help from a fractional CFO for HVAC contractors.
