Full transcript10 chapters · 11,011 words
00:00Why Ryan built Chirp to take follow-up off the sales guy
Ryan Fenn: I changed one sentence at a gas station pitch and went from 10% close rate to 90%. That’s when I realized words aren’t just words. They’re literally the combination to the safe.
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. What if one sentence could take your conversion rate from 10% to 90? Today, I’m joined by Ryan Fenn. He’s the founder of Chirp, who has spent years studying how small changes in communication can lead to big shifts in sales results.
Tyler Martin: Ryan built Chirp to solve a problem most sales teams struggle with, which is consistent, effective follow-up that actually gets responses. In this episode, we talk about the power of language, how to make texting feel human instead of salesy, and how AI can support better communication instead of replacing it.
Tyler Martin: Let’s get into it with Ryan. Hey, Ryan, welcome to the Profit and Grit Show. How are you doing today?
Ryan Fenn: I’m doing great. Thanks, Tyler. Thanks for having me.
Tyler Martin: Dude, I’m proud to say you are the first person I’ve had the second time. This is such an honor.
Ryan Fenn: Happy to be back. Honored to be back. Thank you.
Tyler Martin: Yeah, sure. I only had to beg so much, too, to get you back here a second time. Just kidding.
Ryan Fenn: I’m pretty easy, right? I’m a pretty easy guy.
Tyler Martin: You’re very easy. You’re actually, you know what? I think I’ve texted you probably about five times when I’ve had a product question or something trying to understand how my client could do something better. And I don’t think you realize how good you make me look sometimes
Tyler Martin: because one time I literally was sitting with a client and he’s like, hey, I want to try to accomplish this. And I’m like, you know, Ryan might know how to do that. So I texted you. You literally had responded, I think, before I finished like two or three
Tyler Martin: sentences talking with the client. Like, I’m like, oh, you already responded. The client’s like, oh man, you must really know a lot of people. And it was just a lot. I mean, it was kind of you to respond so quick. So anyway, thanks for always being so present. We’re all just a bunch
Ryan Fenn: of guys that’s out here trying to make it happen, man. We all just got to support each other,
Tyler Martin: Yeah, it’s so true. So true. Okay. Hey, you know where I’d love to start for those folks that don’t know of you? Let’s just start a little bit about what chirp is, what you do, the problem you guys are trying to solve. And then I’ve got some things I’d like to dig in deeper as it relates to that.
Ryan Fenn: Sure. So kind of high level chirp is a tool that I developed in response to just my own needs. I’m a sales guy. I love selling. I love the process of taking somebody from not knowing who you are to shut up and take my money. It’s where I live, right? That’s the part of the world I live in.
Ryan Fenn: And, you know, follow-up is one of the hardest things to maintain as a salesperson. Naturally, because sales guys just love being in the action. We love being in the close. We love getting that dopamine hit from a yes, you know. And follow-up just isn’t very exciting.
Ryan Fenn: But objectively, follow-up is where the fortune really actually lies and where we can make our most money. And so I set out to solve that problem, to take follow-up off the sales guy’s plate so that he feels like he can focus on the things he loves doing, which is closing deals, and then allowing the robots to do the follow-up, make sure that they are getting as many opportunities as possible.
Ryan Fenn: And so our system is designed to help companies automate their follow-up throughout the customer journey at all the various places where a customer can leak out. And we try to catch those and continue that nurturing process to get them back so we can close more deals.
Ryan Fenn: So ultimately, that’s what Chirp is, a follow-up product. It’s a follow-up system. And then I developed that because I’m a sales guy and I needed that in my business. And as I developed it, I realized that it was a very powerful thing and set out to solve the world’s problems with it.
04:40Nailing home services after selling to dentists and trucks
Ryan Fenn: So here I am.
Tyler Martin: And you guys still are mostly focused in the home services area. Do you see that ever changing where your umbrella gets bigger than just generally home sales, home services, excuse me?
Ryan Fenn: Yeah, we’re definitely, we definitely are in the, you know, always on the hunt for the next, you know, So it’s kind of one of those things they say, like with verticals, you nail it and then you scale it, right? And then the best thing you can do is nail like a niche, really nail one specific segment of the market.
Ryan Fenn: I struggled with that initially. We were kind of all over the place. We were selling it to anybody and everybody. Real estate agents were buying it. We even had like food trucks were buying it and using it to sell, to send out messages when they were going to be in a certain place.
Ryan Fenn: And barbershops and dentists. And the problem we had was a non-cohesive messaging, right? Our messaging was too broad. And so what ends up happening is you get a guy on the phone going, well, okay, I’m a real estate agent. You know, what can I do to be better?
Ryan Fenn: And I go, well, this dentist over here, he’s doing pretty good. I don’t care what the dentist is doing. I want to know what the other real estate agents are doing, right? And so it wasn’t until some home service guys came along and we started to figure out integrations into Service Titan, House Call Pro, all these various things.
Ryan Fenn: And we started to see that there was a really big need in that space for this particular process. And we nailed it, I think. We’ve done very well in that space. We have the biggest operators in the country using it. And then now the goal is to, you know, we want to go kind of market adjacent, right?
Ryan Fenn: Where we’re not necessarily just going, all right, now let’s sell to, you know, restaurants. Like, let’s figure out something that’s very similar. And we have some direction there, but right now, 95% of our business is home service.
Tyler Martin: Yeah, yeah. And you’re well known in this community. I mean, your name is the one that comes up consistently.
06:43Why texting bolted onto a CRM sends messages at midnight
Tyler Martin: And on that note, before I kind of get into some of my other questions, I would like to last thing about Chirp specifically is how do you guys feel you differentiate yourselves from whether it be a package that’s built into a CRM or there’s some other competitors out there?
Tyler Martin: What do you guys, one, how do you think you differentiate yourself and how conscious are you in terms of trying to keep that differentiation going as, you know, the world seems to be getting more AI and things seem to be getting easier to develop and faster?
Tyler Martin: How do you maintain that?
Ryan Fenn: Yeah, so that’s one of the challenges, you know, any business faces is like, how do you, how do you, you know, you’re different, you know, deep down you’re different, but how do you actually get that message out to the people, right? And how do you show that you’re actually different?
Ryan Fenn: Because on the surface, you might look at something and go, oh, you do text messaging? My system does text messaging already, so I don’t need you. And at the end of the day, we are focused 100% on one specific thing. We are looking to help you follow up better with your leads.
Ryan Fenn: Now, what does that mean? You look at somebody like a CRM that has texting in their system, and they say, well, we have that here. Okay, cool. Is that their core product? Do they focus 24-7 on that thing? Because if the fortune is in the follow-up, it’s a pretty important thing. And if they’re really good at doing
Ryan Fenn: field service management or whatever their CRM does, that’s what they’re good at. And that’s what they’re going to focus their energy on. And then these ancillary products that are kind of just like, oh, like these ideas on the side that don’t have 100% of their attention are never going
Ryan Fenn: to be as good as somebody like me who’s going, this is all I do all the time, every day. I’m focused on learning what works, what doesn’t work, how to trigger the right things at the right time, how to make sure text messages are getting delivered, how to make sure they’re getting
Ryan Fenn: delivered at the right times. It’s a very nuanced, very complex system. And we have some of the biggest companies in the world competing with us and they can’t do what we can do because they don’t have they’re not in the trenches with us right we have a guy i mean we just have one just recently
Ryan Fenn: it’s like another very big company who has a who has a built-on thing you know super pissed because text messages are going out in the middle of the night and it’s like whoa that’s a pretty big deal to have your text messages go out at midnight right you know so we the way we differentiate
Ryan Fenn: is one, we focus on making it the best product for just this thing, just this one specific thing. We’re not trying to be everything for everybody. And then two, being a more of a strategy partner than a software. So we’re not coming to you saying here, here’s some software. Good luck.
Ryan Fenn: We’ve got the playbooks. We’ve got the strategies all lined up. You’re going to work with us as if we’re an agency. Like you have your marketing agency. We’re your conversion agency where we’re going to come in and make sure that you are closing deals at a higher rate. And so those
Ryan Fenn: are kind of the two main differentiators. It’s tough to, you know, it’s again, people can easily go, well, this guy does texting and we do, uh, and they do over there. So it’s like, it’s like, but if you take follow-up as seriously as you should, and you want to see massively increased
Ryan Fenn: conversion rates, you know, you want to work with somebody that’s obsesses about it, you know?
Tyler Martin: Yeah. Yeah. How do you feel about just this world? Like, you know, we have a lot of these, uh, AI agents that are answering the phone now or automated AI answering the phone. And some of these companies I’m seeing are now getting into like text messaging and video messaging.
Tyler Martin: Is it kind of in your mind the same thing? It’s like just doing a lot of different things that you’re kind of doing?
10:34The skill saw analogy for handing AI tools to green teams
Ryan Fenn: Yeah, it’s doing a lot of different things. It’s also not having 15 years of experience behind because the technology is one thing and the experience is another, right? It’s like, so I’ll use this example. My dad, I grew up building houses with my dad, right?
Ryan Fenn: And he taught me how to use a skill saw at a young age, like 12 or something. I was out there cutting two by fours for him. And so I always knew how to use a skill saw. And I was helping a friend with his Eagle project.
Ryan Fenn: He’s a scout. And I was helping him with an Eagle project. And I had the skill saw. I was 17 years old. I’m at his thing helping him. And he goes, hey, let me try that. And I go, no, it’s dangerous. You know, he goes, no, I can do it.
Ryan Fenn: and uh he grabs the saw because i made it look easy right and he grabs the saw and he hits the wood you know and then bends the blade enough to make it kick back on him right and obviously well he didn’t cut himself he didn’t get hurt but it scared the crap out of him sure and he goes okay
Ryan Fenn: okay okay you finished it right and so that’s the same we’re in the same this same situation i can hand that skill saw to somebody, if they don’t have the experience, they can get really hurt. And AI and text messages and voice, that’s a very big part of your business. There’s a lot of,
Ryan Fenn: let’s not even talk about the legal stuff behind this kind of thing, but the damage that these things can cause if done incorrectly. Let’s say, for example, let’s go back to the one, text message in the middle of the night. You don’t want this stuff left in the hands of people
Ryan Fenn: who aren’t taking this as seriously as we are. And so, yeah, it’s one of those things. There’s a lot of stuff happening. There’s a lot of softwares out there, but those are tools. You want to work with somebody who has the tool and can pick up the skill saw and cut the wood
Ryan Fenn: without it kicking back and cutting your leg off, right? So that’s really what we, you know, and there’s a point where we’re all coming to where tools are becoming more and more irrelevant because you can build tools more quickly with software. now with AI. But again, that all comes, it still all comes back to the experience and whether or
Tyler Martin: not you can take that tool and actually cut the two by four. Yeah. I feel like for whatever reason, the term conversion, it’s a nice buzzword and we use it a lot, but, and I’m speaking from working with quite a few home service clients, particularly HVAC, plumbing and electrical,
Tyler Martin: it gets glossed over though. Like, even though we use that term a lot, people don’t really like hang on, man, if I can improve my conversion by 5%, 2%, 1%, this would mean this much dollars and nothing has changed. No additional cost, no additional in terms of acquiring leads, nothing.
Tyler Martin: I think it gets glossed over. Do you see that when you’re taking on a new client where
Ryan Fenn: that wasn’t front and center of ad spend? It’s such a frustrating thing to see because conversion is to me everything, right? It’s like, who cares how much you spent to get a lead? How much did it cost you to convert a lead? That’s the only number that matters. It’s like,
Ryan Fenn: it’s like, oh, I got, I got leads for $5. Okay, cool. Did you convert any of them? No, I only converted one in a hundred. Okay. That’s $500 for a conversion. $5 lead means nothing if you’re going to pay $500 for conversion, right? So, so conversion to me is everything. And this
Ryan Fenn: comes down this, where this is where we really get into the experience part of things. Because if we talk about, you know, you could say, Oh, I did follow up with them. I sent him a text message. I did what I heard was what other people should do, right. Or what, what, what you’re supposed
Ryan Fenn: to do. A text message being sent is a piece of code being sent and legit, you know, objectively, it’s you did the thing, you sent the text message, but what was the words that you used in that text message? That’s the unseen thing that people don’t realize is super, super
Ryan Fenn: powerful both ways. You can send a single word that is demolishing all of your conversions. That’s completely destroying every chance you had. And you you’re scratching your head going, I’m following up with my leads. I don’t know what’s going on. And I’ll tell you a story about
Ryan Fenn: that because I learned this early on, the power of words and the combination of words.
14:55The gas station windshield line that took him from 10% to 90%
Ryan Fenn: This story I’m going to tell, the purpose of this story is to illustrate the power of words, not necessarily the actual lesson in the words that I used. I’m going to use words and you’ll see the difference, but the lesson is to show how powerful switching up your words can be.
Ryan Fenn: So if you watch my other podcast, if you know about me, I used to have a windshield repair business. And, um, I used to sell it door to door. And then I saw, I saw a girl doing it out of a gas station. And what she would do is she would go up and wash people’s windshields. And then if they
Ryan Fenn: had a chip in their windshield, she would offer to fix them. It seemed like, Oh, that’s super easy. I could do that. So I go to this gas station near my house and I say, Hey, I want to do this. And he says, yeah, go for it. And I go out. And in that first morning I was not getting people. I
Ryan Fenn: I’d go up to him and I’d say, hi, welcome to Mike’s Chevron. I’d like to wash your windshield today. Can I wash your windshield today? Nine out of ten people would say no. No, no, no, no, no. And it was because they felt obligated or whatever.
Ryan Fenn: And just like, no, no thanks. I don’t need that. Whatever. I don’t want to have to tip you. You know, that kind of thing. And so I was like, dang, this isn’t going to work. Because if I see a hundred cars, ten people are going to let me wash their windshield.
Ryan Fenn: And then I’ve got to build my business off of those ten people. Right. That’s a lot of work. That’s a hundred cars that I got to talk to, to get 10 people, just to be able to like pitch, you know, just to be able to like offer my service to. And so I’d
Ryan Fenn: get like maybe one deal out of that one or two, if I’m lucky out of that. Now, when I switched the words from, can I wash your windshield too? As a courtesy today, we’re washing everybody’s windshields. That’s all it was on the surface. It seems like the same thing. We’re saying the
Ryan Fenn: same thing. But that tiny shift in that combination of words went from 10 opportunities to wash the windshield to 90. So nine out of 10 would let me wash their windshield. And so now I have 90 opportunities versus 10. Now think of that in terms of a hundred leads in your business. If
Ryan Fenn: you send out a hundred text messages and you have something in the words there that are only getting 10 people to respond, you’re missing out on 90 other opportunities just because the words you used were incorrect. And so this can mean all the difference in business. This is literally
Ryan Fenn: everything. This comes down to like, cause you can look on the surface. I don’t know if you’ve been in, if you’ve been in sales, let me go door to door. I used to go door to door when I was even before that doing pest control sales.
Ryan Fenn: And you’d have two guys side by side. And you’d be like, these guys are exactly the same. They’re doing the exact same thing. And one guy would come home with 10 sales. One guy would come home with two. And there was like on the surface,
Ryan Fenn: if you didn’t know the nuances between the tiny little differences and the words they’re saying, you’d think they were doing the exact same thing. But there were tiny little differences that took one guy to 10 sales and one guy to two. and so I try to really emphasize with people I say like there’s so many people that like kind
Ryan Fenn: of just like like you said just kind of gloss over follow-up they kind of just go yeah I followed up I followed up it’s like did you follow up 18 times did you follow up with multi-channel text message email voicemail different and then and then online through Facebook social media did you
Ryan Fenn: follow up with the right words did you follow up the right cadence and it’s like oh okay this is quite a bit, you know, I see, I see one, uh, I won’t mention the name of this field service management, but they came out with a feature called second chance leads. And it’s like,
Ryan Fenn: we’ll follow up with your leads. And it’s like, we’re going to give it one more shot. It just makes it seem like such a small, like, like unimportant thing. And it’s like, Whoa, this is everything. And you’re making it seem like this little, like, Oh, you get one more shot.
Ryan Fenn: It’s like, no, there’s so much to this. It’s like a hail Mary. We’ll do our hail Mary. and maybe we’ll get one occasionally. Maybe we’ll get one every now and then. I’m talking about going 14 days of aggressive follow-up followed by three months of moderate follow-up
Ryan Fenn: all the way up to six to 12 months out. We get deals where a text message will go out six months later. Hey, just wanted to check back in. A few months ago, you asked about whatever XYZ service. We want to make sure you were taken care of.
Ryan Fenn: Oh, you know what? I have been meaning to do that. Let’s go ahead and get that scheduled. And it’s like that deal in no world where you would get that deal manually, right? That’s gone. But that automated text that just drops six months later could mean a new deal that you
Ryan Fenn: paid. You already paid for that lead six months ago. Right.
Tyler Martin: So do you have any examples where we could take it into the home services world that are the type of tax or words that I don’t know if I’d call them deal killers, but they’re not. they’re kind of using your example of just by adding the courtesy, you suddenly your conversion
Tyler Martin: way that way up. Is there anything like that in the home service world that you’ve seen examples of that you’d go, these are kind of deal killer things that are said a lot of times?
Ryan Fenn: Yeah. Yeah. I won’t give specifics. I’ll kind of give like, um, kind of principles. Sure. Sure. When people think of text message marketing, they think of Papa John’s get 10% off your order,
20:20Sounding like a friend instead of a Papa John’s coupon text
Ryan Fenn: respond here to accept the coupon. It’s like a very non-personal marketing text. It’s an ad. It’s an ad inside the text messaging world, which kills the whole purpose of texting because texting is meant to be personal. If you’re sending messages that look like marketing messages,
Ryan Fenn: you’re killing the whole vibe of what we’re trying to accomplish. If I’m an owner of an HVAC company and I go, I need to fill up my shoulder season. I’m not going to send out a text message that says, hey, Tyler, good news.
Ryan Fenn: We have 50 slots available for a $49 tune-up. Click here now to get on the schedule. It’s a sales pitch, right? But if I say, hey, Tyler, it’s Ryan with such and such HVAC. Just wanted to say thanks for being a customer. Wanted to let you know in the next couple of days,
Ryan Fenn: we’re going to be out in your area. If you want to get your furnace tuned up, let me know. I’d love to take care of you. Notice how I shifted slightly from marketer to friend, just having a conversation. And that’s the key. If you can make the person feel like, oh, this is just a friend communicating with me like my other friends do when I text.
Ryan Fenn: That’s the principle I would try to really drive home. It’s the same when you think of social media. There’s ads on social media and then there’s social media posts. We’re not there to see the ads. we’re there to see the posts, right? We’re there, we go to, we go on Facebook to see our friends
Ryan Fenn: posts, right? Stupid cat videos and whatever, whatever we want to see, right? The ads that are the most effective mimic social media posts. They aren’t the bright and flashy, like $49 tune up, click here. You know, I’m not there. I’m not on Facebook looking for a $49 tune up. I’m there
Ryan Fenn: to enjoy myself and to get entertainment from social media. And so the same principle applies and text messaging. We’re not there. People aren’t in their texts to get advertised to. They’re in there to have conversations and to connect with people. And so if you can connect with them on a human level,
Ryan Fenn: you have a much higher chance of converting.
Tyler Martin: Ryan, how far away are we, or is this even not a good idea, where we can go back into the CRM and see that maybe the last time we serviced XYZ, I don’t know, we could be talking about their cat. We could talk about the last service we did, some type of personalized context to that text message that says, hey, Ryan, you know, we talked with you back in June.
Tyler Martin: We had something that personalizes what we did then and then say, hey, it’s time for that tune up again. We’re going to happen to be in your neighborhood. Is that a good idea? And are we close to being able to do that?
Ryan Fenn: Yeah, it is. It is. We have a lot of like already set triggers that allow you to do that. This is kind of post or pre-AI. now we’re getting more into where the AI is actually getting more context. We’re reading more. We’re able to look at the past conversation.
Ryan Fenn: Like for example, a followup message, you know, you, before you could create a static text message drip campaign, right? It’s like day one, followup day three, followup day five, followup. Now we haven’t, we have AI able to look at the context of the conversation and then build a
Ryan Fenn: followup sequence based on that conversation. So for example, if they say, I need to talk to my wife, now the follow-up message is going to go, hey, did you have a chance to talk to your wife? A very specific response rather than just, hey, following up with you, right?
Ryan Fenn: And so we’re able to use AI to look into the context of the conversation and be more laser targeted with our messaging.
Tyler Martin: Yeah, because I think that brings it to like a whole nother world, especially if it builds off it itself in terms of how you’re communicating in terms of personalizing and stuff.
24:08What AI found in eight years of text data and blue vs green
Ryan Fenn: The goal is always to figure out how a really good salesman would do it if they had the time to do it. Yeah. And then do it that way. Right. And one of the ways we’re doing that is we’ve been doing text messaging for I’ve been doing it for 15 years or something like that.
Ryan Fenn: Chirp’s been around. we started chirp officially like eight years ago. We have hundreds of millions of text messages in our database and AI is able, I didn’t know what I was ever going to do with that data. It was like, how am I going to read through hundreds of millions,
Ryan Fenn: eight years of text messages, hundreds of millions of text messages and actually get meaningful information from that. And then AI came along and we’ve been having AI reading these text messages and coming back and saying, whoa did you know that monday morning at eight seven to nine a.m is the most effective time to
Ryan Fenn: send an estimate follow-up like there’s that stuff i never would have been able to find right uh and so it’s finding best times a day to send messages words that work words that don’t and it’s and it’s coming up with insights that we never could have gotten without you know without that
Ryan Fenn: so so now we’re taking that data and that’s another thing where people go oh they do text messaging. Well, do they have, you know, eight years and hundreds of millions of text messages that can help you craft messages more professionally. So, you know, we’re creating
Ryan Fenn: the moats as we go. And, and we think we have, we think we have some really powerful stuff. It’s proving to be really cool to see people convert higher. We get companies coming back on, Whoa, I switched to blue messages and I’m getting higher conversion rates, which is
Ryan Fenn: crazy. Like we, we, we have the ability to send blue messages versus green messages. and that’s like you wouldn’t that’s another stupid little thing that you wouldn’t think is a difference and it makes a huge difference like 50 percent higher convert uh conversation rate
Ryan Fenn: with blue messages versus green so yeah cool stuff like that and to your point like when you talk
Tyler Martin: about how you guys specialize in conversion being able to do that blue message thing isn’t like a small deal like you guys actually i believe have a warehouse with phones dedicated to each client that’s allowing that to happen. Is that correct?
Ryan Fenn: Yeah, I don’t want to misrepresent because we’re partnered with a company that does that very thing, but that’s what it is. We’ve partnered with a company that literally gets you a hardware, which is an iPhone, and they have a whole farm of them
Ryan Fenn: like set up in a warehouse where you’ve got these phones set up and they are connected to iMessage. None of it is illegal. or non-compliant or anything. It’s all within the terms of everything. There are certain ways and rules we have to follow
Ryan Fenn: to make this compliant, but it’s really effective. A new lead can come in. We can text them with the blue iMessage and we can send the little congratulations. Like when the balloons pop up, we can send clearer videos through iMessage and there’s just a higher trust factor to blue messaging.
Ryan Fenn: So, so yeah, it’s a, it’s like a big deal. It’s like, we’re automating a cell phone for your business.
Tyler Martin: Yeah. Going back to this database of eight years of tech history, is there anything that stands out in terms of the patterns or things that you saw that kind of caught you off guard or like, Hey, I, I didn’t realize this until I had AI to compile eight years of data. And this kind of caught me off guard a little bit. Does anything stand out like that?
Ryan Fenn: definitely like that timing that I just said was the one of the biggest ones where like, Whoa, okay. You know, seven to nine in the morning on Monday morning. I never like who would have thought, but you kind of think about it and you go,
Ryan Fenn: that doesn’t make sense. It’s like people are kind of in like go mode. Like let’s get things done at that point. And it’s like, I need to get that. It’s like, it just happens to be good. Another one was more confirming of the conversational style messaging.
Ryan Fenn: It’s coming back going, this is conversational style messaging. Very important. another one that is really powerful is uh slight humor we’re not talking you have to be super funny but like basic chuckle type jokes right like like if you if you’ve heard the uh hey your wife is
Ryan Fenn: your wife is hot fix her air conditioner right and it’s like just enough to get a little chuckle right but not you’re not trying to knock it out of the park but the whole point is just to for them to look at their phone and go, like, uh, and then respond. Right. And so basic humor can be
Tyler Martin: really powerful. So, yeah, very cool. Anything on conversely, the other side where it’s like, there is enough of something that’s being said, that’s absolute deal killers. I know we’ve talked
Ryan Fenn: about this a little bit, so it might be redundant, but anything caught you off guard? Yeah. I don’t have specific lines. I wish I, I don’t want to put anything out there. Cause like, they’re so, it’s so delicate and it’s all new data, but it’s definitely the same principle, which is
Ryan Fenn: the idea of sounding markety, sounding buzzwords, things that are, you know, anything that like 50% off or anything like that is just, it immediately triggers the brain to go into I’m being sold
Tyler Martin: mind versus I’m talking to a friend. So yeah, I had a guy named Ryan Williams on my show a couple shows ago and he in the show, he said, Hey, we found when we started using AI, particularly the, the attendance, but when we use AI, that our area is very kind of, I’m using these words. He didn’t
Tyler Martin: use these words backwards. People are, know each other and they’re very chill and they, they weren’t receptive to that. And he felt it really was hurting his business. Is, is there any patterns
29:58Where AI voice backfires and meeting customers where they are
Tyler Martin: that you’ve noticed of like that, like different areas that-
Ryan Fenn: Yes. Yeah. Yes, for sure. So we’re finding regional, different responses regionally, different cadences. That’s why I’m particularly- We have AI voice in Chirp. We offer it. It’s there. But I’m not stoked about it. At my core, I’m almost anti-AI. It’s like I’m not trying to replace humans.
Ryan Fenn: I’m trying to enhance their capabilities. And so I’m not trying to just go, cool, I’m going to be able to eliminate everybody in my business because I’ve got AI. We’re trying to strike a blend between human interaction and automation. And the problem I see with AI voice in general
Ryan Fenn: is if it works for some customers, it works for some customers and people will close and it works, but it really pisses off other people. Like they feel like they’ve been lied to. Right. And it’s like, well, we have a high booking rate.
Ryan Fenn: Yeah, but I pissed off a lot of people. So this is kind of like trying to figure out where this balance is of like, where do we, how far do we take it? One of the things that I really like and I think makes sense in AI voice is
Ryan Fenn: first exposing that you’re AI. Like don’t try to fool the customer. So if you start off by saying, hi, Tyler, this is Ryan. I’m the AI agent with XYZ company. I’m here to answer your questions. If at any time you need to talk to a human, just let me know.
Ryan Fenn: When would you like to book your appointment? And then now you’re not starting off with a lie, right? Like trying to deceive them. You’re at least letting them know that it’s AI. And I think that that’s kind of that right blend. And to speak to specifically what you were saying with these smaller towns,
Ryan Fenn: there are, and this is something people have to determine for themselves. There are groups of people, different areas have different political views, all these different things that you have to be able to build your business around the way they prefer to communicate. And if they hate AI voice, don’t do it.
Ryan Fenn: The beauty of text messaging is that we can start conversations, and it’s much harder to detect, first of all, that it’s AI. And then we can easily take over those conversations and continue them. So let’s say you have 100 leads, right? And you send out messages and then 20 of them respond.
Ryan Fenn: You can say, cool, I can manage 20 messages myself. I’ll take them over versus I’ve got to sit and text 100 people. So we use technology to get it out, but then we’re going to continue the conversation organically or manually. So you have to kind of find the balance in your area, what works.
Ryan Fenn: And it’s worth trying because some people, you’ve heard it. You have some people going, I have a much higher booking rate with my AI voice than I did with my CSRs. Cool. But I can also show you a story where somebody goes, it was the worst nightmare of my life.
Ryan Fenn: So you have to find what works and don’t just buy into the hype. Anybody that’s saying, oh, you’re going to be able to close down your whole call center, all this. It’s like, whoa, pump the brakes. You know what’s best in your business.
Ryan Fenn: understand the tools, work with somebody like me who can, who can guide and, and, and isn’t going to say, oh, you should, you should just do this. It’s like, it should be a collaboration and a
Tyler Martin: process to determine what works for you. Yeah. When I was at Epic in Vegas, a couple of weeks ago, you were there too. Chad Peterman gave a discussion and you just hit the nail on the head exactly what he said. He said, meet your customer where they’re at. So if they want to talk to AI,
Tyler Martin: let them talk to AI. If they want to talk to a human, let them talk to a human. If they want to submit a form online, let them submit a form online. And then he went on to share data. If they want to talk via text and they don’t ever want to talk to you because they’re not the phone
Tyler Martin: type of person, I’m kind of that way. I hate phone calls. It just feels like it takes up a lot of my time. But if you text me, you’ll get a response like that. If you email me, you also get a response like that. So you kind of, his whole point was meet them where they’re at and you’ll see your
Ryan Fenn: conversions go way up. A hundred percent, a hundred percent. And you start with what we’re like, you meet them where they’re at, but you also present what statistically shows is the best, the best way of speaking. Right now people, text messaging is king. People don’t want to get on
Ryan Fenn: phone calls. They have a high, especially these younger kids that are coming up, that are buying houses, new homeowners that, you know, they, the generation below me, I’m 43. These like 30 year olds and like these younger kids, that’s like the highest anxiety group of people. Right. And they
Ryan Fenn: don’t like getting on the phone. They have social anxiety, but they can text and they can text fast. And so you want to make sure you’re offering every way for them to communicate with you, but texting definitely, and not to toot my own horn or like, you know, self-promotion,
Ryan Fenn: but it is, we have 98 to a hundred percent read rates. So it’s like, what’s, what’s better,
Tyler Martin: you know? Yeah, that’s huge. Okay. So next thing I wanted to talk about, cause I feel like this topic really is represented, can be representative for any home service business owner, actually any business owner, but I want to talk about your relationship with Tommy Mello
35:24How Tommy Mello bought 25% and why he paid cash for it
Tyler Martin: and him becoming an investor. Talk about that a little bit. What precipitated that? How did that lead up to that? I mean, Tommy Mello is obviously an icon in our industry, extremely successful. The house that he’s building is like insane. I can’t go without mentioning that.
Tyler Martin: But just talk about that a little bit. I think adding a player like him or someone that’s at a different level, probably than where you, a level maybe you want to get to, but you’re not at yet, probably adds a lot to you guys.
Tyler Martin: So could you share some of that?
Ryan Fenn: First of all, he’s all right. Let’s pump the brakes a little bit. Just kidding. Tommy’s great. So the relationship between me and Tommy’s really organic. We, I reached out to him. It’s funny because he actually had texts. He had messaged me on Facebook months earlier and I actually missed the message.
Ryan Fenn: And so when I went in to message him, I saw a message from him and I was like, oh i missed a message from tommy and so it’s probably like uh like i’m too cool for tommy and uh so i messaged him i said hey let’s talk about text messaging we had a conversation he
Ryan Fenn: goes hey why don’t you come to why don’t you come to vertical track this was back when he was doing vertical track and uh you know let’s let’s talk so we i actually sponsored it was the biggest sponsorship i had done to date like this was three or four years ago and it was like it’s like
Ryan Fenn: $10,000 or something to speak there. And it was like the big, uh, at the time was like a, was a, yeah, a big risk. And, uh, I spoke and I, and he’s, he, he was in the audience and, uh, I love speaking. I feel like I’m not bragging, but that is my favorite thing to do. I’m good at it.
Ryan Fenn: And so, uh, he came up to me after he said, Hey, you know, that was really great. Let’s connect. I want to, I want to see if there’s more ways to work together. And then he put me in touch with, Jim Leslie and Jim
Ryan Fenn: basically Jim at the time was Tommy’s like no guy. Tommy’s the guy that likes to say yes but then he goes talk to Jim and if Jim says yes then we definitely have something right? So you get on a call with Jim and he’s like this
Ryan Fenn: he’s got his arms folded and he’s very skeptical like you’re not. And I said I said yeah so this is one of the most effective ways to use text messaging here and I was telling about it and he leans in and he goes, you can’t do that.
Ryan Fenn: And I was like, yeah, we can do that. And he goes, I’ve been trying to do that for like two years. We haven’t been able to figure out how to make that work. And I was like, we can do it. And he’s like,
Ryan Fenn: I will buy you a steak dinner if you can do that. And I showed him and it worked and he’s like, oh my gosh. So then he’s like, so in that there’s a, there’s a good example of somebody who, who is, we’re focused on this. We know how to make things work, trigger at the right times. Right.
Ryan Fenn: And so then he’s like, okay, cool. So he tells Tommy, Hey, these guys know what they’re doing. we need to get, we need to get involved. So we got a one going on text messaging. We started seeing good results. And then he said, then we were at a service nation and we had been getting
Ryan Fenn: the good results for him. We were at about just if you know, Justin, you know, Justin, we were, we had brought in the, we brought the business to about $300,000 a month in recurring revenue. So we did that. We did that organ. I took it to a hundred thousand by myself,
Ryan Fenn: brought Justin on, took it to 300,000. And so we were on a good clip. It’s not like we went and begged for anything, but we’re at the, we’re at the service nation and Tommy goes, Hey, come to my house tonight. And I had a, I had a flight in an hour and I’m like, well, I’m missing that flight.
Ryan Fenn: So, so I go to Tommy’s house and, uh, you know, we had a great, great time hanging out. And then, uh, he just goes, Hey, you know, I think you guys, I love, like, I love what you’re doing, but I also, and this is, I think, really important for people to understand. I get a lot of people
Ryan Fenn: that ask, how do you network at such a high level? How do you get these people to… I sit at the table with a lot of people, and it comes down to those kind of guys can sense BS long before you walk through the door. These guys are so hyper aware of crappy people.
Ryan Fenn: and I’ve been in Tommy’s house. I’ve since then been to his house pretty much every month. We hang out all the time. We work on a lot of stuff together, but I’ve seen people come into his house and immediately they’re like, well, yeah, we don’t like this guy.
Ryan Fenn: Like there’s a vibe, right? And so I think it’s just really important that if you are going to try to work with high level people, if you’re going to try to network with high level people, that you have your emotional game on track.
Ryan Fenn: You need to be an ethical, honest person without ulterior motives because they’re going to sniff those out so quickly. And if you’re a genuine person, if you’re a nice person and you’re a go-getter, they’re going to pick up on that very quickly. And so immediately he said,
Ryan Fenn: I want to buy into your business. He bought 25% of the business and we’ve been cranking ever since. But yeah, I would say just to kind of speak to that a little bit, it’s like you don’t want to go in there with – anytime you’re going to talk to somebody like that, you don’t want to have some sort of underlying issue that they’re going to sniff out really quickly.
Tyler Martin: Yeah, that’s huge. Was there any point where you pause in terms of taking an investor or giving up a little bit of equity? 25% is a decent amount. It’s not control, but it is a decent amount. Was there any point where you go, even if it’s Tommy Mello, just you just pause a little bit and go, is this right for me?
Tyler Martin: Or is that always been your plan?
Ryan Fenn: It was not always the plan for sure. That was one that was just so obvious. That was like, I know he’s going to bring far more value than than what he’s taking. And he didn’t we didn’t give it to him. He bought and he bought and he paid really well for that equity.
Ryan Fenn: So it wasn’t. And that that was the sign to me that he was serious because there have been people that come along and say, hey, I’ll offer my influence in, you know, for equity. And it’s like, nah, Tommy knew Tommy was willing to offer his influence and also pay for the equity. And so, cause, and I think that’s the
Ryan Fenn: way it should be. If you’re going to, you know, if you’re going to take equity from somebody, you should pay for what it’s worth at that moment. And then you should put your skin in the game after that. And so we, we generally say no to anybody that, you know, comes along and says,
Ryan Fenn: hey, I’ll trade you equity for influence. And the good thing about that deal was it was organic in that he had been using the product and having success with it. I really don’t like the businesses that come in and go, hey, we’ll pay you money if you’ll talk about us. And it’s like, how is that?
Ryan Fenn: It just doesn’t, I don’t want to say it’s dishonest, but it’s definitely not totally honest. Cause it’s like, Hey, this product’s really good. Thanks for my paycheck. Appreciate it. You know? And so, so the good thing about that deal was that he was using it. He was having
Ryan Fenn: success. He saw that and he fairly bought equity. And so I think we did it right. But yeah, equity to me is like, um, you know, you guard it like you do your life. Right. And I’ve made mistakes for sure. And early on, you know, you never know, especially the beginning it’s easy because
Ryan Fenn: something’s worth nothing at the beginning. It’s like a hundred percent of zero is easy to split up. Right. Yeah. And then you start to go down the road and you, Oh, holy crap. You got a good deal, man. So yeah, it’s a, it’s something you should definitely be very considerate of, but there’s
Tyler Martin: times where it’s obvious. Like, yeah, heck yeah. Let’s go. What’s the takeaway for the folks out there in the audience? Like what, I mean, obviously Tommy Mello, a huge name in our industry, a lot of success, really writing on the wall why you would do it. But I mean, what would you say
Tyler Martin: to someone that’s maybe a home service business owner, that’s maybe not a Tommy level level guy, but someone that can bring that value? Like what’s that decision criteria in your mind,
Ryan Fenn: as much as we can cover in a podcast, obviously. So, so I love the, I love skin in the game. That’s my, that’s like, that’s all I ever talk about is I say, look, like what, what anybody can say anything, anybody can say, I will do this for you. I will do that for you. The response should always
Ryan Fenn: be, well, if you can do that for me, let’s sign something here that says, if we hit what you’re saying, then yes, you will get this thing. Right. And then it’s like, it’s a, it’s very telling. It’s an immediate, that’s the best way to negotiate a deal. Right. Because if, if they’re
Ryan Fenn: not willing to do that, they don’t have as much faith in themselves as they’re saying. Right. it’s and so it’s the same Tommy will talk about all the time it’s like the best sales guys are the ones that don’t want a base they don’t want a guaranteed payment right they want to get out
Ryan Fenn: and and they go I I don’t want a base but I want to get a ton of freaking money if I close deals right that’s the guy you’re looking for and so the same thing the same thing apply in a partnership if you’re looking to trade equity if you’re looking to bring on a partner it should be
Ryan Fenn: how much where you at if you’re at the beginning then you just talk about what you guys both bringing the table. But if you’re far along, you have a business worth a certain amount of money. And somebody says, I can do this for you. Say, cool. I’ll pay you when we do that thing. I’ll,
Ryan Fenn: I’ll give you that. Let’s sign something right now that says, if you accomplish this thing, then you get it. Right. And so skin in the game to me is everything. It’s just like, it’s like, show me, you can do just show me, you can do it. And, uh, and so I would say,
Ryan Fenn: I wouldn’t say run away from partnerships. I wouldn’t say that, that, um, they’re not good, but I would, one of the, you know, one of the quotes is the only ship that doesn’t sail is a partnership. And that’s very, it’s very true. Partnerships are one, they’re one way doors.
Ryan Fenn: You go through them, you can’t go back. And so you do need to do a lot of really deep homework. You need to make sure this is somebody that, I mean, you’re getting married on paper, you’re getting married to this person. And so do the same thing you would do, court them,
Ryan Fenn: figure it out and determine and and tommy made that really easy you know if you know tommy if anybody has met him he’s one of the guys and i i kind of believe i have that ability as well to sense kind of that bs he’s the most genuine person i’ve ever met in the trades at that level especially
Ryan Fenn: and so so yeah i wouldn’t my my advice would be a don’t be afraid of partnerships B treat them like a marriage would you marry this person obviously not not from a sexual point of view but you know would you spend a lot of time with this person
Ryan Fenn: would you fight with this person would you be able to forgive this person would you be able to like get down and dirty with everything and then figure out a skin in the game scenario and that was the thing with Tommy the skin in the game is he gave me a bunch of money
Ryan Fenn: for my equity the value of the company at the time. So, yeah.
Tyler Martin: You know, to your point, I see this in my own client base. There are so many people that approach my clients and they get excited and we’ll have a discussion. And I’m kind of like the Jim Leslie a little bit for my clients where I’m like the crudgy guy
Tyler Martin: ready to say no. And they’ll, someone will pitch them. And I’d say 90% of the time, they’re not bringing money to the table. They’ve got some great idea or they’ve got something that’s going to change their whole business. and they’re going to have such a big impact.
Tyler Martin: But when it comes down to writing a check, they have nothing to give. And it’s like, and I always say the same thing. It’s like, you know, unless someone’s willing to back it up with a few dollars, be really cautious, really cautious.
Ryan Fenn: Yeah, 100%. Yeah, it’s like, it’s like, it’s pretty easy. It’s like the number one way to know, right? It’s like, yeah, yeah. All right, are you willing to put it in? Show me, show me you can do it. You’re all top.
Tyler Martin: Last topic, we’re coming up on the top of the hour. Do you have a few more minutes?
47:14Paulie Shore’s advice on story as your moat against AI
Ryan Fenn: Sure, yeah.
Tyler Martin: Okay, cool. I just want to talk about, I’ve heard you say home services are becoming more commoditized. Can we talk about that a little bit? Like, what do you mean by that? You know, why is that happening? And maybe how do we prevent that?
Ryan Fenn: Well, I don’t think there’s any way to prevent commoditization of it, but there’s a way to create a moat around your business, especially as, you know, you get, okay, I’ll give you an example. You just had the CEO of, I can’t remember what it was.
Ryan Fenn: He’s on a podcast, CEO of like some big AI company. And they said, how do you, what do you tell your kids? If, if AI is going to take over the world, what are you going to tell your kids? He says, you tell them to become a plumber.
Ryan Fenn: And so we’re going to see an onslaught of more and more people. I mean, we’re having that. We’re seeing a huge change, right? White collar is going, is scared. Right. Attorneys are scared. People are scared because AI and who’s not scared. The plumbers.
Ryan Fenn: we’ve got a long time before a robot’s going to come into a house and fix your problem right and so we can’t avoid the idea that more and more people are going to become come after this opportunity but i always go back to the same thing i’ve learned i learned this early on i used to do
Ryan Fenn: stand-up comedy i was doing a show one night with uh paulie shore if you remember who paulie shore is sure uh in the army now my one of my favorite movies he uh he was there that night and i was sitting with him, talking with him. I said, Hey, I’m a new comedian. What advice do you have? And
Ryan Fenn: he said, the only thing that you have that’s different than everybody else is your own personal story. That’s it. There’s nothing, there’s nothing else you have. It’s your personal story. And so until your audience loves you for who you are, they’re not going to care about your
Ryan Fenn: jokes. They’re not going to laugh at your joke. The joke is the service, right? That’s the plumbing. That’s the HVAC. That’s the whatever, right? That for him, it’s a joke, right? That’s his service he’s offering, but nobody, but that’s, but anybody can tell that same joke. The next comedian can say
Ryan Fenn: the same thing. The difference is, do I love that person or not? So he said, people, I can tell a joke about airplane food, like a generic lame airplane food joke. And I’ll get a, I’ll get a laugh. But if you go on stage and tell that same joke, you won’t get a laugh because they don’t
Ryan Fenn: know you. They don’t love you. They don’t, they don’t, you know, and I already, I’ve already built up my, my thing and say that the only way you can build yourself up is by telling your own story. So your jokes should revolve around your story. And that has made all the difference in my entire
Ryan Fenn: life of everything. I actually emailed him recently. I’m trying to get ahold of him and be like, Hey dude, I tell, I tell a story all the time, but he hasn’t responded. But the key for me is, and this is the moat you can build around your business is you tell the story and
Ryan Fenn: you tell a story along the customer journey, whenever you can videos, you send out videos and you send it out a video and somebody books, we call this the owner handshake text message goes out with a video. Hey, it’s Ryan with such and such HVAC, whatever, right? Just wanted to
Ryan Fenn: say, thank you so much for giving us a shot. We’re going to come out and really take care of you. Wanted to let you know, this is my business. This is my family here. I built this from the ground up with my bare hands. I get, or my dad built it or whatever, you know, and you tell something that
Ryan Fenn: makes them go, oh, I like this guy. I’m going to do business with this guy. And now your joke, your HVAC service hits, right? Because they are connected to you as a person. And I think my prediction is that as AI gets more and more prominent in every part of our lives,
Ryan Fenn: people will crave actual human connection. And if you can nail that, you create a moat around your business.
Tyler Martin: Yeah, that’s good stuff. Hey, that’s an awesome end to this in terms of just getting people to think about creating their own moat. I’m always amazed, just starting with a website, a lot of people’s websites, businesses’ websites, they lack that personalization. It just blows my mind.
Tyler Martin: You think they’re owned by private equity because they lack so much personalization. And I know because sadly, sometimes it’s my own clients. They’re not owned by private equity. They just lack that touch of getting their story. yourself on there waving a hi let me come see you know like do connect with the people you come on
Ryan Fenn: there and it’s like cold sanitary robotic yeah you’re just you’re just you’re just the same as
Tyler Martin: all the 100 other hvec guys you know yeah yeah such a good point okay so your website chirp.com chirp has two i’s chirp.com uh i’ll include your linkedin link in the show notes anything else you want to share with anybody if they want to reach out to you you know you heard me talk about washing
Ryan Fenn: the windshields earlier, right? And I think that’s really important. I like to earn my opportunity to pitch my clients. And so I want to wash your windshield for you first. I want to offer you something for free. We do a revenue optimization analysis. This is where we do a
Ryan Fenn: quick AI analysis of your business. We find some leaks and how you could improve. We’ll hand you that. It’s totally free. If you end up using Chirp, cool. If not, great. No problem. It’s still of high value and show you where you could improve your conversion rates. And then if you
Ryan Fenn: decide you end up working with Chirp, awesome. We’ll work together. You’ll be a client of mine, be part of the family and we’ll make money together. So if you want to get that, go over
Tyler Martin: to Chirp, sign up for the revenue optimization analysis and let’s rock and roll. Yeah. And one thing I like to, you’d mentioned, and I think people have to think of it this way. Sometimes we just think of this as software. Oh yeah, we’re going to have a software that sends videos, but
Tyler Martin: it’s really that strategy and consultation part two that you guys add that is where the separator
Ryan Fenn: and the software, right? We have a whole coaching program. So you come in and you have the software, you have a coach who works with you to increase conversion rates. And we’re seeing 10, 20, 40, sometimes a thousand X in some like really outlier cases of return on investment into the process.
Ryan Fenn: But even if we’re able to help convert two or three jobs more a month, you’re well over your investment into the company. So it’s software and it’s a team to help you implement that.
Tyler Martin: Awesome. Well, thanks again, Ryan, for being on the show for number two. Hopefully there’s a number three in the future. I really appreciate it.
Ryan Fenn: Thanks, Tyler. Have a great day, man. We’ll see you.
Tyler Martin: You too. Okay, I always love my chats with Ryan. And my biggest takeaway in this one, the words you use matter more than people think. I think we really do forget about this. A lot of contractors say they’re following up, but they’re not paying attention to how
Tyler Martin: they’re following up. The difference between sounding like a marketer and sounding like a real person can completely change how customers respond. When you combine that consistent follow up and the right timing, you start to unlock more revenue from the same opportunities. If you’re a home service owner looking to turn growth into real profit with better cash
Tyler Martin: flow and cleaner financials and KPIs you can trust, go ahead and book a no pressure intro call at CFOintroCall.com. That’s CFOintroCall.com. Or hey, check out my website at CFO Made Easy. That’s CFO Made Easy.com. And as always, as always, thank you so much for listening.
Tyler Martin: I’ll catch you on the next episode.
Related Episodes
- The $1M Revenue Leak: How Chiirp Fixed Home Service Follow-Up – Ryan Fenn
- Why You’re Losing Jobs After the Call Is Booked – Brigham Dickinson
- The Revenue Levers Most Owners Ignore – Justin Judd
- The Hidden Trifecta Driving Growth in Top Home Service Companies – Brennen Smith
Tyler Martin works with owners on the numbers behind these stories: Profit & Grit CFOs.
