Full transcript10 chapters · 11,086 words
00:00Dropping out at 16 and starting windshield repair with $500
Ryan Fenn: Home service businesses don’t have a sales problem. They have a follow-up problem, and that’s what I set out to fix.
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. Hey, today we’re chatting with Ryan Fenn. He’s the CEO and founder of Chirp. It’s a follow-up platform built for home service businesses. We get into how Ryan went from door-to-door windshield repair to building software that powers speed to lead,
Tyler Martin: estimate rehash, and review engines. We’ll explain what that is in the podcast. You’ll hear why most shops don’t have a sales problem. They have a follow-up problem. How to scale authenticity with simple owner handshake videos and what Chirp 2.0’s agent means for your marketing stack.
Tyler Martin: It’s good stuff. You got to hear this. If you run an HVAC company, a plumbing company, an electric company, or really any service business, and you want more book jobs from the leads you already have, lock in for this one. It’s a good one. Let’s get into it and talk with Ryan.
Tyler Martin: Hey, Ryan, welcome to the Profit and Grit Show. How are you doing today?
Ryan Fenn: Good, how are you?
Tyler Martin: Good, thanks for being here. I’m really excited to talk with you.
Ryan Fenn: Thank you for having me. Honored to be here, thank you.
Tyler Martin: Hey, so I’d love to start out, share with me a little, for the folks that don’t know you, which would surprise me, but there may be a couple. Tell us a little bit about yourself. What do you do? And then maybe on a personal note, something.
Ryan Fenn: Yeah, I’m Ryan Fenn. I am the CEO and founder of a company called Chirp. Chirp.com with two I’s. We automate follow-up to help home service businesses ensure maximum conversion rate on their leads. I’m married to Lonnie for 17 years, and I have four beautiful kids.
Ryan Fenn: And they just started school the other day, so I’m podcasting from home today because nobody’s here.
Tyler Martin: Hasn’t been that way for the last couple months, has it?
Ryan Fenn: Yeah, yeah.
Tyler Martin: That’s awesome. Hey, so I want it where I’d love to start in terms of learning about you and just your journey. I believe when you first start your first business, you started, you were 16. I believe you dropped out of high school. You had a baby on the way, had something like 500 bucks.
Tyler Martin: Take me back to that point. Like, what were you doing? What was your plan? What was your vision?
Ryan Fenn: There’s a little gap in the narrative there. I got to clear up. I did. I dropped out of high school at 16, but I started my first business that was successful at 26. So there’s a gap there. Got it. When my first child was on the way, I did lots of things in that 10 years. I sold cars. I sold anything you could think of. I went on a two-year mission for my church to the Philippines and learned a second language there.
Ryan Fenn: So there was there, there’s a gap there, but, but at 26, when my first child was just born, that’s when like the fire really lit, you know, of staying committed to something. Because at that point, you know, it’s no longer just about me and my wife who could, you know, we, we could make it work for us, you know, pretty easily.
Ryan Fenn: Well, once you have that kid, it’s like go time. Right. So, so I started my first business. It was a windshield repair business. so rock flies up, puts a little crack in your windshield. We sealed those up so they don’t spread any further.
Ryan Fenn: You don’t have to replace your whole windshield. I was actually working for a company that did it. It was great for like two months. I’m working for this guy and just going, hey, this is cool. I can feed my family and I can be thinking about
Ryan Fenn: what entrepreneurial journey I want to go down. And then I found out he was doing shady stuff with the customer’s information that I was collecting. And, you know, I immediately, my heart sank because, you know, it’s like I had a good, I was feeding my family, you know, and but I wasn’t going to do it. I wasn’t going to keep doing it with with him doing that. So I quit. And I had about 500 bucks that I had saved up from that. And I bought a windshield repair kit. And I started my own windshield repair business.
Ryan Fenn: the problem was at the time is I didn’t have the lead source that he had because he he had a deal with a local car wash and cars are coming in there all day hundreds of cars are coming in and that was a traffic source right and uh I didn’t have that and so I just started going
Ryan Fenn: door to door that was my first way to get deals and uh it’s funny it worked we were able to go door to door and get windshield repairs we’d just knock on the door and say hi my name is Ryan we do windshield repair. Do you have any chips in your windshield you need fixed?
Ryan Fenn: And sure enough, people would go, Hey, you know what? I do have one. And then it was like, game on. So that’s how we started. I can keep going on and on on that story, but that’s really,
Tyler Martin: you know, that’s, that’s the beginning of it all. So, yeah. So wow. 500 bucks. You tried the windshield repair. Now I do remember a little side story. I actually did that for a short while and I did. And a buddy got me into it and I registered a domain. It was San Jose glass
Tyler Martin: repair. I live in San Jose, California. And I didn’t know this at the time. I wasn’t that smart, but I was getting like tons of calls because San Jose made it, San Jose glass repair. It sounded very official. And people almost like thought like I was like, or something. So I get all these calls
Tyler Martin: all the time. And I also got on this insurance list. And so I had a ton of business. The only problem is I was horrible at it. And every day I, I don’t want to say half, but I’d say like one out of 10, I do. I used to have a friend that was an expert at it. He’d come out and help me fix it.
Tyler Martin: because I didn’t quite leave it clean enough. And every so often he’d support me and I finally sold the business to him. And that was during my college year. So that was actually interesting. And then I think it was a company called SafeLight,
Tyler Martin: if I remember correctly. Didn’t they kind of take over everything or something? Whether it was a chain?
Ryan Fenn: They’re certainly a presence and they are all over the place, but they had plenty of shops where we were, but it’s one of those things you can either go out, they wait for business, right? they advertise and they wait for people to pull in. We were going out and getting it. And so,
Ryan Fenn: yeah, that’s a testament to the fact that competition doesn’t matter. You shouldn’t be thinking about competition. Yeah. That’s a good point. We were able to grow into a lot of locations and did great with, with plenty of safe flights in the area. So.
Tyler Martin: You know, I had a guy on my podcast. In fact, he’s in this week’s episode, Lenny Gray,
06:50Going door to door because he had no lead source
Tyler Martin: and his whole thing is about door-to-door sales. And the conversation I had with him, one conversation was door-to-door sales is kind of scary. Like it, it really, it’s intimidating. It says a lot about you, like for you to, I mean, was it because you had a young family and you’re
Tyler Martin: like your back’s against the wall and you got to kind of make it work and that’s why you did that? Or did you have past experience in that? I mean, what, what made you decide to go door-to-door
Ryan Fenn: sales as a way to get it rolling? Well, you know, I had sold stuff, never door-to-door, but I had sold stuff my whole, you know, ever since I had dropped out of high school. So I was, you know, selling cars and different things. And I’ve been blessed with a lack of self-awareness
Ryan Fenn: or, or like the ability to be embarrassed. I tend to be out there quite a bit. So, so it was natural for me. And I get, I get that it is a difficult thing. And, you know, we talked before we got on the podcast a little bit about the mantra and we’ll get more into that.
Ryan Fenn: But part of what I, you know, believe and do is that we have abilities beyond what we really understand. And so when we kind of have the approach of, I hope this works, I think it’ll work, we’re really discrediting who we really are and the ability we have to create.
Ryan Fenn: And so I look at things as it’s going to work because I will make it work because I have that I have that power within me to make things work. And so once you have that sort of confidence, there’s really no there’s no failure.
Ryan Fenn: It doesn’t exist. You’re a divine being. You have the ability to make things happen as long as you actually believe that.
Tyler Martin: So I love that. Would you say, as we wrap up this segment, would you say that’s the one takeaway from this is you got to you control your own destiny is what I’m kind of taking from that. And that’s how maybe for the listeners out in the audience who are business owners should think about things when they’re trying to grow their business or scale their business, that they control the environment. Would that be fair?
Ryan Fenn: A hundred percent. The entrepreneur, the person that, if you know what the word means, it means one who undertakes, one who takes on this creative responsibility, right? And you have to shift your mindset into this, yes, I will just make it work. And it’s a funny thing.
Ryan Fenn: I’ve had multiple times along the journey where that’s been reinforced. But one in particular was when I was in sort of a doubtful stage in the early days of Chirp. And I bumped into a guy who had built a very big software company, a multi-billion dollar software company. And he
Ryan Fenn: agreed to get on a call with me. And I was talking to him and he just said, he said, well, yeah, it’s going to work. And I’m like, well, like, you know, I don’t know the competition, there’s this and that and it’s hard. And he goes, yeah, but you are behind it and you have the ability to make
Ryan Fenn: it work and therefore it can’t fail. And that really like pushed me back into like reality of
10:01The billionaire who told him impossible isn’t a word
Ryan Fenn: like, oh yeah. Okay. Yeah. Cool. Just go, you know, and entrepreneurs just make things happen
Tyler Martin: and it doesn’t matter what’s going on. It’s funny how, when someone says something like that to you, especially if you respect the, where they’re coming from, it like, can either so many things people have said to me that have stuck with me, even like 30 years ago, that just stick with me
Tyler Martin: to this day when I approach them because it just had a presence on me.
Ryan Fenn: It’s embarrassing sometimes because I’ve had conversations with many very, very wealthy people, billionaires, in the hundreds of millions of dollars. I was talking with another one and he’s a billionaire and he was asking me about some process for actually for Chirp early on.
Ryan Fenn: And I said, oh, I don’t think that’s possible to build it like that. And he goes, what did you say? Not possible. And I was like, yeah. And he’s like, how old are you? And I was like, uh, he’s like, haven’t you learned yet that that’s the, that impossible is not a word like, and this is coming from a billionaire. So it’s like, it’s like, you have to, it’s funny. These people are crazy. You know, they, they, they appear crazy, but that’s the, that’s the whole idea is you’re supposed to be crazy.
Ryan Fenn: You’re supposed to get rid of logic and all reason and say, no, impossible is absolutely possible. So anyways.
Tyler Martin: That’s awesome. I love that. That’s a great takeaway. Hey, so you’re doing the windshield repair business. I feel like I’ve already used up my one research error, so I hope I don’t have any more error. You’re doing the windshield repair business. At what point do you go, you know, this is bigger than just windshield repair.
Tyler Martin: I think there’s an opportunity here. And I think this is, to me, this is like the birth of chirp.
Ryan Fenn: One more gap. But yes. Okay. So from there, I’ve always loved digital marketing and I always wanted…
11:51From gas station windshields to a $2M digital course
Ryan Fenn: I’m always inspired by people that do really great things. And there’s a lot of weird stuff on the internet, of course, but the internet really is a powerful tool. And I’ve always loved internet marketing and I’ve always thought… And before I did that, I was dabbling in affiliate marketing and trying different things.
Ryan Fenn: And, and, um, I got the idea to, cause I, as you know, we had, we had, we had grown into about nine locations. We were now working out of gas stations and car washes and dealerships. So we went from door to door. And then I got the idea to be in a gas station.
Ryan Fenn: Cause I was like, man, cars are coming into the gas station all day. I’ll wash their windshield as a courtesy. And then if they have a chip, I’ll offer. So it’s like, it’s like digital. It’s funny. it’s like you think of digital marketing people visiting the website and you’re like shoot people
Ryan Fenn: are coming into the gas station all day all i got to do is hook them and that the hook was washing the windshield hey let me wash your windshield for you today thanks for coming in and that was enough to to be able to pitch them windshield repair and we would get like 15 repairs out of
Ryan Fenn: a gas station in a day which is like a thousand dollars so it’s like awesome and so we were in all these locations, we’re doing great. And I thought to go big, to go like nationwide or worldwide, even how, how do I, you know, do I just keep getting more gas stations? And that
Ryan Fenn: wasn’t really realistic because it’s, it is by nature, not extremely scalable. There’s a lot of management and stuff that would have, you know, so it’s not, it’s not extremely scalable, but it’s a good, it’s a great like starter business. But I thought, man, there’s a lot of people that
Ryan Fenn: would probably benefit from this. What if I started a digital course, how to grow a profitable windshield repair business. And so I started doing videos out of my tiny little, I had this tiny little two bedroom house that my wife and I bought for $130,000 with our, we had two kids at this
Ryan Fenn: point and I had a Mac mini and I started doing PowerPoint presentations and recording them. I had to figure out how to screen record. And like, it was really hard to do at the time. and I started making videos on how to start your own windshield repair business, how to,
Ryan Fenn: how to approach a gas station, what to say to customers as they come in, all the pitch, all that stuff. And, um, I put that together and I started selling that and I, I started selling it through ads on, you know, local, local classified ads, Craigslist, doing all this stuff.
Ryan Fenn: and then then I started posting ads on Facebook as well but I but the problem I was having with Facebook is I was getting leads for very cheap I was getting leads for like a dollar a lead for an opt-in but these are like really top of funnel leads right just brand new to the like the idea
14:38The text-then-video funnel that primed cold Facebook leads
Ryan Fenn: the concept and so I had to figure out how to take them through a funnel to get them primed to buy And it was, I learned that if I texted the leads very quickly and sent them a link to a video, that was like the, that was the hook, kind of like the gas station washing.
Ryan Fenn: Yeah. And got them to then pay attention. So I went from text message. So, so they would submit their form. A text would go out and say, Hey, it’s Ryan. Thank you so much for your interest in starting a windshield repair business. Here’s a quick two minute video.
Ryan Fenn: They’d watch the two-minute video. And that was just me saying, hey, windshield repair this, that. You know, it’s a great business. I’d love for you to watch my webinar. And so now I go from two-minute video to 45-minute pre-recorded webinar and then invite them
Ryan Fenn: to schedule a call. So that was the funnel that took them through from who are you to shut up and take my money. That’s like the journey, right? Right. And that process, we automated it all the way through to the booked call. And so all we were doing all day, my brother and I, we were getting on calls with people
Ryan Fenn: who had gone through that funnel and booked the call. And by the time they’re on there, it was just a matter of, we knew they wanted to do it because they went through all this, like the video, the 45 minute webinars, like, don’t
Ryan Fenn: book a call if you’re not interested, like, like trying to really weed out as many as right. Right. and we made like $2 million selling that. And we found that the most important part, there’s two parts. There’s the initial contact. You have to be very quick.
Ryan Fenn: If they submit their information, we’ve got to text them in like less than a minute, right? And then if they don’t consume those two videos, the two minute and the 45, we’ve got to follow up consistently. and we would drip text messages on them with testimonial videos of people that did the course,
Ryan Fenn: right? So we did like five or six drip messages over two weeks and they would all point right back to that two minute video. So they’d watch the testimonial and then it would say, watch this two minute video, watch this two minute video, watch. And then they would go
Ryan Fenn: right back into the funnel. Does that make sense? Yeah, totally. And so those two parts were key. Speed to lead, the immediate contact, and then consistent follow-up to get the most out of the leads. And we were spending, I think we spent $250,000 on ads, but ultimately that
Tyler Martin: brought us close to $2 million in sales. I got a couple of questions for you.
Ryan Fenn: Yeah. Go ahead.
Tyler Martin: One, kind of a silly question, but I’m just curious. When you were doing the gas stations, were you giving like the guy working that day a piece of the action we did you didn’t have a formal agreement with gas stations did you how did that work that they allowed you to
Ryan Fenn: you know wipe windows for their customers oh yeah we would go we would approach the owners of the gas station and say we want to do this for you some of them would let us they just go go for it we like that we have somebody out there because one of the problems that gas stations have is
Ryan Fenn: that there’s no presence out there and it can create like um it can create like a they just don’t have anybody watching that area. And so it’s just a blind spot in their business. Yep. So some of them are like, Hey, we like having somebody out there just, you know,
Ryan Fenn: being there and it can stop somebody from doing something shady or doing something stupid. And, um, so some of them are just like, just be out there. And then some wanted a, wanted a percentage and we’d pay them like five bucks. We get paid $65 per chip. So we’d pay them
Ryan Fenn: like five bucks. Got it. Okay. Okay. That’s good. Good to kind of understand that. And then Were you doing the windshield repair as this $2 million of revenue started to manifest in the courses? Or did you sell that? Or how did that work out?
Tyler Martin: My really good friend who was working one of our dealerships, once the course sales started to take off, I offered to let him take over that business.
Ryan Fenn: Sure.
Tyler Martin: And it’s actually still operational today.
Ryan Fenn: That’s crazy.
Tyler Martin: Okay. And so what I’m getting from this now, just getting real crystal clear for me in terms of Chirp. So you start to understand speed to lead and that follow-up are gold. And I also would argue the testimonial showing the belief that you were doing such a great job and giving social proof is probably a big part too.
Tyler Martin: And so somehow, how does this go into, where does Chirp come into this? Because I see this funnel, you’re getting all this expertise. How does Chirp, and then particularly, I’m just curious, you’re really niched, I believe, in predominantly home services, right? Is it trades or would you say home services?
Ryan Fenn: Trades, home services, yeah.
Tyler Martin: Yeah, okay. How did that all play out?
Ryan Fenn: Yeah, so that’s another like trenches, in the trenches story. So I have this idea for this software, right?
19:35Borrowing $500K and pulling Kevin out of a Vermont store
Ryan Fenn: Okay, I want to take this process and I want to put it all into one place where people can come. Because I figured, hey, if it works for me, it’ll probably work for other businesses. And so this was a much larger undertaking to engineer a software.
Ryan Fenn: At the time, it’s becoming much more easier to build software now. But back then, this was seven years ago. So it’s not before AI and before anything. So I’m like, dang, I want to do this. but there’s, I’m looking, I’m in Utah and here in Utah, there’s a lot of big tech companies.
Ryan Fenn: It’s called Silicon Slopes, you know, it’s part of the Silicon Valley deal. And so there’s, there’s some major, you know, Adobe’s here, some Qualtrics, which is a $9 billion company. So anyway, so I’m looking at these companies going like, holy cow, you know, I’m over here doing
Ryan Fenn: a couple million. These guys are doing a couple million a day. Right. And, and so I’m thinking this is a big undertaking. So I go to, I go to a family friend. So when I mentioned earlier, the billionaire, and I just go, Hey, you know, this is my idea. And he had been kind of watching
Ryan Fenn: my journey. I would text him like, Hey, check it out. We did, we did $75,000 this month in course sales. And he’s texting me, Hey, you know, that’s impressive and whatever. So I go to him and I say, Hey, this is my idea. It’s what I want to do. Would you loan me some money to get an engineer
Ryan Fenn: and build this thing. And so he gives me a $500,000. Wasn’t cheap. It was, it was definitely not like, it’s not a gift. It wasn’t a gift. There was a lot of pressure behind it. I went to a family friend as well named Kevin, who, who, when I told you, I looked, I love digital marketing
Ryan Fenn: before all this. He was a guy that I knew from church who had been successful in software development, but he had semi-retired. And so I was like, I was like, dang, man, I wonder if he’d be interested in building this, this software. So I call him up. And cause I, cause I remember,
Ryan Fenn: cause my, the guy that gave me the 500 K, he goes, Hey, you know, I’m willing to give you the money, but engineers are not easy to come by and they’re very expensive and it’s hard to, it’s hard to make this work. And, and so I was at home that night and I was like, man, this sucks. I’ve got
Ryan Fenn: somebody that’s willing to give me, you know, half a million dollars to start this business. And I don’t have an engineer. And so I’m laying there in bed and I go, and I hadn’t seen this guy, Kevin, in like 10 years. And I go, you know what? I wonder if Kevin, and he’s just like,
Ryan Fenn: clicked. And I wonder if Kevin would be interested. So I call Kevin and he had sent his crazy story. His house burned down where we were from in California. And he moved away. That’s that was the last time I’d seen him. He moved to like Vermont. He sold his business and he bought
Ryan Fenn: a local store out in Vermont and was just running this local store. One of the smartest software engineers I’ve ever met. He’s running this little local store out in Vermont. So I call him up and I’m like, Hey, Kevin, are you, are you interested in programming again? And he goes, Ryan, you’ll
Ryan Fenn: never believe this, but in the last three months. So remember I haven’t talked to this guy in 10 years. He goes, the last three months, I have been praying for another opportunity to start programming again and get out of this store. And I go, well, I think, I think this is it.
Ryan Fenn: And, uh, and all these like little miracles just lined up. And this goes back to the saying, I’ll make it happen. When you have that faith, when you have that belief and confidence, you’ll see miracles line up for this to happen for you. But if you’re doubting and you’re not,
Ryan Fenn: it’s really hard to see it. But anyways, so these miracles are lining up and he says, yes. And within two weeks, he was full-time programming. He was able to find somebody to lease his store. Like that was a big problem. He’s like, I’m 60 hours in this store. I’m like,
Ryan Fenn: shoot, I’ll move out there and I’ll run the store while you build this. Let’s figure it out. and he’s like, no, no, no. Let me, let me reach out to this woman who, who used to work for me. And he reaches out to her and he’s like, would you be interested in leasing the store for me?
Ryan Fenn: She’s like, yeah, absolutely. So she, she comes within two weeks, he’s out of the store and full time programming chirp. And, uh, we start programming this thing. And I remember the day he texted me from his phone and he goes, Hey, Hey, I figured it out. We’ve got our, we can now
Ryan Fenn: send, we sent our first text message and he, and he sent me a text message through the software. And it was like this big breakthrough. I was like, Oh, we figured it out, you know? And, uh, that’s like a funny moment. Cause we’re like, man, we’ve done hundreds of millions of texts
Ryan Fenn: since, since then. And it’s, it’s just a funny, it started with that one text, you know? So with about within about six months, we had this basic product, which could capture leads from Facebook leads and follow up with them. And that was like the core of it,
Ryan Fenn: But we were not home service. To go back to your question, we were not home service specific at the time. We were just, hey, who wants this, right? And we were selling it to anybody and everybody. We sold it to real estate agents, some restaurants bought it, guys that sold e-commerce stuff, like all just hodgepodge of customers, right? And it wasn’t working. It was not working at all.
Ryan Fenn: I mean, it was okay. I shouldn’t say at all. We got it to about $30,000 in monthly recurring
Tyler Martin: revenue, but it was just constantly just people. And it was probably difficult too. Cause like everybody has their own way. They wanted to probably approach it. And it was hard for you
Ryan Fenn: guys to price, I would think would support that. Yeah. So you’d get a real estate agent and he’d be like, well, you know, how do I do this? And I’d be like, well, this dentist over here is doing it like this. And he’s like, well, I don’t care what the dentist is doing. I want to know what other
Ryan Fenn: real estate agents are doing, you know? So is this, you’ve heard it, everybody’s heard it, the niches, the riches are in the niches. It’s true, a hundred percent true. And so
25:29Kevin O’Leary on Cameo and the pivot to home services
Ryan Fenn: here’s a little, a little side note that led us into home services just to help people think outside of the box. There’s a company called Cameo. Have you ever heard of this company, Cameo? Names sound so familiar to me, but I don’t know what they do. Go onto this website and
Ryan Fenn: there’s celebrities and you can pay them to do like a birthday greeting or, uh, you know, congratulations for, you know, on your graduation, whatever, just to get a celebrity to say something. And I go on there and, um, Kevin O’Leary from shark tank has an offer to do a birthday greeting
Ryan Fenn: or whatever on there. And I go, I wonder if I just put in there to tell him to talk about chirp that he would do it. And so I paid 500 bucks and I get back a commercial basically of Kevin O’Leary saying, Hey, email sucks. You should do text messaging. It gets a 98% reader. He does this
Ryan Fenn: great script and he goes, you got to check out my friends over at chirp. And I was just like, holy cow, I just paid 500 bucks and I got Kevin O’Leary to talk about. So I thought outside of the box, that’s the point is to think outside of the box when you do marketing and you’re early on,
Ryan Fenn: you don’t have a lot of money to spend. And somebody from home services, a carpet cleaner in HVAC, I saw my ad with Kevin O’Leary. They signed up for Chirp. And then they started talking to me saying, you’ve got to integrate with Service Titan
Ryan Fenn: and Housecall Pro. And I said, what does integrate mean? and then they explained to me like hey if this is happening over here you could tell chirp to do this and i and then i went to my my engineer and he of course is like well yeah we could easily
Ryan Fenn: make that build the apis and build all these connections and that’s when the light like went off this is after three years of struggle of just you know staying in that 10 20 to 30 000 range just trying to figure it out. So once we nailed that, once we figured out that, oh, cool. And
Ryan Fenn: these guys were doing great with it, right? They’re getting, they’re closing more deals. They’re talking about us. They’re like, this is amazing. And that’s when things like the light bulb went off, like, okay, cool. So I, you know, let’s focus, let’s, let’s drill down and focus
Ryan Fenn: on home services because we’ve got these deep integrations and we’ll just go after these guys. and uh they started especially the carpet cleaner guy he started doing all kinds of posts and like you’ve got to see what i’m doing over here this and that and uh i had a couple of sales guys that
Ryan Fenn: that weren’t really they weren’t really getting it they weren’t it wasn’t clicking for them and we were still stuck at that 30 000 range and so i just said you know what i’m gonna slide i’m gonna i’m gonna get rid of these guys and i’m just gonna i’m gonna go and i’m gonna sell this myself this
Ryan Fenn: is COVID times working from home and I’m at 30,000 a month and I just start going into home service groups and introducing myself and then answering questions. I wasn’t soliciting. I wasn’t going in and saying, Hey, you should check this out. I was just organically answering questions.
Ryan Fenn: And then they would ask questions back and I would say, Oh, you could do it like this. Here’s how you could set that up. And they go, Oh, that’s really cool. And next thing you know, I’m getting demos booked and I’m selling Chirp from my bedroom. And I took us from 30,000 a month to a hundred
Ryan Fenn: thousand a month from my bedroom. And then the story goes on to, we’ve got, you know, we hire Justin. If you guys know Justin Judd, who’s, who’s head of our partnerships now, and now we’re pushing a million dollars a month. So it all started from that. We sent a text message.
Tyler Martin: Talk to me about the integration part. Cause is that what really kind of catapulted you? Would
Ryan Fenn: you say is that one of the events one of the major events because the hardest part in software is adoption and we we still are solving this problem to this day but when you’re in software if things aren’t you know people will stay in a software that they don’t like just because they
Ryan Fenn: don’t want to bother learning something new and so it’s like when we go to them and say oh you can do all this stuff and they go well i’m in service i live in service type and i live in house call Pro, right? I don’t want to have to go over and tell Chirp to do these follow-ups manually, right?
Ryan Fenn: And so once we were able to say, hey, you don’t have to change anything you’re doing now, the software will just automatically know when to start following up and when to stop. And that was the trigger, right? That was the moment where they’re like, oh, sweet. I don’t
Ryan Fenn: have to ditch House Call Pro. I don’t have to ditch Service Titan. I just keep going and money’s going to get bigger. Like, and that was huge. That was it. So yeah. Plus you have instant access,
Tyler Martin: I would think to all that user base to some degree, right? Yeah. Well, yeah, we could
Ryan Fenn: definitely say like, Hey, like we didn’t have a partnership in that. They’d say here’s anything like that, but it was like, Oh, you use service Titan. Great. Let me show you our integration and how we can help you make more money. So it was a warmer, you know, intro there was,
30:34His two moats, best in class and people who care
Ryan Fenn: there was a connection where we had something common, right? Something in common.
Tyler Martin: So what’s your moat? Do you think like what prevents, and I don’t, I’m not picking on anyone, whether it be service site and house call pro, whoever, what prevents them from tomorrow creating something within their own product that does what you do.
Ryan Fenn: They do, they have it. They have, they have competing products. They’re there. Okay.
Tyler Martin: There’s two moats that are really important. Number one, when you are an all in one solution, everything for everybody, it’s hard to really be really good at one thing. Yeah. And we, uh, we focus a hundred percent of our efforts on lead conversion. And so we are
Tyler Martin: in there every day trying to make it better, right. For lead conversion. And we’re not in there part of the time here and part of the time here and part of the time here and part of the time here making this, this giant thing. So that’s, that’s number one is we call that best in class. Just
Tyler Martin: like we are focused on this one thing. So that’s, that’s one part of the moat. And it’s always an issue. It’s always, it’s always a question like competition. Sure. All of that’s always happening all the time. I wake up in the middle of the night all the time thinking about this guy’s
Tyler Martin: doing this over here. This guy’s doing this over here. One of my buddies said to me, Billy Klein, he goes, every day there’s a thousand ways to die. So you’re just going to have to get used to it. That clicked for me where it was like, everybody’s in the same boat all the time.
Tyler Martin: If you’re making money, somebody’s going to try to get it. It’s just the way it is. Yep. So once you accept that, it’s much easier to breathe. And then the second moat is people. So we focus heavily. Actually, most of our effort, we have the engineers doing their thing, but most of our
Tyler Martin: effort is in relationships. we go out, we are consistently attempting to create really good relationships with people. And then also we want to make sure that the people in Chirp are there for the customers, because a home service guy doesn’t want to know how to do this stuff. He doesn’t want to know
Tyler Martin: how to do software. He wants to just go, yes, it’s working. I don’t want to think about it. Right. And so if he knows that there’s a team that cares, that’s a lot, a lot of times more valuable. Like if we go apples to apples against a bunch of the competition, we can nitpick and go,
Tyler Martin: yeah, we’re better here. We’re better here at this and this and this and this and this. But those are just things that’s just noise to the contractor. He needs to feel good about who he’s doing business with. And that’s where we shine. That’s our deepest moat is people go.
Tyler Martin: So, and cause my attempt is always, I need to get these people to know, like, and trust me first so that whatever I sell, they’ll buy. Right. And a lot of people come out of just going, well, my product’s better. And it’s like, no, that’s the wrong approach.
Tyler Martin: If they know, like, and trust you, they will buy your product and they will be loyal to you through thick and thin because of you as a person. And so that’s been our big moat and our big presence in the space. And you talk to guys like Tommy Mello, he’ll say the same.
Tyler Martin: He says, I don’t invest in software. I invest in people. If I like the people and I trust the people, and that goes back to how we sold the windshield repair course. That 45-minute webinar, here’s how the windshield repair business works. And this is this.
Tyler Martin: This is that. This is how you do this. And this idea, the webinar was check it out. I used to go door to door and I tell this story, right? And the people go, you know what? I like this guy. I like him.
Tyler Martin: Sure. I can get a windshield repair kit over here. I could learn how to do it on YouTube, but I like this guy and I want to, I want to work with him and then it’s game on. So, but what’s, what’s so cool about that is when we talk about home services, that’s
Tyler Martin: exactly what home services are doing when they go to work with homeowners is build the know, like, and trust, right? You’re coming into someone’s home. So it’s kind of cool that it all goes full circle. Well, and one of the, I tell that story to explain the owner handshake
Tyler Martin: campaign, which is when somebody books, so, you know, you go, you go online and you book with Wasatch HVAC. I say that because this place in Utah is called the Wasatch Front. All right. Wasatch HVAC, I’d book, right? Owner handshake, wouldn’t it be great
Tyler Martin: if as the owner, I could pick up the phone and call everybody that booked and say, thank you so much for booking with me. This is my business, my wife and my kids. We started this five years ago and we tell this short little story
Tyler Martin: to get them to know, like, and trust us. If you could do that to everybody, that’d be great, but you can’t do that at scale, right? But imagine if you could send a video to every single person that books with that same exact sentiment.
Tyler Martin: So now I’m sending out a video. Hey, my name is Ryan. I’m the owner here at HVAC or Wasatch HVAC. This is my wife. These are my four kids. Started this business five years ago with nothing. We’ve worked hard through this and we really value the fact
Tyler Martin: that you’re willing to give us a shot. This whole thing that’s building this know, like, and trust. Now they’re going, oh, I like this guy. And now the technician shows up. You know, I like, you know, and it’s this whole, we’re changing the whole game by saying we’re not selling HVAC,
Tyler Martin: we’re selling us. And then the HVAC just happens, you know? So.
Ryan Fenn: Yeah. That’s powerful. I want to spend just a few minutes in this next section talking about ROI. Can you give, I’m sure you have a million of them, but can you give me a couple of success stories? Like what are some things that you’ve seen where they bring in chirp into
Ryan Fenn: their organization, some success stories related to it?
Tyler Martin: Yeah, sure. We just had a couple of big ones. We had one that we did a case study.
36:30Estimate rehash, abandoned calls and 4x more reviews
Tyler Martin: I’m not yet going to share the name of the company, but increased their monthly. They did a million extra dollars in a month because of this was from estimate rehash. So really, really dialed in estimate follow up campaigns. We’ve had instances where people increased their conversion rate on their website form fill leads by 8%,
Tyler Martin: 8%, which was like $90,000 in a month additional. Sometimes we talk about four, five, six, 8% and you go, well, on a $30 million company, that’s a lot of money. We had one guy doing one of our big ones is abandoned calls. So, you know, businesses miss
Tyler Martin: calls all the time. And so we immediately, we can sense that chirp can sense when a call is abandoned and immediately follow up, start a conversation through text and invite them to book. And what happens is most of the time they don’t even ever end up ever even having to get on the
Tyler Martin: call. They just click the link to book. And so there’s no human interaction. We had one plumber who did $200,000 his first week in doing abandoned calls. Reviews, we’ve had somebody recently report, and we get tons and tons of this, but somebody recently reported that they
Tyler Martin: like 4x to the number of reviews they were getting. And there’s more to just sending a text. Thank you for doing business with us. Will you leave us a review? We’re starting and seeding the idea of a review early on. So even in the owner handshake campaign, we encourage you to say,
Tyler Martin: I’m really looking forward to providing you with five-star service today. We’re putting the idea in their head early on in the game to get the review. You know, lots of, I mean, lots and lots of stories like that. Like I would say in the hundreds of millions of dollars of, you know, increased revenue
Tyler Martin: across our companies.
Ryan Fenn: So that’s so important. I had one of those junk companies come out and take some stuff that I had. And as soon as the young kids came up, they said, Hey, if we perform a good service for you, are you open to leaving us a review?
Ryan Fenn: And he asked me like right up front. And I was like, I hadn’t had that happen too many times. Well, what ended up happening is they did a phenomenal job, really friendly, priced it fair, did it fast, came back at the end. Not only did I leave a review, he was taking pictures of me, which I don’t normally do with the workers because I was so I felt so good about the service.
Ryan Fenn: And they were such nice guys. I wanted to help them out. And so it’s like amazing, you know, how that transition just by them playing it out right.
Tyler Martin: For whatever reason, leaving a review is like a pain. And if you ask it in a way that’s like, hey, you’re doing me this really big favor, it makes it seem hard for the customer even more. And so you want to approach it with that exact same sentiment, that exact idea of, hey, if I’m able to provide you with this, and then they feel like, now I owe you the five-star review.
Ryan Fenn: Yeah.
Tyler Martin: And that’s what the feeling we need to get out of them is that, oh, man, they did such a great job. I feel obligated at this point in a good way. We don’t want them to feel like guilt.
Ryan Fenn: Yeah. Good way. Yeah. But like, man, they went so far above and beyond. I’d be a jerk not to
Tyler Martin: leave a review at this point. Right. And we’ve, if, if we wait all the way to the end and just say, Hey, leave us a review. We’ve, we’ve missed a lot of opportunities to really increase that
Ryan Fenn: conversion. I love that. I got two things on this. One is what would your advice be to someone who says, Hey, we’re already following up. We’re good. And they just leave it at that. Because I hear that a lot. Like, we’re already doing a good job of following up.
Ryan Fenn: We’re good. We don’t need anything else.
Tyler Martin: So following up, you might think you’re doing enough follow-up. Nobody’s doing enough, especially if you’re doing manually. You’re not following up anywhere near enough. What do they say? There’s a lot of studies. People argue some it’s 12 touch points, some it’s 18. But let’s just assume 12 to 18 touch points is where you get maximum conversion.
Tyler Martin: Okay. So here’s what we say. We say, sure. Okay. All right. You’re following up and you’re making money. Great. Do you have a hundred percent close rate? No, I have an 80% close rate. Okay. Well then you have 20% of opportunity here. So until you’re at a hundred percent, don’t talk to me about I’m doing enough.
Tyler Martin: Right. And nobody’s at a hundred percent. And so, and so there’s always room for improvement. We can always do better and we can set those goals and we can say, I have a 50% close rate. No, you have a 50% opportunity rate. You have 50% of people that
Tyler Martin: aren’t closing. Let’s try to chip away at those. And if we can get it to 55, 60, 65, I mean, how much better off are you going to be, especially if you’re not putting any more effort than you’re
Ryan Fenn: already doing right now. So, yeah, I have one other thing you mentioned about the system can kind of pretty much handle everything all the way to booking. And this segues into our next conversation about AI. But before I get there, one of the pushbacks I believe I hear occasionally is
Ryan Fenn: with AI nowadays, it is definitely speeding up tasks and it’s good for admin stuff, but you can’t take away the human element. And if it’s going all the way to booking, you’re taking away the human element. And that’s how we’re going to stay competitive because you’re still getting to talk
Ryan Fenn: to Mabel who answers the phone or whoever. What’s your thought process around that?
Tyler Martin: Yeah. So it is a scary thought, right? Where it’s like, how do I maintain that down home feel? Yeah. While scaling my business. And AI offers some really awesome scalability tools. But yeah, what’s the question? You know, how do I make sure I still… Because everybody wants their HVAC guy. And when you’re small, it’s easy to be, that’s my HVAC guy. And it’s easy, right?
Tyler Martin: But scaling authenticity is difficult. At the end of the day, we’re going into an AI world and you’re not going to be able to keep up if you don’t adopt. And so my mindset around AI and the way we’re headed and Chirp 2.0 is all about AI and how
Tyler Martin: this works is scaling your authenticity as a human being. And the only way really you’re going to be able to do that is to learn AI well enough to train it to do the things that you would do. And basically, so what I would say before,
Tyler Martin: when we were talking about texting, and they go, well, I didn’t write the text, it’s not authentic. We go, well, you wrote it first, just because you sent it to 100 people doesn’t, you know, doesn’t mean that it’s not authentic, still your message and your thing. Just like when I did the
Tyler Martin: webinar, and sent that to, you know, right, thousands and thousands of people. I did it once, I recorded the webinar once, but it was able to produce a whole lot for me. The next era is how do I train my agents so that it’s still my training and me as a person
Tyler Martin: being put out into the world through AI. And so that’s really the only way I see a company adopting AI and maintaining authenticity is by learning it well enough to be able to say, yeah, this is, you know, it’s me within that training.
Tyler Martin: Because there’s no real AI. AI is not a real thing. It’s just a bunch of, you know, data. And so if you’re training that data yourself, you trained it in the way that you would do business. And now it’s just turning you into a superhuman.
Tyler Martin: It’s turning the way that you would talk and the way you do things into the ability to express it to a thousand people at one time. And so it’s just an amplifier if you do it right.
Ryan Fenn: Yeah, I love your answer. I feel like your answer was authentic, frankly, using the word authenticity. Because, you know, people don’t like to hear it because they do love to hear, yeah, we’re people and it’s going to always be people. But the truth is, if you want to scale, there’s only so much.
Ryan Fenn: You’re just not going to be able to keep up with everybody else. So I know I’m running out of time here, so I’m going to move forward to a couple things. I’d love to know in Chirp 2.0, and I want to integrate that with the AI.
Ryan Fenn: Where are you taking things and what should we expect to see in the home services space going forward?
Tyler Martin: Well, you’re one of the first to hear it, Tyler. We are embracing heavily the AI agent idea, and we’re creating an agentic network. And now we’re stepping away from campaigns and these static follow-ups and this thing.
45:13Chiirp 2.0 agents replacing static drip campaigns
Tyler Martin: And what we’re doing is we’re creating individual agents and you can look at these agents as employees in your business that, that do, that are trained to do one very specific thing for each, you know, each task that you’re trying to accomplish. And then those agents are managing that task with precision.
Tyler Martin: So we talk about like speed to lead. We train an agent who is an Angie leads specialist. Okay. that Angie specialist, their job is to only make sure that Angie leads are being contacted within 30 seconds and that they’re being followed up with consistently. You’re not going to go build
Tyler Martin: a campaign. You’re going to say, follow up with the leads for X amount of time. And it’s going to use data over millions of text messages that have been sent. And it’s going to learn what’s the best thing to say at the right times in the follow-up. So you’re not saying day one,
Tyler Martin: send this text message. Day three, send this text message. Day five, send this text message. You’re saying, agent, follow up with these leads for 14 days. And you can choose the level of aggressiveness. If you say, I want to follow up every day. I want to follow up every few days.
Tyler Martin: And what’s going to happen is, let’s say you do a 14-day, you say, I want to follow up with my estimates for 14 days. And I want to do it every two to three days. Every two days, the agent will look at the past conversation and where it’s been and decide what to say next. So that way,
Tyler Martin: like if they were to say, I need to talk to my wife, right? We don’t want to just send a generic, Hey, how are you doing? Just following up on that thing. We want to say, Hey, did you get a chance to talk to your wife? Right. And so it’s going to read that and know, and it’s going to craft
Tyler Martin: the message and then send it. Or it’s going to say, you know what? It’s going to be better for me to send an email right now or a recorded voicemail. And it’s going to decide throughout that 14 days what’s best based on past data. So we’re moving from a static drip campaign world
Tyler Martin: into agents that are smart and learning and following up in a more personalized way.
Ryan Fenn: So will there be like, how many agents do you envision? Like, will there be an agent If it comes through a Google ads, there might be an agent that’s specialized for how to handle that. Or is it more of, is it more of just like one agent is all encompassing?
Tyler Martin: No, there are agent categories. And then within those agent categories are individual agents. So now we say speed to lead. So we have our Angie lead specialist. We have our thumbtack lead specialist, our website form lead specialist. We have our Google LSA lead specialist, our Facebook lead specialist.
Tyler Martin: and each of these are designed to do that one task, right? And then we have estimate, estimate guys, agents. And we say, okay, if the estimate is for this business type, this job, this business unit, this job type, this amount, this is the agent that’s specialized for that.
Tyler Martin: You know, all these various different filters, they’re specialized for those specific things. We’re even going as far as like having a gratitude specialist. So, okay, we want to make sure gratitude for me is like the biggest thing. So I want to make sure you have the ability to express gratitude at different levels throughout the customer journey.
Tyler Martin: And so you have a gratitude specialist. Okay, if anybody spends $10,000 or more with me, this agent knows to send a gift basket to that company. Or, you know, they only spent, you know, anybody that spends up to $5,000, we’re going to send a gift card.
Tyler Martin: You know, these various little ways to express gratitude. And you have the review agent who’s going to follow up and ask for the review and then do it in a way that’s congruent with the rest of the conversation. Just all these different steps along the customer journey.
Tyler Martin: Pre-qualification guy, he’s going to help you get pre-qualified at the right times. All kinds of different…
Ryan Fenn: And Ryan, those agents are learning. Each individual agent, is it learning and improving? Is that a fair statement?
Tyler Martin: Yeah, because we’ve got data over hundreds of millions of text messages that that AI will be tapping into.
Ryan Fenn: Wow, that’s awesome. That is powerful. So when does Chirp 2.0, when does this become accessible to people?
Tyler Martin: Oh, my gosh. I’m hoping and praying that in two to three months.
Ryan Fenn: Okay.
Tyler Martin: So I’m saying that and my engineer, that’s the pressure on my engineer. here. He’s pretty confident, but we’re hoping that our first iteration of this will be two to three months. So basically you just put me on the banned list for your engineering,
Tyler Martin: basically. Anything else in AI before we move? We’re almost ready to wrap up here, but anything
Ryan Fenn: else in AI that’s worth mentioning for home service business owners? Just for people that are looking into it, it’s like, don’t be afraid of it. It’s happening. So it’s like, why be afraid? The people that make the most money are the ones that adopt things quickly and move and learn. And so don’t
Ryan Fenn: be afraid of it. It’s not taking over the world. Embrace it. It’s going to cause pain and it’s going to cause, you know, some changes and shifts, but it’s improvement. It’s good. It’s all good. Just like the internet was good. Same exact idea. It’s just now you, and you can scale your
Ryan Fenn: authenticity through AI. If you understand it well enough, you’re not saying, Hey, go say whatever you want. You’re saying, I want it to perform in a certain way. And now you’re creating a version
Tyler Martin: of you and how you do things. And so don’t, don’t be afraid of it. Yeah. Good stuff. Okay. I want to end up with the last, last two things here. One is what’s one feature or what’s one thing you, we could give to home service business owners right now that they should do either in their
Tyler Martin: follow-up or in automation that maybe you’re seeing people not do that might have an impact to their business, man. I go back to owner handshake. That’s like my baby right now. I love
Ryan Fenn: owner handshake because I’m all about authenticity and people are all about selling the product. Facts tell stories sell. If you tell facts, but I don’t, I personally as a homeowner, I don’t care about what system I have. I care that cold air is coming in or hot air. That’s all I care about.
Ryan Fenn: So anybody that anybody can produce that, right? Your only unique thing that you have is you and your story and your, you as a person, get that, use that as the, as the differentiator, as the, you know, I know we’re almost out of time, but back in my early days when I did, I told you in
Ryan Fenn: that 10 years, I did lots of stuff. I did standup comedy in that time too. And one night when I was hanging out with Pauly Shore, he gave me the best advice I’ve ever had in my life. I said, you know, how do I, I want to be as, you know, I want to be a standup comedian. What’s a good way to,
Ryan Fenn: you know, and he goes, he goes, nobody’s going to care about your opinion until they care about you. And so your jokes need to only be about you at the beginning. If you tell jokes about airplane food, they’re not going to, they’re not going to laugh. I could go up and do the airplane food
Ryan Fenn: joke and they’ll laugh because they love me already. But if you go up and do the same joke, they won’t laugh. And so until they care about you, they’re not going to care about your jokes. And so until people care about you, they’re not going to care about how good you are at HVAC.
Ryan Fenn: Right. And so so that owner handshake really gives you that opportunity to introduce yourself, tell your story and get them to become raving fans.
Tyler Martin: Yeah, that’s a huge one. OK, last thing, your mantra. Do you want to share your mantra as we wrap up?
Ryan Fenn: Yeah, so it’s part, in part, if it’s going to happen, it’s because I’m going to make it happen. But I was raised, I’m a religious person, I’m a follower of Jesus, and I have some funny beliefs around some stuff, but I truly believe we are children.
Ryan Fenn: We are divine creations, we’re children of God. And I’ve always had that confidence. If I’m a child of God, I don’t need any other accolades. I already am what I need to be. And so I don’t look for external validation. I dropped out of high school.
Ryan Fenn: I don’t need to be told that I’ve accomplished these things. And I already have the highest degree, which is being of divine creation. And just saying that I’m a child of God is what gives me a level of confidence. allows me to go into any room, to talk to anybody, to partner with guys like Tommy Mello,
Ryan Fenn: to get money from billionaires, to build software companies. I’ve never had a problem walking into these rooms. I’ve never felt intimidated. And that’s comes from that, that confidence that
Tyler Martin: comes from that. That’s awesome. I appreciate you sharing that. That’s personal too. So I appreciate that. Your website, chirp, C-H-I-I-R-P.com. So there’s two, two I’s guys, be sure to check it out. Ryan, I can’t thank you enough for your time. You’re awesome. You’re an amazing guy.
Tyler Martin: And I’m glad you’re having so much success. You deserve it, man. I can tell you’re just like a
Ryan Fenn: doer. You’ve got the grit. You’ve got the grit in the show name, man. Yeah. Tyler, thank you so much. I appreciate you having me on. This has been great. Thank you. Thank you. Take care, Ryan.
Tyler Martin: Have a great day. Okay. Here’s my takeaway. Ryan’s story proves that growth doesn’t always come from chasing more leads. I think we’re so conditioned, more leads, more leads, more leads. It comes from doing more with what you already have, getting more out of those leads. Most shops don’t need
Tyler Martin: to spend another dollar on marketing. And I’m telling you, this is true. I was talking to a CMO the other day and he was saying, man, they’ve got a business issue. It’s not a more leads issue. And this comes up a lot. And until they’re capturing the business, home service businesses
Tyler Martin: are capturing the value of every call, every estimate, and every customer interaction. Save your money on more leads. Get your process down. And that’s where tools like Chirp and Ryan’s mindset of make it work will really shine. If you’re listening and wondering whether your numbers are working as hard as they should,
Tyler Martin: let’s talk. Grab a quick intro call at cfointrocall.com. That’s cfointrocall.com. or you can go to my website, cfomadeeasy.com, and we’ll look at ways to improve your cashflow and profitability in your business. I’m Tyler Martin, the host of Profit and Grit. I am so appreciative that you listened to this show.
Tyler Martin: See you next week.
Related Episodes
- The Hidden Revenue in Your Pipeline You’re Not Capturing – Ryan Fenn
- The Revenue Levers Most Owners Ignore – Justin Judd
- The Pay System Top Home Service Companies Use to Double Revenue – Ryan Shank
- Why You’re Losing Jobs After the Call Is Booked – Brigham Dickinson
Tyler Martin works with owners on the numbers behind these stories: home services accountant and fractional CFO for HVAC contractors. For where your business sits right now, read the $3M to $15M scaling breakdown.
