Full transcript10 chapters · 9,180 words
00:00From heroin addiction and a stroke to VP of partnerships
Tyler Martin: You’ll discover the handful of revenue levers that actually moves the needle. So instead of working harder, you can focus your energy on the two to three changes that can add seven figures to your top line. Welcome to Profit and Grit with Tyler, where blue-collar owners and insiders spill the
Tyler Martin: 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. Here’s your host, the blue collar CFO, Tyler Martin. A lot of times as business owners, we always feel we need more leads, more leads, more leads to grow.
Tyler Martin: This episode might completely flip that belief. Today, I’m joined by Justin Judd. He’s the VP of partnerships over at Chirp. He’s a guy that’s gone from rock bottom to now sitting in rooms with some of the biggest names in the trades. We talk about the speed to lead,
Tyler Martin: why most shops are leaking revenue in that first 60 seconds, how automation can increase conversion without losing the human touch, and the recruiting mindset shift that can double your company. This one is tactical, but it’s also personal. Let’s get into it with Justin.
Tyler Martin: Hey, Justin, welcome to the Profit and Grit Show. How are you doing, man?
Justin Judd: I’m doing good, man. Thanks a ton for having me.
Tyler Martin: Thanks for being on here. I’m really excited to talk with you. You caught my eye on Facebook. You’re pretty active online. And in Facebook, one day you caught my eye as it related to just overcoming from being rock bottom. And I know you’re part of Chirp now.
Tyler Martin: Chirp is an automation tool, which is an amazing tool. So I had to talk with you. And then when I sent you a message. You were just as cool via messages as you are on your feed. So I want to start out just learning about you. Could you tell me a little bit about what you do? And then if you
Tyler Martin: share that little tidbit about you personally too, I’d love for the audience to learn about you.
Justin Judd: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks a ton for having me. I share my story because I’ve been through a lot. And at the end of the day, my hope is that I can use some of that experience to help other people. So I’ll dive into that here in just a minute.
Justin Judd: I’m the VP of Partnerships at Chirp. I was actually the fourth employee here. So it has been a wild ride. But basically, at Chirp in particular, I’m in charge of business development. So generating leads for the business, creating new partnerships, going out and exploring
Justin Judd: new field service management integration partnerships, marketing agency partnerships, best practice partnerships, different things that are going to move the needle as far as
Tyler Martin: the growth of the business. Yeah. And in context of that, like one of your partnerships recently, you did the revenue optimization lab, and I believe Tommy Mello was actually leading that,
Justin Judd: which is, that’s a pretty exciting partnership relationship. Yeah. Yeah. It has been really cool to get to know Tommy Mello over the last few years. You know, I’ll hop in here a little bit and kind of answer your first question just as far as my past.
Justin Judd: So I am, you know, I’m a recovered heroin addict. I have been at the bottom of the bottom. A lot of people think about heaven or hell as something that happens after this life. I have a little bit of a different mindset on it.
Justin Judd: I believe that we create heaven or hell right here, right now. And it’s because I’ve experienced that. And I’m not saying that there’s not something afterlife. There probably is. I don’t know exactly what that looks like. What I do know from personal experience is that we create heaven or hell right here,
Justin Judd: right now. And I created hell for myself for a long, long time. So my rock bottom was, I actually had a stroke. I had a blood clot in the brain. It paralyzed half of my face for a month. I woke up every day and had to look at myself with a paralyzed face.
Justin Judd: One eye wouldn’t open and one half of my mouth wouldn’t open. And I literally had to look at that every single day I woke up in the mirror. The interesting thing about it was, yeah, it scared the crap out of me. But more importantly, it was a direct reflection of how I was feeling inside.
Justin Judd: I was dying inside. You know, I didn’t have any confidence. I wasn’t happy with who I was as a person. And I knew I was meant for much more, but I couldn’t get myself out of this hole that I had created. And I had two options. It was either give up or change. And luckily, I’m not the type
Justin Judd: of person to give up easy. And so I decided to change. I went to rehab and what I decided to change this time, I went all in. And so, you know, I took full ownership for where I was at in life. It wasn’t anybody else that got me there. It was me that got me there. And I was the only person
Justin Judd: that was going to get myself out of there. I did a ton of therapy and worked on the internal things that were making me want to run away from my emotions because at the end of the day, we don’t typically use substances all day every day
Justin Judd: because we feel good. We’re usually trying to escape something. And then I got a life coach to help me focus on the future instead of dwelling on the past because at some point, you’ve got to get over it. you know, at some point you can’t sit and focus on the past. You’ve got to forgive yourself and
Justin Judd: you’ve got to move forward. And, uh, and I haven’t looked back and now, you know, I’m sitting in rooms with people like Tommy Mello and it’s been a game changer, man. It’s, it’s honestly, it’s kind of, it’s kind of surreal sometimes. Right. And I always tell people, you know, in my opinion,
Justin Judd: And a couple of the most important things in life are number one, discipline, just figuring out how to do stuff, even if you don’t feel like doing it or not doing stuff, even if you do feel like doing it. And then just surrounding yourself with people that have what you want, what you want.
Tyler Martin: Do you have some tips or tricks when you talk about discipline and doing stuff that you don’t really want to do, but knowing you need to get it done and anything that you follow that allows you to get past that? I’m not, you know, I’m not going to do it or procrastination.
Justin Judd: Yeah. You know what? Off the top of my head, I don’t know if I have any tricks. I think it’s something that you just have to make the decision that, hey, whether I feel like doing this or not, I’m going to do it because it’s going to make me feel better.
Justin Judd: You know, for example, there’s days that I don’t want to go to the gym, but how often do you get out of the gym and not feel better? Right. I think it’s pretty rare that someone goes and they actually don’t feel better when they’re
Justin Judd: done, but it’s not always easy to get there.
07:16Why Yelp buying Hatch for $300 million helps Chirp
Tyler Martin: so yeah no that’s good stuff you know what i love you sharing your story and i think it probably resonates with a lot of people in the audience we’re always going through things at times and a lot of times people don’t know you’re going through something they’re just you know they
Tyler Martin: just see the outward picture and it’s it’s good that you were able to overcome it’s great that you were able to overcome that and you share your story because i know other people are probably
Justin Judd: going through things that they need to kind of overcome yeah thank you you know yeah i get people
Tyler Martin: that I get people to reach out pretty, pretty frequently. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So as we get into some things I want to talk about, I do want to just in terms of recent news, you’re obviously with Chirp. Hatch is another similar tool to what you guys do. And they were recently acquired by
Tyler Martin: Yelp. And I guess I would love to know your thoughts around, does that help the market? Is that, do you guys perceive that as a good thing? Do you perceive that as a bad thing? Just kind of want to know your thoughts on it.
Justin Judd: Yeah, that’s a really good question. Right after that happened, I had several people reach out to me. And most of those people that reached out, it was like, man, can you believe that that happened? Is everything OK? Is that a bad thing? And it’s funny because the way my mindset works is it’s amazing.
Justin Judd: You know what I mean? first and foremost, even though Hatch is a competitor, I will never knock somebody who wins. Right? It is not easy to build a software company and to sell it. It’s not easy, especially today, where what used to take 20 developers with software engineering degrees can now be done by a 16-year-old
Justin Judd: vibe coder behind the computer. It is extremely, extremely competitive. So first and foremost, I’ll never bash somebody that goes out and does it. So secondly, it’s actually really good for us for a lot of reasons. Number one, they sold for $300 million and they got a 12x valuation.
Justin Judd: What that means is they were bringing in $25 million in annual reoccurring revenue, and they sold for $300 million. What does that do for CHIRP? It gives us ammunition when we go into conversations with investor and shows us what kind of multiple we can actually ask for.
Justin Judd: The second thing that it’s done, and it’s already started doing this, is it’s bringing attention to us. What do you think Yelp’s competitors are thinking when they go out and buy Hatch for $300 million?
Tyler Martin: Right, I mean.
Justin Judd: They start thinking about, okay, maybe this is something that we should probably look into. And then on top of that, It’s just, it’s, it’s sparked up some interest in other investors. So yeah, I think it’s awesome.
Tyler Martin: Do you think when they get acquired like that, does that, and I, this is just speculation, but I’d be curious your thoughts. Does that help the evolution of their product? Or do you think that kind of puts some barriers because it’s now this bigger company kind of
Tyler Martin: driving the ship?
Justin Judd: This is just me being honest. So everyone listening to this, just understand that I do not have a crystal ball and I say how it is. But I do not think it is going to help them in that aspect. When you get bought by a company that is that big and that’s not really their expertise,
Justin Judd: right? Like with Chirp, all we do every day is figure out how to get better at helping contractors convert more leads. When you get bought by a bigger company that has so many other focuses, I think it’s going to be hard to move as quickly. I think it’s going to be hard to, yeah, yeah. I just, I think it’s
Justin Judd: going to be hard to move as quick. There’s a lot of moving pieces. Support is another thing that I think could end up, you know, becoming an issue. We’ll see. But I think it’s advantageous for us.
Tyler Martin: You almost wonder too, like strategically, like, is there reasoning around rolling it in as a tool within their platform that they charge additional or extra. And it really becomes more of part of the Yelp ecosystem. It just makes me wonder like long-term, I’m speculating, but like, you know,
Tyler Martin: and then it doesn’t really become a separate product. It’s more built into if you’re a Yelp user.
Justin Judd: A hundred percent. Yeah. They’re looking to be able to generate a lead and take it to booking without ever touching a human. Right. So from league to booking without ever touching a human. The other thing is data. Yelp is going to get a ton of data through that partnership.
Justin Judd: And you can oftentimes sell data for more money than you can sell a software service for.
12:08Keeping human touch when the follow-up is automated
Tyler Martin: For sure. Yeah, everybody’s trying to learn everything about us. Yeah. Okay, well, on that note, you brought up the word human. It’s one of the things I wanted to just chat about a little bit. I think we’re getting better and we’re accepting that there’s AI and then there’s humans.
Tyler Martin: But I still get, even from my own client base, like, man, I’m so worried that we’re losing the touch. I’m so worried that it’s great that we have all these tools, but as soon as everything starts to get automated, you kind of lose that touch. And it’s just, you know, your AI is telling,
Tyler Martin: giving price quotes and there’s no human interaction to build value. What’s your thoughts around that? And how do you prevent that from happening?
Justin Judd: Yeah, it’s such a good question. So first and foremost, me personally, I would never tell somebody to just automate their entire business and not have human touch in the process. I just don’t think that that is advantageous for a company. I actually believe that over the next couple of years, with how quickly AI and technology is moving, that human connection and having a relationship with the customer are going to be a massive differentiator.
Justin Judd: So that being said, when you implement automation, you just have to understand that it doesn’t have to come across robotic, right? So Chirp, for example, Chirp is a text message automation software. Well, these text messages that we’re automating, they’re completely customizable. They can say whatever you want to say.
Justin Judd: So I’ll give you one really specific example, and then you can just imagine that this same process can be implemented in any Chirp follow-up campaign. Estimate follow-up. It’s one of the biggest revenue drivers that a company used Chirp for. but a company goes out and they give an estimate and it doesn’t close in the home,
Justin Judd: SHRP will trigger a follow-up with automated text message campaigns. The wording in those text messages is completely customizable. So you have a lot of companies out there that if they go out and they give an estimate and it doesn’t close, the salesperson is still texting that customer, right?
Justin Judd: Or the CSR is still texting that customer. Well, whatever they’re texting them, they can actually put that into an automated drip campaign and the same exact messaging would go out. But they know that it’s going out every single time and it’s running on in the background.
Justin Judd: And then all they’re waiting for is for the person to respond. And now they’re taking over the conversation and they’re closing the deal. Does that make sense?
Tyler Martin: Yeah, totally. Yeah. I mean, it keeps the human touch along with out the human chance for error for getting to do it.
Justin Judd: Exactly. And let’s say you do five touch points through Chirp on every open estimate over a 30-day period, and then you mix in two phone calls from your team. You’re now at seven touch points on every single open estimate over a 30-day period.
Justin Judd: That’s really where you’re going to start to see maximum conversion. and to drive home even harder, I agree with you. You want to make sure you’re still doing those phone calls. Those phone calls are super important. That human connection is super important. The automation is just there running onto the background.
Tyler Martin: Right. No, that’s good stuff. I mean, what do you see? Like, obviously, you know, we’re hearing, I don’t know, what is it called? Cloud bot now. And we’re seeing these multi-agents getting involved where they can actually collaborate together and do things. I mean, where do you think this is all going?
Tyler Martin: And how is it affecting even Chirp’s development? Because I don’t know if you already released it, but I know you’re on the verge if you haven’t where agents are coming out. Is it already we’re in a multi-agent environment or where’s that going in your mind?
16:05Eight years of text data feeding Chirp’s AI agents
Justin Judd: Yeah, here’s the deal. Whether we like it or not, it’s not coming. It’s already here. Yeah. And it’s changing the world. Yeah. It really is. AI is being adopted quicker than the cell phone. Think about that for a minute. It’s crazy. It’s being adopted quicker than the solo.
Justin Judd: It’s being adopted quicker than the internet. So it’s here. It’s not going anywhere, but it’s a huge opportunity. So many people are like, oh, is it going to take away jobs? Well, it’ll take away some jobs, but it’s also going to create new ones.
Justin Judd: What did the cell phone do? It took away some jobs, but it created new ones. The internet, same thing. So I always just tell people, learn to work with it and not against it. chirp ai is in beta and that’s what you’re talking about with the different ai agents
Justin Judd: what’s really cool about that and this goes to show you some of the the cool stuff that you can do with ai we went back eight years and used our ai to look at every conversation that’s been had in chirp wow it’s almost a billion conversations wow it’s almost a billion text messages
Justin Judd: And we had that AI analyze what turned into a booked job, what turned into a sold estimate, what turned into a lost estimate, what turned into a Google review, what turned into a complaint. and that AI is what’s feeding the different AI agents in Chirp AI that are following up
Justin Judd: with your Angie leads, your website forms, your estimates, your missed phone calls. We’re taking eight years of data and it’s now implemented into all of those different campaigns. And so it’s extremely, extremely powerful. We’re calling it the scrolls. We literally have this data on PDFs where the AI is just spitting out, okay, if you’re
Justin Judd: a roofer and you live in this state and you’re running an Angie campaign, here’s exactly what the wording needs to be. You want to use text messaging and you want to mix an email with it. Here’s exactly what the message should say. Here’s the days of the week that it should go out. Here’s
Justin Judd: the hours of the day that it should go out. So it’s really, really cool. Are you saying like,
Tyler Martin: do different geographies, there might be patterns of what is the ideal type of interaction?
Justin Judd: Absolutely.
Tyler Martin: That’s pretty crazy. That’s pretty crazy when you think about like, you know, an HVAC shop in California. It’s different. Should it be having a different approach than maybe someone in Texas?
Justin Judd: Totally. Yeah. There’s different regions that are a little bit more aggressive than other regions. There’s, you know what I mean? There’s regions where text messaging is received a little bit better than other regions. And so we’re trying to just take as much of that data as possible.
Justin Judd: And the reason we’re doing this is, number one, yeah, we want it to obviously be implemented in Chirp AI. But number two, we genuinely care about the customer winning. And I mean that. Like, if we have a customer complaint come in, Ryan, the owner, and I still hear about it, dude, and it keeps us up at night.
Justin Judd: Yeah. And so we’re really trying to build a product that is going to help the contractor. Right.
Tyler Martin: Ryan’s a super cool guy, by the way. This next question, I’m just curious before I get on the next topic. Obviously, Service Titan, you guys integrate with them. You do a great job. How do you continue to differentiate from them? Because they have a product
Tyler Martin: that’s in your playground too. What’s your guys, as much as you can share, obviously publicly, but what’s your differentiator? How do you guys stay differentiating from them and provide value?
Justin Judd: Yeah, that’s a really good question. Uh, my answer to that would be service Titan is a field service management software, right? Chirps a lead conversion software, right? There’s a period after you said that basically, you know, you know what I mean? Like that is their main core focus. That’s what they’re putting a lot
Justin Judd: of their energy into. This is the only thing we’re putting our energy into. And as you know, you know, whatever you focus on increases. And so I feel like that is how we differentiate
Tyler Martin: ourselves is this is the only thing that we’re focused on. Yeah, that’s good stuff. It makes a
Justin Judd: lot of sense. So can I say one other thing? Please question the personal touch. I think this is
20:30Sending owner videos by text to stay memorable
Justin Judd: really cool for your listeners. And this is whether you use Chirp or whether you use a different software, a lot of the strategies that I’m talking about, you can implement in whatever you use. But I mentioned that I believe over the next couple of years that human connection and a
Justin Judd: relationship with your customers will be a massive differentiator. What a lot of people don’t understand is you can actually do video through text message. So imagine every time you complete a job in Service Titan or Housecall Pro, whatever it is, that customer gets a video from the owner
Justin Judd: and it doesn’t have to be high produced. It’s just a cell phone video of you sitting in your office. Hey, really appreciate you letting us come out to your home today. We know there’s a lot of options to choose from. So it means a ton that you chose us.
Justin Judd: Please let us know if you ever need anything. Whatever you want that video to say. Now, anytime a job is complete, that video is getting in front of your customers. We have customers that have 30 or 40 videos that they do in their different campaigns.
Justin Judd: So imagine you lose an estimate. So the estimate gets dismissed and that person still gets a video from the owner. Hey, really appreciate the opportunity we had to come out to your home. We know you didn’t move forward with us, but still just wanted to say thank you.
Justin Judd: Please let us know if you need anything in the future. It’s the long game, dude. What’s gonna happen the next time that customer needs a service? Oh man, you remember that company that sent me a video even when I went with somebody else?
Tyler Martin: well, actually, Justin, what happens is as a real consumer, a homeowner, I’ll, you know, reach out to people. They’ll text me back non-video. And then three months later, maybe I don’t go through with the job or I pick someone that doesn’t do a great job. I’ll go back to my
Tyler Martin: text. I can’t remember who it was that I had a good experience with, or at least I had, I thought I should have went with. And if there was a video in there that gave me the intro, that would have so much more stickiness in my brain to go, oh, this was the company I knew I, or I probably
Tyler Martin: would have went with them anyway with the video. But I don’t think I’ve ever received a video for a home service call yet. So just to kind of quantify how little that is tapped into yet, at least in my market from what I’ve seen, I mean, that’s a huge opportunity.
Justin Judd: It’s massive. And you got anywhere from your $2 million shops to your $300 million shops doing this. Chad Peterman has 60 videos in his campaign. Tommy Mello has about 20. But here’s the cool thing is you just record it once. This is called scaling authenticity. You record the video once
Justin Judd: and now anytime a job is complete, that video is getting in front of the customer. It’s not like
Tyler Martin: you have to sit and record a video every single time. One pet peeve I have, which kind of intertwines with this is, and I wonder if owners are willing to do this because most shops that I go to their websites, they don’t even have pictures of the owners on the website, which
Tyler Martin: blows my mind or about the team or anything. And that lock, usually what I think, if I didn’t know, if they weren’t clients and companies I’ve worked with, I would think they were owned by private equity because they’re so chill about who they are. They just all say, we’re a family-owned
Tyler Martin: company, but then they show you no details. And this is kind of along the same thing. I wonder if owners of shops would be open to doing videos. I would hope they would be because it just gives such a huge competitive advantage. Have you ever got pushback where they’re not comfortable doing
Justin Judd: videos? Yeah. The pushback usually comes down to the owner though. And the owner just isn’t super comfortable being in front of video. And then the other pushback is just like, oh, I don’t have a full marketing team and I don’t know how we’re going to edit it. And sometimes I just don’t
Justin Judd: think it processes that literally you actually want the video to not be perfect because then it’s going to come across more authentic. Yeah. And with Chirp, at least we actually just released iMessaging. It’s a freaking game changer. Oh, wow. Most texting softwares, the text messages go through as green. Yeah. You can now do iMessage through Chirp. So when you
Justin Judd: send the video, it doesn’t have to have a link. It doesn’t get distorted at all. It comes through completely clear. Let’s say you schedule a job. So the event in your field service management software is job scheduled. Well, right when you schedule a job, they get, we call it the owner
Justin Judd: handshake. It’s just a video from the owner saying, thanks for scheduling what to expect. Confidently, your technician is going to give you a five-star review. And then the freaking confetti pops off because you can do iMessage. You can create an entire experience now through
Justin Judd: blue messaging, through like an automation tool. Yeah, that’s awesome. And as I understand it,
Tyler Martin: to have that green messaging, you actually literally have phones. I think it’s in like someone’s data center or something in order to be able to offer that type of service. Is that kind of true? You’ve done your research. Yeah, that’s crazy. For every single account there, it’s got
Tyler Martin: its own cell phone in a data center. That’s crazy. That’s interesting. Okay, I want to, that’s awesome. I want to go to the next thing that comes up a lot is conversion. Like I think a lot of times we’re so trained and we believe more leads, more leads, more leads, more leads, which sometimes
25:52Speed to lead and the one-minute conversion window
Tyler Martin: could be true. But I also think for whatever reason, we gloss over the need to have better conversion. I just want to know your thoughts around that, what you see, if you have any opinion in terms of how we can improve conversion. I’d love to know what you’re thinking.
Justin Judd: Yeah, absolutely. So I love what you said right there. I think sometimes we’re trained to think more leads, more leads, more leads. Everything starts here. Everything starts in between years with mindset. And there needs to be a shift from, I need more leads, I need more leads, I need more
Justin Judd: leads to how can I give myself the best opportunity to convert as many of the leads as I’m getting as possible. So that’s the first shift that needs to happen. And don’t hear me wrong when I say that. I totally get that some companies are slow. And so, yeah, your mind is instantly going to go to,
Justin Judd: I need more leads. But there’s the flip side to that, which is if you can increase lead conversion, you’re instantly improving your bottom line without having to spend more money on marketing. And when you learn how to increase lead conversion, now you can actually funnel more money into marketing, into the channels that you know are working, and you can start to get really, really predictable revenue out of those channels because you know exactly what your conversion rate is.
Tyler Martin: I’m chuckling a little bit because I’m talking to you about conversion. We just talked about the whole video thing. And it’s like, oh, well, like something like that. So, I mean, what are, because obviously, you know, the attention to detail on your leads
Tyler Martin: is part of the reason you get better conversion. So, obviously, the video is one thing. What are some things that you think we can do as shop owners in terms of improving that conversion? What are things that we should be paying attention to?
Justin Judd: Yeah. So, and I’m sure you’ve heard this before, but speed to lead is more crucial than ever these days because we don’t have attention spans as human beings anymore with TikTok and Facebook and everything else. We also get, we just get distracted really easy. And so speed is just of
Justin Judd: the utmost, most importance. And when I say speed to lead to everybody listening that might not be familiar with that. Let me walk you through a super simple example. Most of you have contact forms on your website. If somebody goes to that contact form and they fill it out, you get that
Justin Judd: lead information in an email. And then you rely on somebody from your team to go into that email, look at the lead information, and pick up the phone and call that lead. If you’re doing a really good job at that, and I mean really good, you’re probably doing it in about 30 minutes.
Justin Judd: And even that’s pretty rare. What you can do with an automation tool is called speed to lead. So right when that contact form is submitted, we can actually automate a text message to go out within 30 seconds, which puts you within the one minute window for maximum conversion.
Justin Judd: Because if you contact the lead within one minute, chances of converting increased by 391%. set. So on top of that, one takeaway from this podcast is go into your business and look at every single lead source that you have coming into your business. So contact forms on your website,
Justin Judd: Facebook ads, Angie, Thumbtack, Yelp, Networks, Modernize, Google LSA, HomeBuddy, Modernize. I probably missed a couple, but those are just, we integrate with all of those. And you can find another tool like Chirp that probably integrates with those as well. You can set up speed to lead
Justin Judd: on every single one of those lead sources. And that alone will be massive to help you increase lead conversion. And then just to connect the dots in my mind, that’s kind of where the agents that
Tyler Martin: you guys are rolling out plays into too, right? Because doesn’t each agent have its own, I’m going to call it personality in terms of how they interact with Angie leads and probably eight years of data too. Is that the second part of that? That’s it. Okay. Interesting. Wow. So,
Justin Judd: so that agent will know what to say, when to say it, what day of the week to say it. It can book jobs. It can also send out booking links if that’s the best way to do it. So yeah.
Tyler Martin: Where do you think, so, okay, we got down with Chirp’s help. We’ve got down that speed to lead. We’ve got down a follow-up process. Is there anywhere else where you’re seeing business shops kind of drop the ball? Is it getting estimates back? Is it dispatching timely?
Tyler Martin: Are you seeing anything else in terms of sometimes your conversations of where we continue to need to improve so that conversion happens?
Justin Judd: Yeah, that’s a really good question. So one of the things that we do see is that estimates just aren’t being sent after we’ve gone out to the home. Yeah. And that is just super important because it’s kind of like a speed delete thing.
Justin Judd: You want to hit people while it’s top of mind. Yeah. That’s one thing that we’re seeing. From a trip end, I can tell you something that we see. If you have an audit, and this is even if you use a Service Titans tool or another tool,
Justin Judd: you have the automations in place, right? running in the background. Well, when the person responds, if you don’t respond to that text message right away or that email right away, chances of converting decrease quickly. You don’t want to have a text message just sitting in your inbox for 20 minutes. You want to make sure that we’ve
Justin Judd: collected a lot of data. The quicker that you’re taking over the conversation, once the text messages come in or once the emails come in, the higher the conversion. Yeah, I mean, that’s
Tyler Martin: a huge point. You guys help with the making sure it gets to the prospect quickly, but then when they respond, we have to make sure we’re able to respond quickly too, to keep that relationship going. Otherwise they’re going to call someone else. Exactly. Yeah. That’s a great point.
Tyler Martin: That’s really good stuff. Do you see in terms of conversion, do you get this close to it? I mean,
32:18Gettle’s 9% estimate lift worth $752,000 in two months
Tyler Martin: when a prospect comes to you or a client of yours comes to you and they start to work with you, Do you have any data where you guys go, oh my gosh, you went from this to that after you just added on this element of our product?
Tyler Martin: What does that look like typically?
Justin Judd: Yeah. So it kind of just depends on the strategy. You’ve got your speed to lead strategies. So Angie data, Google LSD data, and then you’ve got like missed call data, and then you’ve got open estimates. But we just did a case study with Gettle specific to open estimate follow-up.
Justin Judd: The interesting thing about Gettle is they’re pretty well known for a strong follow-up process on open estimates, but they still didn’t have an automation tool in place. So they implemented Chirp. They saw a 9% increase in conversion on open estimates. 9% might not seem like a lot.
Justin Judd: For one location for Gettle, it resulted in $752,000 in added revenue. over a two-month period. And so on open estimates, on average, we’ll increase conversion by about 10%. Wow. So an easy trick is go into your field service management software and look at how much money
Justin Judd: you have sitting in open estimates, times that by 10%. And that one thing will usually more than pay for your automation tool. Yeah. That could be going straight to your wallet.
Tyler Martin: Yeah. Okay, cool. This is good stuff. I want to shift gears. I want to talk a little bit about you did the revenue optimization lab. Tommy Mello in that, as I understand it, he talked about recruiting as a revenue lever.
33:55Tommy Mello on recruiting the waitress and using scorecards
Tyler Martin: And I’d love to know, I’d love to just talk about that a little bit. You know, he talked about like how to recruit A players and using like scoreboards to basically have like million dollar tax. Can we talk about that a little bit?
Tyler Martin: Like, what did he say? I’m sure you had some input on this. What were your thoughts around that conversation and what did you take from it?
Justin Judd: Yeah, it was amazing. I’ve worked on a lot of stuff at my time at Sherp, and I’ve never been more excited about something than the revenue optimization lab, just because I feel like it’s a really cool way to be able to give back to this industry.
Justin Judd: And you and I were just talking about it, and we both love this industry. But a couple of the interesting things I think he said was, number one, you’re probably not going to find your next best hire sitting in a… where is it that you go to like, uh, in the unemployment line?
Tyler Martin: Oh, you’re going to go there. I missed that part, but that does make sense.
Justin Judd: Yeah. You’re probably not going to find your next, next best hire sitting in the unemployment line. Right. What does he mean by that? You know, he’s not being rude. He’s just saying like your next a player probably has a job already. Like they’re probably already doing something good somewhere else.
Justin Judd: And so his point of that was, and this is kind of the next part, recruit everywhere, recruit everywhere. I was at a restaurant with Tommy and we had a really good waitress and he freaking recruited her to come in and get an interview at A1. Tommy, I mean,
Justin Judd: the guy’s worth a lot of money now and he’s still recruiting a waitress that was serving us at dinner. Another interesting thing I thought he said is he would rather take a brand new technician that’s never done it before and train him according to the A1 way than take a technician
Justin Judd: that’s been doing it for years and years that may not be open to doing things differently.
Tyler Martin: Right. And I do really appreciate that. I would also argue, my only thing that I’d argue on that is when you’re a little bit larger and you have the resources, I think you can train someone, you can develop them. That’s totally true. Yeah. That’s the only challenge with that,
Tyler Martin: because if you’re a smaller business, you know, because I even look at myself, it’s a little harder to do that. I don’t have the resources. So there’s trade-offs, but that is good feedback. You know, true story, gentleman’s going to come on my podcast.
Tyler Martin: So I won’t say his name yet in case he doesn’t want me to share this, but I heard this story from him. He runs an HVAC shop in Texas and there were these two brothers that were really high performers. And he was going to one,
Tyler Martin: I think it was like a Chili’s or something. He was going for lunch and he sees his competitors, these two brothers, he didn’t know it was the brothers at the time, but his competitor’s truck parked right up at the front. And you know, one of the going things is
Tyler Martin: park your beautifully wrapped vehicle right at the front of wherever you go so everybody can see it. And so they basically did that. So he goes in and he sees them. He doesn’t know them. He walks up to them. He gives them his card and just say, Hey, you know, I know of you guys, you guys are
Tyler Martin: great. I just introduced himself and they have a short chat. They said, no, we’re happy. We don’t ever want to go anywhere. And they’re apparently really high performing tax, like really high, particularly the one brother, other brother’s just okay. So the okay brother about a few months
Tyler Martin: later reaches out to this guy and sure enough, they end up hiring him. And it takes about a year and the brother who’s making like incredible money, I think it was like $400,000 a year, one day decides he’s had enough where he’s working, he’s being taken advantage of,
Tyler Martin: and he leaves and he joins this guy’s company that recruited now both brothers. And it’s like some crazy amount of money, these two guys, in terms of their service and the number of clients they see and the work they do. It’s just crazy.
Tyler Martin: I mean, it’s now a $20 million plus company. And they went from like 10 to 20 in a very short amount of time. And it was all because he took the time, to your point of Tommy Bell’s story, took the time to go out of his way to introduce himself, drop his card, be cool about it.
Tyler Martin: I mean, we really always do have to be recruiting as business owners. Like it’s not optional. We
Justin Judd: really should. And so it’s kind of like a Tommy Miller. That’s a really cool story. Yeah. That’s
Tyler Martin: awesome. Yeah. Okay. That’s good. I love anything else. Any other takeaways in terms of levers or
Justin Judd: things from the lab that you kind of walked away with? So he gave away a free 47 page PDF called something like how to build your next million dollar tech. Wow. And he gave that away to anyone who attended. So if you’re interested in that, I’m happy to give that to you. My email is justin
Justin Judd: at chirp.com. But when every single guest we invite onto the revenue optimization lab, one of the requirements is they have to be willing to give something away for free about what they’ve come on and talked about. So that was a really cool PDF. I think another interesting thing that
Justin Judd: he talked about was just how important scorecards are for several reasons. Number one, it lets the employee know how they’re doing. It also gives them a clear path to moving up in the company and growth in the company. What it does for the company is it allows you to hold your employees
Justin Judd: accountable without making it emotional. I’m sure we’ve all worked with people in the company that we really like, right? Maybe we were friends with them. Maybe they are in our neighborhood or whatever. But at the end of the day, we kind of knew they weren’t performing. Well, it’s really
Justin Judd: hard to just go and have a conversation with those people if you don’t have the data and the score cards. And so a scorecard allows you to really, you can just say, hey, you’re either hitting your numbers or you’re not hitting your numbers. And if you’re not hitting your numbers, this isn’t
Justin Judd: something personal, this is just business and we have to make sure that we grow as a business.
Tyler Martin: Right. Did he get into, as it relates to scorecards, his feeling in terms of, is this like you get to see everybody’s scorecard? Is it private just to that individual? Like, where does he stand in terms of like seeing ranking and stuff?
Justin Judd: You got some good questions. You’ve done this before. He does his by department.
Tyler Martin: Oh, so they can see everybody?
Justin Judd: Yeah. If you’re in a department, you can see everybody’s. Okay. But other departments don’t need to see other departments. Makes sense. You know what I mean? I felt that same way. I was like, yeah, that makes sense. So yeah, he separates it out by department.
Justin Judd: It’s funny because you’ll get some employees that are very adverse to having, you know, being on a, not the scorecard part of their own performance, but the being compared to others. Like they, they’re very pushed back on that. Yeah.
Tyler Martin: I even back in the day I had sales team. actually people would leave when I first started in my culture. And they were just like, I don’t want to have anything to do with this. I’m not going to deal with that. And I had two people
Tyler Martin: leave, but you think, can I ask you a question? Yeah. Yeah. Were those underperformers? They were,
Justin Judd: they were on the lower end. Yeah. Yeah. I would love my scorecard up in front of everyone. That’s the thing. Cause you were a high performer, right? Cause I know I’m going to hit my numbers.
Tyler Martin: So yeah. Yeah. It’s interesting though. You asked that question because you’re spot on, like usually once in a great while, maybe you have someone, but at nine out of 10 times, it’s going to be people that are probably on the lower end of the ladder of performance.
Tyler Martin: Yeah. Yeah. It’s funny. Anyway. Hey, last thing I wanted to talk with you about was you’ve used examples of Nancy and Judith as it relates to CSRs. And I kind of want to just talk with you
41:27Freeing Nancy and Judith from chasing missed calls
Tyler Martin: about that story as it relates, just you give kind of give an example. Can we talk about that a little bit? Who is Nancy and Judith?
Justin Judd: Yeah. So this was actually Ryan Fenn. He talked about this. Okay. It was me and Ryan on a podcast with Chad Peterman. Okay. And basically the question was, you know, Chad was like, man, I think a lot of people look at these tools, like your $2 million companies, 3 million, 4 million.
Justin Judd: And they’re just like, we’re not ready for this. This is your big 20 million, 50 million, $100 million a year companies. And the answer is actually quite the opposite. it. Nancy and Judith are your person sitting in, you know, a $2 million or $3 million a year company.
Justin Judd: They’re the office manager. They’re the CSR. They’re the dispatcher. And they’ve just got a hundred different hats to wear, right? And because of that, it’s going to make it very difficult for them to do all of the tasks that they need to do efficiently. And so you could
Justin Judd: still implement a tool like Chirp at that size. And now Nancy and Judith aren’t having to follow up on missed calls. They’re not having to follow up on open estimates. They’re not having to, you know, try to reach out to leads right when they come into the business. That stuff can be
Justin Judd: automated for them so that Nancy and Judith can focus on their superpowers and continue to, you know, grow the company. Yeah. And I think that’s one challenge I’m seeing
Tyler Martin: within my own client base is we’ve got these tools that could make things more efficient. I still think we need to, as owners, how do we continue to evolve Nancy and Judith into making sure they’re using their superpowers? And how do we as leaders keep working on that?
Tyler Martin: that because, you know, frankly, we’re going as a society, we’re going through a transformation. Like we’re having tools that can do things really fast, but nobody really necessarily trained us like, okay, how do we implement them into our system? So we’re getting the most out of Judith and Nancy, but also utilizing the power of the
Tyler Martin: tools. And I think that in itself is like a whole huge topic of how do you do that?
Justin Judd: That is a really good topic. Yeah. That’s interesting. Maybe that’s revenue. I don’t have all the answers for that one. I’m with you. That’s lab number two.
Tyler Martin: we’ll need Tommy’s help. Heck yeah. Okay, man, this is good stuff. So I think I covered everything. Any takeaway that you want to wrap up with as far as words of wisdom or anything that comes to mind for you before we close out? You know, I think the number one takeaway for me is we’ve
44:10Mindset first and where the hidden money is hiding
Justin Judd: talked a lot about, you know, automation tools or chirp or lead conversion or recruiting. but I mean this when I say everything starts here. Everything starts with mindset. In business and in life, a lot of times we look outside of ourselves to solve problems or challenges
Justin Judd: when in reality, if we went to work on ourselves, a lot of those things would resolve themselves. So if you’re struggling in a different area, I would just suggest to look at how you’re looking at that area of struggle, how you’re perceiving that area of struggle, and maybe seeing if you can reframe that a little bit.
Justin Judd: Because the minute you reframe it, then your brain starts looking for ways to make that new programming happen. So hopefully that made sense to everybody.
Tyler Martin: It makes a lot of sense. I mean, I think your mindset has such an impact on what you can or can’t accomplish, depending on what you believe you can or can’t do.
Justin Judd: Yeah, exactly.
Tyler Martin: Okay. Hey, so the Revenue Optimization Lab, the link for that, guys, is at chirppartners.com. Now, chirp has two I’s in it. chirppartners.com. You’re going to put a forward slash, and then it’s revenue-lab. Now, I’ll, of course, put this in the show notes. but if you want to check that out,
Tyler Martin: Justin’s also very active on Facebook and then LinkedIn. I’ll put his links in there. Do you want to share? Because I’m sure there’s some people out there that maybe missed that 48 page guide that was given out on the scorecards and stuff. Do you want to share your email one more time?
Justin Judd: Yeah, it’s justinatchirp.com and then I will also send it to you, Tyler, just in case you have anyone that asks for it. It’s free to give away. So I’ll send that to you as well. But yeah, email is justin at chirp.com.
Tyler Martin: Okay, Justin, you’re awesome. Your energy comes across in our Facebook messaging that we did all the way to in person. You’re an awesome guy. I know also one last thing before we wrap up. You also are doing a lot of speaking engagements now.
Tyler Martin: I know Epic, unfortunately, will have already passed by the time this publishes. But any other speaking engagements you have on your roadmap yet?
Justin Judd: Yeah, so we’ve got Lennox Live coming up. My calendar’s nuts, to be honest with you. So I don’t know the exact dates, but I think it’s coming up the end of February, kind of beginning of March. We’ve got a speaking engagement at Rhino X.
Justin Judd: It’s happening not next week, but the week after. And then I’m sure we have some other ones in the fall. I kind of just, I just show up to be honest with you.
Tyler Martin: I’m sure it’s great. I can’t wait to see you. I’m going to be at Epic too. Once again, it’ll already be passed by the time this published. But I’m excited to hear your workshop that you’re doing and your presentation.
Justin Judd: Awesome, man. Thanks a ton for having me. This has been a really cool conversation.
Tyler Martin: You too, man. You’re amazing. Take care.
Justin Judd: All right. Thanks.
Tyler Martin: So my biggest takeaway after talking with Justin is this. Revenue doesn’t start with marketing. It starts with mindset and execution. Most owners, we all do this. We say we need more leads. We need more leads. but what we uncovered in our conversation today is that there’s often a hidden bank account
Tyler Martin: sitting inside open estimates missed calls and slow follow-up now guys we hear this all the time but i gotta tell you from my own client base i see this in reality with many many shops so try not to get used to you just always hear it but you don’t really think about it those open estimates
Tyler Martin: missed calls and slow follow-up are just literally throwing money away. And also, it’s just sometimes operational. Just your process. I see a lot of cancellations because when we’re dispatching and scheduling jobs, we’re not doing it in an efficient manner. We’re not leaving room when we’re getting cancellations and the revenue is just going out the door.
Tyler Martin: As Justin mentioned in the show, he said 9% better conversion turned into $700,000 in two months. I really believe some level of that gain exists in almost every company and identifying it and improving process can make a huge difference. So here’s the part I care about as a CFO.
Tyler Martin: If you don’t know your conversion rates, your speed delete, and the dollar value sitting in open estimates, you’re guessing. You can’t forecast what you don’t measure. It’s a very common saying. You can’t forecast what you don’t measure. If you want clarity around your margins,
Tyler Martin: your cashflow, or how to turn operational improvements into real profit, you can book a no pressure intro call at cfointrocall.com. That’s cfointrocall.com. As always, thank you so much for listening. I will catch you on the next episode.
Related Episodes
- The Hidden Revenue in Your Pipeline You’re Not Capturing – Ryan Fenn
- The $1M Revenue Leak: How Chiirp Fixed Home Service Follow-Up – Ryan Fenn
- How to Become the Next GOAT in Home Services – Paul Kelly
- The Rules You’re Living By Are Costing You Millions – Laura Kelly
Tyler Martin works with owners on the numbers behind these stories: home services accounting help from a fractional CFO for home service contractors.
