Electrician job management software and what it can do for your business interview with Chris Hunter - Part 1

Transcript

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Hey guys, James Rest here from Marketing Secrets for Electricians and today we've got a guest speaker, Chris Hunter from Service Titan and he's going to share with us his experience from running a business and also how Service Titan might help you run your electrical business that much better. That's the question. Join me and follow along as we search for the answers. My name is James Rest and welcome to Marketing Secrets for Electricians. Yes, I'm with Service Titan.

We've got over a thousand employees, over 4,500 contractors that we serve, so pretty large. And before that, I had my own air conditioning, plumbing, and electrical service business in the big town of Ardmore, Oklahoma, which is a population about 25,000 people. Okay, cool. And so you've been in this kind of area of service businesses type of thing for, I know, quite a few years then. Yeah, man, it's been my life, really and truly.

I started off like many people do as a technician and I went to trade school back whenever I was even in high school and was able to get out and go to work for a really good company, a local utility, and they invested heavily in the technical side of my training. So then I made that jump from technician over into the service world. I had, you know, as Michael Gerber with E-Myth, he calls it the entrepreneurial seizure. So I had it and that's where it all got started. I've read that book like years ago now, but it's like the book I wanted to read before I got to start my own business.

I was like, that's a good base to learn off and it's quite powerful. But again, it's like we start off in the trade and when you're on the trade, running a business is a completely different ball game. So for those that don't know, what is Service Titan? Like what do they do just before we dive into a few questions here? Yeah, no, great, great question.

So Service Titan really, it is the operating system for the trades. It is the complete end-to-end platform. We take everything really to the next level from we start with the incoming call by being able to track all the marketing sources being able to record the calls all the way through the dispatching process, then onto the mobile side where the technicians leverage this in the field. It's a sales tool and then even back to the office and closing the jobs out and doing the follow-up. So really it's start to finish a complete system for running your service business.

Make life easy. Yeah, that's the goal. Streamline things so you can concentrate on serving customers and providing really an awesome experience instead of doing all this manual data entry and paperwork and all that stuff we hate anyway, right? You can focus on making money basically instead of doing the stuff that needs to be done. And there's a novel thought.

How about that? Actually focus on being profitable instead of busy work, right? No one wants to do that. Yeah, like the 80/20 rule. 80% of the work won't bring you in the money.

20% or the other way around, whichever way. I'm with you. Cool. So starting off, why do you do what you do? Great question.

Great question. So first why I'm here at Service Titan and it's pretty simple. I'm here to make a difference. The trades have been so good to me, my family, even my community. And I've just seen what can happen if somebody starts in a trade and invest in themselves and and really tries to perfect the craft and then learns from others on how to grow this business, man, it can change your life and change many lives.

And I was very blessed to be able to do that and grow a company and then be able to have a successful exit. So now I'm here with Service Titan because they've got such a large platform and it's really a chance for me to give back to the trades that gave so much to me at scale. So that's why I do what I do. It's truly to make a difference. And to serve others.

Cool. That's a bigger purpose than just doing the job. So that's kind of good to say. That's why I like to start with why, because if you have a why, you can do anything. You can plug why into any vehicle.

But if you don't have the why, you're kind of like stranded. Like, why am I doing this? I don't know. I don't have a reason. You nailed it.

So that is the first thing that we always teach as well. So when you're starting a company, if you don't know why you're doing it or really the purpose behind it, you're not going to become a talent magnet. You're not going to be attracting people. You're not when things get tough, you're not going to be able to persevere and push through because if you have times like every day, right? I mean, yeah, we all feel it every day.

So I'm with you. Simon, you know, has that start with why that that resonated with me so much because I was doing that before I even knew that was a thing. But then once he defined it, it was like, oh, man, yes, this is it is YouTube video and his book is quite quite good. I agree. So next, what or how how how did you get to this point?

So you've got a bit of experience. Do you want to expand on that a bit, share a bit more? Yeah, absolutely. So anybody that knows me, here's the saying that I have. It's it's go time.

Right. So it's go time. But the powerful thing about go time is it's actual it actually has a meaning. And it is exactly how I got to this point. So if we start with the G and go time, that is starting with goals.

You know, why are you doing this? What do you want to accomplish? Where are we going? So that was the first step was determined. All right, what do I want to do?

So for me and my contracting business, it was I knew I wanted to build something that was scalable, that we could eventually be able to sell. That was that was the goal. The O in go time is observed. And that's where you do a phenomenal job of this. This is learning from others.

Right. It's going out, finding people that have already done what I wanted to do with my goals that I set and figuring out what they did that worked and what didn't work. So that way I could eliminate the mistakes. I could just I could move forward without having to make all those mistakes myself. And then the T in go time is the secret weapon.

It is take massive action. So a lot of contractors, they set a goal. They may go out and learn, but they don't put it to work. So for me, I simply would hear a good idea. I would learn something like from a podcast like this.

And if it was proven to work, I did it. I just went and did it. And just on that, I find, especially in today's world, it's so easy to go. Okay, there's a bit information. There's more.

There's more. There's more. And before you know it, you just got absorbing information, but you're not moving anywhere. You're just in this little loop of like information loop and you got to take action, learn something, do something that, you know, analysis paralysis, right? That's what happens.

They, you gather all this data and you got all these great ideas. But if you just think about it and you don't take action, it never leads to the second part of how I got here in this whole go time formula. So, so after you've got goals, you've learned from others, you've taken massive action. Now the eye is for inspect. This is, this is about, uh, having systems in place to inspect the results of the action that you took.

So it's measuring, right? We, we, we do some, let's measure, you know, how did we do? So the M on go time is to modify the results of the action. So we measured it. So now what worked, what didn't let's do more of what worked.

Let's modify our plan and do less of what didn't work. Right. Uh, and then the E is for engagement. So engage means like what we're doing here. I believe Jim Rome said, you're the average of the five people that you spend the most time with.

So, so think about that for most technicians or most business owners, who are you spending the most time engaging with? Um, for most people, it may be another, another technician, or if you're a business owner, it may be your supply house. So, so if we're going to be the average of the five we're engaging with the most, let's, let's raise our bar a little bit. Let's talk to people like James rest, right? Who are we can, we can lift our lid and start to start to grow.

And it's also staying engaged with your team and your customers. So that formula is honestly how I got here. Um, I just followed that diligently. So on this, did you make that form up or did you take the different pieces to do it? Did you get inspired by, by some people?

Great, great question. So actually I was doing this formula before I even really understood what it was, but I was doing it because I was learning from others already. I, I was blessed. I never worked for another retail service business since I'd worked for that utility, you know, that did air conditioning. So what I did is the first thing I did when I realized that I wanted to go into business is I started seeking out the leaders in the industry.

I just thought, you know what, if I don't know anything, why not go and learn from these other people first? So I did that. And, and then that's whenever the, I'd always use that word go time anyway. So just kind of, uh, you know, but then once we started analyzing, Hey, what did make this thing successful? That's when me and a couple of key mentors kind of put together the meaning of what go time was and made it something that could be easily conveyed.

And that's kind of what I like to do as well is like, you have an idea or a concept or something and you discuss it with people and that like, you know, round, you know, I talk about it, you talk about it and we go back and forth and we come up with something better than either one of us could have done individually and helps you to find a better result or a goal or whatever the thing may be. So definitely use that tactic a lot. Yeah. There's power in a group. Right.

Yeah. And that's where some people, I think if you're not humble enough to accept that, you don't know everything. You know, this is a thing that we all, we all, no one can know it's everything. It's impossible. There's so much information nowadays.

It's insane. That's right. Yeah. Uh, cool. So, um, with this go time, that, that got you like, you made that up through your company, like, which like, and then, then you started with service, um, Titans or you like, where did that fit in?

Just trying to get out visually. Yeah. So, so as I went into business, I started a heating and air conditioning business in a town, like I said, of 25,000 people. So it was a very small area. And, and I knew that, Hey, if I wanted to grow to be a $10 million company, because I knew in basically that $10 million mark is kind of the magic number of when, uh, you're really attractive to maybe be acquired.

So I thought, how in the world am I going to get there in a town that really only has about two and a half million dollars worth of yearly revenue potential? Wasn't such a big area. Yeah. So back to the E myth, back to, uh, the value of systems and processes and what something that's called the people law. And the people law says in a nutshell that every time that you add a person into an intelligent turnkey system, you expand your reach and you can expand your reach almost indefinitely.

So I heard that and I was like, all right, so here's the deal. I created a, basically a career path for people. So as, as I brought people into the company, our goal was, uh, our, our, our vision was to get really good, which is systems and processes was to develop leaders and duplicate in similar areas. So as, as I attracted team members in, and they, and we learned the system, we learned the processes, we all were improving. So then I said, Hey, instead of losing that person where they may go start their own company, because they, you know, good people rise to the top, right?

Um, times the good ones left. That's it. And I saw that problem. So I thought, why don't I offer these people a chance to go to the neighboring city, the neighboring town over, that was a similar area, take all of our processes and have all the benefits of being an owner, except for we'll keep all the things that most technicians that turn, uh, business owners hate, which is all the, the, the marketing, the billing, the insurance, the taxes, the answering the calls. We'll do all that at a central location and then just let these leaders go and engage in the community and grow their team and serve really well.

And we'll reward them and we'll make this a team. So we did that and we were able to expand the five locations. Cool. And then also that's what led us to get into electrical, you know, being in such a small area in HVAC, we had over a 46% market share in our small little area. So we're like, okay, what are we going to do now?

So adding on additional trades was the natural net next fit. So on that, did you find when you went to someone's house, they were asking you for an electrician? Yes. You know, and that, that was the beauty of it. They, they trusted us as their provider, you know, so then they, they would ask us for all kinds of things.

And, and it was kind of painful having to refer them off to other people. But I learned this electrical, it is a much tougher business than I ever dreamed. It really, so I've got much respect for, for electrical companies that are very successful. Um, when we started it, the, we instantly got customers because we already had this market share. So once we hung the shingle out and said, we do electrical, we got the calls, but I realized quickly, it was, it's a lot different than running an HVAC company.

And you may know better than I am this, but a person calls a homeowner calls an electrician, maybe once every seven years, maybe, I don't know. It's not like the HVAC world where they're calling us like twice a year. Yeah. So, so we had to, we had to think about that. Okay.

If we're only going to be engaging with this customer on a, on a longer time span, how do we serve really well when we're, when we're there? So, and that, that was really where service Titan comes in as well. Service Titan, we've been a customer since 2014 in my company, and they are phenomenal at taking checklist whole home inspections, the, the repeatable process that we wanted to do and implementing into the service call and into the sales call. So for example, an electrician could go to a home and all of a sudden on his tablet, it's going to trigger that, Hey, these questions have to be asked to the homeowner. And we have to check all of these items in the home, you know, cause we want to do a complete inspection, not just treat the symptom.

We want to, we want to provide the solution. For all of it, and then be able to offer good, better, best and options to the homeowner. Not, not really even doing sales. We, we just wanted to do a really good job as a technician and offer homeowner the solution to take care of their problems that we as a good technician uncovered. So service time really fit well into that.

So doing that, we were able to have some success in electrical side, but much, much, much respect buddy. Not as easy as most people think. No. And that's like one thing I'm going to be working on in the future is creating that reoccurring revenue more so for electricians, because like, I know, for example, mowing, yeah, you go once a week, so every trade's kind of got its timeline, but there's still, you can still put packages together and different things to kind of entice people to just use your service. When you go to someone's house, there's always something electrical.

They could get done, not necessarily want to or need to. Right now, but they're like, maybe if you have the right deal, the right offer, or just the right person talking to them, it might happen. So you nailed it. And that's where a system comes in. So a systematic approach to making sure that all the items are checked and then a visual display of the findings, you know, with, with either the stop block buttons, you know, like you do when you get your car's oil change, they give you the, Hey, this had a red.

It was, it needed attention or this is yellow. You know, that, that panel is getting a little bit older, but you know, it's still working. There is some hotspots in there that we probably need to take care of or the green. Everything's good to go. And then being able to showcase that to the homeowner, just to make them aware.

That's our duty, right? Like, especially if it's like, I mean, electrical, if something's dangerous, you're obligated in Australia anyway, by law to like, say, this is a thing. And depending upon how dangerous it is, you could get the power turned off. Life is at risk or potentially at risk and they won't do anything. You can call like the power authority and they can come in and turn off their power.

So they have to get it. Yeah. And that's the thing that that's why I love the trades as well. So people think of the trades and being electrician, being a heat and air guy, it's kind of a blue collar thing and it is, but man, what we do is so important because like you just said, we can literally save lives. We can say property.

We can, you know, whenever I look at a home, I don't see the home. I see the family that's in there. You know, there's a mom, there's a dad, there's these kids and they're dependent on my skillset as a, as an electrician or a heat and air guy to help them keep comfortable and save money and be safe. You know, so I love thinking of it like that. And I wish more technicians would grasp that, that what we do is so important.

Yeah, man. I mean, we're, what we're doing is, is needed. It's important and, and we truly can save lives. And if, even if like, okay, imagine, if you imagine like, what would your life be now if you had no power? Like, yeah, my son would be freaking out because he can't play his video game.

Right. So yeah, it'd be pretty simple. Exactly. Life will be different. We'll almost go back to caveman style.

So yeah. And even with this Corona stuff going on, like everyone's now online zoom, like everything's kind of burst online because you can't have that interaction and people still want it. So an electrical service is needed more. So now to keep that power on, so you can keep that community connected in a way we service time and talk to an electrician that was doing phenomenally well through this COVID situation in crisis. And we asked him like, Hey, how, what's going on?

I didn't have a clue. The trade school that I went to, they didn't really help. So over the years, I've managed to find a way that it works effectively scalable. And you can basically put it on automation. Once you've set up, if you're interested in implementing this in your business or discussing marketing in any fashion, come join us in the Facebook group.

You can go there. Go to marketing electrician.com and click on the Facebook button. See you in the group.