Electrician job management software and what it can do for your business interview with Chris Hunter - Part 2

Transcript

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Hey guys, it's James just here from Marketing Secrets for Electricians and this is the second episode with Chris Hunter. If you haven't watched the first, I'd suggest go back and watching that. It might make more sense for you. So what I want to do, if you don't know what service Titan is, it's a software system that can help run your business or help you to run your business more effectively. So what I like to do is I'm going to get another kind of, I'm going to get an electrician or someone who uses service Titan and we're going to go on a little test drive essentially.

So I'm going to put this in the members area of Marketing Secrets for Electricians and you can see behind the scenes of what we're talking about in this episode to help you get a better idea if this software is a good fit for your business. So here's what I hear a lot. That's the question. We had service Titan 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?

He's like, well, think about it. He said, everyone's at home now. So therefore they're overloading their electrical stuff. Most of them are not going to eat as much out. So they're buying freezers and things like that, you know, to pack food in and plugging it in.

And, and if the circuit can't handle it, now you got a problem. So they, they went on the offense, actually marketing this type of stuff. And they've been really busy and didn't, didn't miss any through this whole pandemic that we went through. And that's what, you know, by doing these podcasts and stuff, I love to get bits and pieces from like, the conversations we have with people, not just from me, because I'm one person. That's why these are important.

Yeah. Because you get a third party, a different perspective, different trade, different, still related, but different. And then that expands our vision. And your, and your reach is dang near global, man. So think about that.

We, we get to hear perspectives from countries, which is awesome. It's kind of cool. I like, yeah. So what is your goal? Like, what gets you fired up?

What's your kind of, what's your vision? Yeah. So right now, at service Titan specifically, like I said, it's all about making a difference. And, and if I can keep helping two things, my goal at service time, one is to help contractors, of course. So the other part is service times got a thousand people that are more than a thousand people now.

And these are some of the smartest people I've ever been around. Oh my gosh. You know, I'm, I didn't go to, I didn't finish college, you know, or anything like that. And I'm working with people that, that have like, I don't know. I didn't even know that made these kinds of degrees.

Right. I mean, so it's like, wow. But here's the thing they need to, you take someone that's that smart. They've got all this engineering power and this fire power to help contractors. They need the voice of the contractor in there to make sure that what they're producing is exactly what the contractors want.

And my purpose is really twofold help contractors. And then help the internal team really relate to what our customers need and what they want. And it's kind of, I pinched myself honestly, because I can make a recommendation and then see such a powerful force and team go to work on it and create something that's going to affect thousands of technicians and customers. It's pretty crazy. I'm really loving it.

For example, when, when COVID hit, so we all, we all felt the pain of this change in this transition. Well, can you imagine them? They, they had a thousand people that all of a sudden had to go work from home, you know, bam, there it is. So not only did they disperse the workforce all to work from home, they knew contractors needed help this year. And now we've got all these companies that are working from home.

And then we've got contract customers that they don't want the, the, the experience changed. And let me give you a quick example. So I had some people come to my house to do some work. They were putting in some home automation stuff whenever I bought my new home and the whole service call was awesome. They really did a great job.

They protected, you know, they wore the mask, felt comfortable, and it got all the way down to the end of the call and they handed me their phone. And this is right after the whole COVID thing broke. So everybody was really paranoid, right? And now I was supposed to sign, sign for it and do my whole, you know, thing on their phone. And all I could think of was, Oh my gosh, let me go like dip my hand in gasoline and hope there's no virus on it.

Right. But what it did is it ruined the whole service experience for me. That one little thing. So instead of me going out and posting a great review and being a raving fan, all of a sudden I was like, Oh my gosh, I hope I'm not going to infect my family because I just touched something, you know, that may have virus on it, whatever. So service time recognize that.

And they put their team to work to create a whole touchless experience. So that homeowners never had to go through that kind of curiosity. How do you, how do you sign without touching? Yeah, that's great. So through the power of the, of the software and the program, they can actually send homeowners the recommendations, the estimate, or they can accept right from their own phone and they can view it.

They can see what they want. They can e-sign. So it's never even, uh, there's no contact that's ever made right there. So that was, that was one way service time really adapted. And went to work fast to help contractors.

And on that though, as well, you have kind of like hit the, like, um, like the customer experience. If you're not getting feedback from your customer, the customers talk. So you're talking now as it was like, it was really good, but this one thing, and you're going to talk about that one thing. And if you're not communicating with it, so when you finish the job, the job's not over, you know, there's still a relationship to be had. And if you get that feedback, like you've gotten this feedback and you've made a change.

The feedback, you can't make the change. You're going to do that. I guarantee you more than one customer, like every customer until this crisis is over, it's going to be like, ah, that you get, you nailed it. Cause guess what? After that call was done that I had with that company, nobody asked how my service experience was.

They didn't even make it easy for me to give them feedback or a review. Um, and let's face it, like right now, if you don't, if you're not gathering reviews, you know, specifically on Google, or, you know, wherever, um, you're, you're doing yourself a disservice because people are going to trust what they're reading from their peers. And I need to be leveraging that and service time makes it very easy to do that as well. Cool. That's like in, in the online marketing world, if you're, it's like, if you're like wanting a product, you search around like everywhere, there's reviews, like there's all these different review sites and then even review sites that hold you hostage.

So you have to sign up and pay the money to answer their abuse. But the point, yeah, everyone, like most people will review a customer. I know I will. I'm going to like, ah, this company, let's see what, you know, have they got shitty reviews and I don't want to use them then. Like, I'm not going to go through the risk.

Yeah. And consumers now, I think the whole game has changed. I think COVID has, has really pushed, um, forward a revolution of change in the way that they expect to be treated. Uh, and they expect to do business. They, they want everything on demand.

They want it to be very convenient for them where they can communicate via text, uh, FaceTime, whatever it is. Cause think about crud, if I want groceries now, man, I can go to my, my phone, order it, probably even track it to the house and see when it's delivered. That's what we can deliver with service time as well. So if you can track your $10 pizza coming to your house, owners deserve to be able to know when the electrician is coming. And that's the big issue.

Yeah. Like just electricians showing up or any trade showing up, there's a whole stigma of like, are they going to show that? That's it. So, so with service time, we make it very easy. We send appointment reminders.

We even have it where the homeowner can confirm that, Hey, yeah, we're good to go. I'm going to be here when they dispatch a bio gets sent. So not only do they see, um, you're a skilled electrician coming out, but you also, uh, coach little league football and, and interacting your community. And Hey, this is a good, good guy or good relationship before you get there. That's awesome.

That's it. And then you can track it. If you have this enabled, um, to see the vehicle come into the house. So that way homeowners aren't having to wait around all day, wondering when they're going to be there. They can make sure they can watch it and see it in real time.

It's pretty awesome. They'd be like, Oh, you're around the block. Okay. Yeah. And it's also an accountability thing for, for the technicians.

Right. So when you, when you dispatch and know that they can see your route coming to the, to the house, you're less likely to, you know, stop off at a convenience store or at a somewhere along the way and waste time on company dollar, you know, the job and do what you need to do. And then Ken, like, I know if you have a team, you can see where your team is as well, I guess. A hundred percent. So right on the dispatch board, you can see a map of where all the technicians are.

Uh, there's even a map of where you do the most business in. So for marketing purposes, you can really zero in like we're killing it in this neighborhood. So maybe we need to amp our marketing up even more, you know, in this area right there. So a lot of power tools in there. Sweet.

All right. So what do you have a, like a bad moment? Let's, let's look at the negative than positive. So is there a bad story, worst moment, uh, when running your business? Oh man.

Golly, I think I could write a book on them. Right. I think I've written books like on like bad moments, like it is a thing. I mean, I, I got to the point where nothing even surprised me anymore. You know, I mean, it's just like, uh, okay, what's next?

But, uh, so I mean, here's a technician example. I got a call one time and this was early on in business where, you know, if you make a mistake on a piece of equipment and it's a couple thousand bucks, Oh my gosh, that is a huge hit. You know, early on in the business world, you don't, you don't, people even don't even understand, you know, if you, if you make, if you damage a $2,000 piece of equipment or a thousand dollar electrical panel falls out the back of your truck, well, do you got to make that up with profit dollars? So if, if, if I take a thousand dollar hit on a mistake, I've got to generate typically about $10,000 in sales to make enough profit, like at a 10% net to be able to recoup from that. But I remember one time a technician called me and he's like, uh, Oh, Chris, you're never going to believe what just happened.

I'm like, well, I'm probably not going to be surprised. Go ahead and give it to me. He's like, well, we were cutting some plywood and we cut through the air conditioning unit. And I was like, wait a minute, stop. How do you cut through an air conditioning unit when you're cutting plywood?

And he's like, well, we were using it as the saw horse. I'm like, Oh my God. Yeah. Classic case here. I get it.

But, but on a bigger scale, I mean, all of us have probably faced some significant challenges in our businesses. And, um, I remember one time my office manager decided she was going to leave and whenever I got in there and saw behind the scenes, what was going on and what I didn't know as the owner, uh, were happening, we had credit cards for months. This was prior to service time. We had credit cards for months that had not been ran, hadn't been charged on all these reoccurring memberships. And, Oh my goodness.

We were just so good. Yeah. And it was a nightmare. So that was why I love service time. They make the, the reoccurring payment thing.

So simple, it's, it's, it's automated. And also the accountability trail that service time leaves from the start to finish, you know, who does every aspect of everything in the company. So it really eliminates a lot of those pain points. And if you do have a bad story, like I did, you can go back and easily track it and figure out who should be held accountable for it accountable. And then also fix it.

Like, so put something in place so you don't like, okay, let's have a rule that you don't do that type of thing again. Exactly. And, and that really landed on me as the owner. I should have been more, um, I should have made sure that there was a systematic way, a checklist, uh, or something to keep things visible about what people were actually doing. And I didn't, I just trusted that they did.

And then when they left, Oh man, I didn't know how to do these systems. So having things documented, who does what, how do they do it? When do they do it? And have an ongoing checklist of making sure they are doing that is, is priceless, I think. Yeah, I agree.

And like, there's a book like extreme ownership. Have you heard of that? I have, I have not read it yet though, but I've heard many people say good things about it. Yeah, it's quite good. I recommend it.

But it's like, it's about you as the owner or he does any business or person, but, um, you as the owner, you take ownership, it's your business, everything essentially falls on you. Like even if the technician done a dumb thing, it's on you because you didn't have the systems in place. You didn't have whatever it was, you know, you made the choice to hire the person, you train the person, you gave him the tools, you set the job up. Like it's all on you, even though he made the mistake and ideally they should take responsibility too. Like everyone takes ownership of the thing and then you can resolve it and move forward.

And yeah, if you keep doing the same thing, you know, as I say, we keep doing the same thing over and over again. It's an insanity. Yeah. The definition, if you keep doing the same thing, expecting a different outcome, that's the definition of insanity. Yep.

That's the one. So, um, now a successful story. So what's it like a good story, aha moment that you had through the business or something? Yeah. So, so personally, uh, one of the most, uh, I felt was one of the most successful because I cared so deeply for my team, but we were named the best contractor to work for.

In the Southern United States. Um, so man, that was a huge, huge honor, but it was even more so an honor because the way you get nominated is by your, your team, nominate your company. It's not a meme. Yeah. And once we, once we were named that you talk about a powerful recruiting tool, you know, how come work for the best company to work for in the, in the air conditioning industry in the Southern United States.

You know what I mean? So that was a huge win for us. And it was a really win because we did care so much for our team and we invested so much into, into them. Like I said, back in the beginning, the, the vision was to, to get really good, develop leaders and duplicate. So that developing the leaders, uh, meant a lot to us and me personally.

So that was, that was a big success for, for us. Cool. So, and that comes back to charging accordingly. So you have time to actually train your guys and you're not stressed out because you haven't got enough money to train the guys. And if you're not charging enough, like all you need, like there's a lot of people like, I mean, Facebook groups with electricians and all joking about prices and all this stuff, but the cheapest guy doesn't win.

It like may win the job, but not the war. Yeah. Like you win that job, but you lose out because you can't, you can't expand only like in my opinion, if you're a solid electrician, you can cut yourself cheap. But you then have less money for you. You have less time for you.

And then if you want to expand, you can't. I recommend people budgeting for development. And here's the, here's the percentage that I recommend. So, and this is all built into your cost of business that, that has to be built into your pricing, right? But whatever you're spending on marketing, let's say I'm spending 10%.

Well, I recommend whatever you spend on marketing. Budget half of that as well for training. So if I'm spending 10 on marketing budget, 5% for investing into my team. And here's the reason why. So if you, if your marketing goes up, you better make sure your team is prepared to deliver on what you're trying to promote and get right.

So if you reduce the marketing costs, well, okay, you can reduce your training budget a little bit as well, but that's kind of a good rule of thumb that I used and it helps you be intentional about developing your team and making sure it's built into your pricing exactly. Like you said, like that's something I, when I was running my business, I didn't, I had a team, but I never, I don't know. I didn't have a budget for it. Like I was just like, okay, we'll learn that thing now. Yeah.

Yeah. Definitely. And, and for, you know, for the electrician or the technician, it's an important aspect for them to feel like they're growing in your company because otherwise they're going to go somewhere. Even if you pay them well, if they don't feel growth and contribution to the, you know, the two biggest motivation factors, you can listen to like Tony Robbins and some other people like they're the, they're the top two and in, in business you got to hit them. So how do you hit them?

And, and this, you definitely as being the boss and even yourself, like I, I do this to grow. I, you know, reach out to people. I do other things because I want to grow personally because I enjoy these things. And yeah, I went in business though. It's harder.

If you like, you know, phones ringing, customers are calling all these things are happening. You're just like, ah, right. That's a system in place that helps you to control those aspects of business, which yeah. So you control it instead of controlling you. I think that's a valuable asset to have on your side.

Yeah. A hundred percent, man. And so we, we had a, a once a month, I would have bring all the team from all the locations in, and this was really just a time that we, we learned. I was able to shower the praise and really celebrate the wins. And I remember some time someone asked me, they said, how in the world, when you're busy, how can you carve out time to do that?

And I said, how can I not? These are the two most important hours of my month, because when the team feels appreciated, when they see what they're doing is working, the, the impact we're having with our customers, they're going to go out all the other hours and really give it their best. So how could I not invest that time to build into my team? So exactly back to your point, they want to feel appreciated. They want to feel like they're making a difference.

And it's our job as leaders to make sure that's happening. Exactly. And it comes back to marketing as well, because if your team feel good, they're going to have that influence on the customer who's then going to become ideally a raving fan. So you can like, it's this loop. Pass it forward and pay it forward all the way around.

It comes back to you get more work. At the end of the day, your, your training will result in you getting more work if you take the time to do it in an effective manner. A hundred percent. And that's why I recommend budgeting for the, the marketing and the, and the training at the same, same level. No, that's a good tip.

I didn't before. So that's cool. So almost wrapping it up here, but like last tips or final things you'd like to share, maybe we haven't covered or anything else you'd like to go over. Yeah. I mean, really I'd just like to end it.

I mean, pretty much with, I know I'm representing service Titan now. It's a phenomenal tool for, for everyone in the trades. And we've got a new podcast out as well called the toolbox for the trades that, uh, man, I would love to recommend your podcast, uh, to our users and vice versa, if we can. So I believe that we together are stronger together as an industry. So the more that we can collaborate, learn from each other, uh, it's back to what we talked about at the beginning, man, the power in the group.

So, um, someone wants to check that out at service Titan.com, uh, slash podcast. And it's called toolbox for the trades. Cool. And that's what's the, so the focus of the podcast is like, uh, what's an example? What's the photo?

So this one is all different trades. So we've got HVAC electrical plumbing, grudge door, whatever it is. Interacting with industry experts and top level business owners, and all just collaborating on ways to grow our businesses and get better. So it's not a service time specific podcast. This is more of an industry podcast.

Okay. Cool. That's good too. Good to have like, um, and then, so on this podcast, who would you recommend? We like host next.

Have you got someone in mind? Oh man. I got a, I got a bunch of people. So, I mean, if, uh, um, If you want some influence in the, in the United States, buddy, I've got some great people to talk to. I'll get the pleasure of interacting with contractors from all over.

And it is phenomenal. The success that, that I get to see and learn from. So, uh, if you want to connect with some people, I can definitely, definitely do that. There's one guy in particular, be really good for you to connect with. His name's Ben Stark.

He was a mentor of mine. He, uh, he, he's a serial entrepreneur. Built and sold several businesses. And I learned so much from Ben and he is heavily invested in training for the trade. So great guy to have him on probably.

Okay. Cool. That's that would be an awesome person having the show. Like, um, yeah, like it's a growth process, you know, more people you talk to the bigger you get in there, the more fun it becomes essentially. That's it.

Yeah. Cool. Um, and then I suppose you've kind of already covered a bit, like, so more to find out about maybe you more. If you want to connect with you rather than the podcast and that, like, where would they go to find more about to service Titan or is there someone else or somewhere? Yeah, yeah.

So I have service Titan.com. Obviously if they want to find out anything about service Titan, but me, me personally, I'm very active in that toolbox for the trades. We have a group as well. Host that or is there someone else talking on that? So someone else hosted, uh, Jackie Abel.

She is phenomenal. She, uh, she hosted, but in our Facebook community, I'm in there all the time. I'm acting. So I'd love to connect with people in there. So toolbox for the trades on Facebook as well.

Sweet. No, that's awesome. Well, thanks for coming on the show and sharing what you've got and, um, learning more about service time. It was a good to have you and maybe we'll connect again in the future, some somewhere else. Um, but yeah, we'll talk again soon.

Absolutely. Thanks for having me on. You want to know how to build a sales funnel for your electrical business. Well, come join us in the Facebook group marketing secrets for electricians and you can get your question answered there and we can work together to help you build a electrical sales funnel for your business that produces leads and sales on autopilot. That's the goal.

Come join in and let's make it happen.