Talk with Roland Ligtenberg (Cofounder of Housecall Pro)

Man have attention, please. The show starts in 10 minutes. We are live, guys. This is Roland Lightenberg. Let me introduce him to you a little bit. He is one of the co-founders of Housecall Pro. Let me get these comments up here. And one of the things I wanted to ask you, I guess the founder journey, we just touched on it a second ago. What were you doing before Housecall Pro? How did you see the niche, the need for something like this, and how did it basically start? How did that start? It's a good question. Well, hello to everybody in the audience. My name is Roland Leitenberg, like you just said, but I'm one of five co-founders of Housecall Pros. There's five of us that left our previous jobs to start this company. And that was back in 2013. So going on a dozen years, which is an eternity in the software world, especially with the way at which things are progressing these days. But. Prior to that, we were at a company called Qualcomm. And most people remember Qualcomm from the days that the San Diego Chargers used to play there, Qualcomm Stadium. But Qualcomm builds chips in all the phones. So every single phone IP from Qualcomm is used to build these things. And so we came from a mobile background. And so one of our insights that we saw was, hey, why isn't there good software for people that are out and about? Not at home in front of computer screens like we are right now, clearly, but out in the field, you know, in the crawl spaces, you know, in the attics, etc. And so coming from that mobile first view that we had while working at Qualcomm, we launched Housecall. And it originally started as... as more of an uber for home services where there was house call for homeowners so they could request the service and house call pro for the pros to do the service and invoice and all the things and turns out that building a marketplace is pretty difficult and really where the opportunity lie was helping the pros run their business from their pocket and so that's what we focused on and we've been going at it ever since so is there any remnants of the old house calls still in existence Yeah, that's funny you mentioned that. So I like to call it like an appendix. You know, nobody knows what it's there for. And, you know, you can take it out and just be fine. But it had sort of purpose at some point, maybe in evolution or who knows what. But yeah, with the consumer side, we don't have that anymore. We probably still had that around for 10 years or so. But really, no one uses it for that purpose whatsoever. Really, that consumer side we have now, it lives on as like what we call the customer portal. So if any one of our pros wants to give a customer portal to their homeowner where they can see all the previous invoices and receipts and work done at their home and they want to rebook, then they have a unique portal that that homeowner can log into and just have access to all the work that was done. So it kind of exists, but like that, but not quite the same as the original idea. I have seen that and not used it yet, partially because I would say 60% of my customers are rental companies and I'm doing, you understand, jobs for tenants. So that's not needed for them. But for my homeowners, I think that would be a really good idea. Yeah, for residential, it's really key because most people... They can't find their invoice or they don't even remember who came out. And anytime you can leave what I like to call breadcrumbs, which is a way for a homeowner to find their way back to you. And the old school way people used to do this is slap a sticker on the furnace or whatever it was that you serviced. And then hope to God that someone saw that sticker and calls the number on that sticker. Or that they don't just randomly call someone out and you've got the sticker wars where you've got a guy slapping a sticker over a sticker over a sticker. And whoever's the last sticker wins. But yeah, so Housecall Pro, we really try to solidify that relationship between the homeowner and the pro and any single breadcrumb that we can give like a customer portal and on my way text, an email receipt, notification, confirmation, whatever it is. If the homeowner is looking, they can search in their email box for HVAC or I love searching my text message history because that's like, you know. Not out of control like my email box. And I can find things a lot easier, you know? And so for as many breadcrumbs we can put out there, we want to make sure that our pros are getting that repeat business. And so, yeah, that customer portal was just one little piece of the puzzle, but it definitely helps. That makes sense. So those breadcrumbs you're talking about, one of them for me is my name on the thermostat. Yep, that's cool. And sometimes when I do a new install for a customer, I tell them, hey, if you forget my number, It's on the thermostat, so you know who to call. Uh-huh. And sometimes that actually leads to more business because the house will get sold, and they think that's the right call. That's right. Yeah. And oftentimes when homes get sold, you know, you hope, you hope that the previous homeowner has that, like, you know, that bin with like all the previous manuals and service history of the home, but there's no, there's no effective good home facts. So leaving breadcrumbs for the new homeowner, I like the way you took it is like, you know, an extra little icing on the cake there. And I see, I see pros doing this both from like, you know, there's just like, You know, plates that you can buy, you can logo out and make those nice and not super obnoxious for the homeowner, but they look good. There's like all the new smart ACs now where you can actually program your logo into the thing. And they're expensive. But you know, if you're a high volume dealer, maybe it makes sense. So there's a lot of different ways to kind of create more breadcrumbs for your business. But anytime you get a chance to do that. You know, remarketing an existing customer or an existing home in this point is going to be way more cost effective than going and giving your money over to Google or Angie's List or, you know, whatever. Yeah. Now, let me ask you about some of the add-ons in Housecall Pro, because I've started to use one of them. And this is I forget what y'all call it. It's like a CSR or AI or something like that. It's an answering Yep. Yep. It's an answering service. And for the reason I have started using it is because I'm a one man business. And when I'm working, I do not answer the phone. I just let it go to voicemail. And I know that just in that one act, I lose some customers because they're not going to leave a voicemail. And if they don't leave a voicemail, I'm not calling them back. Yep. So with the answering service, somebody answers every time. And I have tried other answering services. There was one I promoted on my channel, and they could not take the information given and do the data entry into my CRM, which was Housecall Pro. Ah, yeah. That's problematic. That makes it a little less valuable. So that little bit of benefit with your answering service integrated into Housecall Pro, them Going ahead and creating the customer, getting their phone number, getting their address, and being able to book an appointment, that was very beneficial for me. you Yeah, and very cost effective too. very You know, if you think what you'd have to employ a human, you know, imagine you got eight. Eight-hour shifts, so you got three shifts a day. If you have to employ humans to do that 24-7, much. you're going to have a staff of five people, minimum. Five people, minimum. Problem paying about $40,000 to $50,000 a year. So think about the overhead or $250,000 plus all the benefits. So maybe $350,000 all in. You're going to be spending probably $29,000 to $32,000 a month to do something like that. If you're a bigger shop, you can probably afford to do that. If you get a huge volume of calls, you can do that. What's really interesting stat here probably too for your listeners is that more than half of your business comes after business hours. So more than half your business comes after the hours or before the hour of 9 a.m. and after the hour of 5 p.m. So what happens to that if it's not staffed? And look, someone like yourself, Curtis, too, is if you're the one that's doing the work and you have to answer the phone, you're just going to be busy 24-7. You're just going to completely burn out. So the benefit of CSRI is that it's fully integrated into Housecall Pro and it knows your full schedule. And its rules, its guardrails, are based upon your online booking settings. So you can set what services it wants you to book, when you want them to book you. Not to overbook you. Do you allow same day, next day or two day out bookings? You know, and so you can craft all these rules and then the CSRI is going to be like, okay, well, those are the rules I'm going to listen to. And I'm going to do it for less than a buck a minute or something, you know? So it's super cheap. And, you know, they're not going to call in sick and complain and ask for raises. Speaking of those rules, I asked it if it books an appointment to book it next day, because there are times I get appointments via text message or through an email and I'll just throw it on my Google calendar real quick before I'm able to get it over into Housecall Pro. So I asked Housecall Pro to book for the next day to give me a little bit of room on my own schedule for that day. Welcome. And you can also ask it to make the appointments for an hour and a half or for an hour. And limit the time in the day. I've limited the time from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. So that it's not making appointments right at the end of the day when I'm really trying to go home. Yeah. And it sounds like you've got it dialed in pretty good. But the benefit here is once you dial it in, it's working on your behalf. And it's just going to make it so that these potential customers or existing customers aren't calling somebody else. And that's what it's really generated for. Because you know what's going to happen is that homeowners are going to get frustrated. They're not going to want to wait for a callback because they don't know when they're going to get a callback. And so making them stop the phone dial game. It's going to be really, really nice and will generate more revenue for you because of that. Yeah, I'm liking the, like with Housecall Pro, I like the logistics of being able to tell the customer, hey, I'm on the way. Yep. And I'm not sure, are they able to track your path when you're driving? Yeah, so if you... Yeah, so we have, so there's two modes. There's one mode that if you're not using our GPS tracker or dash cam, and then the other mode is if you are. So we've got a partnership with a company called Force. And so you can either buy an OBD port GPS tracker, which connects in that way, or you can get a dash cam, which includes the GPS tracker in the dash cam unit itself. If you have those two, then they'll be able to track the truck live time for a period of time after you hit on my way. So they get that Uber-like experience. And then if you don't have that or don't want that for whatever reason, you can still hit on my way. It just won't be able to track your location live. But at least you're communicating to your customer in a way that probably 99% of other HVAC companies in the area aren't doing. So you're already delivering more of a five-star experience, which makes it, and people are like, why is this important, Roland? I go, when you go to present your price and your price is higher than someone else's, It doesn't come as a surprise because you're offering a higher quality service. And then all of a sudden, it's going to increase your closing rates and those things. And people are like, where's your data? Where does it prove it? You know, we. We've seen that to be true. If you are more communicative with your customers and you offer on my way, sir, those average tickets are going to be higher. And it doesn't take a brain scientist to figure out why that is. There's a whole bunch of psychology behind that, but it helps. I learned that a long time ago. If you show up in a van, and I learned this from a painter, He basically said, if you show up in a truck that's got paint all over it and it looks like crap, it's beat up, people are going to expect a low price. But if you show up in something that is pristine and nice and looks new and has your nice emblem on the side of it and everything, and you look like a million bucks, they're going to expect a higher bill. And that is the truth. So I do try to make an effort to look good, not just do a good job, but look good. Yeah, but I think, you know, you paint this picture across multiple touch points and you've got multiple opportunities to show that. The truck is a part of it. Wearing booties is a part of it. Having a nice logo like you have is a part of it. On my way text is a part of it. Like all of these things, presenting multiple options. You know, people are always like, oh, I don't like to have multiple options or those things. The best and easiest way to sell and render your services to any homeowner is give them some options and explain to them what they can and can't do and don't assume a budget. You may pull up and they have a Mercedes sitting in the driveway, but you might not know they've got three kids in college, right? And it could be the inverse as well. They might have a beater in front of their home. You might pull up and kind of judge them for that, but you don't know what they have. And so give them all the options that are all reasonable things that they could potentially want and let them pick what they want. And speaking of which, I've always given options, especially when they request, say, a higher efficiency system or something like that. I'll give them several options. But one thing I've noticed in Housecall Pro that I couldn't do in QuickBooks is in your estimates, you can have more than one option in one estimate. And the customer can approve and you can program it so that they can only approve one. I just thought that was real nice. It looks real professional. Excellent. You're showing them. The two different options side-by-side, basically on the same page, and they can't prove it. That, to me, that was nice. Yeah, and look, you know, customers. may not even know or think that they need some other piece until you show it to them. So, you know, and they might not even know to ask the question because as a homeowner, I'm a lay person. I don't know what the heck's going on. And maybe I do want some IAQ or maybe I do want XYZ, you know. And now that I see it, I have the opportunity to ask you a question. Be like, hey, Curtis, what is this thing? You'd be like, oh, the reason I included this in the premier option is because, you know, having a higher SEER, you know, is going to future-proof this just a little bit more for you. And as standards go up, you're going to save. Save, you know, cost and electricity in the long run, you know, but you're have a little bit of a higher price now and you're going to make it over the long run. And so like, but maybe I wouldn't have known what a seer even is, you know, and you may say high efficiency, but like, what does that mean to me? I don't know. But as a homeowner now, you have it, you invite the chance to have that conversation to show your expertise, which is what they're paying you for. Yeah. Well, let me ask you, like the CSR AI or for those that don't understand the answering service that you are now. Yeah. And I think that's a relatively new add-on, isn't it? It's pretty new. It's been out for over a year. But as AI rules out, it gets progressively smarter and better and smarter and better. And so then we talk to more of our customers about it. Because maybe four months ago or so, it didn't have the ability to actually book on the calendar and interact with the calendar. It would effectively take a message and get the notes and get the customer record details and all those things. But now it's looking at all the rules for your online booking. It's doing collision detection. It's doing rescheduling, right? It's going to rebook past clients because it recognizes Curtis called in before. So it ties it to the Curtis record rather than creating a new record. So as AI gets smarter, we keep improving it. Think of it as like, you know, your real life CSR getting more skills because they've been in seat a little longer. You know, I'd rather have someone that's been a CSR for two or three years than someone that I have to train from scratch. So just think about it that way. Do you have any, I'm hesitant to use the word pipeline because y'all use that for something else, but is there anything else in the pipeline that is just as useful for a small business like myself as this answering service? Yeah, yeah, definitely. That's a great question. So one of the things that we're working on is you can think of it as like voice mode for Housecall Pro. And so rather than having to hunt and peck and go through your price book one by one and build systems and those things, you'll have the ability to just have a conversation or leave a voice memo effectively inside the app and it'll build out what it thinks that you're trying to build out automatically. And this is going to save a whole bunch of, you know, diving in three levels, click the thing, come back out, go into AC, now go to condensers, go all the way in, click a thing. And so, you know, This is something that we have an alpha internally right now, and we're just seeing the massive amount of clicks it's reducing. Because simply put, wouldn't it be nice if you could have... And just to help her with you 24-7, that's also your note taker that you're able to tell it all the things that you're doing or thinking. And if you're trying to give an estimate, you're trying to build something new for the price book, trying to find for stuff, you can talk to it like a human and it'll do it for you rather than you having to do it. Because if you think about what an interface is, it's just a way for a human to interact with the computer. But humans have learned to speak. So why can't we use that as a good modality? And look, we all know Siri has been... Sucky for forever, you know, and even Alexa, right? You know, the earlier, but now with Gen AI, it actually works really well. So that's something that is in the pipeline, so to speak. That's going to be coming here in 26. And if people are listening and they're interested in getting on a wait list for that, they can always text me directly. Uh, at eight, five, eight, two, one, five, one, five, one, two. That's my cell. So if you're listening, you hear this and you're like, Ooh, I want to test it. I want early access. As soon as we open it up a little bit further, uh, then I can, I can give it to my team and you can go play around with it. Now, um, I ported it over from QuickBooks. I had been using QuickBooks for years and years and something you just touched on was going through and finding condensers and the one you want or motors and then finding the one you want. All of that is a complete mess in my house call pro because I came over from QuickBooks and then imported it all in this really random way. So when I'm building invoices or estimates and stuff like that, I go in specifically and type what I know is there. Yep. And it finds it. Rather than, yeah, because you already know what you're looking for. But if you didn't know and you were trying to like jump into it and like scroll through it, you'd be like, where is this thing? Right. Now, let me ask you, I had an up-and-coming CRM contact me about promoting their software on my channel, and their hook was that they have relationships with our suppliers that integrate into their software, which makes it easy for us to get the exact piece of equipment and price on the spot. Is there anything like that being talked about over there at Housecall Pro? So we already have some of those integrations, definitely in the plumbing space. We've got a couple of those in the HVAC space, depending on what kind of brands you carry. And then any supplier, even if we don't have an official integration, if you want to get their product catalog or their, effectively, your price book. Which means your pricing as an individual, if they send you any file, we can upload that directly for you. If we see that there's enough of our users that are using that particular one, that we can just do a blanket integration. But yeah, we can totally do that. And that's not a very unique selling proposition, if that's the only thing. I didn't know you could. I didn't know you could. What kind of dealer are you? What are you installing these days? It is. I'm installing Rude products. Okay. Uh-huh. I'm installing Gris products. I'm installing Goodman products. I install a variety of different name brands, but I wasn't just asking about the equipment and the price of the equipment, but also like our parts suppliers, like big ones, like United Refrigeration or Baker Distributing or Johnstone. Having their prices available would be really nice. Yeah, so Baker is one of our partners. So absolutely, we can do that with Baker. Johnston, I know there's some talk there. So those are all doable. And so those are all things that we can actively do if they just send it to us directly or you get an export directly, we can import those. But in terms of like a direct integration, a lot of these suppliers are still working on how they expose those. So if some third party says they have it, it's just because they have had an export and then they just carry that in their own database. But the pricing... on some of these things is different, as you know. The bigger the part, and then the more of it that you sell, if you're a real premier dealer, or I forget what they call their loyalty membership program, but you get different pricing than the next guy. And so that has to authenticate on a user level. So they have to know like, oh, this is Curtis. And Curtis sells $2 million worth of RUDE this year. So he essentially gets 20% off MSRP, etc. So there's a couple of extra moving pieces there that would actually make it more of a price book integration rather than just a product catalog. Because they're kind of like a little bit separately. But definitely possible with whatever you currently have if you have that export. And if there's enough people that... that want that or have that, then we can absolutely build out that integration. But that part, that's like a pretty easily solvable problem. It's not technically difficult. It's just time and distance and how many people want a particular thing. Okay. I didn't know you could do it. I didn't know to maybe ask that little AI tech support thing on the bubble down there. If you can make me do it. Hey. I've had long conversations with that little tech support bubble down there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's faster than the humans, right? Like it just goes. I suppose. You can get to answers pretty quick. But we still have humans as well because I think some questions need more of a human level support. So we essentially, if there are like easy questions, we kind of hand them all over to the AI. But as it gets more complex, then we switch to humans And it's not quite there yet. And we don't want to get that out. I'm going to tell you, I got to admit, I had a little problem. I just started the phone answering services and I wanted to increase the amount of minutes that I was paying for because I was going over my minutes like that fast. And I just went to billing. I found what I was paying for and there was no option there for me to increase it. I didn't know how to do it. So I go down to that little tech support AI thing down there and ask it. And it said, you need to go to add-ons. So I go back out of that and I try to find the add-ons. I couldn't find it. And I had like a 30 minute little thing going on. Apparently the add-ons was a button underneath what she had just said to me that I needed to click on. You know. It took me a while to figure it out, but... It's not foolproof. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no. It could definitely use a little improvement, just like a lot of things in life. But I think also our product is evolving very fast. And so our AI knows what's been documented. And when things are being built, there's not a lot of documentation yet. So the AI is like, well, I don't know. There's not a lot of documentation. So it tries to kind of guess. And so what can happen is it might not give you the complete story that you need to get to where you want. And so on Frontier products, like our CSR AI, literally we have like a new update every week or two. And so that documentation is a little less coverage than, you know, if you were to ask about scheduling or dispatching or invoicing or like, you know, the core kind of features. Yeah, like, honestly, I've had Housecall Pro for a long time, but I didn't use it. I was constantly using QuickBooks, QuickBooks, QuickBooks. And there were a couple of the logistic things about notifying customers and stuff and maybe helping me get Google reviews and stuff like that that I liked. So I have started. Making sure I use Housecall Pro every time now. And there's some other advantages to doing that for like when I go to receive payments. If I didn't do everything through Housecall Pro, I might have to receive the repayment over in QuickBooks. And then when I go to do a deposit and stuff, it makes a accounting mess. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's why we recommend people should integrate with our QuickBooks online integration, but they should do everything in Housecall Pro because it's not a two-way thing. If you do something, you record something in QuickBooks, but then you have to go to Housecall Pro to do it. So yeah, I think maybe you might have figured out the hard way, unfortunately. But yeah, you kind of got to go from Housecall Pro and then leave QuickBooks to the accountants. And And yeah, that was a little bit of a headache. I did learn the hard way. Like, for example, I found customers where I thought I had an overdue invoice, and I sent them an overdue invoice through Housecall Pro, but come to find out, they did pay. It's just recorded over in QuickBooks. So I had to go back over to Housecall Pro and record it as paid. Yeah, yeah. It was a whole headache. So I'm trying to do Housecall Pro everything now. Yeah, yeah. Months, all that stuff will straighten out. It will because, you know, 20% of the things cause 80% of the headaches. So it's going to be like, once you change your workflow in that process, it's sometimes hard because you're building a habit. But Housecall Pro is designed in a way where you don't need to use any other apps. You don't need to use Google, but it might be a little quicker for you right now because your muscle memory is just trained, you know, to add something super quick. But over time, really, you know, our goal is you do everything inside of Housecall Pro and then it can push out to other places. But really that becomes kind of your central hub. Thank But you still have to build the muscle memory, which isn't always easy, especially when you've been doing something in some way for a while. One thing I wanted to mention, before I tried Housecall Pro, I tried another one. Which one? I don't mind saying it. It was Jobber. Oh, sure. Yeah. you. I tried them, and they didn't have support for subcustomers. And for me, they might now, but at the time, they didn't. And for me, that was a deal breaker. Yeah, because you're probably doing a lot of property maintenance and stuff with a lot of tenants. And so you're dealing with multiple. I needed that. And so when they didn't have it, I was like, you know, I can't even use this. This is useful. No. No. Jobber is a great platform for people that are just starting out or have... Um, businesses that don't require a lot of complexity. complexity. But when you start kind of digging under the covers and if you're a mechanical company, you should be using either Housecall Pro or if you're a larger $10 million a year plus shop, you should take a look at Service Titan to see if you can get some of the returns out of it. Now, they're super pricey. And if you plan on growing to be $20, $30, $50 million, you could, but that's only 0.1% of the companies that ever get to that size. Thank you guys. Big companies or PE-backed companies, but in general. I learned a long time ago with my company, I started out trying to grow. First, I maxed out what I could do by myself, and I was making really good money. And then I figured, okay, I'm going to hire somebody. And I built it up to three technicians, an installer, and I used to always send a technician with the installer, and a girl answering the phone. So, um... But I never made more money than I did when I was working by myself. And I know you can. You get to the point where you start making more money, but I never got there. And I started having difficulty with hiring good employees. So I went back to just working by myself. I'm happy like that. And I intend to keep it like that, keep it small. I'm not trying to grow to a 10, 20. 30, 50 million company on, if I can, if I can build out between 500,000 and a million and a half in a year, which is where it might range, I'm doing great. I'm doing fine. Oh yeah, totally. And I think that's what people also, I'm glad you brought that up is. But Housecall Pro, you can tweak it and use it in a way to help you grow and have multiple people and dispatch multiple people as you grow. But also, if you want to stay small and just focus on efficiency and profit at the end of the day, as a one- or two-person shop doing 500 to 1.5, you're in the top 1% in the US with what you're earning. And you have less headaches. You don't have to deal with some of that stuff. I mean, if you're not organized, if you're not efficient, you're not presenting things professionally, then you're going to run up against the ceiling, you know, because you have a limit of your time. But you are already implementing things that are going to pull back time for you, which is actually exactly what you're trying to do, which is great. And my problem when I say I had trouble. attracting good health. I mean, let's put it that way. I was having trouble with guys using drugs, wrecking vehicles, stealing from me, doing jobs on the side with my equipment and stuff like that. And so, and I was paying them at the same time. So, so you could understand my level of frustration when I was trying so hard to grow the company. And it's like the people I was bringing We're destroying it by the way that they were acting. So I followed others' advice and decided just to keep it small. And like you said, I have less headache. I, um... If something's wrong, there's nobody to blame but me. And I know that nobody's stealing from me. I'm doing everything myself. And it's just, if I had known what I know now, I never would have tried to grow the business. I would have kept it small from the start. Yeah. And look, this is where Housecall program really just come help because there's so many small things you're probably still doing today that you're probably wasting time on that you know you shouldn't be doing because you can be doing higher value tasks. And, you know, I think so we have a pipeline add on there, which will follow up on estimates automatically. I always tell people, you know, they're like, oh, I give estimates, but then like I never follow up on them or I never ask enough. And a lot of people are like, oh, you know, it feels weird for me to keep asking people like for their business. But sometimes with automation, it's easy because the computer just does it on your behalf. And it's not that people don't want to do business with you. They're just busy with life. They're busy with Joey's karate class and who knows whatever life throws their way. But, you know, being the person that asks continually is just going to help. But you can't do that as a one-man shop and stay on top of hundreds and hundreds of jobs you're doing over the years. This is where I go back to Housecall Pro can help you become so much more efficient because it's going to be able to increase your output because it's doing things while you sleep. And so if you want to run the shop like you're running, you're going to be hyper successful by just getting rid of some of that nitty gritty, the reminders, put people on the service plans, all the billing for that. Oh my gosh, what a nightmare. If you're to do that by hand, there's no chance. There's no chance you can keep up with that. I don't know what you're talking about. There's just so many little things like that that you can just take off your plate with House of Approach. It's nice. Yes. Um, Here's something you can probably relate to. I get, probably in one day, I get over 100 emails. Haha. That's nice. That's not the ones going to spam. Those are the ones that I need to look over. Yeah, like real ones. Yeah, yeah. Sure. And in those emails, mixed in those emails sometimes are calls. Yep. And So, like, you have an answering service that can take your calls and book an appointment. What about a service that can read your emails and book an appointment? Yeah, coming in 26. So that same. How is this hypothetical? Hypothetically asking. So that's really a possibility. Yeah, so hopefully you're using a modern email client like Gmail. Is it a Gmail account? Yeah. Where does that email come from? Okay, so you'd be able to authenticate your Gmail account with our CSRAI, and it'll handle the inbound requests with the same brain that it handles a phone call. You can put the CSRAI right now in a web chat widget on your website as well, and it operates under the same brain, right? It's just not voice to text. It's text to text. And email is just... Text-to-text, but way slower. That's like snail mail. But they're still coming in. And so our CSR AI will be able to hook into all the places where your customers are reaching out to you. So in the future, that CSR AI will be able to look at it and even be like, ah, is this a potential call? Let's try to book it. And so it'll go back in and try to go schedule something based upon the rules that you set up for the voice side, which is your phone. And if you're using Housecall Pro Voice, it's even smoother because it's all contained within one system, right? And so, yeah, all of that's coming. So some of the calls I get through email are normally through a property management. Yeah, like an AppFolio or something, or there's like a couple of those. They don't respond to a return email. They just send it to you and it gives the. Tenants' phone numbers and the address and the company it's coming from. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm constantly having, like at the end of a job, I will still have to go through my emails to make sure I didn't get another call that I need to get scheduled. Yeah. Yeah, so all of those things. So inside of Housecall Pro, you have what's called your job inbox. And so it's sort of like, think of it as like your command center where all these inbound leads are coming to. So you can handle them. Some are leads, some are opportunities, some are jobs. It's kind of like a spectrum. So anyways, that's where everything will get ingested into. It currently connects to things like your Google Business Profile, your online booking, Thumbtack if you have it, Yelp if you have it, Angie's List if you have it. I don't know, there's a whole bunch more. but You can also connect Dispatch.me. So there's a lot of people that work in the home warranty space that use Dispatch.me as a software to dish out the jobs to contractors, third parties. And so we can also connect via that to any home warranty company. right So they all show up in one place. So it kind of bypasses your inbox, your email inbox, and it's already there. You just click Create Customer, or you can create Estimate, or you can create a job. And it already takes all the data and it creates whatever the object is that you want with it. Well, that's pretty cool. I personally quit doing home warranties. Yeah, yeah. Well, you should as a one-man shop. You don't need, you do, like I would recommend you not to do those jobs because you've got plenty of other better jobs to go do. I'll be honest, the home warranties. I got tired of being the bad guy, telling them, hey, this isn't covered. Even though you've had your warranty service for over 10 years and you thought it would be covered, they found some unique way of denying it. It made me the bad guy. And then half the time I wasn't getting paid or wasn't getting paid what we agreed to. So that was not viable for me. No, it's a different business model, you know, it's, it's a, it's a frequency, um, and it's a good way to keep, um, the job boards busy, uh, if you have other people employed where otherwise they'd be just sitting and hanging out. Right. And so, uh, there's just, there's a different. way to make that work for businesses. Because I've seen some really big businesses do amazingly well with them. But you have to build it in that way. There's a specific way to do it. And you've got to understand the NTEs for all the things. And NTEs for every home warranty company. And it's a whole game, unfortunately. It can definitely work, but you want to have to play the game. It's not just going to work by default. Because you're going to get underbid and this is not going to be fun. I know how to play the game. I used it because I needed it for a long time for the business. And then I just kind of kept it around. And eventually I was just like, you know what? No more. Yeah. I'm not calling these people to beg for my money over and over and over again. I'm done with that. Yeah. Yeah. I've heard that before. I'm going to go back to the bar. I'm just not doing it. Not anymore. So explain to me, I mentioned, I said, I wasn't going to say the word pipeline because that means something different to you. What is this pipeline? Yeah. So here's the easiest way for me to describe it. A lot of offices would have a whiteboard up in their office and they have either folders on it or just dry erase marker. And they'd move a job kind of from left to right. Imagine a bunch of columns, unscheduled, scheduled, in production, complete, and then like paid. You kind of move things from left to right. And so pipeline is a really pleasant way to look at this, which makes sense. Different than a calendar. Okay. So different than a calendar. This is by status, Not by date. And then our pipeline adds something interesting in between those different columns, which is an automation. So you say, to go from here to here, do this automation. And if they do this certain thing, move it to the next step, move it to the next step. And so with pipeline, you can, in the biggest use cases, for every unsold estimate that has not been either marked as accepted or denied. Keep bugging the customer with, did you get a chance to look at the estimate? I'm here to answer any questions, Curtis. You know? Over and over again, at whatever frequency, whatever medium, if you want email or text or call or whatever it is, you can set those up. We've got some default ones that work right out of the box. But that's just an example of one automation of Pipeline. So Pipeline is one part organization and statusing, and the other part automation. And how do you move things from left, which is like lead, to... Complete paid job, which is like all the way on the right. It sounds like it might be useful to me. Yeah, it is. And everyone goes like, oh, Roland, you know, you got to pay for this ad on Tune. I'm like, oh my gosh, if you close one job, it'll pay for this thing for the next three years. So don't tell me how much it's priced or not. The only way that software works and the only way that we stay in business because we don't have contracts at Housecall Pro is that it delivers the value every month. And if it doesn't, you stop. And so the only way as a software, as a service business, is that we deliver much more value than what we cost. And so that's why we've been able to grow the way that we have. And here we are 12 years later and doing quite well. Robert, you're a sick little guy. Robert, I understand. There is a way to make money with home warranties, and I've even advised other people how to do it. Yep. You could absolutely do it. No, we're not saying that you can't. There's absolutely ways to make it work, but you got to play the game. And it takes a little bit to understand how it works. Yeah, you're right. It is. It's almost like a shuffleboard. You're not going to get everything here. So you need to get it somewhere else. And you need to learn how to do that. I just, it's just not for me anymore. Not for me. Yeah, yeah. Let me ask you this question, Curtis. How are you doing your marketing for your business today? Are you mostly word of mouth and just good work and you've been in the area and you just get more business you can handle? Um, Basically, yeah, it's word of mouth. Yeah. And the way I came across, I'm not sure if you're familiar with my YouTube channel. My YouTube channel, I post my work and I just try to do a good job and I try to show others how to do what I'm doing. And sometimes I do get business from that. Yep. Yep. I think it's an easy thing that every pro should be doing is documenting their work and then showing their work. And I'd say the third one, which you also briefly mentioned, but really is the golden nugget. is you show people how to do the work that you're doing, knowing that they won't want to do it themselves, but it's kind of nice to know they're going to call you anyways. Because everyone wants to be a do-it-yourself warrior until they actually start doing the work. And they've got all these YouTube videos saved and they don't do it. And they're like, let me just call the guy who made the freaking video. So I love that as a tactic. It's a great golden nugget. You super understated it there. You try to slide that by me here, but your audience hopefully needs to know that. This is a very simple way. Just document your work, record it. Just talk to like you were talking to a helper. You know, just you can record yourself and boom, post it up there. Make sure you've got the right keywords and things mentioned in your description of the videos in the area in which you do it. You know, so if you're doing like an evaporator replace, a coil replace or whatever it is, Albany, you know, if you start mixing those things together, Google is going to surface that and better yet. AI loves content like this. So in the future, when people aren't going to Google to search for stuff anymore, they're just asking their favorite LLMs what to do. There's going to be a bountiful amount of resources that you've created in an area. So I love that as a strategy. And for me, I am learning because of AI and other things that a good description in your video telling what you're doing helps AI and Google to know exactly what's going on in that video and um i'm getting better at that i've been a little bit hesitant to tell in the description exactly what's going on because i want to tell a story in my videos it's like okay here's a problem and if you watch to the end i'm going to show you how i fix it i don't want to tell them everything in the description Well, here's the thing. The transcript is everything. And guess who can read that? AI, right? So, I mean, you know, it'll know it regardless of what you put in that description. But to the extent you can, think about how the homeowner would communicate the problem that they're having, because that is the problem that they're going to be asking LLMs about. And if your video, right, without even the solution, right, your video will start to rank for that based on views and all the things like you already know. And so I think that's, I love, I love that tactic. That's great. And that's going to age really well. You're never going to regret it. I'll be honest. I didn't start doing this as a business tactic. And in fact, my YouTube channel is barely even related to my business. I did it because I was trying to teach employees how to be better technicians and it would just go in one ear and out the other because they just weren't interested. They didn't care. And I don't have any children to teach it to. So I thought, well, I'll put it on YouTube. People who do care and do want to learn will have this resource of me showing them exactly how to do it. And it has just grown into. Something much bigger than I ever thought it would be. Yeah, look, you put value out in the world, you'll get some rewards somehow, some shape or form. If you help other people become successful, even if you're doing it unknowingly or even knowingly, eventually you'll find success in some way, shape or form. So I think that's a valid philosophy and tactic in life in general. But you've got the fortuitous element here of helping your business as well. And so that's often how these things go. Well, um... I know your time is getting short. Let me ask you, did you do anything for Veterans Day? Uh, so there was a great, um, there was a great post that our social media team put out there because we have so many great veterans, uh, that, that are in the trades. Uh, and so we highlighted a whole bunch of their pictures and a whole bunch of reels and stuff. So that for me was kind of fun just to see and share internally inside of our, inside of our business here. But, uh, my, my father-in-law, uh, served in Vietnam War. Um, and so that's always fun to fly some flags and I've got, um, my Christmas lights on, but they're called twinkly lights. And so I can, uh, I can change the colors of them so they're all just red, white, and blue. Oh, that's pretty cool. That's cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's good. Yeah. I love it. I love it. I got time for like one question. One more question here. Whatever tough question you want or one from the audience. Whatever. Well, the audience seems to be carrying on their own conversation over here. I've been over here looking at it. They're talking about all kinds of stuff. That has very little to do with what we're talking about. Here we go. What is Roland in the trade, or is he a digital tech programmer? Oh, there it is. That's a funny one. Okay, so fun story, fun fact. I ran a college works painting business during college to pay for college. And so I'd just go door-to-door during the school year, and then I'd go paint homes in the summer. And, you know, in San Diego, I'd hire out my team. Um, and go do their production. So I'm not really in the trades or came from the trades. It happened to be something that I did for a little bit to make some easy money to pay for college. Uh, but my background is, um, you know, I used to be a scuba dive instructor. I used to be a, uh, promoter. I used to do consulting. I worked at a tech company in Qualcomm before this one. So I've done many different things. What did you do at Qualcomm? So Qualcomm, I worked in the R&D labs and I took stuff that the engineers built and I'd try to go sell it. And so one of the things was this crazy thing on the phone that could see and listen to where you went and it would match it with some cool advertising stuff. All right. Well, thanks everybody for having me. And so that was fun. And I'll see you all next time. But ultimately, I led to something a little more, Bye-bye. I'm in awe of this stuff. Thanks for having me. Yeah. I feel Hospital Pros is a little more noble Have a great day, everybody. and been able to have a much bigger impact. And don't forget to subscribe to the channel. You can really help. And don't forget to press that bell button. Our pros have serviced one in three homes in the United States, You get alerted every time we put out new content. So don't worry. We'll be back soon. You guys take care. which is really cool. Bye bye. They've done over 100 million jobs. Have a good day. Happy holidays everybody. They do tens of billions of dollars. Bye-bye. See you soon. in revenue every single year. Thanks everybody for having me. Have a great day. Bye-bye. I'm going to go've got a great deal of stuff. So we make up still a very small percentage of the trades, Thanks everybody for this great stuff. Have a great day everybody. Thanks everybody for coming. but there's not many companies that have that kind of an impact. And so I get texts all the time from my friends. I go, hey, Roland, this plumber came over and it said, powered by Housecall Pro. I was like, oh, that's cool. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that was really neat. Um, So, yeah. But yeah, pleasure being on the show, Curtis, for sure. And happy to come back any other time and shoot it with you and whatever questions you come up with. But if anybody has any questions, they want to get ahold of me, you can always text me directly, 858-215-1512. I'll help you get into touch with anybody you want. Or if you've just got general questions, you can shoot me a text. Don't try to call me because I'm mostly in meetings all day long. But if you text me, I can reply while I'm in meetings. Thank you. This was enjoyable. Thank you for coming on the show. I appreciate it. I don't get the chance to speak to an exec that's designing the stuff that I'm working with. Oh yeah, keep the questions coming and keep using the stuff. I mean, everything we do at Housecall Pro is our mission is to champion our pros to success. And we're only successful if our pros are successful. And so our business model is tied to your success because we do the payment processing and we have the subscription, right? And so we have to keep earning your business every single month. And if we don't provide value, we don't win. So that's the name of the game. Let me know how I can help or anyone at the company can help if you're ever going to be listening. And you too, Curtis, if you're ever like, Why is it doing this thing or how do I get I'm in an AI health loop or something. Always feel free to shoot me a text. That's cool. Thank you, man. I appreciate you coming on. I know your time is limited. No problem. Thanks so much, Curtis. I'll see all you guys around. Take care now. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Well, guys, I got to go through these comments and see what in the world y'all been talking about because I was Let me get rid of Roland right there. Let me see. Go back to the comments. So, yeah, I wanted to bring him on because I've started to really use Housecall Pro, and we've talked about it a couple times in the comments, and it's become useful to me, and I thought maybe an interview with this guy would be nice for y'all too. So now that he's gone, it's a little after 8 o'clock, I'm going to go ahead and sign off. Guys, I appreciate y'all tuning in. I'm going to work hard to have a good guest for y'all next week. So thanks for coming in. I really appreciate it. Y'all have a nice weekend and don't work too hard. I do appreciate it.