The Home Service Expert Podcast - Embracing a Data-Driven Approach to Become a Home Service Industry Leader

Episode Date: January 15, 2021

Marc Tatarsky is the SVP of Marketing at FieldAware, a field service management software company. Throughout his 25 years of professional marketing and business experience, he has held various leadership positions in Marketing, Finance, Human Resources, and Consulting. This industry veteran has served as an agent of growth at some of the world’s largest technology companies, including Pactera Technologies, Accenture and NTT Data Services. In this episode, we talked about marketing, finance, human resources, project management, consulting, international development, data...

so having 72 KPIs, that's next to impossible to be able to manage, and you won't be able to determine the right insights from all those different KPIs. You want the ones that are going to be that you can make intelligent decisions from, and so it's important to focus in on those. And then it's also important, as we discussed earlier, is to make sure that the data that you're collecting is good. So if you're collecting it on 72, gosh, keeping that level of data integrity could be next to impossible.

Having it on five or six or seven, whatever it is, much easier to do. And then from my perspective, the other thing that you need to be able to do is be very consistent with the way that you make decisions for your business and for your people so that people understand what the motivations are, what the triggers are, what they should be focusing in on. And if you're pulling in data from too many sources, then it's hard to be consistent. And if

you're not looking at the data consistently and the way you make decisions waffles and varies from time to time, that sends mixed messages as well. And then the last thing I would say is that you need to make a habit out of it, right? When you're collecting data and you're using data to make decisions, you need to do that repeatedly, consistently, and ultimately make it a habit so that it's part of the DNA of the organization overall. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the Home Service Millionaire, Tommy Mello. Welcome back to the Home Service Expert. My name is Tommy Mello, and today I have a guest visiting us for the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

He's an expert in marketing, finance, human resources, project management, consulting, international development, and data. Mark works for FieldAware, right, Mark? Is that right? FieldAware, yep yep that's correct sgp of marketing from 2017 to present spot 810 laser skin and massage franchise owner bacteria usa he worked as the vp head of marketing from 2015 to 2016 a censure a director of marketing life R&D, and MedTech from 2012 to 2015. Director of Marketing Process and Innovation Performance Service Line from 2007 to 2012, and Parrot Systems Market Strategy and Development from 2001 to 2007. Mark is a veteran in the IT industry with over 25 years of marketing and business experience. He provides strategy and execution services and global

marketing initiatives, including marketing strategy, awareness, messaging, demand generation, and lead development to fuel FieldAware's expansion plans. He has held various leadership positions in marketing, financial, and resources consulting, and served as an agent of growth of the world's largest technology companies, including Bacteria Technologies, Accenture, and NTT Data Services. He's passionate about helping businesses combine marketing and business strategy to drive rapid growth, inspire innovation, and promote technology adoption in the field management industry. Ladies and gentlemen, Mike Tatarski. Wow, that's a big resume there, Mark. Yeah, it's been a long career. I'm quite happy with that. But yeah, it's been around the block

a few times. Yeah, no, it's awesome. There's nothing better in my life that I love than marketing. So we're going to have fun here. And you're a systems guy. And I love, you can't find something that I'm more just excited about. So do you want to just tell me in the audience a little bit about your previous history, what you've done, how you've been involved in marketing and where you're going in the next few years, what your goals are? Yeah, no, absolutely. I didn't get into marketing kind of the traditional way. I didn't start in an agency or I didn't have kind of visions of being someone producing commercials and TV and things of that nature.

I actually started out of college in operations and in finance. And that really helped me to learn how to run businesses and look at businesses from a numbers perspective, which ultimately throughout my career has really helped me out. But I surprisingly made a move from being in finance and planning and got into HR serendipitously. And the nice thing about being in HR was that it gave me a lot of exposure to the human elements of business and the emotional side of business. I did that for a couple years before I decided to go back and get my MBA. When I finished my MBA from SMU, I had an international business degree. And so one of the things that I requested when I was working at Perot Systems was that I have an opportunity to

take advantage of that degree. And I actually was fortunate enough to have a company and a boss that said, sure, let's give you that opportunity. And so I went and lived overseas for about three years on an expatriate assignment in Luxembourg. And when I was doing that, I was actually a consultant, an IT consultant, working with a large clearinghouse and financial services organization on their application development program. And when I came back to Dallas is when I actually started to get into sales and marketing. When I came back into the United States, I was still working for ProSystems at that time. And I asked if I could get into a role that would bring me closer to the customer and to the people that are making those buying decisions.

That's something that I wanted to really do and kind of round out the experience that I had. I wanted to be able to work on relationships and the customers themselves. And so that's when I first got into marketing. I've really been in marketing ever since. I had various roles in marketing, whether at ProSystem Systems, helping them set up their marketing department for the first time. I moved over into a management consulting company called George Group, which was a process and kind of lean organizational improvement type firm that ultimately got acquired by Accenture. I stayed at Accenture for about seven years and various marketing roles there, and then moved over to a company called Pactera. I went to that organization because

they are a China-based organization. And so I wanted to get exposure to the APAC and the region and the types of leadership styles that come out of that region. And Pactera gave me that opportunity. And when I left there, I went to FieldAware. And FieldAware has been just an awesome fit for me. The alignment of bringing kind of all the skills that I've gathered through those different experiences in marketing allows me to help FieldAware overcome some of the challenges that we're trying to do as far as taking the company to the next level. But more importantly, it exposes me to a lot of customers that our solution is really helping them achieve some of their goals as well.

So I kind of want to hear a little bit about more BuildAware. So we've all, typically the listeners, we all have a CRM, Customer Relationship Management System. We're all doing things that are outside of our CRM, API, application process interface. Everybody's using Zapier. I mean, everybody knows what Twilio is nowadays, I feel like. So what exactly does FieldAware do? I just want to really examine everything and make sure I understand kind of what you do for companies. Yeah, sure. So FieldAware basically automates the field service process from taking things from the CRM,

dispatching service technicians out in the field, bringing that work order to life for them on mobile devices, enabling them to capture all the work activities that they're doing at a customer site, whether that's on a home site or a business site, and then being able to tie that back into other systems of record, whether that's if you're a larger organization, whether that's an ERP, or whether you're a smaller organization, it's just your finance and accounting software, whether that's Quicken or any other type of financial accounting systems, and then ultimately do payment so that you get paid faster and the cash flow moves quicker. So you guys are like an add-on to like a service, max service type home, how it's called pro, like do you guys work with companies like that or how does that work?

Yeah. So those are all competitors and folks that we compete with on a regular basis. Okay, so you're just basically, you're another solution that handles everything from soup to nuts though. Basically, yes. Our biggest difference on that is we don't try to take every element of field service organization. So I'm not trying to be a CRM. I'm not trying to be an ERP. I'm just focused on the field service function itself and deploying and working with those field service assets, whether those are people or the equipment itself. So you're focused on helping other organizations transform their operations using cloud-based technologies, and that's all in the field of worker activities and processes.

What does the data-driven approach mean and what does that look like? Yeah, sure. So data-driven approach for any business probably evolves a little bit depending on where they are from an overall maturity standpoint. And so at a very basic level,

a data-driven approach means that you're just going to utilize data to make more intelligent decisions, that you're not going to trust your gut, but that you're actually going to look to the numbers, look to the outputs of the business to inform the way that you're going to make business decisions going forward. And so depending on the maturity of the organization or the size of the organization, you can have varying degrees of data-driven aspects to what you do.

Yeah, I think making, so basically taking past data to make decisions. So what are some of the opportunities that come from focusing on the data? Yeah, I mean, I think one of the implicit sides of it is that you really take the emotion out of some of the decision-making. And so you can really have a fact-based driven approach to making decisions. But equally important, I think, is that you can support your business through a variety of different changes, whether it can help support your growth, whether it gives you greater flexibility, whether you work on the efficiency of the way that you operate, or whether or not you're kind of gaining new insights about your own business and how to run that business better. A data-driven approach is kind of the fundamental underpinning for making that all happen. Yeah, that's something we really focus on is we've got six KPIs per department and we use software to kind of keep the score of those KPIs. And then we've got a data integrity

team to make sure the data put in is accurate. And we're able to make a lot of changes on the fly. Like right now, my focus in the business is actually in the dispatcher area because we're getting a lot of cancellations. So teaching people how to dispatch, asking the right questions from the CSRs, being that communicator all day long with the customer and having some types of gold nuggets.

Like for example, I'll give a search protector that we got to get rescheduled, which is a $60 value. I do things like that, but we had 60 cancellations in the last week in one day. And one of the days this week, and I'm like, okay, so we started researching it. Our goal is to get that under 10 per day. But without the data, there's a really good book called The Compound Effect. And he says, what doesn't get measured doesn't get fixed. He said, you got to keep tabs and you got to literally write it down in a notebook. If you don't have software to do it, like counting calories or time on TV, time on social media, alcohol, whatever it might be. So I think data approaches is so important.

And there's so much algorithmic things that happen with Google and everything to help them. AI is becoming a huge deal. Are you guys, what is going to be happening in the next five to 10 years? Do you think as data becomes more readily available there? They know everything. And so now they know exactly like, I mean, they can almost tell you the score before it happens. It's crazy. Yeah, they can tell you who's going to do it, right? You know, I think as far as from

a data-driven perspective, you hit on a couple of really key elements as far as what businesses need to do. I mean, you talked about knowing your KPIs, right? I mean, that's something that we, when we look at things from a maturity standpoint, that's, while that seems like a really basic thing, that's not a level one maturity basis. That's kind of up in the two, three levels. And you have to have that. And the other thing that you mentioned from a data standpoint is, you didn't say this, but, you know, garbage in, garbage out. So you were talking about data integrity and having, you know, essentially a team kind of just focused on that. You know, once again, having a team is the level

of maturity that certainly is above some smaller organizations. And so as far as that data approach, those are some of the really key elements of starting the process. As far as where things are going, you know,ificial intelligence, IoT devices, everything is becoming more and more connected. And the amount of data that major data aggregators are collecting, as you pointed out, is just becoming exponential, right? And because of the computing power in today's world, the ability to mine that data, look at that data, find trends, make sense out of it is just mind boggling, right? So a Google or an Amazon Web Services, they're analyzing billions of points of data every minute, every second, whether they're working with larger organizations

or they're doing it for their own platforms. And so data is changing the field service organizations and the service community at large, but it's changing, in my world, the marketing side of things as well. Yeah, I think that, you know, I'm really, really excited about what we're able to do with data. I think too often, and you tell me your thought on this, is you get a really, really smart data scientist, and I've dealt with plenty of them and they take things to this 10th degree where like I could tell you, I could take in weather patterns and probably do some type of regression testing and be able to tell you that this is a outside of the standard deviation to be significant. But the problem I have with that

is the best things you could do is train and hire right. And so if you take weather patterns and you could probably bring some stuff into that to say this many calls are going to come in over time. But I've seen people, they've got like 87 key performance indicators. And I'm like, this is going to be tough because you shouldn't have more than four or five per department. What are your thoughts on that? I totally agree. Totally agree. So I think there's two things to tease out of what you said there. One is being able to bite off just the amount that you can chew, right? Just because you have data or you can start to collect data doesn't mean that you want to collect everything. You can't have too much data, right? And it has to do with, you know,

I alluded to it before, the overall maturity of the organization. And as organizations become more and more mature, their ability to consume more and more data usually goes up if they're growing properly. But you can't go from ground zero to 100 miles an hour, right? Without bumping yourself all along the way. So from a data standpoint, it certainly is important to stay focused and focus on those things that are most critical to your success right now and that you're able to put a process in place

to be able to leverage the data that you have. So having 72 KPIs, that's next to impossible to be able to manage. And you won't be able to determine the right insights from all those different KPIs. You want the ones that are going to be, that you can make intelligent decisions from. And so it's important to focus in on those. And then it's also important, as we discussed earlier, is to make sure that the data that you're collecting is good. So if you're collecting it on 72, gosh, keeping that level of data integrity could be next to

impossible. Having it on five or six or seven, whatever it is, much easier to do. And then from my perspective, the other thing that you need to be able to do is be very consistent with the way that you make decisions for your business and for your people so that people understand what the motivations are, what the triggers are, what they should be focusing in on. And if you're pulling in data from too many sources, then it's hard to be consistent. And if you're not looking at the data consistently and the way you make decisions waffles and varies from time to time, that sends mixed messages as well. And then the last thing I would say is that you need to make a habit out of it, right? When you're decisions waffles and varies from time to time. That sends mixed messages as well. And then the last thing I would say is that you need to make a habit out of it, right? When you're collecting data and you're using data to make decisions, you need to do that repeatedly,

consistently, and ultimately make it a habit so that it's part of the DNA of the organization overall. Yeah, I agree with that. And I think that with dispatchers, it was a hard role for me to come up with a performance pay and we're still working on it. But I had a guy here recently who's going to be out here two times more. I'm hiring him as a consultant because he's that good. He ran a 480 technician company and he said, Tommy, I've done every performance pay in the world for dispatchers. The thing that motivates dispatchers that's going to get results is how much time are they spending on the phone with the customer and the tech, which should be a lot. You want them on the phone all

day long. They're the communicators. They're the mediators between the techs and the customers as well as the CSRs. So he said, that's a huge one. How much time are they on the phone with the techs and the customers as well as the CSR. So he said, that's a huge one. How much time are they on the phone with the techs versus customers and add it up together? And then the second biggest thing is windshield time. If they could figure out a way to kill windshield time and get more jobs into a day. And then he said, there's a couple other ones he's going to come back out and show me, but it's cool because he's been where I want to go. So I think you're absolutely hit the nail on the head when you said you got to find things that motivate, what are they in control of? And then you got,

I've always said this line and people have heard it a million times on the podcast, but you got to inspect what you expect, right? Yep. Absolutely. That's a key one there. So if you're not inspecting what you expect, then you can't expect people to change, right? So there's a lot of data that's overlooked by most business owners. Can you give me some examples of ones that you often see in customers that you bring on? Yeah. I mean, gosh, Tommy, you just started to hit on many of those already. Within the service organization, there are metrics across the board that are important to running their business, whether they're areas in productivity, whether it's areas in customer service or service

technician performance, whether it's the profitability of the organization, whether or not it's in an area of compliance, or whether it's kind of a process side of things. And so if you're not on a system and you're doing things paper-based or Excel spreadsheets via email, it becomes very difficult to look at many of those different areas of the business. So when people get onto a system, whether it's a field service automation system like FieldAware or some other platform, whether it's just the CRM side of things, you start to unveil different aspects of the nature of the business. And so, you know, looking at customer retention is an important thing. Looking at what customers drive the most profit, which customers are driving the most work for you. Sometimes the most work is not always the best because you may be on an annual maintenance plan.

And so going out to the customer 10 times a week is not a good thing, right? That's just eroding your margins. And so being able to look at a variety of those different levers that help you manage the business, both from a profitability standpoint, but from an execution standpoint, and then also be able

to measure the business from the resources that you're deploying. How quickly and how good are certain technicians in turning the work order around and doing that in a very profitable sense? You mentioned screen time and drive time and things of that nature. How well does your dispatch organization know the resources that they need to pull in to work those work orders? And then are they putting together the most efficient route for the technician for that day, whether they're doing that manually or whether or not they're doing that with a routing and optimization element of the software too. So having those different things and then having access to the underlying data reveals a lot about the organization and how well you're able to run the business.

And so, you know, it really depends, once again, on how large the organization is, whether or not they're on a mature technology platform as to the types of insights that you can gain from it. But one of the areas that I think when we implement a system for a customer is just being able to see the productivity of their workforce is really, really important, right? And so being able to see which workers are most efficient, being able to see whether or not the dispatch organization is ultimately doing the best that they can as far as routing and deploying the resources that are available.

First-time fixed rate is another one of those things that dependent on the type of organization you work for, that's a critical factor for them. Yeah, it's weird. I see three type of companies and I hate to narrow it down to three because there's a lot, but they get so overwhelmed in the day-to-day,

they never get to spend any time working on the processes. And then you got the opposite end of that. They're trying to figure out who ordered the extra stapler and they're focusing on the wrong things. So their whole day, they're very productive, but they're just, their brain goes too micro. And then you've got the third one, which I hope that we are kind of living right now is, you don't sweat the small stuff and you tend to go after the biggest bottlenecks. And you got dedicated people that are always working on the business almost 99% of the time. So I tend to not get bogged down in the day-to-day, although I'm looking really a lot more into hiring and training. And so hiring, training and dispatching is my big two things here. Hiring and training are kind of one thing, if you think

about it. And then the next one big thing for me is making sure dispatch is dialed in because dispatch has such a huge role that people don't understand on revenue. And a lot of the people listening, the CSR is the dispatcher, is also the office manager. What I would say to that is start to tear those apart over time as you grow, because you can't be responsible for everything. Because when you're responsible for everything, you're responsible for nothing, right? Yep. I mean, what you're talking about, is taking those steps of maturity of that operational maturity. You know, you start off where the dispatcher is that office manager and dispatcher, and basically it's the fire department, right?

They got to put out any fire that happens, whether it's getting the right resources to a customer that's demanding or whether or not it's rescheduling because they're not available. I mean, they're doing a lot of different things. But as the organization, and as you grow and you can mature the organization, you can start to split those responsibilities out a little bit more. But if you do that too soon, then you've just created too much overhead. So finding the right balance between being able to grow yourself and align that to the maturity of your organization and where you are from a growth standpoint is critical to

success. And then from our perspective, we look at that and say, how where you are from a growth standpoint, is critical to success. And then from our perspective, we look at that and say, how are you doing operationally? And then what's the maturity of your technology? You might start off doing things on paper, and then you move it to spreadsheets, and then hopefully get to an automation platform of some sort. I like baby steps, but at the same time, I want to act like the company I'm going to become. And the biggest mistake I used to make is I'd hire somebody that could talk to me a certain way at a high level. And I never, I'd hire them on and they made too much money. They just, they didn't have any results. So now I'm like, I'll give you a comfortable base.

And then let's talk about what you're able to control and have them have skin in the game, right? And if they've got skin in the game, then they tend to figure out a way to hit their goals that they've outlined for themselves. They come in with expectations. And there's very few people that'll come in and give all they can without any motivation

to be part of winning the game. So I've literally spent years developing compensation programs that motivate the right things. And most of them are designed to either get them to quit if they suck or make them make a lot of money and be three people in one. They literally run circles around three people and make a ton of money. So it's become a melting pot for amazing people when you get this performance pay. I talk about it a lot,

but what is your aspect or whatever on that? From my perspective and from my HR experience and everything that I've had, I totally agree. I've had to develop compensation plans and bonus programs and even stock programs and things of that nature. And skin in the game is certainly a critical aspect of it. I think what's really important, and I think I heard you say this, is that you're okay with them failing, but more importantly, you're totally okay with them succeeding and blowing it out of the water and making money. And so as long as you go into it with that really open mindset and you set up the compensation plans appropriately, and it's driving the right behavior

that's supporting the growth of your business for where you're at today and where you want to go to tomorrow, that is certainly an important aspect. And then it helps to model that behavior that you're looking for as well. But I go back to one of the things that you said you focus on the most and certainly hiring the right level of talent into the organization, whether it's truly talent from a skillset standpoint or whether it's talent from a mindset standpoint, getting the right people for the organization that are bought into where you're trying to go to and what you're trying to motivate them to do is critical to any DNA of a good organization. I love it. You've gotten a lot of good feedback over the years and recognition and commendations for being a great leader and helping companies

expand their operations internationally. What are some of the market challenges that you see pretty much always popping up? Yeah, it's surprising. A couple of things, and they kind of tie back to some of the things that we've already been talking about. So one of the most critical things that I see that I think companies are always challenged with is being able to identify what, at least we in marketing, would say their ICP, their ideal customer profile, and who that is, and aligning the business to really go towards that ICP. That's one of the things that is really hard. It sounds totally intuitive and simple, but businesses want to, especially when they're growing, sometimes it can be hard to stay focused. And sometimes it's

really easy to try to find new areas that you want to go in, but maybe isn't a really good alignment for yourself. And so that's certainly one of the things that I think for any business is to really kind of step back and understand what that ideal customer profile looks like. And then take a step back and see how you're aligning what it is that you're delivering as a business, the value proposition that you're delivering. Is that lining up and resonating as well as it can, optimally as it can for that ideal customer? So that's one. I think another thing that I've experienced and I've been fortunate to experience throughout my career is how do you manage growth, right?

And managing growth and managing cash flow. Those are two difficult things for organizations to kind of grow through. Because as you grow, you talked about being the company that you want to be. And we talked about baby steps. And I don't know that I like baby steps, but I don't like to take huge, giant leaps that take you completely out of control and becomes kind of a snowball effect. And then your business is kind of out of whack because you've grown too fast. Sometimes you can grow too fast.

You can have too many customers. You don't have the infrastructure to support those customers. And all of a sudden, your customer satisfaction goes tanking, but you're growing, right? But as soon as that customer satisfaction starts tanking, that growth term all of a sudden turns into a decline. And then it's a huge deficit to try to correct. So being able to manage that growth, both from the maturity of the organization, but also from the cash flow side of things as well, I think is one of the things that's really important for businesses of all sizes to be able to manage. And so being able to take those steps and digest that growth and be able to look

to the horizon for what's next at the appropriate time is certainly another tricky aspect of growing businesses. So that is kind of important because, for example, this year, we're going to raise the bar about $13 million from last year. But next year, I plan on raising it $100 million. And people would say, well, how are you going to do that? But we built a machine. Number one, we turned the machine off when COVID happened. We couldn't hire. We went on a hiring freeze, but we doing really, really well. But we built a machine. Number one, we turned the machine off when COVID happened. We couldn't hire. We went on a hiring freeze, but we do it really, really well. But we built a machine.

We built a huge training center. We built automated how we're going to get our trucks from enterprise, get them wrapped, get them designed. We've automated an LMS. We've got full-time recruiters. We've got a full robust greenhouse plus spark hire plus velocity. I mean, all the systems you can imagine to inflow lots and lots of people with marketing to keep these people busy. So how is that determined though? What do you hear when you hear a company that's doing 50 million that says they could triple versus a company that's maybe doing 10 that they say grow 20% a year, that's $2 million growth. Yeah. Look, from a growth standpoint, so everything that you just described in your business, you're taking the steps to be able to, what I said was digest that growth that you're looking to go to, right? If you have

aspirations to grow 3X, but you're not doing all that fundamental infrastructural things to be able to support that growth, then while you may be able to achieve it initially or be on the path to achieving that initially, your organization isn't there to support it. And so you might be able to sell and get there, or you might be able to land, it depends on the type of business that you have. In our business, it's one of those things

you could sell a couple of big enterprise accounts and you could double the size of your business. The question is, can you take those enterprise accounts and get them on, get them up, get them running, make them productive and successful and happy with you? And with those big enterprise accounts, there's a lot of demand associated with that. So if you can get blinded to your success and say, well, I just want five more of those and I could triple the company. Well, if you had five more of those and I could triple the company. Well, if you had five more of those, you might not be able to support those five to the level that you need to. So the steps of growth, I think, are important. Having the team in place and the infrastructure in place to support that growth. One of the things that I learned from Ross Perot

working at Perot Systems was, once again, he had a much more conservative approach than I did. He didn't like to have any debt and didn't want to have any unnecessary overhead. I personally think there's a good balance between being leveraged to some degree and growing and be able to feel that growth from that leverage that you have as an organization, but there are many companies that have, once again, grown really quick, become highly leveraged, and then tanked because they haven't been able to support the growth that they developed with that leverage. So finding that right balance is important. Certainly having the right people with the experience that have been there and done that, set up organizations to support that growth is critical. And then

having all the right components in place to support it is an essential part of it as well. And so the mechanisms that you talked about, the process that you talked about for your organization certainly helped to support the aspirations that you have of going to that next level. But there's the difference of going from 16 to 100 million versus wanting to go from 16 to 500 million, right? And so from my experience, there's kind of growth circles or growing pains that organizations go. And it's kind of the doubling and the tripling of the organization. When you go from an organization of 5 million to 10 million, that's a big jump in the nature of what it takes to run that organization. Going from 10 to 50 is another significant jump. Going from 50 to 100 million

is a significant growth, and 100 to 500, 500 to a billion. I've been fortunate enough to be around organizations as they grow through that. And the level of organizational maturity needed to sustain that, each of those different steps is different for those organizations. You can overbuild the organization too and bring in too much. And that essentially creates way too much overhead for where you are as far as the organization today. And then you can be totally understaffed in that regard too, and be over your head and drowning. And so finding that right balance where you're staying afloat, you're able to tread water and keep air, but be able to propel yourself to that future growth that you're looking for is essential.

Yeah. I had a guy, an investment banker, explain to me more on EBITDA. It was more one to three to EBITDA, we find that the owner is the salesperson, very involved. Yep. Three to five EBITDA, we find that the process is starting to get stronger, but it's a lot of work. From five to eight EBITDA, lots of good hirings going on. And after eight, he said his win, believe it or not, he told me, he said, that's the most fun I've heard from entrepreneurs because now you've got the systems, you told me, he said, that's the most fun I've heard from entrepreneurs because now you've got the systems, you've got the right people, and now it's go time. And we're going to hit that this year.

So I don't know if he was telling me that just because I'm there, but he said, get ready because it's going to be a fun ride. So I'm excited just to start to fly between acquisitions, organic growth, with just some strategic marketing. But the operations had to be dialed in. And there's still things in this last quarter that we're dialing in. So for your perspective, is now a good time for businesses to be expanding? You mean as far as with the global economy? Yeah, COVID and all this crap going on.

Look, from my perspective, there's never not a good time to grow. Now, that's easy to say. ahead and be able to capitalize on where the economy is today and where it's going to be tomorrow. And so I think there's always a great opportunity to fuel growth, whether that's growth today or growth for the future. Look, 2020 is like the year of the lemon. So you got to figure out how to make lemonade out of this stuff. And service organizations have been hit, but there's also lots of opportunity and they're part of the essential worker that's out there as well. So we got to keep the lights on. We got to be able to move the economy forward. And the service industry itself is at the heart of that. We're killing it. I mean, I don't think there's a lot

of companies and I'm not trying to... if we're essential, everybody got busier. So private equity companies are looking at us saying you're worth more than you were worth before this. Yep. I've seen movie theaters going bankrupt. It's amazing what's happening in these industries. So I'm not proud of it. It's not something that I'm like, awesome, but we're fortunate that we came out of this

like we did like a lot of companies. Yeah. And companies like yourself, now's a great time to be able to do some reflection about where you want to go to, because you've been positioning yourself and growing through a very difficult kind of economic period. But that's, I mean, things cycle through and there's going to be an ongoing change. Certainly, it helps to be part of that essential cycle. And so that certainly plays well to everything. But one of the things that we're doing, we've just done a big primary research program with Field Service News, one of the publications in the space. And that's exactly what we were looking at is what is happening to investments in field service organizations coming out of the pandemic,

whether or not we are really truly coming out of it just yet or whether or not we're still kind of mired in it. But we wanted to get a good baseline of what we're calling kind of ground zero coming out of pandemic world is, right? And we're still in the process of pulling together all the insights that we've had, but we pulled out over a couple of hundred different service organizations. And there are a couple of different, I guess, impacts. And it somewhat depends, once again, on the size of the organization. Many organizations, and it sounds like maybe your organization is one of these, were in

a position where they were looking to make certain investments from a technology standpoint that was part of their future horizon or where they wanted to go to. And what the pandemic did was it made them evaluate making those investments. And they actually pulled some of those investments forward because it was required to be able to meet some of the requirements that the pandemic created. And so it's essential that they get those things, those initiatives funded now and move them forward ahead of some other things that maybe aren't so much a priority right now. And then some other organizations, like I said, unfortunately, they might've been smaller, didn't have the reserves to be able to

be that forward-looking and they're buckling down and trying to get the lights on. So there is a little bit of a mix out there. Yeah, it's crazy. It's feast or famine right now. So is there anything... You've been involved in marketing so long. I like to be a master of one thing and then go on to the next one. So we work with a data scientist on mailers, hitting the right people at the right time. Email marketing, text message marketing. So lots of different types of mailers. And then there's online, lots and lots of stuff. Google is God. Facebook's amazing. Nextdoor is awesome. If I could go all digital, I would. I just think that conventional stuff like radio, TV, billboards and some type of yard signs create a brand. And I thought that

was going away, but little did I know, if you listen to the podcast two and a half years ago, I said, forget that stuff. But now I've learned the brand lives in the subconscious brain and it's why people buy. And I didn't understand human beings so much. So what do you have to say about that? Brand versus direct marketing versus... Because we've got our branding that comes to us, which is one part of the business. And we've got our Browse to Repair Phoenix, the non-branded leads. And it costs a lot to become a brand. It's not cheap. So what is your whole take on that? Look, brand can be your cash cow. So if you can build brand, you can build reputation. It carries tremendous weight and can be the catalyst and what fuels

all those other channels that you mentioned, right? And so brand is one of those things that you have to earn it in the hearts and minds of your customers. So it depends on where your customers are. And for many home service organizations, their customers are their customers' neighbors, or your prospects are your customers' neighbors and things of that nature. And so that branding, you talked about skinning the fleet vehicles that you have and presenting your brand in that fashion. Essential, right? Essential. It's powerful what that will do to professionalize your organization and give prospects confidence in who you are and what you do. And so I certainly think building out brand

is essential. Many of those things are done, as you said, in very kind of traditional methods, but that brand is what can fuel the digital side of your business. And the digital side is what can actually help you ultimately scale and explode. I love it. What other insights can you give us on marketing that maybe we don't necessarily think about? I think we talked about data. We talked about where things are going.

And in the area of marketing, things are changing. They've been changing year to year. It's becoming more exponential type changes in marketing because of the data and because of what Google, Facebook, Nextdoor, others, LinkedIn, all can start to provide the insight. Sometimes it's a little scary, right? And maybe it is scary. But there is a plethora of opportunity to be able to take your marketing investments, channel them into the platforms that your prospects back in the... It wasn't actually that long ago

as being one of the main forces. Now we're able to actually look at the types of people that are looking for your services, where they're traveling on the internet and what they're doing and what they're looking at. And you're able to dial it in as far as who it is that you want to get in front of. And then it's just being able to be there at the right time, right place with the right message. And then, as you mentioned, having a brand that will resonate with them for what it is that they need and having the proof points and the validation in the marketplace, customer success, reviews, and recognition are all critical to lowering the barriers to entry for any prospect.

So from a marketing perspective, there's two sides to the coin. One is more and more data, more and more information, more and more insights, more and more ways of looking and slicing and dicing. And so there's even a greater opportunity to scale. The drawback, the flip side of that is it is becoming a little bit more complex. And so smaller organizations that don't have the in-house skills to be able to do that need to look at bringing in an agency or some level of support to be able to effectively market.

So it's important to build that out and make sure that you plan budget-wise to be able to do that efficiently. And it's more than just spraying your market with your brand. There's a little bit more to it. So making sure that you plan for that accordingly, make sure that you support the growth that you're looking for through marketing, work on your brand and your reputation, because that's the cornerstone of what you're going to be able to leverage in those other channels that you have.

And then work either with your team in-house or with an agency and make sure that you're measuring the success of the marketing programs. And when you're finding something that's working, you want to pour some gasoline on that and make it really burn because those are gold mines that you have there. You know, one of the observations I'm starting to make is it's going to be the rise.

You're going to watch exponential growth versus linear growth as big companies start to rise. And I think the home service companies that are creating manual standard operating procedures that are paying attention to the workers are going to be recognized and going to be partnering up. I'll be the go-to garage door company, I think, for Amazon, Facebook, Google. What they've learned is you can't Uber the home service companies because you need reliable transportation. You need someone that's educated on how to fix the problem. You need someone, and it can't be the cheapest because those people, they don't run a good company.

Their trucks don't match. I think there's going to be a lot of wealthy plumbers and HVAC and garage door and fireplaces. I think there's going to be some really, really big people that come out of the next few years because it's all about systematizing it. They need reliability. I've had several technology companies, lead aggregators, call me up and say, you know, we thought we were going to make a lot of money. And these are billions of dollars valuations. And the head of the departments have said, we thought we were going to do so well by bringing in the little guy. Little did we know, the little guys are unreliable. They don't answer their phones. They don't have the right tooling. They don't have the right education.

They don't have the right insurance. So they said, we're looking for companies like you now that could give us consistency. That it's not like we turn on the leads for two weeks and then turn them off for two months because we're trying to hire people. And that's the difference. Uber, just you got to own a car that's reliable.

That's it. There's a lot more prerequisites when you got it, wanting to go into home service. Yeah, no, absolutely. And what you just said, I think it totally resonates with me. The professionalism, being able to systematize what you're doing, building out repeatable processes, leverage technology where you can. That's where we come in is to be able to then make that flow that much more efficiently for you, right? And that creates a level of differentiation that the less sophisticated service providers can't provide. And you can, I mean, once again,

you can pour gasoline on that and really make it go. Yeah, it's'm just talking about, this is the kind of stuff I love. Let me ask you a few other questions as we're starting to wrap this up. Mark, first, if someone wants to get ahold of you, learn more about what you guys do, how do we get ahold of you professionally at the business and then also individually? Yeah. So certainly on LinkedIn is one easy way to get ahold of me just kind of personally on that level. From a business standpoint,

my email address is mark, M-A-R-C, dot Tatarsky, T-A-T-A-R-S-K-Y at fieldaware.com. And so I'm easily accessible. I'm transparent. I like to interact with people whenever, however I can. So I'm happy to do that'm transparent. I like to interact with people whenever, however I can. So I'm happy to do that. And I'm happy to connect with people via LinkedIn as well. Got it. And if you had to pick three books that have been super influential in your life,

what would those three books be? Ah, look at you whipping up the book question. Getting to Yes, I think has always been been an important book and one of those just kind of old school books that every marketer and salesperson can glean different insights from. I would say, oh, you sprung one on me. I wasn't even ready for that. But I'm trying to think of another really good book that I really like. Hey, don't worry about it. I can give a couple for you. Well, I'm an influence. That's a good book that people don't really know about.

I've got a book, another book sitting here that I've gotten into. It's called Six Tires No Plan, The Impossible Journey of the Most Inspirational Leader that Almost Nobody Knows. And it's about the discount tire in the 60s. But just some random books. I just love to hear about random books. Another one that I just recently read was Atomic Habits. Yep. That's a great book. And I read a lot of recommendations for that as well. That's one of those where, you know what, I didn't think I was going to like it, but as I read through it and was taking in everything that, I think his name was James

Clear, had to say, God, it just made tremendous sense, right? So, you know, certainly looking at all those little micro improvements that you can make day to day for yourself, for your business, really resonated for me with where we're at and where I'm at kind of in business today. From a book standpoint, I've helped produce a number of different books around Lean Six Sigma and kind of the lean business side of things. And so from my management consulting days, those books really resonate as well as far as process improvement and being able to apply improvements that build upon themselves. Well, if you look at something like the Toyota way, it's how to triple your process in any business and build quality in the workplace system,

stuff like that. So that's a great book. And the two second lean was a really good book too. But yeah, so Mark, listen, here's what I always do at the end second lean was a really good book too. But yeah. So Mark, listen, here's what I always do at the end of these. I want to give you the floor, anything on your mind, anything we might've not talked about, anything that you could give to the audience to kind of go take action on improving their business. I'll hand it off to you. Yeah. So certainly I think, look, we talked about being able to make lemons out of lemonade. Right now is a great time to be able to do that. If you've got that luxury to have a little bit of a tailwind to be able to get through these difficult times, now's a great time to be able to be a little bit reflective about

your process, about the technology that you're leveraging, and build yourself to where you want to be next. Going to where the puck is not where it is today. Breaks my heart that the Dallas Stars didn't win the Stanley Cup. But anyway, so that's my little bit of a hockey analogy there. But certainly, I think being able to capitalize on the opportunities presented to you, being able to differentiate your organization, being able to use technology to differentiate your organization and fuel your growth for the future is critical.

And in today's world, whether it's home services or broader services, technology can be really a game changer for you. Awesome. Well, I'm truly a believer that you're on to something. We're on for exponential growth. The way technology is quadrupling on a monthly basis,

it's just things are going to change. It's time to learn more about 3D printers and how they're going to change the world because I truly believe that those are the next steps to space and to the final frontier. But I do believe there's some crazy things happening in the back of the scene. You mentioned 3D printers.

I mean, that's one of those things that a couple of years ago, you wouldn't believe that that's even possible. But now, yes, I mean, the whole idea of parts depots and the way that they have that may go away in the not too distant future here, right? Maybe print on demand for parts. It's pretty crazy. I got to say that. And it's exciting. And it's, you know, Amazon is going to know how many wipes you wipe your ass on a daily basis here pretty soon. They're going to start sending toilet paper based on your orders based on, and they're going to put it right in your garage for you. They're going to load up all the food in your fridge because you're going to have a fridge in your garage.

I see the not too far future and it's, it's pretty crazy. You know, I don't, I'm a huge fan of capitalism. I really am tried and true capitalism, but I got to tell you, if you could make things on demand and there's enough food for everybody and people could really live on less because you could do more with robotics. I hate to say this, but it seems like you can start taking care of people that they don't really need to do much. And I hope that's no one ever close to me or my family, but it just seems like that's the way the world's going. I don't know. We're in crazy times. This year has been a crazy year, both from opportunity and just from life changes. You know, this year has really changed and has created a lot

of opportunities for doing business differently. The ability to improve is driven by change. And so changing the way that we operate. So for instance, being able to do video conferencing, remote learning, things of that nature, the home delivery service has changed people's attitudes about how they accept these types of services and the way that people work in general. And I think that's going to really change the way the service industry is going forward permanently,

not just because of COVID now, but just changing in the way the service industry is going forward permanently, not just because of COVID now, but just changing in the way that we expect services to be delivered in the future. I love it. This has been great. Well, listen, Mark, I really, really appreciate you coming on today. I always get a lot out of these technology kind of discussions and learning more about data. And it's just nice to make people aware of what's possible. So hopefully they reach out to you and learn more about FieldAware. And I really appreciate it. Hey, thanks for having me on, Tommy. It's been great talking to you, learning a little bit more about your business. It sounds like you're heading great places and you're an inspiration for

everybody that's out there. Hey, man, I appreciate that. Listen, you have a great day and enjoy the weather there in Dallas. All right. You too. Thanks a lot. Hey, guys, I just wanted to thank you real quick for listening to the podcast. From the bottom of my heart, it means a lot to me. And I hope you're getting as much as I am out of this podcast. Our goal is to enrich your lives and enrich your businesses and your internal customers, which is your staff. And if you get a chance,

please, please, please subscribe. You're going to find out all the new podcasts. You're going to be able to ask me questions to ask the next guest coming on and do me a quick favor, leave a quick review. It really helps us out when you like the podcast and you leave a review make it four or five sentences tell us how we're doing and i just wanted to mention real quick we started a membership it's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash club you get a ton of inside look at what we're going to do to become a billion dollar company and uh we're just we're telling everybody our secrets basically and people say why do you give your secrets away all the time? And I'm like, you know, the hardest part about giving away my secrets is actually trying to get people to do them.

So we also create a lot of accountability within this program. So check it out. It's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash club. It's cheap. It's a monthly payment. I'm not making any money on it to be completely frank with you guys, but I think it will enrich your lives even further. So thank you once again for listening to the podcast. I really appreciate it.