The Home Service Expert Podcast - Getting In Front Of Leads That Are Ready To Do Business

Episode Date: January 6, 2023

Doriane Mouret is the VP of Marketing at Jobox, a software company that provides home service marketplaces with an AI infrastructure to directly connect their customers with home service pros. As an experienced leader and entrepreneur, Doriane understands the challenges that come with starting and managing your own business. Today, Doriane helps home service pros overcome the challenges they face when scaling their business and building their careers by embracing technology. In this episode, we talked about social media, digital marketing, influencer marketing, market research, and AI...

a lot of the things that they need to do, which is upselling, cross-selling, making sure that customers are happy with the job they've done. On Jobbox specifically, how we keep pros is, like you said, we re-engage them all the time. We make sure that they're active on the platform.

We make sure that we send them jobs when it's relevant to them. So re-engaging with the pros is super important to us. I think a lot of the mistakes that business owners make in general, not just home service pros, but it's to focus on acquisition.

And I'm also, I founded startups in the past and I raised money with startups and the investors even that invest in your startups, they're going to look at acquisition first. Like how many new users have you added to your software this month? So it's the entire system is geared toward acquisition where working on retention and making sure you keep your customers is actually the most valuable long-term because

not only you will keep a customer, but they will likely spend more money over time with you. 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. All right, guys, welcome back to the Home Service Expert. Today, I have Dorian Murray with me. She's an expert in marketing, digital marketing, market research, social media marketing, advertising, and video production. She's in St. Petersburg, Florida, and she works at Jobox.ai. She's a VP of marketing.

It's a software company that provides home service marketplaces like Home Depot with an AI infrastructure to directly connect their customers with home service pros. As an experienced leader and entrepreneur, Dorian understands the challenges that come with starting and managing your own business. As a VP of marketing at Jobox, she has extensive knowledge about the home service industry and where it's headed, the challenges home service pros face when scaling their business, and home service pros can level up their careers by embracing technology. Dorian, it's a pleasure to have you on today. Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited. Me too. So we talked about a lot of things before getting this started, but I'd say I get a lot of companies that talk about CRMs. They don't know how to get started. They're using QuickBooks. They don't understand where the world is headed. I'm right on the borderline of being a millennial, 1983.

And if I've got the opportunity to book something, a lot of times I just want to call, talk to the person, make sure that they're prepared for me and when they can get to me. But a lot of people are booking online. We use different softwares that talk to service type, like Schedule Engine, which they just recently bought. And a lot of people are booking online. We use different softwares that talk to service type, like Schedule Engine, which they just recently bought. And a lot of people schedule directly from Google to get my job scheduled. I mean, there's Jobber, Housecall Pro. It sounds like Jobox is a couple of things.

Can you explain in as layman's terms as possible what Jobox is? Yes. I mean, you brought up so many things that I want to talk about and something that we maybe should talk about later as well as how Google has basically eaten the marketing side of the business for home service bros, where 95% of leads are coming from Google these days. And it's something that is not necessarily working. It's a race to the bottom where you have to pay more and more for leads every day to get customers so definitely something i want to talk about if you don't mind later but in terms of what job box is it's basically an operating system to manage your business on your phone that also

sends you jobs from demand partners and you don't pay for a lead gen fee for those jobs so it's a rev sure model that means you, you know, right now, if you're pro, you're probably paying Google, I don't know, it depends, obviously, 10, 20, 30, 50 bucks. Probably that's on the expensive side for a lead. You don't know if the lead is going to be a good one. You take the phone call,

you spend five minutes identifying the problem, realize you can't do it. And boom, you just spent that amount of money that you can't get back. And this is super frustrating for pros because it's a risk every time they decide to take a lead from Google and from those lead gen and dispatchers and all of that. And so what Jobbox is doing is it's actually giving you all the details of the job ahead of time so you can actually identify whether or not it's a job for you. And if it is, you complete the job and you only pay at the end if you actually

complete it and get paid by the customer. So we're trying to kind of like switch the model and make it more beneficial to the pro instead of those dispatchers and lead generators. I completely understand. And actually, I went down a road years ago to create a software similar, based on similar like criteria. The only problem that i had is i'll give you a little secret oh i don't know if i should be saying this but i'm gonna do it the highest people up at thumbtack called me and they said hey we've got some serious issues they told me look we had a dream when we started this company that all the small guys have a chance now because we wanted to make it the closest person and give these smaller guys a chance,

but our model's not working really well. And this is right when COVID hit, they were going to pay me tons of money to go out there and speak to them. I told them, if your leads were good, I'd take all of them because I have a training center that trains for two months. I have brand new trucks. I have for night weekends, every holiday we're here. We've got the best insurance. We carry the best parts and we've got the best training and the best tools. The problem that you have, Thumbtack, is I said, you're trying to find a person for convenience, but I want to make sure they got a background check, a drug test. I want to make sure they drive a new vehicle. They're not going to break down. See what happens on certain lead aggregation systems is the guy will fill up for a day and then he's done because these guys are

workers. They don't really own companies. They just, they go out, they try to do some ads and they know how to do the work, but they don't know how to run a business. They don't know how to train. They don't have anybody else working with them. So it's a lot of one man. We call them Chuck in a truck. And I said, I'll pay you guys 500 grand a month for every lead. You could give me in every city. I don't really care.

And I can run every single one of them. And if I can't, I have capacity. So I can hire new guys and I can train them. And every guy is going to take pictures of every job. We're going to weigh every single garage door. We'll have 50 pictures and videos. And you'll know exactly how long the guys were there because we monitor that. We send them a text message of the picture of the person. And what you guys are hoping for is to get a thousand small guys and try to get the expected

outcome. And it's very, very hard when they're not on the same standard operating procedures, on the same checklists, on the same manuals. So I love the concept with great companies. And you guys are probably seeing this is the best pros that take the most jobs, have the most systems, and they have certain criteria for hiring. And I love the concept because there's so many companies I know that do a great job. They just don't know how to market,

but also they're not taking the pictures. And I had to build systems and really, really systematize the way we trained and how we smile and how to build customer advocacy and play with the dog. And instead of ringing the doorbell, we knock on the door

because strangers ring the doorbell, we knock on the door because strangers ring the doorbell, friends knock. We ask great questions. We diagnose the person before the problem. If somebody's in a hurry, we move quickly. If they want to talk, we spend an hour talking with them. We place our stickers in the right spots.

We offer the best warranty. I'm not knocking Joe boxes. I don't know a lot about it, but it's just the concept I love because we need to even the playing field is what I thought. But then I thought, look at the rest of the playing field. They're shit. They're garbage.

They're driving an old Dodge truck from 1986 that's not wrapped. And then you got who's the cheapest, meaning who's buying the parts from China and not fixing it correctly and going out there twice a year. And then you get customers hating you because why didn't you offer that to me when you were here? Now I can't go to my son's soccer game again. So I've literally thought about both. And right now I'm just like, I want to be the garage door person that anybody would choose.

We're definitely not the cheapest, but we're there exactly when we say what we'll be. And you know, we got a really good technician with a background check. You're getting his profile. He's got a marked vehicle that's completely wrapped. And that's what I consider a great service. Yeah.

And I think you said a good word here, which I really like. It systemizes. Let's pick it a spectrum, right? So on one side of the spectrum, you have companies like yours, which are like super established, have already all their system in place, don't necessarily need someone like Jobbox. And then on the opposite side, you have the people who, like you said, have nothing or driving a broken car. But in between those two extremes, there is a population of people who are really good at doing what they do. And they're just really bad at managing a business or doing

their marketing and all of that. And this is really the audience that Javox is the best for because we systemize things that you spent obviously years systemizing on your own. Things like, for example, having professional invoices, that's a small thing, but being able to automatically generate super pro invoices and being able to let the customer pay on the phone and sign the invoice directly on your phone does make those pros look way more pro without necessarily having to go through those years of learning that you went through. And there is a need, even though it sounds unfair, right? You went through all those years of training and we're giving those tools for free to those guys. But we need more pros. There's not enough skilled trades people out there. We need more people. So it's important to bring, instead of just, you know, focusing on the elites,

try to get more of those guys to have access to the customers as well. So I'll tell you one thing I'm super frustrated with. When I go on Amazon, I bought an electric bicycle and the guy came here one week later, showed up late, no uniform, didn't have a right bolt because it didn't have one. And now he's going to come back a month later and it's sitting in my garage. We're getting it done. I've never had a good experience with Amazon because they don't hire true professionals.

It's almost like a handyman that could do a little bit of everything. I had a guy put together a couple chairs and he's sitting there. He pulls out a bag of bolts and nuts a different time. I understand they take what they could get. Certain things you don't need are really, really smart tradesmen. You could hang a TV, but if you don't have the tools, I'm a specialist. I work on residential garage doors. I can fix them, replace them, or service them. And what I find is when there's a jack of all trades, they kind of take what they could get. They kind of take things that they're not a pro at. They don't have the right tools. They're not efficient at it. They don't have the right stuff on the truck. That's why I think Amazon needs a

company like me more than I need them. That's why Amazon Home Services has failed the first time, failed the second time. They're on their third run. And I promise you, they're going to shit the bed. I mean, they will. And what they did start doing is charging a lot more for the labor side of things because they realized we can't even get good pros to do the jobs for this cheap because they're getting the Chinese parts. And then they want you to install this opener from

China and they want us to put our name on it. And then we end up with a bad review because they bought a piece of junk, but we're supposed to install it. And then if we go out there and tell them this is not a really great product that you purchased to install, then we're the bad guys too. It's like a race to the bottom, in my opinion, sometimes with like Amazon. But at the same time, Google has four algorithms. Pay-per-click, they got the Google My Business page, which shows the hours and reviews. And those are the top three. You've got the Google Local Services.

So LSA, Local Service Ads, which is the Google guarantee. And then you've got the Google local services. So LSA local service ads, which is the Google guarantee. And then you've got organic and you know, I know all four of those. And I will say, I agree with you. Google is kind of like the yellow pages now. I mean, most things are found on Google. Angie and home advisor are now the same company. I've bought leads from e-local. I've done every lead gen company. And there are some good ones, but the question is where are they getting those leads from and what's the quality? Yelp is not buying from really anybody, but Yelp, you tend to get blasted on Yelp. I use Yelp. I mean, I literally am located, I spend money on Yelp, but Google loves Yelp too.

It's on the algorithm. But what I find is Google's a necessary evil. I mean, you make money on Google. Pay-per-click is expensive. What are your thoughts? Because you said it's a necessary evil. I think you said about Google or whatever you said. Tell me what your thought is and where we're going. Is Google not the answer?

Yeah, I definitely want to get into that. I want to address something you just said about the quality of the leads and the quality of the answer. Yeah, I definitely want to get into that. I want to address something you just said about the quality of the leads and the quality of the pros. I think one thing that Jobbox is trying to do is to minimize that trial and error by adding AI to the mix where we're able to use, I mean, I'm not going to get into the jargon,

but basically we're able to analyze a job in details, not just where it is, but like what type of parts do you need, how much time it's going to take, whether or not it's in the skill set of a pro. And we're able to match with a pro, not just based on their location or location of their shop, but where they are right now, whether or not they're available, when they'll be available, whether or not they have the skill set, whether they have the parts, whether they're really good at doing this specific job. So we're using dozens of criteria to match a pro with a job. When you go to those marketplaces, you're talking NG, Yelp, Amazon, they don't have that capacity of matching. And so what they do is they use the simplest thing they can use, which is how close are you from that job?

This is easy to know. So they take the location. They say, okay, Y This is easy to know. So they take the location, they say, okay, Yelp is going to do that. It's like, here are the 10 guys who are the closest to you right now to help with this job, but they don't have more fine tune information to make sure that the pro and the customer and the job match. And so one thing Jobbox does is it's able to remove that trial and error so that the pro you get for the job you need is actually the right pro. And like you said, sometimes it's like a simple thing that will not require an expert. Sometimes it's going to be way more involved and you need to use, whether it's humans on the phone, answering the phone and analyzing the job, or it's an actual AI that's able to do it. You need some kind of

matching that is able to improve the efficiency. So I just wanted to talk about this because you mentioned it. Now on the Google side, I heard something like 95% of leads that pros get are from Google, any type of Google, and you talked about the four different channels. And to me, it's a race to the bottom because if Google is owning that and you have to go through Google to get a lead, then we're all going to start paying way more money per lead. And it's happening. Leads are getting more and more expensive on Google, and you're going to have to pay more and more. And because of that, you charge the customer more and more, and it's like a race to the bottom. So I think it's really important that we build systems and ways to get leads that are outside of the Google system. And I think one way to do this

is by reinforcing the marketplaces that offer jobs for free. So we're talking ng-thumbtack-yelp, all those marketplaces where a customer can go and enter a job or ask for a quote and get quotes from a bunch of different pros. Jobbox can go in the background of those marketplaces and make those job matchings way more efficient. So instead of just, you know, right now on Yelp, they're probably using all the criteria, but the main one is location. They just look at the pros that are the closest to you. If we could give Yelp the power to not just use location, but being able to tell, okay,

based on this job's description, this is the right pro right here. And then we connect the pro with the job and the pro doesn't pay for the job until it's completed. This is a completely way of doing business, which might not work for everybody, but at least it's different and we don't just rely on Google to do it. When I've done performance pay,

what I usually do is I'll figure out how to charge the customer more to cover the cost, just like we do with Google. What I've always kind of learned, and this is just my point of view, is I can pay more per lead because I answer the phone 24-7. We've got bilingual people that can take the phone call. We've got trucks that work late.

We work on Sundays where most people don't. We're able to get out there the same day. So some people say, well, you charge a lot of money. And I say, well, our employees need to get insurance and 401ks and be able to afford a house. And they want to drive a new vehicle and they want a place to actually make it. So yes, the customer has to pay for that. And as inflation goes up and I have to pay more, the consumers are always going to pay that. But in the end, they're going to get a great experience. They're going to get a great person who's safe around their family.

And we're going to show up and not be out of business. And what I find is there's a lot of guys out there that run a business that actually own a job. And if you can't go into a workplace, if you're working out of your house, you don't know how to train somebody, you're a one-man army, it's really hard to call that a business because when you're not there, the business doesn't work. So a business means it runs when you're not there. In my definition, a business that only works when you're there is a job. If you got to answer the phone at nights and weekends,

and you got to dispatch your own calls, and you got to run your credit card processing, or you got a couple employees and you do payroll, and you don't even have a place to go into work. I'm not trying to insult anybody because that was me. I started out in a truck. I know what it's like. So I understand by not having the tools,

how important it is to be able to offer financing and sign the tablet instead of having to carry a paper invoice. You're bringing technology to the technician, which is a huge opportunity. You're beginning to learn with AI how long it takes them to do certain jobs, how long the consumer should expect. I think this works in certain aspects. Pest control is easy because you're spraying the house, you're identifying areas. There's certain things

that have an expected outcome. Certain things are going to be very difficult because there's not a core competency of a training that's comprehensive. So about these, you know, Yelp charges me. They charge me not necessarily per lead

like Google does, but they charge me to advertise. They put you at the top. They charge me not necessarily per lead like Google does, but they charge me to advertise. They put you at the top. They allow you to do special deals. They charge for that. If you want to organize your pictures at the top of Yelp, they charge for that. So Angie charges. And the problem is when you compete to be the lowest price, it's usually the worst service. Yes. They charge if you want to be sponsored, if you want to be at the top, right? There's also some organic results. Well, the first 10 are paid.

Yeah, exactly. So you're kind of at the bottom. And so what we're trying to do is to change that system and introduce a system where you actually get the lead for free and can identify whether or not you can do the job and you only play once the job is completed. And if you can't complete a job,

you say, I can't complete it. It goes to the next pro and the second best pro in the list of pros who are identified with AI. So I think there needs to be a way, there needs to be a second way of getting leads because yes, you can keep increasing your price on the consumer side to make up for the increase of the cost of the google lead but how much can you do that like if your only way to get leads is google google has no reason not to manipulate that and be like you know what tomorrow leads are going to be twice as much why because i Because I can't. I agree with you, but when you look at the local service ads, they're about a third of the price of pay-per-click. What they look at is they give a score. Every call is recorded on a Google line and they see how fast you answered it. They see if you said

it's the name of the company. I know a lot of you know i know a lot of people from other countries that tend to be really good at lead gen and they make the phones ring and then they're just they spam a lot of google stuff and they manipulate the system but then they just sub out the work and you know local service ads they make sure you're all w2 employees you're not a contractor they literally want to see background checks. They want to see a picture of the business. They want to see a picture of me. Google makes all their money from the businesses. They've got to give the best results to the consumer that is searching. Because if I search for Coca-Cola and Pepsi and root beer show up,

I'm not going to go to Google very often. So they got to make sure that they're thinking ahead and they've got, I mean, you got to have a master's degree to get a job at Google to work on their algorithm. And I think Google is understanding that it's certain businesses. They can't charge as much because they're kind of pacing their way out of the industry. But then you get a lot of guys that don't know what they're doing and they

go on a Google pay-per-click and they spend a fortune because they're not optimized. They don't have a good quality score. It's just interesting, the dynamic. And I do agree with you though. There needs to be something out there that makes the playing field fair, but... It's just another channel that people can get leads from.

Google does not necessarily have the insights that companies like Dropbox can have because we're also, you know, helping the pros manage their business. So we have visibility on their business without them having to talk to us. So like you said, anybody can go on,

on Google and we see it all the time. When you type for, you know, locksmiths near me or garage door repair near me, there's a lot of those results that are also just lead gen people who are not pros, but they're actually just Google businesses that are buying the leads and they're reselling to the pros. And I don't think it's good for the industry that this is happening, that we're having all those lead generator professionals,

not professionals, it's going to be confusing if I use this term, but basically lead gen people are just focused on how can I optimize my SEM and my SEO to get that lead first so that I can resell it to the local locksmith who actually is going to do the job. We want to avoid that. My Israeli and friends

that are in the locksmith space and garage doors, they've manipulated the system for years. They've got their call centers and they just sell leads and they do a lot of spam black hat stuff. And they're always beating this. It's like the guy that cracks the cable box. Every once in a while, you'll beat the cable box, then they'll figure it out. But you've been doing this a while now. First of all, what brought you to Jobox? You're the VP of marketing, which is a huge, you know, that's a big title for a big company. What brought you there and what did you do in the past? Yeah. So my entire career is in marketing. So I've done marketing at Microsoft,

a lot of different startups in San Francisco as well. I was in San Francisco before. And really what I loved about Jobox is the fact that their mission is really about helping the home service pros. It's not about optimizing those marketplaces. The mission of Jobbox is about helping the pros. How can we make those pros? And like you said, when you get started and you're alone in your home and you don't have the inventory and you don't have the business, and you don't have the business skills, and you still want to become a plumber. Like, how do you get started? And we want to help those guys basically get their businesses up and running and growing through Jobbox by getting all those leads for free,

by managing their business on the mobile app. So really, I was really into that mission of helping the pros, as opposed to just another tech company trying to use AI to do something. So there was that, there was the fact that Dropbox had been in stealth since the beginning. So they had raised a lot of money, but they were kind of building everything behind the scenes. And when I came in, I had to do everything from scratch. And this is something that obviously that was very exciting for me, building an entire brand from scratch. And this is what I've been working on the past year. It's been really exciting. So the mission, the fact that my role obviously in the company

was exciting because I got to build everything from scratch. And yeah, and the people I work with, we have an amazing team at Jobbox that I love to work with every day. I want to hear a little bit about a lot of people that I know, they're always wondering, do you go to an agency? Do you bring somebody in-house? What do you do in-house versus not in-house, depending on the size you're at? And if I did get somebody like a director, VP, or just someone great at marketing, what would I be looking at to rate them? And marketing is also paying attention to the call center and making sure that the call center is optimized. And anytime we could shortcut out the call center and get them to book online is awesome because we're making it very easy for

the client to pick a spot and just boom. They don't want to wait. They just say, boom, I'll just book it online. Boom, done. It's booked for tomorrow. It's a great rated company. So talk to me a little bit about home service providers looking for marketing like you. Like you got to build. And you talk about brand and I'm a big brand guy.

I don't want just people searching garage door repair Phoenix. I'm in 19 states. I want them typing in A1 garage door service because they're better clients. They pay more higher conversion rate and they want us. Yes. So I would say there is two different audiences here that I need to address. There is the elite businesses like your business, where you were able to build a nationwide, a big business that is able to manage a lot of those things in-house or to hire contractors to deal with all of those things.

And I want to address that. But before I go into that, there's a majority of everybody else where people are like the one person or two person business, and they're just trying to grow and they don't necessarily have the budget to do marketing on their own. And for those guys, they would have to spend so much money on Google, on all those marketing channels to try to get to the top and to compete with businesses like yours. So that's where I'm hoping that something like Jawbox can help them because it's doing all that work for them. Instead of them having to find the leads and to proactively do Google and do Yelp and do all of that, it's like we send them a lead right to their phone.

It's like, hey, we got this job from Yelp. It's exactly in your wheelhouse. It's five minutes from you. You have time to do it right now. Do you want it? We enable those guys to be successful without having to do proactive marketing. And that's really something I think that needs to grow more in the industry because we can't just rely on the 5%, 10% top

businesses, elite businesses that are able to do it all like yours. We need so many more skilled tradespeople in the country. There's not enough of them. Every skilled trade I've had this year, I had to wait sometimes weeks to get what I needed because there was nobody available. So we can't just realize on the top 10%, we have to learn and we have to help at least 50% get off the ground and get their business running. So for those guys, I said, don't invest necessarily on marketing. Try to work with platforms that can find jobs for you and that can take care of the marketing for you. Because that will be at the stage you're at because you don't have thousands of dollars to put in Google. This is probably the most efficient use of your time where you

are on. And it's not necessarily just Dropbox. There's other platforms, obviously, but I'm biased. Where you are on those platforms and you're able to get those jobs without having to do marketing. On the other guys who have the budget, the question is, what do you need to prioritize? And obviously, the home services industry is very specific. It's not like jewelry or clothes where you can actually make the consumer start wanting something that they don't necessarily need, where you can use marketing to make them want a piece of clothing. If I have a plumbing issue or I need to install a new bathroom, it doesn't matter the marketing that you're going to do. I need to do it. It needs to happen. I have water damage in my house. I need a plumber tomorrow. So it's like healthcare. It's those situations where

you can't really create the demand. It just happens because of the circumstances of life. And I would say because of that, if you take that into account, the most important thing is to be where the customer is looking for you. And until recently, a lot of the skilled tradespeople were pen and paper

and they're putting the phone number on their vans and expecting people to like, basically using the real world and word of mouth to get leads but now the consumers especially the millennials and the gen z they go online they are on google they are on all those platforms trying to find a solution to their problem and so that's where you need to be so invest mostly in digital because that's where everybody is going yeah no you know what's interesting is we talk a lot about demand versus non-demand. And what I try to focus on is service agreements. And I want to get in front of the issues

before it goes bad. And number two, Dorian, if I wanted to get you to call me, you know what I would do? Do you have a garage door? I do. I would say, do you know that the number one entryway to your home for pests, spiders, scorpions in Arizona, mice, nasty, nasty things is through the bottom of your garage door?

Let us come check your bottom rubber. I would say, let me make sure your home is safe. I would say, is your door making noise? If so, let us come out and look at it before it breaks. And those are more top of the funnel, but it creates an emotional response. And it's more of a want than a need. You don't have to, but you want to get it looked at. Of course, if your garage door is not opening, you're going to call a pro. So there's demand services and they're figuring out what if I told you that I believe there's going to be a tax rebate because of the efficiency garage door is going to be going green. You're going to save on

energy. Another thing is, did you know that Amazon could deliver a package in your garage? If you have the MyQ system on your opener, so they can do a one-time use the camera unit and people are like, that's cool. I want that. Yes, that's true. But you're right. You're right. The way I would tell a plumber is how many times have you been in the shower after two people and the hot water runs out? Okay. Let me give you an on-demand hot water heater, a tankless. Like you got to hit those annoying things. When I was in landscaping, I used to say, let me do a water conservation analysis on how we could save you a lot of water each month. And I used to do commercials. So I'd go look at all the hoses, the faucets, I'd do drip systems, I'd put new emitters on them.

I love marketing. So there's going to be a fun conversation. You talked a little bit about that you've done a lot of social media. What do you think about influencer marketing? Because that's a buzzword and I love it. One of my companies I work with, they just had a video go viral. She's a local dancer in Utah. They did a funny dance in front of her garage and it got 2 million views so far. And it's just been one week. Do you believe in influencer marketing? It's not that I believe in it. It's happening, right? It's a big part of marketing these days.

I mean, if you look at the home services industry, especially I would say a lot of the influencers are about the do-it-yourselfers. So basically, if I'm a professional garage door person, I want to teach people who want to learn about how to repair, install, or repair a garage door,

how to do so. This is how I can create influencer marketing. So I would say yes, this influencer marketing is huge these days, especially with TikTok. Are you on TikTok?

Yeah, official Tommy Mello. So there's no W, official Tommy Mello. I'm on TikTok. Are you on TikTok? Yeah, official Tommy Mello. So there's no W, official Tommy Mello. I'm on Instagram and we try to post regularly. I got a company that posts twice a day and I just try to deliver great content. We're going to start working on more garage door stuff. But the problem that I think most home service providers have is they go, man, I'm supposed to build a training center. I need to get on a CRM. I need to start SEO. I know Facebook and Instagram do well. There's Facebook leads that I should be on their marketplace.

I need to do Amazon. I know I need to hire better. I need a better recruiter. I need to work on manuals. And it's so hard because you're like, what do I do first? And sometimes people do all of it and they don't really find success because they're so- You need to prioritize.

Yeah. You do. And the book that really set me straight, the first book I read in business was The E-Myth by Michael Gerber. And it really helped me understand that instead of working in the business all the time, instead of doing the work and fulfilling the job, I need to figure out how to create systems processes. I need to figure out how to work on the business instead of in it. Because when I was working in it, I had no time. I was fulfilling the jobs all the time. And I know that AI is going

to change the way we do dispatching, but there's still that old fashioned person that I think is going to last another decade. You know, it's hard. The trades are, the average plumber is 50 years old right now. Yes, exactly. And we're dying to get more people. I'm lucky because I've got 43 people graduating this month and another 38 locked in for next month's 40 people last month. So we've been able to find younger people saying, we promise you a career, a place you can make six figures. But I remember 15, 20 years ago, every time Dick and Harry out there was in the blue collar. Now everybody wants to be famous. They want the four-hour work week. And to answer marketing. Yeah, and people go on,

if I go on my TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, they'll say, four-hour work week. Tim Ferriss, you don't have to work anymore. It's going to be easy. And there are those people that just, whether it's a bikini or they're getting onto a plane or whatever it is, it's not as hard for them to attract followers

and they could do the energy drinks and whatnot. But as far as home service, we promised a career, a place that you could get home to be around your family and you should be able to take two days off and have PTO. And it's tough right now. I mean, you understand that it's hard to find great service providers in general, right?

Yes. And the barrier to entry is becoming higher because 30 years ago, you didn't need to be on TikTok and Instagram and have a website and be on Yelp and be on Angie. So it's become also much harder to get your business going when you start from scratch. So that's what we're trying to do at Jobbox. We need those people. Ideally, all businesses would be like yours and would have this amazing coverage and have... By the way, I want to say that all the pros on Jobbox, we're vetting them as well, but there's platforms that

don't vet them. So you're correct. So ideally, all businesses would be like yours, but it's not possible. And if we expect that to happen, we're going to end up with not enough pros. And tomorrow, it's not even like 10 years from now problem. It's happening right now. So you need to prioritize your marketing. And the first thing you need to do, obviously you can create non-demand, like you said, you can do all those things.

You can be on TikTok. But before you get there, the first thing you need to do is make sure you are where the customers are looking for you when they have a problem. That's the step one. If you're there, you're going to start to do is make sure you are where the customers are looking for you when they have a problem. That's the step one. If you're there, you're going to start making more money because people are going to find you.

Oh, you're closing two jobs a day, five jobs a day. It's going better and better. You're working six days a week. Now you're starting to have more money. Okay, now you can maybe invest in Google or you can maybe create an ad on Yelp or create an Instagram channel and all that. But from the beginning, if you need to prioritize, make sure you are where the customers are looking for you. And it's not necessarily

by just putting a phone number on your van or by having your phone available seven days a week. It's by being online, by letting them fill a form where they can say, my lock is broken. I need a new lock at ASAP. This is my location. And here's a picture of my lock, right? This is what Jobbox enables. We let you be in front of the customer where they're looking for you. And that's the first step to growing your business and going to the next step with your marketing. You know, not all the companies could be like A1 Garage Door Service, but if they listen

to this podcast, they might be. For sure. What common marketing mistakes and problems do home service businesses usually make? I mean, I kind of touched on that already. I think it's mostly by not being where the customers are looking for them. Listen, I don't want to deal with this Google thing

or this Yelp thing. Just call my phone number. That's how you find me. Okay, but eventually you're going to run out of the boomers and the Gen Xers, no offense, who are using the phone to find a pro. Like you're going to end up with those younger guys who are not using the phone

and they don't want to talk on the phone. And every time you try to call them, they're like, there's literally TikToks about that where people are like being shy on the phone. So I think it's very important to understand the audience and the customers you're dealing with and making sure you are where they are. Yeah. One of the things I used to do when I was in the garage is I didn't just ask for one review. I would say, listen, if you could leave me a review on Yelp

and on Facebook, on Nextdoor and Google, I'd love to put a yard sign out. And who is your HOA president? And do you mind if I get a quick testimonial? And so I would ask for a lot more, but I was smaller. So I had the time to do that. Did you give a discount? You know, usually what I would say is I'd give them a surge protector and I'd say, listen, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to give you this for the time you're going to take. I'm not paying you off to give me a five-star review because they'd already told me they're very happy for the service. Now, what can they do to help out my business?

So I said, listen, for your time, I'm going to go ahead and install the surge protector. I try not to give away monetary discounts. I try to deliver more value instead of giving discounts. Yeah. And they deserve to get something for their time. And one of the things I'll find is instead of asking for a review for the company, I say, Dorian, listen, the company really looks at what our reputation is. And if you can leave a review with my name online, it would mean a lot to me because

we really keep track of that stuff. And I'm awarded if you do that by the company, like just like a server or they do a great job and they say, listen, tonight we get a bottle of wine. If you leave the most reviews, I'll be like, hell yeah, you were awesome. I'll leave you a review. So asking for the review for the person is a big deal. You know, smaller home service companies, they got a lot of things to kind of figure out. If you wanted to just start out by starting one thing, obviously get on the networks that people are looking for you. But what's something else that you tell home service companies when they're

getting on? What are some tips that you've found through Jobox? Be super pro. This is stupid things, but like you talked about, making sure you smile, making sure you have some kind of uniform, that your car is working well, that you have professional invoices. Obviously, we're fixing that part on Jobbox, but making sure you look pro from A to Z and that you provide your customers with a good experience. Because even if you don't ask for your review, they may give you a review because of you being so pro. So I would say just, yeah, be super pro. And that's obviously mostly for the smaller guys who are just getting started. Make yourself look like you're a hundred people company, even though you're not.

Well, a few simple things. Tuck in your shirt, make sure you don't smell like bad odor. Make sure your hair is combed and don't smoke in front of a cigarette and become the client's friend and advocate and offer something on the way. Just smile when you're on the phone and say, listen, Dorian, I'm on my way. I'm going to make everything perfect. I appreciate the phone call and I just want to earn your business and thank you for the opportunity. A1's on the way and we're going to take care of you. And that goes a long way, but not a lot of people do that. For sure. I shot a lot of documentaries. We've been following pros around the country to see how they work. And we've been making documentaries about those.

And I remember an experience specifically in Houston where we had a customer who were locked out of their car and it was a teacher and she was outside of her school and we show up you know it's the end of the day it's like 6 p.m and she's alone in this parking lot with her car and she's super upset and so she puts it on the locksmiths it's like she's very upset about everything and the locksmith is super nice and it was disarming and And so within five minutes, she was like profusely apologizing and being super kind. And that helps a lot. I agree. You know, I want to tell you a story about a few years ago.

I had one of the gals we advertised with. She was meeting for me for lunch and her battery died. She was very, very irate. And she said, I just got my car car tuned up and it turns out that this battery is expired it's done with its useful life and she goes they should have looked at the battery they didn't even tell me they didn't look at it they didn't have an inspection they should have caught this and she went online and ripped them a new asshole mean, she went on every review site. She went on the BBB. Oh, that's a big one.

Well, the fact is a lot of times home service providers go out there and they fix the problem. They don't look at anything else. Like if I got my brakes changed and the calipers and rotors weren't doing their job, the brakes would wear out within a month. And if I take my car in, I want them to not only do my oil change, tell me if there's anything else. If I've got a hose that's rotted or it's starting to fail. And I think a lot of home service providers, they don't have a checklist and a comprehensive list. Like if you go change my toilet, just put a new guts in the toilet so it works. Look at all my toilets. Look at my garbage disposal. Check my hot water heater out. Make sure everything's good because without a checklist, without you doing

that, I'm going to go, you were just here two weeks ago. You knew one toilet failed. They were all put in at the same time. Are you incompetent? Why wouldn't you even look and at least show me and give me the options? Because if you're not giving options, you're giving ultimatums. So we have options for everybody. And it's going to be a comprehensive list. You could choose whether you like it. But you know what's awesome? When I could pull up in my CRM and say, here's everything we took a picture of. You signed off at these things that we failed. And you chose to do this. And these companies always ask me, they go, how are you able to sell more? And I say, I give the client options

because there's only three ways to make money. You get more customers, you charge your customers more money because you're more comprehensive and you give them more options, or you keep going back more frequently, which is a service agreement or an annual tune-up. And a lot of them, they're trying to get new customers rather than keeping the ones they already have, remarketing to their list. I mean, listen, I guarantee you guys at Joebox, you guys got a way to remarket to your list. You guys got a way to make sure that they're active because so many people are losing a customer out the back door, so busy trying to get a customer in the front door. What is your thought process on that? Yes, you kind of addressed already a lot of the things that they need to do,

which is upselling, cross-selling, making sure that customers are happy with the job they've done. On Jobbox specifically, how we keep pros is, like you said, we re-engage them all the time. We make sure that they're active on the platform. We make sure that we send them jobs when it's relevant to them. So re-engaging with the pros is super important to us. I think a lot of the mistakes that business owners make in general, not just home service pros,

but it's to focus on acquisition. And I'm also, I founded startups in the past and I raised money with startups and the investors even that invest in your startups, they're going to look at acquisition first. Like how many new users have you added to your software this month? So it's the entire system is geared toward acquisition where working on retention and making sure you keep your customers is actually the most valuable long-term because not only you will keep a customer,

but they will likely spend more money over time with you. And a startup, especially a SaaS product, the most thing they care about is how long does the customer stay with you? How sticky is it? What's the turnover rate? I mean, that's a big, big thing for any type of SaaS is how much does it cost to acquire a customer and did they stay on? And is there a chance to charge a customer more in the future? And if you're the CRM or the ecosystem, you have a lot more advantages because I couldn't run

my business without a CRM. And it's a huge change cost to switch CRMs. I mean, that's why the airlines are still on the 1980s. They just felt around the systems. You know, I made a mistake. Go ahead. I was going to say, there's the data you're accumulating over time, too. That makes the systems. You know, I made a mistake. Go ahead. I was going to say, there's the data you're accumulating over time too.

That makes the customer even more valuable. Not just the money you can take out of them, but the fact that you know them better, it makes you more efficient. You can optimize better because now, you know, the type of garage door they have, because you've already been on jobs there, you know, when it was installed, because you were the one who installed it. You know, you should be grabbing those data points, you should be grabbing age of equipment, you could do a segmented list. And you could actually have a technician show up, like a millennial technician to a millennial couple, or an elderly person that does better,

they just they relate better. Yeah. And if you start getting into those analytics, and really taking a deep dive into the metadata of those, if that's the right word, of really digging. But the problem is most of us don't know how to catalog that stuff. We're not saying this is a mid-age couple with two kids or they really love soccer. And it's the more you could grab of that consumer. And that's where tech helps. That's where technology like Dropbox helps, right? Because we're able to capture that automatically

without the pro having to do anything. And obviously this is just one part, but like the AI comes in support and provides all that support, that kind of like assistant work that otherwise you don't necessarily think about doing. You were talking earlier about the fact that you have to start building your business

as opposed to doing the work. Well, the fact that there's also a lot of pros out there that love doing the work and want to keep doing the work. So how do we enable those guys to keep doing that and keep repairing garage doors or unlocking people out of their cars or like fixing or installing bathrooms? Like how do we help them focus on that

by automating everything else? That's really what Jobbox is about. You know that a long time ago, and this is years and years ago, I don't know if it was Pizza Hut or Little Caesars, but the CEO got on a stage and he said, how do you think we make most of our money? And he said, is it crazy bread?

Is it soda? Is it ranch dressing? What's the number one way? And the audience kept making guesses and they didn't know. And he said, it's the number one way? And the audience kept making guesses and they didn't know. And he said, it's the data. It's the data we accumulate. And I don't know exactly what data, but do you know how many people want to know where people live? And a lot of people stay at their girlfriend's house. A lot of people don't know whether it's somebody wanting to serve somebody paperwork or whatever it is. And that's just mind boggling that the world we're living in is getting

more and more calculated. If I talk right now about something like a, my pillow or a golf club, now Facebook's going to serve me an ad. I mean, I know my phone's listening. Yeah. Yeah. So the mistake I made was I kept calling it Joe box, but it's called job ox, like a job in a box, job box, job in a box. Okay. You know, a lot of employees in the company are actually English is their second language and you can probably hear it in my voice. And so there's so many different accents to say the name of the company, but it comes from a job in a box. So yeah, job box. So when you are learning about marketing, you know, you've got a lot of experience, but if somebody wanted to learn more about just

how online marketing works and digital marketing and how to get found, do you have any resources or things that you learned along the way that you'd recommend somebody going to? That's a really good question. I mean, I actually did a podcast previously that could be interesting to people where I explain customer funnels. And there's a bunch of books out there. If you just look for books, I don't have a specific name in my head right now, but the importance of building funnels. If you learn how to build funnels, you kind of by default learn about everything marketing, but it's, you were talking about top of the funnel earlier. Those are terms that many people, they don't know what it means. So being able to create an experience that goes from the first time someone hears about your brand

to them paying you money, Whatever happens between those two points, you can control that using funnels, customer funnels. And I would say read any book you find about customer funnel. You can listen to my podcast about customer funnel if you want to and how to do this, because then you're going to learn several things. What type of channels you need to do marketing on, what type of messaging you need to create.

Tommy, you were talking about earlier about the messaging of, you know, insects can go under your garage door and that's why you should check out the rubber. This is really good messaging that you can create as a way to get people through that funnel and to a customer for you. So learning the messaging, learning the channels,

learning which channels and in which order. So the first time they hear about you, it might be on Google My Business. And then next time they go on the website and then they call you and then you actually show up at their home and you fix a problem for them. So those are different channels where you interact with that customer, learn how to organize those channels in a way that makes sense for the journey of the customer. So channels, messaging, and prioritizing. So one of the biggest buzzwords here at A1 Garage Door Service is attribution models.

And we've been diving into regression testing, figuring out what are the biggest factors that determine, like, for example, HVAC, the humidity of the air and the condition of the outside effect hvac you know how your air conditioning works and attribution models tell you where the lead comes from but the omni approach of being everywhere is hard to funnel attribution models there's a guy named jeff walker i recommend reading the book launch if you want to learn more about funnels and then obviously click funnels russell brunson is is probably the king of funnels these days and i really like dan kennedy like no bs about marketing to the affluent or no bs about direct marketing and and there's just a lot of information out there i gotta tell you what i don't think is fair, Dorian, is I'm really a software marketing guy that happened to do garage doors.

I think I could do anything. You know, when you look at e-commerce and you look at what they study, they look at click-through rate. They look at if they change that. You could use HubSpot to change the title and find out what has A-B testing. And I can speak high level. I've got people all around me that are better at this than me. But ultimately, you get the right softwares in place. You do the testing.

If you're going to send out a postcard, try four with a call tracking number on it. Right now, just my CRM alone, we have 5,000 call tracking numbers. And we can tell you what works the best. And this is kind of the unfair advantage that you're talking about, but I don't think anybody's going to be able to catch up because we took a really scientific approach to a blue collar industry. Yeah. Yeah,

exactly. But that's what AI is trying to do. And the one thing I would say that's good also about AI is it's able to discover new patterns that you can't necessarily think of. So AI is going to notice, for example, that I don't know, I'm going to make something up right now, but like on Monday mornings, you tend to have more of a specific kind of jobs in this area. And there's less of those specific

technicians. So there is an opportunity here for a business to grow and fulfill more of those jobs. This is a simple one, but the AI that's analyzing all the jobs and all the pros and all the data from the customers is able to find patterns. Oh, it looks like when this happens, jobs are completed faster. So this should happen more often. These things that we may not notice as humans that the AI is going to pick up. So that's where I think the unfair advantage you have can be overtaken by AI. Well, the AI is actually what figures this stuff out a lot of the times. Like, for example, and this is statistics, but if I could pull in a lot of different

factors, the builder of the home, what the brand was of the home, I could start understanding that this population, builder trends, age of of home age of demographic credit score when they pull the loan to remodel their house when they went there's a thing called um construction monitor and you start pulling these things into place and you get the right data person yeah what you start finding is outliers. And when you find these outliers they're basically little honey holes. And you're doing it proactive versus reactive.

I love this conversation because some people that listen to the podcast I'm trying to talk in layman's terms and I think we're doing a pretty good job of describing these things but it's important to be aware of what you need to do but the first thing you got to do is answer the phone call. Put up a website that looks professional.

Simple things like have the customer be able to pay with a credit card right then and there. I charge a mobile convenience fee because I pay a percentage every time someone uses a credit card. And every time I buy a ticket on the airplane, every time my cell phone bill comes, I'm paying an extra fee for using that credit card. So why shouldn't we as home service providers be able to charge cash. I don't even care. The checkbook I have still has the address of the first home I moved in when I moved to the United States, which was my first checkbook. Well, at least you still have a checkbook. If you don't like it, pay with a check. Exactly. So I still have one just in case.

But most customers, unfortunately, want to pay with credit cards. But I'm not sure how quickly this is going to happen. But I actually see this evolving as well. On Jobbox, for example, we have something called the Jobbox wallet where the pros get paid every time they complete a job and they can actually use the wallet to buy inventory. And we work with inventory partners. When they buy directly with the Jobbox wallet, because there is no credit card fee, the inventory partner gives a rebate on the inventory. So at that point, there's just no credit cards involved anymore, right? It goes directly from the job box wallet to the inventory partner. And I'm thinking this is going to happen more and more

going forward, I hope. Well, you know, one of the things that a lot of the small guys doesn't get the advantage like I get is my manufacturers rely on me a lot because I'm the number one client for a lot of these big roster companies and I'm able to buy more quantity and therefore I don't have to pay as much shipping. I don't have the handling fees that they would normally have. So I'm able to buy at extreme wholesale pricing. And then I exercise the co-op and then they say, if you don't pay with a credit card and you give us your bank account number, we'll waive another 4%. And I'm telling you, unfortunately, the big get bigger. And I think we're headed for a world where you're going to see a lot of winners and a whole lot of losers. And what I love, and I know this is controversial

and it's probably not what you guys want to do, but I want entrepreneurs. I want people that want that entrepreneur mindset, but don't want to have to work when they get home. They want to be able to put off their work jacket and not have to worry. And there's a lot of great people out there that can make well into six figures and not have the stress, anxiety, and pain. I know people that get divorced. They haven't been able to raise their kids. They haven't had a chance to breathe. I had a guy that said, I was going to start my own company, but working for you, I'm home at supper every night. I've been able to go play hockey with my daughter that's six years old. So now I'm her coach.

Look, a lot of people say Walmart takes advantage of people. Well, Walmart just goes by the laws the government made. Here's the facts. They make their people work part-time, which the people want to work part-time. They employ sometimes mentally handicapped people or a diverse group of people. Basically, they get a tax incentive. And they say, that's not right. But then change the laws. Vote differently. I don't the laws, vote differently.

I don't know what to tell you, but if we hire someone from the military, we get a $9,000 tax credit and they'll pay for the training. Look, these aren't bad things. And you got to love the people that say, yeah, you didn't earn that. But if we didn't earn it, this is something that I don't want to go down a rabbit hole. But if you say the government made the roads for you to drive on, fine, charge me a toll, but everybody's got to pay the toll then. I pay more than anybody in taxes that I know. I don't understand if we didn't earn it. A lot of people's work is alienable. And when that's the facts, I don't believe there's such a thing as everybody is just going to be this even kill because some people don't want to work I don't know what you think about it. I know that france is a little different than us

But look, I know jesus christ wanted everybody to be equal. Unfortunately, that's just that's not how capitalists work And this country is the best country I could ever want to be in because if you work hard and have nothing My mom had to work three jobs to keep our house. I didn't have any money when I was a kid. We got new clothes. I wasn't broke. We weren't suffering. We had a full plate of dinner every night.

And we got breakfast, lunch, and dinner. But if you work hard here, you can win the American dream. And I love that about this country. And listen, I'm an immigrant. And I just bought my first home. So I'm living the American dream, Like you said, I agree with you. I think it's important to have those top businesses that you're talking about, but I don't, where I disagree with you is I don't think it can only be these because of the demand and the needs that people have,

that consumers are looking for skilled trades and home service pros. How many? I can't remember. It's in the millions, the number of pros we're going to miss by, we're going to be needing by 2030. So we can't all have that entrepreneur mindset at the level at which you have it. And I'm hoping that companies like Jobbox will help people who are really good at doing their job, all the automation that they need so that they don't have to work when they go home. They don't have to do what you're talking about,

and they can actually run a successful business while doing what they love and while helping people. So we'll still have those top businesses that have white glove service that you provide, and we'll still have those bottom of the barrel guys, but I'm hoping that the vast majority will be able to live of what they love and still run a successful business using software. So the worst thing and the best thing that ever happened was Uber. And what I hate about Silicon Valley is everybody says, we're going to Uberize the industry. We're going to Uber it. The problem is you just need to know how to drive a car. If you're a 92 year old person, know how to drive a car. If you're a 92-year-old person,

you can still drive a car in Uber. The problem is Uberizing an industry like home service with a skilled artisan that needs special tools and needs to know a lot. There's a lot of hacks out there. And if you don't have a formal training program, and listen, this is me. I had to learn the hard way. I mean, I'm on my 15th year and I had a landscaping company before this. So I used to mow lawns and shovel snow in Michigan. That's how I made money when I was a kid. So don't get me wrong. I'm not discounting what you're saying.

I just feel like I'll get to the point in the next year that I could hire 200 technicians per month. And what I do is I pull them out of whether they're working in Amazon or if they're a bus boy or if they're a waiter or if they just want something more out of life. So you got to be able to recruit them, but give them a better life. Because most of my buddies making 120 grand a year as a business, they work their ass off. They work nights, weekends.

It's hard for them to go on vacations. And if you figure this out, if your company and job box figures it out, I'm all for that. And I'm not against the small guy. Cause I am a small guy. I was a small guy. We came from a small, like come from a town of Michigan. And I'm not saying I don't want this. I'm just saying, I think that some of these winners, if they treat their people, right. If they take care of them, if they offer them the best and they can provide and let you live your dream. My new book is called Elevate. Build a company which everybody wins. The employees get to win big time. And we have a dream manager. They get to make their dreams and we get to help them hit their dreams. Our clients got to win. The company wins, the vendors win, the partnerships win. And if you could build a company in which everybody wins, it's a good thing.

But the small guy has got to be able to win too. And that's what you guys are helping. And I appreciate that. And I really do. I hope you don't think I'm trying to be condescending in what you guys are trying to do. No, no, for sure. So if you had to give a couple books, and I don't know if you got them off the top of your head, but a book that means something to you, a book really helped you it could be fiction it could be anything

you want it could be just a book you really love that brought a lot of insight into your love on any topic what would be a couple books that you'd really recommend i mean one that comes to mind that really influenced me as a marketer is everybody lies it's uh very interesting it's an economist who and i can't his name is skipping my mind right now but he analyzed the evolution of the world politically socially and match that with what people were searching on google and kind of did an analysis over the years of what people are Googling and how things that happened politically could be predicted by Google searches that happened five to 10 years earlier, which was super fascinating as a marketer to learn about people's intent versus what people show.

And this is especially relevant in the age of social media and influencer marketing, where you tend to show something else than what you really are. But people tend to be more truthful in their Google search because they don't think they're being watched. I mean, I read it, I think twice or three times. It just, it's, it was fascinating to me. So I, I highly recommend it. Everybody lies. Seth Stevens. Thank you. David Cowatts. Yeah.

So there's a guy I had on the podcast that literally helps politicians win elections. And he said, the number one way we win and we turn elections literally is by negative ads. And that's why all I see on TV is people talking shit about their competitors.

So I paid him a lot of money to do a study and we're getting through the study right now. And when you run an ad of just the average Melvin that, you know, the average Chuck in a truck with his butt crack hanging out, you don't know if he's been drug tested or background check. There's an opportunity there. I don't like to run negative ads and I haven't run negative ads, but ultimately you can never say we're the best because that doesn't make sense. The best at what people always say, what's your competitive advantage? Well, we're all open nights and weekends and we can work on anything and we're the best price. Okay. So is everybody else. How did you differentiate yourself? You know, one of the things we do is I promise you Dorian,

if I came out to your house, I'm going to look at you. I'm going to give you options. And I'm going to tell you exactly what I would do, what I'd be telling my mom. And I love my mom. She's an amazing woman. She means everything to me. And I'm going to take care of you exactly like I would my mother. And we're going to do what's right for you. And what's right for you might not be what's right for your neighbor. But I promise you, I'm going to take care of you. And I want to make sure to give you the best service. I'm not promising everything's going to go perfect because the supplier might have a problem. You know, I might get a flat tire, but I promise you, I'm going to try. I'm going to do my best. And if something doesn't go right, I'm going to make it

right by you. And that's a differentiator. And what I would try to get people to do out there is really write down what makes you stand out. And what I found out was I can't really tell you what I'm going to do sometimes. But out of the last 10,996 clients, 97% of them started on time. The other 3% were rectified within 48 hours. I could tell you no one else could say that. No one else could claim that. And so sometimes it's taking what is your client's KPIs?

What do they care about? They care about it. It's on time that we cleaned up after ourselves, that the warranty was real. And there's a great book called The Competitive Advantage. Yes. And it only talks about historical data, not what I'm promising in the future, because there's not a guarantee. It's a guarantee what happened in the past. I guarantee you that I went to bed at 1.30 a.m. last night. It's a fact.

And that's why I'm a little tired right now. But I'm buying that book. I'm going to read it. Doria. Yeah, you should. It's amazing. I love this podcast. You're an amazing woman. Jobbox sounds like a great company. I'm going to let you, we talked about a lot of things here, and I got a lot out of this. And I hope the listeners did. I'm sure they will. Any final thoughts? I'll let you close us out with something to let the audience think about and just marinate on. Yeah.

Before I do, can I just ask you a question? Do you miss the work? You know, what I do miss about it, number one, is I was in better shape. And number two, when I saw a person, they'd literally smile at me and they'd go, oh my gosh. They'd go, the doors never sounded better. A lot of people would give me a hug and they'd say, you saved my day. That's the piece I miss of it.

But I will say, now I like getting hugs from my internal customers. And they say, you saved my life. You gave me a better life. piece I miss of it, but I will say now I like getting hugs from my internal customers. And they say, you saved my life. You gave me a better life. And now I know there's a bigger mission than fixing customers' garage doors. It's giving people a better life and a better reason to be able to raise their children and not have to live in poverty and be able to get out of credit card debt and be able to save money and go on the dreams they've always wanted to. Whether that's finally give their wife an anniversary because they couldn't 10 years ago, or maybe their dad's sick and they want to take them fishing, or maybe they want to take their grandma to Italy because

that's where she grew up. That is a bigger cause for me right now. Do I miss the work? Absolutely. Am I doing better work now? I think so. I still wish I was out there in the summer drinking eight bottles of water, getting in shape, but now I just got to hit the gym. So we got a gym in the office, but you're right. I do miss being out there, but I think there's a better cause now. So I guess my final thought will be around what you just said, because you and I have a similar mission where we're trying to help people achieve their dreams. And I don't know if you heard of the trend right now

of quiet quitting, where people... So quiet quitting is when people just do the minimum that is required of them for their job. And this happens a lot with tech jobs and remote jobs and finance jobs, like jobs that can be where you're on your computer all day long. And one thing that the skilled trades industry has is that it's a lot of people who have a vocation.

It's their dream. They love doing what they're doing. And because of this, we see much less quiet quitting in the skilled trades than we see in other industries. And I'm hoping that whether it's companies like yours that hire a bunch of people, whether it's Dropbox that enable those people

to build their own businesses using AI that we're able to help those guys, the small guys make their dream come true and actually have the life they want to have. I got to add one thing because you said that when you go into anything, especially as an owner, you got to ask yourself this key question,

what's in it for them? And if you could figure that out and you could figure out a performance pay that motivates them to get up and try every day where they get a stake in the outcome, although there's a lot of ways with phantom equity, performance pay, bonuses, you could get them and don't cap them. You should never cap anybody. And now you'll find out people will give you everything they've got if you care about them and you treat them right.

And they got to be able to see the monetary gains too. But like I said, you were a blast. Dorian. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. No, of course. Thank you so much for having me.

That was great. This is fantastic. I appreciate you. Bye-bye. Bye. 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 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 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 life season further. So thank you once again for listening to the podcast. I really appreciate it.