The Home Service Expert Podcast - How To Fine-tune Your CRM To Save Time And Money

Episode Date: May 27, 2022

Charlie Felker is the co-founder of Free-2-Grow, a company that provides back-office support to service-based companies, allowing the owners and operators to focus on their customers and growing their businesses. Free-2-Grow offers its customers the services of a full-time office manager at half of what it would cost to hire someone full-time and provides team support with its cross-trained staff. In this episode, we talked about customer relationship management, efficiency, lead generation and follow-up, employee trust...

The rub that I see, and I was guilty of this, is they just keep hanging on. They're like, okay, well, I'm going to punt this decision to outsource this or hire somebody or use a CRM to next year. And then they just get more and more ingrained in that business. They're responding to immediate customer text messages, or they're in their car, they take a call, and they write something down, and that doesn't get translated into the CRM system. You know, all those little fails add up and you've got to know your business. I get that.

But at some point you've kind of ripped that cord and say, you know what, I'm going to go focus on key accounts or I'm going to go to more BNI meetings or whatever it is and let free to go or whoever it is kind of take on that offering. Too many times they're just extending that, you know, I'm just going to grit this out. I'm going to grit it out. I'm going to put some more money in my pocket. But they're just kind of getting themselves more wrapped around the axle on the minutiae every year. 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. We got a fun day along for you guys here. I got Charlie Falker on here again. Awesome guy. He's actually been to our headquarters here. He's visited. He's hung out. Amazing guy. Located out of St. Louis, the one spot we're not in yet. How's St. Louis doing for you? It's great today. It's sunny and warm, but it's a great place to have a business. I grew up in St. Louis. I love being here. So

would love it if you opened up shop here, Tommy. You know, I got an interesting story about St. Louis, but I'll just go over some of your accolades here. Charlie's an expert of entrepreneurship management leadership. His company that he started and co-founded in 2019 to now is Free to Grow. And the process behind Free to Grow is simple. Allow your business, do what you do best, grow your business, and let Charlie take care of everything else. He was also the co-founder of RFP Testing. And he's done some things at HBM Holdings, Corporate Development Associate. So he's a co-founder of Free to Grow, a company that provides back-office support to service-based companies, allowing the owners and operators to focus on their customers and growing their businesses free to go offers its customers the services of a full-time office

manager and half of what it would cost to hire someone full-time provides team support and it's cross-trained with staff so interestingly enough charlie there's a guy jim abrams. And Jim lived in La Crosse, Wisconsin, so they tell me. And at the time, Jim was going door-to-door basically selling HVAC unit, add-on units, and they were called Train. Train was the HVAC company that's still around. Well, back then, there was no such thing as an add-on unit. Most people in La Crosse, Wisconsin didn't have air conditioning. It was more important to have the heater in the summer or the winter, I should say, than have the air conditioning in the summer. So what happened was Trane actually partnered with General Electric somehow, and Jim got cut in line to be a high level at this company. So he said, where can I go to start one hour air? And he said,

what's really, really cold in the winter, what's really, really hot in the summer, so I can have a really big business in the HVAC and heating business. So he picked St. Louis. And that's kind of how One Hour Air did it. They did Benjamin Franklin with the plumbing, and then they did Mr. Sparky. And he kind of paved the road in the 90s for what some of these bigger companies are starting to do today. Some people would look at him as the godfather

of the larger conglomerates. Yeah, I haven't met Jim. I've heard the name. I've certainly seen his business in and around town. So appreciate that. Successful company. And yeah, to your point of what we do, I'm a home service guy.

I kind of cut my teeth in the construction business. We were supporting seniors through living at home. And so we did a lot of the stair lifts, did a lot of medical equipment and built a nice company over a five-year period and ended up selling that company to a big national holding business. And looking back after my sale, I'm like, man, there's ways I could have run this business better. And I hired and fired five different CSRs. And I know we're going to talk about CRM systems today. Misused our CRM, you know, garbage in, garbage out. And so I basically look back at my experience and, you know, was like, there's got to be a better way for most home service companies. Partnered with a great friend of mine and have built Free to Grow. And having been on your podcast and this relationship, I'm proud to present we now support

six home service expert listeners. And so hopefully we can build on that and add some more value out there. We posted something the other day and someone said, oh my God, Charlie's the best if you want a testimonial. One thing that I've known about you is you answer your phone in the first ring. You're very punctual. The fact is you have a big military background, and I think that's the coolest thing is you understand discipline. Eaters eat

last. I think some of the coolest people I've ever met, they come from the military. They come from a very disciplined background, and they know how to get stuff done. The military really helps people figure that out. Tell us a little bit about your background with that. Yeah. And thanks for asking that, Tommy. You know, I was a senior in high school when 9-11 happened, had a huge impact on me. Actually, I got into West Point, which is where I went to college that week. So I was very serious about serving and did five years after West Point, was in the infantry,

proud to serve with the 82nd Airborne Division. And then I got selected to join the 3rd Ranger Battalion out of Fort Benning. I did four deployments all to Afghanistan. And when I got out, I moved back to St. Louis, where I am now, and went to business school and have been an entrepreneur ever since. But you're right. I mean, the lessons that you learn, leaders eat last, is certainly one that's practiced. And I had a great commander in the military that told me about three foot walls. And anytime a lieutenant or enlisted person would come up to him, he'd say, well, that sounds like a three foot wall issue, meaning that's something you should probably figure it out and step over.

And I've always felt like, to your point of a lot of the military people I come across, that they certainly appreciate a three-foot wall and know what questions to ask and how to get over that. So I appreciate you asking that, Tommy. You know, there's a good book by Jocko, what's his name, Willink? Correct. It's called Extreme Ownership. And he talks about when you're working in a battalion or any type of military, every move matters. You really are only as strong as your weakest link. The wrong call at the wrong time means lives. It's definitely taking it to the next level.

It's every single thing you get ready, you plan on, you plan for, for that real time. And I feel like in home service, we don't do that at all. We're kind of reactive. We're like, oh home service, we don't do that at all. We're kind of reactive. We're like, oh, well now I need to hire somebody. And then you hire the wrong person and you don't plan on it and you don't plan on these decisions. You know, I heard Navy SEALs, what happens is when they clear a room, one guy goes left, one guy goes right, and they depend on each other. And one guy takes the lead, they have a hand signal, and now he's the leader.

Anybody's able to lead if they get more intelligence. And I love it. You don't know who your leader is when you're in there, but you trust each other. And just the whole thought of that thing for me is, the more I learn about it, the more I'm just infatuated with what our military does and how to count on each other

and how to work with one another. And I think that's just a great, it's something that everybody should read that book, Extreme Ownership, because as an owner, my trucks, I was not happy last time we did inventory. And I called the guys up. We were on a massive call, several hundred guys. And I said, guys, I let you down. I'm the one who let this happen. I'm the one who let your trucks look like this. No one held you guys accountable. And it's my fault. And I do think there's a lot to be said about that whole concept of extreme ownership. What do you think about that whole? Man, I couldn't agree more. And I really cut my teeth as far as combat experience in the Ranger Regiment. And the things that I really took away there was kind of dominating the basics.

You know, our junior officers and the enlisted men would never miss an opportunity, even if you're waiting to board a bus, to kind of hammer the basics. And I think I've tried to parlay that into business success, whether that was working on a battle drill or checking equipment or taking time to engage with a lower enlisted soldier. How are you? How's your family? Okay. You know, there was never like a pause where nothing is happening. There's always something that you can do. And I think a lot of skills are perishable. And if you're not hammering them, you know, when we have our weekly huddles, kind of this radical customer service concept, we've got to preach that and consistently hit the basics. And if you hit them every week, it just becomes a part of the culture. But I learned a lot from enlisted men and women who just constantly were so focused on the mission and there was no hanging around. If

people were hanging around, something was wrong. There's a time to train, either get to know your people more. And I think I've really tried to continue that. Really, it's an efficiency that was just phenomenal. You know, you're so good at a lot of things. You're good at follow-up. You're ready to go at all times. And I appreciate that about you a lot. Well, thanks. So are you. So we really wanted to start talking about this whole session is a lot about CRMs and not using it the right way can really up-level one's business. Can you share some of the ways that CRMs save businesses time and money? Yeah. CRMs, at the end of the day, I was doing some prep for this call and we have used or are using 10 different CRMs. So there's a variety of them out there. A lot of them are very similar. There's certainly

some that are tailor-made for your industry or landscape management or tree service or dumpster rental or whatever it is. So there's a lot that are scratching certain itches. At the end of the day, though, it's garbage in, garbage out. And if you don't know what your KPIs are, you don't know how you want to schedule estimates, how you want to do lead follow-up, how you want to quote jobs, you've got to get a lot of that stuff ironed out before you could fully implement a CRM. It's going to be effective and it's a tool for management. And that's one thing that we've noticed. And we've had clients that we've onboarded that it's almost good

sometimes when they don't use a CRM because it's like teaching somebody how to shoot a rifle the right way. There's no bad habits. So if somebody's starting with us from scratch and like, boy, I'm going to go all in on job or service type or whatever, you know, we can take best practices and kind of build that into their business. And then also on the flip side of that, if somebody's got some bad habits, we really can try to say, well, here's how we've done this with the past with successful growing up service companies. Would you consider this and maybe train them on some of that? You know, I had a podcast, it's been a few years now with Ara Modessi and he's the CEO of Service Titan. And he said, one of the biggest misconceptions that we have in our

business, which is a CRM Service Titan. He said, all these other industries and these other so-called gurus, they come in and they say, they need this, they need this, they need this. It's the way it's always been. And the fact is that we deal with billion dollar companies that have figured out the right way to do it. You know, someone comes in and they're like, well, we give a point. If they get a review, we give a half a point. If they do this and we do this and this and this and this and and he's like the hardest part is to conform to the crm but know that it's the right thing it's very very difficult to say we've done it this whole way we can't change that the guys are going to be really pissed off but if you spend enough time on doing what a crm supposed to do is setting up for the way that they built it.

It becomes extremely very, very, very profitable endeavor. It's when you say it doesn't work and you build all these workarounds and these crazy things, which all of us have done. And what I would say to everybody is if you don't love what the CRM is built to do, then find a different CRM, but don't rig it all up with these different ways. What are your thoughts on this? I agree completely. And I also think that a lot of entrepreneurs can get kind of strung up. Let's say they're doing diligence. They're going to pick a CRM and they've got five in front of them. And they find one they really like, but maybe it's $20 a month more expensive than the other. And they go with the cheaper option that doesn't necessarily fit with what they need as a business. I think it's a huge mistake. It's like with the time

you're going to spend in this CRM system and the profitability and the systems that can introduce, spend that $20 a month or whatever it is. That's a common thing that I see is a lot of entrepreneurs like, oh my God, or they don't use it well and they get sick of it and they do something else and it's just rinse and repeat without any sort of systems behind it. All right. Here's a question from the audience here. I love Brent, by the way. He's got GutterCon coming up next week. So what's Charlie's go-to CRM? Just curious. Good question. I used Buildertrend when I was running my small business.

I think we were probably effectively using about a third of that. But that's a construction-heavy, project management-heavy CRM. Jobber's a big one. There's one in St. Louis here called Less Annoying CRM that if you're just kind of wanting to do basic lead gen and lead follow-up, that's a good one. Service Titan, you mentioned, Housecall Pro, LMN. I'd probably put a jobber and a service Titanan though if push comes to shove at the top of my list all right what are the most important things to consider when choosing a crm and you know what you answer one of them is price is irrelevant i tell you what i think service titans at the top of the price list and it's less than a half a percent of my revenue and it's responsible for a lot of my

profit so i wouldn't put price in the scale but people are always like yeah i just can't afford service time yet i'm like that's like saying i can't afford a training center that's like saying i can't afford a good phone system that's like saying i just can't afford to do google yet it's like i can't afford uniforms can't afford nice trucks but why the hell are you in business yeah oh one day treat your business like you want it to be fake it till you make it you know that just bothers me when somebody says they can't afford to do nice things to have the best one day we'll work up to getting the right software to run our business really okay you know you got to look at the industry. Is there

any sort of experience with that CRM in the industry? If so, that's a big check mark. So certainly there, there, there've been a bunch of owner operators that have used that CRM for years and years and years. And implied in that is the CRM has bobbed and weaved to make it more friendly to that business. But you know, there's going to be a variety of options. And my recommendation would be, you know, certainly do your homework. But I wouldn't make a decision on price if it's more expensive, but you know you're going to use it and get a return. That's just an easy decision. I still scratch my head with entrepreneurs that don't make that decision and are still forcing things into a Google spreadsheet or a cocktail napkin.

It's an enormous mistake. It's amazing as I interview a lot of the people in the garage door industry who got on a service site and they're like, we weren't getting the support. And I definitely recognize that. And the problem is, is you've got a bunch of people in the support team that have never ran a business. So we started Garage Door Freedom recently have never ran a business. So we started garage door freedom recently. And Adam is a machine like Adams in there right now, probably talking to someone at service tight and dialing in things.

And I will say, I recommend service time, but I will say, I don't recommend them. If you don't have somebody that understands what they're doing, because unfortunately, you know, the fact is if I was trying to run service tight and it would probably fail. That's not my specialty. I'm not very good with

the systems like that. I can work my way around certain things, but I'm not very good at it. And I think I recognize that. And some people want it to be super intuitive, but they also want all these other things. And it's like, you got to get the system set up right. And as long as it's set up correctly, you don't really need to do much in it. And I think that's the problem is exactly what you were talking about is most CRMs work well once they're set up to a great way to handle payroll, to handle a lot of the different things and inventory and how everything works. The biggest mistake is when someone says, I don't understand, why didn't they set it up right for my business? Well, when you got on the phone, you told them how complicated your systems are and you wanted them to figure out

that stuff. There's only one guy I saw come into businesses and fix them. And that's Tom Howard. And he'll make crazy stuff happen for service Titan. He's come in and helped us out a lot too, but he'll come into large businesses because that's what he gets paid to do. So it's kind of a test 22. I mean, what do you think about the setup and just getting everything dialed in? Yeah. I mean, you know, free to grow sometimes in our last two home service expert clients, we're transferring into house call pro CRM. We know well. And so we were actually able to kind of play that role of, Hey, let's do it the way we've done it and have been successful with it. So here's a question. Yeah. Charlielie i'm on your free to grow site i see you do a lot of work for cleaning companies and nothing really for electricians do you work with electricians

i've got a call with modern electrical services tomorrow it's a home service expert referral i'm hoping we start working with it but not right right now. No, you know, tree care, lawn care, power washing, window cleaning. They would have lied. They would have said, yeah, you didn't lie. And the fact is, I think that's amazing. You just said, no, we don't work with any electricians now. Fact is, I think you're going to be able to help a lot. You do an amazing job of being that back of the house, but you don't fit for everybody.

And you'll tell people that the best advice i could give is is give charlie an opportunity to at least sit down and talk to him and he'll tell you it probably isn't a good fit for what you're looking for but here here's somebody you remember the miracle on 34th street the really old black and white movie old school and he would just say we don't have that at this store and they started advising him to go to the other store. And no one could understand it because they got busier for it. It's because you're helping people out.

You've been in their shoes. And you say, listen, I'm probably not the best fit for you right now, possibly down the road. But here's what we do. And you're not right for every single person out there, right? We're not. And Alan, I appreciate that question. We're not supporting any electricians right now.

I'd certainly love to talk to you. One thing that we have turned down several opportunities is when we have a potential client that has a part-time office manager, CSR, just one part-time, and then we're trying to figure out how does free to grow integrate with this individual. That hasn't worked out well for us, just to be candid. When we come in, we prefer to be kind of the one solution, the one throat to choke, so to speak. And we own that. I mean, to your point of total ownership, we want to own that back office portion, not say, well, you know, I thought this individual was doing this and we're doing that. It just hasn't worked out. So we tend to want to come in and be the one solution. And if it's not, that's okay. It's not

for everybody. What is this perfect size? Where do you feel like you got the most symmetry with what kind of company? Home service, obviously. Owner-operator, probably more focused on sales and business development. A little bit sick of answering the phone, not putting information to their CRM, miss scheduling, missing calls, anywhere from two to six six crews so there's certainly an interest to grow the business and i want to sound harsh but i also don't want to really work for an owner operator that kind of stuck or stagnant and has no interest of building anything past a two or 300k business they're kind of taking everything out and they're okay with that. Not a really cup of tea. We want a young, hungry owner-operator that wants to grow. And we're very scalable. I mean, we have a flat rate model. And so if you go from two to three crews or two to four crews,

we're not going to come back and say, well, now it's this. Yeah. I mean, we love the owner-operator and people like me, like I used to be, wanting to grow and looking to kind of focus on their core business and outsource everything else. They can grow with working with us and outsourcing this function. There's more important people typically that owner operators should be talking to on a daily basis. So if that helps. Charlie or Alan had a follow-up question for you, and I got some answers for this, but follow-up, I see a ton of content for HVAC and almost no content or support for electricians. Why you think that is you know i think electric right now for me you're not going to find a bunch of people going after garage drawers i started a

podcast and i happen to own a company called they want garage or service now i'm seeing a bunch of content popping up and a lot of people are entering the garage or space they're like you motivated me to get in the business and that's's great. It really is. I want to see really great people come into this industry and charge the right prices and really run a successful business. But HVAC, Frank Blau and George Brazil in 1991 started an amazing best practices company called Nextdoor Network. These best practices companies work mostly with HVAC. That's the big dollar.

And then they said plumbing, and now they say electrical. And so my belief is HVAC, you make $15,000 to sell a unit. Plumbing, you get some big tickets. Electrical, you still could too. But the HVAC guys, whenever I go to a convention, the HVAC guys are sold out. They're selling for $2,000 a ticket. They don't care. HVAC guys are glad to pay. They're like, who could I pay? They get sales training,

$30,000 a week, no problem. That's why HVAC businesses, everyone goes after HVAC. That's why Grant Cardone is in the HVAC industry now. That's why Jim Abrams started it. That's why everybody I know is a millionaire in the HVAC industry. Straight up, I have a guy that called me up. He's done garage doors for seven years, 10 years. He's a 7 million a year. He called me up and he said, Tommy, my first summer in HVAC, I did 7 million. He goes, you'd be a billionaire like yesterday. If you were in the HVAC industry, HVAC guys go, no, no, you don't understand. It's, it's way different. It's hard. Tell me where the rich garage guys are. They're everywhere I see for HVAC,

but that's my point of view. What is yours, Charlie? Yeah, I don't have a great answer. I'm not well-versed in that with electrical businesses. I certainly know what you're saying on HVAC. I've got a good friend that owns a big, big HVAC business here doing plumbing and appliance repair. And I think there's also, you get some big grand slams. You see some big companies sell, and there's big dollars involved. I think that can drive a lot of those concepts. Well, you do a few million dollars of EBITDA. Yeah, and you're probably trading for 12 times or something like that.

And, you know, those are big returns. It's fascinating what I'm seeing out there. So when you're setting up a CRM, you're figuring out your strategy, where do you start? Where do you start when you're looking and mapping and listening? And, you know, ServiceTitan is my fifth CRM, so I've been in this role before. Yeah, and again, there's so many different user interfaces, but obviously functionality is big. You know, free to grow is driving the ship. Maybe an owner-operator doesn't necessarily have to worry about that.

You're more focused on the dashboard or KPI reporting. And I've got two really good senior leaders with free to grow that would forget more about CRMs than I could ever know. But I know data entry is big. So getting that lead gen list built. And then you go through your process. OK, so we got the lead entered. Is there any sort of follow-up?

Is quoting standardized? You know, we work with some window cleaners or power washers that may have kind of set pricing for square footage or whatever the layout is. So pricing to quoting to lead follow-up to invoicing. And then maybe there's an interface with, okay, the customer now is logged. We can do follow-up emails or specials or seasonality to business, et cetera. So if those things are met within the CRM, it's typically a good fit. So we'll just go through the total sales or systems process of all of our small businesses

to kind of put those in place. I was on a webinar earlier, we were going over KPIs, and I said, the biggest problem I see is call center. I literally was at the Wizard of Ads in Texas, Roy Williams. And he said, I've never really seen a call center that impressed me. And I've worked with hundreds of companies. And I said, no, you're right. I said, the problem is they're not using the VoIP system correctly. They're not nights, weekends. The calls are not booking enough per CSR. The utilization number is not right. There's so many things I look at. You listen to the quality of the call. They're not empathetic. They're not having fun. They're not, oh my gosh, Mr. Charlie, how are you? Wow. And it's like, when you hear a great call center, but then you got to give more calls to that person. You can do

a weighted average round robin. There's a lot of things you can do and i'm asking what's your favorite kpi to all these people and no one said call center and we forget we go oh let's pay somebody 12 13 an hour it's just the call center we're worried about conversion rate someone falls below 80 conversion rate we're like oh but yet the call center is booking at 63 so you're paying for all this advertising you don't think about the call center. It's the most underutilized KPI out there. I will say I love service time because I can look right now. I can scroll through my system. I got it right here right now. According to today, we're at an 86%, but unfortunately right now that's not including abandonment rate because those haven't been graded yet.

So the next day I can see the abandonment rate and it's never perfect. But what's your take on call centers as far as the KPI? Well, we have a distinct advantage versus call centers. You know, one, I don't like to think of us as a call center where typically, you know, you call in, you can get one of 20 different people and they're just kind of taking name, email address. Okay, great. We'll follow up with you. The benefit that we have, and I think this is reflected in like our positive kind of tone or attitude with, with our clients, clients calling in is we're going to have one to three people working on an account. Okay. So when they start in the morning and when they, you know, go home at night, they're focused on that business. So they, one, they get to know the owner operator, two, they get to know the

products and services, the service area, and they see the successes. You know, they look at that, hey, we closed this, or this was booked, or the, hey, we got the flyer that you put in the mail. Here's the success. So we can tell over time, they get more in tune with that business and they're just happier when that business succeeds. And I'm not sure you get that with a generic call center where you have 15 different people answering that one number. But when you have a small intimate group of people that really care, I mean, that's going to naturally reflect itself. They see the dashboards and the KPIs. And so when they see that lever going in the right direction, that's a win-win.

It is. It is. It is. I had under 10 people in 2010, and I got my mom and stepdad to move out here from Michigan. And thank God they were kind of like a free to grow for me. It was like my personal free to grow because I hated answering. I remember just going to the movie theaters, and I still did it even when they were there. But it was so annoying. It was like, allow me to do what I do best. And when that stuff got out of the way, some of the operational

things, you know, before Adam, I think we got to about five and a half million and then he came on and he was able to really focus on the systems and really get that stuff out of the way. Let me do marketing sales and motivate and just really keep my eye on the ball of hiring and reading and getting more consultants. And I think that's what you guys do is let them focus on what they do best and get that crap out of the way. That's a nightmare for people because they go, I can't find good people. And when I do, they don't want to work or blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm sure you probably have some really amazing success stories of just getting that stuff out of the way for entrepreneurs.

Yeah. Tommy, you obviously figured it out. And there was a point in time where everybody's bootstrapping. And I get that. The mistake that a lot of entrepreneurs make is they'll hire just trying to be cost effective. They'll hire their relative, their mom, their dad, their brother, whoever. And they'll just stick with that. And sometimes that could be great, but sometimes that could just be horrible. There's no accountability. What are you going to fire your cousin? You got to see him at Christmas dinner. It can create all these problems. And I think accountability is the one. It's just keeping family and friends accountable can just be so difficult. And nobody wants to have those tough conversations. Or you know what? The CSR who's your relative will start taking time off, care less about the business.

Free to grow is, you know, we can be fired or you can fire somebody that's a full-time CSR. So I do see that with entrepreneurs. They hold on to that friends and family discount way too long and it's doing them a disservice. Hey, I hope you're enjoying the conversation with Charlie. I just wanted to let you know that we have a special offer from Charlie's company, Free to Grow, that I want to share with you today. So stick with us till the end and I'll reveal exactly how to take advantage of it. But if you're in a rush, just go to homeserviceexpert.com forward

slash podcast forward slash Charlie-Falkner, F-E-L-K-E-R. And check out this exclusive offer that we put together just for our listeners. Okay, now let's continue the chat with my boy, Charlie. Man, I'm getting some notes here. You got me thinking about a lot of stuff. So what's some low-hanging fruits that just a lot of entrepreneurs are not doing when it comes to their CRM, if they have one, CRM? Man, you know, it's the day-to-day entry upkeep maintenance. And I was guilty of this with BuilderTrend. BuilderTrend's a very robust system where I was just so focused on getting the lead in there and getting the estimate out.

And maybe some of the project management fell by the wayside. If you're going to use a CRM, you got to know what within that CRM you're going to use. And if you're not, then you've got to address that. So the little hanging fruit would just be the garbage in, garbage out. And that's what we bring to the table is that eight to five, you're going to get CRM management as a core responsibility of what we do. I think if you go a week and you're all excited about it, and then the next two weeks, you're kind of just isn't going to do anything for your business. When it comes to reports and automations, one of the things I really like looking at, which is a little archaic, it's called the huddle report that tells me what we're trending at for the month. I like to compare last year's numbers. I like to look at, am I getting enough calls for the guys? But realistically, I was just talking to one of my product development guys on this.

I don't want a lot of guys for low-performing technicians. They need to have less jobs. And my mentality is when I get a market, you should see what Phoenix does versus other markets because of all of our TV, radio billboards. But what I love about CRM is I can actually see conversion rates, average tickets. I can look at how many calls. I've got all kinds of analytics built in other things. It's called UTM, tracking perimeters. UTM, you should have that on all of your LSA, your GMB, everything.

And it's amazing when you can track this stuff because you can start to see what happens to your Google My Business page, your local service edge, your PPC, when you start doing TV, radio billboards, because those are hard to track. So quick piece of advice is put UTM tracking codes on everything. And those are unique tracking metric, I think is what it stands for. But what are some cool reports and automations that business owners should be looking at? Man, we put one out to our clients every Monday, a call kind of disposition report, types of call coming in, and we can one out to our clients every Monday, a call kind of disposition report, you know, types of call coming in and we can tailor it to what sort of business or what the

owner is interested in learning. But what type of call was it? It was just kicking tires for a price. Are they wanting to talk to an owner? Was it spam? They want to schedule an estimate, reschedule, you know, whatever it is. So we send those out once a week. And then it's up to us to work with the owner operator to manipulate the KPIs or whatever. I told you about these 10 different CRMs. So it's going to vary. But, you know, if there's certain metrics like order rate or lead conversion, everybody listening kind of knows what I'm talking about. It's just going to vary, Tommy. But, you know, we have a two-week onboarding process where we're going to get to know the business most importantly, but then talk to the owner-operator and say, hey, when the phone rings,

what are the kind of things that you're going to be keeping tabs on? If you're worried about your pricing in the market and you're getting a lot of price quotes and they're not closing, maybe that's a conversation you got to have. But so there's flexibility. I mean, you mentioned how creative some of these CRMs are. Your dashboard can make it work for you. And we do that. There's a lot of people that are, not imitated, intimidated. There's a lot of people that are intimidated by a CRM. They're like, I'm comfortable with paper invoices. I don't need all these KPIs to run my business. I've been successful. And my best advice to them is it's not necessarily change, but really what's happening is as we go in, it's actually keeping up.

It's knowing what's going on in the internal. Let me tell you the scariest thing, Charlie, and I'm guilty of it. It's not going to get a physical. It's because you're afraid of what you're going to find, but you can fix it when you find it. And it's not knowing what's in your bank account because you're actually scared you're like oh i don't want to go into that meeting because i know it's not going to be good news and it's almost looking the devil in the eyes and saying listen i'm here to beat you and defeat you but it's tough and i can tell you firsthand my dad just lost his wife

recently they were really you know something, something special, 20 years. And it's already, yeah, it's horrible. But thank you for that. And so she had some symptoms and she decided not to go and go in. And as she passed, it was, it happened within two months. And the moral of the story is, if you don't want to pay attention to the things, I've been there. And it's almost the same thing as going to the doctor. You got to go. You got to go. You got to look at your CRM. You got to look at the KPIs.

And even if you're afraid of it, you're afraid to get systematized. You have to. And tell me a little bit about the people that are afraid of getting on technology and they're just afraid of what they're going to find. Yeah, I think it's the same people that are afraid of technology. Probably if you looked at their QuickBooks account or wanted to look at a P&L or a balance sheet, it probably would look like a total disaster for the same reason that you just said. They don't want to know what their balance sheet looks like, how much debt they have, credit card statements, which your P&L, your balance sheet, tell the story of a business. I would bet those two coincide pretty darn closely. Somebody's afraid to take two weeks and learn a new technology. I could be wrong, but I would imagine their revenue hasn't really grown

and they don't have a good grasp on their marketing spend or is their marketing efficient. Yeah, those are kind of obsolete businesses, in my opinion, especially within home service industry. Maybe some old school retail outlets can get away with that. But certainly in this industry that's getting in this segment of the economy that's getting more and more competitive, man, if you don't have a grasp on what you're spending in dollars in and dollars out, which CRMs can do that, you're probably losing share. Here's a comment for you by Jeff. We are franchising. Is this more effective than hiring in-house CSRs in the beginning? Yeah, Jeff, thank you for the question.

Our biggest partners are franchises. That's 60% of our business's revenues are through franchises. Most franchisees are on the more sophisticated side, understand that they have a core competency, and that's probably going out and growing the business through sales or business development, whatever, and they're going to outsource everything to us. And on the scalability perspective, we have one franchise that we support 15, well, soon to be 16 different locations across the country. And we can build a team around that franchise. And we've done that. We have a team of three to four people that just answer calls for that individual franchise. So certainly understanding the business and the types of calls that are coming in, we dominate that CRM. If a new franchisee

signs up, we're going to know more about that business than typically they do for a period of time. So before you hire a house, we'd love to talk to you because we know the franchise model really well. So guys, if you want to see the key summaries, they're going to be available once this is all transposed on homeserviceexpert.com forward slash C for Charlie. So C Felker, F-E-L-K-E-R the number two, since this is the second one. So homeserviceexpert.com forward slash C Felker, then the number two. Now I'd like to focus more on customer service for the home service businesses. First off, what does having a consistent customer service presence mean? Yeah. One of our big value propositions is,

you know, we're not going to be absent. I don't have any hard data on this, but I bet absenteeism with CSRs is probably 10% to 12% for people that hire in-house. Sick days, taking time off. I got the Mondays, hungover, whatever it is. We just take federal holidays off. So it's our job to be there. Other than a federal holiday, we're going to be there eight hours a day. We're working towards covering weekends. You know, when we started Free to Grow, we were a five-day, kind of eight hours a day business. We've gotten demand now to focus more on some weekend coverage. What are things that businesses need to have in place in order to be able to have that in their business? I guess we're talking about customer service presence. You know, Alan, who asked about electricians, we've started to work with HVAC companies, companies, smart air solutions, Tom Cox in Oklahoma city was a home service expert listener. So hi, Tom, if you're listening, we've started supporting Tom. And when

we onboard a client or start the partnership process, we're going to look at call volume, number of crews, what sort of CRM are you using, what's your staffing, et cetera. And we'll have a minimum. We're working with Tom. It's a thousand bucks a month because Tom just started an HVAC business in Oklahoma City. He's got marketing bucks. He's buying a truck. He's got a new rent. So we're going to work with individuals to be cost effective for a period of time. As I knew that you're going to have capital, you got to invest in the business. Yet you've got to have dedicated CSR resources. So you're not missing phone calls when they come in or, you know, we'll manage lead channels via email or Facebook or home advisor, et cetera.

So, you know, it doesn't take much. We work with plenty of companies that are in that startup phase. So what are the consequences of not having this? I mean, literally, like, I've seen this a million times. I don't think people really understand. They just say we get to a lot of the calls, but we're not going to work past six. We're not going to do weekends. And oh my gosh, I've met a lot of business owners that have been successful in the past, but really not the future, I guarantee you. Let's just say we like to give our employees time off, and therefore we're going to take care of our employees, but not our customers.

I like to do both. But what are the repercussions, the consequences of not having a consistent customer service presence for businesses? Owner-operators have got to know their craft. They've got to know whatever industry they're operating in from a technical perspective. The rub that I see, and I was guilty of this, is they just keep hanging on. They're like, okay, well, I'm going to punt this decision to outsource this or hire somebody or use a CRM to next year.

And then they just get more and more ingrained in that business. They're responding to immediate customer text messages, or they're in their car, they take a call, and they write something down, and that doesn't get translated into the CRM system. All those little fails add up. And you've got to know your business. I get that. But at some point, you've kind of ripped that cord and say, you know what, I'm going to go focus on key accounts, or I'm going to go to more BNI meetings or whatever it is and let free to go or whoever it is kind of take on that offering. Too many times they're just extending that, you know, I'm just going to grit this out. I'm going to grit it out. I'm going to put some more money in my pocket, but they're just kind of getting

themselves more wrapped around the axle on the minutia every year. So when you're there, you dedicate a person to a company. Explain that kind of how that looks. So what are these people doing the whole time? They're answering phones, they're entering CRM data, they're probably doing some dispatch work. What does it look like? I'm just trying to help everybody get a vision of what this person's doing. Yeah, I appreciate that. So inbound, outbound calls, lead follow-up, certainly taking that call and getting the information to the CRM, following that systemized process that we have built within that CRM, responding to emails, crew management, scheduling. We're big proponents of Slack. So oftentimes even Slack can integrate with our CRMs

where we'll have direct dialogue with owner-operators. And I get a key account calls in. We'll say, okay, this account called in. I'm transferring it right now. And we'll catalog all this into Slack. We use Slack as basically an ongoing line of communication on a daily basis so let's say you've been out in the field all day or in sales meetings whatever the owner's doing they can get back in a day and see exactly what happened in the course of their business yeah i mean we're doing everything essentially tommy on the back office except for bookkeeping uh i like that lead follow-up i think no one does a really good job of

i think that's probably one of the things i would talk about is REF, build rapport, educate, follow up. No companies that I've seen, not really. I mean, there's certain companies like Leland Smith out of Southern California Service Champions. He's got that systematized. And then outbound, I don't think enough people are calling their past customers and saying, hey, do you need me? Just that alone? I've got a buddy in Texas that does not do advertising. He just relies on old customers. If you just hired one employee from Charlie's team and said,

Charlie, I want you to keep me busy. I bet you guys could do it. If you had a decent database to work with, you think that's something you could probably do? Absolutely. We do that frequently. And to piggyback on that, we also get, stuff happens throughout the course of a day.

Okay, this crew is going to be 20 minutes late or there's an accident. And a lot of our up and calls is clearing that kind of stuff up, which I know technicians can drop the ball, et cetera. That's a big portion of our day is reaching out to customers. That dialogue, if you don't reach out, that has an impact on your business. Why is this person late? All of a sudden that snowballs into some big fire that you've got to put out. Those little things matter, and we do those well. You can do anything.

Like if someone called you up and said, Charlie, I like what you're doing. I got 100 clients a day. I want you to call. I want you to basically be like a mini secret shopper for me and then ask the clients for reviews if they're happy. You could do something like that, right? Oh, we just did it for Mountain View Window Queen, another home service expert client, Jordan Piles. Jordan's listening. Hi, Jordan. And he gave us a list, posted a list in Slack, and our team leads for that account

went through and highlighted them and cold called. And I wish I could post, we got a Slack from him and say, hey, I just booked these five jobs from these calls today. So keep it up. That's certainly a big part of you know what we do but again you know if jordan wasn't organized and hadn't catalogued those names numbers all that stuff and to see all that would have gone you know would have been fairy dust gone so it sounds like to me you're pretty much willing to take on anything a business owner just probably knows they should be doing, just doesn't have the time to do. Yeah. It sounds like to me, it's mostly like just more of the back end, except for bookkeeping.

So lots of different things. Could be updating a blog. I bet you guys are doing content writing, but just the things that we don't get enough time to do as business owners. Or 90% of what we do is going to be dominating the phones, dominating your CRM, managing your calendar, constant communication in Slack, lead follow-up. I mean, those are the big- Those are huge. There's so much money. Those are the big things that we do. Yeah.

I've seen companies double by just getting this part figured out, by taking advantage. You know what? I'd love to see in the comments right now, and I'd love to pull some names out of here of just people that probably aren't doing a great job like me. Like I've got so many new customers coming in that need a ton of big service. I think we're not taking advantage of some of our list. And I mean, you know, my list is about 400,000. So I mean, it's massive because we better get working on that right now. Yeah, no, we're doing some cool things with automation. But at the end of the day, I think this service, it pays for itself. Would you say that most of your clients would say that they're making a very, very healthy profit?

Yeah, I mean, Jordan, the Mountain View in California, he paid for himself with us with those five estimates that he booked. And our team knows that. And, you know, it feels good when we get a task or something assigned to us by an owner-operator. And again, we see that needle move. And then we see that slack. Hey, guys, nice work. Just book these five estimates. Our team gets more enthused with that client. And that's reflected when the phone rings. It feels good to want to help somebody. You guys don't do any list buying where you'll buy a list and just cold call? No, if you have a dedicated list of existing or previous customers or a list that you pulled

with specific information, we have no problem going through that list and doing outreach. Yeah, I would say you want to be a little warmer list. What about, this is not what we're supposed to talk about, but right now everybody seems to be having a hard time hiring. And they're probably wondering what your secret sauce is. How do you find great people that are engaged? Do you got any advice on something that's worked for you really, really well in the last year to find amazing people? Yeah, I mentioned this on our last podcast that we've certainly had people that haven't worked out like most companies.

Our biggest successes have been referrals or recommendations from existing team members and team members that have been there for six plus months where they can really vouch for us. And, you know, we've done some good things to really kind of build culture. We really empower. I mentioned we have these two great people, John and Mallory, who kind of are account managers and our training supervisors. And we kind of, Nathan and I are my business partner, really step outside when we have our weekly huddles. We let them run the show and we'll kind of pour water on whatever we need to do or support them. But man, we've really let them run with things. And so there's complete ownership

from our key employees. I'm sure we'll stub our toe with future hires, but our best hires have been, you know, Hey, Mal or Hey, John, who do you know that might want to work for us? Oh yeah. Talk to Sarah or Mike, whoever that's been our, our best recipe. You know, it's funny. I just graduated 20 some odd guys. And I said, guys, before we go eat lunch and they're actually bowling right now, I'm going to be meeting them and they get a big, they get a big prize. If they beat me. One guy finally beat me in our graduation class. And they framed this to let them know that they beat me. Anyways, I said, guys, listen, I'm creating an internal promoter program. And you guys make $1,500 for every person you recruit. But I'm going to help teach you guys. Listen, everybody's big on something. Maybe you're in a softball group. Maybe you go to a certain bar every week. Maybe you're a big member and you step in for the church all

the time. You play the band there. Maybe you're good on Instagram. Maybe you're just, you love TikTok. Maybe you're outgoing and you can go to a BNI group. Maybe your husband or your wife is a huge realtor. Maybe you're a member of your HOA department. So all of us could get more garage or jobs and all of us could find great people. Next time you're getting a haircut, look at your beautician and see if she's doing a great job and offer her a position. Let's get right along. So let's work on this because I'm glad to pay you guys. I said, what happens, Charlie? Tell me what would happen if every one of my employees found an A player this month and we hired them. What would that look like? It's pretty easy math. What month and we hired them? What would that look like?

It's pretty easy math. What would happen to next month? What would we be? You'd be doing great. We'd be double. We'd double our company. If every single employee found one other person, we'd double in size. And it's my job to get the leads, and it's not that hard from a marketing department.

But just think about that. The companies out there go, now what would happen if each employee was able to get 10 leads a week? Find one employee and get 10 leads a week. You say, oh my God, that's impossible. Our employees can't get leads. If you don't have attribution and you don't bring it up, we've got a huge check, speech. But yeah, I think it's so important to get your internal people recruiting. And I think that's just something that we all, we kind of just say, we're going to do what we're going to do, what we're going to do, but we never do it. Yeah. On the flip side, retention is so important too, when you've got, you know, really talented people and something that I think you guys have built with great culture. And I sit, you know, back to talking about the military, the military and the army in specific had these family readiness groups where like, okay okay we've got to train the soldiers but there's a family behind this person that we've got to take care of too and i i've seen some pretty creative concepts where when the family feels like the company's taking care of somebody like we were

considering having uh monthly cleanings for our employees so if somebody comes in and cleans their home once a month john will you sponsor sponsor yeah, I mean, those are great ideas. Or you sponsor a family dinner. So the family gets together like, okay, I see how free to grow or A1 is taking care of our family collectively. I mean, I think those go so long and so far. So you know how I kind of wrap things up here. I've got a lot of notes, man. I love podcasting because it kind of gets me thinking about stuff too. And it kind of reminds me of stuff. And just the difference between me and most people is I don't have the failure to implement. I will take these things and give them to the right people.

And there will be exact follow-up. It'll hit my calendar in five minutes after I get off of this. And there will be things that get done. Everyone else might be taking notes, get a good idea. They'll put it somewhere. They'll say, hey, listen, maybe I'll give it to the note fairy that they could go grant it one day. Now, that's not how this works.

The people that are listening that want change, they're going to book an appointment today. They're not going to wait till next week and their schedule clears because tomorrow's the best day to start. And then it turns into next month and the month after. And maybe next year, my dreams will come true maybe if i keep hoping and wishing you know tommy's doing a lot for us we listen to him all the time but they don't implement anything and it's the implementers that call me up and they're like dude when i started listening to your podcast i was doing 1.2 million i was working i was a bad dad i was a bad coach i was a bad husband now i'm doing 12 million I get these calls all the time.

And this is what it's all about. One of the guys came in here. He said, dude, to get to 5 million, I listened to your first 30 podcasts. To get to 10 million, I listened to the next 50. It was pretty cool. It's awesome, man. So somebody wants to reach out to you, Charlie. They want to call you. They want to get ahold of you. They want to book an appointment with you. What do they got to do? Yeah, look, I'm sure my email will be posted, cell phone. That's the best

way to start. And all the relationships we've had through your podcast and your network have come through there. So I'm sure that'll get posted and we'll schedule a call. It's a relatively informal process. I really want to get to know and figure out what's bugging you and what your problems are and how do we help you, to your point, get from one to two. Yeah, that's great, Charlie. I love this stuff. I really do. I think you're one of the guys... Listen, I recommend a lot of companies. I recommend Schedule Engine. I recommend eSquared. I actually... I'm working on a document that gives my best books to read. I'm sharing some things like an NDA, mutual NDA, non-competes. I'm trying to put everything into this system because I'm getting

really good at building manuals. And I just get all these people that ask the same thing. So I'm like, I'm just going to create a resource for everybody and you'll be on there for sure. But I only recommend people that I really, really like that answer their phone that have done an amazing job. And I know for a fact that you deliver a great service and you stand by and you're not going to BS people. And I can appreciate that a lot. Is there any books that you've read that we have to read that you really recommend? Man, I'm reading one right now that is Ray Dalio, The Changing World Order.

I know Ray Dalio is big in the capital markets and has written principles and other books. Very topical book, especially with current events and a lot of facts and figures. It's taken me a long time to get through it, but he's a worldly guy that I think that's important. I think reading about business is helpful, but sometimes you got to step back and look at kind of macro trends. And that book is certainly that. Yeah. His books are not small. I'll tell you that. The audio audiobook was like 40 hours or something so we talked about a lot of things we really spent a lot of time talking about crms and just making sure you show up for your customers make sure you have somebody there what i like the most about this conversation is just things outside of the box like doing follow-up like outbounding to your people and telling them

do you need your yearly service i think we always go to these external sources and we try to find more business when we have it. Do you know how many customers we call and we follow up and they say, we're using you because you followed up. Like how many people are listening right now that aren't doing a good job of following up? How many people are listening that don't answer the phones past 6 PM? How many people are listening that just don't haven't had the CRM figured out

yet? You know, we talked about a lot, but I'll let you kind of close us out with maybe something we didn't talk about or something you really wanted the listeners to know. Yeah. Tommy, I love our partnership. Love supporting you. Hope for a resource. If there's somebody listening that we can help, reach out to me.

We mentioned early on stuff that I learned from my time in the service and dominating the basics. That's lead follow-up. That's answering the phone. That's talking to customers in a positive way. If you don't know an answer, you'll get back to them. It's all those lessons that aren't hard. It just kind of takes consistent approach and I hope we can help people with that. And I'd love to support an electrician at some point. Yeah, I think you will. You know, you're a man of your word and I can't stress that enough. I really like when you show up, you get a firm handshake, you're trustworthy.

Everything I would say that I'd recommend in a person. And, you know, there are times I have people on the podcast, and I've used them before for different things, but they're not relationships like me and you have. So thank you for coming on and doing everything you do. And I think you take care of people, and I don't think you'd be where you are today if you didn't. And just the fact that there are hard conversations. There's stuff sometimes that don't make the order perfect. And sometimes they hate CRMs, but it's impossible to please everybody.

And you do a great job of pleasing who you work with. So thank you for coming on today and always get a lot out of these. All right, Tommy. Love seeing you, man. All right, brother. And go win your bowling match. I'm going to try. We'll see you later, brother. Hey, I hope that you're enjoying today's podcast with Charlie Faulkner. Now, listen, if you're feeling stuck with all these administrative

tasks and you can't find a way to grow your business into millions of dollars fast because you have to do it all yourself, then Free to Grow is the solution you need. They essentially take care of the entire customer interaction without the owner-operator having to be involved. From filling the call to scheduling the estimate to booking the project and invoicing the customer, they do it all for you. And the great news is that we put together

a special offer for our listeners. If you go to freetoggrow.com forward slash HSE, that's free dash two dash grow.com forward slash HSE, you'll get 50% off on your startup fees. So if you want to get out of the field and grow your business faster, go to free2grow.com forward slash HSE and book a call now.