The Home Service Expert Podcast - How To Nurture Relationships With The New Generation of Homeowners

Episode Date: April 24, 2020

Jack Huntress spent the bulk of his career in environmental sciences. He co-founded PARCEL, a property due diligence reporting company, which gave him great insight into real estate and property management. He also established HomeBinder, an electronic records management system that leverages home inspectors to deliver property specific alerts, ongoing support, and recommendations to new homeowners to reduce headaches.  In this episode, we talked about environmental science, strategic partnerships, entrepreneurship, business development...

When you look at the way in which millennials grew up, what's different is that their childhoods were very scheduled. You know, they went from karate to soccer to birthday parties. Everybody went to everybody's birthday party class. Weekends were not puttering with dad at home on the weekend. Like, it just didn't happen. And I look at my own two kids, everything is structured. And so what's happened as a result of that is we have a generation of home buyers and owners that know very little about homes and home ownership. We run into users of HomeBinder constantly that

aren't even aware that there's a central air filter to change. And when you're talking about some real basic fundamentals that have been lost sort of in a generation, I think that's a real opportunity for us using technology and working with an ecosystem of partners to really make it better, make their ownership more successful, make them less frustrated, catch things, you know, when a $20 problem before it becomes a $1,000 problem, and make them not have such a negative view of homeownership. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields, like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello.

Welcome back to the Home Service Expert. My name is Tommy Mello. And today I have Jack Huntress with me out of Boston. Jack's expertise is environmental science, strategic partnerships, entrepreneurship, and business development. He's the founder of a company called HomeBinder. It's homebinder.com. We use them here at A1 Garage Door Service. He also worked for environmental data resources business development for about seven years, except for that in 2014. MISMO, government committee for a few years. I tag Parcel, LLC co-founder. And he was a Jacques Whitford consultant. He spends the bulk of his career in environmental sciences. In 2001, he co-founded Parcel, a property due diligence

reporting company, which gave him great insight into the real estate and property management. 2012, he founded HomeBinder, an electronic record management system that leverages home inspectors to deliver property-specific alerts, ongoing support, and recommendations to new homeowners to reduce headaches. From contractors, plumbers, electricians, roofers, to appliance purchase and warranty documentation, to paint colors, anything relevant to your home, anything that's relevant is going to be in a home binder. Jack, pleasure to have you on today, brother. It's wonderful to be here, Tommy. Thanks for having me. Yeah, it's going to be cool, man. I think that this is something that people are going to love in the future. The fact that they can have everything under one roof from knowing,

like you said, the warranties on everything in your home to the appliances to you could probably register anything in your home. You know, the exact paint colors for matching, you know, the exact match of carpet, the supplier of it. I mean, this would come in handy for anybody. Do you want to tell us a little bit about your career and how you got started and how you kind of got into HomeBinder? Sure, happy to do it. And without rewinding the clock too, too far, I think I'll talk about sort of starting with Parcel, which was my last startup. It was in the commercial real estate space, but the company that acquired that business was getting into residential real estate. They

thought it was important that residential consumers should know their surroundings, what's going on with the ground, air, water around their property. And that gave me some wonderful exposure to the world of residential real estate. And at the same time, I went to go buy a home with my then wife, then fiance, I should say, now wife. And we looked at a number of homes, went to a bunch of open houses. And at this one particular home, the previous owners had left out during the open house an eight-inch stack of absolutely everything about that home, down to paint colors by room. And we looked at a number of homes. I had owned three homes at that point. And I knew that this really needed to change for residential real estate. Today, when you buy a home, you get effectively knowledge about the bedrooms, bathrooms,

square footage of the home, year built, and the keys, and a good luck. And really, in that first year of ownership, you stumble through ownership, trying to figure out how the home works and what you should do and when you should do it and who you should call. And effectively, all that information that the previous owner had stored in their brain and paper over their 10-year of ownership goes out the window and is no longer valuable to you. And that's really what the core, what we're doing. We're helping owners manage their home better. We're helping sellers position their homes better at the point of sale. And we're helping those buyers be far more successful with the, you know, single largest thing they'll probably ever purchase in their life.

Yeah, that's pretty incredible. So I guess the hard part is how do you get it out to the masses? What's your go-to-market strategy? Yeah. So when you think of our company, you really can think of us as a B2B2C company. And so business to business to consumer. And what this means for us in a practical sense is that we view working with the entire ecosystem of all of the people and professionals that surround the homeowner at all points of their journey as being valuable partners of ours to help and support the homeowner. So we started with real estate agents and home inspectors, as you mentioned in the opening. A big chunk of our customers to date have been real estate agents and home inspectors who

have gifted HomeBinder to their clients. But now we're working with lenders. And as we'll talk about today, a growing number of home service providers with the idea that it's good for them and their business to gift their client a HomeBinder account, load the records of what they did into it, and benefits the homeowner because now they have a tool that's already been started for them by someone that is helping support some component aspect of their ownership and they can continue to organize and manage it going forward and as they work with other professionals those people can contribute to the binder on behalf of the homeowner and so it's we think that the right way to approach this so that every home has a home binder is through not just leaning on the homeowner to do all the work, but really see

that there's value to everybody that supports them from retail, to the real estate agents, to the home service providers. There's value to those businesses to be part of that binder, be the plumber of record on that property so the current owner doesn't forget who they are and the future owner sees what they did. And we, because of the way we act, Tommy, are an electronic tool that nudges and reminds the homeowner to do important tasks through maintenance reminders, as an example. And that also helps service provider businesses by keeping their name and brand in front of clients and ultimately getting more repeat return business and referrals.

Is there any alerts for like a service agreement type thing? You know, air conditioning is really big into that. Yeah, absolutely. So not only would we work with that HVAC professional to load in a record of them, any equipment they installed, records of it, documents, but also set up a maintenance reminder, perhaps several for different items, you know, servicing of the equipment on whatever periodic schedule, sending that homeowner a notification via email or text that it's time to do it. And also for things that the homeowner might be able to do themselves, such as change the air filter on the return vent at some particular frequency. Now in New England, that's once a year where I live, but obviously in other parts of the country, it could be as

short as every six or eight weeks. And so different frequencies for different items. Every home is unique. And I think our goal is to make that home actionable for the homeowner and make it great for the people and the companies that set up that binder for the homeowner. Give me a detail of like from A to Z, everything you put. I love the name home binder because it literally is everything that applies. Well, thank you for those out there and entrepreneurs. I did have to buy it off a squatter. So if you're thinking about a name and you really went to it, I don't regret the money I spent to buy the domain from someone that really

wasn't using it, but I I'm glad it resonates with you, Tommy. Yeah, it's great. It's a great name. So what are the offers that like, so like remote controls for your garage door opener, like everything from A to Z, as long as you input it, is there an easy way? So how does it get inputted into HomeBinder? Is it just a manual process? Well, there's really a variety of ways to do it. And we know that there's not going to be one way that everybody will want to do the same way. So as an example, perhaps the binder was set up by your real estate professional

and then you get it as the buyer. Then you paint a room. You could load that paint color in yourself and add it into the system. There's an area for paints, and you can link those paints to the rooms in which you used it. For those on the premium level, subscription of HomeBinder, which is what A1 garage door is gifting all of their clients, and it's awesome to be working with you. There's the ability to get a custom email address. And so you could just forward an email of something you bought or purchased to that custom email address for your personal binder and it would get loaded in. You could use the mobile app and you could take a picture of the paint color can and load in the image of that and tag it to a room where it was used. And if you happen to be working with a professional that actually did the painting for you, perhaps

they're logging into HomeBinder and pushing that information into your binder where you're just getting an approval. It says, hey, this person says they did this at your home. They have these details. Do you want to accept them? And if yes, that data goes right into the binder for that homeowner. Perfect. So let me ask you this. There's a lot of data. We, like thousands of other companies,

no big secret, we use AWS. Amazon Web Services has really built a premier platform. Obviously, there's other cloud-based services, but we've been really happy with our use of AWS. They offer a lot of the security protections, protocols, backups, all those things that used to cost companies really tens, hundreds of thousands of dollars to do. AWS does very cost-effectively, giving us a lot of function and a feature set around the management of it that we probably wouldn't be able to have otherwise. So that's a big change for anybody that is running a business today as opposed to 20 years ago. And then really around the safeguarded data.

So we view the ownership of the data to be that of the homeowner and the homeowner only. So once that binder is set up, regardless of who set it up for them, it's their private repository. Only they have access to it or anybody that they've shared or directly decided to give access to, say a spouse or a property manager they might be working with. They can at any time create a public-facing report that they could share with potential buyers as an example, but it's really their information. And as we often say around the table, the homeowner is our true norm. We are in a journey with that homeowner for the next 10 years or until they sell the home and beyond, hopefully onto the next home. And so we have a very long-term view about being protective of that homeowner.

And as an example, Tommy, when we have meetings around the table, we kind of leave an empty chair as a symbolic gesture to homeowners and say, hey, listen, we're having this conversation about doing this feature, this idea. What does that homeowner think about this? Is that a good idea or not a good idea in their view? And I think that's helped really guide and shape the product as we've gone forward, keeping the homeowner again at our true north. Got it. So what's the big objection you get from a company like mine or an air conditioning company? What seems to be kind of the hard part about adopting this? Is this thing just everybody's just jumping in at first or is there some type?

You know, for me, I think the hard part is you teach guys to sell your products and your things and you add one more thing. Sometimes they kind of fall off of what they're supposed to do to create profit. So we use this as an added benefit. We kind of twisted it on its head, which I think is working. But as far as the common contractor, what are you hearing? Yeah. So I will say that, you know, for the individual sole proprietor, if you will, generally things are a little bit easier. And as you said, you know, as you have bigger teams and you have a lot more complexity to the business and you're asking

all of your team members in the field to offer, promote a variety of different things, it does get a bit complicated and things can be lost in the noise. I think promote a variety of different things, it does get a bit complicated and things can be lost in the noise. I think, you know, what we always try to do is do two things. Number one, we simplify the message so that in a very, very quick soundbite, the tech in the field in particular, but also reps on the phone can describe what HomeBinder is and communicate it within 20 to 30 seconds so that the receiver of that information, the client, understands the value that they're getting. Because the way it would be used as a tool is perhaps to help assuage a customer's concerns or make a customer a bit happier that was a bit disgruntled or close a sale, differentiate from

a competition. And all those things are ways in which HomeBinder can be leveraged inside of a business. To do that, we really have to make sure that the message that particular business is offering is very simple, very packaged, and comes off the cuff the same way every time for everybody. The second thing is really around automation. And we are an integration-first company. And one thing we work with you and certainly with Service Titan, whom I know you know really well, it needs to be automated. And for the larger businesses, this is really important. The process of setting up these binders can't be something that it's taking you or a member of your team time daily to do. It has to be automated. And in today's world

of APIs and connected systems, that's possible. So whether it's QuickBooks or ServiceTitan or any other platform out there that the service professional may be using to run their business, it's important we're having that conversation about an integration. Because back to your question, what's a big objection? I love the idea of it, Jack. This is awesome. But I just am concerned that it's going to take too much time out of our day and be disruptive to our process to add it.

And so we need having the integrations to ameliorate that concern. So you've been doing this for a while now. it. And so we mean having the integrations to ameliorate that concern. So, you know, you've been doing this for a while now. What are some of the things that you found when people are using HomeBinder? Interesting things you learn about ownership throughout the years. The thing that I'm learning and reminded with constantly, especially over the last few years, we have a new generation of homebuyers, Tommy, millennial homebuyers. And when you look at the way in which millennials grew up, what's different is that their childhoods were very scheduled. They went from karate to soccer to birthday parties. Everybody went to everybody's birthday party class. Weekends were not puttering with dad at home on the weekend. It just didn't happen.

I look at my own two kids, everything is structured. And so what's happened as a result of that is we have a generation of home buyers and owners that know very little about homes and homeownership. We run into users of HomeBinder constantly that aren't even aware that there's a central air filter to change. And when you're talking about some real basic fundamentals that have been lost sort of in a generation, I think that's a real opportunity for us using technology and working with an ecosystem of partners to really make it better, make their ownership more successful, make them less frustrated, catch things, you know, when a $20 problem before it becomes a $1,000 problem and make them not have such a negative view of home ownership. Any home inspector out there, Tommy, will tell you that the amount of deferred maintenance is increasing and increasing on homes. And so I think with the size of the

overall value of all the residential homes in America, there is nothing more valuable than the sum total of all residential homes. We're talking $32, $34 trillion. And I think that's an opportunity, you know, whereas we go forward here to try to make some dent here with this new generation of buyers that really needs help. And I'm sure you and your team see it in the field daily. Yeah, I think this thing's pretty cool because it reminds you of everything. It'll tell you two years on a sand filter that you're supposed to change the sand. I mean, it'll do anything basically from, hey, you need to get the solar lenses clean. I don't know. I can't even imagine how many updates and how many things that we just don't even think about until they go bad.

Does that seem to be the case? Yeah, it's very much the case. And even there's nuances, you know, like you think about carrying over that knowledge from one owner to the next, like in my house, do you use the yellow bags or the green bags of water softener? You know, what's important. You got to use the green ones. They're the iron out bags, little things like that. And believe me, when you have a wife with blonde hair and her, her hair is turning green. This is not a good thing. You want to get ahead of this stuff. It's just an extraordinarily amount of information. Homes are complex. Even in subdivisions that have been around for 30 years, the houses may look the same on the outside, but over a few decades, they start to operate differently because of the ways in which they've been modified by the owners.

And so you have to kind of take that into account. And that's what HomeBinder allows. It allows an individualized experience just for this homeowner. We're not sending out topics like, hey, it's the fall, rake your leaves. No, we're saying, hey, listen, you have an oil furnace or a gas furnace. These two furnaces need to be on a different maintenance schedule. And this is what you should do when it happens. And this is who you should call. And same with septic systems and same with sweeping chimneys and especially these types of maintenance items that are somewhere between 12 months and 36 months. I often can't remember, you know, I happen to have a septic system. I can't remember if I pumped that septic system two years, three years, four years ago. I just can't. We can't keep track of it all. And that's where technology is good for us. We have such busy lives. We need something else helping us think for us. Yeah, I think that there's no way I can

keep track of everything I've done. There's so many times where I wish I knew that plumber I called last time, or I wish I knew if this was still under warranty. And I think this is kind of where technology is going. It's just every single maintenance record that you have goes into an input. And, you know, I remember one day I had my TV go out. So I got the chip replaced and it was under manufacturer. Well, the manufacturer warranty fell out. So I found the same company to come back.

They had another chip. They did it. Well, it kept happening. And then I lost the number. And there's so many times where people are like, well, who is that guy we called last time? Or who's the company we use for this? And it just doesn't live. Back in the day, we used to keep a phone book with the fire department, everything. And we kind of just write it down in the phone book, like garage door guy or you know what I mean? And now it doesn't seem like

people are putting that stuff in their phone and they're not good records if they are. And I think this would be great even for like an Airbnb. Something goes wrong. You know exactly every single detail. The guys you're going to call, how long the warranty is. It just seems like I had a process myself that I was going to launch and it was starting to get too expensive for what I wanted to spend. It was like a checklist. And you would go through and you'd have before and after.

So every time someone left the Airbnb or they got into the Airbnb, they'd go through. And more importantly, you'd have it for the cleaning lady or your cleaning crew. And they'd make sure there's five towels. The sheets are good. And they'd take a quick video with a timestamp. But more importantly, on top of that,

so you could see before and after, you'd also have this whole process to where you know who to call if the TV goes out. You know the exact number to call for the cable company, the SRP or your power company. You got all the stuff under one roof. And this is kind of a piece of what I wanted to do. I wanted to use it more as an insurance policy for when people come into your house with timestamps to make sure everything was there. But I love this stuff. So how does someone even become part of HomeBinder if they're a local pro? Yeah, so if you're a local pro, you go to homebinder.com and at the top, you'll see a drop down menu of professionals and go on that page and select home professional.

There you can sign up. And from there, you can start to experience the system and what it's like to set up binders for your clients. We obviously want to find ways to automate it, but many decide that it's not a lot of time to set up a customer with their name, email, and property address, especially the sole proprietors. Of course, as the big companies get bigger, we want to do more of that in an automated way

using whatever they might have driving their business. Systems I mentioned before, even Salesforce, whatever it might be. And then we have different plans for different tiers of businesses. Just a couple of seats or professionals in the field up to businesses that may have 50 or more techs in the field. And so that's how we size and price the product. Really what we're trying to do here, Tommy, is we're building more of a one-to-one relationship

between the pro and the homeowner. And the idea that that pro really is stamped on that property as the person. And if someone on our system is messaging out to say, I need help with something, it's only going to that one professional. It doesn't go out to lots of people. It's a one-to-one. We're strengthening that relationship between whoever helped them, whether it be the lender, whether it be the real estate agent, or whether it be the plumber. We want those relationships deep between the two. And I can give you tons of examples of people that I used in the past.

I'd love to have back, but I can't remember. I know they left me a business card. I just don't know where their information is. And it's bad for their business too. And when you think about it, home service providers, they have relationships with people, but they don't have relationships necessarily with the home. So every year when six and a half million homes sell across the United States, those

are lost opportunities because the next buyer doesn't generally know who was the person who did this work before. I mean, maybe you left a stamp, maybe you took a Sharpie and wrote your number on the water heater, but there's limitations to what professionals can do in the home to leave their mark. And sometimes there's four numbers on the furnace from four different professionals. It doesn't really help the homeowner to know who was the last person who was called. So I think some of the things that need this to work perfectly. So it's kind of like the people that really, they sell you a car and they're like,

every maintenance record, every oil change they give with you. They give you the complete rundown of the car history from simple as an oil change to a fender bender you got fixed. Now that works really well if the people are meticulous, documented people. Do you think that it's going to be an obstacle to get your typical millennial like myself, or I mean, I'm barely a millennial, but do you think you could get people to actually participate in every single thing? I'm just curious because that's the only thing I see that could be, you know, hey, that was cool for the first month when we entered a few things. What are your thoughts on that?

I think it's an awesome idea. And I think it's going to take off like wildfire. No, look, I think you're right on the point here, Tommy. Humans, let's be honest, we are our own worst enemies. We don't do the things that we should in our professional life, in our personal life, with our health, with our relationships. We just don't. And we know what we should do. And I know that you coach a lot of companies and you see this all the time. People sometimes just can't get out of their own way and do things that are important

to them. And I put myself in that bucket too. I think we have to acknowledge and realize that even though this is a sound and fundamental thing that most homeowners should do, there's going to be impediments to getting it done, which is why working with the ecosystem, all of the service providers that engage with that homeowner so that they have the opportunity to contribute to that binder on behalf of the homeowner, loading in as much as possible, reducing the amount of effort that the homeowner has to do. And it's good for the homeowner because they have good records now. It's good for the business because now they're imprinted on that property and they keep building up their referral and repeat business base. We can do a lot of things. I mean,

we get a number of pros that come to us about, hey, listen, I would like to maybe add more of a subscription component, a service component to my business every year. Hey, I've got a new service line. I'd like to let all of my customers know that I now do this. And so we have custom messaging inside the system to say, oh, next time you log in, this can also be done by someone you have worked with before if you were needing it. So whether it's lateral expansion, whether it's a deepening of service, we're really working to make sure that there's enough significant value there. The service providers want to take the time to make sure that they are the pro of record for everything that they did for that home, for that homeowner.

So let me ask you a question about that so you got the home binder and you're you're forced in messages but do you have some type of metric on how often the homeowner is actually logging into that like i'm on for example next door there are people that are on next door 10 times a day the lost dog did you see that yeah and then there's me that like, I don't remember the last time I logged in. I have a membership and I see stuff come through my feed on, I think it goes to promotions on my Gmail,

but, or one of the things I never look at. But how do you get the customer, the homeowner? Is it alerts to email? Is it text message? What's the best way to get them the message in the login yeah so we definitely see spikes around three events you know one of them being you know the monthly summary that comes off the system hey these are all the updates to your system this is where you stand with stuff you've added just comes off the first of the month it spikes engagement with that the second

thing we see engagement with is really around maintenance type reminders. Hey, it's time to do this. The average home is probably only getting somewhere between six to 10 of those per year, because some things are off cycle. Some things, you know, maybe only happen every other two or three years. They don't happen every year, but that's about as much. We're not trying to get, and nor is our aspiration to get people to log into HomeBinder every day or even every week. We look at just engagement even on a 90-day cycle. And sometimes, Tommy, the engagement isn't so much even they logged into HomeBinder, it's just that they just got out of Lowe's, they got a receipt for a new dishwasher they bought, and they forwarded the receipt to their

custom home binder email right off their phone. And that's engagement to us. They now have recorded that inside their home binder. All they did was forward an email. And now there's a little bit more memorialized. And when you think about those little actions over 10 years, they really start to add up to a significant amount of information that would otherwise be scattered in email inboxes, in drawers, folders, in a work bag, and in your head. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, there's no way. I mean, even if you got a good filing system, which rare people do, it doesn't get done properly. So how do home inspectors play a role in this business? Yeah, so we started with home inspectors because, one, I got to know them. I talked a little bit about Parcel at the beginning and the company that bought that business. They were getting into the home inspector world. So that's one of the reasons I, as I started HomeBinder,

I went back to that world. If you think about it, the home inspector is really the singular whole home expert out there in the world today. There's about 40,000 of them across 20,000 companies across the U.S. Most of them are fairly small, very provincial, working in various markets around the country. But they are the whole home experts. And they're generalists to a degree. They're masters of not one particular trade, but they know homes holistically. And their report is, in the absence of anything else, the best replacement for a homeowner manual. It tells how was this built? How was it heated? How was it cooled?

What you should do? Details of obviously deferred maintenance items. And even they collect information about appliances in many cases. And so they were a natural fit to start with because effectively we're bringing some continuity to a home inspection report that would otherwise probably be lost in some email inbox or be collecting dust on some shelf. But rather, the information has now had some continuity into HomeBinder and is now gently starting to nudge and remind and be a constant source of information for that homeowner throughout their ownership.

And we love working with home inspectors. We see lots of opportunity to keep working with them. There's a big topic out there. Think of it this way, Tommy. In today's world, we take our cars to mechanics. We take our bodies to our annual physical. We take our finances to a financial advisor. We go to a dentist periodically. Who, since most of us have bought our home has come in and looked at it holistically and given us a rundown of what's good, bad, sundry. Nobody. We don't do that. And I think that that's weird for the single largest thing in our lives, the most expensive thing in our lives,

and the thing that if you catch stuff early, you can save thousands of dollars. And so I believe that as we go forward here, inspectors as a community, they're going to play an important role from the lending perspective, from an insurance perspective, from the homeowner perspective, and from a home service provider's perspective. Just by working with home inspectors, we've added tens of thousands of home service providers to HomeViner because they are known by home inspectors and home inspectors get asked all the time for names. And they do this free of charge just because they're a great source of it. And most of their clients ask, who's a good plumber? Who's a

good electrician? Who can I call to, you know, re-roof my house or install a new heating system? And so inspectors are tied to the aging community. They're tied to the home pro community. And they probably arguably know more from a whole home perspective than anybody else in the ecosystem. Yeah, that's true. I mean, these guys know a little bit about every trade because they're going through it. They're identifying things. So what makes a contractor stronger? I mean, you work with a lot of contractors. I think we're a pretty strong company. We offer a good warranty. We've run

tons of warranty calls in the past 10 years and take care of our customers. And that builds trust and allows, I think the average age of a home is something like seven years before you move. So taking care of customers has done a really good thing for us. But what are some of the things that you noticed that really stand out of a great contractor? Yeah, the number one thing and the number one complaint across the board, across the entire service market is responsiveness. If I go mountain biking with my buddies, I need an electrician to do this project. I get five names. I call those five people. Do you know how many return phone calls I'm going to get? Maybe one, possibly zero.

So there's this level of just responsiveness. And obviously, with a good economy, there's not the inclination to do it. But I think good businesses are responsive, even if they can't do the work. They call back, they respond, it helps their brand, they may get called again, and it helps foster the relationship with anybody who gave them the referrals. I mean, one thing that frustrates home inspectors, they give out names and they hear from their clients that, hey, I called that guy, but he never got back to me. That's frustrating. And I think it's a really big problem. And of course, it's a bigger problem in a good economy than a bad economy. So that cycles over time. But right now, I will tell you

that that's a huge complaint and something that I think good contract, good service pros do really well. The second thing I see is that it's the old fundamental of just service, just providing great service. And that's about doing what you say, saying what you do. It's about obviously performing good work, but above and beyond everything else, it's about communication. Most of the effectively disagreements, lawsuits, disgruntledness, and I'm talking about both the home service provider and the home inspectors is an even broader example. It comes down to breakdowns in communication with the customer. You really communicate what

you're doing, what you're not doing, when it's going to get done, and how it's going to get done. And so, keep in mind that your perspective as a service pro, you're very busy and you know this stuff like the back of your hands. If I've hired somebody to, you know, say, I'll use the generator example. Like, I know a little bit, but I don't know the process. What I would really appreciate is, okay, we locked in a date that it's going to happen. Okay, three, four, five, the day before, send me an email and tell me how it's going to play out. What's going to happen? What do I have to have ready? Then remind me on the day of that it's happening. I don't want to have to wonder, are they coming today? Are they not coming today? And then when it's done, send me a wrap-up. So it's all encapsulated. First response of this number two, communication

and managing the service around communication, I think is maybe overlooked more than anything else because it's so close to most pros. And frankly, it takes a little bit of time. So it's tough for the sole guy to do it. But with technology today, it's possible. And you know it, Tom. I'm sure you set up a lot of this stuff through ServiceTitan. And it helps you as a business. It helps your tech because their customers aren't surprised. It helps the customer have a great experience. Yeah, it's amazing. One of the things that I hear a lot of is technology coming to get us as contractors. And what I mean by that is Amazon's coming and Google's coming in. There's all these people coming into, Facebook's coming into home service, and they're saying it's becoming more of a commodity. I mean,

I've heard this over and over, like, soon you're going to be able to order on Amazon and know exactly what you're going to pay for a five-time unit installed, and there's not going to be the sales aspect. And it's kind of a contractor's worst nightmare to not have that personal touch and that extra. I've met with a company that's doing a ton of money in the home service space, and they've got a set deal for anybody that is an investor, especially the hedge funds that only pay $2,500 for a 510 unit that's installed. And they never deal with the contractor. It's all been commoditized. And that's scary a little bit because when you're doing stuff that cheap, what I found is what we have that most companies don't is we have trucks that are the same. We have a communication system. The hard part is the human

element that I think the hardest part of any contractor's job is getting great labor that shows up on time, makes the customer happy, that fixes it the right way. The more specialized it is, the harder to get that human interaction to do it right. So we teach technical, operational, and then there's the sales aspect. And the sales aspect is what really allows us to make money, go into this industry. So if they commoditize it, the margins go to crap. And the hard part is, how do you hire great people in an age where the average plumber is 47-year-old, 47? How do you hire great people when they got to be presentable to the customer?

They got to have a clean background and drive test. They got to have a clean driving record and drive your trucks. And they can make a great job doing anything else. So the hard part, I think, why Amazon has failed and why Google is not taking such the approach to go straight to the consumer, but they're doing the Google local services. So what is your concept of where we're going

in the next 10 years with this whole industry? Because to me, it's scary, but there's still some missing pieces that I don't think they've figured out yet. I have yet to see any example where this really works at scale. And, you know, without sort of naming companies, there's been many companies that have tried to do this at massive scale across all industries, and generally it just doesn't work. And I'm glad you went with the human quotient because that's where I was going to go next

with like what's common among best of breed. At the end of the day, any company is just people. That's it. And I got a reaffirmation of this when I was in my early days, as you referenced environmental consulting. We would do jobs at GE Capital and US Bank,

big portfolios, and we would, our competition, you know, sometimes they big portfolios. And we would start a competition. Sometimes they were these massive companies, like 10,000 people in the company. And I'd be in a meeting with like a GE Capital and they'd say, oh, we don't use them. They're terrible. I'm like, geez, wow. I mean, I'm glad they're picking us, but geez, that company is not terrible. They have 10,000 people. They have some amazing people. They're some of the best in the business. It was just that that particular person had a bad experience with one person. And now that huge company is being written off. And I think one of the things that service provider businesses, you know, some are short-sighted about is employees and employee retention. I can't think of a good reason for most people

that are techs at businesses to want to go out and start their own company, but yet the churn is very high. Many of those people leave aspirationally wanting to do it because they feel like they should be making more money, only to find out they have tons of headaches and they don't really want to run a business. I mean, if you've ever read the book, the EMEF is exactly what this is all about. Sally the pie baker who goes into baking pies because she loves baking pies and wants to make more money. And she finds that her life is miserable. Running a business is no joke. And I think for technical people that want to do things, it's the kind of core responsibility of the business owner to find ways to get their employees knowing the right direction, having the right autonomy,

and being sort of effectively set up so that there is no more attractive option. And that means that for businesses that grow, they focus not on necessarily revenue and profits on every year, but they focus on enterprise value. That's the key. If you think about enterprise value and how much what you're building is worth, you have low churn rate with your employees, you have high success with your customers, you get great referrals, you're building up a massive enterprise value. Now, your profits may not be as much as every year, but that's short-sighted. If you want to get into a business and have fewer headaches, have better customer reviews, have better retention with your employees, which is

the cost of hiring an employee and getting them trained is massive. You know it, right? So it's like all of these things have to get lined up. And I think the first mistake you make is that a tech is a tech is a tech. Not true. That tech has to have, as you said, the right level of experience. They have to be presentable and can communicate well with customers. They have to really understand and have emotional intelligence, which is really big in today's world, to not only deal with customers, but internally within the team so they fit culturally. When you find those people, you have to cultivate it and retain. So yeah, hiring is a big thing.

But I think that more importantly, it's really about creating a place where people feel some of that stuff that, to quote another book, Daniel Pink and Drive, which I'm sure you've read, Tommy. It's really about mastery, autonomy, purpose. And you build that for your employees. You feel like they're winning economically. They love what they do. They don't need to leave. And your life as a business owner is so much better because you're fighting less fires. And maybe you're taking a little bit less here and there, but you're building a massive enterprise,

which is your nest egg for your future. Does that all line up for you? Yeah, no, it's great. I got, it's funny because I just looked at my bookshelf. There's a book, Daniel Pink, The Sell is Human. That's the first book I read by him. And it is, it's not a bad thing. I think that's where the biggest misconception is, is selling's bad.

Don't sell. Ultimately we're a business to make a profit, but I think you made a great point of I'm making sacrifices this year and next year. When you decide you're going to do billboards and radio big time, you know, that's not going to pay off month one, month two,

month three. Ultimately you've got to get it in the subconscious of a human being and have them be the go-to company in your mind and give great service. And then we just had 15 guys land between Monday and Tuesday for training. Trust me, they're making good money for training. We're putting them up. We're feeding them a lot of the times. And you know, the first six weeks to eight weeks, they're not making us any revenue. Well, that's an investment.

I want it to be 50 guys a month. But ultimately, you know, what's kind of cool, we got set up is everybody's bonus and performance pay relies on these guys' success. So I win, my managers win, my trainers win, my recruiter wins when these guys are successful. So it's everybody's cheering for success. So I win, my managers win, my trainers win, my recruiter wins when these guys are successful. So it's everybody's cheering for success. And that's what I think really getting everybody rolling in the same direction is so important. And like you said, I'm making sacrifices because if I was going straight for profit, I probably wouldn't be hiring a bunch

of guys right now. I mean, you know, retention's huge. I think you nailed it on the head. So you have a background in environmental science. I'm just curious how that's influenced your mindset and approach when it comes to starting a business. Yeah. So, you know, in truth, it was a bit more in the world of geology, petroleum, geophysics. And I'll share that I'm sort of addicted to like those shows on the discovery and science channel like how the universe works because it's always evolving and i think about things on like big time scales and i am always grounded by quotes by some of the big guys in

the field like carl sagan like we are but a ward of dust circling a humdrum star in the remote corner of an obscure galaxy. Like, when you really think about, like, the context of who we are, I think it helps put things into perspective in terms of, like, how much progress we have made, you know, in the last 10 years, 20 years, 50 years, and what a big problem really is. Look, we have problems every day running a company and starting a company. But in the big scheme of things, like the world doesn't end. The sun comes up tomorrow. And you wake up every day as an entrepreneur, you know, especially in those early years,

you feel like you just get punched in the face. That's how you wake up every morning. Some mornings you feel like you're sick to your stomach. You want to throw up. But I think that perspective of sort of like the geologic horizon in time has been helpful for me. And I think the other part of it has been considering the broader interconnectivity of everything. And I've used the term ecosystem a number of times on this call, and I mean it. I mean, we are building the platform that is built for the homeowner and anybody and everybody

in the entire ecosystem that wants to connect with them, offer value to them, and that that homeowner wants to be in touch with. And so you think about all these industries, the professional services industry and the insurance and lending and retail and home inspection, everybody's surrounding this homeowner. And I think for us to be successful, we have to take a group win mindset where everybody is winning. We're building a platform for everybody. And that connectivity between all these parties is really important.

And if anybody starts to try to take too much, the whole ecosystem starts to fall apart. And so we have a very much of a long view, long horizon, putting things in context and trying to make things work for everybody involved. We use the term global, we throw it around like a punchline, a throwaway word today. But the deeper meaning locally is that we're all connected, even in our provincial areas and tied together in a variety of ways. And, you know, we as humans are social beings. So we need to, I think, take that into account with building a successful place where everybody wants to come play. And that's what Homebinder's mission is.

I like your context of really how small we are. You know. There's a book, and I wish you knew the name of it, but I had somebody on the podcast talking about it a while ago. And he said, 40 years from now, these books that are written in kind of science fiction are kind of happening. So 40 years from now, we'd have robots that could genetically mutate food to grow stronger and faster and bigger. We'd have really no need to work. I mean, I don't know how the system would work, but human beings, eventually, we can have as much food. It's just crazy to think about what's happening.

And change is scary, but at the same time, it could be great because, you know, socialism, not a huge fan because it doesn't work, but if machines were doing everything and it wasn't a whole lot of work that needed to be done as far as everything's just is done for you. Can you imagine a world like that? I mean, it's mind boggling to me. It is mind boggling. I think the concerning thing for me is, is that I don't think we have kind of evolved as humans in a race to really understand how to be successful and be happy. And I think that one of the things that I find people today, the happiest people I know, is that they have the purpose quotient in their life down pat. They know exactly what their purpose is. They know exactly why they wake up, what they do, what brings them happiness, what they

want to achieve. And I think there's so many people in jobs where they're unhappy. I think that there's tons of people that are battling depression, lost. It's exciting to think about that. And my hope is that between now and then, we learn as a society, basically how to effectively enjoy the life we have and be productive in it and, you know, maximize the days. I lost, both of my parents had died by the time I was 21. And so like, when I think about seize the day and carpe diem and like, today's it, and you don't get it back. Like that's, that's like a real thing for me.

And I'm grateful at the age of 45 to be working on this as a second startup. To me, it's exciting. I'm, I wish it for everybody and I try to make sure that my entire team feels that way too, that my entire team, when they wake up in the morning, they want to do it. And frankly, if they don't, I will try to coach them out because I say, your life is too short. If we're not providing value, don't feel any obligation to me. Let's go find something else for you to do. And hopefully at the end, that produces a net good result for me, for them, for the business. You know, what's interesting is I talked to several

companies that I'm trying to work out a deal to buy their companies and whether they're 50 or 60 or 65, the answer seems to be the same. Yeah, I'll sell, but what am I going to do when I sell? Even though I'll have plenty of money, I don't really have that cause to feel important. I don't know what it is, but what is your take on that? I'm curious. Particularly around people retiring, because I definitely have some thoughts on that. Yeah, yeah. Talk to me about, you know, you've done the trades your whole life. Now you're thinking, God, I'll have the money I can because I'm the type of guy, if I retire, I'll travel, I'll spend some time to work on myself. But then I'm like, what's the next big adventure? And I've got a couple lined up that I've got my eye on. But

to me, I love what Richard Branson and Elon Musk are doing, giving back to mankind and changing the world. But tell me a little bit about, and that's a big goal. I mean, I'd love to look at their footsteps, but tell me a little bit about retirement. I want to hear your thoughts. Yeah, I think when I think about retirement, this probably plays into maybe your question a little bit, maybe something successful as you think about, you know, acquiring the businesses. You're as much painting a financial picture

as you're painting a picture of a future for the people you're talking about acquiring their businesses. And so for me, what excites me and what I hope to do someday is effectively mentor other entrepreneurs, other folks that want to get involved and build a business of some form or another, and hopefully allow the bumps and bruises that I took along the way to have some value

with somebody else. And I think I would take a lot of value from that. When I think about other folks that are thinking about selling their business, some of them are just burnt out and they're spent and they just want out. But for those asking that question, I could just go along the exact same lines. I mean, I think the value you can provide them is that, hey, listen, instead of taking all the money up front, why don't you take it this way and then come on board as a trainer for the next two, three, five years?

You travel a little bit for work. Maybe get your wife's happy. You get out of the house. Every third week, you're traveling for four days. You come here. You train our staff. You basically impart knowledge. And I think I see that a lot as the generations get older.

And we're looking at the baby boomer generation right now to impart a lot of knowledge onto the next generation. And a number of them are doing it, whether it be through mentoring or whether it be going back to teaching at some university. But I think that's an inherent human desire. I think that that's something that humans want to do as they get older and perhaps a way to get those business owners to see a future where they can be productive and be successful and be happy and not have this void on the other side that is probably a bit scary at best, but at worst, just unfulfilling and leads to depression. And that's not good for them. Nobody wants that. Yeah, it's just crazy. When God gives you lemons, you make lemonade.

Some people just make the worst of everything and it's really outlook and perception. So I just wanted to know, I got a few more things for you, but service contracts, I talked to a big private equity kind of company that really helps you kind of sell to private equity. And if you don't, so if you're not selling service agreements,

you're not getting the valuation you should. No, it's incredible. Subscription value is two, three, four, eight X more valuable. In the worst case scenario, and I'm going to give you a kind of a stark example in the inspection space. Home inspectors don't have service contracts. Say an inspection business is doing $150,000, $200,000 a year, two inspectors. The street value of that business

is like $5,000 to $10,000. It's just for like the list of agents that they do business with. And that's sad. A lot of them think that they've built up a nest egg. They have something to sell. They were told by their CPA or brother-in-law like, oh yeah, you got a great business. When you retire, you go sell it. They go out to the market. They find out there's nothing there because it's a total transactional business. There's no subscription revenue. There's no guaranteed customers. It's not like someone that is effectively a financial advisor that has a bunch of clients that are on their book. And if they sell their business, probably 80% of them stick with the new owner or the tax preparer. So it's really important, I think, to think about early,

if you're building a business, how am I maximizing my enterprise value? And you do that in a variety of ways of which this is one. I couldn't agree more. And if the listeners get a chance, the book I really love to explain, this is called The Automatic Customer. And it's very good book on that. So I want to go through, what are your top three books? You said drive, but you got three books you want to share with us that the audience should listen to? So near and dear to me, I think there you know, there's also the, there's the personal front too. So I'll give a, you know, one book on that front, just because I think for anybody out there in a relationship and trying to understand and be successful there, which really can carry

over to how successful we are on the work front, you know, the five languages of love is one that I think was impactful for me. I mean, there's other ones that people I know are aware of, but I think that's one that has been really good for me. And on the work front, boy, it's tough. I would say that as a technologist and thinking about evolution of things, one of the more impactful ones for me was Crossing the Chasm by Jeffrey Moore. I don't know if you know the book, but it's really about the technology adoption life cycle, whether it's microwave ovens or DVRs or CD players, how there's this group of early adopters, and then how eventually the early and late majority come on board as part of a bell curve. And it plays out all the time with all types of technology. And it's really an important one for anybody, I think,

starting something that is a new thing that people don't have a comparison to and are trying to now involve and roll into their lives. You know, there's the books like Good to Great and First Break All the Rules. I think 40X is probably another one, The Four Disciplines of Execution. I'm sure you've read it. It's a powerful book for any business owner to kind of understand how to make the most of their world and enlighten the way their workday and workweek is structured. That's a powerful one. And then The E-Myth. I mentioned that one. I would say that it's a simple, it's a short read. It's a basic book, but anybody thinking about starting a business, it's often the first one I direct them to because it tells a simple story that anybody thinking about starting a

business, I think can relate to about, are they going to be working in their business? Are they going to be working on their business? What steps are they going to be doing to make sure it's the latter and not the former, because the former will drive you crazy. You're not building a company. You're just driving yourself insane. You really have to think about how you work on your business in a successful way to be what you want it to be. Yeah, I had Michael Gerber on the podcast about two sessions ago. So yeah, he's awesome. Oh, that's great. So if someone wants to get ahold of you, what's the best way to reach out to you?

Well, I love to just give my email address, jack at homebinder.com. Really simple, really straightforward. I welcome email. Excited to talk to people. Of course, go to our website, homebinder.com. And of course, if you're a professional listening to this, click on the professionals tab and you'll see home professionals is one of the categories right below home inspectors. We're excited to have this opportunity to talk to your audience, Tommy. I really can't say how much I appreciate the chance to do things like that, tell the story and talk shop with another business owner and with the idea of growth behind it.

I always take from it and I hope your audience saw some value today as well. Yeah, I really appreciate that. Finally, I'll just give you the last moment to give the audience whatever you'd like, any piece of advice or anything else. I'll give you the floor. Yeah, I mean, I'll do it a bit self-serving

just to kind of, to talk a little more about HomeBinder. If you're a home service provider and you're thinking about how you deepen relationships with your customers and win more referrals and have more retention of previous clients, make sure your previous clients are coming back and using you for routine maintenance that they should be doing, and thinking about even expanding service lines, offering value-added service, and a point of differentiation. All these things are part of HomeBinder. And we'd be excited to talk to you. We'd be excited to show you how the system works and find a way to make it successful

around those two elements of the business, being great operationally and giving you a great piece of talking points to help you be successful. We will only be successful if you're successful. I think that's true for any vendor in any space. And again, we really appreciate the time and appreciate listening today. All right, my friend. Well, I appreciate you, Jack. And hopefully people go to HomeBinder. I think it's something that's going to change the future of how homeowners start to think about how they're going to catalog everything and prepare for the future when they need something.

So thank you very much, brother. Appreciate you. Thank you, Tommy. Hey, I just wanted to take a quick minute and thank you for listening to the podcast. You know, most people don't understand this, but the way that the podcast has grown is when people subscribe and they leave a review. So if you would please, please, please, Wyatt's top of mind, take a quick minute to subscribe and leave a quick review. It'll help me out so much. If you just took a little bit of time right now, I can't tell you enough how much I appreciate the listeners and the feedback. And also when

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