The Home Service Expert Podcast - Staying Competitive by Adopting AI to Optimize Efficiency

Episode Date: February 28, 2025

Boris Valkov is the Co-Founder & CEO at Lace, and a technology leader with expertise in artificial intelligence and machine learning. With a background in engineering leadership at top tech companies, he is dedicated to bringing AI-driven solutions to the home service industry. His work focuses on optimizing call center operations, improving booking rates, and helping businesses unlock new growth opportunities through data-driven decision-making. In this episode, we talked about common call center challenges, automation, marketing ROI…  

So if you're small, you start with things that don't scale. Usually you're trying to kind of improve things as they go. But the way for you to become really, really sophisticated and be able to overcome and beat the competition is just to embrace technologies because that's such an unfair competitive advantage. Of course, like coming from a technology company, I'm biased, but that's one of the ways for a small company to be able to catch up. That's the fastest way because what's the other one?

The other ways just to go to the slow processes over time and companies have accumulated knowledge over decades of how to do things properly. So the only way to kind of shortcut this whole process of getting sophisticated is technology because technology very often shocks the world and comes with something so much better, so much more advanced. 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. Before we get started, I wanted to share two important things with you. First, I want you to implement what you learned today. To do that, you'll have to take a lot of notes, but I also want you to fully concentrate on the interview. So I asked the team to take notes for you. Just text, notes, N-O-T-E-S to 888-526-1299. That's 888-526-1299, and you'll receive a link to download the notes from today's episode. Also, if you haven't got your copy

of my newest book, Elevate, please go check it out. I'll share with you how I attracted and developed a winning team that helped me build a $200 million company in 22 states. Just go to elevate and win.com forward slash podcast to get your copy. Now let's go back into the interview. All right, guys, welcome back to the home service expert today. I got a buddy of mine that I actually met at the home service freedom event. His name is Boris V, V-A-L-K-O-V. Vakov. Vakov, based out of San Francisco,

co-founder and CEO of Lace.ai. He's been doing that since January of 2022. Engineering Leadership AI at Facebook, he did that for a couple of years, senior manager R&D at VMware. Let's go to on and on here. Boris is a highly accomplished technology leader with over 20 years of expertise and experience

in software engineering management and leadership. He's an expert in artificial intelligence, machine learning, with a proven track record of developing and deploying large scale AI solutions. Boris DeVos experience and expertise position him as a leader in the tech industry, particularly leveraging AI to solve real world business challenges. His commitment to open source and rapid innovation underscores his approach to creating impactful technology solutions.

So Boris, I had met you, I don't know about four or five months ago. And, you know, I've got a couple of guys on my team that just, everybody brings us technology. I mean, there's some months we look at 12 different technology pieces and Lace AI, I was excited about, and I don't dive into my team does. And everybody on my team was super pumped about it. And I'll tell you what, I've got a list here of some of the things that we've done. We've increased. This is just the tip of the iceberg. We increased our booking rate by 2%, which is about $5.5 million of additional revenue per year. We've identified cancellation reasons to

uncover the lost revenue, which we believe is another 5%, which should be revenue, which we believe is another 5%, which should be another 13 to 15 million. And we're one of the biggest things that your software does is make sure that the compensation is dialed in for the CSRs and their scorecard because you know, with service 10, you got to grade your own call with your software. You kind of solve that problem for us. And we find a lot of people, they're not intentionally lying. Some of them are. I guarantee there's some companies out there where their find a lot of people, they're not intentionally lying. Some of them are. I guarantee there's some companies out there

where their CSRs are lying and they're saying it's a parts call where it's not. But your software makes it easy for us. We understand so much more about the call center. Dustin's obsessed with it. Manny's obsessed with it. There's a lot of money we're unlocking. And we were good.

We were good before we found you. Now we're getting excellent. Yeah. So let's talk about it, man. But just tell me a little bit about why you got into call centers and where the future is going to be in call centers. Yeah. Thanks Tommy. It's great to be here. So maybe I can start with a quick story. I was born in Europe in a country called Bulgaria, a small, 6 million people country and beautiful place. And then from there, my family and I immigrated at the age of seven to Germany. I spent there three years in Germany. We didn't have money. My dad worked as a construction worker. My mom worked in a restaurant. And I was in school, second grade.

So we stayed there for three years. And then our business expired. We came back in Bulgaria. And the savings, we opened a local family-owned business grocery store. So and this is where I encountered for the first time the call center 0.1 version where customers will call on the phone or help them. And then they'll come in person. I'll try to understand what's the problem and try to help them. And this is where I found the more people you help, and the happier they are, the happier I am. So that's how I defined my goal in life and that's how I started. So from there, I also got obsessed with the engineering and technology and I graduated in computer science.

So this is where I met my co-founder Stan. And from there, I started thinking, we work in this software company, I started thinking, how can I impact the maximum amount of people? And it was just a passion of mine, kind of build software now, have a new skill, build a software impact maximum amount of people. And it was just a passion of mine. Build software, now I have a new skill. Build a software that impacts the maximum amount of people. And then in Bulgaria, there weren't too many examples of startup companies that have reached really the level of impact, really massive amount of people that I was imagining to do. But I knew about Google, Microsoft, still Microsystems and the other companies. So from

that perspective, I just thought, okay, I need to come to the United States and start a company and help as many people as I can with software. And that's how we started the whole journey. I applied to 20 US companies and I didn't get any responses. So I took a longer path. So I'm like, okay, the next idea would be I joined the only company I knew that has headquarters in the United States called VMware. I worked very hard, harder than anyone else. And then I got to a point where they offered me to be the first transfer to the United States headquarters out of 1000 people office. And that's kind of how I came to the United States. And that was kind of a mission accomplished stage one. And then I worked a couple of years for VMware, then Facebook. It was amazing, as you mentioned,

like we're one of the best people in the world. And then at Facebook AI, we're actually working on the best AI software that you can imagine in the world with one of the best people, PhD researchers, AI engineers, et cetera. And then this is where I realized that AI reached an inflection point where it's going to be the biggest shift in technology that we've ever seen. And if you think about the revolutions, we had the industrial revolution in the 1760s, we had the digital revolution in 1950, and then we have the AI actual revolution starting a few years ago.

So I just wanted to, I left Facebook, my co-founder Stan was also kind of looking and we started together this company and we just wanted to bring the best technologies from the top five companies that usually have access to the rest of the world. We got super excited about the home services space and that's kind of how we started LACE. The idea was pretty much help the call center in the home services space to be much more efficient. And there's something very special about the cost end in the home services space. And that's why we chose this vertical.

Yeah. And you also work with home improvement. So, home improvement is going to be a big face too. And by the way, that's my thing this year is studying home improvement because garage doors I think fall into both. I'm so impressed by home improvement companies because they can go to a home show and generate millions of dollars. They could do outbound calls and they go knock on doors. You know, we just sit

there and say, hello, oh your garage door is broken, we can come out there. It's a lot easier. But that's why we get a bigger multiple for home services because I'm not gonna replace my windows if we're going through the Great Depression. So your garage door is broke, you're gonna replace it to get out. Absolutely. So average ticket size in those two micro verticals are very different. And then the other thing is that the Home Services Home Improvement Call Center, there's something special about it, which is it's very different from the bank call center, from the kind of the hospital, the airlines, the other ones. This call center, 90% of revenue

comes from the call center in this business, where in the banks and the other ones, it's mostly support. So it's kind of you calling to kind of fix your banking account or kind of change your airline tickets. It's a cost cutting exercise. And here the volume is massive and the average ticket size is massive. So it's an amazing opportunity. And then at the same time, it was a black box. When we talked to one of the first customers, they came to us and they mentioned, Hey guys, we have 20,000 calls per month. 90% of our revenue comes from those phone calls.

We want to improve the booking rate. And we don't know how because there's no action that you can take. So the head of call center will be listening to 5 to 10 calls per day. And that's less than 1% of the calls. So you're making decisions for 90% of your revenue based on 1% of data. So this was extremely inefficient for them. So what they started to do is before technologies, they were about to hire a QA people, three QA people, that will be listening to phone calls and flagging calls all day long, $6,000 each, $200,000 to be able to pay those three folks.

Just increase the analysis of the phone calls from one to 10%. So it's a very expensive, very efficient way to look at this. And that's why we thought that technology, we can completely enable the call center and make it extremely, extremely efficient. I knew you guys are doing it. I mean, look, I can't go into the businesses that you mentioned, but the who's who are getting into this because I look at the call center, service time put out a study

that Tom Howard told me about it. And they said it was, this is crazy to me that the average home service company books 45% of the calls. I cannot believe that because we're hovering right there at the 90 plus. There is so much money. You know, I always tell the story

my mom used to answer phones for us and she was just so friendly and smiling. And it was almost like she was like their mom or you know, their girlfriend or their wife. It's like, oh my gosh, honey. And the crazy thing was, is the clients got so excited to meet me. They're like, who is that lady?

Like, this is the most best experience. It's not just about booking the call. It's about letting them know that you care. And so the people might be listening and say, I've got a great call center. When you get the right call center with the right empathy and the AI is learning correctly and you could train them correctly.

See what I like about your software, Boris, is you're not like taking the phone call. What's like, hello, you know, they the phone call with like, hello. They got the weird, weird ass voice. And then they try to know everything about your business. And then they pause for 8 seconds because there's a lot... Don't get me wrong. I think it's going to be there eventually.

But it's not a substitute. I have a choice. I'm not calling... Look, if I got to call the bank, if I got to call Verizon, if I got to call the alarm company, it's different than calling a home service company, then I need to come out to my house right now. Me and you have talked about this extensively. I believe your software is going to make some moves that will help build that.

But right now I've just, it's too important to lose 1% of the calls. It'll make or break me from my competition. And people are like, oh, well, why Tommy's doing that? We're going to have this AI doing it 24 7. And a lot of people say, I'm just going to do it nice and weekends. You know how much money we make nice and weekends? While you're turning on the automation stuff, we actually have a real person. You tell me. I don't know where the future is going. Yeah. So the way to think about the future is where are we today? What is the majority of the revenue coming from today? And then also the AI agents and AI bots that

are in the future. So the use cases are very different. So one is overflow and weekends and the other one is your main revenue today. And then as we know from history, self-driving cars have been here for way more was on like 15 years ago. Still trying to do a full-sell drawing car. Not every person has a self-driving car. So it's been a 15 years and more journey and we're not there yet. So it's going to take a long time until you trust this to take your main calls, which is the main business. So overflow and weekends is currently the use case. So what we wanted to focus on is where is the majority of your revenue today, which

is like 90% of your revenue is in the people and the CSR and the agents that are taking the call, talking to a customer and booking a call is a very, very complicated operation. So it's not as simple as it might sound for those four minutes. So you need to show a lot of understanding, a lot of compassion. There is a lot of things that can happen on the phone call. So you need to be really, really good. So this is hard. And because it's hard, currently people are best to do that. And from that perspective, what we've built at LACE is to

make sure that you create a superhuman, super people, getting really good, really focused, making sure that every coaching and every aspect that you do in the call center has a direct correlation to the booking rates and the revenue. It's not random. So this is why, like from a strategic perspective, we are focusing where the revenue and the goal and the pain is today. I think, you know, the one thing that I've learned about a tool like this is you still need great managers. You know, we still have Brigham and Barry

over at Power Selling Pros. I don't think, you still want good coaches. You need to still talk to your people. I think a lot of people are like, if I got service time, I'd make a lot more money. No, you got to set it up right. You got to look at your KPIs. You still got to coach on sales. Like service time is not going to go out there, knock on the door and make the sale for you.

It's easier to present options with service time. So there are some cool things that technology will do, but you can't expect to just, hey, I'm going to call Lace up once I get Boris on the phone and this goes live. But you will see holes in your company that are massive. And it shows you where the objections are coming and where the cancellations are coming. And you get to know what to train on. Yes, exactly. So what happens is that many of the companies think that they have 92, 95 percent booking rates, et cetera. So one of the major areas that we're focusing on is first, in order for you to be correct with the booking

rates, you need to have 100% audited calls, which is not the case today. The way the calls are calculated today, booking rates is by manually disposing those calls by human. So this means there is a human error involved in that. So when you go to a full 100% of the calls analysis, then booking rates might actually change sometimes by 10%. So this is one.

So you might be thinking you're 95, actually you're 85. The other thing is, then from there, when you start cancellation, it could be another 10% that you're experiencing after you booked the call, then you cancel. So it's another 10% opportunity that you're not realizing that you have. You're thinking you're 95% booking order, some of the companies thinking that they're 95. So and then only half of the call center's calls, usually for our customers, are qualified calls, which is like a revenue opportunity.

But then you have half of the calls that are not qualified as of today's standards. But then what are those calls? Some of them are spam or technicians calling the mainline, but some of them are marketing opportunities where you actually can fine-tune your marketing campaign and create more of those leads. So it's another 5-10% improvement. So all of a sudden, from what some of the companies think might have 95%, they have like a 30-40%, like they have actually 55-60% actual booking rate opportunity, much bigger

than the area-wide. So this is where being able to see what's going on in your call center is critical because now you're realizing the full opportunity. So the hard part for me is that I know that a lot of my calls are getting wasted. I've got 70 CSRs now and I'm getting inundated with calls that are like, where's my door? What's happening with this? Where is this? What's this? And if I know those reasons, I could use technology so that when I'm with you, I can have service tightened. There's certain things on the invoice that I could put, hey,

Mr. Jones, make sure you call this phone number so you're not hitting our main call center. And then I could start to do around Robert where my top people are getting the majority of the calls. And then I could use these other CSRs that are still great at customer service, but not as great at booking, which means more money. And I don't think people understand. I remember taking the calls a decade ago. If I'm in the movie theater, if I'm at lunch, I don't care if I'm on a ladder. I need to book that phone call. It's everything. If I was to invest in any company, the number one thing, and I mean this, is I'd have to get laced. I mean, look, the reason why is the contact center

is the majority of where the money's made. And everybody says, I'm at 90%, I'm at 89%. But you just gave me so many reasons why. Number one, is the dispositions, right? Number two, cancellations. And number three, all these calls that aren't opportunities, what can we do to create opportunities with them? Yeah, absolutely. And then when you start thinking about the leads, so everyone,

every customer is talking about leads, leads, let's generate more leads and that. So, but people don't understand that the leads have a double inflation. And that's a kind of a dead circle if you go that path, because what happens with leads, of course, we want more leads, but the problem with the more leads is that today you have a double inflation. First, leads are getting more expensive every year, so you're spending more marketing budget next year for the same amount of leads. So your profit goes down. And then this means inflation. And the other thing is the quality of the leads goes down because there's more competition. So the quality of the leads goes down. So there's a double inflation. So now first you need to catch up with inflation and then you need to step up the game. So

this means that you might be kind of just working on half of the leads that you're actually paying for, and this is just going more and more expensive. So this means it's eating from your profit and it's limiting your scale. So that's kind of where one of the major misconceptions comes in. Hey, I'm absorbing 95% of my traffic and I need more leads. This is kind of one of the areas where many of the companies don't realize that once they start using technology, they actually start making a much, much smarter decisions about that. Yeah, I was listening to my buddy, Lance Bachman the other day. And he said, believe it or not,

we make a lot of money on Angie's List and Home Advisor and Yelp and all these other lead aggregators. And that's one thing about home improvement too, is if you answer the phone right away, and you get back to customers when the forms come in, and you could be out there the same day, you're going to make more money. I mean, but so many people go, oh, those leads are so bad. The reason they're bad, just like they say, Valpac's not good and oh, I never made money on TV. You know, I work with a guy named Joe Polish and he says there's the perfect sales letter can fix anything.

But the facts are, you got to be quick. You got to have speed of lead. You got to be able to show up right away. You got to be able to give... Not charge $200 to show up and ring the doorbell. And I think this is where a lot of people lose. I think it's so easy to say, I just need a call from Google when their door is broken. No, I want tune-ups. I don't care if you're going against three other companies on the end. Listen, I think we're the best. I think this is where a lot of people lose. If your company desires leads to come

in between nine and five Monday through Friday, and they need to be perfect broken leads, you're never going to be able to beat a company like us. Period. Absolutely. Yes. So the other thing is that, so you just mentioned some of the opportunities here, but there's so many more. Like for example, qualified unbooked calls, this goes automatically for rehash. So this is a massive opportunity where you didn't book the code was qualified So this goes to rehash automatically then calls that was booked but they canceled afterwards This goes to rehash them automatically as well many of those calls and the other thing is one of the most Common reasons where you can also optimize this life from the CSR teams perspective one thing is that today?

So the way we design place is to answer the top three questions that the company will have in the call center. Number one is what's my true booking rate as we discussed. And the only way to answer this is to analyze 100% of the calls. Otherwise you don't know what's your true booking rate. And the cool one to that is that you're trying to prepare for a marathon and your stopwatch doesn't work. So if you become a little bit better, you don't know whether your stopwatch works better.

So you don't know if you're improving. So booking rates is one. The other one is no company today can answer the question, what are my top five reasons to improve my booking rates in the call center? That is data backed. And I know that if I improve, that's going to improve my booking rates. It's very hard to tell that today without having the full data, only listening to 5, 10 calls per day.

And the other one is when you're coaching your team, your CSRs and scoring them, are you scoring them based on 5-10 calls per month? Usually companies do that. But then coaching is not the same for everyone. So this essentially means every person needs a different coach. Yeah, prescription. Prescription. So this means that based on analysis of the calls, you know who needs to do what coaching.

That has the biggest impact on revenue. So there's so many additional opportunities where you can improve booking rates. And a few of the examples here are, for example, from an objection perspective. So in the call center, many of our customers are receiving abandoned calls. This means capacity problem in the call center, especially the spikes during the week. The other one is immediate service unavailability objection. So if you start getting those objections in the middle of the week, this means that you have spikes in the week where you're kind of...

Understand. ...understaffed. And it has nothing to do with the call center. It's actually in the sales team or in the technicians. So this means that you need to fix your scheduling and your calendar for the team. So other common thing is service fee concerns. This comes sometimes very often. And this often means that you're not getting enough value, not explaining what this service fee the customer is paying for. It's going to be a certified technician. It's

going to be absorbed as part of the service. So all those things, people are not doing it and that's pretty much a major loss. But then there's other things such as financing. If something comes on the phone, like, oh, it's too expensive. Oh, I'm not sure I can afford it. So financing very often doesn't come into the phone calls to make sure that customer understands that this is a possibility. So there's so many opportunities that are being missed every day. And this is where the difference between you have a dark room and trying to hit a target today and then with technology, pretty much everything is clean.

It's just like a focusing on action instead of trying to figure out data. Hey, I hope you're loving today's episode. Quick question. What's your biggest challenge in business right now? Is it lead gen? Is it hiring eight players? Is it breaking through your revenue plateau? Whatever it is, I'll promise you this,

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Go to freedomevent.com and sign up and grab these bonuses now. That's freedomevent.com. Now back to today's episode. You know, I remember when I first got on a service site in 2017, it wasn't, you know, you look at the cost of job or people still call me all the time. They're like, how's call pro is a better price. And look, I don't have anything bad to say about other CRM. I just don't. The different businesses, different things. But when you look at what the software does now, what I don't like is when people like to say, whatever software you choose, I don't care if you're on Inktech or QuickBooks, what your payroll software is, whoever you're using for financing, it's not going to do the

work for you. But the fact is, there's a lot of lazy companies out there that just expect, hey, I got the software. Now what am I going to do? Like Al Levy, his book right there. That was one of my first mentors that made the biggest difference. They buy the manuals from Al Levy. And they say, I bought the manuals. But they didn't coach on them. They didn't do anything.

They just said, well, I spent the money. Well, that doesn't do anything. So, you know, as you're talking to me, I'm writing all these things down about what can I do to make sure we're rehashing these better. You know what I like is I'll call you up and I'll say, this is something I really want to understand.

And you're able to compute these things in hours versus months with other companies. Like, you hear about all these promises from all these companies. What do you think is keeping you guys? Why do you think you're going to win? Because there's a lot of people talking about AI and call centers in the world. I mean, why are you guys set up to win bigger? Yeah, I mean, the DNA of the company is execution and the rate of innovation. So I think the foundation of every software startup is the rate of innovation.

So how big are steps you're making towards the next level of innovation, because your customers expect you to be on the top of the game. And the other one is the speed of execution. So those two things are the only thing that you have a store software startup that makes the difference. Because if you're not fast, and if you're not innovating, then someone's going to take over the market. So from that perspective, our company was set up from the get go.

The DNA was execution, execution, execution, and of course, innovation. We listen to our customers. I spent hours in your call center. We dissected every second, every minute of everything that you guys do so that we can outline the software to the business needs to make it perfect. And that's what we do with our customers. We make sure we spend hours to understand every single second of the conversation to make the software the best possible version of it. So that's kind of what it's about. I don't know if you remember the story where we discussed

with Luke and then looking like, hey, cancellations, we need to think about cancellations. This was in the night. Next day, a couple of hours later, we had cancellations already in the software implemented. The night was a few hours in the day. So this is like the examples of speed of execution and implementing things fast. And that's how the whole company set up to win. And I do believe, like, I've always had this, I learned this about a decade ago is he who

could pay more per lead will always win. Because no matter what, even if you rank better in the algorithm, paying per lead, paying Google, paying Facebook, paying, if you could pay more than the next guy, you could get more leads. So when you could do more with the leads, you could pay more. Yes. So this is what gives us the edge is like, we're understanding capacity planning. Like if we're not paying for pay per click, when we're already booked out in the market, we're adjusting that in real time. Yes. Do you know how many people I see, they're spending a fortune on leads and they're already booked out? Just to say we can't come out there today or tomorrow.

It's a complete waste of time. And then they say, before us, you know This is the first question is like like how much am I gonna spend on the software? And really what I would do is do an analysis and I would have them call you up and say how much am I losing? Compared to some of my competition and maybe it's garage doors. Maybe it's a check. Maybe it's plumbing But you know, I don't know relatively I guess the pricing question always comes out but I think But, you know, I don't know relatively, I guess the pricing question always comes out, but I think, I don't know, what does that look like if someone wants to know? How do you even do that?

Do you just do a consultation? I mean, yes. So we can always do the calculating kind of calculate for every single company what it means. But the easy ROI calculation is average for the home service, our ticket size is 500 to $1,000. Yep. Normal.

And then if you have a high value code is like 10, 20, 30, $40,000. Right. So you lose one of those, it's like 10, 20, 30, 40 thousand dollars. So you lose one of those, you lose thousand dollars. So the question is like, do you believe that your CSR can save one more call with software? And that's the case, you're kind of already making profit. And from there, everything is like a scale for the company and improving. So ROI is very clear in this situation. So everything is about, do you want to be more profitable? Do you want to scale faster? Do you want to have more marketing budget for to be able to kind of grow faster and kind of get more leads, get growth? So that's kind of the questions

that companies should be asking themselves with technology. Yeah, you know, there's, there's a few people that I confide in that we talk about everything. I mean, look, I'm not the first one to just, when I found out about you, I wanted to work with you for a while before I wanted to do a podcast. But once I saw what you guys did, the turnaround time, you did a couple of things for us that were really big. I called a couple of these guys up and I was like, you got to talk to Boris because you know, they've been very kind to me and we work together. So this is tried and true. I can tell you guys, if you walk in, if you've done a shop tour, tommymellow.com forward slash shop, you'll see I've got service tight and open.

I usually got the S&P 500 open. And for the first time ever in the last few months, I've had lace.ai open. I like to keep an eye on it. I like to see the reasons. I like to see how many calls we took versus opportunities. I like to know that these are the facts. One of the things that I love R&V and service type, but that piece was never clear because the CSRs are making the decisions. They're just following their own calls. Yes. And this is just one of the kind of the angles that you see, like booking rates is

just the high level surface level. But then what about like, why did we book and why didn't we book? These are questions that everyone should be able to answer. And that's where the biggest challenge of the call center is today. Like you just cannot answer those questions. And the other thing is that all the opportunities and automation that you create afterwards, like these workflows that you can create after the call center, this is everything can be connected together with the other systems that can be doing the

rehash and the other systems that can kind of reaching out and all those kind of things. So this whole thing can be connected in one system. Of course you can start small and you can fix one thing at a time. But eventually as you're becoming sophisticated call centers, as you guys are one of the most sophisticated calls that we've seen in the industry in the United States, as you're getting to that level, then you start connecting systems, you kind of start working these small details, and then it's pretty much very hard to catch up with that. Well, that's what I want.

You talked about innovations, I want to see what's next. You talked about rehash, you talked about clearing out the call centers where only opportunities are coming in. The quality of leads matter as well, like if we're attracting affluent clients. If you are not branded correctly in a market and you're just doing lead aggregators, it's always going to be about price until you get a message out there that says we're... A lot of people say we're the best. But what does that mean? 24-7, we've got a great brand at your neighbor's house. We're going to treat you like family.

We're going to treat you like mom. And that's what I've noticed in all of our newer markets that aren't quite as sophisticated or large without as many trucks. It's always about price and Lace AI has showed that. The smaller markets are about price as you start to get big and you spend the TV radio billboards and your trucks are around everywhere. There's this trust factor and we see it. It's very vivid and there's so much opportunity here. I do mean this.

If anybody's ever listened to my podcast now, it's eight years. I've always talked about call center. It's one of the most important things. Of course, your cost per lead, which makes the phone ring or makes the form fill come in and then you got to book that converted after you knock on the door, then your opportunity job average, those four KPIs. And can people get better at sales? Yes. They want to find the most money, the fastest. It's in the contact center. Yeah. So you have these four tiers, four tiers of the funnel. It's marketing, the call center, sales and the service. Yep. So the call center is the one where if you don't go

through this part of the business, then it doesn't matter how good of a salespeople you have, but you're never going to have the chance to go to a customer and present the company. So from a cost center perspective, this is the first time we have actual communication person to person where the customer calls the CSR and you're able to explain your business with that. So from that perspective, yes, that's one of the major parts in the funnel where you start from the marketing, but then the next one in the funnel is the call center, which enables and opens the funnel for the sales and everything else that people have in the

business. So this is where, yes, so we just wanted to funnel for the sales and everything else that people have in the business. So this is where, yes. So we just wanted to focus on this part first, make sure that it's very, very clear. It's very, very advanced and AI helps here a lot because what AI is really good at is scale and understanding of what's going on in the conversation. It's like catching things, all the playbooks and all the best practices and all the objections and all of that. AI is so good. It's so much better than a person. And it's also at scale. It's like all the calls. So the good part about that is that if you are a call center manager,

instead of listening to phone calls and kind of, you can still listen to phone calls, but instead of listening, you can go and do this kind of a virtual ride along thing in the call center. You can listen to 1000 calls for less than a minute. Because essentially, you focus only on the one that matter, and then you can process 1,000 calls per minute and then, yeah, what's your performance as a call center manager compared to any other call center manager you have out there? That's one. Then from a CSR perspective, so we usually by default grant access to everyone to be

able to see the rest of the folks. So now you have the self-co as well, in addition to your, your manager where you were struggling with something, the software will show you very clearly what you're struggling with and you can go and see how are your best peers doing it. Yeah. Essentially means you can listen in practice in your company, in your environment, how to do it. And that's so powerful to coach.

What innovations do you see coming down the line here? I mean, look, we heard about this Chinese deep seek. And I know that Nvidia is really the king of when it comes to chips. They say we're in the first phase of AI and there's six phases on the horizon, I think some are along the lines of that. And it's going to start being perpetually faster.

Where do you see as far as LACE? I'm just curious for selfish reasons of what I need to be thinking about coming out here soon. Yes, so we're the leading call center revenue platform in the home services, home remodeling space. We will be leading the charge for a very long time. We will be on the top of every innovation that happens in this space and we'll guarantee our customers that they'll always get the best technology, the newest technology, they'll always be the

fastest and the best. So what is coming is you're going to have all those features we're discussing. They're going to be better. They're going to be faster. They're going to be much deeper to the point where it will be, I don't know what to do. Everything is clear. I just need to take the action. Right now you need to double check a few things, but still it's super clear the action. So it's gonna be to the point where you just need to do that and then you'll be better until you get to the point where,

yes, the innovation will get to a point where self-driving cars will come. But as I mentioned, it's gonna take years. And of course, this will be a transition process where, yeah, it will be. I'm curious, is there like a prompting service that if I say what are the top three, I, you know, I'm not into it on a daily basis, like my team, but like certain people, you know, if you were able to clean up these two things, you might take them from 70% to 90%. Is there like,

I know with ChetGBT4, it's all about your ability to get prompts. Yes. Yeah, so what we do is with Lace is we automatically show you everything that you need to know here. Of course, yeah, some of those prompting things that you can do and can just ask questions, this is very easy to do, so we can definitely add those additional helpers.

But what we're trying to do is we actually know what you need to take action on. We just tell you. So for example, you come today and we're talking to many, many just open a list and you know what to do today. Essentially, so this is your booking rate, your goal is to increase. These are the top things that you need to focus on today and this is how you do it. And then yes, prompting is one of the things that you can ask for questions, but also you can go and see immediately because our goal is here to pretty much tell you everything

that you want to know automatically, immediately. And then you have also these automations where kind of the workflows and the notifications are all that that happens. For example, if you miss a high value call, that's going to be like a 10, 20, 30, $40,000. You're going to immediately get notified so they can recover this immediately with the best salesperson, all those kind of things. So all this innovation to make you extremely, extremely good, your team is coming.

It's going to be pushing the boundary to the point where there's not going to be guessing where you know immediately what's coming. Let me ask you a kind of a tough question. I look at all the software we've deployed and it's, we've got cameras in the vehicles, we've got Monday for, you know, project management. We got, there's just software after software after software. I think the winners are going to be the, who chooses the right software, the quickest,

obviously speed of implementation, innovation. I think it's like, if I had to look at this, I mean, I've been doing this two decades. I got a lot of people on my team, over 800 smart people. And my leadership is smarter than me. What does someone do that looks at all this stuff and says, what does the future look like? I mean, it just seems like, man, if I had to start over again, and I only had a few

people, I mean, of course there's the David and Goliath that I could be more agile and whatnot, but how do I win if I'm smaller against the company that has got all this data? We've got Power BI, we've got all these different factors that we're computing data and looking at marketing and we've got CallRail looking at this and using things. We're not using static numbers anymore. We're actually able to look all the way down to the keyword. How do they compete? Yes.

So if you're small, you start with things that don't scale. Usually you're trying to kind of improve things as they go. But the thing, the way for you to become really, really sophisticated and be able to overcome and beat the competition is just to embrace technologies because that's such an unfair competitive advantage. Of course, like coming from a technology company, I'm biased, but that's one of the ways for a small company to be able to catch up. That's the fastest way because what's the other one? The other way is just to go to the slow processes over time and companies have accumulated knowledge

over decades of how to do things properly. So the only way to kind of shortcut this whole process of getting sophisticated is technology because technology very often shocks the world and comes with something so much better, so much more advanced. By the time all the other big companies implement this technology, you might be the first and you might be the best. And now the question comes like, what are the best technologies? How do I choose those technologies?

And this is where, I don't know, your network conferences and all the other ways to kind of get educated. And then choosing the best partner is very critical because this partner is going to bring you for this specific area that you're kind of focusing on, it's going to bring you to the next level because this partner is constantly to bring you for this specific area that you're kind of focusing on is going to bring you to the next level because this partner is constantly be trying to push the bond and help you be better. So even if you're a small company, I think that if you. Pretend like you're the biggest company you could be. I agree because a lot of people, they, they literally get, they say, we're

not big enough for that yet. And I'm like, but how can you afford not to use this? Like it hurts you more than it hurts us. Like I can make different CRMs work if we had to. Like I talked to Anmol at ServiceTite and he told me what payroll software to get that's going to have the best technology long term, which is incorporated. Like there's just certain things that you just know, like eventually you're going to grow out of QuickBooks. I mean, it's just certain things that you just know, eventually you're going to grow out of QuickBooks. I mean, it's just inevitable.

Yes. Yes. And this is where you as a small company, the advantage is that those companies usually move fast. So because they move so fast, they have the advantage of just choosing the right steps. They can grow very quickly. So that's the only way to win in this market. In my mind, it's just to move fast.

Because if you're a big company, you need to be extremely innovative, as you guys are thinking always about the best technology, but that's not very common. The moment you become a big company, some of the companies become a little bit lazy. Some of the companies have a little bit of momentum. So to keep this kind of a startup mindset, like a small company startup mindset is very hard. So as you get bigger, it's actually more dangerous to fall into a trap like, oh, things are waking and we're kind of winning the markets and we are good.

And this is where the opportunity for small companies come. Or if you stay sharp and are big company, then it's very, very hard to compete against. I'm hungry. I'm still super hungry. I look at it and I'm like, I look at our numbers. It was a really, really, really amazing January. And my team's like, are you happy?

And I'm like, it was a great month. What are we going to do in February? And how do we get more momentum? And how do we get more momentum? And there's this inter-department conflict. Operations is mad at finance and finance is mad at marketing. And I'm like, this is a good thing. I like it. Because not finger pointing, we're still one team, but there's a lot of accountability that's coming out of this is like, no, what about you? And you needed to make sure we do this

and we need to get this and I'm loving every bit of it. It's not like we're calling each other's names and we still know we love each other, but it's, I'm enjoying it because we're setting records and the team is winning and we're going to Mexico. There's people, 49 people that got equity last year, technicians and installers. I get to watch the team winning big. And this is what's killing it.

And I'm happy with, you know, the core tech is part of our team, the private equity guys, and they couldn't have gone better. But listen, I'm a big fan. I don't do this lightly. Like I, I was like, when I met you, I'm like, there's a lot of people that want my attention. We're a big company. We probably take, I mean, you work with bigger companies revenue, but as far as phone calls, we take a lot because we've got a much smaller ticket average.

You guys have a massive volume of calls. Massive. If we learned how to like sell other stuff, we'd make a lot of money. But you know, I'm very proud of where we're at. I'm really proud of our partnership. And you guys have done a lot of money, but you know, I'm very proud of where we're at. I'm really proud of our partnership and you guys have done a lot for us. And I'm glad that you were able to come out here and be on here today. I'm looking forward. I will say this about Boris.

He answers his phone calls. His team follows up when you give them a task, they want to exceed your expectations. As far as our ROI, it's been absolutely phenomenal. And all I'd ask is that you guys jump on a call. What's the best way to reach out and get an appointment with LACE? Reach out to me, boris at lace.ai, p-o-r-i-s at l-a-c-e dot a-i, or book a demo from the website and one of our high trained team members will show you how you can improve your business profitability and call center. This is here to stay guys. I can tell you this. AI is real. This is happening. I think a lot of

people are really looking for this magic pill of just the calls are going to book themselves with this. It just doesn't exist. It doesn't. So I think this is the thing that you got to coach. You got to give a lot of tender loving care to your CSRs and know what prescription they need today. And once you work with them and you work with them and you work with them, you're going to be deadly because you can pay more per lead. And I just know what's happening to our company. I'm really, really excited. I'm going to have you close this out Boris, anything you want to leave the listeners with.

No, thank you so much, Tommy. I love the execution that you guys have. Like sometimes we talk on the phone and things are happening with the text messages as we with. No, thank you so much, Tommy. I love the execution that you guys have. Sometimes we talk on the phone and things are happening with the text messages as we speak and that's exactly what the partners are looking in because this is what we are and that's the partners we're looking in. So speed matters and you guys are great. So thank you so much.

It was great. Thank you. Appreciate it. Appreciate it. Let's go. Thank you. Hey there. Thanks for tuning into the podcast today.

Before I let you go, I want to let everybody know that Elevate is out and ready to buy. I can share with you how I attracted a winning team of over 700 employees in over 20 states. The insights in this book are powerful and can be applied to any business or organization. It's a real game changer for anyone looking to build and develop a high performing team like over here at a one garage door service So if you want to learn the secrets that help me transfer my team from stealing the toilet paper to a group of 700 plus employees rowing in the same direction head over to elevate and win.com For slash podcast and grab a copy of the book. Thanks again for listening and we'll catch up with you next time on the podcast.