← Service Business Mastery for Skilled Trades: HVAC, Plumbing & Electrical Home Service
Service Business Mastery for Skilled Trades: HVAC, Plumbing & Electrical Home Service
Stop Hiding Your Prices: The Real ROI of Transparent Contractor Pricing
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This whole marketing and commercialization plan of our newest product is going to start right now. Now that we're live, I'm going to bring it up on March 31st. You're going to see, if not before then. The next iteration of E Commerce for contractors through contractor commerce, which is conversational AI, wasn't scary because we knew we were right. It is an AI experience. However, it has guardrails that allows the contractor to control some of the different variables. I want to make it 100% possible, feasible and sensible for a consumer to buy a fully installed mechanical anything off a contractor's website without a human being going into the home. The big change we had to make at the company was like worked our butts off to make it possible for a human being to finally go through on Joe Stripmatter's website and get a fully installed system. Three different options with all the details and now the primary user is not the human being, it's a robot.
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Today's episode is brought to you by
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one of our show partners, upfrog.
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Upfrog is the OG when it comes to pricing transparency online. They find system replacement leads through paid ads and have developed an entire system to drive those hard to find system replacement opportunities, nurture the leads and book them into sold systems before your team arrives to help you grow your business.
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I wanna give a huge shout out to Market Storm for sponsoring today's episode.
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You've heard of Google Ads, Facebook ads and SEO, but did you know that there's an entire ecosystem like 80% of the Internet that ads can be served on that you've barely heard?
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That's where Market Storm operates.
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They leverage data science and AI to build customer profiles for your ideal customers and get your ads in front of prospects before they are ready to hire a pro. Planting your brand in their minds early and often to chat with a team
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about how they can help you grow your business. Visit marketstorm AI hello everyone out there in podcast world. Hope you're having a wonderful day. You're listening to or watching the Service Business Mastery podcast. I am one of your hosts sitting virtually next to my co host Joshua Crouch. And we have the world famous tall Paul Redmond on the show today. I am excited to to have you on the show. It's. We've known each other for years, man. Back from Linux days, you made a transition over to the. Is it SaaS. Would it be considered SaaS? Because it's not.
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It is SaaS. Yeah. Okay, good job.
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B
So transition over into SaaS and it's been Cool to watch that journey and follow you along. For those who don't know who you are, would you mind giving a brief introduction of yourself?
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A
Gosh, where do I start? Man, I wish that that preamble conversation we were having about tracking our health metrics was recorded because it's says a lot about our personalities. But yeah. So I'm Paul, currently the president of Contractor Commerce. You may have heard of us before, but we started the industry's first E commerce platform for the trades, which when we started it was a wild kind of fringe idea that's become much more mainstream. And now thanks to AI and search and all those and just the, you know, the clock that we're all on with, consumer behavior is much more normal. But I've been in the home services space really my whole career. Terse mentioned I worked for a manufacturer for about 10 years. I spent about three or four years at a marketing agency. So the, the kind of story behind that story was. Yeah, Yep. The story behind that story was I, you know, I only knew one path or one idea. A first generation college student and, you know, my family or whatever and didn't really know what I wanted to do. And turns out when you get out of college, like people aren't just handing you a job. So I had a really difficult time finding a job. But I knew, for whatever reason, this still seems to be true. I knew that if I could make it in, if I could just get my foot in the door in corporate America, I'd be fine. I just. What's up, Travis? We're just talking about you. I knew if I got into corporate America, I'd be fine. So the first company that ever gave me a shot was Lenox, the air conditioning manufacturer. So, you know, grew up in Michigan, Ohio, moved to Colorado and started in H Vac. Moved all over the country, landed and did all sorts of different things, corporate projects, leadership development, you know, know, sales management, etc, and landed in Charlotte, North Carolina about 10 years ago. And once we landed here, it was like, okay, you know, at every stop we had had a kid like, we're not moving again. And I had always just had.
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C
Because you didn't want any more kids,
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right.
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Or you find Charlotte to be your home is like, we really enjoy it here. Or both.
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The latter. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, it's starting over with a family. You guys, you know, you may have. Well, you've experienced this, Josh. Like, you know, when you go to a new town, you get a new house, you buy your house and you realize like, no One knows you and you, it's. You don't. You can't see it at the time, but you start to build really good memories and have a lot of shared experience. But yeah, it's a really, really hard process. So I've always wanted to have really, really deep roots where I am. So like I'm in a small town right now, Davidson, North Carolina. This is Davidson College. My kids go to school right over there. And so I was trying to merge like my entrepreneurial, like tech startup interests with like really just living in a place that I could call home. So anyways, that's part of the story. But yeah, left and in 2021 joined with Will House, who had become a really good friend of mine through the industry. Similar to how I knew you guys, like just bump into you, get to know you and become friends. And at about that time it had become abundantly clear that like, you know, consumers shop online for just about everything. So we launched Contractor Commerce and been off to the races ever since.
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B
Nerve wracking was that because whenever you first launched it, it was a pretty taboo topic. I loved it, I love talking about it, but it was very much like
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C
I love the comments when you would ask if should put pricing online. I, I vividly remember, yeah, I don't even know how long ago it was now, but maybe two, three, maybe three years ago. I just like just personal profile and say, hey, should we do this or should we not? Or like what's, what's your opinion? It was like you could have thought they were voting for their, their president or something.
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B
It's like 50, 50 crazy.
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And the comments Bunny Kid Rock is what it was like 100%.
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That's what it felt like. And I'm like, man, this is really interesting. And I think there's still a lot of hesitation around some of that. Maybe you can speak to some of that because you guys obviously have those conversations and you hear those fears more so than anyone else does. And then how we like maybe some.
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Like what.
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How have things transitioned over the last couple years? Because I think that would be interesting for people because three years ago is chatgpt and conversational AI wasn't it was there but nobody really. They don't. We didn't know half of what we know now. I mean now we can. You have an idea. You can spin up an app in like an hour.
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B
Well, Josh, you mentioned conversational search and, and stuff like that way. I mean that's, I'm saying way back. I, I want to say 2018 maybe 2019. I mean, well, pre chat GPT. I remember Gary V. Said this and it stuck with me. This is. It might have been earlier than that. Might have been 2016. He said that your blog post need to be conversational. And that's why I think it was probably before you came on the podcast.
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Josh.
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I started doing the transcription of every episode in the read more section. I remember.
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And we'd hide it, but it would be there.
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Yeah, yeah, it was in like you have to click to read more but it would be down at the bottom of screen because Gary Vee was like, it's conversational. Search is the future. And a lot of people are like, you're crazy. But then he mentioned and it made sense to me. This is the reason why I did it because it, it wasn't just because Gary B. Said it. It actually made sense because whenever people say like hey, Alexa, do this or where's the lo. The best such and such. Where's the best H Vac company? Or who's the best H Vac company? And I was like, oh, okay. I can see the dots connecting now. And then, you know, Amazon, there was a, there was a time there talk about online pricing. There was a time there where Amazon was going to do H Vac and everybody was freaking out because all the contractors were going to go away and it was just going to be.
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You're only going to labor like you
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just hey, I have a 2 ton system. Find me a local contractor.
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Yeah.
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And it was gimme like a thousand dollars to install it stuff.
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Oh yeah. And that, and that's what, that's what everybody was afraid of. And I feel like that's probably something that y' all had to battle as well. But um, now it's not really the Alexa stuff. It's more so the chat GPT and the perplexity and all of that and, and the Gemini that's doing the, the search.
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How.
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Yeah, how does that aff. Like it? Are those types of. And I'm transitioning straight into another question here for you.
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We'll come back to the original one at some point. We'll go back to that one.
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But how does that affect, like, is it. Are they able to crawl the, the sections on the website for the pricing?
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Yeah. So I'm, I'm, I thought we would end up in this area. I'm glad we're starting here. I, I get to decide when we announce things at the company. So this whole marketing and commercialization plan of our, our newest product is going to start right now, because we're going to, now that we're live, I'm going to bring it UP exclusive on March30. On March 31, you're going to see, if not before then, the next iteration of E Commerce for contractors through contractor Commerce, which is conversational AI. So when you think back to. Or conversational commerce as, as we're, you know, calling it kind of behind the scenes, you know, when you think back to the first version of contractor commerce, like we built the, the online store capability to sell a physical product so like Tersh, you could sell air filters. And really the part of the market that, that served was the. The contractor who already had a, you know, an air filter or a subscription business that was built into the walls of their business, the core of the market would come to us and say, like, we're never really going to prioritize that, but we want to sell memberships. We want to sell memberships and we want to let someone buy a system, right? And we were like, well, consumer's not just going to check out for a system. This is back in 2018, 2019. So we built a capability to do what you guys are probably familiar with, and there's others. Buying Journeys is what we've named it, the ability for a consumer. And this is key to go as far through the buying process as possible on the contractor's website. So we got to work and you talk about like the early days, Tersh, like you said. Was it scary? It wasn't scary because we knew we were right. We absolutely knew we were right. But what was humbling was we were really early. So, like, I would talk to people and I had a decent run in my career, but I was calling people, trying to talk about this idea, and it was like we were speaking two different languages. Like they just, they were looking at me like, hold on. What? I don't, I don't get it. Well, all of that has passed. There's now, you know, thousands of contractors who've done this. But something changed, like AI search became a thing. So people are now going as far through the buying process as possible within ChatGPT or within Gemini or within Perplexity. I think there's even some, like, not a ton of brand loyalty. Like people bounce around these things and the cost to use those things is coming down so fast. So the big change we had to make at the company was like, you know, worked our butts off to make it possible for a human being to finally go through on Joe Strip Matter's website and get a fully Installed system, three different options with all the details. And now the primary user is not the human being, it's a robot. Right. So the next step is like, how do we get Contractor Commerce to operate on the contractor's behalf within Chat GPT or within the Ask Engine or whatever you want to call it. So that's step one. But we still believe firmly at Contractor Commerce that the buying journey should happen on the contractor's website. So what we're launching on March 31, I kind of mentioned it, conversational AI. It is a version of our plugin that looks and feels just like an AI experience. It is an AI experience. However, it has guardrails that allows the contractor to control some of the different variables. So an example of this is like Joe, who by the way was a great power user of our program. You know, let's say a consumer's on Joe's website and they want to do deep, deep, deep research on a water heater. Right. So they're engaging with the.
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C
So this person's an engineer.
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Okay? Yeah, right, exactly.
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We all know though, we've all had those customers in the past.
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Right. But let's say Joe is like, look, I, I only sell A.O. smith, so I don't want you to guide them to Bradford White or whatever that is. There's the ability for a controlled yet like, kind of guided AI experience that keeps the contractor within the website. The next iteration of that or the next phase is that conversation. Here's where we get really in the weeds. That conversation should be able to happen in ChatGPT and also on the contractor's website and pick up where it left off. So there's a lot of development, a lot of work going on. But the. I'll make a statement here. The idea is, now keep in mind we've always sort of built for the fringe. Like we've always built on the like, edge of the market, trying to be ahead. This is not a popular statement and it's not something I've said before, but we want to make it quite possible. And Josh, I'm, I'm like ducking down because I know your background, but like I want to make it 100% possible, feasible and sensible for a consumer to buy a fully installed mechanical anything off a contractor's website without a human being going into the home. And so I think Rilla was, you know, one of their taglines was like the end of ride alongs. The edge of what we're trying to build for is the end of sales calls. Do I think it will Be the end of sales calls one. Absolutely not. Do I think that the majority of value transaction in the industry will happen when someone goes in home? Yes, but we're going to build for a world where you can go on the website.
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There will be a seg. It's just like everything else I think sometimes like and maybe it's the political climate, it's always like the doomsday scenario of everything when in reality everybody buys differently. Some people want to have someone in house to like explain things like. Because they can see it and they can walk through it and ask those questions and. Sure, like I just like tersh and I'm sure yourself Paul, we use ChatGPT or I've been using Claude and Gemini a lot more lately but using those for just helping me understand things like I. So I, I told you guys not to get back on the health thing. I got my, my blood results back. I took the report. The report was pretty good but it wasn't like 8th grade level like dumbed down to my level. So I threw it in there and I'm like okay, just tell me what's good, what's bad, what, what I can do differently.
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Like a third grader.
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Yeah, I mean like I understood it so much better because like they, you know, they use all the, the medical terms for different things. I'm like, I don't know what the hell that is. And so it's kind of the, kind of the same thing as far as breaking these things down in a way that contractors or homeowners can understand. And what's really interesting is and Paul, you may know this just because you're in that space. Church, I don't know if you know this, but Google has made it very obvious that there's so like, if you search for like cost of an AC system or whatever, something along those lines, the online estimate button right below. So to get the search bar and then Google always has like that bar underneath that says like maps, images, videos, etc. There is a little bar there especially on mobile. It's like says online estimates right below it and if you click on that it changes the entire result to storefronts. People who have pages on their website about cost and things like that. And the, the research I've done, there is very, very, very few that have pages on their website that actually have this, any sort of information or even optimized for that. It is a huge opportunity. Just like anything else. You gotta act pretty soon because people like yourself pushing this to your customers and other, you know there's other platforms out there, they're gonna be doing it and people like myself understand this and we're working with our customers to figure it out because we need to provide our value to our customers and help them with things that they don't understand. But it's coming. And between that and then anytime you ask for like contractors, it gives you pricing information in the AI search stuff, whether it's like they pulls from reviews or even Google on reviews. Now it's not just go leave a five star review and put your words in there. It gives you options of the price, what you thought of the price, what you thought of the service. They're, they're capturing that information. I actually had a, we're doing an outbound reviews thing through most of our clients just because we've realized that there's a lot of power in that with AI search stuff. But we have a client that he only want to do it to his system replacements like an outbound review to his old customers. And I asked him why, he's like, well because the, the service guys, I don't want my, the customers hitting the price button that were too high and stuff. Like I'm like, like if you're scared of Google, we're not going to grow a business here. You're going to be scared and you're
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not going to show up.
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But that's the fear and those are the things people are thinking and talking about is the cost stuff. The cost is going to be out there. It is, it is not a secret. It's no longer a secret.
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They will get it somewhere.
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C
The coaching companies are doing a disservice to this industry by not pushing their contractors to be on the forefront of the state. I've heard recently we've had Marcus Sheridan on the podcast. We had him at our event, he was a speaker at. I'm not going to name the name. Coaching organization. Yeah, I'm not. No, that's the one that's this week.
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No, it wasn't. I'm sorry. It rhymes with certain path. I was there and I'm not going
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to mention, I won't mention any names. He actually, he actually refunded them the speaking agreement because what he teaches with endless customers and pricing up front and on your website they completely went against psychological or philosophically and I'm just like why are you teaching contractors to hide the price? Because you know what the number one thing on phone calls is? The number one objection is they're asking for price. And if you don't Overcome that. Objection. You're missing a lot of opportunity to get in house. Yeah, that was my long monologue because
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A
I know it's topic. It's so true. And Josh, I, um, It's so baked into the industry, the, the, that you shouldn't do that. But really, they're not even looking for price. They're looking to reduce uncertainty, reduce anxiety. The price just helps them orient with, hey, am I, do I have the money? Do I have the, the resources to pay for this? That's regardless of. Yeah, like John just said, transparency is key.
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It's, it's not only that, it's also the fact that whatever search engine tells them, okay, you should be expecting to pay $12,000. And the last time they replaced this system, we was preco and they paid $4,000. There's a lot less sticker shock whenever someone comes in there with 12,000 or 15,000 or whatever. And also if somebody comes in there with 25,000, they can ask why? Like there might be a legitimate reason why it's worth, you know, $10,000 more than what I'm expecting to pay. But I just want to know why. Otherwise you're like, this is $20,000 more than what I expected to pay.
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You know, and that, that's, that's to get back to Marcus. That's his whole philosophy. It's not, it's not even necessarily to put the exact pricing. It's to say why is it higher? What could, what could cause it to go higher? Why is it lower? What's, what's the difference between a licensed contractor and a non licensed con? Like what are all the things and factors. I know Florida is like a, a breeding ground for AC companies and they, I love seeing their posts about Florida stuff because these guys really shove her apart.
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But so bad.
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Yeah, because it's a, it's a. Because so many guys are unlicensed and they just start doing companies. They're literally doing it for beer money, essentially.
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Yeah, but 500 bucks.
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Yeah, that stuff needs to be explained to your customers so they know what they're getting. Because most likely those companies, just because they installed a cheap price doesn't mean they're going to be around in three or five years when you need them to do a warranty claim because they installed it wrong. They're just getting the money now and they're gone. You, you probably won't see them again. And it's my thing has always been own the conversation instead of let someone else own the conversation like Angie and Home Advisor. And whatever other top 10 best contractor lists there are that say, oh, the pricing should be this and this. It's not true. None of those prices are accurate. None of them are even close to what actual homeowners pay. And it sets up the contractor in a bag.
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A
What do you tell people, Paul?
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Whenever that's. Their fear is like, oh, my competitors are going to learn my prices.
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A
Yeah, well, they already know your prices. Like, they're, They're. They've seen invoices, all those sorts of things. But one of the analogies, One of the analogies that I like to think about is I'll. I'll put you on the spot here. Tersh. Tersh. Imagine you get an ad right now. 20, 26F150 Raptor. 15 grand is stolen. Right? Like, but you and me now. But wait a minute. The argument would be like, hey, that dealer who's selling it for 115, like, there's that. There's the guy in Florida who will do it for 500 bucks. Like, you're. But the only reason you can do that, the only reason you can say it's stolen is because you're generally aware of how much a good F150 costs. Because you're. Because the car industry has done a really, really good job of leading first with price. If. If the race to the bottom was truly a thing. I'm not. I mean, I want to be careful not to speak in absolutes here, but there would be no competing car dealerships. Don't you ever see three car dealerships next to each other? Like, they would just all get down to 50 cents at some point? Like, no. People. Human being, like, give human beings more credit. Like, they're. They're reasonable and. But like you said, you saw that $15,000 raptor, and you're like, something's not right. Well, in the AC world, like, yeah,
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sure, I'll buy it for 15 grand total every.
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Yeah.
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I mean, you can find one for 15 grand. And it's actually legit bias.
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Right, Exactly. So, but. So funny story.
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You're right, though.
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This is. Bernie was at a. A company. They're about a $10 million company in Wisconsin. But this is Pre Relentless Digital. Pre. Anything that I've done since I was actually at Professional Services at the time. So they had seven salespeople and they did a lot of estimates. So they did a lot of mailers and things to generate estimates and stuff like that. And they had stack. They literally gave discounts to their customers for everybody else's quotes when they want a job like 25 or 50 bucks off or, and they had stacks of these. So if you don't think your competitors have any clue what your pricing is, you are lying to yourself. It's it. I promise you they know.
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A
I'm, I'm hesitant to share this, but I'll go ahead and do it. I don't think the consequence is that high. But one of the, one of the features that we're building into conversational commerce because if we're thinking we run a difficult, we're in a difficult position because we have to be what is best for the contractor. Ultimately they're our customer, but we also have to air to like what is best for the consumer so that they'll use the thing. Right. There's this fine line and one of the elements that we're testing right now is the ability through that conversational experience to just take a picture of the quote or estimate that you have on your desk from whoever else and analyze it and come through and say like, hey, here's how this matches up to what we do. I noticed they don't say anything about the sump pump that you're going to need or I noticed like building that like taking all the data that exists within our system and their system and our, through our service titan integration, pulling data there to give the customer a second opinion in a way that look, they're going to go put it in like you said Josh, they're going to screenshot it and put it in chat GPT anyway, I'd much rather have them screenshot it and put it in, you know, put, put it in my system. So yeah, we'll see. Now there are. Or go ahead.
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C
I was actually going to transition to George's question because you, you talked a little bit about like second opinions and I'm like, oh, this is a good segue into like marketing strategy for contractors because I, you know, none of these tools or things that you put on your website, whether it's a, an online booking tool or a online pricing estimator of some sort, does anything if you can't get people there. And I think you're kind of going to go into that a little bit. But George asked what marketing strategy would you implement with this system? And I'm gonna just say, I'm gonna say tool agnostic here. But he's mentioning a high level. Cause I know he uses that and we've worked on some of those things together. But can it connect to like a third party tool for text message follow ups Email, follow ups, et cetera. So what, what would you say to that?
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A
Well, first thing that I'll mention is, you know, most contractors have a generally high bounce rate on their homepage. Most people come to the website and then they leave. They spend a little bit of time and they leave. Not, not everybody. But it' you mentioned, Josh, that the number one thing people call on the phone for is pricing related. So you can make a pretty good assumption that a lot of that homepage traffic or traffic that ends up on your website through search is trying to get oriented with pricing. I think that's pretty, pretty commonplace. So where I start with our customers on step one, a great, a great website to look at is Travis Crawford. H vac.com George, if you're buying a computer a little bit, I don't know Travis Cross. You know, you know Travis, they're boys. Yeah. They've got three or four giant calls to action that you can't miss. Instant generator estimate, instant H Vac quote, instant water heater quote. Because they know that people are there and they're curious. And so part of it is just having really clear ways for your customers to get what they might be there for. The counterpoint to that is like a lot of contractors just have contact forms. And so it's just a general contact form where it's like name, address, phone number, how did you hear about us? What can we help you with? Like people don't, not in this age. People don't want to. What's up Dario? People don't want to fill out a contact form. Like they want to get what they came for now. So that's step one, the other piece, and this isn't intended to be self serving. It's not. Look, running a business is complex. Marketing is complex. It's not all about online pricing and instant estimates and E commerce. But in every area of your marketing, you need to let people know that they can get pricing now. And all that does this. This is the misconception that I've had to manage for years. That doesn't mean that the customer is going to get pricing and they're done with you. What it's doing is it is allowing them into your funnel so that you can begin to nurture them, get in the home and sell. And so one of the things contractors aren't, you know, contractors are usually working with customers who are pretty close to the point of purchase. Right. When you do something like this, you might be engaging with someone who's six months out. So you just have to Understand that treatment strategy because you will get more people. I always say, like, you know, quote, more jobs, sell more jobs. Like it's as simple as that.
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C
So George's question. It is difficult to pinpoint one thing because any, there's a lot of things that could work. There's some contractors that I've seen creating video content explaining why their prices is different, similar to like the market share. Your method of like why is it high, why is it low? And all the questions in between. And one of the best ways to answer those questions or get like to feed yourself is to go to a Claude and say, hey, I'm using, I'm just going to keep using Marcus Sheridan because we had a great conversation with him and he was at our event and everyone loved his content. But I want to talk about pricing and I want to be upfront to my customers. I want to use his endless customers or they ask you answer system. Ask me a bunch of questions that my homeowners are probably thinking about in regards to replacing my water heater. Replacing name the thing and just start creating content about it. And this is something that actually we're working on implementing with clients. The hard part is we have to get the questions and they have to answer them because I can't answer them for them. Like Paul, you've been in the marketing industry like tersh. I know you've done articles and stuff like there's, there's regular like SEO content like service pages, location pages, which typically has to have like certain stuff in it to even be relevant. But content like this, I am not going to be liable for what it
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A
says in that article.
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C
And you're going to hate me if I put the wrong thing. And your market's different, but so some of that stuff is that's where these partnerships with, whether it's a social media company or whatever you're doing, you really have to work together. It doesn't mean it's a set it and forget it and someone's just going to do it for you anymore. It means you have to be willing to communicate back and forth the clients we've done this for. We did one right after Marcus was at our event because I knew I was gonna have clients come ask me like, oh, can we do this? IT ranked on ChatGPT in like three days after we posted.
- [29:43]
B
I remember that. That was crazy.
- [29:46]
C
Don't tell Joe, but that was in for water heaters in Dallas Fort Worth. So Joe, there's already water heaters just
- [29:52]
A
so you one viewer shout out to hey, Joe, this is before I knew you, but I had Bacon Plumbing replace my water heater in Plano, Texas about 10 years ago. So small world.
- [30:04]
B
That's funny.
- [30:06]
A
We yeah what you should do, go to Chat GBT and look for pricing for H Vac systems in Charlotte, North Carolina. And if Travis Crawford and above, there's five or six others in this market doesn't show up, I will buy you a beer or whatever. A fifth figure out how to get right.
- [30:23]
C
You don't even insert or barely.
- [30:27]
B
Hello home service professionals. Do you want to maximize your marketing budget? Then you need to be using call tracking from CallRail. Let's say you've noticed a spike in new leads this month. To find out what's driving them, you just log into your CallRail dashboard. Is my new Facebook ad outperforming my other ads or is paid search knocking it out of the park? Or maybe it's time to retire those newspaper ads. Since CallRail assigns a unique phone number to each of my marketing efforts, I know where my best leads come from and which efforts to scrap. CallRail shows you your most cost effective marketing channels so you can get back to business. Go to CallRail.com sbmpod and try it for free.
- [31:11]
C
Today's episode is powered by Ciro Systems.
- [31:13]
B
Sara is all about removing the clutter
- [31:15]
A
and unnecessary touch points to run your home service business profitably.
- [31:19]
C
They use AI dispatching to get the right tech to the right call automatically and job time efficiency to ensure your entire team runs like a profit generating machine.
- [31:27]
B
Get a tech upgrade for your business at Get Sarah Tech Service Business Mastery.
- [31:35]
C
We had a couple questions from Travis and John. I think they're a very similar question so we'll just use Travis's question. So with having pricing on the website, would there be a potential financing pricing model alongside that? Sean well that's a good point.
- [31:49]
A
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. So what we recommend is that you show both the cash price and the finance price. However, there are some contractors that truly are priced 40, 50, 60% ahead of the core market. They might. I'll give you an example. There's a contractor in Northern California. Their good, better best is like 26, 32, 46,000. Like it's wild, right? Sonoma Valley. In that case you want to include some financing. But I will tell you so first of all as a best practice show, both worst case just show financing. That's fine too. But we had some feedback. Travis this is a really a good story about Travis Crawford. So Travis's radio campaigns are amazing. His marketing team is legit. I follow them on social media.
- [32:33]
B
He tells me about his radios, like the feedback. They're hilarious.
- [32:40]
A
So good. But he gave me some feedback that you know, they were talking about, you know, transparent pricing on their ads and someone went to their website and saw just the monthly price and pushed back and said like well that's not transparent. Monthly pricing isn't transparent. So I recommend you do both. You show both the monthly and the
- [32:58]
C
in the car ads. It's super small and white and the background's white and they can't even really see it.
- [33:02]
A
People know.
- [33:03]
C
People know.
- [33:04]
A
When you see. Yeah you see 214amonth or whatever and you're like yeah, well down at the bottom it says, you know it's gonna
- [33:09]
C
be 9.95 or whatever.
- [33:11]
A
Yeah, totally, totally. Like 12 years. Yep. So part of the next ver. So right now you can finance a system through. Through you know, I don't want to say through Contractor Commerce but through the. Through Travis Crawford's online store that's powered by Contractor Commerce you can finance a job. I actually just bought my water.
- [33:31]
C
Does it have to. Is there certain finance companies that works with or what. What does that look like or can you finance company to it?
- [33:39]
A
Today it's bring your own finance company. With our next product release we will have integrated with a couple of different ones but Fin Turf being a good example. So those guys at Fin Turf have built a great product and you can go through and go through the process there in the new version of Contractor Commerce that conversational flow and this can of course be configured by the contractor but we're going to try to finance jobs, we're going to try to finance systems directly through that conversational flow and get it over to the contractor.
- [34:12]
B
So oh so quick question on that, on the. The updated versions and everything if you have the like I guess I'll call it the legacy version of Contractor Commerce, does it move over to that or does it stay the legacy version?
- [34:25]
A
That for we do call it the legacy version we. So it will stay as is. We have so many contractors using it and some that really I mean not some, the majority love it like we built the company on it. Contractors will have the option to choose to migrate to the new experience. It's just one, one button and a little bit of onboarding. But yeah we're. We thought long and hard about that as we get the product live and we start to really understand the difference in conversion might be a little more heavy handed and telling people to move to but just depends Some it's. Yeah, it's going to be up to the contractor. Some people love that.
- [35:01]
B
Is it going to affect how we show up in rankings as far as with the ability for the that AI to search and give prices, will it be able to connect, communicate with Google's AI to. So whenever Google says, I'm going to crawl your page and see what your prices are, is it going to be able to converse there or is it going to be too laggy because, you know, the conversation itself takes a second. But Google has to have it instantly. So will it, will it have the ability to still give the prices to the AI search inside.
- [35:38]
A
All of that information lives within the plugin on the website. And there's some limitations on like if they're using our WordPress plugin, can it be crawled or not? But the idea would be that it would be found through any form of search. Now it's tricky and Josh, you can know this. Like, I can't make guarantees by any means. Um, but yeah, directionally, that's the intent.
- [35:59]
C
Well, in, in my opinion, like, so if you're already gonna have the price on your website through a tool so you're not afraid to share it, you might as well create a blog article focused on the same thing that's gets indexed from, from search itself. Because what will happen is like the overview.
- [36:16]
B
How would you do that, Joe? Josh, like, how would you like, would you do it on a completely different page?
- [36:22]
C
Because, because the contract page that actually the CTA leads. So that way they can almost like it's higher up in the funnel, right? Because they're like, oh, okay, I want to see like a ballpark range. But now I'm ready for a quote. So now throughout the article, you place like get your instant estimate right now, get it today, etc, so that way it's like they get the information that they want in the, the overview or the, the paragraph that they usually put up there and then they can decide if they want to go further. So, and this is back to George's point. You can create video content with that CTA. You can YouTube videos. This would be, I mean, great for home. You're targeting DIY homeowners.
- [37:02]
B
Do a bunch of videos on this stuff.
- [37:05]
A
Yep, I, I'll bring.
- [37:07]
B
Probably think I will. Every time we listen to Josh, it's like, all right, create a video on that. And I'm like reminded I have a stuff.
- [37:19]
C
People do it consistently enough because we're even, we're even working on a process where we can just, we come up with the questions and we just interview our client for an hour. Because the thing is, there are companies putting out a bunch of AI garbage. It's literally they're not in including the client. They're not. I'm not mentioning names because. I know, I know. I'll get a video or some post later.
- [37:46]
A
I'm Switzerland, right here. I want to bring something, though. You bring up a really, really good point. And you said, like, hey, if they land on this random page, how are you going to get them back into the. The buying flow in the conversation? So I should have mentioned this. So we built a feature in our product. It's actually a product in and of itself called Infuse. And what that does is. And Travis Crawford has this enabled, you know, Travis might have, I don't know, a couple hundred pages on his website. I have no idea. But it's not uncommon for contractors to have a ton of pages. What our technology will do, when enabled, Infuse will find every single page on the website and infuse a call to action that leads to the conversational buying journey using contextual clues. So for instance, if there's a page about, you know, cold nights in Eden Park, Minnesota, it will infuse language that makes it part of that blog post so that everything focuses to that, that conversational journey. So, again, super easy to install. You literally, like, go into your contractor commerce account, Infuse, and you're up and running. It's like, it's pretty awesome. We've not done a good job of like telling people how awesome.
- [38:56]
B
I need to go to TC's website and just copy and paste it.
- [39:00]
A
Just put my on it. You know what? Shout out to Travis Crawford. Most people actually do that. And he asked me to stop mentioning his name, but I mean, Charlotte, and he's my guy, so I, like, I gotta figure out. He actually told me he's like, you.
- [39:11]
C
I.
- [39:12]
A
He called me into his office and I thought he was like, upset about the product. He's like, can you quit telling people about us, please? Like, all right, my bad. It's hilarious.
- [39:19]
B
I was literally this morning texting with him and, and, and Ron up in Jersey. So it's funny like, how, how much they like, just in general, it's. They. You've done a great job for them and.
- [39:36]
A
Well, thank you this morning. So thank you. I, I joke in my team, my, My team, like, guys, we've, you know, 2,000 customers. We can quit, we can quit referring just Travis Crawford. But it's such a good story because like his, you know, he's not a PE backed guy. He's in a great market that has some dominant players and he grows and he's built a great culture and he's always out on the front edge of technology and he, he's a sleeper, man. That's a really good company.
- [40:01]
B
So if I have one thing I love about TC is the fact that, man, if, if I'm like, hey, Travis, I need to try out this product. He's like, yeah man, I got you. I'll try. Like, really? You don't even know what it is. He's like, I got whatever it is I got. I trust you.
- [40:17]
A
I'm like, yes, Yep, exactly.
- [40:21]
C
Yeah. We all know Ter and I have way too many ideas.
- [40:24]
B
We do.
- [40:24]
A
We do have so many ideas. Except for the last time.
- [40:27]
B
He was like, no, I'm not giving my phone number to anybody. I was like, because I gave my, I gave his phone number to the, to somebody and they did not.
- [40:34]
C
You forgot to tell them. It's in the show notes already.
- [40:37]
A
It is.
- [40:38]
C
I'm just.
- [40:38]
B
Have you ever heard Paul, you ever heard of goat torturing? So if you. With friends like me, you just, you don't need enemies.
- [40:51]
A
So basically anybody has my cell phone number.
- [40:55]
B
Do not do this to me because I don't know you get it. And so you put an ad on Craigslist saying that you had a new litter of kids or goats or whatever you call them and you had them by mistake and you don't have the room for them, so you're giving them away for free. And the problem is you work third shift, so you're only awake from 11pm to 3am so. But because of the, the cell phone regulations, you have to call multiple times to get through to me. Please dial like at least four times and only call from 11pm to 3am but the first 10 people that call will, will get them for free, as
- [41:42]
A
many as you want. And you will have the most random
- [41:45]
B
people calling you at 11pm and just leaving the most random voicemails because they can't get. Because everybody's do not disturb is turned off by then. Like you can't get through. But if you call like five times, it'll come through.
- [42:00]
A
It'll come through.
- [42:01]
B
And then you'll, you'll wake up in a like panic and you're like, oh, it must be an emergency. They've called me like three times.
- [42:09]
A
Did you go torture yourself or did you do this to somebody else?
- [42:14]
B
Oh, I've done this to several people before.
- [42:17]
A
That's pretty solid.
- [42:19]
B
But this is, this is something I've been doing for about 15, 20 years now.
- [42:24]
A
Craigslist still around, man. Still. Still the same user interface. Never did.
- [42:29]
C
Wild.
- [42:31]
A
Wild.
- [42:31]
C
It hasn't changed at all.
- [42:32]
B
Same. The same clientele in there. And those clientele are the perfect ones for goat torturing too. They'll fall for it every time. So
- [42:42]
C
we have derailed officially.
- [42:45]
A
Amazing.
- [42:47]
C
Paul, last question I got for you. It's a futuristic thing, so as far as you know, you've already seen this grow quite a bit. You guys were, you said, you mentioned you were early and now you feel like it's really become more mainstream. Any predictions for the next year or two on where things are headed when it comes to online pricing, transparency, trust on, on, on the Internet, things like
- [43:11]
A
that, or, you know, what's that ter
- [43:15]
B
I said or in the next six months.
- [43:17]
A
I think that I, there's, there's two. I have two responses to this one. The, the way that human, the way that people use AI to make shopping decisions or purchase decisions or research like that is going to continue to compound, but it's going to become such a normal way of life similar to how people Google things. I don't know. And it's way too early to say that there's going to be this seismic shift of like people moving away from Google to specific AI operators, for whatever that's worth. So I'm not like, I, I'm not part of that school that's like, you should panic, you should do something. So I think AI has changed the way people research the, the way people do everything. It's going to make the really good salespeople better. It's going to make the middle of the pack salespeople not be engaged with. You're not going to want to have someone in your house who doesn't line with your values and those sort of things. So people are going to continue to go online and do that. I think at the same time, like, and this is why I love the trades, there are some fundamental things that are only, that don't really change that much. Building a great company, providing a great service, answering the phone. Like, I think there's this, there's these competing things where, like yes, voice agents are going to be great, but so is answering the phone with a human being. So I think a lot of the fundamental practices that make you a great company and a growing company are still going to be foundational and then you make AI make you a little bit better. But no, I think it's going to be steady change over time. I do think, again, selfishly speaking, I think people are going to start transacting more than they do now and getting at least through the financing process without having someone into their home. And that plays really well for us. But yeah, it's going to be a good couple years, man, I'm, I'm glad to be a part of it.
- [45:03]
B
Does Amazon start selling equipment?
- [45:06]
A
They already do. I mean, they already do. So I think that you see, have
- [45:12]
B
you seen the Walmart pricing?
- [45:14]
A
Like, it's amazing.
- [45:15]
C
Doesn't Walmart have an agreement with Bryant or something?
- [45:18]
B
No, it's like, I think, or maybe it is, but I know I've seen a Goodman on there and it was like below what I could buy it for.
- [45:25]
A
And I was like, yeah, I mean, you can, I need to buy some from Walmart. Kind of a sleeper. I mean, there's brands you can buy in Home Depot, Lowe's, Walmart, Direct now and you can have a pallet up on your doorstep. So I think that, like, there are people who still think that, like, oh, that's going to happen. I'm like, it's already happened and it really hasn't materially changed anything. Like, people still know you have to go to a local contractor to get something like that installed.
- [45:48]
B
So I don't think, like, for me personally, if I, if, if I have the option to buy the materials and service through one contractor versus, like, if I have to buy, like, so I'm building a shop. So if I bought the materials for the shop and then I hired the contractor, the contractor is going to come to me and be like, well, you're going to have to call the manufacturer to get the warranty for whatever, or this parts are missing. Now you have, you have to inventory all these things and you're missing three, three of these things. And now it's going to be three weeks and the contractor is going to move on to a different job for three weeks or whatever. I'd rather just have that, the contractor's problem, you know, and buy it all at one time. Even if he does have some markup on. I have to, it's not a headache for me anymore.
- [46:37]
A
I do see and have. This has been part of our kind of core principle, core principles, our view on the market point of view for a long time is that manufacturers will want to have more control over the homeowner ownership. Right? So whether they're going direct consumer or trying to just change the way that works a little bit because the, the Contractors can be. I mean the contractors are the entry point for the manufacturers and the brands, the distributors, everybody. And so the extent to which they try to reach around and, and go direct to the. Yeah, that, that's, that's tricky.
- [47:10]
C
They're going to upset people.
- [47:13]
B
Yeah, yeah. Well, it's, it's already to the point now where the manufacturers. You almost have to have a manufacturer specific thermostat because they're all communicating. They're all. You have to have their thermostat and it. That thermostat collects data of the customers.
- [47:29]
C
Does that feel. Do you guys remember like when iPhones came out and then of course Samsung created theirs and like every new phone you had like a new charger. You know how irritating it was. They kept changing the chargers and of
- [47:40]
B
course you couldn't use the iPhone 18 is changing again. Yes. Magnetic charger.
- [47:49]
C
You just went to the USBC.
- [47:51]
A
I just went to the 17.
- [47:52]
C
I was so excited because my wife, because Brittany and I could use the same freaking charger. I'm like, this is great because I just have one for you and one for me.
- [47:59]
B
Not the 18. The 18 is going to be magnetic and it's going to be like the three little copper things with the magnet that speaks to it. So it's gonna, it's just if it's
- [48:11]
C
normal, Apple's gonna make anyone that manufacture stuff is really good at getting you to buy stuff. The, all the extra accessories. It's probably make a lot of money because those things are so cheap to make. But that's a whole nother topic.
- [48:23]
B
We appreciate you hanging out with us. We could talk to you for days. I mean every time we're around you, we talk for hours. If somebody is interested, what's the best way to connect with you?
- [48:33]
A
Yeah. So one first, first of all, thank you. Thanks for the opportunity. Thanks for connecting with us. They can go to contractor commerce.com and hit talk to sales or request a demo or any of those things. Hit me up on Facebook or LinkedIn. Paul Redmond on both. You can reach out to me, have someone on my team talk to you if you're an existing customer or like Joe here. Thanks for being a customer. Thanks for helping validate this. The thing I'm most proud of is the fact that we have really happy customers. It hasn't worked for everybody. Not everybody has enough website traffic or enough like structure within their business to support anything new, let alone E commerce. But yeah, really proud of that. So contractor commerce.com or hit me up on any of the social media channels and we'll get you connected and if
- [49:16]
B
you want all cell phone number, just
- [49:18]
A
text me and I'll look it up on craigslist. I'll give you.
- [49:21]
C
I'll give you TCs to Travis Crawford.
- [49:23]
A
So. Yeah, exactly.
- [49:25]
B
Yeah.
- [49:26]
A
Don't go to Travis's website and engage with contractor commerce, please. So cool, man. We appreciate you. If anybody has any questions at all,
- [49:34]
B
please do not hesitate to reach out. Obviously, Paul, he's a wealth of knowledge and the entire team is is a wealth of knowledge. But with that being said, I hope you have a wonderful and safe week. Until we talk again next time. We'll see you later.
- [49:47]
A
Awesome. Thanks, guys. Thank you for listening to this episode of Service Business Mastery. Now that you are equipped with essential business advice from this impactful conversation, you are one step closer to becoming the successful owner of your dreams. If this episode has been helpful to your business journey, don't forget to subscribe to the show, leave a rating and share it with other owners as well. Visit servicebusinessmastery.com to learn more.