← The Home Service Expert Podcast
The Home Service Expert Podcast
AI Will Run Your Business Sooner Than You Think (Boris Valkov)
00:52:04
Loading summary
Transcript60 lines
- [00:00]
A
We recently did a analysis of what is the average ROI for our customers, and I think the analysis came down to 17x.
- [00:11]
B
Welcome to the Home Service Expert. Built for blue collar entrepreneurs who are ready for more.
- [00:16]
A
When your customer says yes, stop talking. Find that the pursuit of a goal, at least for me, is a source of my happiness.
- [00:25]
C
You're never going to be successful doing what everyone else does.
- [00:28]
B
New episodes every Monday.
- [00:32]
C
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. 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 elevateandwin.com 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 an awesome guest. His name is Boris Volkov. Boris comes to my house once a month and we literally only talk about A one garage door service and what we're going to do to make A one a stronger company. We've recently added a lot of specific things to A one like speed to lead, better training for the csrs. Interesting thing about AI, especially voice, is there's massive updates. I mean, you guys see what's going on with Claude and all these other things. So as these algorithms get better, they get better at booking, and we're not far away from being able to book more than our CSRs. I mean, it's happening this year. So Boris is an expert in AI, software engineering, machine learning. He's based out of San Francisco. He's the co founder and CEO of LACE AI. You know, I could tell all about your background and everything. I'm excited. By the way, congratulations on Wrench Group.
- [01:55]
A
Thanks, Tony.
- [01:55]
C
That's a really big accomplishment. They're a massive company. Just here alone in Phoenix, Parker and Sons is a few hundred million. So picking up them is. And they tested everybody else. I mean, I won't go into who else they tested, but they had the top three or four other players and they chose you guys because you got great results. They tested every single one of them alongside of you and you won. So that's a big accomplishment. Tell the listeners a little bit about you, what you're passionate about, why you started LACE and where you believe you're going to win in the long game.
- [02:28]
A
Yeah, absolutely. And thanks to me, it's great to be back on the bot. So, yeah, maybe start from the beginning. I was born in Bulgaria, Europe. And at the age of 10 I started helping my parents in our family business, which was a small grocery store. And what I realized is that every time when I was able to solve a problem and help our customers, I'll see the smile in their face and it'll reflect back on me and make me happy. And the more problems I was able to solve, the happier it made me. So I was essentially that defined the purpose in life for me. Like essentially how can I build useful things and affect people? So I got obsessed with technology, studied computer science and started my career as a software engineer. And this is where I met Stan, my co founder, about 20 years ago. So, and one night I remember sitting in the office late at night and thinking, what do I want to do with my life? And I knew I was obsessed with building software and wanted to affect as many people as possible. So one of the most efficient way to do that is to start a company. And I also wanted to work with the best people in the world. So I really, really liked, was obsessed with the US and I come to the United States about 10 years ago and yeah, so I spent a few years at VMware working on large scale systems for the Fortune 500 companies. And then I joined Facebook or Meta AI where I led the Pytorch distributed team. And Pytorch is the leading AI framework behind breakthroughs like the Tesla Autopilot and ChatGPT by OpenAI. And while I was at Meta, I realized that AI is moving, is about to unlock and unprecedented capabilities in the software stack. And that was the moment where I was really excited. And I started Lace with Stan, my co founder. And the goal was not just to start a company. The goal was to bring the best technologies from the top five companies to the rest of the world and to not just start a company for a second standard company, but to affect the entire industry and vertical. And we got very excited about home services and that's how we, how we started.
- [04:40]
C
You know, I talk to a lot of people that are talking about AI and there's a big difference between you and everybody else. They're all talking about cutting hr, automating certain things in the company. And I think about if you're able to replace 10 of my people, you know, you might be able to give me a million bucks back. But what you did when you sat down with me and you come to the house is. You're like, I can. I could do that stuff for you. But that's really not where you're going to pick up the most. You're going to find the most in the contact center. And then we started talking about speed to lead. Then we started about reducing cancellation rates. And you kind of showed me this Gantt chart of how you're going to attack each one to bring me back the most amount of revenue and profit. And most people I talk to, they're playing with Claude. They did an open claw. They're starting to build some stuff, but they don't understand it's a massive data breach. They don't understand that none of this stuff, it's kind of clunky. I mean, I've seen some of the smartest guys. Do you remember when you probably didn't move to the United States in time, but all the credit card bureaus, everybody kind of like if you called Visa, it was somebody in India, but it was very bad customer service. And then after 10 years, they brought it all back to the States, better customer service. I think that certain people are switching to AI because they're afraid to get left behind, but they still don't have systems. And one of the things you told me, too, is the AI as we know it today has to work. It makes humans 10 times more efficient. You can't just depend on AI. It needs to work with the humans to get trained correctly. Talk to me a little bit about where people are wasting their time, where you see the specific places to use AI to make the most amount of profit in a company.
- [06:21]
A
Yeah. So when we started, first, we want to solve the biggest problem first. So we talk to the first customer, and they talked to us about the call center and the efficiency in the call center. But then we talked to more companies, and we realized that 90% of the revenue today in the call center is handled with phone calls by the people by the csrs. So, and this is why we've built our flagship product, coaching and AI analysis, to handle the 90% of the problem in the call center, which is the biggest chunk of revenue. But when we built that, then to your point, customers came back and said, hey, that's the first time ever I have full control of my call center. But then they said, how about after hours and weekends? We don't have a team there. So this was the next opportunity. And since we first started analyzing and coaching people with AI, we deeply understand what the top 1% of the CSRs were doing and we built the after hours which was the second big use case to unlock revenue in the call center. And then if you think about it, having only AI as you mentioned is not enough because there's always going to be this one customer that wants to transfer to a life person. But if you think about on the other side, only people on the call, there's also not enough because you don't have enough bandwidth and capacity to handle all the load. So this is why we're thinking about this problem in the hybrid super team concept which is essentially combining the best of everything AI and the human touch in one to create the best possible experience for the customers. And this is where you're seeing the best value. So as we discussed, you have this kind of a gant chart of like incremental value unlock which is essentially from zero AI to maximum AI in the business that can unlock one by one multiple use cases such as the coaching, the CSRs who are 90% of the revenue today, second after hours, we can do 10% of the revenue in volume of the call center, then speed to lead outbound cancellations and rehash, ton of opportunity in the rehash as well automation and also creating new revenue. So all of these are areas that have not been solved and have a massive opportunity to be handled with technology.
- [08:37]
C
I'm excited about outbound when you could literally fill up my board. My plan is to maximize every single lead platform, Google, ppc. I want to spend the most and extract every dollar and then add the capacity. Here's my secret that I'll tell everybody. I can pay more per lead. Like I know my competitors, I know our ticket average and our conversion rate, our booking rates higher. So I know I could pay more per lead. So how do I pay? Maximize every single LSA lead in every market, including all my greenfields. Maximize gvp, the GVP exposure, maximize every lead aggregate and then have your outbound call center calling out to fill up the board. So I want to have even more labor, indirect or direct labor, which are technicians and installers. I don't treat them like a cog. But that's if you look at a balance sheet, that's what they're called, direct labor. I want enough direct labor that I could fill up on top of maximizing everything else. So that's going to be a massive unlock. And we're working through this every day. I mean you guys are on our, on a call three times a week with our team and that's what the Difference is you come up with these. I said I want to see the cancellations rate by csrs. I think you had that done in a week. I said I want to see cancer. Same day cancellations. Bam. That was done in a day. You know, there's a company like yours, you go to a VC fund, everybody does, whether it's Sebastian and Rilla, service tech, no matter what, all of all of software, they raise capital. You said when we raise, I'm going to get at least 100 more engineers, the elite of the elite, and they're going to come work for our company. So you plan on like putting most of the money into Ford development and making the product like you could have another product sitting alongside. But you think you're going to win the product game.
- [10:26]
A
I mean, if you think about what actually matters for the customers the most, what matters is roi, revenue, product unlock, all those things. So this is all result of having a great team. And when we started lace, our original goal was simple. We wanted to impact millions of lives and add maximum positive value. And when we started building the product, that was our goal, how to build the best product, the biggest impact and affect customers. So what happened is that this happens through us helping the businesses as much as we can, also helping the customers of our customers or the end user as much as they can. And that all is product. And to get there today, fast forward, we are happy that we are living our mission because we're handling millions of calls every month. And so to do that, this essentially meant that we've put enormous amount of energy and time in the product to build the best possible product, the deepest possible features and the maximum value for our customers. This is the number one goal and number one priority. And then everything else falls, like sales, marketing, all those kind of things are important, but they fall after the product is really, really amazing. And so you touched base on the, on the Wrench. So this is another massive win for us where in addition to handling millions of calls every month, the Wrench Group did a massive analysis and evaluation months of the best products out there and selected lace as the AI vendor of choice. And Range, as we know, is a national leader handling 27 markets across 14 states with 2.5 million customers per year. And so that alone in Range decided to use the full product portfolio of lace, including the revenue engine, like the coaching and the analysis, plus the AI, CSR and all the use cases. And so that helps us with partnership with Range to affect millions of people positively in their experiences. So all of that is a Function of the products that we've built and all the efforts that we put there. So that's why I think that number one priority for every company should be the product.
- [12:44]
C
So a lot of people out there, they say, you know, Tommy, you could use any company you want. People are excited. And the first time I met you was at the HSF event, and that was in California, and we were on the rooftop. And, you know, what's important to me is my CTO Raj was super impressed with you and everything you said you were going to do. You know, I work with a lot of technology, whether it's recording guys in the field, whether it's the cameras in the. There's just so much we use intact. We use. We built some internal tools. You know, we just, we use all these technologies. And you're one of the first people I've ever met that I call you. And it's done within reasonably, probably the lowest amount of time out of any company. There's a lot of people that tell us what their software is going to do. You never really told me it's going to be able to do this. You just said, what do you need it to do? I tell you, and it gets done. How do you win the long game? Because the competition is fierce. A lot of these guys are raising a billion dollars. How do you plan on competing long term? And I think most of it is the talent you're recruiting. I mean, the talent is you're like, tommy, sometimes I can't give these people enough as much as they were making. But they're buying into the dream of where we're going to help clients. And by the way, you're giving them equity and everything else, so they're going to make more long term. But you guys are building something special. How do you win the long game?
- [14:06]
A
Yeah. So as you mentioned, team is critical. So we have a few principles at lace, and that's how the company was built. And I think this is a good. Like we had technology company building a AI software for the trades. But I think the core principles of building a great software company are very similar to the home service building a home service company. So the three top principles that we have in our company are one is team, product and speed. So what does that mean? So from a team perspective, it's paramount. It's everything that we built. It's the biggest asset in the company. We have the product, but the team is the biggest asset in the company. So. And when I was at Facebook Meta, I had a open engineering position. To hire AI engineer and the standards process. Hiring at Facebook is easy. You go to the recruiters, you tell them what you need and then in a couple of days they come back with a list of 30 great candidates that you can choose from. So but instead of going to the easy part and easy process, I was thinking how do I hire the best person on the planet? And I went to my team and asked them, give me the top three people that you know in the world that can be the best fit for our open position. And once I get all the, all the names, I collected them and combined them in a list which is a stack rank of the top people in the world. So from there my job was easy. I started from the top, I went to number one and almost hired and I was able to hire number two for two weeks. So hiring number two in the world in two weeks and if I have followed the standard hiring process at Facebook, it will take me the same energy, the same amount of time, just the result would have been dramatically different. So when you change the way you hire, you change what the company is capable of building. And people might say, hey, but it's easy to hire in those big companies because they have the brand and everyone knows them. But it actually will be shocked how similar it is to hiring a small company. So for example, when you're starting a company in Lace. The first engineer that we hired was a CTO of 150 people company and he joined us chief technology officer of 150 company and he joined us to help us lay down the foundation our software architecture of the software we're building. The second engineer that we hired is a fastest growing engineer at 2000 People Organization from an intern to maximum engineering position in the shortest amount of time. He joined us. We have now people from Google, the headquarters in California who worked years at Google and decades of experience. They joined Lace because they believe in the mission. So I think that the moment everyone realizes that the moment you change the way you hire changes the whole capability of the company. So hiring is number one, the team is super critical. But then product is number two for us as we already discussed. So we are obsessed with everything that we produce, every screen. We're spending enormous amount of time to design it in a way that we have a metric in the company called pixel to action ratio. If you built too complex software, it's going to be very hard to use. If you built a too simple software, it's not going to get the job done. So you need to find the perfect balance and this is where we're spending an enormous amount of time to find the ratio of simplicity to action. And that is the magic in the product that makes it really, really scalable. And the final thing, the third one is speed. Speed is very, very critical. So if you think about speed when, if you are. So when we started, we had to build the best product in this industry. You need to deeply understand your customers fast. But speed without structure is chaos. So the question is, how do you fight the chaos? And what we introduced is in order to focus the whole company in one thing that matters the most. We introduced the Google Design Sprints. A Google Design Sprint is a five day sprint that is brutal, but it's very important. So on day one, you define the problem that you want to solve. On day two, you and your team generate as many ideas as possible and crazy ideas too to solve this problem. On day three, you focus on one solution for the problem so that you can kind of focus the efforts. And then on day four, you built a fully functional prototype, a software prototype that on day five, you find five customers and you give them the prototype to use it and give you feedback and that's the Sprint. Then you finish, you do the post mortem analysis and you restart the Sprint. So we did 22 sprints nonstop. 14, 16 hours is six months sprints nonstop, no weekends. Brutal execution, but that defined the DNA of the company and how we execute and how we build. So those are the three principles that I think are very, very critical and make us special as a company and set up for success. And back to your question on deploying cash and deploying a capital before you lay down the foundation of the company is ready for scale. It's going to be chaos. And we've been working the whole time to define the best possible foundation, best possible products, so that when you deploy much more cash, you can scale in a way that's more efficient than anything else. So just capital is not enough, has to be set up.
- [19:28]
C
How do you set up a company to be able to add 10, 15, 100 engineers in a way that it doesn't cripple the speed? Because you think, you know, I had a coach, Cameron Herald said by adding heads, there's more people at the table, more emails or slacks, there's way more communication where you start getting slower growth. So how do you build it all for? Obviously you set up hierarchies and tiers that report, but how do you maintain the speed while building different heads on the team?
- [19:59]
A
Yeah, so that's a critical Question. And essentially adding more people before you're ready actually can slow down the companies. And I've seen this many times in VMware and at Meta. Just adding people doesn't mean you're going to move faster. Because if you think about four people team, now one person needs to communicate with three. So when you become eight people team, it becomes a combinatorical explosion because now everyone needs to communicate to everyone to be able to kind of be up to speed. As you keep adding more, it just becomes the overhead of keeping everyone in sync and see efficient becomes so hard that it actually can be counterproductive to the execution speed of the company. This is why you need two things. One is obviously team, so the great people are able to do much more work. So I've said it before, but like a 10x engineer is much more valuable and actually less capital than a. Not that a great engineer. So it's very careful to hire the best people. And we apply the same principle, not just engineering, but also in call center, in sales everywhere. For example, our head of AI call center has managed 1,000 life agents before joining LACE and our sales leadership has spent years in service titan and knows every single problem that our customers have. So now, before you create, before you hire this great talent and before you lay down the foundation of this, the software to be easy to add on top. And it's going to be super, super hard to scale. So only when you do those two things, you're ready to scale much faster than anyone else. So that's why I think that it's a hard work to get to the point that you're ready to scale. And just adding people doesn't mean that you're scaling it, just growing the company.
- [21:39]
C
You know, you, you guys, your claim to fame is you help businesses recover up to 40%. That's a lot. 40%. You know, I think Service 10 came out with a study. It was a few years ago that only 45% of the calls get booked in most call centers. Like, I think the biggest thing, and I talk about this on stage, is your contact center is the lifeblood of the company. Like, if your marketing dollars are going to work, you got to make sure you're, you're literally my mom, like, figure out a way to figure out how to book the call, how to get them to become a client. So 40% is a big, it's a big claim. How do you guys, how do you guys see that working in businesses?
- [22:25]
A
Yeah, so as we go deep in the businesses in home services, so There are couple of areas that are massive revenue leaks in the call center as you mentioned. So even you think about the whole company, even if you have the best sales team in the world to close every single lead and every single job, if the call center leaks 50% of those leads, you have zero chance to close those 50 that you never reach the best salesperson. So even if you increase your call center capacity and you have half as good sales team, you're still going to generate the similar revenues because of the volume going much bigger. So that's why call center is important in addition to the sales team. So now if you break it down, there are a couple of areas that you can see a lot of leaks. For example, number one, as we discussed cancellations. So for some companies cancellations are up to 15% of the revenue. So even if some of the companies are booking at let's say 85, 90% after you book 50% are lost in cancellations. So that's one. Then the second one is booking rates. So in many of the companies, many companies think that they are not 90 booking rate. But this is a self reported booking it if you go to a clear AI analyzed calls 100 of the time and automatically dispositioned many cases booking rates drop to 72% the actual booking rates. So now from 72 to getting to let's say 85 which is a good performance is 15% additional booking rates capacity for the team. So now I have 30% opportunity in those two. And then after hours and weekends is where many of the companies don't have a team at all and they go to voicemail or the third party call center is not as good as it should be. So now this is 10% of the volume those companies and another 10% of optimization. Now we have 40% opportunity and then we have the rehash. The rehash is where you didn't book the call, but it was bookable opportunity and then proper rehashing and automation all the can have another 10% opportunity. So if you add these things sometimes for some of the companies that might get over 50% opportunity in in the business. And so this is only the revenue leaks. But if you add on top of this the outbound and the new opportunities that you can create, net new opportunity you can create with the speed to lead and the proactive outbound and all the other things, it might be even bigger opportunity. So this is why we we say that it's from 00 AI to maximum AI maximum value in your call center. You can as you Go to the steps and we have the playbook to do that. You can get to an extremely, extremely efficient call center as doubt in can kind of change the trajectory of the company.
- [25:05]
C
I was going to ask you. So a lot of companies get on lace and they're shocked. They were always told by their call center manager, we're at 90, 92%. Then they get on lace and they're actually a 68, 70, 72%. Have you ever seen a company on board that didn't have those? It's almost every company has those issues because through service time you're dispositioning the call and you're saying that wasn't a real lead because hopefully you're doing performance pay your CSR as a way to game the system. A they could say, well, that was a parts call, that was an out of service area. That was not really a lead. So one thing I would implore some of the listeners, if you really think you're at 9%, 90%, maybe, maybe give Boris a call and have them run it through and tell you your real booking rate because you'll be shocked if you're losing 20% like Boris discussed, from 90 to 70, that's 20% of your revenue and potential profit. So it's a, it's a big deal. How do you prevent AI from becoming overwhelming or overly complicated for businesses to use?
- [26:12]
A
Yeah. So I think that if you think about building software, AI is obviously adding a lot of moving parts and could be complex. And the job of the companies like us and other companies is to make it as simple as possible. And so simplicity is very critical. So far it's been minimal exposure of AI for maximum effect is the question. And if you think about how the iPhone was built. So iPhone is built in a way that people buy it, not because it has the best camera in the world or it has all the features in the world. People buy iPhone because they're the best combination between hardware, software and simplicity and creates this magical experience. So how can you create the same experience with AI and use the same principles where it's powerful but it's simple and it's very, very easy for you to do. So I think to not be overwhelmed, it has to be a path where it's easy onboarding, it's easy to understand and it's easy to use it. That's kind of constrained and kind of hides all the complexity. So this is what I think that is the way to get, to get there to software.
- [27:26]
C
What if somebody said we talk a lot about service titan what about the other CRMs? Housecall pro workies. I know you guys work really good with these massive clients, but there are still some big clients on some of these. There's some franchises on a lot of these. Do you guys play well with other CRMs?
- [27:48]
A
Yeah, yeah. So we have many CRM and dagger integrations because we're trying to cover the market and the majority of the market. So I think that every CRM has strengths in different segments of the market and in different angles. And I think that for different businesses, different verticals, they have a different benefits. So yeah, I think that CRMs are important and I think it's important to have coverage for the one that kind of market demands. So yeah, there are different angles for different types of CRMs. Again, discuss obviously service, that being one of the biggest this space.
- [28:26]
C
Where do you see the product being? Let's go into next year by the end of 2027. Where do you see Lace? What are some of the capabilities? Obviously the AI is going to get stronger, it's going to be able to do more things, it's going to be able to handle tasks. It'll be your executive assistant. It can handle a lot of things. But where do you see the, for development of LACE kind of fitting in the marketplace? What do you, where, where's the future?
- [28:49]
A
Yeah, so as I mentioned there two, two, two milestones. One is the hybrid future, which is like the best possible experience between people and AI. And then it's the full autonomous future. So as we built our product, obviously trying to implement the best AI algorithms, the best technology so that we can bring the best result. So if you look at far, far in the future and the way AI is evolving, absolutely every workflow in home services will be automated and this includes every single team from the call center to every other use case that you can think of like a dispatch and including some of the back office operations and all that. So now that will happen regardless and our job is to always be on the cutting edge and be the fastest and the first to deliver the technologies that are going to unlock these capabilities with Service Titan and the partner ecosystem together. So. But this whole ecosystem together will bring the workforce to a full autonomous systems. And that's, I think it's going to be the future. The question is how quickly are we going to get there?
- [30:06]
C
Well, let's talk about the future. Let's go beyond home service. They talk about white collar jobs like lawyers, doctors, dentists. The first thing to get hit is white collar. And then we have Elon Musk talking about, you know, universal, basic, high income. Universal high income. Where do you foresee? I mean you're, you're closer to this than most people I talk to. But robots, they expect in the next five to ten years, ten to one robots, I mean they've got fingers that work in precision. So long term, what does this mean for mankind?
- [30:43]
A
Yeah, so if you think about the evolution of AI, it's been going for a long time, actually 70 years in 1950s where the first AI experiment started. So it's been a long journey to get to where we are today. And a few unlocks happened up until today, and then a few unlocks will happen in the future. So the unlocks up until today were. So in the beginning it was research only and it was very little production and actual use by people. So then we started seeing the first AI use cases implemented in systems like Netflix for recommendation of movies in Google in 2015 for the search recommendations. And then Facebook added newsfeed and ads, recommendations, stuff like that. So this was the first use case that we saw and kind of interact with AI. So then the massive unlock happened in a few years ago in 2022, where the chat interface was added. So this was the first moment where we unlocked ability to not only researchers and developers to be able to interact with AI through APIs, but now we added a natural language on, on top of the AI. So now all of a sudden you can talk to AI and intelligence through chat interface and then the whole world understands and able to speak. So now we unlocked the world to be able to interact with AI. Then a multi model was added, video, audio, chat. So now we can interact with the system. So as we see the progression, we can extrapolate what's going to happen in the future. So and in the future you can think of that you have access to every, every single system will have access to intelligence. And what does intelligence mean? Even today, the latest machine learning models have been trained on almost the entire data that humanity has that's accessible publicly for those machine learning models. So if you think about it, when you interact today with the latest machine learning model, they've been trained with almost the entire publicly available data in humanity. So that's a powerful move. And then from here this means in the future you have this access. In every single device that you think of, like your vacuum machine, you have access to this intelligence. Your shoes, you have access to this intelligence. Your car, your house, everything, your phone, everything, you have access to this intelligence. So now the question is, how does this where does this go? Right? And two things. One is from a home services perspective, business and in general from home services, I think one thing is certain and this is change. It's going to be a change, constant change, just accelerating. And from a humanities perspective, I think that it will be evolving. Of course we know the end game will be a radical abundance or this has been very well known and discussed recently, concept that everyone will have everything and then the only problem that we need to solve will be meaning of life. And that's going to be the something that I think we should be positive and we should be able to figure out a way to solve the meaning of life. When you're in this radical abundance, although it's going to be a change for every single person who never expected that you'll get to this point. So I think that this is where we're headed. But if we think or should not be, should be thinking positive, not be that like the first reaction for every person is like to be scared of the future. And I think that we should think positively in terms of what are all the good stuff that will happen as we get into this process of, of, of, of, of technological evolution.
- [34:24]
C
Yeah, so super intelligence is when the machine is smarter than all human beings combined, which is nuts. How long, look how far away? Ten years.
- [34:37]
A
So we, we don't have accurate prediction when this is going to happen. But the, the speed at which a new technologies are being unlocked and new capabilities is unbelievable. I think that no one expected that's going to accelerate that quickly. So I think that it will. Like robots are definitely coming very soon. And then the triangle AI robots, quantum computing is going to be a very special triangle that is going to unlock unbelievable capabilities. So yeah, we don't have a prediction, but it's probably going to be sooner than we think. And I think why are we transitioning? A practical advice for every business will be to incorporate in the company's DNA a constant change. Constant change should be in the DNA of every company as we're going through this transition because it's going to be a change changing much faster and back to the jobs that sometimes people are getting concerned about, like, oh, what's going to happen with all the jobs and stuff? So technology is actually not always cutting jobs. Sometimes technology is opening a bigger opportunity. Since historically that has been the case many times. Just to give an example, when Uber was introduced, people will get concerned that all taxi drivers will kind of lose their jobs. What actually happened is before Uber was introduced, there have been half a million Drivers. When technology was introduced, Uber actually lowered the barrier, the anti barrier and right now have 5 million drivers in ride share. So this is a 10x increase of the drivers that are driving those cars. So not always technology has a this scary effect. Sometimes technology unlocks. So as you think about the far future, the future might be very, very bright for us and yeah, I think we should be happy about it.
- [36:35]
C
We went from taxi to Uber to the Wayos driving with no people out there. So yes.
- [36:40]
A
Which was unlock something else for us. So it's always every technological unlock, it's giving us something else to work on and think about. And yeah, back to the transitions of white collar, blue collar workers. So we thought that AI will automate the repetitive tasks first. But actually what's happening right now with all the changes with Anthropic and co op and all the other innovation developers are actually the ones who will have the biggest disruption first. So writing software code we saw anthropic added $4 billion just last month in their revenue incremental. So we're seeing what happens with the engineering and development in general. So I think this is something that is very, very interesting.
- [37:30]
C
It's going to be interesting how it all plays out. I figure just make as much money as possible, keep a lot of it look liquid so you could invest as things start to progress. It's kind of like I wish I got into. I remember the first time I thought it was called bigcoin, not Bitcoin but I found out a little late and I wish I would have parked a few grand in there because of that investment. So as these things pop up, you'll keep me, keep me close. You know we're getting ready to transition everybody in the company from Luke's already done it from chat GBT to Claude and there's a way to kind of export the files into in the cloud. Which one do you like the best?
- [38:04]
A
I mean they kind of now there's all sorts of frameworks coming up every day and the automation is incredible.
- [38:12]
C
Security and security is what I care
- [38:15]
A
most about is a big thing that's currently being worked on. I think it's not completely figured out. So the enterprise use cases are not yet completely figured. This is just the beginning. It is like the. You were at a 1% of what AI will be capable of doing. And that's why I think that right now it's more of a experimental phase. A lot of new use cases. There are some applications, but again there are security and access and things that need to be figured out before we can embrace completely the future. So yeah, I think it's coming, but it's very early on.
- [38:51]
C
Somebody pretty wise told me recently that a lot of these companies that are getting rid of 30, 40% of their people because they're saying it's because of AI, but I think they just found out that they were just they got way too much staff. It was a reason to lay off a bunch of people because I personally don't think these companies all of a sudden woke up one day and said I could handle 40% of the workload.
- [39:14]
A
Yeah, I think that what is happening is a massive advancements in the speed at which we can deliver things, which is great. But at the same time it will take time to figure out the corner cases. For example, you can build quickly a system from zero to like a working system but to be able to maintain the system, to be highly reliable, highly available for millions of people and millions of companies, it's a different story. So there is a path to get from and it's different from working at Meta and Facebook. I learned and seen this multiple times that from research to experimentation to production is a massive change in what you need to do. And so from experimentation to production and to actually be able to fully rely on those systems, it's going to take a little bit of a time. But we're definitely starting a massive change in how we should be thinking about this. And there are already software companies that are not it can fully shipping full autonomously code. But the question is what are the biggest companies in the biggest systems where you can do that without intervention. I think that this is where it's going to be a lot of advancements happening in the next few years.
- [40:31]
C
You know, I just want to say one quick thing and then I got a few more questions. A lot of my buddies, a lot of the people I know that develop something on cloud are like I'm going to be so rich. This thing works great. And I'm like, you don't have distribution and guys at the guys at service, I know they own distribution. You will have own a lot of distribution. I've got a lot of distribution because people listen because I'm talking about cutting edge things. But a lot of these people, they invent a cool tool and then they're like everyone should use it. But they don't know what onboarding looks like. They don't know how to price it. They don't understand that this tool breaks down and shit happens with it. So Luke built this tool in a day it works awesome. It's a health tool in a garage door. We're building it to commercially apply it. It's going to take two months, but it built a pretty cool thing. And the UX needs work. We need to make sure it works every time. It doesn't token out all the shit that we worry. So. But what's cool is what you could do with Claude or Open Claw is you could build a quick tool and then you could actually have it write the code to own the tool versus it using tokens. So we're learning a lot. But I still not convinced that it's where like you said, it's. It's not at the production level to work as a commercial viable product. So when somebody outboards with you, what do they got to think about how much work? Because a lot of people have a lot of things to do. They're like, well, do I do this? Do I get rebranded? Do I get the lead ads turned on? And it's a lot because they listen to this podcast they're listening to and they go, there's so many things I need to do. You what does lace look like to onboard and just get it embedded within the company?
- [42:09]
A
Yeah. So and you start from the funnel and you think about your business and what are the biggest bottlenecks in your business. And yeah, so from. And then you kind of store them one by one. And from a lace perspective, onboarding is. And we worked a lot to make it as simple as possible, as seamless as possible essentially. How can you make it almost like zero touch. Right. And onboarding looks like right now just connect to your systems and then collect a little bit of information which is also automated to a major extent and then your life. So it's very simple, very easy process. And then you have this process of like adjusting a little bit and fine tuning, which also has a ton of improvement that we've done recently which are going to change the way way things happen. So onboarding is now down to extremely, extremely simple steps to get then. But then once you do the onboarding, it's that now you have the software, then a change management needs to happen in the company because some of those things that you have your team that your team needs to get used to work that. And this is where it's very important the software to be very easy to use and to have the proper training and understanding because then you'll be able to use the full value of the product. And then once you do that, then we have created this incremental steps of 0 AI to maximum AI or 0 value to maximum value from the starting point that we walk you through. And that actually helps businesses have a streamlined process of how you first set up your call center and your AIs and then how do you enable the receptionist and then how do you enable the outbound close and then how do you enable the rehash, how do you enable the cancellations, all that thing to get to a point where your business is now on steroids.
- [43:50]
C
Yeah.
- [43:51]
A
And that helps tremendously when you structure the steps and you structured onboarding and also change management in the company.
- [43:58]
C
What do you think? What is your goal for a return on investment? So a lot of people go man, I got all these tools. They don't know if they're paying off or not. I mean it's very hard to come up with an roi. I mean I couldn't, I could, I could tell you it would be hard to run the business without service titan to have to switch. And then now we're embedded with lace and things like our W card to make sure people aren't cheating us on gas. But a lot of people ask, is this, is the juice worth the squeeze? Am I going to see an roi? What is your goal for a return on, by the way? I mean me and you, you, you treated me very fairly. I feel like I'm getting a, a fair cost for what I'm getting in return. It's not like this a regis egregious number and I, I don't think people know what to expect. They're probably worried this is going to be super expensive and it's going to, I always say cost versus investment.
- [44:51]
A
Yeah. So we recently did a analysis of what is the average ROI for our customers and for last month I think the analysis came down to 17x ROI. 17x 17x ROI on what you're paying and what you're getting back from the software. On average, of course you have the outliers of 4x and they have the out like a 40x but on average is 17x. So what does that mean? So this means that you are investing in technology that brings back the money that you invest in. This technology brings back 14 times the return. But that's not just the return. What this gives you is accelerated growth, gives you a bigger visibility, data accuracy and everything. And that is not just roi, but it's the growth of the business and the way you can consolidate the market. So I think that it's first it's crazy amount of ROI and second, it's it's that easy to get to that number because you go to the zero to maximum unlock. So at the end we were shocked
- [45:52]
C
ourselves when we saw the numbers 17x compounding, what do people do to get all of you?
- [46:01]
A
The easiest ways to go to Lace AI Aoac AI and book a demo with us or just reach out to some of us, our sales team or myself. Just reach out to Facebook, LinkedIn and we'll show you how you can get to that number of return.
- [46:22]
C
So it's Boris and then it's valid Kov.
- [46:25]
A
Yes, Boris Valov.
- [46:28]
C
And listen, I'll just tell you I've had a great experience. You know, this was a big decision early on and you always wonder can the person and the team pull off what they say they can do. And I'm a living testimonial and I like to help out partners. I like to help out. You know, I've brought service Titan Thousand. Look, they've got 14,500 clients. I don't know necessarily if it's thousands, but it's the high hundreds if not a thousand. And companies I love, I want to help because the more healthy you are, the more you're onboarding good clients, the more you're able to put into the product. And you always seem to do that. You guys recently did something with power selling Pros which is one of the most respected coaching companies in home service. What makes this partnership so powerful?
- [47:16]
A
Yeah, so when you think about your call center and the data. So first you need a very precise way to get accurate data. Because if you don't have accurate data, you cannot act on the data. So this means that if you are just listening to a 5, 10 calls per day, you cannot make a decision about your business and about what action need to take. That's why first you need technology to give you the accurate data. Once you have the technology to give you the accurate data, then you have a choice as a company. Either your call center team and head of call center need to manage a constant coaching, constant improving to your team based on the data, take action and continuously improve the product or you hire the professionals who have been doing this for a decade. And this is where Brigham, Barry and team, they've been amazing, they've been great coaches. And this is why this partnership made so much sense. Because essentially this is closest to loop and you and for our customers you get the full experience of a super precise technology and actions and the coaching experience of a power selling pro. So this partnership, I think that is a massive unlock for the entire industries industry because you're getting a the full value of what you can do.
- [48:30]
C
So I'm just going to summarize that Lace takes all the data and it gives you the right metrics. And then power selling pros comes in and they continue to train each specific csr. One of them needs to be trained on why do you have so much cancellations? One of them is about selling service agreements over the phone. One of them might be how to get capacity and over overflow. I just like the partnership because when you got the right data, what actions are you taking to make to influence the outcome? So that's why I see it working. Do you got a book that really changed your life? Anything that the audience you think would be beneficial for them to read?
- [49:12]
A
Yeah. So I think for building a company there is a very good book about hard things. About hard things.
- [49:18]
C
Hard things.
- [49:19]
A
About Hard Things with Ben Horowitz, one of the co founders of Andreessen Horowitz. This book covers building a company and the hard things that happen while building a company and what you should expect and what's the reality look like versus what people might think. So I think this is very helpful from, for entrepreneurs to go through this understand very deeply. Yeah, that's one of the, one of the good books that you can check out.
- [49:43]
C
All right, close this out. Boris. We talked about a lot. You got speed to lead, you train the CSRs, you give us the data, you help us out with cancellations. Really it's a recipe for each and every csr. It's almost like the best way is everybody needs their own solution. It's not this global thing within the company. Each CSR needs to train in their specific things and then you're winning now on the lead gen side and you got the outbound to fill up the capacity. I mean, this is, this is a home run. And most companies should at least look into it and see what they could do because they're missing out, they're late to the game. But they need to make it. They need to make this decision quickly. Quickly, because the data will set you free. Last thing, I guess close us out, whatever's on your mind.
- [50:31]
A
I mean, I think that the most important thing is if, if you are a business and you're trying to grow and create something positive for your customers, the easiest way is to focus on the fundamentals and use technology to unlock the biggest progression for your business. So I think that it's very important to embrace change and do this continuously in your company as part of the DNA. This is very important as what the future is going to look like and you need to be prepared for that. And that's kind of the key.
- [51:04]
C
You heard it here. Listen. Embrace technology. Unlock some of the potential of your company. That'll help it to be on steroids. So Boris, I appreciate you brother. Great podcast. Thank you.
- [51:15]
A
Just cover this lace lac AI book a demo.
- [51:20]
C
Yeah La C E A I book a demo today. Hey there.
- [51:26]
B
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, changer for anyone looking to build and develop a high performing team like over here at A1 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 elevateandwin.com forward/podcast and grab a copy of the book. Thanks again for listening and we'll catch
- [52:02]
C
up with you next time on the podcast.