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A
This is to the Point a Rhino experience voted one of the top home services, marketing and operations podcasts. Cutting through the and getting to the point.
B
Hey, what's up to the Point listeners. It's your boy Chris. I hope you're off to a great start. Beginning of January, man, I sure it was lot of fun to take the first 10 days off in Costa Rica with Tommy. A 10 day trip with Tommy Melo is exhausting.
A
Where did you guys go?
B
We went down to, we went down to Costa Rica and we had, well, no, we had a blast. So it's felt good to get back home, get back in the routine and kind of get started. But man, we got a special guest on here today. I was telling, telling our guest this right beforehand, but we have Ara on here, SEO service titan. Been on before I came when the hell you were here last time, Ara. But it's good to have you back on the show and I told you, you are actually Chad and I's first official interview of the new year on the podcast.
A
So extra special, thank you so much for having me. It's always a pleasure and an honor and I want to wish everyone a very happy and healthy new year to you, to all your families, all your loved ones.
B
Look at it, man. He's starting off like just, just crisp at getting after it. So PC or off the bat. Oh man. Well, listen, I hope you're, I hope you had a good holiday season, Ara, and you're already probably already back into it and getting after all the things.
A
And yeah, it was really nice. We of course we hosted family and then we also went over to friends homes and family's homes. And then to start the year off, I took the boys skiing. They really wanted to go skiing. So we had three days that up in Tahoe. Had a great time, got a lot of fresh powder. So luck came our way and then got back right to it, straight into work.
B
Well, there was, there was no, there wasn't much snow in Indiana, Chad. Sorry about that. But there also wasn't much snow in northern Arizona up here. The mountains, the mountains were pretty, pretty lame honestly. All year we just got some snow up there so the propane guy can't get to my cabin. So which means it's been out of propane for about three weeks now. So they're hoping that there's no bus bursted pipes up there. If we do, I'm gonna have to call a plumber. Okay. I have, I have quite a few questions. Okay. Lined up for you, Ara. And but before I Do that. You know, the listeners always love that I kick off the. The podcast with dad jokes. Well, I'm sorry to disappoint you and Chad, but I'm going to switch it up a little bit and try something different this year, and we're going to see how it lands. And this is actually something I've been thinking about. Just like myself. I thought, man, this. Let's just share this thought process with the listeners. So what I. If you. Have you ever wondered. Have you ever wondered, either one of you, where some of these metaphors come from, where they originate from, like, you know, throw the baby out with the bath water, or, you know, as a frog's ass, water tight, or. Or any of these popular metaphors, Because I know that I do. So. So. So, guys, we're gonna go after the first one. I think this is one that we can all relate to, that we've all said, that I've certainly said from stage on the podcast many, many times. It's because it's something that I genuinely believe in. But did you know that the metaphor rising tide raises all ships, do you guys either one of you know where it actually originated from? No, I didn't think you did. Okay, great, because I'd love to share with you. So. So first off, the literal origin of this. By the way, this is a great educational session for. For all of us, right? The literal origin of this was long before it was a phrase. It was simply a physical truth known to sailors and harbor masters. Okay? So in any harbor, when the tide comes in, water level rises. So all boats, big, small, rich, poor, or new, broken, whatever, they all float higher. So this is harbor economics, folks, just in case you didn't know. In the 18th and 19th centuries, use this to explain why dredging reports, building better docks and improving shipping lanes helped every merchant, not just the big shipping firms. Because better ports. Better ports, more ships, more trade, higher income for everyone, right? Raising tide raises all ships, regardless of the boat, the shape of boat. That's him. Now, how did it become famous? That was just the literal origin of it. It became famous because Kennedy. That's right, Kennedy. Back in the 1960s.
A
You know, I chat GPT it. Sorry, I'm not that smart. I just quickly typed it in.
B
You went right to chat GPT. Actually, that's perfect because that's how I got the answer to all this. But what's interesting about it is, is the way he was using it was to defend, like, the federal investment in ports, highways, trade infrastructure, and industrial growth. So. But here's the end of it. Here's the part they don't talk about. Ara, see if you caught this part on your chat GPT 5.2 when people say. Usually say, hey, rising tide lifts all ships or lifts all boats, but only if they're still floating. That's right, only if they're still floating.
A
Chat GPT also wrote that so long as there's no hole in it, this is going to be a metaphor for business now.
B
So listen, growth helps everyone, but only if they're positioned correctly.
A
Okay?
B
Boat can't be. Can't have holes in it and sink. Still gotta be floating. Okay, so we. Whatever floats your boat. Maybe we'll look up that one next.
A
Okay, that was both interesting and insightful. I don't know if it qualifies as a dad joke, though.
B
No, it's not. No, we moved on from the dad jokes. Now we're on to meta popular metaphors.
A
Great.
B
Okay, so. So actually this proved my point with this R is I wanted it to be educational, okay? And, and maybe somebody now will also use the term rising tide raises all boats or ships. Chad, do you approve?
C
I don't know how we could do this podcast without the metaphor segment now. I mean, it's just. Just blowing it out of the water. So we got a lot of. A lot of 26 left to explore some of these metaphors.
A
Excited.
C
Excited to go on the journey with you, sir.
B
Yeah, well, I've got some really good ones lined up, so you're going to get your wish because there's going to be more. Yeah, okay. We're going to jump into it. Thanks for. Thanks for, for, you know, paying attention to my. My wonderful popular metaphors and, and, and are giving me the response because you chat GPT on the fly. Well done. Great use of chat GPT. Okay, hey, we're gonna jump right into this, man. And I have some questions that I did not. I did not chat GPT, but I do often, so. But this one is kind of just going straight into Aura A. You know, you're at the beginning of the year, and I wonder if you think a lot of times about things that you guys have created or made better, you know, on the product suite for Service Titan that you're like, man, I wish, like, this thing is such a great thing that people aren't using it as much. So, so my first question. Or aren't using it as much or to its full potential, like you would like them to maybe even chat. But the first question is, what's the most Meaningful product improvement in this, you know, last year that isn't getting enough attention in your opinion? Ira?
A
That's a very interesting question. I've often said no software is perfect, service titan included and so there's always opportunity to make it better and better. We release hundreds and hundreds of updates each year. So I think it's hard for all of our customers to implement every single one of them. But maybe a different way of looking at is like one of the more exciting things that we've done recently is the big focus on the AI powered capabilities. The most recent one of which are the voice agents that we just released. We talked about them early at Pantheon and we gave a sneak peek at what we were building. Over the past two months we have built and released voice agents and iterated very quickly. Our team has just been in customers offices for the past two months getting feedback, getting requests, fixing bugs, building new capabilities. And it's awesome to see how in about two and a half months time these voice agents are now booking as well as humans and better than the average csr. That's been coolest thing.
B
Yeah. There's been a lot of chatter around the AI agents and, and is there a human being in the loop, is there not? What's their booking rate? And I know that like some people are really trying to make a hard shift to all AI answering which is crazy. Some people that we, that we know it, it is cur. I'm always curious to see how like what, what does that, what does it look like? I mean because you think from a business perspective on how does that impact bottom line of the business if you don't have x amount of CSRs and if it's performing better, it's kind of a pretty tough case to compete against. If you, if it's doing its job and if it's booking it directly into your into service item. Right. Like if it's a full thing, that's a, that's a pretty, that's a pretty attractive solution, I think.
A
Chris, there are probably kind of two categories we need to think about. First is as it relates to a lot of the moments where a contracting business gets a sudden influx, a surge in call volume. Right. It's very hard when this business is seasonal and there can be incredible surges very quickly based on weather. It's very hard to staff at a high level to be able to handle every call. First of all, it's weight number one, way too expensive financially and number two, it's just so hard to find that much talent. So Typically most people staff here and then when the surge comes in, they get way more calls than they can answer. So the, the booking rate on those calls in some cases just zero. So beating zero is not hard. Obviously if you have, if you have an answering service handle overflow or after hours, you know, you will have a, a decent booking rate. Probably not as good as your in house booking rate. And so kind of the bar is low, right, for that segment. Clearly voice agents book much higher than those booking rates. I think that that game is already won. And then for the rest of the calls that are answered by humans, I think we're still in an, in a world where the best csrs book better than the best voice agents. But if you look at average performance across CSRs, voice agents now book higher than the average CSR. So it's a phenomenal place to be in. And the funny thing is like as good as the technology is, this is the worst it'll ever be. It just keeps getting better week after week. Not only does the technology improve, but then customer expectations and customer comfort with voice agents is very meaningfully increasing. I'll tell you this personally. You know, one small example, when I'm at a hotel and I want to call down for room service, I love it when it's a voice agent that picks up because I can just quickly say, you know, two cheeseburgers, extra pickles and hang up. Right? Whereas typically when I call they always pick up and say, you know, hello, thank you for calling in. Danny, can you please hold? Right, and there's always a hold and I always try and sneak in my order before they can say can you please hold? They say, thank you for calling in room. I'm going to quickly say two cheeseburgers please, but half the time that doesn't work.
B
So sorry for the interruption, listeners. I want to give a quick shout out to Rhino X 2026 Keynote Sponsor Pro Book AI. It's ProBook AI. You can check them out in the link below. ProBook AI finds the money you're losing without you having to do anything. It scans your books to catch missed invoices under Build jobs, links, all kinds of stuff. So let it do the hard work for you on finding out where you're leaking money. Thanks again to our keyNote sponsor, Rhino X 2026 Pro Book Ara.
C
Do you think there's an opportunity with these voice agents? This is one thing I think about is the ability to, you know, service customers who maybe their primary language is, you know, call it Spanish or something of that nature. To be able to facilitate interactions with those customers. When maybe you don't have a human CSR team that speaks multip languages or so on and so forth, I feel like there could be an opportunity. But I didn't know what your thoughts were on that, on being able to service maybe a, a segment of the population who, you know, isn't going to call because they don't speak English as their primary language or whatever it may be.
A
Indeed, that's another great example where even the best CSR in the world is not going to be able to speak, you know, 40 languages. But a voice agent is absolutely.
B
So here's another thing I was working on last year, Ara, when I was still an active Rhino employee, which today I am no longer a Rhino employee. I am a senior advisor. But one thing that I was working on was one of our sponsors of oca. As I said, hey, Chad and I have a roofing business and we were running third party lead aggregates, you know, to try and generate leads for the business. And we were learning, you know, from, from Peterman Brothers team and our own team on like, okay, we're handling the third party lead aggregate sales process wrong from the pickup of the phone call all the way through the booking. So I was trying to get to the point of like, could we do this with, you know, an AI agent and train that AI agent on how to handle the third party lead aggregate leads and that book straight into server side. And the answer is yes, we can do it. Now I didn't, I didn't get far enough down the path to launch this thing. But like, that's the thing that I was working on. Just as another like thing to think about, how can I leverage an AI agent? Because a lot of the, you know, a lot of the companies don't know how to handle these lead aggregate leads that come in. Instead they just say, oh well, they suck. It's, it's, it's, it's really a sales problem or a booking problem.
A
And specifically in this case are we talking about speed delete? Like that third party lead will come in via email, whatever text message and you have to call them back really quickly in order to actually book deployment.
B
Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so just, just trying to get, you know, fast, quick. How can I get there quick?
A
That's another fantastic use case because of course like the conversation quality matters there and, but the other variable that really matters there is speed delete. The booking rates are far higher if you respond within whatever, 5, 10, 30 seconds versus if you respond within a few minutes. And a voice agent is going to win that game every single time.
C
Well, and I think it's too the follow up, like, I know we, we're using them right now, but it may call a customer who submitted a form, you know, for the next 21 days until they pick up the, until they pick up the phone to, to be able to have that automated to where those calls are just going out all the time. I mean, it's going to be hard to get to like, oh yeah, I gotta call Ms. Smith for the 17th time. I wonder if they'll pick up or not. You can kind of work your way through that. We've even experimented with some stuff of like outbounding with virtual agents to like, I mean, text message works really well, but like another kind of medium. Can you do like a AI voice agent to your point about room service? Hey, do you want to book your maintenance? Yep. What day? Next Tuesday. All right, perfect. You're on the schedule. Talk to you soon. I think that speed is going to become extremely, extremely important.
A
Totally agree. Particularly Chad, the use case you brought up memberships. You know, I think for more of these, like transactional bookings, I think calls may work for the more marketing type of outbound. I think, you know, most people are going to avoid wanting to pick up the phone for a marketing call especially, I mean, even if it's human, but then especially so if it's a voice agent. And so text is probably the only viable option there. Text and email. But yeah, I agree with you. Text, email, call, you know, put that on a cadence and keep following up until it's booked.
C
Yeah, well, and I think where, where your voice agents become really powerful, just like anything. Like, yeah, I can give a voice agent a list of 200 names and say go. And it can call them all at the same time. I think the important part is the ability to see your capacity and to be able to know, oh, we're a little light in maintenance in this particular zip code. Here's the customer base, Go. And it's doing it behind the scenes because I know in my experience it's always like, okay, fill up maintenance. And then all of a sudden, like the weather doesn't hit and you're like, oh my God, we got to book 100 calls for tomorrow. How are we going to do this? And it's like if something could be proactive in the back of like, hey, these are the levels at which we want to fill capacity. And just always shooting out messaging to try to get those Booked on those particular days. I think that's the big thing, especially as you scale. Because then it becomes not so much right tech, right call, it becomes, okay, I've got enough right techs to go to the right calls now. It's more about like geofencing that technician so he can run maybe five or six calls in a day because he's in the same neighborhood all day long as opposed to zigzagging across town.
A
Totally agree with you, Jet. Ultimately, one of the most important things in a contracting business is like, you have some finite level of capacity and you have to be able to forecast demand and make sure that the demand is going to be pretty much exactly where your capacity is. If you're forecasting that demand is going to be low, you have to pull out every lever to fill it up, just like you're describing. And virtual agents, both voice and text and email and all these other mediums I think are probably the solution there. And so our focus has so far been on inbound voice. And very shortly we will expand to full funnel if we're forecasting low demand. Do everything it takes inbound and outbound to, to make sure you're meeting capacity. Because all that is potential lost revenue if you don't do that.
B
And would you guys say this is still like, size of business agnostic? Like, because there's still some businesses that aren't, like, they're still outrunning their thing and they're not even answering the phone in the first place, which I could see a use case for this too. So would you say this isn't like, even though we're talking about bigger businesses and overflow and things like that, you think it's gonna goes either way.
A
It's certainly applicable to businesses of all sizes. Certainly really great operator and leader like Chad is gonna have far more sophisticated processes and, you know, more talent that can manually do it, you know, better than most. But, you know, even from the way he's describing it, there's still a very big opportunity to make a significant impact in this business and likely a far greater opportunity to make an impact in, you know, people who are not as sophisticated as Chad.
B
So is it fair to say that a rising tide raises all ships?
C
Yes.
A
In this case. In this case, yes. Chad has less holes than most others.
C
One of the things I want to ask you, because it's one of the things that I respect about you the most, is you lean into getting the raw, real feedback about your product, good, bad, ugly, whatever it is, to make it better and I love that about, you know, when I tell other people, they're like, he really had like just got on, just asked you the. Yeah, he just asked me what is it good? Is it bad? Do you like it? Do you not? How do you kind of. And this is more like a leadership question like how do you, how do you cascade that kind of mentality down through the organization? Because I would assume that probably in a software company dealing with a bunch of contracts like ah, they don't know what they're talking about. I'm the one over here coding this thing. I know what's going on. Like how do you, how do you get that down through the organization? So everybody's thinking like that and using feedback to improve the product.
B
Sorry for the interruption, listeners. I want to give a quick shout out to our title sponsor of Rhino X 2026, evoke AI also to the Point sponsor. We're grateful for them. In my opinion, the best AI answering service in the game that actually keeps a human being, us based in the loop. So if you hit 0, you can get to a human being. When I put these guys up against the other competitors, they won hands down. So again, shout out to our title sponsor for Rhinox and our TTP sponsor, Evoka AI, the best AI agent in the game. Check out the link below for Evoke AI in the show notes.
C
By now you've probably heard how much of a proponent I am for Bluon. But I'm not the only one. When you talk to service managers using Bluon, the stories all sound very familiar. Nick Christensen over at Herbal Heating says his team saved 46 hours in just the first month. Between the parts lookup, wiring diagrams and AI troubleshooting, his techs are solving issues faster and ordering the right part the first time. It's even streamlined communications between the techs and the parts department. They just screenshot over the right part part from Blu on and send it over. It's simple, it's accurate and it works. And yeah, Peterman Brothers is definitely seeing that impact too. Do yourself a favor, click the link in the description and book a quick demo to see it in action.
A
Fantastic question, Chad. And look, I don't have a monopoly on answers. This is just how I've thought about it. If anybody has better suggestions, I'd love to learn from it. The question you're specifically asking is this behavior of getting customer feedback and responding to it. How do we get others to mimic this behavior in the organization? Anything that relates to getting folks to embody behaviors for me is about Culture. And I found there's like seven ways of reinforcing culture in an organization. And I've come up with the seven words all to start with R so that I can remember them. It's things like reward the behavior, make a ritual out of the behavior, reprimand when the behavior doesn't happen, recruit for the behavior, so on and so forth. But I think the most powerful is role model the behavior. So when folks see that this is how I operate, I think that is one of the best ways of reinforcing that this is how we should all operate. And kudos to you, Chad and others. We met very recently at our AI summit, you and a group of other contractors and you guys gave me the greatest gift which was feedback on how we can improve how we build product. And you guys give us fantastic feedback about how we need to spend more time in your guys offices. We need to seek your input on the products that we're building, you know, more often. We need to react and respond to that feedback more quickly. And it inspired, you know, this idea of us having more atomic teams with incentives aligned around the success of that product that they're working on. And of course the success metrics there of course are like the business success of that product, you know, the revenue and the retention, et cetera, of that product. But more importantly, things like customer satisfaction of that product. If that product is intended to drive ROI in your business by like increasing your call booking rates, right. Then the success of does the call booking rate actually go up and then the reliability of those products. And the very first team that we actually piloted this with was the Voice Agents team. And that's why, you know, we saw night and day difference in how quickly we built the product, how quickly we've been iterating the product. You know, every week we are now launching improvements to the Voice agent, both improvements in like the tone and its ability to have a great conversation, but capabilities as well. And that's the reason why in two and a half months that product has gotten so good. And I owe a lot of that to the feedback that you and others shared at that event. And you know, we're going to roll out the same structure throughout every part of the organization as a result.
B
Okay, I'm going to shift gears slightly. Okay, so you have a lot of variations of size businesses on the platform, right? So, so I want to. And you, we've, you've released more than just the AI, AI agent stuff, you know, in this past year and you've enhanced some of the Services because of feedback like you, like you go and get from, you know, your customers, from the contractors. So, so for a lot of our listeners that are on the smaller side of things, let's just call it 10 million bucks, like a $10 million H vac contractor. If they adopted everything that you released last year or like a big chunk of what you released last year, where would they feel it first? So they can have some perspective. And then maybe if you want to talk about what the thing is and you don't got to talk about everything are, but just like the thing that kind of pops, you know, top to your head is like if they just adopted, you know, a few of the things that you released that you released last year, where would they feel it first in their business?
A
Yeah, I would hope. Ultimately what we're optimizing for is profitability. Okay. For the contractor. Well, we want to make sure our hard working customers earn the fair profits that they deserve. So profitability, their profitability is what we optimize for. And then when you think about, okay, what drives profitability, clearly the next layer is like revenue minus expenses. Okay. And then so you look at the drivers of revenue. I'm going to speak specifically about residential, right. Even though we have a very big business on the commercial side and we serve a lot of commercial customers, because your podcast is very much focused on residential today I'll limit my conversation about residential on the residential side. For revenue, it's about generating demand, right? Call that leads, generating leads, booking the lead into an appointment, getting a technician or a comfort advisor, sales rep, whatever out there and then optimizing the average ticket and the close rate, those are the things that impact revenue. And so anything that we build, we think about these metrics in, you know, Chad's business. And anything that we build is meant to increase the ability to generate demand. The ability to book calls, the ability to get a technician out there and then the average ticket and close rate. And so, you know, I would hope if somebody, you know, of course we have different features and even different products for each one of things. You know, if you're adopting Marketing Pro, it's all about helping you increase demand. If you're adopting Contact Center Pro, virtual agents, et cetera, it's all about increasing call booking rates. If you're adopting Dispatch Pro, Sales Pro, or using, you know, things in the core product like the ability to generate good, better, best options or integrated financing or all these things, it's about increasing your close rates on average tickets. So I can't single out One individual metric. That's the beauty of Service Titan. And we're not perfect. There's a lot of things we don't do a great job and we got to do better, but when it works, it's impacting all the drivers, which is why you see such a significant increase in revenue. And then of course, we do the same thing on the cost side by effectively automating a lot of the manual labor that would be required to get these increases in revenue. So you're not only getting the increase in revenue, but through automated labor. And so you benefit on the cost side too, and you win, you know, doubly well on the profitability line.
B
Do you? Yeah, that was actually a good, like, general answer, I think of just kind of covering, you know, the whole funnel. And yeah, you as the, as the listener, like, you identify where, which side of that funnel are you weak at right now or if it's all the funnel. And, but once you figure that part out, you know, there's at least a tool to, there's a tool to help fix it, you know, or at least, you know, a tool is only as good as the implementer though too. So keep that in mind.
A
Yeah, and it requires, of course, like Service Titan isn't magically going to do all this. Of course, hopefully it'll do its part. But a lot of the incredible success that we've seen in the contracting industry is like, we have phenomenal operators, incredible entrepreneurs, great leaders with great operational rigor who are willing to do whatever it takes to see their businesses succeed. And you know, over the past 10 years, look at the success that's been created in the industry. If you rewind back, you know, you just said, let's take a small business and then you said 10 million, 10 million is not a small business. And frankly, 10 years ago, when Vaha and I were first building software for this industry, you know how rare it was for us to come across a company doing 10 million or more. It was, it was incredibly rare. And now, you know, there's a lot more of them, thankfully. So, but that was not the case. And so the operators and the entrepreneurs have really raised the standard of performance as well.
B
You know, I'm really disappointed in myself. Thanks for calling that out, Ara, because you're right, and I didn't mean it like that. What I was saying was I was using 10 million as an example. But, but you actually make a good point. Like, I don't want to overlook the fact that even a five million dollar business is a great business, right? In contracting and what it takes to get to being a 5 million dollar company, let alone a 10 million dollar company to a 20 to 100 or whatever. So I'm not discrediting that. And actually the point I was trying to prove is like regardless of size, like you can still use these tools and implement them too, but it's still only as good as the, you know, as the integrator of the tool or the person paying attention to it. So. But I want, I want to talk about something else. I want to kind of stay on the AI track for just a second before we bail off of it. Now we're talking about the voice agent stuff too. But like what, what else, you know, from an AI perspective, can you see this starting to impact these business, like these businesses, you know, throughout this year that's going to continue to help them increase and get better. That's not just the actual voice agen, like what else? And it could be something that you guys have already rolled out that's just slower to, to adopt overall. Like maybe the bigger guys are adopting it and the smaller ones aren't because they don't quite understand it. Right? Like you can even get up on stage and talk about at a pantheon and do a fantastic job, but it doesn't click right. You go home, they don't know how to implement these things. So is there, what else should these listeners be thinking about that, you know, that could really be helpful in their business in addition to yo yo.
A
The harder thing is like I can't think of a single part of the business that isn't being like, isn't benefiting from AI. Yeah, I've shared in the past, like the, the Gulf Shore example, those guys effectively ran the first fully automated job a few months ago. Like the AI did the marketing to generate the lead, the AI booked the appointment, the AI picked the right tech to dispatch the AI routed. That's not hard. But I routed the technician on site. The experience was recorded through Field Pro and all the insights were generated on how to provide a better customer experience and improve salesmanship. And then a lot of the financial reconciliation once the job is done was also automated. And the only part that really wasn't automated is of course the technician in the home doing the diagnostic, figuring out the problem, offering the solutions, the customer selecting a solution and technician having to implement that solution. And increasingly some small part of that with respect to diagnostics is being not automated but supercharged by AI. And I think Bluan is a partner of yours, right? So yeah, through Bluan and Field Pro that's happening. But some dude through Service Titan in our Max program, which is meant to help you fully automate every part of your business, others will do it through other solutions. But I foresee and I think there is going to very soon be a race to fully automate a lot of these process I'm talking about because you think about Chad's business and yours. Well, Chris Roofing, the cost of acquiring a customer is so high these days. You know, for a lot of companies and plumbing, H Vac, etc. It might cost them 500 to 1,000 to more than $1,000 just in like, I don't know, AdWords spend to acquire a customer. In some cases it's, you know, 200 bucks a click. You need five clicks to get a call. That's a thousand bucks just in clicks. And then you apply the call booking rates. It's like I don't know, 1200 bucks to get an appointment. And then you factor in all the other costs of, you know, the CSR booking, the call dispatcher to get a tech out there at the cost of a truck roll. You've spent fifteen hundred dollars to show up at a customer's home and you're not even guaranteed any revenue. The customer might ultimately send you away and say, hey, I'm going to call someone else. So when the cost of customer acquisition is that high, you got to be so efficient and so dialed in your business and that's only possible with AI in order to frankly break even. And then if you want to make a decent 20, 30% profit margin, like imagine the level of perfection that you need and that can only be achieved consistently on every call, every job. If you're leveraging AI, those who do are going to win and those who don't, it's going to be very hard to survive.
C
R01, I'm sure you've never been pitched an idea for what the software should do, but I just thought of this and I thought it was interesting and maybe something to discuss here. So obviously you've got the Field Pro that instructs the technician on how to provide a better service and so on and so forth. You've got the virtual AI agents, you've also got all of the data within Service Titan. Like, is there a world where, like I'm thinking about aiding your service manager? Like you've got a service manager here. I think the one thing that we see with most of, like, well, what am I supposed to work on? What's broke? I don't Know how to read a P and L. Like all of these things. I'm sure people have heard from service managers, like the ability for like them to have kind of like a, you know, field pro person that's like telling them, hey, here's what you did yesterday, here's who's struggling, here's who. Because you know, obviously you can build reports but I feel like, you know, it's, there's so much data that, you know, you have one guy build it, the other guy builds it, it's completely different. They're working on two different things. But that's something that's interesting of like how do we help the leader that's helping the technician get better. And to me it would, it would seem that with all the data there, it could be something that you could look at. I know our team now is anytime they need like a report, it's like pull the data from service titan, dump it into ChatGPT and then outspits this report and it basically just tells you, hey, here's what's wrong. Oh, okay, cool. That was really neat. So that's something interesting that I feel like they oftentimes get overlooked or the business owner of a small up and coming business who's really not sure where to go or what to improve or I always think about the conversation of why need more leads. And it's like your booking rate is 20%, you've got eight that are there out of the last 10 calls that you got, you just didn't book any. So yeah, just a thought that I had for sure.
A
Fantastic idea. So if I understood you correctly, I'll talk specifically about service manager and then we'll talk about the business or the owner. Yeah. Something that, based on how all the different parts of what a service manager is responsible for highlights what the service manager should focus on. Is it, you know, average tickets? Is it getting to the customer on time? Is it recalls, Is it, you know, you need more technicians and then zooming out for the whole business. Similar idea based on all the different metrics. Like your focus needs to be on call booking rates, your focus needs to be on callbacks, your focus needs to be on X. Great idea. I wrote it down. You're welcome. Thank you.
B
Well, it's okay. We have a, we have it documented. We have it documented. Well actually I text Chad that idea and then he just told you. So that's how that really worked.
C
Yeah, I just thought of it because our team like keeps, keeps pumping out these reports. I'm like, how did you do that. They're like, oh, I didn't. I just took all the data and all the reports and I just dumped it in and it spit out this. I was like, oh, that's pretty cool.
A
I mean, we could very easily just automate that one step for you. We'll take the data and we'll ask the LLM, what should the business focus on? You know, just give us the answer and save you that step.
C
Yeah, I mean, I know a bunch of guys who are pumping their P. L into it and, like, saying, like, hey, what's off? What should be. You know, where should I be working on it? Different stuff like that. Yeah, that guy.
B
I may or may not have done that on Prolific this year. So this past year, just looking at different metrics. I mean, listen, you strip out some of the personal things right out of it, too. That way it's not connected to anything, but it is pretty damn cool. Like when we were down in Costa Rica, you guys both know Tommy and how his brain works. I swear, every time we had a conversation about something, you know, flips open his little Android, you know, phone drives me crazy. Stupid green bubble. And then JTPD is everything. Like, everything, you know, and when he's thinking through math, he doesn't do his own math anymore, even though he can do math. Everything he's doing is through his phone. But. But we were talking about, like, you know, how you leverage your finances using chat GPT and how quickly you get to answers. It's. It's crazy.
A
He needs to get that chat GPD PIN or whatever they're working on. Yeah, we'll find out soon enough. So he doesn't need to carry. Does he have the. Does he have the trifold yet or just the bifold?
B
Just the bifold.
A
Just wait.
C
They'll get the trifold.
A
The quad fold.
C
And he uses that thing so much, it looks like it's been through the ringer.
B
It's like.
C
It's, like, tattered.
B
He got it. He got a new one. He got a new one. Yeah. Yeah, I think he got a new. And it was. I noticed it because I was like, wow. Actually, it looks like it's not. It looks like it's new because the other one was all beat up. But. But it's. It is interesting, too, to just watch, like, since we're talking about chat GPT, talk about Gemini, talking about whatever, like, how frequently. How much faster the adoption is now taking off from it as, like, in the short amount of time, like people Googling, like when Google first came out or not even Google, but like Yahoo, whatever you want to call it. What was the very first one? I forget that. God, I forget the name of it.
A
Anyway, whatever it was like.
B
But the adoption was really, really slow. This is nothing like that. Like this, it is getting crazy. And the reason I've always pay attention to it too is like by the end of last year with Rhino in particular, I think we had near $2 million worth of sales come through Chat GPT, which has a very low cost per lead. Right. And we got early to it on how to make sure that we're ranking. Ranking well for it. So we started rolling it out to the contractors. Right. And even though it was. It's a very small percentage in the. And you know, the big picture of lead generation still, it's like you got to get to the game early. You want to get to the game fast for everybody else starts figuring out and, and it's. But just to see how even from that short stint of like, you know, November to even through January of how fast the adoption is scaling on Chat GPT is pretty incredible. And so point being is to all these listeners who's even, even if you still don't understand it, you like to RS ours point earlier. You're like, you got to get on board with this thing. Like, you got to get on board with AI at some capacity. Like, you got to have to start to figure out how to understand it. And if you can't find someone that can and help you or leverage your coaches or whatever. But there's so many different tools and the full funnel, you know, has all kinds of tools and we have a few of our sponsors, you know, that are in that space and they're on. And they're on here because I believe in them and I've seen them in action with contractors and what they can do. So I, I want to shift gears just slightly, boys, just because we got about 15 minutes left and I want to, I want to. I always like asking these questions and, and when I think back real quick before I move on, Aura, when you came to rhino X in 23, I think it was 2023. Yeah, 2023. We were talking about AI then in our Q A, like, and what you guys are already doing back then and that was what you were already doing. And man, just to see where it's at today is. Is incredible and it's exciting. It's like, it's exciting to watch what it does. So. But I do want to move on to like, let's Talk about moving forward and why when I always the conversations I like to have to you are what is Ara thinking about? And this doesn't need to be AI specific at all. It could be anything. Anything. That's you know, you're looking forward in the business. You have a, you have a responsibility in your position to look forward at the industry as a whole. Your business. All the things right. That's the, you know, that's part of your rule is trying to make sure you know where you're headed, you know where you're going and where you're headed. What are you gonna what are you paying most attention to this year from and this will kind of be a two parter. What are you paying most attention to this year at least as as you sit right now from the from your customer base and also just from the industry perspective. So is there that's kind of two separate questions like what are you going to pay attention to the data that you're going to collect from your customer base and then what are you paying attention to from the industry perspective? What's on ours mind yo. Or it could be if you want to steal it. Sorry for the interruption folks. Want to give a quick shout out to our Rhino X Day session sponsor, Chirp. Also a to the Point sponsor Chirp. Oh I love Chirp. I love Ryan Finn. I love Justin Judd. Those guys are fantastic. The virtual ride along game, they are the best and they integrate directly in with service time. What more could you ask for? These guys are the best of the best. Check out the link to below in the show notes. To the Point listeners, listen up. What if the biggest thing holding back your business isn't marketing or hiring, but your bennies? The benefits for home service companies, a better 401k can be the difference between great techs and losing them to the shop right down the street. Basic Capital, our newest sponsor, is the only 401k built to actually put your team on a real path to retirement. Companies that switch over see higher participation, happier teams and dramatically low turnover because your crew finally gets a plan that's a true benefit, not just a checkbox. Don't wait until your best people walk, make the move and click the link below to get 12 months with 0 employer fees when you join. Basic Capital.
A
The success of our business is tied to one thing and that one thing is the success of our customers. So that's all I think about. Both because I love my customers and that's all I want to think about, but also because it is literally my own financial best interest as well. The opportunity that will be created, that is being created by AI, is the greatest success opportunity for our customers and for us. And if we miss the boat or lose the race, it can also be the complete opposite. And so this is the most important thing, and therefore most of my bandwidth is on this is us building products that leverage AI and automation that help our customers become more successful. That's number one. And hence all the focus on automated marketing for our customers. Automated call booking, automated demand generation, inbound outbound, automated dispatching, all the sales insights from the field through field Pro, you know, automating the back office, financial reconciliation, payroll, inventory management services. The second thing is I want us like to leverage the much faster product iteration cycle that we've experienced with voice agents across the whole company. And I want it to get even faster and faster. And so for us, one of the things required to do that is leveraging AI internally in how we operate, which has nothing to do really with like what our customers are using. So we leverage a lot of AI now in, for example, our entire product development life cycle, from like collecting customer feedback and coming up with ideas to writing code, designing, et cetera. A lot of that is now powered by AI. Of course it requires, you know, very skilled and seasoned engineers to oversee it all and review the code and make adjustments and so forth. But it's allowed us to iterate much more quickly. And we want to see, you know, that same level of adoption across other functions, whether it's marketing or sales or even finance or HR and how we do recruiting, so on and so forth. So we're working a lot on that. That's number two and that's pretty much it. Like I like to focus on a small number of things and make sure they're wildly successful as opposed to diluting focus. So those are the two biggest things that I am personally focused on.
B
It didn't seem like a small number of things when you look at small.
A
In number, but each one is massive in scope and scale. I totally agree.
B
Jesus. And you only gave us a little skosh of the actual scope of everything too. I, I imagine though that you also have to be looking at what others are doing, like competitive products, maybe not CRM, but maybe plug in related or service related or product related. And you kind of gotta try and stay ahead of these things too, right? Or stay competitive with them and adopt things faster and it's moving a lightning speed. So to do that at scale across all these different things, that's why I make a Joke of it is that's not easy because you only got so much, you know, time to stay on top of that. But, you know, you. It's part of the game. Like, you. You still have to look outwardly. Not that I'm telling you to focus on, you know, a competitive product or something like that, but you still need to pay attention to what, to what's going on out there, right? Like, that's your part of your responsibility. And, and that part, to me, sometimes isn't as fun. And I'd say I actually, I, I had a. I can't remember if I was talking to you about this chat or not, but it never feels good to be on defense. I don't think. I like. And when. When I'm on offense, when I get to be on offense, I know, like, I'm at my absolute best. When I'm on offense, I'm just focused on. Go, go. Drive, drive. Do. Push the thing. Is it better? Here I take a peek at what my competition is doing. I find out, am I doing it? Am I not doing it? Could I be doing it better? Give my thought, share my direction, Give it to your team. Boom. They go, right, like, that's, that's what I. What I like doing. But when you get put on defense, you. It's. It starts to slow the growth. Right? And what I mean by that is. And, And I'm curious to see how you work through this aura, and even you, Chad, is we have people that are listening right now that are on defense because they're just solving problems. Like, they're not, you know, they're not moving the business forward. They think solving the problem is moving the business forward. And it is, in a way, but it's not really moving it forward. What do you guys. What are you guys doing when, okay, you run into another roadblock, and we always hit these roadblocks and now you get put on. On defense. Are you, you know, sending this off to somebody else? Are you trying to be a part of the original? I'm talking high level, not in the weeds. High level. What are you guys doing to, you know, to take an active role in solving a problem quickly but then being able to, you know, to. To move on to playing on offense again? Does that make sense? Am I get that one? Am I making any sense?
A
Yeah, and maybe I'll answer from, like, different perspectives. So first of all, like, I like to learn from everything and everyone around me. First and foremost, I love to learn from customers. I love to learn from other software players in our space. I love to learn from other software companies who have completely nothing to do with our space. And I love to learn from, like, businesses that are not even software related or in our space and businesses we're not software related, who are completely out of our space. I like to learn from everyone. At the same time, I think it's detrimental for my customers and me if I am maniacally just obsessed with any one of these guys. Right? All of this, even though, for example, right now it's probably the most critical and important wave that we've ever experienced. As important as this is, still I am focused on the long term. And if you've read the Infinite Game, for example, that does a pretty good job of summarizing this philosophy of like, we are for those that are building generational, hopefully generational businesses, we're focused on building something enduring and wildly successful for decades to come. So I'm not, you know, only thinking about today. Right. And then second, I think it's important to have a very strong thesis as to what the ultimate business or product or world needs to look like and pursue that thesis relentlessly. Now, you want to form that thesis based on really strong inputs so that it's like an informed thesis, not just something you make up with no rationale, and then refine that thesis as you get exposed to new data points. And so as I get exposed to new data points from customers, other software companies, so forth, I continue to refine the pieces. And then lastly, in terms of, like, my level of involvement, I've always believed in this particular philosophy. I think, interestingly, there was a article written by Paul Graham, who's the founder of Y Combinator. He wrote it recently, like a year ago that really summarizes this concept. Well, he calls it founder mode. I'll explain it through analogy. He was working very closely with Brian Chesky from Airbnb. And as Airbnb got its first, like, traction of success, the advice that Brian got from the investors around the table was that now that you build something that is successful and is clearly going to scale, you need to go and hire a lot of very seasoned executives who have been there, done that, and seen great success and scale and give them the autonomy to build your business for you. And so Brian took that advice, he implemented that, and then at some point thereafter, he effectively saw that his business was not succeeding the way he wanted. And in his case, what he found was that the people he had hired were folks that like to just operate at 30,000 foot elevation level. And the challenge is if you are running a steady state business that is just going to do everything the same way, kind of into the foreseeable future, that may work. But when you are constantly in growth mode, like building a increasingly better and better business all the time requires reinvention all the time. You cannot reinvent unless you are in the trenches in the front lines. Like you cannot reinvent your sales process unless you are in the front line selling or seeing how things are sold. You cannot reinvent your customer experience unless you are in the trenches talking to customers all the time seeing how implementation is work. I'm talking about software, company implementation is working, customer success calls are working so on. In your case, you cannot reinvent your install process unless you actually know how to install an air conditioning system and know the entire end to end experience front to back inside now. And same with building product, right? If service tightness to become successful, we increasingly need to build more and more and better and better products. And we cannot do that successfully unless the people making the decisions are in the front lines, hearing customer feedback, seeing how well or not well these products are working. And so Paul Graham gave, you know, Brian this advice of like look, if you want to keep building at great scale and pace, like you cannot be involved in everything, that is not the advice. But the most important things that matter in the business, you need to directly lead and be involved in. And so he calls that article founder mode. My take has always been this isn't just about founders, this is about all leaders. All leaders at every stage in the organization, their top priority. They need to lead directly. They cannot delegate. And so Vah and I take this approach whatever is top of my like in this whole scrap party one AI Baha and I directly are leading the effort. Of course we have incredible talent around the table and they're very much involved and contributing like massively. But Vaya and I are very much leading the effort.
B
Sorry for the interruption listeners. I want to give a quick shout out to our evening sponsor at Rhino X 2026, good leap. I love Good Leap. They've been a sponsor for multiple years. They are the best financing option in the game. I know that Peterman Brothers uses them. Red Brick Roofing uses them. Rhino has used them as their vendor partner because they're that dang good at getting contractors clients approved. So thank you to Good Leap for being a sponsor yet again for IMX 2026. Check out their link below in the show notes. Yeah, attention to the point listeners. Branding has never been more important. Is your brand in serious need of an upgrade. Do you have a new company and need a new brand, but don't want to wait six months or pay a ridiculous amount to get it done? If your brand looks like everyone else's, well, guess what? You are everyone else. But Prolific, they build brands that dominate from the first Google search to the driveway. Prolific Brand design can help you be more of you because you are the unique difference that sets you apart from all your competitors. So let's be real for a second. Your brand is either winning or you customers or costing you money. Just ask some of our clients like Ken Goodrich, Ishmael Valdez, my boy Chad Peterman, and even myself. Olific Brand design is the creative pros behind some of the best home services, logos, truck wraps, websites, and now email marketing campaigns. Wouldn't you love it if your email marketing open rates were 30, 40, 50%? And don't go into the spam folder. Hell, that's how we roll at Prolific. So check them out at prolific brand design.com and ask for the to the point promo. Prolific Brand design. Be more of you. Be prolific. Yeah, I thought that was a very good explanation. Explanation. You said Paul, Paul Graham. And. And what was the other guy's name?
A
Sorry, Brian Chesky. Brian is written by Paul Graham. It's called founder mode. I mean, if you just type in founder mode, it'll definitely be the number one.
B
Okay, I wrote Founder mode.
A
It's very popular article.
B
I mean, no, Chad, you got any?
C
I mean, the only thing I would tack on there, which is kind of similar to kind of your last point there, Ara, is like, to me, it's like if we want to keep scaling, like problems become different there. You know, you had different problems at 5 million that you do at 10, 20, 30, 40. And I think some people can scale with that. But what do they say? Most people can only survive like one doubling event of the company. And so for me, it's just consistent. We haven't done a good job of this, but we're going to get better at it is just talent evaluation. Like, we have got to always be evaluating our talent because if we just think that, you know, who got us here will get us there, more than likely we're going to be on the defensive at something point in time because, you know, not that you need to know how to get there, but to Ara's point, you got to have the people that are, as you grow and see success, are still willing to dive down into the weeds and talk to the technician and figure out like, well, what is Going right. What is going wrong? Like, we changed this. The data shows it's going good, but you seem to have other thoughts, like, where are we missing here and getting all of that interaction. I think one of the most powerful things we do to hopefully stay on the offensive and then also to continue to kind of foster that communication all the way through the organization is, you know, our COO does a town hall with every technician in the field the first Friday of every month. He's done it for over a year now. And it's been one of the best things that we've done because we get to hear what they hate, and then we get to go fix it. And a lot of the stuff is not super complicated. It's not like, well, you know, I'd really like to put the furnace in, you know, outside the home. I really just love that. It's not goofy stuff like that. It's more like, hey, this tablet, when I try to do things on it, it doesn't work. Or the process you told us isn't actually how it happens in the field. Can we look at that and fix it? Yeah, that's a great idea. And so they have the ability on their kind of technician front end app to, like, they can submit feedback all the time. So it's just like, hey, what did you. What did you see today that you didn't like, all right, submit it, and then we'll kind of keep a tally, and then we'll find answers for you. And then a lot of it, what we find is not stuff that's broke. It's just there. There's confusion. There is. Hey, it was rolled out this way. I don't think that makes sense. And it's like, well, hold on a second. It actually shouldn't have been rolled out that way. This is actually how. Oh, okay, well, shoot, that's good. You know, different stuff like that. So I think that for us, I hope, keeps us on kind of that growth trajectory that we want to be on, because we're solving these problems and not letting little things get in the way of big advancements.
A
That and. And Chad, like, I've been doing this 15 years. You've been doing it long?
C
14. 14.
A
The same as me.
B
Yeah.
A
Business is simply a metaphor or a euphemism for every day there will be a new problem or new, like, critical opportunity. That's it. And if we think that if we take inventory of all the problems we have today and we successfully solve them, that somehow, miraculously, we'll just have this amazing business that runs itself. That's not how it works. We will solve it. And tomorrow there will be a new problem or a new wave that we have to capitalize upon, and that'll be the new priority. And the important thing to think about there is, like, you are the one that got your business from here to here, and then you were still the same person to take it to here, and yet the same person to take it here. And so who says that you are not the person to take it from where you are today to the next layer? You are the anomaly. The reason why you are the anomaly, the successful anomaly, is because of this idea of continuous learning and improvement. Yes, it does take a new person to go from here to here, and a new person to go from here to here. And now you're here to go here. But you are reinventing yourself at every stage by doing things like investing in learning and development and figuring out what the next tier is going to require and how you need to, you know, adjust yourself and your business to get there. And so for folks that continue this habit, there is no artificial ceiling. It's the folks that refuse to continue that journey. The folks that say, you know, I've gotten far enough and now I'm good to coast or who artificially believe, like, I'm great and I don't need to reinvent myself. Those are the folks that stop scaling.
B
Yeah, man, that's really well put. And. And that is also size agnostic of a business. Right? Like, you're always going to have that evolution happening. And the worst thing you can do is not be curious, not learn, not ask for the feedback, not do all the things, because it actually is the. That's the way to gain the system on getting better faster. Right? Is you just, you figure out what's broken in the field and you address the hard things quicker. And it's like, you know, we don't understand something, don't run away from it, try to lean into it. Or if it's definitely out of your real house, you got to find the person to. To own that, you know, for you. So great feedback. I love having those conversations. I always like, you know, I didn't know you're doing that once a month, Chad, that, I mean, I. We used to do that at Rhino once a year where we'd. For everybody's feedback on what are we doing, you know, right. What are we doing wrong, what's missing, what's confusing. It's basically like get your ass kicked in three columns and you get one win and the all. All the longer ones are the bad ones. Right. The win columns, not the long one. But we got so much better, so much faster and maintained respect of. Of the staff when we did that, because we were listening. Now some things were, you know, you know, didn't like the coffee sucked. Okay, sorry. But like, you get a lot of good information out there that you might not. I know how to view on. But you could fix the problem, you know, in your position. So I appreciate you guys sharing that feedback. And listen, we're like, I know we're butting up on time too, and I want to be mindful of that for you. So I'm going to skip last a lot of these few. These last questions, but I'm always excited to. To see what you guys do, you know, in the new year. And you kind of hinted to a little bit of the. The outbounding stuff. So, because I was gonna have one of the questions, I was going to ask if you'd share anything that you guys are going to work on throughout this year or that you want to put out there, and I'm sure we'll see it at Pantheon.
A
Yes.
B
But I appreciate you. Hey, by the way, have you done any other podcasts so far this year? Are we your first interview? If not, lie to us and tell us. Yes.
A
No, this is my first one.
B
Okay.
A
I don't. I don't do many. I may have only done like four in the past 10 years. 15 years.
B
Really?
A
Yeah.
B
I feel so. I feel so grateful. Thank you, man. I appreciate you giving us the time to do it. Well, listen, I appreciate you, dude. Congrats, you know, on another successful year and I look forward to seeing what you're doing this year. And just forgive us the time. I know it took us a while to chase it down, but you're officially my first inter. Podcast interview, you know, no longer a Rhino employee, which is extra special to me. And you're officially our first podcast interview of. Of the year. So what a hell of a way to kick it off, right, Chad?
C
Absolutely. Couldn't ask for a better guest. Always great to see you, Ara. Thanks for all the insight and all that you guys do to make the industry great.
A
Thank you. I'm very humbled by the kind words and sincerely grateful to be here with you guys. Congrats on an extraordinary journey for both of you guys in your business careers. Thank you so much for your trust and partnership and very much excited to see where we go from here and go from here together. So looking forward to it.
B
Yeah. I appreciate you. All right. I appreciate you, Chad. And to all of our listeners, I appreciate you for listening. Like I always say, you know, got to do everything, but you got to do something. No Zero days.
Podcast: To The Point - Home Services Podcast
Episode Title: The AI Race Contractors Can’t Afford to Lose w/ ServiceTitan CEO Ara Mahdessian
Host: RYNO Strategic Solutions
Guest: Ara Mahdessian (CEO, ServiceTitan)
Date: January 20, 2026
Purpose:
In this episode, Chris and Chad are joined by Ara Mahdessian to discuss how artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping the home services industry, especially in high-growth sectors like HVAC, plumbing, and roofing. They focus on actionable insights for service contractors to leverage new technology—especially AI-powered solutions—to improve profitability, efficiency, and sustainable growth, while navigating the pressures and opportunities of accelerating digital transformation.
ServiceTitan’s Voice Agents: Ara highlights the recent rollout and rapid improvement of ServiceTitan's AI-powered voice agents, which are now “booking as well as humans and better than the average CSR.”
“In about two and a half months’ time, these voice agents are now booking as well as humans and better than the average CSR. That’s been the coolest thing.”
— Ara Mahdessian (07:26)
Handling Volume Surges: AI agents are particularly adept at managing overflow or after-hours calls (particularly during seasonal spikes), outperforming traditional outsourced services and handling calls that previously might have gone unanswered.
Continuous Learning: Both the technology and user comfort with it are improving steadily. Ara notes:
“As good as the technology is, this is the worst it’ll ever be. It just keeps getting better week after week.”
— Ara Mahdessian (10:48)
Multilingual Opportunity: AI voice agents will soon break down language barriers for customers whose primary language isn’t English, offering unique value for contractors who don’t have multilingual human CSRs.
“Even the best CSR in the world is not going to be able to speak 40 languages. But a voice agent is.”
— Ara Mahdessian (13:16)
Speed to Lead: AI agents can instantly follow up on third-party leads or web forms, drastically improving booking rates by responding in seconds rather than minutes or hours.
“A voice agent is going to win that game every single time.”
— Ara Mahdessian (15:00)
Proactive Booking & Maintenance: The panel discusses how AI agents can not only fill current demand but also help contractors smooth out their schedules by proactively reaching out to customers with reminders and maintenance offers, tailored to real-time capacity (“fill up maintenance” or react to weather changes instantly).
Applicability for All Business Sizes: AI voice and automation isn’t just for large operators. Any contractor, regardless of size or sophistication, can benefit—whether for overflow management or more fundamental operational efficiency.
“It’s certainly applicable to businesses of all sizes…”
— Ara Mahdessian (19:21)
Culture of Listening & Iteration: Ara explains how ServiceTitan institutionalizes a culture of customer feedback through role modeling, rituals, and company structure—resulting in rapid improvement, particularly for the Voice Agents product.
“The most powerful is role model the behavior. When folks see that this is how I operate, I think that is one of the best ways of reinforcing that this is how we should all operate.”
— Ara Mahdessian (22:27)
Atomic Teams & Incentives: By aligning product teams and their incentives to customer success and feedback, ServiceTitan accelerates its product development cycle.
What Does All This Impact?: If a $10M residential HVAC contractor implemented most of ServiceTitan’s recent AI-powered releases, Ara says improvements would be felt across all revenue drivers: marketing (“Marketing Pro”), call booking (“Contact Center Pro, virtual agents”), dispatch (“Dispatch Pro”), sales optimization, and ultimately, profitability.
“Ultimately what we’re optimizing for is profitability…and anything that we build is meant to increase the ability to generate demand, to book calls, to get a technician out there—and then the average ticket and close rate.”
— Ara Mahdessian (26:21)
Implementation Still Matters: Tools are only as effective as their user. Success stories boil down to both adoption of tech and operational rigor.
End-to-End Automation is Coming: Ara outlines how AI is coming to automate everything from demand generation and call booking, to dispatching, routing, sales insights, field operations, and financial reconciliation. The only truly non-automatable component remains in-home diagnostic and repairs, but even those are being “supercharged” by AI-powered diagnostics.
“There is going to very soon be a race to fully automate a lot of these processes… those who do are going to win and those who don’t, it’s going to be very hard to survive.”
— Ara Mahdessian (32:33)
Cost Pressure & Efficiency: Rising customer acquisition costs make operational AI adoption non-negotiable for profitable growth.
AI for Management & Leadership: An interesting theoretical discussed: could AI help service managers and owners by surfacing exactly what (and who) needs attention each day, based on real-time business KPIs and trends?
Two Strategic Focuses:
“The success of our business is tied to one thing and that one thing is the success of our customers. The opportunity that will be created by AI is the greatest success opportunity for our customers and for us. And if we miss the boat or lose the race, it can also be the complete opposite.”
— Ara Mahdessian (44:30)
Staying on Offense, Not Defense: Ara and Chad discuss the importance of playing offense (proactive growth, learning, and improvement) versus defense (purely reacting to problems). Both believe in being in the trenches, learning fast, and direct leadership involvement in what matters most.
“All leaders at every stage…their top priority: they need to lead directly. They cannot delegate.”
— Ara Mahdessian (55:10)
“Who says that you are not the person to take it from where you are today to the next layer? You are the anomaly…the successful anomaly… there is no artificial ceiling.”
— Ara Mahdessian (60:40)
On why AI voice booking is vital:
“Clearly, voice agents book much higher than those booking rates. I think that that game is already won.”
— Ara Mahdessian (09:48)
On AI’s rapid improvement:
“As good as the technology is, this is the worst it'll ever be. It just keeps getting better week after week.”
— Ara Mahdessian (10:48)
On inclusivity via AI:
“Even the best CSR in the world is not going to be able to speak, you know, forty languages. But a voice agent is.”
— Ara Mahdessian (13:16)
On building a feedback-driven culture:
“The most powerful is role model the behavior. When folks see that this is how I operate, I think that is one of the best ways of reinforcing that this is how we should all operate.”
— Ara Mahdessian (22:27)
On the AI race:
“Those who do are going to win and those who don’t, it’s going to be very hard to survive.”
— Ara Mahdessian (32:33)
On the importance of offensive leadership:
“All leaders at every stage in the organization…the most important things that matter in the business, you need to directly lead and be involved in.”
— Ara Mahdessian (55:10)
On continuous improvement:
“Who says that you are not the person to take it from where you are today to the next layer? …There is no artificial ceiling. It’s the folks that refuse to continue that journey…those are the folks that stop scaling.”
— Ara Mahdessian (60:40)
Metaphor of the Day: “A rising tide raises all ships” (03:30–06:30)
Lighthearted segment that foreshadows the rest of the episode’s focus—technology’s rising tide in the industry.
AI-Powered Voice Agents Discussion (07:40–20:01)
Deep-dive into ServiceTitan’s innovations and the business cases for AI call handling and automation.
Building Feedback Loops & Product-Customer Alignment (21:38–25:27)
Leadership and organizational lessons from ServiceTitan’s rapid product improvement cycle.
All-in-One AI/Tech Solutions for Profitability (26:21–32:33)
Review of which ServiceTitan tools drive contractor P&L, and the coming automation race.
Leadership, Offense vs. Defense, and Founders’ Direct Involvement (47:08–62:28)
Ara and Chad’s philosophies for building resilient, adaptive, and continuously improving organizations.
AI is Here—Start Experimenting Now: The winners will be contractors who actively test, implement, and iterate on AI solutions, from call-handling to marketing to routing/dispatching.
Feedback Fuels Improvement—Internally and Externally: Build systems for both customer and employee feedback, and iterate fast. Leadership must “role-model” this habit.
Adoption Is Size-Agnostic: The magic of AI and automation isn’t just for large companies—every contractor can benefit, whether they’re struggling to answer every phone call or looking to scale sophisticated outbound campaigns.
Profitability Hinges on Innovation: Margins in home services are under more pressure than ever. AI isn’t an option—it will be essential for keeping costs down and revenue flowing.
Leadership Must Stay In the Trenches: Culture, direct involvement, and continuous self-improvement set companies apart—no matter the tools.
This episode serves as a call to action for contractors: the AI race is here, and the winners are those willing to move quickly, test new solutions, embrace feedback, and keep learning. Ara Mahdessian’s transparency, real-world insights, and humility offer both inspiration and a practical roadmap for service contractors navigating technology-driven change in 2026.