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In this episode of 'Owned and Operated,' host Jack Carr interviews Wyatt Smith from Upsmith to discuss employee retention and the psychology of incentives for skilled workforces. Wyatt shares a look into UpSmith’s mission to gamify the skilled trades industry using software that provides immediate feedback and recognition to technicians while bolstering your employee retention strategy, and how this approach boosts performance and revenue. Wyatt also breaks down the significance of timely rewards and Upsmith's future roadmap.
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Episode Hosts: 🎤
John Wilson: @WilsonCompanies on Twitter
Jack Carr: @TheHVACJack on Twitter
Episode Guest:
Wyatt Smith: On LinkedIn | @wyatt_h_smith on Twitter
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Owned and Operated Episode 141 Transcript
Wyatt Smith: I worked for my dad as a kid. He was a pretty tough boss. So you learn how to be a person that puts a lot of hard work in.
Wyatt Smith: A lot of the principles are principles that I used when I was a teacher. And if you reward people on performing the work the right way, right time, every time, good things happen. Speed matters, which is why software is so powerful. It creates better outcomes.
John Wilson: Recently, we've been buying off SupplyHouse. com. And we've been able to get plumbing, HVAC, and electrical stuff off there. And my biggest concern was timeliness, like Hey, if I need this thing pretty quick, can I get it? And you for sure can. So that was awesome. So deliveries are fast. They ship coast to coast and you can call them and you can get expert support with real people, which is awesome.
John Wilson: So check out supply house.com for buying
Jack Carr: Welcome back to Owned and Operated with your host Jack and not John today. John is out traveling. We have an awesome guest today. We have Wyatt with Upsmith. How's it going, Wyatt? Doing great. I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me aboard. Yeah, man. We're really pumped.
Jack Carr: I know John was really pumped to have you on. Wyatt, we generally start off with with trying to understand people's background and where they, they come from and then how they got into what they're doing today. Can you talk a little bit about your background and where you started?
Wyatt Smith: I'm a farm kid from Alabama who's now working as a tech CEO, helping to gamify experiences for skilled tradespeople.
Wyatt Smith: So A lot of life under the bridge, but it's, what I think about as a kid who grew up on a ranch in a rural part of the country is that the folks that I went to high school with who went into the military or into trades or people that are really the backbone of our country and having a chance to build software to help to make their life better and encourage more people to flourish and what is really important to them.
Wyatt Smith: But I think the most meaningful, high dignified, purposeful things from what I can do, which is to be a builder, is something that is deeply inspiring. The quick story on my background is I was a teacher after college. I taught U. S. History, World History to high school students in Birmingham, Alabama. I went to business school, to Get smart at the intersection of technology and big markets, which I thought was a cool way to get ahead of some big opportunities in the world.
Wyatt Smith: And went out to Silicon Valley, worked in the tech sector for several years there versus the consultant. And then at Uber for several years in the deal team, Uber remains a really big privilege to have been there. During COVID, it's all of our businesses to partner and it freed me up to think about what would come next.
Wyatt Smith: And this mission focused on attacking the skilled worker shortage that people all across this country are facing is why I felt really motivated by it. So we've formed up Smith two and a half years ago and I've been running at it ever since.
Jack Carr: Talk about a journey, man, from rural Alabama to a teacher, then to Silicon Valley.
Jack Carr: That is a cultural jump. Pretty smooth for you. Or were there some pitfalls along the way?
Wyatt Smith: Yeah. I joke a long way from the farm that flag cars. And it's a look at value for sure. I worked for my dad as a kid on the ranch. He was pretty tough boss. If anybody here is a fan of Yellowstone and John Dutton, that's basically my dad.
Wyatt Smith: Oh my goodness. Your dad's your boss. You can't fire your dad. So you learn how to be a person that puts a lot of hard work in. It builds resilience. And so not every step around the road was rosy, but like you have a good sense of what you can accomplish if you work hard, if you're open to coaching and you listen well and try not to make the same mistake twice. Yes, definitely.
Jack Carr: I've been holding the flashlight for my dad at one point in time and you don't want to mess up that task. Like sometimes,
Wyatt Smith: You can do something really confidently, but then when your dad's looking over your shoulder, all of a sudden you just can't get it to work.
Wyatt Smith: The memory I have is like hammering nails and like I could do it really well until he was standing there and I could hit the nail for the heck of it. Yeah,
Jack Carr: and there's nothing like good old country parents totally giving you a hard time There's no punches held back in those kind of environments.
Wyatt Smith: Makes you tougher though. Makes you tougher I think about a lot now as a dad myself I've got two little boys and I want to help them grow to being good men I'm lucky to have had a good dad to learn from
Jack Carr: for sure. And so you did this whole journey and now you're, you said you're back in Texas.
Jack Carr: That's right. Dallas is out back in Dallas. You started up Upsmith. Talk about Upsmith a little bit. How long ago did you start it? And I know you, you mentioned that it's learning the trades through gamification. Can you explain exactly what that means?
Wyatt Smith: Our focus is on using software to help to recognize and reward people for behavior that we know is going to make a big difference inside skull trades businesses.
Wyatt Smith: We focus a lot on home service companies where. There's a connection between the types of service decisions that someone makes in the technician and the outcomes that happen around ticket size, close rate, ultimately customer success. And if you reward people on performing the work the right way, right time, every time, good things happen.
Wyatt Smith: We find that oftentimes it's because The technicians that we serve are operating in a kind of a decentralized way away from, the headquarters and truck, you don't always have a lot of coaching. And so software is pretty powerful and that it can hook into whatever system of record the company uses for monitoring and measuring what's going on.
Wyatt Smith: You can use that as a way of helping to really celebrate people when they do the
Jack Carr: right thing. Do you API into ServiceTight and then what you're doing is you're API into ServiceTight and you're pulling records out. And then what's the next step to actually gamify that process? Do you put that back on the.
Jack Carr: The business owner, or is it like another portal or something like that where texts can go into and see and try to hit goals and
Wyatt Smith: you got it, man. Exactly. We integrate really seamlessly in the background. We don't get in tight and we will send text messages to people that say awesome job, like you just helped this homeowner get to a really big decision.
Wyatt Smith: You offered three options for service because you offered three options for service. This marker here are 500 upsmith points that are now driving your total on a leaderboard. You can see how you're doing relative to other peers in your company or across other branches. You're moving up that board, shooting off a lot of good nature, razzing across the team on who's really crushing it.
Wyatt Smith: That creates a tool for coaching. So now a service manager can go in and say awesome work. You follow the protocol the right way at the right time for the last five times. Like I want to give you a high five and celebrate that. Or looks like you weren't able to get that done this time.
Wyatt Smith: Let's talk about what happens. Let's use that as an opportunity for improvement. What's really cool about it is it because you're Integrated with a system record like ServiceTitan, which is a data rich platform, you then can also link it to revenue outcomes. For the companies that we serve, it's really clear how it made a financial impact for the business and because it tends to lead to then higher performance for the individual or take home pay, greater wages.
Wyatt Smith: A more successful outcome for them to
Jack Carr: talk about this. So we had a Voka on the other day. We were dealing with how best practices that they're able to see in the background, how they're dictating the revenue generation from those best practices. Are there any best practices that you see since you guys have access to all this data that you are focusing on?
Jack Carr: Hey, we really need to keep gamifying this portion because this is driving revenue for business owners.
Wyatt Smith: I just alluded to one of them. That thing is a really powerful one that everybody has. Has in their control, which is how many options for service do you offer on that visit? And what's really cool about it is that you're rewarding the input.
Wyatt Smith: Did you offer a good, better, best option? Did that show up in the ticket? Every time you do that, you can increase the rate at which someone is performing that best practice. We see a 10 to 15 percent lift in average ticket. We see a eight to 10 percent lift and close rate across. Several thousand interactions helps to inform, gosh, if you could just make sure that happens that way each time, like better outcomes are going to happen relative to if you only offered one or your options were service for that,
Jack Carr: yeah, definitely.
Jack Carr: We saw that in our business, that, that key was a huge unlock for us in understanding that number of options drives revenue across the board, good, better, best, whatever you want to call it, just the number of options and then earning those options the right way through. Proper questioning and opening up the customer.
Jack Carr: Were there any that surprised you? Cause that one surprised me. It makes sense logically, but at the time it was a big unlock for us. Was, were there any that you saw that you just went, wow, this is weird. This is cool.
Wyatt Smith: So one that's really interesting is a lot of people experiment with stiffs and commissions.
Wyatt Smith: That's a very common tool for moving a specific skew or a specific product at a given time. But often less attention is put into the timing of how that gets delivered. And so there's one company we were serving who actual stuff would show up maybe four, sometimes six weeks later, whenever somebody in the controller's office like trued up all the data that was in the Excel file.
Wyatt Smith: And it was to the point where the team couldn't remember what they had done. And why they were getting the reward. And so you've just invested in a reward and you've completely wiped out any efficacy for it at all, because I can't even remember what it was for. And so the insight there was like the immediacy of the feedback really matters, and if you can shorten the time between behavior recognition.
Wyatt Smith: Even if you're not offering any incentive pay, just the act of acknowledging the right thing happened, that's how you change ultimately. Do you have a,
Jack Carr: like a, somebody who's a psychology person on your team that, that is messing with these things to try and figure out the gamification?
Jack Carr: Cause that makes sense logically, right? That the immediate stimuli of the reward, very close to the actual action that takes place would result in the action happening more versus six months later, even if you were to exaggerate, for example, purposes, if you were to get something. 5 spiff two years later, like you would just wouldn't care.
Jack Carr: Yeah, we
Wyatt Smith: think a lot about behavioral psychology. It's funny a lot of the principles are principles that I used when I was a teacher. If I, would give an assignment, an assessment to my students, and they were to perform the assessment, if I didn't grade it within 24 hours, I'd give it back to them.
Wyatt Smith: I might as well have not graded it at all, right? Because it is more time goes by. You don't exactly remember what you were thinking when you answered a certain question a certain way. Speed matters and the immediacy of any type of either correction or reinforcement really matters, which is why software is so powerful.
Wyatt Smith: Because you can automate that in a way that shows up in someone's pocket in the moment it happens and creates a better outcome as a result.
Jack Carr: And so with that, along that same vein, right? So it's rewarding the tech or letting the tech know that they missed an opportunity via text message. What is it doing for the business owners that provide?
Jack Carr: Do you provide like a report that comes weekly? Or is there a portal that somebody goes into and then can turn on and off what they want? What does that look like?
Wyatt Smith: Yeah, we think a lot about the user experience for the manager and the business owner, because that's how they have visibility of what's going on across their team.
Wyatt Smith: Again, like these businesses, for the most part, you're not able to be sitting beside on a ride a lot, your technician, every time they're in the field, getting a sense about what's happening in the field in real time matters. And then being able to see the aggregated view of, Hey, we were worded these points here, where's the attributable outcome.
Wyatt Smith: That was downstream of that reward. Do we increase technology leads? Do we increase the number of people signed up our maintenance plan? Do we increase the ultimate close rate, ticket size, key metrics that they're running the business on? We try to empower them in that way too. So they can make a business case about why investing in this product, I think so.
John Wilson: I never thought I would say this, but I actually started to like. Facebook again, so we started a Facebook group a couple weeks ago, and it's been growing really fast It's 50 to 60 members a week right now, which has just been awesome Engagement's been awesome. We're learning people are sharing really valuable stuff Honestly, it's just been a lot of fun To be able to engage so closely with people in my industry.
John Wilson: It's something that I miss missed a lot. So if you're interested in talking to other folks from home service primarily plumbing, HVAC, and electrical, check out our Facebook group. So it's plumbing, HVAC, and electrical business growth hosted by owned and operated and check the link below.
Jack Carr: What is the biggest what's the KPI that when you go out to, if you're going to meet with one of the, You know, a one garage door and you're going to say, Hey, like you need to get on this.
Jack Carr: Here's the KPI that absolutely will blow your mind. What is that KPI? Whether it be internal to the software or overall to a company. This is what somebody has done with your software.
Wyatt Smith: I'll just share a case study we have in thrash. We are working with a quick service. Change company in Texas, which six sexed their return in six weeks working with us over the last two months.
Wyatt Smith: And so for this group, they've put roughly 4, 000 of prizes and software fees, and then the investment that they've generated 30, 000 of net impact on that investment in the last two months. The reason for that though, isn't because of anything novel that we were proposing. These were all things that they were wanting to encourage in the past.
Wyatt Smith: It was at the speed of the communication, the transparency of the data. And the reliability of getting that to the technician right away changed the behavior. Before using us, this would have been done on a whiteboard, phone call, with a text message. Everyone wants it to work, but it's not happening seamlessly, and everybody's time constrained.
Wyatt Smith: And so being able to bring a partner like Asad, that helps to make that request more sensitive.
Jack Carr: Yeah. Do you find that there's any kind of reduced impact of your software because it's coming from kind of an auto generation, right? I'm trying to imagine receiving a text message saying, Hey, good job.
Jack Carr: You offered three, offers for example, and that coming from a software seems to be a little bit less personable than coming from a manager or the boss or the owner of the company.
Wyatt Smith: Yeah, no, it's a great insight. And also I'll A learning we have is that if you have something automated, where it doesn't change each time, you drought it out over time.
Wyatt Smith: You're going to tune it out rather. And so it becomes important to do things like screenshotting that message and having someone come over the top or recording a video and integrate that into the way that someone got celebrated. Have a hyperlink in that text messages that takes you to leaderboards.
Wyatt Smith: So you can see how you're performing relative to other people. And then that is kicking off a second conversation. Typically. Over a group chat or over some other internal message board that the company's using on teams or over, over WhatsApp, that's been pretty powerful too, because that's, what's actually driving the culture of the team, the means it's the emojis, it's the good nature, rousing that they're doing with each other.
Wyatt Smith: And almost in every case we've deployed this, like that happens organically. And that really is where a lot of the magic lends to.
Jack Carr: Yeah. We were talking about that today in our company is we meet regularly once, twice a week. To go over numbers and that good nature razzing is in the friendly competition inter companies is huge to really drive the want and the need and the culture of the company.
Jack Carr: I find it to be an amazing tool to motivate and to keep people going in the right direction.
Wyatt Smith: What stops you from doing things like this all the time?
Jack Carr: Yeah, that, that's what I'm contemplating at the moment. So we do utilize competitions quite often. We do use a lot utilize spiff structure especially if we're trying to move a specific product or trying to get the word out about something, drive leads, drive flips, drive, whatever we do a lot of competition comparison, inter company, interdepartment comparison to really drive that competition.
Jack Carr: I'm wondering. For myself, if we could take that a step further, because we find it to be extremely beneficial to us. Looking at something like this to potentially Say hey it's working for you now if you were to create a leaderboard where they could actively check that Regularly and have a point system for the different items because our point system is revenue generation, right?
Jack Carr: But that's not the only point system that we want. We want good reviews So if you get you know, a hundred points for a review or something like that's the point system That becomes a very fun game as well, from a holistic standpoint, don't get me wrong. Generating revenue is the point of a company that being said there's more to it than just that doing the right processes and getting the right scripts in and then following procedure correctly is also extremely important.
Wyatt Smith: A hundred percent. And then also five star reviews and the number of times that, people will follow your protocol the right way. And it's I reinforce that to you. I'm curious also about, there's all sorts of technologies. You guys are deploying. You're really going to end up in that respect.
Wyatt Smith: I'm sure that they're typically though. It's like a checklist. It doesn't make sense to deploy this technology right now. Is it going to be too much change at any given time? How do you guys think about that as it relates to like where you make your bats?
Jack Carr: Yeah, I think a lot of it. It initially is just, I didn't know that something existed out there like this.
Jack Carr: So that's, that's why I love this podcast in general is we get to bring on myriad of people doing things in the industry and it's really fun to meet all of you, but it's also super fun to see things that we can implement in our business that will really drive And that take very little lift.
Jack Carr: I can't imagine that this is a huge lift item to implement, right? Cause some of these items, to get, we bring people on that they want to transform your entire business via going to a different CRM. And it's just something that's not possible, or it takes a lot of lift to get there.
Jack Carr: But this sounds like it's a fairly easy implementation. Is that kind of correct? Or is there a decent onboarding process?
Wyatt Smith: Now our goal is you can turn this on in less than an hour. So really all we need is the roster. Here's the technicians, we need some sort of direction from you about here's an example of a condition that I want to run, or we have a set of templates too, you can choose from.
Wyatt Smith: But then once we're holding, the API key and we have the roster, we hit go and enroll people via text message. They click on logic link on that text and they're off and running. So I think the goal is just react to your contractors are really time constrained, right? It's not like they're sitting on their hands.
Wyatt Smith: They're. Solving a bunch of problems over the course of the day and for technology to work and really drive an impact for them. It has to work in the background. It has to fit the workflow that they. Are you using already? And so as a technology provider, our job is to listen really well so that it fits the workflow for our customer, and then it can show up for them in a way that's going to make their experience better.
Wyatt Smith: If you meaningfully can increase the value of someone's experience and you can do it in a way that doesn't require material behavioral change, that's where the sweet spot lives on creating an impact. That's what I team tries to accomplish each day.
Jack Carr: Yeah. That's really neat. And are you guys doing this?
Jack Carr: It sounds like the software is fairly not specific to a specific industry and you talked about oil change locations and things like that. Is there any industries you won't touch or is this, so we, we focus primarily on HVAC plumbing and electrical industries here on this podcast, but we do get fencing contractors.
Jack Carr: We, a lot of the material that we utilize on marketing and stuff is applicable to any kind of home service company, whether that be pest control, gutters, The gambit is your software the same where it can go just anywhere or is it home service specific?
Wyatt Smith: The place where we have the biggest impact is.
Wyatt Smith: A technician who has some type of revenue influence over the work that he or she does. There's lots of civil trades businesses where the technician is actually responsible for selling anything. They're there to perform a task. Commercial construction is a good example. Machining is a good example. So the metrics that matter most there are safety.
Wyatt Smith: throughput, cycle time, and less around revenue attribution to the thing the person did. Now we can use our software to help to make those people's lives better too. And when competitions that are about those metrics, but the business case for the business seller is so much tighter when you can show an increase in revenue tied to the performance and the behaviors of the person.
Wyatt Smith: But in the place. So that's where we focus our time.
Jack Carr: Yeah. The ultimate distinguisher right there is revenue generation. So no, I get it. That makes sense to me. Is there a next step that you guys are I obviously, you're getting on podcasts and you're, it wasn't something that I was completely aware about.
Jack Carr: I can't speak for John, obviously he was, we don't have the time, as you mentioned to go and. Really meet with these fun businesses that, that really can have an impact on us. Is there a next step for you or next step for Upwork in terms of, are you guys expanding into anything?
Jack Carr: What's the next step?
Wyatt Smith: No, it's a great, it's a great question. We want to keep serving people really well, right? So it's about sharing, oral learning, using that as a way to help make people's lives better as it relates to the business that they're running. And just keep doing that a bunch of times.
Wyatt Smith: Because if you serve people well, like that compounds and you can grow the business and have a bigger impact with time. Don't get me wrong, like we've got a big roadmap here about improving the way we can help coach and upskill people. So you can see folks in the contest, how they did it, how you can target ways to help people better and ultimately perform in a way that's going to increase their take home paying and revenue for their company.
Wyatt Smith: We have things we're doing that are around thinking through The next opportunity for the company. So here's a place where if you went into this queue or offered this product, exactly, it would really bid at that up and grow. So we're building that into our road map. These competitions can also happen for people in call centers.
Wyatt Smith: And dispatch and insult teams. So like thinking through what are the input behaviors that are going to have the biggest impact on revenue and those functions. And we're looking to expand our impact that way too. But honestly it's just listening to customers and being a really good partner as they're thinking about how technology can help to drive a productivity outcome.
Wyatt Smith: That's our mission.
Jack Carr: Yeah, I see a great use case here because John and I talk about it a lot. We talked about it in the last two episodes. Coaching is an extremely difficult portion of this business and this gives you the data to be able to make those good coaching choices and to help out the team to take home better revenue and to take home or to help the business grow.
Jack Carr: On the whole and coaching is one of those areas that's just very difficult because there's a data input function. And then on the back end, there's an actual coaching function of going through and changing that behavior. And this sounds like you get a little bit of both on that. That's really neat. I like this product.
Jack Carr: Tell us where people can find you, where people can find up Smith. I
Wyatt Smith: appreciate
Jack Carr: the invite.
Wyatt Smith: Yeah. We're at upstairs. com. Come check out what we're building. We have. Really active blog. We have a lot of resources there about how it works. They've used it before. Check out the untapped with us on podcast.
Wyatt Smith: Yeah, we'd love to have you guys on or separately. And we're sharing resources that can help contractors as they're growing their businesses there. We're super active on X But the company at Upsmith, but also my personal
Jack Carr: call it that it's Twitter. It's always Twitter to the end of my life.
Jack Carr: It's going to be Twitter. I'm going to be the old bald guy saying back in my day, we called
Wyatt Smith: it, it was a bird app. I used to call it Twitter, but look, I'm going to yell and Jan and if it's X now, I'm going to call it what they call it. I think Twitter is a really cool way to meet people that are doing important stuff.
Wyatt Smith: Like I, all the work you guys do, I think you guys put a lot of great content out. I think it helps to speak also for people that want to grow businesses and learn, like it's a great place to learn. And always looking to connect with more folks there and would love to hear from any of your listeners who had thoughts about how to do gamification more effectively.
Wyatt Smith: What was your Twitter
Jack Carr: handle just so people can find you?
Wyatt Smith: Yeah Wyatt. H, white underscore H underscore Smith and then add up. Svet is our company. Okay.
Jack Carr: They
Wyatt Smith: can find me there too.
Jack Carr: Awesome, man. Thanks for coming on. If you like what you heard today, minus John, feel free to leave us a five star review.
Jack Carr: I have to get, put my punches in when he's not here. Cause he's too much when he is. Sure. On the AB test.
Wyatt Smith: We show them the AB test. We'll see
Jack Carr: what the five
Wyatt Smith: star was.
Jack Carr: Exactly. Give some feedback. I'm going to go in and I'm just going to hire one of those fake follower accounts to just come and blast this episode so that it has 10 times listens.
Jack Carr: But if you like what you heard, feel free to give us a five star review. Find us on owned and operated. com next month. We have the workshop taking a look at the workshop. I highly recommend it. It's a lot of fun. You get to meet us. You can see John stuff. It's very valuable. Thanks for listening guys.
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