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John and Jack welcome Joe Crisara from Service MVP, a mainstay in the home services business. Joe shares his extensive experience spanning 47 years in the trades industry, detailing his journey from a service technician to a successful entrepreneur. He discusses how implementing call by call management and personalized customer service can drastically improve business outcomes.
Joe also highlights the importance of using technology like Hatch and Rilla to streamline workflows and enhance customer engagement. Is call by call management the path towards becoming your own Service MVP? Tune in and find out.
Turn communication into conversion with Hatch and its AI Agents, ready to handle follow-ups, reminders, email blasts, and more for your home service business. Save employee hours and book more leads with the power of Hatch.
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Episode Hosts: 🎤
John Wilson: @TheWilsonCompanies on Twitter
Jack Carr: @TheHVACJack on Twitter
Episode Guest:
Joe Crisara: @JoeCrisara on Twitter
Learn more about Service MVP
Owned and Operated Episode 143 Transcript
Joe Crisara: Everybody on the team has to be graduated in the system that we operate in.
Joe Crisara: That's the key thing, guys, right? The choice, I call it anticipating the needs of the client. Management really means what? Do something, inspect it to make sure it's right, and then give the next activity. And there's something about the price being higher. Humans are wired that if I don't understand the solution, I can hold the restaurant or the service provider more accountable.
John Wilson: We had a couple of major pain points. Earlier this year, and those pain points were how do we contact our unsold estimates more frequently? How do we book our membership appointments faster? How do we stay in contact with customers and let them know that we have promotions? And how do we run a speed to lead process for Angie's Leads?
John Wilson: When looking around for solutions, we saw a couple great softwares on the market, but our favorite one was Hatch. So when we started using Hatch, we had just switched over from another vendor, and Hatch's user interface It directly tied into Service Titan. It automated the workflow of five or six employees a day.
John Wilson: We're now in contact with hundreds of additional customers. We're selling a ton of our unsold estimates. And it's easier than ever to book our membership follow up appointments. So Hatch has been a really big win for us. In order to book a demo with Hatch, click the link below. Welcome back to Owned and Operated.
John Wilson: Today we've got Joe Cresera from Service MVP on with us today. Welcome to the show.
Joe Crisara: Thank you, John. I appreciate you being here, Jack. Thanks for inviting me here too. And definitely it's a high honor to be here. So thanks so much for letting me help home service professionals reach their potential.
Joe Crisara: I appreciate that.
John Wilson: Yeah, no, this will be a lot of fun. Like we had talked about. I've been hearing more and more about Service MVP over the past couple months, so I'm excited to have you on. I think this will be cool. Before we dive into, I've got a couple agenda items here today, but before we dive in, I would love a little bit of background on you, Joe, and then what Service MVP is all about.
Joe Crisara: Definitely I have been around the block for a few decades. If you want to say that I've been, I'm I've been 47 years in this business since I started out as a service technician back in 19 77 Going to go to trade school and getting a job in the trades. And my dad was a plumber.
Joe Crisara: So I've been in the business for generations. My grandfather was on a plumbing company too, but I got in the heating and air conditioning business. And I I had a I was just working as a technician. I would have been pretty happy. Then I felt like I had an entrepreneurial seizure in about 19 mid eighties.
Joe Crisara: And I started my own business, like I could do this. And I didn't realize that running a business is a whole nother trade beside heating, cooling and plumbing electrical. So I drove that business about in about seven years to about 450, 000 in debt, cause I, I made some bad, I didn't, I wasn't strong enough to know how to collect money or how to price my services, and things like that. I did, I was going to say, I did one of, one of the influencers or where people like, Michael Gerber, I read the E Myth and I read Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I was at a meeting where Nexstar or Contractors 2000, which now Nexstar got started in 1992 in Buffalo Grove, Illinois with that Brian and Gordon Schroll's place at ABC Plumbing in Chicago, then to Buffalo Grove, I was at a meeting where they had Frank Blau, George Brazil, Maurice Mayo.
Joe Crisara: It was like a, it was like the Mount Rushmore of, best practices. And I, that was like a fly. I'm like, and Frank, Blau personally insulted me and told me how much of an idiot I was for charging 70 an hour or whatever. And I was like, I still want to, I treasure that moment. And so I really was like, realized I, but I was bought in.
Joe Crisara: Cause I was suffering badly enough to realize I needed help. And, but I get people like you, John and you, Jack. Way more credit than me because you're doing those back best practices to get to your level and both of your levels without having to be that I don't know reason I was able to listen like I wouldn't have heard that information from them because I wouldn't have been there if I wasn't suffering because if I was just keeping my nose barely above water, I wouldn't have even bothered to go to a meeting like that.
Joe Crisara: But I was open to, I was open to anything. So fast forward, I was like force 450, 000 in debt in 1991 by 1994. It was December of 1994. I was debt free based on some of the principles. I had learned through all those different avenues and I now know the science of pricing of how to do premium mid range account, which next start does use that.
Joe Crisara: That a lot of the contractors who work at Nexstar learned it and said, Hey, we need to get away from this other thing we're doing and move to this stuff. And they took a version of what we do. And because it's a science, it's not like I own the science. I just discovered it and brought it to the marketplace because it saved my company.
Joe Crisara: And so the things that saved my company and turned it around and made it a 25 percent net profit after taxes when I sold the company to ABC, definitely it was something that. I treasure today and you're not, you can arm wrestle with me if you want to, but the things we teach, but they work every time.
Joe Crisara: And I'm not a competitor with next hour. Just get that clear or not a competitor with service, a certain path. Those are all fine organizations. And I, my, my desire is to make you successful enough so you can hire both of us. There is a need for what they do and the need for what we do. We're an enhancement to what we do.
Joe Crisara: It's like saying, just cause I have a frying pan doesn't mean I need a pot. Yeah. Whatever kind of thing, if you're in the kitchen, I think there's a, you're trying to find a way, like with the book, the, what should we do book for a very low cost to get that trust funnel where people can, get the information and use it and make money with it before they ever decide to give me any money other than maybe the book and even the book, we're doing a free book campaign.
Joe Crisara: If anybody wants that, we could definitely provide one for you. Just pay for the shipping. But definitely we're I call it open hand. Where we say, here's the information we want you to use the information so you can gain that trust that we provide. And then if you want to hire us for more, and we have over 33, 000 users who use the program now.
Joe Crisara: And so we graduate every month like we graduated from our service program. 232 people every month. We graduate between 200 and 300 people a month that are going through our courses and are being guided by our coaches. And we're the only service that actually does that. Not no other. No other best practice does it where you have live people playing videos and role playing with your people and graduating them every single week, every single month through every different level of the service experience.
Joe Crisara: So it's a unique business that I don't think anybody could really copy. And if you try and say, I don't know, Took it from somebody. Good luck, read the book. It'll tell you where it all came from. It's a, it was years of pain that the scars are very prominent. But truthfully, what I learned what you guys probably have too, is that the scars give us lessons in a foundation to build off and it makes us stronger because that.
Joe Crisara: The scar tissue is it doesn't bleed the next time. It just gets stronger and you get more resilient. Does that make sense there guys? So Jack and John,
Jack Carr: yeah, we always call it a muscle rather than scar tissue, but yeah same idea. It just gets bigger, but it's stronger. So you've graduated.
Jack Carr: Thousands of people through this class over the last few years. Can you give the listeners an example of something that they would learn that they would be taking away from these classes that will really help them out in their business? What are the, what's the silver bullet? What's a little bit of juice that, that they'll get.
Joe Crisara: That's a good point there. There's four basic parts of the program. One is to say you're, when you go, when you first go to a opportunity, whether it's on the phone or whether it's in the home number one, it's a people business. So number one, my first goal is to say, we need to make a friend with our client to give our client our unconditional friendship whether they accept That friendship or not, we can't control that, but we can't control it from our point of view that we can provide, open that hand to give them that friendship and whether they're, no matter what culture, religion or anything like that, it's a, this is an equal opportunity business.
Joe Crisara: And we want to make everybody comfortable and they're in their home. So we're here to help everybody. And I think. That you would have to have that. Like I always say, you're doing a good job. If you're at a person who's from India and they moved to like Indiana, you got to say like, how does a guy from India wind up in Indianapolis or whatever?
Joe Crisara: And so you have to be curious enough to ask questions, say, Hey you, are you guys are you from Indianapolis? No. Where are you from? Jodhpur, India. And if you're sitting there with the customer and he's on his iPad showing you where Jodhpur, India is at where he was born, you got a good chance, it was number one magic moments and diagnose the family.
Joe Crisara: The victories and challenges of the family and then diagnose the system. The victories and challenges of the system. What are the things that are working? What things are not working? And then you say, how can I match the system with the people? You got the mom, the dad, the kids, the dog, even the people, the grandparents and stuff like that.
Joe Crisara: And the other, Family members, then you got, whatever you're doing, it's the electrical system, the drain system, whatever it is you're doing, how can I make these systems match these people? And that's really what we bring those two together. So not only is it a technical part, but the technical part creates an emotional context of where people do that.
Joe Crisara: So number one, diagnose the people. Number two, diagnose the system. Number three, the science of pricing will show you that you create premium mid range and economy choices. If you give one price let's say my business truthfully that's how I got out of debt, 450, 000 by selling future service memberships.
Joe Crisara: I sell 12 year memberships, 12 year consumables on filters, pads. If you're like right now, you're all, everybody's standing right on top of a profit center. If you sell a media filters or. You sell endless hot water solutions or you sell electrical solution. Whatever it is. There's consumables that go with that.
Joe Crisara: Why are you making people buy it every year? Why don't we sell them 12 years right now and put it in the price and then finances so they can afford it. If you did that, you'd increase your revenue by 38 to 40 percent and you have a 80 percent gross profit on that. Consumables and service memberships at multiple years, not just the one year.
Joe Crisara: Why are we only doing one year? Why don't we do five years on repairs and 12 years, a range of 12 years up down to one year on the renovations we do.
John Wilson: That specific thing has been something we've been diving into deeper is like packaging. We were down visiting Baker brothers down in Dallas a couple of weeks ago.
John Wilson: Yeah. And
Joe Crisara: interesting that Baker brothers, they don't use us as a company, but we have probably 50 employees that use us individually. They bought that they invested because they're, the employees make money, more money because they have bonus system. The employees have passed our name around to each other and said, dude, here's what you need.
Joe Crisara: Yeah, they have a
John Wilson: life. Time program, which I think is interesting or I think packages in general are just interesting when you're just to get a little tactical here. When you're thinking about packages, like the lifetime is fascinating. The 10 years. Interesting. The five year, like, how are you thinking about value stacking those?
Joe Crisara: The easiest part about any service membership or warranty is it has to be super simple and they have to be different at every package bundle level. So one of the mistakes, one of the mistakes could be that. Everything's got a lifetime warranty, it no matter what you buy here, that's not going to create value because if I, if the option that costs 500 bucks has got a lifetime warranty and the one that costs 5, 000 got a lifetime warranty, what, why am I inspired to do the better one when the coverage is the same?
Joe Crisara: Everything's the same, right? So when it comes to the value stack of say a service membership, I think people overcomplicate it and make big decisions. way too much out of it. Simply, you don't even need a piece of paper or anything that represents that. It's there's three things you're going to get.
Joe Crisara: And the rule of creating a membership, what I've learned in the 47 years of doing this, is that it's got to be so simple that the dumbest guy in your company has got to be able to know it by heart. That's the key thing, because if the customer asked that dumbest guy in the company, Hey, is that service membership any good?
Joe Crisara: And he goes, I have no idea what you're talking about. And you're going to be in trouble. Like you, John, where you got a 20 million company, it's, you got to say, does everybody in the company know what to do? That thing clearly know the benefits because they will be asked when they're delivering parts out there to somebody or picking up the garbage or something like that they'll be asked by the customer, Hey, I just, since you're the guy who delivers stuff, I got that service membership.
Joe Crisara: Is that really any good? They're going to off the record, a conversation they have with the ST installers, right? And if they don't, if they don't have a positive response or understand completely, like here's the three benefits are really this. You get the front of the line pass, you go right to the front of the line, get the cut in front of all the other customers.
Joe Crisara: If you get this agreement number two, you get free diagnostic the rest of the year and number three, you get any on demand or scheduled update or maintenance on the system that we have, whatever system electrical plumbing, it could be either on demand for plumbing, or it could be scheduled for HVAC.
Joe Crisara: But that's included with it. And the reason I include only those three things. Cause those are three things you can't lie about a discount, a 15 percent discount. I don't even believe in that. Cause I believe it's a lie on face because what people do is they create the value rate price as the price they want, and then they raise the other price by 15 percent and then they call it a discount, which I don't really feel is ethical.
Joe Crisara: I feel like if you're a premium company and trying to represent the premium solution in your marketplace you don't offer discounts if you're doing it that way, you just offer better service. And that's what people purchase. They don't, nobody has it because people don't even believe that discounts real because they're going to, cause you get work in a place like, Wilson or whatever.
Joe Crisara: It's that's your discount. 18, 000 is my discount price. Holy shit. And then you're almost challenging people. To look for a lower price. There's our discounted rate at 18, 000. It normally costs 24, 000. It's Jesus, really? I bet I can find somebody for less than 24, 000 or, so you're almost like challenging the consumer by mentioning the word discount.
Joe Crisara: So some of the things we moved to, by the way, I used to firmly believe in that. I'm not. I'm not faulting anybody for it. Cause I did the same thing and I realized that I was doing things. So I learned over the years guys is how to get rid of the things that don't make a difference and only include the things that do make a difference.
Joe Crisara: So I call small, big, small things that make a big result. If you do the premium mid range economy options 15 percent will choose the premium. 74 percent will choose it. That's 89 percent of the people will upgrade to premium or mid range solutions. Okay. So if you have a faucet or if you have a igniter, if you have a break circuit breaker or whatever it is you're doing you offer a more premium choice with all the breakers in the panel, plus the main, or you do the whole ignition system, not just the igniter, or you do the hot water with the water purification, the wifi connect the shuttle, whatever you're doing swing the bat through the strike zone and give them the premium option.
Joe Crisara: And then the economy options, go to home Depot and buy one and I'll put it in for 1200 or whatever, or I can't warrant it. Why is three not five?
John Wilson: Why three options, not five or six or
Joe Crisara: seven, or There's three tiers, I want to get that correct. So there's three tiers of options. Premium, mid range, and economy are the three categories.
Joe Crisara: Make sense? Yeah. So everybody innately believes let's say you're going to go What's the most exotic place you guys have ever gone? You ever go to Europe or something like that? Anybody? Yeah, I either Thailand or would have been mine. Thailand's perfect. So you go to Thailand, right? And you're like, I have no idea what that menu says, but you do see the numbers, whatever that you see, one number is higher than the price is higher for this food than the menu for this food.
Joe Crisara: You're like, I don't know. I don't, I can't understand the wait. The waiter can barely speak English and I can't really read the menu, but you do know, you know what? Give me the best thing. I'm going to eat that. I heard this is the best Thai restaurant in Bangkok or whatever. I'm going to get the best thing on the menu.
Joe Crisara: And you say, I'm going to pay more because I know it's going to be more food. It's going to be at a better quality. And there's something about the price being higher. Humans are wired that if I don't understand the solution, I know if I pay more, I can hold the restaurant or the service provider more accountable.
Joe Crisara: Cause I paid more, right? If I paid the Palmer 21, 000 to do something, you better pick up after yourself because it's laid down 21, 000. If I pay him 200 bucks for something, it's yeah, shit. He just didn't have time for 200 bucks. What do I expect? It's that kind of a thing, right?
Joe Crisara: Cause you go on DoorDash, I think we see this, like you look at a menu and you go oh, I was looking for, I was looking for a rotisserie chicken and I'm like, Oh, there's a place that's got it for a 7. I'm like the whole chicken for 7. I'm like, shit, man. What's wrong with that chicken?
Joe Crisara: There's something, it can't be like, by the time they deliver the chicken here with the delivery field, it's going to be like the delivery would be way more than the chicken costs. I'm like, nah, I didn't feel comfortable ordering the 7. It didn't feel good. So when I ordered one for 16, I thought that was still too much.
Joe Crisara: Unbelievable good price, but I'm like they did have some companies that I was thinking about the one for 24, but I bought in the middle, I bought the 16 one but I felt like it had to be enough money to not have Salmonella in
Jack Carr: wine pricing all the time is the average consumer doesn't understand the intricacies in wine, like a sommelier would.
Jack Carr: And so they, there has been some great studies out there where they de labeled the same company. the same brand of bottle. They took the label off, they charged one at 150 and they charged one at 30 and almost across the board, everybody liked the 150 bottle more than the 30 bottle on a taste test.
Jack Carr: Very interesting. The consumer psychology behind pricing and price point. And so you dig pretty deeply into that in your book and how to. Become a premium company, or if you're not a premium company, how to at least moderate pricing to yes,
Joe Crisara: the book has that information in it. Actually, that, that study is in the book.
Joe Crisara: It goes over that. We have several different studies that were done on tiered pricing and the resources. So one of the things that we're different at service is that we don't act like we invented this stuff. We just took some of the things that we learned and I give the, I'm happy to give the resource to anybody.
Joe Crisara: What's the book? What should we do is a compilation of those resources. And you'll see all my resources cited like a Curt Mortensen's book called Maximum Influence or Jack Canfield, the Success Principles the Seven Habits. So all these different books. Things I've uncovered I'm more than happy to share the source of service.
Joe Crisara: I guess the best thing you could say about ServiceMAP is that we have consolidated the sources into One resource that you can find it all from so you don't have to keep it all in a separate file or whatever, you know
John Wilson: We've been we've been working on this packaging That's how we're calling it.
John Wilson: And so we just we haven't done a great job. Like obviously we've done. Okay. Cause we're like a, medium sized contractor, but we haven't done a great job. So on Monday,
Joe Crisara: let's go back. Yeah. It should be two premium, two mid range. Two economy prices. That would be six choices would be the perfect way.
Joe Crisara: Cause the reason is if you say I'm a premium buyer, now you got this one or that one, the question is which premium one do I want as opposed to, do I want premium or mid range that's a yes or no question which premium one do I want is a still shopping with inside your company. I'm not shopping outside the company for that.
Joe Crisara: It makes sense guys.
John Wilson: Yeah, it does. But yeah, so we just, we're working on packaging. We're starting with HVAC. Then we're going to go to a. Like electric and plumbing, but we started on Monday and it has been interesting because our average ticket and HVAC jumped 30 percent this week because we, it used to be that we only basically sold our economy package, which we thought was good prior.
John Wilson: And now we're, we have five layers, so it's like platinum, gold, silver, bronze economy, I think something like that. And Anyways, we've sold like three or four of the silvers, which is like dead in the center this week, which was a, yeah, 30, 40 percent jump over last week's average ticket.
Joe Crisara: And you would even go further if you personalize it, which is what we teach now, how do we enhance that?
Joe Crisara: We take it and say, let, now I show you offer the premium option like you do, but let's personalize the premium option based on what we learned about the family. So if I learned that, John Wilson owns a heating and a I'd say, John, you do so much work for your family and you do so much work for your company.
Joe Crisara: Let me do the work on your home and you take care of those things and I'll take care of this thing. I did that so you could, it's called let John relax solution. So you can relax when you get home. You don't need to work on the lighting or plumbing or whatever kind of thing. Let me do it. So in a way, what's the the customer code, you're going to hear people say what was it like when I had no power?
Joe Crisara: What was it like when I had no cooling? And it could be frustrating or stressful or I worried. Okay. Then it would be called the no worries for John. So we teach people how to take the words that, so we work at Rilla. Now we're, so this
John Wilson: is consultative. Someone's been describing to me recently, the three stages of selling.
John Wilson: And this would be the third stage. So like the first stage was we're going to push equipment. The second stage is logical. And that's Hey, is your second floor hot, cold? That's logical. That's not emotional. And the third stage is consultative.
Joe Crisara: Yeah. What's the cost? What's it like when it's hot in the, what's it like, what's it like?
Joe Crisara: Here's the question that you would, we get that, unlike the golden nugget right here, right? Hey, Joe what's it like when you can't sleep at night when it's like that and they say, what I'm a wreck the next day or I'm Yeah. I'm frustrated at work. I'm tired at work. And then it's going to call, I'm going to call that solution.
Joe Crisara: I'm going to call it the this is Jack's rest easy and get a good night's sleep solution. So can, so how does heating and cooling Relate to the sleep of people. It's greatly related to it. And like the word comfort is too general of a word. What is the price of poor comfort?
Joe Crisara: And you ask customers Joe, what's it like when your son can't stay in the bedroom because it's too hot on the, on those sunny days or whatever, they're going to give you the key and, but whatever they say to describe it, we work with Rilla, the the call monitoring AI call monitoring app, and we programmed all of our stuff in there.
Joe Crisara: So one of the things we programmed in there is how many times have you actually used the customer's first name? Service provider never even asked the customer what their name was. You're not, you can still do the, it'll still work. The premium, you'll probably get that 30 to 40 percent bump.
Joe Crisara: Understand this, John and Jack, you would get A 300 percent bump. If you did put the customer's name and the way they described the problem into the problems, and you also described the benefit they would get into the solutions on an emotional level, because as you guys all know innately that people purchase emotionally and they just justify it with the logic that Jack mentioned there, that's really important factor.
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.
John Wilson: Honestly, it's just been a lot of fun. to be able to engage so closely with people in my industry. It's something that I miss missed a lot. If you're interested in talking to other folks from home service primarily plumbing, HVAC, and electrical, check out our Facebook group. It's Plumbing, HVAC, and Electrical Business Growth, hosted by Owned and Operated, and check the link below.
John Wilson: Yeah, we just hired a we just brought on a sales executive who gave me almost the identical speech you just gave me. Which I would say one I'm excited that he's on the right track. That's great. That's good. Good eye. Excellent. Good for you. But two, I think a lot of his, a lot of his observation, cause he's from solar and it was a, so that was like the background.
John Wilson: And him looking at next star was a lot of, Hey, this is very logical based. And yeah, no one buys on logic. Everyone buys on emotion. Yeah. Yeah, that's really,
Joe Crisara: but the reason it still works, though, the wise, so even though that's true it still works, though, because the customer has that emotion. They bring that emotional component to it, regardless of whether the guy does or not the guy.
Joe Crisara: Or technician, I shouldn't say a man, a guy, it could be a woman too. It could be anything. So any person who's a technician or a salesperson who has who has recognized the emotional description of the event that's happening now in the words of the customer, cause nothing sells better than my own words.
Joe Crisara: Like you're listening to me. Cause that proves that I'm listening to you. By putting the exact words that you just told me into my, when I'm presenting problems, I would say something like, Jack, this is right now we have a fracture in this air movement system, which is the fan motor you got here.
Joe Crisara: But what really bothers me is when you mentioned about your daughter, Amy, having asthma, that just broke my heart to hear that she had to go stay at a hotel and she couldn't stay at your home last night. That just broke my heart. So that's why I call this, let's bring Amy home. Air movement solution to where we can get Amy to stay here and have her be comfortable.
Joe Crisara: That's why I gave it a five year warranty to make sure now that we do this now, but we also take care of the system and watch it every year. Cause the system is, 20 years old. I want to make sure we keep an eye on it. And just so you know, Jack, we also have a way to replace the system. If you didn't want to fix it, we have that ready to go as well.
Joe Crisara: I call it anticipating the needs of the client and having those options, bundles, not just making it one time, John and Jack, but to have it readily available. Cause it's like this. If I said, invite you to my house here and apply a Vista in Los Angeles. And I said, Hey, you guys want a sandwich?
Joe Crisara: You come over to my house and you say, yeah, Joe, do you have a sandwich? I was like, no, we don't have any sandwiches. We have to go buy some. It wouldn't be very. Nice of me to offer you something to eat or drink and I don't have it. But if I have, but if you came to my house and I said, Hey, I made sandwiches.
Joe Crisara: I know you were coming. Would you like one? It almost be rude to not, even if you weren't hungry, you'd have to try one. Cause you'd be like, man, Joe made all these sandwiches. We have to at least try it. I'll have one, you know what I'm saying there? Cause so same with you. If you thought about lead turnovers and how do you get people to go with you?
Joe Crisara: Can be like, I don't recommend. People buy equipment, but I do let them know that the equipment is available to replace. And I would tell them to this that it's actually less money to replace the equipment than it would be to fix the system. It's the expensive way is to fix it and then replace it next year when the prices have increased and you.
Joe Crisara: Pay twice. Now you paid to fix it and replace it and you can always just replace it. And then you'd have a lower price right now because you'd have the lowest price. You'd also have a monthly payment that we would give you the money and give you the job as well. So it's up to you. We make more money if we fix it and then replace it next year.
Joe Crisara: Or if you want to save money, you would just replace it. Now it's up to you. So the question is right there. What should we do? I don't force people to make that decision but you create enough emotional component like that. And you give people a choice between this way or that way.
Joe Crisara: That's the key thing, guys, right? The choice giving people choices is American taking away choices is communist or socialist. It's we've decided that was nice, that was nice, because it's like we've decided what you need. Only a only communists would do would say the government has the side of the cheese you will eat.
Joe Crisara: It's dude, that really it's no. In America, we have tons of cheeses, some that cost you like that. Oh my God. Where's that? That's from Spain. Oh shit. That costs that much just for that small piece is like 15. But it's really good. And then we got the stuff that's not even cheese.
Joe Crisara: It's Kraft singles or whatever. And that's you could buy a whole pound for three dollars or whatever, so bottom line is that in America, we're built on giving choices and the freedom to choose is the biggest freedom we all have regardless of any, whether it's politics or whether it's in home services or anything we do.
Joe Crisara: But if we, when we lose our choices, then we rampage through the streets of this country. We start feeling our choices are restricted from us. That's when it causes called cognitive dissonance to where people it doesn't create peace and harmony in our society. It creates negativity because you're removing choices.
Joe Crisara: That's what we don't like. Makes sense.
John Wilson: We, before we started talking. We I briefly brought up, we just went over packages and I felt like that was really interesting. We, you also brought up the history of service management. I, this seems like there's currently a transition but I'd love to, I'd love to walk through what you're currently seeing and then what we've seen in the past.
Joe Crisara: I first started out in this business. They used to do a thing where they just gave all the service techs, here's all your calls and they even filled out the work order and gave you like five or six things. And here they go, just arrange them. They put them in the right order and said, go to this call, second call, third call, fourth call.
Joe Crisara: And they just gave you the calls. We didn't even collect money or anything. We just built everybody. We just did the work, put the hours down there. And then our. But our boss had a billing department that built everybody. That was the old days. No, it was self managed. Then when next, that's how
John Wilson: we did it a decade ago, by the way,
Joe Crisara: when I first started
John Wilson: in the trades, that's how we did it.
John Wilson: Yeah. So I got my four work orders and I would go and. We'd bill after hours. It was fine.
Joe Crisara: It's who could imagine that? That's if I tell young people today, that's how it was like, Oh, no way. They, how could you stay in business? I'm like, that's true. That you can't, you couldn't and so then then there came a thing where you started doing one call at a time next star and I remember Maurice Mayo and George Brazil first came up with that to be able to reschedule stuff, to make sure that technician only had to focus on one thing, not all those things, but it was better.
Joe Crisara: And it was good for the company because they could manage the schedule without the technician knowing, or taking one call from a guy and putting it to another guy and things like that. Nobody would be offended because they didn't know that the office was doing it. And then there was a thing where, you know, Nexstar and the best practice groups started saying, Hey, let's have, just coach the technicians the next day to re get them back on track.
Joe Crisara: So the, before the next day we can get back on track. So only off track for one day. And then you And we learned at our company when I was coming back and that far in debt that we had, we couldn't afford that. We told guys, listen, we know what success went. One of our clients, you'll see the story of how my client taught me about the premium mid range of study of the pricing.
Joe Crisara: And I told our people, listen, we are selling three to five times more when we do this, and that's the only way we're going to get out of debt is by doing it. So there's no getting out of it. We made people call at the end of every call and say give us the premium mid range economy. Now, with some of the technicians, we also did a thing where we said, Hey, before you present to the client, let us know what you're presenting.
Joe Crisara: And then we start saying, you know what, why don't we just do that with everybody? It moved to a company here in Los Angeles. One of the, one of the most powerful electricians in Los Angeles, who was an XR member too. They they start doing it with their electrician. They had seven electricians. That did about 1.
Joe Crisara: 5 million one year. And then they start doing what we did back in the nineties. I start doing it. This was 2010. I think it was and then they started doing it before they present the price. Hey, show me your option sheet. Cause we had digital photography. We could get the thing sent to us on a text.
Joe Crisara: Let's look at it and we'll have you change it around and then present it that way of doing it. Blew that company up to they're like a 380 million company now in about 10 years. So they went far. So companies like horizon service, same thing. They, Dave Geiger from horizon said, inspect what you expect.
Joe Crisara: He said, this is what they mean. So call by call management is something that has guys like ghetto have had their version of it. And everybody puts their twist on it. And I don't think anybody, I don't think it's really invented management really means what do something. Inspect it to make sure it's right and then give the next activity.
Joe Crisara: So if you think, just slow it down and everybody slow roll this a little bit and say do something, diagnose the system and make the prices show, inspect it. Let me see what it is. You're gonna do a water heater? Where's the expansion tank? Oh, shit. Yeah, put that in there. Hey, where's the Wi Fi connected shutoff valve?
Joe Crisara: Ah, put that in the top option. Where's the water purification? Ah, okay. Yeah, so get that in there. A manager is, Looking at quality control, helping the technician think this through. So now that every time we present something to a client, it's perfect. Like we're not just leaving it to the discretion of the guys in the field.
Joe Crisara: That's the farthest management. So that before the call is presented to the client, it is not only bundled and done the right way. So whatever problems we're finding in the diagnosis, there's got to be solutions that go with those problems. And yeah. All of it's got to be, all of it's got to be customized and relevant to Jack and John and their family.
Joe Crisara: So it's beneficial to the family. Because if I throw 20, 000 at you for a water heater, and it's not customized and relevant, that could be dangerous Oh my God, they called Wilson and they want 20, 000 for a water heater. No, they didn't. They wanted 20, 000 for a package to remod re renovate your whole hot water system, faucets and everything like that.
Joe Crisara: It wasn't just a hot water system. It was everything Wi Fi protection and all. If you customize and make it relevant, that's the element that removes the doubt that this, the pure motive, we call it pure motive means that you have to display not only these bundles, but you have to display the service providers and the company's motivation.
Joe Crisara: For doing these bundles, the bundles are good by themself and they will make a bump. But if you can get your people to express the motivation as to why I did this bundle for you or these bundles for you now, it's instead of having people say, that's a rip off, Jack, get out of my house. Instead, they're going to say, Jack, can I tell you something?
Joe Crisara: I've never saw anybody put things together like this. You're the only one who did this for me. Unfortunately, I can't afford it. But thank you. I'm going to have to ask you to leave right now, but it's okay. I can't afford it. Like they're not going to buy, they may not buy still, but when they give you a goodbye, it's going to be with a hug, they're not going to give you a goodbye with a kick in the ass and get out of my house.
Joe Crisara: Does that make sense here? So even the worst case scenario is two adults who know they care about each other. There's just a financial impediment that we can't overcome sometimes. But. I, there's about 95 percent of them where the financial impediment can be overcome most of the time. Makes sense. So if I like the chances that we provide here, I'd say roughly, you can expect the conversion rate for service in the mid 80s to 90 percent conversion on demand calls and on estimates like furnaces and ACs, it'd be about a, 72 to 69 percent conversion around those calls.
Joe Crisara: I would say from raw leads coming in like that on lead turnovers, it'd be like 94%. I don't know if you've got a lead turnover. Somebody did. It's not going to be just have a comfort advisor call. It's going to be like, Hey, we're going to make those prices. Before we tell people about the problem here. And so being connected to a sales person so that price has already been made before we go to the customer and talk about the problem with the service problem, makes sense.
Joe Crisara: So a lot of things got to be done the right way. I think a lot of people who think they say they do call by call do about 5 percent for what I see. We're actually doing right now. We have Ted Fox from Nexstar who's he's on the board of Nexstar actually. So he's here at. It is guys doing that call by call class right now with our team.
Joe Crisara: We have a big 16 foot by nine foot TV screen on the wall and there got the Rilla up there. They got service tightened up there. They got the social media and the Zillow on the one screen. So we have a, this thing's like a, it's like a, they call it the bridge in Star Trek where they got the control center, right?
Joe Crisara: So you're basically orchestrating, The opportunities. And the cool part is all the service technicians feel cared for, respected and supported because before they had to do all that shit on their own. Does that make sense guys? Yeah. And now it's got wouldn't we all like to say, Hey, can I get a second opinion from somebody before I send this to somebody or whatever?
Joe Crisara: I'm going to, even when you guys are going to talk to an employee and you're going to discipline them in some way, Wouldn't you like to talk to another manager to make sure I'm going to say the right thing you guys at your level, John and Jack, you're probably going to do that. You probably are like, yeah, I'm just about to talk to John about being late.
Joe Crisara: Here's what I'm going to say. Do you think that's the right approach? And it's and what, maybe one of your HR people or somebody say maybe Jackie should do it this way. And we think we're all better because we look at the resources we have. You got a 20 million company, John. Yeah. Yeah.
Joe Crisara: Yeah. You have a lot of resources that you lean on and you probably say to yourself, how can I have somebody else maybe deliver this instead of me? Why am I having to deal with this? Cause I, I think I'm going to let the person who's more compassionate than I would be who's going to deliver that message better.
Joe Crisara: I think if we all look that way, I think that's what call by call does is it puts a team, so we're all working on the same page to communicate value, the stack value for our clients. That's really, it's about Joe, let me
Jack Carr: ask you something real quick at what level, so right, there's a a large gap, a canyon between 5 million and 20 million or 25 million in John's case.
Jack Carr: And so for implementation of a call by call manager, right? When you're on the smaller side, there's this question of, Oh, who do I hire next? Is it HR? Is it marketing? At what point do you feel like that call by call manager is applicable and, or we should start really thinking about that hiring?
Joe Crisara: I think from day one, if you're a startup company, you have one, you have yourself as an owner and you say, I'm going to hire an employer technician to work for me because I want, I'm going to sell big jobs. Let's say you're a one man company and you got, I'm going to hire installer cause I'm selling a lot of installs now.
Joe Crisara: Okay. You got that. Now you've got a service tech. I can start selling these big jobs. Focus on that. And then you got that going. I would say right there is where call by call should start. It should start with a prototype. If you got one person on your team, what do you got? Otherwise, what are you going to do?
Joe Crisara: Have some dude come into your two man company and screw up your customers that you just paid the two man company. Dearly, you know how hard it is for a small company to get a lead. You're going to try, you're going to throw this at this dude that came from another company and hope he's going to handle the customer.
Joe Crisara: Okay. And just take it, roll the dice guys. You can't do that. So listen, there's going to come a day at Wilson and at your company, Jack, what's the name of your company? Rapid. Rapid
Jack Carr: response.
Joe Crisara: That's right. So it's got to come a time where call by call management is just management. It's just the way we do it.
Joe Crisara: Because really, what is the manager doing? Otherwise he's sitting around looking at the results at the end of the call or the next day getting the numbers. And then somebody's better do something about that. We better have some training or whatever. It's like it's it's too late. It's like you're trying to correct the dog after he pooped on the carpet.
Joe Crisara: So you need to do a thing where you take the dog for a walk. Mhm. And so if I had my technician, a one man shop, I'd say, John, you're going to call me and you're going to text me the option sheet or the prices before you show the customer to make sure I'm comfortable with your diagnosis. I'm comfortable with you.
Joe Crisara: So what would it take for a one man company to say, text me your diagnosis. Here's a diagnostic form. I have just diagnosed. Give me the. Give me the basic gas pressure, whatever we're asking for. Let me see what you got there. Give me the duck sizing, whatever it is you're asking for. Give me that before you start making your prices.
Joe Crisara: Okay. So I might ask you that. Hey, go look at this and this. And then I said, okay, let's make the prices now based on what I trained you. Now you make the prices. If that's correct. Okay. Now you can go ahead and talk to the customer after you do that. So if I had one person, so if your company, Jack, I would say you've got to be somebody.
Joe Crisara: Everybody probably does go. So organically it's probably already happening, right? You probably got, you're probably doing call by call. Cause somebody's calling another guy going, Hey, Ronnie, I got this call. And what do you think about this thing? And then he's doing it now. You see what I'm saying there?
Joe Crisara: But you're letting it happen without. Your oversight and your control. It's really irresponsible not to have the company design this system to assist your team systematically. Like it has to happen. Not just every now and then when you want it, not by accident. If something good happens on accident, like Ronnie talking to Jerry and they sold 30, 000 job, it's all Jerry.
Joe Crisara: He told me what to do. Yeah, great. It would be nice if Jerry was telling everybody what to do on that call. What, why is Jerry only getting the one guy? Cause one guy had enough vulnerability where he called Jerry and Jerry's Oh, here's what you do kid. And then he helps them. But Jerry should be maybe not turning wrenches.
Joe Crisara: Maybe Jerry should be using his brain to having other people turn the wrench and his knowledge and skill. You probably already have somebody on your team who could be a great call by call leader. You just only, but you got him sitting there turning a wrench on some call. He might sell a lot of job, a lot of money on those jobs.
Joe Crisara: He does. Wouldn't it be cool if his effect was on every job though? And how rapid the Ted Fox, he 10 Xed his sales with the one, yeah, again, and Michael over here last month. So every month he's sending a new guy to this, to call by call management. And. Last month, he 10X'd the group. He had a five person group with one guy, Michael, doing it.
Joe Crisara: That group 10X'd their results over what they did because it was like, they just blew it up at the best. How many call
John Wilson: by calls do they have?
Joe Crisara: Right now, they're going to have three in a company of 20 employees, I think it's going to be. So you have three. They're developing two. The second guy is now a third guy.
Joe Crisara: They anticipate probably five people by the end of the year. That will be about five, five person groups, maybe.
John Wilson: Like you said, call by call can mean different things to different people. So for us, we run pretty much exactly how you describe it. Where we stop is we don't do over the phone closing, like Gettle, where they hand it over to an over the phone close.
John Wilson: But our call by calls do pretty much exactly What you just described where we have struck. I would say, I don't know about struggled, but more as we're figuring out where to take it next, because we just, we launched it a year and a half ago and we had zero, we also had no service managers. Now we have four call buys and trade specialty has been, it shouldn't be a gap in my mind, like this is a process. But for some reason that seems to be a gap and then like quantity. Like number per heads, that's been a gap. And then who do you put in those places? Do you find good, Verizon store sales managers or,
Joe Crisara: here's what it is. It's even the most complex technical problem can be broken down to something very simple.
Joe Crisara: But I always create. The top 20 troublesome areas for a drain system or the top 20 troublesome areas for an air conditioning system, like biological growth in the drain pipe shows you have biological growth in the coil. So in about a, in about 2 weeks, I can take somebody from not just knowing a little bit about who's intelligent who's Moves fast.
Joe Crisara: If I give me a guy who sold cell phones or something like that, I could definitely teach him how to get the, find the top 20 troublesome areas in about two weeks where he can intelligently say, Hey, did you look at that evaporator call to make sure there's no biological growth on it? Show me the picture of the blower wheel to make sure there's no dust on it.
Joe Crisara: So I repeat that process like for two weeks with that person by end of three days, they're going, I think I got it. And I'm like, okay we're going to stay with you anyway. And what's the duck size? What's the, show me the fiberglass and the duck work. Show me, let me look at the register to see if there's any fiberglass on the right, because that's fiberglass coming inside the duck system from unsealed duck work, that's probably the number one opportunity in the HVAC industry.
Joe Crisara: People don't realize you blow out a condensate drain. Why is the drain clogged with pure water from condensate going through a drain? It's not. There's bypassing the filter. Contaminants are getting in and face loading on that coil. It turns into a slime that's biological growth in the drain pan.
Joe Crisara: And that drain pan and the air we're breathing is full of biological growth. So that's the problem. The problem isn't a drain clogged. The problem is that so I can teach somebody here in our program about two weeks, about the top 20 things you're going to run into in each one of those things, even garage doors, we have top 20 things there.
Joe Crisara: So if you can identify, simplify. Here's 20 things and building top 20 things for building performance. I can tell you that if you that if you have can lights that are unsealed to the attic, that's going to be the troublesome area we have. There are 20 of them. So if you can say, here's the top 20 troublesome areas here's the symptoms we're going to see.
Joe Crisara: But the main problem is this underlying it. So you got symptom on a top 20 problem on a top 20. It's your job as owners of this company that you guys both run to make it And it's simple and easy for your people. Makes sense, guys. Sometimes the technical training I learned is it goes too deep and it makes people into a scientist.
Joe Crisara: So we're not trying to do that. We're just trying to get some dude who can understand your people are breathing fiberglass or that the electrical system is not grounded or whatever kind of a thing makes sense
John Wilson: For multi trade companies like maybe even this guy that you've got there right now.
John Wilson: Is he multi trade? He is. Yeah. Getting plumbing, hydronics,
Joe Crisara: electrical. Yeah.
John Wilson: Okay. So are the called by calls handling like individual trades? Or are they like, we'll handle whoever's up next and it's like
Joe Crisara: a queue I think it is more effective. No, it's not a queue, it's a group of people that have been selected, like number one, everybody on the team has to be graduat.
Joe Crisara: In the system that we operate in. So the technician can't, I can't be teaching people from scratch on my team. So you only allowed on my team, if you've graduated through our technical training and our communication training, and you know how to do the pricing. So if we trained you how to, that's what service MVP does.
Joe Crisara: We graduate people on the pricing, on the communication, the technical part of it. It's all part of what we do in a three week course. And we graduate people on the fourth week when you graduate 250 people almost last month, I said, so we do that for contractors. Cause if you had to do it. it like you could do it like once or twice, but we're doing it every single month.
Joe Crisara: We have coaches that are 18 coaches here who are doing this and they're experts at it. And you might have a trainer at your place, but if it told the trainer, every new employee comes here, you could teach them the same thing every month for the next rest of your life. Yeah. He probably quit in about 14 months.
Joe Crisara: You know what I'm saying? He'd be like, no way I get it. I'm sick of hearing about it, but we have people who love doing that because that's all they do. So bottom line, you have to graduate from the main part of the thing. You have to get educated first. Then we do a draft. The call by call leader says, I'm going to take these people who seem like they're the most compliant and who are most enthusiastic to be on my team.
Joe Crisara: And I would start with maybe two and I would build to as many as five or seven. With AI, you could go as high as 10 or 12 if you're using RILA as an assistant to get the information for you. So it scales bigger with the AI components. I'm not going to lie about that. So if you, so we know we show we actually work for RILA to show people how to do this.
Joe Crisara: We've become a service provider for them. I'm RILA spokesman at Pantheon. I'm going to be the main spokesman on stage for RILA to show people how to use the solution for it. The bottom line is that you have to graduate the program and then you're in our group. Now you can always get out. We're always might tell you, you can't be in the group if you don't do what you're trained to do.
Joe Crisara: So this is not just like you're in the group and that's it. It's not a call, not like a rotation. It's I have drafted five people on my team and this is my team. You're the leader's responsible for everything that goes on with that team. Something like that. If you're not, you can't be there.
Joe Crisara: You have to have somebody to replace you. Maybe somebody on your team could replace you, bring him in and he replaces you if you're absent that day. So that's what it looks like. With that being said if the company, if you have 25 person company, I'd say you should have five, five person team, five, five person teams with one leader for each team.
Joe Crisara: And if you want to have 50 person, you might have as much with AI, you could have as many as five, 10 man teams or whatever, 10 person teams like that. But yeah. The company, what happens is that the employees feel supported much more than they ever had before, because right now, guys, if you join a 25 million company, like Jack is very fortunate.
Joe Crisara: He's only 5 million right now because he has 5 million problems. John has 25 million problems, and that's different, right? So truthfully, it's much easier to control the 5 million company. But to keep that control at 25 million, the only way to do it is actually call by call management. Cause what one service manager is going to manage a hundred people.
Joe Crisara: There's no way you could even, you can remember their names, even remember how you're supposed to how you're supposed to correct a hundred people. So really truthfully, it's the only way of doing it with you're going to grow and scale to John's level. John also probably lives in a market where he has enough excellence that people just choose the company, but to keep choosing the company, John, that's the thing.
Joe Crisara: How do you sustain this so that the 25 million turns into 35 million and they just keep dominating the market. We have a lot of examples, even in Nextar Aaron Gainer from Eco Plumbers uses our services and it's like a who's who of Nextar contractors that use us. And we're, I said, I recommend Nextar.
Joe Crisara: I'm not. I have no adversarial position with them. I feel that next to our contractors, the easiest one to work with, because they know that they need to get trained. And they think they sit, I think they feel the same way about us too. If they go through both of our training, they feel it's easier for them too.
Joe Crisara: So they know they can deal with a contractor that understands that graduating the training is something you need to do. Make sense.
John Wilson: Yeah.
Joe Crisara: Sorry about this. It was good response. I liked it. Yeah. We've been
John Wilson: We've been doing call by call now for a year and a half. And it has been insane.
John Wilson: Like average ticket tripled. Now we haven't gone through your program. We basically, we got invited to Gettle. We unpacked their system. We rebuilt it. And average ticket tripled. So it's been good. The next thing we're trying to figure out is the over the phone close, because we think that is interesting and allows like distribution through multi location.
John Wilson: So that's what we're trying to, that's exactly what
Joe Crisara: they're learning here. So the technology aspect of how to present stuff via zoom, because zoom is the only neutral platform. Don't use Google Hangouts or Microsoft Teams. Teams because they have to have the Google or the Gmail to be able to receive that.
Joe Crisara: So basically zoom is the best neutral platform that anybody could get a link and I could present stuff here at service MVP, we launch meetings inside service MVP. You don't have to have zoom to be able to look at it. It goes on your browser and it brings it up. So bottom line is that we teach people how to not just present the information, but how to hide the, make sure the price security is important.
Joe Crisara: A lot of little details in there, but. I think nothing else. If you had our class class is 7, 500 to send one performance group a leader plus five people to it. You would at least evaluate whether or not you're using all the best practices for pre call mid call. And post call because it's not just not just the middle of the call.
Joe Crisara: It's Hey, what are we doing before the call to get prepped? What are we doing during the call? And then how are we going to manage the project to make sure your job got done the right way? Give me that. Give me that too. I can't just I can't just sell stuff. We got to sell it and get the job done. And that, cause that doesn't sustain it. You can't sustain by selling more without getting the job done with the same excellence you promised. It makes sense. It's all going to be done that way. So I think if people, I welcome people to come to it. We run it every single month. If you go to Service MVP and look at our events is every single month we do it.
Joe Crisara: And I personally teach that with Nick Engelhardt, who's he used to work at all city services here in Los Angeles, he taught 150 technicians how to do our system. And he's highly qualified as a plumber to show your people or any trade actually, cause I do HVAC and electrical too, but I would say, keep it individual.
Joe Crisara: Don't move it. Don't move the departments together on that. Cause you want to make sure you got somebody who is repeat, repeatedly looking at that same diagnostic. And, it's one of the secret things though, is the diagnostic and the observations expressed properly. Cause those problems aren't put out there, right?
Joe Crisara: The solutions won't be right. I'll tell you that. That's the biggest thing.
John Wilson: Makes sense. Thank you. This is good, Joe. I hope you
Joe Crisara: enjoyed it.
John Wilson: Yeah. I'm getting ready to dive into the book. I'm sure I'll have more questions, so we'll check it out. And yeah the call by call has been an interesting one.
John Wilson: We, like I said, we've been on it for about a year and a half, but there's not, honestly, I wish I had known about you guys a year and a half ago because we spent the last year and a half rebuilding it off of how we think it should work, which I actually think is close, but. Sure would have reduced our time from a year and a half,
Joe Crisara: wouldn't have taken that long.
Joe Crisara: They should have had validation and best practices in place. Cause we led the way on that. And and there was an element of what I was doing since the nineties, but we just didn't have the technology. We had to use a bag, we had a bag phone. We thought the flip phone was modern thing back in the day, but so we had, we just did it by the tone of the technician telling us this stuff, but definitely it's an honor to be here guys.
Joe Crisara: And definitely, if anybody wants to look into it, I definitely would say definitely welcome to get the book. If you want to get the book if you want to do that, it's that's the easiest and least expensive way to look into what we do. And then we also have service MVP. We have free courses on service.
Joe Crisara: And if you want to go in there and just take a free course and poke around there, that's service MVP. com. And if you want to email me or just text me or email me, you can go to service, a text function there, or you can email me at Joe at service MVP. com and ask me any requests or any kind of you want to have a talk with me, or we do a thing where we do a tour and a test drive of our services.
Joe Crisara: I'd definitely be happy to take anybody for that.
Jack Carr: Awesome. Joe, really
Joe Crisara: appreciate it for
John Wilson: Yeah. I appreciate you taking the time with us today.
John Wilson: If you like what you heard today, make sure you check out ownedandoperated. com for more information.
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