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How do you boost your business with AI?
In this episode, we chat with Sebastian from Rilla about how AI is shaking up the home improvement industry. Rilla's virtual ride-along software helps sales and service teams get better by recording and analyzing conversations using AI.
Sebastian shares tips on how to best use Rilla in your business, including success stories and practical advice for getting quick returns. Find out why now is an exciting time to be in the trades with AI changing everything from customer chats to managing projects.
0:00 Introduction
1:26 Meet Sebastian from Rilla
4:26 From Stand-Up Comedy to Tech Entrepreneur
8:20 The Start of Rilla
14:58 Coaching and Training with Rilla
24:57 Challenges
25:49 The Power of Laughter in Sales
26:21 Onboarding and Results
35:43 The Exciting Future of Trades and AI
46:50 Conclusion
Special Thanks To FieldPulse
FieldPulse is a really awesome Field Service Management (FSM) platform, that helps you save hours every week and keep operations running smoothly. With features like scheduling, dispatching, invoicing, and reporting, it takes the headache out of managing the day-to-day.
Businesses using FieldPulse see an average of 78% annual growth and are saving 5-10 hours a week on administrative tasks—HUGE!
If you're looking to streamline your ops, stay ahead of the competition, and focus on what really matters (growth) FieldPulse is a game-changer.
👉 Book a Demo with FieldPulse to get 15% off the annual plan when you mention Owned and Operated.
Episode Hosts:
🎤John Wilson:@WilsonCompanies on X
Jack Carr:@TheHVACJack on X
Episode Guest:Sebastian Jimenez: On LinkedIn
Owned and Operated Episode #159 Transcript
Sebastian Jimenez: Home Improvement Contractors are the early adopters of AI technology. Now we've become one of the fastest growing startups right now and ever.
This is a really exciting time to be in the trades. If you're doing physical ride alongs, that's what RILA is going to provide significant ROI.
John Wilson: Recently, I checked out FieldPulse as a field management software for our restoration business. I was pretty impressed. The big wins that we saw. Was it's got two way sync with QuickBooks online and desktop. It's got some really good dashboards and reporting It's got custom workflows and this is probably one of their most unique features It does have crm then it has a lot of the other things that you'd expect out of field service management software financing and payments.
Customer booking portals project management tools price book work order management estimates and invoices where they really shine is the scheduling, dispatch, custom workflows, and the dashboards and reporting. It automated and streamlined our operation, and it gave us easy tools for scheduling and dispatching our team.
And we loved the workflows feature. Make sure you mention Owned and Operated for a special offer, 15 percent off the annual plan.
Jack Carr: Welcome back to Owned and Operated. Today, we have your co host, Jon Wilson.
And Sebastian from Rilla, how's it going, Sebastian?
Sebastian Jimenez: How's it going, guys? Thank you so much for having me here. I've seen a couple of your highlight reels on LinkedIn, and very excited to be here,
John Wilson: We started this, sharing through Twitter, which is like a totally different vibe than LinkedIn. so we're just getting into LinkedIn and, it's weird, man. LinkedIn's weird.
Sebastian Jimenez: Yeah. I've, been on LinkedIn for so long because I've been doing B2B sales, for SaaS for so long.
But, yeah, so I actually met my fiancee, on LinkedIn, because I didn't have an Instagram. Her friend who introduced us, was like, you need to hit her up on Instagram. I was like, I don't use that, I do B2B SaaS sales. I met my future wife on LinkedIn.
John Wilson: I'd like to start off the show with Hey, what one what's Rilla and then two, can you give us a little bit of the background, and then we'll dive into, what the best users of this platform do? what do they look like?
How do they, maximize their revenue in their closing? So what's Rilla? How to start.
Sebastian Jimenez: Yeah. So I realized we are the leading virtual ride along software for the home improvement industry. when salespeople, technicians, design consultants talk to customers in the home, they record the conversations on the real app from the phones and tablets.
And then we use a I to analyze to transcribe, analyze and give them feedback to help them for their sales. And to help their coaches, their service managers, their sales managers, do what we call virtual ride alongs that are a hundred times faster, better, and more productive. And before RILA sales managers, you would have to go out on a ride along.
It takes four hours to coach one person. With RILA, you could do a virtual ride along in three minutes. in the same amount of time, you could do a hundred times more coaching. And that's what people with RILA do. And I'm happy to talk about some of the interesting use cases that we've seen. how did it start?
we started selling this product in january 2022 We went from zero to over 1500 contractors in a little over two years. We're talking about some of the top contractors in the country. some of the guests in your show who use rilla tommy mellow, you know from a1 garage we have Groundworks who uses RILA.
So if you look at the top private equity customers we probably have a monopoly of that already. And, we have tens of thousands of technicians and millions of conversations being recorded. this is a growth story. Everybody's happy, excited. But it didn't start like that how did RILA start? my trade is not in software. I am not a software person I don't know how to code. I am a former stand up comedian I used to do stand up comedy in college for four years that's where I got my addiction to trying things out failing quickly learning from failure And using it as a way to build your craft and creating something awesome.
That's what you do in stand up You go out and you try a joke and you bomb and you figure out why you bombed and even the best jokes start as bad jokes that are not well executed. And then you figure out the execution by a lot of trial and error and then you create a really great set. I got addicted to that and that addiction took me to building tech products.
When I graduated college, I started my first tech company. It was a field marketing management software for companies like Red Bull and Heineken and Molson Coors that do field marketing.
When you send the college kids with uniforms to the college campuses to give people Red Bull like the wing teams.
John Wilson: Like a sales rep type thing Yes.
Sebastian Jimenez: Yes, like a sales rep. This one was more like field marketing.
you want to plan the event. take pictures from the booth. schedule and pay the brand ambassador. It's like all in one software to manage gig worker brand ambassador types. Which is, it's, it has like all its nuances and stuff like that, but it's one of these SAS products that, that gets used to manage a particular use case or vertical.
From this software, the big aha moment for me, came when I was talking to the field marketing manager at Heineken, and I realized that Heineken had 4 million face to face conversations with consumers every month, from these field marketing activations. they were spending about a hundred million dollars a year on social media analytics, surveys, focus groups and market research, from Qualtrics Nielsen Kantar IRI and Sprinkler.
they were only getting 500, 000 data points from consumers every month from online channels. I thought, If Heineken has eight times more data offline, who else fits this profile? And then I realized that it's not only Heineken, it's Molson Coors and Coca Cola. 85 percent of commerce happens offline.
Heineken not only has field marketeers, they have field sales people that go into the stores and the restaurants. And so I thought, Why stop at food and beverage? What about the people who sell windows, siding, flooring, doors, HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, solar? What about the people who sell in retail stores?
I realized that there's 12 million outside sales and service people, and they have about 10 billion face to face conversations with consumers every month. if we could capture these 10 billion conversations, we could probably create something like Google. We could make offline commerce as searchable and indexable as Google did for the web.
And that became the vision for RILA. We called it RILA because it comes from guerrilla marketing. that was 2019 and that was the vision. It never changed. It's still the same vision today. we changed a little bit the way, to get there, but, for three years, essentially from 2019 to 2022.
I like to say that our first three years of business was just us going out of business. We made zero dollars, no money. We were in the red. We're trying to figure out this AI product, trying to figure out the right market, the right use case. And then finally, in January 2022, we found the home improvement industry, this virtual ride along use case that was so powerful for home improvement companies that really care about their home.
coaching and training their people. that's when it really took off. now we've become one of the fastest growing startups right now and ever because of this industry that we found at Home Improvement.
John Wilson: What's the team size of Rilla and how fast has it moved?
Sebastian Jimenez: To give you an idea, So Rilla, Rilla was, it's still a very small team. We're only 50 people, which is something that makes really uniquely different. I think this is happening more and more with AI companies the team sizes are very small, the only comparable teams that are very small with this, kind of traction is like Instagram and WhatsApp.
It's like very small teams that produce insane like instagram was like 17 people when they got acquired for a billion dollars by facebook whatsapp similar thing, but realist started we went from zero to 1. 4 million arr first year of sales we went from 1. 4 million to 10. 6 million arr second year of sales this year I don't want to say what we're going to end but it's you know still you know in that we 10x last year.
We're gonna do something, not quite 10x But getting up there if you look at the historical record of startups, just the first two years alone, and even the third year, Depending on where we end this year, we're going to be the fifth or sixth fastest growing SaaS startup of all time.
and that puts us ahead of companies like Apple. It puts us ahead of companies like Salesforce. So Salesforce went from like 1 to 5 million in their second year and 5 to 20 million in their third year. So we're growing faster than Salesforce. We're growing faster than Apple. We're growing faster than Figma.
That's some of the fastest growing SaaS startups ever. I think we're like literally like number five or six on the historical leaderboard. And I think we might be the fastest growing startup of all time right now. there's another one called perplexity, which might be growing at a similar rate to us
So yeah, it's fascinating. They're very small, very unique. That's awesome. Congratulations to our customers. Cause if they weren't growing so quickly, we wouldn't be growing so quickly. So thank you uncle Tommy Mello, Aaron Gaynor and all you guys.
John Wilson: Yeah. Walk us through, let's dive into a couple of these customers. I think what we want to understand and probably what the audience wants to understand is what does best in class look like. We're all being told that, this expensive, ride along software is going to change the world for us.
maybe it will, but how do you drive it into the business? What do the best do to maximize this investment? how are people winning?
Sebastian Jimenez: Great question. One of the best implementations I've ever seen was, LB Capital with, Lance Bachman and, Bill Rossell.
They're, basically, a large, roofing company. They acquire a lot of roofing companies as well. Lance was the founder of One SEO. He sold that and he's involved with a lot of the top businesses in the country. One of the things that we saw that they did really is that first of all, like it depends on the stage, right?
But when you're onboarding RILA, the biggest thing at the beginning is making sure you get buy in from the technicians and the salespeople in the field. So how do you do that effectively? You could do it the soft way, which we do all the time for the average customer, We pitch it to the technicians in a different way.
The salespeople to technicians, we say this is a protection tool for you. the way we pitch it to them, we learned after thousands of times that we launched with people. we used to pitch it to technicians as a sales tool, but the technicians are not as sales driven as the salespeople.
In fact, a lot of them don't like the word sales, which is its own problem, but that's the reality. And so the way we started pitching it to technicians over the years was, Hey guys, who here has ever had a situation with a homeowner where the homeowner said you did something wrong? Everybody raises their hand and who here has had a situation where the homeowner said you did something wrong But they were lying and they all raised their hand.
They're like, yeah, they're a lie And then you go Bob what happened to you last week? And he goes I went out there I sold my thing. I did everything right. The homeowner said that, we got this case recently. the daughter called and said it was elder abuse because I sold her mom, some HVAC unit she didn't need.
And I said, what happened to you? I lost the sale. I lost the commission. I got a write up because it was, he said, she said, and I said, Bob, how would you have protected yourself in that situation? I would have been great to have a recording, like That's right, Bob.
You would need a recording device. And that's what relay is. And it's a way to protect yourself. And so that's how we pitch it to technicians for salespeople. And the way that we've seen the top companies do this, they don't go the soft route. So I'm thinking of L. B. Capital. I'm thinking of F. H. For Lance Bachman and Bill Russell.
They basically set a cultural standard. They said, Guys, We're going to do this. This is going to be a tool for your improvement. You are going to get better at selling. this is an AI coach in your pocket. And sorry to say, but if you don't want to use this, you cannot work here. they make the standard, like that is super on the other extreme of Hey, this is not soft.
And we're trying to pitch it to you. no, We're going to do this no matter what. Usually when you launch your top performers are the most resistant to the change. They do not want to be recorded. They are the top performers. So they say, why do I need this coaching?
Why do I need this? AI recording me. I already know what I'm doing. so there was one top performer at Lance's company who said that he didn't want to get on it. Lance literally went up to him And said Hey, listen, man, thank you for your service.
we're going to have to let you go. And the guy was like, what? I'm like one of your top guys. And he's yeah, Bill's trying to implement this tool and you're not buying in and it's making other people not buy in and you're not being a leader. So I can't have you work at this company anymore.
And the guy was like, are you serious? Yeah, I'm going to have to walk you out. And he did that. And he's no, dude, I'm going to get on. I'm going to get on. I'm sorry. So he was like listen, we're going to do this no matter what. Those are the best. The companies that see the fastest traction is not the ones that go the software.
It's the ones that say, this is a standard. this is just what we're going to be doing in the company. That's not how we do it because most people are not willing to go there. But again, the few people that are willing to go there, they get the buy in then what do you do once you've implemented?
Cause that's the biggest challenge. Once you implement that with your reps, with your technicians, I'm thinking of any hour, how they did an amazing implementation. They got buy in Any Hour literally rented a movie theater before we launched RILA and played the movie Moneyball to all of their salespeople.
And they literally had their top performers volunteering to use RILA the next day because they did a whole roadshow to launch. It's one of the best things that we've ever seen. it wasn't like, Oh, Get in or else. It was like who wants it? And people were fighting to get in because they were like, I want that.
I want to get the data. I want to get the analytics. And so once you implement it, what we've seen from companies that truly leverage the power of the technology at the beginning, we thought that really was a way to save time doing ride alongs, increase efficiency and improve your sales.
So we would look at how many ride alongs can you do? How fast? One thing we didn't consider is that Rilla enables this different kind of workflow in a company because of the flexibility of coaching. One of the superpowers of the virtual ride along is that it allows you to coach from anywhere. You don't have to be physically present to coach the person,
It's about the flexibility that I can coach from my office, from my car, from sitting in the toilet. So we literally, have coaches and companies who have. Leverage this superpower. And they said, guys, we no longer need to have coaches in person. So if you have a big, private equity company, what they started doing is they started having coaching centers from the corporate standpoint that are able to coach, the entire market.
So if you need coaching resources in Florida, then instead of having to send people down to Florida and pay all these flights and stuff like that, you could just have the corporate coaches. Coach in Florida, at the speed of light. the best companies are rebuilding their businesses around this new technology there's a company called Brookstone windows.
They one of their positions that they have, it's like called the gorilla specialist and their job is a remote coach who coaches all the reps these coaches manage anywhere from 30 to a hundred reps a day. because they can do so many ride alongs. they created this new kind of position, the virtual sales coach or the virtual sales trainer, which is an amazing finding.
John Wilson: For the companies that are doing that, what happens? Because I think typically the way these get pitched is the service managers. So what happens with the service manager side of that position? Does he just take on more text because there's less responsibility?
Sebastian Jimenez: we have a Joker Sarah, Who's one of the great coaches and home services, uncle Joe, who's a great friend of the company. He's going to be doing a talk at the Rilla masters.
We have our conference, the Rilla masters coming up from February 24th at the Virgin hotels, Las Vegas. Joe is going to be doing a talk there. titled, so long the manager long live the coach. the point of the talk is how the service manager's day should be less about putting out fires doing paperwork approving pricing and getting calls from the technicians, and being interrupted every single five seconds in the service manager's day should look more like, What the day looks like for a professional sports coach, a professional sports coach spends 80 percent of their time reviewing game films and that's 20 percent of the remaining time meeting in training meetings with their players to unpack what they figured out from the game film so that they can improve.
And so right now, if you look at realist service manager still use Rilla, but they only use it for an hour a day. So it's not 80 percent of their time. The trainer and the coaches, they spent 80 percent of their time on Rilla. so sometimes when you have Rilla, yes, you can have your service managers.
You said you have different levels, different difficulties of the game, as we call it, where you could just use it for five, 10 minutes. That's what service managers use it one hour. then you have the coaches like Sylvia. Sylvia was that he's the training manager or, at my plumber. Plus she manages a team of 40 technicians.
Because Rilla allows her to do that now. what companies do is they raise up the trainer to do all the training. And then the service manager is more like the, frontline support for the rep. they help improve the sale on the spot. they do more of the call by call management, but the trainer takes care of making sure that the technicians are actually improving over time instead of putting band aids, they're actually giving you the medicine.
the vitamin is that you need to actually get better over time on your own we see companies do it differently, like Momentum Solar, one of our customers, they also did the same thing where they literally took their managers and some other half of their managers.
I said, you guys are going to go back out on the field because they're basically sales people that. Got into a management position. They said, you guys are going to go back out on the field. And then half of the managers, they said, you guys are going to be trainers. And they became the foundation for this corporate training, program that they had with them because, and then now they need half of the managers because the managers are a hundred times more productive.
And so, you see companies use this wealth creation in different ways, Raising up this new position of the coach, and it's almost like changing the skill set that you need in order to be a manager. You have to be a great coach. Now, you can't just be somebody who's putting out a lot of fires.
You have to be a great coach.
Jack Carr: what are the big items that they're coaching on? what are the findings that are coming from all these hours of, recordings? is there any kind of trend that, we're seeing across the board in terms of how we can get our teams better.
By coaching.
Sebastian Jimenez: Yeah. this is one of the cool things. This is another one of the benefits that we discovered with Rilla. We did not expect this, but because of what we've done, and the growth that we've had, we've been fortunate
At the time we had 2 million face to face conversations recorded in the home, between technicians salespeople and homeowners. So it's multiple millions now, because we have so many conversations, so many recordings and we've transcribed and analyze them and we've turned them into data, we can do this thing for the first time ever, which is called money ball for sales.
so Billy Bean, who was also going to be speaking at the real masters, was the manager of the Oakland ACE team of baseball. He invented this concept of money ball, which is you look at data, you look at the inputs of any sport and try to predict how you can improve your chances of winning.
By using data science and analytics to, to use in your coaching and your recruiting in, in, in your way that you manage your teams. with Rilla, because we've turned these conversations, the inputs of the game of sales into data, we could do the exact same thing for the sport of sales. one of the things that we've done is we've, And we publish this in the RILA.
It's called the RILA labs. You go to rila. com slash labs and we publish all of our reports there. We look at what the top 1 percent of top performers across the country, across the trades, what is it that they're doing differently than everybody else? and so that we could actually show, how you could be more like a top performer.
One of the first things we found is one of the main differences between the top 1 percent of top performers. These are people who are closing 5 million, 7 million, 8 million, and 13 million of annual sales for their business single handedly every single year.
those people, talk less than the average salesperson. They talk between 45 and 65 percent of the time. And then the average salesperson talks between 75 and 85 percent of the time. It's a conversation with a customer, not a monologue. The way they talk, because we want it to say, okay, you take this to your team.
You say, okay, your talk ratio, let's, talk less and listen more. How do you do that? How do you, get, People proactive feedback so they can actually do that. what if they don't know how to do it? It's a very simple trick that we found in the real labs, which is the top performers. It's like a Jedi mind trick.
They ask five times more open ended questions than the average salespeople. The average salesperson asks five open ended questions per conversation. The top performers ask 25 open ended question per conversation. So it's five times more. So what they're doing is, asking open ended questions at the beginning, like what brings us here today?
What seems to be the issue? How is the temperature in your room? How long have you been living in the home? But when they do the demo, they stop. instead of saying this, HVAC unit is, better because of this and that, and it's cost you this, they go.
This homeowner, it sounds like this just resonated with you. What about that resonated with you? Because then they stop and they see, they end up making it interactive. Or if the homeowner is not feeling it, they go, Hey, it sounds like this isn't resonating. what's not resonating about this? So I can pivot and show you something that you're interested in.
When they're dealing with objections, this is another thing that we found at the final third of the conversation, the average sales rep starts speeding up their talk speed. The top performers keep their talk speed and slow down a little bit.
And the reason is when they're dealing with objections, the average sales people get, get, they get excited and they get nervous. So their fight or flight response gets triggered and they start talking faster. the homeowner says, I'm, I got, I cannot afford that. I simply too expensive. I can't spend 20, 000 in an HVAC unit.
That is just insane. And the rep was like, no, Mr. Tolman, you have to understand 20, 000 is not that much money when you consider all these different benefits in our company, we have warranties, you can't go with Joe Schmo from out there, and they start talking fast. What do the top performers do?
Open ended question. They say, Ms. Homeowner, What do you mean by the price is too high? And they said I had somebody out here who came and gave me half the price Okay, tell me a little bit more about this person.
Who is that other contractor you're talking to? How about their licensing? How about their warranties and they start discovering and it doesn't feel like a debate It feels like a and that's why they When you listen to a top performer deal with objections that you and you'll be like, man, why do they sound so cool and so smooth?
It's because they're slowing down and asking questions. That's all they're doing. That's the Jedi mind trick. And so there's many more of these insights That's a perfect example though.
Jack Carr: That's really neat data. That sounds like a really fun thing to do.
Sebastian Jimenez: Yeah. We're about to do an analysis on laughter. Cause one of our friends, one of our coaches said that. Every time he listens to top performers, they make people laugh. And so we're gonna do an analysis of if laughter is correlated with a higher close rate. So we'll be publishing that next week.
John Wilson: What's the average time to onboard? So somebody jumps in, like how fast is their team usually seeing improvement?
Cause this is a debate in some of the chats or Facebook groups that I see is okay, how fast does it work? One of the benefits of working with Wilson is that we are basically a same day, next day company. So what that means is if I sell a job today. I'm gonna aim to get it in today, tomorrow, or the next day.
we aim for a really fast turnaround. because of that, we have high expectations of our suppliers. Getting parts in time has been a real challenge, and SupplyHouse. com has been a really awesome partner for us, because of that. They've got, a quarter of a million SKUs, across plumbing, HVAC, and electrical, so they cover all our different lines.
And they can get stuff to you fast and they have a ton of it. Plus on top of that, they have best in class pricing and their new Trademaster program gives you free shipping, free returns, and a bunch of discounts over retail on top of it. the Trademaster program is free to join. Check out supplyhouse.com and make sure to check out their Trademaster program.
Sebastian Jimenez: So this is a good question because it depends on the definition of onboarding for us, to get somebody set up using the tool and get them using it just like recording and the managers can use it, it takes about two hours.
So you have one meeting with your customer success manager at Rilla. They set up all your integrations with your systems. then you do another meeting to launch with the salespeople or the technicians, and that takes two hours and the launch meeting. That's when we do the whole pitch and we soft sell them into the whole concept that we show them how to use the app.
That's all you need. It's a very simple product. It's not like a CRM technology that takes months to implement because you're doing open heart surgery on your business. It's not that complicated. So you start using it and a week after you started recording, then we do an onboarding with the managers where we show them how to coach on Rilla.
We show them how to fit Rilla into their workflow That takes another hour. after the first week, you start seeing that ROI in terms of being able to do virtual ride alongs, like literally Sylvia, who I mentioned, who manages 30 technicians, we onboarded her into our little virtual ride along game.
Sylvia started doing, 435 ride alongs, right after we onboarded her. that's compared to four ride alongs a month that she was doing before. you start seeing the ROI from the wealth creation of the virtual ride along immediately, like first week. your sales numbers start improving after about a month is when you start seeing those results.
it takes about a month because you have to track the results monthly you start seeing improvements from some people, not the entire team in the first month because it takes time to get buy in and adoption month two, that's when you start seeing the ROI of the product in terms of sales improvements, conversion rates, average tickets, month two, that's when we do the first ROI analysis.
we say, look, the people who are on RILA, if you have a large company, we like to put half and half, on half off so that we can show you like, Hey, look at the people on RILA and look at how they outperform the people who are not on RILA. it's like when you do a medical trial of a medicine, you want to see Hey, the people who took it, that they outperformed the people who didn't take it, we do that in two, months. in the first quarter you start seeing those gains. what's really cool is that you see the gains. the more coaching, the more training it's an infinite game. You never stop.
you have to keep coaching, you have to keep training. And the more you do it, the better the numbers get. it doesn't stop over time either.
Jack Carr: how big should a customer be before they reach out to you for a demo? what's the ideal size of a contractor?
Sebastian Jimenez: About five technicians or comfort advisors in the field.
And so that's rule of thumb. If you have five technicians or comfort advisors, you're gonna we have a from over the years that we've been launching. I think we've retained 97 percent of our customers who are above that size, basically, if you're a customer that has five technicians or comfort advisors, there's a 97 percent chance that you're going to have success year over year.
just from first principles, I would say, because there are some contractors who are lower than that level, who we still allow to use RILA. the first principles that you want to look at is, okay, Do you have a, do you have people on the field? do you have three people, four people on the field?
Number one, do you use a CRM technology? Do you use field service management software? If you're not using field service management software, you need to get that fixed first. You need to get your business off of pen and paper and use a process to document everything. do you use field service management software and have it implemented?
The third is, do you have a coaching program, a coaching process that your team's supposed to follow? some sort of steps that they're supposed to follow. And number four, to have the most success, are you already doing physical ride alongs?
If you're doing physical ride alongs or have started thinking about them, that's when RILA is going to provide significant ROI from day one. If you're already doing physical ride alongs, you likely have a process, you likely have a CRM. and if you use Rela, you're going to see like games in the first week.
John Wilson: What other pro tips from the best in class out there? What else can we share?
Sebastian Jimenez: I was talking about talk speed, in the last point. So we actually wanted to see if there was a ideal talk speed for, for the industry. and we saw that there was, we looked at talk speed and how it's correlated with close rates and average tickets.
And the graph, for those of you can't see, it looks like a. It looks like a, a bell curve that's, skewed to the left so that it peaks towards the faster side. So if you put a talk speed and the horizontal axis and you put average ticket on the vertical axis, the graph, skews to the left, which means the peak is to the right.
the peak talk speed is 184 words per minute, right? that's the, peak that has the highest average ticket and the highest close rates in the correlation graph. But, and, that's interesting because that's a little bit faster than the average human talk speed.
The average human talk speed is about 155 words per minute, 155 to 160. So if you do the math there, 184 compared to that's about 1.2 x the. Average human talk speed. So if you want to get good at, if you want to sound like the top performers and get that peak talk speed, what I would recommend is you listen to podcasts at 1.
if you do that, you're likely going to talk at that speed. the reason I talk so fast, by the way. John and Jack, I use Rilla to coach our own salespeople, like our own sales team. I use Rilla every day and I play Rilla at three X speed.
So I talk so fast 'cause I'm used to listening. at really fast speeds. if you wanna be at that 180 I would recommend you listen to podcasts at 1.2 x speed and that's how you should sound as a top performing salesperson. What's also interesting about this metric is that it doesn't peak.
It doesn't peak and it keeps going up. It peaks and it drops down. So if you talk really slow, that might not be good. But if you talk really fast, that's also going to drop your numbers because then, you lose all the gains from speeding up. So if you are like me and you're talking 220 words per minute, you're talking really fast.
You're going to start losing gains in average taken and losing gains in close rates because the homeowner will be like, I don't understand anything this person's saying. They're talking so fast. Like I am right now. And they're giving so much information.
Don't have the time to process what they're saying. Now, if you talk so slow, it's a sign that you might have low energy and then the homeowner's not going to be as excited and as interested to move forward with you in a business. So 184 words per minute is the peak talk speed that we found for the industry.
Which is really, interesting. And again, these are averages across trades, guys. So it's going to vary depending on region, but that's the average across the trade
Jack Carr: Do you relay yourself? I just want to know how fast I talk. Yeah, exactly. That's what I was thinking. You have to relay yourself.
You know exactly what your talk speed is, don't you?
Sebastian Jimenez: Yeah, I can't even check. That's my average, all time, but I can check like in this last month what it's been. But yeah, it's around there. Maybe This month I did a little bit better. Let me tell you right now, I'm looking it up.
Oh, look at that! My average talk speed this month is 186. 6 words per minute. Boom. I slowed down naturally, practicing what I preach.
John Wilson: Look at that. That's funny. this was good, man. we're able to record tons of conversations.
We're able to figure out how to replicate our best performers. We got some pro tips on how to succeed. any last lessons on how to implement this or anything else you'd leave the listener with to really help drive some value here?
Sebastian Jimenez: Yes, this is, a really exciting time to be in the trades.
There's so many businesses you can start so many trades. I saw a post on LinkedIn. so many trades you can pursue. You can pursue the big three or different trades like trees and chimneys. we have so many chimney people that use real and we love our chimneys, The reason why I'm saying it's one of the most exciting times in the trades is that the amount of sophisticated capital that has entered the space is like it's never been before. because of COVID, it was the biggest gold rush ever in the home improvement industry because of work from home.
people in cities like New York and San Francisco, where there's not a lot of market for home improvement, move from cities like New York and San Francisco to the suburbs. When you move to the suburbs, immediately the market for home improvement opens up because you want to do the kitchen. fix the, HVAC unit, or do a re pipe.
And if you live in New York, like I do, and you move into an apartment and the window's kind of funky, that's your window. You're not going to fix it. You're not going to replace it. You're just. That's it. That's your window. When you went to a house, you're going to fix things.
And then you're also spending so much time at home. the American homeowner has never spent so much time at home. Like ever that like a percentage, like there's the average, American homeowners now spending like eight waking hours at home because of work from home. before it was like four hours.
So people are spending the most amount of time at home ever, feeling the pain of their home improvement, home services projects more than ever before. So they're more likely to go on Google. They're more likely to want to look for some replacement opportunities.
And so because of this, private equity has taken notice. that's why you see so many PEs rolling up into the space with so much sophisticated capital. And these are the suits from New York and San Francisco's who are saying, This is the biggest opportunity in private equity. they're funding businesses from really smart, business owners.
So now there's an exit opportunity for entrepreneurs because there's actual money being given to these businesses who, scale to a certain degree. venture capitalists who fund technology companies have taken notice that this is one of the biggest markets in American history that we've ever seen.
And so they're funding companies like Rilla and ProBook and Avoca and conduit. the founder of ProBook, George Eliottis, he, barely graduated from University of Pennsylvania. Tyson, the founder of Avoca, he graduated from M. I. T. Shelby from Conduit Tech.
She did her MBA at Stanford University, Some of the smartest founders right now in the world are targeting products specifically for home improvement contractors. the reason I say it's the most exciting time to be in the trades is because AI just started at the same time this new development in the market started.
the early adopters of AI technology are not in New York and San Francisco. They are in Manassas, Virginia, selling a shark replacement. They're in Nashville, Tennessee, selling chimneys. They're all over the country. Home improvement contractors are the early adopters of AI technology.
I'm living proof of that. We're one of the fastest growing startups ever. selling an AI product to, home improvement contractors. And so just like RILA, there's so many other awesome technologies that are built specifically for the trades. it's allowing contractors to be at the forefront.
Of technology adoption, which has never happened before. it's such a cool time because now if you're a really smart person and you go into a home improvement business, into a trade, you can be the best at implementing technologies and get an amazing headstart. It's no longer an older archaic industry.
It's a dynamic, fast moving industry where you have to stay ahead, where you have to be innovative. The biggest thing I would say if you're a home improvement contractor, this is not the same industry. It was 10 years ago, there's so many smart people. so much smart capital coming in.
this is the hottest industry in America right now. get ready to move because if you don't move, you're going to get left behind.
John Wilson: That's the biggest thing that I would say. Yeah. I agree. I started off in the trades in 2009 and, we had Ellen Rohr on the show a couple of weeks ago.
She's great. she and I were swapping stories because even for the trade, I'm 33 years old, but because I've been in the trade since 2009, I'm old for the industry. I remember the industry from 10 years ago, because that's how I cut my teeth.
And it is a different industry. Then 10 years ago, and I really don't think people understand how different, my best comparison is Uber, everybody was a taxi and then Uber came along. that's the level of disruption we're seeing in the trades. if you're just coming in 2019, 2020, 2021, you have no idea.
Like you have no idea.
It is such a different industry. It boggles my mind just thinking about the insane change we've lived through and how not enough people seem to understand that the change happened because they came after it.
Sebastian Jimenez: It's a really cool time. If you look at, it's so fun to see. if you look at, I keep meeting new start-ups every single, week, I meet new start-ups that are coming up. I don't know if you guys know Y Combinator. Y Combinator is the biggest start-up accelerator in the world. And there's so many businesses coming out of Y Combinator targeting home service businesses specifically.
Who would have thought that The early adopters of AI technology would have been plumbers electricians heat rack technicians and chimney specialists. It's so cool that this is the way the world is going. So I'm here for it,
John Wilson: It's wild. It really is wild. I've joked about that with a few of my, friends who work in ancillary industries. we discussed how deep AI has penetrated, at this point in home service, it touches almost every aspect of the business, it touches our customer action via email or text or communication with inbounds, either phone or message.
It touches job summaries, invoicing, training, marketing, everything. And man, that moved fast because it was introduced to the trades like 14 months ago.
Jack Carr: about this a year ago and then we circled back every six months and it's just some kind of leaping bound above where we had
John Wilson: Cause I was at a ski trip. and it was like, Oh man, I wonder what the future of AI is in the industry. And then six months later, the future is everything.
Sebastian Jimenez: You got, AI for your, you have AI for your marketing. for lead generation, AI for your call center where there's companies like Avoca who's literally, their end goal is to replace the call, the human call center.
It's like literally replace it with an AI. Then you have AI dispatching. with people like Probook that are trying to AI automate dispatch. Then you have AI coaching, with Rilla, AI virtual ride alongs. AI rehash with chirp and hatch and, AI claims approval process for insurance.
There's a company, from former Uber people who are building for the trades. It's to automate your insurance approval process. literally every touch point of a customer journey is getting touched by it. by a point solution for, which is an AI native application, which is, and it's like you said, it's the future, but it's like happening right now.
It's these are, I'm not talking about ideas. I'm talking about companies that are growing. some of these companies are even growing faster than Rilla was when we started, which tells you this is one of those technologies that just keeps growing exponentially.
I think that Rilla is one of the fastest growing companies. in a year or two, there's going to be another company that's going to pass us I don't know the numbers of the other startups, but it might not be insane to see that some of the generational companies using AI are companies that started selling to home improvement contractors right now because of this market domination.
John Wilson: There's literally millions of home service contractors. Like the market is huge. So I can understand how it can grow fast.
Sebastian Jimenez: Yeah. Especially for, tech people, the VCs love being able to sell to large enterprise buyers. I was at an event, the private equities symposium in New York, a few months back and They, said that when the private equity came in, service side was a little bit iffy, but now the private equity customers are their top customers. The ones with the highest MPS, the ones who have the operational capability. So tech companies love big customers with large enterprise deals.
So it makes it an even more attractive industry for that reason. it's like I said, that's my main message. Just it's such a cool time. You'd have to stay active. You have to keep your ears close to the ground. You have to start playing around with the new technologies, just get familiar with it because, Tommy Mello, our good friend always says that he's not running a garage door business.
He runs a technology company that sells garage doors that statement. has never been truer. you guys are running technology companies that sell home improvement. in order to run a technology company, you should be well versed at implementing new technologies.
John Wilson: Yeah, I agree. thanks for coming on today. This was a lot of fun. I feel like I got a good lesson in dropping AI into the trades. Yeah. If people want to, if people want to hear more, understand real a little bit better, where can they go? They can go to our Rilla. com.
Sebastian Jimenez: And they can go ahead and book a demo. One of our salespeople will be using Rilla and I will probably be reviewing and doing a virtual ride along on your conversation. So go ahead and go to rilla.com, rilla.com. before you book a demo, you could also check out the customer stories that we have there.
Cause that's the best way that you're going to learn what this tool can do for your business.
John Wilson: Thanks, Sebastian. Appreciate your time today.
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