John and Jack tackle a listener-submitted question addressing the five crucial aspects every business must master to scale successfully: the importance of daily reporting, tech transparency, job costing, lead attribution, and the monitoring of phone call interactions. Whether you're a Service Titan user or not, these principles are essential for any company looking to achieve sustainable growth.
Episode Hosts:
Special thanks to our sponsor: Service Scalers: Looking to scale your home service business? Service Scalers is a digital marketing agency that drives success in PPC and LSA. Discover more growth strategies by visiting Service Scalers.
Check out Owned and Operated Weekly Insights: a newsletter where John discusses topics ranging from recruiting and marketing to the growth of your home service business. Subscribe to the newsletter here.
John Wilson is hosting a workshop in March! Join us March 19th-21st for the Breaking $5 Million Workshop! It’s specifically crafted to help you take your home service business to the next level. Seats are limited and tickets are selling fast. You can check out the agenda and get all the details right here!
Contact us:
Youtube: @OwnedandOperatedPodcast
John and Jack tackle a listener-submitted question addressing the five crucial aspects every business must master to scale successfully: the importance of daily reporting, tech transparency, job costing, lead attribution, and the monitoring of phone call interactions. Whether you're a Service Titan user or not, these principles are essential for any company looking to achieve sustainable growth.
Episode Hosts:
Special thanks to our sponsor: Service Scalers: Looking to scale your home service business? Service Scalers is a digital marketing agency that drives success in PPC and LSA. Discover more growth strategies by visiting Service Scalers.
Check out Owned and Operated Weekly Insights: a newsletter where John discusses topics ranging from recruiting and marketing to the growth of your home service business. Subscribe to the newsletter here.
John Wilson is hosting a workshop in March! Join us March 19th-21st for the Breaking $5 Million Workshop! It’s specifically crafted to help you take your home service business to the next level. Seats are limited and tickets are selling fast. You can check out the agenda and get all the details right here!
Contact us:
Youtube: @OwnedandOperatedPodcast
John Wilson: I'm John Wilson. Welcome to Owned and Operated. Twice a week, we talk about home service businesses, and if you're a home service entrepreneur, then this is going to be the show for you. We talk about our own business in residential plumbing, HVAC, and electric, and we also talk about business models that we just find interesting.
Let's get into it.
If you're a home service entrepreneur that's just starting out, or is early on in the journey, and you haven't broken the five million dollar revenue mark, we've got an event for you. This spring in Cleveland, March 19th to the 21st, we're hosting an event at my office. It's going to be awesome. Honestly, some of the most impactful visits of my career have been visits to companies that were larger than we were, that we could take lessons from, and see how they're doing stuff.
Like get a behind the scenes look, how are they structuring warehouse? How are they thinking about call center? Can I talk to their managers? Can I understand what their KPIs are? We're going to dive into all that stuff. We are here to help people get above 5 million in revenue. So join us in Akron, Ohio, March 19th to the 21st for a breaking 5 million event.
Love to see you there. Details are owned and operated dot com.
Today on Owned and Operated, we have a listener submitted question on the five fundamental things that every business should get right in order to take their business to scale, with a special flair of how does it add on to ServiceTitan. So we tried to make the answers relevant to whether or not you're on ServiceTitan, but these are the five things that I thought, and then Jack brought three, and they were great.
And hopefully this helps people.
Welcome back to Owned and Operated. Dude, has it been like two weeks since I've talked to you? Like, when was the last time I even talked to you?
Jack Carr: I thought we did last week. No, do we skip a week?
John Wilson: We probably did. I think it's been a really long week.
Jack Carr: Yeah, that's probably true.
John Wilson: That's my take. So how was your week? What have you been up to?
Jack Carr: Oh man plumbing is my favorite thing in the entire world, in the entire world.
John Wilson: A thousand times.
Jack Carr: You have to understand too, like I started it two months before the biggest freeze Tennessee has seen in like 20 years. So we have been doing nothing but changing out, fixing pipes for like 600 bucks per boom, boom, boom.
And so my guy has a goal of what he's supposed to be hitting and he's just crushing it. He's absolutely crushing it. Given like the calls are flying and service calls are easy right now. We're trying to convert as much as possible, but I'm loving plumbing right now. It is really good.
John Wilson: Plumbing's good. I think it's just consistent. So HVAC, like, some days we'll sell a hundred grand and some days we'll sell zero grand. That's HVAC. Plumbing, we seem to sell 40 grand every day, basically no matter what. I don't know how.
But forty thousand dollars just happens every week.
Jack Carr: Like the lead generation feels so much easier. Like we just consistently get six to eight calls a day for plumbing. Really loving plumbing. Our plumbers doing amazing. We have two businesses. We're moving on. We're under LOI on one and going to first draft of APA.
So that's been awesome too. That's going to be huge change. And the second one, we're meeting with the owner Thursday to get under LOI. So a lot of change, but we'll be uh, hopefully a three service or three vertical business in I don't know, two months?
John Wilson: Yeah, that'll be huge. My week uh, good. So last week was a lot of quarterlies. So we have twelve teams. So it was twelve quarterlies. Which if that sounds like a lot. It was. It was a lot. It was cool though. So the business is, it's in this, maturing phase.
Professionalization stage, and what's been awesome to watch is as our various team leaders and individual contributors, like, take very real ownership and accountability and are excited about where the company's going, and that's something that's relatively new to us I would say very new to us I'm attempting to be significantly more deliberate about communicating company wide goals and progress towards those goals.
And people are getting really excited about it, which is cool. Which is, that's the type of people that I want to work for, or work with. And people are taking real ownership of their part. And quarterly's was an awesome way to like, demonstrate that where we, bring in all these different team members that I don't get to work directly with very often.
And they were just excited and contributed. And like it was a cool feeling. The first time I did a quarterly was in 2017 and there was four or five people in the room.
And like we had a round of quarterlies last week with like 50 people. And each one of them contributed in their own way, and each one of them took on a rock, and each one of them is like ready to move their department forward and knows how it affects the business as a whole.
Which like that's crazy
Jack Carr: That's really wonderful. And do you think that some of that's driven by the fact that you guys are doing right now? Because in an industry where we've had a rough Q4, they all have friends that are HVAC and plumbing and
John Wilson: Well, so that's what people said So like today's the last day of january 2024. We just set a record month of all time. So it was a 72 Yeah, it was awesome. So 72 increase in revenue over last january and the other big take is we passed 2017's entire annual revenue in January alone.
Jack Carr: When we grow up, we want to be you, John. We want to be Wilson Companies.
That's our goal. Everyone wants to be uh, berkshire capital or whatever. Uh, we want want to be Wilson Companies we want to be John.
John Wilson: Yeah, I bet. Comes with a lot more stress than you might like, but that was awesome. And we shared that with the team and that was exactly the response that I got was like, the company I just came from is laying everybody off or dude, I know people that like just lost their jobs, like mass layoffs over here.
Like, how are we doing a record month in January? And mind you, this is like our fourth back to back record month.
Jack Carr: Yeah. remember you saying that last over.
Mm
John Wilson: This one's going to be tough break. One, because we're going into February, which I hate. And two, we broke it by about a hundred grand. That's a big difference.
The previous times we'd set records, it was like 15, 20. that's a sale or two. A hundred grand's a leap. That's a big difference.
Jack Carr: Yeah, that'll be exciting to see. Sweet. So, Speaking of doing so well, I know we talked about this. We got a user submitted question, or a listener submitted question.
John Wilson: Listener submitted.
Jack Carr: Shout out to the listener, I don't even know who it is, so.
John Wilson: Yeah, so this is uh, what's up, Dan?
I'm gonna modify your question slightly so Dan's question was, hey what are the five things that people can use best inside ServiceTitan in order to grow their business more. So Dan is an awesome vendor partner of ours.
He is over with Ferguson and Ferguson supplies our HVAC stuff. This is not an ad, but Ferguson does do a great job and we're very happy with them. And he has a lot of customers that are onboarding onto ServiceTitan and he wants to be able to send a resource to them. We're gonna answer that, 100%, and then we're also gonna modify it slightly into what are the five things that any company should do in general, which I believe sort of answered the same question.
But I don't want it to be too specific to ServiceTitan just in case other people aren't using ServiceTitan. There are other ways. To grow a business. what are the five big things that it takes to go from? I just talked with Will Smith from acquiring minds and we spent a solid two hours talking together about what it's like to take a company from a million in sales to 26.
And we probably could have talked for a long time because that took me seven years.
Jack Carr: Right?
What have you been doing the last seven years, John? Give me five.
John Wilson: I actually was able to condense it down into five. Like what were the five biggest career changers which I'd never had to break that list out before. So that was interesting.
Jack Carr: Since my list is much smaller, do you actually mind if I start,
John Wilson: I'm I'd love it
Jack Carr: cause I only really have two that I really want to touch on. And the first big game changer in our business that drove, we had almost a hundred percent year over year growth. And based on this track.
We're looking at between three and five. My goals. We're going to hit the 5 million this year.
John Wilson: There's for sure. You added plumbing so and it's It's basically a given at
Jack Carr: With that though there's two things that I see that is going to drive that growth and the first one, and the biggest is getting a extremely talented salesperson.
Change your model so that a salesperson fits into your business so that they can go drive huge amounts of revenue. Not only are they driving revenue, but they're going out and looking for revenue. When you put somebody specifically in charge of revenue generation and focus on those high ticket items, then.
Surprise, surprise, you sell more of those high ticket items. Techs, in my opinion, aren't the greatest salesmen because they're great at fixing things. They're great at teching, whatever that may be, whether it's at pest control, roofing HVAC plumbing, electrical, I don't care what industry you're in, getting a really good salesperson in that spot is going to be a key to huge amounts of growth.
That's the first thing. The second thing was the realization that we are in charge of our own lead generation.
It hasn't been that long since we started talking about that, but that focus on us being the key person and not letting it just be a passive, Hey, we didn't get enough leads today.
No, no more. We are full every single day. There's somebody who's focuses that but that we have more opportunities for revenue generation and we have more opportunities to be in people's houses. Therefore, we're driving more revenue. So that's probably the second one and a huge one that we've seen.
Big steps on in here in January. My January growth, by the way, was 23, 000 percent.
John Wilson: Nice
Jack Carr: I don't know if it's bad information from last year or we just did dismally last year. I think it's bad information, but either way, the
John Wilson: Let's hold on to that number
Jack Carr: 23, 000%, the last thing and the final thing is getting good acquisitions, right? We have been buying right and tucking in and buying right and tucking in.
It pays off. Like we have customers that call in and they ask for the old owner and then we end up getting in there and selling them a new unit or picking their plumbing. And that has been huge. Absolutely huge for us. We just bought a half a million dollar book for 30 K. Like these are out there.
You need to be actively going for them and they produce very well
John Wilson: Those are good. So mine When Dan asked me this question I thought about it I was trying to take what are the five most impactful things that have changed our business and can they be in the same conversation as what are the five best ways to use your software or whatever? And what was kind of surprising to me is that they can be mostly the same thing or like you can at least have the conversation in the same way. I think I've shared this on our show, but a big thing that we're focusing on in 2024 in the back end of 2023. Is getting good at the basics.
For a long time, our business was too complicated, and it felt too complicated. Last year, we invested a crazy amount of time, energy, and resources into de complicating the business. I'm going to keep it that way instead of simplifying it. Like, we de complicated it. And it took a lot. And now what we're really trying to hone in on is like, how good are we at the very basics? The basic building blocks. Because I, think that, and we put this up on our wall, this is our like in the how do we get there. That a hundred million dollars is a hundred million details. That's how we see this all that to say is it's just more of the same and we need to be better at driving these sort of core details every single day.
First one's daily reporting. Daily reporting has changed a lot in our business over the years as our needs have changed. But we ultimately want to look at the same things. What was revenue? What was calls? What was memberships? What was daily percentage of revenue collected?
There's about 14 measurements that we track daily and have roughly tracked those same daily things out of ServiceTitan for seven years since I got on there.
Jack Carr: And how are you communicating that?
John Wilson: That's the part that's changed. So usually daily huddles. There's a printout that goes on everyone's desk by normally around 10 a. m. and it has revenue from yesterday, collected percentage by department from yesterday, payroll percentage by department from yesterday. That way we know did we hit our big numbers. What was revenue? What was goal? What was memberships? What was goal? Did we collect all of our money? Was our payroll on budget? How much did we sell?
So that has been a guiding force for us. Just that really simple act of reviewing yesterday's numbers. Do you have a reporting practice right now that you're, like, pushing?
Jack Carr: We just started. So we spent a day and a half last week going through and deciding what those 14 items were, which ones are important to us. What metrics , does the team need to know that like, Hey, what does your truck need to do per day so that you'll hit your yearly goal?
So I got hit hard in December with bonuses. So I promised bonuses but the way that the bonuses hit in like arguably some of the worst months of HVAC hurts. So I said, Hey, we're not doing that next year. We're going to do a monthly bonus based on performance.
That way you guys can make more, but also we can, focus on this. And so that has been the focus is we are doing a daily check on revenue on per truck revenue . I think I like that idea of like payroll, or how many hours did you work? Cause that's definitely a key point to it. so we're still so ironing those out
John Wilson: The polling the report is one thing. You go into, reports, you schedule it, you time it, whatever. Uh, If you're not on server titan, you can do it by hand or whatever software you're on. The next most important thing is how do you communicate it? And, so we've been reporting for years.
We have not been very effective. There's dashboards everywhere, so everyone sees everything. There's no like mystery. So when I say we're not good like communicating it, as a leadership team, we don't sit down daily and discuss yesterday. And we don't sit down daily discuss today.
So that's the thing that we're working to enhance. That's the basic that we're working to enhance.
That's part of it driving the leaders know what their goals are, but then how are they driving that to the team? Or is that just via the service side and dashboard?
So I would say that's our second one, is like tech transparency. So the second one is like techs just knowing what they're doing, what they're producing, Like, we want every single person in the company to know their number. So on their iPad and on dashboards all over the office, we have these like giant 50 inch TVs everywhere.
I think there's like 10 of them or something. There's like leaderboards ripped out of Service Titan, and then on every tech's iPad, they can see their own numbers. Here's my ticket, here's my total sales, here's my conversion, they can change today, yesterday, trailing 30, whatever measurement they want to make it.
Transparency in communication is a really big one. I don't even know what it would be like to not have a number transparent business. It's been seven years of i
Jack Carr: Every business been like that though. Fortune 500 companies, when I was managing Frito Lay teams of 50, right? We had dashboards and leaderboards for waste and for everything. It is definitely a key to change your business around like, we've talked about the focus. Is it, driving focus to an area makes that area better. And so, I mean, I love it. We are doing a Tuesday meeting with the entire team and that's when they see the leaderboards, but I'm wondering if there's a way to better be transparent.
John Wilson: You blast it over slack
Jack Carr: Blast over Slack. I was thinking automated blast over Slack daily
John Wilson: You can make that however your team is willing to bear it. At your own risk. But yeah, you can blast that, you can blast that one however you'd like. Yeah.
But, tech transparency is a big thing that we believe in.
Techs need to know their numbers. Business is a game, like this is all a game, I'm doing this for fun. And a game has scores. And you gotta know if you're winning or losing, right? And everybody needs to know if they're winning or losing. Like how many calls have you taken? How many calls have you booked?
What was your average call time? What's your total minutes on the phone? Boom. Great. Now where do you rank to your peers? Alright, what's your total sales? What's your average ticket? What's your conversion rate? What's your dollars per lead? Great. How do you rank your peers? So number transparency has been huge Techs need to know their numbers.
Third one is lead attribution Literally knowing where you got a lead from That's important. We're gonna spend a million dollars on advertising this year. That's a lot of money
Jack Carr: Super interested in this one.
John Wilson: I have not spent a million dollars on very many things I spend a million dollars normally know where it's going Like, I get a widget, or maybe like a business. But ad spend, it's harder to track.
Jack Carr: Yeah, we're having trouble with it right now.
John Wilson: Yeah, it's complicated. So whether it's ServiceTitan or whether it's something else, nailing down how you can track a lead, the reason this matters is In general, my belief for marketing channels is you should have, like, as few channels as reasonable, and put as much money into those channels as possible. I do not think that most companies should be a 20 channel business. I think that, like, we have 6, and we're gonna do 26 million bucks this year. Six channels, our job is to put as much freaking money into each of those channels because you want to find a winner and then you invest behind it, like, fastest horse. But the only way you know if it's a winner is if you can attribute where that lead came from. So tracking numbers, tracking links and trailing that all the way down to revenue dollars. Like how much, top line revenue did I drive from that campaign? That's obviously important, otherwise marketing is just a shooting in the dark, like you have no idea.
So you know what we find is hey our LSA campaign, maybe we drove a hundred grand off this LSA campaign. And the way we do that is by tracking phone numbers. So when the phone rings, it calls in to ServiceTitan and we mark that as a campaign. Again, just like anything else that we're going to talk about here, it doesn't have to be service titan, and there are likely other ways to do it, we just happen to do it in service ti tan That helps us track revenue to lead phone call, which is important, and helps us really figure out what marketing channels are working so that we can continue to invest behind the good ones.
Hey, this episode is sponsored by Service Scalers. So Service Scalers is actually a brand that I've used personally with our companies for a little bit over a year now. They've helped us manage our digital advertising. Frankly, they did a lot better than our last agency. Leads went through the roof and cost per click went way down.
Check out Service Scalers if you're a plumbing, HVAC, or electrical home service company. That's what they knock out of the park and they did a great job for me.
Jack Carr: So that's what I was going to ask is how are you doing that? Because asking where did you get that? Where did you hear about us? Where did you learn about us? Only works so far.
John Wilson: We have about a thousand tracking numbers. Um, Now, obviously that's too much, but you can categorize lead attribution. Like, maybe you say GMBs. And if I have 20 GMBs, then each one of them has a phone number. But, as a category, GMBs provided a million dollars of revenue last year.
Jack Carr: Yeah, that makes sense though. You've hit the nail on the head of my worry is I've been trying to avoid a thousand phone numbers. So we have, I think something like 18 or 20 of them
John Wilson: You don't to buy them. They just come with a service titan. You literally just click a button, you get more.
Jack Carr: I'll have to look into that.
John Wilson: You just go inside settings,
Jack Carr: So we've talked about this a little bit as well. It's the keep it simple thing. And I actually did a one of those mini episodes on that, keeping it simple in. And so our goal this year is actually to take all of our third party services and then consolidate them into service Titan to remove the kind of hecticness of what we had
John Wilson: yeah,
Jack Carr: using 10, 000 different other apps.
John Wilson: Yeah, we did that too, that, lead attribution has been a big project of ours
Jack Carr: Yeah, we're focusing on it this year and that's good to know that service Titan does free additional phone numbers because our other place charges us for phone numbers. I was paying five bucks times 20 bucks or 20 phone numbers a month and it starts adding up if I were to get to a thousand.
Right.
John Wilson: Every new postcard. Every new GMB, every new website, every new LSA account,
Jack Carr: Oh, that's good to know.
John Wilson: TV ads, new phone number. That way we can attribute the lead.
Jack Carr: Okay. Sweet. Yeah. I think this is a huge one. It's one of the harder ones it's simple, but not easy.
It's very difficult to put the systems in place to correctly attribute all the money and where it's coming
John Wilson: Totally.
Yeah. Like, we think we're gonna get to 80% attribution. and, that means 200 grand. Like, to put that in perspective, that means 200 grand we're not gonna know. I don't know about you, but 200 grand's a lot, that's a lot of money, to me, uh, It's weird. Obviously, hopefully we'll try to beat that, but that's what we think.
Uh, Next one up, job costing. Job costing is very burdensome. In an ideal world, you job cost every single job. But, I know that is resource intensive. That takes a human. Like, currently. And there's things you can put in place to make that not take a human.
But like, that right now, that takes a human. And that's payroll, and it's hard to do that as a small company. We close 200 invoices a day. So to job cost 200 invoices a day is a real task. It's a Herculean task. If you don't have the processes to map it out. I'm sure just like anything else, there are other ways to do it.
ServiceTitan does do that for us and the way we do it is the labor's already in there because we use ServiceTitan for timesheets and we just add in the materials as it comes in. Now something that's cool as we're updating our price book is it's going to start automatically job costing based off purchased materials through the PO system that we're adding in there.
But all that to say, like, Job costing is important. You need to know what's happening on every job, and it helps you identify problems really fast. And the moment you stop, the moment you take your eye off the ball on job costing, you're gonna start losing somewhere. Something's gonna go down. You gotta get a handle on that.
Like, we'll stop looking at it for a month. It's a muscle that we've continued to have to get stronger. Like, oh hey, we lose track of daily job costing, which we do daily and we hand out daily problems to people. Like that, along with our DME, the Daily Management Essentials Report, that I said earlier is on people's desks by 10, their job costing problems are on their desk also by 10.
Print it out. Here's your job costing problem. Like, your materials was 50 percent of revenue on this job. Here it is. Here's a printout. See if it's a one time thing, or if it's a pricing problem.
Jack Carr: Okay. You get a pricing problem. You go in and price book and change it up.
John Wilson: It's meant to create a fast feedback loop on pricing. Cause what's happened is like, It was in 2022 that we lost 100 on every toilet we installed. And we install a lot of toilets. And we didn't know. We didn't have the muscle inside our business and we didn't set up the process inside ServiceTitan to job cost every single job.
So we made that a bid focus and now we print them out every single day, hand it over to whoever the responsible manager is.
Jack Carr: I mean that's huge. This is one of the service Titan parts. That's so difficult to set up to
John Wilson: Well it takes people.
And it's like input, like, vendors, who knows how they're gonna send you an invoice, then you have to get it in, you have to add the dollar amount. It's complicated.
But, the thing that I like is it's attached to the job, which makes it easy to find. Because we used to do job costings outside of ServiceTitan.
Possible, obviously, very possible. But you used to have to go into a Google Drive and a spreadsheet and like find it, and it took ten minutes per problem. And now it's like ten seconds. Like it's right frickin there.
Jack Carr: Yeah. I mean what do you think the easiest way to get that set up is? You nailed the hit the head on the nail is the easiest parts. What you make revenue, it automatically goes in there.
John Wilson: Timesheets is next, as long as you're using their time sheets.
Jack Carr: So we have those we've been avoiding the material side to it because a burdensome giant. And so do you go in and manually enter there on every job and enter material
John Wilson: Get a VA. Get a part VA.
Now, there is a PO system, but it takes a lot of setup. We're three or four months into it.
Jack Carr: Cause your VMI should eventually talk to it right
John Wilson: So that's a part of it. For us, it'll be like an eight month total project. So last July, we were like, hey, we want to use this part of the software, the purchase order part. And they're like, okay, how good's your price book? Answer, not very. Okay, how good's your inventory?
Answer, not very. So like, if you're better than us, then it won't take you eight months. But like, for us, it took eight months, because we had to, like, fully onboard two VMI partners. And then, we had to completely uproot our price book, which we just started Monday. Two days ago. So it's a multi month process for us.
We're hoping to be done by the end of March. But, really big process to get that. But when it's done, job costing will be automatic. So the juice will be worth the squeeze.
Jack Carr: Very interesting. It's something we do on big projects, but we don't it on small projects. And I bet that there's some, toilet issues in there that we run into just because realistically, right. just taking one example that I deal with quite a bit is blower motors, man.
Blower motors can range on ECMs to regular from freaking a hundred bucks to like 1400 and there's flat rate. Who knows many of those you miss. So I keep track of it because it's a known issue point. But there's other things out there like that. Boards and old equipment that, man, prices are sky high on those things.
It's a great one and it's something that you really need to actively put your focus into to get to that point.
John Wilson: I'm saying this knowing that it's difficult, the smaller you are, because it does just take resources. It takes cash. But you'll never get the cash if you don't know if you're losing a hundred bucks on every toilet.
Jack Carr: Yeah, I mean, realistically, it's not that difficult to do manually. smaller you are, the less jobs you're doing per day so
John Wilson: For us, we have, yeah, 200 invoices a day. With two to three hundred vendor invoices a day, so it is a task, but even at our size it's only a task for someone two or three hours a day. part time job.
Jack Carr: it's also a very good exercise in getting your SOPs correctly, right? When you're running the 200, 300, 400, 500 invoices in a day, making sure that the guys are putting in the POS correctly, the job names correctly. I don't know if number system or a last name or street address, but making sure that all of those pieces line up so that you can get the information easy and then do it.
John Wilson: Definitely makes you get better yeah, that's a good one.
And my last one is monitoring what happens on the phone call. So that's an important one. Every position has a measurement. Technicians have sales, conversion, all that stuff.
And CSRs or ISRs or DSRs or whatever that role is inside your business has total phone calls, inbound and out, book rate and those are important and really difficult. I'm sure there is a software somewhere that will do it. I don't know what it would be. I haven't seen another one. Maybe like Housecall or something does it.
But regardless, we use a service type and I'm sure there's something else that does it. But that is fundamental. Like, that's up there with lead attribution. Like, are you booking calls? And if you're not booking calls, can you listen to the phone calls later and coach? And can your techs listen to the phone calls when they go out on a job and figure out what the actual problem is?
Like, what did the customer actually say? The phone side is important, like the only way you get work is if you book calls, and the only way you book calls is by continually getting better inside your call center. So you need to be able to support your call takers with recorded lines, that way you can listen and coach on everything.
They need to know their numbers, like are they winning? So we require our call takers to do 80 calls a day, in or out. If there's not 80 calls in, then you will make up the difference in out. And they need to know that score, so they know where they're at for the day. We aim for an 80 percent book rate on in, a 5 percent book rate on outs.
They need to know that. So having a dashboard of data for that like really fundamental piece of what you're doing is important. And this is back to like just having the basics nailed down. Like these are the basics. Like these five things that I talked about that were my important things. They probably sound like not complicated, right?
It's like, hey, have numbers. Know your numbers. Present your numbers. Give call takers access to their numbers. Job cost. Know where a lead came in. It's not like, big complicated things, but these are the things that are the foundation, uh, for your business. Yeah, this is how you get to the next level, is by getting the first level right.
Jack Carr: And really that last one's interesting because it's one of these typically ignored areas of like we said, you have Betsy who's been there for 40 years and
John Wilson: Nobody's tracking her book rate ,
Jack Carr: just has been there for so long that she knows where all the skeletons are and knows all people and whatever.
But realistically to scale past that point, And that's a very good key is one having quantitative goals for them. Like the 80 in or out or 50 80 percent 2%. Like those are all things that I don't think any small business or most small businesses under. Two, three million, they're, nobody's thinking about that.
They're just saying, shit, we need to get more phone calls and answer the phones. But realistically, that's the drive is if you can't measure it you're not gonna be able to improve on it.
John Wilson: Yeah. If you can't measure it, and then, like, something that I'm passionate about is that everyone should know if they're winning or losing in, like, one second. You should be able to, in one second, look at your score. If I'm playing basketball, I can look up at the scoreboard and I know who's winning.
Should be the same thing here. So, Accessible information
Jack Carr: Do you play basketball?
John Wilson: If i'm playing Call of Duty I should be able to know if i'm winning. Which, obviously always winning. But yeah, I think people need to know their score really quick.
Jack Carr: Agreed. I had a long talk with my service manager over this exact thing is he wanted to create this extravagant like, well, the months different, you know, you can't give them a too high of a goal on a month and dah. And I said, nobody's going to be able to track.
If you change it, they need to hit 20, 000 this month, 19, 800 this month, 16, 27, 32 50. No, just make it 21 for the first three, 27 for the next six and 21 for the last three. Like it needs to be simple. I'd rather pay out a little more if they can hit those goals and bonuses because we lined it out then to give them a weird bonus that they can't track themselves
John Wilson: I totally agree. So yeah get the basics right. Keep them simple and these are the basics, but they're complicated, right? Like, you have to, if not service titan, great. But like, you gotta find a way to show that information somewhere to the team, so that the people responsible and accountable for those numbers know their score.
They gotta be able to see it.
Quickly.
Jack Carr: I mean prove the point you're seven years in right now, right? And you're just getting it. You'd say you just lining all this out at least some of them still
John Wilson: It's all been lined out. I would say that we're making more use of it. Like, we should have been making more use of it. We've had it for years, but, like, we weren't really diving It was rudimentary.
Jack Carr: Yeah, you know you were supposed to be doing it, but you didn't
John Wilson: Yeah, we didn't own it. Yeah. And now leaderboards people really like people get coached to their KPIs, which is helpful and behaviors.
In the past year or two, as the team has matured, we've been able to dive deeper than the surface of like, Oh, here's the numbers. It's like, okay, here's the numbers. Here's what they mean. And here's how we can improve them. But it starts with, here's the numbers.
Jack Carr: Yeah, definitely
John Wilson: Sweet, yeah. We appreciate the listener submitted question. So thank you, Dan, and also thanks for listening. I think that is hilarious. If you like what we're talking about, check out OwnedandOperated.com Sign up for the newsletter, we're dropping just, bombs of knowledge every week.
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Jack Carr: Thank y'all
John Wilson: Thanks for tuning in to Owned and Operated, the podcast for home service entrepreneurs. If you enjoyed today's episode, please hit the like button and subscribe to the podcast. If you have any questions or topics you'd like us to cover, feel free to reach out. You can find me on Twitter at at Wilson companies.
I'll see you next time.