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Electrician U
Streamline Your Trade Business with Housecall Pro
Join Dustin from Electrician U and Brooks Pettus from Housecall Pro as they dive into the ins and outs of managing jobs and customers in the trades industry. In this episode, they cover:
- An introduction to Housecall Pro and its mission to support tradespeople with easy-to-use software.
- Discussions on the challenges tradespeople face when transitioning from skilled work to running their own businesses.
- Insights into the role of technology in streamlining operations, from scheduling and dispatching to invoicing and managing customer relationships.
- Real-world examples of how Housecall Pro helps businesses grow by simplifying daily operations and increasing customer trust.
- A look into the future of the trades industry and how emerging technologies can further support small business success.
Dustin and Brooks share personal stories, practical advice, and answer key questions to help tradespeople navigate their business journeys. Whether you’re a seasoned professional or just starting, this conversation offers valuable insights into making your business more efficient and profitable.
Want to learn more about becoming an electrician or mastering the craft? Visit ElectricianU.com for courses, resources, and everything you need to succeed!
What's up my friends, dustin Stelzer with Electrician U, today we have a guest. We have Brooks Pettis from Housecall Pro. For those of you that don't know what Housecall Pro is actually, brooks, why don't I let you sell your own company?
Brooks:Yeah, that's a great idea, Nice to see you.
Dustin:It's great to be here today. Yeah, welcome.
Brooks:Congratulations to you as well on all of your success momentum you have in helping people in the trades. I think that's very close to your sense of motivation, is very similar to Housecall Pro's sense of purpose, like I joined this company seven years ago and we were roughly a thousand pros signed up for our technology and you know, we were a very small company back then and we had this mission. We did a mission because our founder one of our three founders, core founders and then CEO, ian Hite. I met with him that first day when I was interviewing him to take this job and he had this obsession obsession around helping people like his dad Butch. His dad Butch was a painter. He grew up in a family of the trades, saw how hard his dad worked, could always provide for his family Really hard for him to go build a small business successfully. And Ian is wicked smart. When I say smart like off the chain smart, he's like hey, we can help people like my dad do better.
Brooks:And we built a company called House Call Pro to give people like Butch in the trades software and services that align with our mission, like help pros get to success, champion them all the way to success. And we built this company around really easy to use software that could be an operating system for your small business, like schedule, dispatch, invoice, get paid, manage reputation. That is the core of what Housecall Pro does today, and today is for tens of thousands of pros who have subscribed to our offering and we're north of 40,000 people that subscribe to the product Hundreds of thousands of actual users on the product every single day, with tens of billions of GMB flowing through all the jobs they're doing, flowing through our business. It's a remarkable company, yet it all comes back to the same mission, the same sense of purpose you have, I think, which is caring for investing in the success of people in the trades so they can be better off tomorrow than they are right now, and that's the whole business built about it.
Brooks:So I've been here for seven years and built this company with the founders through this incredible story arc. Yet I will tell you, everything we do today is as aligned with the reason I came to this business seven years ago. It's just service to people in the trades and them getting to a better probability of outcome and succeeding. They can take care of their families. They can care of their employees, take care of and be a part of their community as well. Remarkable.
Dustin:Yeah, I think the biggest thing that a lot of people don't really realize when they're in the trades you know they're journeymen, they've been doing this for 10 years, they're like really skilled at what they do. But once you get a master license or you get a contractor's license and you decide to go out on your own, you don't realize that you're now an apprentice in a new trade that you have no clue about. You don't know revenue margin, you don't know coming up with, you know what your price should be or how to track customers and have a database of your customers and follow up. There's so much to know that I think even now, with as much as technology is increasing, especially for the younger generations, I think having new technologies that are as simple as literally picking up your phone and running your entire operation off that phone, it's key and we have to have that.
Brooks:I couldn't agree with you more. This medium is where the pros live every day. I mean, our customers are on that platform in their office eight to nine hours a day. If you're on the field, you're on that thing two and a half to three hours a day Running your business from your phone. That's how we built the company. Now there's bigger companies that use us, bigger shops that use us. They have people in the office, they have people all over.
Brooks:We really built the software for whether it's somebody who's a boomer, a Gen Xer or a Gen Z millennial, anywhere in that spectrum where you can use technology and be successful. It has to be easy to use. It has to be wildly simple and intuitive to fat, thumb it out in the field or to type away at your desk if you're in the office. Yeah, and that's really what the founder's vision was. Is that technology? I mean it's just everything's going to go from offline to online, right, everything in our world that we live in. It's just a question of when, not if. Had that vision, I said let's build really easy to use software mobile first, ideally on the phone that can help that pro run their business from the field or their office and be successful. And, to your point, like most of those pros, our customers are amazingly successful at doing the work and they figure out how to take care of their customer.
Brooks:Running a small business, building a successful small business I might as well be asking them to learn Greek. It is freaking hard and yet they figured out on their own, trial and error. Many of them fail, yet they partnered with Housecall Pro and we radically increased our odds of succeeding and growing. They grow like 30% their first year when they go on to software. Why? Because it's like a systematic approach to running a small business and they win and it's like, oh my God, it's like life changing. So, yeah, technology is pervasive. It's just a question of like, not if you're going to adopt it, when you're going to adopt it and how. What you're motivated to do to get there sooner than later, hopefully, yeah.
Dustin:Yeah, contracting company. When I first started up, I was using hand scratch methods, like I was taught by the older generation before me. A lot of them were going out and highlighting all of their material takeoffs on a plan and they were writing things down by hand and they were writing phone numbers, but then you end up losing track of that, and so I saw some other companies that had really great file management, but it's literally folders and files hung on walls of every customer. Yeah, and then when you got to go dig for something you're digging through like drawers of cabinets, of stuff, and it's just it was, it was great Copy paper.
Brooks:You're like oh my God.
Dustin:Yeah, we had service books that you know the text would go out in the field and they'd write task one, task two. Here's what we did Handwrite a bill, hold it, you know, and we tear off the yellow copy and keep that and it was great. That has worked for so long. But the second I was introduced to Housecall Pro by somebody that was an HVAC friend of mine that just started his own company. He was like dude, I have this app and it's so intuitive and so easy to use and I have all my customers data here I can communicate from if I want to tell the customer I'm on the way or if I want to set reminders that, hey, there's a tech coming out in two days just to you know, remind you to like be home and let us in, like little things like that, we're so amazing.
Dustin:And then a central database of every job that I've done, with a history of what I've invoiced, what I've built. You guys had custom pricing so I could put different items that I do a lot. Yeah, it was just like oh, this is amazing, I don't have to know, I don't have to have years of experience learning from somebody how to do this, because it's all right here.
Brooks:So I mean it should just be like a playbook that you quickly just wait in to understand. Like that on my way text was by far the most adopted, easiest to understand feature that we built in those early days and now it's very common in almost any kind of software. Whether you go to the dentist or whether you go into your doctor, whether you're doing a job at a home, the courtesy of reminder, the courtesy of on-my-way. But back then, seven years ago, eight years ago, these guys started this business up. It was a game changer because it built trust and the pro like in their primordial brain. They know that customer care really matters, not just the quality of work. Like here's an example like in your trade, I can't like the lights go on or they don't Like. That's all I can tell you about whether electrical work is successful yeah, that's all I can tell you about whether electrical work is successful. Yeah. Yet everything in the trades? There's a great lesson for anyone doing the work that we've just seen the pattern of all these customers we have is that the great pros quickly figure out it's not the work itself, it is the trust they build, it is the feeling they engender that they create with their customer that they create with their customer.
Brooks:Does my wife feel safe inviting you strange guy into her house when I'm not home and doing work in her home? That's actually the whole deal of the deal. Like that creates the reminders of when the job is the easy communication path, that on-my-way notification, so she's out running air, she can come home and be here ready, like literally when my wife feels safe. When pros come to our house, she will literally give them coffee, make them cookies to say thank you and for doing the job, the trust that's built. And on my way notification was a game changer early on along that path. And when our pros kind of like you're talking about, they figure out, hey, there's this, you know old world process I had, I got pen and paper, I got stuff on a whiteboard over here. That's fine, it works, it works.
Brooks:Yet when I can use technology, take that big step forward in the brave new world of technology, I can create more trust with Mrs Pettis, with the customer, and that's when the light bulb goes on Like holy crap. Trust equals more success, equals customer. I have for a lifetime and that same woman, my wife, would go tell all her friends and refer business over to you, and that's the magic that happens in these companies, and it's because technology enabled a feeling. It's a sort of perverse thing, but the technology enabled a feeling because it made things easier, more predictable, a feeling of being safer in your home. And that was like the big aha moment that the founders, our product wizards, figured out that they could create feeling through emotion. That is automated in software and boom, off you go. And so all I had to do was go tell the story as a sales team and go sell that narrative, and it's done incredibly well for us. We've been really blessed.
Dustin:Yeah, I mean you're kind of positioning yourself as a guru, sort of to solve a problem. Have you heard of the book?
Brooks:StoryBrand. No, I don't know. I'd love to hear about it.
Dustin:Okay, so if you read business books at all, storybrand is a really simplified model. It's kind of the hero's journey of you know, like the Lion King or Harry Potter, where somebody's going on a journey and they meet a guru that gives them some skills and helps them get to the end and save the day. So positioning your brand to be the guru, not the star of the show because the customer is the star of the show but trying to figure out what is the biggest problem for the customer and how can we offer something that makes them the hero and it keeps them away from the bad thing and brings them towards the good thing. But it's a really good book and it helps you kind of position and like think about how you position your company in that way.
Brooks:Yeah, Dustin, have you told me that after we talked today I'd love to read, cause I read books all the time, trying to find these little kernels of truth that I could borrow, steal whatever it is, and I incorporate them and appropriate them in my own philosophy of success and leading others and serving our customer, which is exactly the deal. That magic is, that moment of hero is the customer feels safe. They want us to come in their home and do the work and they'll invite us back.
Brooks:And when you hit that magical moment, then you're creating these lifetime value customers and everything changes in your business. Like most brokers, just think it's about the next customer, next customer, next customer, next job, next job, next job. It really isn't Like the magic and we have a product that Service agreements, that manages this and teaching pros like I have. These guys came here. I'll tell you a story about this. So, moving this house a year and a half ago, I've had a dozen different trades. People come here and I only let house call pro come here because I you know you're going to be a house call pro user or you're going to get a demo If you want to come work at my home at this point, because I just want to create that. I want to get more technology to life.
Brooks:This guy comes yesterday to go clean my windows and he had started the program about six months ago. He was hacking his way through the program, yet it was light years ahead of anything he'd been doing before in the pen and paper world, so he was using a fraction of what we could do because he just hadn't paid attention, done any training, he just bad-thumbed it. He was already a huge step forward and then we started talking about service agreements. I was like all right, you want to come clean these windows how often in my house? Typically he goes. Well, you know, better be three months.
Brooks:I said, well, we got a tool for that. Build a service agreement where you literally I sign up for a monthly program with you. I'm going to pay you 10 bucks a month as a kind of Netflix fee to your business and I get a 10% discount on any services I have and I'm committing to. Four times a year you come to my home and I literally wrote the service agreement out with him so that he could create a recurring revenue model. I nor my wife will never think about who cleans our windows or our solar panels in this house ever again.
Brooks:Because Squeegee Bros will be back in here every three months because that service agreement, which is a tool in Housecall Pro that they wouldn't have had otherwise, it's all right there in the flow and they're now creating a better business, right, because that customer is a customer for a lifetime that will go refer to people all things are said so like that's. The magic of technology is that it helps pros get from that old world to the new world and do things better, it's easier, it generates more revenue with them, generates more profit with them. Suddenly they're successful as both the work and as being an entrepreneur, as in being a small business person. It's unbelievable, like life-changing kind of stuff.
Dustin:Yeah Well, and it it also can inform people that aren't in the know about the way of doing things without them having to learn it. So, like having a service agreement. A lot of people not might not know what a service agreement is. And so when they have an app that like has an option for a service agreement, and they're like, oh my God, I can get recurring revenue from customers if I have a service, you know, or even invoicing.
Dustin:You know people that have never put an actual invoice or an estimate together. The fact that you guys already prompt with each thing here's what you need to do and here's how you send it and here's how you make an invoice out of it. It's just genius and I think you guys are doing really great with it.
Brooks:Yeah, it is an incredible company. We went back to this, so the way the business has evolved is interesting. All around technology and services right, but core operating system, schedule, dispatch, invoice, get paid, manage reputation. It's been that way for seven years. That's the core of what we do. Today, though, we have literally become a one-stop shop, single sign-on solution for the pro, except for turning the wrench. Take care of that customer, we will give you a product or service and the support to do anything else you want to do in that small business. And again, we create so much value with such a really compelling price point that the pro has to say yes. They say hell, yes every time, like oh, hell, yeah, that's going to change my life. They don't always get that much religion on day one. Most people don't Right, because they kind of like that pen and paper and the whiteboard. They like their old way of cobbling weird conclusions together, because it worked.
Dustin:Yeah, it's something they know, it's familiar.
Brooks:Yeah, it's familiar and and they felt successful with it. What we just try to say is that we can help you do better. But there's a better way to do this. Your way is good. There's just a better way to do it.
Brooks:Let the technology to your point get you from A to B to C to D in a logical path that we know is really repeatable. It gets you to a five-star experience. It gets you to that repeat customer lifetime value customer and that's when the great things happen. So that repeat customer lifetime value customer and that's when the great things happen. So, like old world, new world. It's like old world worked Brave, new world is better. We can help you get there.
Brooks:We'll be your partner, we'll serve you and we are wholly about that customer success and that's why we've been as blessed as we have as a company. It's that sense of purpose and the way we built that software and the way we serve the pro, and I'll tell you it's the greatest job in the world watching pros get to success. Yeah, like this kid here yesterday hacking his way through his small business, successful despite himself, because of himself, all the things right, and yet I taught him like three things when he was here and he's already today, like in our coaching program today versus yesterday, and he went through onboarding this morning to actually learn how to use all the things the right way and like it's just like these light bulb moments and those are like we were like so lucky to get to do what we do every day.
Brooks:It's amazing, yeah.
Dustin:That's funny. That's what I like about teaching. It's like having an apprentice that you've told something seven times to. They have no clue and you know they're trying and trying and then they finally get it one day and they're like oh, it's like that moment. I love that moment.
Brooks:It's the big aha moment, right, like I've had them in my life just so many times. And to watch that, like literally watch their eyes just light up, like, oh, now I get what you're talking about, oh, that's going to help me do this, and that it's just like there's no better business to be in. I can imagine it really is awesome.
Dustin:Yeah, so have you. When you first started House Call Pro, was it aimed at like a specific trade, or was the intent always to just let all trades use it?
Brooks:So originally the business before I got here and I joined the founders again seven years ago or so it was going to be a marketplace to kind of match up the consumer that needed to go find a pro. But it didn't have a really good repeatable nature to it. You can find that customer. It goes off book, like so many marketplaces that are founders. As smart as they are. They figured out well, there's a better way to do it. Let's just build an operating system that helps the butches of the world actually run their business, versus go trying to find a customer. So they built the operating system and with that we found our early success and it was really like a one person shops and it was largely carpet cleaners. Carpet cleaners come in three hour job. They can do two, three jobs in a day. I get the job on the spot, I do the work on the spot, I give you the invoice. So the operating system at its core really serve that pros out in the field and something that's really repeatable and clear and similar price point all day long, like carpet cleaning.
Brooks:Yeah, over time we've seen the mechanical trades explode. So HVAC, plumbing, electrical. You throw a couple more in there that are like those three, but those are the biggest lion's share of the business today because of a whole range of factors. But the jobs make up largely 80% are residential, 20% commercial. They're repeatable kind of jobs. They're easy to use a price book you go bid the job, you estimate job, you do the things in the operating system and that's the audience that's really taken off at a faster clip than all the audience I mean. Honestly, dustin, we have like 100 different trades that use our operating system today. It's bananas If you read something like you got to be kidding me like that. But if they do a job in the home or on some light commercial site, it's a great fit for them. And so the business has gone from carpet cleaner out in the field to typically five to 10 person companies that are using this. It's still very small businesses and helps them all just do the things they need to do on the day to day to win.
Dustin:Yeah, and it seems like it's been a few years since I've used your guys' software, but it seemed, at the time at least, that it was service based, strictly service based, is there? What about the somebody out there that's like running a job site where they're on a job for eight months?
Brooks:Yeah, that's probably not our game Now. We invested in the company that is doing remodeling work and sort of longer term projects in the home, so we do have, like there's more kind of project management, long term estimates feeding back towards an estimate progress report, like then we have a business that actually serves that sector, oh OK. Yet the core of what Housecall Pro does is residential, like commercial. Where you're in a job is probably two weeks or less it's a typical timeframe and the vast majority of jobs are done inside of three days and the majority are certainly done within a day or on the spot. So it's just the nature of where a customer is Like. It isn't long-term project management for construction sites. That's just not a sector we go into, at least not yet Today. It's really a residential experience, probably in a day to two weeks on average, and that's how we help the pro get things done.
Dustin:Yeah, I've noticed that. Just I'm fortunate enough to like talk to a lot of brands and developers of technology and stuff and it seems like it's nearly impossible or it's just ungodly expensive to try to build the one app that does it all for long-term construction as well as service calls, and I guess largely a lot of the companies out there are kind of one way or the other. You're either service or you're new construction, but it seems like these bigger companies will have new construction as their 80% core but they're still doing 20% service calls constantly.
Brooks:They always have a service Well, not always. Most will have a service division because it's good margin and it keeps their crews rolling around the edges of things and develops new customer bases to some of the bigger projects. And so if you're doing a big commercial, multi-year building a hospital or building an airport terminal, that's probably not for us, but some of the work that comes to play as a sub along that way you're probably going to find a good fit with Housecall Pro and new home construction not dissimilar tend to be longer-term projects with a lot of dimensions to it. Now, again, the company we invested in has that dimension, so we're going to be able to offer that too. But again, like the two year, building an airport, probably not going to be us anytime soon, but building a new home all the way back to remodel, all the way back to the residential service install, that's our wheelhouse.
Dustin:So what would you say? Your scale? What kind of scale of customers do you have? Like is it? If you get somebody in? They start their company. They got five, 10 techs. After a couple of years they get 20, 30. Is Housecall Pro a product that can scale up to like 100, 200 employees?
Brooks:That's a great question and you know, if you'd asked me that question two years ago I'd be like we're probably good to one to 10. Really like at our wheelhouse is one to 10. In the last couple of years we took our product and engineering teams and basically 10x the size of it. It was a huge investment in our technology team. So we go build more stuff, just start shipping code and we ended up building a whole suite of tools and solutions to deal with that bigger customer, that more sophisticated customer who's running a multi-dimension business, who's probably now hung his boots up or her boots up, not on the field, very often back in the office really operating as an operator. And so that kind of 1 to 10 wheelhouse of two years ago we sort of focus on 1 to 20.
Brooks:It really is you pick up the shoulders up to 20, 30, 40 trucks. You can still run that business on Housecall Pro and we call it the midsize customer at that point and we have a really strong offering from top to bottom for that pro who's a full-time operator running that business and thinking about growing two or three trucks every year and making that capital investment to do so and has that vision. We can give you all the tools, all the services you need to be a midsize operator today. Now you're running 100 trucks to 200 trucks. There might be a competitor that likes that business better than us. Just not a place we extend into. But we have pros that have hundreds of customers. It's just not the typical in our bread basket, bread and butter every day, kind of pro. Just think 1 to 20, really kind of 20, 30, 40 person businesses. Man, we can just give you unbelievable value in that size company today.
Dustin:Well, I'm sure two companies that are running $200 million a year revenue, they probably have custom stuff created specifically for their business.
Brooks:Yeah, my brother-in-law had an HVAC company built, it sold it became part of a big roll-up and at some point they outgrow anybody who's going to be a SaaS product and they go build their own solution. At that point Just the way that accounting works, the way they think about managing networks all over the country they'll outgrow everybody and start building a proprietary passage, if I get Exactly right. So pretty typical. But look, I mean it's a pyramid, right, like there aren't that many companies up here, the pointy end of the pyramid. All the companies are in that one to 10 space. I mean, if there's a couple million companies in the trades, the vast and I mean like 78% of them live in the base not up near the top of the pyramid.
Dustin:That's just a very small addressable market ultimately. Yeah, yeah, I mean it takes a lot to transition yourself to wanting to be in a local city and have a couple, maybe a couple of different branches in neighboring cities to wanting to be a nationwide enterprise. That takes a certain kind of person, I think, to want to be able to do something like that Certain kind of vision certain kind of person I think to want to be able to do something like that.
Brooks:So Certain kind of vision, certain kind of operator, unbelievable systems installed at that point that scale. Everything in my life is about how do you take something from zero to one, zero to 10, zero to a hundred and scale it up. You know just what I do for a living. And finding people that can operate like that at that frequency are very few and far between. But that can operate like that at that frequency are very few and far between. But we have them.
Brooks:I can't believe it. We have a lot of franchisors come to Housecall Pro and they have their parent, we call them. They have all these children accounts, dozens of them, even hundreds of them that they want to go operate all those children accounts with the children to help them do better. They're a franchisor and the franchisees they need that tooling and reporting and visibility from getting help and so that parent-child structure works well for people who operate multiple geos but it is the exception of the rule Like most of our guys are just one to ten-person shops out there building a great small business that can provide a great living for them and their family. So it's amazing.
Dustin:Yeah, that's really great. That was something interesting I've been looking into lately is just the franchise model and how the parent can kind of still have some sort of optics on what the company is doing and the finances and the customers and everything, because they are the parent. It's their brand, but that's interesting. So is that a different product within Housecall Pro or is it still just all the same product?
Brooks:No, it's just a number of features we just built mostly around access to, again with permissions For parents to be able to see the children account and then reporting that works for the children account and rolls up to the parent as well, so that the parent can help them and also have like a lot of franchise models that are centralized, have a royalty structure they want to actually have, they have the rights to, they want the visibility into the accounting. We just built some functionality around that to make it easier. I mean most of like for 99% of our acquisition in this business over the years I've been here. It's kind of one by one you go find a pro, you get that pro on board, you help that pro to success. We just have a small part of our business that manages this parent, child or one to many approaches that we have.
Dustin:So yeah, Well, okay, so shifting direction a little bit. You, you're in this unique place where you are collecting an immense amount of data about people in the trades, and I I know people are always like, oh, they're stealing our data and you're like that's a trigger word. But what I mean by taking data is you're you're collecting information about what kind of work is being done in the trades, who's doing it, income levels, Having databases of customers and electrical contracting companies is actually really great, and to be able to utilize that data, I think, is really important. There's this weird intersection of AI that's happening right now. Ai that's happening right now, too. So are you, do you guys have any sort of um? Do you have any sort of view into AI? Well, let me start with that before we get into data. What? Do you have any kind of use case for AI that you guys are looking into?
Brooks:Sure, I mean, think about the premise of what AI is, regardless of what all the media hype is and all that kind of BS you listen to hear about, right? So AI at its core should be an augmentation to your intelligence, your knowledge, your capacity to make good decisions At its simplest pace. Imagine, like, imagine just being 20 points smarter tomorrow than you are today. Your IQ goes up by 20 points. Imagine that, like, how empowering, how powerful that premise is empowering how powerful that premise is, and so all AI does, is it mines information databases and learns how to make that information useful to the human. Yeah, right, so that you can do something better, so that you can be more efficient, so that you can be make wiser choices. I mean, that's really the premise of AI in the modern world. It's that simple, like, there's nothing malicious about it. There's nothing even that grand about it, other than just use information that exists, organize it in a way to help humans be smarter in their decision-making or in their process, and it's pure as foreign. So we have lots of information with tens and tens of thousands of customers. We have lots of information on behaviors. Right, it's not about your information and your name or your customer details. That's yours. But there's behavioral things that we see happen and how the product gets used, and we can see the patterns and the machine can see that really well and it can essentially coach you, give you advice on how to do something. So I think AI is going to be pervasive in our lives. I mean, if people haven't accepted that idea, it's a coming Like. It's a coming like it's just it's coming, it's coming, it's coming faster than your life, right From how you talk to Alexa to how you think about making decisions every day. And so as a business, we want to have a point of view on that and say if we can help the pro make better decisions with some kind of augmented way of thinking than we want Like.
Brooks:Again, our whole mission is to help the pro to get success. If AI can be part of that work stream every day and help you make better decisions as a pro and increase the odds of succeeding and thriving as a service professional, then we've done our work. That's our job, our whole purpose as a company. So to date it's been through. Here's the system of operating system, there's the tools, here are the services. Tomorrow that will be augmented by hiring a team member that is leveraging information versus. They work 24 hours a day. They can help you do X and Y and Z. And again, kudos to our founders and their vision on how do you do that, how do you take all this information that exists out there in the universe and help our pros make better decisions every day by giving them this other team member, or two or three or four that can do these extraordinary things 24-7?. And so that's really our vision. That's where we're headed.
Dustin:Yeah, and that's kind of where I was going with the consumer data. Y'all are mining behaviors and capturing not even just maybe what a business owner is deciding to charge, how much margin, how many kinds of jobs they do over a certain amount of time, so that you can give insights on. Maybe you guys should change your pricing to this, give insights on, on, you know, like maybe you guys should change your pricing to this even just just mining all like you wouldn't.
Brooks:It's an incredible amount of information we've produced over the years on help articles. Right, yeah, but kind of all the answers are in the help articles that we created to feedback to our customer. But most people just don't. It's hard to access, it doesn't have a usability factor to it. But if you actually went through and read, like whoever reads a manual, you actually read the manual, you'd be smart at the end of it.
Brooks:So imagine having all of our help articles organized and then extracting that information and feeding it to you in an intuitive way as a pro. So you're like, oh, I need to do this to set up the on my way text. Okay, I know how to do that, yeah. Or, more importantly, you say here's why you want to use the on my way text at this moment, in this circumstance, if you didn't think to do it on your own. And again, it just makes you smarter, it makes it more intuitive for you to operate that small business Like go back to the beginning of this conversation doing the work easy, highly skilled, highly confident, building and running a small business really freaking hard. I'm like so hard. And if you can make that second thing a little bit easier for them by helping them understand what to do, when to do it, how to do it. Man, that's just an incredible blessing and that's what we're pursuing all those lives.
Dustin:Yeah, you know, what's interesting is being that video content creation is what I do now. Yeah, really well, as it turns out, thank you. Well, what I've realized is there's this massive shift in people's patience and not even just like my kids' generation. I used to always think, like my kids, they don't even know what patience is anymore because of this, this fast, you know everything's fast, fast, fast. But it's extending now into my generation, into my parents' generation is like we're all people of far less patience. So, rather than sitting and reading a help article where it's going to take me 10 minutes if I'm dyslexic it might take me 15 and I'm circularly reading and having a short little one minute video. I wonder if you guys have thought of this yet, of having like these little tool tips that help people with things that are just really quick, concise video. Like these little tool tips that help people with things that are just really quick, concise video.
Brooks:We're already testing along those lines. We have a platform that inserts, like a building, a service agreement. What's the best way to build my service agreement? Like show me the templates and imagine having just a little 30 second to a minute and a half long video that shows you, tells you how. Because you're exactly right. I mean, people don't read anymore, they watch, and I can literally watch a YouTube video that will tell me how to do anything I want to do practically in this universe.
Brooks:And that's just the way people search and the way they learn today is obviously through video. And so when you can find any medium that helps the person engage, the information to get to that better decision, you've been really successful on those lines. That's our job. It's like help the pro get to the better outcome, help them be successful. Video is one aspect of it. It's very consumable, it's the way they search, it's the way they learn. Again, the machine AI will eventually coach them in real time along the way around how to do something, the best way, what's the right way to do it, why they should do it Again, so they can make quick little decisions, not just big ones on doing X or Y, and we can give them information to do so. So, again, everything in our philosophy of support and service is built around just helping you do better. There are new ways to do that every day. I think AI just happens to be a big one. It's going to help everybody in the world get smarter and be more capable.
Brooks:But you have to choose to engage with it. As a human, you make a choice. It's a fork in the road. You say, well, I'm going to put my head in the sand, I'm going to never be a part of AI. It's dangerous, it's this, it's that I get it. There's always going For the people that want to be more successful. They'll open their mind and say like the world's changing, how do I embrace the way the world's changing? How can I be better? Because the world has got better tools for me.
Brooks:I think for those that in whatever discipline whether it's House Call, Pro or whether it's in you know how my kids learn at school to whatever the discipline is, I think that machine learning, AI, is going to really make people just higher IQ, better decision-making and never forget the better outcomes over time. And if you put your head in the sand and you ignore it, the world is going to pass you by. It's inevitable and people don't always like hearing that. Like, well, you're just telling me I'm bad. I'm not judging you, I'm just telling you the world's moving. To where it's moving, People are going to be on board or they're not. We'll see how it plays out.
Dustin:Yeah, I mean culture shift technologies. Culture shift products happen all the time and there's always the people that are fighting it. I mean today, there's people that still will refuse to get a smartphone right. They see what it's done over the 20 years that they've been avoiding it.
Brooks:It's the same person who loved the horse and buggy and saw cars as a threat right.
Dustin:Or the TV with the radio.
Brooks:Yeah, it's human nature to fight the thing. You like what you know. I love my horse. I love my horse and buggy. That machine is bad. It's going to ruin everything. It's going to be dangerous to me and society In every big seminal moment of the evolution of humans in our society. Like that they've been, these points, like that's bad. This is the only thing I know. It's good and eventually just momentum overtakes and knowledge and awareness acceptance overtakes.
Brooks:I think that the smartphone was a great one, like you know. You think about, of course, a buggy. You think about internet. You think about smartphone AI. Of course it's buggy. You think about internet. You think about smartphone. Ai is probably the next. It appears to be People way smarter than I am are figuring this stuff out. It just appears to be the next big frontier of seminal change. People are going to embrace it or not. It's going to make it smarter. They can choose to embrace it now or later, but it's going to happen. I think technology our obligation is to make those kinds of tools or resources available to our customer again, because it aligns with our mission Help pros be more successful tomorrow than they are today, and that's what our whole deal at Housecall Pro is is that so? Does having machine learning, coaching, good support on help articles, all those things help them do better? Yeah, it just does. So here we go.
Dustin:Yeah, yeah, I think there's always people that are running towards the things that they want and there's people that run away from the things that they don't want. And I've noticed you can. Both of those people can be wildly successful a hundred million dollar company owners, you know, it's just a. It's like are you constantly evaluating if something's going to fail, or are you constantly thinking I don't care what's going to fail, I'm going to run towards things, and I think with AI, it's got such a massive adoption right now. Like most people think, what AI is is chat, GPT and it's like whoa. There's so much to AI. That's just one way that we interface with one type of AI, but I think it's a beautiful thing.
Brooks:And that's a pull method Like.
Dustin:I go and.
Brooks:I search for something and I get information back Again. All the machine is doing is telling you a better way to do something Right. It's just saying here are the 10 things you should do to be a better leader, to be a better manager, based on all the data that can go mine, that's out there in the universe or in their learning system, and it's just coaching you, telling you the best way to do something based on data. That's all it's doing. That's a pro model.
Dustin:It's our data. It's data that we've already put together.
Brooks:It's the universe's data, it's whatever's out there in the large universe or whatever system data they had. It mines and gives it back better information. All it is because they figured out the processing power to quickly figure out that answer. It doesn't take three days to get it back. Right now, the world has changed technologically to allow that to happen, so that you can get that information back in real time and literally just give you the answer of what to do and why it matters even and you know people get really good asking the questions of the machine. There's also the push model where, just sort of like in our interface, it can intuitively just sort of nudge you, coach you if you want to, and get those answers, just like you guys say I could search for a help article or my team player can sort of nudge and push the answers to me.
Brooks:Well, which one do you think is going to be more adopted over time? Path of least resistance, most likely, right? Yeah, it's fascinating. It's like how quickly this world and this AI conversation has evolved in just 12 months is mind blowing. Yeah, and we have one person who really just is beating the drum, as he always has in our business around innovation, and even I think he's just sort of in awe of how fast this world is coming at us, how much is already here and really kind of where it's going. You know, it's great for everybody. It really ultimately should be great for our entire society and our universe and advancing humans along a path because we just have better information and we're that much smarter tomorrow than we are today.
Brooks:And there we go and so we'll see how it all plays out. It's not like we have an opinion. We have a point of view, because we're a thoughtful company and we're following that point of view and we're building and investing on that point of view. But because how quickly it's changing, who knows what will be in 30 days, in a year, and it actually happens. We in a year, and actually happens.
Brooks:We're just trying to be informed and invest along and do things that we think can help our customer do better, and so we'll see how it plays out. We're very thoughtful, very cautious, very methodical about it to make sure we're protecting and raise interest appropriately as we learn along the way. So, no matter what, our fundamental business is built around service to that customer smarter, better, more capable tomorrow than they are today. We are in service to them and their success. We do that through tools. We give them technology, we give them services, we give them support, and so far good things have happened. Business has grown to the tens of thousands of customers that have been successful using this platform, and it's just amazing how robust it is compared to those early days when we were an operating system to do these five things well, and today you can do just damn near anything.
Dustin:It's amazing. Well, berks, it was great talking to you, man. You guys really are doing a good job. I haven't I've met people that have used Housecall Pro, and I've met people that are still using Housecall Pro, and I don't hear bad reviews. I don't hear people saying, oh, I wish it could do this. It doesn't do this. Everybody that I get that's using it is like this is so helpful, it's so awesome. So, as a company, you guys are doing a great job. Keep it up, and thank you for taking the time to be here and talk to me.
Brooks:It was such a pleasure. Like, I love talking about what we get to do as a business and service to our customer, because I think it's a gift. I mean, it's an unbelievable blessing in my life to have seen it grow and succeed the way it has. I literally talk about it at dinner with my family. I talk about it with our friends. My mission in life is just service this customer and I get to live that story every day. So we feel incredibly blessed, incredibly fortunate to be able to sit here and do the work we do every day. And thank you for even inviting me to be able to go talk about the passion we have and the things we invest in for this customer. And it's nice to hear that you're on the same path as well and you've been able to accomplish this incredible scale and reach and influence to so many people in the trade. So kudos to you as well and thank you for having me here. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. Take it easy, thank you.