Navigating the Balance of AI and Human Interaction in Business with Brigham Dickinson
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We're not talking about turning your technicians into sales guys. We're talking about improving their communication skills to the point where they provide a service that a homeowner will appreciate. That's what great customer service looks like. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields, like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership, to find out what's really behind their success in business.

Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello.

Before we get started, I wanted to share two important things with you. First, I want you to implement what you learned today. To do that, you'll have to take a lot of notes, but I also want you to fully concentrate on the interview. So I asked the team to take notes for you. Just text NOTES to 888-526-1299. That's 888-526-1299. And you'll receive a link to download the notes from today's episode.

Also, if you haven't got your copy of my newest book, elevate, please go check it out. I'll share with you how I attracted and developed a winning team that helped me build a $200 million company in 22 States. Just go to elevate and win.com forward slash podcast to get your copy. Now let's go back into the interview. Welcome back to the home service expert. I'm here with a good buddy of mine that I like to keep in touch with. Bring them Dickinson. He is an expert in sales business, marketing,

Call monitoring, call coaching, technician coaching, pretty much everything you can think about in home service. He's the founder of Power Selling Pros and an author of several books, but Something to Give is one of them. He's the owner and founder of Power Selling Pros, a company that powers your customer experience with call handling, training, and coaching for thousands of companies in the home service industry. He's also the owner of Booked, a night answering service for hundreds of companies in the home service industry. Also an owner of AdWords.

athletic care a sports recovery company for athletes bring them continues to personally consult and train companies throughout the home service industry as long as they are within a reasonable driving distance from his home i don't know why that's in here not really i put it in there but uh yeah no that's great so dude i'm excited to have you you guys um you said you're 60 percent up

This year, just more companies reaching out. A lot of people caring more about booking the calls. Yeah. Last year, you were talking a lot about blind spots. And one of the major blind spots in the home service industry or in a home service company is that they don't know where their call conversion's at. And even if they do, they really don't spend time on it.

Most business owners, they spend time on technicians. I ask them all the time, hey guys, how much time do you spend with your technicians and your supervisors? Oh, I train them every day. Every day, cool. And how much time do you train? How much time do you take to train your CSRs? And it's crickets, right? They spend zero time. And it could be a lack of passion, could be a lack of time. Regardless of the reason, they don't have time to do it. And I think...

That, them recognizing that blind spot and a lot of it has to do with technology. The technology today that's available to us is showing us and kind of putting a spotlight on what was a blind spot before. And so this time last year, about 900 trainees in our program. And we train them one-on-one twice a month using their own phone calls. So it's performance coaching.

It's not just a training that we do and then we leave. Yeah. Right? It's a training where they're held accountable over time. So we're at 900 trainees this time last year, and right now we're pushing almost 1,400 trainees in our program. That's insane. Yeah. It's insane growth. It's insane growth. It's fun. It's exciting. Sometimes I look at my team and go, how did we do this? Yeah. Now it's impressive, man. And I think –

I think you're getting more experience in there. I remember we talked in the last couple of years and you said private equity companies, the first thing they do at a detriment to their own companies is cut the training on the call center. They think we've got this. We hired somebody internally. I've been there. I thought we had it figured out. And I've come back to you and said, we're not giving it enough time and attention.

And I think we've got some of the best call center. You've personally trained the supervisors and we've got some great people. But you guys are not one or the other. Like you should have supervisors. You should have your own internal team, but you still need you. And I think a lot of people miss that. They're like, it's either we've hired all this internal team. And I think private equity companies probably look at it and go, well, why don't they just figure it out? And they try to cut their way to the top. What is your take on that since –

You had such explosive growth. Are some of these PE companies turning the corner? Yes, we've probably signed four in the last 60 days, and they're all saying the same thing. Brigham, we are losing calls like crazy, some of which, and I won't name names, but they're at 3% calls versus set appointments.

That's outrageous. It's, you just cannot have that. And there are other companies that are really big, never, they don't plan to sell. Like they're a cause driven business, but they're stuck around 70, 75. And even in those cases, we can get up to 85, 90 and 95 calls versus set appointments. And so, uh, yeah, there's definitely a lot of PE groups, but there's also a lot of companies that have been around for a second generation, third generation that are realizing that this needs to be fixed. Yeah. That's a big deal. I, um,

Cameron Herald, I got him training Luke right now. He's a great coach, COO of Alliance. Wrote a couple of books. Meeting Suck is one of them. And we were on a call. I actually met with him this morning, but we were on a call a couple weeks ago, and he goes, hey, why don't you – one of the things I do listen to is some of the call center. But he's like, when's the last time you listened to your product specialist? Because we sell over the phone on equipment. You're familiar with that program.

And I go, I have not in a long time. And Luke goes, well, we've got a guy doing it full time. And he goes, dude, you've got to listen to 20 calls tonight, Luke. Tommy, this is not your job. Luke, listen to. And Luke threw up in his mouth. He calls me up and goes, dude, it's so bad. I would imagine it's the same when you listen to your call center.

I listen to a lot because of Lace. Like, I can go right into the call where they dropped it. And I feel a lot better knowing that they're not dispositioning their own calls because there used to be this gray area of, like, that was a parts call. Yeah. Yeah, that's not a call, and they put it into the abandoned call list. Yeah, it goes into this different bucket. So a lot of people are like, I don't need PowerSign, bros. Our booking rate's way up there, but they don't know that there's this hidden way that the people do it. And a lot of people feel like...

You know, they're 15-hour-an-hour people. I'm like, dude, the contact center is everything. Like, they make or break the success of the technician. The way in which they book the call, are they giving prices on the call? How quick are they promising the time? Are you getting that same they don't care about the price? And a great CSR slash dispatcher, depending on how you're structured...

Well, they have a tough job because they got to call these jobs today and move them even though they were scheduled. You only do it once, though. That's what I've learned is you never reschedule more than once with a client. Yeah. But there's so much money being lost. Tons. But I will say since we started working together again in this last year, I listened to the calls. And I promise you I did this for a whole week. I listened to all the non-booked calls. And I'm like, I'm glad we didn't book that call.

Like we could have fought, fought, fought, fought, but at 91%, I was looking at Lace earlier, we're at 91%. I'm like that 9%, I kind of don't know if I want a book because you're almost setting the technician up to fail. And you're going to get those kind of calls. Yep. And you can push it. I mean you can push it and you can get it. But if you put the technician in a situation where he's not going to be successful or she's not going to be successful –

It's probably not worth it. But the thing is, you don't want them to be the judge. You want them to follow the process. The minute they start cherry-picking calls, guess what? You're going to have less calls. 100%. I don't know what you've heard out there. I'm hearing two different things, but I know the summer's not hitting like it should be for HVAC. I've heard just the economy, it's not bad, but it's not good. I would challenge those who are...

saying, hey, it's not as good as it used to be compared to what? What, compared to 2021? Yeah, when it was the heyday. Exactly. When even the technicians got secondhand bagels because all the comfort advisors were rolling in it, right? They were the money men. Well, it's because it was easy. But if we have a strong strategy now, say, for example, if we have a group of technicians that

are turning over more leads than they currently are right now. If they're talking about more products than just the specific part that's broken. Right. I mean, there's a ton of opportunity there. In my mind, there's another blind spot.

with the technician, but if they're rolling, if they're setting things up in a way for comfort advisors, chances are you're going to have just as good a year this summer, if not better. I've only seen this over the last 60 days when I've been in companies like Woodfin and Simpson Salute, where they're turning to their technicians left and right to set up those leads properly so the comfort advisor stays more than busy. Right. They're doing the same thing with their comfort advisors.

14 comfort advisors, I'll tell you another company that had 14 comfort advisors, they cut it down to seven. The reason why they did that is because half of them were about average and the other seven were above average. And so they thought, you know what? Let's give all of our leads to the above average comfort advisors. It was scary. It was shaky for everybody involved. But by the time I got there-

We were able to focus in on the fact that you guys, you made it. You stayed. You're here. Let's do something with this opportunity. Essentially, it's a way for you to make more money right now. Let's go. So there's a lot of ways to approach this and have an awesome summer regardless.

Yeah, I mean, look, I guess what people are complaining about, there's always an ebbs and flow of leads versus hiring technicians. I think most people are in the camp of I need more leads, but they're probably not to the point where they should be top grading and they should be making the exact call you just made. But it's the people that just don't care. They don't want more for their family. They're just comfortable at whatever they make. And they're not asking for more. They really don't like to get trained. That's very difficult for me.

Yeah. Look, they may be comfortable with the way that they do it, but if they can get a little bit more uncomfortable with the way they do it inside the customer's home – because here's what a technician generally does, a typical technician. They'll go into a home and they'll just look at the situation. They'll fix the immediate problem and they'll leave. Now, let me tell you the problem I have with this. I once called an appliance company and my fridge outside wasn't working.

He comes. He fixes whatever was wrong with it. He leaves. Well, a month later, the fridge doesn't work again. So what am I thinking? Oh, dude, you didn't do your job. Right. Now, when I called them, they said, oh –

You called for this. It sounds like you've got something else going on, so we're still going to have to charge you another dispatch fee. Okay, fine. Great. I got to pay another dispatch fee. Guy comes out. He fixes that different part. In the back of my head, I'm going, dude, he probably could have looked at the entire fridge, maybe even told me to replace it. In the back of my head, I'm going, why don't appliance companies offer to replace? Why don't they start selling Sub-Zero and Wolf? Why not?

Well, in the heating coin industry, we can do that. We can offer to replace it. We can offer to fix it, so on and so forth. So look, if we can teach technicians like we teach CSRs to just communicate a little bit better inside the customer's home, they're going to be a whole lot more successful. They're going to make more money. So, you know, perhaps the goal is to help them become comfortable being uncomfortable. I agree. You know, we're talking about, you know, one thing that I've noticed too, and we'll dive into, I want to hear more of the backdrop of what you've been up to, but, um,

even a thing as simple as schedule engine is paying attention to your abandonment rate and having a way what i don't like is i want to know where i'm at in the process and that doesn't show you where you're at in the process because it's a 10 more steps when am i gonna get the job confirmed so i've just realized now is i got to take things into my own hands and i always put myself in look the house we live in you've been over plenty of times is uh

there's always something breaking. Yeah. So I've been, especially this house, it's at that age where stuff's just going wrong. And when a guy comes or a gal comes over and says, here's what I did to my house. Well, like the tankless hot water heaters. Like I had one company come out and he's like, let's just replace this one. The other guy goes, yeah, why don't we just do all tankless? And I'll just bundle it up in a big deal for you. And he showed me the one he has at his house. And actually Aaron Gaynor was over. And he's like, that's the best unit. But I like to know that...

what you would have did if this were your home what would you have done so i tell my guys look replace your garage door i'll give it to you i work gotta deal with our manufacturer to replace it less than i pay for it so put one at your house put one at your mom's house put a myq with the camera when you show people this is what i did for my mom or this is what i did at my home it's worth a million words yeah and a lot of people don't do it you know what i mean like if you're proud of your company and you're proud of the products you sell the

if you own a home, then you should be putting them in. Yeah. Give them the option.

Give them the – people love to shop. But if you only give them one option, that's not shopping. That's you trying to sell something. But if you give them several different options, then now they can choose one, right? They feel safe. They feel comfortable. They're having just a little bit of fun and they can decide which way they want to go. That's what shopping is all about. And if you can make it easy for me, guess what? I'm going to do it. I don't care. I'm going to do it. Most of the time people want convenience. And the problem is we have a tendency to assume.

Whether it's over the phone, whether it's in the home, we assume that this is what the customer wants because that's what I would want. Well, now look, you are a customer, but you're not your customer. Right. So you've got to give them the time and the space to feel like they're shopping. You know, one of my guys came in and visited me recently from Vegas, and he goes, Trevor taught me one of the coolest things ever, when the customer asks the price for a new door.

Because every single service call, there's a conversation usually, maybe just replace this. As he said, well, that just depends on how much you want to increase the value of your home. Some clients go $20,000, some go $30,000. How much did you want to increase the value? So he turns it back to the client. Like, well, how does that work? Well, it's 194% return on investment. There's been a lot of studies done on this. Two in Wall Street Journal in January. Remodel Magazine seven years in a row. You put $100 in, you take $1.94 out.

And all of a sudden, the client's like, wow, I didn't know that. Yeah. It's pretty cool stuff, man. I'm so impressed by the guys. I say guys, but I say that as guys and gals. Of course. I got to be better about that. Tell us a little bit about the journey. I know you've been doing this a long time, and there's a lot of technology coming out.

But you guys are part of that. You guys are working alongside of the technology, but you're not – you got to remember the human element. And people still – if it's discretionary versus indiscretionary, if it's indiscretionary, my pipe breaks or I need this done, I don't want to talk to a robot. I want to deal with a human being. Yeah, absolutely. Look, there's two different models out there in my opinion.

There's a ton of models, but for the sake of time, let's just narrow it down to two. You've got the McDonald's model where you can go in and you can go to that screen that they have, those two big screens. You can kind of click on the thing that you want, and they've actually been able to show that they can increase their conversion that way. That works for McDonald's, right? No human communication or very little is possible.

Whereas you've got this Chick-fil-A model where they've doubled down on the amount of people that are helping you through the line because that's the one thing that holds people up from going to Chick-fil-A is they don't want to wait in the line. So they double down on the people in that line and they keep ushering people through and making that process a whole lot quicker, a whole lot faster. And so they've doubled down on those humans. So the question is, is what kind of model do you want? Now, we both know that with the Chick-fil-A model,

Price is going to be a little bit higher and you're going to wait a little bit longer. But you like the experience, you're willing to wait and you're willing to pay more over McDonald's. Right. Right. But hey, both models work. You just got to decide which one you want to work with. In my opinion, in the home service industry, the reason why PE groups are so excited about this industry is because we follow that Chick-fil-A model. Right. The minute we start switching everything over to AI, everything over to robots, what we're doing is we're

We're accepting the sameness that comes with it. I was at a, I don't know, Service World Expo last year, and there was five different AI companies. Funny thing, I'd go into the little phone booth and I'd hear the same thing from every one of them. It was the same experience. The problem with that is, is we can't justify our price. You guys, if we become the same as everybody else, how do we justify our price? We don't. We lower our price. We go to the McDonald's model. If we want to do that, it's fine.

It works for McDonald's, but it may not work for you. Here's the facts. If I call in, so you know I was recently in Budapest. I had to call Verizon, get the eight days long distance. Talked to an AA agent, three minutes, perfect. Repeated back to me, sent me a text confirming. Bingo. I'll do that with my security company. I'll do that with pest control landscaping, maybe even my pool service. I don't want to do that when a pipe breaks. I don't want to do that when the air conditioning is not working. I don't want to do that when the roof's having a malfunction.

I feel like I need to talk to a human being. This is kind of like something I need to take care of right now. And the AI is still, as much as people say it's not, it's still laggy. Everybody that I know, and I'm sorry because a lot of these people are vendors. Yeah. They're our friends. And they're my friends. Yeah.

But it's not there. It's just that a lot of people that switch, like Tom Howard called me. He's like, I want 100% to this. And then he's like, yep, my call center. I went back to the call. And everybody that I've talked to, they're like, it's good to be used in certain scenarios. And if you could use it as an IVR, that might work. Because now that I look at LACE, I'm like, man, 40% of our calls are not opportunities. Whether they need to talk to the door department, they need normal maintenance, they need...

an invoice, whatever that is. I'm trying to figure that out right now. It's something I'm looking into.

But it's just too many calls. But I don't know. I have nothing bad to say about AI because I think it's the future. In fact, AI is happening right now. They need 500,000 electricians just to build a grid. And they need a bunch of air conditioning guys too because they need to be able to cool that grid. It's nuts. It's coming. I mean, Bill Gates just came out and said in 10 years our lives aren't going to be anything like they are today. I totally agree. Yeah, I was test driving a Cybertruck the other day and I was amazed. Yeah? I was amazed. Yeah. Yeah.

Now look, in the home service industry, because we're dealing inside the customer's home, the more face-to-face time, the better. You have the ability to create a unique experience over the phone as well as in the home.

In my opinion, I'd hold on to that as long as I possibly can while at the same time testing out AI. It's okay to dip our toe in the water. I mean I've got my own call center. We've got over 60 agents. We book 93% of our phone calls. And if we're on the phone, we absolutely use AI to capture that lead so that we can call them back afterwards and make sure that their experience was good. So there's a place for it. There's a place for it and it's important to use it. Yeah, so I –

They told us, I just want to go a little bit deeper into this AI. They told us, you know, go into co-developing. Like a decade ago, they were like, if your kids want a future, be a developer. Now they're like going to the trades. I mean, they're like, if you want. But next year, the robots are coming out. And I watched this whole video today for 15 minutes. They could walk the dog. They could cook. They could do easy landscaping. And they're pretty affordable.

It's just – I think it's a fascinating conversation to think what's life going to look like because I think we've got to embrace it. Yeah. The robots might replace the install crew and that would be awesome. Hey, that's less wear and tear on our humans, right? Our technicians, our employees. So that's a win for them. So once again, let that support the experience you're trying to create for the customer.

as opposed to replace it. Yeah. I mean, I'm not expecting the home service to change very quickly. That skilled labor is not going to change very quick. It's going to be the easy stuff, easy recipes, walking the dog, little things. So what do you think has been the secret to your success with PowerSelling Pros and everything else you're doing? You're big on leadership, leading from up front, but you just told me you're more excited about

Your team's worked harder than they've ever worked, but they're also going on dream vacations and doing more than they've ever done for their families. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Talked about our operations manager, Lindsay Wood, able to take her entire family to Maui for the first time ever. It's really cool. Tasha just got back from a trip. She manages our entire sales team. We're in a really good spot right now. Very exciting place. And again, a lot of it has to do with the spotlight being shown on

The call center, call conversions. What was that thing you said about, look, if I can increase, if you could increase your call conversion by 1%, how much would that? Yeah, well, if we're going to do 300 million, it's 1%, it's 3 million, 1%. So if you increase it by 10%, that's 30 million. Now, if you increase your conversion rate, reduce your cancellation rate, that's the same thing. So understanding both of those, you're talking about millions and millions of dollars. Now, if you're a $10 million company and you increase it by 10%, that's a million bucks.

People don't understand that. They've never done the math though. So the question is, is how do we go about doing that consistently over time? The way that we do it is, is that we do one-on-one coaching twice a month using your own phone calls. All right. So every individual is getting that attention on a regular basis and they're being held accountable to perform at a high level. And I would say that's the difference between us and any other training company that's out there. Other companies provide training and then they leave. We don't tell you what to do

We do that initial training for you and then we start coaching them and holding them accountable for you. We just know business owners have time to do it themselves. Not even the managers have time to do it themselves, right? We go in, we do that specific part for them, holding their team accountable, getting the results that you need to get. And I think that's

So between the spotlight with all the technology coming out, showing people what's happening inside your call center plus the solution that we bring to the table, ongoing one-on-one coaching accountability is what sets us apart. Everybody – I get this question probably the most common question. I get it all the time. They're like, so you're on LACE now.

do you still need power selling pros? And I'm like, yeah. They go hand in hand. Like Lace will tell you where you're missing on certain things, but it's not going to coach them. It does not give them the coaching. And so there's still a lot of the human element. And a lot of people think you're robbing Peter to pay Paul, you're switching where they work together. And people think of these things as a cost. I've always kind of rewritten it in my brain as an investment.

And I think that's why we're winning. Look, I know there's a lot of companies out there winning and I'm, you know, no exception, but I just wish people looked at it and go, I mean, when do you see the real results? So do you say like, give me 90 days? Depends on where your call coefficient is at. So if you're below 60, you're going to see an immediate difference. Immediate. It's easy for us to get up to 70. Yeah. 85, we could absolutely do that in 60, 90 days. Sure. Yeah.

Um, above 90, we need some time. We need some time, six months, year. And, and to do it consistently. I mean, we, again, we have our own call center that books at 93% of their calls. Yeah. So we know how to do it. We do it ourselves. We're not, we're not going to teach you to do something we don't do ourselves. Right. And, uh, it just takes time. It takes time to do it. It just depends on where you're at, where your call conversion is currently at. I want to go back to what we talked about. How many people have come back to you?

I'm just curious. You know, this is a saying at PowerSling Pros that I wish I could change. And the saying is, is everybody comes back, right? We, we have, we've had some companies come back to us four times. Yep. That's silly, right? It takes you four go arounds to realize that this is something that you should always do. And it's because you don't have time to do it yourself.

One of our good clients, Chab Simpson at Simpson Salute, he used us in 2017. I know this because he just sent me a picture of the first brochure that he got from PowerSelling Pros. He said, this is when I first signed up. And then, of course, when he got his call center where it needed to be, he let us go. Well, then three years later, he calls us up and he says, hey, I need to train my team. Cool. Who's still there that we were working with before? None of them. None of them were there. Turnover costs a lot of money. Exactly. Wow. Exactly. So here's the thing.

If you want them to stay longer, you pay them based on their performance and you give them training. You give them ongoing one-on-one attention over time. So you give them the incentive, number one. And number two, you give them tons and tons of coaching and training. If you don't have time to do it, get us to do it for you. We're not going to tell you to do one more thing. Let's just let it, let us take this off your plate. Right. Let us do it for you. So yeah, everybody comes back. Everybody comes back. Sadly. Yeah.

They should never have left. Well, it's funny. How often is it that you see it during a transaction, meaning that they sold a PE or the company changed? Yeah. So look, as good as 2021 was for the home service industry, it was tough for us. I mean, we probably had 25 companies that year sign up with PE groups and say, man, you've been great. Power Cellium Pros, you've been fantastic. You got us where we are, but we've got to let you go because the PE group is trying to cut costs.

So to see that come around, even then, even them come back to me, it's gratifying. I mean, it's cool. And what's happening is the owners who are now managers in most cases are saying, hey, they finally allowed me to get you back on board. Let's go. Let's get it going. Hey, I want to have you keynote at our speaking event, our PE speaking event. Hey, we're going to do this and that.

We're going to make it really easy for each of our managers to do it, and we'll co-op it. That's great. So it's awesome. It's great. It just took a little while for them to come around.

And two, here's something that I am personally very excited about. At Freedom 2025, we're doing a special home service freedom panel with some of the smartest people I know. Jim Leslie, he helped me double our revenue at A1 every year for a few years. Ellen Rohr, she showed me how to plug the leaks and profit and finally keep what we earned.

Brian Burton. He helped to turn some of my texts into one to $3 million closers. Jody Underhill. He helped us recruit hundreds of a players. When you attend, you'll get to learn from my panel and meet Kevin O'Leary, Donald Trump Jr. And my entire billion dollar network. So get your early bird ticket now before the VIP discount and the bonuses disappear. Just go to freedom event.com today. That's freedom event.com.

All right, back to the episode. I think you guys are going to, you know, we're only halfway through the year. It's going to continue to grow. I think there's any companies that are listening. The first place I look at, I look at a lot of businesses. I mean, I'm invited in to do shop tours all the time. And the immediate number one thing is, number one, a lot of times they don't have the data. It's not perfect data. It's not a decimal place data. It should be a decimal place, 89.2% or something.

And then number two, they're like, they just don't see it as this. But you're saying that's changing. You're saying this year has been a really good year that people are starting to recognize. 100%. They have a whole lot more awareness of what's going on inside the call center and that it needs to change. Or even, you know, your booking rate, but we didn't bring up abandonment rate. And that's when there's nobody that answers the call. And, you know, there's tools out there like Chirp, and they help. They definitely make a difference to text message them, get them on a schedule engine, but...

When you add in cancellation rate non-booked and abandoned, it starts to really destroy that number. It's funny that you bring that up because Ryan and I have been talking at Chirp, right? He's got a ton of clients that use it, but they don't have time to call those customers back.

And so we've approached him and said, hey, we've got a call center. Let us call them back. Let us book those calls. And he's like, holy cow, that's amazing. So I don't even know if I should let that cat out of the bag, but that's definitely something that we're working on. Tom Howard came to me six months ago and he said, hey, we have this amazing second chance lead opportunity at Service Titan that we're offering now. Nobody's taking advantage of it. And I said, I'll tell you why, Tom. It's because nobody has time to call those customers back, even if they sign up for the service. Get us...

To call that customer back, we'll go right on to your CRM. We'll book it for you. Yep. And that way you can take advantage of that type of technology. So basically finishing the loop here, right? Yeah. Chirp can only do so much, right? They'll deliver the lead to you, but you've still got to call them. You've got to book it. Yep. Same thing's true with the second chance leads at ServiceTitan.

And, of course, that wasn't the only thing Tom talked to me about six months ago. But we can talk about that in a second. Yeah, no, Tom's such a cool guy. Yeah, he is. I thought I was well-connected, but that dude knows everybody. And he knows exactly what's going on in the industry. Service Titan's doing great, by the way. Oh, they're crushing it. You've been paying attention to that? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I'm happy for Vahe and R and everybody involved. They just continue to excel. I love it.

I'm a big fan of technology, man. I'm the first one. You know, I'm good friends with the Hoffman brothers and Chris. And he's very select on what he wants to implement because he thinks there's going to be big winners and kind of let it play out.

but I like to meet, I mean, I must look at 10 technologies a month and I make the decision. I talked to a lot of guys like Peterman and gainer guys. And we talk about what's working, what's not. I mean, even look at Ishmael, he's killing it with new Bay. I mean, the future is here. It's just knowing what to embrace and what not to. And a lot of people, you know, who, who was late. And I love these guys as a, any hour, they, they really wait for service time to come out with it. And then they embrace it. Uh,

How are they doing? Any Hour? Yeah. Well, stay tuned. There's some really great things going on for Any Hour. Here's the interesting thing about Any Hour is that they have a solid group of leaders on their team. And you may not get the kind of, I don't know, you might not get a... When Any Hour wants to buy you, they might not have the highest bid, right? Yeah.

But the support that they provide more than makes up for that, especially if you plan on staying inside your organization. Right. So that's been my experience with them. And, of course, Dustin is one of the main guys I know there. Yeah, me too. He's extremely – I don't want a phone call. He's an animal. He's extremely talented. And talk about connected. Oh, that guy. He's incredibly connected. He'll win any type of competition. Yeah. He's a good advocate. Yeah, but –

Yeah, they're doing great. Any Hour is a great PE group. So you got Apex, Any Hour. You got some big stuff going on in roofing. You've got Champion Group. You've got Wrench Group. There's about to be some movement. I mean, there's not been... PE's been struggling to find deal flow. I mean, it's been... I just talked to my Goldman guy. He said there's $8 trillion sitting on the sideline. Wow. And it doesn't mean it's all going into home service, but what it means is not a lot of deal flow...

Lots of things are happening with this instability. And as we start to get more stabilized, when that money gets paid out to these companies, what it does is the GDP goes up. Like, everything starts to get back into this golden era. And I...

I'm an optimist, man. I do believe it's coming, and I want to make sure we're firing on all cylinders. And Power Cylinder Pro is a big piece of that. I think it's so important. You always know my mom's story of when she used to answer the calls, and I talk about it all the time because she'd really set me up for success. It's really hard to get that mom feel back.

And Manny in the CSR is like, we'll get there. And you guys are a big piece of that. It's just that one-on-one. One of the things you mentioned to me is like they don't feel the love. And, Tommy, I know you can't give as much as technicians and as much as you're doing now. Like you cannot give the CSRs and the dispatchers. And that's something you guys do. Yeah, they need it. They need it. In many cases, I call it cheap therapy.

They need that one-on-one attention. They need to be able to share with somebody. And, you know, the Power Selling Pros team, our culture is phenomenal. We have a phenomenal team that will take great care of your people and help them feel extremely, extremely special. In fact, if we've got a few more minutes, I'll tell you one more story. Yeah, no, we've got plenty of time. So Tom Howard approached me last year at Pantheon since we were talking about him a minute ago. Yeah.

And he said, "Hey, Brigham, you know all this technology that's coming out for technician recording?" I said, "Yeah." And he said, "What are you going to do with that?" And I said, "Well, what should I do with that?" I asked him the right questions, right? And he said, "Look, everything that you've been doing for CSRs with their communication skills, the technicians could use."

So with all this technology coming out, it'd be smart if you were to come out with technician coaching as well. So we've been working on that ever since. Yeah, I know you fly in and train technicians. Yeah, so I've been doing a ton of ride-alongs with techs over the last three years. But with this technology coming out, I mean, I have a ton of clients that say, hey, Brigham, you've done a phenomenal job teaching soft skills for my CSRs, dispatchers, and lead coordinators. I would love if you could do the same for our techs. The only problem has been,

is that we can't hold technicians accountable with their own performance like we have been able to do for the last 16 years with CSR's dispatchers and coordinators up until recently. Right. Right? So now that we've got all this amazing technology that's coming out, I'm really paying attention to what's going on inside the customer's home while my team is taking care of, you know, our... Call center. Exactly. And...

There is a ton of opportunity with technicians, right? If you're training just the comfort advisors, that's great. You might see a 10% bump in sales, maybe even a 20% bump. But if you want to see real gains, you basically have a goldmine with your technicians. All they need to do is learn how to communicate with their customer and give them all their options. Instead of, hey, I'm just going to fix this part and leave and I'll see you in a month.

Right. Because all the other parts are going to fail as well. Look, if it's outside of warranty, you should be telling them all of their you should be giving them all of their options. And it's and it comes down to just a little bit better soft skills, a little bit more courage and explaining all of their options. Maybe even having a comfort advisor come while you're there. Hey, you know what? Let me get him on speaker.

And I started doing this with technicians and it works amazingly well where I just get them on. I get the comfort advisor on speaker. I let the homeowner and the comfort advisor talk while I'm there. There might be some times where I put the phone on mute and I say, Hey, that's a good idea. Why don't we go ahead and do that? Now I've gotten to the point where I'm a trusted advisor. They think I'm the tech, right? As I'm sitting there with the other technician. It's everything. It's 90% is how that turnover, the technician doing the turnover, uh,

Because that's how we do it. We get on the speakerphone, and I will say that we call them product specialists instead of comfort advisors. The product specialists love certain guys because they set it up so good. They're like, listen, I'm going to see what I can do for you. This is my boss. This guy knows everything about garage doors. He'll build a new door on your home. He knows what's in stock. He knows all the promotions going on. I get paid to repair this, but I'm telling you, I got it working. We can go through and fix this and fix every single thing on this.

But I'd be replacing it at this point. Okay, you got it. And this isn't sales. It's service. Right. Okay? It's service. And the home service industry hasn't caught up to you yet, Tommy. They're not doing that. No. Okay? So one of the main things I've been doing is approaching it from that direction. Because the thing is...

It is not good customer service for you to fix one part, leave, and then come back in a month. That ruins trust. That ruins credibility. Now, you may know everything that's going on inside that system. The customer doesn't. So what that means is if you have to come back out in a month, it doesn't work. No. To the homeowner, it doesn't work. It doesn't work, and you were supposed to fix it.

You missed another day at work. You missed your daughter's recital. You missed the ballgame you were supposed to be at. Exactly. So the way we go about it with the technician is we help them realize this is what a good job looks like. It's not a good job to go in, fix the part, and leave. The whole thing is out of warranty. That means the next part that goes out, you're going to get called back and you're going to have to tell them the bad news that they're going to have to pay for that part plus the labor.

Instead, give them all their options. Hey, you know what? This part has gone bad today. This part, this part, and this part are probably going to go bad in the near future. It's not under warranty, right? Let's give them at least give them the option. That's what great customer service looks like. It's not about sales. We're not talking about turning your technicians into sales guys. We're talking about improving their communication skills to the point where they provide a service that a homeowner will appreciate.

Well, you know, Daniel Pink wrote a good book. It's called To Sell is Human. And so many people hate the word sales. Yeah. If you close your eyes and wrote down when you think of sales, it's usually bad. So we need to change what it means because to get your kids to make their bed at the end of the night is sales. When the day you met your wife, you were in sales because you smiled. You might have done things a little bit different. And I just think there's a bad thing and sales is bad, sales is bad. I go, we just raised money for my church.

in my backyard. And I will say the preacher, his name's Travis Hearn, PT, is when you're collecting money from people, they're making an investment into the church, into the community, into everything that does. And it's interesting because there was a lot of wealthy people there. And I go, I'm curious, guys. We were all talking in my bar area. And I go, why don't more people that are wealthy want to give? Now, I know you...

And Latter-day Saints, they're very good at just automatically coming out of the check. It's just our church, not so much. And one of the guys goes, it's because I'm getting off topic here. Sorry about my ADHD here. No, I love it. Keep going. He goes, because I know it takes money to make money. Yeah. And we want to give.

And everybody at some point in their life, typically if they were super successful, gets into philanthropy and gives to the church and their causes. But we're giving up the compound interest here. And I was like, you know, I never really thought about that. And Travis goes, yeah, no, none of our wealthy, none of the wealthy patrons that go to the church and the congregation give. You know, there's some. And so I gave a lot. I was like, man, I really got to do something.

not near 10% of what I've done. So I still got to work on it. So let's talk about that real quick. Since you opened up that door, I had a company that went under in 2009. I went, I didn't have any more money. I didn't officially go bankrupt, but I ran out of cash, right? I lived off of a home equity line of credit. It's $30,000 equity line of credit that I lived on for a year and a half. And I had a few clients that I was working with and it was a

I was a broker for a couple of ad agencies. When I made the sell, they'd give me money. So I was living off of, I'd say for a year, about $1,000 of income in 2009. And I paid tithing every month. Now, my rent alone was $1,000. Yeah. Okay. And I paid tithing 10% month in and month out. How did I make that work? I don't know.

The math didn't make sense to me, Tommy. Yeah. But I was able to put food on my table every month. Yeah. Every month. And since that experience, I've never questioned it. No. Never. No. And it's funny because I chit-chit-be-teed all the verses in the Bible that say, give and you shall be like. And so it's a great feeling because they go into like portions of Africa and other countries and they serve their own missions and they go out and do a lot of good stuff. And, you know.

My mom went to the church when we were having a hard time for good Thanksgivings or Christmases. I got a lot of student Bibles. Yeah. But, you know, I was thinking, man, I took advantage of this. My family did. We didn't get on food stamps, which some people need to. My mom just decided to work three jobs. She did ask the church. I don't know necessarily how that went if she asked her if they saw we were in need. I never really asked my mom. It's a big deal.

I don't know how we got into that, but I know you're a big man of faith. Well, our upbringing is similar. My parents were divorced when they were young, and my mom raised six kids by herself. She got a four-year degree in two and a half years. So, yeah, we've been through it. We've been through it, and I've learned by example and by experience that if you put God first in your life, he will take care of you, and to the point where sometimes the math just –

Doesn't make sense. And it still works out. So because of what I've been given, I've been given much. And I know that where much is given, much is required. And I too must give. I love it. I love it. I got a few more questions for you here as we'll finish up. As someone who's worked with thousands of companies, what trends are you seeing right now in the home service industry? And how can business owners and home improvement and home service stay ahead of the curve?

When you stay out of the curve, what do you mean? Like stay out of the... Stay ahead of the curve. I mean, look. Oh, stay ahead of the curve. Stay ahead of the curve. Yeah. Yeah. If they're looking at the lowest hanging fruit, okay, let's start with call conversion. It's the easiest one for us to solve. We can solve it. We can solve it right now. You asked whether or not we can increase call conversion in a short period of time.

Absolutely. We can do it after the first initial training. You can see a bump immediately. If calls are coming in, that means that's your lead. Capture it. Capture it. Secure it. Once you've done that, it'll make all the difference for your company. Now, from there, we can start talking about working with different departments. But for now...

Look, you can stay ahead of the curve by fixing that one problem. Contact center. You know, one of the things I do lately, the last three stages I was on, I said, everybody pull out your cell phones, look up your business, and let me see some of your cell phones. I walk up to them, I'm like, oh, fail, fail. As they say, open 9 to 5 Monday through Friday. That means when someone's stuff breaks, whatever industry you're in,

They see close on your GVP. They see we're not open right now. Don't call. Wow. That little thing is 24 seven. We take the phone call and you got a night answering service for that. Or I guess whenever people can't make it to the call. Yeah. Nights and weekends overflow. We handle all those calls. You know what else? If you,

If you can train and incentivize your CSR to sell service agreements over the phone, many times in our industry, at least the heating and cooling industry, is they leave it to the technician to sell a service agreement. That's a bad idea for so many reasons. Number one, when they're feeling the emotional angst, that's over the phone. That's not inside the customer's home after you fix the problem. Guess what? The minute the technician fixes the problem, there's no more emotional angst.

But if you can talk about that home service agreement over the phone, man, that'll make all the difference in the world. They're still feeling emotional angst. And you simply say, Mr. Jones, I'm looking at your notes. I noticed you don't have a membership with us. I'm wondering why not? You do it over the phone. It's going to be easier to sell. Plus, when the technician gets out there, they don't have to sell the agreement. They don't have to trip over the agreement. They can actually talk about airflow. They can talk about other services that we provide in an

And it will make all the difference in the world if that is already sold over the phone. And if you can do that with your CSRs, guess what? They'll get comfortable selling other things over the phone like turning service calls into replacement calls. Why not? The technicians do it all the time. How about turning a heating and cooling call into a plumbing call as well? Why not? If we offer plumbing, why aren't we talking about it?

Renewals, service agreement renewals. If you can get your CSRs to the point where they are proactively promoting your services over the phone, that'll make all the difference for you and for your organization. We're going to, me and you are going to talk about that privately. So if you go back in time and give your younger self just starting a business some advice, what would it be? Well, the first thing that comes to my mind is

Make it a win for your people, not just for you. One of the things I've had to learn the hard way is that my team's got to win, right? Yes, the customer needs to win. But my team needs to win. Like they need to individually win. And as they win, it's interesting how much more gratifying business is for me than it used to be. As I focus in on not just my customer, not just the contractor, but

but also my inside customers. They are as much, if not more, my customers than anybody else. And so the more I learn about that, the more successful I become. I got a personal question. So I've been sending all my guys to different types of training, lots of different stages. They get to see people on stage and several of them are like, I want to do a podcast like you, Tommy. I want to start getting on stages. And I'm embracing it.

I've never made real money by getting on stages. I've always used it to cover my cost to get there. And I don't want to like destroy their dreams. But I'm like, this has been to promote a one and other things that I do. This has been a learning experience for me to apply towards a one. You know, a good buddy of mine, Brian Burton's like, dude, I don't make any money from doing all this waste no day. And I help people.

And I don't want to kill their dream. And I know they can make it if they put their mind to it. And I'm not trying to, like, protect, like, I want them to work. Like, I'm like, we can do both, whatever you want. But what would you tell? Because I've never, like, yes, I'm known. And I think I'm a trusted advisor in the industry. But what would you tell these? I was at dinner with one of them, a very close friend of mine. And he goes, I meant to talk on stage and teach people sales.

And I'm like, well, it's about five years of feast or famine. Yeah. You'll be taking a step back for sure. There's no money in it. It's a long-term strategy to grow a business. I speak. I write books. I don't write books to make money off of the books. I write books for two reasons. Number one, I want my kids to know where I stand after I'm gone.

Okay, and let me get into that really quickly. So I had a mentor. His name's Paul Rogers. He was a national internet sales trainer for Toyota. Phenomenal speaker, phenomenal trainer. He died when he was 56. He died very young, and it wasn't great, right? It was hard for everybody who knew him. But when he passed away, I called his place of work, and I said, hey,

Send me everything. Send me all of his videos. Send me all of his trainings. I want to see everything. In fact, when I think about Paul, just give me something that I can just pull it up and remember him and think about what he taught. They had nothing, Tommy. They had nothing. Nothing. No recordings. Nothing. Everything he taught, everything he did was gone. It was in the ether. It wasn't in the ether. It was gone. It disappeared. And so –

What's interesting about that is as I spoke to his kids over time, some of their stories changed a little bit about him and about what he taught and how he taught it. And that bothered me. Yeah. And so I started writing. Right. I started writing one of the many reasons why I started writing, but I started writing so that after I'm gone –

If my kids, my grandkids, my great-grandkids want to know where I stand, they can pull up a book and they can find out. They can go onto YouTube, type in Brigham Dickinson, and they'll find a plethora of videos, and they will know where I stand. That's number one. Number two, look, I want to give. You know, my last book, right? I do have something to give. You know, for a long time –

And I spent it proving myself, right? I always felt like I needed to prove myself. Like I belong here. I belong here. I belong there. Well, it got to the point where I realized that getting there was never going to make me happy. Right. Never. And so when I was able to –

changed my mindset from wanting to prove myself to actually wanting to give, I became a whole lot more successful. Zig Ziglar says it his way. He says, hey, in order to get what you want, you've got to help enough other people get what they want. So that's my way of realizing, man, that learning how to give is a whole lot more fulfilling than anything else. And so that's the reason why I do it. So here's what I'd say to your team that wants to speak. Look, you've got to realize that we don't speak to make money.

We don't write books to make money. Now, there are some who do that, right? There are some who absolutely do that. It takes a decade. It takes time. Yeah. It takes time for you to get to the, look, here's what you need to do. You know what? Let's just tell them what they need to do. You take advantage of every speaking opportunity that you possibly can. If it's in a neighborhood, speak, right? If it's at a local event, say you can speak and you'll do it for free, right? Say that it's at your church, say that you can do it. And you get as much practice in as you possibly can.

You get involved in training as much as you possibly can. But you'll get to the point where people will pay you a little bit of money to do it and then a little bit more to do it and then a little bit more to do it. But then you'll realize, I mean, at least for me, I figured out a way to make money through coaching. Right. So it's easy for me to do the speaking because it promotes my coaching on the back end.

Yeah, well, look, intrinsically, I can tell you that my Facebook account gets a dozen people a week saying, hey, I just used your company in every single state or market I've ever been in. And I don't ask for that. I just say, look, if you guys test me out, tell me the good, bad and the ugly. And I don't that's kind of what I like is I got nothing really to sell. Yeah, we got HSF and certain vendors get involved. But like.

I talked to Jim Leslie actually earlier today, and he's like, dude, these companies triple because we just – the service titan accounts aren't set up right. They don't really have the manuals in place, the Al Levy stuff. Like these simple little things, it's not like rocket science, but there's an order of operations depending on where you're at. Yeah. And everybody's like, well, do I got to go to kick charge today? And I'm like, well, then you won't have any money to make, but you definitely need that. And do I hire – do I do a wizard of ads and they got all these questions? Do you have a budget? Yeah.

Do you know your KPIs? What's your technology stack? And so we work through these things, and all of a sudden, just their org chart, some of them want equity incentive programs. All these things are kind of complex, but once you look at enough of them and you just know what you're looking at, it's very clear this is what you should do now. Let me add one more thing there. Yeah. I went to a speaker organization.

where people are trying to make it big as speakers. When I went there, I got introduced twice by two very successful speakers, one who was like speaker of the year twice in a row or whatever. But the way he introduced me was, hey, yeah, Brigham is a speaker, but he does something really unique, really cool. What he does is he's got a team that monitors calls and provides coaching to people who need to increase their call conversion. It's really cool. In the back of my head, I'm going,

Dude, I have this really cool thing that I should continue to monetize. Right. Right. As opposed to getting distracted with, hey, a speaking engagement for 50 grand or whatever. Yeah. And here was the kicker. He then began, as he was introducing me, he began to describe how much money I was making doing what I was already doing. And then it was a whole lot more than what they were talking about making. So the back of my head, I was like, what am I doing? So here's what you do.

You find a problem that nobody else can fix. You fix that problem. And then you go to the industry where you fix that problem and you start talking about it on stage. And then guess what? You'll fulfill your dreams and make money too. Yeah. Yeah. I mean we'll chat more about that. Yeah. I think what is it like to onboard? I just want to get one last clerical thing just for Power of Selling Pros.

I know the answer, but if someone wants to reach out, what are the next steps? How do they get involved? What does it look like? What kind of work are they going to have to do? What is their team? What should they expect? So two ways to move forward. We'll do an initial training to set the expectation for what we're looking to hear over the phones. Before you start monitoring calls and providing feedback, it's not fair unless you set that initial expectation first. And so we either do that initial training first,

in person or we do it via webinar. Okay. So you get to choose as a business owner, you get to choose. If you've got a couple of CSRs, let's do the webinar. It's a four hour webinar. We'll set the expectation via zoom, right? Easy. If it's, if you've got more CSRs than that, let's have somebody go out

on-site, we'll do a half day in the morning for half your CSRs and then we'll do another half day in the afternoon. And that way you can cover the phones and still get everybody trained. - Yep. - Right? So we do that first and then we start coaching, right? We start monitoring calls, saving certain calls for coaching purposes.

And then we coach one-on-one twice a month for about a half hour per coaching session. We take them through four levels of certification. It usually takes about a year and a half to complete. And most businesses that we work with, they like, well, the ones that have realized that they shouldn't leave and come back, right? Yeah. They just keep going. They just keep going. And we've got a nice, strong group of individuals or companies that just keep going with those CSRs. And that's what we like to do is just keep working with them day in and day out or at least –

twice a month, month in and month out. Is there anything we got coming up as far as technician or comfort advisor slash? So yeah, so with technicians, we coach them once a month and it's a monthly over the phone check-in and then four customized videos.

So we're monitoring the calls. We're saving certain calls for coaching purposes. And we'll do a video customized just for them four times a month. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense because they're a little bit getting them scheduled. That way they can watch it on their own. Getting them on the phone is very difficult, right? So the check-ins are important because we want to be on the same page with the technician as far as where we're going with the training and how we want to help them make more money, right, for them and their families. So that check-in is very important.

just for the relationship. But the videos make it easier for them to receive the information on their own time. I love it, man. Well, we've talked about a lot. Here, I'm going to have you close us out, whatever's on your mind. Maybe we didn't hit something we should have hit. So whatever you want to end with. You know what, Tommy? I think we hit everything.

It is the lowest hanging fruit. Call conversion is absolutely the lowest hanging fruit inside your business. If you know you've got something that you've got to fix there and you know you don't have time to do it yourself, just get us to do it for you. Just go to PowerSellingPros.com. That's P-O-W-E-R-S-E-L-L-I-N-G-P-R-O-S.com. There's a link right on the front page that you can click for a demo. Talk to us. Let's see if we can custom build a plan for your CSRs, dispatchers,

League coordinators, as well as techs and even comfort advisors at this time. I love it. Well, I will say, I use you guys. I've known you. Shoot, I've known you. Man, you came out to the old, old shop. That had to be...

2015, 2016 maybe. I don't remember the year, but it's been almost a decade ago. Yeah, and it was awesome. Fantastic. Well, I appreciate you being here, brother. My pleasure. Great podcast. Thank you. Hey, listen, if you're listening and you haven't left me a review on this podcast, I'd really appreciate it. And I hope you guys have a wonderful week.

Hey there, thanks for tuning into the podcast today. Before I let you go, I want to let everybody know that Elevate is out and ready to buy. I can share with you how I attracted a winning team of over 700 employees in over 20 states. The insights in this book are powerful and can be applied to any business or organization. It's a real game changer for anyone looking to build and develop a high-performing team like over here at A1 Garage Door Service.

So if you want to learn the secrets that helped me transfer my team from stealing the toilet paper to a group of 700 plus employees rowing in the same direction, head over to elevateandwin.com forward slash podcast and grab a copy of the book. Thanks again for listening and we'll catch up with you next time on the podcast.