Episode Number: 104

Date: September 1, 2025

Duration: 49:02

Host Contact Information

Host: Justin Deese

Website: JustinDeese.com

Contact: [email protected]

Guest Contact Information

Guest: Josh Crouch (Relentless), Tersh (Service Business Mastery Podcast; Trade Automation Pros)

Company: Relentless; Service Business Mastery; Trade Automation Pros

Summary

Justin sits down with Josh and Tersh to dig into practical automation for home service companies—think Trello-based install workflows, warranty tracking, AI-assisted review replies, and turning your “external brain” into daily to-dos. They preview their Tap Into the Future conference in Savannah (Oct 3–5) with a Savannah Bananas game and hands-on “speed-dating” build sessions where attendees implement real automations before Monday. The trio tackles pricing turbulence, bloated tech stacks, and why optimizing processes before automating is the only way to win.

Takeaways

• Optimize → Automate → Delegate: Don’t automate broken processes; fix them first, then layer in automation and handoff.
• Hands-on beats hype: Their event features interactive build tables (e.g., Trello job flow from “sold” to “permit/equipment ordered”) so you leave with working systems.
• Control overhead with connectivity: Too many disconnected apps drive up costs and complexity—map data flow end-to-end.
• Review engine flywheel: Automate empathetic Google review replies and spin those into cross-platform social posts.
• Build an “external brain”: Capture ideas in a single place (e.g., Google Sheet) and auto-convert them into prioritized daily tasks.
• AI ≠ set-and-forget: Models change; prompts and workflows need periodic tuning to stay sharp.

Chapters

00:00 — Welcome, Service Business Mastery & Trade Automation Pros, Savannah Bananas love

01:18 — The Bananas effect: from pushback to sellouts

06:26 — 2025 market weirdness: costs up, conversions down; why efficiency wins

08:36 — Why run an event in October (and how the Bananas inspired it)

10:50 — Format: mixer, ghost tours, interactive Saturday, automation speed-dating Sunday

11:58 — Build-live demo: Trello job/permit/equipment workflow

12:49 — Warranty claims automation (order → return → credit tracking)

16:38 — Humans + automation: free people from low-value data entry

21:05 — Prompt engineering today: still helpful, less mystical

26:31 — Search is shifting; AI browsers, agents, and what’s next

32:49 — Toward agentic, connected companies by decade’s end

34:12 — Centralizing comms vs. scattered texts/emails

38:51 — The “external brain” system & scheduled daily tasks

43:30 — Skool community for step-by-step Zapier/CRM templates

46:23 — Event info & speaker lineup; where to learn more

47:12 — Closing thoughts

Keywords

#HomeService #HVAC #Plumbing #Electrical #TradeAutomation #Zapier #ServiceTitan #HousecallPro #Trello #AIWorkflows #GoogleReviews #CustomerExperience #Operations #ProcessOptimization #MarketingAutomation #Relentless #ServiceBusinessMastery #TradeAutomationPros #SavannahBananas #TapIntoTheFuture

Mentioned in this episode:

Homeservicehoorah.com

Hey, welcome back to another episode of Freedom Blueprint Podcast. We're hanging out today with Josh and Tersh from Service Business Mastery Podcast and Trade Automation Pros, which by the way, guys, those hats are sweet. I love the slogan. I'd tap that. That's, you know, a little tongue in cheek. I like it. Welcome to the show, guys.

Thanks. Yeah. That's right.

Thanks, man. Thanks for having us.

Thanks, Justin.

It's good to be on.

huge yeah so let's talk about ⁓ all the things man you guys have got some cool stuff coming up so you guys have your tap into the future conference coming up that is gonna be October 3rd through the 5th in beautiful Savannah Georgia and you guys are gonna be attending a Savannah bananas game too right

Yes, sir.

Yep. On Saturday.

It'll be my

first. Tersha's probably been to 50 of them. This is going to be my and my wife's first, and we're bringing the kids out too. So it'll be their first game they've ever seen. I've seen plenty of clips. I'm excited to see them in person.

It's exciting to see what they've done as a baseball person a lot of time, or really a sports fan, a lot of times when there's a twist on anything like that, people get weird about it. I love it. It's so cool. It's cool to see how they engage everybody.

there, there was definite, well,

there was definite pushback, in Savannah originally when, when they first announced the name, ⁓ I thought there was going to be riots in the street. Cause they're like, you're ruining baseball for Savannah. And it now, even though same people are like, this is the greatest thing ever. Like, cause the old team that was there before the Savannah sand gnats, they were ⁓ a feeder team to

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

It's, it's pretty, it's pretty wild experience, especially watching the bananas from the time they were, they started, we bought season tickets before the first game and it was a leap of faith. And after we bought the season tickets, then they were like, people were getting really upset and I was like, man, maybe we made a mistake here. But, ⁓ we became friends with Jesse and Jared, the one of the founders and the president. And, ⁓ ever since then we've just been.

fans and it's a really cool experience.

Yeah, it's, it's, it's definitely fun to watch. I met Jesse via a zoom call. It's probably been six or seven years ago, and I think they were just getting started. And I just remember having that yellow outfit on and thinking, what in the world is this dude doing? ⁓ and now you don't see an interview where he's not wearing it. And he's like, that's, that's how you know me. So.

Everywhere it goes.

I think he showed, he had a video with his closet

and it's literally like all yellow suits.

I heard something recently with him that said he was talking about training and he was talking about you train dogs. It's like you train dogs, you teach people. Like it was, it was a pretty cool, it's, it's pretty neat to understand the leadership behind what he's done. It's easy to look at it now and you're like, yeah, it's goofy baseball, but like the things that that dude has done to even get it there. Smart guy. Pretty impressive.

funny.

Well, if it's normal,

you do the exact opposite. That's his whole thing. He's actually the reason why I started wearing three-piece suits. ⁓ I was interviewing him years ago and ⁓ I asked him, said, if you're starting a plumbing company tomorrow, what would you do different to make yourself stand out from everyone else? He said, well, obviously I'd have all my technicians wearing white tuxedos. I was like, you do realize that a plumber is going to be playing with poo, right?

Yeah.

He's like, yeah, I'd have them, I'd have six extra sets of ⁓ white tuxedos in their van so they could change between calls if they needed to. I was like, I mean, it draws attention for sure. And he's like, is it normal? I was like, nope. He said, then that's why we're gonna do it. I was like, okay, touche.

Pipe dope and blue glue, think would.

No.

Well, I find and I think it really ties

number like that and we have to learn we have to it's like I told you guys I was on a call right before this talking with someone who's got they got eight different locations in South Florida and they're growing like a weed but they do a lot of stuff manually and they're like I just don't even know where to start with this stuff they're doing the same tedious processes that we've been doing for years so we just add more people to the mix and keep adding people and admin and overhead costs

And then we buy another software and another one, another one. These softwares don't talk to each other. They're in their little silo. And just never, we wonder why, man, well, the software is supposed to do this thing, but I want it to do another thing. we just don't, nothing connects. And it's just disjointed. And then you got to have like a IT specialist to figure out all this stuff on your payroll, which is again, another expense. And it just becomes like our overheads are bloated. And we have the person that pays for that as the homeowner.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I connected it together.

Mm-hmm.

And

that's why we're not our conversion rates are going down and people aren't as having as great of a year as they've had in the past. And the way to combat that is efficiency and by looking internally and removing bottlenecks. So that way we can keep our prices competitive so we can sell more jobs.

Yeah. And it, and as much as it is the homeowner that pays for it, that's best case scenario. Typically it's the, it's the owner because they're not adjusting their price and watches their numbers well enough to know, Hey, I added this one software. Well, that may not affect you all that much. When you add seven of them and they're $700 a piece. Next thing you know, you're like, Holy crap, I got all this, ⁓ cash in it. And then somebody's got to learn how to do all those things. I think automation is definitely the way to go.

The thing is,

Mm-hmm.

on a monthly basis. if you don't have some sort of, yeah.

especially with the tariff stuff, like, because tariffs

go up and then all of sudden they're down because it's a political thing and it's like to keep track of that. Good luck.

Are vendors

quick to go down with pricing? No.

No. ⁓

Once they raise

it, you know, it's really interesting. They raise it because of tariffs and scares of tariffs and all this other stuff. And then all of sudden the tariffs go away, but the pricing never went back to pre-tariff level. If someone's got an answer for that one, I'd love to hear it. Someone's pocketing that extra money.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Crazy how that works.

Distributors

usually don't miss an opportunity to raise prices. Yeah.

So what's the, ⁓ okay, so let's talk about the event before we dig into ⁓ trade automation. So this is the first time you guys are doing this event, right? So.

Yep, this exact

event and the set up the way that it is, it's fresh for us this year.

So what was the, what was the guiding light? Like what made you guys think we should do an event? Cause as, as we all know, events are, they're tough.

Stressful? Yes.

You know this very well.

Especially with how well,

especially with how many events there are. Cause I mean, we're talking about the month of October or September. there's even September's got Tommy's event Pantheon. We got service world expo. got like Turch and I are literally gonna get six, five or six different events in the month of October alone. Justin will price you at most of those. Um, event season literally is like almost year round now. It's not like it used to be where it was like September, October, and then like March and April, the rest of the year.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

⁓

Honestly,

the reason we picked October is because of the banana tickets. We were able to purchase it in the entire deck in right field, or I'm sorry, first baseline. so the only dates that we had available were the dates that we had the event. And so we knew that we really wanted to take advantage of the fact that we built this amazing relationship with the bananas and

how they've done business so differently. We wanted to bring that into the event. so we are going to make sure that like Friday night, we're going to do a mixer where we're just hanging out chatting, talking to each other. After the mixer, we have some ghost tours and stuff like that to do. And then Saturday, we're going to go full blast at ⁓ presentations and they're all going to be interactive though. So

What we don't want is people to just be bombarded with content and then never implement them. So then on Sunday, we're actually going to do speed dating, but ⁓ for automations. so it's automations and AI, ⁓ but we're going to actually implement the things that we're talking about on Saturday. And then Saturday evening, we're actually going to the bananas game. We're all going to bus up together and ride over and then come back.

I think the bananas...

So tell

me more about the speed date thing. What do you mean by that?

it's going to be like, ⁓ basically what we'll have. I don't even know how many tables there are. There's a bunch of tables there. ⁓ but each table is going to have somebody there. That's going to be like myself. We'll have a table, Josh will have a table and we're going to talk about building out, ⁓ and automation. That's more specific to like one of the ones that I had in my mind is going to be, ⁓ the project management for like a Trello.

So like every time you sell a job inside Service Titan, there's a gap between the job sold and then all the paperwork's completed. So we built out Trello automations that track that whole process and notify the next person. So like, is equipment ordered? Have we pulled a permit? All that stuff. So we're going to build out that whole automation in real time, in person, at my table. And so maybe somebody gets there they're like, this isn't really for me.

Mmm.

then they decided to move over to Josh's table and Josh is building out his marketing automation. And then somebody else is building out a different automation and people can move from table to table to build out these things.

So I want to say when we had our event in May, earlier this year, I got to see the Trello, like you showed me the Trello. I'm going to say that's worth the price of going to be able to sit down with you and build that for any, any, and every business. That was a slick automation that really took and filled in some gaps and it was pretty awesome.

Yeah.

It is. it's, it's, ⁓ obviously that's an easy one. I mean, that's one that really can resonate with a lot of companies, but another one that can resonate with a lot of companies is warranty claims. Whenever we turn in warranty equipment or warranty parts, we like the, there's a, there's a gap from the time we've done the service call. Now we have to order the warranty part. Then we have to go make sure we turn the return the warranty part. by the way, did we get credited for that warranty part?

tracking progress on invoices.

Yep.

Exactly. All of that stuff. so like all of that can be built out inside of some sort of automation, whether it's Trello or, or Monday or whatever.

Yeah, and what we're hoping is so like the different business facets. like you guys had a conference on CFO numbers, financials, accounting, everyone that's going to be there is going to want something a little different. Some people are going to really interested in marketing automation. Some people are going to be interested in operational ones like Tersha is talking about. Some might be interested in something else. So the goal is to make so people can walk away, have something built out or at least know how to build it out and be able to implement it by Monday morning. So that way it's done. And then just because

like Turch and I like we've been doing automation for seven, eight years now with Zapier and other tools. Like these are building blocks. Like it's literally the conversation I just had is because he's like, it's overwhelming. I want to do so much. I don't know where to start. And that's literally the same conversation we have with everybody. Everyone wants everything implemented at once. No matter what you do, it's never going to happen unless you literally hire someone full time to do it for you, which is expensive, but building blocks. So you think differently.

Because now the way Tersh and I think is if something comes through and we see a little bit of a roadblock, we're like, okay, we know this connects, we know this connects, we know this connects. I think we can build an automation for it. I'll give you an example. So we get thousands of images from clients every single month for our digital marketing company. And the problem is those images all come in with like a weird sequence of numbers and letters.jpeg. It's not clear what's in the image unless you actually know. like a ductless unit maybe can

Considered an AC unit by some people right because just depending where you're in the country if you're overseas or whatever so We have an automation. So every time a new file gets added into Google Drive We've run it through chat GPT to analyze the image chat GPT updates based on a very specific prompt What's in the details of the image so that way now the XF data of the image has the right information Then we also update the file name so that way when my web team my Google business profile team my SEO content team look at it

They know exactly what image is there based on just a file name. And then we have all the XF data. So that way the SEO value, the SEO juice or whatever you want to call it is comes with that image versus this long string of numbers and letters dot JPEG that does nothing for anybody. And so like little things like that, but that's a more advanced one because we're putting AI and doing a whole bunch of very serious prompting type stuff. But you have to be able to build something.

Like we talk, like online pricing has come to the trades in a hard way the last four or five years. He's been doing it for 13 years already and he's written three books about it. He's gonna be speaking at the event. We're gonna be talking about email marketing automation because most contractors don't do a good job nurturing their list. And we have an expert that helps us with our emails and does a phenomenal job at writing that content and how to do that and how to leverage AI and automation to do that. That's the kind of stuff that we're gonna be focused on the event is thinking differently.

Mm-hmm.

and making your business, using AI and automation to make this stuff better, not to remove the human element from it. It's to make it all better and enhance what your team is already doing.

Well, and when I think about automation too, think, Josh, what you said, a lot of people think about replacing humans. And to me, I think it's not about replacing humans, but there's certain tasks that really, they don't take a lot of brain power. Nobody likes doing let you let your team do the stuff that is revenue generating or on the phone with customers or whatever it is besides data entry.

They don't want to do it anyways.

Yeah.

Yes.

Well, we pay $20 to $25 an hour for a data entry person. And then all the manual text messages, Slack messages, team messages that we have to send to try to get updates on things versus having a centralized, like Terce was talking about the project and task management, where all of the comments, all of the communication goes on that card for that specific customer versus, shoot, somebody texted, oh, there was an email over here. And trying to figure out where, like,

Mm-mm.

our communication systems in the trades. I remember this vividly for being in the trades are a mess. We would have group text messages for all these different things. And I'm like trying to search my phone, like who said what, where, when, and it's just a mess. And doing that at scale, like you think like a, like a Tommy Mello of a company, like what a thousand people like trying to manage that at scale is you got to implement a lot of technology. And of course he probably has people that literally do just that, but

and some lower place.

Mm-hmm.

daunting.

Most companies never get to that size, so they're just stuck trying to figure it out themselves.

And I don't know very many people that are like, man, I cannot wait today to do data entry all day.

Yeah, there are people out there that enjoy that but it's far and few between.

Well, and are something, so I know AI and automation take up like the core, because that's, everyone wants that, right? That you say AI and automation, like, please give it, give, give it all to me. But there are things that Tersh and I have to delegate because there is no current system for us to use AI and automation, or it's just better for a human to do it. But there's a specific framework and process that we go through for people. So they know what to do first, second, and third, because a lot of times people start delegating stuff.

with a crappy process or they automate a crappy process. And now they have a crappy automation or a crappy delegation. They don't have an optimized systemized process to decide if they want to automate it or delegate it. So it's almost like an inverse relationship where they do the things backwards that they, and it's because of speed. like, I just want to get this off my plate. I don't want to do it. I don't want to deal with it. I don't want to hear another question about it. Just do it for me, but do it for me doesn't.

Yeah.

take you from A to Z so that way you can actually get a great out.

Not only that, there's a lot of times we'll talk to someone and they're like, yeah, it's not for me. I tried it. But what they tried is exactly what Josh just explained and described. And then they're like, yeah, I don't want to automate. Last time I automated, I had so many mistakes and errors and issues with my automations. It's like, yes, did you optimize the process prior to automating it? And they're like, no, we just automated it, just like Josh said. And I'll go, well, there's the thing. Like that's the issue that we're running into.

so many times is you need to optimize automate and then delegate and

Well, and

even with automation, it's not a set it and forget it, right? I mean, you've got to kind of check in on it every now and again. Things change, links break. I don't things update.

That's a big,

absolutely. Let ChatGPT update, and you're building out a bunch of stuff using ChatGPT. You'll know instantly, ⁓ or if you don't notice it, you're going to get a lot of random things that you're like, that doesn't really make sense, because your prompt is completely different now than it was two years ago. ⁓ And I've done that myself. We automate Google review responses.

So replying back to Google reviews and using AI to do that. And if you do it with GPT-5 and you have the exact same prompt that you used whenever you had GPT-3.5, you're going to get drastically different responses, know, or, you know, review replies. And so it's just one of those things that once it's done, you're exactly right. You can't set it and forget it.

Here's a question about chat GDP and AI in general. Prompt engineering is now a term that you hear pretty frequently. What, how important is that going to be in the future?

We did a presentation several years ago. And basically in the presentation, we were like, all right, be prepared to hire a prompt engineer. Kids are gonna go to school, to college, or prompt engineering. That's changed a lot. ⁓ Now it's sure like garbage in, garbage out. But at the same time, as long as you set up your core chat GPT,

Ahem.

behind the scenes, I guess. It knows your personality and it's gonna give you results based on ⁓ that more so than ⁓ the exact prompt that you put in. Now, I will say, if you put a very elaborate prompt in there, you're more likely to get exactly what you're asking for back out. Yeah.

Yeah, put like the do's and don'ts. Like I have some of

the prompts. I'd mentioned that image and analysis thing. I got the prompt from someone else and I looked through the prompt. This guy's a software engineer, so he's very thorough with that stuff. And I'm like, that's a damn good prompt right there. I I'm like, that's impressive. I am taking that with me. Thank you.

Also the problem is if it's task that's done a lot of times, I have an email analysis prompt. And if it's a super duper long prompt, first it's going to use up a lot of your computing power, your GPTs, and it's also going to be a lot slower. So some things are going to time out because like inside Zapier, you have certain amount of timeframe for responses before it times itself out.

It's a balancing act, but in reality, like if you're if you're more detailed and tell exactly what you want, you're going to get exactly what you want out of it. It used to be very much like ⁓ you had to use like the rice method or the, you know, such and such method and then this method and tell it what it is and then ask for it to do this and that dealer. While that stuff still works, it's not required as much as it used to be.

Honestly,

Chad GBT and these tools, a lot of times, so I've been doing these marketing thread posts and something I shared with Tersh about just some stuff in Facebook algorithm that's kind of working right now. ⁓ every day at eight o'clock in the morning, Chad GBT sends me this because there's a task function there where like, so if you want it to do the same thing at a certain interval, you can have it do the certain thing. But in order to get really good, like the first initial outputs I got, I didn't really train it.

on a lot of stuff. But then I had presentations, had blog articles, had videos on topics, like I had a lot of stuff. So I took the time to take all that information and train it. And that's really where I think some of the power is like, most companies have this stuff, they have some sort of policies, SOP, they have something somewhere on how to do a thing. Training it with that information makes it so much better. My outputs now are, I still add a little bit.

to most of those, but it is mostly copy paste because the outputs are so much better now. And then having to ask you questions and taking 30 minutes to answer the questions or whatever that time period looks like. I've written some blog articles using Claude and it's actually based on Marcus Sheridan's endless customers theory. And I answer the questions and I make sure I'm thorough on the answers and the outputs are really good. Like the article because

The last thing you want to do is put up a bunch of AI-generated sloppy crap. And that's what a lot of the internet is doing. I have a competitor that is putting up these 1,500-page websites in three months. And I go through them. And I'm looking at the blog posts. I'm like, this is literally crap.

Mm-hmm.

It may work for a time period, but as soon as Google has a helpful content update and starts tweaking things, it's going to drop drastically. Because the titles don't even make sense. It was like, AC Repair in the City name. won't give you the city, because I don't want to make it obvious. But AC Repair in a City, 10 proven experts. then literally, so you think it's a top 10 list of that city, right? Because based on the title, it's literally like 10 tips. And I'm like, this don't even make sense.

But that's what's happening. People are blindly putting a bunch of crap out, thinking, oh, more is better. More is not better. It's not. It will never be better. Now there's probably a tipping point somewhere in there where putting out more is better, but not to the point of just literally blindly throwing stuff on the internet. so we're gonna be at that point, because there's gonna be a lot more of that stuff coming in the future. Everyone's like, oh, we'll be able to rank you.

Mmm.

one day on Google. Yeah, well, it's not that simple. Yeah, and it's just, and then everyone's just throwing 40 pieces of content at Google every month per website, per like, at some point, Google's gonna be like, yeah, I don't want to index any of this crap. So good luck. So.

But then so will everybody else. So then how does that change? And how is that going to change Google?

And if they do keep indexing it, more and more people are going to go to an AI platform to search for what they're looking for than Google anyways.

Yeah. And perplexity, I mean, to throw perplexity in the mix, they offered Google a massive amount of money for Chrome to buy Chrome. ⁓ They didn't do it, but they do have their own, what's it called, Josh? ⁓

browser extension.

Yes, yes. So ⁓ now you can use perplexity instead of using Google Chrome. And ⁓ I've been testing it out and it works pretty good. It's not there yet. ⁓ But it's one of the cool features is that it has a sidebar that you literally can just click it and ask questions and it'll go into agency mode where it'll, or agent mode, where it'll literally, I could have

⁓ like a Google spreadsheet open and ask it to analyze the spreadsheet. And it'll just go through the spreadsheet that I have and give me the exact answer I'm looking for. Or say I want a really complex formula built for my Google sheet. Say I want this to do this. And it'll literally just build the whole ⁓ formula for me and like no effort at all. And I'm like, dang, this is, this is slick right here. So ⁓ it's all coming.

Yeah. Well,

tools we're talking about, the service titans, the slacks, the trellis, anything that is a digital tool will be all connected to an AI brain and we'll have a chat interface to be able to like to literally ask questions about anything about our company and all of the data we train it on. And the reason I say that is ⁓ there is a, one of my,

It's a consulting agency that we work with is pushing us pretty heavily on agencies right now. And agencies typically like regardless of what people think of them, know marketing agencies are not so fun topic for contractors to talk about. We generally get the forefront of whatever's coming because of all the digital and the tech type stuff. we have to know what's coming and how to use it. But this stuff is coming down the pipeline for us already.

And it's becoming to the point, like he was literally telling me there's one agentic company, it's one employee, it's a seven figure run rate already. And it's one employee doing copywriting, like, obviously it's AI and prompting and all this stuff. it's.

In order to open your brain up for those possibilities, you have to understand what the stuff that we're talking about, because otherwise your mind is gonna literally explode, because you're gonna be like, my God, I can't even fathom what that might even look like, who I need to hire for those sorts of things. it is no longer, like, I remember back when I started in the trades, like, having a CRM was nice, but paper was fine.

And then it was like, well, you really should get a digital CRM on a cloud-based one and all this stuff. it's transitioned to point of like, wait, you're not on a CRM now? Like, it's like, you like, that's one of the first things you do when you open a ⁓ trades business. I mean, I know there's still companies on paper tickets, Turch and I have talked to them, but it's rare. It's rare.

Mm-hmm.

Yep, we have. With paid fish.

Not very many of them though. Nobody

started in the last 10 years and are still using paper and pen. It's older companies that seem to be doing it.

A few not there's not many we

talked to someone we we had my god like I will remember this conversation probably until I lose my memory But it was a guy who bought a business to two and a half years ago or so like six seven employees paper Time of material ⁓ They weren't even offering they didn't even tell the homeowner how much the invoice was gonna cost they build them like two or three days later Like

We run it.

Justin as a UN, if Kristen was around, she'd be like, what? But it's still out there.

Mmm.

Yeah. Hello, AR.

⁓

yes. That was a conversation that we immediately had. were like, how many times do they not pay it? He was like, well, about three times a week.

Yeah.

Yeah, we

got to that conversation with Homer's like, I'm like, that's 150 conversations you shouldn't have to have. But again, if you talk about speeding up time and efficiency and probably all these things take up brain power meant exhaust us mentally. Let's focus for that, that eight hours a day or sick, whatever, how many hours a day where let's focus in on things that are actually going to move the business forward and streamline the stuff that's monotonous and boring. And that's really what we're trying to, we're trying to shout it from the mountain tops because it's worked really well for Tertian and we love it.

and we nerd out on it. But a lot of people just like, well, ChatGPT can do that for me. And I'm like, no, it can't. It can help. It can help you with ideas and analyzing big data sets and stuff. But it doesn't move data from A to B to C to D. It connects everything. It's a hub to essentially get an answer. And then you still got to do something with that. You got to copy it. You got to paste it. You got to put it here. You got to put it there.

Yeah.

Whereas these workflows, for example, and I was looking at one, we haven't implemented this yet. Claude, for instance, is great at writing copy. And we have some really great prompts that I've gotten for writing content. One of the things I found inside of Zapier was when a new ⁓ topic gets added to a Google Sheets row, automatically send it to Claude with a prompt, gives an output, connects it to WordPress, publishes a blog.

As long as it's good.

That does sound amazing.

How do we get the max output for what we pay these people to do? And that's gonna be the future and that's how we lower, that's how we increase our profit, keep our overhead low and we're able to scale much more quickly.

All of that is exciting and terrifying all at the same time.

Justin, have you ever heard of

And that's the future. And that's why we need to talk about, we need to more conversations about it. like most these things we go to, like every time that Tershan and do a breakout, like, wow, those were like the best sessions we've ever attended. But it's limited to like...

Yes.

one breakout per conference or a couple of breakouts per conference. And then of course, like some of them are still teaching like, what is chat GPT? I'm like, we're two and a half, almost three years removed from what is chat GPT. We go to an event and we ask, hey, have you used chat GPT every day, every week? Almost every hand goes up. And then we ask about Zapier and we got like 5 % of people in the audience are like, yeah, I kind of use Zapier. have like an account. really know what I'm doing. They don't get the data moving. They just.

Hmm.

Yeah. Yeah. Signed up for it.

plug in chat GBT all day, but then they still got to copy, move, paste, know, try to streamline stuff. And it's just, still not taking care of the root problem of data entry and moving data.

Terse, you were starting to say something earlier.

⁓ yeah, external brain. Are you familiar with the external brain concept?

Mm-mm. But I'm fascinated.

So

Josh hit a point, he touched on this earlier ⁓ on one of his rants. ⁓ He mentioned the amount of information that you have to store in your brain and ⁓ just the exhaustion that comes with that. ⁓ the concept is called creating an external brain. And your external brain is just a place to

dump information and then you can have it through automation and AI analyze it and then create even a task or a to-do list. can use Trello, you can use notes inside of your phone. You really want something that can be accessed via like a Zapier. So one of my favorite ones is to create every time I.

add a new line on a Google sheet. So I have like a random Google sheet that I have saved to my home screen on my phone. And I can just open it up and then just whatever is in my brain, I can just dump it out there and it's timestamped and everything else. And so then, ⁓ every time, like at the end of every day, it'll create a new task or a new updated, ⁓ external brain of possible to do lists. Like, cause you see some people who have like sticky notes everywhere.

or they have to-do lists across their desk that don't get checked off or they just want to put it on paper. Well, an external brain does that without having to waste your time. Because even with your to-do lists that are on your desk, you still mentally you're thinking, I need to go back to this to-do list to check it off because of this to-do list over here or whatever. I need to transfer them over here. But having that external brain, it does it all automatically for you. And so like sometimes

when you're laying in bed and your brain's just wandering mindlessly and you can't sleep because you got all this stuff on your mind, you just pop open your phone and say, hey, blah, blah, blah. I'm thinking about this. I'm thinking about that. I have this idea going on. What do you think about doing this? And you can literally just have a conversation with it. And ⁓ then it analyzes, you can have chat GPT or any of your, your LLMs.

analyze what you're talking about and then create the full like a to-do list to do. And if you want to go a step above, you can actually take that to-do list and then throw it in the chat GPT and say, Hey, every morning at nine at 9am or whatever time, ⁓ give me my to-do list with whatever's not checked off, anything that's not checked off. ⁓ or you could say,

That actually sounds like a great

idea. have like four to-do lists that I have right now. I have someone's Slack. have some written down. I have some in my email. Somebody click up. Of course I don't get back to any of them.

I know you do.

Yeah. And so like I literally, have exactly. that's,

we're all guilty of doing that. We'll write it down and then you find the to-do list later on and you're like, oh yeah, I really wanted to do that. I forgot about it. Well, I actually created one where it's every single day. I want to say it's like 8 a.m. 8 30. It sends me a notification with the next thing I need to do to my website. So like I went in and I said, hey,

why am I not ranking number one? And then I said, hey, ⁓ analyze all of my competitors' websites that are on the first page or first and second page or whatever it was, I don't remember exactly, and ⁓ compare my page to their page and tell me what I'm doing wrong compared to them. And then it gives me a list. And then I say, well, thinking forward to, what's it called? Question answering style websites, which are

good are going to be good for AI chat or AI search. ⁓ Tell me what I need to fix on my website so that I'm answering more questions for the consumer. And then I said, all right, now you have a list there of 52 things. I want this broken down into one task a week, and I want each each one of these tasks broken down into five days. So every morning at 8 a.m. or 830 a.m. create this task for me to do.

⁓ and send me a notification. So then it sends me a notification every single morning of what the task of the day is. And ⁓ I find that to be rather helpful, ⁓ but you have to be careful also because if you start getting the same exact email over and over and over again, then you tend to ignore it. ⁓ So it's in your best interest to make sure that you are doing what you're asking ChatGPT to help you with.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

And that's operating at a crazy high level, high performance. I think it's awesome. So let me ask this for anybody listening, right? And most of us own home service businesses. What is one automation that they could implement today that could help move the needle? Like what's an easy one step automation?

Yeah.

I would say it's usually the first one that we share with people. It's because we all know that we have to get Google reviews. But the problem with Google reviews is they only live on Google. And the second part is we know we have to reply to those. replying to those with AI, which honestly, I know people will fight. I've had people fight me on this. The replies on AI, when I go to look at their manual ones that they've done.

so much better. It's so much more empathetic and it's more thorough and complete. It gives two or three sentences versus like, for the review. it's like, okay, somebody just literally went into like copy paste, copy paste. And I used to do that. I don't know what to say, especially five stars with no comments. That was the first automation I ever built in my life was five star reviews with no comments. wanted to rotate replies so that way I didn't have to answer those because I hated those reviews. like...

Yeah, later on.

Yeah.

I don't know what to say to you. Like, I don't really know what to say to you except for like, thank you. So I've just like, just rotate it. Here's like 10 pre built responses. Just rotate through these 10 and it worked pretty well, but you know, sometimes it didn't, it was early on. was like six, seven years ago. But that, so the other part of that is because you're already getting the data from the review, create a social media post highlighting that review. So it goes to Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn.

I mean, you loved him. You just didn't like to respond to him.

Twitter if you got any followers on Twitter, ⁓ maybe not necessarily for the trades. think we had like eight followers when I built that. But let everybody know that you do five star work and you don't have to manually do it. I mean, and you can create options like some people are like, I don't want to automatically post something to face. get it. You can send yourself an email with options and you can just have your marketing coordinator. This is, this is where like

the lines between automation and delegation can really blend and become a really powerful system is you automate to a certain point, right? Maybe we don't wanna automatically reply to reviews with AI. We wanna look at two options and Tersha's done this for, he did this for a buddy of his ⁓ where he was sent it to the marketing manager and those two review replies, he was literally after about a month, he let them automate it cause he was literally copying and pasting the review replies. He's like, yeah, these are great. So start that way.

but you can also do social media posts and create posts that are designed for each platform. So Instagram's a little different than Facebook, which is different than LinkedIn, but have those posts and just make that content creation piece where you only have to come up with like one or two really good pieces a week, easy. Where you're sharing a picture of your team training or your picture of a new install and a happy customer with the yard sign or whatever. ⁓ But promote that stuff everywhere and that literally think about it.

People are on Facebook groups, they're on next door communities, they're on all these other places outside of Google that they find business information on. Get the information on there. It's really not that difficult. Now we can automate that. So now we're trying to find more customers in more areas. And the outcome of what us doing that was is we dominated Google. This was the professional services when I worked there. Then we ended up, by the time I left, ⁓

we dominated local Facebook groups. We got a ton of business from local Facebook groups and the 60 to 70 % of the recommendations were us because we constantly told the world we're amazing. So everyone's like, we would have people recommend us that never hired us because we kept telling them how amazing we were. And they're like, yeah, these guys gotta be great. I see it all the time. So just something simple like that can grow your business and you don't have to spend any more money on marketing. So that's what, that's why we always share that one first. It's like the

The possibilities are huge there.

So now anybody who's listening, who's like at that beginner, who's like, I've got Chad's EDP or WhatsApp here. I'm assuming the school group is a really good place to get started with you guys, right? So how would they find out more information about that?

We go literally to like,

it's very, we start at very basic level. What is Zapier? How to find if your tools connect through Zapier. We give you homework on the first couple lessons of like, take two tools. We even show you how Zapier, because Zapier is fantastic at coming up with ideas. They have like probably hundreds of thousands of ideas and they also list the most popular ones too. So ideas that you don't even think about, they have listed on their site and I've found that Claude one.

I literally looked up Clawdon, I was like, well, that was the first one. like, that's a really good one with the blog post and going to WordPress. like, I just didn't populate in my head because I wasn't thinking of it. So it's a very powerful tool. We teach you how to do that stuff. And then of course, we go deeper into the different CRMs. We have, I don't know, 80, 90, 100 templates for Sarah, Housecall Pro, and Service Titan users. So you can go into that module and you can literally like swipe and deploy something that's already built.

You just follow the steps, put it in your account and you're good. and you can start launching it right away. So it's, it's all, it's from basic to more advanced.

How does somebody find the school group?

How do they go about finding the school group?

It's a automation foundation inside the school community. But I can send the link. I can send the link to you as well.

Yeah, you just do a search.

Tersh's

ugly mug is on the video. Yeah, make sure you highlight that I said Tersh's ugly mug is on the video. So everyone's like, ⁓ it's that guy. We tried to, we really should try to use an AI model instead of Tersh, but we haven't gotten there yet.

Okay, yeah, and we'll put all that in the show note too. Yeah, we'll put all that stuff in the show note so you guys can get it.

Yeah

Hello is good. It's great.

It seems a little more on brand if you used an AI model. Just it seems more on brand.

kind of, you know, the

problem is like, I tried doing a thumbnail. I was, was doing this on the weekend. Normally my team creates all my thumbnails for videos for stuff that we do at Relentless, but I was like, it's the weekend. I just want to get this done. And so I created one and I put a picture of myself, but my like the eyes look really weird. Like they don't know how to differentiate the color in your eyes. So like the white versus like the actual color, it just makes them like almost looks like alien eyes. I don't know how else to describe it.

Thanks.

And then I was Everett Lippl did, he took headshots that were sent to him and created like AI generated versions for this like top 40 under 40 thing. My God, man, I got ripped apart with my AI generator. It just looked bad. I don't know if I would, I would not try images of yourself yet unless you find a, you find a, if you find a tool, let us know what it is because they are not very good right now.

Haha.

They make great images, but just an image of yourself, not the greatest.

Yeah,

don't do a human image. The subtleties of our face and everything, it just can't quite do that yet.

So now with the upcoming event, how would somebody get more information that wants to attend the event? Assuming it's not sold out yet, it could already be sold out when this goes live, but if it's not, how would they get more information on it?

happen to the future.ai. It's the all the information is there. How to get in touch with us is there. ⁓ And

Information on the speakers,

the sponsors, all of the agenda, all that stuff will be on that website.

Very cool. Well guys, any closing thoughts before we wrap up?

⁓ If you are doing something more than three times manually every single week Optimize it automate it and if you can't automate it delegate it

We're gonna talk a lot more about that at the event.

That is.

Well, I'm excited guys. Thanks for coming and hanging out. ⁓ well, actually we'll see you guys. Let's see, you'll be at Service World as well. You guys are doing one of the keynotes, which is very exciting. Congratulations. ⁓ So we'll be rooting, I'll be doing the wave out there for you guys.

Absolutely.

Thank you.

You'll be the one guy in the crowd that we're looking at.

Great. Yeah.

That's it. Lock, lock in boys, lock in. All right. We appreciate it guys. Thank you.

Thanks buddy.

Thanks,

Justin.