You are probably not losing money on your marketing. You are losing it after the lead comes in. One company recovered $750,000 in 60 days from estimates they had already stopped chasing. Another did $250,000 in their first week from a single abandoned call rescue sequence. Ryan Fenn has processed over 500 million text messages for home service companies and the finding is always the same: most contractors are missing 30 to 40 percent of their revenue in the follow-up.

Ryan started fixing windshields at a gas station in 2010. He built a $2 million online course business by automating text message follow-up before platforms like Chiirp existed, piecing it together from Zapier, Twilio, and a scheduling tool called ScheduleOnce. He packaged that system into software, got deeply involved in home services, and now runs a million-dollar-a-month platform serving some of the largest contractors in the country.

In this episode you will learn:

• Why your conversion rate drops 50 percent for every minute you wait to contact a new lead. The Salesforce study that proved this is a decade old, and the window is even shorter now.

• The exact 14-day follow-up sequence Chiirp runs for contractors: immediate text, phone call, 15-minute follow-up, then day 1, day 3, day 5, day 7, day 10, and day 14, followed by a slow drip that never fully stops.

• How a lead contacted a full year after the first touch became a closed job. Sales reps only care whether a lead is hot, not when you got it.

• Why running one nurture campaign for all your lead sources is costing you money. You need separate sequences for Google, Facebook, Angie, and Thumbtack, and the first message has to match the ad the person originally clicked.

• The blue vs. green iMessage difference. Chiirp was the first platform in home services to automate blue messaging, and it gets 40 to 50 percent higher response rates than standard SMS.

• How to send a personal owner video to every customer who books at scale using iMessage automation, and the exact trigger sequence that keeps it from getting flagged by Apple.

• The buyer's remorse window. The moment after a high-ticket estimate is signed is the highest-risk moment in the customer relationship, and one automated message closes that window before a cancellation starts.

• What 500 million analyzed text messages revealed. Conversational copy beats marketing copy by 10X, and the difference between a message that converts and one that gets ignored comes down to whether it sounds like a neighbor or a brand.

• Why automation should pour gas on a fire that is already lit, and the question to ask before implementing any follow-up system in your business.

• The two ways to scale any business, software first or people first, and how to decide which one applies to every problem in front of you.

• Why Ryan calls himself the anti-AI guy who sells AI, and what that actually means for how you think about automation.

This one is for the contractor who is generating leads but cannot figure out why the revenue still is not where it should be. The answer is almost certainly in the follow-up.

What's up guys, this is Mauricio Cardinal. I'm with Ryan Fenn. Welcome to the show, Ryan.

Thank you for having me, Mauricio. I'm excited to be here.

I'm excited to have you, man. I'm excited to talk to you. Actually, you know, I looked back in your, in our emails and I think we first connected back in 2021. We actually had a conversation, but we probably just, you know, when we talked a couple of weeks ago, we just, we didn't realize that, but we did talk about five years ago. I just looked at the emails. It's pretty funny. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah.

Alright.

That was a lifetime ago. COVID day, COVID days, man. That's funny. We were social distancing.

Yeah. So you started a, you he told me last time he started a winch fixing windshields at gas station in 2010, right? Walk me through how that led to building a software company worth a million dollars a month.

Yeah. so I, I've always been, you know, very entrepreneurial, just kind of, didn't, I didn't finish high school, so I wanted to just kind of figure out my own path and always just liked selling stuff. have fun selling stuff. when my first son was born, we started, my wife and I started a windshield repair business. and I would go out door to door selling windshield repair.

And then, and then I saw some kids at the gas station, this girl at the gas station, she was washing people's windshields. And I realized she was really smart. She was letting the cars come to her into the gas station while I was out going house to house. She was letting cars come to her and her trick was that, you know, washing the windshield. And that would allow her to, to see the chips in the windshield. And so I went to a gas station. I asked the owner if I could do the same thing.

He said, yes. And, I got started at, is a place called Mike's Chevron and he'd let me go out there and wash people's windshields and I would offer my service and I would get deals. And there's a lot of really cool lessons that I learned in that process. But, from there, I, after about four years of running my windshield repair business, we were in several locations at that point. We were in dealerships, we're lots of.

had a pretty good little business going and I wanted to, I always loved digital marketing and I always loved scaling and getting bigger and so I built an online course, how to start your own windshield repair business. And that was really cool, but I had a similar problem. You know, you have,

cars coming into the gas station, have people coming on to Facebook, right? But they're not there for that reason. They're not there for getting their windshield repaired. And they're also not there to learn about, you know, starting a court, going into a course, that kind of thing. So I had to learn how to, you know, convert or like, you know, create demand from this cold traffic. And I learned that if I put up a good ad, and then I really quickly if somebody requested information, if I texted them,

I had a really high conversion rate compared to calling them. And so I would text these leads as they would come in. And pretty soon I started automating that process. would automate the process of sending the text message, right? And I was getting around a hundred leads a day. These are really cold, top of funnel leads that needed a lot of nurturing, a lot of education. And so I would send out videos and text messages and pretty soon they would

book call, started booking calls with me and I started just kind of automating this whole process and it worked really well. And I made, I sold, I think I made about $2 million selling that course and you know, I wanted to go bigger. So I figured if this process of converting traffic into deals through automation, you know, specifically text message automation could work for me.

ways that we could automate these follow-ups throughout the customer journey. And so we got heavily involved in home services. A lot of home services started, you know, showing us where like where we can integrate and all these different things. And, you know, next thing you know, we run a million dollar a month software program that helps the biggest home service companies in the country and in the world really automate their follow-ups so they can close more deals. So.

That's a pretty straight line for 16 years, it obviously a lot of ups and downs there, but that's kind of the it in a nutshell.

What were you using before? How did you actually build the before you even started the company with the windshield? Of course, like what we're using before I'm just curious during that time.

to build the automations. So, you know, at the time, we put the course on a WordPress site. So we used WordPress for that. And then we used, there were some automation tools within WordPress that allowed us to take forms and push them into a CRM. There was a CRM that doesn't, I don't think is around anymore called Engage. We used Zapier to make the connections.

Yeah.

And it was a very, and then we used schedule once, which was kind of the precursor to Calendly. and so we kind of pieced together a whole bunch of different little things and you know, had Twilio, you know, and all this to make the text messages go out. And so we had all these different like duct tape together, softwares to make these automations happen. And the idea was let's, let's package this all up into a, into one place, you know.

software.

Yeah. So the reason why I asked that, because it's very curious. It was actually, you're, you're trying to automate the follow-up and, uh, and be back then, right? You were already thinking you're just basically building it out yourself and using these different softwares together. It's kind of built out the system that you wanted. Um, and that's important to understand because there's a lot of software now that does that. I mean, my, my big, my big thing about this, and we're to have a conversation about follow-up and all that. I mean, speed to lead follow-up.

Yep.

Mm-hmm.

So that's why it's important to point out right from the beginning. It was actually more charter back then because it was harder back then to build it. Now it's much easier. Chirp is one option. There's other options as well, but chirp is one option that fixes it. And obviously there's changes since that time. And we'll talk about that, especially the cool stuff with the iPhone and iMessage. But that's the thing that I want to point out to people to make sure they understand that, you know,

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

The core thing about one of the problems we're talking about is speed to lead. His follow up is one of the core pieces of making more sales of lead generation. Right? It's truly important.

yeah, yeah. like if, if you can't, we're talking speed to lead, right? So, so if I can't get a lead, if I can't contact my lead, this is studies that have studies been proven with thousands and thousands of lead fills with within my business. But then also like, you know, Marisa being, you know, outside of the contracting world too is like there's Salesforce and all these thousands, millions and millions of different ways that you can generate lead.

lead, you know, lead platforms on these different things where leads are coming in and Salesforce did a study on this. This is like 10 years ago. They did this study that if you, if you're not contacting a lead within one minute, your chances of converting are dropping by about 50 % every minute after that. so by the time you get to minute four, your chances of converting are extremely low. And, and most people, they think they're doing a good job. They think that they're getting to their leads fast.

A minute goes by very, very quickly. And people go, yeah, I contact my leads really fast. And we go, well, how fast? Well, at least five minutes, within five minutes. And you're like, dude, that's a lifetime. And I'll give you an example. I recently had a DEXA scan done. It's a health thing where you go and get your, they scan your body to see how fat you are. And I'm doing this, I looked it up on Google and the first one, I call it.

It does, they don't answer. I hang up the phone. I call the second one. They answer. They take my number. They book my appointment and they hang up. And by the time that was done, I get a text message. Then I get a text message from the first guy. Hey, I'm sorry. I missed your call. Would you like to, you know, book your Dexa scan? And it was only two minutes from when I had called him and then started this other call, but it was enough time for me to book a job with somebody else. So he basically handed that deal.

to his competitor because he didn't have an immediate text message go out that would have stopped me in my tracks. If I would have gotten the text message the moment I hung up or within 10, 15 seconds, I would have responded and said, yeah, I'd like to book and then it would have been game on, right? But because I was able to get on the phone and book that other job, it was too late. So what we find is that one minute is now even becoming

Sure, that was 10 years ago, the Salesforce did that study. And it's like, now think about people's attention spans with real Facebook reels, TikTok, know, how we can't even sit and watch a normal TV show anymore. We want all our entertainment wrapped up in one minute, right? We watch a one minute reel for entertainment. And so our attention spans are shrinking more and more.

Thank you.

And now with AI, our expectations are going through the roof of things where it's like, not only do I want a response within a minute, I want it to be the smartest, best response. I want all the information. We just want things so fast. And so if we're not ready as a home service company to really respond and satiate that need of the customer, they're going to move on very, very quickly.

Yeah, and your experience working with hundreds of home service companies, what percentage of leads are just dying because nobody followed up?

So, you know, we see lift, we'll see lift in the, and when I say follow-up, this is like different follow-ups, there's follow-ups throughout the different stages, like one, in one stage we might see a five to 10 % lift, right? And then in this stage we might see another five to 10 % lift, and then once we've kind of filled all the gaps, we see like maybe a 30, 40 % lift in conversion. You know, we get like a company like Getall, a really big,

home service company that has really well dialed processes. We implemented estimate rehash with them and we immediately saw in the first 60 days, $750,000 of recovered revenue that they would have lost, that they would have given up on. We saw, you know, with abandoned calls, one company we see the text message going out the immediate, you know, the moment that they missed the call.

that's stopping the scroll, that's stopping you from going to the next person. They did $250,000 their first week from Abandoned Call Rescue. So if you're going 30, 40 % lift after we do follow-up correctly, I would say then you're probably missing out on 30 to 40 % of opportunity if you're not.

A lot of people, complain about their business. go, man, my revenue is way high, but I also, I'm not taking any of that home. made a million dollars in a year and it costs me a million dollars to do it. And it's like, it's because the, the, the, the cliche is true. The fortune you're looking for, it's in the followup. That profit margin that you're looking for is in the deals that you missed because you, didn't follow up.

You said that the hardest part of selling chirp isn't the tech, it's the belief that follow-up actually moves the needle. Why is that such a hard sell?

Yeah, I think it's because it's not sexy, right? It's not, it's the part, it's the part of the job. You've probably seen the meme going around. It's like the magic you're looking for is in the work you're avoiding, you know? And you know, what is sexy is marketing and lead generation and you know, getting your name out there and the hustle, you know, and the grind, all this like, this like kind of front end stuff. And that's cool and it's needed, but

The follow-up is, like I said, where the fortune sits because people don't really want to do it. It's boring, right? It's like the actual act of following up sucks. so sales guys don't want to do it. They want the hot leads. They just want to be where the action is. They don't want to sit there and follow up with 100 leads. so, yeah, we've found this kind of funny thing where you go, where people go, yeah, I follow up. I follow up. I follow up.

And then when we'd really drill in and go, well, how, how much, how often? And they go, well, I'll call my lead. I'll call them two times or three times. And then that's, that's it. And it's like, we need to see like 12 to 15 touch points for maximum conversion. And so, so when you kind of, when you lay that out, they kind of go, I'm not going to call my leads 12 to 15 times, you know? And that's obviously where automation comes into play. But yeah, it's.

It's the small and simple things that you kind of don't think are gonna move the needle are the things that actually do. So that's where I'd say the challenge definitely lies.

Yeah, I actually saw a post, this is years ago on a roofing Facebook group where they had like an entire conversation where these guys were bragging about OneCallCloses and how they don't follow up. Oh, I follow up one time and if they don't, if they're interested, I just move on. They're like bragging about that. And it was really illustrative of the mindset these guys have. A lot of these guys have.

Yeah.

And, yeah, they're not interested. just had a conversation with them at one point and then they don't follow up. It's a combination of two things. It's lack of skill and also lack, it's probably ego thing too as well. It's, yeah, these guys are just not ready. I just move on or whatever. I just keep it moving, which is really the wrong attitude to have.

As an owner that would, you know, hopefully drive you nuts because you're going, I'm spending money to get a lead. I'm getting, for, get somebody to raise their hand, it's expensive. costs a lot of money. And if somebody's not respecting that and maximizing the amount of money they can make, they're playing a game that's just, they may make money now, but it's like, kind of like, you know, it's like, you got a good run on the roulette table, you know, like it's going to end. It's going to eventually end.

and it'll probably end when all your chips are stacked on the wrong color. And so, yeah, that's a cool ego thing, whatever. I could care less about that. I don't care if you close them on the first one or on the 10th one. I care, are you profitable in making money? And are you sustainable? That's what matters to me.

Yeah, yeah. Walk me through a real example. say, an HVAC company, 50 leads a month, let's say from Google ads. What is a perfect follow-up sequence look like in the first five minutes, 10 minutes, hour, first week? How does that look like?

Yeah, what's cool is I can say, I'll go through like kind of off the top of my head what the sequences are. And then just so you, so everybody knows like we've taken the last 500 million text messages that we've sent and we're having AI analyze that. And it's telling us exactly like exactly what I'm about to explain, but in more detail what words to say, know, timing and all of this stuff. But we like to see

in the first seven days, a pretty aggressive cadence where we're talking an immediate text message and then ideally a phone call. And then if they don't respond to either of those, text message usually that same within that pretty quickly, maybe 15, 20 minutes. And then a 24 hour later text message, a day three, and then usually like a day five, seven.

10 and 14. So like we'll go all the way to 14 days. We'll also plug in voicemails and emails along that as well. So we're hitting them from different angles. And so we look at like a 14 day sequence being fairly aggressive and then tapering down to tapering down to a drip. I'm, I'm never going to give up on a lead until they've either opted out or converted. So

but I'm not gonna aggressively pursue them. That becomes ineffective. So if I keep pounding them. But what can be very effective is a monthly or bi-monthly, like every two or three months cadence where we're just dripping. And there's a lot of times where like even six months later, a text message will go out and the customer will go, you know what? Yeah, I actually do need to get that done. I was just on a podcast earlier, the guy had.

received a one year text message, he was actually telling the story because it happened yesterday. He got a text message a day, you know, yesterday that had been a year since he had talked to guy and he was ready. He was ready for whatever project it was. And it ended up being a job. so these, these leads, so think about it like this, like sales guys don't care about, they don't care.

when you got the lead, they just care if the lead's hot or not. And if a text message goes out six months later and a person goes, yeah, I'm interested, that's like you just bought a brand new fresh lead, even though you paid for it, you know, six months ago. So, you wanna make sure that you are aggressive that first 14 days and then a slow cadence, slow drip to maintain that top of mind and hopefully get them, you know, later down the road.

So, first 14 days typically around how many touch points do do?

Yeah, so if we just talk, if we're talking text messages somewhere between like five and seven text messages, but then maybe two or three emails and maybe two or three voicemails. we're looking at, you know, in that 12 to 12 to 18 touch point range. Um, you know, which, which is not sustainable if you're doing it, you know, manual.

Does it matter of the lead source? So if you're doing someone from a home advisory lead versus someone from a Facebook lead or from a Google campaign, do you change the workflows for that? Or typically, what do you see in those situations?

Yeah, have different workflows for Angie, Thumbtack, Facebook lead forms, Google, and the reason is because intent is different on each of those. A Facebook lead is their intent might be much higher up the funnel than like a Google search lead form, or an Angie search form. So again, we use the data to kind of draw this out and draw out what the sequences are.

but we definitely want to see specific campaigns. And we also want to call out, it's less about the cadence there and more about the message because we want the message to match, to be congruent with the ad. So if I have an ad on Facebook that says, you know, let's say I'm a carpet cleaner and I say three rooms in a hall for 149 and you click on it, that first text message that goes out, I want to call out that ad. So I want to say, thanks for checking out our ad on Facebook for, you know, I'll say like, you know,

we're running that special three rooms in a hall for 149, how many, know, we're re solidifying that thing and they go, and they make the connection like, this is who this is. But if I just have a generic text message, they might not tie the two together and they might not realize that it's that person texting. So if it's an Angie form, I'm gonna say that, thanks for, you know, filling out your information on Angie's list, you know, I'm an approved Angie contractor ready to help you out, you know.

So it's not so much the cadence, so much as is the, at that point I'm gonna be working dialing the language specific to the ad.

Yeah, so keep that in mind guys, it's important. if people are, and I typically never say that. So people, if they're trying to set this up, what I see is basically just having one nurturing campaign, right? For all the sources of leads, but it's not the right way to do it. You just set it yourself. It's kind of the lazy way to do it. And it's not as effective.

So for you, would build it out. You would, if you're building out the sequence, you would have chirp in the middle and then having different campaigns, depending on the source of the leads, depending on the actual channel.

Yeah, so Angie lead would be so so like in in chirp we have the Angie lead converter campaign, right? And that's specifically only fires when an Angie lead comes in and we'd have the same for thumbtack and we'd have the same for Google LSA and the same for you know Facebook and then within Facebook we might have multiple depending on how many different ads we're running because we want to be congruent and make sure that the message lines up because you know a text message.

Even if it takes 30 seconds, might, that's how quick people can forget. They'd be like, what is this text message? And they don't draw it back to that ad that they saw. And that'll decrease your response rate.

So if you heard that, you reference the text message from, if it's an Angie lead, say, Hey, Hey, I saw you filled out a form on Angie list or from Facebook, saw you saw on Facebook, you reference it just to for them tie it back. And that's probably a change because I wasn't.

Right? Yep. Yeah. Or even if, even if you say like, it's, it was, it's, call it like a pineapple carpet cleaning, right? That was my brother's carpet cleaning business to say, Hey, Hey, it's Ryan with pineapple carpet cleaning. Thanks for checking out, you know, our special. And then it's an immediate like drawback to that thing.

cool. Yeah that's important to understand in the context of actually maximizing your funnel and you're getting the most value from the actual leads. In your opinion right so because I've worked with a lot of contractors and they have different opinions on this but you work with some of the big guys. Do these lead these different lead sources or they're all like they all convert right if you have the right systems on the back end

they all can be profitable, right? terms of Facebook, Google, Angios List, they all can work, right?

a hundred percent. Like, okay, yeah, there are going to be some fly by night fake lead stuff, like, okay, Angie, okay, let's, let's go back to the example of the gas station, right? I could easily, you know, see gas station people pulling into the gas station and I could complain and go, these leads suck. And it's like that girl who was over there washing the windshields, she's going to disagree. And she'd go, no, they don't suck. I'm closing deals.

And you hear these people and they go, Angie leads suck. And then you got a guy over here going, dude, I, I love Angie leads, you know? And, when we look at that, go, no, Angie leads don't suck, dude. You suck. You suck at closing deals. Like you haven't figured out a conversion process to actually like all Angie can do is get people to fill out a form. Like that's their job. They did their job. Right. And it's like, now it's your job to take that data and turn it into an actual deal.

And that's where the skill comes in. so when people, it's not like Angie is just cruising the country, scamming everybody and moving on to the next state. They've been around a long time, right? And there are a lot of companies that make a lot of money with Angie leads. And it's because they built a conversion process that actually turns them into jobs. it's not as easy. And that's, think one of the problems is people will...

get leads from Google, which are the highest intent leads. Those are, those are people searching for your product or service right now and are, using high intent, you know, high buyer keywords and they're searching and those are the easiest to convert. And so then people go, they use that as kind of like a standard, right? And they go, well, these leads suck. And you go, well, Google, cause they compare them to Google leads. And you go,

Yeah, Google leads are awesome, but there's only like four a day available to you. So if you want to scale, you need to go outside of that and you need to sharpen your skills and to sharpen your skills, you need to learn how to actually funnel and create that, that bridge that takes them from, you know, top of funnel to bottom of funnel. So, so yeah, I would say a hundred percent these companies aren't scams. They're getting people to do what they say to fill out the form.

If you can convert them, then you're making it happen.

Yeah. I remember I was working with a contractor, a roofer like years ago. And, back then we had, we were general leads and we had a call center, which booked the appointments for the, for the contractor. And I think one month we booked like 25 appointments and it was like 150 bucks per appointment. was like very inexpensive. And even though we booked the appointment, pre-qualified him, think he just, he closed one deal. and the one, the one he closed.

was a guy, his roof had a tree basically like destroy the roof. And okay, I mean, how are you not gonna convert that? You just have to show up there. The tree destroyed the roof. mean, that's the, yeah, that was a great lead. Well, the tree destroyed the roof. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So, and that's what the guy expected. He 25 appointments and that was a common thing.

Right? Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the standard now. That's the standard now for a good lead. Yeah.

But the key thing to remember guys is it's and Ryan can attest to this I'm sure is that it's gotten way more competitive. It's gotten harder because what you described is something that really wasn't probably necessary five years ago. Like five years ago, Paul, you didn't need to do like different channels and stuff. Now it's 100 % necessary because people have less attention span, right? They forget easier and people say that you have attention span of a goldfish like eight seconds. So that's what that study says.

No.

Yeah. Yeah.

And it's just more expensive to generate the lead. So it's actually more competitive and more expensive. So if you're not actually converting those leads, which Trev is one of the platforms that can do that for you, not setting up correctly, then you're wasting your time. You're just basically lighting money on fire. That's the reason.

And there's this beautiful blue ocean once you actually open your mind up to the idea of lead conversion because you know Everybody wants the Google leads, of course everybody does and the guys that can pay the most are gonna get it right the most the the guys with the deepest pockets and the ability to Convert for one and then also to to like there are you know private equity groups that are willing to like lose money on a deal

you know, just to gain a new customer for life. And so the smaller guys don't have the ability to spend that kind of cash to get a deal. And, you know, there's this huge blue ocean on social. We talk about Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. This year, Facebook alone will be, Facebook will be, they'll, more people spend money on ads at Facebook than on Google for the first year ever.

And so there's this huge opportunity there that's also closing, like it's gonna close over time, it's gonna become more competitive, but it's still really different because it's a completely different game. You have to treat it like a completely different thing. These are not people searching for your product or service. They're not gonna be as good of a lead as a Google lead. It's just like the gas station. We have the traffic coming in, but they're not there for HVAC.

Right? They're not there for plumbing. They're there to see a cat video. They're there to see their friends or whatever. And our job is to capture their attention and create demand before they even go to Google. And so we put ads on Facebook. We capture their information. We capture their name, their number. know, there's ways that we can kind of qualify them right there on Facebook.

And then we capture that information and then and then we put them into a lead conversion bridge where we start that process, send out the first text message, you know, invite them to book, you know, right there. And then if they don't, call, you know, and so there's this process that we can convert this traffic. And then once you actually know how to do that, you, can kind of, you have a lot more control over your business than just waiting for Google to send you a lead. You can, you can create demand versus wait for it.

Yeah. And Google's limited. what he's saying is a hundred percent fact that Google Facebook is becoming the largest digital platform in the world when Google for a long time was a leader. Uh, and my opinion is that I think for a lot of home service companies, Google is not even worth it. Honestly, Google ads, uh, it just, it just depending on what, what niche, what vertical and how much money you're to spend, how long you're to wait, but typically you're right. Like there is a blue ocean because you can be very creative on Facebook. You can do really.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

unique stuff that makes you different. Also, it's not as expensive right now as Google. So you can, if you're really creative, if you're a small, like say, know, long-care company, you can be really creative on Facebook and get a lot of leads. If you do like, know, use your creative mind with the videos and stuff, that's something unique, right?

Mm-hmm. And what's really cool... Go ahead, go ahead.

Not good.

What's really cool about, Facebook ads too is, you know, we get to be creative. That's great. But at the same time, their algorithm, we don't, you know, before, I think you probably know, Maurice had long enough back of where you, had to, we had to put pixels on different parts of our websites so that we could get different so that Facebook could know like, what is the intent of this person? All this difference. The algorithm and AI now, you basically, you put it out there. You don't have to know all this targeting. You don't have to know.

You don't have to target, you target a couple of little things in there, you know, your area and some age things, but you don't have to be like, no intent, nothing. Cause what will happen, let's say you're a garage door company, you can put that ad out there. And if somebody engages in your area on any garage door company, but they don't finish, they'll go, this guy likes garage doors or is interested in getting his garage door fixed. Let's show him.

all of the opportunity, all the options. And now your ad will pop up to a guy that has already engaged. So Facebook's trying to find you opportunity regularly. You don't have to know how to do that. It's doing it for you.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that happened with the Android meta update that happened last year. So it's really about more creative, less control with the targeting, but Facebook does the targeting for you. So you don't have to like, you know, do the targeting yourself. We talked about this last time. You mentioned that automation should replace what's already working, not fix a broken system. How do you diagnose whether a contractor is actually ready for a

Yep. Yep.

That's right.

So yeah, you should already be, if you're going to use Chirp, because Chirp's a really advanced automation platform, does a lot of really cool stuff. But yeah, it's not going to, it's going to make a bad system worse, is what it's going to do. It's going to make a good system better. But if you have a bad conversion process and then you just automate that conversion process, you're going to, you you're just going to automate failure.

which you don't want to do. And so, you know, are you converting leads now? Are you actually, you know, is your business growing, but you're finding yourself doing tasks that are redundant, you know, things that are, you know, that I don't like to say that the, you know, I like to let the robots do the robot things and the humans do the human things. If the things you are doing are repetitive and redundant,

that can be automated. if you're sending the same text messages to the same leads as they come in, that's a redundant task that can be automated. What you can't automate, they're getting there and AI voice is a thing and we offer, but I'm still one that will say you should still get on the phone and close deals as a human being and you should have a human connection, but you can start the process with automation.

And so we look at it's like, okay, cool. Is what you're doing working? You just need to, is it a, is it a fire that's already lit that you just need to pour gasoline on? cause if you pour gasoline on, on dry tinder, it's just going to make it wet and it won't light, right? But if it's already lit and it's working, we can pour that gas on there. And so you want to make sure, you know, you're actually, when we look at like companies that are doing a million, 2 million, and they start to really get.

that kind of like redundancy going they go how do I get to the next level because you start to hit plateaus in your business seems like that two to three million ranges is real that's like that's like where somebody can really get on their own you know with no like no soft maybe a little software help maybe they have an FSM or something like that but but like they hit this plateau where they start to go okay like I'm doing two or three million but I'm busy all day I don't know what more I could do

And that's where we start to look at these automation opportunities. I'm not saying a smaller company couldn't, but that's generally where we see some of the best results is in that two to three million range, then especially in the five to 10 million range.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a, it's a, it's basically like a stages you go through as an entrepreneur, you, know, it's a lot of contractors where they do is rely on hustle and grit, say hustle and grit to get to like two to 3 million. Right. And then after that, you can't, have to use technology. You have to use systems to get to the next level. and follow up is extremely important, but it doesn't mean you don't have to, you can do it right away. Actually, you know, you can, you can start right, right, the right process. And if you do it correctly, you can.

Yep.

Mm-hmm.

I really do with AI that what I see Ryan is basically a lot of smaller companies, even in the home services space that are, can do a lot less. I'm sorry. I a lot more with less people. That's why I do. I do see that. I do see that with a lot of, a lot of people. already happening in our space and agencies. One of the things I'm doing is connecting AI and Claude to all of our tools to make sure we kind of, you know, automate the workflows and save time. Cause there's always things that have to do on my end.

Yes, Yep.

Uh, that, take time. Uh, but if I can save 20 minutes, 30 minutes and little chunks, right. If you build those and over time, you build that over time, you save three or four hours, five or 10 hours, and you do it across the team and that compounds, right. That compounds. So, and, the contractors can do the same thing. They could do the same thing with a lot of the admin stuff and a lot of the sales stuff. Uh, you know, the labor is always going to be labor. They still need to build, build and have technicians and, and, and, uh,

Mm-hmm.

That's right.

and subcontractors, but that's never gonna change, but they still can, the backlog, because a lot of contractors, use subs, right? They use subs or technicians, so they just hire out the actual work. But that's what I see, so.

Yeah, so there's two ways to scale your business, It's either by leveraging people or by leveraging software. you always start, what task do I need taken care of? Can software do it? Cool. If it can be done by software, we start with software. If it can't, then we look to hire, right? And so we always want to start with the cheaper option. so, like you could go,

All right, I'm just going to hire a guy to do all of the all of the follow up for me. It's like, OK, cool. It's going to cost you a lot more money. But that guy will be busy and he'll probably drop the ball. So, you know, that's probably a scenario where where, you know, automation software automation is better than hiring a human. But if we go, hey, I need a new HVAC technician, that's that it's like, OK, are you going to hire a robot to do that? No, that's where we get the human. So.

There's always this kind of the two answers. It's like, and if you simplify your processes to that point where you go, okay, I have a problem to solve. Is it solvable by software? No, then it's human. And then, you know, that's just the question you always ask.

Is there a or formula they teach clients for writing follow-up messages or does it change by trade?

We don't have a formula for it, but we do have the data that you can access, you know, from these messages where you can then use that to, cause it's so different across everywhere, right? Like what works in California might not work in New York and Texas and Florida. Like, and, what, what, you know, obviously it works for HVAC won't work for plumbing and this and that. And, and, and then of course it comes down to like what different leads and stuff. And there's a lot of great copywriting like.

stuff out there, but I don't think that traditional copywriting is correct for this. This is meant to be conversational, not necessarily copy. And so the data that we have really helps get insight into what messages you should be using, how to test. And we also have A-B testing available so you can test to see what's working and what isn't and kind of put them up against each other. And that is...

It's important because what you're saying might be killing a deal. You might be going, man, these leads suck. it's like, man, if I just make one tweak in the text message, you might unlock a whole new opportunity.

What are the common insights that you found from that analysis? Have you actually ran it yet or are putting that together?

Yeah, we've run it. We do have some really cool stuff. The biggest insight is conversational versus marketing. Everything should be conversational. So I'll give two examples where you say, I could say, hey, Mauricio, for the next 50 customers, we're doing $49 tune-ups. Act now so that we can get you booked. Click here to book, right? That's a marketing text message versus

Hey Mauricio, it's Ryan. I did your HVAC, you know, I did your HVAC last year. Wanted to just let you know I'm gonna be in your neighborhood tomorrow. Do you want me to come out and do a tune up for you real quick? That is gonna convert probably 10X better than the marketing type conversation. So when it comes down to it, if you, like you text as if you're texting your friend, right? And you say it in a way that is, I'm your local.

neighborhood HVAC guy and I want to come by and do your thing. know, we're a private equity group. Like it just screams private equity when you just like look all, you you want to sound down home, you want to sound authentic.

Yes, even if you're a large home service business, you want to sound like a local guy, like a local guy that it.

What's the, that's the beauty of automation is we can scale authenticity, right? We can scale that down home feel. I can't, this is a big one for me. call it the owner handshake. Um, when somebody books, you couldn't, if you wanted to scale your business, you couldn't pick up the phone every time somebody books and be like, Hey Mauricio, it's Ryan. Thank you so much for booking with us. I really appreciate it. You know, and then hang up the phone. Like you couldn't do that every time.

But what you can do is you can send a text message with a video of you that says, hey, Mariso, it's Ryan, or no, you can't say Mariso in a video, it's pre-recorded. You can say, hey, it's Ryan with such and such HVAC. I just wanted to say that I really appreciate you booking with us. This is my business, I started it with my wife and my kids. And you know, we've been in business for the last 10 years. We have five star review, know, 400 five star reviews.

My technician, I fully expect that my technician's gonna give you five star service. If he doesn't, I wanna hear about it. Make sure you reach out to me and let me know. Now I can send that video to a thousand customers and create that same feeling of authenticity that I couldn't do if, you know, as I scale. So yeah, automation allows you to feel like that down home guy as you scale, which is one of the hardest things to do.

And that leads to the next thing. You do that because we talked about this last time, the difference between green messaging and blue messaging and use hardware, right? You see actual the phones who send these messages and that's a big response. So you actually send videos through iPhones, through like iPhone messaging.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. so green, green, Apple knew what they were doing when they made blue and green message. They made green kind of ugly and hard on the eyes. If anybody knows they can look at those text messages and the green is just a little bit funky and the blue is, like a soothing, like soft blue and

And not only that, iMessage is a fully different platform. It's not SMS, it's not texting, it's like Messenger, it's like AOL Messenger, it's through the internet, it's not necessarily through text, through SMS. And so it creates a higher level of trust, and it also allows us to, there's cool little things that make it look different, like,

If you say, you, if, I use iMessage, which we, so we're, we're the first in the home service space to automate blue messaging, as a way to do this. But if I send a message right now with green message to you, it, it'll say, Mauricio, this is Ryan. you know, thanks for checking out my, you know, my ad. Would you like to book? Reply stop to opt out. And then a button right below that will say report spam.

and at the top it'll say number unknown. If I text you from a blue message and I say, hey, Mauricio, it's Ryan, thanks for checking on my thing. My ad, would you like to book? It's gonna say at the top, maybe Ryan, which is way more trustworthy. It's also gonna have the add contact button and it's gonna be an iMessage and when they respond it'll be blue and that will signal to the person's brain.

subconsciously that this is a human on the other end versus a spam message. And so we see about a 40 to 50 percent higher response rate on blue messages, you know, versus green. I don't want to say that green, if you're doing neither, you want to do green, like for sure. It's better than calling or anything else still, but blue is better than green.

Yeah, yeah, it's,

And then to answer your question about the videos, we can also send really high quality video versus we can't send high quality video through green messages. And so we can send, just like if I do a video right now and send it to my brother through iMessage, he's gonna get it and it's gonna be a really clear video. But if I send it to my sister who has green messages, it's gonna be all grainy and beat up, you know? And so it's the same now through this process, through automation.

Can I, I'm getting a lead from Facebook, can I do one video where I say, thank you for checking out our heating and cooling company in Miami, Florida, and do like as a video as an owner. And then that video can go out to every single person that opts in through the Facebook campaign. Is that possible?

So you want to get at least one response before you send a video there are a couple little nuances with with iMessage that we want to be careful of to not they they'll If we follow the rules and we keep it kosher will stay blue and then if not, it'll it'll just automatically revert to SMS So what we want to do is we want to first send a text message that says hey, Mariso It's Ryan with Wasatch heating and air or no, no, no, no, sorry. Let me back up

I'm gonna say, hey, it's Ryan with Wasatch Heating and Air. Thank you for checking out our $49 two note special. Am I speaking with Mauricio? That is a very, that's been our highest converting way to start the conversation. And then when they say yes, we then automate the video and we send the video right then. Cool, great, hey, you know, and then it's that. So we don't wanna send it as the first message, but we wanna get them to say yes and then we send that video.

Nice. So you get them to kind of pre-select and kind of have a response.

Yeah, once we have the response, it's game on, right? It's like we can text them back and forth as much as we want. But if we send a video first, it signals, it can kind of signal to Apple that we're spamming.

Yeah, yeah, that's really, really cool. That's really interesting. has a... If you're a smaller business, it's probably not necessary, honestly, if you're not really spending a lot on ads and all that. But if you're getting a lot of leads and you're spending a ton of money, that lift, that 20 to 30%, 40 % lift on each of these things makes a big impact if you're spending a lot of money. It's probably like, if you're...

yeah, dude. Yeah, could be millions.

Yeah, millions, millions, a lot. that stuff like that matters a lot if you're spending a lot of money. But a lot of these guys don't even have that. They don't even have the green messaging. But that's a big factor as well. But yeah, that's cool. So you said that you're like an anti-AI guy. We talked about this last time. Unpack that for a little bit. you like you.

Right?

Yeah, I'm the anti AI guy that sells AI. Yeah. No, I, I like to re help people reframe the conversation around AI. Whereas a lot of people are kind of looking at AI as like, cool. don't need any humans. Now I can use AI. And I look at it as more as like, no AI is there to enhance my humans and turn them into super humans, not get rid of them. I don't want to fully eliminate.

the human from the process. just want to make their jobs. I don't want to say easier. want to say, I want to make them be able to accomplish more in a day. like, for example, I'll just give a simple example. If I, if I have a CSR and I say, Hey, you have 50 leads, sit down and send out 50 text messages to these 50 leads. And they sit there on their phone and they send 50 text messages. Let's say they can do that in an hour and a half, like a minute.

a minute, a little over a minute per message, right? Maybe they can do it faster, but whatever. And then we say, well, okay, that's, that's the one way to use their time, right? But then we could say, well, what if we could just send those 50 messages automatically? And then as the people respond, then the person takes over the conversation and finishes it. Now we've just been able to take what took an hour and a half, take it down to five minutes.

And then maybe 10 people respond and now she can have 10 meaningful conversations with 10 different people and close deals now We've made her much more efficient turned into a superhuman and we're getting more and more where we can automate the messages and conversations But we don't want to take I still even don't like taking that all the way but you know, so AI like I said, it should be enhancing or maybe she can't answer the phone that minute so then AI answers the phone but

I don't want to say, just get rid of all your CSRs and just use AI. like, you know, it just depends on the company and how they want to run things. But for me, I want to have a culture of AI making us better, not replacing us.

Yeah, I think, yeah, I think what I've read is that if you even, you have to train the AI, like these AI call handleings, companies, which is a ton of them now, it probably takes like six months to get it trained to where it actually gets like maybe 30, 40, 50 % booking rate or something like that. It takes a lot of time. It's not just overnight, it's going to come and start, you know, the companies that-

Right.

Yeah, see a lot of these big companies and they come out and go, we've got our AI CSR is booking at 80 % booking rate and it's just, and then you dig in and you realize that that big company has a deal with that AI voice company to promote them. And they've got, you know, they, they were able to sit down for hours and hours and hours with them to dial this in. And then you sign up and go, okay, cool. Book mine at 80%.

It just doesn't, you know, it's not even close. And it's like, there's a lot going on right now where people are willing to skirt the line. They're very ethically flexible, um, would be the word I would use for a lot of these AI companies that are claiming all these crazy things. And it's like, like I said, I sell AI voice. I know it's not like the end all be all. I'm not going to come out and be like, ours will book it. It's like, yeah, it can. If you train it and you do the thing, um,

but it's a lot of work to do that and it's good. Don't get me wrong, you wanna do it, but I just am trying to set the expectation that it's not where people kinda claim it is.

Would you recommend using AI, these AI call handling, especially in the beginning, after hours where people or, yeah.

Yeah, that's what I say. say use it where you can't have a human being, right? Use it for after hours, use it on the weekends. There's a lot of ways to do it. I just don't like the idea of going, cool, I'm gonna fire everybody and use AI now. It's like use it as a backup plan. Because really people don't like it. People don't like hearing AI voice. And you can turn off a lot of customers with it.

but if you, if there's a couple of ways you can get around it, if you start off, if you don't lie, you don't ever want to lie. You don't want the AI to try to claim that it's not AI. So you, want to start off by saying, you know, this is such and such your AI agent with such and such HVAC. I'm here to help you. If at any time you need to talk to a human, please press one, you know, or please let me know. That's a great way to like soften the, like the transition.

Cause if they, if they are like talking to somebody and they realize it's AI and they feel kind of duped, they're going to be pissed off. so, don't try to fake them out and yeah, use it for backup. it for, we use it for abandoned calls. We also see really great response rates with really convert really good conversion with just sending a text message at abandoned call. so one or the other, but yeah, I would say, I would say use it to backfill, not to replace.

What other ways have you seen home service companies use AI that's really interesting or you think that more people should be using?

I mean the other way would be in in in my opinion the the text messaging the cool thing about text messaging is You have a little more leeway because you don't hear it. It's just the text right and so it's it looks You know feels more authentic than the voice does so definitely like automation text message automation website chat and then

booking into your CSM through text message or FSM, sorry.

Yeah, typically what I recommend is having, if you're a home service business, you have four forms of communication on your website. So phone calls, appointments where people can actually book an appointment, form submission, and then also web chat and the ability to either call or text as well on the phone number. That's what I recommend. You said that.

Like who are the companies that you see that are doing something unique in terms of the home services space that is different in the follow up? You mentioned video, which is really cool, which I thought was interesting. What other cool things have you seen that you've been with all these contractors that is different, that can get a lot of good results?

Yeah, I would lean heavily on the video side because that's where that's where you get this opportunity. I I'm a big believer in storytelling and it's the only thing that really differentiates you from anybody else. Right. You're an HVAC guy. You're like 100 other HVAC guys in your area. But you know deep down you're not you know you're different. Right. But nobody sees that unless you actually are able to tell your story.

And so I look at the opportunity through the customer journey to tell my story, right? Like we already kind of told a piece of that at the beginning by sending that first text, like you said, sending that first text message and introducing yourself as the owner and who you are and what your values are, who you stand for, how did you start the business, you know? And then like, as they progress through sending testimonial videos, sending, you know, little short clips of like, you know,

such and such technician came out to my house and they did such a good job. So happy, you know, and then like when they book, we want to make sure that they are, you know, we, we thank them for booking profusely, you know, like, thank you so much. We're looking forward to doing work with you. When they, when the estimate closes and sales, this is one, this is actually one you could take home right now. is a good

When a technician or when somebody's in a home and sells something high ticket and leaves the home, there's a chance that buyer's remorse can kick in at that moment. We've taken them on a high, we've had them buy something from us, and then you leave and they can dip down pretty low and they can go, shoot, did I just make a huge mistake? And if we want to kind of soften that landing,

we can send a text message of the owner saying, hey, it looks like we're going to be doing business together. I'm so happy. I promise this is going to be an easy process for you. I'll make sure that you're taking care of every step of the way. And that can reassure them in that moment of kind of like doubt that they made a good decision.

That's awesome. that would be triggered on like the CRM, like the CRM would trigger after.

Yeah, yeah. So when the estimate is closed, Closed, sold, that would go out.

And then basically it could be any, it gets server-stited and drop or whatever. then, okay, cool, cool, cool, awesome. Where do people find you,

Yeah, any of them. Any of them can do it. Yeah. Yeah.

So I have kind of two places you could check us out. So chirp.com if you want to get a demo of our software. There's all this stuff we talked about today. If you want to connect with me, I have a school, skoll.com slash Ryan Fenn. I teach lead generation. I teach Facebook lead generation there. So kind of chirp is lead conversion, but if you're kind of like going, need more leads, check out the school. That's where we talk a lot about how we build the bridge on Facebook and how we...

create ads that convert people into potential opportunities. So happy to have you check out either of those, chirp.com, C-H-I-I-R-P, and then schoolskoal.com slash Ryan Fenn.

Awesome. Ryan, thank you. Thank you for joining the show.

Thank you so much, Mauricio.