The Home Service Expert Podcast
00:03:48 · Zach Deering, Tommy Mello
[00:03:48] S0: Yeah. Yeah. Well, first off, thanks for having me on. It's been great working with you and Luke and Matt and the entire a one team. I think you're an organization that a lot of people know a lot about from the outside. I think the thing that I've really been sort of taken aback by is the humility and the desire to learn and grow, and I see it throughout the entire organization. And so I just wanna take a moment to really call that out and I think it's pretty special. [00:04:13] S3: We got an amazing team, and those guys I'm super proud of. And there is a lot of... They're very humble, and you you couldn't ask for a better team, man. I hope we're a ride or dies for life.
00:04:13 · Tommy Mello, Zach Deering
[00:04:13] S3: We got an amazing team, and those guys I'm super proud of. And there is a lot of... They're very humble, and you you couldn't ask for a better team, man. I hope we're a ride or dies for life. [00:04:23] S0: Totally. Totally. Totally. But now to your to your questions. So I grew up in Dallas, Texas. I'm dyslexic, so I actually didn't learn how to read until I was 12, so law school was an interesting interesting twist on that. As you mentioned, I've done several different things, but the way I got into home services was through my mom. She had several HVAC contractors in her house, she got overwhelmed by the experience, and I got a real window into what it's like for homeowners today to make these really expensive, infrequent purchases. Case of HVAC, third most expensive purchase someone will make in their lifetime. Garage door, it's easy to spend 10 or $20,000, like, really meaningful purchases that historically, as an industry, we haven't really thought about it as a shopping experience. Right? We've instead say, here's your two options, right, or here's your one option with a bunch of jargon. And so we're really on a mission to change that, but I think it all started by seeing the homeowners experience and then that traced back to my time at Amazon where one of the things at Amazon, one of the core leadership principles is really around customer obsession.
00:05:30 · Tommy Mello
[00:05:30] S3: Yep. And so what what was the beginning stages? Let's talk about what led you to Mantel. So you're 12 years old, you started a business, you got... You have a lot of vast knowledge from the places you worked. The law degree really helps because there's a lot of legal jargon on these things. But what was the initial... When you you started this up, you got a partnership, it was just the online shopping experience is what you guys were thinking about?
00:06:02 · Zach Deering, Tommy Mello
[00:06:02] S0: Yeah. I think initially, we started from a pain point, right, which was my mom and I had this experience and then I've always been pretty curious. Right? I think that's what led to my first business when I was 12, aptly named ZDPCs. I just assembled computers in my my bedroom. Like to joke, like, I'll never have as good of an OpEx business because I didn't pay any rent, and my dad took me to go buy the computer part. So, like, it was it was a really, really cash flow efficient business. But I think I've always been curious, and so what I saw with my mom in my experience was was it just us, or was it the contractors that happened to visit us? And the thing that I quickly learned spending time with homeowners and contractors across the country was this, like, really, homeowners are being sold to rather than trying to create a shopping experience. And that was the thing that came out to to us, and that there was... These are complex purchases, and there isn't really a modern solution until we came around that really thought about how do you create a shopping experience. And so that's really what we're on a on a mission to do. But I think you could trace it back to the same thing that caused me to start the business when I was 12, it's the same thing that caused me to start this business, which is I'm just a very curious person. [00:07:08] S3: That's the best quality to have. What do you think most homeowners really care about?
00:07:08 · Tommy Mello, Zach Deering
[00:07:08] S3: That's the best quality to have. What do you think most homeowners really care about? [00:07:13] S0: Yeah. Totally. It's it's a great question, and it's a question that we care a lot about answering, so we actually commissioned this massive survey of homeowners that have actually bought, right, and had actually shopped in the last twelve months. And what they care about, and I think the most surprising thing, is typically not price. 69% of homeowners say that price isn't the most important thing. What is important to them is trust, it's quality, it's understanding what they're buying, and it's also agency, right? Homeowners, we wanna shop, right? We don't wanna be sold to, we wanna feel control over our purchases. [00:07:55] S3: 100%. Yeah. No. I I I always say this, I love to buy but I hate to be sold to. [00:08:00] S0: Really? [00:08:01] S3: I got a really good book for you. Okay. It's called Relevant Selling by Janie Smith. Okay. And they did a double blind study with 500 homeowners on garage doors in 2017. And where do you think price came out in the order of importance? [00:08:16] S0: I'm gonna guess like fourth or fifth. Number nine. Number nine. Okay. What would... Do do you remember what was number eight? [00:08:24] S3: All I know, one of the top ones was they cared about who was coming to their home, that they were safe. [00:08:29] S0: Sure. [00:08:29] S3: They cleaned up, they honored their commitment, they honored their warranties. The cleanup was actually a bigger thing than I would have thought of. Yeah. But they kept their date.
00:08:29 · Tommy Mello, Zach Deering
[00:08:29] S3: They cleaned up, they honored their commitment, they honored their warranties. The cleanup was actually a bigger thing than I would have thought of. Yeah. But they kept their date. [00:08:36] S0: Yep. [00:08:37] S3: And my dad always taught me you could do it the best quality, you could do it on their timeline, you could do it the cheapest, but you could never be all three. [00:08:43] S0: You're only [00:08:43] S3: two out of the three. [00:08:44] S0: Only? You know, it's funny when I went to college, there was a two out of the three, was just you could either sleep, you could do well in school, or you could have fun. You could only get two of those three. [00:08:55] S3: That's a good point. Yeah, because you could have fun, get good grades, but you're not gonna sleep much. [00:08:58] S0: Exactly, exactly. [00:09:02] S3: Are there general generational differences in how people shop for their home their home services? [00:09:07] S0: There there absolutely are, and a lot of it you actually see in the discovery process. So one of the really interesting things was we looked at how did you find your contractor? Would you like to guess which channel today, for folks that were actually shopping, was the most common channel that they actually discovered a contractor through? [00:09:25] S3: Yeah. I mean, I would obviously guess Google.