The Home Service Expert Podcast
00:44:53 · Becca Erdmann, Tommy Mello
[00:44:53] S1: And yes, we have many many options. So drop downs too. [00:44:56] S0: I love it. I love this stuff. I I could do this all day. What do you think that you offer Becca the most traditional? There's a lot of people that get stuck, especially around 5,000,000. And obviously, look, I've got this book. I started working with this guy, Al Levy, 2017, The Seven Power Contractor. You guys could take a copy. But he walked in my office and said, Show me your manuals. He's retired long since, but standard operating procedures. Show me your checklist. Show me the success guide. Are you allowed to have a beard? You got to get tattoos on your face? What happens if your truck breaks down? How do you get PTO? Who do you go to? Who do you It's a success guide. Our manual is 70 pages. And it just goes through what success, what winning looks like. And it's getting back to the fundamentals. And I think sometimes we definitely grow and we kind of like build our own thing and then we go always back to the fundamentals. And the KPIs drive the decisions down. But a lot of people that's what you use. I think you did is you were like, where's the systems? Where's the processes? So what did you bring? Yeah. Most of these guys listening and gals, I think they're probably missing this piece.
00:46:02 · Becca Erdmann, Tommy Mello
[00:46:02] S1: Well, like I said, I came in and there were no systems and there were no processes. And I'm a very organized person and I needed to organize the chaos. So I just took it upon myself to create everything. And then, of course, what works at 5,000,000 doesn't necessarily work at 10,000,000. And as you grow and you hire and you get more employees, it's kind of just like a constant state of refinement. I'm always having to revise what I had created because it doesn't work anymore. And now that we have leaders in place, again, everything that I had made, it needs to be tweaked. So I think something I'm really good at is creating and implementing. I'm a great implementer and starting. It does not need to be perfect. It just needs to get going. I can see how it's working for that person. Maybe it worked for me, didn't work for them. Edit it and tweak as they go to make it so it works, and I've done that with many positions where now there's nothing else really to edit or revise until we get so big that I need to hire somebody maybe underneath them to work with. [00:47:01] S0: And how do you do that? Because that's where a lot of people fail too is they expect more from their people. When do you know when to put that person? When do you know
00:47:08 · Becca Erdmann
[00:47:08] S1: just Specifically, there's someone in our Chicago office who I keep checking in with. I keep asking how is your workload? How are you handling this? I know we've been growing. I asked her to do different things. And so I keep... Because she's not going to come to me and say she's overworked. So I keep checking in, and I kinda check on the workload. I also can see she's communicates with the customer. She also handles the permit, I can see what she does and doesn't do on what days. And so I wanna make sure that she feels like she's not overworked and not having to do too much. And I keep telling her that if we need to hire somebody below you, I can plan that in my 2027 budget. But she's assured me that she's fine. So... I mean, I think frequent check ins to see how they're doing and how they're operating. When you talk to them, you can kind of sense if somebody's stressed and overwhelmed and if they're behind. And also, their leader would also tell you that their department is kind of falling behind because of a, b, and c. So as I said, we keep growing and changing. We're trying to grow ourselves. We have leaders in place now. So now, everything is different because I'm not directly talking to the employees. I'm talking to the leaders. So it's more about checking in with the leaders, checking with the departments, to make sure everything is operating smoothly. And of course, at the end of the day, the numbers don't lie. So when I get the numbers from each department, that kind of shows me what's working and what's not and what's a red flag that I need to look into.
00:48:29 · Kyle Erdmann
[00:48:29] S2: I think a good thing she's done is created an environment where vulnerability is okay. Yeah. I think that a lot of people create environments where people... Where your staff is afraid to come to you to say they're... They can't keep up anymore because they think that that will be seen as a failure, where she's created an environment where people know that she has their best interests at heart and she constantly talks to the team about how she's just there to help everyone else succeed and hers, you know, she doesn't ever talk about personal things or what she wants. She talks about what can we do for you, how can we help you grow, where do you wanna be at, and how can we make sure you stay on the path to to keep succeeding here.
00:49:02 · Tommy Mello
[00:49:02] S0: That's a big culture shift. I mean, that's... When somebody could come in and be that person and just say, wow, they're like coming up for air. Yeah. And just saying, wow, this is nice because when you're in a completely stressed environment and every leader is stressed, it's like, don't wanna hear your bullshit. You know how much I do? You wanna see my schedule? Yeah. And it's really hard when it becomes that type of environment because it's like, man, I really need some help. Now it's affecting my personal life. And that's when it gets, look, we all signed up to work our asses off And hopefully you still love it, but there are certain times when it's just eating away at you. And that's why you got to deliver skills, know, is time management skills. You know, saying, listen, what can you automate? Especially with AI now and some of the stuff that we could do is like, let's run that through. Like it used to take FP and A a month for that and now you just run it through cloud and you're like, bam, done. How you decide OpenAI versus cloud versus Perplexity versus Gemini versus Grok?
00:49:57 · Becca Erdmann, Tommy Mello
[00:49:57] S1: I haven't even looked into it. I've been told that I should be switching everything over to Claude. Haven't done it. To be honest, it's on my long list of things to do. Right now, we just use ChatGPT and OpenAI because I already built a whole Erdmann GPT that everyone in the company has access to. So, employee handbook, all the questions about PTO and all the things, can you just go in there and type your questions so you don't have to ask me. I built a deck building guide so the sales team could take a picture of the of the back of the house. They could do... Upload the sketch. It will prompt you with the questions, and then it will tell you, these are how many peers. This is the amount of materials. This is what you can input into our one click to get your pricing. I built all these tools already into... I have a whole permit guide that's in there that everybody can access. I mean, I built all these things. So right now, don't have... I don't... I'm not taking the time. I'm not prioritizing switching Oh, [00:50:49] S0: it's very simple. I'll tell you this. I've got a genius that I work with. They just like, let me get into your Claude. Bam. Took all these files from a certain file inside of a file inside of like a... And then he took that, copied that, adjusted this and all of a sudden Claude knew me just as well. [00:51:05] S1: Okay.