The Home Service Expert Podcast
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.
00:51:05 · Becca Erdmann, Tommy Mello, Kyle Erdmann
[00:51:05] S1: Okay. [00:51:05] S0: So it was like, bam. And he's like, you're gonna like this better but here's the deal. If you're building OpenAI or Anthropic, you need to put parameters around there and you need to have somebody set it up to where the machine's not learning. You're not putting your balance sheet income statement. Correct. And then you can see everybody that's using it, how they're using it, and it's part of your company. I think a lot of people, they go buy the $50 version or whatever, they start loading everything into it. And so we've got a lot of parameters around data and how data is being used and I think small companies get away with some stuff, but I think ultimately when you're when you get really to a size that you guys are getting, there's there's like a lot of cyber security things you guys just need. [00:51:43] S1: Yeah. That's on my list. [00:51:45] S2: T's crossed and i's dotted. Our whole system got set up by an AI professor from Stanford. Oh, that's a good one. That we got fortunate to meet at conference and... [00:51:55] S1: Yeah, he helped me kind of create... I told him what the problems were and what I wanted to build and he helped me build them. Then I created custom GPTs and then I made it for Erdmann, so anybody in our company can use any of them. [00:52:05] S0: How do you get people to fall in love with AI on your team? Because it can make one person 10 times more effective if they start using it.
00:52:05 · Tommy Mello, Becca Erdmann
[00:52:05] S0: How do you get people to fall in love with AI on your team? Because it can make one person 10 times more effective if they start using it. [00:52:13] S1: I show them how it saves time. Personally, not the sales. The sales team, I mean, I think the sales manager has done a great job showing how it can save time. For anybody else in the production department and all the permit ones I've created, I show them how I sit them through typing the question and see how fast you get the answer to save you two hours of your time. So that's just showing show you. Why waste your time? Why waste two hours if you had thirty seconds? [00:52:38] S0: I was just saying, start asking it. Start asking it to ask you questions. [00:52:42] S1: Yeah. Right. [00:52:42] S0: It's like, just tell about what you struggle with. [00:52:45] S1: Yeah. About my problems? [00:52:45] S0: Your time. Right. And tell it as much as you could. [00:52:49] S1: Exactly.
00:52:49 · Becca Erdmann, Tommy Mello
[00:52:49] S1: Exactly. [00:52:49] S0: And Google already knows this information. If I say something right now, like I really want to read this new book, it's going to pop up all over Meta. It's going to pop up all over Google. Not train something to ask me questions that I could actually use because everything else is listening. Becca, one more quick question I have is like, how does having a designer in the room change the sales process for what you guys do? Because I could imagine it changed a lot of things. Because I'd rather sit down with somebody like you. Although I want... Look, designers are great. I wanna understand what it's gonna look like, but I also wanna understand how it's made. And I wanna make sure... Because I got some questions on the integrity of the product, but I really wanna talk about the optics too.
00:53:33 · Becca Erdmann, Tommy Mello
[00:53:33] S1: So our design process is kind of evolved over the years. It used to be Kyle and I, we were the duo team going. Kyle was a salesperson, I was a designer. And then eventually, I was just the designer going out after the job was sold. So right now, we have a secondary sales system, is a designer, one in Chicago, one in Arizona, who goes out to meet with the customer after the project's sold. And they have knowledge of the products, they know the answers. And they come with a three d rendering on their homes to show what the entire backyard will look like with their pool or whatever is already there, plus what we're gonna be building, where it's gonna land, the size that they were sold, what it's gonna look like, what furniture it will cover. And so they kinda go over that. But they... I mean, me personally, I could answer anything structurally or how it was built or what the product was because, I mean, obviously, I I know everything. So I... Yeah. I've taught the two designers the same thing. And now I'm in the process of teaching them how to price. So when they're there, say the job was sold at $50,000 [00:54:33] S0: Change order.