Meeting Title: Brainforge opportunities discussion Date: Nov 4 Meeting participants: Bo Jenkins, Yvette Ruiz, Brandi Jenkins, Smeyer, Amber Siru Lin, Matt Burns
Transcript:
Me: Is very, very high. It’s consistently high. So that foundation is important. The big frustration is that we’re only growing at 2 or 3%, and that’s not satisfactory in this market. Right. And we’ve got some services that we’ve done forever, that is pest control. We’ve got other services that are brand new. For example, garbage bin cleaning. Right. So we’ve got 16 in between those two things that we do, and some are doing better than others. Awareness is always a challenge. We diversified. 20 years ago. And then we’ve added services over those years. Every year or two, there’s a new service or in the new market that we’re in. And some of them have grown very nicely, others have stagnated. I’m very frustrated. I think we’ve got the best plumbing company in the region, and we haven’t been growing it. We do a lot of plumbing work. We’ve got a lot of great plumbers, but we’ve hit this. Ceiling and I think we do other services. Landscaping has fallen down. Is it because economy? Is it this or what? I don’t know. But the biggest frustration for me this year. Because I think we’ve got a great team. We’re delivering a great service. There’s a lot of positives. But because the phone doesn’t ring as much as it has previously, we’ve had fewer leads, and with fewer leads, We’re not growing at the rate our retention we measure that is very high. We do a good job of keeping our customers. As I said. I think our Matt said our office staff is also going to job. Our turnover rate as a company is probably better than most. I’d like it to be a little bit better as far as our employees, but we’ve made significant strides. And I’d submit our sales team has done a really good job of not just so the Holy Grail for us. Is not to do a service for a customer. It’s to do 5, 6, and 7 services for a customer. Right. And I believe that. Right? Yes. I think we’re the best plumbers. We’re the best tree trimmers, we’re the best power walk, whatever it is, the service is our number. Substantiate the fact that we do an excellent job. And your customer doesn’t want to go to multiple places. I don’t think they do. They are, but. They are. But that’s the thing, is, I think a lot of customers still don’t know all the services that it is. Still not all know it. We do a lot of things to try that home. We have a very aggressive email campaign to our existing customers letting them know about other services. We’ve done some very creative and innovative work as it relates to what we call lead line. When the pest guy is there, he sees the tree branches touching the roof and he turns in a lead and he gets a little bit of money and we get a lead and we go sell that lead. We do a good job of that. We’ve also tried to open up different channels besides the phone because we know not everybody uses the phone, particularly your age guys. They might want to do it via the web or whatever. So we try to open up those other channels. I think done a pretty good job. We’ve done a pretty good job. But usually when one of our service lines is down, The lament from the manager is I’m getting fewer leads. Yeah, it was more than just that. It’s a fair statement. It’s a fact. And our marketing guy sometimes would say, well, are we converting those calls well enough? Are we, but is usually better than we did before. Done it even better than we did before. So I guess even if we were to start there, the couple questions that I have, and we produced a little bit of tech, but I can. Do you want to throw it up on there? Yeah, I can keep it right here. I mean, it’s basically. It’s basically like, where do we feel like leads are coming from today? The other thing is when a customer searches for pest control, which, as we know, can be very timely, like, they usually need a service immediately, they have them on the hook. It’s like when a storm comes through and they’re looking for tree trimmers. Right. How does ABC show up in all the channels at which that person can engage, whether it is word of mouth, whether it is Google search, whether it is now chatgpt, what are all the ways in which ABC is prominent and, you know, competes? And then I guess another question for us, and this is where we’re very familiar with pest in residential and somewhat commercial, but how does the leads differentiate between commercial and consumer? And those are some of the questions that we would have to start with. Is like, where are folks coming from now? And then how is those segmented between each part of the business, like their initial intent? I think what’s interesting on Yurion is like, you start off with, is that all this? You can say, that’s marketing, that’s nps. If at all this comes down to data, it’s all a source. Where to know where your data is, where it’s coming from, and how to use it. So that’s what’s interesting about y’all. So your core, your data company. But you utilize it. It’s what to do with the data is. And this is how. And this is how we think about the journey, right? We think about awareness. We then think about, okay, the lead comes in. We think about. There’s a decision. We think about, there’s a service delivery and each of these not only has how many are getting in, how fast are you converting them? What are the conversion rates by other dimensions? Like who is it? Like what are they intend for? And then finally the retention and I feel like really commonly overlooked, which I feel you guys. Do a great job is the retention piece, because you’ve already paid to acquire that customer. And they could be their LTV can just continue to go. Right. And that’s super, super important. Mr. Well, that for ABC is higher than any other because of all the things we had the potential to do. Yes. And we’ve got the examples of customers, and we do everything. For most pest control companies, their contract value is gonna be 500, 600 bucks. But for us, we get a pest lead that’s not just pest, it’s everything we do. But if, for example, if you were to say, yeah, we’ve just been emailing all of our existing customers, well, there’s other opportunities to not only do student emails, but do discounts, bundling campaigns. There is opportunities to do what we call, like, reactivation of that, all those folks that you’ve serviced. Whether they’re. Yeah, yeah. So to the point on the bundling, we are doing a good job of that on the front end. Yes. Right. Bo and his team campaign of that was our big drive this year, is to bundle services and make the appropriate incentive to the homeowner to buy two or three things instead. Of just the one thing that they called about. And I think our sales team has done a pretty good job with that, what I think you just said. And I wanna back up to it and get a little clarity. Are you talking about? Off? So you’re saying go to our existing customer base and offer bundles backwards to them, not on the front end, Yeah. So what you should think about is there’s sitting money with your existing customer base or folks that you had a 1 point have already had their email or phone. That is sitting. That is a lead list. And you guys have been in business for a long time. That sits at any moment, those folks could leverage your services. So there has to be these campaigns that are sort of ever long engages them. And one of the things that we talked about doing, I don’t think we ever did and you know, I had a name for it, we just, I don’t think we ever really got the lift out of it was a welcome back. Campaign. We’ve got gazillions of canceled customers. Right. Okay. Next Biggest company in Austin with it. Yeah, 100%. And we’ve never done a good job. I think when they were at the finish line, they either canceled right before a service or they did it and then canceled after most of those cancels. A lot of them. I just don’t need it anymore. Whatever. We part generally in a positive. It’s very seldom that we part company with a customer with a bad taste. Very, very seldom. We move heaven and earth to not. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have a lot of cancellations, right? And so how do we incent those cancellations to a do what they did with us again? And then B to do that, plus two other things with us again, yes. Going back to get them and offering them a bundled package. But I think retroactive, I guess, what you’re saying, with bundles. But we’ve also looked when we have dissected the cancellation reports, a lot of them have one service. People that have multiple services are less likely to cancel. So that’s exactly the reason two bundles find out you’re one single service customers those are most at risk of leaving and also have the opportunity for multiple services. So on those WIMBAC campaigns, because this is something that we were talking with, with doing the outbound calls with Avoca, you know, is it something like that that we would go in there and do we do through an AI or different campaigns? Because, I mean, we do them, we do offers through emails. But yeah, so I think that’s where it’s important for me to understand what is the infrastructure right now around both the awareness and it seems like for the most part, we’re confident in the delivery. And once they’re on the line, like getting the conversion. Yeah, I think when we put a sales inspector on the doorstep, we do a good job. We really do. And when we go to do the service, we do a good job. So. Yeah. Also trying to back up what you said there. I’m trying to remember how I wanted to ask this question of what you were saying, Yvette, is, you know, another thought is, you know, we have a customer rewards program that we’ve done a lousy job of making our customers aware of. Yes. So this is where it’s actually interesting because you’ve inched into a couple of the right areas on thinking about win back campaigns. I’m thinking about a loyalty program. These are all the exact same things we’re seeing with our E Commerce customers who are they’re spending so much money on marketing. And they’re measuring every dollar roi. So I would say you guys have thought about the exact activities that you need to do. I think part of what I’m guessing is the issue is one is measuring the effectiveness of any one of those. What did we even find out? Like, when we did a motion on a win back campaign, did we look at all the folks, what was the conversion rate of the ones that converted? Did they fit a specific criteria? So part of this is this life analysis. It’s basically hey, let’s go look back at every single win back campaign and come to a conclusion. What worked, what didn’t work, but also its understanding. Ok, win back campaign is just one thing to do regarding retention. And similarly on the awareness size. There’s a lot to do around awareness, whether it’s like you’re on how you show up on Google Search, it’s how you’re doing awareness campaigns through local channels. It’s other things, especially on the website. And there’s a lot of opportunity in what we just walk through, which is on the website, which is making sure that people are able to book faster. Maybe they’re able to book without calling people. Maybe they’re book over text. So there’s just these experiments you can run, but for us. And this is where it’s less about running more experiments necessarily. It’s more about the right ones to run. And looking back at the data, And understanding. Ok, if we were to take two calculated bets on either something at the awareness side or something at the conversion side or something at the retention side, what could those be this quarter? How much effort would it be to go end to end and deliver like, hey, what worked? What didn’t work? Right? And that’s, I think, our difference versus coming in as a typical what typical marketing agencies do, and we work with a lot of them, is there to say, ok, you have this budget, we’re gonna spend all this budget, we’re gonna do 10 things, and then what we’re trying to understand is what are things that you can do on a recurring basis and what are other activities that don’t work for your customer that you should stop doing that are not good use of revenue and time because you only have a limited amount of these channels that you could put pressure on, and there’s a limited amount. There’s a diminishing return on more dollars and more effort spent. So have we found that yet? Right. Have we found truly what the customer acquisition cost is across all these different channels? Do we know our true conversion rate? Across phone, across web? And it’s also, do we have all the channels we need? It’s clear we don’t have text based conversions. We don’t have. Hey, you can just book. Without talking to anybody, right? We do. So if it’s there, then it’s not clearly advertised for sure, but it’s on the website. You can click to buy it’s on the website. And there are specific services that you can go on. So they made very proud of it. But to your point, how much do we market it. But if you go on the website and you’re searching and you’re wanting to find information about pest control, you can go to click to buy. You can essentially buy the service, pay for the service and schedule the service without ever talking to anybody. And we sell some business. That way we do, but I also really look at see how long do those customers stay with us. That’s the one part that I always worry about with Click to Buy. Do they really know? Totally. I worry with service buy online versus a product, do they really understand what they’re buying? I also think that the web request because there’s a handful that you can buy, but there’s other. No, it’s a handsome. You can’t buy everything but those right there. I do feel like we can execute quicker on those versus the time that they get to us, right? Whether they can do them automatically. Schedule right there. Nadia, you and I have talked about. Can we make those a claim to buy where you do through a phantom scheduling or the plan we’re going with is the after hour person. Handling those right then and there or the AI. What I’m also worried is that our clicktubey takes too long. That’s my biggest. Yeah, that’s exactly navigated. It takes a while because we do. See, we have an abandoned cart that we track. There’s a lot of people that are on there multiple times, and I worry that they might start. Back out. Might start again later and back out. And there’s also a different flow for someone who’s commercial versus a residential, right? And so there are a lot of schemes you can run to affect these. And I would say we’re comfortable putting all of those schemes in front of you. But what is more important is you have a really good understanding of which is the one thing to affect. Like, if you could waive. What we like to say is you wave a wand and you’re like, this metric gets affected. We truly believe that this would be a huge unlock, and that’s where you should point us. And I’m happy to send this. We walk through the entire funnel and kind of walk through with the ABC customer in mind. But it’s actually very helpful in this process to cross things out where you’re confident that’s not where the alpha is. And if you’re like, ok, there’s something we should do on the awareness side. And once we have the awareness and they arrive at a digital platform, they’re on the call with us, there’s something there. Ok, we can start with that and think about a couple schemes and some experiments to run. And the goal of those experiments is not like we run six months, these are like two to four week. Let’s test something. Either a new landing page. A new copy, a new mechanism on a subset of people to prove a hypothesis. It’s just like a basic science experiment, but for us. In order to even run that experiment, you have to have the data on either side. You have to be able to say, we push this much money in, we got this many impressions, this many things landed. Here’s a conversion rate. Wow, that’s double. Okay, let’s now lean a little bit more. And so for us, our KPI is more about how fast we can run those to arrive at a decision, less about, okay, we have two we’re gonna run over the next six months. And even at the end of it, you’re like, I don’t really know. That’s how most of these experiments go with most folks, and so we’re much more keen on. We have to be able to measure all these things to prove that it’s worked. The old advertising adage of advertising works. You just don’t know which channel really works. 50% works and 50% doesn’t. You just don’t know which is with. Yes. Might’ve been true. We know the Bobby and I kid. We show our age. But when we worked with his dad, it was all about your yellow page ad. And maybe you did some radio and tv, but we had some how big was the yellow page? And there still will be concentration. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not gonna be like, sure, but it’s just so complicated now. And I think our marketing director’s done a relatively good job of trying to keep up with everything. But we are a different animal too. Yes. If you just had one service, that’s one thing when you have 17, it’s another in a lot of different markets. So it’s one thing to say our website is difficult to navigate and maybe get up, get a final commitment. But on the other hand. Man. There’s a lot of stuff on there because of all the services and locations. But, yeah, making that conversion. Rate go up because people do want to buy it, and they want to buy it quickly. If it’s a process, I’ve done the same thing. You go click. And I don’t want to do all this. I don’t want to have to set up an account to even be able to view things, which we don’t. But I’m just saying that’s a lot of times when I abandon something, it’s like I’m not giving you all that. That’s where we get where you have. To put in the information. Then we’ll show you. Right. It’d be better to just say, let us show you the price and those kind of things. So that’s maybe what I feel. Sometimes we need help with somebody with fresh eyes to look at it and go, well, here’s a much better way to get these people to convert. Yeah, if we pick one. Because Utah more like this. An advertising. We do so many things. But if we can really say, okay, maybe we start with the website and conversions online. How can we improve it? How can we make it better? And that’s something we can probably measure because we’d have the data probably to be able to say, here’s our conversions over the past two years. In all these different areas. And if you and your team could look. At that aspect of it first. I think that’s pretty tangible and fairly easy for you to look at and go, well, here’s ways you can improve that. Yes, here’s what I can do. I think you would know. Experience. What should it be? Bingo. Work with ecommerce companies. What could it be? We don’t know. We have members who can see what it is, but we don’t really know is that. No. And I think where we don’t have any industry benchmarks that we really from the service industry could be. No, you’re doing really well. But I also think that from our customers and ecommerce it’s extremely competitive, so the tactics you’re gonna see when you’re buying clothing and stuff online. That is, they’re spending the most money trying to get you to take a little quiz to buy a T shirt. That is the peak. But in your industry, I would say what you have the benefit of is the competition is not at that point. So you have that’s your opportunity. Right. If you were to take even some of the tactics that are working in those other adjacent industries and apply it. And these have to be things that aren’t. They have to be horizontal. As you mentioned, there’s so many things. So this isn’t as simple as just changing the copy, but it also maybe as basic as just reducing certain amount of steps. But until we can’t answer that question, until we really map the customer funnel all the way from landing on the page across each of the core services, show the friction points, and then decide as a team, what are we willing to collect later versus up front, how does that affect the conversion rate? But again, as you guys know, if you’re able to get the prospect on the phone and the conversion rate’s really higher. Okay, so how do we drive that up? How do we drive maybe the disappoint earlier? How do we get more through other channels? There’s also a lot of new channels that are popping up, whether it is through social media, whether it is through text, whether it is other ways that we should explore what the opportunity is. And that just increases literally the width of the funnel. Right. Just pure simple. Because I think you’re right. Because right now we are pushing a lot of people who buy click to buy. For pests if you land on our website. That’s kind of what we’ve said. This is our preferred way. Which right now, I don’t know if that is the right way that we should be doing it. Well, and along all those lines, your preference might be to send an inspector. Right? I would send an inspector out tomorrow because he can sell more things in person. Right. That’s our practice. You have to make that decision, not ingest. You have to see the entire journey to make that decision. Right. Commonly, marketers will just see, they’re just trying to get the lead to convert. They’re not thinking about well, and they’re trying to do that at price. Well, if you look at the entire journey and you’re like, hey, we’re willing to bear that inspector fee because we know we’ll get them signed up with three services, and you know that, then that’s the decision you can make when looking at the whole journey, where you can’t make that. Decision in isolation. The other piece of this we have to try and factor in is who is our customer. Right, and we’ve got these two. Here in the middle. And then these two, right? And the whole generation piece of. And how they buy what they want, how they want to the process that they want. And that’s why we try. We have tried. And I’m reasonably proud of the fact that, you know, depending on how you want to buy, we’re where you want to be. Yes. You want to talk to someone on the doorstep, we can sell you that way. You want to talk to someone on the phone, we can sell you that way. You want to go. Online and not talk to a single person. You could buy that way. And we do it chat. We do it through chat. Sales are increasing. I think we have all of those. I don’t know that we have as much data from each one specifically to understand that next level of depth. And I think we do each of them. Some of the better than others. And as far as what’s that experience? Right to your point, I’ve worried about how long does it take to do click to buy. Right when you say people are in and out and out. It took too much time. I wanted to do it that way, but that was kind of a pain in the ass. So I don’t want to do it that way. And do I want to call and talk to them, and I don’t want to do that I’ll go to another company. I worry also a lot about where do we or do we not show up in search. Yes, right. I mean, I agree. I spent a lot of money and historically have on TV, radio, billboards and this market. I’ve got 600 and something trucks driving around town that are fantastic billboard in each neighborhood. But I worry that on certain of our smaller services, specifically, you go to search for us for electrical and you don’t find it. You go to search for us for different, smaller things that are still very important to us, and we don’t show up. And I would go, well, why did Larry’s company show? Up. It’s a fraction of the size of this company. And he’s showing up on there. And I know all of that’s changing. I just want to conference in Orlando and heard a very good and yet very overwhelming AI conversation, particularly as it relates to marketing. Right. And you touched it a minute ago and GPT. Yes. Right. And I haven’t even done it yet. I’m almost afraid to, to go to chat or to Google and say, who’s the best pest control company in Austin? Not give me a bunch of them, but who’s the best and see what they say. Correct. Right. So all of that’s new? Yes. And so what you’re getting at, too, is this is where you need to have a really good understanding of your channel by channel performance. Right? Right. And so that is where you isolate. Okay, we know that we have. You do San Antonio. We came up Austin. We’re in second place. I got Atex. But can I tell you, for Brainforge, we did a lot of this early on and we now get a lot of traffic. From the chatgpt because people are asking, I need AI help. In Austin or wherever. But it was a very intentional decision. But also, it is still not like a huge segment. So what I wouldn’t recommend is like, okay, we just purely focus on that. But what you’re hitting on is there are these segments that are clearly outlined when we understand what is our current volume through there. And what is our current conversion rate through there? I’m telling you, you will see where the return is. You’ll see that certain channels we’ve spent less on and the actual conversion rates are higher. Okay, maybe we should consider putting some more effort into there. Maybe we should run some paid advertising into that. Channel. But those are the decisions you can only make when you do this basically segmentation approach. And then very similarly, you have to map out each of your customers and their journey. Right. Someone that’s coming very urgently, someone that’s coming more proactively for commercial. And what are the routes in. And fortunately, unfortunately, Google, and search is still one of the primary channels. And it’s becoming people are confident to make decisions, hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars decisions just through a simple search. And so you want to put your business into the number one. And the lucky thing about ABC is that for most companies, they focus on just marketing. They sell lousy service at the end, and they just optimize that. So that’s not the problem here. Right. And so you actually are very confident that no matter what, if they make it through the journey, they’ll win. So there’s a lot that’s possible. I guess one of the things we’ve started to do a little bit more. I don’t know how well we’re doing it. A lot of times beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Is on social, and we are starting to do some social advertising. We’re doing a little bit more somewhat. Creative posts. Sure. And I don’t know. Somewhat. Yeah, but very similarly, because the channel may seem like that’s where the trend is going. If your customers do not buy pest via TikTok. Don’t want to be advertising. Right. So that’s the thing is if they ain’t clicking on it, you can’t. Jars of soap nuance. Because to what? Serve? Sure. One that probably is on pumpkin front porch decorating. That’s where it went. And we weren’t there. Yes. Right. And. So we tried to get there after the fact. That’s perfect. One where we tried to go the traditional approach of tv, radio, online search, but yet it was probably all on social media. Yeah, and it depends. But then it also depends on again, given how nuanced each services are as customer, you have to make a decision on the experiments run. Do we want to focus on one service, on one type of customer, and that’s where you really, if you start to test too many things, we’ll end up in this sort of rabbit. Yeah. But our challenge is this. We have to feed the beast. Okay. We got 80,000 phone calls came into this building last month. Yeah, okay. While it may be down, it’s still a lot. And we have to continue to sell because the bigger we get, that cancellation, while it’s as a percent small, it’s still a lot. Correct? Right. So we got to sell a lot just to maintain even. And that’s become what’s become the challenge to us, right? As we’ve gotten bigger. And so I am our advertising budget. Is robust, but not crazy. And one of the things that I worry about is a lot of our competition is now private equity. And private equity has pretty much unlimited funds to grow the business, because that’s all they’re doing, so that they can then flip it to the next group. And so I do worry that in certain channels, I’m like, man, How do I raise above? Endless pockets. Right. Because our pockets are have a limit. And certainly this is where there are opportunities that don’t require additional budget. These are all the factors in making a marketing decision. And what we find is that again, looking at the entire customer journey, there are levers to push that more require. Ok, we’re just going to divert funds to one channel. We’re going to make changes that are one time to landing pages or a conversion. We’re going to change copy we’re going to change the way we interact with customers. Those don’t require they may not require. This is where an E Commerce actually what’s happening is they? We have customers spending a couple million dollars a month. On just Facebook, for example, right? For them, it is pure race to the bottom. Right. They’re just trying to outspend and just get one more additional placement. Above, we also have folks that have very little spending, but they do a lot through organic or they have other channels. And for example, email on the retention side are a lot cheaper to manage than bidding on keywords. And so this is all factored in. But I think again, what I’m trying to get is to pick the service that either we feel that has the most upside, or pick the service that is going down and start there and then start at either what seems to be the top of funnel at awareness and bringing customers what we would say is like back from the graveyard, right? We call them. Hey, these are folks that we’ve talked to. They’ve bought from us, or at some point we’ve at least talked to them. And they may not have made a purchase, but they’re sitting and they’re just an email sitting in a spreadsheet. We totally have an opportunity to resurrect them back into our funnel. So we have. Look at you guys. Captured emails of every lead we didn’t sell. Right. So to your point, people who called us and we know exactly what we bid for them, too. Yes. And they chose not to buy from us. They chose to do nothing. Or to buy from someone else or to do it themselves. You know, whatever. So we have a gazillion of those. And then we have a gazillion emails of people that we used to do business with that we don’t currently do business with. And so those are again, those are campaigns that we’ve already. They know who we are. Right? And they’ve done something with us. Either call us and allow us to come out or have actually done business with us. And how do we convert them to doing business with us? Yes. So this is where it’s helpful for us to arrive on. What are the areas? So, as you mentioned, there’s the awareness piece. There’s also once they’re aware and they’re at a point where they would like to do some business with us, how do we get them to that point? There’s finally also this resurrection. There’s people that have maybe done business or maybe not, but they’re aware of us. There’s also our existing customer base that can totally upsell. And that’s everything we’ve talked about with the oh, by the way. So that was our first incentive to that world. And those all seem like great areas. I think my question would be in which area if we were to really pick one or two and we were to really pick a couple of core services or a bundle of services where at least it affects one type of customer. What can we, you know, what can we arrive at? And that’s where at that point, to talk about where we would help, we would basically propose a couple of experiments to run. Like, we would one have conversations either with marketing or whoever has had an impact in any of those areas to be like, tell us what’s been done before. Show us any of the data that’s available. That we can then say, ok, we found that we’ve tried this. Or, hey, nothing’s here. We don’t know much. And here’s an experiment that we propose. Here’s the time and effort it would take to do that, and here’s the end to end where we think we would arrive. I think what you’ll find is that the benefit is that you have all these channels to convert and you have a great service. So then it’s just identifying where the conversions are. And that’s typically how we run things. Yeah, because the only data treatment. On certain feedback we get is how did you hear about us? Which is ok, maybe it’s somewhat accurate. But I don’t know how. What made you call us today? It’s also work we’ve done is we’ve gone to companies where we’re like, you’re not collecting any post purchase, you’re not doing a post purchase survey, so how do we know where to double back down? Right. So there’s a lot of work that we do in just helping improve this data collection mechanism. I think we need help there because when we get there, they’re like, well, your abc. I’ve always known about you guys. But something was made you right. Was it Google? Was it? Yeah. And if we radio ad could Because I think we’re a little frustrated. I think we are a little frustrated sometimes. Like Bobby said, we’re spending more in a growing market. We seem to be getting less out of that. But maybe if we could really pinpoint, because I don’t think we know what’s working. Yeah, so that’s the thing. You just have to pinpoint truly what segments contributed to its decrease. There’s gonna be stuff that you’re see that’s actually growing, probably, and you’ll see. Stuff that’s decreasing, and you’re trying to look at what is the contribution. What is contributing to that decrease? And who’s at fault? Is it? Okay, maybe TV and radio is not the high volume channels that it used to be. Sure. Right. And so those are the conclusions, those are the takeaways you have to arrive on. And you have to do that very quickly. You have to say, okay. We have two to three weeks to just go find out where we can find out. At the end of that, we’re gonna say, this is what we found. Here are the channels that are performing well. Here are the channels that are contributing to decrease. We need to now make decisions on saying those channels no longer work or we should limit the spend to a certain amount to still keep awareness. And there’s also gonna be in marketing, the toughest part is that you can measure everything. So a lot of stuff is directional. But there is a ton of survey and other data that you are collecting to show where people are coming from. But when you talk about when people get to the website, every point of that journey is measurable. You can look at the time spent on every single page. You can even look to the granularity of what page do people come from when they convert the most. And we do get some of that from our monkey boy. Analytics. The analytics from Monkey Boy and Google and Less does track that. Look at that. And whatever. Our marketing director, Les, has been the business a long, long time. He’s retiring. In march. So we’re struggling a little bit. We haven’t discussed it truthfully. Next step. What’s the next step? Beyond last? But in the last grew up. He used to work for Fox Services. And when they each fact company changed over their ownership and whatever private equity. Private equity. This was 20 years ago, though they were the dominant service here. They were mechanical. Dominant mechanical services. The right way to put it. But Less had a lot of experience in mechanical, so it fit well, because we were just entering that when we hired. Less was just entering the mechanical arena. And we’ve done a good job of growing it, but we’ve stagnated, I think. Let’s just say we’re searching for the next plateau. Right. And so part of this discussion really is almost. What do we do with our marketing in the future? Because it’s not gonna be less. I don’t know that it makes sense in one way. To just replace less. Without maybe saying, well, what are some other avenues that we can either outsource or we can combine or we can do whatever? Because I don’t know that one person, one marketing director, with all that we do and all these different channels and avenues and information, I don’t know that one person is the answer. You gotta have somebody in our marketing department. 100%. Yeah, but somebody does, right? I think what that person does. But even for example, if you were to say TikTok shorts Rios, that is one or a couple people that just focus on content and it is a tough, very time consuming thing to do. And those folks are not commonly the best that these other channels. And they also need really clear KPI’s on hey, this is the budget you have. We’re trying to if you accomplish this many impressions, this many drives to if we see that X amount of people are coming from TikTok, then that is our win for the quarter. Right. Even setting those goals for them is what they need. Otherwise they’ll take the money and make videos. No expectations. Yeah, with no clear expectations. And so each of these channels are very nuanced. But you know that the driving. Google and Facebook are still incredible drivers. 800 pound gorilla. And that’s what you’re not gonna see. Change dramatically. What you will see though is there are free leads coming from ChatGPT and Google right now. And those are not going to be. That market is not gonna be saturated for at least a couple more years, especially in home and commercial services, in E Commerce and other ways. All of those folks are marketing maniacs. They just like they’ll jump on anything, but in certain industries it will take time for it to mature. And for competition to come. And so those are open opportunities where your cost per lead can be really, really cheap just by changing some ways that the site’s indexed on chat building, some articles that just go directly there. We do a good job. We’ve got a lot. We have a robust blog. Yes. Feed Google. There are certain things that I think that we do really, really well. That aren’t as sexy and visible, but that are working on our behalf behind the scenes. That’s what Les would espouse, and I concur. I was thinking. We have to transition from less. He’s retiring. So what might make sense. And the approach to les is always a little prickly. Because he takes pride in what he does. And we don’t want to view this as. But if we view it, lobby with less, we gotta transition. And have him talk with Utam. For half a day or a day or whatever, and just say, here’s what. Cause Les is gonna give you by far, the best information on what we’re doing. He knows the analytics. He knows the relationship. And our job is not actually to say you’re doing the wrong thing. It’s actually just to. Identify if we approach it that way, Bobby. That’s probably a good exercise, because then Utah can look at that and just overall and say, yeah, man, you’re doing a really good job here. This is good. But here’s some other channels, maybe. And that would also maybe give us a little bit of insight as to how we’re gonna replace less. Because I don’t know that it makes sense to hire just one person to go, oh, you’re the new marketing director. You’ve already said. Well. Cause we do have other relationships, whether it’s monkey boy. Whether it’s Travis’s company. Travis, I know ABC has probably done a lot. What is the cohesive story on what’s worked? Mr. Well, Les knows what, especially in the last, let’s say, five, 10 years, what’s worked, especially given how much of the person’s decision is now digital. How much and how can we make some decisions on the marketing side that will then last on their 10 years. So I’d also heard, and I agree with exactly what you’re saying. But to that end, Is it when we have AI listen to our calls? I swear. At the meeting I heard talking about. Let AI ascertain where that call came from. Or what? Interesting. Yeah. The csr. Puts something down, whatever. But from the call, AI can pull that out, extrapolate that. So, I mean, that’s exactly what we’re starting the call. Is when I said. I said I expected Call Source to be doing that in that type of work. We have now all the transcript data in our proposal. Was. We should start now to extract for many parts of the business. What the customers are saying, right? And right now, it’s not that I like that a lot. It’s not that that can’t be possible, but you have to go have an individual conversation with every csr, but every call and not possible, not possible. This technology has now made that very possible. And so our objective there was, okay, let’s go through the calls, and it could be for a couple of different avenues. If you’re talking about, hey, can we identify why people call us, what are the number one pain points? Okay, we can run through all the transcripts. The other opportunity was for the trainers to give personalized feedback on every call for every CSR is not possible, but it is now something that we can do. And that’s why we started fair evaluation. Exactly your five calls that we were and so call source. We found that the evaluation criteria was definitely not like the ABC way. It was very just like, are the happy sad? And so we were like, we can build a much more nuanced here’s how that call went. Here’s the improvements, not only for the csr, maybe there’s opportunities in the training side, but for the broader business, okay, are there updates to delivery, to service delivery we need to do, to marketing that we need to do? Those are the insights that are locked in on those customer conversations. Right. And so that was the original opportunity we were talking about. Yeah, I mean, like a true heat map. Trying to really look at what the type of. What is it? What are the type of calls that are there and doing more. Yeah, but the transcripts can. I mean, calls does have all the transcripts there. We are able to pull, you know, the calls. But are we utilizing AI to say what is the what does. This wealth of information telling us. Right, right, right. None of us can go listen to every calling. Oh, that was that. And that was that. But as my understanding with AI, we can pull that out as long as we’ve got the transcripts right. Am I right? Yeah. And we would start again. It’s very similar. We start with a couple of areas. We would say we want to find ways that we can improve our service delivery. Now, using that, we would basically generate prompts that would go into each transcript, and I pull those insights out, and it basically helps summarize and link back. Hey, if you go listen to this call, there was this mistake with delivery, okay? Those are the insights for the delivery team. And so that’s exactly where you don’t start with. Just analyze the transcript. Figure out. It’s like, okay, we want to improve this. And that’s actually more of the work, I would say, is finding the right question. Yes, that’s my understanding, yeah. And so I guess our first time that we’ll sit and chat and I guess I’m a little, I don’t want to say confused, but where do you see your role with your company to be of value to abc? You’ve getting to know us. You’re seeing. Matt’s kind of laid out our marking. We’re at a crossroads. We’re doing certain things that are this or that. We know certain things, but we don’t know a lot of other things. We’re trying to find what is the channel, what is the best bet to put our money on to drive it. We’ve shared a view that we’re down as far as what are the at bats, so to speak. And so I don’t know what our next step is with the marketing of my what do I outsource, what I insource, blah, blah, blah, trying to gather everything that we’re doing today, that’s my conversation will be with Les. What are all the things we’re currently doing? Right. Here’s what we’re doing on tv. Here’s the channels we’re on, here’s a radio, here’s our search. Everything that we’re doing. And go. Okay. Where are the gaps? But then I don’t know that we’ve got a really good analysis of that’s all we’re doing. And, okay, that’s comprehensive. And I do think we have a very comprehensive presence. Particularly in Austin, which is where our biggest. And so it’s different in San Antonio. Right? We’re a big company in San Antonio, but not this big. And so our resources are more limited. So we got to be even more strategic. Right. We can make mistakes in Austin, and the phone’s still going to ring X amount, not as much as it was. So I’m trying to understand where your company and you so. Well, Bobby, here’s what we can do for you. Yeah. Here’s the value proposition that we can provide in the areas that we think that we can influence. And try and drive the results that we’re saying that we’re looking for. And so what is that role? And then I can take what that role is as far as my next step on the marketing piece. Right. Well, you know, here’s where y’all have. I won’t call it a piece, but an influence or an impact or whatever. And then I can fill in the blanks that we have then left from that so that. Our next season is knocking on the door, right? We’re coming out of 2025 and 2026 is getting ready to get going again. It’ll be springtime, which is when things here really start to bust as far as all of the different service lines that we have. And so I’ve got a sense of pressure on. What’s our next steps? Sure. So for us. When we come into companies, we don’t come in like, hey, we’re just the data folks, or we’re just here to automate things. We’re a very outcomes focused company. So you mentioned having a partner to deliver something for you. That is, here’s all the things that we’ve done. That is something that we do a lot of help on when we come into companies. Our first job is to do a ton of discovery, and so that is an exact area where we can plug in and deliver for you. Okay. Here, through interviews, through our own discovery, through our own industry research, here is the state of the world. Right. And do that from our lens and our expertise is in data and AI. But we’ve done this now across many businesses and within businesses, many departments, whether it’s finance, sales, you know, background in real estate, you know, and so. But we’ve used data and AI in every part of most businesses. But our job is to drive towards the outcome. We are not marketers. Right? We’re not service techs. We’re not. We are here to inform decisions and we’re here to measure the impact of those decisions. And we hope that’s allow you you can make more of those decisions and most those are more accurate, and that’s our goal. And so for us to get utilized, it’s literally in that way that you said, hey, I just need a review of everything that’s going on, what’s working, what’s not. Okay, that’s one thing. Second post review, we need to agree on decisions to cut, to move, to add. Okay, let’s make those decisions and then we need to measure. Right. And so we are the through line through that entire process. Whether we need to do dashboards, whether we need to do meetings like this, whether it’s interviews. We tend to mold towards the companies we work. We’ve worked with people that are real estate companies. That work very differently than some of our fully digital companies. Today we just signed an energy waffle company. They sell Stroopwafels. Honeysinger. They’re called Honeysinger. They sell an rei. Oh, like an energy ball. Energy for, like, runners when they’re running, and they need sugar, and so. We just have bitcoin or something? No, but we’ve worked with beverage companies. But again, for all of those, the reason why we’ve been successful. Is it’s all about agreeing on the KPIs that matter to the business, having a really amazing understanding of the customer and driving this, like, okay, understand, make a decision, measure the impact, make another decision. And that’s all we go to effect. You asked at the beginning what’s our biggest issue? We kind of identified that in terms of more at bats to put into the funnel, and maybe the funnel leaves some improvement, but overall, more at that, yes.