Owned and Operated #91 - How to Run a B2B ServiceTitan Consultancy with Danny Peavey

A 'Titan' of industry. Owned and Operated regular Danney Peavey joins Jack and John to discuss Home Service Engine and how to wrangle ServiceTitan.
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In this episode, we welcome Danny Peavey, who has a long family history in the trades. He is the owner of Home Service Engine, a B2B consultancy that helps home service companies maximize their investment in Service Titan software. Danny shares his background in the trades and tech, explaining how he helps clients with data analysis, onboarding, and performance management.

Episode Hosts: 🎤
John Wilson: @WilsonCompanies on Twitter
Jack Carr: @TheHVACJack on Twitter

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John Wilson, CEO of Wilson Companies
https://www.wilsonplumbingandheating.com

Jack Carr, CEO of Rapid HVAC
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Owned and Operated Episode #91 Transcript

John Wilson: I'm John Wilson. Welcome to Owned and Operated. Twice a week, we talk about home service businesses, and if you're a home service entrepreneur, then this is going to be the show for you. We talk about our own business in residential plumbing, HVAC, and electric, and we also talk about business models that we just find interesting.

Let's get into it.

Welcome back to Owned and Operated. Today we have Danny Peavy on the show, and he explains a couple different things. So he walks us through his B2B consultant business, how he thinks about clients, how he thinks about hiring, really interesting business to me. I've never really looked at those before.

And also his consultancy is relevant to us cause they help folks with Service Titan integration and basically making the best use out of their investment. So pretty cool service and it was really nice. Look under the hood of how a B2B consultancy works. Thanks for checking it out.

Welcome back to Owned and Operated. Good to see you, Jack.

Jack Carr: Hey man, how's it going?

John Wilson: Good. Today we've got a friend of mine, Danny, on with us today. Welcome, Danny, to the show.

Danny Peavey: Thank you, John. Thanks, Jack. Appreciate you guys having me.

Jack Carr: I'm really excited. I'm really excited. Danny, you are the owner of Home Service Engine, correct?

Danny Peavey: Yes, sir.

Jack Carr: Awesome. Start us off, tell us a little bit about your background, tell us about Home Service Engine, what it is, what it does. Excited to hear about it.

Danny Peavey: Yeah. Yeah. So home service engine we're a service Titan consulting shop. Our goal is just to help home service companies maximize their service Titan investment. So I'm 43. I essentially grew up in the trades. I have a pretty large Italian, Irish family.

So my dad was an electrician. I have three brothers that run a really successful home services company here in Atlanta. I'm sure a lot of people can relate, your mom's the bookkeeper, that whole thing. So I grew up in a family that believed that the trades are more valuable than college.

And, I was lucky to have you know, kind of a front row seat into how the trades and the home services can really change the lives of families,

Jack Carr: Was this your parents' business that then your brothers overtook or was this, they went out there, the three of them, and sorry, I cut you off there.

You have three brothers, correct?

Um, that, that went and did this did they start it up themselves or was it more of a family ordeal prior?

Danny Peavey: So I'm the oldest out of four boys. So the second brother started it when he was 20 and so no my dad actually worked if you guys have ever heard of like warehouser or international paper, he was like an electrician for a company. So now he just, you know, 13 years old, like, Hey, breaking out a yellow notepad and asking him, he's drawn wires and he's like, Hey, let me teach you about electricity.

So he just, I think he had so much freedom in his life with the trades that he wanted to pass that forward. And the first part of my career went into the technical side, but my brothers is the one that actually started the home services company.

Jack Carr: Okay. And so you said you went technical, where were you prior to this? What were you doing?

Danny Peavey: My career started with IBM. When I was 20, I essentially for the first 10 years of my career, I worked for the largest technical companies on the planet. So I worked for IBM, I worked for Apple, and I worked for a company called Hewlett Packard. And pretty much, I'm doing a lot of what I do now, but I helped Fortune 500 companies maximize the tech investment they made with IBM or Apple or Hewlett Packard.

And then for, after that, I had an agency for about six years where I did a lot of CRM and marketing rollouts and did a lot of construction work. And then, so I kind of, with what I'm doing now, it's taking my family upbringing and home services and my professional skillset of tech and doubling down on the home services space.

And obviously service Titan is just where everything's headed.

Jack Carr: That's awesome. That's where the need is time to find that niche and really extrapolate on that, especially with your family. Why service titan? Like how did that domino fall that one day you're running your marketing agency and you go, man, my brothers are having a hell of a time with service Titan.

They cannot figure that out. It is a beast in itself. Or was it somewhere else that you found that?

Danny Peavey: It was a couple of things when my brothers first started I'm always talking to them and we're talking about tech. And so I had put them on, I had recommended Salesforce. And this was obviously a very long time ago. And there's been a lot of different CRMs in the home services space since then.

But, you know, we're always talking about tech and marketing, in my opinion is tech. Whether you're doing marketing or ads or website or CRM it's everything starting to blend together in the tech side. As you guys know, with service site, like marketing is built into the tech.

So yeah, that was really how it started. I think what happened with me, I just started doing a lot of different construction type of jobs. And like you said, on the niche down, you might as well just focus on one segment and try to expand from there, if that makes sense.

Jack Carr: No, it completely does. And so there wasn't really a defining moment where you looked at service titan and went, wow, this is a headache, let me crack this. Or you just eased your way into it with multiple jobs.

Danny Peavey: I think working with so many different CRMs, you kind of, you know, in the home service space, obviously service Titan is number one, and also just seeing how much headache it is with the system, we're very data driven, right?

So even if you just look at the reporting and the KPIs and trying to set up the system. In a way to where it's easy for you to pull out the data and trust the data, you know, that's why, in my opinion, most CEOs buy ServiceTitan is because you want a platform that you can scale with to where you can trust the data, you can trust job costing.

And so, not to strum the violin, but so many home service companies aren't profitable. And I think ServiceTitan is really the tool that I think we're all looking at to say, okay, I can finally see how profitable I really am or aren't. And that's a lot of where we're getting called is to say, I don't trust the data.

I want to understand how I'm performing. And I think that's why there's such a surge right now with service titan. I don't know. What do you guys think?

Jack Carr: Yeah, honestly, our story was service Titan is we started in March of this year or 2023. So we've been running service Titan now for seven or eight months. And that's exactly how I feel is I know there's a purpose to it. I know that there's a pathway, but to find every single pathway and set it up correctly and move through the entirety of service Titan so that you get the good data in to get the good data out is such a nightmare.

We don't have the vendor management inventory set up we're not using equipment correctly like there's just so much to it and because it's such a big elephant. We're just taking really tiny bites out of it at a time We'll get there eventually but I mean I love this idea of a home, you know, having somebody, a consultant come in and help you line it out and help the people on your team that are doing this to line it out.

John Wilson: Yeah, so we're seven years into Service Titan. And like, I wish this existed seven years ago. Or, like, this type of thing. Because somewhat over the last seven years, we've had to continually redo how we originally set it up in the first place because when you're a small business and you're bringing on a large platform or a large anything, who's usually in charge of the rollout when you're like a two, 3 million business, it's like whoever's answering your phones is typically who's going to roll it out.

That's what we did. And that's what everyone else that I've seen has done. So everything is backwards. And you end up having to redo it, like dumb stuff, like naming, like what's your naming strategy because that matters you don't think it matters when there's only like a thousand people in your CRM, but when you have a hundred thousand with different naming strategies, because whoever was the manager at that moment that is really hard to undo we've had to rebuild our membership program three or four times I don't even know what price book we're on seven or eight now.

Okay. But yeah, it's a real nut to crack. And like what most people would do is they would try to hire somebody smart or you can go get like, now there's a little bit more support around it, like you folks, for example, but it's also the software has been around. So more people have experienced it compared to five years ago when it was like not a thing. But yeah, it's a cool thing. I'm into it.

Danny Peavey: So again, I have a tech background and when people say they have a tech background, usually that means they've seen a lot of different trends and a lot of different industries, there's so many families that run home services businesses. And you guys are right, what you just described, John is exactly correct.

When you, like, we've never, in my opinion, seen a system like service Titan and there's so many things you can do with it, which is good thing, but it's also sometimes a bad thing. Like you're describing. And so when you look at like the healthcare industry or the tech industry, for whatever reason, home services is always, they're not the last domino to fall, but whatever's going on in those industries is eventually coming to home services.

Especially with AI coming and all those things. So seeing, like you said some companies doing one, two, 3 million all the way up to five, six, seven. I mean, If you're big tech companies will, you know, if if you're rolling out SAP or Salesforce or similar types of CRMs for a tech company, as you guys know, you have a technology team.

You have an IT team. That's what I used to see in the big Fortune 500 space. But to your point, you roll out ServiceTitan as a CEO doing 3 million. You're looking at, do I take time away from my family to go work on ServiceTitan? Like there's no tech team. There's no IT team. So I just saw a real need in the marketplace and there's also just a lot of help that's needed and service Titan sometimes obviously is getting overloaded with their help desk,

John Wilson: Who's the typical. Company that seems to be reaching out to?

Danny Peavey: So homes, you know, HVAC plumbing, electrical, I think you guys would agree. That's always going to be sort of. the sexy home service companies, I think service Titan would even say like, that's primarily who they're helping. We are starting to hear from what is, what does she say?

Jack Carr: She doesn't understand. I try to tell her that HVAC is sexy, and she just

Danny Peavey: Yeah.

Jack Carr: I'll work on it.

Danny Peavey: I don't know your wife's name, so I'll just say Jack's wife, HVAC is sexy. That's going to be your hashtag for owned and operated y'all's slogan, but I would say I think companies are looking to, you know, how do I maximize service Titan for less than the price of a full time employee?

That's really the value we're trying to provide, but I would say we're seeing companies between the two and a half to seven and a half range primarily reach out. And they're exactly in the same position you guys are in either. There have gone through things a couple of times. What usually happens is the CEO is like, we bought service titan and we're not maximizing it.

We don't know our KPIs. We don't trust the data. It's nagging at me every day that it's not set up, my employees don't have what they need to get their job done. And so then what the company will try to do is they'll try calling service Titan support. I love my service Titan support folks, but sometimes, a shop just needs their own dedicated help desk.

If we will put it that way. And then your onboarding was generic usually. So you're not customizing service Titan. To your business as probably as much as you want in the onboarding process So then you try setting it up on your own, right? It's taking a lot of you and your team's time because everybody has day jobs, right?

John Wilson: Yeah.

Danny Peavey: Some try to hire or think about hiring a full time employee, but if we're honest usually you don't need you know full time service type expert. You just need access to one and then the biggest problem is we don't know our KPIs and we don't know which reports to pull in service Titan, run my reports for me be kind of my service Titan GM.

And so that's usually the trajectory folks find themselves in. And then, like I said, we're trying to come along and say, we'll give you dedicated on demand service titan and help when you need it for less than the price of a full time employee. So you can totally maximize the value that you're getting in the system.

John Wilson: Yeah, that is interesting.

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Jack Carr: So what does that look like? So I know that there's a lot out there now with that help side, but there's also a lot of help out there with people who are promising integration and automation and all these things like between slack and pulling automated reports. Do you guys do those kinds of things as well, or at least consult on those kinds of things?

Danny Peavey: Yeah we'll consult on those things. A lot of what we offer is, we'll offer a help desk offering, we'll obviously offer coaching and training. We offer implementations, if there are one off implementations, I tell you what, a lot of what we do and we're thinking about this maybe from a software layer, but we're getting asked to do what I just call the, you know, a performance package. Is again, it's like a CEOs using the system and they don't know their KPIs, they don't know which reports to run. You're just, you're busy. Some of them, you may not even want to run reports. And so we're actually being asked to just tell me what service Titan is saying as far as how I'm performing.

And then if you disagree with the data, then it's either a data quality issue or it's a business process issue.

And so that's actually been something that we've been surprised about. It just depends if the CEO is data driven or not.

John Wilson: Yeah.

Jack Carr: Yeah, that makes sense. I was smiling midway because that's me 95 percent of the time I'm looking at service time reports, trying to figure out which one I'm supposed to be pulling the data and then trying to figure out, is this actually good data or did the CSR slash dispatcher who took, 200 calls today entering all the data correctly on the back end.

Now definitely this is something that I'm personally interested in. I think I'm in line with the exact clientele. It's, 2 million to 3 million and starting to grow and just implemented Service Titan and trying to figure it out. So this is amazing.

John Wilson: It's a big problem and I did a tweet on this the other day. I think what's exciting about obviously I am just passionate about Service Titan in general. I think it's like the only good decision for software and home service. Probably a little too outspoken about it, but I am excited by like the suite of services that are coming around Service Titan.

So that's interesting. Like I have a friend who runs a business that helps us like get more data out of pictures on service type, like niche, little problem that I need more data from these pictures that we take. And that way I can automatically put that into my marketing funnel and it can just become more and more or like phone coaching or, obviously like this basically ops management for your data and your onboarding, but I think it's sick.

Danny Peavey: Yeah. I mean, you guys are data driven. We're data driven. I think, there's just not to say like the Boomer, the older generation, they just didn't have a lot of access to this, a lot of it was ledger based, and QuickBooks came out what, 20, 30 years ago.

So there's just a huge opportunity now to get better data and to be a better operator I mentioned we're looking at the software stack. Like, we'd love to have some point gamify or jobs. See, it's a big word, all the VC guys like to use, we would like to make some of that performance data or call it a scorecard.

That's something we're very interested in is how could we. You know, the reporting is great and the dashboards and service type are great, but kind of what you were saying, John, and what you're doing on the marketing data, like, how can we just take that data and make it instant, so you can make faster decisions.

John Wilson: Yeah. We've had to get, who did we use data cube? So I think they're the big ones in the space. I don't even know it's Ishmael's company. Right. But yeah, we had to build our own dashboards because service Titan really doesn't provide the dashboards that are like it's fine until you need more information or like you need this same information that they can spit out, but put together in a different way to present which is what we ended up doing.

Like, Hey, we've got this data over here, hours worked or something. And then we've got this data over here of revenue, completed jobs, completed close rate, but like nothing really puts them together. So we had to smash it together in kind of a crude way.

Danny Peavey: Yeah, we've connected to the API and we're, like I said, that's something we're actively building. Cause to your point, we have to pull the reports. The only way to get the month over a month, quarter over quarter, year over year view is a spreadsheet. And so what some people find themselves doing is working with Nexstar or those bigger companies and they have their own system, but there's just sometimes there's still a bit of a gap around data and how am I performing and yeah.

So anyways, not to continue to belabor the point, but yeah, I think the passion for me comes in, my family being in the business, knowing a lot of, we probably all know a lot of family members in this business. we just hear a lot of stories about, I don't have profit.

I don't have profit, and not that service titan is going to save the day, but I really do feel like it is a system that can help us help a lot of us get to get profit

John Wilson: Yeah. I agree. What I think would be interesting we covered the, what you do, which firm believer of, I think it's awesome. You're also a B2B service business. And I'd love to dive into this a little bit. Like, that's what this show's all about. Is we're interviewing service companies, man. I have absolutely no concept of what it would take to launch a B2B service organization, drive value for the clients, grow the business, how to get new clients. Like, how do you think about this?

Danny Peavey: Yeah, from an operational perspective, not to be cute, but lot of what we offer is very similar to how a home service company would go to market, right? So a home service company comes in. Usually it offers some sort of repair to build trust, to solve a problem. And then obviously if something catastrophic, go sideways or there's a an installation that needs to happen.

Hopefully that the company that did the service or the repair, right. you call them and then obviously there's some sort of maintenance component. So our business is very similar. Not because we're trying to be, cute and clever. It's just, that's the nature of software implementation, is that you're really selling capacity. Same way where an HVAC CEO is looking at the capacity of a technician, you know, as we continue to scale we're looking at the capacity of service tech expertise. So it is an interesting discussion. Obviously home services is B2C, but a service based business, whether it's B2B or B2C, there's a lot of similarities.

I don't know if you guys would agree with that, but.

John Wilson: No I, think so. When I was thinking about your business model, this was a few weeks ago. I told Brandon about it, my president, it was mainly like, dude, this is bullshit. Like, where was this seven years ago? ,

Danny Peavey: You were mad about it. Yeah.

John Wilson: Yeah, dude, like this is crappy. And then we were like we started talking about exactly that. It's like, Hey, we only have so many plumbers. Part of the problem with service Titan Is the available expertise. It's not Salesforce with like 20 or 30 years or however long Salesforce has been around or QuickBooks that has experts everywhere. It's still like a relatively new software. So like finding someone that has ever used service Titan, we hire a lot of people. And it's only been in the last two years that most of our technician hires have ever seen service titan and maybe one out of 20 office personnel have ever seen service titan.

So like getting them I agree with this this is going back to like the Capacity of experts, basically the same as plumbers. I can see that because I know we have a tough time, but we've wanted to hire a service Titan certified or whatever they call that. We've ended up just breeding them in house

Danny Peavey: Yep. Yep.

Jack Carr: Yeah, we tried to find a consultant when we were doing the implementation too because we're a small shop It was gonna take my time, full time, three weeks or whatever the implementation multiple times a day and then you know realistically right when I'm setting it up I'm not setting it up optimally.

There's no way. I just don't know enough. I don't know enough about how to do the categories and all this that all feed together in kind of a, simultaneous order. And so we were looking for a consultant and it is hard. It's very hard to find.

John Wilson: So how do you lead gen new clients because I agree like we've tried to do this before like hey fix our membership program Very difficult to find so how do you get like out in front of it?

Danny Peavey: The good thing about the home services space is that it's just so personable, right? Nowadays in the B2B services space there's this idea that. You know, every company needs a media to drive and build audience.

Obviously you guys are doing that. You've got a great brand and a great listenership. And then, you need a product component and a service to your business, especially if you run a service business. For us, it's just being a part of the community. We were at Pantheon last year.

There's tons of Facebook groups committed to maximizing ServiceTitan. So, Our lead gen and our acquisition is really just trying to be as helpful as possible. We are, working on some media right now. We're thought about starting a community, but there's so much community already out there.

We do try, obviously being a part of, this show is fantastic. But I think the space is out of maybe all the industries, it's still just tried and true people knowing people. And so even a lot of conferences, to be quite honest with you. We haven't showed up to too many of them, but that's sort of our plan.

We're not a business where we're trying to scale too fast. Because we really want to make sure that we're maintaining quality. But yeah our acquisition approach is not really super, super complicated.

John Wilson: How does hiring new experts work?

Danny Peavey: Yeah, that's a great question. I have a partner, Jason Arthur he's on my team. I mean, you guys know, hiring is in and of itself its own sales funnel, right? The same, you know, in a way you could probably say the home services company doing 10 or 20 or 30 million.

That might be who we may potentially compete with if somebody has the wherewithal to bring their own service type expert in house. You know, Just staying, it's a similar answer to the marketing and the acquisition question, which is, it's just staying connected shaking hands, kissing babies, and just getting to know people and just really keeping an eye out for talent. Again, no different than maybe what you would guys would do if you went to a HVAC convention and, you know, or plumbing convention, and, we're trying to meet some folks that could maybe be a good addition to your team

John Wilson: I think that probably is right. So are people service titan and certified when they come in?

Danny Peavey: For our clients

John Wilson: No, you're uh, like your experts

Danny Peavey: Oh, they don't have to be, but that's definitely something that we're going through the process of so Jason is certified, but yeah, we're definitely gonna make that, a requirement or like a part of the process. For sure.

John Wilson: We've started putting people through our company through it, because I think it's kind of amazing. On one hand, it shouldn't be this complicated, for the listener, I'm doing air quotes, but it also like in our business, like. It touches every single aspect of our business.

We're seven years in, we're maybe not using 2 percent of service Titan at this point. Like we use almost every feature, especially when they come out, we're like, we're on it pretty quick. Stuff breaks a lot. So we've ended up putting people through the service Titan certification thing, but it's complicated to get them through there.

Like it's hard to sign them up and put them through the courses.

Danny Peavey: Well, Service Titan is definitely making a push for that administrative certificate to happen. And I personally think it's great

John Wilson: It's a wider talent pool all of us, you, for us. And I think like for your reality. like for us we need it because of our size for your client. They couldn't afford to have that person anyways. It still makes sense for both parties.

Danny Peavey: Correct.. Yeah. And that's why I go back to, maybe our businesses are very similar because really it's fractional capacity, right? I mean, Whether that's a service call or repair or, coaching a live training and implementation, there's just a segment of home services companies that like I mentioned earlier you don't need a full time expert. You just need access to one. If that makes sense.

John Wilson: Yeah. How many clients can like what is the capacity for one? What's the title for this person?

Danny Peavey: I would say we would call ourselves service titan and consultants, but, depending again, we have coaching and training, which that's a lot of calls like this or in person obviously we have maintenance plans. So I'd probably say maybe 20 clients to a consultant, You know, it just depends on what that looks like from a workload perspective.

I think for, you know, we, we have a service where we're doing, service Titan tasks, right? Like unlimited service Titan tasks for a certain fee. Most people want to send those tasks using like a video screen share like loom and they want to email it. And as long as you get it back to them within a business day, they're That's something like that with like a great SOP database, something like that could be. Scaled, obviously a lot easier than a company that is rolling out service Titan for the first time and needs, a three month implementation and they do 15 million. But if, if I'm working with a 2 million company that just needs a little bit of some task management and a coaching call here and there the capacity there is a little different.

So that's a little bit of my challenge, right? Is what type of, contract can we take? How many can we take at a time? And what type of resources do we put in place, depending on what people are interested

in.

Yeah. What I think would be

go ahead.

Jack Carr: I was just say for companies that you've already implemented with and who are running and working with you, what's the recurrence look like? So you've lined out a lot of their stuff with them and now they're just working with you on a maintenance or a general, random question here or there. What's the frequency that they're reaching back out to you asking questions? What does that look like?

Danny Peavey: So mo I would say most of our customers are on some sort of retainer, even after a one time implementation marketing pro is starting to become a really big need. We have service Titan, not plugging them too much. They have this four month, buy any pro product.

For free for four months. So I actually had a client today. They, Hey, we're moving forward with marketing pro. Don't have time to, to manage it. Can you, can you run it for us? Can you run our campaigns? Can you do our audience building? And that's like an example of why somebody would, want to do an ongoing contract.

And then, like I mentioned earlier, I'm calling it the performance plan, but a CEO, that's just like, I don't know where reports to run. The dashboard at the front part of, the front part of service site, when you log in, it's not giving me that month over month view, just meet with me every week, every other week, every month, pull my reports for me, put it in, even if it's a spreadsheet, like give me a, a red, yellow, green, and and you're laughing Jack, cause you've probably been through this, but like, we'll pull the report.

All right. We have CSR, we have texts, we have install, we have sales, we have marketing. And then like, let's say there's a zero on tech generated leads, or let's say there's a dash on some sort of. Field, getting that intricate with the data is important because you're going to look at it and freak out like, why is there a dash here?

Why is there a zero here? And instead of turning a blind eye to that, I, we're encouraging people like face it head on. So you can know, again, is it a business process issue? Is it, are people typing things in wrong? So that's probably the largest reason why we're having an ongoing is because it's a data quality, data, good data in.

Yeah. When people come to us we are not trying to like push any sort of package we're really trying to create custom bespoke packages based on capacity. And we always tell our clients like you, you can scale up and scale down. Usually if somebody is implementing, there's a high scale up and then it's a matter of, okay, do you want email support, phone support?

Do you want live meetings? Do you just want email? And we just, again we're trying to give the dedicated service site expertise for less than the full time employees. So we're trying to stay committed to that promise. And, there's usually some creative ways that we can do that.

John Wilson: Yeah. Interesting business. I'm trying to think of another,

I'm trying to think of another one.

Danny Peavey: A business, I'll be, I can't take credit for this business. So again, I come from the tech world, like HubSpot, Salesforce. Like if you look at any major software, you're There's, there are always certified administrators, you've mentioned QuickBooks, John. This is not that what we're doing is really nothing new.

I think what's different is that again, it's home services base. And then as you guys know, service Titan is punching is packing so much into the software.

John Wilson: Yeah. And

they're handing it to like 3 million companies. Yeah. It's ridiculous. And I think I don't know. I

Jack Carr: that an insult,

John Wilson: know

it's not, it's literally a capacity thing because like I,

I look at our, I look at our use of service Titan over the years and we've grown into it and we'll like can probably continue to grow into it. And we obviously have more resources than the average home service company and it's still, yeah. Like ridiculous, but it, like

I said earlier, it touches every inch of the business, like everything,

accounting, marketing, HR, obviously ops, but like every single team is inside this software. Inputting data. So it's wild. But yeah, I agree. It's just like it's early Where's like salesforce and all quickbooks, that's a fairly mature Support supported market whereas it just doesn't seem to be a thing yet.

Danny Peavey: It's also I wouldn't say unprecedented, every department is getting into it, so not that there's infighting, but it's just not that it's weird at all, it's just really different again for an industry that is usually, hasn't always been, technology hasn't always been the most cutting edge thing.

And I think. You've, sometimes you hear murmurs about service Titan, but I think we're all hanging on because they have the largest R and D budget and they do have a good product and,

John Wilson: There's nobody else close There's just no one else close like I genuinely wish there was someone else close I would love to not

like my service Titan relationship is 400, 000 a year. Like that's like total, software fees, the supportive services we have on top, the credit card, everything. I would love to not pay 400, 000 a year, but there is literally just not another option at this point.

Maybe one

day everybody keeps thinking that they're going to build like a service Titan killer, but all they're really doing is like competing with like, like jobber five years ago or something. They're like, I've got a board. I don't know.

Danny Peavey: Yeah. When people build software and I, this is a geeky comment, but. Like softwares are comprised of multiple products, right? So obviously in ServiceTight and like dispatch and marketing and price book, but even when you build integrations, each integration is its own product. So part of the reason why obviously is expensive, and I'm not defending ServiceTight, but it's, let's say you've got 50 or a hundred product managers that are working with developers to build all those products and then smash it together.

So it all works. What they're doing is again, it's hub, spot ask. I mean it's sales Ford ask it's Salesforce ask. So it's, we've just, we just have never seen it at the scale,

John Wilson: yeah.

Jack Carr: It's a great

place to be, though.

Danny Peavey: It's a great place to be. And I think it's an interest. Again, I'm 43. I'm a Geriatric middlenel, so I'm the oldest millennial.

You can be. And so I see, the boomers, I see the older folks and. And then I, we've got millennials like me and you guys and the younger. And, it's interesting, like sometimes the younger, I don't, I'd be curious what you guys think about this. Sometimes the tech for sometimes the, some of the younger folks don't understand some of the tech, like some of the older guys.

So there's this kind of interesting dynamic happening on the age side too, if that makes sense. And people's comfort, how comfortable they are with technology.

John Wilson: we've noticed it depends on the team. Like, Ops is a very easy to get people, like, hey, a new, like, we, this is a right now thing. Like, we actively onboard frontline managers and they've never touched the back end of any software in their life. And it's not

overly complicated

to get them what they need. Regardless of age. Like, hey, here's the search button. Here's how job numbers work. Here's how you procure, procure parts. And here's how you look at job costing. Like, that's it. Maybe price book. Whereas accounting, like, that has been a real struggle. So we've noticed basically anyone above probably 40 seems to really struggle with getting the accounting side of ServiceTitan down. I'm not sure why I think maybe in general accounting likes to stick inside accounting So they're like, no, I want to be inside, QuickBooks or intact or whatever, whereas as you really have to live inside service Titan for 50 to 60 percent of your time as an accounting department. Most of our accounting goes through service Titan. And that was a real struggle and HR, same thing. Like, how do you bridge the gap between your HRIS and service Titan? So all that to say, I think it really depends on department, like call takers can pick it up quick. Field guys can pick it up pretty quick. Ops managers can pick it up quick. Support staff is its own journey. Like, marketing is like, we're on month six and we're still like, getting there. But there's a lot to unpack.

Danny Peavey: Yep. Yep. What about you, Jack? How's it been for you on that?

Jack Carr: We just don't have a choice HR and all this stuff is very, it's very nice when you have a nice large team, but these are just not problems we're running into. If we have three people who are in service Titan, really in the back end changing things. And if they weren't or they're not going to be, they're not working for us because we just, that's one of the hats you have to wear right now.

I view us as John seven years ago, wishing that he had you guys cause this is what we're going through. We're going to build it, break it, build it, break it. And if you're not willing to build it right now, you can't really work with us. But we have a great team. I'd probably say around exactly where John's at.

Forties is. Is where most of our people are in the service are in their mid to late 30s. And we're all just, we all know computers and

are fairly technical. So

It works,

but not as well as it should.

John Wilson: It's a huge software.

It's ridiculous.

Jack Carr: Yeah,

John Wilson: sales force at a plumbing company.

Danny Peavey: that's it. And, and on that note, this.

Yeah, no, It has been fun, I was just going to say the service, the, just draw that parallel, like when my, like I said, my, my family had rolled out sales for when bigger companies roll out sales for us again, like

people, you know, people are so army armies,

John Wilson: Like, we're about to do Sage Intact, and

it's the same thing. It's like a 50, 000 implementation fee from some random consultant to come in and help us launch it. Like, it's real. But,

I can't have my financials down. Whatcha gonna do?

Danny Peavey: And I think, I, I think the softwares know that. I think that they're probably, they see all the revenue. So I think they could, play nice and, if it's a, under a percent of revenue or just, something like that, then, it's just the, some of the costs of doing business type of thing.

John Wilson: yeah. This was awesome, man. If people want to connect with you, where can they find you?

Danny Peavey: Yeah, no, I appreciate you guys having me. Yeah. The best way to find us is if you go to home service engine. co, so not. com. com, we couldn't get the. com, but home service engine. co. And then we're, we're on Twitter or I guess, are you guys calling it X at this point?

John Wilson: I still call it Twitter.

Jack Carr: No,

Danny Peavey: Twitter. Yeah. Twitter. Yeah. So we're on Twitter, we're on LinkedIn, but yeah social media. And, but yeah, if you ever. If you want to reach out and homeserviceengine. co is the best

John Wilson: sweet. Awesome. Thanks for coming out man. And thanks for sharing about the b2b consulting business. That's I don't know. I've always been curious but brandon is determined. He's like dude one day I'm, just gonna consult for people and i'm like, yeah, like go for it,

Danny Peavey: it's yeah. No, I'm an open book, man. It's like I said, there's a lot of similarities, but yeah. Happy to answer other, any other questions about that space.

John Wilson: Awesome. All right. Thanks for coming on

Danny Peavey: yeah. Good seeing you guys.

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