How Data Analysis Can Transform Your Service Business

 Jeffery Eisenberg from Data Turk

Josh Crouch: [00:00:00] Good morning, happy Wednesday. Welcome back to the service business mastery podcast. I am one half of your favorite podcasting team. Joshua crouch sitting next to me virtually is ter Ette. And we are diving into data analysis, which. Don’t change the channel. Some of you guys may think this is super boring, but this is the kind of stuff that’s gonna level you up in your business and take you to the next, that next level to uncover hidden insights.

So we’re gonna be talking about things like business intelligence, business analysis and these things are all designed to increase your net profit, increase your return on investment for any advertising that you’re doing, increase your employees and their. They’re numbers and find out who your top performers are.

And if people were like those top performers, how much more revenue could your business bring in? So I ran across this company a couple months ago. It was a Facebook post somewhere. And I started talking to Jeff Jeffrey Eisenberg is the member of data tur that we’re talking to today. And it’s some really interesting stuff cuz as these softwares and CRMs develop.

The trades are still quite a bit behind eCommerce. And some of these other industries, when it comes to software and business intelligence and things are rapidly evolving. So it’s no longer just good to have like basic data. We need to know what that data is telling us because as business owners. We look at it and oh, [00:01:30] that’s the numbers look good, but you don’t really know what they mean.

Tersh Blissett: My favorite thing is getting reports like every single day and say, oh, here’s your report on this KPI? Here’s your report. And how much 

Josh Crouch: time do you spend looking at those 

Tersh Blissett: delete delete. 

Josh Crouch: feel like there’s a disconnect cuz. Reporting sounds great. Cuz every, all the gurus say you gotta have these reports.

You gotta have meet these KPIs, but you don’t really even understand what they mean for your business. If you have a CSR booking at 75%, what would it mean to your business? If they booked at 77% or 78%, what does that mean for you? So you actually understand like where should you put your effort in 

Tersh Blissett: training?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. So we’re super excited to, to get started with this episode and Jeffrey’s a lively person and we’re gonna get along. Great. And so this is not gonna be a boring episode, just so you’re aware. I know some people, whenever they start talking numbers, it’s Ugh, but lucky for you.

We love this. And this is gonna be a fun episode, but before we get started I do want to talk a little bit about our sponsors Sarah, Billy Stevens with Sarah. He’s been on the show several times. And if you don’t know about Sarah by now You probably live under a rock. I would imagine in the HVAC world at least, but if not all jokes aside, Sarah is an amazing platform that’s up and coming and allowing us to do tons of amazing things.

Josh, what you got to say about Sarah and 

Josh Crouch: Billy? This actually coincides with our topic today because Sarah’s a platform built on giving you that intelligence at your fingertips. So you can [00:03:00] make decisions about your. Your job efficiency. And just understand your number the important numbers in your business.

So that way you don’t look at a. Heap of reports that don’t do anything for your business. And Sarah’s been gracious enough to sponsor the show and also allow us to get better at the production end of this. So we can continually get the content out to you guys. That’s valuable, at least that we think is valuable and that allows us to, stay in front of you guys, whether you watch on TikTok or Facebook or YouTube.

 That stuff takes, if any of you guys have ever done social media, It is a bear to try to get all this stuff on all these platforms and sponsors like, like Billy with Sarah allows us to help with the production costs 

Tersh Blissett: of the show. Yeah. As soon as we figure it out, something else changes. So yeah, it’s great to have a team and be able to have a team like that.

For years I went without sponsors as almost an EU thing and I wasn’t able to provide for the podcast for the listeners in the audience. So super huge shout out for Billy to jump on jump on board and support us. Next I would, I’d like to talk about company cam company. Cam’s a brand new sponsor partner with us.

I’m gonna read this because I, so company cam is something that I jumped on board with many years ago. But then everything else in my life, the shiny object syndrome kicked in and I didn’t stay with it very long. But then I got back on it. Here recently and the team over at company cam, they’ve been really good.

We, Josh and I just did a demo. And we did a demo. With Austin. [00:04:30] And he knew that we wanted to know more about company cam not to purchase something. So we, he knew that we were gonna ask him the difficult questions and stuff like that, and he was prepared and did a great job with his demo.

And so we talked a little bit about How it integrates, how people can do things. And we’re gonna learn more about that. Like people who use CRMs, like service Titan or Sarah and or house called pro or something like that and how they use it in conjunction with that CRM. So we’ll get more data on that for you.

But. First off, I’d like to say that company cam makes it the, it simple to communicate across the platforms. And I did a couple of short videos. I actually went out and called a service call. Believe it or not, this weekend, I went and purposely called a service call so that I could use company cam and record how to do it.

You’re weird. I know it I could 

Josh Crouch: think of a hundred. Things to do on the weekend besides do that. 

Tersh Blissett: It was one of those things like Hey, new toy, let me go try it out. But honestly, It’s really cool. And the concept is great where you can bring all your communication your document, the metadata.

And that’s a big thing for us, metadata, keeping metadata instead of compressing the image and stripping metadata off of it. It takes that and stores it there. So then you upload it to your website, which I didn’t know that you could do this, but could create a carousel on your homepage and then upload all.

Stuff instantly, which is pretty cool. I could see where it get outta hand if you didn’t have somebody in control of it. Cuz my guys can upload some wild images. But the, if you’re interested in company [00:06:00] cam, after that hacked up read about exactly what company cam is. It visit company cam.com/sbm and for a 14 day trial and 50% off your first two months that’s S company.

Dot com slash SBM for service business mastery or reach out to us and ask us about it. We are learning more and more each day about it. I’ve asked in the Facebook groups about feedback on that and getting a little bit of feedback. If you’re not part of our Facebook group, join our Facebook group service business mastery on Facebook and.

We love to have everybody in there because that’s where we communicate the most at. And I got this dad blasted fly one, the one fly in this whole entire house. And it’s right here, buzzing around. It helps if you take a shower 

Jeffery Eisenberg: that’s 

Tersh Blissett: that’s it. You nailed it, man. You do.

Jeffery Eisenberg: Are you looking for valuable business advice to reach that seven figure revenue mark, do you want actionable tips to properly navigate through every business challenge you encounter along the way? Let ter BLIS and Josh crouch be your guide in getting you to the top here at service business mastery tune in as they sit down with world renowned 

Josh Crouch: authors in business leadership and personal growth.

Who share valuable insights about management, marketing, pricing, human 

Jeffery Eisenberg: resources, and so much more. Let their nuggets of wisdom, gold guide you in owning a thriving, profitable, and ever growing business. Cure [00:07:30] your hosts and Josh.

Hey, Jeff how are you today? I’m doing well. How about you guys? Great. 

Josh Crouch: Sorry. You had to listen to us. Go through that, but it those couple, the it’s a, it allows us to produce the show. So it’s one of those things that We we appreciate you sitting there cuz you, if anyone’s never, if you’ve never been on the show or seen the back end, like Jeffrey literally sits there and listens to us for seven minutes as we talk about this stuff just sitting there patiently twidling his thumbs.

Appreciate that. 

Tersh Blissett: Honestly, who wouldn’t enjoy sitting there watching and waiting patient especially 

Josh Crouch: watching 

Tersh Blissett: us. I know welcome to the show, Jeff. So tell us a little bit about you, the background and how you even got started with everything. You’re. All right.

Jeffery Eisenberg: I hate the background questions. Let me tell you what my business does. And then I’ll tell you a little bit about us, so that’s perfect. That’s perfect. We do business analysis. That’s about as boring as it gets. My brother and I and a guy named John Cordo VTI. Okay. So my brother’s Brian 

Tersh Blissett: say that last name twice John Cordo 

Jeffery Eisenberg: VDA.

Yeah, no. And he’s our data scientist. He’s a, he’s our, he’s one of my partners and he He actually worked on the Hubble space telescope. And he like saying he likes to brag. So you’re saying he pretty intelligent first jobs that he worked on three components that actually worked not on the thing that didn’t work.

Okay. And he can bake a mean sourdough, [00:09:00] right? So he’s no, but he’s a brilliant guy, but anyway we do business analysis and business. Something that every business needs and they don’t, people don’t do it because one it’s boring. It’s mind numbingly boring. Yeah. Okay.

And secondly, because we don’t necessarily know how to do it. I I never finished college, but I did take the finance courses I was interested. Yeah. And even then this stuff was boring. By the way I dropped out at the statistics class. I’ve had to have remedial statistics afterwards, teach me stuff.

So numbers is not what I’m about. I rarely actually want to talk about numbers, really numbers. Tell the story about what’s going on inside your company and okay. If. You’re thinking about your company. There’s two things that bring value in your company, right? One is the relationships you have with your customers.

And the second one is the systems that take those relationships and transform that into cash flow. That’s, 

Tersh Blissett: that’s basically it, that’s basically what we want. We want to figure out what’s making us money and keep doing more of that. And the things that are costing us money do less of that.

Jeffery Eisenberg: Maybe the costing us money. We talk. Yeah, I could talk about that too. That’s a good point. Good point. Sometimes here’s a difference between an expense and an investment. Yes. Very much, and if if you were installing an air conditioner and it didn’t cost you anything, just right.

That, that be considered theft. So you gotta, yeah, you gotta be kinda precise when we talk about these things. If 

Josh Crouch: it dropped off, if it dropped off a competitor’s truck and [00:10:30] it’s sitting there, is that theft, 

Jeffery Eisenberg: is it there? Just pull it up in the back. OK. Anyway So we started this business like two years ago, not as a business, it was ki a little bit like a hobby.

We had all this initial downtime. It was right. It was like Marchish, right? Yeah. During the part pandemic and I know a lot of people in the industry and I know them because I’m good friends with a guy named Roy Williams, the wizard of ads. Yeah, I know him. I was just reading the book.

I know a lot of the partners. And so I spend a, an inordinate amount of time around these people. And people had asked us a couple of different times because My, my brother and I we’ve written several New York times bestsellers on e-commerce stuff, basically conversion rate optimization. They, they looked at us as you understand these things.

Can you help look at this? So we had been looking at some things for home service companies and we asked some questions and we got weird answers. And we were like, what? We got this thing. It’s called service Titan. And we made a leap. Okay. Stupid leap. Okay. We assumed that the reason that people couldn’t get the results that we were talking about, like the numbers that we needed was because service type was so bad at generating reports.

And they were so difficult to get at. Now that continues to be true. 

Tersh Blissett: Okay. I was gonna say, did you find that to be true 

Jeffery Eisenberg: or not? No. What? That service type is, makes it very hard to get the [00:12:00] reports. Oh yeah. Yeah. That’s true. Okay. It’s really, it’s not easy. They don’t make it easy. It’s 

Tersh Blissett: overwhelming the amount of reports that are available.

Or that you could 

Jeffery Eisenberg: build. Yes, absolutely. So the data’s there. But there’s a, you have to really be deep insight. Like you have to be a numbers geek to want to even get them out. Okay. Yeah. And but we assumed that we knew the solution and the solution was we started out building this thing that would ask one simple question and give one simple.

Okay. And it was cool. We showed it to people. We got like a dozen people right away to say, oh, I want that. Give that to me. And they gave us monies. Okay. They paid us monies and it was cool, except that just a few months later we looked and they were continuing to pay us money, but they were not logging in guilty.

Tersh Blissett: Okay, I’ve done that before you buy, Hey, like I said, in the intro shiny object syndrome. Yeah, 

Jeffery Eisenberg: Yeah. And the thing is that we’ve been speaking to a bunch of them and some of them we didn’t, and the ones that we didn’t, we just called them and said, can we’re gonna return your money cuz.

You can continue to log in and get these reports if you log them for a few months. Yeah. And, but we feel bad. You’re not really doing this. And so what happened is we wound up with a handful of clients. Okay. Who said no. I want to know this stuff. 

Tersh Blissett: [00:13:30] okay. But they weren’t logging in. 

Jeffery Eisenberg: Ah, can’t I keep calling you, the problem was, remember some of these are friends, it didn’t start out as a business relationship.

So they were friends and we were, they would ask us questions and we would tell them things and we were looking and it was like, okay. And then I’m out to to lunch with a friend of mine. Elmers, who’d be out there of Elmer’s on time in San Antonio, Texas. Okay. 

Tersh Blissett: Another name that I would love for you to say three times real fast Elmers 

Jeffery Eisenberg: ZTE Elmers ZTE.

You have to know that Spanish is my first language, my, my charact. So it easy for me. Anyways we were out, we were eating this really good Mexican food for lunch. And we’re out there and Elmer says to me he’s like he’s got his phone in his hand and a taco in a hand.

Okay. He says to me, We want this stuff done. He was speaking for the industry. Yeah. He was like, we want this stuff done for us. I just want it done for me. I don’t wanna spend time doing, like I don’t have time. He says, I want you to send me a text or an email. And when I get to it, I can look at stuff and I’ll see what it is.

Tersh Blissett: He’s very right in the end. Like he, he was right in saying that for the entire industry cuz that’s how we think yeah. Yeah. 

Jeffery Eisenberg: So here’s the thing. So John and I were having lunch we heard that we looked at each other and oh man, this is way harder than what it needed to be. We had remember we’d already had a a, an epiphany where we found out that nobody cared.

Yeah. And now. Not only do we want this, but we don’t. I don’t even [00:15:00] want it to be active. I don’t want to get in there and do anything. Yeah. And so Elmer led the way we went back and we went back to the drawing board and what we came up with was what we were calling. Informally. Okay. But it’s stuck to us is a whisper service.

It’s what we’re still offering. And the whisper service was one where we would do the complete analysis. And we’d only tell you the two or three tops, four things that were important. Okay. If you needed an explanation, we’d come back to you. And at the same time, we’d go along and work with. On stuff, meaning, you decided to take on an initiative, you might do two or three initiatives in a whole year, right?

This is, these are big business wide things. And you would want to track something or track somebody. And we started, we would instrument that and we could track it. And it was really cool because we fit it all into something you could do in texts. Okay. Oh, that’s cool. And while here’s the thing.

Elmer didn’t wanna look at charts. Yeah. None of our guys, I don’t wanna name the names. Elmer doesn’t mind when I talk about it. But nobody wanted to look at charts and people wanted very few numbers. Like you couldn’t give them a string of numbers and have them pay attention. Yeah. So we would say things like we have a training problem okay.

In your call center. And here’s how here’s the deal. If everybody performed as well as your best performing. Okay. You’d be making an additional [00:16:30] 5 million a year now, is that an actual 5 million? No, but it’s the scale of the problem, right? Somebody says, oh, that 

Tersh Blissett: becomes a very big issue. That’s a $5 million issue versus a $400 issue.

Jeffery Eisenberg: Yes. But it doesn’t look that way cuz on a day to day, These are really small differences. Yeah. You gotta figure, tech goes out to four or five calls a day. An agent might answer even a hundred calls a day. But you’re talking about two or three more bookings.

Yeah. not talking about these mind. You’re 

Tersh Blissett: talking about 15, 1500 or $15,000 system sales, like right off the bat. Like they ultimately could lead to that. That’s but that’s not like you’re thinking more granular and I love what you say there, because literally just yesterday I sent, I forwarded an email to Josh about our websites, analytics, and.

Google analytics sent me an email and it was very bite size, like very much easy information to read. Cuz like Josh sends me a graph and shows me all these numbers and things that are analytics and Google analytics and stuff. And I’m like, that looks like it could be important. For it, that could be good or that could be bad.

Yeah, I got, I dunno. But then, and then Google sends me an email and it says you’ve had 1500 more member or visitors to this page on your website. This page is doing the best on the website, tweak a little bit and they get even better. And I’m like, Josh, look at this. And [00:18:00] so it’s that is 

Jeffery Eisenberg: negotiable.

But even that okay. Is a little bit too fussy. Okay. Cause what we’re cause, cause what happens if that page is. 

Tersh Blissett: Oh, we don’t yet. Who knows? Like great question. 

Jeffery Eisenberg: So what we’re doing and. We’re hoping to actually we’ve we reengineered the reporting business. Oh, okay. Cause remember right now we’re doing a service for our clients.

And it’s cool. We love whispering to clients and I’ll take those clients all day long, but there’s not even a way to sign up on the website. You just have to, go to data, tar.ai. You figure out how to contact us. I’m interested in the business, but the real business is the SaaS business.

We wanna roll out. It’s a software business. Where we generate the insight, not the data, right? The idea of knowing what you need to do or knowing the importance of something is why you care about it. What, if that page on that, that Google told you about was the page. Maybe most people came into your site on, what they could say is, Hey, if you increase that more people would come to your site. Okay. And that might be valuable, but how many, where do people leave your site? Yeah. What did they do during? And so we’re trying to cut through several layers of learning here. Look, I have a D I’m. I’m very driven by that.

Okay. Yeah. And I’m [00:19:30] diagnosed. I got the, the Ritalin slows me. Okay. I can’t, I’ve never been easy to do spreadsheets and stuff like that. I learned it, but it’s hard. This is the stuff that just drives me insane. It ex it’ll 

Tersh Blissett: it’ll physically exhaust you.

Jeffery Eisenberg: Yes. To do it. It’s it drives me nuts. Okay. Now, John revels in this stuff my, my brother who actually he wrote the first book on web analytics. Okay. Like a guy named Jim Novo it’s it was like yeah, painful. Okay. I’ve never liked analytics, but I’ve used them. And I said, no we need to make that jump where what we’re doing is not training people on what these things mean.

Okay. Seriously, like. The last thing that any of our clients want right now is more work. 

Tersh Blissett: We know how to work on an air condition unit. We know how to clear a drain line but we 

Josh Crouch: don’t necessarily know what the business needs to. Move forward. Yeah. We’re worried about oh my God, the phone’s blowing up today.

I gotta go. I gotta go. Like church, gotta go hop in a truck and I gotta get out there. 

Jeffery Eisenberg: And. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I get that we listen carefully, right? Like I could have heard what Elmer said and heard something different. Okay. Yeah. But I but I took it to heart. I, we had talks about this, where we were trying to interpret things, what does that really mean?

And the simple. Value in this right. Is to give people [00:21:00] what’s important about their business. What might have changed? When I tell somebody that like club membership is up for the 25th month in a row to highest, it’s been in 30 months, it’s this it’s okay. Yeah. But if I actually told you that your club members are Used to, okay.

This is an interesting one. Cause we had this club members used to spend 35% more than non-club members. Okay. And we actually have a client where that has now dropped precipitously 

Tersh Blissett: and the do, do 

Jeffery Eisenberg: you know why. So here’s the deal. The whys are a little harder to dig for, but what we did is we said, here are the possible reasons why one of them happened to be right.

Okay. Yeah. Cause you know, I’m not sitting in your office, but the club members, they were being so aggressive about calling the call members and not in a bad way. They have these. Yeah. Just 

Tersh Blissett: to follow up and interact with them. Then 

they 

Jeffery Eisenberg: had exhausted. The whatever services these people needed, they’d had, they got done.

And so this very successful initiative that they had taken on to do club membership and they basically sell everybody club membership. Yeah. Was working out, but they were squeezing too. Gotcha. Okay. That was important, right? That is that 

Tersh Blissett: oftentimes that exact one thing is something that I worry about is every time we visit someone, we are [00:22:30] hitting ’em up for something, is that good or bad?

But you’re able to say, okay, look, based on this data it’s not working or it has worked in the past or 

Jeffery Eisenberg: right. And the thing is we. It’d be great if I could give you like, magic wand to fix that, you still have to go fix it. That’s still the work. But we were able to find these things because that’s stuck out.

Okay. Another thing is, we’ve had clients, where they’re up 30% that month okay. And anything that’s up 30% month over. Doesn’t feel like it needs attention. Typically, yeah. Except that what we found was that that we could see that there are turnovers were decreasing, so 

Tersh Blissett: oh, like a leaflets.

Yeah. Yeah. 

Josh Crouch: So that’s an interesting point, cuz you think about the time of year we’re in right now, why we’re recording this? This is the first week of June. Outside of Wisconsin where I can’t wait to get out of. It’s hot, almost everywhere else. This happens a lot where people say, oh, it’s money making season.

But the problem is they start rushing through calls, money. They don’t follow their process, their actual turnovers their lead flips their system replacement as a percentage of calls go down. Yeah. Because they’re not taking their time. They’re not. They’re I just saw someone yesterday, like, how do we hand handle this?

Our guys are running seven to nine calls a day. I’m like you’re losing a lot of opportunity. Learn to say no, if you guys would just slow down and just learn to say no when it’s slow you take all day at that house. If they’ll let [00:24:00] you, because you can find, yeah, you gotta find every single thing you can that’s wrong because otherwise you’re not gonna, you’re not gonna eat.

 that it’s a understanding that is key, 

Jeffery Eisenberg: right? It’s a lagging indicator. What is when you start to see this behavior, right? You won’t pay for it now you’ll pay for it in a few weeks. Yeah. You will see that your revenue goes down. Yeah. Okay. And so we were able to see that and warm them of it.

And here’s the thing, when you say that, and this is one of the hard parts in such a seasonal business is, ideally you always want to have one. That’s sitting Ile, 

Tersh Blissett: right? Like a a technician in a truck. 

Jeffery Eisenberg: Yeah. You always wanna have a little bit more capacity.

Than what you need. If you’re a growing company 

Tersh Blissett: that’s in a perfect world though cause yeah, for us finding a, another technician to, to sit there this time of year, sometimes is that’s a full-time job in itself is locating that individual. Okay. 

Jeffery Eisenberg: But so I said that equally ridiculous thing let’s look at the other side of that, is if you have people running Seven to nine. Did you, did I hear that correctly? Seven to nine calls. Okay. It was just a post I saw last night. But you’re running at Inus of capacity, right? Oh, absolutely. So we’re looking at systems, right? What would you say if you were running an air conditioner?

Okay. At 95% of capacity nonstop, where’s air condition are gonna 

Tersh Blissett: wind up. Oh yeah. [00:25:30] In the garbage, in a couple. 

Jeffery Eisenberg: Okay. What happens is that any system that’s working at over 80% of capacity, right? We could argue, I’m giving you a rough way of thinking about it. But any system that’s running it over 80% of capacity is running too hot.

So you’re gonna lose people. You’re going to damage clients. You’re gonna be doing allows each other. There’s all these things that will happen. Say no I, listen I can tell you what the problem is. I can’t necessarily help you hire more people. Yeah. Available. I can introduce you to people who might but you have to know that these are issues, you you can’t keep running a system that’s as hot as it is. Yeah. So this is the stuff we help people understand what the under aligned data is telling them. And we’ve been doing this with service Titan and, service Titan is a remarkable tool.

It collects all this data, but it’s also, it also has a lot of holes in what it does. Yeah. Like I, I’m gonna give you a weird example. They’ve introduced this concept of a project. Okay. Are you familiar with the project? Yes. Project. And it sounds so great, right? Okay, we can do this. We can do this as a project, except that your database doesn’t actually know that each job is part of a project it’s, 

Tersh Blissett: it’s so confusing and you can’t job cost an individual invoice, but you can job cost a full [00:27:00] project, but you don’t always have a project for every invoice.

So you can’t technically job cost every single job. Correct. 

Jeffery Eisenberg: Yeah. So we’re we have a bunch of workarounds that we do to understand stuff. Okay. And, like making those at scale. So we’re hoping by the end of this year to have at least a thousand clients, there’s a lot of computing power that goes into kind of rejiggering the way that they show information.

So that we can present it and the technical aspect of that. Okay. It actually makes me want to like crawl under my desk. Seriously. Like John would get ball geeky on you and explain to you and yeah. What they’re doing and how, how it’s not event based. And it’s a state change.

Really. Yeah. Okay. But. Even, they added projects because somebody demanded it. Okay. And then they don’t give you the right way of copy it. And so we wind up doing all this remedial stuff originally. We weren’t going to get involved with financial statements. Okay. But we started getting involved in the price book and looking at margins and stuff like 

Tersh Blissett: that.

So often that’s, that is the big, one of the biggest questions that we get. We are not financial people, we’re not financial experts, but people are always saying. Talk about finances 

Jeffery Eisenberg: oh yeah, that’s a tough thing, but I don’t wanna talk about finances because it makes people flip out. However, if it, when we get your financial statements and we put [00:28:30] them into our database and we’re comparing it together with the service Titan data we’re seeing some really interesting stuff and, it’s we told somebody in December.

Okay. That they were taking too big of a salary. Oh, yeah. 

Josh Crouch: talk about a PA. Talk about a whisper message. 

Jeffery Eisenberg: well, listen, you what’s 

Josh Crouch: good insights to know and to have, right. If somebody doesn’t tell you, you may not know any better. You’re like there’s money there, so I’ll take it right.

Yeah. Distribution or something as an 

Jeffery Eisenberg: owner. Yeah. Except that, that he was chronically paying late fees on other stuff. And it was, oh yeah, it was. A cash flow issue. The money was there, but wasn’t there at the time he needed it. He interpreted, we made a profit as I could take profit. Okay. And no there’s all sorts of other things that were eating up the cash that were profit.

But you still need to replace things. The cash is necessary for all sorts of stuff. And so they were paying more for some materials because they were buying them yep. At retail, right? Yep. , and he was just chronically short of cash. And what we said was, Hey man, it’s like, You could swing this and in a year, this is what the numbers would look like.

Now I hated saying that, but it’s a really simple thing. Not from like an accountant might look at it and say, this is how it [00:30:00] is, but because we had the rest of the view of the business, we could actually say, oh, and yeah, that’s raised 

Tersh Blissett: some. It’s not just having your accountant, like you got your CPA that comes in and says, you’re doing great, or you’re not doing good.

You lost money, you made money. And it’s okay, cool. But 

Jeffery Eisenberg: they’re not looking at the particulars of the business. And here’s the thing. We are not experts in service businesses. I’m the first person to say this. I think at this point, some people might say you’re starting to turn into an expert.

Yeah. Like to me, you’re not an expert until you do something for 20 years. Yeah. You 

Tersh Blissett: do that 10,000, 

Jeffery Eisenberg: 10,000 times. Yeah. Everybody wants to pretend to be an expert. We understand business, there are certain things at work all the time and we’re learning stuff. All the time.

Okay. But because we do understand business, it was really easy to say, you’re not costing correctly. He just misunderstood the numbers. It was a fundamental misunderstanding. . Of how profits worked. And we literally, it’s interesting. Somebody once asked me to do this as a class.

But I took him through and in a couple of hours, I explained how financial statements work and see here’s the thing. I’m not saying he, he knows how to analyze them, but he knows now, after talking to me where the answer to the question. Yeah. Why you need to do this? So he went ahead and his bookkeeping is up to date.[00:31:30] 

There’s a whole bunch of things that they’ve done in terms of their systems. It’s a lot 

Tersh Blissett: of small things that can add up together, especially like you said, bookkeeping being up to date, not having your month closed out by the 15th of the next month or the 10th of the next month. Like what kind of impact can that do to your business?

The following month? Little things like that. And yeah, 

Jeffery Eisenberg: knowing that, cause here’s the thing is your bookkeeping should be even closer to that. Okay. Yeah. I would say, no, I agree. You should be closed out by 10 and I’m not an accounting guy. And the interesting thing is there are lots of clients where I’m not looking at their financial statements because they’ve got that in line, right?

Yeah. So this is it. It’s a next stage of what we’re gonna be doing, but yeah, if, 

Tersh Blissett: if let me get this correct, Jeffrey. Yeah. The 30th of the following month is bad. 

Jeffery Eisenberg: Yeah that it, you should, or 

Tersh Blissett: once a year closing it out once a year is not good either. It’s you should 

Jeffery Eisenberg: be doing, yeah. You let me know how that turns out.

But 

Tersh Blissett: you become a statistic at that point. You become one of the ones that don’t last past five years. 

Jeffery Eisenberg: Yeah. The thing is this industry is professional. Okay. It is very much so it’s interesting. I’ve been saying this I think that I’m gonna get push back on it, I heard that there’s a hundred thousand HVAC contractors.

I don’t know if I believe that number. Okay. I 

Tersh Blissett: could see that because there’s 700 every little town’s. 

Josh Crouch: Great. 

Jeffery Eisenberg: Yeah, it’s got 10, 15, 20, but here’s the deal? The information [00:33:00] systems, the way the businesses are run are still pretty primitive. Okay. Agreed. 

Tersh Blissett: Oh yeah. We’re 

Jeffery Eisenberg: way behind the world.

When I say that, it’ll, it’s not the people who I think are gonna disappear are not the person with one or two trucks. They’ll be fine, cuz they’re running a fairly simple business. Yeah. But what’s gonna happen is there’s a lot of businesses today doing 2 million, 3 million, 5 million Okay. And that’s a relatively sophisticated business, right? That’s not a, when you think about it it’s not a, it’s not exactly a small business in the way that most people would think about it and they’re doing it. With not as much sophistication as an average bodega guy, right? Like how much money is in the cash register.

Yeah. Let’s pay cash for this. Let’s do, let’s make this decision. 

Tersh Blissett: It’s just the way that always been done 

Jeffery Eisenberg: well, but over time, and this is part of the attention that’s come to the industry, right? The The private equity people that are coming to it, the people who are attracted to it, the people like me who are like surprised.

Wow, there’s a lot of money here. And there’s a lot of opportunity, are basically gonna drive out that middle. So the big guys are gonna get way bigger. Okay. The middle guys are gonna have a choice. They’re either gonna get way bigger and become bigger guys. Okay. The ones who don’t, they’re gonna go out of business.

You can’t support these things. You can’t have a a competitive disadvantage of not actually understanding how your business works. And yeah, this is the kind of [00:34:30] thing that Michael Gerber and emo talked about, right? Yep. Why we’re so insistent on working on the systems, if you’ve heard before you should work on your business, not in your business in business, that’s a little hard to define, but I have a really easy way of thinking about this, right? When you’re working in your business, you’re working on the stuff that’s important. Okay. That’s where you’re spend. That’s where a lot of people spend most of their time. 

Tersh Blissett: Yep. Putting out the fires. And 

Jeffery Eisenberg: even if they’re not just putting out fires, even if they that, but they’re, it’s the stuff that’s immediately important.

Yep. Okay. 

Tersh Blissett: Responding to emails and answering questions that people have about the business or. Within the business, answering technicians questions, answering dispatchers what do I do with this person? What do I, how do I solve this problem? 

Jeffery Eisenberg: But if you’re working on your business, you’re working on those things that are going to be tomorrow’s problems, tomorrow’s issues and tomorrow’s advantages. And so listen, I’ve had, I’ve been. A business owner since I’m 28 years old. So half my life, man, I’m 56, so that’s half my life. But most of my adult life, I have not been able to work for other people. I’m I, 

Tersh Blissett: I, I am a terrible employee.

Yes. I’m a 

Jeffery Eisenberg: great, I don’t wish myself as an employee on anybody same here. Same however I can tell. [00:36:00] That I’m not some really special guy. It’s really hard to do this on, not in your business. Okay. It’s, this thing looks like it’s gonna collapse if you don’t do it. And you’re telling me that I need to worry about something that, that doesn’t even matter if a year or two and the answer is.

Yeah. Yeah. And it’s really. It’s horrible to do, but the numbers guide you, right? We step back at data Turk from the business that’s scalable. Is when we finally release this as software will be probably around 300 rows a month and you’ll be able to get all these insights and whatnot.

And then if you’ll want to talk to us or something, We’re actually figuring out what the services might be around that, but they’ll be small and we wanna make that readily accessible. That can scale. Yeah. So the whisper service, can I ask you a 

Josh Crouch: question? That’s not scalable. Jeff. Can I ask you a question about data?

Yeah. Cause you guys look at now, you essentially have data all day long. That’s what you guys do. So this is something that I have realized more and more as I’ve looked in client service science accounts. I remember the service Titan accounts that we’ve had when I was in the H V a C industry house called pro all these different softwares.

I’ve seen the backends and the data. Do, are you guys finding that the data is not very accurate? That’s being imported 

Tersh Blissett: to the system? 

Jeffery Eisenberg: Yes. We’re finding that there are clients who sign up with us and we tell them that they need to clean up their data before we can do something valuable with them. 

Josh Crouch: Is that pretty a pretty common occurrence?

Jeffery Eisenberg: No, but [00:37:30] it’s not uncommon. Okay. , and there are different things that can be done different ways. Some of the things that are done in the field, especially those are training issues. And so sometimes there’s really no way to go back and clean up the data. You can only make the data work going forward. Yeah. And that’s okay. That’s hard to hear 

Tersh Blissett: though. It’s yeah, we can’t take your past five years worth of data cuz it’s all garbage.

Yeah. We can try and interpolate it, but we really need to fix it and then get the data. 

Jeffery Eisenberg: Yeah. Church. I’ll tell you something. I and I’ve heard that and I’ve answered you, I, to. I had a guy who’s an older guy. Who’s very forward thinking. He’s been, he’s been trying to get his whole company digitized and all this kind of stuff.

 And they’re doing just shy of 20 million. Okay. And there was a lot of garbage in his data and he was really he was so bitter about it. He was like, it’s your baby too. As business owner, I just said to him, I was. You gotta be a little less harsh on yourself. I said, because you’re in a position where you can figure this out and you can’t, you can beat yourself up about what happened last year or what happened last month.

 Or you can fix it. And I’m finding a lot of people, right? I’ve spoken to more than one who are resistant to knowing things. It’s yeah. It’s 

Tersh Blissett: let’s just put your head in the sand 

and 

Jeffery Eisenberg: I don’t want to know if I have cancer, by the way I had cancer a year ago, I had that surgery.

It was stage one. They got rid of it, that’s good. And by the way if you’re over [00:39:00] 45 and you haven’t had a colonoscopy I beg you to go do it. Yeah. Okay. It’s really important. But I’m saying that because I know a lot of people. Who don’t they’re scared.

They’re worried. 

Tersh Blissett: They can’t better to not know than to find out so 

Jeffery Eisenberg: bad. You need to know, yeah. And then you can do something about it. So yeah. That it’s an issue, there’s a lot of GE go issues. But but it’s okay. And one of the biggest things is data hygiene.

So you, this idea, like you, you said, a booking rate of 75%. Okay. So you know, that’s based on self-reported data, right? Exactly. Works in, in service Titan. Yep. There’s a large discrepancies there. We prefer our own number, which is the raw booking. Which funny enough, it’s not that what we’re finding is that excused or not a lead yeah.

Are over reported. Although they are in some cases, but minorly that’s, it’s not because people are cheating necessarily But there is no real discipline to that. And that comes from. Having not cleaned out your phone numbers correctly and not using separate lines for inbound calls, like for technicians, that you could do. But it’s just a better number to use all the calls. So if you’re doing about 75%, you’re doing. A 20% raw booking. That’s the number we use Uhhuh and it’s a much better number to use. And [00:40:30] what’s interesting is we thought not that we had invented it. But that we were using it.

Nobody else was. And then I met Chris Yana. Yep. We were talking about this and they’re they used the same number. Like they’re they. Use another number. Yeah. Yeah. And I was pleased because somebody who had a lot of experience with calls and stuff like that was using that type of number.

Yeah. And, we’re doing a lot of correlations industry correlations. Cause at this point we still have a small sample set, but it’s interesting cuz I get to see what people’s data looks like. And There’s a real issues around how people pick up the phone, the people who think they’re doing a pretty good job.

 Okay. The difference between a pretty good job and an, and a good job is large. Yeah. Okay. The difference between a good job and an excellent job is even bigger. We’re seeing this right. That it’s a power curve. And so there are people who are doing, 77, 78. That’s what that, that’s the number they look at in their service type and dashboard.

And they’re proud of themselves. 

Tersh Blissett: I see those numbers and I’m, I think to myself, the exact same thing I, I still want to know if you are getting a, what you would consider. Not bookable call. Like why is it not bookable? But I still wanna know, because I want to figure out a way to get rid of those phone calls, if anything else, if nothing 

Jeffery Eisenberg: else so part of those phone calls are because people are calling back into. Reschedules, 

Tersh Blissett: right. 

Josh Crouch: Mrs. Smith calls in three times asking que [00:42:00] Sherry book. But then she’s got another question that she’s got another question that she forgot on the first 

Jeffery Eisenberg: call. Yeah. So the, you can’t get rid of those.

Yeah. Yeah. Some of them are phone numbers that are no longer used. What’s funny is, they were assigned and they’re really this trash coming in. Yeah. And. Some of it is technicians calling in on these numbers and which you gotta get rid of that interview. You gotta, but that stuff should stop.

Yeah. So it’s, the problem isn’t so much the data hygiene as the idea that how long people should spend on a call. So when I look at this and we look at, it’s funny, the things we look at, we found that it takes between. Four and a half to seven minutes to actually book a call.

Okay. That’s yeah, that’s across. I can believe that. That sounds as of clients Great. So how long does it take to not book a call? 

Tersh Blissett: Yeah. Good point. Okay. I’ve seen 15 minutes and then not 

Jeffery Eisenberg: book a call and well, but if I saw 15 minutes from a single person, I might just go over and smack, right?

Yeah. 

Tersh Blissett: I value, yeah. I get getting value, but at the same time 

Jeffery Eisenberg: but here’s, what’s interesting. The best performing call centers are able to deal with them between one and a half and two minutes. Okay. They’re able 

Josh Crouch: to decipher and get ’em off the phone that 

Jeffery Eisenberg: quickly. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And so they’re not being rude.

They’re going through. Yeah, they’re just saying, okay. I have this answer. We know what it is. Yeah. We’ve been looking at stuff like this. Another one is with what’s it [00:43:30] called? Schedule engine. Yeah. Okay. If I’m on schedule engine, why don’t a hundred percent of the people. Book an appointment. That’s what they went there for.

Yeah. 

Josh Crouch: They’re getting lost somewhere in that five to seven 

Tersh Blissett: step. Yeah. Yeah. You got too many steps and they’re bouncing off the page. 

Jeffery Eisenberg: You gotta remember, this is one of our things is, back well, we wrote this thing in 2006. Okay. We were the world’s leading experts in conversion rate optimization online.

This is. We were those guys, right? So we looked at what was the name of that book? Again? This is waiting for your cat to bark there was another one called call to action before this, and those were two New York times best sellers that we had backed. Wow. And we were writing about conversion rate optimization.

If anybody’s interested in our latest books, they’re smaller and easier to read. This is a book I actually would recommend. We wrote this in 2017. Can you write a book? Amazon is not the important part. It’s even lemonade stand can do it. Yeah. And we send these to our clients because we want them to read it because it’s about these very simple.

Principles, but what I was saying about schedule engine, it’s not a hard thing to fix. Yeah. Okay. 

Tersh Blissett: Yeah. You just gotta, you just gotta know the data. So Jeff, I don’t wanna cut you off, but I know that your time you’re crunch for time. It’s getting it’s our time slot. And if people want to learn more about you, like connect with you where’s where is that best?

I’m easy to 

Jeffery Eisenberg: find. You can find us [00:45:00] at data turt, AI, Uhhuh. You can find me on Facebook. You can find me on LinkedIn. You can find me on Twitter. Okay, cool. And reach out and I’m fairly easy to talk to. Okay. 

Tersh Blissett: Jeff we really appreciate this and we could obviously talk for hours. There’s so much good information that you’re pulling out there.

One of the things I wrote down here I’d like for you to correct me if I’m wrong here. It sounds to me like you’re taking ego numbers and turning them into action items. 

Jeffery Eisenberg: Yes. If you don’t know what you’re gonna do with the patient, cause I could, I collect it. 

Tersh Blissett: I throw percentages at you. This is an amazing, call conversion percentage or this conversion percentage or whatever.

But you’re actually taking that, those Infor that information and turn it into an action item versus just having a EU number out that the throw out there. Yes. That’s, 

Jeffery Eisenberg: that’s how it should be. 

Tersh Blissett: cool, Jeff, we really appreciate you coming on the show and sharing everything with us. And if anybody has any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out to Jeff.

You can reach out to me or Josh, but we’re just gonna send you to Jeff anyways. I hope you have a wonderful and safe day and thank you, Jeff, for coming on the show again. All right. Thank you for having. 

Jeffery Eisenberg: Be see it.

Thank you for listening to this episode of service 

Josh Crouch: business mastery. Now that you are equipped with 

Jeffery Eisenberg: essential business advice from this impactful conversation, 

Josh Crouch: you are [00:46:30] one step closer to becoming 

Jeffery Eisenberg: the successful owner of your. If this episode has been helpful to your business journey, don’t forget to subscribe to the show, leave a rating and share it with other owners 

Tersh Blissett: as well.

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Jeffery Eisenberg: mastery.com to learn more.