Today, we are going to talk about virtually estimating some of our jobs with video and AI. And I’m going to be your host, Corey Byron. I own a little company in Vancouver, Canada called Vancity Electric. Vancity is sort of my boring nine to five job, then my my little side quest I’m on right now is, you know, helping you guys systemize your businesses to reduce chaos and enjoy your your business more and get through the day to day without less chaos. Okay. The old school method. So these are my numbers. So I always float around forty eight percent win rate on all the quotes that I do. And so if you think about that, you know, I cringe when I think about this, half of my time spent quoting is wasted time really. And I’ve seen a lot of people that are down in the 20s or 30s for their approval rate. That means seventy five percent of your time is wasted driving around to quotes. This is a bit of a side point, but this is also why you really want to qualify your clients. This is something I’m working really hard this year, because I think we got caught up in this, Yeah, we’re so excited to quote. We’ll quote everything. But we’ve started to just ask a few qualifying questions. Sometimes they’ll say, when do you want to get this job done? And they’ll say, well, we haven’t bought the house yet. We’re just getting some numbers. Oh, okay. So just by qualifying them a little bit, maybe I can give them some quick budget numbers, but we don’t have to bog down the whole sales and estimating team. We have the four killers, so if you are driving around every quote, obviously a lot of fuel right now. I used to spend a ton in fuel, and it’s even worse now. I started doing virtual estimates during COVID. So gas is way more expensive now. And then the maintenance on your vehicle, obviously, every time you’re taking it to the shop, it’s one thousand dollars one thousand dollars The stress. I used to drive around. What I would do is I would jam pack four or five in person quotes in one day. I would drive around to all those quotes. And I just remember getting home one day, sitting in the driveway. And I hadn’t even done the quotes yet. I just actually drove around and looked at the jobs and took notes and videos. And I was just sitting in my car like, oh, man, it was a brutal day. And everyone’s gonna have a different commute. We all live in different parts of the world. If you live in a little small town, maybe driving around isn’t so bad. If you live in some of these bigger cities with suburbs outside of them, it can be absolutely brutal. Time driving plus family time. So What I really hate to hear is when someone drives around all day looking at jobs, and then they quote them at night. Anytime someone tells me they’re doing something at night, I just cringe a little bit because we all know that’s your downtime, that’s family time. All of those are bad fixed expenses. They’re not creating money. They’re literally just taking away from the profit that you’ve made doing other jobs. The last one here is slow quoting process. How fast is your race to the face? How fast can you get in front of the client? These are my numbers from last year going into this fiscal year. We’ll just break this down a little bit. Some of these are just some quotes I found online. Ninety percent of construction leaders agreed that digital solutions were necessary to boost productivity and keep up with demand. How can we do more with some digital solutions and keep up with the demand? I’m going to show you the demand here. This was my leads from last year. I had nineteen twenty four requests in Jobber last year. I sent eight twenty eight estimates, and as I told you guys, I got fifty percent of those estimates roughly. We also have other jobs that just skipped the estimating process, like, you know, a lot of service calls or a job someone just gave you. This year, I gave myself a goal. I to make it a hard goal for myself. Sales were down last year. I was annoyed by that. I said this year, I want to do one point five million dollars in sales. I know my leads, I know my estimates from last year. If I want to hit one point five million dollars in revenue this year, it’s just a math problem. So, doing the math, breaking it down, I know I need two thousand six hundred and forty eight leads this year. And so that’s something, know, I’m joining different networking groups, maybe rolling out some meta ads, like I’m gonna figure out how to hack and get those leads. And then, but we know the math. If I did eight twenty eight estimates last year to get that revenue, this year, I’m gonna have to do three hundred more estimates. Let’s think about this. Am I going to get another van, hire another estimator to drive around? Or, like, I was pretty busy last year. Was I am I gonna be able to do three hundred more estimates this year on my own? The answer is, we gotta use technology. We gotta start virtual estimating some of these jobs, and that’s at the bottom there. How can we get more done without raising our overhead? So, we can do the math on this, too. I was working this out. So three hundred more estimates, and I’m gonna get half of those jobs, essentially, right? So that’s one hundred and fifty jobs. Our average job size is two thousand dollars so that’s three hundred thousand dollars of revenue. Now, if I have to buy another vehicle and hire another person to go estimate those jobs, now, all of a sudden, I didn’t make three hundred grand, I made maybe two hundred or one hundred fifty. So we want to do more without spending more overhead. Let’s look at it by the hour. So eight twenty eight hours, if I quoted them all from video, I didn’t. I definitely drive out to the odd estimate or if it’s a contractor or something like that, I will definitely come out for the site visit, that kind of thing. But eight twenty hours, if I did them all by video, if I had done them in person, roughly three hours per quote, I got to drive there. I talk for definitely an hour, and I drive somewhere else. So two thousand four hundred minuteus eight hundred is sixteen hundred hours that potentially I could have saved, and divided by eight hours is two zero seven working days. Even if you don’t like my math, you want to cut it in half, it’s still one hundred days of driving around that you could potentially save. We want to give ourselves without creating more overhead, more capacity, able to do more quotes, and we’re going get more revenue without the overhead. Okay, from the client’s point of view, obviously, when we are fast, they perceive it as we are professional, and we are a modern company. And they want to hire a professional in a modern company. You could think of the opposite of this when, if they’re saying, How much is an EV charger? I’m curious, we’re thinking about buying When you say, An EV charger installs around one thousand dollars If you need load management, it’s three thousand five hundred. If you need a service upgrade, it’s around eight thousand dollars When I roll out prices quick like that, they think, Okay, wow, this guy has done this before. They know their numbers. They must be really professional and modern company. Same as when you see these clients at a home show or anywhere, the main question in their mind a lot of times is price. You know, they might have a problem going on in their home. And, you know, they might really like your Google reviews and everything about you. But they are just curious, like, how much is this new furnace? Is this in the ballpark? Like, is it seven grand? Or is it twenty? If it’s twenty, I probably need to look into this more and get more prices. If it’s seven, okay, that sounds like it’s in the ballpark. Yeah. Yeah. Corey, please go ahead. So less disruption to their day. So a lot of people, if they’re getting three quotes, you know, imagine them trying to line up three different contractors to come. They’re not gonna come back to back to back. So when you can just log in by video and and see their job right away, that’s the best. Clear communication. So my guys love it. Context is everything. Right? So I actually share the video calls with the client. I actually put the link to the call right on the quote. I put it in the notes from my crew as well. And so they will all watch the video before they go do the job. So they can see, you know, the tone of the client, the vibe. They can see where they’re working. They can see exactly where the client pointed. I want my EV charger right here. I want this light changed. And they can see the height of the ceiling. So you can’t get more clear than a recorded video. They’re already using Uber, DoorDash, and Amazon. And these companies, think about when you use these companies, they over communicate like crazy. Don’t let yourself tell yourself a story that old people can’t use technology. I know plenty of seven year olds. They all got iPads. They’re all using Amazon. Once in a while, you’re going to have a gruff old guy that’ll say, look, I’m giving you this job, just come look at it with me. And that’s fine, you can go and do that walk around in person. Let’s talk about LiveSwitch. So this is the platform I use to do these virtual walkthroughs. So a couple of features here I want to go through with you guys. Big one, fully integrated with Jobber. So you don’t have to go to LiveSwitch and start a video call. I typically will have LiveSwitch open on one screen, and I have Jobber open on the other screen because I want to estimate the job while the client is showing me the project. So these pictures are a little bit small, but you can start the call straight from straight from Jobber, either the job or the client profile right now. So you don’t have to punch in anything, you just click this button. It sends a text to the client, and this is all they get here. You’re invited to a video call. You can change this text if you want. And all your client does is click on this link. The reason you wanna do text is because it goes to their mobile phone. You don’t wanna email it because it’ll go to their email, their computer, whatever. So text is great. And they don’t need any software. So no app on their phone, nothing for them to download. And once you do the videos, everything is gonna be stored in the LiveSwitch Hub. So all your pictures, any AI reports, we’ll get into that. I’ll show you those. The videos, the links, everything is going to live in there. Nothing’s going to live on your devices taking up storage. During the call, there’s some really cool tools. As the client is showing you around, you can take pictures. A lot of times, if it’s like a serial number or maybe a panel directory or whatever, something specific I really want a picture of, you can just take a picture of it. It’ll be in the hub. It’s got a little laser pointer. So if you really are sort of directing them sometimes, hey, can you show me this panel directory? Can you show me this exact thing here? You can do that. A little laser pointer will show up on their phone. And I don’t typically take notes because it has AI that’s taking notes for you. But if you want to pull up on your screen, on your side, a little box and take some notes, those will be in there as well. A really cool thing about LiveSwitch is that if you don’t have time to be on video, or if it’s a client that you’ve worked with before, or a contractor maybe you feel comfortable with, you can just send them the link and they can record their own video. You don’t actually have to be on the video. And that video will just come back. So sometimes, if I feel comfortable with the client, I’ll say, hey, I’m going to send you a link, record a quick video, and I’ll send you back a quote. Another couple neat things, they have a custom form. So if you want to do sort of a request form on your website, just like Jobber’s request form, you can do that. And at the bottom, the link is there. So they could fill in their info and then record the video. You can have a QR code. I use the QR code actually for hiring. So I have the QR code on my website, on a careers page, and essentially, the the applicant will take a video or take a picture of the QR code. It opens up a recorded video. They answer a few questions for me. And then for everyone that’s applying to Vancity Electric now, instead of just a resume, I have a video of them answering some very specific questions for me. And I can really get a vibe check on the applicant instead. Sometimes you look at a resume, and you just fall in love with the resume, but I feel like you really need to see the person. That’s just another little side thing I do with LiveSwitch. Then the real magic, the AI prompts. Once you have your videos, you can run fully promptable AI on the video. So whatever you want to do, the AI to do with those videos, you can just make a prompt for it and run a report. I’m gonna show you some of these. Okay? So the obvious one is an AI prompt to quote the job. So I have a super detailed electrical prompt where it goes out, it finds price, it fully quotes my job. I’m gonna show you that prompt. Actually, I’m gonna show you the quote it produces. I really like in Jobber on the new the new estimates feature where you can have the main picture at the top and then a job description. So I actually have it write the job description for that box in Jobber for me. So essentially, it watches the video, it writes the job description. It writes it better than I ever would have. Something I’ve been playing around with, if you want a what about a pre site checklist? I made one that will make me a rough wire and a finishing checklist, so things that my crew needs to think about before we get to site. New applicant evaluator. So this one’s amazing. It will watch the hiring video that the person has submitted and gives you such amazing intel. I actually look at this report before I even watch the videos now. Job site measurements. So I made up a painting estimator on there, guys. It can estimate from or it can get the square footage from the video. I measured some stuff in my house. It was within one square foot. So I thought that was pretty good, or within one foot. So it’s not going to change your estimate one way or the other. So I made a full painting estimator. And of course, when you’re I’m not a painter, but I’m sure when you’re quoting painting jobs, you’re trying to get the square footage of walls you’re going to paint for your material and stuff like that. For electrical, I actually use it for cable measurements. If you go on my YouTube channel, you’ll see videos where I’m using it to estimate wire length. Salesperson, so if you guys want to evaluate yourself on the video call, you could definitely do this And it will judge you. It will fully judge you. And that’s just a prompt I made. That’s a fun one. An inventory report. I’ve seen people do this. A lot of people in the moving industry use this. So they will have the client film a video of all the stuff that they would like moved when they’re going to move, and it will do a full inventory report for the moving company so they can quote. Your Imagine is the only thing holding you back here on these. So, okay, here is my electrical estimator quote. So my back end prompt for this is very detailed. This prompt is available on their website. So they are they are essentially taking other people’s prompts now and then just giving them to new clients. So you don’t have to make up your own prompt. If you’re worried about that, you can use pre made ones on their website. And if anyone’s interested about my prompts, I’m happy to send them your way. Just reach out to me. But you can see here, this is straight from a video. It’s come up with a job description by line items. It’s got some code compliance jargon there. It’s gone out to Home Depot, Rona, my wholesaler. It’s it’s come up with quantities for electrical. So in this case, I talked about four light fixtures, like four or six LED light fixtures. So it’s gone and got pricing on these. I can look at a glance. Yep. That’s a great price. I see it. And this is part of my prompt, but I’ve asked it to give me the link to where it found the price. If I want to go buy it from there, I have the link handy. Here’s the here’s it calculating labor margin and fees. So one thing I’ve noticed about AI quoting jobs, it’s going to quote on the higher end, especially for time, you know, material, it’s going to get fairly bang on. But, here, it says ceiling fans, two hours each. Are they really going to take two hours? No. Is this a good ballpark time? Yes, it’s fine for the price. What I usually do is scan these. If I go back a slide, I noticed right here, it provided just a light fixture that was slightly more expensive than I really need. I just had that in the back of my mind. That was sixty dollars that I don’t need to quote. Here, you can see it came up with all the hours, it did all of this on its own. I’ve pre prompted it, it knows our base labor cost is fifty five, It knows the material costs. I’ve asked it to do a forty percent gross margin. You can do whatever you like. I wanted it to add ten percent for taxes and visa payment. And there it is. And so, this one, I took a glance at. I thought it was pretty bang on. I copied this straight into Jobber, and I sent the quote off. And This woman, this was actually this Georgina woman’s job that I was talking about. On the video call, I didn’t get this done on the video call, but me and her, could tell she was fairly serious, so I just said, Hey Georgina, do you want to pick some dates in the calendar? So I got something from her. I think if you can do the quote on the call and ask for the job, that’s great. If you can pick some dates on the call for the install, I think that’s also a good tip. The other one would be, if they don’t want to do dates, could you pick a time on the call to chat about the quote, answer any questions on the quote? So try to get something from those video calls. And you’ll see if you run the salesman evaluator, it will tell you this kind of stuff. It’ll say, Corey, you did a great job. You’re very friendly, but you didn’t really discuss follow-up steps with the client. So it’ll help you out. Okay. We’re getting to the end here. I just wanna include my quoting process because I think there’s probably some nuggets in here, and you guys can steal stuff. Or maybe you’ve thought of this, you just haven’t implemented it yet. So I think something really important with Jobber is we want to try to automate our leads into Jobber, into the request as much as we can. I use CallRail for all our tracked numbers. And if you use the CallRail integration, anytime someone calls one of those numbers, like a yard sign number, a home, you know, website number, Google My Business profile number, all of those calls will end up in Jobber as a request automatically with the lead source. I use Quo. I know a lot of people do, and it also does the same thing. I checked that out yesterday. I was running some meta ads for a while. And so you can use Zapier, and you can automate those leads straight into requests. So you can have someone follow-up. Sometimes your admin or yourself just has to put them in manually, and that’s okay. We do a lot of local service ads, Google local service ads, and there’s a great integration in integrations page for Jobber. It’s called LSA respond. They will automatically add those local service ads straight into Jobber as well. There’s just a few ways. I know it’s not possible to get them all always automated into Jobber, but the more automation, the better your data is going to be. And I’m a big believer of that request feature. I know when people start off with Jobber, they don’t typically use the request feature to its maximum capabilities, but I really like it. It gives you good data when you start putting everything in there. Auto response client guide. When you add a new client in Jobber, I just have a zap right now that sends a welcome email like, Hey, thanks for giving us a shot. We’re super excited about your job. If you want to know a little bit more about us, here’s a client guide. And I have a beautiful, really eye popping client guide that shows this is our flow, this is how things are going to go, here, meet the team, see some of our awards, see some of our prior work. So it’s just another touch point, another way you can sort of wow these people. Like I was saying about the request feature, I really think it’s important that we schedule our quotes with requests. So we are not ghosting clients till Thursday, like my first example. It is just another touch point. It is over communication. I really think clients are dying for over communication. Most of the Google reviews I get mention communication. They don’t mention, wow, they hung our light so well. None of them mention that whatsoever. It is typically always like, these guys are really on top of it. They showed up on time. Their communication was amazing. That’s what they’re writing about. That tells me that’s what they care about. The other one is we want to get them used to being our client. Hey, welcome guides, automated emails, appointment reminders with the picture, anything we can do to sort of get them used to the job or ecosystem, I like the idea of that. Okay. Then obviously, we do the virtual quote. I I think saved templates and line items are a really good way to help you get these quotes done quickly while you’re on the video call. So the more you can use that feature, the more powerful it is. I’ve mentioned this before. We discuss next steps, dates or quote follow-up. I’m trying to do this on every quote. This is something I’m working on as well. And just another note, when I’m on the video call with a client, I would just say chill out, enjoy the call, establish some rapport, have a laugh. Sometimes your Wi Fi is going to drop out. Sometimes the client’s going to walk away from their router, and they’re going to have to switch to cellular. It doesn’t do anyone any good if everyone’s uptight. If you just chill out a little bit and enjoy the call, some of those hiccups aren’t a big deal. I would also add on to this. Sometimes I’m doing a virtual call with a client, and I’ll just say, You know what? I’m actually in the area tomorrow. Why don’t I pop by and have a look? It’s okay to flip over to the old school way if you just feel like you have to, or if it’s just not working online, you don’t have to be super rigid. Quote follow-up. Something else I’ve been really working **** ** this year. So out of the box, Jobber will follow-up on your quotes twice. They have the new automation section. I’ve set up a third follow-up. Your third follow-up could be something crap oh, well, let’s talk about the first two. I would change the wording in those to something maybe a little bit more aggressive these days. Hey, did you get the quote? Or, hey, when do you want to sit down and chat about this quote? That’s sort of I’ve changed my first two messages to those. The third message, you can make a little bit later. You know, if they’ve seen two messages, if you’ve called, you might not be getting the job. But your third message, you might maybe you make it for two or three or four weeks later, and you say something like, hey, if we paid the taxes, would that move this job forward? I’ve had a few biters. So you can get crafty like that. I really like when that quote reminder comes up in my job or calendars. What I use those for is that’s my cue to call. So they’ve got the two follow ups, they might have got the additional one. And now now I’m calling, hey, Bob, I’m just calling about the quote we did for you. Like, you know, and I feel like, look, if we followed up three times, I’ve called, you know, we’ve done, we’ve done our work, I’m sure we could keep following up forever and forever and forever. Think have my Jobber has that new feature where you can auto archive a quote. I think I set mine at ninety days. Look, I’ll follow-up for ninety days and after that, we’re just going to let that thing archive. Definitely check out the new sales pipeline. I’m not using it for requests so much. My admin mail might be, I’m not sure. I’m using it more for quote follow-up. I’ve made a few custom columns. So I have my main column of just quotes awaiting response. I have another one that’s just sort of a keep an eye on column. So typically, a larger ticket items or jobs that I’m pretty sure should move ahead, and I just want to keep an eye on them. I made another column for quotes where I’ve actually already called the client. And maybe I called them and they said, oh, we’re just waiting on a thing. Yeah, definitely follow-up with me. We’re going to move forward, but we’re waiting on this other thing. So maybe I’ve called them. We don’t want to archive that quote, and I definitely want to follow-up again. So you can get crafty in there, make up your own columns, keep an eye on quotes a little better. I also set up the high value quote notification. So this is a push notification in Jobber, comes to your phone. It just literally will come up. It’ll say, Hey, quote went out for five thousand five hundred, high value quote, or whatever. You can set the dollar amount to whatever a high value quote is for you. Like I said, my average job size is two grand, four grand, five grand, those are good jobs for us. We want those. I want to keep an eye on those. Auto handoff to production. Oh, This is my favorite little zap I created a long time ago. So Jobber, if someone approves a quote and pays a deposit, Jobber will send an email, but it’s just a single email from Jobber to the client. You can’t CC people, you can’t really customize it at all. So I’ve kind of used Zapier, I have my own email that goes out. So the trigger is quote approved. And so that email will have the homeowner, it’ll have our production guy, Jeff, he’s my business partner, and it’ll have me in that email as well, all three of us. And it literally says, thanks for approving that quote. I’m going to be handing you off to Jeff. Jeff is going to take you the whole rest of the way. He’s going to be reaching out for scheduling. Here’s Jeff’s hours, his email, his phone number. And it’s just one time where all three of us are in one email together. I can quickly relay, say, Hey, Jeff, Bob would like this scheduled only on a Friday, please. You know, anything like that I can throw in there really quick. It also does two things. It frees your sales team up to be done with that job and go get more work. And it also lets production know that, hey, you’re on deck. This is your baby now. Okay, we’re getting to the end here, guys. Are we going to keep doing things the current way and accept the limits? I showed you that before. Are we going to redesign when and why we send out a truck? We’re not going to replace all site visits, but we do want to just pick and choose a little bit about how we’re going to do them. This QR code, can reach out to me. You can book a meeting. You can check out LiveSwitch. You can check out Jobber. I’m an open book. Reach out to me anytime. I’m happy to answer any questions.
