Adam (00:00):
Welcome to Jobber Masters of Home Service, a podcast for home service pros by home service pros. We’re in Las Vegas, and today we’re talking about easy time-saving automation hacks. I’m your host, Adam Sylvester. Today’s guests are Kelly Guerrero and Kristian Proti. Welcome to the studio, both of you. 

Kristian (00:33):
Thanks for having us.

Adam (00:34):
Kristian, tell our audience who you are and what you do.

Kristian (00:37):
I’m Kristian, the president and owner of 365 Heating, Cooling, and Plumbing in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. We primarily focus on residential and a little bit of commercial HVAC and plumbing.

Kelly (00:52):
And I am Kelly Guerrero. I am with Fast Landscapes out of Florida, Manatee County to be specific, and the founder of Home Pro Coaching program that helps small business owners grow and scale their business to the size they want it to be.

Adam (01:06):
Well, you guys are both big automation hacks. You guys like this kind of stuff, and I think a lot of our listeners they feel overwhelmed. They have too many things to do and not enough hands or time to do it all, and so they want to automate stuff, but they also don’t want to lose. They are afraid of losing the personal touch of their business and just automating everything and then becoming numb to what the client actually needs and wants. And so, how do you guys decide what to automate versus not automate? How do you guys go about that?

Kelly (01:39):
Well, we automate the things that are recurring, right? The things that happen all the time, email reminders, text reminders, follow up texts, things like that. But then anything that really needs a personal touch, like a phone call or a personal email, we may not automate those, or we have templates that are set up, but we can go in and change certain pertinent data to mention something specific to the customer. But the things that we don’t really need to have someone calling and saying, Hey, confirm your appointment tomorrow. Hey, confirm your appointment tomorrow. Those are the things we want to automate.

Kristian (02:12):
Yeah, pretty similar with us. I try to automate anything that would be, I find a complete waste of time for one of my employees, so something like a Facebook lead comes in, taking that customer data and manually entering it into Jobber. I can just put it all through Zapier, and in the snap of a finger, it’s all there, right? So stuff like that, where we can save time, I am big on, and like you said, when it comes to stuff where it’s like a personal touch that’ll have an actual human reach out to clients. But yeah, anywhere where I can save some time with a tedious menial task, I’ll automate that all day.

Adam (02:57):
I think that, let’s drill down in Zapier for a second. So you mentioned Zapier. What are some others, because Zapier is an automation software that connects software, so Jobber and Gmail or Jobber and NiceJob, all these different, it connects, and so it creates triggers, and you can do things because it happened here and now this happens. And so, what are some other Zaps that you guys have used that you really like? Maybe some unique ones or some very standard ones. I’m curious. Let’s get into the details. What kind of Zaps are you guys using to run your businesses?

Kelly (03:27):
Well, I use a lot of, with MailChimp, I use a Zap with MailChimp going to Google My Business and LinkedIn. So anytime I do a blog, it’s not only a blog post, it’s more like an email blast. It puts it out as a blog post to Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn without me having to do anything, it just happens automatically. It’s a huge time saver.

Adam (03:48):
I have a ChatGPT AI Zap that responds to five-star reviews for me because I don’t know why. I just hate that it takes so much time to come up with something fresh every time somebody leaves a review. And so I actually have an AI do it for me, so as soon as they hit submit, it’s like, oh, and it’s different every time, it’s fresh. Sometimes it mentions their names, sometimes it doesn’t, mentions the service, and I just love that. Sometimes I would get in there if I get behind, I have 30 to respond to in a couple of months. I don’t want to spend my time doing all that. I don’t want anyone doing that. AI is perfect for that.

Kelly (04:21):
ChatGPT has been an amazing tool too that helps us with everything from drafting emails, templates, things that it’s just such a time saver, and if you can save time, it totally should do it because we only have so much time in a day.

Kristian (04:34):
Yeah, yeah. You want to focus your time on moneymaking activities.

Adam (04:39):
What other Zap do you guys have any? I feel like everyone has a special favorite Zap that they might use that no one else knows about. For me, one of my favorite ones, it’s so simple, but it saves me so much time as I hate going to email a client, and I go to type in who it is, and they’re not in my email, they’re not in my Gmail account yet. What’s their email address? I go hunt and find for it, but now, just every time a new request is entered into Jobber, it instantly adds them to my Gmail. So whenever I want to email them in the future, their email address is in there.

Kelly (05:13):
Oh, that’s awesome.

Adam (05:13):
I love that. It’s so simple, but it saves me so many headaches. 

Kelly (05:16):
I never even thought of doing something like that. That’s amazing.

Kristian (05:19):
Yeah, that is smart. Yeah, we do a lot of automations around leads, collecting lead data from Facebook, Instagram, Google, funneling it into Jobber and into, I have some different spreadsheets that it goes into, and then from there it’ll automate an email out to my sales reps and to the staff to initiate like, Hey, a lead came in, call them right away, and then to notify the sales rep like, Hey, a lead was just booked for you. Here’s the appointment time. Stuff like that. So yeah, we’re heavy on that.

Adam (05:53):
Any other specific tools you guys are using to automate some of this stuff, texting to your clients, email follow-up, anything?

Kelly (06:00):
Obviously, Jobber is the one that we use that does all of those automations and more, automates things like recurring billing, the invoicing, and syncing to QuickBooks. And I use all of those because it saves me just so much time in my Jobber payments, and then it automatically puts the QuickBooks Journal entry for me right into QuickBooks without me having to do anything.

Adam (06:23):
Yeah. You mentioned invoicing. Gosh, I love Jobber’s automatic invoicing.
That doesn’t get even more automated than that. And so with someone like you and I who have lawn care businesses who are mowing people every single week, high volume, and you’re having hundreds of invoices every week to deal with, and Jobber just charges them all completely behind the background, doesn’t even require a push of a button. 
And that changed my life. I mean, that literally changed my life when I didn’t have to sit at home every night for hours every week, automatically invoicing my clients. It was automatic to them. It wasn’t automatic to me before it came out, and then they brought that out. It changed my life because I didn’t have to spend hours invoicing every week. It was amazing. I just love that.

Kelly (07:06):
And that’s really what kind of started me on my journey of what else can I automate in my life, and not just even in business, in my personal life too, I try and find anything that I can automate, set a system. It may not be traditionally like an automation, but I do things like CEO Fridays where I block off a certain amount of time and I’m just, that’s my time and I focus on things that pertain to my business, higher level stuff, and all of our team does the same thing where they block off certain bits of time and they automate that. On this day, at this time, I do these tasks, and it just kind of gives us all a much more, a smoother flow when we’re working together.

Kristian (07:41):
Yeah, that’s smart. You stay more organized like that.

Kelly (07:43):
Yeah. Yeah.

Kristian (07:44):
That’s good.

Kelly (07:44):
And so I feel like that really does tie in with the automation where you’re automating the tasks that have to happen in your business, the ones that people have to do just as if it were a Zap.

Adam (07:53):
Yeah. How have you guys used automation in marketing and lead nurturing, and follow-up? Any tips on that?

Kristian (08:01):
So we’re using CHIIRP a lot now, so we started with them about a little over a month ago. Anytime a lead comes in, we have different nurture campaigns and drip campaigns within CHIIRP with text messaging and email marketing now that we’re introducing, so that we’re staying top of mind with these people. Even if we don’t sell them something today, I want to hit them up every other month with some sort of a promotion through text or email, something like that. If they don’t buy from us today, they might buy from us in a few months. So just staying top of mind, top of their inbox, top of their message box on their phone, I think is super important.

Kelly (08:41):
We just set up the automation campaign with Jobber to reach back out to clients after they’ve had a job closed for, I want to say, six months or a year. It’s a completely automated, basically touch point where we’re just saying, Hey, how are you? We haven’t worked with you in a while. We’d love to work with you again. And that’s through Jobber’s marketing platform

Adam (09:02):
But I mean, it’s easy to take that kind of stuff for granted. Like before Jobber and automations, you had to remember to call all those people three months, six months, a year later. You don’t have to remember anymore.

Kristian (09:13):
No, it saves a lot of time. 

Adam (09:15):
It saves a lot of time, and so there’s a lot of things that can be fully automated in business. Are there any things that you guys are really firm about holding on to not automating, being, maintaining that human touch, if you will, especially customer-facing things? Is there anything in your business that you think, I’m never going to automate this. It’s always going to be a person doing it.

Kelly (09:38):
Mowing grass.

Adam (09:40):
Exactly. No robots doing that

Kelly (09:41):
The actual technician’s work. But anything else that I can automate that I can, I will. I feel like that’s the smartest thing to do. Yes, you definitely want to have customer touch things with follow-ups, with responding to, not even, you just said responding to reviews, ChatGPT can do that. So if you’re able to buy back your time, how much more is that worth? If you’re able to focus on things that are going to continue to grow and strategy and all of that, I feel like that’s a much better use of your time as a CEO or as a manager than doing a lot of busy work.

Adam (10:17):
Yeah.

Kristian (10:18):
Yeah, I agree.

Adam (10:19):
I actually think that Jobber’s online booking feature is a form of automation because a client can go in there, choose the services they want or the service that they want, they can pick a date on the calendar and it can be either a request for service or an actual job that they can actually book, and then all you do is show up. There is nobody in the office taking down their information, writing it down wrong. They can do it at midnight if they want to, and no one’s in the office, and I actually think that’s a very fast-growing. For us, at least, that’s a very fast-growing feature is we’re getting a lot of online bookings from people who just book a night,  book at the weekend, or they don’t want to talk to a person for whatever reason, and they just go on does it all on their own.

Kelly (10:59):
Well, I think in general, the society is changing, right? People don’t necessarily want to have to get on the phone and talk to a real person if they can do it themselves and go online, Uber Eats, and things like that. You can do whatever you want online, so why should the service business be any different? 

Kristian (11:14):
Yeah. I like the online booking platform that you guys have built within the new website feature that just released. I think that’s really cool. It’s a nice customizable landing page that can have different aspects and areas to it, but yeah, definitely online booking is the way to go. I’m finding, like you said, a lot of people they’re losing that kind of human touch. They don’t want to reach out to a bunch of companies and sit there and wait on the phone for it to ring to get somebody If it’s easier for them to just go online, click a link, fill out a couple questions, and then somebody reaches out, why not do it like that? 

Kelly (11:51):
Yeah. I think the way that we get services now is just changing in general as a society, where more and more things are automated, and it’s just the new reality.
It’s not even so much anything new or cutting edge. It’s just this is what it is, and just to keep up with the rest of the industry, you have to have these automations, or you’re missing the boat. You’re not going to be the one who’s first top of mind in line to get the new business from people.

Adam (12:19):
Are you guys using any kind of automation to collect five-star reviews? You can ask the client at their house, Hey, leave us a review then. What are you using? I know Jobber has a platform for that. Are you guys both using the Jobber platform? Are you guys using anything else in conjunction with that?

Kelly (12:38):
Yeah, I use Jobber and Nicejob.

Kristian (12:40):
Yeah, we use Jobber and then because Jobber only allows, I believe two touch points or something to ask for a review, so now I have CHIIRP where that client after a couple of days or a couple touch points, if they still haven’t left us a review, then it goes into another funnel for the next, I think 14 days, and it’s like every other day we’re asking them for a review morning, afternoon, evening, and I’m finding now that we’re getting more and more reviews by introducing that additional feature, that integration with CHIIRP

Kelly (13:17):
So we use Jobber Reviews, too. We also use NiceJob. I use both of them, and I have loved the way that Jobber Reviews works because as soon as that invoice is paid, it sends them a text message saying, “Hey, could you give us a review?” And I have seen a huge spike. We’ve probably gotten 40 reviews in the last two months since we started using the Jobber reviews.

Kristian (13:36):
I like how personal you can get with it, too. A lot of the time, with anything, any sort of client communication, I always try to include Hello or Hi first name, that Melissa, John, Aaron, Peter, doesn’t matter, to make it feel more personal.
Then the fact that you can just customize anything within the paragraph that’s really cool too.

Kelly (14:01):
Technically, it’s an automation, right? But they’re still feeling like it’s personal. Like you were sitting down, and you texted them personally and asking.

Kristian (14:07):
Well, that’s the thing. A lot of these clients they think that, Hey, somebody from 365 or your company is messaging me asking for this review personally. They don’t know that it’s just AI or this automation tool or whatever.

Kelly (14:24):
That can be our secret. We don’t have to tell him that.

Adam (14:27):
It makes me think of a conversation I had with one of my buddies about a year ago who has a tree company, and I was telling him about some automated follow-ups for getting five-star reviews, and he said, I don’t want any of that stuff. I just call ’em myself. And I say, what do you mean you call ’em yourself? You have time for that? Oh yeah, I’ve got time for all that. I call every single one. I said, wouldn’t you rather just automate it? He goes, Oh, no, that sounds terrible. And I totally disagree with him. Obviously, me, I agree to disagree, but I think if you’re trying to build your business and scale your business up to 250, 500, a million dollars in revenue and beyond, I think that you don’t have time for that. 
I think talking to our listeners here, I think that there are some things that you can do when you’re small that just don’t scale, and calling your clients once, maybe, but you’re going to call your client every week for a month. They’ve tried to get a review. When you’re doing a million dollars, it’s not going to scale, and so you need to have an automated sequence to get those reviews. Over the years, we’ve had about 20% conversion for reviews. So out of 10 jobs, we always get two positive reviews, which, in my understanding, is pretty good, and it’d be way lower than that if we hadn’t been doing automated sequences for years.

(15:43):
Getting those reviews, it’d probably be like 5% or less, actually. And so I just think it’s a no-brainer. Jobber gives it to you for free as part of your account. It’s not an expensive thing, and we all know how important fast reviews are to your visit. It’s like the blood of your business, and so I think you can put a little bit of energy into that and not rely on your memory or your time to do that. It needs to be an automated thing.

Kelly (16:09):
I think that those who hesitate to start something like that are probably scared that they’re going to lose that personal touch. But what I like is that you can go in and adjust templates at any time to keep it fresh, so it’s not the same thing every single time for a year. You can change it and add new emojis or a new way of saying it, and still ask for that review, and it’s all automated, but it really does look like you took the time to sit and type it out yourself and ask them for that review.

Kristian (16:40):
Yeah, so I used to personally call some of our clients just to do a personal follow-up from the president, from the owner, to see how things went, how the job was, did my guys take care of your house? Were they cleaned? Did they clean up after themselves? Stuff like that. And then once we got bigger, I started shifting that into just doing an email because some of these clients, they want to sit and talk for 10, 15, 20 minutes about everything, and then it’s like, okay, well, I don’t have the time for that, and now I can just automate all that, send an automation from Zapier into Gmail. It comes from my personal Gmail account, my email signature’s there, and it sounds very personal, and I get good feedback from it. Clients love it, and we get referrals that way.

Kelly (17:22):
And if someone feels that it’s important to still have that personal contact, why not block off one hour a week that you’re just going to reach out to different customers and it’s different ones each time, so you’re automating your schedule so that you can be focused on the higher level tasks the rest of your week, and then take that one hour just to reconnect with the customers so you don’t lose that touch that you were used to.  For people who are just transitioning into automations.

Kristian (17:46):
Yeah, I agree.

Adam (17:48):
What advice would you guys have for business owners who are trying to dip their toe in the water for this, but they might be afraid of any upfront costs or they might be afraid of who knows what they might be afraid of? What would you say to those people who really need to take the plunge into some automated tasks? How much is your time worth?

Kristian (18:05):
Great question.

Kelly (18:06):
Great question. How much is your time worth? Because that’s one thing none of us get more of. We all have the same 24 hours in a day, and so we have to really make sure that we’re utilizing that time the best way we can, especially if we want to grow as small business owners. So I would say give it a try. Do one automation first and see what that takes off your plate, and if it’s not worth it, well then forget about it, but I’m willing to bet money that it would be worth more than worth.

Kristian (18:34):
Yeah, I’d say first and foremost, just start with something. And then the thing I’d recommend that everyone dip their toes in first is just Zapier. It’s very low cost. And now with their whole AI tool, you can just ask Zapier what you want to accomplish, and it will create that entire automation for you. Whereas I remember before we had all that, I’m there trying to find, okay, what’s the first software? What am I linking it to? What am I doing next? This that? There’s a lot of back and forth.

Kelly (19:07):
Don’t forget, Jobber has a ton of automation just built in, and I think people who are with Jobber for some time, they kind of forget that the competition doesn’t necessarily have that. Be honest, where the things are just automatic follow-ups on invoices, on-my-way reminders. You have an appointment tomorrow reminder, like the day before.

Kristian (19:26):
Yeah, I love those reminders.

Kelly (19:27):
It’s great, and we’re just used to that because we use Jobber, that we just take that for granted, but there’s so many automations and so many ways to make your day-to-day so much simpler, and I really just think it’s worth giving it a shot.

Adam (19:40):
Absolutely.

(19:42):
Kelly, Kristian, that was a great conversation. I want to boil it down to three actionable items for our listeners. Number one is use Zapier. The options are limitless, and if you want to start with one, automatically import all of your new clients into your Gmail, you’ll thank me forever. Number two is to use Jobber automations to nurture leads and to follow up on quotes, ask for reviews, and all that kind of stuff. Use the Jobber automations. Number three, follow up on your reviews. Automate it because you’ll get way more reviews if you just simply automate the follow-up. Some emails, some texts, it’s gold. Remember, you can’t get your time back. Automate everything you can. Guys, that was great. How do people find out more about you?

Kelly (20:26):
You can find out more about me on our website for the company, fastlawns.net, or you can find me on homeprocoaching.com

Kristian (20:35):
You can find us on Google, Instagram, Facebook, 365 Heating, Cooling, and Plumbing.

Adam (20:43):
Well, your people that work for you have great bosses, so keep it up. You guys are doing a great job, and the impact that you’re having on the communities that you live in is significant. Small business is the backbone of the economy, so keep it up. Thanks for being here

(20:57):
Thank you for listening. I hope that you heard something that will help you automate more tasks in your life and business. To save you time, I’m Adam Sylvester, your host. You can find me at adamsylvester.com. Your team and your clients deserve your very best, so go give it to ’em.