Hardy Farrow

Recruiting is hard. Recorded everything I’ve learned about it over the past 2 years of home services.

There are some days where all the stars align and running a business can feel great! -Sold 4 installs in 2 hours -Got a worker's comp refund in my audit! Unheard of! -Hired an amazing electrician -10 Google reviews in 3 days Cherishing the good moments. Let's have a great weekend!

One of our biggest unlocks over the past year has been getting really tight on parts returns & warranty returns. It's really easy to just let stuff sit on technician trucks, randomly in the warehouse, or forget to follow up with a vendor after submitting a return to get the credit. Our process: -Parts Return Form on every job -Automated check to see if "warranty" or "need to return" was mentioned in job notes or invoice summary. -SOP that defines who to go to, what form, what website for each vendor. -Standardized follow-ups with vendors to ensure we get the credit.

SMB Investors: What is the "hub" that people go to in order to list their investing preferences? Axial? Pitchbook? Some other site I don't know about?

Technology is incredible. I'm calling Muse while I drive now and live tackling my inbox, having it pull jobs in Hold in ServiceTitan and reading out where we are blocked, and then I'm shooting off emails via the phone conversation with Muse to my team to unblock them. It's basically turned my commute into a live working session.

Outbound calling has compounding effects. Just sold a customer a water heater that we hadn't worked with in 4 years. We've made 3 outbound calls (never picked up but left VMs) in the past year. Customer referenced it when they called in and said we were the first person they thought of.

One of my least favorite customer types to deal with is the overzealous child who is a junior attorney who operates in a completely different practice area, gets overly protective of their parent, and then pursues a non-rational lawsuit pro bono on behalf of their parent. Happened to me twice now and both times it's been a complete waste of time dealing with them because they have no economic interest in settling/getting to the heart of the matter.

Is anyone else getting hammered on finance declines lately? It's happening a LOT in the past 15-30 days for us. Used to be less than 15% of the time.

Go vote!

We've sold over $1M of work off lead aggregators in the past few years. Here's a few lessons I've learned along the way: 1. Don't do commercial leads. Don't do landlords. Don't do house flippers. Don't do property managers. 2. Urgent work is the best. The more discretionary, the harder it is. 3. Don't charge dispatch fees. 4. If you don't have someone who can call them instantly, turn off the lead source during the off hours. You'll sometimes get lucky with the speed to lead texting but it's challenging. 5. Use the filtering as much as possible. Thumbtack is quite good at this. You can pick type of homes, zip codes, customer supplier vs. not, etc. 6. Some tasks that are quite profitable on other channels won't work on lead aggs. For us, water heater replacements don't really work. Most of the lead agg leads buy their own from home depot & Lowes. Just not worth the ROI for us. 7. Every geographic market is different. Don't waste money chasing a channel that works for your buddy in another state. 8. You gotta monitor the budget unlike LSA. They will find a way to hit the limit you set. If I know my weekly or monthly amount, I will tinker with it to ensure that we don't overspend in the first 10 days of the month. The #1 value for us is using it as a way to fill the board for our guys when we have gaps. I may not make great ROAS on it but I look at $1 of potential profit as better than a guy sitting at the warehouse or going home due to no work.

I don't know when it got like this but I'm happily shocked when insurance DOES cover claims. When I submit stuff, I go in with the assumption that they are going to try to weasel out of covering it. Note: This mainly applies to non-health insurance.

Pretty incredible what you can do with these AI agents. We are using it now to check the schedule at X Time, evaluate capacity, turn off/on lead aggs based on capacity, and deploy voicemail drops and mass text blasts based on outbound data list. All of that stuff used to take us hours each day to coordinate internally, prep the list, and get it sent out.

Nerded out on 2028 presidential primary predictions. There's basically a few voting blocs in democratic primaries: Establishment/Loyalist: (Think Joe Biden in 2020, Clinton in 2016) African-American: (tends to be more socially conservative, traditionalist) Moderate/Centrist: (Andy Beshear/Josh Shapiro types...tend to be more white, less coastal) Technocrats/Abundance Liberals: (Tend to be more coastal, Bloomberg/Buttigieg type voters) Progressives -------------------------- If all the major people run, here's my predictions: Progressive bloc will coalesce around AOC. But, I don't think she can get more than 10% of the other blocs. So, she might get capped at 35% in any state. Harris, Moore, and Warnock will fight over the African-American bloc. I'd give the edge to Harris based on name recognition. The moderate bloc will splinter over 5+ candidates and will coalesce when a clear leader emerges after the first few states. I could see Shapiro or Beshear or Buttigieg or Kelly winning this. The Establishment will probably coalesce around Harris, Buttigieg, or Newsom. They always tend to favor names that have run in the past/have been around a long time. The technocrats will splinter but I could see Buttigieg or Ossoff winning this bloc. ---- If Harris can get 50%+ of the Establishment and African-American bloc, she will win the nomination. One interesting thing here is that Newsom doesn't have a clear lane. He polls high because of name recognition but he's too California for the moderates/centrists. He's governed somewhat moderately which pisses off the progressives. His lack of progress on housing & public transportation doesn't really resonate with technocrats. My gut tells me that there will be 3 leading candidates Harris AOC Some alternative to Harris that tries to coalesce the technocrats, establishment, and moderates into a large enough coalition to beat Harris. It will probably be someone who can create a groundswell movement through their communication style (i.e., Obama 2008, Buttigieg 2020). Maybe Ossoff or Talarico or Buttigieg?

Celebrated 1st year wedding anniversary. Incredibly blessed to have a great partner who believes in me and supports me no matter how crazy my dreams are. Thanks for always pushing me to be my best self!

Hot Take: You should "strategically settle/compromise" on your standards with your business. I've struggled for years to find electricians who are technical + sales oriented. We finally found one in February and he wasn't hitting our goals but was doing a LOT better than anyone we've ever had. So, I held him to the same standard of quality that I did with our other divisions. I gave him daily feedback on what he could do better and pushed him (constructively) on when to offer more options. I knew deep down that he was at risk of quitting because he didn't take feedback well. And he quit 2 weeks ago. Now, I don't have any good electricians. And I'm having to spend time recruiting electricians and this distracts me from our core biz of HVAC & plumbing. Did I do the right thing long-term for the biz by pushing him to do better? Yes. Was this the right time of year to do this with other priorities we had going on? Probably not. If you fix everything in your business, you fix nothing.

11 five star reviews this week! Let’s go!

You can’t underrate the impact of surrounding yourself with ambitious, optimistic, hard working people. There’s something intoxicating about this environment that brings out the best in you.

Most disagreements come down to misaligned expectations. This usually comes from a lack of communication/vague expectations. This is how we teach our technicians/office staff to handle disagreements with customers. Customer: I hate this! I'm so mad about X. It's not what I wanted. Me: Ok, what's wrong? Customer: Rants about 7 things. Me: Ok, what problem are we trying to solve? Customer: Lists multiple things. Me: Ok, when you signed this quote, you agreed on X. What is not meeting your expectations based on X? Customer: Well, I wanted .... Me: Thank you, but no. You agreed on X. Let's focus on that. What did not meet your expectation on X? Customer: Lists it out. Me: Ok, so we agree that X is not meeting your expectation. So, what does well done look like if we did X? Customer: lists out. Me: Ok, so we agree that if we do ________ to solve X, then are all going to be on the same page? Customer: yes. Me: Great. Let me send that out so we are all on same page.

Anyone found an efficient way to turn off and on Angi's every day? They've locked the ability to turn off and on services in their app for over 2 years now and it's mad annoying to call them or deal with their CS agent via chat.

I'm growing increasingly convinced that York has become a corporate black hole where you have no idea what the heck the company is anymore. Is it York or UPG or Johnson Controls or Bosch or BHC? No one knows!

One of the best uses of AI for our business has been building faster feedback loops to employees. People improve when they know: -What expectations are -Are they hitting expectations? -If not, what specifically are they doing wrong and how can they improve? Ways we use AI: -CSR daily coaching -Weekly report card/goal feedback to service techs -Daily job review that flags when we didn't follow processes.