73 | Revolutionizing Home Services with Jimmy Speyer with Glass House

Welcome to another episode of freedom blueprint podcast. Men are pumped up today. I have got my friend hanging out with us and he's going to tell us a little bit about this incredible new way to market to customers that quite frankly, I don't think anybody's doing but we'll get into that in a minute in a minute. But yeah, Jimmy Sperry is here and welcome to the show, man.

Hey, thanks, Justin. And thank you for calling me your friend. I appreciate that. You're my friend, too. there we go. Okay, everybody. Yeah, everybody here gets one. So we're not above paying our way into a podcast. Absolutely.

Look, I even got my coffee mug. was this morning. I was like, man.

Nothing wrong with it. Nothing wrong with it. So yeah, I asked Jimmy to come on because this new business, this business that he's got for marketing, I think is super cutting edge. I think there's so much cool activity and proactiveness that can happen in the marketing field. And I wanted just to go through it a little bit with you and introduce the business to our listeners.

Yeah, cool. I'll go. My name is Jimmy Spire. I'm the CEO. I'm the founder of Glasshouse. And so we are a digital door knocking platform. We are a software company. I think you do us a lot of services, say marketing, because it's very well understood in this business, right? At home services, most leads come from some type of marketing. And we are lead generation. We are about helping people find the right customers, the best customers. But we're not a marketing agency. We work with those.

We are a software platform to help our customers go find the right customers. Basically help our home service customers, because it's all we work with, go find the best homeowners that they want to

And so give us a little bit of insight on what that even looks like.

So my, I'll start with my background so you can understand like what are we doing? Why? How do we come from to this? So I spent 15 years in B2B software sales. And so I'm more of a software background than home services background. Even though I do own a home service business now, I bought that after I started this company. I bought that so that I could show my customers my full 100 % commitment to doing this with them and being part of the community myself. But it's not like how I grew up.

in that industry, like a lot of people in the services and in the trades. But I do have lot of experience in outbound sales. I help build a bunch of outbound sales organizations in software. And in that industry, we pick up the phone and we call people. We don't wait for them to come to us. And in the home services and the trades, a lot of it is waiting. A lot of it is reacting. A lot of it is speed to lead and the phone rang. And how do we make the phone ring? It's kind of everyone's biggest problem.

And so I really thought there was an opportunity to flip the script, to turn that around and say, can we help home services take some of this, some of what we've been doing over here in this other industry and bring the good parts over and say, can we help you go to the homeowner you want to get in touch with? If you're working at Justin's house, man, would it be great to work with his neighbors? And that's what you really want, right? And then their neighbors and their neighbors. And if you could just really own that

a lot of dirt in that neighborhood and just become the vendor of choice in that neighborhood. What would that do for your business? What would it do for your lead cost? Word of mouth, virality, you went viral in a neighborhood. It's just there wasn't a way to do it as far as we could tell. And so that's what we really set out to do over the last year and a half is help home service businesses do that. Help them get in touch with the neighbor next door without having to knock on their door or hope that they see an ad.

Well, and I'll tell you, you know, obviously most of the listeners on this, we're in the plumbing AC electrical space. Door knocking is not anything that I don't know of any company in the U S that does a, does a whole lot of door knocking in our space. know when the, roofing and some other things they do. Uh, and I know when in Canada, there's, there's a little bit more door knocking that happens, but, yeah, I mean, I think here for the most part in our industry up until now, it's been a very

passive, we spend money, we put things out there, we really hope the customer sees it at the time they need it and then calls us. And yeah, I think it's been a very passive type of customer acquisition that we've done up until this point.

Yeah, there's, think that the world is getting to a point. This is really why we believe this is the time. Like why now? Why you, why now? Right? Why us? We have come from a different world in software technology sales, but we're super trying to get deeply ingrained into this industry and investing in it and believe passionately in small and medium sized businesses. Why now? And those leads are just getting more expensive every year and there's more entrance in the market every year. And so that whole jump ball concept,

By the way, stop me. I'll talk really fast. do all the time. I get excited. So that jump ball concept is gonna is just getting harder. Now it's just more and more competitive. If you're new to the game, you're gonna get outspent on Google. You can't spend the $10 million your competitor can. If you've been around for a long time and you're spending all that money, A, you're kind of hooked on that. Don't turn that off because what would we do? But also, how do we grow? Because you've kind of run out of places to put it. I have customers

big HVAC companies. And they're like, well, we just give more money to the Google machine and hope it spits out a couple of more pennies, but it's kind of running out of room in that. They're just shoving another mattresses, guess, at this point, like they've run out of places to put investment that's going to get them much.

So I think about the concept of owning a neighborhood. mean, not even a town, just a neighborhood. And I think about how, how did we do that? But before working with you guys and it was, if the neighborhood had a magazine, maybe you put an ad in there. there's just a, there's just not really a good way. So, so can you tell us a little bit about,

How does Glass House do that?

Yep, so let's get like the nitty gritty. How does this actually work? What is it? Digital door knocking, cool slogan, what does it mean? So very specifically, shout out to my wife. She walked in a year ago and I said, I think we want to do this thing. She goes, so it's like digital door knocking. like, it will be from now on. It's exactly what it's gonna be. I'm married up. I did real well. So this very specific tactical thing is we're gonna connect to your FSM or serum, whatever you want to call it.

It is a very cool slogan.

You're like, boom.

Service Titan, what do you got? And so all your customers are going to be mapped out for you. Let's see where we got jobs coming up. Let's see where we got previous jobs. Like what's the makeup of where we are in this world? And Service Titan can do some of that too, and that's cool. Some FSM's can, some can't. I use Jobber. I own a window washing business. Jobber's great for that. And so what we do is we say, cool, we've got all these jobs. Now when we're going to or we're leaving from that job, that's when that

moment that matters happens. We talk about van marketing and truck marketing, right? They're gonna see you in the job. You have this advantage of a home service business of you physically go to a place. It's not all done remote by Zoom like this and things like that. So you're there. And so how do we leverage before you showed up or do a leave behind, what you wanna do is be able to digitally knock on those doors. By that, I mean you want to be able to email those homeowners. You wanna be able to call them on the phone. You wanna be able to text the homeowners.

in a really tight geographic bubble, in a compliant way. That's important. There's rules about some of this stuff. You need a partner that's going to help you follow the rules, but make it easy. And so what our customers do, what I personally do is every time I have a job, I grab the closest 10, 20, up to 100 houses, say, hey, we're coming out. We work with your neighbors. We're great. They're great. You're probably great. Let's work together. Can we just stop by? Can we?

start relationship, start a conversation, think about brand marketing, just spending money on billboards. Okay, do they get seen? Okay, these get seen. This gets seen, right? And let's create another appointment from that appointment. And then you're creating that virality, right? Well, we did the job, we reached out to the neighbors, those neighbors talked to each other, they saw my van. We can still do the other stuff. We can still put up a yard sign, please do. We can still pay for Google Ads, there's nothing wrong with that.

when you think about an omni-channel approach where you're trying to ring around that customer all the way, you have a gap right now, more than likely, called their inbox, their cell phone, their phone, because nobody's calling. By the way, you say, knock doors in HVAC. No, they really don't. But you know what? No one's calling your customers. I promise no one's calling them. My customers are. I have an HVAC company. They went all in on outbound calling and grew from 9 million to 20 million.

in one year. They did nine million the year before. They more than doubled their business. And that's not normal home service growth. Normal home service growth is what, Justin? 10, 20 %?

20 % is pretty good. Yeah.

Pretty good, right? How about double?

because nobody else is calling. So that's specifically how we do it. What's fun is our customers deploy this in different ways. Pest control, they do it one way. Roofers, they've got a different set of needs. Solar, HVAC, plumbing, pool builders, window washers. It's a little different flavor. We work with them in those different ways. But the concept is the same. The goal is the same. Can I get a $5 lead? And you win all day.

mean, for anybody who really watches their marketing spend, when's the last time you got a $5 lead?

Yeah, like you're, mean, how many cousins do you have? That's about like call them. go, once you run out of cousins, the $5 leads are gone.

Yeah. So, so with the, with the example you gave of the, of the double in business, even if you don't double, mean, realistically, if you've got, let's call it 10 trucks, let's call it five trucks and you actually basically deploy this in your business, even if you picked up one additional call, I mean, my goodness, what, what difference would that make?

Yeah, I see that different, there's different use cases depending on your strategy and on your like, where's your lowest hanging fruit. We're younger business. We just want to grow as fast as we can. Cool. Let's just proactively try and scoop up new customers and think of it as like outbound marketing. Well, we're more mature business. We've got fairly busy routes from day to day, but you know what? When we have a cancel, we want to go fill in some gaps. So we're headed out to a neighborhood tomorrow. We got some gaps.

I've got two up on callers, they're filling in gaps for me. So we're just more efficient now. And so there's lots of ways to kind of make this type of process fit into your business. The one thing I would say is it's not a magic wand. It isn't giving money to the Google people and just saying, make the phone ring. It is taking agency, it's taking control, and then it's investing some of that time and saying, well, we can do this and we don't have to keep putting more money in Google, but it means we can do this.

We will do this. Make it as easy as we can. Our job is to make it easy, right? But you still like easy isn't like all that easy is means we can improve it. doesn't mean that it like does itself.

I mean, it's being proactive.

Yeah. Well, and I think about, if you, if you run, cause I can, I can picture this being, you know, if you have an outlining area.

Or even if you don't have an outlining area and you have a huge neighborhood, the area in Florida, we live in, there's a couple of neighborhoods that are massive that, you know, we kind of bit and piece send trucks here and there. But if we know tomorrow or the next day, we're going to, we've already got two appointments in that neighborhood. Why not utilize this in order to keep that truck inside that one neighborhood? I mean, from a cost perspective, not only are you going to save.

a truck ton of money on your customer acquisition side, right? Like your marketing spend is going to be so much better, but now you don't have windshield time. Your technician's not behind the wheel. They're not burning gas. They're now having more opportunity because hopefully if you're listening to this, there is some performance pace somewhere in your pay structure for your technicians. Now they have an opportunity to make more money and to serve more customers. mean, it just all the way around just feels like a pretty solid,

Pretty solid win.

Yeah, just add use of performance pay. know that's not what we're here to talk about, but my background is in being a sales leader. So I've written comp plans for about a thousand people and I'll say I agree a hundred percent in everybody in it. I'm a proponent of putting performance pay on every job everywhere, like all the time and in every job in a sales organization, but every job in my software company should have performance pay some way or shape or form and great performance pay means

Yeah.

Comp plans and company goals are as tightly aligned as they can possibly be so that when I win, you win, when you win, I win. I don't begrudge you a giant check because it means I got one too. The company's successful. You see these performance pay where eventually the company is starting to like, they're making too much money. I'm like, then you did it wrong. If they're making too much money and you're jealous of how much money your team members are making, you built it wrong. And if they're walking out the door because they don't find it attainable,

then you're busy hiring the next guy when you could have just paid the last one what they're worth.

No, I love that. No, you're no man. Listen, we can can talk about anything. We're not limited. There's no one that's going to give us the axe. We're fine. So so let me ask you this. When you kind of walk us through a little bit of the process of how did this even come about? Like what even made you think of kind of leaning in to this? Really, where I'm getting on this is a little bit of the backstory on the how.

So sidebar.

Right on. Okay.

But then what's the mission of the entire thing? Like, what is the goal?

The how was we came up with a lot of bad ideas first. I'll be perfectly honest. We actually built another piece of software and nobody would even touch it. We thought we had some great idea. Bunch of people from outside of home services, oh, we're going to help you solve some problem. they're like, that's not our problem. But they could literally have cared less. And we'd done that for about six months. Me, a couple of other people here, just a small group of people to get going.

We're like, well, what are we going to do now? Like we don't know better. So what I did was I invested in, I can own a home service business. I'm going to be part of this community. I'm going to learn this myself by doing it. And also I listened to what they were telling me, which was what's your biggest problem? Like, what is your biggest problem as a home service business? And if you ask them 99 % of the time, they all say the same thing. I need more customers. I need more leads. Like everyone wants that.

And we gather slots, we all have problems every day, staffing, all this stuff. But that was kind of like, if you could help us there, you'd really be helping us. And that was kind of a light bulb moment because it really aligned with what I like want to do. Like I have a sales background, so how can I help people sell stuff? Like I'm taking the least of skills that I know I have a little bit of and making it valuable to other people. And so then we were able to take that and say, then what's our mission? What do we really want to do?

I believe in being a mission-driven business. You have a mission that everybody can align to. When you win, your customers win. When your customers win, you win, just like that comp plan. And so we've set out, we're on a mission to grow more profitable home service businesses. And it's intentionally, actually a two for one. We want to grow more profitable home services businesses. We want them to be more of that. We would like more businesses in this space to make profit and make money.

not just have sales. That means better leads, cheaper leads, all the good stuff that comes out of that. And then we'd like them to be more profitable. Even the ones that are making money, can we help you make more money? And so everything we do now as a business, what we build, how we sell, how we price this software, it should be approachable. Everybody in home services should be able to afford this. It should not be like, oh, well, you're, know, the big billion dollar company, sure, this is for you, but everybody else is kind of left out in the cold.

Like it just makes it really, not nothing's easy in business, but it gives a lot of clarity to me and my team when we are making a decision about anything we do. If it doesn't align to that, then we just don't do

That's awesome. Yeah, that's awesome.

I also will, I'll tell you like just last, I have a passion for small and know, small business is a relative term. If you're in the airplane building business, small is still pretty big. If you're, you know, in the plumbing business, it's a little different, but you know, I'm not here to help the fortune 50 or the fortune 100 or whatever they are, right? I don't really care about making American airlines 0.1 % more efficient, but.

a $1 million pest control company or $10 million pest control company or a $5 million plum company or a $50 million HVAC business, right? These are businesses that usually have like, you know, owner-operated this little thing a lot. The people who work there are very, very impactful on the outcome of the business. They're not so big that you can just coast through having 20,000 employees or something like that. And so whatever we can do to help those businesses in that size range, you know,

hundreds of millions or tens or singles of millions of dollars. Yeah, that's super, it's super impactful and meaningful to me personally.

Well, and the truth is there's some, with utilizing your service, there's some tangible numbers that you see, right? So if you can start to acquire customers at a much cheaper rate, there's that win. But then there's all the other wins we talked about earlier as far as being able to generate more revenue, which then in turn helps families and community. And there's like all these byproducts of what happens outside of that that's really pretty incredible.

Yeah, if you grow your business, services, it's a home service industry. Service is in the name. So you are in the service of your community, you're in the service of these homeowners. I personally believe in servant leadership, so I'm in the service of my team members. And so if you can grow it, then you get to deliver more service, you get to help more people, more jobs, more people going to be on the table, college education, houses, babies, whatever the thing is you're helping make happen. Growing your business has a lot of benefits to your community.

and to your team members. So if we can help you do that, I will, again, I get to win. I get to build a company that helps my team. You get to help by helping you build a company that helps your team. It's super well-wined.

Yeah. So, obviously I don't want to talk specifics on pricing just because podcast is out in the world and things change and, we don't want to set a bad expectation, but, I do want to say this as far as pricing goes, this is going to be a fraction of what people are spending on these other platforms. mean, the first time Jimmy and I met and we were talking about the platform. Do you remember the first thing I said to you when you told me about the pricing?

Something about how crazy we were or I think you said well you that you better freeze how are you gonna make any money?

I think I said, you better double or triple that. I was like, that's crazy. You should double or triple that price. mean, after I sign up and then I'm grandfathered in.

Yeah, like for the next guy, for the next guy, you should definitely triple the price.

Yeah, but again, a very affordable way to capture more customers. And again, I keep going back to the proactive, like passive versus aggressive when it comes to marketing. And then I think about too, for those of us in the HVAC space and even the plumbing space, but especially the multi-brand that happens.

Even when you're doing these, if you run a special, I, when we use them, it's, it's always based on some sort of special because we want to get in the home to do an inspection or whatever you want to do. It's, it's your business. You can run it however you want. But, but for me, it's so important that when you're in the home, now you're able to get basically the data of all the equipment. And then from a long-term strategy, think of the impact of how you can market to that. When you know, the system is.

five years old, 10 years old, 15 years old, or the water heater is five, 10, 15 years old. And there's just a lot of power that happens. Even if you go into the home and you leave and you haven't sold a $10,000 system, but now you've made this incredible impact on this customer. They're like, man, I like, I like these guys. They're amazing. They showed up, they were clean. They didn't smell like yesterday or, you know, the bar or Paul malls or whatever.

And then now you're able to directly market to those customers of, your system is 10 years old. Hey, your system is 15 years old. I just, think that there's a lot of power that comes from this, even from the long play. I know you didn't know I was going to say that, but I'm bragging on your stuff is really what I'm doing, but

I, I, thank you. I, well, I appreciate that. I don't want this to be a commercial for our software. think that the concept though is. Thank you. Okay. Yep. But I think our, you know, when you talk about our mission and the concept is, know, how are we creating, I think a new channel for people to make some additional investments in, their business that gives a little bit of a reset moment. You know, these channels, they come, it was the yellow pages 40 years ago when I was a kid, you know, 40 years ago.

Well, too late. just made it one, so.

And then that's kind of played out. And then it was like, you know, early internet and then it was Google. And then now everyone wants to be into the review game and then work in, you know, now they're telling everybody you need to be a content creator. So everyone's going to be a TikTok star. I'm not sure if we're all going to be TikTok stars, but just having another channel where you can take some of the control directly into your business is what ultimately where I think the value unlock is for everybody. Here's something novel. isn't.

the same thing everybody's just been doing forever.

Yeah, so if if someone wanted to get in touch with you and check out a demo, which I would highly recommend anybody listening to do what's what's a good way for them to connect with you?

We want to be easy to find. So glasshouse.biz.biz and you can see a demo on the website and see pricing on our website. We're trying to be super transparent. You can book a call right on our website with us. So we're pretty easy to find. Go on, look at it, reach out, schedule time to chat or get our phone numbers on the website, give us a call directly, we'll answer. But yeah, that's the best way.

Fantastic. So I want to pick your brain as we kind of leave some, a moment of wisdom with Jimmy, whether you want it to be about the business marketing or you've got a pretty good sales background. So what's something you want to share with listeners? It can be on any of them. I know I threw you a little bit of a curve ball there.

So my career I spent in sales and I came up from being a frontline seller, Here's your phone numbers, make these dials, manager, director, vice president of sales, chief revenue officer. I had some success across three different businesses there and we sold a couple of those. Collectively, they were worth about a billion dollars. So I can't say I created a unicorn, but in the aggregate, I think you could say that. And one of the things that I took away from that is when people ask like,

sales philosophy, sales methodology, it depends on what you're selling. But there's some truths there. And one is that there are generally four ways to increase your revenue, to increase your sales in an organization of any kind. And I call this the Disney Prince model. So that's mine, but you can steal it if you want, Justin, if you like it. So you can get more leads, you can win more deals, you can get bigger.

accounts or you can increase your pace. And the way I would say that is the Disney Prince model is you can kiss more frogs, you can find more princes, bigger castles, and that means they get more cash. And that doesn't actually mean bigger deals. You could just get more money from them later too. works. Or, and my favorite is fast forward the movie. And so if I can talk to 10 times as many people as you can, if I can close the deal and half the time that it takes you to close the deal,

You know, what I measure actually more than anything is the speed at which the organization operates through a sales motion. How fast can we get to your house? Let's use a home service. How fast can we get there? Well, if I'm right next door, pretty fast. And how transparent can we make the sales process so that you don't have to go back and ask your wife, your husband 20 different times, and we can close you right on that first call. And then how quickly can we actually deliver? And then how fast can I get billed and get paid, right? The faster I go, the faster I can do everything else.

And it's the one that you control the most. You control the pace at which you move. Do you control market dynamics on acceptable pricing for your service? Not that much. Do you control the number of leads you have? Well, your outsource marketing agency might control those, I guess, but maybe not you. that's maybe not entirely your control, depending on how much you can afford to spend. Can you control your win rate? Man, you can certainly impact it, but there's a...

finite amount of purchases and whatever you're selling in a given year. So, you know, there are going to be those tire kickers out there, but the speed at which you operate and at which you optimize your sales experience so that you make it super easy for someone to buy from you, pretty much in your control.

That's what I've always focused on. That's how we operate here at Glasshouse. We, generally speaking, I'll give you a real world example is someone books a call on my calendar. They can do it right from the website or my team member. And then we'll get on, we'll show them the software. We'll give them a demo. We'll show them the pricing and we'll send them a proposal and it takes about 45 minutes. And then if they want to be in our software, we'll get them on a call. We'll spend an hour with them. They're in the system. It's like two or three days from start to finish.

and the whole thing is built that way. Yeah, speed, speed, speed, speed, speed, because it's up to you. It's not as much about the market. Your speed is pretty much in your control, at least more in control than most of the other ones.

sufficient.

Jimmy, was awesome. Listen, thank you for coming and hanging out. Everything he talked about as far as how to get in touch with him, I'll put all that stuff in the show notes. So go on there, check it out. Again, I would highly recommend do a demo. Check out what they're doing. It is different. I don't know of anybody that's doing anything this way. But again, Jimmy, Glass House, check them out. And man, I appreciate you coming and hanging out.

Thanks for having me, Justin. I had a great time. Appreciate it.

Thanks.