Maintain your local edge: Competing and succeeding as a small business in the trades

Adrian Garcia: Experiencing this in real time with my business and trying to figure out how to make us as a small business look like a big business and keep up with those giants, right?

Meagan McLoughlin: Carre's like mostly small businesses, like that's where we focus all of our efforts on, and that's why it's so important, I think, to us to make some of these things easy and affordable.

Meagan McLoughlin: I actually feel like you guys are really lucky. Like I think HVAC and refrigeration techs are like safe compared to anyone else. Like no skilled trade, is ever gonna be really replaced by ai. The TikTok and the YouTube are searches are still there, but now it's a lot of them are just going to chat GBT, right?

Meagan McLoughlin: Or they're going, I'm still

Adrian Garcia: learning that part.

Meagan McLoughlin: Yeah. Yeah. That's like the next kind of frontier. Just

Adrian Garcia: look at yourself as a consumer and that's how your customers are too. Yeah. I would

Meagan McLoughlin: say like myself as a consumer, I'm like, I don't see anything online or if I'm like cross-referencing Yeah. Platforms, I'm like, is this business real?

Meagan McLoughlin: Then you're also a business owner, so it's like you're wearing two different caps and trying to be a marketer at the same time.

Adrian Garcia: I can take you through the wave of like how that's looked over 20 years. Because When I started, yeah.

Adrian Garcia: Ola, what is up everybody? Welcome back to the Reliable Trades podcast. I'm your host, Adrian, and I'm an HVAC business owner here in South Texas. I do, a little bit of content creation and things of that nature online. On this podcast, we interview a lot of tradespeople from many different trades.

Adrian Garcia: Yeah, business owners, people in manufacturing, people in software companies new technicians, older technicians, people that start at 18, 16 even, and people that start in their forties and fifties. So plenty of good conversations to be had with good people and a lot of good stories that maybe you would relate to.

Adrian Garcia: And if you're listening to this on Spotify, apple Podcast, any other location, please leave us a review. We hope to earn those five stars. And I really have fun doing this podcast. I appreciate everybody that watches or listens and makes this what it is. And don't forget to check out HVAC nights every Thursday night.

Adrian Garcia: Me and Jake host a live podcast weekly, and you can also check out merch from my store, the HVAC Nights, the Nightwear, any of that@reliablehvcr.net. I also want to thank our sponsors that help keep this thing going. Jobber is our favorite CRM. I've tried different ones until finding jobber that kind of controls the chaos that it is running a business and still being in the field and trying to get all the billing, quoting, submitting everything that you need to do outside of the field.

Adrian Garcia: And with jobber, we do our maintenance contracts, we do our invoicing, our quoting, following up with customers to get reviews. That has helped our business a lot and. It offers website building and a whole bunch of AI features now baked in. And you can also do add-ons if you have any other software that you want.

Adrian Garcia: 'cause they do work with a lot of marketing tools and things AI receptionists and things like that. So check out jobber, refer yourself, see if it helps your business. You get a two week free trial and a special discount if you use the link down below. Veto Pro Pack is also a supporter and I can tell you right now, even though I see a bunch of competitors coming into the field, they are still hands down the best toll bags that you can buy.

Adrian Garcia: They are in investment. I understand that. But once you try one. Like I did back during COVID, you won't wanna use any other tool bag. And the thing is, they have so many products now that you can find the one that is perfect for you. So make sure to check out Vito Pro Pack at your supply house or go to vito pro pack.com.

Adrian Garcia: True Tech Tools has a lot of their stuff as well. Go check out their website to make sure that you can find the perfect bag for yourself. You won't regret it. And if you guys run your own business, have you heard of CallRail? They are a call tracking service to help you with marketing needs. One of the things that I've heard a lot of is how to get customers, how to get your name out when you're just starting your business.

Adrian Garcia: Call tracking and marketing is a big deal and it's helped us get our name out. And they also introduced this voice assist to help small businesses out when you can't hire or afford to hire a receptionist. Or even an office space to have this receptionist. So with CallRail in place, they can not only track your calls and tell you what advertisements you're using work or don't work, so you know where to spend your money backed by data and analytics.

Adrian Garcia: And if you're not online, you don't exist in today's world. But they also do this voice assist receptionist that can answer the calls. Whether you're off, you're after hours, weekends with your family holidays, whatever it is, you're on vacation, you want to take some time off, you still need someone to answer the phone.

Adrian Garcia: And in my opinion, in our experience, it's actually helped weed out the good customers from the bad. And, spam type of calls that we get, it actually does work. So if you guys want to check it out for yourself, make sure to check out callrail.com. I'll leave a link where you can get a free trial and try out.

Adrian Garcia: Either tracking or the voice Assist for yourself and see if you like it and if you can implement it in your business. But trust me, it's gonna help you guys quite a bit. Local HQ has been a big help in our marketing and SEO. So they have built our website, they have built our searchability, they have built our Google business profile, and without that, I don't think our phone honestly would've been ringing off the hook the way it is right now.

Adrian Garcia: We look professional, everything's in place for customers to find us online, and that is thanks to Local hq. They are a marketing company that is tailored to the trade. So if you want more information, check out the link below and mention to me or the Reliable Trades podcast and get two months of SEO four free.

Adrian Garcia: All right, Megan, welcome to the show. How are you?

Meagan McLoughlin: Good. Good. How are you, Adrian?

Adrian Garcia: Staying extremely busy. It, the work has been very crazy this year. We'll get into why I think that is, but if you can introduce yourself and what you do over at CallRail and what they do and provide for home businesses, home services.

Meagan McLoughlin: Yeah, absolutely. So nice to meet everyone on air. I'm Megan McLaughlin. I am the principal marketing manager over at CallRail for all of our like new products and stuff like that. And CallRail in general, I think has been around for a while. I think we're like. 15 years old at this point, but we started as like a call tracking and marketing attribution company.

Meagan McLoughlin: So if you are spending, marketing dollars on Google ads or billboards is probably a bad example, but whatever it might be, right? We tell you if it's working or not, and we give you the data behind it. So if I put a dollar in here, do I get $5 out?

Meagan McLoughlin: Kinda make it simple in that respect. And so we've been, building out AI products over the past couple of years. And most recently we relaunched an AI product that's called Voice Assist. And it's focused on like an AI voice agent that can be like a receptionist or like a, when I think about it for home services is like a dispatcher's assistant type of thing.

Meagan McLoughlin: Oh yeah. Not replacing anyone necessarily, but that's like our latest and greatest product and that's what I've been focused on quite a bit. And I think that's, how

Adrian Garcia: long have you been at CallRail?

Meagan McLoughlin: I've been at CallRail for I think three and a half years now. Okay. 'cause I was gonna

Adrian Garcia: ask if you've seen anything, because I think everything always goes back to COVID.

Adrian Garcia: I think after during that time. After that time. It's very different than from before then, where I think social media blew up. Online marketing, everybody's, online doing, everything now. And I feel like softwares like CallRail and, having a CRM, because we didn't have a CRM even to help us with invoicing and quoting.

Adrian Garcia: Before that time, I was doing everything paper and written, and it drove me nuts. That's, it drove me nuts because my, like my dad started this business and I've always been there behind the scenes. Even when I started, I was a helper, but I did all the. Documents, paperwork billing, collecting.

Adrian Garcia: He always sucked me with that. 'cause he was really good at, networking and turning wrenches, but he didn't know how to do all the computer, type of stuff or technology stuff. So I've always done that. And I love the, the switch now to take advantage of technology, which is, like I said, A CRM controls that chaos.

Adrian Garcia: And then now we're implementing marketing tactics or techniques with CallRail and just having a website, having SEO and I didn't know any of this stuff a few years ago, so now we're looking into it and I think it's helped a lot. Have you noticed that kind of change as well?

Adrian Garcia: Just, being with CallRail and I'm sure you've done similar work beforehand and the switch over to you have to be online, you have to keep up with technology, that kind of stuff.

Meagan McLoughlin: Oh yeah, definitely. I think, I mean I think that trend was happening even before then, but COVID exact amplified it.

Meagan McLoughlin: Amplified, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And if you think about during COVID, like you couldn't really use that word of mouth leverage that you probably once had. You're not like running people at the grocery store anymore. And so everyone's online that we knew. And I think especially as like newer generations come into play, like you gotta be wherever they are essentially.

Meagan McLoughlin: And spoil alert, like Gen Z's online

Adrian Garcia: it's weird because even me interviewing like 19-year-old technicians or people in the field. Because I've been doing this almost 20 years, which is always weird for me to say, but I've been doing it a long time. I've seen the trends and I will ask these younger kids, and we even have, we hired a few people now, so I've asked them too, where do you learn or how do you excel or, get more information.

Adrian Garcia: It's YouTube, that's a big one. Or TikTok or, social media. 'cause before it was like a Google search or, trying to find these things, trying to find manuals, paper, textbooks, all that. And now it's the Google search has turned into, oh, it's a YouTube search. Oh, it's a TikTok search, even at that, right?

Adrian Garcia: Those are big search engines that have taken over with this new generation. And if you're not online, you don't exist.

Meagan McLoughlin: Yeah. And in even in the past couple of months, it's been like, the TikTok and the YouTube are searches are still there, but now it's like a lot of them are just going to chat GBT, right?

Meagan McLoughlin: Oh

Adrian Garcia: I'm still learning that part.

Meagan McLoughlin: Yeah. Yeah. That's like the next kind of frontier. And one of the things that we think about, as like a marketing call, like a marketing attribution or tracking kind of company is can we tell you that someone searched in Chachi BT and then found your business and then oh and make sure it's surfaceable and stuff like that.

Meagan McLoughlin: And so

Adrian Garcia: I've heard of that. I didn't know that was a thing because someone said as far as like SEOs and being optimized and being searchable, that's been my focus this year and it's worked because a lot of our new customers have found us through a Google search or finding our website.

Adrian Garcia: You. They find us online that's all this here, that's all they've done is find us online. It's not word of mouth anymore. It's very weird because we relied on that so much in the past and it worked and it still works. But I always tell people, it's put yourself or look at what you do.

Adrian Garcia: I look at reviews. I look at searches myself, like when I want to go eat somewhere, I'm doing a Google search. I'm looking at reviews. I'm going through a list of things online. And if they have a website, even better if they have an Instagram page or a TikTok page, or I can see their food even better.

Adrian Garcia: So just look at yourself as a consumer, and that's how your customers are too.

Meagan McLoughlin: Yeah, I would say like myself as a consumer, I'm like, I don't see anything online. Or if I'm like cross referencing, platforms, I'm like, is this business real?

Adrian Garcia: Exactly. I always get upset when I don't find even a, like a Facebook that I'm like, you have to at least have a Facebook or Instagram or something to show what you offer.

Adrian Garcia: Because if not, you're like, is this business legit or does, do they just not? Are they not good? Something, you start thinking of other things because again, online presence I feel like is such a big thing now. And I've heard that before. As far as making yourself searchable and optimizing for chat, GBTI didn't even know that was a thing.

Adrian Garcia: I just heard that the other week and I was like, oh, okay now I gotta worry about something else. Yeah. Yeah, so did you know that another sponsor of the show at DiversiTech is probably in a lot of y'all's vans? They are the umbrella that is MasterCare Cleaners, Packard Parts Hill, more tools, fresh Air, UV swoosh, quick sling speed, clean assurity, and spin tools.

Adrian Garcia: I have almost something from all of those brands in my van ever since we've started. Packard is a big one for us as far as parts. They usually have something that we would need on a day-to-day basis. So the next time you're replacing parts, maybe look at the name and see if it's one of those. They are your one stop shop for everything hvac, and they have you covered for your everyday HVAC needs.

Meagan McLoughlin: There's always like a new thing, which is I think, probably hard to keep up with. I would assume as like you're like. In it day to day, right? In the thick of like actually going to people's businesses and like fixing like their HVAC and refrigeration. But then you're also a business owner, so it's like you're wearing two different caps and trying to be a marketer at the same time.

Meagan McLoughlin: So I really empathize with that. That's probably challenging. I can take you Yeah, I can take you through the wave of like how that's looked over 20 years. Because when I started, yeah. My dad, came, started the business out of he started all the legal stuff, got everything in place, and then he had to leave his job.

Adrian Garcia: That was a whole like complicated issue. Just one day he had to leave. So they didn't appre, they didn't like that he had a, I guess 'cause it's always been frowned upon if you wanna start your own business because obviously you're working somewhere and then you leave and you start your own business.

Adrian Garcia: So that, that was a whole situation that he found himself in. So he started. A lot sooner than he anticipated. He just, he's okay, we're gonna do it. We're gonna start. He gave me a name. I had to figure out the logos. The uniforms. He's I need business cards. I was like, okay, cool.

Adrian Garcia: Let me design something. So all that fell on me. So I've been doing the marketing is what I've been trying to tell people, since we started.

Meagan McLoughlin: Yeah.

Adrian Garcia: And there's always been, legibility, does it pop, does it, is it unique? Do people remember it? Those are things that we've always tried to do.

Adrian Garcia: And it started with handing out business cards, handing out. And my dad knew that he wanted to stand out. And I was like, yeah, for sure. We did like brochures, we did, something that stood out instead of just business cards. And we went, we did commercial, but we went business to business. I went to several restaurants, dropped these things off in person, talked to the manager, get, get up.

Adrian Garcia: A feel for their personality, you gotta buddy with them. You gotta make them feel comfortable. All that is how we started. And word of mouth helped a lot back in the day, but then we started seeing a shift halfway through that where every customer we had, 'cause we were still doing paper invoices, collecting checks, all that kind of stuff.

Adrian Garcia: And they were transitioning to online where I had to be in a system, in a portal. And, they had their own online systems to dispatch work and be billed and pay and all that. And my dad was super old school. We had to keep up with the technology part of it.

Adrian Garcia: So I've seen the trends and stuff change where it's it's word of mouth, it's, handing stuff out in person. And now it's do you have a nice website? Do you have a. The vans, the van wraps are a big one for us too. Uhhuh, when back then we didn't really emphasize the wraps and, getting the wraps out, getting the website up.

Adrian Garcia: Ha. We have somebody that does our website, does our SEO now, and I can tell you it's working because every day now I get random numbers calling and they leave messages and it's be, we are using a, it's a different number to track so that we know that it came from online. Yeah. Ver versus our old number.

Adrian Garcia: I'm like, oh, these are all new customers. These are all finding us through an online search.

Meagan McLoughlin: Yeah. I, there's so much, I think room to grow is what you learn from going into, it's almost, you're almost expanding channels, right? Like you're word of mouth is a channel. Even like having a van wrap is a channel in itself, right?

Meagan McLoughlin: Yeah. Oh, it works. It works

Adrian Garcia: a lot too. Especially when you start, I would say word of mouth and van wraps are your biggest, way to get your word out, but you need to, grow and learn. And like you said, you take advantage of all these other channels because that's not you're missing out on so many opportunities if you don't put yourself out there.

Adrian Garcia: And as many, platforms or areas where they can find you. Like they're looking everywhere.

Meagan McLoughlin: And then, are you guys doing anything on like a paid search sort of listing? So like Google Ads or even local service ads are like the newest, not newest, but are like a popular thing. I think among,

Adrian Garcia: see that's what I've been talking with other guys because it's a lot of it has to do with the kind of service you provide and doing, in my field, doing residential versus like commercial.

Adrian Garcia: So I've been around a lot of commercial guys for a long time. I've tried the paid ads before, but I recently with the help from CallRail. I do want to get back into that solely, if anything. 'cause my whole thing is before when I tried the paid ads, it didn't work because, we don't need the average homeowner to find us.

Adrian Garcia: We need like restaurant owners people that manage hospitals, stuff like that. And the percentage is very small when you throw out these local ads on online. But again, things have changed. So back then I didn't see a point in it. So we stopped doing that. My whole thing now, because I've talked now with residential companies, people that manage any and all home service businesses.

Adrian Garcia: They spend a ton of money on marketing a month and they're like, if you're not spending this money, you're not seeing results. That is a big thing right now. So if there's anybody, commercial listening, and there's a lot of them that I, that do watch or listen and I talk to regular regularly, my whole thing is I'm not using these or I'm not going to use these online ads for, to get 50 customers or whatever it is.

Adrian Garcia: 'cause I don't do residential. But I think online presence is a big deal right now. So I want to be known in my area, in my city, oh we've seen them everywhere. We've seen them online, we've seen their logo plastered or just in ads. I think online presence is super important and just being well known.

Adrian Garcia: And also we've been around almost 20 years and I feel like people probably. Don't even know that we exist in our own area because, we just run around and do work here and there. We don't advertise and I want to change that. I think, like I said, online presence is a big deal and you can do that with like these tactics of online marketing or ads.

Meagan McLoughlin: Yeah. And a tip for you if you are gonna dip your toes back in. So those Google ads and those local service ads are expensive. Yeah. Like you pay for the customers. But I think to your point, like it's huge growth lever, right? You can pull it at any time, put some money in and you get the customers out, which is nice.

Meagan McLoughlin: But there's like a couple of things that you probably wanna think about one, which might be helpful for you. Local service ads. It's basically, when you search like HVAC near me and like Google's like right near me. It's like really pushing you to say that. That gives you a local service ad.

Meagan McLoughlin: If it is not a qualified lead, like you can tell Google essentially, and then they don't charge you for it, which is great. Oh, okay. And I'll plug like a quick CallRail, like we do things like lead qualification or like lead scoring. And so you can probably identify quickly which are the bad ones and which ones you can say, Hey, Google gives me my money back.

Meagan McLoughlin: Which is nice. And then we also tend to connect voice assist to a lot of these paid ad features because if you're gonna pay for a customer to come in, you gotta answer that call, right? I think it's always important to answer a call. Like any silence is essentially expensive, right?

Meagan McLoughlin: If you miss the call, you miss the job and you're paying to generate those leads at least. So then you're in the red if you're missing those. That's a good opportunity to plug in like an AI voice agent, whether it's from CallRail or another business or something like that.

Adrian Garcia: Yeah I've actually been excited for the AI receptionist and everybody's against AI in general, especially in the trades, but it, unless you use it, you don't understand like how it can be helpful or it can benefit and you can set it up, the way it works or the way you would want it to work and the way you would want to implement it in your business because it can't at the moment stand alone.

Adrian Garcia: You still have to interject you, you're still gonna, make those phone calls and callbacks and follow up and do all that kind of stuff. You still have to do that. It's just helping you when you're tied up. And that's how we are, we're using it in our business.

Meagan McLoughlin: Yeah, I couldn't agree with that more.

Meagan McLoughlin: I feel like, I actually feel like you guys are really lucky. Like I think HVAC and refrigeration techs are like safe compared to anyone else. Like no skilled trade, is ever gonna be really replaced by ai. But I think like it can help with the administrative drag, right? Or like just peace of mind, right?

Meagan McLoughlin: If you're missing calls while you're out on the job and like what we see is actually 85% of people don't end up calling back. Maybe you call 'em back and you recover that lead, but especially maybe for like maybe the residential hvac, they probably go down the list and they're like, Hey, like my ACS out and it's a hundred degrees.

Meagan McLoughlin: Someone's gotta get here. And then I think there's also the element of like after hours or if you're spending time with your family or you're like gonna pick your kid up at school or something like that. Like you don't wanna like sacrifice that time. And just have AI do that instead.

Meagan McLoughlin: So it's not like replacing anyone in a lot of respects right now. No. And so for a small business, because we've been, we've always been like a three man, four man operation. Like I said, we just started hiring, so that's gonna expand barely this year. It's always been my dad and my brother with me.

Adrian Garcia: And then we had one other technician that we onboarded, a few years ago. So as a small business and the ups and downs that we've had, and in the beginning, hiring too, ma too many people not being able to pay all those people. Like we've struggled and learned the hard way how to run a business.

Adrian Garcia: And so I feel for, small businesses and if you're a small business, can you afford to hire a receptionist, like in person? And maybe that phone doesn't ring right? You don't have. Recurring income. You don't have the phone ringing off the hook. You don't have the business to keep them busy. You might have them doing something else as well, but as a receptionist, they're, you might not have enough work or be able to pay one or afford one, let alone the office building that you need to rent out or whatever to have them there.

Adrian Garcia: Because I can tell you from experience, we tried a few times to have an office and then we figured out, we're just running around all day. We're never in the office. So that was a wasted expense in my situation. So we don't have a physical location at the moment. Now that we're expanding, we're looking into it.

Adrian Garcia: But if it's just me, my brother, my dad, we didn't need a place to meet up. We could just meet up at my dad's house. Like it wasn't, there was nothing that we needed a physical office for. So here comes AI receptionist and. I will say, 'cause I do want to get into, I've just been busy showing on my channel like how good this thing can be.

Adrian Garcia: So I do wanna do some test calls and show everybody, so if you're listening or watching, we're gonna get to that. There are some bad ones and there are some good ones. So I've been pitched before the the chat GBT ones that just robot, robot answers and, but they're, CallRail has a good one that, that sounds natural and you can scripted or have it set up the way you need to.

Adrian Garcia: But for me, again, not being able to afford someone there to answer the phone all day not being able to even afford an office space. That's where something like this helps a small business tremendously. Because like you said, if I miss a, if I miss a call, they call somebody else. What? What I've learned, I just want to quickly say, what I've learned is the customers that leave a message with our AI will or are serious customers, the ones that don't leave a message, almost every time I try to call back, they're either trying to sell me something or it's something completely not in our scope of work.

Adrian Garcia: If they want something windows or something else, I'm like, I don't, or cabinets. I'm like, we don't do that. It does weed out good and bad customers and it does a pretty good job because if a customer immediately hangs up or doesn't want to talk to it, it's typically, like I said, spam or scams or people just cold calling for different things and, even if they don't like it, they've left us a message, can I please talk to somebody? And then the AI will relay that message to you and then you're like, oh, okay. I need to call this person back and, talk to them. And I've, that's how I've worked the AI receptionist into our business and we've had good luck with it.

Adrian Garcia: And we've onboarded some customers from those calls.

Meagan McLoughlin: Yeah, that's great to hear. And I actually never get to see the other side of the coin of oh, this person hung up on the ai what's going on there? So it's good to hear that those are often like, not the good leads anyway, but

Adrian Garcia: like what I've heard from others is 'cause other people have used like different ones, they only go back and call the local numbers, right?

Adrian Garcia: So that's what I've tried to do. 'cause if it's like a weird area code, like obviously we're not even dealing with that area, or it's a 800 number or something like that, but these, I don't know what you call 'em, like telemarketers, like people that, that sell stuff. They've gotten so good to where now they're using what do you call that?

Adrian Garcia: Like the fake numbers? Like they can generate like a local number. Oh yeah.

Meagan McLoughlin: I get like a bunch from my area code where I grew up because that's like where my phone is. It's always like one number different from my phone number. And I'm like, I know.

Adrian Garcia: And it's not it's just a number t it's just a tactic that they use to, for you to answer the phone and they're com from completely, somewhere else and Oh yeah, that's what we've seen a lot.

Adrian Garcia: So it's I'll call the local numbers back and I'll see if it's even a real person and go from there. But like for the most part, if they need service and they like us, because like I said, our, you need to have everything in place, like your professional website reviews, your Google business profile is a big one for us this year.

Adrian Garcia: If they see all that, they're going to want you because they, when I've called back and they left messages, they really want us to do the work. They're willing to leave a message and wait for us to call back. And I've even had some that complain, oh man, I don't know this and that, but we want you to do the work.

Adrian Garcia: We want you to do the work. We, because I think everything else has been so professional and it just looks good. Your brand looks good that they still want you.

Meagan McLoughlin: Yeah. And I think it's a, I know everyone would rather talk to a human than ai. I am, I'm not contesting that at all, but I think it's like, at least someone picked up the phone and I feel like I'm getting my message over to them or what I need done.

Meagan McLoughlin: And I think we've seen a lot of this is actually like it, a lot of our home services customers have picked up on using like these voice assistance and stuff like that. And a lot of them say alright I'm gonna collect, this, and this. From someone, maybe it's like their location, their timeline, like what they need done.

Meagan McLoughlin: They could even send us a picture, whatever it might be. Some we can send them a job or like booking link or something like that. And then they they know, Hey, this person's looking for windows. This person's not even I don't even, I shouldn't even bother calling this person back, right?

Meagan McLoughlin: Or this is out of my area. Which actually, like the agent should know at that point. Hey, like we actually don't service outside of, this park Texas or something like that. But yeah, it does like a lot of cool stuff and we've been trying to make it easier and easier to use just because.

Meagan McLoughlin: We don't expect anyone to be like an AI expert. Like you guys got Yeah. Other things to worry about. And so we're like, give us your website and I looked at your website, it's great. We're like, let me, let us quickly train on it. And, you can edit anything that you want, but that's basically the brain, of like your new assistant or something like that.

Meagan McLoughlin: And just making it as easy as possible to kinda get up and running. Yeah. And these AI things do pretty well because it knows, the kind of work that you do and you can like you said, train it and it knows your area. It knows, it knows, it also knows what questions to ask because obviously the only thing you want a receptionist to do, whether it's a person or ai, is take their information down and what's the complaint like, so that we know if we can, he help them out.

Adrian Garcia: So like I've had good luck with it and. I recently just had one the other day that was it was like a, what do you call it, like an agency type of deal, because again, we deal with commercial. So this was somebody that handled a chain of restaurants. So they weren't from here, and they called us, but they left a message with the ai.

Adrian Garcia: And the AI was asking it like, what city specifically do you need service in because it's an outta town number. And they listed the cities and I'm like, oh, okay. I know those. And it they just said they were handling bas, they were basically the middleman for the restaurant that has like 20 stores here, but they were looking for somebody to service.

Adrian Garcia: So I got a lot of information, off of that phone call that the AI took from them. What cities do they need service in? What kind of work do they need? Leave all your contact info, basic stuff. And what I forgot to mention is it's really. Convenient even to be checking, because I check it at work.

Adrian Garcia: I get requests all the time and it comes in. Yeah. And I'm able to check them because you get the recording now. I've had a few that were a little too long for me to listen to, but you get a transcript as well. You can just skim through it and read and see if it's anything that you need to address or call back.

Adrian Garcia: So it's not just like a recording. It's a and I think it, it's an AI summarization as well too, right?

Meagan McLoughlin: Yeah. We do a summary and then we basically have the AI fill out a form type of thing. So I actually made you a demo line if you ever wanna try it based on your website and stuff, I need to, I, I kind of wanna show

Adrian Garcia: on on video how that works and have people hear it for themselves.

Meagan McLoughlin: Yeah, we can do that. But I looked at, when I was setting it up for you, I just looked at like the form field that you have on your website and I was like, ask them all of these questions and like that. Probably what you use on any like web leads, right? That come in. So if that's the information you want out of anybody, like just have the AI asset and it fills it out for you and it can send it over to your CM or your inbox or really like wherever you want.

Meagan McLoughlin: And then also you get the transcript and the summary and the recording. But I always think of those as like deeper dive, yeah. Like it's

Adrian Garcia: super helpful. Yeah.

Meagan McLoughlin: Yeah.

Adrian Garcia: It's super helpful. 'cause I can't always listen, I might be on a job site and I'm just like skimming through and seeing if I need to, step aside and call them back again.

Adrian Garcia: It's just you're, if you're in the trades, in, in any trade, electricians, we do hvac any trade, you are most likely still in the field. There you're, unless you've grown to a certain number. And you run a bigger business, you're still in the field. That's how all small businesses run.

Adrian Garcia: The owner is still working. Yeah. So if you're out there and you need, you can't be on the phone all day, I can't be on, on the computer all day. I can't, it's just not possible. It's hard for me to even just sit down for five minutes. So it's just difficult. And this is just another tool to help you as a CRM would help you with your invoicing, quoting, scheduling, you don't wanna be doing all that yourself.

Adrian Garcia: You can have something in place. And this is where I believe in the trades, like AI can be helpful, is like giving you data, which is the other aspect of CallRail, right? Giving you data for your marketing and ads and answering the phone. I think that's the perfect blend right there for, AI to be helpful to to a small business.

Adrian Garcia: Or a big business. So something that I've been doing more now as we expand and hire people is training. Something that I've dealt with in the past is dealing with customers and their weird complaints where we can get help on those two fronts is actually the software called a Live Switch. Now, live Switch actually helped a lot of big sporting events, so they have a very capable system in place to where they handle a lot of things during COVID for your N-B-A-N-F-L, WWE E, whenever they had those virtual fans, that was Live Switch.

Adrian Garcia: They also helped with the nine one one call where they can have these video calls and different ways of phoning in an emergency and now they are. Helping out home service businesses because the guy that actually runs it ran a home service business himself and actually knows the difficulties and tasks as a business owner, employees and all that.

Adrian Garcia: That comes with it. You need something that does more than just a FaceTime call. With Live Switch, you can do these video calls to any device that has a browser built in and it is just a link that the customer or one of your technicians clicks on. Once you click on that link, you get end-to-end video. So if you're interested and you want to check out Live Switch for yourself, make sure to check out the link down below.

Adrian Garcia: And I think this is a game changer and there is so much other things that I just have not even scratched the surface on. It has a lot of AI built into it. It is just meant to make this experience with your employees and technicians or your customers seamless. And just a better experience for both sides

Meagan McLoughlin: to the conversation we were having earlier about, if you're trying to grow your business and you're marketing out there, like you're paying for those leads, right? And so you gotta make sure like

Adrian Garcia: you're

Meagan McLoughlin: not dropping the ball at the end of it, right? Like those were expensive.

Adrian Garcia: Look, let me just interject my dad. Okay? So I know that this has always been like a, or I've heard a thing not to do.

Adrian Garcia: My dad has his personal number as the work number. He never made a separate line. That's just, how he started it. And I can tell you because like you mentioned earlier, you want your off time, you want your weekends, you want everything, right? You don't want to be answering the phone all day, right?

Adrian Garcia: I can tell you my dad was horrible to where I even had customers telling me about answering the phone. He would not want to answer the phone. And then I would get people telling me, oh, we're gonna, we need service. And it's like somebody I run into and a Home Depot or wherever I run into people, they see me in a uniform.

Adrian Garcia: Oh, I'm gonna call I got the number. I'm gonna call this and that. I tell my dad, he is oh, okay. My dad's I don't know. I don't know if they called or not. Like he doesn't answer numbers. He doesn't know either. Now he's just gotten older to where he doesn't want to answer those calls that is lost leads.

Adrian Garcia: And I it drove me nuts for a while and I'm like, you know what? We need to implement this AI receptionist because I don't know how many calls you just sent to voicemail and they went somewhere else.

Meagan McLoughlin: Yeah, and call tracking helps on that too. If you wanna, if you want a call log right.

Meagan McLoughlin: Where you can actually see what's happening.

Adrian Garcia: Oh, I know. Now I can see all the calls. Yeah.

Meagan McLoughlin: Yeah.

Adrian Garcia: I don't have to rely on him to tell me did they call or not. 'cause he would tell me, no, I don't think they called. I'm like, they probably did, and you send them the voicemail.

Meagan McLoughlin: That's actually funny.

Adrian Garcia: Yeah. So that, that has been a big thing for me is I'm actually able to steal all the calls now.

Meagan McLoughlin: Yeah. Yeah.

Adrian Garcia: So I know.

Meagan McLoughlin: Yeah, and I, we were talking about COVID before too, and I was also thinking about yeah, COVID was like a thing, but then we're like in this weird AI boom and like cultural shift and everybody's trying to figure out, we all, at least in, are told we should be using ai, let's say and there's gonna be winners and losers and stuff like that.

Meagan McLoughlin: And so I think if you think about the.com or like the website boom, back in the day and like how it's evolved, like you don't have a website or Google my business listing or LSAs now, like local service ads, like you're just starting to miss out and what does that look like for AI in the future?

Meagan McLoughlin: Like I think it's, there's a defensive mechanism too, right? Of making sure that you get every lead that you have, but also other businesses are starting to use this. So

Adrian Garcia: look, let me just say if you're especially, 'cause we had a. I had a live stream last night about somebody starting their business and we were talking about like marketing and how that, plays into just the work that you get because they were just starting out.

Adrian Garcia: We've been doing this for 20 years and I had a lot of people in the chat saying, it also depends on where you're at. So you do need to look at your competition. So if somebody's in California, you're gonna have a ton of competition in these big cities. So you can bet that those companies are doing everything in their power to have online marketing and all these ads and everything.

Adrian Garcia: Like they're gonna, they're gonna push everybody out if they can just have their brand everywhere. And if you're not doing it, they are, your competitors are doing it.

Meagan McLoughlin: Oh, totally. And I feel you might know this better than I do, but I feel like a lot of professional services businesses like.

Meagan McLoughlin: They're starting to get bought up by investors or like private equity firms. And if you see it in dental, you start to see all these chains or like vets I went to go bring my dog to a vet the other day and I was like, I want a small business to do this as teams. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Meagan McLoughlin: Weird. But I think I'm starting to see it in HVACs, I don't know if anybody's ever approached you or anything like that, but like those big businesses or those like PE backed firms, like they all now have like marketing teams and call centers and it's a different playing field when you're up against them too.

Meagan McLoughlin: So like being, that's,

Adrian Garcia: yeah, that's a good way to put it. It's, you're trying to, even the playing field is, you'll get left behind. I like, I'm sorry because you bring up that I have been approached several times Oh really? To if Yeah. Is there any cash? Yeah. And I've even had one that was like super nice to me, never brought it up.

Adrian Garcia: And then they're like. Because I think they were coming down here like they were local to Texas. Yeah. And they, and I was just like, I dunno, I don't have time, this and that. And then they were like if you ever want I also buy businesses. If you ever want to looking a way, looking for a way out or want to sell.

Adrian Garcia: And I'm like, oh no. I was like, I'm, we're never meeting. I'm good. Yeah. That's probably, yeah. That's crazy. So my whole thing just personally is, we run a small business. My dad started this was his dream, his goal, and he wanted to pass it on. So I've gone into it. I love what I do and I have kids and I would like to leave them with something.

Adrian Garcia: So that's always my goal. Just on a personal note. Yeah. But yes, I've seen so many of these companies being bought up. I, it is a little scary, especially 'cause I'm from a small town in Texas. Like it's grown a lot in the past couple of years just because we're so close to the border of Mexico.

Adrian Garcia: We've always had shoppers from Mexico. Yeah. We've always had a lot of business booming and now construction is booming and buildings are being put up, like there, there's a ton going on here. So it's grown a lot and it's a little scary because all the businesses that we started up with or that were that small, when we were small or when we started, I'm starting to see all these stickers on the back that they're partnered with or owned by, or a part of this national company that I know and I'm like, oh, they've got bought up.

Adrian Garcia: And I've starting to see that with a lot of these older companies now. Yeah, everybody's goal is different. If you want to build it up and sell it, that's on you. But it's a little scary when a lot of big businesses have this basically monopoly on all these other small, like this whole area could be 10 different companies, but owned by the same company.

Adrian Garcia: You know what I mean?

Meagan McLoughlin: Yeah. And that, we're like, Colorado's like mostly small businesses. That's where we focus all of our efforts on. And that's why it's so important, I think, to us to make some of these things easy and affordable.

Adrian Garcia: Yes. Because

Meagan McLoughlin: doing the math when you were talking about hiring a receptionist earlier and I was like, the cost of this in a month isn't even the cost of a receptionist in a day.

Meagan McLoughlin: Say they work like a,

Adrian Garcia: yeah.

Meagan McLoughlin: Nine to five, let's say at like minimum wage ish type of thing.

Adrian Garcia: And I'm not saying that eventually you don't need a physical person to handle everything. Like I would love to have somebody in the office greeting people and calling people like throughout the day just to check up on them.

Adrian Garcia: You do need, you might need that eventually. I'm not saying it doesn't, you don't need that, but when you start or when you can't afford it, I think this is a really good way to go around it. Or if you never want a physical office, this is a good way to, to work around that is, is there's another option versus, you answering the phone all day and that again it, it's a lot of it's happening here too, where you see these big businesses and them taking over.

Adrian Garcia: And I've seen some move down here that I've never seen before, but I knew they were from up north and they're trying to get into the space just because I've said it's like booming here now. Yeah. And I'm like, man, I've never seen that company here. And now all of a sudden they're here and they're trying to, plant their feet here and take some business.

Adrian Garcia: So that is what, that is part of why I've pushed this year for marketing. Because if anything, even if it brings me no new customers, if anything, I'm trying to just make sure people know us and brand awareness be searchable, be found, be known.

Meagan McLoughlin: Yeah. Yeah. But I thought you laid out like the steps to grow your business quite nicely.

Meagan McLoughlin: 'cause even if you're a small firm, you could use something like this and then hopefully you get to the good problems of oh, I actually need like a human to do the complex things and that aren't like, the same things that you can automate day in and day out in a lot of senses.

Meagan McLoughlin: But then like at a certain point you probably need like a dispatcher, right? Or you need someone optimizing routes, so you're like not driving across town. Yeah. Stuff like that. But yeah, the steps to grow out. Your businesses are like cool and interesting, but also I think I heard you say earlier that you were like looking to expand your scope of your business too, and like how's that been going for you?

Adrian Garcia: Just expanding in general? It is, so I had some good advice from a guy that I always have to give him credit. 'cause I had him on the show a couple years ago and for us HVAC is the busiest during the summer. So like in the summer you feel like you need to hire five people like it, that always happens.

Adrian Garcia: And he's you want to you really want to evaluate yourself during like your slower season and when it, when there's downtime it can, you afford to hire, you know that many people. So that's what we've done. And we've hired three guys this year because we absolutely needed it. And again, we're just trying to put things into place to where my dad can take a backseat again, like offloading from his number to, this AI thing and me trying to market, me, trying to, do everything on the back end.

Adrian Garcia: And we've just, we've done really well. And again, I just don't wanna lose any of that momentum. So I'm trying to make sure that everything's done or set in place for that. And that includes, the wraps, the website, the marketing, that, that does play a part into it. Because if we'd just stop getting phone calls it's gonna be bad for us.

Adrian Garcia: So we've expanded, thankfully it's been busy and we've implemented a structure of how we wanna grow. We have a plan. We have, this, foresee in the foreseeable future, we want this many people and this many vans out there. And as long as we can, my, my main thing, 'cause my, and it's funny 'cause my dad still handles, so the way I forgot to mention the way we run our AI receptionists is it only handles new customers.

Adrian Garcia: Yeah. That is my thing with it right now is I would like it to just handle new customers, weed 'em out so I know who to call back. I know who's serious about work and who I need to talk to after that, if they request it or if, I can offer it, I will give them my work number so that they can check in with us, call in with us, we can check in with them.

Adrian Garcia: Do all the personal stuff that you need to do. So that, there's different, like I said, there's different workarounds. If you want to use the AI only for new customers, that's how we use it to get information to get that first initial job scheduled. And then they get to meet us and then we get to, to maintain that customer afterwards.

Adrian Garcia: So that's the way we've implemented it. And then just trying to put these things into place and 'cause the other, oh, what I was gonna say is my dad the other day was like, we've been busy, like crazy busy.

Meagan McLoughlin: Yeah

Adrian Garcia: we've been lucky.

Meagan McLoughlin: That's good. We're going into the winter. I feel like what you were saying is

Adrian Garcia: we've been lucky.

Adrian Garcia: Yeah. I don't take it for granted. My dad the other day or lately, 'cause I've had some lunches with him to have these meetings and stuff that about what were you plan on doing every time his phone rings, every time he gets a text, for, and it's basically like our older customers, like they need service.

Adrian Garcia: He like throws his phone and he throws himself back. Oh. Then he's that won't stop calling me. I'm like, more work. They need more stuff done. And that's what I'm trying to avoid with, putting these automations into place. Yeah. Because you don't wanna be frustrated especially on the weekends.

Adrian Garcia: So that, that's that, that made me laugh when we were having lunch together. 'cause he's just Yeah he's, it's a good frustration. It's a good problem to have. We just, it the phone has been ring ringing off the hook.

Meagan McLoughlin: I was gonna say, that's a great problem. That's the problem everybody's trying to look to have in a lot of sense.

Adrian Garcia: And I've had people in my chat tell me that a lot of people are starting their own business, in the past couple years. And they're doing it younger and younger, which is great to see if that's their ambition, that's their desire. By all means, do it. It's not for everybody.

Adrian Garcia: It is, especially the first few years you're gonna do a lot. But they've they've asked about like how to get calls, how to, how to get work, get customers. A lot of it is hustling and a lot of it is putting yourself out there, which we've. We've harped on in this episode here is just putting yourself out there and eventually, after you put so much into it, eventually that phone will start ringing.

Meagan McLoughlin: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that phone starts ringing. You answer that calls and then you need something like call rail too. You practice with leads. Yeah. But I couldn't agree more. I think the time is also right for a lot of these young folks to step in and start up new businesses.

Meagan McLoughlin: Like I think you can see generationally I think there was like a slow to write like new people in the, in that trade and stuff like that. And so it's good to see that that's starting to pay up. There might've

Adrian Garcia: been like a gap.

Meagan McLoughlin: Yeah.

Adrian Garcia: But lately, 19 year olds are looking to get themselves set up to That's awesome.

Adrian Garcia: They have this five year plan or whatever it is to, get licensed and get a start a business. So I've always mentioned this, but like at 20 years old, I was not spending my money wisely. I was not investing in myself. I was not as driven as some of these kids now, which is great to see.

Adrian Garcia: And I always tell 'em they're way ahead of where I was at that age.

Meagan McLoughlin: Yeah, good for them. Good for them. And hopefully they're using like you can use things like, or Gemini to be like, Hey, like what do I do next in starting a business? There's all types of way to use ai, which I think can benefit them in a cool way, which I'm excited to see, the next generation, what they're gonna do with it.

Meagan McLoughlin: 'cause Oh yeah. Again, like it's not replacing a lot of stuff at this point in time. I don't think any time really for HVAC and refrigeration, but just. Life easier, right? Or the first draft of everything easier.

Adrian Garcia: Oh, yeah. Being as a tradesperson, you have a responsibility to, to fix things, install things, or maintenance whatever kind of work that you do.

Adrian Garcia: And that, that is one of the reasons that, that I like doing what I do is being able to solve problems and fix things. And the customers are always super happy once you get them, taken care of, whether you're doing a residential call you help a family that is freezing, they need that heat.

Adrian Garcia: Or in the middle of summer they eat that AC or in my situation, it's a big restaurant or a supermarket that has a ton of product. And as soon as that freezer goes down, that's a lot of money. That can go bad. So how do you

Meagan McLoughlin: handle like an urgent situation like that? Because they're like, I'm assuming they're on the phone.

Meagan McLoughlin: They're like, I have a million dollars with the product if you don't come here.

Adrian Garcia: So we've learned from trying to do too much. So we, I will stay away from supermarkets. I will not work for, Walmart or any of those anymore. We used to do a lot of convenience stores that were open 24 7. We will not do that anymore.

Adrian Garcia: So we've been very fortunate to be picky now where Yeah, we have a certain niche, which is like fast food restaurants and local restaurants to where it's manageable. And the only thing is now I have people that we hire that I can send. So that's a plus. Yeah. Yeah. But I used to be the one in the middle of the night going to these calls.

Adrian Garcia: Yes, that does happen. But you, once you figure out a structure and a way to run your business it works itself out. Like you, that's why I said earlier, anybody starting, you're gonna do a lot those first few years. Yeah. Just to build up your name, your reputation the scope of work, like everything that you can put together so that later you can be a little bit pickier.

Adrian Garcia: You can just have your name to, to rely on, that kind of stuff. You build it up that's how we've done it.

Meagan McLoughlin: Yeah. I was talking to someone else in, I think like residential, hvac, or maybe it was plumbing or something, and they were telling me about what a customer thinks is urgent for them versus what they think is urgent.

Meagan McLoughlin: And there's often a different definition. And I was like helping them set up voices so that they can, like voices can discern who thinks I was gonna say we,

Adrian Garcia: we do need that kind of distinction in the AI thing. Yeah,

Meagan McLoughlin: which is helpful. And like they have people that are on call, but they don't wanna be woken up in the middle of the night for, something.

Meagan McLoughlin: Because

Adrian Garcia: even for us, if we could train the ai, I haven't dove too much into it, I just haven't, I looked at it, I have it set up to just, like I said, take information. But yeah, I haven't looked into training it, but if it could 'cause we know our customers, we know the equipment and I know certain customers have the big walk-in coolers.

Adrian Garcia: Yeah, I know they have two of them. And typically if one goes out, they move the stuff over temporarily and then we can get there in the morning or whatever it is. So there, there's some situations where, like my dad mentioned, 'cause he works on like the cooking and like the fryers and stuff. Yeah. And they try to put in a call that they want the fourth fryer fixed and he's you got three other ones that is not an emergency call.

Adrian Garcia: I'm not going out right now. So there are things that. Maybe a AI receptionist can distinguish oh, that's not an emergency. We can book you next, next morning, whatever it is. AC calls. So residential guys, I think one of them told me yesterday like, we don't get 24 7 or we don't give 24 7 service because typically they can wait till the next day or whatever it is.

Adrian Garcia: There is emergency calls and non emer, non-emergency and you it's good to dis distinguish that because that's one of the reasons why we implemented. 'cause my dad didn't, my dad was trying to be the cheapest one out there when we started, and he built it up.

Adrian Garcia: He got it. We're, we've been in business 20 years, it worked, but I wanted to not only raise the prices, but also implement like overtime fees and stuff to deter people from calling us in the middle of the night. For something that can wait till the next day. So we've tried to. Fix that in our business too, because that used to be the thing you would see other companies slap on a sticker on their van 24 7 service.

Adrian Garcia: But that's a big mistake. 'cause then they'll call you in the middle of the night for something that could wait.

Meagan McLoughlin: Yeah. Yeah. And I think if you're calling someone at 1:00 AM or coming out or something, like you guys deserve the overtime and whatnot too. But

Adrian Garcia: yeah, I, yeah, I've told 'em like, it's gonna, it's gonna cost you and some of them are okay with it and I'm like, I guess it's worth it.

Adrian Garcia: And, we get paid the overtime. But for the most part, the reason why we implement even the CRM that we have, or CallRail or I'm trying to work with, I'm trying to work with a lot of software this year just to have our business more automated is because I want to be free on the weekend.

Adrian Garcia: That is my time with my kids. That is my time to, to do whatever we want to do. Celebrate things, go out, be home for dinner. We have dinners every day. Like I want that time away from my phone and my business. Now I will always answer if need be, but I would like for other things to handle that and be, not be so tied to the business after hours.

Meagan McLoughlin: Yeah. Time with your family I think is sacred, especially if your kids are growing up and like they're changing before your eyes, right? Oh, that's

Adrian Garcia: crazy.

Meagan McLoughlin: Yeah. But my son is

Adrian Garcia: almost taller than I am and he is like in sixth grade, it's a weird, they've grown so much

Meagan McLoughlin: basketball player or something.

Adrian Garcia: Oh. I told him he's gonna be the tallest kid in my family because he I think is growing quicker than I did. Yeah. Wow. And that we just took him to the doctor for something and he's in the top, I always forget how to word this top 90% or something of his. For his height. Height of his age. So she is yeah he's taller than most.

Adrian Garcia: I'm like, I know.

Meagan McLoughlin: Yeah. Yeah. Went through a big growth spurt maybe, but Yeah, no I agree. Family time's important.

Adrian Garcia: Is there a way, 'cause the only thing that I've noticed is when people call and they're stubborn, that they want to talk to somebody, is there a way for it to reroute the call to you?

Adrian Garcia: If it's urgent? Yeah. Okay. I need to look into that.

Meagan McLoughlin: And it could be like conditional too. It's like urgent and mentions these things, otherwise tell them they can't transfer. Oh, okay. You know what I mean?

Adrian Garcia: Yeah. I haven't, like I said I have played with it, set it up, and I haven't gone into dive into it.

Adrian Garcia: Yeah, because we're like, just because I've noticed. Yeah. Just 'cause I've noticed that when they're like. The, I see the transcript and it's I need to talk to a representative, and they just keep repeating that over and they're like, the AI is I can't help you.

Meagan McLoughlin: Yeah. Usually the way that we'll set it up is we'll be like, Hey, like in order to transfer you to the right person and see if they're available we need this information out of you.

Meagan McLoughlin: And basically that qualifies them to be able to be transferred out. Oh, okay. And you can transfer to different, say you had an on-call staff or something like that, like you can transfer to different people at different times or different,

Adrian Garcia: see, that's what I liked about CallRail because your call tracking your call your num, your generated numbers, you can route them to whoever you need to route them to.

Adrian Garcia: Because that was when I was going through the demo and stuff like that. That was a neat feature because you have these numbers that you're trying to obviously track and you're trying to you can track a billboard, you can track a wrap, you can track, you can make. As many numbers as you want to see where it came from.

Adrian Garcia: So if it came from an online ad, you'll see those, that number what it generates and so on and so forth. But you can also forward those or reroute those to maybe the on-call technician or, whoever needs to answer that phone at that time. And you can I think you can even schedule it like certain hours or some, something like that.

Adrian Garcia: Yeah.

Meagan McLoughlin: Yeah. And like you said, you were like, I hire people to do some of this. Yeah. And after, 9:00 PM they'll go to them or something like that. Yeah. So go straight

Adrian Garcia: to them and they can be on call. Yeah.

Meagan McLoughlin: But no, I think we have the infrastructure right, of like call tracking and whatnot.

Meagan McLoughlin: And so we're not like a single just like voice AI platform out there, which we've benefited a lot of. 'cause we have all of this extra infrastructure, I guess to, to benefit off of and give you all like the data alongside. The ability to do some things and like also just the workflows and all that good stuff to make it easier more efficient for your business.

Adrian Garcia: Yeah, and I was just, and I asked about the, if they could, if AI could hand off the column, because like we all deal with it. And that's what frustrates me sometimes is people, 'cause I had one, but they were upset about something else. They were like trying to complain about something.

Adrian Garcia: I don't know what it was. It was one of, one of those kinds of customers that just, you were not gonna make happy. And it was somebody that we did not do work for. It was just they wanted to call to complain about something. I was like, okay. They kept saying that they wanted to talk to somebody, right?

Adrian Garcia: And I was like, for one, they were upset that it was ai. But I feel like in, in today's day and age, because again, I always go back to me as a consumer or a customer myself. Any business I call it could be a store, it could be a restaurant. They don't answer the phone anymore. The, it's all this automation.

Adrian Garcia: Pick a number. Yeah. Pick a number. This menu will transfer you. Like you have to go through a lot to get, to finally get to somebody if it even lets you, and I'm like, I think we're allowed to have our AI receptionist because everybody else is doing this automation. And I think AI receptionists are better than a lot of these automation things where you have to sit there through the whole thing and trying to figure out how to transfer over to who you need to.

Adrian Garcia: And I get so frustrated 'cause I think I know Walmart was doing it and there was another one where you sat through the whole thing, finally get transferred over and that person doesn't answer. It just hangs up on you and you're like, oh yeah.

Meagan McLoughlin: And you're like, I didn't even get to tell you guys what I'm looking to do.

Meagan McLoughlin: Yeah.

Adrian Garcia: You know what I mean? Yeah. So I feel like the AI thing is a whole better route because Yeah. Everybody's doing it. It's just, it's the normal now. Yeah. And it's better than the automation stuff for sure. But I was just thinking like on some of those you can like, you spam zero or something to talk to an operator.

Adrian Garcia: So that's why I was asking if it could reroute. But you said you can set it up to only reroute if you need, if they need to.

Meagan McLoughlin: Yeah. You can put those guardrails in place that like, if they're metaphorically right clicking zero by saying talk to representative. Talk to representative. Like you can

Adrian Garcia: Yeah.

Meagan McLoughlin: Figure out a, if you want that or not for your business and make sure that like your voice assistant is trained to do whatever you tell it to do.

Adrian Garcia: Just, yeah, that's a good thing. Nice.

Meagan McLoughlin: Yeah. Yeah.

Adrian Garcia: Was there anything you wanted to end on with CallRail itself? Like, why would somebody want to use CallRail for their business?

Adrian Garcia: It could be the marketing side or whatever side. I know we, we talked a lot about the ai part of it.

Meagan McLoughlin: Yeah. I think we talked a lot today a lot about playing both offense and defense with your business. And a lot of that starts with marketing and, getting your name out there, getting brand awareness, but also doing like advertising if you wanna grow your business and you wanna, take market share or land share, among your community. And I think the important piece to that is if you're spending money on marketing and you're doing any type of brand awareness stuff that's investment that you have put out there and you should make sure that you answer the phone or at least capture those leads in some.

Meagan McLoughlin: Way, shape, or form. And I would recommend a voice assistant or some type of voice AI to go do

Adrian Garcia: yeah, I think it's, I think again, it's super important and for anybody, because e even myself for so long, I was like, yeah, word of mouth. Word of mouth. Your work speaks for yourself. And honestly, it, it does at a certain point.

Adrian Garcia: But if you're starting out or if you're having a hard time getting customers or business, 'cause I've heard that so many times too, is, you can do the best work in the world, but if nobody sees it or nobody knows that you exist, it's not gonna do anything for you. And, having all your eggs in one basket, because we've been there before too and we lost everything and had to start over is never a good thing.

Adrian Garcia: Never a good thing to, to rely on one source. Grow with the market, because I can tell you, even in my area, it's a super small town, or it was, and that market has changed. It is now a lot of big businesses, a lot of big companies, a lot of competitors. And if you're not doing something to stand out, which I've talked about being unique, being creative you have to, do that in the field, but also do that for your business.

Adrian Garcia: And it helps you keep afloat. And like with CallRail, with marketing and the ai, all that kind of stuff can help you figure that out. And that's what I tell people. If you don't know where to start, you don't know what to do, you need to find something that can help you do that. If you don't know how to do marketing, like all that kinda stuff, you can look into, getting help somewhere.

Adrian Garcia: You, if you don't know what's working, what's not. That's what CallRail is built to do, is to help you figure out what is working and, yeah. Yeah. Nobody likes to waste money on ads that don't work.

Meagan McLoughlin: Yeah, for sure. We try to make it easy to find out which to do and don't, so

Adrian Garcia: yeah, for sure. Come try

Meagan McLoughlin: us out.

Meagan McLoughlin: We're a 14 day free trial. I'll plug that. And that's what I, that's what

Adrian Garcia: I love because a lot of the software companies that, that we're using or that I'm working with this year, a lot of them emphasize or help the small business. And that's what I love because it is affordable, like you said, it is easy to use.

Adrian Garcia: It is again, affordable. And there, there's the two week free trial. There's no, if you don't like it, you don't like it. Yeah. Yeah. And you can try it out, see, navigate around, see if you like it or not. And it is something that can help a, any size really. But I think the small business benefits a lot because one of the other things that I'll end on and what I've harped on a lot lately, because again, I'm.

Adrian Garcia: Experiencing this in real time with my business and trying to figure out how to make us as a small business look like a big business and keep up with those giants. What I've always said is you have to, you have to look the part, you have to act the part to get the part. So you need to act like a big business, look like a big business professionally, right?

Adrian Garcia: Uniform right wraps or lettering, however you wanna do it. Whatever you can afford a good website being be a good Google business profile. Like all these things that all the big businesses do, you can do it, it doesn't cost a lot to do a lot of these things. Like you can do it and you can look like one of these bigger businesses and get the benefits of customers.

Adrian Garcia: Like I said, I think we got a lot of our recent customers. 'Cause they were haggling us. Oh, I don't know. That's expensive. All this other stuff. But they're like, oh we still want you to do it. And I do firmly believe it's because of how we presented ourselves.

Adrian Garcia: Like we were very professional looking and we looked like a bigger business. I think you do have to look the part. That's just my experience with it and that's what I've been harping on is really good uniforms, really good vans, really good website, really good. SEO all that plays into part.

Meagan McLoughlin: I couldn't agree more.

Meagan McLoughlin: Thanks for having me on Adrian. Yeah, no problem. I think this was a great conversation. I've been trying to show more of the backend stuff because there's a, like I said, a lot of people starting their own business and I think they need to hear some of this stuff. And I appreciate you for taking the time, going through all the marketing and AI that, that we got into today.

Adrian Garcia: I think it's gonna help a lot of people.

Meagan McLoughlin: For sure. And I'll send you that number if you ever wanna play with it too.

Adrian Garcia: I definitely need to show it on air. I've been meaning to do that because some people think it's like a robot thing. I'm like, no, it actually sounds pretty good. And yeah, a lot of people, if they're serious, they will leave a message and kind of interact with the ai and we've had it work a lot more times than you would think.

Adrian Garcia: Cool.

Meagan McLoughlin: Cool. That's great. All right.

Adrian Garcia: Thanks again everybody watching and listening. I appreciate you guys for tuning in and we'll see you guys next time.