Tim 00:20

Hello, my name is Tim Coleman and I am your host. I am also the managing partner of A2O Digital a full service digital marketing agency working exclusively with home service businesses. My co host today will be Justin Bencsko. Justin is a member of the A2O Digital team has been working in the digital marketing space since 2011. Our guest today is Anthony Castiglione. Anthony is the owner of Innovative Answering Assistant, also known as IAA, he started his company in 2010, hoping to offer a home office feel in a call center form. Over the years Anthony has successfully built a team of industry leading members with a proven track record of growth and success. Anthony also a multi franchise business owner from Precision Garage Doors in Miami, South Jersey, and Providence. Anthony, welcome. We're excited to have you on today's episode.

Anthony 01:11

Excited to be here. Thank you guys for having me.

Tim 01:13

Cool. So why don't we just get started? You're running a call center, you're answering a lot of phone calls every day. Let's just start with what are some of the challenges your team faces when booking calls for your clients?

Anthony 01:32

Yeah, great, great question I get I get that one a lot. You know, different times a year, right? Different situations, obviously always prompt that question. But it's believe it or not. This is always shocking when I say to people, but capacity is actually our biggest deterrent. Right? Everyone, you know everyone always goes to price. Right? At least that's your natural thought. But statistically, capacity is our biggest issue in booking a call. Now second is price.

Tim 02:12

So when you're saying capacity, you're saying does your customer have available space that you can book an appointment on?

Anthony 02:20

Correct! Yeah, do we have somewhere to book it in the timeframe that the customer is required? Obviously, customers value their time, right, and there's a there's a certain portion, and we find it to be a lot that values how quickly someone can get to their house and solve their problem. They value that over the actual price of the repair.

Tim 02:46

So that is that should be the most important thing that any home service business hears today, you're answering millions of phone calls. And we almost always think that the booking percentage is based upon the skill of the person answering the phone, how good am I, how I listened to how good she is I listened to how good he is. He's really good. But the number one thing you're saying is their capacity?

Anthony 03:15

Correct. An example I give all the time is there's not an answer. If you have a say you have a call center, small call center. So you have 15-20 people answering the calls. And you have 10 different companies and you have one company that's booking at 95%. And you have another company that's booking at 60%. How do you explain that? The same people answering the phone, it's the same people answering it right? If they're having a bad day, if they're not as happy to speak to that customer, they're having a bad day with all the customers? How can you explain away a 30% difference in booking percentage, as much as in and you know this as well as I do. But I would love to take credit for some of the companies that we booked at 93% It seems it seems unreal, right? But I can't take full credit for booking somebody at 93% because then I would have to take credit for booking somebody a 50%, right? And as much as I would love to take credit for both of them. There is a reality and the reality of it is it's it's actually more how competitive a customer can be over the phone whether it's again, I can get out there at 10 o'clock. My competitor can't get out there for three more days. Right whether it's you know, pricing does absolutely come in. It's the second most important thing, but everyone believes it's number one

Tim 04:46

I would have thought it too, now here's the other thing now I want to talk to you today in your capacity as the as the person who runs a call center, but now I'm going to ask you to put on another hat right? What is your best customer is it the person who's happy to be booked next week, or is it the person who needs you today or tomorrow?

Anthony 05:03

It's the person that needs you today or tomorrow, right? We are there to to pool pain out of that, right? That's the reality. And when you say pool pain, you are there to offer them the exact service that they need. And if they needed at 8:15 in the morning, and I'm the guy that can be there at 8:15 in the morning, I have a pretty good chance of, of, of getting that customer taken care of and winning them as a customer. And obviously, if we win them as a customer, we're producing revenue from that customer at that exact moment.

Tim 05:38

Right. So, I would say, like, that's, that's the most important thing I'll learn and think about today. That's the number one thing because obviously, being in this around, you know, this business for as long as I have, I know that if you're booking in a lower percentage consider capacity, you're only you're also only booking the customers who don't have the urgency and I have jobs that are there they can haggle about and everything.

Anthony 06:08

It goes hand in hand. That's exactly right. And to just add one more thing to that, when you're thinking about winning a customer over the phone, and you're trying to compare a customer, that's okay, waiting a week, compared to the customer that is that's urgent. One of the things that people forget, when you're talking about capacity, we all need employees, everyone in this country right now needs employees, you can't just magically create a qualified trained technician to run calls. But what you can do is manage your schedule in a way that capacity is at the forefront. If you have a guy that you know is out there, and it's going to be a 15 minute job. And it's sitting in a two hour timeframe. If you're managing the schedule, managing that capacity in real time, you're going to know that that guy is on a 15 minute job, you can now add, you can open up that capacity. And you can add another technician or you can add another call to that technician. So when people hear capacity, you know, it's really easy to just say yeah, it would be great to have more techs. It's not always about having more techs. It's about managing the techs you do have and the calls they are running. People forget that.

Justin 07:26

So what are other examples of that? You just said that because that's exactly where my head was going. Right? Like say I have a capacity issue? Sure. I want to, you know, find some new technicians, train them, that takes a long time, right? What are some things besides what you just mentioned that you can do to manage that capacity and put your you as a call center in a better position to book the leads.

Anthony 07:49

Yup, absolutely. So on the call center side, what we've created is a very simple process, right? We actually we call it open tech and there I always laugh when people say why do you call it open tech. And believe it or not, we call it a open tech because it used to be called ER overflow. And as simple as this sounds, our CSRs on the phone would say to the customer, okay, we're gonna put you on the emergency overflow schedule. And the customer didn't like to hear that they would or they would show we would see the cancellations go way up. Because in their head, I'm on an overflow, maybe they're gonna come out maybe they're not well, it's like being on standby, they felt like. There you go. So as basic as this sounds, we said called Open tech. So the CSR even if they made a mistake, the mistake would be I'm gonna put you on open tech. While the customer is hearing. I'm putting you on an open tech. Yeah, it's kind of a kind of a dumb little thing. But anyway, the way that open tech works is really we are putting putting the dispatching job in the hands of the home office, right? Say that your capacity is set up. You can you're telling us before the day starts that I have one technician that can take five calls. Well, once we booked those five calls, it's done. We're now we're on the booking the next day. So you know, depending on how busy you are, could be 10 o'clock in the morning, you already have your five calls, and then you get that call, "Hey, my AC is out." Right? "My spring broke" an actual emergency call. Well, in that moment, because we've already been given rules that are predetermined. We cannot we cannot book any more than five calls. We're booking the next day. Well, what open tech allows us to do is make the assumption that maybe your technician isn't going to spend two hours like we just talked about, right? Maybe it is only a 15 minute job. So open tech allows us to continue to book once your technician is full. We drop it in the open tech. The home office gets alerted Hey, there's an emergency job that needs to go, we actually tell that customer a four hour timeframe, right? That way, we're giving them a decent amount of time, we're giving the home office time to place that call in an appropriate spot. And, and you literally just magically created with with that one small process, one additional time slot. And some days it's two some days zero, right. But we give that we're able to give that flexibility with that very basic process. And you can save one call a day two calls a day, obviously, our larger customers, I mean, we have customers that legitimately on a daily basis are saving and open tech 15, 20, 25 calls a day. I mean, that's you multiply that by an entire year, you're talking about real revenue, real profit. So that's one of the ways that you can do it Justin.

Justin 10:55

Awesome. What about I'm just trying to think let's just say you don't have room on the schedule, you have that open tech, you could even if that's an emergency situation where they need someone now, right, you may have someone on the schedule, who isn't in an emergency where you can call them reschedule that to a later date, and then put that emergency job get to them right away, right?

Anthony 11:21

That's exactly correct. Because we all know not every job on the schedule is an emergency. Not everyone needs you at 8:15 in the morning, right? It's not, you know, and we all know, right? Picking the phone up and having that honest conversation with a customer and saying, Hey, we have you on for today. We wanted to see if if you would be okay, going tomorrow at 10 o'clock, whatever that is. We've all done it right? You're not trying to offer a bad service. But the reality of it is that customer that you're moving, we would do the same for them if they were in an emergency as well. Right? And people do forget that right? Your brain automatically might go to well, now you're now you're pushing off a customer? Well, you know what we are because in this exact moment, they're not in a critical situation. But because they're a customer of ours, you can actually use it as a positive. You're letting them know when you're in this situation. This is the type of company that we are, we are going to prioritize you. Right. So it doesn't always have to be negative. Everyone always goes to the side of Oh, well. Now you're rescheduled? Well, you can turn that into a positive in an honest way. Yup.

Tim 12:30

Yeah, and if you're getting a bottom robber or garage door estimate, as a consumer, what do I care if I get that, you know, tomorrow or on Friday? What if I'm faulted in my garage then I need you.

Anthony 12:50

There you go. That's it.

Tim 12:52

So the two biggest challenges, time and money kind of what what we've been talking about. How do you work with your customers, Anthony to try and help them overcome those things?

Anthony 13:04

Yeah, we, we say time and time again. And we have really, really great customers that understand this, but you need to understand what your top five competitors are doing. I use the same example constantly. If you call your top five competitors, and they're quoting a range, and you're not, or they're quoting, a specific out the door price on something, and you're trying to quote a range, you're at a disadvantage, right? If your average customer is calling three and a half people, or three, three companies, and they speak to two of them that sound identical, and you're the odd one out, that's a problem, right? Not saying that you have to do everything your competitors do. But you need to understand what your potential customer is hearing when they do speak to your competitor. And if you are so wildly out of out of touch with that, or you're so wildly different, that will be a negative. So to answer your directly, they have to we encourage them and we help a ton of them. We do it all the time. Get a hold of your competitors figure out what they are saying. And then from there, you understand where you where you stand in, in the quoting realm. We tell them to start there. And then at that point, you know what, what the people in your area are actually hearing? And then from there you have a decision to make, do you want to be the odd person out? Or do you want to sound pretty, pretty similar to your competitors to where you're not scaring people off because they're hearing something so different?

Tim 14:46

I had the privilege recently in being in one of those meetings with you Anthony and a person who just recently launched a new market. They were new to the network and I could just, you know, they were the booking percentage was not going as well as we'd hoped. And then you had that meeting with them. And they took it to heart and he made some changes. And it really it turned with it and turned everything around. It was like now Now the schedule is full, right. And that makes all the difference in the world today. And I can tell you, there's nobody who appreciate other than that there's nobody who appreciates it more than us, because I always say, if they're if their phone that's turned into calls, and they're booking them, then my phone's not ringing.

Anthony 15:33

There you go. No, it's true, right? We the there's such a trickle down, right? If you're the guy that's driving the leads, and I'm the guy that's answering the leads, and they don't end up on the schedule. There's a reason why. Right? And the the solution, from my see is not drive more leads. The solution is how do we book more of the leads we already paid for? Right. And sometimes owners, including myself, sometimes we don't want to hear what it takes to book a job. You may not like what it takes that unfortunately, that's a tough conversation. That's what I do everyday for a living is have those conversations. Yeah. And that is why Precision Door specifically, I'll speak on them as a whole has an incredible booking percentage across the board network wide. It's it's because of the work the owners do before the phone rings. Anthony is not phenomenal at everything. A Second Opinion isn't phenomenal at everything, I have to do my job, you have to do yours. And then ultimately, the owner has to give us those tools. Right. Like I said in the beginning, I want to definitely take credit for the guy that books 93%. But I can't really do that. Right, that owner did a heck of a lot of work to give me the tools to do that. Right.

Tim 17:00

So so to just dovetail off that a little bit like how has now owning three franchises. And you know, you're at different places around the country, how is that sort of change your perspective as the as the owner of the call center and vice versa, sort of right.

Anthony 17:18

I would say that my perspective changed on what it is to be busy. Coming from the call center side, you know, we dread Mondays, right? It's the busiest day of the week, you have 20 plus percent increased call volume that day. So on our side, we'd get on the call center side, you'd get a slow, a slow Monday or a slow day. And it's like, Oh, my God, this is you know, it's a nice break. Being on the owner side, I want every day to be a Monday. So my sense of, of being busy and the days that you want it to be busy, the owner side, you want it busy at all times, the call center side, you just want it to be a lot a lot more consistent and even instead of the explosions that you do see happen across the service industry. So that's definitely one of one of the things that that has changed my perspective. The other one and really the biggest, is customer service. So obviously, I being in the call center business, customer service has to be number one. And I have preached a lot over the years to different owners, managers, really just the importance of that. And being on the side where people are writing about you online, people are writing about your your their experience with your employees and your company. So it's not necessarily that my perspective is fully changed. But it certainly really hit the fact home that I that I really have been preaching for a long time now practicing it. It's obviously a lot. It's a lot different than just telling somebody, Hey, you have to have great customer service. So now being again, on the ownership side, we have to practice that and put it in into play every single day. People are going to go online, and they're going to review your company. I'm unbelievably proud as a multilocation owner. We do have very high ratings on Google and Yelp and on our company site. But again, it's not as easy as just saying, Hey, have great customer service. It's something that that we we teach we train on and we're engaged in all day every day. And we stand behind everything that we that we do as a company, being fully responsible for the customer's entire experience start to finish is obviously much different than being on the call center side, you're only talking to them for three or four minutes. Right? So you have three or four minutes on the call center side, or, you know, maybe you're out at their house for three hours, maybe you're maybe they ordered a door with you, and now you're telling them when their orders in and rescheduling them, right, you're touching that customer and talking to that customer and handling them for a much longer time than in the call center side for three, four minutes. So that's a that's a huge, a huge difference, I would say. And something that has definitely been eye opening.

Tim 20:43

Yeah, so that sounds like the number one advice that you would kind of share with any owner. Right? If they don't have that in place, put that in place, prioritize customer service.

Anthony 20:52

Has to, it's gonna come back tenfold guaranteed.

Tim 20:56

What are like some other pieces of advice Anthony, that you would you might give somebody some people maybe are not the top owners yet are trying to get there. Like, what are some things that they can do?

Anthony 21:09

So I'd say like a smaller company. I would tell them in a bullet point, you don't have to marry every decision that you make. Okay. And what I mean by that is there are times that that we see, right, well, you know, say you lose a technician or you get busy. And your schedule is booked out for four days, you know, an owner there, it seems like their first reaction is we need to, we need to be selective of the calls that we're allowing you to book. Right. So whatever their top earning jobs are in the garage door business, it's a spring job. Right? So we'll get that email it says we're only taking spring jobs today. Okay, well, that, that's fine, to be selective, right? Because just like we talked about earlier, we can't just create capacity, there are ways that you should be managing the schedule to create more capacity. But for some of the some of the smaller companies, the owners tend to overreact of the immediate situation. And I'm guilty of it as well, right? You get one day where you're where you're completely empty, and all your guys are sitting at the shop staring at you. And you got it, you feel like you have to change everything. The reality of it is this business and the cause they go up and down. That's never going to change. But I would tell them to, to remember the changes that they make, right? Just because something happens on a Monday doesn't mean it's still going to be effective on a Tuesday. Right? My famous line everybody is don't marry the change. Okay, I'll give you an example of something that we we always try to help our smaller companies with, because it never fails that they all go through this. And the smaller the company, the more you feel it. But for instance, you know, do you have to be as aggressive when you're booking calls out three, four days? No, obviously you don't, right. But when you wake up in the morning, and you have no calls on your schedule, that would be a day or a week or a month, where you might want to consider being more aggressive, whether that's offering a coupon, maybe that's lowering your price. Maybe that's offering some sort of a special, but the biggest, again, back to the original question. The biggest piece of advice that I would give for someone to help their business is don't just set it and forget it. Understand that the situations are going to change. Sometimes it is day to day, it's generally week to week or month to month. But if you make a change on a Monday, and it doesn't work, change it back on a Tuesday, and I'm talking about, you know how we are being asked to interact with your customers, again, goes down to pricing, it goes down to you know, what type of columns you want us to book, the biggest one again, is your schedule is full for a couple of days. And now you say hey, I don't want any of these types of jobs. Well, are you going to remember that you told us not to book those jobs? Right? Are you going to when are you going to lift that? How do you know if now you now you do have enough capacity to add those jobs back? Right. So I would just say pay attention to those changes do not marry the change. And understand that it could change day to day week to week month to month.

Tim 24:52

Give me a, so positive change that a business in that situation could make is say Anthony there's a person I can help find a way to put on my schedule. Yep, that's that's the number one thing we can all do to grow our business.

Anthony 25:10

Yes, fact. Yep, yep. Stop prejudging don't prejudge the call, you have no idea what's going to happen out there. It's a customer that's looking for a service that you offer. Go service the customer.

Tim 25:24

Cool. So I mean, I think I think that's great information for any service business owner to listen to. We've seen it for years, time and money, are the things that are going to affect you and we, you know, I'm learning myself more and more It's time it was every conversation time even more important than money. Let's talk about IAA a little bit. Tell me like what services IAA offers what that kind of looks like to a service business. Let's talk about that a little bit Anthony. I think people now that they've had chance to listen to you would probably like to kind of hear a little bit more about the company I think.

Anthony 26:01

Yeah, yep. So we're a full service call center for lack of a better explanation. I used to always say that we're a Scheduling and Management Company, realistically, your standard answering service or call center in this business is usually a you know, take your name, take your number, send a message, we're where we are different is we offer a level of service that we can take your customer from a phone call, and actually place them where you want them on the schedule, rather than again, taking them from maybe I'm on the schedule, maybe somebody's going to call us back. That is the singular biggest thing that we do we get them, we actually put them on a schedule, we have pricing, we have company information, we do is as as good a job as anybody of being a home office in a call center setting. And it's it's been a process and a and a model that has worked for us for the past 13 or so years. So 24/7, we're taking inbound calls, 24/7 live chat, email leads, all social media leads. And, and then obviously, the leads turn into outbound calling as well, right, somebody has to act on that. And our outbound process is a mixture of phone call, email, and SMS text messaging. So for for, for a small, medium or large sized business we have, we have some of the largest customers in the country, we have some of the smallest customers in the country. And somehow we're able to make, make it still feel the same, regardless of the size of the company.

Tim 27:58

And that's the big differentiator, when IAA that I think about a call center, an answering service, you kind of come in the next day, and you have like three messages where you're going to call a customer back. That's not the case here. In this case, that customers off the street, right? They've received a confirmation text or emails saying like, the tech will be out, it's on the tech schedule, the tech knows about it. Nobody needs to get involved with that customer now beyond the technician.

Anthony 28:24

Yup. And that's, that's from a revenue perspective. And then when you get to the customer service perspective, what's the most annoying thing that could ever happen? You spent $5,000 on a door, and it's 5:01pm. And you're ringing and no voicemail. I'm not saying that my reps can solve their problem right then in there. But if, if we have been given the tools to do it, we actually can solve the problem, because we can send somebody right out to their house. And ultimately, what are they mad at? Right, they're mad at what they just paid for stop working. We have access to the schedule, we have access to the scheduling roles, we can we can service them right there, whether it's 5:01pm or 11:59pm, 2:03am, whatever the case may be. And that's a huge, you know, you may not think that the service industry or people looking for service, you may not think they want to speak to somebody after hours. It's all night long for us right all across the country. So that's a that's it's a huge benefit to a company and from a customer service perspective, there's a real live human on the other line to at least hear you out, even if we can't solve the problem right then and there. Anthony talk to me a little bit about the infrastructure of IAA. We see all these weather events throughout the country and how they can affect business. Tell me a little bit about how IAA infrastructure is done given like these things that are constantly happened, fires in California, hurricanes in Florida. Yep, yep. So speaking of hurricanes in Florida, we are we are actually based out of Sarasota, Florida, which is one of the most beautiful places on earth. But it is also, our office, I think, is six miles from the Gulf of Mexico. And I'm not sure how much everyone knows about the Gulf of Mexico, but it gets a little warm in those in those waters. And obviously, there's a there's always a threat to hurricanes. So talk about talk about lessons in life 2017, we were hit directly with a hurricane. And prior to that, I would get questions all the time when we were onboarding companies. And they would say, what's your plan for a for a hurricane and I would be so proud to tell them I had the biggest generator they'd ever see, I had three internets, three different phone systems, and this cloud and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And all of that was very accurate. And I was unbelievably proud of that. But boy, did I make a massive mistake. I'm from Philadelphia originally, and I have not been through a real hurricane up until that point. And about five days prior to this hurricane hitting. I realized that I had made a crucial miscalculation. And then contrary to how important I felt these phone calls were my employees did not think they were that important. Their home with their families, boarding houses up there out, making sure they had water. I mean, if you've never been in an area that has a hurricane coming to it, it is it is like nothing you've ever experienced. It is like the apocalypse. Every I mean, you cannot get bread, you cannot get water, you cannot get milk it is it you can't get gas. So anyway, long story short. It was five days before when I said oh my god, I made this as a this is a significant error. And yeah, I had no I had no staff ever they evacuated where we live. So even if they wanted to come in, you're you were not legally allowed to to, excuse me, you're not legally allowed to drive on the streets. And it was the worst experience I've ever gone through in my in my life. It was, it was eye opening. And a huge mess. I was I was literally embarrassed that that I missed that bad on something that was so important to me, and something that I spent so much time and money on. So long story short, um, greatest customers on Earth, I had to make, I had to send an email out and they and made some phone calls that I never thought I would I literally had to tell my customers that we had a shutdown, and that they had to answer their own phones for that it would ended up being a 12 hour period. And it happened on a Monday. I'll never forget it as long as I live. So of course, it couldn't happen on a Sunday. It was a Monday. And the only thing that I got from every one of my customers was phone calls text and emails, making sure we were okay. Not a single complaint that that happened. And it was awesome. So that, that that that's something I'll never forget. Because that meant everything to me. That happened on a Monday I came in on Tuesday, and I am not a tyrant to work for. But I walked in and my GM at the time I brought her in my office. And I said you will never hire another person in the state of Florida. And you will learn how to you will come up with a process that that will allow us to go fully remote, or I will find someone that that will and again, I don't ever talk to anybody like that. But backstory to that not because of hurricanes just because of the model that I saw changing. For for a year prior to that. Every meeting that I had, I was like, Hey, we really need to get a remote model really we need to get a remote model and my GM at the time who was no longer with us, fought it fought it and I allowed it to be fought. We were we were done with that at that moment. And from that point forward. Now we are in 26 different states. We just had a hurricane come by a week ago. Nothing changed. I did nothing. We prepared for absolutely nothing and we were and we were in the middle of a full hurricane. So it was it was terrible when we went through it but boy are we better off for it. So now there's not a singular weather event anywhere in the country that that affects us with employees or infrastructure. So sorry, long winded but that's the story.

Tim 35:09

I remember that story Anthony and I remember being very impressed thinking okay, like you just went through the havoc, right the worst day you can have and how you just kind of approached it and made the business stronger. I remember you talking to me about now you having a diversification of accents throughout the country and everything else and how it just made the infrastructure of IAA so much stronger. And, and as business owners, I think that's what we have to deal like when something goes that you can, you gotta you gotta take the bad and create something good out of it.

Anthony 35:41

Oh, absolutely, absolutely. So then when a little thing called COVID came, again, we were unaffected. And I chalked that up to 2017. Hurricane Irma, it kept me in business. And we were 100% ready for COVID when everyone had to go home. So blessings for sure. In in, in bad times, but I was on the good side of it. Thank God.

Tim 36:06

That's awesome. All right. Justin, you have any questions? Final words? Anthony, any final words?

Justin 36:15

No, I mean, I think answering the call is often this like, overlooked thing. I would say, you know, you think about the marketing, right? And how am I going to get my leads, and a lot of people talk about sales, and you know, that side, and there's this like answering the phones in the middle of what you need to be able to do well, to kind of see it to the other end and realize that revenue, so I don't know, I think it's something the thing that kind of sometimes gets forgotten about.

Tim 36:44

I know you were at Pantheon. Service Titan talked about this a little bit, you'll speak to that a little bit.

Justin 36:50

Yeah, that's what I was gonna say. So I was at Pantheon. And you know, they have all different data, there's, you know, they obviously have 1000s of contractors that they work with, and they give you awesome benchmarks. And while I was there, they were talking about booking rate, and they said that the standard across all Service Titan customers is 42% booking rate. That's what I call books at across everyone on their platform. So Anthony, do you know what yours is at right now for you know, your customers on average?

Anthony 37:24

Yeah, yep. So we, across the board, have an average that fluctuates between 80. And I'll call it 81%. As a whole, it's never been above 81. And as a whole, I don't think it's ever been below 79. It always seems to stay there. And, again, as much as I would love to take credit for that. I think I've said it once on this on this call, but the work, the work has to be done before the phone rings, if you're not doing work before the phone rings, Anthony's people cannot help you, your people cannot help you, you have to understand what your customer needs to hear on that call, and why they need to hear it. So again, I'd love to take credit for that. But it's a collective body of work that we have all done to get to that number and I am super proud of it. But I can't take 100% credit for it.

Tim 38:25

It's awesome though.

Justin 38:26

But you think about that, right? Like you kind of you work with the owners to make these things happen. talk them through these things, the owners do things as a business to, you know, accommodate and make sure that they're booking customers as well as they can that equals double the amount of business right? If you were at the industry average of 42%. And you got the exact same number of leads, and you bring that to 80% You literally doubled your business just by doing that.

Anthony 38:55

That's the power of IAA buddy.

Tim 38:59

Listen, I know it too because I have done digital marketing for folks for businesses that answer in house. I know 42% is the reality for a lot of businesses to try to do this themselves.

Anthony 39:14

Yep, yeah, we and we do we know it as well. Tim, I've been I've been a part of. I've been I will brag a little bit. I've been a part of trials that I've been asked to just send people in and say, Hey, give me two CSRS and we're going to train them for five days. And we're gonna see how they do in a business they don't know anything about and they put our process in place which is very basic, I will say I will never claim that it's, it's you know, some brain buster it is it is a less is more approach. And, and we've always come out on top of that. It's just you know, the these the, the reality of booking a call is very, very, very basic. At its core, right smiling face on the phone, honesty, urgency, right? That's the part that we can do. The part that the owner has to do is understand your business model, understand your competitors and your customers. If you combine both of those two, right, you're you that is a recipe for success. And we've done it over and over again, I don't know how many millions of times 10 15 million calls at this point. And again, we're super proud of that. So it can make a difference.

Tim 40:31

Awesome. Cool. Well, listen, I really appreciate you being here with us today. I think that this is one of the most important things that a business owner could listen to today. And if they listened to this and can take this to heart and not just deceive themselves that they're answering their phone calls at 90% which is what I often hear. They would be well served.

Anthony 41:01

Less is more.

Tim 41:02

There you go, thanks really appreciate your time.

Anthony 41:13

Thank you. I appreciate it guys.