Building a Trade Business That Doesn’t Rely on the Owner | Peter Craft

[00:00] Cold open

Peter: I think I thought, "Okay, we can get a bunch of work, and then we'll just go find a plumber, have a conversation with him, then have it with him, then have it again with him." So I was like, "Oh no." First day, we spent like $2,800, and we had like two calls. Turn the ads off, and we just went to the pub.

[00:17] Introduction

Kane: Hey, I'm Kane Tyler Smith, the founder and CEO of Smartfix and Hypotential. This is Unlocking Business, where we have real conversations around business, leadership, mindset and personal growth. If you've been getting value from these conversations, please take a second to like, subscribe and follow our channels. It helps us reach more people, bring on more guests and share more stories. Now, let's get into this episode.

Kane: Today, I'm joined by Peter Craft from ASAP Trades. Peter is one of the owners of ASAP Trades, a Perth plumbing business built around honest service, clear communication and quality workmanship. His team provides everything from emergency plumbing and blocked drains to gas fitting and hot water systems, with a real focus on doing the job right the first time. Peter was also one of the very first members to join Hypotential Foundations. So today, we're not just talking about plumbing, we're talking about building a business, the power of networking, and why relationships matter more than ever. Thanks for coming on the podcast.

Peter: Thanks for having me, mate.

[01:03] Starting a plumbing business again tomorrow

Kane: If you were starting a plumbing business again tomorrow with no customers, what would be the first thing that you would do?

Peter: I mean, the first thing I'd probably do is get a website made, and then set up your Google Business Profile and start getting that running. Then I'd look at getting a job management system or a CRM or something like that. Get something set up so you can really track all your leads coming in, get all their details, and track all your photos, notes and things from all the jobs. But definitely, I'd say a website is a very important one. I see lots of people start a business and not get a website for even like a year. They just sort of roll without it, but you can have it in the background getting traction in your Google Business Profile, you know? When we started, we ran Google Ads a lot, but even just with our Google Business Profile, we would get leads over the weekend because we're 24/7.

[02:05] Website and price book before quitting

Peter: So that really helped at the start, getting some leads over the weekend. You can book up a whole week pretty quick, you know? And then definitely having a job management system or a CRM. We had one from the start, so I wouldn't even know how you'd do without it, to be honest.

Kane: Hard using Outlook Calendar, hey?

Peter: Yeah, I wouldn't know how you'd keep track of it all with diaries, things like that. That would be difficult.

Kane: So when you guys did start the business, did you have a website built straight away then?

Peter: Yeah, so where I was working at my previous place, I was actually making it after work. So it took a long time. Jay and I had a date that we were planning on, like, all right, we're going to get things prepared and just quit our jobs. We weren't just going to roll into it. We're quitting our jobs and we're going into it. We knew we needed a website and we were going to run Google Ads, because we were mimicking what we had done at previous companies we'd worked at.

[03:07] $2,800 on Google Ads for two calls

Peter: So we got our price book set up, so we had all of our pricing. And then I made a website, probably way bigger than it needed to be. It was like a 25-page website or something.

Kane: WordPress?

Peter: Yeah, on WordPress. Just making it after work, things like that. And then we set up Google Ads and stuff ready to go. But we had that website from day one because our initial plan was to run Google Ads, and that plan changed pretty quickly, though we still rely on it heavily. It was a pretty big shock when we actually turned the ads on those first few days. It was pretty hectic.

Kane: As in lead volume was high?

Peter: No, as in we set the ads up so wrong. I think the first day we spent like $2,800 and we had like two calls. When you look back now that we know what to look at, you look at search terms, it was just terrible, going after the wrong thing. So I think Jay and I, after that happened, we just turned the ads off and went to the pub. We were just stopping this for a week and we were going to plan a bit more, you know? And we got someone to help with the Google Ads, get it set up a bit better.

Kane: So was that quite early on you had someone helping with it?

Peter: Yeah, it wasn't an agency. It was someone from Google. They basically set it up, and that was a good starting point, and then from there we just kept changing it and making it a bit better.

Kane: Do you run them yourself now?

Peter: No, not at the moment. We did for a while, but then we wanted to make changes, tweaks and really optimise, and we just don't have the time for it. It's just better to get someone who's a professional and knows what they're doing. It's a scary platform. Sometimes I log into it just to have a look and I close it straight away.

Kane: Yeah, I think it's easy enough to create a campaign and do all that and do some very basic tracking of things.

Kane: But if you really want to optimise how much you're spending, because it is so expensive, you really need to know what you're doing. Otherwise you're just throwing money away, you know?

[05:12] Simpro to ServiceTitan

Kane: Yeah, so I suppose that does lead to you mentioning having a CRM. I know you guys are on ServiceTitan and you were on that pretty much from the beginning.

Peter: Pretty much, yeah. In the beginning, I'd heard about ServiceTitan through audiobooks or something, from guys in America because that's where it's from, but at the start it wasn't available in Australia, so we started on Simpro. Jay, my business partner, and I were both familiar with it, so we thought, all right, that's the easiest way. And that was pretty good. It did the job, but then ServiceTitan became available in Australia, so we were like, oh, let's get into it. We weren't really big enough for it yet, but we decided to switch over so we could start to use it and try and grow into it.

[06:15] Tracking marketing ROI by campaign

Kane: So your Google Ads now, are you able to track from a Google Ad, from a click to the phone call to the job booking to the job completed? You can track all that through ServiceTitan?

Peter: Yeah. From the click and conversion perspective, that's all in Google Ads. But with Google Ads you can set up tracking numbers, Google ones, so we set up our own tracking numbers in ServiceTitan. What that does is we have these numbers on everything, so we can put those numbers on all sorts of different marketing material and apply a campaign to it. If someone calls through that number, it tracks it as that campaign, and then we're tracking it the whole way down to how many booked jobs we actually get from that particular marketing avenue in a month, how many sold jobs we get out of the booked jobs, and how much revenue we actually get.

Peter: And it's good because we can put the cost of that marketing campaign in there, so then we're getting that return on investment for all the different marketing avenues. It's quite easy to see what marketing is paying off. That's one of the main things I heard about with ServiceTitan, and that's what drove me towards it. ServiceTitan is designed for larger businesses, but that information is great for a large business to know where you're spending your money on marketing, and for a small business I reckon it's so important because we don't have that much money to spend. We don't have as much that we can gamble and waste.

Peter: So we originally thought Google Ads was where we were getting the majority of our work. Now we're actually tracking it properly, and a lot of it doesn't actually come from Google Ads. We get stuff from other places, like our Google Business Profile and things like that as well. We were just putting it all down to, if it came from Google, it was Google Ads, when in reality it wasn't.

Kane: Yeah, I think we're in the same boat. We don't use ServiceTitan. We have ServiceM8. It doesn't really have any features like that whatsoever. So if someone calls us and says we found you online, on your website, everything we just place as Google. And with SEO we have no idea what actually is Google or what people have seen maybe on Facebook. They've just said online. It's hard to probe and ask too many questions because customers can get annoyed. If you say, "Oh, where'd you get your number from?" "Online." "Okay, whereabouts?" Like, I just want to book a job.

Peter: But the data is so important, because Google is so expensive. You need to know exactly what's coming from it.

Kane: Yeah, definitely.

[09:23] Call intent, blogs and AI search

Peter: There's also things like your Google Analytics, where you can track how many views your website got per month that were direct and things like that. But that's not telling us out of those what turned into revenue, you know? Which to me is the big one. Views on your site are one thing, but it's the intent behind them as well. Just getting views and then those turning into calls is one thing, but I want to know the intent behind it. We could be getting a lot of calls where they're not actually ready to buy. They're just asking questions. For instance, they might have got to our website through a blog or something, and then they're calling up just asking questions.

Kane: How do I service my hot water system?

Peter: Yeah, things like that. They're calling up asking for advice because they came to us through a blog. If we're looking at just phone calls coming in, we could be looking at that as a really good avenue when it actually isn't, because we're not getting much revenue from it. That's still a hard one to track, because if they get on our website, it's the same thing. We have separate landing pages for Google Ads, things like that. But on the main website, you've got to have that same number all the way across it, otherwise you're going to start messing with SEO.

Kane: Yeah, that's a good point, because recently we've been trying to heavily optimise towards AI Overviews and AI platforms. A lot of those scenarios are long-form or long-tail sentences and whatnot. A lot of that will be like, how do I fix my own light fitting? If we're trying to optimise to show up for everything, that could be a terrible situation for us, because if they're searching for that, somehow they find us and they call us, we would then try and convince them to let us come out as opposed to trying to tell them how to do the job themselves. So it could create unnecessary phone calls. But obviously it's free because you've popped up in AI.

Peter: Yeah, that's true.

Kane: It's going to be an interesting time ahead, I think, with AI Overviews.

Peter: Yeah, definitely.

Kane: We've just started trialling ChatGPT paid ads.

Peter: All right. How's that?

Kane: Don't know yet. Again, it's hard to track. That's where chatting with Jeremy, the Google Ads consultant. We're not going to know if they found us in ChatGPT paid ads or Google, because if they say online, it goes down as online. We don't know. So, literally blind. Completely blind.

[11:27] Finding tradies who can sell

Kane: So, with leads coming in, we spoke briefly about sales and we've spoken before about this quite a lot. It's a very tricky situation. For us, for example, we won't go out to a site and quote an install straight away. Our process is we'll send one of our more experienced senior electricians out there. They'll assess the work, quote it, basically it's a sales process, and then we book them for install. I know you guys are slightly different, but you still have somewhat the same. How hard is it to find people that are qualified in their trade to also be able to sell your services?

Peter: Yeah, I think that's the most difficult part. You'd know, at the moment we're trying to find guys and it's so hard just to find tradesmen. There seems to be such a shortage. And then trying to find guys who have some experience in sales as well as a trade is definitely difficult. So we are trying to work out a way to find guys who are good tradesmen with a good attitude that we're able to train quite easily, you know? It's more the attitude side, but once again, we're looking at a small pool of applicants. What we're trying to do is work out a way to actually train these guys on that sales process.

Peter: One of the guys that we've had for quite a while didn't have any sales experience at all, and we just keep working on it. It does take a long time, lots of training, and we send them out on ride-alongs, things like that. Now he's starting to really pick up the sales, which is good, you know? Some guys pick it up a lot quicker and some guys not so keen, but it's definitely hard to find them. We've been talking about this week that sometimes, if we speak to one of our more experienced tradies about doing sales, as soon as they hear that word, sales or quoting, they panic. "No, no, no, I don't want to do it."

Kane: Yeah.

Peter: Or we bring someone on and they say, "Oh, I've got experience in sales." And then later on you learn they worked in JB Hi-Fi or something like that. But that's not really sales. That's someone coming in to buy something and, yes, they're buying it from you. Whereas what we're doing is going out there quoting the work, trying to sell our services potentially at a higher price point than a one-man band that doesn't have any process or customer service behind them.

Peter: So with us, we're trying to figure out how we just do a ride-along. Let's just get them to go with one of our good guys. We don't try and explain to them this is sales, this is quoting, this is what our expectations are, this is KPIs, because they just panic, because they're a tradie. So we say, just go with them for a day. See how you go. You might like it, you might hate it. Just give it a shot. And for us, that has worked quite well. We've got one guy, for example, who's one of our top tradies. He's just gone to do it and he's still unsure about doing it full-time, but he's doing really well. One of the best guys we've had doing it for a long time.

[14:35] The hybrid service technician model

Kane: Yeah, that's right.

Peter: He says, "Yeah, I still don't want to commit to it full-time. I want to do a bit of both." So now we're looking at maybe going into more of a hybrid model like they do over east, where you go to site and you've got time to do small jobs while you're there. As soon as it's more than an hour and a half, that's when you escalate it to the install team. So I think we're going to go more towards that business model. We'll still have two or three of our top guys that will go to the quotes, like "I want a renovation" or "I want five air cons." That's a quote. You're not going to go and do that straight away. But for jobs like a no power or a broken power point, we send a service tech there. They do that as a minimum. If they can manage to get more work for whatever reason, then we can escalate it to someone else. That is kind of hybrid, and it keeps the guys out of a sales role.

Kane: Yeah, that's sort of what we do at the moment.

Peter: I definitely think that helps get them into it, because they're just looking at smaller jobs. If you send a guy to a hot water system lead and it sounds like a good lead, they're expected to win that job, you know, and not every job is going to be won. Some guys, especially if they're more of an installer or a technician, are going to feel that pressure. We have it in a similar way, where we have guys who just do install work, and then we have guys who are a hybrid of both, which we call a service technician. They'll probably get three to four jobs a day. They go out, look at the job, price it up, give the customer a price, and then they get the job done there and then. And like you said, if it takes longer than an hour and a half or so, that's when we'll reschedule it for another day for an install technician to come.

Peter: On top of that, at the moment we have Jay, my business partner, in that role as a senior technician. That's someone who's purely sales. They're going to those bigger ticket leads because they've got the experience and the sales ability to try and convert them. What we've said to the service guys is that as they go through the service jobs and start to build up their average tickets, there's no clear promotion into senior technician. They will promote themselves, in the way that if they're selling jobs that are always over an hour and a half, they'll always get pushed. If they're consistently doing that, all their jobs will start to get pushed. So they've effectively become that senior technician, you know?

Kane: So it's a natural progression.

Peter: Yeah. The guy we have at the moment is doing really well. When he started, it was a lot of small jobs, but now this month just gone, remembering that they're going to the jobs and doing them, so they're not getting as much volume, he'll finish the month on about $65K, which is really good for a service technician going to it and doing it, compared to where he was a few months ago.

[17:44] Weekly sales training and role play

Peter: Jay stays on top of the training. With that, you do need to stay on top of the training a bit, because they're not typically someone who's suited to sell straight away. It needs to be taught and trained a bit more. So every week we're doing sales training. On top of that, Jay is going out doing ride-alongs. And then we have other sales training things that they can look at in downtime. If they have downtime between jobs, there's other videos and things like that that they can watch.

Kane: What, that you guys have made or from a different source?

Peter: Some that we have made and some from other places, but stuff that they can watch to help them keep learning. Likewise, if they're at jobs and they ever hear the same objection, we get them to write these things down so we can bring them up in the sales meetings. We haven't got stuck into it a lot yet, but where we used to work it did work quite well, and that's role-playing. That really helped. It's really awkward. You're standing in a room, there'll be a few other guys there waiting their turn, and it's really awkward to do role-playing, pretending you're a customer. But I found that really helped. And even just putting yourself in that awkward situation in front of people helped bring up your confidence as well.

Kane: So where you run them weekly, how long for?

Peter: About an hour. It depends on what we're going through. At the moment we've run out of our houses, so this is at Jay's place. He's got a screen set up and everything. So it'll be anywhere from half an hour to an hour depending on what we're going over that week. It'll be a topic to do with part of the sales process, and we keep going over that sales process from start to finish to really make sure everyone's across it and knows how it goes. And then once a month we make a bit of a toolbox as well, so they go a bit longer.

Kane: Do you ever skip the weekly ones? Do you do it first thing in the morning, like 6:00 am or something?

Peter: We do it at 7:00 till about 8:00. But I'm wanting to get it earlier, because if you get out on the road at 8:00, it can really throw out your day. Traffic can get pretty bad. So really 6:00 am would be good, and then everyone's out by 7:00. But at the moment it's 7:00. Sometimes it pushes to 8:00 or 8:15, and then you might not be getting to the first jobs until 10:00, and that should be your second job at that point. At the start it definitely stuffed up the day. So now we block it out in everyone's schedule. We try not to book anything in straight away, so it isn't a rushed feeling.

Kane: Do you have your installers there as well?

Peter: Yeah, we do.

[20:52] Role play and handling objections

Kane: It's interesting, because we recently went through a sales training program with an external person, Julia Hewitt. Obviously that was quite time consuming, but it's worth doing. So at the moment we're doing sales meetings once a week, which probably isn't enough. With her sessions we were doing role play, because everything's about doing the reps, doing the reps, doing the reps, having that objection handling and that kind of stuff. A couple of guys have recently asked, because we're trying to do it in-house now and we're not doing role play because it is so awkward, they said, "We need that. It is helpful."

Kane: So I just had a thought. It'd be interesting if we did a session with you guys, because sometimes if we're in a room with the same group of people, whereas if there's other people as well, having those objections. If you had your plumbing sales guys and our electrical guys, we can go through the whole process. That could actually be quite interesting. We should do that.

Peter: Yeah, definitely. And role playing objections is a big one. I think a big part of sales is taking on that objection, seeing what it's about and what it means, what the customer's actually trying to say to you. Quite often, guys just leave it at that and they're like, "Okay, no worries, I'll just send it through." And you lose that job if you just send it through.

Kane: It's awkward. And if you don't do the role play training, they are training with live customers, which is costing you money.

Peter: Yeah, definitely.

Kane: I do it sometimes. I'll go out and do a day with one of the guys or by myself. And it's hard. If someone says, "Yeah, I'll get back to you tomorrow, I need to speak to my partner," I say, "Okay." Because I haven't had much experience doing the same thing over and over, I don't know what to say. I'm just like, "Okay, no problem, I'll give you a call tomorrow and we'll book it in." There are obviously things you can say. Is it the price? I don't know. There's obviously things you can say, like open questions, which Julia was heavy on, to try and draw that out of people. Because there's always something. Have they already got another quote that's cheaper? Have you not given them enough information?

Peter: Yeah, definitely. The way we've got this business going at the moment, Jay's very much sales and I'm not. So sometimes I will still go to a sales call and I'm so out of it. Where I used to work, I was doing sales every day, and because you're doing it every day, you're really on top of those objections. It's really easy to call people out on their objection, if that's the right way to say it, to go back at them when they bring the objection up. But now, if I went to a call right now, because I haven't gone to a sale or a quote for a while, and someone threw an objection at me, I would find it very difficult to go back on that objection, because I haven't done it so regularly, you know what I mean?

Peter: So I think just always doing it is the key. It's not only just doing the training, but that's why we're trying to get more of these videos and things going, so that when they have downtime, they can watch that and see, okay, that's how we should go about it.

[24:00] Recording sales calls for training

Kane: What would be an example of a video? Have you ever managed to get a POV on a real job of a quote, or is that...

Peter: No, we haven't. I would like to wear, you know, glasses. I don't know how it works.

Kane: In America they do. They'll have their audio recording. I sort of heard about that over east at one of those seminars, and I don't know if you get away with that here in Perth. Obviously you'd have to ask the customer, but as soon as they know that, it's going to change the whole feeling anyway. So it's probably no point.

Peter: ServiceTitan has Field Pro, which I know some of the guys I still speak to from over east, when we met guys, they use Field Pro. It's on ServiceTitan and it's very much suited for an iPad. Once you're at that job, it's recording the whole call. It's not video recording, but it's recording and transcribing that whole sales process, so that it can be played back by the office, listened to, where did you trip up, brought up in sales meetings. That is an add-on to ServiceTitan. ServiceTitan, as expensive as it is, still has lots of add-ons, unfortunately. But that's an add-on that a lot of people use, and they're using it in Australia.

Kane: Yeah, right.

Peter: It would be good to actually see how they're doing it. But as far as the video recording, I think that's a whole different thing.

Kane: It would be, yeah. And you probably wouldn't necessarily need that. The audio would be good enough.

Peter: Yeah.

Kane: But again, I don't know the legalities if you have to tell them, which I assume you do because you're in their home, their property. You'd have to tell them, "Hey..."

Peter: Unless it's the initial disclaimer, like when people call us, it's "this call may be recorded." Maybe it's "all dealings with us may be recorded" or something. I don't know if there's some sneaky way that they've done it. But it would be good to see that purely from a training perspective. You can bring it up. You can look at a guy and see how he's handling these objections. And it could just be a matter of a couple of different words changing it, you know? Jay, for instance, is really good at that. You throw an objection at him, he's just always got a way of playing around it. Those are the guys who are really, really good at sales. With training, I'm not expecting to get people as good as that, but somewhere close would be really good, you know? If you could work out a way to train guys to get them close to being that good, that would be a good success.

Kane: Yeah, it's hard. I was going to say we've never hired someone that's come in with prior experience doing the exact same role. We've tried it. It's never worked, because sometimes we got a certain kind of person to do sales and they're not always the best kind of people. So for us, it's never worked long-term. The people that are with us now that do sales have been with us for such a long time and they always started on the tools as an installer and they've naturally just progressed, even though we've never done that proper training, because we haven't had anyone that is good at it. They've taught themselves, and now I've got the sales process in place. It has helped a fair bit.

Kane: But you've got to, like you're saying, if you do weekly training, it sounds good. I'm just thinking how we do that from a cost point of view. That would be expensive, because some guys do live south of the river. But if it helps increase their conversion rate by even 5%, it's worth its weight in gold.

Peter: Yeah, and it definitely would be, you're on a much larger scale. It's going to be a bit harder to do as well, isn't it? But we only have four guys that we would...

Kane: Oh, doing the actual sales. All right.

Peter: So it's not that hard. Well, it's not that much more than what you'd have. You guys have your installers that probably send out people anyway.

[27:10] Sales personality types

Kane: Yeah, it'd be four at least.

Peter: It's definitely hard. I think the other side of it as well is personality types. There are some people that no matter how much training you put into it, they're just not going to be suited to sales. Their personality doesn't fit with it. And you'll see quite often that people who are really good at sales are not very detail-oriented, things like that. And people who are very detail-oriented and process-driven are typically not really good at sales either. Not to say that they can't be. You can just see the different personality types come out and are much better at it.

Kane: 100%. We've got a guy, for example, one of our guys who's been with us for like five or six years. We tried him doing it for a while, but he just didn't want to do it. Didn't like it. So, cool, doesn't matter. We need great installers as well. We've tried it, no problem. You're our leading hand installer, that's perfect.

Peter: Yeah.

Kane: Sometimes we'll ask guys to come up and do it and they're scared they're going to lose their position on the tools, but it's like, no, you're one of our best installers.

Peter: Yeah.

Kane: We just think this would be a good fit for you. If it's not, then we just go back. But I think with sales there's such a stigma behind it.

Peter: It does, definitely.

[29:18] Fixed pricing and charging properly

Kane: Yeah, it can get a bit out of control. I don't know. Do you have set prices that the guys have to sell things at, or are they able to change the prices themselves?

Peter: So we have set prices, but we can alter them. We allow them to give a certain amount of discount depending on the job. If it's easier than what our standard is, they can. Our usual rule of thumb is fixed pricing.

Kane: Are they able to increase those prices as well?

Peter: Not really.

Kane: Yeah, because at a place we used to work at, there were fixed items, but you could create your own custom ones as well. So people would do like you just said, they could jack the price up because they're going to get a commission.

Peter: Yeah, we had previous guys that would do that, so we're really trying to make sure that can't happen. It's a slippery slope and it ends in a bad reputation, which we don't want.

Kane: Bad reviews, bad reputation.

Peter: Yeah, that would be the wrong thing to do as well, really.

Kane: Yeah, and you don't need to. If your prices are correct in the first place and you're not discounting too much, you shouldn't need to do that. You can charge like $400 an hour because you've got all your overheads to pay for. We charge that or more, sometimes a bit less, and we have no issue winning 56% of all our jobs, because people pay for good customer service. They're not always after the cheap one-man bands at like $150 an hour, because they don't provide the best customer service. If you have a callback with a faulty air con, you try and call them and you can't get a hold of them.

Peter: They just ghost you.

Kane: Because they're busy. They don't have the facilities and backing behind them to provide that service, so you get what you pay for in a way.

[30:20] Biggest lesson: nobody does it like you

Kane: What's one of the biggest lessons you've learned since becoming a business owner?

Peter: Biggest lesson. I think going into it, I was a bit naive. I thought, "Okay, we can get a bunch of work and then we'll just go find a plumber." Jay and I are both very good plumbers. We've done it for a long time. We know exactly what we're doing. I thought, "Oh, we can just go get a plumber who'll be exactly the same and we can just send them out to jobs and they'll just be able to do it. No worries." I think that's probably the biggest lesson I've learned. Likewise on the sales side, "Oh, we can get someone like Jay come in who's good at the sales as well. We'll be able to find those guys."

Peter: I think that's a big lesson, that anyone you get in to work for your business, they're not going to do anything as well as you're going to do it. And I don't know why they would anyway. It's not their business. They don't have as much reason to.

Kane: And if they did, they would do it for themselves.

Peter: They would. That's it. And a lot of the guys who are really good are just doing it for themselves.

Kane: 70% apparently is the number.

Peter: What's that?

Kane: You can only expect no more than 70% of what you can achieve yourself.

[32:26] Procedures, videos, Scribe and Loom

Peter: Yeah, well, that makes sense. I think we over expected from the guys, you know what I mean? Now we've stepped back and we're like, "Okay, we're going to do more on the side of training and procedures on how to do things and how we want things done." Even just how we want hot water systems installed, things like that. There are certain ways we want them done, so we're not expecting that they're just going to do it that way. We're putting procedures in that they can follow.

Kane: Yeah, I think that's huge. We've known each other for a while, sort of through the traps, but we met more officially over east at one of the seminars. Over east they seem to follow the American business models a lot, and they do a lot of training within their staff. We look back over time, we're nine years into business and we've never done training, ever. Only until maybe the last 12 to 24 months have we been trying to. We still don't do it anywhere near what we probably should.

Peter: Yeah.

Kane: Because how can you afford to do training? You're taking guys off the road for a couple of hours every week or two, and you put a value to that. That's like $5,000 to $10,000 a week just on training. But I think you have to. Again, we still don't do it properly, but I think it would make a huge difference. We were talking this morning about guys doing jobs and doing things slightly wrong. Everyone's making slightly different mistakes or having issues on different jobs, and we haven't got anything to show them.

Peter: Yeah.

Kane: Like a switchboard upgrade where we're leaving too much copper behind the terminal, which you can get pinged for and it's just bad practice. But everyone's doing it slightly different. So you have a conversation with him, then have it with him, then have it again with him, then have it with him. It's like, come on. If we'd done a training session... Training's hard, because when we've had it before, you tell them something and no one follows it. But I think that's where the consistency would be important.

Peter: Yeah, definitely. Like you said, they're big on training and that's what I think we want to do, but we don't really know how to do it properly either. How to really get it stuck in. So we're just trying to keep going as much as we can and we tweak it. And to the point, if one of the guys calls me, I'm starting to see that as we grow, it's going to become an issue if people are calling me to ask, "What should I do here?" The guys might call and say, "Oh, how do I do this part of this job again?" And I'll say, "Have a look at the procedures," which are all just stored in a Google Drive. They might be hard to find through folders, but Google Drive is very easy to search. It's made by Google, it's got a good search engine behind it. So I say, "Just search 'hot water' and it'll come up with all procedures about hot water, and then you can find it quite easily."

Kane: So would you have videos in there?

Peter: I'm going to do videos now, yeah. At the moment, a lot of them are pictures with arrows, circles, things like that, with the writing, and then at the top of the procedure it'll just be dot pointed out. So there's two different ways you can look at it, and then we will do videos as well.

Kane: Yeah, that'd be handy. Just imagine now if we had something similar with videos, because obviously trades probably don't really like reading too much.

Peter: No, they don't.

Kane: Even an air con service, for example. We get a lot of callbacks with guys not doing everything properly. They're not following the procedure, but if there was a video showing them, it's so much easier for the guys to just watch a 30 second, 60 second quick video of "do this, do this, do this, do this" as opposed to having to read it, because not everyone likes reading.

Peter: No, definitely. And I reckon the videos are going to be key, especially the first time they watch it. Everyone's different, but I would watch a video first and think, "Okay, cool, that's how that works." But then if I forgot a step of that procedure, I wouldn't want to scan back through a video. I'd just want to look at some dot points and think, "Oh, that was it. Okay."

Kane: Have you tried anything like Scribe or Loom?

Peter: We used Scribe. We don't have anyone answering the phones now, but we did have my mum. She was helping out. So we used Scribe at the start to process out how to do everything in ServiceTitan.

Kane: Okay.

Peter: That was really good. You can make them so quickly, and then I'd give it to her and train alongside her as well, but then she has that to go back on. And then Loom, we're starting to look at using for the procedures. But for the other procedures, because they are more on the job, it's taking actual photos. It was easier to make them in Word and turn them into PDFs really. We just have a template, because we're taking photos of a hot water system at different stages. It's not like on a computer where we can use Scribe.

Kane: Yeah.

Peter: Yeah, sort of thing. But definitely Loom seems like the go for videos and stuff like that.

Kane: It looks good. I don't know how different it is to Scribe, but I know that with Loom, you can film yourself or film what you're doing. I suppose that's where Meta Quest would be handy, because you can film and then talk through it as you're doing it. "I'm installing this valve here for this reason. Need lagging down here. The gravel pit needs to be on the 90-degree angle," whatever it is. And then obviously it can use the AI to give you the summary and it can create your SOP from there, I think.

Peter: Yeah, that's cool. So that's Loom.

Kane: I don't know. I know Loom's got some features. I've heard of Scribe. I think there's another one. But it seems like with the technology out there, there'd be one that can do all of it together.

Peter: Yeah, definitely. I want to look more into it. I did look into Loom when I was trying to do the ServiceTitan ones, but for some reason at that time our internet was so bad. ServiceTitan is quite slow loading because it's just this massive software, and I'd assume all their servers are in the States or something. I don't know how it works. And then you're trying to run Loom at the same time, and I just could not run both at the same time. It just wouldn't work. But now we've got that fixed and it seems to be all working. I'll definitely look at Loom then, hey? Fibre? Fibre to the house, hey?

Kane: Fibre internet.

Peter: We've got heaps of phones, iPads, everything, and our home internet's on them as well, so all through the business. Somewhere along the line, because we're racking up all these phones and things on there, they've downgraded us or we haven't upgraded, so it was hitting the cap so quick and then your speeds just go right down. So now we just have to go and change our plan, I guess, you know? But we didn't know for a while, so we just had really bad internet for ages.

[38:44] What makes a great trade business

Kane: What separates a good trade business from a great one?

Peter: I'd say probably the biggest one's good communication. Customer service, but I think the biggest part of customer service is good communication with your customer. And then also through all your guys as well. Everything, just communication, a good clear way to communicate, so everyone's on the same page. We just spoke about procedures. But then communication with your customer, from the phone call explaining the whole process to the customer, what we're going to do when we get there on site, booking in the time, then they're getting confirmation text messages. It's communicating to them the whole way through.

Peter: Once we're at the job, we run through how we're going to do it. If anything ever changes in that job, say we're going to install a toilet and something changes along the way, don't just go do it. Go get the customer, bring them in and run them through it. That's one of our big things we try to get the guys to do. It's all about communication with the customer and communication with us. If they don't know how to do something, we want them to bring it up to us. We don't want them to be calling us all the time. We want them to bring it up to us so we can maybe create a procedure and train them on it, because we know if they don't know how to do it, someone else probably doesn't know how to do it either. But yeah, I would say just that good communication.

[40:48] Office ratios and missed calls

Kane: Just remind me, a question we spoke about just before we started is we've been looking recently at the ratio between office staff and people on the road. Over the years we've always been heavy on the office staff, and I think that's to provide such a high level of customer service, but that comes with a cost.

Peter: Yeah.

Kane: Because if you've got people in the office that are available, they might have available time on the phone of like 50 to 60%, where they are just available.

Peter: Yeah.

Kane: As soon as the phones ring, you might get five, 10 phone calls at the same time. We're trying to work out now, what's the middle ground? Because our ratio is almost one to one, which is insane. It's insane.

Peter: Yeah.

Kane: I don't know how we would provide the same high level of customer service to our clients if we didn't have that amount of people in the office, because if we don't answer the call, like you mentioned earlier, you're on the phones and on the road, which is hard. So that's where we're at. It's a hard ratio to try and figure out. How do you still provide that level of customer service? If we kept it one to one, our hourly rate would have to go up, which means then we're going to lose more jobs. And then that's still part of customer service, that you're too expensive. We're trying to figure out where the middle ground is.

Peter: Yeah, it's definitely hard. In this type of business, at the moment we're really struggling. We need to get someone to answer the phones. I typically will be in the office all the time, but we're finding it hard to find tradesmen at the moment, so I'm out on the road quite a lot and we're just missing so many calls with emergency maintenance. If you miss a call and you call them back even a minute later, they're most likely gone. We might save some. We track all of our phone calls, and when I get home at the end of the day, we need to make sure we're classifying them correctly in ServiceTitan. So you actually have to listen to the recording and classify them as to whether they came from, or what the phone call was about. That says whether it was a lead, a new job inquiry or whatever. We're classifying it to help with all the reporting.

[42:56] Classifying calls and lost leads

Peter: Usually in ServiceTitan, when you get a call, a green bubble pops up with their details and the phone number, and you click on it, and then if you book it into a job, it works out all that classifying of the call behind the scenes. But if you miss a call, you need to go back in afterwards and classify them. So at the end of the day, I'm sitting there classifying the calls. It's not even the calls. We might miss calls and have them go to an after hours answering service to take the details, and then we try to call them back. When we try to call them back, we're losing a lot of them. We might get some, but a lot of these calls we're seeing are just 40-second phone calls and then they hang up. The phone's ringing for 30 to 40 seconds and then they're hanging up. We don't know what they were calling about, but I can see the campaign was the Google Ads plumbing campaign.

Peter: So we've paid for that lead, most likely. Our Google Ads are pretty on point as to the intent of why they're calling. We don't get many time wasters. So I'm pretty positive that they called about something else.

Kane: And they've just gone, "30 seconds, no, that's too long, hang up." And they just called the next person, because why wouldn't you? They're sitting there with the phone ringing. So it's not even about the ones we're missing and trying to call back. Some of them are not even getting a message taken at all.

Kane: How do you work with that now, then, if you are on the road and you are missing calls throughout the day? Are you trying to call them back as soon as possible?

Peter: Yeah, we're trying to call them back as soon as possible. At the moment, we're so busy and we've turned our ad spends right down. So at the moment, this is bad to say, we almost don't care about losing some of them, because we're so flat out busy and we're not spending a whole lot on ads. But in saying that, when I say not spending a lot, I still look at the end of the day and we might have spent $600 on ads, and we probably didn't really get to any of those calls. But yeah, we are trying.

[45:00] Monday call volume

Kane: That's a painful position, because you're like, if I just had two more plumbers...

Peter: Yeah.

Kane: Then we can make so much more money.

Peter: Yeah, if I had two more, well, probably even three really, if we got three more plumbers, we would, like everywhere else we're getting work from, then we'd jack the ads up again. We'd definitely be getting the work in, especially at the moment, which is a very busy time for plumbing. But we'll try to call them back as soon as possible, and really it's me trying to stay in the office. We've got another trade who just started, so that's going to help with that. There's days where 100% I do not leave. Like Monday. I've got to be there in the office. Monday, you can get a huge call volume. You've just got to be there.

Kane: Same. Mondays are the busiest days.

Peter: On Monday, we don't want to fully book future days. We only want to book two jobs per guy, two leads per guy each day. But we'll fully book up the week from Monday usually, with those two jobs each morning, you know? Then as the days go on, we get the jobs coming in those mornings, and we book them for later. But yeah, on Monday you've got to be there answering all the calls. Even just myself on a Monday, I struggle to get all the calls, because you'll be getting a call and another call comes in at the same time, and then another one comes in.

Kane: So when that happens, with the phone system or the system you have, if you are on the phone or you're busy, do they go to a voicemail at that point, or do you have an IVR system where they say press one for this, press two for that? How does it work?

Peter: No, we don't have anything like that. That's probably a good idea. We use Office HQ. It's an answering service, it just diverts to them.

Kane: And they're here in Perth?

Peter: No, they're not.

Kane: In Australia?

Peter: They're in Australia, but it's still an issue because people want local. They ask, "Oh, where are you? Are you close to Clarkson, for instance, or are you close to Joondalup?" And the person on the other side of the phone doesn't know what those suburbs are, so they start to get tripped up and then they've got to come out and say, "Oh, I'm actually in Sydney." And then you're losing that customer. They think you're some nationwide company when you're not. It's just an answering service.

[47:06] Why ASAP Trades needs a premises

Peter: The key there is that we need someone to answer the phones, but to do that we want an office and a warehouse, so we have a place. It's not just about getting someone and training them to answer the phone, it's a whole bunch of other things we need to do first. What we're looking at at the moment is getting a yard and an office space, because we need somewhere for all the guys to come as well, not bounce between two houses. It worked well when it was just Jay and I and one or two guys, but we definitely need an actual work premises now, and then we can get someone to answer the phone. It's a bit hard at the moment. It's not just get a person to answer the phone, we've got to have somewhere for them to go.

Kane: Yeah, so it's the next level or stage of business for you guys.

Peter: Yeah, definitely.

Kane: Premises, and obviously the training is probably a bit more professional for the guys going to a commercial place as well.

Peter: Yeah, definitely.

Kane: Parking all your vans and...

Peter: I think from every perspective, the culture side of it as well. Quite often guys will come to my place each morning, there'll be materials ordered for jobs, things like that, or they can restock there. But I'd like to have all the guys come into the yard in the morning, restock their vans, and we have a chat, so we're staying on top of how you guys are going, are you happy with everything, do they have any issues, stuff like that. They can chat to the other guys they work with for a little bit and then off they go. It brings that every day the whole company's coming together, even just for a little bit. I remember at previous companies I worked at, it was good in the morning to just have a chat to the guys while you're unloading your van.

Kane: Mhm.

Peter: And then you shoot off and you all go off to your jobs.

[49:10] Culture, training and big-company habits

Kane: Yeah, I know. When we went to Network Plumbing, Scott's place, they also have a huge facility, which would be nice to be able to afford something like that. They have all the guys going in every morning, so it is that level of culture within the team. When you do get good tradies, you need to do what you can to keep them, because as we know there's such a trade shortage and it's hard to get good guys, especially after you invest time into training. You don't want them going somewhere else.

Peter: No, definitely. And you look at things like, do you really want everyone coming to your yard every morning? Once again, it's another cost, that they're all there, they're being paid for like half an hour. But then you look at the example of Scott and Network Plumbing, and it's an amazing business, this huge company, and they're making it work. It's probably why they're that big. We're looking at it like, "Oh, could we afford to have the guys come every morning? Could we afford to do training every week?" That's probably the reason why they've grown to that size, because they do that.

Kane: Mhm.

Peter: You look at some of those American-based companies and they're all like that. I know there are some over east doing like $100 million, but there are companies in America that are insanely big. Massive. Doing well over $100 million a year in revenue, and they're all about that. All about training, all about inventory and big warehouses, making it this whole place, and huge branding, which you're saying we haven't got into, which I know is a big thing for you guys and we really need to get onto it. All about that branding and big wrapped vans and stuff like that.

[50:13] Van wraps and branding

Kane: Mhm.

Peter: It must be working. That's how all the very successful ones are.

Kane: Yeah. You've just said it's so expensive to have a van wrap. We've been trying to get prices and I think we've got the best prices at the moment, which is about $6K per van. It's still a lot of money.

Peter: Wrap?

Kane: Full wrap.

Peter: That's good to know. We're looking at it like, so much money. We're small, but we're still going to wrap six vehicles. What's that, $36 grand? It's a lot of money.

Peter: It is. For us as well, we don't have loads of money sitting there in vans.

Kane: Add a workplace on top of that, like a facility, then admin staff, then you've got to add insurances for that facility.

Peter: Yeah.

Kane: Power, water, everything else. It is worth it. We had one of the most fun times when me and Fin got that first office. It was awesome. It was so good.

Peter: Yeah, it would be. Good feeling, eh?

Kane: Yeah. And make it your own a bit.

Peter: Yeah. Change it up.

Kane: You start to get your signage up there. You've got parking, somewhere to put your spare vehicles and trailers and tools. I know you guys in plumbing have so many tools.

Peter: Oh, it stresses me out. I know my missus is probably sick of our garage, which is just full of equipment and tools and stuff, and there's always one or two vans parked on the lawn that used to look really nice. Now it doesn't.

Kane: Drain cameras, machines.

Peter: Yeah, lots of stuff, hey.

[51:17] Why Peter joined Hypotential Foundations

Kane: So much stuff. You're one of the first members of Hypotential Foundations. Why did you join?

Peter: I think, like you said, we met over in Sydney at that networking thing. I forget what it was called now, but...

Kane: Blue Sky.

Peter: Blue Sky, that's right. And that was great, we met other people and went out to dinner that night. We all chat and everyone's talking about ideas and problems they have. I think joining Hypotential, it's good to have that where we can talk to other people, especially locals who are dealing with the same issues. Chat to other businesses, ideas, things like that, and then for advice as well, you know? You could learn from your mistakes and do it the really long way, or you could turn to other people who have been through that and they can give you that advice, and people are willing to help.

Peter: I think you've said it in some of your other ones, that it's a maze. When you went over to Sydney, how willing people are to actually share and help, and it just helps you move up quicker because you're not having to learn by making all these mistakes. You can get help from someone who's been through it. They're happy to help, and I know if one day we were at a position where we had a big business, I would want to help people and share my advice as well, you know? I think it's important.

Kane: I only really started talking to other business owners about eight years into business, which is pretty insane. I just always assumed that people wouldn't want to talk about it because it's their thing. But as soon as we went over there, people are more than happy to tell you pretty much everything, all their detail, the same situations that we've been through lots of times, either smaller scale or bigger scale. So that's why we started, because as far as I'm aware, there's nothing in WA.

Peter: No. I don't even think that over east thing, that one's now finished. I don't think they do that anymore.

Kane: There's nothing in WA. So Foundations is obviously a private network for traders, which is supposed to be about that, and then we're trying to do business coaching, which is at a higher price point, which is a bit different. Again, I don't think there's any in WA. There's obviously some over east.

Peter: Yeah. I think the private network thing is going to be huge for us, to be honest.

Kane: We've got some official partners in there now as well, like Jeremy, who I know you guys now use as your Google Ads consultant. And the insurance broker is going to be in there. We're trying to get the accountant. We're trying to have everything in there, so they can give their advice because they've helped us build the business as well. I'm not saying that we built our business perfectly, because we definitely haven't, but we've learned so much along the way, and it's probably cost me millions of dollars in losses making those mistakes.

[55:31] Referrals over agencies

Peter: Yeah. If I went back and did it all again, if I was looking for someone for Google Ads or an insurance broker, people like that, one of the main things I'll do is go looking for referrals from people who had actually used these agencies or these brokers. Jay and I went through so many, getting locked into periods. You get locked into a six-month period and then you're not getting results. Even the insurance broker, I think we changed a couple of times as well.

Kane: It's hard changing, isn't it?

Peter: Yeah, all the changing and getting locked in, and it costs a lot of money. You can save a lot of time with something like Hypotential, where you've got people that you know are good and they're going to do a great job, and then you can refer to people. It saves so much pain and heartache of trial and error, really. And then wasting money.

Kane: Yeah, wasting money and time. So how old is ASAP Trades?

Peter: We're about 80... Oh, no. We started in September of 2024, so it's close to two years old.

Kane: Mhm.

Peter: In September it'll be about two years old.

[56:32] Cold calling a Sydney plumbing business

Kane: So what made you go to those interstate networking events that early on in your business?

Peter: Well, I didn't think that was really a thing either, that people really chat about it. We had switched over to ServiceTitan. ServiceTitan wasn't massive in Australia then, and I think we were the first or one of the first in WA to be using it. So there wasn't anyone in WA I could really talk to. There are some things in ServiceTitan, because it is an American platform, that haven't come across very well in Australia yet because it hasn't been here so long, and one of them was the accounting setup. When you speak with ServiceTitan, it was hard. So I was like, "I don't know what to do and how we get this set up." I heard Scott from Network Plumbing on a podcast talking about ServiceTitan. So I just Googled Network Plumbing and called their company. And it was obviously just one of the ladies in the office who answered, like booking a job sort of thing, and I just said, "Hey, this is..."

Kane: "Can I speak to the business owner?"

Peter: Yeah, pretty much.

Kane: "Go away."

Peter: I was expecting to be told where to go, but I said, "Look, I'm a plumber in WA. We've just started on ServiceTitan and I know that Scott and you guys are using ServiceTitan. Is there any chance anyone might be able to have a chat to me and give me some help?" And she said, "Yeah, 100%." I was like, "Oh, all right, sweet. That's amazing." So she took details down. She said, "I'll get someone to call you back." I think she said, "Oh, it's probably best if I get Vicky, which is Scott's wife, to call you back." And then Scott called me back. And I was like, "Yeah, all right." And he put me onto someone within their business to help with that. So that was great, straight away help with that issue. And then he said, "You need to come over to Sydney." I met all these other guys and I was like, "Wow, this is amazing." I didn't think someone like that would even want to talk to someone like me, to be honest.

Peter: So we bought some tickets to go over. Me and Jay went over. At that time we were quite small. It was me, Jay, and we had two plumbers and we were using a contractor. We were only running Google Ads solely. So we booked up that full week full of work. We had all the materials ordered and laid out in the garage, ready to go for all the jobs, all notes, everything done. We pretty much said, "There you go, there's your week of work for both of you," and we went off for a few days over there. I didn't even know it was really a thing. And then after that, seeing how open Scott was, he's obviously a busy man running a very big business, and he was open and just willing to help. I thought, "Ah, it's amazing." Other people were going to be similar to that.

[59:40] Hosting businesses and opening doors

Kane: It's an example, because then, obviously because it's him, he then gets other people around their size to do the same thing and they're happy to as well. Like that event that we went to, what was the business that we went in that ran that?

Peter: Ah, Tonkin. Tonkin Group.

Kane: Their big business. Same thing, but they're more than happy to show you their area, go through a bit of a seminar kind of thing. Yeah, it's cool.

Peter: Yeah, it's definitely cool, and I think what you're doing here is great now, because as far as businesses in WA, you'd be one of the biggest electrical and air con residential maintenance businesses in WA, wouldn't you?

Kane: Yeah, I think for resi maintenance we would be for sure.

Peter: Being able to get people together and show people that, and then coach and give that advice, it's going to be good, because like you said, there's not really much like that in WA at the moment.

Kane: Yeah, I thought the business would be a lot easier, but I think it's going to take time for people to come around to it, because no one's used to really networking. Sometimes people go to a networking event which is business in general, and obviously they're not always the best. There's accountants and stuff.

Peter: Yeah, there's accountants in there, people that as soon as they get one client it's recurring, it's forever, whereas ours is, if you get one job, it doesn't really help you, you know what I mean? We need high volume. So they're not the best for us for work. They're good to meet people. If you're going after real estate or strata longer term clients, it would be good. When I worked for myself years ago, I was a member of BNI, the networking groups, and there is a strong push that you need to be giving those referrals back. You've got KPIs.

Kane: Yeah, and sometimes it was quite difficult to do. But I'd say residential maintenance, we need much higher lead flow. If you're going after strata, real estate, commercial maintenance, like trying to do all the maintenance for hotels, things like that, something like that might be better, because you might actually get put in touch with those people by talking to a corporate accountant. But not really for residential maintenance. It's a completely different business model. Even commercial is a very different business model to what we're running. We do maybe 2% of our jobs as commercial, and it's probably replacing lights or something.

Peter: Yeah. Simple work.

Kane: Yep. Well, not simple.

Peter: But still, it's maintenance work.

Kane: Yeah, maintenance.

[1:01:47] Communication, cleanup and callbacks

Kane: So the plumbing industry isn't always known for great customer service. How do you guys stand out?

Peter: I think for us this year, the communication, that's key. Like I said before, communicating with the customer, being upfront about everything from when we're there, with the price, explaining exactly what they're getting for that price, and doing what we say we do. A big part of the training is making sure that the guys are doing a really good job, but it's also the cleanup. Every van we have is stocked up and we supply a lot of tools, so we know that they have them, and those tools are things that are going to help with that customer service too. It's Milwaukee vacuums in every single van, so we know every van has a vacuum. We've got lots of brooms, dust pans, drop sheets, things like that. Everything that they need to make sure the house is spotless when they leave.

Peter: I think that's a big thing, because customers can see part of what you've done, but they don't really see everything that you've done. They will see the mess that you've left. Or they will remember that you put that there when the guy who came originally said you're going to put it there, you know? So if anything changes along the way, you've got to get them involved, bring them in and show them. "Hey, I know the guy who came before said we're going to put it there, but it's not actually going to work very well. I think it might be best if we go here. Do you agree?" Otherwise, you just go do that and show them at the end of the job, and they're just going to be like, "What's going on? That's not what I was told."

Kane: So frustrating when that happens.

[1:03:54] Callbacks within 24 hours

Peter: Yeah. And then callbacks. You can't really avoid callbacks, and some of them aren't a callback, they're just a waste of time from the customer, but that's one of our top priorities. It might be easier said than done at the moment because we're quite small, but callbacks are our top priority. If there's a callback, we will get out there within 24 hours to get on top of that callback, see what the issue was, and fix it.

Kane: Like every single time. Especially with plumbing, because if there's something leaking, it can cause so much damage.

Peter: Oh, 100%. If it's a little tiny drip into a cupboard, you could have to replace that whole cupboard.

Kane: Drain and everything.

Peter: On the other side of that, we make sure that the guys are fully aware that if you're going to, say, replace a toilet and you see a crack on the tile before you start, get a photo of it, get the customer in, show them that crack before you start, because we want to make sure that everything's documented, that we're not covering a callback that isn't our fault as well. But callbacks are a big one. When we get customers calling with a callback, they're almost aggressive at the start. They feel like they need to be, because they've had this situation happen with another tradesman before, and they've just been told, "Nah, not us." Things like that. So they feel like they have to come on aggressive to get their way. And we're like, "Yep, no worries. We'll be out there. When are you available?"

[1:04:58] Turning callbacks into happy customers

Peter: And it's always that, "When are you available?" We usually wouldn't book any jobs for like 4:00 pm. "I'll be home at 4:00 pm," or "I'll be there at 4:00 pm." Really making sure that if we get a callback, we're turning them the other way. And every callback we've had since, they've flipped the other way. They've turned into a happy customer and most of them have come back and spent more money with us.

Kane: That's such a good point. I was going to ask you a question. I know you guys are obviously pushing for Google reviews, and that's just reminded me, because some people are so scared to call you for a callback. They'll just pump a one-star review, raging. And you're like, "You haven't even called us. What are you doing?" And then we can find the customer. We call them straight away. "Hey, we just saw your feedback. What's the issue?" And they completely change. "Oh, no, sorry. What happened is... no problem, we'll come out and sort that. That's fine. No issue whatsoever." Then you go out there, fix it, and they either change to a five-star or they'll remove it. So people aren't used to having that type of service, which is insane.

Kane: In your opinion, it's like, how can you not go, even if it's not your fault? It is easy for us because we are bigger, but if I have a split system installed and I think it's not working, or I don't know how to use it, we'll just send someone there. We won't even try to explain over the phone how to use it. We're like, "We'll just pop past when we're in the area."

Peter: 100%, and that's part of that customer service. I think initially the customer thought we were just going to fob it off, and now I would hope that they come back to us, which is what's happened with previous customers. They've come back time and again, you know.

Kane: Yeah, definitely. There's so many similar stories with us. Even ceiling damage. A trade accidentally drops a screwdriver through a ceiling when he's doing a rewire, which is a huge job. There's a high chance there's going to be some little mistakes or damages. And again, we just go out and solve it straight away and people are just happy with that, because customers don't expect there to be any damage. But we know from the amount of big jobs that we do that it's very unlikely there's going to be zero damage, because it's such a big job. There's so much involved. In and out of the manhole all day, up on the roof, on old roof tiles. Breaking those is obviously a big one, because if they don't have spare tiles, sometimes we would have to go take a tile out to Wangara and try and get a replacement, same colour, same shape and style, and replace it. But again, that level of customer service is what people pay for.

[1:09:09] What one-star reviews really say

Peter: I love looking at other companies' reviews. I always look at their reviews and you can learn a lot. You can learn a lot about pricing from their reviews, what companies are charging as well, really. But if you go look at one-star reviews, even for companies that are charging a lot of money, they're not often about the price. They're about the price after something else has happened. I find quite a lot of the time it's about the price after they got ghosted. They did the job, the customer called up needing something, and it never got done. Or there was a callback and no one ever came back.

Peter: Or other bad reviews would be, "I booked in between Wednesday 10:00 and 12:00, and they didn't roll up till 3:00. And then..."

Kane: With no communication.

Peter: Yeah, or they called at like 2:30 and rescheduled for the next day and then didn't show up. So literally communication is the main one that all these one stars are coming from. And then it comes down to price. It's not really that often the first one. It's once something else has happened that's annoyed them, then they start to say, "And then they charged me four grand when another plumber said they could do it for three." But it's something else that's got them to that point first.

Kane: Yeah, that is a good point. So that will get reviews that say they're not the cheapest out there, but it was a great service, happy with everything, great team, great girls in the office. It comes with a price, but...

Peter: And it's easy to defend that, then, isn't it? Because...

Kane: Yeah, you defend it. Exactly. You've paid that because we have all of that service there.

Peter: We're able to do that because the price is there. If our price wasn't that, we wouldn't be able to give you that service.

[1:11:13] ASAP Trades in five years

Kane: Yeah, sometimes it's hard to explain that to customers, but... Where do you see ASAP Trades in five years?

Peter: I don't know. I don't really have a plan of any kind, but I definitely want to grow it to a larger team. I think a good size team would be like 10 vans on the road. That would be a really good size team that we can really work on and make sure everyone's working well, good culture, stuff like that. I think that's where I'd definitely want to be in five years. Hope to be bigger than that, but somewhere there.

Peter: And then I know you've had a lot of talks about having other trades and how you guys have gone the other way, but I would like to put another trade on as well. That is sort of why we're called ASAP Trades. At the moment, we are only doing plumbing, but I don't think I would want to do that until we really had plumbing solid, you know? We built a solid system around plumbing. When you have a different trade, there are also going to be changes to everything. But if we had that solid base system, that good solid company to start, I'm hoping that will make it easier.

[1:12:17] Adding electrical as a second trade

Kane: And do you think you would do electrical?

Peter: I think we'd do electrical purely for the reason that we need electricians so often.

Kane: Mhm.

Peter: Power points, hot water systems, stuff like that. Disconnect, reconnect on hot water systems. We need them so regularly. Even if it's a matter of we had, say, 10 vans plumbing, we might only have one or two electricians, it's more just to help with that, but then we could do switchboards, things like that. It's more that we find, not just electrical but other contractors that we've used in the past, if they're not a part of your business, it's difficult. It's hard to trust how well they're going to do things as well.

Kane: Like the power point example you just gave.

Peter: Yeah, like that. And same as just time. If we use other contractors and we say to the customer, "Okay, he's going to be out here between 10:00 and 12:00," then they don't communicate to us or the customer if they're not going to make that time. We can't control what a contractor does. So that's where I'd say electrical would be the next one, more so from that angle of helping with the rest of the business. Then obviously it means that if you go to a power point and the board's in a bad state, then we can do the board.

Kane: Yeah.

Peter: We just can't even price on that stuff really at the moment. Our price for a hot water system includes a GPO, but no other electrical work, because we're not electricians.

Kane: Yeah. So.

Peter: Yeah. But it's something we do not know at all.

Kane: Such a hard one, actually. It just makes sense, and that's why we tried doing it, especially for plumbing at the start. But I think if you were doing what you just said, and you're not paying for advertising, if it is just the work that you're getting organically, it still makes sense. It's just obviously you're finding the right person. You guys will need the nominee. That person needs to be a contractor, a nominee, be good. You need someone great to come in that can just do that, and then maybe they get a sparky under them, which would make the most sense. But it's just hard finding that person, because if they're that good, they'd probably work for themselves. It's just having that person who can come in as a nominee and run this division.

Peter: And then they could just leave as well.

Kane: Yeah, and you lose your nominee.

[1:16:26] Where to find ASAP Trades

Kane: Before you wrap up, is there anything we haven't covered that you want to talk about?

Peter: No, I don't know. Not sure.

Kane: We've covered a lot.

Peter: Yeah.

Kane: Let's book in a toolbox meeting. Sales toolbox meeting. Collaboration. Smartfix and ASAP Trades.

Peter: Yeah, for sure. Role playing. Make everyone feel awkward.

Kane: It'd be good there, because your plumbers can throw you objections for electrical, because they obviously wouldn't understand the trade. So it'd actually be more realistic.

Peter: Yeah. Let's book it in.

Kane: Yeah, cool. Finally, where can people find you and ASAP Trades?

Peter: Well, I'd say our website, which is asaptrades.com.au. And then Facebook. I don't actually know what the Facebook is. I'd say it's like...

Kane: Google ASAP Trades, you'll find...

Peter: Yeah, just Google ASAP Trades.

Kane: Don't pound the Google business.

Peter: Sponsored ad. Yeah, don't click on any that say sponsored, because Google charges you a lot of money for that. But yeah, Google ASAP Trades. If anyone out there is looking for jobs, we're hiring and I think we will be for the foreseeable future.

Kane: Thanks for coming on.

Peter: No worries. Thanks for having me.

[1:17:29] Outro

Kane: Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Unlocking Business. If you've enjoyed this conversation, please take a second to like, subscribe and follow our channels. It really helps us to bring on more guests and have great conversations. If you'd like to connect with today's guest, the details are in the description below. I'm Kane Tyler Smith. I'll see you on the next one.