·
36 minute read
Ask most people what limits a small HVAC business and you'll hear some version of the same answer: not enough leads. Not enough closes. Not enough trucks.
Furman Haynes has data pointing somewhere else entirely.
Furman is co-founder and CEO of WorkHero, a back-office operations platform built specifically for small HVAC contractors — generally shops running two to ten trucks. He and his team ran a survey through the HVAC School audience that drew more than a thousand responses, most of them business owners. The finding that stopped us cold wasn't about sales at all.
The hours scale faster than the business
Here's the shape of it. At owner-operator scale — call it $250,000 to $500,000 in revenue — the admin work runs somewhere between 12 and 19 hours a week. It's usually the owner doing it, or their spouse, at night and on weekends.
Push toward $2 million and that number nearly doubles. Thirty-three hours a week.
That's not a task you absorb between jobs. That's a full-time position nobody hired for, being worked by the person who is also selling, installing, and running the company.
And it's exactly where growth stops. Very few shops get past $2 million. Only 5% ever reach $5 million.
Furman's read on the mechanism is straightforward: somewhere around a million in revenue, you can no longer be your own bookkeeper, your own salesperson, and your own HR person. Everything starts to break down at once. The systems that got you to a million are the same systems that cap you there.
He's careful to add a caveat we appreciated — not everyone wants to grow, and there's nothing wrong with that. Plenty of excellent contractors have looked hard at the hiring, training, and management overhead of scaling and decided they're good where they are. The problem he's describing is the shop that's been stuck at $750K or $1.2 million for years and doesn't know why.
Where the hours actually go
When Furman digs into what owners are doing during those hours, two things come up repeatedly.
The first is quoting without a price book. If an owner tells him estimates are eating his week, the next question is always whether he has one. Furman's honest that a price book isn't a cure-all and that there are real debates about pricing structure in this industry — but there are best practices, and shops that skip them pay for it in hours.
The second is job closeout. Whether technicians are consistently getting photos, notes, and documentation into whatever system the company uses. When that process is loose, the downstream cost is enormous: job costing becomes impossible, and pulling a permit or filing a rebate means somebody is scrolling through a phone's camera roll or digging back through email looking for an RA number. A meaningful share of those admin hours isn't doing work — it's looking for information that was never filed.
This is the piece that resonated most on our end. Eric is a systems thinker, and there have been plenty of moments in building Amply where he's insisted we set something up properly in HubSpot while I just wanted to get the deal closed. He's been right every time. It's the same dynamic, and it's acute in HVAC specifically, because so many of these businesses are started by excellent technicians who didn't sign up for the back office half of the job.
The part about private equity
We asked Furman about PE roll-ups — he was wearing a "Keep HVAC Local" hat, so it seemed fair — and his answer contained the biggest surprise of the episode.
The common assumption is that platforms win because they're more sophisticated. Better systems, real operational muscle, AI, centralized back office. Furman knows people who've worked inside some of the name-brand platforms, on the acquisition and central operations side, and his read is that the advantage is much narrower than it looks. Two levers move the margin: equipment purchasing scale, which can be worth 5 to 10% annually, and software procurement discounts.
That's it. Buy the companies, put them together, negotiate harder.
He frames this as reason for optimism, and we agree. If the edge is purchasing power rather than operational excellence, then the things that actually win jobs — quality work, real expertise, an owner who picks up the phone — are still yours.
What your time is worth
We closed by asking what he'd say to an owner who's up late on a Sunday doing rebates for the twentieth week running, and is certain he can't afford to fix it.
Furman starts with arithmetic. An owner who's also his own salesperson is worth at least $200 an hour, usually more. Ten hours a week on paperwork, conservatively, is $2,000 a week. Roughly eight grand a month, already spent, just not on an invoice anyone can see.
Then he goes somewhere better than ROI. His point is that you don't have to be everything to everyone — and he's explicit that the answer doesn't have to be his company. Hire a VA. Use another service. Fix your SOPs yourself. What matters is taking seriously the idea that a good business and a Sunday night that belongs to your family aren't in conflict. He said he'd love to give a contractor more time at their kid's baseball game as much as he'd love to see them double revenue.
The 5% number isn't a prediction. It's a description of what happens when the paperwork wins.
Timestamps
[00:00] – Introduction
[02:07] – Meet Furman Haynes and the mission behind WorkHero
[04:02] – What Furman learned from spending years alongside HVAC contractors
[08:22] – The 20-hour admin problem and why most contractors hit a growth ceiling
[11:26] – Why systems, price books, and job closeout processes matter
[15:37] – Common misconceptions about HVAC business owners and technology adoption
[17:43] – Private equity, industry consolidation, and keeping HVAC local
[21:53] – Why traditional field service software still leaves major gaps
[26:45] – Inside WorkHero: combining AI with experienced HVAC office managers
[37:18] – Where AI genuinely delivers value today and where the hype exceeds reality
[40:33] – Advice for contractors overwhelmed by paperwork and trying to do everything themselves
Follow Farman Haynes:
- Company: https://www.workhero.pro/
Transcript:
00:00:00.160 — 00:00:46.000 · Speaker 1
The real insight here is that as your business grows by revenue and by number of employees, the number of administrative hours grows with it. You start around owner operator. Maybe you're doing between 250 to 500 K in revenue, and it's usually you or your spouse that's doing the admin, and you're spending between 12 to 19 hours on that paperwork.
The challenge is really going from that 500 K in revenue mark to 2 million at 2 million. The number of admin hours almost doubles. You go up to 33 hours. And what we see in the data is that very few businesses unfortunately make it past 2 million. In fact, only 5% ever make it to 5 million.
00:00:50.000 — 00:03:31.070 · Speaker 2
Hey everyone. Today our guest is Furman Haynes. We've gotten to know Furman over the last three years, mostly because we see each other a bunch at various HVAC trade shows, conferences, etc.. In that time, we realized we have the same customer. We're both interested in serving independently owned HVAC companies with exceptional tradecraft and helping them solve the problem of how you scale that kind of work. Amply comes at it from the technical design side. Furman and Work Hero come at it from the administrative side. And as you heard in that opening, he's got a really insightful perspective on that bottleneck. Administrative work is the gating factor on the lot of exceptional HVAC businesses growing to help more and more people.
So we get into it. We get into work here on why it exists. We get into his view on private equity, which is very interesting, and we get into his view on technology and AI, what it can actually do for HVAC contractors, and where the hype doesn't quite meet the reality. If you're intrigued by what you hear from Furman, go check out Work Hero at www.workhero.pro. It’s dot pro, not dot com. The link is in our show notes. With that, on to the show.
00:03:34.870 — 00:03:37.430 · Speaker 2
Hi, and welcome to the Heat Pump podcast. I'm Ed Smith and.
00:03:37.430 — 00:03:39.830 · Speaker 3
I'm Eric Fitz. We are co-founders of Amply Energy.
00:03:39.870 — 00:03:50.110 · Speaker 2
All right. Today we've got Furman Haynes, co-founder & CEO of Work Hero. And the guy who's become, like, heat pump, HVAC circuit buddy. Hey, Furman.
00:03:50.150 — 00:03:55.850 · Speaker 1
It's great to be with you guys. It's so much fun to have friends in the industry like you and honored to be joining you.
00:03:55.890 — 00:04:07.370 · Speaker 2
All right. Furman. We got a whole set of stuff we want to get into with you. But before we do, set the stage for us, give us the 92nd two minute overview of what Work Hero is. So the audience has the context and then unpack from there.
00:04:07.410 — 00:05:10.590 · Speaker 1
Yeah, really fun to be here with you guys. So Work Hero is the back office solution for small HVAC contractors. We help the companies that are usually between 2 to 10 trucks, help them alleviate the burdens that their office managers and the owners face. So what we believe strongly at work hero is the difference between a good and a great HVAC business often comes down to a great office manager.
The person behind the scenes. Usually it's a spouse, or sometimes the owner themselves. Sometimes it's someone they've hired in who knows cash flow, who has built all the SOPs for the business, who understands what real marketing and real customer service looks like, and those are the businesses that make it as we see it.
And so our mission, our entire focus and work at work here is bring back reliable, professional office management with the real expertise just in the HVAC industry to every single small contractor out there. The way we do that, we can talk more about, but we use a mixture of experts on our team and AI.
00:05:10.630 — 00:05:43.230 · Speaker 3
I can't wait to dig further into that, but I'd love to just hear a little bit more about your experience over the last couple of years. You've been talking to hundreds of these small HVAC companies. You've been meeting them, going to their offices, you've been hanging out at the distributors, you're going to all kinds of different industry events where we're seeing around two.
Can you paint us more a richer picture portrait of what those owners look like and who they are, what their day to day is like?
00:05:43.270 — 00:06:05.090 · Speaker 1
Yeah. And by the way, the best place to get to know contractors in this industry is their local supply house. I want to shout out a specific Johnstone Supply in Medford, Massachusetts, where I spent a lot of time three years ago. There were a couple of guys there at the counter who were very friendly to me, and let me just literally hang out there for hours.
I'll tell you about a few, if that's okay. If like specific contractors, is it okay to name them in particular?
00:06:05.130 — 00:06:06.570 · Speaker 2
Sure. That's up to you.
00:06:06.610 — 00:06:18.090 · Speaker 1
Oh no. Some of these are going to work here. Customers. Some of them are not. The first I'm thinking about is actually not a worker or customer, just a friend. His name is Ryan Walker. It's Skywalker HVAC, one of the best named HVAC businesses. I know.
00:06:18.130 — 00:06:19.930 · Speaker 2
They're in Massachusetts. I see them in Brooklyn.
00:06:19.970 — 00:09:23.760 · Speaker 1
Southern New Hampshire, mainly. He drives down. He's in Nashua, but he's got three technicians owner, operator. He is on jobber and tries to use jobber, tries to use QuickBooks. He's about a million in revenue. And he's what I think of in a couple friends in the industry. I'll call out a friend, Kit woo.
In the industry, think of it as a really high quality, a small contractor, the obsessed with quality work and doesn't want to grow. I've talked to him about this and he says the hiring overhead, the training overhead, the management overhead. He's like, I'm good. He's good at where he is. He was a former tennis instructor.
He plays tennis on the weekends and he wants to just keep his business where it is. So I think about Ryan a lot because I rode around in the truck with him a lot. I saw him try to use jobber. I talked to him a lot about the challenges facing his business, and then he hired Debbie. Debbie was the office manager of a friend of his company that got sold, and Debbie was out of work and looking for a job.
And Ryan said, why don't I hire Debbie? And Debbie came in and just completely overhauled his business SOPs, got him set up on QuickBooks, made sure his jobber was actually working functionally. And this was this moment that Ryan always talked about, and it was a light bulb moment for us. And so that is the one of the guys I think about a lot, a few others that I would just call out, these are family owned businesses.
We work with the Steele family in Michigan. They're a ten person shop, and nine of the ten employees are Steele family members, the only non steel family member they will assure you as a family friend of theirs. But I call that out because these are so many small contractors out there. Our family owned businesses, this is their livelihoods.
This is their everything. A lot of the net worth of their family is tied up in these small businesses. And we work with a lot of husband wife duos. We joke that we save a lot of marriages in this work because we help, hopefully alleviate paperwork in ways that reduce the amount of family table, dinner table conversations, and then just a couple others to call out.
You guys know Fletcher out in Colorado, and Fletcher is a great example of someone at Stellar Air in southern Colorado just obsessed with quality work. Former hers reader knows the building science side of the industry and is doing this work because he loves getting into a home, getting into the ductwork, getting into the custom building side of it in some ways couldn't care less about growing and scaling and maybe selling his business one day.
He's in it for that work, and that's something we love to do. Finally, I'll just mention one other, which is Mike Townsend, a Townsend, Veteran Heating, who you guys had on the podcast. Very different mindset, right? Scaling operator from day one had clear goals in mind for where he wanted to be. Told us what those goals were.
We told him initially when we signed him up and we were helping him set up everything in his business, and we said, you're insane. The fact that you're trying to hit 3 million in the first year alone, or we were like, you can't do it. And credit to him with a lot of hard work and vision and energy and resources, they've been able to scale that operation very quickly.
So I guess my point in saying all this is there are so many different types of businesses out there. Many of them are family owned, and we care about helping all of them succeed.
00:09:23.800 — 00:09:51.500 · Speaker 2
Awesome. You really put in the time to understand these folks, because we met you at three HVAC symposiums ago, when he was still in the Kalos parking lot, and at that point you were just learning. You were like a guy with a rough hypothesis. This was a place where help was needed, and we're just trying to figure out where to do it.
So since that one, you've come out with a survey once or twice, just once.
00:09:51.500 — 00:09:55.140 · Speaker 1
But we ran it just once. Yeah, with Brian and HVAC school. Yeah.
00:09:55.180 — 00:10:05.700 · Speaker 2
You came up with a survey that talks about the 20 hours. Tell us about the survey. Tell us about what those 20 hours are. Where's it going? Just unpack that stat for us because it's an eye opening one.
00:10:05.740 — 00:10:33.140 · Speaker 1
Yeah, I will actually pull up this quick visual to illustrate this. So yeah, for those listening, we ran a survey with Brian or in the HVAC school audience had over 1000 people take it. Most of those were business owners, and we asked a lot of questions. And there's a lot of if we want, we can link out the report that was called the Industry Pulse Report in the show notes.
But this was, I think, among the most important findings, which was.
00:10:33.140 — 00:10:46.120 · Speaker 2
For anyone just listening from and pulled up a pretty cool graphic. If you're on YouTube or Spotify, open it up and you'll be able to see it. And if you're on something else, you can refer to this, but go ahead. But first, you'll need to walk through it in too much detail because folks can look if they really want to see it.
00:10:46.120 — 00:12:14.900 · Speaker 1
The real insight here is that as your business grows by revenue and by number of employees, the number of administrative hours grows with it and the challenge. So what you can see here is you start around owner, operator. Maybe you're doing between 250 to 500 K in revenue. And it's usually you or your spouse that's doing the admin, and you're spending between 12 to 15, 19 hours on that paperwork.
The challenge is really going from that 500 K and revenue mark to 2 million at 2 million. The number of admin hours almost doubles. You go up to 33 hours. And what we see in the data is that very few businesses unfortunately make it past 2 million. In fact, only 5% ever make it to 5 million. And again, caveat here being not everyone wants to grow and we're supporters of that at work here.
If you want to just continue a good quality work at your size. But for those that have been stuck at 750 K or 1.2 or 1.4 for a very long time, we see this in the data very clearly. And the reason is systems is SOPs, is the paperwork is the back office, in our opinion, basically around a million. You as the owner can no longer be your own bookkeeper, your own salesperson, your own HR person.
Everything starts to break down. And we see this every single day. And the contractors that we talked to, and this is a big part of what we're trying to solve.
00:12:14.940 — 00:12:59.050 · Speaker 3
And firm. And just to be super clear, we're talking about 20 hours a week. This isn't 20 hours a month. This is taking up half of the daylight hours a week that someone might be spending at that scale. And it makes sense if for a company that hasn't figured out how to get across this growth trap that you're flagging.
Yeah, it's where people absolutely burn out. You're spending hours and nights and weekends trying to find that extra time because you're still helping with installs, you're still going out and talking to customers to do estimates. And yeah, it's like I get why there's so few companies that make it across this threshold, because if you try to scale at all and you haven't figured out that you're just you're going to work yourself to the bone.
00:12:59.090 — 00:14:49.730 · Speaker 1
Yeah. And just to become great about what are we finding in terms of what are they actually doing during these hours when you're around a million in revenue? I think a couple of things start to break down. I'll just mention two. Quoting and not having a price book is a huge one. So when I talk to an owner and they're telling me that they're spending many hours on estimates and quotes and it's just taking them too long.
The next question I always ask is, do you have a price book? And look, a price book is not a panacea. There's lots of different ways to do pricing in this industry, and we try to work as closely as possible with a business owner to build something custom that isn't just like you have to be flat rate, although we recommend it, or you have to analyze between service and install, or you have to work with this manufacturer.
But there are definitely best practices that you can follow when it comes to pricing. That's just going to make your life, and hopefully soon, the lives of your salespeople or whoever's doing the selling for you much easier and simpler. And so that's number one. And then number two, and maybe we'll talk about this later when we talk about how our automations work.
But the job closeout process, basically when you have completed a job making sure that your technicians are making the job complete and getting all of their photos and notes into whatever software you're using is so critically important. It unlocks things like job costing and unlocks things like making it far easier when you need to pull a permit or submit a rebate, or that information lives.
And so a lot of the time we see, unfortunately, they're spending on these admin hours is just looking up information. They don't know where their photos from this job were, and they're scrolling through their iPhone or Android photo library, or they're going back through their email because they're looking for an RA number or whatever it is.
So yeah, this is where again, organization SOPs systems, whoever you use, even if it isn't working, I would just strongly encourage those businesses at this size to start to get organized.
00:14:49.770 — 00:15:48.390 · Speaker 2
This one hits home intimately because as we've been growing amply, I'm like, I have to get stuff done and I will just muscle through it. And Eric is a engineer and as a result, a systems thinker. And he's we use HubSpot. That's our CRM equivalent of a field service management system. But Eric will say stuff like, it's important we set this up in HubSpot, right?
And I'm like, let me just get them to pay for the product. He's like, oh, we gotta set this up, right? Otherwise it's gonna make all these things downstream really hard. And if I didn't have Eric, like, I would have died and quit a long time ago and hit an absolute ceiling. And we see that in our customers, right?
We've spent a lot of time riding along tools, like everything you're saying. I think it's like businesses in general, but it's very acute in HVAC because there's so many folks who are just excellent technicians who start a job and don't realize there's this whole other piece to it. Right. It's not just how exceptional you are designing and installing.
You got to know the mechanics and the nitty gritty stuff are running the business.
00:15:48.430 — 00:15:49.310 · Speaker 1
Yeah. Amen.
00:15:49.350 — 00:16:57.090 · Speaker 3
I like to tie it back. We talk about being happy in your own participation in the business, and feeling like you have the time to focus on the things that you love doing, whatever that is as an owner or an employee of the business. Figuring out these systems allows you to do that, and that makes you a better colleague.
It makes you you have a different you're in front of a homeowner, right? You're if you are a happier person, you're going to come across better when you're communicating and trying to sell the products and services and systems that you're trying to install. And I also think about all these systems. When you don't have your FSM in place, you don't have these processes around.
How do we close out a job? How do we file for permits? All that stuff? It hurts the customer, right? It hurts the homeowner because it takes you 2 or 3 weeks to get back with just an estimate. Right. And it's a bummer. It's a real bummer for that, the customer of yours. So this helps you. It helps the business.
It helps your customer. And it's like a positive feedback loop. Positive flywheel. Once you address these pain points it's good for everybody.
00:16:57.130 — 00:17:07.209 · Speaker 1
Yeah. Trust me, the customer can feel it when you pick up the phone and you've been doing three hours of rebates and your stress in your voice versus the alternative, they can sense and feel that difference. Yeah, totally.
00:17:07.250 — 00:17:43.320 · Speaker 3
This is actually a good segue to the next question. We certainly have our own perspective just from being relatively new to the industry, but I'd love to hear from you. What does everyone get wrong? Whether it's investors or talking to other software companies, folks that are working for utilities or working on policy manufacturers, all these different stakeholders have different opinions about HVAC contractors.
What do they consistently get wrong about these? The folks running these companies, and what have you learned when you've been at the counter at the supply house that has changed your own perspective? Potentially.
00:17:43.320 — 00:18:54.260 · Speaker 1
One outside consensus on blue collar industries, including HVAC, is that contractors and business owners are Luddites that they don't know anything about technology, aren't fluent in it, and are resistant to it. And I've actually found close to the opposite in this industry, which is business owners who, first of all, are many of them trained in engineering and are deeply technical people, is on the craftsman side of things and also know their way around lots of software.
Most business owners I talked to have tried at least 2 or 3 different FSM field service management software have been through the ringer. They know the differences between why Field Pulse works for some and jobber works for others, and House call Pro, and in many cases, they're just fed up with software that is powerful and can be a system of record for them, but doesn't always do enough for them or isn't custom or customized to their business.
And so that's the main thing I found is or one big realization for me is these are people that are not averse to using technology and software when it works for them. They just, in many cases, are facing software that are way too general for what they really need.
00:18:54.300 — 00:19:20.460 · Speaker 2
I love that answer. We agree selling software to contractors. I wasn't sure what you'd answer for this question, but I'll ask you about your hat since you didn't go on this one. Your hat says keep HVAC local, and there's a lot of talk about private equity in the HVAC world now, and there's hot takes on both sides.
Your hat makes me think you've got an interesting perspective on this one. Furman, how do you feel about the move towards private equity sales and roll ups in HVAC?
00:19:20.500 — 00:21:54.920 · Speaker 1
Oh, this is its own podcast episode. And actually, Brian. Shout out to Brian or who did a really good episode about this about a year and a half ago really philosophical talking about and I found really nuanced about this topic. So in general, I don't love it. I think in most cases these firms are coming in and they're extracting value from communities more than they're adding to it.
And in most cases, I hear the actual employee experience on the ground for technicians and office managers, by the way, when these companies get bought is pretty poor in certain cases. I will say, if an owner or operator, if they don't have someone to sell to or don't want to leave it to their employees, and they so choose to monetize the all of their hard work over many years.
I'm not philosophically opposed to this. I just want to create more options for them to have choice and to keep growing their businesses sustainably if they want to. The last thing I'll say, and this is maybe where it gets into where I have a counter take to many, is I think that many small companies in this space think these PE platforms are more sophisticated than they are when I talk to them.
And by the way, through friends or contexts that I have, I know people that have worked at some of the name brand platforms, and when I say worked at the platforms like in the corporate side of them, meaning helping acquire new companies and working in their central operations, and they basically only do two things to grow the value or improve margins in these companies.
And it's not what you would think. You would think it would be some sophisticated back office efficiencies or use of AI or ways of creating operational efficiencies. It's really two it's economies of scale you get from equipment purchasing. So they'll go to a distributor and they say, we have $100 million purchasing power here Johnstone Supply or Watsco.
What deal can you make for us. And that alone right there sometimes gives them 10%, 5% on an annualized basis. And then the other is actually service Titan software procurement discounts. Not only service Titan but a couple other big ones too. They get huge discounts on this. And if you're a 50 or 100 person shop, you might be spending 100 K easily on Service Titan.
And so again, if you can get some significant discounts there, that alone can help. So when I don't want to like call anyone out or do anything, but like when I talk to people that I know about where they're actually creating value, it's basically just they buy these companies, they smush them together, and they have purchasing power in scale.
And so that gives me a lot of hope for the small guys who care about quality work, but also are care about operational efficiency, because I don't think that these big companies necessarily have the same advantages that people think.
00:21:54.960 — 00:22:11.360 · Speaker 2
I'm not surprised by equipment purchasing. When you said service Titan, I thought for sure you were going to say they have an IT team big enough to set it up, right, that you could get all the benefits the software offers. I am flabbergasted your service Titan comment was just about service Titan's cost or pricing.
00:22:11.360 — 00:22:23.910 · Speaker 1
This is what I've heard. Certainly to the extent that some smaller companies aren't effectively using these FSM tools, PE platforms are investing there, but I don't know if they have any advantage. Service is hard to use no matter who you are. Yeah.
00:22:23.950 — 00:22:25.630 · Speaker 3
Huh? It's fascinating.
00:22:25.670 — 00:23:12.430 · Speaker 2
Yeah. Super interesting answer. That was cool. I'll say one thing on this, which is like, philosophically, I love when one of our customers has the ability to sell and get an excellent exit. Philosophically, I feel bad for the employees and for their customers because I've just seen culture, I've seen performance, I've seen pricing go up, the cult of performance go down, pricing go up.
And that makes me feel bad. We have got to do an episode. Eric, on other options. I want to do an Esop episode, so I'll make a call to anyone listening. If anyone feels like they have an excellent perspective on how to run an employee stock ownership program as an alternative exit that's good for an owner to, as opposed to private equity.
We would love to talk to you on the pod and do an episode there, because it would be cool to surface these other opportunities, because P is just the only one folks talk about.
00:23:12.430 — 00:23:14.550 · Speaker 1
I love that idea. I might have an idea for you there, actually.
00:23:14.590 — 00:23:15.750 · Speaker 2
Oh, cool. Let's talk after.
00:23:15.790 — 00:23:31.770 · Speaker 3
Sounds great. We got a taste of it back in our episode with revision with Fortunato Mueller talking a bit about it, but I agree we should go deeper on it and look at the landscape of options that are outside of just PE. All right. So speaking of private equity and giant software companies,
00:23:33.010 — 00:23:56.890 · Speaker 3
you've already mentioned service Titan has called pro jobber. There's so many of these different platforms. Holy cow. Yeah. It feels like to us that so many of them they just haven't actually cracked this the admin problem for smaller size companies where it's 5 to 10 person business, what is the thing that's like blocking them from actually solving this problem?
Do you have an insight into that?
00:23:56.930 — 00:25:52.330 · Speaker 1
It's a good question. These software are tools. I primarily would describe them as a system of record. So they're a great place to store data, primarily field data of any kind from your field operations. And they've improved significantly in the ways that you can organize that data and do things for memberships or maintenance plans.
Be able to predict when a customer may need further outreach or stuff like that. Unfortunately, I'll put it this way at work here. What we saw firsthand when I was watching Ryan, who was talking about earlier, try to use his jobber, is there's the tool and then there's the person who knows how to use the tool.
And the value actually comes from the synthesis of those two things. You really need that. And so at work here, what we did is we're just going to give them the bundle, we're going to give them. And we'll talk about this in a second. But we're going to give them the expert and we're going to give them the automations in our case all in one.
The other thing that I think they struggle with is they're just a legacy software, which means I could call them DIY. Do it yourself. You have to get in there, click around, manage things, upload data yourself. Right? There's not as much of an ability to just get the work done. And the last thing I'll say is these tools, because they're so general and most of them are across most of the trades or even a broader set of verticals are not focused on what I think of as like post install paperwork that needs to get done.
So heat pump rebates are one obvious one that we think about a lot. I know you guys think about a lot, but we also think about registering the equipment with the manufacturer for the warranty. We think about pulling permits, which my god, if you go to certain states like Colorado or others like jurisdictional permit pooling can be a nightmare and headache for a lot of people.
There's a lot of paperwork that happens after the install that these software have just not worried about, because they're so general and they're not as focused on one industry. And so this is where I think we are a great complement in many ways to the software, because we focus on some of those things.
00:25:52.330 — 00:26:16.490 · Speaker 3
So these tools are we mentioned this, but like literally the platforms are trying to serve someone who's a professional painter, a carpenter, an HVAC business, someone running a lawn care business. And so because it's across all of these different trades or industries, the features they're building are just so generalized that they're not really good at any specific one of these services, especially HVAC.
00:26:16.530 — 00:27:04.550 · Speaker 1
Yeah. Like the quoting tool they're going to build is going to be really useful. The invoicing tool works really well for most of the FSM. If you're residential in the HVAC, like that's a solved problem. You can invoice on the spot code if you're a commercial or you do some commercial HVAC work when it comes to invoicing, you're out of luck.
I do not see. I know build ops, and there's a couple others that have tried to solve this, but there's so many different custom portals that if you work with quick service restaurants or multifamily or any other commercial companies, how you invoice that customer can differ for every single account you work on, which means you're often building custom invoices like sometimes literally still in a word doc or PDF and then manually emailing it to them or something else.
So yeah, there's just there's so much variation. And this is where I think being hyper focused on one industry can really help.
00:27:04.590 — 00:27:18.210 · Speaker 2
I've meant to ask you this and never have you get a new customer. They got nothing. It's all pen and paper. And they're 5 to 15 people focused on HVAC. And they say, which one should we adopt? Who do you steer them towards?
00:27:18.250 — 00:27:20.170 · Speaker 1
You said 5 to 15 technicians.
00:27:20.210 — 00:27:22.690 · Speaker 2
Yeah, 5 to 15. Total person. Two people.
00:27:22.730 — 00:27:24.250 · Speaker 1
Residential or commercial?
00:27:24.450 — 00:27:25.130 · Speaker 2
Residential.
00:27:25.130 — 00:28:06.410 · Speaker 1
We would steer them towards house. Scoperow. Scoperow. And there are other good options out there. But bang for your buck. For the features that matter. For us, for the HVAC industry, the price book feature, and then some memberships or maintenance plan feature and the tagging features that come with that.
In House Squall Pro, there's a really good way to, regardless of what membership or maintenance plans by tier or pricing or date you do, you can tag them very easily and using custom fields and house call, which is just one of our favorite features. So we are integrated with other FSS besides House called Pro, and actually have no formal rev share or any other commercial partnership there that we're just fans of theirs.
I know Roland and some of the other people over there.
00:28:06.450 — 00:28:10.890 · Speaker 2
Cool. Yeah, I didn't hear you trash anyone else that you're clear there, but I was curious.
00:28:10.890 — 00:28:18.240 · Speaker 1
I did say earlier that service is hard to use. It is hard to use. They have been built an amazing tool as well, but it's hard to use and expensive.
00:28:18.280 — 00:28:41.840 · Speaker 3
I feel like we gotta talk more about what exactly you guys are doing at work. Hero. You gave us the 92nd overview and you started asking about someone shows up. They got a 5 to 15 person business. What happens from there? Talk us through what you guys are doing at work, hero. From that meeting a customer for the first time, they've signed up to work with you.
What happens from there.
00:28:41.880 — 00:31:34.140 · Speaker 1
During the even the pre signup process when I get to know them? Otherwise known as the sales process that during when I get to them, we spend a lot of time deeply getting to know their operations. So it feels like sometimes it feels like airing out all your dirty laundry. Because I ask you a hundred different questions about how are you doing invoicing?
What is your job costing process look like? Okay, you don't have one. What is your chart of accounts look like in QuickBooks? So we do a full audit of their operation at that point. It becomes pretty clear to us where are their bottlenecks and their business. Those tend to break down into a few different areas.
One is they don't have a price book yet and they really need one. So that usually is one area where we really dig in. A second is their invoicing. They actually have an accounts receivable backlog. Often that's on the commercial side. We found guys with 5000 even like 300 K accounts receivable sitting there and for a million and a half shop.
So that's really important. And if we see that we just go collect on that as quickly as we can. And then third I mentioned this post install paperwork rebates permits, warranties. And for that shop in that range we described usually they have one office manager. If they have one. And usually he or she is focused on the front office, focused on customer experience calls, dispatch, responding to leads.
And often we find where they have not yet really gotten organized, created a good process is on that post install side. And so they just do the permits or the warranties, the rebates, like when they get to them. And that sometimes means you're letting warranties expire, because there's usually some timeline there to four weeks or eight weeks or 12 weeks post install to actually register.
Rebates are not getting filed at all or taking a while to submit. There's errors with them. And so those are some of the challenges that we solve or help solve at work here, the way that we actually do this. We're a deep believer in using the most powerful technology known to man that is now at our fingertips with AI and using deep human HVAC expertise.
So we have hired a team of, we think, the very best office managers in the entire industry, and we say the top 1%. We review about a thousand resumes for every single office manager we hire. And we have this elite team of them that are they all are service line certified. No house called pro, no price books, maintenance pipelines.
They're real experts. And then we are leveraging their expertise and everything we're learning. We're also building automated workflows that take action in your existing systems so you don't need to download a new software. You don't need to interact with a new app. We plug into your whatever FSM you're using, you plug into your QuickBooks, we plug into your email, which is really important.
And you also can just text us. And so we're basically like a layer that sits on top of all of your systems and can just monitor what's happening and get work done. So hopefully that gives at least a rough sense of how we're getting some of this work done today. Wow.
00:31:34.300 — 00:31:42.620 · Speaker 3
Let's go deeper. The last thing you said connecting to your email. Why? How does that help? Why is that so important? What are you doing with email?
00:31:42.660 — 00:32:23.040 · Speaker 1
Oh, man, lots of things. Probably. I've mentioned it a couple of times, but job crossing is really important still today. Lots of receipts in the from a supply house or other accounts payable comes in through your email. And so instead of taking that invoice PDF and manually downloading it and uploading it into QuickBooks and oh, by the way, making sure that it actually gets matched to the right job inside of House Call Pro or whatever software you're using.
We have automated back process. If customer or utility emails you about something and you're out in the field, but it's actually really urgent. We have the ability to monitor that flag, that take action on that. So in some cases, email is still a really important communication tool. Yeah. Wow.
00:32:23.080 — 00:32:32.800 · Speaker 3
And how are you building these automations or is this like are you in custom one off automations for each customer? What does that look like? Yeah.
00:32:32.840 — 00:33:48.830 · Speaker 1
Yeah, man. At some point, I can't even remember if we've shown you our portal on our system, so I would love to do that. I don't know if we can. Probably not the best idea to do that live, but we have built a library of about 300 different automations today that we've deployed across all the contractors we work with.
I think implicit in your questionnaire is a really important question, which is how templates are they? How much can you really copy paste them? And that's something we're actively working on today right now. So far a lot of it has been very custom, because the way that this customer wants to invoice, the way that this customer wants to close out the job theories.
We're now working on building blocks and skills for each of these automations to be able to deploy them across more accounts, and there's just pattern recognition that comes from building more and more of these the way that we're building this, first of all. Shout out to Kyler, my co-founder, and our entire engineering team who've built everything that I'm describing.
But we also have built a internal workflow builder that actually is so intuitive and easy to use that our expert office managers are the ones building some of these workflows so they know the rebate program in Colorado or in New York better than anyone. And so why should they not be the ones to be building some of these automations?
And so that's we now have built out our team of automation builders. But some of those, the personnel there is actually our office team firm.
00:33:48.830 — 00:34:02.430 · Speaker 2
And I would love to see the portal you guys have built just because we've gotten to know each other. But I've never actually seen it. And I find for our software, like what it looks like really helps bring to life like what ampullae does. Yeah. Can we check it out?
00:34:02.470 — 00:36:38.410 · Speaker 1
I was not ready to do this, but let's do it. Let me pull up something really quickly. First of all, just to make sure people understand, our business owners today are contractors we work with. They just have to call up their office manager or meet with us on zoom. They don't have to worry about managing their software.
What I'm about to show you is behind the scenes. This is what our team of expert office managers is using to manage their accounts. So this is the software that plugs into their system. So let me pull this up. So these are all the different contractors and customers that we work with all across the country.
I will click into this demo account and show you guys a few things. So we are plugging into their field service management software in this case via open API. We're connected to House call. We also pull in their email. Eric was just asking you why, but you can see an invoice from a distributor right here. Really important for certain things.
We also have phone calls that we have with them. So if they call us up in the car or on a zoom call, we're able to parse those transcripts, and our office team can come in here and accept or reject tasks. So we've built a way to manage their communication flow of their business. Down here is where things get pretty cool.
So we're tracking on. You can see there's some service jobs down here. But this looks like it's an install heavy shop. What I'm going to do is click into one of these jobs and show you what's happened. So here's this job for Sarah Williams. What's happened here is we pulled in this data from House called Pro.
And we've created some children tasks. Basically, we know for this specific job that we need to be able to pull a permit, file or rebate and register the equipment. And so our AI is automatically detected, the need for those tasks, and we will go ahead and start to action on them. This is the way that we're tracking all of the different paperwork needed in a business.
The last thing I'll just quickly flash up is the way we're actually building these workflow builders, these automations rather. So I mentioned we have this library of about 300 different automations that we are building. We built an internal version of a Zapier or an Natan or another tool like this, where we can combine code, AI agents, and human steps to create workflows.
So I'll just show you what these look like in practice. I'm pulling up a real automation for a customer. This is for a rebate program out in Colorado where we have AI writing specific code steps, agent steps where I think in this case we're using cloud, but we use all the latest models to download, synthesize, organize the information that's needed for the Excel program.
And then at that point, we have a human step where our QA team comes in and makes sure that manual J and everything is accurately organized before we submit this to the utility.
00:36:38.490 — 00:36:39.810 · Speaker 2
So that's very cool.
00:36:39.810 — 00:36:41.249 · Speaker 1
For contractors that are
00:36:42.330 — 00:37:00.030 · Speaker 1
looking to build their own automations, we actually see a lot of trying to code code or trying to automate themselves. Like we have built a way to partner here. We want their ideas for new automations and new things to build, but I think we're a great partner for the AI curious shop that doesn't have time to actually fully automate.
00:37:00.070 — 00:37:35.910 · Speaker 3
It's very cool to see, and I just love that for someone who is decided to work with you, they don't have to learn any new tools or systems. They're communicating with you through their phone, through text message, through email, zoom calls, whatever it is. And this layer of insight and action that you've built just enhances all of their processes.
And it's crazy to see that. Like when you're talking about we are doing this. It's a combination of AI, of expert humans that are part of the process to really make it go smoothly and make sure that it's really solid.
00:37:35.950 — 00:37:47.270 · Speaker 1
Yeah. The portal you just saw, our office team is in there all the time, using it and sometimes running automations themselves, or editing the automation or just doing other office work that's required.
00:37:47.270 — 00:38:12.100 · Speaker 2
That was helpful to see. I can see now why our mutual customers because we have a bunch of those. Love working with you guys. This is the thing that keeps them up at night literally. Often it's the part of the job that they hate. and to see what you built that your office managers are using and that they just have to talk to your office managers to get that level of ease and sophistication in the paperwork part of the business.
Like, I get it in a way I didn't before, so thank you for showing that that was super useful.
00:38:12.140 — 00:38:21.180 · Speaker 3
Yeah, I've got another way to put you on the spot. Meta question are you using your own layers of software that you've built on your own business?
00:38:21.220 — 00:38:47.260 · Speaker 1
Great question. The old. Are you eating your dog food? Yeah. Question in startup land. So if I'm being completely honest on the go to market side, I lead all of our go to market work. The answer is no. Try to be cloud power users. And we're not using it because this software, what we built is it ties into QuickBooks and House Call Pro, but not HubSpot, which I actually use.
But in certain cases, our product team and others are constantly trying to do some version of what you just described, but we could do a better job of that.
00:38:47.300 — 00:39:10.480 · Speaker 2
Fascinating firm. Super cool to see all of that. You mentioned AI or AI models there quite a bit. There is a ton of hype around AI right now, and there's a lot of people have been burned by it and haven't seen it deliver. So I'm curious, in your perspective, like for a contractor, where is it genuinely useful today?
Where is it not? What are you guys seeing being on the front lines like you are?
00:39:10.520 — 00:41:51.000 · Speaker 1
I think large language models are really good at a few things. The first is working with huge amounts of unstructured data. Previously, you needed to structure everything into a spreadsheet before that's what in some cases, custom software. In general, it's just a bunch of underlying spreadsheets.
Right? And now some of what we're doing with at work here now is building like custom dashboards for contractors. So taking data from their house called Pro, but also their QuickBooks or sometimes even their texts because there's data in there and then saying like on a daily or weekly basis, what is your schedule look like?
How many uncollected invoices do you have? How many rebates or permits are outstanding? And that's like a custom dashboard that previously would never have been able to be produced and works really well because it can just pull from ten different data sources. So working with unstructured data. And then the second I would say is just synthesizing information or working with text really quickly.
So these are the things that I think we've all probably done today. But take a text string from your slack channel if you use that, or a group text or your house call Pro and then transform it into an invoice or a rebate or a permit. And so a lot of what we're doing there is just transforming text in that way and putting it into a format that works in terms of where it's overhyped.
I think it's overhyped in a lot of ways, but right now I would say so. Marketing in particular, I think in the HVAC industry, but also across the economy right now. We now have this like I think of it as like a bullshit detector, but it's like an AI slop detector. We all know when we're reading something that was written by AI, I just interviewed a candidate.
Unfortunately, he emailed me and was like, I could just tell that he had written it using AI. And so I would strongly encourage people to not use AI to produce marketing copy, or at least you can use it to assist, but really bring in a human touch in some cases, intentionally screw up the grammar or wording of an email, because then it will look more human.
And then second, more specific to the trades in HVAC. Call answering is something that is, I'll just say right now what I've heard again and again from all the AI receptions out there. And I don't want to like they're all getting better and better, and I think we will live in a future where a lot of customers do interact with AI voice agents, but I don't think we're there yet.
And particularly learning how to apply AI, answering to the specific workflows of a small contractor so they really care about during hours versus after hours. Is this an emergency call or not, etc. and this is what the AI is trying to detect or route the calls. But a lot of times when I talk to them, the rollout, the initial implementation of an AI receptionist goes poorly.
So I think it does require some. Just like with anything, some a learning curve makes sense.
00:41:51.040 — 00:42:04.180 · Speaker 3
Keep us posted. I feel like you're right, as Ed said, right on the front lines of this stuff, and you're seeing where the rubber meets the road, what's actually valuable and what's not specifically for this space. So I'm sure folks would love to hear more about it.
00:42:04.220 — 00:42:05.500 · Speaker 1
Yeah, definitely.
00:42:05.540 — 00:42:35.460 · Speaker 3
All right. Just to wrap things up, what would you say to a small HVAC owner listening right now who's doing this paperwork on? It's they're deciding between going to one of their kids athletic events or it's Sunday night and it's the 20th Sunday night in a row where they've been up late doing the paperwork, but they feel like they can't afford to make an investment into some tool or process or a service like you guys offer.
What do you say to them?
00:42:35.500 — 00:42:42.220 · Speaker 2
Yeah, let me add one. If they're thinking I can't deal with another startup or tech company who tells me I can solve my problem, what would you say to those guys?
00:42:42.260 — 00:43:57.950 · Speaker 1
Usually what I say is what is your time worth? And there's simple ways to quantify this, which is a small HVAC contractor who's their own salesperson. Usually his time is worth at least $200 an hour, usually more. But if you take that as an example, and you conservatively assume that he's spending ten hours a week on paperwork, that right there is $2,000 times worth talking about eight grand a month.
And that's getting at pure ROI and work here. I think the more important message here is, Eric, you alluded to it earlier, is as a small business owner, you do not need to do everything. I really relate to this as an entrepreneur that I feel like I have to be everything to everyone, and there is a future where actually you can be a happier, healthier version of yourself and run a good business and offload some of this to doesn't have to be us.
There's Vas you can hire. There's other similar companies that I could point you to. The important thing is to just take seriously the idea that you actually can spend more time with your family. You actually can be more available to the people that you love and run a great small business. And I really believe in that future.
I get as fired up to help improve the lives of our contractors as help them grow. I would love to be able to give them more time literally at their kids baseball game. As much as I would love to see them double in revenue, so that's maybe I would leave it.
00:43:57.950 — 00:44:07.910 · Speaker 2
That's a compelling pitch. Furman, thank you so much for coming on. It was so good to get deeper into your business than we ever do when we see you at a conference. This was awesome.
00:44:07.910 — 00:44:09.790 · Speaker 1
Thanks, guys. Thanks for having me on. This is great.
00:44:09.830 — 00:44:11.510 · Speaker 3
Yeah, it was super fun.
00:44:11.550 — 00:44:12.230 · Speaker 1
Awesome.
00:44:15.350 — 00:44:37.710 · Speaker 3
Thanks for listening to the Heat Pump Podcast. It is a production of Amply Energy and just a reminder that the opinions voice were those of our guests or us, depending on who was talking. If you like what you've heard and haven't subscribed, please subscribe in your favorite podcast platform. We'd love to hear from you, so feel free to reach out! You can reach us once again at hello@amply.energy. No .com just energy. Thanks a lot.
