EP: 229 Chris Kiefer w/ Boolean Review + Automation - Automate to Innovate: Business Boosting Must-Dos

Listen to Chris Kiefer talk about his journey and give tips on using automation in your industry. This episode is full of ideas on how automation and AI can change your business!

Key Takeaways:

• Save Time & Money with Automation: Using technology to handle tasks like updating customer records, making quotes, and managing schedules can save lots of time and money, letting your team work on more important things.

• Find and Fix Workflow Problems: Look at how your work gets done and find the slow spots. Then, you can use automation to make things run smoother and faster.

• Improve Jobs, Don't Replace Them: Automation should make jobs better by letting people focus on more valuable tasks, not taking their jobs away.

Don't miss out on this opportunity to gain valuable insights and take your business to the next level with AI and automation!

Find Chris:

Via Email: chris@helloboolean.com

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/chris-kiefer

IG: www.instagram.com/pursuitofpurpose.pod

FB: www.facebook.com/chriskiefer4

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@chriskiefer1

Join Our Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/hvacrevealed

Presented By On Purpose Media: https://www.onpurposemedia.ca/

For HVAC Internet Marketing reach out to us at info@onpurposemedia.ca or 888-428-0662

Sponsored By: 

Chiirp: https://chiirp.com/hssr

Elite Call: https://elitecall.net

Service World Expo: https://www.serviceworldexpo.com/

On Purpose Media: https://onpurposemedia.ca

Transcript

Chris Kiefer: 0:01

But the reason we're doing that is because we're trying to save this much time in these other places, or we're trying to enhance reporting so that we can get you better leads.

Thaddeus Tondu: 0:12

Hey, welcome back to another episode of HVAC Success Secrets Revealed with Thaddeus and Evan, where we have good conversations with good people, and any good conversation we're having is worth having over bevvies, anyways really excited to have on Chris Chris Kiefer from the show from Boolean Automation. I remember having the conversation with him and one thing that we actually didn't put in the show notes is it actually helped grow a painting company from 10 million to 20 million in terms of the marketing side and the director's side yeah, okay, somebody's this is an HVAC show and you're bringing on a painter home services, in a sense, now there's different ways nuances, obviously in terms of wording, but really the customer avatars are the same really in the, time with these things and the problems that a business faces are along the same lines and so I'm excited to unpack some of those things, but in case you're wondering who he is, he's an automation he actually automates a lot of things. We were talking very briefly. If his team uses a manual email versus using AI to be able to help do it, he gets mad. He's what are you doing? There's AI here for a reason and being able to leverage some of those things. And so taking those and talking a little about how now he's taken automation using Boolean and review systems to be able to continue to enhance these services and the Google business profile rankings for clients, which is super impactful, super cool. Excited to dive into this convo.

Evan Hoffman: 1:25

Yeah, anytime that we can talk about automation, saving time, saving money it's a massive impact. I know we were just in a session with another gentleman where we were learning about AI and building your own bots and things like that and he was able to save 18, 000 a month that goes straight to your bottom line by implementing more AI and by buying back more of his team's time. It's not about replacing people. It's about replacing mundane tasks that people are doing and how can you implement that? So always excited for implementation around AI and automations and buying back more efficiency.

Thaddeus Tondu: 2:00

Exactly and buying back your time. That's a big thing. I've been a big kick on that for a minute. So today's episode would not be possible, of course, without our sponsors and in no particular order, Service World Expo, Chiirp, Elite Call and On Purpose Media. Let's go ahead and start with that guy here. And so join us for the most magical contractor experience at the Service World Expo in Orlando, Florida from October 15th to 17th enjoy keynotes, breakout sessions for our workshops, social mixers, and exhibit hall with industry leading products products and podcasts, small like ours, we'll be there. Network with other residential contractors and hear from some amazing keynotes. All designed to help contractors like you elevate your business. Register now and use the promo code secrets 100 for 100 off. Visit serviceworldexpo. com register today and we'll see you there.

Evan Hoffman: 2:40

Love it. And of course we have Chiirp, longtime sponsor of the show. Transform your home service business with Chiirp, the ultimate automation toolbox. Capture more leads, connect instantly and skyrocket your sales. Chiirp integrates seamlessly with platforms like Service Titan and Housecall Pro, offering automated texts, emails, and even ringless voicemails. Boost your Google reviews and customer loyalty and one of my favorites, especially in the summertime for the HVAC industry is rehash programs because at the end of the day, You're busy. You're running a lot of calls. Follow up is one of those things that falls by the wayside. And if you can automate that process with something like Chirp, it goes a long way. So schedule your demo today and get an exclusive 25 percent off your first three months. Visit chiirp.com/hssr to book your demo today.

Thaddeus Tondu: 3:26

Cool. And now once you've got those leads in and you want to use a alternate way to reach out to them, visit Elite Call and they outbound their databases to fill your dispatch boards with lucrative service and sales appointments. By the way, they integrate directly with Chiirp and they help boost your memberships too. So enter in Elite Call, a US based call center that does just that. For over 20 years, their dedicated teams don't just make calls, they directly integrate those into whatever CRM you so choose to use and they fill your dispatch boards. So don't let your competition get ahead. Visit elitecall.net to learn more and connect with your customers first.

Evan Hoffman: 3:59

And we have On Purpose Media. Enhance your online presence with On Purpose Media. Recently voted the sexiest co founders in the home services space by a unbiased poll, of course. They are your go to home service marketing company for everything web design, SEO, PPC, and stunning user friendly websites built to convert visitors into phone calls. Visit onpurposemedia.ca. Chris, how you doing?

Chris Kiefer: 4:27

Amazing. How are you?

Evan Hoffman: 4:29

So good. So much better now that you're here.

Chris Kiefer: 4:32

That's good. love when I can brighten the room. So many things that you guys were saying at the, in the intro there. I just, I had to jump in and say, AI, like it's just about saving time and it's not about eliminating people. That the our mission at Boolean is to free you up to do what you love and that applies to the business owner. We all have hobbies and families and things that we want to spend time doing. But also for your employees. And I love what you said about, eliminating the mundane, boring tasks. Those are like I can't remember where I heard this recently, but I've been saying it often is did you guys know that you actually get a free brain with every employee that you hire? They actually come with a brain and you can apply that brain to a meaningful, interesting, cool problem or challenge and have them solve that for you as opposed to giving them something that literally is, in my opinion, dehumanizing. And if you have a person in your office that's copying and pasting data or doing the same thing 50 times a day. It's, 2024 and AI can probably do that for you. You need to unleash your people to spend time and energy working on things that are actually valuable to the business and literally automate everything else. So that's I just, I'm so passionate about that piece of it and when people say I would say a lot of people get very worried about their jobs and oh, it's going to take our jobs and it's like. It might take away a lot of the tasks that you're currently doing, but your job, like we still want to employ you. We're just going to evolve into new things that you probably didn't have time to do before.

Thaddeus Tondu: 6:10

Why I was in Mexico and Cancun last week was actually attend a conference with a bunch of other agency owners, shout out the commitment summit and JC and Karen Hite ran a fantastic event, but one of the speakers on there Julie McCoy she, they said this, that their business content at scale. That they have a guy in their office whose job is to get himself fired because he's automated so much. Like that's like, how can you automate so you could get yourself fired? Now they're not going to fire anybody, right? But the idea is to be able to, what you're alluding to. So now this guy's actually role is so valuable because he's looked at and analyzed and trended so much AI, so many automations that whenever somebody has a problem, guess who they go to? Like he's fired himself from his current role three, four times over and he's iterated it and he's reiterated it. And now he's at this new pinnacle because of AI and what it can do for them, their business.

Chris Kiefer: 7:05

Couldn't agree more.

Evan Hoffman: 7:06

We're going to dive deeper into that, but I want to know your journey. How did you get here? How did you get to this place starting the business and getting into this world of automations?

Chris Kiefer: 7:15

In growing up I was told because I liked Legos and connects that I was going to be an engineer. And so when I got to go to college, I was like, I guess I'm going to be an engineer. So I just fell into that, went through all the classes and I, I enjoy math and the stuff that I learned, but then I went into the real world after graduating and I lasted six months and was like, that guy in the corner office looks like he's the most unhappy person I've ever seen in my life and so does that guy. Why am I here? Nobody wanted to talk about sports or have conversations. They were all just engineering introverts and so I left and started a marketing company and that was in shortly after I graduated from college, like 10 ish years ago, I did that for six years, just like your typical small business. I call it the stereotypical millennial marketing company that had no real focus or purpose or ideal client. We just were. good at Facebook, Google website, like anything that was digital that the business owners that were operating businesses didn't know how to do and we had a ton of fun, learned a lot, but then it got time to my wife and I wanting to have kids and I was like, I needed a different job. So I took a job as a marketing director for an up and coming painting company, which that was like one of the most fun times of my life because I had all of this knowledge, which you guys can relate to immensely from client after client, all these small business people that really cared about Google and local search and the three pack and all that and the marketing and video and like strategy knowledge, and then running a team, and then I got placed into this company as the first internal marketing hire and they were about 9 million in the first year that I was there and they were just going into an expansion of concrete coatings as well and so the painting business, the painting side or services went from nine to 11 while I was there, nine to 12 and then the concrete coatings business went from about 500, 000 to just over 10 million in the three years that I was there. So it was really, scaling the brand and everything, but we were in four different States, five different Metro areas and I got to manage, I basically built like an internal marketing agency for one company and that was really, it just the agency world is tough. It's hard, hats off to you guys for delivering results to your guys clients and stuff. It was amazing to be able to have the brainpower of four in house marketers just pouring into one brand and obviously that's not possible until you reach a 10 million ish level but I always say to people that are starting service companies, if you're between zero and five or 6 million, that's like the perfect time to have an outsourced agency things are changing so fast. It's hard to keep up on everything. You just got to find the right one. But, and I don't know if you guys, have different strategies, but as companies grow, eventually, It could likely make sense to say, we need a dedicated person to manage this cause it's growing in complexity and you actually can afford, specialists maybe to handle media or paid ads or whatever, depending on the complexity and how many markets and stuff you're in. So that was my journey prior to this and about two years ago, I was still at this painting company and I had decided like I had automated. So I'm the marketing director and I'm trying to automate all these mundane processes that affected marketing. Cause like in order to do good marketing, you need your reports and everything to be dialed and we need lead sources for all of our calls. So I was working closely with reception and inbound leads and all that type of stuff and then also I needed the sales data. So I needed to make sure that we were getting all of our quote information back into our CRM and then I was working with finance to make sure that we were profitable on the jobs we were marketing for and all of this was just basically, I was trying to do my marketing job better, but it was like the first time that I had this engineering education mix was marketing knowledge, leading a team and trying to massively scale a company and it was all of this stuff collided and I found this new opportunity. to automate and I was like telling people in marketing peer groups oh, I'm using Zapier now and there's this tool called make, and we have, AI wasn't happening yet at the time, but we were implementing all this stuff and I thought Hey, anybody can do this like just do here, watch this video. I looked it up on YouTube, you try it and it got to a point where people. Started asking me like, Hey, can you just set this up for me? And it happened enough that through his conversations with friends and some consultants, they were like, dude, you could just be a consultant and automate businesses for your job. And I was like, that sounds too good to be true. Like I probably should stick this marketing thing out. Cause I loved the company that I was at, but I ended up making the leap about two years ago and in that time we've automated or in the process of automating 16 painting companies and there's a couple other service companies that we've assisted, but literally in the painting world, like 80 percent of the data and reporting and management that goes on in the back office of a, four to 15 million painting company, 80 percent of that work is not needed to be done by a human and so what that means for scaling companies, and this would apply directly to HVAC as well, is that you have a lot of overhead that you're paying for in your business that you do not need to be deploying to those data entry or mundane, repetitive tasks. And so that means that you could probably double or triple your size in revenue without hiring any more staff. That's the goal. If you have, assuming you have the right staff in place. So that's what I always explain to business owners is in order to get this automation built and implemented in your business, your team needs to be very much aware that you're not planning to like, Have them like, Hey, help me automate your job so I can fire you cause that's what they think you're doing but it's more of Hey, help me automate your stuff. That's mundane and boring and you don't like doing anyways so you can solve something better. I can pay you more and we can grow faster. That's the the pitch to the team. So that's me in a nutshell.

Thaddeus Tondu: 13:42

I almost look at some of that as like the EOS quadrant of delegate and elevate and so if you take a look at the things of what empowers a person to be able to do the things that they want in a day the top left is love and great at, right? The top right is you're liking good at the bottom left is don't like and good at bottom is don't like not good at and so if you can find those don't like, not good at parts, you can automate that. Now you actually spend more time in the top left quadrant. It's actually more fulfilling.

Chris Kiefer: 14:07

Oh yeah and like you said, not good at guess what humans are not good at copying and pasting and taking data from this system and into that system a hundred times or a thousand times and guess who's really good at it computers and they never make a mistake and they run 24 seven and, so it's I have talked to people that are like, no, I love doing this. That's great but there's computers that are faster, more dependable, and they're not going to call in sick and I don't have to retrain them when you decide to work somewhere else in three years.

Evan Hoffman: 14:35

They don't have feelings about it.

Thaddeus Tondu: 14:37

That's right. I'm curious. You mentioned 80 percent of a lot of the backend could be automated. What are some of the biggest time sucks that you've seen that people are wasting time on that could be an easy layup for an automation?

Chris Kiefer: 14:48

Yeah. The biggest one I would say, that's Probably 15 minutes for every estimate or lead that you go on is make a list of all of the things that a reception or CSR or whoever that front office person is doing and so I'll just list the stuff that happens in the painting world, but it's like making a contact in your CRM, making a deal, making a templated quote for your estimator to be able to fill out, making a company cam project, making a calendar event, sending an invite. Sending a reminder, like all of that stuff and there's usually, somewhere between five and eight things that have to happen all and to me, it's now it just is I actually, about six months ago, I stopped talking about this. Cause I just was so used to like, of course this is all automated and then my sales guy was telling me that he's just meeting with client after client that are still doing all this stuff manually. So there are many companies out there. That are still doing this and this is this was automatable before AI, like we were doing this five years ago and now AI is just enhancing what you can do and how fast you can deploy some of these automations and personalizing like your messaging and stuff to the particular client or service type or whatever. But that's probably the biggest low hanging fruit is just estimate or lead generation setup. Tagging, sourcing, getting all that data side taken care of and that takes a process that might've taken a CSR 15 minutes down to two or three minutes, and then you multiply that by how many estimates are you going on? That's a lot of time. And I could go into more, but that's like probably the, any business that service, I would say. Start there. That's huge.

Evan Hoffman: 16:28

So like that and I like the suggestion. I know some of those features could be taken care of by your field service management software now. If we were to look at it instead of making direct suggestions, cause every business is at a different place when it comes from automations, how would you coach someone or start to identify what could be automated in the business?

Chris Kiefer: 16:47

Yeah, that's a great question. we call it a data blueprint. Is this is like our coined term now for when we're walking through a discovery process with somebody and basically it's start just take a random client that happened to come through the business last week and I say that because a lot of times when people start talking about automation, they immediately start throwing out all the edge cases and scenarios on why this isn't going to work for everybody and I want to clarify that this doesn't have to work for every deal or every person in your business. It needs to work for 80 percent of them, and that's going to be a massive win. So the classic Pareto's law, the 80 20 principle, 20 percent of your or 20 percent of your clients are going to be 80 percent of your revenue, right? And and in the same way, like 20 percent of your. Problems are 80 percent of your time is where you're spending it and so most of those problems, if you can just solve a good chunk of it, or the most repeatable piece, it's going to actually have a massive impact on how much time, even though you didn't account for the one or two random deals that come in every week that just requires some more love and care, but the first process is go through like word what happens in this deal and just this is like it can take a while like when I say a while Let's say four hours or so, but we did this first when I was at my previous company and we called it soup to nuts, which by the way, I don't know if you've heard that term before, but oh, we're going to look at it soup to nuts. Fun fact. I was like, why in the hell are we calling this soup to nuts? Like, where's this come from? Do you guys know? this was AI told me, so I know that's true cause it never lies. Apparently like really fancy meals start with if it's a seven course or eight course meal, you start with soup and then you have like your, your salad and entree and all these things and then you have your dessert and then after dessert you have an after dinner nut, like a mixed nuts or something like that, so the full gamut soup to nuts, like start with the phone ringing and end with, we got our money. And everything in between. And literally what we did was, and we've now abbreviated this slightly, but I'm just saying this doesn't have to be sophisticated. It's literally like hop onto zoom and have your receptionist share their screen and say, okay, I'm going to pretend to be a customer and I'm going to call in and, do what you do and say everything that you would normally, and you just watch. And I would say it's key if you can, it's even better if you can have your receptionist, say like somebody from sales, maybe a finance person a marketing person, just all observing the call. So you watch a process and you take notes and everyone's just like interesting. I didn't know that Sally, writes the email in four different places. That's weird and then, there might be something where the finance guy's Hey, we always have to call customers like six times cause they never answer our calls after the thing's over to get their correct billing email address could you just ask on the call Hey, is this a good billing? And they say, yeah, that's fine. So it's like those types of conversations happen when you get everybody in the same room and so you do that for reception and that, again, that's like a 10 minute process of watching and then maybe you have a 15 minute conversation and then you say, okay, the estimate's been scheduled. Hey estimator, that's on this call. Tell, what do you do? And they're like, Oh, I, go to my calendar. And you're just literally saying show me what happens is like, Oh, it's really annoying. I always have to go in and, make the company cam project and the name never matches up and the email's wrong sometimes and you're just looking for opportunities and then what, and again, this was like the rudimentary way when you work with a automation specialist or a consultant like us now, we already can tell a painting company, for example, look, I bet you've got these 50 problems and they're like. Yep. Yep. Not really. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Okay, cool and so we can short circuit it. But if you're doing this from scratch, it's just look for these places where there's bottlenecks or pain points and then just just decide, like we would make quarterly projects and be like, okay this quarter, we're going to try and knock out like this big pain point for sales and automatically update the CRM with all their quote information or whatever the thing is or now we're going to tackle invoicing. How do we make that a much faster process? So that's like the any business can do that. You can do it if you're a million, you can do it if you're 10 million, and then just be mindful of who you're having on that call to watch, and then you take a we probably had an eight page Google doc when we were done with this four hour thing and then it was like, now another discussion with the owners of the business on, okay, we're going to decide what's most important because Sally thinks this is really critical, but actually if we solve this thing first, that could impact our GP by what, whatever. So that's the process that I always recommend.

Evan Hoffman: 21:43

I was just going to say, I love it because it's reverse engineering the process and what a great practice to put in place, not just for even an automation sake, but just to audit your process, to audit your systems, audit the customer experience, right? When we look at a world where AI is rampant and automations are rampant, being able to own the customer experience and deliver a superior experience throughout the entire process is what is going to separate you as a company and as a business. So I think this is fantastic to do regardless of what the end goal is that you're trying to do it for.

Thaddeus Tondu: 22:18

It's creating an efficiency, right? That's the thing and we talked a lot about efficiencies and how inefficient most companies are. This allows you to be able to create efficiencies copy and paste an email four places, but do once.

Chris Kiefer: 22:28

Yeah, and it's interesting because I think one of the things that I would, that I've noticed is I've I have an ego around how much I love automating stuff, but I still, if someone watched me work, there are probably, I would guarantee things that I'm doing that an outsider would be like, wait, why did you do that? Or why don't you use I'll give you a different Chrome profile like whatever, there's all these weird things that are, I'm aware of, but I'm just so used to doing the stuff the way I'm used to doing it and it's not until someone's Hey, why do you do that? And they're like, I don't know. They've just told me to do this on the first day of my job and then we have all the minds at the table and it's like sales. Do you need that information? No finance. You need it? We used to, but that we stopped doing that three years ago and then it's Oh, Sally, you actually don't need to ask that information anymore because nobody uses it in the business. And there's things like that just persist. That reminds me of the analogy of or the study that someone did with monkeys in the cage with the pole or you guys know what I'm talking about? So the, and this is we are all monkeys, right? At a certain level, they took a group of monkeys and they had bananas at the top of this pole. And then anytime the monkeys would climb up the pole, they would shoot it with a fire hose and then they, get take down and then and like time ago by monkeys climb the pole and the fire hose, everyone gets shot with water. So what didn't take long before the monkeys, if a monkey tried to pull, go up the pole, all the other monkeys started pulling the monkey down to avoid getting drenched in water cause they learned. Hey when you climb the pole, you get shot with water and then they started taking out all of the monkeys that had actually witnessed water getting shot for climbing the pole and then it got to a point where they were replaced. So now there's all new monkeys. None of them. had ever seen water get shot at for climbing the pole and the monkey still tries to climb the pole and everyone pulls them down and it's like, why are we doing that? And nobody knows why they're just like, I don't know. Everyone else did it and they told me to do it. And so anyways, totally random anecdote, but that's literally what happens in the business is you have processes and no one knows why you do it the way that you do it. And it's not until someone says, What if we did it different because they have no idea what sales is supposed to do. They just know finance and sales is actually, that's an interesting idea. I guess we could do that.

Thaddeus Tondu: 24:45

Sure. And like looking at that as some people, you don't know what you don't know really is the essence of that. But how do you break that, that down then? How do you break that barrier? So you can actually get people to look at that to say, Hey, how can we do it differently? Because I think that's probably a struggle because people get complacent and they're resistant to change. So how do you move around that to be able to actually have this look to actually pull back the curtains, to actually take a look to actually instill change for the better?

Chris Kiefer: 25:10

Yeah, I would say it comes from the top. So if the owners are not invested it's like you can tell people, Hey, I want you to be more efficient, but then the next day, if you're like yelling at people, because they change something, like you're going to instill a culture of fear when it comes to process improvement, so that's one thing, but I would say, first of all, it's like as simple as carving out time but when you do carve out the time, I think a really important conversation to have and this is something that we educate our clients on is we want to make sure that everybody in the business understands that we are like globally as a business, we're trying to make our business more efficient and what that means on the Alex Hormozi brought this up and this is spot on with just processes and business but generally you have I don't know if you guys are familiar in mathematics, you've got, local maxima and global maxima. So you can optimize for local point and say we want to make this as high as possible and that's going to affect your globally in the business, that's going to have some sort of impact and when you optimize locally, like I'm going to make my sales job as easy as possible, you might end up saving 30 seconds for your sales reps, but that could end up costing your finance 15 minutes. That makes sense. So it's like having the discussion where it's like, Hey, sales or anybody in the business, your job might have to add one or two more steps in this area or this thing and that's not, that might suck because change is hard and we all have to change. But the reason we're doing that is because we're trying to save this much time in these other places, or we're trying to enhance reporting so that we can get you better leads. So it's it's explaining. It's not about yes, you might have to do another thing that you used to not have to do, but it's all going to come full circle and we're all going to benefit if we focus on making the business more efficient, as opposed to, Let's make the individual roles more efficient. Does that make sense? So like having that, like people, we're all, we all get it. We all understand. We just need to have the discussion of Hey, I don't like that. You're changing my process and it's yeah, that's cool. I wouldn't like people changing my process either, but let me tell you why and this is the goal and there's going to be things that you've always wanted that reception can actually provide you, but, and then vice versa, right? Because we haven't had this discussion, but the goal is not to make any one person's job easier or harder. It's to optimize the business and then we will fill in who's doing what roles, because the truth is. A lot of the roles that you have are going to evolve and change and might not be necessary. That doesn't mean we're firing people. It means we're going to find a new way for you to provide value or do something more interesting with your time.

Thaddeus Tondu: 27:57

I was waiting to see if I haven't had a follow up on that.

Evan Hoffman: 28:00

I didn't want to interrupt you again.

Thaddeus Tondu: 28:01

Oh no, that's all good. We interrupt each other quite frequently with more or less the same points.

Evan Hoffman: 28:05

No, and that's a great point and thing that's stuck in my head is having a culture that actually buys into the greater vision of the company. Unfortunately, that's not the case for every single company. How do you begin to identify then whether or not your culture, your company your team is going to be bought into that greater vision and then bring those people on board if they're currently outliers and almost seeming toxic against the idea of wanting to change and wanting to implement these processes.

Chris Kiefer: 28:31

Honestly and we've done a lot, like we've probably done. 60 to 70 discovery calls with Pat, like potential clients in the last two years and that's me in our sales guy and I would say literally in all the situations we have sometimes chosen not to work with clients, but the only time that I've had issues with like it's always been the owner and there's one time in particular where this one guy we were talking to, he said, okay, so we were interested in doing this, but who do you think I'm going to be able to fire after you're done doing this? And I was just like, that's just the wrong, in my mind. I'm like, this is, this guy doesn't get it and that to me is like a closed mindset from the owner of just I am looking at trying to basically win by shrinking and I feel like you have to have a, like an expansive approach or like an abundance of there's always more, there's always opportunity that we're not aware of and so I don't, I honestly haven't seen a, an employee. I'm sure they exist, but I'm just saying that when you have an owner that buys in, you go to start talking to people and people are like, Oh, of course Chris isn't trying to fire me. Like I like him. I trust him. He's done great things and he's gonna. He's going to keep innovating, but when you have somebody like this, and the interesting thing with this particular client that we didn't work with, some months go by and I hear through the grapevine of some other companies that they've had, this person quit this person, they had turnover here and there and the other thing and it's I guess I just honestly feel that at the end of the day, if the owner understands and explains the mission again, there could be an employee that's I'm out of here like I'm not interested in evolution or whatever you want to call this. I like manual stuff. I'm going to find a company that wants to do it the old school way. I just don't think that there are many of those people out there.

Evan Hoffman: 30:26

I love it.

Thaddeus Tondu: 30:26

And even if they are the individuals who might be resistant to change or they don't like accountability or what have you, you, if you're the business owner and you want the change and there's people that are holding it back you put them into performance improvement plan. You have a conversation with them to say, Hey, we need to do this and you work on it. There's obviously, there's a little bit more finesse to the conversation than what I'm saying here on the podcast and so you put them into performance improvement plan. You have conversations, you help them understand the why of what you're doing for it, not that, not the what and the how, the why, when you leave with the why now they should be able to get bought in. If they don't buy in and they've went through a few performance improvement plans, then bye. Find somebody that's willing

Chris Kiefer: 31:05

Peter Diamandis is a really popular venture capitalist guy. I dunno if you're familiar with him. Yep. He said that companies that fail to implement AI are going to be going well. He has the catchy term is by the end of the decade, you're going to have two types of businesses, the ones that have fully implemented AI and the ones going outta business and so that's a pretty bold claim. I happen to be one that completely sees this and I completely agree. I think it's shorter than that but the end of the decade is six years away and I would say I think it's probably more like three or four years and when I say going out of business, I've had so many people be like, Oh yeah, that's not going to happen. What I mean is you are on your decline in three years from now. If you have not implemented AI and automation, your business will be in decline and then if you want to be like Chris, I'll prove you wrong and I bet I can remain in business. I would say to you. Great. If you'd like to pay more taxes and also, just hire staff that you don't need, you're welcome to do that and see if your business survives as well. So it's like the idea of pushing back on this isn't going to have an impact on us or this is just overhyped or whatever, like every single person that I'm talking to and when you start diving in like I have a podcast and I'm trying, I'm looking on LinkedIn to find people that are AI experts and I'm just interviewing them. I'm just like, educate me what's going on in the space, what's happening out there, and I'm just trying to stay on the edge of what's possible and I also want to clarify I'm not smart. I just am super curious. Like I, and I just can't get enough of this and my belief is that if I can stay. Just on this wave, if I can just stay close to the wave, just somewhat close, there's so many, there's millions, billions of people that are completely ignoring or paying, not paying attention or don't interact with a GPT on a regular basis or a large language model. Like they're just blah, blah, blah, blah, not listening. Those people are going to be in for a rude awakening and anyone that's like trying to stay educated and evolve and learn is going to be in a far better place than the people that are just hoping this doesn't impact them. It just doesn't make sense to me.

Evan Hoffman: 33:16

And even going back to the having difficult conversations with employees my girlfriend had sent me a screenshot of her GPT yesterday and it was, How do I say, get a grip on life in a nice way, please give me three options and how do I say, that's not realistic in a nicer way and give me three options. So even if you suck at having hard conversations, just for that.

Thaddeus Tondu: 33:39

It's funny. my wife was resistant to it for a while too and the other day I was sitting up in her office and I was watching like, what are you doing? And she's I'm using chat GPT that you can create an account and train it. She's Oh no, I don't think I need to do that. But Hey, at least I'm using it. Look at me go and so like more people are just starting to get involved with chat GPT and AI and automations. It's not going anywhere. I, for one thought I'll raise my hand and say guilty. I thought chat GPT was a fad and it was going to die out in six months. Here we are almost two years later.

Chris Kiefer: 34:06

Yeah and when you start diving into this, it's this is impacting ChatGPT is one of the dozen big companies, but there's hundreds of companies that are really trying exerting a lot of effort into doing this and yeah, it's mind boggling. What is like when you start diving into what these are and how they work, these things, these AI, whatever they are, it just is like another it's pattern recognition at a scale that you can't even comprehend. with the number of things that they are processing and feeding into these. And the thing that's crazy is that they just keep getting better. Like the more they're used, the more they learn and yeah, it's a super exciting thing.

Thaddeus Tondu: 34:46

There was one time 15 years ago is when I was leaving university and I remember, I can't remember who said it. I wish I could remember but I was reflecting on this the other day and somebody told me, it's I was looking for, getting into the workforce from university and I had some other jobs in around school, but it's like, okay, well, what are you going to do? I'm like, I don't know. Somebody said, why don't you go look into AI? It's there. It's coming. Go look into it because you would, you'd get a job there. It's going to be the way of the future 15 years ago, somebody had said that to me and I wish I listened, but my thing is I like independence. That's my fourth core value for myself from a values card exercise every day. So I'm like, yeah, fuck you. I'll do what I want when I want.

Evan Hoffman: 35:19

Your

Thaddeus Tondu: 35:19

dad also told you to go into the trades

Evan Hoffman: 35:21

when you were in high school.

Thaddeus Tondu: 35:21

Yeah, he said that too.

Chris Kiefer: 35:23

Anything you want Thaddeus not to do, just tell him to do that.

Thaddeus Tondu: 35:27

There we go. Let's jump into the random question generator. The random question generator is one of my favorite parts of the show. Evan usually has a little read about who sponsors it. We'll just know that on purpose media and if you need a second opinion on your marketing, blow him up because he's the one that handles it. So there you go. onpurposemedia.ca/second/opinion. It's no strings, no obligation. We're going to give you a second opinion on your marketing, whether it's on pace or off pace, and give you some actual steps to do from that. But Chris, the random question generator, nothing to do with the show. There's actually I have one, two, five questions. You actually get to try actually you don't get to try. You get to choose between one or five. You don't get to know what the question is. You just get to see, say, if you want me to read out question one, two, three, four, or five. And I actually have not read these ones in advance. So I'm just going to actually go with the number that you choose.

Chris Kiefer: 36:12

Okay. I'm going four.

Thaddeus Tondu: 36:13

Four. One, two, three, four. If you were a professional wrestler what would your stage name be?

Chris Kiefer: 36:20

Oh, man, I was going to say my classic, like back when I was playing NBA 2K. Was K Dawg, but Dawg was D A W G. So I think I'd go with done any sort of wrestling, but I think I have to just go back to my roots.

Evan Hoffman: 36:37

Now

Chris Kiefer: 36:37

how

Evan Hoffman: 36:37

far back are we going here with 2K? Oh man I feel this would've been in 2000 and 2010 ish. Okay. I don't know, what was that? Did they just call it NBA 2K 10 or whatever the, I don't even remember what it was. I think that would, that was, that's almost the original, that might not even have had a year behind it.

Chris Kiefer: 36:56

it was in college. That was what we do in between all of our practices and games and everything was just, let's go play 2K in somebody's room.

Thaddeus Tondu: 37:03

Yeah. Like a PS two or a PS three. Wanted to go back to something that you had said in the beginning and in growing and helping a business on the marketing side of things grow from 500, 000 to 12 million in three years, like that's a rocket ship pace for home services. In painting, it's, in and of itself and I used to concrete coatings side of things looking at that. And you can go with things that you might have noticed on the operational side, the recruiting side, the marketing side, wherever, I'll I'll leave it open for you, but what were some of the biggest pain points that you guys had experienced in that growth?

Chris Kiefer: 37:36

Oh yeah, hands down the, cause this is the, I'm the marketing guy. So the biggest pain point was when you're scaling a company that big. First thing is the original company, the original painting company had been in the same town for, 17 years. And they were big, like big fish in a small, small, medium sized town and they were well liked. They had a super strong brand and then we're like, Oh, we're, you get the we're super successful here. We could be successful anywhere. And so we opened up a location in, Portland and in Boise and in Salt Lake and we're just like trying to copy and paste and we for sure underestimated the impact of the brand strength and just the brand recognition in that original town and so we would have marketing campaigns that we had tried to, it's working here, maybe it'll work there and you try it and it's like literally not even not only not close, but does not pencil and so we were having to recreate everything in every single market. So basically, I guess I would say the biggest pain point in trying to scale is especially when you go outside of a metro area that you are already in. If you're going to a new metro I would say you have to understand that you are literally starting for the fact that you have a cool brand that everybody knows over here, you might as well have called your business, Joe Schmo, whatever, nobody cares. Nobody knows. You're just literally a random. person driving down the street and that made it incredibly difficult to scale because you're, we're just trying we're trying to just get to the point where people are seeing us five, six, seven, nine times around town and then take action. There's a classic Cameron Herald who wrote A couple of different books. He scaled 1 800 GOT JUNK. I don't know if you're familiar with this guy. He wrote Vivid Vision and whatnot. He said, and he also is a part of College Pro Painters. He, there's a statistic that you only see, like process one out of every three advertisements that's placed in front of you meaning I, on the way to work, I might drive past 200 ads and I'm going to see you know, 60 of them or whatever, if that makes sense and so if I only see one out of every three ads that are like in my field of view, then the next statistic is that people need to see your ad seven to nine times before they take action, which means that you have to show an ad. What is that? 21 to 27 times for a customer or your potential prospect to actually pick up the phone and call you. So the idea of just like we put up a billboard or we wrapped our vehicle, nothing's happening. Something is happening. You're just at four impressions and you need to be at like 30 to get a call and that was the I think what we underestimated was. In this hometown, we literally had gigantic billboards, 30 of them, driving all over town every single day, non stop and we didn't take that into, and those were the vehicles that were wrapped, right? And we didn't take that into consideration. You go to a new gigantic metro and you've got two vehicles and you're running Facebook ads or TV ads and it's what the heck? It's not working. It's yeah, because nobody is seeing your stuff. Like 4 times on the way to the grocery store, and then watching your ad at home when they sit on the couch. You know what I mean?

Thaddeus Tondu: 41:11

And it's I would probably even say it's greater than 7 to 9 times in today's day and age. It's probably almost 17 to 19 times Especially digitally, right and so now with your adage, that's that's an even bigger number, right? That's a lot. So you know, a hundred times I've got to see the impression from, and that's what that's one of the things that I've talked about when I used to train people on how to sell ads in magazines was, it's probably even greater than that, right with that seven to nine. The other part is brand staying power. I listened to somebody again, referencing my week last week that, the best brands, if you were to get a runny nose and you need to grab something, what are you going to grab?

Chris Kiefer: 41:42

Tissue. Kleenex.

Thaddeus Tondu: 41:44

Kleenex, right? Kleenex, right? You said tissue. It's called a tissue, but everybody calls it Kleenex. Why don't you call it a Scotty's, right? Maybe that's a Canadian brand, but so if you cut yourself and there's blood coming out, what are you going to run and grab?

Chris Kiefer: 41:54

Band Aid.

Thaddeus Tondu: 41:54

A Band Aid, even though it's a bandage, right? And so now there's the staying period of the brands are just so good and so if you can now create that with your own identity, it goes into thinking about painting company, thinking about heating company, thinking about cooling company, Oh, this brand comes up, that's the power.

Chris Kiefer: 42:08

And that's the thing that we underestimate is the tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars that it takes to get to. That place like Kleenex they didn't spend 10 that if you look at the trajectory of how long they've been marketing and all that stuff, that is hundreds of millions of dollars to get to a point to where you're like Kleenex, right? It's a, it's not a just let's go knock it out in this quarter.

Thaddeus Tondu: 42:35

And I can't remember I can't remember the example, but there's one company that is like the most synonymous brand. What do you do with Band Aid or Kleenex? They haven't spent money on advertising in like the last three, four years. But I think Band Aid is like the Band Aid brand stuck on you like Band what is it? What's the jingle? Band Aid brand stuck on you like Band Aid stuck on me, something like that. But like the jingle is still there in my head and so you still remember that and I haven't heard that song in a decade oh, I'm stuck on Band Aid brand, like Band Aid stuck on you. That's what it is See, now I say, you're like, ah, and so some people were like, I've never heard that song. Yeah, that's cause that was a product of I grew up with it. They stopped advertising. They stopped advertising because they haven't needed to.

Evan Hoffman: 43:08

So when you were breaking into the market, you said you were doing Facebook ads, you're doing TV. What else were you doing to help get through that phase of recognition? Within a brand new market, a brand new Metro.

Chris Kiefer: 43:20

Yeah. So one of the things that was key, and this is an interesting, cause this is the only software that we still sell and this is the Boolean review system. So this was when I, prior to taking this job as a marketing director, we actually were in the dental space, this, the small marketing agency that I mentioned and we had built a review software, reputation management for a couple of oral surgeons that we were working with and when we left that marketing company and I came to my new job two weeks into the job I noticed that they had, this company had been around for 17 years. They had 67 Google reviews and I was like, can I what are we using for this? And they were, I'm just trying to learn my, the ropes of what's going on and what's already in place. And I don't remember the name of the tool at the time, but I was like, can I plug in my own software? And they were like, you have a software? And I was like, oh yeah, it's this thing. We tried it out in the dental space because of all the politics and the practice management systems and you can't like, you couldn't buy access to an API with Crest or Oral B or these mega dental, Henry Shine was a huge one that owned. Yeah so that was, we weren't able to automate at in the dental space and stupid me at the time, instead of being like, I should just try a different industry, like home service that doesn't have HIPAA laws and these crazy mega companies that control everything. I guess I'm going to take a marketing director job. So ironically in this whole thing, the way it played out was that in the first year and a half of my job at as the marketing director using this Boolean system and customizing it specifically for. Home or like for the painting industry or home service. We went from 67 Google reviews to over 600 in about 18 to 20 months and then over the next, year and a half that I was there, they then ended up surpassing 900 and then now I think they're over a thousand. But they, we became the highest rated. painter in the country based on Google quality and quantity of reviews so we had, there was not a single company, painting company in the country that had more Google reviews and we were just an average run of the mill company at the time and so that was, we then were, applying this Boolean system to all of our other markets. And for a while, it wasn't even something that you could buy because we weren't selling it. But my wife started selling the Boolean system. Because it, like we had paid for development and everything and so we started selling it to other painting companies that were coming to us. And so now I would say Google reviews, that was the other, I don't know if we still have time to talk about it today or not, but the five R's of Google, the rating, Relevance, Radius, Recency, and a Response those are, that's like a critical piece of this Boolean system and I would say. There are many reputation management systems out there. Podium, BirdEye, like you guys said, Chiirp has a number of things that it does, including reviews and all of those are great. They all work but the thing that was really unique and why we had such great success in the home service space was because I was the marketing director that was like, I'm building and customizing this thing I'd already built to be so specific for painting and home service needs that we started incorporating and pulling out of the CRM, like the technician's name, the crew leader's name, the sales reps name, who they talked to on the phone. So all this data that existed in the project management system, we were pulling into our review software and then we were sending requests out that were highly personalized. They were coming from, or they appeared to come from the tech that the person had just talked to. It's a picture of their face or a picture of the crew. It's Hey, Mrs. Smith, thank you so much. We'd love if you could leave us some feedback on the job. So it's these highly personalized requests and guess what that does for the homeowner? It cuts through the noise. They're not seeing a what do you want to call it? Computer generated automated text message. It looks like this is a text from Johnny, who was just at my house and then it lists all the names of the people that they interacted with. So then they were able to leave a review and guess what they say when you give them the names of the people in the review, they actually mention them and then that was like version one and then over the last three years, we've continued to make improvements and that's what I think you guys mentioned just in the intro. One of the things that we're now working on is. Bringing in other popular apps in the home service space, CompanyCam being one of them, so we can actually digest the library of CompanyCam photos and then pick a really great photo using AI to send to the client and on top of that, instead of telling the client like, Hey, here's the list of people That were involved in your project. We can actually have AI just write a draft review for them because we not only give the names, but we give the titles of each person and I'm not kidding you, you would be blown away by what AI can come up with when you give it more context, like when you give it, write me a five star review for an HVAC company, it'll write one, but it's just the most vanilla thing ever. But if you said Here's all the people and their titles that worked on this client's project. Here's the company, the customer's name. Here's the city that we did the project in. Here's the service we provided for them and heck, maybe you even pull in the brand of AC that we put in, right? It writes reviews. That's incredible, like literally exactly what the person would have said and so anyways, that's all that to say our obsession in this niche of reviews for home service is that's the thing that I would say anyone, and that's one of the reasons why. Yes, we work with painting companies for automation at a broad scale, but from a very specific like value add to any home service, it's reviews are off the charts, the most important and then again we go into like why or all the other things that make certain, like a five star review is not a five star review or not equal to all five star reviews. There are really good ones and then just Oh, cool you got five stars and a thumbs up. It's not going to help you as much.

Thaddeus Tondu: 49:32

And that personalization is so key, right? Like it's you can have a rudimentary one, which is follow up with three emails and four text messages, all done via AI and use the person's first name. But when you add in the actual customization from it and sound like, Hey, the tech is sending it to be like, Hey, would you mind doing me a favor? Would you write me a Google review? Bob at ABC heating and cooling hey, by the way, I also took the liberty to type one up based off our interaction. Here you go. You can feel free to copy and paste it or write one of your own. Like most people are going to copy and paste that. Because people are lazy right now, obviously there's a lot of the backend stuff in there and so fascinating stuff. And I think that somebody not leveraging the people that are doing nothing. You're going to get left behind. The next best thing is to ask them in this on the spot to be able to read for review and be able to coach them through what to say. But let's be real. Most people don't have the opportunity and the time to be able to do that or the technicians who have the ability to be able to do that. There's some great companies out there that do that, by the way. Another one is to just send off the automated message that we talked about. But this best way, this way, you're probably going to go from, you probably know the percentages more than anything. If you're just send out a message, can message, you're probably a 15 percent Google review response rate. You send out a hundred requests, you're going to get 50, 15 Google reviews. What are the numbers in the data that you see by customizing in terms of the difference?

Chris Kiefer: 50:50

Yeah, I'm glad you asked and it's actually, that was a generous guess. What I, we've actually looked at clients that are using just off the shelf, the big brands out there and it's actually between one to 3 percent conversion rate. That's just standard and that means and there's a couple of reasons why one of the biggest things is most of the big reputation brands are have dedicated email servers that are specifically for sending requests. But guess what? Every, email has done for the last 10 years is it looks, if this is coming from a real person or not, and it just, Sends it straight to junk mail. So it never gets seen. That's one of the biggest things. So with our system, we actually integrate directly into a Google account and send it from a Google account. That is we recommend an email that would have been communicating back and forth with the project, before. So like an office or like the receptionist or the reminder or something that we know these are inboxing for sure. So that's a huge thing. Email. Yeah. Yeah, you do and the requests, just like you said, if you send this beautiful, like blue background with banners and all this crap, it's not as realistic as like someone sending, we include like a photo of the crew and stuff, but it looks like it was more personalized and it doesn't just immediately say, Oh, that's junk mail. But the percentages are, 1 3 percent is the average that a generic reputation management system is going to give you and in HVAC, you're doing so many jobs that you're happy with getting, 3 5 reviews a week. But there's, we have a garage door company using it. That's literally getting 30 reviews every single week. They're a big company, but there's they're working with a hundred clients, 110 clients a week, and they're crushing it because of the scale. So with ours, our average is about 20 to 25%, but we actually have a guarantee that you will not get below 15%. Or you don't pay for the software and there's not a single reputation software out there that can do that because our average is way 10 is five times better than decent softwares and so we put a bar out there that's look, even the guarantee is going to crush it for you. And then we have some clients that I always recommend you do a little bit of everything you don't want to just. Say, Oh, we automated it. So we're not going to have our customer our technicians smile and shake their hand, so you say Hey, I'm going to send you a request when I'm done. If you could be so kind to leave a review, some clients do that and the percentage jumps up even higher because now it's like, Oh, Thaddeus is just following through and what he told me I was going to do and I looked him in the eye and said, yes, I'd leave your review. There's any of those things. Like people are like, Oh, we put a QR code on our invoice. Great. Keep doing that. Like, why would, it's the same thing. Like we were talking about with impressions, like there's not, as long as they're well placed, like what you don't want to do is just Hey, can you leave you a Google review via text? Hey, did you leave a review via text? And just the same thing, 16 times that's really freaking annoying but it's not weird to ask in person, send an email, send a text message, maybe have it on your website. Like I'm not saying do only one thing. The more times you ask, the more reviews you're going to get. It's like a do one thing, get 3%, do more things, get 5%, do a lot of things, get 10 and you're just like, keep, but make sure that it's well placed and personalized personalization is really big.

Thaddeus Tondu: 54:23

Personalization, intentionality, Intentionality. There we go. One of those days can you pronounce this word for me? I should just replicate myself and then do come on in like Korean or something. I saw a couple of those videos last week and this week. So anyways thank you, Chris, for taking the time to come on here today. Of course, if you want to find a little bit more information on what they do, I'm glad that you did that long pitch the elevator pitch on that, because I was going to ask you more questions about that when we got to this point. But hellobullion. com is their URL. Of course, you want to check them out on YouTube, youtube.com@booleanautomation is the other part. Hello. Boolean, I think kicks off into all your different places as well. So great website too, by the way, from when I looked at it before.

Chris Kiefer: 54:59

And what I would tell everybody is like my whole ethos. If anyone is familiar with Gary V back in the day, like the 2010s Gary V. I haven't followed him recently, but something that stuck out to me back then was just my, our whole philosophy is just provide value. So I tell everybody. Like the reputation management system. If you want to just pay and put it on autopilot, you could use Boolean, but if you want to do it yourself, or you're really nerdy, like the three of us are and want to program it out and have AI do it for you or whatever, I have videos on my YouTube channel that literally break down how to do every single thing that our software does. And so it's really just to me, I'm like, someone's going to post it. So I might as well post how to do it. And then again, for the people that are like, I'd rather not fiddle with this and I just want something to work. Then obviously pay for the software and it works and it's amazing and you don't have to worry about it.

Evan Hoffman: 55:52

showing someone how complicated it is.

Thaddeus Tondu: 55:54

That could be it too. Hey, there's a 14 hours worth of videos to do it yourself. I actually don't know how long videos are, but the thing is you could give away all the information. Reality is 95 percent of people won't do shit with it. The other 5 percent would have found out anyway, so they might as well have found it out from you.

Chris Kiefer: 56:09

And that's the other Gary V quote that I love is, Ideas are shit, execution is the game. You can give someone all the knowledge in the world on how to scale an HVAC company, or how to market an HVAC company, but the execution of that idea is where the money is.

Thaddeus Tondu: 56:22

Bingo, bingo. As we do wrap up, Chris, we got one final question here for you though. What is one question that you wish people would ask you more?

Chris Kiefer: 56:29

Oh, you guys aren't going to give me any of these before to think about one question.

Evan Hoffman: 56:34

You said you watch the show, so I figured you had this one in the back.

Chris Kiefer: 56:37

Yeah, Yeah. So I would say the most, I'll give him like my favorite interview question. Is I'll give you my top three. What's the most baddest thing you've ever done? What do you want people to say about you at your funeral? And what is a belief that you hold to be true that most people would disagree with?

Thaddeus Tondu: 56:55

How many times did those questions get flipped on you?

Chris Kiefer: 56:57

Never. No one's ever asked me

Thaddeus Tondu: 56:58

Let's

Chris Kiefer: 56:59

rapid

Thaddeus Tondu: 56:59

fire them then. Let's do all three.

Chris Kiefer: 57:01

Fuck it. I can't even remember the first one. you've ever done. I would say this is a weird one, but there was a blind guy that was named Scotty Smiley, a military veteran, and he was doing an Ironman and I got wind of this when we were running our marketing company and so we actually made a documentary. You can find it on YouTube. It's 45 minutes long called Beat Feet. It's narrated by Mike Krzyzewski, Coach K from Duke. Scottie pulled some strings to get us a fantastic narrator and it's a good, it's a legit film, but the badass part is that I joked that I literally had to do a quarter Iron Man while holding a camera with a bunch of other people in 102 degree heat to make this documentary and it took six months of editing afterwards and I flew to North Carolina to meet coach K and it was a huge endeavor. But I would say that's probably the most baddest thing I've ever done.

Thaddeus Tondu: 57:53

Oh, that's pretty cool. That's fucking sweet. Second question.

Chris Kiefer: 57:56

Second question. What do you want people to say at your funeral? I love this cause this is a Stephen Covey, seven habits are highly effective people. For me, it's the balance of everybody wants, to grow and have wealth and success and everything. But I had the misfortune, which I now look at as a big blessing to lose my dad when I was 21, he died of cancer and getting to go to your dad's funeral when you're 21 years old is pretty impactful and that has had, a huge ripple effect on many aspects of my life since then. But I would say what, when I've pondered this at the end of the day, It's I want someone to say that he was a good father, good husband. He was, he loved laughing, being with his friends and you realize like when you really think about it, if you guys have ever done a deathbed meditation, I would highly recommend it. This sounds like I love talking about death. People get weirded out by this sometimes. But for me, what it does is it just immediately bubbles up all the stuff that is that really matters. That's really important and, I've got four kids and you realize very quickly that the kids don't care what house you live in, what car you drive, if you got a boat, like they just literally want your attention and that's what I want people to say about me and my funeral.

Thaddeus Tondu: 59:10

Perfect. And the third question?

Chris Kiefer: 59:11

The third question is what is one belief that you hold to be true that most people would disagree with? And this is a Peter Thiel question. He asked people this question to see if they have an opinion on stuff and can argue. I got a couple, I'm going to pick my I would say the biggest the best one that I have for that is that I think Having a family where one parent is at home is actually a really good thing to strive for. Because I think that there's a balance there because like I have my wife she also works in the business, but we work hard to try and make sure that someone can be there for the kids and raise them and I think that our world. When we have a bunch of families that are, that have multiple people working out of the home, and then the kids are either in daycare or whatever, I think that ends up being a net negative for the whole society.

Thaddeus Tondu: 1:00:05

We actually had that debate a lot in our household recently. My wife had just gone back to work with with our two kids and it's just so now the kids can get the benefit of both worlds of parents being home and having fun and enjoying the youthfulness of them, but also their development being into a day home environment with other kids that they just wouldn't get that same stimulation being at home. So it's like a, it's a double dip.

Chris Kiefer: 1:00:25

And I will say that I, you gotta be really careful when you say this, cause it is a privilege. It's not something that we take for granted. Not, some people just don't have that option, but I would say that I think, just social media and everything amplifies our desires for more and just acquiring stuff and the reality is that, if you think about The end of your life and what's really important. You might not feel like you need to get that boat or get that other car or whatever, and maybe that's the thing that's putting the pressure on you to make more money, but at the same time, I'm not opposed to making more money and being more creative and using AI to be more efficient and all that stuff. There's a balance. But yeah, I do. I, and then the last thing I would say, cause if my wife listens to this, she will want me to say this is that stay, I was a stay at home dad for nine months with our first kid and stay at home. Parents have a way harder job than the people working 50 hours, 60 hours a week. I don't care what industry you're in. If you've got the dirtiest jobs that Mike Rose ever seen, it's still harder. Or you're being a parent, a stand on parent is brutal, especially when they're little. So I like to be clear that I'm not saying that. So why don't you just stay home? It's easy. No, it's it is a sacrifice, but I think it's a worthy sacrifice That has a positive impact.

Thaddeus Tondu: 1:01:41

It's an unrelenting job, really, for that for, it's just, it's nonstop. Kids don't stop. They go from the moment that their eyes open to the moment their eyes close, and they're just go. I'm like, kid, give me half that energy. But fun fact, Mike Rowe's Dirty Jobs is now back on the air with new episodes.

Chris Kiefer: 1:01:57

Is he really? Like new episodes? Not just like replays of the old?

Thaddeus Tondu: 1:02:01

New episodes. I happened to watch one the other day. I was just, I was like, I was looking for something mindless on TV. And I was just like, dirty jobs and I got, fuck it, let's put it on. New episode. He actually said, he's I don't know why they convinced me to come back and do the new episodes of this.

Chris Kiefer: 1:02:14

I have to say this. I know we're like approaching way over time, but. You just tell me just cut the show whenever we need to cut off Chris's mic. Mike Rowe has a really, I think this is applicable to HVAC people, he did a video back in 2007, I think? And you can look it up, he basically says, Do not follow your passion. That's like the title of the video. And he basically his summary is it's really terrible advice to tell people like, Oh, just find your passion and then you'll love what, if you love what you do, you'll never work a day in your life. He says that is the worst advice to give anybody and what you need to do is just follow the opportunities that present themselves and then just dive in and he came to that conclusion because of the dirty job show and when you see someone that's so passionate about garbage, that loves it, you're just like, okay, something's going on here. How are they? able to do this or do it with so much vigor and excitement and anyways, the idea of we all just, if you want to be a singer, then just go do that cause you're passionate about it and reality is I don't know about you guys, but I'm, I would say I am extremely passionate about automation, but I didn't know that when I was in high school or college, it was through just Hey, there's an opportunity. I'm going to take it and then I'm going to pour myself into that opportunity and I feel like the trades are something that, have, they've been through a rough time, but I feel I don't know about you guys. They're becoming more and more popular and people are talking about the, and it's also extremely isolated from AI impact in like the work of the work in the field. But there's opportunity, there's tons of opportunity and I love the idea that we can become passionate through just really applying ourselves and giving it our all. I don't remember what the, where the video is, but you guys can probably find that. I'm sure that it's through some searching.

Evan Hoffman: 1:04:04

And if you actually peel back like what it is about being a singer, that actually lights you up. It's finding meaning within that and then how can you apply it to something else? As a kid, I wanted to be the quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys. That was my dream. That's what I envisioned. That's what I played. That's what I played out in my backyard. So it's like, why did you want to be.

Chris Kiefer: 1:04:26

What

Evan Hoffman: 1:04:26

is, let's say you are what's exciting about that? So it's, for me, peeling that back, it was, I wanted to be counted on. I wanted to be relied on. I wanted to be the distributor of the success. It wasn't on it was on me. It was all it was because of me that we achieved, but I couldn't do it without everyone else here. And it was putting all of that on them. I needed to give the ball to someone else so that they could succeed.

Chris Kiefer: 1:04:50

Ooh, I love that. that's fantastic advice. I love that. Yeah. Why? So yeah, tell me what you're passionate about. Why are you passionate about it? Why do you think that's going to make you happy? Why is that going to fulfill you? let's append that. Let's tell Mike Rowe. Let's get Mike Rowe on and tell him he's add that to his video. I love that.

Thaddeus Tondu: 1:05:06

It might almost look like I might've watched an older one. It was last one was aired in 2023. My bad didn't come out in 2024. I was like, hey, let me fact check this here.

Evan Hoffman: 1:05:17

I ask one more question as fast as possible? Do it. Alright, your second answer talking about your dad, how has his death impacted your view on fatherhood?

Chris Kiefer: 1:05:29

Man, I didn't know you guys were such a deep show, you didn't talk about all this stuff with Susan. No, I love talking about this stuff. I would say, so my dad was a PE teacher and he had by most measurements the most boring career and I thought, I remember thinking this when I was in middle school and high school and all my friends dads were, the president of this or had their own business and they were at these sales conferences all the time and my dad literally student taught at Banks elementary, and then he taught, he got a teaching job right after student teaching at Banks elementary and stayed at Banks elementary for 34 years as the elementary K through six PE teacher, that was his job for 34 years and I'm like, man, I haven't even stayed in the same job for more than six years at this point is the longest that I've made it and millennials are more likely to switch anyways, but that was his career, but and I, at the time I was like legitimately embarrassed to tell my, I don't know what, it's just middle school and high school energy, Chris is awkward and doesn't want to talk about my dad being a PE teacher. But looking back, like I had the most fun upbringing ever because I got to go I was, I jumped around to different schools when I was like between first grade and sixth grade. But if it was like field day or obstacle course day, I would just. My dad would let me go to his school and just get to do like the obstacle course all day, or we had access to a gym to practice shooting whenever we wanted, that being said, I would say the impact that it's had is just realizing that my kids, like I said before, My kids just want my attention. It's easy to be like, Oh, I'll buy you something or I'll here's a toy, go play with it. They don't want the toy. They want you to go play catch with them. They want you to watch them shoot. And and that's a thing that it's easy to say, but I want to be clear and the first to admit, I've got a long way to go to be as good of a dad as my dad was, but it's just a, it's even right now I'm telling you guys, I'm going to go inside and make sure I, pay attention to my kids and see what crazy thing they drew on paper that, is a dinosaur that's eating a moon or whatever, which.

Thaddeus Tondu: 1:07:37

That's just circles on a page.

Chris Kiefer: 1:07:39

Yeah. AI. This is parenting hack. Get two things, coloring pages, have chat GPT, make coloring pages for your kids. So you, I asked my kids come up with something that you'd like to color and of course my daughter's unicorns and dinosaurs eating ice cream on the moon and then you put that make me a coloring page. There's a coloring page, GPT in chat, GPT. You put in the prompt. It makes a page and you print it out and your kids can color it. The other one that is unbelievably game changing. By the way, I have a, this is a plumber left us at our house after putting in a faucet. It's like my talking stick. That's why I just realized I'm putting this in the camera.

Thaddeus Tondu: 1:08:19

You don't like, you're so much. I have to. things. I literally have four things in front of me that I do that with. So yeah, just fidget spinners or

Chris Kiefer: 1:08:27

You can like trying to get your kids to brush their teeth or my son fell on a scooter and he didn't want to get back on the scooter. So you have chat GPT, give it some context. Hey, Gabe just fell on his bike and he's really scared and he's hurt and he doesn't want his dad to clean the cut because the cut stings and I was like, explain why to a four year old, why it's a good thing that the cut stings and explain it while using dinosaurs and like some light science or human biology on what's going on with cleaning out wounds, like literally I just voice text all this into the phone. It's like a bunch of gibberish that's got typos and then it tells a story and I'm like Gabe, come here, listen to this. And he's like crying, trying to comfort him and it's once upon a time there was a boy named Gabe who had a dinosaur and this dinosaur got hurt and, it's so it's telling this story and my kids are just like, it gets crazy. Stories are like kids love stories and the ability to tell bedtime stories that they make up, coloring pages, educate them on why they need to brush their teeth to defeat, like King junk, gingivitis, yeah. And all that stuff is it's super fascinating and then you just say and explain it to a four year old. Best parenting tip. If you're not into AI for your business, at least do it for your parenting. Save yourself some time.

Thaddeus Tondu: 1:09:44

I'm going to be definitely using both of those with my children. Hey, look, I'm sure that we could keep going, Chris. We are, a little past our time. We don't really have a time limit. Who are we kidding? But we don't like to turn it to Joe Rogan. Thank you for taking the time to to chat with us drop some knowledge. I think the end was, the whole episode was phenomenal. The end and some of those questions were very impactful for a lot of people. And I think more people should, that second question specifically, what should What do you want people to say about you? What's the eulogy and shit, write your own man that was a deep, I did a long time ago for me and it was moving and so when people, more people think about that, you're going to create a better life for yourself. So thank you so much for sharing that.

Chris Kiefer: 1:10:18

Absolutely. Thank you guys for having me on. This was super fun.

Thaddeus Tondu: 1:10:20

Perfect. Thank you. And until next time.

Evan Hoffman: 1:10:22

Cheers.

Thaddeus Tondu: 1:10:25

Well, That's a wrap on another episode of HVAC Success Secrets Revealed. Before you go, two quick things. First off, join our Facebook group, facebook.com/groups/hvacrevealed. The other thing, if you took one tiny bit of information out of this show, no matter how big, no matter how small, all we ask is for you to introduce this to one person in your contacts list. That's it. That's all one person. So they too can unleash the ultimate HVAC business. Until next time. Cheers.