Too Busy to Grow? Unlock Revenue with AI Automation Systems (Part 2)

Who's joining Gary for part two of this conversation?

Gary McCreadie: What's up, guys? Welcome back to the podcast. So we've got Jim Christian from Podium for part two. We're going to get into this real quick — go check out part one if you haven't heard it yet. Again, it's revolving around AI and how it helps the technician, the business owner, professionals in the HVAC trade, and how you can make yourself more efficient using the tools that are available in front of us. So let's get back to it, guys. This is the HVAC Know It All podcast.

Gary: I'm your host, Gary McCreadie. Welcome to the HVAC Know It All podcast, recorded from a basement somewhere in Toronto, Canada. Your host and HVAC tech, Gary McCreadie, will take you on a deep dive into the industry, discussing all things HVAC, from storytelling to technical discussion. Enjoy the show.

How does AI help an overwhelmed business owner get out of the weeds?

Gary: You mentioned something along those lines earlier, so let's talk about that. How will AI help a business owner who's maybe micromanaging — or maybe has to, for some reason — but they're running calls, they're doing quotes, now they're doing invoicing, and sometimes they're answering phones or dispatching on their lunch break? How does that business owner, who's getting tied down by all these different parts of the business, free themselves up using AI? I know we've touched on some of it, but let's dig into that a bit.

Jim Christian: I'll use a specific example. I totally agree that phrase can be overused and sound really sexy. The thing I think about is a customer I was onsite with, watching how they work. This customer was running roughly 12 residential service techs, and they had another arm of the business doing new construction, with one office manager doing it all — being the CSR, being the dispatcher, doing all that work by himself. Take membership maintenance agreements: we all know maintenance agreements are extremely important for an HVAC business — kind of the lifeblood, the metric for how healthy that business is. They've got that recurring revenue source coming in.

Why do maintenance agreements become such a time sink as a business grows?

Jim: They've got an easy source of leads they can tap into all the time — those customers are guaranteed to come back when they have an issue. Membership programs are kind of a double-edged sword, because on one hand you generally run them at cost, maybe even at a bit of a loss, but you get that recurring inbound lead flow, and those opportunities to be in someone's home and help them get a newer system — that's a win-win for everybody. More efficient, a better upgrade. Those are the good things about it. But when you get to 500 or 1,000 members, it can often become a full-time job just to operate that.

It becomes a huge load. If you've got a thousand members, that means 2,000 individual appointments a year that you need to outbound — you need to reach out to those customers and get them booked for that job. When that single office manager is spending months in the spring and months in the fall just focused on operating that base of members, they don't have the time to think about how to grow the membership program, how to look at retention and make decisions, try out different membership tiers, or make sure they're doing a good job following up on unsold estimates.

Those are the things I'd call working on the business — how do we grow this and make it better? When you let yourself get burdened by the operational side of your day-to-day status quo, you don't have time to go do those other things. That's where — I won't make this a huge commercial for Podium — but that's where AI tools step in and can do that busy work, that repetitive work of literally calling every single member, getting them booked, waiting for them to respond, tracking it on sticky notes, whatever you're doing. It frees up that time so you can bring it back into solving other problems for the business, rather than just operating it day to day.

What are Podium's core services and AI employees?

Gary: You've given us a lot of your time here — over 20 minutes of your time on this podcast. I do want to give you a chance to tell us what Podium does — the services you offer, maybe some pricing structure, how someone would get involved with utilizing your services. I'll be honest, there are a lot of companies out there doing similar things, and I'd like to know how you differentiate yourselves from those other companies, and how someone could get involved with what you're doing. Start with the core services you offer that can help.

Jim: A couple things we mentioned at the beginning of this. Number one, we've got reviews — that's how you build your reputation in the industry. Number two, we've got a full communication suite — that means your phone system, your emails, your text messaging, your social media, any way you communicate with your customers, all brought into one place. And then number three on the core services is our entire field service management suite — that's your schedule, your price book, your estimates, invoices, payments, and the technician app they can actually use in the field. All of those things exist within Podium. The way we think about pricing is we price to the value, and the real value these days — everything we've talked about here — is around AI employees that can actually help you make money.

Podium's AI employees and the Operator

Jim: So you've got all these core services that are part of building a great piece of software, and then the AI employees across the stack. AI CSR over text and email. AI CSR over voice. They handle all those inbound leads and make sure you capture every lead that comes in, so you have the best speed to lead of all your competition in the area. And then AI membership coordinator — this is what I was talking about a little bit. The way the membership coordinator works is you train this agent — you say, "Hey, here's my membership base, it's time to start scheduling those AC tune-ups," and it goes off and starts doing all that follow-up and collecting those bookings, so you can focus more on how to grow your plan rather than how to operate and fulfill your duties to the customers who've already bought.

The final one, Gary — and this is probably the most exciting thing we're working on right now — we call it the Podium Operator. That's the internal agent that can do work for you. It can build reports on the fly, help you identify actionable insights about what's going on in your business, optimize your routes. We're working on ways for the Operator to get plugged in and be something the technicians can use too — everything from taking a picture of a plate on a furnace and logging all that equipment information so you have it for your records down the road, to pulling up diagnostic steps and parts you might need to order. So really, in a nutshell, the way we talk about Podium is: we're an AI operating system for locally run businesses. We have that full suite of standard software and tools you need across communications and field service management, and then these AI employees that work within that software and can scale how much you, as a business, can get done — without worrying about hiring additional people or about seasonality.

How does Podium help with social media and lead capture?

Gary: One thing you mentioned when you were going through all that was social media. I'm big on social media driving business, because I've seen it, I've lived it, I've experienced the fact that if you're active on social media in a positive way, it can drive business — especially the way the algorithms are built these days. Especially on something like TikTok, you scroll through and people who live down the street show up on your page. The algorithms are built so smart these days, and I'm sure that's got a lot to do with AI too. If you're active on social media, you can generate a lot of business. You mentioned social media as being part of what Podium does — how do you guys help with that?

Jim: First thing is you want to bring your social media conversations into your consolidated inbox. I was talking to a business just last week — they had a social media account, they opened it up and realized they'd forgotten to log in for a while, I think it was Facebook, and they had a bunch of old leads who'd reached out to them about something based on an ad they'd posted. They'd lost that opportunity — speed to lead, right? Mostly in this industry we work with things that are close to emergencies, things people need taken care of soon — not a whole lot of discretionary purchases, it's more "I need this done." So that's number one — we bring everything into one space and make sure it's handled together.

The other thing we do is support with ads. On Facebook, for example, you can create ads and track your lead conversion and the effectiveness of those ads. I've worked in a variety of local business types and verticals within home services, and I think, relative to other channels, social media doesn't seem to be as proven a method of getting leads and building your reputation — probably because of the nature of the work. But there's a time and place for it, and what really matters is that you're measuring the effectiveness of it — is this thing we spent money on actually generating leads for us, what's the right cadence — and you have to figure that out by trying it in your own area. Everyone serves a different market, and in some areas social media might be a bigger play than in others.

How do you spot a real AI tool versus an empty promise?

Gary: I want to ask you a question — this is mainly curiosity on my part. Every day I open up my phone and I've got a message, either on LinkedIn or Instagram, usually those two platforms, from somebody who has an AI company. Literally, it's a new person every day. Is it so easily attainable that anybody can just, with a snap of a finger, start a company using AI? I know Podium has put a lot of work into their platform and developed all of these things you've talked about — that doesn't happen overnight. So how am I getting a message every day from someone with an AI company that's apparently going to give me a bunch of leads? This is happening every day now, Jim. I'm confused about how this is — you know what I mean? I'm just trying to wrap my head around it.

Jim: That's a great question, I think about that a lot too. What I'd say is, the most important thing when hearing from any software company, whether it's AI or otherwise, is really digging into the details — is this going to have a positive ROI for me? Is my investment here actually going to return more for my business? Are they going to be able to deliver, whether that's a better customer experience or directly generating revenue and more leads? That's always the most important thing to look at when evaluating what's out there.

To answer your question more directly — yes, point solution AI tools are quite easy to build. When someone says, "Hey, our AI system can build you a better website and get you more leads that way," yeah, that stuff can be done, and a lot of those tools are great at that one point solution. The harder part is bringing together a complete solution that solves more than just a single point need. If a company says, "We've got an AI tool that can build you ads and build your reputation on social media," that's great — but is it actually tied into the way you work, and is it actually going to result in more revenue for your business, or is it just a small piece off to the side? Point solutions are easy to build. The hard thing — and where I think businesses like Podium have an advantage — is being that entire system, bringing everything together to deploy point solutions that are embedded into the product and can deliver more value directly.

What's the real due-diligence process for vetting an AI vendor?

Jim: I'll say too that I'm not fully trustworthy of all these messages I get, because there are a lot of scams out there on the internet.

Gary: It was a couple of years back — maybe not even that long ago — I was reading in one of the Facebook groups, this guy's like, "Hey, have you heard of this guy, seen him around on social media? He told me he could get me 30 more jobs a year with it." He goes, "I sent him 150 bucks and he ghosted me." That's on you, man — you've got to vet these people, make sure they're an actual legit business before you go sending them money. You can spend five minutes online and really vet a company, it doesn't take that long anymore. The internet's pretty good — you can find their website, you can find reviews on them, you can find out what they do, you can see if they've recorded a podcast with someone like me to find out if they're legit. So if you're going to jump in on anything, do your due diligence, vet them, have conversations with other people, find out who's legit and who's not, and then make the decision that's right for yourself and your business, and don't fall victim to a scam. Would that be a fair comment, Jim?

Jim: A hundred percent. I think there are two layers there. One, obviously scams are a problem, and one of the scarier sides of AI is that scams are becoming more and more believable, easier to get tricked by. The other side of it is, by asking all those questions, you'll very quickly understand: are they selling me something they plan to build for me? And that can even be an honest approach — that's actually something we see quite often in the industry now. It's like, "We'll sell you this AI, and then we're planning on forward-deploying a couple of engineers to go build the system for you" and understand what you really want the product to be. That's not all bad — sometimes that works out pretty well. But where you start running some risk is: what's going to happen when they're done building for you? Is it going to scale the right way? That's where you see more out of some of the more advanced platforms — they've built not just tools where we can get this AI employee doing one task for you really well, but what if you change your business operations a little bit — can you train it and change how it works? The final thing I'd say is, when evaluating any software, you've got to look across the entire stack of your business. How does this work in conjunction with the accounting software you need, or something like that? Can they give you clear answers about how those systems actually work together, or are they trying to gloss over it and say, "Oh, it'll all be fine"? That's when you've got to look out.

What's driving the shift from software provider to technology partner?

Gary: I think this conversation has enlightened me a little bit more. Every time I have a conversation with someone new about AI, it generates a new spark, a new interest, a new curiosity. I remember sitting around a campfire two or three weeks ago with a bunch of friends, and we were all talking about AI, and one of the guys busts out his phone and says, "Yeah, I use Claude." We sat there having a few beers, asking Claude questions. It got a little extravagant — a bunch of guys drinking a few beers, we started asking it some funny questions. But we had this whole conversation around it, and we were all business owners — everybody around that campfire is a business owner, either an entrepreneur or running their own business. Everybody was like, "Yes, I'm using it, and I want to use it more, I'm looking into it further to see what it can do for me." It just seems like the people who are forward-thinking are finding ways to implement AI to relieve stress, create efficiency, save time — and hopefully, in the end, you're generating more revenue because you're saving time, you can go after the customer you couldn't go after before, you can give an old customer more time than you've ever had and build within that specific customer you've already got, instead of finding a new one. That's a topic for another day too — existing customers, trying to extract more business out of them instead of going after new ones. There are so many different avenues we could go down here, Jim, but like I said, all these business owners were using it, they all like it, and they all want to use it more in the future as it progresses. Something's going on here that's positive right now, that's all I can say.

Jim: If I can — I think the meta shift I'm seeing in the software landscape right now is, like you mentioned, as a business owner you'll play around with Claude and ChatGPT and any tools you can get your hands on and see what you can build that might help your business. But that takes time and investment, and a certain amount of curiosity. What I'm seeing as a meta shift, and how I think about my own career, is moving away from being a provider of software — now people can start building their own solutions to problems — and toward being a technology partner for businesses that are totally busy and don't know where to start. What hasn't gone away is the need to figure out how to apply the solution so it's plug-and-play and works really well for your business. I talk to business owners all the time who are curious and playing around, ultimately asking, how do I make the most out of this? How do I actually turn this from an idea into something I can operationalize and run my business? So we see that meta shift from being "we provide software" to "we are a technology partner" who helps you navigate this big landscape, because, like you said at the beginning, AI is changing every single day, software is changing every single day. How can we help businesses hit the ground running and get that value without having to invest that valuable time with beers with your friends?

Gary: Okay, cool. Thank you very much, Jim. I really appreciate the conversation. Good luck with all you're doing at Podium, and I'll be looking through a lens at a glance just to see how you're progressing over time, because I think it's some cool stuff. So thank you very much.

Jim: Awesome. Thanks, Gary. Really appreciate it.