Paul Benton: If you’re a plumbing company owner or a friend in the trades, you’re in the right place. talking today with Brad Scruggs about marketing and ai. Brad founded two companies that help plumbing companies grow, and between college and his first company, he actually cut his teeth as a YouTuber in a channel that he grew to 12 million views. So he is not only an AI entrepreneur, he also knows marketing. Welcome.

Brad Scruggs: Paul. Really Yeah Really excited to be on and, you and I have known each other for quite some time and we have some shared clients, so yeah. Excited to be chatting.

Paul Benton: Well, let’s get right into it. You lead ZyraTalk, but you lead it with your twin brother and um, a partner you, three of you met a college. Um, and it provides artificial intelligence to plumbing companies. The punchline is you’ve been delivering over a hundred time return, so there’s lots to talk about.

Let’s unpack that step by step. our audience wants to know how to get a hundred time ROAS and that’s a great story, but tell us how did you find, found xra what was it like going to college with your twin brother?

Brad Scruggs: Yeah, I’ll give a little bit of the background.

Paul Benton: I.

Brad Scruggs: I guess I’ll start from the beginning. So me, Brian, who’s my twin brother, and Ahad, our other partner, we started the company. 10 years ago now, actually. So that was January of 2015 and it started as a lead generation company, that was called Great Pros.

You mentioned another company we founded. We were generating all of these leads for home service businesses, and we were spending all this money on Google ads and all these different leads sources, and we were like, man, if there’s anything we could do to increase our online conversions, we were willing to try it out.

And at that time, Google, Amazon. apple, they, they were all investing in conversational marketing, and it was mostly just chat at the time. So we’re like, what if we just built chat for our website and just see what happens? See if it increases our conversions. So we built it for ourselves, increase our conversions enough to where we’re like, h I wonder if we should give this away for free to some of our clients here in the.

The Southwest and we’re in Phoenix. So we gave it away to some big clients in Phoenix and they saw pretty big returns and it was free from the start for them. And they were like, yeah, we’re generating like 30, $50,000 from your, these chat leads we’re getting. We’re like, okay, well what would you pay for something like that?

And then they would tell us and we’re like, okay, maybe we could turn this into a different product and scale it up. So we did that. Very quickly, we saw for every chat someone was getting on their website, they would get about a hundred phone calls. So this is about 20 17, 20 18 now, and we were like, man, I wonder if we could automate phone conversations and not just chat on the website.

So we built something out using, I won’t get super technical, but we used IBM Watson’s Intent Analyzer, a very robotic sounding voice. It was something you could talk to. But not even close to going to market with.

Paul Benton: Mm-hmm.

Brad Scruggs: So we’re like, okay, let’s run with chat. We grew that to thousands of customers, a lot through channel partners, through a lot of, marketing agency relationships and some other channel relationships.

So that was great. But then the, advancements of AI and these LLMs and voices sounding more real. And the AI side, we ran with voice, uh. About two, two and a half years ago, and now we’re to the point where we are handling thousands of conversations per day with ai. If someone’s using a service Titan in a house called Pro or a different FSM, we can integrate directly with their FSM and have calls feed directly through field, field service management, so CRM basically, but for the trades.

Paul Benton: Mm-hmm.

Brad Scruggs: you mentioned, how we do this for plumbing companies, but, we do this for hvac, plumbing, electrical, um, we’re in different verticals as well, but home services makes up about 90% of our customers.

Paul Benton: A, and so you built this, the arc of this from the fir, because you started this, this was an idea that, that you developed as a biology major with your brother. You were both biology majors in the same college and Ahad too. So it does make you wonder, did one of you. Show up to class for the other and none would’ve been any of the wiser because you look just, just alike. You. How’d you come up with that? What was the first moment when you were sitting on campus where you thought of

Brad Scruggs: That’s a funny,

Paul Benton: seed? How’d you get it all started

Brad Scruggs: we were actually, I remember the story, I don’t even know if I’ve ever told this on a podcast, but I remember me, Brian Amad, we were all sitting in the library submitting applications for medical school. Thankfully we had good enough scores and we took the MCAT and we had good GPAs. So we had the scores and the, you know, the medical experience and background to get in.

So we were applying to all these different medical schools and prepping our applications. And then Ahad was like. What if we just started a software company and just tried, like we could take a gap year. We had enough savings to where we could do that, and we were like, let’s just try it. Let’s see what happens.

And um, from the very beginning, because we did that, we were like. We have to get revenue quickly, or this is gonna turn into a very quick failure. So that’s why we started with lead gen, because we knew we could generate some demand and we know people will pay for leads. Similar to an Angie’s List, a home advisor, like we were selling roofing leads at the time for $65 for a roof installation.

We’d sell it to three people and we had. Different ways to generate ’em for a lot less than $65 of the 185 that we could make. Or 195, so

Paul Benton: and, and you started, so you started with three, you’ve just celebrated your 10th year happy anniversary, your 10th year anniversary with this year. Is that right? Of ZyraTalk?

Brad Scruggs: Yep.

Paul Benton: And how big’s the team now you grew from three to how many

Brad Scruggs: Yeah. Approaching 50. Approaching 50. And, uh. Appreciate that

Paul Benton: Congratulations.

Brad Scruggs: still thank you. Still hiring. We, experience a lot of growth. We, we onboard about anywhere from about 30 to 50 new clients per week, so a lot of demand. some of that’s through partners, but a lot of it, the majority of it is actually through direct relationships.

Um, so yeah, we’re always hiring for onboarding, for sales, for marketing, so.

Paul Benton: And how many customers do you have now?

Brad Scruggs: over a thousand. On the voice side, on the chat side, there is overlap. We have a couple thousand on the chat side. Um, it’s in the thousands. Yeah, I don’t, don’t have an exact number, but many thousands.

Paul Benton: and, um, plumbing is center of, well, you’ve got several centers, but plumbing is a big focus and I’ve been reading, um, case studies. Tell us a little bit more audience about these really high ROI. Case study. It’s astounding. A hundred times. ROIS is amazing. Can you

Brad Scruggs: It is crazy.

Paul Benton: Mm-hmm.

Brad Scruggs: Yeah, absolutely. So, and you mentioned plumbing. So plumbing and HVAC are really the two big trades, electrical as well. ‘Cause when there’s an HVAC company, it’s kind of natural for them to do plumbing as well. And vice versa. As far as the return, we are able to actually match back the revenue of calls that were handled by ai.

And how much revenue those calls turned into as far as job. So we have calls on our website. You could go to ZyraTalk.com. Um, there’s like a, the first call you listen to is a call that turned into a $23,000 job. The one after that turned into a $17,000 job. So we’re doing, doing, revenue matchback. If you use a certain CRM and you talk about the a hundred XROI, we have a client where, I won’t say say their name, but we were able to prove about $700,000 in a month of revenue that they generated, through our product.

And, their bill was not $7,000. So they made over. A hundred XROI, and obviously they have their marketing spend to generate those leads, but the problem we’re solving for businesses is they miss a lot of phone calls. So businesses miss anywhere from 15 to 35% of their phone calls. Our goal is to get that as close to 0% as possible.

Paul Benton: You guys are in the AI field and it’s, and AI is like a tsunami going across country as you define ai, because you have your, you’re working with language models. What in a plumbing , company context, what is artificial intelligence?

Brad Scruggs: It could mean a hundred different things to everyone. So the thing with AI is there are endless use cases that you could use AI for, and at the end of the day, you know, people hear, oh, ai, how do I use AI for my business? I. It’s all about, okay, what do you actually use it for? How do you incorporate it, implement it into your business?

And for us, we use AI to help answer the phones. It’s a very human-like conversation. It’s a very intelligent conversation. It’s trained on your company. So we know things like, what’s your dispatch fee, what’s your emergency dispatch fee? The conversation changes based on the time of the day, if there’s a holiday.

That’s one use case for ai. There are other use cases. People are using AI for dispatching. They have their technicians and what their skills are and where they’re located at the time. Who’s the best, best technician to dispatch to a job based on. Many different factors. You can use AI to write content, you can use ai.

I just, I’ll use AI just to brainstorm ideas, ChatGPT free. And if I’m like, oh man, I wanna write a LinkedIn post today, but I’m having trouble thinking of an idea, I, I actually have a prompt on chat GPT, where I have like 20 of my past LinkedIn posts fed in there. And I’ll go back to it maybe on a weekly basis and say.

Hey, what are three ideas I could write about on LinkedIn this week? It’ll gimme the ideas. I like to write my own content, but maybe I’ll write the first five lines and say, Hey, tweak this a little bit. Make it a little more readable. I’ve got how I want it structured anyway. That’s a use case I use it for, but there are so many use cases for ai.

Paul Benton: And what ZyraTalk does is it begins to learn of the customers and the customer context of each of your clients. So it’s learning over time. So

Brad Scruggs: Absolutely.

Paul Benton: phones, and it’s answering chats artificial intelligence, but it’s, it’s it’s intelligence that’s getting smarter over time and more familiar with each of the clients.

How does that, can you unpack that? How does that actually work?

Brad Scruggs: Well, we had a big head start because we had millions of chats that went through the platform over many years. So we had Head Start where we had all of this data to where we knew what conversations. were happening and how to make them flow. Obviously the phone is different than a chat conversation, but we were able to build something very quickly and then analyze that data of, okay, does it convert better if you say it’s AI in the beginning?

Some people want to be upfront and transparent and say things like that, but if your intro message is too long or you say it’s AI and it feels like a voicemail. Hangup rates are gonna be very high.

Paul Benton: Mm-hmm.

Brad Scruggs: So we have some best practices where it says it’s AI a little bit later in the conversation. That’s one example.

Some other findings that we’ve had is just how the conversation flows. You know, obviously they wanna ask questions like, are you the homeowner? What’s your email address? Maybe you don’t wanna ask the email address because it’s a longer conversation and the dropoff rates can happen. So it’s all about analyzing the data.

There is a little bit of a manual process in training as well. So if someone submits a conversation where they’re like, Hey, this conversation didn’t go exactly how we wanted, um, we can train that up further. And then as we do some manual training, we’re able to have some of the AI training as well, where it gets smarter on its own as too, so.

Paul Benton: so for a new company that’s onboarding, particularly one that’s already on, um, a large CRM, like ServiceTitan or that might be using, call recording and CallRail, there might be thousands of phone call history. I. That they can come to the table. is it possible for them to upload either a sample or the whole data set in de ZyraTalk so that on day one the AI knows what the last 10,000 phone calls were like and what people were asking?

Brad Scruggs: Yeah, that’s a great question. From, for an onboarding and tech standpoint, that’s not exactly how it works. We have data on what works and best practices for like an AI conversation, but what we will do is we’ll ask our clients like, Hey, do you have any call scripts? Or, based on these last 10,000 phone calls.

What are your CSRs trained on? Because the way the AI is trained is exactly how your CSRs are trained as well. What are the call scripts? What are, what are your value adds at the end of a conversation that the CSRs are trained to say? So those are the kind of things that we’re learning and training with the ai.

And then we’ve got our out of the box stuff in our best practices and we kind of mesh that all together to to come to a conversation.

Paul Benton: And I read that. is this true, if a plumbing company owner wanted to train the AI in, in his or her own voice.

Brad Scruggs: That is true. Yeah, they can do that.

Paul Benton: Okay. That is, that that takes, that makes you go, Hmm, that’s amazing.

Brad Scruggs: We, we do have a couple people who do that. Um, we’ve got a bunch of voices they can choose from and most people will do that. But man, I’ve heard some people who will read that three minute script and we train it to sound like them. It is nearly identical. It’s, it’s pretty crazy.

Paul Benton: Do you have, um, data yet on what the, on, on what the, booking rate is from the AI handle calls versus the human calls?

Brad Scruggs: Yeah,

Paul Benton: What do

Brad Scruggs: we do.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, human calls it, it’s very similar. Human calls are, generally, CSRs are booking about 75 to 90% of bookable calls.

Paul Benton: Mm-hmm.

Brad Scruggs: And there’s a, these are human CSRs and there’s a distinction what’s, what makes a call bookable. ’cause some people call and they’re like, Hey, I need to cancel my appointment.

Obviously you’re not gonna include that in what’s determined as a bookable call. We’ve done the same with ai Phone calls I’ve seen as high as like 85. Or no, 88%. Generally we’ll see between about 80 to 85% booking rates with ai. so it’s about the same as humans. But what’s crazy is, you know, as you try to scale up a human team and that infrastructure, there’s just a lot of calls that are missed because it’s hard to scale people.

It’s a, a role that the attrition rate of CSRs, it’s, it’s pretty high. So there’s a big pain point of, uh. Answering phone calls for these businesses,

Paul Benton: Yeah, it never gets fatigued. The AI doesn’t, and you can program it to answer on the first ring if you want.

Brad Scruggs: you can, yeah, at the end of the day, it’s all it’s call forwarding rules, so. We are usually the backup for our clients. So if they don’t answer within let’s say 20 to 30 seconds, it will kick to the AI to have the conversation. ’cause we also have data. If someone’s on hold for 42 seconds or longer, drop-off rates are pretty natural.

And then after that 42 second mark, it’s like a hockey stick. Drop off rates start to be very high, so we don’t want them to even get close to that. So the AI picks up after 20 to 30 seconds of the phone ringing or them being on hold, and then after hours it’s, it’s the first line of defense. So it’s all how we set up the call forwarding rules.

Paul Benton: And if I wanted to, if I said, listen, I wanted to the very first ring, I don’t wanna even wait 30 seconds. That’s possible too. That’s,

Brad Scruggs: Yeah. Yeah. We.

Paul Benton: that’s.

Brad Scruggs: I’ll tell you a story actually. We have quite a few clients who are transitioning to AI being their frontline answering and their human CSRs are the backup. So for those clients, we definitely suggest, say it’s AI in the beginning. ’cause there are a handful, maybe any, it depends on the geo, but anywhere from about 10% to 30% of people will just say, speak to a representative.

But you’d be surprised. Most people go through an AI phone call. No questions asked and no problem. Um, but yeah, they’ll have their CSRs as the backup to the ai.

Paul Benton: And people can visit the ZyraTalk website and actually listen to what an actual AI like. It is

Brad Scruggs: Yes.

Paul Benton: sounding. Um, you integrate with ServiceTitan, correct? I.

Brad Scruggs: Yep. We’re ServiceTitan integration partners.

Paul Benton: And and ROE, yet at the point where the AI can book on a job board yet.

Brad Scruggs: Yeah. We can, there’s two ways that people integrate, and this is not just ServiceTitan, it’s whatever FSM or CRM they’re using. There’s a couple different ways to integrate, but talking specifically on ServiceTitan, a lot of our clients will have it feed onto the bookings tab, which is where calls come through.

Some, like they have different lead sources and. Leads feed onto the bookings tab, and it’s kind of like an intake area where there’s some human intervention and they’ll review it, basically click a button and say, push it to the dispatch board. Other clients who are a little bit more advanced, mostly companies doing like 10 million plus, they’re like, we want, let me mute my slack.

Hopefully the, the viewers aren’t hearing these Slack notifications. Um, do you hear them or no?

Paul Benton: No, no, no.

Brad Scruggs: Okay, that’s good. So the more advanced companies they may use, um, our integration onto the dispatch board. So when we’re having an AI phone call, we’re also parsing out data. What’s the customer’s first name, last name, what’s their address?

And all of that information is parsed so that we can feed it into ServiceTitan and we’re getting their preferred booking time. So if someone’s using capacity planning, we can interact with that as well. And have a job feed directly onto the dispatch board. And then the question is, can it assign you a technician?

When people ask that, they’re really asking can it assign, can it assign you a technician after hours? That’s like the only use case. And, and yes, we can do that as well. So

Paul Benton: escalations in live transfers.

Brad Scruggs: yep. Can do that as well. If an, if someone’s saying, can I speak to a human? We can transfer it back to a, uh. Human phone number.

Paul Benton: Um, if the customer, if the plumber wants to go through deeper training, because the AI will become increasingly more human-like with more, I. Input that you’re putting in there. a, um, a, if a, plumbing company owner just wants to go the extra five miles, is that possible or is it still just how many questions can a plumbing company owner give you to make AI more human-like?

Brad Scruggs: You can get extremely advanced in the way we have our infrastructure built is, and I, I don’t think I’ve talked about this on other podcasts, but we have a multi assistant approach. I. So if someone is calling, they’re like, Hey, I need to reschedule my job. Or, Hey, where the heck is my technician? They were supposed to be here an hour ago, or I need to schedule my annual maintenance.

Whatever they’re saying on that initial query, we can send it to the correct assistant. And I say, we call it our multi assistant approach. It. The caller doesn’t realize anything is happening or transfers are happening in a real time. But if someone’s asking, where’s my technician? It needs to go to the dispatch assistant.

If someone’s wanting to schedule a job, it’s gonna go to the scheduling assistant. In theory, you could, you could say, hey, who’s gonna win the Super Bowl this year? And maybe have a Super Bowl prediction assistant.

Paul Benton: Mm-hmm.

Brad Scruggs: Obviously not a realistic scenario, but anything is possible to be honest. And it’s all trained up based on how the company wants it.

Paul Benton: And just thinking, of more widely here, do you ha do you see a use case for having it be a, um, a resolution line? So let’s say. Y the AI can say Are, are you, were you not satisfied with the service? I’m going to listen very carefully to you document everything and make sure that the owner gets this directly. let’s go through 10 questions here. Does that, is that a possible case?

Brad Scruggs: Is, it’s so funny you say that because I can’t say who, but we’re, we have a big relationship that we’re rolling out and something they want as far as the tracking. Is csat customer satisfaction

Paul Benton: Mm-hmm.

Brad Scruggs: first call resolution. So they’re tracking data that closely and it’s a very natural flowing conversation and at the end it just says, Hey, quick reminder, I’m an AI assistant.

I have two more questions for you. you know, as an AI, I am always trying to improve on a scale of one to five, five being the best. How did I do? And then they’ll be like, oh, of course everyone says a five. Right?

Paul Benton: Mm-hmm.

Brad Scruggs: I say that sarcastically. Not every call’s perfect. Most of them are. Um, and then they’ll say their number.

And then the next question is was, do you feel like your call was resolved? So first call resolution. So we’re getting those metrics. We have ways that we’re, collecting those and having them all in a, a data table. So.

Paul Benton: And, you know, um, from a marketing standpoint, with reputation management, the focus really has been on getting positive reviews. But a, an opportunity in the marketplace seems to be, to really focus in on business intelligence. And so I am curious if you see on the roadmap kind of, uh. Interroga, it’s sort of back and forth, not just on a scale, but like, um, how did the tech make you, make, make you feel today? Um, when you think of our company, what’s the first word that comes to mind and so forth that you can automate business intelligence at scale. You think something like that is an opportunity? I mean, can that be built in?

Brad Scruggs: It, it definitely could. I mean, we talk about different AI use cases. There’s gotta be a use case for review capture and review management. Like, I’m just thinking and brainstorming off the top of my head like if, uh. A job is completed and the technician gives like, I don’t know, a QR code to scan or someone to leave a review and it’s like, call this number and give feedback.

I don’t know. I’m thinking of different use cases, but absolutely. The use cases are endless.

Paul Benton: That’s, that’s amazing. Um, are

Brad Scruggs: I.

Paul Benton: at the point where you can take a a, a dispatch fee payment like at three in the morning? Somebody says, I can, yes, I can have somebody over at the next morning. what’s your credit card number? And I’ll book this right away. Does that exist yet, or is that still futuristic?

Brad Scruggs: It is coming. It’s coming. Not right now, but we are, we’re talking about it for sure.

Paul Benton: Um,

Brad Scruggs: We’ll get there collecting payments with the ai.

Paul Benton: Mm-hmm. what is the, what do you find I is the biggest misunderstanding that people have when they are first learning about AI and, and ai, customer support reps? What’s

Brad Scruggs: Yeah.

Paul Benton: that they

Brad Scruggs: The biggest misunderstanding is people want every call to be 100% perfect. They want it to follow an exact script. First question I’ll ask them, I. Is your human team a hundred percent perfect? Are they perfect every single time? And the, the answer’s always no, of course not. same with the ai. It’s really good, like the conversations, you listen to ’em and you’re blown away by how intelligent it is.

But at the end of the day, nothing is gonna be a hundred percent perfect. The number one problem we’re solving is missed phone calls. If you’re missing 15 to 35% of your phone calls and you can get that down to as close to 0% as possible, that’s. Very impactful. So the misunderstanding is usually, okay, what’s the problem being solved?

It’s not 100% perfect conversations every time. Of course, conversations are perfect, maybe 95 to 99% of the time, but we’re solving the problem of missed phone calls. So that’s, that’s always something that I, I like to drive home.

Paul Benton: As we, as we, begin to shift gears here, what’s, um, Brad, do you have a pro tip? the one thing you’ve dealt with now? Hundreds and hundreds of customer service representative I. contexts and challenges. What’s the one tip that you think that if plumbers heard, regardless of the use of ai, just what’s the one thing that, that people seem to be missing as an opportunity in their CSR management that you’ve seen out of so many hundreds of cases? Can you

Brad Scruggs: CSR management?

Paul Benton: Yeah.

Brad Scruggs: I can’t think of one. Yeah, I mean, I could probably think of a ton, but one that pops into my mind is train your CSRs to take their time on phone calls, especially during the summer. As an HVAC company, CSRs are trained, collect information, get off the phone call as quickly as possible ’cause you’re trying to book the next install call.

So I’ve had conversations with our clients and they’re like, we’ve retrained our human CSRs. Give the customer the attention they deserve because if they don’t get to the next phone call, the AI’s gonna at least have the conversation or maybe that initial conversation and. It works just as well. So have your CSRs take their time, and if it’s the slower season, train your CSRs to do outbound as well.

I don’t think people are taking advantage of their existing customer list. You could go on ServiceTitan right now. Pull a list of all of your water heater installed in the last, let’s say eight to 12 months. That’s a list that you could pull and your CSRs probably have a couple hundred customers call and say, Hey, we installed a water heater nine months ago.

It’s time to get it flushed, and let’s walk through a quick home checklist. Do you have any leaky faucets, any toilet issues, any other plumbing problems? So doing outbound is a another huge opportunity with CSRs. Big revenue opportunity.

Paul Benton: I. Time spent schmoozing and empathy is not given its credit. And, and, um, have you ever read, Tony SAEs from Zappo? He was famously there was, he had his customer service reps. Um. I think there was a record I read somewhere up to seven hours with a customer and um, on the phone, which is just unthinkable. And his philosophy is just connect with the customer emotionally. I don’t think plumbers need to go seven hours, empathy. so that when the ai, when the next interaction is ai, they still have that, that empathetic experience makes

Brad Scruggs: For sure. I was gonna say seven hours their, their house might be underwater.

Paul Benton: So, um, congratulations on, on really, leading the AI wave.

Brad Scruggs: Appreciate it.

Paul Benton: out five or 10 years, AI today is revolutionizing the customer service call experience that’s in place. Um, there are self-driving cars. in San Francisco, um, you can take, you can hail a self-driving car.

Brad Scruggs: Phoenix as well,

Paul Benton: in 10 years from now, are there gonna be non-humans fixing toilets from what you see and what you know with your AI cap on?

I.

Brad Scruggs: fixing toilets. I think we are a long way away. I think the actual technicians. You’re always gonna need someone. you can’t have ai, you know, install a sewer. That’s a pretty invasive job with a lot of, a lot of hands that, and a lot of processes that need to take place. What I will say, and what I, I don’t want to, you know, freak anyone out or anything, but a lot of the back office stuff, it, it’s gonna be automated in the future.

There’s gonna be plumbing and HVAC companies where it’s just gonna be managers and technicians. There’s already AI happening with dispatching. There’s already AI happening with call taking. Um, there’s gonna be AI to handle collections and invoices. So for people who don’t think that’s coming, it, it’s coming for sure.

There’s gonna be these, agentic versions of, FSMs

Paul Benton: Mm-hmm.

Brad Scruggs: and you’d be crazy to think that’s not coming in the next five to 10 years. Um. It’s gonna be here. I, I would be shocked if it’s not here sooner, at, at least at in some capacity. So be on the lookout.

Paul Benton: So, Brad, I need to. Ask before we wrap up here. You have, um, a marketing background as well. you’re, you’re running marketing for Xra, but you’re not only, an AI expert. You’ve built a YouTube channel 12 million views. And just for, um, context, ServiceTitan, which is a public company, a tremendously strong brand, has 4 million views in its YouTube channel.

So. Between college and starting your first company along the way. You built a channel with, um, three times what ServiceTitan has done.

Brad Scruggs: I, I guess, yeah.

Paul Benton: what is your advice in marketing and YouTube as a former YouTuber? What should a plumbing company owner think about engaging with, with YouTube today

Brad Scruggs: when it comes to marketing, I get very passionate. So you’ll probably hear a lot of passion coming from my voice here, and I’ll, I’ll back up a little bit on. What the YouTube channel was at at the time. We were, you know, we were playing video games and we were always finding ways to make money online. So the soccer game, fifa at one point we were the most popular FIFA YouTubers in the us.

It’s kind of a fun story. We were in high school transitioning to college doing it, and it, it was playing the game. Given advice on the game. And, eventually we had partnerships with like EA sports, the makers of the game. They would fly us out places. It, it, it was just crazy. It, it was pretty cool. It was a fun experience.

But what I will say, YouTube, it, it’s all about making good content, but also analyzing the data. And we’re talking a lot about data with ai, but it’s the same thing with YouTube, because YouTube, it’s its own search engine. So I’m sure a lot of plumbing HVAC owners, they hear the term SEO. YouTube is its own search engine.

So you have to do your own search engine optimization with YouTube at the time, and I, I’d be shocked if it isn’t the same. Now, the most important thing for YouTube’s algorithm was the retention, the audience retention, watching your videos. So. We used to have a a ten second intro, and the drop off rate of people watching it would drop to 90% in that 10 seconds span.

So eventually we did away with our intro and just got straight into the video, and it was more of a natural audience retention throughout the entire video. So things like that, really analyzing the data is crucial, but when it comes to marketing, it’s all about understanding where is your customer? How do you get in front of them?

How do you keep their attention? And it’s all about timing as well. How do you get in front of them at the right, right time? So, plumbing, HVAC owner, you invest in PPC and Google ads because if someone is searching AC installation or AC repair, they have an immediate problem. It’s all about timing. You need to get in front of them at that time.

Um, but there’s other things you could do. TikTok, you could make very engaging TikTok com. Content. You could repurpose that content into YouTube shorts. You could make videos on, Hey, here’s how we installed a toilet. There’s so many things you could do with, um, these different things. Can I tell one more story, Paul?

This,

Paul Benton: Yeah, absolutely.

Brad Scruggs: is a, a pretty fun one. We do a lot of event marketing because our customers, they go to events and we wanna get in front of them in person. So we’ll do 50 events this year. Um. I was talking to a guy at event and, and I don’t go to every single one, but I was talking to this guy and he was telling me what he does on TikTok, and I was like, okay, well what do you do?

He, he’s talking about how he makes a video pretty much every day, and he’s gotten, I, I think he tracked 300 leads through TikTok in Phoenix because TikTok is very, it’s very hyper-local people who are in your geo. Are seeing the videos. So he was making content specific to Phoenix hvac and he got like 300 leads from it.

So he was tracking the revenue, it was all free. He’d make a video a day. He said he would have people in in the grocery store be like, Hey, you’re that guy on TikTok who makes the HVAC videos. So anyway, get creative with your marketing. Have fun with it. Think about where your customers are and how do you get in front of them.

So.

Paul Benton: Brad, these are, great thoughts, Brad Scruggs, everybody, and thank you for, sitting down with me today, Brad. That’s our show. We’ll see you in the next video.

Brad Scruggs: Thanks, Paul.