Speaker 1This is to the point of Rinal Experience. Pulling one of the top home services marketing and operations podcast. Cutting through the bullshit and getting to the point.
Speaker 0Hey, what's up to the point listeners? It's your boy, Chris. On all of my co-hosts Mr. Chad, Peterman from Rangali High School. Rangali Ringer has returned. Chad, what's up, buddy?
Speaker 1No, you love it, you know? It's always great to reminisce about what it was like 20 years ago in my life, so yeah, always good to be here and yeah, excited for today for sure.
Speaker 0This is going to be a great episode. We got the CEO of this little bit of Intubity, Intubity, Intubity, Intubity called Angie, Mr. Jeff, get in the house today. I'm excited for it. But before we get there, Jeff, There's something I got, there's some business I got to take care of before I give you a proper introduction, okay, all right, and what I used to do last year was dad jokes because we all need a good set of dad jokes, you know, to kind of run with and, you know, and I think I got through almost the entire year with the set of dad jokes and that kind of played itself out. I got over it. So I switched it up this year a little bit and I thought, You know, I'm going to go over some different metaphors or idioms, whatever you want to call them, they have always wondered. Like where did that come from? So the previous two that we've done this year, where one was rising tide raises all ships. And we, there was the origination of it. And then when we did last was cut to the chase. But this one, this one, Chad, are you ready for this? You're ready for the answer this. And Jeff, if you know the answer, I will be so impressed. This one is, let the cat out of the bag. cat out of the bag is what we're going to break down for just a minute. So I have a whole list of these things where I'm trying to figure out what's the origination of these things because I don't know. And what made me think of it was one time somebody said throw the baby out with the bathwater you ever heard that for Jeff?
Speaker 2Yes.
Speaker 0So I was like, where in the heck did that come from? So this is kind of the path we're going down. But this is a little education session for you, right? So you're going to leave this a little bit smarter than you came in. Okay, boys. All right, here we go. The, let the Calabag, the origination. This was a medieval market scam. Dates back to the 1760s. So a medieval Europe. Livestock like pigs were often sold at markets tied in sex. Why, I don't know, but they were tied. They were put pigs in the bag. Not to be confused with pigs in the blanket, a solid Midwestern dish. So he just on a seller might swap a valuable piglet with the worthless cat in the bag. So if a buyer opened up the sack before completing the deal, the cat would jump out, exposing the fraud. So, outcomes let the cat out of the bag, mate, you're exposed the deception. There you go. The more you know, the more you know. I'm just wondering already. There you go. We could shut her down right now.
Speaker 1We're gonna learn something. I don't know. We're all good.
Speaker 0You know, who do these things are going to become set, you know, it's an educational on a whole new level. This allows me to dig into a little history, which I love and learn a little bit about, you know, the origination of these things, kind of fun. You know, but I will say that people were reaching out to me about dad jokes and can give me suggestions and not one person reached out to me yet about a man or that I share on the podcast. So maybe we're not on this other than I don't know. Okay, let's jump into this because I got a bunch of questions, and this is going to be an interesting episode, and I'm really excited about it. We have the mentioned earlier Jeff Kipsy of Angie on the podcast, they had a great conversation. I don't know if it was a day ago, a couple of days ago, I don't know my days are all running together with Jeff and I was just and I think what I really love we never met before was. was I said, oh man, what do you think about us just tackling you know, what the market is saying, what the pros or set your customers are saying? Like let's just hit it head on and let's talk about it from your perspective and see how your handling things and listen, like a jabble to say the same thing. It's super admirable. When you know, you get, you're getting beat up from, you know, and just getting negative comments and trying to talk to one of them, but it's admirable to me that you hit it head on. That says a lot about character first off. So thank you for being willing to kind of step in front of the shooting range today. Thank you. Are you sure? Thank you. Yeah, no.
Speaker 2Let you know later.
Speaker 0I think we're going to be just fine, just from our time we spent talking on the phone, like your responses I thought were thoughtful. They weren't BS, and I really think that there's a real opportunity for some legit change here, and I think it sounds like you really want to continue to lead that charge and push forward and really listen to this feedback so that way you can continue to improve the business and I respect that. So I really appreciate you coming on here and doing that. So what I did, just to kind of set the stage for all of our listeners, like, this is not we're not sitting here and doing a full promo on Angie. I think that we've had conversations on here too, just about other, you know, lead sources, lead aggregates things like that. But when you get the opportunity to get such a large, such a large company on here and the CEO, like let's hit it head on because I think some of this stuff can be applicable across. Maybe it's a process problem that you have internally and you want to blame or lead source. That never happens. But I just love the fact that I thought, you know what, let me make a post across all these social platforms. Let's let's let everybody and I even said, I put in their Jeff, I put, I want to send it to you. I said, offer solutions. Don't just complain like maybe give some solutions too. I think I got like two. I got two solutions. But about a hundred different people, just making different comments and not everything is bad. There's a lot of positive things to you, but I decided to take the negative ones and let you hit that head on because I felt like one, it's better content too. It allows you to kind of talk your talk through it from your perspective and not many people have access to you, right? And not many people get to hear your perspective or even understand what's going You know, to move to change the business or the perception or whatever. So this is so, and you haven't done one of the, have you, yeah, but you didn't have done one of these before in this home service space, are we the first.
Speaker 2I think of this type, yeah, a couple of interviews, but not with somebody of your stature and.
Speaker 0Okay, well, I'm excited for it. Chad, are you ready? Are you, Chad, you get uncomfortable on this kind of stuff?
Speaker 2He's not looking uncomfortable.
Speaker 1No, I'm excited. I think this is, this is, this is really interesting to me because I think we know from the roofing space, kind of these, you know, categorize them all is kind of lead aggregators. I think it's one of those things that was like popular and then it kind of went away and then like when we started the roofing business like hold on a second, like this could be a really good lead source for us like how do we dive in and figure this out. So I'm excited to learn more about this space and and how we can, you know, hopefully both benefit each other, which be awesome. Have we great?
Speaker 0Hey, you know, Jeff, you know, you know, I think we talked about this on a call. You know, Lance Bachman, right? And like, I got, and you know, Bill works for Lance, too.
Speaker 2Yeah, I know, so pretty well.
Speaker 0Okay, so Bill sent me message this morning, and the video message this morning because he knows interview and he was talking to me about what they have done on their roofing platform with you guys specifically and the success that they've had. and like to the number. I was like, wait a second. So Chad, just you know, since I heard that, I text our partners, I've picked Billy and I'm like, hey, these guys are killing it with the energies. We need to make sure we take a look at it. So Clearly there's plenty of things that work exceptionally well too, but but I want to I want to address you know the hard questions first because I'll as we know Jeff like If there's a lot of people ask in the same question whether perception is true or not true or whatever let's hit it head on so I'm just I'm just going to jump right in and And we'll let her rip, but you know what, actually, let's do this. I want to make sure that I give the listeners a just a peek into your background. So I understand be sides, Angie, like where you're pulling from and kind of where you have been because though you've been there for I think it's 10 years or 10 years or something along those lines really you've only been the CEO, almost as you don't most two years, something like that. So, so maybe just share a little bit of the background, you know, leading up to, to Angie and kind of your progression through Angie because I know you're doing some stuff over overseas too, or, um, and so maybe just give it share that and then I'll jump into the into the good stuff.
Speaker 2I'll be quick. I'll start at the very beginning, which is I'm a Latin teacher skit. When I got out of college, I became a history teacher and basketball coach. When I started having children I realized I needed to make more money and went to business school and went into financial services and also became a CFO which led me to home advisors parent company and I worked directly with a home advisor guy starting 15 years ago Ish and after four or five years doing that I decided I wanted to move back to Boston. And Barry Delaro is the chairman of the parent company in Joy-Le-Venno as the CEO offered me the chance to work with the international home services businesses and run those. And so that's where I started sort of formally part of Angie, although I was working with the pre-Angisless merger. So I spent about eight years focused on the international business, the difference between the international business and the U.S. business is about a tenth of size. and the average pro internationally, 70% of them are non-employers. So it's the pro and it's not trucks in Europe, it's vans. And their phone and maybe maybe the relative help some with the billing, but it's generally not employers. And what we did with that business is we had five different countries with five different platforms and over the period of eight years, we brought all the technology together. We really focused on improving the product and the interaction between the pro and the customer. And we're able to take that business and start at growing double digits, and we're able to take the win rate on the platform to about one in four. And so we achieved success there. And a couple of years ago, my boss, Joy Levin, was the CEO of Angie, asked me to come help. And that's how I got into the US business. And so my orientation coming in was, Let's figure out the core product. Let's make sure the lead quality improves. Let's get the organization focused and get just like any other business. We need to get our unit economics right and not spending money that didn't pay back. And so I spent my first period of time doing that. And I think over the last year, we've become very focused on how do we have this expression and energy that you probably hear in our ads jobs done well. Homeowners come because they want to job done well. Pro's actually come because they want to do jobs well, but we sort of started this new expression, which is we want jobs one well for our pros. Pro doesn't just want to lead, it doesn't want to just have a chat with a homeowner. Here she wants to actually win the work, do it well, get a great review, get paid for it, and build their business. And so we've sort of started change orientation, coming from that background into, how do we make sure our customers are not just buying our leads, but how do we make sure they're winning them enough?
Speaker 0So, way, when you were doing that, did you have to move or did you, were you running that out of the states?
Speaker 2So, I was working through four European offices and then an office in Canada. So, I was living in Boston, but I was pre-pandemic. I was flying over there for two weeks a month.
Speaker 0God.
Speaker 2Legal fire miles.
Speaker 0Yeah, out of magic. Okay, so, so now, let's real quick for those who don't quite understand, Um, what all Angie does, maybe just offer like, you talk about pros. That's what you're talking about your clients, right? You're clients with a pros, um, but maybe what are some of the tools? Because you've got, you know, Angie adds, you've got. So maybe just, um, explain like what the options are for a, you know, contractor to use at Angie. So we'll just kind of start high level with the product offering.
Speaker 2So we've actually done as we've consolidated the various products into one core offering, which is we sell you leads, hopefully leads you in. We think they're good leads because we call thousands of homeowners a month to find out what happens in about 6 and 10 higher April. So we think they're reasonable. You can buy that through a few different packages. You can buy a subscription, which is you commit to a monthly payment, and then we burned down the budget. Within that so it's a commitment and exchange for a discount you can also buy them on what you call a budget Where you say spend up to X and you match you get matched up to X or Y and you can turn them on or off So it's a paper lead rather than a fixed cost with a discount And then the last way you can do it is you can sort of buy them one by one. You can get notified when a homeowner's interested in you and accept it or not, where you can look at leads and choose them and hope that the homeowner picks you. So it's three ways to buy, but it's really one core product. We've moved away from the old ads and leads construct.
Speaker 0Okay, because that actually that question came up a couple different times, so it seems like there's still some confusion around how the model actually is. So thanks for clarifying on that. So some of you listening, there's a answer for that. Now a couple quick easy questions just to kind of help set the tone is and we talk a little bit about this on I think there's also a misunderstanding on what the right size of company is like there's still some misunderstanding on who's an actual good Angie's customer so like what.
Speaker 2So I don't think there is, I think historically we've asked for people to commit to at least 300 bucks a month in spend, which I think restricts some pros who don't want to commit to a few hundred bucks a month. We've recently rolled out an online self-enroll package where pros can buy leads one by one. So actually the way our product works now is we can go to large pros and sell it high volume. We get a medium-sized pros who can set a fixed amount they want each month or small pros can come in and browse and pick these leads one by one. So I actually think If you want a core product, which is a lead, where the homeowner's 60% likely to hire a pro, you can use it at any size and you can use it three different ways.
Speaker 1Jeff, do you see, I guess, along those same lines of like, is it right for every contractor? Do you see, I imagine you have the data, but like, do you see Angie? I mean, like, is there a big discrepancy across markets and does it work well? I think this is always the big thing. I always think of like, Yelp. Like, a lot of people on the West Coast are like, oh, yeah, Yelp is the greatest thing since Lysbred, and I'm sitting here in Indiana going. I don't even know that anybody uses this software. So do you guys see like a big discrepancy? And tell me like exact areas, but like across the country as like, oh, we're really, really good here, but like here, like people just don't seem to interact with the platform from a customer person.
Speaker 2We definitely have different, we have different levels of competition and we have different levels of consumer awareness. I'll just give you the really easy ones, which is we have really high brand awareness and indie. Because that's where it ends. This was where we have really high brand awareness in Denver. And we have high pro concentration in what we call liquidity, which means the homeowner comes and they're likely to find a couple of pros. You know, ironically we have some markets that you wouldn't expect, Pittsburgh and St. Lewis are a couple where you have lower liquidity across some of the main trades and we're not as developed there. So it does vary. Yeah.
Speaker 0Now, okay, so a couple more easy questions, um, is there like this industry, is there like a limit to the industry like is there there's more than just home service, you know, home service pros home improvements pros, is there like a niche that you kind of stay within as far as a customer type or pro type.
Speaker 2So in general, we're looking primarily at the construction specialty construction trades. We also get into some home services, you know, lawns, made handyman, some appliance repair. But you know, we're really looking at core construction specialty construction if you went to your kind of government definitions of trades.
Speaker 0Yada, okay, and then last question, which I think is a good one. Who should not use Angie?
Speaker 2Somebody who is not prepared to follow up quickly with the lead and actually go to the homeowner and present well and try and close that lead out like the best version of the sales person they can be with their personality. I think if you buy leads and you don't call them quickly and get the appointment scheduled and go in I'm not a good salesperson, but you have to go in with integrity, and you have to deal with your unique selling proposition and explain why you'd like the work and you do a good job if you're not prepared to do that, you're going to, you're going to not spend your money well.
Speaker 1I'm just going to say, I mean, I think that's, I mean, what we see with lead aggregators is it is a race to, it's a race to follow up and then how, how persistent are you with follow up to get them on the phone. And I think some people are quick to dismiss kind of this area of leads because they don't have the back office set up. I'm sure Chris has never heard this before. Oh, yeah, we drove all these leads. Well, you didn't answer the phone. You didn't book any of the leads that we sold here. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's something I was never said.
Speaker 0Oh, I mean, my entire life, the past two decades. Yeah, for sure. Gotcha. Okay, those are the easy ones, Jeff.
Speaker 2All right, let's go with it. Are we going to go to medium or are we going to go straight to the hard one?
Speaker 0No, we're going straight for the jugular. Now, here's what I did again. And again, man, so much respect for tackling this. And I love that you're coming at a super transparent and like with like a servant mindset. So thank you for for knocking this thing out for us. Again, for our listeners, what I did was I made a post on social media, some of your listening were part of that, thank you. And just ask for everybody to give us their feedback. Turns out we were around 140 some odd comments and less than 24 hours, not too shabby. And all I did was compile it, throw it in chat GPT, have it rank it from, you know, highest And I just said, we'll take the top four and we'll let it rip. So, I mean, it seemed like it was a pretty significant. And just from some of the things you just said, I think is going to put some of this stuff to bed. I think it's some of the unknown or a perception from back in 2022 or 2021 or whatever. So, or be even before. So first one is the number one concern that we heard from contractors was lead quality, fake information, confused homeowners, dead numbers like numbers that don't work. What is Angie change in the last call? I mean, you've been at it for two years. What is Angie change in the last couple of years to improve lead validation and trust?
Speaker 2So we've done a bunch of stuff. The biggest thing we did was we moved from a fair percentage of our leads being auto matched. So the pro gives us their preferences. If the homeowner comes in and says, I have a roof repair, if you press or signed up for it and have budget, we auto matched. What we move to is you only pay for that lead if we show the homeowner your profile card and the homeowner chooses you.
Speaker 0So they take action. How most are homeowner has to take action?
Speaker 2Where has to take action? And that drives the win rate, significantly. We saw from early 23 until the two months after we rolled out what we call homeowner choice. We saw about a 20% left in win rate. It was about 15% year over year. And then over the course of the year we've seen, I mean, I have my numbers exactly right, but roughly 15% more. So we've been able to drive win rate simply because you know this, having run an agency, intent ultimately leads to higher purchase. And so the choice actually follows to the purchase. So that's been a big thing. The biggest thing that did is we'll we'll talk about this, but if you look at our numbers are a affiliate revenue is down 67% year-over-year. You can see that publicly. I don't have the exact number at my fingertips. So our affiliate channel, which is where we work with other lead aggregators, when our pros match their leads, define the homeowners. We've cut away 60 to 70% of that revenue. It's going to be more than 250 million year-over-year as come out of the business. And, you know, those were all out of match. Right? So we've removed all that, which has changed a lot of the age and shared leads. They're literally driven by homeowners who click and then they're live.
Speaker 0So the significantly increases quality, like legit quality for winter wind rate.
Speaker 2Yeah, intent and winability. I think the other thing we've done is just like you did with your business. We're always looking for channels where we can find more volume. You know, one of the things we hear from our larger So we're always looking in work business, we're trying to grow profitably, so we'll get into new channels, we'll scale them up. But if we find that the win rate is running in the mid-low single digits, we'll throw it away. So we've thrown away another big pile of revenue of channels we've gotten into, and gotten to work, and thrown it away. So we systematically look for weak quality traffic and get rid of it. And I think those two things of what's really driven the rise we've seen in win rate. Again, we call thousands of we talk to thousands of homeowners every month to make sure we actually know what's happening and figure out, are they hiring our pros, are they hiring other pros? And I think in terms of pure lead quality, that's what we've done. The last thing we've done is more recent. which is in the fall, we installed a new software package and which is a anti spam software. So it's trying to read all the signals from the traffic and toss or qualify the more suspect. It's obviously based on a machine learning score and let through the jobs that actually qualifies good intent. So we've done those three things. and we've probably tossed 7% actually of our traffic since we rolled that out. So we're continually sort of making sure that we're delivering more value per lead to our pros.
Speaker 0Got it. So has this been like spread out through over this last couple of years, like it kind of systematically doing one than another, it's kind of been like, is it just like, how new is some of these changes, I guess, is where I'm going?
Speaker 2So if you go back to late 22 when Joey took over, he started looking at core vendors who were taking what we call service requests from and getting rid of the lower quality stuff. Um, we accelerated. I came in as the president late 23. We were accelerating around then and we started eliminating some of these auto-accept leads. And as we work through trying to continually strip out our lower quality stuff, we got to the point where we decided it was time to move to choice. Our Europe business runs entirely on choice delivers delivered a better higher rate and a better win rate on platform intuitively it makes sense. If you talk to homeowners, they think I want to use the pro calls me and pros think I don't want somebody who doesn't want a phone call from me so intuitively it made sense this was combined with the FCC I don't know if you guys were familiar with this the FCC it got thrown out by the new administration but they were going to require consent anytime a phone number was shared with the business so with all this coming together we made the move to do it not was January last year And then as we look for more traffic, we've embraced this discipline of systematically getting rid of traffic that doesn't prove to be effective. So I think we really accelerated over the last year, but we've been working on it for we'd also accelerated a bit of year before and they'd already been working on it. But I think if you thought about it, I think today we're at our highest average quality that we've been in a decade.
Speaker 0I mean, well, to me, it sounds like if I was to summarize it, it's just leads, leads, I'm going to use air quotes volume of leads has now taken a back seat to the quality of the lead, which is lesser because you cut out some of this stuff that was. Not really like we're buying all these leads and sending them out and it was doing auto match, which maybe really wasn't a good lead, which is what people are feeling like, yeah, I'm getting the stuff that's I don't even know I'm calling or whatever it is, like kind of cuts out some of that stuff.
Speaker 2So am I going down the right path with if you go back to 2022 we've jettisoned it in well over half a billion in revenue. Wow. We're about a billion dollars in revenue, but we were over one and a half then and that doesn't even include some of the stuff we've scaled up and thrown away. So we're not perfect. I'm not going to get on here and tell anybody that we're perfect and you're going to reach every lead. It's the internet. We do our best and we're continually trying to tweak it up. But we've really been working at this for a few years. If you watch our stock price, the market doesn't love it. But we are really trying to serve our customers while we build our business.
Speaker 0Yeah, it doesn't love it yet. But that's to reset or whatever you want to call it, right? Because you're trying to listen, you need, you need pros, and you want pros to stay. And the way of pros stays, they get leads it to actually more often than not if they win at a 60% rate. Then it's worth staying at the price, to prices right, and you're setting your budget. So all that makes sense to me. So to me, it sounds like a reset, right? And now it's kind of working back on the quality of the product, which will start to scale the business, which will make all the investors happy. That's the game, right? Sounds like.
Speaker 2Yeah, in an ideal world, we are, we're everybody's, everybody wins.
Speaker 0Yeah. And this is a step, like this is just a step in the journey of hitting it head on versus just kind of staying and they're like, if you're super easy for you as the CEO to really never step out into the public in this type of a forum and hit the stuff head on. So you have something that's worth talking about, that's legit change, which kind of goes right into my next question, and that is, if you were a contractor listening, listening to this right now, what proof would you need before trusting Angie again?
Speaker 2What proof would you need? I mean, I think generally people have to see it to believe it, if you will. And so I would encourage, I'll give an email address. If a pro wants to try with us CEO at ng.com, you can write to me, tell me your story, and we'll try and figure out a way to prove it to you. I think the best way to prove something is actually to try it. And I think the other thing is, You know, we need pros to embrace what's the expression speed to lead. We need to pros to embrace whether you're a non-employer or whether you have a hundred employees and you're whatever, millions of dollars of business, you have to embrace, I need to get that appointment booked, and I need to get in there, and I need to sell appropriately and close the deal. And we believe if you talk to Lance or Bill, I went to their conference, and I saw a kid stand up and say, You know, look, I've got about a million dollar business. I want to get this to five million and more. I'd love to sell it. I'd love to buy a house for my mother. What do I need to do, Mr. Bachman? And Lance says, do you have salespeople going on your calls? And he said, I've met technicians. And Lance says, do they know how to sell? And he says, I don't know. He said, well, we have to start there. So I think if pros are ready to embrace speed to lead and selling and then doing the good work getting the review and building their reputation, your good friend Tommy Malau gave a great speech about take the film right there and put it on your website. I think if pros are willing to embrace that we think our leads are good enough to win and build a business.
Speaker 1Yeah. Well, I think it goes back to what you said earlier. It's, you know, I think a lot of contractors have to get away from, well, I'm just going to blame the lead. It sounds like from what you're saying, hey, we're doing everything we can to get the lead quality up. To make sure that your traffic is good, which probably plays to the benefit of a lot of smaller contractors because I would rather have two good leads because I only have the capacity to run to as opposed to five where three or crappy and I waste my time running across town to do this, but to your point. The speed to lead is part of your sales process. How responsive are you going to be or are you going to let that sit and call them back tomorrow or the next day or whenever you have a free time and then how good is your presentation in the home? Like you can't blame the lead if you win out in your sales presentation sucks. That's on you buddy. So like I we can only get you so far. We can get you in the door. But from there you've got to take it to the next step and I think that's For me, the biggest thing that the contracts have to wrap their mind around is like selling a job is not just about, well, it was a crappy lead. Well, like, okay, well, like were you a crappy salesperson, there's a whole lot more steps to completing selling a job and completing it well than just, oh, let's just blame the lead quality.
Speaker 0Yeah, thank you. Thank you for saying that. I mean, I love those conversations because this is actually if you're listening right now, this is a common thing that happens is our ego gets in the way of part progress and it can't be us. It can't be our sales process. It can't be our CSRs and it's got to be somebody else's fall and then you talk smack about somebody else when honestly you can probably even look in the mirror a little bit, you know, and it you can let go of your ego and say, oh, maybe it is me. Well, then just maybe you can make this stuff work. So instead of like going against a grain, like maybe dial in your process and make sure it's legit like not a U problem before you start, you know, who pulling on everything. So I love this topic. And I think this is still a major problem, Chad. Chad, you know, just from your coaching group. You probably coach on this stuff all the time with people. It's the same thing. We talk about it all the time. speed to lead matters, of course. That's like anything. That's why we have cell phones, computers in our hands like everything like instant gratification is a thing. It's not going away. That's the same thing when we're trying to solve problems, right? If you've got a homeowner trying to solve problem, they reach out to a pro, they want to get to them quick. They want to have done, check the box, feel good about it, and moving on. Moving on to the next thing. I'm no different. So one thing I want to talk about real quick is one Jeff, thank you for sharing the CEO at angi.com. That's A and G I. It's a survey. It's angi.com. Very cool view to do that. May, you know, God rest your soul in your inbox because it's probably going to be.
Speaker 2I will have a little bit of grace on my speed to leave there. I will make sure we get to all your emails.
Speaker 0I mean, you let the cat out of the bag there.
Speaker 2That's all right. We, uh, look, if we don't help our customers, if we don't listen to our customer's problems, how are we going to serve them?
Speaker 0Yeah, and that's great. And actually that that pivot to right into my next question, which I asked you this too, and I'm glad you have it, but we didn't dig too deep on it. And we don't need to dig deep on it. I just want to understand. I asked you I said, Hey, you have pros. Do you have a pro advisory group like the like clients of yours that you can go to to say, Hey, you tell us like, what are we doing? What aren't we doing? You have that right you guys have a pro advisory group.
Speaker 2We do, we have two pro-councils actually. We have a smaller pro-council, and then we have what we call an enterprise pro-council, so that we can listen to the concerns of smaller pros, which are a bit different than the, as I referenced earlier and you know, than the concerns of the scale or scaling pros. So we do talk to both. I personally try and go out of my way to talk to some of our larger customers whenever I have a pro in the house, I try and talk to them and you're up, I've done coffee with literally hundreds of pros. I want to get into a little bit better circuit with our smaller pros here, but we do constantly seek advice and feedback and dialogue.
Speaker 0Great, so now you're analyzing the consumer, you're analyzing the client.
Speaker 2Yeah, absolutely. And we, like any good company, we do a lot of customer research. We have You know how to ask the question behind the question, right? If I go on, if I really have to find out without asking you directly the answer, so we were constantly doing that and trying to figure it out because just like a pro, who's trying to succeed in their business, we're trying to succeed in ours with our customers.
Speaker 0Yep, got it, okay, I love that. Okay, I'm going to move on to number two. I had lived a little bit more than I meant to in there, but I thought it was worth talking about.
Speaker 2All right.
Speaker 0Number two is the frustration is around the credit process. It was a contractor's feel like it's automated and rarely results in credits. What have you changed or planned to change if anything, to make that more transparent or fair to their perspective?
Speaker 2So what we do right now may not be perfect. What we do is we follow up on every single complaint. There's categories where we do them immediately. We actually do proactive refunds. If we detect that something's a spam, you know, a worthless type of lead and it got matched to multiple pros will proactively look for the opportunity to do that. But we'll check everyone. The problem we have is when the pros says something and we can't find that and we can't get to the homeowner. What do we do? And it's, again, it's, if the pro does their best work in the homeowner says, just come and repay the wall, when do you make the decision that you're going to throw that in? So this is one where I can't say we're perfect. What we want to do is factually refund anything that's not a fair lead, right? We all know it's a numbers game. You're not going to win all of them. You're going to have some homeowners put the service request in and then, They were going to build a deck, but they wrecked their car. Some of that is fair. But then the stuff where it's a non-existent person, or I'm looking for a job on your podcast, so I submit the SR to you, or any number of other things like that we want to refund it. But we have this problem of how do we verify it? And I'm not claiming that's perfect. I'm not claiming that's exactly right, but that's where we are.
Speaker 0Yeah, because you still need some, like, like, some proof, right? To, you know, like, there's got to be something in there too. Like, you can't just be like, I said, you know, he said she said, like, there's got to be some sort of verification process that everyone's aware of, just say, okay, I know in order to get that. It's this, some things like if it's a dead number, like you said, it's up.
Speaker 2Yeah. If we know it's not a real phone number, yeah, it's we call we call every refund request. So we do try and make an effort to do it. I think I'm open to ideas again. You can write me and I'm open to complaints. But we do try and verify all the problems when we have something where it's a he set. Nobody else said anything else. How do we figure that out? And I'm just being honest.
Speaker 0Sound like you were open to some suggestion.
Speaker 2I'm sure some will give some to you, but I'm get a lot of suggestions.
Speaker 0So do you think that this shift from the auto match to like this like self-select model will help clean some of this stuff up to like some of these issue like credit issues that are like, I mean, I don't know if that would, I mean, because if it's better, if it's better quality, I mean, maybe we've done multiple things.
Speaker 2So we've moved to this homeowner choice. We've also went through and if you if you've used it, you know, you go in and you have a roofing job, you we ask you some questions. We have gone through and tried new questions on about 90% and picked the winners on a bunch. And we've been able to reduce on the winners, which is say half of that, we're so-ish. We've been able to reduce the wrong task matching by about 25%, 20, 25% and so we've been able to do that. We've also implemented AI in that homeowner service request path so that if a homeowner is confused by the question, they can tell us in their own words So we've really significantly improved our matching. The other thing we did is, when we moved away from Angie ads, Angie ads was a broad match. So if you signed up for roofing, you got anything related to a roof. You might really overindex roof repair and not get roof rena, which is what you want. And now we've allowed all pros to specifically request the tasks. So we've actually changed the bunch about our matching to reduce our refund rate. So it's we're all trying to get to where we only want good matches we want the job the the pro the homeowner We want the homeowner find the pro they need and we want the pro to get matched with the lead they want So we're constantly optimizing there and as I said we're now trying to deploy LLM technology to drive the improvement there
Speaker 1Jeff, is there anything like you guys are obviously doing a lot to make sure that you got the right matches? Is there anything on the contractor side that they can do to kind of help the cause? Like, is there like a better profile? Is there like what should they be on the lookout for to help? Oh, this is going to help me get better the right leads in the bucket.
Speaker 2So there's definitely filling out the profile, right, getting, I would say a professional profile picture not a selfie that you shoot in your truck from, from your lap, but you had a professional profile picture, you get a good, well-written, simple, to the point business description with any key information. We give it to your guarantee on our roof, whatever it is, and then also making sure you have portfolio pictures before and after. So getting your profile set up and then relentlessly, you know, you can bring in reviews from other sources and then relentlessly getting your customers to give you good reviews. If you build that profile like that, you can drive the likelihood that you're selected specifically by a homeowner. And again, I don't have the stats because I don't think we can measure when does the homeowner we might be able to. But when does the homeowner actually read everything and then select? But I'm willing to bet when there when somebody goes through getting all the information having the research and selecting, it really jumps your opportunity to get hired afterwards. So I think building a good profile, We've seen that having those key pro-allaments and at least one good review, more than doubles your win rate in certain geographies. No.
Speaker 0Okay, that actually makes sense. I didn't even think about the frequency of reviews on the profile. Yeah, I'm going to have my help in the selection process.
Speaker 2There's one good review. One, five star review only is better than five in a score of three and a half, right? And so when you get to five good ones, there's step changes. Right, there's a lot of diminishing marginal returns, but it's still good to rack them all up. But developing good reviews and really being focused. I'm sure, you know, one of one of the things I've heard from people is, you know, the five star approach. When you walk into the house, say hi, I'm here. I'm going to do the job. I'm committed to giving five-star service, and what would really help me is if you give me feedback while I'm doing the job. Am I not doing something worthy of five-star service? Because I want to correct it on the spot. And I want to get to the end with you feeling like you got five-star service. And that might come from Tommy or somebody else. I can't remember where I heard it. But if you go through that mentality and you're driving a dialogue with a homeowner or you're making sure you're almost guaranteed to get that review at the end.
Speaker 0Chad, a good point. Chad, how many reviews do you guys have Peter and brothers now? Like, roughly.
Speaker 1Hmm. And Indie, we've got like 10,000, but across all locations, probably close to 30, I'd say.
Speaker 0So 20, 30. So to Jeff's point, your review process is, I mean, maybe you don't do it like that, like your guys aren't doing it like that. But you clearly have something that works really, really well with collecting those reviews. do you hit him like right when they come in is that you kind of fall that path like what's what's what's yours.
Speaker 1uh... so that the key is is the actual technician talking about it uh... we haven't automated to where they can they can send it uh... the request they can send it but what we find is you get a lot more reviews if one two things one you make it personal so you know the technician says hey you know mr. missusmith hopefully i did a great job for you if there anything else i can do um... if if you have five minutes if you could leave a review and put my name in it as your technician that would really help and you know you can say all kind of it's actually one of their KPIs so that's actually not fabricated is how many reviews they get so like hey this really helps me you know I may get a raise I may you know whatever it may be but it would really help if you could you could leave some positive feedback so they've got to talk about it if they just send them then the customer's like, okay, cool, this sounds great. So, I mean, I always think about it like when you go to a restaurant, like, if I'm just going to a restaurant, it's like, I'm not gonna spend the time, I've eaten here, you know, however many times, like, yeah, the food's good, I get it. But you're more likely to review your server if you had really good service. Like, they were on it, they were getting, you know, filling up your water, doing all that stuff. So like, when you can make it personal, it's not so much about reviewing the company. It's like, yeah, they fixed my furnace, great. Awesome. Like he was great. He pet the dog. He did all the things. Like he's awesome. So that's kind of how we encourage it. And just making it top of mind. I think to your people out in the field need to know why a review is so valuable. Like what does that mean? Like the more reviews we get, the more work that we get to send you on like this ultimately affects you, whereas I think a lot of times it's just like, well, they're just asked me to get a review so they can pull up their Google page and You know, stroke their ego about how many reviews they got for the business.
Speaker 0So here's what I'm going with that is if you're pro or think it up, I mean, a pro and you're going into the home, treat the, treat the review process, the same to get the review on your profile, because it helps your overall, it should help your overall results. It's kind of the what I'm telling you. So whether it's either or doesn't matter, you need to have a process for that knowing you're going on an Angie lead. as a pro and you to get that profile some reviews. So, okay. Moving on, my goodness, we're already 45 minutes into this thing.
Speaker 2Okay, good to the hard stuff.
Speaker 0I like it. I think I got too many questions and not enough time. Okay, so there is still a perception that shared leads create a race to the bottom. How are you evolving the shared lead model is distribution based on speed budget review maybe you shared some of us already too, but maybe just give me the short and sweet answer to that one if you can or or whatever you want.
Speaker 2And when you I just want to clarify in the industry right a shared lead can mean we have one aggregator over here that matches it to people sells it to another aggregator and matches it you mean that or do you mean the fact that a homeowner might choose multiple pros on our platform.
Speaker 0So here's what I think that they mean. And I could be wrong to you, Jeff, but here's what I think that they mean is I'm, because there's a perception that that person got the lead that also went to X amount of other contractors at the same time. And I think that's the position that they're coming from is, and when that happens, Is it a race to the, that does that create a race to the bottom, which by the way, I think that's a sales thing, not a, not an Angie problem as far as a race to the bottom, but maybe let's just talk about that, like does that how the process works with the with the new homeowner choice model, like do they can they click on multiple people and they goes to multiple, maybe talk about that.
Speaker 2So homeowners can choose up to five pros in reality, the number of times five pros get picked as low single digits. and four or five pros is, I'd have to look at them right, I think it's high, single digits, maybe low double digits. So it's not a lot. I think the reality is we've done a lot of surveys. And when you go across all home services, what you generally find is you get an average of USA at home when there's so many pros you want to say too. They want to compare larger jobs, they want more smaller jobs. They want smaller cheaper jobs than I'd say, just get me somebody. There's water on my bathroom floor, right? And so our view of it is we're going to present the pros who want the lead and the homeowner's going to choose how many pros they want to talk to. If they want multiple pros and they don't choose them on our platform, they're going to find them somewhere else. So there's going to be competition anyway. So it's not our model to try and necessarily share leads. It's our model to serve the homeowner and give the pros a chance to win. I think people can get into hot debates about whether it should be four or five or three. And I think, you know, we were open to those debates. We don't think necessarily we have everything right and we know when somebody feels like there's a lot of competition that don't feel good. But we do know that when a homeowner wants to talk to multiple people, they're going to, your best bet is to call them right away, get in the house, try and sell first or sell best. We do. I'll just say one more thing, Ryan, which is... We do occasionally get this thing where people think we're selling to dozens of people. We're not sure we've investigated any number of these cases. We can't track them. We think it's possible that sometimes pros will buy a lead from us and then sell it to other people. We have no idea. So we've tried to knock that out because sometimes we get that complaint and we can't figure it out. So I don't know if that's what the persons are referring to. But we're a max of five.
Speaker 0God, I think that's actually a very common question. I mean, Chad, you probably hear that same stuff. Oh, it's still on the to the same person. You know, we'll all go to a race for it and fight for it. And it seems like there's still the homer or still choosing based on whatever's given to the homeowner to, you know, of the profiles that are shown to them, but which if you can, Continue reviews on your profile. Maybe you get more at bats or more, you know, more options by getting, you know, if I start service across all platforms, but you can increase your odds, I should say. But I agree, like most people aren't, don't want to fight people come into their house. Like that takes time, right? To go meet with all this. You want to get stuff done quickly.
Speaker 1Yeah. Well, and also, like, if you're going to complain about the, it being shopped out to other people. Like, so Google's great. Like, they, they, they, they show everybody. Uh, it's all there. Like, I don't, I mean, yeah, there's going to be competition. I don't know that it's a race to the, I mean, it's a race to the bottom if we as contractors race to the bottom. Exactly as a put. So stop racing to the bottom. I was just talking to somebody like, hey, there should be a floor on what it costs to put in a free-ton gas furnace and AC. Please stop selling it. I know that I always say this. I'm like, I know I'm buying equipment cheaper than they are. There's absolutely no way they could be making money on that job. No way. Like I can do the math quick math. There's no way that you made any money. So again, it's like charge what your value is. If you're always racing to the bottom, well then that just tells me that you're not super good at what you do. So I probably don't want to go with you and what we find is we present six options on every call. So there is a bottom, we're essentially, you know, you can race to the bottom as a consumer, but most people want to something in the middle. So it's not always you got to be the best price. Are you the best person for the job and how are you going to sell that to the homeowner?
Speaker 0Yeah, man, good point. Look at you. It's like you've run a business before.
Speaker 1Well, some of that stuff just pisses me off. It's like, come on, guys. Let's, I just want to call all of the HAC contractors in Indianapolis, so we're just going to have a meeting. And we're going to talk about how to price a job and what it should look like. And then, well, I'll be doing better. It's great.
Speaker 0Yeah, it is good to call that out though, because it's kind of a BS, you know, negative thing to say, right, because you're responsible for your race to the bottom. It's not the lead for get where it comes from, it's problem. OK, I'm going to shift gears to you, Jeff, because I got a short time. And I got three questions for you. And I'll more like forward-facing stuff. And this is one that we can talk a little bit about, but I'm interested in your answer. With Google pushing deeper into local services and AI is changing search behavior with the LLMs. How does Angie stay relevant and compete?
Speaker 2So look, we look for homeowners who need work and produce you all at work across every platform. Google is a machine learning platform that always has been. Now they have AI mode, which is a more advanced LLM, AI driven version of it. Google is still going to sell ads next to that content. Google is still going to surface content, just like they surface SEO links. So we have a team of people who are working on how do we structure our data in our content? So we get surfaced and our pros ultimately get exposed to homeowners and need them. And we are working on integrations. We just announced one with Amazon Alexa. We're working, we've submitted an app to an app store for another major LLM, and we're working on getting going there. We are deploying an LLM on our site and training the LLM so that we can demonstrate that we work effectively. And when we plug into the LLM, so we can do that. So we are just working actively. I think you ran a marketing agency, I've got a whole team of marketers who all they do is trying to figure out how they find good homeowners to match with our pros. I think we're going to figure that out with LLMs and we have the team and the technology to do it. So I don't want to be glib, we don't have it solved, but it's another surface area, businesses who are going to have ways that they want to monetize. I think Chad GPT just said they're going to monetize off any IP you create in there. So, so if they want to monetize, we're here to figure out how to officially help them monetize and get our pros worked. That's how we approach it.
Speaker 0Yeah, yeah. And the Chad GPT adds is going to start rolling out with minimum of 200k budget. I mean, listen, it's all intriguing to me. I jump on it.
Speaker 2We actively try and jump in and test and scale anything. If it works great, we scale it more. We've had a lot of success on meta over the last 12 months or so. And if it does work, we throw it back in the water.
Speaker 0Sure, of course, you've got to give it a go. You've got to try it out and see how it works. Is there anything else new coming out besides just the amount of luck to think that you can share or anything like the new offering services and anything like that?
Speaker 2We announced that we're working on, we have a lot of legacy technology. We have the old home advisor platform. We are going to decommission the old dangers, let's platform, because we moved to one product. The next thing we're going to do is we're going to rebuild our homeowner experience, so that it is LLM powered, and it's much more fluid and good for the homeowner. So we are going to progressively work through all these things. And hopefully we'll deliver, we will deliver on both ends. We want to deliver a better experience to the homeowner. And we want to figure out how we either integrate with partners or develop our own technology to make sure pros get the appointment or booked and the job ones. So we're working across across those surface areas.
Speaker 0Yeah, it sounds like you guys are starting to make a lot of different changes thinking about things differently, I mean, it's got to be incredibly difficult when you're public and you've got a lot of A lot of people questioning every single decision, you know, that you make and not, you know, they only see their perspective from their location on the mountain, I don't know, it's like, it can't see the whole picture, all those that's a lot of pressure and you accepted that job willingly.
Speaker 2Like any other job, like any other job, we all have the same things just different people with opinions, right?
Speaker 0That's right. But it seems like you're starting to like these last couple years since you've taken over as a CEO. Like they're starting to be some real progress happening and nothing moves fast at all, especially when you have such a big. business like that. There's a lot of important parts and software and all kinds of things. It seems like you're starting to move some things forward. So I think this closing question is really, really fitting. And my closing question to you, Jeff, is if a contractor listening right now says, okay, I'm going to give Angie. One more shot now that they've learned all the new things or maybe killed some of the perceptions that they had around how leads are distributed or the auto match versus now the new home owner and show whatever it is. Anything that you said, they said, okay, I'm gonna give it one more shot. What would you tell them to do differently today than maybe they did in the past?
Speaker 2So the first thing I'd say is send me an email, tell me your story, tell me what your problems were in the past, tell me what you want to see, and let me get you set up with the right person to talk to, with the right sort of product. Secondly, I think you need to take some of this that you hear out in the marketplace really strong pros and people like yourself. You have to take it very seriously. You need to get on there. You need to get your profile up and populated. You need to bring in the outside reviews. Your first job one, you need to make sure you get a review on the site. And then you need to be on top of these leads. You may not have the capability to have a call center who calls right away and has the whatever sub-two minutes feed to lead, but you have the capability to get in touch and be yourself and be responsive. Because whether it's on-and-you're elsewhere, homeowners don't actually understand well what you do and they're only way to understand it is to talk to multiple pros. So you need to get in there and sell in your own authentic detailed honest way. You need to do it quickly and you need to keep building your reputation. And I think if you do that, We want to see the number of pros who win the jobs on our platform go up. That's what we're committed to and we will try and figure out a way to set you up in a way that sets you up. But you got to commit to it too. Don't spend the money if you're not going to commit to it.
Speaker 0Great, great message. And I'll say this. Hey, how roughly how big is how big of a business is Angie today? On top of the top line, how are you out?
Speaker 2It's about a billion dollars, internationally, yeah, about $900 million in the US, about a hundred million more internationally.
Speaker 0So you hear that listeners, NCO Jeff, on this podcast, gives you an email to reach out to them directly. That has to say something. To me, that says a lot, because there's so many layers between you that could be helpful here. So this is you really stepping out out front and hitting this stuff head on. And I appreciate you kind of letting me shoot this stuff at you and like, I've always kind of looked to, you know, you embrace the challenging questions because if you actually listen and find solutions and maybe you don't have all these challenges anymore, you're always going to have some challenges, but if you can start to chip away at some of the stuff, it starts to change the perception because the reality is actually it is different if you make some changes and you continue to use a, you know, your pro advisory group and reaching out to the homeowners and refining, refining the the process. So I commend you for those things and Just thanks for you know given us and all the listeners know the time and that that means a lot to me that you would do that and and to the home and the home services community as a whole with such a big option for them so I appreciate that I appreciate the time and the opportunity to answer the questions and we love for people to give us another shot we'd love to see them with Chad young anything else for Jeff.
Speaker 1I don't just thank you. This has been really good. I think as Chris said, I think you're willingness to come on here and address people's issues. If there's anything that I know from talking to disgruntled customers of my own, A lot of times it's just confusion that we just need to sort out and it's also, hey, we're going to stand behind our product. Like, this is what it is. We think it's good. Yeah, are we perfect? No. But we're trying as best we can and we want to deliver like you said. We want to get deliver. A great quality lead to a pro and we also want to take care of homeowners. And I think as a contractor, that is kind of the name of the game. So I think we're aligned there and just really appreciate the time and you coming on. Thank you very much.
Speaker 0Well, and Jeff, I know I got to get you off for you. You got three year old to go get so I don't want to hold you hold you up anymore, but Appreciate your time and listen to the listeners Man, hopefully this brought some insight to you and that you will consider again Chad obviously you and I you talked about this. I understand what you're like you guys are doing more on the peer and Other side we talked about it on the red bird side because clearly from what we've learned from Lance and Bill like there's a This is working exceptional for them like that isn't the fluke. So we need to start to tap into some of these things. I learned some more stuff on here that I didn't know about Angie. So for me, it was also educational, but Jeff, I appreciate your time again and I appreciate your position on this and coming on here. Chad, I always appreciate your commentary and to all of our listeners, I can always say, you don't got to do everything, but you got to do something. No zero days.
