Tanner Mullen:  I was unhappy making $7 and 25 cents an hour. I'm 17 years old. It was a my session. My superpower is I am very late. In a funny way, I do not want to do work I don't have to do. I am going to look for every possible way to get the job done fast as possible, as efficient as possible.

Austin Gray: Hey, welcome back to the OWNR OPS podcast. I'm your host, Austin Gray and this show we talk all about starting and growing local service based businesses. We publish episodes every Friday on the podcast, Spotify, apple, and YouTube, and then we send a weekly newsletter on Saturday with a recap of the best learning lessons from our guests.

If you haven't signed up for the newsletter yet, you can do so now. Owner ops.com/newsletter. That's ownrops.com/newsletter. This week's guest, Tanner Mullen from Drip Jobs Tanner actually started a painting company. Back in 2016, but when COVID hit, he decided to build a piece of software that would solve his biggest pain.

What was his biggest pain? He felt like the process of following up with leads was broken, so he built a solution around it. Tanner and I jive, and I've been so excited for this episode because I'm a fellow automation nerd as well, and he and I went deep into the psychology behind. Following up with your website leads fast.

He shared one stat here that will blow your mind. Did you know after five minutes when a customer fills out your form on your website, the chance of them responding to your, I'm gonna leave you on a cliffhanger. You gotta listen to the episode to figure that one out, but it's a crazy stat. After five minutes, you'll be blown away.

Tanner's saying that he offers free business coaching for anybody who follows his Instagram if it's a drip job client. So why don't we kick this thing off and introduce yourself. Tanner, happy to be here. My name's Tanner Mullet. I am a entrepreneur and I love business. So you got a painting company, you got drip jobs. Tell how'd you get started? 

Tanner Mullen: Yeah, man. So it really started, just let me take you all the way back. I was a busboy and I was unhappy making $7 and 25 cents an hour when I was 17 years old, and I got an opportunity to become a server at another restaurant. The interesting part about this restaurant was it was a Chinese owned sushi restaurant.

It was high volume product like a fusion restaurant, and I had the opportunity to create my own income. It was a mind session. It was, Hey, the better you do, the more you'll get tipped. So I treated it like a game. As soon as I got an opportunity, it was. How well can I learn the menu? How well can I convey the offer?

So before I even knew what offers were and sales, I was doing this naturally. In the restroom, there's two types of servers. If you go out to eat, you'll notice the first type is the order taker. The second type is the experience facilitator. Whenever I got a new group of guests, I had to position myself as the expert because I noticed they were there for the experience.

They weren't there, just go through the motions. So I learned this early on. I started falling in love with conveying value, creating a great experience for people. Honestly, I've taken that experience of creating a powerful customer experience and being rewarded for that into my endeavors. Now I've been through car sales, life insurance, banking, and eventually started a house painting business and transitioned into software. So now I have two software companies along with my house payment business. 

Austin Gray: This is incredible. I'm so fascinated by what you're doing. Take us back to the start of the painting company. Why painting and what market? Let's start with what market are you servicing? 

Tanner Mullen: Yeah, so the market I'm servicing, I'd say heavier on the retiree side, but we only do rebates. We're a high end residential retain company at volume. We're not gonna do 2 million, $3 million houses and spend the mod on them. We're gonna do the typical three bedroom, two bath, four bedroom, three bath houses, hundreds of times, and it's awesome. I wouldn't have it any other way. So average shop size is about 5,600 bucks right now, and that's about right.

We positioned ourselves as a leader in our market. Highest rated company, only five O company after eight years, which, knock on the wood here, man, it's fragile, but I'm gonna take it at the end of the day. Again, customer service, customer experience. How I got in there? Dad was a painter, journeyman painter, okay. Worked for a company, recession hit. He had to go do his own thing, would take me along with him on the weekends, waking me up at six in the morning. Here I am prepping out rooms, taping baseboards, and rolling walls. He's doing all the cutting and all the difficult stuff. I'm 13. At the end of the day, I'd get 60 bucks, I'd stash it away, bought my first Xbox. That's something 

Austin Gray: I recently got back from launching a land clearing business down in Austin. And this last winter I launched a snow shoveling business alongside BearClaw. And in both businesses, I've implemented jobber as a way for us to efficiently manage quoting job schedules and invoicing, and even collecting online payment.

Why? Because it's worked so well for us in BearClaw and it's saved us a ton of time and headache. So if you are looking for a software that can help you manage the backend of your business, look no further than Jobber, you can visit Go dot get jobber.com/owner ops. O-W-N-R-O-P-S 

Tanner Mullen: Didn't do much after that. Never painted up until I started my business, but I always remembered the feeling. That I felt first and the customers go nuts when their house was transformed. I loved it. I was like, man, that's awesome. I was just so happy. So I just remembered what it was like. The reason I started my painting business though, is because my dad fell into an addiction.

My mother passed away. He stopped everything. He just stopped, just came up on life. I had a little sister back home. I was away at college. I was a loan officer at a bank working off the corporate ladder. Eventually they wanted to give me a branch to manage at 22, and I was like, you know what? I have an opportunity here to help my family and maybe give that spark back in my dad.

Cause I remember he loved it, but I didn't know how to paint. The only thing I remember was prepping. So I took a course painting Business Pro by Eric Barstow, big name in the painting space. There was a $300 course. And I remember thinking, man, that's a lot of money. And I bought the course and his concept was incredibly intriguing.

And it was sell the jobs. Find the labor, get someone else to do the job. As a salesperson, I'm thinking, this is easy. And I called my dad. I'm like, Hey, what do you think about this? And he couldn't believe it. He's, no, you have to paint everything like everyone else. Old school guy. I'm like, no, this guy, look at his YouTube. He's great. We taught this concept. So anyway, even though that's not how I do it now, and it was way overstated how easy that was. It gave me the boost to get started. I quit my job and I went into business. That's how I started the painting. 

Austin Gray: That's awesome. I resonate so much with that too. 'cause, um, very similar to you. I grew up, my dad owns a concrete business back in West Texas and I spent every summer with him. Wow. Just doing, doing the things we used to tape off floors and all that stuff. Taping off walls. In this scenario it's a little bit different than what you're doing.

Tanner Mullen:  I love that business, 

Austin Gray: by the way. Concrete. 

Tanner Mullen: Awesome business. 

Austin Gray: So he's in the decorative concrete, they do the stained and stamp. Oh, is that right? Right. Cool. 

Tanner Mullen: Stamping Oxy. Big market for us. But I love that industry. I do too. 

Austin Gray: It's a sweet model and margin 

Tanner Mullen: Problem is that it's very honor dependent. It's like an artist. It's like you're sending Picasso in and people want Picasso.

Austin Gray: And I will give it to my dad. He has become Picasso of that industry down there. He's like, why are you spending all this money on ads, man? What are you talking about? Marketing. I've never had a marketing budget. 

Tanner Mullen: Dude. There's a guy here, you just see every other day another driveway is knocked out. He hid that. When he hit that. There's just one guy, that's it. And you wait for him too. You'll be like, oh yeah, I'm not getting my stuff done in six months. But it'll be by the guy. 

Austin Gray: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So my little brother is about to graduate college and he's going to work with him in that business and yeah, he's always sending me pictures. Awesome. Like, Hey, we just knocked another stain one out. Great. Give Van. Yeah. Okay, so you start your painting business. What year is that and how does it go? 

Tanner Mullen: Started the painting business 2016. This is my thought. I'm think dad's gonna come in and be a superstar that I remember he was eight years ago, not the case. Big. Drop off. But it's good because if I knew that I wouldn't have quit my job. But if I couldn't go back, burn the boats. Tony Robbins said, I went to unleash the power within the year before, so I was charged up. I'm like, this is it. This is my moment. One of the things that pushed me is that, I don't know if you're familiar with his event, I unleash the power within Tony Robbins. I'm familiar with him.

Yeah, familiar with him. So he has an event, go to the event, and he has everyone that owns a business stand up in the room. There's 9,000 people. Fricking 8,200 of 'em stood up and in my head, that was a shift for me. I'm not sitting up, I'm still working at the bank. So with all that charged up, I'm like, I go into the business.

He's not who he was and he is way gone. In terms of addiction, that was a problem that I had to manage, thinking that he was gonna be the painter, he was not gonna be the painter. He needed rehabilitation. He was not in a good position. So at that point, I had to be like, dad can't really work together. I put all my chips on this.

So I had to start from scratch. Found a guy that could take it. And was gonna do the model that I just discussed with you, and it worked for a month. Next thing, the guy that I hired, he's like a subcontractor slash independent contractor. He starts taking on other work, trying to sell jobs to the customer, not showing up.

When I tell him, and I'm thinking, this isn't working, man, he's not my employee. He has the leverage and relationship, and I don't have enough work. I don't have enough of the Sun Network work to be like, okay, I'll get someone else. I was desperate, right? So I'm selling the jobs and I'm like, you know what? I need to find a team that's mine.

So he would bring in a helper, and I like the helper. He was a good kid, and I'm like, Hey man, do you want to be a part of my team and I'll pay you hourly? And he was like, yeah, for sure. So he was my first employee. I'm like, okay, now I have an employee. So me and him would pay. I would go do estimates and meanwhile, how do I get leads?

Home advised that was my lead source early on. No Facebook marketers. I didn't have a Google connection and I certainly didn't have a Facebook group. I wasn't on collaborating with other painters. This is in 2016. My buddy started a cabinet refinishing business around the same time and he was using home advisor that introduced me to that.

And I'm like, okay, all I gotta do is pay for leads and I'm gonna get business. Coming from a car sales background, that's exactly what happened. I obviously was selling cars, so they would gimme a stack of leads. So I was used to calling leads, but this was different. You paid per lead in, you call the lead and you book an estimate and these are people that wanna work with you.

So that was my first start getting these leads and trying to convert them into sales. And they were interested leads, but what I learned was that even though they put in their information, I didn't know much about. But ultimately that doesn't mean they're interested. A lot of people are emotional about their inputs online and I'd have to nurture those leads and that's where the need for something like your jobs was born early on back then. 

Austin Gray: When did you start building drip jobs? Was it in tandem with your painting business? 

Tanner Mullen: Yes. 

Austin Gray: Or did you get to a certain point and you were like, Hey, I gotta build this and stop all involvement with your painting business, or did you split your time?

Tanner Mullen: That's a good question, man. For me, first, well, I came from corporate sector, right? So every job I had, car sales, life insurance, and even in the bank, because I was doing sales in the bank, I was flipping loans and selling different products. We had A CRN, right? You're not really doing your job without a crm.

So I knew that I needed A CRN now. I didn't have anything like Drip Jobs, but I had a CRM. So that was the first thing I knew I needed a CRM. As I started looking at what was in the market, I'm thinking, okay, I have the CRM, but I need to get my customers into the CRM, and I don't want to do this manually.

Like this sucks piping in information, right? So I knew that I had leads and I'm like, man, wouldn't it be cool if I could send the lead from. Home advisor to the CRM instant. And what I learned was that home advisor had the ability to grab a web call from their system and send the lead. I didn't know about it.

This is like public information. Hey, connect your CRM. It was like this back door hack. They have a little team in the home advisor unit. Uh, you email and they give you a web hook and you can send it really for developer. I figured out how to do it. I got the web hook and I started playing around with Zapier.

I created a system where the lead would come in from home advisor, go to Zapier, and Zapier would send it to another app called Active Campaign. Inside Active Campaign, you can create automation. So what I did was I put that lead into a list, triggered the automation, whenever a new contact came into the list and created an email seed.

So then I put my whole plan into action. Inside of this, I have it all set up. I hit the publish button. Now in waiting, bro. I'm thinking, wait a minute, what happens if the lead gets the email? They're just going to email me and say, okay, what time can we do an estimate? So I looked up another app and at that time it was, you can book me similar to Calendly.

So I'm thinking, why don't I just give them a link to book their own estimate? So I, through that link and, and then at that point in time, I just discovered fire. It's 3:00 AM and I just put together this crazy automation. I hit public list next day, like seven 30 in the morning, a lead comes in and usually this is what would happen.

I'd wake up around eight from a long day of painting, eight o'clock I'm waking up and I, I don't feel like calling this lead. I don't really want to talk to someone that early. No one wants to do that. So we would wait till nine and that's where the disconnect was, is that I was only able to take care of nurturing that lead when I felt like it, rather than the way it needs to be done, which is an instantly.

So anyway, lead comes in, but I got another email and says, an appointment's been booked. That's all it took. I just understood that I just created something that is going to eliminate friction, help me make more money and optimize my time. I'm documenting a lot of what I'm doing on Instagram at that point.

I always loved to help people. I always wanted to give advice and I started seeing Man was a big network of painters on Instagram, but I just followed anyone that had painting in the green and I would just share my story. I'd take 'em along the ride with me doing estimates. Hey, this is how I'm pricing out this.

And I started to create like a little community of other painting contractors and I started sharing what I'm doing. I'm like, Hey, I got these leads from Home Advisor. I'm nurturing them and they're booking their own appointments. I never have to call another week. Which wasn't entirely true. You still have to call.

Can't completely rely on that. I was fluffing it up to get people excited. So from that point on, I had a couple people that were interested and I started building out these automations for their businesses. So here I am at this stage I have probably three painters. I'm painting every day, hustling, taking on jobs, going and do estimates one crew at a time. And now when I get home, I'm building out automations for a paid contract and I'm selling that package to them, white labeling it and it's in my first version of drip jobs was early on. 

Austin Gray: Just a hack together, no code solution of different tools. I love it. I love it. Proof of thought. I knew you and I were gonna, this is why I was so excited to talk about this because man, this is like one of my favorite things to do in the business is think through these sequences.

What sort of manual tasks can be automated. The tools he just mentioned are readily available to you, and there's no reason why every small service business should not have an automation set up right now. So I'm interested in diving deeper with you on this. I think we could go like three different ways with this podcast. Um. Before we dive straight into automations and software, 'cause that's where I want to go with it. You said you started in 2016 and what is it? 2025. So you're nine years in, what's the uh, annual revenue of that? 

Tanner Mullen: Annual revenue's? 1.6 million. That's what we did last year. We're probably gonna do exactly the same this year.

Austin Gray: Cool. 

Tanner Mullen: Yeah, and I'm happy with that.I don't care about growing it obviously 'cause drip jobs is my focus. But yeah, 1.6 million. I break down how many team members we have right now. 12 payers. We have one supervisor, supervisors, all of the jobs, an estimator and two admin. 

Austin Gray: Awesome, awesome. And then that is just humming right now?

Tanner Mullen: Yeah, at this point it's humming the system. I'm still refining the system. You found me on x I'm sharing that. I don't know if you've seen, but I'm now trying to automate the entire estimating process virtually. We can talk about that later. But yeah, I would say it's at a place where it's humming. The reputation with word of mouth and all that, we get quite a bit of leaf flow.

Austin Gray: How do you break up your time between the painting business and drip jobs at this point? 

Tanner Mullen: Man, drip jobs is an entirely different animal and it's 100% independent of me. That's the interesting part about drip jobs. I can't do any implementation aside from backend automations and optimizations, which I do in my free time. I jump in on product meetings and development meetings just to make sure that the vision stays intact. I think the most important aspect of my role at your jobs is to keep running my painting business to a degree of which I can identify the bugs before everyone else, and I can predict the future and build the future at Drip jobs because I don't have to ask a user their speculation of what the need is gonna be. I am the user, so it's a really interesting relationship. I think that's what makes us special. That I just have a really deep understanding of today's buyer, 'cause I'm dealing with them every day. 

Austin Gray: Absolutely. Yeah. You're the best use case. Best use case because you've got the pulse on the business. You care about the business. You are thinking two and three steps ahead. 

Tanner Mullen: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love it. You get selfishly for me too, to free me. So every time I think one of your questions. What's your superpower, dude? My superpower is I am very lazy. In a funny way. I do not want to do work I don't have to do. I am going to look for every possible way to get the job done fast as possible, as efficient as as possible.

I was the kid in fifth grade who finished the test first. I like to be first. I like to be fast. Now, that wasn't efficient. I don't think I got good grades, but I found the quickest way to get it done for me. That's my superpower. How fast can I do it? How can I optimize my time? One of the things I mentioned earlier was that I hated typing in customer's information to me.

It was inefficient. I hate typing on my phone, writing it down, putting it into the CRM in drip drops. You don't have to ever type in a customer's information. And now came from a selfish reason of, I hate doing this. I didn't have to ask somebody if they hate doing this, I'm just gonna assume that I hate doing it. Everyone else hate doing it. And then we're gonna build a solution around it. 

Austin Gray: So you decide you're gonna build this software company. Take us back to the beginning of that. How do you even go about that? 

Tanner Mullen: Oh man. So COVID and I'm married at this point, building my life and got my savings. Not very much, but I've saved, always had it in the back. Everyone has an app idea, dude, everyone has one. What can I build? And man, I just remember how scary it was. You don't want to get screwed. That's the thing. Like you, everyone believes their app ID is gonna work if it gets built. It's the who's gonna build it thing that gets everyone uneasy. I came across a US-based development day.

Built a similar app. I reached out to them and I said, Hey, I love what you built. I signed up for their app. It was pretty good at the time. I wanna white label it because I had a lot of our Trade Bri customers. Those were the customers that I set up the automations. I had a lot of those guys asking me, Hey, how do I connect it to joist?

How do I connect it to job? How do I connect it to all these different apps so I can do estimates, I can do invoicing. I was desperately looking for the project management and customer proposal component of this patch together, tech stack. This was a long time ago, not too long ago, but not a lot of these companies built their apps 'cause they were so established for this.

Because API, which is like connecting with Zapier, came about around that time. A lot of these apps weren't built with that in mind. So I reached out to them and I said, Hey, this is what I wanna do. And when I pitched it to them. Were like, look, you wanna make way too many changes to what we already have, but we can build you a custom solution.

It sounded like if you can swing it. I said, all right, let's talk about that. So I had a brief meeting with them on Zoom. I went over my vision and they said, what we want you to do is write out all the stuff you want for it and put together a proposal. That night. I'm thinking, okay, wait a minute. I have a chance here.

I met these guys. They seem legit good reviews 'cause it's just a software development company, ux. So I didn't wanna go overseas. I didn't trust anyone, take my money. That's how I thought. And so anyway, for that night, I spent three hours writing out every single thing I would want in this app. And there was no chat, GPT, it had to come straight outta me.

It was all dialed in. So I meet with them, outline exactly what I want, and that's what I thought I wanted. That's the problem with software development is because you have to be very certain. Because software developers will build exactly what you tell them. You can't come in with theory or a hypothesis.

It's like you've got to know. And I had so much reference from Tree Thrive, what I wanted, I just wanted it to be mine. I want it to be an all in one solution. So it was a lot easier for me to do this. I pitch it to them, they give me a price in the six figures I told my wife, listen, I know this is gonna work. And uh, with her blessing, we pursued it and signed the paper. That is incredible. And this is during COVID? How does the buildout process go?

Tanner Mullen: During CO buildout process sucked. Man. It was terrible. It was the worst experience almost of my life. It was incredibly stressful. I was well into paying of $50,000 and I didn't have a workable product. That's a crazy mindset shift for someone who's never spent that kind of money on anything. Doesn't understand software because so much of the time is behind the scenes and I'm asking for updates. They were incredibly unorganized. I went for three project managers, first project manager I had who was pregnant and went on leave, and then I had another guy come in, a young kid out of college.

Everything that could possibly go wrong during this process did. I had to take the reins. I had to become a senior product manager in a software company before I even knew what that role was. I knew that, 'cause what would happen is there'd be little communication throughout the week because they were building other apps for other people.

I was only getting allocated maybe 10 hours a week, 10 15 hours a week, getting billed $150 an hour. They wouldn't send me what they would build at one point where it was something I could click. You can imagine I'm getting that billed at 5:00 PM on Friday. From that point on Friday through Sunday, I'm pairing this thing apart.

I'm like, this button needs to go, this needs to go here, this needs to go here. I'm sending them an email, and by the time that email gets flushed out, fought through, dialed in and iterated on, that was just another 10 grand of things that needed to be done at $150 an hour, I would see all these fixes on my next invoice, and I'm like, this was a bad sign fault and you can lose a ton of money fast.

So I had to really get into the mindset that I just need to get a workable app. The first version of Drip jobs was terrible, but I was marketing it to people using Trade Thrive. I had 30 or 40 customers ready to go. I knew that if I could get it workable, I could start bringing in some money and then start reinvesting that money into a better solution. I thought that they were gonna be the company that was gonna stick with me all the way, but I learned quickly that I needed a co-founder. 

Austin Gray: How did you approach that?

Tanner Mullen: It came from frustration. I didn't know anyone that could code, so I went on Reddit and there was a co-founder, sub Reddit. I pretty much outlined what I've done up until this point.

At this point, we launched, I had 50 or so companies using it. That was even harder because now you have bugs that are coming up and you have tasks, and you have feature requests. Can you imagine every feature request five years ago that we didn't have that people were just expecting because they came from an already established app, like jobber or, and this was incredibly, can you imagine at that point in time, I'm competing against job service tie and all these other companies that are well into 10 years of development.

I know nothing. I have no development team. I have no sales person. I have no onboarding rep. I'm doing it all by myself and no pull out a start or run a software company. I just had an idea. So I'm like, I need to get a developer. I'm seeing a problem here. You talk about efficiencies, understanding reading patterns.

I'm looking at this, this sustains this way. I'm gonna fail. I need to pivot. I need to go into something unknown scary, find a stranger that I could give my six figure code base to, and have him operate with integrity. And that was incredibly difficult. So when on Reddit, put out a post, this one guy came in, a very senior position at a company, everyone knows, okay?

So that was incredibly appealing to me, and he wanted to jump into a startup. He liked the fact that we had customers that was already billed and he wanted to be my co-founder. I was desperate. We agreed on a 30 day trial between him and myself, and throughout the whole time, the first two weeks, it seemed like we were getting some things done from a sales perspective.

I'm like, man, this is great. I can't go in and fix things. And that's a big difference from running my painting business. My team doesn't show up. I'm gonna go paint. I'm gonna make sure my customers are happy if there's a bug, or the system freezes or it sends the customer the wrong message, and I don't have any help.

Guess what? I'm screwed and I have to just apologize. So when this guy came in, he helped me get the code base into a place that I had control and he started fixing things. I'm like, great, this guy's awesome. We're moving forward getting some bugs knocked out. And he got into a little spat with the development company that started jerk jobs and we wind up party ways.

So now I'm completely dependent on the stranger that I've known for two weeks with my six figure code base. I know nothing, I don't even know what the code looks like. I've never even seen it. So at this point in time, he starts talking about money and how he wants to get paid and he wants to incredibly high equity split.

He's a big Y Combinator. I'm gonna launch it, talking about all this stuff. And I'm over here talking about impact and helping the industry and helping guys. And I'm not thinking about all that. Like he was just heavy on the, the way he saw it was like he was just gonna ride a rocket ship in his act.

Anyway, long story short, it didn't work out after the two weeks. I had to find a way to get the code base back. I had a buddy that I knew that could take it for me. He's holding it, and I had to block that guy from everything. Come to find out that he stored all the credit cards that came in the system and spun a new business up on Stripe and started running the credit cards.

Stealing money, siphoning money. This was a whole different scenario, not worth getting into, but that's just highlighting some of the challenges that you just go through early on. So from that point on, I tried again on Reddit and I ran into my co-founder Jason, who's an absolute rockstar. We are good friend to this day. He runs the show, he's our CTO, and without that guy. We wouldn't even be having this conversation. 

Austin Gray: This incredible. So you've spent six vs on building a piece of software. Some dude comes in, he's basically stolen your code or at least the credit card. 

Tanner Mullen: Yeah, yeah. Associated with it. Oh, credit card, everything. He just, he outta Spike, he just extracted everything. Tried to lock us out of where the code was stored. We had to go through hoops and ladders. And meanwhile I had customers that this was insane, dude. 

Austin Gray: So if you think you wanna start a software business, listeners, there you go.

Tanner Mullen:  Man, that's not, even if you don't know Coke, it's like starting a restaurant and you don't know how to cook. You are at the mercy of your chef. If he doesn't show up or doesn't want to work, he has control. So you better make sure you have a good head chef and you probably should give him some equity. 

Austin Gray: How did you get those first customers?

Tanner Mullen:  I. Customers came from Trade Thrive, from that initial app build, but then getting the word on there was all social media, man, it was all podcasts. Those coaching sessions we briefly discussed just building relationships and helping people. And this was natural to me. At the end of the day, people knew that I was really trying to make a better solution than what was out there and I had a lot of people early on believe it and that kind of drove me to continue to like push through these challenges.

'cause I'm like, I have people that are counting on me to get this solution out and I'm not gonna stop until it's built and it's built well. And that hasn't stopped. I still have the same drive today. I'm probably way more diligent today, even though it's operational now, the stakes are higher. Now I'm dealing with companies that are doing a lot more revenue and they need more functionality. They need speed, they need efficiency. Just continuously driving that shit forward. 

Austin Gray: What was the payment plan you offered those initial. Users, 

Tanner Mullen: it's never changed. We've added some add-ons, but it's been 1 47 a month plus or 97. But the 1 47 a month plan out of the gate was a move that I got from the ideology was Tesla, but I just knew that I'm coming out of the gate strong. That's it. Like we're coming out and comparatively, we were priced two to three times what the market was for CRM, but I knew that our software was different than every software out there, so I had to price it aggressively so we could hit the numbers we needed to so I can afford to pay people to build it. So that was 147, and again, comparatively that was high, but I also leveraged the tech stack that I was using to put together the first version of trade drive, and that was coming out to 200 bucks. If you bought everything individually justifying that was based off of that as well.

Austin Gray:  I see. Now you mentioned something from Tesla. What was that? 

Tanner Mullen: When they first came out with the Roadster, they priced it exceedingly high. Right? It was just one of those things. It was like the first, and that kind of created the perception that this was worth more, right? It's like one of those concepts, and then obviously once they got the market share, once they created the desire, then they lowered the price of some of our other vehicles, but they came out of the gate expenses.

Austin Gray: Stryker Digital specializes in SEO services specifically for local service businesses. Bodie and Andy, the two co-founders, have helped me get Bearclaw land services to the number one search result on Google inside my state for my specific search term. If you wanna learn more, visit stryker digital.com. That's S-T-R-Y-K-E-R digital.com. 

Austin Gray: Interesting. That's that whole psychological pricing. 

Tanner Mullen: Absolutely. Move. Yeah. AB of like, I could have been scary. I could have did under a hundred. I just want, I'm like, look man, we're putting a lot of work into this day. It's worth paying for it. That's where we land it.

Austin Gray: What's the old saying? There's room for two in any market, the highest and the lowest price. We'd like that person who delivers the best service and the best quality. And then the one who undercuts everybody on price. One could argue that your type of customer that you're gonna deal with is going to follow whatever pricing strategy you take.

Tanner Mullen: Oh, absolutely. A hundred percent. Alright. 

Austin Gray: How many users right now? 

Tanner Mullen: Right now we have, I think we're up to 2100 businesses using drug jobs right now. Yeah, man, some of those businesses have two to three users, so maybe like 6,000 users, maybe? I'm not, I don't know exactly, exactly user count, but we look at it like businesses, like we're off 2100 business.

Austin Gray: Incredible. Yeah. And then how has the user base evolved in the beginning? You're targeting painting companies at the what? Million, 2 million mark. 

Tanner Mullen: 500,000 to 1.5 million sweet spot, because a lot of them are coming from nothing and then using drip jobs. So it's an easier transition for them. But yeah, Haney Companies was number one concrete, great companies. You and I talked about decorative, concrete coating companies, those sorts of guys. And then that was just because I had put out content around painting, and of course I own a painting business, so it was very relatable. The way the software works now, we have fence installation companies using it, granite installation company, anyone that has a contractual pipeline, right?

So in other words, the way we look at it is you have 11 stages of the customer buying cycle. You have a new lead that could come in from Google, LSA, Facebook ads, a lead funnel home advisor. They're a new cold lead. From there, you have a warm lead. So if you speak to one of those people and they say, Hey, I'm not buying my house for another two months, but I wanted to get.

I just wanted to waste your time. So they will get moved to the warm lead stage. And then from there we have people that request estimates. So they're ready to get an estimate, but they sit in a queue so we can vet the estimate, we can allocate the sales person and decide when we're gonna go. And then we have people that are scheduled for an estimate.

We have customers that are in the in draft stage, which these are customers that we're building their proposal for the proposal sense stage. That's customers. We've sent proposals to proposal, rejected stage. These are customers that reject our proposal, which they can do within drip jobs. And then you have project pipeline.

These are accepted proposals, customers that move forward, proposals that are scheduled, jobs that are in progress, and jobs that are complete. Now, you can add more stages, but these are the stages that roofing companies, fencing companies, painting companies, concrete coating companies. What else are we getting? We're getting a bunch of different, I can't think of it off the top of the head, but these are the state. This is the buying cycle for these types of customers across. All these industries and drip job is perfect. 

Austin Gray: Love it. And then how are you differentiated from some of the other softwares in the market?

Tanner Mullen: Yeah, it's the automation outta the gate, right? So drip jobs, most people think that means like a messy paid job like that they don't understand concept behind a drip. So a drip message is a text and an email that gets sent in a timed fashion picture of water faucet or a 800 drip. And essentially what happens, all those stages that I mentioned to you, 80% of those stages, the card moves automatically, right?

So in other words, if I send a proposal in drip jobs, it moves the card and your pipeline from in draft to proposal sent. It doesn't just move it, it triggers the next sequence to send. Every one of those stages I mentioned to you has a different set of communication that has to be contextual to the customer specific experience with your company.

For example, in my system right now, I have hundreds of emails going out today. And there's emails going out to call leads and text messages. There's emails and text messages going out to call leads. There's emails and text messages going out to people that we sent proposals to. There's thank you messages going out to people that have accepted our proposal.

There is notification messages going out to people that are in progress and now next steps and how to make a payment and all that stuff. Really, what the differentiator is that our software is built off of automation and communication first, and then we put all the invoicing and scheduling and all this stuff on top of that, whereas the big players like ServiceTitan job or the other ones that we are winning business from, they built their software with invoices, proposal scheduling first, and they're trying to add automation and communication on top.

And that's hard for me to explain, but. It makes it convoluted because I believe, and this is why we built it, is 'cause the foundation, all commun relationships, personal and business starts with communication. So that's what makes strip drop special is that the communication is unbeatable unless the software was built with communication as the first component and then patented on top of there again.

Austin Gray: So I'm gonna do something crazy here. Maybe I'm not, but so, so the reason I love what you've built so much, I mean, I have to be careful what I've say said, 'cause I do have sponsors in place here, right? Um, so I've hacked the system internally between two different tools. So I have all these automation and I would love to get, oh man, this would be, I know it would be so fun to do right now 'cause I think you could break down my process and you're like, dude.

That's great. Yeah. And that sucks. I love this is where your system is broke. Yeah. I'm using automation tools to go from our management system, okay. To our communication system. Okay. So I'm using go high level, build 12, which is one of my business coaches, white labeled products. Okay. So that functions as our drip in, but where my pain point is right now, and I'm basically selling for you right now, the pain point is this comes in, right?

So I have to have new lead comes in on the website or meta ads or Google ads, right? Comes into our new lead pipeline, those 11 different stages you were talking about. Right? We have all those built out and go high level. Okay. So that happens. My sales guy lives in there, but he's also sending estimates.

Go high level, doesn't send estimates, doesn't manage jobs, right? So Jobber is our o is our management tool. So we've got a transition from communication system to Java. Correct. And it sounds like you've like this was the pain you saw early and you just went full ahead and you built the system, which I think is really cool.

But I knew we were gonna jive on this 'cause I'm like man, I can't wait to learn more about what he is built because like I've built this system internally but it's hacked together and you as well as I do, there are all these automations that have to happen to get it from go high level into Jobber and then back, back into, so like when we send a an estimate, I have to trigger an automation to send that to move and go high level so that our sales guy knows this has moved right. 

Tanner Mullen: Absolutely. Everything that you're saying, first of all, go high level wasn't around when I started. It was, that's why I used active campaign. I would've a hundred percent used go high level. Honestly. Go high level was around, I may not have started drip jobs. 

Austin Gray: Yeah. Yeah. 

Tanner Mullen: To be honest with you, I was using ActiveCampaign and everything you're saying is the reason why people switch to us because of that exact reason. First of all, there's no company that's excited about using multiple softwares. Second of all, everything you just described to me is very high level technical difficulty. The average contractor who needs everything that you're saying that you built, it's very hard for them to build that or find someone to build that.

It's very expensive. So essentially we have it all built out of the box. The minute you sign up for Drip Drops, all you have to do is add your logo and you're doing everything that you just described in five minutes. That's the difference. The drip's already pre-done. Emails and notifications are already pre-done, and the project management's built in.

The project management includes job costing and includes, and if you're a painting contractor, production rates, invoicing, change orders, work orders, all these things that you know. You need to run your business. And again, this is where I go back to, I'm the contractor, so I know I need all these things, so I put it in there and prioritized it.

But yes, everything you're saying is 100% true. And there's pain points as you scale. When you have to send data back and forth, sometimes the data gets lost in transition, it get, it comes back funky or it doesn't do what it's supposed to do. And these are, again, like it works for you because you found a way to build it. But for the average guy, they don't have a shot.

Austin Gray:  So here's what I will say, and I think you probably know, dude, I have been on a bender. I went down to Austin. I'm helping this guy launch this business. Okay? Right. Very successful entrepreneur in the internet marketing space. Right. Wants to be in land clearing, right?

So he hires me as a consultant. I fly down there and we do a three month deal. I spend a week with him down there. I'm trying to build it the way that I would build my business. Very bootstrap, scrappy. Sure. And he is like, hold on, take a second here. Just take a step back. You've already done this. Let's build it the right way the first time, he's, we're a sales and marketing company and we have, we hire professionals to fulfill the work.

And so we just broke down the whole system and he's in Bear Claw, like, I know you've got the bones in place, but dude, you need to be buttoned up. Like every single lead that comes in, whether it comes from Facebook, whether it comes from Google, whether it comes from your social, whether it comes from website, organic, they need to be tracked and they need to be tagged.

And it needs to go through some sort of system in which you can track that all the way down to a closed job so that you can come down to these metrics, which are what is your customer acquisition cost and what is the lifetime value of that customer and can you trace that back to your marketing and how much is it costing you to get that customer?

So I came back with so much energy. I was like, dude. Our stuff is half-assed. Like I hacked it all together and as well as I do, when you're in operations, you build this stuff and then when you're building the business, you get pulled into operations until you have the full team to manage that. So that was like all year one.

Tanner Mullen: And it's hard to iterate on it. It you set. Well, I'm assuming you set it up, it's working. I'm gonna go do something else and then get back to that. That's the founder's dilemma, dude. 

Austin Gray:  It is. It is. And so like we have these automations coming in all last year, right? And I'm like, they're not perfect, but whatever.

I'm like building on the fly. So I come back and I'm like, this is literally the most important thing that I could spend my time on. So I had this meeting with my team and I'm like, guys, I'm going into hibernation mode. I will be in my office. The lights are gonna be off. I'm gonna be up in the morning at three.

Yeah. I'm gonna be working after I get my daughter down. Yeah. And I told my wife this too, and she's like, what are you doing? But I will tell you the amount of time that I have spent. Yeah. Setting up these automations to get this system built. Right. Over the last three weeks and hiring. I was lucky. I found this DoorDash automation engineer.

He found him on Upwork dude. And he is a baller and so he and I had just been going back and forth. Yeah. Just like building all these things. Then I had to go buy a make.com account, right? Yeah. Because Zapier is limited in some of the things that it can do. I'm trying to paint the picture. I think we've landed on a good system here that works for us, but to your point, like what you've built, I think you saw the same thing or the same broken pieces that I've seen and experienced, and then you just went and built the solution that does all in one.

Tanner Mullen: Yeah, man. And that, but again, I was listening to the pain, but I was also experiencing the pain and coming from let's go to that customer service background, right? Like the thing is that the first pain was, I was like, I feel like my customers are not getting the best experience like that. That's where it came from.

It wasn't about like me being efficient, it just came from this. Aspect of my life where I recognize that people will pay more for a better experience. This is true in many cases of our society. For example, you go to the World Series, same game, different seats you sit at behind home plate paying 20 grand, you sit up in the nose, please, you pay it.

800 bucks, same game, different experience. This concept's prevalent in every area of our society. When it comes down to my painting business, we can't separate ourselves very much. People first think they can paint. That's my first competition, is the homeowner who thinks that you can do it. The second competition is everyone else that owns a painting business, and it's everyone.

I think everyone's first business is a painting business, and then the third one is the competitors. The killers out there, the ones that are operating at the same or higher level than me, so we can't compete on painting, and I knew that early on if I was just gonna compete on painting, I'm in trouble. I have to compete on experience.

The best indicator you can ask any homeowner, the best indicator of a phenomenal experience is perfect communication, perfect every step of the way. We love communication, right? We want to know when our deliveries are on the way. We want to track our packages. We want to get a phone call in our driveway.

So don't think for a second that your home service officers don't think for one second that these people don't have high expectations about communication for a service that they're paying for. The standard is just so low right now because not many people understand this concept that when they receive exceptional communication, it's an outlier.

So they trust you more and trust usually they're willing to get their money for. So this is a very deep psychological topic that I love. I think that desire came from you, obviously from an efficiency standpoint, and for your customers too. This is just a core need in us to make sure that first of our customers are taken care of and then our backend is synonymous with that. That's my approach toward the whole automation topic and wanting to get that in the hands of as many people as possible. 

Austin Gray: Absolutely. I would agree with you a hundred percent. It just comes from a place of, yeah, look like we have an internal rule. We don't bash or talk bad about our competitor. I'm talking about competitors of Bear Cloud, right.

We just focus on what we do. Yep. Lock and tackle. I'm with you, so I was gonna go down this route of I love that man. I think when I started this business, it was like I know that we can provide a level of service and professionalism that our competitors are not, because we can implement these digital tools that allow us to send professional invoices that allow us to schedule a job efficiently and that allow us to communicate immediately upon when they reach out. Nobody wants to wait for an estimate if somebody's filling out a form. There's a good chance that they're in the market and ready to buy.

And if you catch 'em quick Yep. Before they start scrolling to the other things, you're gonna catch 'em in the mode. And I just had this premise of, if we can be fast on the phones, we're going to just have an opportunity to bid more jobs. Because a lot of people out there won't go search for another competitor. If they have somebody who's, Hey, I can come within three hours. 

Tanner Mullen: All they have to do is hit the back button, man, and go down the list. And that is, that's right. How that is powerful for a homeowner, man. They don't care about whether or not you can get around to reaching back out. And there is so much friction in the buying process.

Something is simple. Look, something is standard and simple. And I've done this, I implore you to do it just to, just to get a couple kicks. But go to your competitor's websites, look at what their contact form is. If it's a standard contact form that says, contact us first name, last name. Email, tell us about your project.

That contractor is coped, and I say that because that information is gonna get dropped into an email. That email has to be looked at by a human from that point on, that human has to make a decision on when they're gonna call. Harvard did a study on speed to lead. They're the only ones that have done this study.

But essentially there's a 400% drop all from one to five minutes, but five to 10 minutes. It's like triple that, right? In terms of getting back to an interested lead like this. And that was like five years ago. So it's just gonna be harder and harder when people submit their information to capitalize on that.

On my website, you cannot submit a form without submitting the date and time you want us to come answering a question and pretty much committing to an estimate that we essentially confirm on our side. It's a one stop shop. You're gonna tell us everything you want, you're gonna put in the dates you want. The time of day you want and then we're gonna book it and we're not gonna call you. We're just gonna book it and we're gonna get that interesting. Separate 73%. So that means 

Austin Gray: what? 

Tanner Mullen: 73% of every single customer that comes into our pipeline we schedule. 

Austin Gray: Okay. So you are, I'm very fascinated about this and this is something I spent a lot of time on last three weeks. It's like reducing friction on the form.

Tanner Mullen: It's been I for this meet. 

Austin Gray: Okay, so I'm gonna break this down. How much, oh dude, we're already two minutes over. What do you have a, I got, do you have a hard stop? What's your painting website here? 

Tanner Mullen: Paint premium.com. 

Austin Gray: Alright, so let's go back for listeners here. You said Harvard did a study that says the dropoff is 400% after five minutes.

Tanner Mullen: Let's see, let me make sure I get it right. Harvard based study speed. Do anyone can look this up? So they're the only ones that did a short light of how speed the lead. And they have some cool online graphics here. It's like these three. So here it is. I have the response time here. I pull this up real quick so I can get the noles right.

So speak least. So it says, Hey, here's the one. All right. So the best time to respond is within five minutes. Within five minutes, obviously the best time to respond. And then from that point on, it's a 10 x decrease after the first five minutes. So in other words, in terms of your chances of getting in touch with that customer, decreases by 10 times. There's a whole study on this and I'll send it to you. And I'm trying to find the one where it talks about the percentages, but yeah, it's a 10% decrease after five minutes, which is insane. 

Austin Gray: That is incredible. Yeah. 

Tanner Mullen: And that was done in 2019. Statistically, you will see a 400% decrease after five minutes it says it right there. So 400% decrease after that five minutes. Yeah. So we just eliminate all that and we just have automations there hitting them instantly. 

Austin Gray: Okay, so on your painting, this is a drip jobs custom form. It's whenever they click. 

Tanner Mullen: Yep. 

Austin Gray: Get estimate. Okay. So this, I'm interested to hear your viewpoint on this. 

Tanner Mullen: Marketers will tell you that you just want to have one piece of information so they don't leave the page.

And I think that's below me, dude. I really do. I think like what you're gonna get with that. 'cause what we did was he actually tested that on Facebook. Okay. So we used to have a form on Facebook. And with Facebook it's even worse 'cause they already have your first and last name, so they don't even ask you to put that in.

I think the only thing you have to do at that point is you need to confirm the information before you send it in as a lead form so that there was no friction. Like literally you see my ad, you click the button, the popup comes up and you hit, I'm one of that step sec rate. When I was doing that was about 49% and that was as a company, I think it was like 26%.

For Facebook in and of itself, that was a major problem and the leads were terrible, dude. We would go, our closing ratio was just off because there was no font put into the like to the form, right? So all we did was we added service details and zip code, right? So they actually had to physically type that in.

Leads are way better. Sales per Facebook ads are going up right at that point. It's okay. I don't just, for me personally, I don't want volume. I want call and I think anyone would say it. So when you go to my website, you are a high intent lead. We're not running any cold traffic to our website. There's not a banner over on social media that's driving to our website.

So it's, if you found my website, you went to Google, you click the website button, you're on my website. If you click schedule estimate, at that point you are a qualified lead. So I'm gonna qualify you the same way I would over the phone and it's gonna be favorable for you because you don't have to get on the phone with me. So that's the way we look at that. 

Austin Gray: Okay? I a hundred percent agree with you that the more friction, the better qualified they are. So you are collecting first name, last name, email address, phone number, address, city, state, zip code, service details. Which day works best for you for an appointment? What is another day that works for you? Yep. What time of day works best for you when you want to get this project done? And then please add a few photos.

Tanner Mullen:  They don't have to add the photos, but people add the photos. And what happens is when we get that information, this people see the things, the way we look at it is, imagine you're hungry and you want to go eat at a restaurant, and you don't have to worry if the restaurant's closed.

You just go and you can get your food and get what you wanted in that moment. That's what the psych, to me, that's the psychology behind it, is we're just letting people check the box. So think about this for a second. You go to a com company that has a website. That has that contact us form and essentially they put in the contact information and it says, thank you, your submission has been received.

Okay. Does that really check the box if they get no communication beyond that? No, it doesn't. So if I was tasked to go and get an estimate for a painting estimate, I can't check the box on that yet because I'm unsure what the next step is. That company, even if they don't know it, they're creating doubt in the minds of their customers on the initial impact.

So for us, if you filled out that form right now, you would obviously get a confirmation, you'd be redirected and you would get an email and a text message that lets you know exactly what the next step is. Thank you for filling out the form. Within 24 hours, we will confirm your appointment and it's way sooner than that, but it sometimes happens at night, on Friday or Sunday second.

And then you're gonna get an email that thanks them so much. And it's a personal email. It's not like the Calendly emails you and I use on our business to business. Relationships. It's, thank you so much for requesting an estimate. This is what we're building in Drip jobs. We appreciate the opportunity to serve you. While we're waiting and confirming the details, let me tell you a little bit about why I've started the company and now it's okay. This is good. 'cause what we're doing is we're keeping the momentum alive until human eyes can get to it. 

Austin Gray: Yes. 

Tanner Mullen: Some businesses right now, they don't understand that people in their limited time don't care about your business. They care about their project and you need to understand that. And I think maybe 10 or 15 years ago, the contractor had the leverage and I think now the homeowner has the leverage. 'cause they have options. And we need to make sure that we're keeping that momentum alive just enough to get them to the next step. Get them the next step, get them the next step. And that separates you. Yes. Pretty deep topic, but that's my belief. 

Austin Gray: And in that first email, that was gonna be my next question. You're dripping them immediately into about us or. It's, Hey, here's next steps. Here's what to expect, here's what you can expect. And is the second email about us or is it within that? 

Tanner Mullen: Yeah, so it's actually the, so you can do, the way I described, the way I do it in my business is it gives them the next step. And we're really fast about scheduling it. They're gonna be in the estimate scheduled stage the longest. That's when we do the story.

That's when we do the, this is what you can expect. These are the questions you should ask us during the estimate. Like these are, that's what's going out. So it is, Hey, hang tight, we're gonna get you scheduled in, boom, schedule it card moves, the estimate scheduled customer gets the drip sequence. 'cause they're gonna be in that stage for one or two days.

And then from there they're gonna get the distort. I used to have it in there, but I was scheduling them too fast, which means they weren't gonna get that drip for sure. But for, if you'd like to take your time. And that's the beauty of it is as long as people feel like they're being taken care of, like you just need to check.

It's a little check-in, right? It's just a little, that's all they need. But if you have a website that they're putting that information in. And it's getting dropped off into an email and there's no instant feedback. People have doubt and doubt creates fear. Fear creates, I need to go find another option 'cause I'm not sure if I'm gonna get my knee taken care of. And what happens, you might say, okay, we're really okay, we're fast at it Monday through Friday from 8:00 AM to six. What about the other time? Friday night, Saturday, all day and Sunday. These time periods need to be thought about. 'cause people don't not quest things on those days. 

Austin Gray: Do you have automation triggers with parameters set up within drip jobs where it's, if I get this email after business hours, it's a different trigger?

Tanner Mullen: Say it one more time. 

Austin Gray: This is a really specific question. For example, if you get like the last lead we got at 10:30 PM on a, I don't know, it was last night or something. Okay. Like if we're getting that lead, is that a different email sequence that you send out? 

Tanner Mullen: Yeah. No. So it's the same. It's the same either way. So ultimately. The email that goes out is just gonna be, let's think of it like a, the way I look at it is for, I forget what they call it, but it's like the assembly line, right? And maybe that's what they call it. Essentially, it's every customer. We want to go through the same exact process. And when you have that in business, then you can pinpoint areas, friction, because we have consistency and we're saying, okay, the same thing keeps popping up every time a customer gets to this stage.

So that allows us, when you have a baseline consistency of how your customers interact with their business, at that point you can step back and be like, okay, this is the problem area. Let me pluck that out. Let fix that a little bit. Let me run them through it again. Run it through again, okay. We're getting friction here.

Block that out. So that's the way I see it, is like I just want my customers to have the most consistent buying experience ever. And I'm now transitioning that into our estimating process where it was taking me, 'cause I was building the estimates for my painting business using drip jobs, right? I send someone out, he does an estimate by measuring all the services, taking pictures, giving the brochure, doing the shield, gets the edge measurements to me.

And I was putting it in drip jobs, right? Checking it, making sure the numbers are good. I don't know why it took me so long to delegate this, but I finally did to a VA. Problem was, is my estimates were taking 72 hours an hour. So busy. I'm just like, I don't feel like doing this right now. She has a KPI, so it's like we need the estimate out.

Within three hours of him going to the house, I was able to narrow down that problem because everything else was a constant. So I was like, you know what? Alright, let's squeeze that down, and now that's gonna be our KPIs and within three hours there should be an estimate ready to be sent, and then we can send it the same day and create a better, faster, more efficient experience for our customer.

People don't want to wait for their price. I know that. I don't. It's like I'm literally only meeting with you so I can see how much money it is. Right. I was creating too much friction at that stage of the buying process. 

Austin Gray:  Now, whenever the new user signs up, you said they only have their logo, are all these sequences embedded in their account right out the gate, or are they templates that they can edit? Yeah. Or do you give them the rundown automation? 

Tanner Mullen: I'm gonna give you this example. Right. So you wanted to right now and go high level if you wanted to create this automation, right. New lead comes in, create a contact, create a deal, organize the deal in this stage, right. First simple automation, not multi-step automation, right. 

Austin Gray: This episode is brought to you by dialed in bookkeeping. Ben and his team provide bookkeeping services, job costing reports, and accurate financial information for the home services industry. If you're looking to keep your books up to date, visit dialed in bookkeeping.com/owr ops. When you use this specific landing page, you'll get your first three months 50% off our system built.

Tanner Mullen: That way when you add a new lead, creates a contact, creates a deal, and puts it in the right stages. It's it. So you set the lead and it does all that. That's the standard and it puts it in the pipeline. And those templates though, the text and email sequences already built, they're already built. We stage those templates already built that are general.

You can go in and edit, but they're general and they do the trick and most people don't paint it. The, these were the original ones I used to use in my painting business. I just eliminated the panic component and everything has keywords so it tailors to that customer. Hey Joe. Hey Steve. Hey Nick. Thank you for requesting that estimate.

And now we have a Zap. Now we, we on a Zapier are absolutely freak, but we have a Zap now where you can actually. Tweak the sequence. So if you want to do a Zap just for Facebook leads and bring them into Drift jobs, you can change the sequence in one shot in Zapier. So in other words, you may just have a sequence just for Facebook leads in a different town.

Say, Hey Joe, it's Tanner from Jonestown. I got your requests on Facebook. And what we find is, dude, if we just say like a one sentence phrase, the response rate is through the roof. Hey Joe, did you get my last text? Hey Joe, are you still interested? And this is honestly, I'm gonna get some free game to anyone right now that does drip messages to new leads.

This is by far the most effective drip message that you could possibly ever send. So after the first one that goes out immediately, usually we put a link in there. It does look automated, but I would want people to get that link. I wait one hour and I say, actually, does Wednesday work for an estimate? If there's a Wednesday every week of the year, it could be if Wednesday's, tomorrow, it means tomorrow.

If Wednesday's next week, it means next Wednesday. And they'll either say yes or no. Can we do Tuesday? It just comes across so personal, like I physically typed it and we're getting so many responses from that. So there's all sports are ways to tweak your drip jobs account based on your preferences and different things that you are. And yeah, so that's what we're doing over here. 

Austin Gray: I gotta say, hats off to you because I, yeah, appreciate it. I know how much work has gone into, and it's not only just the building part, it's the psychology piece that you've put yourself not only in your shoes as its owner, but in the customer's shoes and trying to understand what friction points is this, or what pain is this customer feeling right now, and how do we just guide them through the next step? 'cause that's all we are, right? If we can just easily communicate and say, here's the next step, and be very clear about that. The customers take the next step, but to put yourself in the customer's shoes and build this out, hats off to you, man. 

Tanner Mullen: Okay, man. I appreciate it. Like I said, all came from that customer service background and having empathy.

Austin Gray: Look, I hear your slack going off. My phone's ringing here. We got businesses to run, so let's get to the day and I wanna stay in touch. Yeah. Where can people find you online 

Tanner Mullen: on X, it's at Tanner Drip. Jobs on Instagram is official. Tanner Mullen, I just wanna shout out that we give any new business four months at Drip jobs for free. So check that out@dripjobs.com. 

Austin Gray: Talk about you, uh, watch for money stuff like no, no brainer offer, right? 

Tanner Mullen: That's a no. Four months, no. Just upload your business registration and you get four months absolutely free off features to help you start your business because I remember what it was like and it was hard.

Austin Gray: Incredible. I hear the family in the background too, so we're gonna wrap this one up. Yeah. Thank listeners. Thanks again for listening to another episode of The Owner Office podcast. We drop episodes every Friday and send a weekly newsletter summarizing the main learning lessons that people like Tanner Share.

We bring on people in service-based industries like painting companies. We've also had on excavation business owners, stump grinding, business owners, power washing, you name it. We've had the everybody on. So if this is your first time listening to this podcast, I just go back and listen to some of the former episodes here.

And if you haven't signed up for the newsletter yet, it's ownrops.com/newsletter. We'll send a summary of this week's episode and we appreciate you guys listening. Just like building a service-based business. Podcasts are very similar as well. Five star reviews are much appreciated if you are enjoying this type of content.

Would you mind to just take 30 seconds and leave us a five star review on Apple or Spotify? If you're listening on YouTube, we sure appreciate. I'll subscribe. You'll get notified when we drop new episodes. Alright, we're gonna wrap this one up. We'll see you guys next week. Don't forget, work hard, do your best, never settle for less. Thanks brother.

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