How Contractors Can Turn More Calls Into Revenue | Bill Brown, PhoneTap
Service Business Mastery for Skilled Trades: HVAC, Plumbing & Electrical Home Service
Release Date: 09/16/2026
The 3-Minute Rule That Boosts Your Answer Rate 40% | Dave Hansen, ClientTether
Service Business Mastery for Skilled Trades: HVAC, Plumbing & Electrical Home Service
Speed to lead is where most home service companies quietly bleed their marketing budget, and almost none of them realize how slow they actually are. Dave Hansen hears owners brag that they call every lead "within a day," then has to break the news: the new standard is three minutes. Hit it, and you can lift your call answer rate by 40 percent. Dave runs ClientTether, a platform that automates the entire lead lifecycle for multi-location home service businesses, from follow-up and quoting to reviews and referrals. In this episode, Tersh Blissett and Josh Crouch sit down with him to break...
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1/10 the Jobs, Twice the Revenue: Fix Your Margins | Quinn Small, Driive
Service Business Mastery for Skilled Trades: HVAC, Plumbing & Electrical Home Service
Documenting your SOPs used to be the boring back-office chore you kept putting off. In the age of AI, it is about to decide who wins. Quinn Small put it bluntly: if your processes are not written down, good luck keeping up with the owners whose AI already knows exactly how they run. Quinn grew up in the trades, took over his family's window-covering business during COVID, and out of that chaos built Driive, an AI scheduling and dispatch platform for home services. In this episode, Tersh Blissett and Josh Crouch sit down with him to unpack why your documented processes are the fuel AI...
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Stop Guessing Where Your Best Leads Come From | CallRail + JobNimbus
Service Business Mastery for Skilled Trades: HVAC, Plumbing & Electrical Home Service
Most contractors have no idea which marketing actually makes the phone ring, so they keep pouring money where they think it works and hope for the best. The fix is marketing attribution: following every lead from the first call all the way to the booked job. Eric Smith of CallRail and Tyson Dudley of JobNimbus built an integration that finally makes that possible. In this episode, Tersh Blissett sits down with Eric and Tyson to break down why cost per booked job, not cost per lead, is the number that matters, and how connecting your call tracking to your CRM shows you exactly where your...
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Why You Lose Trust Before the Truck Rolls | Rama Sreenivasan, Blitzz
Service Business Mastery for Skilled Trades: HVAC, Plumbing & Electrical Home Service
Most home service companies lose the job before the truck ever rolls, and they never see it happen. Your close rate, not your lead count, is usually the real bottleneck, and the thing quietly dragging it down is trust. Rama Sreenivasan calls the missing piece visual empathy, and he built a company around it. Rama is the co-founder and CEO of Blitzz, an app-free remote video platform used across roofing, solar, security, and electrical. In this episode, Tersh Blissett and Josh Crouch sit down with him to unpack why diagnosing a customer's problem over audio alone erodes trust, and how seeing...
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How a $50K Job Came From One Email List | Tim Jordan
Service Business Mastery for Skilled Trades: HVAC, Plumbing & Electrical Home Service
The cheapest leads in your home service business are not on Google, they are already in your customer list. Email marketing is the channel most contractors ignore, and the numbers are almost unfair. Tim Jordan sent one basic newsletter last month and it produced 45 leads, for the price of a $40 email tool and ten minutes of work. Tim is a serial entrepreneur who bought or founded five companies by age 27, exited all but his window tinting business, and now runs Service Catalyst, a peer mentorship community for service owners. In this episode, Tersh Blissett and Josh Crouch sit down with him...
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Why Delegation Breaks Down for ADHD Entrepreneurs | Skye Waterson
Service Business Mastery for Skilled Trades: HVAC, Plumbing & Electrical Home Service
If you have ever wondered why delegation keeps breaking down in your business, ADHD entrepreneurs have a specific answer, and a fix. Skye Waterson has built her whole company around it. As an ADHD strategist and founder of Unconventional Organisation, she comes in alongside founders, pulls the process out of their head, and builds the systems and team to run it. In this episode, Tersh Blissett and Josh Crouch, both ADHD entrepreneurs themselves, sit down with Skye to unpack why the ADHD brain resists systems, how to actually delegate without micromanaging, and the AI trap that quietly creates...
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$7M to $260M: The 4 Pillars That Scaled Parker & Sons | Paul Kelly
Service Business Mastery for Skilled Trades: HVAC, Plumbing & Electrical Home Service
How to grow a home service business is usually pitched as doing more: more trades, more services, more offers. Paul Kelly did the opposite, and it built one of the largest home service companies in the country. He bought Parker & Sons in 2004 as a $7 million shop and grew it to roughly $260 million in a single market, then wrote the playbook down. In this episode, Tersh Blissett and Josh Crouch sit down with Paul, bestselling author of Tricks of the Trade to Success and creator of the Raising Goats program, to unpack the 4 pillars behind that growth and why simplicity beats complexity...
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How Contractors Can Turn More Calls Into Revenue | Bill Brown, PhoneTap
Service Business Mastery for Skilled Trades: HVAC, Plumbing & Electrical Home Service
Turning more calls into revenue is the growth lever most contractors never touch, because they cannot see what is actually happening on their phones. Bill Brown spent 25 years in HVAC, built an Inc. 5000 company, and still could not trust his own booking data. So he helped build the tool that fixes it. In this episode, Josh Crouch sits down with Bill, co-founder of PhoneTAP, to announce the launch of PhoneTAP and unpack why the calls you already pay for are where your next jobs are hiding. Tersh is out this week, but he, Josh, and Bill built PhoneTAP together to solve one of the least...
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How to Grow a Home Service Business by Buying Competitors, Not Ads | Alex Smereczniak
Service Business Mastery for Skilled Trades: HVAC, Plumbing & Electrical Home Service
How to grow a home service business is usually pitched as one thing: spend more on marketing. Alex Smereczniak has a faster, cheaper answer most owners never consider. As co-founder and CEO of Franzy and a serial entrepreneur who scaled 2ULaundry and sold 118 franchise locations, he has bought, built, and financed businesses more ways than almost anyone. In this episode, Tersh Blissett and Josh Crouch sit down with Alex to unpack how to grow through acquisition instead of ads, why the wrong business partner is the number one reason companies fail, and how to finance a deal using tools most...
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Winning the Messy Middle: Home Services Marketing in the AI Era | MarketStorm
Service Business Mastery for Skilled Trades: HVAC, Plumbing & Electrical Home Service
Home services marketing has a hidden battleground, and most owners never fund it. It is the messy middle, the 40 to 100 days a homeowner spends circling a project before they ever search your name. Rick Brown and Carole Lawson of MarketStorm have spent years mapping that window, and what happens inside it decides who gets the call. In this episode, Tersh Blissett and Josh Crouch sit down with Rick, CEO and co-founder of MarketStorm, and Carole, its co-founder and chief data officer and a Harvard-trained data scientist, to break down how buyer behavior changed after the pandemic and why the...
info_outlineTurning more calls into revenue is the growth lever most contractors never touch, because they cannot see what is actually happening on their phones. Bill Brown spent 25 years in HVAC, built an Inc. 5000 company, and still could not trust his own booking data. So he helped build the tool that fixes it. In this episode, Josh Crouch sits down with Bill, co-founder of PhoneTAP, to announce the launch of PhoneTAP and unpack why the calls you already pay for are where your next jobs are hiding. Tersh is out this week, but he, Josh, and Bill built PhoneTAP together to solve one of the least talked-about problems in the trades. You will hear why the booking rates contractors brag about are not real, how roughly 40 out of every 100 calls are bookable jobs your team may be missing, and how PhoneTAP turns every won and lost call into a coaching playbook inside ServiceTitan. This episode is the launch of PhoneTAP, a ServiceTitan certified app that reviews your unbooked, missed, and abandoned calls to surface the revenue you already earned. See it on your own data at phonetap.ai, or join the launch webinar at phonetap.ai/webinar. CHAPTERS 0:00 – Why You Need to See Your Call Data 2:35 – Meet Bill Brown, 25 Years in HVAC and Co-Founder of PhoneTAP 6:25 – The Launch of PhoneTAP and the Problem It Solves 11:47 – The Qualifying Question That Predicted Revenue 19:47 – Booking Rates That Are Off by Half 21:37 – Why Listening to Every Call Never Scales 28:36 – The Booking Rates People Brag About Are Not Real 44:48 – Out of Every 100 Calls, How Many You Miss 47:01 – Buy the Software or Waste Weeks Building It 52:15 – Inside PhoneTAP: Lead, Booked, and Exactly Why Not 53:51 – Building an Objection Playbook From Won and Lost Calls 1:09:50 – Where to Find Bill and the PhoneTAP Launch Webinar THIS EPISODE IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY UPFROG System replacement leads from paid ads, nurtured and booked into sold jobs before your team arrives: upfrog.com MARKETSTORM An AI-powered advertising platform. Results vary by market, budget, and campaign configuration: https://marketstorm.ai/ CALLRAIL CallRail's Voice Assist is a 24/7 AI voice assistant that answers every call, handles customer questions, and books jobs directly onto your calendar, all without you ever having to step away from the current job. Try Voice Assist for free today at voiceassist.com BREEZY Capture 25-30% more clients with Breezy AI Agents. Use code 'SBM' to book a demo and get $500 on us: https://partners.getbreezyapp.com/sbm/ PHONETAP Your calls hold the key to growing your business. PhoneTAP gives you instant AI analysis, real customer lifetime value, and tools to coach your team. Learn more: phonetap.ai/demo COMPANYCAM Capture work, track job progress, and stay connected from the field to the office with photo documentation and AI tools that keep work moving. Start a free trial at https://companycam.com/ TRAINUAL Trainual is an AI-powered training and knowledge platform for growing teams. Describe the training you need and it builds the steps, structure, and quiz: https://trainual.com/ CONNECT WITH THE HOSTS AND GUEST Josh Crouch: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josh-crouch/ Bill Brown, Co-Founder of PhoneTAP and host of ServiceTitan Hacks: https://www.linkedin.com/in/billbrown80/ PhoneTAP: https://phonetap.ai/ Email the PhoneTAP team (Bill, Tersh, and Josh): [email protected] Register for the launch webinar: https://phonetap.ai/webinar ABOUT SERVICE BUSINESS MASTERY Service Business Mastery helps home service owners run better, more profitable companies. Every week, Tersh Blissett and Josh Crouch break down the operations, technology, and leadership behind growing an HVAC, plumbing, or electrical business, with the operators actually doing the work. More at https://servicebusinessmastery.com/ Want the frameworks from each episode in your inbox? Join the free Service Business Mastery newsletter: https://embeds.beehiiv.com/800fc171-49cd-4d26-861b-ca4256a65625 Subscribe on YouTube and follow us on Spotify and Apple Podcasts so you never miss an episode. If this one helped, share it with an owner who needs it. #ServiceBusinessMastery #HomeServices #PhoneTAP #BookingRate #ServiceTitan