Eric Bassett on Becoming an Owner Advisor, Scoring Sales Calls and Promoting From Within

00:00 Dan Leibrandt

There, my name is Dan Leibrandt and welcome back to Pest Control Legends. Today I'm with Eric Bassett, co-owner of Natura Pest Control. Eric has been in pest control for over 18 years and is an Associate Certified Entomologist and specializes in sales, marketing, organizational development, and building systems and processes. He's been instrumental in growing Natura into one of the most respected pest control companies in the Pacific Northwest. And we actually had Eric on my other show, Local Marketing Secrets, about a year ago, it actually May 2024, which is pretty crazy to think about. So I'm really excited to catch up with Eric, talk about what's changed, what's working, and the lessons he's learned since then. So Eric, welcome to the show.

00:38 Eric Bassett

Dan, thank you so much for having me on the show. The intro that you made, very, very nice, super flattering. So I appreciate that, making me sound awesome. It's great to be back on the show with you as always.

00:47 Dan Leibrandt

Absolutely, man. So I kind of want to ask you a general question here. You can take this wherever you want. But like I said, we did a show a little over a year ago. What has changed? And you even told me before we got on the call, you said, dude, I feel like so much has changed in the past 12, 18 months. So let's just like start to dive into that. Where do we even begin?

01:04 Eric Bassett

I mean, know, a turn in general, one of the big changes that we made is that we took our service manager at the time and we brought him into a general manager role. So I Bug Bux Con that we had back in March. One of the things that I spoke on at that conference was making the transition from being an owner operator to an owner advisor. And we can jump into some of the specifics of that because I still think that that's really applicable to the pest control industry and to any ownership role for that matter, but It was a big change for us, know putting somebody in that role that kind of oversees all the departments in which case we can kind of take a step back into that advisor role and help coach and develop him and then we replaced our customer service manager We were we replaced about 75 % of our staff From the on the customer service side on the inbound sales team side and then you know, we brought up a new service manager. So it was kind of a change for us, a change for both departments and a change to have a new role in the company as a general manager. Fortunately, we have really good experience on the marketing side of things. Mat and his team at Lizard are phenomenal. I know that you and Mat have done content together, which I highly recommend. I did share that video out when you guys came out with it. Really, really good stuff. We've had a great year for that. So. Credit to them. It's yeah, I think back, man, what was I doing in, you know, May of 2024? And so many things have been different. So those are just a few of the big ones.

02:31 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, talk to me more about owner-operator to owner-advisor. I don't think I've heard that term before.

02:36 Eric Bassett

Yeah, so I want to take credit for this, but I feel like someone else has had to have come up with this idea before I have. It just kind of occurred to me as I was trying to plan this speech that I had for Bug Bux Con. And the idea is that when you first build and start growing your business, you wear a lot of hats, right? You're the finance guy, you're the marketing guy, you're the sales guy, you're the technician, you do all the things. And eventually you start to replace yourself. And you're delegating all those roles and tasks to other people. But at the end of the day, those people are still all independently reporting to you, right? So when the sales team has a problem, you're the end result sales guy, right? When the technician team has a problem, you're the guy that gets to answer all the questions. And it's really difficult to focus on the things that are really important to growing and scaling the company to really focus on the continuance of that vision. To hang out in like quadrant two, the stuff that's important but not necessarily urgent, when you're still that guy. And so the idea is, when you're an owner-operator, the business relies on you. It relies on your involvement. You pull your involvement out of the business, things don't move forward, right? In fact, things kind of come to a little bit of a halt. At best, they kind of have to navigate some bumpy pathways. When you... Make the transition from owner operator to owner advisor, you're now building a team around you of high level managers who then act as the operators of the company. And then you sit down with them at least once a week and you have high level meetings where you look at the performance of each individual department. You have them talk to the performance of that department. You have key metrics that are performance based, right? So it's not just an open conversation. You're actually looking at something specific.

04:19 Eric Bassett

Data that's not biased, right? And you provide feedback to them from your experience, right? So you might say, hey, tell me what's going well today, right? Like tell me how the team's doing, tell me what you've accomplished. What are our areas of opportunity? What could be improved? And what's the action plan? What are the things you're gonna execute on in order to make those improvements? And then how can I help as your mentor, right? And then you're just kind of giving them that feedback, but you're granting them the space to go out and execute on that thing. And you're not micromanaging anymore. Right? So if they say, Hey, I need you to check in with me midweek just to make sure I got this task done. Okay. Not a problem, man. I can do that. Right. But I'm certainly not going to be knocking on your door every day and saying, Hey man, are you sure you got that thing done? That's not the idea. And then it frees up my time. To go focus on other things like, hey, should we look at other businesses to acquire? Should we look at investing in other arms of marketing? Should we talk about going to these other industry events, right? What else can we do to bring in resources, both intellectually and maybe even financially into the business to grow the opportunities that we're creating for our team? So that's a little bit of it in a nutshell, but that's the idea. It's the transition from owner operator to owner advisor and that's what I'm trying to get the majority of the owners that I'm connected with and the ones that I consult and coach to understand and to eventually try to get to.

05:44 Dan Leibrandt

Okay, cool, so it's clear you guys are very systems oriented. It seems like you guys have like a weekly cadence. Everything is very systemized. I was curious, because I know a lot of owners that I talk to are using something maybe like EOS or some kind of system around their business regarding how they're working with their team, how they're tracking and everything. Do you guys use EOS or anything similar?

06:07 Eric Bassett

Something similar, so we use the 4DX model, stands for four disciplines of execution. And I always recommend that if people haven't read that book that they do, also EOS or Traction would be a really great book to read. Because any type of format or system or process designed for building and growing your business is good to understand. I would guess that of all the people who probably implement some type of system in their business, 20 % of those people probably do it to exactly what the book says or to exactly what that system is. Most of them end up adapting that to their own unique nature within their company, right? But ultimately having a system, having a process and having that cadence is probably what's most important. But 4DX is a pretty simple one. You know, it just kind of helps us make sure that we have things kind of lined up so Not to dive too far into the specifics, but we do have a cadence surrounding that and it's a weekly cadence So we have a weekly cadence where we meet with our managers their managers meet with their people so our GM will meet with our service manager and office manager and Then the office manager service manager on a weekly basis meets with all their people inside those meetings we have our own format that I kind of created, which is our development format. Essentially, you sit down and you ask them those same questions, right? Like, hey, how are you as a person? How you doing? I want to make sure that they understand I care more about them or just as much about them as a person, as I do an employee. Then it's, hey, what are your wins, right? What are your accomplishments? What's going well professionally? We talk about that for a minute, and then we dive into what their areas of opportunity are, what could be improved.

07:41 Eric Bassett

And then we come up with an action plan and the importance of the action plan, number one, is that they have to come up with it. They need to come up with the specifics based on what they're trying to improve. But number two, it has to be based on lead measures. That's another thing that the 4DX model really hits on is that you've got the lag measures, which is what you use to measure performance, like closing rate is a lag measure. And you have the lead measures, which is the behaviors that you influence in order to impact the lag measure. So, know, asking enough questions on a sales call or asking the right questions on a sales call is the behavior that you're trying to hit on. So everybody has the same kind of format, right? They've got commitments that they had from the previous week, whether or not that commitment actually had an impact, what they're trying to improve, what their action plans are. And then, of course, as leaders within the business, we're always asking, what can I do to help make sure that this action plan of yours happens? So that's kind of our our system that we operate within. And then the cadence of accountability is making sure that that system is discussed every single week. That's a very important part because if it's not discussed, the whole thing kind of falls apart.

08:46 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, yeah, gotcha. I've got kind of a nuanced question, but I understand that you've worked with lot of managers and that's something that you're continually bringing up that we talk to the managers and then the managers are talking to our staff. What are you looking for in a manager? What does an ideal manager look like?

09:02 Eric Bassett

You know an ideal manager number one is organized You know, don't know if you ever looked at kind of the you know, the that quadrant of time management, right? So you've got obviously the important and urgent stuff in quadrant one, know, like that's the things that are always trying to steal all your time then you got the important but not necessarily urgent quadrant two and so on and so forth and Your manager needs to make sure that they are putting the right things in the right boxes so they need to understand how to manage their time properly because I'm relying on them to operate the business and if they don't prioritize the right things in the right way, then we're gonna have a breakdown of what ends up being at the mercy of the other. So time management organization, that's a huge one. The other one is just interpersonal skills. I think you've probably figured this out. Just from talking to people people have different personalities. They have different learning styles. They have different working styles I used to talk to my team about like the love languages of work You know, like how do you want your boss to recognize you because some people like gifts they like prizes They like that kind of thing. They want a little raise or whatever Some people like the acknowledgement some people want to have free time to do other things or they want more responsibility believe it or not so they want different things based on different personalities So it's important as a manager you have to be able to identify the learning style that the type that they want to be appreciated by And you have to understand that they all handle conflict in a little bit of a different way and you have to be calm and cool and collected and Know that just because one person handles conflict one way another person handles it a different way, if you try to manage them all the exact same way, it's not going to be effective. And if you ask any parent out there, like, hey, like, do you parent all your kids the same way? No, the answer is no, right? Because they're all unique personalities in different ways. And I don't mean to say that you should create separate policies for all your employees. That's not what I mean. I just mean that as a manager, there's a gray area that you have to be able to operate in that requires and it requires interpersonal skills.

11:15 Dan Leibrandt

And also going off that, when do you hire your first manager then?

11:18 Eric Bassett

You know as soon as you can and this that's such a really weird way to put it but When you're trying to build and scale a company You're constantly trying to get in enough enough revenue enough of a customer base to replace yourself in some format Every time you replace yourself It's an investment and that investment is gonna cost money and it's gonna cost time And so you see a lot of solo operators who build a book of business, right and they have a full route you know, and there's a point when they ask themselves, okay, do I want to build this thing so that it's bigger than what I have now? And they start looking into the numbers and they're like, okay, cool. I'm gonna have to hire a technician. I'm have to buy a truck. I'm gonna have to do this. Maybe I hire an admin. And they go, well, all this money's coming right out of my profit, you know, at first, before I actually get the accounts to do it, because you have to have the people first. And you realize, well, I could just... Stay as a solo operator and make good money. If I'm the only guy, in fact profit margins as a solo operator are awesome. Usually they're really really good. And so you can load yourself up and you can do a phenomenal job and have and make really good money. But when you go to scale the company it's going to cost those profits. So that's kind of first thing you need to understand is that scaling a company is expensive and it cuts into your profitability. But if that's your drive, if that's your goal, then you're now trying to replace yourself in as many ways as possible. Typically, I'd say the biggest load on your time is you as a technician, right? If you're the guy that's selling and servicing the accounts, that's a full-time gig right there. Get a technician in, get him trained up, get him up to speed on the processes, get him building relationships with your customers, right? Next thing that might end up taking up a significant amount of your time is the admin side of it.

13:00 Eric Bassett

Be prepared to bring in probably a part-time admin in the beginning or a virtual assistant or some kind of person who can handle the important and urgent stuff because the phone ringing falls into that category one, right? That first box, it's gonna take up your time. You gotta pick up the phone. If you don't pick up the phone, customers aren't happy, you miss leads, all those other things, right? Once you start scaling and you start adding technicians, because now you've got enough customers, right? Maybe you have a sales guy that comes in, which is great. Maybe you're trained your admin or your office persons. You've expanded their hours. They're now taking sales calls too. That's great. Eventually, you're going to find people within those departments as they kind of separate out. People in those departments need like more leadership and more involvement that you're going to have time to give. And this is kind of a tough step for most owners to make because one, they don't want to give up that involvement. Usually, as my business partner Jake likes to say it, owners like to keep things within arm's reach, right? As long as I can touch the customer service team over here and I can touch what's going on in the field service team over here, at least I know what's always going on, right? Because as soon as you hire a manager to manage those things, you have to check in with them to know what's going on. And that's your business, that's your baby, right? And it feels awkward and foreign to let that go and to give over that responsibility to somebody else. But the business will not move forward unless you take the leap and do it. So once those teams get big enough, and typically you could see anything from like four to six or seven members per team. So for example, on the technician team, once that team gets like five plus, I might consider identifying a lead technician, right? Some guy who I think has really good managerial skills, he has really good potential. Maybe he's not exactly 100 % there yet, but he shows that he wants that, he has the desire to, and he has good skills for it, or least preliminary skills that can be trained and developed. And over time, I'm going to start delegating those skills over to them until they're ready to really take on that position. I'm also going to see how they respond in certain key leadership areas with their team. Can they provide good news? Can they provide bad news? Can they hold the standards despite things being popular or unpopular or liked or disliked by the team? Can they handle all those things? And that's the kind of person that I'm looking for. So once I've identified that person, I put them in that role, I start to delegate.

15:34 Eric Bassett

And eventually we'll have a formal promotion where I say, hey team, know, it pleases me to announce that we're gonna have so-and-so as our tech manager or service manager, right? Same thing happens on the customer service side, although the customer service side from a scalability standpoint in pest control, you're gonna usually have far more technicians in the field than you're gonna have customer service and office staff in the office, right?

15:47 Dan Leibrandt

You...

15:59 Eric Bassett

But same thing kind of tracks. As soon as I have three or four people in there or more, I'm gonna start looking for that person, right? Hey, who's the responsible person? Who can I put into that role? Who's gonna end up taking over for me? You know, we didn't have, I'm trying to think of probably six or seven office staff and about 15 technicians before we decided to put a general manager in place. Somebody who was going to be looking after, obviously, the service manager for the technicians and the office manager for that team, where we could kind of take a step back and join that owner advisor role that we were talking about before. So that's kind of the loose timeline on that. It really kind of depends on your goals and how you're scaling. But for us, that's how it worked.

16:43 Dan Leibrandt

So regarding all of the higher level positions in a pest control company, are you typically looking to hire internally or are you trying to find these people externally or is it a mix of both?

16:55 Eric Bassett

I think internally is the best place to start. Ultimately, I think you should always have your eyes out for people who are hungry for those types of roles. One of the things that I like to do in interviews when they first come into the business is I say, hey, it sounds like obviously you're interviewing for a technician kind of role. What other roles in the business are you interested in? Where could you see your pathway going? And sometimes people will say, I'm not really interested in anything else. I just need this as a side job while I'm going through school because this is really my career path and that's totally fine. Right. But other times you might see people that go, well, actually I would really love to be a manager or a VP or I really love marketing. Even though I'm a technician, like I would love to be a director of marketing one day. Okay. Great. Right. And I'm silently taking notes or probably even physically taking notes. About what these aspirations are. Because as the business grows, I want to look at our internal resources and promote from within. I think that that shows that you have a lot of care and consideration for the talent that you already have. And these people are putting in a lot of time and effort trying to build and scale and grow that business, which means that they likely have a vested interest in its success if they're able to get to these other positions. So I prefer to do it internally. And when we are hiring, the first thing that we actually do is we look internally first for promotion. In fact, I'm trying to think if we've ever actually hired out for a leadership position. We have not. So we've always hired from within. But even when it comes to hiring entry-level positions, we always check with our internal team first.

18:30 Eric Bassett

And we say, hey, if you guys have any friends or family members or people that you know of that would be a really good fit for this position, let's talk to those people first, get them in the door, give them an opportunity before we go trying to put a bunch of effort into Indeed and Monster and all these other places that hire people. We used to have like a 90 % of our workforce was hired via referral of another employee, which is wild.

18:54 Dan Leibrandt

Mmm, yeah.

18:55 Eric Bassett

As we built and grown, that number has changed a little bit as it naturally would. But we also incentivize our employees to do that. We actually pay referral bonuses when they give us the candidate that ends up getting hired. Later on down the road, at six months and 12 months, we give referral bonuses to those employees.

19:11 Dan Leibrandt

So another thing I wanted to cover was I know you talk to so many other pest control owners and you're even working with a lot of them. That might be previously with the Bug Bux program or you have your own consulting clients. Maybe that's just one time basis or recurring basis. I just want to ask you again, generally, you can take this wherever you want. What has been one of the biggest things you've learned recently from all these kind high level people you're working with just in the pest control space? What's something you've learned that's kind of been a game changer?

19:39 Eric Bassett

You know the biggest thing that I've learned is that not a lot of business owners have that that set cadence of accountability like the 4DX calls it You know some of them they have like meetings, right? They'll say hey, yeah, like we're gonna we're gonna we have a management meeting every single Monday or whatever the situation is or yeah we have meetings when we need to have meetings and you kind of see people on like both two sides of it where it's like well, we don't want to have meetings just to have them because then they're you know, not productive and it's like, okay, well, maybe, maybe not. They just don't have a formal process for that. And maybe even more importantly is that they don't have a formal process for employee development. So for example, you could have an employee that's there and you're not actually tracking performance because they don't have any performance metrics that they track, right? So the only time you know whether or not they're doing a good job or a bad job, is either on other employees' feedback or customer feedback, which can be a real big problem. If you wait until an employee comes to you and says, hey, like I think that they're not doing a good job, odds are they haven't been doing a good job for a long time. Same thing for a customer, right? If you wait until there's a bad review that comes in, where it's like, hey, yeah, I talked to John on the phone and he was super rude and cut me off and whatever, or a technician in the field, right? We have issues, okay? So, number one, if you don't have an evaluation process based on your employee's performance, we really need to implement one. There's a lot of ways that you can do that on the phones for customer service staff and sales staff, know, closing rate and handle time and all these other things. There's a whole laundry list of stuff that you can look at to look at the health of how they're doing. But more importantly, we have a call quality evaluation scorecard.

21:20 Eric Bassett

So our managers in those departments will actually listen to phone calls. And we have a sales process that I teach all my sales staff, and we reverse engineered that to create this call quality scorecard. And that scorecard is what we use to listen to calls and then score the calls. There's 100 points, it's like a test, right? There's four categories, five subcategories, each one is worth one to five, so you have 25 points per four category and 100 points total. If you're doing everything you're supposed to, right, is within your control on that call, you'll score 100. And usually if you score 100, that's a fantastic customer experience, right? Anything below that is the same thing, right? You'd probably score an A or a B or maybe a C, right? And just like in a passing grade, typically what you see is people who are scoring Cs and lower, like that's where the customer experience really starts to struggle. Where like a C and higher, okay, maybe you were able to skate by and we'll be okay, but you gotta make improvements. Ds and lower, it's like, you're having a negative impact on the customer experience here. Not only are you not gonna hit performance metrics, but you're actually going in the opposite direction. We also have service quality scorecards, which is for the service team based on the service that they provide, and that's a combination of. The service manager that's actually there with the technician on site and a combination of talking to the customer that they were servicing and doing an audit on previous services that that technician has actually done. So the evaluation side of it is really important. Not only do need to have metrics that you're evaluating for their performance, but you have to have metrics that evaluate their behaviors. It's that lead measure versus lag measure kind of aspect to it.

22:59 Eric Bassett

I like to help a lot of business owners implement that part of it because that gives them so much more clarity about what's happening in their company. A lot of times, you know, they might reach out to you and be like, hey, we're struggling with X, Y, and Z. We're struggling with retention or I think we have a lot of cancellations. They don't even know what the retention is. Or, you we're not getting a lot of reviews or we get bad reviews or, you know, we get a lot of reservices and we're gonna implement a lot of those metrics and evaluations so that we can see clearly what's really happening, what's at the beginning of this process that eventually causes the end result that you're not liking, right? And then it's a matter of implementing those regular meetings. So the developments we talked about, hey, what's going well, what can we improve, what's your action plan? Implementing that. Helps a ton because then you can actually use that data, you can use those tools, right? We sit down with an inside salesperson and we say, hey, what's going well? You're closing really well, that's great. Hey, what are your areas of opportunity? Hey, you're struggling on upsells, right? Or you're struggling on your callback list. And hey, what's the action plan? You're gonna make sure that you call back all of your leads at the end of every single day before you leave. Perfect, this sounds great, you know? Let me know how it goes. Let me know how I can help, right? Having that in place. On a regular basis means that your employees are always working on improving something every single week. And when you're doing that, your business as a whole is improving every single week. But if you don't have those processes in place, best case scenario, your business is maintaining every single week. But typically what's going on is that there's a little bit of moving backwards every single week and you don't catch it.

24:35 Eric Bassett

Until it reaches a threshold that alarms you. By that time, there's probably been a lot of stuff that's going wrong.

24:41 Dan Leibrandt

Hmm. And just to kind of wrap that up nicely, what would be the result of doing something like that? Let's say a company has no scorecards, not really meeting, not really keeping their people accountable. I mean, what happens after? What are like the direct results that turn decreases, you get more reviews? What happens?

25:00 Eric Bassett

I mean you name it right anything that you want to accomplish that could be a good step forward for your business can be Accomplished with a good system in a good process So for example, you get somebody who's like hey I really want to have more reviews from a marketing standpoint You're like I would like to have you know 500 reviews by the end of the year or whatever your number is, right? Well number one you need to process for that number two You have to be able to gauge the performance of the technicians. How many reviews are they getting right? From the people who are struggling with the performance metric, you have to have an evaluation on what they're saying, so you have to go out and spend time with them and see what they're doing. And then on those regular developments, it's, so I'm noticing that you aren't getting a lot of reviews, what do you think the area of opportunity there is? And they might say, well, just, not a lot of my customers are home, so I don't ever ask. And you say, okay, well, how about we send them a text after the service and say, hey, John, finish up with your service? Do you feel like we're able to deliver a five star service today? We'd love your feedback. Here's a link for a review, right? Boom, or however way you do it. But you have to have some kind of system in place. And that's how you make improvements, whether that's closing rate, reviews, you know, wanna have a better revenue per lead, which has to do with closing, conversion, average contract value, and other things. Lower reservice rate, we have to evaluate how effective our service is, and the products that we're using, and the processes that we have. Anything. If you're trying to improve something in your business from profitability all the way over to mitigating churn, employee turnover, having those in place will do that. Nothing drives me maybe more crazy than when we have a problem in our business and I ask a question like, why is this happening? And the answer is, I don't know, right? Or for example, like that employee quit and I'm like, why? Like, why would they do that?

26:42 Eric Bassett

And they're like, I don't know, right? And this doesn't happen often because they know how much I don't like it. But it's like, for example, you know, if something happens like, hey, so and so I think might end up quitting. And I'm like, what's going on? And then they have a whole history to tell me. They're like, well, from the last couple of developments, we've talked about this issue, we've talked about this problem, we've had this strategy in place, they've not been able to make a difference. I think that this is a won't situation. Like it's a... Personality conflict instead of like a can't skill versus issue like they have a whole thing that they can tell me about What's going on right the context is there and it's because they have a system in place, right? They have a system in order to get the information and make sure that we're either coaching people up or coaching people out right and It's that element that if you if you don't have that in place you have no information and when you don't have any information you have no direction.

27:35 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, definitely. No, okay, so the systems tie to everything. It's not just like one or two stats, especially how you're treating your people and how you're managing them. It's just, I mean, that's the business. It affects every single status, basically what you're saying. Awesome. Probably the last topic I wanted to cover here, which is kind of a fun one. I'm curious to hear your thoughts, especially with all the recent developments, is AI. So I feel like everyone's talking about AI. I'm kind of getting sick of all the AI talk, even though. That's kind of supposed to be my thing. I'm supposed to be the young guy and everyone's asking me about AI stuff But I'm curious from your perspective What's going on with AI? Are you guys using new tools? Are you trying new stuff out? Is anything working? Tell me all about it...

28:15 Eric Bassett

You know, I mean, if I had a dollar for every time somebody asked me about AI in my business, I'd have enough money to not have to worry about business anymore.

28:23 Dan Leibrandt

You too.

28:24 Eric Bassett

AI is really, really cool. I like the tools. I like the ideas. I like the potential and the vision. You know, I have obviously spent a lot of time interviewing different AI platforms, some that are specific to pest control, some that are not specific to pest control. And some of the things that I like a lot are lead management and being able to kind of capture incoming leads and cultivate that relationship. Whether it's from point A all the way to the sale, like closing and converting and scheduling and everything else, if the AI can pull that off, whether it's via text or voice, which we'll talk about in here in just a second, or if it's, we're just hanging on to that until somebody can... Can hop on the phone or until a real person can pick up the conversation. That's fine too. But putting that into your system allows you to avoid a scenario where if things get really busy, people can't get ahold of you, right? People can't connect. And in existing customer type scenarios, that's not as bad because I don't think an existing customer mind's leaving a message. But if it's a potential customer scenario, they're not leaving a message. It's not gonna be like, hey, I'm really interested in your company I want to get a price from you if you could please call me back, you know, that sounds great, dude They're not leaving a message. They're hanging up the phone. They're calling someone else right who probably has AI that's gonna take care of the problem so that element's cool the voice related element of it kind of depends on how you want to package it The text version I think is a little bit more ahead of the game than voice just in my personal opinion and as we've talked about before I have really high standards for those phone calls But I want to make sure that The AI is able to hit on all those same quality metrics that our regular people are going to be able to hit on right? And it's all designed around creating a really good customer experience, but there are very good voice Platforms like AI voice platforms for sales and customer service and everything that you should definitely test and try out same thing with text. So a lot of these companies are making big strides in that. The other thing is creating training material is really cool. You can take a bunch of information and number one, you can summarize meetings and create quizzes with AI, which is really cool. So if you just had a long meeting about information, you plug that information in, you say, hey, create a quiz, and then you can have that for that team and the next team and the next team.

30:43 Eric Bassett

Right? I know that there's AI now that is kind of handling or starting to handle the evaluation side of that phone call. Can we talk about that before where I have a manager that sits down and he's grading all this stuff takes him about 30 minutes, right? Having an AI listen to it in real time and provide that feedback. There are opportunities for that now too. And then you and Mat talked about this on the marketing side of things. AI is making a big impact. So I would probably just make a recommendation that if, you're not gonna do anything else, you're not using AI on your sales calls, you're not using AI for your team or whatever, at least to make sure that you have a marketing partner who is up to speed on the impact that AI is going to have on your marketing. Because just like anything else, you don't wanna be behind the ball when it comes to marketing efforts.

31:30 Eric Bassett

I remember when I was lucky enough that right before LSA came out, the marketing company that I had and really the account manager I had in that marketing company reached out to me and she was like, Eric, this new thing is coming out. Google's doing this new Local Service Ads, Google Guaranteed thing. And I want to get it signed up for it early. So I need this information from you. And I was like, you gotta do a background check and all this stuff. Like, is this even worth the trouble? And she's like, we just gotta try it. And we were really early in. And we got to benefit from a high volume of high quality, low cost leads for a while until everybody got on board and then it was whatever. So it's trying to make sure that you're up to speed on what the next new thing is in marketing. And having a marketing partner, having marketing resources that understand what those impacts are can make or break your business as far as the advantage you have in your market. So that's a big thing that I would hit on.

32:25 Dan Leibrandt

No, that was a really good answer regarding all the AI stuff. I feel like you hit on basically everything in like a few minutes. That was awesome.

32:30 Eric Bassett

I didn't lie when I say people hit me up about it all the time and I'm like, okay, here we go.

32:35 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, no, I can tell you've answered this question before. Yeah, one thing I'll mention there, which might be the most important is the call answering, like you mentioned. And I would agree with you. I don't think it's quite there. It feels like we're almost there. It'll give great responses, but it'll be just slightly delayed where it's like, all right, this is a robot. You know, some people are okay with talking with a robot. And like you said, that's better than talking to nobody. And it ends up going to a competitor because, you know, the market is so competitive now in most places, but. What I've been recommending, what I'm hearing from all the top people in this space is human first, still. That might change, and maybe humans can do some higher level tasks, but for now, human first. If you really can't have a human answer, then you can have a robot answer.

33:18 Eric Bassett

Yeah, and the one thing that I always recommend to people too is don't try to pull a fast one and convince somebody that they're talking to a real person when they're actually talking to AI. So like you can have an AI that mimics my voice, right? So if I wanted to, I could create an AI that can manage all my phone volume that mimics exactly how I sound. But one thing I'm going to do for sure is say, hi, you know, this is James, an AI assistant. I can handle most things. But if you'd like to talk to a real person, press one. And that's fine, right? Then you get people who are like, I don't mind talking to James's AI, I'm gonna go ahead and ask him my question, you know? But if I really don't wanna talk to James's AI, I'm gonna press one. So you give the customer the opportunity to have the best experience in that format without making them feel like, what is going on with this person? Is this person fake? Is this person not real? If they're not real, is this company local? They go down a rabbit hole of places you don't want them to go down.

34:14 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, no, definitely, I agree. So we'll wrap up the show here, Eric. I've got one last question for you that I'd like to ask all my guests, and that is, what is your message for the pest control community? What do you want to tell the pest control owners out there? What do they need to know? What do you want to tell them?

34:30 Eric Bassett

You know, I think the most important thing that I could probably share right now is to just do what you can with what you have where you're at You know the network that I've built It has a lot of really good supportive people in it and those people have pest control companies that range from People that are starting tomorrow. They have zero revenue all the way to people who started 20 30 years ago and some people have, you know, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 million dollars worth of recurring revenue. I have buddies and friends that still work in some of the biggest pest control companies in the world. And the cool thing is that you are in a race with you. It's always going to be you versus you, right? The source of improvement is looking at how can I make myself better based on what I was doing the day before? It's always nice to kind of look at other people to see what's possible. That's not a bad thing Especially if you ask, you know someone for their advice Hey, man, like what are you doing for your marketing or how'd you guys get more leads or how'd you break into the one million dollar five million dollar Milestone or whatever that is getting that information is fine. As long as you don't forget It's always you versus you right you are your own main competitor and the other thing is I'd say that There's plenty of pie to go around for everybody. So don't be afraid to network. Don't be afraid to talk about some trade secrets every once in a while. I promise it's probably not a trade secret. But it's one of those things that it has the ability to improve the industry as a whole. I believe it should be shared, right? And the industry, think, is better when we come together and we network and we talk to each other about what works best. I think it makes things better for us, for our customers, and for the industry as a whole.

36:16 Dan Leibrandt

All right, Eric, well I think this has been a great show. Thank you so much for coming on. Where can people find you on social media and learn more about you?

36:21 Eric Bassett

If you are on Instagram, my handle is @iamericbassett. And then I'm on Facebook. If you're in the pest control industry, I'm sure you probably see me in one of the Facebook groups somewhere. If you want to reach out to me, feel free to shoot me a message on Messenger. I usually respond pretty quick and I'm always happy to answer questions.

36:39 Dan Leibrandt

Awesome. Yeah guys, make sure to go follow Eric. He's a stud. So all those links will be in the description and anything else you'd like to plug or promote.

36:46 Eric Bassett

Now, hope to see you guys at PestWorld this year.

36:48 Dan Leibrandt

Absolutely. Yeah, I'll be there. I hope to see you there Eric and also I'll plug this for you mentioned that you do some consulting on the side you do some one-time stuff some recurring stuff So if you guys want potentially consulting especially around the stuff we were talking about in the show today Maybe around systems around team building all that stuff Eric's the guys to make sure to reach out to them for that of course. All right. Yeah. Thanks so much for coming on, Eric. It's been a pleasure and I hope to see you soon.

37:07 Eric Bassett

Thanks, Dan. We'll see you soon, pleasure to be on.

37:13 Dan Leibrandt

Cool, see ya.