Angi CEO Jeff Kip Answers Contractors' Toughest Questions

[MUSIC] This is to the point. [MUSIC] A Rhino experience. Pulled one of the top home services marketing and operations podcast, cutting through the bullshit and getting to the point. [MUSIC] >> Hey, what's up to the point listeners? It's your boy Chris, along with my co-host, Mr Chad, Peter Mann from Ron Colley High School. Ron Colley-Ringer has returned. Chad, what's up buddy? Don't you love him? >> You. >> It's always great to reminisce about what it was like 20 years ago in my life. So yeah, always, always good to be here and yeah, excited for today for sure. >> This is going to be a great episode. We got the CEO of this little bitty, intubit, intubit, intubit, intubit, intubit, and intubit, called Angie. Mr. Jeff, get in the house today. I'm excited for it. But before we get there, Jeff, there's something I got, there's some business I got to take care before I give you a proper introduction, okay? >> Right. >> And what I used to do last year was dad jokes because we all need a good set of dad jokes, you know, to kind of run with. And I think I got through almost the entire year with the set of dad jokes, you know, and that kind of played itself out. I got over it. So I switched it up this year a little bit and I thought, I'm going to go over some different metaphors or idioms, whatever you want to call them that I've always wondered. Where did that come from? So the previous two that we've done this year were one was rising tide raises all ships. There was the origination of it and then the one that we did last was cut to the chase. But this one, this one Chad, are you ready for this? >> You're always ready. >> You're ready for the answer to this. And Jeff, if you know the answer, I will be so impressed. This one is let the cat out of the bag. The cat out of the bag is what we're going to break down for just a minute. So I have a whole list of these things where I'm trying to figure out what's the origination of these things because I don't know. And what made me think of it was one time somebody said, throw the baby out with the bath water. You ever heard that before, Jeff? >> Yes. >> So I was like, where in the heck did that come from? So this is kind of the path we're going down. But this is a little education session for you, right? So you're going to leave this a little bit smarter than you came in, okay, boys? All right, here we go. The, let the cat out of the bag, the origination. This was a medieval market scam. Dates back to the 1760s. So a medieval Europe, livestock like pigs were often sold at markets tied in sacks. Why I don't know, but they were tied. They would put pigs in the bag, not to be confused with pigs in the blanket, a solid midwestern dish. So a dishonest seller might swap a valuable piglet with a worthless cat in the bag. So if a buyer opened up the sack before completing the deal, the cat would jump out exposing the fraud. So outcomes, let the cat out of the bag, you're exposed to the deception. There you go. The more you know, the more you know. >> I'm smarter already. >> Here you go. >> Jesus, we get shattered down right now. We're all learning. >> He's saying, we're all good. Quick over ahead. >> You know, these are going to become, you know, educational on a whole new level. This allows me to dig into a little history which I love and learn a little bit about, you know, the origination of these things. Kind of fun. You know, but I will say that people were reaching out to me about dad jokes and giving me suggestions and not one person's reach out to me yet about a metaphor that I should share on the podcast. So maybe we're not on to something. I don't know. Okay, let's jump into this because I got a bunch of questions and this is going to be an interesting episode and I'm really excited about it. We have the, I mentioned earlier Jeff Kips, Angie, on the podcast. They had a great conversation. I don't remember if it was a day ago, a couple days ago. I don't know, my days are all running together with Jeff and I was just, and I think what I really love, we'd never met before was, was I said, oh man, what do you think about us just tackling, you know, what the, what the market is saying, what the pros are saying, your customers are saying? Like, let's just hit it head on and let's talk about it from your perspective and see how you're handling things and I, and listen, like, I, Jab will say the same thing. Super admirable when you know you get, you're getting beat up from, you know, and just getting negative comments and trying to talk a little more, but it's admirable to me that you hit it head on. That says a lot about character first off. So thank you for being willing to kind of step in front of the shooting range today. Thank you. Are you sure, are you sure you thank you? Yeah, now, um, let you know later. Yeah, I think we're going to be just fine. Just from our time we spent talk on the phone, like, your responses, I thought were thoughtful, they weren't BS. And I really think that, uh, that there's a real opportunity for some legit change here. And I think, uh, it sounds like you really want to continue to lead that charge and push forward and really listen to this feedback. So that way you can continue to improve the business and I respect that. So I really appreciate you coming on here and doing that. Um, so what I did just to kind of set the stage for all of our listeners, like, this is not, we're not sitting here and doing a full promo on Angie. Um, I think that we've had conversations on here too, just about other, um, you know, lead sources, lead aggregate, things like that. But when you get the opportunity to get, uh, such a large, uh, it's such a large company on here and the CEO, like, let's hit it head on because, um, I think some of this stuff can be applicable across, you know, maybe it's a process problem that you have internally and you want to blame a lead source. Um, that never happens. I just love the fact that I thought, you know what? Let me make a post across all these social platforms. Let's let everybody, and I even said, I even put in there, Jeff, I put that, when I sent it to you, I said, offer solutions. Don't just complain, like maybe give some solutions to, I think I got like two. I get got two solutions, but about a hundred different people, just making different comments and not everything is bad. There's a lot of positive things too, but I decided to take the negative ones and let you hit that head on because I felt like one, it's better content too. It allows you to kind of talk your, you'll talk through it. From your perspective, and not many people have access to you, right? And not many people get to hear your perspective or even understand what's going on behind the scenes, you know, to, you know, to move, you know, to change the business or the perception or whatever. So this is, so, and you haven't done one of the, have you, you haven't done one of these before in this home services space? Are we the first? Uh, I think of this type. Yeah. I've got a couple of interviews, but not with somebody of your stature and reach. Okay. Well, I'm excited for it. Chad, are you ready? Are you, Chad, are you getting uncomfortable about this kind of stuff? He's, he's not looking uncomfortable. No, I'm excited. I think this is a, this is, this is really interesting to me because I think we know from the roofing space, kind of these, you know, all categorize them all as kind of lead aggregators. I think it's one of those things that was like popular and then it kind of went away. And then like when we started the roofing business, like hold on a second, like this could be a really good lead source for us, like how do we dive in and figure this out? So I'm excited to learn more about this space and how we can, you know, hopefully both benefit each other, which would be awesome. That would be great. Hey, hey, you know, Jeff, you know, you know, I think we talked about this in our call. You know Lance, Bachman, right? And like, I got, and you know, Bill works for Lance too. Yeah. I know. I know. I know. I know pretty well. Okay. So Bill sent me a message this morning because he knew I was interviewing you and he was talking to me about what they have done on their roofing platform with you guys specifically and the success that they've had. And like to the number. And I was like, wait a second. So Chad, just so you know, as soon as I heard that, I text our partners. I mean, I've text Billy and I'm like, hey, these guys are killing it with the Angie's. We need to make sure we take a look at it. So clearly, there's plenty of things that work exceptionally well too. But I want to address, you know, the hard questions first because I'll, as we know, Jeff, like if there's a lot of people asking the same question whether perception is true or not true or whatever, let's hit it head on. So I'm just, I'm just going to jump right in and, and we'll let her rip. But you know, actually, let's, let's do this. I want to make sure that I give the listeners just to peek into your backgrounds. They understand besides Angie, like where you're pulling from and kind of where you have been because though you've been there for, I think it's 10 years or 10 years or something along those lines. Maybe you've only been the CEO almost two years, something like, like, yeah, yeah. So maybe just share a little bit of the background, you know, leading up to Angie and kind of your progression through Angie because I know you're doing some stuff overseas to you or, and so maybe just give it share that and then I'll jump into the into the good stuff. I'll be quick. I'll start at the very beginning, which is I'm a Latin teachers kid. When I got out of college, I became a history teacher and basketball coach. When I started having children, I realized I needed to make more money and went to business school and went into financial services and ultimately became a CFO, which led me to Home Advisors parent company. And I worked directly with the Home Advisors guy starting 15 years ago, ish. And after four or five years doing that, I decided I want to move back to Boston. And Barry Dill, I was the chairman of the parent company in Joy Levin, it was the CEO, offered me the chance to work with the International Home Services businesses and run those. And so that's where I started sort of formally part of Angie, although I was working with them pre-Anguis list merger. So I spent about eight years focused on the international business, the difference between the international business and the US business is about a tenth the size. And the average pro internationally, 70% of them are non-employers. So it's the pro and it's not trucks in Europe, it's Vans, and their phone and maybe the relative helps them with the billing, but it's generally non-employers. And what we did with that business is we had five different countries with five different platforms and over the period of eight years, we brought all the technology together. We really focused on improving the product and the interaction between the pro and the customer. And we were able to take that business and started growing double digits and we were able to take the win rate on the platform to about one in four. And so we achieved success there. And a couple of years ago, my boss, Joy Levin, was the CEO of Angie, asked me to come help. And that's how I got into the US business. And so my orientation coming in was, let's figure out the core product. Let's make sure the lead quality improves. Let's get the organization focused and get just like any other business. We need to get our unit economics right and not spending money that didn't pay back. And so I spent my first period of time doing that. And I think over the last year, we've become very focused on how do we have this expression in Angie that you probably hear in our ads, jobs done well. Home owners come because they want a job done well. Pro's actually come because they want to do jobs well. We sort of started this new expression, which is we want jobs one well for our pros. Pro doesn't just want to lead. He doesn't want to just have a chat with the homeowner. He or she wants to actually win the work. Do it well. Get a great review. Get paid for it and build their business. And so we've sort of started to change our orientation coming from that background into, how do we make sure our customers are not just buying our leads, but how do we make sure they're winning them enough? So wait, when you were doing that, did you have to move or were you running that out of the states? So I was working through four European offices and then in office in Canada. So I was living in Boston, but I was pre pandemic. I was flying over there for two weeks a month. Got it. Three more flyer miles. Yeah, I'd imagine. Okay. So now, let's real quick for those who don't quite understand what all Angie does. Maybe just offer, like you talk about pros, that's what you're talking about your clients, right? Your clients are the pros. But maybe what are some of the tools because you've got, you know, Angie ads, you've got, so maybe just explain like what the options are for a contractor to use at Angie. So we'll just kind of start high level with the product offering. So what we've actually done is we've consolidated the various products into one core offering, which is we sell you leads. Hopefully leads you in. We think they're good leads because we call thousands of homeowners a month to find out what happens in about six and 10 higher April. So we think they're reasonable. You can buy that through a few different packages. You can buy a subscription, which is commit to a monthly payment. And then we burn down the budget within that. So it's a commitment in exchange for a discount. You can also buy them on what you call a budget, where you say spend up to X and you match you get matched up to X or Y and you can turn them on or off. So it's a paper lead rather than a fixed cost with a discount. And then the last way you can do it is you can sort of buy them one by one. You can get notified when a homeowner is interested in you and accept it or not, where you can look at leads and choose them and hope that the homeowner picks you. So it's three ways to buy, but it's really one core product. We moved away from the old ads and leads construct. Okay. Is that actually that question came up a couple of different times? So it seems like there's still some confusion around how the model actually is. So thanks for clarifying on that. So some of you listening, there's your answer for that. Now a couple of quick, easy questions just to kind of help set the tone is, and we talked a little bit about this. I think there's also a misunderstanding on what the right size of company is. There's still some misunderstanding on who's an actual good and she's customer. Like, what is like an ideal or is there an ideal contractor or pro range that you guys think fits the mold? So I don't think there is. I think historically, we've asked for people to commit to at least $300 a month in spend, which I think restricts some pros who don't want to commit to a few hundred bucks a month. We've recently rolled out an online self-enroll package where pros can buy leads one by one. So actually the way our product works now is we can go to large pros and sell at high volume. We get a medium-sized pros who can set a fixed amount that won each month or small pros can come in and browse and pick these leads one by one. So I actually think if you want a core product, which is a lead where the homeowner's 60% likely to hire a pro, you can use it at any size and you can use it three different ways. 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So check them out at prolificbranddesign.com and ask for the to the point promo prolific brand design. Be more of you. Be prolific. Jeff, do you see, I guess along those same lines of like, is it right for every contractor? Do you, I imagine you have the data? But like, do you see Angie? I mean, like, is there a big discrepancy across markets and does it work well? I think this is always the big thing. I always think of like Yelp. Like a lot of people on the West Coast are like, oh, yeah, Yelp is the greatest thing since sliced bread and I'm sitting here in Indiana going, I don't even know that anybody uses this software. So do you guys see like a big discrepancy? And you know, tell me like exact areas, but like across the country as like, oh, we're really, really good here, but like here, like people just don't seem to interact with the platform from a customer perspective. We definitely have different, we have different levels of competition and we have different levels of consumer awareness. I'll just give you the really easy ones, which is we have really high brand awareness and Indie, because that's where this was. And we have really high brand awareness in Denver and we have high pro concentration in what we call liquidity, which means the homeowner comes and they're likely to find, you know, a couple of pros. Yeah. You know, ironically, we have some markets that you wouldn't expect. Pittsburgh and St. Louis are a couple where you have lower liquidity across some of the main trades and we're not as developed there. So it does vary. Yeah. Now, okay, so a couple more easy questions. Is there like this industry? Is there like a limit to the industry like is there there's more than just home service, you know, home service pros, home improvements pros? Is there like a niche that you kind of stay within as far as a customer type or pro type? So in general, we're looking primarily at the construction, specialty construction trades. We also get into some home services, you know, lawns, made handyman, some appliance repair. But, you know, we're really looking at core construction, specialty construction. If you went to your kind of government definitions of trades. Got it. Okay. And then last question, which I think is a good one. Who should not use Angie? Who is not prepared to follow up quickly with the lead and actually go to the homeowner and present well and try and close that lead out like the best version of the sales person they can be with their personality. I think if you buy leads and you don't call them quickly and get the appointment scheduled and go in and I'm not a good salesperson, but you have to go in with integrity and you have to deal with your unique selling proposition and explain why you'd like the work and you do a good job. If you're not prepared to do that, you're going to not spend your money well. Yeah. I was just going to say, I mean, I think that's, I mean, what we've seen with lead aggregators is it is a race to, it's a race to follow up and then how persistent are you with follow-up to get them on the phone. And I think some people are quick to dismiss kind of this area of leads because they don't have the back office set up. I'm sure Chris has never heard this before of like, oh, yeah, we drove all these leads. Well, you didn't answer the phone. You didn't book any lead of the leads that we said. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Something I was never said. Oh, I mean, my entire life, the past two decades. Yeah. For sure. Gotcha. Okay. Those are the easy ones, Jeff. All right. Let's go to the, are we going to go to medium or are we going to go straight to the heart? We're going straight for the jugular. Now, here's what I did again. And again, man, so much respect for tackling this. And I love that you're coming at a super transparent and like with like a servant mindset. So thank you for for knocking this thing out for us. But again, for our listeners, what I did was I made a post on social media. Some of you are listening. We're part of that. Thank you. And just ask for everybody to give us their feedback. Turns out we were around 140 some odd comments and less than 24 hours, not too shabby. And all I did was compile it, throw it in chat GPT, have it rank it from, you know, highest the lowest of volume of like the same type of, you know, comment. And I just said, we'll take the top four and we'll let it rip. So it seemed like it was, you know, a pretty significant. And just from some of the things you just said, I think it's going to put some of this stuff to bed. I think it's some of the unknown or a perception from back in 2022 or 2021 or 20 or whatever. So or even before. So first one is the number one concern that that we heard from contractors was lead quality. Fake information, confused homeowners, dead numbers like numbers that don't work. What is Angie change in the last column? I mean, you've been at it for two years. What does Angie change in the last couple of years to improve lead validation and trust? So we've done a bunch of stuff. The biggest thing we did was we moved from a fair percentage of our leads being automatched. So the pro gives us their preferences. If the homeowner comes in and says, I have a roof repair. If you Chris are signed up for it and have budget, we automatically. What we move to is you only pay for that lead. If we show the homeowner your profile card and the homeowner chooses you. So they take action. The homeowner has to take action. And that drives the win rate significantly. We saw from early 23 until the two months after we rolled out what we call homeowner choice. We saw about a 20% left in win rate. It was about 15% year over year. And then over the course of the year we've seen, I mean, I have my numbers exactly right, but roughly 15% more. So we've been able to drive win rates simply because you know this having run an agency in 10 ultimately leads to higher purchase. And so the choice actually follows to the purchase. So that's been a big thing. The biggest thing that did is we'll talk about this. But if you look at our numbers are affiliate revenue is down 60, 70% year over year. You can see that publicly. I don't have the exact number at my fingertips. So our affiliate channel, which is where we work with other lead aggregators when our pros match their leads to find the homeowners. We've cut away 60 to 70% of that revenue. It's going to be more than 250 million year over year has come out of the business. And you know, it those were all out of match. Right. So we've removed all that, which has changed a lot of the aged and shared leads. They're literally driven by homeowners who click and then they're live. So this significantly increases quality, like legit quality for better win rate. Yeah, intent and win ability. I think the other thing we've done is just like you did with your business, we're always looking for channels where we can find more volume. You know, one of the things we hear from our larger pros is where can we get more volume. So we're always looking and we're a business we're trying to grow profitably. So we'll get into new channels, we'll scale them up. But if we find that the win rate is running in the like mid low single digits, we'll throw it away. So we've thrown away another big pile of revenue of channels we've gotten into and gotten to work and thrown it away. So we systematically look for weak quality traffic and get rid of it. And I think those two things of what's what's really driven the rise we've seen in win rate. Again, we call thousands of we talk to thousands of homeowners every month to make sure we actually know what's happening and figure out are they hiring our pros? Are they hiring other pros? And I think in terms of pure lead quality, that's what we've done. The last thing we've done is more recent, which is in the fall, we installed a new software package and which is a anti spam software. So it's trying to read all the signals from the traffic and toss or qualify the more suspect. It's obviously based on a machine learning score and led through the led through the jobs that actually qualify as good intent. So we've done those three things. We probably tossed 7% actually of our traffic since we rolled that out. So we're continually sort of making sure that we're delivering more value per lead to our pros. Got it. So has this been like spread out through over this last couple of years, like a kind of systematically doing one than another is this kind of been like, is it just like how new is this some of these changes, I guess is where I'm going. So if you go back to late 22 when Joey took over, he started looking at core vendors who were taking what we call service requests from and getting rid of the lower quality stuff. We accelerated, I came in as the president in late 23, we were accelerating around that and we started eliminating some of these auto accept leads. And as we worked through trying to continually strip out our lower quality stuff, we got to the point where we decided it was time to move to choice. Our Europe business runs entirely on choice, delivered a better higher rate and a better win rate on platform. Intuitively it makes sense. If you talk to homeowners, they think I want to use the pro calls me and pros think, I don't want somebody who doesn't want a phone call from me. So intuitively it made sense. This was combined with the FCC. I don't know if you guys were familiar with this, the FCC, it got thrown out by the new administration, but they were going to require consent anytime a phone number was shared with the business. So with all this coming together, we made the move to do it. That was January last year, a little over a year ago, we did that. And then as we look for more traffic, we've embraced this discipline of systematically getting rid of traffic that doesn't prove to be effective. So I think we've really accelerated over the last year, but we've been working on it for, we've also accelerated a bit a year before and they've already been working on it. But I think if you thought about it, I think today we're at our highest average quality that we've been in a decade. I mean, well, to me, it sounds like if I was to summarize it, it's just leads leads. I'm going to use air quotes. Volume of leads has now taken a back seat to the quality of the lead, which is lesser because you cut out some of the stuff that was not really like we're buying all these leads and sending them out and it was doing auto match, which maybe really wasn't a good lead, which is what people are feeling like, yeah, I'm getting the stuff that's, I don't even know I'm calling or whatever it is, like kind of cuts out some of that stuff. So am I going down the right path with? If you go back to 2022, we've jettisoned it well over half a billion in revenue. Wow. We're about a billion dollars in revenue, but we were over one and a half then and that doesn't even include some of the stuff we've scaled up and thrown away. So we're not perfect. I'm not going to get on here and tell anybody that we're perfect and you're going to reach every lead. It's the internet. We do our best and we're continually trying to tweak it up. But we've really been working at this for a few years. If you watch our stock price, the market doesn't love it, but we are really trying to serve our customers while we build our business. Yeah, it doesn't love it yet, but that's the reset or whatever you want to call it, right? Because you're trying to listen, you need, you need pros and you want pros to stay and the way it pro stays, they get leads to actually more often than not. They win at a 60% rate. Then it's worth staying at the price, you know, the price is right and you're setting your budget. So all that makes sense to me. So to me, it sounds like a reset, right? And now it's kind of working back on the quality of the product, which will start to scale the business, which will make all the investors happy. That's the game, right? Sounds like it. Yeah, in an ideal world, we all we everybody say everybody wins. And this is a step, like this is just a step in the journey of hitting it head on versus just kind of staying in the like, if you're super easy for you as a CEO to really never step out into the public in this type of a forum and hit the stuff head on. So you have something that's worth talking about, that's legit change, which kind of goes right into my next question. And that is, if you were a contractor listening, listening to this right now, what proof would you need before trusting Angie again? What proof would you need? I mean, I think generally people have to see it to believe it, if you will. And so I would encourage, I'll give an email address. If a pro wants to try out with that CEO at angi.com, you can write to me, tell me your story and we'll try and figure out a way to prove it to you. I think the best way to prove something is actually to try it. And I think the other thing is, we need pros to embrace what's the expression speed to lead. We need to pros to embrace whether you're a non-employer or whether you have 100 employees in your whatever millions of dollars of business, you have to embrace, I need to get that appointment book, then I need to get in there and I need to sell appropriately and close the deal. And we believe if you talk to Lance or Bill, I went to their conference and I saw a kid stand up and say, look, I've got about a million dollar business, I want to get this to 5 million and more. I'd love to sell it, I'd love to buy a house for my mother. What do I need to do, Mr. Bachman? And Lance says, do you have salespeople going on your calls? And he said, I have Mac technicians and Lance says, do they know how to sell? And I said, I don't know. He said, well, we have to start there. So I think if pros are ready to embrace speed to lead and selling and then doing the good work, getting the review and building their reputation, your good friend Tommy Mallow gave a great speech about take the film right there and put it on your website. I think if pros are willing to embrace that, we think our leads are good enough to win and build a business. Yeah. Well, I think it goes back to what you said earlier. It's, I think a lot of contractors have to get away from, well, I'm just going to blame the lead. It sounds like from what you're saying, hey, we're doing everything we can to get the lead quality up to make sure that your traffic is good, which probably plays to the benefit of a lot of smaller contractors because I would rather have two good leads because I only have the capacity to run to as opposed to five where three or crappy and I waste my time running across town to do this. But to your point, the speed to lead is part of your sales process. How responsive are you going to be or are you going to let that sit and call them back tomorrow or the next day or whenever you have a free time and then how good is your presentation in the home? You can't blame the lead if you win out and your sales presentation sucks. That's on you, buddy. So we can only get you so far. We can get you in the door, but from there, you've got to take it to the next step. And I think that's for me the biggest thing that contractors have to wrap their mind around is selling a job is not just about, well, what was a crappy lead? Well, okay, well, where you a crappy salesperson, there's a whole lot more steps to completing, selling a job and completing it well than just, oh, let's just blame the lead quality. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for saying that. I love those conversations because this is actually, if you're listening right now, this is a common thing that happens is our ego gets in the way of our progress. And it can't be us. It can't be our sales process. It can't be our CSRs. And it's got to be somebody else's fault. And then you talk smack about somebody else when honestly, you need probably need to look in the mirror a little bit, you know, and if you can let go of your ego and say, oh, maybe it is me. Well, then just maybe you can make this stuff work. So instead of like going against a grain, like maybe dial in your process and make sure it's legit, like not a you problem before you start, you know, poo pooing on everything. So I love this topic. And I think this is still a major problem. Chad, you know, just from your coaching group, you probably coach on this stuff all the time with people. It's the same thing. We talk about it all the time. Speed the lead matters, of course. That's like anything. That's why we have cell phones, computers in our hands, everything like instant gratification is a thing. It's not going away. That's the same thing when we're trying to solve problems, right? If you got a homeowner trying to solve a problem, they reach out to a pro. They want to pro to get to them quick. They want to have done. Check the box. Feel good about it. And moving on. Moving on to the next thing. I'm no different. So one thing I want to talk about real quick is one, Jeff, thank you for sharing the CEO at Angie.com. That's a NGI to serve by nose Angie.com. Very cool for you to do that. May, you know, God rest your soul in your inbox because it's probably going to be. I will, I will make a little bit of grace on my feed to lead there. But I will, I will make sure we get to all your emails. I mean, you let the cat out of the bag there. That's all right. We look, if we don't help our customers, if we don't listen to our customers problems, how are we going to serve them? Yeah. And that's great. And actually that pivot's right into my next question, which I asked you this too. And I'm glad you have it. But we didn't dig too deep on it. And we don't need to dig deep on it. I just want to understand. I asked you. Hey, you have pros. Do you have a pro advisory group like the clients of yours that you can go to to say, hey, you tell us like what are we doing? What aren't we doing? You have that right? You guys have a pro advisory group. We do. We have two pro councils actually. We have a smaller pro council. And then we have what we call enterprise pro council so that we can listen to the concerns of smaller pros, which are a bit different than the as we were just as I referenced earlier and you know, then the concerns of the scaled or scaling pros. So we do talk to both. I personally try and go out of my way to talk to some of our larger customers whenever I have a pro in the house. I try and talk to them in Europe. I've done coffee with literally hundreds of pros. I want to get into a little bit better circuit with our smaller pros here. But we do constantly seek advice and feed back and dialogue. Great. So now are you analyzing the consumer? Absolutely. Absolutely. And we like like any good company, we do a lot of customer research. We have very good trained UX researchers who know how to you know how to ask the question behind the question. Yep. Right. If I go on, I really have to find out without asking you directly the answer. So we were constantly doing that and trying to figure it out because just like a pro who's trying to succeed in their business, we're trying to succeed in ours with our customers. Yep. Got it. Okay. I love that. Okay. I'm going to move on to number two. I add a little bit more than I'm in and meant to in there, but I thought it was worth talking about. All right. Number two is the frustration is around the credit process. It was a contractor's feel like it's automated and rarely results in credits. What have you changed or plan to change if anything to make that more transparent or fair to their perspective? To the point listeners, listen up. 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If we detect that something's a spam, a worthless type of lead and it got matched to multiple pros, we'll proactively look for the opportunity to do that. But we'll check everyone. The problem we have is when the pros says something and we can't find that and we can't get to the homeowner, what do we do? And again, if the pro does their best work and the homeowner says just come and repaint the wall, when do you make the decision that you're going to throw that in? So this is one where I can't say we're perfect. What we want to do is factually refund anything that's not a fair lead, right? We all know it's a numbers game. You're not going to win all of them. You're going to have some owners put the service request in and then they were going to build a deck, but they wrecked their car. Some of that is fair. But then the stuff where it's a non-existent person or I'm looking for a job on your podcast, so I submit the SRDU or any number of other things like that. We want to refund it, but we have this problem of how do we verify it? And I'm not claiming that's perfect. I'm not claiming that's exactly right, but that's where we are. Yeah, because you still need some proof, right? There's got to be something in there too. He said, there's got to be some sort of verification process that everyone's aware of. Just like, okay, I know in order to get that. Something's like if it's a dead number, like you said, it's a job. If we know it's not a real phone number, yeah, we call every refund request. So we do try and make an effort to do it. I think I'm open to ideas. Again, you can write me and I'm open to complaints. But we do try and verify them all. The problem is when we have something where it's a he said, nobody else said anything else. How do we figure that out? And I'm just being honest. Sound like you were open to some suggestions. I'm sure someone will give something to you, but I'm all right. Yeah. I get a lot of suggestions. So I'm pretty open to them. Do you think that this shift from the auto match to like this self-select model will help clean some of this stuff up too? Like some of these issue like credit issues that are like, I mean, I don't know if that would mean because if it's a better quality, I mean, we've done multiple things. So we've moved to this homeowner choice. We've also went through and if you've used it, you know, you go in and you have a roofing job, we ask you some questions. We have gone through and tried new questions on about 90% and picked the winners on a bunch. And we've been able to reduce on the winners, which is say half of that or so ish. We've been able to reduce the wrong task matching by about 25% 20, 25%. And so we've been able to do that. We've also implemented AI in that homeowner service request path so that if a homeowner is confused by the question, they can tell us in their own words and then we can get them on the right track. So we've really significantly improved our matching. The other thing we did is when we moved away from Angie ads, Angie ads was a broad match. So if you signed up for roofing, you got anything related to a roof. You might really over index roof repair and not get roof, roof reno, which is what you want. And now we've allowed all pros to specifically request the tasks. So we've actually changed a bunch about our matching to reduce our refund rate. So we're all trying to get to where we only want good matches. We want the job, the pro, the homeowner, we want the homeowner to find the pro they need and we want the pro to get matched with the lead they want. So we're constantly optimizing there. And as I said, we're now trying to deploy LLM technology to drive the improvement there. Jeff, is there anything like you guys are obviously doing a lot to make sure that you've got the right matches? Is there anything on the contractor side that they can do to kind of help the cause? Is there like a better profile? What should they be on the lookout for to help? This is going to help me get better the right leads in the bucket. So there's definitely filling out the profile, right? Getting, I would say a professional profile picture, not a selfie that you shoot in your truck from your lap. But you got a professional profile picture. You get a good, well-written, simple to the point business description with any key information, we give it to your guarantee on our roof, whatever it is. And then also making sure you have portfolio pictures before and after. So getting your profile set up and then relentlessly, you know, you can bring in reviews from other sources and then relentlessly getting your customers to give you good reviews. If you build that profile like that, you can drive the likelihood that you're selected specifically by a homeowner. And again, I don't have the stats because we, I don't think we can measure when does the homeowner, we might be able to. But when does the homeowner actually read everything and then select? But I'm willing to bet when somebody goes through getting all the information, having the research and selecting, it really jumps your opportunity to get hired afterwards. So I think building a good profile, we've seen that having those key pro elements and at least one good review, more than doubles your win rate in certain geographies. Yeah. Okay. That actually makes sense. I didn't even think about the frequency of reviews on the profile. Yeah. And how it might help in the selection process. There's step changes. One good review, one five star review only is better than five in a score of three and a half. Right. And so when you get to five good ones, their step changes, one five, 20, 50, right. There's a lot of diminishing marginal returns, but it's still good to rack them all up. But developing good reviews and really being focused, I'm sure, you know, one of one of the things I've heard from people is, you know, the five star approach, when you walk into the house, say, hi, I'm here. I'm going to do the job. I'm committed to giving five star service. And what would really help me is if you give me feedback while I'm doing the job, am I not doing something worthy of five star service because I want to correct it on the spot. And I want to get to the end with you feeling like you got five star service. And that might come from Tommy or somebody else. I can't remember where I heard it. But if you go through that mentality and you're driving a dialogue with a homeowner or you make sure you're almost guaranteed to get that review at the end. Chad, a good point. Chad, how many reviews you guys have here in Brothers now, like roughly? In Indie, we've got like 10,000, but across all locations, probably close to 30, I'd say. So 20 30. So you're to Jeff's point, your review process is, I mean, maybe you don't do it like that, like you guys aren't doing it like that. But you clearly have something that works really, really well with collecting those reviews. Do you hit them like right when they come in? Is that you kind of follow that path? Like what's what's yours? So the key is the actual technician talking about it. We have it automated to where they can send it, the requests, they can send it. But what we find is you get a lot more reviews if one, two things, one, you make it personal. So the technician says, hey, Mr. Mrs. Smith, hopefully I did a great job for you. If there's anything else I can do, if you have five minutes, if you could leave a review and put my name in it as your technician, that would really help. And you know, you can say, I mean, it's actually one of their KPIs. So that's actually not fabricated is how many reviews they get. So like, hey, this really helps me, you know, I may get a raise, I may, you know, whatever it may be. But it would really help if you could, you could leave some positive feedback. So they've got to talk about it. If they just send them, then the customer's like, okay, cool. This sounds great. So, I mean, I always think about it. Like when you go to a restaurant, like, if I'm just going to a restaurant, it's like, I'm not going to spend the time, I've eaten here, you know, however many times, like, yeah, the food's good. I get it. But you're more likely to review your server if you had really good service. Like they were on it. They were getting you know, filling up your water, doing all that stuff. So like when you can make it personal, it's not so much about reviewing the company. It's like, yeah, they fixed my furnace. Great. But no, like Bill was like awesome. Like he was great. He pet the dog. He did all the things like he's awesome. So that's kind of how we encourage it. And just making it top of mind, I think to your people out in the field need to know why a review is so valuable. Like what does that mean? Like the more reviews we get, the more work that we get to send you on, like this ultimately affects you. Whereas I think a lot of times it's just like, well, they're just asking me to get a review so they can pull up their Google page and, you know, stroke their ego about how many reviews they got for the business. Right. So here's where I'm going with that is if you're pro or thinking about coming a pro and you're going into the home, treat the review process the same to get the review on your profile. Yeah. Because it helps your overall, it should help your overall results. It's kind of the one I'm telling you. So whether it's either or doesn't matter, you need to have a process for that knowing you're going on an Angie lead as a pro. You need to get that profile some reviews. So, okay, moving on, my goodness, we're already 45 minutes into this thing. Okay. I like it. I got too many questions and not enough time. Okay. So there is still a perception that shared leads create a race to the bottom. How are you evolving the shared lead model is distribution based on speed, budget, review? Maybe you shared some of those already too, but maybe just give me a short and sweet answer to that one if you can or whatever you want. And when you, I just want to clarify in the industry, right, a shared lead can mean we have one aggregator over here that matches it to people, sells it to another aggregator and matches it. Do you mean that or do you mean the fact that a homeowner might choose multiple pros on our platform? So, so here's what I think that they mean and I could be wrong to Jeff, but here's what they think that they mean is I'm because there's a perception that that person got the lead that also went to X amount of other contractors at the same time. And I think that's the position that they're coming from is and when that happens, is it a race to the, does that create a race to the bottom, which by the way, I think that's a sales thing, not a, not an Angie problem, as far as a race to the bottom. But maybe let's just talk about that. Like, is that how the process works with the, with the new homeowner choice model? Like, do they, can they click on multiple people and it goes to multiple, maybe talk about that. So homeowners can choose up to five pros in reality. The number, the number of times five pros get picked as low single digits and four or five pros is, I'd have to look at them, right, I think it's high single digits, maybe low double digits. So it's not a lot. I think the reality is we've done a lot of surveys and when you go across all home services, what you generally find is you get an average of you, I say to homeowners, how many pros you want, they say to, they want to, they want to compare larger jobs, they want more smaller jobs, they want my smaller cheaper jobs than might say, just get me somebody, there's water on my bathroom floor, right? And so our view of it is we're going to present the pros who want the lead and the homeowner is going to choose how many pros they want to talk to. If they want multiple pros and they don't choose them on our platform, they're going to find them somewhere else. So there's going to be competition anyway. So it's not our model to try and necessarily share leads. It's our model to serve the homeowner and give the pros a chance to win. I think people can get into hot debates about whether it should be four or five or three. And I think, you know, we were open to those debates. We don't think necessarily we have everything right and we know when somebody feels like there's a lot of competition, they don't feel good. But we do know that when a homeowner wants to talk to multiple people, they're going to, your best bet is to call them right away, get in the house, try and sell first or sell best. We do, I'll just say one more thing, Ryan, which is we do occasionally get this thing where people think we're selling to dozens of people. We're not sure we've investigated any number of these cases, we can't track them. We think it's possible that sometimes pros will buy a lead from us and then sell it to other people. We have no idea. So we've tried to knock that out because sometimes we get that complaint and we can't figure it out. So I don't know if that's what the person's referring to, but we're a max of five and that's a very tiny percentage of our leads. God, I think that's actually a very common question. I mean, Chad, you probably hear that same stuff. They sell it to the same person. We have to go race for it and fight for it. And it seems like there's still the homeowner still choosing based on whatever's given to the homeowner, of the profiles that are shown to them, but if you can continue reviews on your profile, maybe you get more at bats or more options by getting five star service across all platforms, but you can increase your odds, I should say. But I agree. I don't want five people come into their house. That takes time to go meet a college. You want to get stuff done quickly. Yeah. Well, and also, if you're going to complain about the, it being shopped out to other people. So Google's great. They show everybody. Kids all there. I don't, I mean, yeah, there's going to be competition. I don't know that it's a race to the, I mean, it's a race to the bottom. If we as contractors race to the bottom, as opposed, so, so stop racing to the bottom. I was just talking to somebody like, Hey, there should be a floor on what it costs to put in a free ton gas furnace and AC. Please stop selling it. I know that I always say this. I'm like, I know I'm buying equipment cheaper than they are. There's absolutely no way they could be making money on that job. No way. I can do the math quick math. There's no way that you made any money. So again, it's like charge what your value is. If you're always racing to the bottom, well, then that just tells me that you're not super good at what you do. So I probably don't want to go with you. And what we find is we present six options on every call. So there is a bottom where essentially, you know, you can race to the bottom as a consumer. But most people want to something in the middle. So it's not always you got to be the best price. Are you the best person for the job? And how are you going to sell that to the homeowner? In home services speed to lead is everything. 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So stop chasing leads, capture them, connect faster, and close more deals with chirp. Contact chirp today and elevate your communication gain. Yeah, man, good point. Look at you. Look at you. It's like you've run a business before. Well, some of that stuff just pisses me off. It's like, come on, guys. I just want to call all of the HVAC contractors in Indianapolis. So we're just going to have a meeting and we're going to talk about how to price a job and what it should look like. And then we'll all be doing better. It's great. Yeah, it is good to call that out though because it's kind of a BS, you know, negative thing to say, right? Because you're responsible for your race to the bottom. It's not the lead, forget where it comes from, it's problem. Okay. I'm going to shift gears to you, Jeff, because I got a short time and I got three questions for you. All right. And all these more like forward-facing stuff. And this is one that we can talk a little bit about, but I'm interested in your answer. With Google pushing deeper into local services and AI is changing search behavior with the LLMs, how does Angie stay relevant and compete? So look, we look for homeowners who need work and pros who won't work across every platform. Google is a machine learning platform that always has been. Now they have AI mode, which is a more advanced LL, AI driven version of it. Google is still going to sell ads next to that content. Google is still going to surface content just like they surface SEO links. So we have a team of people who are working on how do we structure our data and our content. So we get surfaced and our pros ultimately get exposed to homeowners who need them. And we are working on integrations. We just announced one with Amazon Alexa. We're working, we've submitted an app to an app store for another major LLM and we're working on getting going there. We are deploying an LLM on our site and training the LLM so that we can demonstrate that we work effectively and when we plug into the LLMs we can do that. So we are just working actively. I think you ran a marketing agency. I've got a whole team of marketers who all they do is try and figure out how they find good homeowners to match with our pros. I think we're going to figure that out with LLMs and we have the team and the technology to do it. So I don't want to be glib. We don't have it solved. It's another surface area, businesses who are going to have ways that they want to monetize. I think Chad GPT just said they're going to monetize off any IP you create in there. So if they want to monetize we're here to figure out how to efficiently help them monetize and get our pros work. That's how we approach it. Yeah, and the Chad GPT ads is going to start rolling out with the minimum of 200K budget. I mean listen, it's all intriguing to me. I jump on it. We actively try and jump in and test and scale anything. If it works great, we scale it more. We've had a lot of success on meta over the last 12 months or so. And if it doesn't work, we throw it back in the water. Sure. Of course, you've got to give it a go. You've got to try it out and see how it works. Is there anything else new coming out besides just the MNOT Alexa thing that you can share or anything like the new offering services and anything like that? We announce that we're working on, we have a lot of legacy technology. We have the old home advisor platform. We are going to decommission the old danjisless platform because we moved to one product. The next thing we're going to do is we're going to rebuild our homeowner experience so that it is LLM powered and it's much more fluid and good for the homeowner. So we are going to progressively work through all these things and hopefully we'll deliver we will deliver on both ends. We want to deliver a better experience to the homeowner and we want to figure out how we either integrate with partners or develop our own technology to make sure pros get the appointment booked and the job ones. So we're working across those surface areas. Yeah, it sounds like you guys are starting to make a lot of different changes thinking about things differently. I mean, it's got to be incredibly difficult when you're public and you've got a lot of people questioning every single decision that you make. And they only see their perspective from their location on the mountain. They don't know. It's like, it can't see the whole picture. That's a lot of pressure and you accepted that job willingly. Like any other job, like any other job, we all have the same things, just different people with opinions, right? That's right. But it seems like you're starting to like these last couple years since you've taken over as a CEO. Like, there's starting to be some real progress happening and nothing moves fast at all. You especially when you have such a big business like that, there's a lot of living parts and software and all kinds of things. It seems like you're starting to move some things forward. So I think this closing question is really, really fitting. And my closing question to you, Jeff, is if a contractor listening right now says, okay, I'm going to give Angie one more shot. Now that they've learned all the new things, or maybe killed some of the perceptions that they had around how leads are distributed or the auto match versus now the new home owner, or whatever it is. Meaning that you said, they said, okay, I'm going to give it one more shot. What would you tell them to do differently today than maybe they did in the past? So the first thing I'd say is send me an email. Tell me your story. Tell me what your problems were in the past. Tell me what you want to see. And let me get you set up with the right person to talk to with the right sort of product. Secondly, I think you need to take some of this that you hear out in the marketplace with really strong pros and people like yourself. You have to take it very seriously. You need to get on there. You need to get your profile up and populated. You need to bring in the outside reviews. Your first job one, you need to make sure you get a review on the site. And then you need to be on top of these leads, right? You may not have the capability to have a call center who calls right away and has the whatever sub two minutes speed delete. But you have the capability to get in touch and be yourself and be responsive because whether it's on Angier elsewhere, homeowners don't actually understand well what you do. And their only way to understand it is to talk to multiple pros. So you need to get in there and sell in your own authentic, detailed, honest way. You need to do it quickly and you need to keep building your reputation. And I think if you do that, we want to see the number of pros who win the jobs on our platform go up. That's what we're committed to. And we will try and figure out a way to set you up in a way that sets you up. But you got to commit to it too. Don't spend the money if you're not going to commit to it. Great. Great message. And I'll say this. Hey, how roughly how big is how big of a business is Angier today? Top line, how are you at? It's about a billion dollars. Internet. Yeah, about 900 million in the US, about 100 million more internationally. So you hear that listeners and the CEO Jeff on this podcast gives you an email to reach out them directly. That has to say something to me that says a lot because there's so many layers between you that could be helpful here. So this is you really stepping out out front and hitting the stuff head on. And I appreciate you kind of letting me shoot this stuff at you. And like, I've always kind of looked to, you know, you embrace the challenging questions because if you actually listen and find solutions and maybe you don't have all these challenges anymore, you're always going to have some challenges. If you can start to chip away at some of this stuff, it starts to change the perception because the reality is actually it is different if you make some changes and you continue to use a, you know, your pro advisory group and reaching out to the homeowners and refining, refining, refining the process. So I commend you for those things. And just thanks for giving us and all the listeners know the time. And that means a lot to me that you would do that into the home services community as a whole with such a big option for them. So I appreciate that. I appreciate the time and the opportunity to answer the questions and we love for people to give us another shot. We'd love to see them win. Chad, you had anything else for Jeff? I don't. Just thank you. This has been been really good. I think as Chris said, I think you're, you're willing to come on here and, you know, address people's issues. If there's anything that I know from talking to disgruntled customers of my own, a lot of times it's just confusion. That we just need to sort out. And it's also, hey, we're going to stand behind our product. Like this is what it is. We think it's good. Yeah, are we perfect? No. But we're trying as best we can. And we want to deliver, like you said, we want to get deliver a great quality lead to a pro. And we also want to take care of homeowners. And I think as a contractor, that is kind of the name of the game. So I think we're aligned there and just really appreciate the time and you coming on. Thank you very much. Well, and Jeff, I know I got to get you after you. You got three year old to go get. So I don't want to hold you up anymore, but appreciate your time and listen to the listeners. Man, hopefully this brought some insight to you and that you will consider again, Chad, obviously you and I need to talk about this. I understand what you're like, you guys are doing more on the peer and brother side. We talk about it on the red bird side because clearly from what we've learned from Lancembe Bill, like there's a, this is working exceptional for them. Like that isn't the fluke. So we need to, you need to start to tap into some of these things. I learned some more stuff on here that I didn't know about Angie. So for me, it was also educational, but Jeff, appreciate your time again and I appreciate your position on this and coming on here. Chad, I always appreciate your commentary and to all of our listeners, I can always say, you don't got to do everything, but you got to do something. No zero days.