Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 07:59
That’s a tough one, right?
Jimmy Speyer: 08:03
It is. But I had a very specific reason why. I mean, it can be. And I, by the way, like, I’m not like, you know, I had this idea 20 years ago, and I’ve been stewing on it. I just figured if I got into a place that I liked, then I could find a problem that hadn’t been solved. And that’s actually what you could do is like, it’s hard to invent something new, like, kind of if you’re just going to look at another business and try to clone it. But if you actually just spent and I spent six, nine months roughly in home services, just talking to people, trying to solve different problems before I finally settled on this version, by the way. But what I figured was if it was new, then it would solve a big problem that was going on in software, which is software. SaaS was seeing a lot of problems with, you know, valuations dipping and close rates going down, and slowdowns in growth. And people were pointing to a lot of reasons.
And what I saw was that the reason was that there’s just way too much software. Nobody needs 80 different pieces of software and things like that, because everybody was kind of just building all the same stuff. And if we did something new and a few, no matter what your business is, by the way, if you offer something different, then you’re not offering better or worse than the competitor. You’re offering something different. And so all you have to get someone to agree to is, do they want that or nothing? Versus, do I want yours or the other guy’s or the other gal’s or whatever? Like, no, no, no, it’s mine. Or you just don’t care about this problem. In which case, if you don’t care about this problem, then I can’t help you. But if you do, then I’m the only one who can.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 09:30
What’s interesting about what you said is talking to customers. You spent a long time talking to actual potential customers at the time. You know, it’s not like you went into a cave and you’re like, I’m going to try and figure this out on my own. You were trying to figure out the pain points of the market. Can you talk about what some of the things were that you heard in those nine months, maybe some of which you didn’t go with? Some of the feedback you were getting from people was to see what you should solve in the first place.
Jimmy Speyer: 10:01
I was in the home service space only, so all the problems were in blue collar, the trades, home services, pest control, plumbing, and roofing, and all those things. So it was all problems there. And the biggest problem was that we needed more people to talk to. Like just over and over and over again. I need more people to talk to. And then I heard problems about, you know, quality lead quality staffing was a big problem, getting the right people, and people talking about silver tsunami and the, you know, do we have a shortage of plumbers and electricians and skilled tradesmen? And so those were problems too. But like over and over again, it was pretty clear to me that the number one problem they had was, I need more people to talk to. And when I looked at, well, how are you doing this? Or what other tools are there? It’s a very broad topic, but what I saw was that everything was optimized for the leads you already have.
The people you already know, it was, how do I make Google work better? How do I make meta ads work better? Because I get speed to lead, and speed to lead is great. I have a sales background. I run our sales team still at this point. So speed is super important, but you’re not going to have more than 100% close rate. So there is a limit in a cap to how much you’re going to get out of that engine if you don’t expand it. And that was what I saw as a big opportunity. Having built revenue, teams that did inbound and outbound effectively, was that there was really just this giant gap around, why aren’t you going and inventing more leads?
Why are you so obsessed with wringing more value out of the ones you have?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 11:35
Yeah. And people are focused a lot on that space around paid ads. Right? And so, how did you land on this? So, talk about the original when you launched it. What did GlassHouse do originally?
Jimmy Speyer: 11:52
Originally, you went and filled out a Google form with the address of your upcoming job for the week. And then someone named me would go and pull the homeowner information on the back end in a database, put it in a spreadsheet, and email it to you and say, here, call these people, or email them, or text them.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 12:12
And so that person would, let’s say it’s a, you know, a pest control. They would just dial those people and say, we’re going to be in your neighborhood type of thing.
Jimmy Speyer: 12:22
Kind of. We, I would just send it to them. I’d say, here you go. Here’s like 100 people nearby your job, and here’s who they are. And then I asked, what do you want to do with that?
And they said, well, I said, I’m going to call them. I’m like, we really don’t want to call them. It’s too slow, and it takes forever. And frankly, we don’t want to do it like nobody wants to do that. I’m like, okay, so what else are you going to do? They’re like, well, we could email them, like, okay. And then I said, well, what if you texted them and they’re like, can we do that?
I’m like, I think we could figure out a way to do that. And so basically, they were just signing up for $99 a month. This is like three people in the world at the time to have me send them the names of people to get in touch with, with their phone numbers. And then I said, cool. And then I built a little tiny thing. I didn’t know my engineer did that, where they could basically pick the person and send them a very short message. And that was it. That was like the first version of this thing, okay. You told me texting was the place that you cared about the most. Let’s do that. And other things have been added on subsequently, but the core concept was, I’m coming to your neighborhood, give me the homeowners, and I want to text them.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 13:23
Yeah, I mean, it’s pretty instructive, like really going deep and talking to potential customers. Then you basically had this manual approach. You didn’t just go out and create a bunch of features and solutions. You just kept asking the customer what they wanted and manually did it before you built something out. So talk about that original. You know, the versions. Like, what are we looking at today? Like, what is it?
Jimmy Speyer: 13:53
Fast forward all the way to where we are now is you’ve built out, you know, all the tooling to make it sit on top of your CRM and your FSM field service management tools. It inputs your customers, and it looks for people around them. It can create groups. You get to then have templated messages. AI can help you write templates. It can send updates and follow-ups after the fact. Jackie AI: Jackie can pick up our AI. She can pick up the message on the inbound and respond. It sends you a text alert. It can send an email. Now it’s doing property enrichment. So, hey, do you want to target houses that are just over $1 billion, or what does a good customer even look like for you? Like stuff like that. But it started with this concept of caring an awful lot about where you want to sell something. And then going from that.
And what I thought was super interesting having been in inside sales, always inside sales, all the teams I built were really like, you know, sitting at a desk is I imagined what it would be like if an inside B2B company could call you up and say, hey, we sell, I don’t know, payroll software. Would you be interested? And you’re like, actually, we kind of are interested in payroll software right now. We don’t like ours. You say, wonderful. The sales guy is down in the lobby. Can he or she come upstairs right now? You’re like, what do you mean she’s down in the lobby. He’s like, well, that was what a home service business was sitting on, which was like, we have these people out here. They’re in the field. They have to go to someone’s house to do the work. It’s not a salon, but they just go, and they leave, and that’s it. It’s like, what about all the other people? If you could just get them at the right time, it would make all of this work, I think.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 15:32
Yeah, it would be creepy for the accounting software. It’s less creepy for a plumbing company.
Jimmy Speyer: 15:36
Like it makes more sense for it makes more sense for a roofer, right?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 15:39
I’m actually outside your window. Like, what are you talking about?
Jimmy Speyer: 15:42
At what level? People asked that question, too. It’s really important to say that Germany is like people ask, like, well, do people get creeped out when you text them and you already like, tell them you know where they live or something like that? I’m like, yeah, like less than 1% because you have to manage all the opt-outs and all that stuff in our platform. It does that for you.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 15:57
But I mean, at this point, I think people realize that Google knows everything about us at this point anyways. So, you know, not.
Jimmy Speyer: 16:04
Only that, but if you texted people the secret to everlasting life, 1% would get mad. So there’s like, there’s 1% of the people, you’re not going to make happy with anything.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 16:13
Yeah. We’re looking, if you’re looking at this, we’re looking at the SMS and email. And I’m sure with your sales background, you’ve probably helped people craft. What are the good elements of a good text message? I’d like you to talk about that. But here we have, hey, Jerry, this is Pink Pink’s power washing or power washing a home near Lake View Drive tomorrow, which is obviously really specific. While in the area, we’re offering a special of 275 for a whole home driveway, porch, and patio service. Reply here or call to book. Right. And so what is important, you know, you’re creating these direct response messages. What are the important pieces that need to be in here? And this, this applies to any business. It could apply to a Google ad, a direct mail piece, or a text doesn’t matter.
Jimmy Speyer: 17:00
So we came up with it’s like a framework that we just thought sounded good. It’s called the three R’s, right? So we want to be relevant. We want to be responsible, and we want to be relationship-centric, right? So relevance is like you say, who you are, you identify yourself as a business because when you get a message that’s spam, they don’t do that. It’s just somebody texting random numbers. And when you respond, do they sell that response to seven, seven people, and they’re like, cool. These people said they want a tree cleaning or tree trimming. Call them. So you say, I’m in this business. And then you say, I’m this person. I’m Sarah, and Janet, and Jesse, or whoever it is. And you also have responsibility. Responsibility, like the reasonableness test, we would say, is like you only get to test them so many times. We don’t let people spam people like we’re not into spam.
And so there’s a limit to the times a day, days of the week, how often you can do it, all those things. And then it should be a relationship. You should be making an offer, but you’re not transacting through that message. You’re not saying like, click here and put in your credit card information. Like that’s absolutely not happening because what you’re trying to get them to do is say, yes, we would like to look at you as a potential vendor. Every bit is the same way you are with any other awareness strategy. It’s like, cool, can we earn your business? But I’m leveraging this geographic proximity to make it a no-brainer that you would at least give us a shot.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 18:18
Are there any industries that you are surprised end up using your solution? Right. I’m seeing obviously painting, HVAC, plumbing, roofing, and windows. Are there any ones that came to you and like, wow, I didn’t realize this would be a good use case for that industry?
Jimmy Speyer: 18:36
Tree trimming. I didn’t know anything about tree trimming. And so it just seemed like one of those things that I never thought about. And that one was pretty surprising. Painting. I didn’t think that people would ever consider that someone would say, oh, I do need a painter because it’s on average 3 to $7000 for a job. And so I have customers getting 150 x ROI because they sell a meaningfully priced product. I figured roofing, I figured pest control, they do sales already. They already have, like, those are the door knockers usually. So digital door knocking, it’s just makes perfect sense. But I was surprised by those, too. I guess I would say that those are the ones that jump out at me.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 19:14
Yeah. And tree trimming is expensive. I mean, it’s not cheap. So those people probably see tremendous ROI with something like this.
Jimmy Speyer: 19:23
Yeah. Usually, when you start to get when you’re over $1,000 on a customer value per year, annualized basis. So for us, when we look at our customers, we’re saying, are you selling something where you can make $1,000 a year in a customer relationship? Then the math. Math super well. It’s like, oh, great, we don’t we’ll help you get five, ten, 15 of those a month, and then you start adding that up. It gets really attractive even for a small business.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 19:49
I could see some killer copy for tree trimming because like, everyone has a tree near their house, like, is there a tree next to your house that could possibly fall on your bedroom or something? You know? And we don’t. I’m looking at a tree. I don’t know if it’s dead inside, and it’s going to like collapse on me. But yeah, we’ve definitely had a bunch of people out and get stuff trimmed out, right? So that’s, that’s a killer one.
Jimmy Speyer: 20:13
And having just there’s just so many. It’s just so big there. The home service sector is kind of sneaky big. When I got into it, I didn’t realize, you know, 600,000 businesses categorized in that sector. And what’s crazy is that when you go to other tools, you said, well, like, why did you build this? Why can’t home service businesses use x, y, z x y x y, z? Generic B2B tools, you know, HubSpot or whatever it is. Not to pick on HubSpot or like Zoominfo.
I’ll pick on Zoominfo. But when you go to those tools, and you start saying, I’m a home service business, I’m a plumber, I’m a roofer. They don’t even have categories for that. They’re like, we never thought about those businesses for one half of a second. We don’t even have them categorized as an option. And so it gets really hard to say, you’re going to help me with business tools, lead generation tools, and sales tools. Then they don’t even think you exist.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 21:06
I want to talk about hiring in teams. Right. You’ve been a part of large teams. You’re hiring now. Maybe go back to your SaaS days. I know there was an organization that went from three to over 120 sales team members. What worked in helping manage and develop a sales team in those days? We talk about today.
Jimmy Speyer: 21:32
So I was part of a very rapid hiring, going from three sales team members to 125 over the course of four years, but across multiple businesses and different skills and sizes. And then here, hiring here. I think that you have to be really, really clear in all hiring instances of who you are. What are you looking for, and what exact criteria is it likely to be met to be successful? If you meet someone and you are not clear about those things, and then you hire them, and then they don’t agree with your principles that they only find out on orientation day. For instance, I’ve seen this in businesses where it’s like they show up and on day one, it’s like, please tell me about all our values and how you work here and how we work together. I’m like, I hope that they like it because they already took this job. And the likelihood that they do is, you know, 50, 50, whatever it is, that could be a pretty bad outcome.
And so being really upfront can feel uncomfortable in an interview process, like I asked. I try to ask really pointed, serious questions respectfully and nicely and politely. Because what I’m trying to understand is. Are you likely to be successful here? Because everybody needs a job? Generally speaking, most of us I do probably most of us need a job. And so what’s going to happen is people will try to get a job, even if it’s not a perfect fit, because they need a job.
And so, you know, and you want to be helpful, probably, you’re probably a nice person, and you’re like, I want to help people. And so you want to believe that someone can do it, but if they can’t, then you’re just causing a future problem, and they’re going to resent it and be mad. And that’s bad enough. But even worse is if you convince someone to leave their company and their job to come to your company, and it’s not a good fit. And you could have figured that out ahead of time; then that is super irresponsible.
And so I try to ask, I’m looking for the characteristics at my stage of growth that are likely to equal good outcomes. And I also recently instituted a commitment. I don’t institute the policy. I get everybody to commit to the team that we’re only hiring people in the company that we believe will level up the company, as in, like, they have to be better than we think we already are, or we believe that they would level us up and pull us up. Because what I have seen is when you go from like that 3 to 125 in super rapid succession, and you feel like you just have to get the next person in the door, you start to compromise around the edges for the sake of expediency. And then when the level starts to go down, it just becomes self-fulfilling. At that point, you’re like, okay, A is higher than B’s. B’s hired C’s. C’s don’t care. And then the whole organization starts to erode a little bit. And it’s really hard to pull out of that.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 24:15
I’m curious, Jimmy, some of the elements of your hiring process that you find important? I had on Mike Morse, who’s he built his law firm, 150 person law firm. And one of the things he did, I thought was interesting was he always. He said early on he made mistakes and didn’t do any assessments, and now he does assessments at one point. I don’t know if he still does, but he was doing the Colby, he was doing the Wonderlic, which is typically for NFL football players. And he’s like, whatever they’re using now, you know, they’re always doing assessments. I’m curious, in your hiring process, what have you found? Maybe a key component that, now that you know it, you would not leave out?
Jimmy Speyer: 25:00
We do a version of assessments. So across the company, there’s some type of depends on the type of role. So for an engineer, for instance, we have an engineering department. They have to do technical assessments. And that’s pretty common in engineering. And actually just kind of expected. And nobody blinks an eye about it. It’s interesting as we get to other parts of the business, sometimes people say, I have, you’re asking me to work for free or, you know, it’s like, well, no, it’s, it’s just like a test. Like, just like school. We all did it. It’s okay. Like, how dare you make me take the SATs? Like, don’t go to college then. I don’t know, that’s how it works. That’s what they’re asking for. So in the sales team, what we do is they have to do some type of performance-based assessment. So we’re usually asking them to present us with something and walk us through it. And what I’m actually looking for is how they think about it and how they approach it. I don’t really care all that much what they’re presenting.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 25:51
I usually like to sell myself this pen. Like, what’s that from? I forgot what that is from something.
Jimmy Speyer: 25:57
Yeah, the look of The Wolf of Wall Street or something.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 25:58
Okay, okay.
Jimmy Speyer: 25:59
Yeah. So what I will tell people is I’ll say, I want you to present us with something. It can be our product or a product you like. I really don’t care what it is. It doesn’t even matter.
Because here’s the thing. I’m not going to buy it. Nobody’s ever sold me anything on that pitch because it’s never happened. Right? What I’m really curious about.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 26:13
If you’re a salesperson and you’re going to apply, that should be your goal. You need to sell Jimmy something on that.
Jimmy Speyer: 26:21
I need my driveway sealed. So if you sell me that, I might buy it.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 26:23
You just have to troll his social media to see what he needs. All right.
Jimmy Speyer: 26:27
Yeah, a good hoodie, maybe some Nike, some Sneakers. So, I’m looking for how you think about it and how you present, because a lot of inside sales, which we do, is these Zoom meetings. And so you are competing with the most addictive thing on the planet, which is that other person’s phone. And so if you’re not very engaging and you’re kind of boring or dull or nervous and you can’t keep our attention, then you’re not going to keep anybody else’s attention later on either, which means you’re not going to be as successful as you. Somebody else probably could be. And so we are looking for the performance portion, and in other roles, it’s different in the company, but we always want someone to do something that demonstrates the skill related to the job, not the exact job, because we’re going to teach you how to do the job. You don’t work here yet. And the other thing I do that’s like, if you’re listening to this and you’re going to interview here, it’s intentionally like a little sneaky hack, is I send them like the task or the request.
And I tell them, if you have any questions, please ask. If you want us to look at anything ahead of time, send it over. We’ll get on a call with you. We’ll go through it. We’ll coach you on the thing you’re about to present and tell you what we’re looking for again, because when you get here, we’re going to do the same thing. We’re going to teach you, we’re going to work with you. We’re going to coach you. We do three hours of sales training every week. Like you’re going to have all that. So I’m not trying to trick you. I’m trying to figure out if you are, in fact, the type of person who will take feedback, implement it back into the presentation, and make it better. In which case, again, I don’t care what you’re pitching me. I just want to see how you do it.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 27:59
Listen, if they go out and scour the internet and watch interviews on you, they’re probably ahead of 99% of the people anyway. So if they’re listening.
Jimmy Speyer: 28:06
If you’re watching this right now and you do this, then you will get hired, I promise.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 28:12
Can you think of any pointed questions or any questions that you like to ask in the interview process?
Jimmy Speyer: 28:19
Well, let’s focus on salespeople. It’s been most of my career; I’ve hired maybe 250 salespeople. So I’m going to ask them about what they know about the company. I want to I’m going to ask them what they know about the people on the call. So I’ve actually often asked a question, usually in later-stage interviews. Did you know who was going to be on this call? Yes. Okay, cool. What can you tell me about all of them? I want to understand how much research they’re doing. It’s commiserate with the job, though. If this is an entry-level, fresh-out-of-college SDR job to get into a sales organization, they might not know those things. And that’s not really a fair question.
If this is a 250 $300,000 a year senior account executive who’s going to be selling $100,000 software packages? They absolutely should know that. So you have to match it all up. I’m asking open-ended questions. They’re intentionally somewhat vague. They’re not always like, tell me about the time you did this. It’s really more about, like, tell me about some hard things you’ve done, or tell me what you’re really good at. Tell me what you think you need to get better at. And the number one thing I ask every single person is how much do you like to work? And I do that not because, like, I’m sitting there trying to find out the lazy people. It’s because we’re a startup currently, and we’ve built a culture at our company around looking for people who have a relationship to work where they find it to be kind of a meaningful part of their life, not their entire self-worth.
And so what I’m trying to just listen for is, do they ask clarifying questions? What do you mean? Do they just blurt out, well, you know, I try to keep it all super balanced all the time. Like, how do they approach work versus the culture of our company and our team? And it’s also pretty vague, too, because it’s like, well, like, what is their relationship to work? Do they think that it’s a negative component of their life? Like they’re trying to get away from it a lot? Then they are probably going to like, if things get hard, they’re gonna bristle, and things always get hard.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 30:18
Have you gotten any strange answers to that question?
Jimmy Speyer: 30:21
Not really that strange, no. Somebody once told me, not very much. They said like, I’d really like, honestly, if I didn’t have to work, I wouldn’t. I’m not really into work. I’d prefer to just read books and be on a beach. I’m like, totally super fair answer. We are not the book reading Beach place, so you probably won’t like it here, but I appreciate the honesty.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 30:42
I want to talk about bottlenecks right before we hit record. You know, I know you’re mentioning bottleneck has changed. One of my favorite books is The Goal by Eliyahu. Oh yeah, I think, yeah, it makes me think of that book. And how do you think about bottlenecks? And we’ll talk about how that’s maybe changed in your company.
Jimmy Speyer: 31:02
That is one of the best business books I’ve ever read, too. By the way, Jeremy, that is 100%. It’s a big read, like you gotta commit here.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 31:09
Because I listened to it on Audible. I can’t remember how long it is, but it’s well worth it. I agree with.
Jimmy Speyer: 31:14
You. Yeah. It’s like, it’s like Bible thick anyway. So yeah, bottlenecks are interesting because they’re talking about manufacturing that book and like figuring out where your bottlenecks in your manufacturing process are, and a SaaS business, and just whatever business you’re in applies to everything.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 31:27
You know, bottlenecks and everything.
Jimmy Speyer: 31:29
Yeah. And in our business and the software world, there’s been this one bottleneck forever, which is like, there are these principles around, like adding a certain number of engineers doesn’t make things better. Like, you can only have so many engineers working on a project before another engineer doesn’t improve the outcome. So that’s how big companies ultimately get usurped by smaller ones, because you could put 1000 engineers to solve it, and I could put ten. But guess what? Ten is just as good as 1000. Maybe better. And the other problem, though, that comes up from bottlenecks in the software development and engineering world was that it was the hardest role to fill, and that it scaled perfectly linearly.
So you just had to add more people. And then you had that problem about outputs. So all these other parts of the business could scale really well and in fact go to market teams, the ones I was part of helping design and execute, we would tend to be like pulling the business forward, like, hey, we can sell this thing way faster than you can develop it. Like we’re out there promising next week, next month, next year, eventually. Like it’s coming someday. Don’t worry. And engineering just had constraints that made it impossible to keep up with that.
And it’s not their fault. It’s just the way the world worked. And in the last year or so, that has completely reversed. And I’ve seen it in our business.
Our engineering department, this quarter, will ship one year of development in three months. If you went back in time two years, it would have taken them a year at least to build all the stuff that is going out this quarter. From a team of five that is acting more like a team of 20, 25, 30, I don’t know, infinite, because at some point we wouldn’t be able to just put that many people on the projects. And we’re basically in this really strange engineering, unconstrained place where, in fact, go to market, the sales, the marketing, these places, they’re lagging because they are not able to scale at the same rate that the engineering part of the business can build it faster than you can sell it now, which is bonkers. And it changes the entire math of the business.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 33:33
Jimmy, can you think of some of the features like right now that you’re coming out with that maybe would have taken a year or so, but you’re able to release them quicker because of, you know, the technology side?
Jimmy Speyer: 33:48
I’ll give you an example of how that kind of worked. So two and a half, three weeks ago, I had the whole team here in Nashville twice a year. Everybody comes to Nashville, we get together, and it’s just because half the company’s remote, half of them are here. And we decided that for half of one day, we would do a hackathon. So we split up into groups of four.
There are five of us, five groups of four. There are 20 people currently in the business, and we split up, and we all get in these little groups, and we go through, and we decide on some features we want to build. Someone’s like, hey, you know, and we went through customer requests and stuff, and people had their own ideas.
But they could do whatever they wanted as long as it made the minimum criteria that impacted our customers, that it was related to what we build now. And they had to finish it in that amount of time. And so in that amount of time, we went and built real-time text alerts to our customers when somebody is interested. We built this like an automated AB testing, where it writes variants on all your messages for you. We built an internal tool that lets us write a message for our customers to test out and push it out to everybody at one time, so they could be like, hey, it’s a 4th of July special. Here’s a sample. And a couple of other things. And we pushed all of that, all of those features, in small groups in four hours. And if you had tried to do all of that stuff previously, it was at least a month.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 35:07
I would think longer than that even.
Jimmy Speyer: 35:09
Probably like it just depends. Like it’d be hard to even prioritize it. You’d be like, yeah, these are small things, like, yeah, but they have big impacts. They’re like a lot of bang for a buck. And it would have been very difficult. Yet the scope of all this stuff. And so yeah, for hours, we just kind of pushed a whole bunch of stuff, and all our customers got it the next week. But here you go.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 35:28
It’s unbelievable.
Jimmy Speyer: 35:29
The best we could have done. We actually sat down afterwards and asked, like the engineering and the design team members, like go back in time a year, how close to this experience would we have been? And the best we could have done is we could have broken down into groups, and somebody could have pulled up Figma and mocked up what this could look like, and then given it to an engineer. And then a month or two later, maybe had it done. Two fast forward, here we go. Here’s a working piece of software.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 35:56
This piggybacks Jimmy on my last question series of questions, which are favorite resources that could be tech like software, like some tools the teams are using, which could be a tech stack. It could be books or podcasts that you like. Before you get to that, I just looked it up real quick. The goal is just for people to get it in 11 hours and 45 minutes. So if you do listen at twice the speed, you could obviously cut that down. But it is worth the almost 12 hours for sure.
Jimmy Speyer: 36:29
It’s good.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 36:30
So text your favorite resources. It could be the teams using this tech stack. It could be just software, books, or podcasts. What are some of your favorite tools internally or personally?
Jimmy Speyer: 36:45
So we use Claude Code here for a lot of stuff. So if it’s like trying to be like, you know, how are we incorporating AI into our business? We talk here about being a small company. I think in bigger companies, people might be afraid that AI is going to replace their jobs. There are 20 people around here. It’s not replacing anybody’s job. It’s just making us better. And so we tell everybody, automate the mundane, focus on the exceptional. Like, if you can take away 20% of your job with AI, then that’s just 20% more time to spend on more important stuff. It’s great. So we really leaned into that one, and I personally am using it for building sales, automations, reports, and tools, and like quoting engines and all kinds of cool stuff that I’m just getting me out of spreadsheets, actually. Like I’m trying to enter a no more spreadsheets world. And it’s because I just basically take data and put it into like a custom piece of software, essentially. And I love that.
We work with a company called Dreamfuel. Dreamfuel is a mindset coaching organization that our whole team gets to work with. They come in, and they do one-on-one mindset coaching. We do kind of like a monthly group like mindset, mental fitness, things that have an app that they get, and that’s a vendor and a partner that I’ve worked with at multiple companies. And I cannot recommend them highly enough because it’s helping invest in our team in and outside of work. And if they are getting tools that prepare them to be better at their life, not just here, then they’re going to show up here less stressed because their life is less stressful. And so it’s an investment in our company and our team members that helps them inside and outside of work, and that’s great. And then I just listen to a lot of podcasts. I find less time for reading these days than an actual physical book, which I still love a physical book, but I can listen to a podcast while I’m actually like running around or in the car or driving or things like that.
My favorite one is the Acquired Podcast. They do super deep dives into business topics where, you know, they just did the entire history of F1 for 4.5 hours. If you like a long listen, it’s fantastic. And then there’s one called The Boardroom Buzz, which is ostensibly about pest control, M&A. Oh, okay. Yeah, it’s ostensibly about that, but it’s really actually just a great business lesson about M&A and valuations and how to think about business in that regard. And it’s just through the lens of pest control. And they’re all pest control guys, generally speaking. But it is one of my all-time favorites in the home service sector where I live. I try to catch up and listen there as much as I can.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 39:10
I’ll have to check it out. Yeah. I’m looking at the Acquired site. It looks like they have Costco on here. They have. They have a bunch of different things. Coca-Cola. So, like big companies and how they started.
Jimmy Speyer: 39:23
The history of the big. Of some of the most successful iconic companies, and they’ll do like Berkshire Hathaway for eight hours or the entire history of Nintendo for like 100 years worth of history. It’s really, really interesting. And they’re great. The hosts are fantastic, super engaging, and actually probably one of my all-time favorites.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 39:41
Yeah, it’s actually funny. Reminded me I just had the, the authors of the book coming out, and when someone’s listening to it, it’s probably out, but it’s about The Birth of ESPN. And it was written by Bill Rasmussen, the Founder, and then the two co-authors, Mike Soltys, who worked there for 43 years, and then Garrett Sutton. And it was shocking to me, like I never thought of ESPN as a startup, but the crazy stories there of putting everything on the credit card, taking the family’s money, almost going out of business, and their first televised Budweiser sponsored ended up spending a million and a half dollars. Their first sponsor and the televised. The televised game was a slow-pitch men’s softball game in Milwaukee. Okay.
Jimmy Speyer: 40:31
Exciting stuff.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 40:32
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Exactly. So, like, that’s where it started. This has been great. Jimmy, I just want to thank you. Thanks for sharing your stories, your resources, and your journey. Everyone should check out GlassHouse.biz to learn more, and we’ll see everyone next time. Jimmy, thanks so much.
Jimmy Speyer: 40:51
Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.
