Transcription
If you own a pest control company, if you're a manager of a pest control company, if you're a technician in a pest control company, or if you do any of those things in any home service industry, whether that's plumbing, HVAC, lawn care, I think there's a ton of good information that you can learn from watching this [Music] video.
Okay buddies, I'm on stage here. I'm not about to do a musical performance or anything like that. I am here in Atlanta, Georgia. BrioStack just ended the first day of their annual user conference. Quick story: I own and operate a pest control company. I've been in the pest control industry for six years, and BrioStack, they are a vendor for my pest control company. So, they are a CRM (customer relationship management) platform. While I have to do physical work and service these jobs for pests, I also have to create appointment records, invoice my customers, receive payments, schedule the next service.
So, in today's video, I'm not going to be just talking about BrioStack software or what they do, but I'm going to be talking about some of the really, really important and cool things that BrioStack taught their customers today. It wasn't just about how to use software better to help your business run smoothly. There were tons and tons of business tips that I want to share with you for free today, so that's what we're going to do.
What we did first was BrioStack talked about all these new features that they've released in the past few months. So, we're going to talk about some of the more important features, and most importantly, I'm going to talk about how you can use them in your business and how I use them and think they're important. The first new feature that I wanted to talk about was improved routing. So, in a home service business, you have to drive to customers' houses. So, it's very important to drive as efficiently as possible from house to house to house. And when it comes to country roads, or when it comes to traffic, or big cities, it's very important to have a very up-to-date routing software.
The next thing was reporting. BrioStack has maybe a hundred or more reports that you can run that show you the numbers, the numbers for these customers. So, it shows you the outstanding balance, it shows you how you did on advertising, or with this campaign, or that campaign. We just quickly talked about some of the new reporting features. So, reporting is really, really big because I love pest control and I love making people happy, but we're also here to make money, and you need good reporting in order to do that.
Another feature BrioStack released, and I've been dying for this feature, it's a game-changer. Just me as a customer, I think this is really, really important. BrioStack now allows us as pest control owners to send our customers links to pay for their service without logging in. They can just use a simple credit card processor. It synchronizes with their account, and that is super, super handy. If you're not giving your customers ways to pay without logging in, or to pay without calling you on the phone, then I think, I think you're getting behind because the, the number of logins that I have personally, just drive me crazy. Like, every single thing I do, they want a login, username, password, and it's just really exhausting to keep up with how many logins there are nowadays.
BrioStack has improved their increase pricing tool. So, you can go through all of your customers depending on the type of service, when they were created, etc. Unfortunately, in today's day and age, if you're not increasing your prices every year, then the market, it's just crashing down on you with all this inflation. It's just something as a business owner or manager you're going to have to do is increase those prices. Almost all customers understand that increasing price is necessary, and if a customer doesn't understand that and doesn't think that that's necessary, then in my opinion, it's not a customer that you want to have. Just my two cents on that subject.
BrioStack is able to send out tons of emails automatically, and sometimes depending on the words in the subject, the email will get sent to spam. Right? Like Gmail and Outlook, they're really good at catching spam nowadays. So, if you kind of take away some of these phrases out of your subject line, they don't get sent to spam as much.
BrioStack is also improving their internal marketing, is what I call it, upselling. So, they have a way to upsell your current customers new services, and I think that's super, super important. One way to grow your business is to get new customers. Another way to grow your business is to upsell your current customers, make your current customers more valuable. Tons of new features that are just kind of specific to BrioStack, so not super, super important there.
After the improvements were discussed, the president gave a little talk and discussion with, with all of us and just talked about big picture things. Like, when I'm in the business every day doing all of the work, like servicing jobs, answering calls, like communicating with customers, sometimes it's really hard for me to like step back and like take a deep breath and be like, "Okay, is everything I'm doing like really the best thing for me to do right now? Like, is all my hard work going in the right direction?" So, it's, it's really, really invaluable to be able to talk to people that have our best interest in mind. You know, like, like if I grow as a pest control company, BrioStack makes more money. So, they have my best interest in mind. And tons of other pest control company owners from across the country, we're talking numbers, we're talking ways to do business, and it's really, really cool and so, so valuable for someone like me to be able to experience something like this.
The next portion of the user conference, they called the state of the product. It was just kind of an overview. You, uh, not necessarily the new things, but how BrioStack runs their company. They talked about how they get feedback from us, how they take that feedback and use it to improve their software. For example, there were interactive questions that we were asking, and they were answering. It's really cool to see another company like working hard to make my job easier. I mean, I'm paying them, of course, but it's nice to feel like I've got a tool at my disposal and like a whole company. This software, it's so, so powerful. And just like I do training for pest control, like I'm always looking up biology facts about bugs, or how to use this or that new product, new chemical. It's the same with a software. Like, I especially as a business owner, like I have to be able to use the software to the best of its abilities. And they're releasing new features every year, customers are changing every year, technology is getting better every year. So, it's a full-time job and training to keep up. So, it's very important for me as a pest control owner, or as a business owner, to stay up-to-date. And if you're a business owner and you're not trying to keep up with technology or customer demands, then you're going to be getting behind in business. Uh, and that's, that's not good. So, you got to keep your skills sharp. Me personally, I'm really far from where I want to be in all of my skill sets, but I'm improving every day, and I guess that's all you can do.
The last fun thing I wanted to end today's video with was some pictures and images of the epic rock. I was about to say Tic Tac. The epic rock paper scissors tournament. I lost the first round unfortunately, but this tournament, so everyone just pairs up. Every, everyone here does rock paper scissors and competes one-on-one. And if you win, you give your ticket to the winner, and you just keep on collecting tickets until there's two people left on the stage doing Tic Tac Toe, uh, back to back. And the winner got a $1,000 gift card. Prize winner, I could buy all kinds of stuff with $1,000.
The recap of the BrioStack user conference. I hope just some of the things we talked about get your brain going about business. Pest control business, landscaping business, whatever business you're in, whatever you do for a living, just know that you can do it better. And yeah, just, just let me know what you guys think. Like I said, I love doing stuff like this. It helps keep my skills sharp. It helps me stay step back and see my business in, in a bigger picture. Of course, there's no getting around like hard work and doing the business, but you have to make sure you're doing everything as efficiently as possible. That's it. I hope you guys enjoyed this video. Please subscribe to my channel. Please destroy the like button if you liked it. If you don't, I'm not going to make you, but thank you guys so, so much for watching, and I will see you again very, very soon. Peace.