Julian Placino: 0:00

Welcome to the Home Services Success Stories podcast powered by Peakzi, the number one AI platform for growing your home services business. And we have a very special episode today because we actually have one of Peakzi's own. So please welcome Bijan Parvin, who is the director of sales at Peakzi. Bijan, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Speaker: 0:22

I'm doing well, Julian. Thank you very much for having me.

Julian Placino: 0:24

Yeah, and looking forward to getting to know your story. So let's kind of jump right in. Tell us a bit about yourself, your history, how you got started in home services, and why you came to Peakzi.

Speaker: 0:36

Yeah, so um a little bit about myself. I'm just a 33-year-old guy living here in San Francisco. Um, love it out here. Uh, big section of the AI world is taking place in San Francisco, as you well know. So I feel like I'm very suited from this vantage point to um kind of be part of this mission with the home services specifically. And how I got started in the home services was uh in December 2018, I joined a company called Customer Lobby. And this was a company that helped out HVAC plumbing electrical roofing businesses with customer acquisition and customer retention via direct mail marketing, actually. Now, fast forward to uh I believe the end or the beginning of 2021, a company called PulseM was acquired by the family of companies customer lobby owned. And through that, I met Pawan and AJ, who created Pulse Em and built it up to be a very successful company. And inside of that transition process, I became friends with them. And fast forward about three years later, Pawan and AJ had created a new company called Peaksy, very early stages. And they gave me a call and said, Hey, do you want to join this mission? And I was like, Yes, I am very excited to work with y'all. Um, so that's a little bit of how I got started. Then in this industry, I approaching, I suppose, seven years of home service software experience and very grateful for the ride.

Julian Placino: 2:12

Love it. Well, talk a bit about the home services piece. What do you love most about home services, would you say?

Speaker: 2:18

Honestly, the customers, I mean, the clients, these contractors are such cool people, salt of the earth. They are really doing work in their communities, and they are just great people to work with. I'm fortunate to say that a lot of these people I've been working with and working for have become good friends. And some of these people are local to me in San Francisco, some of them are all the way down in Florida. But uh I think the relationships that you build over the years, um, the partnerships, that's my favorite part of this job and definitely keeps me going.

Julian Placino: 2:57

Yeah, and and I think in getting to know just having hosted the show now for a while, yes, it's home services, but you begin to learn about their stories. And a lot of these are family businesses, and they've grown from you know, nothing to something, and then continuing to make an impact in the community, and there really are wonderful stories. So I totally resonate when you say you love the people of the industry. So so what's really interesting is I always get the perspective about what Peaksy is from your customers, but now we have you here here. So tell us, what is Peakzi?

Speaker: 3:28

So Peakzi is a solution that will help contractors essentially prepare for the future. Now, what does that mean? So we all know that we are inside of an AI revolution right now, and we have been injected with AI in every single vantage point of our life right now. And what we have found is that a lot of consumers are using these tools for their own means, they're treating these things like they would Google previously. But why Peakzi was created and you know what Peakzi is doing is protecting the contractors' interests. So if, say, a homeowner is interacting with the AI tool and they're having a broken toilet or some sort of home service issue, we need to make sure that the contractors are present and accounted for to help solve for that issue is meeting the consumer where they're going to search. But from the broad picture, we have a lot of solutions that can help contractors tackle problems inside of marketing, inside of recruiting, inside of their operations using our technology.

Julian Placino: 4:32

Marketing, operations, recruiting, and what else did I miss?

Speaker: 4:37

Uh marketing, operations, recruiting. That would be the big three.

Julian Placino: 4:40

Got it. And what would you say was the why behind Peakzi What was the market need? I know you're seeing like the trends and everything, but if there was like a specific reason why Peaksy came into existence, what would you say that is?

Speaker: 4:53

So I would say Chat GPT, I'm gonna use ChatGPT as the main example, came on the market uh sometime at the end of 2022, and our whole real world changed. Um, and we're seeing a lot of mainstream adoption of AI from people all over the world. And one thing we noticed is that so many businesses are thinking, like contractors are thinking, how can I use AI to be more efficient in my business? How can I use AI to say, dispatch my vehicles more efficiently, to take in some calls and make sure I'm not missing calls? How can I use AI to even coach my technicians in the field better? But one thing we noticed was that no one from the contractor perspective was really asking this question. How are my customers going to be using AI? And we think that is a very important question and can present a huge problem. What if my customers don't see me on AI? Why are my competitors getting all of my leads? So I think we're about to jump into a lot of this more specifically, but that's why Peaksy was created to make sure the contractor can meet the consumer where they are going to solve problems, to search for services, and essentially connect with businesses. So I always get asked this question, and I always want to point the contractor to think of another question. How are your actual customers going to be using AI? Because that could present a big opportunity or even a big problem.

Julian Placino: 6:25

Very interesting. Okay, so so marketing being seen, how are you meeting your customers? How are how are people looking for information nowadays, right? So so with that being said, then tell us a bit about SEO. Is it really dead?

Speaker: 6:39

This is a great question. Um, so SEO is not really dead yet, but it certainly is dying. And there will be some point in the future where SEO does completely die. And that is because if you think of the previous search experience using a system like Google, you would type in something from a home service perspective like AC repair near me. You would get a lot of sponsored advertisements, and then maybe like 10 blue links via Google that have uh good rankings. That is the previous experience. That is SEO. Now, what we're seeing is that more and more Americans are pivoting to tools like ChatGPT to get the same information. But what a tool like ChatGPT or Google Gemini will do is it will summarize those 10 links, take in the sponsored ads, look at the whole ecosystem of the internet, and present one clean answer for the homeowner to gather all that information, reducing the need for clicks all in one shot. Um, so SEO is not dying, but I think the consumer is obviously saying, what is a better experience? The second option I described is a much better experience. And at some point in the future, because right now we're seeing this as a little game where SEO is becoming uh less and less, AI is becoming more and more, there's going to be a cross point where AI becomes much more popular than SEO, and then down the road, no crystal balls on a specific timeline, uh SEO will die. And I would say there's a ton of data to support this right now, and it could be as simple as you want or as complex as you want, but all of the narrative, the mainstream education, all the data says that SEO is indeed dying.

Julian Placino: 8:32

It is indeed dying. Interesting. You mentioned that you don't have a crystal ball or like a definitive timeline, but if you were to kind of to guess and just look around like what you are seeing in terms of consumer behavior, how fast do you think this thing is coming? Like, is there any place that we could find a metric in terms of the cannibalization of AI search versus SEO? Like, where can we look at that?

Speaker: 8:52

Yeah. So a couple, a couple uh points on that. So I study this a lot, my whole team study this, studies this a lot. Have you um noticed Google's AI overviews where starting to give you an AI summary on Google and then all the links below it?

Julian Placino: 9:08

Yeah, it's always on top.

Speaker: 9:10

Yes, it's always on top. So a lot of people study that little implementation. And even six months ago, they were saying that that implementation decreased click-through rates by 35 to 40 percent. Fast forward to about two weeks ago, that implementation has now decreased click-through rates by 60 to 68 percent. So it's getting worse in terms of how those that implementation is really solving for the need to enter the links itself. Um, some other data to support is ChatGPT is always coming out with their weekly uh active users. And when I first entered Peakzi in June of 2024, it was like at 200 million. Fast forward today, ChatGPT has 800 million weekly active users. So um the numbers are just exponentially increasing because more and more consumers are getting savvy to this. All the little kids out here are calling Chat GPT chat, like it's their friend. Like, let me ask chat. Um, and then we're also starting to see more native integrations where it makes it easier, like the barrier for entry to leverage an AI search tool is becoming much more easier from say like a cell phone integration, more or less. So um those would be some stats, and then a little bit of like the narrative around it.

Julian Placino: 10:36

I and I I totally believe it, man. Like just in my own personal behavior, watching my wife, seeing my nephews and nieces, it's like that's the first thing we go to. We go to the LLM, we go to the chat now, right? And I I really don't use Google as much anymore. You know what I mean? And it's like that's such an interesting stat that like it the AI summary decreases click-through rate of of the uh the information below, which is really interesting. So let's talk about the how now. We talked about the what is Pixie and also the why behind it. It makes total sense. So you mentioned the hows. So the hows in marketing and also operations and also uh recruiting, right? So from the marketing perspective, tell us about some of the hows, the features. Something I keep hearing about that your customers are so like enamored by is the AI website. So maybe talk about that.

Speaker: 11:21

Yeah. So how are we doing that? Uh I would say from the big picture, number one, we have um a member of our team who's been studying AI since it was called machine learning, since I was literally like in recess in grade school. Our chief technology officer has been studying machine learning now called AI. So there's a lot of um deep knowledge there around that new the nuances there. Um, number two, the team behind Peakzi has decades of home service experience. And this is the only sector we're going to live in. So some companies want to go a mile wide and serve every industry other under the sun. Um, Peakzi is going a mile deep, home services specifically. And number three, uh, we've built this technology recipe, the AI website, that can influence an AI engine to recommend a home service business. And how do we do that? Without giving too much away of our secret sauce, is you need to structure this asset in a way where a large language model can easily grab the information, put it into its preferred language. So you're speaking apples to apples. That's number one, the foundation. Number two, you need to produce content that can make this business understand that you are a very reputable and well-respected company at every single job type you're willing to do, AC repair, water heaters, et cetera. And every uh and clearly communicate every single city that you serve. So it's all about producing the content that's machine friendly, showcasing the value, this the breadth of your services in every single city that you're willing to serve. And then what that allows a Chad GPT to do is say, if I am a homeowner, I have a broken toilet, and I need help, I need to connect with a service provider that can fix this for me. Chat GPT now has the right content to grab to present to the consumer about your business. And that is completely displacing the workflow of say, broken toilet need help on Google, sponsored advertisements, all these uh links to click, and then I need to essentially uh find a phone number for a business.

Julian Placino: 13:41

Gotcha. Okay. So that's kind of the marketing and visibility piece. Tell us a little bit about some of the features when it comes to the ops perspective.

Speaker: 13:50

Yeah. So we believe contractors need access to competitive data to be able to outperform inside of their market and continue to scale their business. So within the operations piece itself, we have quite literally built a system leveraging ChatGPT and some peakzi intellectual property behind Chat GPT to pull in every single data point around a home service market so a contractor can understand how they are performing with respect to punctuality against their direct competition. What are their customers saying on if they show up on time, if they show up late, how are they pricing? Are these loyal customers, are these customers more likely to go to another business through providing deep reporting, um, benchmarking aspects of the business against their competitors, measuring job volumes against their competitors, all this type of data that can fuel smart decision making to help a business continue to scale in some very competitive environments. That's what we're solving for on the operations side. And we're doing a couple other things around mergers and acquisitions. Uh, private equity has seen uh has entered the industry in a very impactful way, and there's a lot of consolidation going on. So we have some bells and whistles to support um the private equity side of things. Um, but more importantly, what I said about the operations, feeding the data, the consumer sentiment data, making recommendations off of consumer sentiment data, uh is really what we're doing to help outperform competition.

Julian Placino: 15:31

I gotta say, that is so invaluable. It is kind of like, you know, when sports teams study other sports teams, their playbook and all that, so they can kind of see what are their strengths, weaknesses, gaps, all that kind of thing. You're doing that for home services. So they know clearly, not just guessing anymore, but having data back, you know, their decisions on how to continue to improve and serve their customers better, right?

Speaker: 15:52

Absolutely. You have to watch the game tape, you have to look at the uh game script, you have to understand what's happened in the past and game plan for the future, and you need to use your own data and the data that's out there against the competition. You need to study the competition, right? All these NFL coaches the day before or the week before Sunday, they're putting in a massive game plan to address our strengths and the opponent's weaknesses. Same total idea, um, but it's for home service contractors.

Julian Placino: 16:20

Love it, love it. Tell us more about the recruiting in HR perspective because of this one thing for sure in home services that everyone is struggling with, it's great talent. That that mix of like technical expertise and being customer facing. So tell us a bit about what you do in that area.

Speaker: 16:37

Yeah, so um talent sourcing, talent retention. This is a huge problem in the trades. Um, you need to be able to scale your business, and a part of that is people. That's probably the most critical thing about a business is your people. So we help contractors recruit and retain the best talent. There is a little bit of a trade labor gap right now in the trades. Um, a lot of older technicians are beginning to retire, and there's not a lot of younger technicians to fill that essential gap. So, what we're doing is helping clients recruit the best talent inside of their markets, uh, putting in some aspects to retain that talent. And I think right now we are tracking and helping uh hire for over, well, our system tracks over 500,000 home service technicians within the United States. And we have some really good people on our talent sourcing teams that can meet with the company, identify their culture requirements, their license requirements, what makes a technician successful at your company, and how can we go to battle for you and help recruit similar technicians? And I also think with respect to the trade gap, there is uh you know a shortage right now, but this is becoming a very desirable sector for younger people to enter. And uh Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, came out with a statement that kind of really erupted the trades and fired a lot of us up inside of the trades. He said that the next generation of millionaires inside of the United States will be plumbers and electricians. And I really think he also uh meant HVAC technicians as well. So I think that's really helping fuel a lot of younger people to enter the trades. And beyond um what Peakzi is specifically doing, I'm working with so many clients who are putting together little universities inside of their uh inside of their office where they'll go to local uh career fairs, they'll talk to students who might be going a college route or say go a skilled trades route, and they are uh really nurturing and building a lot of talent from their local communities through that path. And that's giving these young kids an option to get certified in a very desirable skill trait, um, get paid to do it, not have to deal with a lot of student debt. And um I think it's some really there's some really fantastic programs going on with a lot of members in my client base regarding that uh sourcing young people initiative into the trades, while Peakzi is taking care of, I need to fill this gap. I really need a qualified technician with five to seven years of experience that knows how to talk to homeowners. Uh, we are helping clients solve for that situation specifically. And that's a very critical problem. I think there's two uh or three big problems in any sort of business that need to always be solved for and strategized over. It's um customer acquisition, customer retention, and then there's talent management. And Peakzi is really producing these solutions to address all three of those critical problems: customer acquisition, customer retention, and talent management.

Julian Placino: 19:58

I think it is absolutely incredible the tools that you're offering home services in terms of that whole recruiting and talent perspective that would give any organization a huge competitive edge. So uh so before we kind of close out and talk about sort of some vision stuff, right? Any other features you think is worth mentioning to our audience about Peakzi?

Speaker: 20:18

Any other features do I think is worth mentioning to the audience about Peakzi? I mean, number one, our North Star here is AI search because we know this is the way of the future, and we believe contractors need to be protected because the way you have generated leads in the past is not going to be the way you generate leads in the future. It used to be the yellow pages, then Google came out with SEO. And now we're looking at AI search. And this is a scary thing, right? Like the game is changing. Uh, there's a lack of an understanding and a technology implementation to uh address this consumer shift inside of search. So that is our North Star, protecting the contractors, because ChatGPT works and others work for the consumers. Contractors need a solution that's going to work for them. So that's our North Star. But behind the scenes, you know, we have all of the data, the competitive intelligence in the world to help address operations, HR talent, and marketing. Um, so I would say that's pretty much all of the way to describe it from the highest level that I think uh the audience here should be aware of.

Julian Placino: 21:31

Love it. So, what do you you already kind of touched on this? You mentioned you you quoted Jensen talking about like what future millionaires are going to be. And you know, I've heard other AI thought leaders saying that the future industry is going to be where people have to physically move atoms, right? Jobs with physical nature, because AI sort of cannibalizes everything else in the digital space. So home services, of course, is one of those things. But what do you see as the future of home services? What does Peakzi see?

Speaker: 21:58

Yeah. So I'll give you two perspectives. I'll give you the contractor perspective and then the consumer perspective. I'll start with the contractor perspective. Um, and then yeah, that quote from Jensen Tang Wang saying the next uh generation of millionaires is going to be plumbers, electricians, and HVAC technicians. So, what's the future of the home services for the contractors? So I think home services has actually been one of the sectors that have been the quickest to adopt AI in so many aspects of their business. But if you look back to when I started in the home services at the end of 2018, the adoption was really just starting. So many of these businesses still ran their business on like pen and paper. Um, and right when I started, there was a company called Service Titan that was really pioneering mass adoption to technology within home service businesses through a CRM technology. And I think that's er when everything started to change in the industry. So when you ask what's the future of the home services for the contractor, uh, I really think it's going to look like mass adoption of tools to help automate business functions outside of the actual trades work itself. Uh, these plumbers, electricians, and HVAC techs have become some of the most savious business owners in the world. And that's a big reason why private equity firms are injecting capital in acquiring businesses in the space, because it's a very desirable sector, a very stable sector. Like if your toilet is broken, you are going to have to get that fixed immediately. But I would say AI is uh decades away from replacing that toilet itself. We are not about to have robot plumbers anytime soon, more or less. So I think this all goes back to the statement from James Jensen Twang that uh the next age millionaires in this country in this country will be the trades workers itself. But I think from a general perspective, um automation of tools for the contractor around the actual home service uh work itself. That's what I would say the future is for the home service business. Now I'll go to the future for the home service customer. And like we've already been saying, the shift of the uh search landscape is massively changing. So I'll kind of describe what I think the future looks like from the home service customer. So you have a broken toilet, you might take a picture, feed it into ChatGPT. ChatGPT is going to give you some elements to self-diagnose this tool. It might tell you to send some more specific pictures, recommend you do a couple things, and then ultimately it's going to say, Do you want help from a professional? And then I'll say yes, book me an appointment immediately. And what Chat GPT and other AI engines will be able to do in its final form is connect me with the best plumber to fix the problem. It will look at my calendar, it will look at the plumbing businesses calendar, it will find a time that works, and then it'll say, Do you want to move forward with the appointment? It'll say yes, and it will directly communicate with the plumber's AI to my AI and get me a plumber that's quality in the time frame that I need it. So essentially, systems to connect customers to businesses through AI agents, all starting from a single picture in a couple words.

Julian Placino: 25:42

Wow. Unbelievable.

Speaker: 25:45

Yeah, and it's happening already.

Julian Placino: 25:47

And it sounds like in Peakzi is for sure 100% at the forefront of all of that, and figuring that out and and approving every single time. That's something I always hear from Peakzi customers, is that they're always coming up with this new thing. This always coming up with this new thing, and they name you specifically, also, which is really great. So uh, okay, great. Well, we're we're about to land the plane here, uh, Bijan. So tell us a bit more about the team, in the sense that what would you say are the values of Peakzi and the team behind it are?

Speaker: 26:15

Yeah. So you actually just mentioned one right at the end of that statement, which is essentially I tie it to innovation. Um, we're always doing something new, we're always keeping our clients up to speed because this is the ballpark that we're living in. And we are still only in like the second inning of the AI ballgame. A client the other day told me that we're still in the batter's cage. So, what we need to do from a product perspective is constantly innovate because we are following what the enterprise technology companies are doing. And as they make new changes, release new bells and whistles, we are always speedy to innovate and make home service sense out of that change. So, number one is innovation. But I would say, even more importantly than innovation is being customer obsessed and caring deeply. Because what we are doing is we are guiding our clients through a huge shift that's happening all over the world, but has a massive impact on their business. And through that shift, we need to make sure our clients are taken care of, are protected, um, understand fully what we are doing and why we are releasing these new features, why we are innovating in this way. And we need to give them comfort because a lot of businesses are scared right now. They know that the customer, like I've said kind of so many times throughout this conversation, is going to this new tool to help them solve problems. They are observing so many times that their business is not represented in the way they want to be on this new tool. And um, we really need to innovate to make them there, but we need to give them comfort that we are their partner in this thing and they are trusting us and that we're going to take care of them. So I would say that would be a couple of ours. Um, and our really our mission is to do this in a responsible way, innovate with speed, take care of our customers deeply, and uh enable these businesses to become market leaders inside of the AI era, I would say would be our values, if you will.

Julian Placino: 28:24

I think those are very, very powerful values. So uh well, Bijan, close us out then. So for home services leaders who haven't joined Pixie yet, what's your message for them?

Speaker: 28:36

I would say that the time is now because there is a total opportunity to get a competitive edge by being on the forefront of this from an understanding and an implementation perspective. I'll tell you a story back from that Pawan has shared from me so many times from the Pulse M days. So Pulse Em was probably the first reputation management solution on the scenes in the home services. This is first when Google reviews were becoming a big thing. And the contractors who adopted to a formal reputation management system early to say get more Google reviews started to get a mile of separation against the competition from a digital perspective. This has all the same feelings of that situation in the past. And the best thing you can do, it's the classic term, uh early bird gets the worm, is that the people who adopt to this early will um see the biggest results. And um, more or less, very simply, the time is now to future proof your business in the world of AI. And that is what Peakzi is all about to future proof a contractor's business in the world of AI.

Julian Placino: 29:56

Love it. Well, Bijan, share with us how do our audience connect with you, email you, connect with you on social. Tell us all that.

Speaker: 30:05

Yep. So um my email is just my first name, Bijan. Uh B isn't boy, Ij A N at peakz.me. And um I'm on LinkedIn, Bijan Parvin. If you just look me up on LinkedIn, you'll see me posting about Peakzi two or three times a week. Uh my cell phone number is 925-330-4509, or they're welcome to visit our website, see a little bit of what we're about, and of course, there'll be some meeting options on our website as well.

Julian Placino: 30:39

Awesome. Well, this has been a tremendous conversation. Thank you so much for your time, Bijan. I think our audience truly benefited from your insights and uh wishing you all continued success in everything that it is that you're doing. Uh, you're serving the home services market so well with with uh with AI and all things.

Speaker: 30:53

So thank you so much for having me. Um I really appreciate you like talking to our clients, getting their stories, their missions, what they're doing in the community. And I look forward to seeing so many episodes from you from our client base talking about um you know the work that they're doing, Julian.

Julian Placino: 31:13

It's been a lot of fun. It's an honor to be part of the mission, and uh, I'm a believer for sure.

Speaker: 31:18

Absolutely. Likewise.

Julian Placino: 31:21

Well, everyone, that is it for today's episode. So thanks for tuning in, and we'll see you next time on the Home Services Success Stories podcast powered by Peakzi, the number one AI platform for growing your home services business.