More Leads Won't Fix Your HVAC Business Without Fixing This First

More Leads Won’t Fix Your HVAC Business Without Fixing This First

May 4, 2026

Show Notes
Guest: Michael Busic, North Edge Marketing

Guest Links:
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/michael.busic.376891
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MichaelBusic
- Website: northedgemarketing.com
Unlock the secret to skyrocketing your trade business—it’s not just about more leads, but about mastering your sales and customer journey. Michael Busic, co-owner of North Edge Marketing, reveals how a background in engineering shaped his approach to data-driven growth, showing you exactly how top private equity firms scale their HVAC operations to millions. This episode cuts through the noise, offering actionable insights to plug the leaks in your sales funnel and turn your data into your best asset.

You’ll discover how tracking every customer interaction from lead to job completion exposes hidden opportunities—whether it’s improving appointment rescheduling, follow-up processes, or the critical pre-sales assets that turn cold calls into warm leads. Michael shares proven tactics like sending homeowners detailed pre-appointment info to boost conversion, and automating review requests that turn satisfied clients into relentless brand ambassadors. Learn why weak data analysis costs companies thousands—and how fixing that foundation can revolutionize your revenue.We break down:
- How to leverage CRM data for immediate wins—export open estimates, identify why they’re stuck, and follow up with value-driven messaging
- Using call monitoring to improve salesperson performance and uncover objections preemptively
- The importance of segmenting demand-based versus longer sales cycle opportunities to optimize follow-up timing
- Strategic cross-selling and referral programs that turn one job into lifelong customer relationships
- Why a relentless focus on fixing internal leaks trumps ramping up lead volume endlessly
In a landscape where many HVAC operators leave money on the table daily, missing these insights could hold back your growth. The opportunity lies in understanding your data, streamlining your processes, and delivering consistent value that inspires customer loyalty.

Perfect for trade owners ready to transform reactive operations into predictable, scalable systems. If you’re tired of chasing unqualified leads or leaving thousands on the table every month—this episode shows you how to build a foundation that works, so your business can grow with certainty. Pull the levers that truly move the needle, and start seeing real results today.

You’ve probably thought it before. Things are slow, the phone isn’t ringing enough, and your first instinct is to call your marketing agency and say: we need more leads.

Sometimes you’re right. Lead volume and lead quality are real problems — and we deal with them every day at Elevated.

But sometimes, more leads is just a more expensive version of the same problem.

I sat down with Michael Busic, co-owner of North Edge Marketing, on the Elevated Trade Secrets podcast, and we went deep on something that most HVAC contractors never actually look at: where revenue is leaking after the lead comes in. Michael’s background is engineering, and he brought a refreshingly analytical lens to what most people treat as a gut-feel problem.

Here’s what we covered — and more importantly, what you can do about it.

The Real Question Isn’t “Do We Have Enough Leads?”

Michael put it simply: if you’re not tracking your customer journey from first contact to completed job, you have no idea what to fix.

Most contractors aren’t running a broken marketing strategy. They’re running a broken sales funnel — and they’re treating it like a marketing problem.

You can’t fix what you can’t measure.

Your Booking Rate Is Lying to You

Here’s something that’ll sting a little.

If your CSR team is booking at 70–90%, that number almost certainly includes repeat customers — people who already know you, already trust you, and were going to book regardless. Fold those in with cold new leads from Google and your real new lead booking rate could be a fraction of what you think.

Once you separate repeat work from cold new leads and segment those booking rates by type (service call, install opportunity, repeat job), you’ll see exactly where your CSR team is struggling. And that’s the data that tells you what to train on.

Nobody Is Ready to Buy When They Answer the Phone

Here’s a process almost no HVAC company has in place: a pre-sales asset sent to the homeowner before the comfort advisor walks through the door.

Think about what typically happens. A CSR books the appointment, and then… nothing. The homeowner forgets. Something comes up. They cancel or reschedule. Or the comfort advisor shows up cold to a homeowner who has no idea who they’re talking to or why they should buy.

What Michael’s team does instead is send homeowners a complete pre-sales package before the appointment: what to expect, what the advisor will look at, what mistakes people commonly make when comparing estimates. It handles objections before they’re even raised and positions you above every competitor before your advisor ever knocks on the door.

The close rate difference? Significant. The cost? A well-built automation.

You Have $100,000 Sitting in Expired Estimates

This one hit close to home — literally, I was looking at this exact situation with a client the week we recorded this episode.

His leads looked fine. Unique leads, quotable leads, opportunity value — all healthy on our end. But the gap between quote value and closed revenue was massive. Roughly nine or ten percent of estimates were being closed.

We pulled his Housecall Pro data and found over $100,000 in open estimates that had gone dead in the past six weeks. Housecall Pro auto-marks them expired after 30 days. Not a single follow-up call. Not one text. Not one email.

His competitors are following up three times. He’s following up zero times. That’s where the $100K went.

The fix isn’t complicated. Go into your CRM right now, export every open estimate from the past three, six, or twelve months, and send them a sequence — text and email — that leads with value, not just “hey, did you think about that estimate we sent?” Nobody wants that message. Give them a reason to re-engage.

You Lost the Lead Before You Even Started

Remember the flower shop owner story?

A homeowner called in for a mini-split install. She was basically ready to buy. She mentioned she owns a flower shop and things were crazy busy through Mother’s Day, so she’d call back after.

The CSR said, “Great, we’ll be here when you’re ready.”

That LSA lead cost 90 bucks. She’s never calling back. She’s going back to Google when she remembers, and whoever picks up next gets the job.

The CSR should have done one thing: put her on the calendar for the week after Mother’s Day. If she needs to reschedule, fine. But getting her in the system with an appointment date means there’s a 50% chance she keeps it — and you just sold a mini-split without a single additional marketing dollar.

This is a training problem, not a marketing problem.

After the Job Is Done, You’re Just Getting Started

Most contractors finish the install and disappear. Job closed, move on. That’s arguably the biggest revenue leak in the entire funnel.

That customer already trusts you. They already like you. And they have:

Friends and family who need HVAC work
Other systems in their home (plumbing, electrical) that need attention
A unit that’ll need a tune-up every spring and fall
Upsell opportunities for IAQ products, smart thermostats, maintenance contracts

But you’re leaving all of that on the table if you don’t have a post-job sequence that nurtures them over time.

The key is leading with education, not a pitch. Don’t send “hey, did you know we also do plumbing?” Do send: “Hey, here’s a story about a homeowner just like you whose water heater we helped replace after their HVAC install — they saved X on their energy bill. Want a free inspection?” The feeling you sell is more powerful than the feature.

Reviews Are a System, Not a Request

You’re not going to get consistent reviews by asking once and hoping.

The sequence that works: text immediately after job completion, email the same evening if no response, text again two days later, final email two days after that. After four touches, you let it go — you don’t want to harass anyone.

For field techs, Michael’s recommendation is to incentivize them with a spiff — $25 to $50 per review — and run a leaderboard in the office. Make it competitive. A $500 bonus for the tech with the most reviews in a month costs you less than one lost job and builds your reputation for years.

One tactical note: you can’t incentivize homeowners to leave reviews, or Google will suspend your listing. Incentivize your techs to earn reviews naturally.

Fix One Constraint at a Time

Michael brought up the theory of constraints, and it applies perfectly here.

You track everything. You find the one biggest bottleneck. You fix it. Then you run the process again, find the next bottleneck, and fix that. You don’t try to fix everything at once — you’ll fix nothing.

That’s an engineering mindset applied to a sales funnel, and it’s exactly the discipline most contractors skip.

The Bucket With the Holes

Michael’s mentor put it perfectly: you have a bucket of water full of holes. You can keep filling it, but it’s never going to fill up until you patch the holes.

Throwing more ad spend at a broken sales process just amplifies the waste. Every dollar you add to the top of the funnel flows straight out through untracked leads, unfollowed estimates, no-shows, and lost repeat business at the bottom.

Before you ask for more leads, ask what’s happening to the ones you already have.

What You Can Do Tomorrow

Two concrete places to start:

1. Export your open estimates. Go back three, six, or twelve months and find every estimate that never closed. Build a simple text and email sequence that leads with value. Even recovering 10–15% of those conversations is likely worth tens of thousands of dollars.

2. Launch a referral program worth talking about. $500 per referred install. Not $25. Your customer acquisition cost is probably already there when you factor in ad spend and sales commissions — redirect it to the customers who already love you and watch them recruit new ones for you.

At Elevated, we grow 1% every day. We don’t claim to know everything. But we do know this: the best-performing clients we work with aren’t always the ones spending the most on marketing. They’re the ones who’ve fixed the leaks before they scaled.

If you want to talk through where your funnel is leaking, book a strategy call with our team. We’ll look at your numbers honestly and tell you exactly what we see.

Transcript
Jared Tangir (00:01.058)
What’s up everybody? Welcome back to the Elevated Trade Secrets podcast, the podcast for home service and trade business owners who are serious about building something real. I’m your host, Jared Tangier, CEO of Elevated HVAC Marketing. And today I’ve got Michael from North Edge Marketing joining me. Let’s get into it. So Michael, tell me a little bit about your background. How did you get to where you are? Start shortly after you were born and until yesterday.

Michael Busic (00:26.374)
Sure, yeah. growing up, know, I come from a Croatian household for any of your viewers that are European. You we grew up traditional European feeling. My family is immigrants. They came over here. So, you know, I always went down like the traditional route. Like I had to do good in school, had to get good grades, played a lot of sports growing up, played a lot of soccer. I participated a lot in Croatian folklore for those, again, that are…

Familiar with the culture, you guys will know what that is. It’s just a bunch of like Croatian dancing and it’s just a culture. It’s a cultural thing. But anyway, I grew up, went through high school, then ended up going to university for engineering, which is, you know, not fun, not fun at all. McMaster, yeah. Yeah, it’s a Canadian university, so you know, is what it is. Engineering, I…

Jared Tangir (01:11.342)
Where’d you go? Okay.

Michael Busic (01:20.858)
I’ve always been good at like math numbers and that sort of stuff. So everyone was like, you need to go into engineering. It’s going to be, it’s going to be good for you because you love numbers and math and everything. Anyway, ended up doing that. Found out that I didn’t really enjoy much of it as I thought I did. I love science and math and everything. you know, it’s, it’s, find it interesting, but the career path, I just didn’t find that it would be the right thing for me. So then I ended up, I ended up meeting Mateo.

You met material. Fortunately, you know, you couldn’t come today. He’s a little bit camera shy and whatnot. No, I’m just playing. I’m just playing Yeah, I’m a material he was in the HVAC field already. So he already knew the industry He’s part of the ins and outs worked with a huge private equity firm of about 26 locations across Canada and Each location is doing roughly between I would say five to thirty million revenue So they they definitely have a lot of their systems down. They know

Jared Tangir (01:55.778)
Ha

Michael Busic (02:19.036)
how to market, how to have a proper sales process, run a proper operation. So we’ve been shadowing that company for a really long time. And that’s exactly what I’m going to be talking about today to show you guys everything that we’ve seen that works in the industry, that private equity companies are running, and how they actually go to these massive numbers.

Jared Tangir (02:37.496)
So how does an engineering background apply to HVAC outside of mechanical engineering?

Michael Busic (02:43.91)
Well, that’s the funny thing. Yeah, no, that’s the funny thing. It doesn’t directly apply, but the one thing that I’ve learned really growing up academically strong is the education system isn’t really there to teach you what you’re going to be using every single day in life. So for example, in math, you’re not going to be using half the stuff you learn. But the important skill that you do

learn in academia is how to problem solve, how to critically think and how to solve problems. It teaches you how to look at a problem, see what you’re given and you need to find a way to approach it with what you’re given and come up with solutions. So I would say that’s, it definitely helped being able to go through that process because I learned a lot how to properly think.

Jared Tangir (03:31.438)
Yeah, for sure. So what’s your role at North Edge?

Michael Busic (03:36.88)
Me and Mateo, we’re both co-owners, so we just do a bunch of everything. Yeah.

Jared Tangir (03:38.7)
Mm-hmm. Okay, awesome. And what expertise do you bring?

Michael Busic (03:45.162)
The expertise that I bring, I would say since I come from a more technical background, I know how all the automations and everything needs to be set up on the back end, so all the technical side. So that’s why I focus mainly more on like the operations and the technical side of things.

Jared Tangir (04:00.075)
Awesome, awesome. So one thing we, you know, a challenge we face at Elevated is, you know, when things aren’t going well, when we’re not, when our clients aren’t hitting their sales goals, it’s automatically a lead problem. And sometimes it is a lead problem, right? Sometimes it’s genuinely a problem. could be a lead volume problem. It could be a lead quality problem, but…

Michael Busic (04:21.81)
Absolutely.

Jared Tangir (04:23.618)
there’s always money being left on the table, right? And that’s something we’ve talked about in some of our past conversations and inspired us to really jump on the podcast. I was looking at a post you published the other day about how you break down the funnel and find those opportunity gaps. Can you kind of walk our listeners through what that looks like?

Michael Busic (04:38.886)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Michael Busic (04:46.14)
for sure. Yeah, so the as you were saying a bunch of money gets left on the table through things in their sales process. So the number one step that I believe everyone should be doing in order to find these things is you need to track the customer journey. Every single lead that comes into your company, you need to be tracking exactly what happens to that lead no matter if they if they didn’t book on the first call, no matter if they if they got an estimate done, you need to be tracking every single metric and

The reason why that’s important is because if you’re not tracking your metrics, how you’re performing, how your comfort advisors are performing, how your CSRs are performing, all the handoffs in between everything, you’re never really gonna know what to fix. that’s definitely the first step. The first step is from a new lead all the way to a job completed, you need to be tracking every single step in between that.

Jared Tangir (05:37.742)
Awesome. Awesome. And can you kind of break down a little bit more how you do that?

Michael Busic (05:42.77)
Sure. So everyone should be using a CRM like Housecall Pro, Jobber, or Service Titan, something like that. Everyone usually makes the jump to Service Titan because of the data tracking, but you can actually get a lot of really good data out of Housecall Pro. And if that’s what people are comfortable with, then I would definitely recommend staying with that. a much affordable option. We use high level in order to track everything. But basically the way it works is

I can just run you through sort of like the typical sales process. So for example, a new lead will come in, they’ll either call in or they’ll submit a form. Then, then the first point of contact is going to be your CSR. So your CSR is going to be in, in, in charge of sort of assigning that lead, scheduling, booking, and all this sort of stuff, handling like the initial objections. but the, other really important thing that CSRs need to be able to do is distinguish between

Jared Tangir (06:14.242)
Yeah.

Michael Busic (06:43.298)
repeat work new jobs If you’re coming back from a job that hasn’t been completed, so these are all Factors that affect the booking rate and one of the things that I’ve I’ve noticed a lot is people track their booking rate But it’s severely inflated because a lot of a lot of their bookings come from repeat work So of course if you’ve worked with a customer before and you’re booking them back in it’s ten times easier to book someone like that

compared to like a new lead coming from Google, right? Like they’re cold. Exactly, Exactly. Yeah, so that massively inflates their booking percentages. So when you have a booking percentage of 70 to 90%, you’re never gonna think that’s a problem, right? So that’s most important thing. First step there is to properly identify and sort of sort out which…

Jared Tangir (07:14.894)
They already have the trust, right? They’re coming in with brand awareness, brand recognition. They’re, yeah.

Jared Tangir (07:31.683)
Right.

Michael Busic (07:40.178)
like your booking rates for each kind of opportunity, whether it’s a service call, it’s an install opportunity, repeat work, all that sort of stuff. Because once you actually know your numbers for, this is what I’m booking for new install opportunities, this is what I’m booking for repeat work, you’re gonna have that data and you’re gonna say, oh, I’m lacking on the service side, for example. So now you have data that tells you you need to be focusing on this part of your booking process.

Jared Tangir (08:07.703)
Awesome, and the funnel keeps going, right?

Michael Busic (08:09.786)
Yeah, 100%. That’s just the first step. So after that, the next thing that would happen is the CSR or dispatcher, for example, books in, say four, let’s keep it on the sales side. So they’re going to book in for a comfort advisor to come to that door. What typically happens is they just book in for a comfort advisor to show up on Monday at 9 AM. But nothing actually happens in between that.

Jared Tangir (08:12.319)
Right, so where do we go from there?

Michael Busic (08:39.632)
And that’s stopped. just sort of book a, like, hey, they say on the phone, hey, we’ll have, we’ll have Jared come out Monday, 9 a.m. And then Jared shows up 9 a.m. Monday, but nothing happens in between that. So a lot of the times what can happen is homeowner is going to forget. They’re going to be busy. Some emergency comes up and they’re going to have to either reschedule or cancel. But the other issue here is they’re not tracking what’s actually happening at this point. Like did they even complete the appointment? Do they have to reschedule? Do they have to cancel all the cancellation reasons?

They don’t because if they’re tracking for example, we’re we’re we’re rescheduling a lot of appointments because Homeowners keep forgetting then there’s obviously an issue there that they need to fix because now they have that data like hey We’re we’re messing up a lot on this but one of the biggest things that I’ve actually I’ve seen very few companies implement before the comfort advisor shows up to the door is Sending that homeowner a pre-sales asset and what I mean by this is

for us what we’ve built out. send, before a comfort advisor even shows up to the door, we send homeowners a complete pre-sales asset. It includes a bunch of things. It goes through exactly what’s gonna happen in that appointment. It’s just basically giving the homeowner a bunch of value, like, hey, these are the common thing. This is what we’re gonna look at. This is what we’re gonna be looking for our estimate. These are common mistakes homeowners make when they’re comparing estimates. These are like…

all the things you should be looking. So we’re giving homeowner a bunch of value. There’s a video like, this is what our comfort advisor is going to do. Bunch of information. Now the point of this is we want to build as much value as possible before the comfort advisor even shows up to the door. It handles all the objections. So it makes the advisor’s job 10 times easier. Whereas if you’re showing up cold, like you don’t have anything, the comfort advisor, you’re basically relying on them to do the entire job. They have to sell hard. They have to…

push this, this, this, if you’re giving a bunch of value, you’re not only you’re giving them all that value, you’re setting yourself apart from the competition. Nobody else is really doing that.

Jared Tangir (10:47.061)
Yeah, and you’re prepositioning them to buy, right?

Michael Busic (10:49.326)
Exactly.

Jared Tangir (10:50.207)
The your comfort advisors are salespeople and it’s like the old inside sales outside sales model, right? We need you need to set your in-home service tax, right? That are doing the sales up for success. And there’s a lot of work that can be done via automation with actual, no additional human effort needed that can increase your close rate, right? and understanding and segmenting, is this a new customer versus an existing customer? And, and

Michael Busic (10:56.124)
Exactly.

Michael Busic (11:06.45)
Hmm?

Michael Busic (11:18.939)
Mm-hmm.

Jared Tangir (11:20.111)
It all comes back to the power of clean data. That’s the biggest gap we see is these CRMs actually have all the data. It’s really just understanding how to segment it and make it actionable.

Michael Busic (11:23.482)
Yeah, 100%.

Michael Busic (11:31.544)
Yep. Yep. How to use it. That’s like a huge gap. Like a lot of people don’t know how to actually use that data.

Jared Tangir (11:39.266)
Yeah, and how to run the report or extract it. And I would say most of the tools are, the CRMs are lacking in the reporting department, meaning all the data is there and you can get it out, but how to visualize it and understand it, digest it and understand where the gaps are, that’s the biggest opportunity and that’s why people need to work with a company like yours. Am I understanding that? That’s like your ultimate goal?

Michael Busic (12:02.962)
Mm-hmm. Yes. Yeah, 100 % the biggest thing if you look at what we actually sell its data we sell data

Jared Tangir (12:10.815)
Okay, right, well you sell data analysis, right? They own their data, right? Yeah. Do you guys do like, do you guys do call analysis? We’re really big into listening to our clients’ calls and we find a ton of opportunities in there. Do you work that into your flow as well? Yeah, what are you guys listening for and like how do you handle that?

Michael Busic (12:14.16)
Yep. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, for sure.

Michael Busic (12:24.304)
Yep, for sure.

Michael Busic (12:28.69)
100 %

Michael Busic (12:33.286)
We basically we give each person that we’re working with their CSRs We have an SOP that they should be following just a basic script of what they should be saying and all sort of stuff So basically we have like a template of what we should be following So we listen in on their calls see how they’re performing see how they’re handling objections and all this sort of stuff and basically it’s just Consulting we say like we found this maybe maybe try this angle or try this we see your your booking rate is lacking in this

Jared Tangir (12:54.391)
Okay.

Michael Busic (13:01.744)
So maybe try this this this

Jared Tangir (13:04.095)
Okay, that’s awesome. And then what about from like the upsell cross sell side?

Michael Busic (13:09.318)
Yeah, so that’s that’s like later on in the sales process. So yeah, so the next thing Yeah, and no worries. So basically like the next thing going back to where we were before When the comfort advisor actually gets in the door So again, they’re gonna be a bunch of things that can happen. Maybe it’s a reschedule It’s a it’s a cancel, but let’s say for example, they actually go through the appointment. They’re walking through the options and everything The homeowner is either gonna accept the estimate or they won’t accept the estimate at the end

Jared Tangir (13:11.755)
Yeah, I like to jump around a lot. You’ll know that.

Michael Busic (13:40.316)
So if they accept the estimate, obviously the next step is clear. You need to send back to the office, say, we need to book in an install date. But the biggest issue is where they don’t accept the estimate. I can’t tell you how many companies, like they just, see an open estimate, they do nothing.

Jared Tangir (14:00.767)
It’s funny you mentioned that. So I have a call coming up after this recording with a client who’s not thrilled with his results, right? And he claims it’s a lead problem, lead volume is there. our main KPIs that we track are unique leads, quotable leads.

Opportunity value and sales value right and things look pretty healthy on our end, but there’s a huge gap between Quote value and sales value right it’s like nine ten percent of the quotes are being closed so we looked in his house call pro And we found just in the last six weeks a hundred thousand dollars in unfollowed up Estimates right house call pro automatically marks them as expired after 30 days right, but there’s absolutely zero touch

Michael Busic (14:27.942)
Right, right.

Michael Busic (14:39.196)
Yeah, that’s ridiculous. I’m talking because

Jared Tangir (14:47.759)
points after the invoice was sent. No calls, no text messages, no emails, no nothing to actually try and get their competitors, I guarantee you, are following up three times and it cost them 100 grand.

Michael Busic (14:49.49)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Busic (14:59.472)
Yeah.

100 % and like one of the things is it’s hard like I understand it. They’re so busy They have a bunch of people coming in left right center They have to carry that all these fires to extinguish in the office like their offices burnt out a lot of people coming in they got to send out new estimates to keep on going and going going but they they don’t realize that you can make so much more money by just Fixing what you currently have

Jared Tangir (15:16.439)
Yeah.

Jared Tangir (15:29.197)
Well, and ramping up your lead volume is not going to fix the problem, right? You need to fix your sales and close problem.

Michael Busic (15:33.958)
Huntin’ never, never, my gosh. Yeah.

Jared Tangir (15:38.806)
before you ramp up your lead volume. That’s really, that’s the biggest gap there. We could get you 50 times more leads than you’re currently getting, but you’re not going to have the ROI that you need and that you deserve if the sales process isn’t fixed. My favorite is when I’m listening to some of these calls and a lot of CSRs I’m super impressed with. They’re very, very good. They follow a structured system, but you can very easily tell when there’s no

Michael Busic (15:41.851)
Yep.

Michael Busic (16:01.99)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Jared Tangir (16:08.899)
no SOP in place for how that call should go. I was listening to a call the other day, you’ll probably get a kick out of this. Somebody called and said, I need a mini split install. they were basically ready to buy on the phone. And then the gentleman said, but I own a flower shop, right, we’re really crazy busy through Mother’s Day, so I’ll call you back after Mother’s Day and get it scheduled.

Michael Busic (16:10.134)
yeah.

Michael Busic (16:22.843)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Busic (16:33.938)
Mm-hmm.

Jared Tangir (16:34.825)
CSR, the easiest thing to do, schedule a service appointment for the week after Mother’s Day. Get them on the calendar. If they need to reschedule or if they need to postpone or they need to cancel, that’s fine, but at least they’re in your system and there’s a 50 % chance they’re gonna keep that scheduled appointment and you just sold a mini split.

Michael Busic (16:40.206)
Yeah, no brainer.

Michael Busic (16:48.508)
Mm-hmm.

Jared Tangir (16:54.893)
And it was an LSA lead, so they paid 90 bucks for it, and it just went out the door. And I guarantee you, this person’s not gonna call them back, because they’re not gonna remember who they talked to. They’re gonna go back to Google, and when they’re ready, and call the next person, and that person’s gonna go out and sell the job.

Michael Busic (17:07.472)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So what happened? They just never called back or?

Jared Tangir (17:13.313)
They never, well, we flagged it. We sent it off to our client to say, I think there’s an opportunity you need to work on recovering. And we’ll circle back with our client in a couple weeks to, they didn’t book it. No, she just said, okay, yeah, I forgot to give you the end of that story. She said, okay, great, thanks. We’ll be here when you’re ready.

Michael Busic (17:19.898)
Mm-hmm, so so they didn’t end up booking that person in

Michael Busic (17:33.67)
That’s so unfortunate.

Jared Tangir (17:35.573)
It’s just burning, like she could have just lit a hundred dollar bill on fire. Lid her boss’s hundred dollar bill on fire.

Michael Busic (17:37.208)
Yeah, yeah, it’s the same thing

Michael Busic (17:43.518)
The easiest thing there would have just been to at least at least put them in the system Even if you don’t book this appointment, you can still put them in the system and say hey We have a new lead that is looking to get booked market to follow up with that person in two three weeks. Hey, do you want an appointment? Simple stuff like that

Jared Tangir (17:48.045)
Mm.

Jared Tangir (17:58.989)
correct.

It is, and that’s where the installation jobs, they’re usually not urgent. Demand services, it’s easy. You call, they have an immediate need, my stuff doesn’t work, I need somebody out today. Great, you go out, you book it yourself, job closed, and then you dump them in the follow-up process, which I wanna dive into deeper with you too about how you guys analyze that data.

Michael Busic (18:09.382)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Mm-hmm.

Michael Busic (18:20.442)
Yeah, it’s easy. Mm-hmm, yeah. For sure.

Jared Tangir (18:28.96)
the installation, might wanna, it might be a three week, six week sales cycle. And having both competencies within a home service trade company is unusual, right? So how do you recommend they bucket those separately and handle those processes?

Michael Busic (18:42.034)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Busic (18:47.899)
Which one specifically you mean like comparing? Mm-hmm

Jared Tangir (18:49.77)
like comparing an immediate need for a demand-based service call, right, versus a longer term sale. It could be a week, it could be two weeks, it could be five weeks for an installation or a ductwork installation or upgrade, things like that.

Michael Busic (18:59.154)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah Yeah, so I mean that that usually varies between company to company like some for example some companies have like selling techs for example So if it’s if it’s like a demand call, they’ll send out like a tech and the tech will do a diagnostic They’ll they’ll see like if it needs a replacement or if it needs a repair if it needs a repair then They can just do it whenever but if it needs or if they need a replacement the the selling tech can obviously sell a replacement right there or if they

If they’re not a selling tech, they’ll usually do is they’ll say, okay, I’m gonna hand it off. We’ll have one of our advisors come out and walk you through replacement options. So there’s a big difference there. We usually focus more, one of the biggest things that we focus on initially is with the comfort advisors. So that’s when we have like a comfort advisor booked in for an appointment. And then we look at that sort of data, how are they handling those objections?

Like what are their lost reasons and that sort of stuff. It’s a lot easier for to close a demand call because they need it, right? What are they going to do? for, for, as you were saying with, install opportunities, it’s always a lot longer sales cycle. it’s, it’s important to be consistently touching, like following up in the, in that gap throughout that three, six week process.

Jared Tangir (20:08.512)
Yeah.

Jared Tangir (20:24.31)
Right. And how do you usually recommend that they solve any solutions you can share, like things that you’ve seen have worked to improve that?

Michael Busic (20:29.318)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so basically what happens, let’s say a comfort advisor goes into a home, they walk through the options and everything, they present an estimate. At the end of that appointment, what they’re gonna get, or what they should be marking down at least somewhere is a little summary of how that appointment went. Like, did you complete the appointment? Did you present, how many options did you present? What did you present? Did they accept? Did they put a deposit down? Did you schedule them in?

Most of the time the answer or maybe not most of the time depending on the company the answer is going to be no like they didn’t collect a deposit They didn’t accept the estimate Now here’s where they should be tracking all of their lost reasons Because based on those lost reason, they’re not technically lost. They’re still open. They just didn’t accept it right away They need to be tracking why they didn’t accept the estimate. So for example, do they need to talk to the wife? Do they need to think about it? Do they?

Are they looking just for prices? They want to compare quotes. There’s a bunch of reasons why why they don’t want to Accept an estimate on the spot, but it’s important to know why because now that we know why they’re not accepting estimates Generally like in entire month, you can see all the reasons you say, okay We need to address this problem better then you need to know like then you can start figuring out Is it gonna be like is your pricing an issue? Is it a sales presentation issue? Is it like the way you’re following up like you’re gonna get all these?

all this information that’s going to help you understand why you’re actually not closing these deals.

Jared Tangir (22:00.087)
And you can use that to roll back into the pre-sales conditioning messaging that goes out before the call.

Michael Busic (22:03.41)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Oh Yeah, 100 % exactly you start seeing like oh, we’re getting a bunch of objections on here You just put that in the pre-seller. I said, hey, we’ve had a bunch of homeowners ask us this question This is what we how we address that

Jared Tangir (22:19.084)
Awesome. So now once we’ve addressed that, and our sales process is improving, we’re watching those metrics and things are improving, what comes after that as far as we walk through the buyer journey or the customer journey?

Michael Busic (22:24.252)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Busic (22:29.906)
Yeah, so let’s say the homeowner eventually accepts the estimate and they want to start moving forward with the installation process. The next step is going to be you’re going to be booking in a job with an actual installer. And again, there’s a gap to be made there as well because, for example, if they don’t collect a deposit but they want to schedule an install date, they can still just cancel it or just forget about it, reschedule and never actually

get that job complete. some companies are booked weeks out, but they want an install sooner. So that’s another huge gap there, for example. So then you need to start tracking from the moment that estimate’s accepted to the moment that job gets scheduled, and then on the install date. So it’s the same process. The installer shows up to the door, like, hey, were you able to complete the install?

Jared Tangir (23:05.622)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Busic (23:29.018)
No, we need to reschedule. And why do we need to reschedule? Because homeowner was, they forgot. So then now you know you need to start sending homeowners things beforehand so they don’t forget. It’s simple, but nobody has that sort of data that tells them like, this is why we’re losing jobs.

Jared Tangir (23:42.924)
Mm-hmm.

Jared Tangir (23:47.892)
I sent you a text message reminder to join the podcast recording. If I can do it. Yeah.

Michael Busic (23:50.148)
Yeah, yeah, Yeah, it’s super easy Yeah, then basically Yeah, there’s there’s that then They just have to do the install another thing that we do for example before before the install day is we send the homeowner like hey, here’s what a typical install day looks like and we walk them through Hey, this is we’re gonna show up. We’re gonna make sure we do this this this we’re gonna clean up the area make sure like the

driveways clear so we can move our stuff. We’re gonna do this, this. We’re gonna clean up the area after, put everything back how it’s supposed to be, and there you go. It just improves the customer experience a million times over.

Jared Tangir (24:32.46)
Which leads into the last step after our completed booking, right? I’m going to tee that up for you.

Michael Busic (24:34.766)
Mm-hmm exactly Mm-hmm. Yeah, so then the let’s say they finished the install everything is good now Now the installs done what most people do is they just say adios see and then they never never ever talk to that that a customer again, but There’s that’s probably one of the biggest gaps where people leave money on the table by not taking advantage of their past customers

Jared Tangir (24:49.728)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Busic (25:03.73)
They already trust you. They already love what you did for them. There’s so many things that we could get into For things you can do to start retaining and making more money off your your current customers

Jared Tangir (25:15.724)
Of course, and the main thing is asking for a review. That’s the easiest thing. And I feel like most contractors, HVAC, plumbing, electrical, any trade for the most part is good about it. We’ve had home service contractors out to the house and I’m always being asked for reviews and I always give reviews because I know how important it is to them. But there’s more after the review is requested.

Michael Busic (25:18.5)
Yeah, that’s the easiest thing.

Michael Busic (25:29.402)
Yeah.

Michael Busic (25:37.138)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jared Tangir (25:45.61)
you shouldn’t just ask for the review once. You really need to ask three or four times in a polite and professional way. So let me hear, I would love to hear how you guys recommend that and I wanna share how we do it and maybe I could learn something.

Michael Busic (25:57.361)
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. There’s, there are two different ways you can sort of ask for reviews. It’s you can either just like leave the job and then have an automatic text to go out and like, Hey, we appreciate you letting us service your home. We want to serve more homeowners like you. It would help us a lot. If you leave a review, you can do that, which, which is fine. It works. But the other really effective way that you can get reviews is by incentivizing your texts to

ask for reviews and There’s a really really big misconception that a lot of companies have out there Like you can’t incentivize Homeowners to give you a review you can’t say oh if you leave us a review will give you $50 will give you a free free tune-up or will give you this this this if you leave us or you can’t do that if you get caught doing that Google I’m sure as you know like

Google suspensions or they remove your reviews. They’re not fun to deal with Not at all, but what you can do is incentivize your technicians to Get reviews and but they have to do it in a natural way. They can’t obviously force them They have to earn it if they do a really good job. They’re good homeowners gonna want to leave a review Give them a spiff $25 50 to $50 per review and then what you can even do is have a leaderboard in your office

Hey, this technician got us 23 reviews this month. This technician got us 18. And then make a fun challenge out of it. Whoever, at the end of the month, whichever technician gets us the most reviews gets a $500 bonus, you know?

Jared Tangir (27:38.964)
Yeah, I found through our research, I found the best time to ask for the review is as soon as the job is completed before the invoice is delivered, right? That’s when customer satisfaction is the highest. And, you know, on Amazon for 29 bucks, you can get those NFC review cards. They’re super easy to program. And we’ve recommended to our clients, hey, I’m gonna run out to the truck to wrap up the job on my end.

Michael Busic (27:45.938)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jared Tangir (28:08.853)
Would you mind leaving us a review? Just tap this card, right? They go out to the truck. Even if they don’t have to wrap up the job in the truck, wait five minutes and then go back in because it is super weird sometimes and awkward for a customer to take out their phone and type their review right in front of you. But now you’ve handed it to them. It’s gonna be weird if they don’t.

Michael Busic (28:18.29)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jared Tangir (28:26.451)
Right? So you put them in an uncomfortable, but not uncomfortable situation. So that’s been really successful. And then ultimately we, and I love your feedback on this. So we do a four touch point sequence after the job is completed. So the first is a text message as soon as the job is completed with, with a similar message to what you said. Hey, thanks so much for trusting XYZ company.

Michael Busic (28:39.986)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jared Tangir (28:49.671)
We really your feedback is really valuable to us and we’d love to work with more homeowners with you. Please leave us a review on Google. Here’s the link, right? If they don’t leave the review we wait until seven o’clock that same night and send them an email Then we wait two days and send them a text message and again with just a quick reminder. I know you’re busy

If you could really find 30 seconds to leave us a review, we’d really appreciate it. No response to that. Two days later, a final email and then they fall off. Beyond that, you’re just harassing the customer for a review and nobody really wants to do that.

Michael Busic (29:09.03)
Yeah.

Michael Busic (29:20.986)
Yeah, yeah, yeah No, that’s a super smart thing that I think every company should be doing I’m not sure if this is how you have a setup in high level but really quick technical thing is like you can set it up as a trigger link if they click that trigger link Then they don’t get the follow-ups, but if they don’t click the trigger link is gonna keep following up with them

Jared Tangir (29:30.763)
Mm. Uh-huh.

Jared Tangir (29:37.291)
Interesting. Yeah, we should probably do it that way. That’s an improvement we can make. We do it through a form, right? So we send them to, collect their feedback on a form first that gets submitted. And then we ask them after they submit it, would you please share your feedback on Google? Right? So that’s how we’re preventing the follow-up, but yours would skip a whole step in there and probably improve conversion rates.

Michael Busic (29:42.706)
So yeah, that’s a really cool little…

Michael Busic (29:56.659)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, you can do it that way,

Michael Busic (30:03.954)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, it’s just a simple like if they click this link then they’re most likely gonna leave a review then you can still Check if they’ll actually left a review But yeah, that’s that’s just a cool little little tech hack

Jared Tangir (30:08.043)
Hmm?

Jared Tangir (30:11.827)
Of course.

Jared Tangir (30:16.799)
Yeah, that’s awesome. what else? The customer journey, right? I think we pretty much reached the end of the customer journey at this point, right? At least for the first job. We’ll share, what’s more?

Michael Busic (30:26.396)
There’s more. Sure. So a lot of, a lot of other things too is that companies aren’t doing is they, don’t, for example, they don’t have a referral program. They don’t have a way to properly convert these people into maintenance contracts. They don’t have a proper way to sort of start running tune up campaigns every spring, every fall to them that, aren’t on maintenance contracts. They don’t have these ways to maybe sell upsell IAQ or like smart thermostats or things like that.

So the really easy way to go about this is to just, once a job’s complete, based on they didn’t get a maintenance contract, they didn’t sign this, they didn’t get this, just send follow-ups. Hey, we’re selling this, this. But you don’t want to do it that way because you’re hard selling at that point. You’re not providing any value. The correct way to go about any of this is what we found works best.

Jared Tangir (31:11.69)
Mm-hmm.

Jared Tangir (31:15.519)
Yeah.

Michael Busic (31:23.102)
Across like even even that a massive private equity company 26 locations What you want to do is provide value through storytelling through education This is look at Jimmy This is what he was hot. He had before he had a fresh install But we noticed like two years down the line his his bills are getting expensive all this sort of stuff So what we did is we did this this this to help him out next thing, you know

His bills went down, his system was performing better and all this sort of stuff. But the other caveat here is a lot of companies will start talking in technical language, but the most important thing, like as a homeowner, I don’t understand what my SEER rating is. I want to know what the outcome is for me. What am I going to feel in my home after this? Once you sell that feeling, you educate them, that’s where you get the most conversions.

Jared Tangir (32:07.861)
No.

Yeah.

Jared Tangir (32:19.967)
That’s fantastic. lead with value.

Right. It’s just like internet marketing. Like we, tell our clients when we’re trying to capture leads, we want to lead with value. Right. It’s of course, when somebody’s searching for AC repair near me, we just want to lead with, with conversion options. Right. But to build ongoing relationships with your customers, it’s all about providing free value that’ll inspire them to think, Hmm, maybe that would benefit me. Right. and then what about, what about cross department?

Michael Busic (32:22.587)
Yeah, 100%.

Michael Busic (32:28.156)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Busic (32:35.11)
Yeah.

Michael Busic (32:46.618)
Yeah, exactly.

Jared Tangir (32:52.829)
Right, so a lot of companies offer their multi-trade HVAC plumbing electrical or obviously the three the big three combination So let’s say you go out for an AC repair or you do it a new AC install How have you found ways to strategically move that customer from an HVAC client customer into plumbing or electrical?

Michael Busic (32:56.283)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Busic (33:12.85)
Yeah, this is a really interesting topic as well because I know a lot of people I made a video on this recently a lot of people they jump into different divisions Because they want more revenue. I’ll get into that. But basically the way it works is you You let’s say you you put in a new AC for this this customer The year or maybe like couple months or a year down the line you just sent out a simple like Message or or something like this like hey like we

Jared Tangir (33:23.882)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Busic (33:41.299)
I’m not sure if you knew but we also do this this this we offer like plumbing for example and we’re you would love to come out do a free like I don’t know I don’t know anything about plumbing like a free Water flush inspection, you know what I mean? Like something yeah exactly like a free inspection safety inspection all this sort of stuff and just to get people in the door that way So it’s super easy to just bounce bounce them across different departments like we mainly just focus on the HVAC side of things because there’s

Jared Tangir (33:50.366)
Nah.

Yeah. Yeah, flush your water heater.

Mm-hmm.

Jared Tangir (34:08.455)
Okay.

Michael Busic (34:10.65)
So much money to be made with just focusing on one trade. If you have your HVAC trade mastered, you can easily get that up to 10, 20 million in revenue. You want to start hitting that two to 4 million EBITDA range. I think that’s a healthy range where you can start expanding into other divisions because you’re going to have your systems down. You’re going to know like this works in HVAC, just simply translate it to plumbing.

Jared Tangir (34:14.367)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jared Tangir (34:27.796)
Mm-hmm.

Jared Tangir (34:36.863)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Busic (34:39.93)
simply translated to electrical. Whereas if you don’t have anything down, if you start a new plumbing division, you won’t have anything down for that either. You start an electrical division, you’re going to have the same problems. So.

Jared Tangir (34:50.219)
So the strategy is even before you start considering adding another trade, your systems need to be dialed in, right? Your entire customer journey process. So let’s take this full circle now, right? How has, because I’m fascinated that you have an engineering background, how has your engineering education and background helped, right?

Michael Busic (34:57.554)
100 % 100 %

Jared Tangir (35:16.147)
with everything that we just described. Understanding because you’ve mentioned the word data over and over and over again.

Michael Busic (35:20.594)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jared Tangir (35:23.997)
there’s a ton of data available and most people aren’t using it. So let’s talk about how your engineering degree has helped set you up for success here and develop the systems and analysis. And then let’s talk about a couple low hanging fruits that, you know, any business owner with the Housecall Pro or service type account, like what could they do tomorrow that would get them some value?

Michael Busic (35:46.003)
Oh yeah, easy. 100%. Yeah, I mean, it goes back to like one of the things that I said before. It’s that rigorous education, like you need to figure out based on what you’re given, how do you solve the problem? So I would say like the number one, the best value that I’ve got from like a rigorous academia program is understanding how to approach problems, how to think things through when it doesn’t work how you expect on the first try. How do you see…

Something wrong happened and to think of all the different possibilities what could have went wrong you need to be able to backtrack think I remember I made this mistake here here this it could be this this this so The biggest thing is just going to be your thought process. How do you critically think? How do you approach problems based on the data that you have and As as we both know it’s a lot of these companies don’t even have that data to begin with so setting them up with that data understanding their numbers

And then actually that’s another part of our value. It’s like you can, we can set up so these people have their numbers, but what do they know what to do with it? How do they know how to fix it? So that’s again, like something that we would come in and we’d be like, your estimate conversion rate is not looking too strong. see you’re falling off here, here, Here are three options that you can do to fix this. What do you want to do? we can implement.

Jared Tangir (37:09.419)
Awesome.

Awesome. Yeah, my son is actually in a high school trade school, right? For engineering. It’s called mechatronics. And I think what you’re saying, and it makes perfect sense is in engineering, know, the solution isn’t always apparent. You have to check, you know, you have to start at the beginning of the chain, right? And work your way down until you find what’s causing the problem. And that’s, you know, really what you guys have perfected at this point, right?

Michael Busic (37:14.994)
Nice.

Michael Busic (37:29.074)
Exactly.

Michael Busic (37:39.185)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it all comes down to the theory of constraint You you track everything there’s gonna be one thing holding you back fix that one thing then you go through it again Then you find the next thing that’s holding you back fix that one thing go through it again Next thing fix that you just fix one thing at a time Everyone wants to fix everything all at the same time fix one thing one thing get it right and then go to the next

Jared Tangir (37:40.617)
That’s awesome.

Jared Tangir (38:03.69)
Brilliant, brilliant, that’s great advice. So if I’m a House Call Pro user or Service Titan, this is probably the two biggest in HVAC, what are one or two low-hanging fruits that I could look at tomorrow? What’s a report I could run? What’s a data I could export and find something actionable to help my close rates, my conversion rates, my cross-sell rates? What do you recommend?

Michael Busic (38:18.364)
for sure.

Michael Busic (38:24.764)
for sure.

Michael Busic (38:29.17)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I’ll give you a couple that anyone can pretty much do. It’s super simple, but it takes work. One of the easiest things that anyone can do, and it depends on how they have their data segmented in their CRM, but assuming they’ve segmented their stuff properly, go into your CRM, find all the open estimates that you have over the past three, six, 12 months, depending how far, you can go as far as years. I know people that they got an estimate.

two years ago and they still didn’t replace their system somehow. some people are just like that, right? You go back, you export all of the open estimates that you have and you just, you send them simple texts and emails, again, leading with value, education and trying to get them back on the board and uncover that objection. That’s another beauty, the little side note, another beauty of like the art of follow-up is to uncover objections by providing value. You can’t like,

Jared Tangir (39:03.22)
Yeah

Michael Busic (39:29.83)
People follow up and they just say, I’m just checking in on the estimate. Did you give us some thought? I don’t care about that. Like I’m, I’ve got stuff going on. Like, no, I didn’t think about it. Whereas if you’re, you’re providing me value with that follow up, like, Hey, like there’s so many ways to provide value and follow up. So it gets the person thinking. but yeah, so anyway, you’re going to export all your open estimates. You need to figure out why they’re open. So that’s again, tracking your lost reasons. and then just get in touch with them, tailor it.

to that lost reason, why it’s open, and just put them through simple texts and emails. It’s super easy to build out, especially in high level. You can do that in like 10 minutes. So that’s one easy, low-hanging fruit. Another one would be all of your super happy customers. You can go back to them and say like, hey, we’re starting a referral program. Every single person that you refer to us for a new replacement.

we’re giving out $500 in cash as a referral fee. Or we’re getting court side tickets to this game in a month or whatever. The main idea here is you want to take sort of what your customer acquisition cost is and translate that into value and give it to your customers because you’re already going to be paying

$500 and ad spend and in closer like your sales guy commissions. You’re already gonna be paying that much anyway So you might as well just give it to them Give it to your customers like no the other mistake people make is they they want to give out little little bonuses like a little $25 gift card. I don’t care about that, you know

Jared Tangir (41:15.786)
No, no one’s going to put any effort into a $25 Starbucks gift card. I’m sorry.

Michael Busic (41:18.866)
Yeah, yeah, yeah you position it like hey do you how would you like to pay off that system that you just purchased with us? Hey, like every single person $500 you refer us 10 20 people thousands of dollars back you paid off your system already Yeah

Jared Tangir (41:35.528)
Yeah, true. And you build an army of brand advocates, right?

Michael Busic (41:41.51)
100%. 100%. Another thing we’re kind of testing is we’re testing putting that referral program into the maintenance contract as well. So the maintenance contract is going to have all these benefits, discounts, priority scheduling. On top of that, every single person you’re for us, 500 bucks. Pays off the maintenance contract. You have a customer for life and customers for life.

Jared Tangir (41:57.62)
Huh.

Jared Tangir (42:02.728)
Right, and that web just continues to grow. That’s fantastic. That’s fantastic. Yeah, bonus.

Michael Busic (42:04.85)
Oh yeah, oh yeah, 100%. I mean, or even one more, I’ll give one more. You would go into all your leads that you haven’t even booked. leads that, know, tech has never came out. For example, like the lady or the flower shop example you gave, yeah, people that have never booked an unemployment. You go through that entire list. Hey, I remember earlier a couple of weeks ago, you were looking to book an unemployment. we have some available spots here, here, here.

Jared Tangir (42:22.974)
the flower shop owner.

Michael Busic (42:33.852)
provide value like hey like whatever and there you go.

Jared Tangir (42:37.874)
Yeah, I mean, there’s so much leakage in the sales funnel at most companies, right? Until you’re maximizing every drop of every opportunity, there’s always going to be more leakage, I guess, and you shouldn’t really expand your marketing. I’ll probably edit that out, actually.

Michael Busic (42:43.004)
Mm-hmm.

100%.

Michael Busic (43:04.434)
It makes sense because you know like people want to just dump more more money in but it’s it’s only just going to amplify like a broken system

Jared Tangir (43:12.362)
Yeah.

Jared Tangir (43:15.738)
That’s it. Until you’ve patched all the holes in your process, throwing more money is just wasting it.

Michael Busic (43:22.694)
Yeah, like a really interesting example my mentor gave me a couple years ago. It’s like you have a bucket of water that has a bunch of holes in it. If you keep filling up that bucket of water and water is going to keep flowing out, you’re never going to fill it to the top.

Jared Tangir (43:36.296)
Yeah, makes perfect sense and that’s exactly what we’ve been talking about for the last 40 minutes or so. So before we wrap up for today, is there anything else you think you want to share with the audience?

Michael Busic (43:37.628)
Yep. Yep.

Michael Busic (43:48.691)
The only thing that I would urge is before even thinking about your next shiny object your next move is Please just try to look at what you have going on. Try to think of ways to Get data out of what you currently have and it’s even it’s so much easier nowadays too with all the technology all AI Claude all the sort you can code something that’ll get you the data. You need no problem. So it’s it’s all about It’s all about

Having the, here’s the other thing as well. A lot of people aren’t humble enough to sort of look at what they have. They have this sort of ego that everything that they’re doing is perfect. They know exactly what they need. But when it comes to talking about the data and looking at, reflecting on what they actually have going on, they just run. So definitely the number one thing I’d recommend is.

get something that can tell you your numbers and carefully reflect that every single week and if you have everything tracked properly you’ll know exactly what you need to fix.

Jared Tangir (44:55.402)
100%.

At Elevated, we strive to grow 1 % every day. We don’t think we know everything, whether it’s learning a new skill, staying on top of a new algorithm update, trying to find a way to better support our clients, 1 % every day. The same thing applies. You’re never going to have a perfect business. You’re never gonna have a perfect sales process. It needs to be constantly evolving. So get out your own way and start looking for opportunities to learn and to improve.

Michael Busic (45:13.765)
yeah.

Michael Busic (45:26.064)
Yeah, yeah, and by all means like I’m not saying I I know everything either I’m constantly learning new stuff every single day, but it’s it’s I would say one one thing not not to like toot my own horn but one thing that I kind of do that helps me keep on learning and even applied in academia I always think that I’m not smart. I Never want to be the smartest person in the room. I always I try to keep my mind as open as possible and learn

Jared Tangir (45:30.974)
Yeah.

Michael Busic (45:54.429)
from as much people that I can. I know there are people ahead of me, people below me. Doesn’t matter. I can learn something from the person below me too. I can learn a million things from the people above me. It’s keeping that open mind and not thinking you’re the best, you’re the smartest, you know everything. I know for sure I am not the smartest person. I bring myself down to a level, I’m below everyone. I wanna learn, I’m hungry. And I think that’s one of the biggest traits that a lot of people can apply. And if they…

Jared Tangir (46:18.142)
Yeah.

Michael Busic (46:22.286)
If they had that sort of mindset, like I know nothing, they would have that hunger, that drive to learn exponentially a lot more. So I think that’s a super interesting thought process.

Jared Tangir (46:33.417)
That’s a great mentality to have, it really is. So Michael, if somebody wanted to work with you guys, contact you, what would they expect? What does your process look like? Do you do an initial assessment or an audit? And then how would people get in touch with you?

Michael Busic (46:48.498)
Yeah, for sure. One of the easiest ways you can get in touch with me, just DM me on Facebook. I’m super active. Or you can just hit up my websites. I have YouTube videos going on, links going to my website and all that stuff. You can just book in a call, get in touch with me there. Easiest way is just shoot me a DM. can set up a… First, I’ll just try to give you quick call, understand what your goals are, what you want to do next, what’s your vision, all sort of stuff. See if it even makes sense to help you out. But then, the…

Jared Tangir (47:01.949)
I’ll put all that in the show notes.

Michael Busic (47:18.652)
The next thing that we would do is we would hop on a call or we completely break down your sales operation and we would show you exactly where you’re losing money like hey like you might be losing money in this step, this step, this step, this is what I would do here, here, here. This is how much money you’re losing based on your new leads, your average ticket and how much you close like this is the gap. And in the end, if you want it fixed, you can work with us or you can find out a way to do it yourself.

Jared Tangir (47:45.929)
That’s awesome. So you’re delivering value either way. That’s fantastic. That’s fantastic. Well, thank you all for tuning in to this episode of Elevated Trade Secrets podcast. We will see you on the next one.

Michael Busic (47:59.155)
Peace.

About the Author

Jared Tangir is the CEO of Elevated HVAC Marketing, a boutique digital marketing agency that exclusively serves HVAC contractors. With a track record of generating millions in new revenue for clients ranging from sub-$1M to $15M+ businesses, Jared and his team specialize in building predictable, profitable lead generation systems—not just websites. Based in Doylestown, PA, he’s known for his direct, no-fluff approach to marketing strategy and relentless focus on measurable ROI.