Solving Contractor Pain Points Through Automation & Tech (ft. Tanner Mullen)

Logan Shinholser
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Contractor Growth Network podcast. I’m Logan Shinholser, and today I have Tanner Mullen, who is the CEO and founder of a CRM specific to contracting companies called DripJobs. Now, the cool thing about Tanner is he’s not just a software guy. He still owns a painting company out of Florida, which is really what springboarded him into starting this software company to make his own life easier. And it’s just taken off from there. So without further ado, let’s go ahead and jump into the episode. Did you always, like, when it came to the operation side of things, are you like an ops person at heart or, like, I guess now you solve a lot of that stuff, but, like, is that just who you are inherently, or what’s up with, dude?

Tanner Mullen
I mean, inherently, I think, like, just always looked for the easy route, man. Always looked at things subjectively, never took anything for face value, and always challenged popular belief in the way things can be done. That kind of transitioned into. When you own a business, you’re actually rewarded for that, as opposed to in school, you’re penalized for it. So that was, you know, I’m just in my playground, man. You know, that’s. It’s. It’s. It’s just. It’s a. It’s a survival technique to optimize and refine and iterate and get from point A to point B faster.

Logan Shinholser
So let’s kind of go back to the beginning, then. So, I mean, you obviously, you own DripJobs at this point. I mean, we’ll talk all through that. But you didn’t just come out all of a sudden at the gate and go, I’m going to create a CRM for contractors. So let’s go back to the beginning and talk to me a bit about Premium Painting. Which. Do you still own that or are you out of that now? Or I guess kind of walk me through that.

Tanner Mullen
Yeah, I do. I still own it. I have four crews out there painting right now. I do most of the work from the office, if any. I have an admin that helps me out on the operational side. But it’s our strategic. Strategic advantage at DripJobs is I’m the user, you know, and I think I still enjoy it. You know, I enjoy the people aspect. It’s getting kind of to be a lot, so. But right now, yeah, I still. I still run and operate premium painting. I started it eight years ago and really just wanted to solve that. One problem that I was facing was I was buying leads, and I needed a way to get Those leads converted to estimates and that’s. That’s where it all began.

Logan Shinholser
So I guess, walk me through. When you were doing this at Premium Painting, what were you doing from like, let’s say, like a manual perspective to try to solve that issue?

Tanner Mullen
Yeah, well, I come from a sales background. I have experience in car sales, life insurance, you know, even in banking. I looked at it from a perspective from a sales lens. I would, you know, hunt down loans and really, like, be aggressive when it came to pursuing business. Right. So this concept wasn’t new to me, but what was new to me was when I entered into the painting business, the concept of people actually wanting to do business with me and wanting to be sold was kind of foreign, right. Because generally I’d get a stack of leads or I’d have to work leads and like convert really cold leads to interested. So with what I was using to generate me leads, which at the time was Angie leads or HomeAdvisor. You know, that was what it was.

Tanner Mullen
The concept of somebody requesting something and me having to pay for it immediately was awesome. But it also came with the drawback of, hey, I got this lead’s information. It could have been at 9:00 at night, could have been on the weekend, I’m with my kids. It could have been, you know, someone that I got the information, they didn’t answer the phone. So the initial thought is, okay, like, I have this information, how can I get this customer scheduled for an estimate? And the manual process was, of course, I’m painting at the time, you know, when I started my business, I was in the field, I’m painting, I get a new lead and I’m busy.

Tanner Mullen
Like, and we know, I mean, of course most of us know that, like, the more time that goes by from the time that lead hits the button, in whatever capacity, Facebook, Google, anything, the significant drop happens of interest. And it’s just, you know, it’s been proven. There’s a Harvard study on it, whatever. So even before then, I kind of knew that, but I’d still be busy and I couldn’t get to that lead right away. And even if I did and they didn’t answer the phone, Logan, you know, what are the chances I call them again and again and do the necessary work required to pursue that individual, a very busy individual that at this point in time eight years later, is even more busy than they were eight years ago, more inundated with information.

Tanner Mullen
So that was the manual process is calling them, whipping up a quick text message, copy and Pasting an email and hoping for the best.

Logan Shinholser
And when you’re going through it, I mean, are you, like, searching for a solution to that, or are you just like, hey, this is just the name of the game. I just got to be on my P’s and Q’s, making sure that I’m just doing outreach as best as possible?

Tanner Mullen
Yeah, I mean, at the time, there wasn’t a solution, right? Of course, you know, the concept of, you know, automated emails was present, but the real trick was to get the lead from where I was getting it from to be sent to the place that does the automation to trigger the email. Right. Like, that was the big concept at the time. And it took me. It took me, you know, just again, like the natural pursuit of the fastest, most efficient way to do things as possible was to find a software that could. That could handle that sort of automation. I stumbled across a program called ActiveCampaign. You may. You may know about. Do you know ActiveCampaign? Automation powerhouse. Right.

Tanner Mullen
And one night, it was like one in the morning, my wife went to bed and I just did like that, you know, mad scientist night. I’m sure you’ve had a couple of those, brother. You know what I’m saying? You’re just in the office just like, going nuts, and you’re getting the epiphanies. And I build out this concept where I could grab a web hook from HomeAdvisor and catch that hook in Zapier, send that hook to ActiveCampaign, trigger an email sequence, and then from then, you just start going.

Logan Shinholser
At this point, are you doing all the estimating yourself or are you trying to develop estimators on the team? So you can take that hat off. What was that like?

Tanner Mullen
I was doing all the sales, all the estimates. I was. I wasn’t painting. I knew better, you know, But I love the art of selling. I love being, you know, at that. At that time. I love being face to face with customers. I love having control over the sale. I was documenting my journey along the way. So I was on Instagram, you know, I was building relationships with other contractors, and what I found was that they were all having the same problem. So I came up with this concept called Trade Thrive. And what I would do is I would set this system up for other painting contractors. So we would brand the emails, we’d write all the copy, and we would pretty much set up this lead to email sequence system.

Tanner Mullen
And of course, that came with its own problems because, well, what happens when the customer books an estimate or says they want an estimate. Does the email sequence keep going? How do we unsubscribe someone from that sequence and get them into something new? And that kind of began the process of really refining what tray thrive at the time look like. And you know, of course eventually we created a custom solution built off of that foundation.

Logan Shinholser
So just at the time when you’re, you know, you’re in your lab, you’re doing all the essentially automation.

Tanner Mullen
Yes.

Logan Shinholser
What was before, you know, you set everything up in the automation wise to afterwards. Did you see like a noticeable impact when it came to client engagement to give estimates? Like I guess what was the outcome of that?

Tanner Mullen
Just fundamentally it was an epiphany. It was, I’m in two places at once. I didn’t have an admin at the time. Right. And that’s what we would expect our admin to do is to follow up with the lead. And it really only took a lead that came in at 11pm when the anxiety hits, right, because we take the office home with us, you know what I’m saying? So it really only took that happening one time for the lead to come from Home Advisor to go through my automation to get the email, to click the link, to go to the calendar page, to book the appointment, to be moved from the initial stage to the next stage to receive a value building follow up email for me to have the epiphany.

Tanner Mullen
And it was just, it was, it was like, okay, like now we’re moving forward. Like now like that was automation now. I was just in two places at once, you know, and that’s all I needed.

Logan Shinholser
I know for us like over here like we have like obviously we’re a marketing agency but like you know like the different stages of okay, like what is our contact rate? So leads come through, how often are we getting a hold of them? And you know, when we actually mapped stuff out we started to notice that like where are the major drop offs? And one of the first drop offs that we had was, you know, somebody fills out a contact form and if they don’t schedule automatically on our calendar, we then manually have to call them back up to say, hey, you didn’t schedule a time, let’s pick a time. But they’re not used to our phone number so a lot of times they just let it go to voicemail.

Logan Shinholser
So we had to, you know, we implemented a automated, you know, SMS that immediately goes out. Hey, we noticed that you didn’t schedule anything but you know, expect a phone call from this number. And that increased our contact rates like immediately. And all it really was just, you know, do a couple pieces of copy, set up the automation, and just like that, it’s now nurturing the lead so much more. So one more touch point. I know. Oh yeah, it just makes it so much easier. It’s just like. And then you don’t think about it, you just gotta make sure it continues to work because it is technology. But it made a huge impact, just the contact rate. And as a result, just down the line of each stage, everything just grows and it makes it so much easier.

Tanner Mullen
Naturally, people want to be pursued. Naturally, people, especially in the residential space. It’s an emotional buying decision. There’s a level of uncertainty. Even if people feel certain in the moment they click the ad, there’s still a level of uncertainty that happens after they hit the submit button because it’s a commitment. And generally speaking, there’s a convincing that needs to take place. Even in your market. You know, I’m sure it’s still risky for people to reach out to a marketing agency. They’ve heard horror stories or they know, you know how it is. So for me, like, I don’t just look at the touch points as transactional anymore. Even though I used to. It was like, okay, hey, let’s get you booked for an estimate. Let’s get you booked for an estimate. I’ve since transformed my approach to be more relational.

Tanner Mullen
Like, we have a three, I think we have a three hour text message that is by far in our little groups that we communicate in like the most high performing text message of all time for converting leads. And it goes out three hours after the lead enters into the DripJobs pipeline and it says, does Wednesday work for an estimate? Question mark. And it’s like, that’s it. And it kind of creates the notion that, you know, this contractor just whipped out his phone and just like quickly like wrote it. So that’s kind of been our approach. And you know, I think people buy into that, flip it around to.

Logan Shinholser
Like the client’s perspective. Because I know we’re talking about the benefits to the contractor and to you, let’s say in the world of like the actual client, what is, you know, you having these touch points do from like a client experience standpoint in your opinion?

Tanner Mullen
Man, I think at the very least it separates us. Right? Like, I think the way that we should be in our sales process is, well, naturally we pursue. Right? Like, and I think most people think that automation is only good for the sales side, like you and I just gave two examples of the sales side. Right. But I had an epiphany as were iterating DripJobs of how important the automation is on the production side. Like, there’s so much communication that has to happen in the production cycle of contracting, you know, and for us in the painting business, we have five stages. The first one is when the project gets accepted.

Tanner Mullen
And I would, you know, whenever I’m doing a talk or, you know, trying to sell people on DripJobs, I always say, like, you know, when someone accepts a proposal from your company, you know, Friday at 9:00 at night, you know, how long does it take you to say thank you? You know, and if the answer to that question is, well, I mean, you know, Monday hits and then Tuesday, and the next thing you know, they’re calling me, asking me what next steps are. And that’s not the same energy and intensity that occurred on the sales side. Right. So that means that there’s already what I believe to be a difference in the experience. Right. In other words, I was sold something with high expectations, but once they got the business, the communication dropped off. Right.

Tanner Mullen
So I’m a big proponent of, you know, integrity. I think it’s integral as a business to uphold that same standard on both sides. So for me, the contractual, the communication on the actual production side is so important. And for the customers, hey, thank you for, you know, approving our proposal. These are next steps. This is what you can expect out of us in the next four days. We’re going to have a start date for you. If you’re interested in a color consultation, let us know and we’ll get you scheduled in for a free color consultation. Then we schedule it. This is your start date. This is what you can expect. If it rains, we’re in Florida, please have some grace. We’ll make sure to get you rescheduled.

Tanner Mullen
And then once we get their colors, you know, people send us colors, they send us their, you know, we confirm the colors. Hey, we got your colors. I can imagine that there’s customers out there that are worried that the contractor didn’t receive their colors because they’re not getting that feedback. Right. So that’s just the beginning of it. But from the customer perspective that this software solves two problems, which I’m very.

Logan Shinholser
Passionate about, the certainty that you’re adding into the process for the consumer is huge. Like, you fill out the form and then it’s immediately, what did I get myself into? It’s like Used to be in car sales, I’m sure people, as soon as they enter the lot and the first time someone goes, hey, they’re like, oh, man. Or they’re into it. But if they’re just the, you know, not ready to be full on, you know, sold to, it’s. It’s a little bit like, what did I just do? So I know from the other side of it being the homeowner, like, we just had our house repainted a few months back. And I know from our side, the process was simple. I just filled out a contact form. Boom.

Logan Shinholser
It just, you know, we got an email immediately with the, like, the basic scope of work with the information that we filled out, and then a text that says, hey, this is who we are, if you want to. I mean, went through the whole process without ever speaking on the phone. Like, you know, which. Some markets love that. Other ones, like, for me, I was like, I feel confident enough. I’ve seen their stuff, they’ve worked at my neighbor’s house, things like that. But just that speed was instantaneously like, okay, like, this is somebody who at least has some system. So when it comes to, let’s say, their scheduling delays or, you know, because even in Charlotte it rains. You know, we just had a big hurricane and there’s issues.

Logan Shinholser
It just, it built in so much like, okay, they’re going to have a contingency plan for things, because from the get go, they’ve already hit me with a couple of different ways of communicating. And it was great. I mean, the communication was great, like the whole way through. So it just set the stage of like, okay, this is more of a. It was almost like a tech. And then I ended up doing a bunch of research on the company where, like, they have, like, VC funding, which for a painting company is a new concept I’ve never heard of. Yeah, it was. But it was awesome. It was a great experience because they just had all their software stuff dialed in.

Tanner Mullen
Yeah.

Logan Shinholser
And it was cool.

Tanner Mullen
And that’s going to be the standard, you know, And I think, you know, we can’t. You know, what’s interesting is like, you’ll experience that in the other areas of commerce that you engage in. So if you go to a restaurant, you’ll. You’re probably. You’re like me. I think we’re around the same age. Like, you’ll go and book a restaurant online and get a confirmation that’s normal to you. You know, you’ll order something on Amazon and you’ll get notified of Every step of the frickin journey, you know, and like that’s normal to you. If you don’t receive that, then you think something’s off. In other words, you lose trust in the business if you sign up for a new app and you don’t get that, you know, email confirmation, email, you’re like, is this app even legitimate?

Tanner Mullen
Like so the thing about it is that, you know, for me I’m a big advocate for the guys that struggle with the bridge from nothing to something, you know, and I think the way we built it was to where those automations that you and I were talking about, I spent the time, hours, days, weeks doing that simple automation of getting a lead and triggering something and then moving the lead based off of an action. And like that requires a high level technical acumen that most contractors won’t even sit down to do. So we just give that out of the box, you know what I’m saying? And it’s like we can make that small company look like the VC company and that to me, like that drives everything, you know.

Logan Shinholser
I love it now when you bring somebody in because to me there’s still a level of like they have to understand what’s happening. I remember when I first started the whole marketing journey 10 years ago for my dad’s company, he was just like, look man, I don’t want to know anything, I just want to know is this going to make my phone ring or not? And like I understand it because you know, at the time he’s 50, he’s late 50s, getting ready to retire and he doesn’t care about like me explaining like keyword research and all the stuff that you need to do. But I realized there was some fault in that where if I at least could sit down and go, look man, let me spend two hours and just explain basically 30,000foot overview how this stuff works.

Logan Shinholser
Like there would have been a lot more trust in it and he, I would get a lot more buy in. So when it comes to your experience of onboarding a new client and then we’ll jump all into DripJobs and how it all works, stuff like that, you bring a new client in, is there like a, are you meant to be more of like a, hey, you just flip the switch on and it’s done or is it like, let me just educate you about like basically this is what it’s going to look like, you know, from an experience standpoint from your company, but also from the client’s perspective.

Tanner Mullen
Yeah, it’s a great question. I mean I think everyone has a different level of technical acumen. I think I would be silly if I didn’t make sure that our customer success team wasn’t the largest portion of our operation. Knowing good and well that everyone needs a certain different type of training. Understanding the concepts are important, but, you know, the way it should be built is, you know, like, for example, like, I don’t do. If you had a chance to play with AI, I’m sure you’ve messed around with it a little bit.

Logan Shinholser
Yeah, yeah.

Tanner Mullen
It’s like you and I don’t need to know how that thing was built. We just need to know the value behind it and how.

Logan Shinholser
Sure.

Tanner Mullen
How it can help us get from point A to point. So I think, like, it’s almost like somebody pulls up and gets a new Lamborghini. We know the car is going to drive. But ultimately it’s important for you to know, like, hey, you want to press this button? You want to, you want to do this? You want to do this? Like, we already built this thing for you. It’s going to go really fast. Just make sure you understand that. Like, hey, like, there’s a couple things here that you need to know about that are different from what you’re used to driving, because the concepts, entirely different, because we’re talking about touch points of communication. So it’s important for you to be aware of what’s sending, how you can adjust what’s sending, because essentially the software is going to communicate on your behalf.

Tanner Mullen
So in other words, you need to know, like, hey, like, you know, they’re gonna think it’s coming from you or your business. So those sorts of things. Yes, that’s, you know, great question because that’s, you know, that’s.

Logan Shinholser
Yeah, I, I remember early on we had a client that were like, doing just no SEO and blogging for and stuff like that. And he called me and he was like, hey, I just got a call. Somebody called me and said, you know, I found your latest blog that you wrote. And because of that blog, like, we are reaching out to you to build our house. And he’s. But he said he was like, and this is before we would, like, set every. You know, we have a different setup now. But he was like, I had no idea what the blog was, but I just had to go along with it and be like, oh, that’s so great. Like, thank you very much.

Tanner Mullen
Real quick.

Logan Shinholser
Yeah, right. That’s what I’m saying. Like, you know, because I, I don’t remember what the one Was. But he was just like, oh, it’s so cool. Like, yeah, we. We invest a lot of time and energy into the blog and, you know, because it’s, like, written as him and stuff, so. Yeah, I can imagine, like, the. You can relate, you know, what’s going. Yeah, yeah. So I get all that stuff.

Tanner Mullen
You need to write them. So, like, the drips or when you sign up, all of them are in there. Comb through them. Make sure you’re happy with the tonality.

Logan Shinholser
Sure. So at the time, like, you’re at this inflection point where you use an active campaign, why create your own software versus just, like, you know what? I had this built out in activecampaign. Every other painting company out there, I could just. I’m just sort of painting automation company where we’re gonna. You know, you have to get your own active campaign subscription, but I’ll build everything out for you. Why do your own thing? Because that is, like, such a big lift that I think most people. I’d imagine. I’ve never built software, but I’d imagine people underestimate every single time.

Tanner Mullen
It’s. It’s been. It’s been the most challenging but most rewarding journey. I mean, of course, like, at this point, it’s nice to talk about it in, like, a relaxed context, but to be honest with you, I kind of just went in with Faith Blind, just kind of said, you know what? Like, I have a lot of people that are asking me to complete the journey. Right. So in other words, it would be like, okay, Tanner, like, you set up another stage for me where, you know, you have proposals that we’ve sent. We want to follow up with those people.

Tanner Mullen
But how do we get the communication from Joist or Jobber or one of the other apps that they were using at the time into activecampaign and then have the customer click a link and, like, it was just kind of getting to the point where it’s like, if I didn’t pivot, I’d only be able to solve a need to a certain degree, which could be worse, instead of being helpful, because now you have all these apps. So I kind of just felt the pull. I knew that there was something there. It just required making it to where we satisfy the entire customer journey, not just, you know, the first few stages.

Logan Shinholser
So when you first set out to build DripJobs, did you have the full journey in mind or did you start off going maybe would just be the front end?

Tanner Mullen
Not at all, man. Honestly, it was just the. It was the sales cycle. Is what I. When I pitched the idea to the development firm, we really only talked about one pipeline. I went hiking in the mountains with my family. I had an epiphany. I said, you know what, we need two pipelines. There’s got to be one for sales, one for jobs. And that really helped because it was like kind of getting overwhelming with like this large huge stage pipeline. So, and then that allowed me to recognize that there’s communication that needs to happen on the other side. But like the key component here is like one of, obviously one of the biggest functions of DripJobs is creating proposals, right? So when you create that proposal and you hit the send button, that card is moving to the proposal sent stage.

Tanner Mullen
The proposal sent follow ups are going to, you know, kickoff and inside of those emails are links back to the proposal. So a customer can actually take action after they read that email, which wasn’t possible in our previous system because every proposal is unique. It’s not going to route back to whatever proposal was in whatever software they were using. So it eliminates the friction.

Logan Shinholser
So and when you start off, are you thinking, hey, this is, I know painting, I’m a painter, I’m just going to apply to this industry. Then that way all, you know, when we’re talking about, you know, like a color consultation, a roofer is probably not going to have much of a color consultation need. So did you start off with just one industry, do you think? Let’s just go front end. But I can do it for anybody.

Tanner Mullen
No way. Yeah, I knew when I was building it that you know, the business principles are the same. Every contractor, it doesn’t matter what you do, wants to communicate with their customers and they want to give their customers a great experience. So we leverage that heavily. And then in our iteration cycles and what we’re building, we build industry specific features as add ons. Like for example, for the painting business, one of our things that we have is production rate estimating. This is an estimating system that you can plug in measurements and rooms and substrates and gallons and it calculates it all for you. So like that was kind of our nod to the painting industry and that allows us to be very competitive there, but still maintain our core foundation as a customer centric, communication focused software.

Logan Shinholser
So talk to me a bit about how it’s like evolved over time. So we start off, we’re pitching to the development firm, we’re just doing front end stuff. What were some of the inflection points where you’re like, well maybe we could add a little bit more and then take it from just how to get the proposal out to now how do we actually get it to maybe production and it stops. So can you kind of walk me through the evolution of the software? Because it’s, I’d imagine it’s never ending.

Tanner Mullen
Yeah, I mean, you know, back to me being the, being the number one user. I mean the thing about it is like, and again I look at this as a major strength. That’s part of the reason why I’m still involved in my painting business. Because as I grow my painting business, I recognize the different things that we need in order to be efficient and that can just go right to the development, you know, product manager and they can iterate on those things. But for me it’s like the evolution was, you know, what did a $800,000 painting company at the time need? Proposals, invoices, work orders, follow ups, you know, it needed the ability to text customers to read responses to follow ups.

Tanner Mullen
It needed the ability to have a task manager, needed to be the ability to see some data, some, you know, lead metrics, to be able to see all these things. So like out of the gate it was like I kind of knew what it needed. What I think I was, you know, through selling the software and having feedback from all sorts of different people. What it did was it showed me that I don’t do business the way everyone else does. So which you know, is an epiphany to somebody, you know. But ultimately for me I was just like, you know what? Like okay, I can see why you would want that built. I could see why you want ach. Like I never run ACH payments, just never. I like barely ever.

Tanner Mullen
And it’s like I had enough people say like I need ACH payments, you know, just little things like that, you know, that kind of just, you know, we consider ourselves product led growth. We publicly put on our website our feature roadmap and let people vote on what we build next. So that’s kind of like how it’s evolved over time. And if we have enough people that knock on our door about it, you know, we’ll prioritize it.

Logan Shinholser
What’s it like for you as a. I’m going to venture to guess non software developer developing software. Because most people that have a software or that their background is in development but you’re coming in be not even like oh, I came out of corporate America, you’re coming in, you know, blue collar, even though you’re not you don’t operate as like the truck in a truck by any means, but it’s still. Painting is a blue collar space. So what’s that like for you? Stepping into pretty much a whole new world when it comes to how to build something.

Tanner Mullen
It’s different, man. And at first it sucked because generally speaking, you know, with my painting business, if my painters didn’t show up one day, guess what? I could go in there and roll out a wall. I could, I could save the product. In other words, I could save face with software. I had to go through a bunch of channels to get the iterations done, especially early on. So we had like 50 companies sign up in the first like six weeks. And you can imagine, I mean, when you first launch a software, the bugs that are just, it’s just like bugs. It’s, it’s bugs like people texting me, this isn’t working. I’m stranded and the app’s not turning. Whatever you can think of went wrong. Went wrong. And I was assigned a project manager by the development firm that built it.

Tanner Mullen
I went local, I didn’t go overseas because I knew that I wanted to be able to clearly convey the vision. And I was like, whatever, I’ll pay more for that. And which I did. And it was sufficient. But it wasn’t exceptional because I had multiple clients, they were building multiple softwares at the same time. Things get missed, you know, And I was given a project manager who clocked out at 5:00, didn’t work on the weekends, and my customers work on the weekends. And I had to. So I ran into this like, major roadblock where it’s like, okay, I don’t know how to code. I have a software company that really isn’t for me, but they claim to be. I have to go through so many channels, I’m like, I’m heading in a failure direction here.

Tanner Mullen
Like, if I don’t make a change fast, I’m going to hit a roadblock. And I knew no one that could code. So the pivot that I made is I went on Reddit and I went to the co founder subreddit and I said, hey, I got this software launched, I got 50 users on it. I need a co founder that can, you know, I didn’t even. Dude, I didn’t even know our tech stack. It was to that level. I’m just vision, like excited. I couldn’t tell you our tech stack at the time, which is crazy to look back on. So anyway, I had this guy reach out. He worked for Microsoft and I was like, oh, Microsoft. Like, you must be like, elite. So me and this guy start talking. I vetted him pretty good, as much as I could. But imagine this.

Tanner Mullen
Like, imagine you don’t know how to paint. You own a painting business. So someone that is talking paint language, you think that they’re really good. You’re like, oh man, it sounds good. Like, you know, we have jobs to paint. We got to get started. So we worked out like this deal where he would come in and we try them out for 30 days. And it was just, you know, he was a very aggressive co founder. He was big on Y Combinator. Like, he was really big on scaling and selling. And that’s not me at all. I’m like, dude, we are not exiting this thing anytime soon. Like, this is going to be a product that we are going to refine to be the best CRM that we can build. He wasn’t with that, very money focused, wanted to take a check early.

Tanner Mullen
I’m like, you’re working at Microsoft, dude. So this was a very weird thing for me. And he lived far away. I don’t know this guy. Anyway, long story short, he winded up embezzling funds from our users. He extracted credit card data. He was just a terrible individual. He created friction between me and the software company. Next thing you know, I do it again. I’m like, I have no choice here. If I don’t find a co founder, I’m in trouble. I went on Reddit, I did it one more time, and that’s how I landed on Jason, who’s been with us for coming up on four years.

Logan Shinholser
I tell you what, man, from a Reddit perspective, I, I love it. Like, I use it a little bit back in the days for like entertainment stuff, but my wife and I have a, we have an eight month old and my wife would be like, Logan, like, have you noticed that he’s got, I don’t know, a red spot on his left arm? Do you know what that is? That? I’m like, I don’t know, just go to Google and literally she’ll type something in. And on Reddit it’ll be like, my baby has a red spot on their left arm. Does anybody know what this is? And it’s like verbatim, all that stuff. So I, I would have never thought to do it as like a. Yeah, not like a dating app, but like a, hey, I need a partner in this stuff.

Logan Shinholser
But I mean, it worked. It works, man.

Tanner Mullen
It worked.

Logan Shinholser
That’s crazy for.

Tanner Mullen
Yeah. And it was a Hail Mary, man. It was a. Toss it up, see what happens. What.

Logan Shinholser
What’s it like when you find out that this guy embezzled from. Not. I mean, it’s one thing to embezzle from you, but like, you mean from a brand stability perspective to, like, know that he did this with clients? Like, what’s that emotion?

Tanner Mullen
Just. Just any business owner, you know, would not want to feel out of control. It’s just like. It’s almost like it felt. It’s honestly just. It sucked, dude. It’s like I had a friend send me a screenshot of a charge. So this guy spun up a fake stripe account, put DripJobs on it, and started running subscription charges on our users. Obviously, no one’s really going to catch that. Like, it’s kind of. It was a very tricky scheme. So he was just pocketing all this money? Yeah, man, it was terrible. It was. But thankfully we caught him. You know, he made a mistake on his Stripe application and put an old Google phone number on there and were able to call it. See, it was him. It worked out, you know. You know, at the end of the day, man, that was pretty crazy.

Tanner Mullen
We learned a lot, though, because, you know, were storing credit card data improperly. Like, not improperly, just not best practice. Like, so now we have so much in place to prevent anything like that from ever happening.

Logan Shinholser
It’s kind of like when the IT company comes by and they’re like, hey, you’ve got all these endpoints and you get the. And I’m like, look like we’re a small operation. It’s cool. Until that one time that something goes wrong and then you’re like, okay, it’s like insurance.

Tanner Mullen
We’ve dealt with that. We’ve dealt with hackers, we’ve dealt with bots. We had a bot come in and build a hundred accounts and send out. They tapped into our API and sent out text. I mean, dude, it’s a journey, like I said. But once those things happen, you have to just bullnose through it. I’m grateful to be talking to you today, in a happy mood about the direction of things, trust me.

Logan Shinholser
And I think that’s the one thing that every business owner forgets, is that what you experienced. Stripe went through that. I’m sure Meta went through that. I’m sure every software, every time company, everybody faces it because you just don’t know what’s going to pop up until it does. So. But nobody really talks. Like, you know, you don’t really hear, you know, venmo coming out and going, hey, here’s all the times that when people were transferring money, they were getting, you know, money skimmed off the top. Yeah. But it happened 100%.

Tanner Mullen
Oh, yeah. It’s inevitable. You can’t. No one’s built a perfect software program that doesn’t have flaws or holes. And you’re putting a lot of trust in the people to build things the right way. And, you know, I’m blessed, man. I have a good team right now. I do.

Logan Shinholser
So talk to me a bit about, like, the full process now with Drip Job, somebody comes in, they get signed up. What is it like, what are all the capabilities from the time that, let’s say somebody fills out a contact form on the website all the way through till the end? How does DripJobs impact everything?

Tanner Mullen
I mean, you know, dude, it’s. It’s so interesting because, like, there’s so many holes in every business that, you know, most business owners, like I say 90%, do not have an efficient intake process for their customers. Right? In other words, like, you can call a painting company right now, you might land on that VC company. But most companies, like, you know, when you call them, you’re going to say, you know, I like painting estimate, right? And then just wait for what happens. Because no one knows what’s going to happen, right? It’s not like when you go into a restaurant, you say, I’d like a table, right? Like, you know what’s going to happen next. Like with the, with contractors, no one knows. It’s either going to be. You have to text them your information.

Tanner Mullen
First name, last name, email, phone number, address, which you’re not trained to do. So you’re probably going to omit some of that information because you’re like, this is, you know, it’s kind of weird. He’s going to say, hold on, let me write it down. Or he’s going to type all your information into his phone. And when he’s driving or paying or doing whatever he’s doing, right? And it’s like, that’s like the first problem we solve is that we give every company a booking form. Like, if you do nothing with DripJobs, at least you get the booking form. Because what that does is it gives you a clean format that you can send to a customer in a text message. So it’s like this. It’s almost like a webpage that you send to a customer right from the app.

Tanner Mullen
So if someone calls you just say, hey, I’m going to send you a link. Just fill out your information and we’ll get you scheduled in for an estimate. Send the form, customer fills it out, they get a text message, they get an email and then you have a request sitting in the queue waiting for you to review and schedule when you have the time, not off the cuff, which is friction. And customers appreciate that. So you ask the question, what happens when someone comes in? It’s very simple. They come in, they add a contact and that’s it. Like it’s the automations are done, the drips are done. The, you know, the proposals.

Tanner Mullen
We have some templates in there but generally speaking like there’s really no setup besides adding in your logo and adding some add ons if you want to try out the different things that we’ve built.

Logan Shinholser
And then does DripJobs help at all with like on the production side of things or is it predominantly still just like getting them through from a client experience standpoint? Up to that point, yeah, production, we.

Tanner Mullen
Have a job schedule, we have change orders, we have work orders. Right. So I just created an automation today that actually sends the work order to the crew leader automatically from DripJobs. Right. So in other words, like I’ll move the customer to a certain stage, it triggers an automation that recognizes the crew leader and it sends them a message in slack with all the customer’s information including the work order. You know, so things like that, you know, notes, you know, you name it. Generally speaking, we’re pivoting heavily into the production management and job costing which is a huge feature we released earlier this year.

Logan Shinholser
And is that meant to be like just front office is using this or is it supposed to be like crew leads or you know, have an app on their phone that now everybody’s in communication that way. Like what does it look like from an internal communication standpoint?

Tanner Mullen
So I’d say that’s an area where we are lacking is the crew access because they need their own app. There’s just so much that a crew member and we want to do with it. But most of what DripJobs is for your sales people, project managers, admins and owners. When it comes to the crews, they can work right off the work order. One thing that you know is a drawback is that they don’t have a schedule built in, but we found some workarounds for that. But ultimately that’s a big plan for us going into the next year is getting something for the crew members to clock in and to do all those crew related functions.

Logan Shinholser
So is that the next big thing for DripJobs that y’all. Because I’m sure software, it’s, you know, small little iterations.

Tanner Mullen
Yeah.

Logan Shinholser
Over and over. And then you get five years down the line and you. This whole robust system versus, like, you know, I. I know it takes a while. If somebody says, hey, can you just add a form that I can put on my website? It’s not like, no, give us two hours, something out. It’s like, yeah, I know. And I don’t think anybody realizes that because they think it’s. It’s just so commonplace, like, what you’re bringing up with. Like, you go to a restaurant and you go on resi to, like, get your reservation. And, like, that’s so easy. But I’m sure so much went into that to, like, be able to build that one feature that just says, we’re going to link up our schedules with what they have, reservation wise, with what you can get.

Logan Shinholser
Like, one form could take somebody a whole quarter.

Tanner Mullen
There’s so many checks in place. It’s insane. Yeah, it’s not. So the next big thing, to be 100% honest with you, Logan, is actually we are tearing down the entire software and rebuilding it from scratch. So how come it was never, you know, again? Like, we call this technical debt in the software space. Right? It’s like, you know, when it was originally built, it was not built for the almost 2,000 companies that we have using it. It was built for 50 companies. And the data layering, the way that the app functions and flows, it works. But it won’t work for when, you know, we scale. And I made the decision last year. I talked to my CTO and I said, you know what, let’s build it from scratch with what we learned, and it’ll be built on the best possible tech stack that’s available.

Tanner Mullen
It’ll have a lot of the things that we learned in place. So, you know, when you. When you’re playing the long game, like us, like, we’re not, again, we’re not trying to scale this thing to exit. We just really want to make a really great product. It’s an easy decision, man. So right now we’re just, you know, we’re rebuilding. We’re keeping the current version updated with new features. We have a team that works on that, but the majority of our resources are actually currently working on the newest version of DripJobs. So what.

Logan Shinholser
What have you learned from. I mean, you start off as a contractor owning that, so, you know, you have your. Your own, I don’t know, fundamentals or understanding of business from that sense. What did you learn by owning a SaaS company that was different than a contracting company that maybe you can apply back to your contracting company?

Tanner Mullen
You know, to be honest with you, man, it’s actually learned more in my painting business.

Logan Shinholser
Interesting.

Tanner Mullen
Than I did the software business. Because, you know, when you’re a quote unquote visionary, right? Like, you have the ideas and there’s some visionary leaders that, like, I don’t know, they drive their team too hard, you know, and it’s like, I spent eight years in the painting business. My team can only paint so fast without breaking or getting mad at me or feeling like I don’t respect them, or feeling like I don’t understand them, or feeling like I’m only in it for my best interest. So with software, the developers are just like the painters, you know, it’s like, yeah, I have all these great ideas, but for me, it’s like I have to have a deep understanding of the process on how to paint so I don’t overwhelm the team with my grandiose vision. I have to be patient.

Tanner Mullen
I have to understand where they’re coming from. I can’t just hit the, you know, CEO button every time. I don’t like the speed of which things are getting done. Because if we rush through a paint job, and I know this for a fact, it won’t be good for either the customer or the painter. And if we rush through code and pushing out features way too fast, it’s the same thing. So to be honest, if, you know, the painting business experience has really taught me more about leadership and management than I learned in the software space.

Logan Shinholser
And as you’re, like, trying to, like, build these two companies, how are you now balancing your time? Because they are very, you know, one is all not scale, but you get a new client in, it’s a lot easier to manage versus if you have to go paint a new house, that’s a crew going off there for a week to do it. And it’s just. It’s very different business model. So how are you? How do you balance the two at this point?

Tanner Mullen
Yeah, I mean, I take weekends off entirely. Like, I don’t do anything on the weekends besides spend time with my family. I mean, you have to during the week. I’m balls to the wall, man. I mean, it’s painting business, putting out fires, hiring, you know, coaching, being a therapist, helping, you know, still doing all the things that a normal business owner would do. And in the software side, a lot of what we do is automated, you know, the sales are mostly automated from website traffic that sign up for demos or just sign up in general, which takes a huge load off of me. Development is pretty much automatic. My cto, I have a VP of engineering. Like, these guys really know what they’re doing.

Tanner Mullen
So the real only responsibility for me is to just be the people manager to identify, you know, bottlenecks that I can contribute to and, you know, just build up the people, which is something that I enjoy doing anyway. So there’s not a lot of time debt there for me. So, you know, yeah, it’s just kind of like balancing both. But it’s interesting because I use DripJobs in my painting business and I, you know, so it’s easy for me to spot things that it would take a couple interviews with users to get to the core. You know, I see all the bugs first, I see the problems. If I get a new feature, I’m the one testing it. So those things I can help with, you know, and coincides with my business.

Logan Shinholser
So my next question was going to be, you know, early on, I know there’s a lot of just using premium painting to then kind of drive the innovation for what DripJobs needs. But it sounds like, you know, I would have kind of figured that would have slowed down, but it sounds like that still very much is at the forefront of you’re testing everything and going, could we do this, could we do that? I’m assuming in addition to the users being able to vote on.

Tanner Mullen
Right.

Logan Shinholser
What are those next features that we bring out? So it’s kind of like this. You’re not just hearing all the masses, you’re also getting it to implement it yourself and figure out what truly is the next thing that needs to be put into place.

Tanner Mullen
Yeah, there’s no better testing than on real data, man. Like, you know, a lot of software companies struggle with that because they have what’s called a product manager come up with an idea of what they think their users would like. And I don’t need that person. It’s like, not only am I well connected in the industry, I am the user. So I can’t see, you know, I can see what would be good. And sometimes, hey, look, sometimes we miss. There’s some features that we’ve tried out that just didn’t work. But the cool thing is that we don’t waste a lot of time with our development. It’s like we’re pretty well certain that anything that we’re working on is Something worth, you know, that’ll be worth it when we release it. So, yeah, big benefit for sure.

Logan Shinholser
So if somebody wants to get started with DripJobs, how do they go about it?

Tanner Mullen
Dripjobs.com But I always say book a demo first. Like, you know, don’t just sign up. You can like if you’re like me, I’m a sign up first guy and then book the demo later. But you know, we actually call those onboardings. So in other words, we’ll train you for free. So if you sign up and you’re like, okay, I like this, then we’ll do a free training for you. But the demo is kind of like preliminary, so you can just see what we do. It’s a 30 minute Zoom call with our account executive, you know, and they’ll just show you what it can do. And we have a 90% closing ratio on demos with no high pressure sales tactics. That’s just straight value. So, yeah, it’s pretty straightforward.

Logan Shinholser
And what would be happening in somebody’s business if they’re listening to this, that they would go, you know what? I need DripJobs. Like, what are they noticing that they, that DripJobs is going to be the answer to their issues?

Tanner Mullen
So many analogies. But I’ll try to pick one that I like. Okay. If you have a family and on the weekends you get a business phone call and you get anxiety and you walk away from your family and you try to answer that phone call, you need DripJobs. Simple. You know, you need something that communicates for you because your customers generally don’t respect the hours of operation. So you need to have a system in place. Either that or you hire a 247 human to do it for you. Which I have yet to find anyone that’s interested in that role, nor do I want to pay for someone to work that much. So it looks like automation is something you should embrace.

Logan Shinholser
Cool. And last question. Kind of an off the wall one. But as you’re bringing up talking about, you’re on, you know, you’re going hiking with your family and you have this business epiphany. I, I do that same stuff. I’ll be like Universal Studios with my wife. And then she’ll notice that I’m like zoned out. And she’s like, what are you thinking about? And I’m like, oh, nothing. And she’s like, what is it? I’m like, well, have you noticed that this line to ride the ride is so long, but they’re entertaining you the whole way? I Wonder how in our business, when we have long lead times, what can we do to, you know?

Tanner Mullen
So I love that.

Logan Shinholser
And she’s like, come on, man, like, we’re on vacation. So, Mike, with all that said, I was thinking about that as you were talking about, do you have, like, an entrepreneur, whether they’re alive or they’re dead, that you look up to as, like, man, that was the guy or the girl that just from an entrepreneur standpoint, they were like, the best of the best.

Tanner Mullen
Yeah, it’s a good question, man. You know, I’ll give you an entrepreneur and I’ll give you a personal development figure that’s helped shape my mindset. So I’d say entrepreneur would definitely be Russell Brunson. He’s, you know, I mean, he did. He’s. He’s doing it. He actually read his book called Expert Secrets, and it really helped me understand the value of creating a tribe, creating a. Creating a cult, like following, you know, even though it’s. I don’t like that word, but it’s the idea behind, you know, creating raving fans about what you’re building and creating a community around the tool. And I think that’s helped us a lot. You know, it’s. I think that’s the direction that a lot of software companies that you’ll see have to take. Because generally speaking, people want to put a face to a name. That’s just how.

Tanner Mullen
That’s just the nature of how we’re buying. That’s why there’s so many influencers and things like that. So for me, Russell Brunson, you know, he built clickfunnels. They did it with no funding. Something that I’m proud of that we didn’t have to do. So, you know, really inspired by his journey and what they’ve done at clickfunnels and personal development wise, I’m a big fan of Myron Golden. Really great business coach. Really in tune with, you know, a business mindset of value. You know, that’s. That’s kind of what I built DripJobs off of, is value first. You’ll find that, you know, we give extended trials. We really don’t want you to use the program unless you’re actually getting value. So, yeah, those two have been instrumental for me.

Logan Shinholser
Nice, man. Well, cool. Well, Tanner, dude, I appreciate you coming on here and just. How about you? Walt Disney is probably my favorite. Really? Yeah, I. He’s. He’s interesting. Just seeing his pathway and how much he.

Tanner Mullen
It’s incredible, right?

Logan Shinholser
It was unbelievable.

Tanner Mullen
The ultimate visionary, by the way.

Logan Shinholser
Dude, it was just humble. And then like the amount of like he slept at the office. He would, you know, teach all of his animators that work for him. He would just come in nights and weekends and just run like workshops for them on how to be a better animator. Dude. And then like to hear the whole build up to like Disney World. And like, he’s one of those guys. Like, he was the visionary, but he was also like the implementer and made it all happen. So, yeah, I mean, his Walt stuff is incredible. But I’m listening to a book right now all about Bob Iger, you know, CEO of Disney and his whole thing. So I’m interested. I’ve. I’ve used to be a very. I’m still.

Logan Shinholser
I am a big business book person, but I’ve slowly morphed into like biographies and stuff like that intricate stuff. Dude, you learn a lot of stuff from like. Because it’s no longer just like, these are the steps that you could do. But it’s like this is actually what happened. And like they opened Disney World and nothing was set up. And then they had to focus on this and this to then get past the PR issues and stuff. So it was, it’s cool to hear how they navigate. You start to realize like, okay, like everybody here, everyone’s dealing with it. Everybody’s got. I went to a seminar yesterday, Jim Collins, who wrote Good to Great, he spoke at it and he was just talking all about the trials and tribulation.

Logan Shinholser
And I think he said, like, to like, grow a company, like the successful entrepreneurs that, you know, typically takes about 34 years for them to grow their company to a place where it’s like solid if you. Well, so I was like, I started mine seven years ago. I got 27 years ago. I’ll be 61.

Tanner Mullen
Way to look at it.

Logan Shinholser
Good retirement age. So, yeah, you do.

Tanner Mullen
Like I told you, man, your name has stayed true for all that. All those time. All that time since I’ve seen you years ago.

Logan Shinholser
So it’s effort as you know, it’s a lot of effort. You know, once you start climbing it. It’s just. There was a quote that was like, the more that people, like, look to you and look up to you, the more that they’re going to want to point out any sort of flaws or discrepancies. So it’s just, it’s like heavy is the head that wears the crown. Like, the more you go up the expectation more especially.

Tanner Mullen
Yeah, especially when there’s money being traded for the value, then it. And for some reason, people get. Go nuts. I don’t know. Yeah.

Logan Shinholser
Because that’s when it really matters. So. Yeah, man. Well, cool. Well, Ted, I appreciate coming on this, guys. DripJobs dot com. Do a demo. Check it out.

Tanner Mullen
Thank you, man.

Logan Shinholser
It’s awesome.

Tanner Mullen
Honored to be here.

Logan Shinholser
Of course, man. I’ll see you guys later. So that was a really cool episode. What I really liked was just the principles that he’s able to apply from his own business into the software to really help kind of lead the innovation. So he’s not just creating features that nobody really wants. He’s actually creating things that he has identified a problem in his own company, which is super cool. So. So if you want to check out DripJobs, go to their website. We’ll put a link in the show notes below and we’ll see you on the next episode. Thank you so much for joining us this week on the Contractor Growth Network podcast. This episode of the Contractor Growth Network was hosted by Logan Shinholser and produced by Dane Appleyard and Logan Shinholser. Today’s guest was Tanner Mullen.

Logan Shinholser
We look forward to seeing you next time when we talk about identifying your ICA with Ian Miclean.