Richard and his son Raphael have been with Kickserv for over 5 years and growing. I sat with Richard, Covid-19 style, long-distance using the telephone. Richard took some valuable minutes out of his day to share with us how he came to implement Kickserv field service software into his carpet cleaning business.

There are three parts to a success story - The Pain, the Fix, and the Outcome. Here is Father and Son's story.

The Pain

• Richard had spent most of his career up to 2009 talking to customers and listening to their needs and delivering on those needs successfully. He then decided to apply his salesmanship skills in his own business - Father and Son Companies was born. Richard had started his business by putting his name into newspapers and local publications at a cost of about $500 monthly. He advertised his services to residential homeowners and real estate agents. It was originally just Richard and his son.

• The business gained some traction in a short amount of time with the phone ringing about 5 times a day, but only closing 30% of all estimates. Soon after the phone began ringing regularly he noticed he had no time to track the source of the calls or follow-up with his customers.

• Richard hired a couple of part-time sub-contractors to assist with his delivery. The field team and office team were all on paper. Dispatching increasingly became more and more laborious. Some of the Important steps to business growth were being dropped out or missed. Richard noticed he had a problem with this customer flow-line. He wanted to continue to grow the business but knew his current system wouldn't handle much more.

• Despite the challenges, the business did grow and in a few years, he had 5 part-time sub-contractors and $150,000 in gross sales, but he knew he could do even better.

• Richard was trying to manage his crew and his finances using only QuickBooks. "QuickBooks is great for accounting but not rescheduling field crews"

The Fix

• In 2014 the phone was ringing enough and there were enough collections to be made that Richard decided to hire his first full-time employee.

• The office manager's job was to run the office. This meant to book calls, dispatch field service vans, and keep the books.

• Richard and his office manager realized that optimum field service software was needed. They went on the hunt scouring the internet and networking with other business owners.

• What were they looking for? They needed online software that would allow them to capture all the customers' data. The software needed to be dynamic enough to allow them to track where their vans were at and flexible to facilitate re-schedules and re-routing on short notice. They needed a method and feature set that would assist with reminding them to follow up with customers.

The Outcome

• "Follow-up is the key to success"

• Richard explained that with all the competition out there that follow-up was the key to tripling (X3) his business. Richard now does over $500,000 in sales each year! Wow! that is serious growth.

• Kickserv makes setting-up reminders on every job so easy. Richard now has the time and tools to stay in touch with his most frequent high-paying customers as well as those that may only use him a couple of times a year.

• Over +40% of Richard's business is repeat customers (and growing)

• Since Kickserv Father and Son's has increased their daily call count by 67% using follow-up reminders and closing almost double (X2) the number of estimates.

• And with new his new superpower ability to remain on top of every customer's callback and follow-through, Richard has been able to slash his marketing budget.

Richard continued talking with me about his experience using Kickserv support. He explained that part of his success was the fact that Kickserv's chat support feature on every page of the app is great. He warns others not to be fooled by slick ad campaigns or catchy websites. The true differentiating factor of getting the app integrated is the world-class onboarding and tech support at Kickserv.

Thank you Richard and Father & Son Companies Team for being our customer.