Episode Summary

For service businesses, growth is often framed as a revenue problem. But in many cases, the fastest path to higher margins is improving operational efficiency. In this episode, Justin Davis and Greg Ross-Munro explain why speed—not just price—wins in competitive service markets, and how technology can accelerate everything from quoting and field workflows to billing and decision-making.

Through examples from industries like disaster recovery, asphalt repair, and property services, they show how relatively simple tools—GPS tracking, mobile apps, real-time dashboards, and AI-assisted automation—can dramatically reduce errors, shorten billing cycles, and free teams to focus on higher-value work. The result isn’t just lower costs. It’s a stronger competitive position, better customer experience, and technology-enabled processes that increase the long-term enterprise value of your company.

Episode notes

• Why improving cost efficiency can be easier than increasing revenue
• The philosophy: “Fast eats slow” in service businesses
• How operational speed creates competitive advantage
• Why speeding up quoting, onboarding, and billing can increase sales
• The impact of digitizing field workflows and checklists
• Real-world examples:
  • Disaster recovery teams using GPS-based job validation
  • Asphalt repair companies using LIDAR scanning on smartphones for instant quotes
  • Automated equipment checklists generated from a single photo
  • Trash valet companies improving routing, payroll accuracy, and violation reporting
• How reducing errors saves money and increases operational capacity
• Why dashboards and data reporting improve decision speed
• How operational software can become a sales differentiator
• The role of proprietary systems in increasing enterprise value during acquisition
• A practical challenge: how to identify automation opportunities inside your business
• Why most service companies should start small with one operational problem
  

Episode Transcript

Justin Davis: Alright, hey my name is Justin Davis.

Greg Ross-Munro: I’m Greg Ross-Munro.

Greg: And today we’re going to be talking about how to improve your service business efficiency and maybe even your differentiation running a service business using technology.

Justin: That’s exactly right. Before we get to that though, things first. As a tradition here, what are you drinking?

I’m going to stay with the Florida theme today and go with this Island Life Key West Lager from the Waterfront Brewery in Key West. I’ve been to this brewery. It’s right there on the harbor. It’s a beautiful place. Huge place if it’s still around.

If you guys are listening and tuning in from the Waterfront Brewery in Key West, reach out for an on-site appearance.

Greg: We should do a podcast from there. Actually do it at the breweries.

I am drinking everyone’s favorite Belgian ale, a blonde Belgian, the Leffe. Put it in this little glass over here. This is actually my wife’s beer that I have stolen out of her collection because it looked delicious. Don’t tell her. She doesn’t listen to this.

Justin: It’s one of the legendary beers out there.

So Greg, today we’re going to talk about how to improve your bottom line by working on your service business, improving efficiency and processes and things like that.

I want to start the conversation this way. If you’re listening to this and you have a service business, whether you’re a lawn care company, a graphic design company, whatever you do—if you’re the CEO listening, you’re probably trying to increase your top line revenue every year.

But increasing revenue is hard. Marketing is tough. Demand generation is tough. At the end of the day what we’re trying to do is make our businesses spin off more cash.

There are two pieces to the balance sheet: revenue and cost. Even if you find it hard to move the needle on revenue, you can move the needle on cost and still put yourself in a really great position.

One of the best ways to do that is to use technology to reduce your cost.

Greg: Yeah, 100%. The other thing is speed, right? You’re always saying it’s not the cheapest that wins. It’s the fastest who wins.

Justin: Fast wins. Speed always wins. There’s a book I love called It’s Not the Big That Eat the Small, It’s the Fast That Eat the Slow. That’s been a philosophy of mine for a long time.

Given a reasonable tolerance for quality, speed will win in the market almost every time. Now if you go fast and produce terrible work, speed doesn’t win. But given acceptable quality, speed dominates.

Greg: Let me ask you something about that. When you say speed, do you mean the crews themselves working faster? If I run a lawn care company or a disaster recovery company and I’m sending field teams out after a hurricane to clean debris or cut trees, are you saying technology makes those crews physically faster? Or something else?

Justin: That’s a great question. It breaks down into several areas.

The crews themselves can sometimes be made faster with technology—but only to a point. Physics is physics. If you’re mowing lawns, the mower can only go so fast.

But when you look at the process of delivering that service, there are many other components: onboarding the client, quoting, payment processes, logging work, accounting, all the back-office operations that support the field work.

Those things can be sped up dramatically.

If you reduce the friction around the job, you get into the job faster, finish faster administratively, and move onto the next one. Even if the physical job doesn’t speed up, the overall workflow does.

And more jobs per day equals more revenue.

Greg: Exactly. Even speeding up the quoting process can win you more jobs.

I saw data from ServiceTitan showing that when companies increased quote speed by three times, they closed four times as many deals as competitors.

Another stat: service companies that digitize field workflows—things like scanning equipment with QR codes or automated checklists—cut billing cycles by 50 to 80 percent.

Imagine getting paid 80 percent faster and your back office doing 50 percent more work.

There’s also real-time data. A transportation firm called TDR Logistics cut operating costs by 20 percent by integrating fleet data into dashboards. They could see vehicle locations, optimize routes, and identify inefficiencies.

Those are huge numbers.

Justin: They are huge numbers. And sometimes it’s not the sexy stuff. It’s back-of-house automation buried deep in the process.

Another aspect of speed is decision making.

When you’re running a business, conditions change constantly. Markets shift. Customers change. You’re effectively navigating a battlefield of decisions.

The faster you get information—accurate reporting, dashboards, analytics—the faster you can make good decisions and stop burning money moving in the wrong direction.

Every hour your business operates, it’s burning fuel. That fuel is dollars.

So faster decision cycles save money too.

Greg: One of the first questions I hear from clients is, “How do I even know if I’m losing money on this?”

Paper processes are a big reason they can’t answer that.

Maybe it’s a checklist. Maybe it’s equipment approvals or maintenance logs. If the process isn’t tracked digitally, you can’t audit it. And eventually that causes slowdowns.

You run into disputes, missing equipment, performance reviews where someone has to dig through old records.

Efficiency isn’t always about doing the same work faster. It’s about freeing people up to do higher value work.

And sometimes technology enables things you simply couldn’t do before.

For example, one of our disaster recovery clients used to highlight roads on a map to know which ones were covered by FEMA contracts. Crews had to visually check whether they were allowed to work there.

Now they open an app with GPS precision. The map tells them whether the road is authorized. If it isn’t, they can’t even log the debris pickup.

That reduced the error rate almost to zero.

Justin: Error reduction is massive. Every mistake costs money.

If work has to be redone or disputes need to be resolved, that takes time. And time is money.

If you reduce errors, you remove those costly cycles.

Sometimes people think parts of their business can’t be automated. They’ll say things like, “We have documents that a human has to read. We can’t automate that.”

But things have changed recently.

There’s far less that’s impossible today than there used to be.

Greg: I know you’re trying to talk about AI, but before we go there, let me give an example of something we couldn’t do two years ago.

We have a client who repairs asphalt. Their crews used to measure potholes manually to estimate material.

Now modern smartphones have LIDAR sensors. We built an app where a property manager scans the hole with their phone. The app calculates the measurements instantly and generates a quote.

The user approves it right there.

No salesperson visit. No phone calls. No manual measurement.

The system already knows who the customer is and how much asphalt is required.

That’s one example. Another is equipment tracking. Instead of filling out long checklists of tools on a truck, a crew lays the equipment out, takes one photo, and AI identifies every item automatically.

The checklist fills itself out.

A human still reviews it, but the time savings are enormous.

Justin: And this is exactly why it can be hard for business owners to see these opportunities.

Your job isn’t to stay on top of every technology capability that exists. So you might not realize what’s possible.

That’s why I recommend thinking about what you wish you could automate and asking someone who works in technology whether it’s possible.

Very often, it is.

Our job is fun because we get to look at businesses, think about all the available technology tools, and combine them to solve problems.

These days I’d almost default to assuming a problem can be solved with technology.

Greg: A few years ago we worked with a trash valet company. Their first issue was employees checking in on timesheets before arriving at the job site.

They wanted GPS-based check-in.

Once we built that, we realized we already had data that could also solve timesheets. Then routing optimization. Then violation reporting for residents who didn’t follow trash rules.

Eventually the system allowed workers to photograph violations. The back office could confirm them instantly, and property managers could see them in a dashboard.

By solving one small problem, we ended up improving multiple parts of the business.

Costs dropped. Efficiency increased. And the technology itself became part of their sales pitch.

Justin: That’s the competitive differentiation piece.

Service companies often fall into a race to the bottom on pricing. But technology allows you to deliver more value at the same price without increasing headcount.

You’re building a better experience at scale.

Greg: And there’s another benefit: enterprise value.

Private equity firms love service businesses. They frequently roll them up—buying multiple companies in the same niche.

If your company has proprietary systems that manage operations efficiently, that intellectual property increases the value of your business during acquisition.

Your technology can scale across multiple companies.

Justin: Exactly. Buyers might want your customer base, your team, or your processes.

Those internal processes—the way your company operates efficiently—can be incredibly valuable during an acquisition.

If you can’t compete on customers or people alone, you can compete on process.

Greg: Another advantage of technology is enforcing process.

Paper SOPs are easy for employees to ignore. But software can guide people through the exact sequence of steps required.

That standardization reduces errors and improves margins.

Justin: Which ultimately leads to better margins… and better margins lead to yachts.

Greg: Efficiency leads to yachts. Yachts lead to happiness.

Justin: I think they lead to happiness.

Greg: I’m just saying—if you’re still running a company on paperwork, paperwork is basically a polite way of saying, “We’ll get to your money later.”

Justin: Exactly.

Greg: Cheers, sir.

Justin: Cheers.

If you were going to give one challenge to a service company listening to this, what should they do on Monday with their team?

Greg: Start by asking your team what the biggest operational pain points are.

Not the core work itself, but everything around managing it. Tracking timesheets, approvals, reporting, coordination.

You’ll get a long list of frustrations.

Then prioritize them. Look for the ones that create either the biggest efficiency gain or the biggest competitive advantage.

Pick the lowest hanging fruit and solve that first.

Don’t start with a massive digital transformation. Start small. Solve one meaningful problem.

Once that works, build from there.

Justin: Love it.

So if you’re listening, go do that. And if you need help brainstorming solutions, reach out.

Greg: Or throw your ideas in the comments. We love thinking about these problems.

We even send our developers into the field with service companies so they understand the work environment.

Turns out developers love running chainsaws.

Justin: I’ve stood on top of a tower in the middle of nowhere watching debris cleanup crews. It absolutely builds empathy.

Greg: Well Justin, have a great weekend. We record these on Fridays, so happy Friday to everyone listening.

Justin: Happy Friday. Always a great discussion.

Greg: Cheers everyone. Peace.