Transforming Sales with AI with Sebastian Jimenez

Intro/Outro:

Welcome to the Construction Disruption podcast, where we uncover the future of design, building, and remodeling.

Todd Miller:

I'm Todd Miller of Isaiah Industries, a manufacturer of specialty metal roofing and other building materials. Today, my co-host is Seth Heckaman. How are you today, Seth?

Seth Heckaman:

Doing well. How are you doing?

Todd Miller:

I am doing very well. Kind of an interesting story, though. My family bought a new dog. I don't think I told you that yet.

Seth Heckaman:

You hadn't, no.

Todd Miller:

Yeah. We bought a new dog and we bought it from a blacksmith. There are not many blacksmiths around anymore, but there is one around us. And he had a dog, and he said, I just can't take care of it anymore. And so we bought an older dog from a blacksmith. It's been great. The only problem is as soon as we got him home, he made a bolt for the door. I will share one other thing. I've been working on an invention recently, and so my invention is going to be a thought-activated air freshener. And really, it makes scents when you think about it.

Seth Heckaman:

Those weren't your best, but those weren't your worst. I give those a seven out of ten on the dad joke scale, so. It was pretty solid.

Todd Miller:

Yeah, not my best, but not my worst. That's the story of my life. Okay, let's drive forward. And we got an exciting question we are digging into today. We're digging into how sales organizations can use today's latest speech analytics technology, as well as machine learning and AI to dramatically increase the morale and performance of their sales teams, as well as the overall success of their organizations. Today's guest is Sebastian Jimenez, founder of Rillavoice, one of the fastest growing startups in the world right now. Seth and I both met Sebastian in person at the 2023 Metal Roofing Summit, and we were both immediately taken by his enthusiasm and the way that Rillavoice technology is really disrupting our industry. And we think it's going to lead to great things in the future as well. So Sebastian, welcome to Construction Disruption. We're pleased- I know you've got a very busy schedule- we're pleased you're taking some time to visit with us today and looking forward to a great conversation.

Sebastian Jimenez:

Thank you. Thank you for having me on, Todd. Thank you for having me on, Seth. Super excited to be here.

Todd Miller:

Well, good. Well, let's go forward with a couple of questions. So the way I look at it, Rillavoice and you are really kind of taking the home improvement and in-home sales industry by storm right now. You were in a high school program at Yale University. You graduated in quantitative economics from New York University. So before we dig into what Rillavoice is all about, tell us a little bit where the world that you grew up from. What brought you, what caused you to start this company?

Sebastian Jimenez:

So great question. I am from the Dominican Republic. Right? So the short answer to the question is I have a bunch of like, you know, Pirates of the Caribbean genes inside of me. So I think that there's like some inner like DNA, like looking for like booty and gold all over the world. And so, yeah, I grew up, I was born and raised in the Dominican Republic. I come from a long line of pineapple farmers, and I came to America for college. I actually finished my high school here. But then I came here for college. I went to NYU, like you said. And when you go to NYU, there's an existential question that's like, haunting you every day, which is like, should you go to class or should you go to Urban Outfitters and just walk around New York City? I chose a third option, which was to skip all my classes, to go and do stand up comedy in very crappy bars in the Lower East Side with not the best of people, let me tell you that. Imagine the kind of degenerates that go to a standup comedy show on a Wednesday at 3:30 p.m. in the afternoon. People that were laid off. And, you know, it's just like broken homes and that kind of stuff. So that's what I was doing in college, just doing standup comedy. And that's the reason I got into tech, right? And to me, it makes all the sense in the world. But people like standup comedy to technology, what the hell are you talking about? And the reason it makes sense to me, like, so. So I went to business school technically, but I didn't learn anything about what I know about business and business school. I learned it from standup comedy, right? Because partly I didn't go to class. But the main thing I learned in stand up comedy, it's the only artform where you have to, like, literally go out there in front of people to practice. Just even to practice, you have to practice in front of an audience. It's not like when you can paint in your room and you know, and write in your room and you know, and do any other kind of art form in your room. In standup, you can't. Even if you're a psychopath, like talk to yourself in the mirror. Like, I was like, How's it going, guys? And your roommate's calling the police. I mean, like, this guy's insane. You can't do it even if you're, like, insane because you need the crowd to laugh or not to laugh to know if the joke is going in the right direction. And so you get this, you learn this concept, which is that true learning doesn't happen in your head. It happens out there in the world and it's waiting to be discovered and found out. And that's the main thing I learned from stand up. But you have to learn through trial and error and like really launching fast. And I had an internship with this Forbes author where we interviewed the founders of Coursera, Etsy, Zola. People like in New York City, they were really good tech founders and how they described how they built their companies and their products. To me, their creative process was very similar to what I was doing in stand up. You have an idea, even if it's in the right general direction, it's going to be wrong on so many different like thousand little ways, right? You can't even predict until you actually put it in front of people and you get that real life feedback from the real world. And then that's when you actually start the building process of actually crafting something amazing and something great. And so that's how I got into technology. I said, That's very similar to what I'm doing in stand up. I want to scratch that edge of like building something amazing, getting feedback from people. And I started my first tech company out of college and was a field marketing management software that, you know, companies like Molson Coors get around Heineken, you know, Red Bull they would use for their field marketing events. Field marketing for the home improvement industry, you guys, you know, you do the home shows, right? And you do the the Costco, the booth at the Costco, right? So consumer brands do this as well, but not necessarily to get leads, but to increase brand awareness for the products. And so, you know, imagine like the Red Bull kids that put the uniforms on, they go up to college campus, they give you Red Bull, get you excited, and you drink the Red Bull and you're like, Oh, this is great Red Bull. And they would use our software to manage all that. And just fast forward, I basically realized that all these consumer brands and many companies in the world from field marketing, they were having like millions and millions of interactions face-to-face with consumers every single month. And I realized that the interactions that they were having real life interactions with real consumers was more data than they were capturing from social media. Right? So like a brand like Heineken, they had like 4 million face-to-face interactions between their consumers and their field marketing brand ambassadors every single month. And they had like 500,000 points of engagement from all their social media combined in a month in the United States. So YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, everything, every interaction, every click, every like, every comment, every mention of their brand was ten times less data than what they were getting from, like, real life interactions. This, you know, face-to-face and field marketing. And I said, What if we could take these 4 million interactions, process them, analyze them, give Heineken a dashboard about their consumer sentiment, their product sentiment, everything about what their consumers think or not think about their brand similar to what they have in social media. It's just like ten times more data with real people. What? And then I started thinking, That's only Heineken. What about Molson? What about Pepsi Cola? What about if you get out of field marketing into field sales, how many conversations in retail? And I figured out that there was 10 billion face-to-face conversations in a commercial capacity between consumers and sales and service marketing people every single month. And I said, What if we could take all those conversations and make the offline world, the commercial world, as searchable and easy to analyze and understand as Google did for the Web? And that was the origin of Rilla, to take face-to-face conversations, process them, analyze them, and make them valuable for businesses, for their sales, their marketing, for everything. And that was then and Rilla what it is now is, you know, we're the leading speech analytics software for the home improvement industry, where people talk to homeowners in the home, record their conversations, you know, we transcribe, analyze them and give them feedback with A.I. to help them improve their sales. But the origin was how do we make the offline world that searchable, as Google did for the Web?

Todd Miller:

Very cool. Incredible idea and incredible how you've seen it through to fruition. So yeah. So, Sebastian, I'm embarrassed. I start with these dad jokes and I find out that you like did professional stand up and yeah, pineapple farmers. You like pineapples? I have to ask you.

Sebastian Jimenez:

Oh, yes, sir. My birthday was. It was my birthday recently in my office. They got me like a mango pineapple coconut cake. And I was like, This is. I think somebody should get canceled for this, but I like the cake. But that's okay, you know. I should, like, start a hashtag against this, but it's. It's okay. It's like, the cake was good.

Todd Miller:

Mango pineapple, next time I'm in the city I need to find that.

Sebastian Jimenez:

Yeah.

Todd Miller:

So I want to tease this out a little bit before you know more before we do sort of the big reveal over exactly what your technology brings to our industry. But when you started looking at the home improvement industry, you know, did you see sort of a big void out there that was kind of hindering growth and success of individual salespeople and organizations? And, you know, if so, I mean, what was that that you saw out there?

Sebastian Jimenez:

So one of the things we saw not only with home improvement, but kind of any industry that has an outside sales component, what the big problem that we saw is, in order to train and manage and kind of ramp up your salespeople, there's only one way to do it traditionally, which is having our sales manager go out and do ride-alongs for ongoing coaching and training. So the typical thing is, you know, my sales rep's not doing well and they're kind of slumping. And then I try to figure out why. If I want to figure out why that I need to go on a ride-along, just take notes, see the sales rep selling and I have to go back and kind of give them feedback. And so that's a problem. You know, that's really time-consuming. If you take the average sales manager, they're going to be spending about 40 hours a month doing ride alongs, right. Only to see about 2% of the totality of the conversations that their teams are having. So you take the typical sales manager, they manage like eight salespeople, right? The eight salespeople are doing like two appointments a day, five days a week, four weeks out of a month. That's like 400 appointments, if I'm not mistaken. And so the sales manager in the 40 hours that they're doing every single month of ride alongs, they're able to see eight out of the 400 meetings that their reps are having. So it's really time-consuming and it's not yielding a lot of, you know, visibility in return, which is why it's really, really difficult to train and ramp up salespeople, you know, which is the reason why we have the 80/20 rule, which is you have really good top performers that are bringing in the bulk of the revenue when they're like at a high level on their own, and then everybody else is not as naturally talented. They're kind of struggling and you get a lot of churn, you get a lot of people are trying to get sales and they don't work out. A lot of it is because of the lack of coaching, because we're we're only getting 2% visibility as to what's going on in the field and kind of the way we explain this to people. It's like, imagine if you had a sports team that, you know, like take the Chicago Bulls with Phil Jackson, Michael Jordan. Imagine Phil Jackson was able to coach the players in the dressing room and track results and see if they're winning or losing games. So he was not allowed to be on the field to see his players playing. Right. And he wasn't allowed to watch the game film and like watch the games on TV. Like he can't actually see what his players are doing on the field. That's the problem that we have today. And anybody who's doing outside sales, for home improvement in particular, what we realized is that this is not just a problem, but it's one of the most fundamental problems, as especially now as leads are getting like, you know, more expensive. It's getting harder to close deals because, you know, we're coming off of this COVID high where, you know, it was like a gold rush for the suburbs. Right. You know, everybody's just like raking in the orders. And now, you know, interest rates are coming up and people are you know, it's harder to to convince them to part with their money. And so sales coaching and training has really become a bottleneck right now because, you know, it was easy for the last two or three years to like kind of get sales where you could get by with like, you know, kind of average sales reps. Now you need to your sales reps to be really, really good. And so for home Improvement, we saw that at this particular moment in time, it wasn't just a problem of coaching. It was like one of the most important problems they had because you can't do anything about the leads getting more expensive, but you sure can make sure that your reps can either close more deals or increase their average tickets. Right. And those are the only two levers as a home improvement company that you can pull right now to increase your profitability and your growth.

Todd Miller:

Awesome. So let's do the big reveal. Tell us what Rillavoice does. I don't want to spoil it for our listeners, but let's do it. Tell us what you do.

Sebastian Jimenez:

So Rilla is the leading speech analytics software in the home improvement industry. So you take out a sales rep that you know sells metal roofs, right? They go into someone's home and they do their presentation, they talk, you know, they build some rapport with the customer. They do their company story, they handle objections. They talk about pricing and financing. They're going to be recording those conversations with the Rillavoice mobile app from their phones or tablets. And then we're going to be using AI to automatically transcribe, analyze and give them feedback to help them improve their sales and to help their sales managers do what we call virtual ride-alongs that are 100 times faster, better and cheaper than the traditional physical ridealongs that they did before. So that's basically what Rilla does.

Todd Miller:

That's fantastic. So so I assume they don't have an earpiece that's telling them real-time, Hey, dummy, don't say that. What does this really look like as far as how they utilize it and how their sales manager interacts with them?

Sebastian Jimenez:

Yeah, it's a great question. So it's not an earpiece. It's not annoying the salesperson in real time. So what happens is, they do their conversation, they stop the recording after the fact, then the tool, they can go back and review their conversation. And it's not just the conversation. We've actually seen that our salespeople don't call it a conversation or a recording. They call it a Rilla. They're like, Let me see my Rilla. It's weird, they say Rilla. So, you know, people say like, if your company can become a verb, that's amazing. That's like a legendary company, like Uber, Google, right? But, you know, at least we became a noun. Still waiting for the verb, but they call it a Rilla. And what a Rilla is, is a conversation, but that gives you an analysis of what happened in that conversation and actual feedback about what you did right and what you could have done better and the way it gives you these feedback, right. It really analyzes how you talk, right? How you talk is how much do you talk versus the customer talks ratio? How much do you interact with the customer, how much back and forth there is? How many open-ended questions are you asking? What's your tone of voice? What what's your talk speed? It analyzes how you talk and then it compares the way you talk to the top performers in your team. Right? So imagine you have a top performer who's closing $35 million in revenue and you're closing less than 1. You want to understand what it is that that person's doing differently than you are, right? So that you can improve. So it analyzes how you talk, compares you to the top performers. And it does the same thing for what you say, literally. So we have we basically use GPT4 for, which is the algorithm that's behind ChatGPT to basically use natural language processing to understand what's being talked about in the conversation. After we get the transcription, we understand literally what is being talked about. So Rilla will basically give you feedback like, Hey, we noticed that you're talking about pricing for like 25 minutes on average in a conversation when the top performers are only talking about pricing for 15 minutes. So you should lower the amount of time that you spend talking about pricing. Here's an example of how the top performer does it, and we will actually feed you automated content so that you can review game film from the top performers in your team. So it's like a really good tool for you as a sales rep to coach yourself in your own time and then go back with your sales manager to review the game film and see what you could have done better.

Todd Miller:

So what's the reaction been? I mean, you serve a lot of audiences. You've got business owners, you got sales managers. You even have the end consumer. You know, what's been the reaction from those different audiences as they start to utilize Rillavoice and listen to their, pay attention to their Rillas?

Sebastian Jimenez:

Yeah, Yeah. So the owners absolutely love it. I mean, we, as soon as they hear about it, they are like, Oh my God, this is the next best thing. We recently had one of our good customers, a large home remodeling company, amazing, amazing human being. He's been in the industry for like, you know, decades. And he said something along the lines of, you know, for 40 years we've been in this business and we've changed everything. We've changed the, you know, the products that we sell. We've changed our technology for the call center. We changed our sales process or marketing process. We've changed how we've had to, like, get leads because of, you know, you know, Google and all these things, and SEO. The only thing that hasn't changed in the last 40 years is the way we coach and train our salespeople. That's the only thing that hasn't changed. And so owners see this as like an opportunity to change. But, you know, kind of like tthe last bastion of manual processes that they have in their businesses, which is how we coach our sales reps with the ride-along. So they get it immediately, they get the vision. Sales managers absolutely adore it. They're like, we have, I tell the story of of this guy Chad from the StormGuard Roofing Company. They sell roofing products all over the country. And I asked Chad, how did it go your first week of using Rilla? He said, Man, listen, in my ten years of sales, I've never saved so much time. And I said, Why? And he said, last week it took me, you know, I went out with one rep and did two ride-alongs with them. Today with Rilla, I was able to manage all my five reps, you know, and I said, Oh my God, a five times improvement. And he said, No. Last week it took me about 6 hours to coach this one rep. Today with Rilla I was able to see all the analytics to all the ride-alongs with all my five reps in less than 50 minutes. So we're talking, you know, 30 to 50 times the productivity for your sales manager who's now a bionic super coach that can coach remotely. And it opens up so many possibilities for the sales manager and then the sales rep. The final audience here is the sales rep. The sales reps absolutely hate it at the beginning. At the beginning, when they get presented, they're like, what the hell is this? Oh, you're going to be recording me, reviewing what I'm saying. What the hell is wrong with you? And this is Big Brother. They absolutely hate it at the beginning. And then what happens? And actually what we've seen is top performers hate it more than other people. Psychologically, they just absolutely hate it. So 20% of your top performers are going to absolutely hate it. The product is designed in such a way that it kind of takes their secret sauce and shares it with everybody else. So I can see what it as like. And then average reps are a little bit concerned and the people who embrace it the fastest are the, the, the low performers are the people who are newer to sales because they kind of need the help. They want to kind of, they want to improve and they need the help. And then what we see is, it's a weird thing. After they record five conversations, the fear goes away almost like completely. It just becomes like a habit. And and it's a thing in psychology called the Hawthorne effect when you know you're being reviewed, your senses are really heightened and you're really concerned, you're really aware that you're being reviewed. But then the effect kind of like dies down after a few hours that, you know, that you're being reviewed. And so psychologically they lose the fear in the first week. And then we literally have clips of like people saying like, this is awful, you know, I mean, and then six weeks later, you're like, oh, my God, I mean, 30% more sales, I'm doing great. So the sales reps, they start. It's like a journey, right? It's like, Oh my God, I'm going to be recorded. What the hell? Okay, now I'm fine with it. And then, Oh my God, this is one of the best tools I've ever used. So, yeah.

Seth Heckaman:

You know, that's just incredible, the amount of information that allows everyone to pull together. But it's something you shared at the Summit that I want to make sure we touch on. It's not you know, it's not just the data on, you know, what words to say, when to say them, you know what questions to ask. But, you know, taking that next step and allowing sales managers and owners to, you know, evaluate their process as a whole on the bigger picture. Tell us what you found out when reviewing the data on the placement of company story in relation to the price proposal. That was a game changer for me.

Sebastian Jimenez:

Yeah, that's awesome. So Seth, thank you. That's an amazing question. So one of the things that we're able to do with Rilla is that, you know, our AI language model understands, you know, what's being talked about and it understands topics like, you know, the company story. And like when people are talking about financing terms and people are talking about, you know, pricing and all these other topics. And one of the things we can see is not only what is being talked about, but how long and when in the conversation is happening. And so we recently did an analysis of 500,000 sales conversations in-home with customers. We anonymized the data, we aggregated it. We looked at what the top performers in the industry like across industries, actually all across the country that bring in $35 million in revenue, the absolute top 1% of people. What is it that they're doing differently in the home? And one of the very counterintuitive things that we found out is that typically the average reps, right, they say their company story like between minute 30 and minute 45 of the conversation of a two hour meeting. So they first do their discovery, their inspection, and then they start their presentation. Their presentation typically starts with something like, you know, here I'm going to give you a little presentation on our company and who we are. You know, you need to be really careful with who you do business with in this industry because you want to make sure that if you're going to let somebody into your home, they have insurance, that they have all these things, their credit and then they go on to their company story. Our company we've been around for you know, we've been around since 1776. George Washington was like my boss. And and we're like, you know, and our roofs are made from American soil and, you know, and George Washington's tears and so and that's company story. And and they do that at minute 30 or 45. Top performers, which was counterintuitive, they don't do the company story on average at the beginning of the conversation at 30 minute 45. They actually do the company story on average at an hour and 45 minutes. So later in the conversation, after they have talked about financial terms, financial terms, meaning how are we going to pay for this? Is there some sort of financing involved? You need to pay upfront. You pay like half and half. Like after they've talked about pricing and financing terms, that's when they're talking about the company story, which is very weird because that's not how salespeople get trained. And so they're doing something different than what their training suggests. And what we saw, we were like, okay, what's happening there? What we saw was that the top performers, right, they go in, they go in, they go to do their discovery. They ask a lot of open-ended questions, What brought you into our home? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then they say the same thing. They say something like, you know, you need to be really careful with who you do business with at the beginning of the conversation. If you're going to let somebody in your home, they should be assured you get a lot of complaints in this industry. And and then they stop there and they don't say the company story. They don't say anything. They just keep going. Let me show you the product. Let me show you a demo. They keep going. Then the price question comes up and that's when the real selling begins, right? How much is it? You know, rep gives a price. Homeowner says, Oh, my God, it's so expensive. $25,000 for a roof. What the hell? And then the top performers, they don't start dealing with the objection. They go, What about the price seems too high for you? And a homeowner starts talking like, Well, I got somebody else who came in last Saturday, and they quoted me at $10,000. Less than half of what you're telling me. Oh, my God. Okay. And who is this person? Now we're talking like, oh, can you tell me a little bit more about that quote? Like, what? What kinds of products were working, what kind of company it is? And they start talking and talking and talking. I was like, okay, so you're working with a local kind of like Jimmy Bob, who's like your friend of the family and okay, I got it. So as I mentioned before, you have to be really careful with who you work with. Can I tell you a little bit about our company and why we're charging the premium that we're charging? And that's when they do the company story, right? Because essentially they're saving their best ammunition, too, when it actually matters, when it's going to land much better for the homeowner. Because the homeowner is actually associating the value of your company with the actual price and the service that they're paying for. And they're doing it right there, which which was weird to us. Butthat's what they're doing. So, yeah.

Todd Miller:

Well, I love that. And really about ten years ago we had actually started to train to keep the company story for the end because people buy people and that is your best stuff to close with. And you know, even showing pictures of your installers and, you know, living at my house, all that type of stuff. And absolutely it was interesting. We had actually learned that from a guy by the name of Bill Gladwell, who is an NLP specialist, and he had said, you know, you really need to switch and do that company story before you close. So good stuff. Really I loved hearing when you just kind of, you did answer a question I had in in that saying that, you know, you're looking at the information you collect from sales presentations across your client base. So someone is not just necessarily being compared to the top performer in their organization, but they're getting, you know, finding out how top performers do it all over the place. And so I love that. So really, the more clients you have, the better your product gets, you know, through machine learning, I would assume.

Sebastian Jimenez:

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And now with with GPT4, we're doing some pretty like wild stuff with like understanding language and understanding what's actually being talked about. It's, it's actually kind of crazy. We recently launched a summarization tool where you could just like, it's like literally having like a human being taking notes about what actually happened in the conversation. And I'll tell you, like everything and I'll be like, Oh, the conversation started here. We even had this GPT4, like it was able to, like there was a customer, one time we saw one of our customers showed us there was like a conversation where they were they were selling a bath and the bath was like electric or motorized or something like that. And the customer said, I don't want that because, you know, like I had a family who, like, suffered from like, you know, had an accident with one of these things. Right. So this is like a very atypical objection. And the thing like said it in the summary is like, oh, the customer expressed big concerns with the motorized bath because a family member had an accident. Just like automatically, I got nowhere. It was really, really interesting. So yeah.

Todd Miller:

Well, so your company is just in a period of absolute rampant growth right now. You recently said on our friend Jim Johnson's show that your growth is like 30% a month and most business owners are going to say, you know, that's just kind of insane. So what have been your biggest challenges as a company and scaling up for something like that?

Sebastian Jimenez:

Yeah, great question. So I mean, the way I see, for and this is true for most business owners, right, for not only for tech, you know and a lot of our customers will probably sympathize with this when you are getting started, right. And you're just trying to find what we call product-market fit, you're trying to kind of make a you're trying to go from 0 to 1. You don't exist in the world and you're literally trying to just not die and exist. And I'm not going to figure out something new, whether you're selling shingles in your market and you're trying to establish your brand as something that's going to last, you know, for longer than three years, which is the average time that small businesses die. And you're trying to really make it happen. And that's when the period of absolute hustle and absolute strength and grit that you have to just do as an owner to just establish yourself. Right. Because there's nobody with you, right? It's just yourself and your vision and whatever you're putting into it, right? And then when you figure something out that it's working, when you start getting customers and you start, you know, people start referring, you know, you see that you got something working right, and then you start growing, the challenge then becomes different. It's not you as an as an owner with your will to exist, right? It's not about building processes and scaling, not even processes, but culture, right? Yeah. How can you how can you actually cement and keep a really, like high-level culture at your company with your values, right? So that as you're scaling, you can keep the same kind of intensity and passion for your customers that you had when you got started, right? How can you scale that as a team? So I would say that the biggest challenge for us, which will continue to be the biggest challenge, is how do we scale that, that absolute world-class culture. And so last year when I saw that we had product-market fit and we had something going on, I started obsessing about how do we how do we cement our cultural values and like literally write it down so that when people we know who to hire, that we actually hire people not even like, yes, we try to hire super talented people and everybody who works here is like insanely smart and super talented. We're always talking to super talented candidates, right? Because we pay very well. So the thing for us that makes a hire or not, it's more about cultural compatibility. And we test for culture in our interviews and we and we are really, really, really intense and conscious and methodical about who we want to bring into our company and who we fire honestly, like who we let go because they're just not a good culture fit for us. And we have eight operating principles that, that we we are very kind of passionate about. Everybody on our team is. And so to me, if we can just keep our culture steady, I think that most of the challenges are, you know, of scaling just kind of solve themselves. If you bring in amazing people who are super high performing, you know, it's like if you're Michael Jordan with the Dream Team and the Olympic team, you have the right people with the right culture. It's like there's not much that can go wrong. But yeah, culture, culture's supreme. I'm obsessed about maintaining a world-class culture.

Todd Miller:

So what was that like for you, you know, to be able to make that change from focusing on product and staying alive and all that type of stuff to this focus on culture? It sounds like you're equally passionate about both, and so that probably helped.

Sebastian Jimenez:

Well, yeah, I mean, well, I didn't even know about culture, like back when, you know, when I was like, focused. I was like, I think I have this thing. It's like back to the pirate genes, you know, like, I think I have, like, this thing where I just get obsessed about whatever the challenge is. So the challenge at that time was finding product-market fit. Okay, we found product-market fit. And then I knew that culture was going to be the next challenge. And the reason I knew that is I read a lot about these, like, amazing founders, you know, Steve Jobs and Brian Chesky from Airbnb and Walt Disney, and they all say the same thing. It's like really, when you're scaling, it's all about culture. Like culture beats strategy and it beats processes, it beats everything. If you just have an amazing culture and the way that people can think of culture like very kind of like as a as a competitive advantage. If you're scaling a team, right? Culture is the way that people make decisions when you're not in the room and you're not in the room most of the times, if you're scaling a team and most of the decisions that are being made about your business are not being made by you. Like 90% of the decisions, if you have a large team, right, are not being made by you, you can make high-level decisions and set the vision, but you're not making most of the decisions. So how do you allow, with very little managerial overhead, how do you allow people to make the right decisions at the right times not being guided by rules and, you know, kind of like, you know, bogged down by bureaucracy. But how do you guide them based on principles and based on cultural values? And so I kind of knew that that was going to be the next challenge. So I kind of like read a lot about it. I became obsessed about it. And it's not just like saying, but it's being very disciplined about it. Like if somebody is not a culture fit, you know, and you realize you have to meet, it's like there's no compromise, there's no compromise with the culture ever. And so and that's how you, it's more about a lot of people know that or pay lip service like, oh, my culture, my culture. But then they're very undisciplined about how they keep, you know, how they keep it together. So we just try to be really disciplined about that.

Todd Miller:

Wow. That's some great insight there, thank you. We didn't anticipate going there in this conversation, but that's some fantastic stuff. So thank you. You know, you've got this tiger by the tail. I'm kind of curious what what are some of your wildest dreams for the future in terms of, you know, how this technology might advance and grow or cross-over to other industries? I mean, you know, one of the things I'm thinking about is everyone complains about physicians and poor bedside manner, but what if what if they could use something like this?

Sebastian Jimenez:

I mean, no, I mean, the really, I mean, we are going to be focused for a long time in the home improvement industry. This is our market and this is our customers that we want to serve. And we don't want to be one of those companies that just is okay for many people. We want it to be absolutely amazing for just a few people.

Todd Miller:

You don't want to be chasing every shiny thing.

Sebastian Jimenez:

No, we really want to earn the right to be able to expand our business. And the only way you do that is by building an absolutely amazing product that's well integrated into the solutions of our existing customers, that fits their workflows. You know, medical of course, there's medical sales, but, you know, they have different workflows, they have different sales processes. So if you're going to build a product that's really good for those processes, you have to really focus, right? And so we are completely focused on home improvement for now, for the next few years. And so like what I, what I think are like some of the coolest things that we're talking about now as a product team is like, you know, I mean that if we go like five years ahead of, you know, Apple just came out with their with their AR glasses. And I think that the biggest disruption to the outside salesperson that's actually going to come in the way of AR. So I somebody who works on AI, I have a pretty strong intuition that the salesperson, the outside salesperson is not going to be replaced anytime soon. It might be different for the call center and the people that sell, you know, on the phone. Because that's already like brewing. But this person outside is like, AI's not very good at, like, gripping things, you know, and opening a door and shaking a hand and like taking a picture and doing an inspection and getting on a roof. And so that, you know, it's funny how AI is like replacing all these white collar jobs and the blue collar jobs are like.

Todd Miller:

Yeah, absolutely.

Sebastian Jimenez:

AI can't grip things. So the outside sales, so the biggest disruption I think is going to happen in the next five years is going to be AR. So I imagine a world where you're a salesperson, you know, you're selling metal roofs and you go into a home and you have AR glasses that are super comfortable for you to wear. It's like a new hardware that consumers are using. And you can literally do your inspection with your glasses and you can take the measurements automatically and you can get feedback right there about what it is that you should say and how you should say it. So that's not for now, but that's, you know, that's in the dream lab still.

Todd Miller:

Well, I think we've all seen, kind of going back to what you were just saying, you've probably seen on LinkedIn, this company building, this building, they put this big billboard on the side of the building. Yeah, let your A.I. finish this building.

Sebastian Jimenez:

So that's why I'm a big fan of AR for the industry, because I think it's like one of the like, AR is either going to replace a job or it's going to make the person doing that job bionic at doing that job. It's just going to make them much better and enhance them. And that's what I think the best usage of technology is, one that enhances the the natural capabilities of human beings. And so I think that that AR represents that. It's, you are going to be doing your job as you usually are. You're going to do your best, you know, with your human skills. But then you're going to have this technology that's going to make you almost like a cyborg, that's going to make you super bionic at doing that job.

Todd Miller:

Wow, good stuff. So what's the process for a company to get involved using Rillavoice?

Sebastian Jimenez:

Yeah. So you go to Rillavoice.com. That's R-I-L-L-A-V-O-I-C-E.com and you click on the schedule a demo link and one of our very highly trained consultants will be able to walk you through a demo and we have trained all of them with A.I.. So you tell us how they did because we're tracking that all the time. And then we'll walk you through a demo. Typically, our customers want to buy very quickly. And once you want to become involved and once you want to sign up for RIlla, it's a pretty simple process of onboarding. You know, it takes about an hour and fifteen minutes to get started of setup time. So it's a pretty quick turnaround time. We have a customer success team that will make sure that you guys are having a great kind of experience. One of the things we've seen in the industry, which we want to kind of change a little bit is that technology products usually just like said, like here you go, right? And you figure it out. And any time that you're implemented, businesses are not buying technology. They're buying solutions to their problems. And so there's things outside of the technology that can always go wrong with implementation for no fault of anybody. There's just like things just go wrong. And so that's why we have a really dedicated customer success team to make sure that they can help you through implementation, help you, you know, connect your things properly, make sure that you're actually having the success. And so we just have a success team that just keeps working for with you for all the time that you're here with us. So but it takes about an hour and fifteen minutes to get set up.

Todd Miller:

Wow, love it. And I love what you just said. Companies don't buy technology, they buy solutions.

Sebastian Jimenez:

Yeah. Yeah.

Todd Miller:

And the answer is, that's good stuff. Well, this has been great. We are close to wrapping up what we call the business end of things. Is there anything we haven't covered today that you'd like to share with our audience?

Sebastian Jimenez:

Yeah, I, I just wanted to kind of briefly mention I've been on this, um, you know, evangelization of I so realize, you know, part of this growing movement. I just want to let everybody who's listening know there are market forces now that are making things like Rilla exist. So Rilla is an atypical company because we're like New York-based and we're going after industries that are outside of New York and Silicon Valley that are not you know, we're not in the tech bubble per se. We're actually in technology to industries outside of tech where it's very much needed and and home improvement in particular. I just want to say to everybody, like right now, at this point in time and I know this sounds crazy, but home improvement will be at the forefront of adoption, which is kind of crazy. And Rilla is kind of proof of that. And what I'm saying by that is like, I really know it just I mean, what the new ChatGPT came out in October 2022. So and it's developing really fast. And typically what used to happen historically is that Silicon Valley, right? If you were a new technology, you would sell your technology to other Silicon Valley companies that would kind of like be the lab rats and tested and kind of be the early adopters before it got adopted in mass market.

Todd Miller:

Sure.

Sebastian Jimenez:

This happened with CRM technologies that came out in the nineties. Tech companies adopted it, startups, and then it came out the mass-market home improvement. It started like in the mid 2000s, right? Like ten years later. And we're still seeing like lack of CRM adopted today, like 15 years later. With AI, it's actually going to be flipped. Technology and venture funding is down 90%. The technology companies are really suffering. Everybody's laying off people in technology. So venture capital, venture capitalists are looking for industries outside of tech to deploy AI and deploy new technologies. And home improvement is at the top of the pecking order because of all the, you know, all the economic forces that we know, COVID, movde people into homes, staying in their homes longer, their appliances are breaking. They're noticing that their roofs are not as nice as they used to be. And so that is making it a really attractive industry for venture capitalists, just like it is for private equity. And so I hear everybody's interested in looking at home improvement like a hawk. And so companies like realize we're just the beginning of the AI wave that's coming out, and that's here, frankly, for the home improvement industry. So I would just keep your ear close to the ground and kind of contend with the fact that you're going to have to be an early adopter, not a late adopter.

Todd Miller:

Wow, I love it. And we know a lot of our audience members are folks who are just kind of trying to figure out their place in this industry. So great advice, as always.

Sebastian Jimenez:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Todd Miller:

Well, this has been great, Sebastian. Before we close out, I have to ask you if you're willing to participate in something we call our rapid fire questions. Seven questions, maybe serious, maybe silly. Sebastian has no idea what we're going to ask him, so. We are going to alternate asking you these questions. Seth, You want to ask the first one?

Seth Heckaman:

Sure. I will get started. So question number one, I'm audible-ing because I'm more curious about this. Who are your favorite stand up comedians?

Sebastian Jimenez:

Oh, my God. Um, there's so many. Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr, Kevin Hart, Richard Pryor, George Carlin. I could go on there, it's a lot.

Seth Heckaman:

It's the GOATs.

Sebastian Jimenez:

Monty Python's Flying Circus. Shout out to my British people. So, Monty Python, John Cleese. Yeah, there's just so many.

Todd Miller:

Okay. Question number two. What is a product that you have purchased recently that has been a game-changer for you?

Sebastian Jimenez:

Oh my God, two, Superhuman. It's an email client that, you know, a lot of startup founders use. It saved me like 2 hours in the day. It's like just a much better, faster way to do email. And the second one is this thing called Magic Mind. Magic Mind is like a little startup energy drink. I don't know what it has in it, but I drink it every day and, and and we're going 30% month over month. So something's working, so.

Todd Miller:

Awesome, so I'm going to check out Superhuman. Magic Mind, we actually trialed their product on our show several episodes ago.

Sebastian Jimenez:

That's awesome. I don't know what the long term effects are. We're going to start getting like a third eye or something, in you know, five years. But who cares? You know, it's worth it.

Todd Miller:

That's right. Shout out to Magic Mind, good stuff.

Seth Heckaman:

Alright, next question. What would you like to ultimately be remembered for?

Sebastian Jimenez:

Wow, what a great question. Yeah. If I if I was remembered by the multiplier effect that the people around me created. Like PayPal. Everybody knows the PayPal Mafia. You know, the culture that they created there. They went on to, you know, the the people that worked at PayPal went on to found LinkedIn and YouTube and Yelp. And it's just like and then the people at LinkedIn went on to found amazing companies as well. And Elon Musk came out of PayPal, so SpaceX and Tesla, and it all came from like that culture. If people, if I could do something like that and people could remember me not even by my own, the fruits of my own labor, but by the labor of people who I got to influence that, that would be great.

Todd Miller:

Wow. That's awesome. Good stuff.

Seth Heckaman:

Very cool.

Todd Miller:

Okay, next question. You're trying to survive a zombie apocalypse. What one person do you definitely want on your team?

Sebastian Jimenez:

What one person do I definitely want on my team if I am going to survive the zombie apocalypse? Huh. I want. Who do I want? There's there's a sales rep of ours that works for, like a company in Texas, and he has, like, ropes and guns and everything locked and loaded in his car. I will go with that guy. I'm not going to say his name. I don't want to embarrass him. He knows what he does. He's got. Yeah, I can just, immediately he came to mind. He has like a truck and he has like, he has all sorts of things in that truck. I don't know if he's, like, part of a circus or something, but he has a cage and he has a ladder and he has a rope and he has knives and guns. So I was like, that guy. Yeah, that that's my guy. That's my best friend.

Todd Miller:

That just sounds like any roofer in Texas, to be honest.

Sebastian Jimenez:

My roofers in Texas, I'm with you guys.

Seth Heckaman:

Next question. Would you rather be able to see ten minutes into the future or ten years into the future?

Sebastian Jimenez:

Oh, ten years. Yeah, ten years.

Todd Miller:

Awesome. Okay, next question. Would you rather be forced to sing along every time you hear a song or to dance every time you hear a song?

Sebastian Jimenez:

Dance. I'm Dominican, man. We got like, our booty moves on it's own.

Todd Miller:

So do we have a song cued up here? Oh, maybe not.

Sebastian Jimenez:

Last rapidfire question. Do you have any hidden talents?

Sebastian Jimenez:

Any hidden talents? I am insanely annoying. And that's hidden because you wouldn't know from just meeting me one time. My mom knows, though she knows.

Todd Miller:

I can't imagine.

Seth Heckaman:

It kinda comes with the territory, with boundless energy and enthusiasm and passion. All that stuff, right? It's the dark side.

Sebastian Jimenez:

Yes, that's my superpower.

Todd Miller:

Good stuff. Well, this has been a real pleasure, Sebastian. You and your technology are just incredible. And we look forward to watching your ongoing success and the growth of Rillavoice and everything to come in the future. So for folks who want to get in touch with you or to learn more about Rilla, how can they most easily do that?

Sebastian Jimenez:

Rillavoice.com, that's R-I-L-L-A-V-O-I-C-E.com and click on the schedule a demo link if you want to learn more.

Todd Miller:

Very good. Well, thank you again. And thank you to our audience for tuning into this episode of Construction Disruption with Sebastian Jimenez of Rillavoice. Look for his contact information also in our show notes. Please watch for future episodes of our podcast, we're always blessed with great guests just like today. Don't forget to leave a review on Apple Podcasts or YouTube. Until the next time we're together, keep on disrupting, challenging the status quo, looking for better ways to do things. Don't forget to take the time to have a positive impact on everyone you encounter. Make them smile, encourage them. Simple yet powerful things we can all do to change the world. So God bless, take care. This is Isaiah Industries signing off until the next episode of Construction Disruption.

Todd Miller:

Intro/Outro: This podcast is produced by Isaiah Industries, a manufacturer of specialty metal roofing and other building products.