Unlock Incredible Growth: Embrace the Magic of Digital Transformation

Jeffro (00:00.962)
Welcome back to digital dominance. Habits and traditions have their place, but when it comes to business, there are times when traditions need to evolve in order to let the business thrive. Having systems is good, but never improving them is bad. Today, I’m excited to be talking with Christina Robel -Holt, a seasoned digital strategist with over two decades of experience in driving successful business transformations through digital tools. Christina has helped guide companies across different sectors like healthcare, travel, logistics.

And she’s helped them seamlessly integrate these digital innovations and software to enhance their operations and improve their customer engagement. So in this episode, we’re going to dive into how traditional service businesses can effectively incorporate digital tools to optimize their operations, to ensure a higher return on investment, and to adapt to changing market demands. So whether you’re looking to refine your digital presence or completely transform your business processes, think Christina’s expertise will provide valuable perspectives on how to make that digital leap effectively. So Christina, welcome to the show.

Christina Wrobel-Holt (01:03.307)
Thanks for having me, Jepra.

Jeffro (01:05.31)
Absolutely. I think this is going to be an interesting conversation because sometimes people, people either love technology and they go at it, you know, full bore or they’re like afraid of it, like, I don’t need it. Our way works fine. And it, usually see the extremes, right? So I want to start by pointing out that even, even though we’re talking about making changes, you shouldn’t be making changes just for the sake of change.

And right now I’m talking to the people who love the digital and the new and the entrepreneurs who have the shiny object syndrome, right? I think a lot of us fall into that, but that’s a recipe for sadness and waste. But there are a lot of legitimate opportunities to increase efficiency, to improve customer service and even increase margins by embracing these new tools and things. So the first question for you, Christina, is how do you know if a change is worth doing before you spend all this time jumping into it?

Christina Wrobel-Holt (01:28.929)
Correct.

Christina Wrobel-Holt (01:56.459)
Sure, sure. Usually most of the clients that I work with start to see symptoms like downturns in customer acquisition, right? So their business growth is slowing and they don’t really understand the reasons why. They see costs climbing, right? Whether that’s in the form of employee salaries or just general overhead and expenses. And the business isn’t producing the same amount of profit and growth that they have experienced in the past. And that is typically where people start. You know, we look at digital tools like digital marketing and SEO and campaigns and websites, and that’s really, really important to have to have a really healthy digital footprint. But I live in the world of digital experiences and making sure that businesses are operating in a way that is easy for people to do business with them. The way that they’re experiencing business transactions across multiple industries. So if you’re used to going on Amazon to quickly look for something and order it, and you have this very seamless experience, whether it’s subconscious or not, consumers are looking for the same types of flows and experiences in all aspects of their lives, whether that’s looking for an HVAC technician or a new plumber, or they’re looking to put an edition on their home. And so what I do is I work with companies to understand 

What are your cost centers? You know, what’s driving costs in your business? What is going on with your customer acquisition? And why are things not the way they were 10 or 15 years ago? And then we really put together a plan that fits that company. The other thing that I’ll say really quickly is that we’re looking at, you know, acquisitions in the trades across the United States, the same way that we were looking at acquisitions of tech companies 15 years ago. And there are people who kind of got burnt out of Silicon Valley venture deals and they’re looking for acquisition of different types of companies now. And one of the things that they’re doing with those companies is exactly this. They’re re -envisioning the way that they can do business. They’re consolidating services. They’re consolidating contact centers and pulling costs out of those businesses. So my advice to anybody in that space is better to look at that early.

Jeffro (04:17.08)
Yeah.

Christina Wrobel-Holt (04:17.247)
Just compare yourself to different industries and get new ideas.

Jeffro (04:21.612)
Yeah, and I was actually going to mention that, you know, we’re seeing so many, whether it’s people retiring and handing off the business or selling it or, you know, the new owner has that huge opportunity, but there’s no reason to wait for that. If you’re not at the point where you want to retire or sell your business, you might as well do this because you’re going to be more streamlined, you’re going to be more profitable, less stressed. And I think that can be a challenge when you’ve done it for so long. And especially if you’re the owner, you’re the one who came up with these processes.

Christina Wrobel-Holt (04:27.733)
Mm

Christina Wrobel-Holt (04:46.879)
Yeah, yeah.

Jeffro (04:50.668)
Maybe you’re too close to it and you’ve taken it like this is personal now if you’re insulting my processes and you’re like, no, we just want to help make it better. And so you kind of have to separate yourself from that.

Christina Wrobel-Holt (04:52.544)
you

Christina Wrobel-Holt (04:57.697)
Yeah. Yeah, I’ve got, I’m actually working with a company right now that they’ve been in business for 35, maybe 40 years and really successful, you know, company. But the, have all of their processes being managed by, you know, one person and that individual is getting ready to retire. And it kind of shook them to their core because there’s so much manual stuff that’s happening.

Jeffro (05:27.427)
Mm

Christina Wrobel-Holt (05:27.453)
and knowledge, not only about their customers and all their relationships, but you know, how they process things, how they transact every day, how they handle their accounting. And so they came to me and we were working together to re -envision the portal, for lack of a better term, that all their customers work through. And then we realized that

We can’t really build this experience out for your customers if we don’t look at the processes that are happening behind the scenes. If somebody wants a real time status of their account, or they want to know where their order is, or they want to know, you know, what’s available to be able to schedule, all of that information has to be connected and it needs to be accessible. so this particular company started out with a problem that they thought they had. And then when we dug in and said, okay, how do we do this? We realized.

gosh, we need to look at the operation and we need to digitize aspects of the operation so we can get to this larger goal. And yeah, so it’s, it’s not always about wanting to retire. It could be changes in workforce or it could be, you know, just increasing the valuation of your business. You know, when people come in and, you know, look at what it’s worth, you don’t want a potential buyer to just be looking at your business for your customer list.

Right? Hopefully if we do it right, they’re looking at the business as one functional entity with all of the people and all the systems and not just kind of chopping it up and absorbing it into something bigger. So yeah.

Jeffro (06:49.997)
Right.

Jeffro (07:01.95)
Right. And part of this can be hard, especially if you have had the same employees for a long time and you envision them as part of the business, but you’re really, trying to make the business run regardless of who the person is in the chair at the end of the day. And even if you never get there a hundred percent, but move in that direction because we used to call this the bus principle, right? If I get hit by a bus, can my coworker come in tomorrow, pick up where I left off? Do they have all the information about my clients, the tasks I was working on?

Christina Wrobel-Holt (07:07.584)
Mm

Christina Wrobel-Holt (07:13.94)
Absolutely.

Christina Wrobel-Holt (07:27.19)
Yeah.

Jeffro (07:28.564)
Is that a smooth transition or are they going to be frantically running around for three weeks trying to understand what was happening?

Christina Wrobel-Holt (07:34.579)
Yeah, no, the paradigm is really interesting because when especially tenured employees, you know, a little bit older and they might have a little bit more anxiety, people tend to think that technology and automation, my gosh, this is going to put me out of a job. And in fact, that is not always the case. Sometimes, yeah, there might be use cases where we intentionally want to do that. But what we’re seeing now is that the tools that we’re using for customer acquisition, lead generation,

you know, digital marketing platforms are becoming more and more effective. And when we lay that volume on top of a business that hasn’t looked at their operating procedures, you can really crush a team quickly when a business goes through those growth cycles, when, our marketing partners are super effective and they do achieve the things they say. So what I tell people is that investing in a digital transformation or a digital audit, if you will, of how we function,

Jeffro (08:13.09)
Mm

Christina Wrobel-Holt (08:33.415)
make sure that when we do acquire the growth that we say that we want, our business can absorb that growth without adding on additional cost, right? We don’t want to, you know, five X our business and five X the number of employees that we need to run the business. You know, that, that eats away at the margin. kind of defeats the purpose. And in fact, a lot of times can crush the owner. So, so I see, especially in the smaller bid, midsize business space,

people want to grow, they’re afraid to grow because they don’t know what it means to them. They don’t know what it means to their personal life, their time with their kids, or maybe with their grandkids. And maybe they have kids that want to take over the business when they retire, but sometimes they don’t, right? And they’re not ready to walk away. So we get people who are a little bit stuck. And that’s where I help them, you know, re -envision how things can be done.

Jeffro (09:10.763)
Right.

Jeffro (09:23.96)
Yeah.

Christina Wrobel-Holt (09:28.705)
We don’t take people out of the equation. We just give people the tools to be able to handle more and still have a balance of life.

Jeffro (09:36.044)
Yeah. Okay. So I think we’ve covered the kind of the high level overview of why we should be doing this, but can we get specific and can you give us some examples of what sort of changes a traditional service business can or should be making?

Christina Wrobel-Holt (09:50.123)
Sure. So last year I worked with a local contractor supplier. So this was a company that provided electrical supply, construction supply, plumbing supply for regional contractors, both commercial and in the housing, residential housing industry. And they were experiencing a tremendous amount of growth. Everything that they were doing was being done manually.

from bidding work to reaching out to builders to processing orders, taking phone calls from people who were asking the status of their orders, coordinating deliveries, and it became apparent that this was no longer sustainable. So as far as the how, we went in and we basically started with an inventory for lack of a more sophisticated term of what are all the things that we do, right?

And then without a lot of science and a lot of effort, what are the things that take the most effort or cause the most stress? So if we were to triple the size of the company overnight, what would keep the owner up at night and what do they know intuitively would be their break points? And 90 % of the people that I talked to, they know the answer to that question, right? If we’re going to 3X, 5X, 10X your business,

Jeffro (11:08.386)
Mm

Jeffro (11:13.747)
Yeah.

Christina Wrobel-Holt (11:16.433)
What do you, what do you, where does your brain go first? Is it a person on your team that maybe is, you know, not as solid as they need to be, or someone that already has one foot out the door or a process that you have to babysit because people just are never getting it right. And so that’s typically where we start. And we look at that and we break it down and then evaluate, okay, what are our options? Can we automate this? Can we implement a tool and.

You know, we take it one thing at a time. Usually we’re pulling costs out of the business as we’re growing, right? So it’s not a cut exercise. It’s refine and now let’s layer more volume in and make sure that we didn’t break anything. Hopefully I don’t know if that answered your question, but yeah.

Jeffro (12:03.136)
Yeah, well, that helps give a specific example for someone to wrap their heads around. I recently switched accounting platforms, for example, and it was painful. Anytime you switch to a new platform or tool or set up a new process with your team, there’s a switching cost associated with it, whether it’s money, time, both. So I’m sure another question that people have is how do we ensure that that investment in this new digital tool or process ends up being worth the hassle?

Christina Wrobel-Holt (12:10.357)
Mm -hmm. Yeah.

Christina Wrobel-Holt (12:18.389)
Yes.

Christina Wrobel-Holt (12:27.551)
Yeah, sure. easiest thing is we involve the team. We involve the team from day one. This is nothing, you know, and this works for small businesses or really large enterprises. You know, a lot of times people have a perception that people don’t want change. And I, and I think that to a certain extent that that’s, that’s true. The human nature, we’re kind of wired to follow the same path out of a sense of familiarity, right. And, and, but.

When you give people the opportunity to really tell you like, what do you wish could be better? What’s the least favorite part of your job? they respond positively to having a platform where they can voice that and even more positively to feeling empowered to do something about it. Right. And then this is, that’s the important part. So when you, when you engage people and you let them tell you, like, these are the things that we really need to focus on.

and then be part of the process, you’d be amazed at how much you can get done and how quickly you can do it versus sitting in a boardroom or a conference room by yourself saying, know, Susie’s never gonna go for this. You know, she’s already stressed out. She’s got enough on her plate. Who’s gonna do that? So the engagement aspect is really critical and it’s counterintuitive because a lot of people think.

how am gonna get my team behind this? How am I gonna introduce this change when they’re already working more than 40 hours a week? And it’s really in the change management strategies that we employ and making people feel like they’re part of something.

Jeffro (14:07.106)
Well, I imagine you might end up with a better process if you include those people because they’re the ones closest to the problem. So they might suggest things that you hadn’t thought of from your two levels back. So you can incorporate that feedback, right?

Christina Wrobel-Holt (14:12.628)
Absolutely.

Christina Wrobel-Holt (14:19.933)
Yeah, yeah, I think more importantly than the solution is making sure that we really understand the problem. If we don’t take the time to really understand the problem and all of its nuance and all of the details of what people do, then we risk implementing something that doesn’t work, right? Or it causes friction or it causes service failures. So, you know, we tend to oversimplify what people do. We also tend to assume

that people are less creative than we give them credit for. You put somebody in a job, they sit there for five years, you you don’t know how they’ve innovated and how they’ve, you know, tweaked their processes over the years to make it work for them. And you’re not going to know that unless you sit down and you dissect it with them. And that’s, you know, not always the most fun for everybody, but it’s really, really critical to figuring out what have they done well to make it work this long.

And how do we replicate the good parts of these processes, the things that we’ve implemented that delight our customers and really make people feel connected to that brand, but do it in a way that’s much more scalable. And that’s the other part of this. We don’t automate, we’re not introducing robots and pulling out all the high touch and all the personalization. It’s really about taking what the business owners have done well.

what the teams have done well to build the company to that point. And then using technology to be able to reach more people, right? And replicate the good stuff and then pulling out that which doesn’t need to happen anymore.

Jeffro (15:57.688)
Yeah, or having the robots do the boring stuff so the people can do the interesting conversations face to face and stuff. So there’s lots of different areas in a business, right? We’re kind of still talking about the concept of how you do this, but let’s say, okay, you’re going to have an operations category, right? There could be bottlenecks there. There could be fulfillment issues or marketing and sales. So if we’re talking marketing and sales, first thing that comes to mind is, okay, do you have a CRM? Do you have anything there? So can you talk about how…

Christina Wrobel-Holt (15:59.945)
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Christina Wrobel-Holt (16:08.193)
Mm

Christina Wrobel-Holt (16:23.883)
Yep. Yep.

Jeffro (16:27.094)
maybe what you would look at first or how you decide if there’s an order or priority of addressing these things.

Christina Wrobel-Holt (16:30.561)
Sure.

Yeah. So I typically, I have a pretty complex discovery process that I go through with business owners. We touch on every aspect of their customer’s journey. So I know you’re familiar with the term customer journey. Some of the listeners may not be. So we think about things in a less siloed way and we think about a potential customer, how they hear about you, all of the different ways they could hear about you.

to the point that they either pick up the phone and call or they search you up on your website to the point that they convert on your website. Now they become a customer or all the way through repeat service calls and the life cycle of that customer. And that’s typically where I start is the inbound acquisition funnel all the way through customer retention.

and billing and logistics, and then there’s service delivery and operations. But we flow that the whole way through. And we do that in one fell swoop. It’s done sequentially, but it’s like a ribbon, if you will, the service ribbon, for lack of a better term. And we look at the points in that process that are weak, right? Whether it’s high probability for service failures or high probability that

Jeffro (17:42.2)
Mm

Christina Wrobel-Holt (17:57.921)
we’re losing a lead or high probability that we don’t have the inventory that we need to be able to service the demand. And that’s where we start. Now, most of the time, the leaders that I work with will have some preconceived notions about where we need to focus. And I listen to those and I say, that’s great. Let’s step through all of this anyways, and just prove that thesis. Because about 70 % of the time,

there’s typically some upstream process that has to be addressed first in order for us to address downstream things. And I’ll give you a really great example. If a company is like, want to build a, you know, we have a website, but we want to build some type of a service portal, right? This is seen really frequently in the trades where people can submit tickets and they can see the status of their driver and they can receive a text notification, you know, that the driver’s on the way and you know,

They’ll receive, you know, they can put in special instructions of, which entrance to come into and, and, know, billing can be done through a tablet. We don’t need to, you know, get their information over the phone. So this is kind of a, an idea, right? Like this is going to make our business better. And then we peel back the layer and we realize, well, you don’t have any place to store people’s email addresses or cell phone numbers. So we can’t email them consistently and we can’t text them.

Jeffro (19:08.973)
Mm

Christina Wrobel-Holt (19:23.969)
consistently. And so even if we implemented this technology, we’d really only be solving the problem for about 20 % of your clients, the way that your business is structured right now. So I could easily go out to a software development company and say, Hey, here’s the specs. Here’s the requirement. Let’s build this thing for this company. They could implement it and see absolutely no business value. In fact, it might cause them a lot of headaches because now they’re

operating their business under two models. know, the way that all the customers that we have their data and can communicate with them, and then all the customers that we still need to pick up the phone and do a courtesy call 30 minutes ahead of the service appointment. So it’s really, really important that we have a plan in place to normalize and standardize processes and data upstream first.

Jeffro (19:55.596)
Right.

Jeffro (20:05.805)
Yeah.

Christina Wrobel-Holt (20:18.785)
And then when we get that to a point that we all feel is okay, then we can pivot to the more fun stuff like building digital products and transforming business. So that’s one example of, just, know, especially in the trades, we’re dealing with companies that have been around for a while and gone through multiple generations of ownership, know, parents passing it down to their kids. So there’s data in there that’s been around.

Jeffro (20:41.143)
Mm -hmm.

Christina Wrobel-Holt (20:46.443)
for a long period of time. There’s data and information that predates having a CRM if they have a CRM, right? And so that’s a really good example of why it’s important to start at the beginning and flow the whole way through and look at the data and figure out, what do we need to do to make this work? And do it in a way that’s really gonna drive efficiency for them.

Jeffro (20:53.131)
Right.

Jeffro (21:10.444)
Yeah, that makes sense. Because that way you’re not skipping over things and not stumbling forward as you try it. Now something else is broken and you’re running from fire to fire. You’re actually smoothing out the process as you go. And then eventually those problems, in theory, go away. Or now you’ve got time freed up to deal with the new optimizations that you can make.

Christina Wrobel-Holt (21:15.541)
Yeah, Yep. Exactly.

Christina Wrobel-Holt (21:31.541)
Yes, yes, yeah, yeah. Then we go out to our marketing partners and say, crank the engine, we want more volume.

Jeffro (21:37.632)
Yeah. Yes. And that puts stress on new areas and then you find them. So it’s a fun process. that kind of also brings a question. We’re talking about the digital tools. So obviously it’s important to get all these things in place so that the business can run efficiently and you can hand it off to new people. People can leave, come in, and you don’t stress out about that. You can go to sleep every night and know that the company is running efficiently.

Christina Wrobel-Holt (21:41.993)
Yes. Absolutely.

Christina Wrobel-Holt (22:05.375)
Yeah.

Jeffro (22:05.454)
But there’s also changes to traditional business models that we’re starting to see. So for example, I saw there’s a plumber who started offering a subscription model. People pay a certain amount each month to basically jump the line any time they have a plumbing leak or something. And then they get a discount on any work that’s performed. So you don’t typically see that model in a plumbing business, but it’s been working really well for him. Do you have any thoughts on that kind of approach?

Christina Wrobel-Holt (22:13.187)
Yes. Yep.

Christina Wrobel-Holt (22:25.121)
I think this is a really great example of looking at the way that consumers are doing business in other industries and looking at what works there and replicating it and bringing it into your industry to the extent that you can align yourself with the same types of experiences. I’m going to use that word a lot. Then you’re going to find higher adoption.

Jeffro (22:37.517)
Mm

Christina Wrobel-Holt (22:52.991)
because there’s somebody out there that’s already hacked into the psychology of a homeowner and has already done the hard work of figuring out that they just can’t keep up with their maintenance checks. One too many times they’ve had to have more work done because they didn’t do the preventative maintenance and this is really attractive to them. And so I think that it’s really smart to do your homework and kind of step out to some of these periphery.

industries that overlap with yours, where the buyer or the buying segment, the homeowner in this case, or business owner if it’s commercial HVAC or commercial plumbing, where they’re seeing success. I’d highly encourage people to network and to cross industries where those concentric circles overlap because you’re to get a lot of great ideas.

and you can shortcut the learning process and the customer discovery process. There’s also some really great opportunities for partnerships and partnership marketing. So if you’re an HVAC company and there’s a plumbing company and the plumbing company is doing this already and they have the platform, by partnering together and aligning your business models, now you can more easily refer business back and forth and offer packages and things like that. So a ton of benefit there.

if it makes sense, right? So I’m not suggesting everybody go out and introduce a subscription model. You gotta figure out what price points make sense, but having recurring monthly revenue is a wonderful thing. It helps offset seasonality. It helps with retention of technicians and suppliers during slow times where we’re always fighting to get talent and people are hopping from one place to the other.

Jeffro (24:31.062)
It is, yeah.

Christina Wrobel-Holt (24:45.855)
So it makes sense in a lot of ways.

Jeffro (24:48.054)
Yeah, and it works best when it’s a win -win, right? Because the homeowner views this as a win too, because they know they’re saving money in the long run, and they just have that peace of mind. And now as the business owner, you’ve got that income coming every month. So that also gives you peace of mind and helps you run a better business.

Christina Wrobel-Holt (24:52.693)
Yeah. Yeah.

Christina Wrobel-Holt (25:00.829)
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think that model too, it might, you know, it might make sense in one market versus a different market too, right? So in a more densely populated area where there’s more demand, absolutely makes a lot of sense in a more rural area where there’s not as much competition. you could probably get away with, you know, doing things the way you’ve done them. just depends.

Jeffro (25:11.79)
Sure.

Christina Wrobel-Holt (25:28.737)
climate and the part of the country you’re in. If you’re in Arizona, you know, that one thing’s more important. If you’re in New Hampshire or something else might be more important. So definitely doing the market research is important. There is no silver bullet, no one size fits all for how you run your business. But doing that work is going to, you know, yield dividends for sure.

Jeffro (25:50.402)
Yeah, definitely. All right, well, we’re coming up on the end of our time here. So thank you for joining me today, Christina. I think we’ve talked about a lot of cool examples and processes that will help get the wheels turning for a lot of business owners. And I’ve said it many times. I’ll say it again. You used to be able to get by without worrying about going digital or creating an online presence or thinking about this new way of doing things, but not anymore. That window is rapidly shrinking and going away. So we’re going more digital every day. No point fighting it.

Christina Wrobel-Holt (25:56.831)
My pleasure.

Christina Wrobel-Holt (26:12.383)
Yeah, not anymore.

Jeffro (26:19.788)
might as well start looking at this now. exactly. And we talked about if it’s going to happen when you retire, when someone else takes over the business, you might as well get the benefit of it now instead of struggling until that point. So you just got to go for it. For those of you guys listening, check out the links in the show notes to learn more about Christina. Last question for you before we wrap up. What’s the, if there was one must have digital.

Christina Wrobel-Holt (26:20.915)
you’re going to do it, do it well. Yeah.

Christina Wrobel-Holt (26:33.067)
Yes, absolutely.

Jeffro (26:45.656)
piece of software or tool that you would recommend for almost all service businesses? What would that be?

Christina Wrobel-Holt (26:51.027)
A good CRM. Good CRM. Yeah. And I’m excluding website because I’m assuming that’s there. So yeah.

Jeffro (26:53.996)
I concur.

Jeffro (26:58.902)
Yes, that’s a given. Hopefully people listening to this podcast already have a website and have made some improvements to it. But all right, yes, CRM is the next step. I agree. Thanks again for being here, Christina. Thanks to all of you for listening. If you’re behind the times, take this as your sign to start making some upgrades. Until then, take care and I’ll see you in the next episode.

Christina Wrobel-Holt (27:08.939)
Ha ha ha.

Christina Wrobel-Holt (27:19.201)
Take care, bye.