Built for Growth: Home Improvement's Tech Playbook

Leads feel tighter than they did during the boom of the early 2020s. Tim Musch says that doesn't always mean demand went away. Often, it means the funnel got leakier.

Tim is a Business Development Specialist at Paradigm Vendo and a 2022 inductee into the Legends of the Home Improvement Industry. He spent more than two decades at MarketSharp before joining Paradigm, and he's known for looking hard at the numbers behind the funnel. Pam Torrey sits down with Tim to talk about getting more out of the leads you already have, and how to adopt new technology without adding to the noise.

In this episode:

• Why leads feel scarcer, and a funnel metric many companies never track
• Where most companies could gain the most: getting more inquiries to a booked appointment
• What a missed 9 PM call and an unsold lead really cost
• Why "a confused mind says we'll think about it," and how transparency and clarity help, even a pricing range on your website
• What to expect from the AI-assisted prospect, who shows up better informed but not always correctly informed
• Why good tool rollouts fall apart on the floor, and Tim's 5 T framework for tech adoption: Trouble, Truth, Target, Test, Traction

About Paradigm Vendo: Vendo is a sales presentation, quoting, and contract platform that runs on an iPad and helps teams stick to a process in the home. Learn more or schedule a demo: https://info.paradigmvendo.com/

Built for Growth is brought to you by Leaping AI, the voice AI built for home improvement and home services. See what we're building: https://leapingai.com

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In this episode of Built for Growth, Pam Torrey talks with Alec Newcomb, Fractional CMO at Thompson Creek Window Company and founder of MarketingAlec, about the gap between AI hype and AI results in home improvement marketing.

Alec sits at an unusual intersection. He advises around 250 companies a year through his newsletter, teaching, and speaking work, while also running marketing for one of the fastest growing window companies in the country. He and Pam dig into what separates AI that moves the bottom line from AI that just looks good in a meeting, then get specific about how Thompson Creek approached voice AI for its call center.

Topics covered:

• Why "performative AI" is the trap most companies fall into first
• The real mandate behind Thompson Creek's AI rollout: double digit bottom line growth, not headcount cuts
• A surprising data point: 26% of Thompson Creek's customers are over 72, and many of them prefer talking to the AI over the call center
• How Thompson Creek tracks the shift with a balanced scorecard of sentiment, sales, and satisfaction metrics, rather than cost savings alone
• What happened when AI took over inbound calls, and how the team handled pushback from call center staff
• Alec's advice for any CMO or business leader who wants real AI results, not just AI hype

If you're weighing where AI actually belongs in a high ticket, trust heavy sales process, this one is worth your full attention.

Aspen Contracting has done over a billion dollars in roofing and storm-restoration sales in the last 12 years, growing to dozens of offices without losing the door-to-door sales culture the business was built on. Tim Nussbeck, Special Projects Coordinator at Aspen, has spent his career turning that growth into repeatable systems, and he brought the same philosophy to the call center.

In this episode of Built for Growth, Tim walks Pam Torrey through how Aspen sequenced its AI voice rollout, starting with the hardest use case first: inbound calls, which run 200 to 400 a day across their offices. He talks about treating AI like a new employee instead of a piece of software, why the aged-lead "rehash" agent became the biggest win (10 to 20x their previous results), and how the team scaled the system across a network now handling close to a thousand inbound and outbound calls a day. Tim also shares where he still draws the line on tech in an industry built on in-home trust, and what he'd tell another home services leader who's skeptical about bringing AI into a people-first business.

Learn more about what Leaping AI is building for home improvement companies at leapingai.com.

Christian Curry has a simple rule for automation: does it need a human, or just to happen?

The canvassing conversation on a homeowner's doorstep stays firmly in the first category. Building trust in thirty seconds isn't something you hand to a machine. But the appointment confirmations and info verification behind that conversation, the paperwork of a people-first business, fell into the second. In this episode, Christian walks through how he draws that line and what changed once he did.

The more interesting part isn't the automation itself, it's what his team started doing instead. The five CSRs who used to spend their day confirming appointments now work outbound telemarketing, putting their people skills toward growing the business rather than administering it. That shift in where people spend their time, more than the technology itself, is what helped drop Panda's customer acquisition cost by 3% and scale the company to four states.

Christian Curry is President of Panda Exteriors, a GAF Master Elite roofing, siding, and solar company serving homeowners from Washington, DC to Philadelphia.

Hear how Leaping AI is helping home improvement companies grow at leapingai.com.

Bath Experts wasn't short on leads. It was short on bandwidth to follow-through. In this episode, Jay Shah, VP of Marketing at Bath Experts, explains why the highest-ROI move wasn't buying more leads, it was calling back the ones already sitting in the pipeline, fresh and aged alike.

Jay walks through what changed when Bath Experts handed outbound redial over to voice AI: roughly 4,000 calls placed a day, a 15% contact rate, and about five incremental in-home consultations booked daily, all live within 30 days of kickoff. It's a conversation about lead follow-through, marketing ops, and where automation actually belongs in a people-driven sales process.

Jay Shah is Vice President of Marketing at Bath Experts, the exclusive Jacuzzi Bath Remodel dealer across Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky.

Hear how Leaping AI is helping home improvement companies grow at leapingai.com.