What is your role right now?
At OpenHouse today, I own sales, marketing, and customer success. So everything to do with revenue, be it outbound efforts to generate new opportunities, new customers, or retention efforts to look after current customers.
My typical day changes all the time. Usually, in the earlier part of the week, you’re working with your sales team to understand where their focus is and what they’re thinking of doing. And so it’s a lot to do with supporting your sales team, and providing them feedback on their sequences, on how they’re doing their outreach, and then helping them in sales calls. So I will be part of discovery calls and I’m part of demonstrations, supporting from a senior leadership standpoint.
I like being part of it, being in the thick of it because I’m still new here. I’m only a couple of months in, so it’s important that if I’m going to talk about OpenHouse, I walk the talk. That’s why I actually conduct sales meetings myself alongside the sales team.
Another part of my week is managing our marketing agency and the content we put out: blogs, interviews, how we design our email marketing newsletter, and our welcome sequence, which is coming out soon.
The last element is onboarding and customer success. That means setting up new customers and then working with them for three to six months to see them settle. I might have an instance where, in one week, I’m taking some calls with current customers, working through prediction reports, working through their OpenConnect buyer insights reports, and helping them understand how they might be able to use them more effectively to run their business.
What’s been the biggest surprise or the biggest learning about AI since joining OpenHouse?
AI can be not just transformative in terms of your daily tasks and routines. Helping you draft something, some piece of content, or helping you organize your calendar, for example. But the biggest piece is that it can be transformative for your business.
OpenPredict will predict what sort of demand you’ll have in 90 days’ time. That’s transformative as a business leader. It’s influencing your pricing, overheads, trades, and raw materials. There’s just so much more potential opportunity for exponential change with certain AI tools.
I wouldn’t even call them tools. I call them technologies, really because they’re bigger than just simple tools. So that’s the biggest surprise I had, I think, coming into the business.
What attracted you to OpenHouse.ai?
First of all, the people. Will, Jamie, the leadership team, are amazing. They’ve had a lot of learnings over the past, and I’d like to think that I’ve learned a lot myself. It’s amazing to be in a room that feels open and open to feedback. That’s where I feel I’m at today, and it only sets the company up for success. In small startups, sometimes micromanagement happens because you’re so close to the action, it’s very natural because you really want to take care of what you are building. So I’m not necessarily against that, but it was amazing how Will gave me an opportunity to build a hypothesis and a theory in terms of how we grow and then back that hypothesis up with a strategy, and all of that is coming to fruition. It’s been an incredible learning experience for me.
The other thing that made me want to join OpenHouse was the technology. OpenPredict is a first-to-market technology. There’s nothing out there that does it.
And the challenge of selling it is what also brought me here—the challenge of selling technologies first in the market because you have to educate your buyers on how they could change their business profoundly with this tool. You have to give them the confidence that they need to make very big decisions that before weren't possible. "
How do you incorporate AI into your daily routine? What are your top tools?
I use ChatGPT, and I use it in a host of different ways. When I wrote the copy for the website, I did a lot of modeling in ChatGPT, probably 100 pages worth of listing my requirements and then telling the story of OpenHouse, the messaging, before and after, customer value journey, providing it with copious amounts of fireflies recordings, which is the second tool I’ll tell you I use, so that I could build a very strong background and base before I would start to ask it to develop things for me.
The content you see on the website today is, in part, AI-generated, but a lot of it is really just generated and then refined. I find that my way of writing, and I write lots of things, I write music, I write screenplays and stuff like that, just because I enjoy it. And I find that I’m not often as acute, or, shall I say, as efficient in communicating as I could be. It can be long-winded, and it can be a little bit like an old Irish bumpy road rather than being like a Canadian highway if you will. So I find that AI helps me to and ChatGPT helps me refine and clean up some of those lines.
And you might say, will you lose your joie de vivre like that? The essence of you. I make sure I don’t. And I think that comes down to not being lazy. It comes down to not just accepting what it gives you. I challenge it more and more and more until you get to where you see yourself. So that’s ChatGPT. And then we use Fireflies, which is a great tool because it records everything on our calls, highlights key points, it captures transcriptions. So it’s been really powerful in modeling, for example, our playbooks for sales, our playbooks for marketing, playbooks for content.
What do you think are the biggest opportunities for home builders leveraging AI?
I think opportunities for builders come in at different levels. I would say the easiest entry level is using AI is to get curious with tools like ChatGPT. Learning how to model with ChatGPT, being patient enough to teach it who you are, how you write, who your company is, what your vision statement is, what your goals are, what your products are, how they work, and then giving copious examples to that. I find when I’m writing with ChatGPT, it helps me better understand what I’m thinking about because I have to write it out and so it’s almost helping me learn. I wouldn’t call them [these tools] transformative because a lot of this stuff I did in previous roles without ChatGPT, I just do it a bit faster now, right? So I don’t call that transformative because if you gave me time, I would still get it done.
Transformative is something like OpenPredict, analyzing 1000s of features or indicators, which would take me not just time, but like, lots and lots of time, months to come up with one analysis. It’s doing it in seconds. So when we talk about this opportunity, I think it’s being able to respond to market changes, how customers engage with you, what they’re looking for, and then quickly adapt your content, adapt your material, and make other changes based on the data.
The other opportunity for builders is around prospective buyers. Home builders haven’t yet cracked the tool to engage high-intention buyers. That’s what we’re doing with OpenConnect, we’re creating a high-intention funnel that engages with buyers who are very serious about making a move and have the ability to make a move quickly. Today, the way websites have been designed, everybody can download a brochure, everybody can download a piece of content, and everybody can download a lead magnet. There’s nothing stopping you from doing that. Something that we offer with OpenConnect is a questionnaire that is essentially a filtering exercise. Something that prompts them and says, ‘Hey, let’s challenge you a bit,’ and takes some time and thought. And what you’re starting to do is wean out the tire kickers, and you’re starting to focus on high-intent buyers. That’s opportunity one from a marketing side and a sales side because you’re only sending the sales team high-intention leads, and so it’s very powerful.
And then the last piece is the insights that you gain from those questions answered, from the way they’ve navigated the website. It’s very different from the way people will navigate the website when they’re just filling out a contact form, and they’re of low intention because they might look at anything and everything or nothing. The opportunity is to use your data to empower your business. I think AI will now allow home builders, big and small, to use their own data to predict their own future. To use their data to make very strong bets on where their market is going to go. Those are big opportunities for me because if you can change the focus of your sales and marketing team to really drive high-intention leads to the right places, you can sell faster and with better regularity.
On the forecasting side, if you know what your demand is going to look like in 90 days, there’s so much you can do with price, with ordering raw materials, with marketing campaigns, if it’s discount and incentive campaigns when a market’s going down, or if it’s evergreen campaigns when a market’s going up. There’s just so much you can do.
I think what’s really important to note is all these opportunities are empowering people. And that’s a big takeaway for me is that at Open House, we’re big believers that AI is not here to take over, as Connor McGregor might say, it’s here to empower our home builders to be better at their jobs.
What does this mean for buyers? Buyers are concerned about the housing crisis and the lack of housing and the lack of affordable housing and affordability in general. How does this potentially impact them?
Well, it’s hard to say for a few reasons. One assumes that if things are easier and you can do things faster with fewer resources, then the cost of inputs should go down. If the cost of inputs goes down, then realistically, your output, the cost you charge to your end buyers, should go down. But, of course, that’s not always the case.
When we look at technology and we look at how empowers home builders, if you're starting to cut down on time and you're cutting down other resources required, you should be cutting down on price, and that should impact the end buyer. "
And that’s a big reason why we exist a OpenHouse. We’re part of helping reduce the price to the end buyer. We’re hopefully helping that go down, but that also depends on whether home builders want their prices to go down. There’s also an opportunity for home builders to adjust their margins, right? Then you have to think about how government is involved or not involved. And you know what sort of regulations exist.
It’s a tricky one for the homebuyers out there today, but know that there are companies like us, many of us out there, that are building tools with an endeavor, of course, to be successful people because we are men and women who are unfortunately driven by egos and the need to be successful, but we also are driven by a degree of principle that says you shouldn’t have to pay so much if the builders can do it better and faster and less expensive.
What do you think the future holds for homebuilding and OpenHouse? What do you think we can expect?
OpenHouse is very focused right now on a specific space—homebuilders that build 100, 200 homes, 100 homes, 200 homes above. But soon, we will be moving more into custom homebuilders to support their needs as well. And I’m also very passionate about modular construction, prefabricated construction. And I do think we’re going to get to a point where homes will be built in a matter of days and weeks, which is super exciting. And I think AI will be there to empower builders to do that alongside the physical. And that, for me, is super exciting because it all means a lower cost.
When we think about where OpenHouse is going with respect to helping home builders, our future is set in the following ways. One, we are already, and we want to expand it, helping home builders get to even flow. That’s the Holy Grail, right? Once you get to even flow construction, life is easier for home builders. Life is easier for the staff of a home builder. For every section along the way, everything becomes a little bit less hectic, stressful, and more profitable. And so the tools we’ve built have already empowered home builders to get to even flow, but it’s about scaling that solution, which is OpenFlow.
Not surprisingly, where we see ourselves going is not just predicting the future of where your demand will be 90 days out but predicting it six months out, nine months out, a year out. We’re already testing hypotheses around six months out and showing that we can do this successfully, so that could be on the horizon soon in terms of releasing that to our home builders.
And then the last piece is around OpenConnect. We see ourselves being the pinnacle provider of high-intention funnels that lead to faster sales, better sales experiences for home buyers through OpenConnect and a more transparent sales experience for home buyers.
Those are the big things we see, the knock-on effect for staff and team members being more confident, more successful salespeople. More successful salespeople who are more confident produce greater success over and over again. Also, visibility of your future in terms of where things are going, not just because of OpenPredict, but because of the insights we’re capturing through OpenConnect and a happier buyer. So that’s where our future is going, and hopefully, we’ll partner with some of the largest home builders across North America to start before expanding globally.
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Any books you’ve read recently that you found inspiring that you want to share?
7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy, it’s sort of a checklist of things you need to be thinking about doing when you’re looking for how to win. It allows you, if you’ve read the book and you’re not too silly, you remember those seven powers you can start to think about those things all the time when you’re on sales calls or launching a social media campaign.
And then something interesting I just read recently which I would recommend people read in general, is about mental accounting, which is essentially how we as humans value or devalue the amounts of money we spend. For example, if you find $100 walking down the street and you’ve been saving for a car, and you’ve been putting away your money, carefully doling out how much you’ll spend on groceries, how much on X, Y, Z, and if you find $100 walking down the street, often what we’ll do is think well, this isn’t part of the budget, I’m going to spend this on a $100 meal. But actually it is the same as the $100 sitting in your bank account. When you think about buyers today, we charge what we know we are worth, but some builders out there are used to paying for tools in a certain way, CRM, lead generators, call support systems, etc. But when what we believe to be a transformative technology comes into play and can make you in the realm of 100x return on investment, and we’re charging Y, their mental accounting kicks in and they think that’s now how much I’m supposed to pay. I don’t pay this (X) for that (Y).
I would say read about it because I, too, am thinking about how I’m supposed to incorporate this into my business but also into my own life.
