AI That Sells While You Sleep

Kyle Hunt: Business is all about solving problems and Remodeler's Autopilot solves a business problem that you have. You did a wonderful kitchen remodeling project for a client two years ago and unfortunately you haven't stayed in touch with them at all. That's a problem. Your clients are your most valuable marketing asset and we want to consistently stay in touch with them with a monthly email. Thanks for tuning into the Remodelers on the Rise show. Whether you're listening or watching, I appreciate you being here. If this was helpful, make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss the next one. We're putting out new episodes every single week focused on helping you build a better remodeling business with real stories, practical ideas, and things you can actually take and use. If you're on YouTube, hit that like button and turn on notifications so you know when new episodes drop. Welcome to the Remodeler's On The Rise show. ⁓ up here in Michigan and down in Maryland and Northern Virginia is this lovely, lovely company called Moss Building and Design, an award-winning ⁓ down in DC. 50 employees, really wonderful ⁓ And I have the pleasure of chatting with, ⁓ is what your signature says, Paul ⁓ DeRoche II. Do your friends just call you Paul? Your friends call you Paul? and with consistent social media posts. But it's hard. You are a remodeler. You've got a lot of different hats and responsibilities. And that is what Remodeler's Autopilot will do for you. It's $147 a month. It is a simple month-to-month agreement. And it makes staying in touch with your previous clients and prospects painless. You can see the details below. Hopefully it is super clear to you how it works. If you're listening on a podcast app, a five-star review goes a long way and helps more remodelers find the show. We've got great links below or in the show notes where you can connect with us, check out our remodelers community and learn more about our coaching and resources. Appreciate you very much. See you on the next episode.

Paul: That's right. I don't wanna tell you what my friends call me, but yeah, Paul's good.

Kyle Hunt: Okay, I do. didn't talk about this in the prep. I usually don't cuss a lot. So there you go. You just edited yourself right there of going, wow, if I'd said what they call me, it might have a little E next to the explicit next to the episode. And his email signature says, chief executive officer and nicest all around guy. And I was a little ticked off when I saw that. I'm like, I try to get the nicest all around guy award, but he evidently, he literally has it in his email signature. So he must've won. Did you win the award?

Paul: That's right. That's right.

Kyle Hunt: You can see the examples and I anticipate like a lot of your remodeling peers, you're gonna go through this page and say, this is kind of a no brainer, let's give this a shot. Would love to have you as our newest remodellers autopilot client.

Paul: That's right. Yes, I I w it's it's a narrow word actually. I don't know if you knew that. Pros thinking about doing it, but yeah, yeah. Nicest all around guy. I've got it.

Kyle Hunt: Nary, Nary Award. Yeah, I actually have, I have an award ⁓ from the Home Builders Association and it's, it's distinguished service to the Home Builders Association of Southeast Michigan. I'm gonna grab it here because, because it's right up here. Distinguished, so he might be nice as guy all around, but I got distinguished service today. And at first, this was from 2014 and one of my longtime clients, named Ben Templeton, Templeton Building Company. I think he nominated me and I remember like they did kind of a fancy award show. We, you know, we had a suit. think I had a tie on and everything. And at first I was like, Oh, it's just, you know, one of my clients kind of, you know, putting me up for that. And I didn't really think much of it. And then when my name got called and I went up there and my wife was just beaming in the, in the crowd. I thought, you know what? I've been working really hard at this business. Um, it was a really cool award thing. So. Any remodel or listening to this, you haven't kind of considered putting your projects in for NARIA awards or Home Builders Association awards or local awards, it might seem like kind of a thing, but it can be really, really meaningful. Paul, do you want to tag anything on that?

Paul: ⁓ I totally agree. I think we've had a we've had a a a couple of good awards over the years through Nari and Pro and ⁓ I think yeah, not only is it rewarding for you, but it's really rewarding for your employees to to see that happen. And they we've always lo ⁓ asked them to partake in the award presentation and they get excited about that.

Kyle Hunt: Yeah, that's really neat. Cool. So we aren't here to talk about awards or to see who's the nicest guy. ⁓ We'll let you guys decide that. Paul, you're already ahead. They're sick of me listening to it. But Joaquin, who is marketing director, what's his title with you guys?

Paul: Title Chief Chief Growth Officer.

Kyle Hunt: Pretty sure he might be up for Nicest Guy Award too. He's pretty up there. ⁓

Paul: He's pretty nice. He's he's he you know, he he might he might be nicer than me, but I'm the nicest all around guy.

Kyle Hunt: All around guy. ⁓ yes. Yes. ⁓ I see what you did there. It was a very specific, very specific title. ⁓ But Joaquin reached out, actually via LinkedIn, and I haven't been checking LinkedIn very much. And I saw, ⁓ there's Joaquin. And he goes, hey, I think an episode would be great for you to have Paul on and to talk about AI, how we're incorporating that in particular with something that you guys are calling Natalie. And ⁓ Joaquin comes with a lot of know, like, and trust from my end. And I thought, Yes, that sounds great. I think in this day and age, in May of June 2026 or whenever you're listening to this, ⁓ AI just continues to pick up steam and we are all kind of grappling with how do we incorporate more of it and how do we use it effectively and how does it actually help us? Not that it's cool, but that it truly helps us. So today we wanted to talk to Paul about specifically this ⁓ Ask Natalie thing they have going on and that side of things, but also just talk about any other kind of tech or AI things that you guys are doing at Moss. If you could, before we jump fully into that, if you could just introduce yourself a little bit more, Paul, and kind of what's your little backstory. And a little more about the business too, if you would.

Paul: Sure. ⁓ yeah. ⁓ so I was a computer science undergrad ⁓ in the 90s and I worked for my dad, who's a carpenter, ⁓ in the summers, and ⁓ went into management consulting, doing technology related work, doing coding, ⁓ as we called it back in the day. And got into operations and then went and got my master's, and as I was getting my masters, ⁓ I had moved into the neighborhood of the founder of Moss. And he really had a compelling vision for the future, fe for the future of Moss. And I was looking to do something different. And I have a love of the construction industry because I grew up in it. And that's when I joined in 2012. And in 2020, my business partner and I, Dave Grexach, we bought the founders out. And so that's how we're here. ⁓ backstory on the business. ⁓ Moss is named after the two founders of grandfathers. So, so actually Pete and Jason. Father and son, Pete and Jason Hampel, father and son, Pete being the father. His father's nickname was Moss. And Moss was the quintessential greatest generation guy, right? Retired from the phone company after 40 years, became the neighborhood handyman. ⁓ and really inspired Jason ⁓ when ⁓ Moss was ⁓ battling cancer and Jason was living in New York, Jason would visit him at Slum Kettering and and you know, Moss was sort of counseling him on his career, really inspired him to do something meaningful.

Kyle Hunt: Hmm. ⁓ What a great nickname, even the way you just said it, and Moss would do it. It is a fun name.

Paul: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's cool. ⁓ so they started ⁓ the company in in July of two thousand one. And ⁓ you know, if you don't rem if you weren't around then or you're a new list you don't remember what happened a couple months later, September eleventh happened. So it wasn't the best time to start the company. And the same thing happened to me. We yeah, I bought the company in January twenty twenty, and then three months later COVID happened. So pretty interesting.

Kyle Hunt: Mm-hmm. Hmm.

Paul: timing of events, but ⁓ yeah, and the company has, you know, started actually started off doing ⁓ straight additions and then additions only and then a couple of years started adding kitchens, bathrooms and basements and, you know, it's just steadily grown since then.

Kyle Hunt: Great. Interesting story, right? Of you kind of buying into the business without a little bit of that background of, know, your dad and the carpentry side. um, but that makes, that makes sense. You're coming from a tech background and that side of things. I did see on the website and just a little Moss history page. And it's just like this little paragraph on July 2, 2001, Pete and Jason launched Moss with a very simple plan. Be honest, be fair, always do the right thing, hire and take care of good people, empower them. and charge them with taking care of our customers and each other. All of the things that Jason's grandfather and Pete's father, Moss, embodied. And I think that just in amongst all of the AI and the tech and everything like that, for that to be, that's who we are. That's what we're about. Those are our core values. That's where the history comes from. That's when you guys bought out the business. That's what you're carrying on. Just a reminder for all of us that in this world of AI and artificial honesty, transparency, authenticity is still going to rule the day. ⁓ Before we click the record button, I was lamenting to Paul, ⁓ our bushes in the front of our house are dead. We have a graduation party in a matter of weeks for my sweet daughter who's graduating high school. And I was just going to let them be kind of dead. And sounds like they were going to come back. They weren't fully dead. My wife didn't have to say anything. She just gave me the look. And I said, ⁓ we're replacing them, huh? ⁓ And this gentleman, I think I'm going to hire him, but he's treading water. My wife came home early from her job at church yesterday to meet him. He didn't show up. I called him at 445. I said as sternly as I could, all right, if that didn't work, how about 10 a.m. tomorrow? I got home at 10 a.m. this morning from my office, 10-12. I was still sitting there. Reminder, just like that paragraph I just read, ⁓ the fundamentals are still going to rule the day as well. Do what you say you're going to do. show up on time, be presentable, be excited about the project, be excited about the opportunity. And with that said, maybe you also need to lean into AI. So tell us in particular about this Ask Natalie. So if you're listening to this, you go to mossbuildinganddesign.com and then under the About tab, one of the sections, it says Ask Natalie. So talk to me about kind of where this came from and how it works.

Paul: Yeah, so Natalie came about from the work that Joaquin did with our company. and he helped us before he joined the company, he did some evaluation on our marketing and gave us some advice. And one of the things that he that he said was that the consumer is moving towards a zero-click environment, right? When people go surfing online and things like that, they're they're moving They're still using Google, but they're using the Google AI summary more than ever. And they're using Google for research and they're doing less clicking and more research and evaluation. And so A and AI is at the forefront of that. Simultaneously, I had also read about ⁓ a new I don't know what you would call it, new browsing methodology for web for websites, which was basically chatting with the ⁓ with an AI to get with the content that you needed on the website. I thought that was pretty interesting. And Joaquin had also suggested, hey, we need to do what other remodelers are not doing, which is we need to be consumers are demanding more transparency than ever. We have to start getting putting our pricing out online so people understand what these what this what these things cost. So all of that kind of coalesced into a single thought, which was we could just build our own AI system based on our data that would give the customers what they wanted. It would give them a a chat interface where they could talk, they could refine their project, they could get information. And as we started to build it, ⁓ we realized that it was going to be way more powerful than we originally even envisioned. The the the amount of information that we already had in our systems was pretty was pretty rich. So we could take that information and feed Natalie with it and that was so that was pretty exciting. ⁓ and we launched it a couple of months ago and ⁓ and yeah I've had great success with it. So

Kyle Hunt: Hmm. Cool. On the page, it says instant answers from 7,000 plus real MOS projects, costs, timelines, design ideas, and details from real projects we've completed in your area. So you're just a couple months in, and what have you kind of experienced or heard even from feedback, or how has even the usage been?

Paul: Mm-hmm. Yeah, so the the main piece of feedback, which which was the same th piece of feedback that you had today when you used it, was I want to see pictures. ⁓ everybody wants to see pictures. So people are constantly using it and asking for that. So that's coming. We have ⁓ version one point one in the works. It's being tested right now, but pictures are live on that version. ⁓ so Just like anything else, like when you do this, right, you don't know what's gonna happen. You just kind of say, hey, this is this is cool, wanna use it, we announce it. So when we announced it, ⁓ we obviously had new customers coming to the website, but we also had existing customers, people who are under contract, go, people who are in design, people who had just signed the contract, go and start to use it. And they started, they were asking it questions, ⁓ trying to noodle ideas on design, trying to figure out, you know, hey, we're this is the next step we are in the design process.

Kyle Hunt: Mm-hmm.

Paul: We're kinda trying to figure out the space allocation of the master bath. Do you have any ideas? And or sorry, the master suite. And su sure enough, you know, Natalie came up with three or four different solutions that were presented, not designs, but you know, text solutions like, ⁓ you could do it this way, you could do it this way, this way. And the customer got really engaged. And then I had no idea this was gonna happen. The cust that Natalie started upselling the customer. So she said she said, Hey, you know, you liked this project that you were that that from our project inventory, that project had vaulted ceilings and exposed beams. Would you like that? You know, that would look cool, basically. The customer would, you know, say, ⁓ yeah, yeah, yeah. That was so that was pretty

Kyle Hunt: Mm-hmm. So a project that might be somebody that might already be in design development as they work through that, do they almost say, hey, go in and see what we were chatting about. These are some ideas that maybe I would like us to look at.

Paul: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. And we had one customer who had just signed the contract with us go in and validate the pricing that we gave them, which which was pretty interesting. They were so they just, you know, it was the day of the announcement, they had signed the contract with us yesterday. So they go into Natalie and they started asking questions and they're trying to get a price range from Natalie. They got the price range from Natalie and then they disclosed to us that they were a customer and they just signed the contract for this amount. So they were happy.

Kyle Hunt: Hmm. So talk a little, go ahead.

Paul: that the ranges were right. ⁓ and the the other thing that we've noticed was is that they're very cusp very, very comfortable sharing their budget ⁓ information with Natalie. So that's that actually that customer that I was just telling you, ⁓ I want to say they what these might be the wrong numbers, but this is roughly close. They, you know, they signed, I think, a $300,000 contract and they had told the s the the

Kyle Hunt: Interesting. Hmm.

Paul: project developer, our sales consultant, that their budget was max three fifteen, but then they revealed to Natalie that their budget was three fifty. So very interesting sort of trust dynamic that's being that was being built up with Natalie. And yeah, and we're seeing new customers, you know, new leads come in, use it. So I don't know how far you took it through the process, but you know, if you express interest in moving forward, Natalie will show you a form.

Kyle Hunt: Hmm.

Paul: And you can schedule, you know, a consultation with one of our ⁓ with one of our project developers real time. So we've we've had a few of those come through.

Kyle Hunt: Yeah, yeah. For those of you watching the video version, you'll see on my screen a little bit and looking to renovate my bathroom, ask questions around, what kind of bathroom is it? Answered that question, talked a little bit about that, has a shower with glass storage, koozie tub, double sink and vanity. Okay, I got you, you thinking about doing this, you thinking about doing that. And just, I described it a little bit more. I probably just spent five or six minutes. I kind of likened it to, if I got on the phone with one of the Moss, phone intake people, I would probably be a similar conversation that we'd have. And ask some more specifics where I'm located. I had to look up the map of the DC area, because I'm from Michigan. I picked Alexandria. Was that a good choice?

Paul: Mm-hmm. That's a perfect spot. Perfect spot. Lots of projects there.

Kyle Hunt: Yes, that's exactly. Alexander's right in our sweet spot, it said. And went through just some examples here. It was interesting when I did ask it for pictures, it kind of pointed to, hey, go to the portfolio, click on bathrooms. Not all of them are on there. I think the one in particular that I was looking at, didn't find it on there, kind of gave that range of 50 to 70, most falling in that 75 range.

Paul: Please go.

Kyle Hunt: And then as I kept going, if it said, yeah, I'd like to know next steps. And then that's when it said, schedule our virtual discovery session. So you're seeing people kind of make it through that and the back and forth, and then go ahead and schedule it right from here.

Paul: Mm yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And we're also seeing a lot of people ⁓ you know, we have a gate on it right now. We have an o you know an authentication gate, right? Which is you if you chat with it twice, we say, hey, sign up, right? We want to capture your email. So we're seeing a a bigger fall off there than we thought. ⁓ so version one dot one's gonna we're gonna wipe that gate out. ⁓ we're just gonna let people use it as much as they want. And then we'll have the ability for at the bottom to say sign up you want to save this conversation. ⁓

Kyle Hunt: Hmm. Yes. Yeah. And I would just from a user standpoint, right? If I'm somebody coming to your site, I'm intrigued by this. This is interesting. And, you know, if I'm only two questions in and I've got to enter my email, go to my email, confirm my email, I think that would just take a lot of people going, forget about it. Yeah. Geez, Joaquin, come on now. We'll get, be patient, man. We'll get their email address as we go.

Paul: Right. Throws it off. Yeah. We'll blame Joaquin for that. ⁓ that we'll blame Joaquin for

Kyle Hunt: Just be patient there. ⁓ Give us just a little, not without getting too nerdy, but give us a little understanding of what did it take to actually build it and input all of this data? What was that process like?

Paul: Yeah, so pretty fun. I I you know, ⁓ I hadn't coded anything really in a long time. So I had to, you know, kind of reacquaint myself with sort of best practices. But I use Claude Code and ⁓ it's I mean, really if you like developing software, you like building things like we do as remodelers, which you know, I love building things, I love building software too. You know, Claude Code is like having ⁓ all of your subcontractors there available, ready to go, and very excited to work for you. So ⁓ that's the and and and for very cheap. I think I think I pay, I have the max subscription, which is $200 a month, and it basically gives you unlimited tokens. I mean, you can max it out, but ⁓ it's very hard to. So I use Claude Code to code it. what I did was we have a production system that manages it that has all of our contracts. All of our change orders, all of our selections, ⁓ schedule, budget, everything. So I had Claude basically create a custom interface to access all of that data. That there's no open API. Build tools. Build tools. They're up but well, they're actually in Minnesota. They're not too far away from where you are. But ⁓ they ⁓ so it's sort of like a builder trans or like a drive chair, you know, very s fairly similar concept, but there's no open API. ⁓

Kyle Hunt: What software is that on the production side?

Paul: ⁓ so how to get that data out ⁓ and pull that data into two things. ⁓ first, ⁓ a database that ⁓ AI can use. So I don't know if people may have heard this term, it's RAG, it's retrieval augmented, something like that. But basically it's a it's a it's a data that sits in the database that allows AI that AI can query and use and

Kyle Hunt: Mm-hmm.

Paul: ask questions about. So that's where all of our stuff is. So when you you know when you see the content and things like that, you're it's searching that huge database. ⁓ and you know I don't know how many rows are in there, but it's you know hundreds of thousands probably because it's little chunks of data that it's looking for. And then when it wants to pull the ⁓ you know the the text that you want to read, like that you want to read that you saw on your screen, it's going out to a content management system that pulls

Kyle Hunt: Mm.

Paul: ⁓ here's the budget range, here's the project, here's the name of it. That's where the pictures live. Of course, not every we don't have pictures for all 7200 of our projects. There's a subset of them, but nonetheless, all of that content ⁓ lives in a system. It's a it's a cms called Sanity. ⁓ so this system is built on neck ⁓ Next.js, which is hosted on Vercel. It's got a super base vector database that does all the querying.

Kyle Hunt: Then I said, didn't I say without getting too nerdy, describe what this is. Now you're getting your coat. Your, 1990s coder is coming out. You're like, you're like, ⁓ this is the coolest thing. It was, it was helpful. It was helpful, but I was starting to get, Ooh, there's a miss. There's a lot. So, right. So a lot, a lot went into it. Obviously I think it's interesting, like big picture concept of like, we've got the database of all of this data. We need to get it into a format that, that it can communicate. And then as far as the actual.

Paul: Yeah, sorry. I I I'm sorry. I guess it's like I guess I'm talking about this stuff. ⁓ nineteen ninety, yeah, I'm going way back. ⁓ see much you want. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Kyle Hunt: Program that I see that's that's facing me on the website. What is that built in?

Paul: So that's built in on Next.js and it's it's all custom code hosted on Purcell. The AI that you're that is being used is Claude. So basically that if you you can think about that website ⁓ that you're that chat that you're interfacing with is our version of Claude, but it is like the real Claude. So I know I didn't download the code or anything and said it. So I'm I'm using Claude's, I'm accessing Claude behind the scenes.

Kyle Hunt: Merci.

Paul: And I'm sending the query, Claude's query in our database and all that kind of stuff. So so we didn't custom build our own AI, that would have been no, we don't have the money money for that or time. So so what we did was we you you know le using ex an existing one, but feeding it our information.

Kyle Hunt: Gotcha. Yeah. Sure. And what'd you say, was the investment to kind of get it to the version it's at right now, was it more just kind of your time and your expertise in this or was it pretty costly too? Yeah. Yeah.

Paul: No, it's very inexpensive. Very inexpensive. Yeah. I mean, I think it was my time. It was my time. We're probably less than a thousand dollars.

Kyle Hunt: and how many hours.

Paul: All in. Ow. Ooh, that's a c I don't even want to ask that question. Don't don't ask me that question.

Kyle Hunt: Yeah. Like we said, we don't want to cuss on this show. But it's interesting. It's going like, it goes back to the first thing that you kind of mentioned as you were introducing this. We're looking at this and we're going, okay, what problem could this solve? does this make sense? mean, anything that we're implementing technology-wise, frankly, process-wise, et cetera, how does this impact our customer? My cousin,

Paul: Ha ha ha. Yeah.

Kyle Hunt: My cousin Derek shout out to Derek out in California. The chances of him hearing this is very, very slim, but if he is, what up, what up cuz, um, he worked for Amazon for a number of years and then he's worked for Google. He's worked for Microsoft. And I remember years ago when I was meeting up with him and he was working on Amazon. said, have you ever been, have you ever been in a meeting with Bezos? And he's like, yeah, I've been in a couple. I said, what's, what's he like? What's he like? It's probably 10, 15 years ago. And he goes, you know, this is his reputation and it's exactly what I saw. Everything is answered with. question of how does that impact the client experience? How does that impact client? What now does that add more friction to the experience? Does that help it? It was just it was just a principle that kind of stuck with me of going that's interesting that the guy that built one of the biggest, biggest businesses in the world, that's what his focus was on. And I think it's interesting because that's where you started with this of going more and more people are using this more and more people want some transparency. It's not that, you know, price is the only thing they care about, but We're living in 2026 where there's a little bit more transparency. Yes, remodel or listening to this. You can absolutely not share any numbers, put one big fat number at the bottom of the proposal and say, look, this is just like buying a car. You don't ask me how much the muffler is and this and that is this is the price. You can do that. And people are still successful with that. You can absolutely do that. But in today's environment where you're putting numbers in front of people that even you're shocked at. That if I would have asked you seven years ago, Hey, did you know that you're going to put that kitchen proposal in front of them? And it's going to be $160,000. You would have laughed your head off at me. You're shocking people with the numbers and you're shocking yourself. And in that environment, we've got to give people some understanding of where the cost is coming in at and how we're getting to it. Yes, we're still going to sell. And it doesn't mean you have to sell line by line price. ⁓ but we have to be open to it. At least remodelers that are. Okay, well just kind of considering it, thinking about it are open to this idea. ⁓ So do you like strongly believe Paul, is that your guys' experience that, people want transparency, people want to know and have more insight early in the process. What am I looking to invest? Tell me kind of your experience with that.

Paul: ⁓ yeah, 100%. 100%. ⁓ I I mean, you know, the people here, at least with that the the people that we sell with to in our market, ⁓ I mean they're they're they're very savvy, they're very smart people. you know, and ⁓ they're do they do their research. ⁓ they wanna know, they wanna get, they wanna understand, you know. And so yeah, absolutely. It's pri not just price, but timeline and product and what's in there. What does this take and what does this mean? Yeah, you so you put the 160 in front of them, but you and I know that same project could be 250. Can it or 300 or even more? What is what does that look like? People don't know. They have no idea, right? And it's just it is to your analogy, like it is like buying a car, right?

Kyle Hunt: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Paul: You can buy a Honda for 50, or you can buy a Lamborghini for 500 and everything in between. So yeah, I I mean the the c the consumer is accessing more information than ever before. ⁓ they're more well informed than ever before. I mean, if I don't understand a legal contract that I have in front of me, I ⁓ I I send it up an AI, you know, especially if it's 60 pages long, I don't want to read it, right? I send it to AI so it summarizes for me. I might ask some permanent questions, but I'm more

Kyle Hunt: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Paul: ⁓ knowledgeable about things than I've ever been before. So the consumer is the exact same way. And that's that's that's been our motto from the beginning. I mean you saw that when you when you read the page, you know, we want to treat people fairly we want to do what's right. The more information you can give the consumer, the more they can make an an informed decision. I mean ultimately we want a we want people who want to work with us. We want to work with you. We want you to work with us. We want to have a meeting of the minds And we might not be a good fit for everybody. That's okay. ⁓ but you're exactly right. When you go on there and you use it, it's a five it's a five five, ten minutes of work. It's it's very similar ⁓ to what what it would be like with a meeting with our project ⁓ discovery session, like what you would booked on. We might get in get into more detail, but the thing that is ⁓ amazing about Natalie is she's also a ⁓ she's a she's an employee, really. ⁓ She's an amazing employee. And our sales consultants, our project developers, use her as an employee. So when they're in meetings, they'll when they're in the virtual discovery session, they'll pull up Natalie and start using it. We have and they and you know, we'll do it in design review sessions when the customers thinking, ⁓ maybe I should add this or take away this or do or this. So the sales consultants can go right into Natalie real time, give them the scope of the project, say this is the these are the ads and changes and everything else like. that the customer's adding and get and get pricing guidance. So the what makes her probab what makes her so knowledgeable is the 7,000 plus projects, which nobody has in their head. I don't have in my head. You know, I've worked here the longest at this point. I I don't have 7,000 projects in my head. Even and even if I did, I I'm not accessible every single day to answer questions.

Kyle Hunt: Hmm. Yeah. And every year that goes by, it seems like my recall is going down as I get older. Yes, that little bit. I mean, I'm only 43, so I'm a baby still, but yeah. I am noticing, there's things I used to hold in my head of like, I'm going down this road, but I'll come back to there. And then I try to get back to there. I'm like, wait, where did it go? It's disappearing. Good. I think that gives some insight. think if I'm a remodeler listening to this, we're not.

Paul: No. No. That didn't happen. Ha ha ha. Yeah, yeah.

Kyle Hunt: You know, I wanted to interview you primarily on this because it's different. I haven't seen, I haven't seen this. This is an interesting, unique application of AI. It's tied in with, you know, ⁓ testing this out to see if it's effective for prospects and super interesting. You're already, I mean, it's brand new. You're two months in a year from now, you're to have so much more thoughts. got version coming in, but interesting that people in design development are already kind of poking around on there. That yeah, it makes sense why me as a as a would you call him project developer? Yeah, project developers kind of like hey, I've got this project. They're thinking about adding this that and the other what's based on our projects. You know what would be an approximate range of what that would add to this particular project. I can see how that could be very very useful. So so lots to think about if I'm a remodeler listening to this of going alright, that's that's interesting.

Paul: Mm-hmm. Project developer, yeah. Uh-huh.

Kyle Hunt: Maybe I ought to think through transparency, think through ease for the customer, think through ways to get ⁓ dialogue and numbers in front of folks. If I can kind of segue a little bit into just overall technology and AI ⁓ as it pertains to how you're using it in Atmos, what are some of your other favorite things you guys are doing that seem to be really helping?

Paul: good yeah that's a good question. So ⁓ we have ⁓ we have a separate business called Renolution. I don't know if you if Joaquin said anything about that.

Kyle Hunt: RENOLUTION.

Paul: Renolution. Yep. It's a renovation revolution is how we got came up with that that name. ⁓ and it's been running for a couple of years and its mission

Kyle Hunt: for revolution. Sounds like we're having a couple cocktails where it sounds like we're having a couple cocktails one night and a couple drinks in. You guys were brainstorming names and you're like, how about this one? What was it again? Renal, Renalution?

Paul: Rena Lucian.

Kyle Hunt: I like it.

Paul: It's it's not quite as good as Facebook, but you know, that we're trying to get something kind of catchy and cool. ⁓ but yeah, so its mission is to connect projects to contractors. So initially people might think, ⁓ is that another Angie's list or another home advisor or something like that? That's not really what we do. ⁓ we spent a couple of years trying to think about, you know, how can

Kyle Hunt: Mm, wow.

Paul: We leverage what Moss does really well. How can we leverage that on a technology platform in some way, shape, or form that would help contractors, you know, do ⁓ execute their business better? So this was back in COVID when we first had the idea. So what do we have and what what did we have a ton of that we an excess of that ⁓ we could start sharing with contractors right out of the gate without doing any technology? And that was leads. ⁓ so we started to onboard contractors onto this platform. And what we learned very quickly, we learned a lot about the contracting industry and how specialized and nuanced folks are. So ultimately, what we've developed is a system that will marry the ⁓ the contractor up with a project and only one contractor. And usually it's contractor larger contractors like Moss that have sent the refer has sent the lead, have referred the lead to Renolution, and then Renolution goes out and sources the project. You know, so from top to bottom, ⁓ on the Moss standpoint, if we were to get 100 calls, we sell about 20 ⁓ of those projects. But you know, fift about 50% of those projects aren't really a good fit for us. We never, we never pursue them past the discovery call stage. And so typically that 50% goes to Renolution. And Renolution closes about 30% of those, you know, pretty significantly higher average just because of that

Kyle Hunt: Interesting.

Paul: And it is using AI to do the matching. So this was done in the very early stages of AI. But it is doing a very sophisticated analysis based upon the project type, the customer experience, the budget, all different types of things on the project to marry up with the right contractor. We ran in the DC market for a couple of years and now we're expanding nationally on.

Kyle Hunt: Renalution, R-E-N-O-L-U-T-I-O-N.com. was just checking it out. Click on the show notes, you'll see it. What else are you guys using kind of tech-wise and AI-wise?

Paul: Yep.com. Yep, check it out. So yeah, so what else are we doing techwise? So we have ⁓ we built a ⁓ a marketing, a CMO marketing app ⁓ with Claude, which basically which connects to all of your social media channels, all of our website channels, all of our analytics channels, and ⁓ has these different agents that run in the background that ⁓ produce content for social media, for blogs that are that the humans then review, edit, and post. But it also has it also takes the information that it's gathering from all the different places, the analytics on Facebook and Instagram and Google and all that sort of stuff, and makes recommendations based upon your strategy. So that's where the CMO part comes in. You look at it and say, okay, well, what am I trying to do? Like one of the things we're trying to do is grow more in in Montgomery County, Maryland. And so that's a that that's an objective. So you we've got the There's these agents that sp spin up in the background. You can think of them as employees. So we have a content writer, we have a reviewer, we have a CMO, all we have a digital analyst, all of those agents spin up work evaluating the information based upon what you're trying to do with the strategy and make recommendations. They make weekly recommendations to the CMO agent. CMO agent reviews it, evaluates it for cost, effort, efficacy, impact, all that sort of thing, and then makes a rec on makes a weekly recommendation list. So it's like a little team. little marketing team that we've got going on there that works that. ⁓ we've also piloted out, we've done this at two different project sites. and we're gonna roll this out ⁓ fully to all of our project sites where we put cameras on the site and ⁓ motion activity cameras and it shoots the image back to an AI system that evaluates what's going on in the project. Our, you know, when did construction site, when did construction happen? Were there any deliveries? Were there any, you know, God forbid any accidents or any issues, any

Kyle Hunt: Whoo!

Paul: anything any damage, is the customer walking this walking the site, all that kind of stuff. So we're getting those sort of analytics back ⁓ on our projects and ⁓ so we're gonna roll that out to ⁓

Kyle Hunt: How many cameras do you need to kind of make that effective on a project? Yeah.

Paul: Depends on project, obviously, right? So like bathroom project, you just need one. Kitchen, you need, you know, depends on what how many work areas. You have an addition, ⁓ you really need about three, three to four. that was using Claude to build it. The image recognition is coming is doing being done by OpenAI.

Kyle Hunt: And that's using Claude again. Super interesting. Well, you're on the cutting edge, man.

Paul: Yeah. So they're telling us what's happening. Yeah. It's pretty cool. So I'm really excited about this one.

Kyle Hunt: Do you anticipate that even just the two that you piloted that on you're going, this is super interesting. This helps us keep an eye on things, helps us organize things. You can see doing that across the board.

Paul: ⁓ yeah. Across the board. And ⁓ you know, how sophisticated can this stuff get? I you know, I don't really know. We'll see how it goes. Could you could you take the image that you're getting and ⁓ compare it to the design? You know, the output against the design? Maybe. You know, do you have any deviations from the design and the build? ⁓ do you need to go ask questions about why? You know, obviously field conditions dictate that a lot. We all know that's the case. ⁓ How's you know, how much we we're already getting time on job site, you know, so we're saying, okay, subcontractor was supposed to be there to build the foundation at seven o'clock. They worked from seven to nine, left, came back, blah blah blah, you know, how much time do they actually have?

Kyle Hunt: Even that, right? Even that of just, can see the summary of, hey, project manager, here's what happened on your job site today. I know you were over on these two. You know, had a delivery. Would it almost grab that little snippet of time too, you watch it? Yeah.

Paul: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Grabs a snip at a time and it shows you ⁓ you know, this you can yeah, click on it and see the image. Now we were using we were sort of cobbling it together to prototype it. ⁓ but we gotta we gotta take a step back and make it a little more more a little more sophisticated to roll it out fully.

Kyle Hunt: Hmm. Interesting. What else is coming to mind?

Paul: Let me see.

Kyle Hunt: Even as general tech wise of kind of apps you're using.

Paul: ⁓ yeah, yeah, yeah. So ⁓ t ⁓ so tech wise we're ⁓ we did you know digital contracting, we have a digital project management system. ⁓ so one of the things that we did after we rolled out Natalie, and Natalie had about 30 days of use for the customers and for the employees, we had a quarterly meeting and we're just talking about it and I was soliciting feedback from all the employees and said, you know, what do you what do you guys think? You know, where should this go? ⁓ And really got a lot of good ideas. One of the ideas was a collaborative project planner. You know, make it so that the customer can go in, start sourcing projects, start sourcing ideas from all the different projects that we have, pull them together into like a project planner, almost like a Pinterest board or something like that, and then allow allow our employees to see that and to engage in that. ⁓ so that so we're gonna work on that. That's probably more like a version two kind of thing, that's a little more sophisticated. ⁓ some people asked, ⁓ hey, what if they found an inspiration photo on Pinterest? Could we upload that inspiration photo on Pinterest and then match that photo to projects that we've done? So that's an idea. That's pretty cool. That's doable. and ⁓ yeah, and then the the last idea that someone had, sort of related to Natalie, but a little unrelated, which is ⁓ to use the data not only in Natalie but also all of the internal data that we have to help our over our teams, our production teams. So the way we're organized is geographically, we have basically each geography gets a mini re mini remodeling company or a large remodeling company, I guess you can call it, but architect, project designer, project developer, ⁓ project manager, and senior project manager. So that team has the responsibility for you know that geography, selling it, building it, everything. So the idea was to take give access out of all of the information that we have to the teams on the history of the projects so that we don't have to go talk to the person that knows, hey, when was the last time we did this? You know, do you guys who you could because you know how this goes, right? Like ⁓ at least in our business. Well we have a project and we know we've done the project a hundred times and we're like, well, when was the last time we did that? Let's go take a look at this. So we could use AI to dive in and say, well, when was the last time we did this? And not just have the customer facing information, but have the behind the scenes information available to the team so they don't have it to start from

Kyle Hunt: Got it. Are you looking at kind of automating and using some AI related to estimating that side of things?

Paul: We've yeah, so we've looked at that. We've looked at that a couple different times. and it's definitely possible. ⁓ it's definit it's definitely possible. I'm a little concerned about making sure we can get it as precise as the existing one that we have. So ⁓ you know, if you want to get a range, a ballpark range, very good at that, right? Very easy, very easy. ⁓ if you

Kyle Hunt: Mm-hmm.

Paul: I think ⁓ what I would like to do is build something on the SMA side that was like a step by step process, right? I'm I'm gonna do this. Okay, now the AI asks ⁓ asks you a question, okay, well, I want to build an addition, okay, well, how many square foot is it? What type of addition is it? And you're answering questions and then it just spit you know, kind of spits it out. ⁓ I tooled around with that a little bit about a year ago and ⁓ reached a couple of blocky or blockers, right? I'm like, I don't think this is worth tackling, right?

Kyle Hunt: Does it have this? Does it have that? Does it not? Yeah.

Paul: But yeah, I mean, you know, anything that you do at the company, ⁓ you know, even things like you know, we're moving. So we're leaving our facilities here and we're relocating. And so I wanted to stop, we wanted to stop shipments coming into our warehouse. It's like, hey, we're moving. We don't want stuff in the warehouse when we move. Stuff is still coming into the warehouse. So very quickly, I just I just got Claude Co. to make a little app for me that scanned everyone's email for shipments. And if it was coming to the warehouse, you got a little nasty gram. Like, hey, hey, hey, hey, I see that's you, you know, shipping stuff to the warehouse. You're not supposed to be shipping stuff to the warehouse. So, you know, there's little things like that that can just, you know, you think about like day in and day out, all the things that you're kind of trying to deal with, there's things that AI can be so, so, super helpful with. ⁓ it's not going to replace the basics like we talked about in the very beginning. You can't not show up on time and say, ⁓ go talk to Natalie. She'll take care of you. It's it's not gonna work. Ultimately you have to build the project and you have to do a very good job building the project. ⁓ but there's so many different things that it it can help with along.

Kyle Hunt: Yeah, what about your designers architects? Are they utilizing it to create some improved renderings or?

Paul: Yeah. No for no we haven't used it. I I think it's so far, I'm not impressed with the renderings that it's that that it's done. You know, it's it's what it's really, really good at is I don't know if you've been to Redfin and you've seen the you know refresh this kitchen kind of thing. Which is kind of neat. Like you you pull up a c up home you might want to buy, you click on the kitchen and it says, ⁓ what would this look like contemporary? What would this look like coastal? You know, it does a pretty good job of kind of refreshing that, but it

Kyle Hunt: Mm-hmm.

Paul: it'll actually kind of mess stuff up a fair amount. Like you might see two stairways coming in and all kinds of things like that. So that's kind of what I see with the rendering so far. ⁓ having having now from an idea standpoint, like you know, or space allocation concepts or just like, you know, riffing on it, yeah, they're definitely using that, engaging with it in all different types of ways to just to stimulate some creativity. But ⁓ but we haven't gotten to the point where we're tr where we're we're using it for renderings. Although I think that's ultimately going to happen. You know, I think it will ultimately happen. I think it's it's pretty good. I understand I know some people in the industry have used it to read plans and you know, verify those plans against ⁓ dis against other specifications spec stocks. And so, ⁓ yeah, I mean it's the thing is this stuff that's happening so fast, you said this at the beginning. ⁓ I mean, when I was an undergrad in the nineties, they said the half life of a computer science ⁓ degree was two years. Now it's like a month.

Kyle Hunt: Southern. Mm-hmm.

Paul: Because Anthropic, the owner, the people who made Claude are using Claude to make Claude. And in Jan in February, they released new major, they had new, one new major software release February. One new major software release every single day. Every single day. And I would I was like, I couldn't keep up. I don't think there's there's not many people that could keep up with that. I mean, it just happened so fast.

Kyle Hunt: shoot okay yeah Yeah. All right. All right. Got it. So we're to pop. We're going to pause there because I, what I liked about this podcast, lots of fresh things, lots of examples, lots of things to think about, lots of ways to, I mean, you just shared a bunch of them for some reason. feel like ending this podcast with just some very analog ideas. So many analog ideas, Paul tell the people, Hey, outside of AI. This is what we need to focus on. What are some of those tried and true things, just rapid fire a few things that matter here still in 2026 that you guys are also watching closely and making sure you're doing.

Paul: I mean, it all starts with the customer. I mean, it all starts there. That you don't have a business without a customer. So if you're not paying attention to the customer, if you're not paying attention to the customer feedback, if you're if you're not paying attention to what's going on with the customer, where they're headed, what they're thinking. ⁓ and it all boils down to the basics around that we all know, I think we all know, right? We should be communicating with them. We should be letting them know what's happened, happening. We should be thinking of different ways to do that. Nothing replaces. ⁓ face-to-face communication, right? There's mechanisms, there's things that we can do to help keep them more informed on a regular basis. ⁓ but you still can't replace that face-to-face. And ultimately you're gonna meet meet them face to face because you're going to their house and you're gonna build their project at their house. Right. ⁓ so yeah, I just think the most basic, the most analog of all ideas is just never lose sight of of that customer. And ⁓ you know, to

Kyle Hunt: Mm-hmm. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Paul: kind of bring it full circle, you talked about the birth of Moss. I'll talk to you about the conception of Moss. The conception of Moss was when Pete was doing a project at his house when he wasn't in the industry and he heard the employees badmouthing their boss while they were building this project. So that he said, I think there's an opportunity here, you know, ⁓ there might be an opportunity here to to to do something. And so, you know, if you keep in your eyes on the customer, who's taking care of your customer? Are you taking care of your customer every day? Probably not. Every single day, are you able to take care of all your customers if you're, you know, running a, you know, if you're running a smaller remodeling company and it and it is you as the project manager, then that's good. You're able to do that.

Kyle Hunt: Thank

Paul: But if you're not, you know, even if you are running it on your own, you're probably gonna have subcontractors, you're gonna have other people doing some of the work. What are they saying? How how what are they talking? How how are they talking to the customer about their experience working for you? You know, those sorts of things. So I think, you know, if you keep your eye on the customer, you have this big trickle down effect.

Kyle Hunt: Good. Yes, I think that's good. mean, and that's just, that's a nice way to kind of round it out of going, Hey, all that said taking great care of our clients and their experience from start to finish is a big part of the name of the game. Taking wonderful care of your team members of learning how to handle conflict, learning how to handle challenges, learning how to inspire and encourage your team, learning how best practices around sales. All of that is still tried and true, but Paul really laid out, Hey, There's some ways that we can use the technology that's out there to maybe make that a little faster, a little more productive, a little more efficient, a little more interesting, and probably more than anything, like we see the trains are moving on the tracks and we've got to hop on and ride it a little bit so that we don't allow people to just kind of go, go, go and innovate and innovate while we're kind of sitting back here. But yes, the analog stuff will still matter. It's an interesting, we're in an interesting industry. There's so many industries that are rightly freaking out about where is this going? Well, guess what folks, maybe there will be robots doing that drywall and that painting and that electrical work. Nah, maybe, maybe, but we are in an industry that face to face that relationship that no like and trust building will still be very, very important in the years. And might I even pontificate? and say decades ahead and utilizing technology to strengthen your business, strengthen that client relationship. That's what this is about. It was a wonderful meeting you, Paul. Thank you for sharing kind of what you guys are up to. I think it'll inspire some of the listeners listening to this and hopefully we'll chat again soon, my friend.

Paul: Yeah, hope so. Thank you.

Kyle Hunt: You ain't nicer than me, by the way.