249. She Run a $1Million Home Service Business Using Just 1 AI Tool

0:00Back in 2016, Andrea Palacio had a stable corporate job, and she walked away from it because she barely saw the people she loved. She bought an e-commerce company, sold it for seven figures, and took her next step, which was buying a boring business, a landscaping company. But that time away from family in 2016, that happened again when she bought this company. She ended up working more than she ever had in corporate. She hired five virtual assistants, all failed, paid a developer$700 for a simple phone system. Five months later, he delivered something broken. So she taught herself, no tech background, just YouTube and grit.

0:36She built her own AI voice receptionist, automated the follow-ups, the invoicing, the client updates. Today, that business does over a million dollars a year and runs so well without her that when someone offered to buy it, she said no. I'm Ryan Atkinson and you're listening to the HealthFit Podcast where we interview entrepreneurs to hear their advice on how you can start a business too. So excited to welcome Andrea today to talk all about systemizing AI automation. So Andrea, thank you so much for being here.

1:01Andrea Palacio:Yeah, thank you so much for having me, Ryan. Super excited to be here. Let's kind of tell the story about first, what do you do? And let's kind of dive into like your background. So first, what do you do right now? So right now I help business owners solve their problems with artificial intelligence. So whether that's lead generation, they don't have the right system, so they are limited by their capacity. I help them build the right systems, automations and how to delegate to AI certain tasks in the business that are maybe manual or repetitive. And yeah, just basically solving all those problems.

1:32Well, yeah, excited to get into it today. But let's before we do that, I want to hear more about like the landscaping company that you acquired. Like how did that like really set you up to like do what you're doing now?

1:40Andrea Palacio:Yeah, of course. So the landscaping company, we acquired that company back in 2023. My background had just been, you know, I graduated from college, graduated from international business, management information systems. We started an e-commerce business in 2016 because I feel like I'm not spending time with my husband who I just had just married. And we do that for a good seven years. And we decide to sell that business because we want to expand our professional life and careers and just grow financially. And so we decide to sell the e-commerce business and acquire a landscaping company. And we do that by using an SBA loan.

2:16Andrea Palacio:When we acquire the landscaping company, The seller steals from us. The manager just quits and tells everybody else that we're not going to make it to just find another job. Our revenue drops from$70 ,000 per month down to$40 ,000 per month. We go from 12 employees down to two employees. And we basically lose all of our top customers. And as we're going through that situation, I'm pregnant with my second son. And my first son is only a seven, eight month old, like maybe nine months at that time. So it was the hardest time of my life when we were going through that pressure, the level of exhaustion.

2:50Andrea Palacio:It was just a lot. And so I find AI as a way to just help me solve my own business problems and help me get out of what I had been dealing with. That's why I'm excited for today's because I think with like my own personal company, there's so much room for like AI automation. My stepdad also has a flooring business. Oh, he probably doesn't even know what AI like stands for. So I'm excited to like think about like what we could do today. So let's kind of start there. So if someone comes to you, you know, they're in the home service industry specifically, let's call it, hey, Andrea, you know, I want to do AI automation, but like, where the heck do I start?

3:24What's like the first thing you would audit for them?

3:26Andrea Palacio:Yeah, for sure. So the first thing I like to ask people is identify exactly where's their time going? Like we need to do an energy audit, a time audit to know exactly what you're doing every single week. And from there, we started identifying what are those manual tests that you're doing or things that are constantly repetitive, right? That's kind of the first thing that I like to do. And then the second question that I like to ask is, okay, do we have enough leads coming in? Because usually you'll find that companies that are maybe less than 700, 600 ,000, maybe even less than that 500 ,000, the struggle for them is just that they don't have a marketing engine that's generating leads automatically.

4:02Andrea Palacio:And so that's where we want to focus on is, okay, let's put together an engine that is going to just run the business and so that you get a lot of leads. And the way you do this with AI is you can either have AI helping you with your content generation. That's the way it helps me with my AI consulting agency now, or the way that it helps in our landscaping company, which we still own. It's managed by my husband now, but we just have AI run all of our ads. And so when AI is running our ads, we have just, yeah, we have our spend is way lower and it's super optimized so that we really get a lot of leads for the bare minimum, right?

4:36Oh my gosh. Well, yeah, I want to ask about that because I'm trying to hack like LinkedIn ads and I'm doing like the worst job probably like possible for that. So walk us through more about like the AI ad strategy because I'm super intrigued and ads is such a great way to get customers. So what the heck is this? Yeah.

4:51Andrea Palacio:We have been running Google Ads. In fact, like when I mentioned that our whole, we lost our top clients, business started dropping, we started doing Google Ads. And we lost about$11 ,000 just trying to learn Google Ads, which was really hard at the time. I didn't know that AI could actually run our ads. So fast forward, I would say maybe a year, a little bit more than that. We start using implementing AI on how it can help us run our ad strategy. And right now, I can tell you that AI just literally goes into our campaign. So we have connected it with Claude, Anthropic, and AI is able to analyze all of your campaigns, see exactly, maybe you don't have the right landing page connected.

5:30Andrea Palacio:Maybe your keywords in your landing page, the words you're using, are not matching the keywords that you're running ads for. It will tell you everything that you need to know in order for you to be able to optimize your strategy and just be able to pay a lower cost per click. So that is like so crazy. So walk us through a little bit more about this step. So we got Google Ads, you know, I'm running Google Ads on the side and people can do their own research on like the keyword strategy, but you then connect it to like a Claude and then basically that'll optimize it for you. Right. So we are connecting Claude directly to Google Ads.

6:02Andrea Palacio:we are connecting it and having it to a full analysis. And then we are just optimizing it every week, asking you questions. Hey, how are things going? It's giving us a report automatically. We have an application where we know the exact numbers. We know how profitable they are, how our conversion rates, we know exactly where we can improve. So we are not playing blind. And most importantly, we're not paying an agency that doesn't... I mean, I hate to say this, but the reality is that I have worked with agencies in the past with lead generation agencies, and you're paying them maybe$3 ,000,$4 ,000 a month just to manage your ads, plus the ad spend, right?

6:36Andrea Palacio:And it's not their money, so it doesn't really hurt them, right? They try to make it as profitable as possible, but the reality is that they have a lot of clients and so it might be hard for them to manage things. And so AI can actually do that for you and you stay on top of things and you know exactly what's going on in your business. You know the numbers, you know the metrics, and now it's easier for you to just measure things. Oh, yeah. Okay, so the person again comes to you and I say, okay, so my time, you know, you need to get the lead set up. So that's one way to do it. What's the content aspect of that as well?

7:05Because it's leads and marketing is everything for a company, like actually getting leads. And so I really want to hit this home for our audience.

7:11Andrea Palacio:100%. So when I started my AI company, I was just, I wasn't running any ads, and I didn't have any leads. And so it was really hard to get started the first couple of months when I started the company. I stepped away from the landscaping company and just, I was just like frustrated the first couple of months. So I started doing content and it started kind of taking off and then like, okay, how do I automate this process? Right. And so now I have AI helping me in the entire personal brand strategy. So I'll give you a couple of examples. I have AI just doing the research for me on videos that will really pop off.

7:45Andrea Palacio:I have AI helping me write my scripts based on my voice. It knows everything about me. It probably knows more about me than I know about myself. It literally just has my voice, my patterns, the way I act, everything completely dialed out. Based on that, it writes my scripts. And then I just record them myself. I used to have my AI clone do them, but I felt like it didn't, it just doesn't transfer the same level of energy that I do because I'm very, I move my hands and I'm very, you know, just kind of loud. I can get a send for that. Yeah. So, so I said, you know, let me just record my own videos.

8:22Andrea Palacio:Then once it does that, we send them to the video editor. So AI is my video editor. It edits my videos, removes the silences, removes the repeated words, and it then gives it to my executive assistant who reviews the videos and then just kind of fixes the things that it's still like not perfect. And then he sends them to me to approve them. Once I approve them, we just set them on the schedule and they go out to seven different platforms automatically with one single click of like a date, putting a date goes out to Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, and threads. So that's the social media strategy type of things.

8:57Andrea Palacio:And then we also have obviously my just me being here on podcast. It's my AI agent that's reaching out to podcasts that I could relate to. And it's pitching me as a guest. So that's why I'm here today. So crazy. And that is so like amazing. That's all just like ran through AI. I'm like actually pretty jealous because I feel like my AI strategy could be like a lot better there. Are you working a nine to five, but dream of entrepreneurial freedom? Look no further than the UFLIP Academy, the number one entrepreneurial platform with 20 plus step-by-step courses taught by active business owners, live workshops, hands-on skill training, a business idea database, and a thriving entrepreneur community to keep you accountable.

9:39Click the link in the description below to join the UFLIP Academy today and make Like this, the year you stopped dreaming and started building your business without guesswork. And then so for a home service provider, like for a landscaping company, let's just make that example. Are those still like the two primary ways you would use it to actually generate like leads for a home service company?

9:59Andrea Palacio:Yeah. And using meta ads as well. So which is the meta strategy is the same type of strategy as you would with Google ads. You can also use AI to do outreach on your behalf. It's also an option. You could have AI do outreach. Like this is what I tell my home service clients. Like if you're doing B2C, you can't find the personal information of your actual residential clients, right? But what you can do is you can partner with, let's say, cleaning companies. You can partner with people that are doing window installations. So you have AI do the research of people that are in your area and they are actually servicing your exact client, your ideal client.

10:36Andrea Palacio:So let's say you focus on, you know, on our end, we focus on high-end properties in the Floridadale area. So reaching out to companies that are servicing those same customers and just sending them outreach emails so we can build some type of referral system or partner strategy that will ultimately get us more leads. Amazing. All right. So someone's listening. All right. I got the leads. You know, I'm actually like flooded with leads. I'm going to start bringing some clients on. And so I need something for like client experience and ops. What are some like the first things that someone should start to like look to implement when it comes to like client experience and ops?

11:06Andrea Palacio:Great question. So when we first started or when we first acquired the landscaping company, we were just losing all of these clients. It was so bad. The first automation that we created, which was a life changer, was just automatically sending pictures to every single client after each service with notes from the crew, exact timestamps before and after pictures. So they knew we had done the job. They knew we had done the job right. And most importantly, which is also part of the marketing engine, is sending them a link, letting them know, So hey, your service was just completed. Can you give us feedback?

11:38Andrea Palacio:Was it a good service? Was it a bad service? And so once we do that, right? They receive that link. And if they feel comfortable, they like the experience, it was good service. They will go straight to Google. When you have a home service business, your Google reviews are everything. They're everything. So you need to be getting reviews automatically, like on the go, right? So when you set up that automation where you automatically are getting reviews from your clients, as soon as the client service has ended, They're now go post a review. Now, if they have a complaint, they fill out a form. So they also let you know the exact issues and you can address them before they become a problem or some type of cancellation of the reoccurring service.

12:14Andrea Palacio:So that would be the solution on how to improve client satisfaction. What's the software that you use for customer investment? I was actually talking to said stepdad about, you know, they need more customer investments. Again, I don't even know if he knows what AI stands for, which is kind of funny. I'm obviously joking, but yeah. Tell him to contact me. He needs to figure this out. Yeah, no. But like, what is like, is it like all through like Claude you're doing this automation or like what software tools are you using for that customer? Yeah. So all I do is I use Claude. So basically we have, we use our CRM that we use for our home service business is Jobber.

12:48Andrea Palacio:So Jobber is really good for, you know, cleaning companies. Any type of home service business, I use Jobber. They don't automatically send links to people to get reviews or automatically send pictures. So it's something that we had to automate. When I first started learning about AI, the first automation, I did it through a tool that's called make.com. It's the simple version of Claude. It's like an automation platform, way more simple. You just kind of like drag and drop modules. So that's how that was built, that first one. Now I do everything with Claude. I'm a Claude code fan and that's all I use.

13:25So are you the one that's actually like Claude coding? Like you're legit the one clawed coding all of this.

13:31Andrea Palacio:Oh, that's me. I don't live anywhere else. Like right now, I can show you a picture of my one, two, three, four screens and they're like half of them are clawed code. Wait, that's so funny. I feel like I get ADHD just from two screens here. Okay, so and then so what are some other like manual busy work that people could be doing? So the reviews is obviously a huge one, but what are some other manual busy work items? So I was having to manually call clients to follow up on invoices because they had not paid. We would charge, you know, not at the beginning of the month, but still some people wouldn't pay.

14:01Andrea Palacio:So I built an AI receptionist that called, passed through invoices automatically. So we sent text messages, we sent emails automatically, but we also then call them, right? So we call them three different times. It has a completely different script that it's following, depending on how long it has been since they have not processed their payment. And so, you know, the first one's more friendly. The second one was like, hey, what's going on? Is there an issue where you haven't paid? The third one is like, hey, we're going to cancel your service and it's going to be suspended because we haven't heard from you type of thing.

14:28Andrea Palacio:So that was very helpful. The other thing, other automations is like the one that answers our phone. Our phone was ringing nonstop. And so here's the crazy part is that a lot of people, they're spending so much money on ads trying to get leads. And the second that lead is calling you, you don't answer. So they go to your competitor because they need their problem solved right now. Not tomorrow, not in five hours, not in an hour where you... Right now. Like they need it now, right? And so that is an opportunity cost if you are taking that extra time to get back to them. So building that AI receptionist that answers every single phone call, building that AI receptionist that books the appointment directly in our calendar and gives them a specific date on when we're going to be there to give them an estimate or provides a quote automatically, right?

15:15Andrea Palacio:That changes everything because now they feel taken care of. They don't need to go to anybody else and they are satisfied. Yeah. So the one pushback that I feel people will say is, oh my gosh, like people are going to tell that it's like AI. But like, is that something like common feedback you get? Like, why do you have an AI bot like calling me? Because I do I feel people would push back. So I do want to answer that. For sure. So there's definitely a lot of people that don't like AI, because we've been used to communicating with humans for years, like all of our lives, right? Our whole life. Our whole lives.

15:47Andrea Palacio:Yeah. So now we're suddenly starting to learn that we can also communicate with robots. A lot of people don't feel comfortable with this. Mind you, I also have a lot of people that are like, they're just older, and they don't even notice that this is AI. Maybe because they don't know that it's a thing that's possible. So they don't even notice this is AI. And they're just, oh, thank you for being so friendly. I am so glad to hear that you're helping me out. Right? So you get the type of customer that doesn't realize it. You get the customer that knows it. And they're just frustrated. And then you have a third type of customer.

16:19Andrea Palacio:Your third type of customer is a customer that's grateful that you even have this in the first place because they know that otherwise it would go straight to voicemail. So when you have that customer, What we do is we don't have it handle all of our calls. We have our executive assistant who answers the phone whenever he's available and then he can solve the issue for the client. So we do like half and half. You don't have to necessarily have AI answer all of your calls, but you want to make sure that when you don't have a human available, you have AI answering them because you're losing the opportunity to get leads that you are already paying for.

16:53Exactly. Yeah, that's that's really good. And then also for that invoicing piece, is there a world where like it automatically like sends the invoices?

17:00Andrea Palacio:Yeah. So what we do is the AI agent just tells it like, hey, do you want to process the payment right now? They say yes. It's going to send a text message with the link because it doesn't take payments over the phone. But it will send them the link where they can process the payment just by clicking the link in their client portal. That is interesting. And then also leads as well. Is there any where were you guys using like outreach? I know you mentioned it earlier, but yeah, how are you guys using like AI for like outreach? I'd love to hear your stack on that. Yeah, that's great. So I personally try that when it comes to when I try doing it for my AI consulting agency.

17:34Andrea Palacio:It didn't work for me. I don't think because of the AI not working, but because I didn't have my messaging right. So here's what I mean. So you can automate a process that is not working, but you're just going to do more volume of the things that are not working correctly. So if I send 100 messages, 100 emails, and my response rate is not even one person, right? I can send 5 ,000 and my response is going to be poor, right? So first, I need to address the issue of having a good message and testing, A-B testing to make sure that, hey, an email that's actually getting a response is getting people interested.

18:12Andrea Palacio:And then you actually go ahead and automate it. So I tried doing that. It didn't work for me, but not because of AI, but I think because of my own lack of skills when it comes to writing the right message. Yeah, there's like so many other like opportunities. I feel like just when it comes to like AI, like there's literally like an abundance of it. What are some other like crazy ways you've seen companies like implement AI for their brands? So in my consulting agency, I have just AI doing all the deliverables pretty much. I have seen basic mortgage companies that have automated the entire process.

18:44Andrea Palacio:Well, I've done for them, automated the entire process of getting all of their customers' documents that they need in order to complete the delivery, which normally takes them a really long time because they have to just verify that it has the correct name, it has the correct address. And so essentially, AI just verifies that the document that the client has sent has in fact correct information. If it's missing anything, it sends an email automatically that says, hey, this document We can't accept it because it doesn't have the address that matches the address that you gave us. So that's a good one.

19:15Andrea Palacio:We had another client. So he services clients in both in English and Dutch. And so this email agent would automatically receive the emails. It would draft the emails in the exact language that the client sent them in. It would check their CRM. It would check their courses that they had available. It would check all the information basically relevant, the WooCommerce order to see all of the information relevant to that client. And it would draft a personalized response based on the exact situation that the client was going through. That was really good. A really cool one, honestly. Another one, we had a client just automate the entire real estate process.