Lauren Kingsley | Meet the $5.1B Operator Home Service CEOs Keep Calling

**Lauren Kingsley** (0:00)
Did you know that you lose 1-5% of your EBITDA in lost data silos? Most companies are losing 27% of their inbound callbacks. Are we scheduling that lead within 48 hours? Because we all know that if it's not scheduled within 48 hours, the propensity for it to net issue goes down 85%.
We have to look at time as the only asset that we can't create. Shift our time on things that actually matter and make an impact.

**Tommy Mello** (0:30)
All right, guys. Welcome back to The Home Service Expert. Today, I got Lauren Kingsley here. Most home service companies think they have a lead problem. They don't. They have a friction problem. Lauren Kingsley has managed $5.1 billion in revenue, has got a 25-person call center into 800-plus people, and launched 11 Greenfield markets.
She's seen what happened when telecoms consolidated, and she says the same playbook is now running in home services. This episode breakdown is why owners are focused on the wrong priorities. Where the real friction lives is in their business, and how to build a revenue machine that runs without the founder in every room. Lauren, it's a pleasure to have you on the podcast.

**Lauren Kingsley** (1:12)
Thanks. Thanks for having me here today. That's kind of close. The $5.1 billion, because I'm all about don't trust and verify. I want to make sure I'm putting the right stuff out there. So the $5.1 billion is across multiple organizations, not just one in particular, and it is way more than 11 Greenfields love Greenfielding.

**Tommy Mello** (1:32)
So I wanted to just talk about Greenfield because that's right up right in my alley. So just tell us your background and tell the audience a little bit about you, where you got started, where you're heading.

**Lauren Kingsley** (1:45)
Sure. So I actually started off in telecom, worked my way from the ground up. I used to actually hop fences. I did it as a summer job planning drop ship cables. That did not last very long at all. I was chased by a dog and I was just not having fun with that. So then I started to sell art out of my car, which really taught me how to get into those really uncomfortable situations.
Go to the places where they have no soliciting on the sign, and you go in, you go to the top person on the top floor, and you're like, hey, you want to buy some art? You got to use your hands and all kinds of stuff. You know, just really awkward but fun situations. So that kind of led me to Telecom. Telecom is where I really got my start. Worked my way from the ground up, started off as an agent doing sales on the call center, worked through Cox Communications, worked my way up in my career, and really started to hone in on sales effectiveness and just organizational growth across multi-market.
And from there was picked up by my previous boss at Cox to take on acquisition and merger with Spectrum. And that was fun because they were going bankrupt and had to really shift culture. And then homeowners, their perspective of the brand, who is Spectrum, kind of like we see in home services with private equity when they're rebranding across multiple organizations. And then shifting the mental model away from Internet only sales to multi-product selling, doing sales over the phone, doing in-home, home security, cell phones, TV, all of that. And then from there, I was recruited undercover boss style by Nathan Richmond, of Mad City Windows, under to take on call center and strategy for Renuity, Mad City Windows and Bath. And really just helping them go through digital transformation, business transformation, evaluate the right processes and strategies when it comes to call center as a margin lever, and it is, and it should be evaluated that way. And making sure that we're really optimizing our marketing strategy, our marketing routing strategy, lead assignment strategy, ensuring that we're filling the slots, all of it comes into play, and really just writing the entire playbook on how to really maximize opportunities in this industry. And so there is so many parallels of what telecom went through 10 years ago, shifting from internet only and multi-market platforms across the nation to where we're finally getting to right now in this industry.

**Tommy Mello** (4:37)
It's an exciting time and I love that it's kind of AI proof. And I think that's one of the most exciting things. The break-fix model is what I'm in, which is a little bit different than it's all blue collar, but I'm in home service and then there's home improvement. And there's very little distinction, there's a lot of distinction. And I learned so much from home improvement because I've been studying Anderson's Renewal and all these other companies that know how to build their own demand. It's like no one's calling us in, I need windows today.