Blue Collar Builders Episode 7: How a Handyman Built an AI Board of Advisors for His Business

From Handyman to AI Software Engineer in Just 2 Years

Tim Leary’s story begins in 2024 when he, along with his father, started building the foundation of Handy’s, a home service and residential repair business in Westfield, New Jersey.

The expected bottlenecks were there. Poor lead conversion, poor cashflow, bad damage, cost, and deadline estimates – everything a small business typically faces at the start of the road. Tim’s creativity and determination helped offset some of those problems.

From scaling his business operations to a revenue of $1.2M in just a year, to skyrocketing Handy’s marketing campaign with a “Need a handy?” local yard sign, Tim found ways to put Handy’s on the map. But then he realized it wasn’t enough.

That’s when AI came into the picture.

How AI Started Transforming Handy’s

One of the problems, Tim explained, with the handyman trade is that it consists of multiple services, which makes estimating job costs more difficult. So, he’s now using AI to try to build a more comprehensive price book, based on all of his available services, allowing his staff to offer faster and more accurate price estimates.

He needs to do this because standard CRM software models aren’t tailored to handyman services specifically:

“(These CRM) are built for HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, and, when it comes to handyman services, we’re niche. So, we need to work around the software”.

Todd notices the same problem, while, at the same time, explaining how Dalton Mills aims to solve it:

“The software should work for you, you shouldn’t have to fit into the software because I tell you ‘this is how you should run your job’”.

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The AI Board of Advisors That’s Helping Tim’s Company Scale Faster

After seeing how effective AI was at offering custom solutions to his problems, Tim decided to take it one step further. His core problem was that he had no way of knowing whether an operational, logistical, or marketing decision was the right one. Sometimes, even good decisions would have unexpected outcomes over time.

So, he improvised. He used AI to build him an AI board of advisors that would bring different perspectives to the table.

“I have created these AI agents that try to see things that I don’t see. [...] I’ll put an idea in and they’ll all talk to each other and you have somebody who’s a pessimist, somebody who’s outside of our industry [...] and someone with a consumer’s perspective.”

As Tim explains, the agents talk to each other and report back to him, explaining how they see his decisions from a more unbiased perspective. This helps address any potential blind spots that Tim may have formed from being so involved in his business’s operations for so long.

Tim’s story shows that creativity and thinking outside the box can sometimes be just what a business needs to take off, which is especially important in a more niche trade like handyman. The problem is that current CRM models don’t allow that type of creativity.

Why Dalton Mills is Different

Dalton Mills offers businesses the freedom to create the exact piece of CRM software that they need for their operations. This allows anyone to build tools tailored to their business and its pain points specifically, just like Tim did with his AI board advisors.

The reasoning behind this approach is that every business works slightly differently and faces different challenges along the way, despite operating within the same trade. So, rather than offering contractors a premade CRM software, Dalton Mills allows them to build their own CRM models, exactly the way they want them.

More importantly, there’s no coding involved, because the AI handles that aspect. All you need, as a business owner, is the operational knowledge and logistics experience and the AI will do the rest.

If you want to learn about Dalton Mills more in-depth or wish to test the platform’s functionalities, apply for early access on the official website today.