Future of Home Services with Workiz CEO, Didi Azaria – EP.278

(00:00:00) – Intro

(00:00:29) – Didi’s career background

(00:02:57) – Pivoting from locksmithing into software

(00:06:25) – What are your strongest skills?

(00:07:42) – “CRMs shouldn’t exist”

(00:09:37) – Founding ideas behind Workiz

(00:13:43) – What are ambitious home service business owners asking for from Workiz?

(00:18:02) – Balancing feature requests and keeping the broader vision of the company aligned

(00:19:59) – What excites you about the business for 2026?

(00:23:01) – What does the organizational structure look like for home service businesses 3-5 years from now?

(00:26:51) – What excites you the most for the future?

Alex Bridgeman: Didi, thank you for coming on Think Like an Owner. This podcast is all about ambitious CEOs growing companies, and your business Workiz serves a lot of pretty ambitious contractors and business owners in-home services in the trades. I’d be curious to hear how you got into this business. You mentioned being a locksmith earlier on. Was that kind of the starting point for what’s now Workiz?

Didi Azaria: Yeah, so Alex, first, thanks for having me. My story starts, I guess, 25, maybe more years ago, in the year of 2000, great year to be in business. I started as a simple technician in LA, in Sherman Oaks, basically copying keys, home lockouts, car lockouts, all these things, just driving around. You need to remember those days where we did not have any cell phone or GPS. You had to do everything manually. But this is how I started, actually.

Alex Bridgeman: So yeah, what was a typical day like then without those things? I mean, that’s a lot of planning and looking for addresses and all that.

Didi Azaria: So, most of the locksmith industry back in the days was emergency-based. So you wake up and you don’t know how your day is going to evolve. So, you wait for a beeper. You get a text message with the address, and you just drive there. In many cases, the customer does not exist there because they fixed the problem or they found somebody that came faster than you. So it was a frustrating, I guess, experience to start with. In some cases, you need to find a payphone to call the client if it was a home lockout just to make sure that they are there. And how would you find the location? It was, again, so much more complex than today. But it was quite an experience. Your office is the back of your truck, and you need to have everything because if you’re missing one single item, you need to stop everything, go and buy the item, and get back to the job location. And again, in many cases, the problem is being fixed already. So you’re wasting your time. All these things, I guess, made me who I am today and knowing the industry from the truck itself.

Alex Bridgeman: How long were you a locksmith for?

Didi Azaria: A couple of years, nothing crazy. I was a lousy technician, to be honest. I’m more of a techie guy. I always try to reinvent the technology behind or the processes behind what we were doing. And at some point, I found myself trying to be a computer scientist, which led me, of course, to run companies and invest in high-tech companies today.

Alex Bridgeman: So, walk me through from deciding not to be a locksmith anymore at some point and going into software.

Didi Azaria: So, I would describe my experience as a very bad technician, understanding that this is not, probably not… I mean, you ruin a lot of keys and a lot of locks before you understand that. Once you realize that, my parents told me, Didi, look, go and study something useful. It’s not your future. So, I went to do my computer science degree, and in the third year, together with three of my best friends, we created a project that everybody loved, which turned into a company. I mean, long story short, it turned into a company. To be honest, you need to be young and stupid to open a company, specifically a startup company with no experience because the statistics are, the odds are against you, 100% against you. But it was a great adventure. So we decided to go on that and build the best business intelligence company in the world. So basically, with no experience building something that, competing with Microsoft, big behemoths out there. And I spent there about 13 years. The company got into hundreds of millions of revenue, ARR, about a thousand employees, really grew into something tremendous, again, with zero experience. And at some point, I met my current partner that was a very successful locksmith. He asked for help. He built something for his friends, and I cannot describe it differently, we fell in love. And since then, we’re together at Workiz, where we’re building basically a business in a box for garage doors, HVAC, and other types of businesses in the States.

Alex Bridgeman: So in building Workiz, it was the second business that you built. What did you do differently? What was different about it?

Didi Azaria: So many things. So the beginning, when you start building a business the first time, you make every mistake possible. You’re not focused, you’re working on- I’ll give you a few examples. I have a great passion for designing the interiors. So, I spent a lot of time designing our office experience. But this is not what you need to do as a leader in a company. You need to hire somebody to do that. You should care less about how the toilet looks like or how the office desk looks like. And you should care more about the strategy and speak to more clients and sell more of your product. Many of us at our first journey are mistakenly thinking that we’re good at everything. And this is probably the worst mistake every leader is doing today. You need to think about yourself as a tool, and a tool is good for probably one or two things and do only that and be the best tool for this, I guess, journey and bring other tools, in this case, human beings, that are better than you in those things. So, at the beginning of this journey, the Workiz journey, I realized quite quickly what I’m good at, what I’m not good at, and immediately hired leaders that could take the idea, the big picture, and break it into marketing, operations, sales, all the items that a successful business needs.

Alex Bridgeman: What do you feel like you’re best at? What are the two, maybe one or two things that you feel like you do best?

Didi Azaria: I would consider myself to be a visionary, so think big. This is how I raised, in some cases with my friends, some cases alone, hundreds of millions of dollars in my lifetime. Raising money for any venture requires a visionary because people buy me, myself, my passion, my big dream. And I can share my first slide at every presentation in the last eight years. It is very simple. We’re going to kill Salesforce. And everybody will laugh, everybody is like, ah. But then they realize that I’m dead serious about it, because to be honest, I don’t think that a CRM should exist. I don’t think that any system of record should exist. And it’s not because of the AI revolution that comes to us in the last two years. It’s my vision from day one. So being a visionary, I guess, and convince people around me in that vision is what I do best. The rest, and I mean everything, 100% of the work is being done by my amazing employees. We would be zero, nothing without them.

Alex Bridgeman: What do you mean that a CRM shouldn’t exist?

Didi Azaria: A CRM at the end of the day for any business today is a system of records to allow you to keep your customer relationship, customer transactions on file, to be able to analyze them, to be able to speak to a client and actually know what happened last year and two years ago. And at the end of the day, it requires you to type in a lot of data. This task is causing every desk employee today between 30 to 50% of their time, at least. So you type data all day long just to have somebody analyze it or somebody reads the data later on. Technology today is super simple to replace that task. So just in our case, we have an AI dispatcher who picks up the phone and takes the call. You call the plumber, for instance, you describe your problem. The human dispatcher took all the details and put them in the CRM for the technician to know when they drive to your home. The problem with that is humans. Humans do not work 24/7. Humans make mistakes, and statistically, we see a lot of mistakes. Just one mistake in the zip code or the home address, whatever, takes the technician elsewhere, which is causing them to lose the work. Very simple. Now, technology today, this is what we do, takes AI, listens to you, speaks to you, puts everything in the CRM, and then there is no CRM basically in the process. The technician gets a text message with exact Google Maps directions to the home without doing anything. Now, the CRM is basically friction. That’s why we think that it should not exist.

Alex Bridgeman: So, what were some of the founding ideas behind Workiz? It sounds like that’s kind of one of them, is there should be more automation and cleaner data. What other key ideas came about through Workiz?

Didi Azaria: I guess I would start with the vision, which is, I mean, I guess it’s a better description of killing Salesforce because you don’t really want to kill Salesforce. They’re probably going to do the same or doing the same today. Our vision is fairly simple to the trades, automate everything but the wrench. We know that the wrench will not be replaced in the next two decades. What frictions do we see in any business which we experience firsthand to allow us to help those guys to thrive as a small business? It’s challenging. Okay, let’s face it. Opening a business is doomed to fail in most cases, and it’s unrelated to how good you are at your job. So, our vision, automate everything, means that let’s take the biggest problems in the business, which are usually around communication. You call the plumber, the plumber doesn’t answer, you call another plumber. Guess what? The plumber just paid for your ad over a click to pay, click to call around 50 bucks. That’s how much they lost just by not answering the phone. Then you have somebody that is not well-trained, that is getting Alex on over the phone and saying, oh, I have a water leakage, I have a broken faucet. Okay, it doesn’t understand the problem or the emergency, the urgency of it. And they book the technician for tomorrow. Guess what? You’re going to call somebody else. And so on and so forth. There are so many frictions in human business communication. So what do we do best? We reduce frictions, we reduce those frictions that make businesses fail for the wrong reasons.

Alex Bridgeman: So you mentioned, okay, so there’s the friction of recording, intaking data from customers and organizing it internally. There’s friction in responding to customers and finding the right location, stuff like that. What other points of friction are you trying to solve and smooth out?

Didi Azaria: Payments. Somebody gets to your home and you don’t have any cash. It happens to me. I don’t carry cash for a decade, I think. If they don’t do tap to pay, I have no way to pay. I don’t even have credit cards today. And the younger you get, the less likely you have cash or credit card, actually the physical card. So, anything between the communication layer down to the payment, and of course, all the processes in between are being handled by the system. And the system, to be honest, should be invisible. It’s easy to develop systems today. It’s hard to understand processes and make sure that businesses run smoothly, to be honest, without you. So you need to run in the background and help them to realize that everything is fine. You just need to do the job. And everything else between the communication, the payments, and the review later on is being done by some smart agent. I wouldn’t call it an agent because, after all, it’s a CRM and it actually has a UX behind the scenes. But it does help those businesses to grow. And as a result, we clearly see around 40% growth year to year, year over year, just by embedding our recommendations. It can be, technician completed the fix. Most of them will be, I don’t know, shy and will not ask for a review. But this is what drives the next customer to come in. So, you automate that. The next time you call post 5pm, nobody will answer. Guess what? Now somebody will answer, with quick Q&A, with, oh, I’m going to send somebody tomorrow morning because the system actually knows the schedule better than anyone else. So again, it’s all of the frictions between you, the customer, and the business are being solved one by one with Workiz.

Alex Bridgeman: Based on… you get a lot of requests for features and new things to be done by Workiz. What are some of the more ambitious home service owners and clients of yours starting to ask for that you think in the next year or two or more your clients will be asking for? What are the cutting edge questions or requests?

Didi Azaria: It’s a great question. The future is very, I guess, vague for most of them. They hear a lot of technology gets in, but to be honest, this business is working in the same way for the last 50 years and probably 50 years into the future. Your sewage, your toilet, your ventilation system, your vents, your HVAC unit will probably not be replaced by crazy new technology into the future. And it’s by definition a complex environment. Homes are complex because each home is very different than another. So we see less changes over there, but more of how, I guess, tech companies are working and how can they embed the, I guess, the business use cases of tech companies in their own line of business. Let me give you an example, service agreements. Many service businesses, specifically in B2B, they will get to the business and sign them on a service agreement. I will visit your shop four or five times a year. You’re only going to pay me a hundred bucks, 200 bucks for that service agreement. I’m going to get a cash flow in prediction. I’m going to come to your business and make sure that it’s running smoothly without you needing to call me for emergency. Because if you’re in Texas and it’s like a hundred degrees, nobody will come to work. So you need your HVAC system to function. So understanding these two motions make the HVAC business a subscription business. That’s one way of looking at it. And we see more and more businesses turning their skills, their crafts into a subscription business with a discount on any fix, with more, I guess, warranty or a warranty period and so on. And within time, we see growing businesses looking at upselling more and more services around their core business. So HVAC would sell cleaning your air, I don’t know, air ventilation system, other than just the HVAC system and trying to…

Alex Bridgeman: Duct cleaning, that sort of thing?

Didi Azaria: Yes. Or actually the ducts around the home, because a lot of air is actually running out of your home. Just when you keep everything closed, you still have a lot of cracks. So there are a lot of additional services you can sell and you just need to open your mind, talk to customers about what’s their pain, very much like in the tech industry. Listen to the same pain for more than a few times, and then you realize that you need to add it as a service.

Alex Bridgeman: What other areas in home services do you see doing a good job implementing those additional services like regular cleanings or annual visits, stuff like that?

Didi Azaria: So, pressure washing, window cleaning, pest control, and pool cleaning. I mean, they will all have an additional, I guess, merchandise, let’s call it, or items to upsell. And to be honest, if somebody here listens to that in the home service, you’re already at the client’s home. Just think about what you can carry in your truck that they will never say no to. And it’s basically a part of your platform. So, you fix a lock, maybe you need a Ring device to be sold with the door or any kind of security system. It’s fairly easy to install. You don’t need to be a crazy techie guy in order to do that. But people will buy them because you’re already at their home and you’re the techie guy that actually comes to fix stuff. So again, think of it as a platform. And as long as you can increase your average sales price at every visit, as long as you bring value with it and not just try to push stuff to your customers, you will become a more successful business and you will survive longer.

Alex Bridgeman: One thing I’m always curious about with software CEOs is balancing the feature requests that you get constantly. Like there’s constantly customers asking you for this or that feature to be added. How do you balance all of those requests and kind of filter them but then also keep in mind the broader vision that you have for the company and where you want it to go? And I guess, where do those converge together and where do they diverge and go apart?

Didi Azaria: Very good question. And again, when you’re running your first business or startup, you always fail at that. This is why we need strategy. And strategy can change. But once you decide on the strategy, you realize who you’re really selling to. Part of strategy is like, okay, I’m selling to X, Y and Z. These are the good clients that I can bring in, clients that I can serve best and I can price my services in a way that they can pay and I can make a living. Once you do that, almost all the decisions are going through that filter. Does it serve that type of a client? Does it increase their efficiency? Does it save them money or time? And once the answer is a yes, the answer to the feature is yes, absolutely. In most cases, and you’ll be surprised, I mean, there is a book, I think, Start With a Yes, in this case, no, start with a no. It is easier for you and for your customers when you say no versus maybe, or worse, say yes and not do. So everything comes down to the strategy. And once you know your strategy and everybody around you in the company knows the strategy, it’s fairly easy to see a feature request or a service request in the trades and just to say yes or no according to what you already know about your customer base.

Alex Bridgeman: What one feature or new business are you excited about this year for Workiz? Like what new section of the software are you excited to publish and work on?

Didi Azaria: So, we’re working in the past couple of years but it got really accelerated the last couple of months on our Genius platform. Genius is the guy in the team that basically everybody is asking questions. Obviously, this is the name that we gave to it. Genius is our ability to reduce all these friction points between the communication layer, which all of our customers are using, down to the CRM, tedious tasks that everybody hates. So you love to speak to your clients. You don’t like to log this conversation in the CRM. So we started a couple of years ago with our virtual dispatcher, which basically speaks to the client and it got really smart lately, speaks French and Spanish. Again, big communities in Canada and United States, of course. English is obvious, but guess how many clients you’re missing because you don’t speak French or Spanish. Now our clients can actually grab that type of business. Now, what about emergencies? Can this dispatcher do emergencies? Because emergencies require friction of time of a regular service. You need to know where the technician is in Seoul. So this is next level. And then we realized that it actually can speak to people in text messages instead of just over the phone. Or it can bring a human being when it’s a more complex conversation. So it basically calls you and says, Alex, I have this Joe on the line and they’re really pissed about the job. And you say, okay, connect us, or I’m busy right now. Tell them that I’m going to call them in five minutes. So all these handoffs, human, AI, human, and so on are really exciting to me because it actually brings real revenue to businesses. I mean, today we have recorded across most of our client lists that are using it today, around 10% top line revenue just by enabling it. So that’s real money. And to be honest, that’s a real solution to a real problem that happens on the field or in the field. So that’s one way of looking at it. And now we’re expanding it to more places. We are adding a marketing solution to help those guys to market, but let’s face it, most of them are handymans. They’re not marketeers. So how do you bridge that gap? Again, the genius is taking control on, okay, these are your clients. This is what we can offer to them. This is how an email, a good email looks like. And this is how a good conversion rate looks like. It creates demand. And now the AI picks up the phone and captures the demand that is being created by the marketing. This is how we create a revenue machine for any service business in the US today. So that’s what keeps us busy.

Alex Bridgeman: What do you think the team organization and structure looks like for a home service business three years from now or five years from now?

Didi Azaria: I’m not very optimistic about the office employees. I think that they’re important. Many tasks that they do today cannot be automated, because at the end of the day, it’s humans speaking to humans. But when they’re off the clock, when it’s the weekend or they go on vacation, they will need help. And this help comes in the form of AI. I think we will need less office employees and more technicians. So I imagine a world where we will see more and more technicians working in the field and less and less people. The very smart businesses will have zero people at the office. They will have a smart, I guess, warehouse and smart routing and smart scheduling and everything will be done automatically behind the scenes. So you only need the Internet to make it work. And the rest is being done by technicians. You will still need to hire, retain, and train your employees. And this means some office manager to bring them together. Again, there are many things that AI will not replace. I think that great companies are built by great people, and no automation will replace that.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, it’s still a company of trust in home services. You’re going to people’s homes where they live, usually at a very vulnerable time, something’s broken, their life and routine has been disrupted. There’s still an element of being trusted and authentic and empathetic…

Didi Azaria: You get somebody home. You get somebody into your home. This is like, I don’t see more trust than that. It’s like bringing a babysitter and not putting a camera to take care of the kids the first time. It’s very similar in the home service industry. So when somebody said, oh, robots will replace everybody, not in the next decade or two.

Alex Bridgeman: You don’t think we’ll have the iRobot robots that can be programmed to cook or fix my AC or fix my door? Maybe one day.

Didi Azaria: Again, the vacuum cleaners are doing a damn good job right now, all the robo vacuum cleaners. But again, to be honest, as I mentioned before, homes are a complex environment, and there are kids over there. You don’t want a very heavyweight robot to be around. In factories, in businesses, manufacturing areas that do not have kids around or delicate stuff, TVs or whatever, I think that this is more likely to happen in the next decade. The rest will take much, much longer.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, we have a Roborock for our home because we have two Corgis. And so the amount of hair, dog hair that gets created on a daily basis, we run it every day. I think I actually just finished a few minutes ago.

Didi Azaria: Mine just retired. It gave me my notice and it said I don’t want to work anymore. My wife is like making it run like five times a day.

Alex Bridgeman: Nice, nice. Do you have the one that self empties?

Didi Azaria: Yeah, this is the third one I’m buying because, honest to God, one day I found… I have a big porch, and it was pouring rain. We left the porch door open, basically found the device upside down in the rain. I said to my wife, I think it committed suicide.

Alex Bridgeman: Oh, jeez. Poor guy. Didn’t see it coming.

Didi Azaria: Oh, yeah. No, it did. It just didn’t want to work anymore.

Alex Bridgeman: It was done. It was done. What are you most excited for, for the next couple of years? What gives you lots of energy?

Didi Azaria: I love technology. I love technology very much. I’m technology enthusiastic. I think that the world is going to experience quite a big change. I want to help the service industry to, I guess, get this change in a more smoother way, gradually versus just falling off a cliff. I think that many of us, even today, do not realize the impact of AI, of the experience that we’re going to have. Once you connect the dots, you realize that, I mean, you cannot ignore the fact that people are searching in ChatGPT and your advertising doesn’t work anymore in Google. This is one way of looking at it. Your technicians are going to probably be less trained than before. How do you bridge that gap using technology? It’s all of these things that are achievable today. My goal is to educate. I’m excited about educating one of the largest industries in the world to reduce the friction between tech and human beings that are actually doing the work that makes our lives easier.

Alex Bridgeman: Didi, thank you for coming on the podcast. I appreciate our time. It’s always interesting to hear more about what you’re working on.Thank you for sharing a little bit more.

Didi Azaria: Thank you so much. I appreciate it.