Guests: Steve Akian — Owner, Akian Plumbing, Heating, Cooling & Electric | Co-Founder, Fix to Finish
Eric Karofsky — Founder, VectorHX | Co-Founder, Fix to Finish
Guest Links: Website:
https://fixtofinish.ai Steve Akian is a plumber by trade who grew Akian Plumbing to $14 million over ten years. Eric Karofsky spent 25 years leading digital programs for Michelin, Royal Caribbean, Fidelity, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Together they're building Fix to Finish, an AI platform that lets a homeowner diagnose their own plumbing problem, see real pricing, and book the job in five minutes, trained on 50,000 real work orders from Steve's company. In this episode, they break down what AI can actually do in a home service business right now, why customer expectations in the trades haven't changed in 40 years, and how one Saturday water heater call got cut in half because the tech showed up already knowing exactly what to do.
You'll learn:
- Can AI actually diagnose an HVAC or plumbing problem (and why they started with plumbing)
- How 50,000 work orders became the training data for a real diagnostic tool
- The Saturday water heater story that cut job time by 50%
- Why techs who hate selling are the ones most excited about this
- The win-win-win philosophy: company, customer, and platform all benefit
- Why home service customer experience hasn't changed in 30 to 40 years
- How the inventory tool matches receipts to photos for real job costing
- Why technicians buy five valves when they only need three
- The app adoption problem and why leadership and culture make it non-negotiable
- Why enterprise AI still isn't taking off (it's a stickiness problem, not a budget problem)
- Design by HIPPO: why the highest paid person's opinion ruins products
- How to segment and test with real customers instead of random panels
- Why one angry customer is not a reason to change your process (but a cluster is)
- The Blockbuster and taxi industry warning for contractors who wait too long