How One Business Owner Is Leveraging AI to Grow His Company

Kyle Ray spent years waiting tables and bartending to pay his bills while building a window cleaning business on the side.

In 2014, about seven years after landing his first client — a massage parlor in a strip mall in Houston — he started earning enough income from his side gig, which he called Geek Window Cleaning, to quit his service jobs.

The difference-maker was SEO. Around 2013, he started paying attention to search engine optimization and learning how to leverage it to boost traffic to his site. By 2015, “if you were Googling ‘window cleaning Houston,’ we were showing up in the No. 1 position,” the entrepreneur told Business Insider. “Then we started getting really busy.”

Nearly a decade later, the strategy that helped transform Ray’s business from a side hustle to a full-time gig is essentially irrelevant.

“We fired the SEO company that we used to use. I no longer care about ranking on Google. It doesn’t matter because search is going to a zero click so fast,” he explained. “If you Google something, Gemini tells you whatever the answer is right there. You don’t even scroll down the page to see what’s there.”

As AI has progressed over the last couple of years, Ray has committed to mastering it, similar to how he tackled SEO in the early 2010s. He’s already seeing results: Having generated six figures in revenue in 2024, he’s on track to exceed $1 million for the first time in 2025, according to his ServiceMonster dashboard.

“We use software and AI as much as possible when it makes sense,” he said. “Our tech stack is kind of wild.”

He rattled off a handful of AI and software tools that he uses to save time and money as a small-business owner — Usewhale.io, ChatGPT, Ingage, Canva, Calendly, PriceGuide.ai, Chiirp, Paive, ServiceMonster, ZyraTalk, ClickUp, and MindMeister — and highlighted the ones that he uses the most.

ServiceMonster to manage customers. Ray said that shifting to a CRM (customer relationship management) software has progressed his business more than any other tool, and helped him stay organized as he’s expanded to servicing hundreds of clients throughout Houston and Austin.

For years, he used carbon copy paper to keep track of his customer history: “It was in a folder and you’re always like, ‘What happens if my office catches fire and I lose all this data?'”

Now, using ServiceMonster, “we can pull up your account history, what we did, and what notes are on your house,” he said. He includes notes of even the smallest details, such as the name of a client’s pet, to provide his clients with what he calls “unreasonable hospitality.”

ChatGPT for just about everything. Ray said he uses ChatGPT every day to do anything from feeding it Geek’s P&L and asking how he can expand margins to asking what new AI tools he should be using as a business owner in the home services industry.

Thanks to ChatGPT, he feels as if he has access to a leadership team without having to hire anyone: “It’s just me. I don’t have a CFO or a CEO or a COO — I’m wearing all those hats — but I can create ones in ChatGPT.”

He uses his “AI CFO” or “AI COO” for basic questions, he said: “If there’s something really complicated or something we’re trying to do or look at, I have a friend who’s the CFO for a massive company, and I can call him. His experience is going to be better than AI.”

Chiirp and ZyraTalk for customer communication. “I want our phone to always be answered. I don’t ever want it to go to voicemail,” said Ray, who uses AI to handle calls that come in after hours or on weekends.

Chiirp, a texting software, can handle basic conversations with customers, while ZyraTalk is an AI voice assistant that answers missed phone calls and speaks to customers like your team would.

By training these two AI tools, “you don’t need to have a full team of customer service reps,” Ray said. “Smaller businesses like mine, it’s hard — I can’t scale at that speed or hire that fast and train, but I can train an AI voice bot to answer the phones when people are calling.”

PriceGuide.ai and Calendly for creating a frictionless customer experience. Ray wants prospective customers to book window cleanings as seamlessly as possible. To do so, he uses PriceGuide.ai, which helps service-based businesses create pricing estimators to streamline the early-quote process.

Once a new client receives their estimate, they can book their initial cleaning through the scheduling platform Calendly, meaning, “you can go from start to finish without talking to anybody,” he said.

Ray said he’s constantly testing different software tools to determine what works best for him and Geek. He believes that every entrepreneur should consider leveraging AI.

“Whatever business you’re in, if you’re not playing the AI game, then you’re going to get left in the dust in a couple of years,” he said. “AI can be overwhelming, but once you play with it and get comfortable with it and know how to use it, then you can do stuff really, really fast. And, money loves speed.”