Monday May 12, 2025

19: The James Hatfield Episode

Get ready to rethink how you connect with customers. In this episode, Chief Revenue Officer James Hatfield shares how he went from starting a simple painting and pressure-washing business to leading sales at LiveSwitch, a cutting-edge video-communication platform. His story covers building companies from nothing, teaching entrepreneurship to people in prison, and ultimately discovering the power of fast, real-time video calls in industries ranging from law enforcement to pro sports—and now home services.

James explains how this near-instant video technology gives service professionals a huge advantage: it saves wasted drives to job sites, increases speed-to-lead, and generates better customer interaction (and more sales). Whether you’re in window cleaning, plumbing, painting, or anything else, you can “claim your property” with a simple QR code sticker so clients can instantly reach you via video. He also dives into building a strong network, harnessing LinkedIn to connect with industry leaders, and positioning yourself as the face of your business online.

If you’re looking for tips on how to amplify your sales, streamline your workflow, and stand out in a crowded market, James’s insights will help you knock on virtual doors and grow your service business faster than ever.

Show Notes
Guest and Company:

James Hatfield, CRO at LiveSwitch

References and Mentions:

ABC Television Show: Free Enterprise (about teaching entrepreneurship to incarcerated individuals)
WWE Thunderdome (example of LiveSwitch’s large-scale live video)
Tennessee Titans (security and event management insight)
D2D (Door-to-Door) experts in Orlando
LinkedIn (key platform for building your professional network)

Resources (Mentioned Every Time):

Sid Graef:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Huge Transformations podcast. I’m Sid Graef out of Montana.

Gabe Torres:
I’m Gabe Torres here in Nashville, Tennessee.

Sheila Smeltzer:
And I’m Sheila Smeltzer from North Carolina. We’re your hosts and guides through the landscape of growing a successful home service business. We do this by interviewing the best home service business builders in the industry—folks that have already built seven- and eight-figure businesses, and they want to help you succeed.

Gabe Torres:
Yep. No fake gurus on this show—just real-life owners who have been in the trenches and can help show you the way to grow profitably. We get insights and truths from successful business builders, and every episode is 100% experience, 0% theory. We’re going to dig deep and reveal the good, the bad, and the ugly. Our guests will share the pitfalls to avoid and the keys to winning. In short, our guests will show you how to transform your home service business into a masterpiece. Thanks for joining us on the wild journey of entrepreneurship. Let’s dive in!

Sid Graef:
Hello, my friend! Welcome back to the Huge Transformation podcast. It’s Sid Graef. I’m so excited today. I get to introduce you to James Hatfield. James Hatfield is the CRO—that’s the Chief Revenue Officer, essentially the money guy—over at LiveSwitch. LiveSwitch is a real-time video platform with a lot of applications. You’re going to learn about it, but here’s the thing that you’re going to love:

We go through James’s journey from right out of high school (even before college) when he started a painting company and a power-washing company. It was really humble beginnings—he started knocking on doors. He’d say he always expected people to say “No,” so he was never disappointed. That eventually built into a business with employees and a team, all based on knocking on doors and just going for it.

Then he “accidentally” got into financial technology—FinTech—and helped build a company up to a 10-figure (that’s billion-dollar) business. They sold that business, and afterward, he and the founder started doing philanthropy, teaching entrepreneurship to people in prison. So incarcerated folks learning about entrepreneurship, and ABC Television actually made a show about it called Free Enterprise. Fascinating story. Now James is back in business as CRO at LiveSwitch, and he’s done so many things. One thing I admire most is that if he believes in an idea that has merit and value, he’s willing to knock on the door, pick up the phone—he says, when he started doing this, he was making 120 cold calls a day—and it transformed how a lot of us in the home service industry do business.

I hope you have as much fun as I did interviewing James and getting to know him. So here we go, our guest today, James Hatfield, CRO of LiveSwitch.

Sid Graef:
Welcome back, everybody. This is Sid Graef, and this is the Huge Transformations podcast, part of the Huge Convention. I’ve got a great guest on today. We were just chatting offline about the secret background of the service businesses and trades—like, “Why hasn’t anybody made a documentary about the guy that climbed a ladder and painted a house?” Right? I get to introduce everybody to James Hatfield. James is currently the CRO (Chief Revenue Officer) at LiveSwitch. James, thanks for being here; it’s good to see you, man. How are you?

James Hatfield:
I’m great, Sid. Thanks for having me. I’m excited to share a little bit and talk about some good, bad, and ugly stories of transition.

Sid Graef:
Cool, cool. So right now, if people peel back the layers a little bit: “He’s got a position with three initials in a technology startup—what does that have to do with home services?” But instead of starting where you are, let’s go back. You had a business painting houses and a power-washing company. Tell us about that—what are the humble beginnings for James?

James Hatfield:
Yeah, usually they say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, right? My grandfather—his dad died really young, and he was the oldest of many kids, so he dropped out of high school at 16, went to work at a tire shop, and he’s a self-made man. Then my father—his dad also died young—and built his own home, coming from nothing. So their dreams for me were very simple. My grandfather said, “Hey, you need to be a painter.” My father said, “You need to be a plumber. That’s how you’ll make ends meet.”

So I went the painting direction. I was like, “Alright, time to start paying my own way.” I have no fear of going up to any door, any house in any neighborhood, and knocking on it asking for a job. In this case, it was painting a house. I learned how to paint a house, apprenticed myself, and didn’t take too long to do it the right way. I put a process together, and then I went selling. That’s where it all began. I ended up growing that into a painting and power-washing company with multiple crews. We painted homes in different neighborhoods of all sizes, even corporate companies, so we did okay.

Sid Graef:
You said you have no hesitation about knocking on somebody’s door and asking for work—like, “Do you need your house painted?” Was that something you learned or was it inherent?

James Hatfield:
I just don’t have any shame. I’m not worried about people telling me “No.” In fact, I expect everybody to tell me “No,” so it just rolls off my back. I heard this story about Jack Nicklaus, the golfer, one of the best of all time. They asked him, “What’s the difference on a Sunday round?” He said, “When I hit it in the woods, I just pop it back out and forget about it. The other guys, they dwell on it for the next three holes.” It’s the same with knocking on doors—I expect a “No,” and I’m never disappointed. Eventually, you get a “Yes,” and that keeps you coming back for more.

Sid Graef:
That’s a great perspective. Most people—the thought of knocking on doors or cold-calling can paralyze them, but you say, “I expect a ‘No,’” so you’re hardly ever disappointed.

James Hatfield:
Never. I expect it.

Sid Graef:
So how did you transition from building that painting and washing company into the corporate world, banking, and eventually LiveSwitch? What happened? Was your dad disappointed you didn’t become a plumber?

James Hatfield:
Definitely disappointed! I didn’t want to be under the house, dealing with all that. I was up on a ladder, but still…

What happened is, while running those companies, I found a weakness: I didn’t understand my financials well. So I put myself through state college, running my companies and taking night classes—back when college was affordable—so I could learn bookkeeping and accounting. I wanted to make sure the numbers added up. Right as I was graduating, I met a guy who had a landscaping company and laundromats. He had created this expert system at Duke University. You’d input a financial income statement and a balance sheet, and it would give you a plain-language report for small-business owners like me who didn’t really speak “accounting.” This was before AI, so we thought, “Let’s give it a shot.”

Back to my door-knocking mentality, but over the phone, I started making 300 cold calls a day to CPAs around the country—just hunting for a “Yes.” We turned that little startup into an Inc. 500 company for three years straight. It’s a multi-billion-dollar company now, sold to KKR.

Sid Graef:
Nice jump—great job. Did you go from that business straight to LiveSwitch?

James Hatfield:
No, after selling that financial technology company, I went into philanthropy. I started churches, and my partner started “Inmates to Entrepreneurs,” where we teach thousands of incarcerated men and women entrepreneurship. Because we both came from home service-based businesses, as well as FinTech, we had roots in that. We wanted to teach it and believed we could. It became an ABC Television show called Free Enterprise. After that, we wanted to build another billion-dollar company, so instead of starting from scratch, we bought a small one. We looked all over the world for a tech company with a unique “Coca-Cola recipe,” found one four years ago—LiveSwitch—which is actually 16 years old.

Sid Graef:
Right, so that leads us to LiveSwitch. For people who don’t know, what is LiveSwitch?

James Hatfield:
It’s something called WebRTC—Web Real-Time Communication—a super nerdy type of video streaming. It’s all about live video, connecting two people anywhere on the globe at extremely high speed, with real-time audio, data, or video streams. A big example is that we powered WWE during COVID—when they couldn’t have fans, we put big screens in the Florida Thunderdome so that fans at home could instantly react to a body slam. That’s the kind of real-time performance we handle.

Sid Graef:
That’s amazing. When we first talked, you mentioned law enforcement usage, so how’d you get from WWE to home services?

James Hatfield:
We started by working with the Washington D.C. Chief of Police to reinvent the 911 call, streaming right from a citizen’s phone to the responding officer. Government stuff takes forever, though. So we looked for other opportunities. We got in front of an NFL security guy for the Tennessee Titans—he loved it but also asked if it could solve small problems like checking across a stadium without driving his golf cart over. We realized we basically had a video walkie-talkie.

Then I have a friend in self-storage, a self-storage Hall of Famer. He said, “Bring this to self-storage,” so I ended up going to a big Las Vegas conference. While there, I accidentally ran into moving and storage companies, calling them 120 times a day. Finally, one guy, Wade Swikle, said, “James, you’ve no idea what you’ve got. Let me tell you how I’d use it in my moving business.” He explained how the biggest cost is driving out to a quote that might be a dead-end. Now he could simply take a live look over video first, then decide if it’s worth coming out. That was our tipping point. Then it spread to painters, power washers, plumbers, holiday-light installers, and more.

Sid Graef:
Yes, that’s the neat thing about how everyday folks find new uses for a technology. So from your perspective, with your background in door-to-door, phone sales, and now all these new ways to communicate—what advice do you have for early-stage business owners trying to get more business?

James Hatfield:
It depends on the type of business, but speaking to painters, power washers, that sort of thing: sometimes you just have to go knock on doors. Don’t rush into big loans or Google Ad spending if you don’t have the budget. Get scrappy. If I lost everything and had to start from scratch, I’d pick my neighborhoods, knock on doors, get those first sales, fulfill them, and then turn those into referrals and recurring revenue. There’s nothing fancy about it, but it’s how I’d do it. And if you want to build fast, once you’ve got some momentum, then you layer in marketing, networking, hiring, and so on.

Sid Graef:
So let’s jump to where you are now at LiveSwitch. Something you said earlier that just blew my mind was how you can literally “claim” a water heater or breaker box with a QR code, so if something goes wrong, the homeowner scans the code on that piece of equipment and it connects them instantly to your business. That boxes out Google so they don’t call a random plumber.

James Hatfield:
Exactly. That’s the new normal, I believe. All thanks to QR codes and smartphones. Put a sticker with your business name, phone, and a QR code on that water heater, breaker box, furnace—whatever. When it acts up, the homeowner sees your code right there, scans it, and a live video feed opens up. Or if you don’t have 24/7 coverage, it’s a drop-box video that they record for you, and you call back after reviewing. It’s all about instant connection and speed—race to the face. Thanks to Amazon Prime, people won’t wait around anymore, so if you’re not there fast, they’ll call someone else.

Sid Graef:
In your crystal ball, how soon before that becomes the norm?

James Hatfield:
It’s already here. It’s just a matter of mainstream adoption. But technology-wise, it’s ready to go right now.

Sid Graef:
One mind-blowing scenario: You can have a technician who hates selling simply hand a tablet to the customer. Then your sales rep—wherever they are—instantly appears and does the upsell in real time. That’s brilliant.

James Hatfield:
Yes, we see that every day. You make sure the right people do the right job. Don’t make your shy tech play both roles. Give them a simple device or an app on their phone, and someone else who’s great at sales can do it from anywhere—maybe even South Africa. It’s game-changing.

Sid Graef:
So what pushback do you get?

James Hatfield:
People say, “My customers won’t like it,” but that’s rarely true. Some say their team doesn’t want to be on video. Or they say, “We’ve been doing it the old way for 30 years,” but guess what—someone else is moving faster. People who adopt it end up saving hours of drive-time per day, closing more deals, so it speaks for itself.

Sid Graef:
This is so interesting. As we wrap up, anything else you’d like to share?

James Hatfield:
Yes, quickly: People underuse networking. Whether you’re in a new industry or established, build your network. Use LinkedIn. Post updates, connect with 20 people a day max, share your insights and your progress. You’ll be surprised by the opportunities that come your way.

Sid Graef:
That’s fantastic. James, thanks so much for your time. We’ll put in the show notes how to find you. For those who want to learn more about LiveSwitch or your approach, where should they go?

James Hatfield:
Head to LiveSwitch.com, book a demo, and specifically request me if you want to chat. Also, you can connect with me on LinkedIn. I love giving more than I take. If you start doing some of these new approaches, let me know how it’s going.

Sid Graef:
Thanks again for coming on. I appreciate your time and expertise, James.

James Hatfield:
Thank you, Sid.

Sid Graef:
Hello, my friend! This is Sid Graef. Thank you again for listening. I hope you got some value today. Anything mentioned—resources, books, tools—are in the show notes, so it’s easy for you to find. Also, remember our mission: helping blue-collar business owners gain financial and time freedom by running a better business. We do that in four ways:

Our free weekly newsletter, The Huge Insider, which is the most valuable newsletter in home services—paid or otherwise.
The Huge Foundations education platform with over 120 hours of industry-specific content, plus monthly topical webinars and Q&A with seven- and eight-figure business owners. It’s a $1 trial for seven days.
The Huge Convention, held every August—in 2025 it’s in Nashville, Tennessee, from the 20th to the 22nd—the largest, top-rated trade show and educational event for home service business builders.
The Huge Mastermind, for businesses over $750K who want to accelerate growth toward $1M, $5M, or $10M in the next five years using the Freedom Operating System.

You’ll find all of this at thehugeconvention.com—just scroll down and click on the Freedom Path. Or check the show notes. If you like this show, please review us on iTunes, subscribe, and share. It really means the world to us. Thanks again for listening, and we’ll see you on the next episode!

Comment (0)

No comments yet. Be the first to say something!