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#22 Build vs. Buy: A Framework for Thinking About AI

#22 Build vs. Buy: A Framework for Thinking About AI

This issue covers the build vs. buy decision in AI — a framework from venture investor Mike Volpi that cuts through the noise: only build if it creates a real competitive advantage, buy everything else, and never confuse a prototype with a production-ready tool. We also go deep on the service wrapper — the six-step system around the technical work that our customers actually write reviews about.

Christopher Hoffmann
May 04, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes

In Today’s Newsletter

Build vs. Buy: A Framework for Thinking About AI
“Things you should do…
Founding Sponsors
The Service Wrapper
Favorite Tweets from the past week

All of your leadership problems. Solved with the right hire. Uncommon Elite.

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What’s on my mind?

Build vs. Buy: A Framework for Thinking About AI

I was in San Francisco last week.

Different world out there. The energy, the density of ideas, the sheer pace of it. It's hard not to notice.

I was there for a conference and had the chance to hear Mike Volpi speak. Mike is a prolific venture investor, former executive at Cisco, and someone who has been thinking about technology strategy at the highest levels for decades. He talked about how companies should think about the "build vs. buy" decision when it comes to AI tools. The framework he laid out was sharp and practical, and I've been turning it over in my head since I got home.

Here's what stuck.

Only build if you're building a competitive advantage.

The question isn't "can we build this?" The question is "would owning this tool and controlling it position us to outperform our competitors in a meaningful way?"

If the answer is yes, then building might make sense. You own the asset. You control the experience. You can improve it on your own terms.

But if the tool isn't a real source of competitive differentiation? Buy it. Don't waste the time, the money, or the engineering resources trying to replicate something that a purpose-built software company has already solved. Ego has no place in this decision.

For most home service companies, including ours, the vast majority of AI tools we will use will fall squarely in the "buy" category. And there's nothing wrong with that.

Your data is yours. Make sure the contract says so.

This one is increasingly important, and honestly, it's one a lot of operators miss.

When you sign up for an AI tool, you are feeding it data. Your customer data. Your call data. Your job history. Your conversion rates. Your operational patterns.

That is your data. Built from years of hard work.

A well-structured agreement protects you. Your AI partner should not have perpetual, non-revocable rights to your data or to any insights derived from it. If you're not paying attention to this when you sign, you could be subsidizing a competitor without knowing it.

Read the contract. Get legal eyes on it. Own your data.

Prototypes are easy. Production is not.

Mike made a point here that I thought was particularly honest and under-appreciated.

Building a prototype is fun. It's fast. In 2026, a capable engineer can spin up an impressive AI demo in days. Leadership gets excited. The board gets excited. Everyone thinks they're ahead of the curve.

Then reality sets in.

Converting that prototype into a reliable, maintainable piece of mission-critical infrastructure is a different challenge entirely. It requires engineering support, ongoing maintenance, bug fixes, performance monitoring, security patches, and version management. The hidden cost of maintaining internally built tools is consistently underestimated.

Most companies, if they're being honest, do not have the bench depth to build and maintain sophisticated AI tools at a high level over time. Building the thing is just the beginning.

Speed of impact matters.

When you buy a proven tool, you get onboarding resources, customer support, and a team of people whose entire job is to make the product work for you. You can move quickly and start delivering value faster.

When you build, you are on your own timeline. Development. Testing. Deployment. Iteration. The path from decision to bottom-line impact is long.

For a company like ours, in an industry that is moving fast, speed of implementation often matters as much as the quality of the solution.

And then there's the talent question.

This is the part of the conversation that stayed with me the longest.

Mike made a straightforward observation: the best engineers in the country, the Stanford and MIT graduates, the people who are building transformative AI tools, are largely concentrated in San Francisco, New York, and a handful of other coastal tech hubs. They are drawn to high-growth, well-funded startups working on hard problems. That's where the culture is. That's where the peer group is.

I love what we're building at HB Solutions Group. I'm proud of it. But I'm also honest about it.

A Stanford computer science graduate is probably not relocating to St. Louis to join a home service company. And even if we could attract that person, retaining them long-term would be a real challenge.

That's not a criticism of our team or our company. It's just an honest read on where elite technical talent lives and why.

The companies building the best AI tools have access to a tier of engineering talent that most operators will never be able to hire directly. When you buy a great AI product, you're not just buying software. You're buying access to the cumulative work of that talent. You're accessing the output of people whose entire focus is solving the problem you need solved.

That's a real advantage. One that's worth paying for.

So where does this leave us?

A few principles I'm taking away.

Buy most things. Build only when ownership of the tool creates a durable competitive advantage that justifies the cost and complexity.

Protect your data aggressively. Don't give away what you've built.

Don't confuse a prototype with a product. The real cost comes after the demo.

Prioritize speed of impact. Getting to value faster is often worth more than getting to a "perfect" custom solution later.

And stay humble about talent. The people building the tools you need are very, very good at what they do.

We are a home service company. Our competitive advantages live in our people, our culture, our customer relationships, and our operational execution. AI is a tool that helps us run that machine better.

Buy the best tools. Use them well.

That's the play.

Chris

Things you should…

1. Let an AI agent handle your next 20 after-hours calls — then listen to 5 of them. You'll either be impressed or have exactly the feedback you need to fix it. Either way, you're moving.

2. Find out who your top referral source is — and when you last thanked them. Referrals don't maintain themselves.

3. Identify the meeting on your calendar that nobody would miss if it disappeared. Cancel it.

Can you do me a favor?

To help me create the best content for you, can you answer this quick (4 question) survey? I promise it won’t take more than 30 seconds :)

The Path Less Traveled - Founding Sponsors

Founding Sponsors… that WE USE in our companies.

When I wanted to launch The Path Less Traveled, I didn’t just want to take any sponsor who would write a check.

On the contrary - I continue to turn down a ton of sponsor inquiries because of one reality: I want my sponsorships to be authentic, and be companies that I work with AND believe in.

Software: ServiceTitan - THE leading software platform for residential and commercial service providers; to be blunt - there is no alternative for scaled enterprise platforms - and that is why it is incredibly rare to find any company over $100M who is NOT using ServiceTitan.

Agentic AI: Netic - Netic has built transformative AI tools that execute end-to-end workflows across speech, text, and data, powering entire functions inside of HB Solutions Group. Elevating the customer experience while reducing friction and cost.

Consumer Financing: GreenSky Home Improvement - helps HB Solutions Group to delight our customers AND grow our business by giving us one of the most powerful tools we can possess: the ability to increase our customers’ buying power.

Final thought: we publish TPLT on/around the 1st and 15th of each month, and we will incorporate a deeper dive into our relationship with each of the partners above on the release on/around the 15th while including this abbreviated section on the release on/around the 1st of each month.

¹ The views and opinions expressed here are owned by The Path Less Traveled and its author and may not reflect the views of GreenSky®

CEO: Growth Mindset

The Service Wrapper

I ask this question to owners all the time.

"When's the last time a customer left you a Google review about the quality of the copper joint your plumber soldered? Or the vacuum your HVAC tech ran on the refrigerant lines before charging the system?"

The answer is always the same.

Zero.

Never happened. Not once.

And yet, if you walked into most home service companies and asked where they focus the majority of their training and development investment, the answer would be: technical skills. How to diagnose. How to repair. How to install. All of it important. None of it what customers actually write about.

This isn't a knock on technical excellence. You need it. It's the price of admission. A field professional who can't solve the problem in front of them isn't going to last long in this business, and they shouldn't. Technical competence is non-negotiable.

But it is not sufficient.

Customers don't have the tools or the training to evaluate the quality of your work at a technical level. What they can evaluate, with remarkable precision, is how you made them feel. Whether you respected their home. Whether you took the time to listen. Whether you explained what you found in plain language, gave them real options, and let them make an informed decision without pressure.

That's what the reviews are actually about.

"He was professional and respectful."

"She took the time to walk me through everything."

"He answered every question I had and never made me feel rushed."

"She protected my floors and left the space cleaner than she found it."

That's the service wrapper. The experience you build around the technical work. And in my experience, it's what separates the companies that grow from the ones that stay stuck.

You can't wing it at scale

Here's where most companies get into trouble.

They hire good people. They send them into homes. They assume that because those people are technically skilled and generally well-intentioned, the customer experience will take care of itself.

It won't.

Good intentions don't produce consistent outcomes. Process does.

We run a multi-trade business. On any given week, a customer might have one of our electricians out to their home on Monday, an HVAC technician performing a spring tune-up on Wednesday, and a plumber clearing a drain on Friday. Three different trades. Three different field professionals. Three different calls.

What I don't want is for that customer to feel like three completely different companies just came through their door.

Different introductions. Different technology. Different ways of presenting options. Different expectations set. Different processes run.

That's a fragmented experience. And fragmented experiences don't build the kind of trust and loyalty that produces long-term customer relationships, high renewal rates on membership plans, or the kind of online reputation that compounds over years into a competitive advantage.

What I want is for that customer to feel the consistency of one great company. Three different people, three different trades, one standard of excellence.

That only happens if you're intentional about it.

Our service system

We have a defined customer service process that we call our service system. Six steps. Every call. Every trade. Every market.

Prepare. Greet. Explore. Present. Execute. Wrap-up.

The execute step is step five. That's where the technical work happens. That's the thing most companies spend 90% of their time training. For us, it's one part of a six-part process.

The greet is how our field professional introduces themselves, sets the agenda for the call, and begins to bring a customer's stress level down from the moment they open the door. Most customers are already anxious before we arrive. Something in their home isn't working. They don't know how much it's going to cost. They're letting a stranger in. The greet is where we start to change that.

The explore is where we ask questions and actually listen. What's going on? How long has this been happening? What's important to you in how we solve this? The field professionals who are best at this step are not the ones who can talk the most. They're the ones who can ask the right questions and stay quiet long enough to hear the answer.

The present is where we give customers real options. Not a single number to approve or reject. Options, explained clearly, tied to their specific situation, so they can make a decision they feel good about. Customers who are educated and empowered are better customers. They trust you more. They're more likely to follow through. They're more likely to come back.

The wrap-up is how we close the call. Did we cover everything? Is the customer informed and comfortable? Did we leave the space the way we found it, or better? That last impression matters as much as the first one.

None of this is complicated. But all of it requires intentionality, consistent training, and accountability to a standard.

Scale requires process

Here's the thing about growth.

As you add people, markets, and trades, the natural drift is toward inconsistency. Every person brings their own style. Every new hire has their own habits. Without a clear, trained, accountable process, you end up with a collection of individuals running their own version of a customer interaction, and the experience you're delivering becomes a function of who showed up that day.

That's not a business. That's a gamble.

The companies that scale well have figured out that exceptional service is not a talent problem. It's a systems problem. You can hire great people and still deliver an inconsistent experience if you haven't given them a clear process and held them to it.

The reverse is also true. You can take a good person who's committed to their craft and, with the right process and the right training, turn them into someone who consistently delivers a five-star experience. Not occasionally. Every time.

That's what we're building.

Over 26,000 members across our brands. Nearly 19,000 Google reviews across our locations. A 4.9-star average that we've maintained while more than quadrupling in size.

That doesn't happen by accident. It happens because we've been intentional about the process our team runs in every home, on every call, every single day.

Technical excellence gets you in the door. The service wrapper keeps customers coming back.

Build the process. Train to it. Hold people accountable to it.

That's how you win.

This Week’s Favorite Tweets

Friends of The Path Less Traveled

Who are the VENDORS that fuel our success?

ACCOUNTING & TAX SERVICES

I met Patrick on X (formerly Twitter), which continues to be one of the best communities for thoughtful operators sharing real insights. I’ve followed his work closely and have been consistently impressed by the quality of content he puts out around building strong finance and accounting foundations in small businesses. He brings both clarity and practicality to a topic that is often overlooked but critically important. If you’re a business doing anywhere from startup to ~$15M in revenue, Appletree is an excellent partner to have in your corner.

PAYROLL & HR

Inova Payroll & HR has been a partner to our companies for over 10 years. They have provided us with a payroll technology platform that has been able to keep pace with the demands of our fast-growing organization (now serving team members across 4 states). Inova’s platform works seamlessly with our CRM, ServiceTitan, and with our accounting back-end, Sage Intacct.

COACHING & TRAINING

If there is one organization - perhaps more than any other - that has fueled our growth over the last 10 years… that organization would be Nexstar Network. I like to say that Nexstar Network has built & refined a “process playbook” that touches on so many facets of our business. Don’t try and re-create the wheel… come and learn from the best. Reach out to my friend Kara Schuster at [email protected] and tell her that I sent you.

#grateful for the “Friends of TPLT” sponsors in this section

Hey…I could use your help connecting with like-minded business leaders:

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