Dispatch is Both an Art and a Science | Podcast Ep. 64 | Toolbox for the Trades

Barbara Pfeiffer, welcome to the Toolbox for the Trades podcast.

Hi.

I am so excited to talk with you. You work for the EcoPLumbers. Erin Gaynor, the owner, has actually been a guest on this podcast before. If anyone listening wants to time travel, I think Aaron is episode like four or something like that. But I'm really excited to chat with you because you were actually nominated to come on the show by your colleagues who said that you know your stuff and you should be on the podcast, which I'm so thrilled about. But I am going to start this conversation the way I do every single one, which is, how did you get into the trades?

So I definitely got into the trades probably around 21 or 22 years old. I just wanted to transition in my life. I was actually living in Pennsylvania then, and so I was just looking for a job, and I ended up knowing who someone that worked there. She ended up being the dispatch manager. And so I really just trusted her. And she said, you'll love this job. You'll be happy here. And I had no idea what dispatching was. I was very confused and obviously didn't know anything about plumbing. I'd never owned a home or knew very little. So it was definitely a totally different experience for me when I started even trying to find out certain plumbing terms there. They did H vac and electrical. So it was three trades all at once. And I felt very overwhelmed in the beginning. And then a couple months in, I started realizing this was really in a way of like playing chess. Throughout the day, you're picking your pieces and trying to make the greatest outcome that you can out of the day. I fell in love with it at that moment, just being able to choose how the day went, being able to pick the puzzle pieces and put them together. And then the other part of it came where I got to actually know the technicians and get to know them on a deeper level and get to kind of see how they joined the trades. And I think in that moment, for me personally, I've gone to college. I've never graduated college. And I think in our time, sometimes that can be very. You can be very insecure about the fact that if you didn't finish school and people definitely make you feel like you didn't choose the right path in life if you didn't. And I definitely grew up in a situation where I felt like I needed to go to school to be successful, which is why I started a few times and then would end up getting involved in a job and want to work and and be out there. And this definitely gave me a pathway where I finally felt like, maybe, you know, school isn't the only option for me. And especially talking to a lot of the guys. I mean, we all know plumbers, and they're very honest, and even just seeing. Just getting to talk candidly with them. I developed really good, strong relationships at that first job and just started becoming passionate about the fact that you don't need to go to a traditional school. There is a lot of great careers in the trades. And, you know, even during difficult times, we're an essential business and we take care of people. So it was nice to actually get some pride from that. I think it had just opened up my eyes at the time because being young and not even realizing, you know, we're not a third world country because we have plumbing and how important plumbing is to us, and just kind of felt like I should stand behind that. I just felt very, very passionate about it.

So I love that. I'm just gonna pause real quick and let you know that was a fantastic answer. You just knocked it out of the park. So I just wanted to give you a little kudos there.

And I'm gonna do.

I was like, holy crap. She just gave a great answer. Going back. I love that that was your experience to dispatch right away. And kudos to whoever told you, like, you're going to love this job. It's so fun. And I love that you compared it to chess. It really, from what my understanding of dispatch is, it's very much like, you have to know your technicians, you have to know what they do. You have to know the trades. And it really is just like this little game you're playing throughout the day. Not a little game, a very big game that drives revenue for the business. I would love to know how you got to EcoPlumbers then.

So I worked for two different companies in Pennsylvania. My last company, I ended up getting laid off. And that was the first time in my entire life I'd been laid off. And I was. I was shocked.

I was like, what?

This never happens to me? So I got laid off. And then I took that as a sign to move back to Columbus. I wanted to move back. I thought I wanted this home to me, and I took it as a sign. And it's actually a very funny story. A few people know it, but I was interviewing. I moved back. I stayed with my mom while I was interviewing. And I'm trying to find a job locally. And I had already gotten a job at an electric company, and I Had one more interview left and it was for the eco plumbers. And I probably sat at home, you know, who wants to do another interview after getting a job? I was like, I don't want to do this anymore. I'd already done probably seven or eight interviews at that time. And I tell the joke that I literally was not even dressed for that interview, probably until 25 minutes beforehand because I told myself I wasn't going to the interview. I was like, I already have a job. I'm done interviewing for now. We'll continue. We'll see how this job goes and then make decisions. And the only reason I came to the interview was because I liked the website. It looked nice and they had a 93 or free deal. And I had known about that deal because of other places I worked. It's a common deal and it just was familiar to me. And I was like, well, I do have a lot of random plumbing knowledge. I may want to try to use it. So let's see. But I showed up for the interview and like I said, I really didn't. I didn't think anything different would happen. But Aaron actually hired me on the spot. And for some reason it just felt really right. It felt like a good match. Even just walking around the building at the time, it just seemed like there was something different about the place. Like, even if they didn't know what was different yet there was something that was going to be different there. So. And we laugh about it all the time because it's actually, you know, I met my fiance at the ecommerce, so. And you know, it's been a great gift even working here. I can't imagine if I didn't show up for that interview. It's just crazy. Those little moments in life changed everything. So that's how it all started.

That's amazing. What a wonderful story. Thank you for sharing. And how long ago was it that you joined EcoPlumbers?

Four years. So it'll be four years and about five days. So yeah. Coming up on my four year anniversary.

Amazing. I just passed my four year anniversary with service titan a couple like a month ago.

Yeah, it goes by fast. It goes by. I couldn't believe it. It definitely goes by fast.

But that's awesome. That's so cool. And you know what's so funny is Aaron was really one of the first people in this podcast who spoke about culture and who spoke about how you have to be very intentional when building it. And it really feels like I've been in that position too where you Go into something, not thinking you're going to like it, but you're like, I might as well just do the interview. And then you get there and you're totally captivated, and you're like, I want to be here. And it sounds like he really did a great job of fostering that for you when you first came on board. And he got a, from what I hear, a really, really good dispatcher out of it. So that's awesome. That is so awesome. I want. Now, you are the Dispatch manager at EcoPlumbers, correct? All right. So we're going to get really into dispatching and training and all of this stuff. But my first question for you is, what do you wish? What do you know now that you wish you knew at the start of your career?

I think, honestly, what I wish I knew would be how to be more prepared for the scalability of dispatching. How to be prepared when there are, you know, 100 technicians versus 30 technicians. Really. I think in a way you hold yourself high when you're like, I'm a great dispatcher. I'm a great dispatcher. I'm a great dispatcher. And I think you have a lot of instant gratification being a dispatcher. You send somebody to a call and you almost instantly see if it works out. And then transitioning from a dispatcher to a dispatch manager, learning how to know that things are just going to be different now, that there's not the same amount of technicians, if we had 15, that it's not the same structure when we have 50. And I think. I don't know if I was just not ready to think about that or really see how much it would change. But just learning for so long, it was always one hand in the pot. You know, we started off with one dispatcher. I replaced that dispatcher, and then from there it was just me and then a backup person for a while, and then we finally got a second person. But even with two people, it was just, we can talk, we can communicate, we can do everything on the board. And once you're talking about having six dispatchers, everything changes. Everybody can't do everything anymore, and you can't be an expert in your head. You have to be an expert on service titan. You have to be an expert at putting the notes in and being able to communicate properly interdepartmentally, too. So I think that is something I wish I truly maybe even thought about more so is how much the growth was going to impact how the structure should change. We have definitely now changed our focus and not looking at everything as the entire business, but that every department is its own business. Just like their business units in Service Titan, they're business units to us, and that's how we have to treat them, because every different department has a different goal. So, you know, for example, if we're talking about our sewer department, you know, their main focus is the LTOs and how to, you know, have a proper lead turnover for the sales technician. So when we're talking about a drain technician and we're talking about a service technician that we would like them to sell and do for the same day, and they are the revenue producers and they need to produce for themselves, we're talking about two completely different goals. So I think in the beginning, when I started getting more dispatchers, I just. It felt very overwhelming to connect everybody's goal when they were different. So I think really learning that separation has to happen at some point, the bigger you get.

That's a phenomenal answer. And I wrote down what you said. You can't be an expert in your head. I interpreted that while you were chatting, while you were talking, that I'm not the only dispatcher anymore. It's not just me and someone else. I need to figure out a way to put all my knowledge and into a system so we can grow and scale at a quicker pace and be more efficient. Is that how you meant it?

Yeah.

I struggle with that so much in my career. It's so. It's such a difficult thing because you love doing stuff. You love doing stuff well, and then when it comes time to hire more people under you, you're like, but I do it so well. And like, you try and put it on a paper and it doesn't. I totally relate to that. I loved that answer. So speaking of, like, how you're bringing new dispatchers up, how you're training them, how many dispatchers do you oversee right now?

Six. So we have six dispatchers, and then we have one inside sales person, and he also helps from dispatching time to time.

Got it. And do you have different dispatchers dedicated to different departments?

So, yes, currently we have some. We're slowly getting into that movement. And I think I even had a. Like, I shared this. I even had a big aha moment for myself was just that I kind of held off on doing that. And I recommend other people don't, because it really does help to get people focused into one department and division. I do think in the beginning of training, it's really important to have everybody see everything, because the one you know, I make this a joke. Everybody loves to say you don't have to know plumbing if you work at a plumbing company. I'm sorry, I don't think that's true. I think you do. You eventually need to learn, especially as a dispatcher, you need to learn some key phrases, you know, and be able to picture things in your head to even be able to know if it should be a sales call or a service call. Like there's some that you have to learn. So in the beginning for a dispatcher, I mean, they're, they're first learning a new job, but also trying to learn a new language and then at the same time they're learning office language and then technician language. So there's a lot going on for a new dispatcher in their role to try to be able to understand everything and then get down to the focus of. Yes, your debriefs need to be correct and you need to be accurate with your job closing. But your main job is right tech, right job and to maximize the revenue. But yeah, so to get back to like direct apartments. So we do currently have a couple people in the service department that are directly doing service only. And then we have a lady that is doing sewers and focused on sewers. And then right now we're just trying to transition and get everybody kind of up to speed. But that is the hope to get everybody directly tied to a department. Just because I think, like I said, it's going to make everybody's life so much easier knowing that they have the same goal as the technicians as well. And it lines up perfectly also.

They just specialize in that one type of work so they can really get hyper specific, really understand that trade. And I love that. You also said, you know, people say you don't have to know plumbing to work in a plumbing business. You're like, you kind of do, especially as a dispatcher. I mean, I can only imagine, as in when you first started your dispatching career, you just started picking up knowledge like, like it was nobody's business because just in probably a few weeks. Right, yeah. So when it comes to. Let's talk a little bit about green dispatchers and bringing new dispatchers into the business, what are some common mistakes that you see green dispatchers make and how do you train them out of it?

I'd say the first one would be that they're usually either very location driven or very customer focused. They kind of, each person either picks kind of one or the other is they're either focusing on what the issue is or they're focusing on where the issue is. It takes a little bit to understand the urgency plus location, and then adding in also who the best technician is. But in the beginning, you can kind of see they're not thinking of all three things. They're just kind of going either in the location direction or the customer focus direction and trying to get them to understand and balance the two. I'd say the biggest thing. Well, there's multiple things to get them out of it. So one big thing that we have done is send all of our dispatchers to service system with nexstar, just with the technicians. So obviously we didn't send everybody at once, but when we're going through the service systems, we try to grab at least one or two dispatchers to go. This helped tremendously in the dispatchers. First, understanding what the technicians are even expected to do, what level of customer service we expect the technicians to uphold, and how they work on bettering themselves every single day. That was a first move that I think has helped a lot in first, getting the dispatchers to just understand what is the technician's job, what do they do, and how are they even communicating with customers in the home. The second thing, that has been very difficult due to obviously Covid and everything. But ride alongs are really important, and it's definitely a big gold mine for next year to make sure that they are more common. But it is so easy to sit at a desk and look at your computer, and all of a sudden they're not plumbing jobs anymore, they're not technicians anymore. It's just a little ticket, and you just got to get the ticket closed and you got to get it moved. And so the reality of what's going on in the outside world can escape a dispatcher. It's happened to me so many times. I mean, you know, we're like sitting there and they're like, why aren't they moving? Or why haven't they left yet? And, well, they're physically picking up a water heater right now, and they're physically taking it out. You know, like stuff is physically happening. But it's really easy to lose sight of that when you're in the office. And you can't blame anybody because this isn't their seat. That's all they know. So I think ride alongs are huge. We currently really only did them like once or twice in the beginning of hire, and I think once I've realized how important they are. For dispatchers to understand what the technicians are doing, it needs to be Implemented way more often. So that way they can ride along and actually see what the technician is doing. How many times did he walk out to his truck and have that understanding of what could be going on?

I 100% agree. You actually kind of answered my next question, which is awesome, which was basically, what's the best way to train green dispatchers? So you already said nexstar, like leveraging your best practices, organizations and training and that kind of stuff. Ride alongs, for sure. People, everyone, everyone, whenever I talk about CSRs and dispatchers always say ride alongs. Ride alongs, ride alongs. Is there anything else that comes to mind that you think is really helpful in that regard?

I call dispatch on the job training. I think it's very hard to kind of train. We do one to two weeks in the beginning. And a lot of it, I will tell every single dispatcher, they say it. I say it's on the job training, it's on the job training. And that means that I cannot prepare you for every situation that's going to come up during the day, but we're going to have to tackle them as they come in and be able to talk them through. Because a lot of it is very subjective. It's not, you know, in this case, do this. In this case, do this. It's always different. You know, it could be raining and now 20 some pump calls are coming in and you had three guys call off and you're trying to move the entire board and figure out what to do with it. I'm not. I can't train you for that day. I can't get you ready for that day. I can at least, you know, help you and give you tools along the way of how to make decisions. But the most powerful thing has been just. Just having conversations. Why do you think that? Why, you know, why did you make that decision? And really being able to let them explain themselves of what they were thinking and how did that tie into our goal for the day?

I love that. I love that so much, the on the job training. And I cannot prepare you for those crazy days because I bet you you still get surprised from time to time.

Yeah.

Yes. What is something that differentiates a good dispatcher compared to a great dispatcher, in your opinion?

In my opinion, a great dispatcher. One thing I'm really big on is we call it history checks, but I'm really big on checking the history of every customer that you've been to before. You send a technician out to their home, we find so much valuable information in looking at the customer history. So we're looking for. First thing we're looking for is, is this job a potential callback to some work that we already did, and it may have slipped through the cracks, and we need to send the original technician. Is this a job where an older technician went there and they loved them, so we should probably send that technician back? We had a lot of information from the history of the customer and who has been to their home. And we found that when we utilize that, we can make better decisions beyond just the metrics of who the best technician is. So that was a big thing that I think a great dispatcher should do, is always check the history and really know the customer, too, especially if they have preferences. You know, sending somebody that they really like can help get the job taken care of. And the customer is very happy too. Dispatchers and technicians have always feuded in some ways. There's always been some issues, and there always will feel like a dispatcher is controlling your day because they're picking the calls. But I think really learning how to be a teammate for the technician, there's so many things that we can do to assist them with their day. Giving them heads up about, hey, this job is coming up. You know, you might want to have this part ready. Just being their teammate and also getting them kind of hyped up for, you know, the next job that's coming in. Being able to just say, hey, I got a great one for you. I'm excited for you, and being genuine about it. I mean, we. We sit in the dispatch room and talk about when we're excited about people. Did you see what so. And so did. Did you see what this person did? And really making that connection, I think, will help. It also helps.

Well, let's talk about communication between dispatch and tax, because I've heard that sometimes it's not that great. Those tips you just gave of being their teammate, being hyping them up, communicating with them, it's so essential to making the whole operation run smoothly. What are some other tips that you would give to dispatchers who are having some difficulty communicating with techs? And I would also say vice versa. What would you say to techs who maybe are like, I have such a. I have such problems with the dispatchers at my company.

I think one of the first problems we saw when we quickly got to six dispatchers was there were personality issues kind of left and right. You know, certain people communicated better than other people, just like we all do. And the first solve is that if they are tied directly to A department, the dispatcher and the technician, you're going to see over time if it was really just a communication issue, a personality issue, or if someone in their role is not doing something correctly. Now, we definitely deal with, you know, some people that talk quicker on the phone. Some people, you know, there's certain technicians that when they call in, they don't want to have to say a word. And we close them out and then we get them moving. There's other technicians that literally want to have a full conversation, ask how your day is, you know, talk about the weather. So it's difficult from a dispatcher's perspective in the beginning to kind of know which technician you're going to get and how they like to operate. So for us, the biggest move is to get dispatchers into certain seats first to be able to handle that. But overall, I think it's just learning communication styles, getting to know people. At my first job, I had. I did mention I got really close with a lot of technicians, but what I didn't mention is I had never met any of them in person.

Wait, really?

The entirety of my. Of me working there, I never met a single one in person. And they had. They were separated. They were not in the middle. They did not go to the main building. They had a warehouse, and they were completely separated. And then coming, you know, to eco plumbers. In the beginning, it was a little bit different because, you know, technicians were everywhere and they were walking through the halls, and it was a little different for me. But you get that bond with people when you see them. You get that bond when you at least know a little bit about their lives or what's going on. So I think it's really just trying to find that balance and learning different communication styles and just kind of figuring it out. But the biggest thing is making sure the dispatcher does not play a manager role. I think if the dispatchers know and the technicians know that their teammates, that neither has authority over the other, it really helps in the process, and it helps everybody understand that there are service managers, those are your managers. Dispatchers are doing their job, the technicians are doing their job, and we're all trying to win the day. So just figuring out how to get that as a team.

Got it. And when you say you want to make sure the dispatchers don't try to play the role of manager, does that somehow come into play a lot where they try and micromanage the text a bit and say, oh, well, you should do this, and that is that kind of what you're talking about, yeah, we're.

Being put in a situation. You know, technicians will call into the dispatch line. And we like this, but we are the phone that will answer. You know, we're there, we're always there, so we'll answer. And sometimes the calls that are coming in are questions that we shouldn't answer. Or as dispatchers and just my role is helping field those, being able to say, hey, you know what? Tell him to call his manager. Because you don't. You can't answer that question, and you shouldn't answer that question. And I think that's helped a lot, just knowing that the dispatcher doesn't have control in that part of the day. They're just doing what they can with the calls they have and the number of technicians they have to hit their daily goal.

Got it. I love that. So I know that the EcoPLumbers has an incentive program in place for dispatchers. Can you tell me a little bit about it and why it works?

So our incentive program is tied to daily revenue. It's tied to the what we call run rate, which is for the incentive programs, we do use, you know, daily revenue and, you know, LTOs and average ticket and stuff like that to tie the dispatchers to their departments. If they don't have a department. Right now, what we're using is company metrics. So that way they still have something to follow and they're still checking to see if the company's winning the day. But also, what we tried to implement just random times here or there, but I've learned it's made the room so much more fun, is we've had, like, fun incentive days where we chose random things to track. We did like a hose bib day. We did a toilet day. We just pick a random, random thing to track and then see how many we can get. If we get to 10, we'll buy everybody lunch tomorrow or something. But also kind of switching up from the monotony of doing the same thing every single day, but also kind of focus on what you find, being able to see something different. And then you might see like, oh, look who's killing it at Hoes Bibs. I never even realized. So those have been a lot of fun. But definitely tying them to the work that they do has been super helpful.

Got it. And what do the incentives look like? Are they, you know, group incentives, like getting lunch? Is it spiffs, kind of like technicians.

So right now we do bonuses individually for the dispatchers, and then the group random events will just come up with when we do. I've had great ideas. I've even had ones where it's. If you can find a customer that has. That mentions their dog on the call or something to keep it, to lighten it up a little bit to be able to find something random in the calls today to also get people excited about showing up to work and, you know, making it fun. But then we do, you know, group lunches and stuff like that as well.

That's awesome. That's really cool. I've actually heard of, actually I've heard of sales teams that try and insert certain lyrics in their scripts when they're trying to do that. That's kind of fun. But yeah, definitely, like shaking it up, breaking up the monotony. Really cool stuff that you guys are doing there. So you've already mentioned a couple times that you're like, you know, you know, Service Titan. I rarely get to talk to someone who has. Who I'm sure just looks at that dispatch board as often as you do. So what advice would you give to someone who is trying to improve their dispatching and is on Service Titan or maybe is not just, you know what, I'll even take the service time part out of it. What advice would you give an.

I'm going to bring it back to Service Titan. Bring it back.

But what advice would you give to someone who is trying to improve dispatching at their business?

I would say the first thing is if you're looking at as how you're booking jobs and how you're creating tickets. The biggest change for us was really focusing on job types within Service Titan. That was a big thing for us. Reason being was we had a job type that we called repair or replacement which ended up turning into every job that got booked. So when every job got booked into a repair or replacement, you know, we obviously know that we can pull data through the SKUs and stuff like that, but it was really difficult to capture a metric on the beginning of the call of what that job type was. What was that call and what did the technician do with that call. So we made the big move. We called it Project Starbucks and we made a. We had a mission statement and everything to change job types and get really specific and intentional with the job types. We're actually going to be making more job types by the towards the end of the year just due to how easy it is to track metrics and be able to see what technicians do it, what job types. So now when you do have a lot of job types, someone has to be responsible for changing them. So when a customer calls in, we may not know on the front end what exactly the correct job type is, but the dispatchers are expected to change the job type after the fact to be able to have the right metrics. So, for example, if a technician walks in, she's lady's calling in and all she's saying is that it's flooding and she doesn't know what's happening. We find out that there's a sump pump that stopped working. We changed the job type to sump pump issues. So that way when it's closed out on the technicians, all of our data, all of our metrics, all of our KPIs are tied to it, tied to the job type. We now know exactly what this technician does on every single job type. That has made a huge difference in really getting that granular detail that you want from technicians and being able to see how did they perform on uncertain jobs.

What I love what you just said there, Barbara, was how you completely changed up your job types. And for anyone who's not on service titan, job type is how you classify a job that comes in through service titan by able to getting super granular granular with your job types. Now the ecoplumbers as a whole has so much more data by simply changing a job from the very vague repair and replacement, which, you know, 98% of your jobs are by going into sump pump issues. Now you can see on a month, weekly basis how many sump pump issues came in or oh, this technician is really good at solving sump pumps. So just by being able to do that, you're able to get a level of granularity that you know which technicians do really well and which types of jobs. And you're also getting data as to like, what kind of jobs are we getting? And it's not just repair and replacement. Right? That's awesome. All right, I have a couple more questions for you. You have been just a well of information, so thank you again for your time. So tell me about the culture at the EcoPlumbers. You already kind of talked about it a lot in this call, but I would love for you to kind of get an opportunity to really speak to it. What is it about the company that makes someone like you, who's a phenomenal dispatcher, want to develop their career there?

I think it first starts with the owner. I think Aaron has done a tremendous job of showing that he is a hard worker and that he will never give up and that he has a dream and that he's going to keep chasing that dream and that he may make mistakes along the way, but he'll pick himself back up and just start over the next day. And that kind of drives fuels me personally, and I think it fuels a lot of people in the building and around, you know, especially. We all make jokes, but especially, you know, seeing the owner there, you know, 4 o' clock in the morning, 5 o' clock in the morning, and staying later than everybody else. That drive is really where it started for me of knowing, like, you know, he really wants this and he's willing to put in the effort day in and day out to make this happen for us. Definitely starts with him. But I think we even a big thing is talking about our culture all the time and talking about our core values. You can say you have a great culture, but you need to keep talking about it. And I think that was a great thing we did. It was a couple years back, we actually revamped our core values a little bit, just reworded them. But we had all the managers there and really sat down and broke down word for word, what are you doing? Core values were what they meant and really got the buy in even from all the managers at the time and understanding of the core values. We celebrate for the core values. We bring them up in our monthly meetings, we bring them up annually. We give core value awards at the end of the year. So talking about our core values and being open about them, I believe has led to a very strong culture over time and really recognizing when people, you know, one of them is whatever it takes. Recognizing when people do whatever it takes. My favorite, without helping people, we don't exist. That's, you know, remembering that and being able to bring it back to that for people. So I definitely believe that culture lives with the managers and through that is through our core values, making sure we're tying everything back to our core values and judging ourselves on our core values and judging other people on if we believe that they uphold the core values. We have taken time before where we have sat down and evaluated ourselves and others to see where we fit within the core values. And then I said at one point, I was like, well, of course managers should fit the core values, because we're managers. We need to fit the core values. And I think really learning that once you are a manager or a leader, just upholding to the core values is not enough. We got to be trainers and teachers of good culture and how to be the best example that we can be.

That's awesome. All right. I have a couple more questions for you then I'm going to give you some time back. But I just again want to say this has been a wellspring of information on dispatching. I, I would, I would say that there is probably not one person listening to this that hasn't gleaned something from your, from your experience. So thank you so much for sharing. This is a new question that I've been asking guests. What's your most controversial opinion of the trades?

I don't know if it's controversial. I just. Or it's more of just an observation of just learning, learning the different generations that are coming through the trades and learning how to grasp the new generation that is coming through to the trades, if that makes sense. We have a school now, so it's ecou and we're able to have people come in and train them from the beginning and really learning how we want to train the trades. It's not the same that it was before. It's not. You know, the stories you hear of people, you know, riding around for five years before, you know, going into a truck or you know, the generational plumber that has their dad, grandfather. You know, a lot of people started in new construction and you know, worked 60, 70, 80 hours a week in the beginning to get where they're at. That's not what, that's not our transition anymore with these new people. And so I don't know if I really have a controversial thought more than I'm curious to see how we are going to utilize this new generation of tradesmen and how we're going to make a mark in the world on that and being able to house what they need and what they're going to want out of a career. I just think it's going to be something different to navigate that. We're already realizing it's changing and times are changing and how are we going to also adapt to the new age of day to day life as a, as a plumber?

Yeah, I 100% agree with you in that like the generations, there are different expectations about work. And I think that's definitely going to come to a head in the trades especially. All right, got some couple rapid fire questions. These should be easy. Ish. How do you take your coffee?

I don't drink coffee anymore.

Oh, way to go. If you could have dinner with one person, dead or alive, who would it be?

I could just sit down and have a conversation with somebody today. I would actually love to speak to Joe Rogan.

What's the number one thing you're trying to learn more about right now.

Making sure that everybody's light is being shown, making sure that everybody is moving in the direction that they want to and that as a leader, that I'm doing the best I can to support them. I think a lot of times sometimes in a role, it's very. It makes me uncomfortable. But it's also, it's very clear that, you know, a lot of people do respect me at the Eco Plumbers, and, you know, they know I do a great job, and I know I work very hard every single day, but I want to make sure that other people are getting the light, too, and that other people are getting the time that they deserve. Because sometimes people can just overshadow. And it may sound anybody's fault, but I think that's something I've really tried to work on, is I want to make sure everybody's getting credit for their great ideas and everything that they're doing. I love that.

If money weren't an object so you had unlimited resources, what's the first thing you would do?

I'd buy a house, because we're already trying to buy a house right now. So I would just call it a day and just buy a house. I would buy a boat because I would have to buy a boat because my fiance would kill me if I didn't. And then after that, I would. I would travel. I would definitely travel. Love that.

Any podcast or book recommendations?

The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni.

What's the number one thing every contractor should do to run a successful business?

Walk around their business.

Yes.

Walk around your business. See what's actually going on in your business. Been a big thing. I learned even with Six Sigma. We did some Six Sigma training recently and really get on. Get on the ground floor and observe. That's been huge for me, just being able to observe and see what is actually going on. How are things working? Before we try to fix anything, let's see how it's actually working on the ground level.

I love that. Barbara Pfeiffer, thank you so much for coming on the Toolbox for the Trades podcast. I really enjoy chatting with you.

Well, thank you.