Don’t Hire People, Hire Personalities w/ Josh Bigelow | Podcast Ep. 47 | Toolbox for the Trades

Josh Bigelow, welcome to the Toolbox for the Trades.

Well, thank you for having me.

I am so excited to talk to you. You have been a service titan, customer and advocate for a while now. You are the founder and owner of Great Dane Heating and Air Conditioning in Detroit. And I know you've got a lot, a lot of insight that you want to share with our listeners today. And I just can't wait to dive into it. But before we do, I'm going to start this interview with the same question I do every single time, which is, how did you get into the trades?

I think I can speak for most of us when I say accidentally. When you're. When you're a young, young kid playing in the sandbox and playing cops and robbers with your friends, nobody pretends they're the guy coming to fix the furnace or fix the refrigerator. We all want to be. We all want to be in the FBI or army guys or firefighters or policemen, you know. And as we make our way through life, I think the first jobs that we have out of high school are ones of opportunity. And I feel that a lot of people that get into our industry are part of that opportunity. They see an opportunity to learn a trade. And once they get into it, most people actually fall in love with different aspects of it and stick with it.

Got it. So how did you fall in love with it?

I like working with people. I consider myself a people person in this particular trade on the residential side. That is all it is. It's a very big relationship based industry as far as working with people. And that's what I fell in love with.

Got it. And I mean, I want to get into the nitty gritty. Nitty gritty details here, Josh. I mean, tell me about your first H Vac job, how you even came to be an owner.

Oh, my first job. I actually just had this conversation the other day. The first job that I had, I was going through school and my lab partner, his dad owned a business, so he lied to his father and told him that I had this wealth of experience. And they hired me as a service technician. And of course I went along with it because it was big money. My first job, they sent me to a very large local mall, told me that somebody had no heat, and to figure it out, it took me two hours to even figure out where the roof was or how to get on it. And then there were a couple hundred rooftop units and I had to figure out which one it was. So I found it. I kicked it a couple times. It came On. And wouldn't you know it, now I'm a heating cooling guy. It was. It was a horrifying, horrible experience. It was. It absolutely was. Because when I, you know, back then we were calling from payphones, when I called the officer, what am I supposed to do? They said, if you can't fix it, don't come back. Now what? Now what do you do? So, yeah.

Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness.

So it was last there very long.

You were like, okay, that was a horrible experience. I think I'm going to keep doing this. Where did we go from there? Like, give me all of the job. Give me all of the places that you worked before founding Great Dane.

Oh, my goodness. I think I worked for four or five other companies before I started Great Dane. I started working when I was 13 years old at Burger King. And even then I had that desire to always be at that, what's the next step? You know, if I was the fry guy, I wanted to work the burger station, and then I wanted to work the other stuff and be a cashier and whatever that was at any of the many jobs I had before I got into heating and cooling. So it was just natural for me, once I got involved, to try and move to those next levels and experience everything that these companies had to offer for me. And that is actually how I moved through our industry. Every time I did change companies, which wasn't very often. I mean, I was at each place for at least three to five years. But when I left, it wasn't because I was unhappy or didn't like the job. An opportunity had presented itself. So whether I was leaving as a service technician to become a service manager or leaving the service manager to become a general manager or a sales manager, those were the only reasons that I went from one place to another, just for the actual opportunity that presented itself. As this industry is a wealth of opportunity, it's how you take advantage of those.

Got it. And that. Continue.

Sorry, go ahead.

Oh, I was just going to say I really admired the way you were saying. I always was looking for the next step. The next step. It sounds like you're definitely the type of person that instead of mastering one skill and getting very good at one thing, you're really motivated by ever changing circumstances and by a new challenge every day. Is that a correct assumption on my part?

That is a very fair assumption. And I am the type of person that would drive me nuts as an employer. Not the person trying to master what it is they're doing, but always worrying about what that Next step is as an employer, a supervisor, and a manager. That personality causes me issue because I just want you to focus on where you're at. So I owe an apology to all the previous bosses and managers that I had up until this point, especially my mother. My poor mother had to deal with this my entire life. So. But hey, it got me to where I am. So.

This is really fascinating and I want to stay here for a second. I'm actually the similar personality mindset myself. I started working when I was 16 at a hair salon. And I think my current count for jobs that I've had because throughout college or even out of college, I would. I would have multiple gigs. I'm very much a person that's always like, what's next? What's next? What's next? Yeah, we're a difficult personality, aren't we? How do you manage those types at Great Dane? And when you're presented with a you, so to speak, how do you try and keep that person engaged and motivated to stay at the company, especially if they're, say, a really talented technician?

It's different with each particular personality. And I manage personalities. I don't manage people. And trying to understand what either motivates or focuses certain personalities are how we try and manage our. I hire people based on personality. Most of the people we hire don't have experience, and we put them through apprenticeships and they learn. I can teach you to do this job. I can't teach people to like you. So when we're dealing with. Back to your question. When I'm trying to work with a personality that's always focused on the next thing and not this thing, I like to sit down and talk with them about that and I'll explain everything. They explain all their questions about what the next thing is to get them excited. I want them to be striving to get to that point. But then we circle back to. But these are the things that I need you to focus on and master before I can give you that opportunity. I'll gladly give it to you, but you have to check all these other boxes first, otherwise you're not going to get the full experience. And usually once we have those conversations with. With an individual, not all the time. Every personality is different, but most times they kind of rise to that occasion and say, okay, yeah, if you're going to give me a shot, you just need me to do A, B and C. I'll knock that out of the park. But don't forget me when it's time to get that Opportunity.

Yeah. Really. I mean that's very fair. And I can imagine that laying those ground rules out for someone you need to achieve X, Y and Z before I can get you to ABC is what also just keeps them motivated and keeps them engaged in work overall. Is there a particular personality test or personality assessment that you use at Grape Dane or is it kind of just your own, your own guts?

We do a personality profile for certain positions. Not for the, not for the entry level positions. That is kind of our gut. As far as you know, when, when we're speaking with somebody, the interview rule, they don't let me interview anymore because I kind of pushed it off onto the team leaders because they would like to make the decision of who they're going to be responsible for. But I am a horrible person to interview with. You have exactly 10 minutes. Not for skilled positions. If you're a technician that's been doing this for 10 years, I just want to geek out and talk tech. I mean that's kind of what we do. But when you're speaking with someone that say is applying for an apprenticeship that has little to no experience in the field or in the industry, they don't understand what they're, what they're asking for. And I just, just happened yesterday and I explained it to him, I said, well you don't understand is you're asking me as the owner of this company to invest up to $100,000 of our money in training you to learn how to do this industry. That's a big ask. You're asking the person that's going to be training you to work longer days, to accomplish less, spend more time away from their family and have a worse day to te how to do this job. So it's going to cost them, it's going to cost the company money. And there's 40 of you applying for this one position. So why should I hire you? Give me, sell me, give me a reason of why you are the right decision for me to make that type of an investment. And I don't think that the people coming out of trade schools or high schools realize how much money an employer actually invests in a new apprentice, whether it's an installation apprentice or a service apprentice. If you think about it, you've got. We offer a thousand dollar tool package for every apprentice that comes on board. So we give them the tools we know they need. We don't want them to go into crazy Benzies or the dollar store to pick up tools to try and do the job that we know just won't work. So we're giving them a thousand dollars worth of tools. We know they're going to have about 150 hours worth of paid training that we're going to be paying for. Plus we have the equivalent of that 150 hours that we're paying somebody else to do the training. So we're losing productivity, we're losing revenue and then we're training this individual to do his job with the mistakes we expect they're going to make. So there's going to be some circuit boards that we're going to have to replace along the way and some customers that may be, well, not as understanding as others when a mistake is made. So there's always a cost to the company, but if you factor that in, you can come up with a good round number of what that apprenticeship is going to cost you. And I don't think most of us is contractors really realize what that number is. And if you actually sit down and put pencil to paper, it'll turn your stomach.

I've actually never spoken to anyone about this, so I'm so happy you brought it up. The cost of an apprentice, the cost of onboarding someone who's completely green to the trade and hopefully converting them into someone who's going to become a, you know, years long member of the Great Dane family. In your case, and I agree with what you just said, which is I don't think people realize how much money it's going to cost the business. Do you do a lot of work as. I mean it's almost like they're interviewing for a scholarship or something. Right?

That's a great way to put it. It is. And then you got to look at the other factor that you're looking at. Maybe 30% of the people that you hire are going to be make it through their apprenticeship. So even though we've hired people with great personalities that we really liked and wanted to have working with us, the problem with them was just the simple fact that they didn't want to do it. It was something different than they thought it was. Maybe they got a different opportunity. It depends on where they are at which point in their life. If you're Talking about a 20 year old person that's getting into this with all of the requirements that are there and their buddies working at a pizza place, delivering pizzas, making more money than he is, that could be a big distraction and hey, maybe I want to do that today instead of working as hard for tomorrow here. There's just so many factors that come into people's, people's lives. And. Or if you get someone that, say, is 25, 26 years old looking to come on board, and now all of a sudden they're becoming a new parent, maybe getting married, maybe buying a house, because that's what happens in your mid to late 20s and early 30s. That could be a big distraction if you're in an apprenticeship that pays 15 to $18 an hour. But now you're buying a house and have to make 20, and maybe down the street at a restaurant or something, you have an opportunity to become a chef for 20 bucks an hour. And there's so many different factors that'll come into play as far as that investment. So the investment you're making in one person is actually shared between several. So there's a lot of factors that come into play. Not a lot of people like to hire the apprentice level. They're always looking for people with experience. And the problem that I recognized years ago is that that's going to go away as far as the people out there that have that experience. And we were fortunate. About five years ago, we have a. We wrote an apprenticeship for our service department. So I was teaching at a local college, Baker College. We helped write their program, design their lab and teach students. Actually hired many, at least one student every semester from the college to come work for me. And one of the students is now running that apprenticeship for me. But we spent two years actually writing it down step by step from the, from the interview process all the way to when they would be able to graduate to the service division. And it's been about five years now. And yeah, about 60% of my service department came through that apprenticeship and it just continues to evolve. Now here's the fun part. So five years, we lost a ton of money building service technicians. So I guess in hindsight it was a. A good investment because we've got great service technicians producing the revenue we need them to make. But this year, 2021 is going to be the first year that that apprenticeship, that maintenance department is going to be profitable. So we have now created a way to generate profit and revenue and build service technicians and continue to grow that department. So right now we currently have five apprentices and the program is about a year and a half program to advance them to the, to the service division, depending on their learning set and you know, how we can move them along. Our hope is by the end of this year to have six, possibly seven people going through that apprenticeship at all times.

I love that you're setting the foundation today to get where you need to go tomorrow, which is very thematic with what our conversation has been the last 15 minutes or so. I'm talking to a lot of owners like yourself, who, depending on their resources, there are some that are at giant scales right now. And I want to talk about where Great Dane is in terms of what does your business look like? In a moment, we have folks that are pulling 30, 50 million a year in revenue, and they've just said, okay, we're gonna purchase this warehouse and we're gonna start our own school. And I'm like, that's great. But also, that is not accessible to everyone and there's. There is a labor shortage. Yesterday I spoke to another gentleman who will also be on this podcast, also named Josh, and they're hiring green techs and they have their own in house training. So I'd love to hear that you just established your own apprenticeship program with your local college. What advice would you give to any folks that are listening right now and are like, ooh, that's a great idea. How can they get started?

Call me. I will. I will give you my program. I mean, we need to start training people, but every company is going to be different. The personality of every company is going to be different in the area. The skill set that's required will be different. What I would say to them is, sit down with your team, get some paper that you can hang on the wall or a dry erase board, and start laying out what is important to you as far as what is the ideal service technician to you. And at that point, now you can design your apprenticeship because you need to build that ideal service technician. So for us, I don't want to have service technicians that can fix problems. I can teach anyone to go through a checklist until they find a component that's broken and change the component. For us as an industry, we need to find out why these components are failing so that we can actually solve the problems for our customers instead of continuing to go back time and time again to continue to fix the service related issues.

I love that. I think that's great and I'm so happy we dove into apprenticeship so early in the conversation. All right, talk to me about Great Dane. For folks who aren't aware of it, what does your business look like? So if you wouldn't mind, you already shared your apprentice count, but how many texts do you have? What does your annual revenue look like?

As of now, we've been in business for 21 years. I was a startup in 1999 and for anybody out there thinking about starting your own business, the first three months are the scariest thing you will ever go through in your life. Trying to figure everything out. It always looks great. When you're working for someone, it seems so easy until you have to have a blank piece of of paper and figure things out, plan on not sleeping, A lot of Red Bull, a lot of five hour energy, a lot of hopes and dreams. But so being a startup company 21 years later, we went through a lot of ups and downs, and more downs than ups, it seems, because we always seem to focus on the negative things, to learn from the negative, to turn it into a positive. We currently have 42 employees. Our revenue last year was just about $7 million in gross revenue this year. Our business plan. We brought BDR on as a coaching advisor about three, four years ago because we couldn't get past the $5 million mark no matter what we did. We kept trying different things. And I finally woke up one morning and said, I don't know what I'm doing. The company I'm walking into this morning is larger and more successful than the one I left last night. So what do I do? I'm obviously outside of my comfort zone because I've done everything I can do to get here. But I look at not so much my competition, but I mean, like Ishmael at NextGen, I mean, who doesn't want to be next gen, right? Those guys are fantastic. But how did they get to where they were? I mean, I'd like to think that he was just that brilliant and came up with all of it on his own, but I'm sure he had people advising him along the way. So I just woke up one morning and realized that I needed to be able to work with someone that has been to where I'm going, not so much where I've been, so that way they can say no. Let me give you some advice. Don't go here. Focus on this. And that'll help you get to where you need to be. And that was really groundbreaking for us and moved us from 5 million to about 7 million this year in 2021. Our sales forecast as far as what our business plan is, we should be at about eight and a half million at the end of this year. And by the end of next year, we should be hopefully beating our heads against the $10 million wall. We have all the infrastructure in place. We've been working on it for a year to two years now. It's time to put those plans into action. And this is where it gets fun because we know what we want to do. Now we're playing chess. We're just moving pieces around on the board and trying to play to win. So the entire team is excited because the stuff we've talked about for years that they were frustrated wasn't happening fast enough. All of a sudden it's happening very quickly because those pieces have been put in place and they know where they want to go and what they want to do. But most of it we're making profit. That's the most important thing. The profits are going up with the revenue perspective.

Thank you for making that clarification. I agree that sometimes revenue can be a flashy number, but if it doesn't come with a nice net profit, what's happening? I'm so happy you mentioned, you know, hitting that 5 million dollar mark and just being like, like just being frustrated because I hear that so, so often. So, you know, we talk a lot about the service groups, the best practices organizations that have really helped a lot of our customers achieve the extraordinary. And I would love to talk to you a little bit more about what was some of the first things that BDR did when you joined the organization? How did they kind of help you get to, to that next level and start framing what it is that you wanted to do?

Great question. The first year with BDR and we actually hired BDR the same month that we hired Service Titan. So we were onboarding with Service Titan while we were onboarding with bdr. So I had a double barrel shotgun instead of a single barrel shotgun pointed at my head for about six months. I didn't sleep much, didn't eat much. It was a horrible experience and it was all self induced by it, by me. I bit off too much at once because I wanted to move forward. My first year though with BDR was very stressful and very, very. There wasn't a lot of forward movement. Anytime you are going to hire on an advisor, a coach, somebody to assist you in any way, shape or form, you have to realize they don't know you, they don't know you, they don't know your business, they don't know your. They know the industry but they don't know your local economy or those things. So it takes a good six months to a year of having meetings, whether it's bi weekly or once a month, whatever it is, to get to learn a personality and build a relationship with a few people. Bye honey. Sorry, my daughter's leaving. I'm saying goodbye to build that relationship of trust. I Don't know who he is or she. I don't know whether to take their advice because maybe they're advising me on what they think I should do, or if they're just saying, well, most of my clients do this or no, stop doing this right away and do that. So the first year was very frustrating because they were speaking very generally with their advice and with their suggestions. It was more foundational than it was. I wanted to have one conversation with someone and him to tell me what it is that I'm doing wrong so I can fix it today. That's where the frustration came from, because that doesn't happen. It was a hope, not a realistic one. That is what would take place. But after about that year, mark of listening to what it was they were saying, the thing that became clear to me, I truly believe that everyone that is in business, regardless of what the businesses they're in, I believe they know deep down what it is they need to do to move forward and to fix the problems. But it takes, takes a ton of effort, a ton of time, and it's a huge distraction from the norm of what you're doing, which is why we all choose to do anything we can that's quick and easy to try and move us forward. And when we come up against those big blocks like the five million dollar wall that everybody just keeps bumping up against, that is the proof that you need to take the time to get those foundational things put in place so that you can move past. So every time you find yourself not moving forward, you really have to take a deep look at, okay, what don't I want to do? And it's time to get it done.

Yeah. And what were some of those things that you didn't want to do that it was time to get done? Was it systems and processes? Was it operations?

It was everything. As a, as a business owner at $5 million a year in revenue, I was still working, wearing most of the hats. You know, I had an accountant, but I was still overseeing her. I had salespeople, but I was overseeing them. I had a service manager, but I was still in charge of the service department. We didn't have an apprenticeship. I was still running out on the installation, so I was wearing all of the hats. I had technicians that were a cancer within my business that were causing issues because nobody wanted to do the work because so and so didn't do it. And I can't get rid of that guy because what happens if you. We lose that technician and he's going to Take everybody with. It's all of that stuff that's put together and you know, I don't have time to write policies and procedures. I don't have time to actually sit down and do an employee handbook. I don't have time to sit down and do a business plan. I don't need a business plan. Look, I know what I'm doing. If I make, if I do calls, I make money. That's my business plan. We're going to. It's all those things that I just kept lying to myself saying, no, I'm going to, I'm going to, to focus on other stuff other than what I need to focus on to move forward. And after 12 months of listening to my business coach, Jim Corcoran say, look, circle back to this, everything's coming back to the stuff you don't want to do because it's hard. And just owning it and running a business is extremely, incredibly hard. I mean, you know, look at my gray hair. I'm 22 years old and I have all this gray hair. So I mean, it's hard. I'm kidding. I'm 22, I'm going to be 50. I started my business when I was very young and that was another challenge, you know, being at that age and trying to have life experience of how to deal with people in situations. I was, I'm blessed. I truly am. When you look back over the last 21 years and of course you look at the statistics of how many businesses survive after the five year mark, let alone the 10 year mark or the 20 year mark, I 1 out of 500. I believe it is to make it past 20 years. And that was, that was more luck than skill. Everybody says as long as you have desire and a good plan and drive that you can be successful in business. And I've seen so many people that were smarter than I was, more well funded than I was, that had a better plan and a better drive, that just weren't in the right place at the right time to either meet the right, right customer or get the right job. So, so as much as I'm not superstitious, I think that this industry has a lot to do with luck. But I also believe that we make our own luck. If you continue to try and put yourself in the right place at the right time, you can generate some of that luck, I guess.

First, I just want to take a moment and say I absolutely love your attitude and your energy. I love how selfish, self aware you are and I appreciate you for your honesty and for Just being direct. I love it. I. In a past life, I was really trying hard to be a television writer. And I took a course and this, you know, it's. I think there's more staffed television writers. No, there's more people on professional NFL football teams than there are staffed television writers in the United States. So it's a very, very competitive industry. And he said, you've got a pie chart, and yes, you got to picture a pie chart. There's going to be a chunk of that that is just going to be just hard work and determination, just like churning out scripts, working it. The next thing is going to be networking, meeting people, getting connections, all that stuff. But 80% of it is luck. And it's true. And so I'm happy that you said that because I think there's a lot of folks listening who, who can have stories. Maybe their businesses didn't fail, but maybe they were trying to expand into a new market and that didn't work out. Maybe they were trying to expand into a new service and that didn't work out. And I think we need to get more honest about things that are difficult. Yeah, maybe a pandemic will happen. I don't think a pandemic will happen, though, Josh. That sounds way too far fetched. Um, but I absolutely love that. And I love how you just kind of had to have this moment with yourself where you just had to face the hard. And I'm happy that the coach helped you with that. And also, kudos for taking on BDR also at Service Titan at the same time, because those are two very big business changes to make at the same time.

No, I didn't think it through very well when I did it. I just, like I said, I. I just came to the realization that, darn it, it's time to move forward. And I just jumped in with both feet before I realized that there was no way to get out of the pool. You know, and you talk about some of the luck in the good and bad decisions that are made. I still remember one of my worst days ever in business here in the Detroit area in Michigan. Opening day home game for Detroit Tigers is. It's a national holiday now. We are not big baseball people. Tigers are a great team, but there's a lot of empty seats in the stands. But for us, it's really cold up here in opening day is like, open the doors. Let's all go outside and be outside together. So it's the official beginning of spring. So even though it's opening day for the Tigers, has nothing to do with baseball. Everybody's going downtown to celebrate. We can come outside again. Summer is here. And it was on opening day, and I want to say it was pretty probably back in 2010, 2009. So it's a long time ago. And there were three or four people in the office with me because I had a skeleton crew at that point. Everybody's off for the day. And I happened to be putting a stamp on an envelope up at our front counter in our retail area, and a customer had pulled into the front lot, so I figured I would wait to welcome the customer coming into the building. And the door opened up, and this very large man took a few moments to get out of his vehicle. And then he stood with his hands on the side of the vehicle and was gasping for air. And of course, I was concerned for him. And he walked about 15 steps to the front door and again, was gasping for air. So I met him at the front door and had a chair ready for him when he came in and said, sir, please sit down. How can I help you? At that point, he looked up at me, held up a badge, and said, my name is Larry. I'm from the irs. I'm looking for Josh Bigelow. My first reaction was to kick the chair out from underneath the hills. I'm sure people have had similar experiences as a business owner. When you're going through a recession like we were back then, some weeks you had to make a decision of, do you pay taxes or do you write salary checks for people to be able to cash? And that was the decision that we made at the time. And we knew that we were trying to catch up on it, but it caught up with us sooner than we would like it to. But at that time, Great Dane was really struggling. We were really having problems. And, you know, he. We had a nice, long conversation with a gentleman. He said, well, I really like you. I can see you're going to make it. You're going to be here for a while. I want to help you. And we paid not just him, but any of our creditors at that time, when we were having serious issues. I told every one of them, charge me the interest you need to charge me. I will pay you every penny that we owe. You said, I will not be the guy that tries to play let's make a deal. I said, I borrowed the money. I will pay it back. It might take a little longer than we all would like, but I was proud to say two years later, we did exactly that. We were able to pay back Every penny that we owed to anybody and be able to move forward. And that was just such a good feeling to have happen. So when you go from the bottom of the barrel, as I felt at that point in time, that there's just. There's just no way out, I said, well, I'm not one to go down without a fight, so let's keep swinging. Every dollar we. Every dollar we make is a dollar in the right direction. So it was. That was a rough year for us.

That is a fantastic story. You are a great storyteller. I don't know if anyone's ever told you that before. You are. I. You just also really drew my attention right now to the highs and lows of being a business owner. So, you know, you were a tech for the longest time, worked your way up, service manager, sales manager, etc. Always looking for the next best thing. And obviously owning a business, that's like the highest level you can achieve, you know, in most people's view, within the industry. So you have those high highs where maybe you have like that crazy profitability, you're growing like crazy, but then also those low lows where you have the IRS man coming into your business. And it just made me think of that dichotomy and how you have these real two extremes as a business owner and how you have to hold that emotion and also make really tough decisions. Do we pay the government or do we pay our people? And so my heart just goes out to you for having to make those tough decisions. And I would love to bookend this chunk of the interview by asking you what has been one of the greatest days that you've been in business?

There have been so many. Trying to think of just one is, as I said, there's so many highs and so many lows. Believe it or not, my best days in business probably weren't the awards that we've won. They probably weren't walking across the stage and getting recognition. The best days that I have in business, to be perfectly honest with you, are the days that my employees, kids graduate and walk across the stage. The days that my. I feel like I'm almost tearing up at this point. I'm sorry, but seeing them get married, seeing them have their kids, buy their first house, seeing watching them go through the same steps of growing up that I did and then being able to sit back and realize that we provided a lot of that opportunity for them to be able to make that happen. We helped them. We helped them grow, we helped them mature. We were able to help Them earn a career to be able to buy those things. I've got a 19 year old kid that's been with us for about three months and last week he bought his first new car. I felt like a proud uncle that day. I mean, I made him take me for a ride in it. And it was just, I mean, to me that's successful in business being able to make that big of an impact for my customers or my family. I spend more time with the people that I work with than I do with my wife and daughter. So there is much more as important to me as the people that I go home and spend dinner and sleep with every night. And that to me is success. We can say, hey, I accomplished a goal and hey, we made 5 million or 6 million this year. EBITDA was over a million this year. I mean, you can look at those things and they're great. But the big picture, the big perspective, what am I proud of? I'm proud of the Great Dane difference. And that's the people that work here. That's the people that work for me. Every time I speak with some, such as yourself, you know, they're asking questions and they'll say, why is Great Dane better than others? Or what is the difference? First of all, we're not better, we're different. When I started the business, it was with the idea of doing things differently, thinking outside of the box. I didn't want to do it the, the same way everyone else did. I wanted to reinvent my own wheel. And we are the difference. The people that work here, the fact that they enjoy coming to work every day, the fact that they care about each other as much as I care about them, that's the great danger. So it's, I mean, I know I went a long way around the block for it, but to me that is success. I mean, to be able to see them happy, to be able to see them come in and flourish and thrive and move forward in their lives, I'd say that is probably my most successful day in business is every day that happens.

I think that's beautiful. And I also appreciate your mindset of it's not about the destination, it's about the journey and the folks that go with you there that are your company. Right. I also, I mean, I'm not much for superstition or luck myself, but I think having that as your North Star in business is probably what's been able to keep you open for 21 years. I think that employees really can see when you care and when they're one of your priorities and I think that really makes a difference, especially for small businesses. So I commend you on that. I think that's awesome.

I hope they feel the same way.

I would love, love, love. This is actually the thing I really wanted to talk to you about. And for folks listening, Josh is wearing his Great Dane polo. And the very first thing I said when I saw him is that he has paw print prints crawling down the back. If you look at his showroom, if you look at the website, Facebook, anywhere, got this really adorable animated Great Dane dog as the logo. There's paw prints everywhere. I need to know, Josh, where did the idea for the name and, and for the branding and for the logo come from?

Well, if you recall, I said starting my own business as a startup. The one of the hardest decisions that I had was the naming of the business because hoping that I would be here multiple years down the road, I didn't want to name it Josh's Heating and Co. Not that anybody that names it after themselves made a bad decision. Please don't misunderstand me. That's not what I'm saying. It was. My personal preference is that I didn't want to be the face of my business as I move forward in case, in case this beautiful mug became not beautiful anymore for whatever reason. But I've always been a fan of animation and fan of things that I can remember very, very easily. Company I worked for years ago, they had a teddy bear was their mascot for the company. And I'm like, that's perfect. It's great. Everybody loves a teddy bear. So as I'm trying to think of the name of the business, we had a, a black Great Dane at the time. He was about 3 years old and he was 240 pounds. And when I started the business, it was the spare bedroom in my house and it was walk time. He wanted to go for a walk. And as he would go down the hallway, you can imagine the tail was touching both sides of the hall, banging on its way down. And he would keep coming into the room and giving me this, this look of tilting his head to the side like, hey, it's time to go for a walk. And then he would go and get his leash and drag the leash and whack that down until you get so frustrated that you have to get up. So he isn't destroying the house. So you take it for a walk and come back. And I finally looked at him, I'm like, there it is. That's the name and that's the logo of the company. And that was a relief to say, okay, got the name. But I am the farthest thing from Walt Disney and an animation artist as you can, as you can get. So trying to sketch out a animated image of a great game that does not look like Scooby Doo or Marmaduke is neuro because those. When you think Great Dane, you think Scooby Doo or you think Marmaduke. And I must have spent weeks doing sketches of different designs. And I still, I just came across it the other day. We kept it. We have a big scrapbook of all the things that have happened over the years at Great Dane. And I still have all the original sketches of the proposed logos of what the. What the logo for the company would be. And of course, asking friends and family which one you like. No one agreed on anything. So we actually have several different ones. So the one you're looking at here on my shirt, we have for just that reason. So it fits in a small place. The actual logo is a long logo with a circle and then the words next to it to be on the side of a band or on the back of your shirt to fill in the space. So. Well, you know, instead of having just that one logo, we all. We started out with several different ones. And, you know, then about was it seven, eight years ago, I just. We had new van, was getting a letter, and I called my guy and I said, look, I need something fresh. I need something new. You know what, Just get some big dog paws and run it all down the side of the van. And he said, what? I'm like, what the heck? You know what? Let's just try something. He goes, you know, that's going to look dumb. And I said, yeah, I'll pay you for it, and I'll even pay you to take it off if I need to, but let's try something different. He said, all right. He called me back about an hour later, and he goes, it actually doesn't look too horrible. He goes, I'll run the van down to you. And he's 15, 20 miles away. And we received over 15 phone calls before he made it here from people complimenting us on that vehicle. They love the dog paws. And at that point, that's when the power of the paw for us became the thing. So now everything we do has paws on it everywhere because, you know, everybody's got. I love my schnauzer or whatever it is on the. On their car and a paw print. So it's. It's a society thing. Where people recognize. We all love animals, whether it's a dog paw or a cat paw. You don't know it's a paw. It gets your attention. And for us, I think it's helped us become much more memorable and recognizable.

I love that. So funny that you.

That's one of those dumb luck stories right there. Had I not just said, yeah, what the heck, I'll spend a couple hundred bucks, throw some paw prints on the side of it, we never would have done it.

That's so funny. And I love that you got 15 or 20 calls just in the drive down. I don't know if you're familiar with Ken Goodrich Goodrich's story, but he has something similar with us. Sadie, his Wheaton terrier. We're like, I can't recall. He told it on the very first episode of this podcast, but it just. It happened just like that. I was like, yeah, sure, make. Let's have her. Like, she started greeting the technicians or something. And I just. I'm a big dog fan. I'm trying to get one right now. My apartment doesn't allow for dogs, so anywhere I can talk about dogs. I appreciate it, and I'm glad to hear that the community is receptive to it as well. Yeah, talk about dumb luck, man. But that's so awesome. That's so cool. I would love to talk to you now about your showroom, because I haven't actually. I spoke to a contractor a couple days ago who has. Is completely remote. And you actually talk a lot about your showroom on your website. You have it in your zoom background right now. What does the showroom do for Great Dane as a company and also for the. The community and for your customers? How does that help the business? How do you feel like it makes a difference between what you can offer and what, say, neighboring H Vac companies can offer?

Well, to answer that, I kind of have to go back to the beginning. As far as we moved into our current facility that we're in in 2003, and I had a vision of what I wanted that to be. Most of us back in the early 2000s, as far as seating and cooling went, if we had what we considered a showroom was we would take a furnace out of a box and we set it in the showroom, maybe put an evaporator coil on top of it so people could come in and actually touch it and say, oh, yeah, that's a furnace, instead of looking at a. An image on. On a piece of paper. And we thought that that was really Cool. Because not a lot of people did that. And when we moved into our facility, we remodeled the facility and I. It took a lot of grief from current staff, family members, and of course, I can't even say competition because my competition, they're friends. I mean, we're all. It's a small world over here and we all value each other's opinion. So when I told them I was going to take about a third of my office space and turn it into showroom, they said I was silly, I was crazy. That was an investment that would never pay off. There's better use for that space. And I just had a vision of what we wanted it to be. And we took six furnaces, installed ductwork on all of them, and tied them all together, ran power to it so they could be run off thermostats and actually fire them up so customers could see the furnace and listen to how they operated as well as the air conditioning units. And what we found is, again, this is going back to the early 2000s. Back then it was 80% furnaces. The 90% furnaces just came out. I mean, 90% on the nose were just, you know, your big things coming out. Carrier. In 2004, it just brought their new Infinity system, which was communicating, which was the first of its kind. And we'd have customers come into the showroom and they'd say, yeah, I need a new furnace. But look, I just want the most inexpensive furnace you have. We would walk them over to the one on the left, we would turn it on. It has atmospheric burners. It's very loud. It sounds like a jet turbine. The blower comes on, they're like, oh my gosh, that's loud. And well, you know, this is what every furnace that you're going to look at in this, in this genre is going to give you. It's an atmospheric burner. It's a standard PSC motor. What you see is what you get. It is stripped down. This is no better or different than any other manufacturer that you get. And then you say, okay, well then talk to me about the next one. Is this one quieter? Then we'd go to a two stage 80 and then maybe to a 90 percenter with sealed combustion. Where we're at locally, a lot of people have single level homes. The furnace is in a closet right outside of the living room. And they have to turn the volume up when the furnace comes on, turn the volume down when the furnace shuts off. So for them, noise was a big concern. It's a comfort concern. Not A temperature concern, but comfort. And when they got to the fuel combustion, like, wow, I really like that. I don't even want to talk to you about the one on the end, because that really looks expensive. I'm like, that's great. You don't have to talk to me about it. But by the way, that has been on the entire time that you've been in the showroom. That's when they get the look you have on your face right now, and they're like, well, wait a minute. And then when they start, we start explaining that back then we had tax incentives that were available, manufacturing incentives. And when they realized it wasn't very much more per month, an extra 20, $30 a month from what they were going to spend. To them, $20 a month was well worth not having to turn the TV up and down and find the remote every time the furnace came on. So it was a unique experience. It took a while to get traffic into our showroom. The first year we had the showroom open, my sales team actually sat in the showroom because we didn't have anywhere else for them to. To be. So we put their desks out in the showroom, figured it was, you know, ambush them when they come in the door. Here you go. They're all for you. And we had 100% closing rate of customers that would come to our showroom. But how do you market a showroom? How do you encourage people to come to your showroom? So when we would do sales, we would say, hey, please come and see the equipment. Please come and see what makes us different. Take a look at the equipment. You can turn it on. You can hear it. It's a unique opportunity. Most people don't have that. And they would come in and they'd see us. We had a customer on a Saturday that came in at about 12 noonish, and we spent an hour with him going through the different things. And he said, well, I got a quote from a couple of your competitors. And, you know, I have the afternoon. I'm going to go and see them, and I'll give you a call next week and we'll make a decision. We're like, by all means, hey, you know, let's give you directions to where they are. They're not far. You know, we want to be helpful. You know, we're confident that we're going to earn your business. And about an hour later, he came back into the showroom, and he says, okay, guys, I'm ready to go with you. And I said, well, just out of curiosity. You weren't gone very long. He says, yeah, I kind of drove through the parking lots and didn't look anything like this. So, you know, I'm good. We'll just do this right here. And I'm like, okay. So now that comfort that they've come and they've met people that they talked to on the phone, and they have faces to that comfort of seeing that what the quality of their workmanship is going to be, we said, okay, that's going to work for us. That's going to pay off. So it was 2004 that my sales manager, Steve, and I said, what can we do to get more people here? We know if they come here, they're going to buy from us. How in the world do we get people to come to great Dane? So I said, let's do an event. Let's do it. We called it open house, because who knows what to call it? So we said, let's just have an open house and invite a bunch of people to come. He said, great. Why would they come? That's a great question, Steve. Why would they come? So we talked with Aprilaire. They used to have these little carbon monoxide alarms that they stopped producing, but we were able to get about 500 of them for $10 apiece. And we said, well, let's give away a free carbon monoxide alarm. Maybe that'll be enough to get people in. Then we kept thinking about, we're like, I think we're gonna need more. So, okay, let's give away free standard filters to people that come in. Just the cheap little throwaway guys. Maybe that'll encourage people. And then Steve said, well, that's great, but what about. He says, I make money selling equipment. What are we going to do to get people to come and want to buy equipment? So we worked with our manufacturer. So let's give away a free infinity system. If anybody's looking at getting a system, they got a chance to come and enter a drawing to win a free system, value up to $10,000. So that's. That's installation, everything. You're going to get it. And that customer is still a customer of ours to this day, by the way, comes and sees us every year. And so we came up with several different offers or reasons for people to come and see us. And we said, okay, it's going to be a Friday, a Saturday, and a Sunday. Now, how do we tell? Well, we're talking 2004. There would. There was the Internet, but they would have to go to your website to be able to read the information. And well, nobody was really looking for Great Dane's website back then. There wasn't social media. You couldn't give them a reason to want to come. See, there were no clickings back then, so no likes, no clicks. So we came up with an inexpensive way. We just little three by five black and white postcard hindsight, probably not the best idea for getting people's attention as it's going through the mail. And we. I had a pizza party at my house and had my neighbors and some employees over and we were putting stamps on these postcards and we were putting the mailing labels on the postcards. Again, not the most professional way they get a hold of our customers, but we were sending out about 15,000 of these. And right about the end of the evening, my neighbor who worked for us at the time as a dispatcher, she said, you know, I really don't want to be a downer on this wonderful parade of an evening if you bought me beer and pizza, but why would anybody want to come to an open house at a heating and cooling place? She said, I work there and I don't want to come to this. And I'm like, well, yeah, that's horrible. Now that you put it that way, Phil, it's too late. Stamps are on it. We paid for the. It's happening, so let's get this stuff out in the mail. And we didn't know what to expect. I mean, I figured if we had 40, 50 people and that would be 20, 30 sales and it would pay for, it would pay for the event. The response was incredible. We had several hundred people come through the doors that three day period. I think it was 340 people in three days. And it was just unlike anything. It was like going to a trade show and everyone came to your booth. It was, it was, it was amazing. So the, our vendor, our main vendor at the time was Carrier Carrier Great Lakes for Carrier Corporation. And they showed up and of course they're saying the same thing that they say when anybody says they're doing an event. It's probably gonna suck, it's probably not gonna work out, but we're gonna go and at least put on a smile and say good job, whether it is or it isn't. So they showed up. We had been getting our butts kicked for four hours straight. And at this point in time, we are just catching our breath, grabbing a sip of water, cleaning up around us for the next wave of people to come through. And here come the carrier people through the door, there is no one in the building except for us. They had a gift basket and a bottle of champagne. And they came in and they said, it's really great that you spent all the money to do this, to do this project. And you know, don't worry, you know, at least you tried. You know, they're just naturally assuming they're there, no one else is. So they're the first ones in the building for the day. And we're all looking at them with this look on our face like, what are you talking about? Fantastic. And 10 minutes later, here come the cars in again. And it's a Friday, so it's our first day. And they came in about 2 o'. Clock. They figured they'd end their day by stopping by at Great Dane to do a wave. To do a wave and drop off some goodies and then scoot out of work early that day. It was about 7 o' clock that night that I realized that they were still stuck in the showroom because they couldn't get out the door. People had them cornered. They were in carrier shirts, which was their mistake. So people were asking all kinds of questions and it was fantastic. And to talk to them. At the end of the night, they actually stayed and helped us clean up. They're like, I've never experienced anything like this before. This was incredible. Are we doing it again next week? And so that was the first week of our open house. Because of COVID last year, we couldn't do1. In 2020, we did a virtual one, which just isn't the same thing. But in 2019. Our open house has evolved over the years. In 2019, let me see if I can do this. By memory, we had just over 2300 customers come through the doors in 10 days. We sold over 2000 media filters, 1800 humidifier pants, scheduled over 700 furnace inspections, and 140 new equipment estimates, which netted us over $600,000 in sales in a two week event.

Wow.

You asked me about the power of my showroom and I've taken you from, hey, I put a furnace out there to where we are today. We currently do about 400 to $450,000 worth of retail business over the counter. And that is primarily filters, humidifier pads, UV light, replacement bulbs. We sell igniters here and there, but most people, when they come in to get replacement parts, they don't know what they're looking for anyway, so, you know, they're not. We don't do a lot of replacement parts, but we have today was, it was 45 degrees in Michigan, which means everyone here was wearing short sleeve shirts and shorts and running around outside because, you know, we can 40 in Michigan when you're coming out of a long, cold winter is. It might as well be summer. It's fabulous. So we're not busy on days like this. And we've still had seven, eight people come through the doors to pick up filters and humidifier pads. So we found a way to turn it into a big business. And we haven't marketed it. Marketed, marketed our parts department very well over the last couple years because we haven't foundationally been in a position to do so. And this year we are. So we are going to start doing a solid marketing on that. Look at my, my maintenance apprenticeship. Each truck, my goal for them is $500 a day worth of revenue. They make $500 a day worth of revenue from the maintenance division. That's above the goal that we actually need them to, to make. And I don't care how they make the revenue or what they do. I don't care if they're having a car wash. If that truck brings in $500. Today we made, we made a revenue goals. So we started offering our maintenance agreement. Customers buy one, get one half off filters all year round. And with COVID what we told the people was, don't come here, we don't want to see you. We'll drop them off to you. That worked out great. We had over a thousand appointments. Just drop filters off on people's porches. And they gave us credit card numbers over the phone. And I'm like, huh? So what you're saying is when we do slow down a little bit in our tweener seasons, we can do filter deliveries and make more revenue than actually going out and doing work. Now you would think that the apprentices would say, well, I'm supposed to be learning how to do different. No, for them, that's fantastic. Like, so wait a moment. Get straight. You just want me to drop off filters to these 20 houses and you're going to pay me that kind of money? Like, yeah, okay. For them it's a, it's a field trip for the day. So it kind of works out. But we're. Covid has caused us to change so much of our business model and our business plan as far as how we focus on, like, look at what we're doing right now with the, with the Zoom meeting. Zoom was available prior to Covid. No one used it. You know, yeah, big corporations did, but it's forced us to do so much remotely. Like technicians now working with their service manager. Well, you got FaceTime on your iPhone or on your itablet. You know, it's just like I'm sitting right next to you. Oh, no, it's the red wire right there. Should have this voltage. Here's your problem. It's caused us so many different ways to communicate without sharing germs.

I love that. And actually, that was. I'm so happy I asked you the showroom question, because I've spoken to a lot of H vac and plumbing companies that will do community events, kind of like a trade show, you know, have. Have their booth, you know, give back to the community, do sponsorships, which I love. I think it's so cool. But I really love the model of the open house that you guys did. And kudos on figuring out that filter delivery hack. That is smart. I first spoke to you a couple of. What time? What's time? Actually, it almost was a year ago because Covid had just hit everyone at service time were all scrambling because what does this mean for our industry? For you, I'm sure. What does this mean for our industry? Luckily, we found out that not only are the trades recession proof, they're also more or less pandemic proof. You did a whole lot of work right at the front with making sure that your customers were safe and that your employees were safe. And I think we spoke, like, beginning of April, if not end of March, so you were very on it in terms of PPE and in terms of making sure everyone was safe. I want to talk about what that did for your culture and what that did for the company as a whole. Now, a year later, just kind of making that immediate shift and priority to the health of your people.

In hindsight, now, it's easy to look back and measure those things. But when we spoke back in March or April, when it was. I recall the conversation, you were asking a lot of questions. And at Crepe Van, you're not allowed to say, I don't know, because to me, that's. That's an offensive way to have a conversation. You don't know. Can you find out who might know? You know, what can we do here? But we just. There were so many. I don't know. You know, is everybody going to die? Are your employees going to be safe? How long is this going to last? Will there ever be a vaccine? You know, will we ever be able to go back to the way we were? It was just so many unknown factors that came into play. But I think that my background over the past 16 years as a firefighter, our volunteer firefighter, absolutely helped prepare me for focusing on the. On the issue and working the problem, so to speak. We always used a lot of PPE without realizing or looking at it as ppe. You know, like the shoe covers, the boot covers. You know, that's a great thing where it shows customers that we respect their property. But let's face it, there's some customers that we, we put the boot covers on to protect our boots. So, you know, there's. There's some houses that you don't want to walk through, or there might be mud in the backyard and just got a new pair of boots. I mean, we always used it for different things, but you know, gloves we already had on hand because we don't want to be changing thermostats and have fingerprints on the wall. So put on a pair of nitro gloves and change the thermostat. A lot of that stuff was there. But masks, we never use masks. The only time you would use any type of a respirator mask, as if you were doing some sort of a heavy duty chemical cleaning or if you were doing some sort of a deserting. So it didn't exist. So when everything happened, I actually was on a cruise ship. I was on a vendor's trip the first week of March. And the. As we were, we, as we left on the ship, they were just starting to talk about. About the COVID It was here and, and it was starting to spread in the week that we were out on the cruise. That's all we could focus on on the news was only the numbers were skyrocketing and this is happening. And it was scary. I mean, it was, it was horrifying. I wanted to be off that boat and be. At least be back in Michigan to be here. The cruise ship in front of us got turned around at port and sent back out to sea because there was Covid on board the vessel. And I'm on deck watching this happen in and you know, my bags are packed. I mean, I'm ready to jump and swim towards shore. My wife was just beside herself. So, I mean, it's just get me to the airport, get me on a plane and get me home. And it was two days after I got home that the governor of Michigan shut down our state and made everybody just go home and say, you can't come back to work. So it was a very terrible time at that point. That's when Donald Trump, in his infinite wisdom Actually sign that declaration to get all the PPE that was available anywhere to be able to give to our medical personnel or first responders to keep them safe, obviously to be able to treat the situation, which was frustrating at the time, but in hindsight, good job. They needed it more than anyone else did. But I'm also a boater, so I just happened to be thinking, I'm like, well, man, this is a bad time of year to not have a mask. Because when I sand the bottom of my boat, I have to wear a mask to keep the. Oh, wait a minute, I wonder if anybody thought about that. So I went online to some boat supply stores and automotive supply stores, and nobody had tapped that market yet. So the 3M respirators were in mass quantities in those resources. So we gobbled up 40, 50 of those to be able to get us through. So we were able to outfit every revenue generator that was still able to work. We were able to give them a 3M respirator with N95 filters so that they would be safe. We were able to give them visors and shields and glasses and gloves and hand sanitizer. We went to a local brewery that was just starting to make hand sanitizer, and we were able to get five gallon drums that we put out in front of our business. And we were able to go on to Facebook again. I don't want to be the face of my company, but at that point I felt I needed to be. And I just, with my iPhone, made a couple videos really quick that said, look, you're important to us. We have hand sanitizer. It is outside. Come help yourself. You don't even have to see a soul. Come and get it so that way you're clean and safe when we come to your house. And we probably went through about 30 gallons of hand sanitizer from people filling their own containers and such. It was not so much even trying to get back to the community. It was just trying to make sure that we can, if there was a way we could do something, to do something. It made me feel good to feel focus on something positive instead of something negative. At that point, we had about 40% of our staff that requested not to come to work at that period of time. Whether they had very young children at home, whether they were taking care of family members at home, maybe elderly family members, or maybe they lived with, you know, maybe they were younger and lived at home with mom and dad who said, no, you're not going to work, and come bringing that back to me. So we lost several people for a period of time. We continued to write their paychecks even before the PPE program came out or PPP program came out, which was very stressful for us. We maxed out all our line of credits. Not that we needed it, but we didn't know if we would need it again. Hindsight, you know, we didn't, but who knew? So we gathered every penny that we could. We got lean and mean and just kept trying to fight our way through it. And coming out of COVID we only had three employees not come back. So three out of 40 was. It was. Not that we wanted to lose the three, but that was pretty darn good to get that many people back and running, because in Michigan, Memorial day, it hit 100 degrees or close to 100 degrees, and we had to go to work. You know, there was. There was no way around it. We went from three months of having nothing to do to, hey, we're popular again. And so. So we, you know, trying to find people and hire people, we had to. We had to pay hazard pay to our people to get them to actually come to work. So we paid them $250 a week hazard pay. As we were going through that whole situation, and that's everybody. Not revenue producers, because the people that were coming to our office were sharing the exact same risk that the revenue producers were paying, because the revenue producers had to go face to face with the office people at some point. So it was all a shared situation. It was. We looked at it day by day and week by week, and we were just, I hate to say hoping, but I think all of us, and not just at Great Dane. I mean, all of us were hoping for it to be okay. And, you know, don't care what state you're in, whether it's Republican or Democrat or who your governor is, Every. Every state had a different climate, had a different culture, had a different way of doing things. And, well, I mean, a year later, we. We look at Covid is not as big of a concern on the shoulders of Americans as it was a year ago. I'm not downplaying the fact that we've lost over 500,000 people or that so many people have already gotten sick or have got a vaccine by no stretch of the imagination. But today, when we look at the hundreds of millions of people that have got the virus so that the odds of them getting it again are slimmer, and then the now 50, 50 plus million people that have got the vaccine, so at least now there's a major part of our population that we're not worrying as much about contracting, sharing, moving it around. That's. I think we all feel a little bit more comfortable to actually start the conversation with. You said you feel so comfortable because your whole family had just finally got the vaccine. So that. That gives you a little bit of comfort. And I guess that's what I'm saying today. I mean, we all have. Have that little bit of there's a light at the end of the tunnel. I don't think that this disease is ever going to go away. Just like the flu doesn't ever go away. It's always changing its air. But it's more of an irritant these days. We still lose thousands of people a year just from influenza, but we look at it as more of an irritant, really, that I don't want to get the flu, so I get the flu shot. So I'm hoping two, three years from now that's what this will be. I just hope that the people that are much smarter than I am or working out a plan for looking at what happened in this situation to make it better if it ever was to happen again, so that we can react in a way that's better for everyone involved. This really affected a lot of people's lives today. I mean, last year, everybody should. And heating, cooling should have had a good year. I mean, if our consumers weren't working, they were at least getting some assistance somewhere so that they had money to pay bills to do these types of things. Unfortunately, those wells ran dry a while ago. So those people that still are unable to work, you know, look at where you're at out in California. I mean, you guys are in the movie tourism industry. I mean, you're hit very hard. We don't do a lot of movies and tourism in Michigan, but the restaurant industry and the tourism industry has just been devastated, and that's 30% of our population is affected somehow by that. And now these people haven't had good revenue for the last three to four months. So now it's going to start affecting me as a business person, because now they won't have the money to pay for those repairs or do those do the things that they were doing six months ago. So it is a concern for all of us. So, I mean, nobody's luckier than the other. We're all in this together.

I agree. I agree. Yeah, it's been a crazy year, hasn't it, Josh? We. We are at an hour, and I want to leave some time for some rapid fire Questions, which I didn't send to you beforehand, but before we get to those, I would love to hear about podcasts or book recommendations you have for fellow contractors out there, owners out there who are looking to do some really cool stuff, if you have any.

There are so, so many books out there. There are so many books on tape. So many. Books on tape is a great thing. If you travel a lot or drive a lot, get books on tape and just, Just listen to it. You'll get lost in the conversation. The drive will be over very, very quickly. But there is one book that I could not put down. It was Charlie. Oh, darn it. I had on the top of my head. Now it's called H Vac Spells Wealth. It was a book that I couldn't put down. I'm not a big book reader. I'm more of a. I like to watch the movie kind of a person. And this one I just couldn't put down drove my wife nuts. I had the light on next to the bed at night as I'm reading through the book, and it was like he was talking to me at that point in my career where he was pointing out what I wasn't doing just because I knew I needed to do it and didn't want to. It's a real good reality check. So it doesn't matter how big you are in business. That's a good book. And the other one that I really like was called the Go Giver.

Go Giver.

It had nothing to do with heating and air conditioning. It was a very short book. I think it was just a couple hundred pages, but it was basically a book about a young man who had a mentor as an. As an older person that had lived his life and built up a large amount of wealth. But it was how he built the wealth and how he lived his life. He got wealth by giving it away. So ever since he was younger, trying to do. Do right by other people. And of course, those waves come back to the shore, so to speak. And that's what the whole book was about. And it just. I saw myself a lot in that book as far as how I feel as far as giving to my employees and giving back to our community and doing the charitable events that we do. It just. It really solidified the fact that it made me feel good to think that, hey, maybe one day all these things will come full circle for my. If not for me, for my family or my employees, and pay off one way or another. But those are definitely two books that were wonderful. And one thing I strongly recommend for anybody in any of our titans, or anybody in any business for that matter, if you have not joined a peer to peer group, do so immediately. I joined a mixed group through ACCA back when we were having our financial challenges in Great Dane back in 2008, nine actually had to borrow the money to go to my first meeting. These people saved Great Dane. They made Great Dane what it is today. If they're not familiar with what a peer to peer group is, they take from what the ACCA peer group way, it's called a mixed group. And they will have up to 14 companies from around the country, the same makeup of what you are around, the same revenue that you have, around the same amount of employees doing the same type of work, their new construction, they'll put you with new construction people. If you're AOR like I am, they'll put you where they are. And these are people that are spending money to get together to make themselves better. So every six months, obviously not the last year because of COVID but every six months someone will host a meeting. So if I was to host a meeting, everybody would come to Great Dane for a couple days, and I would invite three to four companies to come in early to work at Great Dane for three days. So they would. They would be the flies on the wall. They would ride with the salesman, they would talk to people, they would talk to customers, scheduling calls. They would ride with service technicians, they would unload trucks from the vendors, and they would put together a report for the rest of the group that would come in. Because we all have different specialties. For me, my specialty is image and motivation is what they keep telling me. They're like, look, my guys are down. I need you to talk to them. Let's get them up and running. So that way when you come in, they can have a report together saying, okay, Josh, I'd like you to look at this. Bill, we need you to look at this so we can maximize our opportunity to help the host solve the challenges and issues they have. And when you can have some of the brightest people in the business volunteer their time and spend money to come and see you, to make you better, just to be your friend. It's worth every penny that I pay. I've made lifelong friendships with people and I've had some of the icons in our industry in our group that I will never forget. And I owe them everything that I am. They call me or text me or send me Facebook messages at least once a week just to check in and see how everything is. It's just nice to have that kind of friendship and support because we're not. We all feel that we're in this alone because we don't want to drag anyone else down our rabbit hole. But we're all going down the same rabbit hole. It's a big field. It all leads to the same place. So being able to have them to remind you that you'll get through this is fantastic. So. So please join a mixed group or join some sort of a peer to peer group with any organization.

I love that advice. Thanks for sharing. So happy to hear that you still are in connection with the folks you met from the acca. That's great. All right, you ready for some rapid fire questions? Don't think, just answer. How do you take your coffee?

I don't drink coffee.

Tea?

I do drink tea. Yes. I drink green tea with sugar.

Nice. If you could have dinner with one person, dead or alive, who would it be?

Oh. Oh, wow. Ronald Reagan.

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

How to make more profit in revenue.

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

Buy a new boat.

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

Care about your employees and customers as much as you do yourself and your family.

That's great. Josh Bigelow, thanks so much for being a guest on Toolbox for the trades.

Hey, thanks for having me. It's always so much fun talking to you.

Thanks so much. I so appreciate that. I hope you have a great day.