From Truck to Boardroom: How Technicians Build Real HVAC Businesses with Kelley McKay from HVAC Millionaire University

It's really not sales, it's service, not sales. Once you get so many maintenance agreements, if you don't have a really good process that is thorough and allows the technician time, if you don't have that and you just build up a whole bunch of maintenance agreements and convert those maintenance agreements into sales by educating the customer, it's not about hardcore pushy sales. It's just about doing what you said. Provide that better service. Provide a better service and the sales will come.

Welcome to the Home Service Hacks Podcast, the show for contractors who refuse to settle for average. Hosted by Bill Brown, licensed H vac contractor, AI and automation expert and founder of service titan Hacks Community, each episode features real conversations with contractors, tech founders and innovators who are reshaping the trades from AI and automation to pricing, marketing and management. If it's working in the field, you'll hear about it here. Let's get into it.

It's interesting to have. You want to have the abundance mindset, right? Because you don't want to always show them all of the roadblocks to success. But then you also want to be grounded in reality so that they're, they see the, the headwinds coming. Right. It's just, it's such a delicate balance of. It is of making money and keeping it. And it seems to me like it's, you can kind of, for me, it was, you can kind of do one or the other. When I was really aggressive on growth and top line growth, I would, you know, be more aggressive on marketing funds, which was riskier and I would have to hire more people ahead of the, the point where they had output, which was riskier. So it was just all this cumulative risk that if I didn't execute correctly, I was not going to make money. And I, and I thought when we hit about 2 million, I sat back and said, you know what, if I just decide not to grow and just let the growth be 100% organic, cut marketing down to the minimum, focus on existing customers, referrals and everything, I'll be 100% fine with my personal income. But then what would I tell my people? Like they, when they go, hey, I'd like to make more money or everything. No, I'm the only one in this company that makes money. You don't. So then it would be like constantly bullshitting my team.

Yeah.

And talking. You'd either have to promise future opportunities that you knew didn't exist, or you'd have to go through a cycle of continuously building people up and letting them leave the company. So I said, well, I'm not going to put a cap on this growth because I don't want to put a cap on the success of my people. But that added a lot of stress doing that. Really, man, it did. But the, the growth business owners, we handle it right. We take care, we handle that stress.

Yeah. And it's kind of been, I mean, for the last decade since, you know, I guess a little bit earlier than that when YouTube became popular and Talking Heads became more popular, and you've got people like Grant Cardone hitting the scene, you know, and then, and the 10x rule and it's all go, go, go, hustle and grind. And Gary Vee was like, work your face off. And I, I, I was in that approach because that's what I was being, that's what I was feeding into my mind all the time. And then you'll hear little sections of knowledge shared by some industry titans and you want to, as soon as you hear that, it's like, oh, well, I need to do that. And before you're ready, before you're ready, there's not enough context to what it takes to be ready, to be able to make that move effectively. So there's a lot of moves being made that are just going to dig people deeper into a hole and just create a bunch more stress and chaos. That's really not necessary. If you would have just done it in stages. It's like if you are going to make macaroni and cheese, you wouldn't just, you know, put the noodles in and just cook them for one minute and then take them out. Like there's steps. Right, to just make.

It's a recipe for success.

Yes, yes, there's steps.

Nobody has those. The guys that are running these $50 million businesses already went past. Yes, that part of the recipe. And so maybe when they created it, it's not as relevant today, in my opinion. Or maybe they just forget now. I guess some of them could be really knowledgeable of what it took to build their business from zero to a million, 1 million to 2 million and everything. But the challenge is that I was always very, very aware of those stages and did a good job documenting them. So I could go back and, and say, man, the challenges that I had from day one to even the first half a million, very different than the ones from two and a half to three million. And like you said, you're right. If you try to attack, you only have so much capacity, so much time, so much money. If you try to solve a problem that a $2 million business, $3 million business has. When you're a half a million, you're not going to see it through and you're not going to get as much benefit. So you have to know exactly what do I do in this stage of my business? And I can work on one or two things and then move to the next.

And yeah, that's nothing too, is having some type of a control plan. Because what typically happens is the owner maybe goes to a seminar and they're. It's like drinking from a fire hose. They've got all these new ideas and they come back and they, they implement them, but they don't see them through. It's not, it doesn't stick. So it's always just new ideas. It's always. And it all costs money. You know, it's just, it's. It's a lot more.

I've done it.

Yeah, I've done it, too. I did it for years. I was very ambitious and of course, not afraid of hard work and, and I was in the truck. You know, I was a technician for over, over 20 years. Of my 20, you know, my 20, almost 29 years being associated with this industry. I. So it's like I've made all the mistakes. I swear, every time something pops up, it's like, oh, yeah, here's what happened when I did this, you know, when, when I'm talking with other business owners. So there, there is a method to the madness. I've kind of just distilled this down into, like, well, before I say that, it's going back to what you were talking about as far as business. Some of these titans that are in our industry, everybody looks up to. And I'm no different. I look up to them too. But some of the stuff they say really is misleading and it's really hurting the industry. I know they're just trying to help, but sometimes it hurts the industry worse than, than it actually helps. You know, one particular person was saying that, you know, you shouldn't even go in, you shouldn't even start your business without a brand. Like, go, go spend $20,000 on a brand first. And that is like, did you have money?

I guess. Did you do that?

Probably not. I know, I know this individual didn't do that. So why would you tell new people to spend that money doing that? There's way other more effective ways to spend that money to get your business rolling and off the ground. And I've coached people who won the national awards for the best brand and their freaking $500,000 in the hole. Broke.

Yeah. You have to be.

Brand means, it really means nothing until you're ready for it, in my opinion, so.

Right. And you don't have to spend $20,000 on it today either.

Yeah.

You know, one of the things that, that I, I believe that the brand is very important to how much you're able to get. If you're, if you're going to be a high level contractor, offer high level services, your brand should match that. But you can't go into massive debt to get that and then just hope that you're going to get enough customers quickly enough because that's a long term play. Right. And I just think that if you, you could start out with something smaller and, and you know, just as long as it's different than the guy down the street.

Yeah.

So really the brand is more about communicate.

You know, the service you provide, it has the ability to do all without it. You know, costing you three or four thousand dollars to wrap every new truck. And here's the thing too, when it comes to truck wraps in particular is they're great. And, but when you're one person or two people and you've only got two vehicles, you're not like making that impact that you really want because you're just, you don't have that volume going out there every day.

So it's like having one billboard and expecting it to kill it.

Exactly.

Whereas your competition has won all over the outer belt of the city. So the. Yeah, the impressions aren't high enough to justify it and it's the opportunity cost. What could you have done with that? 3,000 bucks, right?

Absolutely, absolutely. So in that, in that aspect, it's, it's kind of been skewed a little bit I think as far as like, you know what, what is the most important things in your business? And we're in the home service industry. So in my opinion that service is the most important thing that you can deliver. That's going to get happy customers. Happy customers.

Yeah, happy customers.

Imagine that.

Crazy. Happy customers is the number one thing that drives your business. Never forget about happy customers.

Never.

Right. Ever. And I think that as small companies, we all start out that way. There's no, there's no, I don't, I find technicians to be really honest to a fault also to the point where they would sacrifice the success of their business to not be priced correctly and stuff like that. Maybe just not knowing. But ultimately the end of the day we get our joy as a technician because that's How I started out was straight technician. Worked for a manufacturer of air conditioning for data centers for years. So really, really technical, nerdy stuff.

Yeah.

And what I, what I found happiness for myself was making customers happy. And you get that. Grew the business.

Hit a dopamine, you know, by when, by having a customer be. Oh my gosh, thank you so much. You just, you, I can't believe this. Like you just saved the day. You're my hero. Like, yeah. Every technician has heard that at some point in their career and it feels good. And it's like that instant gratification that's one of the struggles from making the transition from getting those, those, that instant gratification every single day while you're running calls versus beginning to actually work in the business or on the business.

It's very different, isn't it?

It's a very.

It's a completely different job. Completely.

It is, it is.

And it might as well be a different company almost. It's such a big. That's the biggest transition you can experience. Yeah.

It's an identity shift that has to happen if you're going to grow this thing, you know the. You're not going to grow your business without burnout or exhaustion, whatever you want to call it, resentment, you know, towards your business if you stay in the tr. Like you have to get out of the truck. And it's really hard for most people because it's just comfortable for em. That's what they know.

Right.

Switching into stuff that the unknown. Everything you see online, when it comes to Facebook groups and things of people talking about their numbers and how successful they are is that is just for one, like we said earlier, that's highlights. It's a highlight reel. Like you don't know what's actually happening in the company. But that is a very small percentage. Believe it or not. I mean, oh yeah, truly successful H Vac businesses, most of them are struggling. That's why the statistics say it's like 70% of businesses. I think it was the ACCA who came out with a study that said that 70% of all brand new heating air conditioning businesses fail in the first year. They just don't make it. And then 20% every single year, 20% of all H VAC companies go out of business every single year. And then you look at the regular business statistics. 50% fail by year five and only like 6% make it past 10 years.

It's, it's very low. You're right. It's. It is about. It is a few percentage that make it past, past that 10 year mark. And why is it that? I mean there's obviously a multitude of factors. I think that probably burnout and the owner just runs out of gas. For me personally I ran out of gas near the end of my business.

I, I did too.

And I would say that you have to have your foot on the gas continuously. Doesn't mean aggressive growth. It just means attacking the biggest problem. Pareto principle, the biggest problem in the company. Work on it, fix it, grind through it. But if you decide that you're. You can't do that for whatever reason or you're not going to, that's will kill you. And I, I lost my passion for it due to two things. One was moving away from the company. So I seriously underestimated how what it would be like to run it remotely. And yeah, because we grew from when I left the company was around 2 million and we grew it to 4 and wow a hundred percent remotely. Because I've been very fortunate to be really good with processes. Designing a process from scratch step by step and refining it and working on it. So that always allowed me to.

That's a lot of skill set.

That's a lot of trust.

Yeah. That's skill set that most people don't have.

They and it comes from my computer programming background. So that's where I started. And a computer programming is extremely rigid processes or it just doesn't work. And that's what keeps the guys from getting into the truck. And of course all of the, the big guys talk about processes but as far as actually creating them and implementing them and refining them, I don't, I haven't seen where they've really gone into that. But anyway running it remotely wasn't the same on Zoom. I didn't have the passion for the people as we grew. I didn't even know the people.

Yeah.

And. And so when it was time to grind I wasn't sure who I was grinding for. I got a lot of people that would steal from me. I had went from some high level managers that what's the chance you're going to get that first manager? High level manager. Right. The first time I didn't. I had to go through a couple of those and then I had some family issues that just took me offline and my business just, it just stayed steady and started to decline a little bit and I just lost the passion for it and I think wasn't really burnout cause I wasn't putting in tons of hours. I just didn't understand, didn't Have a purpose for it as much as I did when I was in Ohio. So I think that everybody has a reason for wanting to get out and it could be a good time, it could be a bad time. I was fortunate to have a lot of success throughout the majority of it, despite all of the bad choices that I made during that time.

That's where we're. I didn't have a bunch of success through the majority of it. Majority of it was awful.

Yeah.

And I wasn't actively searching to exit my business, but I had already talked to a lawyer and began like succession planning because I knew that I wanted to exit at some point two years prior to an opportunity falling in my lap. So when the.

That's good.

When the opportunity came, I was like, my business was well ran as far as like the financials, the. Our operations. It was literally one of my sales reps was like one of the, you know, I have a dealer here, one of his other dealers, one another account of his who's looking to purchase a business. And I know that you had mentioned that at some point you would, you would probably exit. Would you be interested in having a conversation with him? I said sure. So next week, go to a meeting. We arrange like another meeting. From that meeting wound up going to the actual owner, which was a private equity company. Not. But they're a real estate company, just a local real estate company. They, they manage like over 5 million square feet of, of real estate. And, and they happen to own one of the oldest and biggest heating air companies in my region as well. So they were trying to like, you know, integrate the two. And they did plumbing, heating air and electrical. So from that first meeting till the exit of my business, it happened very quickly. It was like one and a half months and I was out the door and didn't have a job. And I was like, I walked out with a big check and then I got payments for the next two years and. But they're one of the oldest, largest companies and I don't share the. Probably wouldn't share this. But I'll just tell you like they, I know that they, I know what they do in revenue and it's roughly $20 million. And they've been in business since like the 60s. So to have a company doing 30 million that doesn't exist here in my realm, like this is small town middle America in Kansas.

There isn't $30 million worth of transactions happening unless maybe 100% of the market is 30 million. But yeah, it depends upon the market size. If you Wanted to get bigger, you'd have to expand your market at that point.

Absolutely. My. My business is located in a. I mean, we did business in Wichita, which is the big city close to me, which is about, I want to say, 400,000 people, maybe a little over that, but in the city, the town where my business is located, because my business, they are still running my business. They're renting my building, still use my building and everything, but it's less than 10,000 people. And then, so very small community, just rural America, that's where. Yeah, that's what we have here. And I think it's hard not to. You know, they say comparison is the thief of joy. And when you get online and you look at these other people winning and you're just going through hell, it's hard not to compare yourself and think, like, I'm a complete loser over here, you know?

Yeah, right.

I'm not doing 4 million or 8 million or whatever it is. And it really. Markets. Market really does matter. It truly does. But you can always push. Push your potential, and you can. You can still do very well in just about any market, you know.

Right.

If you have the right processes and systems and, you know, you make that transition to working on your business instead of in your business like it. It's all possible for. For the people who are willing to immerse themselves in education and figure it out.

Right. Without thinking that there's any magic or silver. No, don't chase the.

Tell me about that bill. Did. Did you. Are you guilty of that? Because you're looking at a guilty man.

Right. You're either guilty of it or you lie about it. I don't care who you are. Right. So some of those decisions and those commitments to, you know, spending $6,000 a month on your website and SEO can completely take your business down. That's it.

Yes.

That was the rest of your money. If you didn't grow from that investment, you're. That's it. Your little fragile business is done. The people that made it through that made mistakes in other things. That's just how it is. And you either experience setbacks or you lie about it. It depends on what you want to do. But I think that when you're on the Internet, it's just not very inspiring to talk about all the mistakes you made. But I think that it's also very helpful to be realistic that this is difficult. There's a reason why so many of these businesses don't make it, and it's just overextending themselves. And then running out of cash. Right.

Yeah, I've. I. Because of what I do now, trying to reach those people who are just, you know, they're really just treading water. They're not. The bank account is not growing. Their. Their quality of life is decreasing because of the extra stress that they're taking on and the chaos they're trying to manage. You know, they get so immersed in busy work that a lot of them don't have the time to even search for the information that we share to help people get out of this, to stop the.

Don't even have the time.

Yeah.

To sit down and listen to a podcast.

They're.

They can't even drive.

Putting out fires all day long every day. And there's lots of reasons for that, but money is a big driver. A lot of them are struggling financially and it's like, well, I've got this call. I can't listen to Bill and Kelly talk about H Vac. I gotta go make money because I got bills to pay. So. Yeah.

And I get it.

Yeah, I get it, too.

So, I mean, how do you really. The message that firefighting. Right.

The message. That's what we're trying to figure out is how do we talk, how do we get these people's attention to like, stop the madness and learn? Let's. You can easily learn this if you have any ambition to do something to do better in your company. You can learn what I have to share and it will help you tremendously. So what is the message? Because I've. I'm guilty. Probably on my YouTube channel. I've been on YouTube for over. Over 10 years, since I first started this journey of making changes in my business. I talk about how hard it is a lot and sometimes maybe that's off putting to people because I'm not. But I'm just being real. I'm not trying to sugarcoat shit. I'm not trying to pretend that it's going to be all rainbows, unicorns and butterflies, because it's not. But maybe I'm going about it wrong. I don't know.

Well, you're going to take some losses on it, on. On things. And it's really about winning, winning more battles than you lose. Right. And when you're talking about firefighting, one of the things. One of the books that I read early on, as I was educating myself, was the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. And I had the Stephen Covey, who's the author of the book, his Four Quadrants on My Wall. And the quadrant one was Things that are urgent and important, which are your fires.

Yeah.

So a technician is out on a job and, or a salesperson's out on a job and they call you and you answering the phone is the difference between them selling the job or not? You have to answer the phone. Quadrant 2 are the things that are important but not urgent. Well, moving from quadrant one to quadrant two is that getting out of the truck. And I, I absolutely hated firefighting. I was like, I have to be in fire prevention. I have to find out the root cause of why this happened, solve that, because it's just gonna come up again and again. And so I was fortunate about a year and a half into my business to get out of the truck almost completely. I would go to jobs sometimes. I would do some sales sometimes. But mostly I was in the office and training and recruiting and things like that. But it was because I had such a strong desire to just work on non urgent but important things. So how do the, how does the technician, a technician founder, get to that point? One step at a time, man. Right, yeah, steps.

Because your time is just, oh, you're putting out so many fires and oftentimes people grow without the processes in place. So everybody's just out there doing their own thing and it just kind of compounds the chaos. And then we're dumping money into marketing because we think that's what we need. And okay, well, great. Now we get more calls and we just compound it even more.

Right.

We're not maximizing anything. Whether it's the phone call coming in or the service call process or the sales process or the follow up, like there's nothing there. So it's, it's very easy to just get caught up in the whirlwind of like, more, more, more and growth, growth, growth. And let's do this and get ambitious.

And without like the specific, very specific measurable time based actions that you need to take in order to have that and experience that growth, growth in top line and in bottom line together. And yeah, it takes, I mean, when I'm talking to people about processes, I, we were like, we were talking about earlier, it is a recipe. You're baking a cake over and over again. Anytime you're going to be doing something multiple times, you better have a very easy to follow, rigid process for it. If you're going to answer the phone more than once, you need a very specific, repeatable way that you exactly answer the phone. Or that skill set lies within your CSR who can and will quit at any time. And so these technician Founders, man, how do they really get to that point to be able to sit back and, and, you know, they, they get up against this wall where they're pulled so thin. They do everything but nothing great or nothing fully all the way through that needs to be done. What's the, what's the first step that somebody has to take when it's time to get out of the truck? What do you think the first step is?

The very first step is, you know, everybody always talks about mindset, and the mindset is not. It's not something that ever goes away. When I say mindset, what I'm really talking about is you have to become aware instead of continuing to just put out fires, continuing to do the same thing that you've always done that gets you the same results that's made making your life miserable. We have to stop doing that, and we have to. You know, if you want something different in your business, you have to do something different in your business. So we have to do something different. It's really hard in the beginning, if you are. For me, I was good, fast and cheap. If you're good, fast and cheap, you can be as busy as you want. You can have as much call, as many calls as you want. You can. But there are, there are consequences to being good, fast and cheap.

So it's all on the shoulders of you at that point.

It is.

Where is that, you know, that revenue dollar where it just stops? It can't get any bigger than. Than that if it's you in the truck. I think it's different for everybody, but I believe for me, last time I checked, it was about 300,000. That I could never do more than that with the time that I had, no matter what. If I wasn't sitting back observing the cakes being made, I could never create or watch another. Another cake being made from another person. Right. Or a different process in the business. So that's, that's where that was at. So you're saying that what got you to where you're at was certain things that you do on a daily basis, and if you're not willing to change that, you're just going to stay there.

Sometimes it takes a lot of. Especially because, you know, heating, air conditioning contractors, technicians, like, it's a tough job, you know, and they can take a beating. They can just take a beating for a long period of time, which is admirable. But there you can work smarter, not harder. And so there's, there's only. Time is finite as far as what you're capable of producing in a day. You can only run so many calls. There's only so many hours in a day after multiple times of me finishing my last call. And I had a couple of team members at that time. I'd probably fielded 30 or 40 calls that day along with customers calling and trying to schedule and book that.

God, it was so stressful, wasn't it?

So stressful and nightmare. A couple of really late nights, getting home at 11, 11 o' clock at night. I'm, you know, driving home in the dark and I get home and I'm sitting in the driveway and I realize that I just drove the entire way home without any radio or anything on, no decompression. I am just spent like my mind was running through the day while I'm driving home. I'm in a, I'm a zombie because I've been doing this for the last six days and I'm on day seven and I'm exhausted and tired and for me, I, I, there was a lot of other, we talked a little bit about it, a lot of other pain because your life doesn't stop just because you get busy running a business. So I was raised an only child. I, my dad later remarried and I've got two stepsisters and a stepmom. But my dad died, my mom died, and my wife almost died in the first five years of business. So I've got this stuff happening while I'm trying to juggle customers and team. And at some point I just had, I was searching. So you've got to get to the point where you're actually start searching for the answers because you know that this is not sustainable, right?

Or you're going to, you're going to break down completely and just quit.

Just quit.

Right?

So I started searching, I read a couple of books, I started to get into personal development. It's my belief that personal development is the foundation to every successful business owner. That's why it always, that's why the mindset always comes up in conversation. That's why you learn about, you know, setting some goals and measuring those goals and changing the way you think about your life and what's possible for you. Having a bigger vision, developing consistency. Right. And grit. That was all part of that foundation that I got into personal development as I started to learn how to, how I was going to fix this. It wasn't even business up to that point. I'm 36 years old, 37 years old, and I've read one book that my wife asked me to read and she likes fiction and one book she wanted me to read and I read it and I did not like it. And so I always thought just reading wasn't for me. But then when I started reading personal development and then I, I really dug into like business and learning about business and those are two subjects that I, I just can't get enough of. So I actually enjoy reading and started reading those books and from that it went to seminars and. But in the beginning, to kind of go back to the question, to circle back in the beginning, it might just be like at the beginning, like there's an am. Think of like your day as having bookends. Right? You got an AM and a PM bookend. Well, those are typically times of the day that you truly have control over. I mean, let's be honest, you have control over every hour of your day. Honestly, you can choose to do something or not do it. But we don't feel that way when we're trapped in the cycle of a busy business. So I could control the AM and I kept reading like in these personal development books like get up earlier, get up earlier. So I did, I worked myself up because I was never a morning person and I started getting up at 6, 6am that's not even early for some people. But it's even to this day it's still early for me. So. But I got used to getting up at 6:00am and then from 6 to 7:00 clock in the morning I would grab my coffee first thing and I'm learning, I'm either listening to something. I turned my, my van also into a rolling library. So I started back then there wasn't podcasts, wasn't even a thing. So I bought audiobooks and I started listening to them non stop. That's all that was on my radio. That was all, all that was playing through my speakers in my truck.

For a great way to do it. If you're trying to leave the truck, that's where you're going to be a.

Lot of the day. Yes.

So what are you listening to while you're spending a half hour driving between one job and another? That's where you can do your education.

Absolutely, absolutely. And it's like Tony Robbins has this net time, like no extra time, right. So I think it was him that came up with that and I started really using that. I took that. I also learned some other things like poison in, poison out. So it's like I shut off. I have not watched the news. I mean I'm on social media so I see headlines and stuff. But I like watching the actual news. I haven't done that for, I mean it's been 20, 20 years.

Right. I just don't watch the news.

There's no benefit. It's all negative. And I don't miss anything if there's a major thing happening. I still hear about it through my coworker or I'll see a headline on, on social media somewhere. But I'm not missing anything by cutting that stuff out. So I started that diet of I really paid attention to what's going into my brain and I tried to keep it positive and keep it towards the things that I have control over. But in the beginning, control your bookends and then eventually work your way into being able to book even if it's just an hour during the day. Just like you would schedule a service call, schedule that hour, schedule a one o' clock appointment with yourself to book. Work on the business instead of in it and don't let have you know. You've got to be committed enough to say yes to yourself and no to customers. Sometimes like they're. Yeah, anytime you say yes to anything, you're saying no to something else that you could be doing. Get used to that. Like there's going to be trade offs. But the most important trade off is your education and learning how to run this business so that you can actually get out of the truck. Because the last thing you want is to be 65 years old, still run service calls.

Yeah. That's not even a sellable business either. Right. So you talk about, or we talk about a lot of these guys who I think the typical path to business ownership is they start out as a technician working for a company and they run out of opportunities for growth within that company or they don't really like the owner or their particular management. They start thinking about. My option is either I go work for another company where though I'm going to probably experience the same thing or I start my own. My company charges $15,000 for a system replacement. If I charge 10, I'm good. That's it. That's the, the how much they put into it. Yeah.

And my equipment said before 5,000. So they think that they're making $5,000.

And they don't really know their cost because that takes a lot of planning to really understand granularly all the costs that happens and those are below the surface. And you don't see that as a technician. Typically where these people are in their career, they don't have that knowledge. They could get it Maybe if they asked the owner or if they did some Internet searching, but they don't really know it. So they see the parts that they buy and then they take the total price minus the parts is everything I get to keep. And that is so far from the truth. It is, yeah.

It's.

That'll crush you from day one. So these guys end up having a lifestyle business, but they don't even get to the point where their lifestyle is as good as it was when they were working for the. The previous company.

So it could be actually a lot better working for the previous company if they applied. If they applied themselves and just learned a little bit and became more comfortable with having conversations with customers, they could go into sales. They could make so much more money for so many more years that, you know, building the business up to where you can pay yourself a decent salary and have literally, you know, a fraction of the stress that comes with everything else that you're, you know, it's usually pretty, pretty jarring when somebody goes out on their own and they realize, well, every day the, you know, they just handed me calls to go run or build appointments. Well, now I have to produce those.

Where do I get those from? Yeah, I didn't even think about that when I started. But we still, we still want people to start businesses. There's a lot of success stories from technicians who do it, but they're gonna. You never start out and go down the path and find out things were easier than you thought ever. If you have, they're way harder. Yeah.

I think Alex Hormozi says it's. It's going to be harder than you thought. It's going to take a lot longer than you thought. And that's almost with anything like, try to go get in shape, I promise you it's going to be a lot harder than you thought, and it's going to take a lot longer than you thought.

So it's easy to get fat, too, right?

Yeah.

Yeah. Easy.

Pick your hard. You know, it's hard working for somebody else. It can be, but it's also hard running your own business. You just pick. I feel like if you have ambitions and this maybe even a seed was planted in your head that maybe you could do this, that that was given to you from the universe or a higher power that says, hey, you know, you're capable of this, go ahead and try it. So I think if you have that inclination to want to do this, but if you're, if you're just trying to go make because you're Looking at those invoices and you're saying, well, you paid $50 for this part, and we're charging the customer 600. If you're looking, if you think that it's just about money and you're going to go into business for that reason, then you're in for a rude awakening.

You're make. You're going to make $15 an hour after everything said and done.

Yes.

If you do that, you are going to make there. I've never seen somebody who's been good, fast, and cheap and was making more money doing it themselves than working for a legit company. I just don't believe that that's possible.

It's not. It's not. And if you're really good, I share this all the time. If you're really good at what you do and you. And you have great customer skills and people like you and they're going to tell their friends and family about you no matter. Like, you don't have a choice, your business will grow. You can't. At least to a certain extent. And it's bigger than just one person in a truck can handle. So usually by year two or three for any. For somebody who's not incredibly ambitious and really pushing the limits. Still, by year two or three, your customer list, how do you get customers? It's like one customer at a time, and if you take really good care of them and they tell their friends and family about you, you will naturally grow. It's inevitable. You will get to a point where there are not enough hours in the day, and you're telling customers. You know, you're literally having customers on a system that you installed a year ago calling you now, your schedule's full, but you still want to take care of that customer who gave you $12,000 a year ago. It just becomes unmanageable.

So there's just a certain amount of capacity that you have. I mean, so let's say that Your average H VAC service and maintenance call is $250, which is, in my opinion, pretty low. But it is what it is. Right? And you run four of those calls per day, 52 weeks a year, six days a week. Right. What is that dollar amount that you're gonna get top line? And then just be reasonable and say, all right, 50% is my direct costs, and then 30% are my indirect cost, Overhead, insurance, things like that. At 20% left with you working full time, it's a terrible salary. And guess what? You're not going to make 20% either, because that's you might if you keep it really cheap at the very beginning. Right. Because you haven't hired people and you're doing all the work. But what you're probably going to see is that's $40,000 maybe. And then you also have to risk that 40 to grow in the future. So you just have, like you said, you have to have a mindset, mindset shift if you want to go from a job to a business. I think every business starts out as a job unless it's extremely well funded. But to move from a job to a business requires you to become a different person with a different mindset completely.

Yeah. When get through education, after those expenses are taken care of, there's another thing that's just. There's going to be unexpected and variable expenses that just happen out of nowhere. Things you didn't account for, you didn't plan on. So operating on such thin margins is just, it's just a recipe to create far more stress in your life than what's necessary. You really need to build up some type of a cash reserve because man, people, you could do nothing wrong. You can still get sued. Your, your brand new tires on your van, two of them could get shredded today while driving to your next call. There's always unexpected expenses and expected IRS bill pops up. So to just stay lean and only have enough to squeeze by, you're just setting yourself up for more failure like the possibility and the risk of truly failing where you just, you know, they.

Might as well flip a coin every morning.

They say that you only run out of, you only run out of money once in business. Because if you run out of money, you don't have a business.

Right.

There are a few people, because I've met them and I coach some of them who have good credit and have managed to maintain their good credit. And so they're, they've been capable of running out of money two or three.

Times, you know, but because they get. It's. It's either cash or access to it, right? Yes, it's either, it's either your cash or someone else's. But it is cash, right?

It is cash. And so you have to figure out. That's another thing with business is a lot of people just overcomplicate it. I mean, think about balancing a checkbook. It's simple. You've money in, money out, what's left over if you just keep it simple in your mind when you're, when you're looking. But you really have to look at it. That's the thing you have to pay attention to where the money goes every single day. Every day? Yes.

I think that when I was given my brother advice on starting up, I said, there's one thing that you never ever, ever can get behind on and it's easy to get behind on it. And I said, that is the money, the bookkeeping. And I thought, here's another mistake I made that bookkeeping was relatively easy. So I thought that it would be. It was easy for me to do it, but when I hired someone else to do it as far I, like outsourced it, they did a bad job. And that was something that you have to go back and fix completely. So you're making decisions based upon inaccurate or incomplete numbers, then you have to spend the time to fix it or pay someone else to fix it. And so I said, never, ever, ever let a day go by without not know, without knowing the numbers of it, ever. Don't ever let that happen and never outsource it without that continuing to make sure that you know the numbers every day and at least calculating them and having the right accurate information. What you do with it, well, that varies, right? But you have to know that always. And what's the chances that if you're out in the truck just running calls, like we all have done, that you're gonna do that bookkeeping when you get home at 11 o' clock at night? Probably not, because it has to be accurate. It's, it's very, it's a mental thing. You have to be fresh to do it. So you have to parse out time to know your numbers at all times.

Or you do like me and you just don't do any of it until you get in trouble and you start getting letters from the irs and, and because I was so busy in the field, there was no time when I got home, I had to get bids out to people that I had different jobs I had been to that I had to work up an estimate on. So, yeah, I don't. A basic knowledge I believe is just necessary, but don't overcomplicate it. And one of the reasons why we have to charge what we have to charge is so that we can pay other people to help us with this type of thing. Because you're going to be busy serving customers, you're going to be busy running calls or managing your team. Doesn't mean you're not going to look at the financials you're going to. But there's other things that require a ton of attention from you as a business owner.

And Things you can't outsource. Yes, you know, exactly.

Exactly.

So you're either outsourcing it, you're using technology, or you're hiring for it. Because you're at your capacity right away, day one, you're pretty much at your capacity. You have to say no to things. And you're going to have to say no to that service call that comes in late because you have to do this specific things. So you're going to have to, maybe you're going to have to risk that $250 in revenue or that potential turnover into a replacement system for the bigger picture. And if you're not going to do that, you'll never be able to get there.

Yeah, you, you, you're going to have to start saying no. You got to do what's. Just put it this way. We're, we're constantly trying to do what's best for our customers. Right. I mean, that's what I believe that the home service industry, especially heating air, just because that's what I've been involved in for so many years. Like, these people are the salt of the earth. Like, we love to take care of our customers. We want to make them happy. It's almost like people pleasing to some degree. Like we want people to love our company and to give us raving reviews and tell their friends and family about us. But we do that too many times at the expense of our own financial health, at the expense of our own physical health and our relationship health. Like, if you tackle this the right way and you use the recipe, you can do it all. It's always going to be balanced. There's going to be bursts in your company where you do focus primarily on your company and you kind of maybe neglect your family for a little bit. But the thing is, you would have that conversation prior to going into that burst. So everybody understands what to expect and just know that. So if you do it strategically, you can do these bursts where you just totally immerse in your business and you can make major moves. And during that time you're, I always say teach, train and ingrain your team to. On the process. Constantly training on the process. Of course we can throw in some technical training here and there because we, that's important too. But the process has to be ran. And when we're talking about processes, I look at the definition of a process. It's a series of tasks taken in a particular order to achieve a particular result.

Which ultimately is a happy customer. Right?

Which is a happy customer, which is profit. You know from that $250 call, there better be some profit attached to that. And it needs to be enough to fuel whatever I, my desires are and what I want in my business. And if you're not paying attention to that on a regular basis because you're just too busy putting out fires, it, it just becomes. I was on another podcast years ago and, and he, and the guy I was doing the podcast with was telling me about a sales trainer that he had went to and the guy was talking about how every time you discount your services or give something away for free or don't charge like what you can normally would charge because you just feel bad for those people, you need to put a picture of that family on your visor in your van. Every time you're putting that family and those people above your own family and your own well being. Let that sink in for anyone listening. You have to put your oxygen mask on first. The business has to be taken care of. That includes you. Because you are the fuel, the fire, the determination, the passion that you have. If that goes away, then your business, your business goes away.

You always have to have a more positive approach to things than everyone else because you're going to set the tone for everyone. You know, full transparency in 2020. This is the, this is the fun stuff that I went through, like a lot of business owners do. In 2020, I was involved in a lawsuit for unpaid overtime. And this was one of the first employees I had. And she didn't have a time clock. My guys in the field had a time clock. But I just told her, hey, work 40 hours a week, come in at this time. I just did this flex time thing because I didn't understand how the law worked and exactly how everything had to be documented. Well, when she quit, she sued me for $60,000 and, and which was unpaid over time, plus like punitive damages and everything. I was really upset about it, so I fought it. And in the early 2020, I lost because I didn't realize that if you didn't have it documented and that the jury believed that she worked just one hour of overtime, you would lose. And so all in that cost me $300,000. Yeah, $300,000 loss. And that's what I tell people who have businesses. Just because you make the money doesn't mean you don't have to give it back. Right? You, you, there's a, there's no chance that, there's very little chance that a surprise check is going to come in the mail. There's a lot Higher chance that a surprise bill will. Now, if I look back, I would have settled it if that would have been a better business decision. But when I. The day that I lost that 300 grand after being in court and being told how bad of a person I was by the opposing counsel and. Yeah, and basically the jury agreeing with them to an extent, I had to go back into the company that. Later that day with a smile on my face. I couldn't let any of the. At the time, 25 employees know that that's what happened. And I had to. Had to keep grinding despite all that. And so it was. It was tough, man. It was really tough to do. Yeah, but that's the thing. If you're not the guy, you are the guy. You are the leader in the company. And if you. You have to have a positive attitude in front of your people at all times, or it just starts to go down from there. So that was a. That was a tough lesson. That took me back a couple years, probably. But if I have. If I have anything to write, at the end of the day, it's. It's about resilience, I would say, because that's. That's what a business owner does. He gets punched in the face and turns around and says, all right, I'm gonna keep going. And hopefully next time I dodge that punch. Right. You know? Yeah, I'm like, I say that too.

I'm like, you're gonna get punched in the face. And it's. It's like, you gotta be just like, is that all you got?

That's it.

Just keep standing and. But you're right, it's not just your words, you know, it's your body language, your tonality, people.

And you're.

You're setting the tone for what's. For the mood, the feelings that are happening in. In and around your business. So if you're just completely out of it and you've. Or you've fallen into a deep depression or, you know, or you're spiraling down, I recommend that even if it's just like, you better get yourself together as quickly as you can. But if. If it. If it's that bad, then call in that day. Don't go to work that day because you're. You going to work, trying to, you know, hustle your way through it and grind, quote, unquote, grind it. It can have a lasting negative effect. You know, there's always a conversation happening at your business, whether you know about it or not. It's behind the scenes. It's in the hallway. It's out in the park.

After the meeting. Meeting.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yes. So we want to.

What the fuck is going on with Bill, man? He seems really cranky. Maybe I should go find another job.

Yeah.

Even when I don't know, man.

I heard the glasses running out of money. Oh, did you hear that? Oh, yeah. Well, you know, one of our supply houses said that we, we owed them money. And so the rumor mill begins. So.

Yeah. So, yeah, it's a huge calling to be a business owner, but it is possible to make that transition. A lot of people have done it. I just think that a lot of guys get into it without knowing what it takes. Just like I didn't know what it takes. I didn't know all of that.

Yeah.

But I was fortunate. Let's see. So two years into my business, I got really sick. I had autoimmune disease, ulcerative colitis and had a. Needed to have emergency surgery. Well, a lot of things went wrong and I had complications with it. And I was in the hospital for two months, two years into my business. And I remember during that two months I did like $15,000 in sales. Totally. But at that time I never. I wasn't healthy enough to get back into that grind of all day, all night. So I was forced to become a pro, a process oriented person.

Yes.

By the fact that I physically could not go in the field. And so if I didn't have that, I might not have got to that point. But these business owners have to make that choice to make that transition. Or you're right, they're just going to seem like the most unhappy person because they are probably unhappy. And who the hell wants to work for that guy? Right. And you end up working by yourself because nobody wants to work with you and for you.

Yeah. So one of my clients told me a story about an incident that he had physically with his health, a health challenge. And he wound up in the hospital, same thing. And his dad, he kind of grew up in the heating, air conditioning industry. And his dad was there visiting him in the hospital and he said, son, do you see any customers here in your waiting room? And you're, you know, waiting to come see you, talk to you. And he said from that point on, he realized that, like, look, I'm killing myself, literally killing myself for my customers. And your customers don't. They really don't care. I mean, you're just their service provider, so.

Right.

The contractor cares way more for the customer than your customers care for the contractor. Trust me. Because if something Happens, happens. And you just cannot service them for two months. And they, and it's 98 degrees out with 50% humidity and they need service, they will gladly call somebody else and they'll purchase a maintenance contract from that other person too.

Yeah. I mean, wouldn't you as a customer.

Absolutely.

You do the same thing. Customers are just people, right?

Yeah.

And as you were talking about, as you get to this level of busyness, you actually provide worse customer service. In fact, when I was, when I got to the point where I was the most expensive and had more people, I was able to serve customers way better than I was. To my. Just because I was working hard doesn't mean I was really serving customers. I had to take phone calls while I was at their house. I had to follow up on sales while I was at their house. I was doing lot worse of a job. It just felt like I was doing a good job because I was working so hard.

The reality of the heating air conditioning business is that it is seasonal. That's a lot of things. Sometimes that's, that's a big thing that like you said, there were things that you just didn't think of going into business. That's one of the things you don't really consider because you were still given hours. Maybe during those slow times, even if they were cut down, you were still given hours to still make some living. Well, now it's slow time. You don't have the customer list that your business that you used to work for had back to charging and making sure that we're making enough money on every call that happens and converting the calls when it makes sense to equipment sales so that we can collect more money when that slow season hits it. It's an eye opener. And if you're not sitting on some money to get through that, it's going to be difficult.

So you have to give back all of the money that you made in the summer, in the busy season, because you don't have that customer list. You're either giving it back in labor or you're giving it back in marketing or just general overhead. And I didn't. The off peak seasons were brutal until I build up a list of maintenance agreements. Maintenance agreements. Even though it's old school talked about, you know, it's been talked about since the dawn of, since Ron Smith started talking about it in H Vac spells wealth. But it really did continue the growth of my company all the way through it. Because when I had a maintenance agreement customer, I knew it was just a matter of time. Before that was a system replacement. It was planting a bunch of seeds that all beared fruit at times that I wanted to harvest it, not when it just, it was just an urgent situation. I don't see where an H VAC company could grow without focusing on longer term relationships with customers. I don't think you could just buy your way into a market with short term transactions.

I agree, I agree. It's about one thing that I will share when it comes to maintenance agreements is once you get so many maintenance agreements, if you don't have a really good process that is thorough and you know, it's allows the technician time to be thorough and to have those conversations with the customer showing everything, their analysis of everything that they found and how to communicate that to the customer. That creates some type of urgency to let's get this done. Whatever they found, let's get it done today versus tomorrow. If you don't have that and you just build up a whole bunch of maintenance agreements, now you're sending, you know, four technicians or ten technique. However many you have, you're still burning overhead like you're, you're burning fuel. You're paying them and all their benefits and their insurance and, and everybody lose.

Money on every single maintenance agreement, every single man. Yeah, yeah.

If you don't know how to do that and convert those maintenance agreements into sales by educating the customer, it's not about hardcore pushy sales. It's just about what you said. Provide that better service. Provide a better service and the sales will come.

And that's a process in itself. I don't think it's very natural for a technician turned business owner to just all of a sudden flip the switch and go, okay, now I'm going to be good at sales. It's a very different thing than fixing an air conditioner and making customers happy. I had to spend a lot of time getting training on how to learn or on how to do that. But that will stop your company dead in its tracks. If you're not good at sales and you think sales is a dirty word, don't start a business. Don't.

No.

Or if you think sales is a dirty word, change that mindset. Mindset or quit. You're dead. There's never been a company that hasn't been, that's made it really successfully, that hasn't been proficient at selling their products and services.

Yeah, it's really not sales. It's service, not sales. Like the sales come, you know, I, I, the way I explain it to people is imagine if you wanted to go to a movie and you had a choice of six different movies. And you walk up to the ticket counter and they say, oh, you can only have this one movie. This is the only one you can see. How would you feel as a customer? Maybe that's not the movie you wanted to see. Maybe you had a different movie in mind that's going to upset you if you go to change your flooring and you go to a flooring store and you know all the different materials and the colors and styles and designs to pick from. But they said, oh, these 900 styles, you can only choose from this one. This is your option. Imagine how would you feel as a customer being able to see all these options. The problem is that your customers don't know what their options are because they're not educated, right.

And they, they're not going to educate themselves ahead of time because this isn't something that they plan for.

It's not sexy. There's nothing sexy about heating, air conditioning. So they just want to be able to turn the thermostat down and be cool or turn it up and stay warm. And it's out of sight, out of mind. It's not something they're ever thinking about until it breaks, typically. But it's our job as a professional to go in, to evaluate the system. The system, it's not just that broken hot surface igniter or that failed run capacitor. No, it's a system that's working together. And we want this system to be safe, reliable, efficient, to keep the customer comfortable. We want all of those things. So if we keep that in mind and we look at it as a system and we do a thorough evaluation, you're going to find things that the customer could benefit from and you're going to find, you're going to find parts that are going to be on their way out the door. Like, you know, because of your professionalism, it's your job to know that this part is going to fail in the future. Now, after we've compiled the list of this stuff, we have to have a conversation with the customer to show them their options. Just like going to the movie theater, hey, you can see all of these. Here's four movies you could go watch. Here's eight types of flooring you could pick from to fix this problem, to overcome this problem, and then communicating that in a way that creates urgency. It's really think it's not the hardcore, you know, overcoming objection style, uncomfortable conversations. If you just educate the customer, they're, they're typically Going to go with your recommendations if you, if you communicate that with confidence, which takes a while.

Right. It's a process in itself. It's not for when I learned technician sales and I'm okay to say sales and you know, I can be used interchangeably.

It is sales.

When I learned it, I was so bad at it at the beginning. So I had to get a sales coach to, to teach me the process and I had to believe in it because then it becomes about your employees being able to do it as well. And that's gonna, there's gonna be, it's gonna be met with a lot of, lot of resistance. You're going to spend a good amount of time going through getting buy in from your employees to do that level of process because they're going to think, oh, all we're trying to do is charge more. And that's going to be recurring with employee over and over again. And so you have to understand the process, believe in it. It has to fit in with your own personal core values and beliefs. Then you have to ingrain that as part, part of your culture. But I think that it's very rare that that is already taken care of in that way from day one. I think that's a big transition that people have to make. And if not made, you're done. There's no way you're going to make it because what you're going to do is ask technicians to run eight calls a day. And we were talking about that before. If you're going to give options and you're going to do a great job and spend time educating the customer, you're not going to run more than three calls a day. I, I, maybe four if you're lucky, or if not, if you're lucky. But if you're just going in and knocking out the minimum repair over and over and over again, that is, that's business suicide.

That, that think of that as the old business model. And it worked for what, 50 years. It worked for people where you, it was just about bad, bad contact or you know, bad blower motor, bad condenser fan motor, bad capacitor. And then you just fixed it as quickly as you could to get onto the next call and collect as much money as you can. At the end of the day that that business model is a sure way. Because if you're here, because here's the thing too, a lot of people think that they just stick with that business model, but they charge outrageous prices for it and they don't create any value with the customer, which gives them a bad reputation, which stifles the growth of their business. So part of building a good reputation and that business model just doesn't work. And it's not that, it's not that we're wrong. It's what we were taught and it's what the people who taught you, that's what they did before. So it's just been passed down from generation to generation. That's why we call what we do. There's a new class of contractor. And the new class of contractor does exactly what you're talking about. And that's what we teach. And we go through these transition periods because we do have people who have a team of 10 or 12 people on their team. And at that point, at least the owner already knows because in order to get that big they've had to make changes. But they know every time you make a change there's going to be like, you're going to make waves, there's going to be a ripple effect.

There's going to be a percentage of people that don't make it through that A hundred percent are not, you're not going to get buy in from that. You're going to have to replace. But the thing is that if you go down to seven technicians, you most likely not most likely, but you will make more money with seven technicians than you would with ten. Running endless calls. And I think it's just a simple Excel form like spreadsheet. How much do I have to, what amount of revenue do I have to make on each call to justify this truck on the road? And you're right, you can't just go in and say, well, I need to make $600 on each call, so I'm just going to charge $600 for a capacitor replacement. Yeah, you're not going to get that. You're going to have a lot of bad reviews. So it's, it's really just a, it's a very unnatural transition to make and one of the first ones that has to be done. Understand how to give options, run less calls and actually make money on calls.

Yeah. And what you'll find is that you'll attract a higher caliber of customers because that's a lot of times we start off like being the provider for all the cheap customers out there. And so there's a trade off as far as when you start to understand your value and what you do and you start to increase the, increase the amount of service that you deliver on every call, you start to attract better and better Clients. So there's.

And you don't work for those customers anymore. You have to let them go.

Some of them.

Let them go to the next.

Stay with you. Yes.

Yeah.

Customer may have been with you for the last six years. They may go on. I had lots of them. But it doesn't mean you can't still be friends with them. I'm still friends with some of my customers. That, that, that literally just, we got. Because we communicate, you know, it's all about communication. And they're not afraid to tell me, hey, Kelly, you know, I, I gotta, I gotta use somebody else. I can't, I can't afford your prices. I'm like, no worries, you know, no worries. Just. Yeah.

If you, we decided that we're gonna be Nordstrom and you prefer shopping at Walmart and there's nothing wrong with that. Walmart has its crowd. Nordstrom has its crowd. Who do you want to be in this space? Do you want to be Walmart? Well, Walmart does very low prices and high volume. If that's what you want to do, then you can do that. It just, I haven't really seen that work successfully. I, I don't have a, any experience with a high volume, low cost, successful home service company. It's a lower volume.

Yeah.

Higher service level. And the thing about it is that homeowners don't consume a lot of heating and air conditioning services. It's a very infrequent purchase. If they had to replace a capacitor every three months, they probably would be looking for the cheapest price capacitor. But when you only have to do it a couple of times in your life, if your air conditioner goes out and needs major service or replacement, then you will take a little bit more time with that home service provider to do it right. And you're right, you will attract better customers. I, the more I charge, the more service I offered, the better the customers became, the happier they became. And they vote with their wallet. Right. So if you give them an option that's $2,500 worth of service, they're going to tell you whether or not they want it by saying yes or no and they're going to go buy the less expensive one. So again, really hammering that into the business owner that, that transition, something that you're going to have to make.

You can think of it like this. When it comes to delivering a better value to your client is you go to the doctor and you have this little scratch on your arm that may need stitches and the doctor could just Stitch you up and put a band aid over it and send you on your way. But the doctor checks you out and he says, okay, Kelly, do you have any more problems? And I'm like, well, I actually can't lift my, my arm above, above this high.

Right.

Because my shoulder locks up. And he says, well, let me look at that. That. And so he takes a deeper look and he finds that he could fix it with surgery. So that surgery is going to cost more than my stitches. It's going to, like, I may have to schedule it for a future, future time to get this surgery done. But now once I do the surgery, that surgery could change my life.

And he's in partial about it. He's just giving you the information, right? Absolutely.

I could still say no.

He's like, here's what I can do.

You can they. I, I, as a patient, can fully say no, thank you. I'll. I'll just deal with my frozen shoulder.

But you appreciate that information as a patient?

Absolutely.

Ever had a doctor that's has one foot out the door to see the next patient, how frustrating that is? That's what you're doing. When you have eight service calls a day, you have one foot out the door continuously. Not serving that customer on a high level and 100 to experience. That sucks as a patient sucks.

It does and it does. And the reason why you get better customers and you get better glowing reviews and they become raving fans is because the things that you offered actually really impact the way that system operates in their home, which is where they spend 90% of their time. So just by offering it and educating them that, hey, I could do surgery on your system, does it cost more? Yes, because it's surgery. We're doing something above and beyond just the bare minimum. Put stitches in it and put a band aid on it and go down the road. So, yes, it costs more, but you've got to educate the customer, allow them to make the decision on whether they would like to go forward with this. So they can really change their. It can really impact their environment where they spend so much time. So think of it the same way. It's no different. And you're absolutely right. That was a great, A great acknowledgement there. Yeah. It's not good custody. It's not good bedside manner. Right. Just be not focused on the patient because you got 18 other patients waiting on your schedule.

Yeah. So I've got so many of them. I'm telling you, you're not important.

Yes.

Without telling you that. I'll tell you what. When it comes to options. When I. I think that most businesses start out doing the minimum repairs and then replacing heating and air conditioning systems when they are completely shot, when a compressor's bad and when you can't physically get another one, or when a heat exchanger has a gigantic hole in it, I think that's. That's the natural way to do it. And maybe even doing that, if you went to a company that didn't do it that way and they provided options, I think you can regress back to the doing the minimum. For me, when I started my H Vac company, I had not worked for another residential company. I started out doing the minimum and I was doing two now. And I. I'll never forget, I went on this tune up for furnace and I went through. I had a very long detailed checklist, which I hated the fact that I had such a long checklist. Cause I didn't make any money on the damn things. So that was always something that. It was like, oh man, I'm going through all this stuff and I'm gonna get no money again. Cause I don't know what the hell I'm doing when it comes to offering things. I know. I know everything about this damn furnace, but I'll be damned if I know anything about this customer. And so I go through. Went through the whole thing. And this, this furnace, I looked at it, it was like. I'll never figured. It was a Bryant 80% and it was from 97. It was 15 years old. Check the heat exchanger. Heat exchanger was good. Looked through all the components. They were all original. And looked at the. At the flame sensor. And the flame sensor was really old. Original, had a bunch of corrosion on it. Was. Had a lot of. Man, I'm missing something. I'm too much of an office guy.

Had a lot of carbon buildup on it or had a lot of white.

The white. Yeah, the white cheese that grows on the end of it. The right growth. And so I said, well, that thing's going to fail. But it hasn't failed, but it probably will by the next time I come back to this guy's house for another tuna up. And so I said, all right, everything's working. Because it technically was. Fire was coming out. And I left. And a couple of days later it failed. And I was the villain. You were just out here. Everything was working.

Yeah.

And now it's broke.

Yeah.

And I said, I'll be damned if I don't need to figure out a way to give these customers all the Options that I can just to cover my ass. Because if I would have told him, hey, this flame sensor is original and we have a script that we go through. Here's the, here's the option for it. And he says no, then it is what it is. He says no, but two days later, when it fails, I'm the hero, not the villain. And so I never wanted to be the villain again. And I felt like it wasn't fair for me to have to be in that position just because I didn't give an option. But that's reality. Got to give the options to cover your ass. Minimum.

And you know, look at, looking at checklist. I know nobody likes to use checklist. Typically, you know, service technicians, they're used to running and gunning and just burning through calls and doing the bare minimum and getting to the next one because they don't have any time.

I hate them too, by the way, as the owner.

Yeah, so. But what I share with people is that pilots, astronauts, doctors, surgeons, they all use checklists because they have high stakes jobs. Like, there's a lot on the line and the life that my business can provide for not only me, but my team, like, and the responsibility that you're taking on when you decide to open a business that is high stakes.

So missing something on the checklist can at worst kill somebody. But the purpose for it. Sorry to cut you off. No, no, it's really consistency, right?

Yeah.

It's to be able to provide that same high level of service regardless of what's going on in your mind and external factors that day. There's no way that you can consistently do the exact same service from one tune up to the next without a checklist because you're just going to be distracted. You're going to think about where you have to go or the customer is going to come down and start talking to you. And so what you do when you don't have a checklist in a process is you give some customers better service than others. It's just kind of how it goes. Sorry to cut you off. I'm very passionate about checklists, but I hate them. They're really annoying.

You know, it's another thing that I share with people because this is such a. I come up with my own little analogies and my. Because it helps people. It's the way I framed it in my mind to make sense. So it's what I share. So in hopes that it would, you know, rewire their brain to think the same way. Because that part of the psychology that it takes to like exit the truck and start to work on it, you know, to implement these processes and systems so that your business can start producing better results and you can earn better rewards as an owner. First off, you know, to be the Walmart you said I, I would go, I would even say like the Amazon, the Aldi's, like these, these companies, these giant companies who do share volume it in very, very low margins. They have investors pouring millions and millions of dollars into that company for the, for the first many, many years of operation. They make no money.

It's completely different than what you're doing as a, as a small service provider.

So for us, right, as a little technician in their little truck trying to go out and make money and grow a business, to try to repeat what Amazon's done and be the lowest cost per, the lowest cost provider in your market, it's just, it's a recipe for disaster. So don't even try to do it. You know, as far as some of.

These guys do they want to be the low cost provider or they just don't have the skills to communicate the values that they believe they have.

I did the same thing as you did as far as going to, you know, I, I, I hired, I, I went to a seminar for a sales trainer and I got his CDs and stuff and I listened to those non stop and I learned that process and we've, we adjusted it multiple times to work for our company. And that's the same process that I share with other people because I know it works. But the service call process as well, when it comes to making sure that we do our thorough analysis and then having that conversation. A doctor, you said it, it's like you had this carbon buildup on this flame sensor and you're like everything's working right now. Seems to be working great. I'll say okay if you did anything at all. I've said it a million times to customers. I've been on, I've been on a million calls, you know, probably in 20 years and I was working till 11 o' clock at night. I was the person doing 8, 9, 10 calls a day.

And when I, it's very common too.

It's very common.

I don't want to, on the, the small business owner that's doing it. I don't know very many that hadn't started that way.

Yeah, I, I don't either. These different analogies that I've come up with are, and I share is strictly just to help people make that mental shift that has to be made if you, if you can't make it. I just know from experience it's, it just creates more pain. So hire the coach, become coachable. Stop thinking that you have everything figured out. The sales process, because I went to the kitchen table sales process. It's kind of a complicated, drawn out, long, long deal that if you want to close more sales and when your company, when you do compete against, you know, I don't believe that we don't have nearly the competition that we think we have. Because most heating air business owners, most of them are exactly kind of who we've been talking about. They're just technicians and they have not shifted into a business owner mentality yet. So when you're trying to compete against somebody who actually has begin, begun to implement processes and understands that there's, there's a method to this madness so you can get better results, all of a sudden all these people who are just racing to the bottom trying to get be the lowest option, those people aren't even your competition anymore. You really only have a very small percentage in your market that are true competitors.

That's a mind shift, mindset shift too right to go. All of these providers are not my competition. Just these guys are. That's a different thought too, that you.

Have to have the level of service that you provide versus the level of service that they provide are two completely different things.

Even though you're probably providing that level of service right now because you're so busy, that's where you're reinventing yourself. And I told people, people like why are you changing all the time? I said, look, I've never ran a half a million dollar business before, but now I want to run a $750,000 business, I'm probably gonna have to do some things different. Well, every year I was running a new business so I had to learn new skills. And that's, that's one of them that has to be done. That you and I have got burned into our brain over the years. And when we talk to people that haven't got past that hump, it's kind of like have you make that connection that we had and it just takes time. But if the owner's willing to learn, then eventually something will resonate there. I believe.

Yeah, that's my wish is because I just don't. I know the pain doesn't get any better. It just gets worse and worse until you're just, just feel like you're, you're ground into a pulp and you just have nothing left to get because of the grind culture that was so popular, has been so popular for so many years. We have people like Alex Hormozi, Grant Cardone, Patrick Bet, David, Ed Mylett, Gary Vee, they're all telling you like work your face off. I look up to these people like they're business icons and they seem to be. I mean that's the Persona that they put off and I listen to what they have to say. But at the same time, their grind, Andy Frisella's grind, trying to grow his supplement business. Like he's not on a roof for six of those hours in the day carrying you know, 600 pounds of up and down the roof on a 25 foot ladder. And then it's very different getting stuck on the side of a house at 4 o' clock in the afternoon with the sun beating down on you, literally coming close to having a heat stroke like that, that, that grind. And then trying to also grow your business at the same time. That grind with the physical aspect of being in a, in a truck still, that's a completely different grind from all of those people I just listed that they've gone through. Like tell me a sad story about how you got burnt on a real estate deal. I mean, come on, that's nothing compared to like, like literally having a heat stroke in an Attic on 2:02pm and 120 Degree Attic and then having five more calls to go run. That's a different kind of grind. And so my, my main message is if you do want to grow your business, you've got to get out of the truck. You cannot stay in the truck. Even the guys who have made it out of the truck and they're doing three or four million dollars but then they always jump in the truck at the end of the day because I have one client that was still, he would come and he made his way into the office, made that transition and as a result his business had grown. But still at the end of the day, he's working from 5 o' clock till 10 o' clock because he's picking up all the overflow calls. He's saving the day of customers that needed help that didn't get solved that day. That's all admirable and everything, but it's.

Still not a business.

It's not a business. So that particular owner I as, after working with us, he's like drawn the line in the sand. He's out of the truck, like 0% calls trying to grow this and scale your business. That's where Your attention has to be. I was told by a trainer years ago that 30% of your time should be focused on hiring people and finding talent. And a growing business needs people. So there's no question you do have to put some focus on it. It's like you're the one who chooses how much intensity. The intensity you're going to tackle something, the frequency that you tackle it and the duration. How long are you going to do this? And oftentimes we think that, well, we'll scramble and we'll hire somebody and then we just don't even think about hiring for the next year. And so you've got to, you gotta either increase that intensity, increase the frequency or increase the duration of lots of things in your business if you really want it to grow quickly. It's not linear, it's not just a straight shot. It's always disappointing for new business owners who the first three or four or five years of their business were nothing but the climb. And then they finally get to that point where you have a point where it's like, like, yeah, we, we're not gonna make last year's revenue. It's usually, that's a, that's another typical wake up call for people to say that, you know, either you're comfortable there and you wanna just stick in this realm or. But if you're still incredibly passionate about it, you still got the ambition and the drive and you wanna go farther and you want that $10 million business or $20 million business, what got you here will not get you there.

Yeah, super man. So, yeah, he lost something. So before we wrap it up, how can listeners find you? What's the best place to get your content?

So we have a master class that's happening. It happens about every two weeks. That's called Book more Calls, Close more deals where I teach some of the framework. I teach a framework that's very easy to repeat. I know we had talked about how you went and visited Sales Trainer. So did I. Some of them have really long drawn out scripts that nobody. You're never going to transfer all this information even if you learn it to your team, right? We need something simple. Well, I've reduced it down to the ridiculous to make it easy for people to have those conversations. So I'm going to teach you how to do that on that class. But the easiest way probably is just follow me on YouTube. It's H Vac Millionaire on YouTube. You can find the link to join the class. It's free.

And thanks for your time today. Being a guest on the podcast. Really appreciate it.

It's been fun. I could talk this stuff, man, all day, so.

Oh, yeah, all the time. Thanks a lot, man.

All right.

Dang, I feel.

Thanks for listening to the Home Service Hacks podcast. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform so you never miss miss a future episode. For more information or to connect with Bill, you can check us out on Facebook @ServiceTitan hacks or visit our website at servicetitanhacks.com we'll see you next time.