How a Commercial Contractor Runs Everything From $500 Service Calls to $1 Million Projects

Hello contractors, and welcome to Toolbox for the Trades. My name is Jackie Aubel, and I am coming to you from Pantheon 2026. That's right, we are recording a bunch of episodes of Toolbox here at Pantheon in Orlando, Florida, so you are gonna be hearing some ambient noise, but that is just to make you feel fully immersed in the experience. I love getting to interview customers live at Pantheon. It is such a delight, such a wonderful part of my job. And I know you are gonna love today's episode, so please sit back and enjoy. David Helms, you are the control operations manager at Ed Helms Air Conditioning and Electric and Gulfstream Controls. Today we are gonna be talking about 2 hats, one platform, how a commercial contractor runs everything from $500 service calls to $1 million projects. David, welcome to Toolbox for the Trades live at Pantheon. So nice to have you.

Thank you for allowing me to be here. This is very surreal for me. I listened to the show for a very long time along with Mastering Service Titans. So very happy to be here as a guest today.

Thank you so much for listening. It always warms my heart when folks share that they listen to the show because sometimes when you're doing a podcast, it feels like you're just literally talking in a microphone in a room by yourself. So when people are like, no, I listen, it always feels so nice to hear that. I'm glad that you have listened and you continue to listen. So thanks for sharing and for joining us today. I wanna kick things off with an icebreaker like I always do. So running ServiceTitan for a whole company, which is what you do, and also running a division keeps you very busy. I wanna know how you switch off at the end of the day.

My wife and I will watch TV. That's one of the ways we disconnect. We watch a lot of TV shows or watch some movies. And then when we're not spending time together, I'm playing video games on the computer when I'm not working. Try not to work at night too much. Try to disconnect best I can.

What TV show have you— are you recently been watching?

Oh man, there's so many good things right now. Uh, we really like Ted Lasso. Apple TV's killing it recently. They got a lot of good shows. Uh, we watched Widow's Bay, which is amazing. Widow's Bay. Funny, scary, kind of perfect. So yeah, we like, like to watch TV.

Amazing. Did you watch Silo too?

We are only— we watched the first season. I gotta catch up on the other seasons. We kind of, we, there's just too many shows.

So just too many shows.

Yeah, there's too much stuff out there right now, but we're trying to catch up with everything.

This is mine and David's Apple TV rating podcast. Thank you all for tuning in. So tell me how you got into the trades.

My uncle actually started the company in 1975, and my father ran it with him from a very, very early age. And around 2010, my father bought the company from my uncle. At the time, I was in school for computer science and information technology. I didn't really see myself involved in the trades. It always seemed like a good opportunity, but nothing I was really attached to. And kind of this opportunity came along, and it's in the building automation industry. which is what the Gulfstream Controls part of my business is. It's basically like, think of like smart thermostats, like, but for commercial properties, data centers, you know, chillers, cooling towers, things like that. And so it was a perfect mix of the trades and my technology IT background kind of merging together. And so I had to decide, was I gonna pursue my career in IT or was I gonna jump into the family business? And I decided to go to the family business and get involved with Gulfstream. I did that from 2010 until 2020. Wow. Uh, uh, 2020, which I'm still doing it, but now I'm wearing the ServiceTitan hat, which we'll talk about too, because ServiceTitan is kind of like our software evolution at the company. And I said this, I need to be part of this journey. Mm-hmm. To kind of modernize our company. So I still do both of those jobs at the same time.

Very cool. Can you actually clarify for me, Ed Helms Air Conditioning and Electric, Gulfstream Controls? So Ed Helms Air Conditioning and Electric, that's the one your uncle started that your father bought. And Gulfstream Controls is another company that your family owns?

So same company, different brand. So it's all part of the Ed Helms Group. We have air conditioning, electric, building controls, which is Gulfstream, and we have a trade show division, which is part of our electrical division. We do a lot of commercial, we do some residential. Building controls originally didn't start as Gulfstream. It was a new brand that we did because we can work for other mechanical contractors. So to avoid conflict of interest, we had to Kind of had to rebrand ourselves. We all are in the same office. We all hire each other, like we subcontract each other on projects, but we also can work for other mechanical contractors.

Got it.

Right.

Okay.

So we first started, not that it was a secret, but it was like a branding thing because they don't want Ed Helm's trucks pulling up on their job site. So that was a big thing. Yeah. I mean, I could talk about controls. I'm hearing from, from previous podcasts, I think Mastering Service Titan, who was on there? Leila was on there and they were talking about building controls. I was like, oh my God. It's not this thing that like people don't know about here at Pantheon, right? And other contractors, uh, I assume who have similar paths in their business are connecting that also to ServiceTitan. So whenever I hear about it, I like to ask, okay, how do you take that part of your business and bring it into ServiceTitan? It's not a different process very much, but it's still, you know, technicians and materials and parts. So you can really plug in kind of any trade into ServiceTitan if you really think about it. Cool. So yeah, it plugged right in for us.

Awesome. So the Ed Helm side of things, are you doing residential and commercial jobs? And then Gulfstream Controls, you're creating these building controls that also other contractors who may be your competitors on Ed Helms are using you for that.

Yes. Got it. Generally, we won't bid on the same work because the conflict of interest. Ed Helms doesn't go after really much any new construction. We will on the control side of business. So we really don't cross paths too much. We had to build a good reputation so that other mechanicals would trust us. And we really do, again, relationships. We're relationship-driven. That has allowed people to trust us. There's still a couple mechanicals who won't hire us because of the, you know, potential conflict of interest, but it's really not a— it's not an issue for us anymore.

Cool, cool. Okay, so you joined back in after college, you decided to join on the family business, but then 2020, the company acquired ServiceTitan and you were like, I need to be part of this technology revolution for the company. Talk to me a little bit about that.

So 2020, we weren't on ServiceTitan until 2023. We've been live for a little over 3 years, but 2020 is kind of when technology, everyone kind of leaned on it, right? We're all working remote. And so I'm, you know, we use, I'm a software guy, like I mentioned, we use other platforms, some of them still today, but it wasn't until probably 2020, a couple years later where I started to realize we needed to kind of evolve in how we do a lot of our processes. We've been digital for a long, I don't know exactly when, but we were using like digital forms before ServiceTitan. I couldn't tell you exactly prior to 2020, but again, there were isolated pieces of software that didn't really talk to each other. And so ServiceTitan's kind of like, you know, it's everything being brought together, really digitizing the technicians in the field.

Oh yeah,

that's a big one. And even I like to say it's not easy doing any of this, right? Getting everybody trained and comfortable is definitely, I think, the hardest part about this. It's not so much learning the software, it's the change management and all the things that I listen to Toolbox for the Trade. That's what I'm listening to. What are the, how do you get your people? What's the buy-in? How do you get them to, to, to absorb this stuff? And that's the, the biggest challenge, I think.

Well, tell me about that. How did that work for you? Because if I'm putting myself in your technician's shoes, you are the owner's son coming in with your college degree. Like I did IT and, you know, I, I know a lot of things about technology and you are shepherding this technological revolution essentially. What kind of reactions did you get at first? Did you get any pushback? How did you overcome that?

I do have support. It's not just me pushing the technology. I do have some people who work with us. You know, we're heavily involved in— I'm wearing my Torch hat.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

So we're involved in Torch, and Stacy and I co-admin service Titan together. So, you know, there's a few of us that really understand the push to technology. My viewpoint on it has changed over the years, whereas in the beginning I'm very like, oh, let's use this feature and that feature and that feature. And then I have to remind myself, no, I gotta slow down. This stuff takes time. You have to get buy-in, you gotta get, you know, do training. And so I've had to slow down a little bit 'cause I get really excited to do, oh, that new feature, that new feature. And I've had to kind of relax there. But I think at the end of the day, ServiceTitan's challenge is they have to build a tool for technicians where their goal is to minimize the technicians using it.

Mm-hmm.

Right? Like they need to be productive fixing the stuff, not sitting in software, right? So that's a really hard thing to do.

Yeah.

To build software that you're, the goal is to, you know, minimize the amount of time they spend with it. That's, that's tough.

Yeah.

So, yeah.

So how are you using ServiceTitan today to like minimize that?

Uh, I wish I had the answer for you. I don't think anybody does yet. If anyone knows, let me know.

Oh my gosh. Well, like you said, this is Toolbox of the Trades is an incredible community. Find other listeners who are doing the most to make sure that their technicians are spending minimal amount of time on their iPad and doing, spending most of the time creating that customer experience. And providing good service.

Yes, absolutely.

Before we move on, because I want to talk about one of your 2 hats, right? You've got 2 hats here at the company. One is a service Titan admin. The other one is running the building control side. Anything else about Ed Helms Group, your business division, size of your team, the kind of work you guys do, anything that you want to clarify before we move on to kind of how you work within the business?

Sure. I can kind of just clarify what I do. So I'm the operations manager for Goldstream Controls. I Came up in that trade. I was never like a technician, like, you know, bending pipe or pulling wire, but I definitely got in front of the computer and would commission and start up these systems. I moved on into project management, moved on into sales. So I've gotten that experience on the, you know, it wasn't just a clerical position when I was doing this stuff. And then I became the operations manager, and then ServiceTitan was my way of zooming out and not just focusing on Gulfstream, but focusing on the air conditioning and electrical side of the business as well, and as a whole. And it's kind of helped me understand— I didn't go to school for business, but it's kind of helped me understand things like I didn't understand before, like inventory management and, you know, procurement accounting. I'm not an accountant, but I understand a little bit, and kind of how to run a service department and all these things. And it's overwhelming, but it's very exciting. You know, I'm very passionate about all of it. At the end of the day, I just want to serve our customers, Keep our employees happy, keep our technicians happy. And software, just like any other tool, it just helps you get there.

That's awesome. So you're the service site administrator for every division— air conditioning, electrical, commercial, residential, projects, and service. Talk to me about what that job really involves.

So I mentioned I don't do it alone. Stacy and I do this together. What we try to do is we try to meet every week and go over features that we don't have that we need to implement or problems that the managers are having. And I wish we just had more time to do, to do more of it. Again, it's just one hat that I wear and we just have to, have to constantly prioritize what we're working on. Right. And so I have a couple of goals this year. We want to get everybody over on the new app by the end of the year. Uh, we want to move over to flexible timekeeping. We want to move over to budget codes. I don't know. I can nerd out on ServiceTitan. I don't know how deep you want to get.

No, you can nerd out. I can nerd out on it. I mean, I already give you credit for really being cognizant about we need to switch over to the new Field mobile app.

Yes.

Because having to do that is, it's again, you're trying to inspire change amongst a really big group of people. How many technicians are on ServiceTitan right now?

So we have, I think, 70 or so managed techs. We're about 100, a little over 100 people between office employees and technicians.

Yeah.

So it's a decent sized family-owned company. Yeah.

Yeah. And to your point, like you have to take your time. You can't just turn all the buttons on at once. You really have to be intentional about what features you turn on. So when you and Stacy are going through like, okay, this is what's in the new release or this is what's coming out with some new products, how do you figure out what is worth our time? Like what's a need-to-have versus a like-to-have?

That's a great question. I think it's going to depend on what feature you're trying to implement, who it involves, what's the training look like, how long is it going to take us to get there, what's the ROI? And you can't really measure the ROI. It's more like time-saving. What I'm trying to do differently now is I'm trying to, like I said, slow down, get the features in front of maybe the other managers, get their feedback on it. Probably one of either the Torch meetings or the Ember or Spark meetings. There's so much stuff that I listen to where I think it was Sina who says, WIFM, what's in it for me, right? And I'm like, I have to remind myself, I gotta get, in order to get buy-in, you have to figure out what's gonna help that person, right? Is it gonna make them be able to work faster, more efficiently? What's gonna help our company maintain their revenue, their profits. And I have to kind of think about it in terms of like all things lead to that, right? And so I have to, like I said, slow down and kind of do that analysis. It's just, things just take time. So by slowing down, I think I can get there.

Yeah. And also the bigger you get, the more success your company gets, the slower almost you have to move in that way.

Absolutely.

Because you're not just, when it's like a smaller company, when you're only like maybe 10, 15 people, you can go nuts and turn on all these features and it's gonna be a little bit easier to just get everyone in a conference room and explain why you're doing it. But to your point, like you have to show these features to the service managers first. You have to pitch it to them, get their feedback. It's like almost you become the internal salesperson for the various features that you're trying to implement.

Absolutely. Yeah, that's a good way of looking at it. And it's like, I wish I could, you know, share what I see and what I hear from ServiceTitan and just like zap it over into their brains so they can understand, like, look at, look, look at Pantheon. Look at, look at what ServiceTitan gives back to the community.

Mm-hmm.

In terms of like the support that they give, like we meet with our CSM every week. I meet with product managers all the time and it's like, yeah, that takes a lot of time, but it kind of helps us stay on track. If you're not involved, then you're just on the outside, right? And so I see it as like a give and take with ServiceTitan. I get to give feedback on a product that I want to see improved so they can improve it for our company, right? I don't want somebody else to develop it. And then here we are at the end saying, oh, I wish they did this and this and that. Well, you should have been there. Yeah. You should have gotten involved.

Yeah, there you go. How do you look at the various ServiceTitan features? And figure out like, okay, this is going to work, or workflows, and be like, this one's gonna work for our residential side. This one is gonna work for our commercial side. 'Cause that has to be a whole other level that you're thinking of too. Absolutely. 'Cause even though the workflows are similar, they are slightly different.

The way I'm approaching things now is I'm trying to think about what problem am I solving, right? Mm-hmm. The problem that we have, like most companies have, is, you know, internal communication. You're handing off, you know, who has the ball, right? You're passing it from department to department. ServiceTitan is really strong in that they have all these central features, but where I think they are lacking but getting better at, and I saw some stuff here that I'm really excited about, is how you handle it from department to department, right? Like I saw the automation hub. I don't know if anyone's seen this yet. Again, this is live on the show floor, but like the ability to kind of like send things a certain way to the right department, to the right person, that's gonna be huge for us because every shop runs their departments differently, right? Like we have a, procurement department. So trying to, you know, hand the ball to them so they can do the purchasing to send it, then hand it back to a project manager, then to the— there's just so much that's unique to each company.

Yeah.

So ServiceTitan gives you all the tools to do it, but you have to kind of figure out the way to make it work for you. Right. And you wanna lean on ServiceTitan to kind of get you there. Like we're trying to leverage, you know, I, I don't want people emailing each other. We are still stuck in the world of email. It drives me crazy. I'm like, please don't email internally anymore. Like, Now trying to use the new communications hub inside of ServiceTitan, you know, 30 years ago no one wanted to use email, right? And now everyone's stuck on email. Now, okay, well, email's great, but, you know, let's move on to something, you know, let's use the tool. Let's use ServiceTitan as our single source of truth for the data.

I was thinking of something too. So like internal communication, a really big problem at your company. And I think everyone can say that communication can be really, really tough, especially as an organization gets bigger. So, you've talked a little bit about how you, as the service site admin, identify which features am I going to implement, right? Like, what are we trying to solve for? How am I going to pitch it to the people that are going to use them? Let's talk about that first part. What problems am I trying to solve for? How do you filter information from the folks who are leading the company about what needs are being met? Like, as an admin, are you in revenue meetings? Are you in monthly— are you in QBRs figuring out, like, what parts of the business need tweaking? And is that informing your strategy?

So one of the things that we're trying to do is we meet with the management team every week and kind of go over our, like, our top 10 list of things, right? I've been reading a lot about EOS, Entrepreneurial Operating System, and while we're not doing that, I'm trying to absorb some of those best practices, right? So having an issues list, things like that. I try to go over, like, what are the big problems that we're having? And yeah, internal communication is one of them. And what happens is, like, because we're living in email so much, you know, using distribution lists. Right now we're all just getting attacked by so many, you know, customers calling, customers emailing, internal emails. There's so much. But the fear of if you don't do that, you're going to miss something, right? Yeah. And so what happens is you're just not being efficient because you're attacked by so many messages. And I'm trying to say, okay, well, what can we— what workflows can we, you know, get out of email? What can we automate so that we can have people focus on what they need to focus on, right? Like I'm really excited to hear about, you know, a lot of the AI and automation stuff to not automate the complex items, but automate the easy items, right? That's where I think we can start to kind of like save ourselves all some time. Because at the end of the day, that's the most precious resource we have.

Amazing. Okay, so we talked a little bit about how you speak with the technicians who are actually using the software, folks in the office who are using the software, the what's in it for me. I want to hear a little bit about how you work with the folks at the ownership, at the C-suite level of the company to learn what their pain points are and how you can solve them through ServiceTitan, how you kind of distill their needs and translate it into how can I implement technology either through ServiceTitan or under other vendors to solve for these problems?

We try to meet with the managers every week and go over kind of their biggest frustrations. While before I was like, how can we take advantage of these features that ServiceTitan has. And I'm kind of flipping it in terms of like, what problems do we have? What solutions does ServiceTitan have or other vendors to kind of solve these problems? So my approach has changed over the last couple years doing this. We talk to them, figure out like how we're going to, like I said earlier, how we're going to implement, train, you know, do we have all the right information for this? Are we missing anything? So I'm just trying to be more real in my approach. Whereas, you know, I'm like software, software, software. There's more real that happens in the background, right? like the technicians have to interact with this, with this tool that they really, you know, we don't want them interacting with. We want them interacting with it as minimal as possible, right? Yeah. Which is, like I said, uh, you know, trying to get everybody on the new app. I think the new app is going to help us get there, right? Like, silly example, like scanning the nameplate of the piece of equipment to save them from having to type it in, right? An easy thing, but I think a lot of the technicians in the field are going to appreciate that. You know, I'm trying to think about how, how can this new feature, how can this new workflow help, help them, help the clerical people in the office? How can it increase our sales, increase our revenue, things like that, and improve our overall communication internally? Because I think that's the biggest thing is how much time we spend, you know, in meetings or emailing each other or things like that when I know we could be doing a better job being efficient with our, with our communication.

Awesome. That's great. So let's pivot to your second hat, which is building controls. So getting into Gulfstream Controls, most of your work comes as a subcontractor to mechanical contractors, but you also work directly with building owners, property managers. How does the way you run a job change depending on who you're working for?

When we're working on, you know, for, let's say, a mechanical contractor who's working for a general contractor on these construction projects, these plan and spec projects, usually we're having to bid, you know, against other contractors. And so the estimates have to be a lot tighter. The overall goal with, I mean, I think this is true for HVAC as well, is you may be, you know, you're doing a project for a GC, a general contractor, but eventually you wanna turn that customer, that owner into a service customer, right? You wanna make them a customer for life.

Oh, sure. Yeah.

And so we have to deliver a good product at the beginning. We have to stay within the bounds of the specifications, which we wanna give them more and more and more, but there's costs associated with that. So I think that's the biggest challenge with anyone who's bidding work who also wants to move into a service, you know, a service mentality. You know, once that project is complete and turned over and now you're in service mode and, you know, you're doing service agreements for customers, you know, preventative maintenance, things like that. I mean, building controls is very similar to HVAC in that regard, right? Like we're going on site, we're maintaining equipment. At that point, the quality— not to say the quality is bad on the construction side, but we're trying to work within the bounds of the contract. Once we're in service mode, we can kind of just like go above and beyond for that customer and really show them all the things that, you know, they can do to increase their ROI, to make their building run more efficiently, to keep their occupants comfortable. Yeah, I could talk a lot about building controls. I think it's one of those trades that it's like a— not a secret here at Pantheon, but I feel like, like I said, I've been hearing a lot about it. Folks are using it. So—

It is interesting. I never thought of it in that terms of when you're working within, uh, for like a general contractor, when you're working like— or you're working as a contract, but you're specifically trying to stay within the confines of your contract. Like you can't necessarily overstep.

Exactly.

That is really interesting and has to be kind of challenging cuz you wanna maintain the good relationship with the person you're, who's subbing you out, but you also want to make an impression on the final customer. Yeah. So that they may call you in the future. Yeah.

Let me throw you a curveball. Sometimes you're doing a project for a customer who was a customer before. So you're working in a building, you already know the ownership of the, of the, of the, sure. The building. But now you're having to work through the contracting, you know, through a general contractor. And now you're finding things that you're like, I need to go above and beyond on this contract, but I can't. And so you have to kind of, you know, tread carefully in terms of like letting the construction team know, hey, I found an issue, it's not related to my contract, but I need to do right by the owner of the building. And so yeah, it's a tough balance sometimes.

Yeah, it must be a tough needle to thread for sure. Do a lot of your technicians share at the company, go between the two organizations, NEMS and Gulfstream Controls?

So controls technicians quite often come from the mechanical trade. Uh-huh. So, I mean, those are the best technicians that I have because there is always the joke in the controls industry, it's a controls problem, right? You get an alarm, the chiller's down, it's a controls problem. Usually you have mechanical failures because mechanical equipment has way more moving parts, right? And so there's always that joke of like, it's a controls problem, but there's electrical issues, there's mechanical issues. Controls just kind of sits at the top. Kind of monitoring everything. And so whenever I have a technician who can understand the HVAC industry and the controls industry, those are our best technicians because they understand where that line is, right? But generally, our technicians are in there, you know, they're in the same business unit. They don't cross paths very often, but, you know, we're all, we're all one company. And so, you know, all the technicians know each other, they know who to call, so they do lean on each other for, for expertise sometimes.

It's interesting. I was just curious if some technicians may find it hard to pull back in that way, you know, like not being able to maybe give the full service that they've been trained to give on the other side of the business.

That actually happens a lot. Sometimes they're okay, we have a controls technician doing something and they find an electrical issue. It's like, okay,

yeah,

do I stay in my lane? Do I, you know, do I contact the electrical department? You have to remember that some of these customers are only customers on the control side, on the Gulfstream side.

Sure.

We don't want to overstep. on the mechanical or the electrical side.

Yeah,

right. What happens with some of these customers is once they find out we're kind of like a one-stop shop, those customers just kind of naturally come to us, right? We can do mechanical, electrical, and controls in the building, and that's really valuable for a lot of customers.

Yeah.

So sometimes we do— we get a lot of service opportunities that way, like through relationships and through our customer service, things like that.

Well, speaking of relationships, that is basically building relationships is the way that you've been able to grow the Gulfstream control side of the business. Is that correct?

Not just Gulfstream controls, all of our trades are relationship-driven. I've tried to use, you know, lead generation tools, but what I found is that our reputation, that's the best way to grow our business.

Yeah.

By taking care of our customers and just word of mouth and doing right by the customer, you know, always doing the right thing. You know, we're not perfect. If you make a mistake, you know, we'll fix it, make it right. And just that over the years, over the 50 years we've been in business, That has helped us grow the most.

Amazing. So between your 2 brands, you oversee a bunch of different types of work. What advice would you give to a contractor who's gonna want to maybe use ServiceTitan to oversee a lot of different types of jobs in both the service side, the commercial side? If they were approaching it for the first time, what advice would you give them?

It's an interesting question because when we went live 3 years ago, ServiceTitan was just kind of finding its stride in commercial and construction. It's in a really good, much better place now. So if you're coming on board now, I would say identify all the areas of your business that you want to plug into ServiceTitan. For us, maybe this was a mistake, we went all in. We went all in, all divisions, all at once.

Sure.

Middle of the summer. I don't know why I did that. I was a fool. You know, construction, commercial, service, we went all in at once and I was like, we'll figure it out. And it took us a while. Probably about a year, which is what I've heard is the norm to kind of figure it out. There's really nothing stopping you today from plugging in your part of the business into ServiceTitan. They have a great service platform. Projects are in a really good place. Something that's unique about us, and I don't know if I mentioned it earlier, is we will subcontract each other. So we have a lot of multi-trade projects.

Yeah.

So a project could be like, you know, a $2 million project that could involve all 3 of our trades.

Amazing.

And so early on that was, I think ServiceTitan didn't understand that that was like a thing. So we kind of had to talk to the product, product managers to kind of get us there. And it's in a much better place now.

Awesome. One thing I do wanna shout out in our conversation today, you have mentioned, you know, you got your degree in IT.

Yep.

Right. You're wearing your, representing the Torch Network. You did Spark and Ember. You've listened to the podcast before. You are definitely a learner, right?

I am involved, trying to be. Yep.

What is some advice that you have for folks listening who Are trying to figure it out, try to build the train while whatever, that metaphor about building things as you're working on them. Yeah. What has worked really well for you?

Uh, be either involved or you're not involved, right? Try to give the time to learn, see what's out there, talk to other contractors. Being a part of all of the different groups ServiceTitan has, I think is what separates ServiceTitan from other companies, right? Like they really do give back to the community. You know, we talk to our CSM. We talk to product managers, like I mentioned, and that helps us shape the direction that the software goes. And so, like I said earlier, if you're not involved, then, you know, then all you're doing is waiting. You know, you're standing on the side waiting for things to happen, right? I think there's a delicate balance to it. Like I mentioned, I've had to kind of slow down a little bit. Like, sometimes I was always the guinea pig.

Sure, sure.

And I've had to kind of say, well, let somebody else be the guinea pig, and I'll, you know, I'll be the second one in line, not the first one in line, right? But I would say any contractors who are, who are thinking about this is get involved, you know, try to talk to other contractors, get involved with, you know, Spark, Ember, Torch, listen to the podcast, surround yourself in the, in the ecosystem, surround yourself in the trades ecosystem and in the software. And this has put me on a path to learning about just businesses overall. Like I mentioned, you know, the Entrepreneurial Operating System, which we're not using, but I'm just learning so much about how In order to scale, you have to be organized to what you're doing.

Yep.

Because without, without organization, things get really complicated. I think we're at a, at a, you know, tipping point where in order to get to that next level, we really need to just tighten up on our processes, right? And service design is changing in a good way in that there's always new things being added, right? So it's like a constant escalation game, right? This has changed, right? So now we gotta retrain. But, you know, you kind of have to find that delicate balance.

Amazing. David, as we're wrapping up our conversation, is there anyone you wanna shout out? On this episode?

Yes. I promised my, my children that I would shout them out on the show because they do allow me to sometimes listen to work podcasts in the car. So my son Eric is 12 and my daughter Penelope, she's 9, and they sometimes let me listen to the podcast in the car. So I wanted to, uh, tell them I appreciate them letting me do that and also give them a shout out because, uh, they're great kids and, um, who knows what they'll be one day. You know, maybe they'll get involved in the trades too.

Eric and Penelope, thank you so much for letting your dad listen to my show. I promise that after this episode, He will put on whatever you want to listen to.

Usually some Spotify playlist.

David, thank you so much for joining me at Pantheon to be a guest on Toolbox for the Trades. It's

been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me.