How Small Businesses Create Impact Through Philanthropy | Podcast Ep. 199 | Toolbox for the Trades

Hello, contractors, and welcome to Toolbox for the Trades. My name is Jackie Aubel, and today I am chatting with David and Natasha Manley, franchise co owners of Pro Lift Garage Doors in Amarillo, Texas. Even though they started their business just two years ago, David and Natasha are committed to giving back to their community. We talked about their partnership with the nonprofit Fill with Hope and gave tips on how you can get started with philanthropic initiatives at your business. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did. David and Natasha Manley, you are both the franchise owners at Pro Lift Garage Doors in Amarillo, Texas. Today we're going to be talking about getting started with philanthropy and giving back to your community. David and Natasha, welcome to the podcast.

Well, thank you for having us.

Yep, it's great. Great to be here. Appreciate it.

So excited to chat with you guys. And I have to let the listeners know, right before we hit record, I asked David and Natasha how they met, and they gave me the cutest story. Would you mind retelling for our friends? It's just such a lovely story, and I think everyone would love to hear it.

Sure. So I grew up in the canyon area, just south Amarillo, and I haven't lived here in about 20 years. I'd moved off, and I moved back. Me and Natasha got hooked up through match.com and then she wanted to Facebook stalk me, so she asked my last name, and we had about 20 mutual friends. And she's like, well, how do you know this lady? I go, I played football with her brother and in high school. And I go, how do you know this guy? That's my best friend. Oh, my.

My son and his daughter to homecoming. And it only took me one week on Match to find the love of my life.

And she lived two blocks from where I grew up and about a half mile from my mom.

Yeah.

So.

And this podcast is brought to you by match.com promo code. David and Natasha. That's such a. That's such a sweet story. And you guys have been together for five and a half years, you said?

Yeah.

Oh, my goodness. And during this time, you also started a business, which we're going to get to in just a moment. But before we do, I want to hit you with an icebreaker real quick. David, what's one class you think every school should teach?

I'm going to let Natasha answer that. She's got a really good answer for that one.

Well, I really do think they should teach homemaking. I do think there's a lot of kids who go into college and they have no idea. You know, we would say back in the day how to write a check, but now how to make a payment online, how to balance a checkbook or like how to change the tire, how to make a meal, stuff like that. The simple stuff in life. But a lot of, I think especially older people just take for granted because that's just how they were raised. And these days kids don't learn that anymore.

I'm just going to say trades, there's so such a lack of that in the area. Plumbers, electricians, garage door technicians, all that stuff is. There's always a need for that. And they make really good money.

Yeah, they really, really do. And speaking of it, David, you weren't initially in the trades. You have a whole other career before this. So why don't you tell the folks listening how you got into the trades.

So my, my most of my adult life, 26 years or so, I was in retail. I was a retail ranger. Worked for Walmart and Kroger on the east coast mainly. Got tired of that after 26 years, moved back home, got on with an outfit that manufactured outdoor patio cushions for Walmart, Home Depot and Lowe's. Privately owned company is a really cool gig. A lot of time off during the summer, three day weekends, all the time. They got bought out by a bigger corporation. The founder was ready to retire and the corporate culture got brought back into it. And I just didn't like the direction we were going. Just got frustrated with where we're at. So we took about a two year journey trying to find something and we got introduced to an entrepreneur coach. Just kind of took us through the, you know, different kind of our likes, our dislikes. We did a little survey that we did and at the end presented us with three different franchises to see if we would be interested. And garage doors ultimately won out. We just, we like the business model of the garage doors a lot better. Lower startup cost, easier to launch. Just start with one guy in one truck. The key to that was finding the right guy, which we've been very fortunate with. The people we've had both my, I hired one guy then about three weeks before we opened and then my second technician was that same year in December. Three months later after we opened those, I was already ready for number two.

Amazing. So you had this whole career in retail. You worked for 26 years in this space. The company that you had moved to got bought out. Corporate culture, you didn't like it, so you went to Natasha and you said, all right, I'm ready for the Next stage of my journey. And you met up with something I've never heard before called an entrepreneur coach. Can you just tell me a little bit about how that worked? Yeah, Natasha, go for it.

Well, so they asked all kinds of questions. We had to fill in a big, huge questionnaire with lots of questions. When we did get the results of that, it was just almost scary. Like, how do you know this? I mean, for me, you know, coming from the Netherlands, especially before I met David, if I did not know something, I googled it. Well, that was one of the first things. What is, you know, what came out of this questionnaire. And, you know, they kind of see how your personalities are and what fits best. And, I mean, it was so accurate. It was unbelievable. And still this entrepreneur coach, he's local over here and, you know, he still is supporting us till this day. It's not like, well, you did find something. Goodbye. If we have a question or there is a celebration if he. He just did show up. I mean, it's just unbelievable. He's a good guy.

Yeah. And their. Their services totally free to whoever uses them. We didn't have to pay a penny once we ended up buying the franchise. You know, we.

I bet you he got something out of that.

Well, yeah, we gave, you know, we gave him a gift, gave him a bottle of whiskey and something else. I don't remember what else we gave him, but, yeah, it was. It was pretty cool.

Yeah.

Can you name drop the name of this coach and the services in case anyone's listening is interested?

Les Simpson is his name with the entrepreneur source.

Yeah.

Entrepreneur source.

Yeah.

All right. Wow, that's just so fascinating. I've done, like I've said, I've done almost 200 episodes of this, and I've never found. I've never met people who came into the trades through an entrepreneur coach who's like, hey, you want to start a business? Here are some great options.

Yeah. I was actually talking to my financial advisor at the time, and he did hook us up with him. And so that's how we did end up with him, because we never did hear of it before either. And we did not any. Ever talk to anybody who went through something like that.

I wish I'd have known about this 30 years ago.

So that's incredible. So you guys, five and a half years ago, the two of you meet, you started so that. So we're in 2024. So that was somewhere around 2019, 2022, you decided to start this business together. Was going on a business journey together. Something that brought the, that you guys discovered you were similar to in your relationship. I'm so fascinated with how this, how this manifested for you guys.

I mean, we've, we're, we're. I don't know, it's. I would say we're not the typical married couple. So we, we do a lot of stuff together. I mean, she goes to convention with me when we go out, when we have convention every year. She went to Discovery Day, like, with number one. We love to travel. Yeah. So, you know, it was fun to go to Florida for Pantheon to check all that out. We just, we've never really had an argument per se. We have disagreements, but there's no better. There's no, like, you know, throwing things or cussing or getting, you know, just being rude. We don't, we don't do that, you know, with, I guess, later in life when you get married and you get me the next chapter of your life, so to speak, you know, what you want, you don't want.

Yeah, sure.

So you appreciate each other a lot more because you know how it can be. Yeah.

It's just an awesome story. So we're specifically here to talk about philanthropy and giving back to the community. And before we get into this, I just want to kind of draw attention to this. You started Pro Lift Garage Doors in September of 2022, and we're recording this in October of 2024. So in just the two years that you guys have been in business, relatively small team, you have given back so much to your community, and that's one of the reasons why you were a finalist for the Prometheus Award, which is a new service Titan initiative sponsored by Titans, where we recognize customers who do incredible things to their community. So I would love if you could tell me a little bit about Fill with Hope and what is it about this organization that prompted you to support it?

Growing up with my mom as an educator, kind of knew after the fact that there are food insecurities and children in the school districts. It just, you know, you can walk around with your head in the sand all day long, but doesn't negate the fact that it's still there. So I didn't really realize that until I got out of high school and then, you know, 20 years later, then moved back and then we had opportunity to go with Phil with Hope. I've already kind of had a relationship with the executive director. Her mother in law used to teach me in school, so we kind of had a deal there. But children are just dear to our heart. You know, they're our future. And we knew right away when our franchise challenged basically all the franchise owners to find a child nonprofit, some way to give back to children in your area. The non profit that he started is called Kids Lift. So we're the Kids Lift representative in our area. We knew right away, okay, we're going to partner with Phil with Hope monetarily wise. Yeah, we've, we spent some money and time. And time. But you know, it's just the right thing to do if you're in a position in your community and you're a small business owner. Yeah, we don't make a lot of money. But giving back to your community in the future is going to pay tenfold. I mean they're going to know, hey, these guys fill with hope. They do all this all the time. We started out with a golf tournament last year. We sponsored a hole. I think I remember it was hole 16 at our local golf course. And I picked that hole for a reason because it's far away from the pro shop. These golf tournaments, you know, everybody's gonna be drinking, they're gonna be having a good time and they need something to kind of help get some of the buzz off. So we, we gave away donuts and hot dogs for donation. We raised a little over $500 that day. Then we had our food drive that. So it's our, it's now our annual food drive. We started last year at our local grocery store. It's probably 10 or 15 totes of food that we collected. Plus it's crazy when you're sitting. So in my background being retail, I had customers and organizations come to me all the time and hey, can we set outside your store and just ask customers coming in, can they donate to our cost? And I'm like, yeah, sure, whatever. So Cindy didn't have anybody. Cindy Sheets is the executive director of Fill with Oak. They've never done that before. I said, hey, this, this can work. I used to do it all the time. So we got with a local grocery store, we got it all set up. And you would be surprised at the people walking in the store. Here's $100, here's $5. Here's $50. Number one. It was the first cold snap that we had. So it worked out good because everybody was the grocery store to get chili fixings. And we set up that Saturday morning right outside and it just turned out good. So now we're doing. We sponsored help sponsor a car show. That's one of the events that they put on to Raise money. So we went and helped with that. Had our booth out there and then had the golf tournament. We sponsored a buy your drive hole. So I paid for the drive for everybody to be up like 50 yards in front of the green. I played in the morning tournament. Natasha was like texting me. This is not working. This is not working. We're not getting any money. We're doing hot dogs and donuts again for a donation. So when I we got done, I go, well, we got to do something different. So we kind of scraped the donuts and hot dogs. Okay, that's not working. So we're like, okay. So I started messing with the golfers because they didn't know that we, like bought their drive. So I'm like, hey, I just nailed you a drive. You're 50 yards out. Perfect. All we're asking for is a donation. And then the money just started flowing in. We raised over $1,250, I think.

Amazing. Amazing.

Yeah, yeah. Next Saturday, the 26th, we have our second annual food drive in front of the same grocery store. We've made it more of a community involvement food drive. It's a month long thing that Cindy's going around to different businesses and they're having their food drive in their stores or in their shops. We're doing one out here where we live at the community cent center. Hey, can we have people drop off food and I'll come pick it up? It's turned into a lot bigger than we anticipated.

Plus we advertise it quite a bit. Local businesses. And David and I are both in a bni. Different bni. We talk about it over there quite a bit. And we did make actually little shopping list now too, for the food drive. So we do not just have to tell people, well, we would like 16 ounce peanut butter jars, Capricorns, beef sticks, stuff like that. But we can give them a little, tiny, little bitty shopping list we did make. Just give them a sticky note and say, well, yeah, just that's what we.

Would like, printed out everybody's logos on there and had like those four items. And yeah, this is items we're needing. We just, because we started, did it, we did it. The moment when we did the food.

Drive, we started hiding.

We were just starting, hey, this is what we need. This is what we need. So I think the grocery store is a little more prepared. They were in transition between store managers.

Yeah.

So this year he's gonna have a bunch of different pods throughout the store. Like, okay, this is the where all the Pop tarts are. This is where the peanut butter is, the Capri sun, the beef, all that stuff. So we're doing that Friday. We got a lot of publicity last year through the local TV stations. We did a couple of morning news segments on the ab, the CBS and the NBC affiliate. And then we're doing that again actually Monday and Tuesday this coming week. And they came out and did an interview with us last year as well.

Amazing, amazing. So just to kind of recap here. So, David, you took your knowledge of the retail space to identify, hey, here are ways that we can optimize this food drive, right? It sounds like both you and Natasha, you guys are really quick on your feet when sponsoring the golf tournament to make sure that you were, you know, getting as many donations as you could. And now you've made the food drive even bigger for this year. Unfortunately, this episode won't come out in time for that. But I can't wait to hear how it goes. And this is just fantastic. Cause I'm looking at my notes here and fill with hope. It looks like it. It covers 20 schools and over 1500 children within those schools who suffer from food insecurity. And I know, David, this was such an important topic for you because your mother was an educator in the Canyon school district for many, many years. And so this is something that's very near and dear to your heart. And it sounds like, Natasha, your kids probably went to the same school district.

As well, actually my youngest one just a little bit. But actually, Brian and I did volunteer in the past before I met David at that organization. So I was well aware this organization. And just as a mom, I think in general, or as a parent, you know, if you hear that there are kids who don't get enough, they can just not function. And, you know, if they take tests and stuff like that, I mean, teachers really tell these kids in school, well, you need to have a good breakfast, you know, before this big, huge test, so your brain can function better. And these kids don't have that. So just breaks your heart. We're like, this is what we need to do. This is the right thing to do. And, you know, there's so many organizations who are amazing, but hunger, I mean, that's pretty sad.

I love also that this was a challenge kind of initiated by the franchise, the Franchisor with Kids Lift. Like, hey, we would love for you to do this. And your team still is pretty small again because your company is still so new. So I'm curious, how do you integrate this giving back and Philanthropy into your company culture and how does it shape your team's values? So this is the team that you do have. Like, how do they react to this? And how does it, you know, inform them the work they do?

Right. So it's not like a mandated thing. Okay. This is what we're doing. You've got to be here. They're doing this to say, hey, we're. We're sponsoring Filled with Hope. We're going to be one of their corporate sponsors forever. And if you want to help, hey, great. If you don't, that's. That's fine, too. We would love for you to be part of it. We had one crew that came by the food drive last year. My lead technician. He was a recipient of some of these programs back in the day when he was younger. So him and his helper went into the grocery store that day and tried to incognito get some stuff, but have nobody know that they did it. So it made us feel really good. Like, okay, yeah, he's on board. He likes it.

So that's awesome. And such again, like, this is such direct community action. I'm actually not that familiar with Amarillo in the Canyon area. How many people are in that. In those areas? Approximately.

If you take the. The two counties that make up Amarillo and Canyon, Potter and Randall, it's probably 350,000 people. So it's not.

Yeah.

I call it a met rural metro Amarillo metro area, but rule.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So Phil and Hope does half of that because Amarillo is split in two different counties, Potter and Randall. And so Randall county, that's partial Kenyan ISD is under fill with Hope. And then the other side is Snack Pack for kids and similar organization who does basically the same thing just for.

The other side, for the Amarillo schools. Yeah.

Yeah.

Amazing. So, obviously, you know, when people are starting businesses, when they're running businesses, they're constantly thinking about, you know, how am I going to make payroll? How am I going to make sure that I have a profit? So I think it's really important. This is one of the things we're doing with the Prometheus Award is to talk with owners like yourselves who are giving back. What is one thing you would want to suggest to a company who wants to get started in philanthropic work? Where should they start?

Find something that's just near and dear to their heart, whether it be an experience they had as a youngster or an organization that needs some help in their area. There's tons of. I think every area has got A ton of nonprofits. So there's many, many places to look. If you're in a BNI that's, you know, and Cindy's part of the fill with hopes, part of the B. And I'm in all your networking that you do. Hey, who's somebody that's, you know, struggling, that needs a little more, a little more help. And it doesn't have. It's not necessarily monetarily. It can be just your time or help promote them on Facebook or awareness or the social media. Just get the awareness out of what they're doing.

And even maybe, you know, if you don't know an organization, talk to your employees. Maybe they have a kid with some kind of disability in their family or. I mean, does not even have to be a kid, of course, but we just like kids. There's so many, so many organizations who need help. There's a lot to pick for then. So pick something. What's in your heart. So you. It does not feel like work and it just is easy to do.

Yeah. I mean. Cause you guys are doing quite a lot. You're growing a franchise. You're, you know, you're getting comfortable in your newish marriage and you're also giving a ton back of your time and resources to charity. So I'm curious. I always love talking to couples on the, on the show because there's so many husband and wife duos in the trades. How are you guys balancing your work, your relationship and your charitable giving while keeping just the two of you in sync?

Well, it's pretty easy.

Yeah, it's been, it's been really easy. We have. So we're, we're, we're empty nesters. We have no kids at the house. We do have a little dog. Grand dog.

Yeah.

We schedule everything out. We know the first Tuesday of every month at six o'. Clock. Okay. We're gonna be filled with hope tonight. We're packing bags.

Yeah.

You know, and then we just. Everything else, we just kind of, we kind of plan it out when Natasha gets home. So she does. She's a floral designer by trade, so she worked four days a week for a floral florist in Amarillo. And then Wednesday she worked for the company. But when she gets off work, we kind of stop work at that point in time. Sometimes we'll go later into the evening or whatever, depending on what we have going on. But it's just, I don't know, it's. It's been easy.

Yeah. And we have, I mean, often have something in the evening too.

For business wise, I mean, yeah, we'll go networking events. Yeah, all that type of stuff. So we go to those a lot together.

So the secret to running a successful business with your spouse is to meet on match.com, have all your kids out of your house and find a charity that you guys are both equally passionate about supporting. Yeah, well, you guys are actually doing quite well in just the two years that you've been on business. Why don't you tell me a little bit about the award you guys just won?

So the Amarillo Chamber of Commerce reached out to us and said, hey, you need to fill out this form. For a top business in Amarillo. One of the guidelines is you had to be in business over two years, and we were just shy of that mark. I said, well, I can't fill this out. I haven't been in business long enough. She goes, well, how long have you been in business? I said, just almost two years, because, well, we have a top emerging business award. So we filled that out. They came by the office and did an interview with us and said, okay, hey, you're a finalist and you actually won. There's like, I think, seven of them that they gave out. Top emerging business, different categories. It's crazy, the amount of success that we've had in the short amount of time that we've been open. We doubled the revenue volume our first year that I thought we would do. Our goal, it just, you know, crazy.

Yeah, Amazing.

I'm pretty good. So we're blessed.

Yeah.

Yeah, you guys definitely are. I just. I feel so. My heart is, like, warm talking to you both. You're just so. Just the energy between you two is fantastic. We're going to wrap this interview up in a second, but I know you just got back from Pantheon and this episode is going to air about a month after Pantheon Service Titan's annual user conference. Was there any big takeaways that you guys got from the conference that you're looking forward to implementing at Pro Lift?

One of the things is we have everything goes through the franchisor before we can implement it through Service Titan.

Sure, yeah.

I just. We just got off a call with Innova. Yeah, we met them there. We actually just got a call. I really liked what they had to offer. It's actually going to save me money. But the. The integrations that Service Titan has and the Pro products that Service Titan is now offering are going to be a huge game changer in. In premium service brands. Who's our franchisor? I'm on the pilot group for a marketing pro. So we're in the process of building that out to be able to launch it to the whole franchise, to the whole everybody and convention next January. It is such a powerful platform, but there's so much it can do. You need to almost be like a software genius to figure it out. I bet. I'm on the phone two or three times a week with support. Okay, help me with this, help me with that. But it's been great support. I love it. I learned something new almost every day about the platform. I love it and the different integrations that it offers just in time to be able to build out more processes and SOPs to, you know, more streamline your business. So I'm not doing the day to day in five years, it's more on autopilot and then that's going to make our business a lot more. More attractive. In 10 years, if we're ready to sell, we want to keep it, or if I'm not here or when we want to retire, you know, we can, we can get a general manager and the day to day can go to them. We can just kind of work behind the scenes.

Amazing. Is there anything else I should have asked the two of you that would have made this a better interview?

Well, we know it's going to be probably on the air after the food drive is over, but food insecurity does not stop the end of October. So if you can share a link, that would be amazing. And if people feel like it, you know, you can donate. We have an Amarillo wish list with the products on it. And that's Amazon.

I'm sorry, but that's Amazon Amarillo.

Oh, Amazon wish list. The products are on there and the right sizes how they would like to have it. Because of course, you know, you cannot give one kid a big huge jar of peanut butter and another a small one as an example. And so if you could share that, that would be amazing.

Yep.

You know, 100 donations, I mean, in any forum. And so. And we will take care of it, that it's gonna go to Phil with hope and ends up in those bags the kids get on Fridays before the weekend.

Incredible. Well, not only will we have the links in our show notes to where you can donate to Fill with Hope and to the Amazon wish list that Natasha just spoke about. We will also have links to the Prometheus award at Service Titan. So if you have anyone that you would like to nominate for the Prometheus award, you can check that out. You can learn a little bit more about our finalists and our winners from this last round of the award which we gave a pantheon. I'll actually be having more Prometheus finalists on the podcast in the coming weeks, so we'll be talking more about philanthropy. I hope everyone's as excited about it as I am. David and Natasha, I have to say I love your story. I'm going to be rooting for you, so I please, please feel free to reach out to me in the coming years and let me know how your business is doing. I absolutely love what you guys are doing together as a couple in your, like, second act, third, whatever that is. So please keep me posted. You guys were. I'm rooting for you.

Thank you so much for having us.

And we'll send you some pictures after the food drive next weekend, too.

Yeah, sounds great. All right, guys, thanks for being on Toolbox for the trades.

Thank you so much.

Thank you. Enjoyed it.