Season 3 Guests Share Tricks of the Trades | Podcast Ep. 52 | Toolbox for the Trades

The more I do this podcast and We've done over 50 episodes at this point, the more I am blown away at the incredible work being done by contractors across the world.

You're listening to Toolbox for the Trades brought to you by ServiceTitan, a podcast for top service professionals where we interview leaders for their best tips and tricks of the trades, learn how industry trailblazers stay ahead of the competition, and how you too can be at the forefront of an industry. Let's jump in.

Hello contractors and welcome to the Season three wrap up episode of Toolbox for the Trades. My name is Jackie Aubel. I'm the host of the podcast, content Marketer at Service Titan and a champion for the trades. If you've been listening for a while now, you know the deal. Today, I'm going to do my very best to highlight the key lessons and takeaways we learned from this season's robust roster of guests. This season we got some phenomenal tips on leadership, people, management, hiring, marketing, selling your business, the power of networking groups, and so much more. As always, it was incredibly challenging to select one thing to share from each episode. All of our guests from season three brought their own unique perspective to the challenges and themes facing the service industry today and gave us some valuable tips and tricks while doing so. I hope you find today's episode just as entertaining and informative as our normal show stays. Speaking of our normal show, we'll be back Tuesday, August 3rd with brand new episodes of Toolbox for the Trades. Our first episode is with Julian Skadden, the CEO of nexstar Network and let me tell you, you do not want to miss it. I have to say, the more I do this podcast and We've done over 50 episodes at this point, the more I am blown away at the incredible work being done by contractors across the world. I consider myself incredibly lucky to be able to create the show and share it with you. If you're enjoying the Toolbox for the Trades much as I am hosting it, please, please, please, please, please consider leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts. By doing so, you'll not only support the show, but help other contractors discover it. Now, without further ado, here are our favorite takeaways from the guests of season three. We kicked off season three with Eddie McFarlane, the VP of learning and Development at Haller Enterprises. Eddie is somewhat of a tech whisperer. In his decades long career within the trades, he's seen great examples of leadership that PA for team success and individual satisfaction. According to Eddie, the key is clarity in your communication.

Speaking clearly and making sure we're effective in our communication and we're clear and we're not sugarcoating things. It's very adult conversations. People crave clarity. And we can be transparent with people. We say we want things, but when you look at what people actually follow, it's clarity. And Renee Brown has this great quote about clarity is kindness. Being clear with people is kind. And so I think when you have those really transformative conversations, I think you're being helpful with people. Listen. It's not an easy switch, and it takes practice.

If you need evidence that demonstrates how important clarity is to employee growth, engagement and retention, look no further than Lauren Vahey, the director of customer experience at Nicholson Plumbing Heating and Air. She claims that having clarity in her role as a customer service supervisor was critical to her overall success and contribution to the company.

They did a really good job of giving me clear and concise guidelines that I could operate by a certain amount of money I was allowed to refund without asking for permission, a certain amount of service plans maybe I was able to give away in a month or a quarter or a year, things like that. So I was able to make decisions without having to put people on hold too much and ask around or email back and forth, which was really good. I think clarity is key for anybody the office of being able to understand exactly what power they have.

Of course, it's pretty hard to lead people if you can't hire them first. The hiring shortage was a big topic during this season of Toolbox for the Trades, and our guests were quick to share their strategies for solving the problem. Mary Jean Anderson, the owner of Anderson Plumbing Heating and Air, advised listeners to expand their hiring pool to women. In fact, most of the top producers at her company are female technicians. Here's what MJ had to say about hiring women at Anderson.

They're out there and I would suggest to listeners is in our industry, with 10% aging out per year are the trades, 6% coming in, it's time to start thinking outside the box. And there are, you know, you need to start looking. One good place to look for women is the military. There are many women in the military. And if you're. I'm lucky because there's four different military, you know, bases here in San Diego. So I have that. But it's also when you meet, when you get your first couple, they typically hang out with people that are the same personalities or types and so that you can get referrals through them and putting the word out in your ads, just men and women, we have openings.

Speaking of referrals, Brad Peschek, the CFO of McWilliams & Son, shared the incredibly generous and successful rewards program his company has for employee referrals. According to Brad, when you consider the cost it takes to hire, train and onboard a new team member, investing in a generous referral program is worth it.

So it's a huge incentive for them to keep them on and again, make sure that everything's going well for them because it's one of those things where we calculated the cost of what does it cost to train and rehire people and get them back up to speed. And so we said, hey, look, in the grand scheme of things, if they bring on somebody good and $2,000 in the annually for that person is a drop in the bucket, to be honest. And we've seen a lot of success from that. And again, it's just been neat to see how once they bring them on, they will almost without even telling them they'll become a mentor for that employee.

Another big theme this season was hiring people based on their potential instead of for their experience. One of the biggest takeaways operations expert and service titan guru Kathy Nielsen shared during her episode was to hire employees for behaviors, not skills, and that assessments can help you pinpoint an employee's strengths.

I am a huge fan of assessments. There's one I've used for probably 15 years called the Intermetrics, and I now actually rep the product just because I'm a fan. But they certified me in those assessments on how to use them and we at that time it was their services on how to figure out, identify how do you want that role to behave. And then we looked for people with those behaviors, not look for people we liked or the skill. And so I think that's one of the biggest mistakes I would have made had I not had that is, I wouldn't have, I wouldn't have determined what behaviors I want in a role first.

Got it.

So whenever anybody asks me, well, what are you looking for in a csr? Or how do I know if this service manager is right for me? I ask them, how do you want that role to behave, number one, and then will that person have those behaviors?

According to Steve Sola, the GM of Zoom Drain Philadelphia, in order to set your team up for success, you need to document your systems and procedures and make them available for your people. Reviewing Zoom Drain's org chart and manuals were crucial to Steve while growing his career from apprentice to gm, as well as the guidance he received from his team's leaders.

The biggest thing for me, I think, is our manuals and procedures. As an apprentice, as a tech, that's what I would focus on. I'd read up on, I'd use that to guide myself. And then when you get to the other side of it, when I became a supervisor or service manager, being able to edit those manuals and put things I wanted to instill and our procedures and how we do things and allowed it to make it a lot easier. So I think those are probably the biggest tools. And then, of course, I've had a lot of Jim Kernetti, the owner, and Ellen Rohr and Al Levy having those kind of people in my, I guess, stratosphere around me to be able to ask them for help. That's also been huge as well.

During the season, it became clear that functional org charts go hand in hand with systems and processes when scaling a business. In his episode, Shane Jaeger spoke about how his company's org chart sort of naturally evolved with its rapid growth, leaving folks with tasks and responsibilities that weren't suitable for their role in the organization. It wasn't until Shane and his team implemented the EOS system that they were able to grow sustainably.

As you're a small company, there's two or three of you in the office. And when something had to come up that had to get handled, somebody in the office would take it on and you would get some really crazy organizational charts that HR is doing payroll and they're doing technology and they're also doing the fleet stuff. And so we got real crazy stuff like that. As we grew, we didn't change it real well. Our organizational chart was very difficult to follow. It was just, you know, this person's really good at it, they like it, so let's let them do it. We had to go through a reorganization a couple years ago. Really, really helped us a lot. We used a program called Traction EOS system that really helped us a lot. I'm a big fan of it.

Of course, in order to scale your business at all, you need exceptional marketing to make the phone ring. Crystal Williams, expert marketer for the trades, encouraged contractors to define their USP unique selling position and promote the heck out of it. Here's how Crystal created and promoted the USP for her family business, McWilliams and Son.

So one of the first things that we did was identify a unique selling position. So what is our USP? What is our unique factor about McWilliams and son that's going to make us stand out so down here, down here in old Texas, guess what? We have my buddy, my buddy does AC work. My buddy this, my buddy that. So we really had to overcome the fact that there's a lot of mechanically inclined people. They can do a lot of their own work. And like many of you, lots of Chuck in a Truck style businesses. And so Trey and I literally sat down with a whiteboard and went to town just like, what can we do? So at the time, a lot of contractors were Moving to these 8:00am to 8:00pm, 8 to 8, same great rate. So we were like, you know what? The biggest time that we gain the most customers on the weekends when we do call, when our technicians are being on call. So it's a pain point internally, it's a pain point to have technicians be on call because it's a struggle of how to schedule and retain employees like that. But we also knew that that's where the greatest need was. And so we launched our campaign 7am to 7pm, seven days a week, no overtime charges. And so we launched 7, 7, 7. And so in all of my branding, I started listing 7am, 7pm, seven days a week, no overtime charges. And then I launched a radio campaign around, no matter if it's 3 o' clock on a Tuesday or 3 o' clock on a Saturday, give us a call. Same great rate. And now, like, it's kind of funny, you have these neighborhood social media groups and people will say, hey, it's Saturday afternoon and I have a family event tonight. Who can I call that's not going to charge me an arm and a leg? And like, people will comment on their. McWilliams & Son is 777, no overtime charges. McWilliams & Son. McWilliams & Son.

And naturally, after exceptional marketing, you also need to deliver an exceptional customer experience. During his episode, Eric Nack, the executive vice president and GM at Isaac Heating and Air Conditioning, encouraged listeners to not just focus on replacement opportunities, but to focus on overall home performance when servicing customers. By doing so, you'll create lifetime customers who trust you and your team.

We have a group of auditors and they're trained through bpi. We do programs through nyserda, which is a New York State energy with Development association. But we have, I believe we have about 20 auditors. So they will go out to somebody's home and they will actually do a whole bunch of measurements. Temperature, air, movement, leakage. We'll use the infrared cameras. And what we do is we basically, after they've done the visit is they will Give the homeowner a kind of a menu, and these are all the things that you can do to improve the performance of your home. This is what it will cost you to do it, this is what the savings will be, and this is your payback period. And a homeowner more or less can go through and decide, okay, I'll do 1, 3, 5, and 7 this year and I'll wait until next year to do the others. And I can do these three myself. So it just really gives homeowners an opportunity to save a lot of energy.

Ryan Lucia also goes above and beyond when serving his homeowners. During his episode, he shared that as a garage door service provider, his company has the opportunity to provide a unique and specialized service to design conscious consumers.

A lot of our competitions are sending like technicians to go to people's homes. I feel like I'm really good about helping people pick out styles, narrowing down options. And so when I would walk into a customer's home to talk about their door, it was more of a design experience, not just a garage door experience. And the garage door with a lot of people don't value is that it takes up about a third of your home's curb appeal and a lot of people just ignore that. And I think it's one of the most critical parts of your home because not only is it a third of your home, but it's what most people look at when they pull in the driveway first. And so I take a great pride in being able to take a house and take a door that looks ugly and put something beautiful on there and change the whole aesthetics. So what we've done is we've, we bought a big van and we created a mobile design showroom and we hired a lady with design background and she's now our design consultant. And so we actually book door design consultants appointments. And so we don't actually call them door measures or door quotes or anything like that. It's a consultation for design.

Whatever your differentiator happens to be. A great way to communicate it to your customers would be with email marketing, something Megan Bedford, another fantastic marketer for the trades, strongly advocated for during her episode.

I love email marketing.

It's still one of the best costs for leads that is out there.

And so one is you might be a smaller trade company that doesn't have salespeople, and you might even have salespeople. Think of email marketing as a salesperson working for you all the time. And what I mean by that is one, you can make automated emails that follow up on your estimates that you give. So every time you give an estimate, you can have an email that goes.

Out and says, hey, thanks for giving us opportunity. Here's all the reasons why we could.

Be a great fit, or you could give them a discount to encourage them to take advantage of that estimate and book the appointment. So one is salesperson follow up. It's also great communication. So what I find is a lot.

Of these businesses, like an electrician, I.

Think we use an electrician once every eight years. Okay, so you're an electrician. How are you going to ensure that customer chooses you eight years later when they need electrician?

They're probably not even going to remember you.

But if they know that you've communicated with them throughout the years with like.

Your spring newsletter and all these different.

Tips and tricks and all these things, they're going to know who you are because you just branded yourself to them for eight years through email marketing.

So that's really cool.

It's like staying relevant to somebody that was already your customer and giving them information.

Josh Crouch, founder of Relentless Digital, also suggests using video as a tool to showcase your brand message and expertise, even if it makes you uncomfortable, because the payoff is definitely worth it.

I've been trying to get my clients to do more video, which can be daunting to get them to do that. Not so much that they don't want to. It's a time thing. And then, as you know, I mean, you're on camera a lot with the different things you do it, you can get used to it. But if you're not used to it, it's a. It's a very nervous experience because you're always worried, oh, how's someone going to see me? Am I saying the right things? Do I sound intelligent? But the clients that do videos and they can do them regularly, that stuff really does well. And I do the same thing in my marketing agency. I make videos and then I put them on YouTube or Facebook and then I send the L out to people I talk to or prospects. And it's that lead nurturing, right? Giving back value. I recently just talked to a guy down in California who had tremendous. He's got like 25,000 subscribers.

Whatever marketing campaigns you run, Chisholm Brunner wants to make sure your CSRs and dispatchers know about it as well as any areas of opportunity for the call. During her episode, she shared some key insights on how good CSRs and dispatchers can make or break your business.

We know that our technicians are in a Tough job when that attic, 200 degrees or they're crawling under the floor. You can see that and we all know it. But we often forget that our dispatchers and customer service folks are in the same amount of heat. Every customer's calling's mad. Every technician is tired and they're stuck in the middle. So they really have to have that attitude to handle that. And then they're the ones making the decision because their jobs are to make sure that your company catches as many calls as possible and take care of the technicians and the team members so that they don't completely burn out. And that's a tough job. And if you get somebody in a job that doesn't care, they will run off your customers and your technicians. And a lot of that can be prevented. Like, you should have a call script. When a customer calls your office, you should have a call script that says you usually have to listen to the problem, be sympathetic, but then you got to get back to what is your address? Let me verify your telephone number, I need your email address. They have to check and go, okay, well, do they have a maintenance agreement? And this is a big one too, because people will let those last, or maybe it's just time to renew them. But those agreements kind of keep you locked in. The customer's not going to go through the phone book, right? I have a maintenance agreement. I remember that. Nice guy, comes out every six months. I'm going to call him. You can do all that on the up front. Then when you dispatch my rules, you only get one call at a time. So you give them their call and you let them know, hey, this is an 8 year old unit or last time we were out there, this happened. So if you've got a software system, obviously a lot of those help you by having the technicians, they can read, right, but they're hot and they're tired. Maybe they read, maybe they don't. A good dispatcher will help facilitate that. And they'll say, hey, remember, Ms. Jones is up for a renewal off road tour or the last time we were out there, the unit was low over refrigerant. We need to do a leak test. Those are just little pieces of information that a good dispatcher can offer that will raise your profits. It's kind of difficult because you don't as an owner, you won't see that on the P and L until that person disappears.

Post Covid a lot of contractors have reevaluated the need for physical office space. But Josh Bigelow expressed eagerness to reopen the Great Dane heating and air conditioning showroom. Once the pandemic ends. The showroom, which some of his colleagues and competitors wrote off as a waste of space, has become a brand staple within the community, providing an excellent way to engage with customers.

We'd have customers come into the showroom and they'd say, yeah, I need a new furnace. But look, I just want the most inexpensive furnace you have. We would walk them over to the one on the left. We would turn it on. It has atmospheric burners. It's very loud. It sounds like a jet turbine blower comes on. Oh, my gosh, that's loud. And well, you know, this is what every furnace that you're going to look at in this genre is going to give you. It's an atmospheric burner. It's a standard PSC motor. What you see is what you get. It is stripped down. This is no better or different than any other manufacturer that you get. And then he'd say, okay, well then talk to me about the next one. Is this one brighter? Then we'd go to a two stage 80 and then maybe do a 90 percenter with sealed combustion. Where we're at locally, a lot of people have single level homes. The furnace is in a closet right outside of the living room. And they have to turn the volume up when the furnace comes on, turn the volume down when the furnace shuts off. So for them, noise was a big concern. It's a comfort concern, not a temperature concern, but comfort. And when they got to the sealed combustion, they're like, wow, I really like that. I don't even want to talk to you about the one on the end because that really looks expensive. I'm like, that's great. You don't have to talk to me about it. But by the way, that has been the entire time that you've been in the showroom. That's when they get the look you have on your face right now and they're like, well, wait a minute. And then when they start, we start explaining that back then we had tax incentives that were available, manufacturing incentives, and when they realized it wasn't very much more per month, an extra 20, $30 a month from what they were going to spend. To them, $20 a month was well worth not having to turn the TV up and down and find the remote every time the furnace came up. So it was a unique experience.

Tersh Blissett, on the other hand, had the unique experience of proving that running a remote service company is possible and great for margins. He's been Running Service Emperor that way since the early days, mostly to prove to the listeners of his podcast Service Business Mastery, that you don't need a warehouse to be successful. Here's Tersh talking about the benefits of being fully remote.

Thinking back, most likely the reason why I decided to do it was to show everybody on the podcast because there's a lot of guys and gals on the podcast who are smaller and they feel like they have to have that warehouse or else people won't come on board with them. And so it was kind of like, all right, well, I'm going to show you how to do it without having to have a warehouse. And so then it became, well, all right, so how do I get to 5 million without a warehouse? And then how do I get to 10 million without a warehouse? And it really just out of necessity, everything that I do is extremely deliberate. And so then, like information management people were asking, well, how do you have your policies and procedures in a book that your guys can't go get? Because not only that, we moved 60 miles outside of our service area. So it's literally an hour drive if the guys wanted to come to our house to get a book to review policies and procedures. So that's a piece of cake. We just go to our website, create a subdomain, that's our din area. So then everybody on our team has a sign in a login, and they can access anything that's policy and procedure related, and then they can take a test. It's very similar to the academy where you just take a test and you see did they actually read that or did they not? And that's how we solve that problem where not only that, we don't print paper. That's an expense we don't have to deal with. We don't have a warehouse that's $2,500 a month that I don't have to pay out. So then I can give it to my team. We have nicer vans because of that, we don't have to pay for all those other expenses. And so then people were like, well, what about trash? Well, then I negotiated with all of our vendors, like, hey, if you want my business, I have to be able to dump all my trash in your dumpster. So then we got to doing that, and then we got to doing remote inventory, and then we truck replenishment came on board with Service Titan. So then it's like, oh, sweet. Every Monday we get to do truck replenishment. So instead of having to use a third party inventory management for the service techs, then we're able to use this program that's already built into it. And it's just really, we wouldn't be able to do it if we had the old server that had to sit in the office somewhere. But technology's there.

However you choose to set up your office or run your business, Trevor Lively wants to make sure you have a succession plan in place place. After his father, the founder of Blue Jay Irrigation, got an unexpected cancer diagnosis, Trevor and his team had to quickly react to get his affairs in order. Unfortunately, after his father's death, there were still some loose ends that needed tying up. Trevor specifically came on the podcast to caution other contractors about this risk.

My biggest message to people is just, it's never too early to start thinking about a succession plan, start thinking about a catastrophe plan. What happens if you get in a car accident and you're in a coma for three months? Or what if you go in for a routine surgery and there's complications and now all of a sudden you're out for six months? Or what happens if you get in a car accident and die? What does your family do? How does your business continue to operate? Who's going to step up into that leadership role and keep things moving forward? You have the need for a professional executor for your affairs, not only personally, but professionally. There's a lot of questions that happen through this. And even though I'm a young guy in Knock on Wood, I hope I have many years ahead of me. I've been through this experience where things just quickly changed on us. I'm already starting to have these conversations and starting to put these plans in place so that my team at Blue Jay knows if something were to happen to me, here's the steps, here's what's going to happen, here's the process. For my wife, if something happens to me, here's the steps, here's who you contact, here's the process so that we're taking the stress and the unknowns out of the equation. It's a very simple, straightforward plan so that Blue Jay and my team and all our staff are secure and can continue to operate. But at the same time, my family is also secure and taken care of.

Speaking of security and being taken care of, Brian Cohen from SF&P Advisors offered some some sage advice about selling your business during this season of the podcast. The biggest takeaway, always, always get multiple offers for your business to get the true market value. Here's Brian.

You need to be represented properly so that you get Your fair market value. Again, every transaction has its own fingerprint, and I'm not saying they don't. But if you haven't gotten multiple offers, you're not being represented by somebody who knows what the market will bear and has the relationships with the buyers so that the buyers can't play games with you. These are some of the things that happen. All right, listen, I'm a buyer. I want to make friends with a seller. I want to take you out. I want to get to know you. I want you to be able to get to know us. I want to try and develop that chemistry. And then I'm going to put an offer out there for you and hope that it works. Well, most of the times we say those offers really weren't fair market offers, they wind up coming in less than what they would if they knew that they were competing to buy your business. If they're not competing, they are not going to be pushed to maximize what their offer is. Okay, so now you do this deal right with this company, this buyer that's been wining and dining you, and they've been picking up all the dinners. Well, in hindsight, those dinners cost you hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars potentially at every one, because they didn't give that to you in purchase price. So you just got to be careful. You got. We've saved this a lot, and I'm saying it for a second time, you really have one time to make this really good deal for yourself.

If by any chance any or all of these topics we covered on this season of Toolbox for the Trades seem daunting or overwhelming, consider the. One of the biggest impacts you can make for your business today, right now, is to commit in investing in yourself. Seriously. And if you don't believe me, talk to Keith Mercurio.

The number one hurdle an owner needs to overcome is themselves. And I mean, that can have as little or as much meaning as you want. But the reality is that what I've witnessed inside of most leadership anywhere, regardless of the industry, is that people are consistently wanting to. They say, like, my team doesn't get it and I can't find good people. And they're constantly looking externally at the factors that are limiting their growth in our industry. It's very clear that people will say the number one constraint to growth is talent. Everybody kind of just generally agrees on this. And yet I just finished my role consulting with the leadership team at Radiant Plumbing and Brad and Sarah Casebier down in Austin, Texas. Well, Brad and Sarah Tastebier just went from 20 million in revenue in 2019 to 38 million in 2020 during a pandemic, hired 100 people. So yes, there is a lack of available talent. And part of that is because people who are truly talented in their leadership are creating an absolute siphon of that talent where they're running downhill into their businesses. And that's why they're expanding the way that they are. Brad and Sarah Kspier are two people who their journey had an exponential trajectory when they decided they were going to invest in themselves in their own personal growth and development. These are people that absolutely made a commitment to their own growth and then in turn invested in the growth of their leadership team. And that's in large part, I mean, they got a lot of great things going for them. They're in a good market, they've got a great brand that they've built. I mean, a lot of great stuff. But there's no question, you look at their history and their trajectory, it's like a hockey stick type of a curve. When they got serious about investing in themselves as human beings, owners are the number one constraint of their own success. And people who are consistently if somebody thinks it's somebody else but them, then that's the sure sign it is them.

That's it for Season three of Toolbox for the Trades. Remember, if you enjoyed this season, please, please, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or share this episode with a friend. We also have a Facebook group called Toolbox for the Trades, and I'd love it if you join. We'll be back Tuesday, August 3rd with a new episode.

Ever wonder how much your business is worth? So many owners ask that question and have no idea where to turn for an answer. In just a few clicks, Service Titan's new Service Business Valuation Calculator can give you an easy and free estimate of the current value of your business. Whether you're thinking about selling your company or looking to track growth, check it out now. Visit servicetitan.com again. That's servicetitan.com value see how much your business is worth today. Want to network with fellow service entrepreneurs and former guests of this podcast? Join our private Facebook group Toolbox for the Trades to get immediate access to the best tips, tricks and tactics from fellow service entrepreneurs. Visit facebook.com group toolbox for the Trades or click the link in our Show Notes to join. See you you online.