Why Lack of Process Optimization Hurts Growing Businesses | Podcast Ep. 208 | Toolbox for the Trades

Hello contractors and welcome to Toolbox for the Trades. My name is Jackie Aubel and today I spoke with Dan Lazette, the director of process improvement at Madioni Plumbing Heating and Cooling. We spoke about, you guessed it, processes, specifically the systems Dan put in place to grow the call center from three to 14 employees. Dan shares his insight on scaling for growth, bonus programs that actually work and more during this knowledge packed episode. Enjoy. Dan Lizette, you are the director of process improvement at Madioni Plumbing Heating and Cooling in Southeastern Pennsylvania. Today you and I are going to be talking about tips for setting up systems and processes to scale a business and the benefits of hiring outside of the industry. Welcome to Toolbox for the Trades.

Thanks for having me, Jackie. Appreciate it.

I don't think I told you this in any of our pre interviews or anything, but you definitely have like perfect radio voice. Perfect radio voice. So between the two of us, we should maybe start a talk show or something.

Let's do it. I'm game.

All right, Dan, I'm going to kick us off with an icebreaker as my favorite one. I've been bringing it back recently. What song, if any, would be the soundtrack of your life?

And that's a such a tough question, Jackie. I mean a little peek behind the curtain I guess for everybody. I knew that one was coming and I've been thinking about it in depth for, for a week since you sent that over and I'm afraid I've not really come up with a really good answer. So I'm going to take a little bit of a easy out. You mentioned radio voice. I have been a mobile disc jockey for over 25 years. I specialize in weddings and recently somebody sent to me the top 10 list of the most popular songs played at weddings. I've actually got that here in front of me and I'm thinking this would probably be the soundtrack of my life given how many weddings I've DJed over my career. So number one if you're interested, I want to dance with somebody, Whitney Houston. So will take that as my the top of my frequently played list if you will.

That's actually one a fantastic song like that is. So we we bonded over this a bit when Dan and I first met back when I was in college, I was in catering and so I have been to more catered celebrations than you guys have any idea. Like Truly and Earth, Wind and Fire, September. Like that song.

It's number five.

That's number five, right. It makes me so, so mad anytime I hear it. It just makes Me so mad and because it's been drilled into my brain. But I Want to Dance With Somebody is such a beautiful song. And no matter how many times I've heard that, I do not get tired of it.

That's true. And I played at this five of these top 10. I think I've played at almost every single wedding I've done. And that's a lot of weddings. So it's a good list.

Is there anyone in the top 10 that you cannot stand? Is there is. Do you have a September that you just cannot stand?

I got a feeling Black Eyed Peas is number six. I think that one has kind of been played out in my mind at this point. Low from Flo rida is number 10. Another one that I think is just probably overdone a bit.

Well, now that we've settled that, let's get into business.

Let's do it.

So, Dan, tell me, how did you get into the trades and eventually find yourself at Maddy Oni?

Sure. I got into the trades back in early 2021. Previously I was with the decennial census. The 2020 decennial census. I was an area out of the Philadelphia area office. And as many know, the Census Bureau hires literally over a million people to do this temporary work. And the role I had at the time was also temporary. After exploring options to be pulled on permanently by the Census Bureau, that didn't work out. I was, I guess you could say, somewhat recruited. But I had applied prior to the Census Bureau nearly three years prior to Maddy, only Plumbing, Heating and Cooling, who at the time had posted a vacancy for a call center manager. Three years after I had put that application and resume in. And actually just days after I found out I was not going to be picked up permanently by the Census Bureau, Mattioni called me and asked if I was still available in the job market for the role I'd actually applied for years prior. That started a series of interviews and in mid April of 2021, I joined and completely, for the first time, dipped my toe into the trades as a call center manager.

Amazing. And also, I have to say, when you first told me this, I was like, there's so there's hope out there for folks who have submitted their resumes.

If you ever get that response. Yeah, it was the first time and only time in my career you get the response if you don't get an opportunity that you've gone for and they say, we'll keep your resume on file. Thanks for applying. This one actually was true. And somebody actually did pull it out. Of a folder from years prior to offer me the opportunity. So it's. It technically does happen.

That is incredible. Incredible. And so happy that you are now here at maddyone. So you've done some really tremendous things. We're recording this at the end of 2024 and you joined in 2021, so it's only been about three years. So before we even get into how you've kind of optimized, especially the call center at Maddione. Can you just tell us what type of work Maddione does?

Maddione is plumbing, heating and cooling. Those are the prime business units, if you will. Some smaller ones like sewer we do as well. Kind of an offshoot of plumbing, but H Vac service, H Vac sales, H Vac installation, plumbing service, sewer service are sort of our main business units as set up in Service Titan. Those are sort of our pillars of the industry. We are a third generation family owned company. It has been around since 1948. This is year 76 at this point. And we have remained family owned all through, you know, recent changes in the industry in terms of ownership and investment and things of that nature. And we're super proud of that. When I joined the company in 2021, I was employee number 5152 and we've more than doubled that since that point. So we're on growth trajectory and it's a great company to be a part of.

Awesome, awesome. All right, Very, very cool. So mostly residential service and replacement, right?

Correct. Sorry, yes.

All right. No, no, no problem. We Service Titan now covers like we have customers in all areas, so I would love to clarify that at the top. So when you first joined the call center, you recognized a lot of opportunity for growth. So how did you go about transforming it?

When I first started here, like I said, a company just more than four dozen employees. Maddyoni did spend a good number of years as sort of a mom and pop with a few extra helpers, if you will. And they had a lot of processes. And in my few years in the trades, you know, doing things like Pantheon and some nexstar events, I've met and talked to a number of owners or senior people in organizations who have sort of struggled through this, where being a smaller organization, how do you scale into something larger and more expandable? And so many of the challenges that I've seen sort of on the ground level come with processes or with policies that really probably weren't needed. When you had three plumbers and three H Vac techs and, you know, you had Five trucks. And things were just easily resolved around the breakfast table before we all set out on the road in the morning. But when you start scaling into 50, 60, 70 employees, then a lot of things need to be put in place. And those things weren't in place at the day I started. There were two CSRs and myself today, just to sort of talk about, preview the journey we're about to dive into here. The department now has 14 people when it started at three. And you can see how a lot, as you scale to that type of level, a lot of things were missing from basic documentation to basic policies and procedures, to hierarchical opportunities for folks. And all of this had to be done to get to where we are now.

So three to 14 people in the call center just in three years. It's really incredible. I just want to let you know, that's like very, very, very, very cool. I am not someone where documentation comes easy to me. So, like, this is also like a bit of a selfish question here. I'm always asking questions to help our audience at large, but this is something I really struggle with. How do you even go about tackling the documentation process?

Right. So for me, the easiest way to tackle the documentation process, at least for me, was when I first came in. I sat with a lot of people who were in certain positions, our service managers at the time, those few individuals that were in the call center. And I took copious notes for myself to understand the processes and policies that were in place, the ins and outs of Service titan a la 2021, and basically just sort of took all my own notes. And it was those notes that became the basis of the documentation. Because as somebody new to the company, especially somebody new to the trades, that was learning these things for the first time. The notes and the learning process I was going through was what I ultimately wanted to end up documenting for that, you know, when we move from three to 14, those new individuals who joined the the team, the department organization could follow sort of the same path of learning that I did that would evolve over time from initial documentation of what things are to refinement in terms of clarity of, you know, job types we accept or clarity on. You know, I have a some documentation in place for new individuals who are new to the industry. Just basic Google Image search and definitions and things to sort of get people familiar with. So you sort of start with basic learning and then you just sort of on. And much of 2022, I had my whole team saying, you know, if you ask a question that is not documented, I'm going to send you the answer and then I'm going to convey that into a new page in our notebook. And so I was using responses to questions that I got and that also became documentation. So from my initial training to responses to questions asked of me, those both bore out the, the extensive documentation we've put together over the last few years.

Okay, follow up question. How do you keep that documentation up to date? Because especially 3 to 14, like that's a pretty significant growth for a team. And I can imagine it can be very tempting to get lost in the day to day operations and not revisit that documentation. And then oh crap, it's been, you know, a year, year and a half, two years and this documentation is incredibly out of date. So how do you keep on top of that?

So one thing we started and this was actually a somewhat newer implementation over the summer we actually now have SOR of There's two different things we do. One, we have periodic team meetings, right? Ours are every other Thursday at 2 o'. Clock. We did a study and realized our lowest incoming volume was 2 o' clock on Thursdays. That was the lowest hour of incoming calls. So that's when we decided to hold our 30 minute team meeting. Usually we try to the best of our ability if the, if the agenda allows it to make an item of our agenda to be a review of documentation. So we pick a page. We have what's called our call taker notebook. Currently we're using OneNote Office 365 product OneNote as the basis of our documentation. We're actually in the process of transitioning that over to tranual, another sort of web based documentation product that is, is very cool that I'm just digging into in the last few months. But we would go through every one of these team meetings a particular topic where I would just discuss sort of the major tenants of it, ask everyone any feedback, anybody thought that anything needed to be updated, so on and so forth and then the other one that was periodic and not as consistent as we would have liked. So the other thing we started to do, unfortunately I think human nature is we would. We've created so much wonderful and amazing documentation over the last few years. The problem is now it is voluminous and oftentimes getting people to go to it and to find those answers is the challenge. So now what we do is almost have like a notebook Friday every Friday by end of shift on Friday, every one of our CSRs is required to send a little paragraph summary of a notebook page that they Reviewed and doesn't have to be anything fancy. They just have to review a page in the notebook, read it through, and just do a three to four sentence summary, send it to my supervisor to sort of demonstrate their understanding. And that is also the vehicle that they could provide any feedback if they notice or catch anything that's out of date. And then, of course, as I've been able to over the years, I will pop into different pages as I'm making different updates and edits and things of that nature. I'll review sort of pages that are connected to it to ensure accuracy. That said, you're always chasing that beast. There's always something that's maybe out of date, but I think as long as it can be more accurate than not, we're probably doing something right.

Yeah. All right. Oh, gosh. So you're actually embedding the review of this into your regular meeting cadences and task assignments for the various members of your team?

Absolutely. It's gotten so large that not one person can sort of be a product owner for it. I've got different roles. Right. In our call center, we have our inside sales rep, our cso, as well as, you know, our dispatchers. So I do sort of focus each one of them on pages in the notebook relevant to them to ensure, since they're obviously the experts in those roles, they're doing the work day to day and they're sort of primary on those pages or sections of the notebook. But all of us sort of try to keep an eye through those. Those vehicles to make sure things are current.

Okay, very cool. Is there anything that you know to like so you get someone like me, very like, I love immediate gratification. I love being able to just like quickly like, boom, boom, boom. And then you get kind of these maintenance tasks, like, how do you incentivize people to actually do them? And I'm asking genuinely for me, because this is something I struggle with so, so hard.

Right. So I'm not sure if that was two questions, but I'm going to take it as two. So the first one, in terms of immediate gratification, in terms of being able to find the answers. So both onenote and Tranual, as we're making that transition, are phenomenal products that have fe a search that's effectively instant. So oftentimes you can search for one word. So if there's a question about a membership issue, you can type in the word membership and it will show you the six pages where memberships mentioned, highlighted, be able to tab through. So during our onboarding and training process of somebody new to the department. We always make sure to show them how quick it is, how easy it is and the best tools to comb through all the documentation that exists so that they're able to find that and hopefully be able to go to that as an initial resource versus, you know, peppering myself or my supervisor with questions on, you know, a day to day. One of the biggest challenges I think we have is especially for newer CSRs, they're alive in the moment with a question. They are being faced with a contentious situation from a customer who may be not having a great day or experience up to this point and they want to know X and the answer is there for them, but they need to know where to go and find that. So I think that part of the training and showing them how they can find things quickly but also tying that discomfort that they have when they are faced with those situations is also the incentive for that tedious work on the Friday when they have to do a review of the page. This also helps them keep their knowledge and experience top of mind and have more of an instant recall either of the actual response or at least where to go because they reviewed that page this previous Friday or two Fridays ago so they know where to go to look for something. So the motivator there I think is a combination between their own comfort in doing their own work and that is been mostly successful for us up to this point. There's always one or two where we're constantly prodding to, to do this but. And sounds like you might be one of those two, Jackie.

I am. So you use these tools called OneNote and Tranul. Okay. Essentially. So they're like, they're kind of like this wiki or like intranet for your team essentially of a sort, yeah.

OneNote is the Microsoft 365 product. Right. Their note taking product that you're able to create pages and sections and insert images and PDFs and things of that nature. It's been great for us up to a point. But Trendule is a new one that is a web based product that really kind of goes much, much further in terms of documentation allowing you to embed all kinds of things, link within pages. It's got a whole hierarchy of topics, sections and really even has an accountability feature, teams and structures and how to disseminate the quizzes that you can integrate in terms to gauge how much people are really sort of absorbing of the information. So we're only just in the last few months really digging into Tranual and converting some of our existing documentation over to that tool. But to be honest with you, where we stand right now in Maddyoni Plumbing, Heating and Cooling, in terms of documentation is we have little pockets of the company where they excel more at documentation than others. And so Tranul, we hope, is a tool that's going to allow all departments and all folks to come aboard the documentation train, making it a bit easier to do that. You can even record a video session or screen, share inside tranule and share that directly. And just a lot of enhancements over, you know, a more basic notebook type function that we've used to date.

Awesome. Yeah, that was actually one of my questions. So not to throw any of your other departments under the bus. Is the call center the most. And also little highlight here to you. You are no longer in char of the call center. You are the director of process improvement. So that tells me that you're trying to basically duplicate what you've done with a call center for other areas of.

The business in a lot of ways. Right? Yeah. And if anybody listening or watching right now hears of that title, and yes, it's been made up, we made it up. And the reason it is, I think, is a lot of the things that I've done in the call center, I think our ownership is interested in me sort of focusing some of those same efforts, documentation being one of those areas, but process in general across the various departments that could use some assistance with. With those types of improvements. And documentation is a big one. And yes, I would say the call center is probably near the top of the list in terms of departments that have existing documentation. That said, just to be clear, it's not perfect and it definitely could use some improvement. But I would say that it's closer to ideal than some of our other areas that I think we would like to see improvement on. We've been sort of caught a time or two in the past 12 months with maybe somebody departing the company and come to find out they took a lot of knowledge with them and we've sort of had to scramble a bit to be able to recover the institutional knowledge that walked out the door along with them. And one of my big sort of personal challenges to myself as I move forward in this new role is to sort of eliminate as much of that as possible and to make succession planning and people new to certain roles have a much more successful transition because there is this wealth of documentation and people who can just slide into a chair and achieve as opposed to scramble and try to figure out what my predecessor who's now long gone was doing.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. I, if I could, if snapping translated through podcasts, I would do that right now because that is definitely something that we've heard on the show time and time again how important this is to keeping a company's growth at a nice rate and being able to scale effectively. So I love this. Another thing that kind of came up when you were doing the call that we were kind of revitalizing, all this documentation is you were able to create this hierarchy of career development. So can you tell me a little bit about how that works for the call center and how this motivates folks to kind of stay engaged at maddyone and see where their career could take them if they choose to stay?

Absolutely. One one of the things I've always believed in and has been something that was very important to me in prior roles, prior companies, has been the ability to start with an organization and potentially move on or move up to, you know, higher paying positions, more responsibility, career growth. Right. Progression. And I noticed as I described it back in 2021, you know, as only myself and 2C, there was limited options at that point for anyone to be able to sort of have a trajectory forward. Not to say nothing, there certainly were some options, but they were obviously somewhat limited. As we continued to grow and headcount additions became real as the company was more successful for, you know, a ton of different reasons. I wanted to make sure that in the headcount that was being added to the call center, that there became a variety of roles and a variety of options where somebody could sort of come in the door as a customer service representative. And when they came in, they could look around and see, whoa, that person used to be a csr. That person used to be a csr. Now they're this, now they're dispatcher, now they're service manager, now, you know, so on and so forth. And I wanted to make sure that that path was clear to folks and that they, they felt like they had those opportunities that came from everything, from the establishment for the first time of bringing back an inside sales representative position that existed years ago and had been retired. So we brought that back. We also created, I've alluded to a couple of times already, a call center supervisor. I think a lot of people listening probably have a call center manager. I wonder, do you have a call center supervisor? I can tell you as somebody who was a call center manager in that growth team, right when I had two CSRs, three CSRs, four CSRs, things were okay today. As we're constructed, we have eight CSRs, four dispatchers and ISR. And at that point, like the volume of work, the number of calls coming into the call center, just the ability to even do things like listen to calls just starts to go away, right? You start to become overburdened. And I know we'll do a wink and a head nod here, Jackie. I know service titans working on a whole bunch of things to be able to help call center managers with things like this, but two or three years ago, those type of things were not yet a reality. And so I pressed to have a call center supervisor place. And not only did that allow me to be more productive and effective in my role with efforts like documentation, but also allowed me to share the burden of some necessary activities that I just didn't have time for and also provided yet another tier on that ladder of promotable roles for folks to see. So my call center supervisor today as we exist, she is, was our longest tenured call center employee. She was a CSR for nearly five years. She moved on to the call center supervisor and we talked briefly about my new role with the company. And as of the end of 2024, she will be the new call center manager. Something I'm extremely proud of to see that when I started she was one of those two CSRs. And now as I'm, you know, moving on from the call center to help out in other areas, she will be the new call center manager. So it's been a big focus. We created another role called senior csr, which is basically a lead csr. I've heard it referred to as that as well. So of our eight CSRs, one of them is designated a lead or senior CSR. This is sort of a staging area, if you will, for our potential next dispatcher, our next ISR or our next supervisor as that senior csr. So we have four or five different levels within the call center to create that sort of upward mobility for people to look at, you know, their entry as a CSR to the company as a potential start to a career path that, that hopefully they're super excited about.

Awesome, awesome. Really cool. And actually I. What is an isr? I've never heard that term before.

Inside sales rep. Inside sales representative. So these are the folks that are following up typically with left estimates. So when our plumbers, our H Vac tech, are leaving options that are not sold on the day of those that are unsold, we have a 48 hour turn and then we actually use some various third party products to Follow up with a text message for the left estimate. If we get a positive response or even a negative response, our inside sales rep will step in, sort of engage the customer on any questions they have and figure out why they didn't move forward that day in the home. It could be concerns about timing future projects that the homeowner might have price, of course, and then start to have that conversation and try to recover that sale for the estimates that it left left. And she works that process and she's done an exceptional work. I know there's a lot of discussions about KPIs for an inside sales representative that, that I've heard, but she has. She'll be approaching probably $700,000 in revenue captured as an inside sales representative. And that's following the technician's departure from the home.

It is a tip as old as time. It is. Follow up on your open estimates. Oh my goodness. You are like leaving money on the table when you are not engaging in that. That so 100%. So you were able to also implement a KPI and bonus program for the call center. So tell us a bit about that program and what benefits it provides.

I think that when I came in, I sort of was giving a bit of a carte blanche to design the call center in. In a way, to me that made sense. And one of my first challenges was to create metrics for the call center representatives, the CSRs, customer service reps. There really wasn't any. And the ones that were there I personally had some prior objections to or didn't feel were necessarily of the most value. For example, just to give you one example, sometimes I hear of call centers inside and outside the industry will often monitor talk time and try to coach customer service representatives to a particular talk time. These calls should be under three minutes or four minutes or five minutes. That is not a metric in my call center. I do not believe it. I do not think that is a valuable metric. When somebody calls into Maddy only Plumbing, heating and Cooling, I want our customer service reps to engage with that custom as long as necessary to make them feel confident that their choice and service provider was the right one and to ultimately book that job. And personally, I don't care if that takes 3 minutes, 5 minutes, or 8 minutes, as long as they are booking that job, that's the most important thing. So jobs booked is how I decided one of our metrics would be number of inbound calls, number of outbound calls, jobs booked. And then we use Phones Pro through the integration with Dialpad. And there was A metric provided of missed calls, Right? These are calls that ring out that were not answered by the customer service rep. We do provide a hybrid work environment here at Maddy Oni. So our call center representatives do spend two days at home and three days in the office. So to ensure that they're always attentive to the ringing phone, we also include the missed calls metric as well. So what I did was create basically a formula that combined inbound, outbound and jobs booked in just in terms of sheer quantity. And then we put a multiplier on jobs booked that weighted that more because, frankly, the most important metric is jobs being booked, right? So the trucks keep rolling, the technicians keep having work. And then we did a, you know, a negative factor on that, that missed call. And then that created what I dubbed the CSR performance score. So this created a scale, created a real number. So it started out with a scale that was like the number was nine was the average. And then it. We actually now our minimum required is a 10 and a half on the CSR performance score. And that's a combination of inbound, outbound, jobs book with that negative for mis per hour. So that's what that number is really saying is it's basically a representation of a combination of those factors as a per hour average. And we have things like time credit. So if we put somebody on a special project, that time won't count against them, but otherwise it's hours work during their. Their work week, and raw accounts from each one of those average into this number. So we rolled this out, and then we ended up creating a bonus program. If you scaled certain amount above a minimum metric or, you know, even more so, or even more so, you could earn a bonus in your paycheck. And we did it each pay period, and we did that for about six or seven months. People really got into the program. And of course, we were tracking our CSR performance score, not just individually, but as a department. It became part of a scorecard for me as the call center manager and the supervisor to see that metric continually move forward. After six to eight months of having this program in bet, we actually enhanced this. Unfortunately, we felt the need to kind of go on the other side of the equation as well and attach what we call progressive discipline to those underperforming. So if somebody was not making enough inbound calls or answering enough or booking enough jobs, and it was a. Had a lot of room for coaching and conversations and, you know, performance improvement, you know, before more serious measures were taken, a KPI and a metric in A program that had both rewards and incentive for over performance of expectation, as well as some stick, if you will, on the carrot and stick metaphor for underperformance, created a program that ultimately, I believe when we started this was probably middle of 2020. Average CSR performance score was somewhere around 8.8. And I think last, last couple of pay periods, we've been over 13 now. So as a department we have elevated every, every individual's performance up in our production. I mean we continually set regular monthly records for job books, outbound calls made, so on and so forth. So it's really worked out very well for the team and hopefully the organization as a whole.

Amazing way to go. And this is a program, by the way, that you kind of mimicked out of your previous work, correct?

Right. So I came from a company that was more of a production based environment. It was more data collection, wasn't a true call center per se, but it was very much production based and people had to regularly produce widgets, work items, if you will. And it was modeled after this type of system where basically we were sort of creating a new metric out of counting, you know, some of the most important elements of the production of each role. And we sort of just adapted that from where I came from, from. And it's something that once explained to folks, they understand, they understand what's important, what's weighted and they understand how to sort of even. It gives our customer service reps a real legitimate feeling of controlling their income. And there are other programs out there. Nexstar has something called Win the Day that imagine a number of people listening to may be familiar with. And I always had some disagreements with that particular idea and the concept. There was more where if we as a company, you know, achieved a certain level of performance on the day, then everyone got to share in it. I don't inherently have an issue with that concept, but when I'm coaching or mentoring a customer service rep, they're like, how can I help with that? And so it was important for me in creating this program and in adapting where I came from that it directly show them, here's how you can impact it, here's what you can do to achieve and go above and beyond. And I think that's why the program's been a success.

Yeah, on one hand I, I do understand like, okay, if the company wins, we all win type of thing, but on the other hand it won't necessarily have the type of impact that your program will have because there's only so much that the call center can control. I mean, you can book every single call. You can, you know, set, set everyone up for success, but you still, you lose control after a certain point. So you don't necessarily have that immediate oh wow, I did a good job. So now I'm seeing the financial benefit.

Exactly. And that's exactly it. And to be clear, when I did this, if somebody is listening and thinking about, you know, maybe there's a way I could adapt something like this into my own call center. What I would encourage you to do is sort of look at if. Let's assume for a second you have some type of bonus or KPI or metric where you could reward a CSR for something. Maybe it is win the day or something similar, you know, sharing in an overall company success. I'd encourage you to look back at the last 12 to 24 months of that program and see what you are sort of outlaying in terms of expense for that and use that as if you will, your budget budget for your new program tied more directly to exactly what a CSR does. So this doesn't inherently have to mean that you have to go handing out bonuses to CSRs more. But what we found here was that if you sort of do it in a reasonable way from a cost perspective, that it self motivates them to produce more work that ultimately leads to that higher company success anyways. So I believe that I actually ended up installing a program that was probably more rewarding for the individuals that that that are a part of it, but ultimately actually probably saved the company some money in terms of, you know, a win the day share, if you will, for the csr. So it's the ultimate win win if you can achieve something like that. I'm pretty sure that's what we were able to land on here.

All right, awesome. Very, very cool. So if you could go back in time and give Dan advice, In April of 2021, when you first joined Maddy Oni, what would you say to yourself.

Get ready, get ready for this ride? I think one of the things is that this is what you make of it. One of the coolest things about being a part of Mattioni, being a part of the trades in general is that, you know, I came from a much larger corporate world, if you will, or the US government in terms of the decennial census. Both of those organizations, they had a lot of things in place. And when you were a part of them, I don't think you were ever. You ever think about why they were. You were just told this is the process this is the procedure. This is what you follow when you're in the trades or you're in a growing organization that has been on sort of the growth ride that we've been. You get an opportunity to sort of have that conversation with your teammates, with the management team, with, you know, your peers in the group to decide like, which of these elements that you're familiar with that you've been a part of. You know, whether it be an attendance policy, a KPI, a metric, you know, documentation, process, whatever it is, and say, what is the best of what I've seen and how could that be applied here to all of our current benefits? And I've never been able to be at that juncture because of the larger organizations. They're just sort of put upon you and then you're told this is what you're going to administer. But being able to be in a position to make those decisions on what goes in, how it goes in, what the design of a KPI program is a bonus program. It's enthralling tons of professional gratification for me on this ride. And yeah, I would have just told myself, get ready, because it's going to be a lot of things.

I'm so happy that, that you said that. I knew you were going spoiler alert. I kind of knew he was going to say something like that. But, you know, going back to this trend we're seeing with more and more trade businesses taking people from outside of the industry, how it can be. So it can be rewarding for them because if you're used to a corporate, more bureaucratic landscape where you're kind of maybe more of a cog in a wheel, you don't really see that impact. But at a company like Maddy Oni, you can actually really take exactly what you said, take the best of what you've seen out there and imp. And actually like have your fingerprints on it, so to speak. So to that point, are you looking to hire more people that aren't from the industry?

Yeah, I would think so. I mean, we are always looking, right. It is a delicate balance. We spoke earlier about how within the call center especially that the internal promotional opportunities were so, so important to me in terms of being a member of the management team. That said, as an external. Right. Somebody who nearly four years ago came in from a completely different industry and somebody who sits on a lot of interview panels here, even for other roles within the company. I am a personal testimony. And to be fair, there are several of my colleagues here as well at Maddy Oni that are personal testimonies for what value that can be brought in from somebody who has non industry experience. Obviously it's a tougher hill for them to climb in terms of familiarity with the language, with the lingo, things of that nature. But that does come in time. But the bringing to the table the ideas and experiences of somebody who's been a part of sometimes much larger organizations are very different. Industries can really be invaluable because if you kept those doors closed and you're only looking within yourselves the whole time, where are the new ideas going to come from? Where are the new perspectives going to come from? Where are the improvements that you never would have thought of are going to come from? The fact of the matter is that they probably won't happen and unfortunately it's probably a very rough ride I think for folks who stay closed off to external candidates with other industry experience because I don't know, I don't know where the new ideas would come from.

Dan, this has been so, so helpful. Probably one of the easier interviews I've ever done because you just know exactly what you knew exactly what you were going to say. You shared so much knowledge here. So thank you for your time and I hope to maybe see you again on Toolbox for the trades.

Awesome. Thank you, Jack.