Building a “Humble Heroes” Sales Culture with Michael Flores (Ep. 246)

We're big proponents of Predictive Index. I know other people use DiSC or some other assessment tool, but for us, the strategists, the mavericks, the captains, the venturers, the persuaders, they all tend to make great salespeople. That's not the only ticket in. You got to have a really great attitude. It is about aptitude and attitude together. You got to look at both, but we have a really awesome recruiting team as well. Spent a few years really building up a great recruiting presence. So we're always recruiting.

Welcome everybody to another episode of the Wealthy Contractor Podcast. This is Brian Kaskavalciyan, and with me today is Michael Flores from Expo Home. Michael, welcome.

Hello, Brian. How are you?

Good.

Good.

We were just— I was just telling you that this is like— should have happened like 2 years ago, but here we are now.

Yep. Better late than never.

And, yeah, better late than never. Michael, tell everybody, you have a great story. Tell everybody, kind of give everybody like the 2-3 minute back version on, on your story.

I kind of fell into construction by accident. My whole life was really commercial construction. Didn't grow up in the home improvement business at all. Worked for very large companies like Honeywell and Johns Controls and other companies like that. And, um, and I found, um, um, Expo Home Improvement. Actually was called Window Expo and Bath Expo at the time. When I got laid off, I got laid off from, uh, from my job. I was, uh, growing a company here in the Texas area, and, uh, all of a sudden, uh, they, uh, they had a change in leadership and, and decided to move on without me. So that's how I, uh, I came to know Paul Dietzler. Paul Dietzler is the CEO of Expo Home Improvement and co-owner along with myself. And, and so he had gone through something very similar a few years before me. He was second in command at Omni Hotels and also got that call that nobody wants to get. And so he had a change of leadership there as well and purchased the small little home improvement company. And so both of us didn't have this background. And here we are running this company and started off, you know, very small. And now we're very sizable, have over 300 employees. Wow. In 4 locations, actually 5 locations, just 4 with brick and mortar. And considering the expansion as well. And it's finally starting to get fun. Well, good.

Well, it's funny because I met Paul probably I want to say within a year of him buying the window business.

Okay.

And just kind of watching over the years what he was able to do. And then when you came into the business and what you guys have done together. But it was, it was really interesting because he did not have any home improvement experience, no background at all in the industry, came from the hotel business as an executive. And at first, you know, you kind of like, you know, you talk with people and you're just not sure, you know, is it going to work? Is this going to work? But what do you— what I think both of you guys brought to, to the business is that, that discipline from being a C-suite executive, which we don't see a lot in this industry.

And yeah.

Yeah. And so, yeah, so it's pretty incredible what you guys have done. How many salespeople?

So we're hovering around that 75 mark. And so, yeah, we continue to grow and it's been fun.

Well, let's go. I want to go back. I want to go back to when you came into the business. Can you give us an idea of how big was the business when you came in?

Yeah, so we were just under $20 million in annual revenues at that point in time. And Paul hired me as the director of sales. So, I've, I've been selling, I grew up on the sales side of the construction business my whole life. Like I said, most of it was B2B. And so, but I know, I know how to sell. And, so I came in and, and, we very quickly, grew, sales, installed some processes. I, my job was to really mentor the sales managers that were here in place and put in process, put in structure, put in rigor and discipline, and start to, start to grow the business. So that was in 2018. And then we were able to expand locations. So we grew to San Antonio in that timeframe. So we were in Dallas and Austin and in San Antonio. It was really, really hard to, you know, start to think in terms of B2C. But the process is the same, right? You're just working with people to try to serve their needs.

Yeah. So what are some of the things that you did where, you know, talking about sales, you know, sales, I always say sales is the core of this business. Production, you know, production is kind of— should be the quote unquote easy part because that's a lagging thing, you know, it's like I sold something. Okay, now I've got 4 weeks to figure out how to get it installed. So that should be fairly simple to accomplish. The hardest part of the business is leads.

Yeah, marketing is, is the key. And we, we have found that out the kind of the hard way.

Yep. We all have.

Yeah, absolutely.

You're not the only one.

When you look at the complexity of marketing in this industry, from lead generation and brand brand awareness and, you know, getting higher intent leads in the hands of great salespeople. I mean, that is, that's the secret sauce. Oh yeah. And it's a complicated algorithm. It's 3-dimensional chess to try to figure all that out. You know, you see, you go through the, you know, the different lead sources, aggregators, all the way through branded leads and different levels of intent. And of course, we're, we're also a Jacuzzi dealer and 3 of our markets, so we buy leads from them as well. And those are, you know, some are really great and some are more of a lower intent, but trying to get that mix right and get the leads assigned to the A and B sales reps, boy, what a complicated algorithm that is.

Yeah. But what a great job Dave Azor's doing, huh?

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Wow. We love the relationship we have with with Jacuzzi. And, you know, we obviously have 3 markets that we're assigned geographically. And so, you know, but we're— we have a great partnership with them for sure.

Yeah. Yeah. Good group. Great group. Okay. So let's— I want to come back to marketing. Let's, let's stay on sales for a minute or for a few minutes and talk about what are some of the things that you instituted coming into the into the business. Now, you know, it was already doing $20 million, so, you know, something was going right, but you brought in some other things. So let's talk a little bit about that.

I think a sales culture was what I was hired to, to build, right? So we had a couple of really great sales leaders that were kind of off on their own doing their own thing. Nothing was really structured and process-oriented. So I was, I was there to ground all that in the foundation of process. So training programs and creating one consistent way of doing things, making sure that the process for estimating a job and quoting a job and contracting a job and the legalese that goes into that was all, you know, tied off and top-notch and instituted forecasting and budgeting and, and all of that. And then we actually, for the first time ever, created a rehash program. We call it revisit because I like that word better.

Better, yeah.

We partnered with a company called Hatch. I'm sure a lot of people know that company and really created, you know, a nice additional incremental revenue stream through our revisit function. And so that's really why Paul hired me was to, to deal with that first.

When you say— you just use the term sales culture. What do you mean by sales culture?

I think there's kind of 3 categories of cultures that companies tend to have, at least. There may be more, but 3 that I'm kind of familiar with. One is salespeople, it's not really that hard. They memorize a script, so anybody can do it. And so, there's not really a whole lot of respect. There's also the culture where salespeople can be kind of prima donnas. They walk on water. The company revolves around them. And they're that special team, which also can create tension in the rest of the organization. And there's a culture that I call humble heroes. And so, for us, we have salespeople that can make a lot of money. And they should, but they also have to recognize that we built an entire organization around them to support them, that they're not just doing that on their own. So, you know, when I orient a sales team today, even today, I have one later on today, a new class is starting, and I will talk about the fact that yes, those salespeople can make a lot of money, but the marketing team, the call center team, the customer service team, the production team doesn't have that same opportunity to scale financially like that, but they're working every bit as hard to make the salesperson successful. So I say it would always be, it would be a nice idea if you walked into the expo care room with a tray full of slushies from 7-Eleven, just say thank you for doing such a great job. Walk into the call center with boxes of pizzas out of your own pocket, right? Not funded by the company, but just to say thank you because everybody's working there. So, Those are kind of those three dichotomies of cultures that I kind of look at. And we try to create that culture of humble heroes, people who are hungry and who want to get out there and get it done and work hard, have fun while they're doing it. Because, you know, technically for us, the sales job is the best job, right? You get to meet with lots of people. You make a lot of money. You know, you don't have to deal with the headaches of legal issues or customer satisfaction issues. You don't have to install it. You have to spend your time getting dirty, right? So you go meet people, you have great conversations, you serve them, you make money. And so that's a great life. It's a great job. But remember, it's not just about you.

What are some of the keys to having a successful sales team? And a team, let's just say, could be 2, it could be 75, like what Michael has. But what's the key? And is it different at different levels from your experience?

Yeah. I mean, I think it all comes down to leadership, right? So coaching and mentoring and leadership and obviously, different styles of leaders, you know, exist in the business. Some are very raw, raw and emotional and supercharged and energetic. Some are more understated but provide great, you know, great shoulder to cry on and great feedback and coaching. So I think, having a positive attitude and, you know, understanding the needs of the sales team that are under you is the key. So, you know, for us, we call those frontline leaders. They're field sales trainers, field sales managers. They're in the field with the sales reps coaching and mentoring. And sometimes the sales rep needs a kind of a kick in the pants, and sometimes they need a nice pat on the shoulder, right? And it's all dependent. So knowing the psychology of the sales force is huge. And continuing to drive that motivation, create that hunger is the job of the sales leader.

Where are you finding salespeople right now? I mean, you're not hiring them from the industry, I would imagine. So what are the types of people that are succeeding right now in your organization as a salesperson?

We actually are hiring some people from industry, obviously, as we know, as we all know, and not everybody comes from industry, but as we all know, there's been a lot of private equity coming into the system. And that has, in some cases, changed the culture.

Yeah.

So because we're still privately held and we have absolutely no desire to sell because of what we built here is really, really special. So, you know, we're We're gonna protect that. I'm here to protect that with my equity stake as well. And, you know, we're gonna continue to be pride of the hill, nimble and quick, move on a dime, make decisions fast, and outpace the other person, you know, outpace the other companies. So people are knocking on our door because of our reputation, which is cool and interesting. That didn't happen a few years ago, right? We were too small. So we are hiring a little bit from industry, but, you know, it comes down to, personality style characteristics. So we're big proponents of Predictive Index. I know other people use DiSC or some other assessment tool. But for us, the strategists, the mavericks, the captains, the venturers, the persuaders, they all tend to make great salespeople. That's not the only ticket in. You got to have a really great attitude. So it is about aptitude and attitude together. You got to look at both. But we have a really awesome recruiting team as well. We spent a few years really building up a great recruiting presence. So we're always recruiting, always, always, always.

Yeah, which is one of the keys to building a really great company is always be recruiting. What about the process? What about the process of training, the actual step selling? System. Can you talk a little bit about, a little bit about that?

Yeah. So I think, you know, we have a 2-week in-class process, uh, and, uh, obviously you can't learn everything you need to learn in that 2 weeks. So there's a follow-up process where, you know, you do ride-alongs and get in the field and see some presentations live and handle objections and all that kind of stuff. So we use a 10-step process, uh, probably based and anchored in a Yoho type of approach, but with some Jacuzzi scattered in. And then obviously our, our, our sales leaders come from different backgrounds, Sears, Home Depot, Hella, you know, those kinds of places. So some of those influences integrate into our system. But we do have a system. We do measure that system. We, we use Rilla to, to validate that what we say and what we get are the, are the same, with, you know, obviously allowing for a little bit of style difference. You know, some people are a little bit more country, a little bit more city.

I like that, allowing for a little bit of style. I like that.

Add a little style because some people, you know, especially for us in Texas, right, you get out in the Tyler area, Longview area, east of Dallas, and they're wearing cowboy hats and boots and jeans. And belt buckles, right? So you better, better show up looking like them.

Yeah.

So you have to, you have to add that in. You have to have that flair in.

I just finished watching the first season of Landman.

Okay.

With Billy Bob. And so I, you know, I spent a little bit of time in— where is it filmed? Midland, Midland, Texas.

Midland and Odessa, the two big oil towns.

Yeah. And it's like, it's flat. It's brown and there's lots of like oil wells and lots of cowboy hats and cowboy boots and—

and dust.

And dust. Yes. And lots of dust. So with sales process, so consistency, I would imagine, is very important. They are scripted.

Yes.

But you allow for a little bit of, as you say, I like that style. How much are they allowed to, say, go off of the script and introduce their own style?

You know, I'd say for us, we measure sales performance by NSLI. And so if your NSLI is in a good spot, we're not going to touch your butterfly wings and mess with you, as long as you're doing everything ethically and legally and morally, of course, and all that kind of stuff. But, you know, if you're following the process, to a place where you are serving customers with excellence, we're not going to mess with you. Now, when you start going off the rails and you start to change too much and get too creative and/or get cocky and get overconfident, then our sales leaders will intervene and get you back, hopefully get you back on track so that we don't have to part ways.

Yeah. Yeah. And if they're selling a lot, but they have a bad attitude, do they stay?

Absolutely not. So, one of the things that, you know, part of a humble hero culture is it's not about me, it's not about you, it's about us. And so, the culture for us is everything. And not to say that people don't have their down days, but we don't tolerate foul language. You know, we're a faith-based company, so you won't hear Very often I'm going to say a curse word or a harsh tone. We're humans, so we're going to have sin and we're going to make errors. But the goal is to create unity, to create harmony, to create a culture of unification where people feel like they're part of the family. And so you get somebody with a bad attitude or somebody who's who leaves a big wake behind their boat or, you know, sucks the air out of a room when they walk in, they don't last long at our company. They kind of opt themselves out.

It's just the opposite. Yeah, that happens with us too.

Yeah, absolutely.

You know, it's interesting. So when you're a smaller company, you would think, okay, it's easier to have that family feel if you're 6 people, 10 people, even 20 people. It's easier to have that family feel, although in a lot of cases, as you've probably seen, dysfunctional family. Because if the business isn't running well, everybody's at odds with each other. But as you grow, and you said you guys are at 300-ish people?

300, over 300 people. Yes.

How do you manage culture at that level when there are just so many people in so many departments? And in your case, they're spread out over 5 offices.

So there's a lot that goes into that. Um, tomorrow we have our, our monthly town hall, uh, and so, uh, we have daily huddles. So 9 o'clock every day, we talk about yesterday and today, and we celebrate birthdays and anniversaries and high-five everybody and celebrate success And we have an optional emotional, again, faith-based company at the end. We do that every single day. And then monthly, we have a town hall that we go a little bit deeper into the recognition and we award for integrity, excellence, and service, which is our core values. So, we have nominations throughout the month and we give those awards. We talk a lot about our plan. We talk a lot about our vision. We, you know, we're on EOS, so we have the 10-year plan defined, the 3-year plan defined, the 1-year plan defined. So we talk about it a lot. And fortunately for us, we just went through an engagement survey process with a third-party company. So it's completely independent. We don't know who said what. And our engagement scores, quite honestly, were very, very good. And we still have some work to do for sure.

Always.

First time we've ever done anything like that. So this is a little bit of a gut check, right, to engage, you know, check engagement for your company. And, you know, what if you get a bunch of bad news? Well, fortunately, we didn't get a bunch of bad news, but we have areas of improvement. I think the area for us to improve on is to make sure that our senior leadership team— we call them the growth leadership team or the vice presidents— vice president of marketing, sales, production, Finance, IT, that we all got to get out to the other offices and see those locations as well. They've got to, they've got to see us. So, uh, you know, travel isn't always fun, but it's necessary. And so that's probably the next step for us, is to make sure we're not only having team meetings, uh, on Teams or Zoom or things like that, but we're actually physically present in the buildings.

What do the daily huddles look like? Is everybody in the company in invited to that, or is that just leadership team? What does the daily huddle look like?

Yeah, it's open to everybody, and we encourage everybody to do it. Now, obviously, installers are probably already, you know, they've already penetrated the bathroom and they're already doing the demo, so that we don't see a lot of production on, on the call. Uh, sometimes you'll see salespeople. Like today, we have our weekly big sales meeting, so salespeople are on it. So, we will see typically somewhere between 40 and 80 people on the daily huddle. And so, all walks of life, like you'll get the finance team, the ExpoCare team, which is our customer service team. You'll get the call center, our inside sales department, marketing team, all of that. And we start out with, we tell a few jokes. We have, you know, what day of the year is it? And, and we talk about yesterday's results, and sometimes we'll, we'll have a birthday to celebrate or an anniversary. Uh, in fact, just this past week, our very first installer hired 12 years ago, who, who, uh, is now our senior installation manager for all of North Texas, been with us for 12 years. So he just celebrated his 12th year anniversary. And it's a funny story, we I kid him all the time because his name is Fonzie, and he gave Paul one year when he was hired into the bath business as the first employee on the bath side, or the first installer on the bath side. He said, I'll give him one year. And here he is 12 years later.

12 years later.

Running the business.

Now, are those huddles then recorded and sent out? Are they done via Zoom? Is it a phone call?

It's on Teams and every one of them is recorded. So, we encourage people to go back and listen if they missed it, especially if there's a key announcement, you know, 401(k) enrollment or anything like that, we'll advertise that. So, we have a really good, we call it Connect, Share, Post channel in Teams, as well as the Daily Huddle channel in Teams. And so, everybody's on that. It's very easy to find. And people can go back and view it.

Who leads that daily huddle?

It rotates. So sometimes somebody in the call center will lead it. Sometimes somebody in marketing will lead it. So, you know, so it's not the Paul and Michael show. In fact, we absolutely don't want it to be that. We want it to be organic and we want it to be authentic and genuine. And so in order to have that, it has to be, you know, cascaded down to, not down, cascaded out to, to everybody. And so everybody kind of takes a day and says, this is my day and I'm going to put the agenda together and, you know, come up with the jokes and all of that. And it makes it fun.

That is, that's great. And so, and then you do a monthly town hall. So tell me a little bit about that.

So, for example, tomorrow will be our monthly town hall where it's a more extended meeting. Our daily huddles last 10 to 15 minutes tops. Our extended huddle will last more like an hour. And tomorrow, we'll be focusing on marketing as a function from soup to nuts. So, we just hired a new, really Skokomish cool Vice President of Marketing. She just joined about a month ago. And so, she's new to the organization but catching on fast. And she's going to go through her entire vision so that the whole company gets an opportunity to hear that. So, every month we have a different topic of focus. And it gives us the ability to make sure everybody's informed about what's important and relevant today. So, they know they've been communicated with, which is probably why we had such good engagement scores.

Yeah. Do you share financial results?

We do. We talk about top line primarily. So, we talk about sales security, is what we call it, net installed revenue. Of course, the metrics that we look at from a sales perspective is NSLI and net close rate compared to issued leads, how many issued leads we talk about fulfillment. So we have actually a whole wall of TV monitors that have gauges and, you know, metrics and all that kind of stuff. And so we don't cascade down to the EBITDA level at the frontline level just because that it's kind of hard to comprehend.

It's, yeah, it's not necessary.

It's not necessary, but we absolutely run on a profit-first mentality. So, in other words, that is a sales minus profit equals expenses kind of mentality versus the other way around. Because our why is really to focus in on our 501(c)(3) not-for-profit called The Collective Way. So, we have about 5 organizations that we really invest deep deep with. One is a widow's shelter, one's an orphanage, one deals in human trafficking, and other deals with young business entrepreneurs and leaders. And so, you know, part of our— yeah, we are a company that helps people get better and grows people. We happen to install bathrooms, windows, and kitchens.

You know, we talk about profit, profit, profit so much here. And a lot of it, yeah, the money is great. The money is great, but it's so much more than just about the money. Money is a great tool. And without profit, how can you have a great business? How can you have great people? How can you make sure that your people in your building— it's like I say it all the time about, you know, like if, if people have these things. Well, I want to do this. I want to be a place in my community where people can come and get a great job and make a great living and buy a house and all of that. And I'll always ask them, well, how's it going for your family? And if it's the whole thing about, you know, you have to put the mask on first in the airplane. If there's a sudden loss of cabin pressure, what do they tell you to do? Don't try and put the other person's mask on because you're going to pass out and you're both going to pass out. You know, you're both going to be gone. And so profit, profit, profit, profit is what pays for all of this stuff. And it allows you to do things like that, you know, set up a nonprofit, take some of that money and actually do good in the community. But the business has to do good. The people inside of the business have to do good and their families have to do good first before before now we can go outside and start taking care of the community. And I'm glad you brought that up. You know, the 501(c)(3) is a nonprofit, right?

Yeah, 501(c)(3) is a nonprofit. And yeah, in addition to that, we also have a chief ministry officer on staff and a dream manager on staff. So, you know, taking care of your employees, as you mentioned, you got to take care of— you put your mask on first. So, absolutely, we got to be profitable. The business got to be profitable first. But with that, we also invest in our employees. So, our dream manager actually just graduated a few weeks ago. They're the first tranche of 33 dreamers who accomplished something that they were dreaming about, taking a vacation, going to school.

Okay, hold on. Hold on a minute here, Michael. Tell me more. Okay, first off, what is a dream manager?

There's a book. It's called The Dream Manager out there. Okay. The author—

Never heard of it.

—the title escapes me. But it really is— it helps people to really just think about, okay, am I just going to work to make a living, to exist, to consume oxygen, to pay my bills, or can I be developed and grown and stretched? And because now with technology, it's more of an integrated life. That it's not just I work and then I play, you know, I go home and I turn it all off. No, it's like an integrated life. So we, we read the book Dream Manager and we were so inspired by that that we actually took our, our actually Paul's very, very first employee, Tony Young, who, who folded up her bath business to come lead production at Expo Home. She is now our certified dream manager, second longest employee with the company behind Paul. And so that dream can be anything, can be, I want to take a vacation, I want to save up for a car, I want to go to college, I want to have a family, I want to, you know, I have an addiction, I need something, you know, to help with that, whatever. And so it's completely isolated under the 501(c)(3) umbrella, which makes it not an ExpoHome thing. So, it's confidential. I don't know anybody who's in the program. I don't hear any stories. It's completely at arm's length, but there's freedom and anonymity. And so, they can go in. And like I said, 33 people went through the program this past year and graduated with all their dreams kind of materialized. And talk about process, right? You got to meet monthly. You start on time, you end on time, you follow the plan, you have homework, you bring your homework back, and you got to do your homework. If you don't do your homework, you get booted from the program. So, but it really is a nice offering for our, for our people.

I love that. So this is, it's almost like, it's almost like a coach. Yes. You're providing your people with a coach. Absolutely. And you're saying, tell me what you want. Tell me what you want your life to be like. And let's come up with a plan of how you're going to get there. Yeah. Oh my God, I love this. Absolutely. And there are other companies I've talked with, many companies that, you know, they encourage people to have dream boards or vision boards, I should say. And they do all kinds of things around that. They'll, they'll, they'll meet together in little groups and they'll talk about it. But I'm not sure I've heard about it being done like this where you've actually got a host. Now, is this person— does this person actually live inside the building? Do they have an office in the building? And then you can make an appointment and go and sit down with this person?

And absolutely. So we've dedicated two offices kind of on the far side of the building where our CEO sits. That's kind of our collective way in the quieter side of our building where finance sits. Tony has an office there as well as our chief ministry officer, Scott Hall. Is there as well. And so that also provides a little bit of anonymity too, because you're inside the building, out of the fracas of the rest of the organization and where everybody's kind of milling around. But yeah, they office here. They're very accessible, intentionally accessible. And Toni, you know, just, she's the mom of the business. She really has just done such a great job. That's incredible, Michael.

Culture and our style. Yeah, what a beautiful, beautiful thing you guys are doing for your people. Now tell me about the chief ministry officer.

So the chief ministry officer is really, uh, kind of focused on three things. One, he, he was an ex-pastor, uh, for a large church in, in, in Keller. That's how Paul got to know him. Paul attended that church for a while, and he— so he came out of ministry to come do this chief ministry officer role for us. So, so three main areas of focus. One is development of our leadership team. So he really kind of focused, he's a great leader, great trainer, great speaker. Obviously pulpit ministers are good speakers, right? And very, very wise. He also works directly with the charities to vet them to make sure they're aligned culturally with the philosophy and the mindset that we have in terms of the people we want to invest in. We don't offer a lot of, you know, wide support to lots of different charities. We go deep. With just a few. So, he vets that. And then the third thing he does is he also develops relationships with other like-minded leaders. So, in our community, we'll call it a faith-based organization. There are other faith-based organizations out there. And so, we're doing a few things right, not that we've got it all figured out, but if we can help somebody along in their journey, maybe a little smaller in size, maybe newer in business, that can benefit from the lessons we've learned along the way. So, Scott also works with leaders in more of a training and development and mentorship program as well.

That's cool. That's like having the Army chaplain on staff, right? Absolutely. Absolutely. Non-stereotype. That's really cool. That's really cool. Let's talk about technology. So I would imagine you guys got a lot of tech going on over there. We do. What are some, what are some cool things that you're doing? You mentioned Rilla earlier, you know, listening to sales calls, doing the virtual ride-alongs, but what are some of the other things, maybe AI-based, that you guys are doing or otherwise? Cool tech.

Well, so the, the realization that marketing is the key was quickly followed up by the fact that IT is part of marketing and part of sales. So, it's not about hubs, LANs, and routers and laptops. It is about stitching the technology together to make the customer experience frictionless and fast. And so, We've actually got a pretty sizable IT department, about 5, 6 people in that department that are dedicated and super bright and super smart. So they handle everything from the application management like Leap and all of that, make sure that it's top-notch and stable. And they're always constantly evaluating the market for new alternatives, right? So today we're on Five9 inside of the call center and we're also, using Lace for AI to give feedback back to the managers in the call center to ensure that we're providing the right coaching and feedback.

Those are both AI tools for call centers?

So Five9 is more of a voiceover IP platform. It records the calls and gives you some insight as to who you're talking to. Obviously connected to Salesforce. We've got a full instance of Salesforce. We had to actually graduate out of— we used to be with Improveit 360. And so, we had to, you know, our size graduate to a full instance of Salesforce. So, all of that technology has to work together. The AI part is really Lace today. And so, Lace is like Rilla for the—

[Speaker:BRIAN KASKVALCIAN] But for call centers.

[Speaker:MICHAEL KRIGSMAN] For the call center. And then, Rilla is obviously a big part of our sales organization. Giving that artificial intelligence, giving sales managers the ability to really provide the right feedback to their team. And with the latest developments that Rilla has come up with where you can ask AI Rick the questions, you know, was the wife home and did the sales rep make an attempt to get the wife down from upstairs? And, you know, Rick will tell you yes or no. And you can't hide. It's like watching Game of Thrones. Film. But our, we call it the IT juggernaut, you know, unstoppable force. So, our team led, you know, led by our vice president of IT is probably, you know, we consider it an investment. I call the IT department part of the demand creation team. So, when we get together, we talk about sales and scale and growth. IT absolutely has a seat at the table. Because they're the ones who automate the vision of the vice president of marketing and the vice president of sales.

Wow, very cool. Let's talk marketing. Yes, you got to drive a lot of leads every day, my friend.

Yes, we need less leads. We, we, uh, we, we've been majorly dependent, unfortunately, on the aggregators. And so we're, we're, we're, we're ringing the towel right now. Our new vice president of You know, like I said, just joined about a month ago, and she already has put the right lead mix strategy together.

Good, good, yeah.

So, we're wringing the towel of wasted costs. Intent is going up. So, we're gonna sell more with less leads, which is awesome to even think about, and become way more efficient.

More efficient. Yeah. Well, and also, you know, this business historically, and we've talked about this here a lot recently, especially this year, this business historically has been a make marketing business, meaning I got to go out and make my own leads. Over the last few years, because of COVID we became a take marketing, you know, for 2 or 3 years because there was just so much out there. Yeah, and the aggregators, they very smartly— smartly a word anyway? Yeah, smartly is kind of like bigly. But they very smartly capitalized on that and said, well, wait a minute, these guys can't handle all the leads that are coming, so we'll take them all and then we'll sell it back to them. And a lot of people, what they did was they kind of said, okay, well, I don't need to learn about marketing, I don't need to make my own leads, I'll just go to these aggregators, and if this one's not working, I'll just add another one. Or if these two are working, I'll just add two more. And then they become dependent on the aggregators. And then things like, you know, this year or last year really is when it started. And the, the, the smart companies and the ones that are really going to succeed are doing what you're doing. They're getting away. And look, the aggregators have a part in this. They do. But they were never built to be 100% a lead gen. They should be 20%, maybe 30%, depending on the business at the most. Yeah, they should fill in the gaps.

They should, they should layer into the business. But, you know, we, we got to as a company got to focus on previous customers. We got to focus on self-generated leads and referrals. I mean, that's the top of the funnel when you talk about lead intent. That's the top of the funnel for us. Oh, yeah. So putting the effort and activity and the focus on that is really where we're at in our journey to really scale that. 'Cause that's where the money is. You know, the manufacturing leads that we get from Jacuzzi are great. They have high intent. We're closing them very, very well. So like you said, Dave Azer's doing a fabulous job and team is doing a fabulous job with us. But the aggregators, when you become overly dependent on the aggregators for your lead mix, what you find is you spend a lot of money on that you know, in the aggregate. And that's why they call it aggregators. You spend a lot of money on it and it can create fatigue on your sales side, right? Because you're running a lot of leads that, you know, some aggregators, you know, call a lead, fill in this phone number and email address. That's a lead. Yeah. You looked at my page. That's a lead. So, you know, you got to really be good. And we want our salespeople to be good. Make no mistake. They got to know how to sell. We want the highest intent possible that we can afford. And so, that lead mix coming up and intent is really going to be healthy for our business.

Good. That's awesome. So, I don't know if I even asked you at the beginning, what is like, what's your— well, first, what's your like official title now?

My official title is now President of the company. So, all All of the departments report up to me. I report up to Paul. Paul's the CEO. We're both co-owners. He's a majority owner. I'm a minority owner. But I bought into the business back in that little thing called COVID, right? When we had to lay off. Good for you, man.

Good for you.

Well, it was prophetic for us. It was a divine intervention because, you know, how's the business going to survive when a lot of our lead gen was shows and events? And now, you know, now you can't go to to your customers anymore. So, you know, Paul and I sat in his office and we decided to double down and, and work our way through it, muscle our way through it. And it was not easy, but, but now we're on the other side of that. And like I said, it's really starting to get fun.

Well, good. I'm happy for you guys. You know, again, I remember meeting Paul when he first got in the business and nice guy. You know, I asked him, I asked him a couple times to come on the podcast. He's just, he wants to be behind the scenes quiet, you know, but I'm glad we were able to do this. So I've started to ask people about the best advice they've ever gotten or given. So I want to ask you, like, what's the best advice you've ever been given?

So I say this in our orientation all the time. It's all about relationships. That is the best advice I've ever been given. So yeah, we're in the business to make money. Like you said, you gotta have money to fund the things you want to fund. But at the end of the day, it's the relationships that you've built that really matter. So we're a family here. We, you know, not everybody gets to stay, you know, completely, but for the people that stay and have been here, you know, 5, 10, 12 years, we do life together. And so those relationships are super, super important. You know, nobody asks you on your deathbed, you know, what was your revenue like in 2025, right? The people who are going to be important to you are the people that you did life with, walked through fires together, learned things together and ultimately impacted their lives in a permanent kind of way. So, when you have that philosophy and that mentality, it makes you want to give your very best every day. So, I always ground it back to it's a people business. We're working with, we're working for, we're working alongside people, and that's what matters.

And then everything else kind of follows. Well, that's beautiful. Well, Michael, thank you so much for being here. I appreciate you and I'm really happy for for all of your success and Paul's success. Please give him my best. Maybe he'll listen to this when it comes out. I'm sure he will. We'll see. We'll see. We'll let you know when it goes out and you can pass it on. Well, you could pass it on to him. Hey, great information. Thank you so much for sharing and being open. And for everybody listening, hope you enjoyed the episode. If you did, please leave us a review. Let us know how we're doing. Help other people find Find the show, let us know, you know, what you like, what you don't like, and, and subscribe to the show so you get new episodes when they come out. And what else am I supposed to say? Oh, you can get a copy of my book, The 7 Secrets to Becoming a Wealthy Contractor. I'll buy the book, you, you just pay shipping, and you can get that at thewealthycontractor.com. And And yeah, that's it. Until next time, everybody, Brian Kaskavalciyan. This is The Wealthy Contractor Podcast.