Carmine Iapaluccio of Carmine’s Plumbing, Heating & Air Conditioning: Keeping a full call log during COVID-19.

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When stuff like this happens, it gets me out of the norm and gets my juices flowing again.

Right.

To say, okay, you know, it's a challenge. I mean, to me, it's a challenge. Not that I want this challenge like this, but it's a challenge and say, okay, this is what's going on. How do we overcome it? How do we get our people positive? How do we get our people to overcome it?

Mm-hmm.

And with everything that we've learned over the years, you know, all the marketing and management stuff and the sales, you know, you really gotta kick it in and, you know, keep it going. And to me, that's when I really, you know, kick in and, you know, get going fast. You know, to me it's exciting. You know, uh, it's, it's a challenge, right?

Welcome to the Successful Contractor Podcast, powered by Success Group International, a show for residential contractors about residential contractors. We chronicle business journeys, share insights, and celebrate successes in this wonderful industry of ours. I'm your host, Bob Houchin. On today's show, we're going to speak with Carmine Ippolito of Carmine's Plumbing, Heating, and Air Conditioning in Danbury, Connecticut, which is about an hour outside of New York City, the new epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. Carmine shares how he's immediately sprung into action to deal with this new crisis. He explains how he's altered their operations and marketing, reassured his team, and has kept a strong mindset throughout everything going on. Let's take a listen. Carmine, I cannot thank you enough for taking some time with me. For those who haven't had the pleasure of meeting you, if you could kind of share with everyone your name, your company name, and kind of how you got wrapped up with SGI a very, very long time ago.

Okay, it's Carmine Apoluccio from Carmine's Heating and Air Conditioning in Danbury, Connecticut. I go a long ways back from 1990 with Jim and John on the startup of Contractor Success Group. So I start way back back there, uh, was one of the, uh, consolidators of service experts. Uh, and then after, uh, my non-compete ran out, I ran— I started back up in 2002, back up in my own business again. And here we are today. And I've always been with this group. It's always a great group.

That's great. That's great to hear. How big is your operation? Just so people can get a scope.

We're probably, let's see, this year we're hoping to be about 3.8 million.

Okay, that's great. So you've got a fair number of people in, obviously. So, Danbury, like you mentioned before we started recording here, is about an hour and change from New York, the epicenter of what's going on. Can you share with everyone how it's impacting the community, how many positives you've seen, that kind of background info?

Yeah, quite a bit. Because we're an hour outside the city, a lot of people are coming from the city, coming in our county here in droves, renting houses, buying houses, everything here. And there is a lot of people in our county that actually work in New York City too. So just as of yesterday, we had over 600 positive testings. We're one of the hotspots in the country because of this.

Right.

You know, they've got, you know, the guard up by the hospital setting up and everything else. It's kind of a little crazy, you know. So it's a hotspot here. Everybody is concerned about it because it's very close to us. We've had some people die recently right in the area, and they've got an old folks home with 20 people that have it right now. So that's not gonna be too good in the future.

Sure, sure. Obviously, so you said there's lots of concern. How, you know, I'm sure if there's concern in the community, there has been on your team. What have you done to kind of calm their fears and try and help them kind of grapple with the situation?

Well, I tell you what, I was on vacation last week. I came in Saturday night. And then while I was on vacation in Aruba, we kind of were working with our SEO people to try to get things set up And whatnot on our website. And when I came in Sunday, we had 3 of our guys along with someone who does filming.

Mm-hmm.

So we filmed a film there to put on our website showing the people what we're doing, how we're doing it, that our guys are wearing the booties, wearing the gloves, Wearing the masks.

Right.

Wearing, you know, with wipes and we have spray bottles with Clorox on them and everything. So we showed them how we're doing the tools after each job. All our tools get wiped down and everything. So the video is actually a good video. It's on our website. And we started with that. And when our guys came in that Monday, we turned around, talked to them all and said, look, hey, We're going to tackle this. We're not going to let this sit back and we're not going to stick our heads in the sand.

Sure.

We're going to fight this thing and keep going. And it's our job to keep everybody— it's my job and their job to keep everybody going so we don't have to lay off anybody and we keep working past this thing.

Absolutely.

So we went over scripts with them. We went over everything. You know, with the CSRs in here, we, you know, made sure they were asking people before our guys go out, you know, is everybody healthy, you know, before we send our guys out. And it's tough on the guys because they never know what they're walking into or whatever, you know. So it's been pretty good there. We've turned around. We started videos on Facebook. And what we're doing is Doing like 1 or 2 videos and putting them on Facebook every day.

Okay.

Just, just talking to our customers. Um, you know, we have a couple of radio scripts on 2 different radio stations, um, and that's, uh, playing all the time. And, you know, in our, in our local newspaper, which is no big deal, but we have stuff in there, uh, also. So we're, we're kind of attacking it, uh, You know, from all sides to letting the people know, hey, we're open, we're safe, and we're ready for you. We also, we also have a highway billboard that we're redoing right now.

Oh, okay.

And they're in the midst of printing that so they can get that up there. And again, it's basically gonna say, hey, you know, we're open. We're safe and we're ready for you, you know. Uh, so we're kind of attacking it from just about every way we can, uh, to, to, to be positive. And, you know, the big thing is just letting the people know you're open.

Yeah.

These people think we're closed, that we'll never get them or whatever, you know. And with a lot of people, uh, being home, you know, there's gonna be a lot more plumbing problems, uh, heating and air conditioning problems where we've been trying to attack The, you know, for doing our, uh, our AC tune-ups, um, you know, we, we gotta battle, you know, people, some people canceling and whatnot. So we're trying to overcome, uh, we're trying to overcome them with different scripts and everything.

Right.

And things, things that we're doing. And, uh, so, you know, but we've been pretty fortunate so far to keep everybody going. Uh, You know, I think it's really— it comes from the top down. You know, you've got to be positive. You got to keep your people on the roll. We still have some contests going in the meantime. So, you know, you know, we send out a lot of things on the phone as things are going on. So, you know, it's, you know, while everybody else is, like I say, sticking their head in the sand, And we're trying to be as positive as we can, you know, to get out there and make it happen. Right.

You mentioned you're doing some things on the phone. How has call count looked so far? Is it— you've had some cancellations, but have you kept a fairly full board?

Yes, yes, we've kept a full board, okay, so far. And, you know, every once in a while, hey, they'll have some openings, whatnot. But overall, overall, we've been pretty fortunate, kept a full board. And if If they don't have a full board, we can go into one of our commercial accounts that are open and take care of them.

Right.

So we're spreading it all around to try to keep everybody busy, which has been good. But right now the boards are full.

Good.

The service calls coming in, we're taking care of, and the maintenance guys are still there. Our installs are still good. So, you know, overall everybody's, uh, everybody's doing good. It's just, just got to keep it up. Yeah.

Are you, are you doing much outbound calling? I know you're doing a lot of other marketing things, but are you doing much of that to keep it full?

No, the outbound calling that we're doing is really just for, um, our contract customers.

Okay.

Okay. Uh, you know, arranging their tune-ups.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

And, and do you get any pushback or any say, well, you know, have you seen the news and this?

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. No, we, we, We get pushback and saying, geez, you know, I don't want anyone in the house and whatnot.

Right.

And we tell them, okay, well, Ms. Jones, I can understand that, but you know what, while everyone's home, you know, you want to be breathing some clean air and everything else. And, you know, you don't want to be breathing dirty air, clogged filters, everything else while everybody's home. So, you know, and we go over what our guys do, how clean they are, the precautions we're taking. And everything else. And, you know, you win some over and some you're just not gonna move.

Sure.

You know, and that's okay. We tell them we'll call you in the future. Sure.

So your call takers were pretty quick to respond and adapt their script, it sounds like. It didn't take them too long.

No. All right, right. We went over that from day one. Hey, look, this is what we gotta do, people. We gotta keep these guys rolling or you'll be out of a job, you know? So it incentivizes them. But they've all been good though. They've all been very good jumping in, doing what they got to do, and trying to get customers on board.

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Welcome back to the show. When we left, we were talking with Carmine about outbound calling, but how has he changed how he trains his team?

We basically see them every morning and, you know, we'll place— we let them know what we're doing so they can realize that we're not just sitting in the office here. We're working real hard on a lot of different things, getting a lot of things for them, everything. And like trying to get a mask around here is almost impossible.

Sure.

And then we've been fortunate enough to find some. So we tell them every day we have— in the mornings we'll go Go over different things. We'll show them the videos we're doing so they can see, hey, we're out there doing what we got to do to try to keep them working, keep them positive.

Yes.

Okay. You know, we're getting them, we're talking about air scrubbers and whatnot. We can't really advertise that right now because we'd probably get a lot of backlash. But when the guys are in the house, they can talk to the people. Sure, absolutely.

All right, what are your competitors doing? Are you seeing— are there people that are closing up, or is everyone pretty much just running as usual?

Around here, well, a lot of the competitors don't have a lot of service contracts, so they're kind of dead in the water.

Sure.

You know, I mean, some are running, you know, here and there, and the ones that are doing just install only and they ain't got no service, they're Trying to run some service calls here and there, but it doesn't happen overnight.

Sure.

You know, we see some of them burying their head in the sand saying, poor me, poor me, and keep blaming it on the virus. And I said, no, no, that's not, you know, that's not your problem.

Right.

The virus is not your problem. We've got to overcome the virus, 9/11, all this stuff, you know, dips in economy and everything else. Those are just things we gotta do every day. And the virus is just an excuse if you're gonna use it as an excuse.

You know, it's interesting you mention that 'cause I was thinking about that earlier and I forgot to mention it. I mean, you've seen, being in business for as long as you have in the area you are, you've seen a lot with 9/11, with the recession, and you know, you've managed to always bounce back, so it helps, I guess.

Yeah, we were very close to 9/11 'cause we knew a lot of people that died in 9/11 and from around here and everything else. And it hit hard right here. But you know what? Every time we've had a recession, we've had something, we've been able to respond very quick.

Mm-hmm.

And we were always stronger in those ends. I mean, we've always been real, a lot busier at those times and able to grow at those times. You know, so you really just got to, you know, not use it as an excuse and, you know, saying, hey, you know what? Identify the problem. You know, the problem's not the virus. What's the problem?

And people still want good service. I mean, that doesn't go away just because there's changes.

Most definitely. Right, right.

How do you— is there anything you do to keep yourself positive and having that strong leader mindset every day? Because I mean, you know, the outside noise can sometimes impede on some people's mindset and outlook. So how do you avoid that clutter?

Oh yeah, yeah. Listening to the news will drive you nuts. It's all, you know, gloom and doom. No, you know what? Honestly, when stuff like this happens, it gets me out of the norm and gets my juices flowing again to say, okay, you know, it's a challenge. I mean, to me it's a challenge. Not that I want this challenge like this, But it's a challenge and say, okay, uh, this is what's going on. How do we overcome it? How do we get our people positive? How do we get our people to overcome it?

Mm-hmm.

Uh, and with everything that we've learned over the years, you know, all the marketing and management stuff and the sales, you know, you really gotta kick it in and, uh, you know, Uh, you know, keep it going. And to me, that's, that's when I really, you know, kick in and, um, you know, get going fast. You know, to me, it's exciting. It's, you know, uh, it's, it's a challenge. Right, right.

I love it.

I love it.

Uh, well, obviously, you know, everyone hopes this, um, you know, this gets settled sooner than later.

Oh, yes.

And, um, are you thinking long-term of what What, you know, how, you know, to respond once things calm down and people get back to normal life? Are you doing any special business planning around that, or are you just gonna focus day to day and delivering great service and keeping a full call board?

Well, I think that's the first thing is focus day to day, stay on your plan and whatnot. But I think long-term this is going to change everything we do from here on. Okay, I think a lot more people are gonna be a lot more receptive to hearing us talk about indoor air quality.

Right.

You know, they're gonna be more receptive. Geez, you know, tell me about it, you know, instead of saying, nah, I don't need it, I don't need it.

Right.

You know, and I think it's just gonna change the way people all over the world do things.

Yeah.

And they're gonna be more receptive to a lot of different things, and it's definitely gonna change everybody. So I think there's opportunities for our business Yes. You know, for indoor air quality in the future, I think everyone will look at it a little harder.

Right.

You've dropped a lot of tidbits of wisdom, Carmine, but maybe just in departing here in a moment, is there any other last words of wisdom or advice you'd like to part with SGI members listening to this who haven't been doing it as long or, you know, are still kind of trying to get their operation together? Anything they should be doing in particular to To, you know, keep chugging along and making money?

Well, I think you just can't take your eye off the ball here. You've got to keep going. You've got to keep your people going, keep your prices going. And you really got to keep your eye on the ball to keep everybody going. And whatever it takes, you know, to try to keep everybody going in these times, you really got to— you know, it's not easy.

Sure.

You gotta work hard and really keep everybody going at this point, you know, and not take your eye off the ball and say, ah, we'll do 100% indoor air quality. Well, you know, you gotta keep on your plan, keep going, and, you know, just overcome some of these obstacles that we're gonna have. Sure, sure.

Well, hey, Carmine, I cannot thank you enough for your time and your insight, especially in a busy time like this with so much going on. I really appreciate it. Have a great rest of your day, and you take care.

Great. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

That's Carmine Ippolito of Carmine's Plumbing, Heating, and Air Conditioning in Danbury, Connecticut. Thanks for listening to the show. If you feel like you have a great story worth sharing that would also help other contractors, email me at bhouchin@yoursgi.com. You've been listening to the Successful Contractor Podcast. Powered by Success Group International.

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