Bought 4 Businesses & Built a $10M HVAC Business With Brendon Aldridge

Welcome back to the show. I'm your host, Phil Risher. And on today's episode, we're diving into building a scalable home service business through systems leadership and community impact with Brendan Eldridge. Thanks so much for joining us today, Brendan.

Hey, thanks for having me. Excited to be here?

Yeah, absolutely. I'm excited for our conversation. So Brendan is The owner of Dr. H VAC Ltd, which is a leading heating and cooling company serving the greater Toronto area. With over 20 years in the trades, Brendan has built Dr. HVC into a trusted, community driven business focused on expert service and genuine customer care. He's passionate about developing skilled technicians, growing strong community culture and supporting charities that help at risk youth. So we like to feature people on the show that are, you know, one to $10 million business owners. Plus, can you tell us a little bit about like the origin story but then kind of where you're at now, what the business looks like to paint the picture of what you, what you, you got going on?

Yeah, sure. So it's, I can go back quite a ways. I've been in business 18 years now and started, as people like to say, I failed into the trades. So I started, I got fired from my job where I got licensed way back and started Dr. H VAC and I started doing a lot of commercial work just through like friends and whatnot. And you know, one thing led to another and I got bigger, had to hire my first guy. I remember like I used to pay him cash so every, every Friday I have to go to the bank, pull out some money and pay him. And then, you know, just, just kept growing and eventually got my own, like moved into our, the building we're in now. And then just, just over the, over the years just kept growing and not really having a plan at first. Like I said, it was just the technician mentality. And then eventually it was probably like eight years in, I realized, you know, I have to, I just can't keep staying on the tools. I got to have a little bit of a mind shift and work into more. So like the, the, the manager role, that was pretty tricky, but that was kind of a, like a paradigm shift when that happened. And so that was probably around 2015 and 2017, I joined Nexstar, which was a huge eye opener too, just to kind of realize how much more I had to go. You know, you think you kind of figure it out. And I, I was doing a lot of commercial and residential at the time, so I ended up selling the commercial side of the business. I got into nextar and with that just kind of went all in on the resi side.

Yeah, I love it.

Got off the tools, started working in the office and you know, there's been a few times, but that was one of the times where we basically changed the whole entire staff because it was a, a different kind of model and the. I think only was two people in the office and it, it that changed and then the technicians changed. So it was basically even like it was 5050 but sold 50 which was the commercial side. But it was really a completely new company. Yeah, that yourself was 20002017 and then. Yeah, it's just, it's been like. I was gonna say phase two, but there's been many phases. But yeah, that's kind of, you know, that's what got me into the resi business that we're in now.

Nice. So what's the team look like now? You have technician, csrs, comfort consultants. How does this structure and team size?

We're about 45 people right now and we have four managers. It's like a CSR department, five comfort advisors. We have a plumbing. We purchased a plumbing company in 2023. So that is like another addition that we added on.

Nice. Okay, so you were running H Vac and then you rolled in plumbing. Are you running on Service Titan or.

Also 2017 we signed up with service Titan. That was a big year.

Yeah. So I, I think I deployed service titan at a 7 million dollar home service business in 2019. And so you were before me. It was probably changed a lot since then. I can imagine.

Yeah.

Were you like cto, Chief Technology officer, rolling this thing out or how did you have, you know.

No, there was one of the ladies in the office of csr. She took it on and. Awesome. She. I don't know how she did it, but she rolled it out and then she ended up leaving to go to another nextar company. Another story. But so she had it set up. I just had to figure it out after she left.

Yeah. Okay, nice. Well, I mean that's a beautiful thing when someone can take it on this big behemoth and get it going and then iterations. Now you have obviously a team, I'm sure. And someone's a champion of it in the business, I would imagine. Can you walk me through a little bit of like growing to 45 people and building out this level of management? Because I would imagine you went technician, then you're the manager, but you had to do the sales or hire salespeople inside of that maybe from like the 10. 10 people or maybe you have different buckets of the faces that you mentioned, but, like, maybe it's like 10 people. I was at this thing, and then I went to 20 people, and this was a big jump.

Yeah, we. We grew a lot through acquisition. So I. I would say in 2019, just looking back at, like, our Christmas parties and stuff, we had, like, probably eight to 10 people. And then during COVID in 2020, we purchased a company. You know, it just. There was that lockdown time, and everybody got real nervous, and then things just took off after that, and this. This guy just didn't. He just stayed closed. So it was like he just basically gave up. So we jumped on the opportunity and came with four employees. And that was kind of like a springboard, because it was basically scaling two companies at the same time. And during that time, everything went crazy. It was just like shooting fish in a barrel, if you. That's not the best way to say it, but it was like, yeah, it was growing quickly, so that was kind. So we hired the first manager, and I even told him in the interview, it's like, hey, I don't know how to manage a manager, so you're going to have to, like, be patient with me. And it was a bit of a learning curve. And then. Yeah. And then 2022, we purchased another company, and again, that was a little bit of a springboard. And the. The biggest one was the plumbing company. When we purchased that, that was also another nexstar company. So it had some good systems in place already, but it was a team of 13 people. So that's when, again, they're all sort of like, iterations of like. Yeah, so.

So how would you say. Because people listening to this, you know, they probably have never acquired a company or rolled it up, and I'm sure you had never done that either. And you're like, okay, well, here's an opportunity. Let's figure this out. How do you identify the opportunity? Maybe they came knocking to you, but then looking back, how do you actually roll it into your business to make it work? Maybe. I'm sure it was a lot of.

Problems, but, yeah, we just use sheer force, I guess. Yeah, we didn't really have a game plan. I just. I always wanted the growth. Who acquisition. So I was always putting the word out. So the gentleman, the first company that we bought during COVID we had spoken in 2018 and 2019, and he was wanting to sell then. We just couldn't come to terms on the price. And I. I really didn't know how to Price it. I just basically did some math and I said, okay, I know you're roughly getting this many phone calls a day, and it's just simple math. And I know with those phone calls at our closing rate, we could probably generate this much money. So I knew at first it wasn't a good deal, but his new price during COVID that was like. That was an extremely good price. So I just jumped on it. And then again, just sort of learn as you go. I would. It. Yeah, you just, you just gotta kind of roll with the punches. And it wasn't too bad. It was just. It was like a marketing campaign, really. The first one. Right.

That's what I was gonna ask you. So I think for people listening to this, it's like, could you take, you know, $10,000 and spend Google Ads on it or could you buy a phone number and a book of business and get a couple technicians with it and it's going to generate leads for you. It sounds like it was just kind of a straight marketing channel that you brought in.

Yeah, so they were, they were already on service titan, so it was kind of. It was. It was fairly easy to just merge the two service titans. And we, we just, we just rolled out the nexstar kind of playbook for the. The new technicians. So. And I mean, it's. Nextar is a big help too, because I probably don't realize some of the issues that it was having that nexstar just gives you the answer, so you just keep moving on. Without that sort of help, maybe it would have been a lot bigger problem than. Than I was aware of.

Yeah, that makes sense. So with the. I want to talk about the plumbing one, because I was a part of that situation. I was at an H Vac contractor and they rolled an electrical division that they purchased. So can you talk a little bit about, like, opening up a new channel? I'm guessing maybe memberships or like what that looked like and how you bolted that onto your business and then got the most, you know, revenue out of that opportunity.

Yeah, it was. Well, it. We were on the. Toronto is a pretty big city, so we mostly work on the west side. This company was on the east side and they did a little bit of like, boiler work, but not much. And it was mostly plumbing, so I knew that would be a good fit because it was like a one plus one equals three. We were going to. We'll bring the plumbing to the west side, we'll bring the H Vac to the east side. But what we didn't realize is how much boiler work was out there. That. That probably was like. I don't know the exact number, but, like 40 or 50% of our revenue in 2024. We just. It was like, during the winter, we're almost doing a boiler every single day, and we didn't really. That was, like, a bonus that we didn't account for. So we got lucky there. But it. The plumbing didn't grow as fast as I thought it would. It took a long time to get it to, like, develop on the west end. I thought it would just be easy. Right. Because the H Vac picked up right away. But for whatever reason, maybe it was our name, Dr. H Vac that. So we changed the name now to Dr. H Vac and Plumbing. And that was, like, recently. And we can sort of see some pickup from that. So maybe that's the only reason we weren't really growing it on the. On the west end of the city.

Yeah. So with your H Vac contractors, I'm. You have memberships, service contracts?

Yeah.

Okay. And so then did you have them from the beginning or did you roll them out with Service Titan or when did you get service contracts?

We've always had them. We actually started with commercial maintenances, and then. Yeah, rolled out the. So we've always really had. We just sort of pushed them more, I guess, probably, like, with ServiceTitan 2017. And it took us a while to figure out how to set that up and Service Titan correctly. But once we did it, we probably don't do as good of a job as we should, but. Yeah, we still have quite a few service club members.

Okay. And then with the plumbing, do you have service contracts on the plumbing side, too?

They didn't come with any, but we just gave, like, we just kept the same price. And everybody gets a free plumbing inspection. Not. Not everybody wants one, but everybody's offered one.

Yeah. Okay, cool. So you have the H Vac contracts, so then you can easily just roll that into plumbing and hopefully create plumbing opportunities. And that's the premise. And then plumbing convert their database into H Vac business. Are you doing, like, email marketing, text marketing, Anything to, like, retarget these people to bring them back in and cross sell things?

Yeah, we use, like, Marketing Pro on Service Titan. We. We do a lot of outbound calling. What's that look like?

Outbound calling? What do you. How do you identify the people to call or what are you doing?

Yeah, we use something. We. We have something set up in Service Titan. So if anybody has not called us or worked well if it not worked with us in six months, their name shows up on a list. So we'll just outbound that list and we don't go back from like day one, but we'll go back maybe like two years and just call them and as soon as they say yes or if they say no, they, they come off the list.

Nice. So it'll be like, hey customer, we haven't worked with you in six months. You didn't schedule your fall spring tune up, whatever. Want to see if we could come out and take care of that for you?

Yeah, pretty much. We just say we have a promo on right now. Normal like let's just say whatever. We're talking about $89. We have a promo on for 69. Can we, can we book you in for this Thursday sort of thing? Nice.

Okay, so I love that it's a good retargeting opportunity and then nothing slips through the cracks. Are you doing anything with like age of like aged out units or like.

We do track that. So yeah, anything over 10 years, we tag it as a replacement opportunity. And yeah, so we know we want to have a certain amount of those every day on the call board.

Yeah. Okay, cool. And you mentioned you have comfort consultants. So I know people go back and forth on this like do my text sell or do I have comfort consultants? You selected with comfort consultants? It sounds like.

Yeah.

Is there a specific reason why you didn't go the tech route or is. What have you found?

We, we, we've toyed with it a bit. We just find when you're. It's pretty competitive that a comfort advisor usually can. They'll have a higher average sale. You know, they're not afraid to offer a system and add some of the add ons like the indoor air quality. Whereas the techs are usually just if it's a. They have a 12 year old furnace and a 12 year old C and the AC breaks, they just only replace CAC and then we're back there in six months doing the furnace like so it's a good question.

Everyone has their thing.

Yeah, we do have some techs that we know that can sell and we're super busy in the summer and we know the comfort advisors won't get there. We'll just let the tech sell. But we incentivize them to flip the lead.

Yeah. Nice. I think for people listening to this, if you have technicians and you are the salesperson or you have salespeople, I think there's so much opportunity in like creating the tech opportunity to Give the lead to the salesperson, and you got to build that process out. Do you use like checklists and service titan and then you can kick it over to them like that, or do you have a better process or something for your text to be incentivized to send leads?

Well, yeah, they'll, they'll get like a 1 to 2% if they flip the lead of the sale so that just, they're not just flipping the lead when they do. They're, they're, they want it to sell, obviously. So they'll put in a good word and they'll try their best to warm up the customer. Where if it's just. We used to do it was like 50 bucks to set a lead, 100 bucks if it sells. But now they're incentivized both ways. If it doesn't sell, they don't get anything. And if it does sell, they get a lot. So they're, they're more apt to like spend time with a customer and letting them know the pros and some cons sort of thing. Right?

Yeah, I think it's good because you can tee up your salespeople better. Like, hey, you know, you could go with this thing that's $10,000, or you could get all this for $20,000. And it's probably better for you in the long run. I'm not going to sell you on anything. I'm just giving you a recommendation here.

A hundred percent.

Yeah. It's beautiful.

And it's, it's funny because whatever the texts say, that's usually like when the sales people come, that's like, hey, the tech said this, so that's what I'm doing.

Yeah. So it actually, it works in your favor to have them separate because you have someone teeing them up, but they also, you know, get something else, a percentage off of percentage of it, which is nice.

Yeah.

So I like that. Can you talk to me a little about your CSRs? Like are they selling service contracts or are they, how does that work? Or are they just setting appointments?

We, we, we flip flop on that. Sometimes we do, but we've, we've sort of gone in there where they are selling them now. But we, we don't have a huge push on it right now. They, they do and they get a, they get a spiff if they sell one. But yeah, we've just, we've, we've been really busy lately. So it's kind of like, it's not on the top of our mind. Like there's, there's other Areas, which is probably going to be a mistake in the long run. I'm sure a year or two down the road will be like, oh, I wish we spent more time trying to sell those memberships. But it's, it's just. Yeah, we're in a phase right now where we're trying to keep up with the demand. Yeah, that's not on top of our minds right now.

Yeah, I think it's hard because it's like, yeah, we know we should be doing it, but like we just need to get these meetings book or these jobs booked and like get the stuff on the calendar because. Yeah, yeah, I get that. So you're busy. So where, where's all this coming from? It's just like Google stuff or are you doing anything else unique or.

No, I think it's just we have a big database. We purchased four companies and. And then we're still doing like Google paid ads. We have a pretty good website, so we did a lot of radio ads in the summer. We're still doing them, but we had a big push in the summer. So how did the radio ads go?

Did you do an offer on it and then you, you were able to track it or it's mostly just branding stuff or.

Yeah, just branding. We had, we put our website in there, like a specific website called the Doc. And there, there is people that actually went to. And that's the only place. But I mean such a small number in a big city. But the only real test was people calling me, oh, I heard you on the radio, like, so it was like people were hearing it. But I mean, yeah, it's pretty hard to track like the dollar return on investment sort of thing.

Yeah. So it sounds like you bought these databases for companies and you had. And now you rolled in plumbing. So you kind of have limitations, almost unlimited at this point. Opportunities to cross sell services, to call them after six months, schedule their stuff, give them some type of promo offer. And that's really driving a lot of growth. Through these databases that you're purchasing.

Yes. And yeah, it's the technicians is like we can find leads easier than we can find technicians right now. I think. Yeah, that's always been the common theme.

But that was literally where I was going to go was like, okay, how are you training these technicians to come in? Are you taking them green? Are you trying to get people external? Just whatever we can get. We're trying to get them on board with our process or what does that look like? Because you buy four people, you have it's. You're going to have unlimited opportunities to sell things. At this point, it sounds like within.

Growth we're going with the, like trying to just hire guys like real green and train them up. But we, I mean, I like the theory of that. We just didn't have the bandwidth to get them trained up, so they kind of just would. They were learning on the job and we didn't really want to keep doing that. So now we are looking for people with a little bit of experience. And then we still, like, we have a training center in here, so we can still train them on electricity and like the basics and run them through certain scenarios. We do weekly training, just whatever it may be. But going from like straight green at a school or something to I think we need to be a little bit bigger for us to do it properly. We were, we gave it a college try kind of thing. And yeah, it's either you got to be all in or are just not in at all kind of thing.

Yeah, I think it's, it's hard because you want to bring guys in, but you also want to retain them inside of, you know, you don't want them to come in and get all the stuff and leave. So you got to build something that's sustainable. But how green do you want people to get them up to speed? Like give them a year, give them six months or three months and plug them in when you're growing. And it's a balancing act of all of those things.

Yeah, right. Yeah. So that's where we're. Exactly. It's a balance. And we, we want to, we want to have some like bench strength in our team. But we don't want to hire too many guys right. Where they're not producing and that affects the gross margin. But you can't have, you need some, you need a little bit of bench strength. Right. If somebody were to leave kind of things. So we're just trying to find that magic number right now.

Yeah. Okay. I have a bunch of other questions, but I want to just dive in on this one thing and then I want to move on to a couple other things. So you acquired four companies. People that are listening. He acquired four companies. The beauty is that now he has all his database so he can put in good systems to retarget them cross, sell them different services. Can you. If someone's listening to this and they've never purchased a company before or know what to do, and maybe even the first example of just a small guy that has, you know, a list and, and it's a Lead channel. How? Because you, you said you were doing this for two years. So how should someone go about just like go to Google biz profile, find people that have under 100 reviews and just call them like hey, you thinking about selling or is there a formula?

Yeah, that's a good idea. I haven't thought of that.

Okay.

I just went to a lot of like the, the networking things now that's how I usually met people. Okay. Like they're, I'm sure every city has a local like H vac chapter or something or just out next to our meetings. Anywhere I go, I would just always just sort of drop it like hey, do you have an exit plan? And most, a lot of people would. And I've gone into buildings and just say hey, you, you ever thinking about selling? And some people get really upset, other people are not, but they'll have a good conversation. And then some people, they're like, yeah, like you, you can kind of get the sense that they're, they don't want to come out and say it, but they're like yeah, it's crossed my mind. And then you're like okay. And then the, the biggest one, I bought the plumbing company. They were a nexstar company, but they actually reached out to me through a broker and, and it didn't even seem real at first. You know, you're always getting these emails of like, hey, we'll buy your company. But it was like the same email, but it's like we have interested in selling. So I'm like okay, I'll give it a shot. And then when I found out who they were, I was like, oh yeah, this is a, this is a good one.

Yeah, pretty cool. So with these companies, just for people that are listening and I'm sure you've done it several different ways, but you can buy the asset of the database and the information and maybe you pay one time for that. But then also maybe you could buy and keep some people on for like an earn out or something like that. Can you talk through how you made that decision as a business owner? And I guess instead of taking the profits out, you're reinvesting them back in by buying these things. And what should people think about in one to ten million dollar range?

Yeah, I mean most, well, the three we bought were, were small relatively. And then the fourth one, the, the third company we bought actually was the, the biggest. The last company bought was the smallest. But the, the three of them were just asset sales. So you're basically taking the phone number, the database the emails, like, any. Any way they can contact you. You're. You're just. That's all you're really buying. If, if there's some inventory, it's usually not really worth much. A lot of the stuff, we would just wear it. We'd get the inventory. We'd have to clean out the warehouse, but it would. Sometimes it was just a big run to the junkyard, and we get money for, like, all the old copper and things like that. But it's really the website and the phone number that's the two key things and the database, because you want to be able to reach out to them and mail them.

Yeah, go ahead.

Well, I was gonna say the big one we did was a share purchase, so we bought the whole company. And then you'd be buying the liabilities, all that kind of thing. But it was a bigger one, so we. We had. We wanted to do it that way.

Yeah. So people listening to this, there are small people retiring in your area that are willing to sell you their phone number, their database, their website, just to get out and say that they sold their business for something, let alone just shut their doors. And you, you want to create those opportunities for your business. Can you talk a little bit about the leadership shift? What we found as an agency is like 1 to 3 million dollars. You have problems as a leadership. The hustler has to die. The leader has to be born. Kind of like what you're referring to, that get into technician, the management. The 3 to 5 million range, you kind of got to build a sales team and culture in your business. And then five to 10 is really. You're the true leader, and you got to set the vision and the tone of the company and build a leadership management team underneath of that. Can you talk through and maybe that. Maybe I'm way off, but can you talk through maybe like the different things that you had to face to grow and maybe one of the bigger challenges that you had of. Yeah, any of those.

Well, I think those numbers are pretty dead on, but I think by purchasing that plumbing company, we kind of skipped a step. We went from the 1 to 3 management to the 5 to 10. So we weren't really. We didn't have the systems in place for the 5 to 10 because we were just getting out of that 3 million sort of stage. Right. So then all of a sudden we're pushing the $10 million range, and we have some good people, like good coaches that are really helping us that this year we did our mission, vision, values, which was a big One that helped. I never really believed in it until I did the whole exercise. It was a few days, and I get it now, and that's helped get everybody aligned and just really understanding the processes and systems. So we use EOS, but the same thing. We were on EOS since 2020, but we, we got a new EOS coach this year. And it, it's funny how the way this person described things, it just opened my eyes to why things are so important. Like, I, I, I'd read a sentence and be like, okay, we do that. And then he'd actually explain it. And I'm like, oh, we don't do it like that. So, yeah, it, this was a big learning year, 2025 for us.

Yeah. Do, do, do they act as a fractional integrator, or have you been able to find an integrator, or what does that look like inside of the company?

I guess you could call it like a fractional integrator. I got lucky with this person because I didn't even, I wasn't introduced to him. We started working together, and he wasn't introduced as anybody that had anything to do with eos. It was, he just was like a, a money guy that understood, like, finances and this and that. And our very first meeting, we started talking about EOs, and he just blew my mind about how much he knew about it. So we haven't really got to the finances yet because he's still working on the EOS side of things.

Yeah. So a lot of people, specifically when they go from the 5 to 10 million, they really want to dial in this EOS, but the integrator piece is the hardest. Like you, Brendan, probably have ideas, but you need it to be deployed. Between your sales team, your ops team, and your finance team, how are you able to articulate the vision of where, what you want to do to those people?

I guess, again, with sheer force. Yeah, that's probably our roadblock right now is finding an integrator. We've never, like, that's our next sort of step, our next phase. Yes. We've never had one. And it's probably in the spot where I'm getting in the way now. Right. If we had a good integrator, I'm sure we would scale a lot faster. The bottleneck, I'm sure as well, it's always the owner, but they got the bottleneck right now, and it's, like, hard for me to see. Everyone else has no problem seeing it.

Yeah, of course. Yeah.

So that, that's, this the person I'm Working with now is. I. I guess he. He's not like, he's not putting any of the stuff into play, but he's. He's laying the groundwork for when someone comes at that'll. It'll be a smooth transition.

Yeah. Awesome. So the leaders that you have, the layer of management in the EOS funnel usually. And you might have a different leadership team, but like sales leader, an ops leader, and a finance and HR leader. Is that what you have? Is there any other type of people?

We hired a controller this year. That was a great investment. That's been awesome. But then we have our four managers. We have a CSR manager, service sales and install manager. So those are the four. Like that. That's our leadership team.

Okay, perfect. And then are you doing the L10 meetings and they all have their numbers and 90 and all this stuff?

Yeah, yeah. We use Bloom growth, but. Okay. We do a weekly L10. We do the daily huddle. It. Although we. We've been using the same scorecard for quite a few years. And the. The person I'm working with now is kind of shedding some light on. We're tweaking the scorecard a little bit for our L10.

Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about. So people that might be listening, that are like 1 to 3 million, they hear scorecards and meetings and level of management. If you were to go back to that one to $3 million and give them some words of encouragement or how to do this, like, how do you build a scorecard? Or what do you have on there? Or like, maybe there's nuggets that you know now that would have helped you back then that you wish you would have done. Are there anything in particular that you could pinpoint?

It's a good question. I. I probably would have listened to the. We hired an integrator for that year we did eos. I probably would have took better notes and tried to implement everything he said. I'm not just picking and choosing. Yeah, I tend to do that.

EOS ish.

Yeah. Right. There's like EOS pure and then there's like EOS ish. And nextar kind of like nextar built a lot of their systems on eos, so it's a nice blend to work the two together because they don't conflict each other. But it's tough sometimes because that's when we did it and we didn't have a full leadership team. I find it gets easier as the leadership team grows. I mean, other problems arise, but that sort of. It helps because, yeah, I guess if, like, you're under a million, it's hard to really implement EOS. Right. I think, like, they say 2 million is probably like, the minimum.

Yeah, for sure. 1 to 3 million. A lot of times what we see is that the scorecard or having numbers or looking at numbers is a little bit foreign because, you know, you're coming out of Technician Hustler and you're just kind of like getting the days filled, you know, payroll run. And when you start to look at. This was my experience, I went from 3 to 5 million in my home service business was like, I got to start looking at my leads year over year, and my job count year over year, and my estimate count year over year. And then I have to have people that I can hold accountable to hit my goals for the next thing. And a lot of times when we roll this out with our clients, it's like, yeah, I know I should be doing this, but how do I pull this from my CRM? And then who's going to be held accountable for these things? At this point, you already, you know, you have those pieces in place. But a lot of times people miss that and they don't know how to grow because they don't know the numbers that are leveraged to pull.

Yeah. One thing I would say if I went back and did it again, it would be. You said the accountability part, but it's the whole. The management team more accountable to their numbers. For some reason, I guess me being, like, coming from the field, there were certain, like, I guess I. It was that technician mindset where I was, like, I was thinking as a technician anyways, I guess knowing what I know now, I would have been a little bit more like holding their feet to the fire a bit.

Yeah.

I shouldn't say hold their feet to.

The fire, but I think what it comes down to is that you, as a business owner. As a business owner, we tend to put everything on our shoulders. When it's like, no, my booking rate should be my CSR or my CSR manager. That should be the number that I hold them accountable for, and I can help coach them through that, but I don't need to carry the burden of that number, especially when I can even incentivize them to carry the burden of that number.

Yeah, 100%. And I wish I learned that earlier or implemented it or like, yeah, I lived that.

Yeah.

A few years ago.

Yeah. So if you're listening to this, it's okay to have numbers and then hold your team accountable for those numbers. And maybe even give them a little bit of a carrot or some type of incentive to say if you hit this number then you get this thing. That's a good thing. Okay, so community impact. We talked about at risk youth. I think there's a big opportunity for home service businesses to get involved in their community. And not especially with roll ups and franchise and franchises, but also with PE coming in of like the soul is getting sucked out of a lot of these home service businesses, specifically the local community impact. And if they do it, a lot of times it's for fluff.

Yep.

Being in your local community and doing things for the community. Can you talk about one, like why is that important to you? But two, maybe it's helped you in business in some aspect or maybe some other benefits.

Yeah, it's. We, I haven't been as impactful as I'd like. I, you know, we, we sponsor certain things, certain events, but it's, it's kind of one of those goals that long term is to be able to go into like trouble like certain schools or trouble teens and get them like they're heading down the wrong path and get them on the right path, teach them a trade and really like I, I just feel like some people just don't understand how good the trades can be when you're, when, when you, when you like you're not university material or something along those lines. Right. Like it just when, when people discover it, it's, it's, it's a great thing. So that, that's kind of my like long term goal. So we've sponsored some like high schools. We sponsor certain clubs like the Brampton, like the track clubs. I, I was a runner so I just tend to gravitate towards like running in sports and, but yeah, just. And it's hard now too because we started in one like the, the West End, in one city we're in Brampton, but now basically like we're in Toronto. But that breaks down into different boroughs, different neighborhoods, different cities and it's, I'm still kind of like centralized here for where the community investment goes, I guess.

Yeah, makes sense. I think a lot of times we get involved in the community and it's fun to get involved and there's more that we could do. But there's also like you're involved in the community in some aspects of what you do, even just through your technicians, through your employees of the impact that you're making. And I think this is the thing like pe. I think not all PE is bad, but a lot of times, it sucks the soul out of the actual businesses, and it's just a numbers game. And as a business owner in a local community and supporting 45 jobs and 45 families, that's an impact in and of itself that you're making. So it's a good thing.

Yeah, I agree with that.

Yeah. I do want to ask you about the sales piece because you've alluded to several times that you are more in the technician mindset and then scaling to management. We see this a lot of times 1 to 3 and then 3 to 5 of building a sales team and a sales culture in a business, because at the end of the day, you got to sell something and have a job, you know, to do. So can you talk about what that was like for you? And did you just get a rock star sales manager or salesperson that, like, landed in your lap, or how did you build that and cultivate that inside of your business?

Yeah, I guess our. The first, like, we just hired a sales manager this year. I've been doing the sales manager up until this year, but I remember the first salesperson we hired. They. They just had a knack for it. So I kind of got lucky there.

They were.

They. They had a good close rate, and I didn't know anything to teach them. I just sort of, like, I could help them with the technical stuff. I remember the first call we actually went on. I was like a ride along. I was going to show the person how to do it, and in the middle of a call, they basically interrupted me and took over because I was doing so poorly.

I got it, man. Don't worry.

Yeah. And I was like, okay, no problem. You do your thing. Nothing's really changed. I'm still. I'm probably the worst salesperson in the company, but. Yeah, and then it's been a struggle, though, because it's. It's a tough gig. Right. Just to find anybody that's brave enough to work on straight commission. And then when you get them, then you got to make sure you have the leads. And then when you do get the leads, you then hopefully they're not. Then they got to be able to close them. Right. So we have a team of five now, and it's. It's probably where most of my energy goes, is focusing on just. Just coaching them and training them, helping them with whatever they may need.

Yeah. I think the hardest part, you know, we work with H Vac contractors. It's like nine times out of 10, people are not calling you for replacements, and if they are, it's to price shop. So it's like you got to get the repair leads and then you have to build a culture of repair leads lead to replacement opportunities and then you have to create that full funnel effect in your business. And when you get that, then you can plug your sales guys in and they can run on commission because you have this funnel built.

Yeah, exactly.

A lot of times it's like getting to that point is very hard for people because they don't have those functions in their business of like repair lead to replacement opportunity and then feeding these guys.

Right.

Yeah. So building out the sales team and you said that they were all commissioned so there's no base for these guys. Or you kind of give them a five week Runway or they, or they can create their own opportunities with BNI or. What does that look like?

Yeah, they can, but they, they don't know. Well, in, in the last. Since we started in with Comfort Advisors in 2015, so 10 years, only one has been in the BNI and that was for a few months. But okay, yeah, yeah, they're more than welcome to. We pay extra commission if they generate their own leads.

Yeah.

But yeah, it's all strict commission. We'll do like two weeks of training. We'll pay for that. And then it's basically they're on their own. And we will, if, if they needed help at the start, we'll help them. But it's basically like, I mean it's, it's pretty lucrative. Right. So they don't need to sell a lot. And we actually tell people like, if you're making 125 grand a year as a Comfort Advisor, we'll probably have to let you go because that means you're not closing enough leads.

Exactly.

And they don't really believe us. And then when they're making the most amount of money they've ever had in their life and they're loving it and I'm like, yeah, they're getting pips. They're getting like, hey, you know, we still gotta like, we're not where we need you to be yet.

Yeah, it's so my dad was a technician growing up. He was a technician in pest control. But then I ended up in the trades and I. It was very crazy to me that U.S. comfort Advisor can make $300,000. And it was like, oh, that's pretty normal. And I'm like, okay, this, this is crazy because there's guys that work in tech startups that don't even make this right. There's business owners that don't even make this.

We tell them that there's like doctors, dentists, CEOs that have like went to school for years and years and years and you're just going to waltz in and in a few months be making more money than them. Like, it's, it's, but it's not easy and you do have to put in the, like, you got to do your own homework to get to that level.

Yeah, for sure. Nice, man. That's awesome. So is there anything in your story that was like, if you could pinpoint something that was like a big inflection point of you as a leader or your growth in the business or something that you could pinpoint that would be a good takeaway for listeners that's like, hey, if you're not like nextar. Okay. If you're not in a peer to peer coaching group, like you got to do that because that was a big thing. Or is there something, you know, when I implemented this, this happened.

Yeah, I, I would say some sort of group. Right. Like, it's a coach. It doesn't matter what kind. I just feel like, I mean, there is people that I meet and they never had a coach and just blows my mind because like, I, I would be lost. I have a lot of coaches that spend a lot of money on coaching and consultants and whatnot. But like I, I just, I'm amazed at people that can do it without one. But I also find not many people can do it without a coach. So it's like find somebody or someone and that that's actually done it too, right? Not somebody that's trying to teach you the theory. Somebody that's actually been there and done it. Yeah, I think that's, that's, that's the one thing I could say, like that's, I've done a lot of things. I'm part of another group called EO Entrepreneurs Organization.

Yeah.

And that's a great organization. I get to meet a lot of, like, I learn a lot of stuff and it's, there's, there's not many trades or home services people in the group. But you know, it's just seeing a different side of business and still going through the same struggles. You know, that, that's been a big help. But I think like, yeah, I, I, if I give anyone, if anyone asks advice, it's, there's tons of groups like nextar. It doesn't have to be nextar, but there's so many out there. I see you got Tommy Mellow's book back there, but like, yeah, he's just. Even his podcasts are great. I listen to those things all the time and there's so much information out there. But find a way to get it. Get that info.

Yeah, there's some good coach coaching programs. Strategic coach is one that I'm in. Sullivan.

Yeah, yeah, he's out of Toronto last year.

Yep. So strategic coach is good. I'm also an entree Leadership, which is a Dave Ramsey program, which is good for business owners. There's BTA Breakthrough Academy, which I do some work with them. They're out of Canada too. There's a lot.

It's.

When we talk about coaching, it's like you gotta invest in yourself and so that way you can get through to the next level. And I think what you said hit the nail on the head, which is try to find people that have already done it and that are building businesses and then you're going to pay down that ignorance tax and get there a lot faster for your business.

Where I am now, it's taken me 18 years to get here. If I started over, I think I could do it in three years now and get right to where I am now. And I just like, if I would have. Well, even joining nextar has been a help, but I should have joined nextar and listened like right off the bat instead of like picking and choosing again. Right. So.

Yeah.

But knowing what I know now, it's. It's. Yeah, I probably honestly wouldn't have. I probably would have went out of business at some point without, like, the coaching.

Yeah. It's crazy. I've been at it for seven years now and I tell my wife all the time, like, if I had to do this again, I could probably do it in like a year or two to get where I'm at. Because. Because you already know, like, the pitfalls. And think about those people. If you could hire them as your coaches that have already done it, how quick, more quick, could they download what works and what doesn't into your business and that's what you're paying for, which is the beauty of it.

Yeah, 100%. And just guardrails, too. Like, I look at some mistakes that have cost me so much time and now I probably don't know what those mistakes were, but I was probably heading that way. And the coach will just say, try this way. And like, sometimes they tell you, sometimes they suggest, but regardless, they. They keep the guardrails so you don't weave off too far.

Exactly. Well, cool, man. This has been great. I appreciate you sharing all this stuff. Where should people go, you know, to learn more about you, maybe connect with you on LinkedIn or check out your business, that kind of stuff?

Yeah, just the website's doctorhvac ca drhvac Brendan Aldridge on LinkedIn and then I think on Instagram where the real. Or I'm not even sure the real Dr. H Vac. It's spelled D O C T O R. The Our name was already taken, so.

Yeah, the real is always good, too.

Yeah.

Cool, man. Well, it's great to connect with you. I appreciate you sharing your story on here and look forward to continuing the conversation.

Okay, awesome. Thanks a lot.

Yeah, man.

Bye.