Growing a Family Owned Window and Door Company to Multi 7 Figures with Justin & Rose Reif

Welcome back to the show. I'm your host, Phil Risher. And on today's episode, we're talking about growing a family owned window and door company to multiple seven figures with Justin and Rose Reiff. Thanks so much for joining us today, guys.

Thanks for having us.

Absolutely.

Yeah, for sure. So if you could maybe take a minute or two, give us a quick bio, like how did you get to this point as far as like starting a window and door company and grow it to this point?

Sure. Kind of starts with me. I'm not sure Rose ever envisioned herself in a window and door business. So I grew up around it. My father, we're a family business. He started this company that we currently have, Window Works. But he's been doing windows and doors for about 45 years. He has worked in multiple capacities. This is not his first company. He has worked for director of sales for some large Anderson window dealer. We are an Anderson window dealer in the Raleigh Durham market. And I literally grew up around it. You know, some of my earliest memories, no joke, is climbing on Anderson window boxes when I was a little kid in his warehouse. So when he decided to leave New York, which is where we're from originally, he came down here and saw an opportunity to, you know, fill that, that niche of quality windows. And so he started Window Works. And then eventually I joined him along the way. And then now Rose, for the last several years and is coming further into the business, has decided to come along for the ride as well. So I love it. We ended up where we are.

Yeah, I love it. So I guess your dad started it and then how did you come on, did you start like right out of college and you kind of like came into the business or did you go work somewhere else and then come in and like what points did that come come up?

Yeah, that's a great question. So, no, not even remotely close. I was like, why? I said I did grow up around it and through college I worked doing deliveries and I've done installation. I've done all kinds of things. I went to school for political science and I worked several years in politics and I actually had quite an extensive career and a potential path forward there. But I kind of sa soured on it. And then I went back to school because I enjoyed the, the social psychology side of things. So I got a psych degree and I worked for five years actually doing that. I was going to start working towards my PhD in that and clinical psych. But actually again, family businesses and opportunities sort of arise. And he started this company and I just saw an opportunity. I've always wanted to own my own business, which is part of, you know, I've had, like most people, you have multiple dreams. And I saw this or many years of research and studying in the university setting, which I also didn't mind, but I thought, you know, this is great. And so I took them up on it and, you know, kind of the rest is history. We've been kind of cranking along trying to grow our business ever since.

Yeah, very cool. I think there's a awesome opportunity for a lot of people where it's like, hey, you have this thing over here that your dad built, but let me come in and add fuel to the fire and take it to the next level. When you. So can you tell us like, what does the team look like now? Like sales people and maybe like structure. Like is there like a visionary integrator or how does this all work?

What does it look like? Yeah. No. So again, you know, he started the company, him and my mother together, literally, you know, set the store up. And then eventually I came along and they're getting older. My mother has stepped back. And then, you know, it was kind of he and I for a long time. But we've changed it. We, we have a sales team now. Actually, we're getting ready to hire some more salespeople. We, you know, have installation crews that work for us. We have a project manager in place who oversees them. You, obviously there's administrative staff that helps us get the day to day operations done, like scheduling or payroll, things of that nature. Rose is working as our marketing and brand manager, but she's part of our leadership team. So really there's no aspect of the business that she's not involved in at this point. My father, Jeff is still involved every day. He loves it. He doesn't really want to retire, so, you know, and it keeps him spry. So we meet weekly in our leadership meetings and we have a fractional cfo. We have a wonderful marketing company that we work with now and shout out to Flash. Thanks. I cannot recommend enough if you're listening and you're not working with Flash. But we've really gotten some great people in place, better CPAs. We've leveled up our game in those areas and bookkeeping and things like that. So that's sort of where we are. And we're continuing to, to move up those, those ladder rungs.

Awesome. I love it. I think usually around like the 2 to 3 million dollar mark, it's like you can kind of sell to that point. But then you gotta buy back your time and invest in building the team. Can you talk a little bit about like hiring yourself, your salespeople? Because it's not just you and your dad selling, but like hiring salespeople, building out a sales system. What metrics, like what did that look like and how has the experience been or what's the lessons learned through that process?

So, you know, one of the things that I've spent the last number of years trying to learn is how to run a business. Right. You know, you can get an MBA and it's not going to teach you the real operations of a business. And I think anybody who owns a business understands that. You know, for so long my father and I were working day to day. Well, let's try to get this job. And the more money we make, that grows the business somehow magically, but it doesn't really. And so what you realize you're easy in any small business owner would understand this. You're going to cap out at some point, right? You can only do so much. There's only so many hours in the day and so many days in the week. So we were kind of bumping along. That's where Rose actually came in at some point and was like, look, you guys are at a certain point, you need help. Now Rose is my wife, for I think that was clear. But she's also my super nerd. She loves Excel spreadsheets. My life is spreadsheeted and my life is better for it. So she kind of came in and we started really crunching numbers. Numbers. We started looking at the metrics, figuring out what do we have to track, where do we need to make changes. And you know, obviously one of the first places was getting an admin in to help us. Second was the sales team. We can only sell so much, you know, you can only get in there. And you also, like you said, you buy back your time. Because if I'm not doing the day to day sales operations with my clients, it allows me to then turn around, do things like marketing, grow the business by focusing on the internal metrics and processes and procedures that we've now continue to put in place, but have been putting in place since. Since we started this real growth process. Probably what you say about four years ago. Yeah, about four years ago. We really started to develop a sense of where we wanted the company to go.

Yeah, I love it. There's a difference between cash flow and enterprise value. And when you're just constantly working and getting cash, it's like, okay, yeah, we're making money. It's growing. But are you really actually building a business or just owning a job? And I think that's kind of the part that you came to with hiring salespeople. So a lot of people that listen to the show are like 1 to 10 million. And like I said, at the 2 to 3 million markets, like, okay, I gotta hire salespeople. Were there any specific lessons that you learned when you brought on salespeople that, like, okay, I gotta make sure I track this thing? Did you incentivize them for bringing on their own leads? Or, like, how am I gonna funnel these leads to them? And then how do I get good salespeople and do I train them up or do I bring people from the outside in? Any lessons there or particulars that helped you?

Yeah, I think so. And I was gonna say, if you wanna kind of feel that. Cause you've been part of that process since.

Well, I'm curious what you were going to say.

Yeah, well, I mean, so, yes, hiring anybody, what you do, any. Any position, and sales is included when you hire somebody in your small business, especially when it's sort of new to you. Like, we were. I did sales. Jeff does sales. Got it right. But we do it our own way. When you want to get a new position in place, whatever that position is, you're going to learn a lot about what you want from that person in that position and what you don't want. And I think that the sales position has been a huge learning curve for us because we got people in. Some were great and some were not, and some were great and started out great and then fizzled out over time for whatever reason. What we've realized is, when you look at some of these sales guys, you know, you want to incentivize. It's a sales position. I mean, obviously you don't want to give away everything, but you want them to be comfortable. You want them to, like, come into work. And so for us, we've really kind of built that around the idea of. I'm not really sure, you know, maybe you can articulate it better. I'm trying to.

I think. I think part of what makes it tricky is the products that we sell. Right. Most people have had to deal with H vac stuff in their home at some point. Most people have had to deal with plumbers. How many people buy windows? Right. How many times in your lifetime have you bought windows and doors? Usually it's maybe one, but it's something that most people have zero familiarity with. Right, right. And so I think to find qualified salespeople who, you know, understand the product, understand the customers, and, and that they have, you know, usually zero level of knowledge and to, you know, be able to educate the customer without over educating them. It's a really fine line that you gotta walk.

I'd say education was a big part of it too, because there's, you know, we carry multiple window lines or brands, I should say end lines. You know, Anderson alone has, you know, five or six window lines to choose from, and every one of them is significantly different from the others. And so trying to make sure that your sales team, like, you want somebody who's good at sales, but then you have to educate them. And that has been a big part of it for us and sort of realizing what is the cutoff. Like, I, you know, I always joke, Jeff has a PhD in Windows. And it's kind of true. The man knows more about the history of windows and doors and everything that goes into it and the brands. But I don't necessarily need every salesperson to know at that level, but I also need them to know. Yeah, one of the things, our business is a little bit more unique than some of my competitors because in addition to selling to homeowners, we also sell to contractors and custom home builders. Custom home builders and contractors, you do need more information to sell to them because they're getting more intricate and they get more technical. Homeowners want less technical, but they want more personal. So you're trying to find that balance between the two. And one of the things we've actually discovered, I think, more recently, is that it's actually a different, different skill set. People that you want to hire to sell. The homeowners are not going to be the same guys that are going to sell to contractors and custom home builders. Like commercial things like that?

Yeah, yeah, like a B2B person and then a B2C person. It's a completely different sales process and level of knowledge, whether you can relate to them on a personal level or just like, hey, brass tacks, numbers and data and science is totally different. You mentioned about four years ago you kind of had this light bulb moment or kind of transition into scaling the business. You mentioned you hired an admin, some sales team, a fractional cfo. What did the fractional CFO bring to the table that was like, oh, my gosh, you know, we've been doing this all wrong or anything in particular? I mean, I know. I think you work with Paul, but yeah, I'm curious to hear.

I can tell you our, our Light bulb moment.

Okay, well, let me just preface with this. So we had had our leadership meetings and we were working really hard and we were spreadsheeting and we're trying to develop our KPIs and dashboard and the stuff that goes with it. And Rose, I want to your credit, you did a fantastic job. You know, you really helped to sort of capture that. Now I'm going to let you kind of go.

Well, we were, we were meeting with our CFO and we were talking about, you know, we really want to grow this business. We see so much potential. We're building a great team. You know, why? Basically, we feel like we're working pretty hard at this, but we're not necessarily seeing the payoff that we would expect at this point. And he's. He's looking at our P. L and he's just going through stuff and he's like, well, I literally don't see a line on here for advertising. We've grown entirely to this point by word of mouth, which is great. But also imagine how much we could kick it off if we were actually telling people, hey, we're here. And so that, that for us was like, oh, it's really great move to bring this guy in to point out this very obvious thing that, you know, the three of us should absolutely have seen sooner. But we did, and then we started working with Flash and things have been great.

Yep. That's how we kind of actually literally landed on your doorstep.

Yeah. Oh, my gosh, that's funny. I think a lot of times, like good quality businesses, they do the right thing. They get referrals, they have good salespeople so they can sell, but then they don't actually. They get to a point and then they're like, okay, well, I should be doing actual marketing, like going out, running ads, creating content, doing emails.

Right.

All of these things that just with naturally good sales, you're going to get referrals coming in, you're going to sell, you're going to close, and it's a testament to having a great business. But then when you actually do marketing, it's kind of fuel in the fire on top of it, which is great as far as, like the growth trajectory for the business. You've been mentioning these leadership meetings. A lot of times, people to go from like 3 to 5 million, they have to really professionalize the business and get, you know, heads, like a sales head, an ops head, a finance head, and then have these like, leadership meetings with KPIs. What are some of those KPIs that you're looking at and metrics inside of that meeting that is going to help forecast for growth.

Sure. So what the, one of the biggest is making sure that we maintain our margins, our gross profit margins. Biggest one, that's the one that we, we've repeatedly, you know, struggled. It's, it's, it's the, it's the wave that you're, you know, you're constantly trying to push back against and making sure that we don't compromise or sacrif. And it's also the one that runs through. When you start looking at the business as a whole, is this person or are these products being sold correctly, are we paying people correctly in order to maintain that, obviously you want to attract good talent, you know, you want to offer, you know, benefits and things of that nature. So all of that obviously costs money. So then the question is, is your pricing right? And that's one of the biggest things. So. But it all comes back to the profit margins. It's all about the percentages. And if you don't make the money, then, you know, you're not going to be able to grow your business. And I think that to me, at least that's the one thing that we, I mean, of course these leadership meetings, we talk about lots of other things and intricacies and budgets, but that's, you know, to me that's the biggest one.

From, from several KPIs though, we were able to make strategic changes to the business. So looking at our average, you know, our average ticket and saying, okay, it's, it's good. And obviously these are high ticket items that we're selling, but what could we do to improve it? We realized we were having a lot of people and again, you know, us just kind of bumping along without Paul's knowledge. As a cfo, we did not offer any kind of financing up until a couple years ago. And so then we were looking at our average ticket and realizing a lot of people were sort of splitting their job saying, well, I'll do these windows this year and then maybe in a couple years I'll come back and do the backside of the house or whatever. And you know, really for the customer, that's not what's best because every year these, these manufacturers have a price increase. So if we can get them all, they'll, you know, to lock everything in now they're actually going to get the better deal. They feel like they're saving money because it's less now and less later. But overall it costs them more. So looking at okay, can we offer financing so that people are able to, you know, do everything at once. It helps our customers and then it increases our, you know, average ticket. So that was one that led to a big change in the business. I think looking at our sales cycle, at how many days it was taking us to close deals and realizing, you know, yeah, it's a little trickier than like an H vac system, for example, but we probably can quote this in house. We probably can, you know, bring an iPad with some really, you know, good tech on there and show people what we can offer them and go ahead and close the deal right in the house. And that just makes it so much easier for our customers.

So I was gonna say, and the other thing that I would. Would add to that too. And this was about four years ago. This was actually one of the first things we did. And I cannot stress this enough to really any business owner. I don't care whether you're a home based service or not. Is having a solid CRM system in place. It is critical to your business to have it, especially in a home based service business. Our business has so many moving parts. I could not. We again, we've been in business now, you know, 18, 19 years. We've had a CRM system for four. I don't know how I went that long without it. I don't know how I went that long without understanding what it was. And now that I have it, I could not imagine not, not having it in place. It is critical that you get a good CRM system. There's lots of them out there. You have to find one that fits for you and your business. But yeah, it's. And I think because that CRM system too, it tracks analytics, it tracks sales, closure rates, it interacts and, you know, connects to marketing. Right. We use it for our marketing with our marketing team and scheduling clients and all the things that go along with it is the center of our universe now. Everything else orbits around it.

Yeah, y' all use pipedrive and then do you have any other project management softwares or anything that you use?

We actually just onboarded with a company called. It's called CompanyCam.

Oh yeah.

It allows us to help manage and work with our subcontractors as well as you guys had recommended it for a while because we can do pictures and directly stream them into our website. However, it also, it's actually pretty versatile. It allows us to collaborate with our subcontractors if they're on the job. They can take pictures, we can do pictures. It Allows us to assign jobs with information. It's. It's a pretty neat. We're. We're still learning it. It's literally brand new for us. But. But it's. And of course it also integrates with pipedrive, which is.

Yeah, yeah, cool. I. I think it's cool you can get the pictures with CompanyCam, but one of the really cool thing is you can build checklists in there to have people take pictures of things and you can build it into your SOPs. And especially when you have subs, you can hold them accountable to utilizing this tool so you can see what's actually going on, which is a game changer for a lot of businesses.

Yeah, their AI walkthrough feature is pretty rad. It was really pretty neat to see that function.

And that actually, that leads me into to the other thing too with that we've done over the last. And actually I'd say over the last like 12 to 18 months has become huge for us, is trying to utilize AI whenever we can, wherever and whenever. We've had some successes with it and we've. We've had some failures too. There's a lot of products out there. So again, you kind of have to filter through what works for you or doesn't. But we use AI, you know, just building those standard operating procedures. You know, if you have an idea, we, like I said, bring a project manager on. Was really just a new position for us in the last month and we were trying to come up with. The person we hired has a lot of experience and understood this is a new role. So they're helping us develop it. But prior to that I was trying to come up with some things. We sat around 45 minutes Saturday morning, typed in all the things. Things that in our head it was a giant run on paragraph sentence of like, these are the things that we know the project manager needs to know. And we ran it through AI and developed a checklist. 45 minutes. I mean it would. If you're doing this by hand, hours. So whatever your business is, look at AI in ways to automate and also help save you time. It is such an amazing tool and be nice to it because it'll probably remember you when it takes over. So yeah, I would say please and thank you.

Yeah, I think one of the coolest things is you have all the stuff in your brain and it can come alongside you and just refine everything that you have in your brain into something that's contextual and it makes a lot of sense. We have some clients that like they have this thing where it's like, let me just say all this stuff and then give me a list and then also give me a job description and give me questions that I should ask in the interview process and all the stuff that it could be almost like an outsourced recruiter to help you just refine all your stuff. So I really love that. Have you all done anything with estimating with using AI or I think maybe phone answering or any other things inside of your business?

So our hiring actually we use a company called Hirebus and we use them previously with some early onboarding and then we didn't use them for a while and now we're back to them and they've completely overhauled their system with AI. It's fantastic. They do an AI phone interview, phone screener with folks and give you a whole, you know, personality map basically of, you know, this is what the person said on their resume. And oh, here's a potential catch where when they talked about it in the phone screener, it actually didn't sound as detailed as what they made it sound like on the resume. So be sure to ask them about that. So it basically gives you, you know, here are the things you need to check on with this person. How well suited are they personality wise to the job and then how well does their, their resume and experience match the job based on the AI phone screener? It was amazing. So we, you know, would sit down to somebody. The first time we're interacting with them is at their in person interview. They've already been, you know, resume checked and screened by AI and we had a list of, you know, specific things, potential red flags with this person to look out for and dig into.

It was, yeah, that's really cool.

Yeah, it was interesting because we, we didn't like RO said we didn't use them for a few months and then kind of jump back into it. It was like, it was a huge upgrade and like again AI moves very quickly and it was a huge upgrade in like three, four months, something like that. The other thing that we're using, you know, using it for as well is our Voice, our VoiceOver IP phone service. And it, we have desktop, like regular desktop phones. It doesn't capture it on there but it does create transcripts if you call through the app. And so like our project manager, instead of having to get him a separate cell phone, we set him up with a direct phone number that's only his through the company, but it's all AI and it's turned on. So we have transcripts of every single phone call he does, and it can provide a synopsis. I can go into my dashboard and see. So if occasionally there's miscommunications and clients will say, well, you said X, Y and Z, we can go back and look at that. But I can also pull out a synopsis. I don't have to necessarily read or listen to a phone call. That's 10 minutes. I can get a quick little breakdown of what occurred, which is also great. And that's actually going to be probably going forward, I think, because we're going to be probably transitioning out of our physical workspace to a bigger space. I think we're going to probably transition straight to computers and start moving away from like actual desktop phones because everything is, is. It's not needed. And I can then capture every single phone conversation. There's no, you know, ambiguity about what somebody might have said or didn't say. And that also integrates into our pipedrive system where the desktop phone version doesn't.

Nice. That's so good. Then every single client record will have the phone call attached to it. So then you'll be able to know and line it up and just go back and listen to the call. One of the cool things about call recordings is you can take all the call recordings for that team member and then put them into ChatGPT and say, like, this past week, what are all the things that I need to coach this person on? And you have good coaching out for. Yeah. Is that what Rose is doing?

No. Well, actually she did something very interesting when we were doing an interview. And again, this is something that's very. Anybody can do it. This is not going to cost you anything. Please take this.

We. Well, we thank you. We recorded the interviews and then I explained to, you know, I use Gemini. Okay. Rose, Justin, Jeff, whoever he is, make us better interviewers. Listen to the interview and tell us how we could each improve our interview skills. And so, you know, we went through, I think a three week round of interviews before we, we did second round. And by second round I would say we'd all improved vastly because if we just kept saying like, okay, we took that feedback, wow, listen to this one. Keep making us better.

Well, and the, the other thing. Well, it did. And, and you know, and it was like, okay, you know, Jeff talks a little bit too much. I have that similar problem. But then it was like really kind of broke down each person's role, including the fact that like, Rose, you didn't, you know, you don't Speak as much. So you may want to consider jumping in more. The other thing that it did, which was fantastic, was it also generated questions to ask in the interview. It was like, hey, based on the things you're saying, you may want to consider. And then that gave us a basis, you know, going forward to ask whatever it was about 10 questions roughly came up with, which was great. And it didn't. Again, it was Gemini. It was the free version. Didn't cost anything. It was on her phone. And so, yeah, it's. There's a lot of free stuff out there, too. If you don't want to spend the money or if you don't have the money and you're a small business and you're trying to grow, there's a lot of great opportunities out there, but you don't have to spend a lot of money to. To use some of these tools.

Yeah, I think it's the creativity of just trying it and getting it working into your normal workflow. And then it's like, oh, I could use that over here. Oh, I could ask it this.

Oh, I could do.

And then it's just like, okay, all this stuff just kind of like what you're saying. Just snowball.

Yeah. You know, I love technology, and that's the other word that I've learned. It's my new lexicon, or it's in my new lexicon is tech stack. Tech stack.

Hey, there you go. What's the tech stack looking like? I love it. As far as trajectory, growth goals for the company where. What's the goals, you know, in the next couple years or what do you see? What are you building towards? Anything to share on that?

Why don't you start? Because I feel like I've sort of dominated the conversation a little bit.

Sure. I. I think our goal is to refine what we're doing in terms of customer experience. Earlier today, even, we. We had this issue come up. You know, we have it in our contract that we don't fill nail holes in painting. We're not painters. That's not our expertise. And it happens all the time that people are frustrated by that. They're like, wait a minute, I didn't see that little line in the contract. I missed that. Nobody told me that. I wasn't expecting that. Right. And so finally, we at our leadership meeting this morning said, you know, why can't we make that happen for people? Right. Why can't we do a better job of saying, hey, we're not going to do it, but we can sub it to somebody and have it scheduled right on the back end. That, you know, when we finish your installation, we'll have painters come in. And if you want to pay for that, great. And if you don't, then. Then you just get the standard right, and you'll figure it out yourself. But just. Just really trying to look at every aspect of how we're touching people's lives. I mean, they're letting us into their homes, their biggest investment, making one of the biggest investments that people make into their biggest investment. Windows and doors are not cheap when they're done well. And so we really need to just be delighting people and taking more care and making sure they know exactly what to expect. Because, again, most people have no experience buying windows and doors. If I go buy a car, I kind of know what. What to expect. I know how this is going to go. But buying windows and doors is something completely foreign to most people. And we just want to make it a little less scary and a little.

More, you know, as fun as buying windows and doors. And to Rose's point, you know, we have made a lot of changes over the last number of years and some big ones very recently. And the changes we've made are scary, and they're new and you're trying to work through them, but they're better for the company long term. Right? So we can scale the company. It gives us some. It took some constraints off of us and allowed us to grow. And one of the things in this particular conversation, again, the customer's not happy. And this particular case, you know, the guy looked at his contract and said, yes, I signed it, but still not happy. Right? So we're looking at it. We're going to work with them. But it is a common thing that comes up. And we actually have two things in particular. And we were looking at it today and said, okay. In almost 20 years of business, there's two things that have been a recurring theme that have graded on customers over the years that we do. How can we do this better? I want my customers to be happy. And that's. It's not a BS line. I legitimately want them. I sell really solid products. I don't sell anything that I don't believe in. Any product I sell is a top quality product. You're not going to have to worry about replacing your windows and doors. Again, it's solid. But there's the customer service side. What can I do to make you happy? And there's a really good example. And I will fully admit, I've not always been the Best at customer service in that sense. I mean, like anybody, you're tired, it's the end of the day, you just want to go home. What can I do to make you happy? Just kind of leave me alone. Well, a couple weeks ago, there was a woman who came in. She had bought a door from us, and it was actually something very simple. She loved the door, loved the installation crew, was very happy with all of that. But somehow she didn't get a door screen. She missed it. And she came in, she was very unhappy, and the salesman was out that day. I was late in the day. I was there. She came in, she was older. She said, can I sit down? I pulled out a chair for her, and she just wasn't happy. She said, I understand. I kind of ruined the experience for her. I thought I was getting a screen. Why wouldn't you sell me a screen? And I said, you know, in this market where we are, there's a lot of factors. A lot of people actually don't want screens. I come from New York. Everybody gets a screen. No question. Here in the Raleigh Durham market, there's a lot of reasons. It's too hot, people open their windows, there's pollen, etc. But I sat and I listened to her, and while she was talking to me, literally going through my head was, I'm not going to let her leave until she has a smile on her face. And I said, I'm sorry. And I said, legitimately, it ruined your experience. I didn't want it to ruin your experience. And so I told her, I said, I can get you a screen. What is it going to cost me? I said, it's not going to cost you anything. I'm not going to charge you for a screen. I want you to be happy. At this point, you thought you were getting it, it's fine. And I said, as soon as it comes in, we're going to come out and we're going to put it in. We're going to take care of it. And she was very thankful for that. And we started talking and I said, I'm going to take care of it. I want you to be happy. And then somehow, I don't know, she started talking about her dogs. And Jeff came in, and Jeff loves his dogs. And they started talking and showing each other pictures. And by the time she left, she was, merry Christmas, Happy New Year. Have a great day. She had a smile on her face. And, you know, and the other thing we're going to do, too, is when we go out to do the screen she's got some dogs that she rescues and loves. We're going to go to petsmart. We're going to get some really nice treats again, we have a CRM system, put some notes in there and we're going to really put a smile on her face. I want her to be happy. It isn't about the review. She was a lot older. She probably wouldn't leave a review either way. You know, I don't know. Maybe, maybe not. I don't care. I just want her to be happy and I want all of my customers to be happy. And that's our new approach on everybody. So I love it.

I think there's a big shift in the market with private equity coming in, and it's just all numbers and it takes the local business out of local business and family owned business out of family owned business. And the people that double down on that customer experience are going to be the ones that really stand out and that actually care. It's not just dollars and cents, but really caring. And so if someone's listening to this, the takeaway on that is you need to make sure your customer experience is great and that you as the owner care so much because you're probably going to bump into this person at Walmart or something and like, you want them to be a positive experience with your company. For sure.

Yeah. And it's not. Again, it's not a BS thing. It's like, legitimately I want people, I want to be happy when I'm done doing something. Especially like Rose said, we always give this analogy of it's like buying a car. It costs the same amount of money in a lot of cases as you would to buy a car. It's a big ticket item. People don't always understand the process. It's your home, it's personal. It's your. It's the most personal space. You have other, you know, than like maybe your bedroom or your bathroom. It's your whole house. And so for us, it really is about coming in and trying to make sure people really are happy when the job is done. And we've instituted a lot of things over the last couple years to say thank you by giving small gifts and doing different things. And then we instituted the other thing about giving all of our employees the opportunity to make a customer happy.

Oh, yeah, we obviously sold this from a bigger company, but you know that every employee has carte blanche to spend, you know, 500 a quarter just on customer delight. And, you know, and you have to prove to me that you spent It. I want everyone spending their full amount.

Oh, I love it. So like grab coffee for someone or do something.

Yeah. Or. Yeah, like the dog treats. Right. Somebody came in the other day. What was the story? She loved.

She. So yeah. So she hasn't actually signed on the dotted line yet. She's got a project and she's very particular. She wants the house to be a certain way and it's, you know, all the. And she's got a lot of. There's a lot of moving parts to the deal. I think we're probably going to get it. But she's very nice. But we got in this conversation and she's from up north and same area that I went to, went to school, same university. So did her husband, etc. Thing. Turns out he had proposed to her. This is fascinating. Proposed to her in the graveyard in Tarrytown, New York. Now most people don't know Tarrytown, but they do know the Legend of Sleepy Hollow. And Sleepy Hollow is Tarrytown. And he. They're very big fans and she's a big fan of this. Legend of Sleepy Hollow proposed. Then she made her own wedding dress. She showed me a picture and actually it really was a gorgeous wedding dress. And it was a Sleepy Hollow theme. Very Katrina. Katrina Van Tassel. And I said that to her. Van Pelt is from Jumanji. But I put a note in there and I was like, if she goes with us, we're going to, you know, make sure that when we're done, I don't know what it's going to be, but something. Legend of Sleepy Hollow. I got to find something. And we'll. We'll figure it out. But I want to put a smile on her face and kind of surprise her with. Or surprise them, I should say with. With something. But she's taken the lead on the project, so she's the one. I know I haven't met her husband.

Yeah, I love it.

Just trying to find little ways to make people happy. And again, if you have a CRM system, it's so easy to just put that little note in there so that when it comes time. Here's another one that we actually. This. This is a screw up. We businesses screw up, you own it. If you make a mistake, you own it. Last one and then we can move on. I'll let you is. We had one of our employees at the time, actually, he was leaving a job. He was doing a service. He was backing up and he ran over this little boy's tricycle. Favorite toy at the moment. And thank God nobody was hurt or anything like that, but ran over it, destroyed it. And obviously, the father's not happy. Understandable. And so this was one of the. This is. Was the turning point for me. This was several months ago. I want to give good customer service, but it was a long day. Jeff was on pto. The guy's calling, I want to talk to Jeff. And I'm not happy. And, you know, I said, well, we're gonna. Obviously, I said, he told us it's gonna cost a hundred dollars to get a new one. So I told my admin. I said, tell him we'll give him 150. And I just was like, it's a long day. I want to go home. I don't feel like dealing with this right now. And I told Rose, and basically she was like, stop what you're doing. This is what you're going to do. And it was like a turn. It was like, no, it was like a light bulb moment. It really was. And. And. And I said, okay, what are we doing? She goes, you're gonna go to Target. You're gonna get that little boy some stuff for his bike because it was his favorite toy. And, you know, you're gonna do X, Y, and Z. And we're Put together a little package. And I said, so, okay, fine. And I had fun with it. I was like, this is great. I've got kids. I get it. So we gave him. He only asked for 100. We gave him 150. I put together. I got him a helmet with a Mohawk and little dinosaurs. And we also got some other stuff for his bike. We packed it up. I put together a little note, and I apologized. And I told him, I know it's really hard when you lose something that you like. I said, we're gonna. We all talked about respecting other people's things and things of that nature. And what we did was I had mailed it to them. I fedexed it. And the father called me and was like, my son loves this helmet. He has two years old, two and a half. He watches TV wearing it. He goes, thank you so much. I can't believe you guys did that. It was such an amazing thing. We got him a bike, you know, a new one. He loves it, but he loves the stuff. I got him Spider man, you know, safety gear and all kinds of. And he was so happy. It took nothing to do that, to make him happy. And we screwed up. So, no question, we owed this family, this little boy, something to replace what we broke. But it made it that much better when the father called and I wasn't expecting a call or anything, but he called and was like, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And I said that was the least we could do. It doesn't take a lot, especially if you make a mistake. Just own it and make it better.

Yeah. And how could you take that mistake and give outrageous hospitality that they're like, wow, this is amazing. And it almost gives you the opportunity to really, really wow them, which I think is cool. And I like the 500 credit per quarter and it's like you got to spend it almost. Yeah.

And the employees don't know this yet, but I'm planning to do a little contest of like whoever has, you know, most creative one, funniest one, like they're, they're going to get a little prize for doing, you know, a cup of coffee is great, you know, but I want to, I want to see people really stretch themselves with this and do some.

I love it. I would be remiss if I didn't say as a marketing person, please document this. Take some pictures, you know, do some videos or something. So that way share it.

Awesome. Yeah, we really. I would love to. This is an off camera conversation. Conversation. But we should definitely talk about some things that we can, we can do to do that. But yeah, it's just. But it really is about trying to make people happy and put a smile on their face. It's not hard to do it, really. Just listen to people and you know, and then just kind of play off of that and it's fun. That's the other thing too. It's a feel good thing. Right. You volunteer somewhere. Think about the end of the day when you volunteer. You feel good. It's the same thing. You feel good when people are happy and you've done a good job and you're like, we did this. We wowed them. And yeah, it's. It's highly recommend. Just trying to find ways in your business to make your customers happy.

Yeah. I love it. Well, Justin and Rose, thank you so much. It's been a great conversation. Where should people go to like learn about your business or see what y' all are doing? What's the best places for that?

Window Works NC and Window Works co on all the socials.

Awesome. All right, well, thanks guys and appreciate your partnership as well. And thank you for your time today. Hope you have a great rest of your day.

Thanks, Phil. We appreciate you guys. Bye. Bye.