Growing a Plumbing & HVAC Business to 30 Team Members with Chris Mazinni | Ep 89

One. Welcome back to the show. I'm your host, Phil Risher. And on today's episode, we're diving into the evolution of a multi generational home service business with Chris Mazzini. Thanks so much for joining us today, Chris.

Thanks, Phil. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, for sure. So Chris is the owner and second generation family leader at Aspen Wall Plumbing and Heating in Quincy, Massachusetts. He has a degree in mechanical engineering and decades of hands on experience. He's guided the 53 year old company, which they just celebrated 53 years July 8th. Pretty cool. Through strategic expansion, adding heat pumps, radiant heat services, while modernizing operations. His philosophy is embrace new tech, never say no to a challenging job, and keep customer service at the heart of growth. So, Chris, all that being said, can you take us back 53 years? You know, a long time? I'm sure you kind of grew up in the business. So you talked a little bit how it started, your dad started what, what the evolution looks like.

Sure, for sure. So we've been in Massachusetts that whole time. So my father started the company and he was a, he was a plumber by trade, master plumber. He started the company in Brookline, Massachusetts. And we were in Brookline just doing service work for years. I mean, we were there probably a good 15, 20 years in Brookline. And it was mostly service work. Right. So we do service work in houses. Brookline's a nice part of Massachusetts. So he would do a lot of work, a lot of old piping, a lot of old houses, and he built up a nice customer base within Brookline. Right. We lived in Quincy though. Right. So he would travel to work every day, coming back and forth. And I think he just, through the years he kind of got sick of doing that. So he decided to move the company to a location in Quincy. So he did that. I forget exactly what year it was, but it was in the 80s at some point. Right. So he moved the business there and he continued on with the plumbing side of business. Probably had about three, four trucks maybe on the road, and they continued just to do plumbing. But with this location, he opened up a parts store where people would come to the store to fix your, you know, you'd wanted to fix your own faucet, you wanted to fix your own toilet, do a little bit of your own do it yourselfer. Yeah, type of stuff. A little bit ahead of the game. Right before Home Depot kind of came about. And it was a small store, but we had these unique parts, particularly for like faucets and shower valves that, you know, nobody Wanted to replace a faucet back then and the shower valves. Nobody really wanted to get into ripping the walls apart. So we would just. We'd sell what they called stems, which are just the parts of it. And we had the service side of stuff. And the pot store. My brother was involved first when he graduated high school. His name's Mike. He would go in and he would do service, you know, kind of working in one of the trucks. My father would go and do stuff, and I don't think he particularly loved it. So he decided to run the store itself. And he became an expert in all the parts that we had. So that was kind of his role in the company. And that. That lasted. That lasted for. For a bit at one location in Quincy. We ended up moving to another location in Quincy years later. And we kind of expanded on the part store. So my brother Mike ran that. We expanded into fireplaces, which. My brother took the lead on that. So we put in gas fireplaces, inserts, which is. Which is usually if somebody has a fireplace around here, you know, they're not burning wood inside the fireplace. Yeah, right. So we got away from that. People got away from that. And we would run gas piping to your fireplace and install a gas fire fireplace insert, they call it. Again, that's what my brother did. And then that's. I came in the business in about. I think it was 2004 when I came in. So about. What's that, 21 years ago. Quick math. And started looking at all the stuff we were doing. Looking at the way we were doing things. Right. Opening up our. Our book.

Yeah.

It just had a calendar in it and all the notes in there, whose houses we were going to go to. Wow. I think we. At that time. At that time, we were probably working off the old Nextels. Right. And those things. Yeah. Before that, we were even working off of. We had radios in the trucks. We were doing that. So it was a mix of kind of an upgrade from radios in the trucks into the next cells. And again, people just call in, you know, hey, can you come by Thursday, replace my toilet? Sure. We'd write it in the book.

Yeah.

Half the time you couldn't even tell what was written in the book. Right. So we were kind of a mess.

Yeah.

So I quickly started to realize that we can't come in the morning of. Of the day. Right. We can't come in Monday morning, open up a book with five people staring at you to say, hey, hey, what are we doing today? Because everything changed. Everything was. Well, you go do that one. You do that one. I forget what this one is.

Yeah.

And it was a lot of. Lot of angry customers. Right. It'd be, oh, I forgot to get to Mrs. Smith's house. You know, I forgot. We told her we were coming. Of course, we would never call her until we weren't coming. Right. So we'd wait for her to call in two days later and complain.

Yeah.

And it was just kind of a mess. So that's when I realized, like, hey, we got to kind of get our act together here. And we looked into a couple different programs. We went through a couple different programs.

Even like, Service Titan, House Call, Pro Jobber.

So we landed on Service Titan. Okay. Right. We tried a few before that. Some of them. I can't remember the names of them, but some of them were just glorified calendars that you can share. And we were writing notes in there, and it worked for us for a little bit. And we were trying to write estimates through that, but quickly realized, like, oh, yeah, Service Titan is the way to go.

Yeah.

Well, we started using them, and I don't know what year that was, but, yeah, the late teens, whatever. So that worked out well. So it was a big learning curve with all that, you know, as. As we were realizing that that was kind of the service side of stuff, we started to dabble into new construction as well. And we did that in the early 2000s. Had a lot of contacts with general contractors. It's kind of a. I don't know if it was a housing boom, but there was a ton of these projects that you still see today where they're building, you know, 25 units, 30 units, 50 units. Now you see hundreds of units. So we were on the smaller side. So we would just kind of delve into the 20 to 50 unit sizes, and we started doing that work and oddly enough, quickly realized that that's just not our cup of tea. Yeah, we're not very good at it either.

Yeah. Race to the bottom. They're on top of you for deadlines. It's.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

It's grueling work. It's not.

Yeah.

Down the street, like, to help.

Yeah. I mean, we always said, like, the only people that got paid were the. Were the supply houses. Right. Luckily. Right, Exactly. You know. Yeah. And it just seemed like, though, that's the way that that sort of the industry likes the idea of doing these big projects. Right. Like, everyone likes to, you know, stick their chest out and say, oh, look at me, I'm doing a 50 unit building. Oh, Yeah, I got that job. And we, you know, I kind of thought that was the way we had to go to grow and just. It's just terrible. It's just terrible, terrible work. We just. We just weren't built for it. Right. It just wasn't. Wasn't the way we do business. Even just trying to hire the right people to. To work on the jobs the way we did the jobs. It just wasn't our thing. So it took a little bit that took a few years to kind of say, like, hey, we, we probably shouldn't do this. Right. Because now we're saying no to work, which, like you said, we don't really like to do. Yeah. But you know, we were like, no, you know what? I don't think we should get involved in those projects. And again, like I said, it took a. We. We still did like four or five of them, which, you know, sometimes they take a year to do. So you're deep into the stuff. Exactly. And started to realize we should just focus on residential customers. Residential service. Doing plumbing, doing H vac. Right. Doing heating, doing air conditioning, doing heat pumps. We never knew what a heat pump was 20 years ago. Right?

Yeah.

Started to dive into that a little bit. We kind of toyed with mini splits and just like, what is all this stuff? Right. Because our main focus was plumbing, of course. It's like, oh, yeah, hey, we got to get into H Vac a little bit more.

So a quick question on that. A lot of people, you know, their plumbing shop, you know, doing a couple million dollars, whatever, and then they're like, okay, I want to get H Vac. Do you go out and get a tech and then, you know, train them up or how did you all make the transition and then cross sell the services and get everyone on board? Because that's a big lift for a lot of people. It seems easy, but it's. There's a lot of steps in there.

Yeah, yeah. Nothing's easy, right? So. And I. So one we had. We had some good plumbers that could do that, could do H Vac because they were willing to do it, Right. Anybody can do. They'll say they'll do anything, but if you're not willing to do it, it's just not going to happen. So we had a couple guys that we've had for a long time that were like, hey, I'll try H Vac. So we got into. First thing we got into was. Was space pack high velocity air conditioning. So it doesn't really require the duct skill of like a Sheet metal mechanic because it's a. It's different kind of ductwork, or at the time it was. Now it's kind of sheet metal. And we dabbled into that and we were just using our plumbers as we were doing that and seeing like, oh, yeah, we got to do more H Vac. We ended up. We took over a company in Quincy that had four, four to five employees. I can't remember exactly. So we took that company over, and they were a heat pump company. So we brought on all their techs. And they were fabulous techs. They knew exactly what they're doing. All bunch of. They were all. All in their mid-20s, but they grew up in the business and they knew heat pumps inside and out.

Wow.

So we started marketing to their customers and then, you know, cross selling with the plumbing. And then obviously as we did more plumbing, cross selling the H Vac stuff.

Yeah, it's so good.

Yeah. And it worked out great.

Yeah. What about service contracts? So do you have plumbing contracts and H Vac and how long have you been doing service contracts? Because I know this is a newer ish thing, but I'm proud.

So service contracts, like just in general starting them, that's kind of new to us over the last five years.

Okay, Right.

So we haven't been doing it that long. I find service contracts for us, it was just. It was kind of tricky to even get involved in those. How to set them up. But we do do H Vac contracts. We call them memberships there. And we do H Vac services. We do do plumbing memberships as well. And it's just really an annual inspection, you know, just to kind of go through the house. You know, we promote them to our customers. They're great idea. They're great preventative stuff. I just wish all our customers would actually take advantage of them.

Yeah.

A lot of people pass on them and still try to call in July when they need service, which could all be fixed by a simple maintenance.

Of course, that, that part to me is confusing because it's like, you know, two, three hundred bucks and you just like set for the normal stuff that you have to get done anyways. That's going to help be proactive. And I never really understood why people don't want to get them. I think a lot of times home service businesses sell them at the wrong time. They. They rely on the tech to sell them when maybe the customer service rep could sell them initially. And I think that's. There's a lot of that. Who sells it? When do they sell it, how much do they make for it and be a little difficult there.

Yeah, no, it's, it's a great point. So again, right. You learn from your mistakes. We thought the same thing, right? The tech should be selling these. And then we realized about a year into it, you know, who should sell them is the customer service rep. Right. So the first person answering the phone and we have someone that does that, her name's Eva and she does a great job with it. And she'll always tell the customer, you know, because people call in, say I need a maintenance done. And her first answer is, well, I have a way to save you money if you want to do your maintenance. And you know, some people buy into it and other people that just, no, I just want to do my one time maintenance. But yeah, it's a great program.

Yeah, I love it. Kudos to you. I mean, I figure if you have Service Titan, you have this built out, it's a little convoluted. How do you build this out in Service Titan and make it all work and make everything line up? I'm sure you've gone through that hurdle with Service Titan being, you know, changing everything. I wanted to ask you this because in, in the show notes that, that you had put in was getting into heat pumps and then about energy efficiency. So I want to talk a little bit about that and what your take is on that.

Sure, sure. Yeah. So I mean, we got into heat pumps, right? Just kind of by default. Well, one, one where we were, we're in Quincy. We were amazed at how many heat pumps there are in Quincy where, where we, where we have the office. Just as a side note, we recently just moved to Weymouth. But yeah, so we were in quincy for, for 35 years, 40 years, and we just recently moved. But in any event, we were shocked in Quincy how many heat pumps there are. And there's all different kind of heat pumps. A lot of times people talk about air to air heat pumps. There's water source heat pumps that we see everywhere. There's the PTAC unit heat pumps that you see like in, in the hotels that are in condos all over the place in Quincy. So we got involved in those and you know, years ago we were just fixing them, replacing them, putting them in. And you know, you put in a 14 heat pump or you know, you start looking at HSPF and it's like, oh, you know, wow, this is, this, this should be good. You know, never thinking about energy efficiency because a lot of these units, the backup heat is electric heat yeah, right. So it's like, yeah, they're good until about 30 degrees and then your electric heat kicks in. So we never were talking about how they're efficient or how great they are until the world kind of changed and said, hey, heat pumps are the way to go. Heat pumps are going to save you money. So you have to put them basically you have to put them in your house. Yeah, we started buying into that a bit and we have a program around here where they offer rebates and if you put heat pumps and it's the primary source of heat in your, in your home, you can get up to $10,000 back. You can get interest free loans by putting all this stuff in. So naturally, yeah, this is what the customer wants. Let's stop putting them in. It makes sense.

Yeah. Is that the Mass Save program?

Is that part of that, the mass Safe program? Exactly. Yep, yep. Right. So we stopped putting them in people's homes. And then I would say in particular over the last few years, as people started ripping out their gas systems, their oil systems, they put in the heat pumps and they start getting back to us a year later saying like, hey, this thing's great, but it's a little more expensive than I thought. Yeah, right. And you're like, huh, you know, you start getting the feedback. So we changed that tune a little bit to tell people, don't expect to save money on your energy bill. But if you want to save the world, you know, if you're into saving the environment and all that, then consider a heat pump. Right? So as those heat pumps, we do a lot of the hyper heat heat pumps where it's the same thing as a normal heat pump, as it gets real cold outside, it becomes less and less efficient, you know. And now compared to, you know, what does that mean, less efficient? Right. I mean, compared to what oil? Compared to gas, there is a, there is a temperature where the gas furnace is going to be more efficient than the heat pump. But they don't talk about that. Yeah, you know, nobody wants to talk about that. So we kind of promote, we like to promote the hybrid systems where you gotta, you might have a gas furnace as your backup before when it gets really cold connected to a heat pump system. Right. And that's just kind of just, just an offering that we do. You know, the hyper heat stuff like particularly we use Mitsubishi, that we're not going to offer furnaces as, as, as a low temperature heating. But you just, you know, you're almost afraid to say, just not saving as much as they as they think. Yeah, right. And I just. We try to be upfront with customers on that, just letting them know that so that they know they're making an informed decision. Because we don't, you know, one. You don't really want to be called out about it saying, like, hey, this is more money than I thought. Right.

Someone goes in there, sells them the dream, they get it. A year later, they're looking at it like, okay, this doesn't make any sense. And I think you're doing the right thing by, you know, being upfront and honest that you can do this, you can't do that. Here's all the options. Make the best choice for you.

Yeah, exactly. Right, right. We don't want to tell you how to spend your money. You know, we'll help you spend it, but we'll answer any questions. But, yeah, we try to give them as much information, which can be a lot, too. It's a lot of information.

Exactly. Quick question. So you. You mentioned about a live human csr, you know, woman who answers the phones. Ev. I think it's her name. Have you all dabbled in. I know, service site just rolled out, like their AI chat assistant or any of these other AI answering services or anything like that.

We don't have AI answering service. We have AI on our chat online. Right. So on our website, we have an AI chatbot that's on there, and we've tested that thing up and down to try to fool it. And I would say, I don't know if it's 100% accurate, but I mean, it's up there in the 90s with how accurate it is with answers. And to me, that seems pretty helpful because I will answer some direct questions for people that they might have. We get a whole copy of the chat so we can see that afterwards, and we reach out to customers. Yeah, I mean, I don't, you know, it's. To me, people calling us are, you know, they're either being proactive or it's a panic. Right. They woke up, they have a cold shower, they're running late for work, and, you know, if they don't have any hot water, what are they going to do? Right. They don't want to talk to a robot. Right. You got to talk to somebody.

Yeah.

And make sure that that person says, yep, I can move something around and make sure that, you know, Frank gets out there today at noontime. Right. To me, AI is not going to do that. It may someday, but it's not doing that now. And still I just. I Mean, everyone can relate to calling in to anything, right? You got to call into your credit card and ask a question. You have to go through so many things, like you just got to. You just want to talk to somebody.

Yeah, that's right. We had Brigham Dickinson from Power Selling Pros. It's one of the top CSR training companies. He, the founder, he's been on twice and he talks a lot about that. Like, you know, is. Is your AI going to be able to dispatch someone who just talked to someone and is like, hey, I need to move my appointment back 30 minutes? Like, no, they're going to put them out for two weeks. And it's. It's not as clean as having a real person like what you're saying, which I completely agree with that.

Right, Right. Yeah, yeah. He's great, by the way.

Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah. Bringing me. Good, dude. Great program for sure for a lot of people to go through. Question about, like, marketing, growth, all that. Your bread and butter. Just like Google Residential, they find you, they go to your stuff. Or do you have, like, partnerships with property managers or realtors or ads or mailers? I'm sure it's all changed over the years, but.

Yeah, I know what. And like, who do you believe on half the stuff, too?

Exactly.

Yeah. Yeah, our partnerships. Yeah. We have a great relationship with property managers, some local property managers. So we do a lot of work there. And we call that residential work, but only because it's residential equipment. Right. We'll change our water heaters. We change out H vac systems for them, and it's all residential size. And I mean, they must call us, I don't know, who knows how many times a day with the different properties. So that's helpful.

Is the.

As far as residential, just your, you know, your regular residential.

Oh, quick, quick question.

Yeah, those are property managers.

How do you build those relationships? Do they just like, do you find them or just like, hey, we've been in business for a long time. We just. They know that we do a good job or is there any strategic things around that?

Well, for us, we've built a good relationship with a handful of them that we've been dealing with them for over 20 years at this point. And, you know, just to start with that, it was just a meeting that we had. Right. We had a mutual contact. You meet with somebody. A lot of it's pricing. A lot of it, believe it or not, is still even, like how well we respond to calls. Right. So they'll complain. Not complaints, the wrong word. But they'll talk about your price and say, like, oh, that's a little bit high. And we always say, well, you know, don't forget about the customer service. Like when you call and you have a water heater that's down, most of the time, we're doing it the same day for you. And they're like, oh, no, you're right, you're right. So. So it's not. It is not always about price, which is kind of nice too. It's nice to have that relationship. As far as new property managers, what ends up happening, it's kind of funny is you could be dealing with a property manager at, you know, the local property. They leave their job, they go to a new job, they work for a new property manager, but they dealt with us for so long, they call us and they bring us in. Right. So then you start working at that property, and then if it's a big enough property management company, you end up getting in the system. And then once they're in the system, there must be something that these other property managers can look up and say, find a local contractor. And we're on the list of approved vendors. You can start working with them.

Yeah.

And the only requirement with that usually is the insurance. Sometimes the insurance level is a little bit higher than what's normal. And, you know, sometimes you kind of bite the bullet and maybe pay for the additional insurance just to get on that list because you have, you know, it's less competition.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. So what about some of the other stuff? Mailers, ads, SEO.

Exactly. Yeah. So residential. Residential stuff. The way we, you know, again, it's. It's a lot of repeat customers that we deal with. We have a big database, obviously, in service titan. So what we do is we email. We do email marketing to all of our customers and we send out mailers emails probably we might be up to once a week now at this point. Wow. And they're quick. Instead of it being a long list of, here's five things. Sometimes it's just like, hey, you know, it's a. This is a good time to check your water heater. Just a quick little. A little thing written down in the email so that they can look at and read it. We're getting into texting our customers now, which is kind of coming out through service titan, which was a bigger challenge than I ever thought. That took us almost a year to try to get that high end out, which is just so unbelievable because I always said that I'm like the pizza guy up the street texts me Twice a week about the sales he's having. Why can't I do this?

Are using Marketing Pro. And then the texting feature, it's a little choppy. And like, you got to set up the campaigns and then try to send. It's not as clean as the pizza guy that probably just has it, like dialed in.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But. But what I didn't like is. What I don't like is there's all these other companies that do everything a little bit better than service type. Yeah, right.

Like Chirp and Hatch and all these other.

Yeah, but then you have all these different platforms and you got to pay this guy. You know, that's 99amonth. This guy's a 99amonth. It's like, I know Service titan does all this. So it's like you just deal with the little hiccups they have. Yeah. And, you know, I mean, you're paying them enough money that it should be able to kind of almost all work through this system. So. Yeah, you would think, you know, but we do. Yeah, we do, we do. We got into mailers this year, like just sending out the little plastic cards. We. We did. We weren't doing that a lot. And that. I tell you that that has worked out very well for us.

Really.

It's an offer. Yep, yep. So the offer changes, but it could be, you know, $50 off service. We do service for you, service for. For a friend, so you can kind of share the coupon. You know, we do money off of installs, all kinds of stuff just to kind of send it out to people. We do. We. We try the. We try the Facebook advertising, the social media stuff. That's. That's. To me, I find that very difficult. Yeah. Just not growing up in it. But it's. It's very hard to. To do that social media stuff. And then, you know, we just did a magazine article where they come in and they write up a magazine. You know, just do a little article about you on a local. Local magazine, which was nice. You know, again, a lot. A lot of word of mouth. We did a TV commercial. We did that a few years ago. That was a pretty good success. We kind of. Kind of back down from that for now because I just. I like to explore different options for advertising just to see how well it works. Right.

Yeah, I think it's good. I think a lot of people missed the mark with tracking return on ad spend, which sounds like you're got that somewhat dialed in because a lot of times they want to try stuff, but they. It's like a gut feeling. They don't really know if it's actually, like really turning into anything. And then it's like, oh, I just wasted this money. Or it is working, but I don't know if it's actually working or not. Have you experienced that?

I'm sure in particular on the TV commercial. That's the thing. There was no way to track it.

Exactly.

And the only response we would get, it was always. It was a nice. We did a nice commercial, and my father was the star of the commercial. So he would. He'd be on there and. And he'd say, hey, call Aspinwall from his cell phone or from his. From his office phone. It was just sort of part of the thing. And that was our slogan was call Aspinwall. Everywhere we went, if we had a little logo on our shirt, people would come up to us and say, hey, I saw your commercial. I saw this, I saw that. They'd go up to my father in the food store and, you know, he felt like a little celebrity. It was kind of. It was kind of funny. Everybody saw it. I can't tell you how much money we generated from it, though. No idea.

Yeah, and that's the hard part. Between, like, branding and then lead gen, that's like this blurred lines of how can you quantify branding? But all these people are coming up to you and it's actually working. But who knows?

Yeah, yeah. Who knows is exactly right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just like the cost of gaining a customer. Right. At the cost of a lead. I mean, that's all over the place. All I know is the people you pay money for to. To find you leads will tell you how great your leads are.

Yeah.

Whether that's true or not, the good.

Thing with service Titan, I mean, the calls are recorded. You can listen calls, you can see the forms that came through. So hopefully you could have some type of quality check on these leads. It's not just like before, where you just like, yeah, you got 10 leads, buddy. And like, who are these people?

Right. No, we do have all the checks. You can see all stuff. Right. But even looking at some of the numbers, it's just like, is that. Is that good? I mean, I don't know. You know, generated 10 leads or 20 leads. Is that a lot? Maybe that's not a lot. I don't know.

Yeah, so that's right. I know we got a couple minutes here, but I wanted to ask you about. So you mentioned that you bought this heat pump, this company that has five techs or heat pump come. I think you've done a couple other acquisitions. How do you find these companies to kind of bolt onto yours and evaluate them to, to decide is this going to be a good fit or not.

So with those companies, we kind of, I don't know if lucky is the right word, but we kind of fell in place with, with a company that was just available. Right. They were looking to kind of get out of it. We were there at the right time. There wasn't much evaluation back in the day because we took that one over. That was about 20 years ago. We wanted to get into it. We were more happy taking on the employees that knew how to do H vac service, how to do heat pump services, and we kind of figured we'd grow from there, which is what ended up happening nowadays, like, I'm always looking, you can see all kinds of, of sales going on or businesses for sale. If you go to a broker and they'll send you stuff, I mean, the stuff now, it's outrageously priced. It's just so high, what people want. In the back of my head, I always think to myself, well, if nobody buys that guy's business, the customers aren't going away. They'll just find somebody else to call. Right. I mean, they maybe love that guy, but if he's retiring and we get a lot of those phone calls and say, my plumber's retired, my guy retired, and we just, they just end up calling us maybe by default.

Yeah.

I often wonder, what are you, what are you actually buying? Yeah. Right. So I, I kind of struggle with that because there was a time, there's a little short period where we were looking to buy a couple companies and you start looking at the financials and you start looking at the people, and they didn't really fall through just because the owners on the other end even were kind of like, I don't want to say secretive, but they were like, hey, did you tell your employees, like, can we meet them? I'm like, no, no. They're like, something doesn't feel right here.

Yeah.

So we kind of back down. So. But on that note, I feel again, this is another thing, I think I'm against the grain here, but these, these big companies that are taking over these small family operations, I, I, it's kind of ruining the market a bit. It's just not, you know, it's just not, it's not what the companies were before that they're pretending to still be a small family company with the name, but they're Owned by these conglomerates. Right. Without saying names. I'm sure we could name a few of them.

Yeah.

And it just, to me, it just doesn't have that same feel to it anymore. Right. I mean, the owner doesn't answer the phone. They may pretend like he does, but, but they're not, they're nowhere to be found. They made their money and they're sticking around just long enough so that they can, they can just be on their way.

Yeah. So we, we had a company kind of actually similar to yours. Been around a while. The, the sun, you know, took it over. Then they added plumbing. They were H vac, they added plumbing, went 3 million to 8 million in revenue. Service titan. Then they sold to private equity, one of these big roll up companies. And the guy, you know, the family got some money and then they got some earn outs. Then they lasted two months, earnouts was pretty much gone. Then in two years the business went out of business because the roll up, they, you know, they try to plug in their guy. No one liked the guy. The heart and soul of the business left. And then two years they just, you know, send an email to all the customers like, hey, we're out of business. You need someone to help, you know, go call these people. It's gone. $8 million. Business pushing 10 million. It's just ridiculous.

It's amazing that you can even do that. Right.

I mean, I know they have a customer base, they have service contracts, they have all this stuff.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I just, I don't get it. And, and the common thing we hear a lot is when they don't like these bigger companies is the pricing. There's no care anymore. Right. These guys are just, they're just out to put something in. It's, it costs a lot more money. I mean, I think we're expensive, but some of these places, it's like they're charging thousands of dollars more. They don't care. You know the model of like, hey, make your tech a salesman. The tech doesn't want to be a salesman. He just wants to fix it. He wants to be the superhero, fix the problem. He doesn't even want to charge the customer. They want to walk away from it and have us do the billing, which is fine. But like they don't want to deal with them rightfully. So they just want to come in, help out and kind of move on to the next call and just, and just do their best.

Yeah. You know, so, yeah, so last question here, but do y' all have comfort advisors? And then you have service techs, it sounds like. That's exactly.

Yeah. So we have, we, you know, we just call them salesmen. But yeah, our comfort advisors, they come out to your house and they'll look at, look at what you're trying to do, whether it's a replacement, put new ac, new heat pumps, anything in your house. And we go through the whole process of just what are you looking to do? You know, we size everything. We do the manual Js on everything, make sure we're putting in the right equipment, the right sizes, making sure you qualify for any rebates, maybe that, that are available. Because even that's a whole nother world of well, they said that I qualify. It's like, no, you don't. We've been doing this a long time. You do not qualify. And we tell them to call Mass Save and ask the question. A lot of times they just don't. So. Yeah, it's just interesting the different people that are out there in the business.

Yeah, I think there's different dynamics. I think the way that you explain it, have the service guys, they're the heroes and then you have these other guys who can go in and actually like take their time, build out what really need is needed for this customer. It makes for a much better experience for the homeowner and way more efficient process than just trying to ram a sale in, in a two or three hour service call or something.

Right, right. Yeah, yeah. And they don't. And they don't know, right. They don't really know all the detail. I mean Mass Save is a world in its own.

Yeah.

So you know, these guys are sales guys. Just, they go to all the seminars, they learn about it, they know how to answer the questions. Right. Sometimes, sometimes you, you think you know the answer because this is the way it was a couple years ago. It's like, no, it's not that way anymore.

Yeah, it's changing. Well Chris, thanks so much man. This has been a great conversation. Where should people go to learn about you, your business, you, what should they do?

So I mean there's a couple different ways. You can go to our website, right. Which is just aspenwall plumbing.com. right. There's our website's contact information on there. If anyone has any specific questions or wants to reach out. I'm on LinkedIn under again, aspenwell Plumbing. You'd find me. You'll search my name up, That'll come up. They want to call our office and talk to us. Our number is 617-47282. Six, five. And, yeah, I'd be happy to talk to anybody about stuff because there's so many different ideas out there, and some work and some don't, and what might be good for somebody, and they got it to work. It just, you know. You know, you struggle through it because it's like you just don't understand how they did it. And that seemed to work. Why can't I make that work here? And it's just that's. That's the struggle I find a lot. Right.

So, yeah, definitely came off with your resilience and, like, fighting through stuff. So kudos to you. You're building a good business. And I think based on this conversation, you're doing stuff right, and you're treating the customers right, from what I can hear. So kudos to you, man, because I think you have a great business that you're building.

Yeah, thanks, Phil. I appreciate that.

You got it. Talk to you later.

All right, see you. Bye.