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Successful Life Podcast
Self-Improvement Podcast for Contractors that want to learn about how to grow their business through management and marketing. Develop business ideas to improve your business experience and be successful. Real stories from real business owners.
Successful Life Podcast
Transforming Sales through Service: Doug Wyatt's Insights on Integrity, Financial Mastery, and Continuous Improvement in the Trades Industry
How can prioritizing service over high-pressure sales transform your business? In our latest episode of the Successful Life Podcast, we sit down with Doug Wyatt, a seasoned sales leader and motivational speaker, to uncover the secrets behind his journey from a small town in Southwest Missouri to achieving remarkable success in the trades industry. Doug shares his invaluable insights on the significance of maintaining integrity, effective communication, and passionately believing in the products or services you offer. This episode is packed with actionable strategies to help you elevate your sales and leadership game.
Facing financial challenges in the HVAC and plumbing sectors? Hear about real-life experiences of business owners who have struggled but ultimately succeeded by focusing on accurate financial management, proper pricing, and continuous training. Discover how leveraging tools like Rilla can provide valuable performance metrics to ensure long-term stability and success. We also dive into the importance of building value and how to effectively communicate this to stand out in a competitive marketplace. You'll gain a deeper understanding of how to overcome financial and operational hurdles, ensuring your business not only survives but thrives.
Transform your technicians' mindsets and techniques with our expert advice. Doug Wyatt emphasizes the alignment of core values such as character and integrity with everyday operations, guiding technicians to present all options to homeowners and not sell out of their own wallets. This episode also features inspiring stories of business owners who have cultivated a culture of continuous improvement and effective communication. Learn about Synergy Learning Systems' innovative approach to contractor growth, and how consistent training can drive success. Tune in to master the art of value-based sales, from effective communication to ethical practices, and watch your business flourish.
https://synergylearningsystems.net/meet-the-team/
https://www.audible.com/pd/9-Simple-Steps-to-Sell-More-ht-Audiobook/B0D4SJYD4Q?source_code=ASSORAP0511160006&share_location=library_overflow
https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Steps-Sell-More-Stereotypes-ebook/dp/B0BRNSFYG6/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1OSB7HX6FQMHS&keywords=corey+berrier&qid=1674232549&sprefix=%2Caps%2C93&sr=8-1
https://bit.ly/4bFz4yc https://www.housecallpro.com/successullife
https://www.facebook.com/corey.berrier
https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreysalescoach/
welcome to the successful life podcast. I'm your host, cory barrier, and I'm here with my man, doug wyatt. What's up, brother? Hey?
Speaker 2:how's it going, cory? Good to see you. Thank you, man. Good to see you again. Thanks for having me on today, man, it's an honor to be on here. You were doing some incredible things for the trade, so it's an honor yeah, dude, I you know, I got to.
Speaker 1:you know I I kind of introduced you recently through Brian Burton and his well Waste-O-Day just came out and you can definitely check that out if you haven't heard that episode.
Speaker 1:But Wiser Wednesdays and I got an opportunity, Brian messaged me and said hey, have you heard of this guy, Doug White? I said I'm not so sure. He said I need you to stop what you're doing and log into the Zoom meeting right now, and Brian's a good friend of mine. So I did and I had to pull myself away to get to a call, but I was so absolutely impressed with your ability to speak without sales. I mean, I've been in sales forever, Like, and so before I ruin it all and folks that may not know who you are, why don't you just dive in and tell us a little bit about who Doug is?
Speaker 2:Well, you know, and before I do that I'm just going to say this I mean, we've been friends on Facebook for a while, corey, and you didn't even know it. I know I think you kind of big time me there, but you know, hey, no, I'm just kidding, I'm totally kidding man. Um, thank you so much. The thing about sales, and I think maybe one of the things I'd never say that we're better than anybody, but I do like to say that we're different. One of the things is that, uh, you asked me about myself I read a book by a guy named Dr Stephen Covey back in my twenties and it kind of resonated with me, but it also kind of it was. It was so deep I'd be like I'd realize you know one of those things where you're four or five pages and you realize you're thinking about something four or five pages previously and you you read the words, but you you didn't, you were thinking about something else, and then I'd have to go back and start that chapter again. But I became a seven habits leadership instructor. We'll be approaching two decades here in a couple of years, and so one of the things that I've always believed in sales is that we also have to incorporate some leadership principles in there, right, because I don't think sales is about high pressure. There are people that do it that way. I don't believe that's the way I would ever want to teach it or perform it.
Speaker 2:I think sales is about high service. I don't think it's about high pressure. I think it's about serving others better. But I also think a number of other things about the mindset that it's going to require, the fact that we're going to have to think about the words that we choose to share. We've got to be great listeners, right. We've got to build a product or a service, whatever it is that we are selling that caters to the person that we're selling to, not just something that we're trying to make commission on. And then our word structure, our sentence structure, matters, right. If we communicate in first person or second person and sentence structure, we're going to sound like a critical parent or a mother-in-law that we don't like or somebody that's egotistical or narcissistic. And then the last thing is, it's every time we're promoting a product or service. First we really should believe in it, and then we got to communicate that belief with passion, which I call the EKG level of performance.
Speaker 2:So anytime I speak with somebody about sales. I just kind of like to start with that to say man, sales is an honorable profession but it's going to take work. It is not just about, oh, you talk well or you speak good and you could build a relationship. Sales man, I'm telling you it can be an honorable profession if you really work at getting good. So with that, I guess I should share a little bit of my background. I always start everywhere I go, corey, because I think this is maybe the most relevant thing I want to share, especially when we're talking about sales influence.
Speaker 2:I grew up in a small country town in Southwest Missouri and I started out on performance-based pay at a very young age I'm talking about like seven or eight years old when I started bailing hay for three cents a bail. My dad was a good old boy that would get my brother and I, chris, up before the sunrise and we'd usually work. He didn't think we needed to have a lot of fun and that's where I got my work ethic. From what I learned a couple of things in the countryside, and that was that you live your life with honor, character and integrity and you are where you say you are. You do what you say you're going to do. When you say you're going to do it, you under-promise and you over-deliver and if you can't fulfill your promise you go to your grave trying right? You don't just shake somebody's hand or look them in the eye and tell me you do something and you don't. And so I took that out of the small town and then basketball was kind of my ticket out of town.
Speaker 2:I played a couple of years of college ball at a small school in Kansas and then transferred to University of Colorado, started a door-to-door sales company there, bought myself sales, got myself a little bit of money in my pocket. I started traveling around seeing guys like Stephen Covey and Tony Robbins, zig Ziglar, jim Rohn, brian Tracy, Wayne Dyer some of the greats from back in the day, les Brown. And then after college I had a bunch of kids working for me all over the West Coast about seven states and 500 kids. Was sitting down to lunch one day with a guy who I'd been doing some promotions for and he said you want to open some pizza restaurants. I said heck, yeah. So we opened nine restaurants in one year, built three Subways and six Papa Murphy's.
Speaker 2:And then one day he met a guy that was in HVAC on a golf course and instead of us continuing to franchise restaurants, I invested in an HVAC company, not knowing much more than how to turn up and down my own thermostat. It was also a plumbing division and so, all of a sudden, man, I was in the trades and I had a lot to learn. I fell in love with it very quickly. We won some awards, got a national training agreement with a major manufacturer, trained a thousand companies over about a seven year stint, 7,000 tradesmen, blue collar tradesmen, technicians, hvac and plumbing. And then I got tired of living on the road brother Hotels, suitcases, conference centers. It looks like a jet setter lifestyle, which it can be, but business travel is not the same as vacation travel and anybody who's traveled for business a lot knows it'll wear on you. So I left the training, hung up my training cleats in the summer of 2015, joined a small ma and pa company in Denver.
Speaker 2:18 years in business, no systems or processes. Anyway, we just implemented everything I'd learned over the years and in less than a year and a half we won Linux Partner of the Year. And then got in some cash flow trouble. The next year had to get refocused on KPIs and paying off distributors. Well, I shouldn't say it like that, corey. Paying them off, no, we paid our debt down. So we paid our debt down and, like a phoenix rising from the ashes, we won Linux Partner of the Year again in 2018. Exited that company in February of 2020. Built an all-natural sleep aid. Walmart Walgreens Did a lot of other training for other industries along the way and then a couple of years ago, man, I missed the men and women of the trades, so came back and decided I wasn't just going to go out and this wasn't about money for me anymore.
Speaker 2:Now this is about legacy servitude and helping others.
Speaker 2:Zig Ziglar said you can have everything you want in your life as long as you help other people get what they want. So have everything you want in your life as long as you help other people get what they want. So maybe that's a little bit more than you'd ask for, but I will say I am exactly where I want to be and I truly mean it. All jokes aside, I'm honored to be on your podcast. You're doing some amazing things in the trades and growing up with a background working on tractors and machinery and equipment, it doesn't really get me fired up and get out of bed in the morning. But, man, do I have respect for those that are in the crawl spaces and the attics and the sewers and the trenches and that know how to turn a wrench and serve homeowners and take care of their gas, their water, their electricity, their refrigerant, their CO to protect people. So there's nowhere I'd rather be than right here, right now, working in the trades, talking with a man like you that's serving our trade so well.
Speaker 1:I appreciate that, so I want to. You said something interesting. You said you got into some cashflow issues. There's people likely listening to this show that may be in that very spot. Can you walk us through a little bit more detail as far as what you mean by cash flow issues? And then, what did you do to get out of those cash flows?
Speaker 2:Yeah, Well, yeah, and I'm glad you asked that question because I don't want to shy away from that because I think a lot of times when we see people having success, sometimes that can inspire us and sometimes that can really either depress or demotivate us, because we're in the grind and we're struggling and maybe we're working to. You know, make our house note, or buy that next van, or wrap that truck, or, you know, install that new software and it's hard, and you know, I was just talking with one of our clients yesterday. I was just talking with one of our clients yesterday and last year, in his 14th year in the HVAC industry, he worked about 100 hours a week and over the course of that year he borrowed almost $200,000 to live. So he worked 100 hours a week as a business owner. Everything from the outside looks good. Oh, you got trucks and you a business and you got a, you got a facility and you got a website and you got marketing, you got phones and and he paid. Let's just be clear If a man borrowed a couple hundred grand to keep the doors open, that means that he worked a hundred hours a week and he paid $200,000 to do it. So let's just be clear that's happening a lot more out there than what we'd like to think. National averages in HVAC and plumbing businesses in North America, if you look at the studies, show that most contractors earn about two and a half to three percent net income, which means some are doing better and a lot of them are going broke net income, which means some are doing better and a lot of them are going broke.
Speaker 2:And it happened to me. And here's the thing, corey, it looked like on the outside everything was really really good and many things were really really good. We were growing quickly. We were going down to the Dodge dealership. We were buying three vans at a time. We were going over to Mastercraft and having the beautiful $3,500 Mastercraft shelving installed. We were putting $10,000, $12,000, $15,000 of inventory and vacuum pumps and gauges and all that stuff. A lot of times techs haven't invested to get those themselves. And then you can open up tool accounts and whatever. But you think about a $40,000 van and a $3,500 Mastercraft shelving and $10,000, let's say in inventory and supplies and then you throw on a wrap for, let's say, another $3,000 or $4,000. I mean, you're talking about let's just add it up $40,000 plus about $3,000, plus about $10,000 for the inventory. You're talking about a $60,000 investment. We were doing three vans at a time. We're hiring techs, getting everybody uniforms, we're doing marketing, and so what happened was in 2016,.
Speaker 2:Tremendous amount of growth. We grew a company. We built it on integrity. We built it on servitude. I came in there for a large percentage of the business, but we're not putting any money in. It was bring your intellectual property, bring your coaching, but the agreement was I'm not going to be in the facility more than a day a week. We're going to all have assignments all week long. I'll be back in, we'll do training, we'll work like mad men and women for a full day and the rest of the week we'll work on implementation, studying, getting better. And so what happened is we won the Linux Partner of the Year for our performance in 2016.
Speaker 2:And we walked across the stage in Las Vegas at a Linux event and it was literally. I didn't even know this, because all the truck payments were getting paid, everybody's checks were cashing, the lights were still on, the software was rolling, the marketing was still going and unbeknownst to me and I'll take responsibility but we were not making our payments on the equipment that we were purchasing. And sometimes this happens where we as the contractor kind of use the distributor or the manufacturer as the bank and they're trying to help us out. And our account went past 30 days and then it went past 60. And then at the 90-day mark they cut us off and so we had just won Linux Partner of the Year.
Speaker 2:And you talk about embarrassment. My life was completely flipped upside down. We were faced with closing our doors. All this amazing company and the way we were serving customers and everything we'd done was about to come crashing down and just about closed the doors. And so what we did is we got refocused and we said you know what we're not going to discount, can't afford to, we're not going to waive diagnostic investments. And we said you know what we're not going to discount, can't afford to. We're not going to waive diagnostic investments, we're not going to include them with the cost of the repair. We're going to hold on to every dollar. We're going to be priced fairly, but we're going to be at the premium price mark right here in the Denver market, over the five-county metro area that we served. And so it took us about a year and we paid down that debt and like that debt and like a phoenix rising from the ashes, corey, we came back and we won Linux Partner of the Year again the next year, so 2016 and 2018.
Speaker 2:What I will say is that, little asterisk, it wasn't just that we didn't win, it was that we had lost sight of one of the most important things, and that's measuring the numbers and selling our value, not discounting. I mean, think about this, corey, for the business owners that are out there and they're wondering how they work themselves out of this. It's going to start with not less training, it's going to be more. We're going to have to bite the bullet. We're going to have to bring our team in. We're going to have to have a system in process and then we're going to have to implement like mad dogs. We're going to have to role play. We're going to have to role play. We're going to have to find a way to measure right.
Speaker 2:A company like Rilla can help us to do things like that. We can measure what we're actually doing in the field and we can kind of watch or listen to that game film. If I was in the contracting business these days, I'm telling you Rilla would be the first thing I did. Right, because now I can measure what I'm doing out there and Sebastian's become a good friend of mine and Will and a bunch of the guys over there at Rilla Amazing people doing amazing things, really helping contractors.
Speaker 2:And it's not inexpensive, it shouldn't be. It's one of the greatest things to ever enter our industry and what they're helping contractors to do, but it's only valuable if we use it. So I guess, to kind of put a, you know, or at least you might have some more questions what we had to do is we had to figure out a way to build more value. We had to raise our prices, not lower them, which is scary, right when they're. So, when the vast majority of our competitors are cheaper than us model number, equipment number, thousands of dollars less there's always somebody who'll do it cheaper.
Speaker 2:We had to figure out a way to communicate through stories and the way that we serve and our passion for servitude and how we protect families and are part of our community. We had to figure out a way to share that on every call that came into the facility, every service call that we ran, every sales lead that we ran and every install that we did. Everybody had to be trained, everybody had to practice. Everybody had to role play, everybody had to get better every single week, and not only do we save ourselves, but we came back and became an award-winning company instead of somebody that went out of business.
Speaker 2:And so my message, I think, to everybody that might be in a similar situation, where they're not sure if they're going to make it or we're starting to hit our slow time, or they're not sure if they're going to make it or we're starting to hit our slow time, or they're concerned about the economy, or they're concerned about rates. Rates have been a big conversation. I think I heard the Fed lowered the rate for the first time in a long time the other day. So that'll kind of date this podcast, but I'm sure you're going to have a date on that anyway. But if we're waiting for somebody in Washington or our local municipalities or something to come and save us, here's what I can say Corey, nobody's coming to rescue us.
Speaker 2:We're going to have to figure out a way to implement systems and processes, find the right people, implement those on a call-by-call, daily basis, every single day, and not cower to the low price demands of our cheap competitors and then, therefore, our customers. There's about what I believe, 30% of the market that will, and then, therefore, our customers. There's about what, I believe, 30% of the market that will never pay for our value when we're more premium priced. I'm not talking about ripping people off, I'm talking a fair value for the value that we bring. There's only about, I believe, 67% to 7% of the market that will compensate us for the value that we bring. That's my target.
Speaker 2:I want to serve the people that when we serve them, they're saying you know what? It's a little more than I expected, but I tell you what I like the way you guys run your business, stand behind your work. I like the way you take care of people and you're a little bit more than some others or a lot more. But to tell you what it's my gas, my electricity, it's my water, it's my family. I'm going to use you, emily, I'm going to use you, and so that's possible. And so we stopped discounting, we stopped including diagnostics and we were able to pay off that debt and then come back and anybody can do it, but it's probably going to be the hardest thing you've ever done.
Speaker 1:Well, you know, and I believe the way I see this is that people will pay a higher price because, look, they don't want you at their house to begin with, right, right, they sure as hell don't want you at their house to begin with. Let's just break, right. They sure as hell don't want you to come out a second and a third time and lots of times. When you're discounting, you're cutting corners, you're going to do the same thing with the job. You're going to do the same thing with the job, and it may feel like it's cheaper right now. It might be cheaper right now, but in the long run, if you've ever bought bad service, you pay for it double than what you just paid the guy that's charging a little bit more money.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you know I'm going to, if I can, I'm going to piggyback on what you shared just there. You're absolutely right. But I want to clarify when you say people don't want us there, they don't want what we're, what we're selling and what we're offering, I'm going to clarify that and say, if we're in the, let's say, the heating, air conditioning, plumbing, electrical business, right, we're talking about home services more than home improvement there, because you know what people do like. They like a brand new deck, they like a new pool. They like new landscaping or a fire pit. They might even like a new roof with beautiful shingles Anything that improves the aesthetic. They like new cars. They like wood floors right, they like these things that they can enjoy. They like big flat screen televisions or projectors or all this cool stuff that's available to us. They like the newest iPhone and iPhone doesn't ever discount, right? People like that stuff. What they don't want is their HVAC, their plumbing or electrical not to work. They didn't expect that, and so when they have a challenge, they got a leak Right. They've got hard water, they've got bad airflow, hot and cold spots, they got high utility bills, an uncomfortable home and the last thing that they want to do, they just want it to work. And the last thing that they want to do they just want it to work the last thing that they want to do is pay an HVAC, plumbing or electrical contractor. Which means we got to be better.
Speaker 2:I'll tell you, we used to do the home and garden shows in Denver and we would do pretty good business. We always had a goal that we were going to do a quarter million dollars out of a Colorado home and garden show, quarter million dollars off of the leads that we generated there. There's a pretty long show, pretty difficult to work. We had some very specific ways that we worked it, but one of them, I think, was like seven or eight, nine days long. Another one was only three. But on the bigger shows we wanted to generate a couple hundred thousand dollars, if not more, but minimum quarter million.
Speaker 2:And you know what? Down that aisle there were other like think about the Colorado Garden garden show that are all over the country. Right, these landscaping companies would build an entire yard like water, fully functioning waterfalls, and bring in trees and shrubs and and and little waterways and it's like that's what we're up against. And so let's say that a new, high-end, high efficiency hvac system with all the bells and whistles, and maybe we throw in a tankless I don don't throw in but add on a tankless water heater, indoor air quality. We could easily be in the $30,000, $40,000 range. And if they got two systems, we add on some ductless mini splits. I mean we could be approaching a $40,000, $50,000 system to make their home comfortable, to protect them. And then there's the guy down here with the landscaping project and he's got a solution for a new fire pit, deck and little water feature and he's at 50,000. What does somebody want to invest 50,000 or finance $50,000 with? Nobody wants to invest in the HVAC or plumbing guy.
Speaker 2:We've got to be so good at building our value, at sharing what we do and how it can benefit them and the comfort of their home and the quality of their water and the way that their skin feels, the air that they breathe, the health of them and their family and their children. We got to be really freaking good at that because we're not just up against our cheap competitors selling a lesser system on the HVAC or plumbing side. We're up against every other home improvement project, whether we want to believe it or not. And so when our heating, air conditioning, plumbing, electrical, when it's not working, we're kind of seen as it's a nuisance. They got to start getting on the Google and they're looking for people that they can trust, because they're afraid of contractors, because they hear all these call for action, news stories and their experience with contractors is probably bad right, and so they start Googling by the time that call comes in. This is what I share with our clients. You're already at least halfway if include the diagnostic in the amount for the repair.
Speaker 2:People, that's their job to ask, otherwise they'll have buyer's remorse. We've got to be prepared for that, to build back our value and if we do that we can succeed. In the face of all that adversity, in the face of not just I mean listen to clarify we're not just competing against our fellow HVAC, plumbing and electrical contractors, we're competing for every dollar in that family's budget. Every available dollar of their credit is either going to sushi dinners on Friday, the new Tesla in the garage, the new fire pit out back, the new deck, the new roof and all the fun stuff that they want Sushi dinners, fun stuff on the credit card, right.
Speaker 2:And we can justify that as an experience and we've earned it because we work hard. We can justify that we want to bring the family over to you know, have that new grill and that new fire pit and that new furniture out there on the deck. We can justify the water feature because it's about family time. It's really hard to justify furnaces air conditioners. It's really hard to justify furnaces, air conditioners, heating, air conditioning, indoor air quality, water treatment, unless we, as the contractor, sell them on the value and the benefits. And if we're just trying to compete on price, man, we're going to have a pretty miserable life.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it makes you look, you know I had, you know I'll just be honest.
Speaker 1:I was working for a company six months ago and when I started with them I called every HVAC company. I called like it was a nightmare. I called, I had six appointments in one day. So just newsflash, this is what your customer feels like. I got it firsthand because I acted. You know, I have a bit older unit and I called and said you know, I was thinking about switching it out, blah, blah, blah. And really what I was really doing is I want to see what my competition is like. I want to see what these guys are doing in the home.
Speaker 1:Okay, by the end of the day I was, I was obliterated. I was so confused, even being in the industry, as to what each one of them offered. The only thing I really remembered was one guy dropped his price 25% before I even asked anything, which is absurd. And then the last guy, who actually was my guy he didn't know he was coming to my house. He's like uh, just curious. You know, has anybody mentioned your uh, your ducks, your uh, under your house? I said right. I said you know, not really. They just said I needed to. You know, everything looked pretty good. He said let me show you this picture. He said see all these cobwebs in your crawl space.
Speaker 1:He was like nobody's been in your crawl space and like wow you know, if you had any question about those six people, that guy just showed you that all other five people didn't do worth a crap right? So my point there is you know, if you're you know, you got to also put yourself in the customer's shoes.
Speaker 2:Yes, and you know what I'm hearing there, corey, correct me if I'm wrong, but it's like you know you're out there and you're shopping Right, and you're hoping for somebody to bring value. Yeah, you want the best deal for you and your family. Yeah, I mean, we have this thing in our life as human beings. Yeah, I mean, we have this thing in our life as human beings. Uh, robert cld talks a lot about this in his book persuasion and influence. Two different books great books. I definitely recommend them. Seven principles of persuasion and he talks about that.
Speaker 2:Listen us wanting a cheaper price is a given. It runs across our culture, our life as human beings. We want to get the most for the least. We work hard for our money. And if you could get the best company in town, the best equipment, the best installers, and they would do it for the same price as a guy that doesn't have a great company doesn't put in the best equipment, of course you would take the better company at the lesser price. That's your responsibility. Hang on to as many dollars as you have and get the most for your money. Right, and we're all like that.
Speaker 2:I would recommend that we all kind of get out of that rut of feeling like our customer is the enemy, it's their job. We do the same thing when we go to buy a used car. We find a tiny little scratch on the fender and say, well, bob, looks like this car has really been through it. I'll tell you what even if you thought $5,000 for that used car was fair, you're going to go. Well, I don't know Bob, I don't know. I'm thinking maybe 4,200. Because you're expecting him to come back and go. Well, I could do it for 45, but I couldn't do it for 42. And then you go well, I can't go a dollar over 43. And then he goes okay, deal. And now you feel like you've you thought you would actually pay seven. You thought five was a great deal. It's his fiduciary responsibility to needle you a little bit, ask you for a discount, right. And then old Bob, poor Bob, if he doesn't have sales skills and build back the value of that car and all the way he's maintained it, right, and that he should be offering it for seven or 8,000 instead of five, and five's a great deal. If I was already willing to spend seven and may have had 5,000 in one pocket, I bet there's listeners that have done this.
Speaker 2:If you're trying to buy a $5,000 car, you put $4,000 of cash in one pocket, you put another thousand dollars in another pocket and maybe 500 more, whatever it is Right and then that way when you pull it out, you go man, I've really only got $4,000 in this thing, you're just negotiating, right? I don't know. Does that make us bad people? I think it makes us human. We're trying to get the most for the least. So here's what I would say If we don't make a leveraged activity every single day in our business to figure out how we communicate the stories of the value that we bring, the way that we treat our customers, the way that we take care of people, the way we do ongoing training, then we do just make our own selves a commodity.
Speaker 2:We got to think about the way we present the words that we choose, the order in which we share them, the stories that we share, what we say when somebody says I got to get three bids, your price is too high, or I'm not familiar with your brand, or my spouse isn't here, or I got to sleep on it. Pray about it, think about it. If we're not prepared and working on that every day with us and our team of people that are customer facing whether it's on the calls in the facility or in the homes, on our service calls or sales leads we're never going to have the kind of success that we could have had. And I'm not saying that there's not listeners that have had tremendous amounts of success. But I am saying that if we really work on those leveraged activities and make those a big rock in our business and that's from the seven habits, right We've got to first figure out what's important to us right, begin with the end in mind and where we want to end up, and then the big rocks are.
Speaker 2:Put first things first. What are our leveraged activities? Put first things first. What are our leveraged activities? We got to make sure that we're priced right, probably fairly and probably on the higher end. If we want to grow a great company and attract great people and provide 401ks and health insurance and company picnics and Christmas parties and year-end bonuses, we're not going to be able to be cheap. If we're going to build a great company and if we're going to build a great company to attract the great people, then we've got to be a higher price. And to be a higher price we're still going to face all these challenges.
Speaker 2:And so, with your situation, corey, one guy that shows you some cobwebs and says nobody else has been down here, he didn't have to start talking, smack directly about all the competitors. He didn't have to talk about, you know, dewey's drain them of their life savings as a terrible company, and Huey's heat them and cheat them, abc, whatever. He just says, corey, and he puts on a performance. He shows you a picture and he goes oh my gosh, nobody else has been down here. There's no way they could have boom, boom, boom. Found these holes in your ductwork. Seen that your ductwork's undersized, seen that there's no matter what they install, that that wouldn't have been able to distribute enough CFM to your upstairs primary suite in order to make you and your family comfortable, you and your wife, you and your kids. And so all of a sudden, you're like, well, if those other guys didn't even tell me about it, of course they were cheaper, they weren't solving the challenge to actually make this work. And so that value, that story, that picture, all of a sudden in his mind, all of a sudden you have tremendous amounts of value.
Speaker 2:But it does not mean, corey, that when you get down to the end. Let's just pick some numbers. Let's just say the other guys were at 15 grand and you're at 20, right, just to pick some round numbers. That doesn't mean that he's not going to ask you to do it for 17. We've got to make sure that if you solve all those challenges for this random number of 20, and the other guys were all under 15, promising the same thing, you've shown a different value by the things that you've uncovered, the things that you're going to solve, the stories that you've shared, the value that you bring, how you run your business, how you stand behind your work. And then we've got to be prepared for him still to ask for a discount. And if we're not, then we're going to be reduced to discounting our services.
Speaker 2:And the crazy thing is, corey, even if you give $10,000 off and just like the used car example, and just like we got down to $4,300 or whatever on the car here, if you say, well, yeah, I'll give 10% off, now you're doing your same system for 18,000. You know what didn't change, corey, in most businesses that I've seen, we didn't even reduce the comfort advisor's commission. He made less commission because he only sold 18,000. But let's say his commission was at 5% or 8% or 10, whatever the program is. Everybody's got something different based on base plus and all that stuff. But we're probably going to still.
Speaker 2:Let's just go 10% off 18. You know what? Who else gets paid? The folks in the facility. The fuel bill still has to get paid, the truck payments got to get paid, the software still has to get paid. Everybody gets paid, except who? The business owner. And the national average is two and a half to three and a half percent.
Speaker 2:And if the comfort advisor drops at 10% when, if we would have built back to value, we could hold that 20,000, that last 2000 represents a 10% net. And if you're at three and a half percent net and you give away 10% to get the job at 18 instead of 20, because somebody else is at 15, guess what? This is why companies go out of business. This is why supply houses don't get paid. This is how you get behind on your truck notes or your mortgage payment, or why a buddy of mine had to finance his own company and work 100 hours a week and then borrow $200,000 to live and keep the doors open. How do we get out of that? We double down on our training, we figure out our leveraged activities to build the value in our business, to hold our margin at the end. And if we'll do that, no matter where we are today, you know, I think we can end up in a completely different place and a much better place a year from now. Which reminds me I'll finish on this Tony Robbins said something to me.
Speaker 2:I got to see him for the first time when I was about 20 years old, when I built that door-to-door sales company, started having a little bit of money, and I can remember Tony Robbins saying that we drastically overestimate what we can accomplish in a day, a week or a month and we drastically underestimate what we can accomplish in a year. The challenge for us as a human race is most of us give up too soon and we go back to doing what was comfortable for us before we let the magic start to happen in our lives. We don't lose 50 pounds in a day or a week or a month, but if we do lose 50 pounds over a year, that means on average we just did enough to lose about a pound a week and see at the end of the year we're 50 pounds lighter. But same thing with our company.
Speaker 2:If we think we can go out there and double our prices and hold that margin, we could very well go out of business because we're not prepared, we've not been rehearsing, we've not been practicing, we've not been role-playing, we've not been mastering those things. So don't look at what I can do. Yes, what are we doing every single day? But it's going to be over the course of a year. It took us a year at that company that I had here in Denver to start to pay off all that debt, get cash flow positive and come back and win the award again. It wasn't over a day or a week. How do you handle?
Speaker 1:when? And I'm sure you get this response. But, doug, you know my techs are not sales guys. They don't like selling, they're technicians.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, that doesn't work for me, but here's what I will say. Here's what I will say For everybody listening. I hear this all the time and my guys, they started out the same way. Right, here's what I can say to you. When a guy says I don't want to be in sales, number one he probably has some real baggage and rightfully so about sales. What that guy that says I don't want to be in sales is saying is that I don't want to be a high pressure, pushy snake in the grass, sleazy, nasty salesperson selling people things that they don't need. First thing I'm going to say is sales comes down to our mindset and we've got to think about. You know, there's something in our brain, it's a filter, it's called the reticular activating system and that creates our paradigms of the way that we see the world. And I'll just say this is a real thing. I would encourage everybody to do some research. We have a part of our training that addresses this so that we can start to understand.
Speaker 2:Let's talk about the political spectrum. You know, right now there's a lot of political strife in our country right now and people are so distraught that they're trying to assassinate people, and you know I joke a little bit that you know, if you want to convince somebody, just argue with them on Facebook and they'll you'll change their mind. It never happens, right the reason that you look and you go. How could they believe that, no matter what side of the aisle you're on, if you're like, how could they be so stupid? I thought that person was smart or man, they've got a great career, but they they support that candidate. They're idiots. Well, what's happening is the reticular activating system is filtering in things that they believe and literally filtering out things that they don't believe. Literally, they could see something happen in front of their eyes and, even though they saw it, their brain is filtering out as fast as they see it. There's all kinds of studies that have been done that you could take 10 people that witness an accident in an intersection and interview them all, and they all have a different account of what happened. That's our reticular activating system and the way that we see the world.
Speaker 2:It's the same thing with our technicians that don't want to be salespeople First and foremost. They don't want to be people that don't resonate with their own core values of taking care of people. Technicians, inherently, are programmed and designed to fix things. Now we're talking about a different. We're going left brain, right brain activity where we want them to say let's diagnose the challenge of why this mechanical system's not working, whether it's on the plumbing, hvac or electrical side. They are programmed and trained to fix it and they've been programmed through their reticular activating system to believe that's their only responsibility.
Speaker 2:The challenge is what the true core value is. To be a man of character and integrity is to share all options with the potential customer and let them make the choice. And it does not mean, corey, that we sell out of our own wallet, meaning that we know how much a furnace costs or how much a contactor costs or how much a you know a jug of refrigerant costs or R22. And we would say well, there's no way we would charge that because you know how much it costs at the supply house. If the homeowner knew and knew how to fix it, you wouldn't be there. The value that you bring is your professionalism and everything else right. So we would work with our guys to say our mindset has to be that we have a responsibility to being people of character to share all options and then to recommend what's going to be best for them.
Speaker 2:And I can tell you this if I walk in on a system and I could change an igniter on an 80% single stage furnace, let's say that furnace is 17 years old. The question becomes can I repair it? Could I have it done in 15 minutes? Do I have the part of my truck and could I have this back up and running before the snow starts to fall in the next three hours, before this cold front moves in? All of the answers to that are yes, and let's throw out a number. Let's just say that's $500. Okay, including the diagnostic. I know some people are higher than that, some people are lower. We'll pick a nice even number there. Let's say that it's $500 to repair it.
Speaker 2:My question is does it make sense for every person that you meet with a 17-year-old furnace, with an igniter that went out with a snowstorm coming in, to have them pay you and your company $500 to have a 17-year-old system back up and working? You're going to the very end of the lifespan of that furnace. So I started to have to work on the mindset of my people to say our responsibility is to diagnose the challenge, be honest with them, not tell them that they need something that they don't, but give them the opportunity to know that there is new technology available that has a variable speed motor that can mix up all the air in the home, that can have a two-stage, a variable speed, a modulating gas valve, that we can save them money on their utilities. We can mix up all the air in the home. We can help to eliminate hot and cold spots.
Speaker 2:My job is to discover if their home is miserable, because just about every home I've ever been in that has a single-stage furnace has miserable hot and cold spots. And you know what the worst place is, it's typically the primary suite. And what does that cause? Well, if it's miserable and it won't cool off in the summer it won't excuse me won't warm up in the winter, then that person's probably not getting a great night's sleep. Well, what does that lead to? Maybe not performing as well at work. What does that lead to? Well, maybe getting fired or, at the very least, not getting promoted. What does that lead to? Additional stress, less income. What does that lead to? Coming home not happy, yelling at your wife, not getting up to help with the dishes, right. Maybe that turns into the kids are getting yelled at or they don't get that new ball glove right, all because they can't sleep at night.
Speaker 2:I would like to have a conversation that we could mix up all the air in the home and maybe that's not gonna be $500, but we can install a brand new variable speed modulating furnace and that's going to help solve this. We can also add into air quality and so, instead of a $500 repair, I put those options out there for the homeowner and maybe that solution right there alone is in the $10,000 range. Our responsibility to be men and women of character is not to sell out of our own pocket and say I can fix this for 500. I think the first thing we have to do is get our people to think about. It's not our job and it's certainly it shouldn't be up to us to let that homeowner or not. Let that homeowner be able to make that decision with their own money. Their job is going to be to tell us that's more than I wanted to pay, than I expected to pay. I was wanting to go on this vacation. But if they do have those challenges and now they start to understand the terrible things in our water, the terrible things in our air, having an uncomfortable home and they've just gotten accustomed to it and they realize that we could fix that. You know what Many times we would just give an analogy that says to install the perfect new system with all the indoor air quality, with endless hot water, we can do all that.
Speaker 2:Let's just say that you're somewhere with one of your financing options at about a 1% investment factor, or payment factor, what most people call it. Well, what's 1% of $20,000? It's 200 bucks a month. I'm at least gonna give the homeowner the option that for one sushi dinner that's going to be forgotten by Saturday morning you could have a brand new system right, 200 bucks a month. So maybe your system's 30,000, 300 bucks a month.
Speaker 2:So the thing is, this is and I maybe gave you a long-winded answer, corey, but this is one of the biggest challenges facing our industry is technicians that don't want to be salespeople. So what we've designed is we say first we got to work on the mindset. We got to have these conversations to be true men of character, men and women of character and to resonate with our core values. We shouldn't sell somebody even an igniter in that situation if we didn't give them their other options of how they could have invested their money to take care of their family. And then, number two, we've got to be willing to get very well versed, because most people buy things on credit. People aren't going out paying cash for houses and boats and cars, they're financing those things. So we've got to get good at that.
Speaker 2:And then we just sell from passion. What's going to be the best way that we can take care of that company? And know this, if our technicians say I don't want to be in sales, what if another company that's working on this stuff but maybe doesn't do the work as well as you do stand behind their work as well as you do, they will come in and sell it to them Right. And so instead of you selling it to them, somebody else will. When you could have done a better install, when you could have taken better care of that family, when you maybe would have sold them a variable speed and solved a lot of challenges and resized the return airdrop and sealed up those holes in the ductwork in the crawl space, maybe you did that.
Speaker 2:That to me is like we don't have to be salespeople. We have to go in there and sell with passion of how our company is going to do the right thing and let the homeowner choose and then definitely be prepared when they say it's too much or I got to think about it, sleep on it, talk to the spouse, get three bids or I'm not familiar with your brand. And you'll be amazed. If we work on those things, homeowners will start saying about 70% of them will say you know what, I tell you what, let's just go ahead and do it, but it's going to take a lot of work.
Speaker 2:So I don't know if I got to say sorry, going to sell anything I'm going to say then you're not willing to serve our customers the way they deserve to be served. I don't expect you to sell anything that you wouldn't sell to your very own grandmother. I call that the grandmother rule. If you wouldn't recommend it or sell it to your very own family that you love dearly, don't you dare recommend it to my customer. But if you do believe it's the right thing, even if it's going to be a little pinch on their budget, but it's the right thing to do, let them make that choice with their own money and their own home. Don't make the decision for them. That makes you a good person, not a salesperson.
Speaker 1:I agree. So what do you say to that leader that's accepting that answer from his technicians? Because that's really right, because he's allowing the technicians to say I'm not a salesperson, he's coming to you. I mean, they said they're not salespeople. So it really starts with that guy right. Because if the leader's not having these conversations and lots of times they don't have these conversations, in fact, lots of times they don't have any conversation because they just don't so how do you and you know- why?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think I can share this, and I'm going to go back to this friend of mine and client that turned his business around in the 15th year this past year, and I'll share with you what he did and what I try to influence business owners. I call this being leveraged by labor. Okay, and so if we're leveraged by our labor force which means that's, let's just say, our technicians, right Saying I don't want to do any training, I don't want to do any sales, I don't want to recommend, I only want to fix, I only want to repair that's why I got into the industry. Well, the industry's changing and there are companies that will employ those people, and it doesn't even make them bad people. I think they've got a mindset challenge. They've been fed a narrative for so long they've begun to believe that being in sales is bad or that going into training is bad. And the first thing I say is listen, we may have been the kind of people and I was this kind of person too I didn't really like learning about social studies. I didn't want to take tests, I hated algebra and trig and I felt like that was a waste of my time in high school. I would have been out. I would have rather been out riding dirt bikes right, or playing basketball.
Speaker 2:But what I've realized as a professional in business is to study and to get better at something that's going to help not only our own career and therefore our own family, but the business that we work for. That's employing us, that's providing those leads, that's doing the marketing that put us in that van, that's paying for that fuel, it's paying for that insurance. We have a duty and responsibility to that organization, plus ourselves, to work and become the best we can possibly be. And, corey, that does not just mean on the technical side. If we have people in our industry that are not willing to also become more effective communicators and share different solutions so that we leave the decision up to the homeowner for their home, for their product, with their money, then we're doing them a disservice. So we've got to work on the mindset. So let's go back to the business owner, the number one thing that a business owner can do. The first step that I would recommend that they take today is they reach their tipping point, like my friend did, when he looked up and he said in my 14th year, how in the world do I lose somewhere between $180,000 and $200,000, almost go out of business, and I'm allowing the men that work for me in the field to tell me they don't want to train, they're not going to role play, they're not going to study, they're not going to get good at this, while I lose my ass and I'm going to go out of business and I'm going to lose everything I've ever worked for. Why ever worked for? Why? Because I'm leveraged by the labor force and so he had to reach his tipping point.
Speaker 2:The first thing we have to do is we have to get clear on what it is that we want and what we're willing to tolerate, what we're willing to accept in our own life. Why are we working so hard? And I don't think it's to go broke. I think we have a responsibility on this planet to become the best version of ourselves that we can be. So, for anybody that went into business, I'm not gonna say this is fair and I'm not gonna say that you thought you signed up for this, but I have maybe some bad news. You did when you wanted to start scaling your business, since you started hiring people to go out and serve your customers.
Speaker 2:We now have a duty and a responsibility, I believe, to become better leaders. So we've gotta first make the decision. Then we've got to say how am I going to communicate this, inspire my team? So this is one of the things that we work on with our training programs how do we start to shift that mentality, that mindset, right? And so we help the business owners do that. But whether it's us, or you plug into something else or you go to a training by John Maxwell or Stephen Covey or another leadership program, we have to take responsibility and point the finger inward instead of outward at our team and say, if they're not willing to do it and I haven't inspired them to do it, I first have to work on myself, become a better leader and start communicating these things. I then have to have the willingness and the ability and the wherewithal to schedule a meeting at least once a week so we can get everybody in the organization back on track and communicate my vision.
Speaker 2:Those meetings, in my estimation, corey, have to be very well planned, very well orchestrated. We have to have an assignment of what we were working on the week before and we walk in. Our team should never be surprised. I always gave my team a full week to know what we were going to be working on, so that anybody that wasn't prepared, that was on them, not on me I don't surprise my team, get up there and say, okay, we're going to role play on this today. I'm going to give them a full week and that's what our programs are designed to do A forced learning path with assignments and inspiration, mindset training, role play, training, consistency across every department. I think that's what we have to do as business owners.
Speaker 2:And I will also say this if there's a skill set that I possess, corey, that I've worked on every day of my life if I'm going to be an entrepreneur and I want to scale my business beyond me, I've got to work on becoming a master recruiter. I've got to be able to get people to buy into my vision, because if I'm leveraged by labor and the reason I am is because I'm afraid if my people leave, I'm not going to have anybody to do the work I'm going to find myself back in a van and in crawl spaces and attics and I've already paid my dues and I wanted to build a business. Well, here's what I can say when you find the right people, your challenges have a way of working themselves out. And when you have the wrong people or the people that we're not inspiring to be better and passionate about what we provide and how we serve and how we install and how we run our business, that's our responsibility. First Give them a chance, inspire them, provide the training for them.
Speaker 2:But if we don't become better leaders, if we're not willing to make that investment and we don't reach our tipping point, it's never going to change. But I can promise you this the best companies out there they've got guys coming in working on this stuff five days a week, not one day a week. They've got guys coming in and gals working those phones that are serving customers better than you can imagine. And so if we have the kind of people that say I'm not going to do it, I don't want to train, I would first say is this my responsibility? To start, have I communicated the passion and how we're going to serve and how we're not trying to be high pressure, pushy salespeople? Then my responsibility is to meet with them, invest in them, provide the training and start to remain consistent in those things. No-transcript. So what I do is I say, man, and this goes against some management philosophies, which is also why a company like WhoHire is just becoming absolutely something that's becoming a necessity.
Speaker 2:If you want to shorten and collapse timeframes on this, on your recruitment, hiring and training process, first thing is we've got to figure out who's going to be a good fit for our organization, which is where something like WhoHire that you're developing with Jonathan Wissman Porter Wissman Sorry, I almost missed that that program can help us to condense these timeframes. Bring people in, communicate our vision right. But I'm not saying fire all your people. I am saying sit them down. I have another podcast that I did. We're invested over almost an hour talking about the kind of meeting we can have In 30 days.
Speaker 2:Corey, we can make the decision whether or not this person is gonna be a part of the solution or a part of the problem and, by the way, I would have this conversation with my team every single week. I'm gonna to remind them every decision that you make, every call that you run, every call that you dispatch, every call that you answer, every lead that you run, every meeting you come to, you're either a part of the problem around here or you're a part of the solution. I'll give you an example If a guy walks in late for a meeting. He's a part of the problem. If a guy doesn't have a shirt tucked in part of the problem. If a guy says I don't want to role play, part of the problem.
Speaker 2:Now, take the other person. Guy shows up early, he's sitting there ready to learn, he's coachable. He's saying, okay, I'm going to get better at this, this is what my boss wants. And we, I'm going to get in here, I'm going to put on my name badge, I'm going to be ready to go, I'm going to run every race like it's my last. That's a part of the solution.
Speaker 2:If we have people that don't sell with passion on our calls to schedule and get both homeowners present on a sales lead. If we have people that don't collect the diagnostic investment or say, yeah, we'll waive that at the first bit of pushback, they're a part of the problem. Bit of pushback they're a part of the problem. But then we have to point the finger inward and say have I given him the training? Have I clearly communicated our expectation of what it means to rep our logo like a badge of honor? And sooner or later, I'm telling you, if we become a master recruiter, we will become like my buddy that stopped tolerating that and you know what he did.
Speaker 2:When he realized he was going broke, he said I'm not tolerating anymore. We will get here and train, we will role play, we will do the assignments. We will get better every single day, every single week. And you know what? Here's the here's the here's the short of it. He took his hourly rate from 180 to 620 in the last year. He took his trucks on the road from two to six. He's paid off well over a hundred thousand dollars of that debt Plus started taking paychecks again in this year and after 14 years of what I would call misery, all of a sudden he reached his tipping point.
Speaker 2:He said no more, not, I'm not going. I'm not going broke, losing everything I've ever worked for. So he said if you don't want to train, if you don't want to show up to meetings, you don't want to get in front and role play what we're. We're not asking you to role play algebra and trigonometry. We're asking you to role play how you enter the home, how you put on your shoe covers, how you come back and sit down with the homeowner and present options, how you present financing options, how you present everything, how you put your notes in the software If you can't come in here and say I'm going to get better and be a part of the solution, then he just said you're not going to work here.
Speaker 2:And so he started making some tough decisions. He became a better recruiter. He became a better recruiter, he became a better leader, became a better communicator, and it only took this last year for him to start paying down debt instead of accumulating it, to triple the size of his fleet, triple his pricing, and look at that. Now he's targeting the market of the people that will buy into his value, instead of buying into guys that say I'm not going to make recommendations, I'm not going to train, I'm not going to role play. That's what it's going to take.
Speaker 2:But, corey, to be clear, I'm not saying to go in there and fire anybody today, and if anybody's listening that's in the van working for somebody else, I'm going to say okay, maybe you didn't know what you didn't know, but now that you know that the average contractor earns about 3% on every million dollars, that's $30,000. So let me show you the math on that, because we think it's more. Three cents out of a dollar is 3%. 30,000 out of a million, which means if there's a million dollar business, with all those headaches and all that, and they turn a 3% net. They got $30,000. And, god forbid, it's a two-person ownership team of a husband and wife. That means that they split $15,000 in profit. And that also means that if you have a $5 million company and you think, wow, that business owner is making out like a bandit, well, 3% on $5 million is $150,000.
Speaker 2:And there's a lot of techs across this country with no responsibility to the marketing and the liability and the supply houses and the inventory and the trucks, the vans, the insurance and everything else, and they're out there making well over $150,000 running somebody else's leads, wearing somebody else's uniform, letting somebody else handle that, and so there's a lot of businesses out there, even with a $5 million business, that says it's just not worth it.
Speaker 2:I'm just going to go to work for somebody else. We're either part of the problem or part of the solution, corey, and so I'm going to surround myself with people who want to serve others well and that they're not going to sell out of their own wallet and they're going to work to get better every single day, and, by the way, not just at selling, at being a better husband or father, at being a better spouse, at being a better communicator, at treating our dispatch with more respect and treating our call center and our dispatch. They need to learn how to communicate more effectively as well. It goes across all departments. Nobody is remiss, nobody is removed from this. Everybody has responsibility, I believe, every single day, to just get a little bit better A year from now. Not ever going to be a complete utopia, but, man, your life can look completely different if you'll stick to it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you mentioned habits earlier. It's really just changing habits. It's changing how you've always done things. If you're just refer back to the guy, the 14 year business owner, you know he just got into some bad habits and accepted some bad behavior from his people and you know you just have to. You just have to decide that you want something different and when the pain gets great enough, you change.
Speaker 2:That's what happened and you know what he did. He joined Service Nation and he started getting on. They have AB group calls, right Advisory board group calls, where he gets on with seven to eight 10 like contractors, with a mentor in that group that's also a contractor that runs that group. And he started learning about his numbers. He started learning about how to read his financial statements. He started learning about how he should price his jobs and how he needed to create that margin and he realized why for the first time, why he was going broke and he realized it was never going to change if he didn't price his jobs properly and then have a team that could go out there and communicate that. I met him in the backyard of Lou Hobica's home.
Speaker 2:A lot of people are familiar with Hobica Services and Andy Hobica is one of the greatest comfort advisors to ever live. If you're not following Andy Hobica man, that guy is an absolute. I mean, he's on fire. You find him on Instagram and that dude's doing training. He's still out there in attics and crawl spaces. He's doing the deal man and I think he's got a charity that he runs. The Hobica family is one of the best to ever do it in the trades.
Speaker 2:And I can tell you, when Service World Expo was going on down in Phoenix last year, lou had about 150 or 200 of his best friends over. He's got a lot of friends in his backyard around his pool and his fire pit and everything and he fed all of us. And I'm sitting around his fire pit and I don't know. It probably got to be about 11 PM and this business owner was sitting there and we just started talking, kind of had a conversation like this and he's like well, how do you do it? And I can say this I'm very proud I didn't do it for him, but I was one, just one of those things where he joined us at Synergy. He started implementing the mindset, the training, the effective communication. He continued on with all of his business development training, learning about his numbers, learning about his financial statements, and it took him a year.
Speaker 2:Here we are one year later and his life, I promise you, will never be the same, because he's never, ever going to accept apathy from his team. He's never going to accept guys that say I'm not going to train, I'm not going to role play. He's never going to accept somebody answering his phones that just waves, diagnostics, all willy-nilly. He's never going to accept somebody on his phones that doesn't work their darndest to get both homeowners present for a sales lead. He's never going to accept a technician out there on 20-year-old equipment that doesn't at least have a repair versus replace conversation and at least give the homeowner their options that, rather than putting good money down a dry well with equipment that's seen its better days, that it's on its last few years right, and that they can keep throwing parts at it sooner or later than after you know, does it make more sense to replace it today and have a 10 year bumper to bumper warranty, so to speak, where we'll come back out and service it every year, have a maintenance agreement.
Speaker 2:If he just said, if you guys are not going to have those conversations, I'm investing in the training. If you're telling me you don't want to do it, then you don't have a job and his life has completely changed and that can happen for anybody, and I'm not Corey. It's going to be one of the hardest things we ever do. It's going to be a complete shift, just like it was for this man. But I can tell you this when I talked to him yesterday, he was on the golf course. Now he's got people that are doing the thing.
Speaker 2:It took him about a year to turn that ship around Right, and it was a little bit each time, but as he looks up a year from now, and he's been in our program and he's been in service nation and he's working every day on being a better leader, being a better communicator, holding his team accountable, if you will. It took a year, man, but now he lives a completely different life and I he texted me this morning. I first text I had, uh, had, was him talking about our conversation yesterday and just saying man, I didn't know if any of this would work for me when I met you a year ago, but I started making these changes little by little and life is so good now and I just said, man, you are about to be on a meteoric rise and that can happen for any one of us and it's going to be one of the hardest things we've done.
Speaker 1:You mentioned synergy which obviously your shirt says Synergy. So tell us a little bit about that, since we haven't really gotten into that, and what is it that Synergy can do for a contractor?
Speaker 2:Okay, great question. I'll try to keep this brief because I never want to come on here and just make a presentation. We believe in something called content marketing, where we share content. But I appreciate you asking, corey. I'll say this SynergyLearningSystemsnet is where you can find us, not com Tons of videos on there. So if you're interested and you want to learn more probably some of the most highly produced, entertaining, engaging videos here's what I did when I exited that company the second time on the contractor side.
Speaker 2:After the stint in the middle where we trained a thousand contractors and 7,000 blue collar tradesmen to sell and influence with integrity, I left and we went and built that all natural sleep aid in Walmart, walgreens, cbs, hy-vee. We outsell in six states. Running our headquarters in Missouri, we outsell five-hour energy at register, two to one. It's all natural In that business, corey, even though I had an opportunity to become ultra wealthy and I thought that's what I wanted. I was 45 at the time, I'm 49 today and during COVID, it was a very lonely time for many of us and I found myself sitting behind a desk. Nothing was open and I was studying how to get our sleep aid into China, the Philippines, canada, mexico and India, and so I'm studying international trade and working somewhere in between 12, 15, and, someday, 17 hours a day, and that's no exaggeration.
Speaker 2:And I realized during that time I wasn't happy and I went down to Mexico at a place in Plano Carmen and I invested about a month on a sabbatical to get clear on what I wanted. I went to sweat lodges with the locals, sweated it out. I floated in the ocean for hours on my back in the middle of the night with the moon shining in the Caribbean. And I just said I'm 45 years through my life, I'm going through a divorce because I work way too much. I will say I got divorced during that same time, during COVID, and it wasn't because of infidelity, it was because I was working so hard I wasn't focused on some of the things in my marriage. I'll accept responsibility for that too. But here I am, 45 years old, I've done a lot of different things, been through tremendous amounts of struggle in my life and has also had some success. And I said what do I want the next 45 years of my life to look like? And I came to the realization that I wanted to work in the trades. I missed the men and women of the trades and that that was my calling. I didn't come back for the money. I didn't come back to fleece business owners out of their hard-earned revenue. I came back to make a difference and hopefully to leave a legacy in our industry. And so here's what Synergy is.
Speaker 2:When I came back, I still don't really do any marketing. You could say that being on a podcast is marketing. That's about all I do. I work through referrals. Someday we might do some posts, but right now we're working on building out a program that is unlike anything that's ever been created. When I came back, I said that first stint.
Speaker 2:We got a lot of great reviews on our live events and people would say this is game changing, this is life changing, this is going to change everything. And then I'd run into them a year later at a conference and you could just tell they hadn't done it. The live event, the feedback form, said this is the best thing ever, this is going to change everything. And then life happens just like we get heavy, just like we end up back in the fast food, just like we quit going to the gym. Life happens to us, corey, and so I said, if I'm going to come back, we'll still do live events occasionally, but what I'm going to build is an ongoing follow-up program that we're going to work through a path to mastery, and so what Synergy Learning Systems truly is is a company that's helping us, in the trades and beyond, solve the ultimate challenge, which I believe is the challenge of implementation. Most of us know what to do to lose the 50 pounds. Most of us know what to do to have a great marriage. Most of us know what to do to have a great business. The challenge is we're just not doing it. We're not doing it long enough, consistent enough to let that magic start to happen in our lives, our finances, our spiritual life, our health, our fitness, our business, our relationships, and so what I did is I said I'm not going to come back and just try to sell my services or try to do live events. What I'm going to do is build a green screen studio. I'm going to hire a master of videography, and we hired 11 video editors around the globe, and so we started building this thing out a couple of years ago, everything that we were doing in our live events and everything I did to transform that 18-year-old organization into a Linux partner of the year in less than a year and a half.
Speaker 2:We've put it all on video. We've made it engaging, entertaining. We've made everything like a miniature movie. We've made it where there's interactive portions in every video, where it's like a choose-your-own-adventure, so even though it's recorded, it feels like in every single training video we're talking to you, because you get to choose and answer halfway through every video. Every click is tracked, so the business owner never has the wool pulled over his eyes of who did what and who did what training or passed what quiz. Every video you got to pass a quiz.
Speaker 2:And what we're doing, corey, is we're forcing implementation, but we're also providing opportunities when a business owner invests for their team to increase their personal development, their career development. But everything's measured. And then what we're putting the finishing touches on now is 52 weekly synergy sessions where we're creating a facilitator's program, once you go through all the core training, all of the role plays, where we film in high definition and real service fans and real entryways and real primary baths in real kitchen tables and dining room tables, presenting HVAC and plumbing services all customized, literally broken into small, manageable chunks. Now we're putting the finishing touches on 52 weekly Synergy sessions and to me. This was my vision when I came back to the trades.
Speaker 2:I didn't want to get people excited over a live event, not give them an ongoing follow-up program. So if we join a gym and we start to feel like we're going to quit in February or March, if we had also hired the personal trainer and we'd committed to meet that personal trainer there every morning or four days a week or whatever it is, and then every time to meet that personal trainer there every morning or four days a week or whatever it is, and then every time you met that personal trainer at the gym, they said okay, we're doing buys and tries today and we're doing three sets and I'm gonna have you a spot, or we're gonna go to exhaustion and then we're gonna get on the bench tomorrow and then we're gonna do legs and then we're gonna do abs and then we're gonna do cardio. Yo, there's no way, corey, that we don't get in better shape. And when we look up a year from now, especially if we mix that with a healthier nutrition plan and maybe a few less drinks and a few less trips to the fast food drive-through there is no possibility. If you do what I just outlined and you meet that personal trainer there four or five days a week and you also work on some of the other stuff that you don't drop the pound a week. There's no possibility, no possibility.
Speaker 2:So what we've done is we've taken that same thing and we've said, all right, how do we create the entire core program across all departments in our organization? And then, when I went through the seven habits Corey and became a facilitator, the facilitator program is four times the size of the participant experience. Dr Covey was brilliant in the way he designed a way for him to teach others, to facilitate or teach his program right. And so that's what we're doing. We're creating a facilitator's program where the business owner and the service managers and the sales managers and the office managers don't have to create the content, they don't have to create the assignments. We do it all and we do it for them. They facilitate the program. They don't have to create the assignments. We do it all and we do it for them. They facilitate the program.
Speaker 2:And, just like the personal trainer Corey, I guarantee somebody joins a program that has weekly coaching, weekly training, weekly assignments and they push play and they push print and they have the meeting and they get to be where they've reached their tipping point, where they're not leveraged by labor and letting the people tell them what they're going to do in their business, allowing them to go broke. There's no way. It doesn't work for you. And listen, you can do that with any program, but most of the time what I found in the trades there's too many homeowners calling, there's too many customers, somebody blew through a stop sign, we ran over somebody's bushes, we've got a recall or a callback and all of a sudden we look up and it's Tuesday morning again and we didn't have the time to create an effective meeting.
Speaker 2:And so we just go back to what we've always done and the technicians and the people in the call center and everybody's rolling their eyes Like why did I have to get up early to come in here and eat a cold burrito? And so I just say we got to change that, and if we'll work every single week, we'll be amazed that we can end up a year from now. So what is Synergy? We're working to solve the challenge of implementation with integrity the core values of honor, character and integrity. Serving homeowners better, having more effective communication, lowering sales resistance, inspiring our people to be better than ever before, but not expecting it to happen overnight. This is going to be a process, just like dropping 50 pounds, yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, doug, that was a great explanation, and I do believe that most programs out there don't have any follow through. They go on site, they'll spend three days, maybe four days, and then, well, you're kind of on your own.
Speaker 2:It's not enough. I mean, corey. To use another analogy about the gym, let's just say that you, corey, decide to go out there and build a 24-hour fitness, and let's say that it's a total of. You go out and you finance that and you get a $10 million loan that's going to build a two-story facility. You got a basketball court, you got a basketball court, you got a pool, you got the spa. You got all that stuff, plus all that equipment, the track, everything, right, $10 million. And then you invest in the software, you hire the people, you hire the people to check people in and you got all the cards and everything that's going to take to run a 24-hour fitness. It's the same thing for us in the trades right, we do all these things. We buy all the vans, we inventory, we wrap our vans, we get the software right, we hire the people, we get the uniforms, we do all that stuff. But, corey, if you invest $10 million in building your new 24-hour fitness, right, and then everybody signs up in droves on January 1, right, but all of a sudden you made all the investment, all the equipments there, the track, the gym, the spa, the pool, the software, the people and then all of a sudden, march 15th comes and you're back to the usual suspects, the people that were there before.
Speaker 2:Was it that 24-hour fitness didn't work? Was it that your gym equipment didn't work? Was it that the software didn't work? Was it that your marketing hadn't worked? Didn't work. Was it that the software didn't work? Was it that your marketing hadn't worked, corey?
Speaker 2:The only difference is we got away from having the thing where we said, every day or once a week, we're going to work on this. That's the difference. And so all I'm saying is it doesn't matter how much we've invested in our company, in our vans, in our inventory, in our marketing, in our website, in our software, if we don't find a way, every single week, to do the training, because, corey, you can have a $10 million facility and nobody's going to lose a pound, nobody's going to get healthier if they don't come and actually do it consistently. So that's all we did is we said listen, we're going to get so busy as contractors, and I've lived that life now on the contractor side twice, and I've gotten to know about a thousand of us around the country that are living these lives, and all I know is we suffer from the same thing over and over again Implementation. We're doing the hours.
Speaker 2:The guy I was telling you about was working 100 hours a week. It wasn't that he wasn't working hard, it's at the margin, it's our pricing. It's at the margin, it's our pricing, it's our numbers. It's what I call the leveraged activities, and one of the absolute leveraged activities to have a great business and be able to sell at margin and price your jobs effectively and not have to discount and lose everything that you're working 100 hours a week for is we got to get in there and we got to train. We got to train, we train, we got to train, we got to train and we got to go out.
Speaker 2:And if you really want to measure it, go out and talk to Sebastian at Rilla. And if you really want to get great people on, then sign up with somebody like WhoHire. And if you want somebody to coach you, you either find somebody like me or I mean listen, man, there's tons of guys out there. You got the Joes, you know. You got the Jasons, you got the Victors, you got the the Andes, the Andy Ellits and the Andy Habikas and you got, uh, the everyone right, you got Brigham on the call center. I mean listen. There's amazing people out there with amazing training, and what I would say is stop looking for a magic elixir.
Speaker 2:Dive in and dive deep and stick with it and give it long enough for it to work, and stop listening to your people telling you they're not going to do it. That's the challenge. And so when we reach our tipping point and we say I have had enough and I'm working too hard to be this broke or have this much stress or die an early death from stress and a cardiac arrest, and you say you know what? It's not going to happen overnight. I'm not firing everybody. I'm not firing everybody. I'm gonna start working on myself to be a better communicator. More effectively, I'm gonna inspire these people, I'm gonna communicate my vision and I'm gonna get them to see themselves as servants rather than salespeople. Sales is about serving Sales. Corey, you've probably heard me. You and I've talked about this before. Sales is only three things.
Speaker 1:It's a transference of emotion.
Speaker 2:That's right. And then it's a lowering of risk and earning of trust. As trust goes up, risk goes down. As risk goes up, trust goes down. And if we're flatlining our presentation style and we're not passionate about our company and our people and the service that we provide and the way we stand behind our work, then guess what? The passion is not there. The only emotion being created there is well, my boss wants me to sell you some stuff. Oh my God, how in the world are we going to sell stuff?
Speaker 2:Literally, one of our clients down in Baton Rouge has a technician and he's changed his ways because he had no choice. This business owner said listen, and you know how he found out. A customer called him and said hey, your technician was just here. I've used you guys for a long time and I think you guys are great, but he literally told me that he was only showing me some things because his boss, you, wanted him to sell him some stuff. Of course, his numbers were bad. Listen and listen.
Speaker 2:I'm not even going to say the guy that said it is a bad guy. I'm going to say he's misinformed. I'm going to say he's under-trained. I'm going to say that he's been led to believe in his life, what he's seen in the industry, because he's a master technician. He's their number one troubleshooter. That's the only reason, because he's so good at what he does that he brought him to one of our trainings and said, hey, that ain't going to fly. I'm going to invest in you because you're so good at what you do.
Speaker 2:But there's this whole other side to what we expect here, and you're on the opposite end of the spectrum of what we expect in regard to communication. You're throwing us under the bus, communicating to our customers that we're literally telling you to rip them off, just sell them things, and that's not their company at all. They're the farthest from that. So he just said listen, I don't want to lose you, but I will not keep you If you ever say that we're going to double down on our training. We're going to get to become better communicators.
Speaker 2:And then he had to work on the mindset of this master technician to say do you really think this is ripping people off if we install a brand new system that makes their home more comfortable, that takes care of their children, that cleans their air, that cleans their water, that allows them to get a better night's sleep, that makes them comfortable in their home. Don't you think we owe it to them to share with them that they could have the Ferrari or the Rolls Royce of the heating, air conditioning and plumbing industry for $200 or $300 a month? I mean, corey, the difference in the best system, like in your situation, with the duct work changing out the duct and the crawl going with the variable speed unit, changing the 50 gallon to a tankless, putting in a water treatment system we can solve all that right. Or just say somewhere between $30,000 and $50,000, depending on our marketplace, depending on how we're priced, depending on our overhead. Everybody's different. I don't know enough to tell anybody how they should price their jobs without speaking to them and hearing about their business. But what I will say is a lot of times we lose a job over 500 bucks or a thousand or $5,000.
Speaker 2:And I just get down to the end and I say if we've built the value we've served with passion, communicated what we stand for, that we're not there to rip you off or recommend something that we wouldn't recommend our own family or sabotage your system. If we're willing to have those conversations in the way that we teach it and we get down to the end and the homeowner says, corey, well, you're $3,000 higher. I'm going to do what Tom Hopkins has taught us for the last 30 or 40 years, since the 1970s. And Tom Hopkins has a technique that he says reduce to the ridiculous and dollarize the value. Has a technique that he says reduce to the ridiculous and dollarize the value.
Speaker 2:So anytime you're three or four or $5,000 higher, first things first, we got to make sure that we added value and communicated with passion about what we stand for and who we are. If we've done that, then the trust has been going up and risk is going down. Then we're going to get down to the end and we're $5,000 higher, $3,000 higher, whatever, and let's just go with the three. We're at 18, they're at 15, right, and because most of us are dropping the 10% from the 20. So for back to where we started on the call today, corey, if we're $3,000 higher and we've communicated with passion, we've shared our core values how we take care of people, why we're in business, how the owner takes care of us like his very own family and how we take care of our customers like family, and we would never overcharge them, never sell them something they don't need.
Speaker 2:But here's our recommendation. I wanted you to know this. That person knows they're dropping 200 bucks on their credit card every weekend on sushi or whatever their thing is right, on the ball game, on season tickets, things that they don't really need, but they just don't know. People don't know what they don't know. So we're going to do the old Tom Hopkins and we're just going to first, what I've created as a rare listening process is an acronym. I'm going to breathe a little life into the objection. I'm going to say something like so, corey, it sounds like this is quite a bit more than you had in mind, and you would say, as the homeowner Yep, that's right. Yeah, in fact, quite a bit more, and you just weren't expecting it to be that much and you're not sure if you want to move forward. Is that right?
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:Corey, if we jump out of the role play wasn't expecting that. He was expecting me to say, oh, it's only this and whatever, and it's only this per month. I'm not going to do that. It's going to upset him and even though he won't throw me out of the house, he wants to Because I talked about another man's money and his budget and called it only it's his money. It doesn't matter if it's a dollar, it's his money. I'm never going to say only and I'm never going to say I completely understand, because we all want to be unique. So I'm going to say you know I can't imagine what it's like to be you, corey, but I think I can relate. You know, when I shared with you how we run our company and you know how Ted took care of Francine Claire in that situation where we'd made a mistake on that job, I shared with you all the things that we do to make sure that homeowners are protected and the way we stand behind our work.
Speaker 2:Over the life of a properly installed system, that difference between $15,000 and $18,000 is about $3,000. If this system is installed properly, with the nitrogen purge done by professionally trained technicians, proper permits pulled, you know it'll last here in this market, 20 years of this community. Do you think that all of that combined might be worth $3 a week, the cost of one cup of black coffee from Starbucks? And the homeowner is going to say well, doug, I hadn't thought about it like that and I'm going to just come back and they're right on the edge and I'm just going to go and tap them by saying well, with your permission, why don't we go ahead and take care of the paperwork, get this system set up for installation, and if it doesn't do everything that I've promised you here today, we'll move heaven and earth to make things right, fair enough. And if you will just get really good at doing that two or three or four times, you will be amazed that you won't even have to drop the first 2,000. Because guess what If I divide out 5,000 over those 20 years that a properly installed system should last? Now, if you're in Houston, by the way, or you're down in Orlando, where you have all the salt and all that, please don't hold me accountable to saying there's no way an air conditioner is going to last 20 years in Miami, of course, not, right. You got to change that a little bit. Do your math different. But in Denver, an air conditioning system, it's only going to run a couple of months out of the year, so we could very easily say, properly installed, a system's going to last 20 years.
Speaker 2:Do you think, over the 20 years, that $5,000 works out to be five bucks a week? Do you think $5 a week is worth the safety of your family, the efficiency of your system, a system that's going to make you comfortable in your very home, help you sleep better, installed by a company that stands behind their work? Do you think that it's worth $5 a week? The cost of a Starbucks cup of coffee. And you know what they're going to say every time. They're going to go well, because they're not going to go. Yeah, let me get my checkbook. They're going to go well because they're not going to go. Yeah, let me get my checkbook. They're going to say, well, I don't know, I hadn't thought about it like that. It's a lot of money. Don't go back down the rabbit hole. They agreed. They said well, I don't know, it's still a lot of money.
Speaker 2:I agree. I tell you what. Why don't we go and get this system installed Now? If you want to lower risk, we'd say try it out for a year. At the end of the year, if it doesn't done everything that I promised you and more, we'll buy that system back and you can start shopping all of the contractors in town trying to find somebody that does work like we do and stands behind it.
Speaker 2:I don't think you'll find that. I tell you what, corey why don't we go ahead and call my installation manager? Let's see how soon we can get this installed and make this home perfectly temperate so that you and Maddie can get a great night's sleep and start enjoying this beautiful home once again. Fair enough, I'm just going to ask for the order again. If you will do that, corey, we don't have to run our business on cheap business and low margins. But guess what? It's going to take time and we're going to have to make sure that our technicians see the value in doing that.
Speaker 2:And for those of you that have been keeping the books a secret, I tell you I think one of the best things you can do is show them how fast margin can be destroyed and how the net profit goes away. And I'll say this if you're running at 3% net, listen to this. You want to get leverage on yourself. 3% net, the national average on a million dollars is 30 grand. Imagine if you look at your recalls or you had one system go south on you and you had to refund somebody 20 or 30 grand. You're going to have to do another million dollars just to get back to break even and another million dollars to make 30 grand. So you have one challenge where you lose 30 grand on something. You're going to have to do another million dollars to make it back just to get back to even, and another million to make your 30 grand and another million to make 60 grand. That's no way to live. It doesn't have to be that way, but it's going to take some training, consistent training.
Speaker 1:Well done, my friend. Well said yeah. If anybody's listening whoever is listening to this like that was the most sound advice that you could have possibly given, doug. I know that we are getting close to time. After that magnificent display of salesmanship there, which didn't seem like salesmanship at all, where can people find you?
Speaker 2:Thank you so much. I appreciate you saying that, corey. This is going to be my legacy man. I just want to help people. I want to help people work on this stuff until it becomes part of them and that they don't see themselves as high pressure, pushy salespeople Leverage against ourselves. Communication with our team we're not trying to rip people off, sell things that we don't need. Communication with our team we're not trying to rip people off, sell things that we don't need, and you don't need me to do it. But if you need somebody to help, we're here to help.
Speaker 2:Synergylearningsystemsnet there are videos on there. We believe in a program called they Ask, you Answer one of the greatest books I've ever read for contractors, by a guy named Marcus Sheridan. I highly recommend everybody read that book. You can go on our website and, without ever having to talk to a quote sales person, you can go on there and listen to these amazing videos that our team has produced talks about every one of our programs. There's a program that doesn't require any travel a couple hundred bucks a week every department in your company. A one-year program a couple hundred bucks a week across the department.
Speaker 2:Everything I did to grow a company very quickly to Linux Partner of the Year and then come back from near dead and do it again. It's all there. You can watch every video, including if you go to the investment page, you can see the investment, an entire video outlining the investment, and then, if you have additional questions, fill out the contact us form and I'll be happy to jump on a zoom. And my first thing is I'm not going to try to sell you anything. I don't have anything to sell. I would first have to go through an initial discovery process to learn about you and your company and your dreams, your goals, where you are, where you want to go, how long before you want to exit and what exit looks like to you. And then I could say, if that's the case with you, if our programs were a fit, then I would share how those work.
Speaker 2:But I would strongly recommend that, if anybody even has a bit of interest this is talking about us in the trades, a guy who's been in it on two different stints and I think the videos, I think you'll enjoy them, I think you'll watch them like you're watching a movie. You'll see your life in them. And so synergylearningsystemsnet, no pressure all the information that I think you would need and then, if you need to ask some very direct questions, I'm happy to get on. No pressure to join us. I hope you do. I hope we can serve you. I hope we can help. But if not, at least maybe we'll make a meaningful connection, we'll be friends and we can shake hands and high five at the next expo or conference.
Speaker 1:Doug, I really, really appreciate this today, my friend, thank you very much.
Speaker 2:Thank you, brother. Man, I appreciate what you are doing for the trades, what WhoHire is doing for contractors Amazing stuff that you're doing, corey man. I'm so excited with where we're going in the trades and what you're doing as well.
Speaker 1:Yes, sir. Thank you brother.
