HomeTech.fm - Episode 296 - Navigating COVID-19 with SimpTech Solution's Chad Nichols

Episode Date: March 27, 2020

The Home Tech Podcast is supported by you. To find out more, go to hometech.fm support. This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, March 27th from Denver, Colorado. I'm Jason Griffin. And from Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. Jason, how are you doing? I'm hanging in there, Seth. No scratchy throat, dry cough? Yeah. Well, you know, my throat has been bothering me a little bit. It had me like a little bit nervous last night, but I'm feeling all right. I think it's honestly, I think it's a reflection of the fact that for the last basically two and a half days, I've been on calls like nonstop.

Yeah. I think like a lot of people in the industry, well, in businesses all over the world. I think that COVID-19 has created a whole bunch of work that none of us really necessarily planned on having to do. And a lot of that in my current position has involved just being out in front of people and having a lot of meetings and trying to get our heads around stuff. So other than having a little bit of a tired voice, I'm doing good. I'm hanging in there. How about you? Yeah. And it's work that we don't even want to do, right? It's not the fun work. It's not like putting stuff together. It's like,

that's paperwork related work. It's, it's, it's not the work that any of us would want to do in a vacuum. Right. I think the, uh, you know, in light of the, in light of the situation and just realizing this is our reality, it is work that I am enjoying in the sense that we at One Vision are in a fortunate position where we at least get to help in a small way. I think, to very clear, the, the problems that, that, uh, our industry are facing, um, collectively are, are significant and no one company, no matter how big is going to be able to, to solve all of that. But, uh, we're, we're certainly trying to lean in on our side and, and play the small role that we can. Well, yeah, because, uh, you shared this on Twitter and I think we retweeted on the account, but like, but one vision has put together this huge, what did you call it?

A data? A data room. Data arc. You guys should just rename it to the data arc. This is great. An arc, yeah. Yeah, data room's a pretty common name in sort of the financial world. We don't hear about it a lot here in our industry in our industry, but yeah, we, we've put together a data room. Uh, it's basically a,

an area where we can, uh, aggregate a whole bunch of, of documents and information. And, uh, you know, initially we, we put a bunch of these resources together, uh, for our partner base at One Vision. And that was, that was the first sort of order of business. And we got that taken care of. That was our big project last week. But we, you know, going into it right away, we knew that we wanted to make these resources available to the industry as a whole. And we've put a whole bunch of work. There's been a whole bunch of members of our team and even partners who have contributed some ideas and resources to this project. So, you know, we have opened this up to the public.

News went out today, so there's links floating around. You can go to onevisionresources.com slash COVID-19 and access this data room for free. We've opened, again, opened up all of these resources to the industry, and it's full of really comprehensive guides. There's no shortage of information right now out there about COVID-19, but finding resources that are really specifically tailored to helping an integrator navigate this landscape can be challenging. And certainly we're not the only ones doing it. There are other companies putting on webinars and doing their part. And so this is our small contribution to that. And it's got various plans, how to respond to the financial situation, how to manage client relationships, how to set up internal policies, work from home policies, client

assistance programs, various letters to the, you know, template letters to the government, client questionnaires, work, you know, work from home policies, I think I might've mentioned already, all sorts of resources in there. So definitely hope that people will go check it out. Again, onevisionresources.com slash COVID-19. Yeah, there's no fluff in there. There's no clickbaity things in there. There's no five things about COVID-19, the fifth one will make you angry or something like that. There's nothing in there like this. This is actually a really good resource for anybody who has a business in this industry to utilize. I'm thoroughly impressed with all the stuff that's in there.

Very good job. Very good job. Thank you for that. Hats off. Yeah, appreciate that. All of these are sort of broken down into different briefs, like sort of PDF form, but they're all online. And like you said, none of this is fluff or designed just to, you know, say something. Like we put a ton of work into and research into developing these. And again, we really hope that people will make use of them in this difficult time. Well, with that said, Jason, what do you say we jump into a couple of home tech headlines?

Yeah, let's do that. Before we do, Seth, I do want to mention very quickly to stay tuned. Speaking of COVID-19, that's really going to be the focus and the thrust of this episode for very obvious reasons. It is absolutely top of people's mind right now, and rightfully so. I want to mention along those lines that we do have a guest on this week's episode, Chad Nichols. He's the principal at SimTech Solutions in the Cincinnati, Ohio area. Chad is a One Vision partner, so I've had the opportunity to get to know Chad really well and

work with him. And he's been doing a lot of work within his own company to get in a position to successfully navigate this very complex situation. And so he was kind enough to join us on the show. So stay tuned for that. We're going to dive into a bunch of different strategies and tactics that he's deploying. And I think and hope that our listeners will get a lot out of that. But let's do it, Seth. Let's jump into some headlines. The United States Small Business Administration, the SBA, is looking to help integrators and other small business owners during this tough economic time by making it easier to apply for low-interest loans.

The SBA's Economic Injury Disaster Loan Program is designed to provide businesses of any size with working capital loans of up to $2 million. The SBA will work directly with state governors to provide targeted low-interest loans to small businesses and nonprofits that have been severely impacted by the COVID-19 virus. It could be a lifesaver for some companies out there. It's an option I think everybody should know about. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And again, not to over-promote the One Vision resources thing, but in that data room, we do have a couple of links to some great resources to help track various programs like this. I think it is so overwhelming and complex right now to go try to figure out what various state programs might be available. Different administrations like the SBA, the Small Business Administration, are doing loan programs. There's a whole bunch of assistance

going to be coming out of this. And those who really research it and get to know that landscape now early are going to be best positioned to leverage those resources. And I think that that's something that any small business owner is probably already thinking about, but certainly if you're not, go take a look at this. And I think this SBA one is definitely a good example of where the government's going to have to get involved in various capacities and provide these low interest loans to help small business owners navigate a really difficult time. So obviously welcome news. Yeah, yeah. Shifting from there, Cedia is responding to the rapidly evolving effects of COVID-19 mitigation by announcing a slate of complimentary professional

development opportunities for their members. As the business and personal lives of integrators continue to be disrupted, Cedia is providing hours of valuable learning at no charge for members from the world leader in home technology integration industry training. And so this is a great thing. We actually talk a little bit about this in the interview with Chad. Again, stay tuned for that, about using some of this downtime in the immediate term. This is obviously not a long-term solution, and there's only so long that any company is going to be able to sustain with a lack of billable work. But in the immediate term, I know a lot of integrators I've been talking to said my work, just 50, 80% of it just basically evaporated overnight. And so while you as a business owner are really scrambling to try to figure things out, you got to find ways to keep your team engaged and productive. And I think training and personal, uh, professional development

for your team, uh, is a no brainer. So I'm really glad to see Cedia doing their part to help out here as well. Yeah. And I've also noticed a number of manufacturers have been pumping out some online trainings recently. I mean, a lot of emails have been going by, just kind of made a joke about it in our interview that we talked about, like how many of these like manufacturers have suddenly discovered a plethora of, uh, manufacturers training that they could just, uh, give you and, and, and have, uh, have available. So, um, one of our partners, uh, there's probably like 20 webcasts scheduled for their products. So I was shocked, but also, you know, it could be a good thing for people who want to go in and learn about their products.

Yeah, absolutely. It says the content will include e-courses, webinars, and white papers. And additionally, Cedia will be hosting live webinars and increasing the frequency of the Cedia podcast to twice a week to offer even more value to members. So definitely dig into that. Yep. Yeah. Get the good info where you can. It's no longer business as usual with COVID-19 virus around. So integrators have to apply the same level of ingenuity they use when designing a creative and functional space for their clients to how they communicate with their clients and internally with their team uh how how about working from home jason uh talking

about this this is an interesting article over at uh over at c pro talking about working from home and i'm laughing about you and i have kind of been choking about this working from home the last couple of uh last couple of weeks here because we've slowly started to see a lot of our colleagues end up working from home and it's it's it's no big no big surprise to us right this is this is this is what we do yeah yeah i'm uh deeply thankful that that wasn't a big or painful transition that i had to make i've been working full-time from home for several years now and uh really am feeling i've always felt grateful for that. I really love working from home, but especially in this time. And this is a link to, we'll include a link to this article in our show notes from Ron Callis, the CEO of One Firefly.

I know Ron pretty well and happen to know, as they mentioned in the article, that he's got a fully distributed team. So at One Vision, we've got a bunch of people at a headquarters in Boston, and then we've got a bunch of folks that are distributed as well. Ron is fully distributed, 42 employees, according to this article, not one of them in a centralized location. And so he provides some guidance about some of the things, some simple things, like none of these were earth-shaking when I read them, but they're worth thinking about if you're having to make this move. So investing in good cameras, using video conferencing, I think is so important. Not just, you know, we're really insistent at One Vision about making sure people are on video. Uh, you have the option when you go into these things like Zoom or Ring Central meetings to just be on audio or be on video as well. And having that video, uh, while

it's no substitute for being face-to-face really in person, it's definitely night and day from just having audio. So making sure that you have video, hugely important. Use of Slack. If you've been hearing about Slack and haven't implemented it within your company, I think now's the time. It is an indispensable tool for distributed teams, in my opinion, to try and do this sort of work with email. I can't even imagine what that would be like. And then just some tips in that article as well for maintaining culture and connection with a distributed team. So go check that out. I think there's some useful stuff in there. Yeah. You do have to be careful with Slack. Slack is not a replacement for email. I think it's an augment of email. For sure. Yeah. You have to understand that you mentioning, hey uh here's a task as it slowly disappears up the slack chain

that whoever that task was meant for they're never going to see it again you can't and it's yeah it'll go into the the abyss for sure it's very um what's the word i'm looking for ephemeral ethereal yeah ethereal yeah yeah etherealereal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ethereal, like here now, gone later. Yeah, yeah. So you definitely have to adapt for sure. It's not a silver bullet, but I would say an indispensable tool. And we're going to talk more about this in the coming weeks. I think a lot of people are working from home right now. And I know that there are some probably tips and tricks that you and I could share from our experience. Also, Seth, by the way, it's not just working from home that a lot of people are grappling with.

It's working from home with small children. With babysitting. Yeah, yeah, that's me. Yeah. And you and I can both speak to that. And so we don't have time on this week's episode, but something that we're going to get into in the weeks to come. Because it's a tough balancing act and it can be really difficult at times. But if you can learn to navigate it,

it can also be really, really great and highly productive. Yeah. Yeah. The one thing you can try and do is get your kid to sleep all day and then stay up all night and then you're good. By all means. Then you're golden. Yeah. See how long you can sustain that one. All right. Well, those are, that's it for our headlines this week.

All the links and topics that we've discussed on this week's episode can be found in our show notes at hometech.fm slash two nine six. While you're there, don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter. We'll send you show reminders and other occasional updates about all the great things going on here in the world of Home Tech. Once again, that link is hometech.fm slash 296. And don't forget, you can join us in the chat room live starting Wednesday, somewhere between 7 and 7.30 p.m. Eastern. You can find out more about that over at hometech.fm slash live. Very good. All right, Seth, well, what do you say without further ado, let's go ahead and jump into

our interview. Again, we've got Chad Nichols, the principal at SimTech Solutions in the Cincinnati, Ohio area. And Chad joins us to talk about all of the ways that he, as a small business owner, an integrator, is trying to navigate this crazy landscape. So let's jump in. Hey, Chad, welcome to the show. How are you? Hey, I'm great. Jason, how are you? I'm doing very well. Appreciate you taking the time to join us. I know this is kind of a crazy time for all of us, and we look forward to jumping in and getting a chance to hear from you on how you're dealing with all of the extraordinary circumstances right now. But before we jump into that, why don't you give just a quick personal introduction, share with our audience

who you are and tell us a little bit about your company. Sure. No problem. Yeah. Chad Nichols. I'm in Cincinnati, Ohio. My integration firm is called Simptech Solutions. We're both a residential and commercial integrator. We cover all solution product lines that most integrators do. We are a staff of six and I've had the pleasure of running the company and owning it for 14 years. So the only thing I keep sort of latching on to as we're going through a little bit of this crazy time is I've been through it once before in 2008, 9, and 10. We made it through. We had this skinny down, of course, like many companies, but we pushed through it. And I'm confident that many of us will come out the other side very strong.

Yeah. And hopefully not too much shrapnel as we all move through the process. Right. Yeah, I'm hearing a lot of people, and I think rightfully so, make comparisons to our last big economic recession and talk about going into it. I know we're still pretty much on the very front end of this thing. I think by any reasonable guess,

we can all assume that there's some rough waters ahead. And talk about just how you're maybe framing it and some of the parallels that you're seeing against staying high level. We're going to get into the specifics here about some of the ways you're preparing, but from a high level mentally, as you're trying to get your head around everything that's going on, how are you kind of drawing on that previous experience? You know, I'm really facing it with my team and my customers and my partners just very transparently with communication. You know, each region in the country is different. You know, there's epicenters that are, you know, a much different situation than

rural areas. There's metro areas like Cincinnati that, you know, we have a stay-at-home order right now in the state of Ohio, which we fall under. You know, integration companies by and large have been, you know, classified as essential businesses. However, there's services within that that you're supposed to use as your purpose to be essential. But with all that said, it's a real balance act as an owner to keep all the stakeholders in mind and try to have a balanced situation. So first and foremost, safety comes number one for my employees and my customers. Number two is commitments to my clients. And then number three is, you know, sort of the solvency aspect of my business and balancing all of those,

you know, the, basically a triangle is how I'm looking at it. And that's how I started, um, you know, early on starting to think about it. And quite honestly, it wasn't until, you know, last, uh, or a week, a week and a half ago where it just sort of hit us that we needed to start acting pretty fast. I was watching it and really didn't, I think I was a little naive that it would come to a point where we'd have to really do a stay at home order kind of thing. But it was pretty apparent last week or a week and a half ago that, yeah, this is coming. So first thing I did really was

take a step back and go, all right, how can I balance these stakeholders? And by and large, we're continuing to do work, keeping everybody employed to different levels. And I've had open communication, much like my peers across the country. We all had to take a look at our operating policies and business practices to align with CDC guidance and, you know, trying to be, you know, good citizens, good to our community, trying to keep our business running, trying to keep our employees paid. In my area, and like many areas, retail and hospitality venues were shut down last Monday. And that's almost the equivalent of money circulation nearly stops,

is how it has felt. And people are at home, and there's, you know, one 10th of the cars on the road. You know, I'm on a busy thoroughfare to, you know, two lane, four lane road. And, you know, like I said, there's 10% of the cars that go by, there's a parking lot across the street, that's always full in and out. There's, you know, it's like a little bit of a, like a like every day's christmas you know when you when you go out on christmas day it's it's sort of that model so um trying to take you know use balance and uh you know drawing upon my my past experience has really been focused on you know, taking the lessons of decisive action with empathy and trying to keep, you know, all the stakeholders in mind. But, you know, I have to

obviously do what's best for the company in longer term, medium, long term. Sure. Yeah, I think it's a very common experience. And I think many of us, probably listening to you say that, I know I was sitting here nodding my head when you say it. It felt a little bit like this just popped up a week and a half or two weeks ago, and all of a sudden it was here. And of course, we know this has been developing for several months, but I think it's a very natural human tendency. And I think we all probably, to some extent, have had that experience, certainly even those of us who saw it coming from further away and were thinking about it. It's still, the situation has changed dramatically in the last couple of weeks, just by virtue of all of the shelter-in-place orders and the increased prevalence of the virus here in the States. And so we're all grappling with this in our own time. I like the way you position that sort of in the sense of the triangle

and kind of the three-legged approach. And I think that segues nicely into getting into it because, you know, when we look at this situation at One Vision, we're doing a lot of work with our partners, and Seth and I have been talking about this quite a bit. I really do see, you know, business owners like yourself are in an incredibly challenging position being caught between those three different things. And again, you've got builders and clients and your commitments to them. You've got an internal team that you want to keep employed

and safe. And then you've got the needs of the business. And right now in a situation like this, those three things can very much run at odds with one another but let's take a look at each one of those in isolation and talk a little bit about what you're seeing there so specifically on the client relations side i would divide it into a couple of different camps number one you've got your clients of course and then you've got your builders and i want to start with the builders because i know a lot of the the integratorsators out there are grappling with this and trying to figure out what's going to happen on the demand side as far as builders and new projects and things like that. So what are you seeing there in your local market when it comes to demand and relations with builders? Well, it's a very narrow view and it's only a view over the last week and a half like everybody else.

So I'm not sure how much we can extrapolate from it at a macro level. But within my purview, my residential projects that are a combination of, well, actually right now I don't have any new construction projects on the book on the residential side. It's all major remodel, large remodel. And those are all moving forward. The general contractors fall under essential businesses. They are continuing to have subs come out and do work. So our schedule has been pretty much unaffected on that. We're actually doing a horse farm out in Kentucky, which is a big remodel, a retrofit project for us.

And it's got a silver lining. It's literally my techs are out there with horses and a caretaker on the, you know, 800 acres of farm. And so that's been a little bit of a blessing but that's just personal and unique to us um but on the the commercial side you know there's definitely been a um a challenge there because those businesses um that are funding those are now in shambles and they have a lot of uncertainty and fear. So the commercial projects that we're working on have slowed down. The residential ones were able to keep going, which is kind of, it seems like it would be the opposite, but for some reason on our side, that's how it is, just how things are aligning for us. New construction, I can't imagine that

things that are already ongoing would be stopping unless there is a stoppage for trades. New construction, I can't imagine that things that are already ongoing would be stopping unless there is a stoppage for trades. I do know in Michigan, I was talking to an integrator up there today, the state of Michigan has not put electricians, plumbers, and other trades on the essentials list, which is completely surprising to me. So therefore the low voltage guys have also been, you know, well, they've been singled out as essential, but this integrator I was talking to made a choice to not go do work on those projects because the GCs and the other trades are not showing up. And it's a little bit of an ambulance chaser perception, you know, pulling up, you know, doing work and you're the only one there and some of the brand perception.

So I thought that was pretty responsible on that integrator's part. They had other work to go do so they could redeploy and reshuffle. What do you, so you're seeing from, you said you're seeing from the builders, I mean, from your commercial projects, those have kind of just dropped off and the residential is stayed on. That's an interesting dynamic. I would have thought, I mean, when I think about what's shut down, restaurants, sports bars, those types of projects, it's interesting that those are still moving along. I guess they're just kind of playing the long game. When this is all over, they'll be able to open up. And that must that, that must be the idea, right? Um, well, maybe I, maybe I communicated, uh,

a little ineffective there. So when I actually, the commercial work has stopped. Okay. So like one of the ideas for cash generation with partners and integrators, um, there's been discussed about, you know, get in there and, you know, get into a bar and do a, um, those have been discussed about, you know, get in there and, you know, get into a bar and do a TV upgrade things that are, are hard to do when, uh, the bar is operating. This is the chance. Well, on paper and conceptually, that sounds great. The problem is those owner operators, uh, are fearful if they're even going to survive because they just laid off, you know, all their restaurant employees and, you know, I'm not knocking on that door like me personally.

Yeah, that's kind of what I've been thinking is going to happen to or has happened to a lot of those types of projects and a lot of, you know, bars and that kind of thing. Their staff is gone. They're all sitting at home right now wondering what's going on. So moving on to like your current clients, how are you engaging with them on projects? I've seen, now I'm a member of a lot of groups,

social groups online, and I've seen a lot of guys, it's from the extreme of we're not doing it all, all the way to we're still going into people's homes, but taking care, you know, taking note. And some of them I've seen, these are the funny ones where they'll show up to the front door and they'll yell directions in the door to the client for them to do the service call from the front door. They won't step inside. So where do you stand on that spectrum? I think we're in the middle. So maybe we're balanced. So on the one side, so I guess to be transparent,

so I crafted policy for my team, and I posted everything transparently to our website, talking about our operating practices and business practices during this. We are only running service calls for essential things. So that's network security and life safety. And by and large, the service calls that have come in have been network oriented. And it makes a lot of sense. Yeah. So we're trying to do as much we can remotely. We did have one client yesterday the the 16 year old son for whatever reason decided to muck around with the network and completely factory defaulted the

network you know on a large control four system smart home project because they're just bored at home that's that's what people are doing yeah why right why i have no idea So there was a two-hour remote service call today that we successfully got the whole system reprogrammed remotely, which is pretty awesome. It's a pretty great testament to the tools that we all have today and how we can go about it, which was all billable time. So that was kind of great. So we're trying to limit the time in the home. There are times we are going in. Monday or Tuesday, we actually had to have an appointment with the ISP that was scheduled. We did all the CDC practices. We stayed six feet away. We disinfected. We wear gloves. Matter of fact, the spectrum ISP shows up, no booties, no gloves, no sanitizer. Coughing in his hands. Well, he wasn't doing that. But also to be fair, I don't know how much they're being enabled with supplies and whatnot. But my tech did the right thing. He's like, before we start, would you please go wash your hands right so we we're going to stay six feet away and so we practice what we're preaching and um yeah we're trying to be balanced it's tough i am i'm taking a very uh conservative communication approach to the clients

right now with regards to communicating what we are interested in doing for them. I'm treating it as kind of silent is best and just react to what the demand is. Quite honestly, I don't have a lot of capacity to take a lot of demand and I don't want to put a lot of demand on our installation team right now. So yeah, it's nice to queue up projects for sure. But I think this is the wrong time personally for a service business like an integration firm to be out there creating demand with our clients in this time of uncertainty.

And our focus is on let's get through the crisis. Of course, we want projects to work on in two months, three months, four months, which is some of our worry, I think, as an industry. My personal worry. I'm sure we'll get into that a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. You mentioned remote tools, and I kind of want to hit on that.

These, we've been talking about these on the podcast for quite a long time, but they seem to have, all the work we've put into them, seem to have just all of a sudden completely paid off for us in the past two weeks. And Jason, I think Jason read your list on the, on the show last week, uh, about, you know, going into your, uh, remote, uh, service management tools and cleaning them up and getting in there. And, uh, no sooner did he do that, that I, that I go in mine and look at it and like one of them was dead and hadn't worked for a month and I hadn't noticed. So, um, go ahead and like touch a little bit on some of the tools that you've been, you've

been using, uh, in your business, uh, that in your business that have just gone above and beyond what you expected for a situation where you can't actually get out on site. You're just not so much prohibited, but we can't get there. And there's a good reason for that. Go ahead and just talk about some of the experiences you've had with that, with using those types of tools in this situation. Sure. Well, first and foremost, Oversea is the remote management platform that we use 100%. So we don't have multiple ones. That's the one we've standardized on for a long time. We use Arachnus as our platform for networking across the board, both light commercial and residential. So that right there is the core of it.

Composer for Control 4 is obviously a programming tool, but it's also a network or a diagnostics tool. So we use that to fix things. As a matter of fact, the one I referenced a little bit ago, where the teenager just reset the network, all the DHCP went away., we had to go into Composer and fix things up. But again, Composer and Oversea gave us the eyes and ears once that basic router was back online. Additionally, though, some in-house things that we do is we do network topology diagrams for every project. They're hand-drawn by the techs, and then they're put into a diagram tool by our project service coordinator. And we keep a very detailed system configuration document for every project, every system that we do. And so that has a lot of detail in it that lets us remotely be able to know what we did,

because it could have been a platform or system we put out three years ago, or it could have been one we did a month ago. And so we've invested a lot in that. And we continue to refine those internal document tools. Cool. Love that. And Seth was alluding there, Chad, last week, we, at the beginning of the show, we talked a little bit about the great list that you came up with and shared within the One Vision partner community of ideas to keep employees engaged and productive, to at least bridge the gap. And we're going to get into those. So I wanted to park that for just a minute, though, before we shift to that, because I think there's some

really good stuff we can jump into there and talk just a little bit more about client relations. And another great idea that you were kind enough to share within the One Vision community was this client questionnaire that you came up with. It's a very simple idea, but I love the way you put it together and talk about the concept behind this questionnaire and sort of the balance that you're looking to achieve in terms of taking care of your clients, but doing so in a responsible way. Well, I have to disclose, I'm a guy that I'm not super smart, but I'm very resourceful and love to give credit where credit's due. And I have a personal friend that runs a large heating and air company in town. And I'm a customer of his. And we got a COVID-19 communication about what

they were doing in the early stages of the response of the situation. And they had this idea of, hey, we're here to take care of you. Here's kind of things we're doing inside our company to keep our employees safe. But here's the things that we need to make sure we're keep our eye on as we try to service you, the customer. And it had questions in there that when I read it, I was like, this is genius. Like, yeah, we probably don't want to go to somebody's house if they literally travel back from Seattle or if they've come back from China or, you know, international Italy. Right. These hot spots, these epicenter. And so they had a list of about five or six things.

And I was like, OK, you know, steal the pride. And then as it evolved, I then was made aware by my wife. Hey, here's a graph of the US, here's the epicenter. She's a corporate employee for a large multinational company, and that company was sharing information. So she's like, hey, New York, look at these hotspots. If people are traveling from these places back to Cincinnati, you probably don't need to send your guys there. So that, that evolved the questionnaire. And the first spark though, was about safety of my employee and safety of the client. That's where it really started.

When I read that from the heating and air company, I'm like, yeah, I got to do this. Yeah. And I think again, a very, a very simple idea,

but something that integrators listening to the show can definitely draw from is just that idea of having a template, whether you do it in a PDF or an email that you can fire off and just say, hey, we understand you're having this issue at your home. You know, first of all, like we were talking about a second ago, we're going to try to solve it remotely. If we can't solve it remotely, we want to send somebody on site. But if we do that, we all have a vested interest in making sure we do that responsibly. And so just take a minute to answer these few questions. And so again, I think it was a great idea. And for those home tech professionals listening to the show, who are looking for just small, actionable things that they can do to help keep their employees safe. And again, strike that balance between keeping the business going and taking care of the clients. Again, that triangle that you talked

about and trying to strike that balance. I think simple ideas like that can be really effective. So appreciate you sharing about that. And if I could just be resourceful or be a resource to everybody, if you're listening to this, go to Synthetech123.com. There's a COVID tab on the right. Those policies are there. Feel free to steal a pride, make them your own, use what you want of it. I'd be happy for people to do that. Excellent. Thanks for that, Chad. Let's shift gears a little bit and talk specifically for a little while about your internal management policies and some of the things you're doing on that front. I want to start where we, what we alluded to just a minute ago, and some of the things you're doing on that front. I want to start where we what we alluded to just a minute ago, and some of these ideas about keeping employees engaged and productive, again, goes without saying for businesses that you need billable work to

sustain in the long term. But in the immediate term, while we're all kind of dealing with this chaos and trying to figure out what the coming weeks and months hold. An immediate concern for all business owners is my work just evaporated like overnight for many of these integrators, not all, but for many of them it has. And what do I do right now, today? And so we started this dialogue again. We have a community for One Vision partners, and you were kind enough to share a whole list of ideas that you had come up with. We don't have time to get into all of those ideas, but maybe talk about some of the top three to five of these ideas that you guys are doing right now in order, again,

to keep your team productive and engaged in this immediate time. Well, right now, there's nothing on that list that I've taken action on because I am blessed that we have billable work that's on the books for the technical team to be doing between now and I did an ops review today. We're good up until middle of May

as long as everything remains stable at this point, the way it is right now, and kind of moving forward, getting better. If it gets worse, then obviously all things are subject to change. However, that's not true with my project and service coordinator, who is, you know, to me, a non-essential role. When I look at my organizational chart, I take a look at who's essential, who's non-essential. And that's maybe a draconian way to look at it. But from just a solvency and a business owner standpoint, there's things I could do as an owner that I'm going to have to start doing in order to keep this boat afloat. And so my project and service coordinator falls in that category where there's no new projects right now that I'm onboarding. The phone has quit ringing.

So my assumption is over the next four to 12 weeks, it's going to be lean in terms of leads. It's going to be lean in terms of somebody calling in for demand of a solution that I can offer. Service calls have actually gone down a little bit, probably because I've had 13 service plans go on hold because they were restaurants and bars, right? So until those entities start operating again, there's going to be somewhat less demand perhaps on my service team. But by and large, the answer to the question is opportunity. So when you have an opportunity to have some idle time, or let's call it non-billable time

with your staff, what projects can you do that you can afford to do? So you got to know your numbers, right? You got to know your payroll. You got to know your overhead. You've got to know your cashflow needs from an expense standpoint. You've got to predict how many weeks or months you can withstand that run rate of cash burn compared to how much retained earnings and cash you have in the business and or how much debt you're willing to go acquire in order to capitalize for whatever time period you think it's going to happen. That's a very quick answer or very quick assertion on my part with numbers or not numbers, but with sort of the mechanics of it. But that's how I think through it.

And obviously, you got to back that up with detail to arrive at those detailed numbers. But at the end of the day, it's hard to replace our technicians. The reality is if you lay them off, they're probably not going to go to your competitor because your competitor's in the same boat you're in, likely, in your local market. But as a human, you want to keep them employed. It's good for the economy. It's good for them. So with that said on the tech side, you know, top things that we want to be looking at doing is training. So there's a lot of online training that's free.

There has been a ton of that in the last, literally every meal email I get is, Hey, we're doing online training. Here's the schedule. Boom. It is insane how much that is going on right now. Yeah, for sure. And I know CD is doing their part, um, you know, which they should. The second thing is internal, um, project standards, checklist, um, uh, procedures, one that we're going to work on specifically I've talked to the team about this morning we don't really have a great way to translate customer requirements in terms of scenes and automation type stuff in a smart home type system through the operations team and into the technician hands in order to program it.

We're very inefficient at it. We could be way more efficient if we develop questions and usage scenarios that we could talk to the client about from a sales side or from a project manager side and then flow that in to our programmers. we don't do a good job of it. We're not super productive at it. We get it done, but it's a lot of just Band-Aid and bail wire and whatever. That's one that I think has a lot of opportunity if we focus on it. But then on the project coordinator,

service coordinator, we're doing things around cleaning up our data and Zendesk, cleaning up our CRM, really helping, having her help me prepare some client communications and marketing things. So once I feel like it's time to have those conversations and start to push that out to our clients, we've kind of got the gun loaded. Right. So those are some ideas, both on administrative as well as technical. Right. No, I think those all make sense.

And again, we had a whole list of these. So if you're listening this week and you're interested in checking those out, go listen to last week's episode 295. I think we led the episode off with that. So there's a whole bunch of ideas there and go check that out. Running up a little bit close to our time. And so I do want to shift to that again,

kind of the third point of that triangle that we've been alluding to. We've talked a little bit about client builder relationships. We've talked a little bit about your team and keeping them healthy and productive and engaged. And let's switch to the third one, which you alluded to there just a minute ago in terms of the overall finances. And I know this is a huge topic that we could probably easily spend 30, 45 minutes on alone. So we're going to stay high level because everybody is dealing with this and everybody, there's still a lot of uncertainty about the economic landscape, but give us the big picture, kind of the framework that you're using. You alluded to some of this already, but talk in a little bit more detail about some of the analysis and planning

that you're doing in order to make sure that you're giving your company the best possible chance in this circumstance to stay healthy and solvent. Well, first thing I would say is I'm bullish on our industry long-term,, long term being two to five years. So I want to make it through this. I think there's a rainbow on the other side. I think you have to ask that question of yourself before you even start, because there's going to be blood, sweat and tears to get through this. As an owner, You have to make some hard decisions. The first step I think you have to do, and I kind of alluded to it in my diatribe there for a second,

and that is you really have to get a handle on your expenses. What do you have to have in the door every month in order to keep the boat afloat? Now, what I did is I looked at what our last 12 months of run rate expenses were. I went through every chart of account category in our accounting system. Nothing was not looked at. I then looked at what's the minimum amount I have to have in that category. What do I have to keep? And salary is one of our largest expenses, whether it's cost of goods sold, it's a variable cost up in your project and service cost of goods sold or if it's overhead. But then at the end of the day, you have to know what that is. So I had a column for what

the last 12 months was. I have a column for what I think is minimum. And then I had a column called COVID-19. And that was just my, what am I comfortable with at this point? And it was just my, what do I, what am I comfortable with at this point? And it was really a look at an eight week to 12 week timeframe that I was planning for and that I am planning for, because I really don't know. I really can't plan for anything beyond 12 weeks right now, other than assume the worst, which is nobody calls me, you know, after people go back to work. Now, I don't think that's real, but I'm not going to worry about that. I'm going to worry about getting through the next 12 weeks.

So with that said, I got my COVID-19 number. I then went and looked at what liabilities do I have on the books related to projects? What have I collected deposits for that I haven't ordered product for? That's a liability. So let's say I took in $10,000 on a draw, a deposit, but I'm going to need to order $4,000 of equipment. So that $4,000 goes on the liability list. You should be able to get that from your accounting system. If you don't track at that level, I'm sure you've got some kind of a project system. You can pull those numbers together to help show what your overall expense is going to be able to collect when you finish working your pipeline because that turns into cash then the obvious look at your your your cash in your bank however you sort of federate that out into different accounts or what have you um and at that point you can start looking at where's your where's your cash position uh what where your cash flow needs? And after you do that,

you have to start asking the questions about how long can you run with your staff, both administrative and technical. And you probably have to prioritize your technical staff above your admin to some level because you as a business owner can step in and do admin for a while. It's much harder to step in and do the technical. It depends on the size of your companies, right? Mine's a relatively small company, but I still have to generate revenue in order to cover the overhead. We all have similar mixes in terms of material costs, labor costs, and gross margin. It's just a matter of how big your entity is. So that's the process I use to get to my numbers. And I've been very open communicating with my team.

I had a meeting this morning where I laid out, here is the immediate actions we're taking. We're cutting all these discretion-discretion or these discretionary expenses, had the whole list so they could see it. We could talk about it. I got a lot of nodding heads like, okay, I get it. Like no more marketing. Marketing's done. We're not doing that right now. We're renegotiating our, our landlord lease. We're, we're changing some of our insurance in order to drop the premium. I mean, we're looking at everything we can do proactively. And then the last phase is I got into the discussions about what does this mean over the next two to three weeks while we're at stay-at-home for the office manager, the service coordinator, the technicians, my field operations manager, and me.

And I laid out, here's what's happening. And it included work reduction time or work time reduction for those administrative people. It included, I'm keeping 40 hours a week for my technicians. There's no overtime. We're going to slow down work. We're managing to 40 hours a week. I cut my salary 75%. I laid it out. Here's what I'm doing for the next two to three weeks. Beyond that, when we get the lift of the stay-at-home order is gone and everybody's going back to work, here's what I think is going to happen for us, which puts us out into late April to May. We're furloughing some of our administrative team and, and my ops manager and I'm sucking it up. So that's what we're doing.

Like that's how I chose to handle it, to try to manage through this. I'm not laying anybody off full time. I'm reducing hours, which quite honestly, it's better than the unemployment that they could get if I sent them down that path. And they understood. I got a lot of, yes, I get it, and we talked afterwards. I have a mature staff. They get it.

They don't like it. They're not happy about it. I don't think anybody's happy about the situation we find ourselves in these days. But I think everyone from your contractor partners to your customers, to your employees, to your vendors, everyone understands right now. And I think that understanding right now is going to get us a little bit further down the road than we normally would. I was talking to somebody today about, I'm involved with my HOA, right? And we were trying to do some fundraising stuff. And we had all this fundraising stuff lined up for this year.

And I noticed on my calendar this morning there was a little meeting that we were supposed to get together and have about fundraising. And I sent him a text and was like, hey, we are hitting pause on this, right? And I wish there was a way that we could hit pause on, like, everything, right? Like, you could just hit a pause on paying your rent. You know, you could hit pause on paying your bills. And let's, like, if we've got a shelter in place, if we're mandatory sitting home, like wouldn't it be nice if we just like press pause and, you know, wait the number of weeks that are going to need to be waited to wait this thing out and then come back and press the play button and then pick up right where you left off. I see you're trying to do that in what you've talked about and you've sent some really cool documentation over for us to kind of look at to kind of see what was going through your head when you're talking about reducing costs and all the stuff. I mean, you literally went through everything that I could think of that would be involved in a business. And what I think you did, I don't think you've talked about this on the spreadsheet.

You had like three little columns. You had financial impact, risk to long-term, execution pain level, and then your action and when you're going to do it. But that execution pain level stood out to me because you definitely see, you know, reducing tech's hours. You know, that's something you're going to have. That's painful to have that conversation. And so you could see that you had like different things assigned on that. And I totally get it, man. I'm I'm I'm fortunate enough not to be in that position right now. But man, I feel for everyone out there who is running a small business.

And that includes a lot of our integrator greater friends out there. It is a tough time right now. So good for good on you for getting on top of this, uh, when you did and, uh, really happy to see, uh, hopefully if this thing just kind of disappears and goes away and we can all get back to work in a couple of weeks here. Well, I hope so. That would be a blessing. Yeah, absolutely. Well, Chad, we're, we're, uh, we're going to wrap up here again. We appreciate you taking the time to come on and share some of your experiences. And as Seth alluded to, this is not an easy time. And as business owners and leaders in our companies, we're all having to make difficult decisions and personal sacrifices. And we appreciate you being willing to come on and share that. If anyone is listening, maybe a fellow

business owner who might want to connect with you, are you active on LinkedIn or any of the social media networks? Or is there any way that you're willing to share that they might be able to connect with you? Yeah, I am on LinkedIn. So you can certainly hit me up there. I'm on Facebook. So you can hit me up there. Probably about as far as I go at the moment. Cool.

Yeah. And we'll include a link to your LinkedIn profile in the show notes. Those will be up at hometech.fm slash 296. So Chad, wish you the best of luck navigating these turbulent times. I know you and I will be in touch quite a bit in the weeks and months ahead. Thanks again for coming on and sharing this with us. We appreciate it. No problem. Thank you and have a great rest of your show. All right, well, that'll do it for our interview with Chad and Seth.

I don't know about you, but I really enjoyed, as a former integrator, it hasn't been very long and I certainly am still very tuned into the industry, but I think there's absolutely no replacement for being in a day-to-day. And I just think that vendors, service providers,

all of us in the industry are feeling a lot of trepidation right now. But especially those, you know, the integrators, the home tech pros are out there on the front line. And many of them like Chad, you know, he's got six employees, very much a small business owner trying to make it work. And I really appreciated Chad. These are tough topics. And all of us are uncertain and not 100% confident that we're making the right decisions right now. How could you be? And I really appreciated Chad being willing to come on and open up and share some of the ways that he's been thinking through the situation.

Yeah. You joke that it doesn't feel like it's been that long, but it's been a while. And these last couple of days, it felt like they've been years. I feel like I've gained, I don't know, 10 years since Monday, and it's only Wednesday. I've got more hair falling out, and I don't have a lot to give in that department. Mine's all turning gray on the sides. Mine's like turning gray on the sides. Yeah. Mine's like turning white and falling out. So I'm right there with you.

You look distinguished, Jason. That's, that's, that's the point. That's what I keep telling myself. Yeah. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a harrowing time to be in. I, I, like I mentioned him, I'm not in the position of owning a business right now. And I'm, I'm, I'm kind of glad I'm not,. But I my heart does go out to everyone who is in the position of owning a small business these days. You know, even even my wife's employed by a small business these days and they have 40 employees. And I'm like 40 employees, just like it make knowing that payroll comes up that just makes my my head start twitching my eyes just like like that's that's got to be like a really tough and conversation and they're they're they're an infrastructure so they will have work to do uh but it's like a um it's still an unknown like right now like it's it's filling that pipeline when people won't take meetings to have

you know sales meetings and it's that's kind of a tough, tough, tough situation to be in. So everybody is slow right now. It's not just contained with our industry. It's everywhere else. And hopefully, like I said, this thing just kind of goes away and we can all get back on track. It'd be really nice if we could do that. to the next. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's the million dollar question is, uh, you know, how long is the, uh, you know, put, putting the massive health questions aside for just a second and just focusing on business. It's the million dollar question is how long does this, does this

last and how badly does this shake consumer confidence and how long does it take us to, uh, begin and get through that recovery process. So more questions than answers there to be sure. But again, want to thank Chad for taking the time to come on and we really appreciate it. Let's keep moving here. Seth, we got a pick of the week. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm going to bring a technology pick of the week to our COVID show because I had to escape somehow, right? But this last week, Apple did their iPad OS 13.4 for iPad. And there was a lot of like excitement around the new iPad and how it had a trackpad that would be attached to it and that kind of thing. But if you have an old iPad like I do, and it can be upgraded to the latest version, which mine can,

you can now pair a mouse with your iPad. And man, it is like... Oh, beautiful. It's wonderful. It is absolutely wonderful. They have... It's a different type of... Like the little cursor they give you

is a little like floating sphere on your screen. And it's kind of like a grayed out sphere. And as you get close to like a place where you can type, it turns from a sphere into like a little line, a cursor line. Oh, cool. And then as you go away, it turns back into the sphere.

It's like a little fluid thing. And they've done a really good job of putting this together and making it work on like It's like a little fluid thing. And they've done a really good job of putting this together and making it work on current apps and that kind of thing. So if you have an iPad, give it an update. And try pairing just any old Bluetooth mouse. I have one of the Magic Mouse things here. Two weeks ago, this didn't work because I tried to do it.

It didn't work. It wouldn't pair with the thing. Now it pairs with it, and all the little gestures work. I can use it to scroll up and down a web page just like I would if it was attached to the it. Um, it didn't work. It wouldn't pair with the thing. Now it pairs with it and all the little gestures work. I can use it to like scroll up and down a webpage just like I would if it was attached to the computer. Um, evidently it works with any Bluetooth mouth track pad, whatever you want to do. Um, I think the Apple stuff probably works a little bit better cause it's, it's, it's, you know, built into the system that way. But, um, yeah, I, I wholeheartedly recommend if checking this out because there's a lot of like iPads are pretty powerful. I can kind of when I'm babysitting during the day, I can kind of set this little tiny computer up with the mouse.

And I'm a lot faster than I was if I'm just kind of trying to poke at the screen and and type on the keyboard. So, yeah, that's I know I like this a lot. That's always been kind of my hangup. And I actually haven't owned an iPad in a couple of years now. Um, a lot of that is because I, I'm, I, again, I'm work been working from home, so I'm not like out in the field moving around. That was where I really liked having an iPad. Um, but in a home use environment, I, I'm a, I, I'm a very tactile guy, Seth, you know that about me. I like my hot keys. I like keyboard shortcuts and, and, uh, I just feel so inefficient on an iPad. Like when I'm, when I'm working day to day, I've, I've just gotten to a point with,

with Macs and using my computer that I'm, I I'm very efficient in getting around on a computer. And when I moved to an iPad and I'm kind of hunting and pecking around and just getting between apps and stuff like that feels very slow to me. But of course, the ability to link up a keyboard and now a mouse, because you've been able to do it with a keyboard, obviously, for a long time. But the ability to link up a mouse now, I think would make a big difference. So that's good to know about. It's night and day. And like, I'm kind of in the same boat, poking at it, poking at an iPad and the interface when the iPad, not such a big fan. I got the little keyboard, attached it to it. Okay, it was a little bit better. I could do more like writing type work on it, but not so much like, you know, day to day. Um, this now, I mean, it's,

it's almost like having a tiny little laptop that's less functional than your normal laptop, but like, it's, it's a time, like I can pick it up and just walk over somewhere else with it without any, without any issue whatsoever. And it lasts all day. So, um, if, like I said, if you, I, I now is like the very, this is like the only time I would recommend like, oh yeah, now it may be time to start looking into buying an iPad. Like if you don't have one and you're, you've been ever been interested in getting one, uh, because I think it's with this update, it's going to be a more functional, personal computer.

And clearly, I mean, clearly everything is going that direction. Right. Yeah. The lines are getting a little blurry. Yeah. Right, between a pure tablet and a laptop. Yeah. And the Microsoft Surface, I know, is another example of that.

Yep. Cool. Interesting to know about. Seth, Greg makes a good point in the chat room. It's not babysitting if it's your kid. He makes a good point. I guess it's called parenting or something. That is what it's called

yeah all right well fine i'm not getting paid for it so yeah yeah exactly all right if you have any feedback questions comments pics of the week or ideas for a show topic or guest give us a shout we'd love to hear from you our email address is feedback at home tech dot fm or visit home tech dot fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. And we want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to financially support the show through our Patreon page. If you don't know about our Patreon page, head on over to hometech.fm slash support to learn how you can support Hometech for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over $5 a month gets you a big shout out on the show,

but every pledge gets you an invite to our private Slack chat, the hub, where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day to talk about coronavirus to commiserate yeah oh oh you know what i i yeah i swore so everybody's everybody's at home uh so we'll talk about parenting techniques uh i swore i'd call owen out on this he was talking about teaching his son his four-year-old son, the difference between margin and markup. And I lost it on that one. That is a great... Every four-year-old should know how to do that. Yeah. Joey, our CEO, I don't think would mind me sharing this, was teaching his seven-year-old daughter about probability, statistical probability the other

day. So I think our children are getting a more diverse education than ever before. Silver linings. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. If you're looking for other ways to support the show, we would definitely appreciate you taking a minute to leave us a review on iTunes or in your podcast app of choice, or tell a friend or coworker about the show. Both of those things will help other people find out about the podcast here and spread the word and build the community. And that's really what we're after here. So we would appreciate it. Yep.

Well, that wraps up the show this week, Jason. A pretty interesting time that we're facing ahead of us. Like I was saying, I don't think we're recording this, but after the interview, we were talking a little bit. And Chad said something about the confidence of everybody coming back in. I think confidence is a good word that we can kind of think about as we leave the show tonight. Everybody has confidence that this is going to get past us in some form or fashion. Then we'll all be, they'll all be well, we'll all be doing well after, after this is all over. I would just, I'm just, I wish there was some way we could press pause on everything and just like sit at home, parent, teach about margin and markup and

statistical probabilities. And then in like, you know, a couple of weeks when all this has all died out and gone away, we can press play and get back to get back to work. Yeah. Yeah. It would be nice if there was a pause button for sure. So we will, you know, we'll continue to monitor this topic here at Home Tech and we'll keep an eye on, you know, life does go on outside of COVID. And we'll keep an eye on the industry at large and certainly report on other stuff going on. But we'll certainly be talking more about COVID in the weeks to come. And again, trying to play our small part here on the podcast. I know we've got a lot of professionals in the audience and just trying to figure stuff out right now. So enjoyed recording the show with you, Seth, and I hope you stay well and stay safe. And

we'll look forward to reconnecting again with you next week. Sounds good. Thanks, everybody, for listening in the live chat there, and we'll talk to you next week. All right. Take care.