The Home Service Expert Podcast - #411 Harnessing AI for Financial Insights with Mike Barnhart

Episode Date: May 2, 2025

In this conversation, Mike Barnhart, COO and CFO of Eco Plumbers, discusses the essential role of hope in leadership, financial growth strategies, and the importance of curiosity in business. The discussion also covers customer retention through membership models, the importance of incentive plans, and effective budgeting practices. Additionally, Tommy and Mike delve into team development, the use of technology for efficiency, and managing expenses for profitability. The conversation also highlights the role of technology in improving sales processes and the necessity of effective recruitment and training to build a strong workforce.    Don’t forget to register for Tommy’s event, Freedom 2025! This is the event where Tommy’s billion-dollar network will break down exactly how to accelerate your business and dominate your market in 2025.   For more details visit freedomevent.com   00:00 The Role of Hope in Leadership 01:43 Introduction to Mike Barnhart and Eco Plumbers 02:11 Financial Growth and Strategic Planning 03:00 Greenfield vs. M&A Strategies 06:55 The Importance of Curiosity in Business 08:41 Leveraging AI for Financial Insights 10:54 Rebranding and Expanding Services 12:20 Marketing Strategies and Storytelling 15:13 Navigating Economic Challenges 16:40 Membership Models and Customer Retention 19:51 Incentive Plans and Employee Engagement 20:57 Key Performance Indicators in Business 23:06 Budgeting and Financial Planning 26:10 Top Grading and Team Development 28:55 Utilizing Technology for Efficiency 30:43 Revenue per Employee and Operational Efficiency 32:42 Managing Expenses and Profitability 36:13 Navigating Pricing Strategies for Profitability 39:20 The Importance of Reviews and Conversion Rates 41:20 Sales Techniques and Customer Engagement 46:09 Leveraging Technology for Improved Sales 51:05 Recruitment and Training for Success 55:07 Building Relationships and Networking 01:00:59 Work-Life Balance and Purpose in Business  

As leaders, we are dealers of hope. And there's this phrase, without hope, the people will perish. And so we have to be providing hope for everybody that's part of our team. And literally, I don't think a week goes by that I don't think about that, is that we as leaders are dealers of hope so that our people don't perish. Before we get started, I wanted to share two important things with you. First, I want you to implement what you learned today. To do that, you'll have to take a lot of notes, but I also want you to fully concentrate on the interview. So I asked the team to take notes for you.

Just text, notes, N-O-T-E-S to 888-526-1299. That's 888-526-1299. And you'll receive a link to download the notes from today's episode. Also if you haven't got your copy of my newest book Elevate, please go check it out. I'll share with you how I attracted and developed a winning team that helped me build a $200 million company in 22 states. Just go to elevateandwin.com forward slash podcast to get your copy. Now let's go back

into the interview. All right guys, welcome back to the home service. Experts today is a special day. I've been trying to get Mike Barnhart here for three years, three years. We've been talking about just how to get them on the podcast. He's a busy guy. He is acting as the COO, the CFO shared services within Eco Plumbers. You guys know I hang out with Aaron Gainer quite a bit, but Mike started listening to the podcast originally, turned Aaron on to me, and little did you know that Aaron's son Chase moved out here to go to ASU.

So Aaron's out here a lot. We share a lot of business advice on what's going on, good, bad, and ugly. Mike's an expert in finance, strategic planning, performance management. He's located in Columbus, Ohio. He's worked quite a few places. I know Victoria's Secret is my favorite one. He met Eco's owner, Aaron Gaynor, in 2013 and officially joined the company in January 2015, helping Eco Plumbers grow from 1.9 million to a projected 73 million. Mike is known for his strategic initiatives, financial acumen, and emphasis on data-driven decision-making.

What's up, brother? What's up? I got to fix one of those numbers. We did 73 million last year. We're going for 91 this year. 91. You know it's a CFO, and they're like, so normally people say 90 or 100. You say 91. year. 91? You know it's a CFO and they're like, so normally people say 90 or 100, you say 91. 91.

So what's a healthy bottom line on 91? Usually people say 15%. Yeah, I mean, 15% is a good one. If you can get to 17 or 18, you're doing even better. That's true. What do you consider failing? Under 10. Under 10. In growth years, one of the things I've realized that I was just telling myself before I got a great CFO is I keep putting, I always used to say,

I put the money back in. Hey, I put the money back in. I put the money back in, but I didn't realize unless it's going into marketing or strategic hiring or some type of like Power BI analytics, I wasn't putting the money back in. I was actually wasting the money, and I just lied to myself. You know, our strategy has always been green-fielding, but still, like, our Cincinnati location, we still lose money in it today. You know, and we're a year and a half in. But, you know, our advertising spend is 35% of revenue right now.

So, you know, you're doing that because, you know, when you look at the success story of it, like our Dayton location, we opened up in 2021. This year we're doing $20 million in Dayton and it's super cashflow positive. It's actually the highest margin in location business right now in our business. So it is a little bit different as you're scaling and how that changes. I've got a business right now and I obviously under NDA but it would cost about 30 million dollars to buy.

I think Cortech our sponsor said, would you rather put that money into marketing or buying this business? And I'm like, aha! I'd rather put it into marketing so you're going to give me that over and above what we spend a day. Me and Tom Howard are having a debate actually at Rhino about Greenfield versus or Greenfield versus buy and build turn up, you know buy and build or M&A and He likes M&A way better. I

I feel like you got to find the right company and then you got a there's a lot to be done on integrations Changing the culture you lose a lot of the employees, but you're buying the lead source. I don't know, you guys haven't done much acquisitions, but if you had to pick and choose, I think Greenfield allows you to take your own shot, call your shot, grow whenever you want. Once you build that playbook, and I think it's worth more, if I'm gonna buy your company, I'm gonna say,

man, these guys figured out Greenfield. They could scale to any market at any time. It is slower, for sure, and you talked to Tom Howard I remember I asked Tom one time I was like tell me about you know a tuck in that didn't go well And he's like they've all gone well, you know, so maybe some people are better than others But you know with green fielding it's it's kind of crazy because yes It does take three to four years to really adopt in the market. But once you've hit that kind of threshold It's like you've always been there.

It's like you've been there for 20 years, even though once people do pick up your name. And really, anything that we've ever, I don't know if you've seen this, but anytime I've ever made a change or we used to just be plumbing only, we added excavation, then we added HVAC, we added electrical, we added other locations. You have these changing points within your business.

And from the minute you make them and you start to enact them They all seem to take like 36 months to get some traction Maybe you're can make it a little faster than that with as many As good as you are, but like it always has taken me three years to really build something Yeah, you know, that's the thing people overestimate what they could do in one year underestimate what they could do in five Everybody wants it tomorrow. They're like, I look at people's budgets and I'm like, wait, you're going to 3X this year? But you never 3X'd. Like why this year? And they're like, well, you know, I'm focused now and you've proven it's possible. And I think some people, unfortunately,

that listen to this podcast are trying to live my dream and do what I did, but they don't know the sacrifice it took I don't have kids. I'm not married. They didn't spend enough time with my niece and nephews I don't know what your thoughts are But you know your goal should be to get to an exit that provides for you your family and takes care of you and hopefully Get to roll equity and continue to we like to grow things. I mean is a COO and part owner of eco plumber I'm sure you're like, dude, you're enjoying the growth more than probably maybe trying to hit the finish line. What do you, mentally, how do you look at the growth of Eco?

So, yeah, I mean, you know, to look at it throughout the years, I've been doing it for 11 years now. We've gone from 1.9 million to 91 million this year. It's been a really rewarding journey for sure. You do have those kinds of pressure points along the way where you do hit these parts of scalability that feels really rough and then you kind of push through them. And a lot of that really comes down to the infrastructure that you build within your company.

You have good people, you've got the right meeting cadences, you've got the communication rhythms. And for me, it's – I've never stopped being really curious about the business. For any CFO out there, one of the things that I do every Sunday and I've been doing it for 11 years now, I send out an email to the whole management side and leadership side of the company of here's what I think about last week. And I go through about 20 different reports that I've got kind of flagged on my side and I look at them and I look at them every Sunday and I start to see trends.

You start to understand that business and then you become a really good storyteller. And you're not going to do that if you're not curious. But once you get able to tell that story, like this year I was actually I went to the management team and I was like, hey, I think I'm gonna stop doing this email. I'm still gonna do it for myself. And they're like, no, you have to keep doing this email because it really does highlight out what is happening within the business where we have areas for opportunity, where are there anomalies in the business. And then you can, you know, I'm not the one that's most of the time fixing them these days, but I'm helping people understand what's happening so they can address it

You know Aaron was telling me you guys are playing around with AI chat GBT and you loaded stuff in and it said something like Renegotiate with your vendors or something crazy like what exactly how are you as from a CFO? Go perspective using AI. Yeah, I mean I mean at the basic level It's like why, you don't have to, the nice thing about like chat GPT is how easy it is to use. Like I just load our PDF financial statements in each month and then I'll ask it questions about it.

And I'm pretty good at understanding the business, but it will pull things up that I didn't actually see within the business because you can ask really specific questions. Like I could put January of 24 and January of 25 and I say, but it has every month in between I say you know compare this against the last quarter and compared against January of 25 by location and I want to specifically look at the sewer department and it will give you like a really you know detailed answer on

what's going on with that and you know you're I don't know why every CFO doesn't do this because it's the time it takes to do it is under a minute You know I was going on with chat GBT yesterday, how do you you know I got the app It goes online and you log in but what's the easiest way to upload a document like a balance sheet income statement or P&L? Yeah, so and that's that's the really intuitive thing about chat GBT I do use the desktop version more than the app But you can you know, you just load it right in there it doesn't have to be in any sort of format like it knows how to go read it and pick up the the correct information and

You can ask, you know extremely detailed questions if you want to get in on it. So do you have your favorite? This is supposed to be a very helpful podcast of people out there. So maybe you'll share, maybe you won't. But do you have like certain prompts you use other than comparing year over year? A lot of times I look at location differences. So like I want to see how locations are scaling on margin. As CFOs, we definitely care about margin. And that's the nice thing as you – when you're green fielding a location, you can get to margin stability before you can get to margin stability

before you can get to cash flow stability. You want to keep focusing on how do I actually just make this a margin-profitable business where some people have gross margin of 50%, some people are 55%. It really depends on what your trade is. If you're heavy HVAC replacement, you're probably going to be lower than if you're an electric residential service. But trying to manage that 50-plus percent margin across your business is always going to keep you super healthy. David Kopelka You know, I remember it wasn't that long ago.

It feels like yesterday where Aaron came and he's like, we finally hired a kick charge. And it really was built out of the fact that you guys were going into so many other industries. It couldn't be eco-plumbers. ECO, the plumbers you know. Yeah. So what was that like? Redoing your brand at how big were you guys? What was the revenue?

So we did the brand, started in 2022. So we were about 40 million. That's about when I did it with A1. Yeah. And oh, yeah, he just showed me your pickup truck wrap. That looked pretty good. Oh, yeah. I want one of those.

Yeah, we worked with them because we added HVAC and electric. And we worked with Wizard of Ads on that. Adding electric was a pretty last minute decision. But the brand is Eco plumbers, electricians, and HVAC technicians. That's very intentional. It's not eco plumbing, it's not eco electric,

it's eco plumbers, it's eco electricians. It's about the people, it's not about the service. And so we rebranded it as that, you know, made it more focused on the eco, so it's very in your face. And even this year, so we're almost up to 300 trucks now, and we realized like, we don't need billboards in Columbus, Ohio anymore.

We have 250 of them going around. So let's put that money into a different part of marketing. That's interesting. I did want to bring up Roy Williams, the Wizard of Az based out of Austin, Texas. I went and visited him for a day drank quite a bit of wine Learned a lot about Don Quixote and

You know a lot of people don't know this but if you want to go visit him It's not easy to get the invitation, but it's ten grand He'll take you out to the nicest dinner educate you on his whole process of how he comes up with his ads He was the original guy that really made Rolex take off in a lot of the jewelry stores and then companies started using him for home service and home improvement. When they got junk, I believe was one of the first ones and they're a monster. You guys started using him and it's one of those things where you got to trust the process because you might spend a fortune for the first six

nine twelve months but you're trying to be able to build this thing and they're like they're hypothalamus they're memory banked to like when there's something happens with H.I. Plum Electrical they think of you they remember your jingle they like you they trust you and they'll wait a bit longer to book the call they'll spend more money with you they They're gonna smile more because they like your story Aaron's been telling me about the hate email you guys been getting like you got it. You sound like a smoker Tell me about working with with Roy. Yeah, so I mean, you know, I'm the finance side of the business

I do some ops, but you know, I've always been super lucky like Aaron's always handled marketing and sales strategy but Roy seems to really like me. He calls me Bear. We have a good relationship with them and I think the interesting thing is the way I look at marketing and the way that Aaron and him look at marketing are way different. Every time I've had an idea, he's basically like, that's a terrible idea, Mike, because I don't think that like I look at it like You know maybe connecting with the logic or the value of a customer and he thinks about marketing more about

storytelling and being an entertainer and really just like you know Taking a minute to allow people to think about something else from their day other than you know, what's actually happening in their lives and For that it's been a really good partnership. We've definitely created a storyline that happens within the business. And he's done a great job for other companies as well. Yeah, we were at the Visit Morris Jenkins about six months ago.

And the crazy thing about Roy Williams is he doesn't like working with anybody but the owner, maybe like a CFO COO because He hates P. Yeah him and Aaron still talk every week. Yeah. Well the problem with that is eventually, you know If you're working on getting to a deal Which I think everybody should be if you're in business I could say this because I've been through it and I've got well I was missing a lot of hair because I got like what is that called when you lose your hair?

I'll apesha. I got that through the process. It was like that's dressed and it was super high stress and Now going into the next deal. I'm so excited like everything's running towards the next deal like built to sell grow your ebony like find the not next best partner, but a partner that could take you to the next level. And I'm super excited because for some reason I still feel like anything could happen, you know, anything could happen in the economy, anything could happen within an industry. I know it was really hard for HVAC. You hear HVAC plumbing electrical companies.

2024 was a hard year, 2023 was a hard year. I don't know, are you hearing that within the – just to echo chamber of like – I know you guys work with Nextar. You know, I've heard it from certain companies. At the same time, we just didn't experience it much. Like we did 25% organic growth last year. We're doing – right now – I mean yesterday we had our largest sales day in company history at almost $600,000.

It's just – it seems to be moving in our direction in the right way but I have heard that some – even some of those PE groups have, you know know been down year over year, you know, four to five percent Yeah, so I've got a theory that we're gonna be experimenting with that we're gonna pour Whatever our marketing budget is now. We're gonna It'll be 250% of what it is today. Really? So like if 100% is called 12%, we're gonna be spending close to 30. Yeah. And the way that our CFO structuring that

is more in a way that is considered greenfield, it's considered an add back because that's what you spent to grow. I understand. And I don't know exactly, I don't, but he does, and you don't. Well, your business is so different than mine in the fact that you know

If you have a replacement, you're probably not gonna see that customer for a long time or unless you have I don't have memberships Do you yeah, we got fifty thousand. So like fifty thousand Wow. So last year we made a big push on memberships and We went out we sold ten thousand memberships last year So I heard like you talk about some of your core tenants this year, call center and marketing. One of ours is actually membership fulfillment. We have 30 students in our HVAC school right now to become clean and check maintenance techs. And they get good at the turnover?

What's that? Getting turning over to new equipment. Right now, well, these are green people that have no industry experience. We're teaching them, and then we'll flip them to the LTO experience eventually. But for me, that's the biggest unknown part of our business. Right now, our call volume is so high.

And historically, we've always had about 70% of our customers be net new customers, and that's becoming 60 and 50. And it's becoming more and more repeat customers. And I don't know what the impact of selling 10,000 memberships a year really does for your future call volume. And I think I have a different view on memberships than most people.

On average, we sell between or we create about 200, 250 new members a week. People are like, how do you do that many a week? And we sell, we sell for the discount. And then we retain them. Yeah, no, you do. You got to give a discount upfront and then get them in for the reoccurring. But almost every best practice group. You're going to sell your other industry, like electric or you know.

Yeah. But all these best practice groups are always like, no, don't sell it on the discount. Don't sell it on the discount. I'm like, not like if I'm if I if I end up in three years with 50,000 members Do you know how strong that makes me as a company? Well, here's the deal that every PE company including our partner Portech you got to be able to prove and a guy like you could prove this pretty simply But he goes very rarely have I seen throughout the last decade of looking at H.I. companies. This is coming from the P.E. companies. Have I seen them build a profitable model for service agreements? I have so many and we collect this monthly fee, 13 bucks a month per membership, but we have a really hard time. Here's our biggest

problem. Two things, number one, Keegan Keegan Tommy this never pay commission to a maintenance tech you do not want the client feeling like you're out there just to sell them shit when they just signed up because you'll burn them you get bad reviews number two and your goal is just to build a fence around the client and number two we've taken technicians that can't make it in the real world to make them maintenance techs. I think that's a mistake. You got to teach them how to be lead setters. You say, look, I'm just a maintenance tech.

I'm going to take care of you. Learning this from Leland, I had a 29-point tune-up. Now it's a 151-point tune-up. Make sure it's long and you take stuff apart and you send pictures to the client. And it takes time to learn this stuff because you guys are newer at this, I believe. So don't send commission. Take a long time to learn this stuff because you guys are newer at this I believe So to don't send commission take a long time to do it just haven't be good at sign Lee setting leads, but do not Do not take your you guys who don't make it in the real world or make a maintenance tax Yeah, because the maintenance has to make the most money out of anybody in the company because this client already likes and trusts you

You know what I mean? Does that make sense? I do I mean and as you know CFO the company, incentive plans have always been like one of my biggest things that I focus on. So, you know, our strategy has always been why can't we pay the best and be the best company at the same time? Right. But, you know, for anybody that's not using Configurable Payroll on Service Titan, like start using it. It creates visibility for your technicians to understand how they're going to get paid, when they're going to get paid, what they're going to get paid every single week.

And you can really design pretty good incentive plans through configurable payroll. Ryan from CHIRP always brags about how he turned on a couple of campaigns along with you and Aaron and just murdered it on calls that, abandonment calls. And as much as you guys get, Aaron's like look we can't book out sometimes We're too busy. We are and that's a good problem, and then I just got done showing Aaron Lacey I and I do believe like I really don't think AI is On the call center like I don't want to talk to AI now when I have something broken I just don't yeah, so I do what I would want to do as a client

But Lace is built it just to train our call center to get to 90 plus percent and reduce our cancellations. And you know, we're going to do 300 million plus, so every percent we book and every percent we reduce cancellations is $3 million. And that's the way I look at it. We tested LACE AI and then we ended up adopting it in the entire call center because it is a really good coaching. You know, it teaches even the reps how to be better. I did just hear from service Titan on

Friday of last week that they used to have this feature called second chance lead Yeah, yeah But there's only if you're on phones Pro and they just opened it up to everybody. So what are what are your favorite KPIs? From your perspective gross profit obviously bottom line EBITDA, but what do you really, year over year, comparing the same month, what are some of the things you look at that are your favorite KPIs? Yeah, and some of them probably aren't financial, to be honest. Some of them are operational, but definitely, you know, always looking at the quality metrics. So we're looking at recall rates.

We're looking at how many members are we rebooking or canceling? You know, how many canceled calls do re-booking or canceling? How many canceled calls do we have? Those are what I call the quality metrics. You're looking at your reviews every week. Every week, we get about 360 reviews right now on average. We have about three that are under four stars. You're addressing what those quality measures are up front.

I heard you say you're going back to all your one, two, and three star reviews to try to fix them. I will say that some of them are more around our radio ads. So, you know- Those do get removed. They do get removed. But, you know, definitely looking at quality metrics and then looking at, you know, certainly in our business model, that turnover percentage is super important.

So bring that up every week. The way that we actually sold 10,000 and created 10,000 new members last week, we talked about every single week. So Aaron and I still get on a 7 a.m. call every Wednesday with the entire field staff across all locations, and we talk about certain things. And you know, for 52 straight weeks last year, we brought up memberships. That was something we just weren't going to drop until it was really adopted within the business. That was something we just weren't gonna drop until it was really adopted within the business

But let me ask you so We go through this budget and I gotta tell you budgeting for a guy like me Yeah used to be useless. I used to think it put me in a box And you know back in the day we were on a cash verse accrual We didn't know what like look though. I've learned a lot I think budget like first of all, I think everyone should have a budget I think every single human being should have a personal budget I think every single technician install our warehouse guys should have a budget the personal budget And I kind of talk about budgeting by just understanding how many calls do I need? What's my booking rate? What's my conversion rate? What's my average ticket?

and when I understand that I could really build a really good budget of things to target. And I think Adrian thought I was nuts. He's like, that's not that simple. And then Core Tech, without my guidance, said this is how we build our budget through these KPIs, the exact same thing. Yeah. So when you're thinking about a budget, what do you think about to put it together? Is it through lead gen and hiring and capacity planning? What are the things you're thinking about?

Yeah, so I mean, I love budgeting, actually. It's one of my favorite times of the year. And there's a couple things I always do. Is one, when you say everybody needs to have a budget, you're entirely right. If you ever look up the four steps of execution, we always call it the five steps of execution, you gotta have your mission statement,

you gotta have your KPIs, you gotta have your visual scorecards of whether you're winning and losing. That creates accountability and then you can celebrate it. If you don't have a budget, you can't literally do any of those things. So that's number one. Another thing that I always like to do

with the budgeting cycle is reflection on the past year. Successful people, they do two things. One, they reflect on what is happening in their lives and usually the readers. But one of the things that we do in our business is Jim Collins, he had a book called Great By Choice, talk about bullets and cannonballs. And you've got your, I heard you on your podcast,

you've got your four cannonballs, you've got your call center, your marketing, we do the same thing as we look at throughout the past year. What are all these bullets that we fired? And what are all the small things that we like test it out to see if they're going to work or not? And which one of those should we actually dedicate a lot more traction to within the budgeting process? Getting at the budgeting level, I actually work with the GMs to build each of their budgets in each location. And we start out at the department level at your basic KPIs.

How many texts you have, how many calls per week are you going to run, what's your conversion rate, what's your average sale, and that should drive revenue. We do budget a lot of other metrics on that. But every time I do that with the GMs, like we did that this year, and our budget ended up at $91 million this year. They created a budget of about $115 million. So you've got to teach people, like, hey, it's not so easy to drive these metrics up.

You get something called budget euphoria, where you start to, you know, I can just increase conversion rates by 3% and I can create, I know, an extra $80 on my average sale, but it's not that easy. Like you have to tie that back to behaviors. Well, it's interesting. I'll tell you, the behaviors are definitely true, but this idea of top grading, we've really, really taken this idea up of, look, I'm going to have a conversation with you and Mike, here's the fork in the road. Either you're going to train really hard for the next 90 days and I'm pulling have a conversation with you and Mike here's the two, here's the fork in the road.

Either you're gonna train really hard for the next 90 days and I'm pulling you off the schedule. A lot of ride-alongs, go back to Phoenix. We're gonna have to enhance your efficiency dramatically or I'm gonna write you a letter of recommendation. And I'm gonna get you know, you I'm gonna volunteer you to go work at our competition. My CFO Adrian, amazing guy. Started to top grade his team and he goes, oh my gosh, he came to me like a few months ago, goes, I cannot believe how much easier my life has gotten. Because he was micromanaging. One of the things Chad Peterman has said, if you find yourself micromanaging your direct reports, you got the wrong person. You shouldn't have to micromanage your direct reports. They should be able to report to you

and get their tasks done and their projects done on time and on budget. What are your thoughts on top grading? I mean when you've there's there's two kind of areas of top grading, especially as happening our businesses right now, it's like one is people. Like you know when you find the right person it just all seems to work out. Like we just found an HR person in the past year that's really just clicked within the business and she's done a great job. And, you know, taking people to the next level, taking recruiting, taking onboarding,

all that stuff to the next level. So that, you know, investing in people ahead of where you need them is always the right move. Especially like when you think about top grading right now at the size of our business You know, we're about 400 people, you know data scientists can be very helpful and Project managers can be very helpful for like so, you know, very similar to you

We have our kind of six initiatives for the year and each one of those has to have a project team around them Like it is like this is this is a team that's going to solve this for the year and they're responsible for A, implementing that and then B, communicating that out to our teams. But you need to have a project manager that's able to facilitate to make sure that the project is staying on track throughout the year because they are bigger projects. The other idea of top grading is using technology today. And there are certain things that you talk about. Yeah, it is very hard to increase average sale.

But lately, we've been using a HVAC sales presentation software. And we've just seen the amount of add-ons go through the roof. We've seen our average sale pick up. We're in non-peak season. And we're over 50% conversion rate on replacements. We actually are really changing these metrics through a company that's really obsessed with the customer buying experience

and providing a better buying experience through technology. I love this. Explain to me, by the way, I think technology is one of the most important things that's underutilized. I always say we're a technology company that does garage doors. I mean, we're running like 25. If you include like your project manager and tools, your payroll software, the cameras in your vehicle, like I'm running 25 software. Yeah, I mean, all day long, lace or things like real.

It's just it goes on and on and on. Revenue for employee. Now, I heard Brandon Dawson talk about this with Grant Cardone, you know, the Cardone team. He's like, if you're under 275, whatever it was, thousand per employee, I've never looked at it like that. Maybe it doesn't work because I'll never be at that.

What are your thoughts on revenue per employee? Is that something that you really like that metric? Yeah, I'll say I look at it once a month and just see how we performed on it. I do like the metric because it kind of just tells you how efficient you're being in your company, like how much kind of fluff do you have. And to a certain extent, it should be able to tell you how profitable you are. And it is kind of weird about how every industry is. This isn't like art, just our industry, like kind of every industry, it kind of works out if you do this, you take your revenue,

you divide it by the total number of people, not technicians, but like, you know, your call center, your admin staff, your finance team, everybody included, it works out to somewhere between, you know, around $250,000 of per person. And you know, you have really bad companies that are operating around 160,. And you have really bad companies that are operating around $160,000. You have really lean companies

that are operating around $330,000. That doesn't necessarily mean they're good companies, it just means they're lean. And they're probably pretty profitable in doing so, but they also might be stressed out. So it's worth looking at because it's really hard to be profitable if you're not, let's call it over that $225,000 mark.

You're definitely not gonna be at the profitability that you wanna be at. I'll tell you something that might throw a wrench in this equation is we work with a lot of agencies, from the media buys to SEO to PPC, like we've got the best of the best. And then we've got people in-house that coordinate stuff between them.

When I look at, for example, I was out at one hour, and they had about 40 people working in their marketing team. And I saw a lot of them working on videos, a lot of stuff, like, I don't wanna bring all that in-house, I want specialists that have the best software to do what they do. I really, like, when you look at the marketing team,

the question is, do you bring inventory in-house, or do you have like your vendor managed inventory? Right. So there's there's all these different things that, you know, I've been to shops where they don't own any of their inventory that's all sold to them and they handle that. Then they don't do any of their marketing. They might have three people in their marketing team. So how do you equate for that?

Yeah. So, I mean, or maybe even a third party call center for half the calls. I mean, sure. I mean, the other like financial metric that you're really going to look at within all our businesses that a lot of people call it the big five, but you can call it whatever you want. You're managing your top five expenses, which in every one of our companies is direct labor, direct material, office wages, vehicles and marketing marketing. In the best of companies, that's operating 75% of your revenue typically, 70 to 75. In the worst companies, that's 90 to 100. And you're looking at what those benchmarks are.

Your labor should be around 24%. Your material should be around 20%. Your office wages should be around 11%. If you can do it. Marketing, depending on the market, might be different. But as a total company, hopefully, you're under 10%. And your vehicles, which typically range around 5%. But that's where you're targeting with a lot of those metrics. Interesting. You said labor 15 to 20 to 20 fully burdened labor across the board

is that including sales commissions installer service everything. Everything office staff call center. Within office wages. So those are cogs. Yeah. Okay. So how much all in your labor be as a percentage of total revenue. If you include your CSRs, technicians, installers, warehouse staff, the CFO, the salaries, the commissions, everything. Yeah, I mean, the best-ranked companies are probably around like 33.

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corners and he's looking around the corner all the time. He's not just a you know, maybe that's maybe that's a controller more. But but he's looking at the future as well. And he understands growth. We got we have so good that there's months we're hitting 27 percent. Bottom line. And I think we could hit 30. I think if we really push, we get at 33. But then we'd be kind of screwing ourselves on the marketing side, because we'd

have to start borrowing from marketing. And that's great. We've learned from other companies that's great for about a year. And then you begin to see the decline. It's an interesting question of when is too much. When is it too much? Well, what would be, you know, because I've always said

if you listen to podcasts three years ago, I was like, if you're making more than 25% either you're paying your people too less, you're charging your clients too much more. But I took I didn't take into effect efficiency. I never plan on booking over 90% calls. I never plan on the conversion rates being what they are. I never planned out like like plus a great CFO, like the way that he's able to do stuff like he's like You know what a great you want to know the best question of the world is When you ask a CFO what's one plus one you know what they say the best answer to know they say whatever you want it to be

That's a good account. That's a good account It's who is be a good answer so That's a good accountant right there. Good accountant, good CFO. That too would be a good answer. So what do you feel about profitability when everything... And you know, this is really... There's different industries and there's different competition and there's different private equity involved. So I don't think it's a fair question because if you look at like Zoom drains, they don't have really a whole lot of material costs.

They've got these expensive $200,000 trucks, but they're just they're going and doing drains only. So I don't know. What are your thoughts, though, as far as profitability per home service companies? Yeah, I mean, I think there's two things that, you know, we need to be careful of going into this year. One is, you know, if prices are changing, we have to be ahead of that. Otherwise, you know, we'll lose ourselves because you're not pricing yourself correctly. The other one is, and I think this is our entire industry.

I talk that I really value data scientists and some of the people that really understand statistics, but I haven't yet to actually meet a company that's really heavily invested into pricing strategy. Whereas, my background is in FP&, and I worked for a medical distribution company for a long time. It was about 150 billion. Their goal was to get to 1% profit. They usually never got there.

But they had whole pricing teams that are looking at elasticity, that are looking at ways to, when they can target like more surge pricing, when they can do this, like, there's, you know, Amazon's doing this. There's no reason, like reason we can't invest more into understanding what our pricing strategy

should be as a business. And that's probably where you really maximize profitability. So that is actually something we're investing into this year. You know, I would debate you on that because you put my top guy in at any market and I've proven this over and over again. He's gonna continue. Good job, bad job, just get. You put my best CS in any market and I've proven this over and over again, he's gonna continue, good job, bad job, just get,

you put my seat, best CSR, best dispatcher, best technician, best installer, it's incredible. So it goes back to better recruiting, better training. The optimize the price, it's just so hard for me to get behind like, but the optimize purchasing is completely different. But your best guy is probably gonna get a yes from that customer if your garage door placements $10,000 or

$12,000 right like he's probably gonna do it but there's probably certain there's other indicators that would make the customer more likely to say yes to a $12,000 if we're doing it around demand pricing properly. That's a problem. That's a little bit of my argument. See, the problem is you're treating, in my opinion, you're treating this like e-commerce

instead of the presentation, the timeliness, the idea of influence for opportunity. You wrote the book. I'd love to see what you come up with, and maybe I'm dead wrong, but I feel like, look, you know what's weird at A1 is whatever gets focused on gets kind of a resolution resolution Like we want to make this happen. We got to talk about it every day We got to practice it in roleplay we got a game of fly it and it'll work But you're kind of Robin Peter to pay Paul because if you focus on this So we got to make sure we don't focus on too many things we got to say okay Like what's the best thing that we make money on?

Number one son high-end parts. Yeah. Because we give options. We have a high cycle of number two is taking a service call, turning it into a sale, a turnover. Those two things that we just did good, those two. But what's more important than both of those? Reviews and conversion rate. Because if I'm not even converting, I'm not going to talk about selling better parts.

Like why aren't you even earning the client's business? And if we're getting bad reviews all the time, we won't be in business very long. So it's like this pyramid of this hierarchy of needs for home service companies. Oh, I love this stuff, man. I was talking to Aaron about that, the way you guys do the about that the way you guys are do the presentations and the way the pricing works and the way it makes it kind of pulls into effect the It includes the finance fees, which is genius because why should I eat that cost? It's like yeah, if you choose to do this Here's what it costs. Yeah as a CFO, you know, CFO is always like hey Let's let's not offer financing plans that have any dealer fees You know because they don't want to pay the dealer fees

They want to control the margin better and this takes that away I feel like if it's automatically building it in let the customer pick whatever they want because we're not paying for it anymore You know, it's you know, Joe Chrisara. Does that ring a bell? I know Joe just look behind there. What should we do? He's always said to me, you know, you pick six options and then say, you know, pick one you like. But you start at the best one, is what I've always learned, is you still look based on what you told me, I'm going to go over six options. This would be something that I would say is going to be the best fit for you and your

family. And then we, you know, if that doesn't work, hey, that doesn't work, pick one more economical, pick one you like. Yeah. But this way you're at least earning their business. And by the way, each one of these, you know, you've probably heard about the best profitable one for the company is probably option number four. Yeah.

And that's where most people fall into. Another thing is putting, like if you want option five to sell the most, price it right. Price it a little more than option five But far less than option six and then put most the people's choice Most people choose this right and we think about that a lot from the opposite I think it's probably hard to think about that while you're running the call You know, I've got I know you have some really top-end sales guys. We've got one named Adam and I know him well Yeah, he's presented to us.. I talk to Adam all the time.

And I mean, this guy's super passionate about sales. And I remember I went on a road trip with him one time, and he spent four hours replaying his calls for me. But he's got this saying that we've kind of adopted in our sales team. Because we asked the question of, how do you stay excited doing the same thing like three, four times times a day every single day

and He says when I knock on the door I say to myself it's showtime This is my show and you know, I I start playing I start playing my role and you know, I get excited for it because you You you know, it's showtime. I like that. I like that a lot. I wanna go, you know you talked about revenue per employee, we talked about that for a minute.

I wanna go back, you know Al Levy always taught me about ratios. He's like, most people run it at two to one ratio, meaning you got two people turning a wrench compared to the one support staff. Really bad companies operate at one to one where you've got all these support staff, CSRs, dispatchers, warehouse guys,

you got all these C-suite VP director levels supporting like one-to-one, it's really hard to make money. There's no efficiency. He goes, when you get to three-to-one, you're printing money. I like that ratio stuff, except that still, what happens when you're doing all this, hiring all these marketing companies and doing the outbound call,

you might have a third party inbound call center for nights and weekends. Those ratios kind of get masked. What are your thoughts about different ratios like that? Yeah, I mean, we are actually pretty close to three to one, but you start talking about certain ratios. Yeah, I mean, you can look at an income statement, but an income statement can be misleading like you know you asked me

You know it's 15 percent that benchmark well, then really what's the benchmark of cash flow on that? You know Carl Icahn Yeah, I know Carl Icahn. He does hostile takeovers great sure mastermind you know one of his famous sayings is happiness is positive cash flow and You know because that's really what matters then they are we generating cash what we're doing famous saying is happiness is positive cash flow. Because that's really what matters at the end of the day, are we generating cash from what we're doing, and we're not just putting it, you can hide stuff on an income statement by putting it on a balance sheet.

You can never hide stuff on the cash flow statement. It's really gonna tell you the true story of the business. So that's one that we always look at. And if you're generating, even if you're generating 15% of profit, after you're paying taxes, after you're doing all the distributions of it and everything You should still be looking to get seven eight percent actual free cash flow at the end of the day

That's interesting. Yeah, I mean We do you know Alan Rorty taught us what a financial quick quick check is and we don't do it like we used to but Every week Adrian sends me just a quick text of here's what's going in and out of The bank here's where we sit. It's just for me and He just decided everyone doesn't need to know what's in our bank account. I really didn't care We don't report that a lot of places do we we are transparent on our income statement, right? You know, I don't think people are really gonna understand like paying taxes and yeah, that's true I mean look it is none of their business when it comes I agree with Adrian now now that we talk man-to-man

I'd I and a lot of things he and I see the same thing and a lot. Well, let me ask you I know a lot of businesses The way they solve their problem for next year and a lot of times the problem is it works as they raise prices But there comes a point of diminishing returns. Obviously, when we get our price raised from a manufacturer like the distribution center, we raise our price at the same day. And Tom Howard said the best is instead of doing two price increases a year, do 1% a month across the board. That way, no one really feels it. What are your thoughts?

Because we're still doing two a year. I couldn't sell my team on doing 1% a month. So I'm actually kind of famous in the company of not telling anybody when I change the prices or increase prices. I don't usually tell anybody that's happening, because I don't think the price is the price. This is what we need to do in order to be profitable. I don't think I anybody that's happening because I don't think it's the price of the price like that That's this is what we need to do in order to be profitable

I don't think I actually need to communicate it out and people ask like hey did the prices change and I'm like yeah They did you know, but that that should just be part of business. It shouldn't be really so I'm gonna get a raise Yeah, you got a raise, but I guess there doesn't really need to be transparency. They don't need to know why yeah, this is you know I don't think that they're looking at, you know, that they're trying to understand the entire cost of the business and what our sold hours should be, what our efficiency should be.

You know, obviously we want to become more efficient as a company if we can, we'll become more profitable, but you're not gonna like, you're not gonna plan on becoming more efficient. You're gonna plan on operating your business as it currently is. I like that. And you know, what I get excited about is playing these podcasts,

very few and far between, one out of maybe 30 to my internal team. And this is one I'm definitely going to have them listen to. So I'm going to ask some questions that I think, when I ask questions, my team can get a lot out of. I think I'm actually doing a lot of justice for the listeners, depending on the size of their company. Obviously, if you're pre-10 million, some of this stuff is you're probably not ready for it yet, depending on the size of their company. Obviously, you know, if you're pre-10 million,

some of this stuff is you're probably not ready for yet, and that's okay. When you said you leveraged this technology that helps build the different pricing models, and it's a better demonstration to the client, and it takes into effect these things like financing, what was the biggest thing that caused that software? Is it just the presentation?

It was at the easiness to adopt for the technicians? What caused the growth and how much did you grow in conversion rate and average ticket and add-ons? In the HVAC, we're testing this. It's a product we're testing in HVAC sales right now. So it's not across the entire business, But we're seeing some positive results. And it's a third party company. So you could sign up for it if you're selling HVAC systems. But the way that they present to the customer is it is very much a toggle method of here are the options.

But you can see if I don't want this humidifier, I I just press a button and toggles it back off and it's the price changes and you can see you can really you're putting that power into your customers hands rather than you know service and somewhat static like here's the estimate. The other thing you're building the financing fees and another cool aspect of it was that you are anytime a cut like if you don't close right there, and a customer re-engages with that estimate, like they open it back up. You know when they get notified.

And the salesperson gets notified. And it prompts the salesperson to say, hey, do you have any questions you want to ask about this? Or is there anything I can help you with? So it's better communications, better buying experience. HVAC, it's a newer thing to us. If you took it back, we've only been doing it for three years, I mean, our conversion rates

used to be like 25%, now they're pretty much 50% on a regular basis, so we've been doing a lot better. And then our average sales gone up too. I mean, that's the crazy part of our business. Like, when you look at at If you look at a business that's going down this year Well, you know in HVAC. Well, we've got the 454 transition Which would probably raise your price is 10% and then you've got tariffs which might raise your material prices 10% if you're not Wait a minute for what was the first one? So in HVAC they switched

Yeah for 10 to 454, but it raised equipment prices about 8% to 10%. If you're not growing 16%, you're basically as static as last year. That's what people forget. Yeah. They brag about growth, but yeah. Yeah.

So that's one way to look at it. But another thing with that one is important. You are having these things that are happening with your business. And Aaron knows this. But another thing with that one is important. You are having these things that are happening with your business. And Aaron knows this. And I love to get a win in negotiating. Negotiating is my favorite thing to do.

But regularly just going back to our vendors and saying, are we gonna accept these price increases? Are we gonna at least have a conversation about it? Because you can literally save like 10% across your business just by negotiating stuff and I mean and like any piece of software out there is negotiated I mean we've got one deal That right now we have like our phone systems are basically being for our iPads are basically being paid for for three years For switching over to this other company You know air wouldn't be in me and Aaron were at the golf tournament, Adrian walked up to me and he

goes, we got an extra 600 grand coming back for our insurance something. And he's like, I didn't even know about it. And he knows about everything. But I was like, cool. I love this stuff, dude like I love negotiations, too I think I pushed my vendors a little bit too hard, but I'll give you an example I was out of town, but Luke did a great job. They came in to Give us a 10% increase, but our volumes gone through the roof like dramatically and they ended up when they left

They lowered our price by 10% he goes. You know how much business you guys are losing by the way Look at how much business we've given to this other company. He showed them. And when they left, they, like, this is what's nice is by some people go all in on vendors and then they got all the keys to the city and you have no, one of the things we've learned for private equity is like always have two vendors

and don't give anybody everything. I agree with that. You know, I want to jump into this idea of hiring because I've always said hire slow, fire fast. LL was a big seven-power contractor, taught us manual, standard operating procedure, steps of delegation, but the big thing that I don't talk a lot about is he taught me how to build technicians from the ground up. Now I realize certain industries that you need to be a journeyman, you need to be an apprentice, you need to work your way up. And I do think even if that was the

case for graduates, I would still do it because it's worth them to be homegrown, learn our ways. And it's a long, it's a longer investment into people, but it's the best investment. What are your thoughts as far as getting the best technicians and installers now that you guys are in multiple trades, multiple markets. Yeah, I mean, I've got a few thoughts. Recruiting across our trades is if you don't have a dedicated recruiter, you should. At $10 million, you should have a dedicated recruiter because it's that important in your business. Even if you're just recruiting students. Back in 2019, we were booked out like three weeks in for plumbing services. So we're like, you

know, we looked at it and we said we have to create a school. We got that launched up and we even knew when we launched the school, we said, you know, this first class is probably gonna suck, but the 10th won't. And now we're on like 16th and you know, it's a pretty good program that really brings people

into the trades. The other thing about recruiting is like, you have to have, you know, whether you call them your core values, your guiding principles, you have to have, whether you call them your core values, your guiding principles, you have to have the right fit of people. I don't know, I mean, you grew in your business from the ground up.

And I remember reading this book called Sapiens, and I read it right around the time we were around 150 people. And it was like, hey, once a community hits 150 people, it fragments into another community, because that's about as many people as you can know. And so if you're not recruiting well, like right now we're at 400 people, yeah, I have to spend most of my time walking around saying, hi, I'm Mike, because I don't know the people

in the company anymore. So you have to make sure that you are recruiting for those values that you really think are important and that's where a good recruiter will be worth their weight in gold. The other thing that I will say about creating the own people in your trades, and I know you have a great training center here toured through it, it's amazing, is the, people don't think about this,

it creates that alma mater effect. Like we've had people leave for whatever, five dollars more on the hour or something, and they come back because they're like, well, all my friends are here. This is where I learned the trade. This is my school. Like this is my university. Whatever, you know, you call it.

It creates an alma mater effect that you're giving back to the trades, but you're also creating this kind of community of people that you brought into the trades. Yeah. Plus, you know, the fact is people say if you got a best friend at work best friends don't happen. They happen outside of work. They happen when you meet with your family. You break bread. You go to the bowling league. When you build a best friend at work, 85% of people say I'm not leaving because I have a best friend here. Yeah. Yeah, and that's the key. I think that's true. You know, I was I this, I pay 100 grand

to go to these three meetings a year in this big event. And I really enjoyed it. And I'm a- You should negotiate that. I should. I probably could. It's Joe Paul's genius network. And you know, there's this guy that was training us

the other day, cause this was just last week. And he goes, I think Core Values and Mission and Vision are way overrated. He goes, because I've trained some of the largest companies on the planet, whether it's Google, LinkedIn. He goes on and on. He goes I went to small companies. He goes I'll go up to 10 of your employees randomly and say what's your mission vision and core values? Yeah, and he goes 9 out of 10 of them don't know. Yeah, and he goes so if it was that important, they would at least know them off the top of their head. You know, we actually thought the same this past year.

We ran our budgeting conversations this year. We had a similar conversation that our mission statement was too long. And we really just switched it down to one statement of to create great tradespeople, advance their lives, and win big. That's what we want to do. It's not necessarily about the customer experience. It's about what we're doing for each other. We just made ours, you know,

it used to be to be the largest, most trusted advisor company in North America. Now it's to make our people dream bigger than they ever thought possible and achieve more than they ever thought. It's pretty simple. You know, you started to talk, Jack Tester used to be the CEO of Nextar.

Yeah. And I think he's a brilliant guy. I learned from him the one-on-one form where he basically said, if you're a leader, your team should report to you. You shouldn't have to ask questions and lead the presentation on the one-on-ones. They'll present to you. Right. But I know you guys are working pretty closely with Jack.

He's part of the business in certain aspects. What's it been like to work with Jack as a leader, and what have you learned from him? Yeah, I mean, Jack's on the team. He's on our leadership call every week. He's been amazing to work with. One of the, you know, we were going through the budgeting cycle this year,

and we talked about the importance of budgets, and the importance of missions, and core values, and all that stuff. And one of the things that he talked about is that as leaders, we are dealers of hope. And he actually, this is from like the King Solomon Bible. But, and that there's this phrase,

without hope, the people will perish. And so we have to be providing hope for everybody that's part of our team. And that has sat with me since he brought up the concept. And literally, like, I don't think a week goes by that I don't think about that is that we as leaders are dealers of hope so that our people don't perish. I love that. You know, you came in here pretty prepared.

You've got two pages of notes. Those of you not watching, Mike, as a CFO, I think CFOs are just, DNA is wired to prepare. There's probably some stuff we didn't hit. So what do you got there in your notes, those things that you wanted to discuss? I mean, one of the things I'll just mention that I think I've always done pretty well

throughout this. And I remember when you called me back in 2015, you actually, you probably don't remember this. You called me and I'd only been at Eco for about six months. And I kind of implemented Service Titan, build out the price book and all that within Service Titan. And you called me and you were like, hey, I want to get on Service Titan. I heard you're on it because I think we're like the 30th customer.

Aura pitched Aaron individually. And you start talking to me about it. And I know you got onto it. So you were very persistent. But I was like, man, this guy is special. And I was like, Aaron, you got to talk to this guy. And I know you and Aaron are now best friends. But I hope you guys have to start talking.

But the importance of building your network, whether you're a CFO, whether you're a manager, I just connected my GM and another GM from a company today that I thought they should know each other. You really just need to spend time building your network, both professionally within the industry. And then I'm part of a group called YPO that I've really

enjoyed and I mean sort of like you know your hundred thousand dollar group. It's a you know you're just building these relationships with people that are thinking about things the same way you are and those relationships tend to just open so many doors to help out the company and to help out everything. I couldn't agree more. Your network is your net worth. Who, not how. Meet the right people. Relationships are everything. And, uh,

that's my plan. Literally like, you probably know I'm building a nice house in Idaho and I'm building even a nicer house in PV and the plan is to be able to break bread and have people in there and build deep, deep, deep, to deepen relationships because I live fine in a thousand square foot apartment. I can do fine.

And it's not necessarily to impress them. It's a place because I can't fit very many people in a 1200,000 square foot apartment. I can't really have a party or have a social engagement. So like I might be overdoing it a bit. But my plan is like, you know, people want to come stay the weekend. We never need to bump into each other. Bring your family, go in the lazy river. We'll go shoot some guns in the shooting range, play a game of bowling and to build

deep into strength in relationships. And I think this concept is so strong. I think the problem that most people have though is they'll go to a meeting and they'll give everybody a card. I think what you should do when you go to a gathering is try to build one or two relationships and deepen those rather than try to get to know everybody. I agree with that, for sure. I think that's a lot of people, man.

And it's so hard to even keep up. I get people because this podcast is almost 400 episodes and they come give me a hug. And sometimes like a guy rolled his window down yesterday, got a roofing. He's got a Tesla cyber truck and I was with Raul my driver, but I is like dude. I'm gonna drive. We're gonna go to a restaurant We're gonna go to a movie. He's like never drove with me when he's passenger and Dad rolls down his window and he's like, you know, it's kind of like I Look over it's a wrap truck roofing truck and I'm like, no, he's like Tommy. What's up?

He's like I knew that was you because the TRX and like what's up, man, and he goes have you been I'm like great Have you been he's like great? I was like hey. It's great seeing you brother. I'll see you later He's like how do you know I'm like I don't I feel bad, but like dude. I like I didn't recognize the guy and it's like It's a bad quality You know, but if I had a dime for everybody that like gave me a hug or said what's up or saw him at the airport Or I'm in Boston. I could be anywhere bumped into a guy was telling Aaron I bumped into a guy and Bora Bora

That's crazy, he's actually out of he lives in Ohio Yeah, I mean it is actually strange. I'm from Ohio and you know It feels like and the Buckeyes are big but wherever I travel I said people are wearing I'll be in the most random places and I'll see people wearing Ohio State Oh, yeah, Ohio State stuff like I was doing the running the Bulls and the guys wearing Ohio State hat and I was like What we're in the middle of Spain? You know, that's that's awesome. You know, you guys took us to an Ohio state game and we had the time of our lives. We're going to do that more often. That's one thing is trying to get back. I never heard anybody say, man, I wish I worked more. You've always heard that saying of like, I've never really heard anybody say I wish wish I worked more. But I also never met anybody that looked at somebody successful and say they must have not worked for it You know what I mean? So there's this happy medium of like if today was your last day. Well, it's not my last day

I don't think so I gotta work hard today and I'm gonna take a little sacrifice put a little bit more in today so that my future self Has a better life. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I I think it you know, I have children and you think about what kind of life you want for them Do you really want your children to be happy? I don't know that like I'm not sure that I need them to be happy, but I do want them to live a life that has purpose and that they feel like I'm doing something that's important. I feel that way when I come to work every day.

So to me it's like this is something that I'm doing to show the appreciation that I have for my team that's out there every day. I mean, you guys have nice weather here. It was negative, you know, five degrees in Ohio yesterday. So, you know, that they're out there every day, they're working so hard, they're, you know, in these trades that are really helping their community. And I want to see people win big. And so, and I want to see people get, celebrate things in their lives. And so, you know, as long as you're feeling content that you have a sense of purpose in what you're doing,

it doesn't really feel like work to me. I've never been good at separating work and life. Yep. I should be probably maybe somewhat better at it, but I really like both aspects of it. And I do travel a lot, so I like, I like to get out and have fun too. Yeah, I know you do.

We've had a lot of fun. How do people get to hold you, Mike? They want to reach out. They want to learn more about CFOing a $91 million company or just got some observations or questions. Yeah, the best way to get is my email. It's mike at geteco.com, G-E-T-E-C-O.com. Or hit me up on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn, there you go. How do you spell your last name again? I have it right here, but... Barnhart, B-A-R-N-H-A-R-T. And if you had a couple books, not the Bible, not the E-Myth, not the most common ones, Napoleon Hill,

Del Carnegie, maybe some books just that aren't so common, what would they be? And why? All right, so, yeah, a few of them. You know, I always pick like a book from my favorite year. So like in 2022, I love The Almanac of Naval Rabacan, talking about wealth and happiness. 2023, I read this book called Unreasonable Hospitality.

And for, I mean, so I'm always the bougie one in the company, right? I'm the one that likes to buy, you know, crystal to celebrate, you know, for winning a month or something like that. Like, I like nice things. I like fine dining. This book called Unreasonable Hospitality is really good. It's about 11 Madison Park, which these two guys got really obsessive about food and customer service and being the best at what they do. They were an unknown restaurant and they became the

number one rated restaurant in the entire world for two years in a row and it only took them about seven years to do it. And that was a really cool journey of their story. If you ever just need need an audio book you can't go wrong with green lights. You know, it's just a fun one. Yeah All right, and we talked about a lot of stuff here I mean a lot of stuff and I bounced around a lot, but I wanted to do this this way Because I only had you here for a little over an hour So I just wanted to hit a lot of topics. And we've been meaning to do this. We'll have to do a part two, but maybe something we didn't hit, maybe there's something

that the audience needs to hear. You know, you've seen this company grow in the last 12 years from a little over a million to almost 100 million. It doesn't need to be about work, doesn't need to be about business, it can be about whatever you want, but I'll have you close this out. Just my thoughts on it?

Yeah, just anything. We talked about a lot, about whatever you want, but I'll have you close this out. Just my thoughts on it? Yeah, just anything. We talked about a lot, but anything you want. Yeah, I mean, most off, I just feel a deep sense of appreciation. Yeah, I love the partnership that I've had with Aaron. I've loved the partnership that I've had with a lot. As you become bigger, it's really hard to build those relationships,

but whether it's Jack or Elliot or Barbara or different people that have come and gone on the team, just building those relationships with them has been a great experience. And I feel really proud of what we've accomplished. So there's a real sense of pride. And I don't really think necessarily about like – I have this abundance mindset.

I always have like I'm the eternal optimist. I don't really get like, all right, we need to protect it. I just think like we're going to lose it. I just think like what's next? What are we going to do next? And how are we going to keep innovating? How are we going to keep like modernizing How are we going to keep modernizing the home experience for the customers? How are we just going to stay on top of our game? Because whether you're

acquisition, whether you're greenfield, the world is ours to go take. There's no reason if we're 100 million today, it can't be 500 million in five years. Whatever you want to do is possible if you're willing to put the effort in and do it. Well, that was a great closing, but I'm not gonna close now. Because what if private equity changes that? I mean, I don't know when that moment's gonna come. It could be a year, it could be 10 years,

but eventually, like, built to sell means that's real. You hear the horror stories, and you also hear my story, which I love our relationship with the P.E. guys. I really like Mike. I really, really like Doug. I really like the whole team over there. They still give me control. They give us, they ask us the right questions. But do you still, are you worried about potentially when that day happens down the road? Or it could be strategic. It could be anybody for all I know. But when that does happen, what do you think life's going to be like? What are your kind of SWOT analysis?

Well, I mean, I certainly agree with you that you should build your company to sell it. Like even if you are planning a transaction, you should never say, I'm going to operate my company differently because I plan on transacting in 12 months and I'm going to cut all this stuff. Like you should operate your company like you're going to continue to run forever, but it's going to become a profitable, it's going to be a profitable company. At any given point in the next, if we want to sell sometime in the next 10 years, at any given point in that time, I should always be happy with where I'm at and to sell it.

Right, yeah, that's what build and sell at any moment of any time, yes. Yeah. I disagree a little bit with a couple of things. The only thing I'll tell you is if you're going into the 12 months of The rolling 12 you better have a conversation to talk to the team and get them especially if they have equity Or they have any type of p units or whatever it is have them push a little harder that year Yeah, because those that that year counts the most so but don't cut things I agree with you don't cut things set yourself up for failure the year after it sells

Because that's a bad deal for anybody but even when you look at the reports that are out there still I agree with you. Don't cut things, set yourself up for failure the year after it sells. Because that's a bad deal for anybody. But even when you look at the reports that are out there still, I mean, both our industries are so heavily fragmented. You know, it's like even with PE coming in, they still only own a very small percentage of the total. What do you see the percentage being?

I'm just curious. I haven't looked at that recently. Yeah, I mean, there's some reports that come out each year. You have to usually pay for them to get them, but they're usually pretty solid reports. And it's about 12% in the HVAC plumbing electric industry. For us, we do have a little bit of different strategy. Like we know we're really good plumbers,

and we're learning HVAC and electric. So we have a little bit different strategy of how to grow there than maybe some other PE groups do. But overall, I just think that it's still a very open market to do whatever you want to do. Well, I've heard the HX Plumbing Electrical is about a little shy of $200 billion market cap. So that's why there's a lot of people getting into it. It's just a huge market cap. Yeah. And I heard your podcast. Can you open a company with $20,000? Well, probably not anymore, you know

You can't but you're gonna spend 10 years trying to build that thing. You do need some investment And these guys, you know can provide great investment Well Mike, this was brilliant I'm sure you're gonna get a lot of follow-up questions, but thank you for being here and doing that Sorry, you had to come to 76 degrees today Thank you great job Hey there. Thank you. Great job. any business or organization. It's a real game changer for anyone looking to build and develop a high performing team like over here at A1 Garage Door Service. So if you wanna learn the secrets

that help me transfer my team from stealing the toilet paper to a group of 700 plus employees rowing in the same direction, head over to elevateandwin.com forward slash podcast and grab a copy of the book. Thanks again for listening and we'll catch up with you next time on the podcast.