The Home Service Expert Podcast - How to Build and Stack Value in Your Business To Keep Customers Coming Back

Episode Date: January 26, 2021

Jim Fetter is the owner of Aire Serv of Sumter, a provider of commercial and residential heater and air conditioning services in Sumter, South Carolina. Formerly the owner of an HVAC business called Jim’s Heating & Air Conditioning, he decided to become an Aire Serv franchisee in 2015, bringing nearly three decades of experience in the HVAC industry to the table. In this episode, we talked about small business, HVAC, franchising...

If your perceived value of that purchase is more than what you paid for it, you're going to be happy. And once you start understanding what perceived value is with the customer and how to hit those levels of perceived value with the customer, you start understanding that so much more than customers out there in air conditioning is they want so much more than just air conditioner fixed. I mean, I tell my team all the time, I talk about it every time I bring a new team member so they can start getting their mental approach right, is if a customer calls us and we go out there and fix their air conditioner, we met the least of their expectations. They wouldn't have even called us to start with. They didn't think we could at least fix their air conditioner.

So that's the absolute bottom of the bar. Now, what do we do to build on that? We answer the phone, not just answer the phone with words, but answer it nicely, like we're happy to talk to them, like we're happy to help them. We're looking forward to taking care of their problems for them. Because a lot of times those customers are in crisis situations and they want to know that they're going to be taken care of. So it goes so much farther than just fixing an air conditioner. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello.

Welcome back to the Home Service Expert. My name is Tommy Mello, and today I have a guest visiting us from Sumter, South Carolina. His name is Jim Fetter, and he's an expert in small business, HVAC, and franchising. He started out in the air conditioning world in 92 and for about 23 years he owned Jim's heating and air conditioning and in 2016 he made the jump to a franchise called AirServe of Sumter now he's the owner of AirServe which provides commercial and residential heater and air conditioning service in Sumter South Carolina and as I before, he owned his own HVAC and heating business for 23 years. So he's nearly got three decades in the business and here he is today with us. So awesome to have you here. Thanks for having me, Tom. Looking forward to it, man.

It's interesting. You did it for a long time. You got to see, I mean, think about it. You got to see the yellow pages was the big boys in the early 90s, all the way up to about 2005 and 2006. And then the search engines and other things like Groupon and Living Social. And all of a sudden, they had HomeAdvisor, which back then was ServiceMagic. And all these different lead sources came about. And I feel like very few people that started in the 70s, 80s, and 90s were able to make that leap. I started right as that started in 2006 and 2007. So tell me a little bit about, well, first, I guess you can tell me about your experience

in the business and what got you involved in the business and maybe a little bit of your upbringing where you're at today and then we'll dive into that. Yes, I just, I mean, I started, I was the guy that worked for a company. I was a service technician and just wanted to do something on my own. I wanted to crack out and everything like that. I was pretty young back then in my early twenties and, you know, it just felt like the right thing to do to break out and start doing it for. And, you know, just felt like the right thing to do to break out and start doing it for myself where, you know, my hard effort, I felt like I was getting rewarded for it. So I was that, you know, chucking the truck starting out. And I was like

that for quite a while. I don't have an employer too, but I did, you know, there's many times when I did everything and just kind of went that route. And it's one thing when you're younger and stuff, but as we get older, you know, we start thinking about our exit plan with our business and things like that and health issues. Sometimes we, even if we don't have any, we know we could just be one setback away when we're the only person from having a stable, you know, it may feel like a stable to us because we're doing everything, but we're relying completely on ourselves rather than building a team around us that can do the job even when we're not there. So I didn't really know how to get there in a lot of ways. Sometimes going through some of that stuff, you don't know the answers to questions, but maybe even a worse feeling than that is

not knowing the question to even ask. And I've seen so many things change in the industry in that time period. Like you said, early on, we just dropped ads in the yellow pages and the phone rang off the hook. We had all the business we wanted to do, but things are changing. You got, like you said,

not all the Groupons and all the social media and everything that's taken hold, but even more so than that, what got my attention was all these big players that are coming in that are buying up the customer base, all the home advisors and all these Amazons and everybody now that's coming in and taking up that customer base. And the phone just wasn't ringing as much for different reasons. It's just kind of about, you know, finding out the answers, wanting to be able to find the answers to those questions kind of sparked me towards the franchise and everything.

Yeah. So you're having a hard time, basically. So when was the larger part of the business? How many technicians did you get to when you were on your own there with Jim's Heating? I mean, we had times when we would have part-timers and we'd be 10, 12 people for short term for big jobs that I would take on. But all in all, we were right around the one or two mark really for majority of the time. Yeah. You know, it has changed a lot in how you find customers and that's one of the hardest pieces. So a lot has changed and there have been a lot of valuable

lessons. A lot of the things probably haven't changed. What do you think the franchise, you said it's introduced you to a lot of people that you may have not met, like Josh Kelly, who's amazing. What do you think the franchise, if you go back, you know, five years, what's the difference? What have they taught you? Where are the good things? Because, you know, I've heard pros and cons from franchise and it seems like you're a big advocate. So I'd love to hear what you love about it.

I am a big advocate of it. The franchise, like I said, some of the reasons were because I feel like I didn't have systems, some of the systems in place that I wanted to get in place, wasn't sure how to get there. And I just felt like the industry was changing and I wanted to be part of it. I wanted to be a part of where it's there. And I just felt like the industry was changing and I wanted to be part of it. I wanted to be a part of where it's going. And the franchise, I still credit to the best business decision I've made since I've been in business. It got my wheels going. The franchise, Neighborly and AirServe that I'm with, parent companies, Neighborly, it was so empowering when I joined with them.

So a lot of what I've even heard you talk about in your podcast is the people that you surround yourself with. And AirServe is full of so many great people, so knowledgeable and corporate is just full of so many people, but not even just corporate, which is amazing, but it's all the other AirServe franchisees that are immediately part. It's like one big family. It truly is like one big family with AirServe and all neighborly brands. And I could go to any AirServe right now, pull up at their front door, not tell them I was coming. They're going to welcome me in. We're going to look at whatever's

going on with them. We're going to talk about things going on with me. There's no competition to it. It's all just how can we help each other? It truly is a big family. And I love that. In fact, when I joined the franchise, the one thing that I expected was to get systems. I expected, you know, why else am I going to join if I'm not going to get great systems and show me how to implement things and everything like that. The one thing I didn't get that didn't wasn't planning is the personal growth that I got from it. They have a code of values that they go by. And a lot of the personal growth that came with the franchise really caught me off guard. And I tell you, I've seen it in so

many people with the franchise with AirServe since I've joined them, how real it is to them, how it just affects people on a more personal level than just a business decision. Yeah, it's been powerful. It is. It's a community and it's nice to have a community. I mean, it's so weird because a lot of industries, like I'm a garage door guy. I go to a lot of HVAC shops and they don't care because I'm not competition and they've heard the podcast or something. So I kind of got a backdoor into a lot of these places, but a lot of times you're not going to walk into a huge HVAC shop and then give you all their secrets and stuff, which there's a lot there, camaraderie, personal growth. I wanted to ask you a question that I seem to see very

common for kind of a Chuck in a truck type thing that you talked about is, do you feel like you've raised your prices since you started a franchise in the franchise? Yeah, my whole price structure is completely different. I mean, I used to be the guy out there that was low pricing people. It's not people's prices. I didn't understand where my pricing was, where it needed to be. We ran things different than we run them now. We ran things good. I felt like we always did a good job. What we're able to do now is just completely be. We ran things different than we run them now. We ran things good. I felt like we always did a good job. What we're able to do now is just completely different. We were able to take our customer service level to a whole different things. I mean, the soft service softwares that we use, you know, we did everything paper back then. So just the electronics that we're able

to use now that just kind of everything got overhauled like immediately. So when I joined the franchise, it wasn't like things got easier. It was like I took on a new job to start with. I mean, for the first few months, it was reconstruct my business like it really needed to be to get it on top shape and everything. So it was like a crash course in business 101 and getting things like they needed to be. But it was good, man. I welcome that.

That's what I was looking for. So that was powerful. That was important to me. So there's someone out there listening. They're not part of a franchise. They're probably two, three guys. They go in and they undercut. They might not have a CRM yet. Their whole job, their whole mentality is these other companies, these franchises, these big companies charge too much. They're charging too much. They're making too much. You know, my point of view, you've probably heard is they don't have any overhead because they don't have a CRM. They don't have that customer service. They don't take care of their employees. They don't have a place of business. So they work out of their home. They don't have a new vehicle. They don't have brand new iPads.

They don't have a computer that works with a printer. I can keep going, but it's not hard for a truck and a truck to make a profit. At least they own a job, not a business. But what do you say to those guys out there that were probably where you were 10 years ago? So you've got to build value. If you don't build value in the services you're doing, then you're just overpriced. And all those things that you list, it's understanding the value that you bring to all those things that add value to the customer. Like you talked about employees nowadays. I mean, it's not just about cutting your employees paychecks and stuff like that. It's really, I mean, we do having fun in the process events where we'll take my whole team, we'll set a goal for a month. We'll take my whole team to a top golf or

something like that for the day and just have a great time connecting back with the teammates. It's so important to them. That's one thing that we've missed a lot with the whole COVID thing going on over the last few months. It's been hard to do stuff like that. And it's really harder to connect with the team and get them. It's really showed just how important and positive those things were and how important they still are. So you got to find ways to do those things. You got to train in order to attract the best talent and keep the best talent. You got to take care of them. You got to be on the leading edge with taking care of them, the benefits you provide them and everything like that. And all that's expensive. All those things you were naming, vehicle wraps and nice vehicles and stuff. So

you have a good image you're presenting out there. All the marketing that goes into branding and everything like that is so important. It's expensive, but it all comes down to you got to provide more value than what you're charging for, or you're just a high price company. And if you do that, you got happy customers, as long as you can provide more value than you're charging for customers. Yeah. You know, there's some things I just took there is even Topgolf costs money. I mean, I've got a lot of games here. They all cost money. I mean, it's not free. Today we bought lunch. I mean, we do this stuff all the

time. But when you think about a company with 60 employees just working here, lunch is not 20 bucks. It's a lot more than that. And now we've got our own internal customers we've got to look at. Or I feel like 20 years ago, the old mentality was just pay me more and I'll do the job and nine to five and I get home and I get my separate life. But they were disgruntled even though they didn't know it. And I feel like there's a lot of people out there like that. That's fair enough. And I'm okay understanding that. I think millennials want to be involved. We want to know where tomorrow looks like. Can we move up the ladder? Do you care about me personally? Am I in a place that I'm wanted? And well, it's hard to create it and it's hard to keep it.

But once you do, there's no price that's worth ever going back. Yeah, I agree. And there's a lot of good questions that I have for you. I mean, what was the biggest challenge before you hit the franchise? I mean, I'm sure you keeping good talent was a big one because it's hard to pay good talent and keep them motivated. People like to know where they stand. They like to know the score.

They like to have, and that's what technology brings. They like to, believe it or not, people leave my company sometimes because they go, man, you guys have a lot of meetings. You keep track of everything and then they leave. And then they realize how much they miss it. They come back a lot of the times because they're like, shoot, over there is the wild, wild west. We don't even get to see the owner for three weeks at a time when he comes around. He's not pumping us up. There's barely any meetings. We don't have access to anything. We don't even know where we stand in the company. And so I'm a little bit of the opposite spectrum of that. But what were some of your challenges back then? Yeah, the challenges back then were

kind of doing it all. When you're relying on primarily your back to do it all, and then you got one or two people. I never had a lot of problems with the recruitment part. I just never really had to do much of it. The people that I would have working for me, they would stay for me for a while. They would stay. Really, a times. They ended up being friends that I hired people that I'd known in the business from doing it for so long and stuff. And it wasn't even a recruitment thing that I would go through. And I mean, we'd just be talking and like, Hey man, you want to come to work for me? I almost in a joke. Um, and like, I don't know, what would you pay me? And, you know, it just kind of worked it out, but that only goes so

far you know I mean if you're talking about really putting a team under you you got to learn about recruitment you've got to learn really building up the team the chemistry the morale in the team and all those other things to where you bring the right people in because bringing the wrong person in really hurts so you just got to learn from it and everything. So the biggest difference is I never relied on bringing a lot of people in. So I didn't have to get good at recruitment. That's something I've had to really learn a lot over the last five years to build a team and the team that we have. Yeah. And, you know, a lot of times I feel like we settle. We settle for what we have. There's never any top grading. You know, I had a good budgeting meeting last week.

Went very, very productive. And I get a lot of fight back about, and this is a golden nugget. If anybody's listening to this podcast, I'm going to give them some gold right now. There's still guys that are profitable and they're good employees. The problem is their peers have raised a higher bar. So I believe you should take the mean or the median, if there's outliers, the median, and you should hold people accountable to that and put them on performance improvement plans. And then I have managers that said last week, well, Tommy, if we're still making a profit and they're good employees, then who cares?

And I said, here's the difference. If you were to draw four lines of marketing, one is just SEO and some basic stuff, maybe deal of the day sites. Two is, all right, we're going to spend some money on SEO. We're going to get somebody to optimize our Google My Business pages. We're going to do some PPC, some mailers. The third level is we're going to go all out in mailers. We're going to do every deal of the day. We're going to be on every forum. We're going to do the pay-per-click. The last one is when you're doing billboards, TV, radio that actually improve your click-through rate and save you money because you build a brand. You'll never make it to that fourth layer of mediocrity.

You'll never be able to build a brand. And here's the biggest thing that I want everybody to understand is, Jim, this is huge. Because if you never are able to spend that money on branding, you'll never excel your client level. So that means I'll never go out to the clients that just want to call because they want it done right. If you don't spend the money on the branding and never make it to that fourth layer, you'll never get the clientele you want to become a huge company and make a lot of money and a lot of profit. So by settling and keeping the status quo, you're not only holding the company down, but all the employees that are excelling, you're holding them down. So they're going, why aren't we getting the right calls? Well, how come I never, I hear about this other company and it's true that they'll go out to like all the NBA players, the NFL players. You'll never get to those players houses unless you spend the money

on the brand. And these people don't care about the price. So by accepting mediocrity and saying this person's trying their best, but they're still not cutting it in the call center, the dispatcher, the technicians, or the installers, you're literally screwing the entire company over. And I just, they don't understand it because they don't like the top grade because it's what happened yesterday matters so much, but I'm always in tomorrow. No, no, no. Let's talk about next year. Let's talk about what you're going to do. And so many people get caught in the past. So I just wish people understood that you got to hit this level, then you got to hit the next level and you got to hit the next level, then you got to hit the next level. And the way you do that is through top grading, more importantly, training. I don't believe that if you got somebody that's trying their best

and giving it all they have, you need to top grade them. You need to maybe find a different spot for them in the company because not everybody has the same personality. But to say we're going to accept mediocrity, I think is a huge, huge mistake. And a lot of companies, 99% of companies at a certain point, they just accept it. I think Jack Welch did a great job with General Electric when he said, we're going to top grade the bottom 10% of every department every year. And on December 31st, they're going to know where they stood because it's going to be a fair metric and they're going to walk out happy and still giving us five-star reviews, but understood that their peers beat them. So he created a

constant evolution of the company. I'd love to know when you started. So you started AirServe and you got three months under your belt that you learned about the technology, how to create the lifetime value of a customer. You learned probably things like you said, hiring, recruiting, training. Tell me, after the first three months, what were those aha moments when you actually had systems and processes to rely on? Well, it's a lot of aha moments, really. I mean, it's kind of a continuous stream of them. We have a very well-defined process for how we run a service call. So we have consistency. Every time we run a service call, it's the same. Their customers are going to get the same product from us, same benefits. They're going to see the same thing.

It's good for the technicians. They know what to expect. They know what's expected of them. And it just goes on from there. It's having a proper sales system in place and stuff like that so that we can make sure that when we go and we're talking to a customer about a replacement or something like that, we go through all those things with them to find out what all their needs are. So many contractors out there don't spend the time to do that, but we do. We want to know not just what they need today, but what they want. You know, a lot of things come down to a lot of things like nowadays, you know, indoor air quality is talked about so much with COVID and everything. We've been talking about

IAQ products for five years and believe in it. Indoor air quality is a huge issue across the whole United States. And it's something that we need to educate on. And a lot of contractors don't take the time to learn about it themselves, teach their employees about it, teach their employees how to talk about it, how to install it, how to work on it, how to convey that to the customer so that they can see the benefits, and then just give them an opportunity to see what's right for them, what works for them, what would they like to have. And that's what it comes down to is just being the ultimate consultant for our customers is what we want to be. I like that consultant or advisor, the trusted advisor. Everybody I've talked to, I called my number one guy on installations and he said, Tommy, no matter what, I spent the first 20 minutes getting to know the customer.

I hear this. I've got a new number one guy in the company. Started out as an apprentice. He's a junior tech. He's now the number one closing rate. Because you find conversion rate and average ticket go hand in hand because if you're not converting them, it cuts it in half. If I have 500 and a zero, I'm actually averaging 250. So he earns more customers' business. And I talk about these things quite a bit, but the fact is that he said, Tommy, I'm going to spend a half an hour. I'm going to treat each customer like they're my friend. And they become my friends. And I'm going to ask them if they're selling their house,

we're not talking about a bunch of air quality for the new owners because that's not the best thing for that person. Or if it was my mother, I would talk about this. My mom's moving out. I need to have a good AC unit that works, that the inspector is going to say A-OK and not say it was kind of a MacGyver fix on it. Those of you who know MacGyver, but you know what I mean? It's like to me, it's getting to know. And it's so funny that

all the top people say the same thing. And typically the bottom people, they've got the excuses, man, the weather has been screwing us up and now COVID's messing us up. And, you know, for some reason, my customers, they want to always fix it themselves. And they didn't call us if they wanted to fix it themselves. Even today, I was on a phone call with guys that are on the field supervisor program. And they didn't make a lot of excuses, but they definitely, you could just see. And I said, you know, what's funny when a guy goes and trains and I force ride alongs is, you know what they say, the guys that they're not very good.

They say, I say all the same things. I do it exactly like they do it. And I say, I don't doubt you. Number one, but the customer doesn't like you. They don't trust you. You didn't smile enough. You didn't say it with the right tonality. Their body language was off. You're not sure of yourself. You didn't give options. You didn't read the room. There's so many other things than just saying the exact words. And so many times we miss that. And I've been reading a book. It's called The Sales Boss by Jonathan Wissman. And it's a very good book so far. I'm listening to it on Audible. And it's just sometimes as a CEO, it's not just sales guys. It's your call center.

It's your recruiters. It's your trainers. It's everything. And I think that probably what you have a lot of insight to is you've got help now from the franchisee or the franchisor to all of those things. And do you think that the franchise has specialists for each and everything? And I don't know how big they are, but do you guys use it as a CRM? We use service Titan.

Yeah. So Titan obviously is a monster in the space of everything home service. How much freedom do you have when it comes to hiring or marketing or pricing? What's the plan on all that? Yeah. So the franchise is really support. They're just really pretty much almost entirely just a support system. They do some national ads and stuff like that, obviously. They have some national marketing that they do and everything, but they don't tell me who to hire, what to charge. They show me tools so that I can figure out what my labor rate should be. So they teach me the business side of it so that I truly understand they don't dictate anything to me with any of that, but they show me, they talk

about value. Like I said earlier, if you provide perceived value is a penny more than what the customer gets they're going to be happy doesn't matter if you go to buy a combo at mcdonald's or a brand new chevrolet truck if your perceived value of that purchase is more than what you paid for it you're going to be happy and once you start understanding what perceived value is with the customer and how to hit those levels of perceived value with the customer and how to hit those levels of perceived value with the customer, you start understanding that so much more than customers out there in air conditioning is they want so much more than just their air conditioner fixed. I mean, I tell my team all the time, I talk about it every time I bring a new team member so they can start getting

their mental approach right, is if a customer calls us and we go out there and fix their air conditioner, we met the least of their expectations. They wouldn't have even called us to start with. They didn't think we could at least fix their air conditioner. So that's the absolute bottom of the bar. Now, what do we do to build on that? We answer the phone, not just answer the phone with words, but answer it nicely, like we're happy to talk to them, like we're happy to help them. We're looking forward to taking care of their problems for them. Because a lot of times those customers are in crisis situations

and they want to know that they're going to be taken care of. So it goes so much farther than just fixing an air conditioner. And I mean, I would say that's across the board with anything, whether you're a plumber, electrician, garage door, whatever it is, customers out there, they're looking for more than just the minimum. And when you provide that, then you have a right to charge more and it costs more to provide those services. So we have to charge more in order to stay in business. So I kind of went astray, but the franchises just really helped me to understand the business side of it so that I'm able to properly price what we do.

My prices are a lot higher than they used to be. They have to be. And we provide so much more service. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you, this is what I talked about in my morning mojo call today. I said, people are standing in line to pay $60 for steak. Sometimes you need to request a reservation. The deal is, you're right, the perceived value is more. Sometimes I offer an opener when people don't

need it. And you know why? Because they want the technology. They want to be able to open and close it. They want to decide for themselves that they want something brand new that's quieter, that they can control from their cell phone. And you know what I find, and I've read a lot of forums on different companies, HVAC specifically and garage doors, is when you look at Indeed and Glassdoor, the one stars are these guys always want me to sell stuff that people don't need. And that's just not the case. It's because you suck. It's because you suck at listening. You suck at learning. You've never been trained properly. The problem is you don't need to sell anything somebody doesn't need. You need to give the consumer the option to buy. If you don't mention it, you'll never be successful. And

that's the most annoying thing I think in the world is that people decide what their customers should get instead of giving them freedom to pick and choose on their own. And to have options and to be able to say, this is what I would do. And to be able to say, here's why I'm going to give you what I think will be the best for what you just told me. For example, Jim, you told me you're going to stay in your house another 20 years and raise your family. Obviously with COVID going on, air quality is a concern. You said that your wife was susceptible to dry skin and dry irritation, as well as bloody noses. We could talk about that. We could talk bloody noses. We could talk about that. We could talk about the humidity. We could talk about a lot of things. This room is not getting

near the airflow as this other room. Let's talk about the return. Very few people even know what I'm talking about, but I'm going to make sure that we commit to excellence with you and that you're taken care of and your family's taken care of. Nobody talks like that. Nobody cares about that. No one's talking about the follow-up tab on service titan as much as they should be. My top guy just passed a million dollars last night. One of my top guys. A million dollars in the grocery industry is a lot of money. I know guys in the HVAC that do 12 million a year. The greatest of all time, Dale with, and Goodrich does. But a million dollars in door sales for us is a lot. We celebrated today. The one thing that he told me is, Tommy, he called the customer 22 times to follow up before they bought.

Wow. It's the one thing that I think is the most common mistake that most companies fail at is they don't follow up. They don't have a system. And today I just got a text message from my guy at my auto shop. And he said, I can't believe you guys, they shit on this van so much. It's only been three months old. It was a used van, but it looked like new. And I said, well, that's a great point. There's no system around it. So now I'm creating a checklist for each week that there's a person designated to check the van and make sure it's clean. And the thing is, is most people would have said, oh, well, there's no accountability. And at least I'm able to look at those things and say the reason why is there's no system. There's no standard boundary procedure.

There's no checklist. And these people let the same things happen to them over and over. I mean, Jim, you did it for 23 years. You let the same things happen to you over and over again. But you didn't know there was anything better, right? Yeah, I need to crack my mind. Like I said, that's one thing. Once you start opening up to other things you didn't know about, it really gets your mind going on what other

possibilities are. And then you start kind of taking hold and coming up with great ideas. And they all won't work. So I used to listen to Brian Tracy a lot whenever I first started. And I used to sit up here at my office. And when everybody else would go home at the end of the day, I would stay up here till 12, 1, 2 o'clock in the morning, sometimes setting up new financing and just all the other things that I was overhauling with the business. And I would literally play Brian Tracy on the TV. And he talks about throwing darts at the dartboard. Doesn't matter whether you're good or bad, you throw enough, you're going to have a couple that stick pretty well. Leave them up there. Go pick all the ones off that you missed the dartboard with,

pick them up and throw them again. Leave the ones that stick and do right. Like he was really powerful when he said, you know, the most successful people are the ones that fail the most. If you don't try, you won't have successes or failures, but that's kind of a, not the best way to live a life. That's not how I want to live my life. And so don't be scared to fail. Just when you do fail, put it behind you and try more and just keep doing the things that do work for you. So that was really encouraging. Like listened to a lot of that stuff that I would listen to when I and i would literally play his seminars he had one it was about two hours long and i would literally play it three or four times in a row at times i would be up here at the office so long working on

different marketing stuff and everything like that that we'd be working on and just the power of repetition of hearing it over and over again yeah yeah i used used to listen to Tom Hopkins all the time and the sales master and just, he'd always say, don't reinvent the wheel, say it exactly like me, because if you reinvent the wheel, the words don't come off right. And so that stuck out to me because everybody says, listen to what we have to say and then make it your own. The problem is, there's this old Polish joke I'm thinking of, but I'm not going to say it, but you try to make it your own. It just doesn't come out the same way a lot of the time. So I think the best training in the world is done through repetition and it's repeat back to me what I just said, and it's

role-playing. And there's one thing is the ability to connect. One of my guys, he called me up just in about three weeks ago, and he's like, you know, I had to push two customers car out and jump it for him. And he goes, these poor old people, man. And he's talking to me about them. And literally tears came down his eyes when he was talking to me. And that's how much he cares about our customers. And you can't build that. You got to find it. And that's where recruiting comes in, is to find somebody that cares that much. And when you literally have tears rolling down your eyes from 85 year old people that

are just so in love, but they needed help. The difference is, is you found somebody and I'm really proud of Justin, but I'm proud to say that my team had recognized who he was and brought him in. And to have a guy like that behind us is a lot. I mean, you realize when you get people like that, you're stacking the deck, right? Absolutely. You have a lot of people the same way, right?

The people that actually care. That's right. I mean, you know, it's not about what they know. Ability can be trained as long as it's a smart person. They have the right attitude. One of the worst things you could ever do is bring somebody in that's maybe the best technician in their field, but hard to get along with and ruins your chemistry and your team and stuff like that and brings everybody else down. They might be phenomenal at what they do, but it's really about having that right chemistry

and the right person and everything like that. Smart person, you know, there's a lot of other qualities other than just being a rock star technician that we look for. And sometimes you need those people that are really good at their job and everything, obviously. It takes time to learn that stuff, but they got to be right fit. If they're not the right fit, then they're probably not the right person. Yeah. It's hard to do. It's hard to get rid of somebody that's very good, that hits the numbers and then, but they don't get along really. I think that's the biggest mistake is I've get rid of somebody that's very good, that hits the numbers, but they don't get along, really. I think that's the biggest mistake is I've gotten rid of top performers because they were the worst attitudes.

And they were literally cancer. They say one bad apple kills the whole bunch, and it's true. And it's amazing how much the others turn around when they see that. Because usually that person gets preferential treatment and really disenfranchises the whole company. And I've been part of it. I mean, there are times where I'm like, I got to pay the bills to keep the door open. I mean, I know this guy's got a crappy attitude, but maybe it's because I'm a crappy leader. Maybe it's because my culture I built. Maybe sometimes we got to look in the mirror and say, is it because of us? Because I've let go,

maybe of some people that I shouldn't because maybe I was in a bad mood. Maybe I wasn't the best leader. Maybe I misled them of some sort. So having that open field of communication, I mean, I've always liked to listen to mom and dad's story. Mom has a story, dad has a story, then there's a real story, you know? Right. You said something that I really think is important there too, because I think as the leader of our organizations, we have to always look at ourselves first. We're human too, right? And we have bad days, but we can't show our employees we have bad days. We have to always be upbeat, good energy level. That's what we have to bring to the table. So I think it's really important if something's not going right, we always have to look at ourself first to make sure it's not something that we've started doing that's bringing the rest of the team down. Because like you talked about, I think you said the law of lit earlier, that's powerful, right? Our team can only go as far as we, our leadership levels will take them. So we have a responsibility to our team to always be keeping tabs on ourselves, making sure we're doing right, building up our leadership skills and so that we can take them to the next level.

Because, like you said, the good people that we want to bring on the team, they're looking for that future. They want to know what that future is, especially millennials and stuff you talked about. They want to know what the future holds for them so that they can see where they're going. And when they know that, it's powerful. They work harder. They strive to do their job better. All the little things, all the little things start happening then. Yeah. We touched on it earlier, and I do believe that no marketing source is created equal to other ones. I think that there's ones that'll give volume. There's ones that'll give way less volume, but better customers. There's all different marketing out there. I'm just curious, now that you've dove into the franchise, which I'm sure they're looking at Google Guarantee, your reviews, they're looking at your social media, they're checking out your organic,

there's all these ways to get found now. What seems to be the ones that stand out now that you're in the franchise world? If you had to give your top five sources versus what they were back in the day with the yellow book, what would they be? Yeah. So SEO is always so important. I mean, you build that so many different ways with content you put out there and stuff. And it's important stuff because the same things that fuel the whole organic side is making customers happy. I mean, cause that's your reviews, that's commenting on social media. That's all that sort of thing that's going into it to make stuff like SEO so popular. LSAs, of course, it's a given, you know, with Google LSAs now, since they've taken hold. So important and everything like that. We still do pay-per-click.

LSAs kind of put that on a step back a little bit whenever they've taken hold like they have. But we still do pay-per-click and still get good traction with that. We've really actually started doing more branding stuff, more things on the radio and stuff over the last year or so and i think that's also what's helped our seo and organic type leads that we get where we just don't find ourself having to run early bird specials mid-season tune-ups all those things to try and get the technicians in the door and provide you know show the customers what we're about that we used to run and gun and do um earlier on in our process with the franchise even when we're building up that customer base and everything. So, yeah, it's just so now we're getting more into the branding side of it. And obviously we get a lot of that with corporate also.

So, yeah, we do some of the forces, too. Yeah. So that's the fourth level I'm talking about to where you're going to be turning that when you hit that fourth level, that means all the cylinders are firing. That means that you've got the right person, the right customer, the right conversion rate, the right booking rate. And when you hit that, what's going to happen is some of the coupons you used to do will start going away. You've got to actually make a choice because you're going to have so many customers and

you're going to have to decide. And that's when you shift your marketing. Now there's a purpose for Groupon. There's a purpose for deal of the day sites. There's a purpose for Valpak. There's all these things that transition over time that when you go into a market, you don't start out with that because you got to get the right people. You got to get them trained. You got to understand there's a different avatar for every single city even if it's the same industry i mean albuquerque is not the same as phoenix is not the same as new york what works there might not work the same here yelp they say it doesn't work in the east coast the same as it does here in phoenix and like for example san francisco where they're headquartered so you know marketing

is such a big deal but that's what's nice about being in a franchise is a lot of times they have the critical math to make assumptions and they get to teach you a lot i know a lot of guys like kevin wilson who um i went and visited him for a couple days and he owned or sold a company i think he sold to neighborly. It was called the, um, mosquito Joe's. They sure did. Yeah. Yeah. But he's starting a bunch of other ones and he, he's got it figured out. And I asked him a bunch of questions and I got to learn from a guy who sold for lots and lots of money. He told me, I can't say, but it's super cool to see a company that's sold to a company like neighborly and watch the way they work and

do and trust me they know what they're doing i actually got a letter from them i think they send letters everywhere but uh they've got a good outreach program too you know what is this some advice you'd share with the listeners who want to become a franchise owner you know why don't we do the good the bad and the ugly because i know I know you're giving up some money each month, but you're getting the infrastructure. So what advice would you give? I guess it comes down to the individual, where their business model is at this particular time, when they're thinking about doing it, where they are, what do they have figured out? There's a lot of people that probably figure it out on their own without having to go through that. Ultimately, I think it really comes down to the more people you surround yourself with that know the industry, know business and things like that, that stuff's going to rub off on you. put a fast get you in crash course into getting where you want to be in a really short time frame rather than all the pain of learning and a lot more mistakes along the way. So the franchise

is really good for the support, the background. I mean, there's so many people I could pick at the phone right now. And I don't even know how many people I would have that I could call for a particular question. I mean, it's, I don't know anybody, any franchisee, any corporate person, any of the air serve corporate people, I could call anybody and they have marketing specialists, they have sales experts, they have all that stuff. So it's all about learning. How can you accelerate? Your growth is going to come with your learning. So anything you can do to accelerate that with the people you put around you is going to come with your learning. So anything you can do to accelerate that with the people you put around you is going to help that. So it's really good. You know, there's fees involved with it. It's kind of funny because I actually had a conversation with the customers when they asked

about that. We talked about the franchise when I was on a sales call with a customer and they were, you know, they flat out asked me, they said, well, you know, how does that work? I imagine you have royalties. And I said, we do have royalties, obviously, part of the franchise and everything. But how do you put a price on some of the stuff? How do I put a price on some of the relationships I've made for people that I would have never met if not for the franchise? And I'm talking about people within the franchise. I'm talking about people outside the franchise that I've come to meet and everything now. It's just so many things. where I am now versus where I was when I started. If you keep doing what you've always done, you'll get what you've always got.

Right. Well, that's what I did for a long, long time. And that's not what I'm doing anymore. And my results are completely different. And I have to give so much credit to the franchise for helping to show me and give me tools to be able to implement to do that. There's cost involved with it. Franchise doesn't work out for everybody.

But a lot I think is, are you going to implement? Are you going to take it on like joining the franchise is something that's going to put me on the easy street and I'm not going to have to work. You heard me say a while ago when I joined the franchise, it was like taking on a whole another job to start with because I wanted to implement their system. So it's just what you put into it. If you don't ever put the work into anything, you're just never going to make any difference, right?

Or not going to make much. You can't expect to have good results if you don't put the effort in. You know, if it's something that somebody is looking for growth, I would highly recommend it. It's a great source. And it's not just the franchise either. Like you talk about Josh Kelly. You know, Josh Kelly is one of the smartest people I know. He's super smart and they do consultants. So there's people out there that consult. Also, this just depends on where your level is.

I think the franchise altogether brings so much different stuff to it, even up and beyond the consultants. I mean, it brought my CRM service Titan, where we were able to implement that. Even things like QuickBooks and stuff like that. We already have a baseline for how these things are set up and I don't have to set it up from scratch. You know, our national, our websites and everything are monitored and kept up and everything. So we have so much stuff that would just be so time consuming if I had to do each and every little thing. And I know that there's just some of the top people in the industry that are monitoring that stuff to keep it on par with where it needs to be. So it's an expense. It's an investment. And I think that they're laser

focused on one thing. And that's what I'm trying to build at A1 is that there's a specialist for every single factor, whether that be my mail pieces, whether that be anything, because I'll spend a million dollars a year on mailers, direct mail, if we break the code. So we're always working on ABC testing. It's AB testing, but I think we should test a lot more. And you mentioned something really interesting and it's huge. And I wrote down a few people, Service Titan, my insurance brokers, Paylocity. I mean, between the big things that Service Titan throws and really the things they've done for me and the introductions they've made, the insurance brokers,

I mean, they'll introduce me to anybody in any business and I go visit a lot of them. Paylocity, I mean, I'm good friends with a lot of the higher guys up there. They do a lot for me. They brought me what a franchise kind of does. They brought me the introductions because I've went out and asked. I've wanted to spend time with people that are higher up and better than me. And it's surprising how many people will take the time to take a couple hours with me and just go have lunch. And I might be able to educate them. I'm giving out names all the time, and it's kind of a full circle.

A 360 comes right back. I've tried to help everybody, big, small, medium, large. I don't care. I think it's giving back, and then it comes back. And people always are introducing me saying, hey, I got a guy for you for this. And it's the ability to network that makes us human beings so smart.

I mean, it's the ability to learn off of others and continuing to move along. That's evolution. And it's something that human beings have that no one else has. So if you're not out there networking, if you're not out there learning, if you're not out there asking a lot of questions, you're the smartest guy in the room and that's not where you want to be.

You should be the dumbest guy in the room. You should be asking all the time. And you gave a perfect example of why a franchise makes sense. And I've always thought about doing a franchise, except I know that when I go in the franchise business, I'm no longer in the garage door business. Now I'm in a lot of guys looking for a turnkey and it takes a lot of work. You can't tell people that you haven't busted your ass just as much, just on different things, but you're still, it's not easy. It's not like, Ooh, I signed up for this franchise and I get paid every week now and they do everything. Right. Right. They're just there for support, but they can teach you how to do it and

how to do it. Right. So they're not. Yeah, that's right. And they are there for support but they can teach you how to do it and how to do it right so they're not yeah that's right and they are there for support so many people think they sign up for a franchise you know mcdonald's makes you work before you could buy a franchise you got to work in the franchise you have to have a certain millions of dollars in the bank like all these people think hey i'll just buy into this franchise and I'm set. No, no, no, no, no. They're going to give you manuals and they'll give you the know-how and they'll tell you what to do and they'll give you best practices. But they're not going to run the business.

If they wanted to do it, they would do it themselves. Right. They wanted to raise some money, make something explosive and help out a lot of people. And they got money to invest because you had to pay into the franchise fees, right? That's right. So every time there's different sized markets, I'm sure there's smaller markets you got to pay less. And in a huge market, you pay quite a bit more. And then they only let a certain amount in.

Like what's your closest neighboring franchise to you? A couple hours away. So in South Carolina, there's, I believe there's five right now, five franchises in South Carolina. So how many franchises are nationwide? Over 200. Yeah. And they're up in Canada too. And neighborly even has some over in Europe and stuff like that. So they are worldwide and everything just depends on particular brands and stuff. Yeah. That's cool. So I'm going to just go through and kind of ask you some closeout questions, but I got

to tell you, there's a lot of takeaways from this podcast. I mean, it's nice to hear someone that has done both because a lot of times you've worked in the same industry, you've gone on your own, you've gotten the franchise and it just goes to show a lot of people have a bad taste about franchises because they see I could have done this on my own. But it's so easy to think that until you did it on your own and then you became a franchise. So I think a lot of the people that are on a franchise, they don't realize how much a franchise does for them. And that's good to know. I mean, I got a good friend called Kitchen Tune Up and they do an amazing job.

She runs an amazing show and takes care of all the franchisees. And I was able to talk to them. And they're just, they're amazing what they do there. You know, they just want to help. And I was going to ask, first, we start out with, someone wants to reach out to you, talk maybe a little bit about franchises, maybe even about AirServe. What's the best way to reach you, Jim? Yeah, I mean, my email, phone, I mean, I'm fine with whatever form. I love talking about this stuff. So one thing you did talk about was as people see success, the thing that's been

really amazing to me is so many people that I've met that have seen success, they want to pay it back. They want to pay it back. They want to pay it forward. They want to help somebody else that's trying to get where they were. You know, they see these people that are doing things that they used to struggle with and they want to help. And I'm the same way. You know, I hear you talk about it.

Josh Kelly, the way the franchise, all these franchise consultants. I mean, there's several franchise consultants that used to own AirServe and they're the same way. It's like, how do we pay it forward? You know, we're so thankful of what things that were provided to us and everything and the things that have benefited them. And it's like, what can we do to help other people now? And I'm the same way. Anything I can do to help anybody, I always would easily. Yeah, willfully. And if you're an email person my email is a as an app west is in sam b is in victor and then my name jim fetter j-i-m-f-e-t-t-e-r at gmail.com so yeah man welcome talking to anybody i really do yeah there you go you know i always ask the three books uh you got three books

that have changed your life or helped you. Sounds like Brian Tracy quite a bit. Yeah, Brian Tracy. And then Brian Tracy is huge for me. He's got so much content out there. Yeah, The Law of the Lid. Steve Truitt, the president of AirServe, one of the smartest people you ever meet in the industry. So smart. And he's just he talks about so many different books.

It's hard to read them all. I'm not a big reader and stuff like that anyway, but Law of the Lit is like one that's really hit home with me that Steve's talked a lot about at our meetings and stuff with, you know, business can only grow as far as I, as my leadership skills will take it. So that's another real powerful one. E-Myth, obviously, I think that's a staple for service-oriented businesses. The E-Myth is another really popular one, a really good one. So, yeah. What did you say? You said it's the CEO. What's his name? Steve Truitt.

Truitt. I don't think I know who that is. Yeah. T-R-U-E-T-T. Steve Truitt. Okay. We talked about so many many things and it sounds like you're just a wholesome good something about just people you just get to meet people that want to give back and just you know what I love to hear is that you feel like you're fortunate to have been into this franchise you're thankful it's a great time to be thankful right now but you know you're actually a person that sees where you've been and you realize how fortunate you are and it's a great time to be thankful right now, but you're actually a person that sees where you've been and you realize how fortunate you are.

And it's really nice that you feel that way because so many people feel like they're entitled to success. That's just not the case. I'm going to let you kind of just close this out, give us a few words and maybe just anything that's on your mind that we might have not touched or maybe something we did touch in the podcast, but I'll give you a free reign here to do what you need to do. All right. Yes.

And this kind of gets back to Steve again. He's just been very inspirational over the years with things that he said and everything. You know, one of the biggest things that I've ever heard, a couple of the biggest things. He has some little stories that he tells and stuff like that. One of them is, you know, if you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always got. And my breaking out of that box was joining the franchise. It truly was. That was the start of taking me down a whole different career path and a whole different lifestyle and life in general on a personal level and a business level. So I really do thank him for everything he's done with those things. They also talk about, and it's kind of funny because I've

got a seven-year-old boy. He means the world to me. He's everything to me and everything. And Steve used to tell his story also about how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time? And that's powerful, man. I've talked to people friends that are going through nursing school and it feels overwhelming to them and I tell them that story about how to eat elephant once bite at a time I've told my seven-year-old son that story so that he knows when things start weighing down on him too much don't let it overwhelm you it's not about the big goal it's little things and you can get there. They're simple, right? How simple is that? How to eat elephant one bite at a

time. And if you do what you've always done, you get what you've always got. I mean, it's just kind of common sense stuff, but until you say it and you hear yourself say it and you start thinking about what you're actually saying, it's like that's when you really get it, that you got to break out of your box, out of your comfort zone and do things that are uncomfortable, don't feel right. And once you do them enough times, then doing it the wrong way feels wrong. And that's how it needs to be. That's what it's all about, breaking out of our comfort zone, doing some things that we're not used to doing and see where that leads us, man. See where that leads us in life.

I love it. I want to say one more thing because you reminded me during my calls last week, at the end of the year, we get all the management together and we go through, what did we do this year that we didn't do last year? What have we grown to? And man, people started ripping off things. We made a list. There was like 30 things. And we're not just talking, started taking a new credit card. I

mean, we're talking about monumental, crazy aspects. And that's the things. Sometimes you need to look back and say, so many times I want to move forward and so many things to do. There's so many big goals. But man, when you start to look back and see what you accomplished over the last year from where you were a year and a half, two years ago, and you're thankful and the entire team is thankful and you're doing things to celebrate, that's when you know you got something. And I love that. How do you eat an elephant one bite at a time in the consistency chain? There's these military you go through and you become a Navy SEAL and Navy SEAL is like the elite of the elite of the elite.

And when you become a Navy SEAL, just to become in the Navy, they make you give up because you've got a full week of this stuff. But the guys, they're the same, same, let's pretend the same height, same weight, same mental capacity, same exact endurance. Everything's the same. Best friends. The one that sees just make it to lunchtime. height same weight same mental capacity same exact endurance everything's the same best friends the one that sees just make it to lunch time you know you can make it to lunch but if you think to yourself i gotta make it this whole week on day one you're gonna ring the bell but if right the

person that says in small goals i know i can make it another hour i know i can make it one more cigarette i know i can make it one more day without booze i know this i know this i know this those are the people that are successful because it's not that hard. It's a simple little goals. It's a small bite and it's continued progression. And to be able to notice that it's huge. And just those two little simple things you said, I think they'll stick with people. And I got to tell you, Jim, it's been a pleasure having you on. There's a lot of great insight here. I'm very excited because a lot of people have talked good and bad about franchises, but you've done both. You're one of the only guests I've had that have been in the same industry with living both. So very excited for this to air. And

I can't thank you enough for coming on. Hey, man, I appreciate you having me, Tommy. I hope that maybe that cracks minds open and they'll start thinking outside the box. Do it. Go for it. Don't be scared. Right. Just go for it. You fall on your face. I had one of my earliest technicians that I ever worked with that was training me. He was an older gentleman. And I used to talk to him about going in business for myself. And he said, Jim, he said, do it. And this before I ever went into business for myself, he said, do it. Worst thing you do is you fall on your face, but you're young. You can get back up. He said, I'm older, retirement age. I can't do those things. Go for it, Jim. So, I mean, that's what I'll leave people with. Go for it. Just go for it.

Worst thing can happen. You don't succeed. You can pick up the pieces, make some changes and go at it again. Right? Yeah. Great words, Jim. Appreciate you very much. We'll connect soon. Thank you so much we'll uh we'll connect soon thank you so much

sounds good thanks tommy hey guys i just wanted to thank you real quick for listening to the podcast from the bottom of my heart means a lot to me and i hope you're getting as much as i am out of this podcast our goal is to enrich your lives and enrich your businesses and your internal customers, which is your staff. And if you get a chance, please, please, please subscribe. You're going to find out all the new podcasts. You're going to be able to ask me questions to ask the next guest coming on. And do me a quick favor.

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