HVAC Business Growth Strategies That Work

00;00;00;23 – 00;00;09;26
Unknown
Oh, hey. Oh!

00;00;09;28 – 00;00;15;07
Unknown
Oh!

00;00;15;10 – 00;00;31;24
Speaker 1
Welcome to the Blue Collar Startup podcast, where hard work meets big ideas. Is your home for real talk, real stories, and real strategies from the front lines of life in the business of the trades. I’m one of your hosts, Mike Nelson from Five Towers Media, and I’m your host, Derek Foster at Diego Cleaning Systems.

00;00;31;26 – 00;00;54;02
Speaker 1
I do, I hear I’m good. I’m good. I know we’re going to get right into it. Dee’s in his truck, and, we’ve got a great guest lined up today, so we’re going to jump right into the show here. Without further ado, let’s introduce our guest. Lawrence Castillo. Correct? Yes, I said it correctly. You did great, man.

00;00;54;05 – 00;01;03;04
Speaker 1
Lawrence, I mess up everybody’s name, and I was like, I’m going to go for it, man. It’s kind of become my shtick, I guess, to mess everybody’s names up. So I’m glad I got it right. Lawrence, welcome to the show.

00;01;03;06 – 00;01;08;24
Speaker 2
Thank you. Thank you for having me on. Appreciate it. And looking forward to our conversation.

00;01;08;26 – 00;01;13;20
Speaker 1
Before we get started, though, Lawrence, I got to ask you, what’s the temp out in Los Angeles right now?

00;01;13;23 – 00;01;27;04
Speaker 2
Right now, it’s 70 degrees outside. It’s, This is why our freeways are packed and our housing is expensive. Because everybody moves here from everywhere else. Because they want the the mild, sunny weather.

00;01;27;04 – 00;01;29;09
Speaker 1
So the mild, sunny weather.

00;01;29;11 – 00;01;30;13
Speaker 2
Yeah.

00;01;30;15 – 00;01;48;16
Speaker 1
Yeah, it’s. While I was listening to, one of the shows that you’ve been on recently and you’re talking about heating and, and I was like, heating. I’m like, do they ever get cooled enough out in Los Angeles to need, they need heating. I was like air conditioning obviously, but.

00;01;48;19 – 00;02;23;17
Speaker 2
There are little microclimates within. Understand that there’s 20 million people within two hours of where I’m sitting all the way around. Right. And within that area, there’s mountainous areas, there’s deserts. There’s, you know, the city and there’s the coast right next to the ocean. So we have little pockets where you see extreme heat. And, sometimes in the winter, some colder overnight temperatures, we will get on occasion, we will dip into the, low 40s.

00;02;23;20 – 00;02;44;09
Speaker 2
And that’s really when, you know, when we get what we would call our winter, right? We don’t really get furnace breakdowns, but if your equipment is old enough, it’ll break down. So, you know, we just we pray for any kind of weather severe during the, you know, each season. But, you know, we’re not, not fortunate enough for it to happen enough.

00;02;44;11 – 00;02;45;14
Speaker 2
So.

00;02;45;16 – 00;02;59;11
Speaker 1
Roger that. So, Lawrence, if you can, maybe, just for our listening audience here, give us a little bit about your company. Obviously, you guys are in the heating cooling space since we already brought that up. But give us a little bit more about, who you are and what you do, if you don’t mind.

00;02;59;13 – 00;03;28;06
Speaker 2
Sure. Well, we we have a portfolio of companies, but I guess the one that, that most people know is Brody Pannell. We are an 81 year old heating and air conditioning company in West Los Angeles. And, this is this is a brand that had been around for many, many years, and myself and my partners purchased it, five and a half years ago.

00;03;28;08 – 00;03;52;22
Speaker 2
And, you know, it was just a lot of potential. And so, you know, we we bought it. And just through a really dedicated effort and, bringing a lot of good people into the business and adding some structure and all, you know, all the good stuff that comes along with that. We were able to, to really make a great success out of it.

00;03;52;25 – 00;04;16;11
Speaker 2
And on the back of that, we decided, let’s just replicate that success. Let’s add a few other businesses to the portfolio, which we’ve done, a portfolio for businesses and, you know, still looking for others. But, for right now, that’s what we have. And, you know, our, our coverage territory is Southern California. We have a location in San Diego.

00;04;16;11 – 00;04;44;23
Speaker 2
And then here in Los Angeles, we have Orange County, LA proper, and then, the San Fernando Valley. So, you know, the businesses are all branded individually. They, and three of the four legacy businesses that are over 50 years old. And that was something important to us as we started to build the portfolio, we wanted businesses with great online reputations and whose customer bases were dedicated.

00;04;44;23 – 00;05;04;26
Speaker 2
And and so that became really a hallmark of what we’ve been trying to do. We talk to a lot of people about their businesses. I get a lot of calls from folks that are interested in wanting to be a part of this. But, you know, you look at ten, 12, 13 deals and only 1 or 2 of them makes sense, right?

00;05;04;28 – 00;05;30;08
Speaker 2
Yeah. And in in Southern California particularly, this has been, you know, it’s been a tough few years. There hasn’t been much whether to speak of, the fires really impacted many of our businesses, and we lost a lot of clientele. And so there’s been a lot to overcome. You know, there’s been a change in, in the equipment, different refrigerant, and the cost has skyrocketed.

00;05;30;08 – 00;05;55;20
Speaker 2
And there’s been plenty of plenty of obstacles, for a lot of contractors to, you know, to fight through to to stay successful and to sustain, to be in business. And a lot of the folks that do contact me, they’re upside down, mountain of debt and just looking for a way out. And, you know, it’s unfortunate, to see people in that kind of position.

00;05;55;20 – 00;06;25;10
Speaker 2
So but that’s that’s the landscape here. This is a very Los Angeles is a very fractured market and always has been. And the consolidator has stayed out of Southern California for a long time. They did something in the early 2000s, and then there were a couple of ones he chooses in the 2010, 20 1213 range, and only in the last five years has consolidation really come through private equity, you know, fell in love with our space.

00;06;25;10 – 00;06;48;12
Speaker 2
And here in Los Angeles, they made a go of it. And as we sit here, all of those consolidated have they’ve actually consolidated their holdings here in Southern California. And they buy four or 5 or 6 companies and they end up with two brands because it’s just it’s tough here. It’s tough. There’s no you know, we don’t have 105 degree summers and and 20 degree winters just doesn’t exist.

00;06;48;13 – 00;07;10;09
Speaker 2
So unless you’re really sophisticated, unless you really have an incredible game plan and unless you have local people. And that’s part of the problem, is that a lot of private equity that does come into Southern California, they’re folks from outside of our territory, and they don’t understand how it works down here. So there’s been a lot of failure.

00;07;10;12 – 00;07;41;15
Speaker 2
You know, this LA is much different than than most of the country when it comes to the private equity investment in the industry. So, but here we are. We’re not private equity. Me and my partners are just three guys that are trying to build a nice portfolio and, and, you know, taking a company that has great lineage and, and investing in the people, investing in, you know, the customers investing in, in just making it a better brand and trying to do the right thing for the people.

00;07;41;16 – 00;08;01;19
Speaker 2
So that’s what we’re about. And, you know, I’m proud of what we’ve put together. And I think that a lot of people have taken notice at this point. There aren’t a lot of companies of our size that are out there that haven’t been scooped up. So I think people know that we’re, you know, we’re an independent portfolio.

00;08;01;19 – 00;08;09;12
Speaker 2
And, so that’s gotten us a lot of attention, but proud of our brands and proud of what we do here in Southern California.

00;08;09;15 – 00;08;17;21
Speaker 1
I’m curious with the other brands, do they do they tie into home services so there’s a connection or is it completely different or.

00;08;17;23 – 00;08;44;10
Speaker 2
All of them are heating and air conditioning and plumbing. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. The whole the whole portfolio is portfolio. And my whole career has been spent in heating and air conditioning and, and so, you know, it’s I talk to my friends in other cities and, you know, they’re blessed with weather and, and, you know, I just they wonder how we’re able to make it and how we’re able to sustain.

00;08;44;12 – 00;09;15;14
Speaker 2
And, you know, I just explain to them that we we just have to be better here. Right? My guys are going out and they’re driving to a house and it’s 68 degrees, and they’re not driving to a house where there’s a breakdown. You know, there’s no broken furnace or broken air conditioner. And for us to convert a maintenance call into the successful sale of a replacement system, which is how we pay our bills, we just have to be really good and we give people a great, maintenance.

00;09;15;17 – 00;09;37;01
Speaker 2
And it’s a it’s a, you know, we’re really involved with the customer. It’s a, it’s a great, customer service. The you know, what we deliver to the customer is probably much different than what you see in other places, where they’re running four and five and six calls, and, you know, it’s just order taking. It’s not like that here.

00;09;37;01 – 00;09;54;27
Speaker 2
We have to go into a house and camp out and spend an hour and a half or two hours and, really just be like a little attorney and make your case for why they have to invest in their home and to have better air quality or have a safer system or have better in-home comfort. So we just have to be a little better here.

00;09;54;27 – 00;09;59;07
Speaker 2
But, we work hard on that every day with our people. So.

00;09;59;09 – 00;10;20;24
Speaker 1
Yeah. And and I love to dig into that. It’s, it seemed to be something that I heard, and a few of the different videos I watched podcast that you’re on, as was preparing for the show that you talk a lot about your people, your team, investing in their knowledge, and in turn, also investing in the customer service aspect of what you guys do.

00;10;20;24 – 00;10;26;04
Speaker 1
It sounded like that was paramount for you was the customer service side.

00;10;26;07 – 00;10;56;10
Speaker 2
Yeah. It’s, you know, Howard Schultz, the founder of Starbucks. He always said that that business was a customer service company that just happened to serve coffee. Right. And I really believe that we’re the same, you know, we it’s all about the experience. And really, why should they choose us? You know, we’ve worked hard on our brand story, and we’ve worked hard on our online reputation so that people will click the button and choose us.

00;10;56;12 – 00;11;14;01
Speaker 2
But when we get there, we have to live up to what we’ve put on the internet. We have 5005 star Google reviews, right? Which which really helps, you know, the phone to ring and helps people to select us because everybody wants a five star experience, right? You’re not going to order a pizza from a three star pizza place tonight.

00;11;14;01 – 00;11;37;27
Speaker 2
But we have to we have to live up to that. Right. And anything less than five stars brings our average down. So everyone here knows what the task is, is we just have to be incredible when we hit the door. And, you know, I think that the only way to make sure that that happens is to recruit great people and to just do incredible training.

00;11;37;29 – 00;11;57;00
Speaker 2
And we’ve worked hard on that to make sure that we’re doing both those things. So we have a great recruiting strategy. We have, a great recruiting department. And and we have great trainers who work with our people daily and hold them accountable to make sure that we’re delivering that, that incredible service.

00;11;57;02 – 00;12;18;03
Speaker 1
How do you what does that look like as far as, I have so many questions here, Lauren. So excessive number. Well, like one thing is you’re talking that, you know, I’m hearing I’m like, getting Google business reviews can be challenging. Right. And I know I mean, we hear it from a lot of our clients where they’re like, well what what can we do to get Google business reviews?

00;12;18;03 – 00;12;35;26
Speaker 1
Like we go, everybody’s happy. But then getting them to make that extra effort to actually go and put in their review because it is so important. That’s one question. But then the other question is from, well, there’s let’s start there because we’ll go to the other. So semi fill in for questions that you want.

00;12;35;28 – 00;13;00;21
Speaker 2
So we, you know you walk into a business that’s 75 years old five years ago. And a 75 year old business with 250 Google reviews. It’s it’s mind boggling. And I just I walked in and I said, what is what is what have they been doing? Like, is anybody working on the reputation of the business? Is anybody proud enough of their work to ask for a review?

00;13;00;28 – 00;13;27;19
Speaker 2
And so it really it was the blocking and tackling and having to teach people that in order to build a skyscraper, you have to dig down and into the ground and build a foundation. Right. And the foundation is customer service. And so when it came to the reviews, I had to stand in front of these original nine technicians here of this little business and say, we’re going to change things starting today, right?

00;13;27;24 – 00;13;49;11
Speaker 2
We are the new ownership group, and we’re going to be looking at this much differently. And if you guys want to be busier, if you want the phone to ring more, if you want to have work all year round, it’s a lot easier when people type in broken air conditioner in Los Angeles and we come up and we can come up if we have more reviews than anybody in town.

00;13;49;13 – 00;14;07;10
Speaker 2
And so, you know, we put together a campaign for the guys and said, hey, go out and get these reviews, we’ll buy you some free lunches if we can go ahead. And, you know, if we can start to pile up some numbers. And we gave them some KPIs to hit. And, you know, we let them share in the success.

00;14;07;10 – 00;14;42;06
Speaker 2
And you know, now it’s it’s five years later and we’re sitting with 5000 reviews. And I can tell you that that has made the phone ring here. It’s it’s reduce my marketing spend. Right. Like I spend less money in marketing because just the organic, you know, broken heating Los Angeles and we pop up and it’s really it’s helped, you know, this business financially because people are just coming up with things with us organically.

00;14;42;06 – 00;15;06;13
Speaker 2
I don’t have to buy the leads. I don’t I’m not I’m not having to buy, you know, spend money on marketing to make the phone ring here because my reviews are already making the phone ring. So for anybody who’s listening to this, doesn’t matter what what aspect of business that you’re in, if you’re a barber shop or if you do windows and siding, or if you’re roofing or if you’re a whatever it is.

00;15;06;15 – 00;15;27;13
Speaker 2
I can tell you that one of the one of the best and easiest ways to, to reduce your marketing spend and to help that phone ring is to pile up Google reviews. And and now we’re at 5000. And, you know, I’ve said to myself, hey, let’s start to direct them in other places. And but the way that it works is that it has to be active.

00;15;27;16 – 00;15;54;02
Speaker 2
Like, I can’t get 5000 reviews and then spend two months of getting no reviews, because the way that Google values those reviews is on the current activity, right? So you can’t stop. You can’t stop. It has to be an ongoing, an ongoing effort. And, but yeah, that’s my greatest advice to probably many of the people that are listening with, with the small businesses, just, you know, if you can do it right.

00;15;54;08 – 00;16;18;15
Speaker 2
We started we had 34 people in the business and only, you know, 20, 22, 23 of them were outside staff when we bought this business. And that was enough of a start to get us, you know, with some momentum and you add people and you grow. And here we are with 5000 reviews and we did this. We did the bulk of the work inside of three and a half years, I would say.

00;16;18;18 – 00;16;23;25
Speaker 2
So it’s possible you just have to have an effort in a very organized plan to do so.

00;16;23;27 – 00;16;34;07
Speaker 1
What do you say to the people that are hearing that and saying like, oh, I just can’t get my text to do it. I can’t get them to ask for the review, or they asked for it, and then they walk out the door and it never happens.

00;16;34;09 – 00;17;07;17
Speaker 2
Well, you you can’t leave it to chance, right? You when you think about for me, if we’re going to run an air conditioning maintenance and I might have spent $250 to acquire that customer, you know, through a postcard campaign or through Google Pay per click or Google LSA or whatever it is. That call came to me. And if this month I spent $1,000 on my pay per click campaign and I only booked three calls, that was a $333 customer acquisition cost.

00;17;07;19 – 00;17;29;04
Speaker 2
So with as much money as I’m spending to make the phone ring, you better believe that I’m going to make sure that the technicians that go out with our company name on their chest, that they’re going to understand their part of the job. Right. They we are not going to allow anybody to waste the opportunities that we pay so dearly for.

00;17;29;06 – 00;17;54;29
Speaker 2
So the accountability part of this is it’s quite great in our businesses. We’re very structured and, we measure everyone’s performance. And if you’re not, you know, holding up your end of the bargain, then we’re going to work on coaching you up. And, you know, that’s up to them what they want to be every day. All of these technicians that work for us, they wake up and they can be whoever they want to be, right?

00;17;54;29 – 00;18;15;27
Speaker 2
They walk into a house with the opportunity to be a hero and an educator. And, you know, they understand that we we, we stand in front of them and let them know that that’s our job. And we’re so fortunate to be in that position to to walk into someone’s house and to be able to restore them to working order and a family that has no heat in the house.

00;18;15;27 – 00;18;39;08
Speaker 2
And you get to put on the Cape and, and, you know, they’re celebrating you out the door and they can’t in that situation. There’s no reason that that customer isn’t going to want to go online and just tell everybody about the incredible service that they just received, you know? And if you can’t get a review and that’s happening, then you just you’re in the wrong line of work.

00;18;39;10 – 00;18;51;04
Speaker 2
So, but the accountability part of this is, is great, right? We, we, we spend money to make the phone ring. And, it’s up to the technicians to follow through and make that count.

00;18;51;06 – 00;18;56;07
Speaker 1
And do you make that one of their KPIs that you track on a regular basis is how many reviews are coming in?

00;18;56;09 – 00;19;17;04
Speaker 2
We do, we do. And, you know, here’s the thing I, I can’t everybody runs different types of calls. And sometimes there’s, you know, no homeowner there. And sometimes it’s the tenant situation and sometimes whatever. There’s all kinds of different scenarios. So we don’t expect 100%. Right. We don’t expect you to get a review on every single call. You go on.

00;19;17;06 – 00;19;39;09
Speaker 2
But you know, when you put that out there in front of them, you really see who your achievers are going to be. I have people here that get 25 reviews a month and you know, that’s that’s incredible, right? That’s that’s an incredible effort. And they’ve obviously said, you know what? I’m going to be the review champion here. That’s the way that I’m going to go ahead and make my name.

00;19;39;11 – 00;19;56;07
Speaker 2
Put my my name on the tip of their tongues of the managers tongues and, but everybody, they can make their choice every day when they wake up, you know, they can, and when they get home, right, they get home from a long day of work, and, and some of them kick off their shoes and open a beer and watch the game.

00;19;56;07 – 00;20;20;25
Speaker 2
And then others will sit in front of the computer and work on, you know, educating themselves and investing in themselves and their career and say, hey, I want to learn more about indoor air quality today, I’m going to spend 30 minutes on the computer so that when I go out and see three people tomorrow, I’m prepared to answer their questions and I can speak intelligently about the things that we offer.

00;20;20;25 – 00;20;39;27
Speaker 2
Right? You, you know, you you recruit people into your business, and they’re going to be one of the other. But if you if you speak to them enough about how important the education is and keep talking to them about it and keep training them on it, you know, you’ll find that a lot of them want to be great at what they do.

00;20;39;29 – 00;20;59;08
Speaker 2
But you sort of have to lead them down that path, right? Not everybody is so self-directed as to, you know, just invest in themselves and, you know, tell the wife and the kids, hey, I need an hour, right? You sort of have to tell them that if you want to be great at what you do, it takes extra effort.

00;20;59;10 – 00;21;09;19
Speaker 2
You have to invest in yourself and your family will. The dividends will be paid and your family will appreciate this. So you know I love them. Yeah.

00;21;09;22 – 00;21;31;07
Speaker 1
I love it. Well the and so from a customer service standpoint. So you you and you know we talked about and you said you invest a lot in training for your people customer service. And I’m sure in other aspects of the business. What is that an in-house thing that you’ve created on your own, or do you go to outside companies or what does that look like for you guys?

00;21;31;10 – 00;21;45;11
Speaker 2
When we started this business, there were nine technicians. And, you know, I’m in the seat for 2 or 3 days. And I know that what we want to do is we want to grow it and we want it to be bigger. We want it to be 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 times as big as it is.

00;21;45;11 – 00;22;10;15
Speaker 2
And we want to serve five times as many customers. And to do that, you have to find people. And in our industry and heating and air conditioning, you can’t just take somebody off the streets and hire them and want them to go out and service heating and air conditioning equipment, because they have to have at least the bare minimum amount of education, which is a trade school education here in Southern California.

00;22;10;15 – 00;22;32;18
Speaker 2
That’s about ten months, right? And it cost most people 15 to $20,000. So people go to these trade schools, they get their certificate. And that’s the minimum. That’s the bare minimum of what we can really accept. So if we can find some folks like that, we can bring them in-house. And then we have a teacher here, a trainer.

00;22;32;18 – 00;22;50;14
Speaker 2
He used to be in charge of one of the trade school chains out here. He was in charge of all the teachers. So he’s built a curriculum. And anybody that we bring in from a trade school, they need more than just that. So we have a program where he spends every day with them, giving them more classroom training.

00;22;50;21 – 00;23;23;19
Speaker 2
We put them on the roof of this building that has, you know, like 15 systems. Or we put them on ride alongs in the field with our existing technicians. And after a few months, we, you know, we condemn them ready to go, and we can send them out, on their own, you know, put the keys to a truck in their hand and send them out on their own and, and, so, yeah, the training and then I have, you know, service managers and we, they take turns, you know, every week we do training with small groups every day here.

00;23;23;22 – 00;23;44;05
Speaker 2
You know, as far as where we’re training organization as well. Right? We’re a customer service organization, but we really train people, and a lot of great success stories, a lot of people that have left, you know, another line of work because this was their dream. They wanted to work with their hands. They like home services. And we’ve we’ve seen a lot of really incredible success stories.

00;23;44;05 – 00;24;08;10
Speaker 2
So I’m proud of what we do here to train the next generation, because old guys like me, I’m going to I’m a fossil. They’re going to put me out to pasture in a few years, and there has to be a succession plan, right? There have to be more trainers and more technicians and more managers. And so you’re always trying to identify, you know, the next great person in your in your organization.

00;24;08;10 – 00;24;11;05
Speaker 2
And that’s the way that we do it.

00;24;11;07 – 00;24;34;04
Speaker 1
And you know, along those lines, do you have like a, process for how you identify them? Like, I know that’s always a hard thing where, you know, like for me, small company is too few people. It’s easy for me to see who the the top performers are, right? But in larger organizations where you’re, you’re dozens or hundreds of people, how do you identify them?

00;24;34;04 – 00;24;36;04
Speaker 1
Like how do you look for them?

00;24;36;06 – 00;25;00;25
Speaker 2
It’s a great question. When we started this, and I had the nine technicians and decided I was going to start to take trade school students as the way that we started to build it, I, I discovered very quickly that the trade school graduates were, I need communicators, you know, we’re going into a stranger’s house and we’re performing service, and nobody wants a stranger in their house, right?

00;25;00;27 – 00;25;17;25
Speaker 2
It’s an imposition and it’s weird. And you just want them to go in and out and be done with it. And and for us, we need time in the house. We need time to build value and to make a relationship. And for them to be like, wow, this guy’s incredible. I want him here twice a year to take care of my system.

00;25;17;25 – 00;25;38;16
Speaker 2
And it it takes time in the house to create that. So in order to to make that magic, you have to have the right kind of people. And we discovered really quickly with the trade schools that we weren’t getting those kinds of people, we were getting mechanics, we were getting people who, you know, they like taking motors apart and putting them back together.

00;25;38;16 – 00;25;58;12
Speaker 2
And that’s why they went to trade school. And then they’re graduating and they’re sending them to us, and we’re like, you can’t talk to people, right? Like he can take a motor apart and put it back together. But like, you’re not going to have success unless you can communicate with people. So we were having a hard time, getting those types of folks through the trade school.

00;25;58;12 – 00;26;25;27
Speaker 2
So we said, let’s just take the trade school out of it. Let’s go ahead and open our own trade school. And that’s why I recruited that, that guy here. And then we started to hold open interviews in our training room upstairs. And we would put an ad out the library panel technician training academy. We had a three month course starting in March and, you know, apply here, upload your video, blah, blah, blah.

00;26;26;00 – 00;26;51;26
Speaker 2
Michael, let me tell you, every time we do this, we get 5000 resumes. Oh, wow. 5000. And my training classes, you know, we we do these interview sessions and we whittle it down to like, 15 people. So what he demonstrated to us was that, number one, there’s just a huge demand. There’s a huge demand for what we were offering.

00;26;51;28 – 00;27;16;23
Speaker 2
But for us, you know, we’re we’re going to bring you in here. And once we do these interview sessions and whittle it down, we’re looking for presentable, great communication skills, good ten years of employment wherever they’ve worked. All of that kind of stuff. Right. And so we would lay down and whittle it down, and then all of a sudden you have a training class and you start your training class.

00;27;16;26 – 00;27;37;06
Speaker 2
But for us, we’re taking the, the, the decision making. We’re, we’re, we’re taking it into our own hands. We’re not just taking the people that the trade schools are sending us anymore. We’re actually making our own decisions here and hiring people based upon our own needs. And my needs here are for folks that are going to give great customer service.

00;27;37;14 – 00;28;11;24
Speaker 2
So, that’s what’s worked for us. And but you’d be surprised how many good people are out there that have just either been washed out of, you know, lost out of a good job or a good opportunity and are looking for another path. Every time I stand in front of these groups of 60 or 70 people and do these, these, interview sessions, because we do them sequentially, one after another after another, every time I stand in front of these folks, I’m amazed at how many people want something more and something better.

00;28;11;27 – 00;28;34;03
Speaker 2
And and they’re, you know, I always congratulate them. I tell them I just did this the other day, 2 or 3 days ago in San Diego. We did one, and I just I say, listen, congratulations on taking the time to be here. It’s 5:30 p.m. and you worked your day at your job, and you came here because you’re looking for another path for you so you can take care of your family.

00;28;34;06 – 00;28;55;16
Speaker 2
Congratulations. You know, to those of you who have been here, because the other empty seats, those are folks that didn’t make the time. They got the invitation, they didn’t make the time to be here. And their lives, they probably won’t change. They’re just going to keep on kicking the can down the road. But for the ones that actually take the time to be there, you know, you feel good about that.

00;28;55;16 – 00;29;01;26
Speaker 2
You feel good that there’s a lot of folks that that want to make a good change for themselves and their family. So.

00;29;01;28 – 00;29;14;12
Speaker 1
So, so is it fair to say that instead of taking trained technicians and trying to teach them to be communicators, you’re actually finding communicators and teaching them to be trained technicians?

00;29;14;14 – 00;29;35;22
Speaker 2
That’s precisely it. That that’s amazing. You couldn’t have said it any better. Because because what we found and I think that many, many contractors have found that if you have somebody who’s a trained technician, you know, they’ve been working somewhere else and they have a bunch of bad habits and they want to do it their way.

00;29;35;22 – 00;29;57;04
Speaker 2
And, you know, I it’s just a better thing if you can start them from scratch, teach them your way, immerse them in your culture. Understand this. I have there’s a bunch of them in training right now upstairs. And, you know, they’re sitting up there every day, but they’re wearing the company shirt. They’re a part of our organization.

00;29;57;06 – 00;30;14;07
Speaker 2
And at the end of the few months that they spend upstairs with fill, and we put a key in their hand to a truck, they’re already a part of the organization like that. Their first day in the field is not their first day with the company, the support staff, everybody knows them. They’ve been on calls, they’ve seen it.

00;30;14;09 – 00;30;38;01
Speaker 2
They’re set up for success, you know, and and it’s really a warm start for them. Instead of walking to a new company and getting in the truck and and not being set up for success. So I think that what we’ve put together is a really magical thing. It’s how we’ve grown the business so quickly. And, you know, it’s and I’m doing it for each location, right?

00;30;38;01 – 00;31;07;27
Speaker 2
We we do this very intentionally if we need technicians or installation technicians in, in Orange County, then we do this in Orange County if we need them in San Diego, we do that there. So, it’s been great for us. And, you know, I know that smaller, smaller organizations, you know, you may have people listening to this that have four employees or 11 employees and they’re probably saying, well, I can’t do that, right.

00;31;07;29 – 00;31;35;07
Speaker 2
I will tell you this. We bought this business and there were 34 employees. And I knew that to grow it, which we wanted to do, I had to have a massive recruiting effort. I had to interview people constantly. And the very first person I hired was a recruiting coordinator, because I wasn’t going to have enough time taking over a business, running it, training people, teaching them new systems and processes.

00;31;35;13 – 00;32;07;28
Speaker 2
Recruiting was going to be on my back burner. I never would be able to devote the time necessary in order to source candidates, schedule interviews, go through resumes. You can’t do that. You you just you have to have somebody. And if you’re a small business, have your wife do it or have your husband do it, or have your sister do it, or partner with, you know, some recruiting firm that can send you ten resumes, or ten candidates every 4 or 5 days.

00;32;08;02 – 00;32;29;00
Speaker 2
You have to do something. You have to take a step in order to grow your business. And you can’t grow without people. And so somebody has to be devoted to that effort. And that was the first thing I did. I hired a recruiting coordinator and her job, and she’s still here. And her job is to source candidates and to fill us up with the interviews and to find the right people and to sift through these resumes.

00;32;29;03 – 00;33;05;18
Speaker 2
And, that’s that’s the first step to growing the business is you you have to interview lots of people just to find the right one. So, yeah, that’s that’s some advice for anybody with a small businesses, don’t, you know, don’t sit there and look at, look out the window and wonder why you have all the wrong people. And while you’re not selling enough and why you can’t meet your payroll like you have the ability every day to change your own fortune, and a lot of the time it it it has to do with the recruiting of the right people or bringing the right people in the business, because you may have seven employees and two

00;33;05;18 – 00;33;19;29
Speaker 2
of them may be people that they shouldn’t be there, but you can’t change that unless you can put someone in their place. So the recruiting pieces is critical. If anybody wants to grow and scale their business, doesn’t matter what size you are.

00;33;20;01 – 00;33;46;03
Speaker 1
That’s amazing. Yeah, it’s it’s interesting. I, I have a friend of mine that owns a HVAC company locally, and I know I’m going to send this interview to him, once it goes live, but I, I was thinking about him as you’re talking about this at one point, maybe a year or two ago, and he has done an amazing job, second generation, taking the business over from dad, growing it, has been really cool to watch, to see what he has done, over the last ten years.

00;33;46;10 – 00;34;08;22
Speaker 1
But he said to me that maybe a year or two ago, he’s like, you know, he’s like one of my biggest, blockages for growth is that I just can’t find people. He’s like, I can only take as much business as I can find technicians to do the business. And, so, like, what you’re talking about just sounds like such a great avenue for someone like him.

00;34;08;24 – 00;34;18;02
Speaker 1
And I think he’s his company is a good size now. I think he’s probably of the size where he could do something similar. And, I think it’s brilliant. You know, I.

00;34;18;04 – 00;34;42;27
Speaker 2
And let me tell you what I’ve heard, I just can’t find people. I hear it so often. Yeah. And there are two guys in this town that one of them has a 65 year old business. The other one has a business that’s older than mine. And they’re legendary in this town. They’re like the oldest company in town. And they both, you know, they when I talk to them, they’re amazed at like, how have you done this?

00;34;42;27 – 00;35;05;08
Speaker 2
And but they always say, I can’t find people. You can find people. You can. You just have to have an organized recruiting effort. And it has to be important enough to you. And you have to want to be an agent of change, and you have to want to change your business. You’ve got every day you can wake up and like I said, you can wake up and be whatever you want to be and change your own fortunes.

00;35;05;12 – 00;35;23;27
Speaker 2
If you have the wrong people, start tomorrow, start tomorrow. Get somebody on the phone and let them, you know, find a, a couple of avenues, subscribe to a couple of different services, and then they can start to go through resumes and talk to candidates and put some interviews in front of you. And you can change your own fortunes.

00;35;23;27 – 00;35;44;25
Speaker 2
You can change all the people out of your business. You can cut the bottom 10% out and replace them. You can do whatever you can add and start to grow. There’s tons of people out there and they’ll never know about you unless you’re finding them. They’re not going to find you. They’re not going to find you. The magic, you know, $2 million a year salesman is not going to walk in your door.

00;35;44;26 – 00;35;57;00
Speaker 2
So quit looking at your door. Thinking is going to. Right. You have to find him and to find him. It takes somebody working on that.

00;35;57;02 – 00;36;00;05
Speaker 2
I can’t hear you.

00;36;00;08 – 00;36;15;02
Speaker 1
Sorry. My. There we go. I hit the mute button because my dogs and my kids and everybody was making noises like, oh my God, of course that’s okay. So speaking of finding. Right, it’s.

00;36;15;04 – 00;36;40;11
Speaker 1
I was listening to one I and forgive me, I don’t have the name of the podcast in front of me, but you’re on a podcast and talking about building your book, talking about growing your organization. I’m curious if do you focus more on external growth through new client acquisition, or do you focus more on, internal growth with clients you already have, or is it a kind of a healthy mix?

00;36;40;13 – 00;37;07;01
Speaker 2
I think that the majority of our revenue comes from our existing client base, and that’s probably for most middle to large size companies like mine in home services. And if that’s the case, you need to realize that and say, okay, if most of my, most of my revenue was going to come from existing customers, how can I how am I going to be able to grow?

00;37;07;05 – 00;37;28;07
Speaker 2
Right? You need more existing customers. And the way to do that for me is to sell service agreements, right? If I have 100 service agreement customers in my business, and I know that half of my or more than half of my revenue is coming from them, what would happen if I had 150 service agreement customers? Right? My revenue would be one and a half times what it is.

00;37;28;07 – 00;37;48;20
Speaker 2
Or we can double it. We can triple it. And at least for our businesses, that’s that’s the name of the game we want. We’re going out and delivering this five star service, and we’re spending two hours on someone’s home, giving them an incredible experience. They shouldn’t want to leave the review that we spoke about and they should want to stay.

00;37;48;20 – 00;38;12;15
Speaker 2
Hey, you know what? We want to be a brownie panel customer. We want to sign a service agreement so that you’re here twice a year, every year to take care of our heating and air conditioning system. Right. We want to be we want you to be our company because we trust you, because this young man that came into the house was outstanding, and he was in a proper uniform, and his truck was clean, and he laid out drawer cloths and he had shoe covers, and he communicated with me and he educated me.

00;38;12;17 – 00;38;34;14
Speaker 2
I want you back now. They’re not always going to say that your people have to be trained well enough to educate them about the benefits and the features of your service agreement, and why they should sign up with you, because that heavy mechanical equipment that here is that’s here in your basement or in your attic, it doesn’t take care of itself, right?

00;38;34;14 – 00;38;53;09
Speaker 2
You don’t buy a car and not change the oil for the first 30,000 miles, because it’s going to break down. And a furnace and an air conditioner is heavy mechanical equipment, and it has to be maintained by professionals. And a lot of people, it’s not on their mind. It’s on their mind. Once it breaks down and then somebody has to come out and do a repair.

00;38;53;11 – 00;39;15;28
Speaker 2
But the best way to avoid those expensive and costly repairs is to have somebody in your house twice a year to do the maintenance. So for us to grow, I need more of those, right? I can spend money on marketing and make the phone ring for all these one off people that just found me today because they have a smell in their house, so their air conditioner is not working, but we have to convert them.

00;39;16;00 – 00;39;34;29
Speaker 2
We have to convert them to customers. And the best way to do that is to deliver outstanding customer service and to have service technicians who know how to explain the features and benefits, and the reason that we have to maintain this mechanical equipment. So for us, that’s the way that we’ve grown. You can also grow by acquisition, right?

00;39;34;29 – 00;39;55;16
Speaker 2
You can add a little company or buy a service base or that kind of stuff. But to organically grow your company, you have to realize that you have to have customers that you can depend upon. I need hundreds and hundreds of service calls a day to feed all of my service technicians, and if I have service agreements, it’s it’s built in work.

00;39;55;19 – 00;40;10;08
Speaker 2
All we have to do is call Mr. or Mrs. Jones and say, hey, it’s Lawrence from Brody. Pannell. It’s time for your furnace tune up. Can we get you scheduled today or tomorrow? We’ll get you taken care of for the upcoming heating season. We’ll change your filters. We’ll calibrate your thermostat. We’re going to do all that stuff for you.

00;40;10;14 – 00;40;25;27
Speaker 2
You’ve already paid for it. You’re already a customer. We saw you last year. Let’s get you scheduled. If you don’t have enough of those, guess what? When the weather’s mild and you don’t have those customers to draw on to fill your board, you have to spend a ton of money in marketing in order for the phone to ring.

00;40;25;27 – 00;40;35;21
Speaker 2
Right? But if you’ve got those customers, you know that’s your security blanket for when the times are tough and when you need calls.

00;40;35;24 – 00;41;00;17
Speaker 1
How does someone turn the corner from customer service being an afterthought? You know, like I we all know there’s organizations where they’re not customer service oriented. That’s more like, oh, well, so-and-so is pretty good at customer service. So and so not so much. But they’re still gone out in the field equally, you know, and you want to turn towards this customer service centric type organization.

00;41;00;17 – 00;41;03;27
Speaker 1
Like how do you start to turn that corner?

00;41;04;00 – 00;41;33;12
Speaker 2
Well, management has to realize what great customer service looks like. That’s where it starts because the people who are in charge, the people who are responsible for training, the people who are responsible for holding the your field staff accountable, they have to know what it looks like. And if they don’t know what it looks like, and if they don’t value it, and they don’t believe that that’s going to change the future and and the organization, it’s going to be real hard to hold the, the, the field staff accountable.

00;41;33;12 – 00;42;02;27
Speaker 2
So it starts with the managers. They have to they have to really understand that the business won’t change unless they can hold folks accountable to that level of service. So it starts there. Furthermore, as it trickles down and you have all your field staff, you know, here we have a position agreement, right. And the position agreement states, if you’re a maintenance technician this is what you’re responsible for.

00;42;02;27 – 00;42;33;11
Speaker 2
This is your share. We’ve given you the keys to a truck. Consider it your own little store. And we’re hopeful that you will keep your store clean and organized. That it will. You will. Your uniform will look great, that you’re the kind of person who’s going to show up on time, because that’s what we’re telling our clients. The kind of technician who is, educated enough to be able to talk to the customer in a way that they want us to do the work.

00;42;33;13 – 00;42;56;15
Speaker 2
There’s just there’s a lot that we have to hold them accountable to. So these folks have to understand that. And, you know, once you start to put that kind of structure into your organization, the cream rises to the to the to the top, you have to set up. You also have to set up programs for them to be incentivized, you know, for the results of their outstanding service.

00;42;56;15 – 00;43;18;10
Speaker 2
Right? Whether it’s sales related. Hey, if your truck comes up with this kind of revenue every month, there’s something in it for you. Or if you are able to sell, you know, 15 memberships a month, service agreements a month, then there’s something in it for you or whatever. But the KPIs, there are a lot more that they’ll chase the KPIs if there’s a carrot dangling in front of them.

00;43;18;10 – 00;43;41;19
Speaker 2
Right. So everybody has to set up an organized system on how to hold the people accountable. Because here’s the reality. If you have if I have a technician who’s driving around every day and he goes into a house and he collects no money and he’s getting no reviews, it’s real easy for me to hold them accountable by if there’s a position agreement that says this is what we expect.

00;43;41;21 – 00;43;58;00
Speaker 2
If he’s not hitting that, I can bring him in my office and say, hey, Johnny, you’re not hitting any of the numbers, right? Either the customers don’t like you or you just don’t care. So what are we going to do about this? I can’t hold them accountable unless he knows that. That’s what our expectation is. If there’s no position agreement.

00;43;58;00 – 00;44;16;01
Speaker 2
And it’s not clearly defined that this is what we expect, then he could just continue to do it forever and he sort of hold you hostage. And if you’re going to fire him, then he’s going to go to the labor board and say, hey, they fired me, I don’t know, I’ve been there for six years and I’ve been I’ve been showing up and I’ve been doing my job and I don’t miss a day.

00;44;16;04 – 00;44;39;15
Speaker 2
Well, you get the power back if if you have some KPIs in front of him and you can bring him in and say you’re not hitting these KPIs, you’ve signed this position agreement that says, if for three months in a row you don’t hit these KPIs, you’re subject to disciplinary action or termination. But if that’s not in place, then you’re in a position of weakness because he thinks that he could just hang around and drink your coffee and burn your calls every day.

00;44;39;15 – 00;44;52;09
Speaker 2
Right. So it’s up to you as a manager, to set it up so that you can hold the folks accountable so that you can grow your organization and and be a better company.

00;44;52;12 – 00;45;26;21
Speaker 1
At. Earlier in the show, we were talking about some of the external factors in your market that were going on, earlier when you when you took over the business and, and still to this day. Right, there’s just a lot of, all of these external factors that can have a large impact on a business. And it’s, it’s it’s wild because I was just thinking about this this morning about, you know, as business owners, we spend so much time dealing with all the internal problems that we have probably created in some fashion, but that exist inside of our business.

00;45;26;23 – 00;45;56;08
Speaker 1
And then there’s also all these external threats all the time. Right. And it’s, I don’t I don’t know if a lot of people understand how hard business is just dealing with the internal stuff, let alone the external. I’m just I’m curious, as you’re and running multiple businesses and your external factors and internal factors, how do you how do you handle that all as the president of the organization.

00;45;56;10 – 00;45;59;23
Speaker 2
Great question.

00;45;59;26 – 00;46;20;23
Speaker 2
I think that I’ve gotten better at this, as we’ve you know, I think I’m better at it now than I have been in the past. You really have to when you have four operations and four sets of people tugging on you, you really have to set it up so that, you know, there’s only certain things that that make it to you and that need your immediate attention.

00;46;20;23 – 00;46;41;23
Speaker 2
Right? I really have to be good at prioritization, you know, and understanding, you know, what has to be taken care of and who needs your support the most, the quickest. Because I’m here for everybody. But when I have, you know, 350 people and they all want something from me, then I’m going to I’m going to collapse and I’m not going to be able to help anybody, and I’m going to be the bottleneck.

00;46;41;23 – 00;47;09;09
Speaker 2
Right. And so you really have to set up and have a layer of management that, you know, there you’re backstop. Right. And I have a great layer of management, throughout this organization that that helps me. And they don’t let things get to me unless it’s something that I need to be involved in. And, if you set it up like that, you’re free to work on the bigger picture.

00;47;09;11 – 00;47;33;19
Speaker 2
You know, the first three years of this, it was all me boots on the ground. And I was standing in front of the technicians training them and daily. And I was doing truck inspections saying, your truck’s not clean enough. And I was the marketing guy. I was, you know, figuring out a marketing plan. And I was sitting in the call center teaching them a script on how to be better on the phone.

00;47;33;19 – 00;48;04;17
Speaker 2
And I was doing all of that. And, you know, the ramp up and the growth of the business was extreme, and it was a really special thing. But, you know, here I am five years later or two years after all of that, after I really stepped away from that because they hired those managers. And, I think that I learned that I really got to a point when we started to really add the businesses, that there wasn’t enough for me to go around.

00;48;04;17 – 00;48;28;11
Speaker 2
I couldn’t couldn’t be the boots on the ground anymore, and I had to have that layer of people. So, that’s the way that I make sure that I’m useful and valuable to all of the people that work for us, in that I free myself to be available for the high priority items for the organization, because nobody else is going to get those things done.

00;48;28;14 – 00;48;54;02
Speaker 2
Right. So that’s the way that I’ve done it. You know, other folks do a different ways. But I’m available to everybody. They all have my phone number. And it’s hard to wean them away from wanting me to be involved in everything. Let me tell you what. My salespeople are the ones that still have a hard time letting go because I was the sales manager, you know, as well as everything else for the first three years.

00;48;54;02 – 00;49;10;00
Speaker 2
And and, you know, it hurts sometimes to to know that I can’t answer that call anymore. And I just have to let it go to my sales manager, because I know that they, you know, they they appreciate it and value the effort. In the time that I put into the first three years when I was doing that job.

00;49;10;00 – 00;49;27;00
Speaker 2
But I just I don’t have the time to do that job anymore. So it’s, trial and error and you have to try to find the, the happy medium. But, I think I’m doing okay with that some days. I don’t think I’m doing so great with it. But, you know, some days I think I do. So.

00;49;27;03 – 00;49;53;18
Speaker 1
So I, I know we’re getting short on time. One more question for you. And this is for, you know, young people may be considering the trades or maybe, a younger business owner that is trying to level up in their business. If there was going to be one thing that you’d tell these people about being in the trades, running a business, and what would it be?

00;49;53;20 – 00;50;06;22
Speaker 2
Yeah, it’s it’s that whole thing about what would you tell your, your 25 year old self, right. Yeah. You know, I think that.

00;50;06;24 – 00;50;35;00
Speaker 2
The emotion when I, when I started taking the emotion out of decision making, it helped me to be a better manager. Right? Sometimes I see things in these businesses that just drive me crazy because I know the way it needs to be done. I know the things that I put in place for it to be successful and, and, and they’re not maybe following my processes and it makes me want to blow up and just, you know, drag them around the parking lot.

00;50;35;00 – 00;50;56;19
Speaker 2
Right. But but you can’t do that. And you have to be able to understand that they are not you. And, you know, hopefully they’ll do it in a way that is close enough to the way that you want. But it’s constant meetings and education. I meet with my managers. I do a zoom meeting every morning, where my locations self-report their numbers.

00;50;56;21 – 00;51;15;12
Speaker 2
But I make sure that I’m talking to my managers all the time. I’m here at Brody right now where, you know, I have meetings all day long, and they come in and they want my advice and they need my intervention, and I do that for them. But I just have to be less emotional because I have to understand that they’re learning.

00;51;15;14 – 00;51;48;29
Speaker 2
And I have lots of years and, you know, 25 plus years in this industry that I accumulated all this wisdom out of. And and they they don’t. Right. So, you know, just I need to understand that I’m still a teacher and I’m still teaching them. As far as other advice, I think that what we do in the trades is, you know, the whole service industry, regardless of what facet you’re in, it’s a great thing to be in right there.

00;51;49;02 – 00;52;10;28
Speaker 2
There are so many things that we can fulfill for for customers and for the people out there. And, but if you’re going to start a business or if you have a small business, you have to decide what kind of company you want to be. And I mentioned earlier, you’re not going to call a three star pizza company tonight and order your pizza from them, right?

00;52;10;28 – 00;52;35;06
Speaker 2
That’s your online reputation and the brand story that you’ve created in the brand that you build. That’s that’s your your greatest currency. Right. Well, we’ve came into this business. The trucks, the stickers were peeling off of some old white trucks that were side swiped. And the technicians are running around wearing, running shoes and jeans and and the website was awful.

00;52;35;06 – 00;53;00;22
Speaker 2
And just like, I couldn’t be that kind of company, I wanted to be just the picture of professionalism and to be the biggest, strongest brand in this city. And here we are today, and we are 100% that we went all the awards, we’ve got all the reviews, and our reputation is stellar and done. Everybody can do that every day in their business.

00;53;00;22 – 00;53;20;22
Speaker 2
They can wake up and say, hey, that’s what I want to be and start to take. Just check little boxes, take a few steps. You don’t have the right people figure out how to recruit the right people in. Right? You don’t have the right online reputation or brand story. Make that this week’s work or next week’s work.

00;53;20;25 – 00;53;40;27
Speaker 2
It can all get done. And there are a lot of contractors that just don’t get it done because they don’t know how to prioritize. So look around at the companies around you when you see their amazing vans driving down the freeway, and you click on and you see an amazing, website and their technicians look great and the reviews are amazing, there’s a reason that they got there, right.

00;53;40;28 – 00;53;59;17
Speaker 2
And and you just have to do a little digging and figure out how to get there. But, you know, a lot of tools that people can use to, to be a better company. I hope that some of the things that I’ve talked about today are, are useful to your listeners. But a lot of it just boils down to common sense.

00;53;59;17 – 00;54;15;25
Speaker 2
You, you know, you just have to invest in yourself and invest in your people and have processes and procedures so that you can be an agent of change in your own business and, and take care of your customers and have more employees and have more revenue. I love it.

00;54;15;27 – 00;54;30;03
Speaker 1
Thank you so much for jumping on the show this day, Lawrence. This was great. I, I definitely took a few things away, so I’m sure that our listeners did as well. So thank you so much. If if people want to learn more about you, about your company, how do they find you guys?

00;54;30;05 – 00;54;53;02
Speaker 2
My company is Brody, Pannell, Brody, Penn and Eli in Los Angeles and, Google us. And there’s all kinds of as you said, I’ve done a lot of podcasts and and I, you know, I, I’ve done all the podcast. They asked me to do them. And I love to help contractors. I love to do this right. I I’ll give it all the way for free.

00;54;53;04 – 00;55;13;07
Speaker 2
You know, I don’t have a book deal. I don’t have a you don’t have to spend $129 a month with me to get, you know, the secrets. Like, I’ll give it all up, you know, you can find me on LinkedIn as well, but, every time I do these, these podcasts, I. There will be a dozen emails from small contractors just asking questions, and I’ll answer all of them.

00;55;13;07 – 00;55;28;28
Speaker 2
I’m always happy to help. And, because once upon a time, I was a small contractor, and, you know, I had some great mentors and people that helped me. So, I’m happy to help. And, I hope that today’s conversation will help some folks out there.

00;55;29;01 – 00;55;48;22
Speaker 1
And so I thank you so much, man. I really appreciate it. And, thanks. Of course. Everybody listening. You know, check us out of blue collar startup.io. That’s our website. You can find us on YouTube, on Rumble, on Spotify, on Apple. There’s probably other places too, but let’s focus on those for now. Like subscribe. Leave us a five star review.

00;55;48;25 – 00;55;58;01
Speaker 1
5005 star review. Sounds very nice. So we’ll we’ve got a metric we’re now shooting for Lauren. So there you go. There you go. Thanks again for joining us.

00;55;58;04 – 00;56;26;04
Speaker 1
And that wraps up another episode of Blue Collar Startup. A big thank you to our sponsors, Five Towers Media, Daigle Cleaning Systems, Daigle Fire Solutions, The Michaels Group, Martin Electric, MLB construction, Pinocchio Construction People, and Catamount Consulting for making this podcast possible. And thank you for tuning in. If you learned something or felt inspired. Connect with us on our website at Blue Collar Startup Bio or email us at hardhat Dot CSU at gmail.com.

00;56;26;04 – 00;56;39;00
Speaker 1
We’d love to hear your questions and topic ideas. Help us spread the word by sharing the show and following us on social media for updates. Until next time, keep on building. Keep on dreaming and keep hustling like your future depends on it.

00;56;39;03 – 00;56;48;06
Unknown
Oh, hey. Oh!

00;56;48;08 – 00;56;49;14
Unknown
Oh!