The Business Lessons Behind Duke’s Nationwide Growth

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THE BLUE COLLAR STARTUP – EPISODE 144 TRANSCRIPT
Guest: Matt Fishburn (Duke’s Root Control)
Hosts: Mike Nelson & Stuart Foster
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[00:00] Unknown:
Oh, hey. Oh! Oh!

[00:15] Mike Nelson:
Welcome, everyone, to the Blue Collar Startup, the podcast where hard work meets big ideas. This 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 your host, Mike Nelson, from Five Towers Media.

[00:28] Stuart Foster:
And I’m your co-host, Stuart Foster of Daigle Cleaning Systems. How are we doing today?

[00:33] Mike Nelson:
Rocking! I’m great, man. I’m… I don’t know, I’m in like a really upbeat, positive mood here. You know, we had… I love sales, and I had a solid sales meeting this morning, so I’m pretty much just going to be on top of the world the rest of the day. You know, it’s… I don’t know what it is, man. Sales. There’s nothing better than crushing a sales meeting. Maybe my kids being born, I don’t know. But yeah, I love sales. I love crushing it at sales. And so, yeah, I’m just right in the eye right now, man. How about you?

[01:07] Stuart Foster:
Feel like, actually similar… similar situation. We’ve got, you know, some cool announcements, obviously, that we have coming up. And, you know, we’re 100, 110 miles an hour going forward. And a lot of exciting stuff to come. So, finalizing the franchise process for Daigle Fire Solutions and our exhaustive cleaning system. So we’re super excited to be able to offer people, especially, you know, first responders and veterans, an opportunity to own a business that’s an necessary, essential industry. So we’re super excited for that. I love working with people and seeing them grow and succeed, so that’s what’s going on. And you got nominated for an award recently, didn’t you?

[01:58] Mike Nelson:
We did! Yeah. Thanks. You know how much I love to talk about myself and bring it up? No. Thank you. Yes, we got nominated for Small Business of the Year with the local chamber. Really excited about that. And we’ve got that breakfast coming up in a couple of weeks. Fingers crossed we win. We’re, you know… I can’t speak to other parts of the country, Derek, but we are in an amazing area that has so many amazing businesses. And the people that were also nominated for that, we’re all amazing companies. So I don’t want to say I’d be surprised if I get it, because everybody else on that list is so good, you know? But I also wouldn’t be surprised, because my team is so great at what they do. And because of their efforts, it wouldn’t surprise me if we won. And, you know, I’m competitive, I like to win. So it’s like, you know…

[02:52] Stuart Foster:
Funny story. I reached out to Mike the other night. We had an extra ticket available. We’d sponsored a table at the Adirondack Chamber—shout out to them up here in Upstate New York. For their small business awards. And I said, “Mike, we got an extra ticket. Do you want to come on with us and join the table?” He goes, “Actually, we just got nominated for one of the awards.” Congrats, you know, that’s awesome that things travel.

[03:21] Mike Nelson:
Well, without further ado, enough about us. Let me get to our guest here. I’m really excited about this show. In preparing for it, I love business, I love entrepreneurism, and I love learning things I never would have expected to be a business, let alone a nationwide business. So I’m really excited about our conversation today. Let’s introduce Matt Fishburn from Duke’s Root Control. Matt, welcome!

[03:52] Matt Fishburn:
Thank you, Mike. Thanks for having me, I appreciate it. Yeah.

[03:56] Mike Nelson:
Matt, real quick, just kind of give us the rundown of your role with the business of the business. Like, what you guys do, that kind of stuff.

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[04:36] Matt Fishburn:
Yeah, I’m going to give a little history lesson, just because you guys are Upstate New York guys. Duke’s Root Control actually started in 1948 in Syracuse, New York, as a plumbing and HVAC business. Alec Duke started it up. And in the ’70s, his son Kevin Duke and his son’s best friend, Tony Melvin, took the business over and said, “Hey, this plumbing stuff is okay, but we’re going to try and do something different.”

And there was this chemical—an herbicide—that could kill tree roots, and you could put it in the sewers. And they had this grand idea of like, “Hey, if we could sell this to every municipality in the country, we’d do really, really well.” And they went around doing that to a couple of municipalities in the state of New York. And they’d go back a month later, speaking of sales, thinking they’re going to make another sale, and they’d go look on the shelf—and that chemical was still there! The city got busy, just like most cities and counties. It’s like, “Now we have other stuff to do.”

So Kevin and Tony said, “Oh, we’re going to sell it to you, but then we’re going to be the crew that puts it in the ground for you.” So they created this system, this hose dispensing system. It’s this shaving-cream-like foam that has an herbicide in it. And basically, it fills up the sewer mainlines and kills the tree roots, but not the trees. And tree roots are the number one blockers of sewer overflows, basement backups, and all those types of things. And this is the most cost-effective way to eliminate those roots.

And Kevin and Tony built this business up over 30 plus years from just them two guys in a truck selling it and putting it in, to 50-60 employees, $10, $20, $30 million in revenue. And it got to a point where they were at the end of their careers. They thought more could be done with the business, and some investors came in. I’ve been involved in Duke’s now for seven years. The thought was, “Okay, we do one thing really, really well: this chemical root control application.” Which is great, but can we do more as it relates to inspecting, assessing, doing other programs?

Knock on wood, we’ve grown our business pretty significantly over the last 6 or 7 years by adding more services and expanding where we cover the country. So that’s maybe a little longer background than you were looking for, but I’ll pause there for questions and comments.

[07:19] Mike Nelson:
This is what I love about entrepreneurs! Two guys like, “Hey, we got this stuff, let’s see if we can sell it.” And we sold it. But now we ran into another problem, so let’s figure out how we deal with that problem. And then 30, 40 years later… How much did you say they had before they sold? 25 million in revenue! They built this incredible business below the radar, had 1,000 customers across the country—the business nobody ever heard of. Right? And it’s still below the radar, but it was just incredible guys, incredible team. A number of employees have been with us for over 25 years. We just had our midyear meeting a couple of months ago, and two guys hit their 25-year mark, which is just incredible in this day and age.

You think about: do you have a job or a career? We’re always going after people that want a career, but you’ve got to explain to them what this looks like. We’ve been fortunate enough to continue to build off of what Kevin and Tony started, and build for the future.

[08:43] Mike Nelson:
So who on the marketing team came up with “Rooted in Innovation”? Because I love it, obviously! It’s like dad joke meets good marketing all the time.

[08:55] Matt Fishburn:
There’s many people that claim it, whether it was our third-party marketing consultant, or Brian Conroy—our longest-standing employee right now. He’s been with us well over 30 years, close to 40 years, as a sales rep. He takes credit for it as well. There were a number of people involved in making that happen, but yeah, it’s pretty great.

And while it’s less than half of our revenue today, the coolest part is that cities have been working with us for 10, 20 years. It’s like Kleenex, right? When you say, “Oh, I got a cold, I’m going to grab a Kleenex.” Now they say, “Oh, we got to Duke that line,” right? Like, “We got to do that line. We got to do chemical root control.” I’m like, “Oh, that warms my heart when I hear people say, ‘We got to Duke that line.'”

[09:55] Mike Nelson:
So, 1948—obviously a long time ago, before any of us were even thought about. But when they originally came across this solution and were going to sell this, did they have the visionary idea to make sure they had sole rights to sell this chemical, or any of that kind of stuff?

[10:24] Matt Fishburn:
Kevin, Tony, and Mike Hogan (who is the CEO as well)—all three of those guys are brilliant, intelligent guys. But I think it evolved. Initially, it was just, “How do we grow the pie? How do you create the market?” Because they were creating the market. It’s not like there was a big market where they’re coming in and trying to take a share. It was like, “No, we had to get adoption and get people to believe this.”

So initially it was, “This doesn’t matter, we just got to sell it and get people believing.” But then after a point in time, when some people started trying to jump in and say, “We do it too, but we charge less,” they figured it out. “Okay, we have to get the best product, do the testing, get an EPA registration,” and build all the requirements needed today for efficacy. Because at the end of the day, you’re still putting an herbicide into a sanitary sewer system, which goes down to a wastewater treatment plant.

Man, you can’t put too much chemical in. You have to be careful with the application. You don’t want to shoot it out into people’s houses and blow out laterals or basements. So there is an art to it, but there’s also a huge science to it. They basically built the specifications as they were going and learning.

Now we’ve done this for 40 years, and our workforce—we say blue collar labor, but it’s not blue collar labor. These are skilled technicians that have to pass pesticide licensing. Some states are easier than others, but in Texas, to do the work we’re doing, they line up dead plants and you have to be able to identify dead plants because it’s an herbicide.

[12:31] Matt Fishburn:
Somebody that’s able to identify and pass the test… they’re like, “That’s not a normal everyday thing everybody can do.” So there’s a lot of different nuances that relate to that.

[12:52] Mike Nelson:
What does your role look like in the company from a day-to-day standpoint?

[12:58] Matt Fishburn:
It’s a great question. Today, seven years later, that’s quite a bit different than when I came in originally. Today, I’m spending a lot of my time building out my team, looking at acquisitions, making sure we’re doing right by our customers, going out to see customers and crews, and really setting that direction and working on a Duke’s to be proud of.

That’s kind of our theme right now. When I started, Kevin, Tony, and Mike Hogan knew everybody’s name. You could get everybody together for a Christmas party, they knew everybody’s significant others. You go from 50-60 people to 400-500 people, and you spread out across the country, and you sprinkle in COVID where you haven’t been able to get together for a couple of years… it’s changed things.

We’ve evolved, we’ve acquired businesses, and we’ve integrated them. So my focus today is: how do we keep building that “Duke’s to be proud of”? I told Mike Hogan, Kevin, and Tony, “I want to carry on this legacy.” It’s going to be different, because we have more services and locations, but that’s still what I’m focused on: the sustainability of Duke’s for the next 40 years.

It varies. There’s days you are IN the business, and there’s days you’re working ON the business. My goal is to spend more time working ON the business, because I brought on some key leadership team members that allow me to do that.

[14:43] Mike Nelson:
You know, as you’re talking, that makes me think about something we say all the time. Stuart and I have talked about it over and over again: the idea that you’re either growing or dying, and there is no in-between. Right? And it sounds like no matter where you are, you’re moving forward, growing market share, growing territory. Is that fair?

[15:05] Matt Fishburn:
Yeah, that’s fair. I’d be remiss if I didn’t say it: we have a fundamental we talk about every week, and this week it’s “Embrace change and growth.” One of my team members said, “If you’re not growing, you’re decaying.” I told him I’d never heard that before! “If you’re not growing, you’re dying”—yes. But “if you’re not growing, you’re decaying”—that sounds worse!

We’ve done a handful of greenfield expansions recently where you kind of set up shop. Being blue collar, you have to have a presence in a market, right? We travel our crews quite a bit, but to have a home base with a hub and spoke, local shop, office, and leadership is critical. We’ve done a number of acquisitions, but we’ve also done a handful of these greenfield expansions, which tend to take longer because you’re getting the facility, equipment, and building an operator. You’re bringing guys from other regions to help be mentors and drive it. We found that to be a great strategy as we attempted to get into markets, because you create that culture and build it better from the ground up. It’s not as fast as acquiring something or getting a massive customer, but it’s been really important for our growth in Phoenix, Dallas, and a couple of other great markets that are growing fast. We did it in a more organic way of wanting to do this the right way, and it’s been impactful.

[16:50] Mike Nelson:
Yeah, it makes sense that it’s slower to open a new location than to buy an existing business. It’s kind of like new construction versus rehab—you’ve got to go in and undo a lot of stuff before you can do what you need to do.

[17:10] Matt Fishburn:
Yeah. As it relates to acquisitions when we think about Duke’s, we’ve done five acquisitions during my time here. Every time, you know, in the trades we’re acquiring customers, people, and equipment. They’ve always been doing business one way, right? Change is inevitable. If you’re not growing, you’re dying. Some people don’t want to grow, while other people have been saying, “I’ve wanted to do this forever, and we’ve kind of been stifled here.” So it’s always a delicate balance of understanding what team members want and making sure you can support it going forward.

It’s quicker to get there by acquiring something, but it takes a lot more time and energy to unpack and understand the history and people, building up that trust, and figuring out how to grow it from a base. Usually owner-operators get to a ceiling of complexity, right? It’s like, “We grow to a certain point, and then it’s like, man, I don’t know if I can trust anybody, or if we can get any bigger, or if we have to do a new location.” And usually that’s when we’ve come in because there’s a challenge or an opportunity. If it was easy, they would have done it.

That’s where our team thrives, that’s where I thrive. All of our guys work hard, and I like to think I work hard, but at some point you’ve got to start thinking hard. You have to spend that time thinking about, “Okay, what is our core?” Our sales team comes up every day with something else we could sell or a new service we could offer.

[19:12] Matt Fishburn:
I love sales too, but sometimes they call me the “business prevention guy” because I’m like, “Well, what’s our core? What’s our core offering that we’re really, really good at? What’s the market? What do our customers want?” We could do that, but does it keep us from doing what we’re really, really good at with more customers? I wish there was an easier way to do it, but that’s hard to do when you have customers asking for you to do things and trying to decide, “Should I do that, or do I focus on what our core business is that got us here?”

[19:50] Mike Nelson:
So I’m going to have to get your cell phone number and call you once a week to talk me off that ledge, because man, I’m a sales guy! I’m always coming up with “We could sell this, we could do this, there’s a market for this!” And my team’s looking at me like… and then I try to implement too many things and it doesn’t go great. So I need to call you once a week so you can talk me off that ledge for the business.

[20:15] Matt Fishburn:
All right, you can call me! I’ll tell you because I’ve screwed some of those things up by saying, “Yeah, let’s do this! Let’s buy a bunch of these trucks and units and do this,” and then things change. Right? But yeah, I like to think that I’ve gotten better and I’ve learned from those things. When you have success, you move on to the next thing. You’re like, “Okay, we got it, we’re on to the next,” and then you fail or make an investment into something opportunistic to sell to somebody, and then you didn’t really figure out the market. Those are the better lessons that I always take with me. Hopefully they don’t cloud my judgment, but man, I got some scar tissue there from some of those decisions and investments we’ve made.

[21:05] Mike Nelson:
As far as when you’re looking at expansion, this is always something I wonder about: are you just looking at the map for blank spots on the wall, or what goes into deciding, “Hey, we’re going into Phoenix, we need to be there”?

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[22:15] Matt Fishburn:
Good question. It starts that simple! But for us, for sewer, stormwater, and water infrastructure, we look at population density. Is it growing or shrinking? We look at the age of the system. How long have those pipes been there? Because we’re maintenance guys, not new construction folks. We look at funding—is the funding environment increasing or decreasing? What’s their preference—do they in-source stuff internally and only give the hard stuff out to contractors, or do they actually partner with people and build programs you can build around?

All of that goes into the selection. And by the way, it doesn’t hurt if you’ve got people that have relationships in those markets, or if you can win a big anchor opportunity as well. So density, population, funding, labor dynamics—what does the labor force look like? Who are you competing with as you build up a team? What are the other options for a career path? That absolutely goes into it as well. Those are the big items, but at the end of the day, it does come back to that map: where do we have people, good customers, and population opportunities?

[23:58] Stuart Foster:
Is that something that you look at as well with an acquisition? Evaluating the company and the market at the same time?

[24:06] Matt Fishburn:
Yeah, absolutely. That’s so critical. We always say we’re a national business, but we are very regional and very local. Customers buy from people. We always say, “Sales gets the work, but operations keeps them.” Look at that market—are relationships good, and are we capitalizing on that? Or is the market growing? Is there an opportunity here?

Frankly, we’ve gotten it wrong before assessing the market. There were great relationships, and if those relationships changed, that drastically changed the business even if the market didn’t change. Sometimes we’ve gotten so fixated on “This business is growing because they’re growing their relationships,” but if the relationships change where people move on and dollars don’t stay there, then if the market’s not great, that’s tough. We’ve gotten into a couple of those situations, and that’s something we’ve learned from.

[25:27] Mike Nelson:
How often do you get it wrong, and what does that look like when you’re trying to expand?

[25:38] Matt Fishburn:
Getting it wrong typically means we’re not growing as fast as we had anticipated, or it takes longer, or we have to spend more resources on it. I’d like to say we’re much better than 50%, but we’re not 90%. Somewhere in that wide margin. I’d be lying if I said we were 90% just yet; it doesn’t work like that. As you get bigger, it becomes a challenge.

[26:17] Stuart Foster:
How do you pass those stories down to new employees or existing employees over the course of a year? Do you give that to them up front when they onboard?

[26:45] Matt Fishburn:
I’ll tell you what we’re doing now, and then what I’ve learned and want to do going forward. We’ve given it to them up front in what we call our “welcoming process” (some say onboarding, we try to make it welcoming). But what we found by doing this is that you almost overwhelm people! They welcome them, and they’ve met Mike, Matt, heard this story, did safety training, went out with a crew, and it’s like, “Oh my gosh, this is great, but it’s too much.”

So what we’re working through is how to sprinkle those in over the first 90 to 180 days so that they resonate more as people learn, rather than overwhelming them with all the stuff we’re excited about up front.

As you get bigger, you want to create checklists and processes and get it all knocked out at first. But if a checklist doesn’t resonate, it’s worthless. We got so hung up on that for a while that we’ve kind of stepped back and said, “How do you make this more authentic so they are hearing from people through calls, visits, stories, and videos?”

[28:39] Mike Nelson:
Given your history with going into new markets, if someone listening was considering going into their first new market, what kind of advice would you give that person?

[28:58] Matt Fishburn:
First thing I’d say: don’t lose focus on your core. The new shiny thing always tends to be where you spend your time and energy. But if you are one branch already, that regional location can’t stagnate or go backwards. You have to be able to figure out how to maintain and grow that first.

And that ties into my second piece of advice: who’s in charge of that? Who is leading the charge? To do that effectively, you’ve got to have somebody that knows that market, or somebody who has bandwidth or high potential. It becomes difficult to manage multiple locations. And why are you going to a new market? Is it because of a need, or because you want something more to do? Why are you doing this?

Those three things are critical: core business location has to sustain, who’s going to run the new region/location, and why are you doing it? What’s driving that?

[29:56] Mike Nelson:
Do you have any insight on the wrong reasons or wrong ways to go into a new market?

[30:00] Matt Fishburn:
“Because I’m bored.” I think there’s a growth opportunity, but not enough growth in my current market. “I got somebody on my team that I need to give more to do.” Those are all questionable on the surface—potential wrong reasons. It could make sense if you dug deeper, but boredom or doing it just for expansion’s sake lowers the success rate in my opinion.

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[30:30] Matt Fishburn:
Think about that one bar at one location—how many challenges or issues do you have today with that one location? Multiply that by two, and you can’t be present at both at the same time. You want to grow, but what occupies your time? You could have two issues, or ten!

We say when we’re thinking about new ideas: “Is this a 30-foot dunk?” If I asked you to dunk a basketball, you’d have to do squats and strength training. But if I ask you to dunk on a 30-foot hoop, you’d need a ladder or a jetpack! When we’re thinking about new ideas, we ask: “Is this a 30-foot dunk?” Is this an opportunity that could be huge?

If it’s just a normal dunk outside our core, that doesn’t make sense usually for us. Could it be a 30-foot dunk and a game changer? Then yeah, we will sign up for a couple of 30-foot dunks every year—they don’t all work out, but I don’t need 15 normal dunks outside of our day jobs.

[32:12] Mike Nelson:
We’re getting short on time, but if you were going to give one piece of advice to one of our listeners who is considering the trades or becoming a business owner in the trades, what piece of advice would you give them?

[32:33] Matt Fishburn:
I’m going to give you two, because I can’t just say one thing! First thing is what I tell my kids—I’ve got four kids: the trades and this career path is NOT a fallback option. So often it’s looked at as a fallback option—”Oh no, you’re going to trade school or doing this if you can’t go to college.” That is the wrong mindset.

It’s not a fallback option, first and foremost. The opportunity is unbelievable if you really want to apply yourself to that trade and understand the business side of things. Learn the craft from the bottom up, and then understand the business side of how it works. If you can do both of those, man, you separate yourself!

It’s an unbelievable opportunity, whether starting something, acquiring something, or joining something that’s growing. I tell everybody, I don’t think all four of my kids are going to go to college, and I’m really, really excited about that, because I think my kids that don’t go to college will have a bigger head start in getting ahead than my kids that do! It’s not a fallback option; the opportunity is unbelievable if you really want to apply yourself. You gotta want it.

[34:15] Mike Nelson:
Matt, if people want to learn more about Duke’s or get in touch with you guys, where do they find it?

[34:24] Matt Fishburn:
dukes.com! We got that web address a long time ago. You can find me on LinkedIn—I’m doing more on LinkedIn, so happy to reach out and connect with people there. And we’re always hiring! Our career page is dukes.com/careers. We’re always looking for good field employees, project managers, and team members across the country, so please reach out there or directly to me on LinkedIn.

[35:14] Mike Nelson:
Awesome. Thanks so much for joining us, man. I really appreciate it. Great talking with you guys!

And thanks everybody for listening. You can find this episode and all of our episodes of Blue Collar Startup on Spotify, Apple, Rumble, and YouTube. Thank you to everybody for listening, and thank you to our sponsors for helping us donate money for tools and tuition for kids in trade schools in our area locations here. Thanks, everybody, you’ll hear from us next week!

[35:42] Announcer:
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 Easy, 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 bluecollarstartup.bio or email us at hardhat.csu@gmail.com. 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!
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