Podcast: Mike Cappuccio Welcomes Victor Waskiewicz of JV Mechanical Contractors in Webster, MA

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TRANSCRIPT

Mike Cappuccio: Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the Dominic Douglas Podcast, where I tell the stories of entrepreneurs who are building the business that are focused on ductless heat pumps.

I’m Mike Cappuccio, the owner of Dominate Ductless, and I’m excited today to have a longtime friend and business owner, Victor Waskiewicz.

Did I say that right? And the name of Victor’s business is JV Mechanical Contractors. And Victor is located in Webster, Massachusetts.

So, Victor, let’s, you know, get into it this morning. Can you tell the audience a little bit about yourself and a little bit about your company and in your day to day roles and what you do there?

Victor Waskiewicz: Morning, Mike. Yeah. Morning.

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Mike: You’re welcome. I enjoy it.

Victor: So, uh, I started with my father, and in 1987.

My father Joe, that’s how we got the name JV Joe and Vic, and my dad was a lifelong plumber.

He’s 81 now, so through the 60s and 70s, he was a plumber, a union plumber out in, uh, out in Boston working a lot of the high rises.

You see when you fly into Logan Airport along the Riviera. Yeah. So a lot of those, he he, he ran crews, uh, plumbing. And he got into the HVAC world in the, uh, in the late 70s, early 80s, refrigeration and so on.

Meet Victor Waskiewicz of JV Mechanical Contractors

Victor: So as a kid, I was always turn in wrenches with him. You know, he’d bring me in the truck, I put a boiler in with him, you know, he’d bring me to all these little jobs he was doing. And so, you know, it seemed like that was somewhat of my destiny. I just was not going to college. I knew that later in high school. It just was not my thing. So, uh, when I graduated high school in 87, I jumped in a van with my dad, and we started a local business. He moved from the Commercial Union side, and we just started a local business here in Webster.

And, um, you know, you sign me up as an apprentice. So I started on the plumbing side of the business.

Mike: Wow. Okay. I didn’t know that. All right.

Yeah, yeah. Got me. He helped push me to get licensed. Uh, got my master license. Probably when I was 22. My master plumber’s license then in Connecticut got licensed in Connecticut because we’re right on the border. Um, and then, uh, we just started, uh, doing sales calls here in town. You know, working. I was I was my thing was more on the plumbing and hydronic heating side boilers, um, steam hydraulics rating, floor heating. Uh, that’s how I cut my teeth. That’s how I got into the industry.

And, uh. Yeah. Then we, um, we did everything from steam boilers, radiant floor heating, rooftop units. We got into that as we got into the HVAC back side, just, uh, swapping out rooftop units, um, process piping. And my father wasn’t afraid to do anything he said. Hey, listen. The pipe. It’s copper pipe, whether it’s a four inch or a half inch. He said it all. The tongue, it all gets.

It all gets. All gets put together, right?

Exactly, exactly. So don’t be afraid of it. So I, you know, I give my dad credit for, uh, you know, teaching me not to be afraid to to to go after it and, and try different things that, you know, and if you don’t have the answers and if you don’t know, learn, find out, talk to people that know how to do certain things and and just, you know.

Knowing Your Numbers is the Path to Profitability

Briggs: Heat pumps are. Yes, all the utilities, they’re pushing them. Right, but it was even before that, before utilities were pushing them, we were selling them. It was the best solution for a lot of people. So we started moving them way back then. But going to your classes, how did the training and the training is understanding where the profitability is.
So when I learned from you early on was we made and I had another business coach. We focused on full departments within the company. Most companies that run this is one of their major problems. All the profits from all divisions go into a pool, and they don’t know where they’re making money. I got money at the end of the day, and I’m good.

Cappuccio: They don’t know.

Briggs: They don’t understand that. They don’t understand that, hey, let’s departmentalize. Find out what makes us successful. Where is our most profitable dollars come from? It took me a very short year to two years of actually focusing on that and separating the ductless division to realize Douglas was, hands down my most profitable division.

And once we learned that, we focused all of our energy, all of our marketing, on our most profitable division. And if people would just understand that the contract is out there, if they just learned their numbers, they would do the same.

Cappuccio: So what we’re really saying is probably what helped it was to understand the profitability.

Briggs: Hands down, is knowing your numbers. Because I’m a big. When it comes to that, I’m a real fanatic about numbers. I want to know how many pennies I’m going to make before I buy the first screw. And you can do that with Duckworth, because it comes down to labor management. When you have low labor jobs, they’re low risk. When you have high labor jobs, you’re high risk, because you and I went both to the same old school of one guy works, two guys talk, three guys party. Right?

Cappuccio: Absolutely.

Briggs: Small labor crews. Focus on labor management, and your profitability will go through the roof.

Cappuccio: Yeah, I always used to look, too, and show people, when you look at the numbers and you look at the material and the labor cost, that’s one of the big things we really focus on in the training, which you’ve seen is like, okay, we’ve got $3,000 in equipment costs, and we’ve got $500 in labor costs.

Well, the ratio to that is almost six to one. When you have a six to one ratio with that, you know, that’s going to be a profitable job versus $3,000 in material and $5,000 in labor. It’s going to be very hard to make money on a job like that in there, on that type of a job.

But if there were a couple of high-level topics that really, really helped you, what were they? I mean, what did you really see? Like what? I mean, I know he’s just sat in a training a few months back, and I’m saying to myself, what’s Mike Briggs doing here? Back here to just kind of see what he might be able to pick up. What did you pick up out of that last class that we did? Because you’ve been to several, you saw that. You said, I can go do this on a high, you know, a high-level topic that you said, you know what? This looks good. I got to make some changes here.

Briggs: Yeah. And it was not to go back to what we were talking about, but it did come down to knowing your costs, but that ultimately, once you know your costs, I think one of the highest level things I take away is once you get your costs down and understand, okay, this is how much fuel it’s going to take to be profitable.

Now focus on your standards. Bring the highest level of standards to the game to separate yourself from everybody else. And I really push my guys when you go through your books in how to install the product and everything else, I want to train those guys. Yes, installing ductless is simple, but doing it right is not simple.

So I focus on the details of making sure every aspect of the install is perfect. I treat our customers like they’re walking into a Bentley dealership every time. That’s the kind of service I want to give them. High-level service with high-level product. And then you can separate yourself from everyone.

Mike: What are your day to day roles now? What do you do now? Because it seems like the company has changed a little bit. It’s it’s yeah. Has it changed over time?

Victor: It did. It did I put the ductless side of the industry? I put my first ductless in in 1991, believe it or not.

Mike: Wow. Right around the same time I did.

Victor: Yeah. All right. So, you know, they they weren’t as pretty right now. Pretty hideous looking. Um, and, um, you know, that was my introduction to that world. It wasn’t taking off. As you know, there were struggles back then.

A lot of struggles.

So still doing plumbing and conventional air conditioning, unitary stuff. We just stuck with that because that’s how we could pay bills and didn’t push it back then like you did the the, the ductless work.

Mike: How did you get into the air conditioning side from the plumbing side? Because you were heavy plumbing?

Victor: I was we I think at one point what we did, my dad had it under his belt. He he did he knew HVAC right.

So okay.

We would.

Do both. He knew both.

He knew both. And refrigeration like coolers. I remember putting walking coolers together, uh, putting them together with them. You know.

Mike: I did that too.

Victor: Okay. So. Yeah. Yeah. So I got a taste of everything. And then later, you know, I was in the field doing my thing as a service tech. That’s what I did for 20 some odd years, probably into the early 2000. Then I started my role in the business, uh, kind of evolved into going out and doing estimates on plumbing, heating, AC. I learned I had to learn the AC side of the business as far as the the estimating part, right. The other stuff was easy for me because I knew how to do it.

So then we hired some AC techs. I actually learned some from them on the on the technical side. And then it grew into, you know, many splits, went through a few different product lines in the, in the probably 2005, 2007 and then landed where I am now with Mitsubishi. And then that’s when we started taking off with the Ductless.

Mike: That’s, that’s that’s very interesting. So I want to ask you this question. When did we first meet or when did you first hear of myself? Am going to make it. I’m going to make you think this morning.

Victor: Yeah. You know, Mike, I remember meeting you. It was in Hartford or somewhere near Hartford, Connecticut. You were doing a one day class in a hotel?

Mike: Yeah. That was a long time ago. It was kind of a kind of a dingy motel right off. I remember pulling up there and looking at that place and going, oh, we’re having a meeting here. Do you remember this? I thought this, now it’s coming back to me now. Okay. It’s coming back to me.

Victor: Yeah. And I met you there, and. And I thought the same thing. I’m like, boy, this is an interesting place for this, but let’s go with it. It was co-sponsored by by our distributor, I believe. Um.

Mike: And what was that distributor?

Victor: It might have been Homans. It was probably Homans.

Mike: Okay.

Victor: I believe it was Homans. It was a while ago. I mean, it’s gotta be.

Mike: Tend to think it was at the time. I think I remember this now.

Victor: Yeah. And and at the end of the class, you. I’ll always remember this because I learned about you by the end of the class. You know, you’re sure about your history. And you taught us some really very interesting things about processes and how you do things. And you were growing it. It seemed like you were in a real good growth.

Mike: I was in a growth spurt at that time. That was probably about at least 12. Oh, God, let me think, I said. I’ve been out of it now for years. So at least 15 years, maybe ten, 10 to 1012 anyway. Good. 12.

Victor: Yes, I would agree with that.

Mike: That was when I first started doing consulting and training for Mitsubishi at the time.

Victor: It seemed like it was new it, and I don’t mean that in a way where it looked like you were new at it. It looked. You were sharing the wealth of information as you do now. And you’re you’re you’re more defined classes. But it seemed like it was just kind of getting off. And I it was I got a lot out of it. And I remember at the end you had your laptop open and a couple guys were just coming to speak with you, and I was able to chat with you and you shared your USB stick with me with all this information. And I couldn’t believe it. I’m like, well, this guy makes a nice guy.

He he gave me all this information. He’s not a real competitor because I don’t think we really crossed paths from where I am.

Mike: I will not see it. I’ll share my information with a competitor, I don’t care.

Victor: Yeah.

Mike: Because it really only depends on if they’re going to use the information or not. And then really, they’re really not. It’s kind of like it depends on how serious they are with their business. Some guys are serious, some guys aren’t, you know. Right. So we meet, I give you this USB drive. What do you what do you do? What do you.

Come back with it? I plug it in and I’m looking at all this stuff you got. You know, you list them how you suck a truck and taking a phone call. The CSR is how they how they the script and what what you ask and how you gather information from the customer and and you know. But of course there’s so much you’re an overload. Right?

Mike: Overload. Yeah, I need to pick. I always tell people, like I say, don’t boil the ocean. We’re not here to boil the ocean today. Pick a couple things, pick a couple things and run with it. Exactly, exactly. Short term and long term. Take two things short term and two things long term.

Victor: Yep, that’s what I did. Slowly. It was painful. Painful for me to not be able to grab more out of it and just adapt it, so I. Yeah, the thing sits there hanging, right. I see the USB stick hanging on my monitor all the time. I’m like, I’ll plug it in, look in. Just get in my head. Right. And it took time because when we were growing with all the other aspects of our business from the hydronic side, because that’s a big part of it’s, you know, and, and the plumbing and, and I’m growing with my team and, and managing them.

So we just get bits and pieces and start implementing them as we grew. The ductless side of the business.

Mike: Is the hydronic side of it’s still a big part of your business today.

Victor: It’s a substantial part. We’re still doing boiler swap outs, um, you know, wall hung, condensing boilers, uh, radiant floor heating where there’s a demand. We still do that because it’s profitable and it works. And we’ve been I’ve been doing it since the early 90s, late 80s. Radiant. And we’re known for it, so why not.

Mike: Good at it? You know what you’re doing. You don’t have to venture into a different part. But if you were to look back in, like when you first started, not even, say, like five years into it with your dad. Hydraulics was what a percentage of your business was that at that point?

What was most of it? Hydraulics and plumbing. It was.

Victor: It was almost 90, 95, 90. Oh, totally. 95% of your business.

Mike: Yeah.

And then if you look at your business today, what is it from a percentage? Like if you bring it in your, your heat pump and Mitsubishi product side of your business and your hydraulic side of the business, what is it today? Is it is it a 90% hydraulic still.

Victor: No, no, it’s it’s definitely changed. It’s flipped. I would say right now we’re like a good 60% on the Ductless.

Mike: 60%.

Victor: About almost 60. Yeah. Close to it was half and a half for a while and it seems like it’s starting to tip. We’re getting closer.

Mike: And you start measuring that throughout the years and kind of looking at the revenue and seeing this shift in this business.

Victor: Yes.

Mike: What attributed to the shift? What what the how did you get that? How did you get that wave to kind of roll over? What happened then in that journey?

Victor: I want to say, you know, the more I went to your events and others in the ductless world and saw the success of other people like you and other contractors, some friends I know up north they’re they’re killing it. And I started to see it was like a light switch. I’m like, you know, there’s there’s a lot to be had here. You know, this this part of the business.

We mentioned up, you know, what does that mean?

Yeah.

Got the same people that bought me.

Yeah.

Pretty much. But anyway, so you see these other guys killing it and making, doing, making the shift.

And I feel.

The light switch. What? Something flipped the switch.

Well, for one, the the profitability of Ductless installs versus the stuff that all the other stuff I’ve done, you know, you know what takes more man hours and there could be more headaches. And honestly, with Ductless, I mean, for me, they’re the easiest to sell out of everything I sell. And I like I said, I do like I said before, from soup to nuts, I, I’ve done a lot. Um, and they’re the easiest to sell, promote and install and they don’t they don’t kick back.

There’s not a lot of issues with.

And I always say this to guys, to Vic, it’s like we what’s the biggest problem we have in our industry today? What is it.

Getting enough people.

The getting people. Yeah. And we have contractors doing work that requires very, very talented people for many, many days and they don’t even know if they’re making money on it. Some of the guys, it’s crazy what I see. You know, but I mean, it’s it’s a shift. It’s a it’s a shift. And I when I saw it, I said, my eyes opened up. Up in California where the where the husband wife team. And I’m looking at this thing and I can have one guy do a ductless system in one day and I can make this much money.

Why am I doing this other stuff? I said, I gotta, I gotta create a good marketing plan based around selling this stuff, you know, and and that’s, that’s how I did it. I just created a good marketing plan on on how to attract people. But I want to pick up I want to ask you one question is I picked up one. You said it’s the easiest thing I have to sell. What makes it easy to sell? Is it that you believe in it or just what? What? Tell you a little bit about what it what makes it easy to sell?

Well, I have them. Right.

So you believe. I believe I’m passing my house. I had them in my office. I had them everywhere. So.

Yeah. Same. Right. I’m passionate about it I, I, I trust that it’s easy to sell something when you’re passionate and you trust it, and you support the manufacturer you’re working with. In my case, Mitsubishi supports the heck out of me, and so does my distributor. And so I can go in confidently to a client. Show them everything there is to know about the product, about the Mitsubishi product, and promote it. And for those folks that are making the jump from fossil fuel over, you know, they’re getting two for one.

You know, they get rid of the wall bangers and now the window shakers. And now we’re putting in a nice system that’s going to make them more comfortable in their home, decrease their carbon footprint and, um, save them money on their, uh, on operation of heating and cooling their home. So it it just all kind of wraps confidence.

It’s confidence. It’s confidence. I have confidence in the product too. I don’t you just feel real confident. When you go into a home and you just look at it, it’s just like boom, boom, boom, this is what I can do in your house because you’ve done so much of it and you know it’s going to work and the confidence level is there. And I, I think it just takes the people away from this DIY thing and everything else. It just takes everything away from it that pulls it together and yourself in your own mind, and just lets you just go in and sell it, you know? I mean, do you ever have a lot of problems with the DIY people when you’re in homes and stuff like that? I never did people.

I go to meetings and people are like, ah, how do you combat an online selling thing? Because I don’t think that’s a big issue, do you?

Not against, you know, guys like you. And when you had your business or the rest of us that that are professional about it, we come in at a whole different angle than the DIY and the and the customer sees that in the end, they know they can go online and buy this product for a fraction, and they’re going to ask the question, why is your price so, so much different? But you got to let them know what you’re offering them. You get to, you get to, you know, from the presentation to the to the to the manual J calc, the heat loss. Yeah. Design. You know, and and and all that. Once you show them all that and you bring out all your tools out of the toolbox, by the end, they’re going to see why there’s such a difference between the, you know, the beat up junk car and then and then the nice, uh, the nice sports car.

They’re going to see the difference in why they’re paying more. Yeah.

If I were to ask you this question. Two, two things. I mean, you’ve been to a few of my trainings now. You haven’t sat at one. I know you’ve sat in many, and I. I want to know, like if you were to take away two highlight topics that you got out of what we did, what would they have been? Something switch, something switched. In the end, I want to know what the two things were.

Expanding my presence online. Google presents everything from keywords like window air conditioner. You know, um, I have someone writing blogs that helped us get more Presence out there? Uh, organically. Mhm. A big one. I’ll add the third is the showroom which.

I saw that online. It looks really nice.

Thanks. And u u.

U coming up.

And I gotta thank you for that Mike. You know you talked about showrooms in your class and your dominant ductless class and and I’ve heard this before. Showrooms are you get a person in that showroom that’s on the on the fence and you’re going to sell the job. And it’s happened. I can’t believe it. I believe it now.

But nothing I’m telling you. Train, train your customer service people. For anyone that is 50 over 50 to come to you versus you going to them, it’s so much easier when you bring them to you, to your facility. You have a they have a comfort factor. And I would we would do that all the time when customer service people, if anybody was to the point where they just, they didn’t feel fully comfortable with having you come into the home at that point is, you know, why don’t you just come to our facility and I can show you everything here? And it’s just you’re going to be able to see how things run, work, feel, touch, see, and and we can educate you because, you know, your showroom is not really to show people.

It’s to educate people, educate them. And when you I always say that education is is knowledge is so powerful. And I think that’s I think that that’s what makes it easy for guys like you and I to sell this product, because we’re so knowledgeable about it, and I think people can pick up on that, too, when they’re in homes. When you’re in a home, people pick up on your knowledge, appearance, how you look, how you how you speak, being able to have the right tools in your toolbox. But I’m telling you, we talked about it.

We talked we talked about the the I mean, I know we’ve been emailing back and forth a little bit about presentations and how to educate, educate people in your area. Don’t sell them, Educate them. Educate them first and then sell them. You’re right, you’re right. Educate and then sell. People want to sell. It’s so easy to sell after they’re educated.

For sure. And people want to be informed and they want you to listen to them. And that’s what I find when I go into a home. And now my daughter Nicole, who’s been in your class, she’s been out selling on her own. She’s gone on three now by herself.

Um, unbelievable. I’m so glad to hear that.

And you know what?

My confidence level was a little low, but I told her he. Keep your head down.

She just did her third one. And the first one she went on, she had a five star review within hours of getting them the estimate, she didn’t secure it at that moment. The job.

Does that make you feel?

That was wonderful. It was wonderful. Five star I never got a five star review just for showing up and doing a presentation. Maybe after the job was done. We got the review, of course, but she got one. That was a first. She got.

One.

I’m telling you, she did a great job.

Was that was she was she with the woman in the home.

Um, no. The gentleman? Yeah. Yeah. And the guy was. The gentleman was extremely impressed with her knowledge and how she presented it. So I love it.

And that’s that’s. Oh, I’m so glad to hear that.

It’s fun.

I’m glad to hear that.

Well, I was going to tell you, too.

Mike: Oh, I’m I’m. I don’t know if I’m friends with her on Facebook or not, but I see her on your page. I think, I, I, I think I think I’m friends with her on LinkedIn. I have, I have two now. I have two. I have to tell her I’m so proud of her. That’s that’s awesome.

Victor: Thank you. And I wonder what I taught her. And she’s very good at this. I think maybe women in general are better than than us men is. Listen. Right. Listen to the customer. And customers want to be informed, but they want you to hear. What I’ve learned is they want to be heard. And. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone into a house. And the person before me, the customer, tells me this. They said, you know, I appreciate you listening. You heard me out. You listened to what my needs are and the that’s all I did. I just listened, and then I come up with a solution based on their needs.

Mike: I you know what? I see this a lot was one thing I just want to add is, you know, God gave us two years in, one month to listen. My father always used to tell me that, you know what? You listen more than speak. You’ll learn a lot more when you listen. And then the second part of that is, I see so many Any contractors that I work, that I work with and train around the country, that that they can’t leave a price on a home and they design a system based around their needs or how they would do it, and they don’t listen to the customer.

And I think that’s half the reason why the bids get thrown, get thrown into the trash. Because they don’t listen. They don’t listen. I’m actually putting I actually found that as a big, big problem in my new training that I’m putting together right now. I am highly, highly focused on the sales side of it, on the seven step process that I developed with the sales side of it, because I feel that guys really, really need to be able to sit down in a home and understand what the customer needs are.

But you know, you know what? They don’t know. You know what they don’t know. A lot of them is what questions to ask to understand what their needs are. So I saw this as a problem and we started to really. I’m really highly focused on it and working on it for the last six weeks with this train. I’m I’m really I want to take it to the next level, because when you start looking at artificial intelligence now and what that can do. Oh my God. I’ve interviewed probably 5 or 6 companies over the past 3 or 4 weeks now, and you don’t introduce it as I’m going to record the conversation, you introduce it to the homeowners.

I’m just going to put my note taker on and just take notes of the conversation as we go through things, so I don’t miss anything. And it is amazing at what comes back out of that. That you start to see is what did the customer like? What did they dislike? You can ask it. Some of the tools are so powerful. It’s unbelievable of what’s going on in today’s world. And I think, you know, it’s going to change the way we even do things even more moving forward.

So I don’t know if you have experimented with any of those tools yet, but. Whoa, boy. Pretty powerful stuff, I’m telling you.

I’ve seen what they can do a little bit on some demo stuff. I’m like, wow, where was this stuff years ago? It’s pretty. It’s scary what it can do. It’s great in a good way.

And we’re really just trying to find out what are the customer’s needs. You know, and when you start looking, when you have enough data compiled what the needs were in homes, it allows you now to go market to those needs. It allows you to look at those needs of how to market to people and what to do with that. And again, it’s all back to the education thing. Educating consumers, you know. So I guess if I were to ask you this in closing, is just, you know, what would you tell contractors around the country that aren’t on a heat pump bandwagon now? You know, they’re not selling heat pumps.

What would you tell them?

I would say get educated in the product you choose to work with. Take all the trainings that are there for you from the manufacturers. Learn how to sell and install from trainings like dominate Ductless of course, because that’s where I learned so much and that’s what got me to the next step in my business. Um, believe in it. You got to believe in it. Don’t sell it like it’s just selling any commodity thing. Believe in it, use it. Have it in your home, put it in the homes of, you know, with your team members so they know how to work on them and the noises they make, you know, and

you they can help the customers understand what they’re about better if they experience them themselves. Believe in what you sell.

Does your daughter still live home with you?

Yeah. She’s currently home. Yeah.

Does she have a Mitsubishi system in her own room?

Not in where her room is? No, not.

In her office at work.

Oh, yeah, she had it on the other day. Okay. Oh, yeah.

She believes in it. She knows the comfort. I’m telling you, even if you have other outside salespeople I tell this to everybody is even text technicians. You are the best technician. Put a system, give a system to your best technician and let them put it in his house. Just give it to him. You watch how how that will sell jobs to people. Because if the tech believes in it and he’s got it in his own home, what do you think he’s going to do in homes when he’s out there?

I’m just going to brag about it all day.

Tell everybody about it, how good it is. And you watch. How many more sales calls you’ll be running. So.

There’s another tip. There’s another thing to do.

It’s a good one.

But I’m telling you, I’ve seen guys do it. I’ve seen them give it, give it to give it to the best technician that. That it goes into homes and sees hot and cold spots and homes and stuff like that. And he starts talking about that and he or she sometimes, you know, there’s a lot of women technicians out there now too. And and it just sells product. Again, I think I think believing in it and knowledge is, is so powerful. Absolutely. Victor, I want to thank you for joining today. Great conversation. I told you we were just going to chat.

Have some fun. I’m definitely going to pick up your daughter. And I tell her I’m so proud of her. Um, I can see the smiles on you when she sells something that’s even better. So, um, she will take off, I promise you. So, again, thank you so much and have a great day. Thank you Mike.

Appreciate everything. Thank you.

Bye bye.

I can’t see it. I’ll leave on the bottom. Right.

Thanks, Mike.

Take care. Bye bye. Take care. Bye bye. Bye bye.

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