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TRANSCRIPT
Mike: Okay. Welcome to the Dominate Ductless podcast, where we tell the stories of companies who are building their businesses that are focused on ductless heat pumps. I’m Mike Cappuccio.
I’m the owner of Dominate Ductless, and I’m excited today to have Gregg Ostendorf from Trane Technologies. He works in the southeast region of the United States. And Gregg is in the role of the ductless development manager in, in his region.
So good morning, Gregg, and thanks for coming on the show!
Gregg: Thank you for having me!
Mike: Thank you. Thank you for coming. So, Gregg, tell the audience a little bit about yourself and what your day to day roles are that you perform for trained technologies in your area.
Gregg: Well, that’s, you know, it’s an interesting question. You know, when you kind of look at my role, I guess overall it’s the growth of mini split the ductless market, and it’s a little different every day. But mainly, of course, growing the business is always the main focus. Inventory development, training, just really providing resources to the team. And that’s kind of day to day. And it can go into support finding products and really kind of working directly with account managers, our part centers, and dealers’ direct software. That’s kind of where I’m at.
Mike: Okay, so, Gregg, how long have we known each other and where did we first meet? I don’t really recall that. I know we’ve known each other for a few years, but I’m trying to recall where we first met.
Gregg: Well, it’s, I’ve been in this role two years now. July 1 of last year, or, excuse me, 2022 is when I started. So a gentleman by the name of Ben Haig with Mitsubishi pretty much introduced me to you. Really. It was early spring of 2023, Mike, and I was really trying to kind of, I really came up with a strategy of kind of what I wanted to do in the southeast with the team and training was one thing that I really noticed that we lacked on a little bit and somehow came through that this guy by the name Mike Cappuccio with Dominique Douglas may be kind of a really good resource to meet, introduce. And that’s when I reached out to you and we took it from there.
Mike: Okay, so when did, when did we first. When did we do our first training in that area?
Gregg: I’m sorry, excuse me?
Mike: When did we do our first training in that area? I know we spoke about it, and then I had, I had come down to, I want to say it was Atlanta where I went, and we had some train dealers in that meeting. Was that the first time we. That’s the first time we did the training, correct?
Gregg: It was actually in Greenville, South Carolina.
Mike: It was in Carolina.
Gregg: Okay, Carolina. So we did our first training, which was right in April of 2023. And that’s kind of where we first started. And that’s the first time I ever met you in person.
Mike: So I guess, you know, we knew we were going to do this training and everything, but, you know, how did you go out, you and your team, and identify the candidates that you saw had the potential for these trained ductless products, for these Metis products? How did you guys go out and identify them? Because I know sometimes people have a hard time doing that.
Gregg: I think that was the fun part about this. You know, when you look at trained technologies, we do a lot of training. We have other firms that we use and it’s always focused on our core brands. Right? Train, American standard. And so when it came through to really kind of focus on mini split ductless, you know, I kind of went to a new version, zone comfort Solutions. I liked it a lot better. And how do we do it, really?
You look at the account manager based in South Carolina. I worked with them for several years in my account manager role.
So I knew the strengths of this team and that really kind of made it, I’m not going to say easier, but I also knew the dealer base, really, the powerhouse dealers and then the complimentary dealers. So I think what we did was this wasn’t just a throw grab bag out there. This was, okay, slow down. We’re not going to put this out like we normally do.
We’re going to go recruit and we’re going to recruit dealers that have an understanding of this. Maybe they were playing it a little bit or that’s the fun part about this because there’s so many — so the recruitment style was more or less really finding or dealers. And when I bring my core dealers, these are ones that are trained loyal. Okay? They are loyal to us. We get 99% of their business and we have relationships.
So, Mike, I think what really went well with our first class was we had, I’m going to say, 12 or 13 really, really solid dealers in that class that were train loyal and they wanted to know more about this side of the business. Maybe they were dabbling in a little bit, but they didn’t have a true understanding of the power of what this product can do. And that was what really was kind of neat.
Then the other ones, I’m going to say we probably had out of the 20 people, 20 dealers, the other 7 were ones that were more or less interested in it, but they had the tools and resources within their office to really understand, to take it to their business and help them grow with it.
So I think, you know, so the way we did it, we collectively, I’m not going to say really interviewed the dealers per se the first time around, but it was almost as good as an interview, if that makes sense, where we qualified them. We qualified them to really come to this class. But we took what you had. You had a two pager, and it really made sense that the dealers that understand how to grow business, and that’s how we recruited them based on your two page flyer.
Mike: Yeah. Because I’m telling you, I can’t tell you how many trainings, and I’m just going to compliment you because I’m going to really, I’m going to give you a very good compliment right now. I’m going to tell you that was my best training session that I did for that year with the best dealers.
And I can’t tell you how successful that, that meeting was because I, I go to other meetings and I go to do my two day class, and it’s just sometimes it’s just filling the seats and there’s nothing more. Not, I guess the word not gratifying to me is that I really can’t teach a technician something that’s filling a seat in a two day class, that he can’t even make decisions based on the material that we’re going over. He can bring it back to ownership, but he can’t have any impact on the growth of this company because all they did was fill a seat.
So I want to, first, I personally want to thank you for that, for getting the right people in there, because I’ve seen some of these dealers and what they’ve done from thereafter, you know, when we’ve spent some time with them for the two days. But, I mean, after you identified the dealership, what did you need to do to grow this line? What did you need to go do at that point?
Gregg: Yeah, that’s a great question. Before I get into, really, last year, the growth of South Carolina, let’s talk about that a little bit. Really, the follow up and the working with the account managers, you look at really the Greenville market, and I will say this. If you look at the southeast region, which is Georgia, South Carolina, and Tennessee, those are the three states. And Greenville. And I’ve said this many times now it’s model city. It’s our model city in the southeast for the Mitsubishi product.
And I love the way one of our account are really the account manager there that bought into it. And so, Mike, really what we did together was I went up there another five, six times personally, and we did in house training, sales and application training up there a couple times. And then with some of the dealers that were in that training, I’ve been back and done personal training for them in their offices, one on one, and it’s been fabulous.
And so the Greenville market really just took it, owned it. There’s really five dealers there that have taken this side of the business and really incorporated into their strategy, their overall business approach. And just really to kind of talk about overall numbers, you look at South Carolina.
Last year alone, they led train technologies and growth year over year from 2022 to 2023. 69% growth in one year. It was unbelievable. And it was just, they were just a big bright spot. And every time, when you look at the corporate view of things, South Carolina was brought up many, many times about just how well they did last year. So, you know, it’s just, it’s a team effort. You know, it’s a buy in approach. Everybody kind of has to play. And, you know, the challenge here is, right.
We, you know, we work for a manufacturer. You know, we, we have our products and, you know, account managers, you know, that, that’s, that’s what we do. That’s, that’s, that’s a focus, and it will always be the focus, but if we can actually bring in this other premium product to work with ours, complement our products, it’s a huge thing. And that’s kind of a challenge on my end, is really to develop our team to understand the product and how it can be applied. And I think that’s a challenge. And that’s one thing that we’re going to continue to work on.
And the more that we can do that, the better we will be to help support our customer base.
Mike: It sounds — It sounds to me like it’s a, it’s a two parter. It’s, it’s. It’s training the dealer, identifying and then continual training and follow up with the dealer, but also working internally with your own team and getting buy in and training and support from, from the, from the team as well.
Gregg: Absolutely. You couldn’t send any better. And that’s pretty. So you kind of break down my, my day to day, everything that I have to do. It’s, it’s always development, internal and external. And I think that’s pretty much where living diets right there.
Mike: Yeah, it’s, you know, and to get people to buy into it is. It’s. Sometimes it’s not as easy as we think. You know, I can’t tell you how many trainings I’ve done around the country. And, you know, you sit down with dealers and you explain to them what to do. I think they want to do it, but I think a lot of them sometimes just don’t have the follow up and the help to actually go out and implement the things that they need to do.
And, you know, like we say, one of the things we always stress on is having people help you, having specialists have a team of people that can help you, you know, when you, you know, being able to do these things, you know, from a marketing standpoint, from a customer service standpoint to sales, sales tools, what is it that the manufacturer has to offer the dealer to make life easy for them, you know, that can help them grow their business?
And I can’t tell you, some of these dealers sometimes just don’t recognize or just don’t know where to go get the tools or how to use the tools.
And I think it’s just because sometimes it’s a lack of training that they don’t know. Not because they don’t want to know, they just don’t know.
Gregg: Yeah, I think we’ve done a really good job here collectively as a team. I’m one of six of us in the country, the way we’ve all come together and really build out a plan and the strategy. Each region’s independently. We have our own inside sales support. You have your own account manager base. You have sales leaders.
And the cool part about it is when you get everybody aligned, which is not easy in the corporate landscape, if you can get everybody aligned where everybody kind of knows where to go, where to find the tools, who to ask. Right? That, that’s the biggest thing. If you don’t know the answer, if you know where to go to ask and find that answer, that’s where I think we’ve really excelled.
And I think another thing that we, that we’ve, I think that we’re really good at is our technical support. We have our own, we call them FSRs on the train side. They’re all of our trainers. They do all of our training classes for service when it comes to our product.
But most of them, not all of them yet, but most of them are Diamond DSGs, diamond service group, and, you know, certified to do some four hour. Most of us are four hour trainers, but we have some that are 16 hours now and we’re some regions have our own training facilities and we’re trying to build that out collectively.
So if you look at holistic approach here, where it comes from the sales side, the support side, technical side, I really believe that we’re really coming along and we’re making very good progress as that as a team. And I think once we’ve become the team, more so on this side of the business and bringing it to our sales folks, we’re doing really well. And we’ve got a lot to learn. We’ve got a lot to grow still.
But I think ultimately, the progress that we’ve made in the last couple of years, it’s night and day. And that’s the crazy thing about this industry. I didn’t really say I’ve been in 30 years now. I started with a mechanical contractor for seven. I’ve been with train 23, and I’ve held multiple roles within train technologies.
And I think over the last three years, Mike, this industry has changed more in the last three years than it did the 20 years previous combined.
And it’s changing so fast. You know, we got refrigerant changes coming up. We, you know, we had doe changes a year and a half ago.
And the marketing side of it, the technology side of it, the control side of it, it changes. And you really have to, you don’t have to be great at everything, but you have to be able to know, I think we just talked about this, right? You have to know where to go find the resources. And I think that we’re doing a really good job of providing that. And that, that’s really helped.
Mike: Yeah, that’s, that’s really good. I mean, it’s a training as training and follow up. Keep going back to the training and follow up, you know, but do you feel that the dominate Douglas two day, you know, training can give the dealers some tools to help them grow these products?
When we went through that training, or I guess what I would probably ask is what are some of the real couple of highlights that we did in that training that maybe said to those dealers, hey, you need to start to really focus on this. What do you feel helped them out of that two days?
Because you’ve sat in this for a couple of days now. You’ve sat in more than one training with me, you know, listened and I’m just trying to see, like, what, what are the highlights that you think that the, I know what you have your own highlights, but what do you think that they mentioned to you on the follow up part of that later on that that was a, you know, a highlight.
Gregg: I’ve probably been probably over 100 trainings, business and everything through train since I’ve been with this company. And one thing that I did mention after the first time that, you did the class, I said, this is probably one of the top five training classes that I’ve. I’ve been in. When I. When I say that, that means a lot. I’ve been through a lot. And, you, you sold me on it. Cause if you, if you look at sales, um, classes, what, what I really. First thing, what I really like about the Dominique duck class is two days. You start getting into more than two days, you really lose interest.
And, you know, two full days is hard for really anybody to sit through. And I think the flow and the way I look at yours, you break it out into four, four sections. The way I look at it, four. Day one, you have two different areas where you go into. Help me out here, because I’m kind of just flowing today, the marketing side of it. I really like the way you start the class. You build a value based on what the product, what this manufacturer can help you to build your business.
And really, I look at that as very important because that’s an attention getter when you have the right people in a class, business owners. And that’s what we focus on. If you look at our recruitment, how we go to market, it’s business owners, it’s decision makers. There are no technicians. Don’t bring a technician and don’t bring an installer in. We need decision makers. And I think when first, when you lay groundwork about how you can help them build their business, that brings value and you bring focus right there. You bring buy in.
And to me, that an account manager’s job is to help a dealer, a customer, a client, however, whatever we want to call them, we are their business partners. And if we can bring that value to them, how we can help them grow their business, they will always come to us for answers.
And I love the way you started. You know, day one is more or less, really how to, how to grow the business, how to, how to incorporate it into your business strategy.
Day two, you know, it’s more or less building out your trucks, right? Building it around your, I think your CSAs are your office staff or. So really. I love the way it flows. It’s not boring. What I’ve noticed in the class is you don’t lose attention. And that’s critical in a training class, because I’ve seen people drift. I see them falling asleep.
And when you can keep a class together like that where they’re, they’re focused on really good information, that’s important. And I like the class, I like the structure, I like the two days. And heck, we got you coming back in November to do another class in the southeast. So I look at as a value, and if you bring value to our team, that is what we ask for. And I think you do a fantastic job of that.
Mike: Thank you, Gregg! I mean, you know what I really like to do in a training too, when we have, when we have those owners like that and when you have owners that don’t overlap. And that class was like that, there were a lot of contractors that weren’t from the same area that they will share their thoughts and contractors feed off each other and they listen.
I’ve been to a lot of trainings too in my day, and there’s nothing worse than sitting up in front of a class and listening to someone talking about something that they’ve never done and never been successful in.
And when you listen to the other contractors talk and some things that they were successful in, the other contractors, it’s not just me teaching that class. There’s contractors teaching that class too, as well. I mean, as long as it doesn’t get out of control and out of hand, I’ll let them speak because I feel that’s a valuable, valuable part of that training.
Gregg: Absolutely.
Mike: Letting the contractor speak, you know, I mean, letting you speak. Letting the contractor speak. You know, when this, you know, when there’s something that I need you to engage in and say, hey, you know, train technologies has this that, you know, we, we can offer you this too.
Like you came up with a lot of good creative ideas in that meeting, too, that some of the other distributors don’t really think about, you know, okay, look, we’re gonna give you this for coming here today.
If you can go do this, you know, and, you know, we’ve got a plan. When you cut very strategically planned and thought, thought through, I guess if it was one thing that you could, you know, tell the dealers that you could tell them, what, what would it be?
Gregg: One thing, huh?
Mike: Yeah, one thing.
Gregg: But, you know, yeah, it is a lovely question.
Mike: That you could tell, that you could tell these dealers, like, like I know now you’re going to go out, you’re going to start recruiting for November. Let me put you this way. We’re going to recruit for November. What would you tell those dealers that you’re going to go recruit? How are you going to sell this to them? And go recruit this to them. How are you going to recruit these guys?
Gregg: The cool part about you, look at our customers, the trained customers, we’ve got some guys that have been with us for 30 plus years, right? That’s pretty incredible. And one thing I could probably tell our account managers are maybe just specific people ever trying to go after to come to this class. The industry’s evolving. It’s growing. And to keep pace, to keep up with the industry, Douglas zone Comfort Solutions is part of that, and there’s no stopping it. And really to think forward, to be forward thinking in this industry, I guess my number one thing to bring to the table would be, okay, you’re here, but we can get you here.
And what I mean by that is we can elevate your company not only to be where you’re at today, but we can make you the best of the best. And you really, and to think of that, it’s kind of difficult for some of these contractors. And, and I will say it too, right, I’m from the deep south and change is very hard for some of these people. And that’s a harder thing. Right? It’s that same thing, right? That the old ducted solution or like, for like.
And the mentality now is we have products that we can, we can go after anything. We can provide a solution for any application that’s out there. Let’s let us help you. And I think that’s the real thing. Let us help you. Let us help you grow your business and we will win together.
Mike: Sounds good, Gregg!
Hey Gregg, thanks again for coming on and joining the Dominate Ductless podcast. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you. I always learn something when I talk to you. I’m really looking forward to coming out there in November. Just remember what day it’s on, though. It’s on November 5 and 6th, so I remember.
Gregg: I got you there. Okay.
Mike: I will do my vote before I move, before I, before I jump on an airplane somewhere, but we’ll go from there. But again, thank you for what you’re doing. Thank you for what you’ve done for myself, thank you for what you’ve done for the contractors and for all the training that you’re doing. And I love the follow up that you’re doing. And let’s keep things rolling and have a wonderful day!
Yeah, it is a — I can’t thank you all enough for having me. This is my first podcast that I’ve done, so hopefully you invite me back.
Mike: Oh, I’ll invite you back. Yes, we like good.
Gregg: Excellent!
Mike: Really do because we really want to share these ideas. So again, thanks, Gregg! Have a great day, and I will see you soon! Thank you!
Gregg: Thanks, guys!
