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TRANSCRIPT
Mike Cappuccio: Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the Dominate Ductless Podcast, where we tell the stories of entrepreneurs who are building their businesses that are focused on ductless heat pumps.
I’m Mike Cappuccio, the owner of Dominate Ductless, and I’m really excited today to have Jon Kearney from Kearney HVAC. Jon is located in Salisbury, Massachusetts.
Good morning, Jon, and thanks for joining the podcast.
Jon: Good morning Mike. Good to hear from you.
Mike: Good to see you too. So, Jon, tell the audience a little bit about yourself, your company. You know, how you got started, and you know your day-to-day roles and what you do in your business? Sure.
Jon: Yeah. So, you know, I’ve been in the HVAC space since I was a kid with a family friend growing up that had an HVAC business, so I’d worked with him in the summers. Once school wrapped up, um, you know, kind of decided that was where my path was going to take me. So work for some other outfits, got training, got licenses. Had the opportunity to go to Utah, um, relocate the company I was working for here was closing the branch. And so I went over there, did some management stuff for, for service experts in Utah.
Um, when I came back, I decided it was time to try and give, you know, give it a go on my own. So started with just me and a van started with putting flyers in mailboxes, you know, doing little jobs here, little jobs there. And it kind of just developed into growth and adding new people to the, to the operation every year going forward. And, you know, we’re currently in year 15 and 20.
Mike: Wow.
Twenty-three of us here working now and, um, have some great people that have been with me a long time and, you know, day to day I’m still selling, still in the field, you know, wearing all the hats, trying to keep the train on the tracks.
Mike: Yeah, that’s very interesting. Very interesting. I mean, it’s it always seems to start out that way. You start a business with a vision, and all of a sudden it becomes a company and people and everything else starts to come with it. So what are your day to day roles now in your company?
Jon: Yeah, I’m still doing some sales. Um, a lot of management. Um, I have some great managers in place. I have service manager, install manager, office manager. So they’re trying to, uh, you know, handle keeping everybody else in the field, um, on task, and I’m assisting them. Um, you know, I’ll still jump in and run emergency service when I need to. And help in any capacity I have to, but trying to work on the business, developing processes, understanding costing.
Yeah, so just life happens from there. I mean most of the times pretty much on a given day the guys will leave the shop.
From there they go out to their jobs.
We do site check-ins at 10 and 1, so 10 am and 1 pm they, the leads check in with the office to let them know, hey, we’ve got the indoor units in, we got the outdoor unit in, we’ve got, we’re working on this.
And then of the afternoon, usually around 1 pm it’s like, hey, we’ve, we’ve got vacuum going, we’re finishing up some control wire, we’re doing condensate, something along those lines.
And then by the end of the day, usually between 4 and 6 pm, depending on the type of job and what was going on with it, we’ll get some completion photos for the day from each lead about what’s going on, how the job went, you know what we’re looking at.
And we use those photos to review our installations.
We look at them weekly, at our team meetings weekly and look over those photos and talk about if we see something that we would have wanted to change or that we might even, we’ve even several times seen something in a photo and we have our technician go back and make that adjustment, whatever it may be for.
You know, it’s funny because when people get into this, they’re typically from the tech or the install side. You know, you’re very rarely get an HVAC company that’s run by a business person. Right. So this business part, the Ackerman of the business, is all something that’s learned along the way, developed along the way. And hopefully you have people like your courses. And, you know, we see it all the time where great HVAC guys fail in business. And it’s not because they can’t execute the work for the homeowner.
It’s because they have no idea how to actually run a business.
Mike: They don’t they don’t know margin. They don’t know markup. And, you know, I always say that to guys, it’s so important, you know, I mean, I had one guy in a class a few weeks ago, and, and, you know, he he he made a comment to me at the at the end of the class. He was like, I feel like this is a class where you don’t want guys like me in it, where everyone in this class doesn’t like me because I’m, I’m a, I’m a one man guy. And I said, no, that’s not the case. I said, it’s we’re trying to teach these one man shops how to become ten, 15, 20, 100 man shops.
And you’re not going to get there if you if you can’t price jobs properly. And that usually happens within the first 2 or 3 years when they start to hire more people, they don’t understand the pricing stays the same and nothing changes. And then all of a sudden they don’t have any money to do what they have to do. So, um, it’s it’s very, very, you know, different, you know, as far as doing that. So, um.
Mike: Okay. Um, so, John, how did we first meet you and I. I know we’ve heard of each other for a while, but. What? How did we first meet?
Jon: I think we met at. We definitely met at some events, um, years back. You know, you have the dealer meetings and that kind of stuff. Uh, and then I think I ended up in one of your first dominate ductless classes a while back. Um, I think that’s where we actually formally kind of started having more advanced conversations.
Mike: I know we’ve got a few mutual friends and mutual people that we’ve met along the way.
And, you know, everyone here has good things about each other and how how they’re running their businesses and what they’re doing.
So, John, let me ask you this. How did the dominate Ductless training help you or your company. If at all. I guess I’m going to say.
You know what I mean.
You come to a class for two days and, you know, that’s a lot of time for a business owner to take away from their company and, you know, to really spend time with myself.
Mike: And what did you miss? What did you leave there with? And you know what? What is it that really kind of, I guess. Let me ask you this in a different way is what made you want to come to that class.
Jon: So I wanted to come to that class because I’m always interested in other people’s takes on how to successfully operate. You know, kind of going back to not being a businessman first, you know, when you get into this, I think I’m always trying to talk to other business owners, other people in the industry. You know, it’s important to network with other people. I think anybody that’s willing to talk to you about their business and be open and honest, you should take the time to do the same and reciprocate because, you know, I have friends that own bigger companies, smaller companies.
We’re constantly bouncing ideas off each other. Hey, I ran into this. What did you do? So I think if anything, it’s just getting somebody else’s take on a situation or how to handle a certain thing. If you take something small out of every one of those conversations, you’re only going to help your operation. Um, I think when I went to Dominate Ductless, I was pretty far down the line as far as having developed processes, understanding my pricing structures and things like that.
But I think every single person that owns a small business in this space should take that class, because what I would harp on more than anything else is understand how much it costs to run your business, and your course will do that.
I was fortunate enough that year, 3 or 4 of business to be taught by somebody how to properly price a job.
How to understand what your overhead burdens are.
You know, I was in year three. I thought I was crushing the world on fire. I had done, I don’t know, 4 or $500,000 worth of work. I had like 6800 bucks in my bank account.
And I was like, I just killed myself for an entire year and didn’t make shit for money.
Why? And that’s when I took a course and understood. Okay, well, you’ve got insurance costs, you’ve got gas costs, you’ve got truck costs.
Even if you’re a 1 or 2 man operation, you need to understand that, because undercutting everybody to get the work or doing work for cheap doesn’t necessarily benefit you.
And especially if you’re a smaller operation, your time is valuable.
You don’t have somebody else to go do a job for you.
You better be getting enough for the job you’re doing, or you just took on all the risk all the time and you didn’t make any money.
And now you also have to warranty that product.
You have to stand by that product.
So the biggest tip I have for anybody is understand how much it costs to, you know, operate your business. We check our margins by weekly.
So we want to see how much it cost.
When we add a van.
We add an employee when we have health insurance that gets given to another employee.
And you know, you don’t want the job you don’t make any money on anyway.
And I think that’s hard for people to understand when they’re first getting started.
They want every job. Yeah.
The best job you have is the job you don’t take.
Mike: Exactly. And I always say that you have to have a job where you wish you wrote someone a check for $500. Yep. We’ve all had one of those jobs. But you know what I really picked up when I was listening to that conversation was you learned it early on. And I’m going to tell you that that’s that’s not the norm usually. And I gotta commend you for that. You know that. You said to yourself, wait a minute, I think I’m really good, but I’m not. And you went and got help. You went and got the help. And I think where a lot of guys don’t grasp that is they don’t get the help that they need.
I mean, I had a business coach for 25 years of being in business, and I’m going to tell you she was tough and she was my boss. And, you know, and I think that that is super important for small businesses is to have somebody to to coach you and make you really understand. Because, look, we were just technicians and we’re good technicians. But you know what I found out early on, too, John? I was a horrible business person. Horrible. And I learned about 5 to 6 years into it. And after I bought a residential company that I knew nothing about the residential sector, and I bought a company that wasn’t making any money, I thought it was making money, and I almost went out of business because of it.
And when you realize that and you start to get help, it really, really helps your business. And like you said, it makes you really open your eyes. I think you’ll agree with me. And you said it too, was that I don’t need every job. I need jobs that are profitable, that are going to keep me in business and keep me around. Because without that, it’s going to be very, very difficult, you know? And I guess let me ask you this question. If there were a couple of high level topics that you took away from those two days, maybe two.
Mike: Usually, you know, when I go to a training, I still sit in a lot of trainings myself. I do a lot of research and stuff. I always look to walk away with two things. If I walked out of that room with two things that I said to myself, you know what? I can implement these and help my business. What would those might have been?
Jon: I think the the pricing structure would certainly be on the forefront of that.
You know, you had a different way of arriving at the same thing that I use.
And I’ve actually now adopted how you were doing it?
I just thought it was a cleaner version of what I was already doing.
Um, maybe.
And then I think the other thing was some of the organizational tips. Right?
So, you see people all the time that are scattered.
And when you’re scattered, you’re not going to be efficient and you’re not going to make any money in this business if you’re not operating efficiently.
So I think putting some of the organizational processes in place than stock lists, shop inventory lists, a lot of that stuff that we provided blank forms, things that you can implement in your operation.
I think those are hugely important. And it made us step back and take a look at, you know, we have a very large warehouse that’s stocked incredibly well.
Is it organized? Do the guys know that if I’m buying something in bulk for a better price, if the guys can’t find him or see him or know where they’re at, they’re going to go to the supply house and pay 30% more for the same product.
So I just wasted overhead and time and effort because I wasn’t organized enough in that, in that part of it.
Is it organized? Do the guys know that if I’m buying something in bulk for a better price, if the guys can’t find him or see him or know where they’re at, they’re going to go to the supply house and pay 30% more for the same product. So I just wasted overhead and time and effort because I wasn’t organized enough in that, in that part of it.
Mike: That’s what there’s one thing I always measured in my business that it was brought.
It was brought up to me very early on with one of the the coaches that I had worked with and, and my, my, in my accountant was that cost of goods sold percentage wise to what the revenue was.
And when I looked at that, when we first, you know, when I had spoken about maybe almost going out of business, my cost of goods sold went out of control from one year to another with the ratio.
And it was. And then when I really started to look at, I was like, oh my God, we’re buying all this stuff that we don’t need.
It’s being put in corners, it’s being thrown away. Who knows if it’s being stolen or what or whatever is happening with it. But my cost of goods sold one out of control.
And I always tell guys, look at 25% cost of goods sold to revenue is extremely well. 30%. 31% is really good. You’re running where you need to be.
I was I was measuring a company the other day.
I was on on a call with, um, a gentleman that I coach, and I was looking at it, and his cost of goods sold to his revenue was 56%.
And when I looked at the bottom line, it was -11,000. It wasn’t making any money. And it was like, boom, there it is. There’s your problem in your business right there.
Jon: I think it, you know, I see it all the time, especially when I have employees come in from other operations.
I’ve seen other operations.
One thing we’ve always done is and it takes a little bit of extra effort, and you have to have somebody that’s willing to do it or put somebody in place to do it. But we prep jobs for our staff.
So instead of handing the guy’s voice in the morning and saying, go to the supply house, your employees going to the supply house is the biggest waste of your money on in this industry.
Keep them out of the supply house.
They’re going to buy crap they don’t need.
They’re going to waste time.
So we have a pile of stock for a job.
A job stock list for what?
You need to execute that job that’s ready for the guys in the morning.
Now they’re not wasting any time going to the supply house. They’re not buying extra crap they need.
We know what left the door for that job.
So we know if we sent 164 foot lines that we need 20ft, we’d better be getting a large roll back for the next job. And that eliminates a lot of waste.
And it eliminates a lot of time.
And I think very few companies operate that way.
And I think it would be a great way for a lot of people to prove their efficiencies.
Mike: They don’t. And, you know, I used to measure that by and I was pretty anal about it.
And my business was I had startup reports that I gave you guys and I would have a startup report look and say, okay, that was a 26 foot line set on the startup report.
Well, we gave you 164 foot line set.
Where is the other 125ft? It did come back.
Well, where is it?
You know, that’s inventory control and that’s how you control that cost of goods sold.
You know, I agree with you. It’s like I, I mean, that was what was happening to me when I bought that residential business.
I didn’t know better.
I was giving guys blank checks, you know, and then you, you know, now it’s 30 days later and you’re getting an invoice and it’s got a drill on it.
It’s got pliers on it, it’s got trucked restock on it.
All these things that, you know, guys can’t get a good process down of of job setup and how to restock a vehicle.
I see a lot of guys in training.
They don’t.
There’s no restock process of how to restock the truck because there’s no inventory control.
Yep. And doesn’t the inventory manager pay for himself?
Jon: Oh, 100%!
Mike: If you’re paying that guy 12, $1,500 a week, whatever you’re paying him, you’re saving thousands a week by doing that, by keeping that person in there.
Jon’s Best Advice for Heat Pump Installers
Mike: So. I mean, I guess in closing, John, you know, if you had recommendations for other contractors around the country that, you know, they’re getting into.
We see a lot of guys getting into heat pumps now. What would what would you tell these guys?
Jon: Well, I’d certainly tell them to start by making sure they take advantage of the resources that are out there. Your class again. And this is not to fluff you up or anything like that, but understanding what you’re doing, how to make money is very important. You know, you don’t want to get frustrated at this. You don’t want to work a year and realize you could have made more money working for somebody else. Take advantage of these resources. Go to the trainings. You know, a couple days away from the field is not going to kill you.
Um, and I would recommend anybody to take advantage. All of these distributors are constantly putting on courses. There’s a million things on the internet you can watch and read through your manufacturers, through your distributors. Take advantage of that stuff. And, you know, don’t be afraid to turn a job down. You know, you get a bad vibe from somebody. They’re probably going to screw you. So go with your gut. And, you know, I see people do it all the time. They throw a huge number at somebody and say, oh, well, if I get the job, it’ll be worth it.
Guess what? It won’t be if you haven’t. If you have a gut feeling about something, you can very nicely handle the situation by saying, you know, I suggest you go in a different direction here. I see so many people get burned, and they said the first thing they said to me was, I knew this guy was going to burn me. If you knew he was going to burn you, why’d you do the job to begin with? Um, and then secondly, growth. If you want to build a company, We all want to matter to what you can can control it.
So during that kind of Covid boom, I saw so many great companies that are now out of business because they hired 15 guys. They bought 15 bands because at the time they could keep those people busy. Don’t hire somebody unless, you know, you can keep them busy for the next 12 months. That sustained growth will keep your costs under control. You’ll be able to understand if you’re still making money as you slowly grow, because when you start laying people off, you’re never going to get them back. The last thing you want to do is good.
Employees are hard enough to come by, hire a good guy and find out you’re going to lay him off three weeks later because you’re never going to get that person back again. So grow in a matter of what you can control and you can support. Um, that would be a huge recommendation I would have.
Mike Cappuccio:
Those those are those are two real good recommendations because a lot of guys don’t think like that.
You know, it’s slow.
Slow controlled growth. Slow controlled growth is is the way to go.
And I mean having a good forecast for it too.
I like, you know, honestly I don’t feel anything wrong with, you know, 3 to 7% growth is 7% is even aggressive.
I think sometimes because there’s a lot of things that need to come with 7% growth in a company in the course of a year.
And when you can’t control that, it’s not fun.
So great, great advice for for for guys.
John. John, I want to thank you again for taking, you know, this half hour out of your day.
I know everybody is busy, you know, to join the Dominate Ductless podcast, I wish you nothing but success in the future and and thank you for all the recommendations for everybody.
Have a great day. And, um, knock ’em dead.
Jon: Thanks, guys! Take Care!
Mike Cappuccio: Do that because, and I found kind of interesting one thing that you did say as I was listening to you is the first thing you did one Monday was call Comfort Media Group.
That was interesting to me because that when we looked at what we went through that’s the first gear of getting things going.
So you kind of took the first gear and kind of ran with it. What were you doing any marketing at all prior?
David Cochran: No, not really.
Mike Cappuccio: Not really?
David Cochran: No. And when I say that I mean we might would randomly make a Facebook post or something and Don would be able to attest to what we had previously.
You know, we had a little bit of content on our website.
Not much nothing, nothing as educational as we have now.
So as far as paid advertising, the only thing we really had that you could count I would say would be Google local services.
We were part of that before we had came to your roughly probably a year before we came to your class and we had seen some uptick of that. But other than all that did was make the phones ring.
You know, I mean in the sense of if you search Google kept us up high on the list, so.
Mike Cappuccio: What have you found when you really start to do refined heat pump target marketing, did it work? Let me ask you that question.
David Cochran: It’s hard to say that we’ve really…. Yes, I see a benefit from what we’re doing through Comfort Media Group 100% but I’m still, I’m still, this is just my mind.
I’m still lost on the fact of if you would consider what we’re doing marketing and Don would, you know, answer that better.
In the sense of what we’re doing is great educational content for our customers.
And I love to refer people to our website to read these items because they’re awesome, they’re perfect.
We just don’t…. Other than spending the money with Don, you know, we’re now starting to see we’re doing these videos.
And we’re starting to spend a little money on the Facebook marketing of that.
So Don has been excellent at making those audiences.
And I have seen, like, when he does that, we see a little uptick in whatever we’re working with.
So the big thing we worked on, I would say over the last year as far as with, with Comfort Media, would have been getting some things in ducks in a row with our website and our Facebook.
They’ve been pivotal in getting our Facebook more friendly, I guess is a good word for it.
Being able to go on there, scroll through and nice, nice little articles that are inviting and easy to want to look at and read.
Mike Cappuccio: Yeah, well, you need, as we always talked about, you know, when you look at the marketing funnel and you look at the sales funnel or the marketing funnel, when I always talked about that, bringing people in, the first part of it, when people don’t know anything about anything, they’re looking for information on that.
And I always, when I look at contractors and I go on and look at some of their websites, there’s not a lot of good informational things.
And the way that people are using digital marketing today to take people from a marketing lead to a marketing qualified lead to a sales qualified lead, to an opportunity to get somebody into the home, you need.
I mean, I know when I was a contractor, I didn’t know how to do that.
David Cochran: Yeah, yeah.
Mike Cappuccio: I’m good at. I’m good at selling stuff and fixing stuff and running a business. Not good at marketing.
And I guess if I asked you this question when I first met you, how many heat pumps you think you sold? Guesstimate?
David Cochran: I would say…
Mike Cappuccio: In a year’s time. How many?
David Cochran: Yeah, I’m gonna say somewhere around a 100 to 125 a year.
Mike Cappuccio: Where you think you are today.
David Cochran: We probably haven’t quite doubled that, but I definitely would have seen 150 to 75 maybe up there to that 200.
We’ve had a really crazy end of the year and I think we would have seen a bigger uptick. I do want to put this in there. I think we would have seen a little more uptick than that. Mainly our HVAC stuff has been just drowned and I’m not going to even go down that road. But availability of equipment due to refrigerant change has been crazy.
Mike Cappuccio: Yeah.
David Cochran: And so….
Mike Cappuccio: I think you throw the hurricane in there too. Where you were, weren’t you affected by the hurricane a little bit?
David Cochran: We did. We had the hurricane. So that altered a Lot of people’s buying power and what was going on in their lives.
You know, they, they all of a sudden weren’t worried if their living room was cool because they’re tearing their house down now.
And so there’s been several homes completely tore down that are being rebuilt and that most likely will see some uptick in the beginning of next year.
As far as those folks needing help, generators, it created a huge scare in the entire community around us.
And we got bombarded with tons of leads of people who were just decided that they didn’t want to be without power again, you know.
Cause they were without power for….
Most of the stories we heard were seven to 10 days, which is a fair amount of time.
You know, by that point you’ve, you’re losing food in your fridge.
You definitely don’t have any hot water anymore.
Some of them were on well pumps and they didn’t even have water because they didn’t have power. You know, in their backup generators were just little portable generators and they won’t hardly run all of this.
Mike Cappuccio: Yeah, that’s….. It’s not the best thing to say but you know, natural disasters sometimes can create a lot of business that can…. It’s not what you want it to do, you know.
David Cochran: That’s correct.
Mike Cappuccio: Well, you don’t wish, you don’t wish this on anybody.
But you know the impact of it that it has on business on the back end sometimes, you know, it can be, it can be overwhelming too at times, you know.
David Cochran: Yeah.
Mike Cappuccio: I mean I guess if we really focusing back on the actual training and we really looked at the 2 high, high level topics that you walked out of that room with that you said my company needs to be doing this. What do you think they were?
David Cochran: First one is Comfort Media Group marketing.
Mike Cappuccio: No, marketing was going.
David Cochran: Marketing. Yeah. Marketing is strategic marketing. Again, I can’t stress enough.
Mike Cappuccio: Continuous marketing, I would say. Right?
David Cochran: Yeah. I’m preaching to the choir here.
Mike Cappuccio: I bought a marketing plan.
David Cochran: Yeah. You know, there’s nobody out there that does it like they do.
So I’m preaching to the choir.
I know because you obviously loved them and used them for a long time.
So it would be marketing, strategic marketing that you use regularly.
And to me I think the key point would.
Another one, the big one is honing in on your installation process from start to finish.
Being that you think of throughout that the customer experience, your van layout, all of that fun.
It’s a different type of funnel, but all that funnels down to one thing, and that’s how happy your customer is when you’re done.
Which is the most important thing to us because our customers are who tells other people about us and, or who go online and write about us and share their experience.
And I don’t really like having bad experiences shared. So I think that the marketing gets them there and then the process is what keeps you consistent with everybody.
Mike Cappuccio: Yeah, that’s a real good way to spell that out. You know, I was reading something the other day about that 90% of people of businesses are focused on getting new business and 10% of them are focused on that actually have a refined referral process in their company.
David Cochran: Yeah.
Mike Cappuccio: And when people find out that you can switch that around and have, instead of only being referred by 10% of the people, that 90% of their customer base is referring people.
And I found this funny because I was talking, I was actually talking to a friend of mine yesterday.
Not a friend of mine, but an ex employee who worked for me for a long, long time.
Quick story, worked me for 20 odd years, 25 years. He left the company, moved up to New Hampshire, bought a bed and breakfast up there, started an HVAC company up there. And he’s one guy.
And I said to him, I said, you know, how are you getting work?
And he said, I don’t advertise anything.
He said, I get all my work by other people.
He said, because I do good work and people like me, I give good customer service and everything I get is referral.
And I’m thinking to myself, this is a small business that is being built on a referral network.
So why can’t a bigger business of more people? You know, let’s say it’s a business of how many people in your business, how many people work at your company?
David Cochran: There’s 14 right now.
Mike Cappuccio: 14. So why can’t a business of 14 to 15 people do the same thing?
David Cochran: Yeah.
Mike Cappuccio: Well, that’s 90%. I think I really, I’m, I was honed in on that of like 80% of the leads coming from a referral business in a bigger business job, how awful that would be.
David Cochran: Yeah, it’d be huge.
Don: Let me just make one comment. And I don’t really like to jump in on these things because conversation, two guys. [Crosstalk] – In my customer base, 80% of the revenue comes from existing customers. Whether it’s re the existing customer, buying new services or equipment or referring.
Mike Cappuccio: Yeah, that’s, I think referrals get to get pushed away so much.
But it’s really honing in on having a good referral process.
I mean, you know Dave, you know me.
You don’t probably know me long enough now.
I’m a process guy.
I like to have a process for something. I don’t like to win.
I don’t like winging stuff.
I got a process for how it’s going to get done and then it’s going to be followed through from step one to step ten.
Whatever it is, let’s follow it through.
And really having a honed in referral process because that one job that came from marketing.
Right? Could create 10 more jobs.
David Cochran: Oh yeah.
Mike Cappuccio: You see what I’m saying?
David Cochran: And that’s…. That was….
Mike Cappuccio: I think you hit it right. You hit it right.
You have to give them what you said, good customer service from the time you pick up that phone till the time that job is completed.
And every…. And it’s…. I call it like, it’s like a sandwich, you know, you got a bread, you got bread on the top and bread on the bottom.
What’s going in the middle of it? You know, you can have a real crappy sandwich or a real good sandwich, you know, and you know, obviously the more meat in the middle of the sandwich, the better the sandwich. Right?
David Cochran: Yeah. Yeah.
Mike Cappuccio: So when you give someone a good sandwich, do they go back to that sandwich shop and eat another sandwich?
David Cochran: Absolutely do. Absolutely. And they tell their friends about it too.
Mike Cappuccio: Exactly. That’s what I’m trying to say is.
David Cochran:Yeah.
Mike Cappuccio: So they’re building a referral based on what’s in the middle of this sandwich? Who goes back to the crappy sandwich shop? Nobody.
Don: David, talk about your post sale process that you’re putting together right now with the new video, the Savannah Bananas type video.
David Cochran: Yeah. So we put together this sparked from literally.
I have a business coach, BDR and they do a thing once a year where you.
And it’s called Spark.
So last this January of 24, we went to Savannah, Georgia and the keynote speaker was the owner, the guy who really took Savannah Bananas from nothing and made them this goofy, funny baseball team that everybody thinks is enjoyable to be or see today.
And one of the cool things they do is they’re just unique in the way of that I, I took away.
Anyways, we made a video and it’s…. We call it a thank you video in order. Thank you video.
And so anytime somebody buys an installation from us, they’re going to receive this video.
And Donnie helped us and dawn write the script and they came out and we videoed briefly what will happen in the beginning of the video, it’s just me sitting there and I go, hey, thank you for buying your new system.
We look forward to working with you. Something along those lines.
Then it goes to. Our technicians are rigorously training, building a plan to install your new comfort system or something.
And shows one of our lead install guys doing like some Mr. Miyagi stuff like training.
And then it says your unit is being, or your system is being stored in a climate controlled warehouse.
And it’s got me sliding it in with the pallet jack into the door.
And I’ve got two guys that kind of look, they’re big and tall, they got some Secret Service looking glasses and tie on and stuff.
And they’re looking around like this while we’re putting it in the door.
And then we close the door down and they kind of come together and stand guard of the door, you know.
And it’s just, it’s a really neat way of us to say thank you for buying from us and to kind of.
And Don. I don’t know what it’ll come out to be, but maybe 15 seconds or something.
So something 15 to 30 second video short enough. It’s just something neat, something different that we’re doing.
Don: So it kicks off your process and it makes it remarkable right off the bat.
David Cochran: Absolutely.
Don: They’ve never been treated this way before.
So from the day they make the decision to give you a check, you are setting yourself apart from every experience they’ve ever had.
David Cochran: Absolutely.
Don: And so now they’re anticipating, okay, what’s next, you know, like, how’s it going to go now?
Mike Cappuccio: The other thing too is that that is so awesome with out of the box thinking. It’s just complete out of the box thinking where that’s not just canned marketing crap as well.
David Cochran: No.
Mike Cappuccio: You know, it’s just not some canned piece of crap that you’re seeing that you know, is, it’s, it’s very personal. Thank you.
David Cochran: We felt as though it would give.
That’s something that somebody will talk about. Something that’s, that’s something who really.
It seems like people don’t really care to talk about what the cool stuff that we do, the nitty gritty of what Mike has, Cappuccio has done in the field or David Cochran, you know what, we can go out and how neat we are with our line sets and how level our units are and how well they heat and cool.
The homeowners don’t really understand that 9 times out of 10 and they also don’t care.
I mean, they love that it’s level, but they love the fact that their room’s warm as well.
But something they might talk about is, man, when I bought that system, I got this cool little video. You got to check this out, you know, and show it to their friend or something.
Mike Cappuccio: You know, people don’t realize what goes into something that we do until we show them what we do.
David Cochran: Yeah. Yeah.
Mike Cappuccio: And that’s kind of like where I was…. Where we were talking earlier this morning.
I know it’s probably not into the podcast, but we’ve got a lot of competition that’s coming down the pipe today that is doing this online selling and, you know, the video on your home and.
Yeah, they’re managing a project from somewhere across the country and hiring some subcontractor to go put it in for you. They don’t even know what their process is.
No, they have so many different people doing it.
And I think that that’s just opening this world up for a disaster of what can happen with guys like, you know, yourself and guys like me, when I was in business of just, you know, we like what we do, we enjoy what we do, and we want to show people what we do and why we do it and how can we do certain things a certain way.
There’s nothing more aggravating than going out to a job and seeing something that is a total mess.
You know, I was talking, like, I was talking to my friend yesterday up in New Hampshire.
He’s telling me, he said, you know, I went out to this job.
I got this call the other day from a friend. The friend told a friend about this job, and he had a couple of Mr. Cool units installed in his house.
And telling me about, no, they weren’t even Mr. Cool units.
They were Samsung units. It was Samsung because that’s what he sells.
He sells Samsung up in that area in New Hampshire, whatever it was.
He starts telling me about, you know, there’s a five wire system with the way that they use their.
Their equipment.
And he said, you know, if the first unit I went to, he said, you know, both of them weren’t working. He said one of them had a code that would look like low refrigerant.
He said, so I go there, there’s leaks in that system. He said, but there’s 25 ft of pipe all coiled up behind the unit.
And the guy says to me, well, the guy told me it’s a minimum of 15 ft.
He goes, yeah, well, why couldn’t you.
He said, instead of taking the unit and bringing it straight down, we could have just moved it over 15 ft and done it all nice and neat instead of having all this junk all tied up behind the unit.
He said, well, can you do that for me now when you, when you fix the leaks? He’s like, yeah, sure. So he fixes that.
He gets that all done. He makes it look nice and neat.
And the next one, he starts looking at the electrical and with the five wires, that was thermostat wire, two wire thermostat, which was supposed to be DC communication cables on the L1 and L2.
So he’s running 230 volts through 18 gauge thermos, 22 gauge thermostat wire, and the boards are all blown up.
And, you know, so Samsung tells him we need to replace the compressor and the boards in the outdoor unit.
And the guy is all aggravated.
Him now getting all mad at him.
He says, look, you paid the guy to come put it in.
You bought the equipment, you bought it online.
They put it in.
He said, you know, you just called me to fix it.
Don’t get mad at me.
I fixed one of them.
You only fix the other one.
He said, I recommend replacing the unit.
He said, that’s a perfect scenario of buying something online and somebody not understanding how you do things with the product.
David Cochran: It is. That’s a tough story, too. I really hate those stories.
Mike Cappuccio: And people get mad at them when they come out there and tell them what it needs and they’re blaming it on the equipment.
It is not the equipment problem.
It was how it was installed by someone who put it in that did not know what they were doing. Yeah, and I think that goes back to training and your processes and I’ll leave it at that.
David Cochran: Oh, 100%. And, you know, to touch on what you were just talking about a few minutes ago, you know, I’ve said for years, and I mean a long time, I’ve always said my competition is Walmart and Lowe’s and Home Depot and those types of places.
And some people would look at me really funny when I would say that.
What they didn’t understand was I just meant the level of customer service that they provide to their customers is what I’m competing with.
I’m not competing with Staying Van or Bubba Back, Bubba Buck Crack or Chuck in a Truck or whoever.
Those guys all do HVAC too. And nobody really, like I said before, nobody’s really caring about whether it’s this level or that or neat or they don’t pay attention to that stuff at first.
What they do realize and what they do remember us by is who we are, what we did for them and do we stand behind what we do when we make that mistake?
Mike Cappuccio: Yeah, exactly.
David Cochran: Because we are, we are human.
Now I say our, I’ve been saying now, okay, that’s still somewhat of our competition.
That competition has changed just a little bit. It’s Amazon now.
Amazon’s my big competitor because Amazon is click the button, shows up the next day and if you don’t like it, send it back and we’ll give you all your money back.
Mike Cappuccio: And when you think about this guy that we just talked about buying a system online, having someone install it that was not quality, that didn’t know what they were doing, didn’t understand the products, didn’t, you know, different products get installed differently.
And did he really save money?
Was there a savings and what he did? No, he had to pay this gentleman to come out there and redo everything again.
And now he’s got sitting there with a system that doesn’t work, has no heat, no cooling in the home and it’s like, okay, you know, was there really hire a professional, you know, like you just said, David, Amazon does what they do every day and they’re good at it and they have processes on how they do it.
And you do things the same way in your business.
People call in, you have a process for how you do it.
So is it really competition? Not really.
You just have things the way that you do things.
And I think people are starting to understand more and more and more, you know, and you know what a good article on buying equipment online versus install, you know, versus hiring a professional contractor.
What’s the difference?
You could talk, how long could you talk about that in an article for?
David Cochran: Yeah, think about it the same as I…. Look, I share the analogy all the time that it’s the same as a doctor.
Would you go on Facebook Marketplace or and find your doctor online or do you go to the hospital or the cardiologist down the road or you know, this big city, who has done this for years, who.
Yeah, it’s going to cost $500,000 to have open heart surgery or you can go to Mexico and have it done for 50 grand.
Who goes to Mexico and has a $50,000 open heart surgery?
Mike Cappuccio: I always say, yeah, you know, it just doesn’t make any sense to me, you know.
David Cochran: Nobody does it in the professional world.
Nobody does that stuff with their medical and this and that.
But when it comes to the things we do.
That hasn’t clicked exactly with everyone.
That, hey, you hire the professional to get it done right and you spend a little extra money up front and you don’t ever worry about it again.
You’ve got that person in your back pocket. Now you’re talking with them versus you.
Do you hire the guy, buy it on Amazon and you get your buddy’s friend from work to come put it in?
And he’s working, he’s busy. He’s not…. He don’t care if your unit works or not.
Mike Cappuccio: I actually had a client one time ask me when I handed them the bill one time.
He said, what do you think you’re a doctor charging these kind of prices?
And I looked at him and I said, yes. I said, I’m a doctor. I’m a doctor of HVAC.
I said, and you’re going to pay me what that invoice says because you didn’t know what was wrong.
I knew what was wrong.
You’re not paying me to do what I did.
You’re paying me to know what I know.
And that comes with a lot of years of experience and knowledge, you know what I mean? And….
David Cochran: I do.
Mike Cappuccio: I don’t have anybody.
I don’t have any issue with that at all.
You know, so like you just said, would you pay 50 grand for open heart surgery or 500 grand?
You know this, there’s a reason why you do it.
But I guess.
And David, in closing, tell me if you had a recommendation for other contractors around the country, right, to get on to this heat pump bandwagon, I mean, I guess is what I call it.
There’s a lot of guys that aren’t doing it.
What would you tell these guys?
What would you say to them?
David Cochran: So let’s back up and say if to give the recommendation.
I think that the first piece of the recommendation is going to be to go to my Cappuccio’s class.
And I’m not saying that because I’m on the podcast with you. I’m saying that’s how you get a fast pass to figure this stuff out.
Now you go to this class and you cram it in a day or two and you go home and you’ve got 5,000 things that you all sudden want to do.
And you know, you’ve got this towering idea that, hey, I can get all this done.
You need a good couple of years to implement this stuff. I mean, this stuff takes time and you do it and then you change it and then you do it.
But to just to make it, simply put, that is the quick, easy answer of go to go to this class and listen, take some notes, keep your books, keep your flash drive. You’ve got all the slides.
Go back and review.
Number two is sign up with Comfort Media Group.
That was huge as far as getting all this content out there to be the business that I want it to be.
Mike Cappuccio: So you know what else I listened to too? When you heard there those two things you took the…. What I’m seeing that you got out of that was you took the first gear and started with the lead gen.
David Cochran: Yeah. Lead gen.
Mike Cappuccio: Once you get that piece out of the way and create the plan, you know what’s going to happen, Dave.
Everything else is going to fall into place and then you’ll implement those little things.
That’s why I kind of teach that class the way I teach it. But that’s really good.
David Cochran: What’d you say? Don?
Don: One comment I want to make about this. David started with us with the goal of building trust. Not a goal of getting in the car and hitting the gas.
Mike Cappuccio: Your marketing guy.
Don: He, you know, David’s got a very protective mama bear who was responsible and holding the reins to his marketing strategy.
And she was, she had her eye on his back through the process.
And so we did not start at full blast.
We started slow and steady.
We did a few things.
We tried.
We introduced David to email marketing.
We introduced David to downloads on his website.
Landing pages with education on it in a sort of a measured fashion without David…. go in…. going through a lot, going to a lot of risk.
Mike Cappuccio: Right.
Don: Would you say, David?
Mike Cappuccio: Yeah.
Don: Now here we are a year later.
David Cochran: Yeah.
Don: And David’s starting to push the gas a little bit.
Mike Cappuccio: So start slow, build trust.
David Cochran: One other tip.
Mike Cappuccio: Slow build trust.
David Cochran: Absolutely. I mean that’s… Sometimes I think we’re too slow, but then sometimes I look back and go, you know, hey, I’m glad we took our time.
Mike Cappuccio: That could be managed chaos too.
David at that point too, you know, you don’t want managed chaos. I think a good plan going slow, building trust.
Because I’m going to tell you, I hear so many horror stories of companies that have hired people that have taken their website, can’t get their website back.
The phone numbers are gone. Some marketing company wiped things out.
Oh God. I’ve heard over the past 12 years, I’ve heard disasters.
David Cochran: Yeah. We, you know, obviously didn’t want to find ourselves in those situations.
And I mean it isn’t just with Comfort Media Group.
It’s that way with everybody that works here.
You know, if you have access to my YouTube or my Facebook, you don’t have the master password.
You have… You’re added as a user or something along those lines.
So it’s the same concept of, you know, we should hold and own everything that we operate.
It would be like somebody else owning all of my vans, and we just use them. And then if they get mad at me and they pull all my vans, well, I can’t service any of my customers anymore.
Same concept in my mind.
Mike Cappuccio: Absolutely. Yeah.
And I’ve seen that done with a couple companies.
You know, one guy was like, you know, I gave XYZ, CSI, you know, software company my phone number.
And that was how we tracked all of our phone leads through our main phone number. And he said, and then we left the customer service software that we were using, the CRM, and they were like, well, that phone number is our phone number now.
And he’s like, well, I had this one over 25 years.
Now my phone number is gone.
You know, it didn’t read the fine print.
David Cochran: Yeah. Yeah, that’s crazy!
Mike Cappuccio: Had to pretty much restart a business.
David Cochran: Yeah, that’s crazy!
Mike Cappuccio: There’s so many things in the fine print that you got to understand, you know.
So in closing, I guess I just want to say thank you for joining.
David Cochran: Yeah.
Mike Cappuccio: Podcast. I think there’s some great information here for other contractors to listen to, because you know what?
These are where we tell the stories, really, of entrepreneurs who are building their businesses today.
And I think it’s very hard for some of these guys to build businesses.
You know, when I hear you’re at the 14 person mark, you’ve gone over some walls.
David Cochran: Oh, yeah.
Mike Cappuccio: You’ve hit some walls. You know, you’ve gone through some challenges.
And, you know, I just hope that you’re going to go over a lot more walls moving forward. And one thing don’t forget is be profitable.
David Cochran: So I’ll leave that.
Mike Cappuccio: I want to thank you for coming on. Have a great day, and I guess I’ll end it at that.
David Cochran: All right, well, thanks for having me!
Mike Cappuccio: Thanks, guys!
