Speaker 3It was up to the point, the snooze, it's your boy, excited as always. Well, my homies are on the podcast. We get chat, Peterman, for a Peterman Brothers, an air and gainer from eco plumbers, heating and air conditioning technicians. About a quarter of a billion dollars with a revenue from Indiana, Anohio. But I love it because I talk about, you know, current problems that you guys are having in solutions for it, or potentially future problems you guys are having in some solutions for that they've found them work through. So, like real life scenario, so I love these type of episodes and another thing, an important thing, turn it volume up. You might start noticing some changes with the two-to-point home services podcast come May 1st. Why you ask? I'll tell you. because your boy just got full control back from Rhino, since I exited Rhino. So I got full control back, which means I get to do my own thing. And that means more. We need to start shaking it up and do more with this podcast. And now I've got free reign to do it. So pay attention, come may first. or the first episode in May, because you just might notice a difference. So enjoy this episode with the homies, chatty pee, and airingy.
Speaker 2This is To The Point. A Ryan O'experience. Pulling one of the top home services marketing and operations podcast, cutting through the bullshit and getting to the point.
Speaker 4All right, thank you both for being here. Start off one of, say, congratulations to Chad and closing a great deal. Um, really proud of you. Um, so, wingman, uh, what's your call sign?
Speaker 3Uh, Fiper.
Speaker 4Fiper. And I, we went through all the surveys and, uh, Instead of just going one subject to one subject, we used a confidential technology with AI. To figure out what everyone was most concerned about, and so we formulated some questions along that lines. A lot of people had similar questions and issues in their business. So with that, looking back to like 2020 through 2023, we had a lot of stimulus, easy money, companies grew, a lot of private equity in our market or our industry. And then in the last couple of years, we've heard leads have gotten softer. It's harder margins been compressing. So we're going to start around there. We're going to start with kind of the market shift. HVAC manufacturers have reported that shipments have been down year over year about 30%. So the first question is, what do you guys think is causing this? Is it the macroeconomic pressure? Is it, you know, consumer sentiment changing? Or is it just that we pulled all those installs up from during COVID?
Speaker 6Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of that stuff, right, I think there's You know, macro economic stuff, I think there's pull forward through COVID, but I think at the end of the day, it all comes back to execution. People still need to replace their equipment. They're plumbing still going to break. They're still going to have electrical issues. And, you know, I think if there's one thing that I learned kind of coming out of called the back end of 23 and to 24, Um, is, you know, we saw a ton of growth, you know, we, in 20, between 22 and 23, we doubled in size, um, and when you double in size in 365 days, uh, what you find yourself doing is throwing a lot of people at problems. And so I think, um, as a lot of businesses did, okay, demands pulling back how do we continue to grow, um, for us it came down to a lot of execution, like, how are we good at these things? You know, what is our booking rate? Are we sending the right tech to the right call? What's our onboarding? What's our training look like, all of that stuff? And so, you know, I think that that's something in the business, it can a lot of growth and a lot of demand can mask all of the blocking and tackling that needs to take place in these businesses. They're not, it's a very simple business, but it's not easy, right? Because it's all the unsexy things that you have to focus on, in order to be successful. And I think, you know, lucky for us, we're in a room here today with a ton of great operators who understand the importance of those things. And I think if you talk to them, it's not about some new whizz bang marketing idea or this that or the other, it's about execution. It's about answering our phones. It's about sending the text out, giving options to customers, all of those things, which I think are critical in the building blocks You know, aren't always the, the shiniest, but they're, they're what make these businesses work.
Speaker 7Yeah, so, I guess, from an economics standpoint, I think the last couple years, we just did a study from our plumbing department. for a lot since 2000 and just took a look at that what's happened to our conversions average sales in general and we have seen a downtick in conversions over the last five years in general in that area I think obviously inflational prices have changed that I mean from five years ago what are pricing was to now I do think consumers feel pressure I we saw you know some some great growth last year in our business into our EBITDA, but we did see a margin shrinkage in some of the areas in our business. So, I think you are feeling some of that pressure in general, at least my belief is. I know some guys in here have some big numbers going, but for my standpoint, yeah, I think the market is, feels a little tight, but I still believe there's tons of opportunities to call volumes. still seem pretty strong I think the conversions and getting people to say yes has got a little harder I think there's been a shift in a little bit of purchasing and how you buy Consumers have changed a little bit of how fast they'll pick up and get a HVAC system I definitely have seen that and we're newer in the HVAC game and in the big picture to some of you guys I think we got in probably after everybody was making all the money in HVAC So it's been a good good lesson for us But I do think that there are some economic things that are still tight and, like, I guess what he says, I know there's enough money available to fund these projects, right? But there is, we're seeing turn down rates, a decent amount in our area. We're definitely, I think you've seen repo rates go up right, for home foreclosures are going up. So, I definitely think there's things playing into it, but to your point, I think there's a lot of opportunity, but it is getting harder to get, yes, at least what we've seen in our business, it's getting harder to get, yes, it's.
Speaker 4Thank you. To wrap this question up in the last 12 to 24 months, is there anything one specific thing you started doing or stopped doing that move the needle for you?
Speaker 7That's a great question. I think one thing for me is I went back and I spent a lot of time with our team just really looking at our price book and saying, hey, I think obviously we've seen the price increases and I think what's happened over time is we just started pricing a certain base of people out of the market for us and I think that started to really hurt us in our marketplace, our brand and the ability to create volume and work, right? So We went back and said, hey, we need to find better price points for things. We need to make sure that not every average plumbing sale ticket is $1,000. As the entry point basically, if us became $1,000, and I think we went back and said, how do we revamp this and make this feel that, you know, the everyday American can provide buy service from us? And I think that we were starting the price people out of the market, and we were starting to see that a lot of the people that had done businesses for years, were weren't actually able to afford that from us any more of the people making, you know, even $80,000 a year or $65,000 a year just couldn't afford to actually purchase a plumbing repair from us, which I thought was a big change for us. So we really looked at that.
Speaker 4So it wasn't.
Speaker 7Raising your price as it was it was actually lowering prices in certain areas that we felt would add more value on finding better price points on toilets finding better price points on Disposals, et cetera, et all the way down to renegotiating our equipment, make it sure that we could find something that was a easy swap out for a for a furnace for The everyday person in general. I think that that was just for us of a recognizing that there was a whole base of business that was that we were under serving and a volume game that we were losing
Speaker 4Pastor Chad?
Speaker 6Yeah, I think for us, I think Aaron made a great point, getting yes is his harder. And so I think what we did is really looked at, okay, if getting yes is his harder, how are we going to position ourselves to get as many yes as possible? And so for us, it really started, in this may sound like a weird place to kind of pinpoint, but for us it was onboarding. You know, it sounds silly, right? It's like, okay, yeah, hire new texts and bring them on and we'll have more people and all of that stuff. And for us, it was literally like looking at every 15 minutes of onboarding a new technician into our business and how are we going to make this the most impactful experience of their life so that when they do go out in the field, one, They can start generating revenue sooner, and also they're ready to go and they're providing an experience where people can associate that value with it. And so for us, onboarding is like the most sacred of sacred things, especially when you're getting technicians that are job ready. We train them from the ground up, but you can only do that so many times over the course of the year. So, technicians who have five, seven years of experience, how do we take and take what they may have already learned, really untrain that, and then train them in the Peterman way. And so we are like maniacal about how we do this, what are all the touch points, how we're educating people, bringing in professional educators into the business to say, hey, You know, it's not enough for just the service manager to stand up in front of the room and ran off a bulleted list of, well, this is what you do, and this is how you do this. Like, we have to be able to connect with these people. How do we teach adult learners the skills that they need to be successful out there, and have seen a lot of really positive stuff. We've still got a long way to go. But I think it's something in your business is taking a look at what is your onboarding look like? you know we were back in the day is like flip the guy the keys and hand them some calls and let her rip. Obviously not the best, but I think looking at your onboarding experience and seeing what that looks like is only going to set your guys up and gals out there for success in the field and to get as many yeses as possible.
Speaker 4Thank you. My next question was on margin, but you guys both kind of covered that with your answers and that it sounds like you guys are doing a lot better at onboarding, Aaron, you went back and negotiated a lot of pricing to protect your margin because we've seen a lot of people racing to the bottom as the leads have gone softer. So we're going to skip that question and we're going to go into growth. Now you both have built sizeable multi-location, businesses, you know, originally through Greenfield, but I know you both have done some acquisitions more recently, so if you had to start over today, what model would you choose and why?
Speaker 7Greenfield. One location. Greenfield, one location, I agree. Look, I think for me, I know Chad did probably some more acquisitions, and we did, we did one acquisition. uh... for each that company is about eight million dollars i didn't go that well i think we might can i both would say that if we could re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re No, it's part of the growing pains, it's part of the learning. We definitely learned a lot about what that looks like for us from an acquisition. I think our success has been through Greenfield personally. I think we just understand how to do that better. I think our culture of our businesses more around that. We understand how to just go into a market, start buying the radio, buying the positioning, doing the things like that, and then the culture is easier for us to integrate. right from the beginning. So I personally am a fan of Greenfields. I think we've been able to do that really good in the date and market and making some headway in the Cincinnati market now in the last couple of years. So we went, you know, we had a Greenfield and Dayton in about four years doing $24 million, right? So I think it shows that it's still possible to go take market share by just going in and starting from the ground up and purchasing leads is cheaper.
Speaker 4So you had find that it's easier to build culture keep it after an acquisition.
Speaker 7Yeah, at least from experience. A lot of these guys have done that better than us. I wouldn't say that's a strong suit for us, but we like Greenfield, and I think secondary markets are strong, too. Not always having to go in a major metro.
Speaker 6Yeah, for us, it's been a combination. We've done a little bit of everything. I'd say probably my favorite is one, and we've got 11 locations My favorite is doing tuck-in acquisition work. When I know that I have an established leader at a branch who can do more, we look at smaller acquisitions kind of in that $2 to $5 million revenue range that we can tuck in to a current location, retrain those technicians while they're retraining our own technicians in that market can run those additional calls All of our stuff is centralized so we answer every call dispatch every call from Indianapolis for all 11 locations We're all one brand and hope to be one brand moving forward and then when we go into a new market We do kind of a I don't know there's a bunch of weird names for him, but like like a brown field We're I'm gonna acquire flip the brand and then go off to the races. So we kind of do the, you know, yeah, we want to go in heavy on the branding. But, but usually do a small acquisition to get things started. So we have calls rolling day one. So that the technicians that we bring on, we can keep busy. And then we're going to use our brand over top of that. It would second errands point in secondary markets. I think there's a lot of business. If there's one question, I get asked a lot. It's like, should I start a new location? I'm like, well, how big are you in your current one? where you could probably be four times the size. I think a lot of these markets are a lot bigger than we think. And I would tell you to grow your one location as big as humanly possible before you do a second one, because distance is a thing. We've got locations that are three hours away. Well, that is a different culture than say Indianapolis, where all of our back end is and all of that stuff, And so it becomes a difficult to manage and you've got a lot of personalities and all of those things and so Yeah, I mean I'm already down this road so I can't turn back now But yeah, if I had to do it all over again I would just have one location and any anapolis and you know know where everybody is at everybody comes to the same building It would be awesome.
Speaker 7Yeah, just be like Parker and sons are more shinkens.
Speaker 6They seem to figure it out.
Speaker 4That seems easy All right competing in a commoditized market. So it seems like in the last five years or so, everyone's got prolific or kick charge brand. Everyone's on the same CRM, it's kind of table stakes, the booties, the dispatch text message. So do you guys have one thing in particular that you're doing in your market, that your competitors, genuinely are just not doing the set you apart?
Speaker 7It's a great question because I think early on we felt like a lot of those things were a competitor that is right and now they're just everybody does them. I think one thing that we tried to introduce in our HVAC businesses is a $1,500 buyback program where we just say, hey, any repairs you do for the life of forever. We will buy back that repairs, as long as you buy a system from us. And there's no strings attached, there's no short-term gain, there's nothing on it. Just hey, here it is, this is what we're doing. We haven't seen anybody in our competitive markets do that right like the way that we've seen at least doing so I think that's one thing that we're leaning into Seems to be building some momentum for us, but I'll keep you posted
Speaker 6I think for us, it comes back to kind of just our process. So I talked a little bit ago about onboarding. Our processes, our technicians, give six options on every single call. And that is actually one of their KPIs, average options offered. And it's difficult. The only one we give them a little bit of leeway is HVAC maintenance, but in all other trades it is six options, and we have to teach them how to build those. It's the toughest thing to do for a technician because they're a technician, they know how to work on the furnace, they know how to work on the water heater, and so building out the value in these options has been critical, and I know, you know, most companies give I think our different shader is the process with which we run and then we want to give those six options and they need to be really, really good. And I think we've seen conversion rates jump. It helps with average ticket and I think, you know, Zach was talking with, with, with mantle about creating that shopping experience. It's hard to shop if they just give you two options. But if you've got six, well then all of a sudden I can start shopping and we'll maybe I want to warranty on, longer warranty on this option and I don't want that piece or whatever and they start kind of building out what it is that they actually want and so for us that's been the thing we've kind of leaned into and you know are always looking to perfect it it's not an exact science for sure yeah great I think that that's probably the newest evolution and there's a lot of AI stuff from a digital space that we probably could get into when we're having a time
Speaker 7that I think everybody really needs to be thinking about it's coming up okay but I think the shopping experience is important and we've really leaned into that with mantle software to change how people purchase but you know we'll see how that that's going going well so I agree with that on that.
Speaker 4One of the best parts of these events is what Chris mentioned earlier is that you get a network and talk to people. I was talking to Maverick last night and I hope you don't mind me sharing your idea, but you know, we all, when I operate in my business, we lost money on maintenance. I think most of us do, it's really to get in the door, and he just on the radio started giving away free maintenance or free memberships, but it doesn't include maintenance. They send promotions for maintenance is out to those customers. So it's more of, you're in the club and I thought that was a great idea. a couple of thousand memberships you added in a like a four month span, I think you said? Yeah, so different, she ate her way to get in the door when leaves are soft. So, all right, this question's going to be asked to a couple different debaters up here. So the question is what breaks first at scale. So when you guys have both What breaks first as you scale is that the operations, culture, cash flow, what's the pivotal point there?
Speaker 7A lot of things have broken. On our journey, I think first up is around 10 million. You kind of start to break with managers, managing managers, starts to happen, right? So I think you start to have to break there if you're asking like that type of question here. I think And then I think we held on pretty good to about 30 million and I think things started to break again around 30 million pretty hard for us Be all the be you know operationally how much can you be involved in you know moving over to intact was a Fun, fun, bitch, fun, right, from there. And then you start to see some of the systems that you had as a smaller business, don't align with scale. Some of the stuff, some of the pay plans we had, kind of got broke as you scale across multiple locations, did stuff. I think there's just an array of things there, but I think really the biggest thing for me where broke was as you scale relationships change in the business, and not everybody's going to make it with you, and that's kind of the sad part that we don't talk probably enough about sometimes. It's bitter sweet, but you know, it's just like some people make it with you and some don't. And that's probably the hardest part that breaks in the business. I think it's the relationships with the people that you had as you were building this business all the way up to the scale it is and they change in the dynamic. I know it's not probably the answer. Thank you, David. The other, I guess. Maybe the answer you're looking for. But I think that was the biggest thing for me. I remember calling Tommy. talking to him one time and his, there's like, yeah, it's a great man, but it's part of the journey as you go. So, I'd be my answer. I think just, you know, relationships break and the business changes and people's shift and you gotta be okay making those changes.
Speaker 6Yeah, I think, we mentioned it as is kind of the process piece, you know, for us in 22, I think we hired 300 people and went from 50 million of revenue to 90. in 365 days and I think what we learned through that is as we kind of came out of that was that we threw a lot of people at problems and you know it's like oh we're growing this is great you know just hire some more people like let's do all of this and I think what we learned is that like It's very difficult to grow and we hear these amazing growth stories of, you know, we doubled in size, we've grown 60% and what I would question people or encourage people to do is to understand what processes need to be in place. And it's really hard to build those processes in that condensed amount of time. And so I think getting out of head of kind of process development. And then to Aaron's point, the other thing is is like, you know, we both came up in next start. We joined the same year, damn near the same month. And a lot of those processes when we were smaller, were fantastic. Like it was a great launching pad. But what I can tell you is a lot of those processes, like they break. And you've got to go into, you've got to iterate. And it doesn't mean that what you did before was wrong. It just means it worked at that level. and you're going to need to adapt and create a new one to work at a different level. And the unfortunate part about that is you don't always know that it's broke until you break it. And then you've got to correct. And I think to Aaron's point, what allows you to correct on the fly quickly is talent. And he is 100% right. The people that sit at my, all my leadership team today, The person that's been there the longest has probably been there for like two or three years. Because as you're growing, the talent requirement increases substantially. And I know we have a lot of owners in the room and the one thing I would encourage you to do. If you want to minimize those breaks, you yourself are the lid, right? Maxwell talks about it, law of the lid. And you have to be growing and developing faster than your team. I think Tommy said at one time, he sat down with his team and said, hey, here's the deal, this is the pace at which I go. And if you can't keep up with this pace, you may not be on the team long. And so it's you as a leader setting that pace at which you're going to grow and develop, that your teams either going to follow. or you're going to find out really quickly, who can't hang and I need to bring on someone who's got more talent and has maybe been where we want to go and things of that nature.
Speaker 4I should have mentioned, these guys never saw these questions. They're just answering these on the fly. And my next question was, how do you stay ahead of these processes when you grow? So you answered that well, I guess you just break them first. So thank you. All right, I want to leave a couple of minutes for questions. We're about eight minutes away from time. I want to cover this one quickly, even though you touched on a little bit, Erin, AI, everyone's talking about it. But how are you actually using AI in your business that really moves the needle and has an effect?
Speaker 7Yes, you look at the AI functions, a lot of the vendors are here, have AI stuff that you can use. I mean, obviously we're using things like book features, you know, AI phones, other implement another technology to just add efficiency, we're doing the field pro, we're doing, you know, I guess, we'll feel pro recorded calls now, what they changed it to, listening to calls, bundling all that information up, the thing is like, from AI and then understand kind of what to do within what activities to take with it. But I think the short term is, you want to use things that increase efficiencies through your dispatch or call center. I think those are just pretty no brainers at this point. I think most people are doing those and diving into that. But I think the real AI game for me is not so much operation. I think there's a ton of operational stuff that will happen, that will create efficiencies for sure in the business. I think everybody should take it serious because there will be real efficiencies that will happen through AI through your HR departments, through finance, through lots of things that are coming very quickly. And then over AI stuff on your operating systems, which hold another kind of conversation, But again, I think the AI game is also changing in just the digital space. I think people should really be aware of what's going to happen through search engines over the next year or two and position yourself to really make sure that you're in a good spot through this DAI search engine stuff. I think there's going to be a significant change and how behavior of searching and do stuff happens. And if you're not showing up, you'll be erased.
Speaker 6Yeah, I would agree with all of that. I mean, I think it's here. So I think this room is probably smart enough to realize that, but I feel like you talked to some people and I'm like, oh, you know, it'll catch on. I mean, it's here. You know, we're answering in our call center, I think, roughly about 30% of our book jobs are booked with an AI agent right now, over the last six months. Not to mention all the calls that it can handle. That it's not a bookable call, but it's a customer calling in or you know, just checking on something or whatever it is AI's able to handle that really easily. So we're using a call center, we're using dispatch. I think that the one area that I'm most interested in is kind of the business intelligence piece of, you know, how quickly it can generate reporting, how quickly it can generate like, Hey, here's my data, what's going wrong? Whereas, you know, before it's like looking at each individual ticket and, you know, doing all this stuff, it's like the ability to have that information fast. I think is going to, you know, really challenge us and the talent on our team is one, are we capable of using these technologies to make quicker decisions, pivot quicker, especially as you know, in the HVAC business, the seasonality and different stuff like that, can we pivot and move quicker so that we don't see kind of the ups and downs of this business and we're able to flatten out those lines. I think it's very interesting, and I think something that, you know, lucky for us, I talked to a lot of friends outside the industry and they're like, hey, who do you use for AI and phones and this and the other? And I think we've gotten really lucky with a lot of the, you know, really smart people who have entered the trade space and kind of enabled us to use this technology, probably faster in most cases than a lot of industries out there.
Speaker 4Thank you very much. All right, we got time for a probably one or two questions. Anyone have questions for these guys?
Speaker 2Okay, it's me.
Speaker 4Three questions, very generous, thank you, Chris.
Speaker 0Peter, man, I'm like huge advocate on onboarding and I think I did it to late in my journey where I was taking onboarding seriously. Can you give us an overview of what your onboarding process looks like, maybe per department or what it looks like. So everybody can learn from it?
Speaker 6Yeah, for sure. So for us, they spend, everyone comes to Indianapolis. So regardless of what location you're at, You come to Indianapolis, we onboard every other Monday. Typically, we'll have a class of call it 10 to 15 people from, you know, a bunch of different departments, primarily technicians. So they come in, if they're, you know, pretty far away, then we'll bring them in on a Sunday. They're going to spend the whole week in Indianapolis. So they come in, Monday is all in the classroom. They're kind of getting, you know, all of the HR stuff in this, that and the other, All of that on Monday, on Tuesday, if they're a field technician, they begin writing out with other technicians. So what we found is that we tried to teach them the process before they ever went out in the field. And like they had no basis for what we were trying to teach them. So we flipped that around where they go out with some of our technicians. And we have certain technicians that take new hires. That run the process really well and do all of that. So they'll do that for I think it's two days and then the back end of that week They come back in the classroom and we teach them what we call the Peter Minway And that's essentially from start to finish on a call and then they're gonna do a Dish in the second week. They're gonna do additional right out So they write out they see a technician do it. They come back in they train and then they go back out with a technician do it for a little bit and then it's varied on when we let them out into the field some are quicker than others but that's traditionally how we do it. I will tell you that our training piece, one of the biggest breakthroughs that we made from a talent perspective is my COO is a former educator and middle school principal. it blew my mind the first time I saw it I was he was like this is trash we're going to redo this whole thing this is how people actually learn and this is how we're going to teach them so that's been really really impactful for us as we think about onboarding good question
Speaker 1What was your, uh, uh, uh, your highest ROI, whether it be marketing, uh, talent acquisition or just buying other companies?
Speaker 7I was, I, uh, 40 million. I, I don't know if I can say, well, what was our highest ROI at 40 million? Mike. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I love to spend money on marketing. I mean, I spend a shit ton of money on marketing. Yeah.
Speaker 6Yeah. I mean, I always say when it comes to like, where do I put this excess money? I think the key is, where do you want to go? Right? So many people are like, I want to grow. I'm like, okay, what's like the where do you want to go? Because that's going to determine where you put your money. You know, hey, I've got a $20 million company we're put in 15 to 20 on the bottom line and I'm really good dealing with the amount of people that I have to deal with will then put your money in your pocket or put your money in building the process or do whatever but if the goal is hey, I want to be a hundred and fifty million will then Okay, I need to spend it on marketing. I need to go maybe get a high quality CFO. I need to do all of these things to build the business at 150. What I've always found is like talent. is going to be king and finding the people who have been where you want to go and can help you get there. They knock out a lot of roadblocks and you don't spend stupid dollars, I mean we still spend some but try to minimize those but yeah I mean to me that no one where you want to go is the key and what that looks like and talking to the people in the room who have been there to tell you hey this is do this, don't do that, You need these people to kind of help you along the journey.
Speaker 7Maybe to answer the question a little better since I didn't maybe I misunderstood what the question was there. At 40 million, we did a rebrand of the business. We did kind of what Chad talked about. We refocus our attention to what is the future of our brand. Look like, where do we put our resources? Where do we put capital investment in? So we did a rebrand of the business. We added in multiple trades. We also looked at expansion and greenfield to other markets. We understood what was the cost to be able to operate these. Can we cash flow that? for the next, you know, 18, 24, 36 months, have we built enough cash reserves for that? We feel good with that. We also then invested into our talent pool for developing technicians to building out our university, our training programs, all of those areas to be able to backfill that staff and that growth over time. So that's where we did a similar to what Chad Sanders really invested in the brand itself. So we went from transactional, more of transactional advertising, to brand advertising, transactional mix, really spent that, and we went into green field market, really bought a bunch of bot brandy messages to do that, and then we worked on just investing in talent development and spent the money there.
Speaker 1Thank you. All right, one more.
Speaker 5Doc! What's up, Buds? Um, long time. Chad, I didn't know that you did a deal, so congratulations on that. That's fantastic. Yeah. Hell yeah, so along the ride, we're all trying to win here right and and winning looks a little different for everybody. Maybe you give me each of you guys give me your biggest personal win to date and what you think your next big win is going to be.
Speaker 7Well, we just got some extra money. How about you? I say my first win was first off and most of you guys know my story is a big bankrupt with my first business early on at the age of 28 when completely bankrupt and then just getting back on my feet and getting going I think the biggest win for me was my first million dollars like in my bank account personally felt like a recovery to life so I'd say that was this you're asking you a personal win That was a personal win for me. I think it was just not giving up on myself and realizing that you'd come back from bankruptcy back and have a million dollars in your bank account. I think that was the big win for me to get moving again. And then I think the next win is just a building of business that has an opportunity for the future for the trades. I love the trades. My mission for our company is build great trades. People of answer life and win big. So I love the trades, say my life. It allowed me to rebound back. From bankruptcy to taught me a skill early on in my life that I didn't have so I might go Futures to keep building this business where it can advance trades people's lives create opportunity into it, and You know Obviously, you know, I got some financial goals that I'd like to achieve as we go in 26 27 with the company I was 28 years old Um, when I went bankrupt with my first business, which was a new construction plumbing, about three to half million dollar business, and during the housing crash lost that business. So, you know, it's been 19 years now, uh, of building and trust me the first nine was like nothing. We're doing anything. But, so, yeah, I just think, uh, my personal in is just be able to bounce back. I think resilience matters and everything, right, and we'll go through resilient stuff. So, that's an answer to your question, I guess, in some sense. And then my other big goal benchmark was a $100 million business was to put that out there 15 years ago. When I met Mike 13 years ago, I said, I want to build a $100 million business. Don't know how it is. I didn't even know really anybody at that time. I wasn't part of next-door. Any of those things. So it was my goal was still to build a $100 million business independently before potentially find a partner. And that's what I want to complete this year. So that's my other mission is to complete that independently grown business $200 million. And then from there, look at what the next steps of chapters of my life and in our business life is. I was a million dollars when I wrote that goal.
Speaker 6Yeah, I mean for me personally, you know, when I think about, you know, I spend a lot of time at work, which I love, you know, to Aaron's point, getting to hear the stories of guys who came in as a $18 an hour apprentice and now are running a branch or, you know, some of our lead installers make you know, $130, $40,000 a year and they started like three years ago, they're making $18 an hour and I'm like, wow, this is really, really cool. I don't know that there's many industries where someone could accelerate that quickly. And just to hear those stories of guys who, you know, got into the trade and, you know, they were kind of not knowing where they were going to go and then all of a sudden they're in a place where You know, their wife's able to go back to school, to become a nurse, and she's always wanted to become a nurse. Like to me, those are the stories that keep me working, because the ability for something that is, you know, in my mind, the trades, our mission at Peterman Brothers is to elevate the trades. That's what we want to do. That's what we talk about. When we walk into a customer's home, it's we're here to elevate the trades. And I don't, my dad started our company back in 86. And I knew what Dad did, but it wasn't anything that I was interested in. I can't fix a damn thing. Go figure. But to be able to be a part of an industry that to me has made such an impact on so many lives, to have a small part in that, to be in rooms like this, where like, you got the best of the best You know, truly revolutionized this. I mean, we talked about next star. I remember joining back in 2015, and I'm just looking all Googly eyed at these guys who are running, you know, at the time back then, it was like $30, $40 million companies. Like, that was the biggest of the big, like these guys were rock stars, the Dave Geigers of the world, all of those guys that, you know, you looked up to, and to be able to share kind of our story and to be able to say, hey, And to be doing the same thing, like to me, this is the most fun that we get to do is learn from each other, share it. There's plenty of frickin' business out there. So it doesn't matter if I'm in your market, not in your market, who gives a shit. We're all here to help each other, hopefully create lives for the people that work at our companies and many more. I mean, I think all of the activity in the space, like people are starting notice that We know what we're doing and we're doing some really, really good stuff out there and to me that's kind of the exciting part about the future and where we're headed for sure.
