The GM of advanced heating and cooling. An 18-year-old HVAC company, we do heating, cooling, electrical and plumbing work. Now, tell me about how you first? Well, okay. So, your possession, you deal with sales, but not entirely sales. So, what exactly do you do, you oversee people? Yeah, I oversee. There's probably, in my department alone because we do both commercial residential, I'm probably over seeing about 27, 28 individuals. Most of them are men that have master degrees in plumbing, electrical and HVAC. So, I don't have to worry about them not showing up to work, they all work hard to put their kids through college, but basically I commend each day. I have a workload that the salespeople give me, jobs that they were sold and some of which we saw ISO, and we bid on, and then I make sure to coordinate, get everybody out to the jobs, with the materials and basically almost spoke on a wheel here. There's a lot of moving pieces but the install department we have a lot of responsibility, and we turn over a lot of sales. We make things happen, you sell it when we get put in four. Okay. So, can you elaborate a little bit you said you'd give some sales. So, can can you elaborate on how that works? Well, I have I've been in this community since 1993, and I know a lot of people and people call me often say, Dan can you do this? And some of the jobs I have time to take and bit, get all the materialist how many man days is it going to take, put all those things together a proposal form, and then of course make with the customer or the contractor, and we can negotiate. Where they need me to be, where I need them to be, and then we come to an agreement, they sign off on the contract, and then I make it happen. So, you text on sales again? Now, I'm interested about. So, how do you work with the sales department? The sales department basically, we have a service department. The service department is the leading force for our sales, they go into the home, they fix things and a lot of times they need to replace things or they try to upsell things. We try to have our employees here, not just be service oriented but to be sales-oriented, we want them to be sellers. When, anytime we have an opportunity to go into a customer's home, it's an opportunity to sell them something, whether it be a maintenance agreement, whether it be in enable air filter system, there's a smorgasbord of things in this industry. So, we're constantly trying to get these guys, to sell. The sight when I was in the restaurant business, and that's what I did for 20 years, I didn't want my servers and my partners to be order takers, I wanted them to be salespersons. It's important that, when you have a captured audience or you have individuals undivided attention, that you don't just provide a service that they need, you also provide services that they may need in the future. Or provide them with a product that can make the life that they're living now easier or better. So there's always opportunities to sell to people, and getting the door, that's a sale in itself. So basically the guys walk out to sell. When they sell something, they'll come back to us, we'll start some paperwork and then we'll go ahead and we'll do installs but all of our set, all our service people all of our employees, we try to have Ms. salespersons. And that's the job itself to teach people to go into someone's home and sell them something. Right now, the big thing that we're doing here at advancing and cooling is, we want to have a thousand maintenance contracts and then we get a thousand, we want another thousand maintenance contracts. So, we're constantly challenging our employees to be salespersons. And they're getting a lot better. What are some general tips that you'd give to a person, who is a good salesperson, but now they want to be a manager? Well, I like that. That's a good question, I always want people to love my job and I want my boss's job, I want own the company. So, you always want people that want I always felt like, to have your job but one thing I would tell them is, to appreciate opportunity, don't burn bridges because you would find that in this life in this town is as large as you think this town is, everybody knows somebody and it is and can bite you in the butt. So basically, try to always treat everybody is if you treat somebody that you care about, somebody like walk age family. Okay. Well, who do you like? Treat everybody like that person. If I see somebody that's older or that could use some honesty, when it comes to the salesmanship or possibly if I can find them an opportunity to save them some money, you know you do those things, and there are sometimes you do things and you do them for free and nobody ever knows that you, that you did it. I think that if you live your life like that, you believe in what you're selling, you're passionate about opportunities, and being a salesperson isn't about going out killing it every day. There are some people that, that is, for me personally, it's just the fact that you have an opportunity advancing and Kuhn. Has given me many many opportunities and I think that's one of the bigger things too. Is to have opportunity to sell something. It's got to believe in it, you got to look nice, you want to look handsome guy. So it's a little easier for me, but for the average person just kidding about that. But I think if you get up every day and you go out with an honest heart, you know I think that sales will come naturally for anybody. And to be in a management position, that's a lot different to going out and selling because you're selling your employees policies and procedures. A lot of times it's hard to do especially in this industry because some of my employees are there as old as my dad, they are set in their ways and I have to present it to them in a way, that they will trust what we're doing. I know sometimes they'll shake their head, they're like why are we doing this and but a constant again, you're selling. But to sell, you have to have confidence in it, you have to have faith in it and if you sell it, you have to walk to work, and I think that to be a manager and also you got to want to do it. You have to want to and understand it's like being in a marriage. It is compromise all the time. You're constantly compromising. I'm constantly compromised with my customers, I'm constantly compromised with my employees. Don't let kindness be mistaken as a weakness. That's one thing you can't do in a management position, be fair, go out of your way to help employees. We help employees cut wood in the winter. I actually have employees that I have that now are going to church all the time. So, I try to do things outside of work, but it builds on our relationship. Our boss, employee relationship which a lot people say we can't be friends with your employees, you can differentiate voice. Now, I don't love drinking with my employees because I am not comfortable doing that. I just now Christmas parties and stuff yeah, we have a real good time, but I think too and letting you know, if you're wanting to work your way up the ladder, I think make it crystal clear from the get-go, that is something you strive for, you don't want to settle down here to dish junkie, you want to be out on the floor. I know when I came in here, I was brought in to basically start over. They know that I don't know anything about HVAC. They brought me here to manage people and manage time and manage materials and then when you start doing that, you find that there's so much more too. I want to learn and be the best at this position, I want to learn and be the best father, I want to learn to be the best person, I want to learn to be the best friend. So, it's really what I put into it. I'm selling myself daily things that I need to do to be a better me, if that makes any sense. It absolutely does. How do you work with the owner director and office manager? I know, if I go to the website,new names are there. So you're one of the main contacts but so as the owner. The director, like sales director person, and the office manager. So how do you guys work as a real team and how does that filter down to your sales reps and installation people and all that? Well, we just had a meeting today. We tried to get together administratively once a month. Next month we're going to get together on a boat out on the water. We tried to take us away from this scene, but we also try to address a lot of the things and basically that our customer Some of the things that we want to do better customer service, we want to do better for our employees, but we basically, we communicate a lot. Every morning, when the owner gets here, he comes into my office and he sits in the chair that you're sitting in right now, every single morning. He comes in. I start hours before everybody. I'm here three hours before he even gets in the door. But when he comes in everyday, we go through the entire agenda, things that are coming up. We spent time together. We communicate. I understand his expectations. He understands my concerns. Then, normally after the owner goes out, then the office manager, she'll come in. We have another ray that comes in and answer the phone, so we can spend time together. But we everyday, we have to communicate. There are days when I don't want to see any of them. Of course, but it is imperative that we don't even let one day go by without spending the time communicating with one another. So, it's all basically a big thing of we get together, and we solve the problems in the world, and then we go out, and we set goals for ourselves. We do a lot of goal setting for ourselves personally for each department. We also spend a lot of time with our service manager, who actually he runs the service department force, but we explained to him numbers. We have goals for him. We would like to see, for instance, this month, I have a goal for the guys. We'd like to have them sell $100,000 a month. They had been doing that. Now that they're doing that, we want them to sell more, not because we're greedy individuals because we are tapping into their ability to be salespersons, and we have some incredible salesperson. We have people in this company that sell three and four units a day, which it's pretty stellar and they've never had any sales experience. When people say, well, I wonder how they're doing that? Well, they do because they love what they do. They have a passion for it. We actually have people that send us emails and say, "I really enjoyed this employee that you send over. He had taken the time to explain something to me. I didn't know that this technology existed." So, basically, us as a ministry to your management team, we tell everybody when someone does well. We want to blow that up. We want to magnify. We want everybody, not only the employee to know, but we want all of our employees to know when they do well. Sometimes we don't do so well, but we don't have heartburn. We use those as opportunities to grow and to get better. So, we don't hide those things. We actually magnify and our employees might not like it. There's days I don't like it much either, but it's the right thing to do if you want to be successful. One thing I've found is that as we've grown and gotten bigger, you expose weaknesses in your system. I think that that happens for whether you're a $5 million company or a $20 million company. So, those are opportunities to get better. You get a stronger team. We come up with better process and procedures. The next thing you know, we're bringing in. They say you can't fly like an eagle if you hang out with turkeys. We're very particular who we hire. I had a young man that showed up today. I've been looking at your sign. He's been looking at the sign, but he came in after we went past three tests. Three tests that are not that easy to pass, but he wanted to come in with some credentials. I thought that was pretty stellar. I thought it spoke volumes of us and it spoke volumes about his character. So, you surround yourself with some good people. Next thing you know like when I leave for vacation next week, I have one of the newest members of this team, and know as being like a year and a half. He actually sits in the seat, and he runs everything because he's the only employee that came to me, and said, "I want your job." So, I gave it to him last year. I said, "I'm on job vacation." He earned respect from everybody in the building. He earned respect from the owner of the company, from the secretaries, from the service manager. Now, I have an assistant manager because he had some passion, and some of enthusiasm about sitting in the same, and basically, running the show. That's really good advice actually for because people taking this course are looking to step up. There are already sales people, one likely. But they're looking to step up in our job, and how to go about it, and literally, you just said, "Hey, he cannot be on set. I want to do it. Give me a shot." Yeah. That was a passion for it. When you go in any, you don't want to go into a position and be almost overbearing. One thing I've found is if you show up everyday, and you do the best job you possibly can, and you have a conscience about what you're doing, you don't have to worry about rising through the ranks. That life will do that for you. So, come in everyday, don't be a part of the drama because there's always the drama. One thing the social media these days, there's so much to it. I just think though to be real successful if you just go to work everyday. Just give it your best everyday. Go home at night. Recharge your batteries. Everybody thinks different. I don't think the bottle would be a good way to do that, but I would recommend go on home. For a long time, I would go home, and actually critique my day, and critique my conversations. I actually there are times in my career where I actually would practice looking in a mirror, and talking, and trying to explain my frustrations over something to an employee without yelling to do it in a way that I wouldn't turn them off. So, it sounds ridiculous, but now looking back and thinking, wonder why we're thought to do those things? Well, I did it because I was passionate about what I'm doing today. If you go to work everyday and you give it your best, I can assure you and I can tell you for sure will make it to the top and beyond. I'm certain that. I am certain that. So, this is about evaluations. So, this is kind of interesting. Say, you have a fleet of workers and install our app. How do you manage and evaluate their performance? Do you evaluate, monitor the sales from the office, on the field, online, all over? All over. We were constantly evaluating, not just the sales, but the employees. How well they're doing? We do yearly reviews. I make notes almost daily on every individual employee. If they get a lot of good reviews, we like to make sure that they're aware that. We tell them often. If we're doing a lot of sales, we wanted by to know. We actually in our office, we have a big screen TV that you walked by when you came in. On that TV has daily sales, monthly sales per employee. So, for them, when they walk in and they looked at the board, it's a competition for them. They strive to get that number to be on the top of the board. So, we're watching through our, of course, our sales, but there's a lot of ways to chart how each individuals doing. We actually have an allele that comes in each day and tracks via GPS. How long they were there? How much did they sell? But I think honestly, for us, just to track the big screen out there is a high one of the biggest ways we do it. So, are there like quotas set that they need to meet or? No. We have that we'd like them to meet. Yeah. But I'll be honest with you, the quota is that we said, they're not little. We want you to be a rock star. We want you to some of the guys that started here six months ago, they don't walk around with their head down. They walk around smile on her face and they're constantly saying, "Hey, did you see my sales? " So, they do a good job at work constantly, and we're always trying to bring these boys and girls up, make sure that they're doing a good job. They also would waste is a big thing callbacks. There's a lot that goes into that. So, yeah, you can sell a lot, but if we have a lot of callbacks because it wasn't installed properly or if they didn't like what they bought, you're looking at an average of six to $12,000 are spent on a system. We have to make sure we hit on all cylinders to make it right for them, 100 percent satisfaction guarantee for us. But tracking these guys, not only like the waste if they design doc work, if we have a lot of come back, cost money. But, yeah, we got a pretty good team here. So, how does the company manage the sales expenses? How do you control them? I guess it's more than sales obviously. There's an installation fees too, but your insulate people are all such salespeople because representing your company and all that. So, do you have someone that does that? Do you have, I mean, under centers doing how? We do. I mean, yeah, I mean, just our few cards alone. Everybody it's a privilege to have a company vehicle. So, we give those to the individuals that we think have demonstrated that they are really committed to what we're doing or committed to our customers. They are good at what they do. So, they all have cards and we have a lady that tracks their cards. We put in the a dominators. We put in their special code and she tracks them all the time. So, we actually, and then this new system that we have a lot with QuickBooks and all these things actual itemize force. We have a lay that all she does is track. How much I spend at our vendors? I know monthly, year to date where we are. We're constantly trying to buy things in bulk now because we are a little bit larger. We can afford to buy it in bulk. But we have a lady that basically, that's her job. If she notices something or something's out of whack or she asked questions, a lot of times it's a very easy answer and obvious answer, but sometimes it's not. We have unfortunately, we have caught people not being very honest, that the another thing to be honest. Luckily, we have these processes procedures in place wherever it catch the individual hand and get everything back plus some extra. But you have to have somebody that can sit their daily and track this stuff. It's hard enough to be able to organize all the employees, but then to track all that, that's another beast in itself and I'm blessed I have two secretaries. So, they basically do a great job. One deals with this portion of business. One deals with that. The one that takes care of all the fuel and all the materials, she is in the desk working hard, eight, 10 hours a day.
