E: 89 Billy Stevens & Chris Meseke w/ Sera Systems - How To Use Efficiency As A Catalyst To Your Business’ Success

It was absolutely astounding and eye opening. And if you are an HVAC business or business owner of any kind, just listen to that part cuz it'll change your life.

Hit us up in our Facebook group, facebook.com/groups/hvacrevealed, and let us know what your favorite part is from this show enjoy.

They have a dynamic dispatching that you can put online on your, website, and a pricing model based on actual data. So here's some stats. The average increase in revenue of 52% within the first six months of using Sera. And the icing on the cake is those same businesses have more than doubled their profit margins. So book your demo, head on over to sales.sera.tech/hvac-revealed.

But the business blueprint that Victor's gonna be dropping, it's everything that he's done to build his company and scale it from zero to 50 million in four years. Covers everything from p and L's SOPs position for all the positions in the company. Call scripts, marketing plans, you name it, that and so much more. Definitely be on the lookout for that. If you need the link to register for when you get to see the updates, that is Profit Rocket Business Blueprint dot paper form.co.

Register for that and you will get all of the information when it comes out live. There you go. Done. Let's go.

I'm sure you have those digital analog converters are. And that's what he does is he takes my experience from my 25 years in this fi in the field running these companies. And we sit down and we sit down a lot. We, spend a lot of time. And he basically takes my experience and converts that information in a way that the, our engineers can actually build what I'm asking for. and that's a very vital role.

Because you've gotta understand every little piece of what I'm asking for and how it relates to I may say, Hey, I need something for maybe I need something for membership or something. Well, there's a lot more to that than you think. And so we have to walk through that entire scenario of membership selling, membership processing going back and doing the services. All that stuff has to be digitized in some way so you can make it easier for you when you use the product.

And so from there, I'd like for Chris to go ahead and introduce himself and kind of tell us a little bit about him. So,

And I feel a great responsibility in trying to get this information out there both in the day to day when people are using the application or multiple applications that we have out in the field to keeping things running for them in the field to how do we reach more people, right? How do we get this message out there? And so that's what I'm charged with and I got an awesome team around me to do that, here at Sera.

And just methods and bringing this the story, like I said, that and the experience that Billy has. So yeah, deep responsibility for this this industry to bring us out to the world.

The other challenge is the business owners that have been around since Billy started and running a business, cuz they're, they still exist too, where they've been in it for 25 years. In that transition of going from Yellow Pad technology and filing away everything and writing down everything on paper to now going digital is really where you're coming into place.

So when it comes to softwares, how is it that I. Actually find a software that is going to help grow my business instead of just being another pain in the ass. Think I gotta learn and it's gonna get in the way and end up slowing down our process and causing us to do less, not more.

We, and the reason that's important to take away is we are at every step we look about how these complex things can be broken down. So you said yellow pad, I think is the word you used, right? Taking these processes and sometimes we have to just put all the pads on the table. Now we're on a wall. There's a lot of times what we do and we start peeling it back and we start peeling it back. And usually our design sessions where we have.

Folks that have experience in the industry, we can bring them in cuz we have operating business downstairs in our building. we bring all these ideas in and we start stripping away and make it less and less complex. So Apple has a saying where they have steps in which they look at software where you, zoom out first of all and you look at the big picture and that's what we do first. And then you zoom in and really focus on whatever problem you're trying to solve. And then you iterate through that.

And so we bring that methodology by having designers take a look at the first stab at something we go through multiple iterations is keep taking away and taking away and taking away until it's at is most simplistic form. We find success when we can design something and put it in front of the user. And I had this comment yesterday by bringing one of our new concepts we're having with equipment types.

I put that onto the screen for the first time and the comments were, I understand what this is doing without even you explaining it. I didn't say a thing, I just put it on the board and they understood the concepts in an application before I've even explained anything. And if we can get that with everything that Sera's bringing, we're doing our job. That's what I feel like we're doing our job. So that's one example of a way that we, we tear through a complex and, and bring it.

And you could say, well, other software companies do the same thing. Well, I think what's lost and a lot of times, cause I've worked in the corporate world for a long time is you have a lot more people and it, one of the most difficult things you have is with a group, an organization, is to try to get that. That vision, that image whatever your mission statement is, down to every single person. When you start hiring large teams, you start being a large operation.

You sometimes contract that work out. Sometimes you just have a lot of teams and people that are newer people that are leaving. And so your concentration of that mission statement is a little bit lost in larger companies. And so what we have is we don't have that. We have the passionate people and a small team, and I think that's what we're able to bring is, is Billy's knowledge operating business downstairs to all of our customers we currently have.

And all that goes into sitting in front of a screen and saying, I know what this is, I know what I'm looking at without his explanation. That is modern software to me. And that's success. So I hope that, hope that answers your question. That was a very long-winded way of getting around there, but

Look at our business as example, like the amount of SEO softwares that exist, paid ad softwares that exist to be able to analyze this data and that data and call tracking and let alone the CRM that exists as well. There's so many different things that, that can grab your attention and everything has a new shiny aspect to add a new shiny object to it.

As a contractor, when you're trying to make a decision on what softwares to bring into your business, because this is not just gonna impact you as the business owner, it's gonna impact your entire team and how your operation runs. What sort of things do you need to consider when you're looking at one, making a change? Two, just making a decision in the first place as to what softwares to use.

Just because it's all nice and shiny doesn't mean it's that silver bullet that you're looking for to solve your problems. Unfortunately, if you have a business that just isn't running correct, There's really, nothing's gonna se solve your problem until you dedicate yourself to what this you're trying to buy and make that happen. Right?

And that's what Sera does, is we have a, a, a mission that we're gonna a road or highway that we're gonna drive you down to help you solve these problems as you start using the software more and more. And, and that's the whole idea. Whereas when you're doing a lot of bolt on softwares, which we can do there are very good softwares that we use as to compliment our software as well.

But I just think that you shouldn't get distracted by all the shiny new objects that are out there and really focus on getting the best CRM for you first, because running the business is correctly is the solution. you've already won the lottery by owning the business. I mean, the opportunity to own your own business in this country is amazing. Right. So you won that lottery. So how do we make the most out of that lottery winnings? Right. and that's, our concept here. This is what Sera's about.

it's really about how do we drive all that money to the bottom line and so do you wasting it along the way. I've got a perfect example. So we have job time efficiency and we turned that on for our customers a couple of months ago. And I have a customer, this happened yesterday. He is all bought in in this job time efficiency. And he, calls us up about once a week. I'm not gonna say his name. In fact, I didn't give him a call to ask him if I could use his name.

I should've done that cuz I think he would let me, but I didn't. Anyway, he had a job and he showed it to we actually have a Sera working at Sera and she's our, that's our customer. Different spelling. She's different spelling. Yeah. Yeah. She spelled her name wrong. I'm sorry. No, So she's our customer success advocate. Right. And so, and Sera, you get one of those when you get our software and he calls her up and he sends her an email. He goes, I want you to look at this.

And so she jumps, actually jumps on his Sera account and pulls up that job cuz he gave her the job member. And on that job, it, he, without him saying anything, the guy sold one and a half hours worth of work, but the amount of time it took him to do it was 13 hours. And we're like, And so Sera's first response was, well before she even dug in, she goes, Well, I, it sounds to me like he took payment but didn't close the call when he took payment or, Right. That's your first reaction.

And he goes, and she's like, well, we can talk to your guys about it's very important that they close the call. Now let me show you how to edit it to make it right. He goes, Oh no, it's right. It took him 13 hours. And she's like, well tell me more. he goes, Well, we had a call where we needed a camera, we had one camera, but we had multiple texts and he needed a camera, so he needed to go and get the camera from the guy that had the camera.

So he's leaving a job that he's gonna get $600 for, and he is gonna go get a camera. And there's five or six technicians and there's one camera. and all five or six technicians can use the camera, but they pass it around when someone needs it. Okay? So he goes and picks up the camera, brings the camera back, it doesn't work. The head's been broken. Okay? So now he's on the phone. Everybody's on the phone trying to find the head so he can fix the camera so he can use it.

Locate this problem that he's seeing under that they're having underground, he's unable to unclog it or whatever. Long story short, 13 hours later, they get everything fixed. They get it to where it works, and he goes over there and he solves the problem. And he collected money like he's supposed to close it out, but it took 13 hours. And the reason he brought this to our attention, he goes, This happens to us all the time, and this happens to so many companies.

So Mike, what we try to do at Sera is first and foremost, I'm gonna give you some really quick, easy math here, and a business advice. It's way cheaper to have five cameras on a camera on each truck than it is to have one camera to pass around. so how much money, Let's just look at this. Let say he's got a $400 flat rate price, $400 to 13 hours is $5,200 I think. So this is money that he never went, he never saw another customer totally messed up the schedule for the day, right?

He had these calls booked. Now he doesn't get to those calls. He's involving the himself, the owner. He's involving the dispatcher. Everybody can try to find the solution for this one call. We have all this man hours on it, and this is what happens in these companies. Whereas had he bought five cameras and had a camera on every truck financed that took the depreciation, rode off the interest, he would've made way more. It's so much cheaper to have five cameras, and I know cameras are expensive.

They're like 15 grand, I think. $75,000. But on a five year note, we're talking about 1500 bucks a month. I mean, we just wasted 5,400 bucks, right? Right. in billable time. and so that's almost four months worth of payments. And he would've had a camera in every truck. And so this is the things that we do in our business is that we don't realize that are killing all of our profitability, And this is what we help solve.

We help you get organized so you can see these things that actually cost you more money. And this is just one scenario, but this happens on calls all the time. Not having the right equipment on equipment and tools on a van is the worst thing you can do. Not having two water heaters in a plumbing truck is the worst thing you can do. Not having enough free on or, the right gauges or whatever on those vehicles is the worst thing you can do.

Going and getting it after you're already on a call is a loss right then and there. Now, let's look at the other side, The other point of view, would that customer call that company back again after he wasted 13 hours on this job? We talk about getting the best techs all the time. We talk about getting giving the best service all the time, but yet we won't go buy the equipment to, to do all the things that we need to do to make this happen, right?

And this is where all the money goes, and this is what we help fix. There's nobody out training that. There's nobody training these day to day things. They're training numbers or process or whatever, but no one's training the day and how we're wasting money. And that's what we do at Sera. We've help you stop wasted money so that money can go to the bottom line, right? So he pretty much wrecked the whole week.

In that scenario and disrupted several people in the business and the customer who will never probably call them ever again cuz they're not capable of doing the job. Right. And that is why you need to make good decisions when it comes to software. It will not fix those problems unless you have something to help and at roadmap. Right. And that's what we're trying to provide.

Yeah. If you think you're being cost effective as a business owner because you bought one camera that you can share amongst five trucks and you miss the aspect of being completely inefficient when it comes to being able to deliver for clients when it comes to efficiency on the job and making sure that you can get to three jobs in a day instead of one and pay your guy overtime cuz he just worked 13 hours for the day.

I go, well, so they'll know what to get before we go, well again, now we're wasting time. And now you've got the tech running your business again. I am not anti-tech. I get it. Tech's got his job, we need to support him 100%. But if you're owning the business, you need to be in control of what happens. Right. And that's how you get this thing under control. and having them look at all the calls and they start cherry picking calls.

Then you create this animosity between texts and between dispatchers. You got your favorites, all these things. If you would just do it one call at a time and have everything you need and do it, you'll have a much higher average ticket. You'll have more efficiency, and then all of a sudden you're making money. It's just getting rid of the chaos.

But when you actually equate that out into what that means in your income statement, how that means on your job time efficiencies, how that affects your revenue, how does that affect your Like, there's all these other factors that go into it that people don't get to see that in real time. And I think that's what's fascinating about Sera is now you've taken this old technology that people wait for a week or so, or however long your bookkeeper takes for you to get your books.

And in doing it antiquated way, and boom, it's real. It's right there, it's done right. And now you can see, oh shit, at the end of the day, what jobs did I make the most money? What jobs did I not? Right? It's just, it's a fascinating way to be able to do that. And. I think the shiny object syndrome is all too real, right? Like people hear about it all the time and you have to check yourself as a business owner to say, Okay, well what makes the most sense for me on my business?

It doesn't make sense to switch my software every month, right? Like, we went through that on our business with our project management software. We went from a sauna to hive to click up and I'm like, I'm done. I'm not changing. Like it's just a tool. It's how you utilize that. But I mean, Sera's obviously it's like the Cadillac of all tools that are out there, in my opinion, in field service management software.

So I guess when, when you have that, when you hear about the shiny object syndrome, but maybe Chris, you might be able to, to talk to it And in keeping this KISS theory, how can you, I guess, as a business owner reduce this insatiable need to want to switch all the time when you look at something, what Sera has in place or other softwares, I mean, it just doesn't have to be Sera related. We can talk about some of the other ones if you really want, without saying any names.

Then get into, okay, I hear about this profit margin thing from these guys on this podcast and I wanna know more this Billy Guy has in store for me. Well, then we can take you through how to get things zoned in on your price book. And then you can take the next level. So I think that, You don't have to ne I think some of the fear might be you have to embrace everything all at once. I think that you could do it in steps.

We do like to call ourselves opinionated software only because we try to be opinionated, but yet get outta your way. Some people, we know that this might take some time to adopt some of these methodologies and concepts to what happens when I need to look at every single job and its efficiency. Maybe that's a little overwhelming for me at first, so, Okay.

Well, we got ways and steps that you could run reports first and then start deep diving into what's important little bits at a time, different periods. We've got different ways to filter the reporting. there's definitely ways to consume and take that first step up a big mountain. with Sera, could you described it as a Cadillac for example. Cadillac, or it is supposed to represent lots of features, lots of things inside of the car getting to know each one of 'em and, and how to utilize it.

Is one, one thing I know there's a lot of people that come on board, or I read on user groups too, that they buy a lot of different software to do very niche things, Right? Very niche things. And one for scheduling, one for this, one for that. and while you add them all together, you've got a longer feature list Okay. Yeah. Than a Sera. But what's the load on your brain and, and the time it takes to implement each one to its full extent?

Stop doing that stop doing that start using what's important. Start, with Sera and we'll help you out. Get through an adoption of these little things and much more consumable chunks, I guess is the way I would put that. Does that make sense?

We talked a little bit about that in the very beginning. Taking these big complex ideas that have been in Billy's mind that have been transferred to yellow paper, to back to Billy's mind, to now to you to put on a whiteboard, to get into engineering, to get out to the user, but then make sure the user can be able to, use it in a way that is, friendly.

I mean, I like, I guess let's talk a little bit about a problem though for a second cuz that, that brings to mind what's the biggest problem that people can get into when utilizing a new technology? Somebody could be an older business, moving to tech technology. What are some of those problems that you're seeing people are experiencing with not just Sera, but technology as a whole.

And so I'm not sure if changing is gonna be a plus or a minus. and I'm just gonna do the thing I'm used to. And so that's the biggest hesitation with software. And so it's a constant challenge to instill trust. We could say it all day long, we could try to train it, which we do. We could try to guide people through in the app. We try to do that. We, I guess it would just take a multifaceted approach to instilling trust.

I think that is what the biggest challenge people like me that are in technology and building products have to do. It's once we have the trust, they'll come along for the change and understand that it's better for them and get the results. But until we get that buy-in, it takes time and takes a lot of different methods cuz everybody's different. Everyone's got different things going on. So that's my take on it. I dunno, Billy has another take on,

And if you're running a business and it's making you money, you're making a good living, you're doing all these things, that's all fine and but if you could just take and do my 5% rule and work on each little item and improve it by 5%, it makes a amazing difference. And, the way people work in your office takes a lot of the stress out and it creates a lot of money to the bottom line.

and that's what we really do at Sera, is we just try to simplify the things that have got, that have gotten complicated over the years in your business. Like the one camera, techno thinking like that I don't use a camera on every call, so why should I have a climber on every truck, right? Or these are the things that they start thinking and there's a Home Depot every 10 miles.

So we will, every time we go to a job, instead of having inventory, we'll just go to Home Depot and get the parts go, and come back. Well, we have a rule in our company, and this is just a rule that we do, is you go to a job, you don't leave it till you finish. Right? You get everything we'll bring you everything you need if it's outside of what's in the truck. But one thing I can tell you, if you wanna know what the inventory for an HVAC truck is or a plumbing truck is, we'll give you that.

We got it. We know what you sell. We know it sells the most. We can give you that information if you want it. But you need to be prepared to do these service calls. We always talk about we want the best techs and we wanna provide the best service. and we do all these trainings, we buy all these shiny objects, but then we don't actually fulfill that need. We don't actually take care of the customer.

And that was one of the reasons why we built the customer portal in the first place, because no software even thought about the customer end of it. And I'm not talking about the you have the contractor and then a contractor has his customer and no one's even thought about that person. And how do we involve them in the software? And that's what makes Sera extremely different from what's on the market, is we put out a program that says, We're gonna make it easy for you to do business with us.

We're gonna make it easy for Google to find your company so that you can get the best customers to do business for you, with you, and bring the customer in along with the experience. And if you make a customer happy, they're gonna stay with you. That's really what we're trying to do is make people happy and continue to do work for them and have them refer us. And unfortunately, when we take 13 hours to do an hour and a half job, we're not making that customer happy.

If we go to a job and we get a bunch of things that we gotta do and then we go leave for two hours, I guarantee your text's gonna go, I'll be back in half an hour. I'll be back in an hour, but they're never back. It's 2 0 3 hours, right? Yep. That's frustration. Building up with the customer the whole time they're not there. So let's organize our businesses, have some software that'll organize it. and stop all of this wasteful things that keep you from making money.

you burn in more fuel, you're doing all these things. And so that's, really what we're trying to do here, is just simplify business. At the end of the day, That is what we do, is how do we simplify them? How do we get that money to the bottom line by simplification and all the bells and whistles. Don't change how the company runs. if it's crappy, it's crappy.

But it's funny that you're laughing because at mass, Hey man, I ran out an entire bathroom once and an entire house most of it myself. but it is a true thing, right? Like that's the most frustrating. And yeah, you know what? I probably could've paid somebody and the job would've been done and I would've been, over with it. But I kind of like doing those sorts of things myself and we have a couple other showers in the house, so I'm good. But you think about that like as a consumer, right?

I mean, I think you nailed that when you said a lot of businesses don't, or a lot of softwares don't think about the customer right? At the end of the journey. You know how, think about yourself. Put yourself into that position. Think about when you use a trade or when you use a service, or when you use a product, and think about your experience.

As a consumer, if somebody says, I gotta leave, and they come back in, do three hours, well, generally when they've called you, that's probably an emergency related item, right? We're talking hvac, so your air condition's not working, your furnace might not be working, right? If you're talking plumbing, well, you might not have any water. So now you've inconvenienced the customer even further when you could have had just a simple fix.

you're gauging how many calls they book. How good, What's your close, what's your booking rate? 90%. A hundred percent, 70%, right? We're gauging them. Book every call you can get your percentage up, right? Then you're telling 'em, the dispatcher get all these calls done. And then you're telling your technicians, slow down. Show value. Get the customer what they need. Go run to Don Depot, go look for parts, waste more time, add more calls. Let's keep bringing in the calls.

So what do we end up doing? We're giving bad service to everyone all day long, All day long. We're giving bad service to everyone. And you wanna know why you don't dominate? You wanna know why you don't get the the best you wanna know why you're not growing your business like you should You're just overdoing everything. What if we didn't book every call? What if we book the right calls? Right? That's what we trying to help you.

It makes more sense to give a schedule to a customer that you can somewhat do and participate and make them happy with that. Without overbooking. And so we've been talked to book every call we can, so nobody else gets it. But then we just give bad service to everyone and we run our texts all day long. And to top it off, it's 4 30, 5 36 o'clock, guy's been running since eight.

And you send him the opposite direction of where he lives the other way, 40 miles at six o'clock, seven o'clock in the evening. And so you've got all this overtime, you're burning all this fuel. Well, we need to think about everything that we're talking about when it comes to booking every single call. I, I want my techn, my CSR as a book every call, but I also want them to book the right calls and not overbook us. Right.

And that's, how Sera helps You I see this happen so many times, the technician request a week's vacation and it's busy. Somewhat sometimes you give them that vacation, right? It's summertime. They want off for a week to take their family somewhere. everybody writes it on a sticky note. They get the email and they write on a sticky note and they stick it on the wall. Joe Bob's off this date to this date. That date comes around. All these calls have been booked, Joe Bob included.

And then you can't get ahold of Joe Bob and dispatcher's mad. See, department manager's mad. He's not answering his phone. Dang it. Call his personal phone. Call his wife's phone, and you finally get ahold of him. Well, we're on the beach. Remember, I'm off now you're disrupting his vacation. And it's because there's, just no organization going on. There's no follow through. There's no, we're not thinking about every single person in your company is a customer of.

Every customer out there that you service is a customer of yours, the business owner, your employees are customers of yours as well. And you have to make their life better and you have to make their life less chaos and not abuse them. And when you do that and you create this culture and you're not running them to death, you'll grow a company cuz people wanna work for you because everyone else is doing the chaos thing. And that's what we try to help you get away from.

It's a random question that has nothing to do with anything on the show, but since Chris's first time is here, we're gonna let him go first. Chris, we get to, you get to choose one, two, or three. You don't get to know what the questions are in advance. You just, you just get to choose one, two, or three and we're gonna ask you your random question. So go for it

There's lots of people with the space, but this, I wish I would've known five years ago, met Billy, understood what the need is in the industry and, be able to bring this expertise to, So I would love, I would've loved to have done this five years ago. this is a lot of fun.

no, I, really enjoy traveling in Europe and around the world, wherever I get the opportunity to go. But that's on our bucket list. My 30 year anniversary is next year, and we're going to go to Spain and, spend some time over there.

And it's, yeah, that human nature ability to overlook what it is that we currently have is always fascinating to me. But you

It was dark and the kids just standing in their staring out this window in the arena, like during the mid, like the game was like, it was a stop, but before the face stuff laid. But you come, we're gonna drop P'S like, sorry, I've just, I've never seen the mountains before. And just like fat. And you're like, you don't really think about it because you live there all the time. You see it all the time. Right. And it just goes, it goes by the wayside so,

But in terms of those KPIs, that reporting that we want to be looking at daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually, what are those things that we need to be looking at constantly as a business owners that we can stay on top of the business from that 30,000 foot view, Not getting into all the, the minute details, but that 30,000 foot view, What is it that we need to be on top of so that we can dive in to those areas that need the most attention? and I either one of you can answer this. Go

I had shared with you before the show started that we're actually seeing, measuring some of those successes that you put into the intro. Right. I'm actually able, I have enough clientele that have been using the software long enough, I can now see those top line things. Right. But not everybody shares obviously the full picture. And so I'll let Billy take ll statement to kind of take it to the next level for those that have shared them with share those pieces with us.

We've been finding great success. And so let him walk through some of those key points.

If they could just get the 5 million, if they're at 1 million, if they could just get the 3 million it's kind of goes back to that shiny object or the human psychology we were talking about just a minute ago, right? We always want what we don't have. And if we want, these bigger numbers. we have been coached that revenue fixes all problems and it does not fix problems because 60% of the businesses in the United States went bankrupt while making a. let that sink in for a second.

60% of businesses in the United States that went bankrupt, were making a profit. Now let's dive in to why that matters. I was gonna say, so why is that? Well, first and foremost is poor money management, right? First and foremost, right? You're making money, but you're blowing all this money along the way. Or maybe you've got a high receivables and you're not able to collect. You were making a profit, You weren't able to get the cash coming in like you needed to, to keep the doors open.

There's several different reasons. So you can actually be making a profit and go out of business. It is possible, and and the majority of the people that actually go out of business, we're actually making some money. So revenue is an important part of it since it's the start. And if, just so I can explain a little bit about what you're looking at here. So on the left hand side, on the revenue line, you see total revenue. You see 6.3 million, 3,000,079. That's this year, year to date actual.

Then he has a, what he budgeted. And so he's ahead of his budget by 338,000. And then he compares this to last year. And last year he did 4 million at the exact same timeframe. Okay. So ending September 30. And his variance is a growth of over $2 million. And so that's over 50% growth that he's experiencing since he got on Sera. And he was on one of the other software platforms for the last five or six years. One of the big one out there. and this is what he was.

and so he bought into the Sera concept hook, line and sinker. And, he has only been on our software since January. Guys, this is it. So this is all Sera's stuff. So what he's improved here, this is what I like to talk about, is the gross profit. As you can see on the first line, 3.2 million, that is what he had left over after he paid his material costs, his labor costs. Any of the fees that I directly relate to doing a job, we call it cogs, C o g S. And that's costs of good sold.

So this is what we are doing out in the field and I have them put more stuff up there than normal. Typically, most financial statements I see just have labor, material, subcontractor, things like that. I make them. Anything that affects that job is gonna be in the cogs of the way I do it. The way I suggest you set up your financial statements, all right? Your permits, your fees, your financing fees, all these things cost you money and it's job related, okay?

And so by doing this, now we have a clear picture of how much money we really have left over. And so in this particular case, he has 3.2 million left over are 50% of the money he brought in compared to last year where he did 2 million less, only 45% of the money. Still not bad, but that's a five point difference. And the higher up on the financial statement that you make an improvement, the bigger the number is down at the bottom. All right?

So if you'll scroll down when to go to the overhead operating income and loss, and then right here we have all the operating expense, if you could go. So this is basically his cost of doing business. And then down here at the very bottom is And is earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and annual and annualization amateurization, excuse me. And it's basically cash flow. How much cash did I have available to me to for that year?

So as you can see here, very clearly, he had 8.1 0.8 million or 29%. So think about it like this. For every hundred dollars he brought in, he got to keep $29. Okay? That is a very well run machine. All right. Now if you can go over to the right hand side to 3 0 7. This is an average company. This is what we see. A good company today is an 8% bottom line like this, or 8% in this case. And. 7% bottom line. And so what we have here is a business that almost four Xed his Abitha in nine months.

We still got three months ago. I'm, I'm assuming he's gonna finish well over $2 million in cash. And he also let me know that he has, for this business, this business has been in business. It's a second generation business already, though it's been in business for years. And this is the first time in their history that they've ever had a million dollars of cash with no bills to pay. And they did it in nine months. But what happened to the other 25 years?

Why would, couldn't they do it 25 years ago or they had 25 years to do this? But all of a sudden with a little bit of discipline in nine months, he's doing what he could have been doing for years and really setting himself up for the future. Right? Fortunately, he's a young guy, second generation guy, and he can continue to do this and create this amazing business. Now, here's something I wanna add to this. This business is not in a major city.

It's in a large city, but not in a metropolitan metroplex. It's not in a large Dallas Fort Worth in a large Los Angeles. It's in a mid-market, lower mid-market city. And he's being able to grow his business like this, right, and dominate his area. And basically he put in all the programs that we offer. And he dominates it. Now he's getting all the techs to come work for him. He's being able to pay more cuz he is making more. He can give back to the community.

They can do volunteer work, they can invest back in their own community and become a major part of what's going on. Which they already are. They've been there forever. Right, Right. They're very big part of this family the community and this is what we do. So this is Leg, this is what I call a legacy business. And what I mean by legacy business is a business that's gonna make enough money that it's gonna change the legacy of your family. You can do a lot of things with money like this. Mm-hmm.

you can totally set your children up if you do this right, you can get them in college if that's what you want. You can pay for it. You can set up foundations. You can do all these things that really improve your life and your legacy and your life, and you don't have to keep killing yourself to do it. It's guys, it's really simple, right? We can, we can show you how to do this without killing yourself.

I'm a pretty old guy, but I don't look like I'm really as old as I am because I don't stress because I have it figured out. I've run a company BillyGo, we're running a company downstairs and we'll, BillyGo had zero customers four years ago. It's not even four years, it'll be four years in January. We had zero customers, BillyGo. We never bought a company. We did everything through Sera to build this company, right? Everything.

So in four years, over 26 million in revenue, But that's not the whole story. Vigo was profitable in 14 months from a zero start. And then ever since then, we have double digit growth, our margins and our profits, our revenues at the same time. That's called a gazelle. So we started from the very beginning and become a gazelle cuz we improve our margins as much and we improve our growth. And we're gonna experience about a 65% growth this year, just this year alone.

And still no acquisitions, no customer list, nothing, zero customers. And the way we did it is our customer portal spread like wildfire. We did a festival about four weeks ago and we talk to people and they come by our booth. And the way we get 'em to come to our booth is we have a coloring book that kids can color our truck and they can win a contest. Of course we let all the kids win, but and we send 'em a hundred dollars. We send 'em a hundred bucks, right?

We send 'em a hundred dollars gift card. All anybody that participates, we send 'em a hundred dollars gift. so we get a chance to talk to the parents while the kids are drawing on the, on this color book, right? We got 1,240 emails, good emails from that one weekend, 1,240 new customers because we can offer them this kind of service. One hour appointments, book it on your phone, go do what you gotta do on your day. Just be there between three and four. And that's how we built the company.

Then we built it fast and that's how we're improving this company that you're seeing here. It's the same thing. He made it easy for people to do business with them.

Sure. But I mean, you do the math, I mean, you spent 12 grand on sending out those a hundred dollars gift cards to all those individuals, you, the booth, et cetera, et cetera. That's an investment into your. Community. And when you do those sorts of thing, guys, things, guys, like anybody listen to this like, don't go spend 15 grand if you don't have the 15 grand to spend.

But when you can increase your EBITDA to 29% like this, like this example that we showed on the screen, now they have that much more money to be able to give back to their community. And when you can give back to your community, those things are gonna compound greater than any other thing that you can possibly do. Absolutely.

And I will say this I want, I love that story, but if you're like, Shit, I want to get to 29% EBITDA, I'm at 8% sales dot.tech/h v a c dash revealed book of sales call, take their, take their software for a test drive. You will not regret taking that call and seeing what they can do for your business. Evan,

So I can, easily, within five to six minutes, I can easily pinpoint with a quick glance through the financials where we messed up. Okay. So that is the report card. But the best thing about Sherry is now with the job time efficiency, I can actually do it the second the job's finished. Right. And I would've known, So what we learned from this, I think I'm gonna put an alert. And go dunk, dunk, dunk. Hear it twice the hear it twice.

The average the sales that you gave, if you sold two hours worth of work and you're at four hours, there's some kinda alarm needs to go off and then it's hooked up to the diet, the field to get shocked or something. I don't know. Yeah. You get a shot caller when you gonna work here. So. No, I'm just kidding. But it's being able to pay attention But you know, actually what was really cool about the guy that shared that story with us, he was proud that he, he caught it, right?

The angriness of it happening, but what we were telling him about what job time efficiency would do for him, he was actually paying attention to it. And you actually got to see the evidence. He knew this was going on every day in his company, right. But he didn't have anything to tell him why it's so bad. And what it's really doing to his business.

And so if the guy that was showed these financial statements was running his business all loose like that, not preparing his technicians to do the work, he wouldn't be showing a 29% Right. Great. He cleaned that up. He cleaned up that stuff. And the Gallup research poll says that our technicians are only 38% efficient. I've said this on this show numerous times. Well, there's a perfect example of why it's that bad. In fact, it's way worse in that scenario that we explained earlier.

Yep. this is what we gotta clean up.

And then for me, but for my management team, the guys that manage this stuff on a daily basis, they're held accountable on a daily basis on the efficiency. We know things happen throughout the day that causes problems, but we try to we try to see what those things are and adjust them. But they're responsible for getting the efficiency for their department. and so that's where I'm at So you're talking about different size businesses and the different size roles that need to be played.

A one to $3 million business probably has the owner still in and out of the field. you're gonna, you're gonna see that. And so the first thing we try to do for these one to $3 million business is to get the owner out of the field. All right. And get him to where he can do more for the company by staying in the office. because he's got this information, this live information about what's going on.

Help your guys close while you're in the office so you can help all of them instead of going to these jobs and trying to take over and close a call. Right? So that's what we're trying to do there is get the guy out of the field, lessen the amount of work that the spouse is doing, right? That's that one to $3 million business, that three to $5 million business needs a manager. At least one manager. If you have an HVAC manager and a plumbing manager, that would be even better.

But that's where you start layering on. And now the business owner needs to be able to coach managers. Instead of coaching everyone from one to 3 million, we get he ask the coach, everyone, right? From three to 5 million, he, you start layering on managers and your management, you're, the way you manage people changes because you're not managing. People that do the, out in the field, you're managing the managers that manage the people out in the field. And so your role changes.

And then when you get above 5 million in revenue, you start looking at another layer of managers, right? You have your department managers, you have your overall operations manager and so it, if you have to change as a leader as the company grows. And so that old thing about if I could just get to the next million, everything would be fine. Well, to get to that next goal, if you're at 3 million and you wanna get to five, you gotta hire some people to manage that, right?

And so this is why the myth is busted. Just getting to 5 million doesn't solve your problems. It might solve your problems if you could do it the way you're doing it now, maybe cause you've got 2 million more dollars coming in, but you can't do it. You have to have management to help you take care of the business. And so that creates cost. And so why don't we just, why don't we just stay at 3 million and get a 29 for a couple of years and then slowly grow to 5 million?

Makes a lot more sense, and you make a lot more money, right? Instead of always striving to go right to it and then taking all the burden and inefficiencies along the ride. And then when you get to that 5 million mark, you go, Uhoh, I'm still not making any money. And the number's bigger, right?

You could have, you could be producing at 29 and then take a bunch of that and reinvest it like you talked about in terms of community sponsorship, reinvest into your business, hire another ops manager, right?

We talked about overbooking, and you're being late to everyone and you're, you're making all your customers slightly upset, but that's the norm. Mm-hmm. right? Being late to everything and not, really knowing when we're coming kind of thing. That's the norm. Improving those things will automatically bring the revenue, right? Because now the customer's happy. They're giving you fivestar reviews. They're like, Oh, this company's even better.

It's worth the extra money that they're charging me, but I don't have to waste my whole day. Right? So that's cheaper, right? But instead, we keep raising our prices and giving worse service. and make less money, well raise our price. And for some reason we didn't make any more money cuz we still never got rid of what was causing the problem. Raising prices can't not be the answer every single time. And that's the nice thing about it.

I can sell and you can see that JP was selling his air conditioners on a 50% gross margin 50 and made 29% So you don't have to be the most, the highest price company in town to make tons of money. You need to be the most organized company in town to make the most money. I like the part about 50% gross margin. You go to n pe firm and see if they're charging a 50% margin, there are 60 plus because they have to be. Right. Cause they're so bloated. Right.

and you've been taught to always raise your, hourly rate, 400, 500 on your flat rate pricing. But when you do that, you realize that you didn't change anything on the bottom line. The reason you didn't was is cuz you just pissed off more people because you're trying to take on more stuff. Right? And so your customers were getting. They're just leaving you and you don't even realize it. Right. And your closing percentage went down cuz you're so expensive all that stuff aggravates. Right.

But in a lot of cases, when you actually analyze, you take what Chris has taken out of the ideas and put it into the engineer's hands. See able to build what you know you guys have at Sera. Now you don't app to necessarily increase your prices.

You can look at your efficiencies within your business and, and create your profit that way, which is a different way to be able to do it and maintain your customer base and get more efficient, which helps your customer base, which then gets you more customers. And it's just, it's a spitball on the cycle effect. So then you can charge more because you add more value, right? And then you can increase your prices. Right? And then you get even more right?

There's just, it's a different way to look at it. And I appreciate the new breadth of fresh air into it versus the old adage of, well raise your prices. Right. Because that's not always the right answer. So especially

So I retired a couple years after my business was bought from pe I retired from the PE company and, and the, and my business. And I was a young fellow when I retired and I just got in the way, right? Cause my wife wasn't retired, my kids were still in school. And I just all of a sudden here was this guy that was in the house all day. I was working, I had real estate deals, I had all kind of stuff going on, but I was home and I was in the way.

Nobody was used to me being there cuz I would go in the office early and. I'd work that's what I love to do. And so after the fun of us traveling my wife and I did a lot of traveling when I retired. And then once that kinda wore off and I started thinking I needed to do something again I'd sit around and I guess I was moping around or something and I started hearing from her, BillyGo do something, BillyGo do this. BillyGo do that one day just kind of being a jerk, I go, Really? Billy?

Go and I put it in da go Daddy. And it was available. So I got it. And so, that's how he came up with the name. BillyGoes, It was my ass out of the house.

I just never thought about asking it because it's a question that you wish people would ask more, but don't. So I like it.

I mean, it doesn't automate it like it does at, at BillyGo. There's still some manual aspects to it, but we also have something called dreaming and scheming time in there where it literally is just that dreaming and scheming time where we talk about nothing in everything and just let her fly and have those open dialogues. Because when you have that as an organization, you're gonna get some great ideas that are gonna result from it.

And it's really almost not like work We're really having such a good time doing it. So, Well, I think about Google X Labs and like Google X Labs. It's a, lesser known project from Google and they, it's all their crazy ideas, right? And they actually take, and they celebrate when a project gets cancel.

They have big party and they celebrate as a result because they're like, Hey, you know what, we're, we're gonna celebrate the failure of a project because it means that if we celebrate these failures, people are gonna continue to come up with ideas. And if we can continue to come up with ideas, now we can innovate as an organization and we can innovate as an organization.

We're gonna be on the cutting edge and we're gonna be able to move our business further ahead by a collective coming together with ideas than it were just the leadership team. So I like that. Maybe I'll save that question for the next time that you're on. I'll have to write it down. I had a question, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna hold onto that one on that note. But anyways, as we wrap up, It's been a pleasure, guys. Always a pleasure. Always a pleasure.

I can't wait to meet both of you guys down in Vegas for the service Rocket event. It's gonna be a blast. Stop by our booth. Or actually, it's not a booth, it's gonna be a table. We can shoot the shit and maybe have a couple ranch waters that's in the process. There you go.

One of them being, how do we zoom out with 30,000 foot view to, to really think about what is it that our customers really want? That's something that they do so well at. Sera thinking about you as a contractor, what is it that you really want? What is it that you not only really want, but what is it you really need in order to run your business more effectively? Well, what if we did that for our customers? What if we did that for homeowner?

What is it that you as a homeowner really need in terms of fast, efficient, effective service that you're gonna be willing to pay more for? Because we're overdelivering on value and not spending 13 hours to do a one hour job. Such a great nugget there. I love that one. What were some of your favorites from the show?

And when you have, um, that was Ryan and, and, Robert with the Prestige Group, like that's the new battleground guys like it, really will be, everybody is doing online marketing. Everybody has a website, everybody can, Oh, I'm gonna be there. But when you actually have a different customer experience is gonna be a drastic shift in the business.

And, when you think about your own internal business, I know he briefly touched on this like ever so briefly, but his 5% rule and we kind of unpacked a little bit one-on-one after the fact. The show and I, and I, kind of wish we would've asked him a little bit more about that I wrote it down, but we just, we never got to that. But just do something 5% better. Right? and I, think back to the 1% better per day.

And if you 1% better per day and you compound that over 365 days, man, you could do some great things.

He's like, But what if your dispatchers were able to impact your run rate on calls by 2% as well, and your CSRs were able to impact your booking percent by 2% as well, and we were able to impact your incoming leads by 2% as well and increase your efficiency in terms of how many, what you were paying per book lead by 2% as well. What would that all equate to? He's like, Holy shit, there's my 30% growth. I was like, Exactly.

Indigestion, and if you just work on your efficiencies, you keep everything everything else is the, keep everything the same and you just, work on your efficiencies. Your business. Better off.

Also, the link, if you were listening to this audio on the podcast format, didn't check the video, there will be a link as well for that p and l statement that we showed during the show and we talked about, and Billy walked through with the 29% EBITDA fantastic nugget within that. So make sure you check out the show notes down below, click the links, check all of that out. If you're missing out on the live show, you are truly missing out.

There was some great engagement in the chat today as well. facebook.com/groups/hvacrevealed to join the live show and catch up on all the nuggets that we go through in there. And, If you got any value from this episode, we truly appreciate it. If you could introduce it to one person in your contact list that you think would also benefit from this episode, that's it, that's all. Just one person so that they too can unleash the ultimate HVAC business. And until next time, cheers.