EP: 118 Billy Stevens w/ Sera Systems - Creating Unbelievable Culture Improvements

Billy really hammers that home right at the beginning, so make sure you pay attention to that part. But we wanna hear from you. What was your favorite part of this episode? Leave it in the comments down below, and make sure you join the live show next week where you can join in on the chats, ask your questions from all of our great guests. Enjoy the show. Cheers.

Hey, welcome back to another HVAC Success Secret Revealed with Thaddeus and Evan, where we have good conversations with good people and any good conversation we're having. It's worth having drunk. Cheers, my friend. Cheers.

I mean, if the number one way that you can improve your team, number one thing that you can do for your customer service is to take care of your people and to really drive that culture home. Best way to recruit, improve your culture. I don't know how many more people within the industry can really drive this point. But I'm excited for the conversation regardless, because Billy's always done a great job of taking complex ideas and making them really, really simple.

So I'm excited for this conversation today.

Because they only see, the techs only see the big ticket. They don't actually know what goes into it. So getting through and getting clear on that and doing it in a right way is, it's gonna be a great part. I'm looking forward to that. Absolutely. Awesome. But before we get to the show, first word from our sponsors, Thad you're up. Cool. Well, we actually have a new one, but his logo isn't on the bottom, so that's my bad. So CHIIRP is a ultimate automation toolbox or home service Pros.

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But if you can talk a little bit to, just how bad culture was in your company before you realized there was.

And so things can get, culture can change just based off of the things that I would do, the things maybe you had a, a manager that just doesn't, didn't get along with the group or whatever. And that can create bad culture. it just can happen in so many different ways. And so this is what I was experiencing. I, I basically had a manager that was causing some culture problems and I wanted to fix it. And of course we changed the management team and started doing the things the way I wanted to do.

And I hired these people on, what's the most important part for me is integrity. Integrity is what I look at in a person. Because as I always say, you can't teach integrity or honesty. You're either born with it or you're not. and that's, the thing that is very important, is to find these people. And it doesn't take long to figure out what kind of person they are. And so I would really lean on integrity and integrity.

There's a, I actually pull this up because I knew we're gonna be talking about today. So the integrity means being honest and having strong and moral principles. It also, a person with integrity behaves ethically and does the right thing, even behind closed doors. So what that means is, whether it's a partner in a business that you partnered with, or if it's an employees or managers or whatever, how do they talk about you when you're not at the office or not in front of other peers, right?

And that is when you know your po your integrity is, or excuse me, your culture has improved when what they're doing. behind the scenes is up the snuff, if you will, or a positive impact even beyond that. So you want your employees talking about your company just like you do when they're not at work. and this is how, how you really can judge your culture and how it's going for you.

And then, so if they are really involved in your company and really talk about it when they're at a restaurant and they see someone that's, they meet some people and they wanna talk about their company then you have a pretty good culture per se. But that could be a person by person deal. And so what I did, honestly, it kind of leads into what we were gonna talk about today. The second thing we were gonna talk about was sharing your financials.

The first thing we were gonna talk about, and we can talk about that first because that kinda leads into what your question was. I was having culture problems because employees. and they, think that we make all the money and they, don't get any, they don't get as much. Right. And that is really, that opened my eyes one day when I kept hearing it, but not really understanding it or doing anything about it.

and so it just dawned on me one day to have everybody in the meeting and we took out we tore off some pieces of paper back then cuz we didn't didn't have a whole bunch of money. So we used paper and tore it up and we put it in and we gave everybody a piece of that paper and we asked them if we, if you bring in a thousand dollars to the company, how much does a company making profit write down your dollar figure. And so depending on the number that you get will tell you what your culture is.

So that's the beauty of this little test. It's a really good test. And so if the majority of your answers are over 30% of the thousand or $300, then your culture's probably not that good because they feel like you're getting all the money and they're not. if the majority of your answers are below that number then they understand that the company is doing the best it can to give back to the employees, to the community and all these things. And so just do a blind test.

It's basically the Pepsi versus Coke blind test kind of thing. Ask them this question. Don't prep 'em. And ask everybody in the company, if you will, that doesn't work in the financial department because they see the real numbers. Right. And you'd be surprised, but when I did this little exercise, the number one answer was $500 half of Wow. Wow. The second most largest, the second number where we got the most answers for was actually $1,000. Cause they didn't even understand the question.

Gotcha. Right. Which was scary. Well, all right. They don't even understand the question, so we got a lot to talk about here. And then the ones that said $500, they just thought that they made $500 for every thousand dollars we brought in. And the truth was back then, we probably made negative. $20 or negative a hundred dollars back then because we were trying to figure out how to, how to make her business better.

and to be honest with you, I I doubt very seriously if there's more than 50 bucks on a thousand back then. and the scary thing is, I still see this today. I know, I know you brought up Victor earlier, but his number was very negative, right? When we started helping him with his business just a little over a year ago. and so we started doing these exercises on how to have these different meetings and how to build the culture and what all these things.

And it helped, it helped him out rather quickly cuz I worked with him, him, him as much as I could and spent many times Dr. Flying out to California to help him out and, and get this stuff fixed for him. And so and so we do this with all of our people that are in Sera our software. We actually have people that are on staff and that's what they do.

We do check-ins with them every month and everything and help them go along the, through the system, through a way that they can improve culture and things like that. And so so again, if anything's over 300 bucks, culture's probably not that good. If it's below 300 bucks, more of them are below 300 bucks. Doesn't mean your culture is great, but it's not you could get a feel for the, for the room based off of these numbers. It's just a simple thing to do. Very easy to do, very simple.

And so from that point forward, I made it a mission to talk about how much it really costs to run a business. And if you're losing money or you're making very little money, I say 100%, you show 'em your financial statements. I do trans full transparency. Or you can build graphs and you can pick items out.

And the one item that always blew them away there's several when you have your financial statements and you show them to 'em, like Billy Go today, I mean, we probably spend $20,000 a month on fuel, right? But they only see the a hundred dollars that's going in their tank, and they don't realize that, that bill's $20,000 or, or more. and so that's a big eye-opener. And then you'd show them how much it costs to ensure the building or maybe even the rent.

and one of the things that I really like to. is talk to them on a level that helps them understand what we're, what we're talking about when we start adding all these big numbers up. and so one of the things that I like to do is break it down to how many dollars per hour does it take to pay this one bill? How much work do we have to do to pay this one bill? So if we have a $20,000 per month gas fuel bill and you sell $20,000 worth of air conditioners, did you pay your gas bill?

No. You just bought air conditioners that cost you at least half that money. Air conditioned equipment, the labor, all these things that cost you at least half or more of that money, right? And so take one, big job and show them how it can't even pay. Something as simple as the gas bill or something as simple as the electric bill. and just break it down on those terms.

Just take, pick one job and pick one monthly item and just show them how many times you gotta sell that thing, that one item, just to pay this one bill. And that's when you start opening their eyes to how much it costs to run a business. And the other thing is, while you're trying to educate them on this, you're reaffirming this in your own mind. You're reaffirming what you're saying because you're speaking it out loud and you're talking to these, to these employees and to your, to your peers.

And you're explaining in their learning from you while you're learning from yourself. because if you repeat it and talk about it, you'll start doing it. It'll make you go into action and make you start thinking about it, working on it and doing things about it, and that they can see that you're trying to make these improvements.

and so you can always raise prices or you can raise some prices or leave 'em the same and, and start working on the efficiency of the business, which that's what I prefer to do. I'm, I was never wanting to be the highest price company in town. I just wanted to be the most efficient and make my money through efficiency. and that's what we try to teach everyone each and every day. And, and so this is how we would do that with these people. I love it.

If we don't start showing up with more integrity, how can we expect our team to, if we don't show up and, and set the example of what the culture needs to be, how do we expect our team to buy into anything? Right? And I love what you said around who are you? And no one's looking, Yeah. Right. When your team isn't in the office, are you on Facebook looking at reels or are you thinking about how can I market my business better? How can I improve my business?

Are you watching for entertainment or are you watching for education? Right? Are you going through your p and ls so you can look for ways to be more efficient? Do you understand what your PNLs are? Right? Are you setting aside time to know what your training plan is for the next month, two months, three months within your business so you can continue to grow your team and hire better and, and recruit better and train better? Like all of these things are, are constantly on the mind.

I know Thad and I, when it comes to our business it's exactly what you need to be thinking about to take time away from being in your business and, and actually working on your business. Uber always talks about tha did you have anything from that rant that you wanted to touch on?

The next step of that question is do you do that one-on-one or are you doing it as part of a company-wide meeting or department meeting? How does that generally get structured?

You don't, realize that they're tens of thousands if hundreds of thousands of dollars a year depending on what size you are, and it doesn't get any cheaper. That's a fixed cost. So we, we work on talking about fixed costs, so they understand that relationship. Selling a $15,000 air conditioner does not pay your $15,000 a month rent. Right?

and so that's where I start talking about it because I want 'em to buy in on what it costs to operate the business before we start working on the cog side, which is what they're responsible for.

They're responsible for the cogs, they're responsible for selling the product for the price that it needs to be sold for, and so that we can make the profit that we need to make, and then getting the job getting the photos, doing everything they're supposed to do to give us information so we can do the best job that we can and do the, provide the best service for the customer and do all this efficiently, efficiently, and profitably. and that is what I would work on second.

So I would definitely start on the overhead cost and pick two or three of 'em. Just pick two or three of 'em just to get the conversation going and just telling them what your rent is, is giving transparency instead of us against them. The business is your employees, it's not the owners. And I think we kind of, in a way, forget that sometimes. And, and we not, we don't need to be forgetting that. We need to understand that the business is the owner. It is not the owners.

It is the people that are at the business. Billy, go is not me. Billy Go, is that person in front of Billy Go's customer? And that is your customer. That person in front of the customer that gives you money. Your customer is your employees.

And once you change that mindset to who really is your customer and understand that your employee is your customer, and your employee needs to have this transparency as much as you want to give them, if you don't wanna show 'em your entire financial statements, there is nothing wrong with it. But at least show them something.

Get them thinking about what it really costs, show them what it costs to, replace breaks in a, after a year, how many break jobs have you had to pay for and how much they cost. They don't think about things like that. they just don't. And so start talking about it so they understand what you're talking about.

And then once you apply all these big dollars to, a service call, they, they find out really quickly that maybe I ought to be a better employee and not just always be angry and just do the bare minimum. maybe asking me to put on stickers is there's a reason for it. Maybe asking me to take these photos and organize in them and give in detail on everything that I find, whether I sell the job or not. I need to do this every time.

and that's what's awesome about our software is w we make sure they do that. If you wanna get that model and serial number on our software actually this is a drop in next week. You literally, They cannot move forward. You get a Zap, you'll be able to get a message inside of Serato whoever you want it to go to and go Joe Bob's fixing close out this call and he has not collected any of this information. do you wanna reply back to him?

I mean, it's job by job management is what we're really good at. we don't live in the past like, the other softwares. We are actually live and in front of the call and ready and doing things. you had this visibility that you just don't have on the other softwares. That's what makes ours unique. And that's the point that I'm trying to make when I talk about Sera and when I talk about what I'm doing. it's not the way software was built.

It's the way software should be built and is built going forward. it is live in the situation and you can do these things and start falling along to have them do the things that you want. But if you get them that transparency to make them understand why you need it and how much it costs, if you don't get it, Then they start understanding and applying themselves better, and you get better employees. And when you increase, this is a culture building.

That's all I'm trying to do here is increase the culture to a more positive everything mindset, positive energy throughout the building. Everybody loves coming to work. It's not a chore. that's the things that we're trying to help companies do. It's not always about raising prices and, pulling those kind of triggers. If you build your culture, I'm telling you right now, you will have enough texts to hire. I hear this all the time. There's just not enough texts. Mm-hmm.

And we all show the same thing. What made my company so profitable? Back in the eighties and 2000, what makes Billy go so profitable and grow so fast? It's because of the culture. The day that we opened up Billy Go, and people found out within 24 hours, we had 36 people apply for a job without ever posting an ad. So we didn't steal those people from any company. Those people didn't like the culture Yep. Where they were at. And they got the heck out and wanted to come to work for us.

But unfortunately for them, we only had room for five or six. We didn't even have a business yet. I mean, that's how quickly they came. Right. and then we said, just hold on. Come back when you can't, when we can hire you. And so it's still anyone, they came to us and that's the whole idea. We build a culture, that culture spreads. People hear about it and they keep coming. we're in that tech hiring phase of our business right now and we have not run an ad for a tech.

but we have hired four techs so far this fall and we've hired really good techs from, and they've come to our company because they heard about the culture and they've heard about the opportunity to work 12 months a year, even in the HVAC business. and they've heard, all these cool things and so they start coming to us when it slows down that their places and culture is what brings, that's it. And so we hire again on integrity, honesty.

If they don't fit that criteria, criteria, we don't hire those folks and we'll pass over tons of 'em. Where most companies, unfortunately, are in dire straits, and they'll take just about anybody to get a body in a truck so they can do some work, right? And because we've been so conditioned in this industry that the only way to succeed is through revenue growth. and that is fundamentally right but wrong.

There is no reason to grow your business tremendously if you have all this dysfunction, and it's a lot harder to grow it if you have a lot of dysfunction. Why do some companies grow really well and other ones stay stagnant? I see companies all the time, 25, 30 years old and hadn't had a 1% growth in 15 years. It's the same number every year. It fluctuates just a little bit back and forth every year, never any growth over many, many, many years.

And because they never set a culture that would make people want to come work for them, and that's why they don't grow. And so culture is very, very, very important. And what we do every day, transparency creates. I love that culture.

And when you really, boil it down, I mean, you look at some of the greats and, Tommy Meow even said it too when he was on our podcast I recruit people from all over the place cuz they know about my name and they know about the business cuz we've created winning culture. people get mad at him for the prices that he charges, but he also pays people a livable wage and they have a great following within that.

And that's really again, to echo what you said, separates those individuals who are growing their business that are not because people wanna work there, people wanna stay there. They're bought into this total vision that you have been able to create as an organization. to back up a second to the, overhead costs. And so great, you've got this great, amazing culture and your hiring is easy. You're talking about your financials.

And one question that came to mind is there's a lot of you're a big proponent too of hitting a solid margin. You get to, let's call it 20%, right? 15 to 20%. Some people are at five to 10, let's use math, 20%, you're a 10 million per year business. That's a 2 million per year profit. And if you're showing all of your financials, not just the expenses part, I mean, that's obviously part of it, so they can see it on job.

But if they're seeing a 20% net on there and they're doing the math, and they're like, okay, well if you've went the down the road of everything, right? You've open up the door to show everything. Now they see this 20% net and a $2 million profit. How would you combat a conversation like that? What would you say in that moment?

And that's a, that's a big thing here. Just because you see $2 million of profit doesn't mean you have $2 million in the bank. Mm-hmm. with that profit, you have to pay your taxes. and so just for easy math, your tax bills 40 cents. 40%, right? So you're looking at $800,000 if you just had a straight up tax with no deductions, right? So about, call it 30%, $600,000 worth of taxes.

So immediately you go, you went from 2 million to 1.4 million and so, okay, still $1.4 million is a whole bunch of money. But then this is where your balance sheet comes in. this is where you pay your debt. This is how you pay your debt service. And so when you buy a new truck in today's world, I think if you could even get a truck, it's gonna cost you 60 plus thousand dollars or more. Like way more, or, but at least 60. I'm sorry, I don't know what I pay for 'em.

So I'm assuming there's 60 plus to eight to a hundred or whatever they are. And you're gonna pay for those through financing and you use your profits to pay for those financing charges. So even if you did do a 60 month loan on those trucks, which might as well, right at $60,000 without any interest at all, it's a thousand dollars a month. Now that you have 10 trucks, that's $10,000 a month, which is $120,000 a year.

So now you've got $120,000 that is no longer in that profit because you had to use that profit to pay the, to pay that number. And first and foremost, if you were using, if you're making 2 million, you probably have way more than 10 trucks so that you're paying on especially when you're a four year old business, right? Yep. And, you pay for those costs. You pay for any debt that you have to grow your business.

maybe you bought a company or maybe you borrowed money to start the business that you're in. All of that stuff is paid through the profit. And then this is, how you explain it to your employees and you just do a spreadsheet and show 'em where all the money went. that's all you gotta do. Or you don't have to show 'em that at all. If that's not what you wanna do. You can show 'em the after amount after you pay all these costs. But my, goal here is just show 'em something.

Hmm. let's just start showing transparency and show, and making that analogy that, all right, I just got $10,000 a month on my, on this building here, and I need this many systems to be sold before I can pay my rent. You can only do that if you show 'em numbers and when you show 'em numbers like that, it makes a big difference to them. Now we're talking their language. Oh my gosh, I thought I sold the system for 20 grand. The man put 20 grand in his back pocket. No, that's not how it works.

even in that situation that you just said, if we made a 20% profit, a $20,000 system at 20% is $4,000. You still need to sell two and a half of those before you even pay the rent. At 20,000 each. Mm-hmm. And so reframing it. Yeah. it's extremely revealing to your employees because they don't know our school system in America. I don't know how they do it in Canada, but in America, we do not talk about money at all. It is the, hey, they don't talk about it here either. It is the craziest thing.

We're in a capitalist society. Our entire country is designed around capitalism and we don't mention it once in 12 years of schooling. and I don't understand. And they talk about disadvantage. It is a disadvantage. Why can't we teach people this that maybe, that don't understand this? I mean, I, it came to me naturally. It comes to you guys naturally. That's why you're a bit entrepreneurs. Naturally you start understanding money or you're otherwise you wouldn't make it in business.

and so we do have an advantage cuz naturally we understand and so how do we, why aren't we talking about money in school? I don't understand that. But anyway, that's not my issue. that's the school system.

I was 15 or 16 when I had my first credit card. I understood the concept of, credit and debt at 16 because of my parents. Right. And that's where Par falls to. So in part of our podcast isn't just business things. So I'm going to ask you this in terms of a parent, you're successful, you have kids. You've talked a lot about money. If somebody's listened to this and said, Hmm, maybe I should talk to my kids about some of the basics of money, what sort of advice would you give them?

So talking to your kids, I started very early. In fact, we, my wife and I, before we had any money that we created a an invest, as soon as our kids got a social security card, which is pretty much right away when after they're born, we started investing for them and we turned it into a bill. I mean, it was like paying your electric bill or your rent. I mean, every month we put in $220. To fund our kids' education.

We started from day one because we knew that over time we would have enough money to pay if they wanted to go to college, that we would have the money just in case we didn't have it. If we would've spent it and we weren't successful, then we were getting all these loans that everybody wished that the government would pay off, right?

and so immediately we started talking about that money and explaining that to our kids, why we were doing this, why they needed to work hard in school so that they can further education, and that their parents have been working on saving this money for them. And so the conversation of money started with my kids right away. I'm the kind of guy that will sit down in a restaurant and I'll go back in the day they'll have a little container there that has the sugar packets.

and nobody thinks twice about the sugar package, right? They rip a couple of 'em open, pour 'em in their tea or their coffee. Well, we would talk about the guy that made the paper that the sugar was in. That's the guy that's making all the money. Right? And we would just basically talk about that. We didn't talk about the guy that had the, the Ferrari. We talked about the guy that made the paper cuz that was the guy that had the Ferrari. Mm-hmm. right?

and when we would talk about cars, since I like cars, we talked about the guy that made the lug nuts. Cuz there's 20 of those that go on every car and every car has them, but yet there's only so many Ferrari, right? Mm-hmm. So all the cars have lug nuts. Who do you think has more money? The Ferrari guy or the guy making ments. So that's the point is I would educate my kids on the little things, the things that are just sitting right in front of us that aren't obvious to us.

That. Entrepreneurs took the time to go, man, instead of having that sugar thing that's got all the rice in it and to keep the sugar dry, and then occasionally you see the ants that had gotten in it. And there's always ants coming in the restaurant because you got the su sugar container out on the table all the time. Well, the guy saw that and said, why don't I just put it in paper packets and stop that problem, keep the sugar dry.

And so this is how I talked to my kids from day one, constantly talking to them. And my kids both are very successful. They work hard. they have money in the bank and they're 25 and 20 threes because they, when they started working, they understood they needed to save some of their money and prepare for the future and buy a home. Those are the things that come naturally from that. So I take this same concept and I do this with my kids at work. All right.

All those people at work, no matter how old they are, it's not too late to start learning about. About how much it costs to make things and to do things and to run these businesses. And it's an easy conversation. And I even learned more about myself and money as I talked more and more about it. That's when I got better at my business. Right? And I took my business more seriously.

I, instead of it being a grind, it became a. I was driven by mission to actually make money and not worry about whether or not we could go on a vacation or if I wanted to do whatever, I wanted to be that position. Really, my motivation was, is I wanted to be able to wear shorts to work and not be told what to wear. I swear down in Dallas, and you, and you walked out of, and you walked out of a, a, a meeting.

I'm not gonna say who it was with but some very high level individuals within the, within the space. And you have, I think a, a hoodie on and shorts and sneakers and I think your hat might not have even been straight and you're like, this is how I am, this is how I roll. Right. And but it but it's power, right? I mean it's self-confidence in yourself, right? I

Thankfully my daughter didn't do that to me. But anyway, long story short, she said, are you sure you wanna marry a guy that doesn't wear a suit to work? I mean, don't you want a professional guy? And that was where my motivation came from. I'm like, alright, I'm gonna show this lady. I'm never gonna wear suit and tie unless I'm going to a function that I have to wear one Right? Well, I think that paid off. You call my own shots, right? I wanted to call my own shots. and that was the motivation.

And so as I learned more and more about how to run a business, I learned from my own things that I wanted to achieve personally. and so my thought was is how do I get these guys to think to be themselves because they're confident in their financial abilities, their work ethic, and all these things. and so they will respond.

I'm just telling everyone that's watching this video, these folks will respond if you take this, this role of creating this culture through transparency and, and through teaching them. I have never had a meeting about how to fix a toilet or make an air conditioner run first of all, I don't really know how to make an air conditioner run. I know what a thermostat is. That didn't stop me from running a business

Or when you get technicians that you have a pay system that's commission based and they're doing everything to sell and they're making customers mad, but you don't get rid of them and all the other employees know that they're doing things they shouldn't be doing, but you keep 'em because they're their highest performer for you. They're out. Yep. I love a sacrifice like that.

Number two is, is sharing your financials, right? Diving into that, being transparent, being honest about where it is that you are as a company, how much money you're actually making so that you can get more buy-in from your team. And then point number three, undoing years of bad decisions. And I think this kind of fits nicely with what it is you're talking about now because.

at the end of the day, we're creatures of habit and it's very easy for us to fall back into those old grooves, those old habits of what was easy and what we continually went back to. So how is it that you then stop not only your team, but yourself from falling back into those old habits of bad culture that you're trying to undo and move forward as a company?

And for instance, I can take, let's just take payroll. my favorite subject, this is the most best culture killer in the world is the way that we pay people. So I remember back in the early two thousands, there was this drain thing that came out. And you, you could eat it. You could eat this drain stuff. And you, the goal was, what they taught you to do was, is you go and you, you show 'em this drain stuff and you put it down the drain and it eats all the enzymes and it makes their drains clean.

And you can, and you sh actually would take a bite of it and they'd go, Ooh. And they'd go, yeah, it's safe. And they bought it from you. But the way they got us to sell it to our employees to get 'em to sell it was they, they taught, taught us about spiffs. I'd never heard of the spiff before. and so if you sold. 49 99. Don't quote. I, I imagine that's what it costs. I can't remember. If you sold this jar for 50 bucks, let's say we would give the employee a $10, a $20 spiff.

So, and we probably paid $10 for it and we made $20 and the tech made $20. That's probably what it was. And as always, when we create these little things like this the only one winning is the company selling the product, right? Because we just added overhead. Our labor cost, cogs cost to the cost of running our business. And then, then once we started using this spit program for this thing, then we're like, well, why don't we spiff 'em for doing this?

Hey, well even spiff 'em for showing up with a clean. was spiffing for having their uniform dressed all nice and clean. And we started spiffing for all these things and we spiffed ourselves into 30% labor cost. And I'm a big believer in, in that, that spiffs creates this problem. It's another culture problem, right? Because now the owner is paying out extra money and his labor costs are going up, and it's very hard to have a positive attitude when you don't have any money. It's so hard.

But not only that, we put more pressure on the payroll department because now they gotta start keeping up with all this. And so we created more work for them, but yet we're not spiffing them and we're not paying them more. And we're literally just spiffing for something that if you train them properly, they would just go ahead and do.

And, and that is one of that, that spiffs alone are a culture killer, in my opinion culture killer because they create more work and more, more stuff that the, the payroll department has to do. It takes, the department manager has to deal with it. When you have department managers the techs have to make sure that they're getting all their spiffs so they spend time looking at their payroll as soon as they get it.

You want something that's super simple, that really rewards your technicians, makes them happy, that makes you happy, and it's so easy. It doesn't burden anyone in the office. It doesn't burden anyone in the field, and it doesn't burden you as the owner.

And, and, and this is one of the things that, you know, as we've gotten in gotten more and more into training and all this stuff, these are the things that just kind of slip through the cracks that these trainers that Maybe they haven't never run a business, they don't understand the implications of this kind of procedure or bonusing for everything. You call it spiff, bonus, whatever you want.

The other thing that's a culture killer is commission, because technically in, in the states commissions it legal if you don't pay time and a half over 40 hours, some states over eight hours. And so again, we're, when we're doing commissions, we're like, a lot of companies start off like this. And I know the people out there listening, I want you'll probably go, oh yeah, I, I, yeah, this has happened. And, and we've all done it. I've done it is you start off with, I'll give you 20%.

That's how we started back in the early 2000. Late nineties. We'll give you 20% of everything you sell. And then the guy goes out and sells this $25,000 job and you owe him $5,000 and there's no $5,000 in the job cuz you didn't price it. Right. Right. And then we go, well, I'll pay you 20%, but minus the material. so we can get it knocked down because I'm getting killed here, right? Mm-hmm. And then we're, then we do that for a little while and we go, oh, okay, okay, okay.

So if you use a co subcontractor, I'm gonna deduct that as well. So I'm giving you 20%, but I'm deducting the material now. I'm deducting the subcontractor now. And Ella, if you use a helper, I'm gonna deduct that. And so you just keep taking away, and so you're killing his, the integrity, right? Because you told him you'd paying 20% of everything until he actually went out and sold some big stuff, and it started costing you more than you can afford to pay him.

And so you started cutting back on it and changing it. And so now this is the years of bad decisions, right? Because we almost every company's in this situation right now. I see it because they come to us all the time about how to pay people. and so now that we've got that this hint dim against us. Everybody's checking to make sure they're not getting screwed, if you will. Because it's so complicated now. All right. What was the material cost on this? You know what, I won't use any material.

I'll sell less because the materials costing me money. So I'll go around it or, or I'll just fix this part and now you got a call back because they should have replaced it. and so it creates, creates all of these problems and now you're doing callbacks all the time. And these are just the little things that we just do every day. We don't realize that, just kind of really stamped down our culture problem. It just really makes it hard to run a good, really high elevated culture. in your company.

and so if we could stop doing these things that complicate our companies, complicated, our pay systems, complicated every part of our business, and start simplifying the business and making sure that everybody understands where the business is going and what we're all trying to achieve together, then your culture's gonna go up higher.

This is more profitable to you than raising your prices, and so you're gonna have to get your business back, you're gonna have to get them to, n l pay system that provide that will provide this culture that you're looking for. You need to, you need to you need to take the, the pressure off of them of having to sell something. Because if they go to a job and get a zero ticket, they get nothing. Right? Well, as soon as they get nothing, are they happy? Are they s mad?

I don't think they're happy because they didn't get in. They got a zero ticket. The customer said, no, I'm not doing business with you today. Whatever. And then they go to the next job and then they get yelled at because they got a zero ticket. So then they just pile on his unhappiness, right? How are you building culture in that situation?

But if you had a pay system that rewarded him in a way that was very simple for them to understand and rewarded them well and rewarded the company as well, now you have harmony. And so this is how we build culture. And not only that, we improve the financials at the same time because everybody's in a very positive culture. And so this is what we do. We really help companies. This legacy culture killing stuff. we sell software. There's no doubt about it. That's, that's what I do. Right?

But we're the only software company we're introducing SeraAcademy at the end of this month, or first, first in February. This academy will show them how I do these meetings. It will show them the meetings they need to have to make these changes. It will show them how to use Serathe way that I would use it so they can maximize profitability. and we're very excited about it. It's got all kinds of stuff on there that will help our, help our clients.

And that's something that a se a software company doesn't do. They take your money and they don't enter the call when you need something. We have a full-blown customer service department. We run our software company like a air conditioning plumbing company should be ran, right? We take care of our customers, we want 'em to come back.

We want 'em to keep doing things and we help improve their businesses And so this is why I wanted to get on here today and talk about these three things and how just the little things that we're doing are causing these problems for us in our businesses. And let's start undoing this legacy bad culture.

what does that type of a structure look like? How do you keep that simple? Because I do agree that complicated bonus programs will absolutely kill your culture. It will kill your employees confidence. It will drain them of their ability to perform. So how is it that you can do it in a simplified way to still reward people for going above and beyond?

The bonus is from the, from the profit. And that that technician, that's the number one salesperson in your company, did get there without the people in the office. He didn't get there. Without that guy getting those parts to him, he didn't get there without that installer doing a ne fantastic job on the job that he sold. Mm-hmm. it's a team, 100% team all the way through, and so we don't go through and try to d give people stuff that they don't deserve.

Every single person received the same dollar amount of a bonus for doing, for building the company and making it profitable. And then we tack onto to that. this is something that y'all would like. We tack on an additional a hundred dollars. This is how you build culture and keep people coming back and stay, keep people working for you. Because we have almost zero turnover. If someone leaves our company, we pretty much force them to leave, right? We, we we're ahead of the curve.

So every single employee gets a hundred dollars for every month that they work for the business. That's the other bonus. So there's two bonuses we do. Well, everybody gets the bonus and then everyone on top of that bonus gets a hundred bucks. So if you've been with the company six months, you're getting $600 plus that bonus that everyone got, and you'd only been there six months, what would you do if you walked out of there with $3,500 and you just started? That's it. You're exactly.

And, and now you're going, okay, well what do I need to do to help? and so that, that's how we do it. We don't discriminate on that. We encourage that. So we encourage longevity. So as you rack up months at a hundred dollars, I mean, that's $1,200 a year now that's up in a hurry. Mm-hmm. five years I guess the, I guess it was 48 months, that was the highest amount paid. Because that was our four year January one's four years.

How do you forecast for that later on down the road? Because I mean, that's, that's 10 years down the road. I mean, heck, 20 years down the road, you're now looking at $24,000 bonus per year. How do you forecast for that in your financials and your budget?

$12,000 for 10 years than it is to constantly be retraining somebody and causing and, and doing that and having this revolving door. It's much easier to run a business when you're doing less callbacks because everybody appreciates the job that they're ha that they have not, they're not there just because they need a paycheck. They appreciate where they work. And so the callbacks get taken down, the turnover gets taken down.

All of these things are extremely expensive and, and that is what cost companies thousands and thousands of dollars annually. I'm not saying we don't get callbacks. It happens we make mistakes, people make mistakes, but we're not a callback problem business.

And if you're constantly doing call backs before you get to the real calls, cuz you have this policy, I'm gonna get these callbacks to priority and you're doing all of those before you even get to the ones that are earning you some money, you're going backwards every day. and that's, that's just from years and years of experience.

So when you think about Seraand utilizing the systems and utilizing the software, what it does for HVAC businesses, you actually reduce the amount of employees in your office, right? And so, so when you think about that, you reduce your, your staff, you're reducing your overhead.

So the, the reductions that you actually have staff in your overhead help fund, These sorts of onus structures, which is also the fascinating part that I, I don't think we haven't bridge that yet, but I did because I remember you saying that you reduce your office staff by utilizing and putting in Sera into your systems.

And this is what we do. So, we don't reduce staff obviously. What we do is, is we take and we take these people and we give them better jobs. We reassign them like we, we have them help us on rehashing or they just do more things. Maybe they help in the accounting, they just do extra little things because we free up their workload and we can free up, free up their workload with less people, if that's what you want to do. Or you keep the people you have and you grow into those many people.

And so we, we went from 7 million in revenue at Seraexcuse excuse me, not Sarah, at BillGO last year to 11 and a half million this year. And we did it with the same four ladies in the office. So we, we wanted to see how far we could, how far we could go before we really needed to add another person. And my employees understand that. what we're trying to prove here, because BillGO is a beta test company for Sarah. So we can try these ideas out, right? And, and then pass 'em along to you.

So I'll do all the hard work and, and the cost and the burden that goes with all this testing. And then we'll give you this, the results. And so what we realized was going from 7 million to 11 and a half million in a 12 month period with these same four ladies and then the same three department managers well two department managers and then then a indoor sales manager, if you will. So we've had those seven people from day one.

every year we continue to grow from $0 on the first day to 11 and a half million dollars on the fourth year. And so our budgets for 2023 first for BillyGo is we're actually thinking we're gonna do about 18 to 20 million. So we looked at doing the budget for 18 million. Even in this down economy, we feel like our company's gonna grow more than it did last year.

And that's a whole nother podcast we could get into and why we're not forecasting the 20% dip like they're, we're forecasting growing about 40, 50%. Over this year. And so we sat down and we're like, okay, where are we inefficient? Where do we need someone or, or more than one person, or more than, or, or several people. and I asked them how do you feel like your job is, are you overloaded? Are we making you work extra? And they're like, no, we're still leaving at four o'clock.

I get here I get here, it's eight o'clock, I leave at four. That's still, that's still happening. And I'm like, well, at what point do you want us to, to bring in somebody? and they're like, well, I mean, Maybe we can do it. Maybe we wait till we get into the spring. Because right now, I mean we just don't see, like we can need, we need anyone. And so I keep pushing them because I want 'em to go, well, tell me if you need someone, right? We wanna get this ratio right.

And as we continue to build these things out and Sera it kind of reduces the need to keep adding people. And so what we did is we went ahead and put one person, one extra person in the budget, but there was no plan to hire them. At this point. There's so we think we can go to, we're gonna see if we can get to 18 million with the same seven, seven people, cuz they're not complaining. Think about that for a second.

And by the way, if anybody wants to think about how to use your mind, how does Billy's mindset shift about economic times? Go check out our episode that we had in December with Landon Brewer and Billy, because we talked extensively about the upcoming recession. How do you change your mindset, but like when you have your office staff, staff bought into this to be able to do this, to say we actually don't need anybody. Powerful, powerful stuff.

and so we're solving these problems now and we're a young company and we're growing extremely fast, and are we perfect? No, don't even, not even for a second. Will we ever be perfect? Not as long as I own it, because I'm, I'm never stop. I never stopped. But we're re we are releasing new product every two weeks. Now we've got it in a two week cadence. We've got all the teams built. We're, we're really moving through and we're, we're always thinking about how do we.

how do we get rid of this workload on these folks so that they can do take a breath, go to the bathroom nobody ever wants the dispatcher to go on vacation or call in sick. Right? And we're, we're running thousands and thousands of calls a year. What, what basically four people. And if they go and they all go on vacation and we have a very lucrative vacation package as well. Part of the culture, I think, I think you get three, three or four weeks after four or five years, it's pretty crazy.

We we really take care of 'em. So that's what we do at BillGO. We, we just continue to couple If you wanna innovate and get profitable, you need to talk to us. I mean, that's just the way it is. And I can back up everything. That's one thing I'll do. There's a lot of guys on, on social media yelling. Oh, I wouldn't take a hundred million from my company. Oh, no, no. Well, no, no you wouldn't cuz nobody wouldn't give it to you. And I'm doing 40, 50, 60 million a year.

No, I want, I'll back up anything. So if anybody wants to see anything that I'm talking about, if you wanna see our numbers, if you wanna see whatever, I'll show 'em to you. Come to our office, I'll break it all out for you. We'd love for people to come to Sera and BillyGo

So going forward, starting February 1 Sera is only 395 a month for up to four technicians and only 149 a month for any additional tech. So it's a very affordable, and it really cuts the costs to run your business, in my opinion. Serais free. it's very affordable. It's not a long-term contract, it's just a one year contract. And for only 395 a month for up to four techs that's a smoking deal. And if you have more techs than that it's only an additional 149 per tech.

And there's no charges for the office. No charges for anybody in the warehouse, none of that stuff. It's just people

I think you're gonna be surprised by the names that are behind it. It's gonna be pretty awesome. Can't wait for that. Yeah. Can't wait to tell everybody. You gotta keep your mouth shut.

It's as easy as taking the time to text, text them and tell 'em, great day today. Thanks for everything. It's, it's just, or tell 'em thank you. Every time you see them, your employees. It's just little things like that that really make a big difference and get people excited about working at that company with you. I never referred to myself as a boss. that's the last thing I'm gonna do. I work with these people and they work with me, and together we build really great businesses.

I'm not one to brag on myself, but I know how to build businesses. I know how to build them profitably and I know how to build them fast. and I have a lot of this information that I want to share and that's what I'm, why I'm on these podcasts so often cuz I really wanna share what I know because once you have the answers, the little answers that if you don't have to have big answers, just a lot of little ones add up to big things it really makes a big difference.