Episode #4: Hunter Davidson, CEO & Founder of Sparks Coatings (Client Spotlight)

Transcript:

#4 Podcast Official Audio.mp3

What is going on. We are back with another episode of the Service Legend Podcast episode number four. And let me just tell you guys, I have a real treat for you today. I mean, I have not only an amazing entrepreneur in in the recording industry, but a dear friend. Hunter Davidson, welcome to the podcast.

All right. Thank you, man. I appreciate that. A ton. It’s going to be fun. I’m stoked to be here.

So quick bio here of Hunter. We have Hunter Davidson. He is the CEO and founder of Sparks Coatings. He’s from Tucson, Arizona. And Hunter is a entrepreneur with skills in sales, leadership and bringing goals to fruition. And I can and I can second that 1,000%, and we’ll get into that here a little bit. I do have questions here, textbook questions that that I’ve been asking people. But before we get into the boring stuff, if you will, of of questions, could you just kind of let everyone know, kind of like just the basics of who you are and kind of what you’re up to a little bit about sparks kind of like what you guys do just in general.

Yeah, for sure, man. So Sparks Coatings, we’re based out of Utah. We started about two and a half years ago. Started in St George. We have locations in southern Utah and northern Utah. We’ve seen some pretty awesome growth just in the past two years. Personally, I love riding dirt bikes. I have a razor that I love to go take Rock Crawl, and that’s actually where I’m heading. Right after this is going to take the sparks, pull off and go have some fun.

But so you have the pull.

Yeah. Love it. So, no, you know what? I think that’s one of the things is I’m a very big life like I, I love life. And I think that’s one of the motivating factors behind me being an entrepreneur was I just wanted to be able to have as much freedom and time as I as I wanted. And that’s what we’ve been able to create. So that’s I personally, that’s that’s what I value the most is time and my time to just go have fun and enjoy time with my family.

So, yeah, that’s awesome, man. Well, again, welcome to the podcast. I’m honored privilege to be able to be your friend and be able to interview here. So, so that was a little bit let’s get into that a little bit further. You guys have been in business over at Sparks Coatings for two and a half years. You said or almost two and a half years. Could you give us just an idea of like approximate revenue? It could be monthly or just like projected for this year. How many crews you guys have? I know you mentioned a couple locations. How many sales people or employees, rather, do you have? So let’s go with approximate revenue here, number of crews or locations and then total employees.

Awesome. Yeah. So. For revenue this year. It’s going to be pretty awesome. We’re on track to do. We’re looking we’re about between 1.8 to 2.1 million. It kind of depends on the amount of employees we can onboard probably within the next two months that we’re trying to bring on. That’s that’s been that’s kind of the determining factor as far as employees go. We have 12 full time employees. What were some of your other questions? Right.

Sorry, I kind of fire hose you there.

But you’re good and I have a terrible memory, so.

Okay, approximate revenue, total employees, number of crews because I know you mentioned you have like two or three markets, but how many how many crews? Oh, total there.

So there’s three crews in northern Utah and Saint George. I don’t know if we’ll dive in a little later. It’s a little history there, but that’s where we started. And then we kind of closed it down for a little bit when I moved, but we just reopened it. And so we have one crew going on two in the next month, so we have one full time and a two starting in July.

Sweet. We got some followers here. They said, What’s up, guys? I got some some fire emojis also. Guys, if you guys are watching this live, if you guys could do me a huge favor and just put hashtag live in the comments and then if you are watching this on the replay, put hashtag replay. That’s going to be it’s going to help this reach more people. Also gives us some good context of like who’s watching this live, who’s watching us on the replay and appreciate that. So now let’s go back to that beginning point where you said St George, where we started, things like that. So. How did you guys get started? Like, what were you guys doing? Or What were you doing before Sparks like.

Were you? Yeah, for sure.

In college, were you. What were you up to before? Sparks and kind of like, how would you train? So that’s a good question.

So, no, I’ve never, never been to college, never went. I was a terrible high school student. I think I had I probably missed two or three days a week. So I kind of knew there was a there was a short period of time where I was like, you know, I might go to college. And I ended up ended up not and thank goodness for that. But I started working for another company, a good company as a smaller company, and I kind of did a little bit of everything for these guys. I did. I did some sales, I did some installs and just learned some stuff from there. And then so right around February 20, 22, 2020 is when we started Sparks Coatings. The cool thing about not the cool when when we originally started, I started with partner Breckin Anderson. He’s still one of my close friends today, him and his wife about oh, maybe even a year, I can’t remember. But they actually decided to go travel full time. So they were like living I think they’re in Italy or something. They’re, they’re living the life. But when we started, it was right when COVID happened. You know, I think we had a week before COVID happened where we were like, man, this is awesome, you know? And then COVID happened and nobody knew what was happening. People were how we started. Our business was door knocking. And so we were like, Oh, are people going to be weirded out with this? With COVID going around? It was door knocking.

It was February 20, right?

February 20, yeah.

Wow. Okay, so you started February. So that was like. Right. Yeah, I forgot about that. That’s literally right. When COVID. Yeah, well, we.

We’re kind of dumb enough.

You can’t even say the word anymore. But so that’s when you started and you started door knocking for client acquisition at that time.

Yeah, that’s how you know me and Breckin. We’re completely broke. I’ve literally completely broke. I think I had maybe $600 in my bank account. Breckin had pretty similar, and we got a referral for a bigger job as like an $11,000 job. And we were like, sweet, like, we can do this job, I’ll get a deposit, we’ll pay for the materials, we’ll be able to buy some equipment and then we’ll just keep renting. That was kind of the the mindset we had at the beginning. And, you know, talking to the clients, I was like, you know, so we normally do a 50% deposit schedule and we do the remainder upon completion. And here’s like, you know, I’ve been burned a few times, can you drop off the materials? And then me and Breckin were like, Oh crap, dude, I think we got 1000 bucks between us. I think that’s what we spent. It was like 900 or a thousand bucks where we took all of our money at that time we’re using. Sherwin So we went to Sherwin Williams, bought as much we like did a bunch of break ins of math genius, so we figured out what product would look like the most for 1000. But it dropped off at the guy’s house, got the deposit, and then the rest is history. So shortly after that is when we met Ryan. We actually what we are planning on is going to be equipment. We made a pivot and we actually use all that money on Ryan’s retainer and ad spend. And since that day we’ve been busy. So we’ve got.

A little chunk of cash that you guys are going to spend early on on equipment. But you decided to put it into marketing. Wow. That’s that’s a big risk, man.

Wow. It was. It was, you know, so before we met you, we interviewed a few marketing companies. And I don’t want to turn into a sales pitch for service legend, but I mean, none of them could guarantee results is pretty comforting, you know, looking at guaranteed results you’ve had with coding companies. So that was awesome. But yeah, we decided it would have been better to take take a lower margin by renting on jobs. A lot of our guys had grinded small projects, anything that was 500 square feet or less. We had two hand grinders and two shot backs and we’d bust it out. But it’s kind of funny. My best friend worked for us, he did installs and he kind of joked because I had to move down from about 4 hours away because he had done floors before. I was like, I got like a week’s worth of job training to come work for a week. And he ended up staying for like six months before he moved back because it was a pretty quick turnaround. And that was that was probably my first entrepreneurial lesson was right away I was like the two most important lessons I learned right at the beginning was there’s always somebody who’s better for the job and you should do what you can to hire them and to bring them on. In that case, that was you. And the second was to start to dominate a market. Online marketing is a huge, huge resource. So those are the two lessons we learned right away that benefited us greatly.

Man, I appreciate that. I am flattered. I tell you, man, I know you mentioned it before, but I really appreciate that. And it’s I find it very intriguing on how you guys started from so I mean, so if you guys are listening and you’re wondering, gosh, I don’t know if I should spend money on marketing, gosh, there’s there’s this recession talk and there’s X, Y, and Z, whatever it is. And part of this entrepreneur journey, part of what this podcast is all about is more profit, more freedom, more impact. And as an entrepreneur like, we are going to be forced to take risks in this, in this, in this, in this journey. And that’s exactly what it seems like the past couple of years were for you, was just constant risk taking and obviously making the most educated risk decisions there. But can you talk a little bit about that, like, you know, going through those decisions, like how hard was that for you guys? Like making those decisions?

Like it was hard, it was tricky, you know. So when we first started Sparks, there was a there’s a time where we considered it pretty heavily, where me and Breckin were like, maybe we should get into building at home offices and selling our home office. Kids like to be on. We got pretty deep into that for because I was like, Dude, you know, people are going to be scared to spend money. And it’s one there’s a lot of, you know, I’m religious, there’s a lot of prayer. But also just I equate, I think a really important entrepreneur skill is, you know, you you kind of can’t turn your back were like you know what this is what we know people we are still selling a few jobs. We’re like, let’s just push it for and see what happens, you know? And so I don’t want to say it’s being dumb enough to keep going because that’s what we’re doing now, right?

It’s like, yeah, that was borderline dumb, but dude, if it works or genius, right?

It works, you know, and and even right now, right. There’s a lot of talk of recession and and there’s the entrepreneur I follow. But he gave us a vice where he was like, I don’t have a crystal ball, you know, you never know with the economy where sometimes what could tip the scales to the opposite happens, right? With COVID, everything pointed to things should have shut down. That’s where everything pointed. And we went home, service shot up, right? Yeah. And so like us personally, we’re spending more money than ever on marketing right now. We’re spending more money on new equipment and onboarding. And like I said, part of it is maybe just being dumb enough to be like, you know what? Like, I don’t know what it’s going to do, but I’m going to like I know where I want to be. And that’s what we’re just going to keep pushing for, you know?

And now I love that about you. It’s inspiring for me and hopefully everyone listening, you know, you know, that’s, that’s, that’s on the fence of, gosh, should I start that next crew? Should I hire those two guys? You know, should I spend that money on that new website, whatever it is for you? Like be encouraged here that you’re the entrepreneur, you’re the leader, push through it, make the decision, and be confident in that decision. I want to ask you to just going deeper into that, like. You know, when you guys started back early, early 20, 20, and you guys were just starting out like. Like, What were you guys doing right up from that? Like, did you guys have any skill sets with sales, any skill sets with business?

Like to this day, I think I have sales skill set, but I try to. You know, so Brecon. Brecon is really good. Like, I’m not going to like that, he reckons. Genius. No, I don’t consider myself particularly skilled. You know, it’s a little depressing, but in all honesty, I tell my wife all the time, I’m like, I’m the worst employee in our company. Like, hands down. It’s sad sometimes, but I say I’m the worst and the best I have. One of my skill sets is being really good at making things work. But operations wise, we’re in the process of hiring an office manager, and I’m like, There’s just somebody who’s way more talented at this than I am. And for my company to hit the goals that I want to hit, it’s we need the team. And so when we first started, no, I did not do any like I said, I did some sales to that other company, but it really wasn’t much like I’d go put up flyers, I’d go to quotes with them. It wasn’t much. So I had technical experience. But even that the technical experience I gained from the other company wasn’t a correct technical experience. So I pretty much had to learn how to do floors to make sure we were doing them right.

Yeah. And I wanted to ask that that kind of follow up question there, because, you know, there’s so many people that are getting into the concrete coding space. And what you guys have done in such a short period of time is really, really world class. And I think I think there’s a lot of companies that are, you know, whether adding a division onto their business, their painting company, their a garage door company or whatever, and they’re adding coatings to under the business. And it’s new. And, and there’s guys that are just getting into the business, whether they’re an installer right now and they’re starting their own companies, whatever it is. And I just wanted to highlight just how, like with the right vision and determination and grit, like literally you don’t have to have a master’s degree, you don’t have to be the best salesman in the entire world. You just have to get up and do it. And I think guys are a great example of that. Yeah.

And I think and I think the important thing to recognize there is there’s a point entrepreneurs need to be really humble. I see a lot of entrepreneurs who just think they are the best, that they’re the best at the finances, they’re the best at sales, they’re the best at installing. And then you look at their numbers and the numbers tell a different story, right? And so I think there’s a part where entrepreneurs can be humble, and I think there’s a point where people need to I ask myself quite often, what am I? I believe it was Steve Jobs talked about this, but he was pretty much just wartime CEOs and CEOs. And wartime is during heavy growth and pieces when you need to be maintaining that just a standard. And and so like for me personally I’ve started to realize within the last six months like career getting to a point where growth still needs to be pushed. But I’m almost viewing two sides of the company where I’m like, we have set revenue. We have all these set things where I’m like, I need to bring in maybe even an operations personnel, someone who can come in and take the things of duct tape and zip tied together and actually turn it into a well-oiled machine. And so I think it does take some humility on entrepreneur’s part to be like, what? Which 1 a.m. I? What do I really excel at? And then finding the other person. And that’s what we’ve realized lately is I need and that’s what we’ve been working on, is bringing it on somebody to streamline what we’ve already done while I’m focusing on growing.

So yeah, yeah, that’s awesome, man. And it was, it was pretty cool seeing you down here a couple of weeks back and showing you the operation we have here at Cardinal. And it was just good seeing you. Let me ask you this. So who is your guys? Is who is Sparks coatings ideal customer in and target market within your guys markets there.

You know it’s interesting. So Saint Saint George and Utah County are actually very different clients. St George’s pivoting to more of a northern Utah client. So those are two markets, northern and southern Utah. But Saint George, Utah is still a very heavy retiree community. So it’s interesting when you look at our numbers on our marketing and St George, are booking ratios a lot higher because you have a lot of older people who want quotes in person, want you to come over, want to meet you, shake your hand, right?

Yeah.

And in northern Utah, it’s a lot more of people in their thirties to 45 younger families, sometimes first or second home who we’ve started to pivot a little bit where we realize we do a little bit better virtually with these guys. You know, it’s not quite flip flopped, but yeah, I would say good 30% of our leads that we book are people want virtual where we do a zoom. I’m showing them photos and we’re just doing everything over the phone. Yeah. And so yeah. So Northern Utah, I’d say it’s 30 to 35 second homeowners. That’s what we’ve always found to be the best. Usually for first time homeowners in Utah tend to drain their cash funds and it becomes a harder purchase when I’m asking, you know, five grand for a three car. And also in Utah, I know this is different in states, but the average sized garage here in Utah is about 800 square feet. It’s very common. Everyone has three car garages. Yeah. Wow.

So here in Phoenix, there’s there’s a ton of two cars. I mean, it is it is it is incredible.

You know, and I see people complain about but two cars when priced correctly are awesome because crews can crank them out. You can get a really good margin. And because I love it, because it’s different, right? Asking 3500 for a two car versus maybe like 6500 for a three car. Right. You talk to people in the same income bracket spending double.

Yeah. Yeah.

I personally when I go out to cars, I’m like, good point. Got it. Like, yeah, so that’s. But then in St George, our target market is definitely we’re in the 60 to 70 retiree market who’s in there forever home and we can pitch quality to them really, really well. So our rep does really well.

So you got a forever home, you know, probably looking to really. Best into it. And then you got like, you know, newer homeowners, younger prefer virtual.

And that’s where we’ve had to pivot a little bit in St George. We offer in northern Utah, we offer packages to try to offer some cheaper options because a lot of people are, especially in this market, they’re like, I might only be here two or three years just to get some appreciation before I leave and they just want something. So we have some cheaper, solid color options and some others. But in Saint George, we almost exclusively sell, you know, seven, seven, 50 square foot on our higher packages. And so it’s intimidating for your market.

By the way, for some reason I haven’t figured this out yet, but I cannot see this person’s name. So if you’re still listening, do you charge by the square foot? If you could actually comment again and put your name, that would be fantastic. But because they ask, do you charge by square foot? And so maybe you could you could answer that.

That’s a yes. That’s yes. A no question. 80% of the time. Yes. But let me think how to phrase this. I think something that we made a mistake on and it kills me. I think we made it for far too long. People get hung up on square foot price. I see people on the forums being like, oh, eight bucks a square foot and it’s 200 square feet. And I’m like, you know, I’m like, okay, yeah, it’s a cool square foot price, but, you know, 1600 bucks. What’s your overhead costs look like for the day? What your dispatching costs? And so that was a mistake we made. We had a lot of two cars where, to be honest, we were charging probably two grand, 2400, whatever. And we were like, Oh, this is great. And then because I was slow on our finances, I started to go back with our guy financial planning analysis and realized, Holy crap, on two cars. Pretty much every time we do a two car at that price, we’re breakeven because of our overhead or we’re losing money because we’re called back. And that means that money from the bigger garages are getting pulled to level out those ones. And so it’s a yes and no. Yeah, we charge by square foot, but we do have changed our job in a moment in the past two weeks. So it’s $3,500. We do have higher overhead. I mean, we have office staff, we have truck loans, lease loans on equipment warehouse. So our overhead is is higher where we need to just cover those expenses. And so that’s where we’ve put our where we’re like, okay, we can still make profit for the day. We can we have that budget actually hit. So anything over 3500 is by the square foot charge. Otherwise it’s that minimum charge.

Okay, well, that’s awesome. That makes a lot of sense. And you guys, someone ask, are you guys doing only garage patios? I think you guys are doing a plethora of different job types.

Right. And plus in northern Utah, where we have a pretty big climate swing, so we only do garages that’s in southern Utah. It’s 80% garages and 20% patios.

Okay, fantastic. And that was actually Brian from Epoxy Time and other client of service. What is that, Brian? I hope you’re doing well, man.

And that’s other people can do other work. We just decided really quickly, I was like, I can train guys quickly on a garage and they’re easy to patch up. It made sense for our model, but I know plenty of other people making great money, doing polishing and other stuff.

So yeah, yeah. This industry is just it’s just it’s just massive. It’s just it’s just.

A lot of options.

Looking to I was talking to Pete Johnson at Valence Protective Coatings to Pete Johnson. Hey, Pete, if you’re listening, shout out to you, bro. He’s he’s hands down. Probably one of the best probably one of the best, if not the best concrete coding trainer on how to train your team up. And you can hit him up at valence protective coatings over there.

Shout out just so everyone knows. Does he still do trainings where he’ll fly out to you? Does he?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this guy does. I think I think he’ll come out to you, but he’s got a facility now. But I was just talking to him yesterday and like just just talking about the importance of having the train staff and really fulfilling on jobs that you’re confident on. And so I think how you’ve niched down is, is ideally what we should all be doing, whether you’re even if you’re painting nails, like it’s like, hey, we do our nails this way and that’s what we’re good at. So I think that that’s awesome that you found a way to scale and be efficient, be profitable.

Which is are in the niches.

Which is are in the niches.

I’m sorry. My favorite quote, I really I really believe that. So yeah. Yeah.

So what is your guys is what is Sparks coatings unique selling proposition like how do you guys position yourself in the eyes of your customers? Like what’s your guys is USP or if you guys have. Yeah.

Exactly. So you know it’s funny little history to a mistake. I like to talk about the mistakes that I think a lot of people make them and it’s good to hit it is something I learned pretty quickly. We learn this within the first six months is when you first start your company and even when you own it, you have a lot of pride that you do the best work right depending on your market. But every time we give quotes, you know, a lot of times people are getting multiple quotes, right? And every single sales rep is telling that person, we do the best work, we’re quality. And then there’s $3 a square foot to $8 a square foot. Right. And everyone’s saying they do quality. So what we focus on is one client journey or client timeline. What I’ve learned is a lot of people, what they want in a contractor. Is this experience where they’re easy to work with? No surprises. And that’s really what we pitch. So we do pitch on quality, but we try to build that quality through by showing them our systems and processes when we’re coding them out. Your casualty talking about one of the nice things about working with us, like you got those texts when we on my way over right to keep you in the loop.

Oh perfect. Just wanted to make sure, you know, if you guys book your install, you’ll actually get a call from our office manager right away. He’s going to confirm all the details we talked about, and then you guys are going to get constant updates on your install day. And I kind of walk them through that process. And so kind of where we’ve found is, is really selling people more on us as an organization of being easy to work with, being convenient to work with. And that’s kind of our selling point is because pretty quickly I’m like everyone else looks the same pitching quality. Paul Urea in my opinion I could sell either you could talk the person out of either. It just becomes a selling point, you know. And I hear all the time where clients are getting bashed on epoxy and bashed and they’re getting bashed Spartak and, and so the way that we removed ourselves was I was like, I want to sell them on the company and the ease of using us. And so that’s kind of our unique selling point is we try to really sell them on our systems and processes pretty much.

Yeah, I think that’s great, man. So what types of marketing does Sparks Coatings do? Like, what’s your guys’s marketing mix between online and offline there?

Yeah. So Facebook, Google for online marketing, we’re doing a lot of SEO with you guys. I think that’s huge and important. That was one if I was giving advice, if I was giving advice to start up and I think you guys might tell them, but I would put all my money into Facebook at the beginning. That’s where we, at least in our markets, where we sell a lot of growth. And then when you have some revenue built up, start switching to Google and SEO because that’s long term and that’s what we’ve done recently and I’ve seen the fruits from that. But the other things we do is in Utah, it’s very you know, we have some really high growth markets and so there’s a parade of homes and home shows. Parade of homes is when pretty much toe builders build the nicest homes they can. And for two weeks, people get these tickets and they go through the homes and look at them. And so some of the best marketing is when we do the floors in some of these homes and have booths set up and you’re reaching directly with homeowners. That’s a very cold sale, right? Like you’re grabbing people out of the crowd, trying to give them business or trying to get them to sign up.

So yeah, but it works really efficiently for you. Offer we offer a good promo for the home show, something that we did for a while and we’ve been recruiting for and we’re trying to pick back up is we did do a lot of door knocking. I think canvassing people overlooked a lot. But man, when you’re doing a floor and if you can get somebody on the door so someone’s doing a floor and you’re like, hey, and literally your is out there, the equipment is there, and you’re like, hey, you know, we’re sorry for the noise. That’s just what you come over. That’s what we always say. First, we know we’ve been noisy. You’ve probably been seeing us over there. You know, here’s our card. This is what we do. Do you guys want to come look at the Johnsons? And if you do, the garage will be open. We’ll have caution. Tape up, swing by, take a look at it. And that works very well for us. You know, if if marketing can be a big expense and so if you can take one job in a neighborhood and turn that into even one other or two and cut that cost down by two or three because of the acquisition of other clients, it’s a tremendous money saver.

So I like that a lot because most people like in the recording space, I don’t think a lot of people are actually door knocking or.

You can literally doorknock anything. It’s so funny, but the concrete coatings has blown me away with how well doorknocking works.

Wow, that’s pretty awesome. I think we’ll have to do like I love to do a a training on that in the, in the News Service Legend Academy. We could put a training in there on that. And also, you know what, in the middle of our podcast here, everyone should know if you’re listening, Hunter Davidson is actually going to be the new sales coach for service legend, and it’s going to be for all of our clients. Every Wednesday at 2 p.m. Pacific Standard Time, Hunter will be on Zoom group coaching. So if you have if you’re a client of service legend and you’ve got yourself you’re doing the sales, or if you have sales people, you can you can come. Our first session is going to be next week. So I forget the date on that. What is that next week? Next Wednesday is July six. Yep, July 6th. And it’s going to be at 2 p.m. Pacific Standard Time. Actually, I will be there myself personally with Hunter next week and it’s going to be a blast. We’re, we’re pumped to do this so.

We’ll do some. Yeah well definitely. Well we’ll incorporate into the academy. That’ll be awesome.

Yeah, that’s really cool. And then I want to touch on the Facebook thing real quick. We. Because a lot of companies out there talk about Facebook ads being low quality leads, things like this, which, relatively speaking, to a referral. You know, I guess in comparison it is. Right. But could you speak on that just like what you’ve done to make Facebook ads work for you?

Yeah. And and to be honest, there’s one of my big there’s nothing that peeves me more than to hear people complain about low quality leads, to be honest. And maybe that’s because I do come from when we started, we were door knocking. So I’m like, Dude, any time someone’s going to invite me over to their home, even if they tell me they’re expecting $500 is better than me knocking 20 doors to get to that. Right. So that’s one of my it starts with. So why I guess, you know the question, why do certain clients feel that leads are low quality? For Facebook I mean, you know taken versus if you’re comparing it to a website SEO versus Google Lead. Yes, it’s going to be higher in the funnel. It’s not going to be quite bottom of the funnel, but it’s still somebody who saw your work and was like, That’s really cool. I’m interested. So what it all comes down to is, what’s your process? How quickly are you getting to that person? Because there’s no better time than when they see a sweet garage floor on their phone, like, oh, that looks really cool. So it’s how quickly are you getting to your client to get them interested? I think a lot of people, we have a pretty specific process where someone be like, what’s the price, what’s the quote? And the very first time we kind of just ignored that. They even said that we go. So typically our process is is they’ll request a quote and we have it sent out where it’s like, Hey, this is Ella. Thanks for reaching out.

What city you’re in. We’d love to get you set up for a free quote. And then they’ll say, What’s the price? And then be like, Oh, sweet, we’d love to give you a price where when’s a good time that we can meet? And so we kind of bypassed it first. And I would say L.A would better answer this, but that works probably about 70% of the time where they’ll give us their info and we can set up in person quote. That’s awesome. The other times, if they’re really adamant, then we’ll push for a virtual quote, which is where our sales reps will jump on a zoom with them. We’ll send them photos, we’ll get their square footage and give them a quote. And I think a lot of people diminish. A lot of people. I’m kind of I mean, maybe because I’m younger, in my personal opinion, we’ve talked about this. We’ve gone back and forth on this. I see a heavy future where in-person quotes are starting to go away and everything zoom. I mean, that’s just the way the future’s going. You can we can deny it, but people denied the Internet. It’s here in full. I give it another five, ten years. Virtual quotes would be the majority. But yeah, so that’s kind of one of the ways we get around it is you got to have a process where you’re getting to your leads quick. And then one of the things that helps is I’m very adamant on the numbers. Sales reps need to know your numbers. You need to know how many people you’re going to talk to before you close.

What’s your close ratio? And that always helps because if your close ratio at, say, 30%, a good close ratio, not fantastic, not horrible, just that’s okay. I think that should be a pretty average in the industry. Then, you know, if you go to ten quotes, you’re only going to get three jobs and you mentally prepare yourself at seven. People are going to say no, you know? And so I think that’s something that helps is I think a lot of times when people complain about low quality leads, it’s like a mental thing. They’re depressed, they’re not closing things. And like it is kind of depressing. You’re going to talk to seven people who aren’t interested, but if you look at it the other way, where you know that for me the numbers always work out, I don’t know how it does, but literally every time I keep those in my head, when I’m when I’m doing quotes, I’m like, okay, like that guy said no. That guy said no. Like, boom, boom. Okay, this next guy is going to say yes. And it almost always works out. So having those numbers in your head helps because I think, like I said, when people complain about leads, part of me thinks they’re just it’s just they’re just depressed a little bit that they’re losing them. So know your numbers and have a really good process in place for. Getting to them quickly, because if they click on your ad on Facebook, they’re going to get blasted with another three or four companies. So you want to get to them quickly and.

I think that’s amazing, man. And one thing I’ll add on to that, too, is like a lot of companies or a lot of owner operators that are just starting out, let’s say you’re doing four or $500,000 a year, whatever it is. And, you know, the reality is, is at that point in the business, if you don’t have a a solidified brand in the community where you’ve been there for five years or ten years, what have you, you know, let’s say you’re not Tommy Mellow, you’re not Jason Pierce, you’re not Nick Slavic, you’re not you know, Jeff Jarrett. Or like you don’t have these brands where the communities just know who you are. You’ve been there for, for for quite some time. You have to you have to acquire.

To work harder.

And they’re typically more expensive up front. Usually when you start your business, it’s you spend more money on the marketing because you’re literally trying to steal market share from these companies that are already that already have market share solidified, you know.

Exactly. They already have a large Google presence. They already have Google reviews and they’re just in the market. And I think, too, it’s because it’s hard at the first. But every year we’re in business, I notice our sales get easier and easier in our reality and we are in a good market. And so you should be doing everything you can because when the market gets hard, your close ratio is going to drop. No matter, you know, you’re going to get less leads, it’s just going to drop. And so you should be keeping things good. But. But yeah, I think just stick it through. I was just doing some we did a couple of virtual quotes, our sales reps did, and I was reviewing the calls with them. We’re kind of looking at it, seeing how it could be better. And one of them is interesting, like even just two and one half years, not that long compared to some of these other guys. We have some competitors here, our largest one. I’ve been doing it for ten years. Like they’ve just been around for a long time. Everyone knows them. But we’re reviewing one of the calls and they were talking to them. They were in Cedar City, Utah, and they were building a new home. Going to be done in three weeks trying to get it done. And we’re like, Oh, you know who’s building your house? We’ve worked with quite a few builders and they’re like, Oh, it’s so-and-so. Oh yeah, we did this personal home and we’ve done some work for them. And right away that guy was sold like literally, you know, the call went on for another 10 minutes, but in the guy’s head, because you should have if you could hear him, he was like, oh, he’s like, you’ve done Alex’s personal house where he keeps his classic truck. So I was like, Yeah, yeah, we have. He’s like, Oh, okay, awesome. The rest of the call is super smooth. Gave him Price is done right. 65.

Do those things when you’re you’re only eight months in business or you’re even a year and a half, like, sometimes a.

Lot of skepticism.

Right this time, man. Yeah. So there’s actually a Facebook user. I want to fix this thing. Hey, if anyone.

Can see, you could see.

You know what I mean? I see some of these names, but I think this might be Levi. But somebody says, I would like to see you on a live zoom call and see your zoom pitch. Hey, if you’re a country awesome. Yeah, come next week. And if you’re not, sign up to be a client and you’ll get access, literally. Oh, it’s Brian. What’s going on, Brian? So, Brian, literally next week, 2 p.m. Pacific Standard Time, jump on the live Zoom call. We’re going to be sending out the Zoom links and all of the stuff that you need access to the.

I think that’d be awesome. We should definitely I can let’s make something like that happen next couple of weeks. I can make sure to plan a quote around the time that I’ll get to plan where we get a zoom. Hopefully we get a decent client that’s not looking for a $500 floor, but either way, it’s always good to see those two.

So hey, what we could probably do is just, just record a W, you know, like, like a wind Zoom record. And we could probably do like a live call review on one of our sessions and just kind of play the recording for everyone. That would be kind of cool too, if you guys think that that would be cool, whoever’s listening, if you’re a current client or not, if you think that that would be cool, just type in hashtag. Zoom in the comments here, whether you’re watching live or on the replay comment, hashtag Zoom. That way we can know who would be interested and stuff like that. That way we can really optimize to make the sales coaching as fruitful as possible for you guys. Okay, let’s transition into the reviews. Like I’m always curious about reviews. Like do you guys have any special initiatives to attract online reviews, whether it’s automated or whether it’s in-person? What do you guys do to get five star reviews?

So we do have an automated system that’s something that’s actually big on our list for improvement. Interesting enough. So one of the things I like to do. Is an exercise. I do. I say if I was a 50 million company, what would Sparks look like? And it’s a lot of times what I do is I get quotes not from coding necessarily, but for example, me and my wife needed a water softener. So I got a quote from a larger company and the process was amazing. But one of the things that they did where I learned from them. But because a lot of times people are quick to offer discounts. Right. Oh, they’re like, okay, $300 off, $500 off, you know, maybe more than what they already had in their ad or whatever. And what this guy did, you know, he gave a quote for a water softener. And, you know, even being what I do, it’s crazy. It’s like a $4,000 water softener crap. Now I know what it feels like to get a $5,000 garage and two bucks. But one of the things he did that was really smooth was he was like, you know, and I understand that’s a lot. They had financing options. But then the other cool thing was he was like, we actually do two rebates. He was like, we have a Google review rebate where if you once you’re done and you love the project, if you leave us a five star review within 48 hours after we do it and you guys love it, we’ll give you a $100 rebate.

Wow. You know, and I was like, okay, that’s cool. I like I really liked how they phrase it in a word rebate, right? Like we’re going to do your floor. You’re going to love it. And if you do that, well and then there are other rebate was a referral rebate, which was I think theirs was $100 for every friend that I referred to them that they would give a quote to. So I’m so I really like the way they phrased so be and full transparency. I’m not a fan of how Spark’s is reviews is set up right now. We do have a decent amount of Google reviews. I think it’s not a ton. I think our Northern Utah location has like 40 and Southern has 25, so a decent amount. But that’s been a big push as I’m like, okay, I want to get a lot higher. I want to be dominating. And so I got a quote from not coatings, just another large suit. Their process was and I loved it. And so that’s something where I think we’re going to start implementing in the future. Is the rebate kind of phrase it different than just jumping to a discount?

Yeah. What’s interesting too is like the concrete coding industry is so new. I mean, we don’t have an association, there’s not even really a coaching program for concrete coding companies.

It’s not there’s not a standard of how things should be done correctly. A lot of other industries, it’s like a standard electricians, plumbers, all these things. There’s a set standard. Yeah, but with coding, there’s nothing like that.

You see the rebates, I mean, you see it all over rack Oliver, garage doors. I mean it’s probably been done for the past 20 years at least. I mean just rebates with like in-home service. So I think that’s great, man. I’d love to hear how that goes, man. Keep you updated on that. Yeah. So let me ask you this. What type of follow up marketing are you guys doing for leads that come in that just hard to get a hold of, but also follow up on unsold estimates like rehashing like just are you guys active on that follow ups.

Huge. Yeah, follow up is huge. I, I see a lot of people say if the client’s interested, they’ll text right. And I kind of go the other way or I’m like, when I follow, when we follow up with people, the only people we’re bugging are the people that aren’t interested, which in the nicest way possible. That’s fine. I mean, you’re they’re going to be bugged. They’re going to tell you they’re not interested and then they’re out of your funnel. You can put them in a six month follow up category. And so follow ups here, I try to keep it pretty personalized. We do have some where the rep when he has free time that’s he’s going through all of his old estimates. Hey, it’s John. Just checking in with your garage floor. Like I want to see what you and your wife thoughts are or what your reservations are. And so I like the personal approach, scalability wise. That’s something I think about all the time. I don’t know if that’s super scalable. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. I think we’re going to start introducing more of an automated follow up system here shortly through email and some other stuff, but I’m a huge advocate for follow up, so we close a lot of jobs from as farther away you get, the less it goes. But typically their first priority is 1 to 3 weeks. That’s they’re directly following up with, yeah, almost every day we’re sending a message, we’re sending something. Even if they don’t reply, you’re just regularly filling up with them because we’ve learned, I mean, if people are interested, they’re not going to be bugged unless you’re being weird or annoying about it. But if you’re really nice about it, pretty nonchalant. The only people you’re bugging are the ones that aren’t interested.

Yeah. And those ones you’ve got same thing with kind of like the, like the thick skin with selling like, hey, you’re going to get more no’s than yes. Same thing with follow up, right? It’s same thing. You’re getting more nodes, it’s suppressing.

I think that’s own it. I mean, I’m the type of guy like when I get a sale, like I’m when we sell and I guess I’m stoked. Like my wife gets freaked out sometimes and I’ll get text. I’m just like, yes, like, you know, it’s just a fun feeling. But then when you get to know, you’re like, Oh, you know what? You’re done. And so it’s definitely important, it’s realistic, it sucks sometimes, but, you know, you kind of learn to balance it.

Yeah, yeah, for sure, man. That’s cool, man. Now, do you guys do anything special, like in the production department, like the lead technicians or anyone that like anything special that you guys do on the production side or even the office side that that you’ve found that helps create raving fans. Like, is there anything special that like you just like, man, this is what we do or this is things we do that just really makes our customers happy.

You know? Let me think on that. That’s actually one.

That’s a good question, right? It’s a good question.

It is a good question. And it’s funny, you know, a lot of these questions you’ve asked say I like to be fully transparent with people I hate. You know, on Instagram, on Facebook, there’s a lot of stuff where you’re like, yeah, I don’t know if that’s necessarily true. And that’s actually a struggle we’ve been dealing with. I especially where we realize there’s a massive flaw in where I might have been holding up the keeping the shift from seeking a little bit was I was filling in a big gap and really when I when I realized it was so so for us. No and that’s a big change we’re actually actually making right now is I started to realize our technicians aren’t doing the things where there’s not the right communication, where they’re helping clients get excited about the floor and we’re there and they’re not helping them feel excited. And we’re I realized it was about two months ago me and my wife had our our first baby. So the plan was I was going to take about three weeks off. That was the plan, about four days in the tech started rolling in, you know, from clients. They’re upset about this. This didn’t get fixed, right? This didn’t get communicated. And after about two weeks, I was back to work to put out these fires and fix it. And that’s really when we realized I was like, okay, what we’re lacking is, one, the office manager, which we’re about to hire in the next two days, but the other is big trainings and not big trainings, but real big emphasis on technician having technicians having really good communication with the clients.

And so like now the technicians create a group chat first thing with the clients in the morning with them, the project manager and the office manager. Hey, my name is Jordan. I’m coming to your house today. We’re so excited to get your floor done when they get there. We’re starting trainings on teaching them how to talk to the clients of like, Hey, we’re so glad to be here. Here’s the process, here’s how long we think we’re going to be here today, probably at about between 11 and 12, depending on when we finish, we’re going to take a lunch. We’ll make sure to let you know, you know, just keeping them really well in the loop when they’re there. And so, no, that’s not something that we’ve been good at, but that’s actually been a big push we’ve been making in the past two or three weeks. So a big part, I think. I think companies don’t put enough emphasis on client communication. With the technicians and a lot of a lot of fires and a lot of heartache could be resolved if your technicians know how to talk to your clients.

Yeah. It’s so huge. And one of my mentors, Tommy Melo from day one. And if you’re listening, what’s up, Tommy? Shout out to you, man. But he he’s such a he emphasizes training more than anyone I’ve ever met. And but, like. Like just text. Like they’re teaching them how to smell right with cologne or what have you, with their with mints in their mouths and tonality and eye contact and body language. And I think he was even saying that Tommy said that they’re going to put those those glasses that have cameras on them. So when the techs in, they’re like they can literally see what’s going on, like live like while the techs are.

Like the new Ray-Bans.

Yes. I’m like, bro, if that ever happens, let me know.

You know, it’s huge, you know? And I think I’m not I’m not even we’re not not even close to the level of Tommy or these other ones. But when you look at these companies that are just on that massive level, you got to start asking like they don’t waste money, right? They don’t waste money. Like if he didn’t have to do that amount of training, she wouldn’t. And so you start to look at like, why do these companies emphasize so much? And it’s because callbacks cost a lot more than everybody thinks when you really get down to it. Callbacks are super expensive. So I mean, dispatching the guys labor missed opportunity costs like so being able to have your clients resolve resolutions when they’re there, make sure being well trained to walk through the floor with the client before they top code and they’re just double checking everything and just random things where if your techs are trained adequately to talk to your clients. Right, and problem solve while they’re there, it’s going to save you so much money down the road.

So yeah, it’s so true, man. I love that. Oc Really quickly here, moving on, how do you guys hire interview on board and train team members? Like do you guys have like a, like a hiring process templates, interview questions, tech training. So training like kind of talk to me about that.

Not nearly as standardized as yours. I was blown away when we were in Phoenix about how standardized yours has been. But we we have really good luck on indeed. And we like to pay higher a little bit higher than what the market calls for. We have very good employee retention. I think because of that and because we try to make a good culture, our employees tend to stick around. And so right now what our process is, is we’re almost pretty much strictly indeed. And we always the one thing I always say is you never hire the first person to interview unless you’re just completely blown away. Always interview everyone. As many as you can. Write as many about.

Up at the door.

No, that’ll cost you more money than the callback.

I wish that was the the way. Right. Just. Hey, you know what? Add up and we’re good.

Yeah, that would be the easiest, but if it worked out that way. So we actually do virtual interviews first. So we’ll text them, set up a call, jump on a call. The call here, huge. You learn a lot about them. And then to test their on timeliness and their willingness, usually we’ll be okay. So when are you looking when are you looking to start working? They’ll give us their timeline and then we’ll be like, okay, are you available? We’ll be at this address on Thursday. Are you able to be at the job site at nine? Not to work, but just to say hi to the crew, meet the people you’d be working with, just kind of see what we’re doing. So that’s what we do next. I go to the job site, they’ll meet with the installers, the other installers. We’ll have the installers tell us that they are there on time, early, late. If everything looks good there, then we have them come in for a final interview, typically with me or with Soren or project manager to get the final go through.

So that’s pretty incredible. I really like that. Kind of like just meet at a job site and just getting a visual and kind of getting like like like an actual visual on people doing the job. And it seems like you could probably find some personality connections too with that.

I want your guys to connect, you know, if you want your guys to like working with each other because they hate working with each other, we have to man crews with floaters with that. If it’s a bigger job, we’ll be three men. They don’t like working with each other. They’re not going to want to do a good job. They’re going to want to get done with work. And so that’s big. But the big thing that is that we do it for is to just make sure they can show up on time. That’s why we did the call to make sure they can call on time. We did them kind of three checks of like, can they show up on time all three times is one of the things that we’re doing.

So that’s awesome, man. That’s that’s phenomenal. And do you feel like that’s helped out a lot? Like just because you said you have great retention, so I imagine kind of like. Getting like basically like qualifying your leads. It’s kind of like same thing, right? Qualifying your leads, qualifying your applicants, it sounds like.

So, yeah. And I think then the other thing, what I’ve learned is there is a store manager of certain Williams in St George, his name is JD, that guy. I remember me in Brecon after two months we were talking, we were like, What is it with this store? Like a lot of stories you go into, I dunno if the experience should. Just like these guys have no idea about anything coding related or. Yeah, and all of his employees were like top notch. And I remember asking JD once, I was like, Dude, what’s your process like? How do you get all these guys or killers? How do you do it? And he’s like, Well, we have we have a really thorough interview process. And here’s like within the first two months, he’s like, I pretty much have a book of red flags. If they hit any of the red flags without a reasonable excuse, they’re gone. Like we just don’t have red flags. And I tell him that and I was like, you know, and it’s funny. It’s important to recognize your strengths and skills. I’m terrible. I’m a terrible hire and I’m a terrible I hate firing people because I like I don’t know, you know, I like I don’t know. I like people. I like being friends with people. And yeah, so I’m a terrible hire and I’m a terrible fire. And so that’s one of the things I’ve realized. I’m like, okay, that’s not my I’m going to leave that up to other people because everybody on me, I’m like, Man, that guy was awesome. Like, What a dude. And then we find in the next three days, yeah, they did show up to work the next few days and like of, like I probably if I was better at this, I probably could have saw that.

But most visionaries I have found I share that same trait. And so yeah, man, but carrying on to the culture thing, like, how do you guys keep that amazing culture? Like you guys do anything special, like quarterly, monthly, like how do you guys kind of keep that morale and that culture going?

So. It’s. That’s a good question. It’s a mix of a lot of things. I think it’s. One. The biggest thing you can do is transparent pay structure. That’s a mistake that we didn’t do that we made where and I felt that when I when I first moved to Utah, I worked framing for about five months. That was the first thing I did. And, you know, I kept being promised raises and nothing happened. And so one of the things that we do for our culture is very transparent pay structure. And so we just moved two guys up into a leading position and we bump their pay. And then we said, for you guys to hit this next pay raise, we have two metrics, and if you hit each metrics, it’s a certain bump. And the metric was a 10% callback ratio for a whole month, you can get bumped up and the other one was hitting deadlines for a whole month. And we’re reasonable. I think that’s important to be reasonable. Things happen, trucks break down, traffic hits. You have super soft concrete and all of a sudden your base coat that we normally go, 180 square feet is going 100 square feet and they ran out of product or, you know, things happened. And so we have exclusions for that. I think it’s important to be reasonable with them. But so transparent pay structure has kept people because they know what they’re working for. They’re not like, Oh, I’m going to have to keep asking it, keep bugging it to figure out they know exactly what they need to do to make more money. And then I think also just meeting with them regularly in one on ones. So that way they understand. I really like to sell vision on people, make them see that there’s more potential opportunity for growth as the company grows.

One of the things we can always want to do at the beginning that we just can never afford because we did never we did not understand our finances at all. So the company is very break even at the beginning. But I always said in the construction world there’s a very stigma around just how construction works. And I was like, I want to have a tech vibe to our technicians. You know, they’re doing tech work, they’re doing the installs. But I want to have a more tech company employee vibe. I want to have good perks. I want to we’ve we’ve even talked. We want to be able to give them time off. We want to be able to pay time off. We want to be able to have them have cool things at the warehouse. We try to have we want to just have it where it’s a really fun vibe to be at versus any other construction company. Yeah, and we weren’t able to do that in the beginning because we, like I said, we just didn’t understand our finances is a big mistake we made and could never afford it. But now that we’ve locked down our finances, there’s more money in the budget. That’s one of the things we’re going towards. One of the things I’m going to start initiating going forward is, I mean, I’m a big outdoors guy like like we’ve talked about. And so we’re going to I want to start doing maybe like quarterly trips with the guys where we go boating, we take razors out, we just do fun stuff where it’s a good place to work. So, yeah.

That’s awesome, man. So we’re getting towards the end of some questions here. So what is the best advice you’ve ever received?

The best advice I’ve ever received. Oh, gosh. Let’s trick you on. I have some amazing mentors in my life that give me some great advice. So these two go hand in hand. It’s one is understanding your depth perception. And two, don’t get distracted by the new shiny thing. And so those two go hand in hand for a while. You know, we’ve talked about I as a visionary and ADHD and all these other things. You know, you see things pop up and you can make money doing that. You can make money doing that. Oh, that’s a cool idea. You can make money doing that. And I think it’s important to be like. Have the depth perception of, okay, this is what I’m doing now, which is concrete coatings, and what is my vision for this? For me, I think we’ve talked about it. My, my all time vision has always been to sell Sparks Coatings. Right. And that’s been my dream for a long time to sell a company. And you can’t do that if you’re distracted by five other companies. Right. That you’re trying to do. Yeah. But I think the death reception this is actually from Ed Mylett. He’s like, we all have that deer in the headlights depth perception where sometimes things look a lot farther away than they are. And he pretty much said, if you knew how close your dreams were to fruition, you would work a lot harder and a lot faster. And so the best advice I can give to someone is focus down on one thing. Don’t get distracted by the other things that can make you money. People have been made millionaires by every industry ever you can. If that if that’s your goal, there’s millionaires in every single industry. You just need to buckle down and have the right depth perception to be like. Because I think, too, I see a lot of people put things way far out or way too close, and so just really create a realistic depth perception of how far away that is and then work on that one thing to achieve it. So yeah, that’d be my advice.

And it’s awesome. So. Depth perception. No shiny objects. Being real with yourself. What is the worst advice you’ve ever received?

There’s the. Oh, that’s a good one. I’ve received a lot of bad advice is what I’ve what I’ve realized. I’m trying to figure out how to phrase this, but I’ve gotten a lot of advice that’s pretty much phrased like slow down. Or don’t do that. That’s too risky. And so there’s there’s a lot of advice on Instagram and Facebook. You see a lot of entrepreneurs out there giving advice, and a lot of it is good. But I think the problem is, is there’s no context around what their advice was given. I think there’s times and so. I’m trying to think how to phrase this, but. So like I said, I’ve gotten a lot of bad advice. If I had to phrase it, it would be. Um. You really sent me with this one?

Yeah.

Not to take. That’s a good one. It’s funny. Well, I’m trying to narrow it down because I’m like, Oh, that’s actually cool. And then you really think about it. You’re like, Oh, that’s terrible for what I’m doing.

Well, the slowdown 100 was probably I mean I mean, I’ve gotten that, too, where it’s like, you know, stop, you know, hey, don’t work too hard. And so is that like the worst advice for you? Think like people like trying to.

Not slow down? You know, I get advice from my wife all the time to slow down and be with my family. Right. That’s great advice. My wife’s very right in that. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I should after six have my phone turned to do not disturb and works off. Right. So that part of slow down is really good. The advice I’m talking about is you’ll be.

Sent out to L.A. By the way, she’s amazing.

She is. She is. It comes from people where I’m like, you know, like, here’s our, here’s our growth. Like, here’s what we’ve done and here’s our growth. Like, we’re going to we’re going to we’re going to hit this 2 million mark this year. And I’ve had people be like, Don’t you think you’re growing too fast? And I’m like, I’m like, you know, no, I don’t. Plain and simple. And so I’ve had a lot of I’ve had a lot of vices kind of formed similar to that, where it’s like you need to slow it down. And I think there’s there’s controllable and scalable growth. So that’s why we’re bringing on all these I’m cutting my payback to pay for operations managers and all these things because I can scale with it. So. Yeah. And I guess the easiest way to phrase it, it’s my favorite quote, but just don’t take advice from people who I don’t want to say no one’s less, but aren’t where you want to be at. So people that aren’t business owners, in all reality, that’s the worst advice you could ever get is for people who aren’t business owners. Yeah. So it’s worth noting there are some people that aren’t in your field. Yeah.

Yeah. People literally. It’s all over your soul, right? Like people give you advice on on on so many things that they have literally never talked about, never actually done. They might have just saw it on Instagram and then they’re just sharing that information. Yeah. And I would have to agree with you, like, that’s probably one of my like if I was asked this question, I would probably answer really.

I used to get distracted by that a lot, right? Because I’m lucky my parents are super supportive. You know, they always were like making hints at college. But I’d be like, Oh, we’re doing this. And my mom would always be like, Oh, that’s awesome, honey. But I could always tell you it’s a little like, Oh, I wish you’re in college, but I think that’s changed. But then there’s the opposite, right? Like my mentors are, I mean, their company right now is doing crazy. They’ll do over $100 million a year this year. And any time they give me advice, I’m like, I need to do everything I can to do what he just told me. Like, so it’s the opposite. I take advice very seriously from people who are where I want to be at and from people who aren’t. I’m just like, Oh, you know, thanks. And you just don’t.

It’s like the same practice in the opposite way, it seems like. Yeah. Okay, man, you kind of already shared. My next question was, what is the greatest insight that you can share with our audience that has helped you find success in your concrete coding business?

And there’s definitely the niching down.

Operators that listen to the podcast that are looking to grow their companies to high six figures or seven figures or even multiple seven figures. So that’s the audience here.

Yeah. So I think and the question was best advice. Sorry, I think I heard two questions.

What is the greatest advice you can share? What is the greatest insight that you can share with our audience that has helped you find success in your coding business?

So, you know, it’s funny, there’s when we were shopping for warehouses, there was a guy who didn’t speak much English. He’s a he’s the coolest dude. I really wish I could still talk, still like I knew him more. But we’re looking at different warehouses. He did appliance repairs, he did a ton. And we told him we’re looking for a warehouse. And he didn’t speak much English, but he was like, Make the leap, make the leap, make the next leap, keep leaping. And so it’s funny because every time we do something, every time we hire, when we first hired technicians, it was like, Oh, but we could be making that. Like every time I run payroll, there’s a part of me that’s like, Oh my gosh, there goes 15 grand, you know, that would that would have been cool if I just went into that part of you. And it’s the best advice I got was you just make the leap. Make the leap to hire the installers and train them. Right? Make the leap to keep growing your business. It’s scary every time I say I’m depressed probably 60% of the time because things are just hard and scary and you’re like, But the highs are worth it. And so it’s make the leap, you know, spend the money on marketing to grow your company. Make that leap, make the leap to hire technicians. Make the leap to hire an office manager. Make the leap to hire an operations guy, hire the sales guys and just keep making those leaps and. Yeah.

Yeah, I love it, man. Well, look, thank you so much, man. So if you guys are listening and wherever you’re at in your business, make the leap. Hunter has said it, and it is true. I ordain it to this audience. Make the leap. Man Listen, man, thank you so much for being a client. You’ve been a client with service legend now for.

Over two years, two and a half years.

It’s been a joy to see you grow, develop just from the business personally developing. It’s exciting to see your family grow, man. And yeah, man, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. And again, sales coaching starts next week. So if you’re a client, a service legend, you’ll have sales group coaching starting next Wednesday with Hunter and myself, and then it’ll move to just Hunter. But so make sure you tune in to that and make sure to find us online and please share this podcast. If you guys have friends that are in the coaching business fringe or in the painting business, share the podcast and we’ll talk to you guys soon.

 

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