Welcome And Guest Introduction

Amy Dardis 0:10

This is the Building a Clear Authentic Brand Podcast. And I'm your host, Amy Dardis. And today I am so excited to have Rich Ashton on the show. Rich is the owner of Tom's Mechanical, which is an HVAC and plumbing company that he bought in 1988 in Arlington, Texas. And at the time it was a broken business. Two weeks from being liquidated, he turned it around and he grew his business by promoting the people that he hired, most of whom are still there. And now today he's the author of the book Growing Your Own, which is helping HVAC Trades, Plumbing Electricians companies develop their next layer of leaders. So, Rich, thank you so much for being here today.

Speaker 1 1:00

Thank you, Amy. I really appreciate you inviting me to be on.

Amy Dardis 1:04

So, in your own words, tell me about how you got started in this HVAC world and kind of what made you buy the company and the state of it when you got started.

Speaker 1 1:17

Well, the the short answer to that is stubbornness and arrogance is but Let me tell you, let me tell let me go back a little bit further and I'll tell you how I got to that point. I actually began my career in the real estate business with a with a really incredible company called Tramel Crow out of Dallas. I was lucky to work for them. I was one of the few in the company without a college degree, and I was working around Ivy League MBAs who were very motivated and very smart. And I learned about business there. I had some success. I became a partner in the company, but ultimately it was the wrong fit for me. I I didn't dislike the real estate business, but for whatever reason, I had always known that I was a small company guy. And I wanted to be in the world of small business. And I so I wanted to be talking to the employees and motivating them and using my, I thought my skills were really more communication, motivation, finance, things that I couldn't always use in the real estate business. It's hard to talk to buildings, it's hard to motivate buildings. So I decided after 10 years that I would sell my interest back to them. I did that, and without a plan, other than to say, I'm going to find uh businesses to own and operate, I began my search. I did a little bit more real estate on my own, but I my focus was on finding businesses to buy and operate. And I did that for a period of four years, and it was fine, but I never really found that company that I was in love with. I did several different things, I had I owned several different kinds of companies, and most were successful. And then I came across Tom's Mechanical. I actually was on the bank board with the owner of the company and I watched his loan go bad. And so I he was a he was an acquaintance of mine, and we went to lunch one day and I said, It looks to me like you need some help. I have time on my hands, and if you'd like me to take a look at it at the company, I'll I'd be happy to. So I did that. I wound up making him an offer for the company. He turned me down because he had a big tax refund coming. And so he decided not to take my offer, but he called me a year later and he said, Things aren't any better. Do you think you'd still do that deal? And I said, I probably wouldn't do the same deal because it's gotten worse. And basically, I agreed to run the company alongside him, write a reorganization plan, deal with some of his vendors, and see if I was interested in taking over the company. And uh, and that's that's what I did. So that kind of goes from 87 to 88, is while all that was going on. I finally took title of the company in 1988 and dealt with the bank every single day and and convinced them with the reorganization plan that even though I was from outside the HVAC industry, that what I was talking about was solid and that there was enough of a company and enough of a reputation that that we could go forward. And that's what we did. I in my in my arrogance, I thought I was 39 at the time. In my arrogance, I thought I could turn it around in about two years, took five ultimately, but it I was also trying to do that at a time when the banking system collapsed. And and so I was fighting not only the Thomas Mechanical battles, but I was fighting economy battles. And so I just was so stubborn that I was not going to fail that I I did I stayed in there and did a lot of things that I wouldn't do today. But uh, but in the long run, it worked out. You know, the the beauty of going through hard times is that the good times, you know, just are so much more enjoyable. And so, you know, that's where that's where we are today.

Buying A Company Near Liquidation

Amy Dardis 4:52

So when you bought it, how many trucks in the field did you guys have and how many employees about?

Speaker 1 4:59

There were 60 employees, and there were I'm gonna answer the truck question in two ways. There were probably 50 trucks, but I'm not sure that on a good day, 20 of them were running. Okay. And uh and and to illustrate that, we actually had a full-time mechanic that I inherited when I bought the company. And I I HVAC companies don't have don't have mechanics on staff, but that's how bad the fleet was. Right. And uh and so we we limped through at that time. The problem was is that the 60 employees were doing about a million and a half dollars worth of business. Oh my gosh, that's I mean, it's just it was everything was out of whack. But they had no financial systems. They they had some people who knew how to repair air conditioners and how to install air conditioners. They didn't have anybody that knew how to run a business.

Amy Dardis 5:48

So coming in from outside the HVAC world and not having that experience, did you have an uphill battle that you had to deal with in order to gain the trust and credibility for people to listen to you?

Speaker 1 6:02

Much, much bigger hill than I ever dreamed. I that was not something I imagined. I thought, because I'd been in several businesses, I thought a business plan was a business plan. And I did not understand the parochial nature of the trades. And so as I would take this business plan to the to the vendors who were owed quite a bit of money, we'd go through it and I knew that I knew the plan was solid, and they would be very complimentary of the plan and uniformly said it'll never work. And I that's where the stubbornness came in. And I and I just kept trucking. Inside the company, because I was reasonably motivational in my speaking and I'd always been good at communication. I never dreamed that I would have trouble selling the vision of excellence and great customer service and integrity. I I never dreamed that was a hard sell. It was a really hard sell. And fortunately, because we were so oversupplied with employees, I knew I needed to get rid of them. And those that that couldn't buy in, had no interest in buying in, didn't last very long.

Amy Dardis 7:06

So you ended up having to downsize in number of employees, but you chose who to let go based on their buy-in or their character, not necessarily their skill set.

Speaker 1 7:21

And th those two kind of went hand in hand. You know, failing companies get this kind of death spiral about them. And you I could tell when I walked into the company the very first time that they were in terrible shape. The that there was no, there's no smiling going on. There's there's no vibrancy, there's no life to the company, and it's no fun to work in that environment. It takes a really special quality employee to stay on through what they had endured. They had lost 70% of their business in a two-year, in a three-year period. They primarily were doing multifamily new construction and the multifamily market shut down.

Amy Dardis 7:59

Okay.

Speaker 1 8:00

And uh, and they never saw it coming, so they weren't prepared for it, but they tended to hang on to the employees while the billings, you know, wouldn't support that.

Earning Credibility As An Outsider

Speaker 1 8:08

And there were some, there were some really good people, people that I really liked. There were some very skilled people that we kept on, not a not a ton of them, but but they were, it was so easy to recognize who they were that uh that we we developed that relationship pretty early on and we made it clear that those were the kinds of people we were gonna support, and those kinds of people had a place going forward.

Amy Dardis 8:32

So, how long into kind of your ownership or buy-in of the company, going from this unconscious optimism of like, oh, we're gonna get in there and people are gonna listen and they're gonna get on board. How long did it take you for you to realize, oh wow, like I have an uphill battle against me with getting people to get on board with this?

Speaker 1 8:55

Six weeks. Well, not long. In six weeks, I went from thinking I was a rocket scientist to thinking I might be among the stupidest people on the face of the earth. I had I had had a fast start to my career. I had enjoyed, you know, and a number of successes, and all of a sudden, I could see that that I could lose this thing totally. And I did not want to put it into bankruptcy. The logical thing to do would have been to put it through bankruptcy and and you know, take the immediate pressure off and then work these things out with the with the court helping me. But I I wasn't raised that way. I didn't like the stigma of bankruptcy, and so I didn't do that. Looking back, I think I would I would do that. But I knew almost immediately I because I kept running into the exact same roadblocks, whether it was vendors or whether it was employees. And it it just it was such a shock to me, but it was so repetitive that I I mean I I I had to I knew I had to figure something out pretty quickly.

Amy Dardis 9:50

Yeah. So what what did you end up doing? I mean, what did that what did that journey look like of actually getting the people to be like, okay, like I trust this guy, I believe this guy, like we're we're in it together.

Speaker 1 10:04

I am I have learned to become a pretty transparent person over years and and with with help from my from my wife, I was very transparent. And and I decided at this point in my life that there was no sense telling the employees what everything was gonna be rosy because it wasn't unless we did certain things. I gathered the people who I I felt like we had a chance with, and I began to share information. One of the things that that we did was we owed a lot of people a lot of money. And outside the uh the controller's office on the wall, I put a fake note for each one of those debts on the wall and told them how much how it was like a banknote, and it said, I mean, we we owe these people $460,000. And then as we made progress, I would cross out the 460 and show that we were down to 440, or you know, whatever the number was. And I we probably had a dozen of those notes, not many of them that big, on the wall. And it became for those people that were motivated by what we were trying to accomplish, it became a real source of pride. When they were in the office, they would make it a point to swing by the financial area and see if we'd made any progress. And so it wasn't just me fighting those battles, they were helping me fight those battles. And I began to turn around the mentality in the company, which when I got there was that's the owner's problem to this is our problem, and not only is it our problem, but we're part of the solution, and it's kind of fun to be part of a solution. So that was how we

Making Debt Visible To Everyone

Speaker 1 11:50

fought our way out of that.

Amy Dardis 11:52

That's really cool. I love that you were so well transparent about it, but it you made it visual. Like you made it something where it wasn't in a spreadsheet. It was something that was like you could walk by at any time and it was open to the team to see, and it kind of like building that that camaraderie around it. Like it's it's so simple, but also genius at the same time.

Speaker 1 12:16

Well, I think you run the risk when you do that, that you know, people see, my gosh, we owe everybody in the world. I'm getting out of here. You know, that was the that was the risk in doing it. But I felt like I had enough of those those people who wanted to be there for the rebuilding that uh that I was willing to take the chance. But it was definitely a risk to to be that transparent. It just happened to pay off.

First Wins And Customer Service Reset

Amy Dardis 12:39

How long until it felt like you you kind of started to get some traction moving in the right direction? Like maybe you weren't totally turned around yet, but you were like, okay, like I think we have a chance at doing this, and your people felt that too.

Speaker 1 12:54

So both I took I took ownership of the company on April 1st, April Fool's Day that year, and we had a company Christmas party. I I I was brought up business that with the importance of celebrating successes. And so even though we didn't have you know enough money to have a Christmas party, we had a Christmas party there for the employees one afternoon. We shut the business down, and we had recovered a large receivable from one of the cut one of the long-term customers, and it really helped us out. And so I was able to, it happened right before Christmas. And I was able to announce that and make a real celebration out of that small Christmas party that year. And that's when I began to feel that I, that they were, they were in this with me. And because we had had we had that money to play with, we were able to accelerate our repayment of some some debts pretty quickly. We had, we had, they had a ton of debt, and we'd been able to pay down debt. So it was pretty good with my with my messaging, and I was able to share with them quite a bit of quite a bit of good news. I even remember that was, if I remember right, it was that year. American Airlines had had a huge loss. Well, they're um they're a company that's based in in Fort Worth, so we know them very well locally. And I was able to tell the employees that we may have lost money, but we lost less than American Airlines. And I didn't know if we were ever going to be able to say that again, but but they love that comparison. And so we just kept fighting those little battles every day and and making making progress bit by bit. Now that was the financial side of the company. We were doing the same thing on the customer service side because failing companies fail at customer service as well. It was odd to me. The company was a it was 25 years old at the time that I bought it. It had a it had a reputation, uh, and it was at one point a fairly dominant company in the industry locally. The reputation for customer service had not suffered nearly as much as the financial reputation. So we were able to capitalize on people's belief that Thomas Mechanical was was still something special. And we really reinforced that. And then we found out early on that if we were going to save this company, selling retrofit systems, replacing systems in people's homes was the fastest cash generator that we could uh could find. And so we began to really focus on the retrofit business, built that up pretty substantially quickly. And uh, and and so that was a that was another source of cash for us. And we did a really good job. We really focused the employees on taking care of the customers at that time and and it spread. Not not everybody was willing to hear that message, but that was that was one of our key messages at that time, still is today.

Amy Dardis 15:45

How did you rally people around that so that they were clear on the experience that you as a company were trying to deliver, and then making sure that that's the experience that the customers had?

Speaker 1 15:59

Yeah, we did a lot of surveying and just reaching out and and and following up on the phone with customers and making sure that that they were they were having a good experience. Fortunately, I've been in this town for a long time where the company is based. And I sent a letter to all of my friends that I could think of at the time that I bought the company and said, you'll do me a real favor if you'll use Tom's and uh and and then write me a note or give me a phone call and tell me how your experience was. And uh, and then we uh, you know, I gave them $25 off on their next service call or something like that. Well, I got a lot of feedback and I got a lot of my friends are business owners and they know about good customer service, and I got some really good feedback. So then I was able to say to the employees, this isn't rich talking. This is that customer that you were at at Thursday. Here's what they here's what they talked about on the service call. Here's what they liked, here's what they didn't like. These were people in general who had never had anything other than manufacturer training on customer service. And so we personalized it, we made, you know, we we redid our logo and and uh modernized things, we changed the way our trucks looked. And so all of a sudden, the Tom's mechanical that people were had experienced was a was a different and better Tom's, and they recognized it.

Switching To Retrofit For Cash Flow

Amy Dardis 17:17

So you ended up turning it around, and then you ended up going into a period of growth. And in your book, you said that the book is part of memos that you ended up writing to your to your team specifically. So what prompted you to do that and then kind of get into this like n recognizing that if you wanted to raise up leaders, either you had to or you wanted to grow them internally?

Speaker 1 17:49

Yeah, all of those answers are intertwined. Um I decided somewhere along the line that I was gonna I was gonna get old and and have to retire or sell the business. We had developed such a unique culture in our company, and we were so proud of the way we treated employees who treated our customers great, that I just I didn't see other companies out there doing the same thing, and and I certainly didn't think that private equity groups were gonna come in and respect the uniqueness of our company. So I really kind of fell in love with the idea of raising up leaders, seeing if we could raise up leaders from our existing employees and then leave the company in their hands at least for a while. So that's what we wound up doing. I started out trying to, I took eight people and I tried to teach them to think like an entrepreneur. But that was a mistake. I'm I'm an entrepreneur, but you don't have to be an entrepreneur to run an HVAC company. And so I abandoned that after a relatively short time when it fell flat on its face. I I kind of then really had to think seriously about what this training of leaders was all about. And I came back with another eight people and said, here's what we're going to try to accomplish. And I, you know, we did we did it in a traditional classroom setting, and we probably met every six weeks. And we started out saying, there's something in each of you that is keeping you from being a better leader. Let's determine what that is. Let's find out where your ceiling is. And for everyone, it was different. Some have emotional baggage, the way they were raised, they just never saw themselves in a leadership role or didn't think that people would respond to them. A blue-collar industry, a technician doesn't necessarily think he'll ever be a leader, doesn't think of himself or herself as a leader. There's lots of reasons. And so we went around the room and I identified what I thought it was for each one of them. And so we began working specifically on those things. So it was different for all eight people. As we moved forward, one dropped out pretty quickly. He didn't want to work as hard as we wanted him to work toward being a leader. He and I had said to him that first day, you like the title of leadership a lot more than you like the work of leadership. And uh hurt his feelings, but as we talked about it later, he said, you know, I think that's probably true. And uh, and then we went into the elements of leadership, but I wasn't getting a buy-in. One of the things that I know about business people is that when we get together, we talk about business. We might also talk about baseball or golf or our kids, but somewhere in there we're talking about business. This group that I was training was not talking about business. They were talking about other things. And I said, I got to get them talking about business. At least it has to be top of mind for them. And I don't know exactly why I did it. I I've always enjoyed writing, and I began writing a blog to the leadership team every other week. And it was about a page and a half. It there was no particular order. I used lots of stories from from both my experience and other people's experience and highlighted various leadership principles. And they enjoyed reading them, but they still didn't start talking about them. And the general manager, who is now the president, said, Rich, I think if I in the in the we have management meetings every week, said if if on the week that you write the blog, if I allocate 20 minutes in the meeting to making them discuss the most recent blog openly, he said, I think that may unlock this, what you're looking for. Well, he was dead right. That's exactly what happened. And not only did they begin talking about what was in the blog, they began holding each other accountable as well as themselves accountable to the principles that the blogs explained. One day I was walking through the company and I noticed that several desks had these new white binders. I said, Well, what's in the white binder? Well, we're printing out your blogs and we're keeping them handy on the desktop so that we can refer to them. So I knew I was on to something at that point. Well, I did that. I wrote the blogs for two years, and I I finally I had 52 of them. And I said, I'm starting to repeat myself. I may have, I may have run out of information to share. But they're doing so well. This is a good time for me to step back. And I was still in the office every day, but I handed over the daily management of the company to them, led by the general manager. Then read through the blogs one weekend, and I really liked them. And I said, I think if nothing else than a legacy project, I'm going to publish these in book form. And uh so I, you know, I spent two or three months with a self-publishing house and and did that and was very pleased with the results of the book. Was published in May of 2025. And then my plan was to retire December 31st, 2025. So I then had an immediate business to go to when I retired. It wound up, it all worked together perfectly.

Amy Dardis 22:45

And now you actually go around and you help other trades businesses do implement, train them.

Speaker 1 22:54

I've I've been fortunate to be on shows like yours and get to talk to lots of uh lots of business owners, the trades and outside the trades. I have I've also begun speaking. And so I, you know, I will go to a trades conference or I'm going in a couple of months, I'm going down to a business in Florida to actually talk to three different businesses and uh conduct the, I'm going to conduct the training course that goes along with it then. But sometimes I just do the speaking. And I, you know, locally I've conducted workshops and things like that. It's what I really love to do. It's what I've done my whole life. I'm kind of happy not to be running a day-to-day business anymore, but I'm not ready to be done with business.

Training Leaders Instead Of Hiring Them

Amy Dardis 23:33

Yeah. So I want to go back to a couple of things you mentioned. So one, at the beginning, you had said you had a really unique culture and you were really proud of how you guys treated employees. Can you be more specific about what you mean by like unique culture, what that looks like for you guys in your day-to-day business?

Speaker 1 23:53

I call us an employee-empowered culture. We are only as good as our employees. And it doesn't make any difference if you're working in the warehouse, if you're out seeing customers, or if you're on the phone, you're interacting with our customers one way or another, or you're serving the people who are. And the better you are, the better we are. And we like to, we we start talking about that in the interview process, and then we reinforce it every day in the company. And we're happy to pour resources into employees who want to become more empowered. One of the stories that I've often told is about a lady named Jessica who came to us as a one of our dispatchers, and she was okay at her job. She wasn't bad, she was worth keeping, but she was very, very closed off. And real good about, and our leaders are all good about going through the company and visiting with people and understanding what makes them tick. For most of us, our families are our most important thing, and we love to talk about them. And we're happy to talk about people's family as long as they'll let us in. She wouldn't let us in. And she just, I mean, she was friendly when I would come by, but she didn't want to go anywhere past that. And it wasn't just limited to her reluctance to talk to the owner. It was kind of throughout her dealings with people. I don't know what triggered it, but one weekend, her she had a six-year-old son playing football, and he had committed a penalty, and she didn't agree with the referee's call, and she had made a spectacle of herself on the sideline. And she was, for whatever reason, she was telling me that story on Monday morning when she came back. And I said, Jessica, I uh unfortunately I can relate to that story because I've been exactly the same place. That was the day that we broke through, and she she began breaking through with other people. I guess, I guess it was enjoyable not to be so closed off all of a sudden. Well, she became the leader of the customer relations department within about two years. And had she not opened up, she would never have gotten the opportunity to become what she is today. And she is infinitely happier. I assume she's happier in her personal life too. But she's a joy to be around and she has incredible talent. But she wasn't going to let us empower her or help her become empowered for a long time. We find I just find that if you have a relationship with as many employees as possible and you connect on what's interesting to them, not what's interesting to you. So if they want to talk about their kids, as much as I might want to share stories about my grandkids, I wait until I'm asked. And then I'm happy to share those stories. But it's always about them. And when they know that Rich cares about them and that the other leaders in the company care about them, when ri when Rich and the other leaders are willing to attend a funeral of their mother who they never met, but we know it's important to them for go visit people in the hospital, or you know, take up a collection when uh, you know, when somebody's down on their luck or has a tragedy. When they know that you're real and you're authentic, it's amazing what you can get from people. They can accomplish things they never thought they could accomplish. And when they can accomplish those things, it's way better for all of us.

Amy Dardis 27:16

How did you make time to make people a priority, especially in such busy day-to-day operations, everyone's going in different directions type of business?

Speaker 1 27:28

It's a great question. And once again, I have to give my wife some of the credit. I hit a point where I was a relatively authoritarian leader when I began. And and I I really kind of had to be when this company, if I hadn't been the company, never would have gotten turned around. Had to be a man of action and I had to I had to make tough decisions all the time. That hardened me a bit. And I was not very relational by the time the company was turned around. So that was in, I was in my late or my my mid to late 40s at that time. My wife is a relationship rock star, and I she has no interest in business, but she has an interest in relationships, and she just has a magic about her. And here that magic was for 20 years, basically, or 15 years at that point, that I really hadn't taken advantage of. And I began to observe my wife, and she would never consider herself a mentor, uh, but I learned a lot from her. I also began to look at how my friends who own businesses were handling similar situations, and they were all doing a better job with people than I was. And so I said, okay, the answer lies in getting over yourself. And that's when I realized that it really wasn't about me. I had a role, but it, but if I could make them the focus of what we were doing, they would then make our customers the focus of what they were doing. And it all works together. So it was because I ran up against a wall one way that I had to take stock and learn. I have always been dependent on mentors in my life, and I've been lucky to have a lot of them. Just came to the point where it was very clear that I should begin talking less and listening more.

Amy Dardis 29:10

It is such an inside out transformation where it's, I mean, probably you as a leader, like even internally a little bit, coming to that self-awareness and being willing to operate differently. And then how you treat your employees and how your leaders treat them. And then that's actually what ends up driving customer service in a genuine way, which is really cool that uh it's easy to focus on the outside in instead of the inside out.

Speaker 1 29:41

Yeah, you you're just a hundred percent right. We we we read uh Simon Sinek's book, Start with Why several years ago. And it it it it didn't change any the way we did anything, but it helped us focus on a single sentence for why we were in business. We say we are in business to provide exceptional customer service through the empowerment and support of our employees. And that's just a very simple sentence that captures all of it. And that's exactly what we do.

Blogs That Spark Real Accountability

Speaker 1 30:09

The nice thing about having a simple sentence like that is it enables you to be very consistent in your decision making. When you're considering a new piece of software or a different approach to the market or an advertising campaign or a different way to compensate your employees, how does it play against that filter? And does it make us better at customer service and does it empower the employees? If it doesn't, we're not going to do it.

Amy Dardis 30:35

I love that filter. And like you said, it's clear and simple, and you can apply it to all situations instead of it being this like kind of fancy thing with these big words where you're just like, wait, what is that? What does that even mean? You know, I like that you're just like, yes, like does it do these things? And that's how we'll make our decisions based on that.

Speaker 1 30:55

And AI is a tremendous example of that. You know, how much AI do you use in your company? Well, we use AI. We use AI to streamline things, and it has it has saved us money. Uh I think AI is terrific, and I think it gets better almost by the second. But customer-facing AI is not there yet. And so we would not enhance our customer service by using AI products to interact with our customers. So we don't.

Amy Dardis 31:21

Another follow-up question I had from something you said earlier is you had your your eight group of people, and you were trying to kind of get them to talk about business, and the format that you were using wasn't working. Why do you think it worked to get them to open up with the blog and the meeting versus what you were doing beforehand? Like, what do you think the difference was there?

Speaker 1 31:45

I think that's a really good question. I think it became a discussion as opposed to an isolated, I'm gonna read this, I'll think about it later, and just put it down. But more and and I was not in those management meetings. I had we had made a decision that they were going to be more productive if I was not there. And so I didn't see it happen firsthand, but I saw it from the outside. And when an employee would say to another employee, okay, you're working on that problem, but I think there was a blog about that last month. Did you take that into consideration? And they would literally physical, physically pull the blog out and go through it together and say, Oh, you know what? I kind of got a different understanding. Now I get what Rich was talking about. And so once they realized the power of talking about business, then there was a reason for them to do it.

Amy Dardis 32:38

And actually pulling it in to your weekly meeting, right? Like I mean, you were making time within your day-to-day operations, not having to schedule like another thing on top of it. It was like in like, hey, we meet every week anyway. Let's just add 15, 20 minutes of time to make this real. So you know, this we we prioritize this.

Speaker 1 33:05

You know, I and as you said that, I realized another thing that was probably going on was they knew that they were that somebody was going to raise one of the blogs as they were doing their presentation about whatever problem they were working on. And so I'll bet they went back and and began to to consult the blogs before they made the presentation. I I'll bet that happened. I don't, I can't swear to it.

Amy Dardis 33:25

But yeah. Well, it's amazing when you when you put emphasis on something and you say like, it's the same as like how core values become an ingrained part of a culture versus it's like, oh yeah, we have them written and they're they're in our handbook and they're on the wall, but they don't actually mean something because they haven't brought them into how we operate or how we make decisions. And you you were basically doing that by having these blogs in.

Speaker 1 33:52

And then I guess if you weren't in the room, then they weren't afraid to like offend you because I've I was told that a couple of times that that I didn't I didn't agree with, you know, we'd sit down and talk about it. And I'd say, well, here's you don't have to agree with me, but here's here's why I wrote what I wrote. And once generally, I always believe that that leaders have more information than the people beneath them. Whether it's the president of the United States that gets a security briefing every morning or or just uh a lonely leader in a in a business, we've got more information available to us. And to the degree that you can share non-confidential information, I'm pretty confident that my decisions are are usually solid. And if someone will give me the opportunity to really go through how the decisions were made, uh you know, I I generally can get to a point of agreement. Not always, but generally.

Amy Dardis 34:45

What were some of the topics that these blogs were on?

Speaker 1 34:52

Well, I'll go through some of the they became chapters in the book. So let me, I it's easier for me to think of them that way. So uh one of the chapters is sometimes you've got to climb a tree. And that was about a story that I had seen years ago, and I don't even I don't even know where it was, but about a group of people who were stranded on a desert island and they did the normal things that you would do. You look for food and and you look for ways off the island and you fight with each other. They spent all their time doing that. But I I think I'm not sure exactly how it came about, but sooner or later there was a kind of a 30,000 foot view of where they really were. Well, they were on the a an uninhabited beach of a very inhabited island. And so had somebody climbed a tree to look around, they would have understood where they were and their problems would have gone away. That's that has to do with innovation in the company. Sometimes you have to do something, you have to look at how other people are doing. You can't just get locked into what you're doing. It resulted in our warehouse manager getting a chance to tour an Amazon warehouse. You know, Amazon's probably the most sophisticated distribution company in the world. And he got the chance, along with two or three of our other employees, to tour an Amazon warehouse, and they came back so wide-eyed with you know, with all kinds of ideas. But you you can't grow as a leader if you don't climb a tree periodically.

Amy Dardis 36:16

Or let your people do that. I mean, that's big of you to, as a leader, be willing to invest in your people having that opportunity to go and see a different way.

Speaker 1 36:29

That's a pretty easy one for me. I don't, I don't, I appreciate that he runs that warehouse. I don't want to do that job. So if I if I can give him two hours to go to go tour a warehouse, I'm all for it.

Amy Dardis 36:40

Did you guys ever go and I don't know if this is a common thing in the in the HVAC

Employee Empowerment In Daily Practice

Amy Dardis 36:45

industry, but I know in um like the distribution industry it is where we would go and actually see each other's gas plants or we would see each other's different stores and setups. And they weren't direct competitors because they didn't serve the same geographic market, but everybody in the industry was willing to learn from each other. And so being able to peek behind the curtain of how other operations in the same industry ran was super helpful. Is that common in it is not common?

Speaker 1 37:14

There's there's too much local competition, but because the same vendors service all of us, uh, you know, the information is pretty generally known. And we did take some some tours outside our immediate service area with companies we were not competing with. We sent people out to to visit with them about their financial systems and about their warehouses, things like that. So yes, we have seen others, but it's not as common as as it might be in some other industries.

Amy Dardis 37:41

Yeah, just having that different perspective. Uh what are some other topics that you have in your chapters?

Speaker 1 37:48

One chapter is titled, You Don't Know What You Don't Know. And that's about the importance of acquiring knowledge. Early in my career, the real estate company, I was pulled aside and told that I didn't know very much about business and I needed to start a program of reading. The guy who told me that was a 23-year-old Harvard MBA with an undergraduate from MIT. And uh, he was so smart, and I was so lucky to work with him, and he was dead right. I didn't know anything about business. And I began reading the Wall Street Journal every day, and I began reading five business periodicals every week. In the ensuing 53 years, they have expanded that to where I consume information at least an hour and a half every day. And I believe that whether you're doing it at 10 minutes or 20 minutes a day, I believe it is an absolute requirement for anybody who wants to move forward. And you reading a book about romance is not the same as reading a book about business. But reading a bit a book about business is not the only thing you should be doing. You should read about psychology and you should read about longevity and you should read about health and wellness. My rule is that if I read a book on one subject today, I will not read on that subject again until I have completed four more books. And, you know, I I make heavy use of audiobooks and podcasts to uh so that I can I can combine my exercise with listening and consuming into uh you know information. But it was one of the pivotal changes in my life. And uh, and I'm I'm so grateful that he had the courage to say that to me and uh and that I was not so stubborn that I that I didn't refuse to listen to him. And I everybody has excuses for for not for not doing it. It it's unforgivable to not do it at least some some amount of time every single day.

Amy Dardis 39:41

Yeah, that's so good. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. When you were deciding who to raise up as leaders, do you think everybody has the makings of a leader? Or what was the decision making that went into who you were going to invest in?

Speaker 1 39:59

That's a great question. And the first answer is no. Uh not everybody has the ability. Not everybody has the desire, even if they have the ability. The gentleman I mentioned earlier has the ability. He just doesn't want to, he just, he just doesn't, he doesn't see himself as a leader and doesn't want to be one. And I tell people that if you look at sports teams, and I use sports teams as analogies for lots of things, if you go into the locker room, everybody knows who the stars are, but the stars are not necessarily the leaders of the team. Sometimes it's the backup point guard who's the one that everybody gathers around after a game, and he's got influence. He didn't seek influence, he's a natural leader. When you find that the technicians are gathering around a certain person, regardless of what his title is, or an installer, or people in the office, you know who they are. In a small company, it's really easy to spot them. Those are almost a slam dunk for your future leaders. It isn't always, you know, available. I mean, it isn't always obvious. The other way that you test leadership ability is by delegating. If someone shows even an inkling of interest in moving ahead, I like to give them a small non-critical task and say, here's what I think you've got unique perspective on this. I'd really like you to to work on this little project. It's going to take you a week. I want you to get back to me next Thursday and we'll sit down for an hour and you tell me your results. Well, one of three things is going to happen out of that. They're never going to come back, which shows you they didn't really have an interest, or they're going to come back and it's not very well done. It's your decision at that point to say there's enough here to work with, or this is probably not something that we should pursue. But if somebody comes back and they have done 75% of the project correctly, you've got something to work with. And you know, if you want to find out if the other 25% is is uh is in them, then give them a little bit harder project and and you keep that up. Biggest surprise to me in that theory was how few people will actually come back.

Amy Dardis 42:07

Yeah. And and then the ones that do are the ones that you end up investing more time. I like that. Like starting with a little. And if you manage a little bit well, then growing into you'll be proving yourself that you're capable of handling more.

Speaker 1 42:22

We were talking about chapters in the book, and one of them is on delegation. In fact, the title of the chapter is why delegation doesn't work. And delegation does not work most of the time. And it's not because delegation is incorrect, it's because delegators are not very good. And the art of delegation is for me to explain to you what I would like you to do, and then kind of to have you repeat what it is I said so that we know that what our expectations are. And the next thing is for us to agree on a timeline. And so if it's going to be due by Friday, it's going to be due by Friday. Most delegation stops right there. And the person says, Well, I told them what to do, I told them when to do it, and they never got back to me or it never happened. But if you don't then check in with them, if it's due on Friday and you don't do a check-in on Wednesday and say, How are we coming? Is there anything, any questions you have that I can help you with? You don't need to give them answers. You don't need to tell them the answer to the problem they're solving. But if they're stuck and they're too prideful to ask, you can break that log jam real quickly. And you'd be surprised at how much that simple little check-in comes back. And then on Friday, you make sure, since that was the deadline, you make sure you honor the deadline. They come back and you know, they either do a good job or they don't do a good job. And we already talked about that. But delegation is a circle, beginning with that initial communication, the confirmation of what the job is, the timeline, the check in, and then actually looking at the completed work. And most of it stops somewhere up in here.

Amy Dardis 43:59

I mean, going Through this. So I can imagine that one of the biggest bottlenecks, or maybe it's a real bottleneck, maybe it's an imaginary bottleneck, of being willing to take the time to go through all this stuff of raising up your own leaders, developing people from the inside, it takes time. And you know, HVAC companies are busy and there's customers and there's emergencies and there's trucks in different directions. What would you say to an owner that, you know, gives that?

Speaker 1 44:34

Well, I'd

Delegation That Includes Real Check-Ins

Speaker 1 44:35

say I feel your pain was there. When I began doing this type of training and all with spending as much time as I did, I was already working through a general manager. So I had carved out some time and I was very aware of my need for a succession plan in the company. And so I had a personal motivation to do it. You know, a lot of small businessmen do not have that opportunity. Yeah. That's kind of why I I am pushing the book and the and the training course because it becomes a shortcut. The book, the book actually is a desktop reference, really, of uh 35 principles that are two and a half chapters, I mean two and a half pages long in each chapter and can be read in five minutes. So if you're running up against those obstacles, either the the would-be leader or the business owner can deal with it very specifically and very quickly and can move forward. So that's kind of my hope in how the book will be used, because that is a that's the number one obstacle, is I just don't have time. And I get it. And in a seasonal business like HVAC, you may not have time five months out of the year, but you probably have some time seven months out of the year. Because believe me, some of those months you're looking for ways to keep people busy. So it it it's a it comes back to commitment and desire. And if you're really committed to if you think that's valuable and if you think your company will be way better in two years if you invest the time on a program like this, you're right. Your company will be.

Amy Dardis 46:04

Is it so much that it it does take so much time, or is it that take that it takes less time that you think, but it takes it more consistently?

Speaker 1 46:17

Well, I think that's very insightful. I I think that's exactly what it is. I think consistently it really doesn't take that much time. I mean, you could do this in 10 minutes a morning once a week. Go over a chapter, and then and then with the idea that when we get together next Tuesday, you're gonna tell me how you put that principle that we talked about. How did you put it in play? How did it work? You know, let's talk about your successes and your failures. That's really easy, and that's 10 minutes a week. You know, it it really is as simple as that. But if you do it this Tuesday and you don't do it again for six Tuesdays, you you you've lost it totally.

Amy Dardis 46:57

And that ends up being, I see as a a kind of a point of failure in a lot of businesses is it's they call it event training. You know, you go to a two-day conference or and you get excited and you get pumped up and you get all this information, but then you don't ever do anything with it consistently. And so it doesn't stick. Not that the information wasn't good, but it's finding a way. And that's why I love what you did in your business, where it's like you added it to a weekly meeting you were already having. So you weren't, you were habit stacking, if you will, on top of something that is already ingrained into how you operate and it's consistent. So it's every week, not once a year. And then it's like, okay, do you have time for an extra 10 minutes? Or could we put 10 minutes? And then in that mind, you're like, yeah, I could probably spend 10 minutes doing that.

Speaker 1 47:52

And even if you don't want to carve out the 10 minutes, if if you got the audible or the audio version of the book and required people to listen to it in their truck as they were traveling to a service call. I mean, you know, that's kind of the same theory as how I do with exercise and and learning. So there if you're if you're committed to making this type of improvement, the time, the time can be found.

Finding Time For Consistent Development

Amy Dardis 48:19

What are your thoughts on as, especially in the trades company, this the silver tsunami, I guess, if you will, of so many technicians retiring and then there not being enough new people coming into the trades world and like being forced to take someone who's green and train them up. What's your thoughts on that overall? And then two, how do you know how to invest into the right person?

Speaker 1 48:49

Uh we I mean, we faced that for years. It actually is changing now with the data centers requiring so many blue-collar employees, the trades are now hot. So trade schools are are busy and and I it's shifting around now, finally. But we fought that battle for two and a half decades. In our company, we finally solved it by forming an apprenticeship program and and training our own. And we just said, if we can get someone out of a trade school, we can tell if they they they obviously have practical ability or they wouldn't have completed the trade school. So we put them in a four-month apprenticeship program where they rotate through four divisions in HVAC, two installation divisions and and two service divisions. And at the end of that four months, they have either demonstrated that they're hireable or not, and they have demonstrated some probably extra proficiency in one of those skills over another. So some want to be residential service technicians, some want, some want to spend a couple years doing installation to get a better grounding. But we've gotten to observe them firsthand. They haven't been dead weight. They have, particularly on the installation side, they've actually become an asset to our organization. They get to decide if they want to stay with us, we get to decide if we want to stay with them. And that has been for the last five years at least, that's been the major source of new new technical employees for us. Are they green? Yes. But over and over and over, you find out, particularly on the residential side, okay, customer service is a more valuable skill than technical proficiency. Now you have to have a certain level of technical proficiency, but you can fake technical proficiency easier than you can fake customer service. And so we we pour a lot of customer service resource training into these people. And we know if they're good at customer service, they can catch up on the technical side. And so that that's been our answer to the problem. And it has it's worked spectacularly.

Amy Dardis 50:54

How many candidates? I guess, what does your pool size look like in order to end up with the right fit?

Speaker 1 51:01

We have run as many as eight at a time. That's really too many for the size of our company. So we generally use one a maximum of two in each of those divisions. So somewhere between four and six and at a time. And that's about as much as as we can handle and do a good job with it. I I think our retention rate, our hire rate after four months is 75%. So you know, it it's worked for us. That all those numbers work for us really well. And we get the chance to become their first HVAC job out of school and they learn our culture, and and the ones that are wired correctly don't want any other kind of culture.

Amy Dardis 51:43

So what do you mean wired correctly? Like dive into that a little bit.

Speaker 1 51:48

If if you're a technician whose only goal is to get to six figures as fast as possible, uh by overcharging customers and getting a commission, if that's the way, we're not that company. We just won't do it. And uh and and we get, you know, we we rarely, we rarely let those guys get through the firing net, but if we find them, we get rid of them very quickly. Those are those are not going to be our people. We are a we're a kind of a high-touch company. So if you're a loner, you can succeed in our company. We really would prefer that you get on board with the same direction that everybody else is going. You can you can do it differently, but we like to we like to celebrate. We were talking about culture, you know, 20 minutes ago or so. One of the things that I'm so proud of, and this is kind of shows that that employee empowerment, is our service manager had been with the company quite a while. He was part of that

Apprenticeships And Hiring For Service

Speaker 1 52:40

team. He came out of the field and and and he was a new service manager when he entered the training program. And he really wasn't, he wasn't much of a manager, but he's a creative guy and he loves what we're doing at Tom's. He said, I'm gonna create a reward for the basically the technician of the week or the month. And he said, It's gonna be special. And he came in one day and he had designed online this incredibly gaudy, like a WWE championship belt. And it's I mean, it's it's big. And he awards that every month to the technician, or actually to the service employee of the month. You can you can you can win it by being in the office. And not only, and and that's good enough, and they all they all love that, but he then parades the employee along with the whole service division through the company as he plays the theme from Rocky on his telephone. When you give people the idea that they can make they can make this stuff their own and they can make it special, those are the kind of great ideas that come out of it. And uh, and I love to tell that story about that because when those technicians or dispatchers, whatever, when they parade through the company, their head is high, that championship belt is up in the air, and uh everybody's applauding. It's a it's a big deal every month when that happens in the company.

Amy Dardis 54:05

That's awesome. And it's fun. I mean, that makes work fun, you know? Not just like, oh, you go here and you do this job and you get a paycheck. It's like, no, like where they spend their time, they feel valued and they enjoy it. And that's awesome. At the end of the day, it's these are people's lives and they're choosing to spend their time working for your company. And that's amazing.

Speaker 1 54:27

Well, JW Marriott, I think, is credited with the quote: if you take care of your employees, they'll take care of your customers and the rest will take care of itself. And those are, I mean, that's just a very simple statement that is a hundred percent true. And so we we look for special ways to take care of our employees. Uh they were doing a employee appreciation breakfast, and it was going to be pancakes. And, you know, everybody likes pancakes, and that's fine. And so we decided that instead of just being a pancake breakfast, the leadership of the company would serve all of the employees, and not we wouldn't just serve them pancakes, we'd serve them as much bacon as they could eat, and we made it special, and and we served them, and we wore chef outfits and aprons, and and we put we made them sit down. We didn't make them go through a line and pick up their pancakes. We we brought them to them. And if they wanted four helpings of bacon, we brought them four helpings of bacon. The room was decorated. They absolutely loved it. And and you just those things feed on each other.

Amy Dardis 55:26

Yes, that's so cool and so so creative too, especially you guys being willing to do that for your employees.

Speaker 1 55:34

Why would you not? Is my question. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what did that what did that cost us? Did that cost us $250 to do that? If we didn't get an extra thousand dollars worth of benefit out of it that day alone, not to mention the other days, I'd be shocked.

Amy Dardis 55:52

So you said earlier that you had started out being pretty utilitarian, which I mean it seems like you've come a long way since then. You're talking about my style? Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 56:04

Authoritarian.

Culture Rituals That Make Work Fun

Amy Dardis 56:05

Oh, authoritarian.

Speaker 1 56:06

Yeah. Yeah. I was raised by an authoritarian father, and I I I just copies his copied his style.

Amy Dardis 56:13

Uh just from your own self-awareness. What are some of the internal lessons that you had to learn in order to be the leader that your company needed you to be?

Speaker 1 56:28

Well, I as I mentioned earlier, uh, the the listening part is really important. And and, you know, not only I mean, people talk about listening to their customers, but I think you got to listen to everybody. And I I think listening to our employees, there's no sense us putting a program in place if if they're not going to uh uh if they don't see a benefit. And and we can we can do all the scheming and planning we want. If but if we don't listen to the employees, we'll miss the mark virtually every time. But also really connecting with people. That was the biggest change that I made in my life. And so, you know, you can say good morning and you can celebrate a birthday and you might even know a spouse's name. But until you can go three layers deep in a conversation with somebody, because they've told you before that's what's interesting to them. And maybe their grandmother is suffering from cancer, and and just the simple, how's your grandmother doing? I haven't heard in a week. I mean, it's phenomenal how people respond to that stuff. And that, I mean, that's just being a better person, and you know, in my opinion. It feels good to me, knowing that it makes them feel better. So I just think you look for ways to have authentic connection. I think it's great to to be transparent and admit your failings. Tell them about my failings, and and you know, I I like to make fun of myself. And if if you're not confident in your own skin and and you know can't do that, you know, people know that. At the end of the day, particularly in a small company where people see you every day, they know who you are. They know you're if you're a fearful leader, they know if you if you talk about things and then walk a different life. You can't hide from, and the more authentic they know you are, the more responsive they are to you.

Amy Dardis 58:07

Yeah, absolutely.

Authentic Leadership Lessons And Closing

Amy Dardis 58:08

Well, Rich, this has been a wonderful conversation. And for you guys listening there, so you can actually learn more about Rich and his leadership program for trades and other service businesses as well at growingyourn.net. He also has his book, which you can buy on Amazon or listen to on the Audible version. But Rich, thank you so much for your time and your insight today. I really appreciate it.

Speaker 1 58:37

Well, it's always nice to visit with somebody who has had experience in in similar businesses. And so I appreciate the the questions that you ask because they uh I think I think they bring out the best in any of your guests. So it's it's been very enjoyable for me.

Amy Dardis 58:51

Good. I'm so glad to hear that. Awesome. Well, that is all for this episode, and I will see you guys next time.