John and Jack explore the strategies fueling success in sales and warehouse management in this episode. They emphasize the role of sales folders in informing customers effectively and facilitating sales, as well as the concept of "Packout Kits” for enhancing job efficiency and speeding up installations. Moreover, John stresses the importance of selecting the right vendors and building strong relationships with them, and how this can affect business growth and service quality.
Don't forget to watch John's warehouse video walkthrough here to get a visual glimpse of its operations.
Episode Hosts:
Special thanks to our sponsor: Service Scalers: Looking to scale your home service business? Service Scalers is a digital marketing agency that drives success in PPC and LSA. Discover more growth strategies by visiting Service Scalers.
Check out Owned and Operated Weekly Insights: a newsletter where John discusses topics ranging from recruiting and marketing to the growth of your home service business. Subscribe to the newsletter here.
Contact us:
Youtube: @OwnedandOperatedPodcast
John and Jack explore the strategies fueling success in sales and warehouse management in this episode. They emphasize the role of sales folders in informing customers effectively and facilitating sales, as well as the concept of "Packout Kits” for enhancing job efficiency and speeding up installations. Moreover, John stresses the importance of selecting the right vendors and building strong relationships with them, and how this can affect business growth and service quality.
Don't forget to watch John's warehouse video walkthrough here to get a visual glimpse of its operations.
Episode Hosts:
Special thanks to our sponsor: Service Scalers: Looking to scale your home service business? Service Scalers is a digital marketing agency that drives success in PPC and LSA. Discover more growth strategies by visiting Service Scalers.
Check out Owned and Operated Weekly Insights: a newsletter where John discusses topics ranging from recruiting and marketing to the growth of your home service business. Subscribe to the newsletter here.
Contact us:
Youtube: @OwnedandOperatedPodcast
John Wilson: I'm John Wilson. Welcome to Owned and Operated. Twice a week, we talk about home service businesses, and if you're a home service entrepreneur, then this is going to be the show for you. We talk about our own business in residential, plumbing, HVAC, and electric, and we also talk about business models that we just find interesting.
Let's get into it.
Jack Carr: This episode is sponsored by Service Scalers. They're a brand I've used personally, and after almost giving up on PPC altogether, I gave it one last shot with them. They were able to not only reduce my cost per click, but also drive consistent and high quality leads. If you're a home service company, they specialize in PPC and digital media just for you.
I would highly recommend giving them a call today.
John Wilson: Today, on Owned and Operated. Jack and I talk sales folders in order to drive multi trade with your existing customers. And we spend a lot of time on warehousing. And, warehouse has been a really big project for us for about seven months. So make sure that you check this out on YouTube at some point.
Because we're going to have a video walkthrough of the warehouse. And how ours looks, how we've set it up. Probably like five or six extra minutes on top of the pod.
Welcome back to Owned and Operated. Here we are. 75 degrees. March 13th. Somehow, of all the departments that are doing good for me, HVAC is the one. Which, that was not my bingo card for 2024.
Jack Carr: Honestly, HVAC is not doing terrible in 75 degree weather right now for us either.
John Wilson: Yeah we're still doing two installs a day. Peak is four, but like, I'll take two. And then duct cleaning has really blown up.
I don't know if you're doing that, but like, duct cleaning is a thing.
Jack Carr: Yeah, we do duct cleaning. but what we've blown up even more than duct cleaning, so we sell about one IQ a week, like a one IQ 3000, which is like a 4, 000 package of static filters and UV light and then ozone. And then all that kind of stuff.
We sell about one a week. Like it's something that it's a good money, easy install. We sold four last week. It was a solid, like 15, 20, 000 in just IQ alone.
John Wilson: Yeah.
Jack Carr: So people in this off season really enjoyed those kind of cleanliness duct cleanings and other aspects like that. But besides that, I mean, we've been doing good on installs too, which is crazy.
We're hiring another install crew actually.
John Wilson: Nice. Actually this is going to dive into something totally different than what we originally talked about. So this thing we're doing, I think I've said this before but a lot of our current life is figuring out the stuff that we should have figured out at four or five million.
So it's comical to be figuring it out at our current size. Cause like it makes like a ridiculous impact. So like when we do something now, it's like the differences, it's a lot. So the one of the big things we're currently doing is like a sales folder with every job. I should have been doing that five years ago. So like up sales, cross sales, how do you do it? Right. We'll walk backwards. I have 100, 000 people in my customer list. And, we're working on like fine tuning the data. But, roughly 15 percent of them have used all three trades. The reason's not complicated. A lot of those customers came from acquisitions.
And all of those acquisitions were only one trade. Drains, electric, plumbing, HV AC. So they're only used to calling that number for one trade. A huge opportunity for us is to literally just tell our existing customers that we have all three trades, And that's one of the big reasons.
The second big reason is when you think about how most of your net new customers call you, they're calling you from a lead engine Google, I'll say, PPC, whatever. And they're calling you with a specific problem. Hey, I need a water heater. I have a backed up toilet, backed up drain. Despite the name, despite the marketing material despite and everything, they still might only think of you as plumbing or HVAC because that's the thing that you came out there to fix. So it turns into a big problem and big opportunity of how do you just inform your existing customer base of all the different things that they do, because if the only way that they get exposed to you is through Google LSA, then they're only ever going to think of you as a plumber, or the HVAC guy, or the electrician, or whatever you're there to fix.
So you have to develop these different ways to like, cross sell into the other departments. We've done this not very well. We have a really good referral game, so like, plumber sees something, says something, sends it to an electrician. That happens all day, every day. So that's really good.
And obviously people get used to it. They see the trucks, maybe they ask, but we're not as proactive as we should be. So your indoor air quality thing, the first thing I thought of is, Oh, I'm going to put that in the sales folder. So we're doing the sales folder thing where on every single job, which is 150 a day, we're going to drop off a sales folder that sales folder is going to have all the different things you always want your texts to give your customers.
So we usually train them document by document to like, Hey, make sure you give them this pamphlet for your membership or make sure you give them this. And it's complicated because once a month or once a quarter, you have to rechange the thing that you're wanting them to give.
So now we're just giving them a folder. Hey, here's the folder you give to them on every job and it's going to have like your services menu. Here's your hundred top services or 80 top services with like special breakouts for the big ones, tankless water heaters, indoor air quality. Then you have your monthly specials, you have your memberships.
So that's like a thing that we're trying to be in print production next week. Indoor air quality was always already going to be a part of it. But now I'm thinking about putting packaged pricing on it. Just from the conversation that we just had.
Jack Carr: Yeah. Cause it doesn't really change much depending on the size of the filter. grill or whatever. We just have a few different levels. Now that's a very interesting way to leave the customer a ton of information. It doesn't put a lot of stress on the tech to be able just to hand it over. Here's our services, here's the quick script, move on.
Versus trying to go through, hey, plumbing, drains. Septic, anything down the line, because I know what worked for us like any customer that called him even for HVAC. I know we had this, there's a few people in our chat group that had a differing feelings about it. But we just cross sold from the CSR themselves.
Hey, just to let you know, we also are doing a great special in plumbing. We're trying to get our name out there. So I know you've used this for HVAC, but if you want, we're doing 49 whole home inspections. But I can see that becoming very difficult at scale, right? You had electrical, you can't, hit every single category.
You do appliances. It stops at some point over the phone.
John Wilson: Yeah, we still do that over the phone. I think it's more like how do you over communicate? Because I think from our perspective. Oh, we say it on the inbound. So we're good or it says it on the truck. So we're good. So we're really trying to, how do we like so ridiculously over communicate the fact that we are their whole home care provider and then like package it up in a sweet little package that makes sales enablement easier.
Jack Carr: Yeah, I'm very interested to see how this goes. Do you guys give something to the customers?
John Wilson: Like, healthy home pamphlets?
Jack Carr: Yeah, what does that consist of currently?
John Wilson: it explains the membership. The pamphlet's good, but like, it wasn't very thought out.
Jack Carr: The healthy, like what you guys offer, but it doesn't go into detail about like a whole IQ or water quality or any of these auxiliary duct cleaning.
John Wilson: Yeah, sure. I think that, how do you distill who you are? Because, again, if they came to you through LSA or GMB they're there for a problem. And they might not have done a ton of research. They might not have visited your website. They probably just read a couple reviews and clicked call.
Explaining who we are and like, what we're all about. I'll show you a picture next week when you're in town. I think we'll have a mock up by then.
But it's going to be good. It's this layered folder with the biggest ones broken out of like tankless water heaters, generators, HVAC, sewer replacements, like our big six core services.
And then we're going to have a menu that shows all the other things that we do. Then we'll have the here's today's agenda. We'll have a business card with a review thing because we think that this is also going to help enhance reviews like we'll get more with a QR directly to like. a tracked link for the technician's reviews.
And then a letter about the company and the membership. and monthly specials. So there's a lot that's gonna go into it. But we're excited about it.
Jack Carr: Yeah, very neat.
John Wilson: And that whole 7 minute rant on folders. From you mentioning indoor air quality. I think you spend 100 to get this customer. And then, we don't do a great job of communicating with them After like, a year or two later, so that's something that we're really working on. We also don't do a great job of communicating in the home and like, building density in each account. The way I've always thought about this type of stuff is oh, it's money Like why would I do that?
I already have the lead and then now I'm like, that's really dumb Like a dollar fifty after spending a hundred dollars is fine.
Jack Carr: It's not that big a deal.
John Wilson: Yeah, and the row ass is probably gonna be like a hundred times
Jack Carr: Because if you have a conversion over right, then that immediately
John Wilson: It's going to be easy tell because it's just measured in LTV. Hey, what's our average LTV right now from a brand new customer in the first 12 months? That's our benchmark.
What's it look like in 90 days, 120 days and how do we keep improving that? So it's shockingly easy to measure
Jack Carr: Yeah, the only other way you could potentially do it right would be to do some kind of mailer. Same idea right is it's a thank you card for using us for your service. Here's our services we offer so that's another option, but I guess why would you mail it out you're already in the home?
John Wilson: No, we're going to do that too. We have like a 10 prong strategy to like retarget customers.
Jack Carr: And with the goal being to get them into the other services
John Wilson: Pretty much
Jack Carr: To become whole home
John Wilson: Yeah.
Jack Carr: What's the difference for customers? Obviously that's important from a Hey, we want to be your electric and your plumbing person. But for everyone out there, do you know what the whole home value of a customer is?
Do you guys track that?
John Wilson: Like the LTV?
Jack Carr: No, like the lifetime of a customer in the home, if they were to use you for every service.
John Wilson: Yeah, that's LTV lifetime value.
Jack Carr: Yeah. Okay. Lifetime value.
John Wilson: I could probably share those numbers next week.
Jack Carr: Sweet. Yeah. I remember reading a statistic that was like 142, 000 is the LTV per customer.
John Wilson: That sounds about right.
Jack Carr: And that was across three trades.
John Wilson: Yeah, we've segmented it up in our like, different customer types, it's a totally different number for a member. Than it is a non member and it's a totally different number for people that use you every two years like clockwork versus people that use you every four.
So we're dividing up the customer base by these different segments so that way we can get a better understanding of LTV across segments. Yeah, cause comparing member even to non member both use you in the same cadence, like members twice as much.
Jack Carr: Well, It's cause you build trust. That's why you're the member. Neat.
John Wilson: All right. That was a rant. What we were going to talk about that we promised the listeners, Jack, we promised them was we were going to talk about warehousing and like purchasing and parts delivery, and I think there's a lot to unpack here. We've talked about it before. Before we go much further, and I have to make sure I put this in the intro too. If you aren't, you should check out this episode on, the tubes. You should go to YouTube because I'm gonna have Kristen later upload like a video of our warehouse.
Walk through it and then you can see the different parts that we're talking about. As we're going through it, I think it's gonna be hard to imagine the different parts. So, YouTube link will be in the show notes. Check it out. Okay, so last episode we were talking about like purchase order systems, we were talking warehousing so like, I think the place to get started, and we've talked about like VMI and inventory systems before, but I think maybe the place to get started is just explain how our system worked at 5 million, and maybe how it works today, because it's actually not that different, we've added a couple features, but, do you think that's a good spot?
Jack Carr: Yeah, I think that's a good spot. Let's even take a step back and start off with choosing the vendor. Like I know you're talking about the warehouse and all this stuff, but that's your main vendor, I think is a very important thing before even getting into warehousing.
Cause we started this conversation talking about you could do co assignment what does that initial look like when you started? Maybe that is that 5 million point like what was the big focus? How did you utilize vendors to get the lowest price? And then how did that turn into warehouse?
John Wilson: I mean, we could spend a lot of time on vendor
Jack Carr: I know right?
John Wilson: Management. But, I think really when you're choosing one, you're going to have different key vendors by trade, probably. Each of our trades has one key vendor. Plumbing has their own, HVAC has their own, electric has their own, and that's based off the brands that they want to sell.
Some of those key vendors do offer support to the other trades. Yes, you know, Ferguson offers plumbing materials. But Ferguson is not our key vendor in plumbing. They are our Pricing is definitely important. Guys, I know you're listening to this pricing is important.
Jack Carr: Ferguson is listening so we need to be very careful. We also use Ferguson so
John Wilson: Dan, pricing is important, but yeah, so pricing is obviously important, level of service and are they going to work with you is the next big ones. I'll give a couple of different stories cause I think it illustrates the point. So we work with enterprise fleet management.
I think I've talked about them a lot. And they've been a key vendor for our fleets since early 2019. So the way their system works is you do these capitalized leases and they last five years, and then you sell them off and roll the equity into the next purchases or whatever.
So we just hit our five year anniversary with Enterprise. And it was weird. It was crazy because I'm sitting down, and I'm so appreciative of our relationship with them. I'm sitting down with them, and I'm sitting across the table from the same people. Same humans from the same company that I sat across the table from five years ago When I had like 11 trucks And today we have 96. They were a partner in that they were a key part of that. A big thing that they did that really helped was I asked for custom terms when we initiated our relationship and it was really important to me and I said hey if I can get these terms, I think we can both win.
I know that if I get the terms the way that I want them, I can use the savings that I'm asking for to grow the business, which will in turn benefit you. We all remember that conversation at that table. So we're sitting there and I'm like, Hey guys first I want to thank you, because like you trusted me with these weird terms that I asked for.
And my promise to you was that I would grow the business and that's how I would use those funds. We like took a look around because it was like yeah, like we did like the fleet's nine times larger. Five years ago was how do I go from 11 vehicles to 20 or 30?
And now the conversation is how do I go from 96 to 400? In the same, five six year time period. So key vendor that was willing to work with us in a unique way, early on, and we went from being a small account that didn't really matter that much, to their second largest account out of that branch.
And they're gonna be along for the ride up to 400, and we're gonna come up with a new way the relationship looks, but they were a big part of it.
Jack Carr: Yeah. For anyone listening, that's exactly where I was going. That story was a great example of what you need to find in all of your vendors because at the end of the day, they are people too. And they have things that they can work with and they can help you out and they can do the opposite and not help you out.
To contrast that, I had a vendor early on in my career who, after a year of running an HVAC company, I'm not going to say any names, but they didn't tell me like, I just was naive. I didn't understand that there was better pricing out there. And so I was buying units at full price with zero, not markdown, but just like if you sold one unit, we sold 400, 000 in units or we spent four and a thousand with them and they did not give me a single discount. They did not call me to offer a discount. They did not talk to me whatsoever about working with them to get better pricing. I love them. Nice guys, but just completely bent me over the barrel and we have not been back.
They burned that relationship on the way out because I said, Hey, why didn't you guys ever offer? Like we do more sales with you than probably 50 percent of your customer base. And you didn't offer a single dollar off or better price book or anything. And then we got new people who are very happy to work with us and we are extremely happy.
Ferguson was one of them.
John Wilson: Yeah, I think it's obviously like, taking a flyer on someone that probably doesn't deserve it yet. But I do think the key to a good vendor relationship is the relationship aspect, and that's why pricing is important, but pricing is not the whole thing. What's the level of service?
Do they understand the relationship? Have you done a good job of explaining where the company's going? Or are they just like, stubborn? Now we are the largest single brand in our market. And there have been a pile of vendors that are on my shit list and have been for years because they did something weird.
They got frisky with terms. They didn't work with us on pricing. They didn't work with us in the way that I wanted. And now we're the Goliath and we don't give them a dollar. And like that sucks. And like their salespeople call because they have to. Because we're the Goliath. And we explain to them what happened three years ago and ask if the CFO is still there. So yeah, we have a few of those. It's it's tough. Yeah it's annoying. I think, pricing. What's level of service? How often are they going to run into stockouts? What happens in the case of a stockout? What happens with substitutions? How will they get you parts when you need it?
I think it's a lot more than just pricing. Ferguson's pricing isn't the lowest. But Dan, listening to this we're appreciative. The team does great. The salesperson shows up when we need them to. The branch managers open up parts on Sunday when we need them. And because of that, they get three or four million dollars a year, whatever it is.
So, uh, It's a win win.
Jack Carr: Win win. Love it.
John Wilson: If you like what we talk about on our social media, on Twitter, on this podcast, then you should be signed up for our newsletter. Go to ownedandoperated. com where every Friday we break down our business, we break down insights, things we're learning, things we're working on, and it's good stuff. Check it out, ownedandoperated. com.
Jack Carr: And so then you take that you have a great vendor now you move into owning some of your parts on site, utilizing that vendor. And one of those relationship key aspects is do they allow for co assignment? Are you full VMI? Do they do full VMI or how do you get those parts? Do they do next day delivery?
Things like that. So can you talk through John, when you started, or I guess, 3 million, 5 million, and now what that process changed and how it looked.
John Wilson: So most of the vendors offered same day or next day delivery. So that one's not overly complicated to get. We did consignment in a few different ways. Like a lot of vendors understand consignment. That part's not that hard. Or they'll like barcode your shelves. So they're all super happy to barcode your shelves.
And then we'll come in once a week and count. And sell you inventory. Makes sense. I would do that too. So I think it's actually not that hard to find somebody to work with on that stuff because most local vendors will do it. Some of the bigger vendors don't as much or if they do they want it to be like OEM.
Like motorized units or serialized units. I want to know this serial water heater and where it is. That's most of the consignment but we've run some version of consignment since 3 million.
Jack Carr: just on parts or on equipment too?
John Wilson: We've tried it all. We tried parts that didn't work as well, just because it's confusing.
We've tried every version under the sun. Self managing inventory and I know that like, Chris Hoffman's on the other side of this where he's starting to re self manage his inventory and that's a huge shift but it makes sense. I think it's like resources.
So like at three million, can you hire the best warehouse at 20 million? Can you hire the best warehouse management team ever? And the answer is no like we can't we don't know how to hire it. We don't know how to run it. We don't have the resources for them to succeed at 120 million. Sure. That can be a real conversation.
So I think most of it is about how can you run a simple business as early as you can. I toured a place that was like six, seven million and they had consignment all set up for plumbing and HVAC. And it was down to like copper fittings and it worked really well. And they still had a parts guy or two.
And yeah, you can do that. Most of the time we've consigned water heaters cause that's really easy to track. So we've consigned all the big stuff. Right now we consign furnaces, boilers, generators, tankless. But like we pull that stuff off the shelf now.
Jack Carr: Love that.
John Wilson: The way it used to work, we would order, and we would order into our warehouse, our guys would pull it off the shelves, using our warehouse stock system, which was not that great, and they would order the materials for next day. A really big push, a big obnoxious push of mine and the whole team, is how do we get same day as much as possible. So if I sell a furnace by noon, can I put it in?
And the answer is yes.
But that took a lot of time. That took a lot of work. But the way it looks now and like this is where you should go look at the videos.
Because I think you can do this at any size. I just think that we happened to get it figured out at this size. I don't think it's like some magical thing at scale. Yeah, we have all this equipment ready to go. So if I sell a tankless at 11, or we've done it several times now this week, where we've sold a furnace at 10, 30 in the morning the team's there installing it in like an hour.
So we pull the furnace off the shelf, we pull the air conditioner off the shelf, or the generator, the tankless, or the water heater, because it's all right there. Again, reference the video, it's all inside that video. We pull it off depending on the model. 80 percent of the equipment that we use on a day to day basis is on shelf, ready to go. So we rip it off, we let the wholesaler know like, Hey we pulled it, bill us for it. And then we have these things called pack out kits. And Packout Kits, yeah, is this Milwaukee thing, and this has been a big push. We did HVAC first and Jen, our HVAC manager, did a great job putting those together, and then plumbing in electric followed three, four months later, just in like February, I think they finished it.
Huge project though, like really big. Honestly, it's easier if you do it earlier, because it's so big, but the way we were working, we're like, oh, we have to pull all these individual parts for these jobs, felt crazy inefficient. Because again, we need to be able to do this same day next day. So if we have to spend an hour pulling parts, which is what it would roughly take, or 30 minutes or whatever, And potentially be out of stock on stuff that's not gonna work.
Our guys are gonna go ill equipped to jobs. They have these packout kits. So we have like 85 of them, or some ridiculous number. And, you go pull a furnace, and you go pull a packout. And we have like 10 furnace packouts, and 10 AC packouts, and 3 or 4 water heaters, and a couple tankless, and some boilers, and generators, and panels, and like, all these install types packouts.
Jack Carr: Do those just on them? Do they just have like general things like pipe dope and fittings and this?
So it's just your general everything you could need?
John Wilson: The way to think about this is your installers trucks can be empty except for tools. This is now a mobile truck stock that you pull off the truck every night you restock and you put it back on. That's how we think about it. So we're only putting instead of three shelves into every install truck, we're now only putting one.
That's where you put your tools, the rest of the pack outs and the equipment gets strapped up to the left side of the van. And it's all like driving efficiency. One, we know our job costing really well. Two, I can sell a water heater, and we can be good to go in like, five minutes. Go grab the water heater, it's over there, ten feet away.
Go grab the packout kit, whichever one's available, a lot of purchasing now. And you just like, you walk away with that kit.
Jack Carr: Yeah. I don't care what trade you're in, the annoyance of not having a screw, a bolt, a freaking little teeny tiny piece of this crap that you have to go run 20 minutes 30 minutes to home depot for. Everyone who's ever worked in any trade knows that absolute headache so I couldn't imagine just making sure to have that extra thing of pipedope there. The extra fitting the extra coupling extra this and that the glue. So my story was that I was going to tell is I mean, that's amazing, John.
Like when I was running maintenance programs for fortune 500 companies. That's what we were trying to do. That was one of the big initiative pushes was to create packouts and bins for work orders for jobs on the facility side.
John Wilson: It's easier small like it's harder at the bigger you get why it like scale works against you in this case like now we're okay but like if you wanted to run a packout kit program, you could probably do it in 30 days like for us it was like five six months
Jack Carr: I'll have to check out what your packout kits look like. Get a little sneak peek. Cause I mean that's a great idea. I mean, it's a nightmare on efficiency. And the key, is that's the difference having a good, well equipped truck. That is the difference between being able to do one HVAC unit a day and two HVAC units a day.
John Wilson: That was the inspiration is how do we do same day? How do I do two furnaces? How do I do two air conditioners? How do I do two tankless? Like, how do two generators, like whatever it is, how do we drive maximum output through the same amount of team members? And how do we do it quick? So it's not like a complicated problem, and it's also not a complicated solution. It's complicated to implement, but that's kind of easy. It's just like, Hey, box it all up and have the stuff at your office. So I think we only have like 30 grand of parts between those 85 packouts.
And that's our entire inventory as a 26 million company is 30 grand.
Jack Carr: Yeah, at the end of the day, I think that you think about it a little differently. Rightfully so. but when you're 3 million, you don't have like a warehouse guy or you don't have this, your stock at a point where it makes sense. So there's a lot more that goes into it to build the systems that are able to resupply that packout kits.
John Wilson: See I think differently.
Jack Carr: I know where you're going with this
John Wilson: That's vendor relationships.
The first time I was ever exposed to packouts
Jack Carr: I know still someone set up those vendor relationships though. So I get what saying. And what I'm saying is it takes work to build the behind the scenes of that.
But if you do it small, there's more opportunity, like it's easier to do initially but you have less time to do it. So it's this like dichotomy of trying to get there. But if you do it small and then keep that running through until you're big, it makes it a lot easier on you once you get bigger.
I get what you're saying. This is mostly like a rant about me justifying why I'm not doing it at the moment.
John Wilson: It takes forever. I've been wanting to do packouts for five or six years. So I first saw these packouts. I was at a vendor Used to be a key vendor and got a little frisky with some stuff and that sucks they used to be a hundred thousand a month and if we would have stayed in that relationship, they would be six hundred thousand a month right now.
.
John Wilson: So I was there at their warehouse, and I was looking at something, I see these bins, and I'm like, what the fuck are these bins? What are these things? And the guys are just like filling them up, and it's like a plastic tote for five bucks from Walmart, the green and blue ones with the puzzle piece tops, and I'm like, what the heck are these things? And I look at the top and there's like a laminated piece of paper with a list of parts. I'm like, all that's cool. That's interesting. I like that. And they're like, oh, it's a packout kit. And I'm like, okay, cool. That means nothing to me. So they explain what it is and it's what it sounds like.
So a packout kit, you know, it's got a hundred items in it. And maybe that's like five copper elbows half inch, and recharge kit or whatever it is you're going to need to do an air conditioner. And the vendor themselves was refilling the packouts and they got paid some amount of money.
I don't even know what it was in order to do it aside from just the volume because packouts one is basically a full time job. For us, it's a full time job. But, it's just a lot to manage, and two, it's every day, it's just on repeat but you can lean on vendors to do it you can do it, many of them are used to it, because the largest company in your market is leaning, is like, they're doing it for them, they're participating And it gives a lot of sales volume.
Each packout kit is a thousand bucks. They drop off ten a day. It's half empty. They just got five thousand dollars a day. So it's kind of an easy like win for the vendor and the guys just do it in downtime. Like, Hey, I've got a guy on the counter and he doesn't have anything to do.
Just packouts.
Jack Carr: I'm gonna ask that's a good idea and that takes it out of our hands too because like that's where the word becomes it's like Jackson in the back doing packouts. It's low value
John Wilson: Yeah, you have to make it a win. Like financially you have to make it a win for them too. Like enough volume, you have to make it easy. Like here's the exact list, here's how it works. Here's how we expect to pick it up and drop it off. But vendors will work with you on it. So it's worth giving a shot. And all of that helps drive job costing and faster turnaround times on installs, which for us is important because we're striving for same day next day
Jack Carr: Yeah, so that's why I'm cheesing over how quickly you can turn those around because that's, got kind of pigeonholed into that market, but it's been great for us. I mean, that's what the expectation is. And we have to meet it and it sucks to have to meet it.
But at the same time we overtake other vendors who are overtake other HVAC plumbing companies who take a week to change out your unit. Nobody wants to sit in the heat for four days. Neat. That's great. I'm excited to see your warehouse complete and check out those packout kits, man That's gonna be really neat
John Wilson: Was it done last time you were up?
Jack Carr: You had them like kind of done. I don't know if they were really utilizing
John Wilson: Yeah, dude. It like, really took shape three weeks ago, which is probably right after you left. Warehouse got finally crisp and the VMI project is almost done.
Yeah, so like they're now running electrical, plumbing, and HVAC. I'm very proud of it.
The warehouse, we're at the tail end of like, 1, this is what we've wanted for 10 years, we've been working towards it, we've been moving out of all these locations, we've been doing all this stuff, and then we moved into one location. We combined 6 warehouses worth of inventory together and it looked like it.
I got pics. And then now, it's beautiful.
Jack Carr: It's nice.
It was nice when I was even there. Yeah. Gosh man. day
John Wilson: One day
Alright.
Sales folders and warehouse inventory. And make sure you check this out on YouTube. We'll either during it or after, we'll have a video walkthrough of the place. That way people can get an idea what this thing looks like.
Jack Carr: Or you can come on by to the workshop in june
John Wilson: Yeah.
Jack Carr: You can see it yourself and see it functioning and running and get a really good feel about what how it should flow.
John Wilson: Yeah. Heck yeah. Alright, thanks for tuning in to Owned and Operated.
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Thanks for tuning in to Owned and Operated, the podcast for home service entrepreneurs. If you enjoyed today's episode, please hit the like button and subscribe to the podcast. If you have any questions or topics you'd like us to cover, feel free to reach out. You can find me on Twitter at at Wilson companies.
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