In this re-kick episode, we revisit a timeless conversation with entrepreneur Rich Jordan who has impressively scaled Garon T Pumbing from $800,000 to a projected $17 million in revenue over three years. Starting with no industry experience, Rich's military background as a Marine infantry officer played a significant role in his success. This episode covers Rich's initial plunge into the business world through real estate before purchasing Garon T Plumbing in New Jersey. Rich shares the operational challenges he faced, such as scaling the team, systematizing operations, dealing with parking logistics, and the nuances of purchasing and growing a small business.
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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.
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In this re-kick episode, we revisit a timeless conversation with entrepreneur Rich Jordan who has impressively scaled Garon T Pumbing from $800,000 to a projected $17 million in revenue over three years. Starting with no industry experience, Rich's military background as a Marine infantry officer played a significant role in his success. This episode covers Rich's initial plunge into the business world through real estate before purchasing Garon T Plumbing in New Jersey. Rich shares the operational challenges he faced, such as scaling the team, systematizing operations, dealing with parking logistics, and the nuances of purchasing and growing a small business.
Episode Host:
Episode Guest:
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.
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back to Owned and operated. Today, we're going to be bringing back a classic episode of Rich Jordan. So Rich was kind of fun because we first met on Twitter back in early 2021. And it was fun to meet another. Just brilliant, handsome person like myself that was buying plumbing companies. Since then, Rich has taken this business that we talk about, Guarantee Plumbing, and, you know, he bought it at like 800, 000 of revenue, and they're trending towards 17, this year.
Over the course of three years, which is just absolutely crazy. since we first met, we now have become really great friends and I get to talk to him almost every day, which I'm grateful for. So this was a awesome, re kick episode to just show the journey of a successful home service entrepreneur.
Enjoy. Welcome back to Owned and Operated. So today, we are blessed to be sitting here with Rich Jordan.
Let's cut right to it. Rich, how about you give us like 60 seconds where you tell us about yourself.
Rich Jordan: All right, 60 seconds. Marine infantry officer through my 20s. Turned business owner, currently own Guarantee Plumbing up in New Jersey, residential service plumbing company, and basically had no experience to really speak of prior.
I'm just an overconfident guy that thinks he can figure it out no matter what. And that's basically where I'm at. I mean, I bought a, the company I bought was really small. It was like three technicians. Now we're a team of 12. And we've been under ownership for about nine months now.
John Wilson: That's crazy.
Was the guy's name, Garen?
Rich Jordan: It was. Yeah.
John Wilson: So it's pretty ball.
Rich Jordan: Guarantee spelled G A R O N space T. And the seller's name, the founder's name was Tom Garen. Yeah. So play on his name.
John Wilson: Yeah, this isn't really like a real estate show, but you do have some real estate.
Rich Jordan: I do. Yeah. I consider that my, like dipping my toes in the shallow end of small business was my first apartment building, an apartment building has a P and L just like a business. And it's a lot simpler to manage. So yeah, I purchased an 18 unit apartment building back in 2018 with some deployment savings and did this, similar approach value add and raise the NOI and refinanced it.
And that was pretty awesome too.
John Wilson: Yeah. . Any partners on that?
Rich Jordan: Just my little brother. Yeah. It's my little brother's like, he just turned 26. And so he was like 23 back then had a little bit of cash and there were some issues during due diligence. The bank wanted more money was going to give me less LTV.
So I needed to, bring some more cash to the table and my brother was able to put some up. So now he's a minority owner as like a 26 year old. He's a minority owner in 50 apartments while being active duty as a naval officer. Pretty cool.
John Wilson: Yeah, that is cool. I had some friends that were active duty and it was always fascinating to me the amount of money that they stashed up because like you don't pay for anything or at least they didn't.
I'm sure it depends on your circumstances, but these guys didn't pay for anything like they lived on the base. They were paid like good amount of money. Seems like food and drink is somehow taken care of. And maybe it's just these guys, I don't know, but like, I had some friends that like 21 or 22, they had like 40, 000 in savings.
And I was like, dude, that's crazy. Like that's if you do the right thing, if you go by, apartment buildings, like Rich, that's like a life changing.
Rich Jordan: It could be a great launch, honestly, the like secret is like we get housing allowances and stuff, particularly like on the officer side or on the enlisted side, if you're a little bit older, a little more senior and you get to live off the base, you get a housing allowance and it's untaxed.
So I mean like a third of my income was untaxed.
John Wilson: That's crazy.
Rich Jordan: While I was in the Marine Corps. And then when I went overseas, like in a combat zone, I didn't pay any tax and I was overseas, for a year or, two years. So yeah, housing allowances, combat zone tax exclusions. I mean, it gets pretty nice.
That's why a lot of military guys, we have this kind of reputation for having the nicest cars in town, but I never did have the nicest car in town, but I had some apartments.
John Wilson: Yeah. I mean, you'll get the nicest car in town eventually, right? It was either Dave Ramsey or robert Kiyosaki, one of those guys, but like his wife bought a Jag and somebody was like, dude, why is your wife driving around in a Jag?
And he's like, she bought an apartment building that would pay for the monthly payment of that Jag. So yeah, more respect to that. All right. So you've got some real estate. Your brother sounds like a baller Marine officer. You bought a plumbing company last year. How about you give us a little bit of like why?
Rich Jordan: Yeah, because I'm psychotic and don't understand how hard things are until I do them.
John Wilson: Twitter said this was easy, man.
Rich Jordan: Yeah. I really wanted to be a small business owner for a couple reasons. One of them, is that I've kind of always felt that being a small business owner is like the pinnacle of being a citizen.
In my opinion, right? So like providing jobs, providing a service to the community, like being like a natural influence in that community. To an extent I've achieved that, right? Like for my team and for my clients, the whole like influence in the community thing, not really what's happening now, just because I ultimately, the business that I bought is like three and a half hours away from my house.
It's doesn't check that box for me, unfortunately.
John Wilson: Hold on. Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. Okay. We're going to earmark that and touch base on that. All right. Please keep going, but we're going to circle right back.
Rich Jordan: So yeah, honestly, I always thought small business was like the pinnacle of being like a local citizen.
So that's what initially got me interested in it. And then there was also, coming from like having a little bit of a taste of real estate. The multiples and small business are pretty sweet to do the purchase multiples. You know what I mean? Like I paid basically like 12 and a half times net for my apartment, my first apartment building, right?
8 percent cap. I paid two times that for my plumbing business. So like instantly in the money, right? I mean, that's like, I can live on that. Really well, whereas I'd have to buy like a lot of real estate to be able to live on it as well as I do off plumbing. So that was certainly, you know, that was definitely a big part of it.
As far as why plumbing, I think like my personal skillset, like coming from Marine Corps, from the infantry, Working with infantrymen like that, I mean, of course they're very varied type of people that end up in that kind of work, but at the same time, there's a common thread. And I think I got to tell all my buddies that are still in the Marine Corps, like, Hey, like plumbers are a lot like infantrymen, got my staff sergeants.
I got my Lance corporals, I got my corporals and it's just a similar type of guy that might enlist in the Marine Corps or might go into the plumbing trade. So as far as like a leadership, the leadership aspect has been pretty natural for me and I didn't want to get into like a type of business that was going to be like put on the bench by technology or by offshoring.
Right. And you and Brandon have talked a little bit about that, but you know, plumbing is not going to be offshored to the Philippines anytime soon. At least not as far as I can tell and Silicon Valley is not going to gobble it up either. So that felt pretty good going into the trade.
John Wilson: Those are all good reasons. And I think. I guess to riff on these trades again, I think they're interesting. I think you made the right choice. I think the cat, the COD behavior of home services, the high margins, the evergreen. It's a lot of good stuff and makes a lot of sense why in a post COVID world, it's become even more popular as, you know, home services exploded in a recessionary environment.
Like that's crazy. Granted, a very unique recessionary environment where everyone had to stay home. It doesn't happen very often, probably. But yeah, there's a lot of good, a lot of good there.
Rich Jordan: You can definitely get into the wrong type of plumbing and that's really something that I've learned post acquisition.
So I got kind of lucky. I mean, the COD nature, like you mentioned of residential service plumbing is one of the things that drove me towards it. But like I've, you know, since I've talked to a lot of guys who are doing like commercial. Service work, both plumbing and HVAC. And like some of those guys are getting beat up.
They're getting beat up, man. They've got like heavy customer concentration, maybe not by property, but definitely by property manager. And they're beholden to the price and terms that the founder set with those clients. And those PMs are like beating them up over every line item.
I mean, it's just a totally different beast.
John Wilson: I think in, sort of Northern America, like Northern us, we're dealing with unions too, I mean, in Jersey, it has to be way worse. Then it is in Ohio and anytime, like New England area that I've heard, it's like unions are still very prevalent.
Rich Jordan: Yeah, it's funny. New Jersey is definitely like very unionized, but you don't see any unions in service plumbing. So the unions are all doing like basically if you're not doing a construction project over 2 million worth of plumbing work, you're not going to see a union shop on it. So like I've never had any issues with them.
John Wilson: Yeah, that's pretty interesting.
All right, so the goal of this show is to talk about operational issues. So I know you brought some before we dive into those living three and a half hours away from your business. That sounds like an interesting operational issue.
Oh yeah. I'd love to hear more about that.
Rich Jordan: Yeah, I love that. I did that to myself. I built this prison for myself. Yeah. So I mean, so part of it is that I moved to rural Pennsylvania. I mean, I live like deep in central PA, not necessarily a metropolis. I live in a town of 4, 500 people. And I had to come here because my wife works at the big regional hospital that happens to be here.
So I was like looking in like Harrisburg and Philly and Scranton, right? Redding, some of the, like the larger Pittsburgh, some of the larger metro areas, MSAs in Pennsylvania. Went after a business in Philly didn't get it. And I think that was probably, that was a blessing looking back on it.
I ended up finding this plumbing business in Jersey that happened to be nearby. That's buddy from college. So that made me feel a little bit better about it. He partnered with me on the business that wasn't the original plan for my search, but it just made sense. And I certainly wasn't going to buy a business three and a half hours away.
If I didn't have him there, he literally lives like down the street from the business. I mean, yeah, I've got him, but he still works full time at his original W 2 now that we've grown significantly because at this point we've basically doubled our revenue.
Rich Jordan: He's looking to leave his W 2 and come on and essentially be like a COO, you know, director of ops or something like that. But this whole time up until now, I've been running it by myself for the most part, he tags in occasionally to help out and my in laws live like 30 minutes from the company.
So I literally like I basically deployed to New Jersey. Living at my in laws house, like bringing my dog along with me. And like I would go, I would like drive in on a Sunday night. I'd work the entire week. I'd stay the weekend, work the whole next week. And then on like Friday night, I'd head back to Pennsylvania and spend like, 48 hours with my wife and then go back and do it again for another 12 days.
And I basically did that for like three months. That's crazy. Yeah. I mean, Lauren and I, Lauren's my wife, we're pretty used to that kind of stuff with my background. So it wasn't too bad, but it started wearing on us like in November, I'd say. So basically by Thanksgiving, two months in, Yeah, that would be two and a half months in, right? So that'd be like 10 weeks in. At this point, I brought on a service manager and he had been with us. He had been in that role for about a month he's doing okay. So at that point I started stepping back and I was working, I'd show up on like a Tuesday morning and I'd leave on a Thursday afternoon. So I'd be there for like basically three days and, spend like three and a half, four days at home did that until January. And then in January, I basically like detached from the day to day. And yeah now I do that kind of Tuesday to Thursday thing, I do that once a month, like the first week of the month, I'll go in Tuesday morning, I'll leave Thursday afternoon, I try to book like new technician interviews or, vendor appointments or whatever, like stuff that I need to do in person, which is few and far between at this point, but I try to book those all for those three days and I just run with it and I try to jump on the trucks with the guys too.
John Wilson: I don't think I knew any of this. That's a logistical nightmare for you can imagine.
Rich Jordan: I mean, it was tough. It was a forcing function for me. It like forced me to get a lot of stuff off my plate and like try to systematize and automate and delegate as best I could quickly, you know, before I like marriage unraveled or something.
John Wilson: I know a guy that does this. He lives in Kentucky and he, runs his business up here where we are in Akron and it's only three or four techs. It's like real small. And I think that for them, it has been a huge barrier for growth. Like they cannot grow. For you, that does not seem to be what has happened at all.
I mean, can you tell us a little bit about what you did to systematize, get stuff off your plate? And then like, what's your day to day look like now, what are you doing inside on the company?
Rich Jordan: Yeah. So it started with me doing like literally everything, right? I mean, like think of anything that happens inside of like Wilson plumbing.
I was doing all of it, or I was trying to do all of it and miss and dropping a lot of balls, basically.
John Wilson: Dispatching bookkeeping.
Rich Jordan: Yeah. Answering the phones, pricing the jobs.
John Wilson: Was this to preserve margin? Cause a lot of guys do that to, you know, they want to run at a 35 percent net. So then they work themselves to death.
Was that sort of what you were doing?
Rich Jordan: No, not really. It was survival. I had to do it all.
John Wilson: Cause they didn't have those roles when you took it over.
Rich Jordan: Exactly. And I think I didn't really have an appreciation for that before I stepped in. And it was also, you know. we had an agreement that for three months, the wife and the husband were going to work within the business, uncompensated full time day five, like the second week, the wife wasn't really interested in doing that anymore.
It's just, it was all like, Hey, rich, like, are you going to take the phone today? Cause it's your business now. And it's like, Motherfucker. So yeah, I took it. I mean, it was insane and it was like, we were like smashed in September and I'm like simultaneously trying to onboard a bunch of different like vendors, right. software vendors or CSRs or whatever. And like I've got all these like demos, zoom meetings and stuff. And I have to schedule them all for like 6 PM or later because from 7 AM to 6 PM, my earpiece is going off like every minute. Which just reminds me of another operational struggle I'll have to get to, but like every single minute, my phone's going off, so I'm trying to like lead my team. I'm trying to onboard new service providers, do like to try to run this business and like at one point there was a day where I fielded 140 calls.
John Wilson: That's a full time CSR. That's actually our metric for a full time CSR is like, what, 120?
120. Dude, that's a full time CSR.
Rich Jordan: I was exhausted. And like time for nothing, like I'm no customer service rep for,
I'm the worst CSR in the company, yeah, it was terrible. So, And I was also trying at the same time, I closed on a 32 unit apartment building down in North Carolina that month, like literally two weeks after takeover. So I was trying to like do a remote close on that while taking calls. With like a notary who just thought I was out of my mind and she was right.
It was insane, but it wasn't so much to preserve margin. It was just that all these functions fell in my lap day one. And it was just like, Holy shit, I'm trying to keep all these balls in the air. And like balls got broken, man. Like some of those glass balls got broken. Like permits was one of them.
Like our permit process was non existent and I was like too overwhelmed to be able to stay on top of it.
John Wilson: Were they not pulling permits or you just didn't know how to do it? I mean, it was probably the wife doing it. She left day five.
Rich Jordan: Yeah. It was the wife. It was the wife doing it. And she just like assumed that I knew how to do it and that I had the time to do it.
Neither of those is true. So yeah, man, it was just kind of like, one, I had to, you know, I didn't even have an appreciation at the time for like what kind of jobs needed to be permitted. Which is like common knowledge for now, but then how do they get dropped off? Like how do we pay for them?
When do we need to pick them up? All that stuff was news to me So like quite frankly for the first like six weeks, we didn't submit any permits, which is obviously no bueno.
John Wilson: Honestly six weeks isn't that bad?
Rich Jordan: For the most part our clients Like, let us get away with it. Yeah. I mean there was maybe like two clients that at the end of October, like, Hey, where the hell's my permit?
And it's like, oh shit. 'cause I better dig through the last six weeks it's like, get all these permits done.
John Wilson: There's basic to go like, you know, 10 years without pulling a permit. So so six to six weeks is not that bad.
Rich Jordan: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, so I was trying to get customer service off my plate.
I couldn't really do that until we had like a field service management software in place. So I was trying to onboard us to something. So I got us on Jobber, which was fast enough for me to implement, Jobber is pretty intuitive. It's not something that you and I could run our business on at this point, really.
But it was quick and easy to implement, which was key. And allowed me to bring in a remote CSR that was able to schedule into my software that like was a game changer, right? Just get it off that off my plate.
John Wilson: Was that a vendor or an employee? That was a vendor. It's still a vendor.
Rich Jordan: So pink collars. Yeah. Yeah. Pink collars. They're great, man. Michelle and Doug own pink collars. They're super helpful. It's pretty reasonable too, honestly. And I don't have to worry about like a CSR not showing up to work or like churning CSRs. They've got it right. Their team covers down. And if like someone's sick, has to go to a funeral or leaves.
Like my phones are going to keep getting answered which is really nice.
John Wilson: That's huge. I'll throw a quick, somewhat of a plugin. What was her name?
Brandon Niro: Which one?
John Wilson: From pink collars.
Brandon Niro: Ooh. That's good.
Rich Jordan: Michelle.
John Wilson: She listens to the show. She emailed Brandon a few weeks ago.
Rich Jordan: Oh i, I sent her your episode. Yeah. Yeah.
John Wilson: Yeah. So hey Michelle. Yeah. Thanks.
Rich Jordan: Yeah. That's right. Change of the world, man.
John Wilson: Yeah. That's funny. So yeah, that's cool. So pink collars is now an outhouse or out of house call center that dispatches direct and they do like office administrative stuff too, right? Like payroll and marketing, if you want them to.
Rich Jordan: Yeah, they do. So they weren't doing that for me at first, but as we've grown, I sent you a screenshot, like maybe a couple of months ago of all the missed calls that we were having because I only had the one CSR.
Brandon Niro: It's horrifying. I don't know. It is depressing.
John Wilson: We did not have like an overflow call center thing until sometime last year, like, so I'll very long time without that way too long. And in our mind, it was just like, ah, how many voicemails did we get? And we'll just call them back.
Rich Jordan: That's exactly what I was doing.
John Wilson: Crazy. But you probably learned before we did. And then I think we got a call center to like back us up. And then we find out we were missing like 50 calls a day. We were throwing more money at marketing, just throwing more money. And we weren't picking up the phone and we didn't know it was insane.
Brandon Niro: Blissfully unaware.
Rich Jordan: Yeah. I mean, I really didn't have an appreciation for it until I switched to ServiceTitan.
I switched to ServiceTitan in late February. So like not that long ago. And all of our calls come through there and you see the abandoned calls. And yeah, it was like, Oh my God, you look back like two weeks and it's like 400 abandoned calls. Oh my God. Yeah. And then another nice thing about like having the contracted CSR is like, Hey, I want another one.
And another one is boom available. So now I added a second CSR and like instantly my revenue shoot up like 20 percent I'm booking. I'm actually booking the calls that are coming. It's just insane.
John Wilson: Yeah, that is crazy. Our revenue basically shot up to once we added the outsource call center.
As backup, because we had, I think, three or four people answering the phone. So we're like, ah, we feel like we're fine. We have to be getting every call. And then we find out we're missing like 30 percent of our total call volume. And we're just too stupid to do.
Brandon Niro: 50 percent of the phone calls we were taking we're going to voicemail. So that was
at our peak.
John Wilson: Yeah. I don't want to think about it.
Rich Jordan: Yeah. I mean, that's like just huge untapped potential right there. It's like such an easy fix. Right. Yeah. It's crazy.
John Wilson: Okay. So what are you doing now? Like day to day? What's it look like? You're going three days a week, once a month.
Rich Jordan: Yeah. I like no part of the like customer experience comes through me at this point, right? So from like inbound call schedule, dispatch technician, does it invoices? It all like review requested. It all happens without, my participation at this point. So I'm basically just working.
I'm solely working on the business at this point.
John Wilson: So what does that look like?
Rich Jordan:
I mean, that probably sounds a lot better than it is. Like anything that doesn't fall within that customer, like value experience is mine. Right. So like I managed the marketing, I manage the like backend admin, the payroll.
Anything that has to do with like strategy, procurement of trucks, hiring technicians, like all that stuff that happens in the back, it's all mine. That's in the business, but at the same time. Like things like tweaking the incentive program, right? I've put a lot of brainpower into that.
I know you and I've talked about that before, like recently I'm working on, and this is at your recommendation. I'm working on with enterprise to start leasing vehicles, actually signed with them yesterday.
John Wilson: That's great. Yeah, that program really is. I don't want to like overly plug enterprise here, but like that program's dope as shit. Like you'll be glad you did it.
Rich Jordan: Yeah. It's well, and I didn't really understand this until talking to them quite a bit, but it's, I mean, it's like an ownership program. You basically own the truck, take on a lot of the work and the risk, which is pretty cool.
John Wilson: Yeah. And then you can buy it out for like two grand at the end. And I know guys that do it. Like, I know guys that run the enterprise fleet program and then they buy it out because it's super cheap at the end and they run it for another year or two. And then they sell it for a grand because I mean, five years, that's still a young vehicle.
Like as far as cargo vans go. Yeah. I mean, that thing's still got a lot of life in it. It really is very cool.
Rich Jordan: Yeah. Whereas what I'm doing, what I've been doing currently, like we bought three trucks just not long ago and we're buying them at like a hundred thousand, 120, 000 miles.
They're like five to eight years old. Yeah. I just had literally just two days ago, I dropped 5, 600 on a transmission for one of them. I just bought it three months ago. So that stings. That's like 10 months worth of enterprise lease payments.
John Wilson: That's why we switched. We have a whole episode about this.
It's crazy. But we were just getting our asses handed to us because we were buying all these used vehicles. And then we bought another company that only bought used vehicles. And then we smashed those two together and we have like the shittiest fleet on the planet. And it's just, it's 120, 000 a year in maintenance.
And we're like, dude, we got to do something different. So we went from buying 10 year old vehicles for 17, 000 to, leasing brand new fleet and yeah, no looking back.
Brandon Niro: What's the size of your current fleet?
Rich Jordan: Right now we've got nine company vehicles. Yeah. Well, Eight plus like a branded trailer that we've got.
Yeah. Yeah.
John Wilson: That's cool. Yeah. I think enterprise, they want you to get to 20 as soon as possible. That's the thing, but they'll start working with you at 10.
Rich Jordan: Yeah. I had to do a little bit of salesmanship on that, yeah, I think I can make a pretty strong case for it.
Like our growth rate is pretty strong and we're looking to acquire.
John Wilson: All right. So most of your day to day now is like, sounds like GM COO stuff.
Rich Jordan: Yeah. And it's mostly like asynchronous, right? So like my day is pretty much my own, like I live a pretty chill life at this point.
John Wilson: That's great. Yeah. Why acquire?
Rich Jordan: Why acquire my first business or why continue to acquire?
John Wilson: This is just something that's always interested me. Yeah. And I asked this about myself most evenings, but like, why do this again? Like your life is comfortable or making good money, you're generating wealth. That sounds like the American dream.
Yeah. Why are you, continuing to look for more?
Rich Jordan: We were definitely in a good spot that wasn't necessarily as true, like a couple of months ago, like through the slow, like through the depths of the slow season, like right in the holiday period. So I think that was kind of driving me towards trying to like acquire my way out of the problem.
But at this point, I definitely like slowed my just driving hunt for an acquisition. But at the same time, there's some decent opportunities in my neck of the woods. And I do feel like, while plumbing is a good business. It's pretty cutthroat and it's kind of like grow or disappear.
It's kind of, the way I feel about it. So there's this kind of like impending doom, like following behind me and I'm like running, trying to like outrun it.
John Wilson: I see that in consolidation. I think that plumbing, especially after COVID, holy crap, like it really accelerated.
I see that as like, I think that within the next five years, we're not going to see any companies between a million and 10 million.
Rich Jordan: Yeah. I think you're right.
John Wilson: You're either going to be. A 30 million company, or you'll be a one or two man show, but like, there's the middle ground is going to disappear because of consolidation.
Rich Jordan: Yeah, exactly. And that like 30 million company can like is operating similarly as far as like say customer acquisition is operating similarly to the two and a half million dollar company or the 5 million company. And they can, compete. They got a deeper war chest.
They've got more trucks on the road, like that's just marketing in itself, right? They got billboards rolling around. So I think I have a probably more than healthy appreciation for that dynamic. And I'm just trying to grow. I'm just trying to grow to be able to gain that advantage. Because right now, I mean, like.
We've doubled revenues, tripled the employee count, but I'm still like right there with like a, say half a dozen other 1 million, like 750, 000 revenue to 2 million revenue companies. They're all like right there competing with me. So I'd love to just like leave them in the dust probably by acquiring one of them.
Yeah. I think 5 million in revenue, you start to unlock some capacity in OpEx that is really helpful.
John Wilson: Yeah. that's what happened for us. It happened where we started well, one, we grow the same rate, like minimum 20, 25 percent a year. But then we started unlocking, like we're about to drop an academy.
That's crazy. Yep. Yeah. That's awesome. Like who can compete with that in our area? And the answer is only people. Like our size are much, much larger. That's a huge moat competitively. And then now we have, we just transitioned someone to full time talent acquisition. So recruiter. So again, another, like one more thing that's like, as we make all these strategic investments back into our company. Like we're looking at it from, yeah, we need to keep growing. Yeah. We want to keep growing, but in the same breath, I know how much of a moat we're building and I'm just so grateful that , we still have time because again, I think this wave of consolidation, like if we were doing this in a couple of years, like I think we might be too late because companies are just getting around us anyway.
It's just absolutely gobbled. Yeah. Private equity.
Rich Jordan: Yeah. I mean, I'm getting letters and emails every day from private equity, right? So I got to imagine my competitors are too.
John Wilson: They're all boomers.
Ready to exit.
Rich Jordan: You're right. As you get up in revenue size, you like basically what you're doing at Wilson is you're building like inherent competency in all these different areas.
Instead of like the owner or the operations manager, like trying to also be a recruiter and a hire. And now you have so many full time folks on that. Like that's, I mean, that's awesome.
John Wilson: Yeah. I mean, it is. , it feels next level that we're so excited. Like I cannot tell you how excited we are, but it's also like that only starts at a certain level.
And then I think the other companies, our size are doing that too. Yeah, and then I think just in our outreach with all these companies we've been talking to about buying I always had a rough feeling that like almost every company was about you were either like one or two guys Two and a half million or 20 million.
And that was always just my guess, but then all this outreach, like that's exactly the case. Like we've talked to eat. I can't even believe how many two and a half million dollar companies there are. Like he was crazy. And it's because the owner never learned how to, like, you've done a good job.
You're going to pass it real quick. Cause the owner never learned how to pass, jump out of house. Cause two and a half is when you have to figure out ops management, but yeah, just amazing. And then they're all trying to exit too at the
same time.
Rich Jordan: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's kind of like, if you're going to do it, you got to do it in the next five years.
That's just how I feel about it. I'll accept that. I would like to have a full time marketer on the team. Like you and I both take our digital marketing seriously or digital advertising seriously. And yeah everyone who wants to write a thread about how to buy an HVAC company or plumbing company seems to think that's the answer, but the reality is that like you gain a moat through customer retention and that is like a lot of that's through like traditional marketing.
Oh, yeah, like traditional old school marketing in your town. And that's labor intensive. So like, I'm looking to bring somebody on pretty soon. I think he's going to
run that for me.
John Wilson: Yeah, I think that's an interesting operational nuance. We should talk about that a little bit more.
I'll say that we've definitely found that too. Everyone's shoving so hard for digital that it has ceased to be cost effective. And then you don't really retain those customers. And the big thing that I have against digital is you're not brand building. Like, you're not actually building your company.
You're giving Google dollars to give you dollars back.
Rich Jordan: Yep, you're commoditizing.
John Wilson: You've commoditized yourself, absolutely. You've just turned yourself into a soybean. Yeah, so like the biggest shit that's happened in our company with marketing has been radio mailers. Like we're about to go on cable television, like, this old school shit, but it's like suddenly it's price competitive because everyone's going nuts on Facebook and PPC.
And we had budget to blow because we were like, suddenly we're spending 20 grand a month on PPC and we're like, this isn't doing anything for us at this. It's not brand building. It's not building our company. So like, what have you done? You've had nine months walk us through the marketing journey.
Rich Jordan: I mean, honestly
it's kind of like, my next project. But I've been giving it some thought. So for example, the seller's wife, she used to write thank you cards to folks, right? I couldn't keep up with it, so we're no longer doing it. That's unfortunate. Cause I thought, that's a pretty nice touch, right?
Yesterday I was exploring some ways that we could get back into that.
John Wilson: I think there's services that provide that. I think even service Titan. You can do some it's a grant. It's not a handwritten note, but you could still do something. We have automatic followup set up through our service Titan through the marketing pro.
Rich Jordan: Yeah. So I've actually, I'm still working through this, but there's a couple services, like if you Google like automated handwritten notes, I Googled it yesterday, and I came across handwrite. io and there's a couple of different options, but I think that's who I'm going to go with. It's literally a robot hand that hand writes notes, it's like two 50, a letter like mailed and everything.
Yup. Yup. It's like two 50 to 3 a letter and on like your branded card. And I can pull like a thank you report from service Titan above a certain, like maybe say a certain dollar threshold, like a 500 threshold and have those all sent out every week. Handwritten from Rich, the owner, right?
Like pretty cool. So I think we'll do that. And then I don't know, John, do you do like membership programs or anything like that? Yeah, we have a membership. Yeah. So we've just like stutter stepped our way into a membership program, but we're looking to take that really seriously going forward.
And, I'd love to like really, I mean, spend some money on my members, man. I'm like, branded tumblers, send them to their house. As far as like a lifetime value of a loyalty program member of a, for a plumbing company. I mean, more than worth it to like send them some swag.
So stuff like that, like hitting them, just like direct mail to our current client base, right? I mean, like six months post job, nine months post job, and just like staying top of mind for them so that they're, I mean, they're never going to go to anybody else.
So that's what I'm thinking about.
John Wilson: There's a company down near us and they're big. I don't think you've ever run into them, Brandon. They're a little bit south of us. I was in this meeting one time with this guy. So they do like 30 million. And like 30 million, 2017, pretty consolidation. So like, all right, we were talking about marketing as a group and he said, we don't spend very much on marketing.
We mine our own, or what is it? It was either we mine our own minds or we like farm our own fields or something like that. Yeah, sure, sure. Dude's down in like, literally farm country, so like, very It all makes sense. But that always stuck with me. Like the membership thing or just I really like the thank you card idea.
I'm looking at Brandon right now.
Brandon Niro: The notes have been taken.
Rich Jordan: Yeah. It just seems too easy. It seems too easy to do it.
John Wilson: Yeah, I mean, I would try to negotiate better pricing. On that, I do know a company that they take their memberships really serious. They're exclusively HVAC and their CSRs can sell them and they do very well.
And a lot of them, and they have like three or 4, 000 club members. And what they do is they have their CSRs because they get the commission for the membership sale, the CSR at the time of the sale, writes a thank you card and then a few other things and sends it out.
Rich Jordan: I'm looking to hire somebody right now that's like strictly going to be offensive outbound calls, like that's all they do. , I'm going to incentivize them to sell memberships to our current database of customers.
John Wilson: Hey, this episode is sponsored by Service Scalers. So Service Scalers is actually a brand that I've used personally with our companies for a little bit over a year now. They've helped us manage our digital advertising. Frankly, they did a lot better than our last agency. Leads went through the roof and cost per click went way down.
Check out Service Scalers if you're a plumbing, HVAC, or electrical home service company. That's what they knock out of the park and they did a great job for me.
Brandon, do you have any insights on outbounds?
Brandon Niro: I have very vivid insights on that one. We just talked about it this morning. Actually, I was trying to convince John to let me hire. Okay. A CSR primarily for trying to convince you were a little skeptical of the org chart.
John Wilson: Boys got jokes.
Brandon Niro: Yeah, we have three CSRs that all handle inbound right now and some outbound when they have availability, but we're talking about this.
Now we have three remote and one dispatch. Yeah. So we're talking again, the fourth one to do straight up outbound, because like you said, if you're collecting the phone numbers, if you're collecting email addresses. You have a vault of potential that you're just not using if you're not actually sending them routinely, calling them routinely.
Following up, like you said, keeping top of mind awareness, you're wasting your potential at that point. So it makes sense if you keep that kind of information to use it.
John Wilson: Yeah. We've done outbounds for years, sorry, maybe two years where it became a normal part of our business, but the dedicated person that's a baller move.
What we found, this is hilarious. Okay. So like we didn't do outbounds well. Until I don't want to give Brandon too much credit, but until Brandon showed up,
Rich Jordan: See his head's inflated.
John Wilson: I know it's getting bad.
Rich Jordan: It's coming over the horizon,
John Wilson: But no we really didn't, he came in and we started implementing this whole new model and whatever, but we started doing quote follow ups, this was as bad.
As not knowing how many times we missed the phone every day. So we were doing quotes. Our guys go out any given day, we'll estimate 20 to 75, 000 any given day, pick a day. They, I don't think ever got followed up on ever. Yeah. So then we started doing outbounds purely as quote followups and we started closing.
Brandon Niro: One of every 50 ish.
John Wilson: Yeah. But still it was one of out of every 50. So we ended up generating an extra 30 to 50, 000 a month.
Brandon Niro: And that was before we added the email follow up.
John Wilson: And then we took it a step further by adding an automated email follow up a few days later with like a slight discount or something like that.
Brandon Niro: Yeah. So it's, kind of a triple hit. It's 24 hours after. Hey, thanks for having us out, just a reminder, this quotes out here, if you want to go forth in it, let us know, and then another 24 hours afterwards. So you're 44, 48 hours out, then it offers a 5 percent discount if it's over a certain threshold, and then when you hit the, I think it's it's 72 hours or something around there, it offers a 10 percent if it's over another threshold.
But then it just keeps hitting them with them.
It keeps reminding until they open it or until they unsubscribe to it, or they call in to book the call. It's all through that service type marketing. But I mean, it's insane. The book rate is still, I want to say it's like 3 percent cost. Nothing besides the marketing that we're already using.
John Wilson: But you can track dollars against it because it's all automatic. So like you can go in and you can see. Okay. This person received this email. This is how many clicks we got. And this is the exact dollar amount that came out of this campaign. And it is an embarrassing amount. Like it's high and it's embarrassing that we never did it because it's like, Oh my God.
Brandon Niro: And now it's all automated. it's hands off,
John Wilson: but we still call from the call center.
Brandon Niro: Yeah. Sorry for email followups. It's
automated. Call some of their stuff.
Rich Jordan: And is that all that's all marketing pro for you guys, right? Service Titans marketing pro. Yep. And now you're selling me on it. You have to do it.
John Wilson: It's good. It's good. Their phones pro sucks, but their marketing pro is ridiculous. It's good. Yep. It like, it just automatically does everything, but anyways, outbound,
Rich Jordan: I'm a price book pro guy. And that's a sweet product too.
John Wilson: But yeah, outbounds, that was a game changer for us and doing it effectively.
So that sounds good to me. Do you think you're going to bring them in house or do you think you're going to go through pink collars or what do you think you'll do?
Rich Jordan: I think I'm going to, I'm having pink collars work on it right now. Cause it's like a different competency than they're used to sourcing.
And we're actually, that was one of the reasons Michelle reached out to Brandon. We're looking at, put that Somewhere other than our own shores.
John Wilson: Nice. Nicely phrased SEO. We'll never find you. All right. Cool. Do you have any other operational difficulties you want to riff out?
Rich Jordan: Yeah, I know you guys can appreciate this too. Parking. Oh God.
John Wilson: What section of parking? Cause we've got a lot of thoughts, like where you park at the customer's house or like parking at your building or like what parking?
Rich Jordan: Yeah. That's a good point. Parking at my building.
John Wilson: Brandon's giving me these, he's giving me eyebrows, like across the table.
He's just like. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Let's go.
Rich Jordan: To give some context, I guarantee is in like, it's called like a professional condo association. It's like a blue collar little strip of like garage doors and small offices. I have like a 200 square foot office and a 1200 square foot warehouse.
John Wilson: Oh, dang. That's small.
Rich Jordan: Yeah. And then three parking spots, And we had a feeling that was going to be problem at some point, but we'll be happy to have that problem. That'd be great.
John Wilson: That's like a big tax bill. Like, yeah, I mean, I'll be okay with paying more taxes when I make more money.
Like totally. I'll totally be okay with it. No problem.
Rich Jordan: Yeah. I mean, so three parking spots, I showed up, I had three technicians and I had four trucks. Wait a second. The math's not adding up already, like day one, because the owner was keeping his truck at his house and he's keeping the other three trucks at the shop.
So three trucks, three parking spots in his truck offsite. He brings his truck to work on day one because now it's mine, right? Shit, it's parked in the handicap spot and I've got the president of the HOA like screaming at me. Oh my gosh. this became like a three month long ordeal as we added more helpers and a manager and myself and my partner very quickly, like maybe by the end of, by the first week of November, we're already at like seven employees and they're all bringing their trucks to work.
They're all bringing their own vehicles to work, their personal vehicles. And then they're getting into their company on trucks. We added a, you know, they're like Chevy Silverado and a trailer. Okay. So now we're at five vehicles and a trailer. And then, later on, we bought three more trucks.
I need nine parking spaces for my company assets. And then I have guys driving to work, and needing to park their car somewhere. So literally thankfully COVID is rampant at that time. The retail strip center next door is like a ghost town.
John Wilson: So I literally, I mean, stacking up trucks.
Rich Jordan: Yeah. I mean, I'm literally like parking. Like 10 employee vehicles in like edible arrangements parking lot.
John Wilson: That's a good image
Rich Jordan: And I'm getting away with it. Unbelievably, and we're still doing that to an extent. But basically, as soon as like we felt comfortable, we started letting the technicians take their trucks home.
So that's how we operate now. So it gets a little like crazy in the morning because I've got like six plumbing trucks rolling into a parking lot with three parking spaces. Am I trying to load up and get rid of water heaters and that and throw up stuff in and all that stuff. So it's a problem.
I actually came pretty close to putting an LOI in for like a half a million dollar property down the street. Way bigger than we needed would have like could have comfortably parked 40 trucks at the same time. And I ended up backing off of that because we were pursuing a bolt on opportunity and we kind of needed to put cash towards that instead.
And then that probably got sold and the bolt on is still like dragging his feet on me, but so nothing to show for that except for a cash balance. And I think I mentioned this in a reply to one of your tweets about this, John, but now I'm just like embracing it.
I'm like, look, I'm going to use this constraint to like fuel my own operational creativity.
John Wilson: Brandon and Brandon said, fuck you, dude.
Rich Jordan: Now we're teaming up on Brandon. My goal now is like get to 5 million in revenue without changing my location. Like, can I do 5 million in revenue with three parking spots, a 200 square foot office, and a 1200 square foot warehouse?
I think I can.
John Wilson: Can he, Brandon?
Brandon?
Brandon Niro: He probably doesn't have a second floor that's at risk of Becoming the first floor. So he's got a chance at it.
We get the struggle. So we're at the part where you're saying, can I run that out of 5 million? Cause we're now 5 million. It's tight. I can't believe you're running out of that small of a warehouse
Rich Jordan: The warehouse is pretty comfortable at this point. And then I do have like a second level to it that kind of like sits above the office because the office carves, it's a 1400 square foot footprint, 200 of it's carved out for an office. And on top of the office, we have like a bunch of pVC fittings and stuff like shit load up there. It was like really tight at first because I inherited a warehouse that was like a straight up junkyard. There's this like 30 year old wrench behind me that it's like a trophy from that. But there was like a broke down Corvette in there. I broke down Jeep Wrangler.
I mean, you literally couldn't, it was unusable shit to like strewn about the floor, like hundreds of Home Depot buckets filled with gas pipe fittings strewn about the floor hundreds. So like now it's like really organized, it's very clean. I'm like proud to show it to people now and we have like more space than we need.
Like I might try to put like almost like a classroom back there cause we don't really have any place to like sit all the texts down and go through stuff. So I think we'll probably do that in the back, but yeah, I'm finding 1200 square feet to be pretty. Feasible. And, part of it was I went down that bolt on that.
I kind of alluded to, I went down and walked on site with the owners there and they're, running seven trucks. They should be doing like 3 to 4M in revenue. They're only doing 2 because they're not pricing effectively, but they've got a lot of volume and they're operating basically out of a 2 car garage and it's just really well organized.
It looks like a library. All of these like rows of shelving and stuff. And I was pretty impressed and I was like, wow, we could be doing a lot better with the space that we have. Cause I probably have like two and a half times more space than that.
John Wilson: I think the real estate problem is an interesting one.
We've talked about it a lot, very publicly cause it's very annoying, but I think that you can run super lean on real estate. Until maybe 4 million, because then what ends up happening, it probably depends on trades too, because we're multi trade. I think that adds a little bit to it, but what ends up happening is you have finance in house, marketing in house, middle managers, some of them need offices, some of them don't, you need a conference room, you need a training room, so we're looking at buildings now, But the buildings that we're looking at are like 20, 000 square feet, because what we need is we have to build an academy in there so that we can pass eight figures.
And we have to put 10 offices in because we need all these offices for all these random new jobs that now exist because of the size of a company we are. I think you can run really lean all the way up until then. I guess my point is what I wonder, and Brandon, you and I have talked about this, like the sweet spots.
Do you get to that point where you can run crazy efficient and then just cruise because for us to move to the next level, we're spending a million plus on a building and that's money that could be going towards acquisitions. That's money that could be going towards, a boat. But yeah, it's like, there's a huge capex looming because suddenly the needs of our company, if we're going to continue doing what we're doing, have just dramatically increased.
So it's not just, Oh, we need plumbing and warehouse. It's like, no, when we're looking for a building, we have like a hundred different needs that we have to satisfy that I would not have needed a few million ago.
Rich Jordan: Yeah. It's the training room and conference room are like what I'm missing right now.
That's what I wish I had, but yeah, like I don't have space to like put really any more people in there. My service manager has a desk in there. I have a desk in there that in my desk, you know,
it's kind of like free for like say my permits got to use, but that's pretty much it. So if I wanted like more in house folks on the back end, it's like, Hey, where a parka in the garage, your desk is out there.
Yeah. So that'll definitely be a problem.
John Wilson: We're on the world of outsource now. And that's really just gotten that good since COVID, we started working remotely and we're like, holy crap, we can shove way more jobs remote.
Rich Jordan: Yeah, people are used to it now. And, once you do it for one, you start to realize what it takes to have a remote role.
So what's nice about having my remote CSR and dispatcher is that, like, my company is run to accommodate them, right? we're all on Slack. We have like Trello boards and train you will and like all these like remote first like textile company tools for like your local plumbing shop and it'll allow me, I think, to continue to bring on remote players with like pretty decent results.
John Wilson: Yeah, I agree. That's interesting. All right. I think we've probably run out of time. this was a good time though. This was fun.
Rich Jordan: That was fun.
John Wilson: I think I'm just going to insert like a comment for like for the listener out there.
Rich Jordan: Yeah, let's hear it.
John Wilson: I think that your story is a really great example.
Like you did it and you won, but your story is a great example of what buying home services looks like Where you end up having to do way more than you expect because every thread out there is like Oh, yeah, you just buy you do some marketing and hire a tech and it's like you don't really understand That the companies that are affordable to first time buyers, like it is a job.
And I think you did a great job of explaining exactly how much of a job it was.
Rich Jordan: Yeah. You're right. It's a lot harder than I think people make it out to be. And maybe you and I can be blamed for that to an extent as well, but.
John Wilson: A hundred percent.
Rich Jordan: I think like, like me in particular, I think part of maybe my charm for people out there is like, they're like this idiot can do it.
I can do it. This guy didn't know a fucking thing when he took over.
John Wilson: And he's winning. That's true. And he grew fast.
Yeah, you've got all the makings.
Rich Jordan: But the route is that like, I had to like, pretty much like grind my fingers down to the bone for a couple of months to do it.
Like I've had people ask me like, Hey, I want to buy, there's this plumbing company for sale on biz by sell on my area. And I work for Deloitte and I want to keep my job at Deloitte and own it. What do you think, Rich? I'm like, no, don't do that. Don't even think about doing that.
John Wilson: If you're an Akron, you can do that.
And then just sell it to me for debt. Exactly.
Rich Jordan: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I know we're trying to wrap it up, but at the small end of the acquisitions, which like a guy like me is like going to come in at, there's like serious existential risk, like actual existential risk. Like if I did not figure this shit out.
It with the speed that I did, I would have lost the business straight up, and I would have had the better part of a million dollars hanging out there with an SBA loan balance like that's pretty fucking cool You know so You know like things like hey You've only got three technicians.
If one of them decides to leave because they don't like you or they're scared or whatever, 33 percent of your capacity just disappeared. Oh, and by the way, like all those guys were buddies cause they were such a small team. So the other two are leaving too. All right, cool. Like Marine officer, are you going to install water heaters now?
Like what's your plan? So that's why. Yo, I think I was uniquely qualified to deal with that, like that threat with like the leadership experience or comfort that I had, but even still, man, I had to really double down on that. And that's why I talk so much about it because it was so critical for me to like, get that right.
Cause I mean, the business was like sand through my hands when it just disappeared.
John Wilson: And I think the ability to handle stress in a crisis. One of my toughest events was a specific quarter, quarter one, 2019. I talk about it often because it was like, there was hard times in business before, and then there was this quarter.
And it was definitely one of those times where it's like, man, like you just don't know what's going to happen. You don't know where it ends up. And yeah, we were small at the time too. And that was a 60 year old business. I didn't think that we were at risk of like bankruptcy or anything because we didn't have a heavy debt load, but I didn't know how we were going to exit that with the team and the business intact.
It was just tough. Learned a lot from it, obviously, but yeah, it's crazy that the small business acquisition thing. And I know I probably talk in a way that makes it look easy too, but you know, we're looking at two deals now. We have them under LOI and they're very much jobs. And the only reason that I don't have to do what you did is because I have almost 40 people on my team.
But otherwise, like I mean,
these are, doing 2 million a year. One of them is doing two and a half and that's still someone's going to, we're jumping in and it is a job. if it was just me buying it, it would be a hundred hours a week for the first six months to a year trying to figure that out.
And that's a bigger company. That's 500, 000 in EBITDA. Like they have an office person, they've got stuff going on, but you got to jump in and
Rich Jordan: Yeah. I'm looking at the same thing with the sit bolt on that I'm working on and there's going to be, you know, you start to realize that it's funny, like Nick Kashka, who I think you know on Twitter, right?
Nick's doing a bunch of like gardening roll ups out in California. And he had told me back in like October. Or maybe he said on a podcast or I'm not sure, but he said that rollups are harder than platform acquisitions. And I remember I nodded my head and I'm thinking myself like, this guy's out of his mind.
Like, what is he talking about? The shit that I'm going through right now, a rollup would be way easier than this. And maybe that's true but I am starting to see like, Hey, if I, Roll up or bolt on like a legitimate, like a 2 million company. Like I'm looking at, I have my way of doing business.
I have my systems and it's mostly non negotiable. Like I can't come in like I did with guarantee and like flex and adapt and be light on my feet. I'm going to come in there like a bull in a China shop and be like this is the guarantee way of doing business. And I literally like cannot support your operations any other way.
That's going to be hard and I'm still figuring out like what that's going to look like, but it's going to be hard.
John Wilson: It's a
purge. Like you're going to try to avoid it. I'm sure. Cause you're a nice guy. I was too, but it's a purge. That's the way to do it. Techs adapt. Techs have worked at other companies.
Techs understand how that pricing varies. They understand software varies. The issue that I have consistently seen is office because they're the one that actually does the business of the business. And you're going to come in and this was me anyways, so maybe you won't be like that. But the way that I did it was I walked in and I was like, Oh, you answer phones.
Like you're still going to answer phones. Your job doesn't change that much. No, it's every single thing about this person's job changed and she didn't get a chance to interview for it. And I didn't get a chance to interview her for it to see if she was competent. And then, so it's new softwares, it's new systems, it's new methods of everything.
It's new approval because now they go through a different process through purchasing or, finance or whatever department they have to go through now. It is tough. I mean, even three years later from our last larger rollup, we still have the occasional, Oh, we used to do it this way.
Three years later. And I have flexed and drove that into the ground by this point. Cause it's like, I don't care. So yeah, I think we have a septic deal and there's only one person that's coming. In the office, and I don't think they're going to last the first week because I'm going to do exactly that.
There's only one way that this is going to work and it's my way because I've gone the other way. I tried to be adaptive. I tried to be flexible and it took me 18 months.
Rich Jordan: Yeah. I don't really see any other way. Honestly. It's a purge.
John Wilson: Yeah. Texts are flexible though. Like the texts are like the easy part. I would say you go in and Hey, we're going to put you on this news. Pricing structure, and you're going to make a pile more money. And by the way, we have better benefits.
Rich Jordan: This is going to be the best thing that ever happened to these texts, but yeah, it's going to be rough in the back.
John Wilson: Yeah, it is tough, but yeah, I mean, we're dealing with that with both of our acquisitions. Now they both have it. We're going to stat, we're going to prepare to walk into each of those deals as if the entire office quits day one.
And in a lot of ways, I, hope they do because I'm obligated to the seller. Usually I tell them, like, I'll offer them a job, but they have to work with me because we're going to change everything. Like I don't want to be the guy that comes in and purge. I'd rather be the guy that doesn't do that, but with office, it is really tough to not do it.
Rich Jordan: I believe it. Yep. I can see it right in front of me.
John Wilson: All right.
Cool. Thanks for coming on today. Rich. This was a lot of fun. I'm looking forward to listening back to this episode.
Rich Jordan: Yeah. My pleasure, man. Thanks for having me on.
Brandon Niro: Thank you.
Rich Jordan: Talk soon.
John Wilson: 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.
I'll see you next time.